Particles need to have fundamental positional properties for the simple reason that they must be differentiated.
There's no reason to assume that microscopical particles can be differentiated.
This is something that Leibniz alluded to in his "principle of the identity of indiscernables".
I'm not sure if Leibniz counts as an authority on the quantum mechanical view of the world.
Two particles may interact directly only if they have equal positions.
What exactly do you define as "direct interaction"? Particles interact via the four fundamental forces, none of which requires direct contact (although the strong force comes close).
Also, there's the EPR paradox which even contains an instantaneous (or superluminar if you will) "interaction" of separated particles. (Again, experimentally tested and found to be true, and again not contradicting Einstein. Nevertheless, Einstein had big problems with the prediction of EPR and hated QM because of it.) It all depends on what you count as interaction. Most physicists view EPR as a sort of interaction which is exactly why EPR is interesting.
It is an interesting point of view to attribute positions to the particles themselves and get rid of the concept of space; however this step is not as new as you seem to believe. Physicists have been using different representations of the QM state space (oops) for a long time; the most prominent of these representations is the Fourier domain or k-space (oops), which classifies particles by their impulse instead of position and is older still, dating back to the theories of classical waves. (I'm not good with numbers, you can look the exact numbers yourself if you're interested; I'm guessing somewhere around 1700 *g*)
As you can see above by the numbers of oopses, a lot of different concepts have been called by the name "space". Each of them allows to specify the state of a particle. Which of these spaces is "real" is a matter of taste. I happen to like the old-fashioned position state space a lot because that's how my brain works (as you correctly observed).
I don't like the idea of the position as a property of a particle. If it isn't plain wrong, it's misleading at least. Nearly a hundred years after the Schrödinger uncertainty inequation (not sure if that is a real English word, I'm not a native speaker) this just doesn't make sense. If you will, call a particle a wave-packet in conventional "space space" or a sharp point in whatever space you like; saying that a particle has a well-defined property called "position" just doesn't work in the current framework of quantum mechanics.
Given the picture of a wave-packet in conventional space, tunnelling is not that hard to imagine. In fact it would be surprising if there was no tunnelling. (This is easy to say in 2006, and much less so in the early 1900's, but hey, mankind moves forward!)
Quantum tunnelling is a well-understood phenomenon. There is nothing superluminar about it, at least not if you're applying your physics correctly and don't cry out "Yay!" once you got a quantity of 3.1e8 m/s out of your calculator.
Unless you cite experiments which demonstrate particle velocities larger than the speed of light, I consider this settled.
And no, Google is not an answer. Still, new ideas are produced and defended by scientists, not a search engine.
This is already corroborated in experiments with quantum tunneling. In certain circumstances, particles are observed going through barriers in a way that defy classical physics. Interestingly, they seem to do so at speeds greater than the speed of light.
They do not. There is a lot of confusion around the quantities involved, and at least 10 different definitions of velocity. However, it can be shown that the so-called superluminar quantum tunnelling (which is experimentally demomstrated, e.g. the infamous Nimtz experiment) can transport neither energy (= matter) nor information at velocities larger than vacuum light velocity (3e8 m/s). There is no current experiment to contradict Einstein's velocity limit postulate. There are facts which make general relativity look dubious, but the velocity limit stands.
Quantum tunneling (long distance quantum jumps) is not to be confused with teleportation which just another example of Star-Trek physics nonsense.
The presence of the word "quantum jump" in an article claiming to discuss physics indicates crackpottery. I know of no meaning of that word in the established physics. Instead, it seems to have been invented as a marketing terminus in the sixties.
Imagine a world where you can travel from anywhere to anywhere instantly.
Which is different from teleportation... how?
The experiments which you seem to be referring to are long distance quantum correlations; in these cases particles are said to become "entangled", i.e. their states are not independent. Even after separting them, each particle seems to instantly know of its twin's fate, defying the Einstein velocity limit. This is _not_ teleportation because the particles are travelling at their normal velocities continuously; they do not jump from point A to point B. Also, after separating them, it is again impossible to transmit information using them; that means again, neither energy nor information at superluminous velocities.
That being said, our current understanding of the quantum mechanical measuring process is less than clear. It is the last hot spot in quantum mechanics (sadly, the most important one for interpreting its predictions). There may well be a lot of new insight in our lifetime and it is an interesting field, however I don't expect teleportation of energy or information from this area. If anything such is possible, one has to look into new theories of gravitation and spacetime.
You won't be able to log in on the virtual terminals. You still can log into your X session if you're running a display manager (this is the common setup these days).
You don't even need JavaScript. A browser that implements some subset of CSS or even tables is enough. It's easy to hide content from a skimming reader, let alone the technically challenged.
Please read up on the issue before stating nonsense. Schoen simply re-used the same data for >10 totally different experiments. That's not filling gaps, it's simply fraud. (Filling gaps is wrong, too -- after all, an experimental scientist is not supposed to figure what should be, but reproducably measure what is actually there.)
Direct3D games probably never will be as fast on Linux as they are on Windoze. It simply because the native API on Linux is OpenGL, and every call has to be "translated" from D3D to OpenGL. 3D Sound and other arcane features still have issues under Linux, but straight OpenGL + Stereo Sound should perform as well as it does on Windows.
The filesystem has about nothing to do with game performance, as any game with a chance to run fluently has to keep most of its data cached in RAM.
Now that sound interesting. Which company makes 3D cards akin to nVidia and ATI technology and provides open source drivers? I'd like to get one, please tell me!
I'd still prefer a proper Debian package made by a competent maintainer over some converted RPM. Automatic conversion can never be as good as a handcrafted solution, and this is especially true for Debian kernel-related packages. (Ever heard about make-kpkg?) Yes, we can still convert to tar.gz and rip it apart:-)
An Open Source driver would be even better, but probably that's unrealistic to expect from ATI.
Yes I have to earn my money too. The fact that some software is only available for Windows is really, not microsoft's fault. It's the vendors fault for not providing you with a more diverse product line, perhaps you should find another vendor. Better yet, write your own and sell it.
Very funny. This program I'm talking about is about twice the size of an office suite. Its development can only be paid for because nearly all tax advisors in Germany basically _need_ it. I even doubt the current developer makes much money of it. (And yes, that's a monopoly, too...)
Funny you should mention Be, I really like it too and still have a CD kicking around the house. I'm not sure that Mr. Gausse had a really solid understanding of how to get adoption of Be going on the PC. I've not mentioned the similarity between apple and M$, but Be is a shining example of how, Apple, is too a monopoly on a smaller scale. In fact there are several companies that died at the hands of Apple.
Apple isn't much better either, true... they're bundling a lot. But at least they don't make up a new file format every day. IIRC iTunes uses MP3?
Just becuase it has "critical mass" does not mean that you have to adopt it, agian, choice. More importantly I think that we are going to see a change in the DRM world in the next couple of years. Really DRM is about content, not about formats. When DRM starts to shift to a content centric eye, well see that format no longer matters.
Of course, I can choose not to listen to digital music. I can choose not to read Word attachments and not to visit sites which insist on Internet Explorer. It's just unsatisfying:-)
In the end I think that Micrsoft is currently on very thin ice. And I'd say that if you were a decision maker for a business that it would be possbible and realistic to run a non M$ shop. And that, is the beginning of the end for them.
It is possible, yes -- if you don't need too specific software. A word processor and a spreadsheet are easy to come by, in doubt use OOo. You might have to fight a bit if you've got a cheap printer or a new motherboard, but these are surmountable problems. The specialized software packages are a much more difficult market. In fact, three years ago, we were still running a DOS-based program (on top of Windows). That's in 2001! There's a hell of a latency involved, and not being able to run DOS/Windows binaries without funny emulators might keep Linux out for a long time.
We are talking about a Consumer desktop operating system, not business, or server.
Do we? OK, let's assume that.
Basic System Utilities such as defrag
Very important, yes! Why should I need a defragmenter? Let MS build a proper filesystem which doesn't need defragmenting in the first place. And BTW, Aunt Mary doesn't need a defragmenter anyway. She doesn't even know what it does except maybe that it makes for a good screensaver.
a web browser, a mail client, the ability to share files and network my computer with others, a reasonably robust media player
Microsoft doesn't only include a web browser. It includes a program which recommends a certain ISP, an IM client which can only talk to other Windows users and a media player which doesn't play RealMedia (just for example) but only their proprietary file format. They get people to use Hotmail and MSN portals via their OS. So that's what you call fair competition over there in the US? *sigh*
cars crashing and windows crash has nothing to do with the feature set comparison that i stated.
I wasn't specifically referring to your post here. People keep comparing Windows and cars all the time. I just don't know why. Maybe because that's an example which everybody knows. But it just doesn't fit.
There is ALWAYS and alternative.
Bullshit. You know, kid, some people have to actually earn their money. It's called "work", and sometimes they even need software for their "work". Some of that software is very specific to certain businesses and only available for Windows. I have such a case here. Yes, I know, the alternative is being unemployed. Cool.
No one is making you use WMA. You don't have to.
Did the term "critical mass" ever occur to you? If 90% of all computer users use WMA, then that is what record companies will offer. We're not at this point yet, because Microsoft made a few mistakes; but have a look at how widespread Word attachments are now. You have a computer? Fine. Nearly everybody subconsciously assumes that you have Word (pirated, of course). That's the direction. Whether a few geeks like that or not is not the point.
Get OS X, or install Linux on your pc.
Guess what I'm writing this in. But I'm not 90% of the population. I'm not deciding directions here.
Microsoft has a monopoly because people perpetuate the monopoly.
Monopolies don't disappear on their own. At least for the next ten years, Microsoft will stay with us. And if they are clever, much longer than that. That's why governments have to do something about it. In fact, I think they're not doing enough, not even here in Good Old Europe.
It's not as if there are not alternatives out there
Dude, face it. There are none. No company has the financial power to develop a viable alternative to Microsoft's integrated product suite. And if governments let Microsoft be, no company will ever have that power for decades.
I really like the Open Source idea, I hope it catches on, and I'm trying to do my part in it (filing bugs, doing a few patches here and there, answering user questions on mailing lists), but the Microsoft Monopoly is here to stay unless there are Open Standards or governments restrict Microsoft's actions. Otherwise, OSS will always be second or third after Microsoft, and newcomers like Be (remember?) which actually have innovative products will die.
I'm against MS bashing, and I'm even against splitting the company. But there have to be rules and standards, rules which apply to any company, be it a two-guys-shop in a garage or the Gates Empire.
Please stop comparing cars and operating systems. This comparison is Krap, as you spell it, because
a) Cars don't crash as often as Windows (OK, modern cars will get there...)
b) There's no monopoly in the car market. Face it. For some applications, there is NO ALTERNATIVE to using a M$ OS.
Also, I'm wondering a little what you consider essential features. I don't need to have IE and Windows DRM Player installed in a typical office box. At least if I don't want my employees to spend their time on eBay or downloading Steve O movies.
Slashdot Mirror
Actually, floating-point pixel formats are relatively new on the nVidia/ATI beach.
Valid points, but seriously, get a spellchecker.
Particles need to have fundamental positional properties for the simple reason that they must be differentiated.
There's no reason to assume that microscopical particles can be differentiated.
This is something that Leibniz alluded to in his "principle of the identity of indiscernables".
I'm not sure if Leibniz counts as an authority on the quantum mechanical view of the world.
Two particles may interact directly only if they have equal positions.
What exactly do you define as "direct interaction"? Particles interact via the four fundamental forces, none of which requires direct contact (although the strong force comes close).
Also, there's the EPR paradox which even contains an instantaneous (or superluminar if you will) "interaction" of separated particles. (Again, experimentally tested and found to be true, and again not contradicting Einstein. Nevertheless, Einstein had big problems with the prediction of EPR and hated QM because of it.) It all depends on what you count as interaction. Most physicists view EPR as a sort of interaction which is exactly why EPR is interesting.
The guy whose name the uncertainty relation carries was Heisenberg, not Schrödinger. Sorry.
It is an interesting point of view to attribute positions to the particles themselves and get rid of the concept of space; however this step is not as new as you seem to believe. Physicists have been using different representations of the QM state space (oops) for a long time; the most prominent of these representations is the Fourier domain or k-space (oops), which classifies particles by their impulse instead of position and is older still, dating back to the theories of classical waves. (I'm not good with numbers, you can look the exact numbers yourself if you're interested; I'm guessing somewhere around 1700 *g*)
As you can see above by the numbers of oopses, a lot of different concepts have been called by the name "space". Each of them allows to specify the state of a particle. Which of these spaces is "real" is a matter of taste. I happen to like the old-fashioned position state space a lot because that's how my brain works (as you correctly observed).
I don't like the idea of the position as a property of a particle. If it isn't plain wrong, it's misleading at least. Nearly a hundred years after the Schrödinger uncertainty inequation (not sure if that is a real English word, I'm not a native speaker) this just doesn't make sense. If you will, call a particle a wave-packet in conventional "space space" or a sharp point in whatever space you like; saying that a particle has a well-defined property called "position" just doesn't work in the current framework of quantum mechanics.
Given the picture of a wave-packet in conventional space, tunnelling is not that hard to imagine. In fact it would be surprising if there was no tunnelling. (This is easy to say in 2006, and much less so in the early 1900's, but hey, mankind moves forward!)
Quantum tunnelling is a well-understood phenomenon. There is nothing superluminar about it, at least not if you're applying your physics correctly and don't cry out "Yay!" once you got a quantity of 3.1e8 m/s out of your calculator. Unless you cite experiments which demonstrate particle velocities larger than the speed of light, I consider this settled. And no, Google is not an answer. Still, new ideas are produced and defended by scientists, not a search engine.
This is already corroborated in experiments with quantum tunneling. In certain circumstances, particles are observed going through barriers in a way that defy classical physics. Interestingly, they seem to do so at speeds greater than the speed of light.
They do not. There is a lot of confusion around the quantities involved, and at least 10 different definitions of velocity. However, it can be shown that the so-called superluminar quantum tunnelling (which is experimentally demomstrated, e.g. the infamous Nimtz experiment) can transport neither energy (= matter) nor information at velocities larger than vacuum light velocity (3e8 m/s). There is no current experiment to contradict Einstein's velocity limit postulate. There are facts which make general relativity look dubious, but the velocity limit stands.
Quantum tunneling (long distance quantum jumps) is not to be confused with teleportation which just another example of Star-Trek physics nonsense.
The presence of the word "quantum jump" in an article claiming to discuss physics indicates crackpottery. I know of no meaning of that word in the established physics. Instead, it seems to have been invented as a marketing terminus in the sixties.
Imagine a world where you can travel from anywhere to anywhere instantly.
Which is different from teleportation... how?
The experiments which you seem to be referring to are long distance quantum correlations; in these cases particles are said to become "entangled", i.e. their states are not independent. Even after separting them, each particle seems to instantly know of its twin's fate, defying the Einstein velocity limit. This is _not_ teleportation because the particles are travelling at their normal velocities continuously; they do not jump from point A to point B. Also, after separating them, it is again impossible to transmit information using them; that means again, neither energy nor information at superluminous velocities.
That being said, our current understanding of the quantum mechanical measuring process is less than clear. It is the last hot spot in quantum mechanics (sadly, the most important one for interpreting its predictions). There may well be a lot of new insight in our lifetime and it is an interesting field, however I don't expect teleportation of energy or information from this area. If anything such is possible, one has to look into new theories of gravitation and spacetime.
You won't be able to log in on the virtual terminals. You still can log into your X session if you're running a display manager (this is the common setup these days).
What about changing table row sizes and adjusting the random junk to compensate?
You don't even need JavaScript. A browser that implements some subset of CSS or even tables is enough. It's easy to hide content from a skimming reader, let alone the technically challenged.
Erm... soldiers?
Anyway, from what I've heard, packages for sid are already uploaded and waiting in "incoming".
The same way you would install it on any other linux distro (other than waiting for binaries). RTFM.
Yup, pretty much.
But I do burn CDs over an SSH tunnel?!
Please read up on the issue before stating nonsense. Schoen simply re-used the same data for >10 totally different experiments. That's not filling gaps, it's simply fraud. (Filling gaps is wrong, too -- after all, an experimental scientist is not supposed to figure what should be, but reproducably measure what is actually there.)
Direct3D games probably never will be as fast on Linux as they are on Windoze. It simply because the native API on Linux is OpenGL, and every call has to be "translated" from D3D to OpenGL. 3D Sound and other arcane features still have issues under Linux, but straight OpenGL + Stereo Sound should perform as well as it does on Windows.
The filesystem has about nothing to do with game performance, as any game with a chance to run fluently has to keep most of its data cached in RAM.
This probably would've been prevented if they had compiled using -O3 and -march=athlon-xp.
You mean that would have been prevented if they hadn't..., right?
They do. One more reason to avoid eBay.
Now that sound interesting. Which company makes 3D cards akin to nVidia and ATI technology and provides open source drivers? I'd like to get one, please tell me!
No.
I'd still prefer a proper Debian package made by a competent maintainer over some converted RPM. Automatic conversion can never be as good as a handcrafted solution, and this is especially true for Debian kernel-related packages. (Ever heard about make-kpkg?) Yes, we can still convert to tar.gz and rip it apart :-)
An Open Source driver would be even better, but probably that's unrealistic to expect from ATI.
Yes I have to earn my money too. The fact that some software is only available for Windows is really, not microsoft's fault. It's the vendors fault for not providing you with a more diverse product line, perhaps you should find another vendor. Better yet, write your own and sell it.
Very funny. This program I'm talking about is about twice the size of an office suite. Its development can only be paid for because nearly all tax advisors in Germany basically _need_ it. I even doubt the current developer makes much money of it. (And yes, that's a monopoly, too...)
Funny you should mention Be, I really like it too and still have a CD kicking around the house. I'm not sure that Mr. Gausse had a really solid understanding of how to get adoption of Be going on the PC. I've not mentioned the similarity between apple and M$, but Be is a shining example of how, Apple, is too a monopoly on a smaller scale. In fact there are several companies that died at the hands of Apple.
Apple isn't much better either, true... they're bundling a lot. But at least they don't make up a new file format every day. IIRC iTunes uses MP3?
Just becuase it has "critical mass" does not mean that you have to adopt it, agian, choice. More importantly I think that we are going to see a change in the DRM world in the next couple of years. Really DRM is about content, not about formats. When DRM starts to shift to a content centric eye, well see that format no longer matters.
Of course, I can choose not to listen to digital music. I can choose not to read Word attachments and not to visit sites which insist on Internet Explorer. It's just unsatisfying :-)
In the end I think that Micrsoft is currently on very thin ice. And I'd say that if you were a decision maker for a business that it would be possbible and realistic to run a non M$ shop. And that, is the beginning of the end for them.
It is possible, yes -- if you don't need too specific software. A word processor and a spreadsheet are easy to come by, in doubt use OOo. You might have to fight a bit if you've got a cheap printer or a new motherboard, but these are surmountable problems. The specialized software packages are a much more difficult market. In fact, three years ago, we were still running a DOS-based program (on top of Windows). That's in 2001! There's a hell of a latency involved, and not being able to run DOS/Windows binaries without funny emulators might keep Linux out for a long time.
We are talking about a Consumer desktop operating system, not business, or server.
Do we? OK, let's assume that.
Basic System Utilities such as defrag
Very important, yes! Why should I need a defragmenter? Let MS build a proper filesystem which doesn't need defragmenting in the first place. And BTW, Aunt Mary doesn't need a defragmenter anyway. She doesn't even know what it does except maybe that it makes for a good screensaver.
a web browser, a mail client, the ability to share files and network my computer with others, a reasonably robust media player
Microsoft doesn't only include a web browser. It includes a program which recommends a certain ISP, an IM client which can only talk to other Windows users and a media player which doesn't play RealMedia (just for example) but only their proprietary file format. They get people to use Hotmail and MSN portals via their OS. So that's what you call fair competition over there in the US? *sigh*
cars crashing and windows crash has nothing to do with the feature set comparison that i stated.
I wasn't specifically referring to your post here. People keep comparing Windows and cars all the time. I just don't know why. Maybe because that's an example which everybody knows. But it just doesn't fit.
There is ALWAYS and alternative.
Bullshit. You know, kid, some people have to actually earn their money. It's called "work", and sometimes they even need software for their "work". Some of that software is very specific to certain businesses and only available for Windows. I have such a case here. Yes, I know, the alternative is being unemployed. Cool.
No one is making you use WMA. You don't have to.
Did the term "critical mass" ever occur to you? If 90% of all computer users use WMA, then that is what record companies will offer. We're not at this point yet, because Microsoft made a few mistakes; but have a look at how widespread Word attachments are now. You have a computer? Fine. Nearly everybody subconsciously assumes that you have Word (pirated, of course). That's the direction. Whether a few geeks like that or not is not the point.
Get OS X, or install Linux on your pc.
Guess what I'm writing this in. But I'm not 90% of the population. I'm not deciding directions here.
Microsoft has a monopoly because people perpetuate the monopoly.
Monopolies don't disappear on their own. At least for the next ten years, Microsoft will stay with us. And if they are clever, much longer than that. That's why governments have to do something about it. In fact, I think they're not doing enough, not even here in Good Old Europe.
It's not as if there are not alternatives out there
Dude, face it. There are none. No company has the financial power to develop a viable alternative to Microsoft's integrated product suite. And if governments let Microsoft be, no company will ever have that power for decades.
I really like the Open Source idea, I hope it catches on, and I'm trying to do my part in it (filing bugs, doing a few patches here and there, answering user questions on mailing lists), but the Microsoft Monopoly is here to stay unless there are Open Standards or governments restrict Microsoft's actions. Otherwise, OSS will always be second or third after Microsoft, and newcomers like Be (remember?) which actually have innovative products will die.
I'm against MS bashing, and I'm even against splitting the company. But there have to be rules and standards, rules which apply to any company, be it a two-guys-shop in a garage or the Gates Empire.
Please stop comparing cars and operating systems. This comparison is Krap, as you spell it, because
a) Cars don't crash as often as Windows (OK, modern cars will get there...)
b) There's no monopoly in the car market. Face it. For some applications, there is NO ALTERNATIVE to using a M$ OS.
Also, I'm wondering a little what you consider essential features. I don't need to have IE and Windows DRM Player installed in a typical office box. At least if I don't want my employees to spend their time on eBay or downloading Steve O movies.