Yes, it is. I highly recommend studying the basics of QM; it really is an astonishingly elegant and beautiful theory.
Of course the calculations are difficult - they require you to actually solve those beautiful equations, which is always much harder. For more interesting systems we have to solve perturbatively, which is an ugly hack. But it's possible to directly do e.g. the energy levels of a hydrogen atom - and it really is an elegant calculation, and while I wouldn't call it "easy" it's actually very straightforward.
Every theory of nature we've discovered has been simpler than that which it replaced - and more abstracted from reality, the two go hand in hand. QM versus classical electrodynamics is a perfect example. I would expect the true unified theory to be very simple (we probably discovered the fundamental mathematical part two hundred years ago), but also require a lot of very intricate calculation to relate it to experiments.
Apple doesn't have to share their DRM scheme. Much like Ford does not have to license their engine design, or Boeing doesn't have to license their wing design.
Bad analogy - an engine is a part of a car, wheras a music player and the music on it are fundamentally distinct products. And neither of the companies you mention are in a monopoly position.
Apple refusing to license their DRM doesn't prohibit a vendor from building their own app and media store that runs on the OS. Or, they did not hinder other media files from playing in iTunes.
Huh? Apple refusing to license their DRM does prevent other vendors' music playing on the ipod. (Heck, when real did figure out a way to run their own DRM scheme on the ipod, Apple immediately issued a bogus "security update" to prevent it.) It's absolutely the same thing as MS blocking competitors' apps running on their OS.
It also seems the part you conveniently ignored is the part where Jobs explained why they don't license the DRM.
I ignored it because even if I believed him, it's irrelevant.
Matter of opinion. It seems anticompetitive to me.
Your analogy of MS using secret APIs isn't valid because no one forced MS to use the APIs, MS did it themselves to stifle competition. Content providers are forcing Apple to use DRM, it isn't Apple's choice.
MS had to use some API, just as Apple had to use some DRM. MS chose to not make their API available to anyone else to stifle competition, just as Apple chose to not make their DRM available to anyone else to stifle competition. (Contrary to the popular myth, Apple makes a substantial profit from iTMS - just look at their shareholder statements).
Apple isn't doing anything (illegal or otherwise) to interfere or prevent other online music stores from operating.
They're using their own proprietary DRM format for the ipod and refusing to license it to anyone else. (Seriously, real asked them; it wasn't even a question of "more money than you've got", it was simply "we're not licensing it"). Seems to me to be very much like MS using secret APIs to make office run faster than lotus.
But, by obscuring the port that SSH listens on, have I made the machine dramatically more secure? Maybe not dramatically, but it's slightly more secure.
No, it's less secure - now, you can no longer be sure you have no obvious vulnerabilities, and people who go after your machine specifically have a good chance of finding them. Wheras if you run it on the standard port, you can tell you have no easy open holes by the way your website hasn't been defaced yet.
Sure, USB has them covered - if you don't mind a host-client model, and having to develop your own protocols. (USB networking is a horrible mess, believe me, I've had to get it working). Would USB have been a better choice? Maybe. But 100mb Ethernet is by no means a bad choice.
As for internet connectivity, I'd be amazed if that provider actually delivers on 200mb/s in usage. Even if they are, there are few servers where you get an advantage for 100 mbit over 10 mbit. And what would you even use it for? If you're thinking of streaming video, even 10mbit is more bandwidth than DVD; you won't see websites streams pushing 100mbit any time soon.
We can follow that up with "anyone not using wireless already upgraded to gig-E switches about five years ago".
Well, for starters, 1080p (keep in mind this involves "raw" devices, not sending an MPEG4 down the line) uses just shy of 1.5 Gbps.
So you can't send the full picture down it. That doesn't make it useless.
Sure, but that doesn't actually matter, given that they're backwards-compatible. Hell, consumer hard drives can't keep up with gig-E yet.
We can then finish it off with one of my favorites (actually not, but in this case it really does serve the described need) - Any attached devices needing bidirectional communication can use plain ol' ubiquitous USB.
USB has a definite endedness - the host/client relationship. Which is nice in some situations, but would make things like AV switcher boxes awkward. Ethernet is a perfectly good, established, and equally ubiquitous system for bidirectional communications - it's a good choice, really.
Forgive my ignorance, I am not from the US and I have not been in the army (any army). What does army do to people that they have problems living "normal" lives later?
Not from the US, but know a few ex-military folks. Life in the army is a very organised, regimented (hah) existence. If you go straight out of school, from living with your parents, into your 15-year tour - and many people do - then you never experience having to live for yourself - first your parents and then the army provide your housing, clothes, everything.
Now, 15 years down the line, you're out on your own; your parents might well be dead by this point, and if not then they're probably in their 60s, in need of care themselves more than they can care for you. You're too old (45-ish) to be easily employable, what friends you have are either back wherever you were last stationed, or in the same situation as you are (and quite possibly at the other end of the country). And you have absolutely no idea how to live by yourself - one of my ex-military friends told me it took him a week to figure out where to buy cutlery - not only had he never bought any before, he'd never even thought of it as something you have to buy.
Most people adjust well - many end up starting their own businesses (no-one will employ you for decent wages, and the pension is good enough that you can afford to be unprofitable for a while). But it takes quite a lot of learning, at an age where you're nowhere near as mentally flexible as you once were, and all too many just can't adapt.
The only other sensible option for someone who wants to "make" their own CPU at home would be to program an FPGA, which is certainly less interesting than what this guy has done.
I'm not at all convinced. Sure, it'd be less likely to put your name on slashdot, but the part doing it on the FPGA removes - connecting all the wires together - isn't actually interesting; by and large, it's tedious manual labour. It's certainly worth knowing how to, but honestly once you've wired ten chips up you've pretty much "done them all". To my mind using an FPGA makes it easier to concentrate on the actually interesting part, the processor design, rather than getting caught up in the endless "wire A into hole B".
Most FPSes are designed for the cards a few generations down the line; the detail increase you can get from a ridiculous-rather-than-good card really does make for a noticeable quality increase on launch day (because the devs will have tested it on the ridiculous cards, because what's ridiculous today will be commonplace in a few years). That and high framerate does make a significant difference to some people (I have the misfortune to be quite sensitive to jerky motion, it seems). Sure, this card is for those with plenty of money, and someone geekier would probably match its performance by some custom cooling/overclocking setup on a cheaper card, or some such. But pushing the maximum possible power is still a worthwhile (and indeed geeky) thing.
I think atomic decay counts for more - according to our best understanding of physics it's truly random, rather than merely chaotic. It's possible to have (intentionally or otherwise) a biased dice or roller, wheras you can't make a biased atom.
Oh, and regardless of Shannon entropy, it is a bit more obvious that this approach will more satisfy a feeling of randomness. Unless the die are weighted, their effect will be random. Or as random as one will possibly get, or as random enough for those mathematicians who work for Casinos across the world who use real die for a variety of Casino games and are willing to shell out hundreds of millions in winnings should the roller win.
Dude, that's what the Shannon entropy would measure. If it isn't _very_ close to log_2(6), there's going to be exploitable patterns (and calculating the entropy is a much better way to determine this than "look and see if I can spot any"). As someone else mentioned, he's not using casino-grade dice, which are manufactured to higher quality standards than those one normally uses.
It's already agreed that if we knew the entire state of the universe, that we could see past present and future (just as we can determine numbers either side of a target number within a known sequence or set).
No. Not so.
So as each dice has vastly different atomic landscapes on it's edges, and as the surfaces vary greatly with wind currents randomly blowing through, variations in humidity, vibrations, electro magnetics and all sorts of subtle forces and their variations and effects on one another and the die... those dice rolls are as random as they can get.
It's possible. But it's also entirely possible that there's some slight systematic bias towards certain values (e.g. the shapes of all the dice may be very slightly skewed in the same way, from the manufacturing process). Which is why rather than theorising we should do as the GP suggested: run the machine, calculate the entropy and see how it turns out.
If you assume an entirely deterministic universe then you can of course make it work. But the particle has to somehow "know" which direction the experimenter is going to choose to measure it in, before he does - which seems rather implausible.
Poloroid film has a similar quality to it and can be quite effective in the right hands. It tends to shift to red and yellow casts which endow the subject with an instant retro look and feel.
The thing about this argument is: if that's what you want, you can get the same effect instantly in photoshop. Or you could colour shift in the opposite direction, perhaps giving a futuristic look and feel. Or you could do billions of other things.
If you lack the discipline to be effective with a whole paintbox, you're not going to be a good artist with just one colour either.
territories of the US get non-voting representation in Congress
Sorry to sidetrack the discussion, but how the hell does that work? You have your representative - but he doesn't get to do any actual representing? Is that really any better than the position of the colonies under the British?
I've found that every RTS I've played with others over a LAN has gotten boring pretty quickly
My LAN group still stay up all night playing Total Annihilation, ~12 years on. And we're still discovering new tactics, because rather than trying to balance by keeping strict control over everything, the designers just threw everything in there and let you work it out.
Browsing the network required the lisa daemon to be running, encrypted SMB required samba to be configured to use such. If it wasn't working out of the box this would be a distro issue.
This is always trotted out, but it ignores the last fifteen years or so of C compilation. If that kind of dynamic optimization really did make the program more effective, the C compiler would be within its rights to output a JVM with some hard-coded Java to do what's needed. And to a very limited extent it does things on those lines (advanced C compilers can e.g. output a program that for a repeated branching construct will, rather than using compile-time branch prediction, switch to an implementation of the loop with differing predictions based on the runtime measurements). The reason this isn't taken further is that it's not generally such a big performance win, especially if you'll allow the C programmer to do profile generation on a few test cases and then build this profile in statically.
It is very far off. I'm not sure what criteria you're using to determine what's "not very far off", but if it's first-class functions, then most modern mainstream languages (with notable exceptions of C++ and Java) aren't "far off" from Lisp. But I would say that it's a wrong definition.
First-class functions, lambda, map and friends, generator expressions, and so on. My criterion is what it feels like to write, and in that sense Python is very close. (I'd go so far as to say it's better, but that's going to be contentious).
What really sets Lisp apart is how the program itself is defined in terms of structures that are fundamental to the language, and how those structures can be easily manipulated in the language itself. Simply put, Lisp - especially Common Lisp (though R6RS is neat, too) - is a pinnacle of metaprogramming so far, and that's what is its defining feature.
Lisp fans always claim this, but I think it's a red herring. TCL takes the same principle even further, and it's nowhere near as popular or admired. Metaprogramming isn't what makes lisp good to program in, it's all in the first-class functions and functional programming flow control tools.
Slashdot Mirror
Yes, it is. I highly recommend studying the basics of QM; it really is an astonishingly elegant and beautiful theory.
Of course the calculations are difficult - they require you to actually solve those beautiful equations, which is always much harder. For more interesting systems we have to solve perturbatively, which is an ugly hack. But it's possible to directly do e.g. the energy levels of a hydrogen atom - and it really is an elegant calculation, and while I wouldn't call it "easy" it's actually very straightforward.
Every theory of nature we've discovered has been simpler than that which it replaced - and more abstracted from reality, the two go hand in hand. QM versus classical electrodynamics is a perfect example. I would expect the true unified theory to be very simple (we probably discovered the fundamental mathematical part two hundred years ago), but also require a lot of very intricate calculation to relate it to experiments.
Bad analogy - an engine is a part of a car, wheras a music player and the music on it are fundamentally distinct products. And neither of the companies you mention are in a monopoly position.
Apple refusing to license their DRM doesn't prohibit a vendor from building their own app and media store that runs on the OS. Or, they did not hinder other media files from playing in iTunes.
Huh? Apple refusing to license their DRM does prevent other vendors' music playing on the ipod. (Heck, when real did figure out a way to run their own DRM scheme on the ipod, Apple immediately issued a bogus "security update" to prevent it.) It's absolutely the same thing as MS blocking competitors' apps running on their OS.
It also seems the part you conveniently ignored is the part where Jobs explained why they don't license the DRM.
I ignored it because even if I believed him, it's irrelevant.
Matter of opinion. It seems anticompetitive to me.
Your analogy of MS using secret APIs isn't valid because no one forced MS to use the APIs, MS did it themselves to stifle competition. Content providers are forcing Apple to use DRM, it isn't Apple's choice.
MS had to use some API, just as Apple had to use some DRM. MS chose to not make their API available to anyone else to stifle competition, just as Apple chose to not make their DRM available to anyone else to stifle competition. (Contrary to the popular myth, Apple makes a substantial profit from iTMS - just look at their shareholder statements).
They're using their own proprietary DRM format for the ipod and refusing to license it to anyone else. (Seriously, real asked them; it wasn't even a question of "more money than you've got", it was simply "we're not licensing it"). Seems to me to be very much like MS using secret APIs to make office run faster than lotus.
Uh, VLC's security track record is hardly great. You're better off to install a reputable free codec pack and use their player.
No, it's less secure - now, you can no longer be sure you have no obvious vulnerabilities, and people who go after your machine specifically have a good chance of finding them. Wheras if you run it on the standard port, you can tell you have no easy open holes by the way your website hasn't been defaced yet.
As for internet connectivity, I'd be amazed if that provider actually delivers on 200mb/s in usage. Even if they are, there are few servers where you get an advantage for 100 mbit over 10 mbit. And what would you even use it for? If you're thinking of streaming video, even 10mbit is more bandwidth than DVD; you won't see websites streams pushing 100mbit any time soon.
That's true for any brute-force algorithm. If only there were a name that reflected this kind of approach...
Well, for starters, 1080p (keep in mind this involves "raw" devices, not sending an MPEG4 down the line) uses just shy of 1.5 Gbps.
So you can't send the full picture down it. That doesn't make it useless.
Sure, but that doesn't actually matter, given that they're backwards-compatible. Hell, consumer hard drives can't keep up with gig-E yet.
We can then finish it off with one of my favorites (actually not, but in this case it really does serve the described need) - Any attached devices needing bidirectional communication can use plain ol' ubiquitous USB.
USB has a definite endedness - the host/client relationship. Which is nice in some situations, but would make things like AV switcher boxes awkward. Ethernet is a perfectly good, established, and equally ubiquitous system for bidirectional communications - it's a good choice, really.
Not from the US, but know a few ex-military folks. Life in the army is a very organised, regimented (hah) existence. If you go straight out of school, from living with your parents, into your 15-year tour - and many people do - then you never experience having to live for yourself - first your parents and then the army provide your housing, clothes, everything.
Now, 15 years down the line, you're out on your own; your parents might well be dead by this point, and if not then they're probably in their 60s, in need of care themselves more than they can care for you. You're too old (45-ish) to be easily employable, what friends you have are either back wherever you were last stationed, or in the same situation as you are (and quite possibly at the other end of the country). And you have absolutely no idea how to live by yourself - one of my ex-military friends told me it took him a week to figure out where to buy cutlery - not only had he never bought any before, he'd never even thought of it as something you have to buy.
Most people adjust well - many end up starting their own businesses (no-one will employ you for decent wages, and the pension is good enough that you can afford to be unprofitable for a while). But it takes quite a lot of learning, at an age where you're nowhere near as mentally flexible as you once were, and all too many just can't adapt.
I'm not at all convinced. Sure, it'd be less likely to put your name on slashdot, but the part doing it on the FPGA removes - connecting all the wires together - isn't actually interesting; by and large, it's tedious manual labour. It's certainly worth knowing how to, but honestly once you've wired ten chips up you've pretty much "done them all". To my mind using an FPGA makes it easier to concentrate on the actually interesting part, the processor design, rather than getting caught up in the endless "wire A into hole B".
Most FPSes are designed for the cards a few generations down the line; the detail increase you can get from a ridiculous-rather-than-good card really does make for a noticeable quality increase on launch day (because the devs will have tested it on the ridiculous cards, because what's ridiculous today will be commonplace in a few years). That and high framerate does make a significant difference to some people (I have the misfortune to be quite sensitive to jerky motion, it seems). Sure, this card is for those with plenty of money, and someone geekier would probably match its performance by some custom cooling/overclocking setup on a cheaper card, or some such. But pushing the maximum possible power is still a worthwhile (and indeed geeky) thing.
Yes.
I think atomic decay counts for more - according to our best understanding of physics it's truly random, rather than merely chaotic. It's possible to have (intentionally or otherwise) a biased dice or roller, wheras you can't make a biased atom.
Dude, that's what the Shannon entropy would measure. If it isn't _very_ close to log_2(6), there's going to be exploitable patterns (and calculating the entropy is a much better way to determine this than "look and see if I can spot any"). As someone else mentioned, he's not using casino-grade dice, which are manufactured to higher quality standards than those one normally uses.
It's already agreed that if we knew the entire state of the universe, that we could see past present and future (just as we can determine numbers either side of a target number within a known sequence or set).
No. Not so.
So as each dice has vastly different atomic landscapes on it's edges, and as the surfaces vary greatly with wind currents randomly blowing through, variations in humidity, vibrations, electro magnetics and all sorts of subtle forces and their variations and effects on one another and the die... those dice rolls are as random as they can get.
It's possible. But it's also entirely possible that there's some slight systematic bias towards certain values (e.g. the shapes of all the dice may be very slightly skewed in the same way, from the manufacturing process). Which is why rather than theorising we should do as the GP suggested: run the machine, calculate the entropy and see how it turns out.
If you assume an entirely deterministic universe then you can of course make it work. But the particle has to somehow "know" which direction the experimenter is going to choose to measure it in, before he does - which seems rather implausible.
The thing about this argument is: if that's what you want, you can get the same effect instantly in photoshop. Or you could colour shift in the opposite direction, perhaps giving a futuristic look and feel. Or you could do billions of other things.
If you lack the discipline to be effective with a whole paintbox, you're not going to be a good artist with just one colour either.
Sorry to sidetrack the discussion, but how the hell does that work? You have your representative - but he doesn't get to do any actual representing? Is that really any better than the position of the colonies under the British?
Then why are they creating them at all?
On machines of the era where these design decisions were made, it requires waiting 45 minutes for your document to render.
My LAN group still stay up all night playing Total Annihilation, ~12 years on. And we're still discovering new tactics, because rather than trying to balance by keeping strict control over everything, the designers just threw everything in there and let you work it out.
Browsing the network required the lisa daemon to be running, encrypted SMB required samba to be configured to use such. If it wasn't working out of the box this would be a distro issue.
This is always trotted out, but it ignores the last fifteen years or so of C compilation. If that kind of dynamic optimization really did make the program more effective, the C compiler would be within its rights to output a JVM with some hard-coded Java to do what's needed. And to a very limited extent it does things on those lines (advanced C compilers can e.g. output a program that for a repeated branching construct will, rather than using compile-time branch prediction, switch to an implementation of the loop with differing predictions based on the runtime measurements). The reason this isn't taken further is that it's not generally such a big performance win, especially if you'll allow the C programmer to do profile generation on a few test cases and then build this profile in statically.
Sure, except that "fact" has been false for the last decade or so.
First-class functions, lambda, map and friends, generator expressions, and so on. My criterion is what it feels like to write, and in that sense Python is very close. (I'd go so far as to say it's better, but that's going to be contentious).
What really sets Lisp apart is how the program itself is defined in terms of structures that are fundamental to the language, and how those structures can be easily manipulated in the language itself. Simply put, Lisp - especially Common Lisp (though R6RS is neat, too) - is a pinnacle of metaprogramming so far, and that's what is its defining feature.
Lisp fans always claim this, but I think it's a red herring. TCL takes the same principle even further, and it's nowhere near as popular or admired. Metaprogramming isn't what makes lisp good to program in, it's all in the first-class functions and functional programming flow control tools.