Name exactly ONE article of faith of atheism. Or is not believing that there is an invisible rhinoceros in my living room an "article of faith"?
Well, strictly speaking, everything after "Cogito, ergo sum" is an article of faith (c.f. "Brain in a Vat"). There actually is a neon green rhinoceros in your living room, it's just that you are hallucinating that it isn't there.
A technique that goes a step farther than that takes so much institutional discipline that it's rare, but that produces very high quality code: the programmer does not actually compile their code. They write it, and then send it to a QA group that compiles it and reports bugs back to the programmer. It sounds terribly inefficient, but it causes the programmer to thoroughly review the code.
Reminds me of building large systems on a 286 box (or even older stuff - I've worked on systems on a Vax that took 8 hours just to *link*). Compile times were much longer than now, so you always checked your code over thoroughly before hitting "go".
To split hairs, bits are not solely abstract. They are primarily so, to be sure, but they are physically measurable in all their forms.
True, but there's no direct mapping between the two. You can't say, for example, that: "0V = logic 0, 1V = logic 1, therefore 1000(1024?)V = 1 kilobit". There's always a context-dependent interpretation/quantisation layer between them.
It's not the quantity that's being governed by SI, it's the prefixes.
The prefixes are defined for use with the units that SI measures. "Mega-" as a prefix for anything other than length, mass, time, current, temperature, amount of substance or luminous intensity is not defined by SI. People (in particular, HD company marketing drones) ignorantly assuming that it is defined for other things is what got us into this mess.
A MEGA-anything is a million. It has nothing to do with RAM manufacture, a filesize has no reason to be measured in power-of-two quantities.
It's because, as everyone knows, data is slightly compressible. If you define the height of a single bit as 1 arbitary unit, when you stack 1024 of them on top of each other, the weight of all those bits squashes them down so that the stack is only 1000 units high. As soon as you pull one out of the stack to look at it, it springs back to its original size.
More seriously, this "maybe-bytes" rubbish annoys the crap out of me. A megabyte has been 2^20 bytes for all of the 25-odd years I've been in this field, and has been understood to be so by the vast majority of skilled professionals. It's completely normal for specialised fields to slightly redefine some terms for greater utility, and, in computing, powers of two have far more utility than powers of ten.
Besides, SI deals with physical quantities. Bits are abstractions with no physical reality, so they don't fall within the scope of SI.
I was going to be equally condescending to you. But this is slashdot. Oh, wait....
Re-read the thread. I was responding to a suggestion that the best way of getting the raw data out of iTunes was burning to a CD. Uncompressing then putting the bits out to a WAV file introduces no more losses than uncompressing and burning the bits to a CD. If you compress a second time, the results are the same whether the data comes from a CD or a WAV.
I was refering to how children are historically indoctrinated in the government schools.Gatto says in one of his books that history used to be taught as a narative - this happened, which lead to this this and that.
But all I learned in the government school were random facts. "On July 4th, 1776 the declaration of indepedance was signed", and so on.
Ah, that makes more sense. I suspect that growing up in a country that has physical reminders of its historical development still present connects you more to a sense of narrative - I remember a school trip which involved walking through the remains of an Iron Age village and being able to see the 11th Century castle just up the road from the school. However, in general, I'd agree that an awareness of history as "this is how we got to where we are today" is sadly lacking from education. This is a pity, because without historical knowledge reading the news is like opening a book half-way through and expecting to follow the plot.
Maybe you can relate better to the present "war of terror".
The first words out of my mouth after getting woken up by the phone call that told me about 9/11 were "Oh God, what have those fuckers blown up this time?" - although I live in the US now, it wasn't my first experience of that kind.
If most people understood the long history of western involvement in the middle east (In the last 500 years, there hasn't been more than 5 consecutive years without christian troops stationed in the area, according to Richard Maybury, who has seen the present WWIII/WWIV brewing for over 20 years), most of us in the united States couldn't have been tricked into invading Iraq and Afghanistan.
This is a big and complex topic, and not one that I'm up to handling at this time of night, or on this particular weekend. For now, let me say that I neither fully agree nor fully disagree with your viewpoint (as I perceive it from the above).
They make plans for the future based on their sense of several thousand years of history, whereas we in the west only have a couple hundred years, and anything older than two or three generations is largely forgotten.
Maybe you have a couple hundred years, but some of us here "in the West" have a bit more than that - even my house is considerably older than that, and it's built out of stones taken from a castle much older than itself.
Unfortunately, I'm certain that if I made a special lunch sandwich with razorblades, and some bastard stole it and hurt himself, the police would come after me.
However, in my experience, an extremely over-salted sandwich together with an orange-juice carton full of dirty dishwater works extremely well.
On the few occasions I've been asked to provide a "prior inventions" list, I've provided a large list of very general titles so that I'm basically covered no matter what. Given that it'll be checked over by HR and possibly lawyers, rather than techies, stuff like "system equivalent to a subset of a universal Turing machine" usually gets through...
But why is the hardware CPU chip itself STABLE, and FAST, and released on SCHEDULE?
At one place I worked, one of the hardware engineering rooms had a poster on the wall which read: "Software will be as stable and as bug-free as hardware the day it costs a software engineer five million dollars and three months to run his compiler".
That probably goes some way towards answering your question.
But it DOES invalidate the point made. It is possible to write a computer program that can tell me if ANY given program on any specific computer will have a bug or not. Every single one, perfectly. Do you disagree? Because you'd be completely wrong.
if Ackermann(4,3) == Ackermann(4,6) then do_bad_thing
You could write a computer program to find out if "do_bad_thing" happens, but it wouldn't be able to tell you the result, because you'd be dead.
Yes. The best value for money in laser printers is a single-digit HP Laserjet off of eBay. Most printers made since then are fragile pieces of plastic crap, and the parts+toner for these are still easily (and cheaply) available. I'm running a 4+ and have had no complaints in years.
Do *not* buy a new laser printer, get an old HP off of eBay and spend the price difference getting very drunk.
Man does not decide what is right and wrong, God decides.
Well, that may be true, but until I personally receive a written list that He has signed Himself, I'll have to trust my own judgement (after all, He gave it to me). There are written lists of rules that are claimed to be from Him, but as far as I can tell they were written down by human beings who were just as fallible as I am.
While interesting, I need IEEE 64 bit double precision for my scientific applications.
Depends on what you need 64 bit for - is it for the precision (i.e. mantissa size) or the range (i.e. exponent size)?
If you can live with a double-precision mantissa but a single-precision exponent, it's possible to get that using single-precision building blocks with less than a 2x slowdown. Sorry, don't have the references to hand right now, but a dig around on Citeseer/Google should get you there.
Slashdot Mirror
Name exactly ONE article of faith of atheism. Or is not believing that there is an invisible rhinoceros in my living room an "article of faith"?
Well, strictly speaking, everything after "Cogito, ergo sum" is an article of faith (c.f. "Brain in a Vat"). There actually is a neon green rhinoceros in your living room, it's just that you are hallucinating that it isn't there.
Name a single office in the entire State of California that allows smoking.
Mine. But I'm the only person in the company.
T'is easy, a checkbox system for people to fill in whether they are a sex offender or terrorist. That would work....
That's the way it works already for people visiting the US on non-immigrant visas, believe it or not (see questions B and C): Nonimmigrant Visa Waiver
It would be perfect for the first three weeks...
I like to develop in .NET and I like Visual Studio [1]. [1] Please don't hurt me, Slashdot crowd.
As a friend once said about VS: "if you eat candy all the time, your teeth will fall out and you won't be able to eat real food ever again."
A technique that goes a step farther than that takes so much institutional discipline that it's rare, but that produces very high quality code: the programmer does not actually compile their code. They write it, and then send it to a QA group that compiles it and reports bugs back to the programmer. It sounds terribly inefficient, but it causes the programmer to thoroughly review the code.
Reminds me of building large systems on a 286 box (or even older stuff - I've worked on systems on a Vax that took 8 hours just to *link*). Compile times were much longer than now, so you always checked your code over thoroughly before hitting "go".
To split hairs, bits are not solely abstract. They are primarily so, to be sure, but they are physically measurable in all their forms.
True, but there's no direct mapping between the two. You can't say, for example, that: "0V = logic 0, 1V = logic 1, therefore 1000(1024?)V = 1 kilobit". There's always a context-dependent interpretation/quantisation layer between them.
It's not the quantity that's being governed by SI, it's the prefixes.
The prefixes are defined for use with the units that SI measures. "Mega-" as a prefix for anything other than length, mass, time, current, temperature, amount of substance or luminous intensity is not defined by SI. People (in particular, HD company marketing drones) ignorantly assuming that it is defined for other things is what got us into this mess.
Sorry, the SI guys were in before.
A MEGA-anything is a million. It has nothing to do with RAM manufacture, a filesize has no reason to be measured in power-of-two quantities.
It's because, as everyone knows, data is slightly compressible. If you define the height of a single bit as 1 arbitary unit, when you stack 1024 of them on top of each other, the weight of all those bits squashes them down so that the stack is only 1000 units high. As soon as you pull one out of the stack to look at it, it springs back to its original size.
More seriously, this "maybe-bytes" rubbish annoys the crap out of me. A megabyte has been 2^20 bytes for all of the 25-odd years I've been in this field, and has been understood to be so by the vast majority of skilled professionals. It's completely normal for specialised fields to slightly redefine some terms for greater utility, and, in computing, powers of two have far more utility than powers of ten.
Besides, SI deals with physical quantities. Bits are abstractions with no physical reality, so they don't fall within the scope of SI.
I was going to be equally condescending to you. But this is slashdot. Oh, wait.... Re-read the thread. I was responding to a suggestion that the best way of getting the raw data out of iTunes was burning to a CD. Uncompressing then putting the bits out to a WAV file introduces no more losses than uncompressing and burning the bits to a CD. If you compress a second time, the results are the same whether the data comes from a CD or a WAV.
It's actually a lot easier than that. Use a faked-up sound driver that dumps the audio to a file. Works every time.
Since when did this move from the realm of undecidable problems into solvable with a Turing Machine?
About as long as we've being using finite state machines as approximations to a Turing Machine.
Off topic, but... I really hate graffiti.
Have a look at this guy's work and see what you think.
I was refering to how children are historically indoctrinated in the government schools.Gatto says in one of his books that history used to be taught as a narative - this happened, which lead to this this and that.
But all I learned in the government school were random facts. "On July 4th, 1776 the declaration of indepedance was signed", and so on.
Ah, that makes more sense. I suspect that growing up in a country that has physical reminders of its historical development still present connects you more to a sense of narrative - I remember a school trip which involved walking through the remains of an Iron Age village and being able to see the 11th Century castle just up the road from the school. However, in general, I'd agree that an awareness of history as "this is how we got to where we are today" is sadly lacking from education. This is a pity, because without historical knowledge reading the news is like opening a book half-way through and expecting to follow the plot.
Maybe you can relate better to the present "war of terror".
The first words out of my mouth after getting woken up by the phone call that told me about 9/11 were "Oh God, what have those fuckers blown up this time?" - although I live in the US now, it wasn't my first experience of that kind.
If most people understood the long history of western involvement in the middle east (In the last 500 years, there hasn't been more than 5 consecutive years without christian troops stationed in the area, according to Richard Maybury, who has seen the present WWIII/WWIV brewing for over 20 years), most of us in the united States couldn't have been tricked into invading Iraq and Afghanistan.
This is a big and complex topic, and not one that I'm up to handling at this time of night, or on this particular weekend. For now, let me say that I neither fully agree nor fully disagree with your viewpoint (as I perceive it from the above).
They make plans for the future based on their sense of several thousand years of history, whereas we in the west only have a couple hundred years, and anything older than two or three generations is largely forgotten.
Maybe you have a couple hundred years, but some of us here "in the West" have a bit more than that - even my house is considerably older than that, and it's built out of stones taken from a castle much older than itself.
Unfortunately, I'm certain that if I made a special lunch sandwich with razorblades, and some bastard stole it and hurt himself, the police would come after me.
However, in my experience, an extremely over-salted sandwich together with an orange-juice carton full of dirty dishwater works extremely well.
On the few occasions I've been asked to provide a "prior inventions" list, I've provided a large list of very general titles so that I'm basically covered no matter what. Given that it'll be checked over by HR and possibly lawyers, rather than techies, stuff like "system equivalent to a subset of a universal Turing machine" usually gets through...
But why is the hardware CPU chip itself STABLE, and FAST, and released on SCHEDULE?
At one place I worked, one of the hardware engineering rooms had a poster on the wall which read: "Software will be as stable and as bug-free as hardware the day it costs a software engineer five million dollars and three months to run his compiler".
That probably goes some way towards answering your question.
But it DOES invalidate the point made. It is possible to write a computer program that can tell me if ANY given program on any specific computer will have a bug or not. Every single one, perfectly. Do you disagree? Because you'd be completely wrong.
if Ackermann(4,3) == Ackermann(4,6) then do_bad_thing
You could write a computer program to find out if "do_bad_thing" happens, but it wouldn't be able to tell you the result, because you'd be dead.
Yes. The best value for money in laser printers is a single-digit HP Laserjet off of eBay. Most printers made since then are fragile pieces of plastic crap, and the parts+toner for these are still easily (and cheaply) available. I'm running a 4+ and have had no complaints in years. Do *not* buy a new laser printer, get an old HP off of eBay and spend the price difference getting very drunk.
If you merely store and read data - ANY DATA - and do not interpret it, it cannot carry a virus.
Storing is enough to enable a buffer overflow, which is enough to make the payload active
Man does not decide what is right and wrong, God decides.
Well, that may be true, but until I personally receive a written list that He has signed Himself, I'll have to trust my own judgement (after all, He gave it to me). There are written lists of rules that are claimed to be from Him, but as far as I can tell they were written down by human beings who were just as fallible as I am.
These people can help with part of your problem: http://www.emachineshop.com/
Found the urls. Take a look at these, they may help:
LBNL High-Precision Software Directory Adaptive Precision Floating Point Arithmetic and Fast Robust Geometric PredicatesWhile interesting, I need IEEE 64 bit double precision for my scientific applications.
Depends on what you need 64 bit for - is it for the precision (i.e. mantissa size) or the range (i.e. exponent size)?
If you can live with a double-precision mantissa but a single-precision exponent, it's possible to get that using single-precision building blocks with less than a 2x slowdown. Sorry, don't have the references to hand right now, but a dig around on Citeseer/Google should get you there.