I mean, seriously, our brains exist in the real world. Animal brains also tend to not be driven by strict linear logic, either.
Microsoft is a living organism, of sorts. Very much a parasite.
Yeah, evolution can be a self-correcting process, when individuals choose to correct themselves before they get faced with the natural consequences of their actions.
But you know, it makes no difference whether there was an intelligent God creating the universe or whether it was just that a non-supernatural creation of the universe managed to mimic intelligence, in somehow allowing and selecting processes that could avoid going straight downhill every time. If we use our atheism or our theism to excuse ourselves in believing that our own way is better than everyone else's we are making the same mistake.
The discovery that the mechanics of thought and belief are not entirely shrouded in mystery is neutral to the question of the existence of God, as many have pointed out, even if it might reveal the means that some have used to induce fake religious experiences in others. The existence of fakirs does not prove or disprove the existence of a "real" thing, either.
Then how do you explain the above exchange between fanboys (burning at what time of day, who knows, and burning what, who knows, except that it's probably silicon-based instead of carbon)?
If you're not trained in math, even if you are highly trained in biology or physics, there are a lot of mathematical results that don't appear to derive from their premise.
The fact that the math is both hard and non-obvious doesn't make it wrong.
This is supposed to be an evolutionary advance? Killing off the competitors that keep you in check, so that you don't destroy the environment that keeps you alive?
You believe that Microsoft is the epitome of natural progress?
Maximizing entropy is beneficial?
I know I'm pushing the absurd, here, but how does unbiased evolution avoid heat death? And, if you have to assume a bias to evolution, have you really avoided the hand of the supernatural, or have you just pushed it back to the other side of the big bang?
None of the three experiences mentioned in this study are at the base of my belief in God.
I am familiar with these experiences. I have known for some twenty-plus years that indigestion can induce similar experiences. I have been aware that drugs have also "enhanced" or induced these experiences for many people.
For what it's worth, so can adrenaline rush, not to mention the stress of battle, or the excitement of being engaged in a sport (including the spectator experience, think of that the next time you are watching your avatar's lovely or pimply back side).
Simply achieving a goal after a long struggle is another, as is the exhileration of getting through a good workout without any serious tripups.
I could mention even more homely examples, some which would generally be considered in perfect opposition to the divine.
Not surprisingly, reading sacred writings can induce/enhance those three experiences. So can science fiction, good poetry, etc., etc., etc.
Some people mistake those sensations for "the religious experience". Some don't really mistake them, but do use them as analogs of religious experience, so much that the semantics have conflated a bit.
But, as I said, these are not the basis of my belief in God.
One sort of incomplete way to describe the reasons I believe in God would be an analogy with mathematical "truths".
Once you can sort-of wrap your mind around the concept of the "ideal unit", addition and sequence become axiomatic. 1 + 1 = 2. Yeah. You don't doubt that. Even when you dig into advanced math and discover that there are whole universes of discourse, whole fields of science where the unit is never ideal or where wholes are almost always greater or less than the sums of their parts, you find that sequence and conservation are a good touch-stone. The case you tend to run into first in our current patterns of curriculum, normal vectors, doesn't prove the principles wrong at all. It gives a new framework withing which the principles operate, and when you can manage the framework you can still make useful calculations.
It's basically the same about the love of God, or about the principle of repentance. In the real world, you find lots of things that don't make sense for a long time. But if you are willing to keep returning to the basics, and see how the principles map into the context, eventually it makes sense.
If must say I'm deluding myself about God, then I must also say that I'm deluding myself about math, that rings and fields and topologies are just a bunch of rationalization.
I can tell from my last sentence that I must have been asleep by the time I hit the send button.
What I meant to say was there is a lot of GCC compatible source code in the openBSD and netBSD distribution and packages that will test most of the points like the multiply-by-two example given. Well, maybe not that particular example, but the point I thought I was trying to make was that the bulk of the code being (relatively) standard would tend to push the development of any alternative compiler away from encouraging dependency on implementation of undefined behavior.
But thinking that over with a clear head, I can see that, _if_ some BSD programers had pet behaviors that they liked to program to, existing more-or-less correct code does not prevent such dependency being supported, and even promoted. GCC, of course, being a case in point.
However, the openBSD programers are pretty much sticklers for standard source code. More than any other group, this group is going to tend to stay away from undefined behavior, because dependence on undefined behavior is a good way to open future security holes (like the sign overflow business).
As far as DSPs, I think there is a good point to be made:
The C standard tends to try to bend over backwards to try to accomodate non-mainstream CPUs, and that is not what a standard should do. Standards should not encode all the exceptions, otherwise the exceptions become the standard.
In the case of DSPs, I can think of very few DSPs that can fully support the standard without a lot of run-time support that would get in the way of processing signals digitally. So it makes little sense to attempt to directly support DSPs in the standard.
It makes more sense for the standard to define methods by which a non-standard compiler can qualify and quantify departures from the standard.
In this case, not only do we want to be able to query the actual width of the various integer types, but we also want to be able to query the operational base, the sign behavior, and the behavior of shifts. And we want the standard to provide a way for CPU venders to declare their support for a subset or dialect of the standard.
Kind of like being able to ask someone, "Are you from Texas?" although you really can't be sure in the human case which subdialect of Texan the person you're talking to is speaking. (We is proud o' ow-uh lo-cowl dye-lectix in Texs.) Then you could know such things as that "all" has to be able to parse as a "oil" as well as "every".
In the specific case of the loop that depends on shifting bits out the top, you might enclose the loop with something like
#if ! defined STICKY_SHIFT && OPERATIONAL_BASE == 2 && ( SIGN_FORM & TWOS_COMPLEMENT )
i = 1; while ( ( i >> 1 ) > 0 )/* Do something that requires i to double every pass to the limit of an int. */; #else # error( "Compiler does not support this optimized algorithm." ) #end
While I can imagine an architecture in which your loop never goes negative (explicit sign bit not involved in shifts) I can't imagine an architecture in which the loop would fail to go to zero. I mean, on any binary ALU, that 1 is just one bit, and when it runs off the top there is nothing but zeros left behind.
Hmm. Okay, I can imagine it now -- the CPU sets a flag when a shift tries to shift a one bit out of a register, and faults with the contents of the register unchanged. And you have some code somewhere that ends up catching the signal so that your loop doesn't end in a fault. Of course, multiply will be more likely to be guarded in such a way than shift.
On the one hand, yeah, people tend to write to the compiler as if it were standard.
On the other hand, BSD userland is a lot of test code written to teh GPL mark. Kernel, and other stuff will increase the balance of relatively correct..
Z. Well, yeah, it implements a bunch of nice mathematical tools that are good for checking algorithms.
But do you understand the run-time?
In my opinion, C has suffered as much as it has benefited from the standardization process. (Obligatory thanks to Microsoft as one of the largest influences there.) It's a lot harder for me to understand the run-time of a C program now than it used to be, and if I can't understand the run-time, what good is it if I know my algorithm is theoretically correct? By the time it gets to the metal, timing issues and other semantics issues of getting the abstract stuff mapped to the bare metal may (for example) have pushed my checks for corner cases way out of whack.
But I look at the alternatives. Java used to be fairly understandable. Now it's fast enough to use on a lot of stuff, but it is no longer understandable. (I know that no one mentioned Java, but I just did, as an example.)
Every interpreted language I've seen makes all sorts of implicit assumptions about the run-time behavior that are counter-intuitive to me. I used to think it was just me, but when I ask fans of said language to explain, their explanations are generally full of stuff that turn out to be their personal interpretations of things they don't understand. So the best they can say is that they think they can demonstrate correctness. Or maybe they can demonstrate that they think it's correct.
I suggest you go re-read copyright law to understand the difference between the collective copyrights and licenses applicable to various parts of a work and the copyright(s) and license(s) applicable to the work as a whole. If you hadn't been misrepresenting copyright law and the licenses in question we could both have avoided wasting time.
I still sense that you are under the impression that, if a project includes BSDcd-ed files and GPL-ed files and is licensed as a whole under GPL that it is licensed as a whole under both.
Just to make sure, do you understand that there could be cases where you have parts that are GPL and parts that are BSDcd, and the whole could legally be BSDcd?
Individual files can be licensed under different licenses than the project as a whole, although there is the matter of license compatibility, lack of which might make a project copyrighted, but impossible to legally publish, or maybe even to legally use.
> Considering people "own" the land, I'm yet to see the point in this.
Wow.
Okay. I just laid dibs on the thoughts in you're head.
Your thinking I don't know how to use an apostrophe just now, right?
Okay, you know owe me $10.
What, you say my spelling could use some work, too?
I charge $100 dollars for that thought.
Getting the point?
> Also, it is possible to copyright a novel, or a business trade secret. > How about that secret recipe for turning bullshit into aluminum ?
Hey, you succeeded in alchemy!
> All of those can be defined as "owning" information.
No, that would also be alchemy, unless you have succeeded in seriously perverting the meaning of "owning".
What copyright (and patent) give you is the temporary right to control a certain piece of the market, specifically certain key elements of the piece of the market generated by your creation. (Loosely spoken.) You "own" a piece of the market.
Any attempt to establish rights beyond that have serious conflicts with other parts of the Constitution and with certain parts of the first ten amendments.
(So serious that, if the ??AA don't back off their attempts to generate laws to close the "holes" in the law, they could well be accused of treasonous attacks on the Constitution itself.)
Well, I actually kind of split between using the xCode editor and VIM, but I use ant on the command line for compiling.
Maybe the latest xCode handles reorganization of the project better. I suppose I should go get the latest greatest, but that will have to come after updating my Fedora Core box from 5 to 7, and I found myself using LVM across two hard disks in FC5, which confused LVM when I upgraded to FC6, so I have to back up about 10G of data onto a small number of DVDs and CDs, I guess. I'm still hiding from that, and, in the meantime, even my macs are getting a bit long in the tooth.
I have trouble with the workspace concept in Eclipse.
Netbeans 5 has been okay as long as I'm not using Japanese, but, especially on the Mac, Japanese seems to confuse it, especially Japanese in the comments.
(Actually, I can use Japanese with Netbeans on the FC5 box, but, then there's that thing where the default java environment is GNU's, which means the command line and double-clicking require just a little extra work, and I don't yet have a Linux notebook, so I tend to carry Mac OS around with me instead.)
Slashdot Mirror
What would my kids do with my backup disks and all the data on them if I died today?
Would they have any idea?
The real world is fuzzy, too.
I mean, seriously, our brains exist in the real world. Animal brains also tend to not be driven by strict linear logic, either.
Microsoft is a living organism, of sorts. Very much a parasite.
Yeah, evolution can be a self-correcting process, when individuals choose to correct themselves before they get faced with the natural consequences of their actions.
But you know, it makes no difference whether there was an intelligent God creating the universe or whether it was just that a non-supernatural creation of the universe managed to mimic intelligence, in somehow allowing and selecting processes that could avoid going straight downhill every time. If we use our atheism or our theism to excuse ourselves in believing that our own way is better than everyone else's we are making the same mistake.
The discovery that the mechanics of thought and belief are not entirely shrouded in mystery is neutral to the question of the existence of God, as many have pointed out, even if it might reveal the means that some have used to induce fake religious experiences in others. The existence of fakirs does not prove or disprove the existence of a "real" thing, either.
Then how do you explain the above exchange between fanboys (burning at what time of day, who knows, and burning what, who knows, except that it's probably silicon-based instead of carbon)?
If you're not trained in math, even if you are highly trained in biology or physics, there are a lot of mathematical results that don't appear to derive from their premise.
The fact that the math is both hard and non-obvious doesn't make it wrong.
to kill than be killed?
This is supposed to be an evolutionary advance? Killing off the competitors that keep you in check, so that you don't destroy the environment that keeps you alive?
You believe that Microsoft is the epitome of natural progress?
Maximizing entropy is beneficial?
I know I'm pushing the absurd, here, but how does unbiased evolution avoid heat death? And, if you have to assume a bias to evolution, have you really avoided the hand of the supernatural, or have you just pushed it back to the other side of the big bang?
but we used to call it "motivational speaking".
Definitely abused.
Definitely abuse.
there are those religions in which the body is considered a sacred gift from deity.
what explains
the religious experiences I sometimes have
while dancing?
Or how about that old classic, the greatest good for the greatest number, or whatever it was.
None of the three experiences mentioned in this study are at the base of my belief in God.
I am familiar with these experiences. I have known for some twenty-plus years that indigestion can induce similar experiences. I have been aware that drugs have also "enhanced" or induced these experiences for many people.
For what it's worth, so can adrenaline rush, not to mention the stress of battle, or the excitement of being engaged in a sport (including the spectator experience, think of that the next time you are watching your avatar's lovely or pimply back side).
Simply achieving a goal after a long struggle is another, as is the exhileration of getting through a good workout without any serious tripups.
I could mention even more homely examples, some which would generally be considered in perfect opposition to the divine.
Not surprisingly, reading sacred writings can induce/enhance those three experiences. So can science fiction, good poetry, etc., etc., etc.
Some people mistake those sensations for "the religious experience". Some don't really mistake them, but do use them as analogs of religious experience, so much that the semantics have conflated a bit.
But, as I said, these are not the basis of my belief in God.
One sort of incomplete way to describe the reasons I believe in God would be an analogy with mathematical "truths".
Once you can sort-of wrap your mind around the concept of the "ideal unit", addition and sequence become axiomatic. 1 + 1 = 2. Yeah. You don't doubt that. Even when you dig into advanced math and discover that there are whole universes of discourse, whole fields of science where the unit is never ideal or where wholes are almost always greater or less than the sums of their parts, you find that sequence and conservation are a good touch-stone. The case you tend to run into first in our current patterns of curriculum, normal vectors, doesn't prove the principles wrong at all. It gives a new framework withing which the principles operate, and when you can manage the framework you can still make useful calculations.
It's basically the same about the love of God, or about the principle of repentance. In the real world, you find lots of things that don't make sense for a long time. But if you are willing to keep returning to the basics, and see how the principles map into the context, eventually it makes sense.
If must say I'm deluding myself about God, then I must also say that I'm deluding myself about math, that rings and fields and topologies are just a bunch of rationalization.
joudanzuki
or something.
Personally, I'd rather not have MSWindows and I'd rather not have MSOffice. ClarisWorks on a really old Mac runs great. (I mean _really_ old -- 68K.)
Near as I can tell, the industry is just going around in circles, lot's of people looking to get a monopoly on the next big thing.
RMS is right about some things.
How do they do that and keep it GPL?
Or, rather, if you don't want to assign the copyright (a completely reasonable desire), why not fork?
Not sure that would solve anything, but has it been considered?
replacement for natural gas, for heating, and maybe for fueling generators?
No reason to ditch it?
Then why did AMD go to sixteen registers in the 64 bit CPUs?
I can tell from my last sentence that I must have been asleep by the time I hit the send button.
/* Do something that requires i to double every pass to the limit of an int. */;
What I meant to say was there is a lot of GCC compatible source code in the openBSD and netBSD distribution and packages that will test most of the points like the multiply-by-two example given. Well, maybe not that particular example, but the point I thought I was trying to make was that the bulk of the code being (relatively) standard would tend to push the development of any alternative compiler away from encouraging dependency on implementation of undefined behavior.
But thinking that over with a clear head, I can see that, _if_ some BSD programers had pet behaviors that they liked to program to, existing more-or-less correct code does not prevent such dependency being supported, and even promoted. GCC, of course, being a case in point.
However, the openBSD programers are pretty much sticklers for standard source code. More than any other group, this group is going to tend to stay away from undefined behavior, because dependence on undefined behavior is a good way to open future security holes (like the sign overflow business).
As far as DSPs, I think there is a good point to be made:
The C standard tends to try to bend over backwards to try to accomodate non-mainstream CPUs, and that is not what a standard should do. Standards should not encode all the exceptions, otherwise the exceptions become the standard.
In the case of DSPs, I can think of very few DSPs that can fully support the standard without a lot of run-time support that would get in the way of processing signals digitally. So it makes little sense to attempt to directly support DSPs in the standard.
It makes more sense for the standard to define methods by which a non-standard compiler can qualify and quantify departures from the standard.
In this case, not only do we want to be able to query the actual width of the various integer types, but we also want to be able to query the operational base, the sign behavior, and the behavior of shifts. And we want the standard to provide a way for CPU venders to declare their support for a subset or dialect of the standard.
Kind of like being able to ask someone, "Are you from Texas?" although you really can't be sure in the human case which subdialect of Texan the person you're talking to is speaking. (We is proud o' ow-uh lo-cowl dye-lectix in Texs.) Then you could know such things as that "all" has to be able to parse as a "oil" as well as "every".
In the specific case of the loop that depends on shifting bits out the top, you might enclose the loop with something like
#if ! defined STICKY_SHIFT && OPERATIONAL_BASE == 2 && ( SIGN_FORM & TWOS_COMPLEMENT )
i = 1; while ( ( i >> 1 ) > 0 )
#else
# error( "Compiler does not support this optimized algorithm." )
#end
(Man my C's getting rusty.)
While I can imagine an architecture in which your loop never goes negative (explicit sign bit not involved in shifts) I can't imagine an architecture in which the loop would fail to go to zero. I mean, on any binary ALU, that 1 is just one bit, and when it runs off the top there is nothing but zeros left behind.
Hmm. Okay, I can imagine it now -- the CPU sets a flag when a shift tries to shift a one bit out of a register, and faults with the contents of the register unchanged. And you have some code somewhere that ends up catching the signal so that your loop doesn't end in a fault. Of course, multiply will be more likely to be guarded in such a way than shift.
On the one hand, yeah, people tend to write to the compiler as if it were standard.
On the other hand, BSD userland is a lot of test code written to teh GPL mark. Kernel, and other stuff will increase the balance of relatively correct..
Z. Well, yeah, it implements a bunch of nice mathematical tools that are good for checking algorithms.
But do you understand the run-time?
In my opinion, C has suffered as much as it has benefited from the standardization process. (Obligatory thanks to Microsoft as one of the largest influences there.) It's a lot harder for me to understand the run-time of a C program now than it used to be, and if I can't understand the run-time, what good is it if I know my algorithm is theoretically correct? By the time it gets to the metal, timing issues and other semantics issues of getting the abstract stuff mapped to the bare metal may (for example) have pushed my checks for corner cases way out of whack.
But I look at the alternatives. Java used to be fairly understandable. Now it's fast enough to use on a lot of stuff, but it is no longer understandable. (I know that no one mentioned Java, but I just did, as an example.)
Every interpreted language I've seen makes all sorts of implicit assumptions about the run-time behavior that are counter-intuitive to me. I used to think it was just me, but when I ask fans of said language to explain, their explanations are generally full of stuff that turn out to be their personal interpretations of things they don't understand. So the best they can say is that they think they can demonstrate correctness. Or maybe they can demonstrate that they think it's correct.
Or, at any rate, that's the way it looks to me.
learn to write lisp to understand abstraction.
Learn to write correct C to understand application.
I suggest you go re-read copyright law to understand the difference between the collective copyrights and licenses applicable to various parts of a work and the copyright(s) and license(s) applicable to the work as a whole. If you hadn't been misrepresenting copyright law and the licenses in question we could both have avoided wasting time.
I still sense that you are under the impression that, if a project includes BSDcd-ed files and GPL-ed files and is licensed as a whole under GPL that it is licensed as a whole under both.
Just to make sure, do you understand that there could be cases where you have parts that are GPL and parts that are BSDcd, and the whole could legally be BSDcd?
Individual files can be licensed under different licenses than the project as a whole, although there is the matter of license compatibility, lack of which might make a project copyrighted, but impossible to legally publish, or maybe even to legally use.
What exactly were your points?
> Considering people "own" the land, I'm yet to see the point in this.
Wow.
Okay. I just laid dibs on the thoughts in you're head.
Your thinking I don't know how to use an apostrophe just now, right?
Okay, you know owe me $10.
What, you say my spelling could use some work, too?
I charge $100 dollars for that thought.
Getting the point?
> Also, it is possible to copyright a novel, or a business trade secret.
> How about that secret recipe for turning bullshit into aluminum ?
Hey, you succeeded in alchemy!
> All of those can be defined as "owning" information.
No, that would also be alchemy, unless you have succeeded in seriously perverting the meaning of "owning".
What copyright (and patent) give you is the temporary right to control a certain piece of the market, specifically certain key elements of the piece of the market generated by your creation. (Loosely spoken.) You "own" a piece of the market.
Any attempt to establish rights beyond that have serious conflicts with other parts of the Constitution and with certain parts of the first ten amendments.
(So serious that, if the ??AA don't back off their attempts to generate laws to close the "holes" in the law, they could well be accused of treasonous attacks on the Constitution itself.)
joudanzuki
me too.
:-
Well, I actually kind of split between using the xCode editor and VIM, but I use ant on the command line for compiling.
Maybe the latest xCode handles reorganization of the project better. I suppose I should go get the latest greatest, but that will have to come after updating my Fedora Core box from 5 to 7, and I found myself using LVM across two hard disks in FC5, which confused LVM when I upgraded to FC6, so I have to back up about 10G of data onto a small number of DVDs and CDs, I guess. I'm still hiding from that, and, in the meantime, even my macs are getting a bit long in the tooth.
I have trouble with the workspace concept in Eclipse.
Netbeans 5 has been okay as long as I'm not using Japanese, but, especially on the Mac, Japanese seems to confuse it, especially Japanese in the comments.
(Actually, I can use Japanese with Netbeans on the FC5 box, but, then there's that thing where the default java environment is GNU's, which means the command line and double-clicking require just a little extra work, and I don't yet have a Linux notebook, so I tend to carry Mac OS around with me instead.)
So I do have an excuse, sort of.
joudanzuki
when the mac moved to the iNTEL platform, maybe?
Guess it shows that more people know how to optimize x86-32 than PPC.
Maybe that's a good indication that people have a harder time tracking registers in their heads as the number of available registers increases over 8?
(Thinking that optimization algorithms that are not understand by the people who write them are likely not to optimize as well as one might hope.)
joudanzuki, a preacher of parameter stacks separate from instruction pointer stacks