One thing that immediately comes to mind is that IMAP doesn't natively support "labels" or "conversations" in the same way -- labels in particular, a message has one folder and that's it. Neither does mbox or maildir. Also, maybe it's my setup, but I seem to have issues with large folders or operations on large numbers of messages, something GMail doesn't seem to have a problem with.
That may be a feature you wouldn't care about, but if OP asked specifically for a Gmail clone, and claims to actually be using all of Gmail's features, that suggests this is one thing which needs to work well.
And if you're going to need a custom application accessing custom storage, it seems like you could either have a custom protocol and a custom client, or a web client, and I don't see much advantage for native here.
An individual decides to raise prices, why should he do that just because there's more money in existence?
Disclaimer: I Am Not An Economist. But this seems pretty stupid.
Consider just two people. To make things simple, suppose Bob has $1 of disposable income per month, and Alice bakes Bob a delicious cake for that $1.
Now, suppose Eve gives Bob an extra dollar. That month, Bob can spend $2. It's true, Alice doesn't have to raise her prices -- she can now bake two cakes that month. That's not bad -- it can't take her a whole month to bake a cake anyway, and she probably has other customers. So, in isolation, it's not that bad.
But suppose Eve gave everyone an extra dollar. Now either everyone has an extra dollar they can't spend, or Alice has to work twice as hard for a month to meet that demand.
Actually, this sort of pressure is why inflation can be a good thing, and where the argument comes from that Bitcoin is unsustainable -- this is how economies grow. Alice might not be able to work twice as hard, but she can work harder -- she has the incentive. And then she'll have some extra money of her own to spend, so someone else works harder. So the currency does lose its value as prices adjust, but the lag before they do results in people pushing to do just a bit more. Without that, the theory goes, there'd be more of a tendency to stagnate and hoard.
So, anyway... Maybe Alice works twice as hard for a month. But then she has extra money, so the money didn't go out of the economy. So now she can present the same dilemma to someone else -- either work extra hard at the same prices, or raise prices. But if you're putting enough into the economy, that's unsustainable -- there's a point where no one can work hard enough to keep up with that demand.
At that saturation point, you could either raise prices to deliberately reduce demand, or out of greed. It doesn't really matter which, because as soon as Alice decides to raise prices, Bob's $1 buys less. He can either have a cake only every other month, or he can try to make more money of his own to keep up -- and if there's more money in the economy in general, he might be safe raising prices so he can stay at his cake-a-month habit.
Or, consider the other option -- Alice refuses to raise prices or work harder. Bob will just have to wait if he wants more cake -- so he has an extra dollar. If everyone was like Alice, he'd never spend it -- but someone, somewhere, will have figured out how to bake cakes faster, or will just have a slightly better-tasting (or just different) cake for $2 instead of $1. No matter how psychologically disciplined Alice might be, Bob will find somewhere to spend his money, thus either making someone work harder or raise prices, and in either case, putting them in the same position as Bob.
So, adding even a single dollar to the economy can, in theory, ripple through the entire economy, causing each participant to either raise prices, work harder, or become more efficient.
However, GP is wrong in one respect: It's not irreversible. Money certainly can be destroyed. It's just much less common than inflation.
Incidentally, while your specific example about food works well, note that learning how to make automobiles did make the knowledge of how to make buggy whips worth less in any concrete sense -- so yes, new knowledge can devalue old knowledge.
Does any browser implement any similar standard completely, consistently, or correctly?
The question isn't whether anyone's absolutely correct, it's how far off people are. It's which browsers let us build cool shit, which browsers make it easy to at least write to standards "only" 4-5 years old and expect it to work pretty much anywhere, and which browsers are a hassle to support or are holding everyone back.
From experience, unless I'm doing bleeding-edge HTML5 stuff, it's reasonable to develop in my browser of choice and test in other browsers maybe weekly, given how rarely anything but IE has issues. If I am building bleeding-edge HTML5 stuff, Chrome seems the most likely to actually have a particular feature implemented.
Re:This site works best with...
on
OK Go Goes HTML5
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· Score: 1
So, this is listed as a "chrome experiment", which means that while it's cool that you can make art out of multiple browser windows, this is far from the correct way to do it. HTML has long had far better ways to get the effects they've done here.
I guess a more appropriate snarky response would be, it isn't hard to find out yourself -- or at least, find out whether the particular game you've picked is 64-bit.
As far as I can tell:
vvvvvv began life as a flash game. Unless that's changed, its 64-bit-ness would be dependent on Flash, unless it came bundled with its own Flash, in which case, almost certainly 32-bit only.
Hammerfight appears to be 32-bit only, and also locked to a certain (low) resolution which hasn't worked well with my dual-monitor setup, but it does work.
And Yet It Moves is 64-bit, as you mentioned, but I cannot make it work, 64-bit or 32-bit.
Why would you not have that? On what x86_64 machine are you so starved for RAM, disk space, or bandwidth that you can't install 32-bit libraries or enable a 32-bit kernel, yet you have sufficient RAM, disk space, and bandwidth to download and play a game?
A 64-bit version is nice regardless, but this isn't a good argument for it.
I'm apparently not alone in having to at least tweak the games a little to make them work. Right now, AYIM doesn't fucking work, and the Humble Indie Bundle version doesn't even generate any logs from that.
From another post, it seems only one of the games "just worked" with Linux. By contrast, the original Humble Bundle had all games just work on Linux, out of the box, with no issues.
I'm using Kubuntu 11.04. Not exactly an obscure distro. Others are reporting the same problem with Ubuntu 11.04, and that it worked in 10.10. And the forum post dates back to August. One admin replied right away, another replied over a month later, and there's been no other contact from the game devs, and no fix from what I can tell.
I guess the solution is to either track down each game and try a demo first, or buy them for 1c instead.
While that's a fair prediction, they might easily support Linux simply by choosing Flash over, say, Silverlight, or by using HTML5 video -- that'd get them iDevices without having to pay Apple a 30% cut. They certainly wouldn't do so out of a desire to support Linux, but there are other reasons to prefer these.
So, if you actually know what's going on, do you have technical details? Do they use Flash, Silverlight, HTML5, ActiveX? Did they completely roll their own?
So, while most comments so far seem to suggest that most of Slashdot doesn't want to hear about Bitcoin, I'm posting in the hopes that one or two people here actually understand how it works.
The network is imperfect in the sense that there is, at the moment, a one-to-one mapping between users and public-keys.
This strikes me as entirely fucking wrong. There is a one-to-many mapping here -- while one key belongs to one user, a user can (and should) have many keys.
Or is it that they're admitting that they make this assumption?
Also, this:
The presence of a Bitcoin mining pool (a large red vertex) and a number of public-keys between it and WikiLeaks' public-key is interesting.
Not really. I'd guess most Bitcoins now are originally mined in a mining pool. The number of public-keys between it and WikiLeaks may represent distribution between the mining pool and its users, or (more likely) actual transactions where the mining pool assigns coins to a miner, who trades with someone else, who trades with someone else, who donates to Wikileaks. Knowing which mining pool originally generated those coins doesn't really tell you much, does it?
It's possible I'm misreading this, though. The summary within the blog post is informative:
Bitcoin is not inherently anonymous. It may be possible to conduct transactions is such a way so as to obscure your identity, but, in many cases, users and their transactions can be identified.
But we sort of knew this. Bitcoin is not inherently anonymous. However, it is not particularly hard to be more anonymous than what this article suggests.
it seems that it should be possible to teach Microevolution( http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Microevolution [wikipedia.org] ) which we've seen in the lab, without adding in a bunch about Macroevolution which we *can't* prove...
So, follow your Wikipedia link. You'll find that Wikipedia also defines Macroevolution as "evolution on a scale of separated gene pools.[1] Macroevolutionary studies focus on change that occurs at or above the level of species..."
Ok, first of all: Do you believe Amazon? I'm guessing that on reading this story, you, like the rest of us, tentatively accept it as true. Unless you have good reason to believe otherwise, Amazon would know -- they're certainly the best equipped to know. So if you're not willing to dig deeper, it seems reasonable to trust the experts when it comes to evolution, also.
But how does Amazon know?
I could speculate. I could re-read the article and see what I come up with. But I think we can both be pretty confident that none of them personally saw the bit flip, to the extent that such a thing can be seen. In fact, I'd even hazard a guess that no one was even aware that it had happened until the service started to drop.
Please, if you learn anything from this exchange, never use that argument again. The other arguments you've made could fairly be called ignorance, and you do even have some good points. But this is stupidity. We don't apply "did you personally see" as a restriction for almost anything else we believe, especially when it comes to matters of religion. There are reasonable standards of evidence. If I personally saw it happen, that'd be sufficient, but it sure as hell isn't necessary.
Now, don't mistake this for thinking I mean that Creationism is a better option - it isn't.
Well, it's not an option. Let's start with that. It is not and never has been science, and does not belong in a science classroom.
OTOH, I'm all for comparative religion.
But there are other options out there, like evolution through punctuated equalibriam versus gradual change.
First of all, these aren't "other options" to macroevolution. They are both theories of macroevolution. And I've got no problem if a science teacher wants to talk about the real scientific controversies -- things like this -- rather than manufactured public-opinion controversies.
But more importantly: We don't need to teach the entire discipline, especially all its esoteric controversies, in a high school biology class. In high school physics, it's really enough to cover Newton's laws of motion. It'd be cool if you can talk about things like relativity, but you want to cover the Newtonian stuff first, even if it's technically "wrong" now -- it's still relevant and useful, and approximately correct in almost every situation where they'd care. Similarly, understanding the basic concepts of evolution, including natural selection, speciation, and the evolutionary tree, is still useful and relevant regardless of whether you accept gradualism or punctuated equilibrium.
an argument that what we see in small scale must translate linearly to large scale and vise-versa.
Actually, that's kind of backwards -- ideas of evolution were proposed, and natural selection was suggested as a mechanism after the fact. But sure, we can go this way, too -- we see selection and spe
So, it's my understanding that micro and macro actually do have a biological meaning. Microevolution is evolution which does not result in speciation, whereas macroevolution does. I haven't done more than check Wikipedia at this point...
I doubt any creationist would appreciate those definitions, however -- as you've pointed out, speciation has been observed in the lab. What they're really trying to get at is something much more nebulous -- some categorization usually called a "kind", as in "You never see one kind of thing turn into another." But they never pin that down to anything as precise as, say, species. The closest they come to actually defining a "kind" is to give perverse examples -- "You never see dogs giving birth to cats!" (Indeed, and if you did, it'd falsify evolution.)
I also doubt many biologists would care about these definitions. To anyone with a working knowledge of evolution, it seems clear that if microevolution works, the only reason evolution at any scale wouldn't is if there's some sort of barrier -- and creationists have yet to even define where that barrier is to be found in the animal world, let alone a mechanism for it.
It... adds a more interesting element to very, very, very dry content...
Maybe the problem is the content? If your presentation is boring, seeing it on a little virtual projection screen in a 3D virtual world which is then projected to my monitor is not going to make it interesting. The only way I can possibly see that being more interesting is if I ignore the presentation to look at peoples' avatars, or walk out of the room and explore, both of which I could do just as easily by opening another tab in the browser.
On the other hand, if your presentation is interesting, I will endure watching it in a dozen ten-minute 240p YouTube clips.
We've also added some interactive aspects to the conferences in Second Life. We also had a virtual convention where vendors set up a booth, complete with books (which when clicked linked to amazon or the vendors website), links, products, brochures (which linked to pdf files) etc. This allowed people to virtually walk around and gather/speak with vendors...
I'm still not seeing the advantage of a 3D world here over a vendors page with links. Maybe it's that you can actually speak with the vendors -- so, add a live chat option -- though it seems like a major selling point is not having to talk to them:
...people were able to get more information from the vendors since they could walk right up, click the links, get the pdf and not have to worry about getting a sales pitch unless they typed and asked for one.
And I'd probably get even more information by scrolling down that hypothetical 'vendors' page, middle-clicking anything interesting, then ctrl+pgdown through all those new tabs, rather than having to walk up to a virtual booth.
About the only way I see this being at all useful is if it was a game development conference -- maybe you have some mini playable version of your game inside SL. But if you're going to port your game to a platform like that just for a tradeshow-like demo, maybe a WebGL port would be a better investment in the long term.
I think it would be quite difficult to recreate the latter dynamic in Skype.
True. Skype was an example.
I guess my point is that this mining simulation is exactly the sort of thing that would make me excited about Second Life, except there are so few of them that I'm not sure I care enough to download the client. I like the idea of a generic virtual world client, but I'm not convinced Second Life is it, especially given its centralized nature. By contrast, I have to imagine similar things are going to start springing up with WebGL, and there, it's as simple as clicking on a link -- no downloads, no registration -- and presumably easier to just start hosting.
But in the mean time, Second Life has been used less as a generic virtual world client, and more as a generic conferencing client, which just baffles me. Kind of feels like Microsoft Bob. I'm perfectly fine clicking on a link or an icon to get that PDF -- I don't feel particularly enriched by clicking on a virtual pamphlet on a virtual vendor booth in a virtual trade show.
What world are you standing in now? A 3d one. So why would you need to share your slides and chat here?
In other words, why would I use anything other than the Internet?
When I was working, I found that there was a much broader range of interaction, something I doubt SL can match. If we're all in the office, and we have an idea, we can go draw on a whiteboard, use pencil and paper, talk about it, or take a break and play Halo. Or I have a question about the code, I can ask a coworker, peek over their shoulder at what they're doing. Or "hallway usability tests" -- grab someone walking past, say "Hey, does this look right?" and let them play with whatever I've been working on.
Or, sometimes, even pair programming.
These are all things which are possible to do over the Internet, but would be less efficient overall. By contrast, does SL do any of these things well?
The other possible advantage is that in-person communication is much higher-bandwidth -- there's a lot of nuance you don't necessarily pick up in text or over the phone. Even for dry, technical stuff, I haven't really noticed how, but I've definitely noticed that two dev teams had trouble communicating minor design details or understanding what the other team was doing for months, then one member of one team flew in to visit with the other team, and suddenly we had communication.
But again, does that really happen with SL? I'd argue Skype is better for that, if anything -- no, you can't have pixel sex on it, but you do have webcams.
The only other advantage to the real world is that we're better at interacting with it, but trying to recreate that in the computer Just Because strikes me as a throwback to Microsoft Bob. I don't need to see the slides on a virtual projector so I can turn around and ogle everyone's avatar. Just stream it to my monitor as a 2D video stream and be done with it.
I know IBM got all excited about Second Life for the same reason, but really, what is the benefit of this over, say, Skype?
Granted, I'm happy you've gone with something which is nominally open source, but I use Skype only as an example. Why do you need an entire 3D world to share your 2D slides and chat?
Especially when they ask what could this research be used for they go into so prerecorded rant about how Science isn't about making money it is just about learning more about the universe...
While that may be their motivation, there's a lot of cool stuff that comes out of pure research, or at the very least, out of research in completely unrelated areas.
I think there really is a rift, but I think it's largely caused by the fact that research must necessarily take a very long view if it is to get anywhere, and will have many more failures than successes when done right, whereas most corporations are run by people who are very focused on short-term profits.
The scientist knows that something as seemingly irrelevant and theoretical as relativity can have serious implications for something as ubiquitous and commercially successful as GPS, if you give it time -- and you get to find out all kinds of cool stuff about the Universe.
The CEO knows that the shit the scientists are doing is expensive, and that the money has to come from somewhere, and even if the Higgs Boson turns out to be a major profit center 50 years from now, he'll be retired if not dead. On the other hand, making a slightly smaller, faster, more efficient CPU right now will make the company a lot of money, which also means a big bonus for him, maybe a chance to cash out.
I don't mean to paint the corporation as evil here -- even the best-intentioned CEOs have the same problem. They have the wrong incentives driving them, even subconsciously, and even without that, there's the fact that if the Higgs Boson bankrupts them in the next 5 years, they won't get to see if it's profitable in 50.
I'd certainly have no problem working for the private sector, and that's probably where I'll end up, but there is something to be said for the government, or a charitable organization, or someone just throwing cash at a project because it looks cool, long before anyone has any idea if it'll be useful. If no one did that, we'd have ninety years of refinement in buggy-whip technology instead of, oh, cars. Then again, if the government made our cars, well... Amtrak, anyone?
Perhaps you are right and no one would have found uses for it.
I didn't say that. Of course there would be uses for it, but the question is whether there are any use cases for which it's actually an advantage. For example:
you make/usr/bin/emacs run ed,
I can't imagine ever really wanting this. I can trivially alias 'emacs' to 'ed' in my shell, or place a shell script called 'emacs' earlier in my PATH (modifying my PATH if needed). Probably the most practical use would be to let me tell programs like git what editor to use, but they don't hardcode 'emacs' or 'vi', they use the EDITOR variable.
I do see one advantage to this approach -- I like chroot jails, but they require admin assistance to set up, and much of the grunt work in doing so is ensuring stuff is made available in the right places -- which usually means a lot of bind mounts (/proc,/dev) and/or hardlinks (stuff from/usr/lib, etc). If a user could trivially set up a sandbox similar to a chroot jail, that would be a definite advantage.
But we have chroot, and I would imagine it wouldn't be terribly difficult to make a setuid binary which allows users to set up their own chroot jails safely. In fact, this entire functionality could probably be duplicated with that setuid binary plus an appropriate FUSE filesystem, probably something related to unionfs -- you get your own writable view of the entire filesystem (at least anything you have read access to), but your writes actually go somewhere in your home directory, so no other users see them unless you share that somehow. It's not as elegant, but it would work.
I seem to remember Plan9 had a lot of similar ideas. And again, the most interesting and practical ideas (like the/proc filesystem) were ripped off wholesale and incorporated into Linux long before Plan9 itself was ever a competitor.
I think this sentence is where most of your objections come from. The trick is that it doesn't affect other users, unless you specifically allow them to look in your view of the file system.
Well, but this was another point I made, just prior to that sentence:
I don't really see what advantage there is to putting stuff in the root directory, rather than your home directory, other than making them available to other users.
If I'm not imposing these changes on other users, what's the advantage of doing it this way over simply sharing things in my home directory?
it would be difficult e.g. to put the root file system on FUSE.
Not terribly. It'd be difficult to allow a non-admin user to do so, or to switch to that after the fact, but I believe there are a few LiveCDs which run a FUSE-based root filesystem already.
HURD was designed when multi-user systems with remote file systems were the norm. Today a lot of the features seem superfluous...
Well, but even in that environment, they seem superfluous. I guess I'm still not seeing the advantage of a "view" system like that unless you have programs with hardcoded paths. By comparison...
Getting rid of the SUID-bit and making it possible for users to present limited environments to the less-trusted programs they run still make sense.
This is the problem with waiting decades, though...
Like you have a normal user account and decide you want to try this cool new network file system but the admin won't install the kernel module.
So you run FUSE.
On HURD, not a problem, you just run a file system daemon yourself and you can mount it anywhere you want without needing administrator rights.
What advantage does this offer over FUSE? You sure as hell need admin rights (at least) to install HURD in the first place, and as an admin, I'd much rather just install FUSE on a proven OS. The filesystem needs to be ported to FUSE, just as it would need to be ported to HURD.
Or you decide that package managers suck and it's much better to keep all files for Emacs in/Applications/Emacs (Or/OS/Emacs for the purists)...
That's what your home directory is for. I don't really see what advantage there is to putting stuff in the root directory, rather than your home directory, other than making them available to other users. Doing stuff like that which affects other users should require admin rights. If you just want to make it available to other users, it's only moderately difficult to expose selected pieces of your home directory, assuming there isn't a mode 1777 directory somewhere that you're allowed to write to.
So, this might be actually useful, but there are too many reasonable hacks to make it happen now, much more reasonable than replacing your entire kernel. But the real problem is that most of the best ideas HURD had are in other OSes now, like FUSE.
...they need to go write their own OS where proprietary drivers are okay, because we Linux users don't want them.
Fuck you, you do not speak for all Linux users.
I would much prefer an open source driver to a proprietary one, all things being equal. All things are not equal. As cool as AMD has been lately, their proprietary Linux drivers still have far better 3D performance than the open ones.
More importantly, I run proprietary software on Linux, even proprietary software I've paid for! I'm ok with that.
I would still rather my system be open source, and I would especially like it if the proprietary stuff I run (even drivers) was properly sandboxed. I find myself wondering why I should be forced to trust this gigantic binary blob from nVidia more than I trust the JavaScript running on any random website. I understand the technical reasons why this is needed right now, but if something like HURD can solve them, I'm all for that.
...because of issues surrounding freedom of religion, if they do not make a special case *for* religion, and allow exemptions because of it, then they are oppressing the values of any religions that the requirement comes into conflict with... Of course, the law does also oppress religions that require things like human sacrifices or other ritualistic murder, as well as numerous other activities that are quite clearly illegal...
Most often, you find that the activity allowed with religious privilege should be allowed for everyone regardless -- for instance, a certain native american tribe is allowed to use Peyote, so long as it's within the correct religious context. Children are certainly allowed to drink the wine, either as part of communion (Christianity) or because we're saying the blessing over the wine (Judaism). In this case, I generally feel that people should be able to do what they want with their own bodies once they're of age, and before that, a small amount of wine (particularly with parental supervision) isn't going to hurt anyone, so these activities should be permitted with or without the religious context.
But this isn't the most troubling problem...
...they are oppressing the values of any religions that the requirement comes into conflict with, and therefore cannot claim to be a free country.
In order to create exemptions for religion, either everything is permitted, or you have now put the government in the role of choosing what is and is not a valid religion.
If that can actually be done safely and efficiently, it also means a non-free driver can't crash the kernel or fuck up other drivers. I would guess there are security implications as well.
Right now, a bug in the nVidia kernel driver on Linux could compromise the security of the entire machine, or crash the entire OS, or flip some bit in some other unconnected kernel system (or userland process), and it's hard enough to debug these things when you do have source code. So wanting an untainted kernel makes a lot of sense.
Slashdot Mirror
One thing that immediately comes to mind is that IMAP doesn't natively support "labels" or "conversations" in the same way -- labels in particular, a message has one folder and that's it. Neither does mbox or maildir. Also, maybe it's my setup, but I seem to have issues with large folders or operations on large numbers of messages, something GMail doesn't seem to have a problem with.
That may be a feature you wouldn't care about, but if OP asked specifically for a Gmail clone, and claims to actually be using all of Gmail's features, that suggests this is one thing which needs to work well.
And if you're going to need a custom application accessing custom storage, it seems like you could either have a custom protocol and a custom client, or a web client, and I don't see much advantage for native here.
An individual decides to raise prices, why should he do that just because there's more money in existence?
Disclaimer: I Am Not An Economist. But this seems pretty stupid.
Consider just two people. To make things simple, suppose Bob has $1 of disposable income per month, and Alice bakes Bob a delicious cake for that $1.
Now, suppose Eve gives Bob an extra dollar. That month, Bob can spend $2. It's true, Alice doesn't have to raise her prices -- she can now bake two cakes that month. That's not bad -- it can't take her a whole month to bake a cake anyway, and she probably has other customers. So, in isolation, it's not that bad.
But suppose Eve gave everyone an extra dollar. Now either everyone has an extra dollar they can't spend, or Alice has to work twice as hard for a month to meet that demand.
Actually, this sort of pressure is why inflation can be a good thing, and where the argument comes from that Bitcoin is unsustainable -- this is how economies grow. Alice might not be able to work twice as hard, but she can work harder -- she has the incentive. And then she'll have some extra money of her own to spend, so someone else works harder. So the currency does lose its value as prices adjust, but the lag before they do results in people pushing to do just a bit more. Without that, the theory goes, there'd be more of a tendency to stagnate and hoard.
So, anyway... Maybe Alice works twice as hard for a month. But then she has extra money, so the money didn't go out of the economy. So now she can present the same dilemma to someone else -- either work extra hard at the same prices, or raise prices. But if you're putting enough into the economy, that's unsustainable -- there's a point where no one can work hard enough to keep up with that demand.
At that saturation point, you could either raise prices to deliberately reduce demand, or out of greed. It doesn't really matter which, because as soon as Alice decides to raise prices, Bob's $1 buys less. He can either have a cake only every other month, or he can try to make more money of his own to keep up -- and if there's more money in the economy in general, he might be safe raising prices so he can stay at his cake-a-month habit.
Or, consider the other option -- Alice refuses to raise prices or work harder. Bob will just have to wait if he wants more cake -- so he has an extra dollar. If everyone was like Alice, he'd never spend it -- but someone, somewhere, will have figured out how to bake cakes faster, or will just have a slightly better-tasting (or just different) cake for $2 instead of $1. No matter how psychologically disciplined Alice might be, Bob will find somewhere to spend his money, thus either making someone work harder or raise prices, and in either case, putting them in the same position as Bob.
So, adding even a single dollar to the economy can, in theory, ripple through the entire economy, causing each participant to either raise prices, work harder, or become more efficient.
However, GP is wrong in one respect: It's not irreversible. Money certainly can be destroyed. It's just much less common than inflation.
Incidentally, while your specific example about food works well, note that learning how to make automobiles did make the knowledge of how to make buggy whips worth less in any concrete sense -- so yes, new knowledge can devalue old knowledge.
That still doesn't answer the question, though. Do you know what they're actually using?
Does any browser implement any similar standard completely, consistently, or correctly?
The question isn't whether anyone's absolutely correct, it's how far off people are. It's which browsers let us build cool shit, which browsers make it easy to at least write to standards "only" 4-5 years old and expect it to work pretty much anywhere, and which browsers are a hassle to support or are holding everyone back.
From experience, unless I'm doing bleeding-edge HTML5 stuff, it's reasonable to develop in my browser of choice and test in other browsers maybe weekly, given how rarely anything but IE has issues. If I am building bleeding-edge HTML5 stuff, Chrome seems the most likely to actually have a particular feature implemented.
So, this is listed as a "chrome experiment", which means that while it's cool that you can make art out of multiple browser windows, this is far from the correct way to do it. HTML has long had far better ways to get the effects they've done here.
I guess a more appropriate snarky response would be, it isn't hard to find out yourself -- or at least, find out whether the particular game you've picked is 64-bit.
As far as I can tell:
vvvvvv began life as a flash game. Unless that's changed, its 64-bit-ness would be dependent on Flash, unless it came bundled with its own Flash, in which case, almost certainly 32-bit only.
Hammerfight appears to be 32-bit only, and also locked to a certain (low) resolution which hasn't worked well with my dual-monitor setup, but it does work.
And Yet It Moves is 64-bit, as you mentioned, but I cannot make it work, 64-bit or 32-bit.
Crayon Physics also appears to be 32-bit only.
I haven't tried the others yet.
Why would you not have that? On what x86_64 machine are you so starved for RAM, disk space, or bandwidth that you can't install 32-bit libraries or enable a 32-bit kernel, yet you have sufficient RAM, disk space, and bandwidth to download and play a game?
A 64-bit version is nice regardless, but this isn't a good argument for it.
I'm apparently not alone in having to at least tweak the games a little to make them work. Right now, AYIM doesn't fucking work, and the Humble Indie Bundle version doesn't even generate any logs from that.
From another post, it seems only one of the games "just worked" with Linux. By contrast, the original Humble Bundle had all games just work on Linux, out of the box, with no issues.
I'm using Kubuntu 11.04. Not exactly an obscure distro. Others are reporting the same problem with Ubuntu 11.04, and that it worked in 10.10. And the forum post dates back to August. One admin replied right away, another replied over a month later, and there's been no other contact from the game devs, and no fix from what I can tell.
I guess the solution is to either track down each game and try a demo first, or buy them for 1c instead.
The 32-bit versions will work for the games which don't have one. If I see a 64-bit version, I'll get that, but otherwise, who cares?
While that's a fair prediction, they might easily support Linux simply by choosing Flash over, say, Silverlight, or by using HTML5 video -- that'd get them iDevices without having to pay Apple a 30% cut. They certainly wouldn't do so out of a desire to support Linux, but there are other reasons to prefer these.
So, if you actually know what's going on, do you have technical details? Do they use Flash, Silverlight, HTML5, ActiveX? Did they completely roll their own?
So, while most comments so far seem to suggest that most of Slashdot doesn't want to hear about Bitcoin, I'm posting in the hopes that one or two people here actually understand how it works.
The network is imperfect in the sense that there is, at the moment, a one-to-one mapping between users and public-keys.
This strikes me as entirely fucking wrong. There is a one-to-many mapping here -- while one key belongs to one user, a user can (and should) have many keys.
Or is it that they're admitting that they make this assumption?
Also, this:
The presence of a Bitcoin mining pool (a large red vertex) and a number of public-keys between it and WikiLeaks' public-key is interesting.
Not really. I'd guess most Bitcoins now are originally mined in a mining pool. The number of public-keys between it and WikiLeaks may represent distribution between the mining pool and its users, or (more likely) actual transactions where the mining pool assigns coins to a miner, who trades with someone else, who trades with someone else, who donates to Wikileaks. Knowing which mining pool originally generated those coins doesn't really tell you much, does it?
It's possible I'm misreading this, though. The summary within the blog post is informative:
Bitcoin is not inherently anonymous. It may be possible to conduct transactions is such a way so as to obscure your identity, but, in many cases, users and their transactions can be identified.
But we sort of knew this. Bitcoin is not inherently anonymous. However, it is not particularly hard to be more anonymous than what this article suggests.
it seems that it should be possible to teach Microevolution( http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Microevolution [wikipedia.org] ) which we've seen in the lab, without adding in a bunch about Macroevolution which we *can't* prove...
So, follow your Wikipedia link. You'll find that Wikipedia also defines Macroevolution as "evolution on a scale of separated gene pools.[1] Macroevolutionary studies focus on change that occurs at or above the level of species..."
In other words, if speciation happens, macroevolution happens. And speciation happens. We have observed that.
Did *you* see personally see fish evolve into something else?
Awhile back, I remember reading about why Amazon S3 went down.
Ok, first of all: Do you believe Amazon? I'm guessing that on reading this story, you, like the rest of us, tentatively accept it as true. Unless you have good reason to believe otherwise, Amazon would know -- they're certainly the best equipped to know. So if you're not willing to dig deeper, it seems reasonable to trust the experts when it comes to evolution, also.
But how does Amazon know?
I could speculate. I could re-read the article and see what I come up with. But I think we can both be pretty confident that none of them personally saw the bit flip, to the extent that such a thing can be seen. In fact, I'd even hazard a guess that no one was even aware that it had happened until the service started to drop.
Please, if you learn anything from this exchange, never use that argument again. The other arguments you've made could fairly be called ignorance, and you do even have some good points. But this is stupidity. We don't apply "did you personally see" as a restriction for almost anything else we believe, especially when it comes to matters of religion. There are reasonable standards of evidence. If I personally saw it happen, that'd be sufficient, but it sure as hell isn't necessary.
Now, don't mistake this for thinking I mean that Creationism is a better option - it isn't.
Well, it's not an option. Let's start with that. It is not and never has been science, and does not belong in a science classroom.
OTOH, I'm all for comparative religion.
But there are other options out there, like evolution through punctuated equalibriam versus gradual change.
First of all, these aren't "other options" to macroevolution. They are both theories of macroevolution. And I've got no problem if a science teacher wants to talk about the real scientific controversies -- things like this -- rather than manufactured public-opinion controversies.
But more importantly: We don't need to teach the entire discipline, especially all its esoteric controversies, in a high school biology class. In high school physics, it's really enough to cover Newton's laws of motion. It'd be cool if you can talk about things like relativity, but you want to cover the Newtonian stuff first, even if it's technically "wrong" now -- it's still relevant and useful, and approximately correct in almost every situation where they'd care. Similarly, understanding the basic concepts of evolution, including natural selection, speciation, and the evolutionary tree, is still useful and relevant regardless of whether you accept gradualism or punctuated equilibrium.
an argument that what we see in small scale must translate linearly to large scale and vise-versa.
Actually, that's kind of backwards -- ideas of evolution were proposed, and natural selection was suggested as a mechanism after the fact. But sure, we can go this way, too -- we see selection and spe
So, it's my understanding that micro and macro actually do have a biological meaning. Microevolution is evolution which does not result in speciation, whereas macroevolution does. I haven't done more than check Wikipedia at this point...
I doubt any creationist would appreciate those definitions, however -- as you've pointed out, speciation has been observed in the lab. What they're really trying to get at is something much more nebulous -- some categorization usually called a "kind", as in "You never see one kind of thing turn into another." But they never pin that down to anything as precise as, say, species. The closest they come to actually defining a "kind" is to give perverse examples -- "You never see dogs giving birth to cats!" (Indeed, and if you did, it'd falsify evolution.)
I also doubt many biologists would care about these definitions. To anyone with a working knowledge of evolution, it seems clear that if microevolution works, the only reason evolution at any scale wouldn't is if there's some sort of barrier -- and creationists have yet to even define where that barrier is to be found in the animal world, let alone a mechanism for it.
More than that, I'm fairly sure Apple called it "System Settings" before KDE did, which makes this really hypocritical on the part of the KDE devs.
It... adds a more interesting element to very, very, very dry content...
Maybe the problem is the content? If your presentation is boring, seeing it on a little virtual projection screen in a 3D virtual world which is then projected to my monitor is not going to make it interesting. The only way I can possibly see that being more interesting is if I ignore the presentation to look at peoples' avatars, or walk out of the room and explore, both of which I could do just as easily by opening another tab in the browser.
On the other hand, if your presentation is interesting, I will endure watching it in a dozen ten-minute 240p YouTube clips.
We've also added some interactive aspects to the conferences in Second Life. We also had a virtual convention where vendors set up a booth, complete with books (which when clicked linked to amazon or the vendors website), links, products, brochures (which linked to pdf files) etc. This allowed people to virtually walk around and gather/speak with vendors...
I'm still not seeing the advantage of a 3D world here over a vendors page with links. Maybe it's that you can actually speak with the vendors -- so, add a live chat option -- though it seems like a major selling point is not having to talk to them:
...people were able to get more information from the vendors since they could walk right up, click the links, get the pdf and not have to worry about getting a sales pitch unless they typed and asked for one.
And I'd probably get even more information by scrolling down that hypothetical 'vendors' page, middle-clicking anything interesting, then ctrl+pgdown through all those new tabs, rather than having to walk up to a virtual booth.
About the only way I see this being at all useful is if it was a game development conference -- maybe you have some mini playable version of your game inside SL. But if you're going to port your game to a platform like that just for a tradeshow-like demo, maybe a WebGL port would be a better investment in the long term.
I think it would be quite difficult to recreate the latter dynamic in Skype.
True. Skype was an example.
I guess my point is that this mining simulation is exactly the sort of thing that would make me excited about Second Life, except there are so few of them that I'm not sure I care enough to download the client. I like the idea of a generic virtual world client, but I'm not convinced Second Life is it, especially given its centralized nature. By contrast, I have to imagine similar things are going to start springing up with WebGL, and there, it's as simple as clicking on a link -- no downloads, no registration -- and presumably easier to just start hosting.
But in the mean time, Second Life has been used less as a generic virtual world client, and more as a generic conferencing client, which just baffles me. Kind of feels like Microsoft Bob. I'm perfectly fine clicking on a link or an icon to get that PDF -- I don't feel particularly enriched by clicking on a virtual pamphlet on a virtual vendor booth in a virtual trade show.
What world are you standing in now? A 3d one. So why would you need to share your slides and chat here?
In other words, why would I use anything other than the Internet?
When I was working, I found that there was a much broader range of interaction, something I doubt SL can match. If we're all in the office, and we have an idea, we can go draw on a whiteboard, use pencil and paper, talk about it, or take a break and play Halo. Or I have a question about the code, I can ask a coworker, peek over their shoulder at what they're doing. Or "hallway usability tests" -- grab someone walking past, say "Hey, does this look right?" and let them play with whatever I've been working on.
Or, sometimes, even pair programming.
These are all things which are possible to do over the Internet, but would be less efficient overall. By contrast, does SL do any of these things well?
The other possible advantage is that in-person communication is much higher-bandwidth -- there's a lot of nuance you don't necessarily pick up in text or over the phone. Even for dry, technical stuff, I haven't really noticed how, but I've definitely noticed that two dev teams had trouble communicating minor design details or understanding what the other team was doing for months, then one member of one team flew in to visit with the other team, and suddenly we had communication.
But again, does that really happen with SL? I'd argue Skype is better for that, if anything -- no, you can't have pixel sex on it, but you do have webcams.
The only other advantage to the real world is that we're better at interacting with it, but trying to recreate that in the computer Just Because strikes me as a throwback to Microsoft Bob. I don't need to see the slides on a virtual projector so I can turn around and ogle everyone's avatar. Just stream it to my monitor as a 2D video stream and be done with it.
I know IBM got all excited about Second Life for the same reason, but really, what is the benefit of this over, say, Skype?
Granted, I'm happy you've gone with something which is nominally open source, but I use Skype only as an example. Why do you need an entire 3D world to share your 2D slides and chat?
Especially when they ask what could this research be used for they go into so prerecorded rant about how Science isn't about making money it is just about learning more about the universe...
While that may be their motivation, there's a lot of cool stuff that comes out of pure research, or at the very least, out of research in completely unrelated areas.
I think there really is a rift, but I think it's largely caused by the fact that research must necessarily take a very long view if it is to get anywhere, and will have many more failures than successes when done right, whereas most corporations are run by people who are very focused on short-term profits.
The scientist knows that something as seemingly irrelevant and theoretical as relativity can have serious implications for something as ubiquitous and commercially successful as GPS, if you give it time -- and you get to find out all kinds of cool stuff about the Universe.
The CEO knows that the shit the scientists are doing is expensive, and that the money has to come from somewhere, and even if the Higgs Boson turns out to be a major profit center 50 years from now, he'll be retired if not dead. On the other hand, making a slightly smaller, faster, more efficient CPU right now will make the company a lot of money, which also means a big bonus for him, maybe a chance to cash out.
I don't mean to paint the corporation as evil here -- even the best-intentioned CEOs have the same problem. They have the wrong incentives driving them, even subconsciously, and even without that, there's the fact that if the Higgs Boson bankrupts them in the next 5 years, they won't get to see if it's profitable in 50.
I'd certainly have no problem working for the private sector, and that's probably where I'll end up, but there is something to be said for the government, or a charitable organization, or someone just throwing cash at a project because it looks cool, long before anyone has any idea if it'll be useful. If no one did that, we'd have ninety years of refinement in buggy-whip technology instead of, oh, cars. Then again, if the government made our cars, well... Amtrak, anyone?
Perhaps you are right and no one would have found uses for it.
I didn't say that. Of course there would be uses for it, but the question is whether there are any use cases for which it's actually an advantage. For example:
you make /usr/bin/emacs run ed,
I can't imagine ever really wanting this. I can trivially alias 'emacs' to 'ed' in my shell, or place a shell script called 'emacs' earlier in my PATH (modifying my PATH if needed). Probably the most practical use would be to let me tell programs like git what editor to use, but they don't hardcode 'emacs' or 'vi', they use the EDITOR variable.
I do see one advantage to this approach -- I like chroot jails, but they require admin assistance to set up, and much of the grunt work in doing so is ensuring stuff is made available in the right places -- which usually means a lot of bind mounts (/proc, /dev) and/or hardlinks (stuff from /usr/lib, etc). If a user could trivially set up a sandbox similar to a chroot jail, that would be a definite advantage.
But we have chroot, and I would imagine it wouldn't be terribly difficult to make a setuid binary which allows users to set up their own chroot jails safely. In fact, this entire functionality could probably be duplicated with that setuid binary plus an appropriate FUSE filesystem, probably something related to unionfs -- you get your own writable view of the entire filesystem (at least anything you have read access to), but your writes actually go somewhere in your home directory, so no other users see them unless you share that somehow. It's not as elegant, but it would work.
I seem to remember Plan9 had a lot of similar ideas. And again, the most interesting and practical ideas (like the /proc filesystem) were ripped off wholesale and incorporated into Linux long before Plan9 itself was ever a competitor.
I think this sentence is where most of your objections come from. The trick is that it doesn't affect other users, unless you specifically allow them to look in your view of the file system.
Well, but this was another point I made, just prior to that sentence:
I don't really see what advantage there is to putting stuff in the root directory, rather than your home directory, other than making them available to other users.
If I'm not imposing these changes on other users, what's the advantage of doing it this way over simply sharing things in my home directory?
it would be difficult e.g. to put the root file system on FUSE.
Not terribly. It'd be difficult to allow a non-admin user to do so, or to switch to that after the fact, but I believe there are a few LiveCDs which run a FUSE-based root filesystem already.
HURD was designed when multi-user systems with remote file systems were the norm. Today a lot of the features seem superfluous...
Well, but even in that environment, they seem superfluous. I guess I'm still not seeing the advantage of a "view" system like that unless you have programs with hardcoded paths. By comparison...
Getting rid of the SUID-bit and making it possible for users to present limited environments to the less-trusted programs they run still make sense.
This makes a lot of sense.
This is the problem with waiting decades, though...
Like you have a normal user account and decide you want to try this cool new network file system but the admin won't install the kernel module.
So you run FUSE.
On HURD, not a problem, you just run a file system daemon yourself and you can mount it anywhere you want without needing administrator rights.
What advantage does this offer over FUSE? You sure as hell need admin rights (at least) to install HURD in the first place, and as an admin, I'd much rather just install FUSE on a proven OS. The filesystem needs to be ported to FUSE, just as it would need to be ported to HURD.
Or you decide that package managers suck and it's much better to keep all files for Emacs in /Applications/Emacs (Or /OS/Emacs for the purists)...
That's what your home directory is for. I don't really see what advantage there is to putting stuff in the root directory, rather than your home directory, other than making them available to other users. Doing stuff like that which affects other users should require admin rights. If you just want to make it available to other users, it's only moderately difficult to expose selected pieces of your home directory, assuming there isn't a mode 1777 directory somewhere that you're allowed to write to.
So, this might be actually useful, but there are too many reasonable hacks to make it happen now, much more reasonable than replacing your entire kernel. But the real problem is that most of the best ideas HURD had are in other OSes now, like FUSE.
...they need to go write their own OS where proprietary drivers are okay, because we Linux users don't want them.
Fuck you, you do not speak for all Linux users.
I would much prefer an open source driver to a proprietary one, all things being equal. All things are not equal. As cool as AMD has been lately, their proprietary Linux drivers still have far better 3D performance than the open ones.
More importantly, I run proprietary software on Linux, even proprietary software I've paid for! I'm ok with that.
I would still rather my system be open source, and I would especially like it if the proprietary stuff I run (even drivers) was properly sandboxed. I find myself wondering why I should be forced to trust this gigantic binary blob from nVidia more than I trust the JavaScript running on any random website. I understand the technical reasons why this is needed right now, but if something like HURD can solve them, I'm all for that.
Well, those are the ones who answered that evolution definitely did not happen. Another roughly 20% answered "not sure."
...because of issues surrounding freedom of religion, if they do not make a special case *for* religion, and allow exemptions because of it, then they are oppressing the values of any religions that the requirement comes into conflict with... Of course, the law does also oppress religions that require things like human sacrifices or other ritualistic murder, as well as numerous other activities that are quite clearly illegal...
Most often, you find that the activity allowed with religious privilege should be allowed for everyone regardless -- for instance, a certain native american tribe is allowed to use Peyote, so long as it's within the correct religious context. Children are certainly allowed to drink the wine, either as part of communion (Christianity) or because we're saying the blessing over the wine (Judaism). In this case, I generally feel that people should be able to do what they want with their own bodies once they're of age, and before that, a small amount of wine (particularly with parental supervision) isn't going to hurt anyone, so these activities should be permitted with or without the religious context.
But this isn't the most troubling problem...
...they are oppressing the values of any religions that the requirement comes into conflict with, and therefore cannot claim to be a free country.
In order to create exemptions for religion, either everything is permitted, or you have now put the government in the role of choosing what is and is not a valid religion.
If that can actually be done safely and efficiently, it also means a non-free driver can't crash the kernel or fuck up other drivers. I would guess there are security implications as well.
Right now, a bug in the nVidia kernel driver on Linux could compromise the security of the entire machine, or crash the entire OS, or flip some bit in some other unconnected kernel system (or userland process), and it's hard enough to debug these things when you do have source code. So wanting an untainted kernel makes a lot of sense.