The number of multiplication problems that can be "instantly" solved by the times tables is such a tiny fraction of the set possible problems, that it's really negligible.
I suspect that some people who spent a lot of effort to memorize the tables before calculators were available would rather require new students to continue the tradition than admit that their hard-earned skill was obsolete and virtually worthless in the current century.
But miracles go beyond the normal laws (regardless if those laws are from God or not). By definition you can't use science to prove them or base a science upon them because they are exceptions.
People who wish to promote creationism and/or ID either don't understand the definition of the supernatural or simply want religion (Christian religion in particular) to be taught in school and are willing to promote a deception in order to achieve that goal. The fact that such deception is against one of the commandments they claim to believe in apparently isn't a problem for those in the latter category.
What I find most interesting about the attacking of evolutionary theory by ID proponents is that even if evolution were proven 100% incorrect, it would provide zero evidence that ID is true.
There are an infinite number of theories one could devise for how life and man appeared on earth, proving any of them wrong isn't going to be evidence in favor of another unless they are exact logical opposites. This is not the case with evolution and ID.
Funny you mention that. Remember that big uproar a few weeks ago about the US National Anthem being translated into Spanish? Yeah, we want to keep the official language of the US the one approved by King George! If wanted to speak something else, we would have had a revolution!
"Likewise me with binary formats. While they have their place (I notice that TCP/IP headers aren't compressed XML), neither do they make a lot of sense in many of the places people want to use them. Using them as a wrapper around human-generated text seems to be one of those places."
But ASCII is a binary format, a very popular format to be sure, but binary nonetheless. There's no special relationship between "human-generated text" and ASCII. We have become so used to using ASCII that we sometimes think it is equivalent to text, but it isn't.
"A visual {HT,X}ML interpreter wasn't the best counterexample you could have picked."
I think it illustrated my point rather well. I suspect you missed it.
"But encodings are far more universal than formats. Any basic frequency analysis would immediately reveal that an ASCII document was 1) composed of 8-bit bytes, and 2) "A"=65, "B"=66, etc. That's many orders of magnitude easier than, say, reverse engineering DOC without access to a program that generates files in that format."
I think you're making a lot of assumptions about what conditions 100 years in the future will be like. Perhaps they'll be using characters rather than letters and expect to find bitmaps in the documents rather than encodings. Who knows?
Sorry. When a person doesn't want to waste their time, they just don't post. When they post and all they say is "never mind", I just assume that they don't have an argument.
"The primary purpose is to encourage entrepreneurism."
Actually there were far more individuals (proportionaly) running their own businesses before the rise of corporations than after, so I guess they failed.
"...and it can also be written with any program that can read and write text."
Yes an ASCII file can be written by any program that understands the (binary) format ASCII just as a file in another binary format can be read by any program that understand its binary format. So What?
The infatuation that some people have for ASCII seems quite bizarre to me. We have no problem requiring users to use new tools such as browsers to achieve some goal, but somehow it's considered a sin for developers to use a non-ASCII tool to develop or maintain an application even if the result is a significant performance boost.
"100 years from now, I'll still be able to glean the content of OpenDocument files with any program that understands by-then legacy encodings like ASCII. If a binary spec is lost, though, so are the documents written with it."
Any program that that understands a particular format (ASCII or otherwise) will still be able to understand it 100 years from now (assuming the media is still readable). If the binary spec for ASCII were lost, you'd be just as SOL as you would be with any other spec.
Don't forget that the primary purpose of corporations is to avoid personal liability and responsibility. It is both difficult to jail a corporation or jail individuals working for a corporation for corporate misbehavior.
The claim was that.Net was just a "reimplementation of Java with different semantics." Whether the features in.NET that weren't in Java have been "floating around for years" doesn't support that claim. In fact most ideas in Java had been around for years and most of them had been implemented before Java was created. This is true of all new languages. So what?
Yes, they probably have exchanged information with Linux servers and have spoken on the phone to corporations that run Linux, but they haven't run Linux on their own machines.
"How many people installed.Net 1.1 on their Windows 98/2k boxes? All it took was a checkbox on Windows Update...but I NEVER saw it installed on a desktop until XP required it."
XP doesn't require any version of.Net, but it would make things a lot easier for.Net developers if it did.
"Then Microsoft came up with.NET and the CLR, which when you think about it, is a reimplementation of Java with different semantics."
If this is true then apparently MS implemented Java features in.NET that Sun didn't even know about until after.NET was available. I wonder how that is possible?
If the data is generated (by a data acquistion system for example) rather than entered by humans, the database just adds an unnessary step. It typically isn't very useful to process such data using SQL.
For most languages there is no standard commands for compiling, linking, etc. The commands and options depend on the platform and the vendor. So knowing how to use these commands for a particular CLI toolset is no more fundamental than knowing how do the equivalent for a particular IDE.
How did the Microsoft ruling support competition? Because there's certainly no doubt that it supported competitors. Just look at the money that Sun and Time Warner got out of it. That money didn't come from a new competitive landscape, it came directly from MS.
Slashdot Mirror
The number of multiplication problems that can be "instantly" solved by the times tables is such a tiny fraction of the set possible problems, that it's really negligible.
I suspect that some people who spent a lot of effort to memorize the tables before calculators were available would rather require new students to continue the tradition than admit that their hard-earned skill was obsolete and virtually worthless in the current century.
But miracles go beyond the normal laws (regardless if those laws are from God or not). By definition you can't use science to prove them or base a science upon them because they are exceptions.
People who wish to promote creationism and/or ID either don't understand the definition of the supernatural or simply want religion (Christian religion in particular) to be taught in school and are willing to promote a deception in order to achieve that goal. The fact that such deception is against one of the commandments they claim to believe in apparently isn't a problem for those in the latter category.
What I find most interesting about the attacking of evolutionary theory by ID proponents is that even if evolution were proven 100% incorrect, it would provide zero evidence that ID is true.
There are an infinite number of theories one could devise for how life and man appeared on earth, proving any of them wrong isn't going to be evidence in favor of another unless they are exact logical opposites. This is not the case with evolution and ID.
What point?
Funny you mention that. Remember that big uproar a few weeks ago about the US National Anthem being translated into Spanish? Yeah, we want to keep the official language of the US the one approved by King George! If wanted to speak something else, we would have had a revolution!
"Likewise me with binary formats. While they have their place (I notice that TCP/IP headers aren't compressed XML), neither do they make a lot of sense in many of the places people want to use them. Using them as a wrapper around human-generated text seems to be one of those places."
But ASCII is a binary format, a very popular format to be sure, but binary nonetheless. There's no special relationship between "human-generated text" and ASCII. We have become so used to using ASCII that we sometimes think it is equivalent to text, but it isn't.
"A visual {HT,X}ML interpreter wasn't the best counterexample you could have picked."
I think it illustrated my point rather well. I suspect you missed it.
"But encodings are far more universal than formats. Any basic frequency analysis would immediately reveal that an ASCII document was 1) composed of 8-bit bytes, and 2) "A"=65, "B"=66, etc. That's many orders of magnitude easier than, say, reverse engineering DOC without access to a program that generates files in that format."
I think you're making a lot of assumptions about what conditions 100 years in the future will be like. Perhaps they'll be using characters rather than letters and expect to find bitmaps in the documents rather than encodings. Who knows?
Sorry. When a person doesn't want to waste their time, they just don't post. When they post and all they say is "never mind", I just assume that they don't have an argument.
"The primary purpose is to encourage entrepreneurism."
Actually there were far more individuals (proportionaly) running their own businesses before the rise of corporations than after, so I guess they failed.
"...and it can also be written with any program that can read and write text."
Yes an ASCII file can be written by any program that understands the (binary) format ASCII just as a file in another binary format can be read by any program that understand its binary format. So What?
The infatuation that some people have for ASCII seems quite bizarre to me. We have no problem requiring users to use new tools such as browsers to achieve some goal, but somehow it's considered a sin for developers to use a non-ASCII tool to develop or maintain an application even if the result is a significant performance boost.
"100 years from now, I'll still be able to glean the content of OpenDocument files with any program that understands by-then legacy encodings like ASCII. If a binary spec is lost, though, so are the documents written with it."
Any program that that understands a particular format (ASCII or otherwise) will still be able to understand it 100 years from now (assuming the media is still readable). If the binary spec for ASCII were lost, you'd be just as SOL as you would be with any other spec.
Don't forget that the primary purpose of corporations is to avoid personal liability and responsibility. It is both difficult to jail a corporation or jail individuals working for a corporation for corporate misbehavior.
The claim was that .Net was just a "reimplementation of Java with different semantics." Whether the features in .NET that weren't in Java have been "floating around for years" doesn't support that claim. In fact most ideas in Java had been around for years and most of them had been implemented before Java was created. This is true of all new languages. So what?
Yes, they probably have exchanged information with Linux servers and have spoken on the phone to corporations that run Linux, but they haven't run Linux on their own machines.
"How many people installed .Net 1.1 on their Windows 98/2k boxes? All it took was a checkbox on Windows Update...but I NEVER saw it installed on a desktop until XP required it."
.Net, but it would make things a lot easier for .Net developers if it did.
XP doesn't require any version of
Most computer users have never run Linux in any way or have any contact with that text editor with illusions of grandeur that is Emacs.
"Then Microsoft came up with .NET and the CLR, which when you think about it, is a reimplementation of Java with different semantics."
.NET that Sun didn't even know about until after .NET was available. I wonder how that is possible?
If this is true then apparently MS implemented Java features in
Well, I didn't say that a database couldn't be used. I just said that it wasn't necessary or particularly useful in some scenarios.
By crippled tool do you mean MATLAB?
I don't know anything about R, so I can't comment on it.
The purpose of computers is to satisfy lazy people. Non-lazy people just perform the work with pencil and paper.
"That's fine, as long as you realize you're using a hack...you are absolutely NOT using the 'correct' tool for the job here."
Well, at least you put the word "correct" in quotes. Internet applications like Slashdot are a hack too but it doesn't stop you from using it.
Not all companies that do R&D signal analysis are large enough to have an R&D department or can afford to provide MATLAB for all engineers.
If the data is generated (by a data acquistion system for example) rather than entered by humans, the database just adds an unnessary step. It typically isn't very useful to process such data using SQL.
For most languages there is no standard commands for compiling, linking, etc. The commands and options depend on the platform and the vendor. So knowing how to use these commands for a particular CLI toolset is no more fundamental than knowing how do the equivalent for a particular IDE.
Complaints about moderation are always Ontopic on Slashdot by defintion.
Hey I can do this all day. Bring on the next brain-dead mod:)
How did the Microsoft ruling support competition? Because there's certainly no doubt that it supported competitors. Just look at the money that Sun and Time Warner got out of it. That money didn't come from a new competitive landscape, it came directly from MS.