The Callanish stone circle on the Isle of Lewis is very picturesque. It's in a beautiful setting and the view out over Loch Roag from the stones is pretty spectacular. I think it might even be free to get in.
Incidentally, what are some of my fellow Slashdotters' checklists when they experience an infection? I haven't had any problems for years, so I haven't put much thought into it until last week when I got infected.
Perhaps it's a massive propaganda campaign by Microsoft to get some publicity? I get the impression that they're starting to feel a bit of competitive pressure these days.
I'd be shocked if an other product better supported MS' proprietry format than MS' products. Yes, MS Office is better in supporting MS Office macros. But OpenOffice is better in supporting OpenOffice macros.
OpenOffice.org calc does a better job of creating Excel 97/XP files that Excel. I find that the spreadsheets I make with Excel (and we've got the one with the ribbon interface as well now) are a good 25% larger than when made with OOo calc and saved to Excel format.
You can create the file in Excel, load it into OOo calc and save it in Excel format without making any other changes and it miraculously shrinks in size!
The pointy-haired corporation I work for has finally allowed us developers to have Linux on the desktop. Our Windows XP PeeCees got reinstalled with 64-bit CentOS and the Windows XP images got relegated to virtual machines on a server.
I do everything except OutBreak and PoorPoint on CentOS. All our development is for Linux anyway.
Yes, I detest Microsoft. No, I'm not immature, I just have opinions that have formed over 25 years of bitter experience.
Back in the day, there used to be a BBC TV programme called Tomorrow's World, which was half an hour on a Thursday evening and all about science and technology.
As a small boy in the 1980s I loved watching it. I remember once there were some scientist/engineer types on talking about the future of the car, about how to improve efficiency into the 100-200 miles per gallon range. The idea they had was a gas turbine/electric hybrid. There would be a small (about twice the size of a baked bean tin) ceramic gas turbine (which could run at very high temperatures) connected to an electrical generator feeding into batteries which would power electric motors at each wheel. The electic motors could also be used for regenerative breaking.
That was a cool programme in those days and one of the things that got me into science and engineering.
I am Scottish and have the genuine accent. What's more, when I was a small boy I used to watch Star Trek and want to be an engineer on a starship just like Scotty.
OK, so I'm an engineer and have the accent, but two out of three isn't bad and I'm working on the starship.
Finding the appropriate function in modern IDEs is as simple as...
Therein lies the rub.
The point of high-level languages is to make ideas expressible clearly and simply so that the human can understand them and so that the compiler can translate them into efficient machine code.
That we need these huge, complicated, clever IDEs to be productive with many popular languages is very telling.
I've managed to get this far without an IDE. I write C every day at work, shell scripts, Makefiles and the occasional bit of C++. All I use is vim and the GNU command-line utilities. Luckily the C++ that I encounter is small enough (a few thousand lines of embedded stuff) that I don't need special tools to navigate through it. I can simply open a few files and read them.
We use CPPUNIT for unit testing, and again I don't need an IDE. I just read the header files.
Other people whose projects are completely in C++ struggle with Eclipse and SlickEdit.
I love coding. In own time I like reading about other languages. I've dabbled in scheme, Java and ruby, and one day I'll learn them properly. D looks very promising. I must try it out. C++, like PERL, is a necessary evil in our profession and I only do it when I'm paid.
I was talking about the last 100 years in general, and this country's attitude towards innovation, not the small closed world of academia. They know what to do, but they would because that's their business. I was talking about the rest of society's attitude. We are a nation of Liberal Arts Luddites.
The UK has always been a terrible place for scientists, engineers and entrepreneurs trying to develop new technology. Just like everywhere else, we have great ideas but there is a total lack of vision when it comes to implementing them or even entertaining the idea that something may be useful in the future.
I'm really disappointed with this new government's science policy. It is very similar to a Thatcherite one from the 1980 where the government would cut back science research and development spending and "target" what was left at things that would be or might be immediately useful to industry.
That's not science, it's corporate technology R&D. It's the sort of things that companies can and should do.
Actually, egotistical is the wrong word - fucking insane fits a lot better.
The whole point of Relativity is that there's no "preferred reference frame" i.e. you can't just assume that you can measure things anywhere presumably against the universe as some kind of fixed backdrop (the Newtonian view) and expect to get the right answers. Speed, distance, mass, time and gravity all depend of the frame of reference in which they are measured. Two objects moving with respect to each other are, by definition, in different frames of reference.
It might be better if you read the Wikipedia articles on the Lorentz Transform and Special Relativity. The Lorentz Transform article explains simultaneity and measuring the speed of light leading to the Lorentz Transforms which lead straight to Special Relativity.
As I said before, Special Relativity is counter-intuitive because it is outside of our sphere of everyday experience. The only way to really understand it is by reading good articles on the subject that explain it from first principles and that use maths. It will take you a few hours of reading, thinking and trying the maths before you will really begin to appreciate it.
Arguing on a discussion forum isn't really sufficient.
Time travels at the same rate in the different locations for people at those locations. However, when they look at the other location from where they are, they will see time there traveling slower. Since there is no preferred reference frame, they both see the same effect. That's not insane, it's physical reality, the maths predict it and it is observable in Nature by experiment.
You're missing something very important about the Twin Paradox: that is how long it takes for information about one of the observers in one frame to reach the observer in the other.
It's 18 years since I went to university to study Astrophysics. In our first year, the Special Relativity text book we had was Special Relativity by A P French from the M I T Introductory Physics Series. It's clear and concise and you can buy it from the likes of amazon.com.
A spacecraft is at rest with respect to Earth (for argument's sake). It might be in low earth orbit, ready to leave. To all intents and purposes their clocks tick at the same rate. Communication is to all intents and purposes instantaneous between them.
The rocket starts accelerating away from the Earth. The people on the Earth see the rocket moving away faster and faster. The people on the rocket see the Earth moving away faster and faster.
As the rocket approaches a substantial fraction of the speed of light, as observed from the Earth, clocks on the rocket appear to slow down. Light from the rocket appears red-shifted. The rocket's length contracts in the direction of travel. On Earth, the clocks there are still going at the same rate.
As observed from the rocket, clocks on Earth appear to have slowed down (by the same amount that the clocks on the rocket appear to have when viewed from the Earth). Light from the Earth appears red-shifted. The Earth has contracted in length along the direction of travel of the rocket.
The faster the rocket gets (as observed from Earth), the slower its clocks appear to run, the more red-shifted it looks and the shorter it gets. The people on the rocket appear to age more slowly.
Meanwhile, on the rocket, the people on Earth appear to be aging more slowly and clocks appear to run slower etc.
Another consequence of this is that wherever the rocket is going, the distance to its destination shrinks as seen from the rocket. For very high velocities, the more energy added (the more the rocket accelerates) this distance shrinks.
Put another way, if you are on this rocket you could effectively reduce the distance to anywhere arbitrarily if you could add enough energy with a sufficiently powerful engine and enough fuel.
The trouble is, it's an awful lot of energy.
By the way, the mass of the rocket also increases the faster it goes (and so does the Earth's). The Lorentz transform is the key to it all and comes from the principle of simultaneity.
If all inertial reference frames were equally valid, there would be nothing to stop you from traveling faster than the speed of light.
Wrong.
You cannot travel "faster than the speed of light" because no matter where or how you measure it, light always travels at speed c.
The wikipedia page on Special Relativity explains this clearly from first principles. Don't expect to understand this in half an hour. It will take a few hours of reading and doing worked examples. Since it is out of our sphere of everyday experience, it is not intuitive.
I was being sarcastic. It's a bit like the Beowulf cluster of Natalie Portmans in Soviet Russia etc. A few years back, everyone round here was putting "wallah" in their posts, not knowing the correct spelling. The other thing they get wrong nowadays is writing "then" when they mean "than" and "disinterested" when they mean "uninterested." Also "insure" instead of "ensure", "effect" instead of "affect"....
Life is short, but the interwebs are getting full of such talk. I can't deal with them all in one foul swoop and I'm getting tyred. Too old for that kind of think.
What has the Free (as in Freedom) Software Foundation got to do with the State owning the means of production on behalf of the workers, authoritarian government and the elimination of dissent?
Why should I need extra software to transfer files between two systems with TCP/IP networking? Two Win XP machines used to be OK.
They weren't my machines. I was only trying to help someone. Alas, I ran out of time and had to give up. I think they burnt the files to DVD or something in the end.
I thought Windows was supposed to make things easy for non-technical people?
The problem is more fundamental than that: it's at the IP level. The Windows 7 machine refuses to send/receive IP packets to and from the XP machine.
It was a few months back now, and they weren't my machines, but I am interested to know why things didn't work. Windows is too hard for my poor little brain!
So, using a piece of Cat 5e and TCP/IP networking, how to I get files from a Windows XP machine to a Windows 7 machine?
It used to be relatively easy with XP (not as easy as using rsync, but anyway) you just found the picture of the NIC to point at, put in an IP address and netmask and enabled the mysterious Windows networking things by ticking the right boxes. Then you could make your drives visible on the network. Do the same on the other machine and "wallah" you could transfer files to your heart's content.
Try that with one Windows 7 machine and one Windows XP machine. For some reason, the Windows 7 machine will not see the Windows XP machine.
As a Brit, I follow the US space programme with intereset, because it's the best hope the human race has for getting off this rock.
It seems to me that buying routine human access to LEO from commercial companies is a good idea nowadays that the technology is sufficiently advanced and well understood, and it seems silly to waste public money on that which can be accomplished quicker, cheaper and safer by the private sector. Ares I looked like a disaster waiting to happen both financially and in terms of crew safety.
The space shuttle was a remarkable piece of over-engineering, but 14 people lost their lives in it.
I feel really sorry for these people being layed off. The transition from Shuttle to whatever the successor may be has been very poorly handled. Minds keep changing and there is no plan. Tens of thousands of people will suffer and a great deal of technical skills will be squandered.
I'd like to see NASA developing a new heavy-lift booster for going beyond LEO, something that can lift huge payloads (100 tonnes?) and people if necessary. I'd like to see big space telescopes, a long-term human outpost on the moon, the manned asteroid missions and a space dock and construction facility for building a real space ship for going to Mars.
Where is the vision? My country doesn't have any, alas. We cancelled our rocket programme back in the 1970s because the politicians couldn't see a future in satellite launching...
China is coming along, I suppose, so there might be some home there, maybe even a new space race?
One thing's for sure, we (the human race) will never get anywhere unless someone sets some goals. We need to learn to live on other planets and the only way we'll do that is by trying.
So, is NASA going to build a DIRECT launcher now or will there be yet another politically-driven paper study of an over-engineered, under-performing white elephant?
That's why intel is keen on Solaris. It already scales. I'm sure Oracle will manage to put a spanner in the works somehow, though. Then it will be more economical to rewrite Linux.
Slashdot Mirror
The Callanish stone circle on the Isle of Lewis is very picturesque. It's in a beautiful setting and the view out over Loch Roag from the stones is pretty spectacular. I think it might even be free to get in.
Incidentally, what are some of my fellow Slashdotters' checklists when they experience an infection? I haven't had any problems for years, so I haven't put much thought into it until last week when I got infected.
Me neither. I switched to Linux in 1996.
+1 Funny (very bad attempt at trolling).
Perhaps it's a massive propaganda campaign by Microsoft to get some publicity? I get the impression that they're starting to feel a bit of competitive pressure these days.
I'd be shocked if an other product better supported MS' proprietry format than MS' products. Yes, MS Office is better in supporting MS Office macros. But OpenOffice is better in supporting OpenOffice macros.
OpenOffice.org calc does a better job of creating Excel 97/XP files that Excel. I find that the spreadsheets I make with Excel (and we've got the one with the ribbon interface as well now) are a good 25% larger than when made with OOo calc and saved to Excel format.
You can create the file in Excel, load it into OOo calc and save it in Excel format without making any other changes and it miraculously shrinks in size!
The pointy-haired corporation I work for has finally allowed us developers to have Linux on the desktop. Our Windows XP PeeCees got reinstalled with 64-bit CentOS and the Windows XP images got relegated to virtual machines on a server.
I do everything except OutBreak and PoorPoint on CentOS. All our development is for Linux anyway.
Yes, I detest Microsoft. No, I'm not immature, I just have opinions that have formed over 25 years of bitter experience.
Back in the day, there used to be a BBC TV programme called Tomorrow's World, which was half an hour on a Thursday evening and all about science and technology.
As a small boy in the 1980s I loved watching it. I remember once there were some scientist/engineer types on talking about the future of the car, about how to improve efficiency into the 100-200 miles per gallon range. The idea they had was a gas turbine/electric hybrid. There would be a small (about twice the size of a baked bean tin) ceramic gas turbine (which could run at very high temperatures) connected to an electrical generator feeding into batteries which would power electric motors at each wheel. The electic motors could also be used for regenerative breaking.
That was a cool programme in those days and one of the things that got me into science and engineering.
*sits back smugly*
I am Scottish and have the genuine accent. What's more, when I was a small boy I used to watch Star Trek and want to be an engineer on a starship just like Scotty.
OK, so I'm an engineer and have the accent, but two out of three isn't bad and I'm working on the starship.
Finding the appropriate function in modern IDEs is as simple as...
Therein lies the rub.
The point of high-level languages is to make ideas expressible clearly and simply so that the human can understand them and so that the compiler can translate them into efficient machine code.
That we need these huge, complicated, clever IDEs to be productive with many popular languages is very telling.
I've managed to get this far without an IDE. I write C every day at work, shell scripts, Makefiles and the occasional bit of C++. All I use is vim and the GNU command-line utilities. Luckily the C++ that I encounter is small enough (a few thousand lines of embedded stuff) that I don't need special tools to navigate through it. I can simply open a few files and read them.
We use CPPUNIT for unit testing, and again I don't need an IDE. I just read the header files.
Other people whose projects are completely in C++ struggle with Eclipse and SlickEdit.
I love coding. In own time I like reading about other languages. I've dabbled in scheme, Java and ruby, and one day I'll learn them properly. D looks very promising. I must try it out. C++, like PERL, is a necessary evil in our profession and I only do it when I'm paid.
Real men code in Assembler.
Real Men code themselves a FORTH environment in assembler.
My favourite quote: c++; /* this makes c bigger but returns the old value */
I was talking about the last 100 years in general, and this country's attitude towards innovation, not the small closed world of academia. They know what to do, but they would because that's their business. I was talking about the rest of society's attitude. We are a nation of Liberal Arts Luddites.
The UK has always been a terrible place for scientists, engineers and entrepreneurs trying to develop new technology. Just like everywhere else, we have great ideas but there is a total lack of vision when it comes to implementing them or even entertaining the idea that something may be useful in the future.
I'm really disappointed with this new government's science policy. It is very similar to a Thatcherite one from the 1980 where the government would cut back science research and development spending and "target" what was left at things that would be or might be immediately useful to industry.
That's not science, it's corporate technology R&D. It's the sort of things that companies can and should do.
...and the "traveling twin" will see the stationary one as younger...
So what would happen if the "traveling twin" turns round once he gets to his destination, and comes back at the same speed?
Actually, egotistical is the wrong word - fucking insane fits a lot better.
The whole point of Relativity is that there's no "preferred reference frame" i.e. you can't just assume that you can measure things anywhere presumably against the universe as some kind of fixed backdrop (the Newtonian view) and expect to get the right answers. Speed, distance, mass, time and gravity all depend of the frame of reference in which they are measured. Two objects moving with respect to each other are, by definition, in different frames of reference.
It might be better if you read the Wikipedia articles on the Lorentz Transform and Special Relativity. The Lorentz Transform article explains simultaneity and measuring the speed of light leading to the Lorentz Transforms which lead straight to Special Relativity.
As I said before, Special Relativity is counter-intuitive because it is outside of our sphere of everyday experience. The only way to really understand it is by reading good articles on the subject that explain it from first principles and that use maths. It will take you a few hours of reading, thinking and trying the maths before you will really begin to appreciate it.
Arguing on a discussion forum isn't really sufficient.
Time travels at the same rate in the different locations for people at those locations. However, when they look at the other location from where they are, they will see time there traveling slower. Since there is no preferred reference frame, they both see the same effect. That's not insane, it's physical reality, the maths predict it and it is observable in Nature by experiment.
You're missing something very important about the Twin Paradox: that is how long it takes for information about one of the observers in one frame to reach the observer in the other.
It's 18 years since I went to university to study Astrophysics. In our first year, the Special Relativity text book we had was Special Relativity by A P French from the M I T Introductory Physics Series. It's clear and concise and you can buy it from the likes of amazon.com.
Crikey! That's complicated. All I wanted to do was the equivalent of rsync or scp some files over the network.
If I'd had a couple of KNOPPIX disks I'd just have booted each machine into Linux, run ifconfig and done an rsync.
A spacecraft is at rest with respect to Earth (for argument's sake). It might be in low earth orbit, ready to leave. To all intents and purposes their clocks tick at the same rate. Communication is to all intents and purposes instantaneous between them.
The rocket starts accelerating away from the Earth. The people on the Earth see the rocket moving away faster and faster. The people on the rocket see the Earth moving away faster and faster.
As the rocket approaches a substantial fraction of the speed of light, as observed from the Earth, clocks on the rocket appear to slow down. Light from the rocket appears red-shifted. The rocket's length contracts in the direction of travel. On Earth, the clocks there are still going at the same rate.
As observed from the rocket, clocks on Earth appear to have slowed down (by the same amount that the clocks on the rocket appear to have when viewed from the Earth). Light from the Earth appears red-shifted. The Earth has contracted in length along the direction of travel of the rocket.
The faster the rocket gets (as observed from Earth), the slower its clocks appear to run, the more red-shifted it looks and the shorter it gets. The people on the rocket appear to age more slowly.
Meanwhile, on the rocket, the people on Earth appear to be aging more slowly and clocks appear to run slower etc.
Another consequence of this is that wherever the rocket is going, the distance to its destination shrinks as seen from the rocket. For very high velocities, the more energy added (the more the rocket accelerates) this distance shrinks.
Put another way, if you are on this rocket you could effectively reduce the distance to anywhere arbitrarily if you could add enough energy with a sufficiently powerful engine and enough fuel.
The trouble is, it's an awful lot of energy.
By the way, the mass of the rocket also increases the faster it goes (and so does the Earth's). The Lorentz transform is the key to it all and comes from the principle of simultaneity.
If all inertial reference frames were equally valid, there would be nothing to stop you from traveling faster than the speed of light.
Wrong.
You cannot travel "faster than the speed of light" because no matter where or how you measure it, light always travels at speed c.
The wikipedia page on Special Relativity explains this clearly from first principles. Don't expect to understand this in half an hour. It will take a few hours of reading and doing worked examples. Since it is out of our sphere of everyday experience, it is not intuitive.
I was being sarcastic. It's a bit like the Beowulf cluster of Natalie Portmans in Soviet Russia etc. A few years back, everyone round here was putting "wallah" in their posts, not knowing the correct spelling. The other thing they get wrong nowadays is writing "then" when they mean "than" and "disinterested" when they mean "uninterested." Also "insure" instead of "ensure", "effect" instead of "affect" ....
Life is short, but the interwebs are getting full of such talk. I can't deal with them all in one foul swoop and I'm getting tyred. Too old for that kind of think.
What has the Free (as in Freedom) Software Foundation got to do with the State owning the means of production on behalf of the workers, authoritarian government and the elimination of dissent?
Why should I need extra software to transfer files between two systems with TCP/IP networking? Two Win XP machines used to be OK.
They weren't my machines. I was only trying to help someone. Alas, I ran out of time and had to give up. I think they burnt the files to DVD or something in the end.
I thought Windows was supposed to make things easy for non-technical people?
The problem is more fundamental than that: it's at the IP level. The Windows 7 machine refuses to send/receive IP packets to and from the XP machine.
It was a few months back now, and they weren't my machines, but I am interested to know why things didn't work. Windows is too hard for my poor little brain!
So, using a piece of Cat 5e and TCP/IP networking, how to I get files from a Windows XP machine to a Windows 7 machine?
It used to be relatively easy with XP (not as easy as using rsync, but anyway) you just found the picture of the NIC to point at, put in an IP address and netmask and enabled the mysterious Windows networking things by ticking the right boxes. Then you could make your drives visible on the network. Do the same on the other machine and "wallah" you could transfer files to your heart's content.
Try that with one Windows 7 machine and one Windows XP machine. For some reason, the Windows 7 machine will not see the Windows XP machine.
As a Brit, I follow the US space programme with intereset, because it's the best hope the human race has for getting off this rock.
It seems to me that buying routine human access to LEO from commercial companies is a good idea nowadays that the technology is sufficiently advanced and well understood, and it seems silly to waste public money on that which can be accomplished quicker, cheaper and safer by the private sector. Ares I looked like a disaster waiting to happen both financially and in terms of crew safety.
The space shuttle was a remarkable piece of over-engineering, but 14 people lost their lives in it.
I feel really sorry for these people being layed off. The transition from Shuttle to whatever the successor may be has been very poorly handled. Minds keep changing and there is no plan. Tens of thousands of people will suffer and a great deal of technical skills will be squandered.
I'd like to see NASA developing a new heavy-lift booster for going beyond LEO, something that can lift huge payloads (100 tonnes?) and people if necessary. I'd like to see big space telescopes, a long-term human outpost on the moon, the manned asteroid missions and a space dock and construction facility for building a real space ship for going to Mars.
Where is the vision? My country doesn't have any, alas. We cancelled our rocket programme back in the 1970s because the politicians couldn't see a future in satellite launching...
China is coming along, I suppose, so there might be some home there, maybe even a new space race?
One thing's for sure, we (the human race) will never get anywhere unless someone sets some goals. We need to learn to live on other planets and the only way we'll do that is by trying.
So, is NASA going to build a DIRECT launcher now or will there be yet another politically-driven paper study of an over-engineered, under-performing white elephant?
W16? Give me a Wankel rotary engine any day. Reciprocating piston engines are for Victorians.
That's why intel is keen on Solaris. It already scales. I'm sure Oracle will manage to put a spanner in the works somehow, though. Then it will be more economical to rewrite Linux.