You've been moderated funny, but that's pretty insightful actually. It just goes to show how ridiculous these limits are, when there's a good chance you could find more free, unused, and unrecognised bandwidth just lying around on the airwaves.
I barely understand it myself. A decent explanation by someone who gets it and can communicate in human language would be good:D
But from what I can gather... they do everything that standard binary computers do, but other things as well. Instead of just working on binary bits (which can be 1 or 0), they operate on qubits (which can be 1 or 0, in one dimension, but also have a quantum spin, adding another dimension). So essentially, they work with complex (2-dimensional) numbers as their basic level of computation, rather than just working on a single (onoff) dimension.
If you think of the few manipulations we can do on a bit: AND it with another bit, OR it, XOR it, negate it... and then think of everything that's come from those simple principles: adding numbers, doing logical ANDs and ORs (as opposed to bitwise ANDs and ORs), making decisions and carrying out actions based on that logic, doing simple multiplications, divisions, sorting, etc... all the way up to complex layers above this, like operating systems and mp3 codecs. Now imagine where we'd be if the most fundamental building block, the bit, was 2-dimensional instead of 1-dimensional. It's a whole new ballgame.
One of the few currently known benefits of quantum computers is this: the advanced cryptography we use to protect secrets is based on how long it would take a computer to find the cryptographic key by doing lots of brute-force calculations. Usually, security types are happy with something that would take a lot of expensive computers ten years to crack. Quantum computers, though, by using their extra dimensions to calculate, can do these so much faster, that they're no longer safe. The way it seems to work is that, with a standard computer, you have to do lots of seperate calculations, which, all together, take an exponential amount of time. Whereas, with a quantum computer, it can be reduced to a simpler function that can all be done at once, or at least, in a way that doesn't require every part of the sum to be done seperately.
At a guess, I'd say they'll probably be good for anything involving complex numbers, too. In particular, the Dirac codec, Realvideo9 (or is it 10?) and other wavelet codecs, and probably a lot of things that we use graphics cards' processors and vector processors like MMX/3dNow/Altivec for now.
Anyway. This is just what I've been able to pick up, and might well be wrong on a little/most of it. Someone with more maths training can probably get a better idea from wikipedia:
I doubt it. The people saying things like that are small town lower class. The decision to use open source is made by people who run technology oriented businesses.
I'm pretty sure Microsoft officially waved the communist card against Linux at one point. But we all know they're trailer trash, so maybe that just backs up your argument.
of how many starving children in Africa they could have fed instead of buying a jet so they can show off.
Google's founders have always seemed to show a philanthropic attitude. This is at odds with buying fighter jets. The obvious conclusion is that Google have finally worked up the guts to go after Microsoft's HQ directly. When MS is dead, and people in africa aren't being charged a month's wages for MS products, then clearly, Google's philanthropic arm will be satisfied with the purchase too.
Coming from the country with more police cameras than anywhere else, and being on a medical driving license that has to be renewed much too often, with private information disclosed from my doctors (thereby eliminating my right to confidential treatment) etc., I'd disagree strongly. As an adult, I'm aware of the law, and my social responsibilities. If we're trying to fix the fact that some people aren't aware, or don't care about their responsibilities, we should absolutely NOT do that by invasively micro-managing the people that get it right.
Aside from stereotyping russians, you guys are showing a lot of cultural bias, that you probably don't realise. Stop calling people lazy, and go read The Importance of Living. Or just spend time living in a hunter-gatherer tribe for a while. You might find yourselves returning to your lives and calling the people around you workaholics... or just plain insane.
"To truly understand another culture, you must first understand your own."
Assuming that you'll be able to rip whatever DRM they use is dangerous. With hardware that cooperates to undermine you, PKI could easily be used to encrypt data in ways that are unbreakable through software -- by ANYONE. All it takes is a chip that publishes its public key for the media source, and re-encypts data directly to digital monitors (IE, an LCD monitor, and speakers) which also publish their public keys. Short of breaking your OWN chip apart to see it's unique key, you're screwed. Moreover, it could well be unbreakable, if those chips used one-time pads.
Battling DRM and other abuses of power is a lot like the anecdote about battling the nazis: if they come for others and you don't speak up, there will be no one left to speak up when they get to you. Or, in other words, don't be complacent on the grounds that you'll survive. If you let the technology gain a foothold, you'll be up the creek too, just like everyone else.
Exactly. Using DRM to enforce copyright is the equivalent of having cops watch how much fuel you put in your car's tank, and checking your mileage after a journey, to make sure you don't speed. It's simply invasive, untrusting, and unnecessary for adults, and wrong, given that the assumptions are flawed. This is ESPECIALLY true, given the fact that we actually have a right to change the speed limit, if the majority of us decide to, or to copy things that were previously not copied, if the majority of us decide to.
There are rape victims who have come to use the experience positively and setup charities etc, so even in those cases (agreeing that they seem the most suitable of many), I think there is no such thing as "undesirable" memories --- only unwise reactions to those memories.
Depends how little. Bzr has worried me once since it hit v1.0. Granted, that was enough of a death sentence to make me switch. I'm not convinced it's wholly unredeemable yet though, and does have lots of good qualities that make it worth checking out --- maybe even branching and fixing if necessary.
Agreed, but Git seems to be unusual in that regard. Most of the other distributed version control systems are more intuitive to me than it would be to have a bastardised system of a central repo with modern workflows shoe-horned into it.
By no stretch of the imagination, is a linux binary future-proof. Linux probably has the least future-proof ABI of any reasonably popular OS.
More importantly... Linux, and all Unices, are all about source-code. Traditionally, you got the source and built the app yourself. Modern distros of Linux, BSD, Solaris, etc. tend to save you time by providing binaries, but that's simply a time-saving measure. It's not even guaranteed that your Linux system is an x86 system, so there's really no such thing as a "Linux binary". That's more of an option on unix machines that have fat binaries and limited platforms, like OS X.
In essence, a binary is never future proof. Source, and even more so, algorithms and specifications, are.
Agreed on reflective, and not fun. But punitive and uninteresting? I'd say not. To me, those ideas seem to come out of faults in our justice system -- the corruption of the system to satisfy people who want revenge, rather than to ensure a peaceful, healthy, harmonious society.
It seems to me that, if someone can be a useful, contributing member of society by working on code, then prison should encourage that, not discourage it. The only caveat I'd add is that coding is a corner case, given its relatively unsociable workflow. But that's more of a general problem for the IT industry, than a problem for the justice system.
Git, Bazaar, Mercurial, Darcs and a few other distributed systems are the only ones I've entertained since I lost interest in RCS/CVS years ago. No one in their right mind should be even thinking about so-called tools like SVN these days.
Even just to keep my simple documents like lesson plans and tutorials up-to-date across a few machines and platforms I don't control (with pen drives/emails in-between), I need to use rsync-like tools that can cope with more than a single central repository, and sync in both directions. The days of big central mainframes which hold the One True Source Code Repo are long gone.
So far, my thoughts are this:
Bazaar( aka bzr, aka bazaar-ng until recently ): very nice, but a little flakey now and then.
Git: seriously fast, powerful, but too complex for any project with lay-contributors and too easy to hose your work with
Mercurial and Darcs: not much experience with them, but at least Mercurial's TortoiseHg option for windows seems ready to go, which is a huge win if you care about a cross-platform solution.
No, microsoft got it wrong, hence the problem. The windows infrastructure was never designed to be multi-user, much less to have role-based security etc. If they had simply admitted that the unix model was superior, and used it, they wouldn't be having an issue now.
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You've been moderated funny, but that's pretty insightful actually. It just goes to show how ridiculous these limits are, when there's a good chance you could find more free, unused, and unrecognised bandwidth just lying around on the airwaves.
If noah was already building stuff with qubits, he was getting a lot more help from god than we all thought.
I barely understand it myself. A decent explanation by someone who gets it and can communicate in human language would be good :D
But from what I can gather... they do everything that standard binary computers do, but other things as well. Instead of just working on binary bits (which can be 1 or 0), they operate on qubits (which can be 1 or 0, in one dimension, but also have a quantum spin, adding another dimension). So essentially, they work with complex (2-dimensional) numbers as their basic level of computation, rather than just working on a single (onoff) dimension.
If you think of the few manipulations we can do on a bit: AND it with another bit, OR it, XOR it, negate it... and then think of everything that's come from those simple principles: adding numbers, doing logical ANDs and ORs (as opposed to bitwise ANDs and ORs), making decisions and carrying out actions based on that logic, doing simple multiplications, divisions, sorting, etc... all the way up to complex layers above this, like operating systems and mp3 codecs. Now imagine where we'd be if the most fundamental building block, the bit, was 2-dimensional instead of 1-dimensional. It's a whole new ballgame.
One of the few currently known benefits of quantum computers is this: the advanced cryptography we use to protect secrets is based on how long it would take a computer to find the cryptographic key by doing lots of brute-force calculations. Usually, security types are happy with something that would take a lot of expensive computers ten years to crack. Quantum computers, though, by using their extra dimensions to calculate, can do these so much faster, that they're no longer safe. The way it seems to work is that, with a standard computer, you have to do lots of seperate calculations, which, all together, take an exponential amount of time. Whereas, with a quantum computer, it can be reduced to a simpler function that can all be done at once, or at least, in a way that doesn't require every part of the sum to be done seperately.
At a guess, I'd say they'll probably be good for anything involving complex numbers, too. In particular, the Dirac codec, Realvideo9 (or is it 10?) and other wavelet codecs, and probably a lot of things that we use graphics cards' processors and vector processors like MMX/3dNow/Altivec for now.
Anyway. This is just what I've been able to pick up, and might well be wrong on a little/most of it. Someone with more maths training can probably get a better idea from wikipedia:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Quantum_computer
You might also want to read up on complex numbers.
I'm pretty sure Microsoft officially waved the communist card against Linux at one point. But we all know they're trailer trash, so maybe that just backs up your argument.
Godwin's law is against overuse. Obviously I think my analogy was used appropriately here, or I wouldn't have used it.
On limited pads... agreed, now that I think about it. Thanks for the clarification :)
Google's founders have always seemed to show a philanthropic attitude. This is at odds with buying fighter jets. The obvious conclusion is that Google have finally worked up the guts to go after Microsoft's HQ directly. When MS is dead, and people in africa aren't being charged a month's wages for MS products, then clearly, Google's philanthropic arm will be satisfied with the purchase too.
Coming from the country with more police cameras than anywhere else, and being on a medical driving license that has to be renewed much too often, with private information disclosed from my doctors (thereby eliminating my right to confidential treatment) etc., I'd disagree strongly. As an adult, I'm aware of the law, and my social responsibilities. If we're trying to fix the fact that some people aren't aware, or don't care about their responsibilities, we should absolutely NOT do that by invasively micro-managing the people that get it right.
No, if it can be viewed, it can be re-digitised. Big difference, in terms of quality.
Aside from stereotyping russians, you guys are showing a lot of cultural bias, that you probably don't realise. Stop calling people lazy, and go read The Importance of Living. Or just spend time living in a hunter-gatherer tribe for a while. You might find yourselves returning to your lives and calling the people around you workaholics... or just plain insane.
"To truly understand another culture, you must first understand your own."
Assuming that you'll be able to rip whatever DRM they use is dangerous. With hardware that cooperates to undermine you, PKI could easily be used to encrypt data in ways that are unbreakable through software -- by ANYONE. All it takes is a chip that publishes its public key for the media source, and re-encypts data directly to digital monitors (IE, an LCD monitor, and speakers) which also publish their public keys. Short of breaking your OWN chip apart to see it's unique key, you're screwed. Moreover, it could well be unbreakable, if those chips used one-time pads.
Battling DRM and other abuses of power is a lot like the anecdote about battling the nazis: if they come for others and you don't speak up, there will be no one left to speak up when they get to you. Or, in other words, don't be complacent on the grounds that you'll survive. If you let the technology gain a foothold, you'll be up the creek too, just like everyone else.
Brazil, India, China, Philippines, Extremadura...
Exactly. Using DRM to enforce copyright is the equivalent of having cops watch how much fuel you put in your car's tank, and checking your mileage after a journey, to make sure you don't speed. It's simply invasive, untrusting, and unnecessary for adults, and wrong, given that the assumptions are flawed. This is ESPECIALLY true, given the fact that we actually have a right to change the speed limit, if the majority of us decide to, or to copy things that were previously not copied, if the majority of us decide to.
There are rape victims who have come to use the experience positively and setup charities etc, so even in those cases (agreeing that they seem the most suitable of many), I think there is no such thing as "undesirable" memories --- only unwise reactions to those memories.
Sorry, that was a flippant and unnecessary response, which I would never normally make. It's been a long day. Please ignore.
You sir, cannot read. Learn to read, then reply.
Depends how little. Bzr has worried me once since it hit v1.0. Granted, that was enough of a death sentence to make me switch. I'm not convinced it's wholly unredeemable yet though, and does have lots of good qualities that make it worth checking out --- maybe even branching and fixing if necessary.
Agreed, but Git seems to be unusual in that regard. Most of the other distributed version control systems are more intuitive to me than it would be to have a bastardised system of a central repo with modern workflows shoe-horned into it.
Most of us are very familiar with addition, but learning multiplication even moderately would still be a huge benefit over addition alone.
By no stretch of the imagination, is a linux binary future-proof. Linux probably has the least future-proof ABI of any reasonably popular OS.
More importantly... Linux, and all Unices, are all about source-code. Traditionally, you got the source and built the app yourself. Modern distros of Linux, BSD, Solaris, etc. tend to save you time by providing binaries, but that's simply a time-saving measure. It's not even guaranteed that your Linux system is an x86 system, so there's really no such thing as a "Linux binary". That's more of an option on unix machines that have fat binaries and limited platforms, like OS X.
In essence, a binary is never future proof. Source, and even more so, algorithms and specifications, are.
Agreed on reflective, and not fun. But punitive and uninteresting? I'd say not. To me, those ideas seem to come out of faults in our justice system -- the corruption of the system to satisfy people who want revenge, rather than to ensure a peaceful, healthy, harmonious society.
It seems to me that, if someone can be a useful, contributing member of society by working on code, then prison should encourage that, not discourage it. The only caveat I'd add is that coding is a corner case, given its relatively unsociable workflow. But that's more of a general problem for the IT industry, than a problem for the justice system.
Or that they're seeing stuff twice due to console corruption.
Git, Bazaar, Mercurial, Darcs and a few other distributed systems are the only ones I've entertained since I lost interest in RCS/CVS years ago. No one in their right mind should be even thinking about so-called tools like SVN these days.
Even just to keep my simple documents like lesson plans and tutorials up-to-date across a few machines and platforms I don't control (with pen drives/emails in-between), I need to use rsync-like tools that can cope with more than a single central repository, and sync in both directions. The days of big central mainframes which hold the One True Source Code Repo are long gone.
So far, my thoughts are this:
Bazaar( aka bzr, aka bazaar-ng until recently ): very nice, but a little flakey now and then.
Git: seriously fast, powerful, but too complex for any project with lay-contributors and too easy to hose your work with
Mercurial and Darcs: not much experience with them, but at least Mercurial's TortoiseHg option for windows seems ready to go, which is a huge win if you care about a cross-platform solution.
If you had released what you did, and it had potential, someone might have finished it for you a year ago.
No, microsoft got it wrong, hence the problem. The windows infrastructure was never designed to be multi-user, much less to have role-based security etc. If they had simply admitted that the unix model was superior, and used it, they wouldn't be having an issue now.
In which case you can no longer trust linux.