How on earth was the above "Informative", when it's clear you haven't got a clue what you're talking about. If you think a company's involvement with a phone is purely "selling" then you clearly don't know anything about the business. They design, architect, prototype, and develop those things for sometimes more than 2 years before they ever even reach the market. The devices which are very close to market will clearly be released, it's just that they're not wasting effort on new ones.
My last job at ${GADGET MANUFACTURER} was to receive code from ${SOC VENDOR}, and vet it for quality, before we pulled their changes into our source tree.
And you may interpret that painfully literally. Even if the quality was shit, we still had no choice but to pull the changes. All I provided was a head-start on the bug-filing. At least I did have someone to blame. I didn't envy my position, I was going to demand a rise or walk.
"Without [Linus], Linux would turn in to PHP. Look what happened to that. PHP is plain awful now. It started off with a good idea, then all the amateurs took control and ruined it."
There are a remarkable number of bodgers in the linux kernel too. The general code quality is not that high. In particular from some SoC vendors. He has to trust that if they're selling that code to customers who need it to work, then it probably works. And if it doesn't, then they are the maintainers responsible for fixing it. Unfortunately the customers are sometimes as incompetent as the chipset vendors, and don't know what they're being sold. I promise you, sometimes it really isn't pretty. Fortunately the core parts seem to be under much tighter rein, but they're still far from bulletproof.
If they're on a filesystem, then they are in a database. The data within spreadsheets is also held in a trivial database format, with <sheet, row, column> as primary key. One could map the contents onto a single table in a RDBMS, and recreate the original from that database, so the two are isomorphic. It would be unpleasant, but one could even write a SQL stored procedure to evaluate a cell's value if you were sufficiently perverse. Not that that matters, evaluation is at a separate level from storage.
If you think it's nonsense then that's purely due to insufficient understanding on your part. If you look at the history of filesystem evolution, the similarity to databases is such that the two have at times been indistinguishable.
If you look at all the data that's out there, most of it is managed using the database family known as "file systems". (And "queried" using a program called "explorer", at least last time I used a member of the prevalent OS family.)
My argument was in my prior post . You are clearly too stupid to have understood it. This correlates with the fact that you said something stupid prior to it. In combination with the fact that you're now making stupid posts after it, my only conclusion is that you are indeed terminally stupid.
> It sounds like this hinged on where the DAC was placed.
Long precendent for that. Mobile phones that vibrate patented? Simple - put the vibrating element in the (removable) battery. So it's no longer the phone that does the vibrating, and your product is no longer infringing.
I would suggest that more than 99% of patents have precisely no innovation of worth at all nowadays.
In 10 years, going out every night when the aurora forecast was listed as exceptionally high, we never saw an aurora once in Finland. From the look of some photos (from Hanko, for example) we missed them by less than 100km. The biggest enemy was clouds. Scuppered our meteor sightings too. And probably a lunar eclipse or 2.
Nope, the north pole, and your distance from it, is mostly irrelevant. What's more important is your distance from the *magnetic* north pole. Given that it's still up in Canada - you're way closer in NY state than Romania is. At the rate the pole seems to be moving, maybe towards the end of the century there will be some hope for it to be seen further south in Europe.
The northern lights have never been seen in the southern hemisphere, you're thinking of the southern lights. The southern lights will never be visible in south-eastern europe.
Due the inclination of the magnetic north pole, the northern lights are rarely seen further south than finland, and even sightings in the southernmost parts of finland are rare. As it's summer time, the skies are lighter than normal, even more so the further north you go, so I would be surprised if anyone in europe saw them at all.
Much of the USA should have an OK display though. I would be surprised if Mike at Extreme Instability doesn't have some new photos up in the next few days.
I didn't follow the whole argument, nor did I need to, my comment was simply a key-hole analysis of you not addressing the point actually made in what you quoted with your response to it. It was a textbook example of the "straw man" fallacy, and as such logically unsound. There's nothing more that I can say that wasn't in my prior post, it's about as succinct and to the point as it can be.
""" "All the technologies you enjoy (TVs, internet, cell phones, automobiles, AC, etc.) were based on research that likely seemed frivolous at the time"
absolutely incorrect:
television - was an application of an electron gun technology that was not derived at all from any 'finding' of a new particle....the tech and science for it was there for at least 50 years
internet - laughable...no discovery in particle physics initiated the ARPANET research whatsoever """
What a load of non sequiturs! Whoever you are responding to does not assert that "All the technologies you enjoy were based on particle-physics research", he asserts "All the technologies you enjoy were based on research that likely seemed frivolous at the time". In case you can't see the difference, one has mention of particle physics, and one doesn't. Alas your rebuttal only rebutts the particle physics claim, which was not the one that was made.
Your straw man burns, congratulations. Now would you like to address the points actually raised?
There are still many questions that can be asked. We still don't understand why there are certain asymmetries in the results of the results of some of the experiments being performed. Both numerical asymetries (e.g. why does X happen more than anti-X?) and geometric asymmetries (e.g. why are the created particles not uniformly distributed over the sphere of all possible directions?). There are also plenty of curiosities, such as why the various subatomic particles have the (ratio of) masses that they do have.
I hope no physicist worth his salt would answer a "gut feel" question about how things might *be*. See interviews with Feynman for examples of how he deflects such questions, and makes you wish you'd never asked them! He can answer a gut feel question about what kinds of results would lead to the most interesting, to him, new experiements, though. (e.g. "I'd like to see 1 more Higgs-compatible bosons detected, but no more in yadda-yadda energy range, as it would then mean that X's theory is dead, and Y's theory is tenable, and therefore we might be able to create a foo if we can collide a bar with a baz." (can you tell that example was pulled straight from my arse?))
Finland definitely has alcohol problems generally. You have a similar binge drinking culture to the UK. Except with the Finns, you mostly drink to pass out, the Brits do it to get out of control. You're only average in Europe when measuring EtOH L/year, but you generally save it all up for the weekend - just make sure you pick up a bottle of pöytäviina on the way home from work on friday. As soon as the cap's off - you can throw it across the room - you won't be needing it any more. (Occasionally I'd "need" to go to Alko on a friday afternoon, and I saw a lot of this behaviour.)
In general, apart from the health issues (and maybe lack of productivity if it was pikkuperjantai and a working day the next day), I didn't see too much of a problem with the Finns getting drunk. They'd pass out, that's all (at least until the 90s, the 00s were a little more 'european'). Until their 'diddle-do-dup diddle-do-dup diddle-do-dup dupppp' (i.e. Nokia phone) went off, that is - that sound could probably wake Finns from comas.
If you don't like beer, you've probably never had the right type - Lapin Kusta is not a good example of the drink. Give me sahti any day...;-)
No, you're not being naive, but in part you're missing the point. If "they are only dangerous if X", then they are potentially dangerous. Basically by definition.
And yes, when you have something potentially dangerous, you never interpret it outside a sandbox that permits only the behaviour you explicitly want the external entity to be able to invoke. That looks like a fancy way of saying something quite similar to "check that it's safe", or whatever you said earlier. However, in this instance you must have full control over that interpreter, and trust that you never write code with bugs. You must carefully sanitise them of all possible threats. But how can you be sure you know what all possible threats are? (years of experience, and being perfect seem to be 2 requisites) Instead, the correct (safe) attitude to take is that unsafe data should never be passed to anything that interprets them - they should be passed as an arbitrary string of bytes, nothing more. The technique for this in SQL is called using "Prepared Statements" - all the parsing is done in the absense of the external data, in such a way that the external data is, as you say, inert data. It requires self control to do this, and most programmers don't have the patience to do it *always*. The mechanism to mix trusted code and untrusted data isn't just there in almost every web-oriented programming language, it's the *easiest way of doing things*. This is why the mistakes are so often made. And why harsh (but fair) code review is so important.
Of course, even that's not enough paranoia, as you must make sure that you don't pass that data on to any other entity that isn't as untrusting. The browser "trusts" the web server, in general, which means that if you're sending potentially-dangerous (i.e. any) externally-provided data (such as something pretending to be a blog comment) to a browser, it is your job to ensure that you escape the data in a way that the browser won't attempt to interpret it. (c.f. javascript injection)
Doesn't everyone in the world agree with it, it's clearly almost certainly true? (I can leverage the True Scotsman falacy on the word "civil" to make it truer.)
I, proud member of the set of everone, certainly have questioned why. I'm not entirely sure there is that great a cost. Division of labour is important for efficiency. The most strenuous work I do each day is pressing whichever keyboard has the toughest spring. I would like to be able to have someone with big muscles fit my kitchen units, and rebuild our outer wall, thank you. The damage from the aggressive tendencies is paper cuts compared to the damage caused by greed (and under that I include things like corruption, etc.) from by-some-measures intelligent businessmen.
(And for those Brits who remember TMWRNJ, yes I realise I'm playing the Richard Herring "who is the real sick man in this so called society?" role somewhat.)
Slashdot Mirror
How on earth was the above "Informative", when it's clear you haven't got a clue what you're talking about. If you think a company's involvement with a phone is purely "selling" then you clearly don't know anything about the business. They design, architect, prototype, and develop those things for sometimes more than 2 years before they ever even reach the market. The devices which are very close to market will clearly be released, it's just that they're not wasting effort on new ones.
In the history of databases, transactions are a relatively modern thing. Codd's most influential work predates ACID by well over a decade.
My last job at ${GADGET MANUFACTURER} was to receive code from ${SOC VENDOR}, and vet it for quality, before we pulled their changes into our source tree.
And you may interpret that painfully literally. Even if the quality was shit, we still had no choice but to pull the changes. All I provided was a head-start on the bug-filing. At least I did have someone to blame. I didn't envy my position, I was going to demand a rise or walk.
"Without [Linus], Linux would turn in to PHP. Look what happened to that. PHP is plain awful now. It started off with a good idea, then all the amateurs took control and ruined it."
There are a remarkable number of bodgers in the linux kernel too. The general code quality is not that high. In particular from some SoC vendors. He has to trust that if they're selling that code to customers who need it to work, then it probably works. And if it doesn't, then they are the maintainers responsible for fixing it. Unfortunately the customers are sometimes as incompetent as the chipset vendors, and don't know what they're being sold. I promise you, sometimes it really isn't pretty. Fortunately the core parts seem to be under much tighter rein, but they're still far from bulletproof.
If they're on a filesystem, then they are in a database.
The data within spreadsheets is also held in a trivial database format, with <sheet, row, column> as primary key. One could map the contents onto a single table in a RDBMS, and recreate the original from that database, so the two are isomorphic. It would be unpleasant, but one could even write a SQL stored procedure to evaluate a cell's value if you were sufficiently perverse. Not that that matters, evaluation is at a separate level from storage.
If you think it's nonsense then that's purely due to insufficient understanding on your part. If you look at the history of filesystem evolution, the similarity to databases is such that the two have at times been indistinguishable.
If you look at all the data that's out there, most of it is managed using the database family known as "file systems". (And "queried" using a program called "explorer", at least last time I used a member of the prevalent OS family.)
My argument was in my prior post . You are clearly too stupid to have understood it. This correlates with the fact that you said something stupid prior to it. In combination with the fact that you're now making stupid posts after it, my only conclusion is that you are indeed terminally stupid.
> It sounds like this hinged on where the DAC was placed.
Long precendent for that. Mobile phones that vibrate patented? Simple - put the vibrating element in the (removable) battery. So it's no longer the phone that does the vibrating, and your product is no longer infringing.
I would suggest that more than 99% of patents have precisely no innovation of worth at all nowadays.
The act copyrightable, but the name - surely trademarkable! Waste no time registering it.
Yes, and as the question was one of location on the planet's surface, the distinction between the two poles was important.
In 10 years, going out every night when the aurora forecast was listed as exceptionally high, we never saw an aurora once in Finland. From the look of some photos (from Hanko, for example) we missed them by less than 100km. The biggest enemy was clouds. Scuppered our meteor sightings too. And probably a lunar eclipse or 2.
Nope, the north pole, and your distance from it, is mostly irrelevant. What's more important is your distance from the *magnetic* north pole. Given that it's still up in Canada - you're way closer in NY state than Romania is. At the rate the pole seems to be moving, maybe towards the end of the century there will be some hope for it to be seen further south in Europe.
The northern lights have never been seen in the southern hemisphere, you're thinking of the southern lights.
The southern lights will never be visible in south-eastern europe.
Due the inclination of the magnetic north pole, the northern lights are rarely seen further south than finland, and even sightings in the southernmost parts of finland are rare. As it's summer time, the skies are lighter than normal, even more so the further north you go, so I would be surprised if anyone in europe saw them at all.
Much of the USA should have an OK display though. I would be surprised if Mike at Extreme Instability doesn't have some new photos up in the next few days.
I didn't follow the whole argument, nor did I need to, my comment was simply a key-hole analysis of you not addressing the point actually made in what you quoted with your response to it. It was a textbook example of the "straw man" fallacy, and as such logically unsound. There's nothing more that I can say that wasn't in my prior post, it's about as succinct and to the point as it can be.
"""
"All the technologies you enjoy (TVs, internet, cell phones, automobiles, AC, etc.) were based on research that likely seemed frivolous at the time"
absolutely incorrect:
television - was an application of an electron gun technology that was not derived at all from any 'finding' of a new particle....the tech and science for it was there for at least 50 years
internet - laughable...no discovery in particle physics initiated the ARPANET research whatsoever
"""
What a load of non sequiturs! Whoever you are responding to does not assert that "All the technologies you enjoy were based on particle-physics research", he asserts "All the technologies you enjoy were based on research that likely seemed frivolous at the time". In case you can't see the difference, one has mention of particle physics, and one doesn't. Alas your rebuttal only rebutts the particle physics claim, which was not the one that was made.
Your straw man burns, congratulations. Now would you like to address the points actually raised?
There are still many questions that can be asked. We still don't understand why there are certain asymmetries in the results of the results of some of the experiments being performed. Both numerical asymetries (e.g. why does X happen more than anti-X?) and geometric asymmetries (e.g. why are the created particles not uniformly distributed over the sphere of all possible directions?). There are also plenty of curiosities, such as why the various subatomic particles have the (ratio of) masses that they do have.
I hope no physicist worth his salt would answer a "gut feel" question about how things might *be*. See interviews with Feynman for examples of how he deflects such questions, and makes you wish you'd never asked them! He can answer a gut feel question about what kinds of results would lead to the most interesting, to him, new experiements, though. (e.g. "I'd like to see 1 more Higgs-compatible bosons detected, but no more in yadda-yadda energy range, as it would then mean that X's theory is dead, and Y's theory is tenable, and therefore we might be able to create a foo if we can collide a bar with a baz." (can you tell that example was pulled straight from my arse?))
Disco? Yeugh! I prefer my music a bit heavier, and hate all those lights!
The problem is that there's a flip-side. IT departments who don't push vital patches in time will get negative feedback for delaying.
(And of course one could view "then it's not a pure capitalism" as a "no true scotsman" argument.)
Seems like /. has contaminated my poytaviina!
Finland definitely has alcohol problems generally. You have a similar binge drinking culture to the UK. Except with the Finns, you mostly drink to pass out, the Brits do it to get out of control. You're only average in Europe when measuring EtOH L/year, but you generally save it all up for the weekend - just make sure you pick up a bottle of pöytäviina on the way home from work on friday. As soon as the cap's off - you can throw it across the room - you won't be needing it any more. (Occasionally I'd "need" to go to Alko on a friday afternoon, and I saw a lot of this behaviour.)
... ;-)
In general, apart from the health issues (and maybe lack of productivity if it was pikkuperjantai and a working day the next day), I didn't see too much of a problem with the Finns getting drunk. They'd pass out, that's all (at least until the 90s, the 00s were a little more 'european'). Until their 'diddle-do-dup diddle-do-dup diddle-do-dup dupppp' (i.e. Nokia phone) went off, that is - that sound could probably wake Finns from comas.
If you don't like beer, you've probably never had the right type - Lapin Kusta is not a good example of the drink. Give me sahti any day
No, you're not being naive, but in part you're missing the point. If "they are only dangerous if X", then they are potentially dangerous. Basically by definition.
And yes, when you have something potentially dangerous, you never interpret it outside a sandbox that permits only the behaviour you explicitly want the external entity to be able to invoke. That looks like a fancy way of saying something quite similar to "check that it's safe", or whatever you said earlier. However, in this instance you must have full control over that interpreter, and trust that you never write code with bugs. You must carefully sanitise them of all possible threats. But how can you be sure you know what all possible threats are? (years of experience, and being perfect seem to be 2 requisites) Instead, the correct (safe) attitude to take is that unsafe data should never be passed to anything that interprets them - they should be passed as an arbitrary string of bytes, nothing more. The technique for this in SQL is called using "Prepared Statements" - all the parsing is done in the absense of the external data, in such a way that the external data is, as you say, inert data. It requires self control to do this, and most programmers don't have the patience to do it *always*. The mechanism to mix trusted code and untrusted data isn't just there in almost every web-oriented programming language, it's the *easiest way of doing things*. This is why the mistakes are so often made. And why harsh (but fair) code review is so important.
Of course, even that's not enough paranoia, as you must make sure that you don't pass that data on to any other entity that isn't as untrusting. The browser "trusts" the web server, in general, which means that if you're sending potentially-dangerous (i.e. any) externally-provided data (such as something pretending to be a blog comment) to a browser, it is your job to ensure that you escape the data in a way that the browser won't attempt to interpret it. (c.f. javascript injection)
Doesn't everyone in the world agree with it, it's clearly almost certainly true? (I can leverage the True Scotsman falacy on the word "civil" to make it truer.)
I, proud member of the set of everone, certainly have questioned why. I'm not entirely sure there is that great a cost. Division of labour is important for efficiency. The most strenuous work I do each day is pressing whichever keyboard has the toughest spring. I would like to be able to have someone with big muscles fit my kitchen units, and rebuild our outer wall, thank you. The damage from the aggressive tendencies is paper cuts compared to the damage caused by greed (and under that I include things like corruption, etc.) from by-some-measures intelligent businessmen.
(And for those Brits who remember TMWRNJ, yes I realise I'm playing the Richard Herring "who is the real sick man in this so called society?" role somewhat.)
I cannot agree at all. Neoclassical capitalism would even reject the concept of an absolute "economic value" for something.