Damn this thing is annoying - how do you fight your own favourite movies?
:) Let me rephrase that--"Damn, sometimes it's hard to do the right thing!".
I agree, sometimes it is. Doesn't change the fact that you should do the right thing, though.
I hear that a lot of the peace activists (and let's face it, there were certainly a lot of people doing that just because it was what was cool) would argue that they weren't opposed to the war because they were afraid to die--they would be willing to die for what was right. But when a couple of them were killed by whoever it was at Kent State, everyone went home...
What you're doing is seeing the larger problem of living morally encapsulated into the tiny little question "will I refuse to buy the DVD of the X-Men in protest of what the MPAA is doing?" [NOTE--I do NOT know if that DVD applies. I don't know where all the arms of the MPAA octupus are attached. please pardon my ignorance].
The fact that the majority of people really woudn't want to be bothered with not buying the DVD of a movie they really like is the biggest threat to our freedom. We act like it's "the corporations" or "the government". The truth is, it's us. If we were willing to go through the pain of product boycotting, we would control everything. It could easily be organized (the internet exists), but how do you get people to care? --
As much as I hate to say it, as much as it sucks, I'm afraid 2600 is fast becoming a victim of their own reputation.
Although it appears that you're not trying to support the judges attitude, it appears to me that you're failing. Basically, you're saying, "it's too bad, it's not fair, but it's their fault that they are getting screwed by the system.", right? Explain to me how what you're saying is different than "well, she wouldn't have had such a hard time proving that she didn't sleep with Bob if she hadn't slept with Tom, Dick and Harry".
You go on to re-iterate that it's not fair. What I'm missing here is your point. I read "they are reaping what they have sown" to mean "they brought this on themselves", or, in other words, "it's their fault". Then later I read that it's wrong that this is happening. In other words, "it's the system that's wrong". I put these together to mean "reputations shouldn't matter, but they do, so they shouldn't have gotten a bad one, poor fools".
The article already points out that the judge was apparently biased against 2600 because of their previous publications, and that this is wrong. So what you are adding is that, because their description of what's wrong with various security models reads to you like instructions for crackers they have brougt it on themselves? It just keeps sounding to me like you sympathize with the judge even though you know you shouldn't.
Not a flame, just wondering if you can clarify your point, or tell what you think they should have done differently. Would it have gone better for them, in your opinion, if their past articles had been less of a how-to and more cold and clinical? I'm just not getting it.
yawn--what did he say that we haven't already heard? how was this considered woth posting here?
that's not flamebait, it's a legitimate question. Other people have raised it, too. (Yes, even if I do say so myself). Clue in, moderator--how was I "baiting" someone to flame me? Or did you mean that it was a flame itself? Hmph. "Concise review", I would say.
--
If I recall Nanosaur (from the computer store iMac demos years back), that would be classified as a Third
Person Shooter (as would Hexen II, Heavy Metal : FAKK2, etc)
Oh, sorry--I didn't realize how fine the distinctions were. So they call it third person just because you can actually see your own whole body?
Actually, you can hit TAB to switch to "head cam" if you want. Maybe it's both. Or am I not getting the first-third distinction?
Hi, I have a couple of questions for the "real gamers" out there. I got an iBook recently, and it came with Bugdom and Nanosaur by Pangea.
Nanosaur is essentially a first-person shooter. Bugdom, though, is certainly not that (at least, not on most levels). I'm not a hard-core gamer, so I'm curious as to whether Bugdom fits into any "genre", and, if so, what else might be out there like it.
Also, are there other games which, like Bugdom, are challenging for adults but still accessible to kids?
It wouldn't take much to get around this "thou shalt not publish benchmarks" restriction.
Let's just agree right now that the next time we do a benchmark, we'll refer to Oracle as "commercial database 1", Informix as "Commercial database 2", MS-SQL as "Commercial database 3", or something like that.
It would be a little awkward to defend your choice of numbers if you only did the bm for 2 and 3, though:).
You could have something more subtle, though. Pick any databases you want as "commercial 1" and "commercial 2", and then state somewhere in your writeup that "people are very interested in knowing how PosgreSQL stands up agains the established giants like Oracle, Informix, MS-SQL, and DB2". Then we just know to read into that that commercial 1 was Oracle, and commercial 2 was Informix. Any list will do--just casually mention at the end of the writeup that
"the following databases have EULA's that prohibit the publishing of benchmarks:
Oracle
Informix
DB2
MS-SQL
"
There's no way that the companies could prove that you were doing that, and you would just never confirm or deny that there was any correlation.
it gets funnier and funnier--now you're objecting to "the principle of the thing". I have long maintained that _it doesn't matter_ whether what MS has done is illegal--it is clear that their practices have been unprinipled and resoundingly negative for both consumers and the industry. the last person that should be claiming principle is MS. Do you really think that they would have settled if they were innocent of wrongdoing? They clearly have the money to prove themselves right, if they were (maybe they would have needed another legal team, though...)
it's nice to hear you enjoy your work, though. It woud be even worse if what makes the rest of us miserable was making the people that made it miserable, too.
I think you are on the right track. Who knows what would have happened should Apple have been in charge, but they sure didn't want to allow anyone else to use Mac-like interfaces, for example.
I've thought about this a lot, because I love the MacOS, hate the actions of MS, etc. But I'm not blind to the fact that Steve Jobs wants to get his way just as much as Bill Gates does. There is one thing, though, that _might_ have made it better for us all if Apple had become the 800lb gorilla instead of M$, and that is that Jobs was driven by the desire to make computers "insanely great", as he said, while Bill is driven by winning. (I don't think Bill even knows how bad their software is, actually--he thinks (or says he thinks) it's great, and the real question is "who's out there that might knock me off the top? how do I defeat them?").
So, maybe huge, unassailable apple would have been better than huge, unassailable M$, but it's hard to say. It probable ended up better for us all that Apple had to fight to survive. It's almost as if competition is good.
One day, in the not-so-distant future, linux or something like it will be as good (for the low-end user) as the MacOS, and the best things in life will be free like they should be. Until then, I'm glad that Apple didn't die in the interim. They have, and still do, in many cases, really made contributions to the user experience. But don't get the idea that they're "nice" as opposed to M$'s "nasty". If they were nice, the Newton stuff wouldn't have been killed so abruptly and mercilessly--a lot of people would have been happy even now buying newtons like the eMate, even with no further research on Apple's part. No concessions were made to the users, it just died. Many other examples exist--they are a profit-driven company with shareholders and a bottom line. It's really hard to be forward looking enough to say "if I just do the right thing, I'll win financially in the long run." The Board isn't going to just take that attitude on faith, after all.
Anyway, i've said more than enough. I respect apple a lot, but don't confuse them with Woz (who is still an employee, of course, but obviously not making the corporate decisions...)
And... "Embracing non-free software solutions is a dead end"???
While this may be the popular dogma around here, it isn't actually all that true. Microsoft embraces them all the time, and they seem to be doing quite well. As do most software companies that actually make money in the real world.
"they seem to be doing quite well" at what? oh, right, making money by exploiting and contributing to the ignorance of the general population. Yeah, that's the real world. I can't help thinking that you're one of the people that thinks people bash Microsoft because we're jealous of Bill Gates' wealth--when the real truth is that it's because of his wealth that you fawn over him, and so you think that our actions must be motivated by the same factor.
In the real real world, there are lots more important things than money. Not that you would get that impression from popular culture, I understand, but you should try to think harder than the characters on Friends, etc.
And as for the question of whether closed source projects are a dead end, well, they often are. There are exceptions--I have used Eudora Light and BBEdit Lite for years. They always served me admirably, and I never paid a dime for them. On the other hand, you have the way Sun yanks the Java community around. It seemed like everything was going to be nice and free at first, but then you realized that they could yank the entire thing out from under you.
There is always a risk with closed source, or open but not free source. Always. And there is always the risk with an open source project that it will fragment or never get the attention/funding it would have if you had made people pay for it.
But to return to what I was really trying to say with this, you are extremely naïve if you don't see that there is a lot of truth or potentional truth in the poster's comment. Look around.
They visited us when the kid was 18 months old. Trust me, that kid was seasoned. Just after his nap on the couch, he wandered off, managed to climb to my chair without anyone noticing, pounded on my keyboard and wrote a nice document that was something like this:
The experiment has gone horribly wrong. I am trapped in a nearly helpless body. They force me to eat strained vegetables. The invasion will have to wait a few years.
---- It's even better when you play it backwards...
You're getting sleepy... very sleepy... Heeeeeeeeeeeeeeee's a hypnotist A hypnotist with laaaaaaaaaadies. ... you won't remember why you liiiiiiked himmmm
---- (obviously, I don't need no steenkin karma...)
In 1839, Gabriel Lame announced a proof to FLT. It involves a fairly simple factorization of x^p+y^p into factors with complex coefficients.
This, in fact, originated the term "Lame Proof"...
Anyone who's interested in these terms should pick up a college text on abstract algebra. You'll need to read most of an introductory text....
If you're going to get one, get Gallian's (the one mentioned in this post's parent). Interspersed with the "pure" mathematics are biographies, interesting applications, quotes from Beatles songs, etc. One of the best upper-level math texts ever, in my opinion.
First, let me say that I heartily agree that math is one of the best degrees you could have to do computer programming or any other kind of work that is heavily oriented toward problem solving.
But I differ with you in your answers about why the explanations/texts/etc can't be easier. There is some truth in what you and (moreso) others in the thread are saying, but there is also a heavy undercurrent of math groupthink. Just because no one takes the time to explain these higher concepts clearly doesn't mean there is not a way to do it. It's a hell of a lot harder to explain this stuff simply, but it could be done.
The fact that it generally isn't done is partly due to how hard it is to explain complex or highly abstract concepts clearly. But it's also partly due to the fraternity/hazing attitude in academia that "they should have to work as hard at it to get it as I did".
I have found that I can, with enough effort, find clear and simple (not necessarily short, though!) ways to explain even highly "esoteric" concepts. This involves the very difficult process of attempting to figure out how a newbie will be thinking about what I am saying, and trying to come up with accurate analogies to things that will already be familiar to them. Inevitably, after a lot of effort in this direction, I end up understanding the subject matter on a much deeper level.
This leads me to think that part of the reason that there are not clearer explanations out there is that you just have to understand it better than most people do before you can explain it that well, and at the same time you have to be thinking about how people outside of your field think.
The union of these two sets (one set being "those with a deep understanding of postgrad mathematics", and the other set being "those who spend a lot of time thinking about how to explain things clearly to newbies) may be vast, but the intersection is damn near the empty set (- that wisecrack is borrowed).
Intersect that with "those who have written math textbooks", and you'll get the picture.
It's not impossible, it's just hard, and, often, our cultural blinders don't let us see the payoff (if you want evidence of that, notice how quickly people reject the notion that more visualization would help--"if you learn with graphics, you'll suddenly quit understanding things when you get to 4-d or infini-d". It's baloney, but it's deeply ingrained baloney.)
Yet another barrier is that mathematicians make excellent use of the economy of notation. You can say a hell of a lot with a few symbols, and the very thought, once you've learned to use these symbols, of actually going back and writing out in english what you just expressed in symbols is anathema.
An analogy, for those who have messed with Perl, is regular expressions. How many people really comment their regular expressions? Once you've said it in such a nice, tight format, it just hurts to think about having to explain it in text.
For example, one of the first RegExp's in the perlre manpage ("man perlre" if you're on unix) looks like this:
s/^([^ ]*) *([^ ]*)/$2 $1/; # swap first two words
okay, that's commented--well, the "effect" is described. But imagine if you were trying to state what that expression does:
"Starting at the beginning of $_ (the default variable for matching), find the longest contiguous block (even if it's a block of length zero) of non-space characters (and store that in a variable called $1), then go past all the contiguous spaces after that, and group together the next contiguous block of non-spaces. Put this block of non-spaces into a variable called $2 [the "store that in $1 and $2" is implied by the presence of the parentheses, by the way]. Replace all of the matched text with a string consisting of the second block, a single space, and the first block."
Now that I've explained it in more excruciating detail, I understand it better. I can see that it won't work as advertised, for example. (try it on
foo bar baz
or even
foo bar
Maybe something like s/(\S+)\s+(\S+)/$2 $1/; would be better. Got to be careful with them *'s!
)
But look at the sheer number of characters in the text explanation! To another perlvert, the regular expression says the exact same thing. This is very similar to the situation in math--it's sooooo much easier to get the point across with a few terse symbols and references to theorems that it's really hard to get yourself to go through the effort required to explain it to the uninitiated (oops--pun inintentional).
Again, I'm not meaning to flame you, Darby--you hardly exhibited the problem compared to what other posts did. I'm talking about the general trend.
Wrong! You haven't been paying attention! You are supposed to say:
Great idea! You should apply for a patent!
(but seriously, and sadly, this is probably patentable--maybe you should patent it and make the licensing be "you can use it only if you make all your patents free for use in free software" or something)
In the long term, Linux is destined to rule all operating systems. Why? Because the ruling techno-elite of the future, I mean the people who will head up IT departments and be making all of the real decisions, are all Linux enthusiasts today. The Comp. Sci. majors running Linux and *BSD boxen in their dorm rooms today will be dominating the industry tomorrow.
It just occurred to me (or re-occurred to me--as reading my own source code (and clever comments therein) reveals, there's no telling what great ideas I might have had in the past but forgotten) how right this is, and how we know it's right--we have the current bizarrely pro-Microsoft IT departments of today as proof-of-concept. As has been pointed out on many occasion, the people in those positions are probably almost all former dosophiles, and therefore have a biological need to validate all that "expertise" they developed by forcing their platform onto everyone in their company.
When the current crop gets out there, they'll probably have the same attitude about Linux, forcing it onto the next generation of the technologically underclued and/or politically underpowered. I guess if I'm going to be beaten with a stick, that's a much better stick to be beaten with.
And hey maybe the open culture will make their dictatorships benevolent. Maybe they won't just replace:
"we don't support Macs. We've standardized on Microsoft." with "we don't support Macs. We only allow open source solutions."
Hell, I can dream.
I know, I'm late in having this epiphany, but you know how it is--you have an idea you think is cool, you have to share it with millions of people that are already tired of it.
project to build a Secure WAN with cheap boxes between server and web to encrypt/decrypt transmissions (using "fax effect" to spread itself). did it die?
Actually, "Earth's" "Moon" is a planet
on
Is Pluto a Planet?
·
· Score: 1
Yo,
If you work out the math, you'll see that the force of the sun on the "moon" is always "winning" against the force of Earth on the "moon"--the orbit of the "moon" is always bent toward the sun (unlike, say, the moons of Jupiter, whose orbits are always concave toward Jupiter). So what we think of as Earth's moon is more logically considered a companion planet to the earth. It's quite a bit smaller, and its orbit is significantly perturbed by Earth, but you really can't make a case for saying it orbits Earth.
At least, that's what I remember learning in some class somewhere.
Slashdot Mirror
See the truth here!.
Good job, guys!
--
I agree, sometimes it is. Doesn't change the fact that you should do the right thing, though.
I hear that a lot of the peace activists (and let's face it, there were certainly a lot of people doing that just because it was what was cool) would argue that they weren't opposed to the war because they were afraid to die--they would be willing to die for what was right. But when a couple of them were killed by whoever it was at Kent State, everyone went home...
What you're doing is seeing the larger problem of living morally encapsulated into the tiny little question "will I refuse to buy the DVD of the X-Men in protest of what the MPAA is doing?" [NOTE--I do NOT know if that DVD applies. I don't know where all the arms of the MPAA octupus are attached. please pardon my ignorance].
The fact that the majority of people really woudn't want to be bothered with not buying the DVD of a movie they really like is the biggest threat to our freedom. We act like it's "the corporations" or "the government". The truth is, it's us. If we were willing to go through the pain of product boycotting, we would control everything. It could easily be organized (the internet exists), but how do you get people to care?
--
Wait, now, where, exactly, do you tap? Does it matter which knuckle??? Tell, tell!!!
--
Although it appears that you're not trying to support the judges attitude, it appears to me that you're failing. Basically, you're saying, "it's too bad, it's not fair, but it's their fault that they are getting screwed by the system.", right? Explain to me how what you're saying is different than "well, she wouldn't have had such a hard time proving that she didn't sleep with Bob if she hadn't slept with Tom, Dick and Harry".
You go on to re-iterate that it's not fair. What I'm missing here is your point. I read "they are reaping what they have sown" to mean "they brought this on themselves", or, in other words, "it's their fault". Then later I read that it's wrong that this is happening. In other words, "it's the system that's wrong". I put these together to mean "reputations shouldn't matter, but they do, so they shouldn't have gotten a bad one, poor fools".
The article already points out that the judge was apparently biased against 2600 because of their previous publications, and that this is wrong. So what you are adding is that, because their description of what's wrong with various security models reads to you like instructions for crackers they have brougt it on themselves? It just keeps sounding to me like you sympathize with the judge even though you know you shouldn't.
Not a flame, just wondering if you can clarify your point, or tell what you think they should have done differently. Would it have gone better for them, in your opinion, if their past articles had been less of a how-to and more cold and clinical? I'm just not getting it.
thanks,
mike
--
They just don't seem to get the "Microsoft, everywhere, all the time" dogma. It's a wonder anything works over there.
--
Even better--now you censor criticism of the moderation. You're da MAN!
>>yawn--what did he say that we haven't already
>>heard? how was this considered wo[r]th posting
>>here?
> That's poor moderation--the above is a concise
>and accurate review. If anything, it could be
>considered a
> flame, but it's certainly not flamebait. Other
>people have raised the same point--what was wrong
>with mine, not PC enough?
--
that's not flamebait, it's a legitimate question. Other people have raised it, too. (Yes, even if I do say so myself). Clue in, moderator--how was I "baiting" someone to flame me? Or did you mean that it was a flame itself? Hmph. "Concise review", I would say.
--
Oh, sorry--I didn't realize how fine the distinctions were. So they call it third person just because you can actually see your own whole body?
Actually, you can hit TAB to switch to "head cam" if you want. Maybe it's both. Or am I not getting the first-third distinction?
mike
--
Hi, I have a couple of questions for the "real gamers" out there. I got an iBook recently, and it came with Bugdom and Nanosaur by Pangea.
Nanosaur is essentially a first-person shooter. Bugdom, though, is certainly not that (at least, not on most levels). I'm not a hard-core gamer, so I'm curious as to whether Bugdom fits into any "genre", and, if so, what else might be out there like it.
Also, are there other games which, like Bugdom, are challenging for adults but still accessible to kids?
Just curious,
mike
--
It wouldn't take much to get around this "thou shalt not publish benchmarks" restriction.
:).
Let's just agree right now that the next time we do a benchmark, we'll refer to Oracle as "commercial database 1", Informix as "Commercial database 2", MS-SQL as "Commercial database 3", or something like that.
It would be a little awkward to defend your choice of numbers if you only did the bm for 2 and 3, though
You could have something more subtle, though. Pick any databases you want as "commercial 1" and "commercial 2", and then state somewhere in your writeup that "people are very interested in knowing how PosgreSQL stands up agains the established giants like Oracle, Informix, MS-SQL, and DB2". Then we just know to read into that that commercial 1 was Oracle, and commercial 2 was Informix. Any list will do--just casually mention at the end of the writeup that
"the following databases have EULA's that prohibit the publishing of benchmarks:
Oracle
Informix
DB2
MS-SQL
"
There's no way that the companies could prove that you were doing that, and you would just never confirm or deny that there was any correlation.
it gets funnier and funnier--now you're objecting to "the principle of the thing". I have long maintained that _it doesn't matter_ whether what MS has done is illegal--it is clear that their practices have been unprinipled and resoundingly negative for both consumers and the industry. the last person that should be claiming principle is MS. Do you really think that they would have settled if they were innocent of wrongdoing? They clearly have the money to prove themselves right, if they were (maybe they would have needed another legal team, though...)
it's nice to hear you enjoy your work, though. It woud be even worse if what makes the rest of us miserable was making the people that made it miserable, too.
Actually, I think that this case was about "illegally obtaining a monopoly" rather than "illegally maintaining a monopoly".
/.
Read the article that is linked to from the just-previous caldera article on
you seem awfully sure that DR DOS is male....
(Not to mention that someone using Ms as a single would hardly backtrack to Mrs at marriage)
I think you are on the right track. Who knows what would have happened should Apple have been in charge, but they sure didn't want to allow anyone else to use Mac-like interfaces, for example.
I've thought about this a lot, because I love the MacOS, hate the actions of MS, etc. But I'm not blind to the fact that Steve Jobs wants to get his way just as much as Bill Gates does. There is one thing, though, that _might_ have made it better for us all if Apple had become the 800lb gorilla instead of M$, and that is that Jobs was driven by the desire to make computers "insanely great", as he said, while Bill is driven by winning. (I don't think Bill even knows how bad their software is, actually--he thinks (or says he thinks) it's great, and the real question is "who's out there that might knock me off the top? how do I defeat them?").
So, maybe huge, unassailable apple would have been better than huge, unassailable M$, but it's hard to say. It probable ended up better for us all that Apple had to fight to survive. It's almost as if competition is good.
One day, in the not-so-distant future, linux or something like it will be as good (for the low-end user) as the MacOS, and the best things in life will be free like they should be. Until then, I'm glad that Apple didn't die in the interim. They have, and still do, in many cases, really made contributions to the user experience. But don't get the idea that they're "nice" as opposed to M$'s "nasty". If they were nice, the Newton stuff wouldn't have been killed so abruptly and mercilessly--a lot of people would have been happy even now buying newtons like the eMate, even with no further research on Apple's part. No concessions were made to the users, it just died. Many other examples exist--they are a profit-driven company with shareholders and a bottom line. It's really hard to be forward looking enough to say "if I just do the right thing, I'll win financially in the long run." The Board isn't going to just take that attitude on faith, after all.
Anyway, i've said more than enough. I respect apple a lot, but don't confuse them with Woz (who is still an employee, of course, but obviously not making the corporate decisions...)
Later,
mike
While this may be the popular dogma around here, it isn't actually all that true. Microsoft embraces them all the time, and they seem to be doing quite well. As do most software companies that actually make money in the real world.
"they seem to be doing quite well" at what? oh, right, making money by exploiting and contributing to the ignorance of the general population. Yeah, that's the real world. I can't help thinking that you're one of the people that thinks people bash Microsoft because we're jealous of Bill Gates' wealth--when the real truth is that it's because of his wealth that you fawn over him, and so you think that our actions must be motivated by the same factor.
In the real real world, there are lots more important things than money. Not that you would get that impression from popular culture, I understand, but you should try to think harder than the characters on Friends, etc.
And as for the question of whether closed source projects are a dead end, well, they often are. There are exceptions--I have used Eudora Light and BBEdit Lite for years. They always served me admirably, and I never paid a dime for them. On the other hand, you have the way Sun yanks the Java community around. It seemed like everything was going to be nice and free at first, but then you realized that they could yank the entire thing out from under you.
There is always a risk with closed source, or open but not free source. Always. And there is always the risk with an open source project that it will fragment or never get the attention/funding it would have if you had made people pay for it.
But to return to what I was really trying to say with this, you are extremely naïve if you don't see that there is a lot of truth or potentional truth in the poster's comment. Look around.
transposed the r and o, and replaced r with h. should have used dvhoak keyboard--no, wait, that doesn't seem to help...
fhdsjsdfm vfrwef
wreu2398zacx
asdh78yhvsabn
safh,..fsadf..................
Omigosh--I just decrypted that! It reads:
The experiment has gone horribly wrong. I am trapped in a nearly helpless body. They force me to eat strained vegetables. The invasion will have to wait a few years.
---- It's even better when you play it backwards...
Heeeeeeeeeeeeeeee's a hypnotist
A hypnotist with laaaaaaaaaadies.
you won't remember why you liiiiiiked himmmm
---- (obviously, I don't need no steenkin karma...)
>There's a lady who's sure all that glitters is gold...
Geez, looks like we're gonna have to put up a "No Stariway" sign here, too.
(I feel my karma sinking...)
This, in fact, originated the term "Lame Proof"...
Anyone who's interested in these terms should pick up a college text on abstract algebra. You'll need to read most of an introductory text....
If you're going to get one, get Gallian's (the one mentioned in this post's parent). Interspersed with the "pure" mathematics are biographies, interesting applications, quotes from Beatles songs, etc. One of the best upper-level math texts ever, in my opinion.
First, let me say that I heartily agree that math is one of the best degrees you could have to do computer programming or any other kind of work that is heavily oriented toward problem solving.
But I differ with you in your answers about why the explanations/texts/etc can't be easier. There is some truth in what you and (moreso) others in the thread are saying, but there is also a heavy undercurrent of math groupthink. Just because no one takes the time to explain these higher concepts clearly doesn't mean there is not a way to do it. It's a hell of a lot harder to explain this stuff simply, but it could be done.
The fact that it generally isn't done is partly due to how hard it is to explain complex or highly abstract concepts clearly. But it's also partly due to the fraternity/hazing attitude in academia that "they should have to work as hard at it to get it as I did".
I have found that I can, with enough effort, find clear and simple (not necessarily short, though!) ways to explain even highly "esoteric" concepts. This involves the very difficult process of attempting to figure out how a newbie will be thinking about what I am saying, and trying to come up with accurate analogies to things that will already be familiar to them. Inevitably, after a lot of effort in this direction, I end up understanding the subject matter on a much deeper level.
This leads me to think that part of the reason that there are not clearer explanations out there is that you just have to understand it better than most people do before you can explain it that well, and at the same time you have to be thinking about how people outside of your field think.
The union of these two sets (one set being "those with a deep understanding of postgrad mathematics", and the other set being "those who spend a lot of time thinking about how to explain things clearly to newbies) may be vast, but the intersection is damn near the empty set (- that wisecrack is borrowed).
Intersect that with "those who have written math textbooks", and you'll get the picture.
It's not impossible, it's just hard, and, often, our cultural blinders don't let us see the payoff (if you want evidence of that, notice how quickly people reject the notion that more visualization would help--"if you learn with graphics, you'll suddenly quit understanding things when you get to 4-d or infini-d". It's baloney, but it's deeply ingrained baloney.)
Yet another barrier is that mathematicians make excellent use of the economy of notation. You can say a hell of a lot with a few symbols, and the very thought, once you've learned to use these symbols, of actually going back and writing out in english what you just expressed in symbols is anathema.
An analogy, for those who have messed with Perl, is regular expressions. How many people really comment their regular expressions? Once you've said it in such a nice, tight format, it just hurts to think about having to explain it in text.
For example, one of the first RegExp's in the perlre manpage ("man perlre" if you're on unix) looks like this:
s/^([^ ]*) *([^ ]*)/$2 $1/; # swap first two words
okay, that's commented--well, the "effect" is described. But imagine if you were trying to state what that expression does:
"Starting at the beginning of $_ (the default variable for matching), find the longest contiguous block (even if it's a block of length zero) of non-space characters (and store that in a variable called $1), then go past all the contiguous spaces after that, and group together the next contiguous block of non-spaces. Put this block of non-spaces into a variable called $2 [the "store that in $1 and $2" is implied by the presence of the parentheses, by the way]. Replace all of the matched text with a string consisting of the second block, a single space, and the first block."
Now that I've explained it in more excruciating detail, I understand it better. I can see that it won't work as advertised, for example. (try it on
foo bar baz
or even
foo bar
Maybe something like
s/(\S+)\s+(\S+)/$2 $1/;
would be better. Got to be careful with them *'s!
)
But look at the sheer number of characters in the text explanation! To another perlvert, the regular expression says the exact same thing. This is very similar to the situation in math--it's sooooo much easier to get the point across with a few terse symbols and references to theorems that it's really hard to get yourself to go through the effort required to explain it to the uninitiated (oops--pun inintentional).
Again, I'm not meaning to flame you, Darby--you hardly exhibited the problem compared to what other posts did. I'm talking about the general trend.
mike
Great idea, you should send it to handspring!
Wrong! You haven't been paying attention! You are supposed to say:
Great idea! You should apply for a patent!
(but seriously, and sadly, this is probably patentable--maybe you should patent it and make the licensing be "you can use it only if you make all your patents free for use in free software" or something)
It just occurred to me (or re-occurred to me--as reading my own source code (and clever comments therein) reveals, there's no telling what great ideas I might have had in the past but forgotten) how right this is, and how we know it's right--we have the current bizarrely pro-Microsoft IT departments of today as proof-of-concept. As has been pointed out on many occasion, the people in those positions are probably almost all former dosophiles, and therefore have a biological need to validate all that "expertise" they developed by forcing their platform onto everyone in their company.
When the current crop gets out there, they'll probably have the same attitude about Linux, forcing it onto the next generation of the technologically underclued and/or politically underpowered. I guess if I'm going to be beaten with a stick, that's a much better stick to be beaten with.
And hey maybe the open culture will make their dictatorships benevolent. Maybe they won't just replace:
"we don't support Macs. We've standardized on Microsoft."
with
"we don't support Macs. We only allow open source solutions."
Hell, I can dream.
I know, I'm late in having this epiphany, but you know how it is--you have an idea you think is cool, you have to share it with millions of people that are already tired of it.
project to build a Secure WAN with cheap boxes between server and web to encrypt/decrypt transmissions (using "fax effect" to spread itself). did it die?
Yo,
If you work out the math, you'll see that the force of the sun on the "moon" is always "winning" against the force of Earth on the "moon"--the orbit of the "moon" is always bent toward the sun (unlike, say, the moons of Jupiter, whose orbits are always concave toward Jupiter). So what we think of as Earth's moon is more logically considered a companion planet to the earth. It's quite a bit smaller, and its orbit is significantly perturbed by Earth, but you really can't make a case for saying it orbits Earth.
At least, that's what I remember learning in some class somewhere.
mikey