As much as PHP might be a decent language for writing server-side web logic, PHP is Perl rewritten by people who don't grok Perl. Unfortunately, I have yet to find a webpage-embedded language that I like enough to replace PHP.
Anyhow.. I agree with you completely. Humans, though certainly having the most impressive mind ever to inhabit this planet, are not special. In fact, we aren't even average aside from our brain. We can't smell for shit. We can't see for shit. Our sense of touch is mediocre. Good thing we have a kick-ass mind, eh?
Minor nitpick: Actually, our sense of sight is pretty decent compared to most other animals. Just about the only animals with sharper vision than us are the birds of prey, and it's combined with very good color vision that's mostly surpassed only by flower-finding insects and birds. The only real downside to our vision is how lousy it is at night. (Note: "us" includes at least the higher primates here, not just Homo sapiens. Our eyes have been on this evolutionary track for quite a while.)
A better analogy that I've been thinking about using in the future: imagine if people, when confronted with incomprehensible managerial decisions (e.g. CHRIS: "Oh, oh, well the colour of the drug in it's unsynthesized state is kind of a blueish hue." DON: "Great, so, uh, orange it is then?"), were in the habit of exclaiming "that's so Mormon!", implying that the Mormon faith is similarly incomprehensible and arbitrary. (If you're in the habit of mocking Mormons, pick any Christian denomination. My co-worker comes from a Mormon family and gets defensive over it, even though she's not Mormon herself anymore.)
Why do bees and ants do it, then, if it's so bad? When you're not bumping up against the carrying capacity (which has been approximately true of Homo sapiens since we became nomadic -- our main resource limits have historically been on how rapidly we could find and collect them, not how soon 'til they ran out), it's actually not that bad a strategy.
Prior to 3.3, MS-DOS was incompatible with itself, much less killer apps. I mean, one of the big new features of 2.0 was *directories*, fercrissake. It's more fair to say that the PC became popular in spite of MS-DOS, rather than because of it.
I admit I did have an overly strong impression of how much Parrot featured in Python's (particularly GvR's) current long-term plans. I was under the impression of a 2.5-going-on-3.0 timeline. Admittedly, I don't pay nearly as much attention to the Python community as I do to Perl (I've been getting itchy enough for Perl 6 that I've considered writing a toy Perl-like language that merged some 5 and 6 features).
Um, no, actually. It started off as a joke at the time, but since then Parrot has actually turned into a a real project which will run Perl 6 and, eventually, Python and other interpreted languages. (The Perl folks are in much more of a hurry to ditch their spaghetti Perl 5 VM, so that's priority #1.:-P) But there's some strong rumblings in the Python community about the Python port in progress, there are quite a few references to JVM bytecode translation and a Scheme port, and I've seen unsubstantiated rumors of Ruby and PHP ports. True, the core Python community isn't planning a switch yet, but if someday down the road the standard Parrot distribution comes with a Python frontend, people might start flocking to it for the one-stop convenience.
Since the PDF renders at a downright glacial pace, I rendered it with GhostScript at 75 DPI (actually at 300 DPI followed by an interpolated 0.25x scale, since I couldn't figure out how to get GS to do sub-pixel rendering). Anyways, here it is (174 KB). And may God have mercy on my server.
Yup, over large enough scales. Which is why everyone was concerned (up until a few years ago) about whether or not there might be a "Big Crunch". If the universe ever stops expanding, it must then proceed to collapse -- excepting the unlikely possibility that dark energy weakens but thereafter remains constantly balanced at the equilibrum, as Einstein originally envisioned when he proposed the Cosmological Constant.
It's because the attractive forces overpower the expansion. At a short enough range, even gravity is strong enough to hold a galaxy in one piece and keep its stars from Hubble-expanding away from each other. It's only at the vast distances of intergalactic space that the expansion can finally overpower the fundamental forces.
Even if abiogenic oil theory is true -- and that's a big if -- it still took 4.5 billion years for enough of it to pool up that it was worth drilling for as an energy source. It's still not renewable.
Of course, my biggest question for the abiogenic oil crowd is, where the hell did the carbon come from in the first place? And where is the carbon coming from that replaces the oil we drill out? Is there some heretofore unknown nuclear reaction by which silicon spontaneously splits into 2 carbon atoms, against both science and common sense? Follow the carbon, and you've answered the question of how rapidly oil renews itself. And right now, the far most likely theory of where the carbon came from was the Earth's surface, where nearly all the carbon on Earth is currently concentrated (in the biosphere).
Oh, and regarding fission, nobody seems to pay attention to passively safe breeder reactor designs. Lefties hate 'em because they're nuclear (even though it eliminates the "waste unsafe for 10,000 years" issue), Righties hate 'em because they can be used to make plutonium (although normally the plutonium is recycled by the reactor as fuel, hence the name "breeder"). They're also a lot more fuel-efficient than the standard "control rods and water" design.
It's called mprotect(2). The program that wants to turn data into code just asks the OS nicely.
Unfortunately, I can think of at least one exploit for a no-exec stack. The attacker overflows a buffer with his exploit code, tacking on the following stack:
(top of stack) (local variables allocated after the buffer) cc cc cc cc cc cc... - Exploit code overwriting local variables xx xx xx xx - Return address for exploited function (start of mprotect(2) in libc) xx xx xx xx - Return for mprotect(2) call (start of exploit) xx xx xx xx - <i>addr</i> parameter (start of stack) xx xx xx xx - <i>len</i> parameter (size of stack) 07 00 00 00 - <i>prot</i> parameter (R+W+X)
Except that it would kill your sex drive, so you wouldn't care about the boobies. Besides, I doubt that after the novelty had worn off you would find your own boobies attractive -- gay men don't have the option of standing in a mirror all day and saying "Oh, me, you're so hot!", so odds are you wouldn't either, even if you kept both the libido and the breasts.
I think the fact he was gay should be pointed out. Young people need heroes they can have something in common with.... Well, Alan Turing can be one of those heroes that a young homosexual can look up to and say, "I can do great things too!"
He was to me, ever since I first read about him at age 17. In fact, tied only with Albert Einstein (mostly for his irreverent attitude toward seriousness and convention, and his opposition of McCarthyism -- I think of him as a proto-Discordian), he's pretty much my biggest hero.
And to those who say that Turing's sexuality isn't worth mentioning: a hero is someone with a personality, someone defined by more than what they accomplished. Strip them of that, and they become a mere "historical figure". That's why people think history is boring.
And hopefully, they won't get martyred like he was.
What the article does not cover, however, is if Turing were alive today, would he prefer the elaborate menu-driven splendor of dselect, or the minimalist elegance of dpkg. That's what I would like to see the media pay some attention to.
My money is on dselect. He was a pretty practical guy a lot of the time (e.g. the Turing Test). dselect gives you a more straightforward idea of what's going on in dependency-land.
Now, come on. How does a computer scientist (for lack of a term broad enough to cover Turing) accidentally eat an apple laced with KCN? AFAIK cyanide isn't a common fixture of most computer/math research labs, and Turing as a (dabbling but competent) chemist would certainly have the common sense to not let a cyanide spill go uncleaned.
I mean, think about it. What would you do if your government arrested you and said, "Hey bub, you read too much porn and we think porn-reading is a mental illness, so we're putting you on estrogen to kill your sex drive. For life, probably, since nobody can really cure porn-reading. Oh, and you'll grow boobies. If you don't like it, you can take prison instead, where people will ass-rape you daily for being a porn-reading sicko. Have a nice day!"? (On the odd chance that you're a woman, instead imagine some mythical hormone that withers up your breasts, kills your libido, and turns you into a tomboy.) I'm not sure that I know any people, regardless of gender or sexual orientation, that wouldn't be demeaned and degraded by such a radical forced change to their identity.
Once used, nuclear waste needs to be stored. this waste has a half life of thousands of years, and it needs to be put in a place where it cannot harm anyone or anything for this period of time.
Actually, read up on breeder and CANDU reactors. (As a concrete example, Argonne National Laboratory ran the EBR-I/EBR-II/AFR project, a testbed for a passively safe breeder reactor design -- see this sidebar about "burning" nuclear waste and this article about next-gen reactors. I can't squeeze from their site whether or not they ever built the AFR itself, so I'm assuming not.) The reason the waste of traditional fission reactors is radioactive for so long is that everyone's paranoid about recycling it, because it might conceivably be used by technicians at the plant to make plutonium. If the waste byproducts were recycled into breeder reactors, the medium-term byproducts (those with multi-1,000 year halflives) could be broken down into a mix of more stable atoms plus some short-lived (100-ish year HL) waste, which is a lot more reasonable to deal with. Basically, if it's noticeably radioactive, it's better to release that energy in a usable form right now rather than let it sit around leaking that energy into the surroundings for millennia.
The entire point of the AP tests is that they prove you're knowledgable enough to skip a few low-level classes. You didn't have the knowledge at the time, so you (deservedly) failed.
I used that technique myself. For 3 years. I would install things into neat little/usr/pkg/<packagename> directories, then use a Perl script I wrote that installed the package to/usr using symlinks. However, you forgot some stuff...
wget http://some.random.server/~foouser/some/inane/depe ndency.tar.gz wget http://another.random.server.in.cn/with/1k/downloa dspeed.tar.gz lynx http://www.google.com/search\?q=where+the+hell+is+ THAT+at\? http://somewhere.you.would.never.guess/ THAT.tar.Z tar vxzf dependency.tar.gz cd dependency-1.0.0 ... uncompress -c THAT.tar.Z | tar vxf - ^C uncompress -c THAT.tar.Z | tar tf - | xargs rm -fv mkdir THAT cd THAT uncompress -c../THAT.tar.Z | tar vxf - ls -l vim Makefile vim wrong-makefile-fragment.mak vim some/arcane/config/dir/fragment.mak vim README lynx obscure/path/to/documentation.html vim path/you/would/never/guess/unintuitive.h
Once upon a time, my computer ran Slackware, but I can't say that with a straight face anymore. I don't even remember which version. Half my C++ programs don't work quite right anymore, inbetween the C++ compiler (dragged kicking and screaming from egcs-2.91) and the C library (I *think* glibc-2.0ish) getting upgraded to modern times. I won't even touch on multimedia dependencies.
Needless to say, as soon as I get a test box to copy everything over to, the server is getting Debian and apt-get shoved up its disk.
I doubt any of them grasp the subtlety of the difference between UTF-16 (a multi-double-byte encoding that can encode all of Unicode) and UCS-2 (a plain double-byte encoding, which can only encode the Basic Multilingual Plane and is what most Windows programmers think of as "Unicode"). Personally, I blame Microsoft for sloppily defining the wide-character NT API that way (although I can't blame them for not using UTF-8, since it wasn't well-known when they released NT 3.1). They should have put some more thought into forward compatibility.
Don't insult our intelligence here, a vast majority of the files transfered by DCC are pirated.
A vast majority of files transferred by Internet are pirated. A friend (who just left the movie scene) and I (a neutral observer) once computed that high-level piracy (raced FTP sites and the like, mostly sitting on fat telecom links "borrowed" by otherwise legit admins -- the sort of piracy that the FBI didn't know existed until recently) consumes about 50-75% of all bandwidth on the Internet. When a single download thread for a single person can transfer a 3 SVCD movie in about 2 minutes, and there's other people doing the same thing on the same site, and there's dozens of sites out there, you know that there's some serious bandwidth utilization going on.
Slashdot Mirror
...NOOOOOOOO!
As much as PHP might be a decent language for writing server-side web logic, PHP is Perl rewritten by people who don't grok Perl. Unfortunately, I have yet to find a webpage-embedded language that I like enough to replace PHP.
Anyhow.. I agree with you completely. Humans, though certainly having the most impressive mind ever to inhabit this planet, are not special. In fact, we aren't even average aside from our brain. We can't smell for shit. We can't see for shit. Our sense of touch is mediocre. Good thing we have a kick-ass mind, eh?
Minor nitpick: Actually, our sense of sight is pretty decent compared to most other animals. Just about the only animals with sharper vision than us are the birds of prey, and it's combined with very good color vision that's mostly surpassed only by flower-finding insects and birds. The only real downside to our vision is how lousy it is at night. (Note: "us" includes at least the higher primates here, not just Homo sapiens. Our eyes have been on this evolutionary track for quite a while.)
A better analogy that I've been thinking about using in the future: imagine if people, when confronted with incomprehensible managerial decisions (e.g. CHRIS: "Oh, oh, well the colour of the drug in it's unsynthesized state is kind of a blueish hue." DON: "Great, so, uh, orange it is then?"), were in the habit of exclaiming "that's so Mormon!", implying that the Mormon faith is similarly incomprehensible and arbitrary. (If you're in the habit of mocking Mormons, pick any Christian denomination. My co-worker comes from a Mormon family and gets defensive over it, even though she's not Mormon herself anymore.)
I've previously said that, from an evolutionary perspective, it makes about as much sense to have gay people around as to have grandmas around.
Supporting your family is only marginally better
Why do bees and ants do it, then, if it's so bad? When you're not bumping up against the carrying capacity (which has been approximately true of Homo sapiens since we became nomadic -- our main resource limits have historically been on how rapidly we could find and collect them, not how soon 'til they ran out), it's actually not that bad a strategy.
What about MS DOS?
Prior to 3.3, MS-DOS was incompatible with itself, much less killer apps. I mean, one of the big new features of 2.0 was *directories*, fercrissake. It's more fair to say that the PC became popular in spite of MS-DOS, rather than because of it.
I admit I did have an overly strong impression of how much Parrot featured in Python's (particularly GvR's) current long-term plans. I was under the impression of a 2.5-going-on-3.0 timeline. Admittedly, I don't pay nearly as much attention to the Python community as I do to Perl (I've been getting itchy enough for Perl 6 that I've considered writing a toy Perl-like language that merged some 5 and 6 features).
Um, no, actually. It started off as a joke at the time, but since then Parrot has actually turned into a a real project which will run Perl 6 and, eventually, Python and other interpreted languages. (The Perl folks are in much more of a hurry to ditch their spaghetti Perl 5 VM, so that's priority #1. :-P) But there's some strong rumblings in the Python community about the Python port in progress, there are quite a few references to JVM bytecode translation and a Scheme port, and I've seen unsubstantiated rumors of Ruby and PHP ports. True, the core Python community isn't planning a switch yet, but if someday down the road the standard Parrot distribution comes with a Python frontend, people might start flocking to it for the one-stop convenience.
I always preferred "Little Timmy took a drink, but now he'll drink no more".
Well, considering that the Perl 6 effort is what kicked off the Parrot bytecode engine, which both Python and Perl plan to use, you're probably right.
Since the PDF renders at a downright glacial pace, I rendered it with GhostScript at 75 DPI (actually at 300 DPI followed by an interpolated 0.25x scale, since I couldn't figure out how to get GS to do sub-pixel rendering). Anyways, here it is (174 KB). And may God have mercy on my server.
Yup, over large enough scales. Which is why everyone was concerned (up until a few years ago) about whether or not there might be a "Big Crunch". If the universe ever stops expanding, it must then proceed to collapse -- excepting the unlikely possibility that dark energy weakens but thereafter remains constantly balanced at the equilibrum, as Einstein originally envisioned when he proposed the Cosmological Constant.
It's because the attractive forces overpower the expansion. At a short enough range, even gravity is strong enough to hold a galaxy in one piece and keep its stars from Hubble-expanding away from each other. It's only at the vast distances of intergalactic space that the expansion can finally overpower the fundamental forces.
Even if abiogenic oil theory is true -- and that's a big if -- it still took 4.5 billion years for enough of it to pool up that it was worth drilling for as an energy source. It's still not renewable.
Of course, my biggest question for the abiogenic oil crowd is, where the hell did the carbon come from in the first place? And where is the carbon coming from that replaces the oil we drill out? Is there some heretofore unknown nuclear reaction by which silicon spontaneously splits into 2 carbon atoms, against both science and common sense? Follow the carbon, and you've answered the question of how rapidly oil renews itself. And right now, the far most likely theory of where the carbon came from was the Earth's surface, where nearly all the carbon on Earth is currently concentrated (in the biosphere).
Oh, and regarding fission, nobody seems to pay attention to passively safe breeder reactor designs. Lefties hate 'em because they're nuclear (even though it eliminates the "waste unsafe for 10,000 years" issue), Righties hate 'em because they can be used to make plutonium (although normally the plutonium is recycled by the reactor as fuel, hence the name "breeder"). They're also a lot more fuel-efficient than the standard "control rods and water" design.
It's called mprotect(2). The program that wants to turn data into code just asks the OS nicely.
Unfortunately, I can think of at least one exploit for a no-exec stack. The attacker overflows a buffer with his exploit code, tacking on the following stack:
Except that it would kill your sex drive, so you wouldn't care about the boobies. Besides, I doubt that after the novelty had worn off you would find your own boobies attractive -- gay men don't have the option of standing in a mirror all day and saying "Oh, me, you're so hot!", so odds are you wouldn't either, even if you kept both the libido and the breasts.
I think the fact he was gay should be pointed out. Young people need heroes they can have something in common with. ... Well, Alan Turing can be one of those heroes that a young homosexual can look up to and say, "I can do great things too!"
He was to me, ever since I first read about him at age 17. In fact, tied only with Albert Einstein (mostly for his irreverent attitude toward seriousness and convention, and his opposition of McCarthyism -- I think of him as a proto-Discordian), he's pretty much my biggest hero.
And to those who say that Turing's sexuality isn't worth mentioning: a hero is someone with a personality, someone defined by more than what they accomplished. Strip them of that, and they become a mere "historical figure". That's why people think history is boring.
And hopefully, they won't get martyred like he was.
Amen to that.
What the article does not cover, however, is if Turing were alive today, would he prefer the elaborate menu-driven splendor of dselect, or the minimalist elegance of dpkg. That's what I would like to see the media pay some attention to.
My money is on dselect. He was a pretty practical guy a lot of the time (e.g. the Turing Test). dselect gives you a more straightforward idea of what's going on in dependency-land.
Now, come on. How does a computer scientist (for lack of a term broad enough to cover Turing) accidentally eat an apple laced with KCN? AFAIK cyanide isn't a common fixture of most computer/math research labs, and Turing as a (dabbling but competent) chemist would certainly have the common sense to not let a cyanide spill go uncleaned.
I mean, think about it. What would you do if your government arrested you and said, "Hey bub, you read too much porn and we think porn-reading is a mental illness, so we're putting you on estrogen to kill your sex drive. For life, probably, since nobody can really cure porn-reading. Oh, and you'll grow boobies. If you don't like it, you can take prison instead, where people will ass-rape you daily for being a porn-reading sicko. Have a nice day!"? (On the odd chance that you're a woman, instead imagine some mythical hormone that withers up your breasts, kills your libido, and turns you into a tomboy.) I'm not sure that I know any people, regardless of gender or sexual orientation, that wouldn't be demeaned and degraded by such a radical forced change to their identity.
Once used, nuclear waste needs to be stored. this waste has a half life of thousands of years, and it needs to be put in a place where it cannot harm anyone or anything for this period of time.
Actually, read up on breeder and CANDU reactors. (As a concrete example, Argonne National Laboratory ran the EBR-I/EBR-II/AFR project, a testbed for a passively safe breeder reactor design -- see this sidebar about "burning" nuclear waste and this article about next-gen reactors. I can't squeeze from their site whether or not they ever built the AFR itself, so I'm assuming not.) The reason the waste of traditional fission reactors is radioactive for so long is that everyone's paranoid about recycling it, because it might conceivably be used by technicians at the plant to make plutonium. If the waste byproducts were recycled into breeder reactors, the medium-term byproducts (those with multi-1,000 year halflives) could be broken down into a mix of more stable atoms plus some short-lived (100-ish year HL) waste, which is a lot more reasonable to deal with. Basically, if it's noticeably radioactive, it's better to release that energy in a usable form right now rather than let it sit around leaking that energy into the surroundings for millennia.
The entire point of the AP tests is that they prove you're knowledgable enough to skip a few low-level classes. You didn't have the knowledge at the time, so you (deservedly) failed.
I used that technique myself. For 3 years. I would install things into neat little /usr/pkg/<packagename> directories, then use a Perl script I wrote that installed the package to /usr using symlinks. However, you forgot some stuff...
Once upon a time, my computer ran Slackware, but I can't say that with a straight face anymore. I don't even remember which version. Half my C++ programs don't work quite right anymore, inbetween the C++ compiler (dragged kicking and screaming from egcs-2.91) and the C library (I *think* glibc-2.0ish) getting upgraded to modern times. I won't even touch on multimedia dependencies.
Needless to say, as soon as I get a test box to copy everything over to, the server is getting Debian and apt-get shoved up its disk.
I doubt any of them grasp the subtlety of the difference between UTF-16 (a multi-double-byte encoding that can encode all of Unicode) and UCS-2 (a plain double-byte encoding, which can only encode the Basic Multilingual Plane and is what most Windows programmers think of as "Unicode"). Personally, I blame Microsoft for sloppily defining the wide-character NT API that way (although I can't blame them for not using UTF-8, since it wasn't well-known when they released NT 3.1). They should have put some more thought into forward compatibility.
Don't insult our intelligence here, a vast majority of the files transfered by DCC are pirated.
A vast majority of files transferred by Internet are pirated. A friend (who just left the movie scene) and I (a neutral observer) once computed that high-level piracy (raced FTP sites and the like, mostly sitting on fat telecom links "borrowed" by otherwise legit admins -- the sort of piracy that the FBI didn't know existed until recently) consumes about 50-75% of all bandwidth on the Internet. When a single download thread for a single person can transfer a 3 SVCD movie in about 2 minutes, and there's other people doing the same thing on the same site, and there's dozens of sites out there, you know that there's some serious bandwidth utilization going on.
Aw crap. The flag is -ffloat-store, but you're otherwise right.