Well f**k me! I plugged in a USB mouse under Suse 9.2 and it just worked. Unfortunately it's hard work rebuilding our code because libraries everywhere seem to have changed. But at least I have a decent mouse.
You left out the bit about the fairy godmother. And the princess in the tower. And I'm sure you got the ending wrong because it's supposed to go "...and they lived happily ever after". Exactly which collection of fairy tales did you get this story from?
I'll try what you say about USB mice and changing resolution on my shiny new Suse 9.2 box tomorrow. I hope it's better than the previous crap I've had to use.
You are being disingenuous over copy and paste. I bet you know full well there are (at least) two completely independent copy-and-paste buffers in Linux and different applications use different ones. That stuff about right clicking is a distraction. I've never copied that way - I've been using Windows and Linux both for a decade.
I went for an interview at IBM a few years back. They told me at the interview "This is not a research company". IBM is a service company. The research is a tiny part of their work. (And I did get the job, if you were wondering.)
When I want to plug in a USB mouse I have to hack the XF86Config. When I want to change screen resolution I have to do the same thing. Copy and paste is hopelessly broken as different applications seem to use independent copy-and-paste buffers. There's no consistency between one GUI application and the next. The 'productivity' apps are very poor imitaions of Office lacking countless features useful in everyday life. Printer support is horrendous. Linux is not the most pleasant option for your desktop. I don't mind being forced to use it - I spend most of my time on the command line, and the main GUI app I use is pretty good (ie. Firefox, though Thunderbird can't touch Outlook). And it's great for working on machines remotely. But I pity ordinary users who have to put up with it for ordinary everyday tasks. At least in my company they have the sense to give admin staff Windows machines.
I was pretty blown away by the GPS units I saw there. They rendered 3D views of where you were. This sounds like a dumb idea at first as if you want to see that you can just look out of your car. But the arrows showing you which way to go are also rendered in 3D so you can actually get a reliable indication of the path to take rather than "turn left in 50 yards" 50 yards after your turn. So my advice: if you want to see what's on its way check out what they have in Japan.
I have a Windows PC and my wife has a Windows PC. From time to time I run MS Anti-Spyware and it finds nothing on either machine. I and my wife surf the web, we occasionally download applications and so on. I also have a Virtual PC running on my Powerbook and I once found some spyware on it. I'd almost go so far as to say spyware is a myth. But...
I have a friend who's just given upon a laptop because it is so spyware ridden. But he also likes to show of his multi-gigabyte 'stolen' music collection.
So it seems to me that the people with a big spyware problem may be people who download crap indiscriminately off the web. If your music is coming from www.freemp3.ru then it seems you only have yourself to blame.
This is a wholly misleading calculation. You're computing how much energy is being removed from the atmosphere. But the total amount of energy moved out of the atmosphere isn't an interesting quantity at all. For example if all of the Earth's atmosphere were to transfer all of its energy to a region just over your head you'd soon notice it even though there is no change in total energy.
An improved approach might be to attempt to prove that the deviation of the atmosphere's 'trajectory' is small if you introduce a windmill into the system. But actually this is almost certainly false because of the so-called "butterfly effect". A deviation in the initial conditions of a chaotic system like the weather grows exponentially over time.
A more useful approach would be to prove that if you introduce a small windmill to the atmosphere, even if you may change it's trajectory radically, you don't change the types of things that are statistically likely to happen. I have no idea how to prove such a result mathematically. But I know your argument doesn't even come close to this.
On the other hand, a book index will actually take you to the section relevant to a particular word rather than just some unreliable web page that just happens to contain the word in a prominent position.
You enter a dark and smoky tavern. Everyone turns to look at you as you enter. Then a wizened old man in a dark cloak comes up to you and asks "Are you brave adventurers?".
acting
I don't like sand. It's coarse and rough and irritating,
and it gets everywhere. Not like here. Here everything's
soft... and [touching her skin] smooth...
OK, I cheated. That last one was professional acting rather than something from a D&D game.
It's a fundamental postulate of QFT that there is a lowest energy state called the 'vacuum state'. If there weren't such a thing the whole theory would be in big trouble and we'd have to start again. QFT predicts that this vacuum state has, in some sense, non-zero energy. But it's absolutely fundamental to QFT that you can't extract energy from this state because then you'd leave it in a lower energy state and QFT says there is no such thing. So it's a fundamental thing, not an engineering issue.
Now I grant that QFT may be wrong. But seeing as the non-zero energy of the vacuum state is predicted by QFT, if you reject QFT you are basically rejecting the notion of zero point energy as well.
There is another possibility: that when we make a vacuum (or at least approximately a vacuum) it doesn't actually correspond to a vacuum state. It might be that there is a lower energy state, but it's hard to achieve, so what we have looks like it's a vacuum state when it isn't. (Not how the word 'vacuum' means something different to 'vacuum state' now. 'Vacuum state' doesn't really mean vacuum, it just means lowest energy.) Again this isn't what zero point energy is about but it is a possibility, I suppose, that this is how the world is. But this is a very scary possibility. If a lower energy state than the normal vacuum exists then it means that everything around us could decay into it meaning the end of the universe. I'm not worrying about this myself. See this link for a tiny bit of info on the subject.
there is no one or two ways of doing something with templates but unlimted instead
Rejecting something because it gives you a choice is a bad idea. Do what I and many other do. Carve out a subset of C++ that satisfies your needs. Like you, I don't use friends. I also won't use multiple inheritance. I don't reject templates because they allow both abstraction and performance. I'm strict about what operator overloading I'll do (eg. I'll override operator+() if the operation really corresponds to + in a ring or field in the mathematical sense). But I won't reject anything simply because it gives me a choice.
You can't really refresh a qubit. What actually happens is you have a system made up of several qubits that acts, as a unit, logically like a single qubit, and is still well behaved if some of the underlying qubits are corrupted.
Heiroglyphs and cunieform are pretty lousy at stuff like computing
I probably wasn't clear. My point is that the most trivial technology is suitable for storing bits. Whether it's pieces of rock, magnetic fields through coils or charges on a tiny capacitor, bits are fairly easy to maintain and we don't have to worry about decoherence. Storing qubits is much harder - even if you only want to store them for future reading and not compute. You're pretty well forced to work either with microscopic systems or with extended systems where it's hard to address specific qubits as in NMR quantum computers.
Not even 'exactly', just approximately would do for many applications. But in a language with GC an operation that should take 100us might end up taking a full 1s because garbage collection is triggered. Whether you're manipulating 3D objects in a modeling package or waiting for an input device, an occasional delay of even a fraction of a second is not acceptable. For some reason I find most of my career involved with these types of applications.
But I do Haskell at the weekends when performance doesn't matter:-)
Qubits are not bits. If a bit is unstable then make lots of bits and use your favorite error correcting code to represent the data. Error correction is a hot topic for error-correcting codes too. But it's very much harder. In particular - the decay of a qubit to decoherence is exponentially rapid. By using error correcting codes you merely extend the decoherence time from something like picoseconds to dozens of picoseconds (those aren't exact numbers BTW, it might be femtoseconds or something else), but the exponential decay eventually wins. Classical systems can remain stable for millennia. (Egyptian hieroglyphs are encodings of classical bits.) Also, every paper I've ever read on quantum error-correcting codes makes assumptions about the form of the influences that causes decoherence. But real systems never fit these models exactly. Any deviation between reality and the model will again result in exponentially fast decay to decoherence. Many physicsts are totally sceptical about quantum computers, at least qubit based ones, for this reason. I personally think the decay of qubits is a showstopper.
It's unlikely that Ramanujan made such a claim. It's close to an integer and there are are some deep reasons for for this. See here for some more info. He most certainly wouldn't have discovered this result by a long hand calculation of its value.
This is a bit of a crazy way to make a comparison. Boeing's customers almost certainly have the luxury of being able to spend as much money as they like on making up for shortcomings in the software by throwing more hardware at the problem. If, on the other hand, you're writing for games consoles, or embedded systems, or home PCs, you might not have that luxury.
Jave is slower than C++. It's not open for debate.
Because C++ still has the performance edge and in some applications (games, other types of interactive 3D app, medical image processing, monte carlo sims of financial derivatives...) performance matters, C++ can bring a tolerable mix of abstraction and performance.
BTW Some people don't see memory allocation as a 'problem'. For many applications you want complete control over memory allocation and you don't want garbage collections and random moments, expecially for applications with a real-time component.
What I don't understand is this: if you're going to sacrifice performance then the world is your oyster. Why do you have to use some lame C++ clone like Java or C#? Why not try ocaml (whose performance isn't bad at all anyway), or Haskell (where you can make your code as elegant as a Haiku), or some other powerful language. C# and Java solve only one problem in C++ but otherwise open up few new options. Functional programming languages rethink the entirety of programming and make countless new techniques available.
Slashdot Mirror
Well f**k me! I plugged in a USB mouse under Suse 9.2 and it just worked. Unfortunately it's hard work rebuilding our code because libraries everywhere seem to have changed. But at least I have a decent mouse.
You left out the bit about the fairy godmother. And the princess in the tower. And I'm sure you got the ending wrong because it's supposed to go "...and they lived happily ever after". Exactly which collection of fairy tales did you get this story from?
You are being disingenuous over copy and paste. I bet you know full well there are (at least) two completely independent copy-and-paste buffers in Linux and different applications use different ones. That stuff about right clicking is a distraction. I've never copied that way - I've been using Windows and Linux both for a decade.
I went for an interview at IBM a few years back. They told me at the interview "This is not a research company". IBM is a service company. The research is a tiny part of their work. (And I did get the job, if you were wondering.)
When I want to plug in a USB mouse I have to hack the XF86Config. When I want to change screen resolution I have to do the same thing. Copy and paste is hopelessly broken as different applications seem to use independent copy-and-paste buffers. There's no consistency between one GUI application and the next. The 'productivity' apps are very poor imitaions of Office lacking countless features useful in everyday life. Printer support is horrendous. Linux is not the most pleasant option for your desktop. I don't mind being forced to use it - I spend most of my time on the command line, and the main GUI app I use is pretty good (ie. Firefox, though Thunderbird can't touch Outlook). And it's great for working on machines remotely. But I pity ordinary users who have to put up with it for ordinary everyday tasks. At least in my company they have the sense to give admin staff Windows machines.
No. I mean 3D. You know, that extra 3rd dimension that allows things to actually extend out of a flat plane.
I was pretty blown away by the GPS units I saw there. They rendered 3D views of where you were. This sounds like a dumb idea at first as if you want to see that you can just look out of your car. But the arrows showing you which way to go are also rendered in 3D so you can actually get a reliable indication of the path to take rather than "turn left in 50 yards" 50 yards after your turn. So my advice: if you want to see what's on its way check out what they have in Japan.
I have a friend who's just given upon a laptop because it is so spyware ridden. But he also likes to show of his multi-gigabyte 'stolen' music collection.
So it seems to me that the people with a big spyware problem may be people who download crap indiscriminately off the web. If your music is coming from www.freemp3.ru then it seems you only have yourself to blame.
What exactly was it that you didn't like about River kicking the shit out of anything in her path?
At one point they were giving away copies free with magazines so surely I can get it legally without paying.
An improved approach might be to attempt to prove that the deviation of the atmosphere's 'trajectory' is small if you introduce a windmill into the system. But actually this is almost certainly false because of the so-called "butterfly effect". A deviation in the initial conditions of a chaotic system like the weather grows exponentially over time.
A more useful approach would be to prove that if you introduce a small windmill to the atmosphere, even if you may change it's trajectory radically, you don't change the types of things that are statistically likely to happen. I have no idea how to prove such a result mathematically. But I know your argument doesn't even come close to this.
Strip clubs exploit men and women. Men also exploit strip clubs and so do women. That's the nature of a capitalist economy: it's not a zero sum game.
On the other hand, a book index will actually take you to the section relevant to a particular word rather than just some unreliable web page that just happens to contain the word in a prominent position.
That's not necessarily meant in a bad way. Sometimes this life stuff gets in the way of a good bit of fantasy.
The guy got paid didn't he?
OK, I cheated. That last one was professional acting rather than something from a D&D game.
Now I grant that QFT may be wrong. But seeing as the non-zero energy of the vacuum state is predicted by QFT, if you reject QFT you are basically rejecting the notion of zero point energy as well.
There is another possibility: that when we make a vacuum (or at least approximately a vacuum) it doesn't actually correspond to a vacuum state. It might be that there is a lower energy state, but it's hard to achieve, so what we have looks like it's a vacuum state when it isn't. (Not how the word 'vacuum' means something different to 'vacuum state' now. 'Vacuum state' doesn't really mean vacuum, it just means lowest energy.) Again this isn't what zero point energy is about but it is a possibility, I suppose, that this is how the world is. But this is a very scary possibility. If a lower energy state than the normal vacuum exists then it means that everything around us could decay into it meaning the end of the universe. I'm not worrying about this myself. See this link for a tiny bit of info on the subject.
there is no one or two ways of doing something with templates but unlimted instead
Rejecting something because it gives you a choice is a bad idea. Do what I and many other do. Carve out a subset of C++ that satisfies your needs. Like you, I don't use friends. I also won't use multiple inheritance. I don't reject templates because they allow both abstraction and performance. I'm strict about what operator overloading I'll do (eg. I'll override operator+() if the operation really corresponds to + in a ring or field in the mathematical sense). But I won't reject anything simply because it gives me a choice.But I do Haskell at the weekends when performance doesn't matter :-)
Qubits are not bits. If a bit is unstable then make lots of bits and use your favorite error correcting code to represent the data. Error correction is a hot topic for error-correcting codes too. But it's very much harder. In particular - the decay of a qubit to decoherence is exponentially rapid. By using error correcting codes you merely extend the decoherence time from something like picoseconds to dozens of picoseconds (those aren't exact numbers BTW, it might be femtoseconds or something else), but the exponential decay eventually wins. Classical systems can remain stable for millennia. (Egyptian hieroglyphs are encodings of classical bits.) Also, every paper I've ever read on quantum error-correcting codes makes assumptions about the form of the influences that causes decoherence. But real systems never fit these models exactly. Any deviation between reality and the model will again result in exponentially fast decay to decoherence. Many physicsts are totally sceptical about quantum computers, at least qubit based ones, for this reason. I personally think the decay of qubits is a showstopper.
It's unlikely that Ramanujan made such a claim. It's close to an integer and there are are some deep reasons for for this. See here for some more info. He most certainly wouldn't have discovered this result by a long hand calculation of its value.
Jave is slower than C++. It's not open for debate.
BTW Some people don't see memory allocation as a 'problem'. For many applications you want complete control over memory allocation and you don't want garbage collections and random moments, expecially for applications with a real-time component.
What I don't understand is this: if you're going to sacrifice performance then the world is your oyster. Why do you have to use some lame C++ clone like Java or C#? Why not try ocaml (whose performance isn't bad at all anyway), or Haskell (where you can make your code as elegant as a Haiku), or some other powerful language. C# and Java solve only one problem in C++ but otherwise open up few new options. Functional programming languages rethink the entirety of programming and make countless new techniques available.