One-molecule logic gates. Then, one-molecule FPGA's. Then one-molecule processors. Then one-molecule computers. Then one-molecule beowulf clusters. Then we will be like unto gods.
To paraphrase Harlan Ellison, I have no mod points, and I must laugh.
Electricity can always be split up into individual electrons, but light sometimes acts as a wave, and is thus harder to manipulate in small increments.
Uh, not quite. Single electrons have half-integer spin and thus obey the pauli exclusion principle, while photons (spin zero) obey bose-einstein statistics. This makes electrons "avoid" each other while photons "congrigate" (condense). But both may be viewed as either waves or as particles, and the WP duality per se has no effect on their behaviour.
Richard Stallman, Ken Sakamura, and Linus Torvalds, have been jointly awarded the first annual Takeda Foundation Prize,...
Remember how, in Star Trek, it was/is the rule when citing history to give 3 sources: two of which you've heard of, and one which is apparently post 21st-century? You know, Kirk will talk about e.g. ``defenders of freedom like Thomas Jefferson, Abraham Lincoln, and Ankuba of Sirius 43.''
How did this get modded "informative" and "interesting"?
As others have pointed out, the majority of the statements in this post have one of the classic "political speech" structures:
The boogyman is bad, therefore we must ( spend more on pork| stamp out the muppets| vote for me in '03 |...or whatever).
The paragraphs few that do contain statements (e.g. the sunset clause, endowed rights) are incorrect. This sort of blather is not informative, interesting, or insightful.
One advantage of the net you forgot to mention: the very fact that many people harbor suspicion of the content increases its value.
If something is printed in the New York Times, or broadcast on CNN, it is much more likely to pass without critical evaluation than something that is posted on the web. "I saw it on the web" is almost a synonym for "it may be true; I want to get more data, cross check some facts." To my mind, that is a very valuable for new media in a free society, especially one that intends to stay free.
I'm a relative newcomer to the Open Source world, but what has struck me is how none of the big profile projects seem to have their own test harness or test suites. Maybe I'm missing something. Please let me know what test suites major OSS software ships with...What I mean is something like "make test" integrated into the project. Running that generated test code would perform hundreds of sanity checks (or even thousands for complicated projects) on the code.
Install a kernel, run a battery of tests. Find systemic breakers really quickly. It's not hard, it's just a matter of discipline to write the tests. As code is written, write the tests for the code. Any time a bug is found outside the normal test suite, write the test that should have found it. Automatable tests wherever possible...Part of the official build process for releasing the software should be a 100% compliance with the automated tests.
There is a comprehensive testing suite in place for linux; in fact, we just saw it in action. It involves testing the kernel on thousands of boxes simultaneously, running ten of thousands of hours of tests, and getting feedback to the developers within a few hours.
To paraphrase pogo: "We've seen the test suite, and it is us."
Now, this may seem odd or broken, but it has a few charming advantages. First, the costs are distributed amongst those that benefit most, with zero accounting overhead. Second, the response time is very fast. Third (and, IMHO, most importantly) test coverage is maintained by the same laws of statistics that make sure there is air for you each time you take a breath; if usage patterns change, the new usage is included in the tests automatically--even if no one is consciously aware that they are doing "something new" it still gets tested.
-- MarkusQ
+1 Funny on the MQR standard
on
Bert Is Evil
·
· Score: 2
Mutual 1...experienced or done by each of two or more parties with reference to the other or others...3 standing in a specified relation to each other...--1995 OED, concise
So there are two waves. One wiggles up-and-down; the other wiggles left-and-right. They are orthogonal, in that their wiggles are at right angles and thus don't effect each other at all. This mutual othogonality permits them to both pass through the same fiber at the same time, doubling the capacity.
Just trying to grok "mutually orthogonal". Is that redundant, or just over my head? Not trying to nitpick, but to understand something my networking prof never explained.
"mutually orthogonal" means (for a set of two or more elements) that each pair of elements is orthogonal--AFAIK, it's a synonym for "pairwise orthogonal". "orthogonal," of course, has lots of synonyms, including "linear independence," "at right angles," "having zero dot-product," "statistically uncorrelated," etc.
So, the three spacial dimensions, the set {phase of the moon, day of the week, time of day}, etc. are all "mutually orthogonal." When talking about a set of only two elements, the "mutually" is superfluous, but not redundant.
I'm not sure that an optical transform is the same as a digital transform, or that they can be used to do the same thing. Can their optical FFT/digital encoding produce the same bits during JPEG encoding as a digital FFT/digital encoding JPEG encoder? This is crucial for image/video compression algorithms.
They are the same, in theory (in practice the tolerance of your components limits you to only a few digits of accuracy). The basic (and very generic) relationship is:
RW: Some real-world, physical process
OB: An observational model of RW
AN: An analytic model of OB
DI: A digital implementation of AN
AI: An analog implementation of AN, sometimes even based on RW.
The wonder of science is that many RW have the same OB, and many OB have the same AN (in both cases allowing for some paramiterization). While all of these can "implement the same function" they will have very different time/space/energy/cost/etc profiles. Digital, in particular, givers you greater precision and flexibility, but at a rather high cost in speed, size, and energy usage.
Up until faily recently (say, the last twenty to fifty years) the DI's were mostly done by hand. The only reason to do them was to get those extra digits, mostly for designers of the AIs (such as tube amplifiers and anti-aircraft guns) or to produce tables for use "in the field".
I was about to post the same observation; instead (having no mod points) I'll try to draw attention to your post. (And likely get modded down as redundant or offtopic if I succeed. *sigh*)
IMHO, the optical aspects are a red herring. The real speed advantage comes from going analog, which has always been (and always will be) much faster than digital. This gets rediscovered every few years, and then lost when the harsh limits on analog accuracy become more bothersome at the same time as the speed of digital is creeping upwards.
If you are a company, business, organization or individual who has been disconnected (primarily internet access, but VoIP is a possible solution) by the WTC attacks and would like assistance from NYCwireless, send the following information:...
I have no mod points at present, but this post belongs much higher than (1).
Maybe that's what it's all about. It's going to be bought by some fake person and remain in military use. Then we'll have one silo that maybe isn't being targeted.
I can only assume the current high (only) bid [$1.5M] is a joke.
Maybe he's using bay area apartments for price comparison. If you take the NPV of the cash flow stream, it comes out about right, and I'll bet it's much better per square foot.
The only problem with the place is that it's not nearly as secret as it once was. I'd pay twice what the going price for this thing is, if only it *wasn't* plastered all over EBay.
I, on the other hand, would pay extra to make sure that everyone knew which silo it was that no longer held an ICBM.
Especially the people who might have loaded silos of their own.
They're using rubbing alcohol and liquid oxygen. Despite the fact that low-concentration hydrogen peroxide might be on your bathroom shelf beside the isopropyl alcohol, they are entirely different chemicals.
The original point was someone advocating hydrogen peroxide as an alternate to liquid oxygen. It's much safer, but also a little over twice as dense per free oxygen. Sometimes the context gets lost when posts are reparented.
You make a very good and frequently overlooked point here; I'm not sure why it was modded as "flamebait".
We need to remember that programers and lawyers are in essentially the same business--bending complex systems to their will. Just because the programers pull a nifty twist, we shouldn't assume that the lawyers won't have an equally devious "Ah, but I'm not left handed either" response.
Slashdot Mirror
To paraphrase Harlan Ellison, I have no mod points, and I must laugh.
-- MarkusQ
Uh, not quite. Single electrons have half-integer spin and thus obey the pauli exclusion principle, while photons (spin zero) obey bose-einstein statistics. This makes electrons "avoid" each other while photons "congrigate" (condense). But both may be viewed as either waves or as particles, and the WP duality per se has no effect on their behaviour.
-- MarkusQ
Remember how, in Star Trek, it was/is the rule when citing history to give 3 sources: two of which you've heard of, and one which is apparently post 21st-century? You know, Kirk will talk about e.g. ``defenders of freedom like Thomas Jefferson, Abraham Lincoln, and Ankuba of Sirius 43.''
You've never heard of Linus Torvalds?!?!
-- MarkusQ
-- MarkusQ
As others have pointed out, the majority of the statements in this post have one of the classic "political speech" structures:
The boogyman is bad, therefore we must ( spend more on pork | stamp out the muppets | vote for me in '03 | ...or whatever ).
The paragraphs few that do contain statements (e.g. the sunset clause, endowed rights) are incorrect. This sort of blather is not informative, interesting, or insightful.
-- MarkusQ
If something is printed in the New York Times, or broadcast on CNN, it is much more likely to pass without critical evaluation than something that is posted on the web. "I saw it on the web" is almost a synonym for "it may be true; I want to get more data, cross check some facts." To my mind, that is a very valuable for new media in a free society, especially one that intends to stay free.
-- MarkusQ
Install a kernel, run a battery of tests. Find systemic breakers really quickly. It's not hard, it's just a matter of discipline to write the tests. As code is written, write the tests for the code. Any time a bug is found outside the normal test suite, write the test that should have found it. Automatable tests wherever possible...Part of the official build process for releasing the software should be a 100% compliance with the automated tests.
There is a comprehensive testing suite in place for linux; in fact, we just saw it in action. It involves testing the kernel on thousands of boxes simultaneously, running ten of thousands of hours of tests, and getting feedback to the developers within a few hours.
To paraphrase pogo: "We've seen the test suite, and it is us."
Now, this may seem odd or broken, but it has a few charming advantages. First, the costs are distributed amongst those that benefit most, with zero accounting overhead. Second, the response time is very fast. Third (and, IMHO, most importantly) test coverage is maintained by the same laws of statistics that make sure there is air for you each time you take a breath; if usage patterns change, the new usage is included in the tests automatically--even if no one is consciously aware that they are doing "something new" it still gets tested.
-- MarkusQ
I never have any mod points when I need 'em.
-- MarkusQ
-- MarkusQ
I was partial to the 7400 series myself.
-- MarkusQ
So there are two waves. One wiggles up-and-down; the other wiggles left-and-right. They are orthogonal, in that their wiggles are at right angles and thus don't effect each other at all. This mutual othogonality permits them to both pass through the same fiber at the same time, doubling the capacity.
-- MarkusQ
"mutually orthogonal" means (for a set of two or more elements) that each pair of elements is orthogonal--AFAIK, it's a synonym for "pairwise orthogonal". "orthogonal," of course, has lots of synonyms, including "linear independence," "at right angles," "having zero dot-product," "statistically uncorrelated," etc.
So, the three spacial dimensions, the set {phase of the moon, day of the week, time of day}, etc. are all "mutually orthogonal." When talking about a set of only two elements, the "mutually" is superfluous, but not redundant.
-- MarkusQ
They are the same, in theory (in practice the tolerance of your components limits you to only a few digits of accuracy). The basic (and very generic) relationship is:
RW: Some real-world, physical process
OB: An observational model of RW
AN: An analytic model of OB
DI: A digital implementation of AN
AI: An analog implementation of AN, sometimes even based on RW.
The wonder of science is that many RW have the same OB, and many OB have the same AN (in both cases allowing for some paramiterization). While all of these can "implement the same function" they will have very different time/space/energy/cost/etc profiles. Digital, in particular, givers you greater precision and flexibility, but at a rather high cost in speed, size, and energy usage.
Up until faily recently (say, the last twenty to fifty years) the DI's were mostly done by hand. The only reason to do them was to get those extra digits, mostly for designers of the AIs (such as tube amplifiers and anti-aircraft guns) or to produce tables for use "in the field".
-- MarkusQ
IMHO, the optical aspects are a red herring. The real speed advantage comes from going analog, which has always been (and always will be) much faster than digital. This gets rediscovered every few years, and then lost when the harsh limits on analog accuracy become more bothersome at the same time as the speed of digital is creeping upwards.
-- MarkusQ
I have no mod points at present, but this post belongs much higher than (1).
-- MarkusQ
Haven't you heard? God not only uses emacs, he wrote it.
-- MarkusQ
*laugh* I like the way you think.
-- MarkusQ
Maybe he's using bay area apartments for price comparison. If you take the NPV of the cash flow stream, it comes out about right, and I'll bet it's much better per square foot.
-- MarkusQ
I, on the other hand, would pay extra to make sure that everyone knew which silo it was that no longer held an ICBM.
Especially the people who might have loaded silos of their own.
-- MarkusQ
The original point was someone advocating hydrogen peroxide as an alternate to liquid oxygen. It's much safer, but also a little over twice as dense per free oxygen. Sometimes the context gets lost when posts are reparented.
-- MarkusQ
Cute. I strongly agree with what I presume was your point; that anonymity is in fact ubiquitous.
--MarkusQ
-- MarkusQ
We need to remember that programers and lawyers are in essentially the same business--bending complex systems to their will. Just because the programers pull a nifty twist, we shouldn't assume that the lawyers won't have an equally devious "Ah, but I'm not left handed either" response.
-- MarkusQ
Yes.
-- MarkusQ
Gas is a state of matter.
In this case, it is both. Methane, a gas, is being used as a fuel.
-- MarkusQ