There are many forms of extremely robust replicator on our planet. I doubt any would survive the firey descent into Jupiter's atmosphere, but some might, and even survive the strange chemical conditions and crushing pressures of Jupiter's atmosphere.
While releasing microbes on Jupiter to see if they survive is an interesting idea, I think doing so when we know so little about that planet is reckless. I would rather pick a moon of Jupiter that we think has extremely slim chances for life existing on it, and crash it there. Perhaps one of the small, rocky ones with very little ice.
What do you mean, no other purpose? I use it for driving nails into a wall by repeatedly shooting them very accurately. It's faster than a hammer, really. Not only that, if you use hollow points, you end up with a neat shape on your wall afterwards.
The bigger your telescope, the more light you can gather and the finer the detail you can resolve. The problem that caused space spaced telescopes to be planned is atmospheric distortion. The density of the atmosphere, and hence its refractive index, changes in a complicated, almost random pattern. It's why stars twinkle.
OWL will be a deformable mirror telescope. It will technically not be a single mirror telescope, but a whole gigantic array of hexegontal deformable mirrors all abutting eachother. The fact that the mirrors are deformable means that you can use light from a bright object or laser beam to on-the-fly recalibrate the mirror for atmospheric distortion effects, resulting in a clear picture.
Building a large mirror like this in space would be very costly. Much more costly than building it on the ground. And previous problems that have made large mirrors not very useful on the ground now have solutions.
How parallelizable is the problem of micro-adjusting small portions of a large deformable mirror to correct for atmospheric distortion?
I remember a Scientific American article stating that you'd have to devote a top-of-the-line Cray to continuously recalculate the deformations needed given data from the guide star, or laser simulated guide star. If this problem is highly parallelizable, you may be able to get away with _much_ cheaper hardware.
I'm sure the idea has occured to you, but I want to know what your thoughts are on it.
This isn't true. There is a significant cost incurred by vendor lockin. If the vendor of a tool seems to have the idea that you will forever be tied to their platform and tool, then, I would avoid the tool, no matter how good it was.
The only thing that the GPL does that's relevant in a non-copyright universe is a cancellation of the ability to make the source code a trade secret. It would be interesting to see if this could be achieved absent of copyright law.
Because stuff released under public domain can be put under copyright again by anybody with minor changes. If copyright didn't exist, this couldn't happen.
The only thing the GPL does that's relevant in a non-copyright universe is a cancellation of the ability to make the source code a trade secret. It would be interesting to see if this could be achieved absent of copyright law.
Is Oracle using this information to crush competitors and improve its market position? They're basically paying for their own investigative reporting. The information is being presented to everybody, and just happens to put Microsoft in a very bad light with respect to their anti-trust trial. In a way they are, but it's not very direct. Microsoft is basically hanging itself.
Are they doing anything illegal? Well, the Oracle PR person claims they gave specific instructions to the company they hired that they not do anything illegal. While a PR person is about as trustworthy as the weather in the midwest, this statement is fairly plausible, and Oracle's immediate admission also tends to make me believe they aren't prevaricating.
What would happen if Microsoft did this? Well, they'd turn up Oracle's links to IGI (the investigating firm) I'm sure. It doesn't sound though like Oracle is trying too hard to hide them. They might turn up other interesting things about Oracle's business practices, but I highly doubt that they'd turn up anything nearly as embarassing as Microsoft's hiring of 'independent' advocacy groups.
Would I care if Microsoft did this? No, not really. It would mostly generate a big shrug, and a 'business as usual for Microsoft' attitude from me. It wouldn't generate the same sense of outrage as learning about Microsoft's OEM contracts, or hearing that they plan to make their software purposely incompatible with the Palm Pilot. It's notable mostly because Oracle isn't known for business practices that are in the least shady or underhanded.
So, nope, I don't care. In fact, I largely find Oracle's actions to be highly amusing. 'The truth shall set you free.' *chuckle* It's also highly characteristic of what I know of Larry Ellison. And their immediate admission without really trying to patch it over with PR scores big points with me.
Ahh, the default settings of the programs aren't Microsoft's fault. Obviously, the programs couldn't possibly be written to allocate memory as they need it and only build up to allocating a massive chunk on a system where you were actually handling a heavy load.
Yep, it's all the stupid admin's fault. After all, what can you expect out of an admin who was hired because NT is supposed to be extremely easy to administrate due to its graphical nature.
You are an utter idiot for bringing up this stupid point that's brought up time and time again and mysteriously moderated up when it should be moderated down to -1 (stupid).
It's been publicly stated by Stallman that if copyright law didn't exist, he wouldn't consider the GPL necessary. Get this through your thick skull. The GPL exist because copyright law exist. If copyright law didn't exist then the GPL wouldn't need to exist.
I don't understand ho this stupid point can be made again and again and consistently refuted yet people seem to think it somehow has merit.
Each and every single one of these features (and most of them can be characterized as silly syntactic sugar) are overshadowed by the vendor lock-in and lack of platform neutrality.
From what I've read, the biggest thing to learn from Java is that garbage collection is not necessarily horribly evil, and on-the-fly optimization of an easy to parse instruction set will eventually beat the pants off of processor specific optimization done at compile time.
That latter lesson is extremely important, and I hope that compilers that compile C++ to Java bytecode or something similar come out soon. Of course, the Transmeta chip/software handles x86 on-the-fly, but I bet it would do even better with a more regular instruction set.
Near as I can tell from the comments I've read, C# ignores this one big, interesting thing about Java completely. And, as far as escaping the garbage collector in a language designed for garbage collection, you've gotta be out of your gourd.
Just because it's not likely to happen at any given moment doesn't mean you shouldn't do something to prepare. It's like saying that there's no sense in having death and dismemberment insurance because it's so unlikely you'll ever be unexpectedly killed or severely injured. Yeah, maybe the chance is only 1 in 100 million, but that's no excuse for not being prepared when the roulette wheel lands on your number.
Since now is the first time in our history when this kind of disaster is concievably preventable given some preparation, would should begin preparing.
Why not start launching 0.5 tons of water or so with every shuttle launch? Get it all collected in one place in orbit, and the reaction mass is at least out of the gravity well. Sounds like an excellent preparation move to me. Instead of having the strategic helium reserves, we can have the strategic reaction mass reserves.:-)
Despite this review, I went to see this movie last night. I could've skipped it and been just as happy. Stupid, cheesy plot-line. Bad dialogue. Hammy overacting. Villains that don't make any sense. And a plot device that's built up over the entire movie, only to turn out to be incredibly lame at the end.
The only saving graces of this movie were the animation, and pacing.
So many SF movies I see, I think to myself how much better the movie could've been if the writers had had a clue about SF. This one was no exception. The Drej could've been scarier without violating the PG rating (like the villain in Mulan), the plot device could've been interesting and thought provoking, and the dialogue and story could've been a lot better. The only part I liked was the 'smart guard' part.
If you want to see a stupid, cheesy movie that's actually is decent, see Independence Day or Mystery Men again.
I object to the words 'social well being'. Who defines 'social well being' anyway? To me, that looks like an endorsement of drug laws, or any other form of government looking after our 'welfare'. That way leads to a system even worse than the one we currently have.
I think large corporations should largely be ignored by government. I think it should be illegal for them to make any kind of campaign contribution or hire lobbyists.
Basically, the people in charge of corporations have found a way to concentrate a lot of political power in themselves using our economic system, and it has got to stop.
I like the shock resistance of hardware memory too much. It's going to take a long time and a lot of field evidence to convince me that the shock resistance of that drive is good enough while it's on. (Note that the 1500G rating is only for when it's off.) Until then, I'm happy with 32M and 64M smart media cards for my digital camera, and solid state memory for my Palm Pilot and cell phone.
On the other hand, this bodes well for laptop drives. I'm willing to be very careful with my laptop while it's on.:-)
Re:C++ as a teaching language/programming obscure?
on
Who's Afraid Of C++?
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· Score: 1
I think C++ is a bad teaching language, but for much different reasons. I would prefer a conceptually less cluttered language. Python and scheme are my current languages of choice for teaching.
Learning precisely how a computer works down to the transistor is nice to know, and sometimes helpful, but rarely necessary for a programmer to be at least decent. If you really want people to learn what the machine is doing, have them learn assembly. 68000 assembly is conceptually clean enough for people to get most of the concepts.
Your love of C because you can figure out what a particular piece of code is doing, exactly, just by looking at is means that you just haven't taken the time to become as proficient with C++ as C. C++ is hairier than C, but you still have a pretty good idea what a piece of code is doing, even at an assembly level, if you're familiar with the types involved. I can read the assembly output of a C++ compiler and relate it back to the C++ code it came from with few problems.
As someone else pointed out, it's all just abstraction levels. Computers don't think in anything. We place our interpretations on the bits and invent ways of describing them that we can get good conceptual handles on and work with. OO is just a different way of looking at the bits. One that's proven (in competent hands) to allow programs of greater complexity than could be achieved without it.
Re:Can someone give 1 good reason to use C++ over
on
Who's Afraid Of C++?
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· Score: 1
Do you know exactly and precisely what happens when you call 'fopen' if you don't have library source?
I use C++ because it makes the organization of large programs much easier. I now go for a style of programming that breaks the system up into just a few different ideas that can describe almost anything the system works with. This makes it easy to understand it, and easy to extend it or fix it.
It's kind of like knowing how an integer works. Once you know that, you can apply that knowledge to any integral type, and you'll be largely correct in the conclusions you derive from that knowledge.
Even before C++, I tended to code this way, and C++ just made it a lot easier. I remember wanting the features of C++ before I knew C++ existed.
*chuckle* What a ramble. I hope it makes some sense.
Re:Can someone give 1 good reason to use C++ over
on
Who's Afraid Of C++?
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· Score: 1
I hate this style, it makes life harder for maintainers, and it makes life harder for optimizers. Strangely enough, the reasons for this are largely identical.
I hate the style because it makes it difficult to figure out what in the heck you're doing at any given point. I like seeing definite lifetimes for variables because that gives me many more clues as to what you intended to do with them. I know the variable belongs in a particular block, and only that block. Any later references to it are really a reference to a different variable.
I'd almost like to see import and export statements for explicitly pulling variables in from enclosing blocks sometimes with the way some people program.
Optimizers also like knowing a lot of detail about the lifetime of a variable. It helps immensely in memory and register allocation. They know that after a certain point, the value of the variable can't possibly matter.
Hold up a cell phone near the cord leading to the handset of a landline phone you're using to call it. Then come by and tell me the interference is nothing to worry about.
Slashdot Mirror
There are many forms of extremely robust replicator on our planet. I doubt any would survive the firey descent into Jupiter's atmosphere, but some might, and even survive the strange chemical conditions and crushing pressures of Jupiter's atmosphere.
While releasing microbes on Jupiter to see if they survive is an interesting idea, I think doing so when we know so little about that planet is reckless. I would rather pick a moon of Jupiter that we think has extremely slim chances for life existing on it, and crash it there. Perhaps one of the small, rocky ones with very little ice.
I happen to agree with you completely. It's amusing that you were moderated to -1 by someone.
What do you mean, no other purpose? I use it for driving nails into a wall by repeatedly shooting them very accurately. It's faster than a hammer, really. Not only that, if you use hollow points, you end up with a neat shape on your wall afterwards.
I can tell you the answer to this one.
The bigger your telescope, the more light you can gather and the finer the detail you can resolve. The problem that caused space spaced telescopes to be planned is atmospheric distortion. The density of the atmosphere, and hence its refractive index, changes in a complicated, almost random pattern. It's why stars twinkle.
OWL will be a deformable mirror telescope. It will technically not be a single mirror telescope, but a whole gigantic array of hexegontal deformable mirrors all abutting eachother. The fact that the mirrors are deformable means that you can use light from a bright object or laser beam to on-the-fly recalibrate the mirror for atmospheric distortion effects, resulting in a clear picture.
Building a large mirror like this in space would be very costly. Much more costly than building it on the ground. And previous problems that have made large mirrors not very useful on the ground now have solutions.
How parallelizable is the problem of micro-adjusting small portions of a large deformable mirror to correct for atmospheric distortion?
I remember a Scientific American article stating that you'd have to devote a top-of-the-line Cray to continuously recalculate the deformations needed given data from the guide star, or laser simulated guide star. If this problem is highly parallelizable, you may be able to get away with _much_ cheaper hardware.
I'm sure the idea has occured to you, but I want to know what your thoughts are on it.
This isn't true. There is a significant cost incurred by vendor lockin. If the vendor of a tool seems to have the idea that you will forever be tied to their platform and tool, then, I would avoid the tool, no matter how good it was.
The only thing that the GPL does that's relevant in a non-copyright universe is a cancellation of the ability to make the source code a trade secret. It would be interesting to see if this could be achieved absent of copyright law.
Because stuff released under public domain can be put under copyright again by anybody with minor changes. If copyright didn't exist, this couldn't happen.
The only thing the GPL does that's relevant in a non-copyright universe is a cancellation of the ability to make the source code a trade secret. It would be interesting to see if this could be achieved absent of copyright law.
Thinking about this for a bit...
Is Oracle using this information to crush competitors and improve its market position? They're basically paying for their own investigative reporting. The information is being presented to everybody, and just happens to put Microsoft in a very bad light with respect to their anti-trust trial. In a way they are, but it's not very direct. Microsoft is basically hanging itself.
Are they doing anything illegal? Well, the Oracle PR person claims they gave specific instructions to the company they hired that they not do anything illegal. While a PR person is about as trustworthy as the weather in the midwest, this statement is fairly plausible, and Oracle's immediate admission also tends to make me believe they aren't prevaricating.
What would happen if Microsoft did this? Well, they'd turn up Oracle's links to IGI (the investigating firm) I'm sure. It doesn't sound though like Oracle is trying too hard to hide them. They might turn up other interesting things about Oracle's business practices, but I highly doubt that they'd turn up anything nearly as embarassing as Microsoft's hiring of 'independent' advocacy groups.
Would I care if Microsoft did this? No, not really. It would mostly generate a big shrug, and a 'business as usual for Microsoft' attitude from me. It wouldn't generate the same sense of outrage as learning about Microsoft's OEM contracts, or hearing that they plan to make their software purposely incompatible with the Palm Pilot. It's notable mostly because Oracle isn't known for business practices that are in the least shady or underhanded.
So, nope, I don't care. In fact, I largely find Oracle's actions to be highly amusing. 'The truth shall set you free.' *chuckle* It's also highly characteristic of what I know of Larry Ellison. And their immediate admission without really trying to patch it over with PR scores big points with me.
With sufficient munging, you can make anything do almost anything.
That's because nobody actually believed they'd actually do anything mentioned in that one.
Ahh, the default settings of the programs aren't Microsoft's fault. Obviously, the programs couldn't possibly be written to allocate memory as they need it and only build up to allocating a massive chunk on a system where you were actually handling a heavy load.
Yep, it's all the stupid admin's fault. After all, what can you expect out of an admin who was hired because NT is supposed to be extremely easy to administrate due to its graphical nature.
You are an utter idiot for bringing up this stupid point that's brought up time and time again and mysteriously moderated up when it should be moderated down to -1 (stupid).
It's been publicly stated by Stallman that if copyright law didn't exist, he wouldn't consider the GPL necessary. Get this through your thick skull. The GPL exist because copyright law exist. If copyright law didn't exist then the GPL wouldn't need to exist.
I don't understand ho this stupid point can be made again and again and consistently refuted yet people seem to think it somehow has merit.
Each and every single one of these features (and most of them can be characterized as silly syntactic sugar) are overshadowed by the vendor lock-in and lack of platform neutrality.
From what I've read, the biggest thing to learn from Java is that garbage collection is not necessarily horribly evil, and on-the-fly optimization of an easy to parse instruction set will eventually beat the pants off of processor specific optimization done at compile time.
That latter lesson is extremely important, and I hope that compilers that compile C++ to Java bytecode or something similar come out soon. Of course, the Transmeta chip/software handles x86 on-the-fly, but I bet it would do even better with a more regular instruction set.
Near as I can tell from the comments I've read, C# ignores this one big, interesting thing about Java completely. And, as far as escaping the garbage collector in a language designed for garbage collection, you've gotta be out of your gourd.
This is clearly the most intelligent post on this thread. You are absolutely correct in every single point you make.
Well, the volume management will be there in 2.4. I'm using it right now actually. It's very nice.
Logical Volume Manager (LVM)Just because it's not likely to happen at any given moment doesn't mean you shouldn't do something to prepare. It's like saying that there's no sense in having death and dismemberment insurance because it's so unlikely you'll ever be unexpectedly killed or severely injured. Yeah, maybe the chance is only 1 in 100 million, but that's no excuse for not being prepared when the roulette wheel lands on your number.
Since now is the first time in our history when this kind of disaster is concievably preventable given some preparation, would should begin preparing.
Why not start launching 0.5 tons of water or so with every shuttle launch? Get it all collected in one place in orbit, and the reaction mass is at least out of the gravity well. Sounds like an excellent preparation move to me. Instead of having the strategic helium reserves, we can have the strategic reaction mass reserves. :-)
Despite this review, I went to see this movie last night. I could've skipped it and been just as happy. Stupid, cheesy plot-line. Bad dialogue. Hammy overacting. Villains that don't make any sense. And a plot device that's built up over the entire movie, only to turn out to be incredibly lame at the end.
The only saving graces of this movie were the animation, and pacing.
So many SF movies I see, I think to myself how much better the movie could've been if the writers had had a clue about SF. This one was no exception. The Drej could've been scarier without violating the PG rating (like the villain in Mulan), the plot device could've been interesting and thought provoking, and the dialogue and story could've been a lot better. The only part I liked was the 'smart guard' part.
If you want to see a stupid, cheesy movie that's actually is decent, see Independence Day or Mystery Men again.
I object to the words 'social well being'. Who defines 'social well being' anyway? To me, that looks like an endorsement of drug laws, or any other form of government looking after our 'welfare'. That way leads to a system even worse than the one we currently have.
I think large corporations should largely be ignored by government. I think it should be illegal for them to make any kind of campaign contribution or hire lobbyists.
Basically, the people in charge of corporations have found a way to concentrate a lot of political power in themselves using our economic system, and it has got to stop.
I like the shock resistance of hardware memory too much. It's going to take a long time and a lot of field evidence to convince me that the shock resistance of that drive is good enough while it's on. (Note that the 1500G rating is only for when it's off.) Until then, I'm happy with 32M and 64M smart media cards for my digital camera, and solid state memory for my Palm Pilot and cell phone.
On the other hand, this bodes well for laptop drives. I'm willing to be very careful with my laptop while it's on. :-)
I think C++ is a bad teaching language, but for much different reasons. I would prefer a conceptually less cluttered language. Python and scheme are my current languages of choice for teaching.
Learning precisely how a computer works down to the transistor is nice to know, and sometimes helpful, but rarely necessary for a programmer to be at least decent. If you really want people to learn what the machine is doing, have them learn assembly. 68000 assembly is conceptually clean enough for people to get most of the concepts.
Your love of C because you can figure out what a particular piece of code is doing, exactly, just by looking at is means that you just haven't taken the time to become as proficient with C++ as C. C++ is hairier than C, but you still have a pretty good idea what a piece of code is doing, even at an assembly level, if you're familiar with the types involved. I can read the assembly output of a C++ compiler and relate it back to the C++ code it came from with few problems.
As someone else pointed out, it's all just abstraction levels. Computers don't think in anything. We place our interpretations on the bits and invent ways of describing them that we can get good conceptual handles on and work with. OO is just a different way of looking at the bits. One that's proven (in competent hands) to allow programs of greater complexity than could be achieved without it.
Do you know exactly and precisely what happens when you call 'fopen' if you don't have library source?
I use C++ because it makes the organization of large programs much easier. I now go for a style of programming that breaks the system up into just a few different ideas that can describe almost anything the system works with. This makes it easy to understand it, and easy to extend it or fix it.
It's kind of like knowing how an integer works. Once you know that, you can apply that knowledge to any integral type, and you'll be largely correct in the conclusions you derive from that knowledge.
Even before C++, I tended to code this way, and C++ just made it a lot easier. I remember wanting the features of C++ before I knew C++ existed.
*chuckle* What a ramble. I hope it makes some sense.
I hate this style, it makes life harder for maintainers, and it makes life harder for optimizers. Strangely enough, the reasons for this are largely identical.
I hate the style because it makes it difficult to figure out what in the heck you're doing at any given point. I like seeing definite lifetimes for variables because that gives me many more clues as to what you intended to do with them. I know the variable belongs in a particular block, and only that block. Any later references to it are really a reference to a different variable.
I'd almost like to see import and export statements for explicitly pulling variables in from enclosing blocks sometimes with the way some people program.
Optimizers also like knowing a lot of detail about the lifetime of a variable. It helps immensely in memory and register allocation. They know that after a certain point, the value of the variable can't possibly matter.
Hold up a cell phone near the cord leading to the handset of a landline phone you're using to call it. Then come by and tell me the interference is nothing to worry about.