If you read his FAQ, every point can be answered by Smalltalk. (And could be 30 years ago). Unfortunately I have a feeling he's never seen Smalltalk, so he's going to re-implement it poorly.
"Object-oriented programmers who do not know Smalltalk are doomed to reinvent it poorly?"
Pretty much what I came here to post, anyway. I think the only significant difference between his system and Smalltalk is that Smalltalk does not persist its state automatically, you have to ask it to do so, so if you just switch off a Smalltalk system you lose your most recent updates.
This could be implemented as a library. It seems to be basically a class which implements "auto-serializing" (maybe activated by a system callback) and make every class which needs to save data to extend it.
Not really. The point is that it applies to all data in the system. And also it isn't serializing in the traditional sense (transforming objects into a format that can be written to a stream) but is rather directly storing the in-memory representations of the objects in a persistent storage system.
In order to do this convincingly in a library, you'd need feedback from the operating system when data was modified. I don't believe most standard OSs do this.
I still don't buy it. They're throwing an abstraction layer on top of a regular system and calling it something different, but all the underlying structures are the same.
No, it doesn't look that way to me. Think about this way: Unix is built around the philosophy that everything can be treated as a file. Most other modern OSs use the same paradigm, or one strongly influenced by it.
Phantom, it seems, is built around a different way of thinking: everything's virtual memory. Your computer is a persistent chunk of virtual memory, the same size as your hard disk. Every time you modify memory, it's flushed out to disk (presumably journalled and checkpointed in such a fashion that memory corruption cannot occur). When you restart it, the memory state is loaded back in (or allowed to demand-page back in, perhaps) and the system can restart in exactly the same configuration it was in when you switched it off.
The idea isn't entirely new. Smalltalk, for instance, works similarly: it has a virtual machine with a memory image that's persisted to disk, although in this case the persistance is not automatic and continuous.
In Unix, you can implement virtual memory by storing data in a file. In Soviet Russia^W^WPhantom, you can implement a file by storing data in virtual memory.
Over time, with a traditional software system, there are enough page faults that when I roll back around to something I opened yesterday, the performance is extremely slow while all the states are being loaded back into active memory (and the states of something I'll need in 5 more hours are being written to disk).
If I'm persisting my whole filesystem in that fashion, there are quickly going to be issues.
Your argument doesn't make sense. That software is slow because it's having to go to disk to get memory that it needs. This is thousands of times slower than ordinary memory reads, so the software runs slowly until all the memory it needs gets paged back in. Your filesystem, however, you don't _expect_ to be in memory. Accessing the filesystem is usually that slow anyway, so it isn't an issue if it gets paged out.
Alternatively, you could mean that you're concerned that filesystem use will cause application memory to be paged out. This is a concern, but is easily addressed (e.g. by introducing different virtual memory pools for different types of object with rules about how far one is allowed to grow at the expense of others).
1) MS does not get nearly as much revenue from a copy of Windows as it does from a copy of Office. (This is per copy revenue, not total, and besides, even if it is smaller, it doesn't mean it is insignificant.)
Given that the pricing of copies of the most basic versions available of both are similar to each other (£70 for XP Home OEM, £60 for Office 2007 Home & Student Retail), I'm not convinced this is true. Sure, MS gets way more revenue from the advanced versions of Office, but comparitively speaking how many of those do they sell? Home & Student contains Word, Excel and Powerpoint. That's all 99% of their customers want/need.
I recycle old computers for various social organizations that dont have any money and money IS important to them, just like it is for the people who come to the food bank where I work on weekends. Money is not important to you but in many countries it is. Heck, in your own country it is.
Just this winter, I had a single mother of two whose kids go at my son's school ask me about the costs of software since she heard I knew computers. She told me she could afford a second hand computer but that the prices of Windows, Office and Norton more than she can budget for. I let her use my backup laptop for a week to see how she liked OO instead of Office on her laptop and she was amazed that for $120 I was able to find her an Intel 2.66Ghz desktop that would run Gnu-Linux nicely. She's not poor by any stretch but she still has to count her money carefully and a few hundred bucks is a big deal.
Try to think of people who arent in your financial situation when you say no one looks at price or cost. We do pretty well but I hate spending money when I dont have to.
OTOH, Microsoft don't care about these people. People who can't afford to buy Windows (~£70 for XP Home) aren't likely to be able to afford Office either (~£60 for the most basic version). Sure, there are a small number of people who'll be able to afford one and not the other, but compared to the number of people who can afford both and the number of people who can afford neither that is a tiny market.
Obviously the unknown in this algorithm is "Hold up a convenience store.
Except I'm pretty sure the average convenience store will likely have less in their till than the bat'leth cost. Those things are pricy. I managed an e-commerce site for a replica weapon shop once... their bat'leth was actually the most expensive sword in their inventory; I think it cost about £200 ($300).
GETDATE() (or pretty much any sensible implementation doing the same thing on any other database server) will return the date as a, well, date, not a string. At whichever point it gets converted is where you hit the problem. If the recordset gets read in Java, C#, C++, whatever, the driver will give you a date object, that you can convert at will in the format you wish
Unfortunately, project constraints meant I was working in VB6.
Seriously, just go buy a Zimbra license. Runs on Linux, does everything exchange does, not too pricey and it works great with outlook clients.
Including forcing you to purchase additional client licenses every time you need a new desktop. For many of us, the major benefit of open source is that we get to do stuff like adding a new computer to our networks without having to spend an hour or two going through the software licensing logs trying to work out which products we now need to purchase additional licenses for.
I'll probably get flamed, but I actually like T-SQL better than vanilla SQL for most uses.
It's been a while since I used TSQL, but I remember having enormous trouble with it last time I did use it because its implicit string->date conversion function seemed to expect the date formatted according to the server's locale, but my development server had a different locale setting (UK, where the servers actually are) to the live server (US, i.e. Windows default). Similarly, dates returned by queries were formatted in the server's locale rather than ISO format.
Here's a quote from the documentation:
Examples A. Use GET DATE to return the current date and time
This example finds the current system date and time.
SELECT GETDATE() GO
Here is the result set: July 29 1998 2:50 PM
Except, as I remember it happening, on my machine, that would be returned as "29 July 1998 14:50".
Idiotic. Made working with the damned thing extremely hard.
Whilst a million enterprises out there shrug their shoulders and think 'why would I want to wrestle with this when I could just go along with the AD stack that I know, trust and my MSCE admins love'
There are plenty of enterprises out there that would love to switch away from MS products, if they could find something that works. I worked in a bank a few years back that was using HP's (now discontinued) Exchange replacement. Their IT staff hated Exchange with a vengeance, but there was a requirement to have Outlook with all features supported and there was little alternative.
The fact that no completely free alternative to Exchange + Outlook has so far been created is a large barrier to switching. Current alternative systems require an Outlook plugin, which is uniformly not free and costs a significant fraction of the price of an Exchange CAL, making switching from Exchange an expensive proposition. A drop-in Exchange replacement could be very benificial, as could a drop-in Outlook replacement be beneficial for desktop Linux users.
I wish people would stop referring to this as zero gravity, which is a totally ridiculous name for it. As is the name "microgravity" I've seen used. Let's call it what it is: freefall.
Torture doesn't work either except as a tool to get somebody to admit to things you've already decided you want them to admit to or as a tool of terror.
Which, interestingly, is about all a lie detector is useful for as well: as a prop to convince somebody you know they're lying. It's a persuasion device, not an analytical one.
The much lower bar of simple 'negligence' is all that is required to libel private individuals.
Yes, although libelling a company is generally harder (the degree of what is considered fair comment is wider in scope) and I suspect if the scientists were doing their job even remotely properly it would be extremely hard to show negligence: they should have reams of documentation describing how they came to their conclusions, which should be more than adequate to satisfy a court that they weren't negligent.
But in the UK, if I'm not mistaken, the burden of proof lies on the accusedâ"that is to say, you have to prove that you're not being libelous (search the page for "burden of proof"). Asinine? Absolutely.
Only for the defence of truthfulness; there is also the defence of "honest opinion", which would apply here, for which the truthfulness of the statements does not have to be shown. Statements of fact are not subject to this opinion, but most of the stuff from the paper (like comparing the validity of Namesysco's product to that of astrology) would clearly come under this category.
He's right. Lie detectors do not detect lies. They detect stress levels while making a statement which, when measured and compared against a previously established baseline, allows on to *estimate* truthfulness.
The problem is, if you believe what you are saying is true, you can unknowingly tell a lie and pass.
Amusingly, the Namesysco product apparently has different outputs for 'untruthfulness' and 'inaccuracy'. I dunno how it's supposed to detect inaccuracy, but that's what it claims to be able to do.
Nemesysco's Poly-Layered Voice Analysis measures 18 parameters of speech in real-time for interrogators at police, military and secret-services agencies. Its accuracy as a lie detector has proven to be less important than its ability to more quickly pinpoint for interrogators where there are problems in a subject's story. Officers then can zero in much more quickly with their traditional interrogation techniques.
The software measures voice for a variety of parameters including deception, excitement, stress, mental effort, concentration, hesitation, anger, love and lust. It works prerecorded, over the phone and live, the company said. V Entertainment recommends it for screening phone calls, checking the truthfulness of people with whom you deal or gauging romantic interest.
Or, according to the article that was pulled, it measures momentary transient signals in the digitized recording that are more likely to be caused by a noisy signal or random[1] combination of multiple frequencies and assigns them into arbitrary classifications using a method that has no known basis in science and was invented by a man with no formal scientific training who prefers to program in (sloppy) Visual Basic. Its only benefit is in making people who are lying nervous about doing so, because they think it might work.
[1] or at least semi-chaotic, it seems based on a brief analysis.
Does this mean that Android would be illegal in the US? No.
Actually, yes. Assuming the summary is correct, any facility that enables the user to disable the click is not permitted. Providing the source code and a means to upload new firmware clearly comes under this category. Therefore, open source phone software is no longer permitted.
* Atrocity Archive by Charles Stross is obviously written by someone who knows computers and most of all sysadms very well. Although I really hope that he doesn't know what he is talking about when it comes to using computers to summon demons from the fractal dimensions...:)
For the uninitiated, and possible the initiated who just haven't seen this particular bit yet, Charlie has a short story set in the same universe as the Atrocity Archives up on tor.com [tor.com] [.com] [.com].
Re:Nope. Never.
on
Daemon
·
· Score: 5, Interesting
Yep. Also worth mentioning is Charlie Stross's Halting State, which is about crime in an MMORPG. No, really. Charlie is, I believe, the only successful novelist with a 4-digit slashdot uid.
they're going to have an expert review it in 20 minutes?
What about a change to some obscure British scifi novel, like The Last Legionary? (By Douglas Hill)
"There are currently no topic results related to your search."
It would be a problem if they actually had articles on obscure topics, but they don't. And I bet they're not planning on allowing you to create new articles. Which is another reason why Wikipedia wins every time.
What? you can read Britannica on the web? I had no idea, I've never stumbled on a Britannica link, never, not even in Google.
You don't find Britannica links in Google primarily because Britannica is a subscription service, and therefore nobody ever links to it, so it has an abysmal pagerank. Also, until recently I believe they didn't include article content beyond the first couple of sentences in pages unless you're logged in (now they include a few paragraphs of content, and have an annoying javascript nag screen to try to persuade you to subscribe), which would have seriously hampered their ability to get indexed. I'd also say their site needs serious attention from an SEO professional if they're serious about being indexed... looking at the page source I see 7 full screens of HTML before we get to the content. Any SEO will tell you that's too much, and the key to a good rank is to get your content as close to the top of the file as you can. (For comparison's sake, Wikipedia has only 3 screenfulls, most of which is within the <head> tag, whereas most of Britannica's is in the body tag.)
Besides that, it doesn't take that much power to keep the disc spinning, compared to frequent re-starts after stops.
A hard disk typically consumes about 10W to keep spinning. It consumes about 30W for roughly 2 seconds to start up. Therefore, any time it stops spinning for more than 6 seconds is a net powersave.
Slashdot Mirror
If you read his FAQ, every point can be answered by Smalltalk. (And could be 30 years ago).
Unfortunately I have a feeling he's never seen Smalltalk, so he's going to re-implement it poorly.
"Object-oriented programmers who do not know Smalltalk are doomed to reinvent it poorly?"
Pretty much what I came here to post, anyway. I think the only significant difference between his system and Smalltalk is that Smalltalk does not persist its state automatically, you have to ask it to do so, so if you just switch off a Smalltalk system you lose your most recent updates.
This could be implemented as a library. It seems to be basically a class which implements "auto-serializing" (maybe activated by a system callback) and make every class which needs to save data to extend it.
Not really. The point is that it applies to all data in the system. And also it isn't serializing in the traditional sense (transforming objects into a format that can be written to a stream) but is rather directly storing the in-memory representations of the objects in a persistent storage system.
In order to do this convincingly in a library, you'd need feedback from the operating system when data was modified. I don't believe most standard OSs do this.
(Windows 3: 1987 release; Macintosh: 1984 release; difference: 3 years)
Erm. Scratch my previous comment. Source I was looking at had the wrong date for Windows 3 release.
*blush*
I still don't buy it. They're throwing an abstraction layer on top of a regular system and calling it something different, but all the underlying structures are the same.
No, it doesn't look that way to me. Think about this way: Unix is built around the philosophy that everything can be treated as a file. Most other modern OSs use the same paradigm, or one strongly influenced by it.
Phantom, it seems, is built around a different way of thinking: everything's virtual memory. Your computer is a persistent chunk of virtual memory, the same size as your hard disk. Every time you modify memory, it's flushed out to disk (presumably journalled and checkpointed in such a fashion that memory corruption cannot occur). When you restart it, the memory state is loaded back in (or allowed to demand-page back in, perhaps) and the system can restart in exactly the same configuration it was in when you switched it off.
The idea isn't entirely new. Smalltalk, for instance, works similarly: it has a virtual machine with a memory image that's persisted to disk, although in this case the persistance is not automatic and continuous.
In Unix, you can implement virtual memory by storing data in a file. In Soviet Russia^W^WPhantom, you can implement a file by storing data in virtual memory.
Over time, with a traditional software system, there are enough page faults that when I roll back around to something I opened yesterday, the performance is extremely slow while all the states are being loaded back into active memory (and the states of something I'll need in 5 more hours are being written to disk).
If I'm persisting my whole filesystem in that fashion, there are quickly going to be issues.
Your argument doesn't make sense. That software is slow because it's having to go to disk to get memory that it needs. This is thousands of times slower than ordinary memory reads, so the software runs slowly until all the memory it needs gets paged back in. Your filesystem, however, you don't _expect_ to be in memory. Accessing the filesystem is usually that slow anyway, so it isn't an issue if it gets paged out.
Alternatively, you could mean that you're concerned that filesystem use will cause application memory to be paged out. This is a concern, but is easily addressed (e.g. by introducing different virtual memory pools for different types of object with rules about how far one is allowed to grow at the expense of others).
Macintosh has always called directories folders, so it predates Windows 3 by at least 6 years.
Or, you know, 3 years if you know arithmetic.
(Windows 3: 1987 release; Macintosh: 1984 release; difference: 3 years)
1) MS does not get nearly as much revenue from a copy of Windows as it does from a copy of Office. (This is per copy revenue, not total, and besides, even if it is smaller, it doesn't mean it is insignificant.)
Given that the pricing of copies of the most basic versions available of both are similar to each other (£70 for XP Home OEM, £60 for Office 2007 Home & Student Retail), I'm not convinced this is true. Sure, MS gets way more revenue from the advanced versions of Office, but comparitively speaking how many of those do they sell? Home & Student contains Word, Excel and Powerpoint. That's all 99% of their customers want/need.
OTOH, Microsoft don't care about these people. People who can't afford to buy Windows (~£70 for XP Home) aren't likely to be able to afford Office either (~£60 for the most basic version). Sure, there are a small number of people who'll be able to afford one and not the other, but compared to the number of people who can afford both and the number of people who can afford neither that is a tiny market.
1. Buy Klingon Bat'leth
2. ????
3. Profit!
Obviously the unknown in this algorithm is "Hold up a convenience store.
Except I'm pretty sure the average convenience store will likely have less in their till than the bat'leth cost. Those things are pricy. I managed an e-commerce site for a replica weapon shop once... their bat'leth was actually the most expensive sword in their inventory; I think it cost about £200 ($300).
GETDATE() (or pretty much any sensible implementation doing the same thing on any other database server) will return the date as a, well, date, not a string. At whichever point it gets converted is where you hit the problem. If the recordset gets read in Java, C#, C++, whatever, the driver will give you a date object, that you can convert at will in the format you wish
Unfortunately, project constraints meant I was working in VB6.
Seriously, just go buy a Zimbra license. Runs on Linux, does everything exchange does, not too pricey and it works great with outlook clients.
Including forcing you to purchase additional client licenses every time you need a new desktop. For many of us, the major benefit of open source is that we get to do stuff like adding a new computer to our networks without having to spend an hour or two going through the software licensing logs trying to work out which products we now need to purchase additional licenses for.
I'll probably get flamed, but I actually like T-SQL better than vanilla SQL for most uses.
It's been a while since I used TSQL, but I remember having enormous trouble with it last time I did use it because its implicit string->date conversion function seemed to expect the date formatted according to the server's locale, but my development server had a different locale setting (UK, where the servers actually are) to the live server (US, i.e. Windows default). Similarly, dates returned by queries were formatted in the server's locale rather than ISO format.
Here's a quote from the documentation:
Except, as I remember it happening, on my machine, that would be returned as "29 July 1998 14:50".
Idiotic. Made working with the damned thing extremely hard.
Whilst a million enterprises out there shrug their shoulders and think 'why would I want to wrestle with this when I could just go along with the AD stack that I know, trust and my MSCE admins love'
There are plenty of enterprises out there that would love to switch away from MS products, if they could find something that works. I worked in a bank a few years back that was using HP's (now discontinued) Exchange replacement. Their IT staff hated Exchange with a vengeance, but there was a requirement to have Outlook with all features supported and there was little alternative.
The fact that no completely free alternative to Exchange + Outlook has so far been created is a large barrier to switching. Current alternative systems require an Outlook plugin, which is uniformly not free and costs a significant fraction of the price of an Exchange CAL, making switching from Exchange an expensive proposition. A drop-in Exchange replacement could be very benificial, as could a drop-in Outlook replacement be beneficial for desktop Linux users.
I wish people would stop referring to this as zero gravity, which is a totally ridiculous name for it. As is the name "microgravity" I've seen used. Let's call it what it is: freefall.
Torture doesn't work either except as a tool to get somebody to admit to things you've already decided you want them to admit to or as a tool of terror.
Which, interestingly, is about all a lie detector is useful for as well: as a prop to convince somebody you know they're lying. It's a persuasion device, not an analytical one.
The much lower bar of simple 'negligence' is all that is required to libel private individuals.
Yes, although libelling a company is generally harder (the degree of what is considered fair comment is wider in scope) and I suspect if the scientists were doing their job even remotely properly it would be extremely hard to show negligence: they should have reams of documentation describing how they came to their conclusions, which should be more than adequate to satisfy a court that they weren't negligent.
But in the UK, if I'm not mistaken, the burden of proof lies on the accusedâ"that is to say, you have to prove that you're not being libelous (search the page for "burden of proof"). Asinine? Absolutely.
Only for the defence of truthfulness; there is also the defence of "honest opinion", which would apply here, for which the truthfulness of the statements does not have to be shown. Statements of fact are not subject to this opinion, but most of the stuff from the paper (like comparing the validity of Namesysco's product to that of astrology) would clearly come under this category.
IANAL, etc.
He's right. Lie detectors do not detect lies. They detect stress levels while making a statement which, when measured and compared against a previously established baseline, allows on to *estimate* truthfulness.
The problem is, if you believe what you are saying is true, you can unknowingly tell a lie and pass.
Amusingly, the Namesysco product apparently has different outputs for 'untruthfulness' and 'inaccuracy'. I dunno how it's supposed to detect inaccuracy, but that's what it claims to be able to do.
Nemesysco's Poly-Layered Voice Analysis measures 18 parameters of speech in real-time for interrogators at police, military and secret-services agencies. Its accuracy as a lie detector has proven to be less important than its ability to more quickly pinpoint for interrogators where there are problems in a subject's story. Officers then can zero in much more quickly with their traditional interrogation techniques.
The software measures voice for a variety of parameters including deception, excitement, stress, mental effort, concentration, hesitation, anger, love and lust. It works prerecorded, over the phone and live, the company said. V Entertainment recommends it for screening phone calls, checking the truthfulness of people with whom you deal or gauging romantic interest.
Or, according to the article that was pulled, it measures momentary transient signals in the digitized recording that are more likely to be caused by a noisy signal or random[1] combination of multiple frequencies and assigns them into arbitrary classifications using a method that has no known basis in science and was invented by a man with no formal scientific training who prefers to program in (sloppy) Visual Basic. Its only benefit is in making people who are lying nervous about doing so, because they think it might work.
[1] or at least semi-chaotic, it seems based on a brief analysis.
Does this mean that Android would be illegal in the US?
No.
Actually, yes. Assuming the summary is correct, any facility that enables the user to disable the click is not permitted. Providing the source code and a means to upload new firmware clearly comes under this category. Therefore, open source phone software is no longer permitted.
* Atrocity Archive by Charles Stross is obviously written by someone who knows computers and most of all sysadms very well. Although I really hope that he doesn't know what he is talking about when it comes to using computers to summon demons from the fractal dimensions... :)
For the uninitiated, and possible the initiated who just haven't seen this particular bit yet, Charlie has a short story set in the same universe as the Atrocity Archives up on tor.com [tor.com] [.com] [.com].
Yep. Also worth mentioning is Charlie Stross's Halting State, which is about crime in an MMORPG. No, really. Charlie is, I believe, the only successful novelist with a 4-digit slashdot uid.
they're going to have an expert review it in 20 minutes?
What about a change to some obscure British scifi novel, like The Last Legionary? (By Douglas Hill)
"There are currently no topic results related to your search."
It would be a problem if they actually had articles on obscure topics, but they don't. And I bet they're not planning on allowing you to create new articles. Which is another reason why Wikipedia wins every time.
What? you can read Britannica on the web? I had no idea, I've never stumbled on a Britannica link, never, not even in Google.
You don't find Britannica links in Google primarily because Britannica is a subscription service, and therefore nobody ever links to it, so it has an abysmal pagerank. Also, until recently I believe they didn't include article content beyond the first couple of sentences in pages unless you're logged in (now they include a few paragraphs of content, and have an annoying javascript nag screen to try to persuade you to subscribe), which would have seriously hampered their ability to get indexed. I'd also say their site needs serious attention from an SEO professional if they're serious about being indexed... looking at the page source I see 7 full screens of HTML before we get to the content. Any SEO will tell you that's too much, and the key to a good rank is to get your content as close to the top of the file as you can. (For comparison's sake, Wikipedia has only 3 screenfulls, most of which is within the <head> tag, whereas most of Britannica's is in the body tag.)
Besides that, it doesn't take that much power to keep the disc spinning, compared to frequent re-starts after stops.
A hard disk typically consumes about 10W to keep spinning. It consumes about 30W for roughly 2 seconds to start up. Therefore, any time it stops spinning for more than 6 seconds is a net powersave.