C, Perl, C++ (a wee bit) and (alas) FORTRAN. However, if you can avoid FORTRAN, do so at all costs. I only used it because I had to modify a huge code which was already in FORTRAN.
I'm afraid that part of the experiment is a social experiment, and he can't quite do that on a NON-production box, since it requires real live moderators.:)
Of course, how many iMac owners will suffer through a Linux install?
On the other hand, it ought to be straightforward to make the Linux install immensely easy on an iMac. After all, they are all pretty much identical. There's been a lot of news about making Linux easy for newbies, and it seems like the iMac is a great opportunity.
...that using proprietary software is like submitting yourself to slavery.
Am I a slave because I read a copyrighted novel? No! Is a shareware programmer a slave-owner? Again, No!
The analogy is a little more fitting if you personify your software.:) In the case of proprietary software your software itself is a slave of the writer, since s/he is the one who ones it, and you have only payed to use its services.
Whereas with free software, your software it your own slave... Hmmm. I guess maybe the metaphor breaks down.:) Oh well.
I think that the proposed system does emphasize quality over quantity, in the long run. Once you get a default rating greater than one there is a much greater chance of your comments being moderated down, which means if you then post a whole lot of boring comments, you will probably decrease your alignment rating.
Also, this would eliminate the need to be constantly adjusting the alignment thresholds over time. An average is always an average.
I think that the system won't require constant adjustments, as it was proposed. Basically everyone's default score will continue to rise until their comments are moderated up as often as they are moderated down.
On another note, it looks like there is a possibility of score inflation, if people moderate up more often than down, which could be a bad thing...
You seem to be bringing up more a question of what the moderators should be able to do, than who they are. Personally I would like the moderators to be people who are representative of the readers of/.
However, you have a good point regarding the role of minority opinion. I certainly don't want to read only the comments that 50% of slashdotters agree with, since I would much rather read both sides of an arguement.
However, I think the best way to assure this is in how the moderation is exactly accomplished, as you hinted in your discussion of "one person, one vote." There are certainly better and worse ways of implementing this, but that is a question for another day (at least according to Rob). But I certainly want there to be a large enough pool of moderators that those minority opinions are well sampled. Otherwise there will be no possible scheme to allow their voice to have an effect on the moderation.
Freedom? What is freedom? To me, it's being able to do anything you want without consequences.
This may be your definition of freedom, if you happen to be an anarchist. But personally, I wouldn't consider myself free if anyone who wanted (and was stronger than me, which is most people) could beat me up whenever they wanted without fear of repercussion.
Freedom is being able to do whatever you want, so long as it doesn't limit other people's freedom. This is a recursive definition, and pretty vague, which is why noone seems to agree on what freedom actually is.
This is what the GPL deals with. It espresses a sort of mutual definition of freedom, in which you are free to use my code so long as I am free to use your code. This seems eminently reasonable to me.
As I recall, LinuxPPC runs on virtually every non-Mac PPC computer. Of course, you'd want to look into this. But I think it even runs on the old BeBoxen. Of course, I don't know where you'd buy a non-Mac PPC computer... but then there are an awful lot of things I don't know.
Contrary to what Bruce suggested, this liscence compensates the "unpaid contributer" more than the main author. According to the liscence each author (meaning anyone who has contributed code to the work) gets an equal vote on who the steward is, so noone has the leverage to keep most of the profits to themselves.
Of course, there do seem to be problems with this liscence regarding the details. I could get my friends and family and pets to submit code I wrote so that we could get a bigger share of the vote (and thus the pie). But I suppose the other authors could always fork the project and refuse to let me or my family and pets submit any code, once they realized what I was doing...
This doesn't miss the point of free software at all. I keep hearing that free software is not about "free beer", but that is the only type of freedom that is really limited by the NCL.
You can still copy the source as you see fit and distribute binaries just like you could under the GPL. You can modify the source however you like, and distribute the modified version. The only new restriction is that you (being someone other than the author) can't sell the software for a profit.
I don't see how this violates the spirit of free software. If someone wants to make a profit by selling my software, I don't see why it is unreasonable for me to get a share of that profit.
Of course, you don't want to "speed read" stuff like novels where the the point is to spend time doing something fulfilling
I suppose it depends on the novel. A lot of older novels have big sections that are really boring to me. For example, War and Peace was a great novel, but it has whole chapters that are completely boring. Skimming can be very good in this case. Of course, maybe getting an abridged version it better... but I hate to not know what it was that they cut out!
And, can PNG with an alpha layer be smaller than a normal GIF? It is 33% bigger...
Only the lookup table for the palette need be 33% larger. The data for the pixels is still 8 bit (or whatever you choose). For an 8 bit image disregarding compression, this would come out to 256 bytes regardless of the image size. And they probably compress the heck out of the alph channel, since in most cases it is probably one.
The other major difference (I think) is that in apple's case they only get to terminate the use of the Affected Code. So they can't terminate your liscence to all of Darwin over one infringement case. This seems to be much better than the IBM liscence was.
Yeah, I looked at it. I know C/C++ but have never seen javascript before in my life. It looks like it would be pretty simple to translate into C and then do a brute force search. But I have real work to do.... OK, I admit, I'm procrastinating right now, but I can only procrastinate for so long.:(
Your explanation is correct as far as it goes, but there is one more detail. With the LCD screen they are able to redirect the light before it passes through the pixel elements, and it passes through without changing direction. In a CRT display the light is produced diffusely by the pixels, so it would be quite a challenge to collimate it and redirect it.
This article was definitely overly optimistic. There are several major problems with nanotubes. Currently we have no way of choosing whether we make metallic or semiconducting tubes.
And we have no way to know whether they are metallic or semiconducting without hooking up traditional wires to them.
And we have no way to arrange them as we like on a surface.
And if we did, we couldn't make devices out of them, since we have no way to make decent electrical contacts between them.
It is not that I don't respect the people who are working on tubes. I work with a bunch of them, and they are very clever people. But they would be the first to tell you that they aren't likely to be able to make computers out of these things.
Does anyone else NOT want a substance at about a billionth of a degree kelvin near their head? This stuff makes liquid nitrogen look toasty by comparison.
Actually, the BEC has a very tiny head capacity, so it probably wouldn't freeze your eyes... Of course, the vacuum chamber might break your neck...
Actually, the neutrinos can't create Cherenkov radiation, since they're neutral. The neutrino detectors detect the charged particles created when the neutrinos decay. But you are right about them using Cherenkov radiation to do it.
Yes, if you could push a mirror through the condensate faster than 38 mph you would definitely get some pretty cool Cherenkov radiation. This is essentially what Cherenkov radiation is, only Cherenkov radiation is produced by charged particles moving faster than 38 mph. Of course, moving a mirror through this gas would pose certain difficulties.
I heard an interesting story once regarding Cherenkov radiation. Apparently in some of the older accellerators, in order to line up the detector with the beam of electrons (or whatever), the experimentalist would put his/her eye in the path of the beam and look at the Cherenkov radiation (typically blue) in order to see precisely where the beam was. The electrons were travelling (once in the eye) faster than the local speed of light, so they spit off Cherenkov radiation. But I'm not sure I'd really want them shooting on through my brain!
Here at work I use a one-processor machine with 1 Gig of memory. And on supercomputers I use a whole lot more than that. I topped 8 gig used just by my program for a large calculation. So it really just depends who you are and what you're doing.
Because some of us can't read any German. In my case, I do quantum mechanics, so the words that Babelfish can't figure out, I can figure out myself. So I could quite easily understand the bit that Babelfish was able to translate, while from the untranslated text I could only understand those words that Bablefish couldn't translate.:)
Hmm... I'm no cryptoexpert, but isn't it possible to measure randomness by watching the output from the function? So just use your random number function in the processor and put it in a program that measures all the usual things one measures when one tests a random function...
I'm no cryptoexpert either, but I think there are certain kinds of non-randomness which are hard to test for, if you don't know what you're looking for. On the other hand a nonpseudo random number generator is something I've always thought should be built into chips. But then maybe that's just because I got burned by the terrible PRNG's in Numerical Recipes first edition, which the authors thought that they had tested to ensure they were sufficiently random...
Well, there are unfortunately certain difficulties with making shorter wavelength diode lasers. And those are the only kind of laser that are ever likely to be cheap enough for consumer applications.
In the case of gallium nitride, there is a yellow luminescence that was a major problem for making lasers. One of the theorists in my research group was trying to figure out precisely what defect caused the luminescence (probably vacancies). Presumably this company figured out how to make GaN with very little of whatever defect caused the yellow luminescence.
Diode lasers with even shorter wavelengths would have to have even higher band gaps, and then they would have to be pure enough that there are no optically active impurity or defect states lying in the gap. That would be a major pain.
I don't know the details, but I know that violet is maybe 350-400 nm, while red is around 700-800 nm. I think that red lasers are currently used, so this would mean a factor of two (as the article suggested). But if anyone knows better than me, I'd love to be corrected.
I'm not about to conceede that suddenly you (and a couple other idiots) have found a flaw in a logical riddle that is 2 millenia old. It still exists because it's NOT wrong. You'll have to accept that.
I'm afraid I won't have to accept that. Two thousand years does not make anything correct. You seem to have no respect for Plato, and his writings have been around for longer than those of Epicurus.
Notice the Epicurus lived BEFORE the Christian god existed. He never HEARD of Jesus, or Christ. He lived during a time when Greek and Roman mythology were still bonafide religions. And if you've read any of that mythology, none of the gods were omnipotent or good, and many of them practiced EVIL.
However, it you have also read Plato's work (which came before Epicurus), you will know that there was a lot of revisionism going on. Plato did believe that god was good, and on that basis rejected much of the old mythology. He also believed that god was omnipotent. I don't think that he said that explicitely, but he did say that he didn't believe that anything bad (remember, he had a different understanding of bad than most people) could happen to good people, since the gods wouldn't allow it. Presumably it was works like those of Plato which Epicurus was responding to.
I guess I should mention as a caveat that I obviously don't know what Plato believed, since he only wrote dialogues. However, if I remember right, most of what I have refered to here can be found in Euthyphro, in case you're interested.
Slashdot Mirror
C, Perl, C++ (a wee bit) and (alas) FORTRAN. However, if you can avoid FORTRAN, do so at all costs. I only used it because I had to modify a huge code which was already in FORTRAN.
I'm afraid that part of the experiment is a social experiment, and he can't quite do that on a NON-production box, since it requires real live moderators. :)
On the other hand, it ought to be straightforward to make the Linux install immensely easy on an iMac. After all, they are all pretty much identical. There's been a lot of news about making Linux easy for newbies, and it seems like the iMac is a great opportunity.
Am I a slave because I read a copyrighted novel? No! Is a shareware programmer a slave-owner? Again, No!
The analogy is a little more fitting if you personify your software. :) In the case of proprietary software your software itself is a slave of the writer, since s/he is the one who ones it, and you have only payed to use its services.
Whereas with free software, your software it your own slave... Hmmm. I guess maybe the metaphor breaks down. :) Oh well.
Also, this would eliminate the need to be constantly adjusting the alignment thresholds over time. An average is always an average.
I think that the system won't require constant adjustments, as it was proposed. Basically everyone's default score will continue to rise until their comments are moderated up as often as they are moderated down.
On another note, it looks like there is a possibility of score inflation, if people moderate up more often than down, which could be a bad thing...
However, you have a good point regarding the role of minority opinion. I certainly don't want to read only the comments that 50% of slashdotters agree with, since I would much rather read both sides of an arguement.
However, I think the best way to assure this is in how the moderation is exactly accomplished, as you hinted in your discussion of "one person, one vote." There are certainly better and worse ways of implementing this, but that is a question for another day (at least according to Rob). But I certainly want there to be a large enough pool of moderators that those minority opinions are well sampled. Otherwise there will be no possible scheme to allow their voice to have an effect on the moderation.
This may be your definition of freedom, if you happen to be an anarchist. But personally, I wouldn't consider myself free if anyone who wanted (and was stronger than me, which is most people) could beat me up whenever they wanted without fear of repercussion.
Freedom is being able to do whatever you want, so long as it doesn't limit other people's freedom. This is a recursive definition, and pretty vague, which is why noone seems to agree on what freedom actually is.
This is what the GPL deals with. It espresses a sort of mutual definition of freedom, in which you are free to use my code so long as I am free to use your code. This seems eminently reasonable to me.
As I recall, LinuxPPC runs on virtually every non-Mac PPC computer. Of course, you'd want to look into this. But I think it even runs on the old BeBoxen. Of course, I don't know where you'd buy a non-Mac PPC computer... but then there are an awful lot of things I don't know.
Contrary to what Bruce suggested, this liscence compensates the "unpaid contributer" more than the main author. According to the liscence each author (meaning anyone who has contributed code to the work) gets an equal vote on who the steward is, so noone has the leverage to keep most of the profits to themselves.
Of course, there do seem to be problems with this liscence regarding the details. I could get my friends and family and pets to submit code I wrote so that we could get a bigger share of the vote (and thus the pie). But I suppose the other authors could always fork the project and refuse to let me or my family and pets submit any code, once they realized what I was doing...
You can still copy the source as you see fit and distribute binaries just like you could under the GPL. You can modify the source however you like, and distribute the modified version. The only new restriction is that you (being someone other than the author) can't sell the software for a profit.
I don't see how this violates the spirit of free software. If someone wants to make a profit by selling my software, I don't see why it is unreasonable for me to get a share of that profit.
I suppose it depends on the novel. A lot of older novels have big sections that are really boring to me. For example, War and Peace was a great novel, but it has whole chapters that are completely boring. Skimming can be very good in this case. Of course, maybe getting an abridged version it better... but I hate to not know what it was that they cut out!
Only the lookup table for the palette need be 33% larger. The data for the pixels is still 8 bit (or whatever you choose). For an 8 bit image disregarding compression, this would come out to 256 bytes regardless of the image size. And they probably compress the heck out of the alph channel, since in most cases it is probably one.
The other major difference (I think) is that in apple's case they only get to terminate the use of the Affected Code. So they can't terminate your liscence to all of Darwin over one infringement case. This seems to be much better than the IBM liscence was.
Yeah, I looked at it. I know C/C++ but have never seen javascript before in my life. It looks like it would be pretty simple to translate into C and then do a brute force search. But I have real work to do.... OK, I admit, I'm procrastinating right now, but I can only procrastinate for so long. :(
Your explanation is correct as far as it goes, but there is one more detail. With the LCD screen they are able to redirect the light before it passes through the pixel elements, and it passes through without changing direction. In a CRT display the light is produced diffusely by the pixels, so it would be quite a challenge to collimate it and redirect it.
And we have no way to know whether they are metallic or semiconducting without hooking up traditional wires to them.
And we have no way to arrange them as we like on a surface.
And if we did, we couldn't make devices out of them, since we have no way to make decent electrical contacts between them.
It is not that I don't respect the people who are working on tubes. I work with a bunch of them, and they are very clever people. But they would be the first to tell you that they aren't likely to be able to make computers out of these things.
Actually, the BEC has a very tiny head capacity, so it probably wouldn't freeze your eyes... Of course, the vacuum chamber might break your neck...
Actually, the neutrinos can't create Cherenkov radiation, since they're neutral. The neutrino detectors detect the charged particles created when the neutrinos decay. But you are right about them using Cherenkov radiation to do it.
Yes, if you could push a mirror through the condensate faster than 38 mph you would definitely get some pretty cool Cherenkov radiation. This is essentially what Cherenkov radiation is, only Cherenkov radiation is produced by charged particles moving faster than 38 mph. Of course, moving a mirror through this gas would pose certain difficulties.
I heard an interesting story once regarding Cherenkov radiation. Apparently in some of the older accellerators, in order to line up the detector with the beam of electrons (or whatever), the experimentalist would put his/her eye in the path of the beam and look at the Cherenkov radiation (typically blue) in order to see precisely where the beam was. The electrons were travelling (once in the eye) faster than the local speed of light, so they spit off Cherenkov radiation. But I'm not sure I'd really want them shooting on through my brain!
Here at work I use a one-processor machine with 1 Gig of memory. And on supercomputers I use a whole lot more than that. I topped 8 gig used just by my program for a large calculation. So it really just depends who you are and what you're doing.
Because some of us can't read any German. In my case, I do quantum mechanics, so the words that Babelfish can't figure out, I can figure out myself. So I could quite easily understand the bit that Babelfish was able to translate, while from the untranslated text I could only understand those words that Bablefish couldn't translate. :)
I'm no cryptoexpert either, but I think there are certain kinds of non-randomness which are hard to test for, if you don't know what you're looking for. On the other hand a nonpseudo random number generator is something I've always thought should be built into chips. But then maybe that's just because I got burned by the terrible PRNG's in Numerical Recipes first edition, which the authors thought that they had tested to ensure they were sufficiently random...
In the case of gallium nitride, there is a yellow luminescence that was a major problem for making lasers. One of the theorists in my research group was trying to figure out precisely what defect caused the luminescence (probably vacancies). Presumably this company figured out how to make GaN with very little of whatever defect caused the yellow luminescence.
Diode lasers with even shorter wavelengths would have to have even higher band gaps, and then they would have to be pure enough that there are no optically active impurity or defect states lying in the gap. That would be a major pain.
I don't know the details, but I know that violet is maybe 350-400 nm, while red is around 700-800 nm. I think that red lasers are currently used, so this would mean a factor of two (as the article suggested). But if anyone knows better than me, I'd love to be corrected.
I'm afraid I won't have to accept that. Two thousand years does not make anything correct. You seem to have no respect for Plato, and his writings have been around for longer than those of Epicurus.
Notice the Epicurus lived BEFORE the Christian god existed. He never HEARD of Jesus, or Christ. He lived during a time when Greek and Roman mythology were still bonafide religions. And if you've read any of that mythology, none of the gods were omnipotent or good, and many of them practiced EVIL.
However, it you have also read Plato's work (which came before Epicurus), you will know that there was a lot of revisionism going on. Plato did believe that god was good, and on that basis rejected much of the old mythology. He also believed that god was omnipotent. I don't think that he said that explicitely, but he did say that he didn't believe that anything bad (remember, he had a different understanding of bad than most people) could happen to good people, since the gods wouldn't allow it. Presumably it was works like those of Plato which Epicurus was responding to.
I guess I should mention as a caveat that I obviously don't know what Plato believed, since he only wrote dialogues. However, if I remember right, most of what I have refered to here can be found in Euthyphro, in case you're interested.