Because I like MS Equation Editor better. I don't like the OO formula editor because I don't enjoy the cycle of tweak the code - look and see if it updated correctly - tweak the code again - etc. I like that MS Equation Editor is 100% WYSIWYG.
That being said, I can easily understand that people writing math dissertations would prefer being able to enter a formula at full keyboard speed rather than having to do a lot of mouse movements. For someone in that situation, it would be worthwhile to take the time to learn the syntax of OO formulas. But if you prefer to use the mouse-based GUI, then the MS product is much (much!) better.
Writing facetiously is not an excuse for writing badly. In fact, writing correctly is even more important when you are trying to be funny, particularly if you hope to succeed. Which, I am sorry to have to say, you did not.
Yes, -er is a comparative and -est is a superlative. The super- prefix is a slightly different question. I think it is usually neither (superficial, superfluous, supernatural), but in some cases can be a sort of comparative (supermarket, superhuman, supercomputer). I don't think it is ever a superlative, except arguably in the case of the word superlative itself.
The English language has exactly three ways to form a superlative:
1. For "simple" adjectives: est 2. For other adjectives: the most 3. Irregular superlatives: best, worst, least, most, eldest and furthest.
The superlatives for each of your adjectives would be:
the most overblown the most phantasmagoric the most fantastic the most delusional the most raving the most lunatic
The one that comes closest to qualifying for an "est" form is raving, but the resulting superlative is not commonly used and would convey an ironic tone: "You just made the ravingest post I've recently seen on Slashdot."
-Graham The English language does have other ways of forming superlatives
I think lightyear4 may have been trying to say "The honorable Lord British." Which is a perfectly appropriate form of address for a somewhat-but-not-extremely reputable individual like a member of the House of Commons, significant mayor, minor gentry, local elected cheese-grater, etc.
I do not believe there has been much discussion among the peerage of the correct style and title of address for the dictator-for-life of a pretend kingdom.
Also, I agree that, as a name, "Lord British" is just dumb on its face. Why not have other UO characters called "Senator American" and "Marquis French."
Having a net worth of $1 million doesn't even mean living the high life. Picture a middle class household with an annual income of $60,000. They certainly can't afford a beach house and 3 SUV's, although they aren't missing any meals, either. Suppose Dad had a traumatic experience as a youth and tends to worry about money and retirement. Consequently, he's been saving $15,000/year since he was 25. (His neighbors, who live better than he does but pay $15,000/year on their second mortgage and maxed-out credit cards, think he's a bit weird and offputting.)
By the time he's 55 he can reasonably expect to have a balance of around $1 million in his retirement fund. Given that he probably also has some equity in his house, etc., he probably became a "millionaire" (e.g., more than $1 million net worth) around age 50.
Can he afford a trip to space? Sure, if he wants to accept the consequent reduction in his retirement income. But he worked all his life to put that retirement account together; he doesn't seem like the kind of guy who would blow it on (what is essentially) a three-day bender.
If you want to find space tourists, you have to look for people who are not merely millionaires, but who also have the disposition and ability to *spend* bucketloads of money. This means you're in the $10mm-and-up range, of which there are far fewer people.
It's already an undesirable situation if we lose another Shuttle orbiter. However, perhaps it could be an undesirable situation where everyone survives, instead of an undesirable situation where some people die.
Once everyone's on board the ISS, you would presumably do another Shuttle or Soyuz launch (or two) to bring them back. Mission planners have no doubt looked at the food and air reserves on the station, vs. the time it would take to stage an emergency launch.
You're wrong, actually - even though the original poster agrees with you. "Who" is used when it is the subject of a verb (the thing doing the action). "Whom" is used when it is the object (the thing being acted upon). The correct choice most certainly does not depend on any preceding conjunction. There are many cases where "of who" works perfectly well, and this is one of them.
To make this easier, re-write the sentence as "It is just a case of who your English teacher was." The main verb of this sentence is "is." The subject of "is" is "it." The rest of the sentence is a noun clause serving as the object of "is."
Within the noun clause, there is another verb, "was." The subject of "was" is "your English teacher," leaving "who" again in the role of an object.
So in this particular sentence, "who" is serving as an object in both contexts, and is therefore unambiguously correct.
The announcement that prompted this article is that Windows 2000, which was released in March 2000, loses mainline support this month. It will continue to receive security fixes and "major" bug fixes until June 2010.
Red Hat's major release in the Windows 2000 timeframe was Red Hat Linux 7, released on October 17, 2000. Errata support for RHL 7, including security updates, officially ended in March 2003.
That's the apples-to-apples comparison. At the time of the Windows 2000 release, anyone who claimed that Red Hat was in a different (and lower) category of supportability - which is what you are now claiming - would have been yelled at by Slashdot as a Microsoft astroturfer.
But even if we drink the orange Kool-Aid and accept that no Red Hat release prior to RHEL 2.1 could be considered supportable, consider that RHEL 2.1, which was released in May 2002, lost mainline support in May 2005 - last month, and will receive security bugfixes until May 2009. Where was the Slashdot article then?
At the time of RHEL 2.1's release, the current Microsoft OS was Windows XP, which was released in December 2001 - five months before RHEL 2.1. Windows XP will not lose mainline support until December 2006, with security fixes continuing until December 2011.
Looking backward, Microsoft has sometimes extended support coverage for additional years when it found that many customers were continuing to use an older product. It did this for Windows NT and for Windows 98. Red Hat, on the other hand, has cancelled support programs causing great disruption to its customers, including ending support for an OS version less than a year after its release (RHL 9).
Moving forward, currently Red Hat offers 3 years of full support and 7 (total) years of security fixes. Microsoft offers 5 years of full support and 10 (total) years of security fixes.
Of course, it's important to note that the open source nature of Red Hat's releases means that other groups besides Red Hat can take over support for abandoned releases. However, if you stick to comparing apples to apples, you don't have a case.
What I really wonder about this sort of situation is: Why not just show the British version? Seriously, why do they pay all the production costs, risks, etc to make a "word for word" copy? Is it just to avoid the British accents?
The all-time most successful British-to-American crossover is almost certainly "Three's Company," which was the American version of the British "Man About The House." Both were extremely successful.
Incidentally, why is it that successful British shows always have to be dumbed-down and cheesed-up before studio execs deem them fit for American audiences?
Consider that would be condicting the inquiry by doing our own thinking using human brains. Of all the potential ideas, thoughts, and concepts that could conceivably exist in the universe, we are inherently only capable of processing those which can be formed within a human brain.
In the computer world, some CPUs have been capable of fully emulating themselves: A 6809 emulator running on a 6809 could in theory be capable of running any object code that runs on the native processor. Others have not been: The Z-80 has a separate address space for device I/O, which cannot be virtualized. The 80386 could emulate itself, excluding the emulation control features (e.g. it could not emulate itself emulating itself).
In the biological world, human consciousness as manifested via the human brain might (or might not) lack the capability to conceive of all the principles of its own operation.
How many times does this have to be re-stated on this thread? YOU DO NOT NEED TO DO THIS IN REAL TIME.
Let's suppose it takes a billion instructions to simulate the activity of a single neuron over the course of a second. Then this computer could run about seven seconds of real-time brain activity in about a year. Seven seconds is far more than enough time to recognize and classify an object, in a working (and trained) biological brain.
Can you use this to run hyper-speeded brains through simulated childhoods? No. But does it have the potential to be interesting for research purposes? I have no idea, I'm not a biologist, but it seems feasible to me.
Yes, of course that's what he meant. However, there are certain technical difficulties inherent to a numbering system in this base; notably, the requirement to identify more than 37 septillion differentiable single-place symbols. Expressing a "digit" as a base 10 number defeats the purpose of the system, even if you draw a circle around it.
SerpentMage's key insight, of course, was that we are only interested in a particular number - the factorial of the Great Answer. This will be the only use we will ever make of the base-37483411234209726053065806 numbering system. Therefore, we only need to create unique symbols for two entities - the number 37483411234209726053065805, which we will refer to as "4", and the number 33187259034871818286636170, which we will refer to as "2". Under this system, (decimal) 42! equals (base-37483411234209726053065806) 42.
Appropriate assignment of values to the symbols "six," "nine" and (possibly) "times" is left as an exercise for the reader.
All fine and good, except that Patrick Stewart can't play the part. He was nearly too old to do a "young" Picard during the TNG series, and that was 15-20 years ago. Do you really want some other schmuck playing Picard?
What's interesting about this is the way it combines biological and machine intelligence. Cockroaches (at least the kind we get here; I've never seen a Giant Madagascar Hissing Cockroach -for which, I heartily thank whatever power there may be) have a fairly complex pattern of behavior; they "understand" finding food, running away from predators, locating good places to hide and live, etc, etc. These behaviors are not easy to model using machine intelligence; at least, not in a way that works in the real world.
Imagine if you could program a cockroach. You have chemical and optical receptors, and the ability to move individual legs and appendages. You have to be able to do things like "go forward" and "eat this object," both of which are quite complex in practice. You also have to answer questions like "is it food" or "is it scary." And you need an overriding program that prioritizes the various items in your environment and decides, at each moment, what you should do next. How many lines of C code do you think this would take? How do you suppose any given program might fare in the real world, competing for resources (and trying to avoid being eaten or stepped on) alongside real cockroaches?
So what if it turns out that real cockroaches are way ahead of the state of the art in machine intelligence - but you find cockroach behavior useful in some potential system? Instead of waiting for AI research to catch up to the cockroach, why not just put a cockroach in the driver's seat and let it run the robot. Treat it as a "black box" heuristic machine. Use machine intelligence only to constrain its behavior.
As to shining a light on the cockroach to get it to run a particular direction, you have to ask: Why not just turn refuse to obey the cockroach's commands if you are going "the wrong way" according to the machine intelligence? I don't know the answer, but I didn't have to face the task of actually building the thing. However, I would imagine it is much simpler to turn LEDs on and off than to get involved in the mechanics of how the legs work.
If you can figure out how cockroaches (or some other control animal) identifies friend and foe, how they focus on a particular target, and what their attack behaviors are, it's entirely plausible that you could use this in a military application. Imagine armored, landscape-destroying robots with giant laser weapons; piloted, perhaps, by kittens. I'm sure this is where the research will inevitably lead.
Yes, NT, 2000 Server and 2003 Server have all included Remote Installation Services, which allows you to network-boot PXE compatible clients *using Microsoft proprietary protocols*.
What they have changed is that 2003 Server SP1, as I understand it, now allows you to network-boot PXE compatible clients *using tftp and any CD image*, whether from Microsoft or not.
So I should now be able to toss a Knoppix ISO on my 2003 SP1 server, and netboot any PXE machine I happen to own.
I don't know if it's really this easy, or what the gotchas are, but conceptually it's a big step forward.
It's the strong quantum observer hypothesis. Program your computer to start playing at noon in a soundproof room. If there's nobody in the room at the time, then nothing happens.
Suppose there's a picture on the wall, and the music is so loud that it has a chance of knocking the picture down. As long as the room stays empty, what's inside is not considered to be a picture, or sound, or what have you: It's a set of state probabilities. Maybe the picture has fallen, maybe it hasn't, there's no way of telling so both "states" are encoded into the reality of the room.
Until someone opens the door, at which point the universe backtracks, picks one or the other event, and shows you all the evidence and history of whichever event it decides should have occurred. (E.g. if the picture falls, does mold grow on the frame, etc.)
It's a weird hypothesis, but it apparently explains some experimental results better than the other variously weird hypotheses.
Slashdot Mirror
Your link goes to a PDF of a document with a lot of forumulas in - what, Polish? It isn't openable in Equation Editor.
Because I like MS Equation Editor better. I don't like the OO formula editor because I don't enjoy the cycle of tweak the code - look and see if it updated correctly - tweak the code again - etc. I like that MS Equation Editor is 100% WYSIWYG.
That being said, I can easily understand that people writing math dissertations would prefer being able to enter a formula at full keyboard speed rather than having to do a lot of mouse movements. For someone in that situation, it would be worthwhile to take the time to learn the syntax of OO formulas. But if you prefer to use the mouse-based GUI, then the MS product is much (much!) better.
-Graham
Really? I love it. It's one of the things I miss most in OpenOffice.
Writing facetiously is not an excuse for writing badly. In fact, writing correctly is even more important when you are trying to be funny, particularly if you hope to succeed. Which, I am sorry to have to say, you did not.
-Graham
Yes, -er is a comparative and -est is a superlative. The super- prefix is a slightly different question. I think it is usually neither (superficial, superfluous, supernatural), but in some cases can be a sort of comparative (supermarket, superhuman, supercomputer). I don't think it is ever a superlative, except arguably in the case of the word superlative itself.
-Graham
Those are adjectives, not superlatives.
The English language has exactly three ways to form a superlative:
1. For "simple" adjectives: est
2. For other adjectives: the most
3. Irregular superlatives: best, worst, least, most, eldest and furthest.
The superlatives for each of your adjectives would be:
the most overblown
the most phantasmagoric
the most fantastic
the most delusional
the most raving
the most lunatic
The one that comes closest to qualifying for an "est" form is raving, but the resulting superlative is not commonly used and would convey an ironic tone: "You just made the ravingest post I've recently seen on Slashdot."
-Graham
The English language does have other ways of forming superlatives
I think lightyear4 may have been trying to say "The honorable Lord British." Which is a perfectly appropriate form of address for a somewhat-but-not-extremely reputable individual like a member of the House of Commons, significant mayor, minor gentry, local elected cheese-grater, etc.
I do not believe there has been much discussion among the peerage of the correct style and title of address for the dictator-for-life of a pretend kingdom.
Also, I agree that, as a name, "Lord British" is just dumb on its face. Why not have other UO characters called "Senator American" and "Marquis French."
-Graham
Having a net worth of $1 million doesn't even mean living the high life. Picture a middle class household with an annual income of $60,000. They certainly can't afford a beach house and 3 SUV's, although they aren't missing any meals, either. Suppose Dad had a traumatic experience as a youth and tends to worry about money and retirement. Consequently, he's been saving $15,000/year since he was 25. (His neighbors, who live better than he does but pay $15,000/year on their second mortgage and maxed-out credit cards, think he's a bit weird and offputting.)
By the time he's 55 he can reasonably expect to have a balance of around $1 million in his retirement fund. Given that he probably also has some equity in his house, etc., he probably became a "millionaire" (e.g., more than $1 million net worth) around age 50.
Can he afford a trip to space? Sure, if he wants to accept the consequent reduction in his retirement income. But he worked all his life to put that retirement account together; he doesn't seem like the kind of guy who would blow it on (what is essentially) a three-day bender.
If you want to find space tourists, you have to look for people who are not merely millionaires, but who also have the disposition and ability to *spend* bucketloads of money. This means you're in the $10mm-and-up range, of which there are far fewer people.
-Graham
It's already an undesirable situation if we lose another Shuttle orbiter. However, perhaps it could be an undesirable situation where everyone survives, instead of an undesirable situation where some people die.
Once everyone's on board the ISS, you would presumably do another Shuttle or Soyuz launch (or two) to bring them back. Mission planners have no doubt looked at the food and air reserves on the station, vs. the time it would take to stage an emergency launch.
-Graham
From the article: "Since DECnet is a less well-known protocol, nobody is attempting to hack it," says Quayle.
Well, they weren't. Until you said that.
-Graham
What you're describing may be laziness or incompetence, but how is it corruption? Where's the conflict of interest?
You're wrong, actually - even though the original poster agrees with you. "Who" is used when it is the subject of a verb (the thing doing the action). "Whom" is used when it is the object (the thing being acted upon). The correct choice most certainly does not depend on any preceding conjunction. There are many cases where "of who" works perfectly well, and this is one of them.
To make this easier, re-write the sentence as "It is just a case of who your English teacher was." The main verb of this sentence is "is." The subject of "is" is "it." The rest of the sentence is a noun clause serving as the object of "is."
Within the noun clause, there is another verb, "was." The subject of "was" is "your English teacher," leaving "who" again in the role of an object.
So in this particular sentence, "who" is serving as an object in both contexts, and is therefore unambiguously correct.
-Graham
Well, then you should read "Digital Fortress," by Dan Brown. It will give you new respect for the merely egregious stupidity of TV.
Okay, let's compare MS to RH, using only apples.
The announcement that prompted this article is that Windows 2000, which was released in March 2000, loses mainline support this month. It will continue to receive security fixes and "major" bug fixes until June 2010.
Red Hat's major release in the Windows 2000 timeframe was Red Hat Linux 7, released on October 17, 2000. Errata support for RHL 7, including security updates, officially ended in March 2003.
That's the apples-to-apples comparison. At the time of the Windows 2000 release, anyone who claimed that Red Hat was in a different (and lower) category of supportability - which is what you are now claiming - would have been yelled at by Slashdot as a Microsoft astroturfer.
But even if we drink the orange Kool-Aid and accept that no Red Hat release prior to RHEL 2.1 could be considered supportable, consider that RHEL 2.1, which was released in May 2002, lost mainline support in May 2005 - last month, and will receive security bugfixes until May 2009. Where was the Slashdot article then?
At the time of RHEL 2.1's release, the current Microsoft OS was Windows XP, which was released in December 2001 - five months before RHEL 2.1. Windows XP will not lose mainline support until December 2006, with security fixes continuing until December 2011.
Looking backward, Microsoft has sometimes extended support coverage for additional years when it found that many customers were continuing to use an older product. It did this for Windows NT and for Windows 98. Red Hat, on the other hand, has cancelled support programs causing great disruption to its customers, including ending support for an OS version less than a year after its release (RHL 9).
Moving forward, currently Red Hat offers 3 years of full support and 7 (total) years of security fixes. Microsoft offers 5 years of full support and 10 (total) years of security fixes.
Of course, it's important to note that the open source nature of Red Hat's releases means that other groups besides Red Hat can take over support for abandoned releases. However, if you stick to comparing apples to apples, you don't have a case.
-Graham
What I really wonder about this sort of situation is: Why not just show the British version? Seriously, why do they pay all the production costs, risks, etc to make a "word for word" copy? Is it just to avoid the British accents?
-Graham
The all-time most successful British-to-American crossover is almost certainly "Three's Company," which was the American version of the British "Man About The House." Both were extremely successful.
Incidentally, why is it that successful British shows always have to be dumbed-down and cheesed-up before studio execs deem them fit for American audiences?
-Graham
Consider that would be condicting the inquiry by doing our own thinking using human brains. Of all the potential ideas, thoughts, and concepts that could conceivably exist in the universe, we are inherently only capable of processing those which can be formed within a human brain.
In the computer world, some CPUs have been capable of fully emulating themselves: A 6809 emulator running on a 6809 could in theory be capable of running any object code that runs on the native processor. Others have not been: The Z-80 has a separate address space for device I/O, which cannot be virtualized. The 80386 could emulate itself, excluding the emulation control features (e.g. it could not emulate itself emulating itself).
In the biological world, human consciousness as manifested via the human brain might (or might not) lack the capability to conceive of all the principles of its own operation.
Just a thought.
-Graham
How many times does this have to be re-stated on this thread? YOU DO NOT NEED TO DO THIS IN REAL TIME.
Let's suppose it takes a billion instructions to simulate the activity of a single neuron over the course of a second. Then this computer could run about seven seconds of real-time brain activity in about a year. Seven seconds is far more than enough time to recognize and classify an object, in a working (and trained) biological brain.
Can you use this to run hyper-speeded brains through simulated childhoods? No. But does it have the potential to be interesting for research purposes? I have no idea, I'm not a biologist, but it seems feasible to me.
-Graham
Yes, of course that's what he meant. However, there are certain technical difficulties inherent to a numbering system in this base; notably, the requirement to identify more than 37 septillion differentiable single-place symbols. Expressing a "digit" as a base 10 number defeats the purpose of the system, even if you draw a circle around it.
SerpentMage's key insight, of course, was that we are only interested in a particular number - the factorial of the Great Answer. This will be the only use we will ever make of the base-37483411234209726053065806 numbering system. Therefore, we only need to create unique symbols for two entities - the number 37483411234209726053065805, which we will refer to as "4", and the number 33187259034871818286636170, which we will refer to as "2". Under this system, (decimal) 42! equals (base-37483411234209726053065806) 42.
Appropriate assignment of values to the symbols "six," "nine" and (possibly) "times" is left as an exercise for the reader.
-Graham
All fine and good, except that Patrick Stewart can't play the part. He was nearly too old to do a "young" Picard during the TNG series, and that was 15-20 years ago. Do you really want some other schmuck playing Picard?
I was thinking of relatively simple constraints, like "do not enter the headquarters building" or "you aren't allowed to shoot a manager at OCP".
-Graham
What's interesting about this is the way it combines biological and machine intelligence. Cockroaches (at least the kind we get here; I've never seen a Giant Madagascar Hissing Cockroach -for which, I heartily thank whatever power there may be) have a fairly complex pattern of behavior; they "understand" finding food, running away from predators, locating good places to hide and live, etc, etc. These behaviors are not easy to model using machine intelligence; at least, not in a way that works in the real world.
Imagine if you could program a cockroach. You have chemical and optical receptors, and the ability to move individual legs and appendages. You have to be able to do things like "go forward" and "eat this object," both of which are quite complex in practice. You also have to answer questions like "is it food" or "is it scary." And you need an overriding program that prioritizes the various items in your environment and decides, at each moment, what you should do next. How many lines of C code do you think this would take? How do you suppose any given program might fare in the real world, competing for resources (and trying to avoid being eaten or stepped on) alongside real cockroaches?
So what if it turns out that real cockroaches are way ahead of the state of the art in machine intelligence - but you find cockroach behavior useful in some potential system? Instead of waiting for AI research to catch up to the cockroach, why not just put a cockroach in the driver's seat and let it run the robot. Treat it as a "black box" heuristic machine. Use machine intelligence only to constrain its behavior.
As to shining a light on the cockroach to get it to run a particular direction, you have to ask: Why not just turn refuse to obey the cockroach's commands if you are going "the wrong way" according to the machine intelligence? I don't know the answer, but I didn't have to face the task of actually building the thing. However, I would imagine it is much simpler to turn LEDs on and off than to get involved in the mechanics of how the legs work.
If you can figure out how cockroaches (or some other control animal) identifies friend and foe, how they focus on a particular target, and what their attack behaviors are, it's entirely plausible that you could use this in a military application. Imagine armored, landscape-destroying robots with giant laser weapons; piloted, perhaps, by kittens. I'm sure this is where the research will inevitably lead.
-Graham
You think America's a free country? Try doing exactly what you suggested. Watch what happens.
Yes, NT, 2000 Server and 2003 Server have all included Remote Installation Services, which allows you to network-boot PXE compatible clients *using Microsoft proprietary protocols*.
What they have changed is that 2003 Server SP1, as I understand it, now allows you to network-boot PXE compatible clients *using tftp and any CD image*, whether from Microsoft or not.
So I should now be able to toss a Knoppix ISO on my 2003 SP1 server, and netboot any PXE machine I happen to own.
I don't know if it's really this easy, or what the gotchas are, but conceptually it's a big step forward.
-Graham
It's the strong quantum observer hypothesis. Program your computer to start playing at noon in a soundproof room. If there's nobody in the room at the time, then nothing happens.
Suppose there's a picture on the wall, and the music is so loud that it has a chance of knocking the picture down. As long as the room stays empty, what's inside is not considered to be a picture, or sound, or what have you: It's a set of state probabilities. Maybe the picture has fallen, maybe it hasn't, there's no way of telling so both "states" are encoded into the reality of the room.
Until someone opens the door, at which point the universe backtracks, picks one or the other event, and shows you all the evidence and history of whichever event it decides should have occurred. (E.g. if the picture falls, does mold grow on the frame, etc.)
It's a weird hypothesis, but it apparently explains some experimental results better than the other variously weird hypotheses.
-Graham