Let's imagine our Universe is in fact a human being.
Now imaging you are a microcivilization who came into experience when the human was 4 years old. An entire civilization would wink in and out of existance by the time the Universe's heart beat once. If they tried to observe all of the molecules in the body, they would see a rapidly expanding organism, that seems to have at one time occupied a single point in space.
Despite the illusion, around puberty the Universe would stop growing.
That's an interesting idea. I see a flaw in your analogy though. It's true that a human's growth stops once reaching adulthood, but the adult will eventually die anyway.
Are you saying that the universe won't eventually die, or that its fate cannot be predicted by what we can see of the past?
...though the Church of Latter Day Saints translates the Bible according to Joseph Smith.
That is incorrect. The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter Day Saints uses the King James Version of the Bible in English, and in foreign languages we use a commonly used version of the Bible in that language (such as the Reina Valera in Spanish).
I tell ya what casts doubt on the author is the fact that he says "start with the interface". I mean c'mon. That's not the right way to program...that's just backwards. Your application should perform it's function and the interface should be started later. Starting with the interface causes your application to be "glued" to it and you do in fact have to rewrite it several times that way.
Doing it "backwards" sounds to me like one of the principles of agile methods. Start with user stories. There's nothing like a prototype UI to help you figure them out.
...what will be put into the public domain that anybody actually wants?
There are many works which are not wanted by enough people to justify putting them back into print. However, if they were public domain, the few individuals who do want them would be able to print or otherwise distribute their own copies. The Gutenberg Project and others like it would benefit greatly from something like this.
Unfortunately for you, many people, including the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Federal Circuit, disagree.
Unfortunately, the people who believe that business models should be patentable will find out too late that it was a bad idea.
"Intellectual Property" isn't. Ideas are very different from material goods, and trying to treat them the same is stifling the creativity that has advanced science, technology, and business in the United States up until now.
If YOU want to get new features, YOU have to decide if they are worth the price. End of story.
Actually, that's only half the story. The standard procedure in capitalism is charging what the market will bear. The OP has stated that his market is unwilling the bear that particular cost. If enough users feel the same way he does, Apple will change their prices.
That said, Slashdot isn't the best place to make your voice heard to Apple management.
Saying that Mormons aren't Christian is misleading. Most people use the word "Christian" to mean "believer in Christ". Mormons believe that Jesus Christ is the son of God, the savior of the world.
Christians believe that there is one god (YHWH, the Three-and-yet-One), but Mormons believe in three gods...
That statement is also misleading. The three gods which Mormons believe in are the Father, the Son, and the Holy Ghost.
...and that you and I can become gods if we live a proper Mormon life (e.g. go to church regularly and abstain from narcotics and non-medical drugs, as well as immoral sexual activity).
That's a pretty narrow view of Mormon theology. It's correct as far as it goes, but it focuses on minor issues and ignores major ones. A better way of describing Mormon beliefs would be to say that we understand the following scripture literally:
16. The Spirit itself beareth witness with our spirit, that we are the children of God:
17. And if children, then heirs; heirs of God, and joint-heirs with Christ; if so be that we suffer with him, that we may be also glorified together.
[Romans 8:16-17]
Display: 160x160. More pixels equals more power drain. Palm OS apps will run just fine.
Memory: 32MB. More memory equals more power drain. If you need more the SD slot is available.
Processor: TI ARM. Faster clock speed equals more power drain. XScale does the P4 trick with clock speed anyway.
In other words, they designed this device to have a practical balance between performance and battery life, instead of just pushing for the highest numbers they could cram into it.
It's worth noting that the Power4 does not support AltiVec, or a couple of other things that are specific to G3/G4 processors. As such, it's unlikely(if at all possible) that Apple could use the chip.
The OP mentioned Power4 as a possibility for the Xserve. Since it is intended as a rackmount machine, I wonder if Altivec is a big requirement. Remember that the G3 doesn't have Altivec either.
TTFN
Re:A serious question - i'm not trolling, honest!
on
Twin Prime Proof Erroneous
·
· Score: 2, Informative
I do know that the holy grail is the search for larger primes.
Actually, finding large primes is pretty easy. Taking a large number and finding its prime factors is not. This conjecture/proof doesn't seem to have any immediate bearing on cryptography.
...there is quite a bit of historical evidence that says that prosperity and national success are not harmed by a state religion.
The issue of a state religion has nothing to do with prosperity. It is an issue of freedom. There is no state religion in the US so that all citizens are free to believe as they wish, and act according to those beliefs.
The proper meaning of separation of church and state is that each citizen's values should be shaped by her religion or other moral code, and all citizens should come together to form laws which express a compromise between those values. By placing all religions and belief systems on an equal footing, all citizens are placed on an equal footing as well.
This would be like delivering mail based on city of birth rather than city of residence. Yes, the address could uniquely identify a person, but it would give no information whatsoever about how to go about finding him.
The only way to implement this would be a database roughly the size of DNS that would map portable addresses to current actual adresses. I suppose it's possible, but the cure might be worse than the disease.
The big deal is that it would cause all the religious people to freak out, and they would have to rewrite their religion in a major way.
You're painting with an awfully big brush there. I don't know of many religions where "life only exists on earth" is a major doctrine.
I'm sure there are some people for whom it is a strongly held belief, but for each one of those there are many more who do not have a strong belief either way, and even quite a few for whom the discovery of life on other planets would be a validation of their faith.
May I suggest that you take a class on the religions of the world? I think you would find it an informative experience.
As the amount of data to backup continues to increase, tape won't be able to keep up.
I wonder if anyone has thought of making a tape with either optical or magneto-optical material instead of regular magnetic material. Would there be any fundamental problems with this approach? If it worked, it would have the advantage of a tape's large surface area and an optical drive's data density.
Really, technology not about right and wrong. It's about power.
But the use of power is what right and wrong are all about. If you have no power to do a thing, then whether it's right or wrong doesn't really matter.
It can be argued that technology is morally neutral, but the use of technology cannot be.
You mean like creating links or shortcuts and organising those into folders?
The point is not how files are organized. The point is the user interface to the collection of files. This UI makes it easy to quickly see what files are part of the collection, and manipulate them.
Apple's strength lies in doing well those things that could have been done by anyone but haven't been. For example, anyone could have put lights underneath laptop keyboards. It's just that no one thought to do it until Apple did.
In point of fact, Conquest does not use LRU. Conquest uses a very simple rule- files larger than a threshold are stored on disk, and files smaller than a threshold are stored in RAM.
That doesn't answer the question of what to do when you have more small files than will fit in your RAM. Obviously, if you have infinite RAM you don't need a disk at all, so what is the system's behavior when it runs out? It seems to me that it either uses LRU (or a similar scheme), or its performance degrades to that of a regular file system.
History has shown that Fermat's Conjecture is easy to prove. The problem is that it's very hard to prove correctly. I believe Fermat had a proof similar to the many incorrect proofs we've seen over the years.
And even if they show up some day, that may be interesting to all kinds of folks, but I don't foresee any exciting physics in that either.
I would say there would be a lot of exciting physics in a real visit from real extraterrestrials. Either they have learned to travel faster than light, shorten the distance between stars, suspend the animation of their people, or build a craft that lasts for centuries. Any one of those would be fascinating physics in my opinion.
I think you should lay down a clear TOS. With all the trouble recently, you should make everything transparent from the start.
Exactly true. One of the things that ought to be specified in the TOS is how much traffic for how much money. Don't say unlimited unless you really mean unlimited.
My suggestion would be a base cost which includes a certain amount of traffic allowance (which a typical home user would not exceed) plus a cost per additional megabyte. Having email reminders at certain traffic amounts and a hard cap (specified by the user) would help out those who typically use more than the base amount, but still want to control their bill.
At that point, there is no cooperation from the community--just anonymous publication-- until such time as the recalcitrant company fires (not releases, but fires for nonperformance) its entire management staff, all presidents, vice presidents, financial officers, and legal officers.
I disagree that that is the proper condition for reinstatement of trust. It is important that you allow people to change their behavior. All that should be necessary is for the company to publicly show that they will no longer sue people who honestly investigate flaws in their security. For example, immediately dropping all pending lawsuits of that nature, hosting a conference on security systems of the type they employ, etc.
Slashdot Mirror
Let's imagine our Universe is in fact a human being.
Now imaging you are a microcivilization who came into experience when the human was 4 years old. An entire civilization would wink in and out of existance by the time the Universe's heart beat once. If they tried to observe all of the molecules in the body, they would see a rapidly expanding organism, that seems to have at one time occupied a single point in space.
Despite the illusion, around puberty the Universe would stop growing.
That's an interesting idea. I see a flaw in your analogy though. It's true that a human's growth stops once reaching adulthood, but the adult will eventually die anyway.
Are you saying that the universe won't eventually die, or that its fate cannot be predicted by what we can see of the past?
TTFN
...though the Church of Latter Day Saints translates the Bible according to Joseph Smith.
That is incorrect. The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter Day Saints uses the King James Version of the Bible in English, and in foreign languages we use a commonly used version of the Bible in that language (such as the Reina Valera in Spanish).
TTFN
I tell ya what casts doubt on the author is the fact that he says "start with the interface". I mean c'mon. That's not the right way to program...that's just backwards. Your application should perform it's function and the interface should be started later. Starting with the interface causes your application to be "glued" to it and you do in fact have to rewrite it several times that way.
Doing it "backwards" sounds to me like one of the principles of agile methods. Start with user stories. There's nothing like a prototype UI to help you figure them out.
TTFN
...what will be put into the public domain that anybody actually wants?
There are many works which are not wanted by enough people to justify putting them back into print. However, if they were public domain, the few individuals who do want them would be able to print or otherwise distribute their own copies. The Gutenberg Project and others like it would benefit greatly from something like this.
TTFN
Unfortunately for you, many people, including the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Federal Circuit, disagree.
Unfortunately, the people who believe that business models should be patentable will find out too late that it was a bad idea.
"Intellectual Property" isn't. Ideas are very different from material goods, and trying to treat them the same is stifling the creativity that has advanced science, technology, and business in the United States up until now.
TTFN
If YOU want to get new features, YOU have to decide if they are worth the price. End of story.
Actually, that's only half the story. The standard procedure in capitalism is charging what the market will bear. The OP has stated that his market is unwilling the bear that particular cost. If enough users feel the same way he does, Apple will change their prices.
That said, Slashdot isn't the best place to make your voice heard to Apple management.
TTFN
Saying that Mormons aren't Christian is misleading. Most people use the word "Christian" to mean "believer in Christ". Mormons believe that Jesus Christ is the son of God, the savior of the world.
Christians believe that there is one god (YHWH, the Three-and-yet-One), but Mormons believe in three gods...
That statement is also misleading. The three gods which Mormons believe in are the Father, the Son, and the Holy Ghost.
That's a pretty narrow view of Mormon theology. It's correct as far as it goes, but it focuses on minor issues and ignores major ones. A better way of describing Mormon beliefs would be to say that we understand the following scripture literally:
16. The Spirit itself beareth witness with our spirit, that we are the children of God:
17. And if children, then heirs; heirs of God, and joint-heirs with Christ; if so be that we suffer with him, that we may be also glorified together.
[Romans 8:16-17]
The caveats:
The reasons:
Display: 160x160. More pixels equals more power drain. Palm OS apps will run just fine.
Memory: 32MB. More memory equals more power drain. If you need more the SD slot is available.
Processor: TI ARM. Faster clock speed equals more power drain. XScale does the P4 trick with clock speed anyway.
In other words, they designed this device to have a practical balance between performance and battery life, instead of just pushing for the highest numbers they could cram into it.
TTFN
But where, ultimately, does this research lead?
We shall not cease from exploration
And the end of all our exploring
Will be to arrive where we started
And know the place for the first time.
-- T S Eliot
It's worth noting that the Power4 does not support AltiVec, or a couple of other things that are specific to G3/G4 processors. As such, it's unlikely(if at all possible) that Apple could use the chip.
The OP mentioned Power4 as a possibility for the Xserve. Since it is intended as a rackmount machine, I wonder if Altivec is a big requirement. Remember that the G3 doesn't have Altivec either.
TTFN
I do know that the holy grail is the search for larger primes.
Actually, finding large primes is pretty easy. Taking a large number and finding its prime factors is not. This conjecture/proof doesn't seem to have any immediate bearing on cryptography.
TTFN
...there is quite a bit of historical evidence that says that prosperity and national success are not harmed by a state religion.
The issue of a state religion has nothing to do with prosperity. It is an issue of freedom. There is no state religion in the US so that all citizens are free to believe as they wish, and act according to those beliefs.
The proper meaning of separation of church and state is that each citizen's values should be shaped by her religion or other moral code, and all citizens should come together to form laws which express a compromise between those values. By placing all religions and belief systems on an equal footing, all citizens are placed on an equal footing as well.
TTFN
I suspect that most conspiracy freaks are control freaks in "real life".
:)
If it weren't for the borderline paranoid schizophrenics, our society would be a lot less interesting.
TTFN
...e-mail address portability.
This would be like delivering mail based on city of birth rather than city of residence. Yes, the address could uniquely identify a person, but it would give no information whatsoever about how to go about finding him.
The only way to implement this would be a database roughly the size of DNS that would map portable addresses to current actual adresses. I suppose it's possible, but the cure might be worse than the disease.
TTFN
White exterior, rounded corners, integrated display...
Perhaps they should have named this the ePod?
TTFN
The big deal is that it would cause all the religious people to freak out, and they would have to rewrite their religion in a major way.
You're painting with an awfully big brush there. I don't know of many religions where "life only exists on earth" is a major doctrine.
I'm sure there are some people for whom it is a strongly held belief, but for each one of those there are many more who do not have a strong belief either way, and even quite a few for whom the discovery of life on other planets would be a validation of their faith.
May I suggest that you take a class on the religions of the world? I think you would find it an informative experience.
TTFN
As the amount of data to backup continues to increase, tape won't be able to keep up.
I wonder if anyone has thought of making a tape with either optical or magneto-optical material instead of regular magnetic material. Would there be any fundamental problems with this approach? If it worked, it would have the advantage of a tape's large surface area and an optical drive's data density.
TTFN
Really, technology not about right and wrong. It's about power.
But the use of power is what right and wrong are all about. If you have no power to do a thing, then whether it's right or wrong doesn't really matter.
It can be argued that technology is morally neutral, but the use of technology cannot be.
TTFN
You mean like creating links or shortcuts and organising those into folders?
The point is not how files are organized. The point is the user interface to the collection of files. This UI makes it easy to quickly see what files are part of the collection, and manipulate them.
Apple's strength lies in doing well those things that could have been done by anyone but haven't been. For example, anyone could have put lights underneath laptop keyboards. It's just that no one thought to do it until Apple did.
TTFN
In point of fact, Conquest does not use LRU. Conquest uses a very simple rule- files larger than a threshold are stored on disk, and files smaller than a threshold are stored in RAM.
That doesn't answer the question of what to do when you have more small files than will fit in your RAM. Obviously, if you have infinite RAM you don't need a disk at all, so what is the system's behavior when it runs out? It seems to me that it either uses LRU (or a similar scheme), or its performance degrades to that of a regular file system.
TTFN
Are you calling Fermat a liar?
History has shown that Fermat's Conjecture is easy to prove. The problem is that it's very hard to prove correctly. I believe Fermat had a proof similar to the many incorrect proofs we've seen over the years.
So, yeah.
TTFN
And even if they show up some day, that may be interesting to all kinds of folks, but I don't foresee any exciting physics in that either.
I would say there would be a lot of exciting physics in a real visit from real extraterrestrials. Either they have learned to travel faster than light, shorten the distance between stars, suspend the animation of their people, or build a craft that lasts for centuries. Any one of those would be fascinating physics in my opinion.
TTFN
Reincarnation and Nirvana are of course all as faux as any religion dogmas.
Because you, of course, have a truly remarkable proof which unfortunately this margin is too small to contain?
TTFN
I think you should lay down a clear TOS. With all the trouble recently, you should make everything transparent from the start.
Exactly true. One of the things that ought to be specified in the TOS is how much traffic for how much money. Don't say unlimited unless you really mean unlimited.
My suggestion would be a base cost which includes a certain amount of traffic allowance (which a typical home user would not exceed) plus a cost per additional megabyte. Having email reminders at certain traffic amounts and a hard cap (specified by the user) would help out those who typically use more than the base amount, but still want to control their bill.
TTFN
At that point, there is no cooperation from the community--just anonymous publication-- until such time as the recalcitrant company fires (not releases, but fires for nonperformance) its entire management staff, all presidents, vice presidents, financial officers, and legal officers.
I disagree that that is the proper condition for reinstatement of trust. It is important that you allow people to change their behavior. All that should be necessary is for the company to publicly show that they will no longer sue people who honestly investigate flaws in their security. For example, immediately dropping all pending lawsuits of that nature, hosting a conference on security systems of the type they employ, etc.
TTFN