I understand both Gnome and KDE are based on ORB's specifically ORBit and mico. My question is what is the level of compatability of these ORBs? For instance if I am writing a server only portion of my ORB (doesn't use any GUI calls) will it compile with both KDE and Gnome? If not how much work would be required to port from one to the other.
The Goldbach conjecture is still open as far as I know (and no it hasn't been shown to be undecidable in standard number theory).
Interesting sidenote until recently whenever an example was needed in philosophy papers about a statement whose truth was unknown but which was in principle implied by the information at hand (i.e. proving we don't know the logical consequences of all our factual data) fermat's last theorem was used. They have had to switch over to the Goldbach conjecture.
Another wonderful unsolved conjecture is the collatz or 3n+1 problem.
Given x run the following algorithm
if x is even divide x by two
if x is odd take 3x+1
repeat until we get 1.
Does this algorithm always terminate? (Erdos was said to have remarked that we [the matematics community] was not ready for such problems).
Excersice for you assembly buffs out there how fast can you write an algorithm to check out the conjecture (i.e. test it for all starting x below some number). I tried writing it in C and even my shitty assembly was orders of magnitude faster. I believe the conjecture has been verified up to an incredibly large number.
Personally I shudder to think what having to take all that math could do to a person if they had to get a job in something like computers!
All that learnin hurts the brain as we all know.
It seems that the higher you go in math the more bland and unapproachable the subject becoms and the more difficult (difficulty!) it becomes
Well yes it becomes more difficult...just like coding for X is alot more complicated than hello world. However, it actually becomes MUCH more interesting. Think about it...addition and subtraction are pretty fucking boring while higher mathematics gives you stuning results such as the Banach Tarski Paradox (A sphere may be cut up into finitely many pieces and by translating and rotating the pieces reassembled into a two spheres of the orignial size).
Why can't people produce a nice graphical textbook about complex math subjects with plents of examples and problems to work on?
Math books with examples and problems to work on are fairly common. The reason the textbooks often aren't (and shouldn't be) graphical is because mathematics is not a graphical pursuit. It would be like explaining perl via venn diagrams. Yes, some parts of mathematics MODEL the real world (such as R^3) but all to often people taught via pictures are restricted by them. As soon as they run into a problem without an obvious visual component (say a problem in R^4 (yes it can be useful)) they are stuck.
I have a bias towards things that have a lasting importance versus things that have a limited appeal
Question who is more famous? Archimdes or the political leaders of athens? It in fact appears mathematics is of much more lasting imprtance than whatever war is occuring at the moment.
How can you tell little Billy about STW?
As we all know little billy is the ultimate judge of these matters. I imagine huffman encodings shouldn't be studied either.
Ohh while not a textbook their is a book On relativity or something either written by einstein or from his notes which is exceptionally good.
Yes, but there was a differnt treaty which forbid the US of Russia from placing offensive weapons in space regardless of detonation
Re:The humans rights violations are irksome
on
China Enters Space
·
· Score: 1
Im confused! I thought definitionally the difference between socialism and communism is that communism achieves its ends by overthrow of the current state (hence deystroying that said democracy) while socialism is when private property is abolished via legal means.
Of course the european countries are then only partially socialistic.
The issue that needs to be overcome of course is the motivational factor. If someone is not rewarded for additional work then they will not do the work. The secret therefore to some sort of communist/socialist system is to replace monetary reward by some sort of non-material reward.
But open-source coding is a wonderful prototype of this model. The monetary reward for coding is surplanted by the recognition (conciously or unconciously) of having coded useful software. (HINT TO SOFTWARE COMPANIES: attach programmers names to their project and let them decide on release date etc..). This model may very well continue to be adopted as people's general prosperity levels increase so recognition becomes scarcer than material goods. Of course the question is how will you ever get janitors and garbage collectors to work under such a model given the low amount of recognition they are given.
As far as I know China was not party to the US and russian treaty against putting weapons in space. As such it is very possible that we might see nuclear weapons or something in space b/c of this.
This may lead us to another cold war type of scenario. Far from being bad (as long as we don't nuke each other) the pressure to develop to innovate and even to explore space will be great thus blasting the world out of its sort of consumer compacancy (i.e. does going to space/basic research mean more money/bigger TV for me. No? then don't fund it).
Suspending by the waist is probably not optimal as you will certainly notice the difference from actually walking. Instead your feet should be straped to two foot supports which actually hold your weight. These foot supports would move freely as long as your feet were above a certain level (the virtual floor) but would lock as soon as they hit the virtual floor. The entire unit can then be given a very small velocity (as mentioned in the above post) which your inner ear doesn't notice keeping you from hitting the wall.
In effect you are walking on giant metalic hands which always sloightly pull you back to the origin preventing you from ever hitting anything.
The most promising solution to this problem appears to be the large room with some sort of "fooling" effect to make the user always slightly turn away from the wall. It may sound farfetched but consider most of our "realistic" simulations come from the fact that the human brain relies on a couple little tricks to understand the outside world not on very good sesory input (for example use of two slightly differnt images to simulate 3d when in fact the objects are not so far away and could be detected via a focusing mechanism).
What about some sort of mechanism to slightly fool the inner ear? This would cause the user to (unconciously hopefully) list to one side keeping them inside a fixed area...if we combined this with a mildly sloping floor it might be used to good effect. The difficulty hear is of course to fool the inner ear without having to stick needles in their or anything.
Has anyone done any research into what happens when the image presented to the user is slightly tilted from the angle expected by the tilt of their head? Do they walk differntly?
A sort of simple proof of concept of this idea is to put yourself in a large room close your eyes and try to walk straight across...extremly difficult to do! Imagine if you were being actively fooled!
How is this fraud? If your package gets broken then you are paid for the damages!! No one ever said UPS couldn't charge what it likes for the insurance. Who the fuck cares what insurance company they use?
Did anyone really think UPS didn't make money on their insurance? The implications for TAX law are large as they are funnelling income to the owner through a differnt company but their seems to be no fraud whatsoever.
Is their any organization which provides free legal defense for gratuitous suites against internet content (such as this case and the DeCSS issue). Sort of like an ACLU for freedom of expresion on the internet. It seems like something the EFF should really be involved in as the greatest danger to free speech on the internet seems to be abuse of copyright law, trademarks and especially patents.
Yes, mirroring is useful but it also allows a dangerous precedent to be set. If the sites are mirrored but not legally defended it gives legitamacy to the companies/religions claims.
There may be some extremly high end cards to optimize this sort of rendering but this is unlikely.
At root 3d cards liberally approximate lightining and reflection and other things to allow the operations to be performed extremly fast on specialized hardware.
What you are talking about is accelerating raytracing/radiance type imaging which does not make such simple approximations and hence at root just requires a bunch of computational power (hence why titanic was rendered on hundreds of linux boxes and not "rendering cards").
This virus seems to be a relativly mild and easily controlled virus I was wondering about the possible threat of the recently availible Bubbleboy virus.
Given the ease of its transmission and the number of users who will not upgrade their email it appears the potential for infection is enormouse.
But how big? Will it be big enough to make a dent in internet bandwidth (a la the internet worm). Or will the fact that it is a virus and not a worm prevent such widespread network clogging?
As I understand the QPL allows derivitive works and modifications provided the original liscensce holders gain the right to redistribute your modifications.
AND
Any modifications you make must be distributed as a seperate patch file.
The first clause doesn't seem to cause the community any difficulty (so some people can sell it big deal)! However the second clause is very bothersome. Suppose KDE or PHP really catch on and people decide to improve/extend the base libraries. These products could still be around and kicking 10-15 years from now just like X is. But by that point the liscensing companies may very well have faded from the picture.
This leaves us with a huge bloated mess of patch files at the core of an expanding system making it difficult to work with. Now I understand the desire of the company to keep their product name undiluted and to recieve patches so perhaps the minor modification that the patches must be made availible on request (you can always go back and diff it) but the modified source may be distributed UNDER A DIFFERNT NAME!!
Small modification but it could make a big difference in the longterm future of some products.
Consider the two cases of special and general relativity, two of the most important theories and influential theories developed in physics. Yet both of them were developed ENTIERLY theoretically.
Special relativity was inspired entierly by thought experiment and the inconsitancy of maxwells equations with respect to moving observers. I believe Einstein claimed to have no knowledge of the Michelson-Morely Interferometer experiment at the time he discovered the theory.
The general theory of relativity then arose from the THEORETICAL issue that gravity was inconsistant with the principal of invariance of physical law under change of reference frame. There was the slight clue using the eccentricity of mercuries orbit but this was a minor factor.
What kind of model do you propose for research? Absurd amounts of money on accelerators to gather trillions of data points which don't mean anything to us as we have no theory to predict/explain them?
Besides Theory is cheap compared to experimentation.
If I understand your post you seem to be claiming that by somehow understanding chaos we will understand the probablistic nature of quantum mechanics and be able to rectify it with classical mechanics.
However, quantum mechanical events don't just act random they ARE random. To assume otherwise is to invoke some sort of hidden veriable model (the decay of a radioactive isotope is not random but is determined by an incredibly complicated (chaotic?) process we don't understand). This theory was shown to be incompatible with the principle of casuality using the EPR paradox and bells inequaility.
Secondly from a purely pragmatic position we can abandon classical physics as just being an approximation...the difficulty is merely integrating gravity into quantum theory as I understand...it has nothing to do with needing to be non-probabilistic.
The peer review system is merely an acknowledgment of the fact that many more radical ideas are wrong than right. The peer review system ensures that a theory is accepted/published only it if has significant evidence behind it.
Sure it is conservative and slow to act but IF a theory is correct it will have convincing evidence and hence eventually convince the establishment.
Sure the peer review system isn't perfect but what do you want? God editing Nature? There appears to be no better system to keep out the kooks the crackpots and the well intentioned but flawed theories from driving out the good science
Alot of fuss has been made about the inflammatory nature of these questions and whether this excuses John's extremly poor answers.
Compare this to what clinton did when pressed about much more personal issues with tougher questions when a large segment of the population despised him.
Did Clinton call his enemies (justified or not) stupid immature losers? No, he did tactfully deny to answer some questions but this is far from what JV's responses were (JV not only was insulting but ignored all questions not only a select few with deep personal answers.)
Add to this the fact that he agreed to be interviewed on slashdot and only a complete moron would really believe no tough or accusatory questions would come out of this community...especially for JV.
This looks like nothing but a coordinated attempt to get people to dislike the man. This is probably exactly what he is doing...he is not a stupid man this gains him publicity and as he mentioned valuable information. So stop trying to fucking hack his site and ignore him.
It is in things like this that we see the true genius of the GPL. This should finally shut up those people who keep critisizing the GPL. Does anyone really think these companies would release the source coed to these apps if they weren't forced too?
Some of it is the open-source buzzword (I am begining to think that companies will give away cash if it lets them claim they are buzzword X) but without the GPL they would release their source under horribly incompatable and unusable liscenses.
Soon we may pass the critical point where it is more economically advantageous to develop using the free code already out there than to keep your code base propietory.
I don't believe this is quite true. No program could use the static libraries..however given that you cannot copyright the library interface (hence why WINE can be free) anything could load the shared library
If anyone can explain what XML actually does which is useful I would be glad to hear it. And don't tell me it is a subset of SGML or it is a language definition standard...neither of these give any clue about how it could in any way be useful...neither does the XML spec...it appears to be just a large complicated way to specify parsers
Suppose we had any sort of identification number which is availible to the government. As some government employees (who probably aren't paid enough so that a bribe won't tempt them) have access to these numbers. As once you are inpossesion of the unique identification numbers/passwds the automated nature of internet voting would make it relativly eassy to commit the fraud.
There is a solution. Issue every citizen a smart card containing a non-recoverable private key (the smartcard only signs documents). Then each citizen must physically register their public key at a government station. As the private key is never revealed only theft of the msartcard itself with suffice to allow fraud making the system seemingly more secure then todays voting.
Slashdot Mirror
they should hook this thing up to the web....well at least oint a web came at it!
Then have it run a vending machine or some such...it would be an interesting piece of notsalgia to get your coke from a 1950's computer
I understand both Gnome and KDE are based on ORB's specifically ORBit and mico. My question is what is the level of compatability of these ORBs? For instance if I am writing a server only portion of my ORB (doesn't use any GUI calls) will it compile with both KDE and Gnome? If not how much work would be required to port from one to the other.
The Goldbach conjecture is still open as far as I know (and no it hasn't been shown to be undecidable in standard number theory).
Interesting sidenote until recently whenever an example was needed in philosophy papers about a statement whose truth was unknown but which was in principle implied by the information at hand (i.e. proving we don't know the logical consequences of all our factual data) fermat's last theorem was used. They have had to switch over to the Goldbach conjecture.
Another wonderful unsolved conjecture is the collatz or 3n+1 problem.
Given x run the following algorithm
if x is even divide x by two
if x is odd take 3x+1
repeat until we get 1.
Does this algorithm always terminate? (Erdos was said to have remarked that we [the matematics community] was not ready for such problems).
Excersice for you assembly buffs out there how fast can you write an algorithm to check out the conjecture (i.e. test it for all starting x below some number). I tried writing it in C and even my shitty assembly was orders of magnitude faster. I believe the conjecture has been verified up to an incredibly large number.
Personally I shudder to think what having to take all that math could do to a person if they had to get a job in something like computers!
All that learnin hurts the brain as we all know.
It seems that the higher you go in math the more bland and unapproachable the subject
becoms and the more difficult (difficulty!) it becomes
Well yes it becomes more difficult...just like coding for X is alot more complicated than hello world. However, it actually becomes MUCH more interesting. Think about it...addition and subtraction are pretty fucking boring while higher mathematics gives you stuning results such as the Banach Tarski Paradox (A sphere may be cut up into finitely many pieces and by translating and rotating the pieces reassembled into a two spheres of the orignial size).
Why can't people produce a nice graphical textbook about complex math subjects with plents of examples and
problems to work on?
Math books with examples and problems to work on are fairly common. The reason the textbooks often aren't (and shouldn't be) graphical is because mathematics is not a graphical pursuit. It would be like explaining perl via venn diagrams. Yes, some parts of mathematics MODEL the real world (such as R^3) but all to often people taught via pictures are restricted by them. As soon as they run into a problem without an obvious visual component (say a problem in R^4 (yes it can be useful)) they are stuck.
I have a bias towards things that have a lasting importance versus
things that have a limited appeal
Question who is more famous? Archimdes or the political leaders of athens? It in fact appears mathematics is of much more lasting imprtance than whatever war is occuring at the moment.
How can you tell little Billy about STW?
As we all know little billy is the ultimate judge of these matters. I imagine huffman encodings shouldn't be studied either.
Ohh while not a textbook their is a book On relativity or something either written by einstein or from his notes which is exceptionally good.
Yes, but there was a differnt treaty which forbid the US of Russia from placing offensive weapons in space regardless of detonation
Im confused! I thought definitionally the difference between socialism and communism is that communism achieves its ends by overthrow of the current state (hence deystroying that said democracy) while socialism is when private property is abolished via legal means.
Of course the european countries are then only partially socialistic.
The issue that needs to be overcome of course is the motivational factor. If someone is not rewarded for additional work then they will not do the work. The secret therefore to some sort of communist/socialist system is to replace monetary reward by some sort of non-material reward.
But open-source coding is a wonderful prototype of this model. The monetary reward for coding is surplanted by the recognition (conciously or unconciously) of having coded useful software. (HINT TO SOFTWARE COMPANIES: attach programmers names to their project and let them decide on release date etc..). This model may very well continue to be adopted as people's general prosperity levels increase so recognition becomes scarcer than material goods. Of course the question is how will you ever get janitors and garbage collectors to work under such a model given the low amount of recognition they are given.
As far as I know China was not party to the US and russian treaty against putting weapons in space. As such it is very possible that we might see nuclear weapons or something in space b/c of this.
This may lead us to another cold war type of scenario. Far from being bad (as long as we don't nuke each other) the pressure to develop to innovate and even to explore space will be great thus blasting the world out of its sort of consumer compacancy (i.e. does going to space/basic research mean more money/bigger TV for me. No? then don't fund it).
opps forgot to give credit to the post far above suggesting a similar scheme
Suspending by the waist is probably not optimal as you will certainly notice the difference from actually walking. Instead your feet should be straped to two foot supports which actually hold your weight. These foot supports would move freely as long as your feet were above a certain level (the virtual floor) but would lock as soon as they hit the virtual floor. The entire unit can then be given a very small velocity (as mentioned in the above post) which your inner ear doesn't notice keeping you from hitting the wall.
In effect you are walking on giant metalic hands which always sloightly pull you back to the origin preventing you from ever hitting anything.
The most promising solution to this problem appears to be the large room with some sort of "fooling" effect to make the user always slightly turn away from the wall. It may sound farfetched but consider most of our "realistic" simulations come from the fact that the human brain relies on a couple little tricks to understand the outside world not on very good sesory input (for example use of two slightly differnt images to simulate 3d when in fact the objects are not so far away and could be detected via a focusing mechanism).
What about some sort of mechanism to slightly fool the inner ear? This would cause the user to (unconciously hopefully) list to one side keeping them inside a fixed area...if we combined this with a mildly sloping floor it might be used to good effect. The difficulty hear is of course to fool the inner ear without having to stick needles in their or anything.
Has anyone done any research into what happens when the image presented to the user is slightly tilted from the angle expected by the tilt of their head? Do they walk differntly?
A sort of simple proof of concept of this idea is to put yourself in a large room close your eyes and try to walk straight across...extremly difficult to do! Imagine if you were being actively fooled!
How is this fraud? If your package gets broken then you are paid for the damages!! No one ever said UPS couldn't charge what it likes for the insurance. Who the fuck cares what insurance company they use?
Did anyone really think UPS didn't make money on their insurance? The implications for TAX law are large as they are funnelling income to the owner through a differnt company but their seems to be no fraud whatsoever.
THIS IS A NON-ISSUE!
Is their any organization which provides free legal defense for gratuitous suites against internet content (such as this case and the DeCSS issue). Sort of like an ACLU for freedom of expresion on the internet. It seems like something the EFF should really be involved in as the greatest danger to free speech on the internet seems to be abuse of copyright law, trademarks and especially patents.
Yes, mirroring is useful but it also allows a dangerous precedent to be set. If the sites are mirrored but not legally defended it gives legitamacy to the companies/religions claims.
There may be some extremly high end cards to optimize this sort of rendering but this is unlikely.
At root 3d cards liberally approximate lightining and reflection and other things to allow the operations to be performed extremly fast on specialized hardware.
What you are talking about is accelerating raytracing/radiance type imaging which does not make such simple approximations and hence at root just requires a bunch of computational power (hence why titanic was rendered on hundreds of linux boxes and not "rendering cards").
This virus seems to be a relativly mild and easily controlled virus I was wondering about the possible threat of the recently availible Bubbleboy virus.
Given the ease of its transmission and the number of users who will not upgrade their email it appears the potential for infection is enormouse.
But how big? Will it be big enough to make a dent in internet bandwidth (a la the internet worm). Or will the fact that it is a virus and not a worm prevent such widespread network clogging?
As I understand the QPL allows derivitive works and modifications provided the original liscensce holders gain the right to redistribute your modifications.
AND
Any modifications you make must be distributed as a seperate patch file.
The first clause doesn't seem to cause the community any difficulty (so some people can sell it big deal)! However the second clause is very bothersome. Suppose KDE or PHP really catch on and people decide to improve/extend the base libraries. These products could still be around and kicking 10-15 years from now just like X is. But by that point the liscensing companies may very well have faded from the picture.
This leaves us with a huge bloated mess of patch files at the core of an expanding system making it difficult to work with. Now I understand the desire of the company to keep their product name undiluted and to recieve patches so perhaps the minor modification that the patches must be made availible on request (you can always go back and diff it) but the modified source may be distributed UNDER A DIFFERNT NAME!!
Small modification but it could make a big difference in the longterm future of some products.
This is just not true!!
Consider the two cases of special and general relativity, two of the most important theories and influential theories developed in physics. Yet both of them were developed ENTIERLY theoretically.
Special relativity was inspired entierly by thought experiment and the inconsitancy of maxwells equations with respect to moving observers. I believe Einstein claimed to have no knowledge of the Michelson-Morely Interferometer experiment at the time he discovered the theory.
The general theory of relativity then arose from the THEORETICAL issue that gravity was inconsistant with the principal of invariance of physical law under change of reference frame. There was the slight clue using the eccentricity of mercuries orbit but this was a minor factor.
What kind of model do you propose for research? Absurd amounts of money on accelerators to gather trillions of data points which don't mean anything to us as we have no theory to predict/explain them?
Besides Theory is cheap compared to experimentation.
Uhh no..
If I understand your post you seem to be claiming that by somehow understanding chaos we will understand the probablistic nature of quantum mechanics and be able to rectify it with classical mechanics.
However, quantum mechanical events don't just act random they ARE random. To assume otherwise is to invoke some sort of hidden veriable model (the decay of a radioactive isotope is not random but is determined by an incredibly complicated (chaotic?) process we don't understand). This theory was shown to be incompatible with the principle of casuality using the EPR paradox and bells inequaility.
Secondly from a purely pragmatic position we can abandon classical physics as just being an approximation...the difficulty is merely integrating gravity into quantum theory as I understand...it has nothing to do with needing to be non-probabilistic.
The peer review system is merely an acknowledgment of the fact that many more radical ideas are wrong than right. The peer review system ensures that a theory is accepted/published only it if has significant evidence behind it.
Sure it is conservative and slow to act but IF a theory is correct it will have convincing evidence and hence eventually convince the establishment.
Sure the peer review system isn't perfect but what do you want? God editing Nature? There appears to be no better system to keep out the kooks the crackpots and the well intentioned but flawed theories from driving out the good science
Alot of fuss has been made about the inflammatory nature of these questions and whether this excuses John's extremly poor answers.
Compare this to what clinton did when pressed about much more personal issues with tougher questions when a large segment of the population despised him.
Did Clinton call his enemies (justified or not) stupid immature losers? No, he did tactfully deny to answer some questions but this is far from what JV's responses were (JV not only was insulting but ignored all questions not only a select few with deep personal answers.)
Add to this the fact that he agreed to be interviewed on slashdot and only a complete moron would really believe no tough or accusatory questions would come out of this community...especially for JV.
This looks like nothing but a coordinated attempt to get people to dislike the man. This is probably exactly what he is doing...he is not a stupid man this gains him publicity and as he mentioned valuable information. So stop trying to fucking hack his site and ignore him.
It is in things like this that we see the true genius of the GPL. This should finally shut up those people who keep critisizing the GPL. Does anyone really think these companies would release the source coed to these apps if they weren't forced too?
Some of it is the open-source buzzword (I am begining to think that companies will give away cash if it lets them claim they are buzzword X) but without the GPL they would release their source under horribly incompatable and unusable liscenses.
Soon we may pass the critical point where it is more economically advantageous to develop using the free code already out there than to keep your code base propietory.
Is their going to be some change in the attitude toward open-source? Will the buisness plans change?
Finally a AI slashdot poster....in a few months the writers will be getting ontopic first posts automatically :-)
I don't believe this is quite true. No program could use the static libraries..however given that you cannot copyright the library interface (hence why WINE can be free) anything could load the shared library
If anyone can explain what XML actually does which is useful I would be glad to hear it. And don't tell me it is a subset of SGML or it is a language definition standard...neither of these give any clue about how it could in any way be useful...neither does the XML spec...it appears to be just a large complicated way to specify parsers
Possible but unlikely.
Suppose we had any sort of identification number which is availible to the government. As some government employees (who probably aren't paid enough so that a bribe won't tempt them) have access to these numbers. As once you are inpossesion of the unique identification numbers/passwds the automated nature of internet voting would make it relativly eassy to commit the fraud.
There is a solution. Issue every citizen a smart card containing a non-recoverable private key (the smartcard only signs documents). Then each citizen must physically register their public key at a government station. As the private key is never revealed only theft of the msartcard itself with suffice to allow fraud making the system seemingly more secure then todays voting.