What are the kinds of things people "believe in"? God? The tooth fairy? The clue was always there - his campaign slogan meant "Change that's purely illusory"
In nothing that's freely accessible can I see what extrapolation algorithm was used in those models. I've run multi-megayear solar system simulations, and I've seen all the crazy stuff mentioned happen. But that was while I was using crappy 2nd-order extrapolation algorithms. Once I switched to 4th-order Runge Kutta or higher, almost all those curiosities disappeared. Which implies that what's being seen is instabilities (and thence chaos) in the numerical methods as much as instabilities in the solar system being modeled. Numerical computing is hard, there are many many gotchas like these. The academics refered to in those wiki pages that claim to have run their own models consistently do not provide the single piece of information that will let me judge whether their paper should be binned without reading.
Yours is most similar to mine, of those I've seen.
93-94 - slackware, as a user rather than sysadmin. 95-98 - transitioned towards redhat, but still played with slackware and others 98-99 - transitioned towards debian. Was my primary OS by this stage. 99-2000 - SuSE (better support for the O2 video card on my DEC Alpha) 00-12 - debian stable
Where's the ->ubuntu->debian bit, you may ask? Well there was an accidental 09-10 on Ubuntu on one machine which I regretted very very quickly, but it was up and running on my work machine, and didn't have time for a wipe and a reinstall of everything under debian, so whilst it counts as 2 years of Ubuntu, I wish it hadn't existed at all in my history.
The ZX backplanes were all fully documented. The RST calls were documented, and at only 8 or 16K in size, were trivially dissassemblable if you didn't have someone else's documentation. So you could use the hardware as you saw fit, and the software as you saw fit.
Want to slow the computer down to arbitrary speeds by continually pulsing the IORQ line with a variable duty cycle? Fine, trivial, that's what the documentation was for, and the 'Slomo' was born, it made games so much easier! Want 16MB of RAM paged from 1024 different RAM packs? Fine, trivial, that's what the documentation was there for - but you'll want to look at external power adapters for all those RAM pack.
There wasn't so much the IP obsession in the UK that US companies like Apple now have, you could basically do anything with the devices, and it was considered good publicity when you told others how to do the same. If you were selling peripherals - great - that expands their market for the original box.
So, what do you know about crypto that NIST don't?
They *specifically* stated that "computational efficiency" was important in their official announcement of the FIPS 180-3 competition. That was second on their list, right after "security".
Not *brute force* attacks - dictionary attacks. The search-space is too large for brute force to be a realistic method for finding collisions.
Assuming you're salted and not in plain text (big assumption, alas), nothing can sensibly defend against weak keys - but that's because all the security is in the key. Weak keys are weak, end of.
Quite a lot, yes, but not as much as he imagined. That's why I made explicit mention of his LHoV estimate being too high. His ratio was quite accurate, but his starting point, the LHoF (or LHoM, if you prefer) was way too high.
It has a coalition government by name, and nothing else. The libdems are completely impotent. The only thing they actually have the power to bring about is an end to their pretence of having some power. Practically it is little different from gerrymandering - the conservatives have redrawn the boundaries so that everyone who voted libdem now supports them.
You said it had "no long-term effects". Removal of tissue that does not grow back is not just a long term effect, it's a permanent effect. Therefore you seem to think that the tissue grows back. Either that or you simply don't know what the words you are using mean. Either way makes you an idiot.
""" The main reason I don't use Linux is basically the same. I started to use unix in 1987... I know what a cron tab is or what most other configuration files are for. But changing one, seeing it works (after restarting a demon or what ever) and realising after the next reboot everything is gone because you are supposed to use super duper configuration tool XYZ which overwrites the config files on startup gave me to many gray hairs:) """
But what you've described there is OSX. There may be some wanky Linux distros that try to emulate that behaviour, but there are plenty that don't. Everything I want to tweak in Debian I do by editing a text file (which gives me the ability to do very easy version control, for example). If you want to avoid grey hairs, avoid things trying to be like OSX.
> Objects IRL like a whiteboard/todo list/grocery list on your fridge don't need to be saved.
Objects IRL like whiteboard/todo list/grocery lists on your fridge don't have the concept of simply immediately undoing the changes since you were last happy with what you had. Humans are impoerfect and fickle, and will begin on something they think it's good, and then just want to scrap what they've done. Computers should there to support humans in what they do, no impose rules over how they can do things. Why do you, or your designer friend, want to limit the computer to the pitifully feeble constraints that tangible objects IRL are limited by?
I too think this article's a bit fake. I don't believe that there are more boobs being made in Mac software UI design than at any point in the past 15 years. e.g. This review first appeared in the UI hall of shame in 1999: http://web.archive.org/web/20020601171751/http://www.iarchitect.com/qtime.htm It describes exactly the problem that this story seems to be focussing on, namely attempting to look like something you are not, but which users are familiar with in the real world.
This isn' supposed to be a blanket anti-Mac rant. I happily admit that back further still, when everything in the world was a bit clunky, then Mac stood out as being significantly better in many respects. That's in part correlated with there still being some elements of Jef Raskin in their designs, not that he was always right about everything by any means.
God, I'm not surprised you've forgotten things in the news if you've forgotten already that I offerend the final option of actually just fucking googling it to satisfy your curiosity.
I'm less surprised that you think foreskins regrow now I know you're a bit feeble in the brain department.
I have a particular dislike for some IT-related charities. I remember when I left the UK I decided to ditch several of the computers I was using (I was dabbling with different OSes, and networking, so needed several rather than multi-booting). And by "ditch" I meant "find a charity that would take them to more needy places than fancy English suburbia". The local internet cafe had a poster requesting just this - computers for an orphanage in Romania. One drawback - the minimum requirements for the computers' specs were higher than *any* computer that I had, including the ones I was taking with me (running slackware/debian they were good workhorse computers). Fuck that charity. I was a charity case according to their standards. That's broken.
I do disagree with your "For the price of such junk you could just train a decent teacher..." because you can't train a decent teacher for 0 UKP, which is the price of donated junk.
I do like the idea of bringing telecommunications to remote villages, for example - but that doesn't mean I think every *individual* needs that kind of resource. I didn't have it for the first 20 years of my life, there's no goddamn way that anyone can claim it's in some ways a necessity. However, I had access to a library. It's that common shared resource that's the useful and valuable thing. The internet is the new library.
Sheesh. Try reading the news. Once you've mastered that, try also remembering what you read. If that's too much - horror of horrors - try satisfying your curiousity through the medium of a search engine.
> if a cop pulls you over, do you FOI his personal email for the duration of his tenure as a cop? would you consider this to be reasonable? would a court?
Straw man. You clearly don't understand the difference between communication for the purposes of his job, and communication that happened whilst he had the job. You are inequipt to partake in a sensible discussionn of this matter if you cannot tell the difference between the two.
> You cannot be "addicted" to gambling, shopping, masturbation, etc. These are compulsive behaviors - they are NOT addiction.
I know that in the 80s and 90s graduate psychology classes in the UK were using the word "addiction" for those, but I can't remembr precisely which modifier came before it. They're almost always maladaptive uncontrolled habits - which is what addictions in the broader sense are. The fact that you felt the need in the rest of your paragraph to use the modified term "physical addition" rather thn just "addiction" is telling.
And let's go back to
> Addiction is bio-chemical.
Are you really saying that my orgasms are not biochemical? What 2nd century medicine book have you been reading? Can compulsive masturbation be cured by canting Hail Mary and sacrificing chickens?
>... in the ICD-10 classification, which would be the diagnostic criteria followed by every medical doctor out there...
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ICD-10 """ Some 25 countries use ICD-10 for reimbursement and resource allocation in their health system. A few of them made modifications to ICD to better accommodate this use of ICD-10. """
So there're 200 countries which don't use it, and of the 25 that do use it, some of them have rewritten parts of it, and yet you say "every medical doctor"? That's a significant rounding error.
That was a fun estimate - thanks! I notice that it's much easier to melt aluminium than your wild stab in the dark. Aluminium's LHoF is only 399 kJ/kg and LHoV is 10,530 kJ/kg. Your 5kWh/lb = 5*3600*2.2 kJ/kg ~= 40000 kJ/kg. So you've not underestimated by 1 or 2 orders of magnitude, you've actually slightly overestimated.
The UK's as near as dammit a two party system. Much of civilised Europe is heading towards a two party system too. It's practically inevitable unless you're careful to avoid it. It's just Duverger's Law kicking in.
It is nice logic. It's sound too. How can you not see that? Voting for anyone is validating the system that without fail will put the incumbent back in office.
Slashdot Mirror
"Change We Can Believe In"
What are the kinds of things people "believe in"? God? The tooth fairy?
The clue was always there - his campaign slogan meant "Change that's purely illusory"
In nothing that's freely accessible can I see what extrapolation algorithm was used in those models. I've run multi-megayear solar system simulations, and I've seen all the crazy stuff mentioned happen. But that was while I was using crappy 2nd-order extrapolation algorithms. Once I switched to 4th-order Runge Kutta or higher, almost all those curiosities disappeared. Which implies that what's being seen is instabilities (and thence chaos) in the numerical methods as much as instabilities in the solar system being modeled. Numerical computing is hard, there are many many gotchas like these. The academics refered to in those wiki pages that claim to have run their own models consistently do not provide the single piece of information that will let me judge whether their paper should be binned without reading.
Yours is most similar to mine, of those I've seen.
93-94 - slackware, as a user rather than sysadmin.
95-98 - transitioned towards redhat, but still played with slackware and others
98-99 - transitioned towards debian. Was my primary OS by this stage.
99-2000 - SuSE (better support for the O2 video card on my DEC Alpha)
00-12 - debian stable
Where's the ->ubuntu->debian bit, you may ask? Well there was an accidental 09-10 on Ubuntu on one machine which I regretted very very quickly, but it was up and running on my work machine, and didn't have time for a wipe and a reinstall of everything under debian, so whilst it counts as 2 years of Ubuntu, I wish it hadn't existed at all in my history.
The ZX backplanes were all fully documented. The RST calls were documented, and at only 8 or 16K in size, were trivially dissassemblable if you didn't have someone else's documentation. So you could use the hardware as you saw fit, and the software as you saw fit.
Want to slow the computer down to arbitrary speeds by continually pulsing the IORQ line with a variable duty cycle? Fine, trivial, that's what the documentation was for, and the 'Slomo' was born, it made games so much easier! Want 16MB of RAM paged from 1024 different RAM packs? Fine, trivial, that's what the documentation was there for - but you'll want to look at external power adapters for all those RAM pack.
There wasn't so much the IP obsession in the UK that US companies like Apple now have, you could basically do anything with the devices, and it was considered good publicity when you told others how to do the same. If you were selling peripherals - great - that expands their market for the original box.
So, what do you know about crypto that NIST don't?
They *specifically* stated that "computational efficiency" was important in their official announcement of the FIPS 180-3 competition. That was second on their list, right after "security".
Not *brute force* attacks - dictionary attacks. The search-space is too large for brute force to be a realistic method for finding collisions.
Assuming you're salted and not in plain text (big assumption, alas), nothing can sensibly defend against weak keys - but that's because all the security is in the key. Weak keys are weak, end of.
Quite a lot, yes, but not as much as he imagined. That's why I made explicit mention of his LHoV estimate being too high. His ratio was quite accurate, but his starting point, the LHoF (or LHoM, if you prefer) was way too high.
It has a coalition government by name, and nothing else. The libdems are completely impotent. The only thing they actually have the power to bring about is an end to their pretence of having some power. Practically it is little different from gerrymandering - the conservatives have redrawn the boundaries so that everyone who voted libdem now supports them.
You said it had "no long-term effects". Removal of tissue that does not grow back is not just a long term effect, it's a permanent effect. Therefore you seem to think that the tissue grows back. Either that or you simply don't know what the words you are using mean. Either way makes you an idiot.
""" ... I know what a cron tab is or what most other configuration files are for. But changing one, seeing it works (after restarting a demon or what ever) and realising after the next reboot everything is gone because you are supposed to use super duper configuration tool XYZ which overwrites the config files on startup gave me to many gray hairs :)
The main reason I don't use Linux is basically the same. I started to use unix in 1987
"""
But what you've described there is OSX. There may be some wanky Linux distros that try to emulate that behaviour, but there are plenty that don't. Everything I want to tweak in Debian I do by editing a text file (which gives me the ability to do very easy version control, for example). If you want to avoid grey hairs, avoid things trying to be like OSX.
> Objects IRL like a whiteboard/todo list/grocery list on your fridge don't need to be saved.
Objects IRL like whiteboard/todo list/grocery lists on your fridge don't have the concept of simply immediately undoing the changes since you were last happy with what you had. Humans are impoerfect and fickle, and will begin on something they think it's good, and then just want to scrap what they've done. Computers should there to support humans in what they do, no impose rules over how they can do things. Why do you, or your designer friend, want to limit the computer to the pitifully feeble constraints that tangible objects IRL are limited by?
I too think this article's a bit fake. I don't believe that there are more boobs being made in Mac software UI design than at any point in the past 15 years.
e.g. This review first appeared in the UI hall of shame in 1999:
http://web.archive.org/web/20020601171751/http://www.iarchitect.com/qtime.htm
It describes exactly the problem that this story seems to be focussing on, namely attempting to look like something you are not, but which users are familiar with in the real world.
This isn' supposed to be a blanket anti-Mac rant. I happily admit that back further still, when everything in the world was a bit clunky, then Mac stood out as being significantly better in many respects. That's in part correlated with there still being some elements of Jef Raskin in their designs, not that he was always right about everything by any means.
God, I'm not surprised you've forgotten things in the news if you've forgotten already that I offerend the final option of actually just fucking googling it to satisfy your curiosity.
I'm less surprised that you think foreskins regrow now I know you're a bit feeble in the brain department.
+1 Insightful
I have a particular dislike for some IT-related charities. I remember when I left the UK I decided to ditch several of the computers I was using (I was dabbling with different OSes, and networking, so needed several rather than multi-booting). And by "ditch" I meant "find a charity that would take them to more needy places than fancy English suburbia". The local internet cafe had a poster requesting just this - computers for an orphanage in Romania. One drawback - the minimum requirements for the computers' specs were higher than *any* computer that I had, including the ones I was taking with me (running slackware/debian they were good workhorse computers). Fuck that charity. I was a charity case according to their standards. That's broken.
I do disagree with your "For the price of such junk you could just train a decent teacher..." because you can't train a decent teacher for 0 UKP, which is the price of donated junk.
I do like the idea of bringing telecommunications to remote villages, for example - but that doesn't mean I think every *individual* needs that kind of resource. I didn't have it for the first 20 years of my life, there's no goddamn way that anyone can claim it's in some ways a necessity. However, I had access to a library. It's that common shared resource that's the useful and valuable thing. The internet is the new library.
Sheesh. Try reading the news. Once you've mastered that, try also remembering what you read. If that's too much - horror of horrors - try satisfying your curiousity through the medium of a search engine.
http://www.gatesfoundation.org/hivaids/Pages/reducing-hiv-risk-through-circumcision.aspx
> if a cop pulls you over, do you FOI his personal email for the duration of his tenure as a cop? would you consider this to be reasonable? would a court?
Straw man. You clearly don't understand the difference between communication for the purposes of his job, and communication that happened whilst he had the job. You are inequipt to partake in a sensible discussionn of this matter if you cannot tell the difference between the two.
> You cannot be "addicted" to gambling, shopping, masturbation, etc. These are compulsive behaviors - they are NOT addiction.
I know that in the 80s and 90s graduate psychology classes in the UK were using the word "addiction" for those, but I can't remembr precisely which modifier came before it. They're almost always maladaptive uncontrolled habits - which is what addictions in the broader sense are. The fact that you felt the need in the rest of your paragraph to use the modified term "physical addition" rather thn just "addiction" is telling.
And let's go back to
> Addiction is bio-chemical.
Are you really saying that my orgasms are not biochemical? What 2nd century medicine book have you been reading? Can compulsive masturbation be cured by canting Hail Mary and sacrificing chickens?
> ... in the ICD-10 classification, which would be the diagnostic criteria followed by every medical doctor out there ...
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ICD-10
"""
Some 25 countries use ICD-10 for reimbursement and resource allocation in their health system. A few of them made modifications to ICD to better accommodate this use of ICD-10.
"""
So there're 200 countries which don't use it, and of the 25 that do use it, some of them have rewritten parts of it, and yet you say "every medical doctor"? That's a significant rounding error.
That was a fun estimate - thanks! I notice that it's much easier to melt aluminium than your wild stab in the dark. Aluminium's LHoF is only 399 kJ/kg and LHoV is 10,530 kJ/kg. Your 5kWh/lb = 5*3600*2.2 kJ/kg ~= 40000 kJ/kg. So you've not underestimated by 1 or 2 orders of magnitude, you've actually slightly overestimated.
/Who Killed the Electric Car/ http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0489037/ expands on what you mention.
> Let's assume that the Sandia technique/technology results in sustained
Stop right there!
The word "sustained" appears neither in the summary or the article.
Anyway, I think it's best to talk about the implications of their experiments only after they've been done.
There's nothing stupid about trying to increase the number of page impressions on a site which carries ads.
A dick, perhaps, but not necessarily stupid.
The UK's as near as dammit a two party system. Much of civilised Europe is heading towards a two party system too. It's practically inevitable unless you're careful to avoid it. It's just Duverger's Law kicking in.
"That makes the assumption that you would want one of the two major parties to win."
Nope, it makes the assumption that you have a preference between the two, however slight.
It is nice logic. It's sound too. How can you not see that? Voting for anyone is validating the system that without fail will put the incumbent back in office.