Enough people did jump to that conclusion, otherwise the both-dead-and-alive notion would never have entered the pop-sci meme pool.
In any case, yes atoms count as observers when they interact with the quantum state in a way that determines the state of the quantum system one way or another. How fuzzy that line is depends on the experimental set-up but it's far below Geiger counters, let alone cats.
Well, the original Copenhagen thing referred to an "observer" and everybody jumped to the absurd conclusion that it must be a conscious human observer. As opposed to a cat, or indeed a Geiger counter.
These days, only popular science-mangling magazines (and some stupid schoolbook authors) still perpetrate that both-alive-and-dead-superposition nonsense.
The referred article states that one use for this toy would be in assessing damages to reactors under meltdown conditions and asserts that Japan, despite being Robot Mecca (my paraphrase), doesn't have any that can do that,
Forgive me if I'm wrong, but I don't think that thing would survive ten seconds under the kind of radiation barrage one would expect inside a nuclear reactor. Not at those radiation levels. Many CCD images from Fukushima are completely washed-out because of radiation. I hesitate to speculate exactly what would happen to the contents of modern CPUs and RAM chips, but it won't be pretty.
Given that many places on this planet already *are* out of sync (the worst I've personally experienced was almost 2 1/2, southwest Spain in summer), abolishing local time altogether would be the logical next step.
Then you don't habe to worry about the difference between leap seconds and leap days any more...
The problem with this idea is that the offset changes, so you need (a) bigger rules files which (b) need to be up-to-date (can't know in advance when the next leap seconds are going to be, after all).
(c) it's very hard to get back to TAI. *All* the computers running now would have to either switch, or not participate in the NTP protocol. The best we can do is to go back to TAI+whatever_the_offset_is_right_now and never send out another leap second indication. And that seems kinda stupid.
DST is so not set by local governments. It's set by some idiots in far-away places, and everybody follows like sheep.
Witness the fact that whatever the US does to their DST rules, Europe follows.
Witness the fact that due to these stupid rules and some other brain-dead decisions, there are places out there (like western Spain) where the time is more than two and a half hours out of sync with the sun, in summer. That's beyond crazy.
Now they want to move that further out of whacko by letting the whole world drift off another hour. Except that, well, any drift anybody could notice personally is a minute or two (we have a leap second about once a year), so what? me worry?
cloop is read-only, true -- as long as you're not mounting it with LVM and create a read-write snapshot.
Which is exactly what the Ubuntu people plan for their Live CD. Instead of taking over your hard disk, it will over your CD-ROM drive plus your USB stick.;-)
Whether he actually lied is up to debate. Whether an NDA makes sense if you can just click your way through it, too. So is exactly what kind of monetary value Apple actually lost because of that leak, if any.
Anyway.
Killing a guy's future for something like that, malicious intent or not, believable interview or not, NDA or not, is Just Plain Wrong. Save that for real criminals who do real damage, OK?
Who says it's a stock photo? I got the impression from the discussion about it that it's been done for Ubuntu specifically, (a) because it mirrors the Ubuntu logo, and (b) because you usually don't find pictures like the other two in the collection in stock image catalogs.
InnoDB is free, it comes with the basic MySQL distribution and is GPLv2'd.
You can change compatibilit settings, so you're mistaken on the ` vs. " problem.
4.1 is in "gamma". Good enough if you ask me.
Autoincrement is non-standard SQL anyway, so what do you expect?
True -- if you absolutely cannot live without stored procedures, triggers, views and all the rest then MySQL may not (yet) be the right database for you. But nobody suggested otherwise.
CVS forces you to apply patches (or merge branches, which is essentially the same thing) multiple times.
it happens like this:
- You fork off a branch and edit file X, which is also touched in the mainline.
- You merge the mainline into your branch, e.g. because you need a bugfix from it. CVS forces you to resolve the conflict, which is Good.
- Two weeks later, you merge again. Again, CVS says that there is a conflict in file X -- which you already resolved!
The reason for this is that CVS lets you merge branches, but it doesn't remember that you did so -- you have to do that in the CVS comment.
Personally, I use BitKeeper. It may not be 100% free code, but at least it works.
You can work around all the CVS problems given enough discipline and code structure, but the point is that there's a tool which lets you structure your code the way you need and not the way it needs -- so why bother?
If enough people are using the P2P network, it would be sufficient to brute-force scan a few likely IP ranges. One Gnutella node found, and you get fed 10000 new addresses to remember.
One of them is likely to be online when you reconnect next week.
That's the beauty of the Gnutella protocol. It has some scaling issues, but...
NB, there are also cleats for old people who are afraid of falling down when the sidewalks are iced over in winter. They might work even better. I haven't tried either of these yet.;-)
> He got a fairly unprofessional response.
If you write a note to Linus (who has never heard zilch from or about you) and state that his ideas about this, that and the other advantage of Linux over Windows are Wrong, you'll be getting a fairly unprofessional-sounding response too. Even if you happen to be somewhat or mostly correct. That's a fairly universal pattern of human social interaction, I'm afraid.
> 40 minutes over an ISDN line
So the heap of changes either was damn large, or the wire format was damn inefficient.
Surprise: you cannot do anything about the former, and there wire format BK uses is really compact (and THEN it's zipped while transmitting), so that's a non-argument.
> locking
How else are you going to make sure that every change will be applied to a consistent repository AND that every change leaves the repo in a consistent state?
If transmitting your changes takes too long, you can easily write a small script which transmits your changes and applies them on the server. Don't forget to make sure that nobody else will check in any of their changes while you've been sending yours. Oops, if you want to prevent this from happening you need a lock. What a surprise...
Anybody can download Bitkeeper, and anybody can sync from the public kernel repository, so where do you get the "no one else has access to it" part from?
> Aegis supports TestFirstProgramming
So does Bitkeeper; writing a trigger script which implements this feature isn't difficult.
- arch: "unlike BitKeeper, that local repository is a full repository in its own right"
So is Bitkeeper's. From your description, I don't see anything BK can't do.
From a cursory look at their front page, Aegis cannot do at least one thing which Bitkeeper can: true peer-to-peer interaction. Aegis still has the idea that there's a master repository you integrate changes into. With Bitkeeper, there isn't any (or rather, the system doesn't force you to have one) -- if you want Alan or whoever to check out your nifty patch, you just mail it to him.
Bitkeeper can do some other things really well. Check out their Web site if you want' I'm not going to type a BK commercial here.
Yeah, Bitkeeper isn't open-source-purist-free. So what. It's a great piece of software, and anybody can use it for free, and the people involved need to eat. Give them a better business model which is proven to work (theirs does work, according to Larry), or shut up please.
IMHO, the best selling point for BK is that it's written by a bunch of people who really know their stuff and who are willing to listen to what other people need. I speak from experience here; they did a whole lot of heavy-duty bug chasing for me, and I'm not even a paying customer.
Re: OS X port
on
GTK-- vs. QT
·
· Score: 2, Interesting
The downside is that QT is slow, which is because they fake all the high-level UI calls with low-level code. That's how you can run a QT program on the Mac, but with Win32 or Motif look-and-feel.
The HUGE disadvantage is that QT programs will never be as fast as "real" Mac programs, because all the UI stuff (bitmaps for buttons, for instance) will eat up memory space and disk access time. The other programs get the UI for free.
It's also a practice Apple doesn't like. At all. Remember the Mozilla port?
There's also the danger that OS X will pick up some new feature, like for instance voice-controlled mouse movement to UI elements or whatever. Every program will magically work with them, except for QT-based programs which will just sit there and look stupid until Troll gets around to update their (closed-source!) Mac port.:-/
Nothing new here. The US has a rather large history of selectively enforcing its own standards. Witness, for instance, its blackmailing Bayer to sell their Anthrax antibiotic cheap.
Not that others don't do that too, but it's really damaging the US credibility. Sitting on a moral high horse is one thing, but shooting the poor animal's feet off while you're gallopping full tilt is something else.:-/
What's the problem? Install fink, install gnome, compile+install Evolution. It should just work; if not, submit a patch.
Sure the GUIs are completely different. If you don't like that, there's this interesting little (FSVO 'little', andway) project porting GTK+ to Aqua...
Slashdot Mirror
Enough people did jump to that conclusion, otherwise the both-dead-and-alive notion would never have entered the pop-sci meme pool.
In any case, yes atoms count as observers when they interact with the quantum state in a way that determines the state of the quantum system one way or another. How fuzzy that line is depends on the experimental set-up but it's far below Geiger counters, let alone cats.
Well, the original Copenhagen thing referred to an "observer" and everybody jumped to the absurd conclusion that it must be a conscious human observer. As opposed to a cat, or indeed a Geiger counter.
These days, only popular science-mangling magazines (and some stupid schoolbook authors) still perpetrate that both-alive-and-dead-superposition nonsense.
The referred article states that one use for this toy would be in assessing damages to reactors under meltdown conditions and asserts that Japan, despite being Robot Mecca (my paraphrase), doesn't have any that can do that,
Forgive me if I'm wrong, but I don't think that thing would survive ten seconds under the kind of radiation barrage one would expect inside a nuclear reactor. Not at those radiation levels.
Many CCD images from Fukushima are completely washed-out because of radiation. I hesitate to speculate exactly what would happen to the contents of modern CPUs and RAM chips, but it won't be pretty.
Given that many places on this planet already *are* out of sync (the worst I've personally experienced was almost 2 1/2, southwest Spain in summer), abolishing local time altogether would be the logical next step.
...
Then you don't habe to worry about the difference between leap seconds and leap days any more
The problem with this idea is that the offset changes, so you need (a) bigger rules files which (b) need to be up-to-date (can't know in advance when the next leap seconds are going to be, after all).
(c) it's very hard to get back to TAI. *All* the computers running now would have to either switch, or not participate in the NTP protocol. The best we can do is to go back to TAI+whatever_the_offset_is_right_now and never send out another leap second indication. And that seems kinda stupid.
DST is so not set by local governments. It's set by some idiots in far-away places, and everybody follows like sheep.
Witness the fact that whatever the US does to their DST rules, Europe follows.
Witness the fact that due to these stupid rules and some other brain-dead decisions, there are places out there (like western Spain) where the time is more than two and a half hours out of sync with the sun, in summer. That's beyond crazy.
Now they want to move that further out of whacko by letting the whole world drift off another hour. Except that, well, any drift anybody could notice personally is a minute or two (we have a leap second about once a year), so what? me worry?
cloop is read-only, true -- as long as you're not mounting it with LVM and create a read-write snapshot.
;-)
Which is exactly what the Ubuntu people plan for their Live CD. Instead of taking over your hard disk, it will over your CD-ROM drive plus your USB stick.
Can't do that with squashfs.
In that case, either he lied (bad) or he didn't violate the NDA -- the person who sent him the image did (good).
I suppose we'll find out in the trial...
Whether he actually lied is up to debate. Whether an NDA makes sense if you can just click your way through it, too. So is exactly what kind of monetary value Apple actually lost because of that leak, if any.
Anyway.
Killing a guy's future for something like that, malicious intent or not, believable interview or not, NDA or not, is Just Plain Wrong. Save that for real criminals who do real damage, OK?
Who says it's a stock photo? I got the impression from the discussion about it that it's been done for Ubuntu specifically, (a) because it mirrors the Ubuntu logo, and (b) because you usually don't find pictures like the other two in the collection in stock image catalogs.
InnoDB is free, it comes with the basic MySQL distribution and is GPLv2'd.
You can change compatibilit settings, so you're mistaken on the ` vs. " problem.
4.1 is in "gamma". Good enough if you ask me.
Autoincrement is non-standard SQL anyway, so what do you expect?
True -- if you absolutely cannot live without stored procedures, triggers, views and all the rest then MySQL may not (yet) be the right database for you. But nobody suggested otherwise.
That shut-down notice need a serious apostrophectomy. :-/
Anyway -- too bad, though I hazard to say it's their own fault: if you do consulting you got to charge for it.
Surprise: The next Release (after Sarge) will be named "Etch".
it happens like this:
- You fork off a branch and edit file X, which is also touched in the mainline.
- You merge the mainline into your branch, e.g. because you need a bugfix from it. CVS forces you to resolve the conflict, which is Good.
- Two weeks later, you merge again. Again, CVS says that there is a conflict in file X -- which you already resolved!
The reason for this is that CVS lets you merge branches, but it doesn't remember that you did so -- you have to do that in the CVS comment.
Personally, I use BitKeeper. It may not be 100% free code, but at least it works.
You can work around all the CVS problems given enough discipline and code structure, but the point is that there's a tool which lets you structure your code the way you need and not the way it needs -- so why bother?
One of them is likely to be online when you reconnect next week.
That's the beauty of the Gnutella protocol. It has some scaling issues, but ...
NB, there are also cleats for old people who are afraid of falling down when the sidewalks are iced over in winter. They might work even better. I haven't tried either of these yet. ;-)
Right -- all the peaceful people will slide around helplessly, while the rioters will wear metal-spiked soccer shoes and escape unscathed.
Great idea, folks. Reallygreat. :-(
Oh boy.
> He got a fairly unprofessional response.
If you write a note to Linus (who has never heard zilch from or about you) and state that his ideas about this, that and the other advantage of Linux over Windows are Wrong, you'll be getting a fairly unprofessional-sounding response too. Even if you happen to be somewhat or mostly correct. That's a fairly universal pattern of human social interaction, I'm afraid.
> 40 minutes over an ISDN line
So the heap of changes either was damn large, or the wire format was damn inefficient.
Surprise: you cannot do anything about the former, and there wire format BK uses is really compact (and THEN it's zipped while transmitting), so that's a non-argument.
> locking
How else are you going to make sure that every change will be applied to a consistent repository AND that every change leaves the repo in a consistent state?
If transmitting your changes takes too long, you can easily write a small script which transmits your changes and applies them on the server. Don't forget to make sure that nobody else will check in any of their changes while you've been sending yours. Oops, if you want to prevent this from happening you need a lock. What a surprise...
... except that BK is developed by Larry McVoy.
I haven't seen Al's name in any of the BK changes.
Anybody can download Bitkeeper, and anybody can sync from the public kernel repository, so where do you get the "no one else has access to it" part from?
There's even a *shudder* Windows version.
> Aegis supports TestFirstProgramming
So does Bitkeeper; writing a trigger script which implements this feature isn't difficult.
- arch: "unlike BitKeeper, that local repository is a full repository in its own right"
So is Bitkeeper's. From your description, I don't see anything BK can't do.
From a cursory look at their front page, Aegis cannot do at least one thing which Bitkeeper can: true peer-to-peer interaction. Aegis still has the idea that there's a master repository you integrate changes into. With Bitkeeper, there isn't any (or rather, the system doesn't force you to have one) -- if you want Alan or whoever to check out your nifty patch, you just mail it to him.
Bitkeeper can do some other things really well. Check out their Web site if you want' I'm not going to type a BK commercial here.
Yeah, Bitkeeper isn't open-source-purist-free. So what. It's a great piece of software, and anybody can use it for free, and the people involved need to eat. Give them a better business model which is proven to work (theirs does work, according to Larry), or shut up please.
IMHO, the best selling point for BK is that it's written by a bunch of people who really know their stuff and who are willing to listen to what other people need. I speak from experience here; they did a whole lot of heavy-duty bug chasing for me, and I'm not even a paying customer.
The downside is that QT is slow, which is because they fake all the high-level UI calls with low-level code. That's how you can run a QT program on the Mac, but with Win32 or Motif look-and-feel.
:-/
The HUGE disadvantage is that QT programs will never be as fast as "real" Mac programs, because all the UI stuff (bitmaps for buttons, for instance) will eat up memory space and disk access time. The other programs get the UI for free.
It's also a practice Apple doesn't like. At all. Remember the Mozilla port?
There's also the danger that OS X will pick up some new feature, like for instance voice-controlled mouse movement to UI elements or whatever. Every program will magically work with them, except for QT-based programs which will just sit there and look stupid until Troll gets around to update their (closed-source!) Mac port.
Nothing new here. The US has a rather large history of selectively enforcing its own standards. Witness, for instance, its blackmailing Bayer to sell their Anthrax antibiotic cheap.
:-/
Not that others don't do that too, but it's really damaging the US credibility. Sitting on a moral high horse is one thing, but shooting the poor animal's feet off while you're gallopping full tilt is something else.
What's the problem? Install fink, install gnome, compile+install Evolution. It should just work; if not, submit a patch.
Sure the GUIs are completely different. If you don't like that, there's this interesting little (FSVO 'little', andway) project porting GTK+ to Aqua...