The steps can be in the head of the person who does the work. It's the answer that counts. The work is almost never a proof, because to be a proof even the most basic arithmetic would need to invoke all the axioms. A simple vector calculus problem done as a proof would take up a notebook, and good luck doing it by hand without using a proof assistant (say coq). There's a lot of math that is in common use but has never been presented formally enough to make it quick-and-easy in proofs. People are still working on formalizing it enough to be useful! See for example Journal of Formalized Mathematics. Whatever passes for a proof in high school and college is usually nowhere near a complete proof. Heck, many such proof are in fact incorrect -- they leave out many unspoken assumptions, and if you try to reproduce them under assumptions that look right to you, you fail. BTDT.
Oh, you can use F=m*a. It has predictive power. It tells you what will happen in certain conditions, and it tells you that quantitatively. That's what a scientific theory is. The "making of a new planet" is not a theory, not in the scientific sense. It's a hypothesis, but it's based on existing theories. Naming stuff is just to make it easier to refer to it. It'd be somewhat hard to use spherical coordinates (rectascension and declination) when referring to every object out there.
Given that very few (if any) elected politicians in the U.S. are openly atheist, I'd say they don't give a fuck either way about being accountable whether they believe or not.
I have a question, then -- and I'm serious, I'd like to know, I'm not intending to troll, I just don't get it: how helpful is such a belief? I mean, it's not really a theory in any scientific meaning of the word, because it has hardly any predictive power. The knowledge that Earth, or even Universe, was "created", whatever the heck that means, is a seemingly useless thing to know. It's like knowing that the answer to life the universe and everything = 42. It may well be, but so what? How can you use such knowledge?
It does make all the sense for devices that are not used by the OS nor exposed by the higher level APIs provided by the OS. On OS X, it's quite simple to develop user-space USB drivers that are a part of your application. Even Microsoft made it way more complicated with their user mode driver framework. On OS X, if you have a single app that runs a piece of custom hardware, you just start the app, it claims the hardware, and that's it. No waiting for a hardware detector to grab a driver, etc. It's a very nice user experience. I imagine it should be done the same way on iOS devices.
1. Hmm, Adobe's mobile flash plugin sucks. We can't count on them to do it right. The desktop plugin just happens to be the leading cause of crashes and beachballs while browsing using Safari on OS X. Hmm.
2. So we should probably develop our own plugin. But hey, why develop a runtime from scratch that we're not going to be making any content for?!
3. So maybe we should be making content for it (and maybe also tools)? Meh, why would we help anyone make content that can run on other, worse yet, competing, platforms?
4. Screw that. We can invest all of that effort into making our own tech better. Our market doesn't seem to mind.
It may be blowing slashdot out of the water in terms of content, but it's truly unreadable. They truly, unabashedly have no fucking clue as to designing it for usability. The sheer looks of it drive people away. I'd pay them some attention if they didn't seems to be just another ad-ridden disqus template. Yes, the reality of things is such that if you want a site that works well and looks well, you have to sit on your dumn butt and work on it. There are no shortcuts. They didn't get the memo.
And has a half-decent built-in PDF rendered. I classify chrome as about the only useable alternative to Acrobat Reader other than Apple's preview. The various free readers are quite unfinished in many ways, in comparison.
You can take almost any bird and fill its bones and it'd still fly. Bones are an optimization, not a flight-enabler. Birds can carry stuff, after all, and sometimes that stuff can be pretty heavy and weigh way more than the bird's entire skeleton.
Acrobat is almost universally a pain, unfortunately:( It's an otherwise nice application, but the devil is in the details. On OS X, preview does quite a good job of pdf rendering. Otherwise, Chrome is my generic suggestion for a browser/pdf viewer combo. You will need Acrobat Reader for some things, though (some forms, pdfs with javascript form filler code, 3D pdfs that are commonly used for previewing solid models). Acrobat Reader's main fault is that it has too many features, and you need them just for the occasional pdf that uses them -- mostly government forms and 3D.
Agreed. Circle is a concept -- it's a bunch of rules that tell you if something is a circle. Talking about its "existence" is some kind of brain damage...
The problem with belief in Jesus (and related beliefs) is that those are not theories. They make no testable, and thus useful, predictions, none at all (let's spare the afterlife bit, mmkay?). Evolution and modern geology make predictions, ahead of time, that have been subsequently tested many times over. A belief in a deity is entirely orthogonal to acceptance of any scientific theory.
Oh boy, the misunderstanding of scientific theory, yet again. Theories, in the sense of scientific theories, are the ultimate output of the scientific method. Something is not merely a theory, being a theory is the ultimate status for a body of knowledge! A scientific theory is an explanation of facts: it must make predictions that match facts observed so far, and it must also make predictions that have not necessarily been observed yet, but will eventually be observed to agree with it. Something is not merely a theory, you must first elevate it to a rank of theory by doing a whole lot of work first.
So, saying that evolution is no longer a theory would mean opposite of what you imply: a dethronization, pushing off the books, etc. Evolution is a very strong scientific theory, heck, it's a theory that along with a modern Earth's geological theory has, for example, led directly to finding fish with front legs in an IIRC 350 million year old exposed barren land somewhere hard-to-get-to. It has had a whole bunch of triumphs like that, triumphs that strongly support not only evolution but the modern geology too -- triumphs that trump young Earth creationism, for example.
You're conflating filesystem support with support for opening a filesystem stored in a file (as opposed to a block device). Windows doesn't have an out-of-the-box support for mounting any filesystems that are not on a block device. It requires third party tools to do so. Nevertheless Windows obviously supports both UDF and ISO9660 filesystems, otherwise you could read anything off a CD-ROM or a DVD. It's just that out of the box you have no way of telling windows to mount a file (a you would using the loop block device on Linux). Here's where modern Unixes excel, and OS X provides a very nice GUI for all that.
I don't think that Windows supports writing to ISO9660 or UDF natively, but this may differ between versions.
True, but that's by design, expectation and is not a probem. Linux is a kernel that's under active development all the time. It's a moving target by definition. Why would you care only about the kernel if you're writing for an entire operating system (aka distro)? There are distributions that are not moving targets, hey, they even meticuluously maintain binary compatiblity. Who'd have thought of that, ha?
That's why you don't write for some nebulous concept of Linux, you write it for a particular distro, chosen for its market penetration, expected viability, and available support. In most cases the first choice is RHEL.
Except printers. Printer drivers and printing framework on Windows almost universally suck -- to a point where OS X and recent Linux distros have better printing support than Windows in many, many cases.
Because it's a coherent platform that you can develop for. Linux is just a kernel. The closest thing to a stable Linux platform that you can target in commercial development would be RHEL. But the random joe user doesn't know that there are differences, that Linux != Linux -- and why should they? Why should they care that if they have ubuntu LINUX something that's marketed for redhat enterprise LINUX doesn't work. That's what they see, hear, feel, and get upset about. And, as much of a geek as I am, I agree with joe user here. There's also the benefit of an integrated OS + hardware -- with Linux, you can never be sure if the user installed the distro that supports all of the hardware they'll expect to work. It'd be likely a support nightmare for the application developer, something that'd make Windows support nightmares look timid.
If you're targeting a particular distribution that happens to have long term support, like say RedHat Enterprise Linux (RHEL), then you can actually count on all the packages from the distribution being available, if not already installed. Due to RedHat's market penetration, anyone targeting Linux with a commercial product offering would best focus on getting it running under the latest RHEL, perhaps under the previous one as well if feasible (RHEL 6 and RHEL 5 at this time, respecitvely), and only then looking at whatever the next contender is.
Slashdot Mirror
The steps can be in the head of the person who does the work. It's the answer that counts. The work is almost never a proof, because to be a proof even the most basic arithmetic would need to invoke all the axioms. A simple vector calculus problem done as a proof would take up a notebook, and good luck doing it by hand without using a proof assistant (say coq). There's a lot of math that is in common use but has never been presented formally enough to make it quick-and-easy in proofs. People are still working on formalizing it enough to be useful! See for example Journal of Formalized Mathematics. Whatever passes for a proof in high school and college is usually nowhere near a complete proof. Heck, many such proof are in fact incorrect -- they leave out many unspoken assumptions, and if you try to reproduce them under assumptions that look right to you, you fail. BTDT.
Oh, you can use F=m*a. It has predictive power. It tells you what will happen in certain conditions, and it tells you that quantitatively. That's what a scientific theory is. The "making of a new planet" is not a theory, not in the scientific sense. It's a hypothesis, but it's based on existing theories. Naming stuff is just to make it easier to refer to it. It'd be somewhat hard to use spherical coordinates (rectascension and declination) when referring to every object out there.
Given that very few (if any) elected politicians in the U.S. are openly atheist, I'd say they don't give a fuck either way about being accountable whether they believe or not.
I have a question, then -- and I'm serious, I'd like to know, I'm not intending to troll, I just don't get it: how helpful is such a belief? I mean, it's not really a theory in any scientific meaning of the word, because it has hardly any predictive power. The knowledge that Earth, or even Universe, was "created", whatever the heck that means, is a seemingly useless thing to know. It's like knowing that the answer to life the universe and everything = 42. It may well be, but so what? How can you use such knowledge?
That was deliberate, AC, very deliberate. Alas, I have two decent trouts in the fridge, time to bake them tonight!
It does make all the sense for devices that are not used by the OS nor exposed by the higher level APIs provided by the OS. On OS X, it's quite simple to develop user-space USB drivers that are a part of your application. Even Microsoft made it way more complicated with their user mode driver framework. On OS X, if you have a single app that runs a piece of custom hardware, you just start the app, it claims the hardware, and that's it. No waiting for a hardware detector to grab a driver, etc. It's a very nice user experience. I imagine it should be done the same way on iOS devices.
I'm sure their thinking went kinda like this:
1. Hmm, Adobe's mobile flash plugin sucks. We can't count on them to do it right. The desktop plugin just happens to be the leading cause of crashes and beachballs while browsing using Safari on OS X. Hmm.
2. So we should probably develop our own plugin. But hey, why develop a runtime from scratch that we're not going to be making any content for?!
3. So maybe we should be making content for it (and maybe also tools)? Meh, why would we help anyone make content that can run on other, worse yet, competing, platforms?
4. Screw that. We can invest all of that effort into making our own tech better. Our market doesn't seem to mind.
It may be blowing slashdot out of the water in terms of content, but it's truly unreadable. They truly, unabashedly have no fucking clue as to designing it for usability. The sheer looks of it drive people away. I'd pay them some attention if they didn't seems to be just another ad-ridden disqus template. Yes, the reality of things is such that if you want a site that works well and looks well, you have to sit on your dumn butt and work on it. There are no shortcuts. They didn't get the memo.
And has a half-decent built-in PDF rendered. I classify chrome as about the only useable alternative to Acrobat Reader other than Apple's preview. The various free readers are quite unfinished in many ways, in comparison.
1. Computer science has got zilch to do with computers. It's a field of mathematics.
2. This "tron" program does not push the boundaries of any science.
3. Neither is it some a software engineering feat.
It's a hack with some neatness to it, that's about it.
The anthem supposedly praises their prostitutes. The obvious question is, then: are they really that good? ;)
You can take almost any bird and fill its bones and it'd still fly. Bones are an optimization, not a flight-enabler. Birds can carry stuff, after all, and sometimes that stuff can be pretty heavy and weigh way more than the bird's entire skeleton.
Acrobat is almost universally a pain, unfortunately :( It's an otherwise nice application, but the devil is in the details.
On OS X, preview does quite a good job of pdf rendering. Otherwise, Chrome is my generic suggestion for a browser/pdf viewer combo. You will need Acrobat Reader for some things, though (some forms, pdfs with javascript form filler code, 3D pdfs that are commonly used for previewing solid models). Acrobat Reader's main fault is that it has too many features, and you need them just for the occasional pdf that uses them -- mostly government forms and 3D.
Agreed. Circle is a concept -- it's a bunch of rules that tell you if something is a circle. Talking about its "existence" is some kind of brain damage...
The problem with belief in Jesus (and related beliefs) is that those are not theories. They make no testable, and thus useful, predictions, none at all (let's spare the afterlife bit, mmkay?). Evolution and modern geology make predictions, ahead of time, that have been subsequently tested many times over. A belief in a deity is entirely orthogonal to acceptance of any scientific theory.
Oh boy, the misunderstanding of scientific theory, yet again. Theories, in the sense of scientific theories, are the ultimate output of the scientific method. Something is not merely a theory, being a theory is the ultimate status for a body of knowledge! A scientific theory is an explanation of facts: it must make predictions that match facts observed so far, and it must also make predictions that have not necessarily been observed yet, but will eventually be observed to agree with it. Something is not merely a theory, you must first elevate it to a rank of theory by doing a whole lot of work first.
So, saying that evolution is no longer a theory would mean opposite of what you imply: a dethronization, pushing off the books, etc. Evolution is a very strong scientific theory, heck, it's a theory that along with a modern Earth's geological theory has, for example, led directly to finding fish with front legs in an IIRC 350 million year old exposed barren land somewhere hard-to-get-to. It has had a whole bunch of triumphs like that, triumphs that strongly support not only evolution but the modern geology too -- triumphs that trump young Earth creationism, for example.
All I have to say is: no shit, Sherlock! This is news how, again?
You're conflating filesystem support with support for opening a filesystem stored in a file (as opposed to a block device). Windows doesn't have an out-of-the-box support for mounting any filesystems that are not on a block device. It requires third party tools to do so. Nevertheless Windows obviously supports both UDF and ISO9660 filesystems, otherwise you could read anything off a CD-ROM or a DVD. It's just that out of the box you have no way of telling windows to mount a file (a you would using the loop block device on Linux). Here's where modern Unixes excel, and OS X provides a very nice GUI for all that.
I don't think that Windows supports writing to ISO9660 or UDF natively, but this may differ between versions.
An order of magnitude more?! Go to your electrical supplier and see how much the code books go for. You might be pleasantly surprised.
True, but that's by design, expectation and is not a probem. Linux is a kernel that's under active development all the time. It's a moving target by definition. Why would you care only about the kernel if you're writing for an entire operating system (aka distro)? There are distributions that are not moving targets, hey, they even meticuluously maintain binary compatiblity. Who'd have thought of that, ha?
That's why you don't write for some nebulous concept of Linux, you write it for a particular distro, chosen for its market penetration, expected viability, and available support. In most cases the first choice is RHEL.
Except printers. Printer drivers and printing framework on Windows almost universally suck -- to a point where OS X and recent Linux distros have better printing support than Windows in many, many cases.
WinXP supports reading UDF and ISO9660 out of the box, so I don't know what you meant :(
Because it's a coherent platform that you can develop for. Linux is just a kernel. The closest thing to a stable Linux platform that you can target in commercial development would be RHEL. But the random joe user doesn't know that there are differences, that Linux != Linux -- and why should they? Why should they care that if they have ubuntu LINUX something that's marketed for redhat enterprise LINUX doesn't work. That's what they see, hear, feel, and get upset about. And, as much of a geek as I am, I agree with joe user here. There's also the benefit of an integrated OS + hardware -- with Linux, you can never be sure if the user installed the distro that supports all of the hardware they'll expect to work. It'd be likely a support nightmare for the application developer, something that'd make Windows support nightmares look timid.
If you're targeting a particular distribution that happens to have long term support, like say RedHat Enterprise Linux (RHEL), then you can actually count on all the packages from the distribution being available, if not already installed. Due to RedHat's market penetration, anyone targeting Linux with a commercial product offering would best focus on getting it running under the latest RHEL, perhaps under the previous one as well if feasible (RHEL 6 and RHEL 5 at this time, respecitvely), and only then looking at whatever the next contender is.