But Microsoft, please, please, please, please, please learn how to write a proper terminal window! The Console in Windows 2000 is the worst every written. Or at least I thought it was until I tried the XP one where MS broke the only good features that the W2K one had. Writing a decent console is a few days work for a decent developer. Please assign the measly amount of money required to make a console that allows you to (1) copy and paste correctly between windows and (2) allows you to cursor up to edit previous commands. (Yes, I know cursor up does something along those lines but I'm yet to figure out exactly. One cursor up certainly doesn't just give you the last command typed afetr a few minutes of use.) Hell, if you had spare time you could even make it transparent 'n' stuff.
Have you not heard of propaganda? Propaganda doesn't work unless you publish it. And as for why they'd want it removed again. It's called "plausible deniability".
The point is we should celebrate. Those plants died believing that that was all there was to their existence. But millions of years later the energy they stored during their lifetimes has found a new purpose. Maybe millions of years after you die you'll find a purpose too. I think it's wonderful.
Well if you have a computer to hand a calculator is often unnecesary. But even then I often find it convenient to reach for the calculator. Sometimes I like to work away from the computer - you know, with pen and paper, and then it's useful to have a calculator to hand to check stuff. I can't imagine do full blown calculations with it but occasionally testing out a little something with say a 8x1 Fourier transform can be useful to check your hand calculations in a simple test case. I guess that pins down the use: testing out simple test cases.
Hello. Welcome to the civilized world. One of the aspects of civilization is the use of mathematics in projects as diverse as figuring out how much tax you owe and computing whether or not that extra bit of fuel could possibly kick your satellite up into the correct orbit. Unfortunately humans aren't good at the repetitive operations involved and hence need to use calculators to help them out. The procedures built into the HP49+ include things like Fourier transforms, differential equation solving, regression and optimization. Next time you look out of a window and notice a car drive past or a tall building or a computer remember that these tools were used to do these things. What's more, around the world there are hundreds of thousands of people actively doing these things.
The high end TI calculators use REDUCE (I think) as their algebra package and it's pretty awesome. I can throw some pretty nasty integrals at it and it gets them. My HP48G is crap by comparison as it had only the most rudimentary algebra (even though the blurb about it originally suggested it was sophisticated). Does anyone know if the HP49G+ does real algebra comparable to REDUCE?
For example if I throw deSolve(y'+y''=sqrt(1+x),x,y) at my TI89 I get a sensible answer back (including a subexpression for an integral that it couldn't get in closed form). Will the new HP do that? Or better? (Mathematica knows to use Erf[] (of a complex variable no less) to polish off the integral.)
I think the crucial point is that the atoms themselves aren't the interesting thing and that's why it's not really worth crediting Democritus and Co. The crucial thing that Dalton did was come up with numbers that turn into testable hypotheses.
When any Ancient Greeks argued for the existence of atoms they were saying more about themselves than about the universe. They were revealing that many humans have a problem with the concept of a continuum and prefer everything to be made out of discrete parts. This isn't a property of the universe, it's a property of human minds. If you read Nietzsche then at one point he argues that atomic theory was incorrect even though, at that point, the evidence was stacked against him. I think that what he was actually attacking was this human psychological need to believe in Atomism. In fact Nietzsche supported a quite different vortex theory that you could argue looks more like quantum mechanics. But at the end of the day this is all waffle. What matters are the numbers and that's what Dalton computed.
Didn't you notice something weird about the second expression you printed? Like the.000000? Try computing exp(pi*sqrt(N)) for other values of N to a lot of decimal places.
When Dalton originally proposed his atomic theory there was much resistance. The idea of tiny, hard, indivisible units was unreasonable to many of the people around Dalton and it took a long time for people to accept his ideas. But guess what! The people who resisted were right. Today we have completely replaced the idea of an indivisible atom with a wavefunction in a Hilbert space. We might still call these things 'atoms' but they bear very little relationship with what Dalton was thinking of. In fact, at the time people used Dalton's theory as a metaphor as they couldn't take the ideas literally at all. And that's exactly what physicists do today.
What kind of guru lists deprecated products as going out? VB6 and Windows 9X? It's like predicting that sales of 1999 Fords will decline.
More fun is to predict the upcoming technologies that while die before they properly start. (PS If you're a venture capitalist here is the place to look.)
DRM It simply can't be done. If it could be done it would require completely secure hardware. There is no way any piece of hardware can be mass produced and distributed to hundreds of millions of homes without someone cracking it. And all it takes is one person to crack it. It might foil the kids at home but it might not stop the bright student who sneaks into the X-ray crystallography or electron microscopy department after dark to see just what is hidden on those supposedly sealed DRM chips!
Quantum Computing An N bit quantum computer can (for certain problems) do the work of an exp(N) classical computer. The problem is, even with error correction I expect it to take exp(N) work to fight decoherence so I don't expect this to replace regular computing. On the other hand it may find some niche applications: e.g. quantum cryptography can be thought of as a quantum algorithm and will find applications.
A biotech boom driven by the completion of the genome project I think most people know by now that the genome project was a high profile scam. There's no doubt it was useful. But the human isn't like an encyclopedia that you can just look things up in. "Decoding" the genome wasn't decoding at all. It was simply reading the message. Decoding it will take another few centuries and those claiming to be able to produce useful drugs and therapies now are soon to fall by the wayside. OK, it's not really a scam. What was a scam was getting it done so quickly at the expense of so many other useful projects and what we have is a glut of data we can't hope to use yet.
Speech recognition. It will get cracked one day and then we'll have machines that can understand what we say. But soon people will realize that nobody wants it. Why say "eks plus equals why minus one carriage return" when it's easier to type? and why say "up a bit, left a bit, down a bit" when a joystick is much more responsive. And who wants to sit in an office full of people talking to their PCs, printers, PDAs and pacemakers? It's bad enough with telephones!
...use the same bluff the second time around someone at the Pentagon has decided to play the Star Wars Manuever again.
exp(pi*sqrt(163))'s law dictates that you can successfully use a bluff with a frequency that is inversely proportion to the memory length of your intended audience.
The composers will in fact be replaced by AIs. Popular music will be one of the few areas where AIs will actually have any success in the following decades. And so, of course, it will be illegal to share AI thoughts!
...then I'm just going to have to seek out "smart phones" without voice capability. I hope there'll always be a niche for those. Damn I hate people phoning me!
20 years ago. 1983? Let's see. We had some version of DOS, I guess around 2.0. Home users have finally left DOS 7.0 or whatever the real name of Windows Me was for Windows XP. We had spreadsheets, not much change there. We had Wolfenstein. The graphics are slicker but it's much the same. We had BBSes, now we have Slashdot.
Come on! I have no doubt about the reducibility of the human mind to software but anyone who thinks it might happen within 20 years must live in a box sealed up from the rest of the universe. (Hmmm...maybe those were the kinds of thoughts David Blaine was having?). In the last 20 years we've had incremental changes in software and hardware. It'll be at least a century more before those incremental changes add up to anything interesting. In fact, I hardly remember any time in the last 20 years when something was revealed to me about a piece of software and I thought Wow! That's smart. Few people are even trying to do smart stuff nowadays. (The one example I can think of off hand is Doug Lenat's early work like AM and Eurisko but now it seems it's all discredited anyway.)
In 2000 years time we'll all be quantum states running around inside machines, but for the next 20 or so life is going to be pretty much the same. We'll be watching the same trashy TV (at slightly higher res) listening to the same cheesy pop music (and not sharing it with out friends), playing the same old computer games and doing the same old life stuff: sex, marriage, birth, death, adultery etc. No AI is going to appear in 20 years!
Hmmm....I was going a bit funny with the negatives.
I suggest you read up on your history
Come on. You know you just tossed that out without actually reading any history yourself gambling it was on your side. Well it's not.
Many markup languages existed in 1971: troff predecessors runoff, roff, rf; SGML predecessor GML (I remember actually learning that one at IBM years ago). Book publishers had been talking about structure information in manuscripts for years before Project Gutenberg started. And just about any computer capable of dealing with entire novels in files (at least around 100K) would have been capable of running a simple viewer for such languages. The original argument was that they wanted the files to be viewable on any machine. Even if that did require plain ASCII there was no reason why the Gutenberg guys couldn't have generated that ASCII from markup that they archived.
Anyway, it seems they're working on fixing the problem now so good luck to them!
...they were still throwing away the formatting of the text to force it into crude 80 column ASCII. Are they still doing that? At the time they started the project I don't think there wasn't much excuse for not using some kind of markup and nowadays there's absolutely no excuse.
Of course I'll now get the expected slew of people telling me that the formatting can all be reconstructed. It cannot. There is no unambiguous way to recover reasonable formatting of these texts to be viewed in any other format other than 80 columns. For a while I tried reading Gutenberg books on my Palm but the spurious line breaks everywhere drove me crazy, even after doing quite a bit of scripting to make a best guess at the correct format.
When authors write it's not just the letters that counts. Some of that writing effort goes into formatting and you can't just discard it. It's depressing thinking how much work has gone into removing crucial information from 10,000 of the world's texts.
You can't beat the default Tellytubbies style with which Windows XP comes. Its deep primary colors shout out profundity while its oversized iconography makes a bold statement that few can ignore. It looks so good I can't bear to turn off my PC. I leave it switched on with the monitor standing next to my stylish Barney dinosaur.
Slashdot Mirror
But Microsoft, please, please, please, please, please learn how to write a proper terminal window! The Console in Windows 2000 is the worst every written. Or at least I thought it was until I tried the XP one where MS broke the only good features that the W2K one had. Writing a decent console is a few days work for a decent developer. Please assign the measly amount of money required to make a console that allows you to (1) copy and paste correctly between windows and (2) allows you to cursor up to edit previous commands. (Yes, I know cursor up does something along those lines but I'm yet to figure out exactly. One cursor up certainly doesn't just give you the last command typed afetr a few minutes of use.) Hell, if you had spare time you could even make it transparent 'n' stuff.
I'm still waiting for the patches for DOS 6.22. As far as I know MS haven't released a single security fix for this OS.
The point is we should celebrate. Those plants died believing that that was all there was to their existence. But millions of years later the energy they stored during their lifetimes has found a new purpose. Maybe millions of years after you die you'll find a purpose too. I think it's wonderful.
Well if you have a computer to hand a calculator is often unnecesary. But even then I often find it convenient to reach for the calculator. Sometimes I like to work away from the computer - you know, with pen and paper, and then it's useful to have a calculator to hand to check stuff. I can't imagine do full blown calculations with it but occasionally testing out a little something with say a 8x1 Fourier transform can be useful to check your hand calculations in a simple test case. I guess that pins down the use: testing out simple test cases.
What's Metakernel? I've looked on the web but still can't tell. I lost my serial cable years ago so haven't downloaded any HP packages in years!
Maybe you didn't know.
For example if I throw deSolve(y'+y''=sqrt(1+x),x,y) at my TI89 I get a sensible answer back (including a subexpression for an integral that it couldn't get in closed form). Will the new HP do that? Or better? (Mathematica knows to use Erf[] (of a complex variable no less) to polish off the integral.)
When any Ancient Greeks argued for the existence of atoms they were saying more about themselves than about the universe. They were revealing that many humans have a problem with the concept of a continuum and prefer everything to be made out of discrete parts. This isn't a property of the universe, it's a property of human minds. If you read Nietzsche then at one point he argues that atomic theory was incorrect even though, at that point, the evidence was stacked against him. I think that what he was actually attacking was this human psychological need to believe in Atomism. In fact Nietzsche supported a quite different vortex theory that you could argue looks more like quantum mechanics. But at the end of the day this is all waffle. What matters are the numbers and that's what Dalton computed.
Didn't you notice something weird about the second expression you printed? Like the .000000? Try computing exp(pi*sqrt(N)) for other values of N to a lot of decimal places.
When Dalton originally proposed his atomic theory there was much resistance. The idea of tiny, hard, indivisible units was unreasonable to many of the people around Dalton and it took a long time for people to accept his ideas. But guess what! The people who resisted were right. Today we have completely replaced the idea of an indivisible atom with a wavefunction in a Hilbert space. We might still call these things 'atoms' but they bear very little relationship with what Dalton was thinking of. In fact, at the time people used Dalton's theory as a metaphor as they couldn't take the ideas literally at all. And that's exactly what physicists do today.
...DOS which you can pick up on ebay.
More fun is to predict the upcoming technologies that while die before they properly start. (PS If you're a venture capitalist here is the place to look.)
exp(pi*sqrt(163))'s law dictates that you can successfully use a bluff with a frequency that is inversely proportion to the memory length of your intended audience.
The composers will in fact be replaced by AIs. Popular music will be one of the few areas where AIs will actually have any success in the following decades. And so, of course, it will be illegal to share AI thoughts!
...then I'm just going to have to seek out "smart phones" without voice capability. I hope there'll always be a niche for those. Damn I hate people phoning me!
Come on! I have no doubt about the reducibility of the human mind to software but anyone who thinks it might happen within 20 years must live in a box sealed up from the rest of the universe. (Hmmm...maybe those were the kinds of thoughts David Blaine was having?). In the last 20 years we've had incremental changes in software and hardware. It'll be at least a century more before those incremental changes add up to anything interesting. In fact, I hardly remember any time in the last 20 years when something was revealed to me about a piece of software and I thought Wow! That's smart. Few people are even trying to do smart stuff nowadays. (The one example I can think of off hand is Doug Lenat's early work like AM and Eurisko but now it seems it's all discredited anyway.)
In 2000 years time we'll all be quantum states running around inside machines, but for the next 20 or so life is going to be pretty much the same. We'll be watching the same trashy TV (at slightly higher res) listening to the same cheesy pop music (and not sharing it with out friends), playing the same old computer games and doing the same old life stuff: sex, marriage, birth, death, adultery etc. No AI is going to appear in 20 years!
Many markup languages existed in 1971: troff predecessors runoff, roff, rf; SGML predecessor GML (I remember actually learning that one at IBM years ago). Book publishers had been talking about structure information in manuscripts for years before Project Gutenberg started. And just about any computer capable of dealing with entire novels in files (at least around 100K) would have been capable of running a simple viewer for such languages. The original argument was that they wanted the files to be viewable on any machine. Even if that did require plain ASCII there was no reason why the Gutenberg guys couldn't have generated that ASCII from markup that they archived.
Anyway, it seems they're working on fixing the problem now so good luck to them!
Woohoo!!!
Of course I'll now get the expected slew of people telling me that the formatting can all be reconstructed. It cannot. There is no unambiguous way to recover reasonable formatting of these texts to be viewed in any other format other than 80 columns. For a while I tried reading Gutenberg books on my Palm but the spurious line breaks everywhere drove me crazy, even after doing quite a bit of scripting to make a best guess at the correct format.
When authors write it's not just the letters that counts. Some of that writing effort goes into formatting and you can't just discard it. It's depressing thinking how much work has gone into removing crucial information from 10,000 of the world's texts.
They should also test for the converse. Is the Antichrist John Paul II dying because I'm praying for it or would he be dying anyway.
Newsworthy==lots of people who read the forum would like to read the story. I found it interesting. I'm sure many others did too.
Your monitor does silver? Cool. Maybe you could post the (r,g,b) value so I can reproduce it on my screen.
You can't beat the default Tellytubbies style with which Windows XP comes. Its deep primary colors shout out profundity while its oversized iconography makes a bold statement that few can ignore. It looks so good I can't bear to turn off my PC. I leave it switched on with the monitor standing next to my stylish Barney dinosaur.
$a = int(rand(5));
if ($a==0) { print "Security flaw in Windows discovered!\n" }
elsif ($a==1) { print "IBM invents new higher density storage.\n" }
elsif ($a==2) { print "Intel announces faster CPU.\n" }
elsif ($a==3) { print "G5 fastest CPU on desktop.\n" }
elsif ($a==4) { print "G5 not fastest CPU on desktop.\n" }