Do me a favor and review the Michelson - Morley experiment and what it really proved or disproved. And remind me when they performed the experiment in the absence of a gravitational field. (And yes I'm aware of Hammar's experiments.)
For a follow on, explain how ring laser gyroscopes work.;-)
But before that, reread the message and show me where I said anything about relativity being self-contradictory, or explain when quantum entanglement became part of relativity.
(What really gets me is why people who have no problem reconciling particle-wave duality think that proving A necessarily disproves B, even if A and B appear to be mutually exclusive.)
Well, funny hair aside, the thing about Einstein's kooky theories is that they turned out to have amazingly good predictive ability, at least on the macro scale (where large numbers tend to swamp quantum effects). Even when he thought he was wrong (the cosmological constant), he may have turned out to be right.
That makes them kind of hard to let go of.
Of course, his theories may just model an emergent behaviour of large numbers of quantum interactions, and have nothing whatsoever to do with actually explaining why those behaviours exist. But they're still useful in the domains where they've been demonstrated to work, just as Newton's theories are.
The catch is in not relying on them too blindly in domains where they haven't been adequately tested yet.
That depends, can you prove to a blind man that light exists? Or to a 2D being that a third dimension exists?
If I hypothesize that "spooky action at a distance" is evidence of an objective reference frame, can you come up with an experiment to prove that it is not?
See, the other explanation is that you just don't understand relativity, never mind quantum mechanics.
Well, you're reading far more into my posting than was there, but I'll bite. Please demonstrate your understanding of relativity and quantum mechanics by reconciling the two. Feel free to use as many pages as you need. For extra credit, come up with a theory of quantum gravity and suggest experiments to test it.
Yes, power savings are necessary. Lower power used by the logic also means lower power needed by the cooling fans, which overall translates to less heat put out by the box, which means less cooling needed for your data center.
This is especially critical in older data centers. I know of one where they can't put more than a couple of blade enclosures in a rack because the DC wasn't designed to put that much power and cooling into one spot. Physical space is no longer the limitation.
Since there's always a demand for more computer power (and more storage), more efficient equipment means they can pack more of it in without having to build a new datacenter.
that's the 'weirdest' part: an interaction which an instantaneous non-local effect *but* that cannot be used to communicate faster than C??
And you'd think with that inherent self-contradiction, physicists would acknowledge that there's something fundamentally fscked with their understanding of the universe.
Yeah, they'll tell you that faster-than-C communication breaks causality and "allows things to happen before they're caused".
So you tell them that no, in an objective reference frame, event A happens before event B, but it takes a while from the photons to catch up -- much like a lightning flash and thunder clap.
And they'll tell you back again that NO! there are no objective reference frames, that's what relativity is all about.
And I say that's like a couple of 2D Flatlanders arguing that there's no third dimensional point of view. Or perhaps a couple of blind guys arguing that there's no lightning flash, and there's no way you could tell them that there's a thunderclap coming because that would be predicting the future, and it hasn't happened yet.
This is why I never pay attention to the "after mail-in rebate" price, and no longer even bother shopping at stores that advertize that price heavily (with the rebate details in teeny tiny print).
Instant rebate or nothing, baby. Of course there's no Fry's around here, so I don't even have to worry about all the other issues with shopping there (I generally shop Microcenter.)
You keep using that word. I do not think it means what you think it means:
Definitions of militia on the Web:
* civilians trained as soldiers but not part of the regular army
* the entire body of physically fit civilians eligible by law for military service; "their troops were untrained militia"; "Congress shall have power to provide for calling forth the militia"--United States Constitution
wordnet.princeton.edu/perl/webwn
* A militia is a group of citizens organized to provide paramilitary service. The word can have four slightly different meanings:* An official reserve army, composed of non-professional soldiers* The national police forces in the Russia, and other CIS countries, and the Soviet Union: Militsiya* The entire able-bodied population of a state, which can be called to arms against an invading enemy* A private, non-government force, not necessarily directly supported or sanctioned by the government
en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Militia
* a group of civilians trained as soldiers who serve full time only in emergencies
www3.newberry.org/k12maps/glossary/
* A citizen army; a military organization formed by local citizens to serve in emergencies.
library.christchurch.org.nz/FamilyHistory/Glossary/
* All males, usually between the age of sixteen and sixty, were required to do local military service. Each county of a province (or state) would divide its inhabitants into companies, which in turn would form battalions or regiments. Militiamen were generally not uniformed, only sometimes paid when on actual service, and often had to provide their own arms and accoutrements....
www.royalprovincial.com/etc/gloss/gloss.htm
* a group of men who drilled on a regular basis and were considered the community's first line of defense to protect the community as a whole. In most communities, the militia elected its own officers, and the quality of militia varied from community to community. Until late in the Revolutionary War, these men wore civilian clothes to the battlefield. Both the rebel and Tory sides had their own militia forces....
pbsvideodb.pbs.org/resources/liberty/primary/gloss.html
* Private citizens available for military service in an emergency.
www.tsgraves.com/relics/legalLand.htm
* armed forces raised locally to protect the citizenry, and may be called upon to serve in a wider conflict as happened in the American Revolution and Civil War.
freepages.genealogy.rootsweb.com/~randyj2222/gendi ctm.html
* a part-time military force, recruited from a local area, rather than nationally.
www.durham.gov.uk/recordoffice/usp.nsf/pws/durham+ record+office+-+the+learning+zone+-+The+Story+of+J immy+Durham+-+Glossary
* The part-time civilian military force used in Great Britain, Upper Canada and the United States. See also Incorporated Militia and Sedentary Militia. [ Top of Page ]
www.archives.gov.on.ca/english/exhibits/1812/gloss ary.htm
* is a military unit made up of non-professional soldiers. In Chinese, a militia is called tuanlian.
pages.prodi
I always liked one of Heinlein's ideas -- was it in "The Moon Is A Harsh Mistress"? -- where the Legislature has two houses -- one whose job is to pass laws, the other whose job is to repeal them.
Either that or a constitutionally mandated limit on the total verbiage of laws passed. Once that's reached, you have to repeal something before you can pass another.
(And yeah, probably holes can be picked in either of those, but it's a starting point.)
Of course I haven't RTFA, but don't they connect the tanks on these things? That seems pretty obvious, and something they've been doing with airplane fuel tanks probably since they built the first plane with more than one tank.
Depends on the job, and the person. I telecommute all but one or two days a month (if that). But in additional to the email there's also Jabber and (too many) phone conferences. And slashdot;-) The rest of the team that I usually work with is scattered across three time zones -- not counting the offshore folks in (mostly) Bangalore and KL.
But then the work I'm doing now (sys admin) doesn't require the kind of intense collaboration that, say, software development on a largish project does (been there too). As for distributed tools for getting work done, give me a text-based conferencing system any day. (I'll admit my bias: I wrote CoSy (BIX, NIX, etc) back in the day). Combine that with an easy way to include sketches or markup (tried it with NAPLPS but the user interface just wasn't there yet) and you'd be (almost) all set.
Yeah, with some of the analogous stability issues. That said, though, it was Mandrake that I recommended to a client when we were building some DV applications for them; Mandrake was the first distro to include the IEEE 1394 (Firewire) drivers, so at least I didn't have to walk them through rebuilding a kernel.
Only to the extent that I tried a live CD with Beryl.Compiz on it and played with the eye candy for a little while. It worked fine, but I'm not a big enough fan of eye candy to worry about it too much. I'm not even sure what driver it loaded now.
My default distro is SUSE 10.1 (from before the Novell-MSFT deal, I've been using SUSE for years), with the radeon driver. AMD64 in 64-bit mode.
No need to release the source for Flash -- gnash is already most of the way there. If Adobe would just release the spec under a non-restrictive license that would be enough. (As currently licensed -- gratis -- you can only refer to the spec to code apps that create Flash content, not apps that play Flash files.)
I don't know what typical C++ code looked like in the early 1990s, but I'm sure it sucked.
Oh, it did. And as one who at one point was using cfront to compile their C++ (although that was more late 1980s), I have to confess that some of that suckage was mine. OTOH, we didn't have templates or try..throw..catch then (well, they were just starting to become available).
Granted it's not an alternative to the Flash file formats (SWF/FLV), but it's an alternative to Adobe's player for those.
As far as alternatives to SWF go, there aren't many options. Back in the day I used to push NAPLPS but that's getting rather long in the tooth. There's SVG which has wide if inconsistent support, I don't know if there's a way to combine video with that though.
Want an alternative to Adobe's Flash? Take a look at gnash, the GNU Project's Flash player. It's still in alpha but works with a lot of flash stuff, including eg YouTube, and on 64-bit.
There are not that many graphic-intensive games for Linux.
Not many, true, but the FlightGear flight simulator is the main reason I upgraded from a cheap generic graphics card to an ATI 9250 based card (the highest level card with FLOSS drivers based on specs ATI released back when they were doing that). (And yeah, compared to current state of the art graphics cards, 9250s are still cheap.)
I wouldn't mind something a little faster, though.
Slashdot Mirror
Software costs nothing.... Compared to the cost of supporting it.
Yep, and the ratio of software cost to support cost for both Windows and Linux is roughly the same...
Do me a favor and review the Michelson - Morley experiment and what it really proved or disproved. And remind me when they performed the experiment in the absence of a gravitational field. (And yes I'm aware of Hammar's experiments.)
;-)
For a follow on, explain how ring laser gyroscopes work.
But before that, reread the message and show me where I said anything about relativity being self-contradictory, or explain when quantum entanglement became part of relativity.
(What really gets me is why people who have no problem reconciling particle-wave duality think that proving A necessarily disproves B, even if A and B appear to be mutually exclusive.)
Well, funny hair aside, the thing about Einstein's kooky theories is that they turned out to have amazingly good predictive ability, at least on the macro scale (where large numbers tend to swamp quantum effects). Even when he thought he was wrong (the cosmological constant), he may have turned out to be right.
That makes them kind of hard to let go of.
Of course, his theories may just model an emergent behaviour of large numbers of quantum interactions, and have nothing whatsoever to do with actually explaining why those behaviours exist. But they're still useful in the domains where they've been demonstrated to work, just as Newton's theories are.
The catch is in not relying on them too blindly in domains where they haven't been adequately tested yet.
Can you prove it exists?
That depends, can you prove to a blind man that light exists? Or to a 2D being that a third dimension exists?
If I hypothesize that "spooky action at a distance" is evidence of an objective reference frame, can you come up with an experiment to prove that it is not?
See, the other explanation is that you just don't understand relativity, never mind quantum mechanics.
Well, you're reading far more into my posting than was there, but I'll bite. Please demonstrate your understanding of relativity and quantum mechanics by reconciling the two. Feel free to use as many pages as you need. For extra credit, come up with a theory of quantum gravity and suggest experiments to test it.
What? You mean there are no refuelling stops in the middle of the ocean? Who'd have thought it?
(Actually the support ships in nuclear carrier groups often refuel from fuel the carrier um, carries.)
Yes, power savings are necessary. Lower power used by the logic also means lower power needed by the cooling fans, which overall translates to less heat put out by the box, which means less cooling needed for your data center.
This is especially critical in older data centers. I know of one where they can't put more than a couple of blade enclosures in a rack because the DC wasn't designed to put that much power and cooling into one spot. Physical space is no longer the limitation.
Since there's always a demand for more computer power (and more storage), more efficient equipment means they can pack more of it in without having to build a new datacenter.
The spooky part comes in when you take that blue ball and paint it red, and the other guy's ball turns blue. Ouch.
(Yeah, I know that doesn't really happen, but some bad explanations of entanglement could lead you to think that it could.)
that's the 'weirdest' part: an interaction which an instantaneous non-local effect *but* that cannot be used to communicate faster than C??
And you'd think with that inherent self-contradiction, physicists would acknowledge that there's something fundamentally fscked with their understanding of the universe.
Yeah, they'll tell you that faster-than-C communication breaks causality and "allows things to happen before they're caused".
So you tell them that no, in an objective reference frame, event A happens before event B, but it takes a while from the photons to catch up -- much like a lightning flash and thunder clap.
And they'll tell you back again that NO! there are no objective reference frames, that's what relativity is all about.
And I say that's like a couple of 2D Flatlanders arguing that there's no third dimensional point of view. Or perhaps a couple of blind guys arguing that there's no lightning flash, and there's no way you could tell them that there's a thunderclap coming because that would be predicting the future, and it hasn't happened yet.
This is why I never pay attention to the "after mail-in rebate" price, and no longer even bother shopping at stores that advertize that price heavily (with the rebate details in teeny tiny print).
Instant rebate or nothing, baby. Of course there's no Fry's around here, so I don't even have to worry about all the other issues with shopping there (I generally shop Microcenter.)
Definitions of militia on the Web:
/
...
... .html
* civilians trained as soldiers but not part of the regular army
* the entire body of physically fit civilians eligible by law for military service; "their troops were untrained militia"; "Congress shall have power to provide for calling forth the militia"--United States Constitution
wordnet.princeton.edu/perl/webwn
* A militia is a group of citizens organized to provide paramilitary service. The word can have four slightly different meanings:* An official reserve army, composed of non-professional soldiers* The national police forces in the Russia, and other CIS countries, and the Soviet Union: Militsiya* The entire able-bodied population of a state, which can be called to arms against an invading enemy* A private, non-government force, not necessarily directly supported or sanctioned by the government
en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Militia
* a group of civilians trained as soldiers who serve full time only in emergencies
www3.newberry.org/k12maps/glossary/
* A citizen army; a military organization formed by local citizens to serve in emergencies.
library.christchurch.org.nz/FamilyHistory/Glossary
* All males, usually between the age of sixteen and sixty, were required to do local military service. Each county of a province (or state) would divide its inhabitants into companies, which in turn would form battalions or regiments. Militiamen were generally not uniformed, only sometimes paid when on actual service, and often had to provide their own arms and accoutrements.
www.royalprovincial.com/etc/gloss/gloss.htm
* a group of men who drilled on a regular basis and were considered the community's first line of defense to protect the community as a whole. In most communities, the militia elected its own officers, and the quality of militia varied from community to community. Until late in the Revolutionary War, these men wore civilian clothes to the battlefield. Both the rebel and Tory sides had their own militia forces.
pbsvideodb.pbs.org/resources/liberty/primary/gloss
* Private citizens available for military service in an emergency.
www.tsgraves.com/relics/legalLand.htm
* armed forces raised locally to protect the citizenry, and may be called upon to serve in a wider conflict as happened in the American Revolution and Civil War.
freepages.genealogy.rootsweb.com/~randyj2222/gendi ctm.html
* a part-time military force, recruited from a local area, rather than nationally.
www.durham.gov.uk/recordoffice/usp.nsf/pws/durham+ record+office+-+the+learning+zone+-+The+Story+of+J immy+Durham+-+Glossary
* The part-time civilian military force used in Great Britain, Upper Canada and the United States. See also Incorporated Militia and Sedentary Militia. [ Top of Page ]
www.archives.gov.on.ca/english/exhibits/1812/gloss ary.htm
* is a military unit made up of non-professional soldiers. In Chinese, a militia is called tuanlian.
pages.prodi
What? I thought congresscritters were a species of invertebrate.
I always liked one of Heinlein's ideas -- was it in "The Moon Is A Harsh Mistress"? -- where the Legislature has two houses -- one whose job is to pass laws, the other whose job is to repeal them.
Either that or a constitutionally mandated limit on the total verbiage of laws passed. Once that's reached, you have to repeal something before you can pass another.
(And yeah, probably holes can be picked in either of those, but it's a starting point.)
Of course I haven't RTFA, but don't they connect the tanks on these things? That seems pretty obvious, and something they've been doing with airplane fuel tanks probably since they built the first plane with more than one tank.
biomechanical killer bugs.
Runaway (with Tom Selleck and Gene Simmons, among others), although the killer bugs are more rat sized than bug sized.
Depends on the job, and the person. I telecommute all but one or two days a month (if that). But in additional to the email there's also Jabber and (too many) phone conferences. And slashdot ;-) The rest of the team that I usually work with is scattered across three time zones -- not counting the offshore folks in (mostly) Bangalore and KL.
But then the work I'm doing now (sys admin) doesn't require the kind of intense collaboration that, say, software development on a largish project does (been there too). As for distributed tools for getting work done, give me a text-based conferencing system any day. (I'll admit my bias: I wrote CoSy (BIX, NIX, etc) back in the day). Combine that with an easy way to include sketches or markup (tried it with NAPLPS but the user interface just wasn't there yet) and you'd be (almost) all set.
Mandrake was always Redhat on steroids.
Yeah, with some of the analogous stability issues. That said, though, it was Mandrake that I recommended to a client when we were building some DV applications for them; Mandrake was the first distro to include the IEEE 1394 (Firewire) drivers, so at least I didn't have to walk them through rebuilding a kernel.
Any luck with Beryl.Compiz, or AIGLX?
Only to the extent that I tried a live CD with Beryl.Compiz on it and played with the eye candy for a little while. It worked fine, but I'm not a big enough fan of eye candy to worry about it too much. I'm not even sure what driver it loaded now.
My default distro is SUSE 10.1 (from before the Novell-MSFT deal, I've been using SUSE for years), with the radeon driver. AMD64 in 64-bit mode.
No need to release the source for Flash -- gnash is already most of the way there. If Adobe would just release the spec under a non-restrictive license that would be enough. (As currently licensed -- gratis -- you can only refer to the spec to code apps that create Flash content, not apps that play Flash files.)
I don't know what typical C++ code looked like in the early 1990s, but I'm sure it sucked.
Oh, it did. And as one who at one point was using cfront to compile their C++ (although that was more late 1980s), I have to confess that some of that suckage was mine. OTOH, we didn't have templates or try..throw..catch then (well, they were just starting to become available).
Man, if you think MS's problem is lack of developer talent, you clearly haven't met anyone who works for MS.
I don't have to; I've seen their output.
I'm not sure what you'd call the process that produces that stuff, but "developer talent" isn't it.
Mind, given some of the crap I've seen lately in proprietary software from non-MS sources, maybe it's all relative.
Granted it's not an alternative to the Flash file formats (SWF/FLV), but it's an alternative to Adobe's player for those.
As far as alternatives to SWF go, there aren't many options. Back in the day I used to push NAPLPS but that's getting rather long in the tooth. There's SVG which has wide if inconsistent support, I don't know if there's a way to combine video with that though.
Want an alternative to Adobe's Flash? Take a look at gnash, the GNU Project's Flash player. It's still in alpha but works with a lot of flash stuff, including eg YouTube, and on 64-bit.
We don't need Yet Another Microsoft 'Standard'.
There are not that many graphic-intensive games for Linux.
Not many, true, but the FlightGear flight simulator is the main reason I upgraded from a cheap generic graphics card to an ATI 9250 based card (the highest level card with FLOSS drivers based on specs ATI released back when they were doing that). (And yeah, compared to current state of the art graphics cards, 9250s are still cheap.)
I wouldn't mind something a little faster, though.
It's not a thread! fork() gives you a new process, you insensitive clod!
Heh, now that's funny.
What's the big deal? That happened centuries ago, hence Sunni and Shia Islam.