You can control a chaotic system. The control input also is chaotic.
Oh, I would strongly dispute that! Having a chaotic system means that the influence of any type of input, chaotic or not, is unpredictable.
I think though that with the development of better algorithms and a sea of computers, one can build a computer network that is capable of supporting weather control.
The problem is that the chaos grows exponentially - long term prediction (and hence control) becomes mathematically impossible without infinite precision.
The examples you give aren't really weather control - just vague attempts without much science. These were largely abandoned decades ago when the true chaotic nature of weather was understood - seeding one cloud may actually result in more rain later - it just can't be worked out.
Not all of us have the luxury of working in an environment with a good IDE:(
Emacs will do it... I guess!
If not, then a few hundred lines of PERL:)
It's all good, though. I'll grant you probably are right. I haven't really had a long career or anything. Just needed to vent. Can't believe you took it that seriously though.
Well, it was way harsh! Perhaps I should not have taken it so seriously. Sorry.
Yup. And your other points are valid too, but because linux isn't a corporation, it can compete with zero margin indefinitely.
I see what you are saying, and I do actually believe that Linux will dominate in the end, but I just don't believe it is inevitable.
The IT market keeps changing. Linux has to grow and adapt. That takes time, effort and money from Linux developers to keep up. Linux could become redundant but free due to lack of innovation. This is extremely unlikely, but still possible.
you might take a swing at MySQL, just for grins.
No - because it was hopelessly inadequate for the purpose I had in mind - a full-featured transactionally safe commercial application
Maybe a couple years after that, you've had good luck with it and move some more, because, heck, you are halfway there already, and it sure would be nice to roll that Oracle licensing cost into something else.
yes, but for the kind of applications that Oracle is often used for the licensing cost is tiny. When you are dealing with companies with expenditures and turnovers in the millions or higher (as I do) the cost of Oracle barely registers.
There is a reputation of trust and security that comes with a product like Oracle, that is going to take years or even decades for products like MySQL to acquire. This might never happen - look how long Microsoft has been trying to get Windows considered enterprise-ready and secure!
arrrg. you are a newb. You've obviously not only been coding for 30 years. But coding THE SAME WAY for 30 years.
Amazing! Your ability to determine the details of long software engineering career simply based on the position of brackets in code...
You write string processing/parsing code in straight C because "it'll make it fast", when C++/STL has had a standard string type for *years*, and to top it off you: Use idioms like this:
while( *ptr++ != NULL ) count++;
I can't believe I am reading this arrogant and offensive rubbish.
OTB style pisses me off because it makes it hard to match up braces for nested control statements (when your fixing somebody else's crap).
There is something called INDENTATION.
You realise all this is irrelevant anyway, as almost all good IDEs will allow the formatting to be changed anyway you like?
Linux is free... How can anyone compete with that? How can a competitor eat it's lunch? There is no lunch!
Because there are things Linux can't do. I have set up companies with Linux desktops. I can't install ALL Linux because some people need to use software that doesn't run on Linux.
Linux, PostgreSQL, MySQL etc etc etc don't have to compete with anything, they are going to consume the market landscape because they are free and their "competitors" are not.
That is a paradoxical thing to say, considering there are different distros of Linux in competition with each other (RedHat, SuSE), and PostgreSQL and MySQL mutually compete as well.
These products are free (and I often use them!), but sometimes the cost of moving to them is not. I have a considerable volume of Oracle-specific SQL written by others. Migrating to MySQL would certainly not be free. Then there is developer and DBA retraining....
They are going to end up selling some expensive, niche products.
Then, by definition, that is going to be profitable niche where Linux has not successfully competed.
The question asked is "A million bells, whistles and the cost of a dollar or good enough and free".
Or sometimes, "Bells, whistles and the cost of a dollar, or not good enough and free". Sometimes that dollar has to be paid.
All I gotta say is that if you use {
this {
style {
of indention
}
} }
You are a newbie.
No way! I have been coding for 30 years...
It makes more sense to code
if (test) {
statement1 } else {
statement2 }
because the eye can immediately see from the 'if' and 'else' statements alone that a block of conditional code follows. Having the braces on the same line also marks out the lines as special: flow control code. I find that
if (test) {
statement1 } else {
statement2 }
simply adds pointless extra lines to code, with no gain in readability.
The problem I have with evolution theory (besides the fact that I believe in a literal Bible) is that scientists are quick to say that we evolved from primordial soup or apes or whatever it is nowadays but what you don't hear is how humans share 60% of their DNA with bananas.
That is easy to explain. Both humans and bananas are made of cells. Those cells are very, very complex. Over most of evolution (billions of years) life was nothing but single cells or simple arrangements of them. Cells do a huge amount - metabolise things, divide, regulate their internal structure and chemistry, move, respond to various stimuli. Things such as bananas and humans are basically just different arrangements of these cells. It would be astonishing if we did not have a lot of DNA in common.
Seems to me that you'd find a lot more fossil records that don't match a known species if evolution were as widespread as science claims.
There are lots of such records. How many do you need?
Personally, I think evolution is all bunk and not, as one of my more liberal friends said, fact.
All you need to do is go out and look. Evolution is happening all around you. Bacteria are evolving resistance to chemicals we throw at them. There has even been evolutionary change in island birds within living memory.
Evolution is fact - just open your eyes.
And if we all did morph from primordial soup, why are there so many different species of plants and animals around? If the earth was one big hot molten rock, seems to me we'd all be the same species.
Why? Look at how animals change through breeding and mutation even over a single human lifetime. Imagine what can happen in around 50 million human lifetimes! You can't - no-one can. The time is too long for us to think about. That is why we find evolution so difficult - it happens slowly, but over a very, very, very long time lots can happen.
It takes more faith to believe in what man thinks he knows versus having faith in the One Creator.
No. When a man 'thinks' he knows something, that is not faith. Evolution is not about faith. Its about being prepared to look and understand things for yourself, not being told what is true by others. This is called 'science'.
I think this is where they count in "mutations" or "aberrations"
That is why I carefully chose the phrase 'sufficient differences'.
A combination of bone structure differences along with skull formation changes indicates that we are dealing with more than a mutation or malformation.
Actually, the only difference between chimps and humans is three "bits" of DNA (DNA is much like computer coding, only base 4 instead of base 2).
This is not nonsense. The difference is a few percent of the DNA sequence. That is tens of millions of 'bits'.
Theoretically, our closest living great ape species actually came from a common ancestor that was much closer to modern humans than to apes- chimpanzees are two mutations off from that common ancestor, modern humans are one. So maybe NOT one giant leap- but easily three leaps, just based on the genetic evidence alone and not taking any fossils into account.
Its not a few leaps - it is a large number of small changes in DNA sequence, and the regulation of expression of that DNA.
they dig up these bones and have an idea what they once looked like based on skelital remains, but any more than that is pure speculation and theory...
No. Bones tell you a lot. You can see things such as internal bone structure and points of tendon attachments which tells you about musculature. Many bones reveal a lot of detail about the flesh that was around them. The skull shows detail of the brain organisation within it, and this is particularly relevant to this new species. Looking back over hominid fossils, it is possible to follow brain evolution.
Well that is my point! I'm glad you agree! So, then it is foolish to say anyone lied if you don't know what they believed!
On the question of belief, and so of lieing, we know what relevent evidence was available to Blair,
Nonsense. We have clearly established that we DON'T know what evidence was available, as much of it has not been made public! The existence of this confidential evidence was made clear by the Hutton enquiry.
Hutton was, on this issue, just evading the question.
Hutton didn't evade the question at all. Hutton said the allegation of lying was unfounded. It could not have been made clearer.
You raised the Hutton enquiry. Now you are refusing to accept its conclusions.
I stated the fact and drew the only conclusion I think is supported by that fact. Feel free to propose an alternative.
I don't know! I wasn't there! Neither were you! You are simply drawing conclusions, not giving any real evidence for that conclusion. I could suggest that they invaded when they did because of aliens - there is as much evidence for that as there is for your suggestion.
Either present evidence that you are doing more than putting your own interpretation on something that you can't know the truth about, or admit you are wrong.
["The allegation.. that the Government probably knew that the 45 minutes claim was wrong before the Government decided to put it in the dossier was an allegation which was unfounded."]
Of course, that is not really interesting, since there is no way they could know it was wrong.
Yes, but they may have believed it was right.
Actually, I think that a report that states that an allegation of lying is 'unfounded' is both interesting and important.
What is interesting is whether they had reason to believe it was true when they said it.
Yes. It is correct that are questions to be asked. I don't know the answers to these questions and neither do you (I assume). Stating that the government 'lied' assumes that you do know the answers, and you know what they believed.
[that they chose to invade before the weapons inspectors reported]
"No, that is not evidence for anything. It is just your opinion."
Er, no, it is a fact.
I was not questioning that they invaded before the report. What I was questioning was your use of this fact as evidence "that Bush Blair did not believe WMDs would be found by the UN weapons inspectors". You are only putting forward your interpretation of events, and not evidence, I would suggest.
The Hutton report is a public document and makes clear what information was available to Blair,
No it doesn't. Much of the evidence was confidential and was not released to the public.
including the fact that the 45 minute claim was made by a single, unreliable source.
Let me quote from the report: "The allegation.. that the Government probably knew that the 45 minutes claim was wrong before the Government decided to put it in the dossier was an allegation which was unfounded."
In other words, Hutton concluded that the allegation that the government lied about the 45 minutes claim was unfounded.
I'm not saying I agree with Hutton - I am saying that I don't know!
And, as I said earlier, we have evidence that Bush Blair did not believe WMDs would be found by the UN weapons inspectors in the form of their decision to act before the inspection report could undermine their case.
No, that is not evidence for anything. It is just your opinion.
In so far as any such case can be, I think this one is proven.
As I said, I believe he believed it by the time he stood behind that dossier, I also believe he knew it was bogus. Doublethink. We could then get into a semantic argument about whether the result was a lie in the strictest sense. I think it is clear it was not a position an honest person could have taken.
I don't think anything is clear! The thing that troubles me is when people who weren't directly involved and did not have personal contact with the security and intelligence services start making statements like 'Blair knew that there were no WMDs' or 'Blair knew that this claim was false'.
I wish I had this ability to know in detail the contents of documents and reports that I have never seen!
Unless everything was made public, and I suppose it can't be for a while for security reasons, anything you say about what Blair knew or did not know is nothing but speculation. Perhaps when documents are released in a few decades (as usually happens) we will know.
But, until then, saying 'he lied' is, in my view, wrong.
I won't accept testimony from someone with a vested interest.
New Scientist is very careful about what it publishes. They accepted the testimony, so if you don't accept it, you are accusing them of publishing lies.
There is a signifigant difference between levels of certainty. "I know" implies a level a hell of a lot closer to certainty than what those lying politicians had to go on.
Who in the UK government lied about what exactly?
Just going around saying politicians are 'lying' is a naive simplification.
Slashdot Mirror
You can control a chaotic system. The control input also is chaotic.
Oh, I would strongly dispute that! Having a chaotic system means that the influence of any type of input, chaotic or not, is unpredictable.
I think though that with the development of better algorithms and a sea of computers, one can build a computer network that is capable of supporting weather control.
The problem is that the chaos grows exponentially - long term prediction (and hence control) becomes mathematically impossible without infinite precision.
The examples you give aren't really weather control - just vague attempts without much science. These were largely abandoned decades ago when the true chaotic nature of weather was understood - seeding one cloud may actually result in more rain later - it just can't be worked out.
If you terraform it, you can tweak the weather to be what you'd like.
No you can't. The weather (and possibly even the climate on long time scales) is fundamentally chaotic.
No, the { } are equivalent to
BEGIN
END
There is nothing to say what they are equivalent - we are free to interpret them in any way we choose.
I think the original post said it right. Cheap and good enough trumps expensive and great.
No. Sometimes you absolutely have to have quality. You don't run critical business applications on 'cheap and good enough' software.
Not all of us have the luxury of working in an environment with a good IDE :(
:)
Emacs will do it... I guess!
If not, then a few hundred lines of PERL
It's all good, though. I'll grant you probably are right. I haven't really had a long career or anything. Just needed to vent. Can't believe you took it that seriously though.
Well, it was way harsh! Perhaps I should not have taken it so seriously. Sorry.
As for MySQL, it can't compete with Oracle for very high reliability systems now. How about in five years? In ten? Twenty? More?
And Oracle, with decades of experience and innovation, stands still and waits for MySQL to catch up?
That is why it is not inevitable that open source will win in every case.
Easier for you to read, not for others. Amazing that this is a personal preference!
No. Many share my view, including Linus himself.
Yup. And your other points are valid too, but because linux isn't a corporation, it can compete with zero margin indefinitely.
I see what you are saying, and I do actually believe that Linux will dominate in the end, but I just don't believe it is inevitable.
The IT market keeps changing. Linux has to grow and adapt. That takes time, effort and money from Linux developers to keep up. Linux could become redundant but free due to lack of innovation. This is extremely unlikely, but still possible.
you might take a swing at MySQL, just for grins.
No - because it was hopelessly inadequate for the purpose I had in mind - a full-featured transactionally safe commercial application
Maybe a couple years after that, you've had good luck with it and move some more, because, heck, you are halfway there already, and it sure would be nice to roll that Oracle licensing cost into something else.
yes, but for the kind of applications that Oracle is often used for the licensing cost is tiny. When you are dealing with companies with expenditures and turnovers in the millions or higher (as I do) the cost of Oracle barely registers.
There is a reputation of trust and security that comes with a product like Oracle, that is going to take years or even decades for products like MySQL to acquire. This might never happen - look how long Microsoft has been trying to get Windows considered enterprise-ready and secure!
if (condition)
function();
I tend to do
if (condition) {
function();
}
always, even for single lines, as this is consistent and I always read if () { as 'if..then'
arrrg.
you are a newb.
You've obviously not only been coding for 30 years.
But coding THE SAME WAY for 30 years.
Amazing! Your ability to determine the details of long software engineering career simply based on the position of brackets in code...
You write string processing/parsing code in straight C because "it'll make it fast", when C++/STL has had a standard string type for *years*, and to top it off you:
Use idioms like this:
while( *ptr++ != NULL ) count++;
I can't believe I am reading this arrogant and offensive rubbish.
OTB style pisses me off because it makes it hard to match up braces for nested control statements (when your fixing somebody else's crap).
There is something called INDENTATION.
You realise all this is irrelevant anyway, as almost all good IDEs will allow the formatting to be changed anyway you like?
Any other newbies remember this from fortran or am I just high again ?
:). Sheesh, I even remember Algol!
I remember
ok, maybe not a newb, but your code still looks like crap.
.. THEN, so you should not split up if(..){
<jar-jar>How Woood!</jar-jar>
I have explained clearly and logically why the code I showed is easier to read....
if(condition)
{
in Java/C++/C#
Is as dumb as
IF condition
THEN
in more verbose languages
You don't split up IF
Linux is free... How can anyone compete with that? How can a competitor eat it's lunch? There is no lunch!
Because there are things Linux can't do. I have set up companies with Linux desktops. I can't install ALL Linux because some people need to use software that doesn't run on Linux.
Linux, PostgreSQL, MySQL etc etc etc don't have to compete with anything, they are going to consume the market landscape because they are free and their "competitors" are not.
That is a paradoxical thing to say, considering there are different distros of Linux in competition with each other (RedHat, SuSE), and PostgreSQL and MySQL mutually compete as well.
These products are free (and I often use them!), but sometimes the cost of moving to them is not. I have a considerable volume of Oracle-specific SQL written by others. Migrating to MySQL would certainly not be free. Then there is developer and DBA retraining....
They are going to end up selling some expensive, niche products.
Then, by definition, that is going to be profitable niche where Linux has not successfully competed.
The question asked is "A million bells, whistles and the cost of a dollar or good enough and free".
Or sometimes, "Bells, whistles and the cost of a dollar, or not good enough and free". Sometimes that dollar has to be paid.
All I gotta say is that if you use {
this {
style {
of indention
}
}
}
You are a newbie.
No way! I have been coding for 30 years...
It makes more sense to code
if (test) {
statement1
} else {
statement2
}
because the eye can immediately see from the 'if' and 'else' statements alone that a block of conditional code follows. Having the braces on the same line also marks out the lines as special: flow control code. I find that
if (test)
{
statement1
}
else
{
statement2
}
simply adds pointless extra lines to code, with no gain in readability.
The problem I have with evolution theory (besides the fact that I believe in a literal Bible) is that scientists are quick to say that we evolved from primordial soup or apes or whatever it is nowadays but what you don't hear is how humans share 60% of their DNA with bananas.
That is easy to explain. Both humans and bananas are made of cells. Those cells are very, very complex. Over most of evolution (billions of years) life was nothing but single cells or simple arrangements of them. Cells do a huge amount - metabolise things, divide, regulate their internal structure and chemistry, move, respond to various stimuli. Things such as bananas and humans are basically just different arrangements of these cells. It would be astonishing if we did not have a lot of DNA in common.
Seems to me that you'd find a lot more fossil records that don't match a known species if evolution were as widespread as science claims.
There are lots of such records. How many do you need?
Personally, I think evolution is all bunk and not, as one of my more liberal friends said, fact.
All you need to do is go out and look. Evolution is happening all around you. Bacteria are evolving resistance to chemicals we throw at them. There has even been evolutionary change in island birds within living memory.
Evolution is fact - just open your eyes.
And if we all did morph from primordial soup, why are there so many different species of plants and animals around? If the earth was one big hot molten rock, seems to me we'd all be the same species.
Why? Look at how animals change through breeding and mutation even over a single human lifetime. Imagine what can happen in around 50 million human lifetimes! You can't - no-one can. The time is too long for us to think about. That is why we find evolution so difficult - it happens slowly, but over a very, very, very long time lots can happen.
It takes more faith to believe in what man thinks he knows versus having faith in the One Creator.
No. When a man 'thinks' he knows something, that is not faith. Evolution is not about faith. Its about being prepared to look and understand things for yourself, not being told what is true by others. This is called 'science'.
I think this is where they count in "mutations" or "aberrations"
That is why I carefully chose the phrase 'sufficient differences'.
A combination of bone structure differences along with skull formation changes indicates that we are dealing with more than a mutation or malformation.
Actually, the only difference between chimps and humans is three "bits" of DNA (DNA is much like computer coding, only base 4 instead of base 2).
This is not nonsense. The difference is a few percent of the DNA sequence. That is tens of millions of 'bits'.
Theoretically, our closest living great ape species actually came from a common ancestor that was much closer to modern humans than to apes- chimpanzees are two mutations off from that common ancestor, modern humans are one. So maybe NOT one giant leap- but easily three leaps, just based on the genetic evidence alone and not taking any fossils into account.
Its not a few leaps - it is a large number of small changes in DNA sequence, and the regulation of expression of that DNA.
One dead body does not a new species make.
if it shows sufficient differences from other species, it certainly does.
they dig up these bones and have an idea what they once looked like based on skelital remains, but any more than that is pure speculation and theory...
No. Bones tell you a lot. You can see things such as internal bone structure and points of tendon attachments which tells you about musculature. Many bones reveal a lot of detail about the flesh that was around them. The skull shows detail of the brain organisation within it, and this is particularly relevant to this new species. Looking back over hominid fossils, it is possible to follow brain evolution.
They may have believed anything.
Well that is my point! I'm glad you agree! So, then it is foolish to say anyone lied if you don't know what they believed!
On the question of belief, and so of lieing, we know what relevent evidence was available to Blair,
Nonsense. We have clearly established that we DON'T know what evidence was available, as much of it has not been made public! The existence of this confidential evidence was made clear by the Hutton enquiry.
Hutton was, on this issue, just evading the question.
Hutton didn't evade the question at all. Hutton said the allegation of lying was unfounded. It could not have been made clearer.
You raised the Hutton enquiry. Now you are refusing to accept its conclusions.
I stated the fact and drew the only conclusion I think is supported by that fact. Feel free to propose an alternative.
I don't know! I wasn't there! Neither were you! You are simply drawing conclusions, not giving any real evidence for that conclusion. I could suggest that they invaded when they did because of aliens - there is as much evidence for that as there is for your suggestion.
Either present evidence that you are doing more than putting your own interpretation on something that you can't know the truth about, or admit you are wrong.
["The allegation .. that the Government probably knew that the 45 minutes claim was wrong before the Government decided to put it in the dossier was an allegation which was unfounded."]
Of course, that is not really interesting, since there is no way they could know it was wrong.
Yes, but they may have believed it was right.
Actually, I think that a report that states that an allegation of lying is 'unfounded' is both interesting and important.
What is interesting is whether they had reason to believe it was true when they said it.
Yes. It is correct that are questions to be asked. I don't know the answers to these questions and neither do you (I assume). Stating that the government 'lied' assumes that you do know the answers, and you know what they believed.
[that they chose to invade before the weapons inspectors reported]
"No, that is not evidence for anything. It is just your opinion."
Er, no, it is a fact.
I was not questioning that they invaded before the report. What I was questioning was your use of this fact as evidence "that Bush Blair did not believe WMDs would be found by the UN weapons inspectors". You are only putting forward your interpretation of events, and not evidence, I would suggest.
The Hutton report is a public document and makes clear what information was available to Blair,
.. that the Government probably knew that the 45 minutes claim was wrong before the Government decided to put it in the dossier was an allegation which was unfounded."
No it doesn't. Much of the evidence was confidential and was not released to the public.
including the fact that the 45 minute claim was made by a single, unreliable source.
Let me quote from the report:
"The allegation
In other words, Hutton concluded that the allegation that the government lied about the 45 minutes claim was unfounded.
I'm not saying I agree with Hutton - I am saying that I don't know!
And, as I said earlier, we have evidence that Bush Blair did not believe WMDs would be found by the UN weapons inspectors in the form of their decision to act before the inspection report could undermine their case.
No, that is not evidence for anything. It is just your opinion.
In so far as any such case can be, I think this one is proven.
Hutton didn't think so, and nor do I.
As I said, I believe he believed it by the time he stood behind that dossier, I also believe he knew it was bogus. Doublethink. We could then get into a semantic argument about whether the result was a lie in the strictest sense. I think it is clear it was not a position an honest person could have taken.
I don't think anything is clear! The thing that troubles me is when people who weren't directly involved and did not have personal contact with the security and intelligence services start making statements like 'Blair knew that there were no WMDs' or 'Blair knew that this claim was false'.
I wish I had this ability to know in detail the contents of documents and reports that I have never seen!
Unless everything was made public, and I suppose it can't be for a while for security reasons, anything you say about what Blair knew or did not know is nothing but speculation. Perhaps when documents are released in a few decades (as usually happens) we will know.
But, until then, saying 'he lied' is, in my view, wrong.
I won't accept testimony from someone with a vested interest.
New Scientist is very careful about what it publishes. They accepted the testimony, so if you don't accept it, you are accusing them of publishing lies.
There is a signifigant difference between levels of certainty. "I know" implies a level a hell of a lot closer to certainty than what those lying politicians had to go on.
Who in the UK government lied about what exactly?
Just going around saying politicians are 'lying' is a naive simplification.