Someone who's this greedy, self-centered and determined to make a mess of everyone's life, liberty and property for his own advancement would discretely get his ass kicked one day on his way home from work.
Apple was rather careful from the outset to inform everyone that it should be called "Mac OS 9" and not "OS 9".
Perhaps, but that's not what people did. Take a look at comp.os.os9; as recently as June 14, 2005, a post there shows the confusion still exists, and back at the time of the suit the newsgroup was full of people asking Macintosh questions.
But destroying a company -- any company -- just because of executive stratagy is very harmful to the "little people" who depend on the company for livelyhood. Should the middle-class workers really be punished just to make a point?
Sorry, but IMHO it's just about impossible for any conscious person to not be aware of Microsoft's actions; none of the "little people" are innocent.
Agreed. There's no equivalent of "La Academie Francaise" or "La Academia Real" for English.
But...if there were no rules, we couldn't even refer to some people as English speakers and others as not. Since nobody goes that far in this sort of discussion, I think that we can agree that English does have some rules. If there are different sets of rules for different English-speaking communities or subcultures or whatever the proper word is, I'd even go so far as to say that there's a large overlap among those sets.
I would say that writers should consider their target audiences and write to make communication (which is the goal of a writer, right?) go as smoothly as possible. Misspellings and breaking the rules used by that target audience gets in the way of communication.
If you're writing for people who use apostrophes for plurals and write "loose" when they mean "lose," hey, go for it...but be aware that you'll bug the heck out of a different, and possibly far larger, possible audience.
The catch is that a human can construct and prove Godel's theorem, whereas a Turing machine, by definition, cannot.
Eh? Where'd that come from? Goedel just showed that there is at least one proposition that a deductive system sufficient to construct the natural numbers can't prove without destroying itself via inconsistency. Nothing in that implies that a Turing machine can't prove Goedel's incompleteness theorem.
Nobody is claiming that the human mind is infinite. All I'm saying is that I and others (including some really smart famous philosophers) have concluded, based on Geodels' theorem, that turing machines and minds are qualitatively different things.
Really smart and famous people are, alas, not perfect. Isaac Newton spent a lot of time trying to get the pope's name to add up to 666. Crookes (the tube guy) got suckered by spiritualists. Linus Pauling went off on his "vitamin C cures [insert name of disease here]" crackpottery. Brian Josephson (the junction guy) believes in psychic BS.
In particular, really smart and famous people, like people in general, like to believe they're special: able to make tall intuitive leaps in a single bound, superior to mere machines.
No, that's not what Goedel's incompleteness theorem says. It says that any deductive system has one of three flaws:
1. You can't derive the arithmetic of the natural numbers from it. 2. There is at least one true proposition that isn't a theorem in the system (i.e. it's incomplete, hence the name of Goedel's theorem). 3. The system isn't consistent.
(3) renders a deductive system worthless, and (1) renders it pretty weak, so one can hope at best for (2).
Note that nothing is said about humans versus machines, and there's no reason that humans aren't as subject to it as programs.
Example, which I think I read about in GEB (but customized for the current discussion): "lawpoop cannot consistently assert this proposition." Clearly that is a true statement. (Yes, it's silly, but Goedel's theorem goes through a lot of work to generate an arithmetic encoding of "This statement is not provable in deductive system S," which is much the same sort of statement.) Sorry, but there's nothing magic about humans.
Yeah, but...Mr. Guthrie's blog talks about Atlas being used to produce web apps using, among other things, DHTML, which if I understand rightly is non-standard and very different between IE and Netscape--so what difference does it make if Atlas itself is portable?
Yes, the Deaf can use GUIs, but...those GUIs tend to have a bunch of audio signals to indicate errors and the like. Not all of them have corresponding visual signals, and a generic "flash screen" doesn't let one tell different situations apart as easily as the variety of sound effects available. Heck, I'm surprised that GNOME bothers to give the "flash screen" option in addition to "flash window"; surely one would want to know the particular window having the problem.
For that matter, written languages are second languages for many Deaf people. Suppose you were an English speaker, and given a computer that had all the menus, messages, and so forth in Finnish. How easy would that be to use? (If you're reading this, Mr. Torvalds, s/Finnish/Basque/, please.)
Probably for the Deaf it's more a question of applications:
Do TV viewing apps for those spiffy HDTV cards support EIA-708-B? (There's a LOT involved in full EIA-708-B support.) tvtime's captioning only supports drop-shadowed white characters; not very helpful with a light background.
I know TTYs, to put it mildly, suck; they're stuck in the days of Baudot code, abysmal displays and glacial bandwidth...but still, many people use them. Is it possible to use one's computer to communicate with someone using TTY? (That's more a hardware question than anything else, to be sure.)
There is, alas, no widely accepted way to record signed languages on a flat surface. (The 3D nature of signing makes it hard to do, but I wish someone would. IMHO the Deaf really need a Sequoyah.) The Deaf use webcams to communicate via sign where possible, where hearing people would use a text-based IM system. Are webcam apps convenient for deaf users? Do they provide features analogous to gaim/jabber/etc.?
Interesting. That differs greatly from my experience. Aside from a 200 MHz Pentium Pro box I couldn't pass up on due to the price, none of my computers have had Intel CPUs. One NexGen, one Cyrix K6, and the rest various AMDs. The NexGen died. The K6 died, but several hundred miles away because I'd handed it down to my sister, and I never got to diagnose the reason. All the AMD boxes are still functioning.
Speaking of running closer to tolerances, you don't happen to overclock your CPUs, do you? I don't; maybe that's the reason for our different experiences.
[nvidia] can keep the drivers closed till hell freezes over for all I care - they work, they work great......as the folks in this 22-page long, nearly year old thread on the nVidia Linux forum, titled " 'screen frozen, but mouse pointer moves' bug", would no doubt agree.
But for real breaking news, and for real informed opinion, there is no way for blogs to compete with traditional news media. After all, you generally at least need a college degree to get a job in the news industry...
And that ensures that one is getting accurate information from the traditional news media because...? I guess I should believe that a random military officer went to the trouble, in the early 1970s, to typeset his private memos about GWB; after all, the folks at CBS have college deg--oops, college degrees!
Of course, traditional media's had its own share of problems the past couple years, but then that's partly because they're actually held to some sort of ethical standard.
And who's been holding them to that standard? Blogs, in large part. Media are supposed to be a countervailing force...but they've become sufficiently large and powerful that they themselves need a countervailing force, and blogs are providing one.
Blogs are not held to any standards whatsoever, and any blogger can get away with pretty much anything they want, however erroneous or borderline slanderous their statements may be.
Blogs are held to the same standards as other sources of information--if people discover that they are erroneous, they won't pay attention any more and go somewhere else for information.
C is good for what it was first used for: writing Unix. At least initially, it was mimimalistic; orthogonality took a back seat to ease of implementation. (See Gabriel's classic essay for details.)
(It's certainly not flawless. Any language that needs a utility like cdecl to make declarations understandable has problems, and there should've been a Boolean type from the beginning. It would be nice if char (which should be whatever represents a glyph on the target system) weren't conflated with short short int. Basically, if C were in your back yard, it would be declared an "attractive nuisance.")
I think the authors of The Art of Unix Programming wisely recognize that C, like any other tool, should be used only where appropriate. (Sorry if that's tautological, but I can't think of a better way to put it.)
Because then you have a case like the AM stereo debacle. The FCC refused to pick a standard, so you could never be sure that your radio could handle whichever of the several competing methods any given AM station, if they even bothered to switch, used. As a result AM stereo went the way of the dodo.
I wouldn't be surprised if you were a "cheap-goods consumer." Most of the bullet points apply to a "cheap-goods consumer": they like free trade, would oppose cartels (a union being a cartel on labor) and price floors on products, etc. Why is thrift suddenly a vice when applied to labor?
You'll recall that the former Soviet Union copied the IBM 360/370 design for their Ryad series of computers. I vaguely recall reading long ago in Datamation that Cuba tended to rip off DEC designs (e.g. the PDP-8).
The mailing list maintainer should consider the request to sign up a waste of time, and unsubscribe people who declare mailing list messages a waste of time.
You're really lucky if you manage to catch a top 40 song (in the hard rock genre) on any of their stations
You're persuading me to give XM serious thought. Avoiding Top 40 isn't a bug, it's a feature.
For example...the problem with "oldies" stations is that they're not oldies stations; they're oldies Top 40 stations. The only thing that keeps them from being as wretched as modern Top N stations is that they select their material from a time when radio was less specialized, so that they achieve some variety despite themselves. Even so, you'll never hear Quicksilver Messenger Service, or Pearls Before Swine on most oldies stations. Heck, you won't even hear the Nazz's "Hello, It's Me" as opposed to Todd Rundgren's solo version.
1. If you do more than one thing at a time, you'll benefit--two single-threaded programs can run without getting in one another's way.
2. This might be a good time to brush up on your pure applicative language skills...don't they lend themselves to easier parallelism than imperative languages?
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Someone who's this greedy, self-centered and determined to make a mess of everyone's life, liberty and property for his own advancement would discretely get his ass kicked one day on his way home from work.
As opposed to continuously?
On the rentamark.com web site is a link to "Americans for the Enforcement of Attorney Ethics" (which itself sounds like a bad joke, but anyway...).
Apple was rather careful from the outset to inform everyone that it should be called "Mac OS 9" and not "OS 9".
Perhaps, but that's not what people did. Take a look at comp.os.os9; as recently as June 14, 2005, a post there shows the confusion still exists, and back at the time of the suit the newsgroup was full of people asking Macintosh questions.
But destroying a company -- any company -- just because of executive stratagy is very harmful to the "little people" who depend on the company for livelyhood. Should the middle-class workers really be punished just to make a point?
Sorry, but IMHO it's just about impossible for any conscious person to not be aware of Microsoft's actions; none of the "little people" are innocent.
Agreed. There's no equivalent of "La Academie Francaise" or "La Academia Real" for English.
But...if there were no rules, we couldn't even refer to some people as English speakers and others as not. Since nobody goes that far in this sort of discussion, I think that we can agree that English does have some rules. If there are different sets of rules for different English-speaking communities or subcultures or whatever the proper word is, I'd even go so far as to say that there's a large overlap among those sets.
I would say that writers should consider their target audiences and write to make communication (which is the goal of a writer, right?) go as smoothly as possible. Misspellings and breaking the rules used by that target audience gets in the way of communication.
If you're writing for people who use apostrophes for plurals and write "loose" when they mean "lose," hey, go for it...but be aware that you'll bug the heck out of a different, and possibly far larger, possible audience.
The catch is that a human can construct and prove Godel's theorem, whereas a Turing machine, by definition, cannot.
Eh? Where'd that come from? Goedel just showed that there is at least one proposition that a deductive system sufficient to construct the natural numbers can't prove without destroying itself via inconsistency. Nothing in that implies that a Turing machine can't prove Goedel's incompleteness theorem.
Nobody is claiming that the human mind is infinite. All I'm saying is that I and others (including some really smart famous philosophers) have concluded, based on Geodels' theorem, that turing machines and minds are qualitatively different things.
Really smart and famous people are, alas, not perfect. Isaac Newton spent a lot of time trying to get the pope's name to add up to 666. Crookes (the tube guy) got suckered by spiritualists. Linus Pauling went off on his "vitamin C cures [insert name of disease here]" crackpottery. Brian Josephson (the junction guy) believes in psychic BS.
In particular, really smart and famous people, like people in general, like to believe they're special: able to make tall intuitive leaps in a single bound, superior to mere machines.
No, that's not what Goedel's incompleteness theorem says. It says that any deductive system has one of three flaws:
1. You can't derive the arithmetic of the natural numbers from it.
2. There is at least one true proposition that isn't a theorem in the system (i.e. it's incomplete, hence the name of Goedel's theorem).
3. The system isn't consistent.
(3) renders a deductive system worthless, and (1) renders it pretty weak, so one can hope at best for (2).
Note that nothing is said about humans versus machines, and there's no reason that humans aren't as subject to it as programs.
Example, which I think I read about in GEB (but customized for the current discussion): "lawpoop cannot consistently assert this proposition." Clearly that is a true statement. (Yes, it's silly, but Goedel's theorem goes through a lot of work to generate an arithmetic encoding of "This statement is not provable in deductive system S," which is much the same sort of statement.) Sorry, but there's nothing magic about humans.
Yeah, but...Mr. Guthrie's blog talks about Atlas being used to produce web apps using, among other things, DHTML, which if I understand rightly is non-standard and very different between IE and Netscape--so what difference does it make if Atlas itself is portable?
Yes, the Deaf can use GUIs, but...those GUIs tend to have a bunch of audio signals to indicate errors and the like. Not all of them have corresponding visual signals, and a generic "flash screen" doesn't let one tell different situations apart as easily as the variety of sound effects available. Heck, I'm surprised that GNOME bothers to give the "flash screen" option in addition to "flash window"; surely one would want to know the particular window having the problem.
For that matter, written languages are second languages for many Deaf people. Suppose you were an English speaker, and given a computer that had all the menus, messages, and so forth in Finnish. How easy would that be to use? (If you're reading this, Mr. Torvalds, s/Finnish/Basque/, please.)
Probably for the Deaf it's more a question of applications:
Do TV viewing apps for those spiffy HDTV cards support EIA-708-B? (There's a LOT involved in full EIA-708-B support.) tvtime's captioning only supports drop-shadowed white characters; not very helpful with a light background.
I know TTYs, to put it mildly, suck; they're stuck in the days of Baudot code, abysmal displays and glacial bandwidth...but still, many people use them. Is it possible to use one's computer to communicate with someone using TTY? (That's more a hardware question than anything else, to be sure.)
There is, alas, no widely accepted way to record signed languages on a flat surface. (The 3D nature of signing makes it hard to do, but I wish someone would. IMHO the Deaf really need a Sequoyah.) The Deaf use webcams to communicate via sign where possible, where hearing people would use a text-based IM system. Are webcam apps convenient for deaf users? Do they provide features analogous to gaim/jabber/etc.?
It's not that simple.
Interesting. That differs greatly from my experience. Aside from a 200 MHz Pentium Pro box I couldn't pass up on due to the price, none of my computers have had Intel CPUs. One NexGen, one Cyrix K6, and the rest various AMDs. The NexGen died. The K6 died, but several hundred miles away because I'd handed it down to my sister, and I never got to diagnose the reason. All the AMD boxes are still functioning.
Speaking of running closer to tolerances, you don't happen to overclock your CPUs, do you? I don't; maybe that's the reason for our different experiences.
[nvidia] can keep the drivers closed till hell freezes over for all I care - they work, they work great... ...as the folks in this 22-page long, nearly year old thread on the nVidia Linux forum, titled " 'screen frozen, but mouse pointer moves' bug", would no doubt agree.
I have a feeling a lot of these people are working on /. many hours of the day.
/. be using clean CSS-based HTML by now?
If they were, wouldn't
But for real breaking news, and for real informed opinion, there is no way for blogs to compete with traditional news media. After all, you generally at least need a college degree to get a job in the news industry...
And that ensures that one is getting accurate information from the traditional news media because...? I guess I should believe that a random military officer went to the trouble, in the early 1970s, to typeset his private memos about GWB; after all, the folks at CBS have college deg--oops, college degrees!
Of course, traditional media's had its own share of problems the past couple years, but then that's partly because they're actually held to some sort of ethical standard.
And who's been holding them to that standard? Blogs, in large part. Media are supposed to be a countervailing force...but they've become sufficiently large and powerful that they themselves need a countervailing force, and blogs are providing one.
Blogs are not held to any standards whatsoever, and any blogger can get away with pretty much anything they want, however erroneous or borderline slanderous their statements may be.
Blogs are held to the same standards as other sources of information--if people discover that they are erroneous, they won't pay attention any more and go somewhere else for information.
Well...
C is good for what it was first used for: writing Unix. At least initially, it was mimimalistic; orthogonality took a back seat to ease of implementation. (See Gabriel's classic essay for details.)
(It's certainly not flawless. Any language that needs a utility like cdecl to make declarations understandable has problems, and there should've been a Boolean type from the beginning. It would be nice if char (which should be whatever represents a glyph on the target system) weren't conflated with short short int. Basically, if C were in your back yard, it would be declared an "attractive nuisance.")
I think the authors of The Art of Unix Programming wisely recognize that C, like any other tool, should be used only where appropriate. (Sorry if that's tautological, but I can't think of a better way to put it.)
Because then you have a case like the AM stereo debacle. The FCC refused to pick a standard, so you could never be sure that your radio could handle whichever of the several competing methods any given AM station, if they even bothered to switch, used. As a result AM stereo went the way of the dodo.
Her ex-boyfriend's pockets are far smaller than Yahoo's.
Hard work, morality, and virtue are great but we all know that most of the people on top are there because of nepotism or family money.
Sorry; I don't know that. Got any links to data?
I wouldn't be surprised if you were a "cheap-goods consumer." Most of the bullet points apply to a "cheap-goods consumer": they like free trade, would oppose cartels (a union being a cartel on labor) and price floors on products, etc. Why is thrift suddenly a vice when applied to labor?
Sort of the intellectual equivalent of Golden Throats .
I wouldn't be surprised if they stole it.
You'll recall that the former Soviet Union copied the IBM 360/370 design for their Ryad series of computers. I vaguely recall reading long ago in Datamation that Cuba tended to rip off DEC designs (e.g. the PDP-8).
The mailing list maintainer should consider the request to sign up a waste of time, and unsubscribe people who declare mailing list messages a waste of time.
You're really lucky if you manage to catch a top 40 song (in the hard rock genre) on any of their stations
You're persuading me to give XM serious thought. Avoiding Top 40 isn't a bug, it's a feature.
For example...the problem with "oldies" stations is that they're not oldies stations; they're oldies Top 40 stations. The only thing that keeps them from being as wretched as modern Top N stations is that they select their material from a time when radio was less specialized, so that they achieve some variety despite themselves. Even so, you'll never hear Quicksilver Messenger Service, or Pearls Before Swine on most oldies stations. Heck, you won't even hear the Nazz's "Hello, It's Me" as opposed to Todd Rundgren's solo version.
Near-infinite brightness...
In that case, wouldn't they be a lot smarter to sell it as a generator? Just stick a photocell in front of it...
Well... yes, but:
1. If you do more than one thing at a time, you'll benefit--two single-threaded programs can run without getting in one another's way.
2. This might be a good time to brush up on your pure applicative language skills...don't they lend themselves to easier parallelism than imperative languages?