SyncSort was the first useful sort program to break the O(N log N) barrier (yes, this is possible, CS101 kiddies)
You're playing with semantics there. No, sorting faster than O(N log N) is not possible. Yes, it is possible to divide a sort into two steps, such as computing a sort key and then doing the actual sort, such that the second of the two steps is less than O(N log N).
This allows you to save time when repeatedly sorting unchanged records, but saying that you have a faster-than-O(N log N) sort algorithm is a misstatement, because it depends on precomputed keys and you are not taking the time to compute those keys into account.
Authors retain the copyright to most books published in the United States; they simply license reproduction and distribution rights to a publisher. Terms vary, but typically the rights revert to the author when the book goes out-of-print. So my original question was how can the O'Reily (the publisher) decide to release something to the public domain?
Well, Mr. I Didn't Read The Article, the following passage from the article may come in handy:
Although in most cases it owns the rights to the books it has published, O'Reilly will release books under the Founders' Copyright only with the author's permission. The company is in the process of soliciting that permission, and 80% of the authors who have responded to date have agreed to honor the Founders' Copyright. O'Reilly is also applying the Creative Commons Attribution license to hundreds of out-of-print books, pending author approval.
That's a very misleading statement. Yes, you use Visual Studio.NET, but the XBox does not run CLR code, it runs ordinary native binaries.
That's like saying "I'm running Java!" because you used a Java-to-native compiler and produced an ordinary native EXE, and then ran it without any trace of Java on the system.
The death star has a diameter of 120km (our moon, for reference, is 3500km). Do you REALLY want to download a 120,000 x 120,000 (14.4 gigapixel) image?
that is assuming the best way to get hydrogen is from water. you use electricty to create H2 and Oxegen and you use Hydrogen and oxegen to create electricity. every time you do that you lose energy in the form of heat.
Back in my day, they taught the laws of thermodynamics in high-school physics. Anyone with even a basic grounding in physics wouldn't find that the least bit interesting.
I suppose now you're going to tell us that water is wet?
Out of curiosity, what is the use of a backup that is not periodically rotated off-site? And by "off-site" I mean at least 50 km away? What happens when a tornado takes out the building holding the critical data AND the building holding that nice array of IDE drives 2 minutes apart?
Then you're probably out of business anyway, so what does it matter at that point?
Remember Eve? She and Adam got themselves booted out of paradise and as a result humans must face disease, old age, death, and painful child births all because of us. Not God US. (makes you wonder where Lillith is then)
I don't know if you really believe that or if you're just pointing out what most Christians believe, so this isn't necessarily directed at you.
But, let me ask you a question. Suppose that I fathered a child. I instructed that child not to do something -- say, eat my piece of pizza. The child is naughty and eats my pizza while I'm not looking.
I, being in a righteous fury, decide to punish my child. Instead of simply giving him a stern talking-to, I decide to be a bit harsher and:
1) Banish him from my house for all eternity. 2) Intentionally sabotage all of his future career opportunities so that he is forced to work his butt off to make any money. 3) Afflict him with diseases. 4) Devise horrible parasites to torture him and all of the other creatures in the world. 5) Cause him to grow old and die (he was immortal). 6) Tremendously increase the suffering his wife must endure during childbirth, and create a great risk of death for both her and her children. 7) Refuse to ever, under any circumstances, completely forgive him and revoke these punishments. 8) Inflict all of these punishments on every single living man, woman, and child, from now until the end of time, because they are all at least distantly related to my son.
Because he disobeyed me. Once. Wow, I sound like a candidate for Father of the Year, huh?
OK, here's another one:
I have a puppy. I have loved and nurtured this puppy since the day it was born. One day, I take my puppy up to my bathroom, fill up the bathtub, and drop it in. It struggles to keep its head above the water, so I reach into the tub and hold its head under. Eventually it stops squirming. I empty the tub and leave its body to rot.
How would you react to me if you found out that I had done that?
Now, think about how many billions of innocent creatures God supposedly drowned during the Great Flood. Millions of people. Billions of animals, including cute baby ones. Oh, but that's a happy story, with all the cute, smiling animals marching onto the Ark, and the nice happy rainbow at the end.
Funny, they never mentioned the stench of rotting puppy carcases in Sunday School.
I find this statement intensely irritating. According to Christian mythology, God created the universe and everything in it. That means, of course, that he made HIV, tapeworms, mosquitos, malaria, ticks, bot flies, amoebic dysentery, and countless other nasties.
Please answer this question honestly: if you went to a tropical country and caught amoebic dysentery (for those who don't know what this is, it's an incredibly severe, life-threatening diarrhea), would your reaction be:
A) "Going to a doctor would be undoing God's work. He created the parasites which are currently causing me to shit blood and mucus, and I must respect his creations by refusing to kill them."
B) "Please, doctor, I'll do anything! Give me antibiotics!"
Think about that for a minute, in all seriousness. I'm betting that if you were really faced with the situation, you'd want to be so pumped full of drugs that you couldn't see straight.
Now, for the bonus question, think about what kind of being would purposefully create things like HIV and amoebic dysentery (remember, he's omniscient and omnipotent, so it couldn't have been an accident), and why exactly you think he's such a great guy.
The current state of affairs is exactly that, a situation where genetic modification technology is so crude that animals like Dolly, when they are viable at all, largely have various genetic defects associated with them.
Still we have scientists filled with hubris rushing to produce almost certainly defective clones.
1) Which scientists, exactly, are "rushing" to produce clones? I have seen no indication of this.
2) We can't possibly perfect cloning without practicing it a lot. Unless you're advocating a clone-free world, the fact that our current cloning technology is imperfect is largely irrelevant -- of course it's imperfect, we're just learning how to do it. Our first computers sucked, too, but I didn't see anyone complaining about "scientists, filled with hubris, rushing to produce vacuum-tube-based monstrosities". You gotta start somewhere.
So in other words, if I forgot to lock my car and someone steals it, I should be punished for it? What if I leave a package on my front porch for two minutes while I go grab something from the kitchen -- am I responsible for its theft during that period?
I agree that companies should write good code. However, painting them as the bad guys is a dangerously skewed viewpoint. I suppose you have never, ever, once in your life forgotten to lock a door or window?
I know sarcasm can be tough to spot, but he was kidding.
Anyone who suggests catching an exception and printing "segfault" as a solution is obviously kidding -- the intent, I believe, was to point out that verbosity is a much better fault then brevity in something like error handling. "segfault" is damned near the most useless message you can possibly imagine getting from a program, isn't it?
That article is the most absurd joke I have ever read. He spends half the article complaining about Java's startup time (which (A) does not apply in any server situation, and (B) is unfair, because you don't count the machine's bootup time when talking about the performance of C programs, do you?).
Then he invents other ways to talk about the startup time without seeming to talk about the startup time (for instance, trussing Hello World results in a ton of output, but naturally that's Java starting up and loading its classes. Again, do you consider what the machine has to do to boot itself up when you're talking about C programs?). I will point out again that Java's startup time is almost irrelevant, especially in a server environment (which is what he's talking about).
The rest of the article is picking on the "jar" tool. jar is a program written in Java. Criticisms against the jar tool no more reflect on Java than criticisms against gzip reflect on C. The fact that jar doesn't do a good job of reporting errors is (A) irrelevant, because it's a developer tool and we know how to read exceptions, and (B) still more irrelevant, because how well it reports errors has nothing to do with what language it was written in. Tons of C programs have lousy error reporting as well, such as a number of Unix utilities I might name.
Further, this article is obviously very old. He's talking about Java 1.1.8, which is what, five years old now? Might as well criticize Linux by talking about obscure video driver bugs that were fixed five years ago. Obviously, that's not the article's fault for having been written so long ago, but it is the parent poster's fault for bringing it up as if it is somehow still relevant.
And, in case you didn't notice, both results are the same URL. That brings the grand total to ONE AIDS site in the entire country of China, at least according to this search engine.
That's absurd. The state owns the toilets in its buildings, too -- how would you feel if they filmed you taking a dump and then interrogated you about it? They own the toilets and the stall you were sitting in, so how could you complain?
It is unreasonable to expect (or want!) our government to be scrutinizing us for anti-American behavior at all hours, when we are decent law-abiding citizens who have done nothing wrong. Nobody would expect the FBI to be going through our library records, and it's utter bullshit that they have the right to (in the absence of some sort of criminal investigation).
If you are so comfortable with having your privacy invaded, please post the following:
Your real name and address Your social security number Which books you have read in the last two years Which movies you have watched in the last two years
What, you don't want perfect strangers having access to such personal information? Why not? You're not... *gasp*... a terrorist, are you?
The single most important development that would come out of a room-temperature superconductor would be the elimination of batteries, fuel cells, gas tanks, and every other such power storage technology.
Because a superconductor conducts with literally zero resistance, you can create a ring of superconducting material, pump as much current into it as it will tolerate, and just let the current cycle forever. No degradation whatsoever. Then when you want power, you just tap into the ring and pull it out on demand. Superconducting rings are real devices, by the way -- they're just big and expensive and require cryogenics.
If we could make them out of something that operated at room temperature, then we could (probably) make very small superconducting rings, and if the power density were high enough, we could use them instead of batteries or fuel tanks. And they would never, ever wear out, no matter how many times you charged or discharged them. The amount of power they could contain is dependent on the superconducting material in question, but a high-power-density room-temperature superconductor (if such a thing is possible) would eliminate all of mankind's power storage and transmission problems. The only concern left would be generation.
No. That's precisely what we're complaining about, dumbass.
Have any idea why he's being held?
No. Neither do you. Neither do his friends. Neither does his family. Neither does he. That's the fucking problem.
Note that I'm not saying the guy is innocent. How can I say that, when nobody even knows why he's in jail? Maybe he did something horrible, maybe not. Either way, tossing him in solitary to rot without ever telling anybody why is not the way to handle it.
If not, why should the US government give YOU all the evidence available in an ongoing investigation?
Nobody's asking for "all the evidence". Something as simple as "you are under arrest for..." and scheduling a court date would do just fine, thank you. Or are you forgetting the Bill of Rights, which guarantees the right to a fair and speedy trial to all US citizens? It is very, very unconstitutional to hold someone in solitary confinement indefinitely without charging them for a crime.
I bet you'd be singing a different tune if it was you or one of your loved ones in jail, and nobody would give you even the flimsiest reason why.
Oh, but he's a dirty Arab, so it's okay. Silly me. The bastard probably planned to blow up the Statue of Liberty. I hear the brown-skinned folks are like that.
I wasn't referring specifically to consumer-grade digital cameras, which is what you are basing your argument on (just as the people arguing in favor of film are talking about professional-quality film and processing, not generic-brand film processed at the local drugstore).
My digital camera (Nikon D1X) captures 12 bits of color per channel, which is far, far more than the human eye can distinguish. Adobe Photoshop works with images of up to 16 bits per channel, and I consider that a standard software package.
Ultimately, of course, you're generally going to be producing an 8-bit-per-channel image, because even that is more than the human eye can distinguish. The extra bits just give you more room to play with before you downsample it.
Slide film captures the colour exactly as it was, whereas digital rounds it to the nearest bit.
This is what we refer to as "argument by bizarre definition".
Slide film captures color via photochemicals that change in response to light. Digital cameras capture color via sensors that signal in response to light. Saying that one is better "by definition" is patently absurd.
If slide film is inherently perfect, why are there so many different slide films with different color responses? If slide film captures color "exactly as it was", why is Fuji Velvia widely known for producing great landscape shots but murdering skin-tones? Slide film has all the same color concerns that any other capture method has -- good red response but poor greens, or great blues but muddy purples, for instance. Nothing is perfect, especially when the only real way to judge them is using the also-imperfect human eye.
I'm not basing my "better color" assertion on a bizarre definition of the abstract ideal. It's just my opinion, but I hold that my professional digital SLR, with little or no post-processing, produces better color than anything the film world has to offer. "Good color" is a subjective thing, and while you may disagree with me about that (cite examples please!), I stand by my statement.
That's why we upsample digital images before sending them to the printer. I would never print a 20"x30" without interpolating to a higher resolution first, so your point is well-made but irrelevant.
Try it, seriously. Downsample a 300DPI 20"x30" photograph to 100DPI and then upsample it back to 300DPI (using bicubic interpolation) before sending it to the printer.
See how noticeable the difference is under typical viewing conditions (i.e. you don't generally scrutinize a 20"x30" photo from two inches away). My bet is "not at all". A trained eye might be able to spot a difference, although not a significant one, but I'd be surprised if the average Joe could even reliably distinguish which image was which.
I'm being absolutely serious -- try it, if you get a chance, and report your findings back here.
Ok, I'll load my 30-year old Canon with some Kodak Technical Pan film. Lets make 16x20" enlargements and see how we compare, huh?
I've made 20"x30"s from this camera with no complaints. They weren't razor-sharp, but then again neither are 35mm prints at that size. Yours will be a bit sharper, but mine will have no grain and better color. Which one is better is a matter of opinion. And against Canon's 11MP, you wouldn't have a prayer.
Or, lets take wide-angle pictures. With the cropping factor on your Nikon D1X, how can you be any wider than say 32mm (35mm equivalent).
I have a 17mm lens (17-35mm F/2.8 AFS), which is 25mm equivalent on the D1X. If I went down to Nikon's rectlinear 14mm, I'd get 21mm equivalent. That's certainly wide enough for almost any application.
Slashdot Mirror
SyncSort was the first useful sort program to break the O(N log N) barrier (yes, this is possible, CS101 kiddies)
You're playing with semantics there. No, sorting faster than O(N log N) is not possible. Yes, it is possible to divide a sort into two steps, such as computing a sort key and then doing the actual sort, such that the second of the two steps is less than O(N log N).
This allows you to save time when repeatedly sorting unchanged records, but saying that you have a faster-than-O(N log N) sort algorithm is a misstatement, because it depends on precomputed keys and you are not taking the time to compute those keys into account.
Well, Mr. I Didn't Read The Article, the following passage from the article may come in handy:
That's a very misleading statement. Yes, you use Visual Studio .NET, but the XBox does not run CLR code, it runs ordinary native binaries.
That's like saying "I'm running Java!" because you used a Java-to-native compiler and produced an ordinary native EXE, and then ran it without any trace of Java on the system.
Because those would be awfully big images.
The death star has a diameter of 120km (our moon, for reference, is 3500km). Do you REALLY want to download a 120,000 x 120,000 (14.4 gigapixel) image?
So really "pound for pound" burning gasoline is much more dangerous than hydrogen.
... yeah. That was my point. It's called "sarcasm".
Uhhh
that is assuming the best way to get hydrogen is from water. you use electricty to create H2 and Oxegen and you use Hydrogen and oxegen to create electricity. every time you do that you lose energy in the form of heat.
Back in my day, they taught the laws of thermodynamics in high-school physics. Anyone with even a basic grounding in physics wouldn't find that the least bit interesting.
I suppose now you're going to tell us that water is wet?
The only thing that scares me about hydrogen is the explosion part.... Car wrecks could definitely get a lot scarier.
Yeah, good thing we're running on non-flammable, non-explosive gasoline right now.
Out of curiosity, what is the use of a backup that is not periodically rotated off-site? And by "off-site" I mean at least 50 km away? What happens when a tornado takes out the building holding the critical data AND the building holding that nice array of IDE drives 2 minutes apart?
Then you're probably out of business anyway, so what does it matter at that point?
Remember Eve? She and Adam got themselves booted out of paradise and as a result humans must face disease, old age, death, and painful child births all because of us. Not God US. (makes you wonder where Lillith is then)
I don't know if you really believe that or if you're just pointing out what most Christians believe, so this isn't necessarily directed at you.
But, let me ask you a question. Suppose that I fathered a child. I instructed that child not to do something -- say, eat my piece of pizza. The child is naughty and eats my pizza while I'm not looking.
I, being in a righteous fury, decide to punish my child. Instead of simply giving him a stern talking-to, I decide to be a bit harsher and:
1) Banish him from my house for all eternity.
2) Intentionally sabotage all of his future career opportunities so that he is forced to work his butt off to make any money.
3) Afflict him with diseases.
4) Devise horrible parasites to torture him and all of the other creatures in the world.
5) Cause him to grow old and die (he was immortal).
6) Tremendously increase the suffering his wife must endure during childbirth, and create a great risk of death for both her and her children.
7) Refuse to ever, under any circumstances, completely forgive him and revoke these punishments.
8) Inflict all of these punishments on every single living man, woman, and child, from now until the end of time, because they are all at least distantly related to my son.
Because he disobeyed me. Once. Wow, I sound like a candidate for Father of the Year, huh?
OK, here's another one:
I have a puppy. I have loved and nurtured this puppy since the day it was born. One day, I take my puppy up to my bathroom, fill up the bathtub, and drop it in. It struggles to keep its head above the water, so I reach into the tub and hold its head under. Eventually it stops squirming. I empty the tub and leave its body to rot.
How would you react to me if you found out that I had done that?
Now, think about how many billions of innocent creatures God supposedly drowned during the Great Flood. Millions of people. Billions of animals, including cute baby ones. Oh, but that's a happy story, with all the cute, smiling animals marching onto the Ark, and the nice happy rainbow at the end.
Funny, they never mentioned the stench of rotting puppy carcases in Sunday School.
Christians are nuts.
Undo God's work?
I find this statement intensely irritating. According to Christian mythology, God created the universe and everything in it. That means, of course, that he made HIV, tapeworms, mosquitos, malaria, ticks, bot flies, amoebic dysentery, and countless other nasties.
Please answer this question honestly: if you went to a tropical country and caught amoebic dysentery (for those who don't know what this is, it's an incredibly severe, life-threatening diarrhea), would your reaction be:
A) "Going to a doctor would be undoing God's work. He created the parasites which are currently causing me to shit blood and mucus, and I must respect his creations by refusing to kill them."
B) "Please, doctor, I'll do anything! Give me antibiotics!"
Think about that for a minute, in all seriousness. I'm betting that if you were really faced with the situation, you'd want to be so pumped full of drugs that you couldn't see straight.
Now, for the bonus question, think about what kind of being would purposefully create things like HIV and amoebic dysentery (remember, he's omniscient and omnipotent, so it couldn't have been an accident), and why exactly you think he's such a great guy.
The current state of affairs is exactly that, a situation where genetic modification technology is so crude that animals like Dolly, when they are viable at all, largely have various genetic defects associated with them.
Still we have scientists filled with hubris rushing to produce almost certainly defective clones.
1) Which scientists, exactly, are "rushing" to produce clones? I have seen no indication of this.
2) We can't possibly perfect cloning without practicing it a lot. Unless you're advocating a clone-free world, the fact that our current cloning technology is imperfect is largely irrelevant -- of course it's imperfect, we're just learning how to do it. Our first computers sucked, too, but I didn't see anyone complaining about "scientists, filled with hubris, rushing to produce vacuum-tube-based monstrosities". You gotta start somewhere.
So in other words, if I forgot to lock my car and someone steals it, I should be punished for it? What if I leave a package on my front porch for two minutes while I go grab something from the kitchen -- am I responsible for its theft during that period?
I agree that companies should write good code. However, painting them as the bad guys is a dangerously skewed viewpoint. I suppose you have never, ever, once in your life forgotten to lock a door or window?
I know sarcasm can be tough to spot, but he was kidding.
Anyone who suggests catching an exception and printing "segfault" as a solution is obviously kidding -- the intent, I believe, was to point out that verbosity is a much better fault then brevity in something like error handling. "segfault" is damned near the most useless message you can possibly imagine getting from a program, isn't it?
That article is the most absurd joke I have ever read. He spends half the article complaining about Java's startup time (which (A) does not apply in any server situation, and (B) is unfair, because you don't count the machine's bootup time when talking about the performance of C programs, do you?).
Then he invents other ways to talk about the startup time without seeming to talk about the startup time (for instance, trussing Hello World results in a ton of output, but naturally that's Java starting up and loading its classes. Again, do you consider what the machine has to do to boot itself up when you're talking about C programs?). I will point out again that Java's startup time is almost irrelevant, especially in a server environment (which is what he's talking about).
The rest of the article is picking on the "jar" tool. jar is a program written in Java. Criticisms against the jar tool no more reflect on Java than criticisms against gzip reflect on C. The fact that jar doesn't do a good job of reporting errors is (A) irrelevant, because it's a developer tool and we know how to read exceptions, and (B) still more irrelevant, because how well it reports errors has nothing to do with what language it was written in. Tons of C programs have lousy error reporting as well, such as a number of Unix utilities I might name.
Further, this article is obviously very old. He's talking about Java 1.1.8, which is what, five years old now? Might as well criticize Linux by talking about obscure video driver bugs that were fixed five years ago. Obviously, that's not the article's fault for having been written so long ago, but it is the parent poster's fault for bringing it up as if it is somehow still relevant.
And, in case you didn't notice, both results are the same URL. That brings the grand total to ONE AIDS site in the entire country of China, at least according to this search engine.
In bullet time, the actors were the only thing that were real. The entire set was CG.
Methinks you are talking out of your ass.
That's absurd. The state owns the toilets in its buildings, too -- how would you feel if they filmed you taking a dump and then interrogated you about it? They own the toilets and the stall you were sitting in, so how could you complain?
... *gasp* ... a terrorist, are you?
It is unreasonable to expect (or want!) our government to be scrutinizing us for anti-American behavior at all hours, when we are decent law-abiding citizens who have done nothing wrong. Nobody would expect the FBI to be going through our library records, and it's utter bullshit that they have the right to (in the absence of some sort of criminal investigation).
If you are so comfortable with having your privacy invaded, please post the following:
Your real name and address
Your social security number
Which books you have read in the last two years
Which movies you have watched in the last two years
What, you don't want perfect strangers having access to such personal information? Why not? You're not
The single most important development that would come out of a room-temperature superconductor would be the elimination of batteries, fuel cells, gas tanks, and every other such power storage technology.
Because a superconductor conducts with literally zero resistance, you can create a ring of superconducting material, pump as much current into it as it will tolerate, and just let the current cycle forever. No degradation whatsoever. Then when you want power, you just tap into the ring and pull it out on demand. Superconducting rings are real devices, by the way -- they're just big and expensive and require cryogenics.
If we could make them out of something that operated at room temperature, then we could (probably) make very small superconducting rings, and if the power density were high enough, we could use them instead of batteries or fuel tanks. And they would never, ever wear out, no matter how many times you charged or discharged them. The amount of power they could contain is dependent on the superconducting material in question, but a high-power-density room-temperature superconductor (if such a thing is possible) would eliminate all of mankind's power storage and transmission problems. The only concern left would be generation.
Do you have any facts in this case?
No. That's precisely what we're complaining about, dumbass.
Have any idea why he's being held?
No. Neither do you. Neither do his friends. Neither does his family. Neither does he. That's the fucking problem.
Note that I'm not saying the guy is innocent. How can I say that, when nobody even knows why he's in jail? Maybe he did something horrible, maybe not. Either way, tossing him in solitary to rot without ever telling anybody why is not the way to handle it.
If not, why should the US government give YOU all the evidence available in an ongoing investigation?
Nobody's asking for "all the evidence". Something as simple as "you are under arrest for..." and scheduling a court date would do just fine, thank you. Or are you forgetting the Bill of Rights, which guarantees the right to a fair and speedy trial to all US citizens? It is very, very unconstitutional to hold someone in solitary confinement indefinitely without charging them for a crime.
I bet you'd be singing a different tune if it was you or one of your loved ones in jail, and nobody would give you even the flimsiest reason why.
Oh, but he's a dirty Arab, so it's okay. Silly me. The bastard probably planned to blow up the Statue of Liberty. I hear the brown-skinned folks are like that.
I wasn't referring specifically to consumer-grade digital cameras, which is what you are basing your argument on (just as the people arguing in favor of film are talking about professional-quality film and processing, not generic-brand film processed at the local drugstore).
My digital camera (Nikon D1X) captures 12 bits of color per channel, which is far, far more than the human eye can distinguish. Adobe Photoshop works with images of up to 16 bits per channel, and I consider that a standard software package.
Ultimately, of course, you're generally going to be producing an 8-bit-per-channel image, because even that is more than the human eye can distinguish. The extra bits just give you more room to play with before you downsample it.
Slide film captures the colour exactly as it was, whereas digital rounds it to the nearest bit.
This is what we refer to as "argument by bizarre definition".
Slide film captures color via photochemicals that change in response to light. Digital cameras capture color via sensors that signal in response to light. Saying that one is better "by definition" is patently absurd.
If slide film is inherently perfect, why are there so many different slide films with different color responses? If slide film captures color "exactly as it was", why is Fuji Velvia widely known for producing great landscape shots but murdering skin-tones? Slide film has all the same color concerns that any other capture method has -- good red response but poor greens, or great blues but muddy purples, for instance. Nothing is perfect, especially when the only real way to judge them is using the also-imperfect human eye.
I'm not basing my "better color" assertion on a bizarre definition of the abstract ideal. It's just my opinion, but I hold that my professional digital SLR, with little or no post-processing, produces better color than anything the film world has to offer. "Good color" is a subjective thing, and while you may disagree with me about that (cite examples please!), I stand by my statement.
That's why we upsample digital images before sending them to the printer. I would never print a 20"x30" without interpolating to a higher resolution first, so your point is well-made but irrelevant.
Try it, seriously. Downsample a 300DPI 20"x30" photograph to 100DPI and then upsample it back to 300DPI (using bicubic interpolation) before sending it to the printer.
See how noticeable the difference is under typical viewing conditions (i.e. you don't generally scrutinize a 20"x30" photo from two inches away). My bet is "not at all". A trained eye might be able to spot a difference, although not a significant one, but I'd be surprised if the average Joe could even reliably distinguish which image was which.
I'm being absolutely serious -- try it, if you get a chance, and report your findings back here.
Really? That's only 100 dpi.
So? Your computer monitor is probably only around 80DPI. Photos look pretty good on it, don't they?
The situation is actually better with a print, because the image is interpolated so that you can't see the pixels.
Ok, I'll load my 30-year old Canon with some Kodak Technical Pan film. Lets make 16x20" enlargements and see how we compare, huh?
I've made 20"x30"s from this camera with no complaints. They weren't razor-sharp, but then again neither are 35mm prints at that size. Yours will be a bit sharper, but mine will have no grain and better color. Which one is better is a matter of opinion. And against Canon's 11MP, you wouldn't have a prayer.
Or, lets take wide-angle pictures. With the cropping factor on your Nikon D1X, how can you be any wider than say 32mm (35mm equivalent).
I have a 17mm lens (17-35mm F/2.8 AFS), which is 25mm equivalent on the D1X. If I went down to Nikon's rectlinear 14mm, I'd get 21mm equivalent. That's certainly wide enough for almost any application.