No, companies can't just compete on the basis of their products anymore. This is very unfortunate, in the fact that marketing sways a consumer's decision so much that they don't consider quality. This is why so many people use windoze today - Bill Gates isn't the best software engineer, but he's a hell of a marketer. Nowadays people don't care much if it's powerful, but rather if it looks pretty and is easy to use. Ahh, I remember the good old days . . . well not really but I wish I did!
The whole idea behind less is that less is more, but more than more. So true and false are equivalent. I'm sure the incompleteness theorem fits into this somewhere.
Does anybody know how much work is going into FreeBSD's drivers? My major reason for not installing FreeBSD is because it doesn't have as many drivers as say, Linux. This seems to be tha major limitation of all free OS's, though linux is in much better shape than it was a few years ago. I'd gladly work on this stuff, but I don't really know much about low level hardware IO. I hope people are working on their drivers.
Dude, you have to look at the big picture. Considering that our current relative rate of travel through space is that of a snail, we need to know whether geraniums can grow in microgravity. Actually any plant food source that would be needed in space travel. This information is critical if we ever want to have successful extra-solar travel. So stop worrying about your money; you could stop spending it on buying a tee-shirt with a fancy name on in and invest into something to profit the future of mankind.
We all know that once a medium brings pornography to its customers, it becomes wildly popular. We all know how Cable became a hit once Cinemax brought us porn, and the internet became popular once it was considered the prime choice for porn-carrying. So, I envision a future where everyone has, not a computer, but a home genomics kit, on their desk, from which they attain their porn. Once the human genome is fully understood, this will be no problem and we will be able to alter human growth so that the birth cycle of a test-tube baby is days instead of months, so we can have a fully-grown sex-person of one's choice. Of course this is all speculative. Any suggestions? (Remember, I'm always kidding)
That is true, but it still does not explain what the surrounding medium would be - a pure vaccuum? Or something else? The reason bubbles hold underwate is because if the internal surface tension on the barrier between the water and the air pulled out of the water. Last time I checked, there was not much tension on the surface of a vaccuum. In fact, the Van-der-Waals force between molecules of air is so much less than that of water that I doubt any type of bubble like that could hold unless you created a traditional bubble - with a medium that holds together on the boundary (the skin of a soap bubble, the soap itself). But it's all speculation anyway - without a good flight plan they're screwed from the start.
Interesting - I think the only way it could be done in air (that you are suggesting that is) is to have the bubble be a pure vaccum so there is now drag. But I guess you hadn't thought of the fact that a pure vaccuum provides no lift. So you need air. This is not the same as underwater, in this case, since they are being launched and just going and going - under water you can have the same bouyancy as the surrounding material, which is tough in a plane. So the only feasible way would be to somehow launch a craft at such high speeds that the lack of lift would not matter - and this is essentially putting the craft into orbit. And I still don't know how you would get a pure and complete vaccuum around the craft.
This sounds like a really cool technology - however it has quite a ways to go before it might be considered for commercial use. As people already have mentioned (I'm sure) the environmental impact might be significant due to the great speed. Also, any number of things could cause the vaccuum around the vessel to dissipate (watch out for the seaweed) and drag the ship down. But these bubbles have very interesting physical properties. not just the bubbles to encapsulate the ship, but just bubbles in general (in a liquid, that is). Their ill effects were obviously noted when props on ships started to corrode and such. Also, when electroforming, bubbles can help agitate the solution for quicker ion dispersion, but if the bubbles are near the surface being electroformed then the bubbles cause disuniformity. Anyway, bubbles are just fun. Expecially Soap bubbles.
You have a good point, but very few people understand the inner workings of a computer anyway. There are a lot of hidden messages in ReBoot (look at what some ASCII codes floating around spell out) so there is obviously some computer knowledge there. But why not spread the knowledge and put more information in there? They could have made some references to UNIX systems - after all they were living in "Mainframe" and what was the last time a mainframe ran Windows? (OK, I guess Multics wouldn't be well enough known to be used;)
I've watched some episodes of it (since it used to be on before DBZ) and the content is quite biased towards DOS based systems! You'd think that this stuff was being written by people who had SOME knowledge of computer systems, seeing as they must work with the renderfarm that draws the stuff, but maybe the writers have never worked with anything beyond Windoze. There is always mention of command.com (always representing the controller of the computer) and other windozey ideas. Have you seen the "Vidwindow"s that pop up? Besides that, the show is pretty cool (except that "the web" (notice, not the internet, the web) is represented as being independant of other computers, as in another entity existing in nothingness).
True, the hardware could do all of this for you, but it wouldn't help much if the software was smart enough to speed things up by not putting things in the environment that wouldn't be visible anyway. Think about it: some games base what's visible on a "per-room" basis, rather than attempting to display the entire environment at once (unless the doors are open, then it's the next room over too, but usually not 2 rooms over). The hardware would only display the software calls that were made (eg if the software was based on OpenGL then the program would probably not draw the ENTIRE environment, but just the parts it felt necessary, which may or may not be the person sneaking up on you around the corner). Usually, for speed, software does not command the hardware to attempt to draw the whole world.
Hmm, if we open up our lives and give away privacy, we can exchange it for security! I think it was Winston Churchill who said, "He who would give up privacy for security deserves neither." How about that?
It's always nice to know that the FBI has given up on plantae and is only going for animalia now. I mean, with all the decision involved before, they had to choose if they wanted greens or blood! I wonder if I'm meat or celery to them . . .
Well, I don't know how NSI will be taking this . . . But seriously, this has GOT to be the most blatant attempt for M$ to gain control of as much as they can. Scenario: 1) This.net thing becomes popular 2) People put a lot of their files there 3) Supreme court rules to break up M$ (final ruling) 4) M$ says that this will not fit entirely under either the "OS" nor "applications" nor "internet stuff" category, so "none claim control of it" (as a scheme of course to keep the company together) 5) people panic that their files will be destroyed because nobody will control them 6) mass riots against all law-sustaining bodies This might be a problem. But really, who would put their files in Microsoft's hands? What will they do when they have access to all my files? I wonder . . . MS guy looking through logs late at night: "Wow, this guy has a HUGE collection of recipes in his account! I can sell his name, number, email, address and all his other personal information to cooking companies who pay me a lot of money!" For the sake of mankind, don't let them do this!
Ah, some day we'll look back at the "good old times"...
When you could eat off of your genetic engineering tools...
When you could tell if that thing in the basement was alive or not by using a spatula... When your two youngest children were more or less human... When you didn't modify your household plants to fortify the structure of your house... When your chromosomes were not patented...
So, what will it be like then? I'll tell you when I get there.
>>On the other hand, we have DWG, which is a >>fairly rich format that deals with the >>description of 3D objects. Could decoding a file >>format that deals with text and it's >>presentation really be that much more difficult >>to reverse engineer?
>Well considering DOC can store ANYTHING - >including the description of 3D objects yes.
This has/nothing/ to do with decoding the file. The fact that it might be able to store a description of 3D objects makes no difference, same thing as storing _another_ file linked/embedded into it. That 3D description is not part of the file format! (Do you think Microsoft could make a 3D modeler?)
Secondly, Corel already has an excellent converter for DOC files - it not only imports them correctly, but exports them (IMHO) better than Word. Look at the HTML that Word makes out of DOC files (not that I would use that "feature") - tags are littered around randomly, there is no consistancy. But if you convert a WPD file into DOC and let Word convert it to HTML, it/is/ cleaner! Try it.
What does Radio Shack have to do with this? Is this a publicity stunt for them? I have the feeling that people find it easier every day to do something like that.
All right, there has been too much confusion about the plural of virus, so I feel I have to clear it up (yes I'm a Latin scholar). (1)First of all, many believe that it should be viri, this is the most wrong - this stems from the Latin second declension masculine vir (gen. viri) which means "man". (2)The second most wrong is vira - some seem to believe that this would be corect because the plural of bacterium is bacteria. However, bacterium is a neuter word, which means it's nominative and accusitive plural forms in Latin will end with "a". Virus not being a neuter word, it should not end with "a" in its nominitive plural form. (3)I don't know why the ending "ii" is up there - this is probably because people hear the plural of radius being radii (that is pronounced correctly with a long i for English but for Latin it would still be short). Radius is a second declension word with a genitive stem "radi-" so adding the plural nominitive second declension ending makes it radii. (4)The only correct form is, of course, viruses. Not only through process of elimination, but also because virus is a third declension word. The third declension nominitive and accusitive plural ending is "es" which is where we get the "s" ending for many English words we wish to pluralize. When you want to make the plural form in the nominitive (that being the only form we would use in English since nouns are non-declinable for us) the proper form is viruses. You might say, "wait, that's not complicated enough - Latin always sounds funky!" but c'est la vie! Pardon my French.
The first computer I touched was an old Commodore-64 when I was in 2nd? grade. I learned how to "program" in BASIC on that, which was good since it was simple enough for little kids to understand but still a lot of fun. Later I learned C, C++, then Java, and everything is easier after that. The important thing is to introduce everything gradually.
DUH, that's what I'm talking about!! Do you think I'm so stupid that I think Reimann-Zeta applies to fluid mechanics? Did you think i thought that of yang-mills fields too? I was referring to more than ONE of the problems! Don't think yourself higher than others just because you are higher than many (or think you are).
Sorry, my bad. Since this one needs to have roots along axes which are non-real, that should have been (1-z/root_n) or (z-root_n) in those parenthases up there.
These problems are some of the most important problems today, as I see it. Flow of incompressible fluids for fluid mechanics, missing mass from yang-mills fields, and expecially the Reimann-Zeta hypothesis. If I am correct, Reimann-Zeta is extremely important to find the distribution of primes (will there always be more twin primes? etc). If this is solved, we have some problems: if we can easily determine the distribution of primes then we can predict the next one, and RSA falls apart because it relies upon people having a hard time finding those really-really-big primes that people use for high encryption. If it is proved unsolvable, we are happy in encryption-land, but then we can't find stuff like: oo --- \ 1 | --- / n^3 --- n=1 in closed form (yes, it can be expressed as an infinite product of (1-x/root_n) or (x-root_n)). It would be sad to see it proven unprovable, for such a cool problem.
I always knew Google was up to something . . . hehe that is probably the best search engine I use - no advertisements. Good to see good people doing good things.
Slashdot Mirror
No, companies can't just compete on the basis of their products anymore. This is very unfortunate, in the fact that marketing sways a consumer's decision so much that they don't consider quality. This is why so many people use windoze today - Bill Gates isn't the best software engineer, but he's a hell of a marketer. Nowadays people don't care much if it's powerful, but rather if it looks pretty and is easy to use. Ahh, I remember the good old days . . . well not really but I wish I did!
The whole idea behind less is that less is more, but more than more. So true and false are equivalent. I'm sure the incompleteness theorem fits into this somewhere.
Does anybody know how much work is going into FreeBSD's drivers? My major reason for not installing FreeBSD is because it doesn't have as many drivers as say, Linux. This seems to be tha major limitation of all free OS's, though linux is in much better shape than it was a few years ago. I'd gladly work on this stuff, but I don't really know much about low level hardware IO. I hope people are working on their drivers.
Dude, you have to look at the big picture. Considering that our current relative rate of travel through space is that of a snail, we need to know whether geraniums can grow in microgravity. Actually any plant food source that would be needed in space travel. This information is critical if we ever want to have successful extra-solar travel. So stop worrying about your money; you could stop spending it on buying a tee-shirt with a fancy name on in and invest into something to profit the future of mankind.
We all know that once a medium brings pornography to its customers, it becomes wildly popular. We all know how Cable became a hit once Cinemax brought us porn, and the internet became popular once it was considered the prime choice for porn-carrying. So, I envision a future where everyone has, not a computer, but a home genomics kit, on their desk, from which they attain their porn. Once the human genome is fully understood, this will be no problem and we will be able to alter human growth so that the birth cycle of a test-tube baby is days instead of months, so we can have a fully-grown sex-person of one's choice.
Of course this is all speculative. Any suggestions?
(Remember, I'm always kidding)
Does anyone know a good resource where I could get the specs on the CPU? is it CISC or RISC? I'd like to see the assembly set for one of them.
Dude, try thinking. The water is vaporized. If you do it in air, you "vaporize the air?" No, it's already a vapor - so use a vacuum smart guy.
That is true, but it still does not explain what the surrounding medium would be - a pure vaccuum? Or something else? The reason bubbles hold underwate is because if the internal surface tension on the barrier between the water and the air pulled out of the water. Last time I checked, there was not much tension on the surface of a vaccuum. In fact, the Van-der-Waals force between molecules of air is so much less than that of water that I doubt any type of bubble like that could hold unless you created a traditional bubble - with a medium that holds together on the boundary (the skin of a soap bubble, the soap itself).
But it's all speculation anyway - without a good flight plan they're screwed from the start.
Interesting - I think the only way it could be done in air (that you are suggesting that is) is to have the bubble be a pure vaccum so there is now drag. But I guess you hadn't thought of the fact that a pure vaccuum provides no lift. So you need air. This is not the same as underwater, in this case, since they are being launched and just going and going - under water you can have the same bouyancy as the surrounding material, which is tough in a plane. So the only feasible way would be to somehow launch a craft at such high speeds that the lack of lift would not matter - and this is essentially putting the craft into orbit. And I still don't know how you would get a pure and complete vaccuum around the craft.
This sounds like a really cool technology - however it has quite a ways to go before it might be considered for commercial use. As people already have mentioned (I'm sure) the environmental impact might be significant due to the great speed. Also, any number of things could cause the vaccuum around the vessel to dissipate (watch out for the seaweed) and drag the ship down. But these bubbles have very interesting physical properties. not just the bubbles to encapsulate the ship, but just bubbles in general (in a liquid, that is). Their ill effects were obviously noted when props on ships started to corrode and such. Also, when electroforming, bubbles can help agitate the solution for quicker ion dispersion, but if the bubbles are near the surface being electroformed then the bubbles cause disuniformity.
Anyway, bubbles are just fun. Expecially Soap bubbles.
You have a good point, but very few people understand the inner workings of a computer anyway. There are a lot of hidden messages in ReBoot (look at what some ASCII codes floating around spell out) so there is obviously some computer knowledge there. But why not spread the knowledge and put more information in there? They could have made some references to UNIX systems - after all they were living in "Mainframe" and what was the last time a mainframe ran Windows? (OK, I guess Multics wouldn't be well enough known to be used ;)
I've watched some episodes of it (since it used to be on before DBZ) and the content is quite biased towards DOS based systems! You'd think that this stuff was being written by people who had SOME knowledge of computer systems, seeing as they must work with the renderfarm that draws the stuff, but maybe the writers have never worked with anything beyond Windoze. There is always mention of command.com (always representing the controller of the computer) and other windozey ideas. Have you seen the "Vidwindow"s that pop up? Besides that, the show is pretty cool (except that "the web" (notice, not the internet, the web) is represented as being independant of other computers, as in another entity existing in nothingness).
True, the hardware could do all of this for you, but it wouldn't help much if the software was smart enough to speed things up by not putting things in the environment that wouldn't be visible anyway. Think about it: some games base what's visible on a "per-room" basis, rather than attempting to display the entire environment at once (unless the doors are open, then it's the next room over too, but usually not 2 rooms over). The hardware would only display the software calls that were made (eg if the software was based on OpenGL then the program would probably not draw the ENTIRE environment, but just the parts it felt necessary, which may or may not be the person sneaking up on you around the corner). Usually, for speed, software does not command the hardware to attempt to draw the whole world.
Hmm, if we open up our lives and give away privacy, we can exchange it for security!
I think it was Winston Churchill who said, "He who would give up privacy for security deserves neither." How about that?
It's always nice to know that the FBI has given up on plantae and is only going for animalia now. I mean, with all the decision involved before, they had to choose if they wanted greens or blood!
I wonder if I'm meat or celery to them . . .
Well, I don't know how NSI will be taking this . . . .net thing becomes popular
But seriously, this has GOT to be the most blatant attempt for M$ to gain control of as much as they can.
Scenario:
1) This
2) People put a lot of their files there
3) Supreme court rules to break up M$ (final ruling)
4) M$ says that this will not fit entirely under either the "OS" nor "applications" nor "internet stuff" category, so "none claim control of it" (as a scheme of course to keep the company together)
5) people panic that their files will be destroyed because nobody will control them
6) mass riots against all law-sustaining bodies
This might be a problem.
But really, who would put their files in Microsoft's hands? What will they do when they have access to all my files? I wonder . . .
MS guy looking through logs late at night: "Wow, this guy has a HUGE collection of recipes in his account! I can sell his name, number, email, address and all his other personal information to cooking companies who pay me a lot of money!"
For the sake of mankind, don't let them do this!
So, what will it be like then? I'll tell you when I get there.
>>On the other hand, we have DWG, which is a
/nothing/ to do with decoding the file. The fact that it might be able to store a description of 3D objects makes no difference, same thing as storing _another_ file linked/embedded into it. That 3D description is not part of the file format! (Do you think Microsoft could make a 3D modeler?)
/is/ cleaner! Try it.
>>fairly rich format that deals with the
>>description of 3D objects. Could decoding a file
>>format that deals with text and it's
>>presentation really be that much more difficult
>>to reverse engineer?
>Well considering DOC can store ANYTHING -
>including the description of 3D objects yes.
This has
Secondly, Corel already has an excellent converter for DOC files - it not only imports them correctly, but exports them (IMHO) better than Word. Look at the HTML that Word makes out of DOC files (not that I would use that "feature") - tags are littered around randomly, there is no consistancy. But if you convert a WPD file into DOC and let Word convert it to HTML, it
What does Radio Shack have to do with this? Is this a publicity stunt for them? I have the feeling that people find it easier every day to do something like that.
All right, there has been too much confusion about the plural of virus, so I feel I have to clear it up (yes I'm a Latin scholar).
(1)First of all, many believe that it should be viri, this is the most wrong - this stems from the Latin second declension masculine vir (gen. viri) which means "man".
(2)The second most wrong is vira - some seem to believe that this would be corect because the plural of bacterium is bacteria. However, bacterium is a neuter word, which means it's nominative and accusitive plural forms in Latin will end with "a". Virus not being a neuter word, it should not end with "a" in its nominitive plural form.
(3)I don't know why the ending "ii" is up there - this is probably because people hear the plural of radius being radii (that is pronounced correctly with a long i for English but for Latin it would still be short). Radius is a second declension word with a genitive stem "radi-" so adding the plural nominitive second declension ending makes it radii.
(4)The only correct form is, of course, viruses. Not only through process of elimination, but also because virus is a third declension word. The third declension nominitive and accusitive plural ending is "es" which is where we get the "s" ending for many English words we wish to pluralize. When you want to make the plural form in the nominitive (that being the only form we would use in English since nouns are non-declinable for us) the proper form is viruses. You might say, "wait, that's not complicated enough - Latin always sounds funky!" but c'est la vie!
Pardon my French.
The first computer I touched was an old Commodore-64 when I was in 2nd? grade. I learned how to "program" in BASIC on that, which was good since it was simple enough for little kids to understand but still a lot of fun. Later I learned C, C++, then Java, and everything is easier after that. The important thing is to introduce everything gradually.
DUH, that's what I'm talking about!! Do you think I'm so stupid that I think Reimann-Zeta applies to fluid mechanics? Did you think i thought that of yang-mills fields too? I was referring to more than ONE of the problems! Don't think yourself higher than others just because you are higher than many (or think you are).
Sorry, my bad. Since this one needs to have roots along axes which are non-real, that should have been (1-z/root_n) or (z-root_n) in those parenthases up there.
These problems are some of the most important problems today, as I see it. Flow of incompressible fluids for fluid mechanics, missing mass from yang-mills fields, and expecially the Reimann-Zeta hypothesis. If I am correct, Reimann-Zeta is extremely important to find the distribution of primes (will there always be more twin primes? etc). If this is solved, we have some problems: if we can easily determine the distribution of primes then we can predict the next one, and RSA falls apart because it relies upon people having a hard time finding those really-really-big primes that people use for high encryption. If it is proved unsolvable, we are happy in encryption-land, but then we can't find stuff like:
oo
---
\ 1
| ---
/ n^3
---
n=1
in closed form (yes, it can be expressed as an infinite product of (1-x/root_n) or (x-root_n)).
It would be sad to see it proven unprovable, for such a cool problem.
I always knew Google was up to something . . . hehe that is probably the best search engine I use - no advertisements. Good to see good people doing good things.