How many of you (or your wives for that matter) get on their childs teacher's case for being "too hard on my kid", "they just aren't good at math" etc. and not the other way around?
It's a deep cultural thing though. I am a mathematician and I can't tell you how many time I've had a conversation that went
Person: So what do you do? Me: I'm a mathematcian. Person: Oh, I was never any good at math in school.
And that last point is always said with almost an air of superiority, like there's an underlying "I didn't do well at math and I'm successful, why did you waste your time?" - often enough people will actually come out and say that too. I'm sure any other mathematicians here on Slashdot can testify to much the same thing. There is a deep deated cultural belief that mathematics isn't important - is it any suprise teachers and parents pass that attitude on to their kids?
It's not just the perceptions of themselves, it's also their perceptions of the workings of the rest of the world that can be highly coloured. Ask a lot of people in the US about, say, the Canadian healthcare system and they'll give you lots of stories about people dieing on waiting lists, intolerable waiting times, and a general complete failure of the system. That's so far from the truth it isn't funny. No Canadian healthcare isn't perfect (personally I'd like to see them open up a parallel private system this "two tier healthcare is evil" is as stupid as the US fear of public healthcare), bt for the most part it functions very well, and very efficiently. Per captia health spending in Canada is significantly less than in the US.
There are also the perceptions of Europe as being some socialist unproductive quagmire. Yes, in terms of GDP per capita most European countries are behind the US - but they also get much longer holidays, and work less hours and thus have more time for family. Turning things around if CO2 emisisons (as US opponents of Kyoto like to claim) are the natural byproduct of production, and reducing emissions would reduce GDP... well consider this list of countries by GDP/CO2 emissions which shows that in terms of waste most European countries are significantly more efficient in generating GDP than the US. Is Europe perfect? No, not in the least, they're just different, with different priorities - they produce less but do it more efficiently. That's not the pereption a lot of Americans have of Europe though.
The sad thing is many of these christian fanatics are uneducated, Rush Limbaugh/ Bill O'Reilly products (sculpted zombies) who's life doesn't stray further than Wal-Mart.
Or, in fact, into reading the bible any more than selectively. US fundamentalist Christaianity seems to have rather odd ideas about what exactly Christ said. The concepts of loving your neighbour, helping the poor, and forgiveness that seem to crop up a lot on the new testament... well apparently they're not so important. Despite 85% of the population of the US professing to be Christian, the US has ranks second to last among developed nations for foreign aid as a percentage of the economy, rate almost as poorly for private charity, have high rates of poverty for a developed nation, and are the only developed nation that still uses capital punishment (so much for "turn the other cheek"). 75% of Americans thought that "God helps those who help themselves." was a teaching from the bible - look as hard as you like, it isn't there; Ben Franklin said it. Christianity in the US is less Christianty, and more some bizarre American religion with vague Christian roots - I mean hell, most mormons are closer to following the new testament then a great many US Christians.
Apple's Keynote does a pretty good job but isn't anywhere near as feature-filled as powerpoint.
Oh joy, Powerpoint has more features then Keynote. It doesn't have the features I need or want, so for me PowerPoint is just so much crap. I'm willing to trade lots of PowerPoint's cutesy features like transitions and half assed drawing tools and tacky animations to get the features I need. What do I need? Rendering of mathematical formula that isn't complete crap. In practice that means I use LaTeX, and do any drawing in a decent drawing program (like say inkscape), and output PDF presentations. If I hadn't already invested effort in learning LaTeX I'd be using OpenOffice with this little add on which allows for beautifully rendered math easily integrated in.
People always pipe up with "but it doesn't do X" whenever alternatives to MS Office are presented... well it's my turn. Word and PowerPoint are complete and utter crap at doing anything that requires any semblance of mathematics. That's pretty fundamental really. When the hell are they going to get around to doing anything about it? MS Office is ueless to me in the meantime.
So share price is the ultimate measure of profitability? Those charts and data tell you very little beyond the fact that around 2000 there were some suckers who were stupid enough to pay exorbitant prices for shares in... well lets' be honest, any tech company.
What you might want to look at are Novell and Red Hat, and the statistics like "profit margin" and "gross profit". Are they raking in money hand over fist? No. Are they making a healthy profit, particularly for companies of their respective sizes? Certainly. Contrary to what you seem to want to imply, they are doing quite well.
VA Software? Yeah, well they're pretty fucked right now.
Other options were discussed I believe, though never all that seriously. There was some consideration of dropping an atomic bomb (or two) away from a heavily populated area as a demonstration. How effective that would have been is debatable. The targetting was already well underway by that point (see the firebombings of many Japanese cities that killed about a million civilians), so militarised populated areas were most certainly fair game. Basically the ethics had already been thrown out a while ago, so there were few compunctions about pushing ahead with using a nuclear weapon in a heavily populated area.
There is also the issue of the necessity of the second bomb at Nagasaki. By the time it was dropped the Japanese were still dealing with confused reports of what had happened at Hiroshima (the Japanese military command didn't actually believe it). Very little time as given for the Japanese to fully come to grips with what they now faced, and it is entirely possible that once the full details of Hiroshima were determined (which was a few days after Nagasaki) a surredner may well have been forthcming regardless of whether a second bomb was dropped. This is, again, debatable - second guessing history is a fools game really - but it is likely Japan would have surrendered regardless of the Nagasaki bombing.
Despite the title, it's doesn't look like a replication of the NASA shuttle. The phrase "reuseable orbiter" used in the article seems closer. It looks more like a capsule to which they've added some semblance of "wings" to allow a little bit of maneuvarbility and more landing options. Hell some of the designs for the CEV look not dissimilar, and that is supposed to be NASAs next generation that they are seriously banking on.
No, because there aren't any magic formulas. I can walk into a casino and predict a lot about their slot layout. The more data I have the more analysis I can do, and the more I can predict about the layout.
Without a reasonable amount of data to analyse there is nothing I can tell you about slot machine layout that is going to be of any reasl significance. I can tell you that you'll loses money the slowest on the video poker games near the middle of the casino. I can't tell you how to make money though.
Besides, I don't gamble in casinos. I know how they work, I know the odds, and I know exactly how much money they make. Casinos don't need to legally bar me from gambling, showing me their average actual hold and turnover is more than enough to stop me ever playing their slot machines.
Who's calling who a cheat? They can change the take percentage on their slot machines from the other side of the country? Not taking enough money and giving away to many winnings? Click the mouse a couple of times and fix that.
No, they can't. First of all that's illegal, and is tracked. Second the machines simply aren't built to allow that. Slot machine have a locked "theoretical hold" value which is the theoretical long term amount that the machine will retain as a percentage of turnover. It is fixed, tracked and cannot be changed - certainly not at the click of the mouse.
What a casino can and will do is lay out the machines on the floor with theoretical hold as a consideration. That is, they will endeavour to put a bank of relatively low hold nickel or dime machines near the entrance (not at the entrance mind you, the machine right at the front will be dollar machines or the like: they want casual gamblers wandering by to play the high stake slots) so you get to hear the sound of people winning. The rest of the floor layout is just as carefully designed, taking into account the theoretical hold, popularity of the game type, denomination of the game, quality of the floor space (harder to quantify), and so on to maximise profit. I used to work in the R&D department for a software company that helped casinos do this more effectively, so believe me, I know how exacting they are.
Card counting at blackjack is actually pretty easy to pick up, and you don't need expensive high tech systems to do it. You just need staff who know what the signs are and are reasonably vigilant. It takes some time to really make a lot of cash at card counting, and in general casinos are entirely capable of picking up on it quickly enough that it really makes very little difference to them. There are some interestign and elaborate schemes I've seen that can actually get past these basic measures but they require:
(1) an entire team fo people (2) a shitload of capital to begin with (3) a bit of luck
In fact it wouldn't surprise me in the least if they weren't overstating their capabilities deliberately. I mean it's the threat that's important. As long as you believe they can catch you doing X it doesn't matter whether they actually can or not.
I've worked for a few different Las Vegas casinos doing data analysis. My job was more to do with maximizing profits rather than catching cheats, but it did involve analysing a lot of the same or similar data. In many ways casinos are indeed remarkably advanced in this, but in many ways they aren't. It's a surprisngly conservative industry in many ways. I suspect much of this is boasting rather than actual practical systems that they make serious use of.
I like plots that make sense, dialogue that actually sounds like people talk...
You know, I'm actually quit fond of dialogue that is not at all how people talk - as long ass it's good dialogue. Try watching, say, a film by David Mamet (random example that comes to mind, I'm not endorsing him as the pinnacle of good dialogue). In a lot of his films the things people say are not what a person would ever actually say, but rather the things you wish you'd said 2 days later when you've had tome to think about it. The dialogue isn't realistic, but it is often extrenely sharp and snappy. Heck, try watching a film like Closer (featuring Natalie Portman no less) that's been adapted from a play: people do not talk like that in real life, but damn there's some good sharp dialogue in there.
Einstein was not awarded the Nobel for special relativity because much of it was in fact unveiled by the great mathematician Henri Poincaré. Poincaré found the key point, i.e., everything stems from defining time as being obtained by synchronizing clocks with electromagnetic signals.
Not really. Poincare did do a lot of the interesting math, following on from Lotentz, that provides a lot of the mathematical foundations for relativity, but what he didn't do was redefine time. Poincare still viewed the different time in the calculations as a sort of "local time" which was in a sense merely a mathematical fiction required to make the calculation go through. Poincare still believed in the ether, and thus an absolute referene frame and an absolute time. It was Einstein who, with his observations about the very nature of time being relative, did away with a ficntional "local time" and an absolute reference frame. In Einstein's view there was no true reference frame and all time was "local time" - local to the observer. The effects on time were thus not a mathematical fiction, but a physical reality. It was this observation and new conception of time that Einstein is highly regarded.
That does not, of course, in any way diminish Poincare's work - and he did a great deal of work besides just that relating to relativity (he is the father of algebraic topology for instance). Certainly Poincare deserves a little more recognition for his great achievments than he gets outside of the mathematics community. Misrepresenting Einstein's achievements is not the way to give Poincare his due credit however.
(As a side note, more recognition should probably also be given to David Hilbert, who did a lot of the pure maths required to lay the foundations of General Relativity).
Recurrent capital raising is not really a good sign. At mittedly this is only their second bite at the cherry, but it's a second bite at (lets' be honest here) exorbitant and inflated prices.
All these diverse ofeerings come at a cost - some will be hugely successful, and some will not. The fact that Google is having to go back to the well so soon is possibly a sign that their expansions aren't as profitable as they'd like as much as a sign of desire for more expansion.
Sure I agree, but none of that is screaing "massive consumer uptake!" like the original poster was trying to imply. Don't get me wrong, Solaris is great, but a lot of it's stand out features are things that look great on a server are useful on workstation and aren't especially relevant at all on a desktop. I expect Solaris to gain some ground in the server department. I don't expect it to make stunning market share gains that significantly outstrip Linux's growth - it may well grow at rouhgly the same rate, but i don't see how it will be faster.
It's a matter of taste really though. The object system in Perl6 is considerably cleaned up. Yes it has the usual Perl punctuation soup as syntax, but structurally it is a lot cleaner. Some people adore Perl's syntax. You seem to be quite fond of Ruby. Personally I quite like the spareness of Python. If all you have issue with is the syntax... well I can't help you with that, because I don't really like it either.
As an aside, variable declaration is something Python does manage (there's no "use strict" - it basically has that on by default immediately). As an added bonus an option for declaring static types as well seems to be in the works.
Meanwhile, Linux has been around since 1991, and it still isn't ready for the desktop. If upstarts like Firefox and OS X can increase their market share so much faster than Linux, why not a revamped/free-as-in-beer Solaris x86?
Probably because almost all of the desktop software available in Solaris x86 is exactly what is used on Linux: Xorg for X11, GNOME (or possibly KDE if you so desire) for a desktop environment. StarOffice (which is to say OpenOffice.org) for office applications, Firefox as a web browser, Evolution as an email client... the list goes on. What does Solaris 10 offer that Linux doesn't? DTrace and excellent developer and server performance tuning tool. Zones, and excellent server security and partitioning system. Really crappy hardware detection and configuration. A severe lack of drivers for standard consumer hardware. A packaging system that's great for updating servers but even worse than what Linux offers for desktop use.
Solaris 10 will be ready for the desktop a sometime after Linux is ready for the desktop and not before. The desktop software stack is the same, and Solaris offers nothing new for desktops at the lower level. It does have nice features for servers, but then so does Linux. I would expect Solaris to gain back some ground in the server space slowly, but I don't forsee how it could manage to somehow shoot up in market share any faster than Linux already is.
Perl6 has the advantage of starting from the beginning, taking all that was learned from the evolutionary development that lead to Perl5, as well as the lessons learned from other languages like Python and Ruby. Honestly, read through the design commentary for Perl6 by Larry Wall. There are a lot of good ideas there, and Perl6 promises to be a much cleaner, more consistent and more elegnt language than Perl5 - that is, it has learned what was good in Perl5 and thrown away the (vast amounts) of cruft. Looking at what they're proposing, if it actually works as promised then I do think it will compete well with Python - and I'm a Python person myself*. Honestly, read a little of what Perl6 has to offer before you dismiss it out of hand. It looks like it will be a very nice language indeed.
Jedidiah.
* One of the things I like about Python is that they're willing to deprecate and then *remove* features to help combat cruft.
Anyway, in my arguments to encourage research into trying new ways of doing things, I always used Bell Labs as my favorite example/reason why we should.
That's okay, you just need to change what Bell Labs is an example of. I mean really, what has Bell Labs produced recently? Some very impressive stuff if you actually look at some of what has managed to trickle it's way out. Things like Plan9 and Inferno are actually very impressive indeed in terms of the core ideas (that is, the part the research division is responsible for). Had a little more money been thrown into really building something out of those they could have been huge. So really Bell Labs is an example of what happens when management stops paying attention to, and having faith in, their research department.
Want another example. How about Microsoft research? They have some very good people there, Tony Hoare and Leslie Lamport to name just two off the top of my head. If you dig around through some of the stuff they are working on there's some amazing ideas there. How much of that is actually seeing the light of day and making it into product? Very very little.
The reason Google seems so good is not because they have more good people doing research - in practice they probably don't. It's because management spends more time listening to and working with the research teams to see that those ideas actually get used.
The death of Bell Labs is just another example of what happens when the research department gets ignored. And yes, I am a bit bitter, having worked in a research department that regularly got ignored.
and we can let the alcoholics have the.xxxx TLD, (remember the xxxx rotgut from the Bugs Bunny - Yosemite Sam cartoons>).
XXXX is also a brand of Australian beer. As Australian beers go it's not especially good (which is to say it vastly better than the canned water of mainstream US beers, but isn't especially good). Given that it originates in Queensland the general assumption is that it is called XXXX because the original brewers (and, in fact anyone buying it) didn't actually know how to spell BEER so just went with the first four symbols they were capable of writing (or drawing in this case). That's not to say that everyone is Queensland is illiterate... only the locals.
There is only so much the Fed can do. If things go well they can comfortably and easily soften the blow, if things go badly there is basically nothing they can do about it. There are a lot of factors lining up here: Continuing large budget deficits (over which the Fed has no actual influence), a nation with a culture of living beyond it's means (over which the Fed has zero influence), an only barely floated (and effectively still pegged) yuan (over which the Fed has no influence), a housing bubble from the very low interest rates of the last 3 years (which puts limits on how fast and how high the Fed can push interest rates), and an increasing unwillingness on the part of China and Japan (the two biggest foreign holder of US debt) to continue buying debt (over which the Fed has little influence).
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How many of you (or your wives for that matter) get on their childs teacher's case for being "too hard on my kid", "they just aren't good at math" etc. and not the other way around?
It's a deep cultural thing though. I am a mathematician and I can't tell you how many time I've had a conversation that went
Person: So what do you do?
Me: I'm a mathematcian.
Person: Oh, I was never any good at math in school.
And that last point is always said with almost an air of superiority, like there's an underlying "I didn't do well at math and I'm successful, why did you waste your time?" - often enough people will actually come out and say that too. I'm sure any other mathematicians here on Slashdot can testify to much the same thing. There is a deep deated cultural belief that mathematics isn't important - is it any suprise teachers and parents pass that attitude on to their kids?
Jedidiah.
It's not just the perceptions of themselves, it's also their perceptions of the workings of the rest of the world that can be highly coloured. Ask a lot of people in the US about, say, the Canadian healthcare system and they'll give you lots of stories about people dieing on waiting lists, intolerable waiting times, and a general complete failure of the system. That's so far from the truth it isn't funny. No Canadian healthcare isn't perfect (personally I'd like to see them open up a parallel private system this "two tier healthcare is evil" is as stupid as the US fear of public healthcare), bt for the most part it functions very well, and very efficiently. Per captia health spending in Canada is significantly less than in the US.
There are also the perceptions of Europe as being some socialist unproductive quagmire. Yes, in terms of GDP per capita most European countries are behind the US - but they also get much longer holidays, and work less hours and thus have more time for family. Turning things around if CO2 emisisons (as US opponents of Kyoto like to claim) are the natural byproduct of production, and reducing emissions would reduce GDP... well consider this list of countries by GDP/CO2 emissions which shows that in terms of waste most European countries are significantly more efficient in generating GDP than the US. Is Europe perfect? No, not in the least, they're just different, with different priorities - they produce less but do it more efficiently. That's not the pereption a lot of Americans have of Europe though.
Jedidiah.
The sad thing is many of these christian fanatics are uneducated, Rush Limbaugh/ Bill O'Reilly products (sculpted zombies) who's life doesn't stray further than Wal-Mart.
Or, in fact, into reading the bible any more than selectively. US fundamentalist Christaianity seems to have rather odd ideas about what exactly Christ said. The concepts of loving your neighbour, helping the poor, and forgiveness that seem to crop up a lot on the new testament... well apparently they're not so important. Despite 85% of the population of the US professing to be Christian, the US has ranks second to last among developed nations for foreign aid as a percentage of the economy, rate almost as poorly for private charity, have high rates of poverty for a developed nation, and are the only developed nation that still uses capital punishment (so much for "turn the other cheek"). 75% of Americans thought that "God helps those who help themselves." was a teaching from the bible - look as hard as you like, it isn't there; Ben Franklin said it. Christianity in the US is less Christianty, and more some bizarre American religion with vague Christian roots - I mean hell, most mormons are closer to following the new testament then a great many US Christians.
Jedidiah.
Apple's Keynote does a pretty good job but isn't anywhere near as feature-filled as powerpoint.
Oh joy, Powerpoint has more features then Keynote. It doesn't have the features I need or want, so for me PowerPoint is just so much crap. I'm willing to trade lots of PowerPoint's cutesy features like transitions and half assed drawing tools and tacky animations to get the features I need. What do I need? Rendering of mathematical formula that isn't complete crap. In practice that means I use LaTeX, and do any drawing in a decent drawing program (like say inkscape), and output PDF presentations. If I hadn't already invested effort in learning LaTeX I'd be using OpenOffice with this little add on which allows for beautifully rendered math easily integrated in.
People always pipe up with "but it doesn't do X" whenever alternatives to MS Office are presented... well it's my turn. Word and PowerPoint are complete and utter crap at doing anything that requires any semblance of mathematics. That's pretty fundamental really. When the hell are they going to get around to doing anything about it? MS Office is ueless to me in the meantime.
Jedidiah.
So share price is the ultimate measure of profitability? Those charts and data tell you very little beyond the fact that around 2000 there were some suckers who were stupid enough to pay exorbitant prices for shares in... well lets' be honest, any tech company.
What you might want to look at are Novell and Red Hat, and the statistics like "profit margin" and "gross profit". Are they raking in money hand over fist? No. Are they making a healthy profit, particularly for companies of their respective sizes? Certainly. Contrary to what you seem to want to imply, they are doing quite well.
VA Software? Yeah, well they're pretty fucked right now.
Jedidiah.
Other options were discussed I believe, though never all that seriously. There was some consideration of dropping an atomic bomb (or two) away from a heavily populated area as a demonstration. How effective that would have been is debatable. The targetting was already well underway by that point (see the firebombings of many Japanese cities that killed about a million civilians), so militarised populated areas were most certainly fair game. Basically the ethics had already been thrown out a while ago, so there were few compunctions about pushing ahead with using a nuclear weapon in a heavily populated area.
There is also the issue of the necessity of the second bomb at Nagasaki. By the time it was dropped the Japanese were still dealing with confused reports of what had happened at Hiroshima (the Japanese military command didn't actually believe it). Very little time as given for the Japanese to fully come to grips with what they now faced, and it is entirely possible that once the full details of Hiroshima were determined (which was a few days after Nagasaki) a surredner may well have been forthcming regardless of whether a second bomb was dropped. This is, again, debatable - second guessing history is a fools game really - but it is likely Japan would have surrendered regardless of the Nagasaki bombing.
Jedidiah.
Despite the title, it's doesn't look like a replication of the NASA shuttle. The phrase "reuseable orbiter" used in the article seems closer. It looks more like a capsule to which they've added some semblance of "wings" to allow a little bit of maneuvarbility and more landing options. Hell some of the designs for the CEV look not dissimilar, and that is supposed to be NASAs next generation that they are seriously banking on.
Jedidiah.
No, because there aren't any magic formulas. I can walk into a casino and predict a lot about their slot layout. The more data I have the more analysis I can do, and the more I can predict about the layout.
Without a reasonable amount of data to analyse there is nothing I can tell you about slot machine layout that is going to be of any reasl significance. I can tell you that you'll loses money the slowest on the video poker games near the middle of the casino. I can't tell you how to make money though.
Besides, I don't gamble in casinos. I know how they work, I know the odds, and I know exactly how much money they make. Casinos don't need to legally bar me from gambling, showing me their average actual hold and turnover is more than enough to stop me ever playing their slot machines.
Jedidiah.
Who's calling who a cheat? They can change the take percentage on their slot machines from the other side of the country? Not taking enough money and giving away to many winnings? Click the mouse a couple of times and fix that.
No, they can't. First of all that's illegal, and is tracked. Second the machines simply aren't built to allow that. Slot machine have a locked "theoretical hold" value which is the theoretical long term amount that the machine will retain as a percentage of turnover. It is fixed, tracked and cannot be changed - certainly not at the click of the mouse.
What a casino can and will do is lay out the machines on the floor with theoretical hold as a consideration. That is, they will endeavour to put a bank of relatively low hold nickel or dime machines near the entrance (not at the entrance mind you, the machine right at the front will be dollar machines or the like: they want casual gamblers wandering by to play the high stake slots) so you get to hear the sound of people winning. The rest of the floor layout is just as carefully designed, taking into account the theoretical hold, popularity of the game type, denomination of the game, quality of the floor space (harder to quantify), and so on to maximise profit. I used to work in the R&D department for a software company that helped casinos do this more effectively, so believe me, I know how exacting they are.
Jedidiah.
Card counting at blackjack is actually pretty easy to pick up, and you don't need expensive high tech systems to do it. You just need staff who know what the signs are and are reasonably vigilant. It takes some time to really make a lot of cash at card counting, and in general casinos are entirely capable of picking up on it quickly enough that it really makes very little difference to them. There are some interestign and elaborate schemes I've seen that can actually get past these basic measures but they require:
(1) an entire team fo people
(2) a shitload of capital to begin with
(3) a bit of luck
Jedidiah.
In fact it wouldn't surprise me in the least if they weren't overstating their capabilities deliberately. I mean it's the threat that's important. As long as you believe they can catch you doing X it doesn't matter whether they actually can or not.
I've worked for a few different Las Vegas casinos doing data analysis. My job was more to do with maximizing profits rather than catching cheats, but it did involve analysing a lot of the same or similar data. In many ways casinos are indeed remarkably advanced in this, but in many ways they aren't. It's a surprisngly conservative industry in many ways. I suspect much of this is boasting rather than actual practical systems that they make serious use of.
Jedidiah.
So unless the script has been changed significantly (and there's reason to believe that it has; I haven't read the script)...
Given that Alan Moore has read the script and spared little invective when describing it, I think we can presume it has been substantially changed.
Jedidiah.
I like plots that make sense, dialogue that actually sounds like people talk...
You know, I'm actually quit fond of dialogue that is not at all how people talk - as long ass it's good dialogue. Try watching, say, a film by David Mamet (random example that comes to mind, I'm not endorsing him as the pinnacle of good dialogue). In a lot of his films the things people say are not what a person would ever actually say, but rather the things you wish you'd said 2 days later when you've had tome to think about it. The dialogue isn't realistic, but it is often extrenely sharp and snappy. Heck, try watching a film like Closer (featuring Natalie Portman no less) that's been adapted from a play: people do not talk like that in real life, but damn there's some good sharp dialogue in there.
Jedidiah.
March 17th also has a little less historical significance for vigilantes trying to overthrow the British government than, say, November 5th.
Jedidiah.
Einstein was not awarded the Nobel for special relativity because much of it was in fact unveiled by the great mathematician Henri Poincaré. Poincaré found the key point, i.e., everything stems from defining time as being obtained by synchronizing clocks with electromagnetic signals.
Not really. Poincare did do a lot of the interesting math, following on from Lotentz, that provides a lot of the mathematical foundations for relativity, but what he didn't do was redefine time. Poincare still viewed the different time in the calculations as a sort of "local time" which was in a sense merely a mathematical fiction required to make the calculation go through. Poincare still believed in the ether, and thus an absolute referene frame and an absolute time. It was Einstein who, with his observations about the very nature of time being relative, did away with a ficntional "local time" and an absolute reference frame. In Einstein's view there was no true reference frame and all time was "local time" - local to the observer. The effects on time were thus not a mathematical fiction, but a physical reality. It was this observation and new conception of time that Einstein is highly regarded.
That does not, of course, in any way diminish Poincare's work - and he did a great deal of work besides just that relating to relativity (he is the father of algebraic topology for instance). Certainly Poincare deserves a little more recognition for his great achievments than he gets outside of the mathematics community. Misrepresenting Einstein's achievements is not the way to give Poincare his due credit however.
(As a side note, more recognition should probably also be given to David Hilbert, who did a lot of the pure maths required to lay the foundations of General Relativity).
Jedidiah.
Recurrent capital raising is not really a good sign. At mittedly this is only their second bite at the cherry, but it's a second bite at (lets' be honest here) exorbitant and inflated prices.
All these diverse ofeerings come at a cost - some will be hugely successful, and some will not. The fact that Google is having to go back to the well so soon is possibly a sign that their expansions aren't as profitable as they'd like as much as a sign of desire for more expansion.
Jedidiah.
No, I mean exactly what I said: Linux and Solaris use (effectively) the same office suite. It doesn't "belong" to either kernel or OS.
Jedidiah.
Sure I agree, but none of that is screaing "massive consumer uptake!" like the original poster was trying to imply. Don't get me wrong, Solaris is great, but a lot of it's stand out features are things that look great on a server are useful on workstation and aren't especially relevant at all on a desktop. I expect Solaris to gain some ground in the server department. I don't expect it to make stunning market share gains that significantly outstrip Linux's growth - it may well grow at rouhgly the same rate, but i don't see how it will be faster.
Jedidiah.
...is silly because one is shipping on production enterprise class systems and the other is experimental.
Hey it works for the Microsoft marketing department!
Jedidiah.
It's a matter of taste really though. The object system in Perl6 is considerably cleaned up. Yes it has the usual Perl punctuation soup as syntax, but structurally it is a lot cleaner. Some people adore Perl's syntax. You seem to be quite fond of Ruby. Personally I quite like the spareness of Python. If all you have issue with is the syntax... well I can't help you with that, because I don't really like it either.
As an aside, variable declaration is something Python does manage (there's no "use strict" - it basically has that on by default immediately). As an added bonus an option for declaring static types as well seems to be in the works.
Jedidiah.
Meanwhile, Linux has been around since 1991, and it still isn't ready for the desktop. If upstarts like Firefox and OS X can increase their market share so much faster than Linux, why not a revamped/free-as-in-beer Solaris x86?
Probably because almost all of the desktop software available in Solaris x86 is exactly what is used on Linux: Xorg for X11, GNOME (or possibly KDE if you so desire) for a desktop environment. StarOffice (which is to say OpenOffice.org) for office applications, Firefox as a web browser, Evolution as an email client... the list goes on. What does Solaris 10 offer that Linux doesn't? DTrace and excellent developer and server performance tuning tool. Zones, and excellent server security and partitioning system. Really crappy hardware detection and configuration. A severe lack of drivers for standard consumer hardware. A packaging system that's great for updating servers but even worse than what Linux offers for desktop use.
Solaris 10 will be ready for the desktop a sometime after Linux is ready for the desktop and not before. The desktop software stack is the same, and Solaris offers nothing new for desktops at the lower level. It does have nice features for servers, but then so does Linux. I would expect Solaris to gain back some ground in the server space slowly, but I don't forsee how it could manage to somehow shoot up in market share any faster than Linux already is.
Jedidiah.
Perl6 has the advantage of starting from the beginning, taking all that was learned from the evolutionary development that lead to Perl5, as well as the lessons learned from other languages like Python and Ruby. Honestly, read through the design commentary for Perl6 by Larry Wall. There are a lot of good ideas there, and Perl6 promises to be a much cleaner, more consistent and more elegnt language than Perl5 - that is, it has learned what was good in Perl5 and thrown away the (vast amounts) of cruft. Looking at what they're proposing, if it actually works as promised then I do think it will compete well with Python - and I'm a Python person myself*. Honestly, read a little of what Perl6 has to offer before you dismiss it out of hand. It looks like it will be a very nice language indeed.
Jedidiah.
* One of the things I like about Python is that they're willing to deprecate and then *remove* features to help combat cruft.
Anyway, in my arguments to encourage research into trying new ways of doing things, I always used Bell Labs as my favorite example/reason why we should.
That's okay, you just need to change what Bell Labs is an example of. I mean really, what has Bell Labs produced recently? Some very impressive stuff if you actually look at some of what has managed to trickle it's way out. Things like Plan9 and Inferno are actually very impressive indeed in terms of the core ideas (that is, the part the research division is responsible for). Had a little more money been thrown into really building something out of those they could have been huge. So really Bell Labs is an example of what happens when management stops paying attention to, and having faith in, their research department.
Want another example. How about Microsoft research? They have some very good people there, Tony Hoare and Leslie Lamport to name just two off the top of my head. If you dig around through some of the stuff they are working on there's some amazing ideas there. How much of that is actually seeing the light of day and making it into product? Very very little.
The reason Google seems so good is not because they have more good people doing research - in practice they probably don't. It's because management spends more time listening to and working with the research teams to see that those ideas actually get used.
The death of Bell Labs is just another example of what happens when the research department gets ignored. And yes, I am a bit bitter, having worked in a research department that regularly got ignored.
Jedidiah.
and we can let the alcoholics have the .xxxx TLD, (remember the xxxx rotgut from the Bugs Bunny - Yosemite Sam cartoons>).
XXXX is also a brand of Australian beer. As Australian beers go it's not especially good (which is to say it vastly better than the canned water of mainstream US beers, but isn't especially good). Given that it originates in Queensland the general assumption is that it is called XXXX because the original brewers (and, in fact anyone buying it) didn't actually know how to spell BEER so just went with the first four symbols they were capable of writing (or drawing in this case). That's not to say that everyone is Queensland is illiterate... only the locals.
Jedidiah.
There is only so much the Fed can do. If things go well they can comfortably and easily soften the blow, if things go badly there is basically nothing they can do about it. There are a lot of factors lining up here: Continuing large budget deficits (over which the Fed has no actual influence), a nation with a culture of living beyond it's means (over which the Fed has zero influence), an only barely floated (and effectively still pegged) yuan (over which the Fed has no influence), a housing bubble from the very low interest rates of the last 3 years (which puts limits on how fast and how high the Fed can push interest rates), and an increasing unwillingness on the part of China and Japan (the two biggest foreign holder of US debt) to continue buying debt (over which the Fed has little influence).
Please read this paper (I linked to it in one of my other comments as well). It provides an excellent and balanced analysis of issues with the current account deficit. Yes things could go well and the Fed can cushion things nicely. No that does not mean things will go well and no, there's not necessarily anything the Fed can do about it. Is there reason for panic? No. Is there reason to be concerned? Yes, and any sensible economist is actually somewhat concerned and watching the current account closely.
Jedidiah.