Nearly 25 years after its release and with less memory and a slower CPU than any Atari a Sinclair ZX81 still makes just as good a doorstop as it ever did.
--
I don't wait for my laptop to boot - I suspend and resume it like most laptop users. The people who write articles for ZDnet are clearly so inexperienced with computers they've never even used a laptop (or maybe they have but they were too scared to select 'suspend' from a menu). No wonder they can't figure out what faster RAM is all about.
--
It's probably slower that most programming languages you could find today, but it makes really small programs...
This is often true but not for the reason you might think. In principle it should be damn fast if you have a smart optimising interpreter. APL is very good for manipulation of large matrices, say. As the code tends to be very compact the amount of time actually spent interpreting the code itself is small compared to the time spent performing the operations themselves. Also, as the operations tend to be higher level than in C, say, the interpreter has an opportunity to optimise sequences of operations and concatenate them together. In addition APL lends itself nicely to lazy evaluation.
On the other hand it's often extremely easy in APL to come up with extremely inefficient algorithms that nobody would even dream of writing in C, say, but are very tempting in APL because they only require 3 or 4 keystrokes! Just a simple example: suppose you want to sum along the diagonals of a matrix - it can be easier to simply resize the matrix to be one wider or one narrower than before and then sum down the columns. With a bad APL interpreter the whole matrix has to be rearranged in memory before summing can take place. Nobody would write code like that in C. On the other hand a good APL interpreter wouldn't really rearrange the array but simply change the way the data is indexed making it potentially almost as efficient as C.
I think it's the best language for numerical work and it's a hell of a shame that it's not used more. I wish there were a reasonably priced (eg. free) and easy to install APL interpreter that came with decals I could use to upgrade the keyboard!
--
It was interesting to read in the article that judges have recently had to come up with a better definition of science than "generally accepted" (which would make virgin birth science I guess). One of the requirements they cited was 'falsifiability'. I find this interesting for this reason: falsifiability is crucial for developing science but surely it is redundant in court. Suppose someone wanted to use X in court to prove A is true rather than B. If A is different from B and their argument is sound then this argument itself forms part of a test of the falsifiability of X. If, on the other hand X isn't falsifiable then there is no difference between A and B and so there is no reason why anyone would want to bring X as evidence. So it seems to me that 'falsifiability' is not a useful criterion for deciding whether a 'science' should be used in court (though I'm also saying it's not 'wrong' either).
What does anyone else think?
--
I used FreeBSD 3.4 (PAO) and FreeBSD 4.0 with PCMCIA and it just worked (on a Vaio 505TX). I was using it for a year with absolutely no problem - in fact PCMCIA worked 100% reliably unlike under Windows 98 or Linux. However I was completely unable to install FreeBSD 4.1.1 - it failed to detect the PCMCIA ethernet card and so I couldn't do a net installation. I tried every IRQ setting possible as well as the 'correct' settings gleaned from Windows 2000. Maybe it got broken somewhere along the way. It's very frustrating!
--
Hey! That's not offtopic at all. Maybe I should explain: Moliere (a famous French playwright BTW) wrote a play with a character Tartuffe (from which we derive the word Tartufferie). This character explained that opium worked because it has a 'soporific virtue'. Now any but the least bright person realises that 'has a soporific virtue' is nothing other than a restatement of 'opium makes you soporific' but somehow it sounds more scientific to the uneducated ear. Well explaining why neutron stars might fly out of a nova in terms of an 'asymmetric explosion' is much the same thing. It is quite clear to anyone who knows the meaning of the word 'asymmetric' that any explosion that flings out a neutron star is asymmetric. So this is a vacuous explanation is it not? But somehow 'asymmetric explosion' sounds scientific. The word 'asymmetric' probably sounds really technical to a science journalist who doesn't really understand what they are talking about and that's why it was probably used in the original article.
--
One way to understand continuations is to look at how it's implemented. Check out the source code to one implementation of scheme, SCM. In effect it doesn't interpret continuations in scheme but implements continuations in C and then implements the scheme continuations using the C ones. The actual code works by deviously using setjmp, longjmp and messing with the stack but it's not that hard to understand (although it's a bit messy on architectures that have a non-contiguous stack). The last time I looked at this code was about 5 years ago so apologies if it's been reimplemented differently since then.
Many years ago I used a similar implementation of continuations in C myself in order to implement a version of the very complex recursive pattern matching that Mathematica supports - in effect by using coroutines to generate streams of possible matches. At the time most people thought this was a gross solution to the problem but now I see that continuations are considered to be respectable I shall have to start using the method again.
--
However, 'sharing' with millions of strangers is considered to violate the law.
And who is the State that they should be able to determine how many friends I am allowed to share with? Why anyone votes for governments that interfere with people's lives like this is beyond me.
--
And I guess opium makes people soporific because of its soporific virtue. It's amazing what you can get away with saying if it's meant to be 'scientific'.
--
...but for a different reason to that of most people. It seems to me that there ought to be a fundamental human right for two consenting adults to do whatever they like with each other in private. I believe that these rights should cover everything from sharing DNA to sharing data. Copyright gives other people the right to interfere with the private actions of individuals. Whatever the benefits that copyright may bring to society (and I do not deny that they exist) it seems fundamentally wrong that a third party is allowed to interfere in the privacy of my own home if I decide to share something with a friend. The powers that are required to enforce copyright rules seem to me to be too great to allow governments to wield them. So while I can sympathise with all those authors out there who feel they have a right to control their creations I don't think that the solution is to grant them the right to tell me what I can do in my own home.
Having said this I must add that I have paid for almost every (maybe even every) item of intellectual property in my home that the law currently requires us to pay for because I think it is good to recompense creators for their work. If a way can be found to make people pay for IP without what I see as human rights violations then I'll be all for it. But otherwise I think the price is too much to pay.
--
And if you put all of the wires in this beast end to end you would have a wire long enough to connect the moon to the earth three times over. And if you tried to store the amount if data it can process in one day on floppy disks you would need a pile of floppies 2.85 miles high. But that's not all. If you took all of the air that goes through the fans to cool it and pumped it to a submarine you could keep 18 active sailors. And of course 85% of statistics are made up.
--
Do you have a reference to the actual paper describing decoherence free subspaces and one describing what was actually performed in this experiment? I've always been sceptical of quantum computing papers because it has seemed pretty obvious to me that decoherence effects grow exponentially so I'd love to see a good paper contradicting me!
--
Thanks for some really interesting links - especially that lecture! Now if I hadn't gone out on a limb and accused NASA of hoaxing on Slashdot I would never have found out about them:-)
I hadn't realised how recently Wegener's work had been accepted. Nowadays it's even seen as a crucial precondition for the existence of life so it's importance has come a long way (of course it's not essential if you believe nanobacteria can do the work tectonics does!).
BTW I'm not afraid of paradigm shifts. Eg. comparable to nanobacteria story: the day I read up on prions many years ago I was converted. It's just that for the Mars thing all of my BS detectors were firing at full power...
--
I have used Weisstein's encyclopaedia many times over the years and found it very useful. But one problem I always had with it was that Eric didn't always seem to understand what it was he was writing entries about. It seemed to me that he was just copying equations out of textbooks sometimes. In places he was copying from rather ancient texts and was using pretty non-contemporary notation. One day I was expecting another author to come chasing after him for stealing their text. My concern came true but not in quite the way I expected!
Sad though, it was a hell of a useful site.
--
The nanobacteria subject is fascinating but it's another example of a story that is sometimes associated with extra-terrestrial life - probably to gain publicity.
When was the tectonic plate theory accepted? They must have been interesting times. Certainly my father thinks it's a lot of nonsense...
I think the major flaw in your argument is the "common sense" argument
I guess it is the weakest point. When weighing up evidence like this I guess we rely on our own experiences and yours are different from mine. Having worked in string theory related stuff for a few years I know what it is like to have a sceptical audience. But I generally tend to make guarded statements like "Assuming string theory is a good model then...". I would never make a statement like the following from the NASA press release:
METEORITE YIELDS EVIDENCE OF PRIMITIVE LIFE ON EARLY MARS
A NASA research team of scientists at the Johnson Space Center and at Stanford University has found evidence that strongly suggests primitive life may have existed on Mars more than 3.6 billion years ago. (My italics)
Given the doubt over the interpretation of 'nanobacteria' fossils it seems to me that the most reasonable interpretation of part of this 'evidence' is that it is a demonstration that such 'fossils' can be produced by inorganic processes in a sterile environment but of course you don't get big bucks for a finding like this.
And as a final note, it's still "meteorite," not "asteroid."
Ooops! They don't even look similar.
--
I suspect that all anyone has done is test out the "Hello World" document or spreadsheet. Has anyone tried working with a several hundred page document? Has anyone tried doing mailmerges? Has anyone tried any number of the thousands of things people really do with these applications? Most importantly - would anyone trust giving a presentation to a large audience using Powerpoint under Wine?
PS At SIGGRAPH 2000 one brave soul gave a presentation to about 2000 people using Powerpoint under Linux/VMWare.
--
Firstly I think it is possible for a hoax to arise without the apparent perpetrators of the hoax being guilty. A more clear cut example is the bible code hoax. The original researcher may have actually had good intentions but the publishers of the paper almost certainly had humourous intentions and so I don't think it would be fair to accuse the original author without knowing more about him.
Another thing to point out about the bible code hoax is that no matter how sophisticated the mathematical machinery used to determine statistical significance, no matter how good the authors credentials, most people of reasonable intelligence can determine that the methods used had an error even without looking at the paper. The reason they can do this is that the a priori probability of the bible code hypothesis is true is so small that the chance of error by the researcher is large by comparison. A person of reasonable intelligence can bring all sorts of evidence to bear in making this assessment: the track record of the researchers or other researchers in the field, the track record of the research institution, political or religious biases in the hypotheses and so on.
Now the bible code case is more clearcut but I still think that the fossil bearing asteroid case has some similarities. I think that most reasonable people instantly saw the story for what it was. Given the difficulty of assessing paleological evidence, especially evidence this subtle, and given the need for money by NASA at the time it seems like a very reasonable hypothesis that this was not a straightforward press release about some scientific research.
The original researchers may have acted in good faith although I believe that it was a very reasonable hypothesis for me to think that the methods were erroneous (this belief seems to have been subsequently borne out). However the press release and paper required an approval process and here I think someone has chosen to give the story an extra spin. In addition the TV networks also gave their extra spin so that the final story was broadcast as if it was pretty definite that fossils of extraterrestrial life had been found. What is more, whoever approved the NASA press release would have know that this is what CNN (and co.) would have reported. In addition this is precisely what NASA wanted reported in order to gain extra publicity (and hence funding) for their Mars projects. So the research was not published as a criticism of the methodology but as high profile evidence for extraterrestrial life. This seems tantamount to a hoax to me.
--
The alleged fossil remains in a meteorite which is thought to have come from Mars (not an asteroid) were not a hoax
Actually I believe they were. I doubt that many (if any) genuine researchers really thought that there was any chance that the formations found on those meteorites were formed by life. I don't believe the meteorites themselves were faked but I have major doubts about the credibility of the researchers. I think it was a bid for more funds - especially given the state of NASA funding at that time.
--
If anything is discovered in space these days it seems that someone has to close with "and that means there is a chance of finding life there". I guess that must be the way to get funding these days - starting with Nasa's life bearing asteroid hoax a few years back.
--
...of filtering because then we have the fun race between parents who know next to nothing about computers trying to administer security on a box running an OS with no concept of security (at least in most cases) and used by kids who live and breathe rebellion and technology. But I pity those kids born of sysadmin parents.
--
>I am saying that guns can safely co-exist with an advanced first-world society without causing extreme violence.
How can you say that I am incorrectly inferring a causal link and then go on to assert that there is a causal link (asserting that removing a will remove B is basically the same as saying A causes B)?
Also causal links are never as simple as just A=>B. The engine is what makes a car go. But if someone doesn't put their foot on the gas the car goes nowhere. That doesn't imply that the engine is heavily implicated in the going of the car.
You can pretty well guarantee if you free up guns in most Western countries you will end up with a significantly increased homicide rate. There may be some unusual countries where this won't be the case but they will be the minority. There are many interesting reasons why both Switzerland and Israel are highly atypical developed countries. And I'm not sure that any country wants to learn anything from the case of Israel.
--
He he! I just want to say I like the meaning you read into the scare quotes (extra "'s) in the Salon article. They're supposed to indicate irony but it's funny how people, like the writer of the Salon.com article, often seem to subconsciously use them to undermine their own argument!
--
Take a peek at the graph of homicide rates across the world in this month's Scientific American.
To everyone on this planet outside of the US it's completely and totally obvious that the constitutional right to weaponry is the biggest cause. Are parents in the US *that* much worse than parents elsewhere? Of course not. Is there more violence on US TV? The rest of the world watches US TV. The cause is gun law. Why do Americans find this so difficult to see?
By the way - I'm not making any value judgement about gun laws. If you Americans like guns that's all well and good. Just don't be surprised that this pleasure comes with a price.
On the other hand it's interesting to compare with a country that doesn't seem to have laws any more. The homicide rate in Russia is incredible.
--
Slashdot Mirror
Nearly 25 years after its release and with less memory and a slower CPU than any Atari a Sinclair ZX81 still makes just as good a doorstop as it ever did.
--
I don't wait for my laptop to boot - I suspend and resume it like most laptop users. The people who write articles for ZDnet are clearly so inexperienced with computers they've never even used a laptop (or maybe they have but they were too scared to select 'suspend' from a menu). No wonder they can't figure out what faster RAM is all about.
--
--
...but I couldn't find where to click to find a stock quote for GNOME or LINUX. What the hell kind of news story is that?
--
It was interesting to read in the article that judges have recently had to come up with a better definition of science than "generally accepted" (which would make virgin birth science I guess). One of the requirements they cited was 'falsifiability'. I find this interesting for this reason: falsifiability is crucial for developing science but surely it is redundant in court. Suppose someone wanted to use X in court to prove A is true rather than B. If A is different from B and their argument is sound then this argument itself forms part of a test of the falsifiability of X. If, on the other hand X isn't falsifiable then there is no difference between A and B and so there is no reason why anyone would want to bring X as evidence. So it seems to me that 'falsifiability' is not a useful criterion for deciding whether a 'science' should be used in court (though I'm also saying it's not 'wrong' either). What does anyone else think?
--
I used FreeBSD 3.4 (PAO) and FreeBSD 4.0 with PCMCIA and it just worked (on a Vaio 505TX). I was using it for a year with absolutely no problem - in fact PCMCIA worked 100% reliably unlike under Windows 98 or Linux. However I was completely unable to install FreeBSD 4.1.1 - it failed to detect the PCMCIA ethernet card and so I couldn't do a net installation. I tried every IRQ setting possible as well as the 'correct' settings gleaned from Windows 2000. Maybe it got broken somewhere along the way. It's very frustrating!
--
Hey! That's not offtopic at all. Maybe I should explain: Moliere (a famous French playwright BTW) wrote a play with a character Tartuffe (from which we derive the word Tartufferie). This character explained that opium worked because it has a 'soporific virtue'. Now any but the least bright person realises that 'has a soporific virtue' is nothing other than a restatement of 'opium makes you soporific' but somehow it sounds more scientific to the uneducated ear. Well explaining why neutron stars might fly out of a nova in terms of an 'asymmetric explosion' is much the same thing. It is quite clear to anyone who knows the meaning of the word 'asymmetric' that any explosion that flings out a neutron star is asymmetric. So this is a vacuous explanation is it not? But somehow 'asymmetric explosion' sounds scientific. The word 'asymmetric' probably sounds really technical to a science journalist who doesn't really understand what they are talking about and that's why it was probably used in the original article.
--
One way to understand continuations is to look at how it's implemented. Check out the source code to one implementation of scheme, SCM. In effect it doesn't interpret continuations in scheme but implements continuations in C and then implements the scheme continuations using the C ones. The actual code works by deviously using setjmp, longjmp and messing with the stack but it's not that hard to understand (although it's a bit messy on architectures that have a non-contiguous stack). The last time I looked at this code was about 5 years ago so apologies if it's been reimplemented differently since then. Many years ago I used a similar implementation of continuations in C myself in order to implement a version of the very complex recursive pattern matching that Mathematica supports - in effect by using coroutines to generate streams of possible matches. At the time most people thought this was a gross solution to the problem but now I see that continuations are considered to be respectable I shall have to start using the method again.
--
--
--
...but for a different reason to that of most people. It seems to me that there ought to be a fundamental human right for two consenting adults to do whatever they like with each other in private. I believe that these rights should cover everything from sharing DNA to sharing data. Copyright gives other people the right to interfere with the private actions of individuals. Whatever the benefits that copyright may bring to society (and I do not deny that they exist) it seems fundamentally wrong that a third party is allowed to interfere in the privacy of my own home if I decide to share something with a friend. The powers that are required to enforce copyright rules seem to me to be too great to allow governments to wield them. So while I can sympathise with all those authors out there who feel they have a right to control their creations I don't think that the solution is to grant them the right to tell me what I can do in my own home. Having said this I must add that I have paid for almost every (maybe even every) item of intellectual property in my home that the law currently requires us to pay for because I think it is good to recompense creators for their work. If a way can be found to make people pay for IP without what I see as human rights violations then I'll be all for it. But otherwise I think the price is too much to pay.
--
And if you put all of the wires in this beast end to end you would have a wire long enough to connect the moon to the earth three times over. And if you tried to store the amount if data it can process in one day on floppy disks you would need a pile of floppies 2.85 miles high. But that's not all. If you took all of the air that goes through the fans to cool it and pumped it to a submarine you could keep 18 active sailors. And of course 85% of statistics are made up.
--
Do you have a reference to the actual paper describing decoherence free subspaces and one describing what was actually performed in this experiment? I've always been sceptical of quantum computing papers because it has seemed pretty obvious to me that decoherence effects grow exponentially so I'd love to see a good paper contradicting me!
--
Thanks for some really interesting links - especially that lecture! Now if I hadn't gone out on a limb and accused NASA of hoaxing on Slashdot I would never have found out about them :-)
I hadn't realised how recently Wegener's work had been accepted. Nowadays it's even seen as a crucial precondition for the existence of life so it's importance has come a long way (of course it's not essential if you believe nanobacteria can do the work tectonics does!).
BTW I'm not afraid of paradigm shifts. Eg. comparable to nanobacteria story: the day I read up on prions many years ago I was converted. It's just that for the Mars thing all of my BS detectors were firing at full power...
--
I have used Weisstein's encyclopaedia many times over the years and found it very useful. But one problem I always had with it was that Eric didn't always seem to understand what it was he was writing entries about. It seemed to me that he was just copying equations out of textbooks sometimes. In places he was copying from rather ancient texts and was using pretty non-contemporary notation. One day I was expecting another author to come chasing after him for stealing their text. My concern came true but not in quite the way I expected! Sad though, it was a hell of a useful site.
--
--
I suspect that all anyone has done is test out the "Hello World" document or spreadsheet. Has anyone tried working with a several hundred page document? Has anyone tried doing mailmerges? Has anyone tried any number of the thousands of things people really do with these applications? Most importantly - would anyone trust giving a presentation to a large audience using Powerpoint under Wine? PS At SIGGRAPH 2000 one brave soul gave a presentation to about 2000 people using Powerpoint under Linux/VMWare.
--
Firstly I think it is possible for a hoax to arise without the apparent perpetrators of the hoax being guilty. A more clear cut example is the bible code hoax. The original researcher may have actually had good intentions but the publishers of the paper almost certainly had humourous intentions and so I don't think it would be fair to accuse the original author without knowing more about him. Another thing to point out about the bible code hoax is that no matter how sophisticated the mathematical machinery used to determine statistical significance, no matter how good the authors credentials, most people of reasonable intelligence can determine that the methods used had an error even without looking at the paper. The reason they can do this is that the a priori probability of the bible code hypothesis is true is so small that the chance of error by the researcher is large by comparison. A person of reasonable intelligence can bring all sorts of evidence to bear in making this assessment: the track record of the researchers or other researchers in the field, the track record of the research institution, political or religious biases in the hypotheses and so on. Now the bible code case is more clearcut but I still think that the fossil bearing asteroid case has some similarities. I think that most reasonable people instantly saw the story for what it was. Given the difficulty of assessing paleological evidence, especially evidence this subtle, and given the need for money by NASA at the time it seems like a very reasonable hypothesis that this was not a straightforward press release about some scientific research. The original researchers may have acted in good faith although I believe that it was a very reasonable hypothesis for me to think that the methods were erroneous (this belief seems to have been subsequently borne out). However the press release and paper required an approval process and here I think someone has chosen to give the story an extra spin. In addition the TV networks also gave their extra spin so that the final story was broadcast as if it was pretty definite that fossils of extraterrestrial life had been found. What is more, whoever approved the NASA press release would have know that this is what CNN (and co.) would have reported. In addition this is precisely what NASA wanted reported in order to gain extra publicity (and hence funding) for their Mars projects. So the research was not published as a criticism of the methodology but as high profile evidence for extraterrestrial life. This seems tantamount to a hoax to me.
--
The alleged fossil remains in a meteorite which is thought to have come from Mars (not an asteroid) were not a hoax Actually I believe they were. I doubt that many (if any) genuine researchers really thought that there was any chance that the formations found on those meteorites were formed by life. I don't believe the meteorites themselves were faked but I have major doubts about the credibility of the researchers. I think it was a bid for more funds - especially given the state of NASA funding at that time.
--
If anything is discovered in space these days it seems that someone has to close with "and that means there is a chance of finding life there". I guess that must be the way to get funding these days - starting with Nasa's life bearing asteroid hoax a few years back.
--
--
...of filtering because then we have the fun race between parents who know next to nothing about computers trying to administer security on a box running an OS with no concept of security (at least in most cases) and used by kids who live and breathe rebellion and technology. But I pity those kids born of sysadmin parents.
--
>I am saying that guns can safely co-exist with an advanced first-world society without causing extreme violence. How can you say that I am incorrectly inferring a causal link and then go on to assert that there is a causal link (asserting that removing a will remove B is basically the same as saying A causes B)? Also causal links are never as simple as just A=>B. The engine is what makes a car go. But if someone doesn't put their foot on the gas the car goes nowhere. That doesn't imply that the engine is heavily implicated in the going of the car. You can pretty well guarantee if you free up guns in most Western countries you will end up with a significantly increased homicide rate. There may be some unusual countries where this won't be the case but they will be the minority. There are many interesting reasons why both Switzerland and Israel are highly atypical developed countries. And I'm not sure that any country wants to learn anything from the case of Israel.
--
He he! I just want to say I like the meaning you read into the scare quotes (extra "'s) in the Salon article. They're supposed to indicate irony but it's funny how people, like the writer of the Salon.com article, often seem to subconsciously use them to undermine their own argument!
--
Take a peek at the graph of homicide rates across the world in this month's Scientific American. To everyone on this planet outside of the US it's completely and totally obvious that the constitutional right to weaponry is the biggest cause. Are parents in the US *that* much worse than parents elsewhere? Of course not. Is there more violence on US TV? The rest of the world watches US TV. The cause is gun law. Why do Americans find this so difficult to see? By the way - I'm not making any value judgement about gun laws. If you Americans like guns that's all well and good. Just don't be surprised that this pleasure comes with a price. On the other hand it's interesting to compare with a country that doesn't seem to have laws any more. The homicide rate in Russia is incredible.
--