Unix is not built around the shell. The shell is just a normal executable (program, software, ice, whatever you call it) that uses Unix system calls to become a command interface.
The Unix shell has no knowledge of what the other executables or scripts that you execute with it do and the OS doesn't require text to be passed between programs. The unix philosophy is that everything is a stream of bytes and programs can do with them whatever they want.
The advantage of having a program output text rather than some object structure, is that it's output can be trivially displayed (i.e., without further translation). So, if I type "ls" under Unix, I can read the actual file names.
The disadvantage is that information gets lost. E.g., "ls a*" displays file names next to each other, doesn't display the path name or other information. When you ask it to do so, its output becomes more complex to parse for other programs in the pipe.
It seems the PowerShell tries to overcome this problem by having "ls a*" (or "dir a*.*":-) output objects instead of text and then doing the translating for you only at display time (correct me if I'm wrong). That way, when you pipe "ls a*" output into another program, that program has all information it needs about the files you were looking for.
If that's the case, the PowerShell is going to be somewhat inconsistent and tricky to deal with for people who are used to the (IMHO simple and elegant) idea that "ls > file; wc file" is the same as "ls | wc".
You can only trivially compute the source of an EEG signal: it is the whole head. For the rest, it is unsolvable (it's known as Helmholtz's inverse problem). Where I work (http://www.fcdonders.nl/), much EEG related research makes an attempt to estimate the source of the *difference* of two signals. That's probably what you saw in Aachen. And even that is very problematic. It basically just works under rather heavy assumptions about the nature of the source and the fact that there is only one source. And even that requires hours of computation on modern PCs and doesn't always give a satisfactory result even when the data of 20 to 30 subjects over one hour of measuring are used. Individual data is much, much noisier, so I would say that localization of an EEG component is impossible. That, plus the fact that these simple devices don't have an eye or jaw electrode to filter out the effect of muscle activity (which makes the signal really noisy).
MEG signals are much easier to localize, but I don't think that that will become mainstream any time soon, given the fact that it requires supercooling...
The other Brain-Computer-Interfaces rely on very simple signal processing. E.g., if you relax, the EEG signal will show a change in the power around 10Hz (called the alpha frequency). But that doesn't provide enough information for controlling an interface.
And "whole-cell patch clamping" and fMRI are definitely *not* an alternative. For the first, someone needs to open up your head and attempt to locate a suitable neuron (which requires you to be conscious, by the way), and the temporal resolution of fMRI is not really great and the machines are huge and expensive and require supercooling and at least a 1.5T magnetic field (which might be a bit too strong). But if you don't mind a game with the responsiveness of an oil tanker, you can play "pong" with fMRI: http://www.nature.com/news/2004/040823/full/040823 -18.html.
Who profits from a closed driver? It's obvious that nVidia and ATI are the first to profit from such a deal, but to them it probably means very little. Linux has a small market share and game fanatics (basically anyone who pays for an expensive card) will already have a Windows installation. So creating a Linux driver is only going to profit them marginally.
The Linux community might also profit from having non-open source support for graphic cards. It might be an incentive for certain companies to start porting their software to Linux.
Who profits from open source drivers? As far as I can see, only the competitors of the company that open sources its drivers. The Linux community will gain some knowledge and expertise in developing, but that would be considered marginal by most Linux users.
Consequently, the short-term "economical" decision would be in favour of accepting closed source drivers if you want the Linux community as a group of users to prosper. If you are more interested in development and see Linux as your main tool in this, you might insist on having open source software only.
The Wright brothers did not have such a great insight into aerodynamics, they had the great idea of building a wind tunnel. And because they were such good mechanics, and invested very much time, they could pull it off. Gutenberg is somewhat of a mystery.
None of the two applies to the Orion hype. Yes, it is possible that someone sees what's been wrong in a flash of inspiration, but the description points at an application of older techniques (trying to guess the topic from running text). So, I really wonder what triggered Google's behaviour.
To define the concept of 'change' you really need a framework of time, or at least of some continuous parameter, in which it can happen.
Still something happened at t = 0. If this wasn't caused by something that happened before that moment (since you claim there is no before), how did it happen? What caused it? These are the questions that boggle the normal mind and need an answer before accepting a theory as wild as the Big Bang.
At time t=0, there was the entire Universe, in a very hot and dense state.
Excuse me, but doesn't being "hot" imply (potential) movement and therefore the existence of time?
The guy must have invented something absolutely bloody amazing. I mean, it's not like similar technology hasn't been around for ages now (check contributions to the TREC (http://trec.nist.gov/) conferences. Some of the submissions reach a level of sophistication Google can only dream of. And the algorithms are published.
So, what's up with this "Orion" thing? What insanely great insight into language processing can a CS student have that whole teams of experts still didn't get?
And I'm saying his/her argument why it isn't legitimate isn't convincing. He/she should explain how a change can happen when there is no time, otherwise there is no Big Bang.
That's the problem, yes. Logic seems to dictate that either you assume you've got no idea what existed at T 0 and stop claiming there was nothing; otherwise, you have to separate the ideas "change" and "time", i.e. define timeless change (since going from nothing to something constitutes a change).
And it is precisely the causility at t=0 that causes the problems for the normal person, as I wrote in my post. If you can separate time from cause and effect or change, then fine, otherwise you haven't got a leg to stand on. How did a change occur in a timeless, static, total void? If you cannot answer that question satisfyingly, it's your problem. It's the age old question: Who created God? The result is that either you stop believing in God (aka. give up the notion that all of the Big Bang theory is correct), or you stop believing in logic (which is the foundation of the Big Bang theory). So there you are.
Then you must answer the question how there can be an event when there is no time. How can you accept that from a total void without change (as change implies time) something jumps into existence?
Until you can say how that is possible, the cause of the Big Bang is problematic. It's the same as answering "Who created God?"
A priori refers to Kant. In "Kritik der reinen Vernunft", he comes to the conclusion that time and space are a priori. That is not the modern cognitive way of describing how our mind works, but it closely connects to it: we are pre-wired for experiencing time and space and we do not learn it. It is innate, so it is a given.
A priori does indeed not equal absolute, but that is the way time is experienced. Time paradoxes are contradictions for most people. If I would tell the average student here that time goes slower when you go faster, he/she would not understand, because he/she does not have the concept of time that you have. That's what's causing all the havoc in this discussion.
Playing with words is what it is. One writer uses a different meaning of the word "time" than the other. The fact that physics cannot define time without a universe, has no meaning for a normal person who experiences time as a given, a priori, absolute. Saying that it is undefined doesn't take away the legimitate question what existed before the Big Bang. "No idea" would have been a better answer than "it didn't exist".
All other arguments, such as "what is north of the north pole", are not related to this problem. They describe other definition problems.
I think the original poster would be happy if you could answer him why the big bang occurred when there was no time. If you can distangle cause and effect from time, he might concur.
It does the injection via buffer overflow. In a secure environment, RFID tags can be supposed to hold only a limited amount of data, e.g. a 64 byte code number with some kind of verification. If the application stops reading after 64 bytes, you can put as much SQL on the tag as you can, but it won't get injected.
Don't misinterpret me: I think RFID is a bad idea, but blowing up airports using a buffer overflow on a malicious tag can easily be prevented.
Not only this, but a single check on the length of the tag would be sufficient against this attack. So in well-designed software there would only be one place where to check for length. It's not like certain well-known operating systems, that have unguarded buffers in dozens of places. That seems to diminish the risk quite a lot. Not to mention that any organization that takes its security serious, will probably set up a warning system for malicious RFID tags, which will expose attackers quite quickly, since they're likely to be physically nearby.
While I like the Oscar Wildeish style of your comment, the commentator is right: your post is one of the higher forms of obviousness. Your pride may be hurt, but there's no need to start calling names.
Slashdot isn't only about breaking tech news; it's about keeping geeks generally informed.
So, what's next? ls -h? Regular expressions? tee?
Sorry that you wasted a couple seconds reading the summary
Slashdot only publishes 20 to 30 stories per day, and it's annoying enough to find Star Wars trivia between them. There is a special "Linux" section that is devoted to stuff like this, but even there the level is higher. So what's the point of publishing this on the front page?
Hindsight is always perfect, but I really should have added an irony warning symbol.
Because there is not just one moderator. Everybody can moderate. So there are always a few people who think that's funny. But by not being an Anonymous Coward, but logging in instead, you can set a threshold to all posts, which will exclude most of them...
This is Slashdot. It's not your www.i-am-a-grandmother-who-has-been-saddled-up-by- her-grandson-with-linux-and-has-just-discovered-th e-command-line.com People here know how to deal with linux and are interested in more complex things and in news. This is neither. Although I have to agree with the person that wrote "give me another xbox story instead"...
So, people don't know how to interpret the output of ps? And that's a Slashdot frontpage story? What have I done wrong in my settings to deserve such trivial items?
A cycle is a chain of connections that connects to its own starting point. Something like A -> B -> C -> A. If you unlink A, it won't be deleted, since there is still a reference to it (namely C). Consequently, the whole chain will stay in memory. If your app produces such circular data structures regularly, memory will slowly fill up.
Slashdot Mirror
Unix is not built around the shell. The shell is just a normal executable (program, software, ice, whatever you call it) that uses Unix system calls to become a command interface.
:-) output objects instead of text and then doing the translating for you only at display time (correct me if I'm wrong). That way, when you pipe "ls a*" output into another program, that program has all information it needs about the files you were looking for.
The Unix shell has no knowledge of what the other executables or scripts that you execute with it do and the OS doesn't require text to be passed between programs. The unix philosophy is that everything is a stream of bytes and programs can do with them whatever they want.
The advantage of having a program output text rather than some object structure, is that it's output can be trivially displayed (i.e., without further translation). So, if I type "ls" under Unix, I can read the actual file names.
The disadvantage is that information gets lost. E.g., "ls a*" displays file names next to each other, doesn't display the path name or other information. When you ask it to do so, its output becomes more complex to parse for other programs in the pipe.
It seems the PowerShell tries to overcome this problem by having "ls a*" (or "dir a*.*"
If that's the case, the PowerShell is going to be somewhat inconsistent and tricky to deal with for people who are used to the (IMHO simple and elegant) idea that "ls > file; wc file" is the same as "ls | wc".
You can only trivially compute the source of an EEG signal: it is the whole head. For the rest, it is unsolvable (it's known as Helmholtz's inverse problem). Where I work (http://www.fcdonders.nl/), much EEG related research makes an attempt to estimate the source of the *difference* of two signals. That's probably what you saw in Aachen. And even that is very problematic. It basically just works under rather heavy assumptions about the nature of the source and the fact that there is only one source. And even that requires hours of computation on modern PCs and doesn't always give a satisfactory result even when the data of 20 to 30 subjects over one hour of measuring are used. Individual data is much, much noisier, so I would say that localization of an EEG component is impossible. That, plus the fact that these simple devices don't have an eye or jaw electrode to filter out the effect of muscle activity (which makes the signal really noisy).
3 -18.html.
MEG signals are much easier to localize, but I don't think that that will become mainstream any time soon, given the fact that it requires supercooling...
The other Brain-Computer-Interfaces rely on very simple signal processing. E.g., if you relax, the EEG signal will show a change in the power around 10Hz (called the alpha frequency). But that doesn't provide enough information for controlling an interface.
And "whole-cell patch clamping" and fMRI are definitely *not* an alternative. For the first, someone needs to open up your head and attempt to locate a suitable neuron (which requires you to be conscious, by the way), and the temporal resolution of fMRI is not really great and the machines are huge and expensive and require supercooling and at least a 1.5T magnetic field (which might be a bit too strong). But if you don't mind a game with the responsiveness of an oil tanker, you can play "pong" with fMRI: http://www.nature.com/news/2004/040823/full/04082
Who profits from a closed driver? It's obvious that nVidia and ATI are the first to profit from such a deal, but to them it probably means very little. Linux has a small market share and game fanatics (basically anyone who pays for an expensive card) will already have a Windows installation. So creating a Linux driver is only going to profit them marginally.
The Linux community might also profit from having non-open source support for graphic cards. It might be an incentive for certain companies to start porting their software to Linux.
Who profits from open source drivers? As far as I can see, only the competitors of the company that open sources its drivers. The Linux community will gain some knowledge and expertise in developing, but that would be considered marginal by most Linux users.
Consequently, the short-term "economical" decision would be in favour of accepting closed source drivers if you want the Linux community as a group of users to prosper. If you are more interested in development and see Linux as your main tool in this, you might insist on having open source software only.
At the end of the page, I found the following quote:
"I never let my schooling get in the way of my education." -- Mark Twain
Slashdot must have a great oracle hidden somewhere. If only they published it, at least the P=NP problem would be solved.
The Wright brothers did not have such a great insight into aerodynamics, they had the great idea of building a wind tunnel. And because they were such good mechanics, and invested very much time, they could pull it off. Gutenberg is somewhat of a mystery.
None of the two applies to the Orion hype. Yes, it is possible that someone sees what's been wrong in a flash of inspiration, but the description points at an application of older techniques (trying to guess the topic from running text). So, I really wonder what triggered Google's behaviour.
Still something happened at t = 0. If this wasn't caused by something that happened before that moment (since you claim there is no before), how did it happen? What caused it? These are the questions that boggle the normal mind and need an answer before accepting a theory as wild as the Big Bang.
At time t=0, there was the entire Universe, in a very hot and dense state.
Excuse me, but doesn't being "hot" imply (potential) movement and therefore the existence of time?
The guy must have invented something absolutely bloody amazing. I mean, it's not like similar technology hasn't been around for ages now (check contributions to the TREC (http://trec.nist.gov/) conferences. Some of the submissions reach a level of sophistication Google can only dream of. And the algorithms are published.
So, what's up with this "Orion" thing? What insanely great insight into language processing can a CS student have that whole teams of experts still didn't get?
And I'm saying his/her argument why it isn't legitimate isn't convincing. He/she should explain how a change can happen when there is no time, otherwise there is no Big Bang.
Exactly. So how did the change occur if there was no time?
That's the problem, yes. Logic seems to dictate that either you assume you've got no idea what existed at T 0 and stop claiming there was nothing; otherwise, you have to separate the ideas "change" and "time", i.e. define timeless change (since going from nothing to something constitutes a change).
And it is precisely the causility at t=0 that causes the problems for the normal person, as I wrote in my post. If you can separate time from cause and effect or change, then fine, otherwise you haven't got a leg to stand on. How did a change occur in a timeless, static, total void? If you cannot answer that question satisfyingly, it's your problem. It's the age old question: Who created God? The result is that either you stop believing in God (aka. give up the notion that all of the Big Bang theory is correct), or you stop believing in logic (which is the foundation of the Big Bang theory). So there you are.
Now I'll prove that black is white.
Then you must answer the question how there can be an event when there is no time. How can you accept that from a total void without change (as change implies time) something jumps into existence?
Until you can say how that is possible, the cause of the Big Bang is problematic. It's the same as answering "Who created God?"
A priori refers to Kant. In "Kritik der reinen Vernunft", he comes to the conclusion that time and space are a priori. That is not the modern cognitive way of describing how our mind works, but it closely connects to it: we are pre-wired for experiencing time and space and we do not learn it. It is innate, so it is a given.
A priori does indeed not equal absolute, but that is the way time is experienced. Time paradoxes are contradictions for most people. If I would tell the average student here that time goes slower when you go faster, he/she would not understand, because he/she does not have the concept of time that you have. That's what's causing all the havoc in this discussion.
Playing with words is what it is. One writer uses a different meaning of the word "time" than the other. The fact that physics cannot define time without a universe, has no meaning for a normal person who experiences time as a given, a priori, absolute. Saying that it is undefined doesn't take away the legimitate question what existed before the Big Bang. "No idea" would have been a better answer than "it didn't exist".
All other arguments, such as "what is north of the north pole", are not related to this problem. They describe other definition problems.
I think the original poster would be happy if you could answer him why the big bang occurred when there was no time. If you can distangle cause and effect from time, he might concur.
It does the injection via buffer overflow. In a secure environment, RFID tags can be supposed to hold only a limited amount of data, e.g. a 64 byte code number with some kind of verification. If the application stops reading after 64 bytes, you can put as much SQL on the tag as you can, but it won't get injected.
Don't misinterpret me: I think RFID is a bad idea, but blowing up airports using a buffer overflow on a malicious tag can easily be prevented.
Not only this, but a single check on the length of the tag would be sufficient against this attack. So in well-designed software there would only be one place where to check for length. It's not like certain well-known operating systems, that have unguarded buffers in dozens of places. That seems to diminish the risk quite a lot. Not to mention that any organization that takes its security serious, will probably set up a warning system for malicious RFID tags, which will expose attackers quite quickly, since they're likely to be physically nearby.
It would be more valiant if you posted with your real name/handle.
While I like the Oscar Wildeish style of your comment, the commentator is right: your post is one of the higher forms of obviousness. Your pride may be hurt, but there's no need to start calling names.
By the way, the tone of your reply is sarcastic.
A good programmer can write FORTRAN in any language.
So, what's next? ls -h? Regular expressions? tee?
Sorry that you wasted a couple seconds reading the summary
Slashdot only publishes 20 to 30 stories per day, and it's annoying enough to find Star Wars trivia between them. There is a special "Linux" section that is devoted to stuff like this, but even there the level is higher. So what's the point of publishing this on the front page?
Hindsight is always perfect, but I really should have added an irony warning symbol.
Because there is not just one moderator. Everybody can moderate. So there are always a few people who think that's funny. But by not being an Anonymous Coward, but logging in instead, you can set a threshold to all posts, which will exclude most of them...
Yes, you're right. Perhaps this really is more interesting. Sad, isn't it?
This is Slashdot. It's not your www.i-am-a-grandmother-who-has-been-saddled-up-by- her-grandson-with-linux-and-has-just-discovered-th e-command-line.com
People here know how to deal with linux and are interested in more complex things and in news. This is neither. Although I have to agree with the person that wrote "give me another xbox story instead"...
So, people don't know how to interpret the output of ps? And that's a Slashdot frontpage story? What have I done wrong in my settings to deserve such trivial items?
A cycle is a chain of connections that connects to its own starting point. Something like A -> B -> C -> A. If you unlink A, it won't be deleted, since there is still a reference to it (namely C). Consequently, the whole chain will stay in memory. If your app produces such circular data structures regularly, memory will slowly fill up.