One thing I've often wondered: with the knowledge we have now and the technology available to the nineteenth century (or maybe up until about the 1930's say) could we go back and reinvent mechanical or valve driven computers, only make them much faster than they knew how then? (Eg like an updated version of the Analytical Engine). Would come in handy if a world-wide catastrophe occurred and we were all plunged back into the dark ages in terms of industrial capacity but we still had the knowledge. (Provided we remembered to make a hard copy before the asteroid struck:)
You don't get it at all [...] bunch of nitwits [...]
No need to be so agressive, I'm just disagreeing with you, that's all. Telling people that they should "let go of dualism" to escape from suffering is simply not realistic for the vast majority of people.
Well, buck up. You aren't separate from the universe. You are not a subject, observing the objects. You aren't a little man sitting in your head looking out through your eyes and hearing through your ears. The sense of self is just another sense, just another track in the recording. No one is listening because there aren't any such things as individuals to observe.
So if another Hitler comes along, should we just tell the Jews to "buck up" on their way to the gas chambers? Why should they be afraid of dying, that's just unenlightened dualistic thinking, right?
I think your Buddhist view is about as useful as the view that the world is really just a simulation and the answer to both is the same: pain is real and we have to treat it seriously. Anything else is dangerously close to solipsism.
I tried vimplugin - it's buggy and the project appears inactive. Also tried NetBeans with jVi and that seems pretty cool - most things I tried worked and the project is active.
Sun is a staunch advocate for open source, so it would hardly appease the open source community to sue Google over an open source software stack
The Dalvik VM is not open source. Not only is it not open source, there has not even been a spec published for the Virtual Machine.
Which is handy for the mobile phone companies because they can place their proprietary code inside the Dalvik VM and thus control the way the APIs are used. (Because you can only access them from Java code).
Has anyone done a cost-benefit analysis for the amount of money spent on IT security? Seems like the only people qualified to estimate the probabilities - ie security consultants - have a vested interest in over-exaggerating security dangers.
I found this book review which seems to suggest that nobody knows:
The major flaw with MCR arrives in ch 4, on p 68: "The variables affecting potential cost savings include (1) the potential losses associated with information security breaches, (2) the probability that a particular breach will occur, and (3) the productivity associated with specific investments, which translates into a reduction in the probability of potential losses." This is true -- but this is the key problem: devising even rough estimates of 1, 2, and 3 is nearly impossible in practice. The authors' examples (see figure 4-2 for one) assume these factors can be determined (like $10 mil total potential loss without countermeasures, 75% probability of loss with no countermeasures / 50% with $650,000 of countermeasures, and so on). When I saw these contrived examples I wondered "what is the origin of these figures?" The fact of the matter is that they are all guesswork, which means the calculator can say anything the analyst wishes to produce.
In some sense we are back to square one, although much better educated in economics. (Note that Andy Jaquith's book Security Metrics also observes how calculating these figures is nearly impossible in real life.)
The social impact of coffee and tea is possibly just as important as the physical effects. In those days people went to coffee houses to drink coffee. These were melting pots where people from a wide variety of backgrounds would meet and discuss the latest ideas. In London, coffee houses were known as "penny universities". And of course as anyone who has ever given up caffeine for a while will know, if you only drink it occasionally it has a hell of an effect. Imagine some the greatest minds of the Industrial Revolution all sat brainstorming in a coffee shop high on caffeine!
I think we need to let go of the idea that the survival of our particular species is so important. If you take the view that the Universe is basically here to generate stories, then what's the best strategy for producing the most interesting stories? If I was the Universe then I'd take a dim view of colonization - it sounds like it's going to lead to stagnation and repetition. Far better surely to have the ability for life to start all over afresh and new with no memory of what happened in another corner of the Universe.
I agree completely. Why the fuck is this topic such a common argument in the US? Are people so petty over there? Now I don't know about other european nations, but I live in Sweden and I have never ever heard (or heard about) anybody have this arguent in real life.
You didn't say and so I have to ask: is it common for men to put the seat back down in Sweden then? Or do your partners not mind either way?
Exploration of space is the most important goal for humankind. Earth provides a very limited experience, and in a few 100 years it will be totally explored. If we want to understand the universe, space is the final frontier.
Wouldn't it be easier - and better for the planet - to destroy all our machines, burn all our books and just start over? After all the fun of exploration is the idea that you're seeing things no-one has ever seen before. Who cares if some previous civilization has been there and got the t-shirt provided they crumbled into dust long ago and what they did has been forgotten. Also, I challenge you as an individual to experience all that the Earth has to offer in your lifetime. Once you've been to the tops of the highest mountains and the bottom of the deepest oceans and taken in all the beauty of the natural world, then you can get started on the artificial creations - music and books and movies etc.
if you get bored with all that then nothing in the Universe will satisfy you.
Er, where in any of the linked articles does it says that "People who refuse to give up [...] the records of their car movements for the last year [...] will be denied passports". All I can see is a reference to automatic recording of number plates on CCTVs - hardly the same thing.
Why all the constant UK bashing from American posters? It's the US that is driving this nonsense after all. You know, the country that first started photographing and fingerprinting all foreign nationals entering the land of the free?
There are two parts to this - one is getting a list of which web pages contain the search terms, and the second is ranking them. The first is easy (ish) to achieve. For the second, rather than fancy algorithms like Google page rank which can be manipulated by SEO, just let the people decide. Everyone gets to vote just once on the ranking for a particular web page. To prevent abuse make use of something like OpenID to authenticate users. Sure you might see very popular pages at the top of the list that don't have much relevancy but better that than the current system and anyway suitable choice of keywords should filter out most of the fluff.
And this is precisely the point; if an iPod user decides that their next music player should be, for example, a Creative Zen or even a mobile phone with integrated music player, they currently cannot reuse their existing music that they've purchased from the iTMS.
Caveat emptor. Don't use an iPod/iTunes if you think this might be an issue for you. This is not something that requires the heavy hand of the law.
Re:One choice better than no choice?
on
Norway Outlaws iTunes
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· Score: 2, Interesting
In my view, choice is never bad. Competition is good.
But by making iTunes illegal, you are taking away people's choice to use it. Nobody is forcing you to buy an iPod and if you do, nobody is forcing you to use iTunes. You still have the choice of buying CDs and ripping them.
If you don't like the iPod/iTunes setup, buy another player. Let the market decide.
Basically, OOP languages like C++ and Java use this methodology, but it's obscured through friendly syntax. What we can expose from the above is:
1. When class members change, structs change. This causes binary incompatibility between different versions of libraries. The exception is Objective-C, which looks up members based on their name in a hash table generated at run-time
2. The addresses of branches (specifically CALL to call a function) are indirect (yes, in Obj-C too); this means that you can replace the class with another class that has the same structure but different functions being pointed at. It also means that the CPU can't do branch prediction, which hurts pipelining and intelligent CPU caching, causing pretty big slow-downs.
For the first point, there is no "binary incompatibility" in Java. Fields are referenced in the class file by symbolic names which are resolved dynamically at runtime. See here for more info.
Secondly, if you have a Java method whose performance is critical, you can declare it as final. This gives the JIT compiler the option to either inline the method or create a direct non-virtual link to the method.
Indeed. Historians are still trying to figure out how parents raised their children before the advent of dedicated children's TV channels. Some actually claim that they had to spend some time with their kids, or limit their TV viewing to certain times.
Even so, I'd argue that even if you stuck with 4:3 SD and a built in mono speaker, a Freeview box is worth it for:
- FilmFour
- Some of E4 and More4
- Some of BBC3
- BBC4
- BBC News 24
And CBeebies! If you've got small children it's absolutely indispensible. Go check out Blue Cow and see what the analogue folk are missing.
The first computer I ever programmed on back in 1977 was a Marconi Myriad. It had a small speaker that made a different tone depending on what instruction was being executed. It provided excellent feedback on the health of the system. When everything was running normally it made a very rich and complex noise, but you could easily tell from the sound when things started to go wrong and if it went into a loop it would make a single high pitched tone. A bit like those cardiac monitors when a patient flatlines.
Some of the guys had laboriously created programs (loaded by paper tape) that played classical music, eg Bach's Air on the G String.
On the other hand maybe it's the Halesowen police. Yesterday's Daily Mail had a story about the same police force stopping children from playing hopscotch in the street. You can find this story on the BBC web site too.
Make the socket interface a filesystem, and all you do is mount a fileserver over that, to create a socks proxy/http proxy/whatever. All apps get the capability of doing networking over a proxy, transparently - no need for using libs or prelinking hacks that usually don't work.
I used to work on the System V/proc filesystem. I was really ugly because everything useful all went through a massive ioctl switch. Check out what the Plan 9 folk themselves say:
Nonetheless, it is possible to push the idea of file-based computing too far. Converting every resource in the system into a file system is a kind of metaphor, and metaphors can be abused. A good example of restraint is/proc, which is only a view of a process, not a representation. To run processes, the usual fork and exec calls are still necessary, rather than doing something like
cp/bin/date/proc/clone/mem
The problem with such examples is that they require the server to do things not under its control. The ability to assign meaning to a command like this does not imply the meaning will fall naturally out of the structure of answering the 9P requests it generates. As a related example, Plan 9 does not put machine's network names in the file name space. The network interfaces provide a very different model of naming, because using open, create, read, and write on such files would not offer a suitable place to encode all the details of call setup for an arbitrary network. This does not mean that the network interface cannot be file-like, just that it must have a more tightly defined structure.
Slashdot Mirror
One thing I've often wondered: with the knowledge we have now and the technology available to the nineteenth century (or maybe up until about the 1930's say) could we go back and reinvent mechanical or valve driven computers, only make them much faster than they knew how then? (Eg like an updated version of the Analytical Engine). Would come in handy if a world-wide catastrophe occurred and we were all plunged back into the dark ages in terms of industrial capacity but we still had the knowledge. (Provided we remembered to make a hard copy before the asteroid struck :)
No need to be so agressive, I'm just disagreeing with you, that's all. Telling people that they should "let go of dualism" to escape from suffering is simply not realistic for the vast majority of people.
So if another Hitler comes along, should we just tell the Jews to "buck up" on their way to the gas chambers? Why should they be afraid of dying, that's just unenlightened dualistic thinking, right?
I think your Buddhist view is about as useful as the view that the world is really just a simulation and the answer to both is the same: pain is real and we have to treat it seriously. Anything else is dangerously close to solipsism.
I tried vimplugin - it's buggy and the project appears inactive. Also tried NetBeans with jVi and that seems pretty cool - most things I tried worked and the project is active.
The Dalvik VM is not open source. Not only is it not open source, there has not even been a spec published for the Virtual Machine. Which is handy for the mobile phone companies because they can place their proprietary code inside the Dalvik VM and thus control the way the APIs are used. (Because you can only access them from Java code).
How can you be an "independent enthusiast" for something that was only revealed a few hours ago and that therefore you can know very little about?
Are the people who moderated this up having a joke? It might not mean much in the US, but it is a huge day here in the UK and elsewhere.
I found this book review which seems to suggest that nobody knows:
The social impact of coffee and tea is possibly just as important as the physical effects. In those days people went to coffee houses to drink coffee. These were melting pots where people from a wide variety of backgrounds would meet and discuss the latest ideas. In London, coffee houses were known as "penny universities". And of course as anyone who has ever given up caffeine for a while will know, if you only drink it occasionally it has a hell of an effect. Imagine some the greatest minds of the Industrial Revolution all sat brainstorming in a coffee shop high on caffeine!
Just out of interest, what language was your workload written in, was it Java by any chance?
I think we need to let go of the idea that the survival of our particular species is so important. If you take the view that the Universe is basically here to generate stories, then what's the best strategy for producing the most interesting stories? If I was the Universe then I'd take a dim view of colonization - it sounds like it's going to lead to stagnation and repetition. Far better surely to have the ability for life to start all over afresh and new with no memory of what happened in another corner of the Universe.
I agree completely. Why the fuck is this topic such a common argument in the US? Are people so petty over there? Now I don't know about other european nations, but I live in Sweden and I have never ever heard (or heard about) anybody have this arguent in real life.
You didn't say and so I have to ask: is it common for men to put the seat back down in Sweden then? Or do your partners not mind either way?
Wouldn't it be easier - and better for the planet - to destroy all our machines, burn all our books and just start over? After all the fun of exploration is the idea that you're seeing things no-one has ever seen before. Who cares if some previous civilization has been there and got the t-shirt provided they crumbled into dust long ago and what they did has been forgotten. Also, I challenge you as an individual to experience all that the Earth has to offer in your lifetime. Once you've been to the tops of the highest mountains and the bottom of the deepest oceans and taken in all the beauty of the natural world, then you can get started on the artificial creations - music and books and movies etc.
if you get bored with all that then nothing in the Universe will satisfy you.
Why all the constant UK bashing from American posters? It's the US that is driving this nonsense after all. You know, the country that first started photographing and fingerprinting all foreign nationals entering the land of the free?
There are two parts to this - one is getting a list of which web pages contain the search terms, and the second is ranking them. The first is easy (ish) to achieve. For the second, rather than fancy algorithms like Google page rank which can be manipulated by SEO, just let the people decide. Everyone gets to vote just once on the ranking for a particular web page. To prevent abuse make use of something like OpenID to authenticate users. Sure you might see very popular pages at the top of the list that don't have much relevancy but better that than the current system and anyway suitable choice of keywords should filter out most of the fluff.
Caveat emptor. Don't use an iPod/iTunes if you think this might be an issue for you. This is not something that requires the heavy hand of the law.
But by making iTunes illegal, you are taking away people's choice to use it. Nobody is forcing you to buy an iPod and if you do, nobody is forcing you to use iTunes. You still have the choice of buying CDs and ripping them.
If you don't like the iPod/iTunes setup, buy another player. Let the market decide.
Check this out, quite funny.
Secondly, if you have a Java method whose performance is critical, you can declare it as final. This gives the JIT compiler the option to either inline the method or create a direct non-virtual link to the method.
You don't have kids, do you?
And CBeebies! If you've got small children it's absolutely indispensible. Go check out Blue Cow and see what the analogue folk are missing.
The first computer I ever programmed on back in 1977 was a Marconi Myriad. It had a small speaker that made a different tone depending on what instruction was being executed. It provided excellent feedback on the health of the system. When everything was running normally it made a very rich and complex noise, but you could easily tell from the sound when things started to go wrong and if it went into a loop it would make a single high pitched tone. A bit like those cardiac monitors when a patient flatlines. Some of the guys had laboriously created programs (loaded by paper tape) that played classical music, eg Bach's Air on the G String.
On the other hand maybe it's the Halesowen police. Yesterday's Daily Mail had a story about the same police force stopping children from playing hopscotch in the street. You can find this story on the BBC web site too.
Generics has made Java ugly. Here's an example.
I used to work on the System V