The thing about Ceres being "promoted" is actually more interesting to me than having Pluto downgraded. I never realized Ceres was large enough to be a sphere.
They aren't "trashing science" by coming up with a definition that fits the phenomena; "trashing science" would be trying to force reality to conform with your preconceived notions of "how it should look".
When you overrelease, you are attempting to release data that had already been deallocated when its reference count hit zero. That could segfault, or start causing strange memory errors.
First, if the item still hasn't been collected by the autorelease mechanism, decrementing the counter won't hurt it. If it has truly already been freed, Apple's implementation of malloc has defenses that detect this and prevent a double-free from occurring.
Apple's malloc library is interesting. I assume that these kinds of defenses make it slower than it could be, but you actually have to enable a special debug mode if you want double-frees to cause program crashes.
1. "The Watchmen" 2. Star Trek. 3. At least 6 million news stories about the CIA each year. 4. Bruce Schneier 5. About 6 hundred million blogs commenting about the news stories.
Oh, and
6. Decimus lunius luvenalis, better known as Juvenal.
dmalloc and other malloc debuggers work by using the existing glibc malloc-hook functionality. And, guess what? That functionality isn't thread safe.
This isn't about enabling debug features in the default malloc library, it's about not using a design methodology that's been well understood for the past 30 years. The debug hooks for glibc are broken. Period.
Thanks for the heads up - I googled for "thinking forth" and found the source forge site. In my defense, it was opened a good 2 years after I went looking for the book. At the time I needed it, I could only find copies on eBay.
Heh. And to think, if that source forge site had been open 2 years earlier, I might not have quit my job.
The IAU's whole plan in this is to create a new classification, "dwarf planet" that sounds enough like the old classification that outsiders won't complain. If you go around pointing out that "dwarf planet" != "planet" you might ruin everything!
Okay, for the second part. Please explain the scientific value of your definition and why the IAU would want to lump all orbiting bodies into one group instead of, say, defining several classes of stellar companions, ranging from gas giants on the large side to KBOs on the small end.
I understand planetary astronomy fairly well (I built my own dob, which, I think is the moral equivalent of a PHd in astrophysics (I'M KIDDING ABOUT THAT PART)).
Anyway, my point was that the 9 planets cover an incredibly broad class of phenomena and that there's no good scientific reason to try and squeeze them all into a single classification.
The only reason for giving Pluto and Jupiter the same classification is historic and social. Now, that is a powerful reason and should not be ignored, but it has no place in science itself. This whole controversy is due to the collision of culture and science and miscommunication between the two.
I downloaded it and it looks like the exact same thing I was using in 1983. I'm not going to waste time trying to find out any different if you don't care enough to write a 30 second message.
I guess it was back in 2003 that I was introduced to a "highly proprietary, specialized scripting language" that I immediately recognized as FORTH - which the salesman denied.... Later, after playing with it I even figured out which PD implementation of FORTH they had ripped off, but I also discovered that you can no longer get "Thinking FORTH" or "Starting FORTH" and that the FORTH had apparently become a completely dead language.
To be honest, I wouldn't recommend using it in a modern environment - or as a machine architecture - but for squeezing complex applications into machines with 4k of RAM it was very sweet.
Sorry, but LISP (though I don't mean Common LISP) is just as much a stack language as FORTH.
Ummm. Yeah. I know that. That's why I mentioned it. It was a joke, you know?
I've programmed in Forth, Lisp, APL, hand-written Postscript, and just about every other computer language that was ever popular, and several that never were.
Heh. I can still remember writing Postscript by hand to convince our laser printer to make the signs I needed for my N-gauge train layout...
is really the only effective stance to take. Pluto was called a "planet" because we didn't know about KBOs and now people are used to calling it a planet. Since I strongly doubt we're going to bother naming all the KBOs we will discover, why worry about it?
The truth of the matter is that Pluto is a KBO but every time the popular press runs an article pointing that out, astronomers are flooded with calls from Auntie Mabel demanding to know where they get off changing what she learned in school.
This isn't even remotely like a dispute between two theories - it's a simply argument over nomenclature and science has no problem at all simultaneously supporting multiple naming conventions.
"Pi" is a mathematical discovery, "planet" is a social construct. "Planet" can't be defined any more precisely than other social concepts like "art" and "obscenity".
It's no big deal, really. No doubt when we reach other stars, we'll classify their planets according to which solar planets they resemble - and that will be as useful as any other definition.
Please give us a scientific definition of a planet that includes Mercury but excludes Pluto and Titan.
"Planet" - like "hacker" has always been a very vaguely defined term and meant different things to different people. The line between "planet" and "Kuiper belt object" is as blurry as the line between two species of galapagos finch.
because you should choose a language that fits the problem, not the reverse.
If the problem is "make this work on a stack based machine" then look out! You're gonna have aging LISP programmers crawling out of the woodwork to show off their obsolete, er, elite, programming skills.
Slashdot Mirror
The thing about Ceres being "promoted" is actually more interesting to me than having Pluto downgraded. I never realized Ceres was large enough to be a sphere.
Titan and Jupiter are double planets.
science doesn't fit people's social convenience.
They aren't "trashing science" by coming up with a definition that fits the phenomena; "trashing science" would be trying to force reality to conform with your preconceived notions of "how it should look".
Charon is large enough that it doesn't orbit around Pluto, Pluto and Charon orbit around a common point in the space between them.
This is similar to Earth and the Moon, except that the Moon is small enough that the "common point" is beneath the surface of the Earth.
When you overrelease, you are attempting to release data that had already been deallocated when its reference count hit zero. That could segfault, or start causing strange memory errors.
First, if the item still hasn't been collected by the autorelease mechanism, decrementing the counter won't hurt it. If it has truly already been freed, Apple's implementation of malloc has defenses that detect this and prevent a double-free from occurring.
Apple's malloc library is interesting. I assume that these kinds of defenses make it slower than it could be, but you actually have to enable a special debug mode if you want double-frees to cause program crashes.
Stop taking pride in your cultural illiteracy.
Please see:
1. "The Watchmen"
2. Star Trek.
3. At least 6 million news stories about the CIA each year.
4. Bruce Schneier
5. About 6 hundred million blogs commenting about the news stories.
Oh, and
6. Decimus lunius luvenalis, better known as Juvenal.
that the US military built the GPS network and reserves the right to turn it off whenever it feels the need?
dmalloc and other malloc debuggers work by using the existing glibc malloc-hook functionality. And, guess what? That functionality isn't thread safe.
This isn't about enabling debug features in the default malloc library, it's about not using a design methodology that's been well understood for the past 30 years. The debug hooks for glibc are broken. Period.
Thanks for the heads up - I googled for "thinking forth" and found the source forge site. In my defense, it was opened a good 2 years after I went looking for the book. At the time I needed it, I could only find copies on eBay.
Heh. And to think, if that source forge site had been open 2 years earlier, I might not have quit my job.
The IAU's whole plan in this is to create a new classification, "dwarf planet" that sounds enough like the old classification that outsiders won't complain. If you go around pointing out that "dwarf planet" != "planet" you might ruin everything!
Okay, for the second part. Please explain the scientific value of your definition and why the IAU would want to lump all orbiting bodies into one group instead of, say, defining several classes of stellar companions, ranging from gas giants on the large side to KBOs on the small end.
I understand planetary astronomy fairly well (I built my own dob, which, I think is the moral equivalent of a PHd in astrophysics (I'M KIDDING ABOUT THAT PART)).
Anyway, my point was that the 9 planets cover an incredibly broad class of phenomena and that there's no good scientific reason to try and squeeze them all into a single classification.
The only reason for giving Pluto and Jupiter the same classification is historic and social. Now, that is a powerful reason and should not be ignored, but it has no place in science itself. This whole controversy is due to the collision of culture and science and miscommunication between the two.
I've dropped into EFI off and on, but I never worked up the courage to install that EFI pong game that came out at one point.
I downloaded it and it looks like the exact same thing I was using in 1983. I'm not going to waste time trying to find out any different if you don't care enough to write a 30 second message.
There's a very good reason for that.
What makes it so great?
I pulled it down, and (superficially) it looks like any other FORTH interpreter.
Seriously - I'm not trying to run it down, tell me what makes it worth my time to revisit a UI model I first saw on a C64?
I guess it was back in 2003 that I was introduced to a "highly proprietary, specialized scripting language" that I immediately recognized as FORTH - which the salesman denied.... Later, after playing with it I even figured out which PD implementation of FORTH they had ripped off, but I also discovered that you can no longer get "Thinking FORTH" or "Starting FORTH" and that the FORTH had apparently become a completely dead language.
To be honest, I wouldn't recommend using it in a modern environment - or as a machine architecture - but for squeezing complex applications into machines with 4k of RAM it was very sweet.
Sorry, but LISP (though I don't mean Common LISP) is just as much a stack language as FORTH.
Ummm. Yeah. I know that. That's why I mentioned it. It was a joke, you know?
I've programmed in Forth, Lisp, APL, hand-written Postscript, and just about every other computer language that was ever popular, and several that never were.
Heh. I can still remember writing Postscript by hand to convince our laser printer to make the signs I needed for my N-gauge train layout...
is really the only effective stance to take. Pluto was called a "planet" because we didn't know about KBOs and now people are used to calling it a planet. Since I strongly doubt we're going to bother naming all the KBOs we will discover, why worry about it?
The truth of the matter is that Pluto is a KBO but every time the popular press runs an article pointing that out, astronomers are flooded with calls from Auntie Mabel demanding to know where they get off changing what she learned in school.
This isn't even remotely like a dispute between two theories - it's a simply argument over nomenclature and science has no problem at all simultaneously supporting multiple naming conventions.
"Pi" is a mathematical discovery, "planet" is a social construct. "Planet" can't be defined any more precisely than other social concepts like "art" and "obscenity".
It's no big deal, really. No doubt when we reach other stars, we'll classify their planets according to which solar planets they resemble - and that will be as useful as any other definition.
Please give us a scientific definition of a planet that includes Mercury but excludes Pluto and Titan.
"Planet" - like "hacker" has always been a very vaguely defined term and meant different things to different people. The line between "planet" and "Kuiper belt object" is as blurry as the line between two species of galapagos finch.
Vesta and Ceres were considered planets before astronomers realized how many asteroids there were.
because you should choose a language that fits the problem, not the reverse.
If the problem is "make this work on a stack based machine" then look out! You're gonna have aging LISP programmers crawling out of the woodwork to show off their obsolete, er, elite, programming skills.