I'm taking exception to the original post, not trying to define a measure of complexity. I quote:
That is like saying 1/3 is unknown just because you can't print enough 3's after the decimal place to be accurate.
This seems to think that the problem with expressing pi's value involves the use of a decimal number system, when it's actually an inherent difficulty of expressing this value with integers.
Re:Unknown value?
on
Happy Pi Day
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· Score: 1, Insightful
But no system of representing numbers could express pi's relationship to 1 exactly without an infinite amount of information. We can express a method of calculating pi, for instance, but the method must necessarily have an infinite number of steps. That means the value cannot be found exactly, so in some sense it is very much "unknown".
I just picked the N95 because people bring it up a lot. Your phone has engineering compromises too, just like any other phone. It's just a matter of which compromises you like.
I will say that I don't personally like to carry a purse, so size is important to me, and history shows that it's important to a lot of other people. I'm not sure that the mini-tablets and such that are twice the size of an iPhone will ever be accepted by the majority.
The Wikipedia link you gave for the N90 specs the "talk time" at 3 hours and the battery size as 760mAh. Unless that screen is very dim, you wouldn't be able to do much Web browsing or video watching on that thing without a recharge. I've seen the iPhone battery quoted as 1400mAh -- even if that is inaccurate it's certainly much more than 760mAh.
So the N90 isn't designed correctly around the principle of having a big, high-quality screen. Back to the N95 -- surely the smaller screen was a deliberate choice, but principal among the reasons for that choice would be UI issues. Apple obviously put a lot of work into the button-free UI that makes the iPhone's big screen workable; without that UI you need buttons which means a smaller screen, a two-piece mechanical design (which leaves less room for a battery), or a device that's too big. You can't just toss out a device like the iPhone with Windows Mobile or something and expect it to be usable.
MMS is just an example of something people complain about; you didn't specify which of the features from the '90s were must-haves for you. And I don't mean to say that someone is seriously irrational for disliking the iPhone; I'm criticizing your use of the cliche "fanboy" which (you may have noticed) is often used as a straw man around here. My point is that the iPhone's capabilities are going to make it a very interesting platform, and it would be a mistake to dismiss it out of hand by complaining that it doesn't have enough Gs or that you like some other phone better.
Your comment is a great example of the disconnect between some Slashdotters and real users about the iPhone. Your example must-have feature is an obscure technology that a small minority of people would ever use. You toss the iPhone a "very pretty UI" line, but how many of your "phones designed by checklist" have a 320x480 screen and a big enough battery to power it for hours? The N95, while much-praised by irrational Apple-haters*, is only 240x320. Doesn't everything we know about computing tell us that large, quality displays are critical for real-world end-user productivity? And you'd toss all that away with "very pretty but doesn't have XMPP/MMS/PEBKAC protocols that I, for one, use daily"? Why was Nokia wasting time on MMS so people could send each other pictures of themselves when they should have been figuring out how to put a decent screen on a device and have it still fit in your pocket?
Now here we are, months away from the release of apps, and already people are already turning their guesses about how Apple will interpret the SDK ToS into news. But all we really have are guesses. Your assertion that Apple will block development of an XMPP client is completely unfounded; this speculation is based on a paragraph in the Human Interface Guidelines (of all things) that is really talking about making the application quitting/restarting transparent to the user. Apple allowed AOL to demo an AIM client, so the conspiracy theories about AT&T wanting more SMS revenue turned out to be completely unfounded; there will be IM on the iPhone as soon as developers release clients. Even the notion that Apple will "block Firefox" is based on the fact that Firefox includes a plugin architecture (which could be disabled) and a JavaScript interpreter (which may or may not be included in Apple's definition of an "interpreted language").
* - normally it wouldn't be polite to imply that someone is irrational simply because they like or don't like a certain product, but it's become part of the way we discuss Apple stories on Slashdot, apparently.
See, the thing to do with all these cores is run a physics simulation. Physics can be easily distributed to multiple cores by the principle of locality. Then insert into your physics simulation a CPU -- something simple like a 68k perhaps. Once you have the CPU simulation going, adjust the laws of physics in your simulation (increase the speed of light to 100c, etc) so that you can overclock your simulated 68k to 100Ghz. Your single-threaded app will scream on that.
P.S.: I know why this is impossible, so please don't flame me.
Because there is SO much free space inside the iPhone case for large extra chipsets. And AT&T's 3G network is well enough built out that the average user can expect 3G performance to be better than EDGE performance a significant majority of the time. And there are no independent tests confirming that 3G chipsets available in 2007 used much more battery power even when just making calls.
this is just as big as the trustworthy computing initiative that Microsoft underwent in the early part of the decade.
And thank god for that. Now it's so easy for people to understand what is really going on inside their computers, easy to establish straightforward relationships of trust with applications (as well as other computers, and other users), and easy for developers to write applications within those frameworks of trust so that they aren't tempted to demand access to everything.
It's great that Microsoft alone understood that "trustworthy computing" was a UI problem more than a computer science problem. Their innovative security UI is a beacon for the industry.
I couldn't disagree more. It's tempting to look upon this huge landscape of art that's already been made and conclude that the old stuff is better, that so much of the new stuff is uncreative, and that there's no reason to make it anymore. That thinking would make this a pretty poor society. We need music, and even TV, that reflects what it's like to live in OUR time. We'll certainly make mistakes and there will be plenty of terrible art, but in a way making bad art is part of the process of making good art. It's like R&D for culture: you can't just make something good out of whole cloth, you need an understanding of what is good and what isn't.
That isn't to say we should worship the new, but to denigrate it as you have done isn't useful, in my opinion.
The fact that this was such a big deal for so many people was absurd
Agreed! In fact, to make sure the message gets across, we should close down musical writing next. Society would be better off if there wasn't any new music being made, since we all know it's not important. And then we could get authors to stop writing, video game makers to stop making video games, sculptors to stop sculpting. Before long we'd DEFINITELY have a clear idea of what's really important.
OK, maybe you don't like this particular art form, but what's interesting about the motion picture as culture is the way it requires so many players to put together. On the opposite side of the art spectrum we have an author or painter who works alone and creates something that's an expression of themselves, and there is a lot of value in that, but the collaborative art can have a lot of value too.
Of course, 90% of it is crap, but that doesn't mean that it's a GOOD thing that this happened. In fact, in the end it will probably have a disproportionate effect on interesting and creative shows, as those sometimes need more time to establish an audience -- time that has now been lost.
I know being a sourpuss can be popular here on Slashdot these days, but insightful it ain't.
Your history is a little off. Hubble was launched in 1990, not 1995. And it was heavily delayed... launch was originally scheduled for 1983, and construction was actually completed in the mid 80s. Serious design work dates back to the 70s.
So I can totally believe that the military could have contemplated something similar in 1965. Whether it would have been successful is another question.
NO! We have a decent economy and a great nation because we don't subscribe to any one idiot's "master plan"! We absolutely need a society where everyone has a say. The Soviet Union, communist China, Nazi Germany -- pure systems, all which were doomed to failure from the start. Communism, in particular, cannot work and never will, no matter how nice and wholesome people are, because it's a horribly broken system that throws away all the important resource-allocation information. America's strength has always been that we are suspicious of anyone who thinks they have all the answers.
I know it's popular to go on about how America is going down the tubes, but there just isn't much truth to it. So we're having a recession? Big deal. No economist seriously believes that it's possible to have an economy that doesn't go through recessions. I'm sorry, but you are completely wrong -- we need a proper national dialogue among people with different views, and the problems we face today will all be solved in their own different ways (some with government programs, some with the free market, some with a hybrid of the two).
Since this is Slashdot, it's time for a systems design analogy: it's a huge mistake to believe that a system should be completely centralized on one giant mainframe, just as much as it's a mistake to think that it should be completely distributed to individual PCs. Both systems seem to have a kind of elegant beauty, and both systems are completely unworkable.
Only a small portion of the total energy picture comes from foreign oil, and we only really need that to run internal combustion engines. There's no reason to speak of the "power going out" if there wasn't foreign oil. For that you're talking about coal, to a large extent, which is in fairly tremendous domestic supply.
Secondly, the US economy is much better prepared to deal with a reduction in oil supply now than at any other time in the recent past.
Power supplies also generate a lot of heat -- notice that those bricks tend to be warm under load, even through that insulation. Put them inside the laptop and you're adding a bunch of heat to a place that you want to be removing heat from. So you need bigger fans and it takes even more space. It's just unworkable.
What about sellers who only scam some of their buyers? They would know when to expect negative feedback because they know who they've cheated. With your plan they could make a pre-emptive strike, if you will.
Well, there is another possible way that's been suggested, though the details haven't been ironed out. Suppose you don't have coverage and go to the hospital with appendicitis. They treat you and present a bill for $5000, which you can't pay.
These days they just write it off and throw a debt collector at you, which makes other people pay for your care as you say. Under Hillary's plan there would presumably be less of this, though it's hard to eliminate entirely (illegal immigrants? foreigners? the homeless?)
The other way is to give you the option of joining the government system to get the bill paid, but with a penalty. Maybe you'll pay double premiums for five years or something, or lose the option to leave the program, or heck, the government could take it out of your social security later on. There are a lot of options in between sticking the hospitals with the costs and forcing people to buy coverage from the government.
I have kidney disease, diagnosed at the age of 19, which required transplantation and still requires prescription drugs that would cost thousands of dollars a month if I didn't have health coverage.
Let's back off for a second. First, you accuse people of voting for Obama only because he's black. As proof you offer Krugman's diatribe claiming that Hillary's health care plan is superior. I offer you some counter-arguments and you make a false statement while calling Obama a liar. Then I say that forcing people who cannot afford health care to purchase it doesn't help them much, and you call me a dumbass. We've gotten a long way from your original theory that people only vote for Obama because he's black. Care to issue a retraction?
Sure, 20-year-olds can get diseases by surprise. But that doesn't mean that the government healthcare is automatically a good deal. In Hillary's plan, the government makes it "affordable" by demanding that you afford it. Obama's plan ensures that if the government healthcare isn't a good deal, people don't have to buy it. I think this is a fundamental matter of personal choice, that's all, and that's one reason I prefer Obama to Hillary. It's not because he's black; it's not because he's a liar; it's not because I'm a dumbass.
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I'm taking exception to the original post, not trying to define a measure of complexity. I quote:
That is like saying 1/3 is unknown just because you can't print enough 3's after the decimal place to be accurate.
This seems to think that the problem with expressing pi's value involves the use of a decimal number system, when it's actually an inherent difficulty of expressing this value with integers.
But no system of representing numbers could express pi's relationship to 1 exactly without an infinite amount of information. We can express a method of calculating pi, for instance, but the method must necessarily have an infinite number of steps. That means the value cannot be found exactly, so in some sense it is very much "unknown".
But what if you were the Police office who unfairly got poor reviews because you arested someone who deserved it..
So what? Free speech has nothing to do with what's "fair".
Honestly, I kind of felt like the response was a subtle jab at how silly and stupid the question was.
I just picked the N95 because people bring it up a lot. Your phone has engineering compromises too, just like any other phone. It's just a matter of which compromises you like.
I will say that I don't personally like to carry a purse, so size is important to me, and history shows that it's important to a lot of other people. I'm not sure that the mini-tablets and such that are twice the size of an iPhone will ever be accepted by the majority.
The Wikipedia link you gave for the N90 specs the "talk time" at 3 hours and the battery size as 760mAh. Unless that screen is very dim, you wouldn't be able to do much Web browsing or video watching on that thing without a recharge. I've seen the iPhone battery quoted as 1400mAh -- even if that is inaccurate it's certainly much more than 760mAh.
So the N90 isn't designed correctly around the principle of having a big, high-quality screen. Back to the N95 -- surely the smaller screen was a deliberate choice, but principal among the reasons for that choice would be UI issues. Apple obviously put a lot of work into the button-free UI that makes the iPhone's big screen workable; without that UI you need buttons which means a smaller screen, a two-piece mechanical design (which leaves less room for a battery), or a device that's too big. You can't just toss out a device like the iPhone with Windows Mobile or something and expect it to be usable.
MMS is just an example of something people complain about; you didn't specify which of the features from the '90s were must-haves for you. And I don't mean to say that someone is seriously irrational for disliking the iPhone; I'm criticizing your use of the cliche "fanboy" which (you may have noticed) is often used as a straw man around here. My point is that the iPhone's capabilities are going to make it a very interesting platform, and it would be a mistake to dismiss it out of hand by complaining that it doesn't have enough Gs or that you like some other phone better.
Your comment is a great example of the disconnect between some Slashdotters and real users about the iPhone. Your example must-have feature is an obscure technology that a small minority of people would ever use. You toss the iPhone a "very pretty UI" line, but how many of your "phones designed by checklist" have a 320x480 screen and a big enough battery to power it for hours? The N95, while much-praised by irrational Apple-haters*, is only 240x320. Doesn't everything we know about computing tell us that large, quality displays are critical for real-world end-user productivity? And you'd toss all that away with "very pretty but doesn't have XMPP/MMS/PEBKAC protocols that I, for one, use daily"? Why was Nokia wasting time on MMS so people could send each other pictures of themselves when they should have been figuring out how to put a decent screen on a device and have it still fit in your pocket?
Now here we are, months away from the release of apps, and already people are already turning their guesses about how Apple will interpret the SDK ToS into news. But all we really have are guesses. Your assertion that Apple will block development of an XMPP client is completely unfounded; this speculation is based on a paragraph in the Human Interface Guidelines (of all things) that is really talking about making the application quitting/restarting transparent to the user. Apple allowed AOL to demo an AIM client, so the conspiracy theories about AT&T wanting more SMS revenue turned out to be completely unfounded; there will be IM on the iPhone as soon as developers release clients. Even the notion that Apple will "block Firefox" is based on the fact that Firefox includes a plugin architecture (which could be disabled) and a JavaScript interpreter (which may or may not be included in Apple's definition of an "interpreted language").
* - normally it wouldn't be polite to imply that someone is irrational simply because they like or don't like a certain product, but it's become part of the way we discuss Apple stories on Slashdot, apparently.
See, the thing to do with all these cores is run a physics simulation. Physics can be easily distributed to multiple cores by the principle of locality. Then insert into your physics simulation a CPU -- something simple like a 68k perhaps. Once you have the CPU simulation going, adjust the laws of physics in your simulation (increase the speed of light to 100c, etc) so that you can overclock your simulated 68k to 100Ghz. Your single-threaded app will scream on that.
P.S.: I know why this is impossible, so please don't flame me.
Because there is SO much free space inside the iPhone case for large extra chipsets. And AT&T's 3G network is well enough built out that the average user can expect 3G performance to be better than EDGE performance a significant majority of the time. And there are no independent tests confirming that 3G chipsets available in 2007 used much more battery power even when just making calls.
Not.
Just a correction -- OSX uses no code or design from X Windows, and the X in OSX has nothing to do with the X Window System.
There is an X server included to run X applications, but Aqua/Cocoa are not similar to X.
Wouldn't it be much more practical to solve that problem with a USB hub and a lazy Susan?
this is just as big as the trustworthy computing initiative that Microsoft underwent in the early part of the decade.
And thank god for that. Now it's so easy for people to understand what is really going on inside their computers, easy to establish straightforward relationships of trust with applications (as well as other computers, and other users), and easy for developers to write applications within those frameworks of trust so that they aren't tempted to demand access to everything.
It's great that Microsoft alone understood that "trustworthy computing" was a UI problem more than a computer science problem. Their innovative security UI is a beacon for the industry.
I couldn't disagree more. It's tempting to look upon this huge landscape of art that's already been made and conclude that the old stuff is better, that so much of the new stuff is uncreative, and that there's no reason to make it anymore. That thinking would make this a pretty poor society. We need music, and even TV, that reflects what it's like to live in OUR time. We'll certainly make mistakes and there will be plenty of terrible art, but in a way making bad art is part of the process of making good art. It's like R&D for culture: you can't just make something good out of whole cloth, you need an understanding of what is good and what isn't.
That isn't to say we should worship the new, but to denigrate it as you have done isn't useful, in my opinion.
The fact that this was such a big deal for so many people was absurd
Agreed! In fact, to make sure the message gets across, we should close down musical writing next. Society would be better off if there wasn't any new music being made, since we all know it's not important. And then we could get authors to stop writing, video game makers to stop making video games, sculptors to stop sculpting. Before long we'd DEFINITELY have a clear idea of what's really important.
OK, maybe you don't like this particular art form, but what's interesting about the motion picture as culture is the way it requires so many players to put together. On the opposite side of the art spectrum we have an author or painter who works alone and creates something that's an expression of themselves, and there is a lot of value in that, but the collaborative art can have a lot of value too.
Of course, 90% of it is crap, but that doesn't mean that it's a GOOD thing that this happened. In fact, in the end it will probably have a disproportionate effect on interesting and creative shows, as those sometimes need more time to establish an audience -- time that has now been lost.
I know being a sourpuss can be popular here on Slashdot these days, but insightful it ain't.
Your history is a little off. Hubble was launched in 1990, not 1995. And it was heavily delayed... launch was originally scheduled for 1983, and construction was actually completed in the mid 80s. Serious design work dates back to the 70s.
So I can totally believe that the military could have contemplated something similar in 1965. Whether it would have been successful is another question.
NO! We have a decent economy and a great nation because we don't subscribe to any one idiot's "master plan"! We absolutely need a society where everyone has a say. The Soviet Union, communist China, Nazi Germany -- pure systems, all which were doomed to failure from the start. Communism, in particular, cannot work and never will, no matter how nice and wholesome people are, because it's a horribly broken system that throws away all the important resource-allocation information. America's strength has always been that we are suspicious of anyone who thinks they have all the answers.
I know it's popular to go on about how America is going down the tubes, but there just isn't much truth to it. So we're having a recession? Big deal. No economist seriously believes that it's possible to have an economy that doesn't go through recessions. I'm sorry, but you are completely wrong -- we need a proper national dialogue among people with different views, and the problems we face today will all be solved in their own different ways (some with government programs, some with the free market, some with a hybrid of the two).
Since this is Slashdot, it's time for a systems design analogy: it's a huge mistake to believe that a system should be completely centralized on one giant mainframe, just as much as it's a mistake to think that it should be completely distributed to individual PCs. Both systems seem to have a kind of elegant beauty, and both systems are completely unworkable.
I think your view is way excessive.
Only a small portion of the total energy picture comes from foreign oil, and we only really need that to run internal combustion engines. There's no reason to speak of the "power going out" if there wasn't foreign oil. For that you're talking about coal, to a large extent, which is in fairly tremendous domestic supply.
Secondly, the US economy is much better prepared to deal with a reduction in oil supply now than at any other time in the recent past.
I just have to say that replacing the second "means" with "does" makes the quote 72% less awesome.
NERDS watch NERDY movies and TV shows! Duh! How short-sighted do you have to be to reason "I'm a nerd, and I don't watch TV, so TV can't be nerdy"?
Seriously, make your own site, use the tagline "News for Nerds who Despise Culture", and go to town.
Power supplies also generate a lot of heat -- notice that those bricks tend to be warm under load, even through that insulation. Put them inside the laptop and you're adding a bunch of heat to a place that you want to be removing heat from. So you need bigger fans and it takes even more space. It's just unworkable.
You misspelled "Osama".
What about sellers who only scam some of their buyers? They would know when to expect negative feedback because they know who they've cheated. With your plan they could make a pre-emptive strike, if you will.
Let's see. A free (as in beer) Windows XP would compete with Vista and win. Microsoft would lose billions of dollars in revenue.
I'm with you so far! Any downside?
Well, there is another possible way that's been suggested, though the details haven't been ironed out. Suppose you don't have coverage and go to the hospital with appendicitis. They treat you and present a bill for $5000, which you can't pay.
These days they just write it off and throw a debt collector at you, which makes other people pay for your care as you say. Under Hillary's plan there would presumably be less of this, though it's hard to eliminate entirely (illegal immigrants? foreigners? the homeless?)
The other way is to give you the option of joining the government system to get the bill paid, but with a penalty. Maybe you'll pay double premiums for five years or something, or lose the option to leave the program, or heck, the government could take it out of your social security later on. There are a lot of options in between sticking the hospitals with the costs and forcing people to buy coverage from the government.
I have kidney disease, diagnosed at the age of 19, which required transplantation and still requires prescription drugs that would cost thousands of dollars a month if I didn't have health coverage.
Let's back off for a second. First, you accuse people of voting for Obama only because he's black. As proof you offer Krugman's diatribe claiming that Hillary's health care plan is superior. I offer you some counter-arguments and you make a false statement while calling Obama a liar. Then I say that forcing people who cannot afford health care to purchase it doesn't help them much, and you call me a dumbass. We've gotten a long way from your original theory that people only vote for Obama because he's black. Care to issue a retraction?
Sure, 20-year-olds can get diseases by surprise. But that doesn't mean that the government healthcare is automatically a good deal. In Hillary's plan, the government makes it "affordable" by demanding that you afford it. Obama's plan ensures that if the government healthcare isn't a good deal, people don't have to buy it. I think this is a fundamental matter of personal choice, that's all, and that's one reason I prefer Obama to Hillary. It's not because he's black; it's not because he's a liar; it's not because I'm a dumbass.