I sense that you are becoming frustrated and as a result, your comments are becoming increasingly hostile. In light of that, I think it's best to end the conversation here. I appreciate your attempts to explain all this stuff to me. I will continue to read up on the subject elsewhere to try to come to a better understanding. Maybe someday I will agree with you. Thanks again, Anonymous Coward, whoever you are...
> Anyway, I officially give up. You're not even trying to understand any more, and are consistently > misrepresenting everything I say. You insist that everything be defined with respect to an embedding space > even when it is MANIFESTLY DEFINED without regard to any such space; any intrinsic geometry you reinterpret > as extrinsic, again, even when it is manifestly makes no reference to any extrinsic space. Your prejudices > are insurmountable.
I resent the implication that I am not trying to understand any more. That's really uncalled for when I have done nothing except challenge the statements that you have made in the same way that you challenge mine.
Anyway, it's clear that this means of communication is insufficient for properly getting across the points we are trying to make. From my point of view, you keep using terms which are inconsistently and incompletely defined, and when shown how they are inconsistent or incomplete, point to some other inconsistent and incomplete definitions which satisfy the specific point in question but which then invalidate other aspects of the first set of inconsistent or incomplete defintions. And then when that is pointed out, you go back to the first set of incomplete and inconsistent definitions to satisfy the second set. It's like you're using a bunch of half-truths to try to build up a truth, using the true half of each half-truth to explain the false part of the other half-truth. That's what it "looks" like to me. It's not because I am refusing to try to understand. I guess we'll have to call it, like I said, a limitation of this communication mechanism, because I *am* trying to understand, but whatever arguments you think are so convincing, they aren't seeming so convincing to me.
As a final point, you say that these these non-Euclidean spaces are "MANIFESTLY DEFINED without regard to any such [extrinsic] space". So I guess your point is that non-Euclidean space is self-consistent by the definitions of non-Euclidean space. That's great. But please don't try to use the ants-on-a-sphere example to demonstrate how this is so because it is just a *poor* example, being implicitly defined in an extrinsic 3d space. And also, please don't expect me to believe that non-Euclidean geometries can describe any aspect of the physical reality in which we live, if any example you can pull up to demonstrate non-Euclidean space requires an extrinsic Euclidean space in which to frame the example. And finally - if physicists really believe that non-Euclidean space is required to explain the bending of light in gravity then... I wonder if someday a simpler explanation won't be hit upon which doesn't require contorting space in this way.
> No, that's what a 3D protractor does. A 2D protractor already exists in 2D, not 3D. It doesn't project > anything.
Your 2d protractor will then by definition not be able to be placed on the surface of the sphere. Because it will always exist at a tangent to the sphere. If the 2d protractor is "curved" to match the surface of the sphere, then it's no longer 2d. It's 3d. It's that 3rd dimension that lets you curve it to fit the sphere.
I say all of those things because I don't think non-Euclidean space is well-defined. I would prefer to think of there being a greater number of dimensions with our space "curved" within them. Because even though that concept seems dubious at best to me, at least it seems logically feasable, unlike this non-Euclidean concept of "space that curves" without defining what it means to "curve" except to appeal to a higher dimension, and yet at the same time saying that there is no higher dimension.
1) A protractor is a 3d object. So right there you have admitted that you have to appeal to a higher dimension (the 3rd dimension) to measure the curvature of a non-Euclidean 2d space (the surface of a sphere)
2) A protractor works by implicitly projecting 3d points into a 2d plane. It rotates its ends through a plane. So when you line it up on some part of the sphere on which you are going to measure your "triangle's" angle, and then sweep it through an arc, you are implicitly projecting the lines that it is measuring the angle between from the 3d curved face of the sphere to the 2d plane defined by the sweep of the protractor
> Suppose you have a spherical triangle on the Earth, with one vertex at the north pole and two at the > equator. All three of its angles are 90 degree right angles.
Stop right there. You're begging the question. We're talking about how to measure angles on a spherical surface. You've just said that we have three 90 degree angles. That begs the question. How did you measure the angles as 90 degrees?
> You can build a protractor entirely within the Earth's surface. But make it simpler: construct a > "right-angle measurer". It's a cross, with a 1-meter north-south piece of wood, and a 1-meter east-west > piece of wood. If you can line one bar up with one edge of a triangle, and the other bar with the adjoining > edge, then the two edges of the triangle form a right angle.
All of those objects you describe exist in three dimensions, and it would not be possible to build them as two dimensional objects. Really you should be talking about how to measure *within* the surface of the sphere, without using objects that you define in our 3d world. Just define a structure within the surface of the sphere that you will use to measure angles on the surface of the sphere. It would be the analog of what you are talking about. A right-angle measurer there would just be two lines that meet at a 90 degree angle (of course how you would know that they are meeting at a 90 degree angle without already having a right-angle measurer, I will never know).
> Note: we are not "projecting" anything. The right-angle measurer itself lies completely within the > spherical surface. Its two crossed bars follow the curvature of the Earth; they are not totally planar. > (The smaller the measurer is, the closer it becomes to being actually planar, but again that's beside the > point.) This is a key point: no part of our measuring device pops up off of the 2D surface into a third > dimension. It lies entirely within the Earth's surface.
Your right angle measurer does not lie completely within the spherical surface. Mine does though. Your device must by definition "pop up off" of the 2d surface if it is a 3d object like a pair of crossed bars.
> We can take it to the three vertexes of our giant spherical triangle and verify that yes, all three are > 90-degree angles.
By definition, you cannot even move the thing without appealing to a higher dimension (you can't even *define* it without a third dimension!). Go ahead and slide it across the surface of the sphere, and rotate it. You are of course moving the thing in three dimensions when you do that. So immediately you are appealing to three dimensions by trying to use this device to measure the angles of your "triangle".
In every example you have given me thus far, you have appealed to a higher dimension. You haven't even said how you would define a sphere except as a three dimensional object. You can say that the surface of a sphere is a "curved 2d plane" but that's just abuse of terms. It's not that at all. The surface of the sphere *is* the sphere and it's a *3d* object.
You also seem to want to use this trick where you define the surface of a sphere as a "space" in and of itself, where all of the properties of geometry will work differently than those o
You talk about intrinsic geometry as "curvature" of the space, without appealing to a higher dimension in which to define that curvature. I think that what you're really saying is that we can *model* the space as if it is curved in a higher space, but it really isn't. There is no higher space in which it is curved, it just has properties when measured within itself, that would correspond to the same properties that that space would have if it were curved within a higher dimension.
So within this non-Euclidean space, I may find that if I apply a force to an object in a certain direction, the object moves X units of distance. Then if I apply a force in a perpendicular direction, the object moves N * X units of distance. One way to visualize why this would occur, and to write mathematical formulas defining the rules of movement in this space, is to pretend that the space is "curved" within some higher dimension. But you don't actually *say* that it is curved in a higher dimension, you just say that these rules of movement are intrinsic to the space. There is no higher dimension, and yet there are rules of movement that would be identical to what you would find if the space were curved within a higher dimension.
So the ants on the balloon are not actually inside a space curved in a higher dimension, all of their physics just acts like they are.
I *think* that's the basis of what you're trying to say. So when we talk about lengths being contracted by gravity waves and such, what we're really saying is that we can model the behavior of the physics of our actual universe by pretending that it's embedded in a higher dimension, with a nonuniform "shape" that changes over time. And yet, we say that although it *behaves* like it has contracting lengths and nonuniform shapes and stuff, it doesn't *really* have those things, because it's not really embedded in a higher dimension, which it would *have to be* in order to actually have those things. In fact, it doesn't even matter if it's really embedded in a higher space or just behaves like it does, it's all the same to us, right?
I could even get on board with this idea - it's just a way of saying, "distances don't work the way that you would logically think it does given your limited experience in a macro world". Although it seems counter-intuitive, maybe in our universe, lengths contract and space "curves" in a way that can be modelled by a n-dimensional space embedded in an n+1 dimensional space (using rules of geometry that would "make sense" in this model to derive observed behaviors in our actual universe).
Why our universe should behave like its curved within a larger space, and not actually *be* curved within a larger space, I don't know. I would think that the easier logical deduction to make would be that our universe exists within a 4th spatial dimension in which it curves.
Interesting. But why is the rate at which electric and magnetic fields "charge up" limited by anything? What is happening during this "charging up" process? I think it comes back to my simplified concept - that they charge up at "the fastest rate possible", which is to say, the shortest time duration possible between a cause and an effect. I suspect that all that permeability and permittivity of space are are ways of talking about the speed of causality. But I don't really remember the details, and don't remember permeability and permittivity at all, even though I am sure we must have derived things the same way, as I'm guessing this stuff is pretty standard in college physics courses.
> If you don't want to call it a triangle, fine. Call it a "gentriangle" (for generalized triangle). The > point is that there is a measurement procedure you can follow identically in either Euclidean or > non-Euclidean space, which does not appeal to any higher dimensions, which can determine whether the space > is Euclidean or non-Euclidean.
Can you explain what this measurement procedure that one can follow identically in either Euclidean or non-Euclidean space?
I can't think of any way that measuring in these two spaces would be the same. We measure angles in a plane, and I can only think that the only way to measure the "angle" between two lines on a curved surface would involve projecting those lines onto a plane and measuring the angle there. If we projected all three angles of the triangle onto the same plane (the only way to do this measurement "the same" as in the flat Euclidean case) then we would also measure 180 degrees. It is only if we allow the projection of each vertex into a different plane (say, one tangent to the sphere at the vertex), that we could measure more than 180 degrees total for all three. But then, we're assuming a 3d space in which to project those 2d planes tangent to the sphere, so we've already violated one of the assumptions of the non-Euclidean space, that it doesn't require any higher order dimensions to perform measurements within it.
> I'm not appealing to any hyperspaces. I'm talking about the intrinsic curvature of 3D space itself. I can > determine that by examining the properties of 2D objects (triangles), but I don't have to; I could equally > well, say, measure the interior solid angles of a 3D tetrahedron instead.
Are you *sure* that it won't require "stepping out" of your three spatial dimensions into 4 in order to properly measure the interior solid angles of that 3d tetrahedron, if the space in which the tetrahedron exists is "curved"? If not, then won't the interior angles of the tetrahedron in the curved space "look" like they are in non-curved space, if you can only exist in and move around in that curved 3d space yourself?
> No. I can determine the 3D curvature of space by examining the geometry of a 3D pyramid.
I know that it's not going to be possible to properly explain what you mean via this limited means of communication. But I really wish that I could sit down with someone like you and go over it "in real life" with a pen and paper. Because I would *love* to see the reasoning, backed by illustration and whatever other means of explanation are available, of how one would, in a 3d "curved" space, ever be able to notice that the space-time is curved, except by stepping out of the 3d world and into an extra dimension by which one would be able to compare different points within that 3d space which one could see would look like they lie in a straight line in that space, but could be see in the extra dimension to curve.
Sometimes I wish that I could just go to a local university, find a physics professor, invite him/her to lunch, and get an explanation for stuff like this. Because I still don't find your examples and explanations sufficent, despite how much I appreciate the effort you have taken.
Consider that there would be no way to have "examples" or "illustrations" of what a "curved space-time" would look like *except* by reducing to a simpler case (of a 2d curved space) and illustrate it in 3 dimensions. And whenever you do that, it always begs the question of, "if the only way to even think of these spaces as embedded in a higher dimension, then how can they ever exist independently thereof?"
> We naturally visualize curved objects as being embedded in the 3D space we can experience, so naturally our > intuition is for how lower dimensional objects embed in higher dimensional spaces. But that doesn't mean > that's the only kind of curvature that makes sense. You can speak of the extrinsic curvature of a 2D sphere > embedded in 3D, o
Those ants may be stuck to a sphere, but that sphere is embedded in a 3d space (how else would you define a sphere)? They may not know it, but they're really living in three dimensions, even if they feel like they're in 2 dimensions because everywhere they look, it looks like two dimensions.
Of course, it only looks like two dimensions to them if they can't see anything "beyond" the surface of the sphere as they look at its horizon. If light is bending around the sphere so that they can never see off of the sphere, then it doesn't change the fact that the light is bending in the 3d space that the sphere is embedded in. The ants may not realize it but its true.
Now how does this analogy relate to the original question? If our 3d space is combined with a 4th time dimension to make a "space-time" that can bend, then how is it bending if not in some higher dimension? If the ants' sphere is bending, it is doing so in the third dimension that we as the observer of the sphere and the ants are aware of. The only way for that sphere to even *exist* is if there is a third dimension, regardless of whether or not the ants can perceive it.
So is there a 4th spatial dimension that our 3 spatial dimensions are "curving" in? It would seem that this is the logical extension of the analogy that you gave.
I understand that there are ways of formulating math so that you only have to care about the shape of the space that is containing the objects that you are interested in. And yet, if one was to "really" exist in that reality and be an observer of that system, one would *necessarily* have to sit outside of it, in a higher dimension, able to observe it.
What really bugs me is string theory with its supposed 11 or 13 or whatever dimensions; I just have this gut feeling that any theory that requires such things is not on the right track. I think the real answer is a much more difficult one that obeys our three spatial dimensions and observes time as the natural consequence of causality (which can be modeled as a 4th dimension but shouldn't be thought of as one). That's my gut feeling about it. Of course my gut feeling is totally irrelevent, given that I am not a physicist. But when I read Garrett Lisi's stuff I was really impressed that it only requires three spatial dimensions and time.
I have come to understand that Garrett Lisi's "Exceptionally Simple Theory of Everything" is really just a "taxonomy" of the particles and forces of physics, produced by some very high order but "simple" math (in as much as group theory can be "simple"), with some arbitrary choices of derivation (or whatever "breaking the symmetry of E8" means). So it's not so much an explanation of why things are the way they are as it is a comprehensive "periodic chart" of particles and forces, but it is interesting because it has predictions that could lead to new applied physics if they turn out to be correct, and because it gives physicists a new "language" to describe the fundamental particles and forces of physics, which may be enough to kick-start some new, more fruitful (than string theory) directions in theoretical physics.
I gather all of this from trying very hard to read and understand the paper and all comments that I could find on it, and I am not a physicist and can only understand these things in a very shallow way, using my own analogies and teasing out little threads of understanding that I can latch on to from the little bits that I do understand from the paper and people's comments. And yet, I find it really satisfying that the geometry involved doesn't require more than 3 spatial dimensions. I kind of just reject the idea of more than 3 dimensions. And I want to understand this whole concept of "warping space-time" because it bugs me that it doesn't make sense to me and yet it predicts some very experimentally verifiable things...
* A triangle made by three light rays can become arbitrarily more and more "perfect" by being arbitrarily far from any source of gravity. Since the laws of physics are supposed to work the same everywhere (that is one of the assumptions of relativity, no?), then we ought to be able to frame our laws of physics using arbitrarily straight lines by assuming that all masses are an "infinite" (or as close to infinite as possible) distance away. These same laws should then hold even when sources of gravity are present. Since we can't perform measurements anywhere that there are no sources of gravity (we do our experiments on Earth), I think it must be possible to do experiments multiple times, and "account for" the varying effects of gravity according to the known masses present, and from the different results, infer what the measurements would be without any sources of gravity present.
* That is the first time I have ever heard anyone argue that we should redefine the geometric concept of "straight" at any location in space as "the straightest that light can travel at that location given the effects of gravity there". Is this standard in theoretical physics? If it is, I wouldn't know, because I'm not educated as a physicist, but I would really be surprised to find that it is regardless.
I appreciate your taking the time to try to help me understand this. I will try to read up on "Riemann curvature tensor", but I don't think I will be very successful; I have read about such things before but I always stumble with a) a basic inability to understand some of the fundamental math due to a lack of education and b) questions about fundamental aspects of the theory in question that seem to be taken as "givens", and I can never understand why.
First - I will have to read up more on "intrinsic geometry". My simplistic understanding of the concept of "curve" does not allow it to occur except as an N-dimensional geometric shape embedded in N+1 dimensions, but if "intrinsic geometry" somehow allows this, then I think understanding that is fundamental to my understanding of "curved space-time".
As to your example - I don't quite get it. How can you measure the angles of a triangle and find that they don't add up to 180 degrees? If you're talking about a triangle on a plane, then the angles will *always* add up to 180 degrees, by definition. If you're talking about a "triangle" drawn on the surface of a balloon, then the angles can be greater than 180 degrees - but in this case, "triangle" doesn't really mean the same thing has in the first case, nor does "angle". My point being that, you can't say that "the triangle as defined in two dimensional geometry can have angles adding to greater than 180 degrees in non-Euclidean, curved space", because by *definition*, the geometric shape you are talking about in the first half of the sentence is not the same thing as the geometric shape that you are talking about in the second half of the sentence. The first will always be on a plane and will always have angles adding to 180 degrees; the second thing is not on a plane and does not necessarily have angles adding to 180 degrees. So you're not really "measuring a triangle", at least not in the sense that you are suggesting as an example of "intrinsic geometry".
Furthermore, I don't understand what "non-Euclidean, curved space" *means*. "Space" can't curve. Geometric shapes in that space can curve relative to the space. That's what "curve" *means*.
And, when you say that you didn't have to appeal to any 4D hyperspace - what you should really be saying is that you *did* have to appeal to a 3D hyperspace, since the geometric object in question is a 2-dimensional one (triangle), and your example did use a 3d space (i.e. the surface of a balloon or something). If you were talking about the geometry of a 3d object (say, a pyramid, and whatever the equivalent angle rules for pyramids would be), then you *would* have to appeal to a 4D hyperspace if you were going to make the analogous observations as you did about the 2d triangle drawn on a 3d surface.
My mind just cannot grasp the concept of a space which curved, except when viewed from a space of higher dimension. Whenever explanations are given of this, they invariably do so by confusing terminology, i.e. using a single word to refer to a concept in N dimensions and then trying to use the same word to apply to an analogous concept in N+1 dimensions, and then concluding things based on the fact that these two things are the "same" because they use the "same word", when in fact they are different, and the useage of the same word was misleading. This is how I see your example. But I would like to be shown how I am wrong, if I am indeed wrong.
This is at somewhat of a tangent to the discussion, but I've always thought of the speed of light as representing something fundamental that clearly cannot be exceeded, as follows:
I took my last university physics course in 1991 and my memory of the details is very, very fuzzy. But I do remember a specific conclusion that I came to based on what I was learning, and I have retained that conclusion along with a vague idea of what led me to it, which was:
Light is electromagnetic radiation. Breaking this term down, it means "radiation (i.e. something travelling away from its source) of paired electric and magnetic fields". I know that we learned in that class that a standing electric field causes a standing magnetic field, at a 90 degree angle offset from the electric field, and a standing magnetic field causes a standing electric field, at a 90 degree angle offset from the magnetic field. And I am pretty sure that we learned that there is some distance in space between these fields as they are "caused". So the electric field causes a magnetic field, rotated and moved slightly, and that magnetic field causes an electric field, rotated and moved slightly, which causes another magnetic field, which causes another electric field, etc, etc. These fields "move" through space because each causes another field at a slight offset, and this constant offsetting is observed as movement through space.
What I don't remember is what the offsets are (i.e. what the difference in position exactly there is between the electric field and the magnetic field), and whether or not there has to be some initial movement in the field or something to propogate this movement (obviously there must be something determining the direction in which the fields are offset and thus "moving", but I can't remember what it is), but I can recall visualizing it as an x-y coordinate axis that is twisting as it moves through space, the twisting representing the rotation as each magnetic field causes an electric field, and vice-versa. In my mind it looks like a spiraling L-shape flying through space. That's my mental model of electromagnetic radiation, that I retain from that class.
The insight that I had is that the electric field causes the magnetic field 'instantly', and that then causes an electric field 'instantly', and so on. There is nothing in the equations or models which describe the electic field causing the magnetic field, and vice-versa, that would limit the rate at which this happens; time is not even in the equation, it's just "E causes M, M causes E". So one would think that they would all exist at the exact same instant in time, and the 'speed' of propogation of these fields would be infinite. But this can't be so, because each previous field 'causes' the next field, and it always takes 'time' for something to happen. And so the speed of light is limited only by 'how fast things can happen'. In other words, the speed of light is "the speed at which a cause can produce an event". It is limited solely by this fundamental aspect of reality. If "things could happen faster", then light would "move faster".
So I never expect anything to be able to move faster than the speed of light, because it would mean that the fundamental "rate" at which events can occur in our reality would be exceeded. This kind of sounds like the same thing as saying that events would start to occur at the same instant that their causes occur, or even *before* their causes occur, which would imply time standing still or moving backwards. Which fits the concept that travelling faster than light would mean travelling backwards in time, which is also a logical contradiction in our reality.
Perhaps the distance between the E field and the M field it produces is "the smallest distance possible in our reality", whatever that is. And the time taken for the E field to produce the M field is "the smallest time possible in our reality", whatever that is. And the ratio of these two values is - the speed of light.
I really need to read up on and refresh my memory about the physics of this stuff.
"curvature in space-time"? What does this mean exactly?
You can only draw a curve of an N-dimensional geometric shape in N+1 dimensions (i.e. a curved line must be embedded in a plane, a curved plane must be embedded in 3-dimensional space). So are you saying that there is some super-dimension that is the "5th dimension", in which the four-dimensional "shape" of "space-time" can "curve"?
It was a stupid joke about the Apple Lisa. He wasn't actually talking about the Laser Interferometer Space Antenna. If it makes you feel any better, the joke wasn't funny anyway.
I think this type of thing can be implemented correctly and work well. Just because Microsoft can't do it correctly in Outlook is irrelevent. Outlook does very little correctly, and is a major piece of shit as a mail client, so it isn't suprising that they don't do autocorrect correctly either.
It would be cool if there were a mail server feature that would "fix" when the mail is received for delivery. It could detect when top-posting was used and automatically turn it into bottom posting, and apply other obvious fixes. This wouldn't even be that hard because I think that all email clients precede quoted blocks with ">" at the front of each line, and nested quote blocks can just as easily be detected by multiple ">" prefixes.
I actually made the mistake of sending out a "public service announcement" to the engineering mailing list at my company a couple of years back, detailing the reasons that bottom posting was better than top posting, and how quoted blocks should be trimmed to keep them relevent, etc, and of course a multi-day flamefest between various engineers ensued with no one actually listening to anything that anyone else was saying, just spouting off about their own preferences and why their way was "right". Nobody seemed to care about the links I included which pointed to comprehensive summaries of how email etiquitte works and why. I learned my lesson, and won't do that again.
Nope. I am just uninterested in spending my time refuting arguments that have been refuted dozens and DOZENS of times in OLPC discussions on Slashdot and furthermore only require a tiny amount of thoughtful contemplation to see the errors of anyway. If the OP can't take 10 seconds to actually think through the problem, I can't take 5 minutes to correct his stupidity.
Your remark might have worked if the OP hadn't only contributed the same drive that's been regurgitated and then discredited a thousand times already on the various OLPC discussions.
You should go to the OLPC site and read about the initial experiences they are having with their first deployments. There are benefits that even the OLPC team didn't realize would occur.
But Intel *is* trying to promote its Classmate PC as an alternative to OLPC. They have willingly decided to compete with OLPC, and they're not even doing it in the same spirit or with the same goals. They are basically trying to fudge whatever they can just to get sales of their product; clearly they don't care about the actual impact that their product will have on its customers, as evidenced by the 'providing a generator so that the Classmate PC can actually be powered instead of designing the thing correctly in the first place'. All of Intel's actions have been consistent with a pure profit motive, even when it harms a not-for-profit organization that, as far as I can tell, and despite unfounded personal attacks on Negroponte aside, has purely humanitarian goals. These sales tactics are not surprising considering Intel's corporate attitute towards OLPC and while they may not specifically be vetted by Intel, they certainly fit Intel's overall agenda.
Re:The classmate hardware SUCKS, at least...
on
Negroponte vs Intel
·
· Score: 1
> Having good hardware design doesn't mean jack if the software is slow as hell.
Uh, do you know what software is called 'soft' ware? Because it can be modified! So having good hardware design *does* mean 'jack' if the software is slow as hell, because the software can always be reworked or rewritten to improve its functionality. The hardware is fixed once the product is manufactured. So you'd better believe that it is significant that the OLPC has good hardware. Who cares about the software - that can always be, and will always be, improved with time. Software is about 1000x more complex than hardware anyway, so it isn't surprising that the software will take longer to mature.
> Their intention of creating a GUI that can be recoded was a poor decision. They had no respect to the > fact that the hardware should've been treated as an embedded system, and for all the builds that I've > tried, either on emulator, or on test boards, sucks.
Can you please rephrase these sentences. I work on embedded systems professionally and what you have said basically makes no sense.
> OLPC's direction (or lack of) caused a whole group at my university to drop out of interest.
No offense dude, but seeing that you don't really seem to be able to coherently argue a point, I am not sure how much the OLPC project will be missing your contributions.
hey! Great response. I get very disillusioned and depressed when I read the comments of so many people in response to these OLPC articles. I can't even comprehend how so many people can miss the obvious logical arguments and facts so readily, and so I have to blame it on wilful ignorance. It's hard to believe that people who are being wilfully ignorant about a topic can ever be educated, but I appreciate people like you who try!
Those are really great points, and not to detract from them:
I personally would invest in Intel or MS before I'd invest in your company. This is not a judgement about you in particular; on the flip side I'd personally rather work at or do business with your company than either Intel or MS. But when it comes to investing money, I and most people will choose the business with the fastest growth every time. I don't want any company I invest in to do something dishonest, so this would temper my enthusiasm for investing in MS or Intel; but, in the end, I think the pure profit motive would win out for me too. And I don't think I am unusual.
My point being, that what you say may all be true, but the market is very large, and the majority of the resources will go to whoever fights the hardest (and often, the dirtiest). This means that people like you and companies like yours are sadly, destined to remain a very small part of the market.
You are completely underinformed on this issue, and the little bit of an opinion that you do have is clearly based on personal bias and not factual evidence or even rational thought. Please stop attempting to contribute to the discussion until you have educated yourself to the minimum level necessary to be worth listening to. Thanks!
Slashdot Mirror
I sense that you are becoming frustrated and as a result, your comments are becoming increasingly hostile. In light of that, I think it's best to end the conversation here. I appreciate your attempts to explain all this stuff to me. I will continue to read up on the subject elsewhere to try to come to a better understanding. Maybe someday I will agree with you. Thanks again, Anonymous Coward, whoever you are ...
> Anyway, I officially give up. You're not even trying to understand any more, and are consistently
... I wonder if someday a simpler explanation won't be hit upon which doesn't require contorting space in this way.
> misrepresenting everything I say. You insist that everything be defined with respect to an embedding space
> even when it is MANIFESTLY DEFINED without regard to any such space; any intrinsic geometry you reinterpret
> as extrinsic, again, even when it is manifestly makes no reference to any extrinsic space. Your prejudices
> are insurmountable.
I resent the implication that I am not trying to understand any more. That's really uncalled for when I have done nothing except challenge the statements that you have made in the same way that you challenge mine.
Anyway, it's clear that this means of communication is insufficient for properly getting across the points we are trying to make. From my point of view, you keep using terms which are inconsistently and incompletely defined, and when shown how they are inconsistent or incomplete, point to some other inconsistent and incomplete definitions which satisfy the specific point in question but which then invalidate other aspects of the first set of inconsistent or incomplete defintions. And then when that is pointed out, you go back to the first set of incomplete and inconsistent definitions to satisfy the second set. It's like you're using a bunch of half-truths to try to build up a truth, using the true half of each half-truth to explain the false part of the other half-truth. That's what it "looks" like to me. It's not because I am refusing to try to understand. I guess we'll have to call it, like I said, a limitation of this communication mechanism, because I *am* trying to understand, but whatever arguments you think are so convincing, they aren't seeming so convincing to me.
As a final point, you say that these these non-Euclidean spaces are "MANIFESTLY DEFINED without regard to any such [extrinsic] space". So I guess your point is that non-Euclidean space is self-consistent by the definitions of non-Euclidean space. That's great. But please don't try to use the ants-on-a-sphere example to demonstrate how this is so because it is just a *poor* example, being implicitly defined in an extrinsic 3d space. And also, please don't expect me to believe that non-Euclidean geometries can describe any aspect of the physical reality in which we live, if any example you can pull up to demonstrate non-Euclidean space requires an extrinsic Euclidean space in which to frame the example. And finally - if physicists really believe that non-Euclidean space is required to explain the bending of light in gravity then
> No, that's what a 3D protractor does. A 2D protractor already exists in 2D, not 3D. It doesn't project
> anything.
Your 2d protractor will then by definition not be able to be placed on the surface of the sphere. Because it will always exist at a tangent to the sphere. If the 2d protractor is "curved" to match the surface of the sphere, then it's no longer 2d. It's 3d. It's that 3rd dimension that lets you curve it to fit the sphere.
I say all of those things because I don't think non-Euclidean space is well-defined. I would prefer to think of there being a greater number of dimensions with our space "curved" within them. Because even though that concept seems dubious at best to me, at least it seems logically feasable, unlike this non-Euclidean concept of "space that curves" without defining what it means to "curve" except to appeal to a higher dimension, and yet at the same time saying that there is no higher dimension.
> Use a protractor.
I think you just made my point.
1) A protractor is a 3d object. So right there you have admitted that you have to appeal to a higher dimension (the 3rd dimension) to measure the curvature of a non-Euclidean 2d space (the surface of a sphere)
2) A protractor works by implicitly projecting 3d points into a 2d plane. It rotates its ends through a plane. So when you line it up on some part of the sphere on which you are going to measure your "triangle's" angle, and then sweep it through an arc, you are implicitly projecting the lines that it is measuring the angle between from the 3d curved face of the sphere to the 2d plane defined by the sweep of the protractor
> Suppose you have a spherical triangle on the Earth, with one vertex at the north pole and two at the
> equator. All three of its angles are 90 degree right angles.
Stop right there. You're begging the question. We're talking about how to measure angles on a spherical surface. You've just said that we have three 90 degree angles. That begs the question. How did you measure the angles as 90 degrees?
> You can build a protractor entirely within the Earth's surface. But make it simpler: construct a
> "right-angle measurer". It's a cross, with a 1-meter north-south piece of wood, and a 1-meter east-west
> piece of wood. If you can line one bar up with one edge of a triangle, and the other bar with the adjoining
> edge, then the two edges of the triangle form a right angle.
All of those objects you describe exist in three dimensions, and it would not be possible to build them as two dimensional objects. Really you should be talking about how to measure *within* the surface of the sphere, without using objects that you define in our 3d world. Just define a structure within the surface of the sphere that you will use to measure angles on the surface of the sphere. It would be the analog of what you are talking about. A right-angle measurer there would just be two lines that meet at a 90 degree angle (of course how you would know that they are meeting at a 90 degree angle without already having a right-angle measurer, I will never know).
> Note: we are not "projecting" anything. The right-angle measurer itself lies completely within the
> spherical surface. Its two crossed bars follow the curvature of the Earth; they are not totally planar.
> (The smaller the measurer is, the closer it becomes to being actually planar, but again that's beside the
> point.) This is a key point: no part of our measuring device pops up off of the 2D surface into a third
> dimension. It lies entirely within the Earth's surface.
Your right angle measurer does not lie completely within the spherical surface. Mine does though. Your device must by definition "pop up off" of the 2d surface if it is a 3d object like a pair of crossed bars.
> We can take it to the three vertexes of our giant spherical triangle and verify that yes, all three are
> 90-degree angles.
By definition, you cannot even move the thing without appealing to a higher dimension (you can't even *define* it without a third dimension!). Go ahead and slide it across the surface of the sphere, and rotate it. You are of course moving the thing in three dimensions when you do that. So immediately you are appealing to three dimensions by trying to use this device to measure the angles of your "triangle".
In every example you have given me thus far, you have appealed to a higher dimension. You haven't even said how you would define a sphere except as a three dimensional object. You can say that the surface of a sphere is a "curved 2d plane" but that's just abuse of terms. It's not that at all. The surface of the sphere *is* the sphere and it's a *3d* object.
You also seem to want to use this trick where you define the surface of a sphere as a "space" in and of itself, where all of the properties of geometry will work differently than those o
I think the very basic problem I have is this:
You talk about intrinsic geometry as "curvature" of the space, without appealing to a higher dimension in which to define that curvature. I think that what you're really saying is that we can *model* the space as if it is curved in a higher space, but it really isn't. There is no higher space in which it is curved, it just has properties when measured within itself, that would correspond to the same properties that that space would have if it were curved within a higher dimension.
So within this non-Euclidean space, I may find that if I apply a force to an object in a certain direction, the object moves X units of distance. Then if I apply a force in a perpendicular direction, the object moves N * X units of distance. One way to visualize why this would occur, and to write mathematical formulas defining the rules of movement in this space, is to pretend that the space is "curved" within some higher dimension. But you don't actually *say* that it is curved in a higher dimension, you just say that these rules of movement are intrinsic to the space. There is no higher dimension, and yet there are rules of movement that would be identical to what you would find if the space were curved within a higher dimension.
So the ants on the balloon are not actually inside a space curved in a higher dimension, all of their physics just acts like they are.
I *think* that's the basis of what you're trying to say. So when we talk about lengths being contracted by gravity waves and such, what we're really saying is that we can model the behavior of the physics of our actual universe by pretending that it's embedded in a higher dimension, with a nonuniform "shape" that changes over time. And yet, we say that although it *behaves* like it has contracting lengths and nonuniform shapes and stuff, it doesn't *really* have those things, because it's not really embedded in a higher dimension, which it would *have to be* in order to actually have those things. In fact, it doesn't even matter if it's really embedded in a higher space or just behaves like it does, it's all the same to us, right?
I could even get on board with this idea - it's just a way of saying, "distances don't work the way that you would logically think it does given your limited experience in a macro world". Although it seems counter-intuitive, maybe in our universe, lengths contract and space "curves" in a way that can be modelled by a n-dimensional space embedded in an n+1 dimensional space (using rules of geometry that would "make sense" in this model to derive observed behaviors in our actual universe).
Why our universe should behave like its curved within a larger space, and not actually *be* curved within a larger space, I don't know. I would think that the easier logical deduction to make would be that our universe exists within a 4th spatial dimension in which it curves.
Interesting. But why is the rate at which electric and magnetic fields "charge up" limited by anything? What is happening during this "charging up" process? I think it comes back to my simplified concept - that they charge up at "the fastest rate possible", which is to say, the shortest time duration possible between a cause and an effect. I suspect that all that permeability and permittivity of space are are ways of talking about the speed of causality. But I don't really remember the details, and don't remember permeability and permittivity at all, even though I am sure we must have derived things the same way, as I'm guessing this stuff is pretty standard in college physics courses.
> If you don't want to call it a triangle, fine. Call it a "gentriangle" (for generalized triangle). The
> point is that there is a measurement procedure you can follow identically in either Euclidean or
> non-Euclidean space, which does not appeal to any higher dimensions, which can determine whether the space
> is Euclidean or non-Euclidean.
Can you explain what this measurement procedure that one can follow identically in either Euclidean or non-Euclidean space?
I can't think of any way that measuring in these two spaces would be the same. We measure angles in a plane, and I can only think that the only way to measure the "angle" between two lines on a curved surface would involve projecting those lines onto a plane and measuring the angle there. If we projected all three angles of the triangle onto the same plane (the only way to do this measurement "the same" as in the flat Euclidean case) then we would also measure 180 degrees. It is only if we allow the projection of each vertex into a different plane (say, one tangent to the sphere at the vertex), that we could measure more than 180 degrees total for all three. But then, we're assuming a 3d space in which to project those 2d planes tangent to the sphere, so we've already violated one of the assumptions of the non-Euclidean space, that it doesn't require any higher order dimensions to perform measurements within it.
> I'm not appealing to any hyperspaces. I'm talking about the intrinsic curvature of 3D space itself. I can
> determine that by examining the properties of 2D objects (triangles), but I don't have to; I could equally
> well, say, measure the interior solid angles of a 3D tetrahedron instead.
Are you *sure* that it won't require "stepping out" of your three spatial dimensions into 4 in order to properly measure the interior solid angles of that 3d tetrahedron, if the space in which the tetrahedron exists is "curved"? If not, then won't the interior angles of the tetrahedron in the curved space "look" like they are in non-curved space, if you can only exist in and move around in that curved 3d space yourself?
> No. I can determine the 3D curvature of space by examining the geometry of a 3D pyramid.
I know that it's not going to be possible to properly explain what you mean via this limited means of communication. But I really wish that I could sit down with someone like you and go over it "in real life" with a pen and paper. Because I would *love* to see the reasoning, backed by illustration and whatever other means of explanation are available, of how one would, in a 3d "curved" space, ever be able to notice that the space-time is curved, except by stepping out of the 3d world and into an extra dimension by which one would be able to compare different points within that 3d space which one could see would look like they lie in a straight line in that space, but could be see in the extra dimension to curve.
Sometimes I wish that I could just go to a local university, find a physics professor, invite him/her to lunch, and get an explanation for stuff like this. Because I still don't find your examples and explanations sufficent, despite how much I appreciate the effort you have taken.
Consider that there would be no way to have "examples" or "illustrations" of what a "curved space-time" would look like *except* by reducing to a simpler case (of a 2d curved space) and illustrate it in 3 dimensions. And whenever you do that, it always begs the question of, "if the only way to even think of these spaces as embedded in a higher dimension, then how can they ever exist independently thereof?"
> We naturally visualize curved objects as being embedded in the 3D space we can experience, so naturally our
> intuition is for how lower dimensional objects embed in higher dimensional spaces. But that doesn't mean
> that's the only kind of curvature that makes sense. You can speak of the extrinsic curvature of a 2D sphere
> embedded in 3D, o
Those ants may be stuck to a sphere, but that sphere is embedded in a 3d space (how else would you define a sphere)? They may not know it, but they're really living in three dimensions, even if they feel like they're in 2 dimensions because everywhere they look, it looks like two dimensions.
...
Of course, it only looks like two dimensions to them if they can't see anything "beyond" the surface of the sphere as they look at its horizon. If light is bending around the sphere so that they can never see off of the sphere, then it doesn't change the fact that the light is bending in the 3d space that the sphere is embedded in. The ants may not realize it but its true.
Now how does this analogy relate to the original question? If our 3d space is combined with a 4th time dimension to make a "space-time" that can bend, then how is it bending if not in some higher dimension? If the ants' sphere is bending, it is doing so in the third dimension that we as the observer of the sphere and the ants are aware of. The only way for that sphere to even *exist* is if there is a third dimension, regardless of whether or not the ants can perceive it.
So is there a 4th spatial dimension that our 3 spatial dimensions are "curving" in? It would seem that this is the logical extension of the analogy that you gave.
I understand that there are ways of formulating math so that you only have to care about the shape of the space that is containing the objects that you are interested in. And yet, if one was to "really" exist in that reality and be an observer of that system, one would *necessarily* have to sit outside of it, in a higher dimension, able to observe it.
What really bugs me is string theory with its supposed 11 or 13 or whatever dimensions; I just have this gut feeling that any theory that requires such things is not on the right track. I think the real answer is a much more difficult one that obeys our three spatial dimensions and observes time as the natural consequence of causality (which can be modeled as a 4th dimension but shouldn't be thought of as one). That's my gut feeling about it. Of course my gut feeling is totally irrelevent, given that I am not a physicist. But when I read Garrett Lisi's stuff I was really impressed that it only requires three spatial dimensions and time.
I have come to understand that Garrett Lisi's "Exceptionally Simple Theory of Everything" is really just a "taxonomy" of the particles and forces of physics, produced by some very high order but "simple" math (in as much as group theory can be "simple"), with some arbitrary choices of derivation (or whatever "breaking the symmetry of E8" means). So it's not so much an explanation of why things are the way they are as it is a comprehensive "periodic chart" of particles and forces, but it is interesting because it has predictions that could lead to new applied physics if they turn out to be correct, and because it gives physicists a new "language" to describe the fundamental particles and forces of physics, which may be enough to kick-start some new, more fruitful (than string theory) directions in theoretical physics.
I gather all of this from trying very hard to read and understand the paper and all comments that I could find on it, and I am not a physicist and can only understand these things in a very shallow way, using my own analogies and teasing out little threads of understanding that I can latch on to from the little bits that I do understand from the paper and people's comments. And yet, I find it really satisfying that the geometry involved doesn't require more than 3 spatial dimensions. I kind of just reject the idea of more than 3 dimensions. And I want to understand this whole concept of "warping space-time" because it bugs me that it doesn't make sense to me and yet it predicts some very experimentally verifiable things
That is a very interesting. A couple of points:
* A triangle made by three light rays can become arbitrarily more and more "perfect" by being arbitrarily far from any source of gravity. Since the laws of physics are supposed to work the same everywhere (that is one of the assumptions of relativity, no?), then we ought to be able to frame our laws of physics using arbitrarily straight lines by assuming that all masses are an "infinite" (or as close to infinite as possible) distance away. These same laws should then hold even when sources of gravity are present. Since we can't perform measurements anywhere that there are no sources of gravity (we do our experiments on Earth), I think it must be possible to do experiments multiple times, and "account for" the varying effects of gravity according to the known masses present, and from the different results, infer what the measurements would be without any sources of gravity present.
* That is the first time I have ever heard anyone argue that we should redefine the geometric concept of "straight" at any location in space as "the straightest that light can travel at that location given the effects of gravity there". Is this standard in theoretical physics? If it is, I wouldn't know, because I'm not educated as a physicist, but I would really be surprised to find that it is regardless.
Thank you very much for your clarification. That makes much more sense.
I appreciate your taking the time to try to help me understand this. I will try to read up on "Riemann curvature tensor", but I don't think I will be very successful; I have read about such things before but I always stumble with a) a basic inability to understand some of the fundamental math due to a lack of education and b) questions about fundamental aspects of the theory in question that seem to be taken as "givens", and I can never understand why.
First - I will have to read up more on "intrinsic geometry". My simplistic understanding of the concept of "curve" does not allow it to occur except as an N-dimensional geometric shape embedded in N+1 dimensions, but if "intrinsic geometry" somehow allows this, then I think understanding that is fundamental to my understanding of "curved space-time".
As to your example - I don't quite get it. How can you measure the angles of a triangle and find that they don't add up to 180 degrees? If you're talking about a triangle on a plane, then the angles will *always* add up to 180 degrees, by definition. If you're talking about a "triangle" drawn on the surface of a balloon, then the angles can be greater than 180 degrees - but in this case, "triangle" doesn't really mean the same thing has in the first case, nor does "angle". My point being that, you can't say that "the triangle as defined in two dimensional geometry can have angles adding to greater than 180 degrees in non-Euclidean, curved space", because by *definition*, the geometric shape you are talking about in the first half of the sentence is not the same thing as the geometric shape that you are talking about in the second half of the sentence. The first will always be on a plane and will always have angles adding to 180 degrees; the second thing is not on a plane and does not necessarily have angles adding to 180 degrees. So you're not really "measuring a triangle", at least not in the sense that you are suggesting as an example of "intrinsic geometry".
Furthermore, I don't understand what "non-Euclidean, curved space" *means*. "Space" can't curve. Geometric shapes in that space can curve relative to the space. That's what "curve" *means*.
And, when you say that you didn't have to appeal to any 4D hyperspace - what you should really be saying is that you *did* have to appeal to a 3D hyperspace, since the geometric object in question is a 2-dimensional one (triangle), and your example did use a 3d space (i.e. the surface of a balloon or something). If you were talking about the geometry of a 3d object (say, a pyramid, and whatever the equivalent angle rules for pyramids would be), then you *would* have to appeal to a 4D hyperspace if you were going to make the analogous observations as you did about the 2d triangle drawn on a 3d surface.
My mind just cannot grasp the concept of a space which curved, except when viewed from a space of higher dimension. Whenever explanations are given of this, they invariably do so by confusing terminology, i.e. using a single word to refer to a concept in N dimensions and then trying to use the same word to apply to an analogous concept in N+1 dimensions, and then concluding things based on the fact that these two things are the "same" because they use the "same word", when in fact they are different, and the useage of the same word was misleading. This is how I see your example. But I would like to be shown how I am wrong, if I am indeed wrong.
This is at somewhat of a tangent to the discussion, but I've always thought of the speed of light as representing something fundamental that clearly cannot be exceeded, as follows:
I took my last university physics course in 1991 and my memory of the details is very, very fuzzy. But I do remember a specific conclusion that I came to based on what I was learning, and I have retained that conclusion along with a vague idea of what led me to it, which was:
Light is electromagnetic radiation. Breaking this term down, it means "radiation (i.e. something travelling away from its source) of paired electric and magnetic fields". I know that we learned in that class that a standing electric field causes a standing magnetic field, at a 90 degree angle offset from the electric field, and a standing magnetic field causes a standing electric field, at a 90 degree angle offset from the magnetic field. And I am pretty sure that we learned that there is some distance in space between these fields as they are "caused". So the electric field causes a magnetic field, rotated and moved slightly, and that magnetic field causes an electric field, rotated and moved slightly, which causes another magnetic field, which causes another electric field, etc, etc. These fields "move" through space because each causes another field at a slight offset, and this constant offsetting is observed as movement through space.
What I don't remember is what the offsets are (i.e. what the difference in position exactly there is between the electric field and the magnetic field), and whether or not there has to be some initial movement in the field or something to propogate this movement (obviously there must be something determining the direction in which the fields are offset and thus "moving", but I can't remember what it is), but I can recall visualizing it as an x-y coordinate axis that is twisting as it moves through space, the twisting representing the rotation as each magnetic field causes an electric field, and vice-versa. In my mind it looks like a spiraling L-shape flying through space. That's my mental model of electromagnetic radiation, that I retain from that class.
The insight that I had is that the electric field causes the magnetic field 'instantly', and that then causes an electric field 'instantly', and so on. There is nothing in the equations or models which describe the electic field causing the magnetic field, and vice-versa, that would limit the rate at which this happens; time is not even in the equation, it's just "E causes M, M causes E". So one would think that they would all exist at the exact same instant in time, and the 'speed' of propogation of these fields would be infinite. But this can't be so, because each previous field 'causes' the next field, and it always takes 'time' for something to happen. And so the speed of light is limited only by 'how fast things can happen'. In other words, the speed of light is "the speed at which a cause can produce an event". It is limited solely by this fundamental aspect of reality. If "things could happen faster", then light would "move faster".
So I never expect anything to be able to move faster than the speed of light, because it would mean that the fundamental "rate" at which events can occur in our reality would be exceeded. This kind of sounds like the same thing as saying that events would start to occur at the same instant that their causes occur, or even *before* their causes occur, which would imply time standing still or moving backwards. Which fits the concept that travelling faster than light would mean travelling backwards in time, which is also a logical contradiction in our reality.
Perhaps the distance between the E field and the M field it produces is "the smallest distance possible in our reality", whatever that is. And the time taken for the E field to produce the M field is "the smallest time possible in our reality", whatever that is. And the ratio of these two values is - the speed of light.
I really need to read up on and refresh my memory about the physics of this stuff.
"curvature in space-time"? What does this mean exactly?
You can only draw a curve of an N-dimensional geometric shape in N+1 dimensions (i.e. a curved line must be embedded in a plane, a curved plane must be embedded in 3-dimensional space). So are you saying that there is some super-dimension that is the "5th dimension", in which the four-dimensional "shape" of "space-time" can "curve"?
It was a stupid joke about the Apple Lisa. He wasn't actually talking about the Laser Interferometer Space Antenna. If it makes you feel any better, the joke wasn't funny anyway.
I think this type of thing can be implemented correctly and work well. Just because Microsoft can't do it correctly in Outlook is irrelevent. Outlook does very little correctly, and is a major piece of shit as a mail client, so it isn't suprising that they don't do autocorrect correctly either.
It would be cool if there were a mail server feature that would "fix" when the mail is received for delivery. It could detect when top-posting was used and automatically turn it into bottom posting, and apply other obvious fixes. This wouldn't even be that hard because I think that all email clients precede quoted blocks with ">" at the front of each line, and nested quote blocks can just as easily be detected by multiple ">" prefixes.
I actually made the mistake of sending out a "public service announcement" to the engineering mailing list at my company a couple of years back, detailing the reasons that bottom posting was better than top posting, and how quoted blocks should be trimmed to keep them relevent, etc, and of course a multi-day flamefest between various engineers ensued with no one actually listening to anything that anyone else was saying, just spouting off about their own preferences and why their way was "right". Nobody seemed to care about the links I included which pointed to comprehensive summaries of how email etiquitte works and why. I learned my lesson, and won't do that again.
Nope. I am just uninterested in spending my time refuting arguments that have been refuted dozens and DOZENS of times in OLPC discussions on Slashdot and furthermore only require a tiny amount of thoughtful contemplation to see the errors of anyway. If the OP can't take 10 seconds to actually think through the problem, I can't take 5 minutes to correct his stupidity.
Your remark might have worked if the OP hadn't only contributed the same drive that's been regurgitated and then discredited a thousand times already on the various OLPC discussions.
You should go to the OLPC site and read about the initial experiences they are having with their first deployments. There are benefits that even the OLPC team didn't realize would occur.
But Intel *is* trying to promote its Classmate PC as an alternative to OLPC. They have willingly decided to compete with OLPC, and they're not even doing it in the same spirit or with the same goals. They are basically trying to fudge whatever they can just to get sales of their product; clearly they don't care about the actual impact that their product will have on its customers, as evidenced by the 'providing a generator so that the Classmate PC can actually be powered instead of designing the thing correctly in the first place'. All of Intel's actions have been consistent with a pure profit motive, even when it harms a not-for-profit organization that, as far as I can tell, and despite unfounded personal attacks on Negroponte aside, has purely humanitarian goals. These sales tactics are not surprising considering Intel's corporate attitute towards OLPC and while they may not specifically be vetted by Intel, they certainly fit Intel's overall agenda.
> Having good hardware design doesn't mean jack if the software is slow as hell.
Uh, do you know what software is called 'soft' ware? Because it can be modified! So having good hardware design *does* mean 'jack' if the software is slow as hell, because the software can always be reworked or rewritten to improve its functionality. The hardware is fixed once the product is manufactured. So you'd better believe that it is significant that the OLPC has good hardware. Who cares about the software - that can always be, and will always be, improved with time. Software is about 1000x more complex than hardware anyway, so it isn't surprising that the software will take longer to mature.
> Their intention of creating a GUI that can be recoded was a poor decision. They had no respect to the
> fact that the hardware should've been treated as an embedded system, and for all the builds that I've
> tried, either on emulator, or on test boards, sucks.
Can you please rephrase these sentences. I work on embedded systems professionally and what you have said basically makes no sense.
> OLPC's direction (or lack of) caused a whole group at my university to drop out of interest.
No offense dude, but seeing that you don't really seem to be able to coherently argue a point, I am not sure how much the OLPC project will be missing your contributions.
hey! Great response. I get very disillusioned and depressed when I read the comments of so many people in response to these OLPC articles. I can't even comprehend how so many people can miss the obvious logical arguments and facts so readily, and so I have to blame it on wilful ignorance. It's hard to believe that people who are being wilfully ignorant about a topic can ever be educated, but I appreciate people like you who try!
Those are really great points, and not to detract from them:
I personally would invest in Intel or MS before I'd invest in your company. This is not a judgement about you in particular; on the flip side I'd personally rather work at or do business with your company than either Intel or MS. But when it comes to investing money, I and most people will choose the business with the fastest growth every time. I don't want any company I invest in to do something dishonest, so this would temper my enthusiasm for investing in MS or Intel; but, in the end, I think the pure profit motive would win out for me too. And I don't think I am unusual.
My point being, that what you say may all be true, but the market is very large, and the majority of the resources will go to whoever fights the hardest (and often, the dirtiest). This means that people like you and companies like yours are sadly, destined to remain a very small part of the market.
You are completely underinformed on this issue, and the little bit of an opinion that you do have is clearly based on personal bias and not factual evidence or even rational thought. Please stop attempting to contribute to the discussion until you have educated yourself to the minimum level necessary to be worth listening to. Thanks!