One of the major problems encountered in time travel is not that of accidentally becoming your own father or mother. There is no problem involved in becoming your own father or mother that a broad-minded and well-adjusted family can't cope with... The major problem is quite simply one of grammar, and the main work to consult in this matter is Dr. Dan Streetmentioner's Time Traveler's Handbook of 1001 Tense Formations. It will tell you, for instance, how to describe something that was about to happen to you in the past before you avoided it by time-jumping forward two days in order to avoid it. The event will be described differently according to whether you are talking about it from the standpoint of your own natural time, from a time in the further future, or a time in the further past and is further complicated by the possibility of conducting conversations while you are actually traveling from one time to another with the intention of becoming your own mother or father. Most readers get as far as the Future Semiconditionally Modified Subinverted Plagal Past Subjunctive Intentional before giving up; and in fact in later editions of the book all the pages beyond this point have been left blank to save on printing costs. The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy skips lightly over this tangle of academic abstraction, pausing only to note that the term "Future Perfect" has been abandoned since it was discovered not to be.
From a developer's point of view the prospect of having to test my apps with so many possible configurations of a modular Windows does not appeal to me.
Then imagine the user experience. You try to install a new app you just bought and then discover you have to buy new modules from Microsoft to get them to work. This will not fly with the general public.
Look how much people hate the various version of Vista and the compatibility uncertainty it brought.
Making code thread-safe is really not that difficult once you understand the basics I have to dissagree on that. I'm sure you are professional and understand the task well but compare the effort that you have to put into it for what you get. No other part of programming in c++, bar complex template design, takes as much care as multithreading. To design something really well it requires that you know in advance how it will be used. But you can only know so much.
For example, you design a class that's thread safe. Lets say no more than one thread will be messing with the internals of the class at a time. This is fine for most use cases so far but one year down the line you want to move some data between instances of these classes in an atomic, thread safe manner at a higer level in the program and you find your design doesn't allow this ONLY because of threading issues. This is a major difficulty no matter how good you are at coding because you can't predict the future. There could be dozens of possible uses devised for the class that conceptually are already possible but you have to add extra logic just to keep it thread safe.
functional languages. It seems to me one of the most promising angles on this problem is the resurgence of functional languages such as haskell, list and f# and even the adoption of concepts from that world seen in languages such as python and so on.
As for US and European interest, for example Microsoft Research have some excelent papers on possible solutions
e.g. Software Transactional Memory http://research.microsoft.com/~simonpj/papers/stm/
STM for C# http://research.microsoft.com/research/downloads/Details/6cfc842d-1c16-4739-afaf-edb35f544384/Details.aspx
I personally suspect finely grained parallelism is unlikely for the forseeable future for reasons such as existing knowledge of employees and legacy code. But hybrid solutions such as shifting heavy computation to languages suited to easily writing concurrent code (e.g. F#) tying into imperative languages for the event driven side. E.g. C#.
Who needs a massively parallel gui anyway? Very few applications right now.
you have to create a proper set of choices first. I know what you mean but one could argue that proportional systems force a change that bring about that set of choices. I see it in a way as a fix for abuse of what has almost become a cartel by lowering barriers to entry.
However, the price is extreme view must be accepted as part of process. You can't have your cake and it.
How difficult do linux users here find it to port their data & apps from one linux distro to another?
It seems to me that something to automate that task as much as possible would be welcomed.
"Absolute zero represents complete cessation of motion"
afaik absolute zero represents the minimum possible motion but it is not motionless. this is implied by Heisenberg uncertainty principle. if it had no motion at all both position and momentum could be known.
>I just wish more activists would do the same.
What if a pro-nuclear power activist changes their mind and advocates a renewables only approach?
Maybe if you could get a few of them arranged on a shaft surrounded by others of opposite opinions we could harness the power of the flip-flop!
When hearing the "would you rather the person was shot?" argument I just ask if they thought the person would or should have been shot had a taser not been available. The answer is almost always "well I suppose not but..."
Slashdot Mirror
Saddam has WMD [citation needed]
One of the major problems encountered in time travel is not that of accidentally becoming your own father or mother. There is no problem involved in becoming your own father or mother that a broad-minded and well-adjusted family can't cope with...
The major problem is quite simply one of grammar, and the main work to consult in this matter is Dr. Dan Streetmentioner's Time Traveler's Handbook of 1001 Tense Formations. It will tell you, for instance, how to describe something that was about to happen to you in the past before you avoided it by time-jumping forward two days in order to avoid it. The event will be described differently according to whether you are talking about it from the standpoint of your own natural time, from a time in the further future, or a time in the further past and is further complicated by the possibility of conducting conversations while you are actually traveling from one time to another with the intention of becoming your own mother or father.
Most readers get as far as the Future Semiconditionally Modified Subinverted Plagal Past Subjunctive Intentional before giving up; and in fact in later editions of the book all the pages beyond this point have been left blank to save on printing costs. The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy skips lightly over this tangle of academic abstraction, pausing only to note that the term "Future Perfect" has been abandoned since it was discovered not to be.
From a developer's point of view the prospect of having to test my apps with so many possible configurations of a modular Windows does not appeal to me. Then imagine the user experience. You try to install a new app you just bought and then discover you have to buy new modules from Microsoft to get them to work. This will not fly with the general public. Look how much people hate the various version of Vista and the compatibility uncertainty it brought.
For example, you design a class that's thread safe. Lets say no more than one thread will be messing with the internals of the class at a time. This is fine for most use cases so far but one year down the line you want to move some data between instances of these classes in an atomic, thread safe manner at a higer level in the program and you find your design doesn't allow this ONLY because of threading issues. This is a major difficulty no matter how good you are at coding because you can't predict the future. There could be dozens of possible uses devised for the class that conceptually are already possible but you have to add extra logic just to keep it thread safe.
It's hard.
functional languages. It seems to me one of the most promising angles on this problem is the resurgence of functional languages such as haskell, list and f# and even the adoption of concepts from that world seen in languages such as python and so on. As for US and European interest, for example Microsoft Research have some excelent papers on possible solutions e.g. Software Transactional Memory http://research.microsoft.com/~simonpj/papers/stm/ STM for C# http://research.microsoft.com/research/downloads/Details/6cfc842d-1c16-4739-afaf-edb35f544384/Details.aspx I personally suspect finely grained parallelism is unlikely for the forseeable future for reasons such as existing knowledge of employees and legacy code. But hybrid solutions such as shifting heavy computation to languages suited to easily writing concurrent code (e.g. F#) tying into imperative languages for the event driven side. E.g. C#. Who needs a massively parallel gui anyway? Very few applications right now.
Hmm according to Stephen Colbert they must be using reality for their information!
Newshour with Jim Lehrer is also shown on SBS.
How difficult do linux users here find it to port their data & apps from one linux distro to another? It seems to me that something to automate that task as much as possible would be welcomed.
"Absolute zero represents complete cessation of motion" afaik absolute zero represents the minimum possible motion but it is not motionless. this is implied by Heisenberg uncertainty principle. if it had no motion at all both position and momentum could be known.
>I just wish more activists would do the same. What if a pro-nuclear power activist changes their mind and advocates a renewables only approach? Maybe if you could get a few of them arranged on a shaft surrounded by others of opposite opinions we could harness the power of the flip-flop!
When hearing the "would you rather the person was shot?" argument I just ask if they thought the person would or should have been shot had a taser not been available. The answer is almost always "well I suppose not but..."
It's used today even. France sells the UK power through an under sea HVDC cable. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/HVDC_Cross-Channel more http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Submarine_power_cable#Submarine_cables_for_DC
> at 2AM while they sleep a peeping tom eh?
They could use me and my friends on a late night drinking session.
of the conversation.
...
http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/technology/3643477.stm
Yes.
I do to.
On Slashdot you say?
Wow that's
Yes I agree.