I don't use Windows much, in fact I can't remember the last time I did, probably a few months ago.
At any rate Vista does look somewhat appealing, especially if the Monad command line comes with it. I must say that dictation capable speech recognition out of the box is a Good Thing(TM) and that alone could persuade me to lay down the cash necessary for a box that can run the thing. That said, should the speech system have a Newton like learning curve it could end up being more embarrassing than worthwhile for Microsoft. The rest of the features described though don't seem to be an obvious improvement over Mac OS X, and yes, I know OS X has speech recognition, but you can't use it for dictation.
what i want to know - and what holds me back from moving to an iiMac from my DP g5 1.8 - is
In general there's no reason to do so, the iMac Core Duo should be roughly equivalent in speed to a dual G5 system right now. Having the cores on a single chip gives it a slight advantage but the power dissipation aside the G5 is a very efficient chip and matches up well with the new Intel offerings on a clock for clock basis.
The Intel iMacs are not a Power Mac replacement, and shouldn't be considered as such, they bring roughly Power Mac levels of performance to the iMac and Powerbook lines, but do not surpass it.
More specifically...
1. how they will perform when rendering with Compressor
Probably about the same or even in favor of the G5. Compressor's code is highly dependent on the SIMD (SSE or Altivec) unit and the G5's Altivec unit, or the G4's for that matter is generally considered a better SIMD implementation on a general purpose microprocessor than SSE.
2. how much faster is FCP when hooked up to similar disk packs (like cheap desktop FW400 raids)
Again there will probably be no significant difference between the two platforms, since a the Core Duo is roughly twice as fast as the G5 iMac, but so is a dual G5.
3. Will i still be able to run background processing tasks like Compressor and handbrake yet get good foreground performance so i can email, websurf and get on with life while waiting for those 30-1 hour long tasks, instead of walking away from the machine, lest i get tempted to use it and really slow down the renders.
Multitasking performance is as much a function of the operating system's scheduler as the hardware. Again you would see little difference between the two machines. The G5's ability to hold more memory actually gives it a higher level of potential performance when the memory is maxed out than the iMac.
4. Will Aperture stop sucking performance wise?
Short answer, no. Aperture's performance is largely a function of Core Image which depends on the graphics card and system bus moreso than the CPU.
In general if you need an immediate speed upgrade a quad core G5 with a lot of memory is what you should purchase, otherwise wait for the workstation class Intel machines (MacMac? Following the PowerBook -> MacBook convention)
Exponential decay typically refers to decays of the form e^(a t) where t is the independent variable so r^(-2) is an exponential decay, or to actually read the definition you linked to and exponential decay is:
a. Containing, involving, or expressed as an exponent. (a condition satisfied by r^(-2))
and
b. Expressed in terms of a designated power of e, the base of natural logarithms (which is equivalent since r^x=e^(x ln r))
Several posters have commented on the differences between music and things that are typically traded in exchange markets. I don't thnk most of them are a propos, however the article does not address what
I see as the two largest shortcomings. First a little background, the point of an exchange market is to find the market clearing price, the minimum price at which all sellers can be satisfied. Movements in the price are perceived to correspond to the sellers and buyers changing opinion about what the fair price should be.
Now to the problems, the first is how to establish the initial price. Typically this is done in some sort of IPO process but the point of an IPO is to raise cash for future activities not to fund a return on what has already been done. This problem could be worked around by using a market to fund artists but I'd estimate that would not work any better than the current system of bar bands, demo tapes and talent shows. I cannot imagine a market that can set the price for an existing song based on popularity though. Unless someone can explain why there'd be a rush to buy the song immediately, I'd imagine that everyone would just wait a period, at which point the song would be assumed to have no value its price would drop and everyone can pick it up on the cheap. This is a coordination problem but it should be easy to set up a system that can game the popularity rankings in that fashion. Which leads to the second problem, buyer's remorse. If a song becomes popular and rises in price there'd be natural resentment among those who bought it at an higher price than those who had it before. This isn't a problem for most markets because the goods must actually be exchanged in the transaction. If I buy a stock at a higher price from you, you get cash but now I have the stock that I can sell to someone else at an even higher price. If you just copied the song to sell it to me then you still have the song and now you have my cash and can always undercut me for future sales of the song. Why would any rational person enter such a market? Or why would any rational person think there is a DRM scheme that would prevent buyers from copying the songs?
Special relativity allows me to convert mass into energy so suppose I start with a neutral pion. This can be travelling at a constant velocity when it decays into two photons. Suddenly I have now have no mass and my speed is that of light...and no external forces acted. Ooops!
Atomic decay is governed by a force in this case the electromagnetic, and thus the first law does not apply. However, because Newton defined momentum as Mass*velocity a massless photon can't carry momentum according to Newtonian theory. This is because Newton's definition of momentum was wrong due to his misunderstanding about the nature of light, not because the law was incorrectly stated. When the proper expression for momentum is used, namely the four vector of relativity Newton's second law is consistent.
First that is NOT Newton's second law...The correct law is:
The rate of change of momentum of a body is proportional to the external force applied.
This is only correct if you use the 4-vector definitions for force and momentum and not Newton's. Thus, the law as Newton wrote it is wrong.
I forgot a clause in my original statement, the phrase due to an applied force should follow change in motion. Thanks for the catch. The idea of momentum as a 4 vector only makes sense when motivated by the invariance of the velocity of light with respect to comoving observers. Newton had no reason to believe in that invariance and thus it's unsurprising he came up with a definition of momentum which is only approximately true when velocities do not approach that of light. However as you note when written with a 4 vector for momentum (which leads to the issue of which time to use to express the derivative as I noted earlier) Newton's second law is correct. Like his force law for gravity, his formula for momentum is incorrect due to his ignorance, but the law itself is fine when the correct expression for momentum is used.
first a minor point: relativity is NOT classical physics.
In the sense that relativity is not a quantum theory, and that General Relativity allows for infinite energy densities just like Newtonian physics, relativity is a classical theory. Note that when I got my first degree in physics, using Schrodinger's equation in which potential fields are also treated as fully continuous and thus allow for infinite potentials technique is referred to as semi-classical, since it bears that resemblance to other classical theories. Thus in the sense that any physical theory that allows infinite energy densities to occur is classical, relativity is classical. Or to use another common definition, any non-quantum theory of which both Newtonian physics and relativity are examples, is classical. If you want to draw the classical/nonclassical boundary elsewhere that's your perogative but since in physics the latter definition is most common I doubt you'd find many people who understand you.
One of Newton's most amazing ideas that turned out to be CORRECT was the particle nature of light
Light exhibits self interference which no reasonable definition of the word particle as used in everyday experience allows. Einstein's paper on the photoelectric effect was strong evidence of the quantization of energy of light, and quantized energy is a property of particles as commonly understood, however the reconcilliation of self interference and quantized energy is ultimately what led to quantum theory not relativity. Newton's conception of light as a particle was explicitly the idea of light as little billiard balls which is simply wrong.
Even at everyday energies Newton's laws are only approximatations and are not correct
I have no idea what your every day energy level is, but even if your total energy was 1/100th greater than your rest energy (equivalent to kinetic energy gained from moving at 14% of the speed of light, wh
Newton's Laws are perfectly fine, the first: an object in motion will continue in motion until acted upon by an outside force is perfectly consistent with General (and of course Special) Relativity, although it's very difficult to talk about acceleration in Special Relativity (see Newton's Second Law)
Newton's Second Law: that the change in motion is proportional its change in momentum (which is the product of mass (or inertia) and velocity) is very difficult to state in either General Relativity or Special Relativity. This is because a decision must be made about which observer's concept of time to use to take the time derivative of momentum and this in general the notion of force is avoided in relativity. But it's there usually referred to as the Minkowski Force.
Newton's Third law, Every reaction is met by an equal and opposite reaction is simply conservation of energy and is not violated in any classical theory, of which relativity both General and Special are.
What Newton was wrong about (and it's not really fair to call him wrong since he lacked a theory of electrodynamics and accurate measurements of the speed of light and the fact that it's independent with respect to the motion of observers so it's better to call him ignorant) was instantaneous action at a distance as implied by his theory of gravitation (Special Relativity gets around the instaneous part, General Relativity explains the action at a distance part, but not in a fashion consistent with the best theory of electromagnetic interactions QED) and the nature of light as a particle. Given that like Einstein's annus mirabilis, Newton's major achievements in physics and math were accomplished over the period of a little more than a year before he even finished the equivalent of his undergraduate degree I think we can cut him a little slack. After all, what world changing intellectual feats did you accomplish this summer?
The problem with the idea that Newton was wrong as opposed to under-informed and that Einstein made Newton's theories irrelevant in some fashion is what leads Intelligent Design proponents to claim a similar supercession of Evolution via Natural Selection claiming they are the Einstein's to Darwin's Newton. Since Einstein is more or less the Paul to Newton's Moses (or the Plato to Newton's Socrates although I think that's a poorer analogy) in the sense that he represents a fuller, different yet complementary and compatible ideology, it's ironic that IDers claim to bear the same relationship to Darwin.
There's no confusion, consider the case of an organism with 4 mutations. That means that there is one quadruplet mutation combination being tested, 4 (4 choose 3) triplets being tested, 6 (4 choose 2) pairs and 4 singlets. The key is to remember that all of these combinations are tested in parallel in one individual, and the rest of the possible combinations are being tested in other individuals, also in parallel.
This result is so straightforward that it doesn't really merit much investigation.
You know, I'm as atheistic and completely non-religious as the next slashdotter, but it's attitudes like this that help destroy any hope of rational discourse between the two sides of this argument.
I am a Christian however I have a very different perspective on this than you
Get back to me when mainstream American christians applaud murder in their god's name.
The term mainstream is meaningless in this context. The Taliban never were a majority in Afghanistan and radical Christian conservatives never have been a majority here, but at this moment they are a very influential group. That said, here's a radical Christian who has sympathy for murder in God's name
Seriously, if you're going to compare religious people to the Taliban, you might as well go all the way and compare them to Nazis so we can invoke Godwin's law on your ass..;)
It's never easy to tell when something passes from just a disturbing mania to ouright lunacy. Like you, I generally don't find the activities between current Christian conservatives in the US and the radical theocrats of other nations equivalent, but the parallels are becoming disturbing.
I should have said: "Quantum mechanical effects become significant in the realm of the extremely super small." Likewise: "Einstein's relativity becomes significant in the realm of extremely large values of velocity."
Close but no cigar, BECs (Bose Einstein Condensates), Nonlinear optical systems, and the Stern-Gerlach experiment (which gave evidence for electrons having spin) all occur on scales as large or larger than cell biology. Special relativity depends on velocity but General relativity does not, in fact velocity is a difficult idea to describe in General Relativity and not useful anyway. In full scale General Relativity all you have is spacetime and curvature.
What about: "Look around, and everyone will see that quantum mechanics is not tangible."
I guess the 8 foot tall, 2 ton NMR spectrometer I work on isn't tangible. How about this NMR magnet is it tangible? Of course I guess NMR isn't a quantum phenomenon.
I have not heard about the quantum economic model yet, or social Q.E.D.
Probably because quantum theory refers to a very specific set of axioms which cannot be applied willy nilly. While Darwin's Theory of Evolution likewise refers to a very specific logical framework, the general ideas of competition and selection can be simulated in a variety of other systems hence the proliferation of "Darwinian X" ideas floating around. On the the other hand, quantum statistical phenomena apply only in very specific cases and other than those systems studied by quantum physicists don't appear in economic systems or social interaction networks or other areas in which analogies to Darwinian Evolution can be made. On the other hand, there is a lot of useful work that can be done in applying quantum mechanical ideas to computation.
This sounds very interesting, but is it just simply a strange twist on words?
No
Let me explain: Quantum mechanics takes place in the realm of the extremely super small. Einstein's relativity takes place in the realm of extremely large values of velocity.
No, relativity applies just as accurately to a garden snail as a laser beam and quantum mechanics applies to a neutron star just as much as an electron (in fact in many ways neutron stars can be considered large atomic nuclei). The disconnect between quantum physics and relativity comes from the fact that the former describes reality in terms of wave functions (although practicing physicists use a different, equivalent formulation in terms of fields) and the latter in terms of curvature tensors. Reconciling those points of view is the point of a ToE.
The Theory of Everything. The Holy Grail of physics is to find this super theory that unites relativity, quantum mechanics, electricity and magnetism, gravity, mechanics. Although relativity is used in quantum for calculations, there are some contradictions in reconciling the two theories, thus Einstein's famous quote (during his hunt to reconcile relativity with quantum), "God does not play dice with the universe!"
This is wrong on so many levels I don't know where to begin but I'll try. Neither quantum mechanics nor relativity have any problems describing electromagnetism (now more properly known as the electroweak force), there is no succesful theory of quantum gravity yet, but the creation of one does not require a ToE as far as anyone can tell, although a ToE will necessarily have a quantum theory of gravity as one of its consequences. Einstein's "God does not play dice..." quote was in reference to his belief in (now discredited) hidden variable theories which would attempt to remove some of the probabilistic aspects of quantum mechanics.
Look around, and everyone will see that quantum mechanics is not something that happens around us!
Aagh, my computer just vanished thanks to the impossibility of its existence! Given the physical nature of a quantum well (a system that traps a particle in a particular energy state, typically very small and cold) if I could see one I'd probably have several more pressing problems to address than my misunderstanding of quantum physics.
As you observe the movement of the train, does the Heisenberg uncertainty principle come into play?
Yes, but thanks to the fact that uncertainty in the product of position and momentum only has to be larger than Planck's constant divided by 2*pi and Planck's constant is a very small number in SI units given the relatively large errors in the equipment at hand for observing trains I can safely cross train tracks. Or to put it another way, the de Broglie wavelength of a typical train is so small as to be safely ignored.
This uncertainty principle does not conflict with everyday life chiefly because it only applies to the special case of extremely small and extremely fast particles.
To be precise, only when the de Broglie wavelength approaches the spatial extent of a system do quantum mechanical effects become significant. Similarly, although there is no equivalent to the de Broglie wavelength in relativity, when the energy of an object is smaller than a certain threshhold relativistic effects can be safely ignored.
So this comparison, extension and exercise of extending quantum mechanics to Darwinian proportions appears to me to be more than anything a philosophical exercise.
There are a host of comments to the effect that Quantum Physics is ad hoc a la Ptolemaic epicycles, or that the research described is pseudo-science etc. First of all Quantum Physics is not ad hoc, nor does it have any relationship to Ptolemaic epicycles. It is grounded in well established axioms and which have proved themselves spectacularly successful in describing physical reality up to and including the physics of the semiconductor devices which commenters used to demonstrate their astounding ignorance and pride therein.
The problem modern physicists face is that the mathematics of Quantum Physics does not obviously lend itself to description in terms of everyday experience. Most people do not have every day experience with superpositions of states nor do they navigate their existence using that model which leads to a disconnect between the mathematics of Quantum Physics and "common sense". That doesn't make the math wrong, it merely indicates that we have adapted to living in a world in which quantum effects can be safely ignored, unless one is trying to make 0.6 micron scale transistors for Slashdotters to abuse.
The research in question actually goes a long way to explaining why it's OK to ignore the quantum nature of reality above certain scales. In short, among the states that a large ensemble of subatomic particles, like Buckingham Palace, can be in there are states which are relatively resistant to large perturbations by observation. Fortunately for the occupants of Buckingham Palace those states tend to describe a palace comoving with the Earth's surface in London, England, and not a palace hurtling towards the sun at a significant fraction of the speed of light. This is a brutally oversimplified plain English explanation of the results, which can only be precisely stated mathematically, and thus likely to lead to significant misunderstanding. Ironically, the research goes a long way to explaining why another reader and I can both agree on the form of the letters of this message.
Your sentence illustrates the myth that, in the IT industry, technically superior products will rise to the top.
I think I actually implied otherwise, that there are a host of reasons why products and ideas succeed in the marketplace, technical superiority being only one of them. Time to market, capitalization, flexibility of the developer (often products succeed in markets other than the original target, Java for example) etc. As an example consider Ted Nelson's Xanadu, arguably a superior system to HTML, but except for a very few afficionados, having no users to speak of.
It is good enough only in the micro. There is a statistic which mentions the geometric (maybe even exponential) rate at which we are creating and storing new data. Sure, for your current family album this level of granularity may suffice - but I suspect in the future our family albums will be composed of video, audio, stills, etc. at a magnitude that makes getting 10,000 results impossible to sort through by hand. You'll require more accurate search results and will want to ask more precise questions. The RDBMS is the way to get this
Or better heuristics, getting 10000 results isn't a problem as long as my target is in the first 10-30 results.
the solution for tagging metadata is obviously not a 'solved problem' yet - this is mostly because no one has seriously tried to study it
I beg to disagree, I think most people, on looking at the problem realize how hard it is to solve, and given the existence of competitors like Sherlock, Google, whatever Microsoft implements in Longhorn, the risk of getting no pay off at all, decide that there are other ways to attack the problem, or more profitable avenues of research. I'd refer to Pike's comments vis a vis kernels: there's plenty of research on kernels, but there's little reason for a user to switch kernels since there's not enough of a benefit to the applications they use compared to the pain of switching.
The real question is not if or when we will have this but whether or not companies like Google will implement it correctly the first time or after the technically inferior solutions collapse under their own weight.
Not being on the inside of Google myself I don't know if they think they're running into scaling limits, but outside evidence is that there is no problem. As for correct implementations, it seems to me that applying the query as metadata to search results would solve the problem of metadata generation without requiring a radical breakthrough in AI. It may be less intellectually or technically satisfying, but like a lot of half way solutions, like the Web itself, it can serve as a platform for further development without requiring an earthshattering breakthrough.
I mentioned in another post that SQL products are NOT RDBMS
Ah, a disciple of Date. If we're going to switch vocabularies that's fine. In the wider world DB2, Oracle, SQL Server etc. are synonymous with RDBMS and the terms are used interchangeably. You are of course correct, that technically that's incorrect, but the technical point has largely been ignored by the computer industy, users and developers. I can work with your definition as well.
PageRank is an algorithm of popularity and not an algorithm of relevancy and as such, it really bears little relevance to implementation of relevancy algorithms as we are discussing. Of course, relevancy algorithms could contain page rank as a heuristic. See http://www.google.com/technology/
My fault for being imprecise, PageRank is only part of Google's search algorithm and I used it to refer to the whole. The point about scalability still stands (I'll get to why Oracle et al. are a propos even though they aren't RDBMSes in a bit).
In order for you to create a document (in the New World Order there really is no such thing as a web page any more) about Atlantic Slave Trade, you would have to have some sort of schema that defines it (by definition, it would require one).
I think this is a case of worse is better. The New World Order may never be imposed because ignorant neophytes have gone and ran with HTML in directions the high priests never intended. Lacking any armies with which to enforce compliance it's an open question whether the high priests will ever be able to control the chaos again. Technically superior solutions (and I actually agree with you here in the beauty of a real RMBS as opposed to what's marketed as such) may have aesthetic superiority, but just as real RDBMSes will never replace Oracle, DB2 etc. until either the replacement cost is 0 or there is some orders of magnitude greater functionality not available in other systems, so those waiting for the NWO may still be waiting on their dying day.
How does Google know that "my trip" refers to the trip that you took from 01-OCT-1995 to 20-OCT-1995 with three friends? What about the content of the pictures?
It doesn't, and it doesn't have to. The query, my name Versailles pictures is probably good enough to find those pictures (and 10000 unrelated items, but the one I'm interested in is easily identifiable). And there's the problem with replacing Google: it's good enough for so many tasks that a replacement would have to be orders of magnitude better to displace it. As for when the pictures were taken, or what their contents are, I get that information the same way I get it now, from the file metadata, assuming it's correct. On the other hand, every photo organization program available (iPhoto etc.) allows the user to add all kinds of meta data to search for content. And guess what? Most user's don't, because the last thing you want to do after taking 200 pictures on a trip is spend 2 days typing captions for all of them. People still identify pictures they way they did with old fashioned photo albums: by context, comparing them with pictures of similar scenes or with time information (clothing style, etc.) to fill in details that may have been forgotten. This is easy enough for human intelligence to do, and so far beyond current AI ability, that I don't see any application improving on this model any time soon, although at some point someone may.
Finally, there is no requirement for a 'formal language' - when you do a Google search do you have to specify a formal language? That is a matter of implementation
But there are no implementations that don't have some form of formality involved. The problem is I (and the vast majority of people) have many bytes of free form text that Google indexes just fine. Simple Vector Quantization (I use a Mac) works fine for searching for documents locally on my machine, and my guess is that Google's algorithms are some form of vector quantiza
Although computationally expensive in terms of complication PageRank is trivial in comparison to RDBMS algorithms. For empirical support, consider Google's ability to scale, and the ease with which competitors arise (eg. Teoma) versus the exotic hardware and endless upgrade cycles Oracle et al. require as RDBs grow. The difficulties of RDBMS competitors to match features, especially in the open software world (Postgres, MySQL etc.) sould be another indication that RDBMSes fail criteria 1 and 3 you propose
As for semantics. If I search for Caribbean Islands on Google, I'm presented with thousands of pages, ranging from travel agents to essays on history. I can refine the search based on my needs; for example to pages on the Atlantic slave trade. In an RDBMS on the other hand, if there's no section of the schema that corresponds to the slave trade, then I'm not going to find any information about it at all. The schema of an RDB defines its semantics, and when the semantics are clear and limited, a parts list for example, that's fine, but there are a lot of queries that simply cannot be answered in such a rigid format. To be fair, there are plenty of queries; such as what exhausts fit my car, that are most efficiently answered with data stored in a RDB format.
Finally, as for information loss, if I post a webpage about my trip to Versailles plus pictures, then information has not been lost. A search will now not only turn up pages on the history of the palace but people can see what the rooms actually look like on my page without my having had to state in any formal language that I had the information. That kind of flexibility is simply impossible with current RDBs and if AI ever gets that flexible my guess is that the result would look a lot more like the WWW than a DB.
The phrase "structure is meaningless; search is king" is a non-sequitur to someone aware of data management fundamentals. Structure gives meaning which in turn allows you to relate the data to others.
Or the form of the query in combination with a semantically agnostic indexing scheme (ie. PageRank but there are others) gives structure to the results which the user uses to give meaning to the data.
Most people with mono monitors installed Hercules clone cards, which were the same 720x350 but they permitted you to do 4 shades of [green|amber|white] monochrome graphics in 720x350 resolution. This was in fact greater than the video resolution of the Macintosh (512x384)
The Macintosh of 1984 (and today) was a completely integrated system. While it would have been possible to build a mouse for a circa 1984 IBM PC, or to equip it with superior graphics capabilities, or to implement a WIMP interface, none of these things had been done, and given the Mac's miniscule market share (peaked at somewhere between 10 and 15% in the late 80s early 90s) it was not at all obvious that the cost of those developments on a PC would be worth the returns. It's not so much what Microsoft did as when they did it that helps explain their success.
The IBM Enhanced Graphics Adapter (EGA) however, was 640x350 in 16 colors, with a 64 color palette. While this might seem anemic by today's standards
But who could afford it? Business machines were primarily monochrome or CGA at the time EGA came out. The relatively miniscule home market of the time did drive graphics adoption forwards as games started to take advantage of the new graphics, but it was far from common for a IBM-compatible PC to have top of the line graphics, or even color capability until the 90s.
He makes the argument that because Apple was 10 years ahead they couldn't have licensed their stuff and taken the places of MS. I make the argument that because they were 10 years ahead they were in the prime position to take the lead.
No he doesn't, he says that what Apple made in 1984 couldn't be done on then current PC hardware so the OS was worthless without the hardware. As for licensing the hardware, remember that the hot technology stocks of the mid-80's were DEC, Tandem, Wang etc. Any of those companies, had it chosen to, could have bought Apple 10 times over, then bought Microsoft for dessert. Apple would have lasted a nanosecond as an independent company in a world of Macintosh clones in 1984, any major technology player of the time could have simply undercut Apple's prices and used their cash horde to gain market share at a loss. Then pick of the empty husk that was left of Apple if they felt benevolent. That is of course, if any major technology company had felt the market the Macintosh opened was worth the trouble, which was not at all clear at the time.
Bottom line, had Apple wanted to license the OS, there WAS a market for it.
RTFA, the point isn't whether there was a market for a licensed Mac OS (Oh sure, Apple pays for R&D and marketing then you undercut them on price, that worked great for IBM versus Compaq). The point is whether Apple would be gushing money like Paris Hilton on a shopping spree, a la Microsoft, if they did. And as Apple's experience with the Mac clones bore out it was more like gushing blood after your heart's been ripped out of your chest.
Yes it is. You probably mean market share is not equal to installed base which is all units ever sold. Apple's installed base is probably larger than its current market share since Macs had a higher market share in the past and the growth rate of unit sales for personal computers slowed in late 90s.
Re:The future sucks, it always does
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Why do I get the feeling that if SF writers were in charge of the industrial revolution we'd still all be dairy farmers?
Because you are likely only exposed to a very small segment of SF literature that is dystopic. Furthermore you regard all dystopic SF as Luddite.
Why does the future always suck,
In regards to SF, that's patently untrue. Heinlein, Brin, Asimov, Clarke, Rodenberry etc. are all utopianists, as are the gaggle of writer's churning out novels in the Star Trek franchise.
why is that the natural consequence of progress along any dimension?
That's an assumption on your part
Why do they embrace defeat?
Who's defeated? If you control one of the mega-corporations that are common in these types of dystopic stories you're doing very well in the world. In fact in such stories mega-corporations tend to subsume national governments so corporate executives even restrained by something as inconvenient as a constitution.
the cure is always either free love or fascism isn't it?
Huh?
That's why I like PK Dick so much. No happy endings, we all die alone tortured by our paranoias.
Dick died alone and tortured by his paranoias. His daughters survived to become a very profitable media enterprise. This is not meant to relect negatively on his daughters.
The same way you become a great athlete, or a great musician, or even a great investor; practice.
There is of course an absolute limit to what you will be able to accomplish that's beyond your control, at 6' tall no matter what I do I will never be able to be a more valuable basketball player than Tim Duncan, no matter what I've always got to deal with the extra 12" of height (and probably more in reach) that he has. But that doesn't mean a 6' tall person can't become a great basketball player; Allen Iverson, Isaiah Thomas, Calvin Murphy etc. all show that it's possible.
Similarly if you want to become a great hacker, then hack away. Devise projects and complete them. In time you'll find it becomes easier. Education helps too. And there may be some things you can never be good at. If you lack good spatial orientation skills the finer points of computer graphics may escape you, but that won't prevent you from being perhaps the next great writer of file systems, compilers, DBMSes etc.
And how appealing is it to pick up your dust bunny covered keyboard that your kid spilled Sprite on last week to type an email while squinting across the living room at your TV?
There's a reason few people put non-portable PCs in the living room, and given Apple's famous reputation for designing products for ease of use, I think the practical difficulties of using a computer in the living room is one reason they haven't suggested putting your iMac there, Bluetooth keyboard or not. That's one reason why Airport Express is a stealth killer app. Now you can type your emails in your home office, where it's appropriate, and you can listen yo your iTunes collection in the living room, where it's appropriate. The next pieces are a faster wireless network so you can reliably transmit video, a Universal Remote, and a video jack on Airport Express v2.0 so you can use your Mac as a video server too. The killer strategy is not to put the computer in the living room (after all back in the day of the Vic20 and TI99 the computer already was in the living room), but to use it as your home server and have access to its functions as appropriate, where appropriate. Apple's design genius is not in making things look sleek (if so Sony would be eating Dell's lunch) but in making them as functional as they are pretty.
The theory taught in business school is that a mature industry can support at most 3 organizations and usually only support 2. The problem being that the terms industry and mature are rarely well defined, but this is an editorial, not a case study or even journalism. Therefore liberties are taken with respect to intellectual rigor.
Denumerable and rational are not synonymous. Denumerability is a property of sets, rationality is a property of numbers. To make denumerability applicable to number then, one considers whether a program exists that can generate an arbitrary digit of that number, which is true for pi. If such a program exists, then because the set of all programs is denumerable we can say that the number is denumerable. There is no program of finite size which can compute an arbitrary digit of Chaitin's constant, therefore Chaitin's constant is not denumberable.
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I don't use Windows much, in fact I can't remember the last time I did, probably a few months ago.
At any rate Vista does look somewhat appealing, especially if the Monad command line comes with it. I must say that dictation capable speech recognition out of the box is a Good Thing(TM) and that alone could persuade me to lay down the cash necessary for a box that can run the thing. That said, should the speech system have a Newton like learning curve it could end up being more embarrassing than worthwhile for Microsoft. The rest of the features described though don't seem to be an obvious improvement over Mac OS X, and yes, I know OS X has speech recognition, but you can't use it for dictation.
what i want to know - and what holds me back from moving to an iiMac from my DP g5 1.8 - is
In general there's no reason to do so, the iMac Core Duo should be roughly equivalent in speed to a dual G5 system right now. Having the cores on a single chip gives it a slight advantage but the power dissipation aside the G5 is a very efficient chip and matches up well with the new Intel offerings on a clock for clock basis.
The Intel iMacs are not a Power Mac replacement, and shouldn't be considered as such, they bring roughly Power Mac levels of performance to the iMac and Powerbook lines, but do not surpass it.
More specifically...
1. how they will perform when rendering with Compressor
Probably about the same or even in favor of the G5. Compressor's code is highly dependent on the SIMD (SSE or Altivec) unit and the G5's Altivec unit, or the G4's for that matter is generally considered a better SIMD implementation on a general purpose microprocessor than SSE.
2. how much faster is FCP when hooked up to similar disk packs (like cheap desktop FW400 raids)
Again there will probably be no significant difference between the two platforms, since a the Core Duo is roughly twice as fast as the G5 iMac, but so is a dual G5.
3. Will i still be able to run background processing tasks like Compressor and handbrake yet get good foreground performance so i can email, websurf and get on with life while waiting for those 30-1 hour long tasks, instead of walking away from the machine, lest i get tempted to use it and really slow down the renders.
Multitasking performance is as much a function of the operating system's scheduler as the hardware. Again you would see little difference between the two machines. The G5's ability to hold more memory actually gives it a higher level of potential performance when the memory is maxed out than the iMac.
4. Will Aperture stop sucking performance wise?
Short answer, no. Aperture's performance is largely a function of Core Image which depends on the graphics card and system bus moreso than the CPU.
In general if you need an immediate speed upgrade a quad core G5 with a lot of memory is what you should purchase, otherwise wait for the workstation class Intel machines (MacMac? Following the PowerBook -> MacBook convention)
r^(-2) = e^(-2 ln r)
Exponential decay typically refers to decays of the form e^(a t) where t is the independent variable so r^(-2) is an exponential decay, or to actually read the definition you linked to and exponential decay is:
a. Containing, involving, or expressed as an exponent. (a condition satisfied by r^(-2))
and
b. Expressed in terms of a designated power of e, the base of natural logarithms (which is equivalent since r^x=e^(x ln r))
I see as the two largest shortcomings. First a little background, the point of an exchange market is to find the market clearing price, the minimum price at which all sellers can be satisfied. Movements in the price are perceived to correspond to the sellers and buyers changing opinion about what the fair price should be.
Now to the problems, the first is how to establish the initial price. Typically this is done in some sort of IPO process but the point of an IPO is to raise cash for future activities not to fund a return on what has already been done. This problem could be worked around by using a market to fund artists but I'd estimate that would not work any better than the current system of bar bands, demo tapes and talent shows. I cannot imagine a market that can set the price for an existing song based on popularity though. Unless someone can explain why there'd be a rush to buy the song immediately, I'd imagine that everyone would just wait a period, at which point the song would be assumed to have no value its price would drop and everyone can pick it up on the cheap. This is a coordination problem but it should be easy to set up a system that can game the popularity rankings in that fashion. Which leads to the second problem, buyer's remorse. If a song becomes popular and rises in price there'd be natural resentment among those who bought it at an higher price than those who had it before. This isn't a problem for most markets because the goods must actually be exchanged in the transaction. If I buy a stock at a higher price from you, you get cash but now I have the stock that I can sell to someone else at an even higher price. If you just copied the song to sell it to me then you still have the song and now you have my cash and can always undercut me for future sales of the song. Why would any rational person enter such a market? Or why would any rational person think there is a DRM scheme that would prevent buyers from copying the songs?
Special relativity allows me to convert mass into energy so suppose I start with a neutral pion. This can be travelling at a constant velocity when it decays into two photons. Suddenly I have now have no mass and my speed is that of light...and no external forces acted. Ooops!
Atomic decay is governed by a force in this case the electromagnetic, and thus the first law does not apply. However, because Newton defined momentum as Mass*velocity a massless photon can't carry momentum according to Newtonian theory. This is because Newton's definition of momentum was wrong due to his misunderstanding about the nature of light, not because the law was incorrectly stated. When the proper expression for momentum is used, namely the four vector of relativity Newton's second law is consistent.
First that is NOT Newton's second law...The correct law is:
The rate of change of momentum of a body is proportional to the external force applied.
This is only correct if you use the 4-vector definitions for force and momentum and not Newton's. Thus, the law as Newton wrote it is wrong.
I forgot a clause in my original statement, the phrase due to an applied force should follow change in motion. Thanks for the catch. The idea of momentum as a 4 vector only makes sense when motivated by the invariance of the velocity of light with respect to comoving observers. Newton had no reason to believe in that invariance and thus it's unsurprising he came up with a definition of momentum which is only approximately true when velocities do not approach that of light. However as you note when written with a 4 vector for momentum (which leads to the issue of which time to use to express the derivative as I noted earlier) Newton's second law is correct. Like his force law for gravity, his formula for momentum is incorrect due to his ignorance, but the law itself is fine when the correct expression for momentum is used.
first a minor point: relativity is NOT classical physics.
In the sense that relativity is not a quantum theory, and that General Relativity allows for infinite energy densities just like Newtonian physics, relativity is a classical theory. Note that when I got my first degree in physics, using Schrodinger's equation in which potential fields are also treated as fully continuous and thus allow for infinite potentials technique is referred to as semi-classical, since it bears that resemblance to other classical theories. Thus in the sense that any physical theory that allows infinite energy densities to occur is classical, relativity is classical. Or to use another common definition, any non-quantum theory of which both Newtonian physics and relativity are examples, is classical. If you want to draw the classical/nonclassical boundary elsewhere that's your perogative but since in physics the latter definition is most common I doubt you'd find many people who understand you.
One of Newton's most amazing ideas that turned out to be CORRECT was the particle nature of light
Light exhibits self interference which no reasonable definition of the word particle as used in everyday experience allows. Einstein's paper on the photoelectric effect was strong evidence of the quantization of energy of light, and quantized energy is a property of particles as commonly understood, however the reconcilliation of self interference and quantized energy is ultimately what led to quantum theory not relativity. Newton's conception of light as a particle was explicitly the idea of light as little billiard balls which is simply wrong.
Even at everyday energies Newton's laws are only approximatations and are not correct
I have no idea what your every day energy level is, but even if your total energy was 1/100th greater than your rest energy (equivalent to kinetic energy gained from moving at 14% of the speed of light, wh
Newton's _laws_ were and still are wrongly named.
Newton's Laws are perfectly fine, the first: an object in motion will continue in motion until acted upon by an outside force is perfectly consistent with General (and of course Special) Relativity, although it's very difficult to talk about acceleration in Special Relativity (see Newton's Second Law)
Newton's Second Law: that the change in motion is proportional its change in momentum (which is the product of mass (or inertia) and velocity) is very difficult to state in either General Relativity or Special Relativity. This is because a decision must be made about which observer's concept of time to use to take the time derivative of momentum and this in general the notion of force is avoided in relativity. But it's there usually referred to as the Minkowski Force.
Newton's Third law, Every reaction is met by an equal and opposite reaction is simply conservation of energy and is not violated in any classical theory, of which relativity both General and Special are.
What Newton was wrong about (and it's not really fair to call him wrong since he lacked a theory of electrodynamics and accurate measurements of the speed of light and the fact that it's independent with respect to the motion of observers so it's better to call him ignorant) was instantaneous action at a distance as implied by his theory of gravitation (Special Relativity gets around the instaneous part, General Relativity explains the action at a distance part, but not in a fashion consistent with the best theory of electromagnetic interactions QED) and the nature of light as a particle. Given that like Einstein's annus mirabilis, Newton's major achievements in physics and math were accomplished over the period of a little more than a year before he even finished the equivalent of his undergraduate degree I think we can cut him a little slack. After all, what world changing intellectual feats did you accomplish this summer?
The problem with the idea that Newton was wrong as opposed to under-informed and that Einstein made Newton's theories irrelevant in some fashion is what leads Intelligent Design proponents to claim a similar supercession of Evolution via Natural Selection claiming they are the Einstein's to Darwin's Newton. Since Einstein is more or less the Paul to Newton's Moses (or the Plato to Newton's Socrates although I think that's a poorer analogy) in the sense that he represents a fuller, different yet complementary and compatible ideology, it's ironic that IDers claim to bear the same relationship to Darwin.
There's no confusion, consider the case of an organism with 4 mutations. That means that there is one quadruplet mutation combination being tested, 4 (4 choose 3) triplets being tested, 6 (4 choose 2) pairs and 4 singlets. The key is to remember that all of these combinations are tested in parallel in one individual, and the rest of the possible combinations are being tested in other individuals, also in parallel.
This result is so straightforward that it doesn't really merit much investigation.
You know, I'm as atheistic and completely non-religious as the next slashdotter, but it's attitudes like this that help destroy any hope of rational discourse between the two sides of this argument.
I am a Christian however I have a very different perspective on this than you
Get back to me when mainstream American christians applaud murder in their god's name.
The term mainstream is meaningless in this context. The Taliban never were a majority in Afghanistan and radical Christian conservatives never have been a majority here, but at this moment they are a very influential group. That said, here's a radical Christian who has sympathy for murder in God's name
Seriously, if you're going to compare religious people to the Taliban, you might as well go all the way and compare them to Nazis so we can invoke Godwin's law on your ass.. ;)
It's never easy to tell when something passes from just a disturbing mania to ouright lunacy. Like you, I generally don't find the activities between current Christian conservatives in the US and the radical theocrats of other nations equivalent, but the parallels are becoming disturbing.
I should have said: "Quantum mechanical effects become significant in the realm of the extremely super small." Likewise: "Einstein's relativity becomes significant in the realm of extremely large values of velocity."
Close but no cigar, BECs (Bose Einstein Condensates), Nonlinear optical systems, and the Stern-Gerlach experiment (which gave evidence for electrons having spin) all occur on scales as large or larger than cell biology. Special relativity depends on velocity but General relativity does not, in fact velocity is a difficult idea to describe in General Relativity and not useful anyway. In full scale General Relativity all you have is spacetime and curvature.
What about: "Look around, and everyone will see that quantum mechanics is not tangible."
I guess the 8 foot tall, 2 ton NMR spectrometer I work on isn't tangible. How about this NMR magnet is it tangible? Of course I guess NMR isn't a quantum phenomenon.
I have not heard about the quantum economic model yet, or social Q.E.D.
Probably because quantum theory refers to a very specific set of axioms which cannot be applied willy nilly. While Darwin's Theory of Evolution likewise refers to a very specific logical framework, the general ideas of competition and selection can be simulated in a variety of other systems hence the proliferation of "Darwinian X" ideas floating around. On the the other hand, quantum statistical phenomena apply only in very specific cases and other than those systems studied by quantum physicists don't appear in economic systems or social interaction networks or other areas in which analogies to Darwinian Evolution can be made. On the other hand, there is a lot of useful work that can be done in applying quantum mechanical ideas to computation.
This sounds very interesting, but is it just simply a strange twist on words?
No
Let me explain: Quantum mechanics takes place in the realm of the extremely super small. Einstein's relativity takes place in the realm of extremely large values of velocity.
No, relativity applies just as accurately to a garden snail as a laser beam and quantum mechanics applies to a neutron star just as much as an electron (in fact in many ways neutron stars can be considered large atomic nuclei). The disconnect between quantum physics and relativity comes from the fact that the former describes reality in terms of wave functions (although practicing physicists use a different, equivalent formulation in terms of fields) and the latter in terms of curvature tensors. Reconciling those points of view is the point of a ToE.
The Theory of Everything. The Holy Grail of physics is to find this super theory that unites relativity, quantum mechanics, electricity and magnetism, gravity, mechanics. Although relativity is used in quantum for calculations, there are some contradictions in reconciling the two theories, thus Einstein's famous quote (during his hunt to reconcile relativity with quantum), "God does not play dice with the universe!"
This is wrong on so many levels I don't know where to begin but I'll try. Neither quantum mechanics nor relativity have any problems describing electromagnetism (now more properly known as the electroweak force), there is no succesful theory of quantum gravity yet, but the creation of one does not require a ToE as far as anyone can tell, although a ToE will necessarily have a quantum theory of gravity as one of its consequences. Einstein's "God does not play dice..." quote was in reference to his belief in (now discredited) hidden variable theories which would attempt to remove some of the probabilistic aspects of quantum mechanics.
Look around, and everyone will see that quantum mechanics is not something that happens around us!
Aagh, my computer just vanished thanks to the impossibility of its existence! Given the physical nature of a quantum well (a system that traps a particle in a particular energy state, typically very small and cold) if I could see one I'd probably have several more pressing problems to address than my misunderstanding of quantum physics.
As you observe the movement of the train, does the Heisenberg uncertainty principle come into play?
Yes, but thanks to the fact that uncertainty in the product of position and momentum only has to be larger than Planck's constant divided by 2*pi and Planck's constant is a very small number in SI units given the relatively large errors in the equipment at hand for observing trains I can safely cross train tracks. Or to put it another way, the de Broglie wavelength of a typical train is so small as to be safely ignored.
This uncertainty principle does not conflict with everyday life chiefly because it only applies to the special case of extremely small and extremely fast particles.
To be precise, only when the de Broglie wavelength approaches the spatial extent of a system do quantum mechanical effects become significant. Similarly, although there is no equivalent to the de Broglie wavelength in relativity, when the energy of an object is smaller than a certain threshhold relativistic effects can be safely ignored.
So this comparison, extension and exercise of extending quantum mechanics to Darwinian proportions appears to me to be more than anything a philosophical exercise.
What's a Darwinian proportion?
There are a host of comments to the effect that Quantum Physics is ad hoc a la Ptolemaic epicycles, or that the research described is pseudo-science etc. First of all Quantum Physics is not ad hoc, nor does it have any relationship to Ptolemaic epicycles. It is grounded in well established axioms and which have proved themselves spectacularly successful in describing physical reality up to and including the physics of the semiconductor devices which commenters used to demonstrate their astounding ignorance and pride therein.
The problem modern physicists face is that the mathematics of Quantum Physics does not obviously lend itself to description in terms of everyday experience. Most people do not have every day experience with superpositions of states nor do they navigate their existence using that model which leads to a disconnect between the mathematics of Quantum Physics and "common sense". That doesn't make the math wrong, it merely indicates that we have adapted to living in a world in which quantum effects can be safely ignored, unless one is trying to make 0.6 micron scale transistors for Slashdotters to abuse.
The research in question actually goes a long way to explaining why it's OK to ignore the quantum nature of reality above certain scales. In short, among the states that a large ensemble of subatomic particles, like Buckingham Palace, can be in there are states which are relatively resistant to large perturbations by observation. Fortunately for the occupants of Buckingham Palace those states tend to describe a palace comoving with the Earth's surface in London, England, and not a palace hurtling towards the sun at a significant fraction of the speed of light. This is a brutally oversimplified plain English explanation of the results, which can only be precisely stated mathematically, and thus likely to lead to significant misunderstanding. Ironically, the research goes a long way to explaining why another reader and I can both agree on the form of the letters of this message.
Your sentence illustrates the myth that, in the IT industry, technically superior products will rise to the top.
I think I actually implied otherwise, that there are a host of reasons why products and ideas succeed in the marketplace, technical superiority being only one of them. Time to market, capitalization, flexibility of the developer (often products succeed in markets other than the original target, Java for example) etc. As an example consider Ted Nelson's Xanadu, arguably a superior system to HTML, but except for a very few afficionados, having no users to speak of.
It is good enough only in the micro. There is a statistic which mentions the geometric (maybe even exponential) rate at which we are creating and storing new data. Sure, for your current family album this level of granularity may suffice - but I suspect in the future our family albums will be composed of video, audio, stills, etc. at a magnitude that makes getting 10,000 results impossible to sort through by hand. You'll require more accurate search results and will want to ask more precise questions. The RDBMS is the way to get this
Or better heuristics, getting 10000 results isn't a problem as long as my target is in the first 10-30 results.
the solution for tagging metadata is obviously not a 'solved problem' yet - this is mostly because no one has seriously tried to study it
I beg to disagree, I think most people, on looking at the problem realize how hard it is to solve, and given the existence of competitors like Sherlock, Google, whatever Microsoft implements in Longhorn, the risk of getting no pay off at all, decide that there are other ways to attack the problem, or more profitable avenues of research. I'd refer to Pike's comments vis a vis kernels: there's plenty of research on kernels, but there's little reason for a user to switch kernels since there's not enough of a benefit to the applications they use compared to the pain of switching.
The real question is not if or when we will have this but whether or not companies like Google will implement it correctly the first time or after the technically inferior solutions collapse under their own weight.
Not being on the inside of Google myself I don't know if they think they're running into scaling limits, but outside evidence is that there is no problem. As for correct implementations, it seems to me that applying the query as metadata to search results would solve the problem of metadata generation without requiring a radical breakthrough in AI. It may be less intellectually or technically satisfying, but like a lot of half way solutions, like the Web itself, it can serve as a platform for further development without requiring an earthshattering breakthrough.
I mentioned in another post that SQL products are NOT RDBMS
Ah, a disciple of Date. If we're going to switch vocabularies that's fine. In the wider world DB2, Oracle, SQL Server etc. are synonymous with RDBMS and the terms are used interchangeably. You are of course correct, that technically that's incorrect, but the technical point has largely been ignored by the computer industy, users and developers. I can work with your definition as well.
PageRank is an algorithm of popularity and not an algorithm of relevancy and as such, it really bears little relevance to implementation of relevancy algorithms as we are discussing. Of course, relevancy algorithms could contain page rank as a heuristic. See http://www.google.com/technology/
My fault for being imprecise, PageRank is only part of Google's search algorithm and I used it to refer to the whole. The point about scalability still stands (I'll get to why Oracle et al. are a propos even though they aren't RDBMSes in a bit).
In order for you to create a document (in the New World Order there really is no such thing as a web page any more) about Atlantic Slave Trade, you would have to have some sort of schema that defines it (by definition, it would require one).
I think this is a case of worse is better. The New World Order may never be imposed because ignorant neophytes have gone and ran with HTML in directions the high priests never intended. Lacking any armies with which to enforce compliance it's an open question whether the high priests will ever be able to control the chaos again. Technically superior solutions (and I actually agree with you here in the beauty of a real RMBS as opposed to what's marketed as such) may have aesthetic superiority, but just as real RDBMSes will never replace Oracle, DB2 etc. until either the replacement cost is 0 or there is some orders of magnitude greater functionality not available in other systems, so those waiting for the NWO may still be waiting on their dying day.
How does Google know that "my trip" refers to the trip that you took from 01-OCT-1995 to 20-OCT-1995 with three friends? What about the content of the pictures?
It doesn't, and it doesn't have to. The query, my name Versailles pictures is probably good enough to find those pictures (and 10000 unrelated items, but the one I'm interested in is easily identifiable). And there's the problem with replacing Google: it's good enough for so many tasks that a replacement would have to be orders of magnitude better to displace it. As for when the pictures were taken, or what their contents are, I get that information the same way I get it now, from the file metadata, assuming it's correct. On the other hand, every photo organization program available (iPhoto etc.) allows the user to add all kinds of meta data to search for content. And guess what? Most user's don't, because the last thing you want to do after taking 200 pictures on a trip is spend 2 days typing captions for all of them. People still identify pictures they way they did with old fashioned photo albums: by context, comparing them with pictures of similar scenes or with time information (clothing style, etc.) to fill in details that may have been forgotten. This is easy enough for human intelligence to do, and so far beyond current AI ability, that I don't see any application improving on this model any time soon, although at some point someone may.
Finally, there is no requirement for a 'formal language' - when you do a Google search do you have to specify a formal language? That is a matter of implementation
But there are no implementations that don't have some form of formality involved. The problem is I (and the vast majority of people) have many bytes of free form text that Google indexes just fine. Simple Vector Quantization (I use a Mac) works fine for searching for documents locally on my machine, and my guess is that Google's algorithms are some form of vector quantiza
Although computationally expensive in terms of complication PageRank is trivial in comparison to RDBMS algorithms. For empirical support, consider Google's ability to scale, and the ease with which competitors arise (eg. Teoma) versus the exotic hardware and endless upgrade cycles Oracle et al. require as RDBs grow. The difficulties of RDBMS competitors to match features, especially in the open software world (Postgres, MySQL etc.) sould be another indication that RDBMSes fail criteria 1 and 3 you propose
As for semantics. If I search for Caribbean Islands on Google, I'm presented with thousands of pages, ranging from travel agents to essays on history. I can refine the search based on my needs; for example to pages on the Atlantic slave trade. In an RDBMS on the other hand, if there's no section of the schema that corresponds to the slave trade, then I'm not going to find any information about it at all. The schema of an RDB defines its semantics, and when the semantics are clear and limited, a parts list for example, that's fine, but there are a lot of queries that simply cannot be answered in such a rigid format. To be fair, there are plenty of queries; such as what exhausts fit my car, that are most efficiently answered with data stored in a RDB format.
Finally, as for information loss, if I post a webpage about my trip to Versailles plus pictures, then information has not been lost. A search will now not only turn up pages on the history of the palace but people can see what the rooms actually look like on my page without my having had to state in any formal language that I had the information. That kind of flexibility is simply impossible with current RDBs and if AI ever gets that flexible my guess is that the result would look a lot more like the WWW than a DB.
The phrase "structure is meaningless; search is king" is a non-sequitur to someone aware of data management fundamentals. Structure gives meaning which in turn allows you to relate the data to others.
Or the form of the query in combination with a semantically agnostic indexing scheme (ie. PageRank but there are others) gives structure to the results which the user uses to give meaning to the data.
Most people with mono monitors installed Hercules clone cards, which were the same 720x350 but they permitted you to do 4 shades of [green|amber|white] monochrome graphics in 720x350 resolution. This was in fact greater than the video resolution of the Macintosh (512x384)
The Macintosh of 1984 (and today) was a completely integrated system. While it would have been possible to build a mouse for a circa 1984 IBM PC, or to equip it with superior graphics capabilities, or to implement a WIMP interface, none of these things had been done, and given the Mac's miniscule market share (peaked at somewhere between 10 and 15% in the late 80s early 90s) it was not at all obvious that the cost of those developments on a PC would be worth the returns. It's not so much what Microsoft did as when they did it that helps explain their success.
The IBM Enhanced Graphics Adapter (EGA) however, was 640x350 in 16 colors, with a 64 color palette. While this might seem anemic by today's standards
But who could afford it? Business machines were primarily monochrome or CGA at the time EGA came out. The relatively miniscule home market of the time did drive graphics adoption forwards as games started to take advantage of the new graphics, but it was far from common for a IBM-compatible PC to have top of the line graphics, or even color capability until the 90s.
He makes the argument that because Apple was 10 years ahead they couldn't have licensed their stuff and taken the places of MS. I make the argument that because they were 10 years ahead they were in the prime position to take the lead.
No he doesn't, he says that what Apple made in 1984 couldn't be done on then current PC hardware so the OS was worthless without the hardware. As for licensing the hardware, remember that the hot technology stocks of the mid-80's were DEC, Tandem, Wang etc. Any of those companies, had it chosen to, could have bought Apple 10 times over, then bought Microsoft for dessert. Apple would have lasted a nanosecond as an independent company in a world of Macintosh clones in 1984, any major technology player of the time could have simply undercut Apple's prices and used their cash horde to gain market share at a loss. Then pick of the empty husk that was left of Apple if they felt benevolent. That is of course, if any major technology company had felt the market the Macintosh opened was worth the trouble, which was not at all clear at the time.
Bottom line, had Apple wanted to license the OS, there WAS a market for it.
RTFA, the point isn't whether there was a market for a licensed Mac OS (Oh sure, Apple pays for R&D and marketing then you undercut them on price, that worked great for IBM versus Compaq). The point is whether Apple would be gushing money like Paris Hilton on a shopping spree, a la Microsoft, if they did. And as Apple's experience with the Mac clones bore out it was more like gushing blood after your heart's been ripped out of your chest.
Yes it is. You probably mean market share is not equal to installed base which is all units ever sold. Apple's installed base is probably larger than its current market share since Macs had a higher market share in the past and the growth rate of unit sales for personal computers slowed in late 90s.
Why do I get the feeling that if SF writers were in charge of the industrial revolution we'd still all be dairy farmers?
Because you are likely only exposed to a very small segment of SF literature that is dystopic. Furthermore you regard all dystopic SF as Luddite.
Why does the future always suck,
In regards to SF, that's patently untrue. Heinlein, Brin, Asimov, Clarke, Rodenberry etc. are all utopianists, as are the gaggle of writer's churning out novels in the Star Trek franchise.
why is that the natural consequence of progress along any dimension?
That's an assumption on your part
Why do they embrace defeat?
Who's defeated? If you control one of the mega-corporations that are common in these types of dystopic stories you're doing very well in the world. In fact in such stories mega-corporations tend to subsume national governments so corporate executives even restrained by something as inconvenient as a constitution.
the cure is always either free love or fascism isn't it?
Huh?
That's why I like PK Dick so much. No happy endings, we all die alone tortured by our paranoias.
Dick died alone and tortured by his paranoias. His daughters survived to become a very profitable media enterprise. This is not meant to relect negatively on his daughters.
The same way you become a great athlete, or a great musician, or even a great investor; practice.
There is of course an absolute limit to what you will be able to accomplish that's beyond your control, at 6' tall no matter what I do I will never be able to be a more valuable basketball player than Tim Duncan, no matter what I've always got to deal with the extra 12" of height (and probably more in reach) that he has. But that doesn't mean a 6' tall person can't become a great basketball player; Allen Iverson, Isaiah Thomas, Calvin Murphy etc. all show that it's possible.
Similarly if you want to become a great hacker, then hack away. Devise projects and complete them. In time you'll find it becomes easier. Education helps too. And there may be some things you can never be good at. If you lack good spatial orientation skills the finer points of computer graphics may escape you, but that won't prevent you from being perhaps the next great writer of file systems, compilers, DBMSes etc.
And how appealing is it to pick up your dust bunny covered keyboard that your kid spilled Sprite on last week to type an email while squinting across the living room at your TV?
There's a reason few people put non-portable PCs in the living room, and given Apple's famous reputation for designing products for ease of use, I think the practical difficulties of using a computer in the living room is one reason they haven't suggested putting your iMac there, Bluetooth keyboard or not. That's one reason why Airport Express is a stealth killer app. Now you can type your emails in your home office, where it's appropriate, and you can listen yo your iTunes collection in the living room, where it's appropriate. The next pieces are a faster wireless network so you can reliably transmit video, a Universal Remote, and a video jack on Airport Express v2.0 so you can use your Mac as a video server too. The killer strategy is not to put the computer in the living room (after all back in the day of the Vic20 and TI99 the computer already was in the living room), but to use it as your home server and have access to its functions as appropriate, where appropriate. Apple's design genius is not in making things look sleek (if so Sony would be eating Dell's lunch) but in making them as functional as they are pretty.
The theory taught in business school is that a mature industry can support at most 3 organizations and usually only support 2. The problem being that the terms industry and mature are rarely well defined, but this is an editorial, not a case study or even journalism. Therefore liberties are taken with respect to intellectual rigor.
And just where do you stow the keyboard for your DVD player?
Denumerable and rational are not synonymous. Denumerability is a property of sets, rationality is a property of numbers. To make denumerability applicable to number then, one considers whether a program exists that can generate an arbitrary digit of that number, which is true for pi. If such a program exists, then because the set of all programs is denumerable we can say that the number is denumerable. There is no program of finite size which can compute an arbitrary digit of Chaitin's constant, therefore Chaitin's constant is not denumberable.