josemariaruiz

<conspiranoia> 1) People in Cyprus (and investment funds?) start using Bitcoin. 2) "Biggest" attack in Internet ever, latency increase. 3) ECB send trucks with cash to Cypruss 4) Guys are caught cutting cables that can affect trading (increase latency again). </conspiranoia>

Philipp K. Janert, author of «Data Analysis with Open Source Tools», spends a few pages for explaining how he perceives this «difference».

From his point of view Machine Learning is a fake science. Fragile, secretive and specific techniques for big problems that need secret parameters that have never been published for their application. This parameters will be supplied to you for a price by the inventors-researchers' companies.

In the other hand, statistics is real science, where everything is published and studied by a whole community. A science that has accumulated hundred of years of experience and that offer all its knowledge in any university. The methods offered by statistics are of broad application, robust and open.

And I think he has a point in this reasoning.

PD: Statistics works, ask in any hard sciences. Its contributions has been essential for the science in the last centuries. Machine Learning was bashed (like old AI) because it never offered real solutions or helped us to advance in our understanding of anything. Machine Learning is a tool, not a science, that tries to cope with the limitations of our knowledge, which means that it's a very convenient tool for engineers and problem solvers, as are numerical methods are, but it means too that its results share the problems of numerical methods.

Can you imagine offering a fully scalable AD online? Having access to the code you can start doing things that Microsoft never allowed you to do ;)

(Google Docs is, as far as I know, OpenOffice for example)

"Get Xorg + gnome/kde/xfce (xfce should work, kde is missing working dbus (due to local socket auth and bugs in select() cornercases)) + some webbrowser working (iceweasel 9 works, though not https)."

From GNU/Hurd TODO list :)

Microsoft AD is the ONLY reason many companies (Apple shops included) have Microsoft servers. People cannot imagine how disruptive is a fully operational Samba 4.0 AD for Microsoft. (like a fully operational space station with a planet destroying laser :p)

Duke Nukem forever... Samba 4.0... what's the next? A GNU/Hurd competitor to Ubuntu? Space travels to Pluto? Time machines?

Being from Málaga, and my wife from Ronda, I can confirm what you say xD.

Well, 'a few kilos' too heavy is not that bad compared with USA people :p. It's all about the change in the customs and the way we eat. Spanish gyms are full of very healthy people, yet running and going to work in bike is still strange in Spain (which is a culture-shock for someone from NL).

And about asking for the past and Franco... Ronda is not representative of Spain!!! ;) (and yes they are still proud of been in the right «band» if you ask in a bar)

The Ni-Nis (translated as "Not working Not studying") are all around Spain, but in Málaga is worse as the unemployment rate there is the nearly the bigger in whole Spain.

Curiously my answer (I don't know if it's THE answer) is that Spanish people do not like conflict. We don't have class actions as in other countries and people are not used to claim for their rights against big companies. I think we still need a bit of this crazy david-vs-goliath mindset I've seen in other countries where people fight big injustices to the death.

The Spaniard is too preoccupied about what the other will think of him if he makes something... abnormal, which here means anything that will distinguish you from your neighbors . Spanish society is very very alienating and this is why so many foreigners find it so close and unfriendly to people from other cultures.

Change comes when a paradigm no longer can support the evidence of its failure and a new paradigm can replace it. All these countries (Portugal, Italy, Greece Spain... PIGS!) are now discovering that the "quality of life" was sustained in a false growing paradigm based on subsides and abuse. The new paradigm will be brought by all the people living outside that will bring back a different work culture and have probably broken links with the establishment in their countries.

Or at least that's my hope. Maybe all this is really a healing mechanism.

The waiter of Fawlty Towers was Spanish :)

Everybody hates Endesa. In Spain is highly probable that when someone takes your call to a company he/she will be in South America ;)

And about Spanish companies and how they treat their customers, I'm with you. This is ingrained in many mediterranean countries: no ones got rich doing hard work or through a strong work ethic. You can only get rich stealing, abusing and lying. The rate of people who evades taxes is so high that in countries like Greece it's seen as normal. In fact in Greece you are a malakas («stupid/loser» yet the literal translation is «wanker») if you paid all your taxes.

«Oh, there are plenty of entrepreneurs, mind you. But many of them are “serial” entrepreneurs, whereby “serial” I actually mean lazy, ineffectual bums living off subsidies for years on end while they latch on to one incubator after another and leech them for all their worth.»

That was a good one, a perfect description of the standard Spanish entrepreneur :)

You have to innovate and innovation is something decided by a committee of bureaucrats who have never worked in the private sector in their life!

No real VCs, there are a few in Spain but they invested in risky things like construction, subsided agriculture and in companies with government contracts.

It's so easy to flight to London and meet real investors instead of doing all the ass-kissing of government agents and banks to get subsides... yet no one did it. Hubris was the cause.

Yes Davidw, but I can tell you something about quality of life... it doesn't exists if you don't have money :) Salaries in Spain for IT are so absurd: 600~1500 EUR/month in the south. If you are in the 1500EUR/month salary you are a lucky bastard!

Spain is going to change in a really bad way in the next one or two decades and no one wants to be there when they can stay at 5 hours of flight in UK (including bus/train to the airport and arriving home in Spain).