Whenever someone brings up that old old troll about X11 being obsolete, my bogometer shoots up to 10. What the hell do you mean, X11 is old? ASCII is old too, have you stopped using ASCII? X11 is beautifully designed. Its extensibility insures it against becoming outdated for a long time to come. In the last few years it has patched almost all of its desktop related weaknesses, like antialiasing and sound. Its network transparency is extremely useful. I can't live without it for a day. Bloat used to be an issue 10 years ago, but has long ceased to be the case. I can't imagine what the hordes of *X sucks* trolls get out of it.
As for your question "why should linux be on the desktop", I'll give you my reason. I've written an app or three for *nix, and if linux finds its way to more desktops I'll have more people running what I wrote and it brings a smile to my face. So it is in my interest to fight against the FUD and help linux get to as many desktops as possible. You are, of course, free to run whatever you like.
True. Too often a technology rapidly gains popularity and then the world finds that it is missing some vital component which, with hindsight, should have been built into the protocol in the first place. Worse, the extra feature can not be tacked on to it without breaking compatibility. Had SMTP had a better authentication system, spam would probably not exist today. Another example is gnutella - it didn't scale. But there is often no way to provide for the future since it is impossible to know what direction a technology is going to take. Burdening it with too many security related features early on might prove a barrier to adoption. One way out could be to make it extensible at every level (like X window. See how well it has withstood the test of time.)
And it's why, most of the time, the Google home page contains exactly 37 words. "We count bytes," says Google Fellow Urs Holzle, who is on leave from the University of California at Santa Barbara. "We count them because our users have modems, so it costs them to download our pages."
And yet the google logo on the home page is 8.3 KB!
That's funny. So why can't China or Your-favorite-regime simply block/ban downloading freenet itself? It could also simply block the appropriate ports.
Ok. Imagine for a moment that the internet was built from the start on the freenet model. Then there would have been no way for China to block access to it, right? Now imagine that freenet gets really popular and bandwidth gets cheap to the point that most of the content on the internet is on freenet. This scenario is futuristic, but not impossible: the more freenet nodes there are, the more incentive there is to join freenet. So if this happens, China can no longer block freenet without missing out on all that content:)
Discovery of imaginary numbers
on
Imagining Numbers
·
· Score: 4, Interesting
I posted this a while ago, but mistyped the subject as "discovery of irrational numbers". Braino:(
There is an intriguing story about the discovery of imaginary numbers.
In 1539 the mathematician Tartaglia won a contest involving solving cubic equations. His method used complex numbers, though he did not understand them as such. The mathematician Girolamo Cardano learned the method from him, promising him to keep it secret. However Tartaglia soon died, and Cardano published "Ars Magna" in 1545, in which he described the solution of cubics using imaginary numbers.
But it would be long before complex numbers would be properly understood and not looked upon with awe and mystery.
Re:Discovery of irrational numbers
on
Imagining Numbers
·
· Score: 1
Oops.. that was supposed to be "discovery of imaginary numbers", of course. Sorreeeee
Discovery of irrational numbers
on
Imagining Numbers
·
· Score: 1, Interesting
There is an intriguing story about the discovery of irrational numbers.
In 1539 the mathematician Tartaglia won a contest involving solving cubic equations. His method used complex numbers, though he did not understand them as such. The mathematician Girolamo Cardano learned the method from him, promising him to keep it secret. However Tartaglia soon died, and Cardano published "Ars Magna" in 1545, in which he described the solution of cubics using imaginary numbers.
But it would be long before complex numbers would be properly understood and not looked upon with awe and mystery.
... of an anecdote I came across in an essay about the difficulty of writing math books for the lay reader.
A statistician met his friend after a long time. After convincing the friend that statistics was not all about adding long columns of numbers, he proceeded to show him some interesting things like how to estimate the population based on a sample using the normal distribution. Pointing at the equation of the Gaussian distribution, the friend asks "what's this?" Statistician: "Oh that's pi, of course". Friend: "You mean the ratio of the diameter of a circle to the radius?" Statistician: "Sure". Friend (indignant): "Youre kidding me! The diameter of a circle can't have anything to do with the population of a country!"
An extreme example, perhaps, but shows how difficult it can be to write non-technical math books. Too often authors oversimplify things to increase readership. Mathematicians loath this and try to make their writing as stiff and formal as possible, "giving no indication that either the author or the intended reader is a human being". Yup, that's how one mathematician described "The Ideal Mathematician". Any honest effort that attempts to strike a balance needs to be applauded.
What the hell is the point in defining an acronym, and then never using it in the rest of your text? Why even bother doing it? It's completely pointless, and really annoying. Stop it for fuck sake.
TIAFC,AICDATAIW (This Is A Free Country, And I Can Define All The Acronyms I Want).
The reason I haven't tried it yet is that it's written fully in Java. Nothing wrong with that, of course, except I can't afford to overload my Pentium II 333 Mhz box anymore. Already running a webserver on it. But I'll be sure to give it a go when I get more hardware.
Insightful? Insightful?? For the zillionth time something I said in obvious jest has got modded up +5 insightful. Puhleeeeeeeese I'll take a -1 troll, offtopic, anything just spare me the insightful mod. This time I even put the smiley there at the end to make sure no one can mistake it... *sniff* Who the hell is moderating, anyway, Bots? sheesh.
It's now official. C++ creator admits it was all a hoax! Read on for the details of the stunning scoop...
On the 1st of January, 2003, Bjarne Stroustrup gave an interview to
the IEEE's 'Computer' magazine.
Naturally, the editors thought he would be giving a retrospective
view of twelve years of object-oriented design, using the language he
created.
By the end of the interview, the interviewer got more than he had
bargained for and, subsequently, the editor decided to suppress its
contents, 'for the good of the industry' but, as with many of these
things, there was a leak.
Here is a complete transcript of what was was said, unedited, and
unrehearsed, so it isn't as neat as planned interviews.
Interviewer: Well, it's been a few years since you changed the world of
software design, how does it feel, looking back?
Stroustrup: Actually, I was thinking about those days, just before you
arrived. Do you remember? Everyone was writing 'C' and, the trouble was, they
were pretty damn good at it. Universities got pretty good at teaching it,
too. They were turning out competent - I stress the word 'competent' -
graduates at a phenomenal rate. That's what caused the problem.
Interviewer: Problem?
Stroustrup: Yes, problem. Remember when everyone wrote Cobol?
Interviewer: Of course, I did too
Stroustrup: Well, in the beginning, these guys were like demi-gods. Their
salaries were high, and they were treated like royalty.
Interviewer: Those were the days, eh?
Stroustrup: Right. So what happened? IBM got sick of it, and invested
millions in training programmers, till they were a dime a dozen.
Interviewer: That's why I got out. Salaries dropped within a year, to the
point where being a journalist actually paid better.
Stroustrup: Exactly. Well, the same happened with 'C' programmers.
Interviewer: I see, but what's the point?
Stroustrup: Well, one day, when I was sitting in my office, I thought of
this little scheme, which would redress the balance a little. I thought 'I
wonder what would happen, if there were a language so complicated, so
difficult to learn, that nobody would ever be able to swamp the market with
programmers? Actually, I got some of the ideas from X10, you know, X
windows. That was such a bitch of a graphics system, that it only just ran on
those Sun 3/60 things. They had all the ingredients for what I wanted. A
really ridiculously complex syntax, obscure functions, and pseudo-OO
structure. Even now, nobody writes raw X-windows code. Motif is the only way
to go if you want to retain your sanity.
Interviewer: You're kidding...?
Stroustrup: Not a bit of it. In fact, there was another problem. Unix was
written in 'C', which meant that any 'C' programmer could very easily become a
systems programmer. Remember what a mainframe systems programmer used to
earn?
Interviewer: You bet I do, that's what I used to do.
Stroustrup: OK, so this new language had to divorce itself from Unix, by
hiding all the system calls that bound the two together so nicely. This would
enable guys who only knew about DOS to earn a decent living too.
Interviewer: I don't believe you said that...
Stroustrup: Well, it's been long enough, now, and I believe most people
have figured out for themselves that C++ is a waste of time but, I must say,
it's taken them a lot longer than I thought it would.
Interviewer: So how exactly did you do it?
Stroustrup: It was only supposed to be a joke, I never thought people would
take the book seriously. Anyone with half a brain can see that object-oriented
programming is counter-intuitive, illogical and inefficient.
Interviewer: What?
Stroustrup: And as for 're-useable code' - when did you ever hear of a
company re-using its code?
Interviewer: Well, never, actually, but...
Stroustrup: There you are then. Mind you, a few tried, in the early
days. There was this Oregon company - Mentor Graphi
AFAICT, they use the random model and function as a neutral escrow authority. The ransom model is not mentioned in the article though.
Poor choice of name? Like free software/open source, I guess.
It turns out there are so many jewels in the survey results that it's difficult to decide which ones to put on display here at LinuxWorld.
After much consideration, I chose a nearly flawless diamond. It replaces the cubic zirconia otherwise known as the axiom that Linux is taking more market share from Unix than from Windows.
This poetry is even less beleivable than the MS FUD:)
Consider this: most linux users have a static IP but a large fraction of MS users will have a dynamic IP. So if they are counting unique IPs it will have a heavy windows bias.
Proxies. Again, more linux users could be behind a proxy (a few hundred linux users at my univ go through a single proxy) than windows users
Third, some factors similar to those described in the article could be at work (linux more efficient ==> less linux servers for same job). Maybe linux users are more efficient googlers? I think this is unlikely, but still a possibiility.
Fourth, it doesn't agree with my webserver stats (i.e, counting the hits I get from google searches). Of course, my data set is quite small, but it can not cause a threefold difference (I get 3% linux, 5-6% Mac). Maybe its because the content I have is biased towards linux users, but on the whole it makes me think that some combination of the factors above may be at work in decreasing the perceived share of linux.
Re:Who cares about decimal?
on
RMS Turns 50
·
· Score: 1
50 is the smallest number that can be expressed as the sum of 2 squares in two different ways: 5^2 + 5^2 = 7^2 + 1^2 = 50
MySQl being more popular than Postgres has a lot to do with mindshare than product quality. Take me, for instance. I set up apache for the first time a month ago, and I wanted a db server for some things. I had heard of both MySQL and Postgres, but I had been bombarded with the words "LAMP" and MySQL guide/tutorial/howto so many times in the past that my first thought was to give MySQL a try. I found it was already installed on my machine, had lots of documentation, and had no learning curve - no complaints at all. So, Postgres didn't even get a fair consideration from me. Of course, you might say that newbies and students like me don't count, but keep in mind that I might become a database admin some day, at t which point I would have a lot more experience with MySQL than Postgres...
A lot of sites have to eat their own dogfood, like hotmail. Now they needn't any longer. If they can change their fingerprint, they can run linux and make it look like they're running NT. (They used to run FreeBSD earlier.)
Slashdot Mirror
As for your question "why should linux be on the desktop", I'll give you my reason. I've written an app or three for *nix, and if linux finds its way to more desktops I'll have more people running what I wrote and it brings a smile to my face. So it is in my interest to fight against the FUD and help linux get to as many desktops as possible. You are, of course, free to run whatever you like.
They did, but didn't have time to process it so it was too blurred to make out :)
True. Too often a technology rapidly gains popularity and then the world finds that it is missing some vital component which, with hindsight, should have been built into the protocol in the first place. Worse, the extra feature can not be tacked on to it without breaking compatibility. Had SMTP had a better authentication system, spam would probably not exist today. Another example is gnutella - it didn't scale. But there is often no way to provide for the future since it is impossible to know what direction a technology is going to take. Burdening it with too many security related features early on might prove a barrier to adoption. One way out could be to make it extensible at every level (like X window. See how well it has withstood the test of time.)
Business week seem to have got a really good tech section. Check out some of the articles in the "recent tech features" sidebar on the left.
And yet the google logo on the home page is 8.3 KB!
Spiderman pulls out of film. Film at 11.
There is an intriguing story about the discovery of imaginary numbers.
In 1539 the mathematician Tartaglia won a contest involving solving cubic equations. His method used complex numbers, though he did not understand them as such. The mathematician Girolamo Cardano learned the method from him, promising him to keep it secret. However Tartaglia soon died, and Cardano published "Ars Magna" in 1545, in which he described the solution of cubics using imaginary numbers.
But it would be long before complex numbers would be properly understood and not looked upon with awe and mystery.
Oops.. that was supposed to be "discovery of imaginary numbers", of course. Sorreeeee
In 1539 the mathematician Tartaglia won a contest involving solving cubic equations. His method used complex numbers, though he did not understand them as such. The mathematician Girolamo Cardano learned the method from him, promising him to keep it secret. However Tartaglia soon died, and Cardano published "Ars Magna" in 1545, in which he described the solution of cubics using imaginary numbers.
But it would be long before complex numbers would be properly understood and not looked upon with awe and mystery.
A statistician met his friend after a long time. After convincing the friend that statistics was not all about adding long columns of numbers, he proceeded to show him some interesting things like how to estimate the population based on a sample using the normal distribution. Pointing at the equation of the Gaussian distribution, the friend asks "what's this?" Statistician: "Oh that's pi, of course". Friend: "You mean the ratio of the diameter of a circle to the radius?" Statistician: "Sure". Friend (indignant): "Youre kidding me! The diameter of a circle can't have anything to do with the population of a country!"
An extreme example, perhaps, but shows how difficult it can be to write non-technical math books. Too often authors oversimplify things to increase readership. Mathematicians loath this and try to make their writing as stiff and formal as possible, "giving no indication that either the author or the intended reader is a human being". Yup, that's how one mathematician described "The Ideal Mathematician". Any honest effort that attempts to strike a balance needs to be applauded.
Ha!
The reason I haven't tried it yet is that it's written fully in Java. Nothing wrong with that, of course, except I can't afford to overload my Pentium II 333 Mhz box anymore. Already running a webserver on it. But I'll be sure to give it a go when I get more hardware.
Debian is really living up the name of being a rebel OS ;-)
Insightful? Insightful?? For the zillionth time something I said in obvious jest has got modded up +5 insightful. Puhleeeeeeeese I'll take a -1 troll, offtopic, anything just spare me the insightful mod. This time I even put the smiley there at the end to make sure no one can mistake it... *sniff* Who the hell is moderating, anyway, Bots? sheesh.
On the 1st of January, 2003, Bjarne Stroustrup gave an interview to the IEEE's 'Computer' magazine.
Naturally, the editors thought he would be giving a retrospective view of twelve years of object-oriented design, using the language he created.
By the end of the interview, the interviewer got more than he had bargained for and, subsequently, the editor decided to suppress its contents, 'for the good of the industry' but, as with many of these things, there was a leak.
Here is a complete transcript of what was was said, unedited, and unrehearsed, so it isn't as neat as planned interviews.
Interviewer: Well, it's been a few years since you changed the world of software design, how does it feel, looking back?
Stroustrup: Actually, I was thinking about those days, just before you arrived. Do you remember? Everyone was writing 'C' and, the trouble was, they were pretty damn good at it. Universities got pretty good at teaching it, too. They were turning out competent - I stress the word 'competent' - graduates at a phenomenal rate. That's what caused the problem.
Interviewer: Problem?
Stroustrup: Yes, problem. Remember when everyone wrote Cobol?
Interviewer: Of course, I did too
Stroustrup: Well, in the beginning, these guys were like demi-gods. Their salaries were high, and they were treated like royalty.
Interviewer: Those were the days, eh?
Stroustrup: Right. So what happened? IBM got sick of it, and invested millions in training programmers, till they were a dime a dozen.
Interviewer: That's why I got out. Salaries dropped within a year, to the point where being a journalist actually paid better.
Stroustrup: Exactly. Well, the same happened with 'C' programmers.
Interviewer: I see, but what's the point?
Stroustrup: Well, one day, when I was sitting in my office, I thought of this little scheme, which would redress the balance a little. I thought 'I wonder what would happen, if there were a language so complicated, so difficult to learn, that nobody would ever be able to swamp the market with programmers? Actually, I got some of the ideas from X10, you know, X windows. That was such a bitch of a graphics system, that it only just ran on those Sun 3/60 things. They had all the ingredients for what I wanted. A really ridiculously complex syntax, obscure functions, and pseudo-OO structure. Even now, nobody writes raw X-windows code. Motif is the only way to go if you want to retain your sanity.
Interviewer: You're kidding...?
Stroustrup: Not a bit of it. In fact, there was another problem. Unix was written in 'C', which meant that any 'C' programmer could very easily become a systems programmer. Remember what a mainframe systems programmer used to earn?
Interviewer: You bet I do, that's what I used to do.
Stroustrup: OK, so this new language had to divorce itself from Unix, by hiding all the system calls that bound the two together so nicely. This would enable guys who only knew about DOS to earn a decent living too.
Interviewer: I don't believe you said that...
Stroustrup: Well, it's been long enough, now, and I believe most people have figured out for themselves that C++ is a waste of time but, I must say, it's taken them a lot longer than I thought it would.
Interviewer: So how exactly did you do it?
Stroustrup: It was only supposed to be a joke, I never thought people would take the book seriously. Anyone with half a brain can see that object-oriented programming is counter-intuitive, illogical and inefficient.
Interviewer: What?
Stroustrup: And as for 're-useable code' - when did you ever hear of a company re-using its code?
Interviewer: Well, never, actually, but...
Stroustrup: There you are then. Mind you, a few tried, in the early days. There was this Oregon company - Mentor Graphi
AFAICT, they use the random model and function as a neutral escrow authority. The ransom model is not mentioned in the article though. Poor choice of name? Like free software/open source, I guess.
Laudable initiative, IMHO.
Proxies. Again, more linux users could be behind a proxy (a few hundred linux users at my univ go through a single proxy) than windows users
Third, some factors similar to those described in the article could be at work (linux more efficient ==> less linux servers for same job). Maybe linux users are more efficient googlers? I think this is unlikely, but still a possibiility.
Fourth, it doesn't agree with my webserver stats (i.e, counting the hits I get from google searches). Of course, my data set is quite small, but it can not cause a threefold difference (I get 3% linux, 5-6% Mac). Maybe its because the content I have is biased towards linux users, but on the whole it makes me think that some combination of the factors above may be at work in decreasing the perceived share of linux.
50 is the smallest number that can be expressed as the sum of 2 squares in two different ways: 5^2 + 5^2 = 7^2 + 1^2 = 50
MySQl being more popular than Postgres has a lot to do with mindshare than product quality. Take me, for instance. I set up apache for the first time a month ago, and I wanted a db server for some things. I had heard of both MySQL and Postgres, but I had been bombarded with the words "LAMP" and MySQL guide/tutorial/howto so many times in the past that my first thought was to give MySQL a try. I found it was already installed on my machine, had lots of documentation, and had no learning curve - no complaints at all. So, Postgres didn't even get a fair consideration from me. Of course, you might say that newbies and students like me don't count, but keep in mind that I might become a database admin some day, at t which point I would have a lot more experience with MySQL than Postgres...
A lot of sites have to eat their own dogfood, like hotmail. Now they needn't any longer. If they can change their fingerprint, they can run linux and make it look like they're running NT. (They used to run FreeBSD earlier.)
The folks at netcraft use these kinds of techniques for getting their server stats. Modifying the TCP/IP stack will screw up their stats collection :(