Indeed. Microsoft have also been forced time and time again to make compromises to get better performance. An example of this is known to people that write file filter ddrivers for NT. Basically they seemingly couldnt make(a reasonably nice) object model run fast enough in some circumstance. So now there are effectively *two* file system interfaces for and NT files system : one that uses the regular IRP passing schmantics and the other doing direct calls into your driver to speed things up.
This, as people can imagine, complicates everything(in a particular part of NT that is already complicated enough and not terribly well documented).
Well Im not defending dodgey TV shows image manipulation here(I dotn watch the show). But given a photo taken within the Nyquist sampling theory(ie sampled at twice the max frequency within the image) and given enough processing power it is possible to recover quite a bit of information from and image using extrpolation techniques.
Exactly. And to a lesser extend *all* open source projects have to limit access in cetain ways to be able to function at all. Most OS project for example restrict write access to CVS/SVN repositories for the obvious reason.
I wasnt saying that they were explainations about the origin of sexual development. There were links there on speculations on how the sexes could have evolved. The simple answer is that we just dont really know exactly how it happened. We *might* one day know but we may never know clear and specific reason as to why certain things evolved for whatever reasons. All we seem to know is that the mechanisms of natural selection seem to apply within our ecosystem to evolve orgaisms in groups. When you say that evolution seem "obvious" I would ask you, if its so obvious why did it take so long to occur to anybody. You and I stand here with hindsight and much more knowledge of the universe than any other in the history of man.
What you seem to be after is the answer to the question Why? Why are there two sexes... why did this organism evolve this way. The answer is basically... because... thats how it happened. You could ask "Why does the general theory of relativity seem to describe reality". The answer is agai is again... just because. That seems to be the way reality is. Is evolution the Truth? No of course not. Its a model trying to reflect the reality of what we observe, just like everything else. Its just science.
Considerign your backgroud in psych Id recommend this book. It focuses on the evolutionary background on the human mind... and even touches on how evolutionary biology can explain the evolution of not just things like our eye(the simple bit of our visual system... just the camera) but how these changes are integrated into our mind.
I can think of reasons why that would be the case, but I think we should at least have a few examples.
The short answer to this question is quite depressing. 99% of all species, or what we artifically call species, go extinct. The human fate is almost certainly the same. You point out that shark have lastest quite a long time with little change. This is because there has been no need to. If soem environmental change occurred that endangered shark lifestyles then they would have to adapt as a population or go extinct. Natures not very nice over the long term... nor that fair... just like life:)
I was thinking last night that you get much more accelerated replication in viruses/bacteria, etc, I wonder if anyone has noticed a process of change from one species to another in these cases, and why aren't arguments using fast-replicating cells like these thrown around more?
male and female reproductive systems having do duplicate their changes - then I realised, how do people explain the change from asexual to sexual reproduction in the evolutionary theory?
Also try readign and posting in the usenet group talk.origins. People *always* come up with these arguments.... saying "well evolution cant be right cause no ones thought of xyz". Problem is we have. Biologist and others have been debating/arguing/exploring the ideas of evolutionary biology for a few hundred years now. I can understand why a biologist would get frustrated and annoyed when someone outside the field come along questioning a evolution based on something that has been long settled. I can only imaging it like being a software developer(which I am) and having to deal with the dreaded "user who thinks they know something about development and IT but in fact causes more trouble than they help".
The one author I would like to add is Damon Knight.
My god. I thought I was the only one. A very rarely mentioned author these days I find. My only downer abotu Knight is that I dont think he wrote nearly enough in my opinion. He pasted away in 2002... alas. Hes also responsible for a SF cliche in that he wrote a short story that the Twilight Zone "To Serve Man" is based on.
You are correct. It is very difficult to destory a flash device. I have destory one in pretty much the way that you describe. I used to have a job writing an encryption driver for the PocketPC platform for SD and Flash cards. I used to perform stress, performance and memory leak tests on the devices by basically hammering read/writes of blocks to the devices. It took me about 3 or 4 months of doing this on a test rack before oen of the SD cards failed:) My estimate(guesstimate really) for that device was approx 200K direct block writes. Most of the devices survived such treatment... but I am sure they were gettign close.
I had a professor that looked even more like Flanders than that guy
Did you go to school in Canberra, Australia? And was this guy a physics lecturer. If so we had the same guy. Once I was walking past him in a hallway and he actually said "Hi-diddly-hi" to me. And he didnt know what the simpsons was(he had strongh dislikes for TV in general). Was a really nice guy tho.
I have the same requirement now! At a gig I am leaving in June. Oddly it exactly identical 8-40 chars, 1 cap, 1 lower, 1 numeric and one symbol. Password is cycled every month. Im thinking that this requirement must be specificed in some security standard somewhere as Ive also had to deal with it at another finaicial institution.
Egads! They made a movie out of The Cold Equations. I often read slashdot to be informed of things I dont know(I get all sorts of useful titbits round here). But that is infromation Id really rather I could forget. At least I can make it a point never to watch that.
However ignoring demands and dealy harshly with the IRA would seem to contradict what you are saying here. What really started working with the IRA was discussion and resolution(after Maggie "we do not deal with terrorists" Thatcher left). It hasnt been always smooth and a perfect prcess... but there are a lot less bombs going off in London these days. And offshoot nutter(ie The Real IRA) seem to be geting stamped out(I suspect by the actual real IRA combined with law enforment).
Im not suggesting that this is always the way to go. However I think it would be a more positive step to allow some other hope for people who firmly beleive that their only option to fight back is to wire exoplosives to themselves and walk into crowed cafes or crash airliners into large, occupied skyscrapers. There will always be nutter prepared to do this for their cause... but the nutters need a support network. A support network involves money and people. The IRA got into trouble when their US fundign started drying up. But there were still nutter to blow stuff up. Its because the animosity and hatred become an instituion. Its viewed as a good thing to hate the english/americans/whoever.
I should disclaim that I am half Irish and my mother was born in Belfast. She left when she was 6 but was raised in a firm republican family(my grandmother was buried with the flag of the Republic. Her sister was killed and her brother maimed by a pub bomb. My great grandmother ran a safe house and stored guns for the IRA against the blacks and tans during the civil war). For many years my mother would not become a citizen of Australia as it would involve swearing an oath to the queen. She had no rational reason to hate the english, and she is not a bad person, but she did. It was ingrained that deeply from a distance of thousands of miles from The Troubles. Later in life she realised this... and became a citizen. Ive witnessed levels ranging from dislike to hatred for the other side. Of course its a lot less these days. I wouldnt say that I understand where a young palistinian young is coming from... I obviously can not... but I know something about irrational disputes that get ingrained in people... and in families.
Or did each and every single one of them end up in the situation where there was no other choice that they could think of.
No. I know because I knew someone who worked as a part time hooker to put herself thru university. She had no problems with the idea of having sex for money... admittedly this was in Australia. Wehere is is completely legal. And she was working in a brothel that was run and owned by women. She said she didnt really have to have sex with someone she didnt really want to etc. She claimed it was a lot better than working in a shop... didnt eat nearly as much of her time... she got to study at work when there was nothing else to do. Im not marally condoning this lifestyle. But she was not a messed up drug addict. She just didnt mind and didnt think it was unethical. I respected her right to choose whatever she want to do with her body.
Over ten years ago a lecturer of mine at uni was, on his own and just for fun, porting Tk(as in Tcl/Tk) to make use of the Motif libraries as noone else had done it. He got about 80% done of it and got too busy to complete it. Months later silicon graphics got in touch with him regardign the libs. Apparently they wanted a Tk for Motif dfor something and were wondering if he was going to finish it and if they could use it(I beleive this was before all the attention to licensing details we have today... I think he just released it to his edu web site and only had some "it aint my fault if this code breaks something" disclaimer).
Anyways... he said he was going to finish it soon when things calmed down with his time. SGi sent him a couple of shiney workstations to encourage him to test it on their OS and hardware:)
Why ? Don't people always say that they want variety in their job ?
Yeah. I dont really get the comment either. I used to have have a great gig where I split my time between asm/C/C++/java. The reason : I was the only programmer and we had a product that 1. Had a user interface written in java/j2ee 2. Talk to embedded devices for monitoring that had been developed in house(the hardware guy helped a bit with the asm I admit) 3. Require JNI interfaces written in C for device itnerface and 4. required a realtime componented that was running in a real time O/S(QNX version 4 if you want to know) and had the controlling software written in C++. It was great fun !:)
The Vatican are wise to do so. Big reason: they screwed up horribly over Galileo, they took way too long to catch on to the whole Darwin thing, and they don't want to look like fools again. The Vatican is therefore keen to show the world that religion can coexist with a rational understanding of the universe.
Its cause the atholic Church is old. Its interesting to watch religions as they form and mature as an established. They eventually learn that its pretty unwise to do radical things that will make them look foolish. my favourite example of this is predicting the end of the world to a specific date. Lotsa religions/cults start out doing this and it quickly become apparently that they *cant* actually get this right... and theres no real point to doing this. Look at the Johovas Witnesses. They used to do ti over and over. Havent noticed them doing this recently however.
Go Tridge! Hes from the same town Im from... good old boring Canberra:)
My Dad sometimes plays chess with him(if you dont know Tridge is into chess and has written a chess engine called KnightCap). Apparently the last time they play Tridge kick my Dads ass:)
This would also be really helpfull for wine and samba developers.
Actually I think it would be wise for the wine and samba developers to never look at the code. It would certainly be part of the license that you could not work on competing products after viewing the source. I am pondering contributing to the classpath project, and they are pretty strict about havign their developers never view the source of the original java library.
Ive also seen, on site, the source code for the complete Windows CE 3.0 kernel many years ago. Had to sign a dohicky thing. We made modifications to the kernel and proposed MS make the change(we were trying to work with compaq to get a modified kernel for encryption stuff... long story short... MS said no). Just as an aside. if the person who wrote the database file system for CE 3.0 is readign this... I find your code virtually unreadable... it gave me a migrane. Oh and whoever wrote the encryption routine for writes to disk... there was a bug... that could result in null memory access.
[Brian is writing graffiti on the palace wall. The Centurion catches him in the act] Centurion: What's this, then? "Romanes eunt domus"? People called Romanes, they go, the house? Brian: It says, "Romans go home. " Centurion: No it doesn't ! What's the latin for "Roman"? Come on, come on ! Brian: Er, "Romanus" ! Centurion: Vocative plural of "Romanus" is? Brian: Er, er, "Romani" ! Centurion: [Writes "Romani" over Brian's graffiti] "Eunt"? What is "eunt"? Conjugate the verb, "to go" ! Brian: Er, "Ire". Er, "eo", "is", "it", "imus", "itis", "eunt". Centurion: So, "eunt" is...? Brian: Third person plural present indicative, "they go". Centurion: But, "Romans, go home" is an order. So you must use...? [He twists Brian's ear] Brian: Aaagh ! The imperative ! Centurion: Which is...? Brian: Aaaagh ! Er, er, "i" ! Centurion: How many Romans? Brian: Aaaaagh ! Plural, plural, er, "ite" ! Centurion: [Writes "ite"] "Domus"? Nominative? "Go home" is motion towards, isn't it? Brian: Dative ! [the Centurion holds a sword to his throat] Brian: Aaagh ! Not the dative, not the dative ! Er, er, accusative, "Domum" ! Centurion: But "Domus" takes the locative, which is...? Brian: Er, "Domum" ! Centurion: [Writes "Domum"] Understand? Now, write it out a hundred times. Brian: Yes sir. Thank you, sir. Hail Caesar, sir. Centurion: Hail Caesar ! And if it's not done by sunrise, I'll cut your balls off.
I ran into him once in JFK while waiting for my missus to fly in from LAX. It was a bit of a angry situation because the entire flights baggage had been loaded on the wrong plane and was in Philly or something. There were lots of angry people and George and the people he was with seemed pretty pissed(Fair enough... I would have been also). So I didnt want to bother him. But two women next to me went up to him went up to him and asked "Arent you Lt Sulu?" His reponse was "Actually in the last film they made me a Captain". And he chatted with them for a bit. He left me with an impression of being a really nice guy... under the circumstances I dont think I would have been so patient with random people asking me stuff.
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Indeed. Microsoft have also been forced time and time again to make compromises to get better performance. An example of this is known to people that write file filter ddrivers for NT. Basically they seemingly couldnt make(a reasonably nice) object model run fast enough in some circumstance. So now there are effectively *two* file system interfaces for and NT files system : one that uses the regular IRP passing schmantics and the other doing direct calls into your driver to speed things up.
This, as people can imagine, complicates everything(in a particular part of NT that is already complicated enough and not terribly well documented).
Well Im not defending dodgey TV shows image manipulation here(I dotn watch the show). But given a photo taken within the Nyquist sampling theory(ie sampled at twice the max frequency within the image) and given enough processing power it is possible to recover quite a bit of information from and image using extrpolation techniques.
According to Ben Kenobi, it all depends on your point of view.
Exactly. And to a lesser extend *all* open source projects have to limit access in cetain ways to be able to function at all. Most OS project for example restrict write access to CVS/SVN repositories for the obvious reason.
Na your thinking of Welshy
I wasnt saying that they were explainations about the origin of sexual development. There were links there on speculations on how the sexes could have evolved. The simple answer is that we just dont really know exactly how it happened. We *might* one day know but we may never know clear and specific reason as to why certain things evolved for whatever reasons. All we seem to know is that the mechanisms of natural selection seem to apply within our ecosystem to evolve orgaisms in groups. When you say that evolution seem "obvious" I would ask you, if its so obvious why did it take so long to occur to anybody. You and I stand here with hindsight and much more knowledge of the universe than any other in the history of man.
What you seem to be after is the answer to the question Why? Why are there two sexes... why did this organism evolve this way. The answer is basically... because... thats how it happened. You could ask "Why does the general theory of relativity seem to describe reality". The answer is agai is again... just because. That seems to be the way reality is. Is evolution the Truth? No of course not. Its a model trying to reflect the reality of what we observe, just like everything else. Its just science.
Considerign your backgroud in psych Id recommend this book. It focuses on the evolutionary background on the human mind... and even touches on how evolutionary biology can explain the evolution of not just things like our eye(the simple bit of our visual system... just the camera) but how these changes are integrated into our mind.
I can think of reasons why that would be the case, but I think we should at least have a few examples.
:)
The short answer to this question is quite depressing. 99% of all species, or what we artifically call species, go extinct. The human fate is almost certainly the same. You point out that shark have lastest quite a long time with little change. This is because there has been no need to. If soem environmental change occurred that endangered shark lifestyles then they would have to adapt as a population or go extinct. Natures not very nice over the long term... nor that fair... just like life
If you are honestly curious about these questions I politely point you to
http://www.talkorigins.org/
I was thinking last night that you get much more accelerated replication in viruses/bacteria, etc, I wonder if anyone has noticed a process of change from one species to another in these cases, and why aren't arguments using fast-replicating cells like these thrown around more?
They are. See here
male and female reproductive systems having do duplicate their changes - then I realised, how do people explain the change from asexual to sexual reproduction in the evolutionary theory?
They do again
Also try readign and posting in the usenet group talk.origins. People *always* come up with these arguments.... saying "well evolution cant be right cause no ones thought of xyz". Problem is we have. Biologist and others have been debating/arguing/exploring the ideas of evolutionary biology for a few hundred years now. I can understand why a biologist would get frustrated and annoyed when someone outside the field come along questioning a evolution based on something that has been long settled. I can only imaging it like being a software developer(which I am) and having to deal with the dreaded "user who thinks they know something about development and IT but in fact causes more trouble than they help".
The one author I would like to add is Damon Knight.
My god. I thought I was the only one. A very rarely mentioned author these days I find. My only downer abotu Knight is that I dont think he wrote nearly enough in my opinion. He pasted away in 2002... alas. Hes also responsible for a SF cliche in that he wrote a short story that the Twilight Zone "To Serve Man" is based on.
You are correct. It is very difficult to destory a flash device. I have destory one in pretty much the way that you describe. I used to have a job writing an encryption driver for the PocketPC platform for SD and Flash cards. I used to perform stress, performance and memory leak tests on the devices by basically hammering read/writes of blocks to the devices. It took me about 3 or 4 months of doing this on a test rack before oen of the SD cards failed :) My estimate(guesstimate really) for that device was approx 200K direct block writes. Most of the devices survived such treatment... but I am sure they were gettign close.
"Hooray! People are paying attention to me!"
I had a professor that looked even more like Flanders than that guy
Did you go to school in Canberra, Australia? And was this guy a physics lecturer. If so we had the same guy. Once I was walking past him in a hallway and he actually said "Hi-diddly-hi" to me. And he didnt know what the simpsons was(he had strongh dislikes for TV in general). Was a really nice guy tho.
I have the same requirement now! At a gig I am leaving in June. Oddly it exactly identical 8-40 chars, 1 cap, 1 lower, 1 numeric and one symbol. Password is cycled every month. Im thinking that this requirement must be specificed in some security standard somewhere as Ive also had to deal with it at another finaicial institution.
Egads! They made a movie out of The Cold Equations. I often read slashdot to be informed of things I dont know(I get all sorts of useful titbits round here). But that is infromation Id really rather I could forget. At least I can make it a point never to watch that.
However ignoring demands and dealy harshly with the IRA would seem to contradict what you are saying here. What really started working with the IRA was discussion and resolution(after Maggie "we do not deal with terrorists" Thatcher left). It hasnt been always smooth and a perfect prcess... but there are a lot less bombs going off in London these days. And offshoot nutter(ie The Real IRA) seem to be geting stamped out(I suspect by the actual real IRA combined with law enforment).
Im not suggesting that this is always the way to go. However I think it would be a more positive step to allow some other hope for people who firmly beleive that their only option to fight back is to wire exoplosives to themselves and walk into crowed cafes or crash airliners into large, occupied skyscrapers. There will always be nutter prepared to do this for their cause... but the nutters need a support network. A support network involves money and people. The IRA got into trouble when their US fundign started drying up. But there were still nutter to blow stuff up. Its because the animosity and hatred become an instituion. Its viewed as a good thing to hate the english/americans/whoever.
I should disclaim that I am half Irish and my mother was born in Belfast. She left when she was 6 but was raised in a firm republican family(my grandmother was buried with the flag of the Republic. Her sister was killed and her brother maimed by a pub bomb. My great grandmother ran a safe house and stored guns for the IRA against the blacks and tans during the civil war). For many years my mother would not become a citizen of Australia as it would involve swearing an oath to the queen. She had no rational reason to hate the english, and she is not a bad person, but she did. It was ingrained that deeply from a distance of thousands of miles from The Troubles. Later in life she realised this... and became a citizen. Ive witnessed levels ranging from dislike to hatred for the other side. Of course its a lot less these days. I wouldnt say that I understand where a young palistinian young is coming from... I obviously can not... but I know something about irrational disputes that get ingrained in people... and in families.
Or did each and every single one of them end up in the situation where there was no other choice that they could think of.
No. I know because I knew someone who worked as a part time hooker to put herself thru university. She had no problems with the idea of having sex for money... admittedly this was in Australia. Wehere is is completely legal. And she was working in a brothel that was run and owned by women. She said she didnt really have to have sex with someone she didnt really want to etc. She claimed it was a lot better than working in a shop... didnt eat nearly as much of her time... she got to study at work when there was nothing else to do. Im not marally condoning this lifestyle. But she was not a messed up drug addict. She just didnt mind and didnt think it was unethical. I respected her right to choose whatever she want to do with her body.
Over ten years ago a lecturer of mine at uni was, on his own and just for fun, porting Tk(as in Tcl/Tk) to make use of the Motif libraries as noone else had done it. He got about 80% done of it and got too busy to complete it. Months later silicon graphics got in touch with him regardign the libs. Apparently they wanted a Tk for Motif dfor something and were wondering if he was going to finish it and if they could use it(I beleive this was before all the attention to licensing details we have today... I think he just released it to his edu web site and only had some "it aint my fault if this code breaks something" disclaimer).
:)
Anyways... he said he was going to finish it soon when things calmed down with his time. SGi sent him a couple of shiney workstations to encourage him to test it on their OS and hardware
Why ? Don't people always say that they want variety in their job ?
:)
Yeah. I dont really get the comment either. I used to have have a great gig where I split my time between asm/C/C++/java. The reason : I was the only programmer and we had a product that 1. Had a user interface written in java/j2ee 2. Talk to embedded devices for monitoring that had been developed in house(the hardware guy helped a bit with the asm I admit) 3. Require JNI interfaces written in C for device itnerface and 4. required a realtime componented that was running in a real time O/S(QNX version 4 if you want to know) and had the controlling software written in C++. It was great fun !
The Vatican are wise to do so. Big reason: they screwed up horribly over Galileo, they took way too long to catch on to the whole Darwin thing, and they don't want to look like fools again. The Vatican is therefore keen to show the world that religion can coexist with a rational understanding of the universe.
Its cause the atholic Church is old. Its interesting to watch religions as they form and mature as an established. They eventually learn that its pretty unwise to do radical things that will make them look foolish. my favourite example of this is predicting the end of the world to a specific date. Lotsa religions/cults start out doing this and it quickly become apparently that they *cant* actually get this right... and theres no real point to doing this. Look at the Johovas Witnesses. They used to do ti over and over. Havent noticed them doing this recently however.
You mean "UR MUM IS PWNED!!1!" surely.
Go Tridge! Hes from the same town Im from... good old boring Canberra :)
:)
My Dad sometimes plays chess with him(if you dont know Tridge is into chess and has written a chess engine called KnightCap). Apparently the last time they play Tridge kick my Dads ass
This would also be really helpfull for wine and samba developers.
Actually I think it would be wise for the wine and samba developers to never look at the code. It would certainly be part of the license that you could not work on competing products after viewing the source. I am pondering contributing to the classpath project, and they are pretty strict about havign their developers never view the source of the original java library.
Ive also seen, on site, the source code for the complete Windows CE 3.0 kernel many years ago. Had to sign a dohicky thing. We made modifications to the kernel and proposed MS make the change(we were trying to work with compaq to get a modified kernel for encryption stuff... long story short... MS said no). Just as an aside. if the person who wrote the database file system for CE 3.0 is readign this... I find your code virtually unreadable... it gave me a migrane. Oh and whoever wrote the encryption routine for writes to disk... there was a bug... that could result in null memory access.
Richard Feynman called his particles 'partons'... after Dolly :)
[Brian is writing graffiti on the palace wall. The Centurion catches him in the act]
Centurion: What's this, then? "Romanes eunt domus"? People called Romanes, they go, the house?
Brian: It says, "Romans go home. "
Centurion: No it doesn't ! What's the latin for "Roman"? Come on, come on !
Brian: Er, "Romanus" !
Centurion: Vocative plural of "Romanus" is?
Brian: Er, er, "Romani" !
Centurion: [Writes "Romani" over Brian's graffiti] "Eunt"? What is "eunt"? Conjugate the verb, "to go" !
Brian: Er, "Ire". Er, "eo", "is", "it", "imus", "itis", "eunt".
Centurion: So, "eunt" is...?
Brian: Third person plural present indicative, "they go".
Centurion: But, "Romans, go home" is an order. So you must use...?
[He twists Brian's ear]
Brian: Aaagh ! The imperative !
Centurion: Which is...?
Brian: Aaaagh ! Er, er, "i" !
Centurion: How many Romans?
Brian: Aaaaagh ! Plural, plural, er, "ite" !
Centurion: [Writes "ite"] "Domus"? Nominative? "Go home" is motion towards, isn't it?
Brian: Dative !
[the Centurion holds a sword to his throat]
Brian: Aaagh ! Not the dative, not the dative ! Er, er, accusative, "Domum" !
Centurion: But "Domus" takes the locative, which is...?
Brian: Er, "Domum" !
Centurion: [Writes "Domum"] Understand? Now, write it out a hundred times.
Brian: Yes sir. Thank you, sir. Hail Caesar, sir.
Centurion: Hail Caesar ! And if it's not done by sunrise, I'll cut your balls off.
I ran into him once in JFK while waiting for my missus to fly in from LAX. It was a bit of a angry situation because the entire flights baggage had been loaded on the wrong plane and was in Philly or something. There were lots of angry people and George and the people he was with seemed pretty pissed(Fair enough... I would have been also). So I didnt want to bother him. But two women next to me went up to him went up to him and asked "Arent you Lt Sulu?" His reponse was "Actually in the last film they made me a Captain". And he chatted with them for a bit. He left me with an impression of being a really nice guy... under the circumstances I dont think I would have been so patient with random people asking me stuff.