what could have been DOS if only Kildall hadn't been out flying his airplane
Au contraire (pardon my French). I doubt that Kildall was half the businessman that Gates was (and is.) The thing about MS-DOS is that it was not sold to IBM; it was licensed non-exclusively. THAT was the coup d'etat that gave us the IBM-compatible revolution. IBM had fumbled by using industry-standard hardware that any company could replicate (NOT in the Star Trek sense, mind you). MS-DOS allowed any pair of guys in a barn to market a drop-in replacement for the IBM PC. Had Kildall been at home, he would have sold CP/M outright for an amazing chunk of change and IBM might yet be in control.
Of course, the amazing thing is that, having been screwed over mightily by Gates, IBM partnered with him again in developing OS/2, allowing Gates to use them for free R&D for his own windowing product. But that's a topic for another post...
Read the CISC vs. RISC article on arstechnica. it addresses this sort of thing. It was found not to be as useful as it seems. HOWEVER...that was probably because chip designers were trying to predict the behavior of software. MMX and similar improvements to Intel CPUs resulted from analyzing actual software to see how it could be made faster in hardware.
You're forgetting that the characterization of Gollum/Smeagol in the movie differs drastically from that of Gollum in the books. I doubt that Elizabeth, aged 6, has read the books. I think it's safe to say that Serkis is answering based on Jackson's vision of the character in the movies, not Tolkien's vision of the character in the books.
Precisely. In the books... [SPOILER ALERT!] [SPOILER ALERT!] [SPOILER ALERT!] [SPOILER ALERT!] [SPOILER ALERT!]...it seems more like Gollum accidentally falls to his death. After seeing LOTR II, I wonder if Gollum's death will be a bit more willful. Perhaps Gollum will steal the ring and Smeagol will leap into the flames of Mount Doom.
There's also no contract between you and ANYBODY. Contract law? That's a result of bills passed by Congress, itself a result of the Constitution, which was the end result of the Constitutional convention, which resulted from a declaration a few years before that stated (among other things) "We hold these truths self-evident..." The formation of the USA and its legal foundation had the notion of natural rights as a heavy influence. The government doesn't censor, torture, or secretly imprison you, not because they agreed not to, but because it is not right that they do so. That is the philosophy on which the Constitution was based.
This notion of 'contract' that you place a lot of emphasis on is nothing more than the formalized (and rather natural) notion of "Don't lie." Is it legal to lie? Certainly. Is it right to do so? Generally not. Silence is acceptable; "I don't wish to say" is acceptable. Lying is not.
The implicit statement in clicking the search button is "I want an unbiased, and, to the best of your ability, a complete list of sites on this subject." For Google to censor their list is perfectly acceptable IF they state that they are doing so..."Twelve sites not listed because your government does not wish to do so."
Ford is free to refrain from selling me the color I like. They are wrong to say they can't when they can. Burger King likewise. All are free to do as they wish; all are wrong to lie. Google is free to return the results they please so long as all understand that the results are incomplete.
"You really stink! (way oh, way oh, way oh!) You really stink, girl! You really stink! (way oh, way oh, way oh!) But I love you." (blatt, blut)" ---(Tuba solo)
I bought a record player solely to listen to that "floppy little record." Good times...
The CEOs of Miller, Budweiser, and Guiness meet for lunch. The first CEO orders a Miller; the second, a Budweiser. The Guiness CEO, however, orders a Coke. "Why didn't you order a Guiness?" the first two ask. "I thought that if you weren't drinking beer, I shouldn't either."
The problem with the one-time pad is that it is completely impractical. Empirical evidence shows that it one-time pads are actually LESS secure than other encryption schemes. The pads are intercepted or copied when they are delivered from place to place or are reused because a message had to be sent but the new pads had not yet arrived. The mathematical perfection of a one-time pad is kinda nifty, but is about as useful as postulating a spherical cow in a mathematical study to improve dairy production.
The movie pretty much missed the point of the book. Read the Rinkworks summary of the book - it's pretty much on target. Heinlein was a complete reactionary, and, politically, the book was an ode to patriarchal rule (though not exactly totalitarian, kind comes close) by soldiers, the ultimate conformists. The only people who could vote were veterans.
The other point of the book was power armor. One guy enclosed in a solid suit of powered armor who could be dropped from orbit and take on a conventional tank battalion gets together with a platoon of his closest friends and wreaks havoc on a planet. (I've not read an earlier scifi story about power-armored soldiers; as nearly as I can tell it's the archetype for the whole armored infantry subgenre of military scifi.) The armor in the movie is nifty, but the soldiers are susceptible to a headshot from a high-velocity pellet gun, for crying out loud, while Heinlein's mobile infantry could handle nukes a nuke with no problem.
In short, if the producers wanted to make an B-grade campy anti-authoritarian sci-fi movie with nifty costumes that lack verisimilitude, that's fine with me. I'd see it twice in theaters and buy the video. But WHY oh WHY did they have to eliminate the possiblity that anyone would ever produce a movie that treated Heinlein's novel and its two core ideas with some respect?
Good on #2, but not quite on #1. Centripetal and coriolis forces are quite real and entirely valid. Centripetal forces are obvious in a static frame of reference, while coriolis (and centrifugal) forces are valid in a rotating frame of reference. If you are being rotated, you will experience centrifugal force, and if you try to move you will encounter the coriolis force. Someone watching you from outside the rotating area would chalk it all up to good old-fashioned inertia.
The myth about no centrifugal or coriolis forces exists because it's easier to say that to freshman than to try to teach them to analyze forces within a rotating frame of reference.
Assume one more thing before replying: * The definition of "putting your business on the net" means "connecting a set of electronic devices to a telecommunications network in such a way that nearly every host on the Internet can send information to one or more of them." (Otherwise, you're not really "on the net," are you?)
BTW, the last of the parent poster's assuptions is really in two parts...the company lost revenue AND/. knew the/. effect would be too much for the page. The latter assumption is kinda hard...is there a way to determine what kind of bandwidth an arbitrary remote site can handle, short of failure testing?
every physicist knows that their equations are only approximately correct, so how the hell can they directly apply to pure math
So you're saying that formulas that approximate reality can have nothing to do with 'pure' math?
Permit me to introduce my friend, the parabola. All of its interesting geometrical properties are encoded in this equation:
y=ax^2+bx+c
Archimedes studied the parabola (and prefigured calculus by about 2000 years). The equation leads you rapidly to complex number theory, and figures in projective geometry (it's the same thing as a circle!). Millions of freshman high school students could tell you that mathematics doesn't come any purer, becuase there is clearly NO practical application for any of this. Yet Newton saw in this equation an approximation of relativity (about 400 years before relativity) and used it to describe the motions of projectiles and planets. Funny how this poor approximation of reality leads to some interesting mathematics even if you ignore the practical applications.
Slashdot Mirror
DOH! I looked at that post for something like a minute, trying to figure out something to say about it. Nice work!
Actually, that's what you get for complaining about nit-pickers. ;)
after clicking submit, that is what
That comma should be a semicolon. As it stands, you have a run-on sentence.
what could have been DOS if only Kildall hadn't been out flying his airplane
Au contraire (pardon my French). I doubt that Kildall was half the businessman that Gates was (and is.) The thing about MS-DOS is that it was not sold to IBM; it was licensed non-exclusively. THAT was the coup d'etat that gave us the IBM-compatible revolution. IBM had fumbled by using industry-standard hardware that any company could replicate (NOT in the Star Trek sense, mind you). MS-DOS allowed any pair of guys in a barn to market a drop-in replacement for the IBM PC. Had Kildall been at home, he would have sold CP/M outright for an amazing chunk of change and IBM might yet be in control.
Of course, the amazing thing is that, having been screwed over mightily by Gates, IBM partnered with him again in developing OS/2, allowing Gates to use them for free R&D for his own windowing product. But that's a topic for another post...
"Oh Lord, forgive the errata"
You forgot the period at the end of that sentence.
What's your serial number? Mine's 62888-5155.
My power supply is rated for 3.5A at 125V, making only 45W.
Laughing! Out! Loud!
Read the CISC vs. RISC article on arstechnica. it addresses this sort of thing. It was found not to be as useful as it seems. HOWEVER...that was probably because chip designers were trying to predict the behavior of software. MMX and similar improvements to Intel CPUs resulted from analyzing actual software to see how it could be made faster in hardware.
You're forgetting that the characterization of Gollum/Smeagol in the movie differs drastically from that of Gollum in the books. I doubt that Elizabeth, aged 6, has read the books. I think it's safe to say that Serkis is answering based on Jackson's vision of the character in the movies, not Tolkien's vision of the character in the books.
Precisely. In the books... ...it seems more like Gollum accidentally falls to his death. After seeing LOTR II, I wonder if Gollum's death will be a bit more willful. Perhaps Gollum will steal the ring and Smeagol will leap into the flames of Mount Doom.
[SPOILER ALERT!]
[SPOILER ALERT!]
[SPOILER ALERT!]
[SPOILER ALERT!]
[SPOILER ALERT!]
you know, if you post that in response to every /.ing, you could probably start a trend...soon people you'd never heard of would be imitating you.
G.E.O.S.
Graphical Environment Operating System.
There's no contract between you and them
There's also no contract between you and ANYBODY. Contract law? That's a result of bills passed by Congress, itself a result of the Constitution, which was the end result of the Constitutional convention, which resulted from a declaration a few years before that stated (among other things) "We hold these truths self-evident..." The formation of the USA and its legal foundation had the notion of natural rights as a heavy influence. The government doesn't censor, torture, or secretly imprison you, not because they agreed not to, but because it is not right that they do so. That is the philosophy on which the Constitution was based.
This notion of 'contract' that you place a lot of emphasis on is nothing more than the formalized (and rather natural) notion of "Don't lie." Is it legal to lie? Certainly. Is it right to do so? Generally not. Silence is acceptable; "I don't wish to say" is acceptable. Lying is not.
The implicit statement in clicking the search button is "I want an unbiased, and, to the best of your ability, a complete list of sites on this subject." For Google to censor their list is perfectly acceptable IF they state that they are doing so..."Twelve sites not listed because your government does not wish to do so."
Ford is free to refrain from selling me the color I like. They are wrong to say they can't when they can. Burger King likewise. All are free to do as they wish; all are wrong to lie. Google is free to return the results they please so long as all understand that the results are incomplete.
plus the floppy little record
"You really stink! (way oh, way oh, way oh!)
You really stink, girl!
You really stink! (way oh, way oh, way oh!)
But I love you."
(blatt, blut)" ---(Tuba solo)
I bought a record player solely to listen to that "floppy little record." Good times...
PRECISELY my point! The artist must have been well-endowed with psi power!
...I thought the root-mean-square technique dated back to the 19th century, at least.
This is, of course, implied by the original comment.
( 5^ 2). QED
(10^2)/2=((5*2)^2)/2=((5^2)*(2^2))/2=(5^2)*2=2*
As an exercise, prove the following statement in hexadecimal arithmetic:
A^2/2=5^2*2
Observe standard algebraic order of operations.
+1, Math geeky.
Anyone else notice the Quake logo at the top of the page of the original Dopefish sketch?
Creating a tank-like transmission might be hard.
Au contraire! (Pardon my French).
I took look around the guy's web site; he's got a page on tracked vehicle transmissions here.
The CEOs of Miller, Budweiser, and Guiness meet for lunch. The first CEO orders a Miller; the second, a Budweiser. The Guiness CEO, however, orders a Coke. "Why didn't you order a Guiness?" the first two ask. "I thought that if you weren't drinking beer, I shouldn't either."
The problem with the one-time pad is that it is completely impractical. Empirical evidence shows that it one-time pads are actually LESS secure than other encryption schemes. The pads are intercepted or copied when they are delivered from place to place or are reused because a message had to be sent but the new pads had not yet arrived. The mathematical perfection of a one-time pad is kinda nifty, but is about as useful as postulating a spherical cow in a mathematical study to improve dairy production.
YHBT. YHL. HAND.
No freaking DUH you haven't read the book.
The movie pretty much missed the point of the book. Read the Rinkworks summary of the book - it's pretty much on target. Heinlein was a complete reactionary, and, politically, the book was an ode to patriarchal rule (though not exactly totalitarian, kind comes close) by soldiers, the ultimate conformists. The only people who could vote were veterans.
The other point of the book was power armor. One guy enclosed in a solid suit of powered armor who could be dropped from orbit and take on a conventional tank battalion gets together with a platoon of his closest friends and wreaks havoc on a planet. (I've not read an earlier scifi story about power-armored soldiers; as nearly as I can tell it's the archetype for the whole armored infantry subgenre of military scifi.) The armor in the movie is nifty, but the soldiers are susceptible to a headshot from a high-velocity pellet gun, for crying out loud, while Heinlein's mobile infantry could handle nukes a nuke with no problem.
In short, if the producers wanted to make an B-grade campy anti-authoritarian sci-fi movie with nifty costumes that lack verisimilitude, that's fine with me. I'd see it twice in theaters and buy the video. But WHY oh WHY did they have to eliminate the possiblity that anyone would ever produce a movie that treated Heinlein's novel and its two core ideas with some respect?
Good on #2, but not quite on #1. Centripetal and coriolis forces are quite real and entirely valid. Centripetal forces are obvious in a static frame of reference, while coriolis (and centrifugal) forces are valid in a rotating frame of reference. If you are being rotated, you will experience centrifugal force, and if you try to move you will encounter the coriolis force. Someone watching you from outside the rotating area would chalk it all up to good old-fashioned inertia.
The myth about no centrifugal or coriolis forces exists because it's easier to say that to freshman than to try to teach them to analyze forces within a rotating frame of reference.
Assume one more thing before replying:
/. knew the /. effect would be too much for the page. The latter assumption is kinda hard...is there a way to determine what kind of bandwidth an arbitrary remote site can handle, short of failure testing?
* The definition of "putting your business on the net" means "connecting a set of electronic devices to a telecommunications network in such a way that nearly every host on the Internet can send information to one or more of them." (Otherwise, you're not really "on the net," are you?)
BTW, the last of the parent poster's assuptions is really in two parts...the company lost revenue AND
every physicist knows that their equations are only approximately correct, so how the hell can they directly apply to pure math
So you're saying that formulas that approximate reality can have nothing to do with 'pure' math?
Permit me to introduce my friend, the parabola. All of its interesting geometrical properties are encoded in this equation:
y=ax^2+bx+c
Archimedes studied the parabola (and prefigured calculus by about 2000 years). The equation leads you rapidly to complex number theory, and figures in projective geometry (it's the same thing as a circle!). Millions of freshman high school students could tell you that mathematics doesn't come any purer, becuase there is clearly NO practical application for any of this. Yet Newton saw in this equation an approximation of relativity (about 400 years before relativity) and used it to describe the motions of projectiles and planets. Funny how this poor approximation of reality leads to some interesting mathematics even if you ignore the practical applications.