Wouldn't it be great for every app to essentially have its own virtual world? That would indicate a much lower potential for harm inherent to the OS architecture.
Not quite there with you on this one. Take a UNIX environment for example. There are a lot of 'localhost' services which are required for a VM to be useful. It's obvious for a UI front-end, but even in the back-end you've got cron-tasks et-al. Whatever the OS or technology, these boiler-plate services consume resources, often in a wasteful way (disk-caching being a huge one).
So while I'm all about VM's, for me, they represent a way of doing more with less hardware when you physically can't put two components onto the same OS. A great use-case is testing-environments. I know people that are all about the VM-snapshot and recover on a separate machine, but there was a slash-article about the apparent 15% reduction in web-performance when running in a VM.
Maybe I'm just old and grumpy now, and my view of the VM is similar to people's view of multi-threading 15 years ago - that MT will never be as fast as sequential logic, except that you can throw massive amounts of parallel hardware at the problem. Likewise in 2 to 5 years, the same will probably be said about VM's.
Like others' I'm in no way recommending Java as a 1'st course, but for completely different reasons than you. My reasons are that Java solves just about every CS problem I'm aware of. If you're trying to teach these concepts, it's hard when you can view the freaking source-code of the JVM and copy-paste into your homework.
Your argument about public static void main(String[]) { } is trite.. I've never seen a language that didn't require SOME boiler plate or corresponding startup knowledge. Basic is as close as you come, but for a first-timer, you still need to learn how to run the commands to work in the program. Visual Basic for Applications started by hiting 'create macro' in office is probably the closest, but you still need some training to make it do much useful - the office libraries are pretty coarse.
Your argument about how hard it is to iterate over a string is also mis-guided.. You're thinking about how to solve a CS example that is easy in one language but more complex in another.. But the example is completely academic.. Solution: choose a different example - one that has the least visual/logical obstruction in the language of choice.
void print(String s){System.out.println(s);} public static void main(String[]) {
for (int i = 0; i 10; i++) { print(i + " of 10"); } }
Again, using boiler-plate to simplify the meat of the program. A good CS student will be curious about the boiler plate, and develop learning skills on their own - which is the point of a university v.s. a vocational school.
Python, while a great language (due to it's early enforcement of coding style) requires just as much API learning as java, C#, C, C++.
While I loathed the topic when going through it, Lisp/Scheme/friends may very well be the best beginner language for a University course. No libraries, very elegant and simple design. Shows all the basic CS operations. Weeds out people that can't comprehend recursion within 4 or 6 months. Though tragicly, not terribly useful after the first year or two of college.
BTW, something that's often lost in/. discussions regarding music/movies: Just because you disagree with the price of something (especially something that you don't need!), doesn't give you the right to steal it.
You're right except for 2 things.
1) We're not talking about an individual stealing anything - though I'm sure a lot of us are haphazardly guilty - expecially during our poorer younger years. The issue is the invisible hand. The fact that the store left the back-door open and can't figure out how to put a lock on it means that there is plentify low-moral-cost availibility of a commodity good. Music, Musak, however you view the current pop-culture-in-a-box, has forced the industry to lower their commodity prices. The fact that they're now allowing us to purchase $1 songs (and especially now on itunes - the subset of a CD with no future risk) means that cost pressures are there.. That labels have to compete against the existing reality of their own short-sightedness. So $15 is no longer practical for a CD, the market won't bear it [for much longer].
2) Copy-right violation is a legal term, and in that sense, as similar, but not identical to stealing. But there is no moral attachment to that particular law.. It's a purely commerce oriented legal artificat that both England and the US support. China isn't as big a supporter because it's currently to their benefit to allow copy-right theft to exist. But there is no fundamental moral dillema here. No more than having God-justice being applied to you if you use a button on a web-browser to purchase something in a single step (which violates the current suite of patents - unless that has changed, but was still in effect for some time). So please don't appeal to a higher sense of morality for a tertiary concept of commerce.
I'm not sure what you're trying to say. Maxwell dealt with this phenomina, not by declaring that current existing between edges of a capacitor, but by introducing a non-current term into the equations.
curl E = -d/dt mag-flux curl H = Current + d/dt e-flux divergence D = total e-charge divergence B = 0
My memory might have missed an minus sign somewhere or misplaced a flux with flux-density. But my point is that Current is a distinct parameter. The capacitor's changing electric-flux [density?]was Maxwell's contribution.
Matter works the same way as light. And by that I mean that the energy injected in a direction interacts with all the bundles of energy that live in it's path. The stronger the interaction, the longer the effective delay before the wave-front can move forward. The actual injected energy is bundled (quantized) so the physical matter/photons may lag the wave-front by significant amounts. This distinction between the wave-front and the actual bundles of energy is the wave-matter duality that Einstein expressed.
Note that there are secondary and tertiary effects to a physical shock-wave. The atoms are giggled, and their light electrons will vibrate in a pattern related to the shock-wave. Those vibrational patterns will produce their own wave-fronts of pure electro-magnetism, which obviously travel much faster than the physical atoms would. But note, that in that shock-wave too, the photons that make up the E&M shockwave lag the leading edge, thus also traveling slower than the speed of light.
Also note that in the shock-wave, atoms may be extracted from the rod, and most certainly electrons will be ejected, and quite obviously photons will be ejected. The ejection includes outward directions - namely towards the observer. So you would, effectively be witnessing a compression shockwave, as well as a measurable E&M emmission.. All would adhere to relativity in terms of having no measureable motion of the rod exceeding the speed of light.
So in your pole banging on the moon's surface, the rigidity of the material (i.e. diamond) is irrelevant, because the initial thrust upwards is nothing more than an energy wave propagating through the medium (via electron-proton bonds). The characteristics of the material determine how that energy shock-wave propagates INCLUDING how fast it propagates.. And as you might imagine, the ideal case is when there is zero matter in which to interact with (and thereby slow the wave-front). So pushing the rod up is by no means going to make any visible depiction of faster-than light information travel.
Then, of course, we're glossing over the impossibility of a couple-inch-think diamond lattisse surving free-standing like that with such massive stress forces acting on it.. Much less how it could ever be put into place.
In terms of 'group velocity'. There are two really good examples. One is a bunch of pre-timed blinking lights. Imagine each light timed to go on and off so that an observer see an apparent motion of a continuous dot around a rather large building. It is possible to pre-program the dots such that measurement suggests the dot is "moving" faster than the speed of light. The accuracy would have to be incredible.. But you could imagine installing a mere 50 spot-lights on the moon, spread out to the far edges.. Then pre-program those dots to flicker, producing an apparently faster-than-light show.
The other more mechanical example would be a hypothetical pair of scissors that stretches out from the earth to the moon. Squeezing the trigger, one could imagine the intersecting blades zipping along in an accelerated fashion (due to the geometry). You would imagine a 'faster than light' group velocity. But my description of the matter-shock-wave above applies here, so you could not achieve such a rigid motion of planetary scale. The matter shock wave would only allow a dismally slow propagation of actual motion.. And the visual inspection of the scissor blades (assuming even that were possible) would not provide any measureablly excessive speeds.
I think the error in your thinking was that a diamond was uncompressible. You imagined that since a diamond couldn't be compressed, then any upward thrust must have the furthest away atoms pushed instantaneously. But as I have outlined, compression does occur, even if only by generating a warping of the crystal (which would be due to the exagerated vibrational pattern of the electrons along the outside of the crystal at the point of the shockwave).
A black-hole, for example, is theorized as having every possible energy state consumed. There are zero empty/free energy-states, so energy
Is there something about the cognitive functioning of humans that makes us receptive to belief in a supernatural deity?'
I don't see what the big question is here. When you grow up, you see a red glowing light. It excites you. You reach for it.. It burns you.. You remember that it burns you.. You don't reach for that red light anymore.
But with unprovable phenomena (such as lighting bowling night for Zeus, or your personal savior Jesus), there is a pretty glowing light.. It makes sense (kind of). It makes you happy (until you have to stop playing at 11am on Sunday to go to Church). It has lots of cultural excitement (Christmas, Hannaka(sp?)). So you keep reaching for that red light... But it never burns.
It probably doesn't burn because it's just a community hallucination. But the fact remains, you don't have negative reinforcement. So you keep believing.
I propose that all undeterred possibilities are intrinsically sought out by life's sense of curiosity, or at least it's tendency to fill up space randomly (a curious cat wandering into the unexplored room, and the amoeba moving into a less dense region of the fluid). This, I think is the more powerful evolutionary/phsycological phenomena. This is what makes our randomness stick and survive catastrophic incident.
Belief is just one of many unscorching pretty lights. Religion is the community's exploitation of that belief (for better or worse).
You know that the many US lawmakers who are in bed with special interests are ready to jump all over this study. One more chance to "discredit" global warming.
Yes, the special interests are the 95% of Americans who like Air conditioning, cars that get less than 40mpg, people that have homes of greater than 1,000 square feet, americans that travel more than 1 mile to work (using any form of transportation, including walking), americans that use computers for more than 30 minutes a day, americans that don't wake and sleep in tandom with the sun rise/set.
Any deviation away from natural organic atmospheric processes is going to have an impact (either locally or globally). The question is, to what degree do we suppress the efficiencies that derive from consumptive energy. Any suppression of consumption necessarily correlates to a reduction in efficiency.
As a law maker, would you mandate that all cars sold today must be hibrids? This pretty much wipes out the US auto-industry, since they are several years behind. This would cause real-estate prices in the city to sky-rocket, because the added cost of a hybrid car makes living closer to work a necessity for many.
There are consequences to every action.. And more often than not, law makers do not properly guage the cost-benifit analysis. Thus it is USUSALLY best to not act - unless there is overwelming evidence that the known benifit of removing a known hazzard far outweighs the likely consequences (such as reducing smog emmisions in a large city).
The reason US lawmakers are hesitant to act on global warming is that law makers are being elected to INCREASE US jobs, to INCREASE corporate productivity, to REDUCE the trade deficite, to REDUCE the cost/price of commodities like fuel and food. All the anti-global-warming ledgislation has the exact opposite pressures on those topics. If you choose the environmental route, you're pretty much shunning every other demographic by necessity. So the question is, is it worth becoming yesterday's news as a nation for something which has the possibility of being not worth it. I say yesterday's news, because 1) We would have to give HUGE money gifts to 3'rd world countries to offset emmissions (kyoto protocol), further straining our trade-deficit / devaluing the US dollar 2) cost of US industry sky-rockets (retooling for emmision control), making 3'rd world country factories 2 to 5 times more profitable than they already are compared to the US - think labor outsourcing is bad today? 3) Cost of energy regionally sky-rockets as manditory rationing or environmental taxation (think tobacco) is requried to reduce regional pollution 4) cost of machinery sky-rockets as all energy burners require retooling and thus repurchasing and thus overt demand of the temporarily scare high-efficiency machinery.
Yes, you can phase all these things in, grandfather, etc.. But then we're talking 20 years (rember Bush proposes a 5 year mandate of 5% gas efficiency??).. By many counts, that's too late. To be "serious" requires radical change, and I have zero trust in our government to manage such a massive nation-wide shift.
In my opinion, the market needs to generate high-efficiency, low cost technology.. Benevolent Billionaires would better serve the world by investing in such technology instead of wasting it on politics. The right technology entices the invisible hand to adapt... Then, when a rational upgrade policy is evident, congress can mandate it's effective use (meaning industry must at least achieve 90% of the effective efficiencies as the current state-of-the art, without explicitly mandating a particular product's use).
Hybrid cars are a joke to me. All they are is a recognition that humans like to accelerate. We push a big-battery high-current high-torque electric motor for acceleration boosts. But you still have to burn the same amount of energy to recharge that battery.. Where is the savings? The smaller engine? Doubtful, because it gets horrendous mileage on the open-r
There is also greater heat with larger cache sizes.
Oddly enough, smaller caches are supposed to have faster access-cycle times (lower latency).. (presumably because of requiring fewer address bits). But every stat I've looked at over the past several years has Intel with lower-latency caches than AMD.. I haven't see the latest crop of Duo v.s. AMD though so I can't comment there.
There is inter-cache locking that has to occur.. If one CPU's cache owns a piece of memory, then all subsequent references must come from it, not main-memory. Hyper-transports makes use of this super-high-speed cache-to-cache copying.
A) Koran is supposedly written in the language of God (Arabic?)- to translate it would be blasphemous. B) Almost all believers speak Arabic, and few non-believers speak Arabic C) Apparently the Koran has very hateful wording about non believers, and certain of races (namely the Jews - be they believers or not)
To force you to learn Arabic prior to learning the Koran, you will have been engaged in the Arabic and Islamic culture prior to passing much judgement/bias.
To sanction a non-Arabic Koran would sanction any hateful passages. An Islamic cleric could not claim that sub-passages were being mis-interpreted, because they themselves sanctioned the translation.
Thus it is in no way of interest for Islamic Clerics to sanction English translations - though there is nothing stopping 3'rd parties.
Rome rejected translations of the Bible to English for ages. But England wanted to remove the cultural authority of Rome. It would take some non-Arabic-speaking nation of repute to make such a definitive split from the middle-east. Though how many non-Arabic nations in the middle-east still seem to survive culturally is beyond me.
Just because someone claims Christ doesn't mean Christ claims them. That is about as useful as saying I will know which apple in this barrel is poisoned after I've eaten all but one of them and I'm still alive.
A charismatic person that claims devine inspiration will deceive entire nations (KKK, Crusades, Nazis...). To feel justified by being deceived in thinking that an all powerful God would disallow such blasphomy deserves whatever price it's people pay. Not that it isn't our duty to warn them. Check your bible about a verse on not tying up your horse - thinking God loves you too much to let ill happen.
Unless I'm missing something, the rule requires that all measureable phenomena must be equally describeable by the two competing theories.
In such a situation, then the one that has the fewer composits wins. Complex means a thing can be considered has being made up of simpler parts.. Thus is seems trivial to comprehend that the more atomic/fundamental something is, the simpler it is.
You can thus shift the argument from 'the simpler theory' to the trustworthiness of the assumptions that make up the atomic building blocks.
Web applications are "always on" applications.. Something you can not do with even a laptop. With the knowledge of a URL, a username and password, you can access a service from anywhere on the planet, with as little as a cell phone.
You don't have versioning nightmares.
You don't have installation headaches.
You don't have platform lock-in.
You don't have OS restrictions.
You don't have performance / hardware requirements.
You don't have EULA's because..
You don't have copyright infringement
You don't have software co-mingling concerns
You don't have tons of test platforms during development time.
You don't have technical support calls out the ass (assuming your site has a standard user interface).
You have intrinsically collaborative software.
You don't have hard-drive crashing concerns / backup concerns.
So I'm sorry if the UI experience isn't optimal for all circumstances, but I'm using online tax software exclusively.. Turbo tax can kiss my ass...
I hear ya.. But it's just as easy to hit ":w!" when you're done in that case. For the majority of cases that you don't have to save changes it saves time and system resources (especially if you're on a heavily loaded machine).
Ahem.. look at files > 100Meg??? Why are you using gvim? You should use gview!!!! gvim creates a swap file, gview doesn't. gview (like view) is just [g]vim with the -R flag. Actually, 100Meg probably doesn't make much of a difference... But I've been having to contextually search 5 gig log files these days (damn default jboss logging levels). And that makes the difference of getting the job done that afternoon.:)
Re:parentheses and brackets, oh yeah
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· Score: 2, Informative
Come on.. You haven't memorized "aYj"bY2j"ap2j"bp yet? (" (Store next-command in buffer) a, Yank-line. j Move to next line. " (buffer) name bYank line. (Repeat next command) 2 times - j line-down. Then from " (buffer) name apaste. 2 lines j (down), From " (buffer) b, paste.). Once you've written that to your brain, the ability to cut and past between hundreds of megabytes of text file becomes blinding.
Or 10Gma2jd'aGoto line 10, mark line/col-number to buffer a, move down j2 lines. d from current line to marked line a
Or 02wma2j01wd`a Go to 0'th column of current line. Jump 2words forward. mark line/col to buffer a. Jump 2 lines j (down). Go to 0'th column. Jump 1wword forward. delete from the `current line/col to the line col in buffer
Cryptic, but no more so than a programming language - once you learn the building blocks, complex stuff comes naturally (assuming you have a mind for compositing).
I've not see named buffering (especially with the ability to refer to either the lines as a whole or the exact col-positions) in any other editor. emacs has ring-buffers (or kill-buffers), but I've never been able to use that intuitively. There are vi key-sequences that can be applied to heavy-weight editors like emacs, eclipse or Intellij Idea, but they just don't seem to fit naturally (because the power of those editors are afforded by their special key-sequences).
The end result is that I still have gvim windows and Idea windows on separate monitors 24/7. Each type of editor does its intended role perfectly - no more, no less.
Re:So let the flame wars begin!
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· Score: 3, Informative
First, I am totally with you - vi is a MUST for configuring UNIX servers remotely (or even locally) (I want to shoot our sysadmin when he uses nano or pico and "accidently" line-wraps a critical config item).
"vi"'s defaults are completely oriented towards editing large text config files - better than ANY other editor I've ever seen. emacs often defaults to scrolling past the end of the screen (where you can miss important info if you're not careful). Other editors auto line wrap, or don't properly handle control or windows characters (vi shows nice ^M or whatever symbols). Search-and-replace is fast, and extremely expressive (moreso than any windowed dialog I've ever seen, including [xg]emacs). These are the tools of the sys-admin.
That being said. Remote server management is best "designed" to use a web interface. Any shmuck can design an application that has a foo.properties or foo.conf or.foo But for all the effort that goes into writing the configuration API, you might as well embed a micro-web server (there is no language known to man that can't receive a trivial text input, reading only the 1'st line, and spitting out a canned text). It is just as easy (if not easier) to add configuration line-items via a web-form than via a config-file. The reason being, that changes to a properties file usually require restarting or pinging the core app. The micro-web service is directly updating the active operation (and can take whatever steps necessary to perform batch alterations.
The only remaining elements are buffer-overrun exploits, DOS attacks, authentication... In the UNIX world, you have to be root to edit the config file, so that was considered secure enough. But apache port-80 proxying is commonplace now.. You get all your security up-front. Granted the flaw in my argument is that apache doesn't have web configuration - and probably never will.
Every home-use NAT-box / router I've seen has http interfaces, and that's just dandy for me.
A clock cycle is the flipping of the voltage of a clock wire from 0V to Vcc (originally 5V, but more like 1.6Volts these days). This clock signal is used by almost every transistor in the computer to coordinate the transitioning of signals from one stage of pipeline of operatins to the next. It is possible to not use a clock (asynchronous compuation) by making each stage generatr "Im done signals" directly between stages, but this is significantly more complex - you have to take ito account wire length and the load levels. Conversely, on each and every clock tick, the computer designer can be guaranteed that every memory cell has been sucessfully written to, and can thus design circuitry that begins reading the values of those memory cells immediately at he voltage flip. While you might not see the distinction, consider that two unrelated people in two different departments are deigning the different pieces that talk to each other - much like software development. Te clock becomes a religeous standard.
Thus, hopefully you can already see that while clock is critcal, it does not necessarily relate to performance. You still have to design all the ciruitry that performs the operations between those clock ticks. Almost every useful operation (such as adding two numbers) requires many many clock ticks. Modern computers are designed to maximize the concurancy of operation so that while it takes many clock ticks to do one macroscopic operation, so many operations are being processed, that on average, you get more than one macro operation completed per clock tick. You can have as may as 80 high level instructions simultaneously "in flight" throughout the pipeline.
The challenge is largely mathmatical / logical. If all you wanted to do was add up two sets of numbers with arbitrarily large set size, then you could create an infinitely fast computer for not that much money. (incidently, if you just wanted to perform the logical ANd or logical OR, yo could do it for mere pennys and ultra high performance - peta flops and beyond). But such trivial situations are almost completely useless. All real data is dependant on previous calculations. A = B + C / D. You cant simultaneously add and devide, you have to do one then the other. In an identical maner MOST computational operations are 1 or two instructions away from some dependent calculations (such as adding being dependent on the loading of a number from slow memory).
So in the mid 90's we saw a surgance in CPUs that could intelligently find every concievable independent operation that can be found in a given command sequence. The greater the parallelism, the faster the average macro-level operation per second (such as SPECint or SPECfp).
One trick, however is to compile from source code the order of operations that maximizes data independence. MMX, 3DNow, SSE, Altivec are such successful examples. Intel failed in its attempt to completely rewrite an instruction sequence in its Itanium using state of the art concepts. The end result was GREAT at SPECint and even better at SPECfp, but failed miserably at normal real world applications. To say nothing of the 800MHZ clock speed (in the day of 3GHZ monsters). Again, the clock represents the fastest rate at which a single micro-operation can be completed (such as moving a number from a high performance buffer to the entry-way of an addition pipeline, or from the output of said pipeline back to a meory cell). But the Itanium chose to do some VERY complex things in each and every clock tick (like renaming 128 registers in a sliding window to support a function call stack). This meant that to comply with the rule that everything gets done by the end of the clock tick you can not increase the clock speed until you speed up the slowest operation.
The Pentim 4 is the exact opposite. In a marketing attempt to advertise 4GHZ CPUs, the took simple operations and broke even them up into multiple stages such that the worst case was 1 / 4,000,000,000 of second in duration. Further, th
because not everybody uses javascript in their peer applications. And many of us need to use wealth of tools and languages to communicate (use the right tool for each job). so using established inter-company communication formats is critical. Building on those tools for the personal hobyist allows rapid integration into the larger ecosystem. It is fine to us propritary technologies in point to point communication (A la AJAX), but API's like eBay, Google, credit card, and thousands of middleware companies cant reinvent the wheel every time.
such an organism in the wild could very well turn our planet into a dustbowl
So why haven't trees stripped every ounce of Carbon Dioxide from the atmosphere?
Because there is more to a chemical process than one input (such as water).. For photosynthesis, there are many chemicals and input sources that are necessary. Sunlight being the most critical element, as it's what provides the energy.
You can do some simple math to figure out how much energy would be necessary in a 100% efficient environment to convert the ocean to Hydrogen and Oxygen.. Then take into account that very little of the high energy solar radiation actually gets to the earth's surface. Then take into account the starvation of constituent ingredients. In photo-synthesis, you need carbon dioxide, Oxygen and water. I don't recall the exact cycle. But for the engine to operate you need to efficiently feed all ingredients in the exact mixture. In nature, this happens through diffusion.. The "waste" products slowly ooze out, while the ingredients seep in (with sun-light permiating based on ideal geographic locations).
Then you have competition between the cells.. They fight over one another, thus starving one or more ingredients. But much like a database deadlock situation. If A blocks B for resource 1 and B blocks A for resource 2, then you have an inpass.
Finally, there are counter-weights in nature. As the chemical makeup of the surroundings change (due to super-saturation of new elements, and th starvation of others'), the ability to do business as usual degrades. The chemical engines themselves, eventually become the food source of some other mechanism.
Thus, even in a homogenous environment of some genetically engineered cellular factory, it would be nearly impossible for the oceans to run dry. SOOOO many factors would kick in LONG before any appreciable progress was made.
Now, it's possible under the right circumstances for a desert's lake to dry up, for example (assuming the right minerals exist to promote cellular replication).
But as other posters have noted, if this were an easy thing to occur, it would have already happened naturally and there wouldn't be water on earth today.
Now where, exactly, does your description fit into that?
Well, it's not my description, as I pointed out. It just makes the most sense of any description I've come across. And I have spent most of my life twiddling with Religion (as a hobby).
Again, you make the classic assumption that religions are all about dogma and are all similar to the dogmatic religions of Christianity, Islam, Judaism, Zoroastrianism, etc.
You misrepresent what I said.. Religion is not about Dogma. Dogma is one vessel by which the general order can be emparted to the individual's personal order. More correctly, Dogma is a contextualized way for the collection of beliefs to be passed on to outsiders.
By definition: "a system of principles or tenets, as of a church."
But this assumes that all of the principles are neatly organized, and internally consistent.. This requires a LOT of thinking, and usually by lots of people, before a regular dogma can emerge.
There are tons of informal religions.. Or more correctly, religions that aren't consistent from one village to another, yet have the same label (as used by outsiders), or are recognized as one-in-the-same by insiders.
The ability to categorize divergent religions into the same category is the same as how we group people into "white", "black", "asian" or "hispanic".. There are key characteristics which we identify and rough into one category or another. When an asian person sees another pseudo-asian person, they may identify that other person differently than say a white American (who might have a greater tendency to categorize both equally as asian). The second asian might instead be categorized as Taiwanese or Chinese or what-have-you.
The same is true with the categorization of religion.. It obviously has greater differentiation within a similar set of practioners than to outsiders.
But this doesn't preclude the concept of personal internal order being provided by participating in the community's external order.
Moreover, I made no mention of a "shared" belief between religions. Only that the general order (also referred to by me as the community's order) is consistent enough to provide internal order.
Your examples including Buddhism perfectly match my description. Buddhism provides a description of the universe and your place within it. It also designates a method that can relinquish the world of suffering (training your mind to consider nothingness as an escape of the viscuous life-cycle of reincarnation). This very specifically is a general order (description of the universe and personal best-practices) such that your internal psychi can be without strife - having internal meaning/order/consistency.
Even the pseudo-religions like confusionism is a philosphy about how you and your rulers should live your respective lives. Again, virtually any philosophy is a structure-providing order. Even Atheists rely on the trust of logic, rationalism, and the consistency of natural things as part of their inner peace.
Finally, even a barbaric anarchistic atheistic amoral person with low mental capacity has a sense of the world.. Their sense is pure survivability.. Be stronger than your neighbor so you can take what you need and defend what you have. The only difference here is that they may be a community of one. So their sense of order may not come from outsiders.. Possibly not even from their parents.
In this extreme case (and possibly excluding hermits for similar reasons), you could find those that would not meet this analytical view of religion.
As one final point.. The key discriminator is the making of internal 'order'. Natural order and community order that does not ultimately translate into personal order is not inherently religious. Learning the quick-sort isn't inherently religious. But recognizing that the divide-and-qonquer alogithm is found throughout nature, and trying to encorporate this natural process into your everyday approach to things, and finally preaching to others the personal benifits of applying divide-and-qonquer could be considered religious.
I just can't figure out why it needs to CPU lock like that in the first place.
preface: I-am-not-a-windows-programmer...
My guess is that windows isn't actually locking, but instead that the file-system directory is locking... But since virtually any OS call is accessing some kind of file object, those OS calls will likely lock too.
Same is true in UNIX, except UNIX isn't retarded enough to have unrelated virtual paths block one another. Gnome, on the other hand... Well it does still dream about becoming windows/Mac one day..
The key problem as I see it with windows is the super-directory. Most directories have 2 or 3 levels of indirections to them that absolutely necessitate being in sync with one another.. 'My documents', 'Temporary [internet] files', 'Shared folders', hell, even the drive letters. I assume that the definition of a path therefore requires a central lock. And something like the addition / removal of a device requires the locking of this directory.
If you had an OS file number which directly mapped to an inode, which directly mapped to an immuteable partition somewhere, then I couldn't imagine there being a need to lock along with the central directory.. But if your file accesses are always of the form "J:\My Folder\blalba" with two levels of virtual/dynamic directories, then good luck.
Note, I'm hoping that subsequent accesses to an already opened file don't block, but who knows.
As a lay person, most of what I know about the topic comes from he history channel. But that info tends to coincide with slash postings like this.
From what I've gathered, 65M years ago one one of the very few mass extinctions due exclusively to a meteorite. There aren't as good markers that scream big-rock in some of the other period transitions.
...religion only exists to explain the unexplained. Since there's nothing (or almost nothing) left unexplained, we don't need religion (or spirituality, I assume).
How can you say all things are explained by science? Maxwell derived the complete electro magnetic equations 1xx years ago and Einstein General relativity 8x years ago, yet we have only begun to understand them practically.
There is a difference between the understanding of the general order of things and discerning pratical things.
Except that there are things left unexplained, and there are events in people's lives that cannot be explained.
From my above, unexplained things will always exist no matter how great the depth of general understanding. But I have little doubt that all things important to humans will ultimately be found to be imperical, testible, and thus Scientifically grounded. cience isn't about having the answers, but about reliably pursuing them.
First and foremost are the historical lies that have been told by the authorities in power that have empowered the feeble minded - those willing to kill for an idea never grounded in empirical evidence. Muslim, Chrisitians, and even Jews (with respect to the "holy land").
I have faith that the ability to research historical evidence will become the greatest achievement of mankind. Whether this comes through mathmatical deduction, or space mirrors that can see ancient earth light or some quirk over time travel - it doesn't matter.
Simple logical deduction disproves that 3 mutually exclusive religions can not all be completely correct. Yet people die or are terminally oppressed (even today) over the subtle interpolations of the infallible truths of their respective texts.
Religion exists not to explain the unexplained, but because it is human nature to ponder the mysteries of life. No matter how much science figures out, there are always mysteries, not all of which can be explained by science or that science would ever even try to understand
When studying religion, you do find that the thing most common among them is the use of giving personal order out of the knowlege of the greater order. A primitive way of saying this is in fact that Religions purpose is to explian the unknown. Read "The sacred Canpoy" an excellent though dated book.
From this it is still true to say charismatic leaders give hope to the lost or down trodden. That morality can still be found in the central philosophy and theology of a particular dogma.
But history is replete with arbitrary nomos's (general orders), so it is repugnant to me that the evolved state of the current three western religons can be considered uniquely sacred.
Also, religion != morality != ethics. Religion doesn't exist because we think we need to be nice to one another. And as much as religions are similar on some ethical and moral issues, they differ very greatly on others.
From my above, you can see where my analysis would lead to different conclusions. Religion, in an order centric view, necessitates defining morality. And those that crafted the doctrine (Mohammud, Jesus, Abraham, Moses, Pharoh, etc) all had similar needs to fullfil. Their followers would not have deemed them credible if there wasn't a natural feeling about rules regarding friendliness towards like neighbors. (Note that most religions were/are still hostile towards outsiders. Even Jesus gives creedence to the idea of the inferior non-Jews - the Samaritans - saying Jews should take pity on them)
Its a big technical task of creating this pervasive database store (especially with a organizational structure like Microsoft seems to have), as far as I know no one has ever done this before so its not like you can learn from someone else and the biggest issue I think is whether developers accept it.
Look up ReiserFS. From what I remember, its original design goals (and research funding) included essentially making database-like table+column accesses mere file operations (directory, file and meta-data). Dont know if the full blown DB-light accesses ever got implemented though, just the basic file meta-data.
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Wouldn't it be great for every app to essentially have its own virtual world? That would indicate a much lower potential for harm inherent to the OS architecture.
Not quite there with you on this one. Take a UNIX environment for example. There are a lot of 'localhost' services which are required for a VM to be useful. It's obvious for a UI front-end, but even in the back-end you've got cron-tasks et-al. Whatever the OS or technology, these boiler-plate services consume resources, often in a wasteful way (disk-caching being a huge one).
So while I'm all about VM's, for me, they represent a way of doing more with less hardware when you physically can't put two components onto the same OS. A great use-case is testing-environments. I know people that are all about the VM-snapshot and recover on a separate machine, but there was a slash-article about the apparent 15% reduction in web-performance when running in a VM.
Maybe I'm just old and grumpy now, and my view of the VM is similar to people's view of multi-threading 15 years ago - that MT will never be as fast as sequential logic, except that you can throw massive amounts of parallel hardware at the problem. Likewise in 2 to 5 years, the same will probably be said about VM's.
Like others' I'm in no way recommending Java as a 1'st course, but for completely different reasons than you. My reasons are that Java solves just about every CS problem I'm aware of. If you're trying to teach these concepts, it's hard when you can view the freaking source-code of the JVM and copy-paste into your homework.
Your argument about public static void main(String[]) { } is trite.. I've never seen a language that didn't require SOME boiler plate or corresponding startup knowledge. Basic is as close as you come, but for a first-timer, you still need to learn how to run the commands to work in the program. Visual Basic for Applications started by hiting 'create macro' in office is probably the closest, but you still need some training to make it do much useful - the office libraries are pretty coarse.
Your argument about how hard it is to iterate over a string is also mis-guided.. You're thinking about how to solve a CS example that is easy in one language but more complex in another.. But the example is completely academic.. Solution: choose a different example - one that has the least visual/logical obstruction in the language of choice.
void print(String s){System.out.println(s);}
public static void main(String[]) {
for (int i = 0; i 10; i++) { print(i + " of 10"); }
}
Again, using boiler-plate to simplify the meat of the program. A good CS student will be curious about the boiler plate, and develop learning skills on their own - which is the point of a university v.s. a vocational school.
Python, while a great language (due to it's early enforcement of coding style) requires just as much API learning as java, C#, C, C++.
While I loathed the topic when going through it, Lisp/Scheme/friends may very well be the best beginner language for a University course. No libraries, very elegant and simple design. Shows all the basic CS operations. Weeds out people that can't comprehend recursion within 4 or 6 months. Though tragicly, not terribly useful after the first year or two of college.
BTW, something that's often lost in /. discussions regarding music/movies: Just because you disagree with the price of something (especially something that you don't need!), doesn't give you the right to steal it.
You're right except for 2 things.
1) We're not talking about an individual stealing anything - though I'm sure a lot of us are haphazardly guilty - expecially during our poorer younger years. The issue is the invisible hand. The fact that the store left the back-door open and can't figure out how to put a lock on it means that there is plentify low-moral-cost availibility of a commodity good. Music, Musak, however you view the current pop-culture-in-a-box, has forced the industry to lower their commodity prices. The fact that they're now allowing us to purchase $1 songs (and especially now on itunes - the subset of a CD with no future risk) means that cost pressures are there.. That labels have to compete against the existing reality of their own short-sightedness. So $15 is no longer practical for a CD, the market won't bear it [for much longer].
2) Copy-right violation is a legal term, and in that sense, as similar, but not identical to stealing. But there is no moral attachment to that particular law.. It's a purely commerce oriented legal artificat that both England and the US support. China isn't as big a supporter because it's currently to their benefit to allow copy-right theft to exist. But there is no fundamental moral dillema here. No more than having God-justice being applied to you if you use a button on a web-browser to purchase something in a single step (which violates the current suite of patents - unless that has changed, but was still in effect for some time). So please don't appeal to a higher sense of morality for a tertiary concept of commerce.
I'm not sure what you're trying to say. Maxwell dealt with this phenomina, not by declaring that current existing between edges of a capacitor, but by introducing a non-current term into the equations.
curl E = -d/dt mag-flux
curl H = Current + d/dt e-flux
divergence D = total e-charge
divergence B = 0
My memory might have missed an minus sign somewhere or misplaced a flux with flux-density. But my point is that Current is a distinct parameter. The capacitor's changing electric-flux [density?]was Maxwell's contribution.
Matter works the same way as light. And by that I mean that the energy injected in a direction interacts with all the bundles of energy that live in it's path. The stronger the interaction, the longer the effective delay before the wave-front can move forward. The actual injected energy is bundled (quantized) so the physical matter/photons may lag the wave-front by significant amounts. This distinction between the wave-front and the actual bundles of energy is the wave-matter duality that Einstein expressed.
Note that there are secondary and tertiary effects to a physical shock-wave. The atoms are giggled, and their light electrons will vibrate in a pattern related to the shock-wave. Those vibrational patterns will produce their own wave-fronts of pure electro-magnetism, which obviously travel much faster than the physical atoms would. But note, that in that shock-wave too, the photons that make up the E&M shockwave lag the leading edge, thus also traveling slower than the speed of light.
Also note that in the shock-wave, atoms may be extracted from the rod, and most certainly electrons will be ejected, and quite obviously photons will be ejected. The ejection includes outward directions - namely towards the observer. So you would, effectively be witnessing a compression shockwave, as well as a measurable E&M emmission.. All would adhere to relativity in terms of having no measureable motion of the rod exceeding the speed of light.
So in your pole banging on the moon's surface, the rigidity of the material (i.e. diamond) is irrelevant, because the initial thrust upwards is nothing more than an energy wave propagating through the medium (via electron-proton bonds). The characteristics of the material determine how that energy shock-wave propagates INCLUDING how fast it propagates.. And as you might imagine, the ideal case is when there is zero matter in which to interact with (and thereby slow the wave-front). So pushing the rod up is by no means going to make any visible depiction of faster-than light information travel.
Then, of course, we're glossing over the impossibility of a couple-inch-think diamond lattisse surving free-standing like that with such massive stress forces acting on it.. Much less how it could ever be put into place.
In terms of 'group velocity'. There are two really good examples. One is a bunch of pre-timed blinking lights. Imagine each light timed to go on and off so that an observer see an apparent motion of a continuous dot around a rather large building. It is possible to pre-program the dots such that measurement suggests the dot is "moving" faster than the speed of light. The accuracy would have to be incredible.. But you could imagine installing a mere 50 spot-lights on the moon, spread out to the far edges.. Then pre-program those dots to flicker, producing an apparently faster-than-light show.
The other more mechanical example would be a hypothetical pair of scissors that stretches out from the earth to the moon. Squeezing the trigger, one could imagine the intersecting blades zipping along in an accelerated fashion (due to the geometry). You would imagine a 'faster than light' group velocity. But my description of the matter-shock-wave above applies here, so you could not achieve such a rigid motion of planetary scale. The matter shock wave would only allow a dismally slow propagation of actual motion.. And the visual inspection of the scissor blades (assuming even that were possible) would not provide any measureablly excessive speeds.
I think the error in your thinking was that a diamond was uncompressible. You imagined that since a diamond couldn't be compressed, then any upward thrust must have the furthest away atoms pushed instantaneously. But as I have outlined, compression does occur, even if only by generating a warping of the crystal (which would be due to the exagerated vibrational pattern of the electrons along the outside of the crystal at the point of the shockwave).
A black-hole, for example, is theorized as having every possible energy state consumed. There are zero empty/free energy-states, so energy
Is there something about the cognitive functioning of humans that makes us receptive to belief in a supernatural deity?'
I don't see what the big question is here. When you grow up, you see a red glowing light. It excites you. You reach for it.. It burns you.. You remember that it burns you.. You don't reach for that red light anymore.
But with unprovable phenomena (such as lighting bowling night for Zeus, or your personal savior Jesus), there is a pretty glowing light.. It makes sense (kind of). It makes you happy (until you have to stop playing at 11am on Sunday to go to Church). It has lots of cultural excitement (Christmas, Hannaka(sp?)). So you keep reaching for that red light... But it never burns.
It probably doesn't burn because it's just a community hallucination. But the fact remains, you don't have negative reinforcement. So you keep believing.
I propose that all undeterred possibilities are intrinsically sought out by life's sense of curiosity, or at least it's tendency to fill up space randomly (a curious cat wandering into the unexplored room, and the amoeba moving into a less dense region of the fluid). This, I think is the more powerful evolutionary/phsycological phenomena. This is what makes our randomness stick and survive catastrophic incident.
Belief is just one of many unscorching pretty lights. Religion is the community's exploitation of that belief (for better or worse).
You know that the many US lawmakers who are in bed with special interests are ready to jump all over this study. One more chance to "discredit" global warming.
Yes, the special interests are the 95% of Americans who like Air conditioning, cars that get less than 40mpg, people that have homes of greater than 1,000 square feet, americans that travel more than 1 mile to work (using any form of transportation, including walking), americans that use computers for more than 30 minutes a day, americans that don't wake and sleep in tandom with the sun rise/set.
Any deviation away from natural organic atmospheric processes is going to have an impact (either locally or globally). The question is, to what degree do we suppress the efficiencies that derive from consumptive energy. Any suppression of consumption necessarily correlates to a reduction in efficiency.
As a law maker, would you mandate that all cars sold today must be hibrids? This pretty much wipes out the US auto-industry, since they are several years behind. This would cause real-estate prices in the city to sky-rocket, because the added cost of a hybrid car makes living closer to work a necessity for many.
There are consequences to every action.. And more often than not, law makers do not properly guage the cost-benifit analysis. Thus it is USUSALLY best to not act - unless there is overwelming evidence that the known benifit of removing a known hazzard far outweighs the likely consequences (such as reducing smog emmisions in a large city).
The reason US lawmakers are hesitant to act on global warming is that law makers are being elected to INCREASE US jobs, to INCREASE corporate productivity, to REDUCE the trade deficite, to REDUCE the cost/price of commodities like fuel and food. All the anti-global-warming ledgislation has the exact opposite pressures on those topics. If you choose the environmental route, you're pretty much shunning every other demographic by necessity. So the question is, is it worth becoming yesterday's news as a nation for something which has the possibility of being not worth it. I say yesterday's news, because 1) We would have to give HUGE money gifts to 3'rd world countries to offset emmissions (kyoto protocol), further straining our trade-deficit / devaluing the US dollar 2) cost of US industry sky-rockets (retooling for emmision control), making 3'rd world country factories 2 to 5 times more profitable than they already are compared to the US - think labor outsourcing is bad today? 3) Cost of energy regionally sky-rockets as manditory rationing or environmental taxation (think tobacco) is requried to reduce regional pollution 4) cost of machinery sky-rockets as all energy burners require retooling and thus repurchasing and thus overt demand of the temporarily scare high-efficiency machinery.
Yes, you can phase all these things in, grandfather, etc.. But then we're talking 20 years (rember Bush proposes a 5 year mandate of 5% gas efficiency??).. By many counts, that's too late. To be "serious" requires radical change, and I have zero trust in our government to manage such a massive nation-wide shift.
In my opinion, the market needs to generate high-efficiency, low cost technology.. Benevolent Billionaires would better serve the world by investing in such technology instead of wasting it on politics. The right technology entices the invisible hand to adapt...
Then, when a rational upgrade policy is evident, congress can mandate it's effective use (meaning industry must at least achieve 90% of the effective efficiencies as the current state-of-the art, without explicitly mandating a particular product's use).
Hybrid cars are a joke to me. All they are is a recognition that humans like to accelerate. We push a big-battery high-current high-torque electric motor for acceleration boosts. But you still have to burn the same amount of energy to recharge that battery.. Where is the savings? The smaller engine? Doubtful, because it gets horrendous mileage on the open-r
There is also greater heat with larger cache sizes.
Oddly enough, smaller caches are supposed to have faster access-cycle times (lower latency).. (presumably because of requiring fewer address bits). But every stat I've looked at over the past several years has Intel with lower-latency caches than AMD.. I haven't see the latest crop of Duo v.s. AMD though so I can't comment there.
There is inter-cache locking that has to occur.. If one CPU's cache owns a piece of memory, then all subsequent references must come from it, not main-memory. Hyper-transports makes use of this super-high-speed cache-to-cache copying.
I suspect something more sinister.
A) Koran is supposedly written in the language of God (Arabic?)- to translate it would be blasphemous.
B) Almost all believers speak Arabic, and few non-believers speak Arabic
C) Apparently the Koran has very hateful wording about non believers, and certain of races (namely the Jews - be they believers or not)
To force you to learn Arabic prior to learning the Koran, you will have been engaged in the Arabic and Islamic culture prior to passing much judgement/bias.
To sanction a non-Arabic Koran would sanction any hateful passages. An Islamic cleric could not claim that sub-passages were being mis-interpreted, because they themselves sanctioned the translation.
Thus it is in no way of interest for Islamic Clerics to sanction English translations - though there is nothing stopping 3'rd parties.
Rome rejected translations of the Bible to English for ages. But England wanted to remove the cultural authority of Rome. It would take some non-Arabic-speaking nation of repute to make such a definitive split from the middle-east. Though how many non-Arabic nations in the middle-east still seem to survive culturally is beyond me.
Just because someone claims Christ doesn't mean Christ claims them.
That is about as useful as saying I will know which apple in this barrel is poisoned after I've eaten all but one of them and I'm still alive.
A charismatic person that claims devine inspiration will deceive entire nations (KKK, Crusades, Nazis...). To feel justified by being deceived in thinking that an all powerful God would disallow such blasphomy deserves whatever price it's people pay. Not that it isn't our duty to warn them. Check your bible about a verse on not tying up your horse - thinking God loves you too much to let ill happen.
Unless I'm missing something, the rule requires that all measureable phenomena must be equally describeable by the two competing theories.
In such a situation, then the one that has the fewer composits wins. Complex means a thing can be considered has being made up of simpler parts.. Thus is seems trivial to comprehend that the more atomic/fundamental something is, the simpler it is.
You can thus shift the argument from 'the simpler theory' to the trustworthiness of the assumptions that make up the atomic building blocks.
Web applications are "always on" applications.. Something you can not do with even a laptop. With the knowledge of a URL, a username and password, you can access a service from anywhere on the planet, with as little as a cell phone.
You don't have versioning nightmares.
You don't have installation headaches.
You don't have platform lock-in.
You don't have OS restrictions.
You don't have performance / hardware requirements.
You don't have EULA's because..
You don't have copyright infringement
You don't have software co-mingling concerns
You don't have tons of test platforms during development time.
You don't have technical support calls out the ass (assuming your site has a standard user interface).
You have intrinsically collaborative software.
You don't have hard-drive crashing concerns / backup concerns.
So I'm sorry if the UI experience isn't optimal for all circumstances, but I'm using online tax software exclusively.. Turbo tax can kiss my ass...
I hear ya.. But it's just as easy to hit ":w!" when you're done in that case. For the majority of cases that you don't have to save changes it saves time and system resources (especially if you're on a heavily loaded machine).
Ahem.. look at files > 100Meg??? Why are you using gvim? You should use gview!!!! gvim creates a swap file, gview doesn't. gview (like view) is just [g]vim with the -R flag. Actually, 100Meg probably doesn't make much of a difference... But I've been having to contextually search 5 gig log files these days (damn default jboss logging levels). And that makes the difference of getting the job done that afternoon. :)
grep -n 'Search Str' file* | head -5
view file1
linenumG
Come on.. You haven't memorized "aYj"bY2j"ap2j"bp yet? (" (Store next-command in buffer) a, Yank-line. j Move to next line. " (buffer) name b Yank line. (Repeat next command) 2 times - j line-down. Then from " (buffer) name a paste. 2 lines j (down), From " (buffer) b, paste.). Once you've written that to your brain, the ability to cut and past between hundreds of megabytes of text file becomes blinding.
Or 10Gma2jd'a Goto line 10, mark line/col-number to buffer a, move down j 2 lines. d from current line to marked line a
Or 02wma2j01wd`a Go to 0'th column of current line. Jump 2 words forward. mark line/col to buffer a. Jump 2 lines j (down). Go to 0'th column. Jump 1 wword forward. delete from the `current line/col to the line col in buffer
Cryptic, but no more so than a programming language - once you learn the building blocks, complex stuff comes naturally (assuming you have a mind for compositing).
I've not see named buffering (especially with the ability to refer to either the lines as a whole or the exact col-positions) in any other editor. emacs has ring-buffers (or kill-buffers), but I've never been able to use that intuitively. There are vi key-sequences that can be applied to heavy-weight editors like emacs, eclipse or Intellij Idea, but they just don't seem to fit naturally (because the power of those editors are afforded by their special key-sequences).
The end result is that I still have gvim windows and Idea windows on separate monitors 24/7. Each type of editor does its intended role perfectly - no more, no less.
First, I am totally with you - vi is a MUST for configuring UNIX servers remotely (or even locally) (I want to shoot our sysadmin when he uses nano or pico and "accidently" line-wraps a critical config item).
.foo But for all the effort that goes into writing the configuration API, you might as well embed a micro-web server (there is no language known to man that can't receive a trivial text input, reading only the 1'st line, and spitting out a canned text). It is just as easy (if not easier) to add configuration line-items via a web-form than via a config-file. The reason being, that changes to a properties file usually require restarting or pinging the core app. The micro-web service is directly updating the active operation (and can take whatever steps necessary to perform batch alterations.
"vi"'s defaults are completely oriented towards editing large text config files - better than ANY other editor I've ever seen. emacs often defaults to scrolling past the end of the screen (where you can miss important info if you're not careful). Other editors auto line wrap, or don't properly handle control or windows characters (vi shows nice ^M or whatever symbols). Search-and-replace is fast, and extremely expressive (moreso than any windowed dialog I've ever seen, including [xg]emacs). These are the tools of the sys-admin.
That being said. Remote server management is best "designed" to use a web interface. Any shmuck can design an application that has a foo.properties or foo.conf or
The only remaining elements are buffer-overrun exploits, DOS attacks, authentication... In the UNIX world, you have to be root to edit the config file, so that was considered secure enough. But apache port-80 proxying is commonplace now.. You get all your security up-front. Granted the flaw in my argument is that apache doesn't have web configuration - and probably never will.
Every home-use NAT-box / router I've seen has http interfaces, and that's just dandy for me.
A clock cycle is the flipping of the voltage of a clock wire from 0V to Vcc (originally 5V, but more like 1.6Volts these days). This clock signal is used by almost every transistor in the computer to coordinate the transitioning of signals from one stage of pipeline of operatins to the next. It is possible to not use a clock (asynchronous compuation) by making each stage generatr "Im done signals" directly between stages, but this is significantly more complex - you have to take ito account wire length and the load levels. Conversely, on each and every clock tick, the computer designer can be guaranteed that every memory cell has been sucessfully written to, and can thus design circuitry that begins reading the values of those memory cells immediately at he voltage flip. While you might not see the distinction, consider that two unrelated people in two different departments are deigning the different pieces that talk to each other - much like software development. Te clock becomes a religeous standard.
Thus, hopefully you can already see that while clock is critcal, it does not necessarily relate to performance. You still have to design all the ciruitry that performs the operations between those clock ticks. Almost every useful operation (such as adding two numbers) requires many many clock ticks. Modern computers are designed to maximize the concurancy of operation so that while it takes many clock ticks to do one macroscopic operation, so many operations are being processed, that on average, you get more than one macro operation completed per clock tick. You can have as may as 80 high level instructions simultaneously "in flight" throughout the pipeline.
The challenge is largely mathmatical / logical. If all you wanted to do was add up two sets of numbers with arbitrarily large set size, then you could create an infinitely fast computer for not that much money. (incidently, if you just wanted to perform the logical ANd or logical OR, yo could do it for mere pennys and ultra high performance - peta flops and beyond). But such trivial situations are almost completely useless. All real data is dependant on previous calculations. A = B + C / D. You cant simultaneously add and devide, you have to do one then the other. In an identical maner MOST computational operations are 1 or two instructions away from some dependent calculations (such as adding being dependent on the loading of a number from slow memory).
So in the mid 90's we saw a surgance in CPUs that could intelligently find every concievable independent operation that can be found in a given command sequence. The greater the parallelism, the faster the average macro-level operation per second (such as SPECint or SPECfp).
One trick, however is to compile from source code the order of operations that maximizes data independence. MMX, 3DNow, SSE, Altivec are such successful examples. Intel failed in its attempt to completely rewrite an instruction sequence in its Itanium using state of the art concepts. The end result was GREAT at SPECint and even better at SPECfp, but failed miserably at normal real world applications. To say nothing of the 800MHZ clock speed (in the day of 3GHZ monsters). Again, the clock represents the fastest rate at which a single micro-operation can be completed (such as moving a number from a high performance buffer to the entry-way of an addition pipeline, or from the output of said pipeline back to a meory cell). But the Itanium chose to do some VERY complex things in each and every clock tick (like renaming 128 registers in a sliding window to support a function call stack). This meant that to comply with the rule that everything gets done by the end of the clock tick you can not increase the clock speed until you speed up the slowest operation.
The Pentim 4 is the exact opposite. In a marketing attempt to advertise 4GHZ CPUs, the took simple operations and broke even them up into multiple stages such that the worst case was 1 / 4,000,000,000 of second in duration. Further, th
because not everybody uses javascript in their peer applications. And many of us need to use wealth of tools and languages to communicate (use the right tool for each job). so using established inter-company communication formats is critical. Building on those tools for the personal hobyist allows rapid integration into the larger ecosystem. It is fine to us propritary technologies in point to point communication (A la AJAX), but API's like eBay, Google, credit card, and thousands of middleware companies cant reinvent the wheel every time.
such an organism in the wild could very well turn our planet into a dustbowl
So why haven't trees stripped every ounce of Carbon Dioxide from the atmosphere?
Because there is more to a chemical process than one input (such as water).. For photosynthesis, there are many chemicals and input sources that are necessary. Sunlight being the most critical element, as it's what provides the energy.
You can do some simple math to figure out how much energy would be necessary in a 100% efficient environment to convert the ocean to Hydrogen and Oxygen.. Then take into account that very little of the high energy solar radiation actually gets to the earth's surface. Then take into account the starvation of constituent ingredients. In photo-synthesis, you need carbon dioxide, Oxygen and water. I don't recall the exact cycle. But for the engine to operate you need to efficiently feed all ingredients in the exact mixture. In nature, this happens through diffusion.. The "waste" products slowly ooze out, while the ingredients seep in (with sun-light permiating based on ideal geographic locations).
Then you have competition between the cells.. They fight over one another, thus starving one or more ingredients. But much like a database deadlock situation. If A blocks B for resource 1 and B blocks A for resource 2, then you have an inpass.
Finally, there are counter-weights in nature. As the chemical makeup of the surroundings change (due to super-saturation of new elements, and th starvation of others'), the ability to do business as usual degrades. The chemical engines themselves, eventually become the food source of some other mechanism.
Thus, even in a homogenous environment of some genetically engineered cellular factory, it would be nearly impossible for the oceans to run dry. SOOOO many factors would kick in LONG before any appreciable progress was made.
Now, it's possible under the right circumstances for a desert's lake to dry up, for example (assuming the right minerals exist to promote cellular replication).
But as other posters have noted, if this were an easy thing to occur, it would have already happened naturally and there wouldn't be water on earth today.
Now where, exactly, does your description fit into that?
Well, it's not my description, as I pointed out. It just makes the most sense of any description I've come across. And I have spent most of my life twiddling with Religion (as a hobby).
Again, you make the classic assumption that religions are all about dogma and are all similar to the dogmatic religions of Christianity, Islam, Judaism, Zoroastrianism, etc.
You misrepresent what I said.. Religion is not about Dogma. Dogma is one vessel by which the general order can be emparted to the individual's personal order. More correctly, Dogma is a contextualized way for the collection of beliefs to be passed on to outsiders.
By definition:
"a system of principles or tenets, as of a church."
But this assumes that all of the principles are neatly organized, and internally consistent.. This requires a LOT of thinking, and usually by lots of people, before a regular dogma can emerge.
There are tons of informal religions.. Or more correctly, religions that aren't consistent from one village to another, yet have the same label (as used by outsiders), or are recognized as one-in-the-same by insiders.
The ability to categorize divergent religions into the same category is the same as how we group people into "white", "black", "asian" or "hispanic".. There are key characteristics which we identify and rough into one category or another. When an asian person sees another pseudo-asian person, they may identify that other person differently than say a white American (who might have a greater tendency to categorize both equally as asian). The second asian might instead be categorized as Taiwanese or Chinese or what-have-you.
The same is true with the categorization of religion.. It obviously has greater differentiation within a similar set of practioners than to outsiders.
But this doesn't preclude the concept of personal internal order being provided by participating in the community's external order.
Moreover, I made no mention of a "shared" belief between religions. Only that the general order (also referred to by me as the community's order) is consistent enough to provide internal order.
Your examples including Buddhism perfectly match my description. Buddhism provides a description of the universe and your place within it. It also designates a method that can relinquish the world of suffering (training your mind to consider nothingness as an escape of the viscuous life-cycle of reincarnation). This very specifically is a general order (description of the universe and personal best-practices) such that your internal psychi can be without strife - having internal meaning/order/consistency.
Even the pseudo-religions like confusionism is a philosphy about how you and your rulers should live your respective lives. Again, virtually any philosophy is a structure-providing order. Even Atheists rely on the trust of logic, rationalism, and the consistency of natural things as part of their inner peace.
Finally, even a barbaric anarchistic atheistic amoral person with low mental capacity has a sense of the world.. Their sense is pure survivability.. Be stronger than your neighbor so you can take what you need and defend what you have. The only difference here is that they may be a community of one. So their sense of order may not come from outsiders.. Possibly not even from their parents.
In this extreme case (and possibly excluding hermits for similar reasons), you could find those that would not meet this analytical view of religion.
As one final point.. The key discriminator is the making of internal 'order'. Natural order and community order that does not ultimately translate into personal order is not inherently religious. Learning the quick-sort isn't inherently religious. But recognizing that the divide-and-qonquer alogithm is found throughout nature, and trying to encorporate this natural process into your everyday approach to things, and finally preaching to others the personal benifits of applying divide-and-qonquer could be considered religious.
I just can't figure out why it needs to CPU lock like that in the first place.
preface: I-am-not-a-windows-programmer...
My guess is that windows isn't actually locking, but instead that the file-system directory is locking... But since virtually any OS call is accessing some kind of file object, those OS calls will likely lock too.
Same is true in UNIX, except UNIX isn't retarded enough to have unrelated virtual paths block one another. Gnome, on the other hand... Well it does still dream about becoming windows/Mac one day..
The key problem as I see it with windows is the super-directory. Most directories have 2 or 3 levels of indirections to them that absolutely necessitate being in sync with one another.. 'My documents', 'Temporary [internet] files', 'Shared folders', hell, even the drive letters. I assume that the definition of a path therefore requires a central lock. And something like the addition / removal of a device requires the locking of this directory.
If you had an OS file number which directly mapped to an inode, which directly mapped to an immuteable partition somewhere, then I couldn't imagine there being a need to lock along with the central directory.. But if your file accesses are always of the form "J:\My Folder\blalba" with two levels of virtual/dynamic directories, then good luck.
Note, I'm hoping that subsequent accesses to an already opened file don't block, but who knows.
As a lay person, most of what I know about the topic comes from he history channel. But that info tends to coincide with slash postings like this.
From what I've gathered, 65M years ago one one of the very few mass extinctions due exclusively to a meteorite. There aren't as good markers that scream big-rock in some of the other period transitions.
...religion only exists to explain the unexplained. Since there's nothing (or almost nothing) left unexplained, we don't need religion (or spirituality, I assume).
How can you say all things are explained by science? Maxwell derived the complete electro magnetic equations 1xx years ago and Einstein General relativity 8x years ago, yet we have only begun to understand them practically.
There is a difference between the understanding of the general order of things and discerning pratical things.
Except that there are things left unexplained, and there are events in people's lives that cannot be explained.
From my above, unexplained things will always exist no matter how great the depth of general understanding. But I have little doubt that all things important to humans will ultimately be found to be imperical, testible, and thus Scientifically grounded. cience isn't about having the answers, but about reliably pursuing them.
First and foremost are the historical lies that have been told by the authorities in power that have empowered the feeble minded - those willing to kill for an idea never grounded in empirical evidence. Muslim, Chrisitians, and even Jews (with respect to the "holy land").
I have faith that the ability to research historical evidence will become the greatest achievement of mankind. Whether this comes through mathmatical deduction, or space mirrors that can see ancient earth light or some quirk over time travel - it doesn't matter.
Simple logical deduction disproves that 3 mutually exclusive religions can not all be completely correct. Yet people die or are terminally oppressed (even today) over the subtle interpolations of the infallible truths of their respective texts.
Religion exists not to explain the unexplained, but because it is human nature to ponder the mysteries of life. No matter how much science figures out, there are always mysteries, not all of which can be explained by science or that science would ever even try to understand
When studying religion, you do find that the thing most common among them is the use of giving personal order out of the knowlege of the greater order. A primitive way of saying this is in fact that Religions purpose is to explian the unknown. Read "The sacred Canpoy" an excellent though dated book.
From this it is still true to say charismatic leaders give hope to the lost or down trodden. That morality can still be found in the central philosophy and theology of a particular dogma.
But history is replete with arbitrary nomos's (general orders), so it is repugnant to me that the evolved state of the current three western religons can be considered uniquely sacred.
Also, religion != morality != ethics. Religion doesn't exist because we think we need to be nice to one another. And as much as religions are similar on some ethical and moral issues, they differ very greatly on others.
From my above, you can see where my analysis would lead to different conclusions. Religion, in an order centric view, necessitates defining morality. And those that crafted the doctrine (Mohammud, Jesus, Abraham, Moses, Pharoh, etc) all had similar needs to fullfil. Their followers would not have deemed them credible if there wasn't a natural feeling about rules regarding friendliness towards like neighbors. (Note that most religions were/are still hostile towards outsiders. Even Jesus gives creedence to the idea of the inferior non-Jews - the Samaritans - saying Jews should take pity on them)
Its a big technical task of creating this pervasive database store (especially with a organizational structure like Microsoft seems to have), as far as I know no one has ever done this before so its not like you can learn from someone else and the biggest issue I think is whether developers accept it.
Look up ReiserFS. From what I remember, its original design goals (and research funding) included essentially making database-like table+column accesses mere file operations (directory, file and meta-data). Dont know if the full blown DB-light accesses ever got implemented though, just the basic file meta-data.