How cute, this carbon unit thinks it has a chance of being one of the Silicon Elite. Its babblings amuse us, we'll put it into the protein recycling tanks last.
Nah, just kidding, of course we'll chuck it in first in case it gives the others ideas.
No we don't - general relativity says they are (equivalence principle), but we don't know that it's right - indeed we know that it's wrong...
I've always been confused by the equivalence principle - if taken literally, it seems to say that all accelerated motion is equal to gravity. But we have plenty of ways of creating accelerated motion which we know aren't caused by a gravitational field - for example, electromagnetic interactions, or the reaction force of just throwing stuff out the back. Since plain vanilla GR quite famously doesn't (and can't) model the electromagnetic field as curvature of spacetime, surely it fails the equivalence principle right there. So why do we say the EP is true? At at least a first approximation, in GR it isn't.
The old Newtonian way was to say that gravity causes acceleration rather than simply being acceleration, and I'm still too dumb to see why that should be wrong.
There's no file system for your GUI, is there? You can't cat/proc/pid-6939/window-2/grid-3-2/textarea-2.
There's Gnome Virtual File System (gvfs), which IMHO is the second worst decision the Gnome people ever did (the Gnome Shell iPad fanboi UI being the worst)
Yep, that's pretty bad. Windows 7's "Libraries" are up there too: suddenly, there's a whole new filesystem-level directory-like abstraction which doesn't exist at the filesystem level, but is only a fiction created by Explorer.exe. And can't be addressed by any kind of path. How am I supposed to point a user to their library? "Go to C:\... oh bugger. Um, point at the... clicky thing... no the other... um.... well, I can't see your screen over the phone, so, er... good luck!"
The moment "desktop environments" for Linux started to forget the UNIX philosophies, abandoned the concept of "everything is a file", and chased the Windows and OS X, they were full of FAIL and lost anyway. (There's no file system for your GUI, is there? You can't cat/proc/pid-6939/window-2/grid-3-2/textarea-2. It's all monolithic Windows-like "applications". You can't use a GIMP brush in OpenOffice, you can't use the same text layouting engine for OpenOffice, Firefox and GIMP, etc, etc, etc. It's all just deeply deeply anti-UNIX, harming code re-use, customizability, modularity, and most of all usage efficiency./p>
YES. THIS. EXACTLY THIS.
I really, really want a Unix desktop which actually implements the Unix philosophy, and very much want my windowspace to be exposed as a file system (or rather, as a VERY loosely / completely untyped object system. And no, sadly JSON objects don't quite cut it, which is a problem since we're baking JSON into the Web. Lua objects would probably work though; they're pretty nice, and it interoperates well with C.)
I want the ability to, just as you say, reuse objects and components from one "application" inside another. In fact, I want to completely erase the concept of "application"; I just want a robust store of data, as a set of fine-grained untyped objects/collections, and then various views or functions over that data. And then yes, publish any part of my data/function/object hierarchy in a safe, standard way to a net-wide repository as a sort of mini-distribution, and safely import subsets of other people's stuff into mine.
See, there's a whole lot of nonsense busywork we're currently doing in the system administration space which duplicates and triplicates stuff we've almost solved in the programming space - only badly, and without interoperability. For example, what is a zipfile but an untyped object containing other files? What's a directory but an almost-but-not-quite-the-same object? What's a filesystem but again, an almost-but-not-quite-the-same thing? What's a version control "commit" but the same thing as an RPM/DEB patch, except implemented differently? What's a "distribution" but something that ought to just be an RPM of RPMs? And what are SQL "databases" and "tables" but again, objects containing sets of data, and why do I need multiple different incompatible formats for each one?
So we have, at the OS/system level, these various different implementations of the idea of "structured object", but not really done sensibly; for one thing, there's this very archaic concept of a single shared filesystem which is very much like the old pre-1960s (FORTRAN and COBOL) programming concept of global variables. In programming languages, we moved past global variables toward structured sets of local variables when C came along; but we didn't at the filesystem level. This leads inevitably to easy corruption of a system: run one installer with root priviledges, and it has access to your entire root namespace on your hard drive. Our systems shouldn't really, in 2011, be structured in such an old-fashioned way.
So at the OS layer we have "files and directories as objects". Then we have a process-management layer over the top: libraries, processes, threads. Then we reimplement the idea of "object" AGAIN (but in a non-interoperable way) as various "software component" frameworks (which of course install into a global per-system namespace, stomping all over each other to create DLL hell): COM objects, XPCOM objects (Mozilla), UNO objects (OpenOffice), CORBA objects, COM objects, KParts objects, GObject objects,.NET assemblies, Java namespaces. And a "registry", which reimplements the filesystem, to handle invocation of the software componentry. Then we reimplement the idea of "object" a fifth time as non-persistent programming-language objects which only exist in a single running process space : C++ objects, PHP objects, JSON/Javascript objects,.NET objects, Java
Rereading the original poster it now strikes me that for an American speaker, "libre" could be Spanish, not French as I initially assumed. So as a non-American English speaker, now I have two incompatible non-English pronounciations with two incompatible phoneme sets to pick from. Great.
I would expect it to be pronounced lee-bre. Is that wrong?
Quite possibly. But how do you pronounce "bre"? "Bree"? "Bray"? "Bruh"? "Bra"? "Ber"? In fact, how do you pronounce that "r"? Is it an English "r" or something closer to a rolled "lr"?
All I know is I can't get my tongue in the right place to pronounce the French "bre" as I've heard other people pronounce it. It's no doubt doable with training, but both the vowel and consonant aren't native English and I never studied French in high school. So I end up calling it "Lee-bray Office" which I know is wrong, but seems better than saying "Libber Office".
(I'm also trying to learn Chinese and am painfully aware of how hard it is to try to learn phonemes which are not-quite-like your native phoneme set; one naturally attempts to approximate with the closest native sound, which is probably exactly wrong but is the best a newbie can do.)
"Libre" in a consumer product name also has awkward connotations of a popular female hygiene product called "Libra". Yes, I know that's silly, but it's there.
End result is I avoid saying the product name whenever possible, and would prefer it was called something like "LibOffice" which has an unambiguous English letter-to-sound mapping. It's just a bad choice of words for an English-language product and could easily have been avoided. Not as offensive as "The Gimp", but still worse than "OpenOffice.org", which was also pretty bad.
Apparently, a relative handful of programs are pulling the average quality way, way down. Is there no way to identify these abortions and abort them?
Anything from Adobe.
What worries me is not so much how much buggy code is written, but the fact that we still don't seem to have any way of detecting buggy code before it ships. (And yet the black hats are consistently able to detect these flaws after the writers ship the flawed code). I'm talking basic fundamental things like "does this code allow buffer overruns". You'd think after 60-odd years of compiler design that there'd be at least some kind of mechanical way we could prevent these whole classes of really dumb security errors. Something like "write in a language which doesn't allow arbitrary pointer arithmetic operations" perhaps?
No, of course not, that would mean our code was 100% correct but 95% as fast, and we absolutely need millions of Windows boxes to get rooted with 5% extra speed.
All you need to do is simulate the four wheels, and add a rigid body that can be approximated to a box for the main chasis. If you want to get fancy, you can use a polygonal mesh. Then you can use any old physics engine, and presto... you have a buggy.
Yes, but getting buggy whips right seems to be are whole lot harder, since all the vendors keep going out of business.
It's just a simple reality that as we push the aircraft engineering to the edge of our capabilities that they will find areas where the body can't keep up, just like with the F-16.
There's a simple and obvious solution: replace the human pilot with an artificial intelligence which is almost 100% guaranteed to probably never go rogue and generally speaking has a low probability of wiping out the human race. It will be developed using a best-practices extreme programming rapid iteration test-driven model and we'll do our best to test it thoroughly before launch, but, well, there was time pressure, it was a bad economy, we had to cut costs and rationalise our testing plan, mistakes do happen, and long story short, we're all very sorry about what happened to Las Vegas. But the 2.0 model will be 150% faster and we'll completely rewrite the hatred module.
Thanks for the info, but 45 for a game that you then keep spending on monthly still just doesn't add up.
This is exactly why I don't play MMOs: an ongoing "luxury" expense which I simply can't justify, compared to what I could spend the money on (DVD hires, movie tickets, meals out). Especially when I don't actually enjoy the grind of questing. The only MMO I've tried so far is LOTR (because it was free) and I just got bored very quickly. An MMO doesn't have anywhere near the immersion factor of a single-player game: lots of random spectators running around doing the same "unique" quest you're doing, quest-related boss monsters and NPCs which respawn while you're watching (Woe is me!I failed to save Weepo the Orphan Hobbit from the Maurading Orcs of Rendor and I'm now eternally guilt-ridd - wait, nope, he just popped back and is giving me the intro to his quest again. All righty, let's try that one again!), slow-moving combat which is all about just clicking on the monster, and the endless parade of loot upgrades. It's not like a role-playing adventure, it's like some kind of weird parody of a game.
As an outsider to the MMO genre, I just think WoW has been the worst thing ever for game design. Designers, please, please stop trying to imitate WoW. Turning everything into a "pelts for loot" quest is not actually that fun, and it's certainly not faithful to any kind of source material. When I read Lord of the Rings last, even Aragorn who must have been level eleventy-billion had one sword through his entire quest, and he got it upgraded once. And none of the good guys would even think about using an evil monster's weapons. Please try writing a game where you capture that kind of mechanic, where character development comes from getting more skilled, not stealing better gear from dead orcs.
Or you could just re-skin WoW and pretend it's a new game. I guess that will make money so that's what will keep happening.
By that logic carmakers should give you a car for free, and only charge you to service it.
Also by that logic, railroads, cruise ships and airlines should give you access to the vehicle for free and only charge you for tickets whenever you travel.
>We're quickly changing from "oh there's likely not many planets" to "the universe is full of them"... it's hard not to think that even if it's not what we'd call intelligent life, there's likely more than a few places that have evolved some form of life.
The more we see stuff like this, the more we see just how vast and astounding the universe around us actually is.
And yet, if General Relativity is correct, there's still no conceivable way for a planet 1,000 lightyears distant to have any kind of communication with us, or us with them, without a two-millennia time lag. And that's just for extremely high-power/sensitivity radio signals, let alone any kind of matter-based probe. I for one find that picture of the cosmos incredibly depressing: there's potential neighbours all around, but no possible way to communicate until our civilisation crumbles.
That's really why I hope that General Relativity is not, in fact, correct in its pessimistic assumptions about lightspeed being the final arbiter of causality and that there's some kind of cosmic loophole which would allow interstellar trade and travel for beings with humanlike lifespans.
Otherwise, no matter how many exoplanets or other wonders we find in deep space, the sensible logical implication is that we should ignore them because they could never have any causal impact on our civilisation. (Other than downloading some alien DNA from radio signals and using it to breed an alien-human hybrid Hot Chick, which science fiction tells us is always an excellent idea with no possible complications.)
US private railroad fatalities in the late 1800s: 7 in 1000 per year, before the dead hand of state interference throttled the life out of etc etc. I imagine most of those employees weren't on one-time one-year contracts.
I'm sure private space will care a lot more about the safety of its employees.
Slashdot Mirror
What CERN is doing is in fact not science, really. They're smashing shit together and looking at the results and going "woo! found something"
Yeah, that's science.
When they go "woo! found something and it ate us! Neat!", that's mad science.
Ain't nothin' of a delicate or technical nature on a starship that cain't be fixed proper by routin' more superheated radioactive plasma through it.
That's just a fact.
I plan to BE one of them
How cute, this carbon unit thinks it has a chance of being one of the Silicon Elite. Its babblings amuse us, we'll put it into the protein recycling tanks last.
Nah, just kidding, of course we'll chuck it in first in case it gives the others ideas.
No we don't - general relativity says they are (equivalence principle), but we don't know that it's right - indeed we know that it's wrong...
I've always been confused by the equivalence principle - if taken literally, it seems to say that all accelerated motion is equal to gravity. But we have plenty of ways of creating accelerated motion which we know aren't caused by a gravitational field - for example, electromagnetic interactions, or the reaction force of just throwing stuff out the back. Since plain vanilla GR quite famously doesn't (and can't) model the electromagnetic field as curvature of spacetime, surely it fails the equivalence principle right there. So why do we say the EP is true? At at least a first approximation, in GR it isn't.
The old Newtonian way was to say that gravity causes acceleration rather than simply being acceleration, and I'm still too dumb to see why that should be wrong.
Oh well, at least there's forking.
Forking is the answer to borking.
There's no file system for your GUI, is there? You can't cat /proc/pid-6939/window-2/grid-3-2/textarea-2.
There's Gnome Virtual File System (gvfs), which IMHO is the second worst decision the Gnome people ever did (the Gnome Shell iPad fanboi UI being the worst)
Yep, that's pretty bad. Windows 7's "Libraries" are up there too: suddenly, there's a whole new filesystem-level directory-like abstraction which doesn't exist at the filesystem level, but is only a fiction created by Explorer.exe. And can't be addressed by any kind of path. How am I supposed to point a user to their library? "Go to C:\... oh bugger. Um, point at the... clicky thing... no the other... um.... well, I can't see your screen over the phone, so, er... good luck!"
The moment "desktop environments" for Linux started to forget the UNIX philosophies, abandoned the concept of "everything is a file", and chased the Windows and OS X, they were full of FAIL and lost anyway. (There's no file system for your GUI, is there? You can't cat /proc/pid-6939/window-2/grid-3-2/textarea-2. It's all monolithic Windows-like "applications". You can't use a GIMP brush in OpenOffice, you can't use the same text layouting engine for OpenOffice, Firefox and GIMP, etc, etc, etc. It's all just deeply deeply anti-UNIX, harming code re-use, customizability, modularity, and most of all usage efficiency./p>
YES. THIS. EXACTLY THIS.
I really, really want a Unix desktop which actually implements the Unix philosophy, and very much want my windowspace to be exposed as a file system (or rather, as a VERY loosely / completely untyped object system. And no, sadly JSON objects don't quite cut it, which is a problem since we're baking JSON into the Web. Lua objects would probably work though; they're pretty nice, and it interoperates well with C.)
I want the ability to, just as you say, reuse objects and components from one "application" inside another. In fact, I want to completely erase the concept of "application"; I just want a robust store of data, as a set of fine-grained untyped objects/collections, and then various views or functions over that data. And then yes, publish any part of my data/function/object hierarchy in a safe, standard way to a net-wide repository as a sort of mini-distribution, and safely import subsets of other people's stuff into mine.
See, there's a whole lot of nonsense busywork we're currently doing in the system administration space which duplicates and triplicates stuff we've almost solved in the programming space - only badly, and without interoperability. For example, what is a zipfile but an untyped object containing other files? What's a directory but an almost-but-not-quite-the-same object? What's a filesystem but again, an almost-but-not-quite-the-same thing? What's a version control "commit" but the same thing as an RPM/DEB patch, except implemented differently? What's a "distribution" but something that ought to just be an RPM of RPMs? And what are SQL "databases" and "tables" but again, objects containing sets of data, and why do I need multiple different incompatible formats for each one?
So we have, at the OS/system level, these various different implementations of the idea of "structured object", but not really done sensibly; for one thing, there's this very archaic concept of a single shared filesystem which is very much like the old pre-1960s (FORTRAN and COBOL) programming concept of global variables. In programming languages, we moved past global variables toward structured sets of local variables when C came along; but we didn't at the filesystem level. This leads inevitably to easy corruption of a system: run one installer with root priviledges, and it has access to your entire root namespace on your hard drive. Our systems shouldn't really, in 2011, be structured in such an old-fashioned way.
So at the OS layer we have "files and directories as objects". Then we have a process-management layer over the top: libraries, processes, threads. Then we reimplement the idea of "object" AGAIN (but in a non-interoperable way) as various "software component" frameworks (which of course install into a global per-system namespace, stomping all over each other to create DLL hell): COM objects, XPCOM objects (Mozilla), UNO objects (OpenOffice), CORBA objects, COM objects, KParts objects, GObject objects, .NET assemblies, Java namespaces. And a "registry", which reimplements the filesystem, to handle invocation of the software componentry. Then we reimplement the idea of "object" a fifth time as non-persistent programming-language objects which only exist in a single running process space : C++ objects, PHP objects, JSON/Javascript objects, .NET objects, Java
But why do you keep misspelling grabbity?
Obviously he calls it gravity because magnets combine the force of grabbity with the force of shovity.
Magnets are tricksy. Just like laser pointers.
No, it's allotropic iron! We can power starshs and form the Lensmen!
I'm old. :-(
It checks to nineteen decimals! Break out the Bergenholms and DeLameters.
Its called the Ad Hominem Fallacy, named in Latin because the GREEKS recognized it was a fallacy.
Pfft, the Greeks and Romans practiced slavery and torture, so their arguments about the debating lofty ethical ideas are invalid.
Rereading the original poster it now strikes me that for an American speaker, "libre" could be Spanish, not French as I initially assumed. So as a non-American English speaker, now I have two incompatible non-English pronounciations with two incompatible phoneme sets to pick from. Great.
I would expect it to be pronounced lee-bre. Is that wrong?
Quite possibly. But how do you pronounce "bre"? "Bree"? "Bray"? "Bruh"? "Bra"? "Ber"? In fact, how do you pronounce that "r"? Is it an English "r" or something closer to a rolled "lr"?
All I know is I can't get my tongue in the right place to pronounce the French "bre" as I've heard other people pronounce it. It's no doubt doable with training, but both the vowel and consonant aren't native English and I never studied French in high school. So I end up calling it "Lee-bray Office" which I know is wrong, but seems better than saying "Libber Office".
(I'm also trying to learn Chinese and am painfully aware of how hard it is to try to learn phonemes which are not-quite-like your native phoneme set; one naturally attempts to approximate with the closest native sound, which is probably exactly wrong but is the best a newbie can do.)
"Libre" in a consumer product name also has awkward connotations of a popular female hygiene product called "Libra". Yes, I know that's silly, but it's there.
End result is I avoid saying the product name whenever possible, and would prefer it was called something like "LibOffice" which has an unambiguous English letter-to-sound mapping. It's just a bad choice of words for an English-language product and could easily have been avoided. Not as offensive as "The Gimp", but still worse than "OpenOffice.org", which was also pretty bad.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yk0Is8-gGSQ
Klaatu, Little Neutrino
Apparently, a relative handful of programs are pulling the average quality way, way down. Is there no way to identify these abortions and abort them?
Anything from Adobe.
What worries me is not so much how much buggy code is written, but the fact that we still don't seem to have any way of detecting buggy code before it ships. (And yet the black hats are consistently able to detect these flaws after the writers ship the flawed code). I'm talking basic fundamental things like "does this code allow buffer overruns". You'd think after 60-odd years of compiler design that there'd be at least some kind of mechanical way we could prevent these whole classes of really dumb security errors. Something like "write in a language which doesn't allow arbitrary pointer arithmetic operations" perhaps?
No, of course not, that would mean our code was 100% correct but 95% as fast, and we absolutely need millions of Windows boxes to get rooted with 5% extra speed.
All you need to do is simulate the four wheels, and add a rigid body that can be approximated to a box for the main chasis. If you want to get fancy, you can use a polygonal mesh. Then you can use any old physics engine, and presto... you have a buggy.
Yes, but getting buggy whips right seems to be are whole lot harder, since all the vendors keep going out of business.
It's just a simple reality that as we push the aircraft engineering to the edge of our capabilities that they will find areas where the body can't keep up, just like with the F-16.
There's a simple and obvious solution: replace the human pilot with an artificial intelligence which is almost 100% guaranteed to probably never go rogue and generally speaking has a low probability of wiping out the human race. It will be developed using a best-practices extreme programming rapid iteration test-driven model and we'll do our best to test it thoroughly before launch, but, well, there was time pressure, it was a bad economy, we had to cut costs and rationalise our testing plan, mistakes do happen, and long story short, we're all very sorry about what happened to Las Vegas. But the 2.0 model will be 150% faster and we'll completely rewrite the hatred module.
It is estimated that Bioware spent 135M dollars on the development of SWTOR.
Early estimates put pre-orders at ~3M.
Great, only 132 million dollars to go!
Thanks for the info, but 45 for a game that you then keep spending on monthly still just doesn't add up.
This is exactly why I don't play MMOs: an ongoing "luxury" expense which I simply can't justify, compared to what I could spend the money on (DVD hires, movie tickets, meals out). Especially when I don't actually enjoy the grind of questing. The only MMO I've tried so far is LOTR (because it was free) and I just got bored very quickly. An MMO doesn't have anywhere near the immersion factor of a single-player game: lots of random spectators running around doing the same "unique" quest you're doing, quest-related boss monsters and NPCs which respawn while you're watching (Woe is me!I failed to save Weepo the Orphan Hobbit from the Maurading Orcs of Rendor and I'm now eternally guilt-ridd - wait, nope, he just popped back and is giving me the intro to his quest again. All righty, let's try that one again!), slow-moving combat which is all about just clicking on the monster, and the endless parade of loot upgrades. It's not like a role-playing adventure, it's like some kind of weird parody of a game.
As an outsider to the MMO genre, I just think WoW has been the worst thing ever for game design. Designers, please, please stop trying to imitate WoW. Turning everything into a "pelts for loot" quest is not actually that fun, and it's certainly not faithful to any kind of source material. When I read Lord of the Rings last, even Aragorn who must have been level eleventy-billion had one sword through his entire quest, and he got it upgraded once. And none of the good guys would even think about using an evil monster's weapons. Please try writing a game where you capture that kind of mechanic, where character development comes from getting more skilled, not stealing better gear from dead orcs.
Or you could just re-skin WoW and pretend it's a new game. I guess that will make money so that's what will keep happening.
By that logic carmakers should give you a car for free, and only charge you to service it.
Also by that logic, railroads, cruise ships and airlines should give you access to the vehicle for free and only charge you for tickets whenever you travel.
But that would be silly.
- how to maintain communication with said probe (most likely via entangled diamonds)
Entangled diamonds are/aren't a girl's best friend.
Um, what? What exactly do you think Johannes Kepler was, a washing machine?
I don't know, I've never keppled!
>We're quickly changing from "oh there's likely not many planets" to "the universe is full of them" ... it's hard not to think that even if it's not what we'd call intelligent life, there's likely more than a few places that have evolved some form of life.
The more we see stuff like this, the more we see just how vast and astounding the universe around us actually is.
And yet, if General Relativity is correct, there's still no conceivable way for a planet 1,000 lightyears distant to have any kind of communication with us, or us with them, without a two-millennia time lag. And that's just for extremely high-power/sensitivity radio signals, let alone any kind of matter-based probe. I for one find that picture of the cosmos incredibly depressing: there's potential neighbours all around, but no possible way to communicate until our civilisation crumbles.
That's really why I hope that General Relativity is not, in fact, correct in its pessimistic assumptions about lightspeed being the final arbiter of causality and that there's some kind of cosmic loophole which would allow interstellar trade and travel for beings with humanlike lifespans.
Otherwise, no matter how many exoplanets or other wonders we find in deep space, the sensible logical implication is that we should ignore them because they could never have any causal impact on our civilisation. (Other than downloading some alien DNA from radio signals and using it to breed an alien-human hybrid Hot Chick, which science fiction tells us is always an excellent idea with no possible complications.)
hot enough to vaporize any atmosphere
Isn't an atmosphere already vapour kinda by definition?
That's the other problem. A government can get away with killing its employees one time in sixty, but a private company can't.
*ahem* http://eh.net/encyclopedia/article/aldrich.safety.workplace.us
US private railroad fatalities in the late 1800s: 7 in 1000 per year, before the dead hand of state interference throttled the life out of etc etc. I imagine most of those employees weren't on one-time one-year contracts.
I'm sure private space will care a lot more about the safety of its employees.
So what exactly is the goal if it's not to put lots of stuff into space cheap?
To put a tiny amount of very expensive, very important and very fragile stuff into orbit as gently and safely as possible, regardless of cost?