Well, a black hole is just a critical amount of mass inside a critical diameter.
It's like taking an apple, or if you want, the biggest freighter on earth, and compressing it to a microscopic size...
The biggest freighter on earth isn't heavy enough to attract stuff around it... so the black hole it forms won't be either.
Now that being said, I don't know how they intend to "stabilize" the black holes... because as you noticed, anything that touches it *will* be sucked into it, so what comes to my mind is a black hole the size of an atom free falling all the way to the core of the earth, and starting to consume everything that touches it until it eats up everything...
Neat tricks are generally either one of these three things:
A hidden API call - which can be easily found via ASM listings
A nice little algorithm - which can be found in comp sci books
An elegant piece of code - which can *not* be decompiled from ASM
So no, I disagree with you.
Poster of this article: read for answer to your Q.
on
Build Your Own ECG
·
· Score: 1
The black line is the output of my ECG with a square wave input (switched by an intricate device called "the hand" pulling in and out a wire). Anyways, the output should be pretty close to a square wave. So I decided to do a little real-time signal processing and came up with a routine that would filter out the effect of the low frequency cutoff.
Hmmm, you should know, as someone who deals with electronics, that obtaining a 'square' wave with the hand is pretty much impossible. There issue at hand is your circuit's impedence. The circuit has self induction, and no matter how cleanly you disconnect the wire, you will get a power spike. Now, on the other hand, if you were to have some sort of electronic gate (such as a transistor) doing the cutting for you, you would still have to 'establish' the current (which will behave like an exponential function - which is actually exactly what we see in the uncorrected black line here.)
Now, I don't know exactly what you were talking about when you mentionned the negative power spike in your EKG reading... but I can tell you the filters you applied were not at all doing what you thought they would be doing. You weren't producing a square signal to begin with... so it's not like your corrections brought you back to the orginal source... it's more like they brought you were you wanted to be.
You really need a wave generator to be able to do square waves... they are theoretically impossible to achieve, and in practice are damn friggin hard. the hand is definitely not good enough =)
Goes to show you how easy it is to forge science results even with the purest of intentions...
This is the stupidest question I've ever read in my life. Your question and the way you ask it sounds so arrogant, that it makes my skin crawl.
You've even set up the volley so that everyone can jump in and say "well, look at *nix".
Way to go slashdot, you've posted a Troll. And guess what, it's a hell of a troll, because it got 700 replies, and counting.
My troll of the day: dear slashdot, I just don't understand why there are traffic accidents. I mean, my father has driven the same car all his life to work without crashing once, and yet, my sister, who just got her car 2 months ago had a fender bender.
I mean, is it too hard to drive? Aside from the fact the Ford makes SUVs that tip over... is it not possible to make a safe car?
My answer to you is: yes, let's build a titanium car, that has 200 cubic meter airbags (constantly inflated) around it, with rubber that is 9 inches thick.
Yes, the feeling of danger was definitely lacking.
Although I really liked the issues about choice indeed, I found that the Agents, and even Agent Smith himself had lost their potency from the first one.
In the first matrix facing an agent was nearly the end of the world... Whereas in this one, it was merely business as usual.
And also, the agents seemed to know exactly where they were at all times, unless they used the keymaker backdoors. In the first matrix, they had to deal with agents, but also with regular people... After all, the matrix is huge, it shouldn't be trivial for an agent to pinpoint where Trinity is. But in this one, as soon as Trinity so much as punched someone, plop, an agent would appear.
Overall though, I really liked some parts of this movie. Definitely.
And more often that not, things these patches break are blocks of monolithic unmaintainable code written by bad programmers.
Seriously, bitch all you want, I've rarely ever seen 'working binaries' break because of a patch. I've seen *many* hack jobs (usually scripts) break because of a patch tightening up security... (scripts assuming write access to the Windows directory for example, or assuming to run under Admin).
Of course, this is strictly speaking from a server side software developer point of view...
I disagree that this is sensationalisim,this discovery is deffinatly news worthy. I do dislike the now ubiquotus ( on XXX date XXX happend killing XXX ) to every story in relation.
That's what I'm talking about. Yes, the news is newsworthy, but the ubiquitous (on XXX...) thing is the sensationalist part.
It's a catch 22, but they are CNN, and can and should be able to handle it tactfully. Be it by providing a link to "the tragedy" in a different article, or by mentioning it at the end of the article... or something.
Here, it's the first paragraph, it's almost like: "look, look... people died, and we found worms"...
It's almost like giving a boost to scientific news by making it human tragedy related.
Bottom line: this piece of news should be as exciting as "the genome of a variant of the Flu virus in Indochina has been completely mapped"... Exciting? Hardly.
The space shuttle did disintegrate, but in terms of space bound meteorite impact, it was quite a controlled descent. It broke apart, looked fiery, but that doesn't mean it was a ball of plasma. A Fighter jet can break down and look fiery at just 200 feet off the ground...
My further point is that this article is somehow trying to strike the "oh look, things that have common characteristics with humans (in that their cells divide, and some of them have sperm <poster's humour>) made it alive through... it's not such a big tragedy after all."
The first thing that's mentionned in the article is:
All seven astronauts were killed when the shuttle disintegrated over Texas on February 1. Columbia contained almost 60 scientific investigations.
Anyways, boo on CNN, it both draws on sensationalism (exploiting a story because of it's tragic sense), and assumes readers are stupid...
If you want to go sit at a Starbuck's and type your resume on it, yeah, this one might be slightly cumbersome. But as far as I'm concerned, I've got plenty of reasons to want the power of a laptop in the size of my palm. Most important things being: using it as a docking station for my mp3 player, quick fast access to email (and emails *are* short little messages in my books), IM, and SSH/connectivity... anything that'll give me a way to monitor remote servers.
When I'm out on vacation or something, I don't like lugging around an extra briefcase containing a laptop. And, I do like checking the state of my servers every once in a while.
The proper place to implement leap-seconds in a system with a calendar-independant time system (like UNIX) is to do so in the "translate to real time" system, rather than adjusting the "more perfect than the Earth" time setting.
As obvious as that might seem, I hadn't thought of it.
There you go, another fruitful conversation on/. The world *is* coming to an end.
There is still the issue of international agreement about 'where' the leap seconds are inserted, but that is detail at this point.
I'm not offended. I still consider there to be an issue for discussion here... you say:
If you're doing something where time is important, then the system which checks time needs to sync up with itself.
What I'm talking about still stands here... the concept of leap seconds isn't an issue of synchronisation between two systems...
Think of it this way: on a single system, I have 2 time stamps. How do I know if there was a leap second in between those two timestamps? The problem of leap seconds is like saying: "a 4 bit integer is 0000 -> 0, 0001 -> 1 , 0010 -> 2 , 0011 -> 4, 0100 -> 5 , 0101 -> 6..." etc. etc
We take it for granted, but really, an 8 bit byte can represent *any* 256 numbers... It is out of convenience that we have made it so that they represent 0 - 255. For example, it could be agreed upon, on planet zork, that 8 bit integers code up the first 256 prime numbers...
I don't know if I'm getting my point across, the bottom line is that eventually, with additions of leap seconds, 32 bit integers will stop meaning what they mean... the nth second will actually become represented by a 32 bit integer value of (n + k)...
This point is systematically ignored by the mathematicians and engineers who enthuse about artificial intelligence. You have to go next door, to the philosophy department, to find people who accord due importance to it.
You know, as much as I liked the rest of the article, I find it very very irritating that some people have the arrogance of being able to have a voice of authority over what is conscious and what is not.
It is kind of reminiscent of people who had an authority of saying such and such race wasn't human, and so had no souls.
What really annoys me are statements like these "In an android, or in a software simulation of a human such as an agent, words and gestures are produced by millions of lines of programmed software" which completely ignore things like neural nets, and/or expert systems, where the behaviour of the system is mainly determined by the data it contains... not the code it executes.
Neural networks are known to learn by usage... and that's their whole point: the code in there is just a framework.
Now sure, in the end, everything is a turing machine, since fuck, we can only have a finite amount of data, and so, we could just simply roll out that data and the execution path of the program into one gigantic executable...
But I really fail to see how this is any different from the actual universe, which has a finite number of elements in it... and which for all intents and purposes has a code base that is perpetually executing (the laws of physics, and science in general is the pursuit of knowing exactly what that code base is).
Philosophers are cool and all, but when you don't know too much about programming, it kind of gets above your comprehension level. And like I said, I don't buy those "oh it's a finite state machine in the end" arguments... they are lazy. My Math teacher had once said something about the "proof by absurd" technique... he said, if you prove something by saying the opposite is impossible, then it's because you don't really understand the problem at hand. I find all the explanations as to why artifical consciousness is impossible to be of that ilk.
Don't go calling people idiots with such broad sweeps. This isn't even a heated thread about an even mildly important topic.
Regarding bus-clock timing, there is this thing called epoch time which is the pride and joy of the *nix people (read: any slashdotter would brag about it). The concept of epoch time is quite simple and straight forward: t2 - t1 = timespan. *Regardless* of t1 and t2.
This issue with Leap seconds will simply *break* that cardinal rule.
end of story
Now is it good or bad? I don't care to defend or even present my opinion on that (Notice how my original post said "So what's the principle we abide by? Our measurement of a day or hour stretches? or we change what time we wake up at? ").
But you *are* breaking a principle, a rule... and it's never nice to break rules and introduce exceptions. Period.
Like I originally said, it's not a trivial matter, and you shouldn't treat it as such either.
Ok. Now imaginage 50 years from now, we've sent people to mars and back. Space travel is starting to become common place. By then docking maneuvers are considered tedious and cumbersome. They are common place. So the international community decides to automate it. They make an RFC and what not...
Quadruple fault tolerant (with 4 different systems running) are mandatory...
It escapes reviewers attentiont that the two systems synch each other on different atom clocks.
You're gonna say I'm nitpicking... but what if someone told you 50 years ago that it was a bad idea to work in empirical units (versus metric). Would your answer have been "hey, it's just a simple conversion". The fact of the matter is that conversions like that are much simpler of an issue to deal with, and yet we lost a satelite on mars because of it...
Just imagine the much broader, more mundaine implications of this... the world is networked. Every here and there, a programmer *will* make assumptions that the current second on earth is the same everywhere. Think robotic surgery from remote locations... Think railroad switches for high speed trains. A couple of seconds are much bigger than you think they are.
I'm only scratching the surface of the problem here.
The earth's rotation will continuously slow down until it reaches a period of 47 days. So what will our rational be? To add leap seconds every time we need to? or to have a standard UTC that is unlinked to the earth's rotational velocity...
As said in my post: leap seconds are annoying because it disrupts the continuous nature of time... t=400 might be 201 seconds ahead of t=200 if we add leap seconds...
It obviously isn't of pressing international nature... But it *is* definitely an international matter: what if China decides not to add leap seconds... or even worse, what if China decides to add them at a different time than say Europe?
What if 20 years from now, a chinese space shuttle tries to dock with the ISS, and there is a problem because of this?
As I originally said, it's of major importance, and will require much foresight.
Imagine this simple, granted exagerated, scenario:
You park your car somewhere on June 5th 2003, someone comes and says there's a special leap day on June 6th, and it becomes June 7th...
All of a sudden your car seems like it's been there for two days on paper.
Imagine how difficult it will become to measure elapsed time (just strictly from a computational POV) if we start adding and removing seconds here and there.
This problem is a huge one.
In fact, the earth is slowing down to the point that:
The slowing rotation of the Earth results in a longer day as well as a longer month. Once the length of a day equals the length of a month, the tidal friction mechanism would cease[...] That's been projected to happen once the day and month both equal about 47 (current) days, billions of years in the future. If the Earth and Moon still exist, the distance will have increased to about 135% of its current value.... from link.
So what's the principle we abide by? Our measurement of a day, or hour stretches? or we change what time we wake up at? What happens if we colonize Mars?
It's a crucial problem that requires lots of foresight.
so what if his previous attempts were near frodulent... at least he's trying. I'm sure your twin was there when the Wright brothers were building their first paper airplanes... saying how un-gentelmanly it was to run around fields trying to accomplish what prestigious scientists of the Queen's court had deemed impossible.
When I was doing high level math at university (which I'm not doing anymore - so don't get me wrong, I'm more or less in the same boat as you), every problem I read at first sounded like klingon to me... And I was good at math.
Math is one of those disciplines where you just can *not* skim the problem and expect to understand it... you have to load into memory every word that is in the text (like 'manifold' etc), and create a working instance of that object in your brain...
It's basically like launching a heavy app like Photoshop.
So yeah, to answer you: even when I was right in the middle of studying this stuff, there were moments when I would think I was stupid too... but if you concentrate *and* you know what they're talking about, it makes sense.
Slashdot Mirror
It's like taking an apple, or if you want, the biggest freighter on earth, and compressing it to a microscopic size...
The biggest freighter on earth isn't heavy enough to attract stuff around it... so the black hole it forms won't be either.
Now that being said, I don't know how they intend to "stabilize" the black holes... because as you noticed, anything that touches it *will* be sucked into it, so what comes to my mind is a black hole the size of an atom free falling all the way to the core of the earth, and starting to consume everything that touches it until it eats up everything...
And then we die. End of story.
Or "Event Horizon" (the movie) for that matter...
</shivers>
A hidden API call - which can be easily found via ASM listings
A nice little algorithm - which can be found in comp sci books
An elegant piece of code - which can *not* be decompiled from ASM
So no, I disagree with you.
Hmmm, you should know, as someone who deals with electronics, that obtaining a 'square' wave with the hand is pretty much impossible. There issue at hand is your circuit's impedence. The circuit has self induction, and no matter how cleanly you disconnect the wire, you will get a power spike. Now, on the other hand, if you were to have some sort of electronic gate (such as a transistor) doing the cutting for you, you would still have to 'establish' the current (which will behave like an exponential function - which is actually exactly what we see in the uncorrected black line here.)
Now, I don't know exactly what you were talking about when you mentionned the negative power spike in your EKG reading... but I can tell you the filters you applied were not at all doing what you thought they would be doing. You weren't producing a square signal to begin with... so it's not like your corrections brought you back to the orginal source... it's more like they brought you were you wanted to be.
You really need a wave generator to be able to do square waves... they are theoretically impossible to achieve, and in practice are damn friggin hard. the hand is definitely not good enough =)
Goes to show you how easy it is to forge science results even with the purest of intentions...
You've even set up the volley so that everyone can jump in and say "well, look at *nix".
Way to go slashdot, you've posted a Troll. And guess what, it's a hell of a troll, because it got 700 replies, and counting.
My troll of the day: dear slashdot, I just don't understand why there are traffic accidents. I mean, my father has driven the same car all his life to work without crashing once, and yet, my sister, who just got her car 2 months ago had a fender bender.
I mean, is it too hard to drive? Aside from the fact the Ford makes SUVs that tip over... is it not possible to make a safe car?
My answer to you is: yes, let's build a titanium car, that has 200 cubic meter airbags (constantly inflated) around it, with rubber that is 9 inches thick.
Pointless. Sigh.
Although I really liked the issues about choice indeed, I found that the Agents, and even Agent Smith himself had lost their potency from the first one.
In the first matrix facing an agent was nearly the end of the world... Whereas in this one, it was merely business as usual.
And also, the agents seemed to know exactly where they were at all times, unless they used the keymaker backdoors. In the first matrix, they had to deal with agents, but also with regular people... After all, the matrix is huge, it shouldn't be trivial for an agent to pinpoint where Trinity is. But in this one, as soon as Trinity so much as punched someone, plop, an agent would appear.
Overall though, I really liked some parts of this movie. Definitely.
Nothing to do with the matrix itself as a computer.
Seriously, bitch all you want, I've rarely ever seen 'working binaries' break because of a patch. I've seen *many* hack jobs (usually scripts) break because of a patch tightening up security... (scripts assuming write access to the Windows directory for example, or assuming to run under Admin).
Of course, this is strictly speaking from a server side software developer point of view...
That's what I'm talking about. Yes, the news is newsworthy, but the ubiquitous (on XXX...) thing is the sensationalist part.
It's a catch 22, but they are CNN, and can and should be able to handle it tactfully. Be it by providing a link to "the tragedy" in a different article, or by mentioning it at the end of the article... or something.
Here, it's the first paragraph, it's almost like: "look, look... people died, and we found worms"...
It's almost like giving a boost to scientific news by making it human tragedy related.
Bottom line: this piece of news should be as exciting as "the genome of a variant of the Flu virus in Indochina has been completely mapped"... Exciting? Hardly.
The space shuttle did disintegrate, but in terms of space bound meteorite impact, it was quite a controlled descent. It broke apart, looked fiery, but that doesn't mean it was a ball of plasma. A Fighter jet can break down and look fiery at just 200 feet off the ground...
My further point is that this article is somehow trying to strike the "oh look, things that have common characteristics with humans (in that their cells divide, and some of them have sperm <poster's humour>) made it alive through... it's not such a big tragedy after all."
The first thing that's mentionned in the article is:
All seven astronauts were killed when the shuttle disintegrated over Texas on February 1. Columbia contained almost 60 scientific investigations.
Anyways, boo on CNN, it both draws on sensationalism (exploiting a story because of it's tragic sense), and assumes readers are stupid...
You'd think we're trying to make Iraq conform to a document object model.
<snare snare high-hat>
If you want to go sit at a Starbuck's and type your resume on it, yeah, this one might be slightly cumbersome. But as far as I'm concerned, I've got plenty of reasons to want the power of a laptop in the size of my palm. Most important things being: using it as a docking station for my mp3 player, quick fast access to email (and emails *are* short little messages in my books), IM, and SSH/connectivity... anything that'll give me a way to monitor remote servers.
When I'm out on vacation or something, I don't like lugging around an extra briefcase containing a laptop. And, I do like checking the state of my servers every once in a while.
The Evil new account is in an IE browser, and the poor abused old account is in a NN window.
As obvious as that might seem, I hadn't thought of it.
There you go, another fruitful conversation on /. The world *is* coming to an end.
There is still the issue of international agreement about 'where' the leap seconds are inserted, but that is detail at this point.
If you're doing something where time is important, then the system which checks time needs to sync up with itself.
What I'm talking about still stands here... the concept of leap seconds isn't an issue of synchronisation between two systems...
Think of it this way: on a single system, I have 2 time stamps. How do I know if there was a leap second in between those two timestamps? The problem of leap seconds is like saying: "a 4 bit integer is 0000 -> 0, 0001 -> 1 , 0010 -> 2 , 0011 -> 4 , 0100 -> 5 , 0101 -> 6 ..." etc. etc
We take it for granted, but really, an 8 bit byte can represent *any* 256 numbers... It is out of convenience that we have made it so that they represent 0 - 255. For example, it could be agreed upon, on planet zork, that 8 bit integers code up the first 256 prime numbers...
I don't know if I'm getting my point across, the bottom line is that eventually, with additions of leap seconds, 32 bit integers will stop meaning what they mean... the nth second will actually become represented by a 32 bit integer value of (n + k)...
You know, as much as I liked the rest of the article, I find it very very irritating that some people have the arrogance of being able to have a voice of authority over what is conscious and what is not.
It is kind of reminiscent of people who had an authority of saying such and such race wasn't human, and so had no souls.
What really annoys me are statements like these "In an android, or in a software simulation of a human such as an agent, words and gestures are produced by millions of lines of programmed software" which completely ignore things like neural nets, and/or expert systems, where the behaviour of the system is mainly determined by the data it contains... not the code it executes.
Neural networks are known to learn by usage... and that's their whole point: the code in there is just a framework.
Now sure, in the end, everything is a turing machine, since fuck, we can only have a finite amount of data, and so, we could just simply roll out that data and the execution path of the program into one gigantic executable...
But I really fail to see how this is any different from the actual universe, which has a finite number of elements in it... and which for all intents and purposes has a code base that is perpetually executing (the laws of physics, and science in general is the pursuit of knowing exactly what that code base is).
Philosophers are cool and all, but when you don't know too much about programming, it kind of gets above your comprehension level. And like I said, I don't buy those "oh it's a finite state machine in the end" arguments... they are lazy. My Math teacher had once said something about the "proof by absurd" technique... he said, if you prove something by saying the opposite is impossible, then it's because you don't really understand the problem at hand. I find all the explanations as to why artifical consciousness is impossible to be of that ilk.
Don't go calling people idiots with such broad sweeps. This isn't even a heated thread about an even mildly important topic.
Regarding bus-clock timing, there is this thing called epoch time which is the pride and joy of the *nix people (read: any slashdotter would brag about it). The concept of epoch time is quite simple and straight forward: t2 - t1 = timespan. *Regardless* of t1 and t2.
This issue with Leap seconds will simply *break* that cardinal rule.
end of story
Now is it good or bad? I don't care to defend or even present my opinion on that (Notice how my original post said "So what's the principle we abide by? Our measurement of a day or hour stretches? or we change what time we wake up at? ").
But you *are* breaking a principle, a rule... and it's never nice to break rules and introduce exceptions. Period.
Like I originally said, it's not a trivial matter, and you shouldn't treat it as such either.
Quadruple fault tolerant (with 4 different systems running) are mandatory...
It escapes reviewers attentiont that the two systems synch each other on different atom clocks.
You're gonna say I'm nitpicking... but what if someone told you 50 years ago that it was a bad idea to work in empirical units (versus metric). Would your answer have been "hey, it's just a simple conversion". The fact of the matter is that conversions like that are much simpler of an issue to deal with, and yet we lost a satelite on mars because of it...
Just imagine the much broader, more mundaine implications of this... the world is networked. Every here and there, a programmer *will* make assumptions that the current second on earth is the same everywhere. Think robotic surgery from remote locations... Think railroad switches for high speed trains. A couple of seconds are much bigger than you think they are.
I'm only scratching the surface of the problem here.
Like I said, it will require foresight.
The earth's rotation will continuously slow down until it reaches a period of 47 days. So what will our rational be? To add leap seconds every time we need to? or to have a standard UTC that is unlinked to the earth's rotational velocity...
As said in my post: leap seconds are annoying because it disrupts the continuous nature of time... t=400 might be 201 seconds ahead of t=200 if we add leap seconds...
It obviously isn't of pressing international nature... But it *is* definitely an international matter: what if China decides not to add leap seconds... or even worse, what if China decides to add them at a different time than say Europe?
What if 20 years from now, a chinese space shuttle tries to dock with the ISS, and there is a problem because of this?
As I originally said, it's of major importance, and will require much foresight.
Imagine this simple, granted exagerated, scenario: You park your car somewhere on June 5th 2003, someone comes and says there's a special leap day on June 6th, and it becomes June 7th...
All of a sudden your car seems like it's been there for two days on paper.
Imagine how difficult it will become to measure elapsed time (just strictly from a computational POV) if we start adding and removing seconds here and there.
This problem is a huge one.
In fact, the earth is slowing down to the point that:
The slowing rotation of the Earth results in a longer day as well as a longer month. Once the length of a day equals the length of a month, the tidal friction mechanism would cease[...] That's been projected to happen once the day and month both equal about 47 (current) days, billions of years in the future. If the Earth and Moon still exist, the distance will have increased to about 135% of its current value.... from link.
So what's the principle we abide by? Our measurement of a day, or hour stretches? or we change what time we wake up at? What happens if we colonize Mars?
It's a crucial problem that requires lots of foresight.
so what if his previous attempts were near frodulent... at least he's trying. I'm sure your twin was there when the Wright brothers were building their first paper airplanes... saying how un-gentelmanly it was to run around fields trying to accomplish what prestigious scientists of the Queen's court had deemed impossible.
Math is one of those disciplines where you just can *not* skim the problem and expect to understand it... you have to load into memory every word that is in the text (like 'manifold' etc), and create a working instance of that object in your brain...
It's basically like launching a heavy app like Photoshop.
So yeah, to answer you: even when I was right in the middle of studying this stuff, there were moments when I would think I was stupid too... but if you concentrate *and* you know what they're talking about, it makes sense.
Conclusion: it's knowledge, not intelligence.
"It was in fact a trick question. Coventry City have never won the FA Cup."
Notice how the name of the section goes:
MSDN Home > MSDN Library > User Interface Design and Development > Windows User Interface > Windowing > Messages and Message Queues >
Do you see "Thread" anywhere in there?
I will admit that my anti-anti-microsoft rash got irritated a bit, and I might have been a bit flamy...