> Thirdly, the electoral college is the law of the land. We simply cannot violate it based on whim.
It seems that most conservatives (GOP or otherwise, living in the south I've seen my share of really conservative Democrats;-) ) view our nation's legal framework or ``social contract'' this way, and I do believe it is a valid opinion. (Students of constitutional law will recognize its manifestation in that field as a ``traditionalist'' or ``literal'' interpretation of the Constitution as opposed to a ``constructionist'' or ``liberal'' interpretation (basically a letter-of-the-law vs. spirit-of-the-law debate).)
However, I think that ``violation'' and ``reinterpretation'' are not synomymous. The government is valid only by consent of the people, so if an aspect of it turns out to suck, I don't think we (the people or our duly elected representatives), should hesitate to tinker with it. No law is graven in stone (c.f. the ever-mutable Tax Code:-)). Violation would be Gore saying ``Screw you people, I'm having my good buddy Clinton call out the Army to shoot all the Bush supporters. Fuck this democracy crap anyway..." (and I think even the staunchest GOP member would recognize the difference between an armed coup and vigourous legal attempts to have as many recounts as it takes to get an accurate vote tally).
Of course, this `if it sucks, change it'' attitude probably isn't suprising coming from a capital-L liberal and Free Software/Open Source subversive like me...;-)
> I am a Republican, and voted for Bush, so obviously I'm biased.
Yeah, no shit?
> Americans hate lawyers, as do I.
Ahh, broad generalizations along the pattern of ``All good Americans do X! (Are you a good American?)". Long a staple of the conservative puerility (like a plurality but with less collective intelligence).
>... is resorting to lawyers.. for the sole purpose of getting a Judge to appoint him President.
I think that he's using lawyers for the sole purpose of getting a judge to require that a FAIR, COMPLETE, and ACCURATE vote count be conducted, which is sort of a prerequisite for legitimacy in a democratic system of governance. The Republicans have done nothing since November 7 except obstruct this process.
> Gore blah blah blah Clinton machine.
Uhh, yeah. Like Bush has been the poor innocent village idiot in the corner not doing a thing. I recently saw some GOP flack on Hardball (probably normally caucasian but he was so into the Angry Conservative Bluster (TM, patent pending) when I channel surfed through he was about the color of a good merlot) saying at the top of his lungs that the Democrats were spending US$3million on lawyers. OK, how much has the GOP spent on lawyers?
> (sub quote)... less biased historians
You mean conservative ones you agree with?
> Boyd [sic], is the lead government lawyer in the Microsoft case. blah blah shakes my faith in the Reno case against them blah blah
How suprising that a Republican would argue in favor of a large business against that Big Meany, our government? You by any chance wouldn't happen to have four little letters in your Republican Standard Issue stock portfolio (M-S-F-T), now would you?
Sigh. Depressing that the world looks at people like you and associates the word ``American'' with that thundering ignorance. In short, fuck you, and fuck every fucking Republican in this excerable country. I quite honestly hope you all burn in hell.
</flame>
Flaming of moron aside, there have been so many irregularities associated with the FL vote, that I don't think we will ever truely know who won. In this instance, I think the 25 electoral votes should go to neither man (which would be worse for a party, conservative or liberal: to lose an election or win one in such a manner that half the country hates them for it?), and the election should be decided based on the other 49 state's votes (i.e. recalculate the required majority of electoral votes based on the total sans FL, and who ever crosses that line, wins).
IIRC the command-line cal program does the holidays thing quite nicely, handling holidays for US, Canada, (several other countries), Christian faiths, Muslim faiths, and another major religion I'm forgetting. Maybe you (the programmers) could take a look at how they did it (probably pretty simple, IIRC the holiday data files were just plain ASCII in the form of date: description new-line).
I'm a college student at UT-Austin, working on a degree in Computational Chemistry. This past summer I was doing undergrad research with the Sessler group, and the grad student I mainly worked with was a really cool guy (hi wyeth!;) ).
Anyway, we talked a few times about the possibility of taking the group's information managment ``to the next level'' (<--hate that phrase) by integrating a lot of it into a centralized database (chemical inventory, lab notebooks for the researchers, data, blah blah blah) that had a web front end so any of the machines they used could access it if they could run a web browser, and they could access it from home/abroad. From what I know about LIMS, that's about 2/3rds of what you'd need. The other 1/3 would be actually interfacing to the data collection instruments, which could be either really bad or really easy depending on a few factors like whether or not the instrument manufacturer(s) have unix drivers, in-house skill inwriting drivers/data collection software (potentially pretty easy if the stuff interfaces through a standard port like serial or parallel and you know the wire protocol, my pchem lab text talkes about doing this), that sort of thing. Or you could leave the instrument-inerfacing machines as win32 boxes, and interface with them through SAMBA and shell/perl/whatever scripts to copy and manipulate the data files (<--"if its an ugly hack and it works reliably it's not ugly").
If you have a spare box lying around, try slapping a free Unix on it, apache, PostgreSQL (or MySQL if you must:-/), SAMBA, and your scripting language of choice to give it a test run. Point out to the PHBs the advantages of having software custom-written to exactly fit your lab's needs, not to mention the cost savings over the upgrade cycle and downtime associated with the commercial win32 software installation, after you have a working prototype to show them. You could even generate some extra revenue by providing consulting services to other labs in your area that might wish to do something similar once you've worked through it for your installation.
At the last place I worked, we printed out two signs for the guy's restrooms. The one over the shitter said "Core Dump", the one over the pisser said "Pointer Error, Memory Leak".
Lends a whole new meaning to ``shit or get off the toilet!'' I don't think you'd have too many poeple sleeping in public restrooms after receiving ~110+ V to the ass...
Can you imagine what the SNMP variables for that would look like?
Can you imagine the results of a DoS attack on the shitters if they were completely remotely driven? (DDoS -- Distributed Disgusting odour (from) Shitters)
If they do have full networking, how long before jokes about "laying some fat pipe" come into common parlance? (Or "stringing some fiber" or...)
Well, I say old, it was like 5 years ago at a hellhol-errr-place called TAMS. Anyway, he was really good at math. Really good. So one day he was telling me about this thing called the Steiner Space or something like that (my strong suite is chemistry, not abstract math). And within Steiner Spaces you could find/define something called a Steiner Point (again, it's been ~5 years and I'm not a mathematician), which was the one point in that Steiner Space that would be equidistant to all other (non-capital-S) Steiner Points in that Steiner Space. Seems pretty intuitive in 3space (for a bounded space anyway ("the middle of nowhere")); naturally since mathematicians are all closet perverts, they'd extended this to cover nSpace.
Point being, we were laughing about the possibility of defining a "UNT-Campus-Shitters" Steiner Space where each non-capital-S Steiner Point was a campus crapper. So then you could use rigorous mathematical methods to find the "Shitter Epicenter" of campus, the point at which if you had to crap you could go in any direction....
OK, yeah, so when you're IQ is >= (10*age) (sidenote: I was 16, he was 17) and you're stuck in a dorm eating suck-ass food you tend to come up with odd ways to pass the time...;-)
You're bitching about a ~$47 for 600Mhz cpu not being cheap enough when you're using SCSI for your disk subsystem? Are you nuts?;-)
With regard to the MB price difference, I can sort of see your point but the delta only looks to be 20-30 dollars... (I'm looking at www.pricewatch.com for general prices and www.essencom.com (<--been a satisfied customer there several times) for specifics.).
(Oh, sorry, the retail box with fan & heatsink Duron at 650Mhz from essencom is a whopping $75... heh heh On pricewatch the lowest price is 47 for a back-o-the-truck-special duron 600)
--
fuck you Re:poor english aside, you're a moron
on
JKH on OS X
·
· Score: 2
[quote]
GUIs pay no dividends until all applications in one user environment not only look but also behave the same. Only then is it easier to use a GUI because then you don't have to learn an interface from scratch. There are two
methods to get programmers to adhere to such standards, either publish them and only buy products which adhere to the explicit (and often implicit) UI conventions or create an OO application framework whereby each
graphical component (in appearance and behavior) is abstracted from the actual code. Apple Macintosh implemented the former while NeXT OPENSTEP implemented the latter.
[end quote]
typical Apple/M$ fan bullshit. Consistency is nice, but don't presume to tell me what is more or less usable for my windowing environment. I personally like having a very minimal window manager and a shit load of xterms, which most MacOS nitwits would decry as being abyssal in the usability category. Useability depends on the user, you turd!
[quote]
Another reason OS X is a billion times better than your Linux/KDE2 environment is the display server Quartz. Quartz is designed for desktop publishing. Anything seen can be printed (rendered) as PDF, PS, or
raster. It also supports Color Sync so when I send a smoke image to an OS X user he will actually be able to see it which is less than I can say about a GIMP user I know.
[endquote]
Yes, we all know how often we need to send screenshots to grandma as PDF files. Color sync is irrelevant unless you want everyone to use the eaxct same OS. Personally all the color sync I need is 16 shades of gray.
On a side note, attacking his English skills is pretty fucking low since he's obviously not a native speaker by his word ordering. I'm sure he speaks English a damn sight better than you speak his native tongue. Expecting all the world to speak flawless English is incredibly arrogant, and unfortunately that's what most of the world associates with English speakers thanks to people like you. Try taking a Russian or Asiatic language class before you upbraid someone on linguistic matters again...
--
Re:Don't expect all of OS X to be open-source
on
JKH on OS X
·
· Score: 2
Is display PDF all that much different than Display PostScript that the NeXT machines used? Using a vector-based format for display is a cool idea (iirc ps and pdf were vector-based, but maybe I'm just smoken dercrackenpipen).
Anyway, since display postscript hasbeen around a while, that might be a better canidate for some open source activism, rather than the company's latest and greatest. (There may already be a free analog, not sure. If so then even better, the code release would help the free project.):-) Besides, I think that the possibility of Apple ever being really openis minimal, one second spent with MaCOS or Apple hardware will convince you of exactly how Closed their design philosophy seems to be...
--
Re:I chose the webramp (aka, sonicwall) box
on
Linux Routers
·
· Score: 2
I think that you can define a DMZ host in addition to the NAT range. Admittedly that's just one host, but...
Besides, who says you can't do port forwarding of 53, 25/110, and 80/8080/443 from the outisde to static inside ips? You can disable dhcp on the inside you know...
Well, it is a moot point if you already got the sonicwall:-)
Let's all just hope for Linus' sake that she didn't come under the Badly Soiled Diaper license...;-) A kid could turn out to be a real devil under those circumstances...
yeah, I can see it pretty easily really. The Java2D classes in JDK 1.2.x and 1.3 are nice. Think the GIMP and PostScript having a love child, with a dab of Illustrator. Since the.swf file format is an open one, you could write a Java-based parser class (ByteInputStream anyone?) and use it's output to feed a Java2D-based ``rendering engine''...
That would actually be pretty sweet. If I were more of a Java God I might do it...:-)
WRT doing it on an ARM or other embedded processor, why not? StrongARMs are, what, 200-odd MHz? That's faster than the machine I'm using to type this (p166), and this guy handles Flash and JDK 1.3 applets pretty well. Now what if that internet app is using a Crusoe, eh?
This is not to say that your company's product doesn't sound nifty, it does...
WRT to VRML, I think that standard is bloated enough already irregardless of the plugin playing it...;-).
Well, Solaris isn't exactly iron-clad in the security dept. by default. For that, it's OpenBSD hands down. If you need big iron, well, then you're probably running a proprietary Unix anyway (like irix for some huge SGI-based vis lab, AIX on some huge S/80 ibm db2 box, Solaris on some huge Sun Oracle box, etc.). Free unixen are IMHO best suited to the problem space addressed by bunches of ``little'' boxes (best hardware support there, anyway, and similar price structure), by little I mean <= 4 cpus and <= 2gb of ram... (i.e. web farms, render farms, distributed DB serving, workstations, etc)
--
Quick link to the release notes / changelog
on
FreeBSD 4.2 Is Out
·
· Score: 4
For those of you who might be curious and lazy, here's a quick link to the RELNOTE S.T XT for this release (i.e. the changelog/release notes).
A quantitative determination of the answer for any question of the pattern ``when will x be done by y company'' is now possible after many centuries of theoretical thought regarding the flow of resources in human society. The answer is: exactly when doing X is economically advantageous to company Y. No sooner, but maybe later if the company is run by idiots...
:-)
On the topic of plugins, well, the appliance writers should either partner with plugin companies in order to port the plugins needed or write ones of their own if the file format is an open standard. This solves the ``now'' problem but it probably precludes any $29.95 devices any time soon...
Well, use a non-silicon patch mechanism. In other words, only one person at a time has the ability to modify the source package through some arraingment between the participants. Like how a token ring lan works. Kludgy, yes, but platform independent and doesn't use sourceforge.:-) (Perl used somethign similar for a while back in the early 5.x days called the ``patch pumpking'' whereby only one person at a time had the ``patch pumpkin'')
Shrug. Restricting yourselves to win32 and private server leaves you with a pretty small solution space. Anyway, good luck!
--
well, not directly what you asked, but...
on
CVS Via E-Mail?
·
· Score: 2
OK, so I know this isn't really an answer, but have you considered making a project on sourceforge? It would take care of all the stuff you needed to host the project (CVS, bug tracking, blah blah, you know the drill). Plus it's got a slightly better uptime/availability that some random Windows machine...;^)
WRT to the question itself, I'm not very familiar with the workings of CV, but speaking in the broadest sense of theory I could see how this might be doable using email, in that the message subjects could contain he codes neccessary to make the storage program interpret which message contains what, and the diffs could be attachments.
This could also be non-trivial to program (i.e. me doubting CVS can do this normaly you may have to code up something that's ``really CVS-like'' from scratch (probably in perl because there exist plentiful tools native to the language and module base that would make this task easier than C or whatnot), like do you go on sent-time or receive- time to determine which diff came in ``first'' and represents an earlier version number?
Quick post becuase I'm way tired and I don't want to make the S/N higher than it has to be:
It is true that most large (i.e. n developers for n > 1;-) ) projects need coordination and leadership (c.f. the programmer team ``layout'' described in Fred Brook's _The Mythical Man Month_, probably the seminal text on SoftEng, whereby you have one head ``architect'', a ``junior architect'', a few ``toolsmiths'', and a bunch of ``implementers''). Initially, yes, a democracy may seem unworkable due to the communication overhead involved in reaching consensus on everything. However, the power of democracy may also be used within the organization to allocate positions of power to the most worthy candidates (Ms. X has the most design experience so she gets elected to the 6 mo term of ``Lead Architect and All Around Object Model Person'', etc), analogous to our meatspace political system, a government of the coders, for the coders, and by the coders.
You could argue that this isn't pure democracy, and you'd be right. But a meritocracy / representative democracy would be a damn sight better than most of the slave pits I've coded in...
As far as ``boring'' goes (maybe another comment, no sleep in 27 hours). well, yeah, but then you have the knowledge you're a) getting paid to do boring work, b) getting paid to code, which is better than working at McDonalds or some shit, and c) maybe making the world a better place in some small way by having your code out there to educate/inspire/etc/whatever another coder and/or by helping some suit appreciate the power of open source tools.
I've been using Pg since the 6.4 series of builds, and about a month and a half ago switched to 7.0.2. It is worth the upgrade IMHO, but of course since you're relying on it for critical business data you'll probably want to test it some first...;-)
Oh, and if you don't have a budget how come you have a 600mhz alpha? 600 amd mhz is pretty cheap, but my impression is that 600 Alpha mhz are very much not...:-)
By basing the pattern matching strictly on low-range frequencies, you're FFT/"beat finder" algo isn't going to catch any of the patterns in the higher frequencies (thus being b0rked by songs with sounds strictly >= 1000Hz or so, or different songs that use the same base sounds, like, say, every rap song in existence). Further, you're planning on running this algorithm (which requires doing a digital format change and computing a FFT, neither of which is cheap in terms of disk or CPU) on every song retrieved by a search engine (more resources in terms of bandwidth)? The search engnies would laugh at you if you proposed they spend money on this to actually put it into service on their machines. Oh, and now any search with music terms in it takes a leisurely 12 hours to complete if you match more than about 3 songs. Also, given the inherently distorted nature of the found song once you've bandpassed it, wouldn't you have to do the same thing to the MIDI files in the auth lib?
So even if your non-AI algo were to work reliably (which I highly doubt), it would be prohibitively expensive in terms of system resources (now or a decade from now).
Slashdot Mirror
> Thirdly, the electoral college is the law of the land. We simply cannot violate it based on whim.
It seems that most conservatives (GOP or otherwise, living in the south I've seen my share of really conservative Democrats ;-) ) view our nation's legal framework or ``social contract'' this way, and I do believe it is a valid opinion. (Students of constitutional law will recognize its manifestation in that field as a ``traditionalist'' or ``literal'' interpretation of the Constitution as opposed to a ``constructionist'' or ``liberal'' interpretation (basically a letter-of-the-law vs. spirit-of-the-law debate).)
However, I think that ``violation'' and ``reinterpretation'' are not synomymous. The government is valid only by consent of the people, so if an aspect of it turns out to suck, I don't think we (the people or our duly elected representatives), should hesitate to tinker with it. No law is graven in stone (c.f. the ever-mutable Tax Code :-)). Violation would be Gore saying ``Screw you people, I'm having my good buddy Clinton call out the Army to shoot all the Bush supporters. Fuck this democracy crap anyway..." (and I think even the staunchest GOP member would recognize the difference between an armed coup and vigourous legal attempts to have as many recounts as it takes to get an accurate vote tally).
Of course, this `if it sucks, change it'' attitude probably isn't suprising coming from a capital-L liberal and Free Software/Open Source subversive like me... ;-)
--
<flame>
> I am a Republican, and voted for Bush, so obviously I'm biased.
Yeah, no shit?
> Americans hate lawyers, as do I.
Ahh, broad generalizations along the pattern of ``All good Americans do X! (Are you a good American?)". Long a staple of the conservative puerility (like a plurality but with less collective intelligence).
> ... is resorting to lawyers .. for the sole purpose of getting a Judge to appoint him President.
I think that he's using lawyers for the sole purpose of getting a judge to require that a FAIR, COMPLETE, and ACCURATE vote count be conducted, which is sort of a prerequisite for legitimacy in a democratic system of governance. The Republicans have done nothing since November 7 except obstruct this process.
> Gore blah blah blah Clinton machine.
Uhh, yeah. Like Bush has been the poor innocent village idiot in the corner not doing a thing. I recently saw some GOP flack on Hardball (probably normally caucasian but he was so into the Angry Conservative Bluster (TM, patent pending) when I channel surfed through he was about the color of a good merlot) saying at the top of his lungs that the Democrats were spending US$3million on lawyers. OK, how much has the GOP spent on lawyers?
> (sub quote) ... less biased historians
You mean conservative ones you agree with?
> Boyd [sic], is the lead government lawyer in the Microsoft case. blah blah shakes my faith in the Reno case against them blah blah
How suprising that a Republican would argue in favor of a large business against that Big Meany, our government? You by any chance wouldn't happen to have four little letters in your Republican Standard Issue stock portfolio (M-S-F-T), now would you?
Sigh. Depressing that the world looks at people like you and associates the word ``American'' with that thundering ignorance. In short, fuck you, and fuck every fucking Republican in this excerable country. I quite honestly hope you all burn in hell.
</flame>
Flaming of moron aside, there have been so many irregularities associated with the FL vote, that I don't think we will ever truely know who won. In this instance, I think the 25 electoral votes should go to neither man (which would be worse for a party, conservative or liberal: to lose an election or win one in such a manner that half the country hates them for it?), and the election should be decided based on the other 49 state's votes (i.e. recalculate the required majority of electoral votes based on the total sans FL, and who ever crosses that line, wins).
--
IIRC the command-line cal program does the holidays thing quite nicely, handling holidays for US, Canada, (several other countries), Christian faiths, Muslim faiths, and another major religion I'm forgetting. Maybe you (the programmers) could take a look at how they did it (probably pretty simple, IIRC the holiday data files were just plain ASCII in the form of date: description new-line).
--
I'm a college student at UT-Austin, working on a degree in Computational Chemistry. This past summer I was doing undergrad research with the Sessler group, and the grad student I mainly worked with was a really cool guy (hi wyeth! ;) ).
Anyway, we talked a few times about the possibility of taking the group's information managment ``to the next level'' (<--hate that phrase) by integrating a lot of it into a centralized database (chemical inventory, lab notebooks for the researchers, data, blah blah blah) that had a web front end so any of the machines they used could access it if they could run a web browser, and they could access it from home/abroad. From what I know about LIMS, that's about 2/3rds of what you'd need. The other 1/3 would be actually interfacing to the data collection instruments, which could be either really bad or really easy depending on a few factors like whether or not the instrument manufacturer(s) have unix drivers, in-house skill inwriting drivers/data collection software (potentially pretty easy if the stuff interfaces through a standard port like serial or parallel and you know the wire protocol, my pchem lab text talkes about doing this), that sort of thing. Or you could leave the instrument-inerfacing machines as win32 boxes, and interface with them through SAMBA and shell/perl/whatever scripts to copy and manipulate the data files (<--"if its an ugly hack and it works reliably it's not ugly").
If you have a spare box lying around, try slapping a free Unix on it, apache, PostgreSQL (or MySQL if you must :-/), SAMBA, and your scripting language of choice to give it a test run. Point out to the PHBs the advantages of having software custom-written to exactly fit your lab's needs, not to mention the cost savings over the upgrade cycle and downtime associated with the commercial win32 software installation, after you have a working prototype to show them. You could even generate some extra revenue by providing consulting services to other labs in your area that might wish to do something similar once you've worked through it for your installation.
Anyway, good luck!
--
Mildly tangental to the story at, er, hand:
At the last place I worked, we printed out two signs for the guy's restrooms. The one over the shitter said "Core Dump", the one over the pisser said "Pointer Error, Memory Leak".
--
Lends a whole new meaning to ``shit or get off the toilet!'' I don't think you'd have too many poeple sleeping in public restrooms after receiving ~110+ V to the ass...
--
Can you imagine what the SNMP variables for that would look like?
Can you imagine the results of a DoS attack on the shitters if they were completely remotely driven? (DDoS -- Distributed Disgusting odour (from) Shitters)
If they do have full networking, how long before jokes about "laying some fat pipe" come into common parlance? (Or "stringing some fiber" or ...)
--
Well, I say old, it was like 5 years ago at a hellhol-errr-place called TAMS. Anyway, he was really good at math. Really good. So one day he was telling me about this thing called the Steiner Space or something like that (my strong suite is chemistry, not abstract math). And within Steiner Spaces you could find/define something called a Steiner Point (again, it's been ~5 years and I'm not a mathematician), which was the one point in that Steiner Space that would be equidistant to all other (non-capital-S) Steiner Points in that Steiner Space. Seems pretty intuitive in 3space (for a bounded space anyway ("the middle of nowhere")); naturally since mathematicians are all closet perverts, they'd extended this to cover nSpace.
Point being, we were laughing about the possibility of defining a "UNT-Campus-Shitters" Steiner Space where each non-capital-S Steiner Point was a campus crapper. So then you could use rigorous mathematical methods to find the "Shitter Epicenter" of campus, the point at which if you had to crap you could go in any direction....
OK, yeah, so when you're IQ is >= (10*age) (sidenote: I was 16, he was 17) and you're stuck in a dorm eating suck-ass food you tend to come up with odd ways to pass the time... ;-)
--
Cohen vs. California, 403 US 15, 18 (1971) ... Protecting Non-spoken Free Speech since the 1971. :-)
Admittedly the internet isn't governed by US Supreme Court decisions, but NSI is...
--
You're bitching about a ~$47 for 600Mhz cpu not being cheap enough when you're using SCSI for your disk subsystem? Are you nuts? ;-)
With regard to the MB price difference, I can sort of see your point but the delta only looks to be 20-30 dollars... (I'm looking at www.pricewatch.com for general prices and www.essencom.com (<--been a satisfied customer there several times) for specifics.).
(Oh, sorry, the retail box with fan & heatsink Duron at 650Mhz from essencom is a whopping $75... heh heh On pricewatch the lowest price is 47 for a back-o-the-truck-special duron 600)
--
[quote]
GUIs pay no dividends until all applications in one user environment not only look but also behave the same. Only then is it easier to use a GUI because then you don't have to learn an interface from scratch. There are two methods to get programmers to adhere to such standards, either publish them and only buy products which adhere to the explicit (and often implicit) UI conventions or create an OO application framework whereby each graphical component (in appearance and behavior) is abstracted from the actual code. Apple Macintosh implemented the former while NeXT OPENSTEP implemented the latter.
[end quote]
typical Apple/M$ fan bullshit. Consistency is nice, but don't presume to tell me what is more or less usable for my windowing environment. I personally like having a very minimal window manager and a shit load of xterms, which most MacOS nitwits would decry as being abyssal in the usability category. Useability depends on the user, you turd!
[quote]
Another reason OS X is a billion times better than your Linux/KDE2 environment is the display server Quartz. Quartz is designed for desktop publishing. Anything seen can be printed (rendered) as PDF, PS, or raster. It also supports Color Sync so when I send a smoke image to an OS X user he will actually be able to see it which is less than I can say about a GIMP user I know.
[endquote]
Yes, we all know how often we need to send screenshots to grandma as PDF files. Color sync is irrelevant unless you want everyone to use the eaxct same OS. Personally all the color sync I need is 16 shades of gray.
On a side note, attacking his English skills is pretty fucking low since he's obviously not a native speaker by his word ordering. I'm sure he speaks English a damn sight better than you speak his native tongue. Expecting all the world to speak flawless English is incredibly arrogant, and unfortunately that's what most of the world associates with English speakers thanks to people like you. Try taking a Russian or Asiatic language class before you upbraid someone on linguistic matters again...
--
Is display PDF all that much different than Display PostScript that the NeXT machines used? Using a vector-based format for display is a cool idea (iirc ps and pdf were vector-based, but maybe I'm just smoken dercrackenpipen).
Anyway, since display postscript hasbeen around a while, that might be a better canidate for some open source activism, rather than the company's latest and greatest. (There may already be a free analog, not sure. If so then even better, the code release would help the free project.) :-) Besides, I think that the possibility of Apple ever being really openis minimal, one second spent with MaCOS or Apple hardware will convince you of exactly how Closed their design philosophy seems to be...
--
I think that you can define a DMZ host in addition to the NAT range. Admittedly that's just one host, but...
Besides, who says you can't do port forwarding of 53, 25/110, and 80/8080/443 from the outisde to static inside ips? You can disable dhcp on the inside you know...
Well, it is a moot point if you already got the sonicwall :-)
--
Let's all just hope for Linus' sake that she didn't come under the Badly Soiled Diaper license... ;-) A kid could turn out to be a real devil under those circumstances...
--
yeah, I can see it pretty easily really. The Java2D classes in JDK 1.2.x and 1.3 are nice. Think the GIMP and PostScript having a love child, with a dab of Illustrator. Since the .swf file format is an open one, you could write a Java-based parser class (ByteInputStream anyone?) and use it's output to feed a Java2D-based ``rendering engine''...
That would actually be pretty sweet. If I were more of a Java God I might do it... :-)
WRT doing it on an ARM or other embedded processor, why not? StrongARMs are, what, 200-odd MHz? That's faster than the machine I'm using to type this (p166), and this guy handles Flash and JDK 1.3 applets pretty well. Now what if that internet app is using a Crusoe, eh?
This is not to say that your company's product doesn't sound nifty, it does...
WRT to VRML, I think that standard is bloated enough already irregardless of the plugin playing it... ;-).
--
Well, Solaris isn't exactly iron-clad in the security dept. by default. For that, it's OpenBSD hands down. If you need big iron, well, then you're probably running a proprietary Unix anyway (like irix for some huge SGI-based vis lab, AIX on some huge S/80 ibm db2 box, Solaris on some huge Sun Oracle box, etc.). Free unixen are IMHO best suited to the problem space addressed by bunches of ``little'' boxes (best hardware support there, anyway, and similar price structure), by little I mean <= 4 cpus and <= 2gb of ram... (i.e. web farms, render farms, distributed DB serving, workstations, etc)
--
For those of you who might be curious and lazy, here's a quick link to the RELNOTE S.T XT for this release (i.e. the changelog/release notes).
--
A quantitative determination of the answer for any question of the pattern ``when will x be done by y company'' is now possible after many centuries of theoretical thought regarding the flow of resources in human society. The answer is: exactly when doing X is economically advantageous to company Y. No sooner, but maybe later if the company is run by idiots...
:-)
On the topic of plugins, well, the appliance writers should either partner with plugin companies in order to port the plugins needed or write ones of their own if the file format is an open standard. This solves the ``now'' problem but it probably precludes any $29.95 devices any time soon...
--
So I guess you're not a mime type?
:-)
Mike
--
Subject says it all... ":-)
--
Well, use a non-silicon patch mechanism. In other words, only one person at a time has the ability to modify the source package through some arraingment between the participants. Like how a token ring lan works. Kludgy, yes, but platform independent and doesn't use sourceforge. :-) (Perl used somethign similar for a while back in the early 5.x days called the ``patch pumpking'' whereby only one person at a time had the ``patch pumpkin'')
Shrug. Restricting yourselves to win32 and private server leaves you with a pretty small solution space. Anyway, good luck!
--
OK, so I know this isn't really an answer, but have you considered making a project on sourceforge? It would take care of all the stuff you needed to host the project (CVS, bug tracking, blah blah, you know the drill). Plus it's got a slightly better uptime/availability that some random Windows machine... ;^)
WRT to the question itself, I'm not very familiar with the workings of CV, but speaking in the broadest sense of theory I could see how this might be doable using email, in that the message subjects could contain he codes neccessary to make the storage program interpret which message contains what, and the diffs could be attachments. This could also be non-trivial to program (i.e. me doubting CVS can do this normaly you may have to code up something that's ``really CVS-like'' from scratch (probably in perl because there exist plentiful tools native to the language and module base that would make this task easier than C or whatnot), like do you go on sent-time or receive- time to determine which diff came in ``first'' and represents an earlier version number?
Anyway, good luck!
--
Quick post becuase I'm way tired and I don't want to make the S/N higher than it has to be:
It is true that most large (i.e. n developers for n > 1 ;-) ) projects need coordination and leadership (c.f. the programmer team ``layout'' described in Fred Brook's _The Mythical Man Month_, probably the seminal text on SoftEng, whereby you have one head ``architect'', a ``junior architect'', a few ``toolsmiths'', and a bunch of ``implementers''). Initially, yes, a democracy may seem unworkable due to the communication overhead involved in reaching consensus on everything. However, the power of democracy may also be used within the organization to allocate positions of power to the most worthy candidates (Ms. X has the most design experience so she gets elected to the 6 mo term of ``Lead Architect and All Around Object Model Person'', etc), analogous to our meatspace political system, a government of the coders, for the coders, and by the coders.
You could argue that this isn't pure democracy, and you'd be right. But a meritocracy / representative democracy would be a damn sight better than most of the slave pits I've coded in...
As far as ``boring'' goes (maybe another comment, no sleep in 27 hours). well, yeah, but then you have the knowledge you're a) getting paid to do boring work, b) getting paid to code, which is better than working at McDonalds or some shit, and c) maybe making the world a better place in some small way by having your code out there to educate/inspire/etc/whatever another coder and/or by helping some suit appreciate the power of open source tools.
--
I've been using Pg since the 6.4 series of builds, and about a month and a half ago switched to 7.0.2. It is worth the upgrade IMHO, but of course since you're relying on it for critical business data you'll probably want to test it some first... ;-)
Oh, and if you don't have a budget how come you have a 600mhz alpha? 600 amd mhz is pretty cheap, but my impression is that 600 Alpha mhz are very much not... :-)
--
By basing the pattern matching strictly on low-range frequencies, you're FFT/"beat finder" algo isn't going to catch any of the patterns in the higher frequencies (thus being b0rked by songs with sounds strictly >= 1000Hz or so, or different songs that use the same base sounds, like, say, every rap song in existence). Further, you're planning on running this algorithm (which requires doing a digital format change and computing a FFT, neither of which is cheap in terms of disk or CPU) on every song retrieved by a search engine (more resources in terms of bandwidth)? The search engnies would laugh at you if you proposed they spend money on this to actually put it into service on their machines. Oh, and now any search with music terms in it takes a leisurely 12 hours to complete if you match more than about 3 songs. Also, given the inherently distorted nature of the found song once you've bandpassed it, wouldn't you have to do the same thing to the MIDI files in the auth lib?
So even if your non-AI algo were to work reliably (which I highly doubt), it would be prohibitively expensive in terms of system resources (now or a decade from now).
--