Right, but there is such a thing as raising a child properly and raising a child badly. We have laws against certain forms of child abuse, but unfortunately other forms are still allowed...
One thing the article doesn't point out is that increasing the solidity of the propeller disc can have it's own consequences, and there is generally an optimum solidity (depending on various other factors) which results in the highest efficiency.
MS has 70,000 employees, most of which are mediocre. In fact, that's almost the essence of their development model --- throw thousands of crappy developers at a problem and excrete a solution that is just workable enough to make some money.
If you think Stallman has made this into a religious thing, you really don't have a very good understanding of the history of the GPL.
I'm not going to claim to have a deep insight into Stallman's mind, but based on historical events in the public record, I think it's fair to say that the GPL has an extremely practical intention behind it.
Stallman is a product of the computer industry of the 1980s. This was when "open" in the commercial software industry meant nothing similar to what it does now, and when lot's of "open" code (BSD, UNIX, etc) got locked up by companies. Taking the historical context into account, it's absolutely obvious where the "share and share alike" aspect of the GPL comes from.
Incidentally, as someone who has at least a bit of code under the GPL, I resent the insinuation that I've somehow been duped by fancy advertising. If you don't like the GPL --- fine, use the BSD license for _your_ open source code. Meanwhile, there are lots of people, perhaps less magnanimous than yourself, who like the idea of a common pool of open code that is actively protected by a license with some teeth.
This is one thing I liked about Die Hard 4 (besides Bruce Willis killing a heli with a car) --- the fact that they actually acknowledge that not all computers in the universe are connected to the public internet. I like how they had to physically break into the power station to hack the computers controlling the grid.
The thing you're describing is called an APU. It's used to start the jet engines, and to power the aircraft on the ground, but in most commercial aircraft, it does not provide in-flight power once the main engines are running.
As for scarcity, power isn't a terribly scare resource on an airplane. Remember, the engines are producing tens of MWs of power at cruise speed. Taking even a couple of hundred KWs off the main shaft to power electrical systems is not really a problem.
The SPEC benchmarks are _almost_ perfectly parallelizable. They are just multiple instances of a single-threaded benchmark, and as such don't really test all the things that arise in true multi-threaded programs (cache line bouncing, etc).
But *compilers* are more important than ever, and writing a good compiler is hard work. x86 compilers have been tweaked and improved for nearly 30 years.
Compilers have gotten better, but mostly at CPU-independent optimization. Compilers for x86 aren't better than compilers for other architectures, it's just that x86 CPUs are extraordinarily insensitive to mediocre code generation. The reason is two-fold. First, they kind of have to be, because x86 doesn't really have enough registers to make fancy scheduling profitable. Second, x86 compilers have to target a wide variety of CPU implementations, so code ultimately ends up being compiled for something like a P6, and CPUs have to get good performance out of that existing code.
yeah yeah, multitouch blabla.. no stylus = have fun selecting text with the wacky zoom-in fingerslide position-the-caret action hotness and by all means call it a feature!
It's called a design trade-off. I definitely scroll and zoom way more often than I select text. Phone screens are limited --- binding the common actions to easy-to-use mechanisms makes a lot of sense.
This will give me a Möbius strip with uniform stresses throughout
Uh, no. Even if you just take your perfect piece of paper and twist it slightly, you'll get a non-uniform stress distribution.
Think about it this way. Take your hands and put them together firmly. Slightly twist your left hand, trying to move your left thumb upwards and away from you. What's the sheer stress on your right hand due to the torque? It's upward near your palm, and downward towards your finger tips. That means its zero somewhere in the middle. This is a non-uniform stress distribution. The same thing will be true for adjacent slices of the flat sheet, even a mathematically perfect one.
If it were the bending, then wouldn't the energy densities depend on the material used to create the shape?
For most simple, homogenous materials, you can factor the material properties out of the equations describing the strain distribution. Eg: the equations describing the deformation of a brick with a load on top are the same whether the brick is aluminum or steel, they are just parameterized by the Young's modulus and Poisson's ratio of the material used.
The analysis is for what happens if you take a flat sheet and bend it into a mobius strip. Hence the line in the article: "wide developable strip undergoing large deformations"
You'd understand the significance of this sort of work if you had a background in engineering. The utility of this work isn't just in understanding mobius strips. The methods used to understand such structures can be used to understand other types of structures.
What this work did was use a new mathematical technique to analyze strain energy within a mobius strip. Computation of the strain energy (potential energy function) of various geometries is an important part of the finite element formulation used to analyze real mechanical structures. The fact that the geometry is so simple doesn't mean the work is useless. Finite element methods are formulated on very simple geometries. For example, you can do very precise analysis of something like an airplane skin using a fundamental element as simple as an isotropic 2D rectangular sheet.
I've been doing my current project on my 13" MacBook. I've found that a pair of side-by-side Emacs windows, each split into two 80x25 sections works perfectly. I very rarely have to continue code on the next line, and even then I almost never have functions that take up more than a single 25-line screen.
Of course, this is with Lisp code, which is really compact both vertically and horizontally. I can almost never reasonably get that sort of density with C++ code, which just eats horizontal space for lunch.
Actually, I thought it was neat. The code had some connection to the plot of the story, and was actually from the source code. It's much like the computer code you see in Crichton's books, except real.
[QUOTE]No it doesn't. The set of positive integers is separate from the set of negative integers, and both are infinite.[/QUOTE]
Spinoza predates Cantor's work on set theory, so he didn't know that. But that's a fair point that hadn't occurred to me. That said, both positive and negative integers are contained within the set of real numbers, which are also infinite, but have a higher cardinality. If God is infinite then he must either be completely disjoint from the corporeal world (which brings into question how you can have human Son of God), or he must be part of a greater thing.
[QUOTE]This of course assumes that size - or the total amount of qualities - equals perfection.[/QUOTE]
Obviously it depends on your definition of perfection. But the way he's traditionally presented, being all-encompassing is part of the basic perfection of God. You can give up on the "all-encompassing" aspect, but that brings you to: "so, what encompasses God?"
[QUOTE]Assuming that there is only one perfect state. There is no reason to assume such a thing, or can you give any ? And if there is more than one perfect state, an entity could flip between them without losing or gaining any perfection.[/QUOTE]
You could admit the existence of a multiplicity of perfect states, though that's very weird to conventional reason, but that introduces a fundamental moral ambiguity. It allows the existence of multiple qualities that are equally as good as each other. Beyond that, there are some things you can't skirt around. For example, God is presented as wanting certain things for humanity. A perfect entity could not possibly want anything, because that would imply that he is in a less perfect state, and that fulfilling that want could move him to a more perfect state.
[QUOTE]Look, just give it up. [/QUOTE]
It's not my argument, nor is it an argument against the existence of God. It's an argument that has been made by a very eminent philosopher that I find greatly limits the ways in which you can logically view God, if he exists.
Spinoza (a devout believer in God, btw) made a pretty convincing argument that if God does exist, he couldn't take the form of the traditional Jewish/Christian/Muslim diety.
The gist of the argument is thus: the premise of most monotheist religions is that God is singular, perfect, and omnipotent. However, the Torah/Bible/Quaran also ascribes to him qualities such as loving his creations and wanting them to live a just life. These views are contradictory. First, the premise that God is separate from his creations implies that God is finite. The premise that God is finite screws up a lot of assumptions. If God is finite and separate from his creations, then the two must be contained in some greater thing, and this greater thing would be more perfect than God, by virtue of being a superset of him. Moreover, if he's finite, that opens up the possibility that he is not singular. Second, something which is perfect must logically be immutable. Any change in the state of a perfect thing would render it imperfect, or imply that the original state was not perfect to begin with. Thus, God cannot love anything, or want anything for his creations. He cannot think, feel, reason, or want, because all of these things imply mutability. Indeed, perfection and omnipotence are incompatible, because action implies change!
It's very hard to logically reconcile these concepts while still believing that God sent his son to die for our sins, because he wants humanity to be saved. The traditional mono-theistic religions basically give up on the idea of God as perfect and omnipotent in order to maintain the "big man in the sky" idea. Spinoza couldn't deal with that, he posited instead that God was infinite and immutable, not just being a separate entity in the universe but being the entity of which the universe itself was an expression. The problem with this idea, though, is that you can't expect such an entity to answer your prayers, to offer opinions regarding reproductive practices, etc.
In the US:Saudi relationship, the Saudi's are making out like bandits. If the US stopped supporting them, their damn monarchy be greatly damaged, and rightly so.
Uh, you got it backwards. It's more like Australia:New Zealand as USA:Canada. The latter are smaller countries with fewer resources (and in the cause of Australia and New Zealand, the skew is much heavier). So yeah, if Canada was shipping patients to the US for certain procedures, I wouldn't find that particularly weird at all.
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Right, but there is such a thing as raising a child properly and raising a child badly. We have laws against certain forms of child abuse, but unfortunately other forms are still allowed...
That's actually an excellent answer. There is an article about precisely that subject here: http://www.aerospaceweb.org/question/propulsion/q0 039.shtml
One thing the article doesn't point out is that increasing the solidity of the propeller disc can have it's own consequences, and there is generally an optimum solidity (depending on various other factors) which results in the highest efficiency.
The 68k is for all intents and purposes a 32-bit machine. It had a 32-bit native word and 32-bit addresses.
Current "64-bit" CPUs have 128 bit memory busses -- that doesn't make them 128-bit.
MS has 70,000 employees, most of which are mediocre. In fact, that's almost the essence of their development model --- throw thousands of crappy developers at a problem and excrete a solution that is just workable enough to make some money.
If you think Stallman has made this into a religious thing, you really don't have a very good understanding of the history of the GPL.
I'm not going to claim to have a deep insight into Stallman's mind, but based on historical events in the public record, I think it's fair to say that the GPL has an extremely practical intention behind it.
Stallman is a product of the computer industry of the 1980s. This was when "open" in the commercial software industry meant nothing similar to what it does now, and when lot's of "open" code (BSD, UNIX, etc) got locked up by companies. Taking the historical context into account, it's absolutely obvious where the "share and share alike" aspect of the GPL comes from.
Incidentally, as someone who has at least a bit of code under the GPL, I resent the insinuation that I've somehow been duped by fancy advertising. If you don't like the GPL --- fine, use the BSD license for _your_ open source code. Meanwhile, there are lots of people, perhaps less magnanimous than yourself, who like the idea of a common pool of open code that is actively protected by a license with some teeth.
This is one thing I liked about Die Hard 4 (besides Bruce Willis killing a heli with a car) --- the fact that they actually acknowledge that not all computers in the universe are connected to the public internet. I like how they had to physically break into the power station to hack the computers controlling the grid.
The thing you're describing is called an APU. It's used to start the jet engines, and to power the aircraft on the ground, but in most commercial aircraft, it does not provide in-flight power once the main engines are running.
As for scarcity, power isn't a terribly scare resource on an airplane. Remember, the engines are producing tens of MWs of power at cruise speed. Taking even a couple of hundred KWs off the main shaft to power electrical systems is not really a problem.
The SPEC benchmarks are _almost_ perfectly parallelizable. They are just multiple instances of a single-threaded benchmark, and as such don't really test all the things that arise in true multi-threaded programs (cache line bouncing, etc).
But *compilers* are more important than ever, and writing a good compiler is hard work. x86 compilers have been tweaked and improved for nearly 30 years.
Compilers have gotten better, but mostly at CPU-independent optimization. Compilers for x86 aren't better than compilers for other architectures, it's just that x86 CPUs are extraordinarily insensitive to mediocre code generation. The reason is two-fold. First, they kind of have to be, because x86 doesn't really have enough registers to make fancy scheduling profitable. Second, x86 compilers have to target a wide variety of CPU implementations, so code ultimately ends up being compiled for something like a P6, and CPUs have to get good performance out of that existing code.
Entertainingly, PPC code is much larger than AMD64 code, prefix bytes or no.
And I suppose we should give equal time to both sides of the "does 1 + 1 = 2" debate?
yeah yeah, multitouch blabla.. no stylus = have fun selecting text with the wacky zoom-in fingerslide position-the-caret action hotness and by all means call it a feature!
It's called a design trade-off. I definitely scroll and zoom way more often than I select text. Phone screens are limited --- binding the common actions to easy-to-use mechanisms makes a lot of sense.
This will give me a Möbius strip with uniform stresses throughout
Uh, no. Even if you just take your perfect piece of paper and twist it slightly, you'll get a non-uniform stress distribution.
Think about it this way. Take your hands and put them together firmly. Slightly twist your left hand, trying to move your left thumb upwards and away from you. What's the sheer stress on your right hand due to the torque? It's upward near your palm, and downward towards your finger tips. That means its zero somewhere in the middle. This is a non-uniform stress distribution. The same thing will be true for adjacent slices of the flat sheet, even a mathematically perfect one.
If it were the bending, then wouldn't the energy densities depend on the material used to create the shape?
For most simple, homogenous materials, you can factor the material properties out of the equations describing the strain distribution. Eg: the equations describing the deformation of a brick with a load on top are the same whether the brick is aluminum or steel, they are just parameterized by the Young's modulus and Poisson's ratio of the material used.
The analysis is for what happens if you take a flat sheet and bend it into a mobius strip. Hence the line in the article: "wide developable strip undergoing large deformations"
You'd understand the significance of this sort of work if you had a background in engineering. The utility of this work isn't just in understanding mobius strips. The methods used to understand such structures can be used to understand other types of structures.
What this work did was use a new mathematical technique to analyze strain energy within a mobius strip. Computation of the strain energy (potential energy function) of various geometries is an important part of the finite element formulation used to analyze real mechanical structures. The fact that the geometry is so simple doesn't mean the work is useless. Finite element methods are formulated on very simple geometries. For example, you can do very precise analysis of something like an airplane skin using a fundamental element as simple as an isotropic 2D rectangular sheet.
Well I'll be, its state election law, not Constitutional law.
For the same reasons the Constitution provides for secret ballots in elections.
I've been doing my current project on my 13" MacBook. I've found that a pair of side-by-side Emacs windows, each split into two 80x25 sections works perfectly. I very rarely have to continue code on the next line, and even then I almost never have functions that take up more than a single 25-line screen.
Of course, this is with Lisp code, which is really compact both vertically and horizontally. I can almost never reasonably get that sort of density with C++ code, which just eats horizontal space for lunch.
Actually, I thought it was neat. The code had some connection to the plot of the story, and was actually from the source code. It's much like the computer code you see in Crichton's books, except real.
[QUOTE]No it doesn't. The set of positive integers is separate from the set of negative integers, and both are infinite.[/QUOTE]
Spinoza predates Cantor's work on set theory, so he didn't know that. But that's a fair point that hadn't occurred to me. That said, both positive and negative integers are contained within the set of real numbers, which are also infinite, but have a higher cardinality. If God is infinite then he must either be completely disjoint from the corporeal world (which brings into question how you can have human Son of God), or he must be part of a greater thing.
[QUOTE]This of course assumes that size - or the total amount of qualities - equals perfection.[/QUOTE]
Obviously it depends on your definition of perfection. But the way he's traditionally presented, being all-encompassing is part of the basic perfection of God. You can give up on the "all-encompassing" aspect, but that brings you to: "so, what encompasses God?"
[QUOTE]Assuming that there is only one perfect state. There is no reason to assume such a thing, or can you give any ? And if there is more than one perfect state, an entity could flip between them without losing or gaining any perfection.[/QUOTE]
You could admit the existence of a multiplicity of perfect states, though that's very weird to conventional reason, but that introduces a fundamental moral ambiguity. It allows the existence of multiple qualities that are equally as good as each other. Beyond that, there are some things you can't skirt around. For example, God is presented as wanting certain things for humanity. A perfect entity could not possibly want anything, because that would imply that he is in a less perfect state, and that fulfilling that want could move him to a more perfect state.
[QUOTE]Look, just give it up. [/QUOTE]
It's not my argument, nor is it an argument against the existence of God. It's an argument that has been made by a very eminent philosopher that I find greatly limits the ways in which you can logically view God, if he exists.
Spinoza (a devout believer in God, btw) made a pretty convincing argument that if God does exist, he couldn't take the form of the traditional Jewish/Christian/Muslim diety.
The gist of the argument is thus: the premise of most monotheist religions is that God is singular, perfect, and omnipotent. However, the Torah/Bible/Quaran also ascribes to him qualities such as loving his creations and wanting them to live a just life. These views are contradictory. First, the premise that God is separate from his creations implies that God is finite. The premise that God is finite screws up a lot of assumptions. If God is finite and separate from his creations, then the two must be contained in some greater thing, and this greater thing would be more perfect than God, by virtue of being a superset of him. Moreover, if he's finite, that opens up the possibility that he is not singular. Second, something which is perfect must logically be immutable. Any change in the state of a perfect thing would render it imperfect, or imply that the original state was not perfect to begin with. Thus, God cannot love anything, or want anything for his creations. He cannot think, feel, reason, or want, because all of these things imply mutability. Indeed, perfection and omnipotence are incompatible, because action implies change!
It's very hard to logically reconcile these concepts while still believing that God sent his son to die for our sins, because he wants humanity to be saved. The traditional mono-theistic religions basically give up on the idea of God as perfect and omnipotent in order to maintain the "big man in the sky" idea. Spinoza couldn't deal with that, he posited instead that God was infinite and immutable, not just being a separate entity in the universe but being the entity of which the universe itself was an expression. The problem with this idea, though, is that you can't expect such an entity to answer your prayers, to offer opinions regarding reproductive practices, etc.
In the US:Saudi relationship, the Saudi's are making out like bandits. If the US stopped supporting them, their damn monarchy be greatly damaged, and rightly so.
Uh, you got it backwards. It's more like Australia:New Zealand as USA:Canada. The latter are smaller countries with fewer resources (and in the cause of Australia and New Zealand, the skew is much heavier). So yeah, if Canada was shipping patients to the US for certain procedures, I wouldn't find that particularly weird at all.
I do enjoy the "hacking the password" by looking through an unencrypted disk image :)