That's what I get for trying to be polite. That new irony-detection circuitry of yours must be running amok now!
Joylessness indeed! Why, I included a whole exclamation point in my previous post - and there are three in this one!
Freude trinken alle Wesen
An den Brüsten der Natur;
Alle Guten, alle Bösen
Folgen ihrer Rosenspur.
There you have it - we tread the same rose-covered path, you and I, despite my inherent goodness and your unleavened evil. Wait, do I have that the right way around? It's so confusing these days, what with the good guys laundering drug money for the evil ones and all...
It's only better-than-french because it's fresher. Unbeknownst to anyone else, the French have long been launching secret mining missions to the Kuiper Belt in order to obtain their famous brie. Do you think Jules Verne just imagined all that stuff? And you believed that old story about brie somehow being made from cultured milk? I mean c'mon, how likely is that, really?
Pluto would not be reclassified as an asteroid, regardless of popularity, since it's apparently constituted largely of ice, and if brought closer in towards the sun, would essentially turn into a comet. It might leave behind a few small asteroids in the process, though.
Pluto would be classified as a Kuiper-Belt object, or as the article in The Age put it, an "ice dwarf".
But the truth is, these labels are meaninglessly vague. They'd be better off just saying that Pluto is a Kuiper Belt object which for various reasons, also qualifies as a planet. But judging by the arguments about this, there's a subclass of rather vocal astronomers on both sides who are pretty anal and uncompromising - a bit like the scientific equivalent of birdwatchers: "That's a blue-crested browntit, I'm telling you!" "No, you idiot, anyone can see it's a brown-breasted hoople!"
There are advantages to both approaches - regulation helped create a more standard environment for users, but lack of regulation in the US helped create the technology which the next European generation will apparently be using.
A big reason for the different approaches is simply the differing political structure between US and Europe: not just the greater "capitalist fundamentalism" of the US, but the fact that the US is a relatively homogenous single market, whereas Europe is forced to deal with a slew of languages, cultures, and national governments. Approaches to these problems are necessarily different, and trying to claim one or the other is "better" is comparing homogenous apples to segmented tangerines.
The sense I got from the article was that the author just wanted to do an "I told you so", which was prompted specifically by experiences he apparently had in dealing with e.g. Ericsson on the technological issues. Having worked in similar (much smaller scale) situations, I think I know exactly what he means - I've encountered NIH syndrome plenty of times, and I've watched with satisfaction when the technically superior approach I was advocating wins out over the entrenched politically-backed incumbent technology. I can sympathise with the impulse to publicly tweak the people who previously made things more difficult than they needed to be. It's unfortunate that because of the nature of the situation, this devolves into a macho Europe vs. America contest, and the author of the article bears some responsibility for this.
Since I'm neither American nor European, I'll happily sit back and let you guys duke it out and use the best technology that comes out of it. No matter how you slice it, competition works well, in the end - whether between technologies or political structures.
It's kind of amusing to use high-class trolling techniques, such as rhetorical statements and sarcasm, on someone whose ability to comprehend is as limited as yours. My original post was not "playing it safe" - I knew you weren't an 11-year old girl. That's the "rhetorical" bit, when you grow up and become a real troll, you might want to look into that.
Anyway, I can't help a sneaking suspicion that you really are impressed by FAO Schwarz, in which case you're emotionally an 11-year old girl, if not physically. So I guess my message worked on multiple levels. I'm even more of a genius than I originally thought I was! M4d propz to me!
If you had any convictions, you wouldn't have made it to the ", or a", even if the other option boils down to being a troll. It's superfluous and just plain silly!
Kind of like your first message? I dunno, I thought mine was original, in a sort of blatant stereotypical knock off brand of original. If both conclusions lead to the same thing, what does that tell you? Wouldn't that be sort of a clue? Perhaps a little too subtle...
Anyhow, I can only assume that with your stratospheric user ID, you're still learning the ropes. I look forward to the day when you join the ranks of the great trolls of/. I'm sure it'll be a few years yet, but probably by the time the UIDs reach the millions, you'll do it. I have complete faith in you. In the meantime, just try a bit harder, willya?
Oh, and try not to break character so easily, too. It's always depressing to see that in a young troll...
...are very different than user interfaces for software. Maybe in the future, when we can wave our hands around in the air like Tom Cruise in "Minority Report" (or the shuttle pilots in Earth Final Conflict), we'll have more intuitive user interfaces.
But right now, among other things, most developers are simply limited by the fact that we have incredibly low-resolution displays (relative e.g. to paper), very limited and limiting input devices (keyboard and mouse), very limited software support for advanced user interface strategies, and low media bandwidth (e.g. even gigabit LANs have trouble dealing with many simultaneous video streams). We're still using menu access techniques that had their beginnings on text consoles (the pull-down menu), and only lately have some innovative alternatives begun to take root (e.g. piemenus).
If the devices we were controlling were simply VCRs and the like, Norman might have a point. But what we're actually doing is developing "physical" interfaces to abstract intellectual concepts that don't always have obvious analogs in the real world. It's hardly surprising that one of the most effective interfaces is textual.
Historically, text and written or spoken language has undoubtedly been the most effective way of communicating abstract concepts. Pictures are used as an aid to understanding, at best, an adjunct to written and spoken language. So why do we try to provide completely pictoral interfaces to our software? It does everyone a disservice, and effectively forces users to be dumb, disempowering them by hiding or eliminating (*cough*Windows*cough*) their ability to use language skills to control their environment.
(For anyone who disagrees with what I'm saying, please translate the above message into pictures and sign language and email me the results.)
And you got three negative mod points. One person thought you were funny.
Posting messages designed with the goal of simply eliciting a response has a name: it's called "trolling".
Judging by a couple of your other message, you qualify - e.g. the hologram storage thing (I could post a reply with just as many explanation points pointing out how yes, you can store information in a hologram); and the Unix Y2K bug, which aside from the various Unix Y2K issues that did exist, is also the term often used to refer to the two-billion-second rollover that'll occur in a couple of decades.
So, you're either a troll, or a somewhat technically ignorant person who instead of asking questions, enjoys displaying his ignorance in an attempt to get responses. Which is still a troll.
I thought it was original, in a sort of blatant stereotypical knock off brand of original.
Aside from the "spatial" issue someone else mentioned, is the simple fact that it's hard to enforce laws on a ship that's in international waters, thousands of miles from its country of registration.
Most of the well-known functional languages don't do lazy evaluation, so that would only be a "big ticket item" for languages like Haskell, which do.
And no, I don't think your description captured functional languages very well - as you say, it sounded more like Prolog. Besides, the "rule-based" appearance of some functional languages (notably Haskell & the ML family) is really mostly syntactic sugar. Scheme, which is much closer to the pure lambda calculus on which most functional languages are based, doesn't have such a rule-based appearance.
I think it's probably really easy to compress something consisting of 4 letters (it's 4, right?) in various sequences. I'm sure you could get it down to almost a quarter of its size...
You're confusing encoding with compression. Something composed from an alphabet of 4 letters is already essentially encoded in base 4, and can be encoded in binary using 2 bits per letter.
How much you can compress the resulting bit stream completely depends on the nature of the data, and without knowing something about the actual data patterns in the genome, it's not really possible to know in advance how much it'll compress.
The issue is the nature of a EULA on most software. The "accepting" party never signs anything, and acknowledgement of the agreement is simply, assumed based on use of the software. That makes its status somewhat questionable...
Yes, poorly-written Perl is hard to maintain. Reply and give me a list of languages that make shitty code easy to maintain, eh?
OT, but that's excactly what languages like COBOL and Java attempt to do, and why they're so popular with business. They enforce a certain minimum structure on every piece of code, they force you to declare (and think about!) types, and they limit the degree to which obfuscation is possible, by restricting certain kinds of features.
To some extent, these languages do succeed at this goal. I've been called in to take over projects in Perl, C++, Java and other languages. I do think it's more difficult to screw up Java code as much as one can in other languages - which is also why it's the last language I'd pick for a personal project, since it's frustratingly restrictive.
When your language is over 50 years old, a few years here or there doesn't make a difference. Nobody is choosing to use FORTRAN based on marketing literature.
"Foreshadow" is more accurate than "forecast" in this case. UUNet is not completely down - it just keeps going in and out in places, and congestion is high. If the entire UUNet network went totally dark without much warning, that would be pretty catastrophic by comparison.
I'm off to buy a few crates of canned food and bottled water...;)
Sorry, I only noticed that after I posted my message. I used the word "bit" completely unconsciously, to mean "piece" or "part". I was saying that the quantum part of the process is simply used to transmit the one-time pad in such a way that it is known to be transmitted without interception.
As has been pointed out elsewhere: the quantum bit is used to transmit a one-time pad, which is then used to encode & decode the actual message, which can be sent over any channel of your choice. Since you know if the transmission of the one-time pad has been compromised, it's a very secure system in general. At no point is there the possibility of a third party actually decoding your message (bar a sophisticated man-in-the-middle attack, I guess).
If someone intercepted every attempt to transmit your one-time pad, you might have a problem, but there are apparently ways around that.
Slashdot Mirror
Joylessness indeed! Why, I included a whole exclamation point in my previous post - and there are three in this one!
Freude trinken alle Wesen
An den Brüsten der Natur;
Alle Guten, alle Bösen
Folgen ihrer Rosenspur.
There you have it - we tread the same rose-covered path, you and I, despite my inherent goodness and your unleavened evil. Wait, do I have that the right way around? It's so confusing these days, what with the good guys laundering drug money for the evil ones and all...
A troll with a cause, how droll!
HAND, you wild and crazy troll!
Your aspirations are simply too puny! We need all the material we can get our hands in, in order to build a Dyson Sphere around the sun!
It's only better-than-french because it's fresher. Unbeknownst to anyone else, the French have long been launching secret mining missions to the Kuiper Belt in order to obtain their famous brie. Do you think Jules Verne just imagined all that stuff? And you believed that old story about brie somehow being made from cultured milk? I mean c'mon, how likely is that, really?
Yeah, that's exactly what the evil denizens of Planet X would have you believe... OMG, you must be...! AAAAAAH!
Pluto would be classified as a Kuiper-Belt object, or as the article in The Age put it, an "ice dwarf".
But the truth is, these labels are meaninglessly vague. They'd be better off just saying that Pluto is a Kuiper Belt object which for various reasons, also qualifies as a planet. But judging by the arguments about this, there's a subclass of rather vocal astronomers on both sides who are pretty anal and uncompromising - a bit like the scientific equivalent of birdwatchers: "That's a blue-crested browntit, I'm telling you!" "No, you idiot, anyone can see it's a brown-breasted hoople!"
Where? Did I miss one?? You don't mean TRoLLaXoR, surely...
Compared to what? Antarctica?
Well, y'all jes' have a nice day now, y'heah?
A big reason for the different approaches is simply the differing political structure between US and Europe: not just the greater "capitalist fundamentalism" of the US, but the fact that the US is a relatively homogenous single market, whereas Europe is forced to deal with a slew of languages, cultures, and national governments. Approaches to these problems are necessarily different, and trying to claim one or the other is "better" is comparing homogenous apples to segmented tangerines.
The sense I got from the article was that the author just wanted to do an "I told you so", which was prompted specifically by experiences he apparently had in dealing with e.g. Ericsson on the technological issues. Having worked in similar (much smaller scale) situations, I think I know exactly what he means - I've encountered NIH syndrome plenty of times, and I've watched with satisfaction when the technically superior approach I was advocating wins out over the entrenched politically-backed incumbent technology. I can sympathise with the impulse to publicly tweak the people who previously made things more difficult than they needed to be. It's unfortunate that because of the nature of the situation, this devolves into a macho Europe vs. America contest, and the author of the article bears some responsibility for this.
Since I'm neither American nor European, I'll happily sit back and let you guys duke it out and use the best technology that comes out of it. No matter how you slice it, competition works well, in the end - whether between technologies or political structures.
It's kind of amusing to use high-class trolling techniques, such as rhetorical statements and sarcasm, on someone whose ability to comprehend is as limited as yours. My original post was not "playing it safe" - I knew you weren't an 11-year old girl. That's the "rhetorical" bit, when you grow up and become a real troll, you might want to look into that.
Anyway, I can't help a sneaking suspicion that you really are impressed by FAO Schwarz, in which case you're emotionally an 11-year old girl, if not physically. So I guess my message worked on multiple levels. I'm even more of a genius than I originally thought I was! M4d propz to me!
If you had any convictions, you wouldn't have made it to the ", or a", even if the other option boils down to being a troll. It's superfluous and just plain silly!
Kind of like your first message? I dunno, I thought mine was original, in a sort of blatant stereotypical knock off brand of original. If both conclusions lead to the same thing, what does that tell you? Wouldn't that be sort of a clue? Perhaps a little too subtle...
Anyhow, I can only assume that with your stratospheric user ID, you're still learning the ropes. I look forward to the day when you join the ranks of the great trolls of /. I'm sure it'll be a few years yet, but probably by the time the UIDs reach the millions, you'll do it. I have complete faith in you. In the meantime, just try a bit harder, willya?
Oh, and try not to break character so easily, too. It's always depressing to see that in a young troll...
But right now, among other things, most developers are simply limited by the fact that we have incredibly low-resolution displays (relative e.g. to paper), very limited and limiting input devices (keyboard and mouse), very limited software support for advanced user interface strategies, and low media bandwidth (e.g. even gigabit LANs have trouble dealing with many simultaneous video streams). We're still using menu access techniques that had their beginnings on text consoles (the pull-down menu), and only lately have some innovative alternatives begun to take root (e.g. piemenus).
If the devices we were controlling were simply VCRs and the like, Norman might have a point. But what we're actually doing is developing "physical" interfaces to abstract intellectual concepts that don't always have obvious analogs in the real world. It's hardly surprising that one of the most effective interfaces is textual.
Historically, text and written or spoken language has undoubtedly been the most effective way of communicating abstract concepts. Pictures are used as an aid to understanding, at best, an adjunct to written and spoken language. So why do we try to provide completely pictoral interfaces to our software? It does everyone a disservice, and effectively forces users to be dumb, disempowering them by hiding or eliminating (*cough*Windows*cough*) their ability to use language skills to control their environment.
(For anyone who disagrees with what I'm saying, please translate the above message into pictures and sign language and email me the results.)
And you got three negative mod points. One person thought you were funny.
Posting messages designed with the goal of simply eliciting a response has a name: it's called "trolling".
Judging by a couple of your other message, you qualify - e.g. the hologram storage thing (I could post a reply with just as many explanation points pointing out how yes, you can store information in a hologram); and the Unix Y2K bug, which aside from the various Unix Y2K issues that did exist, is also the term often used to refer to the two-billion-second rollover that'll occur in a couple of decades.
So, you're either a troll, or a somewhat technically ignorant person who instead of asking questions, enjoys displaying his ignorance in an attempt to get responses. Which is still a troll.
I thought it was original, in a sort of blatant stereotypical knock off brand of original.
At least you're not deluding yourself too much...
Aside from the "spatial" issue someone else mentioned, is the simple fact that it's hard to enforce laws on a ship that's in international waters, thousands of miles from its country of registration.
And no, I don't think your description captured functional languages very well - as you say, it sounded more like Prolog. Besides, the "rule-based" appearance of some functional languages (notably Haskell & the ML family) is really mostly syntactic sugar. Scheme, which is much closer to the pure lambda calculus on which most functional languages are based, doesn't have such a rule-based appearance.
You're confusing encoding with compression. Something composed from an alphabet of 4 letters is already essentially encoded in base 4, and can be encoded in binary using 2 bits per letter.
How much you can compress the resulting bit stream completely depends on the nature of the data, and without knowing something about the actual data patterns in the genome, it's not really possible to know in advance how much it'll compress.
But thanks for the informative post!
Oh great. Now we have RMS-hater-hater fanatics.
He said "Read my post again". That is not even remotely an "attack". You're being paranoid - get a grip. That's not an attack, just friendly advice.
The issue is the nature of a EULA on most software. The "accepting" party never signs anything, and acknowledgement of the agreement is simply, assumed based on use of the software. That makes its status somewhat questionable...
You're either an 11-year old girl, or you're pretending to be one. Either way, it's pretty lame... Might I suggest you try this site?
OT, but that's excactly what languages like COBOL and Java attempt to do, and why they're so popular with business. They enforce a certain minimum structure on every piece of code, they force you to declare (and think about!) types, and they limit the degree to which obfuscation is possible, by restricting certain kinds of features.
To some extent, these languages do succeed at this goal. I've been called in to take over projects in Perl, C++, Java and other languages. I do think it's more difficult to screw up Java code as much as one can in other languages - which is also why it's the last language I'd pick for a personal project, since it's frustratingly restrictive.
When your language is over 50 years old, a few years here or there doesn't make a difference. Nobody is choosing to use FORTRAN based on marketing literature.
I'm off to buy a few crates of canned food and bottled water... ;)
Sorry, I only noticed that after I posted my message. I used the word "bit" completely unconsciously, to mean "piece" or "part". I was saying that the quantum part of the process is simply used to transmit the one-time pad in such a way that it is known to be transmitted without interception.
If someone intercepted every attempt to transmit your one-time pad, you might have a problem, but there are apparently ways around that.