Remember where the people of the era where when it was "written". For them any number over a few thousand must have seemed un-knowingly huge. It's a culture where infinity was conveyed with a phrase like "seventy times seven times" (490!). In my humble opinion, the "seven days" was merely a way to convey seven stages and partition events with some reference to time. Sadly, some people fail to allow the "holy word" to be re-thought even though they are reading a translation in the first place.
It's not as if they didn't have a word meaning "stages" back then. If you desire any semblence of accuracy in your thought you need to look at the Biblical creation story with the same detachment as you would some Indian one you're learning for the first time (or some secular fairy tale, for that matter). If you do this, you will see that the literal details of the stories typically have no significance whatever -- they are just filler, background for moral messages. Does it matter how many hands Vishnu has, exactly? No -- somebody just made that up, like the fact that Little Red Riding Hood wore a red hood. God created the world in seven days because it sounded good to put it that way -- the author wasn't trying to say anything deep or important by saying "seven days". This should be clear whether or not you believe the author was inspired by God (or was God).
I tell you what --- I think the rise in fundies the last few years is temporary. You look back a generation or two, that is people who had contact with the beginnings of the first rapidly changing society, with cars, airplanes, telephones, radio, TV, either personally or via stories from their grandparents. They could see the pace picking up, the gradual quickening, and so the continued quickening does not scare them. Future generations, the ones actually growing up now, see it as natural. The problem is with a generation or two in the middle, who think they have some bizarre vague false genetic memory of a time that existed only in their fantasies, where society was stable, and can only see modern society as being a corruption. They had no gradual start of changes to help them see change as good, and they didn't grow up with the rapid changes of nowadays.
I can't help but consider this wishful thinking. History may have some tendency to progress forward, but the reactionaries do not always lose -- and right now, the intellectual reactionaries have been increasing in power since (at least) WWI, and its attendant discovery that mass beliefs can be bought.
People today are educated through two means. The first is a culture industry, manufactured to spec for the purpose of generating money -- as represented by these IMAX films. As we can see here and elsewhere, the market ultimately has no room for scientific accuracy. The second is the PR industry; i.e., the deliberate purchase of public opinion -- the only fundamental source of human power, particularly potent in a democracy. It would be nice to believe it -cannot- be bought, as surely this fact cripples the foundation of democracy, but that simply does not bear out when you look at why people believe what they do. Neither of the two avenues provides much hope for rational thought.
We may be able to shed certain backwards notions, but the quality of our overall thought is being systematically reduced; whatever belief systems take the place of the old ones, we can be confident, judging from recent history, that they will be a combination of those that sell, and those that can be bought by organizations with an interest in their effect on human behavior (which is just a more general formulation of the latter class). Whether coming from organizations representing left or right, corporation or non-profit, logos does not work nearly so well as intellectual dishonesty; the Michael Moores and Bill O'Reillys will always have more influence than the Bertrand Russells -- indeed it would be impossible to imagine a Bertrand Russell of today achieving any sort of fame. Not compared to Oprah.
Whoever wins any of the mass intellectual battles fought today, we can be confident it will not be accuracy or honesty. It has not been, for many decades.
Re:Ah. You tried to get into mensa....
on
MSN Sponsors Mensa
·
· Score: 1
OK. My point was that he seemed to feel a need to prove that he was "special" (did he really use that word? I can't remember). It would have been far more keeping with his stated indifference to paper qualifications not to try to use them to defend the validity of his own views. Imagine if he had used the same method to defend the opposite position:
I have <list of degrees>, so I think I know something about intelligence -- and IQ really hits the mark. Mensa is fantastic! The only people who disagree are those jealous morons who couldn't make it past a Masters.
I don't know about that. It's more of a difference between CS curriculum (plus liberal arts curriculum) and CS. Linear Algebra &c are beaurocratically mandated but not genuinely relevant to either.
Re:Ah. You tried to get into mensa....
on
MSN Sponsors Mensa
·
· Score: 1
It was just a little riff; I'm surprised someone moderated it up too (maybe he meant to click "Funny"). But I still don't see a difference between bragging about grades and degrees and bragging about IQ scores.
The reason for allowing the vocab is simple statistical correlation with non-verbal IQ tests. It's obviously not culturally unbiased, which is why they also make the culturally unbiased tests, but verbal tests that actually have predictive power are much easier to design.
Mensa doesn't design the tests. Various psychologists and beaurocrats do them. They're the same tests that are used to determine whether people are competent for trial, or whether young students are in the right grade or need special education, etc. Nobody claims that the tests are perfect, and they're revised all the time. But they're correllated, at least, with general conceptions of intelligence; puzzle-solving is not at all an ability isolated from every other. People who can "solve puzzles" better can learn math and music more easily, etc, as a matter of statistical fact, and parts of some tests just measure memory. The tests clearly have some measure of validity. You can't dismiss them entirely.
Where does all the Mensa hostility come from? Mensa is not all that exclusive, millions of people in the US qualify... IQ tests are not perfect, but Mensa's standards are low enough that false -negatives- for the sort of person they want are surely rare. At least sometimes it could be a way to find diverse people sharing a deep kind of mental agreement. It seems to be a far more admirable basis for association than any common social pattern. And if it's a support group for the dysfunctionally intelligent, so what? Surely slashdot posters should understand the social isolation that can result from intelligence.
That said, I've no personal experience with Mensa.
Re:Ah. You tried to get into mensa....
on
MSN Sponsors Mensa
·
· Score: 2, Insightful
Frankly, I'm not the "worrier" type who needs the justification of a test to prove (s)he's as good as (s)he thinks (s)he is.
[...]
Uh huh...
I've excelled in every academic test I've ever taken. (14 'O' levels, 6 'A' levels, 2 'S' levels, a Physics degree from IC, London, and a PhD at KCL). I have more qualifications (in spades) than 99% of people I've met.
[...]
You can still make all changes atomic with flat files (very easily). If your state per user is under a few kilobytes it's perfectly reasonable (and does not violate ACID) to use a flat file for each user's state. And if it's bigger you can still isolate with multiple files, which you can change multiply in atoms with a simple journal. This is how databases work when they use flat files for storage.
You won't use any of that in programming (he was talking about hacking, not CS degree reqs), and anyways that's all very basic, math-for-engineers stuff.
The page provides links to a windows installer as well as Ubuntu.deb packages (and, naturally, the source). In fact, it uses python and GTK+, so it is rather more Unix- than Windows-native.
The bet is at the moment of "cp" when I create a copy "I own", and technically it's me pirating the song.
Better use "ln" next time then -- that'll make it legal.
The tracking of incidental copies in RAM, etc., is of course absurd. Merely playing a song on a stereo creates a copy in the form of sound waves, not to mention the copies in the DAC circuitry and the speaker wire, or in the eardrum and the brain. There is a substantial difference between the eardrum copy and a CDR copy, which is that the CDR copy can continue to exist indepedently of the eardrum, but not vice-versa. RAM copies can have this property, or not (tmpfs &c), but the ones created through everyday use of the filesystem will not.
Continuing the absurdity, a single copy in RAM involves millions of electrons redundantly representing the same information. Does this count as millions of copies for the purpose of law? By all reason, if RAM constitutes a single copy, it must surely constitute these millions as well.
Unlike Windows, the source for Linux is readily available. So if you really have something better it will be no problem to write a 100% compatible layer that will run Linux-apps on your OS. Actually such a thing already exists in BSD and AFAIK also on AIX-L.
Source availability just makes this possible, not "no problem". More importantly, a Unix compatibility layer inevitably brings with it all the faults of Unix -- it does not allow you to escape Unix.
You also miss the biggest advantage of Unix:
It's simplicity. Take the permissions for example. You can argue all day about ACLs being "better" than the classic Unix uga-bits, but at the end of the day, the Unix-way is adequate for almost everybody and more importantly can be understood in theory and praxis by almost everybody. On the other hand, ACLs may be undertood in theory, but they will turn into a terrible unmaintainable mess once you start to use them on a larger scale.
The Unix way is -not- simple, in practice -- writing suid binaries to manage permissions is not simple; in fact it is a huge Unix problem that the security model makes it necessary. ACLs are better, in that they relieve some of the need for suid binaries, but capabilities are far better than anything else -- it is far more simple to write a secure program within a capabilities model than within either of the other models.
In general, Unix is relatively simple, but still more complex than it has to be.
Unix is a decent system -- it's the only OS I use. But it has obvious flaws.
The security model is terrible -- a capability-based system is obviously correct, and the uid-based system lives only on inertia. The filesystem predates any DBMS knowledge, and thus there is a very complex, inconsistent filesystem hierarchy to emulate a database, with various PATH environment nonsense, etc. X, of course, is terrible. BeOS IPC may be worse (I've no familiarity with it) but Unix IPC is still a real pain. And the biggest one: C. C screams "1970" in every way. The improvements of D (for example) will never make it into mainstream use, but there is little arguing that D is not superior to C. Even C++ is not taking off in Unix, and although C++ has some major faults of its own, it is definitely better than C. (C++ is less well-supported, for sure, but that is in turn because it is less popular).
I should clarify that I don't really mean to speak of the failures of specific systems, but of the various superior approaches that systems have pursued. Whatever caused Plan9 to fail, the real question is: why haven't various design decisions of Plan9 become popular? The answer, in some cases, may be that they are not actually superior -- but in a good number, it is only that they are not already popular.
The trouble with operating systems is that in order to be useful they
have to be popular, or at least compatible with other popular operating
systems. An OS, or anyway an OS interface, is a natural monopoly.
Microsoft was founded on the notion that natural monopolies are great
ways to make loads of money without actually doing anything productive,
and they have been very successful exploiting this fact, even as they
have been incredibly detrimental to computing generally.
Linux is in exactly the same position, and the free software world
needs to recognize this. Unlike Windows, Linux's monopoly was not created
to exploit its users; unlike Windows, Linux's monopoly is not -really-
exclusive (it is just Unix). But Linux's chief selling point is still
mere compatibility -- with both hardware and software -- and because
of the power of this inertia, Linux can succeed without actually
being better. This is what makes Linux the next Windows.
Unix was a great system in 1970. It was a far, far better way to
manage a computer than the most popular approaches at the time, and became
successful because of this. It was a great contribution to computing.
Today, however, by all rational measures it should be obsolete.
Nobody designing an operating system today would make it anything like
Unix, unless they wanted it to be compatible with Unix. I don't want
to get into specific critiques -- if you disagree on this point, then
just ignore me. If, however, you see the myriad outdated approaches in
the design of Unix, then you will realize the problem here.
Systems like Plan9 or EROS use designs obviously superior to Unix,
and are destined to fail because of this, not in spite of it.
If we do not figure out the problem here and fix it, we will be stuck
with Unix for as long as it took to get rid of Microsoft -- maybe longer.
Ken Thompson said it thusly:
You can have the best and most beautiful interface in the
world and the most extensible operating system that ports to anything
and then you have to port on top of it a thousand staff-years worth
of applications that you can't obtain the source for. You have two
choices: Go to Microsoft and ask for the source to Office to port to
your operating system and they'll laugh at you; or get a user's manual
and re-engineer the code and they'll sue you anyway. Basically, it'll
never happen because the entry fee is too high.
Anything new will have to come along with the type of revolution that
came along with Unix. Nothing was going to topple IBM until something
came along that made them irrelevant. I'm sure they have the mainframe
market locked up, but that's just irrelevant. And the same thing with
Microsoft: Until something comes along that makes them irrelevant,
the entry fee is too difficult and they won't be displaced.
I think that this has been the case already, in large part, since the industrial revolution. The original capitalist paradigm of a multitude of companies competing in a single market has simply been obsoleted. Global communication and transportation, among other factors, allow a far greater economy of scale, and thus it has been the case in most markets for a very long time that no two companies have much hope of competing against a single company the size of their combination -- or in any case, far less chance than if they combined to compete.
You are right to point out that a monopoly economy is not necessarily a bad thing. Experience has shown centrally-managed, cooperative monoliths to be capable of far greater efficiency than competitive, decentralized markets, which is of course what we should expect from a technical-scientific point of view; the monolith is far more flexible in its allocation of resources, can easily avoid redundancy, and can benefit far more from the mentioned economy of scale. Competitive markets, of course, have been shown to have surprising advantages, but these are no longer sufficient to justify their existence on the grounds of efficiency in most arenas (excluding labor). Morever, competition within a market, particularly where that competition centers on differential productivity, is clearly an unstable state, for the reasons mentioned above (even if mergers are prohibited, since the smallest companies would simply fail one by one). We cannot hope to maintain it.
The problem, of course, is that the efficiency made possible by monopoly is offset (for the consumer) by the enormous potential for abuse also made possible (the benefit of efficiency is still there, but it serves only the owners of the monopoly). These abuses might be curbed by government regulation, but the typical approaches -- price controls, &c -- have substantial deficiencies.
The ideal solution, from a game-theoretic perspective, would be for consumers of the monopoly service to collectively negotiate a purchase of the service. Thus, the buyers union becomes a monopoly itself, and each party is -- theoretically -- on equal grounds in negotiating the service and its price; the principles involved become very much like those of traditional capitalist models.
In practice, this approach has run into two major obstacles wherever it has been attempted: first, that unions other than corporations are very difficult to form (and governments are far more hostile to union monopolies than corporate ones, making it even harder); second, that the negotiating parties of a union have been historically quite corrupt, particularly when that party has been a political body representing as a union the public benefactors of a government contract -- which is the easiest sort way to effect collective negotiation. However, the approach has worked quite successfully whenever governments negotiate with corporations from other countries, where few conflicts of interest arise.
Even with corruption, though, this more rational bargaining model would prevent the majority of exploitation made available to monopolies, and union monopoly, like corporate monopoly, also allows greater benefits of economy of scale: price discrimination would become capable of far better realization, greatly increasing total wealth. Overall, we would have a much more rational organization of production from a technical perspective, a much more rational means of determining prices from a game-theoretic perspective, and a much more rational mechanism for allocating resources from an economic perspective.
Unfortunately, although we can expect a collective negotiating organization to be stable within a market, its absence is equally stable; each represents a Nash equilibrium (a local maximum where no individual buyer can benefit by changing his individual negotiating strategy). How to hop between these equilibria without government support remains a problem to be solved, but one worthy of much social and political effort.
All of my music is encoded in ogg, and the originals are mostly scratched beyond repair, so to me the iPod as shipped is already a brick. But the iPod hack is quite safe, as it is possible to flash the ROM without being able to boot the ROM; moreover, the bootloader is the only critical part and I understand it is quite solid.
After I come home for work and eat dinner, I usually have enough shows on my TiVo that TiVo picked for me to keep me entertained until I go to bed a couple of hours later.
God - that is depressing. I have no doubt that TiVo can provide, through its suggestions, a constant stream of programming sufficient to hold your attention through your every free hour... but I can only find it deeply frightening.
One of the replies to your post was from someone who finds Paris attractive. I'm sure there's a percentage of people who are just naturally hard wired for those preferences, but given the fact that Paris' body isn't really capable of supporting a pregnancy without medical aid, I doubt she matches the image of what we EVOLVED to prefer.
Exempting, of course, the fact that we have evolved to prefer what is desired by others. The purpose of the beautiful wife is two-fold: to bear beautiful children, but also as a symbol of status and success.
Slashdot Mirror
People today are educated through two means. The first is a culture industry, manufactured to spec for the purpose of generating money -- as represented by these IMAX films. As we can see here and elsewhere, the market ultimately has no room for scientific accuracy. The second is the PR industry; i.e., the deliberate purchase of public opinion -- the only fundamental source of human power, particularly potent in a democracy. It would be nice to believe it -cannot- be bought, as surely this fact cripples the foundation of democracy, but that simply does not bear out when you look at why people believe what they do. Neither of the two avenues provides much hope for rational thought.
We may be able to shed certain backwards notions, but the quality of our overall thought is being systematically reduced; whatever belief systems take the place of the old ones, we can be confident, judging from recent history, that they will be a combination of those that sell, and those that can be bought by organizations with an interest in their effect on human behavior (which is just a more general formulation of the latter class). Whether coming from organizations representing left or right, corporation or non-profit, logos does not work nearly so well as intellectual dishonesty; the Michael Moores and Bill O'Reillys will always have more influence than the Bertrand Russells -- indeed it would be impossible to imagine a Bertrand Russell of today achieving any sort of fame. Not compared to Oprah.
Whoever wins any of the mass intellectual battles fought today, we can be confident it will not be accuracy or honesty. It has not been, for many decades.
It was just a little riff; I'm surprised someone moderated it up too (maybe he meant to click "Funny"). But I still don't see a difference between bragging about grades and degrees and bragging about IQ scores.
The reason for allowing the vocab is simple statistical correlation with non-verbal IQ tests. It's obviously not culturally unbiased, which is why they also make the culturally unbiased tests, but verbal tests that actually have predictive power are much easier to design.
Mensa doesn't design the tests. Various psychologists and beaurocrats do them. They're the same tests that are used to determine whether people are competent for trial, or whether young students are in the right grade or need special education, etc. Nobody claims that the tests are perfect, and they're revised all the time. But they're correllated, at least, with general conceptions of intelligence; puzzle-solving is not at all an ability isolated from every other. People who can "solve puzzles" better can learn math and music more easily, etc, as a matter of statistical fact, and parts of some tests just measure memory. The tests clearly have some measure of validity. You can't dismiss them entirely.
Where does all the Mensa hostility come from? Mensa is not all that exclusive, millions of people in the US qualify... IQ tests are not perfect, but Mensa's standards are low enough that false -negatives- for the sort of person they want are surely rare. At least sometimes it could be a way to find diverse people sharing a deep kind of mental agreement. It seems to be a far more admirable basis for association than any common social pattern. And if it's a support group for the dysfunctionally intelligent, so what? Surely slashdot posters should understand the social isolation that can result from intelligence.
That said, I've no personal experience with Mensa.
You can still make all changes atomic with flat files (very easily). If your state per user is under a few kilobytes it's perfectly reasonable (and does not violate ACID) to use a flat file for each user's state. And if it's bigger you can still isolate with multiple files, which you can change multiply in atoms with a simple journal. This is how databases work when they use flat files for storage.
You won't use any of that in programming (he was talking about hacking, not CS degree reqs), and anyways that's all very basic, math-for-engineers stuff.
The page provides links to a windows installer as well as Ubuntu .deb packages (and, naturally, the source). In fact, it uses python and GTK+, so it is rather more Unix- than Windows-native.
The tracking of incidental copies in RAM, etc., is of course absurd. Merely playing a song on a stereo creates a copy in the form of sound waves, not to mention the copies in the DAC circuitry and the speaker wire, or in the eardrum and the brain. There is a substantial difference between the eardrum copy and a CDR copy, which is that the CDR copy can continue to exist indepedently of the eardrum, but not vice-versa. RAM copies can have this property, or not (tmpfs &c), but the ones created through everyday use of the filesystem will not.
Continuing the absurdity, a single copy in RAM involves millions of electrons redundantly representing the same information. Does this count as millions of copies for the purpose of law? By all reason, if RAM constitutes a single copy, it must surely constitute these millions as well.
Well, that's exactly what I mean.
In general, Unix is relatively simple, but still more complex than it has to be.
Unix is a decent system -- it's the only OS I use. But it has obvious flaws.
The security model is terrible -- a capability-based system is obviously correct, and the uid-based system lives only on inertia. The filesystem predates any DBMS knowledge, and thus there is a very complex, inconsistent filesystem hierarchy to emulate a database, with various PATH environment nonsense, etc. X, of course, is terrible. BeOS IPC may be worse (I've no familiarity with it) but Unix IPC is still a real pain. And the biggest one: C. C screams "1970" in every way. The improvements of D (for example) will never make it into mainstream use, but there is little arguing that D is not superior to C. Even C++ is not taking off in Unix, and although C++ has some major faults of its own, it is definitely better than C. (C++ is less well-supported, for sure, but that is in turn because it is less popular).
I should clarify that I don't really mean to speak of the failures of specific systems, but of the various superior approaches that systems have pursued. Whatever caused Plan9 to fail, the real question is: why haven't various design decisions of Plan9 become popular? The answer, in some cases, may be that they are not actually superior -- but in a good number, it is only that they are not already popular.
Linux is in exactly the same position, and the free software world needs to recognize this. Unlike Windows, Linux's monopoly was not created to exploit its users; unlike Windows, Linux's monopoly is not -really- exclusive (it is just Unix). But Linux's chief selling point is still mere compatibility -- with both hardware and software -- and because of the power of this inertia, Linux can succeed without actually being better. This is what makes Linux the next Windows.
Unix was a great system in 1970. It was a far, far better way to manage a computer than the most popular approaches at the time, and became successful because of this. It was a great contribution to computing.
Today, however, by all rational measures it should be obsolete. Nobody designing an operating system today would make it anything like Unix, unless they wanted it to be compatible with Unix. I don't want to get into specific critiques -- if you disagree on this point, then just ignore me. If, however, you see the myriad outdated approaches in the design of Unix, then you will realize the problem here.
Systems like Plan9 or EROS use designs obviously superior to Unix, and are destined to fail because of this, not in spite of it. If we do not figure out the problem here and fix it, we will be stuck with Unix for as long as it took to get rid of Microsoft -- maybe longer.
Ken Thompson said it thusly:
I think that this has been the case already, in large part, since the industrial revolution. The original capitalist paradigm of a multitude of companies competing in a single market has simply been obsoleted. Global communication and transportation, among other factors, allow a far greater economy of scale, and thus it has been the case in most markets for a very long time that no two companies have much hope of competing against a single company the size of their combination -- or in any case, far less chance than if they combined to compete.
You are right to point out that a monopoly economy is not necessarily a bad thing. Experience has shown centrally-managed, cooperative monoliths to be capable of far greater efficiency than competitive, decentralized markets, which is of course what we should expect from a technical-scientific point of view; the monolith is far more flexible in its allocation of resources, can easily avoid redundancy, and can benefit far more from the mentioned economy of scale. Competitive markets, of course, have been shown to have surprising advantages, but these are no longer sufficient to justify their existence on the grounds of efficiency in most arenas (excluding labor). Morever, competition within a market, particularly where that competition centers on differential productivity, is clearly an unstable state, for the reasons mentioned above (even if mergers are prohibited, since the smallest companies would simply fail one by one). We cannot hope to maintain it.
The problem, of course, is that the efficiency made possible by monopoly is offset (for the consumer) by the enormous potential for abuse also made possible (the benefit of efficiency is still there, but it serves only the owners of the monopoly). These abuses might be curbed by government regulation, but the typical approaches -- price controls, &c -- have substantial deficiencies.
The ideal solution, from a game-theoretic perspective, would be for consumers of the monopoly service to collectively negotiate a purchase of the service. Thus, the buyers union becomes a monopoly itself, and each party is -- theoretically -- on equal grounds in negotiating the service and its price; the principles involved become very much like those of traditional capitalist models.
In practice, this approach has run into two major obstacles wherever it has been attempted: first, that unions other than corporations are very difficult to form (and governments are far more hostile to union monopolies than corporate ones, making it even harder); second, that the negotiating parties of a union have been historically quite corrupt, particularly when that party has been a political body representing as a union the public benefactors of a government contract -- which is the easiest sort way to effect collective negotiation. However, the approach has worked quite successfully whenever governments negotiate with corporations from other countries, where few conflicts of interest arise.
Even with corruption, though, this more rational bargaining model would prevent the majority of exploitation made available to monopolies, and union monopoly, like corporate monopoly, also allows greater benefits of economy of scale: price discrimination would become capable of far better realization, greatly increasing total wealth. Overall, we would have a much more rational organization of production from a technical perspective, a much more rational means of determining prices from a game-theoretic perspective, and a much more rational mechanism for allocating resources from an economic perspective.
Unfortunately, although we can expect a collective negotiating organization to be stable within a market, its absence is equally stable; each represents a Nash equilibrium (a local maximum where no individual buyer can benefit by changing his individual negotiating strategy). How to hop between these equilibria without government support remains a problem to be solved, but one worthy of much social and political effort.
What's the point of surviving cancer if you can't enjoy a good hack?
Except this -HAS- functionality. Loads of it. This means Ogg Vorbis for the iPod, man!
All of my music is encoded in ogg, and the originals are mostly scratched beyond repair, so to me the iPod as shipped is already a brick. But the iPod hack is quite safe, as it is possible to flash the ROM without being able to boot the ROM; moreover, the bootloader is the only critical part and I understand it is quite solid.
Here, here! I'm fet up with spelling errors, too.