How much longer does IBM's patent on arithmetic coding run? I know it was proposed as an alternative to huffman encoding for JPGs, but since it was patented noone used it, even though it produced superious results.
it's all down to entropy. A shorter gene sequence might have its uses (less energy to copy?) but redundancy is king when you have a high error rate for the copying. I would imagine that DNA has evolved to be highly robust in the face of mutation, which is in direct conflict with reducing representation size.
What would be really cool would be to work in some industrial strength error correction code into the copying mechanism (grey codes for example). If we are to go into high-radiation environments such as space, some sort of additional error correction will likely be needed in our genes.
does anyone know whether representation plays into gene interpretation? Ie the physical folding of the protein interacting with how the data it holds is interpreted (visualise paper tape which holds not only printed data, but is also knotted in such a way to expose some letters and obscure others).
I had understood (well, I haven't read the dox yet, so my ass is talking here) that the state of processes was saved and hot-swapped into the newly started kernel.
I thought that sounded reasonably cool.
If it is just a way to avoid bois restart, that is less cool, but definately beats running lilo to remotely restart with a new kernel.
Given that Theo indicated that an SMP kernel was currently infeasable, I'd suspect that a distributed kernel (of which an SMP appears to be a special case) is pretty unlikely.
The idea being that while mass might be more effective, light is easier to carry. Better yet, light is easy to send from the base, so you don't have to carry it at all.
The book Heavy Weather (Bruce Sterling) has a protagonist power a spaceship by rail-lauched iron slugs from the moon. Each one is captured and fired back, speeding the ship up. A bit of double barreling and (see Indistingiushable from Magic by Forward for illustrations) and the coming and going slugs wont collide.
It was asimov. Some short and squat robots that flew to jupiter and outmachoed the not-so-jovial jovians. Turns out the Jovians were gung ho on interplanetary war, but were so scared of the macho humans that they changed their plans, never realising that the robots were'nt human.
IIRC the field flickered like a flourescent light.
I'm suprised that this was modded up. There are non-homework reasons to use scheme. Modern implementations are suprisingly fast.
While you might not want to port those numerical apps yet, the expressiveness and interactivity of scheme allows you to churn out applications at an amazing rate.
I tend to use python for small sys-admin programs ("python - a better shell") and web toys, but for anything larger than a few pages, I find myself pining for scheme. I never do get around to installing it tho, so I end up using java and jpython. I'm going to look into kawa right now.
It's a case of trying to balance the very absract good society derives from privacy against the concrete damange of crime. We all agree that no-privacy is really bad; the problem comes when we start trying balance the abstract against concrete. You find that it is almost impossible, so pretty much the only valid approach is going to one of the extremes. I would favor making the right to privacy be as absolute as the right to free speech (which is abridged, but not much). Recent legislation seems to tend in the opposite direction (c.f. recent brittish proposals to record pretty much EVERYTHING).
I think a decent compromise might be to take a page out of the DCMA of all places. Anyone who tries to protect their privacy (closing of doors, using encryption) has a right to it. Anything in the clear is fair game.
This would be completely in line with the current standards on police conduct -- without a warrant, they can look through windows and enter through open doors (== in the clear) but not break a lock or open a bag (== encrypted).
So by the above standards, the keyboard tap is A-OK, and so is carnivore. Damn. Knock me down, please. Oops.
Can anyone comment on how much a person whose house is being searched under warrant must cooperate? Opening safes? Unlocking doors? Locating documents?
It will only be enabled if you turn it on, so you can decide for yourself. Me, I'd give my left... Well, I wouldn't, but I'd really keen on the subpixel stuff to make up for the measly 1024x768 res on my laptop.
I think you'll find that a conventional harddrive has a stiff (glass?) platter ontop of which very light read heads float. The same aerodynamic effect which pulls a wing up pulls the heads down towards the spinning disk but keeps them from touching, IIRC.
Well, I just got some three letter network's broadcasts, but they were crap. I don't really care when the events are shown, but I do want to see whole events. Ok, so have a nice recap at 6pm, and if I have to stay up until 4 in the morning to watch sailing or fencing, that's fine, but show then SOMETIME.
Instead, we got MTV like snippets from different events, with seemingly more filler (bios of the american athletes who were slated to win, analysis of some event we hardly got to see, excuses why so-and-so failed to win) and advertising than sports. How am I supposed to get excited about that? I didn't so I turned it off and went to the bar.
In summarium, I was unable to watch any sports because of all the hoopla about the olympics.
multiple inheritance is one of these (mis)features that is REALLY useful in a few cases, but causes no end of trouble in 17 other parts of the language spec and everyday programming.
I think anyone who has programmed in Java or Smalltalk for a while has wanted it, but it is generally held ot be more pain that it is worth.
This is especially true as there are other alternatives (such as mixins) which solve 90% of what you would gain from multiple inheritance but without the language hassles.
Having an OS give up because of a normal application error is unacceptable. However, in this case the application isn't netscape, but your X server, which is unusual in that it speaks directly to the video hardware, and is thus given the means to crash your machine (NB -- not your OS).
Any OS that can be crashed by an application that doesn't speak to hardware is broken. OSes Just Don't Crash.
(BTW, if you reformat the harddrive, your OS hasn't crashed but rather done exactly what you told it to, killing itself in the process -- this is more akin to killing the machine rather than the OS).
Ok, so I wish it had a bit stronger type system, perhaps a-la Bruce's LOOM, which allows you to express covariant types. This is needed because the method Animal::eat(Food) can't be overriden by Cow::eat(Grass) in Java's type system (where Grass is a subclass of Food).
Appart from that, tho, what exactly is your beef with Java the language (as opposed to the various implementations floating around)?
Giving him some credit, it IS possible that he is refering to the generated accessor methods which are necessary to allow inner classes to access private variables of the outer class. These are impossible to access from Java, but nothing stops you from getting at them if you write your own bytecode.
But if that is his point, he could use a course or two in expository writing.
Code morphing is potentially even more powerful than you make out, and could make the current dynamo implementation look like a snail.
Dynamo currently hosts a single binary, while Code Morphing also hosts the OS and the device drivers and...
The neat thing is that if you're careful, you can start inlining kernel and driver code into the application. Goodbye context switch on system call! That could get you big, big, performance wins.
Of course, transmeta isn't doing it yet, so maybe I missed something.
Slashdot Mirror
Ok, so I wanted to verify your opinion, so I did a google search. It appears that you are right
Jeff Merkley sucks.
I'd never seen that one before. cute.
(why does the preview strip links?)
How much longer does IBM's patent on arithmetic coding run? I know it was proposed as an alternative to huffman encoding for JPGs, but since it was patented noone used it, even though it produced superious results.
Well,
it's all down to entropy. A shorter gene sequence might have its uses (less energy to copy?) but redundancy is king when you have a high error rate for the copying. I would imagine that DNA has evolved to be highly robust in the face of mutation, which is in direct conflict with reducing representation size.
What would be really cool would be to work in some industrial strength error correction code into the copying mechanism (grey codes for example). If we are to go into high-radiation environments such as space, some sort of additional error correction will likely be needed in our genes.
does anyone know whether representation plays into gene interpretation? Ie the physical folding of the protein interacting with how the data it holds is interpreted (visualise paper tape which holds not only printed data, but is also knotted in such a way to expose some letters and obscure others).
ObIANAGeneticScientist
I had understood (well, I haven't read the dox yet, so my ass is talking here) that the state of processes was saved and hot-swapped into the newly started kernel.
I thought that sounded reasonably cool.
If it is just a way to avoid bois restart, that is less cool, but definately beats running lilo to remotely restart with a new kernel.
Given that Theo indicated that an SMP kernel was currently infeasable, I'd suspect that a distributed kernel (of which an SMP appears to be a special case) is pretty unlikely.
I dunno. I thought nanotubes would be... smaller.
The knotted tubes are 10 microns in diameter, and are shown using an optical microscope.
Given that intel is mass producing microchips with features 1/75th this size, I had thought the state of the art would be smaller than that.
I'm obviously missing somehting.
The idea being that while mass might be more effective, light is easier to carry. Better yet, light is easy to send from the base, so you don't have to carry it at all.
The book Heavy Weather (Bruce Sterling) has a protagonist power a spaceship by rail-lauched iron slugs from the moon. Each one is captured and fired back, speeding the ship up. A bit of double barreling and (see Indistingiushable from Magic by Forward for illustrations) and the coming and going slugs wont collide.
Pretty cool
It was asimov. Some short and squat robots that flew to jupiter and outmachoed the not-so-jovial jovians. Turns out the Jovians were gung ho on interplanetary war, but were so scared of the macho humans that they changed their plans, never realising that the robots were'nt human.
IIRC the field flickered like a flourescent light.
whaddayamean Colorwheel?
how fast is this baby spinning? 150 rps? It does the colors sequentially?
why does it seem like I'm missing something here?
How sub-obtimal is the MMAP approach if you are RAM starved, as compared to accessing the DB like a conventional file?
If not too much, you see a nice incremental way of scaling performance: just buy more ram, reboot. Neat!
For those of us who like strong typing (yes, I'm a masochist) I'd like to tip the hat towards Java ML or Haskell-to-Java.
JML
J HS
Neither is an interpreter, but for sheer perversity, they're both worth a look.
Johan
I'm suprised that this was modded up. There are non-homework reasons to use scheme. Modern implementations are suprisingly fast.
While you might not want to port those numerical apps yet, the expressiveness and interactivity of scheme allows you to churn out applications at an amazing rate.
I tend to use python for small sys-admin programs ("python - a better shell") and web toys, but for anything larger than a few pages, I find myself pining for scheme. I never do get around to installing it tho, so I end up using java and jpython. I'm going to look into kawa right now.
Thanks for the kick in the pants!
It's a case of trying to balance the very absract good society derives from privacy against the concrete damange of crime. We all agree that no-privacy is really bad; the problem comes when we start trying balance the abstract against concrete. You find that it is almost impossible, so pretty much the only valid approach is going to one of the extremes. I would favor making the right to privacy be as absolute as the right to free speech (which is abridged, but not much). Recent legislation seems to tend in the opposite direction (c.f. recent brittish proposals to record pretty much EVERYTHING).
I think a decent compromise might be to take a page out of the DCMA of all places. Anyone who tries to protect their privacy (closing of doors, using encryption) has a right to it. Anything in the clear is fair game.
This would be completely in line with the current standards on police conduct -- without a warrant, they can look through windows and enter through open doors (== in the clear) but not break a lock or open a bag (== encrypted).
So by the above standards, the keyboard tap is A-OK, and so is carnivore. Damn. Knock me down, please. Oops.
Can anyone comment on how much a person whose house is being searched under warrant must cooperate? Opening safes? Unlocking doors? Locating documents?
It will only be enabled if you turn it on, so you can decide for yourself. Me, I'd give my left... Well, I wouldn't, but I'd really keen on the subpixel stuff to make up for the measly 1024x768 res on my laptop.
I think you'll find that a conventional harddrive has a stiff (glass?) platter ontop of which very light read heads float. The same aerodynamic effect which pulls a wing up pulls the heads down towards the spinning disk but keeps them from touching, IIRC.
Well, I just got some three letter network's broadcasts, but they were crap. I don't really care when the events are shown, but I do want to see whole events. Ok, so have a nice recap at 6pm, and if I have to stay up until 4 in the morning to watch sailing or fencing, that's fine, but show then SOMETIME.
Instead, we got MTV like snippets from different events, with seemingly more filler (bios of the american athletes who were slated to win, analysis of some event we hardly got to see, excuses why so-and-so failed to win) and advertising than sports. How am I supposed to get excited about that? I didn't so I turned it off and went to the bar.
In summarium, I was unable to watch any sports because of all the hoopla about the olympics.
multiple inheritance is one of these (mis)features that is REALLY useful in a few cases, but causes no end of trouble in 17 other parts of the language spec and everyday programming.
I think anyone who has programmed in Java or Smalltalk for a while has wanted it, but it is generally held ot be more pain that it is worth.
This is especially true as there are other alternatives (such as mixins) which solve 90% of what you would gain from multiple inheritance but without the language hassles.
how is that a troll?
erm.
He's right, you know.
Having an OS give up because of a normal application error is unacceptable. However, in this case the application isn't netscape, but your X server, which is unusual in that it speaks directly to the video hardware, and is thus given the means to crash your machine (NB -- not your OS).
Any OS that can be crashed by an application that doesn't speak to hardware is broken. OSes Just Don't Crash.
(BTW, if you reformat the harddrive, your OS hasn't crashed but rather done exactly what you told it to, killing itself in the process -- this is more akin to killing the machine rather than the OS).
Ok, so I wish it had a bit stronger type system, perhaps a-la Bruce's LOOM, which allows you to express covariant types. This is needed because the method Animal::eat(Food) can't be overriden by Cow::eat(Grass) in Java's type system (where Grass is a subclass of Food).
Appart from that, tho, what exactly is your beef with Java the language (as opposed to the various implementations floating around)?
Which features did you have in mind?
Giving him some credit, it IS possible that he is refering to the generated accessor methods which are necessary to allow inner classes to access private variables of the outer class. These are impossible to access from Java, but nothing stops you from getting at them if you write your own bytecode.
But if that is his point, he could use a course or two in expository writing.
It comes our rhyming with "skull" when I say it out loud, which is why I was confused.
huh? I'm not following you there, in the cl -> shell step.
shalmaneser!
Code morphing is potentially even more powerful than you make out, and could make the current dynamo implementation look like a snail.
...
Dynamo currently hosts a single binary, while Code Morphing also hosts the OS and the device drivers and
The neat thing is that if you're careful, you can start inlining kernel and driver code into the application. Goodbye context switch on system call! That could get you big, big, performance wins.
Of course, transmeta isn't doing it yet, so maybe I missed something.