This is great! The systems worked well up to the point until a fundamental limit, which could not be overcome, hits. The fact that they had overdimensioned it already that the system worked four times longer than planned shows that the right design decisions have been made.
Please do me a favor and read the following:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Interpretation_of_quantum_mechanics#The_Copenhagen_interpretation
As it is said the Copenhagen interpretation is only an interpretation that we see QM systems in the way we see them. There are other approaches and as many people in the field and many who understood parts of Legget's work (and many other great people in the beginning of the 80s) I am not a fan of any theory requiring a wavefunction collapse or a concious observer role.
And contrary to your assumptions superposition of Wavefunctions is NOT specific to the Copenhagen Interpretation, but a generic property of the QM we are using.
And BTW i admire Deutsch, but not for the many-worlds interpretation (which does not qualify as a scientific theory because i can not make tests for it), but for his very solid work on infromation in QC.
THis is a very complex question and it can only be addressed in a broader context. Another, simpler example of technology making people stupid are pocket calculators. When I was in school we were allowed to use non-graphing, plain calculators from grade 10, while nowadays pupils in my home country use any calculator from grade 8. The effect is that calculating fractions, even simple ones, is out of question. I was giving exercises in physics beginners (of other subjects, e.g. biology). It was tremendously hard to perform any symbolic calculation in the excercise. Rearranging a fraction required an extra step. I had to start to introduce cosmetic steps... On the other hand these students knew how theier pocket-calculator calculated variances for them, something which is error-prone. Both skills (manipulating fractions and using your calculator to make complex operations less error-prone) are needed. There is a very fine line between arrogance and wisdom in this case. I for my part just put this under "observation" and i won't interpret it. And unless you are willing to give and hear a detailed answer, dont'ask such questions.
> QC is based on a stupid conjecture (the Copenhagen interpretation of QM) that can never be observed
Excuse me. QC is NOT based on the Copenhagen interpretation. If you dont understand that in a real experiment you have to split the Copenhagen interpreation into two parts.
1) The measurement process, during which you create a 'split' in the space of possivle paths which separates your systems more and more, while introdusing the coupling a way that you replace one of the conjugate variables by your own (i.e. random) information.
2) The Philosophical idea 'if the path are so well separated, do i have many realities (if i 'amplify action' really stronly)?'.
The first question is what matters to physicist, and belive me, it is understood quite well. The second one does not fascinate me. Until we understand simple things perfectly, i wont think about more complicated things....
O wow! how qualified! You know, i may be only 33 but i remember very well what people educated in the 60ties (e.g. Teachers, Engineers) told me when i was a child how transistors could NEVER replace tubes for certain applications (e.g. High power). Yea right. We see that now.....
I work in the QC field, and we will not see any really working quantum computer doing any non-trivial task (i personally dont count dwaves "thermally assisted adiabatic QC" as one) the next 15 Years and after that it may take 30 Years or forever until it gets cheaper to buy QC instead of classical ones for the applications where QC are optimal. And even then it will not be in personal computers. But QC has the potential to replace very big computing systems (e.g. Blue Gene) which use a huge amoung of material and Energy for protein folding by a comparatatively decently sized QC which may take including the infrastructure (condensed matter QC: cooling, vacuum, shielding rooms, rf signal sources, staged amplifiers, crogenic electronics, optical/Atom/ion QC: cooling, lasers, optics, UHV equipment.) something well below 1MW, if you dont need big pumping Lasers more like a few kW, of power and less than 200 square meters (some of them will however need a tailored base of the building to avoid vibrations).
I doubt connecting an entertainment park using an maglev will pay off. In Germany the "Transrapid" had been in planning for decades, but finally only one track was built in China. The problem was that a similar "high visibility" project in Germany was discussed, namely connecting an not-so important (on european scale) Airport (Munich) with Munich Main Station. Finally nobody wanted to carry the costs, especilly not the industry for which this would have been an very expensive advertisement. In Europe there are at least two high-speed trains which are extremly sucessfull: ICE and TGV. The secret of both is that they carried commuters from the first day they where build. It is not completly uncommon to commute over 100km by train in the morning. So the ideal place for a maglev is when two megacities have a distance of 80km-120km and you can connect them. Because then you get commuters, because it makes a difference for them if they need 2 hours commuting per day or one.
There is a clear dependence how valid a test is, on it's difficulty. Make it too hard and you will have bad "resolution" make it too easy and the same will happen. Ideally you PDF (probability distribution function) covers the whole scale of grades AND maps out the interesting level of skills to meaningful values.
So, if the ISPs do traffic shaping "to improve the service" it's bad, but we admit that on the small scale (when it affects ourselfs) there is a real need for traffic shaping! Thats interesting....
I am a experimental physics postdoc. Nearly everybody i know uses Matlab/Octave (theoreticians Mathematica). For simple (not heavy number crunching), matlab/octave is the de-facto way to exchange numerical programs. You get without much trouble results and a plot within a few minutes. And your students will learn what vectorization is, if they use matlab long enough. (if you can write you operation in a vectorized form, you can also do heavy number crunching). The documentation of matlab is excellent, and there are a lot of toolboxes which actually solve detail work (they have their price). You can use instrument control and DAQ toolboxes to control experiments directly. The matlab support is responsive and not arrogant at all (reporting bug is more a "thank you, we'll look at it" experience instead of a "what the fuck are you doing to trigger this bug? dont do it.").
One big problem about matlab is that it spoils the programming style a little bit, but after all, these are physicists. The ones who can not program when they enter university will never learn it fully.
Successful is not necessarily "good"by academic or theoretical means.
Needed things:
1) A application niche, which is not fully occupied yet, where this language brings an unique advantage. E.g. perl (unify shell scripts with sed/awk). E.g Python (lighweight scripting in applications, with suitable syntax for easy (but solid) construction of iterations. Java (Cross-Plattform distribution). etc...
2) Easy to learn. usually this means either orthogonality in the features in the language (python, tcl) or a vast collection of the languages it is going to replace (perl). Usually new languages are accepted and used if they make life in some aspect easier in the very moment.
3) Supported by some larger organization or by an active community. A good head programmer reacting on bugs, feature requests and weigthing them off.
4) Usually: free implementations are needed. Or at least a good students program.
Given this works under real world conditions, it would make it possible that every shop gets the list of faces of criminals or other people which "you dont want" in your shop, recognize them in real time using little investment only and throw them out. Or the possibility to track a person on traffic surveillance cameras. That is pretty freaky. Politicians, please make laws which restrict such databases. I don't like the idea of beiing escorted out of the shopping mall because of my credit rating. Or that some idiot at the pollice marks me as suspect because of my moving patterns (which can be easily saved for a long time). Imagine that he can select you and then track you more or less in real time.
If surveillance is to cheap it becomes a problem....
The article on Wikinews pretty much corresponds to the 'news' on conservapedia some days ago about the same trial. While the topic would be extremely interesting, because as a matter of fact i see the issue with the image, i would be more interested in comptetent lawyers speakting than christian fundamentalists giving other christian fundamentalists the opportunity to speak (quite unbalanced) and calling this news. I lived a large part of my life in Germany, and since Americans were among the group influencing out constitution, and due to the extremely bad experience Germany made with state-based censorship, it is lucckily forbidden and we have a strong free speech (for which i am, as for the freedom of Europe, very thankful to the USA). To be more precisely, censorship is forbidden with the exceptions of child pornography, denial of the holocaust and usage of nazi symbols. And, to point it out one more time 'censorship' only applies to censorship fron the state. Nobody can force a newspaper to print an article, and this should apply to Wikinews
If an Administrator decides an article is to be deleted - well, that wikipedia. If you dont want you articles to be deleted, post them somewhere else. The really ineresting question is: how long would a article in the opposite case have lasted on conservapedia? I gueass not very long. The cases of biased censorship there are the worst i have ever seen (virtually any controversial article is locked down, for some of them even the talk page). And doesnt the outcry about the liberal decay of values on wikipedia come from a direction who proposed to censor scientific journals? So why should wikipeadia allow that people whos daily business is to flame on wikipedia for being 'liberal' to publish 'news' (of similar bad quality as the rest of conservapedia) on their own server? Why should a decently minded admin leave such a crappy article, which remains on topic (the lawsuit) for a few sentences and then turns over to general mud-throwing on the website? Actually i would have really been interested in how such these things are seen in the USA, the home of free speach. - and not just by people belivieng that they are better Americans than 'the liberals', but by layers from bith sides an maybe a competent judge.
BTW: While i disapprove the Album cover, it is a fact that you can find it in record stores. So reporting about htat means to report on a fact. If you need a image for that-this is a question which should be settled by a general policy in Wikipedia.
So wait... you are saying for something which is used by a significant part of the worlds population every day it still takes 12years until it exceeds something, which is mainly used by a few percent of the inhabitants industrialized, rich countries (http://www.transtats.bts.gov/, 660Mio Pass/Year are less than 2Mio/day -> like one percent flys each day).
Yea, thats a funny comparison i should say. it's like calculating when China will overall consume more drinking water than the US.....
Dont take this things in your hands. If you have to ask Slashdot to determine wether to break into the accounts or not, then you are not the right person to do the job. You obviously have no experience in forensics (not computers) or investigations. And obviously it's neither your profession nor have you been involved with suicide cases regularly. There is no way you can handle this, get the right conclusion, stay within the correct legal procedures and not get hurt emotionally at the same time.
Ask yourself: let's say you break into one of the accounts, the bring the evidence to court/the insurance etc. i can tell you, if you did it, it's most likely not to be used as evidence any more. Let's say you find it out. Are you trained in handling relatives? Let's say you find it out but don't want to tell it to the relatives? Do you know how to handle that? What about you? are you emotionally firm enough to really search for something like this?
used journaling filesystem, at least i think that this is not likely. Most new installations come with ext3 as default since several years now and i personnaly dind never feel any urge to change the default in this case. The promised performance gain was so small for my applications that there was no justification to prefer some file-system which did not make it into the kernel for a long time (for antisocial behaviour of the main person), which had later a lack of backward-compatibility (and known not-adressed issues in v4 handled with the same antisocial attitude) over ext2/ext3. The toolsa for the latter never lost a single file on the system i was using and you can mount your ext3 disk on any linux kernel.
The only reason Reiserfs was used was because it was the first free Journaling OS, so for some time there was no other option for people which were keen on this feature.
It depends very strongly on each persons style how he or she performs mathematics. I have met some people who are extremely good in developing a certain technique until the point when it makes a new abstraction possible. And then other people may use these tools and maybe can do some discovery. It'like in physics (the subject i have a PhD in): for sure it need a lot of "invention" to build an Atomic Force Microscope. To invest these "invention" is a matter of intuition, even if the process itself is very technical. When the AFM is working "discoveries" can be made. Some of them rqeuire more intution, some less. Some are expected before the AFM is build, others not. Non-Scientists, and some scientists, too, would put the expected discoveries into the "invention" class. However, from a scientific viewpoint the results have the same quality as the unexpected ones. In math it's the same. There are very constructive tehings, like exploring finite fields. In the poor framework of the original question asked, this would be something like an invention. However, sometime things like Fermats conjecture appear out of nothing. The really interesting question is: finally a combination of highly developed abstract methods and mathematical intuition very far beyond my personal horizon did the proof.
So was this a result of discovery or an invention? I would say it doesnt matter to me!
I found the experiences with kaffe not so bad. I agree, there are issues, but overall if you write a program (exclude GUI) to handle some data, it will most likely work with all implementations.
and at that time Java was every bit as proprietary as VB and other close dead-end languages. No. The documentation of the VM was available, so you could program your own. See kaffe, see gcj etc.
You could develop and run java progeam without Sun's machine and be compatible with it. I can't say that this is true for VB.
be communicated. It will communicate itself. Societies which dont stick to that process will go down in history. We live in a globalized world, and should i feel (i am a scientist) that I would be asked funny questions about articles i collaborate on, i would leave - actually the ignorance sometimes expressed towards scientists in the US is a bias not to go there. I accept if somebody asks me "what do you think are the consequences of your work?", but in the moment somebody says to me, "Gott wuerfelt nicht" (quoting Einstein: translated to "God doesn't roll a dice"), so why are you busy with quantum mechanics? I would just say good bye. As a physicist i have the priviledge to be rather far away from such religious questions, because right now last century physics is a big success. Everybody has a device with billions of switching elements based on modern physics in his pocket most of the time. So more intelligent people would not deny that physics, which is needed for to the most complex system working on earth (the internet), is not something which you should deny one second later, when discussing climate change etc. But as i said, evolution of societies will settle this thing.... (E.g. seen the brain-drain in Russia right now)
My real reason: lazyness. Nothing changes very much, if you dont like. During the times while i was essentially doing my productive work with a nearly unchanged desktop configuration, windows users had to change OS 4 times completely. MS changed menu configurations, introduced senseless feature, made their own products incompatible with themself (Im remember funny effects when loading coduments containing Formulas into Word 97). Everytime i administrate a windows machine (now Vista) i am stunned that one can be so stupid and make new icons for the configuration panel each 4 years. My configuration was unchanged over 6 Personal computers at home and at work, and on the Solaris workstations. Networking also did not change very much. It always "just worked".
The second reason is a very simple one: Installing a system with everything you need (and more) takes 30 Minutes. And there are no license Issues. There is some expensive software i love to use (e.g Matlab, Mathematica), but i find that the "license" issue and "making myself to a slave by writing code for a sytem only sold by one company" shifts my feeling each year more and more to free variants. Mathematica i do not use any more when it is not needed for that reason, and in matlab i try to be compatible to octave. Since i do that, i am considerably more happy, even if i still use matlab (but i can now run anything on any lab computer, if graphical output does not have to be so fanvy).
Actually, i have to admit that i sometimes change something. in 1999 i switched to pine and in 2005 i switched to evolution. I consider the second switch was a mistake. i also switched after using ctwm from 1995 to 2003 to gnome (or icewm for my Thinkpad X24 which i bought used). I dont regret that change. And i think i dont care which UNIX os i am working on, so maybe i'll also change that sometimes again.
-Smartphone xyz has a touchscreen, similar to the iphone, and the animations are even nicer. -web based product abc is better than google efg. You can select more fonts. -[Notebook from notable series] is nearly as thin as the apple air -[free office suite x] can read [some standard] better than open office etc.
General scheme: [alternative product well known to everybody interested] has [arbitrary unsuprising advantage withing the "version flucuation" in some feature] since [last patchday/last version] over [well known, overhyped popular product], when measured by [some arbitrary method or by looking at it].
Because more and more techniques are crammed into different subsystems without isolation from others and without the computer having any model of itself. What i mean is: let's dictinct "broken by design" and "implementation bugs". About the first one we cant do much on a short timescale, because a new design (e.g. mandatory encryption/authentication) requires user education (how to distribute keys) about bugs ii can only say: wireless network driver are doing things which are not driver-like (e.g. WPA). If we could isolate the "high entropy exchange" WPA part completely from the comparatatively straighforward hardware access and let the higher layer run in userspace, we would have won a lot. But as long as every hardware vendor is focused on getting the own hardware to the market quickly they will continue to pack crappy drivers.
1) can overcome real difficulties (Something which overcomes the design principle that everything should be "downwards compatible" to be transported over web servers/proxies/http or funny extensions/hacks of these, overcomes a real problem).
Slashdot Mirror
This is great! The systems worked well up to the point until a fundamental limit, which could not be overcome, hits. The fact that they had overdimensioned it already that the system worked four times longer than planned shows that the right design decisions have been made.
Please do me a favor and read the following: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Interpretation_of_quantum_mechanics#The_Copenhagen_interpretation As it is said the Copenhagen interpretation is only an interpretation that we see QM systems in the way we see them. There are other approaches and as many people in the field and many who understood parts of Legget's work (and many other great people in the beginning of the 80s) I am not a fan of any theory requiring a wavefunction collapse or a concious observer role. And contrary to your assumptions superposition of Wavefunctions is NOT specific to the Copenhagen Interpretation, but a generic property of the QM we are using. And BTW i admire Deutsch, but not for the many-worlds interpretation (which does not qualify as a scientific theory because i can not make tests for it), but for his very solid work on infromation in QC.
THis is a very complex question and it can only be addressed in a broader context. Another, simpler example of technology making people stupid are pocket calculators. When I was in school we were allowed to use non-graphing, plain calculators from grade 10, while nowadays pupils in my home country use any calculator from grade 8. The effect is that calculating fractions, even simple ones, is out of question. I was giving exercises in physics beginners (of other subjects, e.g. biology). It was tremendously hard to perform any symbolic calculation in the excercise. Rearranging a fraction required an extra step. I had to start to introduce cosmetic steps... On the other hand these students knew how theier pocket-calculator calculated variances for them, something which is error-prone. Both skills (manipulating fractions and using your calculator to make complex operations less error-prone) are needed. There is a very fine line between arrogance and wisdom in this case. I for my part just put this under "observation" and i won't interpret it. And unless you are willing to give and hear a detailed answer, dont'ask such questions.
> QC is based on a stupid conjecture (the Copenhagen interpretation of QM) that can never be observed
Excuse me. QC is NOT based on the Copenhagen interpretation. If you dont understand that in a real experiment you have to split the Copenhagen interpreation into two parts. 1) The measurement process, during which you create a 'split' in the space of possivle paths which separates your systems more and more, while introdusing the coupling a way that you replace one of the conjugate variables by your own (i.e. random) information. 2) The Philosophical idea 'if the path are so well separated, do i have many realities (if i 'amplify action' really stronly)?'. The first question is what matters to physicist, and belive me, it is understood quite well. The second one does not fascinate me. Until we understand simple things perfectly, i wont think about more complicated things....
O wow! how qualified! You know, i may be only 33 but i remember very well what people educated in the 60ties (e.g. Teachers, Engineers) told me when i was a child how transistors could NEVER replace tubes for certain applications (e.g. High power). Yea right. We see that now..... I work in the QC field, and we will not see any really working quantum computer doing any non-trivial task (i personally dont count dwaves "thermally assisted adiabatic QC" as one) the next 15 Years and after that it may take 30 Years or forever until it gets cheaper to buy QC instead of classical ones for the applications where QC are optimal. And even then it will not be in personal computers. But QC has the potential to replace very big computing systems (e.g. Blue Gene) which use a huge amoung of material and Energy for protein folding by a comparatatively decently sized QC which may take including the infrastructure (condensed matter QC: cooling, vacuum, shielding rooms, rf signal sources, staged amplifiers, crogenic electronics, optical/Atom/ion QC: cooling, lasers, optics, UHV equipment.) something well below 1MW, if you dont need big pumping Lasers more like a few kW, of power and less than 200 square meters (some of them will however need a tailored base of the building to avoid vibrations).
I doubt connecting an entertainment park using an maglev will pay off. In Germany the "Transrapid" had been in planning for decades, but finally only one track was built in China. The problem was that a similar "high visibility" project in Germany was discussed, namely connecting an not-so important (on european scale) Airport (Munich) with Munich Main Station. Finally nobody wanted to carry the costs, especilly not the industry for which this would have been an very expensive advertisement. In Europe there are at least two high-speed trains which are extremly sucessfull: ICE and TGV. The secret of both is that they carried commuters from the first day they where build. It is not completly uncommon to commute over 100km by train in the morning. So the ideal place for a maglev is when two megacities have a distance of 80km-120km and you can connect them. Because then you get commuters, because it makes a difference for them if they need 2 hours commuting per day or one.
There is a clear dependence how valid a test is, on it's difficulty. Make it too hard and you will have bad "resolution" make it too easy and the same will happen. Ideally you PDF (probability distribution function) covers the whole scale of grades AND maps out the interesting level of skills to meaningful values.
I really read "mouse brain hits the store". Would be more interesting....
So, if the ISPs do traffic shaping "to improve the service" it's bad, but we admit that on the small scale (when it affects ourselfs) there is a real need for traffic shaping! Thats interesting....
I am a experimental physics postdoc. Nearly everybody i know uses Matlab/Octave (theoreticians Mathematica). For simple (not heavy number crunching), matlab/octave is the de-facto way to exchange numerical programs. You get without much trouble results and a plot within a few minutes. And your students will learn what vectorization is, if they use matlab long enough. (if you can write you operation in a vectorized form, you can also do heavy number crunching). The documentation of matlab is excellent, and there are a lot of toolboxes which actually solve detail work (they have their price). You can use instrument control and DAQ toolboxes to control experiments directly. The matlab support is responsive and not arrogant at all (reporting bug is more a "thank you, we'll look at it" experience instead of a "what the fuck are you doing to trigger this bug? dont do it."). One big problem about matlab is that it spoils the programming style a little bit, but after all, these are physicists. The ones who can not program when they enter university will never learn it fully.
Successful is not necessarily "good"by academic or theoretical means. Needed things:
1) A application niche, which is not fully occupied yet, where this language brings an unique advantage. E.g. perl (unify shell scripts with sed/awk). E.g Python (lighweight scripting in applications, with suitable syntax for easy (but solid) construction of iterations. Java (Cross-Plattform distribution). etc...
2) Easy to learn. usually this means either orthogonality in the features in the language (python, tcl) or a vast collection of the languages it is going to replace (perl). Usually new languages are accepted and used if they make life in some aspect easier in the very moment.
3) Supported by some larger organization or by an active community. A good head programmer reacting on bugs, feature requests and weigthing them off.
4) Usually: free implementations are needed. Or at least a good students program.
Given this works under real world conditions, it would make it possible that every shop gets the list of faces of criminals or other people which "you dont want" in your shop, recognize them in real time using little investment only and throw them out. Or the possibility to track a person on traffic surveillance cameras. That is pretty freaky. Politicians, please make laws which restrict such databases. I don't like the idea of beiing escorted out of the shopping mall because of my credit rating. Or that some idiot at the pollice marks me as suspect because of my moving patterns (which can be easily saved for a long time). Imagine that he can select you and then track you more or less in real time.
If surveillance is to cheap it becomes a problem....
The article on Wikinews pretty much corresponds to the 'news' on conservapedia some days ago about the same trial. While the topic would be extremely interesting, because as a matter of fact i see the issue with the image, i would be more interested in comptetent lawyers speakting than christian fundamentalists giving other christian fundamentalists the opportunity to speak (quite unbalanced) and calling this news. I lived a large part of my life in Germany, and since Americans were among the group influencing out constitution, and due to the extremely bad experience Germany made with state-based censorship, it is lucckily forbidden and we have a strong free speech (for which i am, as for the freedom of Europe, very thankful to the USA). To be more precisely, censorship is forbidden with the exceptions of child pornography, denial of the holocaust and usage of nazi symbols. And, to point it out one more time 'censorship' only applies to censorship fron the state. Nobody can force a newspaper to print an article, and this should apply to Wikinews
If an Administrator decides an article is to be deleted - well, that wikipedia. If you dont want you articles to be deleted, post them somewhere else. The really ineresting question is: how long would a article in the opposite case have lasted on conservapedia? I gueass not very long. The cases of biased censorship there are the worst i have ever seen (virtually any controversial article is locked down, for some of them even the talk page). And doesnt the outcry about the liberal decay of values on wikipedia come from a direction who proposed to censor scientific journals? So why should wikipeadia allow that people whos daily business is to flame on wikipedia for being 'liberal' to publish 'news' (of similar bad quality as the rest of conservapedia) on their own server? Why should a decently minded admin leave such a crappy article, which remains on topic (the lawsuit) for a few sentences and then turns over to general mud-throwing on the website? Actually i would have really been interested in how such these things are seen in the USA, the home of free speach. - and not just by people belivieng that they are better Americans than 'the liberals', but by layers from bith sides an maybe a competent judge.
BTW: While i disapprove the Album cover, it is a fact that you can find it in record stores. So reporting about htat means to report on a fact. If you need a image for that-this is a question which should be settled by a general policy in Wikipedia.
Ubuntu is ok already, but parts of my experience are still somewhat inconsistent.
So wait... you are saying for something which is used by a significant part of the worlds population every day it still takes 12years until it exceeds something, which is mainly used by a few percent of the inhabitants industrialized, rich countries (http://www.transtats.bts.gov/, 660Mio Pass/Year are less than 2Mio/day -> like one percent flys each day).
Yea, thats a funny comparison i should say. it's like calculating when China will overall consume more drinking water than the US.....
Dont take this things in your hands. If you have to ask Slashdot to determine wether to break into the accounts or not, then you are not the right person to do the job. You obviously have no experience in forensics (not computers) or investigations. And obviously it's neither your profession nor have you been involved with suicide cases regularly. There is no way you can handle this, get the right conclusion, stay within the correct legal procedures and not get hurt emotionally at the same time.
Ask yourself: let's say you break into one of the accounts, the bring the evidence to court/the insurance etc. i can tell you, if you did it, it's most likely not to be used as evidence any more. Let's say you find it out. Are you trained in handling relatives? Let's say you find it out but don't want to tell it to the relatives? Do you know how to handle that? What about you? are you emotionally firm enough to really search for something like this?
used journaling filesystem, at least i think that this is not likely. Most new installations come with ext3 as default since several years now and i personnaly dind never feel any urge to change the default in this case. The promised performance gain was so small for my applications that there was no justification to prefer some file-system which did not make it into the kernel for a long time (for antisocial behaviour of the main person), which had later a lack of backward-compatibility (and known not-adressed issues in v4 handled with the same antisocial attitude) over ext2/ext3. The toolsa for the latter never lost a single file on the system i was using and you can mount your ext3 disk on any linux kernel.
The only reason Reiserfs was used was because it was the first free Journaling OS, so for some time there was no other option for people which were keen on this feature.
It depends very strongly on each persons style how he or she performs mathematics. I have met some people who are extremely good in developing a certain technique until the point when it makes a new abstraction possible. And then other people may use these tools and maybe can do some discovery. It'like in physics (the subject i have a PhD in): for sure it need a lot of "invention" to build an Atomic Force Microscope. To invest these "invention" is a matter of intuition, even if the process itself is very technical. When the AFM is working "discoveries" can be made. Some of them rqeuire more intution, some less. Some are expected before the AFM is build, others not. Non-Scientists, and some scientists, too, would put the expected discoveries into the "invention" class. However, from a scientific viewpoint the results have the same quality as the unexpected ones. In math it's the same. There are very constructive tehings, like exploring finite fields. In the poor framework of the original question asked, this would be something like an invention. However, sometime things like Fermats conjecture appear out of nothing. The really interesting question is: finally a combination of highly developed abstract methods and mathematical intuition very far beyond my personal horizon did the proof.
So was this a result of discovery or an invention? I would say it doesnt matter to me!
I found the experiences with kaffe not so bad. I agree, there are issues, but overall if you write a program (exclude GUI) to handle some data, it will most likely work with all implementations.
You could develop and run java progeam without Sun's machine and be compatible with it. I can't say that this is true for VB.
be communicated. It will communicate itself. Societies which dont stick to that process will go down in history. We live in a globalized world, and should i feel (i am a scientist) that I would be asked funny questions about articles i collaborate on, i would leave - actually the ignorance sometimes expressed towards scientists in the US is a bias not to go there. I accept if somebody asks me "what do you think are the consequences of your work?", but in the moment somebody says to me, "Gott wuerfelt nicht" (quoting Einstein: translated to "God doesn't roll a dice"), so why are you busy with quantum mechanics? I would just say good bye. As a physicist i have the priviledge to be rather far away from such religious questions, because right now last century physics is a big success. Everybody has a device with billions of switching elements based on modern physics in his pocket most of the time. So more intelligent people would not deny that physics, which is needed for to the most complex system working on earth (the internet), is not something which you should deny one second later, when discussing climate change etc. But as i said, evolution of societies will settle this thing.... (E.g. seen the brain-drain in Russia right now)
My real reason: lazyness. Nothing changes very much, if you dont like. During the times while i was essentially doing my productive work with a nearly unchanged desktop configuration, windows users had to change OS 4 times completely. MS changed menu configurations, introduced senseless feature, made their own products incompatible with themself (Im remember funny effects when loading coduments containing Formulas into Word 97). Everytime i administrate a windows machine (now Vista) i am stunned that one can be so stupid and make new icons for the configuration panel each 4 years. My configuration was unchanged over 6 Personal computers at home and at work, and on the Solaris workstations. Networking also did not change very much. It always "just worked".
The second reason is a very simple one: Installing a system with everything you need (and more) takes 30 Minutes. And there are no license Issues. There is some expensive software i love to use (e.g Matlab, Mathematica), but i find that the "license" issue and "making myself to a slave by writing code for a sytem only sold by one company" shifts my feeling each year more and more to free variants. Mathematica i do not use any more when it is not needed for that reason, and in matlab i try to be compatible to octave. Since i do that, i am considerably more happy, even if i still use matlab (but i can now run anything on any lab computer, if graphical output does not have to be so fanvy).
Actually, i have to admit that i sometimes change something. in 1999 i switched to pine and in 2005 i switched to evolution. I consider the second switch was a mistake. i also switched after using ctwm from 1995 to 2003 to gnome (or icewm for my Thinkpad X24 which i bought used). I dont regret that change. And i think i dont care which UNIX os i am working on, so maybe i'll also change that sometimes again.
Yes. Me too. similar discussions:
-Smartphone xyz has a touchscreen, similar to the iphone, and the animations are even nicer.
-web based product abc is better than google efg. You can select more fonts.
-[Notebook from notable series] is nearly as thin as the apple air
-[free office suite x] can read [some standard] better than open office
etc.
General scheme:
[alternative product well known to everybody interested] has [arbitrary unsuprising advantage withing the "version flucuation" in some feature] since [last patchday/last version] over [well known, overhyped popular product], when measured by [some arbitrary method or by looking at it].
Because more and more techniques are crammed into different subsystems without isolation from others and without the computer having any model of itself. What i mean is: let's dictinct "broken by design" and "implementation bugs". About the first one we cant do much on a short timescale, because a new design (e.g. mandatory encryption/authentication) requires user education (how to distribute keys) about bugs ii can only say: wireless network driver are doing things which are not driver-like (e.g. WPA). If we could isolate the "high entropy exchange" WPA part completely from the comparatatively straighforward hardware access and let the higher layer run in userspace, we would have won a lot. But as long as every hardware vendor is focused on getting the own hardware to the market quickly they will continue to pack crappy drivers.
Especially anything that
1) can overcome real difficulties (Something which overcomes the design principle that everything should be "downwards compatible" to be transported over web servers/proxies/http or funny extensions/hacks of these, overcomes a real problem).
2) Is supported by google
has chances to be a big thing.