Only, he could see the 200x200x square sample, and tell that it was just common sand, before picking it as representative of the sand for analysis.
277 karma · joined October 2, 2012
Ahh, sour grapes and/or jealousy. Yes, it IS obvious now.
True, but the point I wanted to make is that Occam's Razor doesn't give us the "true story", just the more possible given the evidence we have.
I.e sometimes the complex, involved story can be the actual thing that happened, despite involving 20 more entities and complex interactions.
Actually it wouldn't have to be "a completely accurate simulation of our universe in our universe". A "somewhat accurate simulation of our universe in our universe" would also do for the statistical purposes of that premise. If you have recursively-simulated universes, even if they are not 100% like each other, it shouldn't change the probabilities, right?
That said, I don't fully agree with the main premise:
>if recursively-simulated universes are possible it becomes vanishingly unlikely that we do not live in one
Sounds to me somewhat akin to the faulty "ontological proof of the existence of God" ("Anselm defined God as "that than which nothing greater can be conceived", and then argued that this being could exist in the mind. He suggested that, if the greatest possible being exists in the mind, it must also exist in reality. If it only exists in the mind, a greater being is possible—one which exists in the mind and in reality.").
That's only if we assume a digital simulation.
An "advanced civilization" could also run it in some kind of analog computing environment, no?
_Best_ not as in "the true one", but as in "the most possible, if we don't know any better".
An event could have an elaborate explanation and a simple one, and the elaborate explanation could still be the true one.
E.g a guy is found knifed in a desolate street of New York. His wallet is missing. He had no known enemies. The simplest explanation is "it was a mugging gone wrong". In fact, he was killed by a guy that had an obsession on the girl he recently started dating. The killer didn't even take the wallet to make it look like a mugging: he took it because it had pictures of the girl and the dead guy he wanted to add to his "shrine". (Hmm, I should go write for CSI).
>thus since this "simulation" works exactly the same as the known universe and we don't know about anything that is outside the universe we can safely ignore this theory and not lose any information about how the universe works.
Except if a simulation _doesn_t work_ "exactly the same as the known universe" but has tiny details that could be telling, which is, like, the premise of the whole article.
The main problem, as is with Flash based editors, would be performance.
>Is anyone aware of an article that explains the architecture of Photoshop? How pixels are processed through its stack of layers?
Well, the layers are just different images with alpha transparency drawn on top of each other, and the blend modes are just math done between two layers' pixel values.
Here's an (rather basic) article:
http://photoblogstop.com/photoshop/photoshop-blend-modes-exp...
Putting up a Wiki as documentation for a project/API, essentially means "we don't have time to write documentation, so we jotted together some napkin notes, maybe you can come in and fix them".
I've never seen "wiki for documentation" work in practice. It's always left in some semi-incoherent state, stale and incomplete.
Which also makes sense. $100,000 to me is serious money. To Bill Gates it's small change. Money is a relative - percentage thing.
A $20,000 car is a purchase you make once in 5-10 years. Saving $100 means nothing in that context --you're already parting with 200 times the amount, so if the $100 amount meant something for you, you'd have gone for a cheaper, say $15000, car in the first place...
Savings of $10 (20%) on small items, like food or garments, on the other hand, pile up.
You spend more than $20,000 on small items per year than you do on cars...
I think you answered your own question with the "save" part.
The vendor shipping it with the browser means it controls it, it has responsibility for it, it secures it, and it allows it. End of story.
>Why wouldn't other browsers have Pepper?
JS is a necessity for a web browser/vendor, and is already present in it. Pepper is not, and there are NO signs it will be. Do you see any movement towards adoption as of now? I see the opposite, the abandonment of even old style plugins.
And this is the argument he's making: that does not fly by browser vendors. They DON'T want to have code run OUTSIDE their VM/GC.
43 is quite far from 30.
>however, it's a gradual thing and not much different at 32 versus 28, for example
Exactly.
Same thing happens with 99% of "easy" stuff.
E.g if you find cooking easy, it's because a cook only learns how to _do_ cooking, not how or why it works (which would involve chemistry, physics, physiology, math, biology and other stuff).
The odds of which are still insignificant.
And the college being expensive is a "government created problem" because?
Extremely believable.
I'm afraid the points you make are not gonna help with my condescending tone.
50% usage? That's a HUGE success for a de-facto standard. There are even _official_ standards with much LESS use (SOAP comes to mind). So, the "50% non usage" part means absolutely nothing.
>you are also assuming that the target is a web browser, which is what jQuery is meant for. jQuery has no bearing on firefox extension programming, nodejs programming, or upcoming win8 RT and Firefox OS programming
Even if that was true, it would be irrelevant. Yes, a standard is only a standard is some SPECIFIC field. RS-232 is a standard, but has no bearing on, say, building construction. And those ANSI Screw size standards have no bearing at all in software: http://www.engineersedge.com/screw_threads_chart.htm
That doesn't make them any less standard.
That said, your examples are also false. jQuery can and IS used in nodejs AND in firefox extension programming. And presummably Firefox OS programming. Some examples:
http://net.tutsplus.com/tutorials/javascript-ajax/how-to-scr...
http://stackoverflow.com/questions/491490/how-to-use-jquery-...
You mean like the hundreds of standards they adhere too, from POSIX (OS X is a certified UNIX OS), to all the networking standards, unicode, MIDI, OSC, VPN, ... whatever?
Or several they have released themselves for wider adoption, like the HTML5 Canvas thing, CSS transitions, Webkit, LLVM, Rendevous, etc?
Not even sure what you wrote means...
I didn't know about it and I watched the iOS6 presentation, skimmed through the iPhone 5, iOS 6 apple.com pages, regularly read 2-3 Apple websites + HN, and am a web developer.
And they will NOT do it until the battery, CPU power et al are there to support it running on the browser in the way a random website wants to handle it.
Because many people don't yet know about it? As if people read the "feature lists"...
>It is inexcusable that it wasn't previously possible to upload photos to sites (one of what is now the most common use cases for the internet) without involving a native app. The iOS ecosystem struggles to find a middle ground between native and a competitive/competent browser. This feature was no doubt strongly argued by Apple's PMs for many years, but finally they won out over some other dept's PM team.
I seriously doubt this conspiracy theory. How about, they just got around to it? It also took Android a version or two to add the same feature -- and Mobile Safari has been more feature complete AND faster than the built-in Android "Browser" for years, so it's not like they tried to stifle mobile apps.
(As a matter of fact, when Jobs touted mobile apps as the way to build applications for the iPhone (pre SDK), people were frothing at the mouth, demanding a native SDK).
>Camera Roll is ~/Photos + Pinterst-like dynamic grid a la Masonry.
Nothing like Masonry, which is all about calculating and presenting images of differing heights in a non uniform grid. This here is just a grid, something ages older than Masonry and/or Pinterest.
The BAD kind of skeuomorphism is mimicking real life object behavior, when a different approach is both possible and more easy to use in software. That is, UIs like this:
http://codecpack.co/images/BlazeDVD.jpg
It has nothing to do about having faux-leather on your background.
Page flipping, which Apple uses in iBooks, is such an example of bad sceuomorphism.
But most other Apple's sceuomorphism criticism is about irrelevant fad designer preferences for clear-cut modernist LOOKS (e.g Metro style, flat etc). Those things are fads, and come and go. The same guys were all over "lickable interfaces, drop shadows, embossed elements, etc" a few years back. Actually, circa 2005-7, it was a whole movement of developers using such visual sceuomorphic and ornamental details, named the "Delicious Generation".
To see that the LOOK part of design (and not behavior, e.g look&feel) is all about fads, consider the case of Jonathan Ives again. The same "minimal, aluminum+glass" guy, was the one who designed the flower-power iMac back in the day:
No, it's the best a small team, sponsored by those companies, but having nothing to do with them --it's not like Google or Adobe or MS assigned their best engineers to the new site-- could come up with as an ALPHA release, and in a short period of time.
Isn't it OBVIOUS?
Which sounds like the smart way to go about it.
It seems a little illogical in the chocolate vs laptop $.50 off voucher, but it too makes sense. The laptop voucher provides almost no value to you, considering you are about to spent $700 dollars on the thing anyway. $.50 could be just the gas to go to the store to buy it.
$.50 for the chocolate on the other hand, will be taken only by cash strapped people (or coupon maniacs).
I doubt people with $700 at the ready to buy a laptop would at the same time clip a $.50 coupon for a chocolate bar.