I think this is where the notion, popular in some quarters, of 'value added tax' comes in: you get a rebate on taxes paid at the previous layer. Of course, that wouldn't apply to taxes that were instituted with the express purpose of modifying your behaviour, rather than just raising funds (as discussed in other replies to your comment).
The theory of evolution does not say that monkeys evolved into men. Indeed, nobody who has thought about it for a few minutes says this. The theory of evolution itself says just that things evolve. Empirical observation of biological systems leads us to believe that monkeys have common ancestors with men. Not that monkeys evolved into men (unless you are using the language in a way that also allows you to say that men evolved into monkeys).
As to the idea of monkeys and men having a common ancestor, it is far fetched. It is so improbable as to be essentially unquantifiable. This is true of everything that happens in the real world; there's no obvious reason for things to turn out as they do. But, looking at how they have turned out, it's often not so hard to figure out the path they took. And in the case of men and monkeys, we can look at the DNA and see that yup, that's what seems to have happened. Because other explanations are less likely.
And even that has no bearing on religion, by the way. God may still be controlling the dice; randomness by its nature has the power to conceal causation. Atheists may believe that it is unlikely that it is a god that the randomness is concealing, but on this question there is no statistical test you can apply.
Quite seriously, you can say that you doubt the theory of evolution, but that's just words. If you genuinely understand it - as opposed, perhaps, to what you have heard people say about it - you'll find that its validity is entirely obvious.
You don't have to do a lot of empirical research to reach an informed judgment on the question of evolution. You can check the argument yourself. Structurally, the reasoning is a trivial induction, which would take down arithmetic if you doubted it. For points of attack, then, that leaves reproduction, variation and death. So what is it? Things don't die? They don't reproduce? Or you can't see that people's children take after them without being identical?
The most bizarre thing about this whole debate is that evolution not 'just a theory.' It is one of those incredibly, blatantly obvious things that can't possibly be doubted once it has been pointed out, with an empirical component like that putting your tongue in a functioning toaster is a bad idea, and a logical one like that if you throw your stuff out then you won't have as much stuff as before. The amount of reasoning required is less than that needed to open one of those damned plastic clamshell packages that so many small electronic doodads come in. The only possible way to doubt it is to go 'oh! oh! I am afraid of this conclusion' and turn your brain off in the middle of the oh so huge three-step chain of reasoning.
Seriously, anyone who is able to doubt evolution is not qualified to operate heavy machinery, much less teach or run a museum.
And, by the way, this is not intended as an attack on anyone's religion. Merely on their mental competence or (given that it is more probable that they are lying than that they haven't noticed that people and animals have offspring and die) moral character.
Of course you should be in jail for willfully, systematically and apparently proudly endangering pedestrians (and, indeed, other drivers).
For using one device rather than another to play a film? That's ridiculous.
So I fail to see your analogy.
Oh, and by the way, imagine how much more annoying it is for the rest of us in Region 1 who get to sit through this stupid message about what the US government thinks is law. What gives the US the right to post US legal messages on TV screens in Canada, playing DVDs bought in Canada on equipment bought in Canada? D'oh! At least we don't see the War on Drugs messges anymore (is the War on Drugs over? Did you guys win?) We need a law that lets us charge the US back for the time wasted by these bizarre, misdirected and politically offensive messages!
I do agree that sugaring the namespace remains useful even when there is improved API support. But an extended API opens the way for much richer application behaviour (of course, if poorly designed, this could be more tedious, but poor design is not a i>requirement), and for some different, useful tradeoffs, such as time-aware globbing and file browsers.
As to using '?' and escaping it with a backslash, sure, great solution! And when you quote that, you merely have to escape the backslash with a backslash, or two, or four. Of course, if there's a literal '?' in the filename, that needs to be escaped, and we can't really use backslash, because that's already escaping the '?' at the shell level. Hmm, '@' would be good, but we're trying to keep that free in case an email address is a filename. So maybe we can use '??'? And then we can avoid ambiguity by escaping both questionmarks with a backslash or two. Or four. Or eight. No, really, trust me, using a non-special character is a hugely better choice. (Think of it as a language design matter, because that's what it really is.)
Finally, as to the NetApp experience--I'm not saying '.snapshot' won't work. I am saying that I have my own testbed, and I'm my own guineapig. 'diff -c foo.c foo.c@11:33' is something I want to say often enough to be worth giving it a character, and I do want it to be terse. It's nice! It's really nice!
It's possible that it makes a difference that my prototype offers continuous protection rather than snapshots, and that the time syntax is relaxed. If nothing else, my own arrangement doesn't have a limited set of 'snapshots' with which to prepopulate the magic directory. But having had it, I wouldn't voluntarily trade '@' for '.snapshot/', no I would not.
I've written something like this myself (just a prototype, so no good performance, but rather slicker feature-wise), though I doubt it will see the light of day. Still, I can answer your questions about namespaces. Anything that messes with the filesystem namespace in any way can, of course, cause problems. The 'real' solution is new system calls, new shells that know about them--a top to bottom extension of POSIX filesystems.
Not so practical in practise.
Why not use '?'? Perhaps you are not yourself a Unix/Linux user--that one's a shell wildcard, one of the oldest and most entrenched, and would cause all kinds of quoting problems. Actually, '@' is quite unusual in being a still-available character. Why not use '.snapshot/'? Unix philosophy, and it turns out to be true: the less typing a user has to do, the more useful the feature in practise. And I say that with conviction, as someone who has had a prototype running on their desk, and has had the pleasure of typing 'cd..@tuesday_afternoon' and having it work. Plus, of course, as you yourself point out, someone is already using the ''.snapshot' syntax--and dollars to doughnuts, not just NetApp, but joe users who take 'snapshots' with cp -R, too.
Someone else asked what about files named 'joe@rhubarb.com'--it's not a good or beautiful answer, but it turns out to be practical enough just to pretend the '@' was escaped if the time part fails its syntax check; the problem isn't 'solved' but all the software I use daily then seems to work normally. I don't know if the cow takes this route, though. Again, the only industrial grade solutions are a controllable namespace (a wart in the making) or a mechanism whereby applications can delcare their awareness or otherwise of this feature at the syscall level (a tough sell).
I'll agree with you about the hypocrisy. Supporting war as anything other than an absolute last resort - when you have already been attacked on a similar scale - is one of the few things I might be talked into supporting the death penalty for. The slaughter of innocents is not tolerable behaviour.
But in truth, no, that's just me posturing. I honestly don't believe I can support the death penalty at all, even for genocides (and believe me, I have thought seriously about the proposition of giving the ICC the power to mandate assassination). The death penalty is a too-convenient way of silencing people, it destroys legal and historical evidence, and it is an action for which there is no remedy if it is taken in error. There are other disincentives to violence, with the added advantage of being far less nonlinear. On a small scale, automatically double the penalty for any crime committed while holding a weapon, for example. On a larger scale, reverse the burden of proof on heads of state, and require them to go before a court and defend their actions at the end of their term in office. Disincentivisation is far more useful - and much more easily justified - than revenge.
After all, is our goal to punish the guilty, or to protect the innocent? These may be related, but they are not identical.
The parent was claiming that 'the vast majority' of countries (and indeed opining that this majority might consist of all nations but one!) impose no constraints on speech whatever. I was observing that this is, frankly, bullshit. I don't think that makes me a communist, or a revisionist, or an illiterate who has never read Orwell (or Huxley or Bradbury or Zamyatin or Hobbes or Plato for that matter); it's more a question of reading the news occasionally, and having a faint clue about the world at large. Um, unless you guys have decided that reading the news makes you a communist. It is true, now I come to think of it, that most Chinese I've met know more about the US than Americans I've met know of China.
But then if, as you claim, there are four year old kids making plastic cups in Shanghai, then this would be a symptom, not of communism, but of capitalism. Whence my observation about the regime being by this point clearly post-communist (Nota bene: 'post-communist' does not mean capitalist, it does not mean American. I don't know where China is trying to go, its leadership is more than a little opaque, but I am sure they don't want to end up a cultural or economic colony of a Western power—once again, a little knowledge of Chinese history will tell you that this question, too, has already been asked and answered). And if I used inverted commas around the phrase 'living wealthy' it is because, although it was a key phrase in the grandparent's argument, one which the parent did not understand or chose not to understand, and one to which I wanted to refer, we do not usually use those words in this way in English. It does not imply any uncertainty in my own analysis. Comrade.
Interesting. The parent is modded 'insightful.' Perhaps this is some strange new meaning of the word, of which I was previously unaware.
No, contrary to your belief, many countries do have banned religions. Many countries do watch seperatist movements sufficiently carefully that speech about them is (whether because of censorship or self-censorship) far from free. Many countries do have charismatic figues whose presence they do not tolerate and whose influence they seek to diminish. Even if you see Europe and America through rose-tinted glasses, surely you aware of the more politically intense parts of Africa, Asia, South America? Or perhaps you are unaware that there are even reasons for concern about Zimbabwe, Myanmar, and parts of the Arab world? (Where do you get your news?)
I admit I am not an American, and I may not have all the details of American history right, but I have the distinct impression that being, for example, a black supremicist has not, over the years, been condicive to one's personal freedom. And today, even white racists keep quiet about it. No, I agree, it does not normally get one jailed; but it certainly get one fired. And in (otherwise very calm and pleasant) parts of Europe, yes, public holocaust denial will get you locked up.
You may argue that there is a difference of degree, or a difference in emphasis; and I will agree with you. I am not apologising for China. But the person you are replying to is entirely right: China is not, as you would like to believe, unique merely in controlling speech.
Now as to Chinese history. Perhaps you are unaware that China has a history. Rather more of it than the USA. Go look it up. The person you are responding to is again right: China does indeed have a history of thousands of years of attempting to maintain coherence of a huge and disparate empire through rigid control. This has at times been startlingly successful; at other times undeniably catastrophic. The current no-longer-communist regime is just the last of many. Chinese history and chinese attitudes are indeed different from American ones.
Finally, you seem to have an objection to the juxtaposition of the phrases, 'living wealthy' and 'with limited resources.' How quaintly American. Wealth is caused by waste, is it? That attitude is not one that will see you among the leaders of the world for very long, and thankfully it is not one that the entire rest of the world shares. Wealth can arise from managing what you do have, wisely; or from waste and theft. Civilisation lies in choosing the former path. 'Living wealthy' with limited resources is not merely consistent, it is a laudable goal towards whch we should all strive.
None of this is to defend the original post; but your attack on it is impressively off-target. Certainly not everyone's English is as good as yours. Thankfully, however, many people are better informed and more charitable.
Actually, Fortress seems, in many ways, a nice piece of work. Your comment is well taken, but it does the effort a bit of a disservice to help people obsess about what is frankly a minor detail (and honestly I'm not persuaded Unicode support can be classed as a bug). Here, let's tell the/. community something exciting about the language: like the fact that its loops are parallel and distributable by default, and it is the iterator that determines the loop's serialisation pattern, if any.
Seriously, languages need to be judged by their semantics as well as their cosmetics, or we will be doomed to repeat the experiences of C++ and COBOL forever ('looks familiar, so it must be good!').
What I have told people older than myself who have asked is that "the Internet is a system for customer-dialled, and even fully automatic, telegrams. Because they charge a flat rate for service and the messages themselves are free, it gets used for all kinds of everyday things, like newsletters, catalog stores and—it can send pictures on the principle of a facsimile—things like poster walls." This explanation has the dual advantages of referring only to technology available for a century now, and of being true in full technical detail.
I've repeatedly got reactions from agèd people like, "Huh! Maybe I'll get myself a computer then. That's nothing scary, after all. And I miss telegrams."
But this won't help the younger generation, who probably don't remember back when we had civilisation and technology and stuff;).
Customer dialled telegrams aren't rocket science; I have no idea why the 'net is so mystified in modern life.
Well, the article is spectacularly under-informative. In our experience (yeah, yeah, been there, done that, got an award at Supercomputing...), the hard part is the last few inches. It is (or I should say, 18 months ago it was - maybe by now you can get all the peripherals you need in PCIe?) hard to get more than a few Gbps in and out of a workstation. We ran about 4.5Gbps per direction across North America in '05, but it took three workstations at each end, essentially because DMA over PCI-X is in practise much more limiting than UDP/IP over lightpath.
But from TFA you can't tell: maybe the endpoints are rackfulls of dedicated hardware and they run multiple TCP streams run in parallel, in which case I have to agree that that doesn't seem like much of a trick at all. In any case, some tuning has to be forgiven: the bandwidth-delay product on these runs is on the order of a gigabit, and, well, your stack isn't tuned for that, out of the box.
As to running over the public Internet, been there, done that, too. As a consequence of some unscheduled maintenance, we got dumped onto the public 'net one day. What actually happens is, they decide you're a DOS attack and they block you! Surprise! Bad research project, no record!
The thing I find amazing about this discussion is that the Slashdot audience, often (in part if not in whole) so well-informed, appears here so utterly ignorant. Folks, to take a random example, twenty years ago I used to subscribe to a journal called Visible Language. Google tells me that it's still there, at http://www.id.iit.edu/visiblelanguage . It's far from the only source on such information. Yes, there is a research community on these topics. The research has been done. It was done, for print, centuries ago; it was done, for the screen, decades ago. It is something that matters, sure, to nerds as to anyone who reads. But how quite does it get to be news, now? Because someone at Wired recently half-remembered what he learned in a typography class at school?
So ja, sure, 'equal areas' is just an informal approximation, it's what you remember of the idea, informally, once your school days (or whatever other days they were when you read up on typography) are somewhere in the distant past. It doesn't mean there's no theory to it; it doesn't mean there's no well-researched and well-documented theory of it. It just means that it's one of those, OMG, pre-Internet topics that's tricky to Google for, and nobody, either here or at Wired, dropped by their local library recently to check it out in detail. Or, equally possibly, that it didn't seem worth the effort to explain in more depth when the purpose of tfa was, frankly, just to be cute.
As to why our on-screen typography pays little attention to such well-known ideas, I somehow suspect it's a combination of the cowboy programmer syndrome so pandemic in web technology and the distinct possibility that some corporate baboon somewhere has a patent-lock on 'text that doesn't look like crap'....
Sorry, are you sure it is not you who are confused? From the FA: 'The transmission of the call is routed in part through a "public computer network" and in part through the PSTN. This implies that the transmission must cross at least one gateway between the "public computer network" and the PSTN. The Internet is one example of a "public computer network," but the patent does not define what else would qualify as a "public computer network."'
So unless there's language in the patent that TFA missed, discussing specifically, say, protocol conversion between nominally circuit switched and nominally packet switched data streams, or unless words like 'the Internet Protocol version 4' (as opposed to merely 'an internet protocol,' which would still clearly apply to the PSTN), I don't see how we can accept your objection.
The real problem with this whole discussion is that, to those 'skilled in the art,' it is blindingly clear that the PSTN has itself been a public network composed of computers for a very long time, that it is rife with gateways, and the crucial distinction between a 'public computer network' and a 'public network composed of computers' is notoriously a matter of security discipline, not of technology. But the real criterion in patent law is not whether something is obvious to one skilled in the art, it's whether one skilled in the art can explain why it is obvious to a lawyer. And, ahem, you can't explain anything obvious to a lawyer, because lawyers can't think in straight lines!
Actually it's not that we passionate socialists have some weird idea that raping artistic geniuses is good; rather, the weird idea we have is that forcing them into prostitution is bad. A subtle distinction, I know. But perhaps you were thinking of some other political group?
'Intellectual property' is a tricky thing. Property is a social construct anyway, and the idea that one person can own the contents of another,/i> person's head is subtle, at best. Many creators, as opposed to creators' agents, understanding that value is in novelty, utility and aesthetics, would prefer to live without the concept—providing there is still a means to gain recognition, and still a means to eat. And to come back to socialism, certainly I am not persuaded that a system in which the value I produce is assigned to a corporation which keeps 99% of the benefit for itself and passes 1% back to me is better than one in which the state takes 70%, leaves me 30%, and gives a significant proportion of its share and passes it on to other people like me, who also need to eat. From which I conclude that it is not a foregone conclusion that socialism is less artist-friendly than capitalism. Art is, after all, notoriously hard to value—and artists have better things to do with their lives than manage their businesses interests, too.
You say that the number of Hummers on the street is not significant. You are very wrong. The number of Hummers out there is enough to intimidate the female drivers who make most of the rest of the purchasing decisions. They may not want Hummers themselves, but they do not want to be killed by one. So instead of buying small, agile cars that they would enjoy driving, and which, absent the Hummers, would feel safer to them, they ask the salesman, 'how high can you get me above the street?'
So, yes, ban the Hummers. Perhaps ban male drivers between the ages of 17 and 25, too, actually. Nah, that wouldn't fly.
I think perhaps you have missed my point. The elements of Q are, by one usual construction, equivalence classes over pairs of integers. The 'integers' in Q, while isomorphic to the integers in Z, are quite different objects (they are those equivalence classes happening to contain a member whose denominator is the integer 1). Your union of Z and the integers of Q is a heterogeneous set containing two distinct objects for each conceptual number: ones like 7 [whatever its internal structure may be] and ones like {...<21,3>,<14,2>,<7,1>,<-7,-1>,<-14,-2>,<-21,-3>. ..}.
As to your counter-example of my claim that all floats are (in the usual mathematical sense) equal, it is not what you think. Yes, you have demonstrated that many floats are unequal, but you have not thereby disproved that they are equal. In fact, most floats are both equal and unequal. This is a contradiction, and proves that the system is inconsistent—which was rather my point. Certainly one can push back against this difficulty, as you have done, by saying, well, let's abandon associativity, and yes, this is indeed what is done in standard computational arithmetic, but in the original context of determining what notation makes the most mathematical sense, it remains more than a trifle radical. Some of the core structure of the numbers has been abandoned in order to maintain a notation.
A completely different way of looking at the whole discussion is of course to assert that all of mathematics is only really ever done up to isomorphism, in which case Z might really be said to be embedded in Q; but in that case the floats, lacking, as you say, associativity, aren't isomorphic to anything useful or interesting at all. Either way, 4 isn't, mathematically speaking, at all like 4.0.
Forgive me, but one of the biggest problems I have with casual and trendy environmentalism is the pandemic attitude that if it doesn't happen here then it's not a problem. Indeed, this is exactly the attitude on the part of businesses and governments that environmentalists are supposedly fighting against. A device gets power from somewhere, right? So I ask: which wastes less energy, and which has less impact on the environment in terms of manufacturing and disposal, (a) a host power supply and eight rechargeable batteries, (b) a host power supply and eight wall warts, or (c) a lone host power supply that had 10% more capacity?
Now, of course lower power devices are by and large a good thing, but a look at the current market will rapidly show you that reliance on a wall wart, or a pathetically, even uselessly, short battery life, while a huge inconvenience to the consumer, is not enough to change a manufacturer's mind about a design. This is not something device manufacturers exhibit any flexibility about; I don't know why, but it's true. Power on the data cable will let designs like current ones work more conveniently and—summing across the whole system—more efficiently. This is not the moment to don your hair shirt and live with the lower-tech approach: it's a genuine improvement.
As a mathematician (or at least, an ex-mathematician) I am always amazed by mathematicians who forget that 'equality' between distinct domains is introduced (in standard developments) as a mere abuse of notation. Just because there is a canonical injection of Z into (say) Q does not mean that any element of Z is equal to any element of Q in any normal sense.
Moreover, since 4.0 is a floating point number, it's not even a very helpful abuse of notation to allow 4 and 4.0 to be 'mathematically' equal, since you can demonstrate that mathematically all floats are equal to each other: there's some nonzero epsilon small enough that epsilon + x is 'equal' to x. It is not helpful to then apply normal mathematical reasoning and conclude that all integers are equal - that is, it's nice to maintain some part of a programming language that is actually consistent, and if we're going to use the symbol '=' for both types, it's helpful at least to maintain that these are distinct overloads!
Really, any programming language for the mathematically savvy would issue a warning whenever you used a floating point type for anything; floating point support is a somewhat lame compromise for hardware compatibility. If on the other hand we had the habit of using constructive real numbers (which, unlike classical real numbers, are implementable), we would, quite rightly, be forced to reconsider the notion of equality globally.
Hm. First of all, I've always understood that the problem with the US educational system is precisely that the government does not assume responsibility for it. If curricula were set by suitably qualified ederal bodies and were outside the influence of local pressure groups, I suspect a much better job could be done. (In many other countries, a much better job is done.)
Secondly, I'm not sure that the goal here is to persuade drug companies to spend 100M in R&D costs. As a matter of social policy, we should not be trying to maximise the exploitation of the drug companies any more than we sould be trying to maximise their profits; we should be trying to optimise the cost/benefit ratio for society. Again, perhaps having the research directed by medical experts rather than businessmen would give us better return on investment.
Finally, as to that 'hippie' epithet: have you noticed that those who would abolish notion of 'intellectual property' are actually advocating a free market? It is the pro-patent pro-copy-protection pro-IP lobby which is attempting to expropriate the contents of the collective consciousness and then have the state re-license it to its cronies. That is, the pro-IP lobby is advocating 'bad communism' and the anti-IP lobby is asking that ideas be allowed to find their own value in a market economy.
The DMCA already provides legal protection for snake oil in the form of copy protection schemes. Even if this technology doesn't work in the least, all it would take is for a Digital Millennium Networking Act to be passed saying that nobody is allowed to demonstrate flaws in a networking technology.... When there's a government to supply the truth, who needs a working product anyway?
Certainly I noticed that mention of visas. I'm not American. I'm also good. Why would you assume I'm cheap?
But imagine for a moment a business not run by idiots. It does want to save costs, yes. Not because it's out to stiff underintelligent, undereducated, uncompetitive American born-and-bred workers, but because money saved can be put into R&D and (ok, this is a bit sad) marketing. Thereby ensuring that the business has a future and that there will still be a globally competitive technology sector in the States even after all of Asia has ramped up.
So if you're pro-America, have the guts to allow your businesses to hire the best talent, regardless of skin colour and accent.
Goodness knows Microsoft is doing a better job of keeping the rest of the world under its thumb than the Bush administration is....
Slashdot Mirror
I think this is where the notion, popular in some quarters, of 'value added tax' comes in: you get a rebate on taxes paid at the previous layer. Of course, that wouldn't apply to taxes that were instituted with the express purpose of modifying your behaviour, rather than just raising funds (as discussed in other replies to your comment).
We evil socialists are so wicked that we then want to pay for your retirement and your college education! Muahahah.
The theory of evolution does not say that monkeys evolved into men. Indeed, nobody who has thought about it for a few minutes says this. The theory of evolution itself says just that things evolve. Empirical observation of biological systems leads us to believe that monkeys have common ancestors with men. Not that monkeys evolved into men (unless you are using the language in a way that also allows you to say that men evolved into monkeys).
As to the idea of monkeys and men having a common ancestor, it is far fetched. It is so improbable as to be essentially unquantifiable. This is true of everything that happens in the real world; there's no obvious reason for things to turn out as they do. But, looking at how they have turned out, it's often not so hard to figure out the path they took. And in the case of men and monkeys, we can look at the DNA and see that yup, that's what seems to have happened. Because other explanations are less likely.
And even that has no bearing on religion, by the way. God may still be controlling the dice; randomness by its nature has the power to conceal causation. Atheists may believe that it is unlikely that it is a god that the randomness is concealing, but on this question there is no statistical test you can apply.
Quite seriously, you can say that you doubt the theory of evolution, but that's just words. If you genuinely understand it - as opposed, perhaps, to what you have heard people say about it - you'll find that its validity is entirely obvious.
You don't have to do a lot of empirical research to reach an informed judgment on the question of evolution. You can check the argument yourself. Structurally, the reasoning is a trivial induction, which would take down arithmetic if you doubted it. For points of attack, then, that leaves reproduction, variation and death. So what is it? Things don't die? They don't reproduce? Or you can't see that people's children take after them without being identical?
The most bizarre thing about this whole debate is that evolution not 'just a theory.' It is one of those incredibly, blatantly obvious things that can't possibly be doubted once it has been pointed out, with an empirical component like that putting your tongue in a functioning toaster is a bad idea, and a logical one like that if you throw your stuff out then you won't have as much stuff as before. The amount of reasoning required is less than that needed to open one of those damned plastic clamshell packages that so many small electronic doodads come in. The only possible way to doubt it is to go 'oh! oh! I am afraid of this conclusion' and turn your brain off in the middle of the oh so huge three-step chain of reasoning.
Seriously, anyone who is able to doubt evolution is not qualified to operate heavy machinery, much less teach or run a museum.
And, by the way, this is not intended as an attack on anyone's religion. Merely on their mental competence or (given that it is more probable that they are lying than that they haven't noticed that people and animals have offspring and die) moral character.
Of course you should be in jail for willfully, systematically and apparently proudly endangering pedestrians (and, indeed, other drivers).
For using one device rather than another to play a film? That's ridiculous.
So I fail to see your analogy.
Oh, and by the way, imagine how much more annoying it is for the rest of us in Region 1 who get to sit through this stupid message about what the US government thinks is law. What gives the US the right to post US legal messages on TV screens in Canada, playing DVDs bought in Canada on equipment bought in Canada? D'oh! At least we don't see the War on Drugs messges anymore (is the War on Drugs over? Did you guys win?) We need a law that lets us charge the US back for the time wasted by these bizarre, misdirected and politically offensive messages!
I do agree that sugaring the namespace remains useful even when there is improved API support. But an extended API opens the way for much richer application behaviour (of course, if poorly designed, this could be more tedious, but poor design is not a i>requirement), and for some different, useful tradeoffs, such as time-aware globbing and file browsers.
As to using '?' and escaping it with a backslash, sure, great solution! And when you quote that, you merely have to escape the backslash with a backslash, or two, or four. Of course, if there's a literal '?' in the filename, that needs to be escaped, and we can't really use backslash, because that's already escaping the '?' at the shell level. Hmm, '@' would be good, but we're trying to keep that free in case an email address is a filename. So maybe we can use '??'? And then we can avoid ambiguity by escaping both questionmarks with a backslash or two. Or four. Or eight. No, really, trust me, using a non-special character is a hugely better choice. (Think of it as a language design matter, because that's what it really is.)
Finally, as to the NetApp experience--I'm not saying '.snapshot' won't work. I am saying that I have my own testbed, and I'm my own guineapig. 'diff -c foo.c foo.c@11:33' is something I want to say often enough to be worth giving it a character, and I do want it to be terse. It's nice! It's really nice!
It's possible that it makes a difference that my prototype offers continuous protection rather than snapshots, and that the time syntax is relaxed. If nothing else, my own arrangement doesn't have a limited set of 'snapshots' with which to prepopulate the magic directory. But having had it, I wouldn't voluntarily trade '@' for '.snapshot/', no I would not.
I've written something like this myself (just a prototype, so no good performance, but rather slicker feature-wise), though I doubt it will see the light of day. Still, I can answer your questions about namespaces. Anything that messes with the filesystem namespace in any way can, of course, cause problems. The 'real' solution is new system calls, new shells that know about them--a top to bottom extension of POSIX filesystems.
..@tuesday_afternoon' and having it work. Plus, of course, as you yourself point out, someone is already using the ''.snapshot' syntax--and dollars to doughnuts, not just NetApp, but joe users who take 'snapshots' with cp -R, too.
Not so practical in practise.
Why not use '?'? Perhaps you are not yourself a Unix/Linux user--that one's a shell wildcard, one of the oldest and most entrenched, and would cause all kinds of quoting problems. Actually, '@' is quite unusual in being a still-available character. Why not use '.snapshot/'? Unix philosophy, and it turns out to be true: the less typing a user has to do, the more useful the feature in practise. And I say that with conviction, as someone who has had a prototype running on their desk, and has had the pleasure of typing 'cd
Someone else asked what about files named 'joe@rhubarb.com'--it's not a good or beautiful answer, but it turns out to be practical enough just to pretend the '@' was escaped if the time part fails its syntax check; the problem isn't 'solved' but all the software I use daily then seems to work normally. I don't know if the cow takes this route, though. Again, the only industrial grade solutions are a controllable namespace (a wart in the making) or a mechanism whereby applications can delcare their awareness or otherwise of this feature at the syscall level (a tough sell).
I'll agree with you about the hypocrisy. Supporting war as anything other than an absolute last resort - when you have already been attacked on a similar scale - is one of the few things I might be talked into supporting the death penalty for. The slaughter of innocents is not tolerable behaviour.
But in truth, no, that's just me posturing. I honestly don't believe I can support the death penalty at all, even for genocides (and believe me, I have thought seriously about the proposition of giving the ICC the power to mandate assassination). The death penalty is a too-convenient way of silencing people, it destroys legal and historical evidence, and it is an action for which there is no remedy if it is taken in error. There are other disincentives to violence, with the added advantage of being far less nonlinear. On a small scale, automatically double the penalty for any crime committed while holding a weapon, for example. On a larger scale, reverse the burden of proof on heads of state, and require them to go before a court and defend their actions at the end of their term in office. Disincentivisation is far more useful - and much more easily justified - than revenge.
After all, is our goal to punish the guilty, or to protect the innocent? These may be related, but they are not identical.
Ah, so at last America has abolished the death penalty! I am glad to hear it. Now ... about reinstituting habeas corpus...?</sarcasm>
The parent was claiming that 'the vast majority' of countries (and indeed opining that this majority might consist of all nations but one!) impose no constraints on speech whatever. I was observing that this is, frankly, bullshit. I don't think that makes me a communist, or a revisionist, or an illiterate who has never read Orwell (or Huxley or Bradbury or Zamyatin or Hobbes or Plato for that matter); it's more a question of reading the news occasionally, and having a faint clue about the world at large. Um, unless you guys have decided that reading the news makes you a communist. It is true, now I come to think of it, that most Chinese I've met know more about the US than Americans I've met know of China.
But then if, as you claim, there are four year old kids making plastic cups in Shanghai, then this would be a symptom, not of communism, but of capitalism. Whence my observation about the regime being by this point clearly post-communist (Nota bene: 'post-communist' does not mean capitalist, it does not mean American. I don't know where China is trying to go, its leadership is more than a little opaque, but I am sure they don't want to end up a cultural or economic colony of a Western power—once again, a little knowledge of Chinese history will tell you that this question, too, has already been asked and answered). And if I used inverted commas around the phrase 'living wealthy' it is because, although it was a key phrase in the grandparent's argument, one which the parent did not understand or chose not to understand, and one to which I wanted to refer, we do not usually use those words in this way in English. It does not imply any uncertainty in my own analysis. Comrade.
Interesting. The parent is modded 'insightful.' Perhaps this is some strange new meaning of the word, of which I was previously unaware.
No, contrary to your belief, many countries do have banned religions. Many countries do watch seperatist movements sufficiently carefully that speech about them is (whether because of censorship or self-censorship) far from free. Many countries do have charismatic figues whose presence they do not tolerate and whose influence they seek to diminish. Even if you see Europe and America through rose-tinted glasses, surely you aware of the more politically intense parts of Africa, Asia, South America? Or perhaps you are unaware that there are even reasons for concern about Zimbabwe, Myanmar, and parts of the Arab world? (Where do you get your news?)
I admit I am not an American, and I may not have all the details of American history right, but I have the distinct impression that being, for example, a black supremicist has not, over the years, been condicive to one's personal freedom. And today, even white racists keep quiet about it. No, I agree, it does not normally get one jailed; but it certainly get one fired. And in (otherwise very calm and pleasant) parts of Europe, yes, public holocaust denial will get you locked up.
You may argue that there is a difference of degree, or a difference in emphasis; and I will agree with you. I am not apologising for China. But the person you are replying to is entirely right: China is not, as you would like to believe, unique merely in controlling speech.
Now as to Chinese history. Perhaps you are unaware that China has a history. Rather more of it than the USA. Go look it up. The person you are responding to is again right: China does indeed have a history of thousands of years of attempting to maintain coherence of a huge and disparate empire through rigid control. This has at times been startlingly successful; at other times undeniably catastrophic. The current no-longer-communist regime is just the last of many. Chinese history and chinese attitudes are indeed different from American ones.
Finally, you seem to have an objection to the juxtaposition of the phrases, 'living wealthy' and 'with limited resources.' How quaintly American. Wealth is caused by waste, is it? That attitude is not one that will see you among the leaders of the world for very long, and thankfully it is not one that the entire rest of the world shares. Wealth can arise from managing what you do have, wisely; or from waste and theft. Civilisation lies in choosing the former path. 'Living wealthy' with limited resources is not merely consistent, it is a laudable goal towards whch we should all strive.
None of this is to defend the original post; but your attack on it is impressively off-target. Certainly not everyone's English is as good as yours. Thankfully, however, many people are better informed and more charitable.
Actually, Fortress seems, in many ways, a nice piece of work. Your comment is well taken, but it does the effort a bit of a disservice to help people obsess about what is frankly a minor detail (and honestly I'm not persuaded Unicode support can be classed as a bug). Here, let's tell the /. community something exciting about the language: like the fact that its loops are parallel and distributable by default, and it is the iterator that determines the loop's serialisation pattern, if any.
Seriously, languages need to be judged by their semantics as well as their cosmetics, or we will be doomed to repeat the experiences of C++ and COBOL forever ('looks familiar, so it must be good!').
What I have told people older than myself who have asked is that "the Internet is a system for customer-dialled, and even fully automatic, telegrams. Because they charge a flat rate for service and the messages themselves are free, it gets used for all kinds of everyday things, like newsletters, catalog stores and—it can send pictures on the principle of a facsimile—things like poster walls." This explanation has the dual advantages of referring only to technology available for a century now, and of being true in full technical detail.
;).
I've repeatedly got reactions from agèd people like, "Huh! Maybe I'll get myself a computer then. That's nothing scary, after all. And I miss telegrams."
But this won't help the younger generation, who probably don't remember back when we had civilisation and technology and stuff
Customer dialled telegrams aren't rocket science; I have no idea why the 'net is so mystified in modern life.
Well, the article is spectacularly under-informative. In our experience (yeah, yeah, been there, done that, got an award at Supercomputing...), the hard part is the last few inches. It is (or I should say, 18 months ago it was - maybe by now you can get all the peripherals you need in PCIe?) hard to get more than a few Gbps in and out of a workstation. We ran about 4.5Gbps per direction across North America in '05, but it took three workstations at each end, essentially because DMA over PCI-X is in practise much more limiting than UDP/IP over lightpath.
But from TFA you can't tell: maybe the endpoints are rackfulls of dedicated hardware and they run multiple TCP streams run in parallel, in which case I have to agree that that doesn't seem like much of a trick at all. In any case, some tuning has to be forgiven: the bandwidth-delay product on these runs is on the order of a gigabit, and, well, your stack isn't tuned for that, out of the box.
As to running over the public Internet, been there, done that, too. As a consequence of some unscheduled maintenance, we got dumped onto the public 'net one day. What actually happens is, they decide you're a DOS attack and they block you! Surprise! Bad research project, no record!
The thing I find amazing about this discussion is that the Slashdot audience, often (in part if not in whole) so well-informed, appears here so utterly ignorant. Folks, to take a random example, twenty years ago I used to subscribe to a journal called Visible Language. Google tells me that it's still there, at http://www.id.iit.edu/visiblelanguage . It's far from the only source on such information. Yes, there is a research community on these topics. The research has been done. It was done, for print, centuries ago; it was done, for the screen, decades ago. It is something that matters, sure, to nerds as to anyone who reads. But how quite does it get to be news, now? Because someone at Wired recently half-remembered what he learned in a typography class at school?
So ja, sure, 'equal areas' is just an informal approximation, it's what you remember of the idea, informally, once your school days (or whatever other days they were when you read up on typography) are somewhere in the distant past. It doesn't mean there's no theory to it; it doesn't mean there's no well-researched and well-documented theory of it. It just means that it's one of those, OMG, pre-Internet topics that's tricky to Google for, and nobody, either here or at Wired, dropped by their local library recently to check it out in detail. Or, equally possibly, that it didn't seem worth the effort to explain in more depth when the purpose of tfa was, frankly, just to be cute.
As to why our on-screen typography pays little attention to such well-known ideas, I somehow suspect it's a combination of the cowboy programmer syndrome so pandemic in web technology and the distinct possibility that some corporate baboon somewhere has a patent-lock on 'text that doesn't look like crap'....
Sorry, are you sure it is not you who are confused? From the FA: 'The transmission of the call is routed in part through a "public computer network" and in part through the PSTN. This implies that the transmission must cross at least one gateway between the "public computer network" and the PSTN. The Internet is one example of a "public computer network," but the patent does not define what else would qualify as a "public computer network."'
So unless there's language in the patent that TFA missed, discussing specifically, say, protocol conversion between nominally circuit switched and nominally packet switched data streams, or unless words like 'the Internet Protocol version 4' (as opposed to merely 'an internet protocol,' which would still clearly apply to the PSTN), I don't see how we can accept your objection.
The real problem with this whole discussion is that, to those 'skilled in the art,' it is blindingly clear that the PSTN has itself been a public network composed of computers for a very long time, that it is rife with gateways, and the crucial distinction between a 'public computer network' and a 'public network composed of computers' is notoriously a matter of security discipline, not of technology. But the real criterion in patent law is not whether something is obvious to one skilled in the art, it's whether one skilled in the art can explain why it is obvious to a lawyer. And, ahem, you can't explain anything obvious to a lawyer, because lawyers can't think in straight lines!
Actually it's not that we passionate socialists have some weird idea that raping artistic geniuses is good; rather, the weird idea we have is that forcing them into prostitution is bad. A subtle distinction, I know. But perhaps you were thinking of some other political group?
'Intellectual property' is a tricky thing. Property is a social construct anyway, and the idea that one person can own the contents of another,/i> person's head is subtle, at best. Many creators, as opposed to creators' agents, understanding that value is in novelty, utility and aesthetics, would prefer to live without the concept—providing there is still a means to gain recognition, and still a means to eat. And to come back to socialism, certainly I am not persuaded that a system in which the value I produce is assigned to a corporation which keeps 99% of the benefit for itself and passes 1% back to me is better than one in which the state takes 70%, leaves me 30%, and gives a significant proportion of its share and passes it on to other people like me, who also need to eat. From which I conclude that it is not a foregone conclusion that socialism is less artist-friendly than capitalism. Art is, after all, notoriously hard to value—and artists have better things to do with their lives than manage their businesses interests, too.
Oh, go by the statistics. Ban drivers! :)
You say that the number of Hummers on the street is not significant. You are very wrong. The number of Hummers out there is enough to intimidate the female drivers who make most of the rest of the purchasing decisions. They may not want Hummers themselves, but they do not want to be killed by one. So instead of buying small, agile cars that they would enjoy driving, and which, absent the Hummers, would feel safer to them, they ask the salesman, 'how high can you get me above the street?'
So, yes, ban the Hummers. Perhaps ban male drivers between the ages of 17 and 25, too, actually. Nah, that wouldn't fly.
I think perhaps you have missed my point. The elements of Q are, by one usual construction, equivalence classes over pairs of integers. The 'integers' in Q, while isomorphic to the integers in Z, are quite different objects (they are those equivalence classes happening to contain a member whose denominator is the integer 1). Your union of Z and the integers of Q is a heterogeneous set containing two distinct objects for each conceptual number: ones like 7 [whatever its internal structure may be] and ones like {...<21,3>,<14,2>,<7,1>,<-7,-1>,<-14,-2>,<-21,-3>. ..}.
As to your counter-example of my claim that all floats are (in the usual mathematical sense) equal, it is not what you think. Yes, you have demonstrated that many floats are unequal, but you have not thereby disproved that they are equal. In fact, most floats are both equal and unequal. This is a contradiction, and proves that the system is inconsistent—which was rather my point. Certainly one can push back against this difficulty, as you have done, by saying, well, let's abandon associativity, and yes, this is indeed what is done in standard computational arithmetic, but in the original context of determining what notation makes the most mathematical sense, it remains more than a trifle radical. Some of the core structure of the numbers has been abandoned in order to maintain a notation.
A completely different way of looking at the whole discussion is of course to assert that all of mathematics is only really ever done up to isomorphism, in which case Z might really be said to be embedded in Q; but in that case the floats, lacking, as you say, associativity, aren't isomorphic to anything useful or interesting at all. Either way, 4 isn't, mathematically speaking, at all like 4.0.
Forgive me, but one of the biggest problems I have with casual and trendy environmentalism is the pandemic attitude that if it doesn't happen here then it's not a problem. Indeed, this is exactly the attitude on the part of businesses and governments that environmentalists are supposedly fighting against. A device gets power from somewhere, right? So I ask: which wastes less energy, and which has less impact on the environment in terms of manufacturing and disposal, (a) a host power supply and eight rechargeable batteries, (b) a host power supply and eight wall warts, or (c) a lone host power supply that had 10% more capacity?
Now, of course lower power devices are by and large a good thing, but a look at the current market will rapidly show you that reliance on a wall wart, or a pathetically, even uselessly, short battery life, while a huge inconvenience to the consumer, is not enough to change a manufacturer's mind about a design. This is not something device manufacturers exhibit any flexibility about; I don't know why, but it's true. Power on the data cable will let designs like current ones work more conveniently and—summing across the whole system—more efficiently. This is not the moment to don your hair shirt and live with the lower-tech approach: it's a genuine improvement.
Or, it would be, if the design were competent.
As a mathematician (or at least, an ex-mathematician) I am always amazed by mathematicians who forget that 'equality' between distinct domains is introduced (in standard developments) as a mere abuse of notation. Just because there is a canonical injection of Z into (say) Q does not mean that any element of Z is equal to any element of Q in any normal sense.
Moreover, since 4.0 is a floating point number, it's not even a very helpful abuse of notation to allow 4 and 4.0 to be 'mathematically' equal, since you can demonstrate that mathematically all floats are equal to each other: there's some nonzero epsilon small enough that epsilon + x is 'equal' to x. It is not helpful to then apply normal mathematical reasoning and conclude that all integers are equal - that is, it's nice to maintain some part of a programming language that is actually consistent, and if we're going to use the symbol '=' for both types, it's helpful at least to maintain that these are distinct overloads!
Really, any programming language for the mathematically savvy would issue a warning whenever you used a floating point type for anything; floating point support is a somewhat lame compromise for hardware compatibility. If on the other hand we had the habit of using constructive real numbers (which, unlike classical real numbers, are implementable), we would, quite rightly, be forced to reconsider the notion of equality globally.
Secondly, I'm not sure that the goal here is to persuade drug companies to spend 100M in R&D costs. As a matter of social policy, we should not be trying to maximise the exploitation of the drug companies any more than we sould be trying to maximise their profits; we should be trying to optimise the cost/benefit ratio for society. Again, perhaps having the research directed by medical experts rather than businessmen would give us better return on investment.
Finally, as to that 'hippie' epithet: have you noticed that those who would abolish notion of 'intellectual property' are actually advocating a free market? It is the pro-patent pro-copy-protection pro-IP lobby which is attempting to expropriate the contents of the collective consciousness and then have the state re-license it to its cronies. That is, the pro-IP lobby is advocating 'bad communism' and the anti-IP lobby is asking that ideas be allowed to find their own value in a market economy.
The DMCA already provides legal protection for snake oil in the form of copy protection schemes. Even if this technology doesn't work in the least, all it would take is for a Digital Millennium Networking Act to be passed saying that nobody is allowed to demonstrate flaws in a networking technology.... When there's a government to supply the truth, who needs a working product anyway?
But imagine for a moment a business not run by idiots. It does want to save costs, yes. Not because it's out to stiff underintelligent, undereducated, uncompetitive American born-and-bred workers, but because money saved can be put into R&D and (ok, this is a bit sad) marketing. Thereby ensuring that the business has a future and that there will still be a globally competitive technology sector in the States even after all of Asia has ramped up.
So if you're pro-America, have the guts to allow your businesses to hire the best talent, regardless of skin colour and accent.
Goodness knows Microsoft is doing a better job of keeping the rest of the world under its thumb than the Bush administration is....