A 'hidden variable' explanation? Bell showed that local hidden variable theories weren't possible, and non-local theories seem unlikely as they contradict relativity, classical mechanics, and intuition.
So no, most physicists think that there's a fundamental uncertainty underlying quantum mechanics, one that's more than just imperfect knowledge.
QM does indeed throw in a level of uncertainty. No-one's quite sure what effect that uncertainty has on the large-scale world; it seems that quantum effects generally get lost when summing over the large numbers of particles we humans deal with. (Unless we do something clever to expose them -- hence lasers, silicon chips, &c.)
But chaos theory is something else. A chaotic system is still perfectly predictable if you know the starting positions and velocities with total accuracy. Instead, chaos theory looks at what happens when you don't know them; it describes how the initial tiny inaccuracies can get larger and larger until they dominate.
So systems like the weather are unpredictable mainly because we can't measure the conditions perfectly, regardless of whether the universe is predictable or not.
Yeah, I switched similarly. Nothing as serious as tendonitis, just strained my right palm (Oi, keep quiet at the back!) to the point where I couldn't do anything with that hand for a couple of days. Mousing left-handed was surprisingly easy, in fact, as were most things. There were a few things that I had real trouble with, such as brushing my teeth; but mostly it was a process of re-education -- remembering to open doors with the other hand, &c.
Since then, my hands have been fine, but I still use the mouse with either hand. Mousing left-handed actually balances the hands far better: the right hand is already leaping between the RHS of the letter keys, the arrow keys, and the numerical keypad, whereas the left is otherwise pretty stationary.
Option 2a is letting other music stores sell tracks in FairPlay-protected AAC that the iPod can play.
Option 2b is letting other music players play FairPlay-protected AAC files from iTMS.
They could do either one of these alone, or both. 2a would remove many of people's complaints about the iPod, without cutting into sales -- it could cut sales from the iTMS, but if Apple don't make profit on those, they won't care. 2b, though, would obviously cut into iPod sales, which would probably hurt them much more.
However (and I don't know if this came through in the film, as I haven't seen it yet), the Christian view is that the physical torture He went through was nothing compared to the spiritual torture -- rejection by and separation from God, the sufferings that we deserved... Crucifixion was a common punishment, and many people would have suffered similar physical torture, but if you believe it, what He went through was far worse even than that.
Anyway, concentration on those last few hours is nothing new -- Bach, for example, wrote two celebrated works (the St Matthew Passion and the St John Passion) covering just that period. But it still makes me uncomfortable. It'd be like filming War of the Worlds, say, and stopping just as the Journalist chooses to give his life to the Martians. Of course that last day is extremely important, but it makes me want to yell at the screen "Yes, but WHAT HAPPENED NEXT?"!
I think we're talking about different things here.
The risk AISI is fragmentation of the Java platform -- the specifications for the language, the JVM, and the library APIs. Conflicting versions of these would spoil platform-independence right along with supplier-independence and many other things. So it's in almost everyone's interests to keep a single specification. Through the JCP, Sun lets everyone have their say in them whilst keeping them fairly stable, which is working well AFAIK.
What you're talking about is the implementation of that platform, and here I may be right with you. I don't think multiple implementations -- provided they implement the same spec -- are any bad thing. Sun could no doubt help by making their compatibility suite more freely available, but AFAIK they're not doing anything to stop other implementations. I don't see too many issues with their open-sourcing their own implementation, either -- again, provided that they could ensure it still implemented the same spec. Maybe they could do that by making the compatibility suite strictly-licensed (disallowing modifications) and requiring it to pass any implementation calling itself 'Java', even their own?
(Maybe much of the discussion hereabouts stems from people confusing these two aspects when they talk about 'open-sourcing Java'?)
C# is no argument. Java is a threat to M$ with or without C# -- as long as Java lets people code cross-platform apps, Windows is that bit less important. So it's in M$' interests to kill or subvert it as long as it's popular, C# or no C#.
Just like there are dozens of incompatible versions of Python and Perl right?
Do you think for a moment that if M$ wanted to kill either of those, they wouldn't be able to? The only reason Python and Perl are still going strong is that M$ don't care about them. They've shown they do care about Java, so you can't necessarily compare.
we believe that open sourcing Java is the only way for Sun to fulfill their promise of Write (and compile) Once Run Anywhere.
Wy do you believe this? I see no reason to, and many reasons not to.
At present, Java's platform-neutrality is pretty good; better than almost anything else. Not just the handful of mainstream desktop OSs, but all sorts of other niche platforms, from phones to mainframes. And it's not just that something runs, but that the platforms are similar enough that software can run on them all. Unchanged.
Now, if Java were completely open-sourced, what's the betting that that range would be maintained? What are the chances that no developer would take the short-cut of hacking in a quick extension to something that's only on their platform? A few quick hacks like that, and suddenly Java software will tend to be platform-dependent; a few more, and it'll get hard to write platform-independent stuff even if you want to.
(And this is without even mentioning a certain 600-lb gorilla with every motivation and tried-and-tested means for platform lock-in. And don't think C# would stop them, either.)
In one respect, Java is almost like the GPL: that takes away certain rights from the developer (the right to change and distribute only the binary) to ensure that greater rights are preserved. Java too restricts the developer slightly (making it hard to access platform-specific features) in order to preserve the greater right of platform-independence. An open-sourced Java would have to ensure that every developer signed up to that ideal; I have very little faith that they all would. And then Java would lose its main advantage.
Many others too. I couldn't find any Atari GUIs, for example -- TOS, MiNT, MultiTOS, nor MagiC. And it has no handheld GUIs at all -- SIBO and EPOC (later developed into Symbian OS) for starters.
In fact, I expect more GUIs are missing than included. Hardly 'Every GUI Ever'...
The disclosed information will have to be updated each time Microsoft brings to the market new versions of its relevant products
Well, I'm sure there are many loopholes in the order (is the scope defined tightly enough to avoid small but vital omissions? what counts as 'interoperability'? &c), but this is one fairly obvious one.
Note that they don't have to release information until they release the product, leaving the rest of us playing catch-up for weeks or months. What's the betting MS then speed up their development cycle so that products are 'released' every few weeks or months, leaving the rest permanently bobbing in their wake...
Me too. Except that in my case it's my Psion 5mx. But I too have read a lot of stuff I've bought at Fictionwise, and stuff I've downloaded for free (some legally from author websites &c, and some, er, not), and it's all in open formats. I can read in bed with the lights out (keep quiet at the back, there!), and I probably read more because it's always there with me -- no more time spent staring at the ceiling of the Chinese take-away, for example.
Another advantage of open formats is their malleability. Neither Gutenberg nor Fictionwise texts are perfect (though they're very good), and texts from other sources are generally much worse; with an open format I can fix misspellings &c, improve the formatting, and generally edit them to my liking. And I can easily cut'n'paste quotes so that I don't have to retype them in online discussions &c. Plus all the usual EBook advantages of searching, bookmarks, high capacity, &c.
As I usually have to point out, I'm not saying that etexts are suitable for everyone -- many people have good reasons for preferring paper. But don't dismiss them; some of us find them extremely useful!
But there're places you can buy DRM-free text files already. Fictionwise, for example, has a lot of stuff for sale in unrestricted formats, which include PDF and Palm DOC as well as iSilo, LIT, Franklin eBookman, Hiebook, Mobipocket, and Rocket. DOC in particular is readable on many platforms, and freely convertible to/from plain text, so books you buy there are pretty well platform- and future-proofed.
I don't know how well Fictionwise are doing (they've been going quite a while and all the signs look good), but if more people put their money where their mouth is, maybe they'd be doing better still...
Yes, but then you freeze the layout. The advantage of HTML, plain text, and similar file types is that the formatting can change to fit the display. EBooks are a great chance to move away from page breaks in the middle of the screen, lines that don't wrap properly, text that's an uncomfortable size, &c.
PDF is great for one thing: representing a printed page. But books are more than just printed pages.
Has anyone used pair programming per se on a project? What was it like? Did you get any benefits? Were there times when it got in your way?
I haven't, but I'm working on an open source hobby project with one other author. We tend to thrash out the high- and low-level design issues by email, sometimes at great length, and then one of us does the actual coding. This seems to work extremely well for us: we both understand all of the project well, and so can do maintenance as needed; we rein in the other's ambition or enthusiasm where needed, but we also prompt each other's imagination too. And the discipline of explaining it all to someone else helps get the design focused and clear.
I've often thought that something like this would be handy at work, too. In most of my programming jobs I've been left largely alone -- there may have been approval for specs and design documents, and brief code reviews after the fact, but the actual creative stuff has almost always been a solo job; and I think this is wrong. Of course, you'd have to get on with the person in question. And -- even more important -- you'd have to have roughly the same vision of where you want to go. But with those assumptions, I'd expect it to work well.
Actual low-level coding is IMO a one-person job (too many cooks, &c), though reviews are always a good idea -- but you shouldn't need to be doing any real design work then, because it should have been done already. And that's where I think pair programming would really help. Maybe it should be renamed 'pair designing'! Anyone else agree?
I don't care what they're selling -- like the iTMS, I don't think I can buy anything from here. But I visit their site a lot for one reason: album artwork.
They are the best source I've found for album cover art: the pictures are large, sharp, colour-balanced, and not over-compressed, and they have a very large selection. Since I started using iTunes' artwork feature to add cover art to all my music, most of it has come from Walmart.
Whatever you think about their corporate policy (and I've heard nothing good), that's at least one good thing they do.
I can perfectly understand a short summary after (and maybe before) each main section. (In fact, I remember that being given as advice for public speaking: "First, tell them what you're about to tell them. Then, tell them. And finally, tell them what you just told them.")
But to spend just as much time again going over stuff without adding to it would seem a real waste. Is that the sort of repetition in the programme?
it's been a long time since I (briefly) signed on to CIX so I can't really say
Well, whatever the relationship, it's still going strong. There's a new web front end, and supporting middleware, but the back-end CoSy hasn't changed much over the last few years. It's still keeping thousands of us in touch (mostly via OLRs) and busy nattering every day, so I guess we owe you some thanks! [fx: raises glass]
any -R compatible drive will work internally (or externally via FireWire) in a Mac with no drivers.
...but not necessarily with Apple software. I recently swapped My Mac's Apple-provided internal DVD-ROM drive for a DVD (+R/-R) writer, and although Toast's perfectly happy with it, both iTunes and the Finder turn their nose up are refuse to write with it (though both condescend to read from it)...
But you don't! I found visiting the US highly confusing because I'd expect to pay the price on the tag, instead of the quoted price plus some awkward percentage that varied from place to place... You never know quite what you're going to have to pay.
Instead, here in the UK everyone quotes the price you actually pay, including VAT! (They have to, by law.) After all, that's the most important thing at the checkout. You can work out how much of that goes to the government if you want to, but that's hardly a major concern when you make a purchase.
VAT is hardly exploitation. It's not as if we don't know it's happening. Look on it as a public contribution to ensuring our country is run reasonably well and that it looks after its people. After all, you generally get what you pay for -- if you don't pay much, then you get a country that doesn't look after its people very well, as the US has found...
(Oh, and please don't call all other governments 'socialistic'. It doesn't do much either for international relations, or for your image here.)
Variable snooze doesn't even need customisation, though! Alarms on the Psion Series 5, for example, can be snoozed for any length of time by pressing the 'Snooze' button several times -- it adds 5 minutes for each press, up to a maximum of 60.
How hard would that be to implement? You could even make it multiples of 9 minutes, so that the traditional use wouldn't change, and people who weren't interested in variable snooze wouldn't even have to know about it...
Slashdot Mirror
A 'hidden variable' explanation? Bell showed that local hidden variable theories weren't possible, and non-local theories seem unlikely as they contradict relativity, classical mechanics, and intuition.
So no, most physicists think that there's a fundamental uncertainty underlying quantum mechanics, one that's more than just imperfect knowledge.
QM does indeed throw in a level of uncertainty. No-one's quite sure what effect that uncertainty has on the large-scale world; it seems that quantum effects generally get lost when summing over the large numbers of particles we humans deal with. (Unless we do something clever to expose them -- hence lasers, silicon chips, &c.)
But chaos theory is something else. A chaotic system is still perfectly predictable if you know the starting positions and velocities with total accuracy. Instead, chaos theory looks at what happens when you don't know them; it describes how the initial tiny inaccuracies can get larger and larger until they dominate.
So systems like the weather are unpredictable mainly because we can't measure the conditions perfectly, regardless of whether the universe is predictable or not.
Since then, my hands have been fine, but I still use the mouse with either hand. Mousing left-handed actually balances the hands far better: the right hand is already leaping between the RHS of the letter keys, the arrow keys, and the numerical keypad, whereas the left is otherwise pretty stationary.
Option 2a is letting other music stores sell tracks in FairPlay-protected AAC that the iPod can play.
Option 2b is letting other music players play FairPlay-protected AAC files from iTMS.
They could do either one of these alone, or both. 2a would remove many of people's complaints about the iPod, without cutting into sales -- it could cut sales from the iTMS, but if Apple don't make profit on those, they won't care. 2b, though, would obviously cut into iPod sales, which would probably hurt them much more.
However (and I don't know if this came through in the film, as I haven't seen it yet), the Christian view is that the physical torture He went through was nothing compared to the spiritual torture -- rejection by and separation from God, the sufferings that we deserved... Crucifixion was a common punishment, and many people would have suffered similar physical torture, but if you believe it, what He went through was far worse even than that.
Anyway, concentration on those last few hours is nothing new -- Bach, for example, wrote two celebrated works (the St Matthew Passion and the St John Passion) covering just that period. But it still makes me uncomfortable. It'd be like filming War of the Worlds, say, and stopping just as the Journalist chooses to give his life to the Martians. Of course that last day is extremely important, but it makes me want to yell at the screen "Yes, but WHAT HAPPENED NEXT?"!
The risk AISI is fragmentation of the Java platform -- the specifications for the language, the JVM, and the library APIs. Conflicting versions of these would spoil platform-independence right along with supplier-independence and many other things. So it's in almost everyone's interests to keep a single specification. Through the JCP, Sun lets everyone have their say in them whilst keeping them fairly stable, which is working well AFAIK.
What you're talking about is the implementation of that platform, and here I may be right with you. I don't think multiple implementations -- provided they implement the same spec -- are any bad thing. Sun could no doubt help by making their compatibility suite more freely available, but AFAIK they're not doing anything to stop other implementations. I don't see too many issues with their open-sourcing their own implementation, either -- again, provided that they could ensure it still implemented the same spec. Maybe they could do that by making the compatibility suite strictly-licensed (disallowing modifications) and requiring it to pass any implementation calling itself 'Java', even their own?
(Maybe much of the discussion hereabouts stems from people confusing these two aspects when they talk about 'open-sourcing Java'?)
C# is no argument. Java is a threat to M$ with or without C# -- as long as Java lets people code cross-platform apps, Windows is that bit less important. So it's in M$' interests to kill or subvert it as long as it's popular, C# or no C#.
Do you think for a moment that if M$ wanted to kill either of those, they wouldn't be able to? The only reason Python and Perl are still going strong is that M$ don't care about them. They've shown they do care about Java, so you can't necessarily compare.
Wy do you believe this? I see no reason to, and many reasons not to.
At present, Java's platform-neutrality is pretty good; better than almost anything else. Not just the handful of mainstream desktop OSs, but all sorts of other niche platforms, from phones to mainframes. And it's not just that something runs, but that the platforms are similar enough that software can run on them all. Unchanged.
Now, if Java were completely open-sourced, what's the betting that that range would be maintained? What are the chances that no developer would take the short-cut of hacking in a quick extension to something that's only on their platform? A few quick hacks like that, and suddenly Java software will tend to be platform-dependent; a few more, and it'll get hard to write platform-independent stuff even if you want to.
(And this is without even mentioning a certain 600-lb gorilla with every motivation and tried-and-tested means for platform lock-in. And don't think C# would stop them, either.)
In one respect, Java is almost like the GPL: that takes away certain rights from the developer (the right to change and distribute only the binary) to ensure that greater rights are preserved. Java too restricts the developer slightly (making it hard to access platform-specific features) in order to preserve the greater right of platform-independence. An open-sourced Java would have to ensure that every developer signed up to that ideal; I have very little faith that they all would. And then Java would lose its main advantage.
In fact, I expect more GUIs are missing than included. Hardly 'Every GUI Ever'...
Well, I'm sure there are many loopholes in the order (is the scope defined tightly enough to avoid small but vital omissions? what counts as 'interoperability'? &c), but this is one fairly obvious one.
Note that they don't have to release information until they release the product, leaving the rest of us playing catch-up for weeks or months. What's the betting MS then speed up their development cycle so that products are 'released' every few weeks or months, leaving the rest permanently bobbing in their wake...
The other way around, surely?
Another advantage of open formats is their malleability. Neither Gutenberg nor Fictionwise texts are perfect (though they're very good), and texts from other sources are generally much worse; with an open format I can fix misspellings &c, improve the formatting, and generally edit them to my liking. And I can easily cut'n'paste quotes so that I don't have to retype them in online discussions &c. Plus all the usual EBook advantages of searching, bookmarks, high capacity, &c.
As I usually have to point out, I'm not saying that etexts are suitable for everyone -- many people have good reasons for preferring paper. But don't dismiss them; some of us find them extremely useful!
I don't know how well Fictionwise are doing (they've been going quite a while and all the signs look good), but if more people put their money where their mouth is, maybe they'd be doing better still...
Yes, but then you freeze the layout. The advantage of HTML, plain text, and similar file types is that the formatting can change to fit the display. EBooks are a great chance to move away from page breaks in the middle of the screen, lines that don't wrap properly, text that's an uncomfortable size, &c.
PDF is great for one thing: representing a printed page. But books are more than just printed pages.
I haven't, but I'm working on an open source hobby project with one other author. We tend to thrash out the high- and low-level design issues by email, sometimes at great length, and then one of us does the actual coding. This seems to work extremely well for us: we both understand all of the project well, and so can do maintenance as needed; we rein in the other's ambition or enthusiasm where needed, but we also prompt each other's imagination too. And the discipline of explaining it all to someone else helps get the design focused and clear.
I've often thought that something like this would be handy at work, too. In most of my programming jobs I've been left largely alone -- there may have been approval for specs and design documents, and brief code reviews after the fact, but the actual creative stuff has almost always been a solo job; and I think this is wrong. Of course, you'd have to get on with the person in question. And -- even more important -- you'd have to have roughly the same vision of where you want to go. But with those assumptions, I'd expect it to work well.
Actual low-level coding is IMO a one-person job (too many cooks, &c), though reviews are always a good idea -- but you shouldn't need to be doing any real design work then, because it should have been done already. And that's where I think pair programming would really help. Maybe it should be renamed 'pair designing'! Anyone else agree?
They are the best source I've found for album cover art: the pictures are large, sharp, colour-balanced, and not over-compressed, and they have a very large selection. Since I started using iTunes' artwork feature to add cover art to all my music, most of it has come from Walmart.
Whatever you think about their corporate policy (and I've heard nothing good), that's at least one good thing they do.
I can perfectly understand a short summary after (and maybe before) each main section. (In fact, I remember that being given as advice for public speaking: "First, tell them what you're about to tell them. Then, tell them. And finally, tell them what you just told them.")
But to spend just as much time again going over stuff without adding to it would seem a real waste. Is that the sort of repetition in the programme?
Well, whatever the relationship, it's still going strong. There's a new web front end, and supporting middleware, but the back-end CoSy hasn't changed much over the last few years. It's still keeping thousands of us in touch (mostly via OLRs) and busy nattering every day, so I guess we owe you some thanks! [fx: raises glass]
Interesting. Do you know if/how the version you wrote is related to the (apparently much changed) version of CoSy that CIX still uses?
[fx: lines up behind Anonymous Coward] Me too. If people hereabouts took as little care over their code as their English, then, well, oh dear...
But you don't! I found visiting the US highly confusing because I'd expect to pay the price on the tag, instead of the quoted price plus some awkward percentage that varied from place to place... You never know quite what you're going to have to pay.
Instead, here in the UK everyone quotes the price you actually pay, including VAT! (They have to, by law.) After all, that's the most important thing at the checkout. You can work out how much of that goes to the government if you want to, but that's hardly a major concern when you make a purchase.
VAT is hardly exploitation. It's not as if we don't know it's happening. Look on it as a public contribution to ensuring our country is run reasonably well and that it looks after its people. After all, you generally get what you pay for -- if you don't pay much, then you get a country that doesn't look after its people very well, as the US has found...
(Oh, and please don't call all other governments 'socialistic'. It doesn't do much either for international relations, or for your image here.)
How hard would that be to implement? You could even make it multiples of 9 minutes, so that the traditional use wouldn't change, and people who weren't interested in variable snooze wouldn't even have to know about it...