That's a whole different kind of evolution, if you would even allow it to be called a kind of evolution. Really it's abiogenesis, using evolution as a convenient metaphor for a particular abiogenic theory. The name of the theory might be confusing.
Textbooks and scientists when referring to biological evolution mean 1) the gradual change over time of species and speciation (what is said to be fact by scientists) and 2) the mechanism by which this is said to take place, usually some kind of natural selection (what is said to be theory by scientists) and nothing more.
It does not explain--or even try to explain--the ultimate origins of life. So, yes, the disclaimer is misleading in its wording.
"They report predictions that are easily dismissed as "so what?". (Me playing devil's advocate here, not expressing my opinions.) So the water levels will rise, what's the harm beyond economic cost? The Earth's climate has changed since it first formed."
I know. I felt a mix of Carlin's "the earth has seen worse" and my "I really don't care if that seal dies."
I only really cared when I saw the technology we could get from nature. Animal sonar is far better than our own. Bats are far better at flying around and intercepting things than we are. Some snakes have far better infrared sensors than we have. Plants and animals have so many chemicals we could use in medicine. We're just starting to reverse engineer things in nature and it will help us make huge leaps--if it's still there for us to use.
When I hear the numbers about all the species going extinct, I think we could have had better optics or a cure for something if only one of those things had lived. It's like throwing away patents and inventions.
"Appeal to Authority (they're climate scientists therefore their beliefs must be the truth) and Appeal to Majority (most believe it therefore it's true)."
You've got the word of "appeal to authority" but not the spirit. It's a mistake to rely only on authority to justify something (because reasoning and evidence are the only things that justify), but in the case of climate scientists they supposedly determine the truth as best as anyone can on this subject, using reason and evidence. It's proxy reasoning; not necessarily authority.
Or, to maybe put it better, it's an authority only because it's a good thing to appeal to. You can't throw it out because it made it that far.
Same with "appeal to majority". If we were talking about a simple survey of the ignorant, majority would mean nothing. And if this were deduction, it would be bad deduction. But this is about who's argument is more convincing, and thus most likely to be true (or truer). You could not perfom a survey on a better sample to determine who's argument is more convincing on this topic.
Do you mean that if you install it for AMD64, then the binary packages aren't compatible? That's the only way I could see it.
I installed from the AMD64 ISO and had to apt-get source, which I think only didn't work because it was my first time ever using apt-get... I wouldn't say there was a problem with Ubuntu.
"I'm very glad to hear that someone likes complexity, shades of motivation, adult-level emotional responses. That's been my exact goal, and if there is a market for a Jonathan Strange & Mr. Norrell book, there should be one for mine as well (I hope, anyway)."
It's good to hear that more people are working in this direction. When I see a real-life villain say, "I am this way because I am eeeviil! ha-ha ha-ha. And I soon my forces of doom will spread around the globe!" as he rubs his hands together in a small display of his neutoric habits--instead of "What do you mean I'm the bad guy?! You're the bad guy, here!"--then maybe I'll consider simple good vs evil stories to be satisfying.... maybe.
It can be hard for me to watch a movie or read a book in which there is lax motivation and depth and not think of Captain Planet. I don't know if I should laugh or cry half the time.
I was thinking about playing MP3s, in which you don't have to use Fraunhofer algorithms (very few players actually use their algo's)--and assumeed encoding was the same. I looked around and that doesn't look like the case.
I've always hated loading PDF's. I've got a mid-range PIII with Windows 98 and a decent-fast P4 with Windows XP. Both have very fast hard drives and plenty of memory.
Both grind and take (in my mind) forever to load the huge mega-app that is Adobe Acrobat.
"Imagine trying to tell people that they can no longer use 24-bit color, watch videos, play MP3s, surf the web, render PDFs, use instant messages, compose home movies, download photos from their camera, create DVDs."
Or imagine a simple little system where there is one component (call it a driver) that can deal with hardware and an abstraction (call it an api) that anything can get at in the same way, regardless of the driver underneath.
Then we could have 24-bit color, videos, mp3's, tcp-ip and the web, images from your camera... and it wouldn't really be that big or inefficient. Some OS's specialize in media and are small and efficient. I'd be all for that!
But, no. We have something that started out like that and became: hardware -> driver -> abstraction -> abstraction -> abstraction -> abstraction -> abstraction -> abstraction -> abstraction -> abstraction -> abstraction -> abstraction -> abstraction -> abstraction ->... etc.
But at least it's not out of place. Everything else is wrapped in a wrapper, in a wrapper, in a wrapper, in a wrapper...
"JWZ once said about Mozilla bloat: "Mozilla is big because your needs are big.""
About that quote... My needs aren't that big. Almost nobody needs an XUL interface to their browser. That's why there are so many smaller, faster, better Gecko-based browsers that work just fine--and what's missing from them is a mystery to the casual user.
They wanted to built a suite. People didn't want one.
They wanted to make Mozilla a platform for writing cross platform, network apps. People didn't want it to be one.
They wanted to use it to eventually make productivity apps. That's just stupid.
They've been turning it around, but they still have a while to go.
"Software, even software written in text, even OSS, is already visually designed. It always has been. Flow charts, diagrams, screenshot mockups -- shit, I've gotten specs that were nothing more than a drawing on a paper plate."
Well, that's a horrible distortion of what people are talking about here when they talk about visually designing software...
"The only difference is that Bill forsees getting rid of the intermediate step of writing code to represent the visual system."
There you go... almost. The interface can already be designed visually, and that's not what it looks like he's talking about.
The statement, "create applications in less time by using visual representations of the inner workings of software rather than writing lines of programing code" sounds more like programming by flowcharts and visually represented data structures (i.e. you don't ever see 'if' as text) for the main program logic, not the interface.
"And personally, I don't know what the FUCK you're talkign about. Programs that look pretty but don't work can be written in any IDE."
Maybe you should read the post you're responding to.
"most programs will end up 'looking pretty' in the program editor"
You see, what he's saying is that a visually designed program will look bug-free in its visual source, but actually be buggy. It's not that hard to understand what he's trying to say.
There would be panic and chaos and riots as our world view collapses around us. We aren't alone, therefore the Bible is wrong, therefore there is no ultimate authority. It's OK to kill...
Or something like that.
If you assume our alien policy was written around 1945-1955, this kind of idiocy isn't too hard to imagine.
"I always thought the born-agains were the ones who had a major breakdown (like bush when he quit alcohol) and became hyper-zealous super-proselytizers."
Ohh! That's a really good way to put it. It's like the terms "born-again democrat" or "born-again republican" used to describe an extremist that switches sides and only gets more extreme.
I don't know if you're serious or just trying to bother people by being pedantic.
Born-again means Christian.
Perhaps under one definition, or under the original definition. But the colloquial definition of "born-again" means to be part of a "born-again" movement, not just a Christian.
he probably meant Christians who evangelize, which is a large part of the doctrine of most Christian faiths, if not all (I can't think of a reason a church would be non-evangelical, since spreading the word is one of the most basic tenets of Jesus's teachings).
First, if I remember correctly, the Bible says to make the teachings "available", not necessarily to evangelize.
Second, this might be the same problem as the first thing I quoted from you. The colloquial definition of "evangelical" is not the same one you are using. It means a small extrememly vocal and radical subset of protestant Christianity not necessarily of the proper name "Evangelical".
However, I can't even pretend to know what the poster was actually thinking, so maybe he really did think he was making a distinction somehow.
He was making a real distinction, but you two were speaking a different common language.
"A system library that makes unlink "safe", called entomb... Versioning can be provided by some userspace-fs combinations (atfs comes to mind). I also understand reiser5 will have built-in versioning support."
It looks like about one out of every thousand people knows about these (except Reiser5). Is it your mission to try everything? How the hell...
I've posted these two ideas several times before or have seen them proposed several times before to the universal reactions: "good idea" or "bad idea". Never, "been done already".
I was thinking of doing it myself. 'Saves me from that!
And you'd think a unified GUI/CLI trashcan would be something the usibility guys would go for. I think it's a mystery why Linux doesn't install like that. But you prolly already know of a distribution that does this...
"GConf is supposed to be the new way to store configuration information. Although I see a lot of new programs using XML (for example, ogle) which is kinda nice. But there's nothing wrong with the shell/windows.ini file syntax, as far as I'm concerned."
I like the.ini file syntax. I sometimes like XML. I was just thinking that making consistancy painfully easy would be a good thing.
"Gimp does let you do stuff in the shell, using script-fu and a perl script. However, what you really want is "convert" which is a part of the ImageMagick toolset, which handles tons of file formats, converting between them, and doing simple transformations (crop, scale, add text, color balance, etc) from the command line."
Well, what I really want is one ever-present image library (the one that every app everywhere will use to load.jpeg, etc.) to export some functionality, gimp to export some, abiword to export some of its stuff, etc. (but not some bulky add-on package). If this is already implemented, super.
"Finally, your X "shortcut" idea is superflouous. You don't really make "shortcuts" in linux desktop environments. What you do is make icons that run actions. So, you edit your configuration file, save it as something else in your home directory, then copy the icon, modify it so that the -f or -config option (application dependant) points to your config file, and off you go!"
That's exactly what I was trying to avoid. I think a simple copy+edit of the icon you already see is much more user friendly and fast.
"Let's not try to re-invent the wheel too much. Unix environments give you a lot of tools already to do much of what you suggest."
Funny. I came up with some of these ideas (config files, exporting) specifically because I saw too much reinventing the wheel.
Another thing Unix gives you: A million programs (be it at instillation or on the internet), no friggin' idea where to start. Looking around at things on FreshMeat and SourceForge tells me some large percentage of app development is not to outdo an existing program, but is instead out of ignorance of the 40 other implementations (most of which started for the same reason).
Ah well.
A different kind a fault tolerance
on
Fault Tolerant Shell
·
· Score: 0, Offtopic
I've always wanted a shell that deletes into a 'garbage' folder, but in a native way so programs calling a delete function would also. I've also wanted a 'file versions' feature to bring safety to accidently overwriting. Then it would really be tolerant of user faults.
While we're at it: a config file library so every config file is the same format; exportable functions so gimp can export gmp.imageResize fileName 800 600 to the shell; and a codecs folder with libraries for image, video, document, and data compression.
Not every might see that last one's benefit, but I think if every app exported its format there (quicktime, realmedia) and let it be universally called, apps would be judged by interface, not filetype support.
Another idea: make every shortcut in X the config file. That way, a simple copy+edit makes two easily created+accessed differently configed programs. (I don't know about network-wide configs, though.)
"But, replacing the von Neumann architecture means changing just about everything I know. That's big. Everything is von Neumann. All the computational models, all the theory, all the basic underpinnings of what I know..."
I think you're confusing "Turing machine" with "von Neumann architecture".
"seconded. I don't see what is the problem with von Neumann architecture, and the article is pretty vague about that."
The von Neumann archicture doesn't distinguish between instructions and data, allowing a program to modify another program or itself. (Think viruses/trojans.) But I think memory protection has patched this pretty well.
It also has a memory bottleneck. Other models, such as Harvard, (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Harvard_architecture ) try to fix these problems. (And I'm guessing that strict seperation of code and data might ease formal proof?)
I don't know of any great solution to the problem of starving the processor with slow memory access etc. but I think this is where you would look for one...
"There is no support for some Python features that some programs will require. Most of these are fairly obscure, but are a limitation. Examples include: - String formatting - Core language features, such as long integers, complex numbers, built-in object methods and so forth. - The standard Python library."
Slashdot Mirror
"Do a google search for "chemical evolution"."
That's a whole different kind of evolution, if you would even allow it to be called a kind of evolution. Really it's abiogenesis, using evolution as a convenient metaphor for a particular abiogenic theory. The name of the theory might be confusing.
Textbooks and scientists when referring to biological evolution mean 1) the gradual change over time of species and speciation (what is said to be fact by scientists) and 2) the mechanism by which this is said to take place, usually some kind of natural selection (what is said to be theory by scientists) and nothing more.
It does not explain--or even try to explain--the ultimate origins of life. So, yes, the disclaimer is misleading in its wording.
"They report predictions that are easily dismissed as "so what?". (Me playing devil's advocate here, not expressing my opinions.) So the water levels will rise, what's the harm beyond economic cost? The Earth's climate has changed since it first formed."
I know. I felt a mix of Carlin's "the earth has seen worse" and my "I really don't care if that seal dies."
I only really cared when I saw the technology we could get from nature. Animal sonar is far better than our own. Bats are far better at flying around and intercepting things than we are. Some snakes have far better infrared sensors than we have. Plants and animals have so many chemicals we could use in medicine. We're just starting to reverse engineer things in nature and it will help us make huge leaps--if it's still there for us to use.
When I hear the numbers about all the species going extinct, I think we could have had better optics or a cure for something if only one of those things had lived. It's like throwing away patents and inventions.
"Appeal to Authority (they're climate scientists therefore their beliefs must be the truth) and Appeal to Majority (most believe it therefore it's true)."
You've got the word of "appeal to authority" but not the spirit. It's a mistake to rely only on authority to justify something (because reasoning and evidence are the only things that justify), but in the case of climate scientists they supposedly determine the truth as best as anyone can on this subject, using reason and evidence. It's proxy reasoning; not necessarily authority.
Or, to maybe put it better, it's an authority only because it's a good thing to appeal to. You can't throw it out because it made it that far.
Same with "appeal to majority". If we were talking about a simple survey of the ignorant, majority would mean nothing. And if this were deduction, it would be bad deduction. But this is about who's argument is more convincing, and thus most likely to be true (or truer). You could not perfom a survey on a better sample to determine who's argument is more convincing on this topic.
Do you mean that if you install it for AMD64, then the binary packages aren't compatible? That's the only way I could see it.
I installed from the AMD64 ISO and had to apt-get source, which I think only didn't work because it was my first time ever using apt-get... I wouldn't say there was a problem with Ubuntu.
"I'm very glad to hear that someone likes complexity, shades of motivation, adult-level emotional responses. That's been my exact goal, and if there is a market for a Jonathan Strange & Mr. Norrell book, there should be one for mine as well (I hope, anyway)."
It's good to hear that more people are working in this direction. When I see a real-life villain say, "I am this way because I am eeeviil! ha-ha ha-ha. And I soon my forces of doom will spread around the globe!" as he rubs his hands together in a small display of his neutoric habits--instead of "What do you mean I'm the bad guy?! You're the bad guy, here!"--then maybe I'll consider simple good vs evil stories to be satisfying.... maybe.
It can be hard for me to watch a movie or read a book in which there is lax motivation and depth and not think of Captain Planet. I don't know if I should laugh or cry half the time.
What? No Slackware?! //and so on
I was thinking about playing MP3s, in which you don't have to use Fraunhofer algorithms (very few players actually use their algo's)--and assumeed encoding was the same. I looked around and that doesn't look like the case.
Oh, well.
I still sue 6.4 for everything it can still play. I run at 800x600 and 9.x, even in Classic, just wastes too much screen to be usable for me.
I've never been able to get the Real alternative or QuickTime alternative to work. Everything else is fine.
You shouldn't have to pay any royalties if you don't use Fraunhofer algorithms or code.
Great googlie mooglie! That's about as fast as it should be.
Thanks.
I've always hated loading PDF's. I've got a mid-range PIII with Windows 98 and a decent-fast P4 with Windows XP. Both have very fast hard drives and plenty of memory.
Both grind and take (in my mind) forever to load the huge mega-app that is Adobe Acrobat.
"Imagine trying to tell people that they can no longer use 24-bit color, watch videos, play MP3s, surf the web, render PDFs, use instant messages, compose home movies, download photos from their camera, create DVDs."
... etc.
Or imagine a simple little system where there is one component (call it a driver) that can deal with hardware and an abstraction (call it an api) that anything can get at in the same way, regardless of the driver underneath.
Then we could have 24-bit color, videos, mp3's, tcp-ip and the web, images from your camera... and it wouldn't really be that big or inefficient. Some OS's specialize in media and are small and efficient. I'd be all for that!
But, no. We have something that started out like that and became: hardware -> driver -> abstraction -> abstraction -> abstraction -> abstraction -> abstraction -> abstraction -> abstraction -> abstraction -> abstraction -> abstraction -> abstraction -> abstraction ->
But at least it's not out of place. Everything else is wrapped in a wrapper, in a wrapper, in a wrapper, in a wrapper...
"JWZ once said about Mozilla bloat: "Mozilla is big because your needs are big.""
About that quote... My needs aren't that big. Almost nobody needs an XUL interface to their browser. That's why there are so many smaller, faster, better Gecko-based browsers that work just fine--and what's missing from them is a mystery to the casual user.
They wanted to built a suite. People didn't want one.
They wanted to make Mozilla a platform for writing cross platform, network apps. People didn't want it to be one.
They wanted to use it to eventually make productivity apps. That's just stupid.
They've been turning it around, but they still have a while to go.
"We take a 3-D model of a part and convert it into a bunch of small cubes called voxels, which stands for volume elements," Ramani said.
Doesn't voxel stand for "volume pixel" or "volumetric pixel"?
"Software, even software written in text, even OSS, is already visually designed. It always has been. Flow charts, diagrams, screenshot mockups -- shit, I've gotten specs that were nothing more than a drawing on a paper plate."
Well, that's a horrible distortion of what people are talking about here when they talk about visually designing software...
"The only difference is that Bill forsees getting rid of the intermediate step of writing code to represent the visual system."
There you go... almost. The interface can already be designed visually, and that's not what it looks like he's talking about.
The statement, "create applications in less time by using visual representations of the inner workings of software rather than writing lines of programing code" sounds more like programming by flowcharts and visually represented data structures (i.e. you don't ever see 'if' as text) for the main program logic, not the interface.
"And personally, I don't know what the FUCK you're talkign about. Programs that look pretty but don't work can be written in any IDE."
Maybe you should read the post you're responding to.
"most programs will end up 'looking pretty' in the program editor"
You see, what he's saying is that a visually designed program will look bug-free in its visual source, but actually be buggy. It's not that hard to understand what he's trying to say.
No no no.
There would be panic and chaos and riots as our world view collapses around us. We aren't alone, therefore the Bible is wrong, therefore there is no ultimate authority. It's OK to kill...
Or something like that.
If you assume our alien policy was written around 1945-1955, this kind of idiocy isn't too hard to imagine.
"I always thought the born-agains were the ones who had a major breakdown (like bush when he quit alcohol) and became hyper-zealous super-proselytizers."
Ohh! That's a really good way to put it. It's like the terms "born-again democrat" or "born-again republican" used to describe an extremist that switches sides and only gets more extreme.
I don't know if you're serious or just trying to bother people by being pedantic.
Born-again means Christian.
Perhaps under one definition, or under the original definition. But the colloquial definition of "born-again" means to be part of a "born-again" movement, not just a Christian.
he probably meant Christians who evangelize, which is a large part of the doctrine of most Christian faiths, if not all (I can't think of a reason a church would be non-evangelical, since spreading the word is one of the most basic tenets of Jesus's teachings).
First, if I remember correctly, the Bible says to make the teachings "available", not necessarily to evangelize.
Second, this might be the same problem as the first thing I quoted from you. The colloquial definition of "evangelical" is not the same one you are using. It means a small extrememly vocal and radical subset of protestant Christianity not necessarily of the proper name "Evangelical".
However, I can't even pretend to know what the poster was actually thinking, so maybe he really did think he was making a distinction somehow.
He was making a real distinction, but you two were speaking a different common language.
"A system library that makes unlink "safe", called entomb ... Versioning can be provided by some userspace-fs combinations (atfs comes to mind). I also understand reiser5 will have built-in versioning support."
.ini file syntax, as far as I'm concerned."
.ini file syntax. I sometimes like XML. I was just thinking that making consistancy painfully easy would be a good thing.
.jpeg, etc.) to export some functionality, gimp to export some, abiword to export some of its stuff, etc. (but not some bulky add-on package). If this is already implemented, super.
It looks like about one out of every thousand people knows about these (except Reiser5). Is it your mission to try everything? How the hell...
I've posted these two ideas several times before or have seen them proposed several times before to the universal reactions: "good idea" or "bad idea". Never, "been done already".
I was thinking of doing it myself. 'Saves me from that!
And you'd think a unified GUI/CLI trashcan would be something the usibility guys would go for. I think it's a mystery why Linux doesn't install like that. But you prolly already know of a distribution that does this...
"GConf is supposed to be the new way to store configuration information. Although I see a lot of new programs using XML (for example, ogle) which is kinda nice. But there's nothing wrong with the shell/windows
I like the
"Gimp does let you do stuff in the shell, using script-fu and a perl script. However, what you really want is "convert" which is a part of the ImageMagick toolset, which handles tons of file formats, converting between them, and doing simple transformations (crop, scale, add text, color balance, etc) from the command line."
Well, what I really want is one ever-present image library (the one that every app everywhere will use to load
"Finally, your X "shortcut" idea is superflouous. You don't really make "shortcuts" in linux desktop environments. What you do is make icons that run actions. So, you edit your configuration file, save it as something else in your home directory, then copy the icon, modify it so that the -f or -config option (application dependant) points to your config file, and off you go!"
That's exactly what I was trying to avoid. I think a simple copy+edit of the icon you already see is much more user friendly and fast.
"Let's not try to re-invent the wheel too much. Unix environments give you a lot of tools already to do much of what you suggest."
Funny. I came up with some of these ideas (config files, exporting) specifically because I saw too much reinventing the wheel.
Another thing Unix gives you: A million programs (be it at instillation or on the internet), no friggin' idea where to start. Looking around at things on FreshMeat and SourceForge tells me some large percentage of app development is not to outdo an existing program, but is instead out of ignorance of the 40 other implementations (most of which started for the same reason).
Ah well.
I've always wanted a shell that deletes into a 'garbage' folder, but in a native way so programs calling a delete function would also. I've also wanted a 'file versions' feature to bring safety to accidently overwriting. Then it would really be tolerant of user faults.
While we're at it: a config file library so every config file is the same format; exportable functions so gimp can export gmp.imageResize fileName 800 600 to the shell; and a codecs folder with libraries for image, video, document, and data compression.
Not every might see that last one's benefit, but I think if every app exported its format there (quicktime, realmedia) and let it be universally called, apps would be judged by interface, not filetype support.
Another idea: make every shortcut in X the config file. That way, a simple copy+edit makes two easily created+accessed differently configed programs. (I don't know about network-wide configs, though.)
"But, replacing the von Neumann architecture means changing just about everything I know. That's big. Everything is von Neumann. All the computational models, all the theory, all the basic underpinnings of what I know..."
I think you're confusing "Turing machine" with "von Neumann architecture".
"seconded. I don't see what is the problem with von Neumann architecture, and the article is pretty vague about that."
e ) try to fix these problems. (And I'm guessing that strict seperation of code and data might ease formal proof?)
The von Neumann archicture doesn't distinguish between instructions and data, allowing a program to modify another program or itself. (Think viruses/trojans.) But I think memory protection has patched this pretty well.
It also has a memory bottleneck. Other models, such as Harvard, (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Harvard_architectur
I don't know of any great solution to the problem of starving the processor with slow memory access etc. but I think this is where you would look for one...
"There is no support for some Python features that some programs will require. Most of these are
fairly obscure, but are a limitation. Examples include:
- String formatting
- Core language features, such as long integers, complex numbers, built-in object methods
and so forth.
- The standard Python library."
Are they joking?
I'd pay $45 for Windows. I'd pay $60 if they let me not install most of what I don't want.