I was working at this place once as a contractor. There was an Indian guy there who sat next to me. One time another Indian came by to talk to him. I assumed they were from the same part of India and were speaking in their mutual native language. But the guy who sat next to me said later that they were talking in Hindi, which was not the native language of either one of them. He said that everybody in India knows 3 languages, their own native language, Hindi, and English.
Now, I understood what he meant, and that he was exaggerating, and he knew I understood. Probably I'm posting this too late and too deep for anybody to post a followup, but if there are followups, will they be about how native speakers of Hindi would then only know 2 languages and that's a very big chunk of the Indian population? or how it's only the educated elite that would be learning even one other language?
Also, I was eating in an Indian restaurant recently and got into a conversation with another patron who was from India, and he said he spoke "Damil". That's what it sounded like to me the way he said it but it's Tamil, which is not even a member of the Indo-European family of languages like Hindi and English. He mentioned that the last time he visited home he was irritated because more people, were using Hindi there.
I went on a tour of an American carrier that had been decommissioned, the Hornet. One of the guides said the Chinese had wanted to buy it. Maybe the Chinese would want this one if only to study the technology.
John Dall from "Rope" was in another movie with a famous long take, "Gun Crazy" from 1950. From the wikipedia article on "Gun Crazy":
The bank heist sequence was shot entirely in one long take in Montrose, California, with no one besides the principal actors and people inside the bank alerted to the operation. This one-take shot included the sequence of driving into town to the bank, distracting and then knocking out a patrolman, and making the get-away. This was done by simulating the interior of a sedan with a stretch Cadillac with room enough to mount the camera and a jockey's saddle for the cameraman on a greased two-by-twelve board in the back. Lewis kept it fresh by having the actors improvise their dialogue.
Sure, pixel size has a lot to do with legibility. Any font is going to be unreadable for a small enough pixel size. I believe the point is something like this:
Get a monitor with pixel size that's just big enough for you to read this font. Now try some other font and see if you can read it as well.
Personally I'm impressed by this. Is it useful? Well, as a casual desktop user who sometimes uses magnify features on my browser, perhaps not. Then again, with ultra readable fonts I might not need to use magnify as much. There are probably situations where it is useful. Some people have sarcastically suggested using it to put things in fine print that you don't really want read, but I would think this is precisely the font you don't want for that kind of thing. If nothing else it's good to probe the limits of human perception.
The idea is to get away from fossil fuels. A pure hydrogen based engine might satisfy that requirement, but, I have read somewhere that pure hydrogen leaking into the atmosphere is a bad thing too. Sorry, can't provide a link and maybe that's wrong, but if correct then storage of hydrogen could be a big issue.
(how do I make a paragraph break here? Do I need to enable javascript or something?)
Maybe off topic but, what gets me is that all the talk is about rechargeable batteries in the vehicle. Why not something like aluminum oxide batteries that could be exchanged at the equivalent of a filling station when they run out? The driver wouldn't have to wait around and the spent batteries could be efficiently recharged by specialized equipment for re-use.
I am neither astronomer, astrophysicist, nor celestial mechanic. But, when the white dwarf was in it's red giant phase, engulfing the red dwarf, it seems to me the red dwarf would have just been vacuuming up whatever red giant material was near it as it sailed along on its path. Would that have caused friction that would make it spiral in closer? Also, if part of the mass of the other star in its red giant phase was beyond the orbit of the red dwarf, then it would have had less gravitational pull on the red dwarf wouldn't it? Which would tend to make the red dwarf move away from its companion. Assuming though that I'm wrong about all this, (probably a safe assumption since the author of the article is much more knowledgeable than me) and that the red giant phase of the one star did cause the red dwarf to gradually move closer, it seems like it was kind of a close call for the red dwarf. If the red giant phase had lasted just a little longer, the red dwarf might have fallen into the giant.
The heat of the giant and its super nova would have raised the temperature of the red dwarf too. Wouldn't that have made the red dwarf burn its own fuel faster, at least for awhile, and maybe disturb its convection currents.
This was years ago, and probably it was originally a BBC series since most of the scientists seemed to British, judging by their accents, but I saw it on a local PBS station in the USA. In the various episodes scientists were taken away from their high tech infrastructure and challenged to do things that normally required fairly high tech equipment, like receive radio messages or determine their latitude and longitude.
I just recently happened to read a book pulled almost at random off the public library shelf, Magic and Superstition in Europe, A Concise History from Antiquity to the Present by Michael Bailey. It's a historian's look at magic. The author seemed particularly interested in things like the statistics for witchcraft trials, and how the mania would go from one region to another in Europe. He even offers a conjecture that it was the reaction to the witchcraft trials, when they started to ask how they could know if someone was a witch, that that was a big boost to the scientific approach. Anyway, he portrays Newton as being in the 17th century tradition of alchemy and magic more than the 18th century enlightened tradition, and cites John Maynard Keynes that Newton was not the first of the scientists but the last of the magicians. I looked for that quote here on the internet and found this:
In the eighteenth century and since, Newton came to be thought of as the first and greatest of the modern age of scientists, a rationalist, one who taught us to think on the lines of cold and untinctured reason.
I do not see him in this light. I do not think that any one who has pored over the contents of that box which he packed up when he finally left Cambridge in 1696 and which, though partly dispersed, have come down to us, can see him like that. Newton was not the first of the age of reason. He was the last of the magicians, the last of the Babylonians and Sumerians, the last great mind which looked out on the visible and intellectual world with the same eyes as those who began to build our intellectual inheritance rather less than 10,000 years ago. Isaac Newton, a posthumous child bom with no father on Christmas Day, 1642, was the last wonderchild to whom the Magi could do sincere and appropriate homage.
Somewhere I also read (maybe in the same book) that when Newton went to work at the mint, his knowledge of metals from his alchemical experiments helped him a lot in that job.
it should be able to show us all kinds of new things and ultimately a complete run-through should be possible
I'm not sure what the previous poster meant by 'complete run through', but it's in response to a probably sarcastic post about how weather predictions lose accuracy rather quickly. The reasons have nothing to do with the accuracy of the model but with chaos theory, the 'butterfly' effect. Very slight perturbations, even things happening outside the model like cosmic rays or gravitational influences of other stars, will cause slight, random, perturbations that will cascade into major differences. Change one tiny little event like having a extra 10 pound meteor hit the moon a billion years ago for instance, and Australia could have ended up at the North Pole.
I remember reading a book about the Mitrokhin archive, which was archival info about the activities of the KGB during the Cold War. One memorable thing was that the Soviets got a LOT of technical secrets from the West and they congratulated themselves on how it was cheaper to steal than develop on their own. The problem is, they couldn't get ahead that way. The porosity of the west allowed information to be traded, cross-fertilization, open competition that stimulated and sped up the development of new things, so that whatever was stolen was soon obsolete anyway.
As for diplomatic secrets, there was the famous incident of a bug in the US embassy in Russia from which the Soviets got a lot of diplomatic secrets. I've read comments that this actually was a good thing because that way the Russians knew the US wasn't planning to attack them any time soon, just as we could relax a bit thanks to our spy satellites and U-2s showing us the Russians weren't planning to attack us any time soon.
I admit I'm only offering speculation and hearsay, and I don't want to come across as too starry eyed and idealistic. Particularly in war loose lips and sink ships and Bletchley Park was very bad news for the Nazis in WW2 so there is a place for espionage and counter-espionage, but I do think that before people get utterly hung up on security and paranoia, they should perhaps do a little thinking outside the box.
Re:Many OS's were better and died or got very vew
on
Windows 95 Turns 15
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· Score: 2, Interesting
I was working as a computer programmer in the late 70s and early 80s. I remember the big fuss around the first 16 bit micro-processors, Intel 8086, Zilog Z8000, and Motorola 68000. I particularly remember when the hardware guys at my company got their hands on a sample 68000. We looked at that 64 pin chip like it was a precious jewel. The general consensus there and in the computer mags was that the 68000 was the best of the lot. So what happened? IBM came out with the PC using the 8086 and 'the masses', the non-cognoscenti, all rushed out and bought that. My thought at the time was that they were just mesmerized by the 3 letters IBM on the machine, and it ran MS-DOS. So my perception is that that's how Microsoft first cornered their market. To paraphrase Mae West, "Goodness had nothing to do with it."
Fast forward about 10 years. I'm working at a place that sells software on a lot of platforms, I ported the product to various Unix clones but they also had guys doing MS-DOS and IBM stuff. OK, I get assigned to do a port to OS/2 version 1.0. I did it and thought the OS was pretty cool. It was my first use of threading, except for some crude stuff using unix fork. Then the next version of OS/2 came out. It's been awhile, but I think it was supposed to have been done by a British group that had a totally different philosophy. Everything I'd written broke, and I struggled to get it working till my boss said forget it. He never had anything to do with OS/2 after that.
From the article: "C++ came about because of people's frustration with working with the low-level C language"
I think that's a bit oversimplified. Though I won't claim to know better than Rob Pike what caused C++ to come about, I do think there's more to it than can be said in one sentence. Part of the popularity of C++ was the new fashion of 'object-oriented' programming. Marketing types were eager to brag about how advanced they were because they were 'object-oriented' and the proof was that they were using an 'object-oriented' language.
One thing I remember reading somewhere a long time ago, probably in some obscure usenet posting in sci.comp.lang or something, was that bugs were based on lines of code, and the language that got the job done with the fewest lines of code was the one that would have the fewest bugs. "Brevity is the soul of wit" according to Shakespeare's Falstaff, and the older I get, the more I tend to agree with that. APL is about the briefest language I ever encountered, but don't take that as a recommendation. (I sometimes think to myself that it gets its brevity by cheating, lots of special characters and operators, but I'm not ready to lodge that as an official quibble about it.)
Hiding information, or fobbing it off into libraries, is one way to make things brief, but really, I think ideally, a language should present as much information in a 'page' of code as possible about what it is doing, and maybe APL, for someone really
familiar with all the operators, would find APL to be great in that regard. I never had a chance to work with it with a proper keyboard and display myself.
But if I were rich enough to be able to fund the development of a language, what I'd be asking my designers to go for would be, put as much information per character as possible about what the code is trying to do on the page in a human readable and human typeable, form.
OK, I'm an old-timer, and when I was working in the field, it was mostly as a generic embedded-systems or C-programmer. I see some prim replies to the 'pounding on the table' bit about how they wouldn't work in such an 'unprofessional' environment. Well, back in the wild and wooly 70s and 80s and even the 90s, the unprofessional places could be the most fun! I actually got to go to Cape Kennedy and put my hands on a real space shuttle while working for a very small 'unprofessional' outfit.
I never had an interview with the pounding on the table bit myself. My favorite interview question was when somebody said they wanted to test my comfort level with C. They asked me how long it would take to write code to do something. I forget exactly what, but it sounded complex at first but after a moment of thought, I realized it was pretty simple. It took me a few seconds to get up the nerve to say 'about half an hour' (I was really thinking maybe 5 or 10 minutes) because I kept thinking I must be missing something. But when I said it, the guy just nodded his head and said 'OK'. That was basically the whole interview. (I didn't take the job because I was waiting and waiting for the company's bureaucracy to get me a security clearance and in the meantime I got another job for more money.)
My first distro was slackware, a 50 diskette distro for my laptop back in the early 90s. Since then I've experimented with many distros, including linux from scratch and beyond linux from scratch. Mostly now I go with ubuntu from laziness, but a couple of distros that I've been favorably impressed with lately that don't get mentioned a lot are arch linux and Sabayon. I particularly like Sabayon as a live CD. (Note: Sabayon is up to 5.3, but I'm still using 5.0).
I'm a little late getting into this thread so probably nobody will read this. But, I decided to try and think of some classics that wouldn't have negative reviews. First that came to mind was "Vanity Fair" by Thackeray. There are so many editions that after going through 2 pages of editions looking for 1 star reviews, I quit. Thackeray, like Dickens wrote for magazines that paid by the word. So in the magazine form he was very wordy. But unlike Dickens, when the book form came out, he would edit out some of the wordiness. I don't think it's a perfect book, but find it hard to believe anybody seriously would give it only 1 star, and maybe nobody did.
Next I thought of Thomas Hardy. Sour enough to get some flack from his Victorian/Edwardian contemporaries and maybe more suited to modern tastes. "Jude The Obscure" got some 1 star reviews as being too depressing. But the first 3 editions on Amazon's list for "Far From The Madding Crowd" did not turn up any 1 stars.
If nobody received the call, the energy wouldn't disappear, but it might eventually get dissipated by some means. Two people might get the message, but only one would have the proper set of entangled particles.
What I'm wondering though, is if the center of mass/energy would change. In a classical closed system, the center of mass is going to stay the same for the system as a whole because of conservation of momentum. If the universe as a whole is a closed system, could one teleport energy (or mass) and change the center of mass of the whole system? I realize there is already quantum fluctuation of energy so maybe that also could ultimately, in a random way, change the center of mass.
Has anyone ever done research on the psychology of the victims? There are people who are compulsive gamblers, and people who can't say no to a salesman. It's easy to say that the people who fall for the scams are greedy, but, as was pointed out in the interview, some people are suckered in by hard luck stories too. Even then, something must be going on to overwhelm the victim's common sense, something that ends up being self-destructive, and also destructive for their families.
I wonder if any psychologist has ever tried to set up some online pseudo-scam just to locate people who are susceptible to scams so that they could be studied the way, for example, that addiction is studied.
When I first heard about background radiation, I thought to myself, didn't George Gamow predict that in one of his Mr Tompkins books which I read either in high school or junior high school? (and these books were written for juveniles). In fact Gamow did predict it. I read years later in Timothy Ferris's book "The Red Limit, The Search For the Edge of the Universe" that Gamow was astonished that the discoverers of the background radiation did not credit his insight. The book also mentions various scientists who were aware of the theory predicting background radiation but who didn't make the connection. Some of them apparently admitted feeling stupid about it afterwards. I guess I get worked up about this because Gamow actually gave a talk at the college where I was a student perhaps a year before he died. I had looked forward to seeing him speak but he was obviously in very bad shape.
Thinking about it now, I don't know if it was in the Mr Tompkins books specifically, but it was in a book of Gamow's written for laymen. I remember he had something he called ylem. So, if I, a layman could make the connection as soon as I heard about the detection of the background radiation, how come the experts couldn't? This is something that used to amaze me, but I've come across enough stories of experts screwing up over the years (just saw a documentary about Bernard Madoff for instance), that nowadays I'm less amazed. Still, what can you do? Nothing is certain; we're always playing the odds with any information we're given.
I know that people like to be dramatic, but I think this is taking people's jobs only in the sense that individual people working at the job can be more productive and so one would need fewer of them, something that's been happening since the dawn of the industrial revolution. In the New York Times Book review of November 15, 2009, the cover review is of a book by Malcolm Gladwell done by Steven Pinker. According to the NYT book review editors, Gladwell that if he were trying to break into journalism today, he would start by getting a master's degree in statistics. AI to help process the statistics could be a big help to reporters, and that's just one example of how machines could help. As others have pointed out, there would be attempts to 'game' the machines, and, as still others have pointed out, wetware intelligence gets gamed already. In some sense, it just takes same old same old to a new level, but what can you do? The world changes and pretty much everything has to change with it.
Re:Maybe it's his social/PR skills that really cou
on
Happy Birthday, Linus
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· Score: 1
I think it would have been a disaster if Microsoft had captured the server market
Why?
Microsoft's strategy has been to come up with proprietary extras that go beyond open standards. Users get hooked on these and they are proprietary. It locks out competition. If you've seen my sig you probably can figure out that I'm in the anti-Microsoft crowd. (It's actually a paraphrase of Cato the Elder, who was famous for concluding each speech in the Roman Senate with the statement "Furthermore, I maintain that Carthage should be destroyed.")
I don't want to turn this into a big long Microsoft rant; there's enough of that on the net already. Suffice to say, I'm pretty damn sure that we're better off not having a monoculture dominated by Microsoft.
Maybe it's his social/PR skills that really count
on
Happy Birthday, Linus
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· Score: 1
Various people have suggested that FreeBSD or Hurd would have filled the breach if Linux hadn't come along (and maybe been better). We'll never know for sure unless somebody finds a reliable way to view alternate timelines, but, I'd say there is evidence of non-technical issues in the GNU and FreeBSD camps that could have been showstoppers. Somehow Linux stayed on course. Was that a fluke or something to do with Linus and his personality? I suspect that that was where Linus really made a difference, and without that, the suits might really have prevailed. I think it would have been a disaster if Microsoft had captured the server market, and there was a real danger back in the 90s that that's just what would have happened.
In the comments to a recent slashdot topic on Duke Nukem, somebody mentioned that the perfect is enemy to the good. In that context, it was suggested that the desire to make Duke Nukem 'perfect' is what killed it. I'm too much of an outsider to know for sure, but I can't help but suspect that the desire for perfection in the Hurd was a major difficulty. When something 'good enough' came along, that was just the straw that put it in limbo.
Slashdot Mirror
I was working at this place once as a contractor. There was an Indian guy there who sat next to me. One time another Indian came by to talk to him. I assumed they were from the same part of India and were speaking in their mutual native language. But the guy who sat next to me said later that they were talking in Hindi, which was not the native language of either one of them. He said that everybody in India knows 3 languages, their own native language, Hindi, and English.
Now, I understood what he meant, and that he was exaggerating, and he knew I understood. Probably I'm posting this too late and too deep for anybody to post a followup, but if there are followups, will they be about how native speakers of Hindi would then only know 2 languages and that's a very big chunk of the Indian population? or how it's only the educated elite that would be learning even one other language?
Also, I was eating in an Indian restaurant recently and got into a conversation with another patron who was from India, and he said he spoke "Damil". That's what it sounded like to me the way he said it but it's Tamil, which is not even a member of the Indo-European family of languages like Hindi and English. He mentioned that the last time he visited home he was irritated because more people, were using Hindi there.
I went on a tour of an American carrier that had been decommissioned, the Hornet. One of the guides said the Chinese had wanted to buy it. Maybe the Chinese would want this one if only to study the technology.
John Dall from "Rope" was in another movie with a famous long take, "Gun Crazy" from 1950. From the wikipedia article on "Gun Crazy":
The bank heist sequence was shot entirely in one long take in Montrose, California, with no one besides the principal actors and people inside the bank alerted to the operation. This one-take shot included the sequence of driving into town to the bank, distracting and then knocking out a patrolman, and making the get-away. This was done by simulating the interior of a sedan with a stretch Cadillac with room enough to mount the camera and a jockey's saddle for the cameraman on a greased two-by-twelve board in the back. Lewis kept it fresh by having the actors improvise their dialogue.
Sure, pixel size has a lot to do with legibility. Any font is going to be unreadable for a small enough pixel size. I believe the point is something like this:
Get a monitor with pixel size that's just big enough for you to read this font. Now try some other font and see if you can read it as well.
Personally I'm impressed by this. Is it useful? Well, as a casual desktop user who sometimes uses magnify features on my browser, perhaps not. Then again, with ultra readable fonts I might not need to use magnify as much. There are probably situations where it is useful. Some people have sarcastically suggested using it to put things in fine print that you don't really want read, but I would think this is precisely the font you don't want for that kind of thing. If nothing else it's good to probe the limits of human perception.
The idea is to get away from fossil fuels. A pure hydrogen based engine might satisfy that requirement, but, I have read somewhere that pure hydrogen leaking into the atmosphere is a bad thing too. Sorry, can't provide a link and maybe that's wrong, but if correct then storage of hydrogen could be a big issue. (how do I make a paragraph break here? Do I need to enable javascript or something?) Maybe off topic but, what gets me is that all the talk is about rechargeable batteries in the vehicle. Why not something like aluminum oxide batteries that could be exchanged at the equivalent of a filling station when they run out? The driver wouldn't have to wait around and the spent batteries could be efficiently recharged by specialized equipment for re-use.
I am neither astronomer, astrophysicist, nor celestial mechanic. But, when the white dwarf was in it's red giant phase, engulfing the red dwarf, it seems to me the red dwarf would have just been vacuuming up whatever red giant material was near it as it sailed along on its path. Would that have caused friction that would make it spiral in closer? Also, if part of the mass of the other star in its red giant phase was beyond the orbit of the red dwarf, then it would have had less gravitational pull on the red dwarf wouldn't it? Which would tend to make the red dwarf move away from its companion. Assuming though that I'm wrong about all this, (probably a safe assumption since the author of the article is much more knowledgeable than me) and that the red giant phase of the one star did cause the red dwarf to gradually move closer, it seems like it was kind of a close call for the red dwarf. If the red giant phase had lasted just a little longer, the red dwarf might have fallen into the giant. The heat of the giant and its super nova would have raised the temperature of the red dwarf too. Wouldn't that have made the red dwarf burn its own fuel faster, at least for awhile, and maybe disturb its convection currents.
This was years ago, and probably it was originally a BBC series since most of the scientists seemed to British, judging by their accents, but I saw it on a local PBS station in the USA. In the various episodes scientists were taken away from their high tech infrastructure and challenged to do things that normally required fairly high tech equipment, like receive radio messages or determine their latitude and longitude.
Somewhere I also read (maybe in the same book) that when Newton went to work at the mint, his knowledge of metals from his alchemical experiments helped him a lot in that job.
it should be able to show us all kinds of new things and ultimately a complete run-through should be possible
I'm not sure what the previous poster meant by 'complete run through', but it's in response to a probably sarcastic post about how weather predictions lose accuracy rather quickly. The reasons have nothing to do with the accuracy of the model but with chaos theory, the 'butterfly' effect. Very slight perturbations, even things happening outside the model like cosmic rays or gravitational influences of other stars, will cause slight, random, perturbations that will cascade into major differences. Change one tiny little event like having a extra 10 pound meteor hit the moon a billion years ago for instance, and Australia could have ended up at the North Pole.
I remember reading a book about the Mitrokhin archive, which was archival info about the activities of the KGB during the Cold War. One memorable thing was that the Soviets got a LOT of technical secrets from the West and they congratulated themselves on how it was cheaper to steal than develop on their own. The problem is, they couldn't get ahead that way. The porosity of the west allowed information to be traded, cross-fertilization, open competition that stimulated and sped up the development of new things, so that whatever was stolen was soon obsolete anyway.
As for diplomatic secrets, there was the famous incident of a bug in the US embassy in Russia from which the Soviets got a lot of diplomatic secrets. I've read comments that this actually was a good thing because that way the Russians knew the US wasn't planning to attack them any time soon, just as we could relax a bit thanks to our spy satellites and U-2s showing us the Russians weren't planning to attack us any time soon.
I admit I'm only offering speculation and hearsay, and I don't want to come across as too starry eyed and idealistic. Particularly in war loose lips and sink ships and Bletchley Park was very bad news for the Nazis in WW2 so there is a place for espionage and counter-espionage, but I do think that before people get utterly hung up on security and paranoia, they should perhaps do a little thinking outside the box.
I was working as a computer programmer in the late 70s and early 80s. I remember the big fuss around the first 16 bit micro-processors, Intel 8086, Zilog Z8000, and Motorola 68000. I particularly remember when the hardware guys at my company got their hands on a sample 68000. We looked at that 64 pin chip like it was a precious jewel. The general consensus there and in the computer mags was that the 68000 was the best of the lot. So what happened? IBM came out with the PC using the 8086 and 'the masses', the non-cognoscenti, all rushed out and bought that. My thought at the time was that they were just mesmerized by the 3 letters IBM on the machine, and it ran MS-DOS. So my perception is that that's how Microsoft first cornered their market. To paraphrase Mae West, "Goodness had nothing to do with it." Fast forward about 10 years. I'm working at a place that sells software on a lot of platforms, I ported the product to various Unix clones but they also had guys doing MS-DOS and IBM stuff. OK, I get assigned to do a port to OS/2 version 1.0. I did it and thought the OS was pretty cool. It was my first use of threading, except for some crude stuff using unix fork. Then the next version of OS/2 came out. It's been awhile, but I think it was supposed to have been done by a British group that had a totally different philosophy. Everything I'd written broke, and I struggled to get it working till my boss said forget it. He never had anything to do with OS/2 after that.
From the article: "C++ came about because of people's frustration with working with the low-level C language" I think that's a bit oversimplified. Though I won't claim to know better than Rob Pike what caused C++ to come about, I do think there's more to it than can be said in one sentence. Part of the popularity of C++ was the new fashion of 'object-oriented' programming. Marketing types were eager to brag about how advanced they were because they were 'object-oriented' and the proof was that they were using an 'object-oriented' language. One thing I remember reading somewhere a long time ago, probably in some obscure usenet posting in sci.comp.lang or something, was that bugs were based on lines of code, and the language that got the job done with the fewest lines of code was the one that would have the fewest bugs. "Brevity is the soul of wit" according to Shakespeare's Falstaff, and the older I get, the more I tend to agree with that. APL is about the briefest language I ever encountered, but don't take that as a recommendation. (I sometimes think to myself that it gets its brevity by cheating, lots of special characters and operators, but I'm not ready to lodge that as an official quibble about it.) Hiding information, or fobbing it off into libraries, is one way to make things brief, but really, I think ideally, a language should present as much information in a 'page' of code as possible about what it is doing, and maybe APL, for someone really familiar with all the operators, would find APL to be great in that regard. I never had a chance to work with it with a proper keyboard and display myself. But if I were rich enough to be able to fund the development of a language, what I'd be asking my designers to go for would be, put as much information per character as possible about what the code is trying to do on the page in a human readable and human typeable, form.
OK, I'm an old-timer, and when I was working in the field, it was mostly as a generic embedded-systems or C-programmer. I see some prim replies to the 'pounding on the table' bit about how they wouldn't work in such an 'unprofessional' environment. Well, back in the wild and wooly 70s and 80s and even the 90s, the unprofessional places could be the most fun! I actually got to go to Cape Kennedy and put my hands on a real space shuttle while working for a very small 'unprofessional' outfit. I never had an interview with the pounding on the table bit myself. My favorite interview question was when somebody said they wanted to test my comfort level with C. They asked me how long it would take to write code to do something. I forget exactly what, but it sounded complex at first but after a moment of thought, I realized it was pretty simple. It took me a few seconds to get up the nerve to say 'about half an hour' (I was really thinking maybe 5 or 10 minutes) because I kept thinking I must be missing something. But when I said it, the guy just nodded his head and said 'OK'. That was basically the whole interview. (I didn't take the job because I was waiting and waiting for the company's bureaucracy to get me a security clearance and in the meantime I got another job for more money.)
Sabayon?
My first distro was slackware, a 50 diskette distro for my laptop back in the early 90s. Since then I've experimented with many distros, including linux from scratch and beyond linux from scratch. Mostly now I go with ubuntu from laziness, but a couple of distros that I've been favorably impressed with lately that don't get mentioned a lot are arch linux and Sabayon. I particularly like Sabayon as a live CD. (Note: Sabayon is up to 5.3, but I'm still using 5.0).
I'm a little late getting into this thread so probably nobody will read this. But, I decided to try and think of some classics that wouldn't have negative reviews. First that came to mind was "Vanity Fair" by Thackeray. There are so many editions that after going through 2 pages of editions looking for 1 star reviews, I quit. Thackeray, like Dickens wrote for magazines that paid by the word. So in the magazine form he was very wordy. But unlike Dickens, when the book form came out, he would edit out some of the wordiness. I don't think it's a perfect book, but find it hard to believe anybody seriously would give it only 1 star, and maybe nobody did. Next I thought of Thomas Hardy. Sour enough to get some flack from his Victorian/Edwardian contemporaries and maybe more suited to modern tastes. "Jude The Obscure" got some 1 star reviews as being too depressing. But the first 3 editions on Amazon's list for "Far From The Madding Crowd" did not turn up any 1 stars.
If nobody received the call, the energy wouldn't disappear, but it might eventually get dissipated by some means. Two people might get the message, but only one would have the proper set of entangled particles. What I'm wondering though, is if the center of mass/energy would change. In a classical closed system, the center of mass is going to stay the same for the system as a whole because of conservation of momentum. If the universe as a whole is a closed system, could one teleport energy (or mass) and change the center of mass of the whole system? I realize there is already quantum fluctuation of energy so maybe that also could ultimately, in a random way, change the center of mass.
Has anyone ever done research on the psychology of the victims? There are people who are compulsive gamblers, and people who can't say no to a salesman. It's easy to say that the people who fall for the scams are greedy, but, as was pointed out in the interview, some people are suckered in by hard luck stories too. Even then, something must be going on to overwhelm the victim's common sense, something that ends up being self-destructive, and also destructive for their families. I wonder if any psychologist has ever tried to set up some online pseudo-scam just to locate people who are susceptible to scams so that they could be studied the way, for example, that addiction is studied.
I'm no expert on China, but when people start getting this touchy, it usually means they sense they're in trouble.
The author seems to be praising Android with faint damnation.
When I first heard about background radiation, I thought to myself, didn't George Gamow predict that in one of his Mr Tompkins books which I read either in high school or junior high school? (and these books were written for juveniles). In fact Gamow did predict it. I read years later in Timothy Ferris's book "The Red Limit, The Search For the Edge of the Universe" that Gamow was astonished that the discoverers of the background radiation did not credit his insight. The book also mentions various scientists who were aware of the theory predicting background radiation but who didn't make the connection. Some of them apparently admitted feeling stupid about it afterwards. I guess I get worked up about this because Gamow actually gave a talk at the college where I was a student perhaps a year before he died. I had looked forward to seeing him speak but he was obviously in very bad shape. Thinking about it now, I don't know if it was in the Mr Tompkins books specifically, but it was in a book of Gamow's written for laymen. I remember he had something he called ylem. So, if I, a layman could make the connection as soon as I heard about the detection of the background radiation, how come the experts couldn't? This is something that used to amaze me, but I've come across enough stories of experts screwing up over the years (just saw a documentary about Bernard Madoff for instance), that nowadays I'm less amazed. Still, what can you do? Nothing is certain; we're always playing the odds with any information we're given.
I know that people like to be dramatic, but I think this is taking people's jobs only in the sense that individual people working at the job can be more productive and so one would need fewer of them, something that's been happening since the dawn of the industrial revolution. In the New York Times Book review of November 15, 2009, the cover review is of a book by Malcolm Gladwell done by Steven Pinker. According to the NYT book review editors, Gladwell that if he were trying to break into journalism today, he would start by getting a master's degree in statistics. AI to help process the statistics could be a big help to reporters, and that's just one example of how machines could help. As others have pointed out, there would be attempts to 'game' the machines, and, as still others have pointed out, wetware intelligence gets gamed already. In some sense, it just takes same old same old to a new level, but what can you do? The world changes and pretty much everything has to change with it.
I think it would have been a disaster if Microsoft had captured the server market
Why?
Microsoft's strategy has been to come up with proprietary extras that go beyond open standards. Users get hooked on these and they are proprietary. It locks out competition. If you've seen my sig you probably can figure out that I'm in the anti-Microsoft crowd. (It's actually a paraphrase of Cato the Elder, who was famous for concluding each speech in the Roman Senate with the statement "Furthermore, I maintain that Carthage should be destroyed.") I don't want to turn this into a big long Microsoft rant; there's enough of that on the net already. Suffice to say, I'm pretty damn sure that we're better off not having a monoculture dominated by Microsoft.
Various people have suggested that FreeBSD or Hurd would have filled the breach if Linux hadn't come along (and maybe been better). We'll never know for sure unless somebody finds a reliable way to view alternate timelines, but, I'd say there is evidence of non-technical issues in the GNU and FreeBSD camps that could have been showstoppers. Somehow Linux stayed on course. Was that a fluke or something to do with Linus and his personality? I suspect that that was where Linus really made a difference, and without that, the suits might really have prevailed. I think it would have been a disaster if Microsoft had captured the server market, and there was a real danger back in the 90s that that's just what would have happened.
In the comments to a recent slashdot topic on Duke Nukem, somebody mentioned that the perfect is enemy to the good. In that context, it was suggested that the desire to make Duke Nukem 'perfect' is what killed it. I'm too much of an outsider to know for sure, but I can't help but suspect that the desire for perfection in the Hurd was a major difficulty. When something 'good enough' came along, that was just the straw that put it in limbo.