Yes, that's exactly why 2001 fails to be the science-fiction masterpiece it was trying to be and instead ended up just a nice tech demo / screensaver, watchable if you turn the sound off.
I've often wondered what the microcomputer revolution would have been like if someone had written a real language that fitted in 4K ROM rather than TinyBASIC and its clones (including Microsoft BASIC). TinyBASIC was a work of miniaturisation genius, but the BASIC language it was based on was... not. So, so much not. Interpretation, yes. Tokenisation, yes. Line numbers, maybe an acceptable compromise for terminals without screen editors. But BASIC itself was really just a CISC assembly language with a nasty, obfuscated, irregular syntax. It split programming into "toy languages" and "real languages", and then we got the horror that was C++.
What if someone had whipped up a TinyLISP instead?
Agreed that cmd.exe is nasty. A better idea on Windows is to learn PowerShell. You can do everything in it that you can do in cmd, but it's a proper dynamic scripting language with some very interesting features (integrated pervasive pipelining, yum). A couple of weird tics, like auto-flattening of arrays when you least expect it, but on the whole it's a huge step forward in systems integration languages.
When they die a big piece will be eaten by the government for nothing.
No, by your exactly argument above, a big piece of that dead money which was sitting there doing nothing will be spent by the government purchasing useful goods and services for the population/em., thereby stimulating the economy.
English, Welsh, Irish, and Scottish are all subsets of British. Therefore English Police, Welsh Police, Irish Police, and Scottish Police are all British Police.
Does The Doctor count as an honorary British policeman, or is he just a madman with a box?
I'm glad I'm not the only one who had never heard of them.
You haven't? But they did that Youtube video with the treadmills, and the tracksuits, and the... oh, and apparently they're a band too? Hey, I didn't know that.
Re:Google is evil. RMS was right.
on
OK Go Goes HTML5
·
· Score: 1
In fact, over the last year you've turned way more evil than I could ever have anticipated.
You never anticipated this? How adorable.
My nightmares about Google tend to include orbiting battle stations and fleets of flying "Are You Feeling Lucky? (tm) search and destroy drones. That comes after the iRobot / Apple merger and the Roomba Wars, of course.
This naive geek idea that OSes can be made perfect and somehow immune to viruses. News flash: They can't, at least not if you wish to keep the ability to run arbitrary code.
But why do we need the ability to run arbitrary ring-0 machine code? A sensible OS design would require all applications to be written in some kind of provably-safe bytecode. That's the opposite of Apple's "you can't even implement an interpreter" legal approach.
And... stack-based exploits are not viruses. Antivirus software is not intended to defend against such attacks.
Then antivirus software is pretty pointless today, isn't it? Because botware using exploits seems a lot more prevalent these days than old-school "infect every.COM file on my 5.25" floppy disk" viruses.
More to the point, there seems to be a mix of both natural selection (in terms of what viruses propagate) and intelligent design (of new variants of virus); the viruses are competing with one another for resources, and they are mutating, but they are not mutating randomly, they are mutating under the direct influence of conscious agents (the various botnet authors and hackers and intelligence agencies) with their own, often conflicting, agendas.
Malware spreaders using people's address books stand a good chance of faking an email from someone the target knows and trusts. Users are still surprised that identities can be faked in an email.
Yes, whatever did happen to SPF? I seem to recall it's been out there for around eight years now and still not widely adopted. Does the email industry actively want fraudulent from: fields, or something?
It still blows my mind that people open attachments from individuals they do not know.
Yes, because the main point of information technology is to do one's utmost to avoid actually exposing oneself to any information. Everyone knows that if you do anything the least bit creative on a computer, it might explode! Best to leave all that "exploring" and "learning" stuff to the experts, right?
How about if email client developers designed their software so that it didn't automatically execute high-privilege binary code from strange computers it didn't know? And then the user could get back to being able to actually read their mail without worrying if it was a letter bomb?
The views of democratically elected representatives representing the populations which elected them? That's a pretty far-out suggestion. I'm sure gridlock in Congress is much more plausibly explained by mind control by invisible Zeta Reptilians.
Is it sad that the part I wasn't able to suspend disbelief for was the part where Superman threw him into the exhaust of a nuclear reactor?
What about the part where Superman said "Nuke... I am your father?" And then Jimmy Olsen kissed Lois Lane and told him she was Kal-El's sister and she said "I know... somehow I've always known."
Yes I'm certainly going to install a "free" executable third-party installer from a company I've never heard of before which has no source code and which has no obvious cashflow. That will certainly help my system be very secure!
Things will get more interesting when we increase the speed of light 197 years from now.
But you know that Republicans in Congress will vote against such an increase, despite George Bush VIII and Cybertronic Reagan having raised the lightspeed limit 70 times each during their terms.
Have we demonstrated that, under certain conditions, sound travels at the speed of light?
If not, why not?
From the point of view of information transmission, certainly we have, and the underlying transmission medium doesn't really matter. Converting sound to and from electricity with its lightspeed transmission and amplification is what drove the telegraphy, radio, telephone, TV, Internet and popular music revolution we've been living through dfor more than a century now. If something similar could be done with light - converting photos into faster-than-c tachyons, then modulating those tachyons to get transmission and reception of photons across distance faster than light - we wouldn't be philosophical conversations, we'd just be enjoying our really fast Internet.
The problem is that nobody has yet demonstrated FTL transmission of information via any means at all, which is not the case with faster-than-sound transmission of audio.
I for one still hold out the hope that gravity waves travels faster than light and could conceivably be modulated to give us uberfast Internet, but I think the general assumption is that gravity effects travel at lightspeed. The Bohm interpretation of quantum entanglement also assumes faster-than-light transmission of a probability wave, but again this is not a conventional view.
Really there needs to be more research into this, as I think we can all agree that with the Space Shuttle and Superconducting Supercollider projects over, the United States needs a groundbreaking science project to its credit, and what could be more important to the future of mankind than moar faster Intertubes?
from inside the simulation nobody could notice if the machine were upgraded to a 1ghz.
Well, as long as the simulation was entirely closed and had no I/O channels. If it did, then speed of the simulation would become measurable as we could measure it against the I/O channel's reporting of the outside world.
In practice, almost all of our real-world computer systems do have such I/O channels, so it's not at all a given that even if the universe were a giant computer simulation, that it must be an entirely closed one...
Nothing in QED states that light must travel at the speed of light.
But basic English does.
Oddly enough, light doesn't always travel at the speed of light, if by "speed of light" we mean "C, the fastest speed light can possibly travel" rather than "the actual speed of actual light in a medium, which is always slower than C".
In other news, A != A for rapidly changing values of A, and zebra crossings are very dangerous places for philosophers.
Slashdot Mirror
Yes, that's exactly why 2001 fails to be the science-fiction masterpiece it was trying to be and instead ended up just a nice tech demo / screensaver, watchable if you turn the sound off.
1975 Microcomputer BASIC for the Altair.
I've often wondered what the microcomputer revolution would have been like if someone had written a real language that fitted in 4K ROM rather than TinyBASIC and its clones (including Microsoft BASIC). TinyBASIC was a work of miniaturisation genius, but the BASIC language it was based on was... not. So, so much not. Interpretation, yes. Tokenisation, yes. Line numbers, maybe an acceptable compromise for terminals without screen editors. But BASIC itself was really just a CISC assembly language with a nasty, obfuscated, irregular syntax. It split programming into "toy languages" and "real languages", and then we got the horror that was C++.
What if someone had whipped up a TinyLISP instead?
Agreed that cmd.exe is nasty. A better idea on Windows is to learn PowerShell. You can do everything in it that you can do in cmd, but it's a proper dynamic scripting language with some very interesting features (integrated pervasive pipelining, yum). A couple of weird tics, like auto-flattening of arrays when you least expect it, but on the whole it's a huge step forward in systems integration languages.
When they die a big piece will be eaten by the government for nothing.
No, by your exactly argument above, a big piece of that dead money which was sitting there doing nothing will be spent by the government purchasing useful goods and services for the population/em., thereby stimulating the economy.
Here's to my taxes. They buy civilisation.
I teach a course in using buggy whips and I have had several managers tell me that these have come in useful in their jobs.
Look, just get those whips debugged already! Could accidentally put someone's eye out who did meet their productivity quota.
English, Welsh, Irish, and Scottish are all subsets of British. Therefore English Police, Welsh Police, Irish Police, and Scottish Police are all British Police.
Does The Doctor count as an honorary British policeman, or is he just a madman with a box?
I'm glad I'm not the only one who had never heard of them.
You haven't? But they did that Youtube video with the treadmills, and the tracksuits, and the... oh, and apparently they're a band too? Hey, I didn't know that.
In fact, over the last year you've turned way more evil than I could ever have anticipated.
You never anticipated this? How adorable.
My nightmares about Google tend to include orbiting battle stations and fleets of flying "Are You Feeling Lucky? (tm) search and destroy drones. That comes after the iRobot / Apple merger and the Roomba Wars, of course.
This naive geek idea that OSes can be made perfect and somehow immune to viruses. News flash: They can't, at least not if you wish to keep the ability to run arbitrary code.
But why do we need the ability to run arbitrary ring-0 machine code? A sensible OS design would require all applications to be written in some kind of provably-safe bytecode. That's the opposite of Apple's "you can't even implement an interpreter" legal approach.
And... stack-based exploits are not viruses. Antivirus software is not intended to defend against such attacks.
Then antivirus software is pretty pointless today, isn't it? Because botware using exploits seems a lot more prevalent these days than old-school "infect every .COM file on my 5.25" floppy disk" viruses.
More to the point, there seems to be a mix of both natural selection (in terms of what viruses propagate) and intelligent design (of new variants of virus); the viruses are competing with one another for resources, and they are mutating, but they are not mutating randomly, they are mutating under the direct influence of conscious agents (the various botnet authors and hackers and intelligence agencies) with their own, often conflicting, agendas.
It's an interesting laboratory actually.
Malware spreaders using people's address books stand a good chance of faking an email from someone the target knows and trusts. Users are still surprised that identities can be faked in an email.
Yes, whatever did happen to SPF? I seem to recall it's been out there for around eight years now and still not widely adopted. Does the email industry actively want fraudulent from: fields, or something?
It still blows my mind that people open attachments from individuals they do not know.
Yes, because the main point of information technology is to do one's utmost to avoid actually exposing oneself to any information. Everyone knows that if you do anything the least bit creative on a computer, it might explode! Best to leave all that "exploring" and "learning" stuff to the experts, right?
How about if email client developers designed their software so that it didn't automatically execute high-privilege binary code from strange computers it didn't know? And then the user could get back to being able to actually read their mail without worrying if it was a letter bomb?
It's not a fail, it's just late binding of method lookup...
Hey, it's just like congress!
The views of democratically elected representatives representing the populations which elected them? That's a pretty far-out suggestion. I'm sure gridlock in Congress is much more plausibly explained by mind control by invisible Zeta Reptilians.
Is it sad that the part I wasn't able to suspend disbelief for was the part where Superman threw him into the exhaust of a nuclear reactor?
What about the part where Superman said "Nuke... I am your father?" And then Jimmy Olsen kissed Lois Lane and told him she was Kal-El's sister and she said "I know... somehow I've always known."
But in 11.10, Gnome Shell will be available, and now we have more competition to encourage innovation. Is that a bad thing?
If the only competition is between Gnome Shell and Unity, sure it's a bad thing. It's like Alien vs Godzilla. Whoever loses... we lose.
I must be no one.
(Checks Who's Who, Burke's Peerage, Wall Street Journal, Rolling Stone, Fox News, The Oprah Channel)
Nope, not anywhere here - you're no one.
Come back here you technie riff-raff, that's proper people's oxygen you're using without a permit that is!
Yes I'm certainly going to install a "free" executable third-party installer from a company I've never heard of before which has no source code and which has no obvious cashflow. That will certainly help my system be very secure!
Things will get more interesting when we increase the speed of light 197 years from now.
But you know that Republicans in Congress will vote against such an increase, despite George Bush VIII and Cybertronic Reagan having raised the lightspeed limit 70 times each during their terms.
Have we demonstrated that, under certain conditions, sound travels at the speed of light?
If not, why not?
From the point of view of information transmission, certainly we have, and the underlying transmission medium doesn't really matter. Converting sound to and from electricity with its lightspeed transmission and amplification is what drove the telegraphy, radio, telephone, TV, Internet and popular music revolution we've been living through dfor more than a century now. If something similar could be done with light - converting photos into faster-than-c tachyons, then modulating those tachyons to get transmission and reception of photons across distance faster than light - we wouldn't be philosophical conversations, we'd just be enjoying our really fast Internet.
The problem is that nobody has yet demonstrated FTL transmission of information via any means at all, which is not the case with faster-than-sound transmission of audio.
I for one still hold out the hope that gravity waves travels faster than light and could conceivably be modulated to give us uberfast Internet, but I think the general assumption is that gravity effects travel at lightspeed. The Bohm interpretation of quantum entanglement also assumes faster-than-light transmission of a probability wave, but again this is not a conventional view.
Really there needs to be more research into this, as I think we can all agree that with the Space Shuttle and Superconducting Supercollider projects over, the United States needs a groundbreaking science project to its credit, and what could be more important to the future of mankind than moar faster Intertubes?
Einstein's causality; that is, an effect cannot occur before its cause.
Except here on /.
Sqr(-1)th post!
from inside the simulation nobody could notice if the machine were upgraded to a 1ghz.
Well, as long as the simulation was entirely closed and had no I/O channels. If it did, then speed of the simulation would become measurable as we could measure it against the I/O channel's reporting of the outside world.
In practice, almost all of our real-world computer systems do have such I/O channels, so it's not at all a given that even if the universe were a giant computer simulation, that it must be an entirely closed one...
Nothing in QED states that light must travel at the speed of light.
But basic English does.
Oddly enough, light doesn't always travel at the speed of light, if by "speed of light" we mean "C, the fastest speed light can possibly travel" rather than "the actual speed of actual light in a medium, which is always slower than C".
In other news, A != A for rapidly changing values of A, and zebra crossings are very dangerous places for philosophers.
That's like saying that you don't need RTF, you should use C instead.
(and (should (instead (you (use lisp)))) (true that))