Weird! I bought a linksys wireless base station and I thought it was the best piece of hardware I ever bought. The easiest to install and administer. I'd say it's the only piece of hardware I've ever bought that I can't really fault. No drivers to install. I just plugged it into my network at home, I did a tiny bit of config to give it my DSL password, and it worked.
The airport base station must be *really* good. (Saying that proves I don't work for Linksys:-)
Just cursor-up to bring back the last command I typed would be useful. Under Unix I'll work something like
repeat:
cursor-up, cursor-up, enter (makes project)
cursor-up, cursor-up, enter (launches project)
Under Windows the behavior is quite different as it remembers where it was in the history so repeated cursor ups like above eventually take you off the top of your history. I don't want to scan up or down a little subwindow to find my last command!
I don't want to scan up or down a little subwindow to find my last command! The tricky thing is that it seems the console is actually linked right into your application so it's very hard to replace - though I keep hoping one day someone will write a replacement for the console API that can be dropped in as a replacement DLL.
And winclip looks useful, but it doesn't help with the problem tha doing a copy of a multiline command from a console has to be carried out in rectangular pieces. Unfortunately multiline commands are the ones you're most likely to need to copy.
Maybe next we can have a usable shell from which we can type those commands. (Don't tell me about CMD.EXE with its horribly confused history and 'rectangular' cut-and-paste so bad it must be deliberately bad. No, don't point me to implementations of rxvt that don't support the MS Console API and hence don't support most command line applications.)
You may mock! years ago Watcom had a bug in their C compiler that somehow confused the size of a char with the size of an int. This meant I could write a piece of code, apparently to print out a string one character at a time, but instead printed every fourth character instead. I sent them a bug report including some code that would, in the absence of this bug, print the message "fortune coookie". Note, the triple 'o' isn't a spelling error. Think about it!
He he! I've been playing my way through these games (bought the Enchanter trilogy on ebay recently) and solved the transparent crystal maze problem in Enchanter just a few days ago. But you say '3D'. Are you referring to yet another similar puzzle?
This paper really isn't as crazy as it seems. I haven't read the pop-science explanation of the paper as these are far to painful to read.
Suppose we have a string, like a violin string. Pluck it and look at close up. You have a standing wave in the string. One of the interesting things about these standing waves is that you can glean information about the length of the entire string just by looking at a small part of the string. For example in standing waves you often see 'nodes', points along the string that don't oscillate vertically (assuming the string is stretched horizontally). Well nodes are equally spaced, and if the ends of the string are fixed then the ends are nodes too. So you know that the total length of the string is an integer multiple of the distance between nodes. So just looking locally at the string tells you something about it stotal length, even if you can't see the ends.
Now thing more generally. Let's think about a more rigid metal wire whose ends you can't see. If at least one end is fixed then when you tap it the nodes are likely to always be in the same place. But if, instead, the wire is looped back round on itself in a big circle then when you tap the wire the nodes, although equally spaced, can be anywhere along the length of the wire (because a wire circle has symmetry, you can rotate it by any angle and it's still the same). So you can tell the difference between a long wire with fixed ands and one that is a loop.
Well this paper is the same thing on a grand scale. Instead of the usual "wave equation" that decsribes waves in a wire or string we have a more complex equation. But the idea is much the same - we may be able to extract information about the entire universe just by looking at the sort of structures we get locally. Unfortunately this is a much harder problem. With a 1D string there is just one way to make it wrap round on itself - join the ends to make a circle. With a 3D space there are many more ways. Each one has a 'signature' in terms of the type of waves that can form in it. But it's not easy to go from the wave patterns to the shape. So in a sense this paper is just a bit of fumbling around looking at the sort of shape that might give rise to observation. The particular topology proposed might not be correct, or even plausible, but eventually these intermediate results might lead to a deeper understanding of the kind of shapes that are consistent with what we observe. It might even be that ultimately a boring wide open universe that doesn't wrap at all is the only consistent one - but we won't know that unless people do this kind of research first.
One thing that makes this paper more interesting are the "rigidity theorems". Basically the idea is that if the universe has negative curvature everywhere (negative curvature is like the surface of a saddle, rather than that of a sphere) then just having fairly vague information about how it wraps round on itself tells you a lot about the surface. (Essentially you just need topological information and that's enough to tell you a lot of non-topological information too.)
Don't be sceptical about the paper, be sceptical about how it's reported. The original paper is very sober and doesn't make any particularly dramatic claims.
ETHICS? Oh, you mean the system where rich people who'd like to stay rich talk poor people into staying poor so that the rich people don't even have to pay for an armed force to protect their riches. Yes, it's a good system isn't it.
The number of people whose PS2's have been modded by soldering is far greater than the number of people with PS2's who can solder. That's why there are companies providing this service. And because there are companies doing this, and making non-trivial amounts of money, it's worthwhile for some individuals to invest an effort into cracking the system.
Where's the documentation? It came with a flimsy document showing trivial stuff. When I do Start->Help I get tons of documentation but it's all 'fake' in the sense that it tells me stuff that's obvious. Eg. to Share a folder I need to right click on the file and select 'Sharing' et.c. Doh! Where are the docs telling me how to write a device driver? Where are the docs telling me how to manipulate junction points? This OS shipped with Internet Explorer which supports a bunch of programming languages like Javascript and VBS. Where are the docs about these? Where are the docs for the APIs in all of the DLLs all over the place? Oh yeah...I have to buy a separate product to access those. When my PC fails to boot what do I do? Where are the docs telling me about the different stages during the boot process? Are there any logs? What is the precise format of NTFS on the disk? Endless questions to which I can find no answers in the documentation that came with my OS.
Centrifugal force is no more imaginary that gravity. Since Einstein we've all had to get used to the idea that what you measure depends on your frame of reference. In a rotating frame centrifugal force passes every test for being a force. In fact, locally it's indistinguishable from gravity.
Gravity looks fictional to someone in freefall who can't feel a thing.
To be a Christian is to follow Christ. Follow in the sense of leading a life like Christ, daily taking up our cross. Ergo Christ was a Christian, even if not in the historical sense.
Why have you spent so much time filling your brain with 'facts' that you don't actually understand (in some cases by your own admission)? Oh, I thought I'd also point out that someone else seems to have thought the same thing as me, hacked into your account, and placed an apposite quotation in your sig. I strongly recommend that you read it.
I know barely enough to clearly discern why big-bang is broken...
My current favourite is one which features a changing ZPE...
And what, pray tell, made it your favorite? The fact that it came packaged in a pretty box, the pleasant aroma that it gave off, or maybe just the fact that when you wear it it gives you warm fuzzies?
You're being completely disingenuous. It's a complete myth that everything in a novel needs to play a part in the 'story'. One could just as easily ask the question "why are you mentioning homosexuality when the books contain all sorts of othe rmaterial that aren't crucial to the story?". But that's an easy one to answer, you have a homophobia problem.
Slashdot Mirror
The airport base station must be *really* good. (Saying that proves I don't work for Linksys :-)
Just cursor-up to bring back the last command I typed would be useful. Under Unix I'll work something like
repeat:
cursor-up, cursor-up, enter (makes project)
cursor-up, cursor-up, enter (launches project)
Under Windows the behavior is quite different as it remembers where it was in the history so repeated cursor ups like above eventually take you off the top of your history.
I don't want to scan up or down a little subwindow to find my last command!
I don't want to scan up or down a little subwindow to find my last command! The tricky thing is that it seems the console is actually linked right into your application so it's very hard to replace - though I keep hoping one day someone will write a replacement for the console API that can be dropped in as a replacement DLL.
And winclip looks useful, but it doesn't help with the problem tha doing a copy of a multiline command from a console has to be carried out in rectangular pieces. Unfortunately multiline commands are the ones you're most likely to need to copy.
No, x86. Not quite sure why you'd think it was big-endian.
Maybe next we can have a usable shell from which we can type those commands. (Don't tell me about CMD.EXE with its horribly confused history and 'rectangular' cut-and-paste so bad it must be deliberately bad. No, don't point me to implementations of rxvt that don't support the MS Console API and hence don't support most command line applications.)
You may mock! years ago Watcom had a bug in their C compiler that somehow confused the size of a char with the size of an int. This meant I could write a piece of code, apparently to print out a string one character at a time, but instead printed every fourth character instead. I sent them a bug report including some code that would, in the absence of this bug, print the message "fortune coookie". Note, the triple 'o' isn't a spelling error. Think about it!
Wow! Very thoughtful of the author. I'll have to read it then.
I'm thinking of reading the book but I'm still playing a few old Infocom games (!!!). Are there many spoilers in the book?
He he! I've been playing my way through these games (bought the Enchanter trilogy on ebay recently) and solved the transparent crystal maze problem in Enchanter just a few days ago. But you say '3D'. Are you referring to yet another similar puzzle?
Suppose we have a string, like a violin string. Pluck it and look at close up. You have a standing wave in the string. One of the interesting things about these standing waves is that you can glean information about the length of the entire string just by looking at a small part of the string. For example in standing waves you often see 'nodes', points along the string that don't oscillate vertically (assuming the string is stretched horizontally). Well nodes are equally spaced, and if the ends of the string are fixed then the ends are nodes too. So you know that the total length of the string is an integer multiple of the distance between nodes. So just looking locally at the string tells you something about it stotal length, even if you can't see the ends.
Now thing more generally. Let's think about a more rigid metal wire whose ends you can't see. If at least one end is fixed then when you tap it the nodes are likely to always be in the same place. But if, instead, the wire is looped back round on itself in a big circle then when you tap the wire the nodes, although equally spaced, can be anywhere along the length of the wire (because a wire circle has symmetry, you can rotate it by any angle and it's still the same). So you can tell the difference between a long wire with fixed ands and one that is a loop.
Well this paper is the same thing on a grand scale. Instead of the usual "wave equation" that decsribes waves in a wire or string we have a more complex equation. But the idea is much the same - we may be able to extract information about the entire universe just by looking at the sort of structures we get locally. Unfortunately this is a much harder problem. With a 1D string there is just one way to make it wrap round on itself - join the ends to make a circle. With a 3D space there are many more ways. Each one has a 'signature' in terms of the type of waves that can form in it. But it's not easy to go from the wave patterns to the shape. So in a sense this paper is just a bit of fumbling around looking at the sort of shape that might give rise to observation. The particular topology proposed might not be correct, or even plausible, but eventually these intermediate results might lead to a deeper understanding of the kind of shapes that are consistent with what we observe. It might even be that ultimately a boring wide open universe that doesn't wrap at all is the only consistent one - but we won't know that unless people do this kind of research first.
One thing that makes this paper more interesting are the "rigidity theorems". Basically the idea is that if the universe has negative curvature everywhere (negative curvature is like the surface of a saddle, rather than that of a sphere) then just having fairly vague information about how it wraps round on itself tells you a lot about the surface. (Essentially you just need topological information and that's enough to tell you a lot of non-topological information too.)
Don't be sceptical about the paper, be sceptical about how it's reported. The original paper is very sober and doesn't make any particularly dramatic claims.
Spelling mistake.
I expect that there are more chipped phones than modded PCs. Try here.
It's amazing the fantasies people will write when they respond to a post they couldn't be bothered with reading.
ETHICS? Oh, you mean the system where rich people who'd like to stay rich talk poor people into staying poor so that the rich people don't even have to pay for an armed force to protect their riches. Yes, it's a good system isn't it.
The number of people whose PS2's have been modded by soldering is far greater than the number of people with PS2's who can solder. That's why there are companies providing this service. And because there are companies doing this, and making non-trivial amounts of money, it's worthwhile for some individuals to invest an effort into cracking the system.
Where's the documentation? It came with a flimsy document showing trivial stuff. When I do Start->Help I get tons of documentation but it's all 'fake' in the sense that it tells me stuff that's obvious. Eg. to Share a folder I need to right click on the file and select 'Sharing' et.c. Doh! Where are the docs telling me how to write a device driver? Where are the docs telling me how to manipulate junction points? This OS shipped with Internet Explorer which supports a bunch of programming languages like Javascript and VBS. Where are the docs about these? Where are the docs for the APIs in all of the DLLs all over the place? Oh yeah...I have to buy a separate product to access those. When my PC fails to boot what do I do? Where are the docs telling me about the different stages during the boot process? Are there any logs? What is the precise format of NTFS on the disk? Endless questions to which I can find no answers in the documentation that came with my OS.
Gravity looks fictional to someone in freefall who can't feel a thing.
Eh? Your father did that. You did nothing.
To be a Christian is to follow Christ. Follow in the sense of leading a life like Christ, daily taking up our cross. Ergo Christ was a Christian, even if not in the historical sense.
Hey, what page do they wire the routers on?
Why have you spent so much time filling your brain with 'facts' that you don't actually understand (in some cases by your own admission)? Oh, I thought I'd also point out that someone else seems to have thought the same thing as me, hacked into your account, and placed an apposite quotation in your sig. I strongly recommend that you read it.
You're being completely disingenuous. It's a complete myth that everything in a novel needs to play a part in the 'story'. One could just as easily ask the question "why are you mentioning homosexuality when the books contain all sorts of othe rmaterial that aren't crucial to the story?". But that's an easy one to answer, you have a homophobia problem.