it actually now exists inside the borders of the UK and is no longer in International waters as it was when it was first constructed
If you extend that line of thinking too far, parts of France are inside of Spanish international waters. If Sealand considers itself independent, and people consider it independent, then it is no more within the UK's international waters than part of the UK is within its international waters.
And considering that a British court declared that Sealand was independent in 1968, the only thing likely to change Sealand's independence would be war.
2) In this case, using a "popularity" measurement to auto-complete would be different enough from all of the examples you listed to be a "new" idea.
Word processors choose which word to autocomplete based on the popularity of that word. You start writing a paper about "disestablishmentarianism" in many word processors, and they will start completing that word for you instead of "disease", which would show up for example if you were writing a paper about the frivolous-patent craze.
1./bin/grep 2./usr/bin/locate 3. Browser url autocompletion 4. Every spellchecker since the invention of dirt, which queries a dictionary listing. 5. Every wordprocessor which autocompletes words you're typing with what it thinks is the most likely candidate. 6. Every computer-based card catalogue which allows you to search for part of a title.
Oh, I'm sorry, was applying the idea to toys new and original?
Than they are really...stupid...There is no reason to cater to the belief that there is a necessity to speak a language of imaginary creatures. It's not healthy.
And I suppose, given your extensive knowledge of treatment for the mentally ill, you would recommend we simply yell at sick people and tell them to get better. I think not. Let professionals do their jobs, until you can come up with a demonstrably better method.
"Longhorn" is instantly recognizable as a well-known breed of cattle.
To understand the choice of "Longhorn" as the product for the next version of Windows, let's consider a few well-known properties of cattle:
1. Cattle are unintelligent. 2. Cattle move slowly, and just look at you blankly when you tell them to move. 3. Cattle are huge, consisting mostly of fat. 4. From the perspective of cattle, the grass is always greener on the other side, so it's always worth upgrading to the next field. Although after you jump through the electric fence, you realize you didn't actually get anywhere better.
Accidentally deleting the entire filesystem is a rite of passage.:)
Yes, but it isn't:
rm -rf/
which is a rite of passage, but instead:
rm -rf.*
The resulting behavior makes sense, but the first time around it definitely catches you off guard in the painful learning sense. (CAUTION: If you try this, only try it at least two directory levels deeper than anything important.)
and there's an on-going discussion as to whether or not neutrinos have mass, because if they do, there's enough of them that they might well make up the missing mass of the universe.
The discussion has pretty much moved toward conclusion, and the conclusion is that neutrinos DO have mass, and that the limits placed upon their mass, while greater than zero, do not yield enough total mass to account for the remainder of missing mass. These results might shift slightly with corrections of experimental error, but a drastic change is unlikely.
If you're administering Windows 2K servers that aren't getting hundreds of days uptime per cycle, you're not very good at it.
Since when does someone have to be a "good" administrator in order to not have their systems crash? Shouldn't operating systems be stable out of the box? There is a definite tradeoff between maximizing security and default features, but reliability and high uptime should be intrinsic to the system.
Please tell me how you'd describe a web browser in that "language",
"I want a window which displays the latest html protocol correctly." Then the compiler looks up the latest html protocol and writes a program to display the protocol. This leaves the programmer free to decide what the program should do and how it should interact with the user, rather than to focus on details of implementing protocols and doing display appropriately. The point isn't to have a web_browser() function pre-written, but to have a compiler which can write an arbitrary function given only a specification.
but definately not to a 10 year old child.
Give some 10 year olds some credit, you might be surprised.
In 100 years, computer languages won't exist, or at least won't be used for anything but toy programs. Programs will be created, tested, and debugged through genetic algorithms.
I think this is sort of like saying 50 years ago that programming won't exist in the year 2000 because almost no one will use machine code anymore.
I fully expect that in 100 years, computers will be able to do much of what we currently consider programming faster than humans can. The act of programming, and thus programming languages in general, might evolve into a higher level way of describing the specifications and behaviors of a program, without directly specifying what are now considered implementation details. In this way, a 10 year old could write a bug-free web browser in an afternoon, simply by specifying what the features should be and what type of layout it should have.
Paradigms don't last forever, but some ideas do. (Where forever is a relative term.)
The Von Neumann architecture presented us with a model for the conventional computer, where instructions are stored as data, which helped us to think of computing and programming in an abstract manner. Even as researchers are trying to advance into new computing architectures, such as FPGA's or quantum computing, the idea of storing instructions as data is permanently plastered into our heads. Universal quantum computers are being sought which can execute arbitrary sets of instructions. FPGA's are being used for redesignable massive parallel processing, but even the pathways through the FPGA's are being set from data. This, in essence, is what the Von Neumann architecture was all about, just taken to a more maleable level.
I've never understood the need to print stuff out. It's hard to grep a dead tree.
It's also hard to mail a business letter over email. Most businesses a person must interact with in normal day-to-day life still want you to write a letter on physical paper and sign it with your hand.
If every product were individually tagged so your kitchen and appliances always knew what was inside of them, then yes, internet appliances could be rather useful. Imagine if you could simply specify the foods you want to keep in stock, and your computer could automatically generate your grocery list. Or if you could get a pop-up window at 4pm that says, "That ground beef in the fridge is about to expire, you'd better make it tonight or freeze it." Or if your fridge beeped when you took bad milk out of it, so you didn't have to discover its rancid nature in the process of spitting it all over your friends and family.
I would take this post as an obvious troll, if not for your low user number and the fact that you've posted insightful comments in the past.
Both languages piss me off considerably (forgive the strong language)!
First procedural (QCL) and now OOP!
While you seem to have gripes with OOP, OOP certainly has its strengths. The article you linked to is clearly written by a strong proponent of functional languages (which have certain, but limited, uses). OOP does an excellent job of abstracting the job of programming into units comprehendible by human short term memory (which of course make those units useful for programming). OOP also allows one to design logical interfaces to describe real world concepts in an abstract manner, and this feature is exactly what is required to make quantum computing understandable and useable in the field of computer science.
QCL does a similar task in a procedural manner by integrating the relationships between quantum objects into the structure of the language itself. This is perfectly reasonable.
Quantumn physics is reversable phyics... and that thus a destructive update is very hard to realize!... don't I hear "functional programming" cried out loud here?
I haven't studied the new language, but QCL performs this task quite well. The state of the system is preserved in a data structure containing an array of qubits.
A functional language would seem a particularly poor choice at this point in quantum computing language design. When designing languages for quantum computers, it should be clear how the appropriate portions of the language would map directly onto a sequential set of operations to instruct a physical quantum computer to perform (in other words, a sequence of fundamental quantum gate operations). Functional languages do not provide this with the same clarity as procedural or object oriented languages.
Large companies like Monsanto sell genetically engineered seeds to farmers that produce plants whose seeds are unusable
Then perhaps one should stop using the phrase "genetically engineered" food to describe these, and call them "genetically crippled" or "genetically sterilized", and opposed to "genetically enhanced."
This means that there won't be any new products or new ideas, because it will be the easiest thing for everybody to just sit back and enjoy the free, readily available goods that they get by replication.
There are two fields generally considered on this topic, software and music, so let's consider them both. The argument that software won't work if people can openly share it should be quite readily dismissed by anyone who reads Slashdot regularly. The open source movement provided a clear model that, if nothing else, shows software can, and WILL BE, developed by community to fit desire. So your argument that incentive disappears and thus creation disappears clearly disagrees with demonstrated human nature in the field of software.
Second, let's consider music. Music has existed for a long time, cd's have existed for a short time. Music is quite definitely something which does not improve by throwing a whole lot of money at it. Music is art, an expression of the soul. You can't get a better painting by paying the painter more, neither will a musician write better music if you pay the musician more. The idea of a "starving artist" is a longstanding phrase, and the phrase only exists because the true artists don't paint or write or sing for a paycheck, they do it for the art, and they will continue to do it for the art, no matter what economic system they end up in.
In modern times there seems to be no shortage of people willing to pay for concerts, so the artist's aren't really going to be hurt by an economic model shift. The recording industry might have to reform itself into a publicist, promoter, distributer, and scheduler, but this is how things go, economic systems reform as technologies change. The art certainly won't die, it courses through our veins.
The article shows much more clearly than the pop news release that the rotation has nothing to do with quantum spin, and is entirely a classical electrostatic phenomenon. I will try to translate the article briefly:
Essentially, when you apply a charge to the first of the three metal spheres, the charges all repel each other and go to the outside of the first sphere. This exerts a repulsive force against the like charges on the other two spheres, causing an imbalance as more charges are pushed to the far side of the spheres (from the first one) than are on the close side of the spheres. Then, because the second and third spheres have an imbalanced charge distribution, they also exert forces on each other which further displace the charges.
The displaced charges result in a potential which isn't perfectly balanced like two spheres would be, and the resulting calculation shows an interaction proportional to 1/(r^6), where r is the separation distance, which yields a rotation.
Slashdot Mirror
it actually now exists inside the borders of the UK and is no longer in International waters as it was when it was first constructed
If you extend that line of thinking too far, parts of France are inside of Spanish international waters. If Sealand considers itself independent, and people consider it independent, then it is no more within the UK's international waters than part of the UK is within its international waters.
And considering that a British court declared that Sealand was independent in 1968, the only thing likely to change Sealand's independence would be war.
2) In this case, using a "popularity" measurement to auto-complete would be different enough from all of the examples you listed to be a "new" idea.
Word processors choose which word to autocomplete based on the popularity of that word. You start writing a paper about "disestablishmentarianism" in many word processors, and they will start completing that word for you instead of "disease", which would show up for example if you were writing a paper about the frivolous-patent craze.
There has got to be prior art on this.
/bin/grep /usr/bin/locate
1.
2.
3. Browser url autocompletion
4. Every spellchecker since the invention of dirt, which queries a dictionary listing.
5. Every wordprocessor which autocompletes words you're typing with what it thinks is the most likely candidate.
6. Every computer-based card catalogue which allows you to search for part of a title.
Oh, I'm sorry, was applying the idea to toys new and original?
Than they are really...stupid...There is no reason to cater to the belief that there is a necessity to speak a language of imaginary creatures. It's not healthy.
And I suppose, given your extensive knowledge of treatment for the mentally ill, you would recommend we simply yell at sick people and tell them to get better. I think not. Let professionals do their jobs, until you can come up with a demonstrably better method.
"Longhorn" is instantly recognizable as a well-known breed of cattle.
To understand the choice of "Longhorn" as the product for the next version of Windows, let's consider a few well-known properties of cattle:
1. Cattle are unintelligent.
2. Cattle move slowly, and just look at you blankly when you tell them to move.
3. Cattle are huge, consisting mostly of fat.
4. From the perspective of cattle, the grass is always greener on the other side, so it's always worth upgrading to the next field. Although after you jump through the electric fence, you realize you didn't actually get anywhere better.
It said something to the effect of "Stay back 150 feet. Not responsible for damage from being closer".
That must be one hell of a sign if you can read it from 150 feet away.
Don't call it X.
Can I call it X2?
not everything was gone...but ls was....which was kinda funny...
If you lose ls, or just about every command, but you are still in a bash shell, the following command:
alias ls='for file in *; do echo $file; done'
Will give you a more mundane replacement ls, using only embedded bash commands.
Accidentally deleting the entire filesystem is a rite of passage. :)
/
.*
Yes, but it isn't:
rm -rf
which is a rite of passage, but instead:
rm -rf
The resulting behavior makes sense, but the first time around it definitely catches you off guard in the painful learning sense. (CAUTION: If you try this, only try it at least two directory levels deeper than anything important.)
and there's an on-going discussion as to whether or not neutrinos have mass, because if they do, there's enough of them that they might well make up the missing mass of the universe.
The discussion has pretty much moved toward conclusion, and the conclusion is that neutrinos DO have mass, and that the limits placed upon their mass, while greater than zero, do not yield enough total mass to account for the remainder of missing mass. These results might shift slightly with corrections of experimental error, but a drastic change is unlikely.
It is not the moon which is used as a movie screen, but the movie screen which is used as a moon... *Deep pensive look*
If you're administering Windows 2K servers that aren't getting hundreds of days uptime per cycle, you're not very good at it.
Since when does someone have to be a "good" administrator in order to not have their systems crash? Shouldn't operating systems be stable out of the box? There is a definite tradeoff between maximizing security and default features, but reliability and high uptime should be intrinsic to the system.
It has also been suggested that Hindenberg was himself 'sabotaging' his own efforts.
Other historians have also suggested that his name may have been "Heisenberg".
Please tell me how you'd describe a web browser in that "language",
"I want a window which displays the latest html protocol correctly." Then the compiler looks up the latest html protocol and writes a program to display the protocol. This leaves the programmer free to decide what the program should do and how it should interact with the user, rather than to focus on details of implementing protocols and doing display appropriately. The point isn't to have a web_browser() function pre-written, but to have a compiler which can write an arbitrary function given only a specification.
but definately not to a 10 year old child.
Give some 10 year olds some credit, you might be surprised.
Firenerd and Thundernerd?
Do you really think we need more subliminal suggestions of "Firenerd" in this economy?
arriving from various "air roads" at a sporting stadium
What is this "sporting stadium" you speak of?
In 100 years, computer languages won't exist, or at least won't be used for anything but toy programs. Programs will be created, tested, and debugged through genetic algorithms.
I think this is sort of like saying 50 years ago that programming won't exist in the year 2000 because almost no one will use machine code anymore.
I fully expect that in 100 years, computers will be able to do much of what we currently consider programming faster than humans can. The act of programming, and thus programming languages in general, might evolve into a higher level way of describing the specifications and behaviors of a program, without directly specifying what are now considered implementation details. In this way, a 10 year old could write a bug-free web browser in an afternoon, simply by specifying what the features should be and what type of layout it should have.
Paradigms don't last forever, but some ideas do. (Where forever is a relative term.)
The Von Neumann architecture presented us with a model for the conventional computer, where instructions are stored as data, which helped us to think of computing and programming in an abstract manner. Even as researchers are trying to advance into new computing architectures, such as FPGA's or quantum computing, the idea of storing instructions as data is permanently plastered into our heads. Universal quantum computers are being sought which can execute arbitrary sets of instructions. FPGA's are being used for redesignable massive parallel processing, but even the pathways through the FPGA's are being set from data. This, in essence, is what the Von Neumann architecture was all about, just taken to a more maleable level.
We can make small airplanes, but they can't stop at an intersection like a car can.
No amount of air traffic will ever require an intersection. It's a three-dimensional world out there.
I've never understood the need to print stuff out. It's hard to grep a dead tree.
It's also hard to mail a business letter over email. Most businesses a person must interact with in normal day-to-day life still want you to write a letter on physical paper and sign it with your hand.
If every product were individually tagged so your kitchen and appliances always knew what was inside of them, then yes, internet appliances could be rather useful. Imagine if you could simply specify the foods you want to keep in stock, and your computer could automatically generate your grocery list. Or if you could get a pop-up window at 4pm that says, "That ground beef in the fridge is about to expire, you'd better make it tonight or freeze it." Or if your fridge beeped when you took bad milk out of it, so you didn't have to discover its rancid nature in the process of spitting it all over your friends and family.
I would take this post as an obvious troll, if not for your low user number and the fact that you've posted insightful comments in the past.
... don't I hear "functional programming" cried out loud here?
Both languages piss me off considerably (forgive the strong language)!
First procedural (QCL) and now OOP!
While you seem to have gripes with OOP, OOP certainly has its strengths. The article you linked to is clearly written by a strong proponent of functional languages (which have certain, but limited, uses). OOP does an excellent job of abstracting the job of programming into units comprehendible by human short term memory (which of course make those units useful for programming). OOP also allows one to design logical interfaces to describe real world concepts in an abstract manner, and this feature is exactly what is required to make quantum computing understandable and useable in the field of computer science.
QCL does a similar task in a procedural manner by integrating the relationships between quantum objects into the structure of the language itself. This is perfectly reasonable.
Quantumn physics is reversable phyics... and that thus a destructive update is very hard to realize!
I haven't studied the new language, but QCL performs this task quite well. The state of the system is preserved in a data structure containing an array of qubits.
A functional language would seem a particularly poor choice at this point in quantum computing language design. When designing languages for quantum computers, it should be clear how the appropriate portions of the language would map directly onto a sequential set of operations to instruct a physical quantum computer to perform (in other words, a sequence of fundamental quantum gate operations). Functional languages do not provide this with the same clarity as procedural or object oriented languages.
Large companies like Monsanto sell genetically engineered seeds to farmers that produce plants whose seeds are unusable
Then perhaps one should stop using the phrase "genetically engineered" food to describe these, and call them "genetically crippled" or "genetically sterilized", and opposed to "genetically enhanced."
This means that there won't be any new products or new ideas, because it will be the easiest thing for everybody to just sit back and enjoy the free, readily available goods that they get by replication.
There are two fields generally considered on this topic, software and music, so let's consider them both. The argument that software won't work if people can openly share it should be quite readily dismissed by anyone who reads Slashdot regularly. The open source movement provided a clear model that, if nothing else, shows software can, and WILL BE, developed by community to fit desire. So your argument that incentive disappears and thus creation disappears clearly disagrees with demonstrated human nature in the field of software.
Second, let's consider music. Music has existed for a long time, cd's have existed for a short time. Music is quite definitely something which does not improve by throwing a whole lot of money at it. Music is art, an expression of the soul. You can't get a better painting by paying the painter more, neither will a musician write better music if you pay the musician more. The idea of a "starving artist" is a longstanding phrase, and the phrase only exists because the true artists don't paint or write or sing for a paycheck, they do it for the art, and they will continue to do it for the art, no matter what economic system they end up in.
In modern times there seems to be no shortage of people willing to pay for concerts, so the artist's aren't really going to be hurt by an economic model shift. The recording industry might have to reform itself into a publicist, promoter, distributer, and scheduler, but this is how things go, economic systems reform as technologies change. The art certainly won't die, it courses through our veins.
Or here if you don't like pdf's.
The article shows much more clearly than the pop news release that the rotation has nothing to do with quantum spin, and is entirely a classical electrostatic phenomenon. I will try to translate the article briefly:
Essentially, when you apply a charge to the first of the three metal spheres, the charges all repel each other and go to the outside of the first sphere. This exerts a repulsive force against the like charges on the other two spheres, causing an imbalance as more charges are pushed to the far side of the spheres (from the first one) than are on the close side of the spheres. Then, because the second and third spheres have an imbalanced charge distribution, they also exert forces on each other which further displace the charges.
The displaced charges result in a potential which isn't perfectly balanced like two spheres would be, and the resulting calculation shows an interaction proportional to 1/(r^6), where r is the separation distance, which yields a rotation.