Show me a passage in any lawbook that equates copyright infringement with theft.
That's a bit like saying that home invasion isn't assault, and then demanding to see a law book that equates home invasion with assault, with one exception: using unlicensed software isn't copyright infringement. Just because there's a more specific version that uses a name involving different words doesn't mean that it's anything different.
Now, as to why using unlicensed software isn't copyright infringement, let's review, shall we? Copyright is the body of law which governs who is allowed to publish or distribute materials. Copyright infringement of software is the source side of piracy, not the destination side: the people who print illegal copies of a CD and sell them for $5 are infringing copyright. If these parents have not redistributed what they were given, they are not infringing copyright.
As far as what they actually are doing, well, it's theft, plain and simple. What Microsoft sells are licenses to use its software. The user agreement is used to enforce that someone may not use the software without having purchased a license from Microsoft, a retailer or partner. In this sense, US law quite plainly interprets sold licenses as equivalent to currency, in that they can be transferred, sold, bought, and have a value as representative of another item - in the case of dollars it's the gold standard (or at least once was,) and in the case of software licenses it's the right to use the product.
In that one may transfer one's right to use software by selling one's license, to duplicate said license - which is prerequisite in the case of using a license one has not paid for - is parallel to counterfitting. You are by using cracked software counterfitting a license. And, if you'll take the time to look, counterfitting in the United States is considered theft from the government.
That said, nobody was trying to be legalistic. The issue is simple and obvious from the moral standpoint: Company A offers a product it cost $5 to make for $10. You use said product without paying for it. That's boldly obviously theft, your attempts at legal semantics notwithstanding.
You sir have just earned yourself one green dot, #10 in eight years - limited edition. I wish there were more people like you, who were willing to mock thieves to their faces for their self-serving contrived nonsense.
You're confusing the measurement and the thing being measured.
Using your temperature example, let's way we used a dynamic scale such that the average temperature was defined as 100 deg. As the cycles of solar output, ocean currents, green house gases ebbed and flowed, the average temperature WOULD NOT CHANGE. The average temperature would remain 100 deg as long as the definition was unchanged.
I would contend that in fact it is quite the other way around. Indeed, this is exactly what I was telling the grandparent poster: just because we've said that the new scale rests at a new center doesn't mean the actual brownian motion isn't changing. (I'm retreating from the word temperature in preparation for what follows.) You can change the scale for temperature all you want, but the brownian motion isn't married to that scale in any way, and as you alter what part of the scale is marked 100, the actual movement of the atoms is indeed changing as a whole.
In case you haven't picked up on it yet, temperature, like I.Q., is a human construct. It is what we define it as.
The motion of atoms has nothing to do with how we label it. Also, please keep your tone civil.
There may be some delay between changes in the populace and adjustments in the definition, but if some strange radiation turned us into a world of Einsteins, the average I.Q. would still be 100.
Yeah, actually that was my point, though that's not how IQ is defined at all. That said, look, the point you're making is my own: if we hit some Fantastic Four gamma cloud and suddenly everyone has giant green throbbing superbrains a la Jack Kirby, sure, we can change the IQ scale all we want. That's why I said, and I quote, its norm value is still increasing. If you don't have a statistical background, I should point out that that's a specific term that means "the underlying value on which a measurement scale is based." Statisticians frequently need to distance themselves from changing measures; this is one of the tools by which they do so. To remind me that the scale is changing when I'm explicitly talking about the value without the scale is a bit silly.
Now the intelligence or mental ability represented by that 100 would change, but don't mistake the measurement for that thing being measured.
I'm not. That is why I referred to the norm value, which is explicitly removed from the measurement. Please don't talk down to people when you're uncertain of their meaning; frequently you'll find you're being insulting to someone for being wrong when in fact they actually aren't. Indeed, I should have thought that this sentence would have let you know I was quite cognizent of the scale change: "Just because the scale is renormalized doesn't mean what it's measuring isn't changing."
C'mon.
You mean the energy in the atmosphere would be rising. The temperature would stay the same.
No it wouldn't. Temperature is not an indication of scale; if it were, we wouldn't have several scales for temperature. Moreover, temperature scales haven't been renormalized as far as I know ever. That's why I chose it as my example - it has been singularly immune to this sort of problem, unlike distance, weight, and as so acrimoniously shown here, intelligence. Indeed, as far as I know, the only changes that have ever been made to temperature scales have been to augment their definitions to include for new science as we became aware of it - for example, we added the codecil that measurements were taken at sea level when we discovered Boyle's law, and that measurements were taken with a radiation influx of zero once we realized that was a way to heat water.
The point is, you're talking down to me for making a mistake that not only was I not making, but indeed that was the entire point I was making in the first place. I suggest you re-read what I said with a little less contempt in your mind; you'll find I'm not so dumb as you seem to believe that I am.
I'm calling bullshit. E3 had twenty seven major vendors last year. Twenty seven vendors do not pull out of the major global conference simultaneously. I just don't believe this is true. Sony has increased the size of their show every year for the last five years, because it's making them a ton of press. Nintendo had booths in all three major halls. Even software vendors like Konami plunk down for huge booths.
This is just another "hi we're going to lie to get traffic then dust it under the rug" tactic, as is becoming frustratingly common with online news sources.
Sort of. The average IQ scale is shifted on a consistent basis to keep the median at or near 100. That said, the definition of IQ isn't actually for the average 100; that would mean that we couldn't provide a measurement until the year (or month or whatever) had been tallied. The definition of IQ is relative to an offset.
That said, it's the IQ measurement that's changing; its actual norm value is in fact increasing, and has been for more than a century (basically, since it was formalized under the current system.) If we made a temperature system which was relative to the planetary norm, even though the measurement would have to be shifted downwards year to year to account for Intelligent Warming (sorry, I live in the Republican Religious States of America,) the temperature would indeed still be rising, even though the scale was being modified to keep it relative.
Just because the scale is renormalized doesn't mean what it's measuring isn't changing.
Whereas that may very well be the root of the misunderstanding, it is nonetheless a misunderstanding. Language is not so mobile as this. The phrase "radical" had a longer shelf life than this has had, beginning with the beatniks and hitting its stride so hard that it was showing up in the titles of video games and even on occasion in the mouths of newscasters. Nonetheless, we have as a culture awoken from the error and moved on. Similar examples include the fading usage of "outrageous" to mean cool in a line-pushing fashion, beginning in the 1940s with the post-depression reactionary crowd to people performing human interest acts on the street for money, "ignorant" to mean rude, beginning largely with a common misreading of the bible and spreading from the American southwest, and the misuse of nuclear to mean fission (or, less commonly, fusion) devices.
These things happen. Mistakes get into the dictionary; all three of those can be found in the Merriam Webster in the 1980s. Just two years ago, they still had transparent meaning "passes light" (that's translucent,) and translucent as "partially transparent" (an explanation.)
What people don't seem to understand is that the various Websters and the OED are actually very low quality dictionaries. They are tomes which strive to sell on terms of size, and will therefore pick up any common misunderstanding and list it as soon as they can justify it. Fuck's sake, the OED has "google" listed as a verb. Mind you, they don't mark it slang or jargon - they've just up and accepted the marketing as an official part of their lexicon. It's absurd - linguistics demands a hundred twenty year window to observe cementing of the denotation of a word, if it's not a noun; this company is less than ten years old. As philoblapterers, they should know better. These are bargain basement dictionaries who get by on the ill-gotten fame from the size they've accumulated through absolutely appallingly low standards.
There are good dictionaries. In America, look for the American Heritage Etymological (it has a full article about this word in the extended edition that's both quite interesting and which takes the same stance I do.) In Britain, there is the set of Cambridge dictionaries, as well as the little known and woefully underrated Collins Dictionary, which is remarkably witty and of clarity at times even incisive.
When people look for reasons to claim that because there was a phrase that there's now a word, they behave as do the OED and MW. There's a damned good reason that all other dictionaries are so much smaller: they're honest and pay attention to academic practice. Please don't be a Webster. Just because there's a phrase that could be an etymon doesn't mean the usage of the word is any less incorrect.
If the Sapir-Whorf Hypothesis is to be believed, then muddying the waters in this fashion makes us all stupider.
So? Windows 95 hosts KHTML just fine, and runs on a Pentium-60 with 2 meg of ram. If someone took the time, it'd be relatively straightforward to get KHTML working in Win3.1 under Win32s, which would drop the OS requirements to a 386 with 640k of RAM. That still doesn't add up nearly to Firefox' bloat. Hell, the Mini-Mozilla project won't even run well in 32 meg of RAM, and that's as stripped down as Moz can be.
The simple fact of the matter is that Gecko is bloated as hell. I use it every day; I think it's the best browser on earth. It is, however, pointlessly and embarrassingly enormous.
Well, as far as the difficulty of collaboration issue, it's not like it's hard to get networked interaction going in Windows; it's built in. You just go use your mouse cursor, and select the text. As far as people chatting and playing Solitaire, if they're doing that in a meeting, that sounds to me like a good reason for disciplinary action. If you can't trust your employees to pay attention during a 10-15 person meeting, you're in a whole lot of hot water.
It is both cheaper and more effective to get a pile of networked laptops, and have people look at their local copy. Other benefits include people being able to cut and paste, to participate and so on.
Back in the real world, commerce sites cannot afford to pretend that all browsers follow W3C standards. Most web sites won't ditch 88% of their customers instead of writing a few lines of hack-around code.
Business trumps standards thumping on the web. That's why we are where we are.
That all said, when NASA switched to the PSP and TSP, their bug rate dropped by almost 90%, and they had to generate far less documentation. Just because you have a team with an amazing record doesn't mean there isn't a better way. NASA has learned this several times.
I am not too sure what you mean by "wanking" - when I read it, I felt it was the opposite - that he was self-deprecating his research.
You are the first of several hundred people I know who've read that book to claim it was anything other than offensively self-aggrandizing, and this slashdot article shows dozens of people who see it the way that I do. At several points he claims the book is the most important in the history of science, that he's more important to mathematics than Leibniz or Euler, and even that he's now got the importance of Isaac Newton. And you think he's being self deprecating?
That said, given that you don't seem to know what self deprecating means, I suppose I'm not too surprised.
He does talk about how he feels he is the first to put 1+1 together
Actually, he attributes that to John Conway. This is an error - automaton research goes back to the seventh century BC - but Conway is a reasonable modern-era candidate.
and none of them ever came to the conclusions Wolfram has.
That's funny. Essentially every review I've read has pointed to a litany of books that beat Wolfram to the punch. I can name several off of the top of my head that cover all the ground you're quoting.
is that complexity can and does arise in nature from simple sets of "rules"
I really doubt that's his point. He had moved past emergent behavior before the end of chapter 1, and that wouldn't be at all new. Indeed, that automatons can be used as a Turing machine has been well known since 30 years before Wolfram was born, so I really, really doubt that was Wolfram's point for that huge assed book.
he shows how it can simulate the outputs of much of what we discern as natural "chaotic" processes - wind and water patterns, weather, seashell designs, zebra striping, and snowflakes - to name a few.
No. This has been well known since 1940. Wolfram is not so ill-read that he would think this news. I'm beginning to believe that you read the introduction, gave up, and are now trying to sound more aware than you actually are.
He goes to show that even when you make the system more complex (for example, by adding more rules or extra dimensions), slices through the data set show that the output devolves into the simpler two-dimensional six rule implementation. This is the essence of what he calls the "Theory of Universal Computation".
No, douche. The Theory of Universal Computation was the work of Alan Turing as the basis of the Universal Turing Machine in 1936 (arguably derived from Godel's work on symbolic logic,) and was reformulated into the Church-Turing Thesis by Stephen Kleene in 1943. No significant progress has been made since David Deutsch's Quantum ToUC in 1985. Wolfram's book does not define this 70-year-old principle. Furthermore, the ToUC states that a computer can be devolved into a single dimensional state machine, not a two-dimensional state machine; you really should find out what the Turing Machine is, since it's not an abstract concept at all, and if you're willing to assume practical lengths for the infinite tape can actually be manufactured with about twenty bucks of parts from Radio Shack.
It becomes clear that you don't actually understand what you're talking about.
Yes, other authors disagree with him - including authors that I hold in high regard as well (Ray Kurzweil comes to mind).
Kurzweil is little better than a science fiction author; you might as well be quoting Marvin Minsky. They're both douchebags whose primary contributions to the field have been getting people's interest; they are effectively just megaphones. Start by reading John Haugeland - he's about as good an AI researcher as you can get tabs on without an existing in-depth knowledge. Haugeland has the rare benefit of citing strong authors on both sides of an opinion, meaning that whether or not you agree with him, you can follow his recommendations to find real researchers to lea
You are pointlessly combattive in your desperation to ignore that they're not giving you data for free in the effort to sell you something. I understood the data they gave. If you don't, that's your problem. And no, I don't fall for sold bridges; that's why I don't own the magazine.
Enough with the personal attacks. I think I won't be speaking with you again.
Actually, if you get first edition prints of the earlier books or, like me, if you learned his name through the campaign setting, you'll find that it was originally spelled with a G. Nice job blowing up over nothing, though.
Thanks for letting me know what I don't do for a living, though, as I'd nearly forgotten and thought I was a professional chef.
Huhuhhuuhu. Well said, sir. I believe I'll be stealing that.
I think putting up graphs without even the kindness of a legend, labels, etc is not terribly useful.
Uh huh. That's kind of the issue here, though, is that this isn't meant to be useful. It's pretty, it's a tease, and they're trying to get you to buy the magazine, which has exactly what you're suggesting should be there. It's marketing 101.
You need to re-read this bit:// but if they do not convey information (and not lose a large amount of relevant information) then they are just a nice way to generate patterns for some nerd's tie.
Tu quoque, senator. You need to re-read this bit: Maybe you should have read TFA more carefully, as it in fact gives two specific cases of utility.
Even after RTFA, the whole thing seemed like the guy sucking himself off.
He didn't seem that way to me, though you rather do. Your post seems to be there essentially to make you feel smarter than him.
Scalability is achieved through many different technologies with many different engineers? I would never have thought that.
That's not actually what he said. What he really said was that the specific path to scalability during constant change which had worked well for Amazon was to maintain absolute modularity whenever possible. He didn't say it was the only path, just that that was what had worked for them. He didn't say it was about scalability, he said it was about scalability during change.
Those two differences are enormous. Consider RTFA again.
Jeez, I'm glad this guy is just the CTO, not somebody important.
Yeah, because if there's one thing you can say about Amazon, it's that their technology isn't impressively extensible. (cough) Remind me your impressive work again? Or are we just sitting in our glass house, warming up our pitching arm?
but it really just shifts the burden to the database, which tends to be 1 big box.// So the question becomes, how do you scale the database horizontally?
There really aren't any major databases which don't cluster, and some architectures like Mnesia and KDb are built specifically to handle being the generic workhorse behind data requests. That said, what you're discussing isn't shared nothing - it isn't even degenerate shared nothing. If it was, then there wouldn't be any state to share. Moving the shared state into the database doesn't make it degenerate shared nothing; it just means you've moved the sharing. This would be like looking at the US Rail system before the connection at promontory point, calling it a degenerate shared rail network, then pointing out that you still can't get from New York to Los Angeles.
There are, in short, cases where 99% isn't most of 100%. Shared nothing doesn't "degenerate." Nothing isn't gradated. Either you're sharing nothing, or you aren't. In the case you describe, you aren't. The people who referred to the system you described as "shared nothing" bought into a methodology, weren't willing to do it right, and ended up with a system that didn't scale. The reason it didn't scale isn't because it creates a chokepoint; the chokepoint was generated by their not doing it correctly. Shared nothing, when done correctly, scales better than almost any other methodology (transparent clustering like Erlang can be argued to scale better because it has fewer problems with resource allocation.)
Microsoft SQL Server, DB2, Teradata, MySQL, etc. are all "shared nothing".
Er, no, they aren't. Shared nothing is about keeping no state outside the query. Read-write databases accessable by more than one point are by definition never part of this methodology. They cannot be.
Do yourself a favor and investigate other methodologies than RoR. There's a reason that the same people who called ASP.Net an unimportant flash in the pan, who called ColdFusion a dead technology and who laughed when Oracle said the Web would make them the new Microsoft are yawning in the faces of RoR, Python and Nails. Sure, it's possible that RoR is the next big thing, but if you look at the track record of the people being unimpressed, it seems likely that being familiar with traditional, proven methodologies is a good safety net, in case these people turn out to be correct about Rails.
I'm still waiting to see the big thing that wouldn't have been reasonable without Rails. Right now, I don't see anything big running on Rails at all, let alone something that would have been unreasonably difficult in other languages.
Slashdot Mirror
Show me a passage in any lawbook that equates copyright infringement with theft.
That's a bit like saying that home invasion isn't assault, and then demanding to see a law book that equates home invasion with assault, with one exception: using unlicensed software isn't copyright infringement. Just because there's a more specific version that uses a name involving different words doesn't mean that it's anything different.
Now, as to why using unlicensed software isn't copyright infringement, let's review, shall we? Copyright is the body of law which governs who is allowed to publish or distribute materials. Copyright infringement of software is the source side of piracy, not the destination side: the people who print illegal copies of a CD and sell them for $5 are infringing copyright. If these parents have not redistributed what they were given, they are not infringing copyright.
As far as what they actually are doing, well, it's theft, plain and simple. What Microsoft sells are licenses to use its software. The user agreement is used to enforce that someone may not use the software without having purchased a license from Microsoft, a retailer or partner. In this sense, US law quite plainly interprets sold licenses as equivalent to currency, in that they can be transferred, sold, bought, and have a value as representative of another item - in the case of dollars it's the gold standard (or at least once was,) and in the case of software licenses it's the right to use the product.
In that one may transfer one's right to use software by selling one's license, to duplicate said license - which is prerequisite in the case of using a license one has not paid for - is parallel to counterfitting. You are by using cracked software counterfitting a license. And, if you'll take the time to look, counterfitting in the United States is considered theft from the government.
That said, nobody was trying to be legalistic. The issue is simple and obvious from the moral standpoint: Company A offers a product it cost $5 to make for $10. You use said product without paying for it. That's boldly obviously theft, your attempts at legal semantics notwithstanding.
You sir have just earned yourself one green dot, #10 in eight years - limited edition. I wish there were more people like you, who were willing to mock thieves to their faces for their self-serving contrived nonsense.
MOD comes from Amiga, not c64. Right company. Wrong decade.
You're confusing the measurement and the thing being measured.
Using your temperature example, let's way we used a dynamic scale such that the average temperature was defined as 100 deg. As the cycles of solar output, ocean currents, green house gases ebbed and flowed, the average temperature WOULD NOT CHANGE. The average temperature would remain 100 deg as long as the definition was unchanged.
I would contend that in fact it is quite the other way around. Indeed, this is exactly what I was telling the grandparent poster: just because we've said that the new scale rests at a new center doesn't mean the actual brownian motion isn't changing. (I'm retreating from the word temperature in preparation for what follows.) You can change the scale for temperature all you want, but the brownian motion isn't married to that scale in any way, and as you alter what part of the scale is marked 100, the actual movement of the atoms is indeed changing as a whole.
In case you haven't picked up on it yet, temperature, like I.Q., is a human construct. It is what we define it as.
The motion of atoms has nothing to do with how we label it. Also, please keep your tone civil.
There may be some delay between changes in the populace and adjustments in the definition, but if some strange radiation turned us into a world of Einsteins, the average I.Q. would still be 100.
Yeah, actually that was my point, though that's not how IQ is defined at all. That said, look, the point you're making is my own: if we hit some Fantastic Four gamma cloud and suddenly everyone has giant green throbbing superbrains a la Jack Kirby, sure, we can change the IQ scale all we want. That's why I said, and I quote, its norm value is still increasing. If you don't have a statistical background, I should point out that that's a specific term that means "the underlying value on which a measurement scale is based." Statisticians frequently need to distance themselves from changing measures; this is one of the tools by which they do so. To remind me that the scale is changing when I'm explicitly talking about the value without the scale is a bit silly.
Now the intelligence or mental ability represented by that 100 would change, but don't mistake the measurement for that thing being measured.
I'm not. That is why I referred to the norm value, which is explicitly removed from the measurement. Please don't talk down to people when you're uncertain of their meaning; frequently you'll find you're being insulting to someone for being wrong when in fact they actually aren't. Indeed, I should have thought that this sentence would have let you know I was quite cognizent of the scale change: "Just because the scale is renormalized doesn't mean what it's measuring isn't changing."
C'mon.
You mean the energy in the atmosphere would be rising. The temperature would stay the same.
No it wouldn't. Temperature is not an indication of scale; if it were, we wouldn't have several scales for temperature. Moreover, temperature scales haven't been renormalized as far as I know ever. That's why I chose it as my example - it has been singularly immune to this sort of problem, unlike distance, weight, and as so acrimoniously shown here, intelligence. Indeed, as far as I know, the only changes that have ever been made to temperature scales have been to augment their definitions to include for new science as we became aware of it - for example, we added the codecil that measurements were taken at sea level when we discovered Boyle's law, and that measurements were taken with a radiation influx of zero once we realized that was a way to heat water.
The point is, you're talking down to me for making a mistake that not only was I not making, but indeed that was the entire point I was making in the first place. I suggest you re-read what I said with a little less contempt in your mind; you'll find I'm not so dumb as you seem to believe that I am.
I'm calling bullshit. E3 had twenty seven major vendors last year. Twenty seven vendors do not pull out of the major global conference simultaneously. I just don't believe this is true. Sony has increased the size of their show every year for the last five years, because it's making them a ton of press. Nintendo had booths in all three major halls. Even software vendors like Konami plunk down for huge booths.
This is just another "hi we're going to lie to get traffic then dust it under the rug" tactic, as is becoming frustratingly common with online news sources.
Sort of. The average IQ scale is shifted on a consistent basis to keep the median at or near 100. That said, the definition of IQ isn't actually for the average 100; that would mean that we couldn't provide a measurement until the year (or month or whatever) had been tallied. The definition of IQ is relative to an offset.
That said, it's the IQ measurement that's changing; its actual norm value is in fact increasing, and has been for more than a century (basically, since it was formalized under the current system.) If we made a temperature system which was relative to the planetary norm, even though the measurement would have to be shifted downwards year to year to account for Intelligent Warming (sorry, I live in the Republican Religious States of America,) the temperature would indeed still be rising, even though the scale was being modified to keep it relative.
Just because the scale is renormalized doesn't mean what it's measuring isn't changing.
I don't need the questions, so I just fill the response field with noise. 'S pretty secure.
And I for one welcome our new Immunity Syndrome overlords.
Whereas that may very well be the root of the misunderstanding, it is nonetheless a misunderstanding. Language is not so mobile as this. The phrase "radical" had a longer shelf life than this has had, beginning with the beatniks and hitting its stride so hard that it was showing up in the titles of video games and even on occasion in the mouths of newscasters. Nonetheless, we have as a culture awoken from the error and moved on. Similar examples include the fading usage of "outrageous" to mean cool in a line-pushing fashion, beginning in the 1940s with the post-depression reactionary crowd to people performing human interest acts on the street for money, "ignorant" to mean rude, beginning largely with a common misreading of the bible and spreading from the American southwest, and the misuse of nuclear to mean fission (or, less commonly, fusion) devices.
These things happen. Mistakes get into the dictionary; all three of those can be found in the Merriam Webster in the 1980s. Just two years ago, they still had transparent meaning "passes light" (that's translucent,) and translucent as "partially transparent" (an explanation.)
What people don't seem to understand is that the various Websters and the OED are actually very low quality dictionaries. They are tomes which strive to sell on terms of size, and will therefore pick up any common misunderstanding and list it as soon as they can justify it. Fuck's sake, the OED has "google" listed as a verb. Mind you, they don't mark it slang or jargon - they've just up and accepted the marketing as an official part of their lexicon. It's absurd - linguistics demands a hundred twenty year window to observe cementing of the denotation of a word, if it's not a noun; this company is less than ten years old. As philoblapterers, they should know better. These are bargain basement dictionaries who get by on the ill-gotten fame from the size they've accumulated through absolutely appallingly low standards.
There are good dictionaries. In America, look for the American Heritage Etymological (it has a full article about this word in the extended edition that's both quite interesting and which takes the same stance I do.) In Britain, there is the set of Cambridge dictionaries, as well as the little known and woefully underrated Collins Dictionary, which is remarkably witty and of clarity at times even incisive.
When people look for reasons to claim that because there was a phrase that there's now a word, they behave as do the OED and MW. There's a damned good reason that all other dictionaries are so much smaller: they're honest and pay attention to academic practice. Please don't be a Webster. Just because there's a phrase that could be an etymon doesn't mean the usage of the word is any less incorrect.
If the Sapir-Whorf Hypothesis is to be believed, then muddying the waters in this fashion makes us all stupider.
So? Windows 95 hosts KHTML just fine, and runs on a Pentium-60 with 2 meg of ram. If someone took the time, it'd be relatively straightforward to get KHTML working in Win3.1 under Win32s, which would drop the OS requirements to a 386 with 640k of RAM. That still doesn't add up nearly to Firefox' bloat. Hell, the Mini-Mozilla project won't even run well in 32 meg of RAM, and that's as stripped down as Moz can be.
The simple fact of the matter is that Gecko is bloated as hell. I use it every day; I think it's the best browser on earth. It is, however, pointlessly and embarrassingly enormous.
That "non-existant article" is a 25 minute movie with slides and hard statistics. Nice try.
Well, as far as the difficulty of collaboration issue, it's not like it's hard to get networked interaction going in Windows; it's built in. You just go use your mouse cursor, and select the text. As far as people chatting and playing Solitaire, if they're doing that in a meeting, that sounds to me like a good reason for disciplinary action. If you can't trust your employees to pay attention during a 10-15 person meeting, you're in a whole lot of hot water.
It is both cheaper and more effective to get a pile of networked laptops, and have people look at their local copy. Other benefits include people being able to cut and paste, to participate and so on.
That isn't what the word "irony" means.
Back in the real world, commerce sites cannot afford to pretend that all browsers follow W3C standards. Most web sites won't ditch 88% of their customers instead of writing a few lines of hack-around code.
Business trumps standards thumping on the web. That's why we are where we are.
No, he's right. KHTML runs just fine on the Nintendo DS, on a 70 mHz ARM in 4 meg of ram. That you need a 400mHz box w/ 128m RAM is just absurd.
That all said, when NASA switched to the PSP and TSP, their bug rate dropped by almost 90%, and they had to generate far less documentation. Just because you have a team with an amazing record doesn't mean there isn't a better way. NASA has learned this several times.
I am not too sure what you mean by "wanking" - when I read it, I felt it was the opposite - that he was self-deprecating his research.
You are the first of several hundred people I know who've read that book to claim it was anything other than offensively self-aggrandizing, and this slashdot article shows dozens of people who see it the way that I do. At several points he claims the book is the most important in the history of science, that he's more important to mathematics than Leibniz or Euler, and even that he's now got the importance of Isaac Newton. And you think he's being self deprecating?
That said, given that you don't seem to know what self deprecating means, I suppose I'm not too surprised.
He does talk about how he feels he is the first to put 1+1 together
Actually, he attributes that to John Conway. This is an error - automaton research goes back to the seventh century BC - but Conway is a reasonable modern-era candidate.
and none of them ever came to the conclusions Wolfram has.
That's funny. Essentially every review I've read has pointed to a litany of books that beat Wolfram to the punch. I can name several off of the top of my head that cover all the ground you're quoting.
is that complexity can and does arise in nature from simple sets of "rules"
I really doubt that's his point. He had moved past emergent behavior before the end of chapter 1, and that wouldn't be at all new. Indeed, that automatons can be used as a Turing machine has been well known since 30 years before Wolfram was born, so I really, really doubt that was Wolfram's point for that huge assed book.
he shows how it can simulate the outputs of much of what we discern as natural "chaotic" processes - wind and water patterns, weather, seashell designs, zebra striping, and snowflakes - to name a few.
No. This has been well known since 1940. Wolfram is not so ill-read that he would think this news. I'm beginning to believe that you read the introduction, gave up, and are now trying to sound more aware than you actually are.
He goes to show that even when you make the system more complex (for example, by adding more rules or extra dimensions), slices through the data set show that the output devolves into the simpler two-dimensional six rule implementation. This is the essence of what he calls the "Theory of Universal Computation".
No, douche. The Theory of Universal Computation was the work of Alan Turing as the basis of the Universal Turing Machine in 1936 (arguably derived from Godel's work on symbolic logic,) and was reformulated into the Church-Turing Thesis by Stephen Kleene in 1943. No significant progress has been made since David Deutsch's Quantum ToUC in 1985. Wolfram's book does not define this 70-year-old principle. Furthermore, the ToUC states that a computer can be devolved into a single dimensional state machine, not a two-dimensional state machine; you really should find out what the Turing Machine is, since it's not an abstract concept at all, and if you're willing to assume practical lengths for the infinite tape can actually be manufactured with about twenty bucks of parts from Radio Shack.
It becomes clear that you don't actually understand what you're talking about.
Yes, other authors disagree with him - including authors that I hold in high regard as well (Ray Kurzweil comes to mind).
Kurzweil is little better than a science fiction author; you might as well be quoting Marvin Minsky. They're both douchebags whose primary contributions to the field have been getting people's interest; they are effectively just megaphones. Start by reading John Haugeland - he's about as good an AI researcher as you can get tabs on without an existing in-depth knowledge. Haugeland has the rare benefit of citing strong authors on both sides of an opinion, meaning that whether or not you agree with him, you can follow his recommendations to find real researchers to lea
You are pointlessly combattive in your desperation to ignore that they're not giving you data for free in the effort to sell you something. I understood the data they gave. If you don't, that's your problem. And no, I don't fall for sold bridges; that's why I don't own the magazine.
Enough with the personal attacks. I think I won't be speaking with you again.
Actually, if you get first edition prints of the earlier books or, like me, if you learned his name through the campaign setting, you'll find that it was originally spelled with a G. Nice job blowing up over nothing, though.
You can do better than that. I'll give you another shot, on the house. Do have the balls to log in this time, though; that's just sad.
Thanks for letting me know what I don't do for a living, though, as I'd nearly forgotten and thought I was a professional chef.
// but if they do not convey information (and not lose a large amount of relevant information) then they are just a nice way to generate patterns for some nerd's tie.
Huhuhhuuhu. Well said, sir. I believe I'll be stealing that.
I think putting up graphs without even the kindness of a legend, labels, etc is not terribly useful.
Uh huh. That's kind of the issue here, though, is that this isn't meant to be useful. It's pretty, it's a tease, and they're trying to get you to buy the magazine, which has exactly what you're suggesting should be there. It's marketing 101.
You need to re-read this bit:
Tu quoque, senator. You need to re-read this bit: Maybe you should have read TFA more carefully, as it in fact gives two specific cases of utility.
Even after RTFA, the whole thing seemed like the guy sucking himself off.
He didn't seem that way to me, though you rather do. Your post seems to be there essentially to make you feel smarter than him.
Scalability is achieved through many different technologies with many different engineers? I would never have thought that.
That's not actually what he said. What he really said was that the specific path to scalability during constant change which had worked well for Amazon was to maintain absolute modularity whenever possible. He didn't say it was the only path, just that that was what had worked for them. He didn't say it was about scalability, he said it was about scalability during change.
Those two differences are enormous. Consider RTFA again.
Jeez, I'm glad this guy is just the CTO, not somebody important.
Yeah, because if there's one thing you can say about Amazon, it's that their technology isn't impressively extensible. (cough) Remind me your impressive work again? Or are we just sitting in our glass house, warming up our pitching arm?
but it really just shifts the burden to the database, which tends to be 1 big box. // So the question becomes, how do you scale the database horizontally?
There really aren't any major databases which don't cluster, and some architectures like Mnesia and KDb are built specifically to handle being the generic workhorse behind data requests. That said, what you're discussing isn't shared nothing - it isn't even degenerate shared nothing. If it was, then there wouldn't be any state to share. Moving the shared state into the database doesn't make it degenerate shared nothing; it just means you've moved the sharing. This would be like looking at the US Rail system before the connection at promontory point, calling it a degenerate shared rail network, then pointing out that you still can't get from New York to Los Angeles.
There are, in short, cases where 99% isn't most of 100%. Shared nothing doesn't "degenerate." Nothing isn't gradated. Either you're sharing nothing, or you aren't. In the case you describe, you aren't. The people who referred to the system you described as "shared nothing" bought into a methodology, weren't willing to do it right, and ended up with a system that didn't scale. The reason it didn't scale isn't because it creates a chokepoint; the chokepoint was generated by their not doing it correctly. Shared nothing, when done correctly, scales better than almost any other methodology (transparent clustering like Erlang can be argued to scale better because it has fewer problems with resource allocation.)
Microsoft SQL Server, DB2, Teradata, MySQL, etc. are all "shared nothing".
Er, no, they aren't. Shared nothing is about keeping no state outside the query. Read-write databases accessable by more than one point are by definition never part of this methodology. They cannot be.
Do yourself a favor and investigate other methodologies than RoR. There's a reason that the same people who called ASP.Net an unimportant flash in the pan, who called ColdFusion a dead technology and who laughed when Oracle said the Web would make them the new Microsoft are yawning in the faces of RoR, Python and Nails. Sure, it's possible that RoR is the next big thing, but if you look at the track record of the people being unimpressed, it seems likely that being familiar with traditional, proven methodologies is a good safety net, in case these people turn out to be correct about Rails.
I'm still waiting to see the big thing that wouldn't have been reasonable without Rails. Right now, I don't see anything big running on Rails at all, let alone something that would have been unreasonably difficult in other languages.