I have experience with two laptops. One had a touchpad, the other had both a touchpad and a trackpoint.
When I only had a touch pad, I carried around an external mouse (well, trackball; Logitech Marble Mouse to be exact)---and I dreaded the times where I'd forget to bring it along and have to use the touch pad. With my current laptop which has a track point, I don't even think about whether I should bring along an external mouse---the track point works great and it's more convenient to not have to plug anything in. [and with edge scrolling and infinitely wide edges, the touchpad now works as a "scroll pad".]
Granted, it the touchpad-only laptop was el cheapo and perhaps the touch pad wasn't the greatest. But still---track points are really great input devices (at least the one I have), and they're small enough to fit on practically speaking anything.
So why bother with turning your keyboard into a touchpad? I imagine the user might trace a vertical line, intending to move the mouse around, but the device going "oh, r-f-v-space, what an interesting key combo." Or the user pawing and poking the keys somewhat less than straight, and the device not picking up on it. It seems... with my experience of touchpads, this seems like it could be dangerously full of fail and meh.
If users do not trust that their credit card numbers and private information are safe on the Internet, they won’t use it.
And the current system works fine, so that's an argument for government hands off, right? Or maybe it's an argument for tightening credit/debit card security? I mean, the crypto for transmitting credit card numbers works fine as is...
If content providers do not trust that their content will be protected, they will threaten to stop putting it online.
Then the pirates will have the online distribution market all to themselves. Yeah, I'm sure the legit content distributors are going to like that.
If large enterprises don’t have confidence that their network will not be breached over the Internet, they will disconnect their network and limit access to business partners and customers.
Any sane large organization should realize that it will have security incidents. I see an abundance of organizations online today. So this is an argument for... what, exactly?
If foreign governments do not trust the Internet governance systems, they will threaten to balkanize the Domain Name System which will jeopardize the worldwide reach of the Internet.
Uh-huh. And the US having control of the root zone engenders trust exactly how? I see this as a great argument for less US gov involvement.
The quintessential chaotic system, mandelbrot's fractal, is just such an example. You take any imaginary number c = p(1).
The way I always heard it is you define f_c(z) = z^2 + c. Then you compose f_c with itself n times (for n = 0, 1,...), and evaluate f_c^n at 0. So f_c^1(0) = f_c(0) = 0^2 + c = c.
Then you say p(n+1) = p(n)^2 + p(0), and you examine the value of p(infinity) for various values of c.
Eh, $\infty \not \in \mathbb{N}$. You examine the values of p(n) for all n.
This will draw the famous mandelbrot fractal.
To be exact, a point c is in the mandelbrot set if there exists a K such that for all natural numbers n the norm of f_c^n(0) is at most K.
It other words, by iterating (z -> z^2 + c) you never get further away from (0, 0) than a distance of K.
Side remark:
Say I'd give you 5 consecutive digits and ask you for the position in pi. Since there are infinite solutions to this question, it's not actually predictable
So you're saying I can't tell you what the answer is before... well, before what?
Also, since you're asking for the unique solution, your question is bogus. Why do you ask it?
Now imagine a computer that uses a reversible logic system that is reversible, would that computer have a time-symmetric operation?
Well, quantum computers work something like that.
You may want to think of the state of a classical computer as a bit vector, a member of {0, 1}^n for some n. In the same vein, the state of a quantum computer is a member of C^{2^n} for some n; it's a 2-to-the-n-dimensional complex vector. Oh, and it has length 1.
The state transformations you can do are described by unitary matrices; in particular, they are invertible. Say you apply U to a state x and get a state y. Applying U^{-1} to y will still take time, though (is my understanding; but I'm not certain). And you can do a measurement which loses information.
So, quantum computers are maybe not exactly what you want, but you might want to look into them.
Geek now means conformity [...] it's about having seen and being into the right anime [...] I don't call myself a geek or a nerd nowadays, because both terms have been rendered essentially meaningless.
Reality Distortion Field 3UU Sorcery Sell target player an Apple product. (Target player gains control of an Apple product you control. You gain control of all lands that player controls.)
For some people here at/. Apple could give you money for taking an iPad (or any other Apple device) and they'd still complain that they didn't get enough money.
It takes time carrying out that transaction. Maybe I could earn more doing something else with my time.
Maybe I have to fill out a contract with Apple to get the money, and I'm worried about the contract. Maybe I'm worried enough that I need a lawyer to read and understand it for me. That costs money.
Apple of course needs to compensate for that, and the transaction time, and a little more, for me to accept.
Okay, I'm stretching the argument thin, and it only works for unrealistic values of transaction cost and donation size, but there are rational reasons for saying no to free money (with or without the extra free iConsumerElectronics).
And doesn't it go the other way around as well? Aren't there a few Apple lovers who'd complain about getting too little money if someone gave them money and a Windows/Linux CD?
The freedom of the Android platform could use some development house to take the lead. They should pick a platform or 3 that are the most popular and develop their own version of Android as well as quality applications and quality application reviews.
I may be completely misreading you, but what you're saying sounds something like this:
The solution to fragmentation is to create a new, better and unfragmented platform to compete with everybody else.
That works great for Linux distros, window managers and desktop environments, right?
You don't win an n-way shouting match by turning it into an (n+1)-way shouting match except if you shout really frigging loudly. On the other hand, you can make the shouting match go away if you can make everybody say the same thing---or, outside of the analogy, make people standardize on whatever is relevant to the fragmentation.
Is open source labor as cost efficient as hiring a real programmer?
Wait, are you saying that Linus Torvalds, Larry Wall, Bram Cohen and Bram Moolenaar are not real programmers?
Or... well, exactly what do you mean by "open source labor"? As I understand it, a copyright license can be open source, as can software* released under an open source license. But I don't know how to extend that to labour---do you mean the labour that goes into producing open source software? If I look at a work process, how do I tell whether it qualifies as "open source" by your definition?
(* and music, movies, books, and other copyrightable stuff)
One set of co-morbid conditions that are experiencing an upsurge in research is the existence of an autism spectrum disorder in an individual who also has Down syndrome
If autism and Down syndrome can coexist, it seems reasonable they can also not coexist, and that they therefore are different things.
If [this] is a valid precedent, then in any moment slashdot admins could be convicted in Italy for an AC comment.
I think the safest best is that the slashdot mothership corporation CEO's might be held liable for slashdot posts.
Exactly what do you mean by admins? Sysadmins? Were any Google sysadmins held liable in this case?
Or any of us, if we didnt promoted down that comment when had moderating points.
Were any youtube users held liable in this case?
Exactly what do you base your statements on? I'm not a lawyer, and I don't know Italian law, but I think it could say that CEOs are liable, but not other staff and certainly not users/consumers/customers. How do you know it doesn't?
"Those are my personal opinions. Yours may be different."
That's, roughly speaking, how you do it.
And you can't really say "But your opinions are wrong!". At best, you can say something like "The policies you advocate go against the constitution", and they can respond "Well, then I guess my opinion is that we should change the constitution."
You may try arguing that their suggested policy has consequences which (a) they don't know about; and (b) they don't like or agree with. I'm not sure how well it works, but at least you're attacking the problem from a decent angle.
If you have a problem with Google controlling your email, why do you let them do that?
you control my web searches
If you have a problem with that, why not switch to a competitor?
If you don't want people to have power over you, the solution (at least in this case) is to not give them power. Yes, you'll have to pass up an offer of some convenience. But you can't have both, so if you complain about them having power, you're complaining about you making the wrong choice for yourself.
Slashdot Mirror
This seems really neat and all. However...
I have experience with two laptops. One had a touchpad, the other had both a touchpad and a trackpoint.
When I only had a touch pad, I carried around an external mouse (well, trackball; Logitech Marble Mouse to be exact)---and I dreaded the times where I'd forget to bring it along and have to use the touch pad. With my current laptop which has a track point, I don't even think about whether I should bring along an external mouse---the track point works great and it's more convenient to not have to plug anything in. [and with edge scrolling and infinitely wide edges, the touchpad now works as a "scroll pad".]
Granted, it the touchpad-only laptop was el cheapo and perhaps the touch pad wasn't the greatest. But still---track points are really great input devices (at least the one I have), and they're small enough to fit on practically speaking anything.
So why bother with turning your keyboard into a touchpad? I imagine the user might trace a vertical line, intending to move the mouse around, but the device going "oh, r-f-v-space, what an interesting key combo." Or the user pawing and poking the keys somewhat less than straight, and the device not picking up on it. It seems... with my experience of touchpads, this seems like it could be dangerously full of fail and meh.
(my $cents = 2)
Yeah, and you'd think Microsoft would know how to shuffle too, right? ;-)
Will they float?
Maybe, but what I really want to know: will it blend?
If users do not trust that their credit card numbers and private information are safe on the Internet, they won’t use it.
And the current system works fine, so that's an argument for government hands off, right? Or maybe it's an argument for tightening credit/debit card security? I mean, the crypto for transmitting credit card numbers works fine as is...
If content providers do not trust that their content will be protected, they will threaten to stop putting it online.
Then the pirates will have the online distribution market all to themselves. Yeah, I'm sure the legit content distributors are going to like that.
If large enterprises don’t have confidence that their network will not be breached over the Internet, they will disconnect their network and limit access to business partners and customers.
Any sane large organization should realize that it will have security incidents. I see an abundance of organizations online today. So this is an argument for... what, exactly?
If foreign governments do not trust the Internet governance systems, they will threaten to balkanize the Domain Name System which will jeopardize the worldwide reach of the Internet.
Uh-huh. And the US having control of the root zone engenders trust exactly how? I see this as a great argument for less US gov involvement.
Barbra Streisand
The quintessential chaotic system, mandelbrot's fractal, is just such an example. You take any imaginary number c = p(1).
The way I always heard it is you define f_c(z) = z^2 + c. Then you compose f_c with itself n times (for n = 0, 1, ...), and evaluate f_c^n at 0. So f_c^1(0) = f_c(0) = 0^2 + c = c.
Then you say p(n+1) = p(n)^2 + p(0), and you examine the value of p(infinity) for various values of c.
Eh, $\infty \not \in \mathbb{N}$. You examine the values of p(n) for all n.
This will draw the famous mandelbrot fractal.
To be exact, a point c is in the mandelbrot set if there exists a K such that for all natural numbers n the norm of f_c^n(0) is at most K.
It other words, by iterating (z -> z^2 + c) you never get further away from (0, 0) than a distance of K.
Side remark:
Say I'd give you 5 consecutive digits and ask you for the position in pi. Since there are infinite solutions to this question, it's not actually predictable
So you're saying I can't tell you what the answer is before... well, before what?
Also, since you're asking for the unique solution, your question is bogus. Why do you ask it?
Now imagine a computer that uses a reversible logic system that is reversible, would that computer have a time-symmetric operation?
Well, quantum computers work something like that.
You may want to think of the state of a classical computer as a bit vector, a member of {0, 1}^n for some n. In the same vein, the state of a quantum computer is a member of C^{2^n} for some n; it's a 2-to-the-n-dimensional complex vector. Oh, and it has length 1.
The state transformations you can do are described by unitary matrices; in particular, they are invertible. Say you apply U to a state x and get a state y. Applying U^{-1} to y will still take time, though (is my understanding; but I'm not certain). And you can do a measurement which loses information.
So, quantum computers are maybe not exactly what you want, but you might want to look into them.
This is one of the main reasons why you see a performance improvement in x86-64
Isn't that just a question of setting the right -march=foobar --omg-optimizations flags in /etc/emerge.make.conf.zomfg.fast?
Re you using the Zerty keybord lyout?
Goto www.freeubuntu.com or www.freepuppy.com for your free computer OS.
Big Corporation: See! "Goto", not "Go To". Linux is only for programmers and hackers and such!
Big Corporation: oh, and why isn't it freepony.com? See, Open Source doesn't give you a free pony!
That's funny, I use emacs, and I just hit ^C-s-g to see definitions.
That's not bound to anything in my emacs. What's the function name? (C-h k might be helpful)
Are you using etags? Something fancier? Please share your tooling tips with your fellow nerds :)
I took a speed-reading course and read War and Peace in twenty minutes. It involves Russia
-- Woody Allen
Geek now means conformity [...] it's about having seen and being into the right anime [...] I don't call myself a geek or a nerd nowadays, because both terms have been rendered essentially meaningless.
Heretic! Turn in your geek card!
Reality Distortion Field
3UU
Sorcery
Sell target player an Apple product. (Target player gains control of an Apple product you control. You gain control of all lands that player controls.)
For some people here at /. Apple could give you money for taking an iPad (or any other Apple device) and they'd still complain that they didn't get enough money.
It takes time carrying out that transaction. Maybe I could earn more doing something else with my time.
Maybe I have to fill out a contract with Apple to get the money, and I'm worried about the contract. Maybe I'm worried enough that I need a lawyer to read and understand it for me. That costs money.
Apple of course needs to compensate for that, and the transaction time, and a little more, for me to accept.
Okay, I'm stretching the argument thin, and it only works for unrealistic values of transaction cost and donation size, but there are rational reasons for saying no to free money (with or without the extra free iConsumerElectronics).
And doesn't it go the other way around as well? Aren't there a few Apple lovers who'd complain about getting too little money if someone gave them money and a Windows/Linux CD?
nothing says "I have a small penis" like owning something from Apple.
I don't want to be thinking things like that about my girlfriend...
Thanks for confirming confirmation bias [wikipedia.org] for me. It was pretty much what I expected anyway...
I know what you mean. I believe in confirmation bias. That's why I only acknowledge evidence for it...
Since plutonium, element 93, is found in uranium ores (being bred there by neutron capture) and Pu-244 (half-life 80.8 million years)
Holy cr*p, dewd. 80 million years, that's a long time.
So, if they ever discover an element with a negative half-life, will they call it Banach-Tarskium?
The freedom of the Android platform could use some development house to take the lead. They should pick a platform or 3 that are the most popular and develop their own version of Android as well as quality applications and quality application reviews.
I may be completely misreading you, but what you're saying sounds something like this:
The solution to fragmentation is to create a new, better and unfragmented platform to compete with everybody else.
That works great for Linux distros, window managers and desktop environments, right?
You don't win an n-way shouting match by turning it into an (n+1)-way shouting match except if you shout really frigging loudly. On the other hand, you can make the shouting match go away if you can make everybody say the same thing---or, outside of the analogy, make people standardize on whatever is relevant to the fragmentation.
Is open source labor as cost efficient as hiring a real programmer?
Wait, are you saying that Linus Torvalds, Larry Wall, Bram Cohen and Bram Moolenaar are not real programmers?
Or... well, exactly what do you mean by "open source labor"? As I understand it, a copyright license can be open source, as can software* released under an open source license. But I don't know how to extend that to labour---do you mean the labour that goes into producing open source software? If I look at a work process, how do I tell whether it qualifies as "open source" by your definition?
(* and music, movies, books, and other copyrightable stuff)
My parent said:
This has nothing to do with the autistic boy in the video
The summary said:
a YouTube video showing a boy with Downs syndrome
And the internets at http://autism.suite101.com/article.cfm/autism_and_down_syndrome said:
One set of co-morbid conditions that are experiencing an upsurge in research is the existence of an autism spectrum disorder in an individual who also has Down syndrome
If autism and Down syndrome can coexist, it seems reasonable they can also not coexist, and that they therefore are different things.
Please don't confuse the two.
If [this] is a valid precedent, then in any moment slashdot admins could be convicted in Italy for an AC comment.
I think the safest best is that the slashdot mothership corporation CEO's might be held liable for slashdot posts.
Exactly what do you mean by admins? Sysadmins? Were any Google sysadmins held liable in this case?
Or any of us, if we didnt promoted down that comment when had moderating points.
Were any youtube users held liable in this case?
Exactly what do you base your statements on? I'm not a lawyer, and I don't know Italian law, but I think it could say that CEOs are liable, but not other staff and certainly not users/consumers/customers. How do you know it doesn't?
It's certainly not the best nationality to have but I haven't came across a better one so far.
Wait, if you haven't come across a nationality that's better than yours, how do you know such one exists?
</pedantic>
How do you rationalize positions like that?
"Those are my personal opinions. Yours may be different."
That's, roughly speaking, how you do it.
And you can't really say "But your opinions are wrong!". At best, you can say something like "The policies you advocate go against the constitution", and they can respond "Well, then I guess my opinion is that we should change the constitution."
You may try arguing that their suggested policy has consequences which (a) they don't know about; and (b) they don't like or agree with. I'm not sure how well it works, but at least you're attacking the problem from a decent angle.
You control my email
If you have a problem with Google controlling your email, why do you let them do that?
you control my web searches
If you have a problem with that, why not switch to a competitor?
If you don't want people to have power over you, the solution (at least in this case) is to not give them power. Yes, you'll have to pass up an offer of some convenience. But you can't have both, so if you complain about them having power, you're complaining about you making the wrong choice for yourself.
Stop making that choice.