There's plenty of extant work showing how an irrational radix works, though I wouldn't say most of it is terribly serious. Probably the most often cited example is phinary.
Admittedly, phinary does have the advantage that non-negative integers all have a terminating exact representation in it, which base-pi does not. But this thread isn't about suitability; it's about possibility. And base-pi is certainly possible.
In fact, *every* integer is irrational!
This statement is wrong in more than one way. First, representation does not determine whether a number is irrational. Presumably what you mean is "no integers have terminating representations [in base pi]".
But that statement is trivially incorrect. In base-pi, zero is "0". Zero is an integer.
More interestingly, pi**0 is one, so in base-pi, one is "1". And since pi < 3, two is "2" and three is "3". So all the integers in [-3,3] in fact have terminating base-pi representations.
In base pi, the string "120.3" means (in decimal) pi**2 + 2pi + 0 + 3pi**-1, or about 17.11 decimal. It works just like any other radix. So you have that 1's digit, which you use for integers greater than 0 and less than the radix.
[Why doesn't Slashdot support decent HTML markup like , and entities such as π? Or LaTeX math, or KaTeX, or MathML, or something? What a pile of crap.]
Certainly the concept of "open source" has been around for many decades; at the very latest it emerged as the complement to IBM's shift to proprietary, binary-only software offerings in the "unbundling" phase after the Consent Decree. As I recall, when I was working at IBM in Cambridge, MA, not long after RMS formed the FSF and began promoting his version of "free as in the way I think it should be" software, there was much discussion of other provided-as-source-with-liberal-license models for software. (Obviously there was a ton of open-source software available at the time, distributed through various means such as UUCP, FTP, and Usenet posts.)
A quick Google Ngram search shows the phrase "open source" (often hyphenated) was definitely in use prior to 1997, though mostly in the intelligence community to refer to sources of information.
GN is less clear on the phrase "open source software", partly because GN does not handle serial publications well.
In any case, while the participants in the 1998 Netscape Summit made much noise about their supposed coinage of "open source" (see e.g. ESR's page about it on catb.org), we already had a number of terms for the phenomenon, even if they were not always accurate ("public domain software") or disputed ("free software"); and the term "open" was widely in use in the industry for specifications and the like - for example with X/Open (formerly Open Group) and Open Software Foundation, both of which originated in the 1980s.
Claiming that some sea change happened in 1997/1998 with The Cathedral and the Bazzar, the Netscape Summit, the formation of the OSI, etc is typical Matt Asay historiography: "Hey, the stuff I care about is automatically important!". Those events did serve a rhetorical function, providing a nucleus around which the growing commercial interest in FOSS could organize itself. It's easier to persuade the management when there's a consistent vocabulary and they're hearing the same arguments from several sources. But it wasn't any sort of fundamental change - certainly not as important as, say, IBM's unbundling, or AT&T's or BSD's UNIX releases, or the FSF/GPL, or Linux.
Personally, I've long felt Matt Asay is one of those people who knows a hell of a lot less than he seems to think he does. When he was writing columns for the Register they were rife with error, inaccuracy, myth, and dubious opinion.
Sigh. The D-Wave machine does adiabatic quantum computing (assuming it does anything non-classical at all), which isn't even vaguely related to universal quantum computing. It's just a form of annealing that uses quantum tunneling. There's no superposition of states or anything else useful for BQP algorithms like Shor's or Grover's.
IBM's z is arguably still a CISC architecture. Mostly it does the CISC-ISA-decoded-to-RISC-micro-ops dance, but the execution cores still contain a fairly complicated set of features, such as FPUs for both binary and decimal operands.
Really, though, the RISC-CISC dichotomy no longer makes much sense, which I take to be the force of your point. And while z is still important in business computing, and a cash cow, it's a niche architecture compared to x86 or ARM.
It's not clear to me what you mean by this. I believe DEC filed the first branch-prediction patent, in 1989; that was for the Alpha, which was indeed a RISC CPU (back when the RISC/CISC distinction was still useful). But you seem to be implying that has some relationship to RISC-V, which is far from clear. All but the smallest modern general-purpose CPUs use speculative execution, including branch prediction.
No existing RISC-V designs are susceptible to Spectre. There's nothing in the RISC-V ISA that makes it magically immune to Spectre. If someone implements a RISC-V CPU that has speculative execution and caches, then it's open to Spectre-class attacks, unless specific (expensive) steps are taken to block them.
Some ARM CPUs have Spectre vulnerabilities. Others do not, and the ARM whitepaper on Spectre describes the mitigations they've already designed for the Spectre variants described in the original Spectre paper.
No non-Intel CPUs are susceptible to Meltdown, as far as I've seen; Meltdown is a specific design error, allowing speculative loads across privilege boundaries, while Spectre is a family of issues with speculative execution and side channels.
The renumbering of interstate exit signs by distance (usually from the western or southern border of the state for through roads, from the start for spurs, and from one end or the other for loops) started in the late 1980s, I think. You're correct that not all states have adopted it.
I grew up in Massachusetts and first noted the numbering-by-mileage in the Carolinas, I think. It's now quite common, even for non-interstate limited-access highways in some areas. US 127 in Michigan has mileage-numbered exits, for example.
Wikipedia claims:
Nine states as of June 2008 and the District of Columbia use sequential numbering schemes on at least one highway, although the 2009 edition of the Manual on Uniform Traffic Control Devices (MUTCD) requires these jurisdictions to transition to distance-based numbering.
Of course I haven't bothered to try to verify that.
I've done 2 coast to coast road trips in the past year and don't recall a single highway mileage sign.
They say memory is the first thing to go.
I do a lot of long-distance highway driving. Most or all US interstate highways have mile-marker signs (as well as all the other English-unit signs other posts have mentioned). In dense-traffic areas they sometimes have them for every tenth of a mile. The signs are little vertical rectangles set a few feet above the ground on one side or the other of the roadway.
Now that most interstates label exits by mileage rather than sequentially, the mile markers are quite useful in letting you know how far you are from your exit, if exits themselves are sparse on the section you're driving.
they've only run fiber to a handful of their service areas
Apparently you're hard of reading. I wrote "their service area around Taos". I'll admit "all over" was ambiguous; I meant it in the informal sense ("I've been running all over town").
I'll take a wild guess that most if not all of these are in more densely populated areas.
Your wild guess would be wrong. Thanks for playing!
if you don't worry too much about customer service, network availability, or the other finer points of being an ISP
I have KCTC as an ISP, and they've been just fine - much, much better than CenturyLink, who we had before. But that's irrelevant, because the point is that they've run the fiber and lit it. Other ISPs could do the same.
Bullshit is Michael Powell's stock in trade. He was a lousy FCC chair (the Stupor Bowl "wardrobe malfunction" happened on his watch), and he's a lousy pundit.
His reference to Y2K - which wasn't a disaster because a huge amount of remediation work was done ahead of the deadline - is evidence enough of that. But as many others have pointed out, this entire piece is crap. It's Powell's usual bread (shopping!), circus (social media!), and pandering to traditional Republican constituencies (small-government types in this case).
Kit Carson Telecom has run fiber all over their service area around Taos, New Mexico - much of it rural, and with numerous geographical obstacles (mountains, national forest land, pueblo land). Rural fiber isn't hard at all if you have a good relationship with the incumbent electric utility and the lines are above ground.
Pfft. This is the Internet, where Nikola Tesla is a god whose every idea is a beacon of brilliance, unrealized in a contemporary utopia only due to the machinations of the evil Edison.
why is it that in high school anime the classrooms are always oriented so that the windows are on the left? (From the students' perspective.) From what i understand this is generally the way real classrooms in Japan are...
You know, I'd never noticed this, but now that you mention it - I think all the classrooms I was in when I was in Japan (which, admittedly, were only a handful) had the desks oriented this way, so that the windows were on the students' left.
I do almost all my in-town errands on foot, or on bike when I'm at my other, somewhat more remote house. Regardless of weather (and we get a lot of rain and snow here), because I like to be out and about.
But we still use delivery for pizza, even though the pizza place is half a mile from the house. They transport the pizza in an insulated bag, so it stays hot; it'd cool off significantly even in a 5-minute walk home in cold weather. And carrying a pizza by hand half a mile is awkward, because you have to keep the box horizontal. And I don't mind supporting someone's pizza delivery job. (I'm also a good tipper.)
Why bother? The future is humans wiped out by the next mass extinction event.
I mean, if you're going to take the long-term view, you may as well take it seriously. Plus you know you'll almost certainly be proven right (to some hypothetical outside observer) eventually.
Personally, I'm rooting for the supervolcano team, but the large extraterrestrial object team has some great players too.
Humans are basically worms. We have an alimentary tract.
Humans are basically bags of water.
Humans are basically part of a thin film of organic matter on the planet's surface.
Reducing to a generalization isn't in itself terribly informative. Are you claiming that because monkeys and humans are both primates,[1] processes observed in monkey brains can be presumed to apply in human brains as well? With high probability? Maybe?
Mind you, I'm not saying I necessarily disagree with any of those. But if you want to make a claim, why not make a substantive one, rather than waving vaguely in the direction of phylogenetic relationship?
[1] I'll omit any discussion of the monkey / ape distinction here, because, god, who has the patience for this?
What I am is driven. I have a much higher drive than most people. Obsessive compulsive Disorder doesn't remotely fit.
Yes, GP was making a foolish, reductive, and uninformed diagnosis.
And there are other reasons why someone might be happy working more than 40 hours (or whatever other arbitrary number someone wants to pick) per week. I wouldn't describe myself as "driven", and there are a number of ways I like to spend my time - interacting with my family, reading, walking and riding my bike, etc. But I also enjoy working. Even when I'm on vacation, if I don't do something productive each day, I get restless and discontented.
It doesn't have to be working on my job. I have projects of my own. I do a lot of work on my houses. I help friends with their projects.
But the job's a convenient option, because there are always multiple interesting projects there, and I have a community of coworkers to share them with, and I know the results are useful to someone. I don't feel pressured to put in time at work; I rarely feel pressured by work at all. It's an interesting way to spend my time.
And as for "work/life balance": It's pretty much precisely where I want it.
Maybe that makes me an anomaly too. But I do get tired of hearing J. Random Slashdot Idiot pontificate on how "everyone" has particular needs, and failing to perceive those needs is self-deception or a mental disorder.
As a citizen of the US, I resent this. Our justice system and the "experts" who advise it take many factors into account when determining guilt, such as race and class. It's not just political affiliation.
Slashdot Mirror
There's plenty of extant work showing how an irrational radix works, though I wouldn't say most of it is terribly serious. Probably the most often cited example is phinary.
Admittedly, phinary does have the advantage that non-negative integers all have a terminating exact representation in it, which base-pi does not. But this thread isn't about suitability; it's about possibility. And base-pi is certainly possible.
In fact, *every* integer is irrational!
This statement is wrong in more than one way. First, representation does not determine whether a number is irrational. Presumably what you mean is "no integers have terminating representations [in base pi]".
But that statement is trivially incorrect. In base-pi, zero is "0". Zero is an integer.
More interestingly, pi**0 is one, so in base-pi, one is "1". And since pi < 3, two is "2" and three is "3". So all the integers in [-3,3] in fact have terminating base-pi representations.
In base pi, the string "120.3" means (in decimal) pi**2 + 2pi + 0 + 3pi**-1, or about 17.11 decimal. It works just like any other radix. So you have that 1's digit, which you use for integers greater than 0 and less than the radix.
[Why doesn't Slashdot support decent HTML markup like , and entities such as π? Or LaTeX math, or KaTeX, or MathML, or something? What a pile of crap.]
You could load it in your Maglite and have a nuclear incandescent flashlight. Take that, you LED-flashlight bastards!
Clearly this is the best possible use for a reactor in this form factor.
Still too expensive.
You're unfairly maligning oily cardboard. Domino's wishes they could hit the oily-cardboard bar.
Perhaps Domino's "pizza" will be delivered by autonomous cars in five years. My pizza certainly won't be.
Certainly the concept of "open source" has been around for many decades; at the very latest it emerged as the complement to IBM's shift to proprietary, binary-only software offerings in the "unbundling" phase after the Consent Decree. As I recall, when I was working at IBM in Cambridge, MA, not long after RMS formed the FSF and began promoting his version of "free as in the way I think it should be" software, there was much discussion of other provided-as-source-with-liberal-license models for software. (Obviously there was a ton of open-source software available at the time, distributed through various means such as UUCP, FTP, and Usenet posts.)
A quick Google Ngram search shows the phrase "open source" (often hyphenated) was definitely in use prior to 1997, though mostly in the intelligence community to refer to sources of information.
GN is less clear on the phrase "open source software", partly because GN does not handle serial publications well.
In any case, while the participants in the 1998 Netscape Summit made much noise about their supposed coinage of "open source" (see e.g. ESR's page about it on catb.org), we already had a number of terms for the phenomenon, even if they were not always accurate ("public domain software") or disputed ("free software"); and the term "open" was widely in use in the industry for specifications and the like - for example with X/Open (formerly Open Group) and Open Software Foundation, both of which originated in the 1980s.
Claiming that some sea change happened in 1997/1998 with The Cathedral and the Bazzar, the Netscape Summit, the formation of the OSI, etc is typical Matt Asay historiography: "Hey, the stuff I care about is automatically important!". Those events did serve a rhetorical function, providing a nucleus around which the growing commercial interest in FOSS could organize itself. It's easier to persuade the management when there's a consistent vocabulary and they're hearing the same arguments from several sources. But it wasn't any sort of fundamental change - certainly not as important as, say, IBM's unbundling, or AT&T's or BSD's UNIX releases, or the FSF/GPL, or Linux.
Personally, I've long felt Matt Asay is one of those people who knows a hell of a lot less than he seems to think he does. When he was writing columns for the Register they were rife with error, inaccuracy, myth, and dubious opinion.
Sigh. The D-Wave machine does adiabatic quantum computing (assuming it does anything non-classical at all), which isn't even vaguely related to universal quantum computing. It's just a form of annealing that uses quantum tunneling. There's no superposition of states or anything else useful for BQP algorithms like Shor's or Grover's.
CISC CPUs don't really exist in modern computing
IBM's z is arguably still a CISC architecture. Mostly it does the CISC-ISA-decoded-to-RISC-micro-ops dance, but the execution cores still contain a fairly complicated set of features, such as FPUs for both binary and decimal operands.
Really, though, the RISC-CISC dichotomy no longer makes much sense, which I take to be the force of your point. And while z is still important in business computing, and a cash cow, it's a niche architecture compared to x86 or ARM.
RISC started the concept of Branch Prediction
It's not clear to me what you mean by this. I believe DEC filed the first branch-prediction patent, in 1989; that was for the Alpha, which was indeed a RISC CPU (back when the RISC/CISC distinction was still useful). But you seem to be implying that has some relationship to RISC-V, which is far from clear. All but the smallest modern general-purpose CPUs use speculative execution, including branch prediction.
No existing RISC-V designs are susceptible to Spectre. There's nothing in the RISC-V ISA that makes it magically immune to Spectre. If someone implements a RISC-V CPU that has speculative execution and caches, then it's open to Spectre-class attacks, unless specific (expensive) steps are taken to block them.
Some ARM CPUs have Spectre vulnerabilities. Others do not, and the ARM whitepaper on Spectre describes the mitigations they've already designed for the Spectre variants described in the original Spectre paper.
No non-Intel CPUs are susceptible to Meltdown, as far as I've seen; Meltdown is a specific design error, allowing speculative loads across privilege boundaries, while Spectre is a family of issues with speculative execution and side channels.
The renumbering of interstate exit signs by distance (usually from the western or southern border of the state for through roads, from the start for spurs, and from one end or the other for loops) started in the late 1980s, I think. You're correct that not all states have adopted it.
I grew up in Massachusetts and first noted the numbering-by-mileage in the Carolinas, I think. It's now quite common, even for non-interstate limited-access highways in some areas. US 127 in Michigan has mileage-numbered exits, for example.
Wikipedia claims:
Nine states as of June 2008 and the District of Columbia use sequential numbering schemes on at least one highway, although the 2009 edition of the Manual on Uniform Traffic Control Devices (MUTCD) requires these jurisdictions to transition to distance-based numbering.
Of course I haven't bothered to try to verify that.
I've done 2 coast to coast road trips in the past year and don't recall a single highway mileage sign.
They say memory is the first thing to go.
I do a lot of long-distance highway driving. Most or all US interstate highways have mile-marker signs (as well as all the other English-unit signs other posts have mentioned). In dense-traffic areas they sometimes have them for every tenth of a mile. The signs are little vertical rectangles set a few feet above the ground on one side or the other of the roadway.
Now that most interstates label exits by mileage rather than sequentially, the mile markers are quite useful in letting you know how far you are from your exit, if exits themselves are sparse on the section you're driving.
Kermit? So fancy. I'm posting this via Xmodem.
Dude. Everyone knows space is real, and big. Ergo it's a double.
they've only run fiber to a handful of their service areas
Apparently you're hard of reading. I wrote "their service area around Taos". I'll admit "all over" was ambiguous; I meant it in the informal sense ("I've been running all over town").
I'll take a wild guess that most if not all of these are in more densely populated areas.
Your wild guess would be wrong. Thanks for playing!
if you don't worry too much about customer service, network availability, or the other finer points of being an ISP
I have KCTC as an ISP, and they've been just fine - much, much better than CenturyLink, who we had before. But that's irrelevant, because the point is that they've run the fiber and lit it. Other ISPs could do the same.
Bullshit is Michael Powell's stock in trade. He was a lousy FCC chair (the Stupor Bowl "wardrobe malfunction" happened on his watch), and he's a lousy pundit.
His reference to Y2K - which wasn't a disaster because a huge amount of remediation work was done ahead of the deadline - is evidence enough of that. But as many others have pointed out, this entire piece is crap. It's Powell's usual bread (shopping!), circus (social media!), and pandering to traditional Republican constituencies (small-government types in this case).
Kit Carson Telecom has run fiber all over their service area around Taos, New Mexico - much of it rural, and with numerous geographical obstacles (mountains, national forest land, pueblo land). Rural fiber isn't hard at all if you have a good relationship with the incumbent electric utility and the lines are above ground.
Pfft. This is the Internet, where Nikola Tesla is a god whose every idea is a beacon of brilliance, unrealized in a contemporary utopia only due to the machinations of the evil Edison.
Meanwhile, in the real world...
why is it that in high school anime the classrooms are always oriented so that the windows are on the left? (From the students' perspective.) From what i understand this is generally the way real classrooms in Japan are...
You know, I'd never noticed this, but now that you mention it - I think all the classrooms I was in when I was in Japan (which, admittedly, were only a handful) had the desks oriented this way, so that the windows were on the students' left.
If I had a bitcoin for every time I have to point out "How does one send tulips pseudonymously across the globe to anyone in 10 minutes?...
Coincidentally, I have a bitcoin for every time I've wanted to do that. In fact, I have a million BTC for every time I've wanted to do that.
Perhaps I should add that when I say "pizza", I mean pizza. Not that crap that Domino's sells. I'd pay to have that removed from my home.
I do almost all my in-town errands on foot, or on bike when I'm at my other, somewhat more remote house. Regardless of weather (and we get a lot of rain and snow here), because I like to be out and about.
But we still use delivery for pizza, even though the pizza place is half a mile from the house. They transport the pizza in an insulated bag, so it stays hot; it'd cool off significantly even in a 5-minute walk home in cold weather. And carrying a pizza by hand half a mile is awkward, because you have to keep the box horizontal. And I don't mind supporting someone's pizza delivery job. (I'm also a good tipper.)
In short, the OP should shut the fuck up.
Why bother? The future is humans wiped out by the next mass extinction event.
I mean, if you're going to take the long-term view, you may as well take it seriously. Plus you know you'll almost certainly be proven right (to some hypothetical outside observer) eventually.
Personally, I'm rooting for the supervolcano team, but the large extraterrestrial object team has some great players too.
Humans are basically worms. We have an alimentary tract.
Humans are basically bags of water.
Humans are basically part of a thin film of organic matter on the planet's surface.
Reducing to a generalization isn't in itself terribly informative. Are you claiming that because monkeys and humans are both primates,[1] processes observed in monkey brains can be presumed to apply in human brains as well? With high probability? Maybe?
Mind you, I'm not saying I necessarily disagree with any of those. But if you want to make a claim, why not make a substantive one, rather than waving vaguely in the direction of phylogenetic relationship?
[1] I'll omit any discussion of the monkey / ape distinction here, because, god, who has the patience for this?
What I am is driven. I have a much higher drive than most people. Obsessive compulsive Disorder doesn't remotely fit.
Yes, GP was making a foolish, reductive, and uninformed diagnosis.
And there are other reasons why someone might be happy working more than 40 hours (or whatever other arbitrary number someone wants to pick) per week. I wouldn't describe myself as "driven", and there are a number of ways I like to spend my time - interacting with my family, reading, walking and riding my bike, etc. But I also enjoy working. Even when I'm on vacation, if I don't do something productive each day, I get restless and discontented.
It doesn't have to be working on my job. I have projects of my own. I do a lot of work on my houses. I help friends with their projects.
But the job's a convenient option, because there are always multiple interesting projects there, and I have a community of coworkers to share them with, and I know the results are useful to someone. I don't feel pressured to put in time at work; I rarely feel pressured by work at all. It's an interesting way to spend my time.
And as for "work/life balance": It's pretty much precisely where I want it.
Maybe that makes me an anomaly too. But I do get tired of hearing J. Random Slashdot Idiot pontificate on how "everyone" has particular needs, and failing to perceive those needs is self-deception or a mental disorder.
As a citizen of the US, I resent this. Our justice system and the "experts" who advise it take many factors into account when determining guilt, such as race and class. It's not just political affiliation.