You will see computers that are just as "usable" as everyone keeps wanting. You'll be able to do all your things without thinking about a filesystem or files or anything like that. It'll work great...
But it'll be so restrictive that it won't qualify as a general purpose computer in your eyes. It'll be good for companies, who can sell you ten computers instead of one, but that's it. Some will buy them. You will, if they become cheap, but you'll keep your gp machine.
The elevator crack is also silly because an elevator goes up, down, and stays still. The operation can be more or less complex, but that's all it does. A computer is a canvas for a painter, a darkroom for a photographer, a pasteboard for a desktop publisher, a video editor, a storage device capabable of holding everything you have ever done or had the time to record or take a photo of, a typewriter for the novelist or a poet, a super fast and simple calculator for a child, a super fast and complex calculator for a scientist, a general purpose slave who has no complaints for a programmer, a spreadsheet for anyone running their own business or keeping track of their family finances, a limited tax attorney, a way of designing every physical thing from PVC pipes to rocket ships, and a robotic operator in charge of the construction of those things. It's a blazing testament to the will of man, a monument to tool use, and the best thing humanity has going for it since the opposable thumb.
The Lucas lightsaber scenes are flashier and cooler, but *nothing they do makes sense*. Pretty much no actual swordsmanship has ever been in a Star Wars film, I was certainly not expecting this one to start.
The Jedi emotion thing is inconsistent with the movies, but IIRC the books don't exactly have the Jedi being ascetic. That level of "all ur base r belong 2 us oh, btw, we left ur mom in slavery lol luv is 3V1L!!" seemed created to make Anakin's eventual fall more believable.
The trust fight was odd, and was probably placed there to create tension quickly- it's arbitrary, but how else are you going to get there with two Jedi knights, who would logically be like loyal siblings?
I wouldn't say it blew anything. The plot could certainly have been better, but I wouldn't say it was bad.
The complaints I'm seeing here are ludicrous. That was altogether stunning, and I'll be watching it again soon.
I think a light saber fight in a darkened series of caves was a bit ambitious (given that the sabers are strongly monochromatic light sources), but they still pulled it off ok.
Ironically, his advice "Don't follow cops" is something I follow very closely. And the companion "Don't let cops follow you".
You would only believe these two things if the following conditions were fulfilled:
(1)- At some level, police have rights and privledges that you do not. (2)- At some level, police have the ability to harm you. (3)- At some level, police are unfair and arbitrary.
If any of these things were not true, then you would not have a problem with police being near you. (1) and (2) are true and most people don't have a problem with that. The question is, why don't more people bitch about (3)?
The current traffic setup is basically, you are guilty. *How* guilty determines how the police act. The cop in your case wanted to flex nuts, so he did. The guy who pulled over my law abiding father for not stopping twice at the stop sign (seriously, he said you had to stop once at the white line, then again two feet forward where the intersection actually starts), the cop who pulled me over when I wasn't speeding and claimed I was doing OVER TWENTY OVER (and had a radar gun to show that *something* was going over twenty over), and the wide array of other police hassles means that you simply can't trust them.
You can't trust them because they have more power than you, traffic court is a kangaroo court (I had pictures to show that the officer couldn't see me to verify that his 20+ reading was coming from me, because it obviously fucking wasn't, and that didn't matter either), and are often arbitrary.
It only takes a few bad cops to make me distrust the whole lot of them. Not because I feel that they are all bad, but because statistics state that I'm going to get pulled over for no goddamn reason x%, where x is positive, when a cop is around, and 0% when no cop is around.
So when I see them, I react with fear, and get the fuck away from them before they hurt me any more.
Is it possible that these speed increases are due to superior compilation? I recall that the PPC implementation of compilers was in a bad state as of a couple years ago, and this would be a very real area where they could realize speed increases without having "made mistakes" in the past.
Most people use the speed changes to argue in favor of Apple and against M$. But, you would see the exact same progression if M$ was adding more features (which slowed things down a bit), while Apple was correcting coding / design mistakes from an earlier OS. Versus the implied world where new M$ code is bloat-tastic, and Apple is bravely discovering new ways to speed things up.
I think the solution is a mix of the two, and I'm not convinced that all aspects of XP are slower than earlier versions (I'm convinced that some of the filesystem stuff is faster). OS X was built on a mature OS but was itself not mature on release: that they would find ways to increase the speed of their Apple-specific code was sort of inevitable.
Anyway, this isn't a valid reason to bash M$ or even praise Apple (because it implies that they were doing things the slow way before).
Praising Apple for having better GUIs and features is very valid, of course.
Doesn't matter much to me, really: I like Free Software, so I'm running Fedora, and I'm not swimming in money to the point where I can just go grab a new machine anywho. But those new G5s really do look badass...
I don't dislike your point exactly... Mac bashers have been loud forever (I was one years ago, based on having to use it at school, then they got better, then they got better, then...), but...
You know, I really just hate your example. I don't exactly know why. Maybe because it assumes that there are areas of knowledge forbidden to everyone depending on how they were born? I mean, I'm not rich, but I think that I can model that behavior in my head and come to valid conclusions about it. It has been helpful when predicting where the behavior of rich people deviates from middle class ones, and how. And isn't that really what empathy is about?
Actually, my method works ALL the time, not none of the time. It is not stupid. It works 100% of the time.
The only thing that is correct is part about the head death of the universe: it's computationally retarded to try that solution.
WE WERE NOT DISCUSSING COMPUTATIONALLY INTELLIGENT THINGS
We were talking about, "in theory". The post I was responding to brought up MD5, not as a practical point, but as an example of how one way functions are not invertible. Except that, they are. MD5 was brought up to talk about whether the brain, the physical brain, can be fully responsible for the mind, and whether the mind and the brain map together. They also talked about "reductionism", which is what scientists get called when they do something that explains almost everything.
So, please examine the content of the conversation before posting. My post was accurate and relevant. Yours was inaccurate, inaccurate, accurate, accurate, and altogether didn't get what was being discussed.
The lack of a umount -force_really_yes_I_mean_it_I_dont_care option under Linux ticks me off- but I think it's pretty funny that Linux is getting crap for not only having one (it doesn't) but doing it by default (which would certainly be the wrong call)!
My biggest gripe is the lack of a "Force unmount even if it will leave the system unstable" option. That should absolutely be in there by default, and I've considered seeing if I can hack such a thing up for my own use.
If something (possibly a runaway process that's trying to make thumbnails out of files that aren't even remotely graphical in nature or keep track of filesystem changes changes or whatever) is locked up, then you simply have to axe the process first- which is still a pain that you shouldn't *have* to put up with (especially if your next action is going to be to shutdown the system). lsof works ok for this, and fuser works as well.
So no, Linux isn't very good about this, and people even tend to have strong opinions on it.
But so would not having them feel as if they have to write the damn file from scratch. Is it like totally impossible to just go to the part of the file that it cares about and edit that? I mean, in your universe, they would still have to just modify the fields that they want, they would just have a little less effort to do it.
Additionally, if they (and ATi might not do it, but someone would) break it in a registry-looking thing, it's a pain in the ass to put back together. No matter how fuxx0red my machine has gotten, vi has always worked.
I like their script that overwrites your xorg.conf file. That thing is great. It breaks my keyboard, my mouse, assigns arbitrary and wrong refresh rates for my monitor, and a couple other things I'm too tired to think of right now. Last time it didn't even work.
I'll give the Free software thing a try soon, but it hasn't been a high priority for me, as I don't use my hardware acceleration near as much as I thought I would (I thought my nice job would give me money to play games: it did, but took away my time!).
It currently *seems* that we will not need quantum theory in order to map out consciousness, ie, that our existing approximations will work just fine on the scale of something as huge as neurons.
However, the last claim you make, the "what it means to make an observation", is in no way shape or form up for debate. When quantum theory talks about "an observer" it isn't to imply that this observer is intelligent, or you, or me, simply that an interaction has occurred, and this interaction has changed the state of things. It require a you, or a me, it requires a photon or an electron.
Re:Not that bold, ask a creationist!
on
Mapping the Mind
·
· Score: 1
MD5 Inversion:
Given: MD5 Hash output M.
Step 1: Generate a random input file F. Step 2: Generate the MD5 hash of input file F, O. Step 3: Compare O to M: if they are the same, complete. If not, return to step 1.
This sounds stupid, but it is actually a solution that works 100% of the time.
One way functions are not one way. They are computationally trivial in one direction and computationally more difficult by orders of magnitude in another.
Importantly, this has no relevance on what I was discussing.
Well, didn't quite you ask "Should government force be used to redistribute wealth?" which is the most "no" one I can come up with.
The point isn't that all ten would be like that: the point is that "slanted scientists" aren't gotten around that way. How would you fix a P2P network where over half the nodes are "bad"?
The big example that keeps coming up is environmentalism. Now, personally, I think that dumping tons of extra carbon has to have a bad effect, and that "we don't have any evidence" should, if that really is the case, still make us err on the side of caution. However, as a layperson, I am *utterly unable* to determine the truth. Utterly and completely. There are a bunch of studies. The one making the strongest points on *both* sides have been thoroughly debunked. There are way, way, more on the side of "environmentalism" (to simplify), but consensus doesn't equal correctness. I have no way at all to determine who is correct in the absolute sense, and this disturbs me greatly.
There are other, less controversial issues as well, as well as controversial ones where I tend to disagree with the consensus views- but is it for a real reason?
If you grab all the studies in the area and look at them in search of truth, all you are really doing is rewarding consensus. If all studies were your golf ball example, then looking at ten of them with that phrasing would be *less* helpful than one. As soon as this becomes the common way to do this, the guys wanting to raise golf ball taxes will simply commission more studies (months in advance, unpublicized) and they'll all come out over the course of two years, gradually swaying public opinion.
You would be a fool to believe that this is not occurring constantly.
I've only had cable service for a couple months, so I've literally never called the number before. When it works, it's the best connection I've ever had (counting college).
Obviously anyone could install Linux, or pirate the full OS. But picture this:
I write a program that gets around the big limits . Maybe it also ads back in support for a few minor things (network printers might be hard to reimplement, but setting PROGRAM_LIMIT from 3 to 32767 shouldn't be too hard).
Now, my understanding is that this would be *completely legal*. Probably, this would also be inevitable. Meaning that, Microsoft is selling (and knows that they are) the full version (or damn close to it) for a tiny fraction of the cost. So the entire thing is just to preserve the price in other places.
I guess this isn't a big deal or any kind of surprise, but given that there will undoubtably be a little.exe that you run that "fixes" you with the near equivalent of the full version (legally), it's still kind of amazing.
Well, even if it does, it's still held true for so many orders of magnitude as to be ridiculous. For a technological observation, it was truly excellent.
The error is that CherryOS did something *ILLEGAL* (they used source code not in accordance with the license, "stealing" it), while Tridge did something that *BitKeeper strongly disagrees with*.
If what Tridge did was illegal, then he'd be getting the fires of hells shoved at him here, because if you'll notice open source and illegal pretty much never go together.
Reverse engineering is a right that has been successfully defended in court numerous times.
More importantly, Tridge wanted a *reimplementation*, something that does the same thing but is itself not the same. Much like Microsoft did with a GUI OS (Windows) compared to the Mac. And Apple went to court, and Apple rightly lost. CherryOS wanted to use another's work directly, sell something that they did not own as if they did.
The real difference is, Tridge wants to "write good fiction like Asimov" whereas CherryOS wants to publish the Foundation trilogy under its own name.
Not that bold, ask a creationist!
on
Mapping the Mind
·
· Score: 1, Insightful
The creationists (and other pseudoscientists) keep making that "bold" prediction.
Then science comes in and stomps out all the fun, and then the charlatans move to the *next* thing we don't know and start claming that we'll *NEVER* know it cause it's *way too hard*...
I will instantly move to any ISP that doesn't sign this, assuming my current one does. I suspect that this won't be a very uncommon occurance, or at least, I suspect that a few ISPs in everyplace will always be holdouts.
But man, this is terrible. I hate how everyone wants to make the net into TV. I don't watch TV because it's passive. I hope we'd all put up a good fight for the net.
Slashdot Mirror
You will see computers that are just as "usable" as everyone keeps wanting. You'll be able to do all your things without thinking about a filesystem or files or anything like that. It'll work great...
But it'll be so restrictive that it won't qualify as a general purpose computer in your eyes. It'll be good for companies, who can sell you ten computers instead of one, but that's it. Some will buy them. You will, if they become cheap, but you'll keep your gp machine.
The elevator crack is also silly because an elevator goes up, down, and stays still. The operation can be more or less complex, but that's all it does. A computer is a canvas for a painter, a darkroom for a photographer, a pasteboard for a desktop publisher, a video editor, a storage device capabable of holding everything you have ever done or had the time to record or take a photo of, a typewriter for the novelist or a poet, a super fast and simple calculator for a child, a super fast and complex calculator for a scientist, a general purpose slave who has no complaints for a programmer, a spreadsheet for anyone running their own business or keeping track of their family finances, a limited tax attorney, a way of designing every physical thing from PVC pipes to rocket ships, and a robotic operator in charge of the construction of those things. It's a blazing testament to the will of man, a monument to tool use, and the best thing humanity has going for it since the opposable thumb.
And all of that was BEFORE the web!
The Lucas lightsaber scenes are flashier and cooler, but *nothing they do makes sense*. Pretty much no actual swordsmanship has ever been in a Star Wars film, I was certainly not expecting this one to start.
The Jedi emotion thing is inconsistent with the movies, but IIRC the books don't exactly have the Jedi being ascetic. That level of "all ur base r belong 2 us oh, btw, we left ur mom in slavery lol luv is 3V1L!!" seemed created to make Anakin's eventual fall more believable.
The trust fight was odd, and was probably placed there to create tension quickly- it's arbitrary, but how else are you going to get there with two Jedi knights, who would logically be like loyal siblings?
I wouldn't say it blew anything. The plot could certainly have been better, but I wouldn't say it was bad.
I was very impressed.
The complaints I'm seeing here are ludicrous. That was altogether stunning, and I'll be watching it again soon.
I think a light saber fight in a darkened series of caves was a bit ambitious (given that the sabers are strongly monochromatic light sources), but they still pulled it off ok.
I was very impressed.
Yea, I dislike this a lot.
Ironically, his advice "Don't follow cops" is something I follow very closely. And the companion "Don't let cops follow you".
You would only believe these two things if the following conditions were fulfilled:
(1)- At some level, police have rights and privledges that you do not.
(2)- At some level, police have the ability to harm you.
(3)- At some level, police are unfair and arbitrary.
If any of these things were not true, then you would not have a problem with police being near you. (1) and (2) are true and most people don't have a problem with that. The question is, why don't more people bitch about (3)?
The current traffic setup is basically, you are guilty. *How* guilty determines how the police act. The cop in your case wanted to flex nuts, so he did. The guy who pulled over my law abiding father for not stopping twice at the stop sign (seriously, he said you had to stop once at the white line, then again two feet forward where the intersection actually starts), the cop who pulled me over when I wasn't speeding and claimed I was doing OVER TWENTY OVER (and had a radar gun to show that *something* was going over twenty over), and the wide array of other police hassles means that you simply can't trust them.
You can't trust them because they have more power than you, traffic court is a kangaroo court (I had pictures to show that the officer couldn't see me to verify that his 20+ reading was coming from me, because it obviously fucking wasn't, and that didn't matter either), and are often arbitrary.
It only takes a few bad cops to make me distrust the whole lot of them. Not because I feel that they are all bad, but because statistics state that I'm going to get pulled over for no goddamn reason x%, where x is positive, when a cop is around, and 0% when no cop is around.
So when I see them, I react with fear, and get the fuck away from them before they hurt me any more.
Good job, society!
Is it possible that these speed increases are due to superior compilation? I recall that the PPC implementation of compilers was in a bad state as of a couple years ago, and this would be a very real area where they could realize speed increases without having "made mistakes" in the past.
Course, I could be wrong...
I am not trolling.
Most people use the speed changes to argue in favor of Apple and against M$. But, you would see the exact same progression if M$ was adding more features (which slowed things down a bit), while Apple was correcting coding / design mistakes from an earlier OS. Versus the implied world where new M$ code is bloat-tastic, and Apple is bravely discovering new ways to speed things up.
I think the solution is a mix of the two, and I'm not convinced that all aspects of XP are slower than earlier versions (I'm convinced that some of the filesystem stuff is faster). OS X was built on a mature OS but was itself not mature on release: that they would find ways to increase the speed of their Apple-specific code was sort of inevitable.
Anyway, this isn't a valid reason to bash M$ or even praise Apple (because it implies that they were doing things the slow way before).
Praising Apple for having better GUIs and features is very valid, of course.
Doesn't matter much to me, really: I like Free Software, so I'm running Fedora, and I'm not swimming in money to the point where I can just go grab a new machine anywho. But those new G5s really do look badass...
I don't dislike your point exactly... Mac bashers have been loud forever (I was one years ago, based on having to use it at school, then they got better, then they got better, then...), but...
You know, I really just hate your example. I don't exactly know why. Maybe because it assumes that there are areas of knowledge forbidden to everyone depending on how they were born? I mean, I'm not rich, but I think that I can model that behavior in my head and come to valid conclusions about it. It has been helpful when predicting where the behavior of rich people deviates from middle class ones, and how. And isn't that really what empathy is about?
Actually, my method works ALL the time, not none of the time. It is not stupid. It works 100% of the time.
The only thing that is correct is part about the head death of the universe: it's computationally retarded to try that solution.
WE WERE NOT DISCUSSING COMPUTATIONALLY INTELLIGENT THINGS
We were talking about, "in theory". The post I was responding to brought up MD5, not as a practical point, but as an example of how one way functions are not invertible. Except that, they are. MD5 was brought up to talk about whether the brain, the physical brain, can be fully responsible for the mind, and whether the mind and the brain map together. They also talked about "reductionism", which is what scientists get called when they do something that explains almost everything.
So, please examine the content of the conversation before posting. My post was accurate and relevant. Yours was inaccurate, inaccurate, accurate, accurate, and altogether didn't get what was being discussed.
The lack of a umount -force_really_yes_I_mean_it_I_dont_care option under Linux ticks me off- but I think it's pretty funny that Linux is getting crap for not only having one (it doesn't) but doing it by default (which would certainly be the wrong call)!
My biggest gripe is the lack of a "Force unmount even if it will leave the system unstable" option. That should absolutely be in there by default, and I've considered seeing if I can hack such a thing up for my own use.
If something (possibly a runaway process that's trying to make thumbnails out of files that aren't even remotely graphical in nature or keep track of filesystem changes changes or whatever) is locked up, then you simply have to axe the process first- which is still a pain that you shouldn't *have* to put up with (especially if your next action is going to be to shutdown the system). lsof works ok for this, and fuser works as well.
So no, Linux isn't very good about this, and people even tend to have strong opinions on it.
Well, that would solve the problem, true...
But so would not having them feel as if they have to write the damn file from scratch. Is it like totally impossible to just go to the part of the file that it cares about and edit that? I mean, in your universe, they would still have to just modify the fields that they want, they would just have a little less effort to do it.
Additionally, if they (and ATi might not do it, but someone would) break it in a registry-looking thing, it's a pain in the ass to put back together. No matter how fuxx0red my machine has gotten, vi has always worked.
Basically, the issue is with ATi, not X.
And you know this, even.
I like their script that overwrites your xorg.conf file. That thing is great. It breaks my keyboard, my mouse, assigns arbitrary and wrong refresh rates for my monitor, and a couple other things I'm too tired to think of right now. Last time it didn't even work.
I'll give the Free software thing a try soon, but it hasn't been a high priority for me, as I don't use my hardware acceleration near as much as I thought I would (I thought my nice job would give me money to play games: it did, but took away my time!).
It currently *seems* that we will not need quantum theory in order to map out consciousness, ie, that our existing approximations will work just fine on the scale of something as huge as neurons.
However, the last claim you make, the "what it means to make an observation", is in no way shape or form up for debate. When quantum theory talks about "an observer" it isn't to imply that this observer is intelligent, or you, or me, simply that an interaction has occurred, and this interaction has changed the state of things. It require a you, or a me, it requires a photon or an electron.
MD5 Inversion:
Given: MD5 Hash output M.
Step 1: Generate a random input file F.
Step 2: Generate the MD5 hash of input file F, O.
Step 3: Compare O to M: if they are the same, complete. If not, return to step 1.
This sounds stupid, but it is actually a solution that works 100% of the time.
One way functions are not one way. They are computationally trivial in one direction and computationally more difficult by orders of magnitude in another.
Importantly, this has no relevance on what I was discussing.
Well, didn't quite you ask "Should government force be used to redistribute wealth?" which is the most "no" one I can come up with.
The point isn't that all ten would be like that: the point is that "slanted scientists" aren't gotten around that way. How would you fix a P2P network where over half the nodes are "bad"?
The big example that keeps coming up is environmentalism. Now, personally, I think that dumping tons of extra carbon has to have a bad effect, and that "we don't have any evidence" should, if that really is the case, still make us err on the side of caution. However, as a layperson, I am *utterly unable* to determine the truth. Utterly and completely. There are a bunch of studies. The one making the strongest points on *both* sides have been thoroughly debunked. There are way, way, more on the side of "environmentalism" (to simplify), but consensus doesn't equal correctness. I have no way at all to determine who is correct in the absolute sense, and this disturbs me greatly.
There are other, less controversial issues as well, as well as controversial ones where I tend to disagree with the consensus views- but is it for a real reason?
That's my real gripe.
If you grab all the studies in the area and look at them in search of truth, all you are really doing is rewarding consensus. If all studies were your golf ball example, then looking at ten of them with that phrasing would be *less* helpful than one. As soon as this becomes the common way to do this, the guys wanting to raise golf ball taxes will simply commission more studies (months in advance, unpublicized) and they'll all come out over the course of two years, gradually swaying public opinion.
You would be a fool to believe that this is not occurring constantly.
I've only had cable service for a couple months, so I've literally never called the number before. When it works, it's the best connection I've ever had (counting college).
Yesterday I arrived home and my internet was down (Comcast). It was obviously a DNS problem (so sayeth TCP dump).
First step: Need to call company.
216.239.57.99
Google for "Comcast help number" and assorted queries, until it comes up.
Second step: Call Comcast. They have a major DNS outage, as you are already aware. They have no solution yet.
Third step: Google for how to specify your DNS in Linux.
Fourth step: Google for alternate DNSes.
Fifth step: Do as Google demands.
Bang! Full intarweb functionality. All from one IP address. Memorize it, it's worth the neurons!
Obviously anyone could install Linux, or pirate the full OS. But picture this:
.exe that you run that "fixes" you with the near equivalent of the full version (legally), it's still kind of amazing.
I write a program that gets around the big limits . Maybe it also ads back in support for a few minor things (network printers might be hard to reimplement, but setting PROGRAM_LIMIT from 3 to 32767 shouldn't be too hard).
Now, my understanding is that this would be *completely legal*. Probably, this would also be inevitable. Meaning that, Microsoft is selling (and knows that they are) the full version (or damn close to it) for a tiny fraction of the cost. So the entire thing is just to preserve the price in other places.
I guess this isn't a big deal or any kind of surprise, but given that there will undoubtably be a little
Well, even if it does, it's still held true for so many orders of magnitude as to be ridiculous. For a technological observation, it was truly excellent.
The error is that CherryOS did something *ILLEGAL* (they used source code not in accordance with the license, "stealing" it), while Tridge did something that *BitKeeper strongly disagrees with*.
If what Tridge did was illegal, then he'd be getting the fires of hells shoved at him here, because if you'll notice open source and illegal pretty much never go together.
Reverse engineering is a right that has been successfully defended in court numerous times.
More importantly, Tridge wanted a *reimplementation*, something that does the same thing but is itself not the same. Much like Microsoft did with a GUI OS (Windows) compared to the Mac. And Apple went to court, and Apple rightly lost. CherryOS wanted to use another's work directly, sell something that they did not own as if they did.
The real difference is, Tridge wants to "write good fiction like Asimov" whereas CherryOS wants to publish the Foundation trilogy under its own name.
The creationists (and other pseudoscientists) keep making that "bold" prediction.
Then science comes in and stomps out all the fun, and then the charlatans move to the *next* thing we don't know and start claming that we'll *NEVER* know it cause it's *way too hard*...
Pah!
I will instantly move to any ISP that doesn't sign this, assuming my current one does. I suspect that this won't be a very uncommon occurance, or at least, I suspect that a few ISPs in everyplace will always be holdouts.
But man, this is terrible. I hate how everyone wants to make the net into TV. I don't watch TV because it's passive. I hope we'd all put up a good fight for the net.
One of the reasons I go to slashdot is the sheer power of people fixing annoying problems with 1-10 lines of text.
The second core will be used for spyware, silly!