[N]either OS is deterministic or suited for an operation like that.
That's the significant point. While linux may have a lot of the reliability and openness that you want, it isn't a RT system. There are number of RT OSs available that would be better than linux. Some of them make all the source available.
... little bits and pieces of info can sure add up to a major security hole...
Back in the 70's there was an interesting case that was widely reported, mostly as a commentary on how US military security works. It seems that the DoD funded a couple of university profs to do a study of what could be learned about the US military solely by collecting information from public sources. They worked for a couple of months, and submitted their report.
Suposedly the report got a Top Secret classification within 24 hours...
Does this mean that anything implemented to the POSIX standard is owned by SCO?
If so, we might note that Windows/NT has included a POSIX library from the start. So Microsoft is going to have to pay $96 in royalties for every NT/2K/ME/XP license that they've collected royalties on.
If the MS Watch works like the MS box that I have sitting next to my linux box (so I can test web pages on IE), what the watch will do is reboot 3 or 4 times per day. Each time it will make yet another DST correction, despite the fact that DST is no longer in effect and I've checked the box saying not to do DST.
If I absentmindedly click the OK button, the watchk will be off by an hour. But mostly it'll be just another annoyance when I look at the watch to check the time, find that it has rebooted, mumble a few choice obscenities, and twiddle with it to turn the DST thingie off yet again so I can see the time.
And it'll lose 45 seconds per day.
Yeah, I know there's a linux watch available. But I can't really see running an xterm on it. The default borders and title bar would take up the whole screen, and I'd probably never find a way to turn them off.;-)
--
Re:comment to any search engine guys
on
You Can't Link Here
·
· Score: 3, Informative
There's a simple and standard way to tell search sites not to link to portions of your web site. It's the "robots.txt" file. It allows you to restrict access to your URLs by all or specific search programs. All of the established search sites read this file and honor its contents.
It has a lot of valid uses. On one site where I have a lot of cgi scripts, there's a "tmp" directory used for the usual purpose. Its contents are deleted after an hour. Indexing this directory is pointless, since the data will go away so soon, so the robots.txt file tells all searchers to not bother searching it.
Any site that seriously wants to keep part of its material out of the search sites' databases has a tool that does exactly this, and almost all search sites will honor it.
Backlit looks cool, but is purely cosmetic. What would be just as cool, and actually useful, would be for the symbols on the keys to light up. Then you could use it in the dark without problems when you forget where the ~ or | key is on this @#$@&% keyboard. This isn't a trivial concern when you routinely work with several different machines, all with different keyboard placement of some chars.
I use X's cut-and-paste all the time, and it's really frustrating to use the complex dance that both Macs and Windoze machines make you do to just copy a few bytes from one place to another.
Of course, my SO sneers at 3-button mice. She has worked on several projects where she had a 16-button mouse. Once you get handy with one of those, others seem limited and clumsy.
I've heard any number of comments from the CAD/CAM crowd about how useful it would be if they could carry around a "laptop" with a real mouse like the one on their design station. Field work would be so much easier if you can fill the portable's disk with all the diagrams or maps, and edit them on the scene.
Though myself, what I want is a way to plug 8 or 10 mikes into a PowerBook, so I can do N-track field recordings. I've looked around www.apple.com, but haven't found the part numbers yet.
How can [Bill Gates] be evil when he wants to save children in third world countries from AIDS?
Well, according to several recent reports on his contributions to various efforts, he wants to save them from the threat of linux even more he wants to save them from AIDS.
In a few months, your service agreement will forbid such anti-corporate comments
If your ISP is one of the many now owned by msn.com (i.e., Microsoft), your EULA probably already forbids this, except perhaps in jurisdictions where there are local laws against such restrictions. And in the US as a whole, such restrictive terms are legal. Under the DMCA, publicly describing bugs or flaws in any product you buy or rent is illegal..
Could this... have enough appeal to get a mainstream keyboard maker behind it?
Well, I've already seen this used as an example of "market failure". After all, this isn't exactly a new story. The problems (for some people) of computer keyboards and the "mechanical typewriter" solution has been pretty much common media knowledge for several years, and there seems to be a fair amount of medical support for it.
If you believe the market theories, we obvious must have had typewriter-like keyboards for sale for several years now. No rational manufacturer would ever ignore such obvious demand. So where are they?
Huh? What sort of idiot would pay 10 grand for something with this resolution? Your average laptop can do better than that. Yeah, it's big, but the pixels must be really big, and you'd have to put it across the room for it to look halfway decent.
Actually, that's the fourth. For some time now, people have been occasionally mentioning a third:
Free as in disk space.
But if you consult a good enough dictionary, you'll find a whole lot of other meanings of "free". This is, as esr has said, a major bug in the English Language.
So, if you try to overclock your diamond chip, could you vaporize it?
Nah; most of it would just reconfigure as graphite, except at the surface.
There is a problem with overly-warm diamonds in an oxygen atmosphere: Occasionally, a C atom will join up with a passing O2 molecule and they'll wander off together. This doesn't happen with diamond rings, because the temperature required would be high enough that you'd pull the ring off. But it is a worry in a chip that you want to last for years. But it's easy enough to prevent. You just cover exposed diamond surfaces with a layer of something that blocks the oxygen. Gold will do quite nicely.
Gutenberg invented the printing press at a time when books were worth their weight in gold (in europe, at least)...
Well, maybe, but a funny anecdote from 220 years earlier: When Ghengis (not yet Khan) led the first Mongol exploratory expedition into the wild western lands, around 1220, one of the ways that the explorers supported themselves was by bringing along a troop of Korean printers. They made cheap printed editions of the Koran and Bible as they went, and sold them to the locals. This was, of course, one of the things that got them labelled as demons, since they were undercutting the monopoly that the local religious establishment had on these books.
But it had no effect in Western Europe, since the Mongol troop didn't get that far. And, of course, technology already in common use in Asia was not considered real by Europeans, even after demos.
If you dig up the various stories about the recent increases in the number of blimps in the world, you'll read that one of their minor problems is that people are always using them as targets. It's not actually all that big a problem, because even very large bullets leave only a slow leak. Part of the routine maintenance is plugging all the small holes in the fabric. Every few years they have to replace the fabric.
It's more of a problem when the bullets miss the fabric and hit the gondola. Flight crew in one of those advertising blimps over a football game can be a risky job in some areas.
But this wouldn't be that much of a problem for a blimp at 21 km altitude. It would take a rather high-powered rifle to hit something that far up, and your typical suburban redneck probably wouldn't have anything with that kind of power.
They could be a target during military (and terrorist) operations. Even then, though, blimps are difficult to bring down. Your typical small missile, even if it hit and exploded inside the baloon, would just leave a lot of small holes, causing a slow descent. It would take a direct hit on the gondola to put it out of action quickly, and that's not an easy target.
Your assertion that pi is the same in all possible universes seems quite silly to me.... because everythin on the basis of which we conceive of that is part and parcel of the universe itself, including the laws of physics.
Sorry, you're dead wrong here. First, pi and circles have nothing to do with physics. There are no circles (as mathematicians define them) in our universe. Pi is an abstract concept, not a physical object. We can conceive of them nonetheless. The human mind is hardly limited by the physics of our universe. Suggesting that it is is, well, silly, and flatly contradicted by watching an hour or so of Saturday-morning cartoons. I can conceive of things that don't exist in our universe, and so can you.
It's possible that another intelligent species might not conceive of pi. But any that do will come up with the same value (though they may represent it in a different base). Or they may use circumference / radius, giving a value of 2*pi, but that doesn't affect the discussion.
Pi's value is what it is. It has nothing to do with anything in any physical reality. It's a pure mathematical concept, and as such, will have the same value for anyone who conceives of it.
This is really no different that observing that 1 and 2 have the same value in all possible universes. You may name and write them differently, but that doesn't affect their values. Pi is merely another (somewhat more compicated) number. Not even a god can change its value. They can define another value, but it won't be pi.
I have a number of friends who are stuck with using NT at work. They say they have an approach that works pretty well. They note that Microsoft claims that NT is POSIX compliant. They take this at face value, and start downloading the source for all the usual POSIX-based tools from the online linux archives. They compile them, and they mostly work quite well.
There are problems with the things that just don't work right, of course. But a friend put this in an interesting perspective. Back in the early days of POSIX, the committee sent out requests for specs for a system called WEIRDNIX. This was defined as a system that was technically in compliance with the POSIX specs, but took advantage of every loophole and ambiguity to do things in the worst possible way. This was a technique of pre-emptively adjusting the wording so that vendors would have difficulty violating the spirit of POSIX.
The Microsoft version of the POSIX libraries can be viewed as an implementation of WEIRDNIX. This should give you a good idea of them problems that you will encounter.
But in general, the gnu and linux tools are widely reported to work pretty well on NT. Better than the NT tools, anyway.
Maybe this is why, when I try to download the latest release of mozilla to my Win98 machine, it tells me "This program has performed an illegal operation...."
Do you have a reference for a proof of the normality of pi? The last I read, this was still at the "conjecture" stage, though there have been enticing arguments in its favor.
Of course, proof of the normality of e would also suffice, since pi and e are related by a well-known equation that has no other transcendental terms.
The problem with this argument is that pi has the same value in all possible universes. So its value implies nothing at all about the existence of anything in our universe or in any other.
True, you get different digits if you use different bases. But this is also unaffected by the existence of any god or gods. In base N, you get the same sequence of digits no matter what universe you are in, regardless of whether there's a god.
There is also a conjecture, undecided as far as I know, that pi is what mathematicians call a "normal" number. (Look it up.) If this is true, then the expansion of pi in any base will turn up the pattern that Sagan described. The pattern (and all others) will turn up an infinite number of times, in a frequency distribution determines solely by the number of digits in the pattern.
Among all the adulatory writing about Einstein, I've occasionally seen the observation that pretty much all of his great work was done while he was with Mileva. This begs an obvious question: How much credit does she deserve for his results? Was she really just his muse, as some have suggested? Was she a good mathematician who turned his ideas into theory? Was she the real thinker who was ignored because she was female (and Serbian)?
This is one of the few responses here that wouldn't flunk a 6th-grade writing test. Note that the question was not "What's your favorite SF?" The question was "What's your favorite sf UNIVERSE?"
Any grade-school teacher would flunk most of the answers here on the simple ground that they answer a question that was not asked, and don't answer the question that was asked.
This is a standard ruse of students when they can't answer the question, of course. Seeing most of the respondents here answer the wrong question so blatantly would sadden even the most jaded grade-school teacher.
And I was hoping to read some interesting discussions of the good/bad points of some of those universes...
Slashdot Mirror
[N]either OS is deterministic or suited for an operation like that.
That's the significant point. While linux may have a lot of the reliability and openness that you want, it isn't a RT system. There are number of RT OSs available that would be better than linux. Some of them make all the source available.
Ask any handy RT programmer for more details.
--
... little bits and pieces of info can sure add up to a major security hole ...
...
Back in the 70's there was an interesting case that was widely reported, mostly as a commentary on how US military security works. It seems that the DoD funded a couple of university profs to do a study of what could be learned about the US military solely by collecting information from public sources. They worked for a couple of months, and submitted their report.
Suposedly the report got a Top Secret classification within 24 hours
--
Does this mean that anything implemented to the POSIX standard is owned by SCO?
...
If so, we might note that Windows/NT has included a POSIX library from the start. So Microsoft is going to have to pay $96 in royalties for every NT/2K/ME/XP license that they've collected royalties on.
This might get interesting
If the MS Watch works like the MS box that I have sitting next to my linux box (so I can test web pages on IE), what the watch will do is reboot 3 or 4 times per day. Each time it will make yet another DST correction, despite the fact that DST is no longer in effect and I've checked the box saying not to do DST.
;-)
If I absentmindedly click the OK button, the watchk will be off by an hour. But mostly it'll be just another annoyance when I look at the watch to check the time, find that it has rebooted, mumble a few choice obscenities, and twiddle with it to turn the DST thingie off yet again so I can see the time.
And it'll lose 45 seconds per day.
Yeah, I know there's a linux watch available. But I can't really see running an xterm on it. The default borders and title bar would take up the whole screen, and I'd probably never find a way to turn them off.
--
There's a simple and standard way to tell search sites not to link to portions of your web site. It's the "robots.txt" file. It allows you to restrict access to your URLs by all or specific search programs. All of the established search sites read this file and honor its contents.
It has a lot of valid uses. On one site where I have a lot of cgi scripts, there's a "tmp" directory used for the usual purpose. Its contents are deleted after an hour. Indexing this directory is pointless, since the data will go away so soon, so the robots.txt file tells all searchers to not bother searching it.
Any site that seriously wants to keep part of its material out of the search sites' databases has a tool that does exactly this, and almost all search sites will honor it.
--
Backlit looks cool, but is purely cosmetic. What would be just as cool, and actually useful, would be for the symbols on the keys to light up. Then you could use it in the dark without problems when you forget where the ~ or | key is on this @#$@&% keyboard. This isn't a trivial concern when you routinely work with several different machines, all with different keyboard placement of some chars.
So can you get it with a 3-button mouse?
I use X's cut-and-paste all the time, and it's really frustrating to use the complex dance that both Macs and Windoze machines make you do to just copy a few bytes from one place to another.
Of course, my SO sneers at 3-button mice. She has worked on several projects where she had a 16-button mouse. Once you get handy with one of those, others seem limited and clumsy.
I've heard any number of comments from the CAD/CAM crowd about how useful it would be if they could carry around a "laptop" with a real mouse like the one on their design station. Field work would be so much easier if you can fill the portable's disk with all the diagrams or maps, and edit them on the scene.
Though myself, what I want is a way to plug 8 or 10 mikes into a PowerBook, so I can do N-track field recordings. I've looked around www.apple.com, but haven't found the part numbers yet.
How can [Bill Gates] be evil when he wants to save children in third world countries from AIDS?
Well, according to several recent reports on his contributions to various efforts, he wants to save them from the threat of linux even more he wants to save them from AIDS.
--
In a few months, your service agreement will forbid such anti-corporate comments
If your ISP is one of the many now owned by msn.com (i.e., Microsoft), your EULA probably already forbids this, except perhaps in jurisdictions where there are local laws against such restrictions. And in the US as a whole, such restrictive terms are legal. Under the DMCA, publicly describing bugs or flaws in any product you buy or rent is illegal..
--
Could this ... have enough appeal to get a mainstream keyboard maker behind it?
Well, I've already seen this used as an example of "market failure". After all, this isn't exactly a new story. The problems (for some people) of computer keyboards and the "mechanical typewriter" solution has been pretty much common media knowledge for several years, and there seems to be a fair amount of medical support for it.
If you believe the market theories, we obvious must have had typewriter-like keyboards for sale for several years now. No rational manufacturer would ever ignore such obvious demand. So where are they?
--
Yeah, and I boggled when I read the spec:
...
852 x 480 resolution
Huh? What sort of idiot would pay 10 grand for something with this resolution? Your average laptop can do better than that. Yeah, it's big, but the pixels must be really big, and you'd have to put it across the room for it to look halfway decent.
Now if it did 16000 x 9000 pixels
free as in free time.
..." phrases seem to contain any irony.
Yeah, that's even better than "disk space". They're both really the same use of "free".
I do like the "Free as in Tibet". None of the other "Free as in
Actually, that's the fourth. For some time now, people have been occasionally mentioning a third:
Free as in disk space.
But if you consult a good enough dictionary, you'll find a whole lot of other meanings of "free". This is, as esr has said, a major bug in the English Language.
So, if you try to overclock your diamond chip, could you vaporize it?
Nah; most of it would just reconfigure as graphite, except at the surface.
There is a problem with overly-warm diamonds in an oxygen atmosphere: Occasionally, a C atom will join up with a passing O2 molecule and they'll wander off together. This doesn't happen with diamond rings, because the temperature required would be high enough that you'd pull the ring off. But it is a worry in a chip that you want to last for years. But it's easy enough to prevent. You just cover exposed diamond surfaces with a layer of something that blocks the oxygen. Gold will do quite nicely.
Gutenberg invented the printing press at a time when books were worth their weight in gold (in europe, at least) ...
Well, maybe, but a funny anecdote from 220 years earlier: When Ghengis (not yet Khan) led the first Mongol exploratory expedition into the wild western lands, around 1220, one of the ways that the explorers supported themselves was by bringing along a troop of Korean printers. They made cheap printed editions of the Koran and Bible as they went, and sold them to the locals. This was, of course, one of the things that got them labelled as demons, since they were undercutting the monopoly that the local religious establishment had on these books.
But it had no effect in Western Europe, since the Mongol troop didn't get that far. And, of course, technology already in common use in Asia was not considered real by Europeans, even after demos.
... if you feel the need to hide, you must have something to hide, and you are assumed to be a criminal.
I do have something to hide: my credit card numbers.
--
snipers
If you dig up the various stories about the recent increases in the number of blimps in the world, you'll read that one of their minor problems is that people are always using them as targets. It's not actually all that big a problem, because even very large bullets leave only a slow leak. Part of the routine maintenance is plugging all the small holes in the fabric. Every few years they have to replace the fabric.
It's more of a problem when the bullets miss the fabric and hit the gondola. Flight crew in one of those advertising blimps over a football game can be a risky job in some areas.
But this wouldn't be that much of a problem for a blimp at 21 km altitude. It would take a rather high-powered rifle to hit something that far up, and your typical suburban redneck probably wouldn't have anything with that kind of power.
They could be a target during military (and terrorist) operations. Even then, though, blimps are difficult to bring down. Your typical small missile, even if it hit and exploded inside the baloon, would just leave a lot of small holes, causing a slow descent. It would take a direct hit on the gondola to put it out of action quickly, and that's not an easy target.
--
during the 'Dark Ages', the accumulated knowledge of centuries vanished,
....
Well, actually, it didn't quite vanish. It was carefully saved and protected in church archives
Your assertion that pi is the same in all possible universes seems quite silly to me. ... because everythin on the basis of which we conceive of that is part and parcel of the universe itself, including the laws of physics.
Sorry, you're dead wrong here. First, pi and circles have nothing to do with physics. There are no circles (as mathematicians define them) in our universe. Pi is an abstract concept, not a physical object. We can conceive of them nonetheless. The human mind is hardly limited by the physics of our universe. Suggesting that it is is, well, silly, and flatly contradicted by watching an hour or so of Saturday-morning cartoons. I can conceive of things that don't exist in our universe, and so can you.
It's possible that another intelligent species might not conceive of pi. But any that do will come up with the same value (though they may represent it in a different base). Or they may use circumference / radius, giving a value of 2*pi, but that doesn't affect the discussion.
Pi's value is what it is. It has nothing to do with anything in any physical reality. It's a pure mathematical concept, and as such, will have the same value for anyone who conceives of it.
This is really no different that observing that 1 and 2 have the same value in all possible universes. You may name and write them differently, but that doesn't affect their values. Pi is merely another (somewhat more compicated) number. Not even a god can change its value. They can define another value, but it won't be pi.
--
I have a number of friends who are stuck with using NT at work. They say they have an approach that works pretty well. They note that Microsoft claims that NT is POSIX compliant. They take this at face value, and start downloading the source for all the usual POSIX-based tools from the online linux archives. They compile them, and they mostly work quite well.
There are problems with the things that just don't work right, of course. But a friend put this in an interesting perspective. Back in the early days of POSIX, the committee sent out requests for specs for a system called WEIRDNIX. This was defined as a system that was technically in compliance with the POSIX specs, but took advantage of every loophole and ambiguity to do things in the worst possible way. This was a technique of pre-emptively adjusting the wording so that vendors would have difficulty violating the spirit of POSIX.
The Microsoft version of the POSIX libraries can be viewed as an implementation of WEIRDNIX. This should give you a good idea of them problems that you will encounter.
But in general, the gnu and linux tools are widely reported to work pretty well on NT. Better than the NT tools, anyway.
--
Maybe this is why, when I try to download the latest release of mozilla to my Win98 machine, it tells me "This program has performed an illegal operation ...."
--
Do you have a reference for a proof of the normality of pi? The last I read, this was still at the "conjecture" stage, though there have been enticing arguments in its favor.
Of course, proof of the normality of e would also suffice, since pi and e are related by a well-known equation that has no other transcendental terms.
The problem with this argument is that pi has the same value in all possible universes. So its value implies nothing at all about the existence of anything in our universe or in any other.
True, you get different digits if you use different bases. But this is also unaffected by the existence of any god or gods. In base N, you get the same sequence of digits no matter what universe you are in, regardless of whether there's a god.
There is also a conjecture, undecided as far as I know, that pi is what mathematicians call a "normal" number. (Look it up.) If this is true, then the expansion of pi in any base will turn up the pattern that Sagan described. The pattern (and all others) will turn up an infinite number of times, in a frequency distribution determines solely by the number of digits in the pattern.
Among all the adulatory writing about Einstein, I've occasionally seen the observation that pretty much all of his great work was done while he was with Mileva. This begs an obvious question: How much credit does she deserve for his results? Was she really just his muse, as some have suggested? Was she a good mathematician who turned his ideas into theory? Was she the real thinker who was ignored because she was female (and Serbian)?
;-)
I wonder if she ever met Rosalind Franklin?
This is one of the few responses here that wouldn't flunk a 6th-grade writing test. Note that the question was not "What's your favorite SF?" The question was "What's your favorite sf UNIVERSE?"
...
Any grade-school teacher would flunk most of the answers here on the simple ground that they answer a question that was not asked, and don't answer the question that was asked.
This is a standard ruse of students when they can't answer the question, of course. Seeing most of the respondents here answer the wrong question so blatantly would sadden even the most jaded grade-school teacher.
And I was hoping to read some interesting discussions of the good/bad points of some of those universes
<sigh/>