I gained great respect for Bruce Perens for his handling of the whole HP fiasco. He seems pretty level headed. But this goes to show that Bruce can be just as idealistic as RMS, albeit in his own way.
More than a few Open Source developers work day jobs for companies who hold software patents. These patents supposedly protect the livelihood of those at the company. I don't think it's unreasonable to expect that at least some of these developers will have sympathy for software patents.
Just as the readers of Slashdot do not share a "hive mind" (although many trolls like to claim it), the international community of Open Source developers do not all think alike, even in regard to software patents. To claim that the vast majority of developers are against patents, and that the remaining few are either misled or dangerous enemies, is pretty pompous and arrogant.
What's done to prevent the rapid over-oxidation, especially in something that astonishingly thin?
In your experiment, the graphite glowed because it got hot. It also oxidized because it got hot. It's a simple case of resistive power dissipation.
In this case, the carbon is emitting light through a quantum process, not thermal radiation. The graphite doesn't get hot and therefore doesn't oxidize.
But in the U.S. it is very hard, because we are all about money money money, consume consume consume.
As long as the U.S. exists as the U.S., this will be the case. To be anything other than a culture of consumers would require such incredible social changes that the result wouldn't be the same country anymore. Take comfort that the entire world isn't all like this.
People are allowed to sue each other because otherwise they'd settle their arguments by beating each other with sticks. Which mode of settlement seems more reasonable to you?
No, sorting faster than O(N log N) is not possible.
Generalized sorting, you are correct. However, it's possible to sort ordinal types (such as integers) in O(N) so long as the range of values is definitely bounded. You just go through the array, increment a counter for each ordinal value you see, then go back again and output the appropriate number of occurrences of each ordinal.
An extremely special circumstance, but it is O(N) sorting nonetheless.
They're playing with fire if they do that; printer manufacturers are already under investigation for anticompetitive practices by the EU. If they have any sense, they'll back off fast.
But how can a judge indict them if they control the printers the indictments are printed with?;-)
There is a precise way to calculate how much work (energy) it takes to compress a given amount of gas. The energy transferred is equal to the negative integral of the pressure with respect to changing volume. From the ideal gas law we know that PV=nRT, so P=nRT/V. If you work out the integral, you'll find that in order to store W joules of energy, you need to compress the gas to a fraction of e^(W/nRT) of its original volume. This is assuming that the compression process is isothermic.
I won't go into specific numbers (you can plug them into the equation if you want), but it should be clear that the stored energy is a logarithmic function of the pressure. In other words, storing energy in the form of pressurized gas is extremely inefficient, and in fact becomes exponentially more inefficient as the pressure increases.
You can sign the binary that is a result of the build
process, but you can _not_ make a binary that is aware of certain keys
without making those keys public - because those keys will obviously have
been part of the kernel build itself.
Ah, but do they really? I don't think there's anything in the GPL stipulating that an end user cannot modify a compiled binary. Why couldn't you just put a big static array of zeros in the code, and supply a secondary (closed source) program which overwrites those zeros with an actual key? You couldn't distribute pre-keyed binaries (since they wouldn't correspond to the source) but you can allow the end user to run a quick command to insert the keys into the binary him/herself.
You'd just make it a part of the installation process, like installing the boot loader. 1) Install kernel 2) Twiddle some bits in kernel 3) Install bootloader.
It seems like there would be no GPL violation since the binary you distributed was directly compiled from the source you distributed; the user just happened to run a command which overwrote a portion of that binary.
I saw AOTC in IMAX, and it completely sucked. Several people got sick, and I developed a headache. I mean for crying out loud, the film was shot digitally right? It should have been a piece of cake to re-project the film so it would actually look good on the screen, but they apparently didn't do anything at all.
The result was an annoying blast of light and sound that was extremely nauseating.
I hope with The Matrix they actually put some effort into a good IMAX presentation.
Granted, I haven't heard or read a lot of stupid things today, but your statement is the most remarkably stupid item I've come across in the last 24 hours, and likely the last month or so.
Ok, I admit I phrased that badly. Ok, very badly. Imagine the set of all possible manhole shapes, wherein each such shape has a minimum diameter of D. By minimum diameter I mean, no matter which way you measure across the shape in a line which passes though the center of mass, that distance is always >= D.
Of all the shapes in that set, the circle is the one with the minimum surface area for a given minimum diameter. Why this is true should be obvious on its face.
The way I had it phrased before, I realize, sounded quite stupid. Of course, all shapes with identical thickness and surface area, no matter what their actual shape, will occupy the same volume. I was typing faster that I was thinking, sorry.
You forgot another important reason, which is that the circle has the most area for a given diameter, and therefore uses the least amount of material (steel, I assume) to cover a hole with a given area. This minimizes both the cost and the weight.
If the US keeps on down it's slippery slope towards totalitarianism, you won't need terrorists to feel unsafe - the government will be more than enough.
Ironically, we might get there by giving unjustifiable power to the government to protect us from imaginary fears. Might I offer a quote:
"Of course the people don't want war. But after all, it's the leaders of the country who determine the policy, and it's always a simple matter to drag the people along whether it's a democracy, a fascist dictatorship, or a parliament, or a communist dictatorship. Voice or no voice, the people can always be brought to the bidding of the leaders. That is easy. All you have to do is tell them they are being attacked, and denounce the pacifists for lack of patriotism, and exposing the country to greater danger." [Emphasis mine]
Trusted computing is normally about 2 things: Making sure that nothing has access to anything it's not supposed to, and making sure that there is an audit trail for who did what.
Ah, I get it! Trusted computing is about not trusting anyone!
Oh wait, that wouldn't get us free energy, just another bad movie.
I didn't say we'd trigger the earthquakes ourselves, and besides, I was only being half serious. But if nature is gonna deal us some bad hands sometimes, why not try to extract what we can from it?
Hmmm, I wonder what an earthquake would do that recharger?
Interesting idea. What if you covered a large field with tall towers, with ten-ton steel weights hanging from large springs from the tops of the towers. When an earthquake strikes, a huge amount of energy will be transferred into the spring/weight systems. Then you use some kind of linear generator to extract this energy from the vibrating weights.
Well, a couple of reasons. Most important, the "pagefile" is there to protect against a hard out-of-memory condition. Modern operating systems are in the habit of overcommitting memory, which means they grant allocation requests even if the available RAM can't fulfill them. The idea is that an app will never actually be using all those pages simultaneously. If things go wrong and all that extra memory is actually needed, the system starts kicking pages to disk to satisfy the cascade of page faults. This means the system will become slow and unresponsive, but it will keep running. But say you didn't have anywhere to swap to. The system can't map a page when a process faults on it, and the process gets killed. But which process gets killed? After all, is it the process's fault if the OS decided to overcommit system memory? The swap space serves as a buffer so a real administrator with human intelligence can come in and kill off the right processes to get the system back in shape.
Swap is also important because not all data can just be reloaded from the filesystem on demand. Working data built in a process's memory is dynamic and can't just be "reloaded." If there's no swap, that means this memory must be locked in RAM, even if the process in question has been sleeping for days! We all know the benefits of disk caching on performance. Process data pages are higher priority than cache pages. Thus if old, inactive data pages are wasting space in RAM, those are pages that could have been used to provide a larger disk cache.
Ok, I wasn't strict enough in what I was saying. Selecting breeding, in the absence of any mutating potential cannot introduce new genetic material. Frogs turn into horses because the genes actually change, not through random shuffling of existing genes.
Human lifespans are short enough that the mutating potential is very small over the period of a human life, or over the lifetime of the animal you are breeding, for that matter. Thanks for pointing out that my statement was incomplete.
When farmers bred the two best cows or sheep, and then bred THOSE offspring, wasn't that genetic engineering of the breed?
No. You can't breed an organism into anything you want. For example you couldn't turn frogs into horses just by breeding the frogs that seem most "horse-like". Breeding only mixes up pre-existing genes. Half of the chromosomes come from the mother, and half from the father. The offspring has a new (and probably unique) combination of genes, but the genes themselves are identical to those in the parents.
Genetic engineering, on the other hand, is capable of altering the genes themselves, creating brand new ones. Until now, natural mutation was the only way for brand new genetic material to be created. Now, humans themselves can do it.
Tech support and programming jobs around the world will double by 2010, and even if it does double in the USA, the more it doubles the lower our salaries.
That's only true if we're all equally skilled. The reality is, some programmers are far better than others. These people are always going to be rare, no matter how many Java programmers are mass produced by CS programs around the country.
Some example of positions that will always be high pay (ok, I'm guessing here): compiler design and optimization, high speed photorealistic rendering, artificial intelligence systems, font rasterization, etc.
In other words, there are coders who take spec and code spec; and there are engineer/programmers who design large complex systems and implement them better than your average college graduate. One of these classes of people will always be employed. The other will be up shit's creek when we finally get computers to write their own programs for us (yes, that day will come).
You have nesting: it is easy to jump out of a sub-statechart.
Without knowing more detail, I can only speculate here but from this statement, it appears this allows you to "call" another FSM from a particular state. Ok, now you have a PDA, the next step up from a FSM.
You have parallelism: if a statechart is subdivided with dashed lines (or whatever the fashionable notation for this is now), you have two (or more) control flows.
This is known as nondeterminism in computer science. Any nondeterministic machine can be converted to a deterministic one (removing the virtual parallelism). It doesn't add any theoretical power, but it definitely makes it easier to design the machine.
I wss a little confused by the term "statechart," but it turns out he's talking about finite state machines. I guess he figured one more new buzzword wouldn't kill anybody...
A state machine is a way of representing a computational task. The machine or program can be in precisely one of a number of possible states at a given time. Different kinds of events cause the system to move from one state to another state (called a transition). Each transition can have an associated side effect. Therefore, the model of computation is:
read input
decide which state to move to based on input and current state
execute transition action
actually move to the new state
return to step 1
State machines are theoretically limited in the kinds of input sequences they can process. As it turns out, a state machine can only process inputs which can be described by regular expressions. However, it is possible to "augment" a state machine to extend its power. If you do this by adding a data stack, you have produced what is called a "pushdown automaton" and this gives you a great deal of power. But that is a departure from a pure "CS" FSM.
The FSM is sort of the bottom rung of the computational ladder. FSMs can process regular languages (i.e. the languages describable by regular expressions). PDAs can process context-free languages (like most programming languages). Even more powerful than a PDA is a Turing machine, the theoretical "ultimate" model of a computing machine.
It might seem odd to think of the input events to the program as comprising sentences in some "language," but it makes sense when you consider it. Input events have an inherent structure to them, and this structure can often be described in the form of a regular language. In these situations, using an FSM model of the code is very natural since the code is directly, structurally related to the events it is processing.
I don't understand. MTU is a state-funded school (i.e. a public school). When the RIAA came knocking on their door, why in hell did MTU reveal the personal identity of the student in question?
It makes total sense (at least for giants like HP and Epson) to have planned obsolescence for their printers. Remember, HP makes most of its money from *toner* and *ink*, not the printers themselves. Over time, as the manufacturing process for a particular ink improves and becomes cheaper, competition between vendors drives down the price of ink. In order to maintain a good cash flow, the vendor designs a new ink, which is slightly more costly to produce, and which sells for a higher price than before.
If old printers survived for long amounts of time, then the vendors would be forced to keep their old ink manufacturing facilities operational. But this isn't what they want; they want to move to the new ink formulations and keep the price of ink as steady as possible, to guarantee a cash flow. This means they need to obsolete the printers to keep everyone on track to use the new ink.
Because a superconductor conducts with literally zero resistance, you can create a ring of superconducting material, pump as much current into it as it will tolerate, and just let the current cycle forever. No degradation whatsoever.
The coil energy is stored in the form of a magnetic field (the coil is a giant solenoid). The stored energy will eventually bleed off through magnetic interactions with the environment.
Then when you want power, you just tap into the ring and pull it out on demand.
Yikes. If you try to "tap in" to an inductor, it will produce an enormous voltage and immediately arc to close the circuit. The only way to get energy out of a superconducting solenoid is through some magnetic interaction. Whatever device you use to do this, it's gonna be expensive.
we could (probably) make very small superconducting rings, and if the power density were high enough, we could use them instead of batteries or fuel tanks.
Again, the energy is stored in the solenoid's magnetic field. A solenoid storing any sizable quantity of energy is going to have an enormous magnetic field. It's going to be very tricky to design devices that work properly very close to an extremely large magnet.
Slashdot Mirror
More than a few Open Source developers work day jobs for companies who hold software patents. These patents supposedly protect the livelihood of those at the company. I don't think it's unreasonable to expect that at least some of these developers will have sympathy for software patents.
Just as the readers of Slashdot do not share a "hive mind" (although many trolls like to claim it), the international community of Open Source developers do not all think alike, even in regard to software patents. To claim that the vast majority of developers are against patents, and that the remaining few are either misled or dangerous enemies, is pretty pompous and arrogant.
In your experiment, the graphite glowed because it got hot. It also oxidized because it got hot. It's a simple case of resistive power dissipation.
In this case, the carbon is emitting light through a quantum process, not thermal radiation. The graphite doesn't get hot and therefore doesn't oxidize.
As long as the U.S. exists as the U.S., this will be the case. To be anything other than a culture of consumers would require such incredible social changes that the result wouldn't be the same country anymore. Take comfort that the entire world isn't all like this.
People are allowed to sue each other because otherwise they'd settle their arguments by beating each other with sticks. Which mode of settlement seems more reasonable to you?
Generalized sorting, you are correct. However, it's possible to sort ordinal types (such as integers) in O(N) so long as the range of values is definitely bounded. You just go through the array, increment a counter for each ordinal value you see, then go back again and output the appropriate number of occurrences of each ordinal.
An extremely special circumstance, but it is O(N) sorting nonetheless.
Why doesn't IBM just do us a favor, buy SCO, dissolve it, and end the whole problem?
But how can a judge indict them if they control the printers the indictments are printed with? ;-)
I won't go into specific numbers (you can plug them into the equation if you want), but it should be clear that the stored energy is a logarithmic function of the pressure. In other words, storing energy in the form of pressurized gas is extremely inefficient, and in fact becomes exponentially more inefficient as the pressure increases.
Ah, but do they really? I don't think there's anything in the GPL stipulating that an end user cannot modify a compiled binary. Why couldn't you just put a big static array of zeros in the code, and supply a secondary (closed source) program which overwrites those zeros with an actual key? You couldn't distribute pre-keyed binaries (since they wouldn't correspond to the source) but you can allow the end user to run a quick command to insert the keys into the binary him/herself.
You'd just make it a part of the installation process, like installing the boot loader. 1) Install kernel 2) Twiddle some bits in kernel 3) Install bootloader.
It seems like there would be no GPL violation since the binary you distributed was directly compiled from the source you distributed; the user just happened to run a command which overwrote a portion of that binary.
The result was an annoying blast of light and sound that was extremely nauseating.
I hope with The Matrix they actually put some effort into a good IMAX presentation.
Ok, I admit I phrased that badly. Ok, very badly. Imagine the set of all possible manhole shapes, wherein each such shape has a minimum diameter of D. By minimum diameter I mean, no matter which way you measure across the shape in a line which passes though the center of mass, that distance is always >= D.
Of all the shapes in that set, the circle is the one with the minimum surface area for a given minimum diameter. Why this is true should be obvious on its face.
The way I had it phrased before, I realize, sounded quite stupid. Of course, all shapes with identical thickness and surface area, no matter what their actual shape, will occupy the same volume. I was typing faster that I was thinking, sorry.
You forgot another important reason, which is that the circle has the most area for a given diameter, and therefore uses the least amount of material (steel, I assume) to cover a hole with a given area. This minimizes both the cost and the weight.
Ironically, we might get there by giving unjustifiable power to the government to protect us from imaginary fears. Might I offer a quote:
"Of course the people don't want war. But after all, it's the leaders of the country who determine the policy, and it's always a simple matter to drag the people along whether it's a democracy, a fascist dictatorship, or a parliament, or a communist dictatorship. Voice or no voice, the people can always be brought to the bidding of the leaders. That is easy. All you have to do is tell them they are being attacked, and denounce the pacifists for lack of patriotism, and exposing the country to greater danger." [Emphasis mine]
-- Herman Goering at the Nuremberg trials
Ah, I get it! Trusted computing is about not trusting anyone!
I didn't say we'd trigger the earthquakes ourselves, and besides, I was only being half serious. But if nature is gonna deal us some bad hands sometimes, why not try to extract what we can from it?
Interesting idea. What if you covered a large field with tall towers, with ten-ton steel weights hanging from large springs from the tops of the towers. When an earthquake strikes, a huge amount of energy will be transferred into the spring/weight systems. Then you use some kind of linear generator to extract this energy from the vibrating weights.
Well, a couple of reasons. Most important, the "pagefile" is there to protect against a hard out-of-memory condition. Modern operating systems are in the habit of overcommitting memory, which means they grant allocation requests even if the available RAM can't fulfill them. The idea is that an app will never actually be using all those pages simultaneously. If things go wrong and all that extra memory is actually needed, the system starts kicking pages to disk to satisfy the cascade of page faults. This means the system will become slow and unresponsive, but it will keep running. But say you didn't have anywhere to swap to. The system can't map a page when a process faults on it, and the process gets killed. But which process gets killed? After all, is it the process's fault if the OS decided to overcommit system memory? The swap space serves as a buffer so a real administrator with human intelligence can come in and kill off the right processes to get the system back in shape.
Swap is also important because not all data can just be reloaded from the filesystem on demand. Working data built in a process's memory is dynamic and can't just be "reloaded." If there's no swap, that means this memory must be locked in RAM, even if the process in question has been sleeping for days! We all know the benefits of disk caching on performance. Process data pages are higher priority than cache pages. Thus if old, inactive data pages are wasting space in RAM, those are pages that could have been used to provide a larger disk cache.
You basically always want swap.
Human lifespans are short enough that the mutating potential is very small over the period of a human life, or over the lifetime of the animal you are breeding, for that matter. Thanks for pointing out that my statement was incomplete.
No. You can't breed an organism into anything you want. For example you couldn't turn frogs into horses just by breeding the frogs that seem most "horse-like". Breeding only mixes up pre-existing genes. Half of the chromosomes come from the mother, and half from the father. The offspring has a new (and probably unique) combination of genes, but the genes themselves are identical to those in the parents.
Genetic engineering, on the other hand, is capable of altering the genes themselves, creating brand new ones. Until now, natural mutation was the only way for brand new genetic material to be created. Now, humans themselves can do it.
That's only true if we're all equally skilled. The reality is, some programmers are far better than others. These people are always going to be rare, no matter how many Java programmers are mass produced by CS programs around the country.
Some example of positions that will always be high pay (ok, I'm guessing here): compiler design and optimization, high speed photorealistic rendering, artificial intelligence systems, font rasterization, etc.
In other words, there are coders who take spec and code spec; and there are engineer/programmers who design large complex systems and implement them better than your average college graduate. One of these classes of people will always be employed. The other will be up shit's creek when we finally get computers to write their own programs for us (yes, that day will come).
Without knowing more detail, I can only speculate here but from this statement, it appears this allows you to "call" another FSM from a particular state. Ok, now you have a PDA, the next step up from a FSM.
You have parallelism: if a statechart is subdivided with dashed lines (or whatever the fashionable notation for this is now), you have two (or more) control flows.
This is known as nondeterminism in computer science. Any nondeterministic machine can be converted to a deterministic one (removing the virtual parallelism). It doesn't add any theoretical power, but it definitely makes it easier to design the machine.
They are not simple toys like FSMs.
FSMs are simple, but they aren't toys.
A state machine is a way of representing a computational task. The machine or program can be in precisely one of a number of possible states at a given time. Different kinds of events cause the system to move from one state to another state (called a transition). Each transition can have an associated side effect. Therefore, the model of computation is:
- read input
- decide which state to move to based on input and current state
- execute transition action
- actually move to the new state
- return to step 1
State machines are theoretically limited in the kinds of input sequences they can process. As it turns out, a state machine can only process inputs which can be described by regular expressions. However, it is possible to "augment" a state machine to extend its power. If you do this by adding a data stack, you have produced what is called a "pushdown automaton" and this gives you a great deal of power. But that is a departure from a pure "CS" FSM.The FSM is sort of the bottom rung of the computational ladder. FSMs can process regular languages (i.e. the languages describable by regular expressions). PDAs can process context-free languages (like most programming languages). Even more powerful than a PDA is a Turing machine, the theoretical "ultimate" model of a computing machine.
It might seem odd to think of the input events to the program as comprising sentences in some "language," but it makes sense when you consider it. Input events have an inherent structure to them, and this structure can often be described in the form of a regular language. In these situations, using an FSM model of the code is very natural since the code is directly, structurally related to the events it is processing.
Ok, there's your dose of CS for the day.
Isn't that a violation of the FERPA Act?
If old printers survived for long amounts of time, then the vendors would be forced to keep their old ink manufacturing facilities operational. But this isn't what they want; they want to move to the new ink formulations and keep the price of ink as steady as possible, to guarantee a cash flow. This means they need to obsolete the printers to keep everyone on track to use the new ink.
On the other hand, I may be talking out my ass.
The coil energy is stored in the form of a magnetic field (the coil is a giant solenoid). The stored energy will eventually bleed off through magnetic interactions with the environment.
Then when you want power, you just tap into the ring and pull it out on demand.
Yikes. If you try to "tap in" to an inductor, it will produce an enormous voltage and immediately arc to close the circuit. The only way to get energy out of a superconducting solenoid is through some magnetic interaction. Whatever device you use to do this, it's gonna be expensive.
we could (probably) make very small superconducting rings, and if the power density were high enough, we could use them instead of batteries or fuel tanks.
Again, the energy is stored in the solenoid's magnetic field. A solenoid storing any sizable quantity of energy is going to have an enormous magnetic field. It's going to be very tricky to design devices that work properly very close to an extremely large magnet.
Ok, then what is this and this and this and this and this?