Until then, this whole story is just bullshit - low-grade sci-fi, not even worth the title of "speculative fiction", more on a par with a fourth-grader's "What if George Washington could turn himself invisible and had a robot friend".
Didn't Philip K Dick write a story along those lines?;)
So you subscribe to the theory that people only create for the gain of material goods?
How then do you explain the huge numbers of people who create simply for the pleasure of creation? Why do people work in (say) scientific research when, by all accounts, it doesn't pay as well as doing something more practical? Why do people persist in writing novels when the average novelist earns substantially under average salary?
I think the human creative impulse is more basic than this, and parallels the impulse to acquire material goods. Replicators, free energy and holodecks won't end creativity. They'll just free up more time for it.
However, there are solutions where the ball self intersects in such a way that _causes_ it to enter the wormhole. wacky stuff. how one would arrange such a thing is another matter.
Clearly, you would create the wormhole in the correct location and set up the ball in the right starting position with the intention of giving it the right impulse to send it into the wormhole, at which point it would emerge from the wormhole and do the job for you...
Like a previous poster said, ANYTHING you interact with will have an effect on the timeline.
Think of the Butterfly Effect postulated by Chaos Theory.
This effect does not mean (as is usually assumed) that a small change in initial circumstances will necessarily result in a large change in outcome. It is entirely possible that some changes will have no effect at all.
Consider quantum theory for a moment: one of the consequences is that any possible action has a range of possible outcomes that are only resolved between on observation. Whole cascades of changes could take place in the unobserved portions of space and time and we might never know because the unknown method that is used to choose between all the possibilities when an observation takes place might conspire to return the timeline to the state it was in before (or at least to a state that won't cause a contradiction).
Also, it might only be parts of the timeline that have a direct influence on the time traveller that are static, anything else might be changeable. This is likely to not be very much, though.
Actually, this theory claims that doing that wouldn't work, because if you tried to go back into the past and invent time travel first, that would make a change to the timeline that is known not to be true, and would be impossible.
Essentially, this theory says that you can travel in time, as long as you're discrete. In fact, quantum mechanics will conspire to force you to be discrete.
And it's just about the best example of the principle of a local maximum (and the real meaning of the phrase "it has to get worse before it will get better") that I can point people to.
Neal is the kinda writer who will give you 900 pages of backstory on Anakin and no turn into Darth Vader. Is anyone actually surprised this is his opinion?
What, that he thinks one of the big problems with ep 3 is that you need to know too much about the backstory in order to be able to understand it? Obviously you were right onto him there.
I signed up for nytimes.com about 2 years ago. I used a unique e-mail address for it that is tracked in my database to the site I gave it to. So far, it hasn't had any spam on it.
a fair swath of folk tend to think Neal Stephenson is among the best sci-fi writers ever
And a larger proportion don't. Sure, he has his fans, and Snow Crash was a pretty influential book, but "among the best ever"? Sorry -- he doesn't live up to that at all.
anything that includes any of the "three E's": Erection, Emission or Entry.
That ain't all porn. In fact, there are plenty of countries around the world where porn featuring any of those is explicitly illegal, not just assumed to be so by the current administration.
Whereas you've apparently spent your time working out how to tell the age of a slashdot account from its numerical id. That's almost as bad as working out a system for stardates! Get a life!
As far as I'm concerned, OS == kernel. If you were to take a CS course in operating systems, or read a textbook on OS design, you sure as hell wouldn't find any mention of media players or HTML rendering engines.
It's been a while since I read it, but I'm pretty sure my copy of Operating System Concepts (I forget the authors, had pictures of dinosaurs on the cover...) had a chapter on shells. The HTML rendering engine is part of the (graphical) shell, these days, or so MS want us to believe.
The machines exist. The problems are manifold, though:
* They're big. So big, in fact, that no bookstore would want one, because they would take away a lot of shelf space that can be used for the popular books they sell lots of
* Most people don't want to buy anything that would require one. In the unusual case of somebody wanting something not on the shelf, it can be ordered in a few days. The number of customers who ask for something that's actually out of print is so small that it doesn't justify the expense of the machine.
* Few people would buy books from the machine, because it costs over twice as much to produce them. A typical 300 page paperback costs well over $10 to print. This doesn't leave much space for profit if you want to sell it at a price even approximately similar to the price of the books on the shelves.
Re:Only going to work if it became standard
on
Advocating Dvorak
·
· Score: 1
it's about as easy as switching languages.
Hmm. When I switch from C to Python, I find myself putting a semicolon on the end of every line for a little while.
As I read it, his server could be secure if it drops the HTTP connection whenever it receives a malformed request. Also, any server that doesn't support keep-alive is not going to be affected by this.
The author probably wasn't using the symbiotic loader, which keeps Office in RAM at all times for the sole purpose of faster startup times.
He specifically states he wasn't. But then, neither was I for the 7 second startup I just recorded. On a P2-400 with 96Mb RAM. Loading the application over a 54Mbit wireless network.
Your prevarications aside, Office (since 2000) doesn't require a reboot during installation (on Windows since 2000). Period. Over the years, I must have done over a thousand such installs...do you know how many of these installs required a restart? ZERO.
How do you know you've covered all possible situations? MS Office installer will almost certainly use MSI; MSI will require a reboot if and only if it is unable to replace a file during installation (since Win2K; on previous versions it requires a reboot if a service or driver was installed, I think). Failed file replacements can occur if a program is using the file that was replaced.
I don't know what files MS Office might replace, but it is entirely possible that it replaces some component that is rarely used (perhaps even not normally installed) but which might have been in use on this person's computer.
Your experiences are not necessarily representative, and you shouldn't make blanket statements about whether something is possible without understanding and knowing all the factors that may make it possible... and the system we're talking about is complex enough that I suspect there is no individual who knows it well enough to categorically state such a thing is impossible (you'd probably have to have 3 or 4 people in a conference before they'd agree to it).
94.82? WTF? Did he mean 194.82? Even that seems a bit large.
I suspect he's using NTFS disk compression.
He gives lots of indications that his system is borked. His comment about normal.dot is a sure sign that something is wrong.
Maybe, but it's a *very* common problem with MSWord. Something like 80-90% of installations I've used try to save normal.dot every time you close the application.
22 minutes to load a 4.9MB text file? That's completely outside the range of believable.
Indeed. I just did it (by copy & paste, which I think was how he said he did it) in Office97 where it took 50 seconds. Admittedly, pagination took another 2 minutes, but it was usable for further editing after those 50 seconds.
Slashdot Mirror
I thought touching up minors was illegal?
Until then, this whole story is just bullshit - low-grade sci-fi, not even worth the title of "speculative fiction", more on a par with a fourth-grader's "What if George Washington could turn himself invisible and had a robot friend".
;)
Didn't Philip K Dick write a story along those lines?
So you subscribe to the theory that people only create for the gain of material goods?
How then do you explain the huge numbers of people who create simply for the pleasure of creation? Why do people work in (say) scientific research when, by all accounts, it doesn't pay as well as doing something more practical? Why do people persist in writing novels when the average novelist earns substantially under average salary?
I think the human creative impulse is more basic than this, and parallels the impulse to acquire material goods. Replicators, free energy and holodecks won't end creativity. They'll just free up more time for it.
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This is not the link you're looking for.
Too late. Michael Crichton has stolen your idea and published a book several years prior to your invention of it.
However, there are solutions where the ball self intersects in such a way that _causes_ it to enter the wormhole. wacky stuff. how one would arrange such a thing is another matter.
Clearly, you would create the wormhole in the correct location and set up the ball in the right starting position with the intention of giving it the right impulse to send it into the wormhole, at which point it would emerge from the wormhole and do the job for you...
Like a previous poster said, ANYTHING you interact with will have an effect on the timeline.
Think of the Butterfly Effect postulated by Chaos Theory.
This effect does not mean (as is usually assumed) that a small change in initial circumstances will necessarily result in a large change in outcome. It is entirely possible that some changes will have no effect at all.
Consider quantum theory for a moment: one of the consequences is that any possible action has a range of possible outcomes that are only resolved between on observation. Whole cascades of changes could take place in the unobserved portions of space and time and we might never know because the unknown method that is used to choose between all the possibilities when an observation takes place might conspire to return the timeline to the state it was in before (or at least to a state that won't cause a contradiction).
Also, it might only be parts of the timeline that have a direct influence on the time traveller that are static, anything else might be changeable. This is likely to not be very much, though.
Actually, this theory claims that doing that wouldn't work, because if you tried to go back into the past and invent time travel first, that would make a change to the timeline that is known not to be true, and would be impossible.
Essentially, this theory says that you can travel in time, as long as you're discrete. In fact, quantum mechanics will conspire to force you to be discrete.
And it's just about the best example of the principle of a local maximum (and the real meaning of the phrase "it has to get worse before it will get better") that I can point people to.
Neal is the kinda writer who will give you 900 pages of backstory on Anakin and no turn into Darth Vader. Is anyone actually surprised this is his opinion?
What, that he thinks one of the big problems with ep 3 is that you need to know too much about the backstory in order to be able to understand it? Obviously you were right onto him there.
I signed up for nytimes.com about 2 years ago. I used a unique e-mail address for it that is tracked in my database to the site I gave it to. So far, it hasn't had any spam on it.
Hell, yeah. If they carry on much longer they'll both have the required prosthetic limbs...
LOL. You're right: every time I see it, I think Count Duckula.
a fair swath of folk tend to think Neal Stephenson is among the best sci-fi writers ever
And a larger proportion don't. Sure, he has his fans, and Snow Crash was a pretty influential book, but "among the best ever"? Sorry -- he doesn't live up to that at all.
so, you're saying dsuck(swe_{i})/dt = 0 for all i, 1 = i = 3?
Huh? How can I make my standard mobile handset talk to asterisk? I don't see any info on that in the documentation...
anything that includes any of the "three E's": Erection, Emission or Entry.
That ain't all porn. In fact, there are plenty of countries around the world where porn featuring any of those is explicitly illegal, not just assumed to be so by the current administration.
Whereas you've apparently spent your time working out how to tell the age of a slashdot account from its numerical id. That's almost as bad as working out a system for stardates! Get a life!
As far as I'm concerned, OS == kernel. If you were to take a CS course in operating systems, or read a textbook on OS design, you sure as hell wouldn't find any mention of media players or HTML rendering engines.
It's been a while since I read it, but I'm pretty sure my copy of Operating System Concepts (I forget the authors, had pictures of dinosaurs on the cover...) had a chapter on shells. The HTML rendering engine is part of the (graphical) shell, these days, or so MS want us to believe.
The machines exist. The problems are manifold, though:
* They're big. So big, in fact, that no bookstore would want one, because they would take away a lot of shelf space that can be used for the popular books they sell lots of
* Most people don't want to buy anything that would require one. In the unusual case of somebody wanting something not on the shelf, it can be ordered in a few days. The number of customers who ask for something that's actually out of print is so small that it doesn't justify the expense of the machine.
* Few people would buy books from the machine, because it costs over twice as much to produce them. A typical 300 page paperback costs well over $10 to print. This doesn't leave much space for profit if you want to sell it at a price even approximately similar to the price of the books on the shelves.
it's about as easy as switching languages.
Hmm. When I switch from C to Python, I find myself putting a semicolon on the end of every line for a little while.
Err... that wasn't what you meant, was it?
As I read it, his server could be secure if it drops the HTTP connection whenever it receives a malformed request. Also, any server that doesn't support keep-alive is not going to be affected by this.
The author probably wasn't using the symbiotic loader, which keeps Office in RAM at all times for the sole purpose of faster startup times.
He specifically states he wasn't. But then, neither was I for the 7 second startup I just recorded. On a P2-400 with 96Mb RAM. Loading the application over a 54Mbit wireless network.
Your prevarications aside, Office (since 2000) doesn't require a reboot during installation (on Windows since 2000). Period. Over the years, I must have done over a thousand such installs...do you know how many of these installs required a restart? ZERO.
How do you know you've covered all possible situations? MS Office installer will almost certainly use MSI; MSI will require a reboot if and only if it is unable to replace a file during installation (since Win2K; on previous versions it requires a reboot if a service or driver was installed, I think). Failed file replacements can occur if a program is using the file that was replaced.
I don't know what files MS Office might replace, but it is entirely possible that it replaces some component that is rarely used (perhaps even not normally installed) but which might have been in use on this person's computer.
Your experiences are not necessarily representative, and you shouldn't make blanket statements about whether something is possible without understanding and knowing all the factors that may make it possible... and the system we're talking about is complex enough that I suspect there is no individual who knows it well enough to categorically state such a thing is impossible (you'd probably have to have 3 or 4 people in a conference before they'd agree to it).
took up 164MB (94.82 according to Windows)."
94.82? WTF? Did he mean 194.82? Even that seems a bit large.
I suspect he's using NTFS disk compression.
He gives lots of indications that his system is borked. His comment about normal.dot is a sure sign that something is wrong.
Maybe, but it's a *very* common problem with MSWord. Something like 80-90% of installations I've used try to save normal.dot every time you close the application.
22 minutes to load a 4.9MB text file? That's completely outside the range of believable.
Indeed. I just did it (by copy & paste, which I think was how he said he did it) in Office97 where it took 50 seconds. Admittedly, pagination took another 2 minutes, but it was usable for further editing after those 50 seconds.