I have opened my Computerus Geekus Bibleus, or Computer Geek Bible for those who don't speak fluent Latin, and it says here, in the Book of "Networking", Chapter 0x03, Verse 0x00, "Thou shalt not use the protocol known as SMB/CIFS on any sort of network, being of Ethernet, Token Ring, Appletalk, or others of this sort, when thou wishest to export thine directory trees, exceptest as thou dost use the Good Software Package that He calls Samba. This Package may only be installed upon thine computers which run some Unix variant, whether they be *BSD, GNU/Linux, Mac OS X, or another." So, as you can see for yourself, you don't need to worry about giving in to the Empire! The good book tells you that it is completely alright.
Okay, I am not a physicist, but physics allows some really wierd stuff. Does it make sense? Not really. Does it work? Yes. Is it right? Probably not. What YOU don't understand is that there is no such thing as absolute time, as Newton believed. Einstein said that all that matters is what you can see from your point of view. If you can't see it, it doesn't matter. It may matter later, but you can't tell that. Newton said that your point of view doesn't matter, Einstein said that only your point of view matters. And no, neither event a or b occured first because it is impossible to prove which one did. You can prove that, from one frame of reference, event a occured first, but that won't be universally true.
However, I don't belive in true randomness. Things may appear random, but most likely they are not. Of course, this idea has never been proven, but there is much mathematical support of this. I've read most of S. Wolfram's A New Kind of Science, and what I've learned is that simple mathematical rules can be used to create things that appear totally random, even though they are obviously not because we know exactly why those things are how they are. Read the book -- it is very good. It also brings us back to the conflicts of Calvinism -- whether there is such a thing as free will. I get around this debate by saying that, depending on how you look at it, there is and there isn't free will. On a fundamental level, there are very specific processes that determine how your brain works. It appears that one could not have free will. However, they work together in such a way that it is impossible to determine what the eventual result will be. You could create a simulator to simulate someone's brain, but the precision required to determine the inital conditions and the computing power required to compute it is far out of our capabilities. Not only that, but we don't even know all the rules/processes. If you read the book, you will understand more of what I'm talking about. It's got really pretty pictures!
Oh, and I belive in morals also; they are simply the most efficient way to let the most people be happy. I have morals, and I would probably not be as happy if I stopped following them because I would piss people off and I would not be happy because I would be screwed.
So, to recap: randomness and free will: two sides of the same coin because both can be created out of simple mathematical rules (probably, it's never been proven but is highly likely with enough processing power); morals make a society better; physics is damn wierd and nobody knows if it is correct.
Oh, and FYI, I was brought up as a born again Baptist, taught to believe in Jesus Christ and all that stuff. However, I'm too open minded to buy too much in that stuff. I believe that science is the way to prove what is true, and the Bible can't possibly be correct. Sorry, that's my opinion. I'm only an agnostic for now, while my friend is a total atheist. He's screwed up somewhat anyway.
They can't win, and while sharing copyrighted music is probably wrong under the law, it is not harmful to the RIAA. I think of it like radio:
Radio: anyone can listen anyone can keep it (recording) music quality is poor
P2P filesharing: anyone can listen (downloading) anyone can keep it (downloading and not deleting) music quality is poor (mp3!)
The only difference is that record companies don't get direct royalties. But they do make money just because people are being exposed to the music. If nobody was ever exposed to the music, nobody would ever buy it. Filesharing is a radio that you can tune to any song you want and any station you want any time you want (if you've got the connection).
Slackware has all the programs, it just doesn't enable it by default. I used it for a while, then I went back because devfsd it tends to be tempermental. I still use it to see what devices I've got connected and recognized, though.
Re:Does Linux 2.6 permit decent video capture?
on
Linux v2.6 Begins Testing
·
· Score: 5, Insightful
It's not the driver, it's just that Linux Kernel 2.4.x is not preemptible. In other words, the kernel system calls, like read and write, are made to be interruptable in 2.6.x. Basically, it adds some code that allows something else in the kernel to run if one thing is waiting, say, for some sort of input, which improves latency for short periods of time. Linux Journal, May 2002 edition explained this and they had a latency graph of a system playing music under a load. Without the preemptible patch, there were huge spikes in latency (basically audible as gaps in the music) but with the patch, there were minimal changes in the latency. Just today, I noticed something similar to what you talked about. I was ripping CD's and then encoding them as Ogg. Apparently, cdparanoia does system calls that have high latency and since they can't be interrupted, working in X is slow. However, since Ogg encoding is mostly userspace, X was much faster even though more of my processor was being used. Recently, Slashdot linked to an article outlining the changes in 2.6. People have also been making patches for 2.4 for a long while to improve latency, and I think there is a backport of the low latency patch to 2.4.
Reminds me of the Messenger Bird network, where a computer outputted packets, they were printed out, strapped to a bird, and that bird flew across the mountains to another computer, where the packet was inputted by hand. Horrendous latency, with very little throughput.
Okay, first, it is entirely possible that the train is going backwards; it just depends on your point of view. If you are going 55 down Route 1 to pass granny doing 35 in the fast lane is she going backwards and you forewards, you stopped and she backwards, or both of you forewards and the Earth stopped, or both of you spinning like a top with the Earth? Science says that it is impossible to experimentally prove any one of these, so they all are true. In fact, Quantum Mechanics says that indeed you can go back in time because time is merely another dimension. Imagine a film reel where each cell is a two dimensional world at a point in time. You can move the reel back and forth, moving time as you like. However, this is not that good of an analogy because nothing is static like that, not even time. No, not even physicists understand it really; they plug in numbers into equations and see if the results match the data from experiments.
If creationism is demonstrated true, then God's existence is proven. Or do you say that creationism being proven would not necessarily prove the existence of God?
Of couse if one is able to prove creationism true, God's existence is proven. Science would then test this proof (as long as it is not a string of logical statements that come from the Bible or other text, or some sort of "revelation" or something like "we exist, therefore God exists") and conclude as to whether it is true by scientific means, i.e. experiments. If the experiments agree, then science must accept creationism and therefore God.
A fool looks at a watch and says that it has no creator.
Depends on what you define as a creator. I personally see everything as some sort of process taking place in the Universe, meaning that everything is a result of something, not necesarily something one could identify as a "creator". The watch's "creator" is merely a complex chemical process that created it.
Although these are my views, I have not totally ruled out the existence of a god or supreme being. Like many other scientists, I don't belive in a "personal god" but I can't say there isn't a god. Japanese culture states that everything has a soul, and I have to agree with that. How can you tell the difference between a river that seems to have the will to flood towns and a madman that wills people to die by his gun. I define soul very loosely; therefore, God may indeed simply be the same as the universe. Indeed, I also believe that it is unimportant whether God does exist as long as you can't tell the difference.
One of the worst problems I've had with ReiserFS is that on reset, the wrong data gets written to the wrong files. Just today, my.xsession-errors got written directly to the end of/lib/modules/2.4.21/modules.pcimap and something funky happened to/etc/hotplug/pci.agent (I didn't examine it). Another time,/etc/X11/XF86Config was overwritten by some other file. I just hope that 2.6.0 fixes that. I may eventually switch to ext3.
Well, download it and find out. Keep your old kernel and cross your fingers and hope that there are no bugs in the filesystem drivers!
Re:Money crunches create platform dependencies
on
Analysis: x86 Vs PPC
·
· Score: 1
I think that if you use a portable language, it's not a big concern, as long as all your dependancies exist for the other archetecture and all your assembly code optimization has some sort of portable backup. I'm just an ameteur C coder, but I don't think there's much else. Some people put integers into pointers and vice versa under C and GLib has macros for doing this. I don't know how effective it is across archetectures, though, due to differing size pointers and int defaults. ex.: int a = 3, c; void *b;
((int) b) = a; c = (int) b;
and c should be 3. I can't remember a time when I actually did this, but one may use it for GTK+ callbacks or something like that. There could also be memory alignment problems and stuff where people play with the stack too much. Now I down to speculating; could someone explain more?
Not only that, but in 15 years we will have to learn to do quantum computing because we just won't be able to go any smaller with traditional semiconductor technology. We may have holographic mass storage by then, so we will have nearly infinite storage, but if it is not fast then we will still have to resort to some sort or RAM, and that will still be some sort of semiconductor. Fast foreward to the present... It would be nicer for that digital paper stuff to come out (probably never). Of course, mine has to run GNU/Linux AND I want it to be able to record and rewind live TV and radio, play Oggs, store all my pr0n, and play Half Life 2 at 75 FPS (well, the last one's not that important; I don't play to many games.).
That also seems to be the mentality of GLib and GTK+. There are many times when a NULL pointer is passed to some API function and my program segfaults immediately. I can bring up GDB and find what function first passed the NULL pointer.
I've had a lot of trouble with the Via 8233 southbridge audio using the oss kernel driver. I switched to ALSA and everything works fine now, and ALSA comes with ALSA to OSS abstraction modules, too.
Certainly not. There is no need for Pocket Duct because electrical tape has already filled the pocket adhesive market niche.
Re:For all the hatred OSS has towards MS product..
on
Gnumeric Turns 5
·
· Score: 0, Flamebait
Since that time the project has grown to more than 300,000 lines and now supports all 325 worksheet functions in MS Excel, plus almost 100 more.
That's standard GNU software for you; the three options you actually use and the 29,854 you don't that were included because some programmer decided that "Hey wouldn't it be cool if my program could read some obscure file in some bastardized format, invented by some yak farmer in Tibet?"
But the irony is that if Microcrap didn't sell IBM Drek Operating System, Apple would have taken over, selling very proprietary systems, doing the same stuff Gates does, except also having a monopoly on hardware. OS X may never have went BSD and people would still be reverse engineering every change Apple made to their BIOS. Sure, smaller outfits would still exist with other computers, but they would probably not have been popular because they weren't Mac compatible. You would have the exact same shituation, but with one company controlling the hardware AND software. Of course, I don't have a beowulf cluster of universe simulating computers telling me what would have happened if Mr. True Believer Anonymous Coward had shot Bill, but I'm not sure the OSS movement would be less screwed.
I don't think the Higgs boson has mass, becuase it is what gives things mass. Photons don't have charge, do they? I suppose I just don't get the reference.
If you really want to read a funny book on physics, I recomend The God Particle by Leon Lederman. It is written by an experimentational physicist, not a theoretical physicist, and is the greatest book on physics. It goes through an entire history of physics, from Democritus of Abdera from ancient Greece, who first hypothecized that everything was made of a-toms (Lederman's spelling for really uncuttable things, not chemical atoms), to modern day (~1993) with the Fermilab particle accelerator. Everything is explained very incrementally and very well, but if you don't get it, Lederman inserts so much humor that it is extremely enjoyable to read.
That's neither. It's Kelvin, which uses the same difference in temperature as Celsius but has zero set to absolute zero, where there is so little energy that particles stop moving, or a Bose-Einsten Condensate forms where particulate matter turns into a wave. So, 273.15 Kelvin (note that there is no degrees before Kelvin) is the same as 0 degrees Celsius, and 300 Kelvin is 26.85 degrees Celsius, which is also (9/5)*(26.85 degrees Celsius) + 32 = 80.33 degrees Fahrenheit. However, since we are scientists, the temperature listed in the article may as well be in Celsius because 10e12 Kelvin is about the same as 10e12 + 273.15 degrees Celsius, due to Sig Figs (a commonly used method for rounding numbers within experimental accuracy). Either way, physicists would probably never use Celsius or Fahrenheit because things like thermodynamics (ThermoGodDamnIts!) can't be calculated in Celsius. They need a real baseline, not one based on water, that, while useful for bileogical work, is not for even chemistry. Wow, I knew I learned something in AP Chemistry this year!
Re:For those unfortunate times...
on
42-Volt Autos
·
· Score: 1
Yeah, but isn't 42 the answer to life, the universe, and everything?
Re:How long till it decays
on
Corn-Based Plastic
·
· Score: 1, Redundant
I dub my parent post the first significant, non-corny post in this thread!
I don't mind typing, but I'm not that fast (never more than 18 WPM) and not that accurate. I would rather have a Matrix style pluggie in the back of my neck directly connecting my brain to the computer, allowing me to type at the same speed as I think. And while you are making one of those, could I get downloads to? It would be so cool to compress everything you need to know into a file to be downloaded into your brain. Call it a "firmware update" if you will.
Most of the time, I don't even use most real cursive capital letters. Most of the print capitals are faster to write than the cursive ones because there is less to draw than the funkydoodle G or Q.
Slashdot Mirror
I have opened my Computerus Geekus Bibleus, or Computer Geek Bible for those who don't speak fluent Latin, and it says here, in the Book of "Networking", Chapter 0x03, Verse 0x00, "Thou shalt not use the protocol known as SMB/CIFS on any sort of network, being of Ethernet, Token Ring, Appletalk, or others of this sort, when thou wishest to export thine directory trees, exceptest as thou dost use the Good Software Package that He calls Samba. This Package may only be installed upon thine computers which run some Unix variant, whether they be *BSD, GNU/Linux, Mac OS X, or another." So, as you can see for yourself, you don't need to worry about giving in to the Empire! The good book tells you that it is completely alright.
Okay, I am not a physicist, but physics allows some really wierd stuff. Does it make sense? Not really. Does it work? Yes. Is it right? Probably not. What YOU don't understand is that there is no such thing as absolute time, as Newton believed. Einstein said that all that matters is what you can see from your point of view. If you can't see it, it doesn't matter. It may matter later, but you can't tell that. Newton said that your point of view doesn't matter, Einstein said that only your point of view matters. And no, neither event a or b occured first because it is impossible to prove which one did. You can prove that, from one frame of reference, event a occured first, but that won't be universally true.
However, I don't belive in true randomness. Things may appear random, but most likely they are not. Of course, this idea has never been proven, but there is much mathematical support of this. I've read most of S. Wolfram's A New Kind of Science, and what I've learned is that simple mathematical rules can be used to create things that appear totally random, even though they are obviously not because we know exactly why those things are how they are. Read the book -- it is very good. It also brings us back to the conflicts of Calvinism -- whether there is such a thing as free will. I get around this debate by saying that, depending on how you look at it, there is and there isn't free will. On a fundamental level, there are very specific processes that determine how your brain works. It appears that one could not have free will. However, they work together in such a way that it is impossible to determine what the eventual result will be. You could create a simulator to simulate someone's brain, but the precision required to determine the inital conditions and the computing power required to compute it is far out of our capabilities. Not only that, but we don't even know all the rules/processes. If you read the book, you will understand more of what I'm talking about. It's got really pretty pictures!
Oh, and I belive in morals also; they are simply the most efficient way to let the most people be happy. I have morals, and I would probably not be as happy if I stopped following them because I would piss people off and I would not be happy because I would be screwed.
So, to recap: randomness and free will: two sides of the same coin because both can be created out of simple mathematical rules (probably, it's never been proven but is highly likely with enough processing power); morals make a society better; physics is damn wierd and nobody knows if it is correct.
Oh, and FYI, I was brought up as a born again Baptist, taught to believe in Jesus Christ and all that stuff. However, I'm too open minded to buy too much in that stuff. I believe that science is the way to prove what is true, and the Bible can't possibly be correct. Sorry, that's my opinion. I'm only an agnostic for now, while my friend is a total atheist. He's screwed up somewhat anyway.
They can't win, and while sharing copyrighted music is probably wrong under the law, it is not harmful to the RIAA. I think of it like radio:
Radio:
anyone can listen
anyone can keep it (recording)
music quality is poor
P2P filesharing:
anyone can listen (downloading)
anyone can keep it (downloading and not deleting)
music quality is poor (mp3!)
The only difference is that record companies don't get direct royalties. But they do make money just because people are being exposed to the music. If nobody was ever exposed to the music, nobody would ever buy it. Filesharing is a radio that you can tune to any song you want and any station you want any time you want (if you've got the connection).
Slackware has all the programs, it just doesn't enable it by default. I used it for a while, then I went back because devfsd it tends to be tempermental. I still use it to see what devices I've got connected and recognized, though.
It's not the driver, it's just that Linux Kernel 2.4.x is not preemptible. In other words, the kernel system calls, like read and write, are made to be interruptable in 2.6.x. Basically, it adds some code that allows something else in the kernel to run if one thing is waiting, say, for some sort of input, which improves latency for short periods of time. Linux Journal, May 2002 edition explained this and they had a latency graph of a system playing music under a load. Without the preemptible patch, there were huge spikes in latency (basically audible as gaps in the music) but with the patch, there were minimal changes in the latency. Just today, I noticed something similar to what you talked about. I was ripping CD's and then encoding them as Ogg. Apparently, cdparanoia does system calls that have high latency and since they can't be interrupted, working in X is slow. However, since Ogg encoding is mostly userspace, X was much faster even though more of my processor was being used. Recently, Slashdot linked to an article outlining the changes in 2.6. People have also been making patches for 2.4 for a long while to improve latency, and I think there is a backport of the low latency patch to 2.4.
Reminds me of the Messenger Bird network, where a computer outputted packets, they were printed out, strapped to a bird, and that bird flew across the mountains to another computer, where the packet was inputted by hand. Horrendous latency, with very little throughput.
Okay, first, it is entirely possible that the train is going backwards; it just depends on your point of view. If you are going 55 down Route 1 to pass granny doing 35 in the fast lane is she going backwards and you forewards, you stopped and she backwards, or both of you forewards and the Earth stopped, or both of you spinning like a top with the Earth? Science says that it is impossible to experimentally prove any one of these, so they all are true. In fact, Quantum Mechanics says that indeed you can go back in time because time is merely another dimension. Imagine a film reel where each cell is a two dimensional world at a point in time. You can move the reel back and forth, moving time as you like. However, this is not that good of an analogy because nothing is static like that, not even time. No, not even physicists understand it really; they plug in numbers into equations and see if the results match the data from experiments.
If creationism is demonstrated true, then God's existence is proven. Or do you say that creationism being proven would not necessarily prove the existence of God?
Of couse if one is able to prove creationism true, God's existence is proven. Science would then test this proof (as long as it is not a string of logical statements that come from the Bible or other text, or some sort of "revelation" or something like "we exist, therefore God exists") and conclude as to whether it is true by scientific means, i.e. experiments. If the experiments agree, then science must accept creationism and therefore God.
A fool looks at a watch and says that it has no creator.
Depends on what you define as a creator. I personally see everything as some sort of process taking place in the Universe, meaning that everything is a result of something, not necesarily something one could identify as a "creator". The watch's "creator" is merely a complex chemical process that created it.
Although these are my views, I have not totally ruled out the existence of a god or supreme being. Like many other scientists, I don't belive in a "personal god" but I can't say there isn't a god. Japanese culture states that everything has a soul, and I have to agree with that. How can you tell the difference between a river that seems to have the will to flood towns and a madman that wills people to die by his gun. I define soul very loosely; therefore, God may indeed simply be the same as the universe. Indeed, I also believe that it is unimportant whether God does exist as long as you can't tell the difference.
One of the worst problems I've had with ReiserFS is that on reset, the wrong data gets written to the wrong files. Just today, my .xsession-errors got written directly to the end of /lib/modules/2.4.21/modules.pcimap and something funky happened to /etc/hotplug/pci.agent (I didn't examine it). Another time, /etc/X11/XF86Config was overwritten by some other file. I just hope that 2.6.0 fixes that. I may eventually switch to ext3.
Well, download it and find out. Keep your old kernel and cross your fingers and hope that there are no bugs in the filesystem drivers!
I think that if you use a portable language, it's not a big concern, as long as all your dependancies exist for the other archetecture and all your assembly code optimization has some sort of portable backup. I'm just an ameteur C coder, but I don't think there's much else. Some people put integers into pointers and vice versa under C and GLib has macros for doing this. I don't know how effective it is across archetectures, though, due to differing size pointers and int defaults.
ex.:
int a = 3, c;
void *b;
((int) b) = a;
c = (int) b;
and c should be 3.
I can't remember a time when I actually did this, but one may use it for GTK+ callbacks or something like that. There could also be memory alignment problems and stuff where people play with the stack too much. Now I down to speculating; could someone explain more?
Not only that, but in 15 years we will have to learn to do quantum computing because we just won't be able to go any smaller with traditional semiconductor technology. We may have holographic mass storage by then, so we will have nearly infinite storage, but if it is not fast then we will still have to resort to some sort or RAM, and that will still be some sort of semiconductor.
Fast foreward to the present...
It would be nicer for that digital paper stuff to come out (probably never). Of course, mine has to run GNU/Linux AND I want it to be able to record and rewind live TV and radio, play Oggs, store all my pr0n, and play Half Life 2 at 75 FPS (well, the last one's not that important; I don't play to many games.).
That also seems to be the mentality of GLib and GTK+. There are many times when a NULL pointer is passed to some API function and my program segfaults immediately. I can bring up GDB and find what function first passed the NULL pointer.
I've had a lot of trouble with the Via 8233 southbridge audio using the oss kernel driver. I switched to ALSA and everything works fine now, and ALSA comes with ALSA to OSS abstraction modules, too.
Certainly not. There is no need for Pocket Duct because electrical tape has already filled the pocket adhesive market niche.
Since that time the project has grown to more than 300,000 lines and now supports all 325 worksheet functions in MS Excel, plus almost 100 more.
That's standard GNU software for you; the three options you actually use and the 29,854 you don't that were included because some programmer decided that "Hey wouldn't it be cool if my program could read some obscure file in some bastardized format, invented by some yak farmer in Tibet?"
But the irony is that if Microcrap didn't sell IBM Drek Operating System, Apple would have taken over, selling very proprietary systems, doing the same stuff Gates does, except also having a monopoly on hardware. OS X may never have went BSD and people would still be reverse engineering every change Apple made to their BIOS. Sure, smaller outfits would still exist with other computers, but they would probably not have been popular because they weren't Mac compatible. You would have the exact same shituation, but with one company controlling the hardware AND software. Of course, I don't have a beowulf cluster of universe simulating computers telling me what would have happened if Mr. True Believer Anonymous Coward had shot Bill, but I'm not sure the OSS movement would be less screwed.
Nice sig, but my path to Enlightenment is /usr/X11R6/bin/enlightenment
I don't think the Higgs boson has mass, becuase it is what gives things mass. Photons don't have charge, do they? I suppose I just don't get the reference.
If you really want to read a funny book on physics, I recomend The God Particle by Leon Lederman. It is written by an experimentational physicist, not a theoretical physicist, and is the greatest book on physics. It goes through an entire history of physics, from Democritus of Abdera from ancient Greece, who first hypothecized that everything was made of a-toms (Lederman's spelling for really uncuttable things, not chemical atoms), to modern day (~1993) with the Fermilab particle accelerator. Everything is explained very incrementally and very well, but if you don't get it, Lederman inserts so much humor that it is extremely enjoyable to read.
That's neither. It's Kelvin, which uses the same difference in temperature as Celsius but has zero set to absolute zero, where there is so little energy that particles stop moving, or a Bose-Einsten Condensate forms where particulate matter turns into a wave. So, 273.15 Kelvin (note that there is no degrees before Kelvin) is the same as 0 degrees Celsius, and 300 Kelvin is 26.85 degrees Celsius, which is also (9/5)*(26.85 degrees Celsius) + 32 = 80.33 degrees Fahrenheit. However, since we are scientists, the temperature listed in the article may as well be in Celsius because 10e12 Kelvin is about the same as 10e12 + 273.15 degrees Celsius, due to Sig Figs (a commonly used method for rounding numbers within experimental accuracy). Either way, physicists would probably never use Celsius or Fahrenheit because things like thermodynamics (ThermoGodDamnIts!) can't be calculated in Celsius. They need a real baseline, not one based on water, that, while useful for bileogical work, is not for even chemistry. Wow, I knew I learned something in AP Chemistry this year!
Yeah, but isn't 42 the answer to life, the universe, and everything?
I dub my parent post the first significant, non-corny post in this thread!
Maybe some of that AIX code filtered down into Linux while IBM was working on it. Just my 2 cents.
I don't mind typing, but I'm not that fast (never more than 18 WPM) and not that accurate. I would rather have a Matrix style pluggie in the back of my neck directly connecting my brain to the computer, allowing me to type at the same speed as I think. And while you are making one of those, could I get downloads to? It would be so cool to compress everything you need to know into a file to be downloaded into your brain. Call it a "firmware update" if you will.
Most of the time, I don't even use most real cursive capital letters. Most of the print capitals are faster to write than the cursive ones because there is less to draw than the funkydoodle G or Q.