I'm likely not alone in my need to be able to sync my finance software with my Visor. Are there any plans to link GnuCash to a Palm-based money manager program, a la Quicken and PocketQuicken? Or are there any plans to develop a new, GPLed "PocketGnuCash"?
Actually, Kubrick shot on 35 milimeter in a 4:3 aspect ratio.
Mea culpa. I wasn't aware of this. (I know James Cameron prefers 4:3 as well.) The point remains, though, that an anamorphic transfer would allow the viewer to choose an appropriate aspect ratio for her TV and viewing preferences, and would do so in the most elegant way possible, without wasting precious resolution for hardcoded letterboxes.
(I read a review of the old _2001_ DVD -- I think it was from Widescreen Review -- that said that the letterboxes weren't even black.)
At the end of 2006 (or 2005?) the US Federal Communications Comission will drop all licenses for analog broadcasters and digital, widescreen TV will be your only option. At that time, any non-anamorphic DVDs will be playable only by using the "zoom" feature of most DVD players, resulting in a grainy mess.
Legally, the movie studios can release whatever the hell they want. If you don't like it, start making your own damn movies.... You can thank George Lucas and his Star Wars "re-releases" for the re-release line of thinking.
I made no complaints about the legality of DVD re-releasing, nor would I wish for such a practice to be illegal. I fully agree that the proper response to these activities is to boycott the products, and that's the stance I've taken. However, it's especially egregious for a studio to release a DVD and then re-release within 24 months it with baseline, de-facto-required DVD features like 5.1 sound and anamorphic video. Lucas' re-releases (whether you like them or not -- I am ambivalent) at least changed the actual movie, rather than merely mastering it properly for a given format. (Lucas also remastered the series to his THX standards, but he had not yet developed those at the time of the original films' release on VHS -- unlike anamorphic video and Dolby Digital 5.1, which have been with us pretty much as long as the DVD format itself.)
No kidding. It's really lame how some studios have slapped together shoddy DVD releases (I actually didn't think the _Holy Grail_ DVD was that bad, but I'm not an MP connoiseur) just so they can re-release the all-singing, all-dancing super edition within a year.
For an even more egregious example, examine the shoddy, non-anamorphic, "old" Kubrick DVD set as compared to the marginally flashier (but DD 5.1 and anamorphic) one which came out this week. "Uh, wouldn't you mind spending $200 for the DVDs we should have sold you in the first place?" Movie execs that authorize non-anamorphic DVDs, knowing full well how worthless they'll be come 2006, should be castrated and strung up by DVI cable. (I didn't buy the "old" Kubrick set, but I know people who did.)
I guess that the Randroids will all tell me that it's OK because the market will bear it, but I still think it's pretty dirty to throw together a half-assed product so that you can sell twice as many to fans when you release an acceptable version. The market will bear anything when you have consumers by the balls. In this respect (and only in this respect), Lucas isn't being an ass by not releasing the Star Wars films on DVD.
Dynamo dynamically optimizes binaries; an equivalent in the Java world is IBM's Jalapeno VM. Unfortunately, the Dynamo approach is only feasible on the HP architecture, and it is only feasible on HP-PA because the PA-RISC chip has an absurdly large i-cache (greater than 1 mb). Look at HP's Dynamo site for more information, but IIRC the problem is dynamo's
extremely aggressive branch prediction.
Dynamo dynamically optimizes binaries; an equivalent in the Java world is IBM's Jalapeno VM. Unfortunately, the Dynamo approach is only feasible on the HP architecture, because the PA-RISC chip has an absurdly large i-cache (extremely aggressive in branch prediction.
I commute by bicycle, and am a grad student, so I don't have quite as many gadgets and don't need to lug around backup tapes. However, I need to bring my notebook, cell phone, Visor, minidisc player, books, some CDs and MDs, etc., to and from campus when I'm biking, and I've found that a Timbuk2 messenger bag (web site) is even better than my old frame backpack (which had a lot of compartments). They're better for biking than for walking, but if you don't load them with 70# of books, you should be able to walk fine with one, too.
A messenger bag has two straps -- one large and one small -- that cross your chest. The bag itself sits on your lower back, so it is much cooler to wear when biking and walking on hot days. You can get pouches for the big strap; I have one designed to hold keys (also big enough for a tape or two) and one designed to hold a cell phone. Mine also has several zippered and velcro'd compartments; you can order them with a divider or special notebook sleeve as well. The bags also look great -- so if you have to "go corporate", you'll still fit in. Timbuk2 makes every one custom, to order, in three or four days. You might also want to check out their "computer commuter bag".
~wog
DISCLAIMER: I own one of these bags, but have no other affiliation with Timbuk2 Designs.
187 years ago, "Norway" was invented. "Norway" is a virtual community where people can "treffe venner" (meet friends), "gaa paa kino" (watch cinema), even "spise reindyrsfilet" (eat reindeer). Unlike the web, which is organized by "links", Norway is organized by "roads" and "fjords". Instead of "clicking" on a "link", one can "drive" on a "road" to get to a new destination or take the "hurtigruta" to a different fjord. Like the web, however, Norway is somewhat balkanized -- there are over 37 dialects of its markup language, "Norwegian".
In any case, Glad Syttendemai til internet venner vaaren i Norge!
For more information on Norway's constitution day, please visit here (in English): 17.mai
If you'd like to disable out-of-order execution for your timing code (maybe necessary on PPro and later processors -- I've found that it doesn't make a lot of difference for most real benchmarking tasks), add a cpuid instruction before the rdtsc. Note that the cpuid instruction will clobber eax, ebx, ecx, and edx (you can give these registers to the GCC __asm__ directive).
The CPUID instruction forces all instructions in the pipeline to complete. Using the serialized rdtsc takes about 40 cycles on an Athlon 750.
OT: I really had to wrestle with the lameness filter to get this through -- even one line with the inline asm declaration was a "junk character post". Perhaps the lame"ness" filter should recognize that "C/asm code" is different from "ASCII goatse"...
Re:hmm nice.. now get some work done... right now!
on
Ximian gets new CEO
·
· Score: 2
They ARE working on it. If you want evidence of this, track the ximian-support list. (The list archive is here.)
I'm as impatient as the next guy, especially since red-carpet and evolution are becoming more rad with every release, but it's pretty clear that they've got a lot of work to do to ensure that Ximian works perfectly on all of the platforms that they support, and releasing polished builds is currently less important to them than ensuring stability and consistency (as it should be).
I've clearly been reading slashdot for too long, because I didn't even notice that. I think longtime/. readers must develop some neural pathway that auto-inserts missing words, swaps transpositions, and corrects spelling mistakes. That's kind of like how if you cover one eye with your hand, you can "see through it", I'd imagine.
The preceeding link is courtesy of Google. They mirror and grep for you.
I agree with the original poster -- for all intents and purposes, Linus is a moron. Before you moderators start handing out (-1, blah) points, hear me out. Sure, he's a great programmer and has made a great contribution in the form of the Linux kernel, but it's fairly clear from listening to him that he doesn't understand any developments in systems research since about 1960, with the possible exception of copy-on-write. Don't get me wrong -- I've used Linux since 1994, and it's better than most desktop operating systems. However, Linus' absolutely hubristic rejection of (barely) modern concepts which he doesn't understand, such as
threads ("processes are faster", sez he)
message-passing
version-control systems
just to name three easy ones, is doing little for the Linux community or for people who want to deploy Linux in a serious environment. If you don't believe me, just compare Linux performance to Solaris x86. Sure, Linux has gotten faster with 2.4, but it still can't hold a candle to systems designed by people who haven't ignored the last 40 years of systems research.
It's time for Linus to get out of the way and let someone else serve as "CVS with taste" for the kernel -- after that, Linux has a chance of becoming a rock-solid, lean, and efficient kernel.
One very nice thing about BibTeX is that you can get BibTeX citations for papers directly from the ACM Digital Library (sometimes), from DBLP, or from Citeseer -- so you download the paper, view it, and if you like it, cite it! There are also many large repositories of BibTeX entries for all manner of papers available, especially in the DB and OO communities -- just do a google search for "inproceedings" and a favorite author if you don't believe me.:-)
Some kinds of astrology cannot be falsified scientifically, and neither can evolution. As a result, either theory is science. Falsifiability is what we are concerned with, not truth or falsity. A false theory can still be a scientific theory, but a non-falsifiable theory is pseudoscience.
Since natural selection is a theory about why the world came to seem to a believer in natural selection as it does, it is not falsifiable, unless we can observe the entire process by which the world came to be that way. Falsifying the believer's perception of the world is irrelevant to falsifying the hypothesis, since another, equally non-scientific hypothesis could be proposed about the newly-accepted state of the world.
The point is not that evolution is wrong, only that evolution is not scientific, and that to believe in evolution is as irrational as to believe in any other theory of first causes.
I strongly suggest you read some philosophy of science before continuing in this discussion.
It's a mistake to think that because some particular experiment can't be done that there is no way to test a theory. Instead of sitting and waiting for speciation to happen, we can also, for example, examine the fossil record for evidence of the ancestry of current species. When we do, what do we see? Zillions of species, appearing and dying, the new obviously related to the old, all arranged in neat cladographic hierarchies.
I'll ignore the problems with the 3.5 billion year gap in the fossil record and the problems with radiocarbon dating (especially in metamorphic rocks) and stick to the philosophical issues here. Natural selection details a "what happened", but it does so in a way that implies a particular "why it happened". Evolutionists claim that because of their (at times admittedly tenuous) evidence for a particular perception of "what happened" that their explanation for "why it happened" is correct. This is somewhat akin to claiming that Nostradamus had the ability to predict the future (a "why") because people have been able to reconcile some of his statements with their perception of reality (a "what").
The real reason why evolution is not science, though, is visible in the last paragraph of your reply -- one can replace "speciation" and its relatives with "correct predictions" and its ilk; and "evolution" with "astrology", and the last paragraph will be just as sensical as it is now.
Theories predict a "why". Evolutionists merely have a "what" -- and their "what" depends on their perceptions, which are heavily influenced by their unfalsifiable "why" -- their "what" may or may not even be correct. I sense that publishing a paper against the fossil record would have similar consequences for a modern scientist as Copernicus' rejection of Ptolemaic astronomy had for many before Copernicus.
Read Popper; also read Carl Hempel's _Philosophy of Natural Science_.
If we observed any of these things it would lead us to believe that evolution was a bad theory. That is what it means to be falsifiable. That none of these falsifiers is true leads us to believe the theory.
Due to the absurd length of time for natural selection (speciation, not peppered-moth-style adaptation) to run its course, predictions based on the theory of natural selection are not possible, and therefore it is not falsifiable. Using pre-existing criteria as a defense for evolution is no substitute, because (as any number of "primitive cultures" and religious zealots have proven) it is possible to account for any number of pre-existing conditions in a theory. Perhaps we are having a vocabulary disagreement? I use "falsifiable" in the way that Karl Popper did.
My point remains that speciation via natural selection is not observable and not falsifiable. Furthermore, I still maintain that evolutionists, rather than acknowledge their intellectually and scientifically shaky ground, resort to the same sort of mindless dogmatism, irrationality, and name-calling that they accuse the creationists of. Those who claim that science is borne of observation need to recall that the Greek pantheon of deities was borne of observation, as well (cf. Hesiod).
In any case, it's not every day that I get the honor of a rebuttal from a legend.:-)
I don't think that natural selection is falsifiable either, and I've read quite a bit of Popper (although I side more with Hempel on matters of confirmability/etc.)
"Evolution as a concept like logic and math" is an analogue to "the 'glass onion theory of the universe' as a concept like logic and math" or "the 'Genesis account of creation' as a concept like logic or math" basically invites a Kuhnian paradigm shift -- because we see the world through a given paradigm, we are forced to interpret everything we see as fitting in to that paradigm, rendering all our theories useless when that paradigm is supplanted.
If we really wanted to get into the Philosophy of Science on this debate (which, I believe, is valuable), we ought to break out the underdeterminists.:-)
I still maintain that the evolutionists who choose to debate the "scientific creationists" not only sink to the creationists' level, but below -- the creationists *never* go ad hominem....
The real problem with this debate is that it invariably deteriorates (rapidly, even in serious articles) into evolutionists cracking jokes about Bible-thumping and fundamentalists. Now I don't agree with fundamentalists, but this pattern really annoys me, because it seems to be little more than a foil for the fact that the evolutionists don't have a falisfiable theory either.
I will say that evolution is one of the better explanations we have today, but phlogiston was once the best explanation we had for combustion. Evolution is not falsifiable -- even if it were, no amount of science can disprove a mystical, revealed truth.
I guess I could also bring Nietzsche and Wittgenstein's views of "science as a religion, flawed like all the others" into the fray, but I fear I will catch enough heat for this.
I've yet to read the semantics document, so I won't comment on the language itself. However, the idea of multiple representations for a single program is a good idea both from a philosophical standpoint (a la Wittgenstein -- "to imagine a language is to imagine a form of life" -- so allow different forms of expressing a program), and from an engineering standpoint. In the latter arena, Eidola mimics the venerable ancestor of Scheme and Pascal, Algol 68, which allowed users to construct their own grammar for the language's constructs (an early attempt at i18n!); also, it could allow Literate Programming with great facility.
Slashdot Mirror
I'm likely not alone in my need to be able to sync my finance software with my Visor. Are there any plans to link GnuCash to a Palm-based money manager program, a la Quicken and PocketQuicken? Or are there any plans to develop a new, GPLed "PocketGnuCash"?
(I read a review of the old _2001_ DVD -- I think it was from Widescreen Review -- that said that the letterboxes weren't even black.)
At the end of 2006 (or 2005?) the US Federal Communications Comission will drop all licenses for analog broadcasters and digital, widescreen TV will be your only option. At that time, any non-anamorphic DVDs will be playable only by using the "zoom" feature of most DVD players, resulting in a grainy mess.
For an even more egregious example, examine the shoddy, non-anamorphic, "old" Kubrick DVD set as compared to the marginally flashier (but DD 5.1 and anamorphic) one which came out this week. "Uh, wouldn't you mind spending $200 for the DVDs we should have sold you in the first place?" Movie execs that authorize non-anamorphic DVDs, knowing full well how worthless they'll be come 2006, should be castrated and strung up by DVI cable. (I didn't buy the "old" Kubrick set, but I know people who did.)
I guess that the Randroids will all tell me that it's OK because the market will bear it, but I still think it's pretty dirty to throw together a half-assed product so that you can sell twice as many to fans when you release an acceptable version. The market will bear anything when you have consumers by the balls. In this respect (and only in this respect), Lucas isn't being an ass by not releasing the Star Wars films on DVD.
~wog
damn slashcode...
Dynamo dynamically optimizes binaries; an equivalent in the Java world is IBM's Jalapeno VM. Unfortunately, the Dynamo approach is only feasible on the HP architecture, because the PA-RISC chip has an absurdly large i-cache (extremely aggressive in branch prediction.
A messenger bag has two straps -- one large and one small -- that cross your chest. The bag itself sits on your lower back, so it is much cooler to wear when biking and walking on hot days. You can get pouches for the big strap; I have one designed to hold keys (also big enough for a tape or two) and one designed to hold a cell phone. Mine also has several zippered and velcro'd compartments; you can order them with a divider or special notebook sleeve as well. The bags also look great -- so if you have to "go corporate", you'll still fit in. Timbuk2 makes every one custom, to order, in three or four days. You might also want to check out their "computer commuter bag".
~wog
DISCLAIMER: I own one of these bags, but have no other affiliation with Timbuk2 Designs.
In any case, Glad Syttendemai til internet venner vaaren i Norge!
For more information on Norway's constitution day, please visit here (in English): 17.mai
If you'd like to disable out-of-order execution for your timing code (maybe necessary on PPro and later processors -- I've found that it doesn't make a lot of difference for most real benchmarking tasks), add a cpuid instruction before the rdtsc. Note that the cpuid instruction will clobber eax, ebx, ecx, and edx (you can give these registers to the GCC __asm__ directive).
The CPUID instruction forces all instructions in the pipeline to complete. Using the serialized rdtsc takes about 40 cycles on an Athlon 750.
OT: I really had to wrestle with the lameness filter to get this through -- even one line with the inline asm declaration was a "junk character post". Perhaps the lame"ness" filter should recognize that "C/asm code" is different from "ASCII goatse"...
I'm as impatient as the next guy, especially since red-carpet and evolution are becoming more rad with every release, but it's pretty clear that they've got a lot of work to do to ensure that Ximian works perfectly on all of the platforms that they support, and releasing polished builds is currently less important to them than ensuring stability and consistency (as it should be).
I've clearly been reading slashdot for too long, because I didn't even notice that. I think longtime /. readers must develop some neural pathway that auto-inserts missing words, swaps transpositions, and corrects spelling mistakes. That's kind of like how if you cover one eye with your hand, you can "see through it", I'd imagine.
Ha! Wow, /. is clever and hilarious.
The preceeding link is courtesy of Google. They mirror and grep for you.
I agree with the original poster -- for all intents and purposes, Linus is a moron. Before you moderators start handing out (-1, blah) points, hear me out. Sure, he's a great programmer and has made a great contribution in the form of the Linux kernel, but it's fairly clear from listening to him that he doesn't understand any developments in systems research since about 1960, with the possible exception of copy-on-write. Don't get me wrong -- I've used Linux since 1994, and it's better than most desktop operating systems. However, Linus' absolutely hubristic rejection of (barely) modern concepts which he doesn't understand, such as
- threads ("processes are faster", sez he)
- message-passing
- version-control systems
just to name three easy ones, is doing little for the Linux community or for people who want to deploy Linux in a serious environment. If you don't believe me, just compare Linux performance to Solaris x86. Sure, Linux has gotten faster with 2.4, but it still can't hold a candle to systems designed by people who haven't ignored the last 40 years of systems research.It's time for Linus to get out of the way and let someone else serve as "CVS with taste" for the kernel -- after that, Linux has a chance of becoming a rock-solid, lean, and efficient kernel.
and you will see a link to a source release for Sash for Linux: http://oss.software.ibm.com/developerworks/opensou rce/sashxb/
One very nice thing about BibTeX is that you can get BibTeX citations for papers directly from the ACM Digital Library (sometimes), from DBLP, or from Citeseer -- so you download the paper, view it, and if you like it, cite it! There are also many large repositories of BibTeX entries for all manner of papers available, especially in the DB and OO communities -- just do a google search for "inproceedings" and a favorite author if you don't believe me. :-)
Some kinds of astrology cannot be falsified scientifically, and neither can evolution. As a result, either theory is science. Falsifiability is what we are concerned with, not truth or falsity. A false theory can still be a scientific theory, but a non-falsifiable theory is pseudoscience.
Since natural selection is a theory about why the world came to seem to a believer in natural selection as it does, it is not falsifiable, unless we can observe the entire process by which the world came to be that way. Falsifying the believer's perception of the world is irrelevant to falsifying the hypothesis, since another, equally non-scientific hypothesis could be proposed about the newly-accepted state of the world.
The point is not that evolution is wrong, only that evolution is not scientific, and that to believe in evolution is as irrational as to believe in any other theory of first causes.
I strongly suggest you read some philosophy of science before continuing in this discussion.
The real reason why evolution is not science, though, is visible in the last paragraph of your reply -- one can replace "speciation" and its relatives with "correct predictions" and its ilk; and "evolution" with "astrology", and the last paragraph will be just as sensical as it is now.
Theories predict a "why". Evolutionists merely have a "what" -- and their "what" depends on their perceptions, which are heavily influenced by their unfalsifiable "why" -- their "what" may or may not even be correct. I sense that publishing a paper against the fossil record would have similar consequences for a modern scientist as Copernicus' rejection of Ptolemaic astronomy had for many before Copernicus.
Read Popper; also read Carl Hempel's _Philosophy of Natural Science_.
My point remains that speciation via natural selection is not observable and not falsifiable. Furthermore, I still maintain that evolutionists, rather than acknowledge their intellectually and scientifically shaky ground, resort to the same sort of mindless dogmatism, irrationality, and name-calling that they accuse the creationists of. Those who claim that science is borne of observation need to recall that the Greek pantheon of deities was borne of observation, as well (cf. Hesiod).
In any case, it's not every day that I get the honor of a rebuttal from a legend. :-)
You should read some Karl Popper and Carl Hempel -- falsifiability is not a matter of "as close as you can get" -- it either is the case or not.
"Evolution as a concept like logic and math" is an analogue to "the 'glass onion theory of the universe' as a concept like logic and math" or "the 'Genesis account of creation' as a concept like logic or math" basically invites a Kuhnian paradigm shift -- because we see the world through a given paradigm, we are forced to interpret everything we see as fitting in to that paradigm, rendering all our theories useless when that paradigm is supplanted.
If we really wanted to get into the Philosophy of Science on this debate (which, I believe, is valuable), we ought to break out the underdeterminists. :-)
I still maintain that the evolutionists who choose to debate the "scientific creationists" not only sink to the creationists' level, but below -- the creationists *never* go ad hominem....
I will say that evolution is one of the better explanations we have today, but phlogiston was once the best explanation we had for combustion. Evolution is not falsifiable -- even if it were, no amount of science can disprove a mystical, revealed truth.
I guess I could also bring Nietzsche and Wittgenstein's views of "science as a religion, flawed like all the others" into the fray, but I fear I will catch enough heat for this.
*any* knowledge of Wittgenstein is liable to influence just about everything. :-) The *Tractatus* is very proto-OO in places, for example.
Both have block structure and static, lexical scope. These were new features when Algol *68* came out.
I've yet to read the semantics document, so I won't comment on the language itself. However, the idea of multiple representations for a single program is a good idea both from a philosophical standpoint (a la Wittgenstein -- "to imagine a language is to imagine a form of life" -- so allow different forms of expressing a program), and from an engineering standpoint. In the latter arena, Eidola mimics the venerable ancestor of Scheme and Pascal, Algol 68, which allowed users to construct their own grammar for the language's constructs (an early attempt at i18n!); also, it could allow Literate Programming with great facility.