I don't exactly get it. Is it the group as a whole that predicts accurately or its "best predictors"? Because clearly the first hypothesis favors direct democracy as a decision-making process. My intuitive guess is that when you pick a large enough group, some people within that group are clearly going to do better than specialists, because, in a certain way, they are themselves specialists.
Long story short, Horgan's thesis isn't "oh noes we aren't funding basic research," it's more along the lines of "there is just nothing as huge to discover left, no matter how much money you pour onto it.
Anyone here think that the computer science revolution is anywhere close to being finished? In my opinion it probably has another hundred years left in it. I also think we are just scratching the surface in biochemistry. It is scary to think of where that field will be in a hundred years. Physics can go figure out dark matter and dark energy. That's sure to stir things up. Maybe figure out sustainable fusion while their at it.
As with everything, it depends on (1) what you want to do now, and (2) your past experience.
IMHO, you need to separate the need for a media box from a tinkerable gadget. When you sit down after a hard day and grab a drink, the last thing you want to worry about is JTAG chains or something. I like having a few x86-64 boxes to just get something done, even though the idea of little-endian 4004 descendants isn't exactly elegant.
I still love tinkering with stuff programming-wise, but I've completely lost my ambition to tinker with hardware.
If you love programming, what's the problem? You're lucky to have something that excites you. However, it's nice to take hacking into new directions every now and then. Try to find an avenue from your software skills into hardware, or whateve else that might be remotely interesting. (As a teacher, I just have to mention http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Z...).
For example, in early 2011 I got into FPGAs, which for me was the perfect union of software and hardware tinkering, having a smattering of experience in both electronics and programming. It was life-changing in some ways, but eventually it's just one of the tools to hack with. For example, designing circuitry to run genuinely in parallel has given me great insight in the software world as well.
The Raspi always seemed kind of meh, both because FPGAs were already established in the embedded field, and because you'd be programming a chip someone else designed, instead of designing your own
No. drives are *not* sealed. Making a sealed drive that won't implode if you, say, take it on an aircraft in your laptop, or to ship it to the client (for example) is non trivial.
By "ship", do you mean a submarine? Because otherwise my head in plode (considering a roughly sea-level internal pressure vs. the mile-high club)
Well, as I'm a Mac person these days, I've swapped out those sorts of issues for the ones that Apple produce.
...yeah, if I've gotten a slipstreamed install disc with SP3 on it, I could have saved myself a lot of time when I did the same experiment. *shrug*
Out of interest, which version of IE did it have after install completed? I see you were prompted to upgrade to IE8, but my memory is hazy on whether IE7 was ever included on later XP install discs.
But XP? Not so simple. XP has lower system requirements, it works well on systems that are dog slow under 7. It's STILL BEING SOLD for that very reason, and the machines that ship with it will generally not work with other versions, either from lack of resources, lack of drivers, or both.
I'm aware you can still get XP discs second-hand or ex-stock here in the UK - Amazon lists several versions, although some look suspiciously like they may be OEM versions that are tied to specific brand/model PCs. I'm not aware of any PC maker here in the UK offering an XP options, though - maybe Windows 7, for business systems and workstations.
Ultimately I will probably just put Slackware on the machine that's running XP now but if ReactOS were a little more mature I might use it instead.
I recently wiped my old (2003 vintage) laptop, which originally came with XP, and installed Linux Mint - considering the machine's specs, it works fairly well.
I've read about ReactOS, but given the slow pace of progress I regard it as curiosity rather than a viable alternative.
Seriously. I remember trying out the preview version on my then-XP-running PC back in 2009, and being blown away by a) how much easier it was to install and get going, b) how well it ran all my existing software, c) how it let me finally use all of the memory installed in my machine, d) how much better it was than Vista. I pre-ordered a copy soon after, and the rest is history. Now, on my Mac, I have my Windows 7 VM for running various applications I still use.
Installing Windows XP today is not nearly as fun as you might think, particularly if you've got a pre-SP2 copy. When I tried it, I had to manually install some patches just to get Windows Update working, then some more before I could install IE8, and some more before I could install MSE. And then all the patches to bring the whole lot up-to-date - that took hours and hours to finish. I'd only recommend trying it if you're installing onto a machine that you don't actually need to use for a good while.
As for the 'but it's tried and tested" argument for hanging onto XP, I would point to the number of flaws that are still being uncovered in the Windows codebase, many of which are also in XP. Yes, you can mitigate against some by hardening your system, running only as a standard user, etc. - but for most current XP installs that will probably mean extra aggravation caused by third-party software written back in the Bad Old Days that expects to run with full admin privileges.
The only excuse for continuing with XP, to my mind, other than sheer obstinacy, is where you've got systems that absolutely, positively require XP running on physical hardware - specialised hardware or software that won't work via a VM because they need direct access through physical ports. Such systems should be segregated from local networks and the Internet as much as possible.
You virtually always hit the noise limit before you get to the point where you have to worry about the fundamental discreteness of matter and energy. The majority of quantum experiments involve a lot of cooling and isolating of systems with very good reason!
However, due to the statistics, you can actually detect the effect of discrete electrons, without going to the level of single-electron measurements. But broadly speaking you're correct.
Good point, the important specification would be "50% of what time?"
I've always had this problem about the whole idea of probability. If the odds of you dying in a car accident are 1/1000000, and you still die tomorrow, what good is the low number of one millionth? You either die or you don't. Probability is only a measure or a larger population, i.e. the fraction that gets the rock, death or whatever. The idea of a probability for a unique event is meaningless.
This is why I like the many-worlds interpretation of quantum mechanics. It gives real meaning to probability as the fraction of universes with the favourable outcome, even if the event is unique from our perspective (though with a total of infinite universes, the definition of a fraction can be tricky). On the other hand, changing the reality to suit a math concept is not necessarily the wisest thing.
I didn't realize that the "less than" symbol wasn't allowed.
Let me introduce you to this newfangled thingamagick called H. T. M. L.
After an instrument has been assembled, extra components will be found on the bench.
