Even professionals sometimes need things like this
on
Where is the Any Key?
·
· Score: 1
A few decades ago, IBM changed some of their computer
service manuals to refer to the "AMD". This was the "Air Movement Device"--what most people call a "fan".
The story I heard was that IBM's manuals had originally described the device as a fan. Some servicemen, though, were so used to TLAs (Three-Letter Acronyms), that when they read about the "fan" they tried to find the "F.A.N.". And couldn't.
I once tried something similar. I got the
telephone number, which turned out to be in Uzbekistan. Then I set up my fax program to repeatedly dial the number, whenever I wasn't
using the phone line for the internet. Thus, every time they answered the phone in Uzbekistan, they got a fax machine trying to get through--hence effectively disabling their phone line. And because this was in a different country, they couldn't trace me.
I didn't worry about the cost of the calls, because the people in Uzbekistan soon figured out that the calls were almost all faxes. I reckoned that even if they picked the phone up 10 times a day (to check to see if I'd stopped), it was worth the cost. Calls are only charged when they pick up the phone, right? So I let this go on for over a month.
Then I got my telephone bill. It was in the thousands. It turns out that there are three countries in the world where, if you phone there, you get charged even if no one answers the phone. And Uzbekistan is one of those countries!
I didn't know about that, and I complained to
the phone company about the bill. But my case seemed weak because I was, it's fair to say, abusing the phone system. The phone company ended up splitting the bill in half, and I paid the rest.
I don't know if my attempts had any long-term effect on those nice folks in Uzbekistan. But at least I tried.
Does this always work? If so, why do
we need import filters? Why not just write a
script (or something) that puts the Word document
into a viewer and then copies/pastes it into OOo and then saves? Or, rather, why didn't the OOo team do that?
Yep, you're right that Mathematica is not a good comparison -- I stuck that in mainly as a reference to the numerical part of Mathematica, but the symbolic stuff is pretty much unmatched (though Maple fans might disagree).
Might disagree? No "might" about it! Mathematica is better than Maple for numerical data analysis. Considering symbolics, though, Maple's ability to solve ODEs, for example, is much better than Mathematica's. Also, generally, Maple is supposed to be more reliable than Mathematica (though I've not done a full detailed comparison myself).
In most big cites in Canada, CanWest Global Communications owns at least the dominant newspaper and one of the top television stations. In Montreal, the second-largest city, it owns the lone English-language daily newspaper as well as one of two private English-language television stations. In Vancouver, the third largest city, it owns both daily newspapers and two of the top three television stations. It also owns numerous other newspapers, including the major daily in the Canadian capital (the Ottawa Citizen), as well as television stations reaching 94% of English-speaking Canadians.
The owner is staunchly pro-Israel (his name is Israel Asper): so all CanWest media must provide pro-Israel news coverage of the Middle East. Journalists who don't follow this can be fired or suspended. And all CanWest newspapers are required to print company editorials on national and international issues. Even worse, CanWest is pro the current Liberal government: so the government has done nothing during the past few years while CanWest spread.
For this and much more, you could also read the article by Chian et al., cited above by Watchful.Babbler, which is based on the well-known Volterra approach.
I second this! I've got Bachelor's and Master's degrees in CompSci and PureMath, and I've worked as a software consultant and doing research in mathematical finance. The specific mathematical techniques taught in school are sometimes useful later on and sometimes not (depending on what you do). The training in rigorous thought that PureMath gives is always enormously valuable.
MTV has, finally - after flirting with the idea for years - officallly announced they will cut back to about 10 videos a week. It recieved a mention in TV Guide's Cheers and Jeers last week or the week before
JEERS to scaling back. MTV recently announced a plan to air fewer videos. The channel hopes to increase ratings by picking 10 hit clips each week and playing them more than 30 times each.
Not quite the same thing. A video is what, four minutes on average? So that's 4*30*10 minutes = 20 hours per week.
RealPlayer has a new version of its infamous product, which is called "RealOne" Player.
If you use one of the previous versions of their player, you get a pop-up that encourages you to switch to the new version. I thought I'd try the new player. So I went to the download page for RealOne.
At the bottom of the page, in tiny print, are links for "Legal Notice/Terms of Use" and
"Privacy Policy". So I clicked on each.
Up came blank windows in my browser. So then I viewed the source for each of the two pages:
<HTML></HTML>
Which explains why the windows were blank. What do you reckon the terms of use and privacy policy are
really like?
The article talks about "the worldwide recession". A recession is typically defined as two consecutive quarters (i.e. six months) of negative GDP growth. The Economist gives the most-recent GDP changes data for each of 19 different Western countries (sorry, not free). Only two are negative (Denmark and Norway). The most-recent quarterly GDP change for the the Euro area is +1.3%; for the USA it is +4.0%.
There is a rationalization going on in business IT. This is not a recession at all.
Photo #21 (top): Shared source "includes the benefits of open source". -> Not mentioning the benefit that (only) open source is free-as-in-beer.
Photo #22 (bottom): "Open standards have become a point of confusion". -> So the correct thing to do is use Microsoft's proprietary standards?
Photo #24 (bottom): "All software companies must carry significant legal overhead to protect against GPL infection". -> Otherwise all companies (not just software ones) must carry significant legal overhead to protect against BSA raids.
"90% of politicians give the other 10% a bad reputation."
--Henry Kissinger
Why do you post when it is clearly you who is misinformed?
FACT: most people can hear up to at least 30 kHz. No, they cannot hear a pure sine wave at that frequency. But they can hear a difference if such frequencies are or are not present in the music. Moreover, almost all music contains such frequencies. No, not as pure sine waves. And it is not even the harmonics that cause the effect. Rather, because to duplicate the waveform transients, you must have the high frequencies. (Think Fourier.)
Yes, such transients are reproduced on vinyl. No, they are not reproduced on CD.
There are various controlled studies demonstrating these things. Since you are such an authority, I shouldn't need to give you references, but since I'm so magnanimous, I'll give a few anyway:
M. L. Lenhardt et al., "Human ultrasonic speech perception", Science [sciencemag.org] 253: 82 [1991].
T. Oohashi et al., "High-frequency sound above the audible range affects brain electronic activity and sound perception", AES Preprints [aes.org]
91: 3207 [1991].
Your final star'ed points are just dumb. You don't give any references, because of course you don't have any. Get a good turntable/arm/cartridge. The reverse of most of what you say is true. E.g. your claim of 60dB dynamic range is nuts: the range is over 100 dB. You are confusing the noise floor of a high-hiss record with dynamic range--but you can hear 20 dB into that noise, and a good record need not have high hiss. Vinyl has poor bass??? It's much better than CD. And so on.
There's one thing that I very much miss in OpenOffice: a grammar checker. For me, it's what keeps me with MSWord. And I've never seen anyone seriously complain about anything else.
Traditionally, vendors have driven most big IT markets. They have been, for example, quite successful at locking in corporate customers. Once a company has deployed a piece of proprietary technology--say, an expensive package of enterprise software--it is very costly to switch to another provider. Software vendors can thus milk their "installed base" by selling them one upgrade after another.
IT buyers, however, are increasingly reluctant to play this one-sided game. They are putting pressure on vendors to make it easier for them to link the various bits of their systems. Indeed, the concept of collaborative e-commerce makes sense only if applications have a common language. What is more, vendors themselves increasingly favour open standards as a defensive strategy to neutralise the power of proprietary-minded competitors.
Being forced to do more with less, IT managers are coming to like Linux, the free operating system. Linux and the universe of "open-source" businesses that surround it are one of the few areas of the technology business that is actually growing. Almost a fifth of server computers sold by Dell now have Linux installed rather than Windows. Sun Microsystems has begun offering Linux servers, and might soon add a Linux PC to its product line.
Basically, if you lose sleep, your response
times for various tasks increase. This is
why driving/piloting/etc. is dangerous when
you are sleep-deprived. The accuracy of your
responses, however, does not really change. Thus, although no one else seems to want to hear this, the quality of the code you write is unlikely to decrease.
All this is for short-term sleep deprivation. Longer term, things change. So maybe, for example, you could work 15-hour days, and then rest up on weekends. (Of course, you might not want to do so, but that's a separate issue.)
And before anyone tries to claim this is flamebait, please read the reference linked to above. I'm just a messenger.
... individual tech people are probably better off spending their energy writing code than being part of the political process.
This really gets me. Advocating that individuals
should not be part of the political process? And
instead the important thing is to do our work. This sounds like a perfect Creed for Slaves.
The real solution is for geeks to become better at getting their voices heard. How many geeks have sent out a polite clear e-mail explaining to their friends/family/colleagues what DRM, say, could do to them? And how many of those e-mails ended with a line like "If you found this message interesting, please forward it on."? If enough people eventually get the message, the political system will too.
I prefer small ultra-portable laptops (for travelling). But, I
also like big 1600x1200 screens. And I only
want a single computer.
So what I'd like to do is buy an ultra-portable
laptop and a separate big screen. Most of the time,
the screen will be plugged into the laptop.
When I'm travelling, though, I'll not take the
big screen with me; instead, I'll make do with the screen that comes with the laptop.
Does anyone have suggestions on which
ultra-portables this could be done with, and
also on what potential problems might arise?
Disease was introduced *accidentally* in the early 1500's and pretty much wiped out most Native Americans by the beginning of the 1600's.
I wasn't aware that most were wiped out that early. If it's true, do you have a reference?
There were no concentration camps, no ovens, no Gestapo. The number of people actually killed - as in, murdered - by Europeans can be measured in the tens of thousands.
This is false. Consider even just the 1800s. Forced population dislocations led to a lot more deaths than you indicate. Once the gold rush started, there was much more killing. The bison population was reduced from 10 million to under 10 thousand--largely as a deliberate attempt to deprive native populations of their livelihood, again leading to a large death toll.
And yes the Spanish had death camps (though the number who died in them is probably small compared to the number who died from smallpox).
And please note: accepting historical fact by no means exempts people from moral action *today*. Passing laws to protect Native Americans and provide them with equal opportunity are a sign of ethical behavior; indulging in blame-fests is a way of avoiding concrete action which might affect one's pocketbook. Blaming ourselves for what thousands of peoples have done during the entirety of human history is a great way to 'accept responsility' without having to take corrective action to make the lives of Native Americans *alive now, today* more equitable - especially when self-blame is free and money is not.
I do not hold myself responsible for what my ancestors did to Native Americans, intentionally or unintentionally. Life isn't fair, and such is the lot of the conquered. I do, however, blame myself if I don't act to improve the lives of Native Americans in our nation today. So lets stop whining and start doing something constructive, eh?
We agree on this one. (And how did you know I was Canadian, eh?)
And 80% of the Native American mortality wasn't due to slavery, or genocide, or the use of biological weapons. It was due to the fact that Native Americans had no resistance to common, resistable diseases among Europeans, like the flu. By the time Lewis and Clark reached the Willamette Valley - the first white guys to see alot of America - almost 90% of the valley population had been killed by diseases spread from Native American population to Native American population across the continent. Not smallpox, which never reached the Willamette valley, but primarily the flu.
The actual population decrease was more like 95%: there were over 5 million native people in 1500 and only 0.25 million by 1900. And much of this was due to deliberate genocide. See here for some good analysis.
If you include Mexico and South/Central America, this becomes much more horrid. Roughly 75 million native people were killed. Although diseases were one of the primary causes, they were often deliberately introduced by Europeans, essentially a primitive--but effective--form of biological warfare.
As for historical comparisons (you mention Assyria), this was a successful genocidal holocaust on a scale that appears to be unique.
This is a bit off-topic, but...
I just found this advertisement for software that, they claim, can turn any CD burner into a DVD burner. If true, it would make copying DVDs a lot easier and cheaper.
Does this make sense? And does anyone know anything about the product?
The IBM board of directors today elected Samuel J. Palmisano chief executive officer of the company effective March 1.
... Mr. Palmisano... [as] head of IBM's server and enterprise storage businesses,... spearheaded a major initiative to embrace Linux, the open source software, across IBM's server line. Today all of IBM's hardware and software products support Linux.
Nobody ever got fired for choosing Microsoft. Nobody ever looked ignorant for choosing Linux.
KDE and Gnome
OpenOffice and KOffice
Linus' Linux and...
So there is now talk of forking Linux.... I believe that almost everyone would be better off with a single open-source system. Sorry to those whose egos might be offended: Linux/KDE+OpenOffice. The rest waste OSS resources.
Another review, by The Economist
on
Browsing Alone
·
· Score: 2
The Economist also did a nice review of Putnam's Bowling Alone, available here. Their conclusion is
If Mr Putnam, a Harvard political scientist, is right, his findings constitute the greatest challenge now facing America's political classes....[and] the professor is probably right.
Nobody ever got fired for choosing Microsoft. Nobody ever looked ignorant for
choosing Linux.
Slashdot Mirror
The story I heard was that IBM's manuals had originally described the device as a fan. Some servicemen, though, were so used to TLAs (Three-Letter Acronyms), that when they read about the "fan" they tried to find the "F.A.N.". And couldn't.
I didn't worry about the cost of the calls, because the people in Uzbekistan soon figured out that the calls were almost all faxes. I reckoned that even if they picked the phone up 10 times a day (to check to see if I'd stopped), it was worth the cost. Calls are only charged when they pick up the phone, right? So I let this go on for over a month.
Then I got my telephone bill. It was in the thousands. It turns out that there are three countries in the world where, if you phone there, you get charged even if no one answers the phone. And Uzbekistan is one of those countries!
I didn't know about that, and I complained to the phone company about the bill. But my case seemed weak because I was, it's fair to say, abusing the phone system. The phone company ended up splitting the bill in half, and I paid the rest.
I don't know if my attempts had any long-term effect on those nice folks in Uzbekistan. But at least I tried.
Does this always work? If so, why do we need import filters? Why not just write a script (or something) that puts the Word document into a viewer and then copies/pastes it into OOo and then saves? Or, rather, why didn't the OOo team do that?
The owner is staunchly pro-Israel (his name is Israel Asper): so all CanWest media must provide pro-Israel news coverage of the Middle East. Journalists who don't follow this can be fired or suspended. And all CanWest newspapers are required to print company editorials on national and international issues. Even worse, CanWest is pro the current Liberal government: so the government has done nothing during the past few years while CanWest spread.
The Economist had story last year and another story the year before giving details.
__________________________
"None are more hopelessly enslaved than those who falsely believe they are free." --Goethe
For this and much more, you could also read the article by Chian et al., cited above by Watchful.Babbler, which is based on the well-known Volterra approach.
I second this! I've got Bachelor's and Master's degrees in CompSci and PureMath, and I've worked as a software consultant and doing research in mathematical finance. The specific mathematical techniques taught in school are sometimes useful later on and sometimes not (depending on what you do). The training in rigorous thought that PureMath gives is always enormously valuable.
At the bottom of the page, in tiny print, are links for "Legal Notice/Terms of Use" and "Privacy Policy". So I clicked on each.
Up came blank windows in my browser. So then I viewed the source for each of the two pages:
Which explains why the windows were blank. What do you reckon the terms of use and privacy policy are really like?There is a rationalization going on in business IT. This is not a recession at all.
-> Not mentioning the benefit that (only) open source is free-as-in-beer.
Photo #22 (bottom): "Open standards have become a point of confusion".
-> So the correct thing to do is use Microsoft's proprietary standards?
Photo #24 (bottom): "All software companies must carry significant legal overhead to protect against GPL infection".
-> Otherwise all companies (not just software ones) must carry significant legal overhead to protect against BSA raids.
"90% of politicians give the other 10% a bad reputation." --Henry Kissinger
FACT: most people can hear up to at least 30 kHz. No, they cannot hear a pure sine wave at that frequency. But they can hear a difference if such frequencies are or are not present in the music. Moreover, almost all music contains such frequencies. No, not as pure sine waves. And it is not even the harmonics that cause the effect. Rather, because to duplicate the waveform transients, you must have the high frequencies. (Think Fourier.)
Yes, such transients are reproduced on vinyl. No, they are not reproduced on CD.
There are various controlled studies demonstrating these things. Since you are such an authority, I shouldn't need to give you references, but since I'm so magnanimous, I'll give a few anyway:
91: 3207 [1991].
Your final star'ed points are just dumb. You don't give any references, because of course you don't have any. Get a good turntable/arm/cartridge. The reverse of most of what you say is true. E.g. your claim of 60dB dynamic range is nuts: the range is over 100 dB. You are confusing the noise floor of a high-hiss record with dynamic range--but you can hear 20 dB into that noise, and a good record need not have high hiss. Vinyl has poor bass??? It's much better than CD. And so on.
There's one thing that I very much miss in OpenOffice: a grammar checker. For me, it's what keeps me with MSWord. And I've never seen anyone seriously complain about anything else.
Twinhead laptops use a heatpipe. I've got one. It works just like you say--and the laptop runs fanless, which makes it very quiet.
http://www.alpa.org/internet/projects/ftdt/backgr/ Daw_Lam.html
Basically, if you lose sleep, your response times for various tasks increase. This is why driving/piloting/etc. is dangerous when you are sleep-deprived. The accuracy of your responses, however, does not really change. Thus, although no one else seems to want to hear this, the quality of the code you write is unlikely to decrease.
All this is for short-term sleep deprivation. Longer term, things change. So maybe, for example, you could work 15-hour days, and then rest up on weekends. (Of course, you might not want to do so, but that's a separate issue.)
And before anyone tries to claim this is flamebait, please read the reference linked to above. I'm just a messenger.
The real solution is for geeks to become better at getting their voices heard. How many geeks have sent out a polite clear e-mail explaining to their friends/family/colleagues what DRM, say, could do to them? And how many of those e-mails ended with a line like "If you found this message interesting, please forward it on."? If enough people eventually get the message, the political system will too.
The whitewashing NY Times neglected that detail.
For more on the story, see here.
So what I'd like to do is buy an ultra-portable laptop and a separate big screen. Most of the time, the screen will be plugged into the laptop. When I'm travelling, though, I'll not take the big screen with me; instead, I'll make do with the screen that comes with the laptop.
Does anyone have suggestions on which ultra-portables this could be done with, and also on what potential problems might arise?
Kind thanks, Sara
And yes the Spanish had death camps (though the number who died in them is probably small compared to the number who died from smallpox).
We agree on this one. (And how did you know I was Canadian, eh?)If you include Mexico and South/Central America, this becomes much more horrid. Roughly 75 million native people were killed. Although diseases were one of the primary causes, they were often deliberately introduced by Europeans, essentially a primitive--but effective--form of biological warfare.
As for historical comparisons (you mention Assyria), this was a successful genocidal holocaust on a scale that appears to be unique.
I just found this advertisement for software that, they claim, can turn any CD burner into a DVD burner. If true, it would make copying DVDs a lot easier and cheaper.
Does this make sense? And does anyone know anything about the product?
If this is true, then Houston, we have a problem.
http://www-916.ibm.com/press/prnews.nsf/jan/42CE5
Here's a quote:
Nobody ever got fired for choosing Microsoft. Nobody ever looked ignorant for choosing Linux.
OpenOffice and KOffice
Linus' Linux and
So there is now talk of forking Linux.... I believe that almost everyone would be better off with a single open-source system. Sorry to those whose egos might be offended: Linux/KDE+OpenOffice. The rest waste OSS resources.
Please think. Dividing weakens. Uniting strengthens.
Nobody ever got fired for choosing Microsoft. Nobody ever looked ignorant for choosing Linux.