Reading through the thread on fractalforums was inspiring. You guys play off each other remarkably well. Some gorgeous work all through there.
You guys helped correct JosLeys' "error" where he had large bridges under the bulbs. I'm not sure that wasn't a mistake... his work was remarkable also and the peer norming there may be throwing out something interesting.
If that's the case, it's been a sad day since at least 1984. These things teach us interesting things about numbers and are interesting in and of themselves. As a way of making math more visually beautiful they also serve to draw the interest of youth to a field ordinarily seen as dry and boring.
There's more at work here than just the fact that suddenly otherwise law-abiding citizens have decided to become criminals.
Copyright is a bargain, a compromise that people submit to like civilized adults - but only in so much as it's perceived to be fair. Once eternal copyright was enacted the fairness of the proposition ended, as did the voluntary compliance. This was predicted long ago:
I will only say this, that if the measure before us should pass, and should produce one-tenth part of the evil which it is calculated to produce, and which I fully expect it to produce, there will soon be a remedy, though of a very objectionable kind. Just as the absurd acts which prohibited the sale of game were virtually repealed by the poacher, just as many absurd revenue acts have been virtually repealed by the smuggler, so will this law be virtually repealed by piratical booksellers. At present the holder of copyright has the public feeling on his side. Those who invade copyright are regarded as knaves who take the bread out of the mouths of deserving men. Everybody is well pleased to see them restrained by the law, and compelled to refund their ill-gotten gains. No tradesman of good repute will have anything to do with such disgraceful transactions. Pass this law: and that feeling is at an end. Men very different from the present race of piratical booksellers will soon infringe this intolerable monopoly. Great masses of capital will be constantly employed in the violation of the law. Every art will be employed to evade legal pursuit; and the whole nation will be in the plot. On which side indeed should the public sympathy be when the question is whether some book as popular as Robinson Crusoe, or the Pilgrim's Progress, shall be in every cottage, or whether it shall be confined to the libraries of the rich for the advantage of the great-grandson of a bookseller who, a hundred years before, drove a hard bargain for the copyright with the author when in great distress? Remember too that, when once it ceases to be considered as wrong and discreditable to invade literary property, no person can say where the invasion will stop. The public seldom makes nice distinctions. The wholesome copyright which now exists will share in the disgrace and danger of the new copyright which you are about to create. And you will find that, in attempting to impose unreasonable restraints on the reprinting of the works of the dead, you have, to a great extent, annulled those restraints which now prevent men from pillaging and defrauding the living.
The reason why I am asking is so that I can get a feel for the validity of your statement about the coding culture amongst people working for Microsoft.
There are very few things you need to know here. Programmers for Microsoft:
Wanted to work for Microsoft
Convinced some people at Microsoft they would play along with their game
Survived the spinup to the Microsoft programming culture
Deliver the products you've come to expect
Whether your interest is as a prospective buyer of their output of a prospective employer of a former Microsoft programmer, the choice is clear. Microsoft carefully selects their programmers from the brightest and the best because they can. They filter for the folks who can coexist with them because they must. They drive them with the processes that they have. The programmers deliver what they can in this context and accept the limitations of the context as a condition of employment. Having survived this experience a programmer must necessarily have certain properties which, depending on your point of view, mark him "desirable" or "undesirable".
Buzzwords can be fun. Next time you're scheduled for a sales presentation make up a bunch of cards with different sets of mixed buzzwords and give each attendee a card and a highlighter. The first person to get five buzzwords marked off should yell BINGO! and win a small prize for paying attention. It's called buzzword bingo. It works equally well whether you warn the presenters or not, since they can't help themselves. Some salespeople can't get past the first slide without "BINGO" ringing out.
Here's a nice starter list: Manage virtual ROI available secure cloud service protect tier integrate enterprise 2.0 TCO efficiency scale trust partner federate content core architect generation.
Somebody talked. The options market started heating up hours before the announcement.
It looks like it's going to be a good fight, as the traditional tech companies merge transformer-style into a pair of consolidated all-in-one providers. Maybe they'll battle to the death for every server room dollar.
All the while Apple sews up more and more lines in the consumer electronics market and Jobs smiles subtly. It's almost as if he knows what happens once we've consolidated everything in the datacenter.
God created the world. She did this by creating a universe that would create men by carefully constructing a dispersion of matter and energy and physical laws at 10^-42th seconds into the Big Bang. Genesis is allegory and an absurd perversion of an oral history that's suspect at best. Because He's 32 dimensional, to Her these things happen in the local nexus of a particular interpretation of a poem that's an allegory for a much more beautiful and tragic construct than our lives could ever be. The fact that our universe exists at all is due to a peculiar ambiguity of two terms, which imply either the story Oedipus Rex, or the flavor of peanut butter mixed with arsenic and the subjective nature of the interpretation is part of the art.
Unfortunately for you and me, the end purpose of this endeavor is to create a crystalline intelligence with the subtlety to transcend its corporeal existence and bring about the end of the being divine that imagined it into being, which event will occur outside of our light cone some 30 billion years from now. We are merely the by-blow of a divine suicide attempt.
You can't falsify "God did it." What you can do is move further back in time the moment when He set the wheel in motion, or didn't. We will never be rid of the folks who insist on an intent to create the present moment and maybe that should not be a goal. We can move backward in time the moment where we can infer from the current phenomena what happened, and that's a good goal of science. Absent a positive proof that's the best we can do. The why is best left to philosophers, but the when is within the scope of science and the how may one day be.
Or, as the story shows, by entirely natural processes.
And the natural laws that govern these natural processes, they just happened by accident. They weren't chosen or anything in the first 10 ^-37th second after the big bang. Out of the infinite number of potential physical constants and laws, our number just "came up". We get to observe this fortunate circumstance because things happened the way they did because God does, in fact, "play dice with the universe".
I wonder what we will be stirring up in 20-50 years.
You don't have to wonder. The results are here. That's just the wikipedia page, but you can follow the links. I hoped they saved a sample so we can check again in 100, 1,000 and 10,000 years.
They are proving that life as we know it should be common. Life as we don't know it? That's still an open question. It may have been here all along and we didn't see it.
They're not going to take kindly to anything that could challenge their certainty.
I'm going to try not to disparage our future overlords. They're out-reproducing us and so according to Darwin they are more fit. Whether Darwin or Malthus wins in the end is an open question.
This shows that a component of one of the building blocks of life can be made by natural processes.
The Miller-Urey experiment was also fruitful here. Over modest timescales in likely primordial Earth environments it appears that the building blocks formed are the ones commonest to all forms of life-as-we-know-it. The leap from "could have" to "did" is getting more manageable every few years.
The experiment in TFA goes further - finding methods for synthesis of the components not on a primordial Earth, but in space. This is a net positive for the panspermia theory. Oh, and BTW: you left off an important part of that quote.
Our experiments demonstrate that once the Earth formed, many of the building blocks of life were likely present from the beginning. Since we are simulating universal astrophysical conditions, the same is likely wherever planets are formed," explained Sandford.
We'll know more when we start dissecting comets, and even more when we dissect comets that orbit other stars. The tricky thing about life is that it takes darned little of it to make all of the life that we see.
Think of it like this... you like, bacon, right? When people go to colonize the distant stars, it would be helpful if there was already bacon there when they arrived. Bacon is made from pigs, which are living things, and almost all living things of which we are aware are in part made of this stuff.
So the odds have improved that our interstellar colonists will arrive at a place that already has salty, delicious bacon -- which is good, since by then they'll probably be almost already out after a long trip.
He's not going to get what he wants here. Google gives us what we want - indexing of all the websites in the world, for the nominal cost of some tiny text ads. If all his websites were to drop off the Internet tomorrow I doubt anybody would notice.
Newscorp only adds a tiny fraction to the overall news flow. Most of it is rehashed wire reports or self-generated "groundhog day" type stuff.
Slashdot Mirror
Try the mirror. (It needs sound and it takes a while to cache.)
Reading through the thread on fractalforums was inspiring. You guys play off each other remarkably well. Some gorgeous work all through there.
You guys helped correct JosLeys' "error" where he had large bridges under the bulbs. I'm not sure that wasn't a mistake... his work was remarkable also and the peer norming there may be throwing out something interesting.
If that's the case, it's been a sad day since at least 1984. These things teach us interesting things about numbers and are interesting in and of themselves. As a way of making math more visually beautiful they also serve to draw the interest of youth to a field ordinarily seen as dry and boring.
There is a subtle difference between "a solution" and "the solution".
But yeah, I was selling it a bit because the pictures are so lovely.
Did we all not already have enough links to that screen?
And for those for whom bit.ly is too long, the makers of bit.ly have a new domain: j.mp
There's more at work here than just the fact that suddenly otherwise law-abiding citizens have decided to become criminals.
Copyright is a bargain, a compromise that people submit to like civilized adults - but only in so much as it's perceived to be fair. Once eternal copyright was enacted the fairness of the proposition ended, as did the voluntary compliance. This was predicted long ago:
I will only say this, that if the measure before us should pass, and should produce one-tenth part of the evil which it is calculated to produce, and which I fully expect it to produce, there will soon be a remedy, though of a very objectionable kind. Just as the absurd acts which prohibited the sale of game were virtually repealed by the poacher, just as many absurd revenue acts have been virtually repealed by the smuggler, so will this law be virtually repealed by piratical booksellers. At present the holder of copyright has the public feeling on his side. Those who invade copyright are regarded as knaves who take the bread out of the mouths of deserving men. Everybody is well pleased to see them restrained by the law, and compelled to refund their ill-gotten gains. No tradesman of good repute will have anything to do with such disgraceful transactions. Pass this law: and that feeling is at an end. Men very different from the present race of piratical booksellers will soon infringe this intolerable monopoly. Great masses of capital will be constantly employed in the violation of the law. Every art will be employed to evade legal pursuit; and the whole nation will be in the plot. On which side indeed should the public sympathy be when the question is whether some book as popular as Robinson Crusoe, or the Pilgrim's Progress, shall be in every cottage, or whether it shall be confined to the libraries of the rich for the advantage of the great-grandson of a bookseller who, a hundred years before, drove a hard bargain for the copyright with the author when in great distress? Remember too that, when once it ceases to be considered as wrong and discreditable to invade literary property, no person can say where the invasion will stop. The public seldom makes nice distinctions. The wholesome copyright which now exists will share in the disgrace and danger of the new copyright which you are about to create. And you will find that, in attempting to impose unreasonable restraints on the reprinting of the works of the dead, you have, to a great extent, annulled those restraints which now prevent men from pillaging and defrauding the living.
-Thomas Macaulay
Copyright holders have by getting what they want ended their advantage.
IBM tried it when they went to OS/2. Suddenly a hard drive was a "Fixed disk" and a motherboard was a "Planar board".
It's a sad game but it's the only one there is. It's fun to watch megacorporations fight to the death over ownership of a word.
The reason why I am asking is so that I can get a feel for the validity of your statement about the coding culture amongst people working for Microsoft.
There are very few things you need to know here. Programmers for Microsoft:
Whether your interest is as a prospective buyer of their output of a prospective employer of a former Microsoft programmer, the choice is clear. Microsoft carefully selects their programmers from the brightest and the best because they can. They filter for the folks who can coexist with them because they must. They drive them with the processes that they have. The programmers deliver what they can in this context and accept the limitations of the context as a condition of employment. Having survived this experience a programmer must necessarily have certain properties which, depending on your point of view, mark him "desirable" or "undesirable".
Thick client is also insensitive these days. You want to go with "fluffy client".
Just kidding... the least offensive term is, I believe, "rich client", though in a bank that could be confusing too.
Buzzwords can be fun. Next time you're scheduled for a sales presentation make up a bunch of cards with different sets of mixed buzzwords and give each attendee a card and a highlighter. The first person to get five buzzwords marked off should yell BINGO! and win a small prize for paying attention. It's called buzzword bingo. It works equally well whether you warn the presenters or not, since they can't help themselves. Some salespeople can't get past the first slide without "BINGO" ringing out.
Here's a nice starter list: Manage virtual ROI available secure cloud service protect tier integrate enterprise 2.0 TCO efficiency scale trust partner federate content core architect generation.
Also, test the network stack real good.
The iPhone is the number one smartphone in the market by the metric that matters most to Apple: net profit.
And they sell overpriced x86 boxes to a niche market segment.
That would be the "profitable" niche - and they appear to have taken over the "profitable" corner of every game board they play on.
Somebody talked. The options market started heating up hours before the announcement.
It looks like it's going to be a good fight, as the traditional tech companies merge transformer-style into a pair of consolidated all-in-one providers. Maybe they'll battle to the death for every server room dollar.
All the while Apple sews up more and more lines in the consumer electronics market and Jobs smiles subtly. It's almost as if he knows what happens once we've consolidated everything in the datacenter.
the subjective nature of the interpretation is part of the art.
Did I say that's it's a comedy? Because it is. It's hilarious, from a certain point of view.
Oh, let's get absurd.
God created the world. She did this by creating a universe that would create men by carefully constructing a dispersion of matter and energy and physical laws at 10^-42th seconds into the Big Bang. Genesis is allegory and an absurd perversion of an oral history that's suspect at best. Because He's 32 dimensional, to Her these things happen in the local nexus of a particular interpretation of a poem that's an allegory for a much more beautiful and tragic construct than our lives could ever be. The fact that our universe exists at all is due to a peculiar ambiguity of two terms, which imply either the story Oedipus Rex, or the flavor of peanut butter mixed with arsenic and the subjective nature of the interpretation is part of the art.
Unfortunately for you and me, the end purpose of this endeavor is to create a crystalline intelligence with the subtlety to transcend its corporeal existence and bring about the end of the being divine that imagined it into being, which event will occur outside of our light cone some 30 billion years from now. We are merely the by-blow of a divine suicide attempt.
Ok, now disprove that.
You can't falsify "God did it." What you can do is move further back in time the moment when He set the wheel in motion, or didn't. We will never be rid of the folks who insist on an intent to create the present moment and maybe that should not be a goal. We can move backward in time the moment where we can infer from the current phenomena what happened, and that's a good goal of science. Absent a positive proof that's the best we can do. The why is best left to philosophers, but the when is within the scope of science and the how may one day be.
Or, as the story shows, by entirely natural processes.
And the natural laws that govern these natural processes, they just happened by accident. They weren't chosen or anything in the first 10 ^-37th second after the big bang. Out of the infinite number of potential physical constants and laws, our number just "came up". We get to observe this fortunate circumstance because things happened the way they did because God does, in fact, "play dice with the universe".
I wonder what we will be stirring up in 20-50 years.
You don't have to wonder. The results are here. That's just the wikipedia page, but you can follow the links. I hoped they saved a sample so we can check again in 100, 1,000 and 10,000 years.
They are proving that life as we know it should be common. Life as we don't know it? That's still an open question. It may have been here all along and we didn't see it.
You probably don't know this, but...
They're not going to take kindly to anything that could challenge their certainty.
I'm going to try not to disparage our future overlords. They're out-reproducing us and so according to Darwin they are more fit. Whether Darwin or Malthus wins in the end is an open question.
This shows that a component of one of the building blocks of life can be made by natural processes.
The Miller-Urey experiment was also fruitful here. Over modest timescales in likely primordial Earth environments it appears that the building blocks formed are the ones commonest to all forms of life-as-we-know-it. The leap from "could have" to "did" is getting more manageable every few years.
The experiment in TFA goes further - finding methods for synthesis of the components not on a primordial Earth, but in space. This is a net positive for the panspermia theory. Oh, and BTW: you left off an important part of that quote.
Our experiments demonstrate that once the Earth formed, many of the building blocks of life were likely present from the beginning. Since we are simulating universal astrophysical conditions, the same is likely wherever planets are formed," explained Sandford.
We'll know more when we start dissecting comets, and even more when we dissect comets that orbit other stars. The tricky thing about life is that it takes darned little of it to make all of the life that we see.
Think of it like this... you like, bacon, right? When people go to colonize the distant stars, it would be helpful if there was already bacon there when they arrived. Bacon is made from pigs, which are living things, and almost all living things of which we are aware are in part made of this stuff.
So the odds have improved that our interstellar colonists will arrive at a place that already has salty, delicious bacon -- which is good, since by then they'll probably be almost already out after a long trip.
He's not going to get what he wants here. Google gives us what we want - indexing of all the websites in the world, for the nominal cost of some tiny text ads. If all his websites were to drop off the Internet tomorrow I doubt anybody would notice.
Newscorp only adds a tiny fraction to the overall news flow. Most of it is rehashed wire reports or self-generated "groundhog day" type stuff.
Any truth to the rumor there was a Windows version of that but it didn't get popular because in Windows the processes shot back and were spawncamping?