Do you have any particular reason to not believe in the many universes?
I'm wondering because, although I haven't thought about it too much (way-y-y more important things to think about), I tend to believe in the parallel universe theory.
The universe is both elegant and maddeningly complex. Given all I've studied about it I intuitively believe that you can't mess with it: namely a paradox as discussed so far can never exist. If the universe will allow for time travel, I don't think it'll let that same time traveler lock up (who would hit ctrl-alt-del?) the universe by creating a paradox (conversely if the paradox can exist, one cannot time travel).
I can think of two models, both flow from the 'multiple universe' theory.
The simplest explanation that I can think of (which is often the right one as we all know) is that at the moment of time travel the universe does a huge fork() on itself, and you end up in a completely new copy of the universe you left, at some particular moment in time. You can then mess things up with reckless abandon since you are working on a copy of the original universe. You could kill yourself 10 minutes before you time travel and you would still exist - a product of the other universe. When you travel *back* (to the future;)) the universe forks another universe off of the altered one and you repeat the process. As another poster said "You can never get home". You keep forking. So, if you killed your grandfather in 1900 and came back to 2003 you'd be living in a world in which your grandfather was brutally murdered by someone fitting your description, although chances are the trail would be pretty cold a hundred years later.:)
I guess it's not so much a fork process but a copy followed by a rewind/fast-forward (as appropriate).
The second is that there are an infinite number of universes out there, each branching off an infinite number of times with each decision that happens (e.g. the universes are all pre-forked for you). So, there exists a universe in which you kill your grandfather, your uncle, yourself, your neighbor, the dog next door, one in which Shakespeare *was* a million monkeys banging away on a million typewriters, etc..
When you time travel, you pop on over to that particular universe that is appropriate with what you are going to do/did/etc. (so time really doesn't exist). Kind of kills free will, I suppose, but I see no reason that free will is necessarily a law of nature.
Indeed. There's nothing in the article to indicate that this is anything but a run-of-the-mill, end user problem (e.g. running a virus). Mr. Smith thinks it may be a particular virus, and that virus may (I don't know enough about it to comment one way or another) exploit a common hole in Windows, but to indicate that this is a symptom of Windows insecurity with insufficent evidence is unethical.
Certainly it may only infect Win32, but that is by design. There have never been rootkits for Linux? Trojaned apps?
I'm pretty disappointed (although not entirely surprised) in SlashDot posters. This article was clearly more than simply 'mailing disks' which > 95% of the topics (including dupes of dupes of dupes of...) on this article have been about.
Sure, he mentioned cost of shipping disks, and actually concluded that shipping an entire computer system is more economical than mailing individual disks. However, there are far more interesting and discussion-worthy conclusions he raises.
What about disk capacity reaching such incredible sizes as 2TB/disk - and the fact that current random-access methods will render such drives unusable? This affects all of us, since our OS' filesystems will need to fundamentally change to be more sequential (e.g. like tape drives). Personally, I hope that whatever happens to the fs the OS will insulate me from being forced to use it in a sequential manner (e.g. will I be exposed to the sequential nature of the medium or can it be successfully abstracted?)
He talks about, in almost glowing terms, the SlashDot favorite MySQL and how "At some point, somebody will say, 'I'm running my company on MySQL.' Indeed, I wish I could hear Scott McNealy [CEO of Sun Microsystems] tell that to Larry Ellison [CEO of Oracle]." And, although the Research Area people are pretty independent, this is from a MICROSOFT employee. Not a peep from the/. audience.
Personally, I think that using MySQL as a 'research tool' as he suggests is a Very Bad Idea - it's not even a mediocre implementation of the relational model and there are better open-source implementations out there (PostgreSQL being the one that comes to mind). Basing scholarly studies on MySQL would be like basing the foundation of a skyscraper on a shack (not that any other SQL DBMS's are much better, but why use one of the worst?). The best 'research vehicle' would be an open-source truly relational database management system (there are no commercial TRDBMS either). It doesn't have to be very advanced, but it has to be architected from the ground up to be a TRDBMS (which means SQL doesn't cut it as a query language).
One thing he notes which I see as being a large problem in the open-source community as well is how "...The thing that slows Oracle, IBM, and Microsoft down is the testing, and making sure they don't break anything--supporting the legacy. I don't know if the MySQL community has the same focus on that." As a long-time PHP developer and advocate I'm still hesitant about updating our production systems - it seems as if every successive release of PHP has innumerable functions removed or changed with no ability for backwards compatibility. I guess it's a lot easier to say to users 'you get what you pay for' when they are just that - users and not clients. One of my disappointments from many open-source proponents (which I am one) is the hostility to treating clients as clients - 'you can always edit the source', etc. - for the most part large companies don't care/want to edit the source - that is what they want to pay you to do. Until more projects (MySQL included) start to realize this, then they will pretty much always occupy niche roles in the enterprise.
Finally, even he, an academic seems to (at times) confuse the relational model's implementations' details (e.g. the SQL product performance) with the model itself (of which there is no mention of performance, because it has nothing to do with the model). Theoretically, a TRDBMS should be faster than the SQL implementations we have today. It just takes someone to do it, and I don't see why the open-source community can't build the BEST mousetrap there is - we just have to abandon the 'mob culture' of MySQL.
Indeed. XML is quite oversold. I could understand the need for human-parseable data files, but XML sucks for a data storage and transmission mechanism. See: this thread for an example of the lunacy of XML.
I was wondering how long it would take to have something like this implemented, although I was thinking of a purely law enforcement perspective, though. Often we get BOLOs for certain types of vehicles -- why not have a satellite look for them (weather permitting, of course)? The resolution is more than adequate to find a black four-door sedan (and even match a partial plate), and then you could combine it with spatial-awareness software that could determine the relative probability (given the location and time of the initial report) that the car it is looking at is the one we're looking for. It could then relay these to officers on the ground.
Given what we have to work with (eyes and ears on the street) even if it was very inaccurate I couldn't imagine it would be *worse* than our current hit ratio.
As far as privacy is concerned, I can't say much more than you'd need to trust local law enforcement not to abuse it, like you do with NCIC/LEADS etc. Most people have a misconception that law enforcement are all horribly corrupt and would stop at nothing to violate your rights. Fortunately I can say that this is definitely not the case for many (all the different agencies and officers I've worked with would lead me to believe that the vast majority are honest). Generally we don't have any SPS (Secret Police Sh.. Stuff) going on. The Federal Gov't, though, may. Trust your local law enforcement.:)
But as technology advances the opportunity to invade rights becomes far easier (and it is generally much harder to track. An officer sitting in front of someone's house is fairly noticeable by the public; a computer watching the camera images is not). The only thing I can think of is have legislative oversight and keep track of who is being tracked and for what reason.
Welcome to the Real World
on
PHP 5 Beta 1
·
· Score: 1
I welcome this change; philosophically I think that the inclusion was one that should have never been there in the first place.
Anyway, to those people whining 'What about when I can't compile the bin?' - welcome to the real world. What about those of us who use a different DBMS than MySQL? We get by, and so you will, too.
Re:Requires Microsoft Visual C++
on
PHP 5 Beta 1
·
· Score: 1
You certainly don't need to compile PHP to use it on windows. There are a lot of sources out there for Win32 bins, I know because I had to use the ISAPI module for IIS.
And, at least in Windows, you don't need to compile anything into the bin, you just stick extra DLLs in the directory.
I use SpamInspector by GIANT Company: http://www.giantcompany.com/products.asp x
It catches virtually all my spam (except the one-liner emails that just have a URL; must not have a rule for that one for some reason) and rarely ham (can't think of a time in which it has caught ham). One positive feature is that it (supposedly) integrates everyone's checking of 'spam' or 'not' so that if enough people mark something as spam (that didn't get caught by the filters) it adjusts the filters accordingly so I don't get it (e.g. the Nigerian emails) (or vice versa).
Most (all?) the benchmarks I've seen show a small net gain in the PIV with HT enabled than without for most cases. It certainly is not a replacement for a 'real' SMP system, I think it is for home users who like to do things like rip CDs while watching a DVD and downloading MP3s all at the same time (or insert some other pseudo-commonplace scenario dreamed up by Intel here).
All in all, if I was to have a PIV I'd rather have one *with* HT than without.
When I went to replace my aging PIII500 I considered getting another dualie, but really for what I do (email, gaming, Word, IM, etc.) I couldn't justify having two CPUs so I just got a fast Athlon (1.3GHz). Most games are not SMP-capable (nor are games really SMP-efficient given what they do) so the other CPU would essentially sit idle. As I said before CPUs are so fast now that they achieve pseudo-multitasking quite well (esp. given the new Hyper-Threading technology) so unless I had a need I canâ(TM)t justify spending the extra cost for a âcoolnessâ(TM) factor.
I guess if I had the time Iâ(TM)d like to set up a Sybase ASE instance (weâ(TM)ve got a couple medium-sided ~30GB databases that Iâ(TM)d like to mine so as to not hit the pr0d servers) so a dualie AMD with lots of RAM running RedHat would be cool to set up, although it would have to have a pretty big business case if I was to actually spend my money on it.
As I just noticed another poster talking about monitors: on my dual CPU system I also had two 19" monitors to kick out the heat as well. I've since switched to the perfect-text (sub-pixel font rendering 0wnz) DVI LCDs.
That's why I leave my Athlon-based PC in my other room running 24/7 in the winter. It's cheaper than running the heater (my apt is old and doesn't have central air/heat, just crappy space heater things in each room) and less chance of catching something on fire, too.
However here in the summertime it causes the room to be noticeably warmer than the rest of the apartment; the in-window a/c unit has to work overtime to keep that room cool.
To be fair, the PC I had before this one (dual PIII500â(TM)s) allowed (forced?) me to *open a window* in the middle of winter and actually position a fan to bring cool/cold air from outside to chill the computer. Kind of ridiculous, but having dual CPUs (which were the fastest at the time) made up for it.
Nowadays CPUs are so fast that for home use it would be extravagant, but when the dualie eventually caught fire (watch where you place jumpers -- don't short out motherboard fan pins) and was replaced with a single-CPU version (one of the procs was still salvageable) I was amazed at how much slower things became (trying to rip/encode a CD, listen to an MP3, and do something else at the same time resulted in data errors, skipping in MP3 playback, etc.).
I wasn't aware mSQL was still under development. In any rate, I couldn't see using mSQL when there are better solutions that you are probably already using.
This is Tucker-fuckin-Max we're talking about. He's not just some guy, he's the self-proclaimed God's gift to women. I don't know about that, but he is damn funny and if you haven't purchased his new book you damn well should.
Also, look at the timeline. The Mozilla bug was entered in 2Apr, and fixed 22May. The IE bug was found on 23Apr, and I assume Microsoft was notified around that time as well. If we want to be fair, MS still has another two weeks to release a patch in order to match Mozilla's turnaround time.
Oops, I got too mixed up in the verbiage and messed it up:
The problem is that, since people don't know the fundamentals of relational theory, they don't know what the 'features' are (which in my mind are requirements) - so how can they effectively decide whether or not they are important?
The problem is that, since people don't know the fundamentals of relational theory they don't know they don't need the 'features' (which in my mind, are a requirement).
This is why those of us that do know get flapped when those that don't tell us it is not necessary. See the problem?
Re:SAP and MySQL - The Difference is in the Name!
on
SAP and MySQL Join Forces
·
· Score: 2, Informative
Although this is off-topic I've wanted to use this link for a long time so, well, here it is.
"..the INGRES project at U.C. Berkeley. The INGRES project had a language called QUEL. They started a company that implemented QUEL. QUEL fought SQL tooth-and-nail, and explained how QUEL was better than SQL in many different ways, and in fact it is better at doing aggregates. There are lots of areas where QUEL is better."
"..Tom Price: Although the first code they [Ingress] shipped was SQL on top of QUEL...
Mike Blasgen: It was see-QUEL. [laughter] That's right." http://www.mcjones.org/System_R/SQL_Reuni on_95/sql r95-Teradata.html
Glock training pistols; they do everything we need them to do (except fire real ammo -- Glock sells one that shoots CO2 powered marking cartridges). I'd think live ammo could be.. a little dangerous.:)
But still OC is not really good for taking someone down who doesn't *really* want to be (or is on some sort of controlled substance), but it's good for the pile of drunk fratboys fighting each other in the middle of the street.:P
Slashdot Mirror
Wow, nice troll. I think that deserves a golf clap for your efforts.
*polite applause*
They'll be creating something but I don't know what. Hopefully it won't resemble havoc.
Why was this moderated up? This is exactly what the article stated!
Do you have any particular reason to not believe in the many universes?
;)) the universe forks another universe off of the altered one and you repeat the process. As another poster said "You can never get home". You keep forking. So, if you killed your grandfather in 1900 and came back to 2003 you'd be living in a world in which your grandfather was brutally murdered by someone fitting your description, although chances are the trail would be pretty cold a hundred years later. :)
I'm wondering because, although I haven't thought about it too much (way-y-y more important things to think about), I tend to believe in the parallel universe theory.
The universe is both elegant and maddeningly complex. Given all I've studied about it I intuitively believe that you can't mess with it: namely a paradox as discussed so far can never exist. If the universe will allow for time travel, I don't think it'll let that same time traveler lock up (who would hit ctrl-alt-del?) the universe by creating a paradox (conversely if the paradox can exist, one cannot time travel).
I can think of two models, both flow from the 'multiple universe' theory.
The simplest explanation that I can think of (which is often the right one as we all know) is that at the moment of time travel the universe does a huge fork() on itself, and you end up in a completely new copy of the universe you left, at some particular moment in time. You can then mess things up with reckless abandon since you are working on a copy of the original universe. You could kill yourself 10 minutes before you time travel and you would still exist - a product of the other universe. When you travel *back* (to the future
I guess it's not so much a fork process but a copy followed by a rewind/fast-forward (as appropriate).
The second is that there are an infinite number of universes out there, each branching off an infinite number of times with each decision that happens (e.g. the universes are all pre-forked for you). So, there exists a universe in which you kill your grandfather, your uncle, yourself, your neighbor, the dog next door, one in which Shakespeare *was* a million monkeys banging away on a million typewriters, etc..
When you time travel, you pop on over to that particular universe that is appropriate with what you are going to do/did/etc. (so time really doesn't exist). Kind of kills free will, I suppose, but I see no reason that free will is necessarily a law of nature.
Indeed. There's nothing in the article to indicate that this is anything but a run-of-the-mill, end user problem (e.g. running a virus). Mr. Smith thinks it may be a particular virus, and that virus may (I don't know enough about it to comment one way or another) exploit a common hole in Windows, but to indicate that this is a symptom of Windows insecurity with insufficent evidence is unethical.
Certainly it may only infect Win32, but that is by design. There have never been rootkits for Linux? Trojaned apps?
I'm pretty disappointed (although not entirely surprised) in SlashDot posters. This article was clearly more than simply 'mailing disks' which > 95% of the topics (including dupes of dupes of dupes of ...) on this article have been about.
/. audience.
Sure, he mentioned cost of shipping disks, and actually concluded that shipping an entire computer system is more economical than mailing individual disks. However, there are far more interesting and discussion-worthy conclusions he raises.
What about disk capacity reaching such incredible sizes as 2TB/disk - and the fact that current random-access methods will render such drives unusable? This affects all of us, since our OS' filesystems will need to fundamentally change to be more sequential (e.g. like tape drives). Personally, I hope that whatever happens to the fs the OS will insulate me from being forced to use it in a sequential manner (e.g. will I be exposed to the sequential nature of the medium or can it be successfully abstracted?)
He talks about, in almost glowing terms, the SlashDot favorite MySQL and how "At some point, somebody will say, 'I'm running my company on MySQL.' Indeed, I wish I could hear Scott McNealy [CEO of Sun Microsystems] tell that to Larry Ellison [CEO of Oracle]." And, although the Research Area people are pretty independent, this is from a MICROSOFT employee. Not a peep from the
Personally, I think that using MySQL as a 'research tool' as he suggests is a Very Bad Idea - it's not even a mediocre implementation of the relational model and there are better open-source implementations out there (PostgreSQL being the one that comes to mind). Basing scholarly studies on MySQL would be like basing the foundation of a skyscraper on a shack (not that any other SQL DBMS's are much better, but why use one of the worst?). The best 'research vehicle' would be an open-source truly relational database management system (there are no commercial TRDBMS either). It doesn't have to be very advanced, but it has to be architected from the ground up to be a TRDBMS (which means SQL doesn't cut it as a query language).
One thing he notes which I see as being a large problem in the open-source community as well is how "...The thing that slows Oracle, IBM, and Microsoft down is the testing, and making sure they don't break anything--supporting the legacy. I don't know if the MySQL community has the same focus on that." As a long-time PHP developer and advocate I'm still hesitant about updating our production systems - it seems as if every successive release of PHP has innumerable functions removed or changed with no ability for backwards compatibility. I guess it's a lot easier to say to users 'you get what you pay for' when they are just that - users and not clients. One of my disappointments from many open-source proponents (which I am one) is the hostility to treating clients as clients - 'you can always edit the source', etc. - for the most part large companies don't care/want to edit the source - that is what they want to pay you to do. Until more projects (MySQL included) start to realize this, then they will pretty much always occupy niche roles in the enterprise.
Finally, even he, an academic seems to (at times) confuse the relational model's implementations' details (e.g. the SQL product performance) with the model itself (of which there is no mention of performance, because it has nothing to do with the model). Theoretically, a TRDBMS should be faster than the SQL implementations we have today. It just takes someone to do it, and I don't see why the open-source community can't build the BEST mousetrap there is - we just have to abandon the 'mob culture' of MySQL.
Indeed. XML is quite oversold. I could understand the need for human-parseable data files, but XML sucks for a data storage and transmission mechanism. See: this thread for an example of the lunacy of XML.
I was wondering how long it would take to have something like this implemented, although I was thinking of a purely law enforcement perspective, though. Often we get BOLOs for certain types of vehicles -- why not have a satellite look for them (weather permitting, of course)? The resolution is more than adequate to find a black four-door sedan (and even match a partial plate), and then you could combine it with spatial-awareness software that could determine the relative probability (given the location and time of the initial report) that the car it is looking at is the one we're looking for. It could then relay these to officers on the ground.
:)
Given what we have to work with (eyes and ears on the street) even if it was very inaccurate I couldn't imagine it would be *worse* than our current hit ratio.
As far as privacy is concerned, I can't say much more than you'd need to trust local law enforcement not to abuse it, like you do with NCIC/LEADS etc. Most people have a misconception that law enforcement are all horribly corrupt and would stop at nothing to violate your rights. Fortunately I can say that this is definitely not the case for many (all the different agencies and officers I've worked with would lead me to believe that the vast majority are honest). Generally we don't have any SPS (Secret Police Sh.. Stuff) going on. The Federal Gov't, though, may. Trust your local law enforcement.
But as technology advances the opportunity to invade rights becomes far easier (and it is generally much harder to track. An officer sitting in front of someone's house is fairly noticeable by the public; a computer watching the camera images is not). The only thing I can think of is have legislative oversight and keep track of who is being tracked and for what reason.
I welcome this change; philosophically I think that the inclusion was one that should have never been there in the first place.
Anyway, to those people whining 'What about when I can't compile the bin?' - welcome to the real world. What about those of us who use a different DBMS than MySQL? We get by, and so you will, too.
You certainly don't need to compile PHP to use it on windows. There are a lot of sources out there for Win32 bins, I know because I had to use the ISAPI module for IIS.
And, at least in Windows, you don't need to compile anything into the bin, you just stick extra DLLs in the directory.
I use SpamInspector by GIANT Company:p x
http://www.giantcompany.com/products.as
It catches virtually all my spam (except the one-liner emails that just have a URL; must not have a rule for that one for some reason) and rarely ham (can't think of a time in which it has caught ham). One positive feature is that it (supposedly) integrates everyone's checking of 'spam' or 'not' so that if enough people mark something as spam (that didn't get caught by the filters) it adjusts the filters accordingly so I don't get it (e.g. the Nigerian emails) (or vice versa).
Most (all?) the benchmarks I've seen show a small net gain in the PIV with HT enabled than without for most cases. It certainly is not a replacement for a 'real' SMP system, I think it is for home users who like to do things like rip CDs while watching a DVD and downloading MP3s all at the same time (or insert some other pseudo-commonplace scenario dreamed up by Intel here).
All in all, if I was to have a PIV I'd rather have one *with* HT than without.
When I went to replace my aging PIII500 I considered getting another dualie, but really for what I do (email, gaming, Word, IM, etc.) I couldn't justify having two CPUs so I just got a fast Athlon (1.3GHz). Most games are not SMP-capable (nor are games really SMP-efficient given what they do) so the other CPU would essentially sit idle. As I said before CPUs are so fast now that they achieve pseudo-multitasking quite well (esp. given the new Hyper-Threading technology) so unless I had a need I canâ(TM)t justify spending the extra cost for a âcoolnessâ(TM) factor.
I guess if I had the time Iâ(TM)d like to set up a Sybase ASE instance (weâ(TM)ve got a couple medium-sided ~30GB databases that Iâ(TM)d like to mine so as to not hit the pr0d servers) so a dualie AMD with lots of RAM running RedHat would be cool to set up, although it would have to have a pretty big business case if I was to actually spend my money on it.
As I just noticed another poster talking about monitors: on my dual CPU system I also had two 19" monitors to kick out the heat as well. I've since switched to the perfect-text (sub-pixel font rendering 0wnz) DVI LCDs.
That's why I leave my Athlon-based PC in my other room running 24/7 in the winter. It's cheaper than running the heater (my apt is old and doesn't have central air/heat, just crappy space heater things in each room) and less chance of catching something on fire, too.
However here in the summertime it causes the room to be noticeably warmer than the rest of the apartment; the in-window a/c unit has to work overtime to keep that room cool.
To be fair, the PC I had before this one (dual PIII500â(TM)s) allowed (forced?) me to *open a window* in the middle of winter and actually position a fan to bring cool/cold air from outside to chill the computer. Kind of ridiculous, but having dual CPUs (which were the fastest at the time) made up for it.
Nowadays CPUs are so fast that for home use it would be extravagant, but when the dualie eventually caught fire (watch where you place jumpers -- don't short out motherboard fan pins) and was replaced with a single-CPU version (one of the procs was still salvageable) I was amazed at how much slower things became (trying to rip/encode a CD, listen to an MP3, and do something else at the same time resulted in data errors, skipping in MP3 playback, etc.).
I wasn't aware mSQL was still under development. In any rate, I couldn't see using mSQL when there are better solutions that you are probably already using.
Not to mention he knows *nothing* of relational theory:
http://www.pgro.uk7.net/qu092902.htm
So if all your friends were jumping off of bridges you'd want to do it, too?
Just because something is popular doesn't make it right (and vice-versa).
Obviously QNX shows that you can have great performance in an unbreakable (no, not in the cheezy Oracle-esque sense, but the *real* deal) package.
Because, as we all know, the cookbook approach is the best way to go. :P
This is Tucker-fuckin-Max we're talking about. He's not just some guy, he's the self-proclaimed God's gift to women. I don't know about that, but he is damn funny and if you haven't purchased his new book you damn well should.
Also, look at the timeline. The Mozilla bug was entered in 2Apr, and fixed 22May. The IE bug was found on 23Apr, and I assume Microsoft was notified around that time as well. If we want to be fair, MS still has another two weeks to release a patch in order to match Mozilla's turnaround time.
Oops, I got too mixed up in the verbiage and messed it up:
The problem is that, since people don't know the fundamentals of relational theory, they don't know what the 'features' are (which in my mind are requirements) - so how can they effectively decide whether or not they are important?
The problem is that, since people don't know the fundamentals of relational theory they don't know they don't need the 'features' (which in my mind, are a requirement).
This is why those of us that do know get flapped when those that don't tell us it is not necessary. See the problem?
Although this is off-topic I've wanted to use this link for a long time so, well, here it is.
...
i on_95/sql r95-Teradata.html
"..the INGRES project at U.C. Berkeley. The INGRES project had a language called QUEL. They started a company that implemented QUEL. QUEL fought SQL tooth-and-nail, and explained how QUEL was better than SQL in many different ways, and in fact it is better at doing aggregates. There are lots of areas where QUEL is better."
"..Tom Price: Although the first code they [Ingress] shipped was SQL on top of QUEL
Mike Blasgen: It was see-QUEL. [laughter] That's right."
http://www.mcjones.org/System_R/SQL_Reun
Glock training pistols; they do everything we need them to do (except fire real ammo -- Glock sells one that shoots CO2 powered marking cartridges). I'd think live ammo could be.. a little dangerous. :)
:P
But still OC is not really good for taking someone down who doesn't *really* want to be (or is on some sort of controlled substance), but it's good for the pile of drunk fratboys fighting each other in the middle of the street.