Well, how long is a 1ft length split up into 7 equal parts in your so-called "Standard measurements"? (feet, inches, etc. aren't Standard at all and aren't used very much outside the US) Right, it's 1 5/7 inches. The decimal number system wasn't designed to deal with thirds; if you know a length exactly (and it's non-integer), you should usually use fractions, because, as you've noted, 0.333333333333333... isn't very practical. Scientifically, decimal representations of non-integers makes sense only when dealing with measured quantities. (All instruments are imperfect.) If you take a 10' length and bend it on itself, then you must be in an ideal world where a 10' length is exactly 10', and the substance of this length has no imperfections. (It must bend exactly evenly to produce an exact circle, and it can't stretch one bit.) Then you could measure your diameter with your perfect ruler... As you can see, calculating pi by physical measurement is infeasible. Most of the properties of pi that are interesting to mathematicians (its irrationality, transcendentality, relationship with e, and possible normality) can't be verified physically no matter how good an instrument you use. Mathematics in itself doesn't concern itself with the real world; it must be applied.
I don't believe that your question can really be answered mathematically; it has been proven that the set of non-normal numbers (numbers whose digit aren't completely random) has measure zero. In other words, if you pick a number on the real number line in an entirely random fashion, the probability that you'll hit a non-normal number is zero. However, as we know, pi isn't just any random number. We know its digits don't repeat (it's irrational). However, your question is unanswerable in that an analysis of the already-found digits won't reveal anything about the later digits. If we just look at the set of numbers whose first trillion digits coincide with those of pi, then, as above, the probability that a randomly selected number among them is non-normal is zero. This doesn't constitute a proof, though; although the measure of the non-normals is zero, non-normals still exist. This is a bit counterintuitive; however, remember that you're multiplying 0 not by a finite number but, in fact, by C, which is a higher order of infinity than that of the naturals. Thus, the result tells us nothing and enables us to do nothing more than speculate.
Well, it has been conjectured and not disproved that pi is normal; in other words, its digits are entirely, comprehensively, and thoroughly random. Thus, a list of its digits makes an excellent randnum table.
This isn't a fixed value, because in a hydrogen atom, or any other, the nucleus is surrounded by a cloud of electrons. The cloud has no edge; the electrons (one, in hydrogen) can be anywhere.When we measure sizes of these atoms, we're actually measuring the size of the threshold within which the electrons will be, with a certain probability. For example, we might measure the diameter of the region around a hydrogen atom which contains the electron 95% of the time. This probability will be arbitrary (although we could use 50%). Thus, I think it's better to only look at the hydrogen nucleus, one proton.
They did. I realize this was a joke, but, coincidentally, I had been looking for it online just last week, and the linked site contains a full scanned-in copy of what might very well be the first edition.
TeXmacs!=Emacs. In TeXmacs, WYSIWYG. I just thought I'd mention that, although I must admit my original post was a bit stupid (i.e. 8-year-olds don't yet need the features of LaTeX). Thus, in an attempt to vindicate myself, I'll mention the DebianEdu and Debian Jr. projects. Even if the original poster didn't intend to use Debian, these projects could provide ideas of what to include.
I have found LaTeX to be quite sufficient for all of my school-paper-writing needs. It's free, international, supports good advanced math, and does a good job of automating many things like kerning, spacing, placement, citations, and everything else. You can choose your editor, which is very handy. The only school-ish things I found it inappropriate for are things like page layout, which can and should be handled by a specialized program to do that, or a vector graphics program. What can WP do that LaTeX can't? (WYSINWYG, unless you use TeXmacs, but I don't consider that to be a significant sacrifice for the flexibility of a text file.)
I understand that "Red Hat" was implied there, but I still think that the not-so-minor distinction between one of the many Linux-using distros and the kernel itself should have been made, if not by the original story submitter, by the/. editors. Linux 7.3 does not exist and will not for a very long time.
I'm sure if you have that many good ideas then you can make a more valuable contribution to the community than adding one to the already mind-bogglingly wide variety of distros out there. Help with something else, such as bugfixing. If you're an interface freak and love the OS X UI, try writing a GTK+ engine or whatnot to recreate Aqua (and no, Aquiline doesn't count). If you really think your kernel patch is the holy grail and must be included in the main tree, it's still simpler to just send it to other tree maintainers (such as some distros) or LKML.
Re:You made it his business
on
Nosy Vendors?
·
· Score: 1
If I were in their position, I would tell the sales rep that I want to use non-Windows stuff, in hopes of not having to pay for Windows. If the salesperson asked why, I'd explain.
Re:How dense can you get?
on
One of Many
·
· Score: 1
1094g/cm^3 is 1094000g/L, or over one tonne of matter in a volume of one litre (~1 quart, for you non-SI-ers).
1. [Assume] Businesses need recurring revenue (i.e. you can only burn VC $ for so long)
2. [Assume] As long as your hardware doesn't crap out, software lifetime is infinite
3. [Assume] You have a finite customer base
4. [Assume] If you keep improving your software, eventually it will do everything your customers want
5. [Therefore] You can only sell so many copies of software to your customers before they don't need you any more
6. [Therefore] Software as a product is only good for a limited amount of money, and that isn't recurring
7. [Conclusion] Software as a product is not a viable business model in the long-run
If we look at this on a strictly mathematical basis, and say that the software product can be assigned a percentage (where 100% means does all the customers want, 0% means does nothing), then your assumption 4 is not necessarily correct. The percentage of completeness of the product might converge to 100% without ever reaching it (e.g. 90%, 99%, 99.9%, 99.99%, or, for a slower improvement, 50%, 75%, 87.5%, 98.75%,...). Thus, there might always be a few who are benefitted by new added features. There is also a flaw in your assumption 3. While there might be a finite number of people alive at any one time, remember that people are constantly being born, and they can't just inherit their software (this is starting to sound more and more as if software were property...), because the population (and the portion of the population with access to computers) is constantly increasing. I agree with you that if open source is not neglected because of its unconventionality, then in a sufficiently competitive marketplace, without monopolies, it will prove more viable and overcome its competition. However, your argument is not entirely solid.
Companies that sell a product that doesn't break have already signed up for their death blow.
This is, I think, the main drawback of capitalism. A corporation does everything it does for profit purposes. They have plenty of economic incentive to make sure their products aren't durable. (In the case of software companies, they must ensure that their product still has deficiencies of some sort, or nobody will upgrade.) (Go ahead, call me a commie if it makes you feel better...)
Yeah... I just love the part which lists various Microsoft-invented non-standard proprietary protocols and languages (things like COM, DCOM, and ASP) and says that there only exist "third-party solutions"... obviously, whoever's reading that is supposed to nod away and get mad at the people producing GNU/Linux (misreferred to as Linux) for supporting ever-so-useless IETF, W3C, ISO, and POSIX standards made by stupid, biased third-parties instead of wonderful, proprietary, limited, over-priced WinXP... and as to their complaints about "Linux"'s non-integration, I still chuckle a bit every time I am reminded that they did not use their own "standard" GUI widgets in Office, but, instead, opted to reinvent the wheel... well, that's enough MS-bashing for today. That should last me until, say, tomorrow.
you don't mind having to buy Office just to modify Office files
you're on Windows
. Actually, the various APIs are probably there on Macs as well. However, if you're on Linux, then you're stuck. OpenOffice, Abiword, et al. do a reasonable job of reading Office files, but can't quite read everything perfectly, and the fact that Office documents are binary dumps instead of nice, legible XML doesn't help. This is, as I think many readers have realized, a significant advantage that an XML file format would lend. If they carry this out, then developers of other apps, such as competing office suites and member programs, whether free software or not, will have a much easier time reading and correctly interpreting these documents.
Congrats, Adam Wise! You seem to have succeeded in getting a story posted to the Slashdot frontpage with no reply (the thing was posted about 9 hours ago)! I'm sure someone'll notice and tell everyone in a post, though, producing a first post. However, by that time, some of his message will be wrong. It might then be modded troll for mentioning that it's first post, or, alternatively, modded up for gratuitous negated recursion.
This is horribly offtopic, but seemingly necessary.
Logarithmic or not, it doesn't matter. You can't be x times quieter than something. Its not possible. You can be x times louder, but not quieter. Ignoring negatives, x * y is always going to be a larger than either x or y. It really drives me nuts how people misuse that term. You'd think a geek site would be capable of using mathematics terms correctly.
That is incorrect. x*y is not necessarily larger than either x or y, because either can be between 0 and 1. Furthermore, "x times quieter" is equivalent to "1/x times louder", usually. Expressions such as these can hardly be considered mathematics terms.
I agree wholeheartedly. I furthermore believe that Debian should try giving away their OS for free to educational organizations as well, to provide an incentive of some sort for trying it. This really should have been done long ago! Wait...
Well, first of all, I`ll nitpick out that Linux is a kernel, not an OS, and that while it may contain some low-level innovations, it certainly doesn't innovate. In any case, I'd like to point to Liquid War as an example true innovation. In fact, this is probably the most unique game I've ever played, and it's GPLd. Most games are just variations upon simple themes, and the simple games are usually clones of games which are very old. However, Liquid War shows that innovation on a fundamental level is still possible, and can be created by the Free Software community.
I've used equation editing features of various Windows word processors and found them all to be somewhat decent; however, when I switched to GNU/Linux, and sought a solution to the document handling question, then I forayed into HTML and various word processing packages, but made decisive steps toward LaTeX at the end of last (school) year. I find it to be excellent at typesetting in general and equation rendering specifically, especially when augmented with the standard amsmath packages. Of course, it's not WYSIWYG, but it doesn't need to be. If you learn the stuff, it's faster and more flexible, and you have more of an idea what you're doing; many of the mathy symbols surprised me by being as well-named as they were. (e.g. \in \forall \because \therefore) What problems have people had with this?
Try something more like chickenpoces, or, if pox is in the neuter, which I don't think it is, then chickenpoca or pocia. However, poces sounds non-neuter. Pretty much any noun ending in -x is in the third declension. To produce chickenpoxii, you would need pox to be in the second declension. Besides, poxii sounds wrong; few plurals end in ii, although you might be tempted by the cities of Pompeii and Veii and their filii and their disgusting, improvised, incorrectly conjugated virii to think otherwise.
Slashdot Mirror
Well, how long is a 1ft length split up into 7 equal parts in your so-called "Standard measurements"? (feet, inches, etc. aren't Standard at all and aren't used very much outside the US) Right, it's 1 5/7 inches. The decimal number system wasn't designed to deal with thirds; if you know a length exactly (and it's non-integer), you should usually use fractions, because, as you've noted, 0.333333333333333... isn't very practical. Scientifically, decimal representations of non-integers makes sense only when dealing with measured quantities. (All instruments are imperfect.) If you take a 10' length and bend it on itself, then you must be in an ideal world where a 10' length is exactly 10', and the substance of this length has no imperfections. (It must bend exactly evenly to produce an exact circle, and it can't stretch one bit.) Then you could measure your diameter with your perfect ruler...
As you can see, calculating pi by physical measurement is infeasible. Most of the properties of pi that are interesting to mathematicians (its irrationality, transcendentality, relationship with e, and possible normality) can't be verified physically no matter how good an instrument you use. Mathematics in itself doesn't concern itself with the real world; it must be applied.
I don't believe that your question can really be answered mathematically; it has been proven that the set of non-normal numbers (numbers whose digit aren't completely random) has measure zero. In other words, if you pick a number on the real number line in an entirely random fashion, the probability that you'll hit a non-normal number is zero. However, as we know, pi isn't just any random number. We know its digits don't repeat (it's irrational). However, your question is unanswerable in that an analysis of the already-found digits won't reveal anything about the later digits. If we just look at the set of numbers whose first trillion digits coincide with those of pi, then, as above, the probability that a randomly selected number among them is non-normal is zero. This doesn't constitute a proof, though; although the measure of the non-normals is zero, non-normals still exist. This is a bit counterintuitive; however, remember that you're multiplying 0 not by a finite number but, in fact, by C, which is a higher order of infinity than that of the naturals. Thus, the result tells us nothing and enables us to do nothing more than speculate.
Well, it has been conjectured and not disproved that pi is normal; in other words, its digits are entirely, comprehensively, and thoroughly random. Thus, a list of its digits makes an excellent randnum table.
That's very wrong; the ninth digit after the decimal point is not 4 but 3. Not only that, but the toothpick technique is not fast at all.
/ 17-4/19+.. .
Another well-known but slow algorithm is as follows:
pi=4/1-4/3+4/5-4/7+4/9-4/11+4/13-4/15+4
exa-
zetta-
yotta-
Ref: Bureau International des Poids et Mesures
This isn't a fixed value, because in a hydrogen atom, or any other, the nucleus is surrounded by a cloud of electrons. The cloud has no edge; the electrons (one, in hydrogen) can be anywhere.When we measure sizes of these atoms, we're actually measuring the size of the threshold within which the electrons will be, with a certain probability. For example, we might measure the diameter of the region around a hydrogen atom which contains the electron 95% of the time. This probability will be arbitrary (although we could use 50%). Thus, I think it's better to only look at the hydrogen nucleus, one proton.
Extreme apathy is the difference between "I don't care" and "I so don't care" or "I don't give a damn at all".
They did. I realize this was a joke, but, coincidentally, I had been looking for it online just last week, and the linked site contains a full scanned-in copy of what might very well be the first edition.
TeXmacs!=Emacs. In TeXmacs, WYSIWYG. I just thought I'd mention that, although I must admit my original post was a bit stupid (i.e. 8-year-olds don't yet need the features of LaTeX). Thus, in an attempt to vindicate myself, I'll mention the DebianEdu and Debian Jr. projects. Even if the original poster didn't intend to use Debian, these projects could provide ideas of what to include.
I have found LaTeX to be quite sufficient for all of my school-paper-writing needs. It's free, international, supports good advanced math, and does a good job of automating many things like kerning, spacing, placement, citations, and everything else. You can choose your editor, which is very handy. The only school-ish things I found it inappropriate for are things like page layout, which can and should be handled by a specialized program to do that, or a vector graphics program. What can WP do that LaTeX can't? (WYSINWYG, unless you use TeXmacs, but I don't consider that to be a significant sacrifice for the flexibility of a text file.)
I understand that "Red Hat" was implied there, but I still think that the not-so-minor distinction between one of the many Linux-using distros and the kernel itself should have been made, if not by the original story submitter, by the
I'm sure if you have that many good ideas then you can make a more valuable contribution to the community than adding one to the already mind-bogglingly wide variety of distros out there. Help with something else, such as bugfixing. If you're an interface freak and love the OS X UI, try writing a GTK+ engine or whatnot to recreate Aqua (and no, Aquiline doesn't count). If you really think your kernel patch is the holy grail and must be included in the main tree, it's still simpler to just send it to other tree maintainers (such as some distros) or LKML.
If I were in their position, I would tell the sales rep that I want to use non-Windows stuff, in hopes of not having to pay for Windows. If the salesperson asked why, I'd explain.
1094g/cm^3 is 1094000g/L, or over one tonne of matter in a volume of one litre (~1 quart, for you non-SI-ers).
If we look at this on a strictly mathematical basis, and say that the software product can be assigned a percentage (where 100% means does all the customers want, 0% means does nothing), then your assumption 4 is not necessarily correct. The percentage of completeness of the product might converge to 100% without ever reaching it (e.g. 90%, 99%, 99.9%, 99.99%, or, for a slower improvement, 50%, 75%, 87.5%, 98.75%,
This is, I think, the main drawback of capitalism. A corporation does everything it does for profit purposes. They have plenty of economic incentive to make sure their products aren't durable. (In the case of software companies, they must ensure that their product still has deficiencies of some sort, or nobody will upgrade.) (Go ahead, call me a commie if it makes you feel better...)
Yeah... I just love the part which lists various Microsoft-invented non-standard proprietary protocols and languages (things like COM, DCOM, and ASP) and says that there only exist "third-party solutions"... obviously, whoever's reading that is supposed to nod away and get mad at the people producing GNU/Linux (misreferred to as Linux) for supporting ever-so-useless IETF, W3C, ISO, and POSIX standards made by stupid, biased third-parties instead of wonderful, proprietary, limited, over-priced WinXP... and as to their complaints about "Linux"'s non-integration, I still chuckle a bit every time I am reminded that they did not use their own "standard" GUI widgets in Office, but, instead, opted to reinvent the wheel... well, that's enough MS-bashing for today. That should last me until, say, tomorrow.
They're spectacles, you unbespectacled freaks!
- you don't mind having to buy Office just to modify Office files
- you're on Windows
. Actually, the various APIs are probably there on Macs as well. However, if you're on Linux, then you're stuck. OpenOffice, Abiword, et al. do a reasonable job of reading Office files, but can't quite read everything perfectly, and the fact that Office documents are binary dumps instead of nice, legible XML doesn't help. This is, as I think many readers have realized, a significant advantage that an XML file format would lend. If they carry this out, then developers of other apps, such as competing office suites and member programs, whether free software or not, will have a much easier time reading and correctly interpreting these documents.Long live (G/SG/X/XHT)ML!
Congrats, Adam Wise! You seem to have succeeded in getting a story posted to the Slashdot frontpage with no reply (the thing was posted about 9 hours ago)! I'm sure someone'll notice and tell everyone in a post, though, producing a first post. However, by that time, some of his message will be wrong. It might then be modded troll for mentioning that it's first post, or, alternatively, modded up for gratuitous negated recursion.
That is incorrect. x*y is not necessarily larger than either x or y, because either can be between 0 and 1. Furthermore, "x times quieter" is equivalent to "1/x times louder", usually. Expressions such as these can hardly be considered mathematics terms.
Now, why did I reply to that?
I agree wholeheartedly. I furthermore believe that Debian should try giving away their OS for free to educational organizations as well, to provide an incentive of some sort for trying it. This really should have been done long ago! Wait...
Well, first of all, I`ll nitpick out that Linux is a kernel, not an OS, and that while it may contain some low-level innovations, it certainly doesn't innovate. In any case, I'd like to point to Liquid War as an example true innovation. In fact, this is probably the most unique game I've ever played, and it's GPLd. Most games are just variations upon simple themes, and the simple games are usually clones of games which are very old. However, Liquid War shows that innovation on a fundamental level is still possible, and can be created by the Free Software community.
I've used equation editing features of various Windows word processors and found them all to be somewhat decent; however, when I switched to GNU/Linux, and sought a solution to the document handling question, then I forayed into HTML and various word processing packages, but made decisive steps toward LaTeX at the end of last (school) year. I find it to be excellent at typesetting in general and equation rendering specifically, especially when augmented with the standard amsmath packages. Of course, it's not WYSIWYG, but it doesn't need to be. If you learn the stuff, it's faster and more flexible, and you have more of an idea what you're doing; many of the mathy symbols surprised me by being as well-named as they were. (e.g. \in \forall \because \therefore) What problems have people had with this?
Try something more like chickenpoces, or, if pox is in the neuter, which I don't think it is, then chickenpoca or pocia. However, poces sounds non-neuter. Pretty much any noun ending in -x is in the third declension. To produce chickenpoxii, you would need pox to be in the second declension. Besides, poxii sounds wrong; few plurals end in ii, although you might be tempted by the cities of Pompeii and Veii and their filii and their disgusting, improvised, incorrectly conjugated virii to think otherwise.