Has anybody here used the awful search interface they put up on MSDN a couple of months ago? Its hideous. It takes twice as long to find anything as its predecessor did. Googling with site:msdn.microsoft.com is often the only way of finding some documents (I had to do that to find out any information on programming NT Services without using.NET...)
Searching for a name of one of their programs ("dr watson") doesn't turn up any information on it in the knowledge base. You have to search for 'drwtsn32' to get anywhere, despite the full name of the program being mentioned in the articles about it.
Yeah, great search interface. Really inspires my confidence.
Actually, you have to define the chance of something happening as a function of how much information you have about it. Not doing so leads you to ridiculous results.
For example: if I copy a byte from/dev/random to a file, there is a 1/256 probabity that the byte is zero. This is true even after the copying has completed, despite the fact that the outcome is already determined. Otherwise you'd have to say "the probability of the byte being zero is either 0 or 1" which isn't a particularly useful statement. Probability is about dealing with the possible outcomes of information that is not known. Unless you're looking at quantum theory, at which point its about the possible outcomes of information that is not knowable, which is subtly different.
I just read the linked articles, and I didn't see any reference to the criminals' parents blaming the game. Just the victims.
I wouldn't know. I just got to the part where it describes GTA as "realistic" and gave up. I mean, what's realistic about it? The cars don't handle realistically, the guns don't handle realistically (I mean, have you ever tried holding a machine gun and firing off 99 rounds?). The way damage to vehicles is handled is very unrealistic. The game involves answering phone calls made to public phone boxes and performing jobs that are given to you. This doesn't happen. If the game were "realistic" it wouldn't be fun!
HT double clocks the Cache! so you have two cache's for the price of one!
Huh? I thought hyperthreading gave you a second instruction pipeline so that when the first one doesn't provide enough instructions for the processors parallel execution units (which have been a feature since the pentium) instructions from a second thread can be executed with the spare power.
paralellisam can be defined as the maintence of cache coherence, it is either inclusive (cray) or excluseive (rs6000), and requries a lot of bandwidth (local x-bar versus network)
Again huh? Me, I though parallelism was simply "executing more than one instruction at the same time". Certainly maintenance of cache coherence is an important design problem for building large parallel systems, but really it isn't the 'definition' of parallelism.
Where as parallel computers are not cache coherent and have a remote x-bar architechure, it all adds up to the same hypercube.
WTF does that mean? Who modded this drivel as 'informative'?
Nah. Read "The Plan for Spam" (can't remember the URL off the top of my head, but a google for that exact phrase should find it). Apparently bayesian filters actually work better on misspelled spams, because only the spam actually ever uses the misspelling...
The death of the ad hoc development style, or the saving grace? Nothing you mentioned seems like a big deal to me.
[what was mentioned was an agreement between contributors and open source projects detailing that permission to use the code is granted correctly, the contributor's employers have no interest in the code, and so on]
The FSF operate a number of their projects in a manner where if you want to contribute above a certain (fairly trivial) threshold, you need to provide this kind of paperwork.
This prevented me from contributing to the GCC project.
They require a copyright assignment, which requires a statement from your employer that releases any copyright interests that your employer may have on any code you prepare for any open source project that you work on.
My employer was not willing to sign such a document. I suspect many won't because it opens up all sorts of potential legal complications further down the road.
So, GCC lost out on the time I (and my employer) was willing to put into it. Which is a shame. Instead, we developed in-house a competing system (similar to the GCJ component of GCC).
Yes, I know we could have forked GCC, but there is a non-trivial cost in maintaining a fork of such a large codebase. When you can reimplement with a much simpler implementation to achieve what you need, I don't think there's much question which is better.
The currently prevaling legal interpretation (shared by Linus Torvalds amoung others) is that the signing key cannot be construed as part of the source code. Source code is human-readable description of what software does. A key is just 1024 bits of random noise.
An interesting interpretation. I'm not certain that it is correct, though. The GPL states:
For an executable work, complete source code means all the source code for all modules it contains, plus any associated interface definition files, plus the scripts used to control compilation and installation of the executable. However, as a special exception, the source code distributed need not include anything that is normally distributed (in either source or binary form) with the major components (compiler, kernel, and so on) of the operating system on which the executable runs, unless that component itself accompanies the executable.
I would certainly contest that the signing key is part of the 'scripts used to control compilation and installation', as it is impossible to compile and install the kernel without it. Neither is it distributed with any of 'the major components [...] of the operating system'
Besides, the BSOD is obsolete as of Windows XP. By default, it instantly reboots and then displays a dialog informing you that the compter has "recovered from a serious error" after it restarts.
That's actually a Win2K feature. I had a Win2K machine a while back that was stuck in a constant reboot - bluescreen - reboot cycle.
Should've previewed that, I know, but does anyone know why slashdot stripped out my pound signs?
I can't even get them to show up with £ - I just get this: (maybe that works for you, could just be my daft browser, a fairly old beta Mozilla...)
I don't envy anyone trying to implement robust transaction processing in PHP/MySQL, for example
MySQL's transaction handling has been working stably for me for about 2 years now, I think it is. It can be used quite easily from PHP. I don't see the issue.
I've developed web applications in Java (using Apache + Tomcat) and PHP, and I'd say PHP is definitely the cheaper and easier of them for almost all applications (Java would be my language of choice if I needed to perform complex calculations or carry out extensive business logic checks before committing transactions).
I haven't used.NET, but my guess is that in most cases it is largely indistinguishable from Java. The real benefit is that you can hire cheap monkeys who will program it in Visual BASIC, because that seems to be easier than doing it in C# (it isn't, it just looks easier, so the people who can do it are cheaper). So that's where the real saver is. Yeah, I'd say.NET is cheaper than Java because of this. Java programmers tend to be graduate level and want salaries (in the UK) of about 20-40 K. Most VB.NET positions I see advertised are in the 10-15 K range.
I've seen that code (The line 'DO 5 K = 1. 3' from the linked article, which should read 'DO 5 K = 1, 3' for correct behaviour) crop up in several places being blamed for various malfunctions in the past.
I think the reason it survives so well is because it essentially highlights a rather bad design flaw in the language - that identifiers can contain spaces and can be used without declaration.
This means that it is very hard to spot syntax errors in the language, because an error later on in the line can leave the entire start of the line as an identifier...
...able to check that none of its software is compromised and even (in a future version) prove its integrity to a remote system.
How do you do that? I mean, how do you prove that the system is secure and not just pretending to be secure by doing *almost* all of the things that would be needed to be secure?
I could understand how a system could (eg) verify a signature on a kernel in order to boot it up, but this is a Linux system, therefore:
1. Its open source. You must (by requirements of the GPL) be given everything you need to compile a derivitive work of this. If the kernel is signed, that means the keys must be supplied with the source code, otherwise part of the build environment which isn't normally shipped with the compiler or major components of the operating system isn't included.
2. Has the kernel module loading facility been disabled? If it has, its crippled and worthless. If it hasn't, then you can load a module that pretends to be part of the kernel, accesses the DRM hardware and pretends to the outside world to be a secure environment when, in fact, it isn't.
One possible problem is that if you want to move quickly, having had a page there previously can cause your own site not to start working for 24 hours after the DNS change is made; if there has never been a resolving address in the domain before that can happen immediately. So this service slows down setting up your web site by 1 day...
1. In the UK, punitive damages are very rarely awarded. So you only get compensated for your actual provable costs probably something like 95% of the time. So, awards are typically something like 20-30% of what US awards for similar incidents are. (I don't have actual figures, but my impression from widely reported cases suggests that is true).
2. It doesn't cost a fortune to defend an action. As a small company owner, if somebody got litigous with my company, I would almost certainly not be in the situation of having to settle because I couldn't afford the cost of defence. In the US that would almost certainly be the case.
3. For some reason I don't entirely understand, costs awarded against the eventual loser of the case in the UK tend to be much lower anyway. This could be because there are stricter rules about what costs are eligible, I'm not certain. But you certainly rarely here about cases in which the costs have run in to millions, or even the hundreds of thousands like this case.
1) an Armageddon style battle. Not a Last battle, but a huge, all-out, good-vs-evil battle. I think people are just getting a feeling, though they're looking externally when they should be looking internally.
(2) Lord of the Rings is a fundamentally Catholic work (sorry if I sound to some like I'm not being humble. I'm quoting Tolkein when I say that.) That is, it goes back to orthodox Christianity.
(3) Lord of the Rings is about internal moral struggles.
(4) Lord of the Rings upholds that the right will be victorious.
(5) Lord of the Rings gave birth to whole genres of fiction, storytelling, games, and so on.
Your points (2) and (5) aren't really important, I don't think. (2) may have been relevant 50 years ago, but probably isn't today, and isn't really apparent from a reading of the book anyway. (5) is basically a testimony to how successful the book was, not a reason for it to become successful.
Other than those, there are many science fiction stories that fulfil all of these criteria. Myself, I'm a big Babylon 5 fan. Babylon 5 definitely meets the remaining criteria. I'm currently writing an SF novel. It definitely has points (1) and (4). I intend to include (3) but I haven't written that section of it yet, so don't know how successful I will be.
But those others all relate to something that is lacking in our society, today, and in our lives, today. And since that lack is destroying us both internally and externally in real life, we make up for it in fantasy.
Contrast that with the 50's, when our major lack was in technology, and our fantasies (for that's what sci-fi really is) played out in that field.
That's a good point. But Science Fiction is more than that. It is intended to be thought provoking, provide puzzles and solutions for those with an analytical mind, make us ask the important questions, whatever those might be... and while you can do that in a Fantasy setting, it is in some ways easier in Science Fiction (and in Alternative History, an often overlooked related genre), largely because you are showing a society that is probably more closely related to our own, there isn't as much of an escapist attitude. So there is an assumption - the differences between this society and ours will be justified. So I can try to work out why it is the case. In Fantasy you can't do that.
And I think that is probably the reason why Fantasy is more popular (and, incidentally, I understand it always has been - this is hardly a new trend). Science Fiction relies on the reader's thoughts, like a mystery story. Without that element it rapidly devolves into 'space opera', which is a sub-genre that most people who are aware of the distinction consider inferior. Most Fantasy lacks that mystery, and makes up for it with 'magic'. Magic is a very powerful and attractive meme, and we just love hearing about it, believing for just a moment that it is possible.
So that is why most readers consider Fantasy superior to Science Fiction - they just don't want to (or cannot) expend the effort in reading the book to fully appreciate it, so its appeal is immediately limited. The appeal of Fantasy, however, is something that works for just about everyone and requires no effort from the reader other than suspension of disbelief, which is something that reading a novel effectively requires anyway.
All too often the authors focus on just the scietific aspect and totaly forget about the characters.
I have read every single Asimov book I could find because he never made that mistake. Science is the setting, the characters are the story.
I'm sorry, but there are a lot of Asimov stories which are primarily science driven, where the characters are only there to illustrate a particular aspect of his scientific idea.
Examples that spring to mind are Pate de Foie Gras (which is, BTW, an excellent story, despite lacking character and structure) and many of his 'detective' stories (where the detection is usually related to some scientific fact, for instance that Mercury's atmosphere contains a large amount of hydrogen). Also a lot of the robot short stories are driven absolutely by the consequences of his laws of robotics.
There are, however, I'll agree a lot of exceptions to this. The 'Caves of Steel' series had some interesting character driven situations, certainly, despite being a mystery about the laws of robotics again. And certainly a lot of his later works were much better in this respect.
But to say he 'never made this mistake' is a rather overly broad statement. Asimov frequently used his characters as tools to show off science. He got away with it sometimes because on many occasions, the science he was expounding was psychology...
I haven't read the book you suggest, but I struggled with a number of explanations of the effects of relativity in regard to motion (i.e. time dilation and mass increase).
In the end, it worked better when a friend pointed out to me that what _really_ matters is this: the speed of light will always appear to be the same amount faster than you, no matter how fast you travel, and will always seem to require the same amount of work to get up to (meaning of course the amount of work that would be required to accelerate to that speed if it weren't for relativity).
Most books don't seem to push that point home. They give a formula for time dilation but don't explain where it comes from (simply renormalising the time axis so that the speed of light is |v| + c), and similarly for the mass effects...
That is much easier to understand than jumping in with the effects. It's also a rational way of understanding why relativity was needed in the first place - other solutions to the problem that light appears to travel at the same velocity in all directions either place us at the centre of the universe (unlikely) or allow for variable speeds of light (which disagrees with observation).
Err, I don't think Zero Point Energy is heat. It still exists at absolute zero, that's where the name comes from. So I don't suspect thermodynamics applies to it... that is one of the reasons a lot of people have been reluctant to accept that (a) it exists and (b) you can actually achieve a net effect with it [which I guess is just a corrollary to (a)], but you can't really use one theory to disprove another. That's what observation is for...
So what? Solaris 9 booting on a six year old workstation goes this fast after optimizing the rc directories.
The original AC I was replying to suggested that 5 minutes was common. I was pointing out the error of magnitude. Also, the fact is that Linux with a modern desktop environment isn't much better.
I wasn't saying 'wow, isn't windows fast'. I was saying 'look, there isn't a lot of difference between windows and a system of the kind that I guess you prefer'.
Also, the timings here are on a Pentium 2 233Mhz processor with a fairly poor 5,400 RPM IDE disk. The 6 year old Sun workstation you talk about probably has a comparable processor (if not actually a faster one) with a reasonably high quality SCSI disk. _That_ isn't a fair comparison.
Also, most people wait for the hourglass cursor to go away in Win2K after logging in, anyway (I don't trust Windows enough to attempt work while it is still busy--that's just asking for trouble).
Well, I don't. And you know what - I've never had an issue with it. Besides, the hourglass only stays for another 5 seconds.
Actually, I have substantially optimised my Linux startup times to get it down to that. I've removed a load of non-essential services (I'm not running a mail server or web server at all now, I only really have stuff that runs from inetd and mysql running other than the absolute essentials) and moved the X startup so that it happens before a lot of other stuff has loaded.
OK, I'll admit that I haven't parallelised it beyond this, but I wouldn't expect to see a huge amount of improvement from that. Besides, most unix daemons fork and terminate the parent process before doing very much, in much the same way that most WinNT services just call StartServiceControlHandler (or whatever its called) first thing as they get into their WinMain()... there's not a lot to gain by parellelising that.
Probably because they have a contract to provide service to the spammer. The contract will have a clause saying that if you send spam we can terminate your account, but in order to make that term fair (which is a legal requirement on contracts in many countries) to the consumer you would have to provide notice and allow the consumer a reasonable time period to contest the decision before terminating the service.
This is the only legal way of dealing with it from the ISP end, and I think, unless you have experience of running an ISP, it is a little unreasonable of you to complain about things you obviously have no idea about.
Slashdot Mirror
Good link. But I think this one's better:
Something else MSN can't find...
Microsoft? Search experts?
.NET...)
Has anybody here used the awful search interface they put up on MSDN a couple of months ago? Its hideous. It takes twice as long to find anything as its predecessor did. Googling with site:msdn.microsoft.com is often the only way of finding some documents (I had to do that to find out any information on programming NT Services without using
Searching for a name of one of their programs ("dr watson") doesn't turn up any information on it in the knowledge base. You have to search for 'drwtsn32' to get anywhere, despite the full name of the program being mentioned in the articles about it.
Yeah, great search interface. Really inspires my confidence.
Actually, you have to define the chance of something happening as a function of how much information you have about it. Not doing so leads you to ridiculous results.
/dev/random to a file, there is a 1/256 probabity that the byte is zero. This is true even after the copying has completed, despite the fact that the outcome is already determined. Otherwise you'd have to say "the probability of the byte being zero is either 0 or 1" which isn't a particularly useful statement. Probability is about dealing with the possible outcomes of information that is not known. Unless you're looking at quantum theory, at which point its about the possible outcomes of information that is not knowable, which is subtly different.
For example: if I copy a byte from
I just read the linked articles, and I didn't see any reference to the criminals' parents blaming the game. Just the victims.
I wouldn't know. I just got to the part where it describes GTA as "realistic" and gave up. I mean, what's realistic about it? The cars don't handle realistically, the guns don't handle realistically (I mean, have you ever tried holding a machine gun and firing off 99 rounds?). The way damage to vehicles is handled is very unrealistic. The game involves answering phone calls made to public phone boxes and performing jobs that are given to you. This doesn't happen. If the game were "realistic" it wouldn't be fun!
This isn't a problem I have. Try using a different mirror (I use uk.imdb.com, and get addresses like uk.imdb.com/title/some-obscure-code).
HT double clocks the Cache! so you have two cache's for the price of one!
Huh? I thought hyperthreading gave you a second instruction pipeline so that when the first one doesn't provide enough instructions for the processors parallel execution units (which have been a feature since the pentium) instructions from a second thread can be executed with the spare power.
paralellisam can be defined as the maintence of cache coherence, it is either inclusive (cray) or excluseive (rs6000), and requries a lot of bandwidth (local x-bar versus network)
Again huh? Me, I though parallelism was simply "executing more than one instruction at the same time". Certainly maintenance of cache coherence is an important design problem for building large parallel systems, but really it isn't the 'definition' of parallelism.
Where as parallel computers are not cache coherent and have a remote x-bar architechure, it all adds up to the same hypercube.
WTF does that mean? Who modded this drivel as 'informative'?
Nah. Read "The Plan for Spam" (can't remember the URL off the top of my head, but a google for that exact phrase should find it). Apparently bayesian filters actually work better on misspelled spams, because only the spam actually ever uses the misspelling...
The death of the ad hoc development style, or the saving grace? Nothing you mentioned seems like a big deal to me.
[what was mentioned was an agreement between contributors and open source projects detailing that permission to use the code is granted correctly, the contributor's employers have no interest in the code, and so on]
The FSF operate a number of their projects in a manner where if you want to contribute above a certain (fairly trivial) threshold, you need to provide this kind of paperwork.
This prevented me from contributing to the GCC project.
They require a copyright assignment, which requires a statement from your employer that releases any copyright interests that your employer may have on any code you prepare for any open source project that you work on.
My employer was not willing to sign such a document. I suspect many won't because it opens up all sorts of potential legal complications further down the road.
So, GCC lost out on the time I (and my employer) was willing to put into it. Which is a shame. Instead, we developed in-house a competing system (similar to the GCJ component of GCC).
Yes, I know we could have forked GCC, but there is a non-trivial cost in maintaining a fork of such a large codebase. When you can reimplement with a much simpler implementation to achieve what you need, I don't think there's much question which is better.
The currently prevaling legal interpretation (shared by Linus Torvalds amoung others) is that the signing key cannot be construed as part of the source code. Source code is human-readable description of what software does. A key is just 1024 bits of random noise.
An interesting interpretation. I'm not certain that it is correct, though. The GPL states:
I would certainly contest that the signing key is part of the 'scripts used to control compilation and installation', as it is impossible to compile and install the kernel without it. Neither is it distributed with any of 'the major components [...] of the operating system'
Besides, the BSOD is obsolete as of Windows XP. By default, it instantly reboots and then displays a dialog informing you that the compter has "recovered from a serious error" after it restarts.
That's actually a Win2K feature. I had a Win2K machine a while back that was stuck in a constant reboot - bluescreen - reboot cycle.
Should've previewed that, I know, but does anyone know why slashdot stripped out my pound signs?
I can't even get them to show up with £ - I just get this: (maybe that works for you, could just be my daft browser, a fairly old beta Mozilla...)
I don't envy anyone trying to implement robust transaction processing in PHP/MySQL, for example
.NET, but my guess is that in most cases it is largely indistinguishable from Java. The real benefit is that you can hire cheap monkeys who will program it in Visual BASIC, because that seems to be easier than doing it in C# (it isn't, it just looks easier, so the people who can do it are cheaper). So that's where the real saver is. Yeah, I'd say .NET is cheaper than Java because of this. Java programmers tend to be graduate level and want salaries (in the UK) of about 20-40 K. Most VB.NET positions I see advertised are in the 10-15 K range.
MySQL's transaction handling has been working stably for me for about 2 years now, I think it is. It can be used quite easily from PHP. I don't see the issue.
I've developed web applications in Java (using Apache + Tomcat) and PHP, and I'd say PHP is definitely the cheaper and easier of them for almost all applications (Java would be my language of choice if I needed to perform complex calculations or carry out extensive business logic checks before committing transactions).
I haven't used
Nice article.
I've seen that code (The line 'DO 5 K = 1. 3' from the linked article, which should read 'DO 5 K = 1, 3' for correct behaviour) crop up in several places being blamed for various malfunctions in the past.
I think the reason it survives so well is because it essentially highlights a rather bad design flaw in the language - that identifiers can contain spaces and can be used without declaration.
This means that it is very hard to spot syntax errors in the language, because an error later on in the line can leave the entire start of the line as an identifier...
...able to check that none of its software is compromised and even (in a future version) prove its integrity to a remote system.
How do you do that? I mean, how do you prove that the system is secure and not just pretending to be secure by doing *almost* all of the things that would be needed to be secure?
I could understand how a system could (eg) verify a signature on a kernel in order to boot it up, but this is a Linux system, therefore:
1. Its open source. You must (by requirements of the GPL) be given everything you need to compile a derivitive work of this. If the kernel is signed, that means the keys must be supplied with the source code, otherwise part of the build environment which isn't normally shipped with the compiler or major components of the operating system isn't included.
2. Has the kernel module loading facility been disabled? If it has, its crippled and worthless. If it hasn't, then you can load a module that pretends to be part of the kernel, accesses the DRM hardware and pretends to the outside world to be a secure environment when, in fact, it isn't.
One possible problem is that if you want to move quickly, having had a page there previously can cause your own site not to start working for 24 hours after the DNS change is made; if there has never been a resolving address in the domain before that can happen immediately. So this service slows down setting up your web site by 1 day...
Here in the UK things are nearly as bad.
I would have to disagree with that.
1. In the UK, punitive damages are very rarely awarded. So you only get compensated for your actual provable costs probably something like 95% of the time. So, awards are typically something like 20-30% of what US awards for similar incidents are. (I don't have actual figures, but my impression from widely reported cases suggests that is true).
2. It doesn't cost a fortune to defend an action. As a small company owner, if somebody got litigous with my company, I would almost certainly not be in the situation of having to settle because I couldn't afford the cost of defence. In the US that would almost certainly be the case.
3. For some reason I don't entirely understand, costs awarded against the eventual loser of the case in the UK tend to be much lower anyway. This could be because there are stricter rules about what costs are eligible, I'm not certain. But you certainly rarely here about cases in which the costs have run in to millions, or even the hundreds of thousands like this case.
1) an Armageddon style battle. Not a Last battle, but a huge, all-out, good-vs-evil battle. I think people are just getting a feeling, though they're looking externally when they should be looking internally.
(2) Lord of the Rings is a fundamentally Catholic work (sorry if I sound to some like I'm not being humble. I'm quoting Tolkein when I say that.) That is, it goes back to orthodox Christianity.
(3) Lord of the Rings is about internal moral struggles.
(4) Lord of the Rings upholds that the right will be victorious.
(5) Lord of the Rings gave birth to whole genres of fiction, storytelling, games, and so on.
Your points (2) and (5) aren't really important, I don't think. (2) may have been relevant 50 years ago, but probably isn't today, and isn't really apparent from a reading of the book anyway. (5) is basically a testimony to how successful the book was, not a reason for it to become successful.
Other than those, there are many science fiction stories that fulfil all of these criteria. Myself, I'm a big Babylon 5 fan. Babylon 5 definitely meets the remaining criteria. I'm currently writing an SF novel. It definitely has points (1) and (4). I intend to include (3) but I haven't written that section of it yet, so don't know how successful I will be.
But those others all relate to something that is lacking in our society, today, and in our lives, today. And since that lack is destroying us both internally and externally in real life, we make up for it in fantasy.
Contrast that with the 50's, when our major lack was in technology, and our fantasies (for that's what sci-fi really is) played out in that field.
That's a good point. But Science Fiction is more than that. It is intended to be thought provoking, provide puzzles and solutions for those with an analytical mind, make us ask the important questions, whatever those might be... and while you can do that in a Fantasy setting, it is in some ways easier in Science Fiction (and in Alternative History, an often overlooked related genre), largely because you are showing a society that is probably more closely related to our own, there isn't as much of an escapist attitude. So there is an assumption - the differences between this society and ours will be justified. So I can try to work out why it is the case. In Fantasy you can't do that.
And I think that is probably the reason why Fantasy is more popular (and, incidentally, I understand it always has been - this is hardly a new trend). Science Fiction relies on the reader's thoughts, like a mystery story. Without that element it rapidly devolves into 'space opera', which is a sub-genre that most people who are aware of the distinction consider inferior. Most Fantasy lacks that mystery, and makes up for it with 'magic'. Magic is a very powerful and attractive meme, and we just love hearing about it, believing for just a moment that it is possible.
So that is why most readers consider Fantasy superior to Science Fiction - they just don't want to (or cannot) expend the effort in reading the book to fully appreciate it, so its appeal is immediately limited. The appeal of Fantasy, however, is something that works for just about everyone and requires no effort from the reader other than suspension of disbelief, which is something that reading a novel effectively requires anyway.
All too often the authors focus on just the scietific aspect and totaly forget about the characters.
I have read every single Asimov book I could find because he never made that mistake. Science is the setting, the characters are the story.
I'm sorry, but there are a lot of Asimov stories which are primarily science driven, where the characters are only there to illustrate a particular aspect of his scientific idea.
Examples that spring to mind are Pate de Foie Gras (which is, BTW, an excellent story, despite lacking character and structure) and many of his 'detective' stories (where the detection is usually related to some scientific fact, for instance that Mercury's atmosphere contains a large amount of hydrogen). Also a lot of the robot short stories are driven absolutely by the consequences of his laws of robotics.
There are, however, I'll agree a lot of exceptions to this. The 'Caves of Steel' series had some interesting character driven situations, certainly, despite being a mystery about the laws of robotics again. And certainly a lot of his later works were much better in this respect.
But to say he 'never made this mistake' is a rather overly broad statement. Asimov frequently used his characters as tools to show off science. He got away with it sometimes because on many occasions, the science he was expounding was psychology...
I haven't read the book you suggest, but I struggled with a number of explanations of the effects of relativity in regard to motion (i.e. time dilation and mass increase).
In the end, it worked better when a friend pointed out to me that what _really_ matters is this: the speed of light will always appear to be the same amount faster than you, no matter how fast you travel, and will always seem to require the same amount of work to get up to (meaning of course the amount of work that would be required to accelerate to that speed if it weren't for relativity).
Most books don't seem to push that point home. They give a formula for time dilation but don't explain where it comes from (simply renormalising the time axis so that the speed of light is |v| + c), and similarly for the mass effects...
That is much easier to understand than jumping in with the effects. It's also a rational way of understanding why relativity was needed in the first place - other solutions to the problem that light appears to travel at the same velocity in all directions either place us at the centre of the universe (unlikely) or allow for variable speeds of light (which disagrees with observation).
Err, I don't think Zero Point Energy is heat. It still exists at absolute zero, that's where the name comes from. So I don't suspect thermodynamics applies to it... that is one of the reasons a lot of people have been reluctant to accept that (a) it exists and (b) you can actually achieve a net effect with it [which I guess is just a corrollary to (a)], but you can't really use one theory to disprove another. That's what observation is for...
Windows 2000 - 45 seconds
So what? Solaris 9 booting on a six year old workstation goes this fast after optimizing the rc directories.
The original AC I was replying to suggested that 5 minutes was common. I was pointing out the error of magnitude. Also, the fact is that Linux with a modern desktop environment isn't much better.
I wasn't saying 'wow, isn't windows fast'. I was saying 'look, there isn't a lot of difference between windows and a system of the kind that I guess you prefer'.
Also, the timings here are on a Pentium 2 233Mhz processor with a fairly poor 5,400 RPM IDE disk. The 6 year old Sun workstation you talk about probably has a comparable processor (if not actually a faster one) with a reasonably high quality SCSI disk. _That_ isn't a fair comparison.
Also, most people wait for the hourglass cursor to go away in Win2K after logging in, anyway (I don't trust Windows enough to attempt work while it is still busy--that's just asking for trouble).
Well, I don't. And you know what - I've never had an issue with it. Besides, the hourglass only stays for another 5 seconds.
Actually, I have substantially optimised my Linux startup times to get it down to that. I've removed a load of non-essential services (I'm not running a mail server or web server at all now, I only really have stuff that runs from inetd and mysql running other than the absolute essentials) and moved the X startup so that it happens before a lot of other stuff has loaded.
OK, I'll admit that I haven't parallelised it beyond this, but I wouldn't expect to see a huge amount of improvement from that. Besides, most unix daemons fork and terminate the parent process before doing very much, in much the same way that most WinNT services just call StartServiceControlHandler (or whatever its called) first thing as they get into their WinMain()... there's not a lot to gain by parellelising that.
frankly I would love it if I could use COM on UNIX, too.
So get hacking. Here's a starting point that nearly works...
http://sourceforge.net/projects/gcom/
Probably because they have a contract to provide service to the spammer. The contract will have a clause saying that if you send spam we can terminate your account, but in order to make that term fair (which is a legal requirement on contracts in many countries) to the consumer you would have to provide notice and allow the consumer a reasonable time period to contest the decision before terminating the service.
This is the only legal way of dealing with it from the ISP end, and I think, unless you have experience of running an ISP, it is a little unreasonable of you to complain about things you obviously have no idea about.
Huh? Open Office loads in about 5 seconds on my (relatively feeble) Win98 machine.
What are you on?