Ok, so you're the guy to ask: What's so great about your guy? Ron is the only candidate in any election I've seen in quite a long time that I've really liked, and the only excitement I've heard about Obama was racial, or about his charisma. I'm wondering if he's got some ideas to go with the charm. And since you're telling me that there's some support overlap between our guys, I figure you'd know what I'd like about yours:-)
People like Obama because they don't disagree with him. This is because it's impossible to disagree with him, since it's almost impossible to pin him down on a lot of issues. Some of his statements are about how great big government programs which will necessarily distort the market are great. Sometimes he says the free market is super important. Carbon is bad, but he won't say whether or not he thinks building nukes is a good idea for reducing carbon emissions. On and on, if you really pay attention, he just says hope a lot and a very charismatic way. Some people like that.
After Iowa, I said "Today, unprecidented numbers of young people came out to vote for Obama with a passion we haven't seen in a very long time. And, none of them knew why."
I'm guessing this is the consequence of some "traditional" political opinions, much like Sweden insisting on having a state monopoly on alcohol, despite it being quite clearly demonstrated that it does nothing to prevent minors from obtaining it ( which is pretty much the argument in favor ).
The simple answer is that there is a deep seated belief that laws, rules, and regulations will do exactly what their author says, and no more. It hasn't always been this way, though. That's why the original conception of the US government was so baroque. We had locally elected congress, state legislature appointed senators, a nationally elected president, and a supreme court that serves for life. All those wildly diverse bodies had to be in agreement about a law in order for it to pass and stand up to judicial review. The founding fathers clearly wanted their to be as few rules as possible over the head of the citizens. Unfortunately, over time, we have come to basically abandom a lot of those principles of the founders. Combined with our puritanical traditions which force us to insist that we need to ban things to protect people from things we don't like. (Or, at least, things we don't like *them* to like.)
Consequently, we prohibit prostitution, which means only criminals are pimps, the profession is incredibly violent, and there is no way to regulate safe practices or disease testing. We won't legalize it any time soon, because we are convinced that banning it makes it less common. This ignores the fact that it is extremely common despite being banned.
Likewise, drugs.
And, underage alcohol use. We know we don't want kids to be alcoholics, so we decide that banning it will make it less common. Unfortunately, this means that a 20 year old can't responsibly have a watered down glass of wine in a restaurant while having dinner with his parents. American kids usually don't learn a culture of responsible alcohol use because they only encounter it at wild parties with their friends. Consequently, we have a very high rate of alcohol abuse.
I blame it as a result of a culture where we have professional legislators. I mean, if you really think about how absurd it is to have a person who dedicates his whole life to professionally inventing new laws, you can hardly be surprised when the culture as a whole starts to see meddlesome rules as the correct way to do almost everything.
Your physics department sounds like a nice place. I'll add it to my list of reasons to make it to Sweden.:)
I hope they put this toward something useful, rather than blow its time on SETI.
Even if we find life outside our solar system, the aftermath would not be worth-while. We would most likely not be able to communicate with them, and even if we could, we would have to perfect quantum mechanics and have teleportation working properly before communication is practical.
Well, I agree that a SETI success is probably very unlikely, how "useful" is anything that a radiotelescope does? It's only purpose is to observe, collect data, and maybe blow our minds. Until it collects the data, we can have no idea if the likeliest, biggest mind blowing factoid will have to do with black holes, galaxies, planet formation, pulsars, or little green men. If we knew what we'd find, we wouldn't need to look for any of it.
As for the aftermath not being worthwhile. Well, I think that just the knowledge that they exist is enough. It would put humanity in a completely different context and potentially have dramatic, sweeping social implications. If we managed to actually understand their signals, and maybe decipher their language, it would be even more amazing. Even if we never learn anything from their equivalent of Mr. Wizard.
This is exactly what I said when I was talking about this with my girlfriend.
I suspect that, for safety reasons, what will end up happening is that there will be a separate highway for automated cars, where every car that gets on that highway is on the same radio / cellular / wireless network and can talk to every other car. It's an expensive proposition, to be sure, but the automated cars could not truly guarantee the safety of their passengers without being able to communicate with the other cars.
Now, perhaps by the time this gets around, we'll have such well-performing AI that it can deal with manual-driving cars. But they still won't be able to exercise the sort of full advantages of automated driving (I'm thinking of traffic management, gap reduction between cars, etc.) without every car on the road being automated and communicating.
Fair enough, an automated car can't guarantee passenger safety. Neither can a manual car.
I think this will never happen. A completely automated roadway system is not needed, and would be a big waste. What might happen is that around 2020, every new car is legally required to have car to car wireless networking, and by 2030, every car registered for public roads is required to have it, regardless of age. Antique cars may not have the AI, but they would at least be required to have the networking tranceivers so all cars will know their position, velocity, etc. so they know to stay well clear of the human-driven cars. A few years after that, most roads will be illegal to drive manually.
So, a parallel system of roads for automated cars would only have any sort of use for about twenty years. After that, it would serve no purpose. And, I really don't see it as that big of a deal for an AI car to drive well on a mostly-manual road. The DARPA grand challenge has already proven that we are way ahead of where I thought we'd be by now. Commercial products like Boujou has proven that computer vision is already miles ahead of where I figured we might get in my lifetime. Another ten years of research at the same pace of the last ten, and I don't doubt that I'll be able to just input a destination and take a nap while my car takes me wherever I'm headed.
Do you still need a driver's license once they start taking steering wheels out of cars?
You have to wonder how many of the people that did get Vista on their laptop/desktop remove Vista and install XP? I work for a major electronics retailer and we always have people that buy Vista machines and have us install windows xp on them for a fee. Sort of related but we get an ungodly high amount of computer returns with the reason being Vista sucks.
Honestly, I would expect that in the retail channel, the vast majority of PC's sold with Vista are running Vista. In a corporate environment, a lot of IT departments are probably not bothering with Vista while others beta test it, and won't have any interest in investigating deploying it until SP1 is well understood. On the common home user front, however, people use whatever their machine came with. most of them don't know what the difference is between Office and Windows. Hell, some of them have trouble grasping the difference between "MSN Windows" and "AOL Instant Messenger." Yes, really.
Vista may drive some people to insist that their new machine be made to "work like the old one." But the vast majority of the consumer base just isn't well educated enough in the subject to be able to make a choice between XP and Vista. They are still using Windows 98, and just want to replace the old busted one as conveniently as possible.
It seems that all the statistics and reports about how Vista is doing well, or Vista is doing badly seem to ignore the fact that when it comes to consumer sales, the average buyer is simply incapable of being "excited about the new hotness" or of "rejecting the new beast." Whenever you read these sorts of information tidbits, just assume that about a third of all computers are sold to iguanas.
Uhhh... I would assume that all the systems were imaged using Ghost or something similar. They would have been anyway with Vista in order to avoid manually setting them up for deployment, so no additional time was spent versus deploying with Vista, and the site license would mean that no dollars were spent versus Vista. So, that hardly seems like an act of pigheaded ignorance. I would have done exactly the same thing, under the circumstances.
When has a commercial airliner been shot down by a missile? Or is this just someone trying to suck more money out of me when I fly again.
Indeed. If we spent 40 billion dollars on automatic self-driving cars, we could basically elliminate roadway accidents and save many thousands of lives. Or make a high speed train network that doesn't have the dangers or air travel. Or, we could just save 40 billion dollars and call it a victory. Spending 40 billion dollars to develop an anti missile system is just absurd given that it sort of theoretically might possibly save one plane load of people. I mean, saving that hundred people or so would be great, but the cost-benefit analysis is just fucking stupid.
Where do you live? I'd be curious to know if your location has any kind of requirement like we do to caption public TV. It's implemented such that you don't see it if you don't want to so it-s a win-win for everyone. I know that I once saw a Macgyver episode in Greece, open-subtitled in Greek, that I couldn't watch because I can't read Greek and I need captions... very frustrating! The only reason I could follow the story at all was because I had seen the episode before.
I'm in America, which does require captioning for broadcast. I don't personally need captions except for foreign programming. I just think it would be beneficial to world harmony and awesomeness if captions were included as a matter of course in the stuff I download. All the TV I watch is generally from downloaded pirate sources, rather than broadcast.
Doesn't matter, neither does anyone else. There is one important rule in creating a GUI: follow the same design principles as the target OS and applications with similar functionality as yours.
For many apps, looking like the OS is a very valid design goal. There are, however, a great many applications that value consistency across platforms much more than they value fitting into the platform. Lightwave and Shake leap to mind for me personally, though a lot of high end graphics programs use the same philosophy. Both apps have supported Mac OS X, Irix, and Windows. Between them they have also supported Solaris and Linux and more. Neither tries to look particularly like the host OS so that you can move a Shake artist from Irix to Mac OS X without any retraining - they feel right at home. It's a valid design goal, if it suits your user base.
Shake also has a completely unique file picker dialog which is uniquely suited to dealing easily with file sequences, just as a nother example.
You can't really translate between 'r' and rho. It's a character set issue. It's a straight equivalency of sounds. Cyrillic is based on the Greek alphabet and the English alphabet is based on the Latin alphabet. It could be confused with Paraguay because of the character encoding, but it's not really the same letters.
Well, it's both wrong, and not wrong. "Translation" is often used in a very broad sense to say things like source code is translated into an executable form by a compiler. Programmers who work with text might well have a background in things like compilers, and do i18n using that sort of terminology. Translation also means to take some semantic meaning and express it in another natural language, which is obviously not what this is. So, depending on what exactly the author meant, it may or may not have been an incorrect usage.
And, best of all, it's completely valid to also have the argument about whether identical letters from different writing systems are the same letter or not. In some contexts they are. In other contexts, they have almost no relation. From the perspective of a person looking at a letter, the shape and appearance is absolutely the only thing that matters. For the DNS server, the only thing that matters is naturally the sequence of bits that appear in a query.
The best term in place of translation is probably "transliteration" which refers to changing between two different writing systems without concern for meaning, but trying to preserve pronunciation. Even if it's the word I'd use, I can hardly argue it ought to be the only word that is correct. You know, some days, you just want to conquer the world and make all but one writing system illegal and burn the rest. I don't really acre which one we wind up with.
I'm partly deaf. Require captions to watch TV and movies. These Internet films never have captions even when the viewers can handle it (I know Quicktime Player can, I think WM Player can too, iTunes has a menu item for it).
Sadly, none of the American TV I download ever has subs/captions. I don't need them, but I can see how they would be useful. OTOH, there is a ton of Japanese stuff that naturally comes with English language subtitles when you download it. You may not be able to find something you like, but it is probably worth a look if you are bored and looking for some novel video content.
As far as support, I know ogg, mkv, and QuickTime movies all support test tracks. I don't think AVI does at all, except burned into the image, and I have no idea about WMV, so I wouldn't be surprised if Windows Media Player has pretty poor support. You'll probably never see 100% of Internet content with captions, but one of the good things about the Internet is the relative ease of interaction between creator and audience. Hopefully, you and others in your situation will be able to convince a large number of producers of the value of including text tracks. If nothing else, it'll expand the international appeal of content because it is a hell of a lot easier to translate something for yourself when you see it written down than when you are going, "I wonder what the hell that guy just said."
P.S. According to Google I appear to have coined a new word. Hypefomercial: noun. Etymology: hype+infomercial. A television program that is an extended advertisement designed to manufacture "coolness" and social buzz for a product, in contrast to infomercials which are usually built around product discussion and demonstration.
Huzzah! to your wordsmithery, sir. If I should happen to remember that word, I have a feeling I'll have enough use for it to become annoying. hypefomercial.
As a Colorado resident, I have to say I wasn't expecting this sort of a move. It seems like most people I talk to about this sort of issue are grossly anti-informed, and try to dismiss anybody talking ill of the new magic electro voting machines must be a luddite incapable of understanding the issues.
I have been considering rambling for five minutes about voting machines at the next Freak Train in January. (It's an open mic show in Denver at the Bug Theater on a Monday at the Bug Theater.) I was sort of assuming it wouldn't be worth my trouble, but with this local news as a starting point, I may just do it.
BTW, if anybody local knows of any good venues for talking about these sorts of things, I enjoy rambling in front of an audience.:)
I kind of wonder what the relevance of the availability of the blueprint of a modern multithreaded special-purpose server CPU means to the average Joe.
Probably not much, unless Joe has got an degree with a specialization in computer science or electrical engineering.
The vast majority of (bachelors level) computer science degrees don't involve anywhere near enough focus on hardware issues for the "blueprint" of their CPU to be of any real use. The low level source of a CPU is of direct use to a vanishingly small subset of people. But, so is the source of the Linux kernel. I've never submitted a patch to the kernel. I wouldn't know where to start, frankly. And, I'm moderately qualified to do so, having done a fair amount of C, and a bit of embedded programming. I'm certainly more qualified to tinker with the kernel than I am with CPU source.
But, that sort of isn't the point. The fact that you and I wouldn't know where to start with something like that doesn't change the fact that such people do exist. And, there are some people who can't do anything with it, but are really curious to know more about what it is, and this may be the spark that makes them decide to learn. You and I may get the result of one of those guys having access to this. so, even though my own project plans won't be influenced by the availablity, I do expect that you and I will be effected by it indirectly.
Who is stupid enough to go to Youtube for authoritative information about anything? I mean, I get why people might use something like Wikipedia for this (with all the pitfalls that can bring), but this just plain does not make sense to me.
Very few people will go to YouTube specifically looking for medical information. However, I imagine a great many people will meander from one thing to another on YouTube, find these sorts of videos, and then have their content stuck in their heads. If anything, I think the fact that people being swayed by these sorts of videos *aren't* looking for authoritative information is part of the reason that they may have the ability to sway so many minds. Anybody looking for authoritative information will be thinking about where the information comes from, and have a better chance of having their skeptic shields up. Just stumbling across information leaves a lot of people more inclined to feel that they have made a significant "discovery."
And, then they send the link to the video to their friends. Their friends are naturally more accepting of the information in the videos because it was given to them by a friend, and they necessarily tend to trust their friends, so thanks to subconscious "guilt by association," they tend to trust anything that comes from their friends.
Yeah, they're heroes today, but when Oregon's power utilities decide to start providing Internet over their power lines, turning their electrical grid into one vast RF radiator that wipes out HAM frequencies, we'll have all those all-knowing/.ers declaring HAM radio a thing of the past, that they should get a life, and my personal favorite "Don't worry, when the power goes out, we can turn on your HAM radio sets and save us all, so what's the problem?"
I was actually thinking the same thing. I mean, I'm all in favor of a new form of broadband to promote competition, but IMHO wiping out HAM to do it just isn't worth the price. Frankly, I wouldn't mind a few states including a few weeks of basic HAM instruction as part of the standard high school curriculum so that people are more aware of an incredibly important resource in emergencies.
Although Gimp resembles Photoshop it isn't the same. Some skills are transferable but if you are teaching graphic design it's silly to teach anything other then what industry uses. It means they must relearn many skills once they enter the job market. If your teaching at a higher more theoretical level then it might be acceptable because more of it transfers. But if it's a trades school or technical college you're better off teaching the actual industry tools regardless of cost.
I'm sorry, but that's absurd. When I was in middle school, we had a computer lab full of Macs, and a lot of the parents were in a little tizzy about how Windows is the only thing that gets used in the real world, so it was the only thing that should be used for teaching. So, a great effort was made to use the handful of Windows 3.1 machines that were around at the school at that time. Of course, at this point, transferring skills from Win3.1 to Vista is actually not the slightest bit easier than transferring skills from System 7. Learning how to do basic word processing and typing, and whatnot was all we needed, and it didn't make a lick of difference what exactly we used because years later when we finally entered the work force, everything had changed.
The only point when it really matters what you use for teaching skills is in college. Any earlier and the tools will change enough that the only useful thing you can teach is general theory. Sure, show the kids Photoshop if it is handy. But, teach the kids about color spaces, alpha channels, and all that good stuff using a couple of tools, and they'll be able to get up to speed of Photoshop Pro CS17 Deluxe when the time comes.
Have you ever been to a local, state, or government site that has documents available in pdf? Why should a two page text file be two megabytes? Why should a fifty page legal brief be fifteen megabytes? Portable my ass unless you are one of the tech savvy.
This isn't the document format's fault. People doing stupid things with PDF's would do things just as stupidly in any other format. I know a lot of those government PDF's are apparently made by somebody grabbing a copy of whatever document they need as a PDF, scanning it in, and calling it a day. The result is that you just have high resolution images of each page. Yes, that results in a large file size, but there really isn't any document format where a user is incapable of doing something similar. Maybe if scanning programs defaulted to trying to OCR scanned images, or had a lower default resolution, more of the PDF's you run across would be smaller, but that is a tool issue, not a format issue.
Great, now just make a reader that doesn't slow my system down to a crawl while opening a 100K document.
The whole point of standardization is that it doesn't matter what Adobe does. Anybody can impliment the standard without too much trouble. Though, in practice, it was a DeFacto standard anyway, and there is already a ton of software that supports PDF. I haven't used Adobe's PDF reader in years.
xpdf, kpdf, Preview.app, Foxit Reader, etc. all work and between them probably support damn near any platform you would want to use. I use Foxit on my Windows machines, and I find it to be very convenient software which is fast, light, and mostly stays out of my way.
It's time to leave the antiquated x86 design behind us and move to a cleaner architecture.
I used to sing the same song, but it really doesn't apply any more. The parts of the chip that are genuinely X86 specific are quite small on a modern CPU. Consequently, a change in instruction set would actually have a very slight impact on a modern CPU, except for probably making it slower. If AMD had been using this design to build a souped up MIPS processor, there is absolutely no reason to suspect that they wouldn't have run into exactly the same sort of trouble. Sadly, if somebody wanted to make a really modern architecture, they'd want to make some sort of uber CISC which actually operates directly on a compressed instruction stream to make maximal use of cache space and instruction fetch bandwidth. Thankfully, nobody has had the stomach to invent such an abomination!:)
Wow, bad times for AMD. They're losing the war against intel, and now have another set back. A 20% performance penalty is simply unacceptable for any processor. The fact that it is for brand new ones makes it an even bigger slap in the face for consumers.
Well, AMD doesn't sell used processors, as far as I'm aware, so where else would AMD have problems than in brand new processors? I mean, seriously, if a bug was found today in 1 GHz Durons that required a slowdown to work around, the headline wouldn't be "AMD Processor has bug," it would be, "AMD QA fucking incompetent, take years to notice problem with processor." You would rather they just ignored the problem until they came out with something newer so that the problem wouldn't be in a brand new processor?
Ron Paul says, "Abortion is a crime, and the states should decide how to punish women who get abortions."
He also says, "Get the government out of my wallet and my life", but it's okay for it to decide what women do with their bodies? Family planning?
Ah, but even though Ron Paul is against abortion, he wouldn't support a federal level ban. He considers it a state issue, so if he were president, he wouldn't be actively pushing for a ban. That's part of the reason I consider him harmless, I though I strongly disagree with him on issues such as abortion. "The Federal Government should have no say in X" is a sort of "agree to disagree stance that I can live with. Apparently he doesn't really like gays, either. But, at least he won't push for nonesense like a federal gay marriage ban.
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People like Obama because they don't disagree with him. This is because it's impossible to disagree with him, since it's almost impossible to pin him down on a lot of issues. Some of his statements are about how great big government programs which will necessarily distort the market are great. Sometimes he says the free market is super important. Carbon is bad, but he won't say whether or not he thinks building nukes is a good idea for reducing carbon emissions. On and on, if you really pay attention, he just says hope a lot and a very charismatic way. Some people like that.
After Iowa, I said "Today, unprecidented numbers of young people came out to vote for Obama with a passion we haven't seen in a very long time. And, none of them knew why."
The simple answer is that there is a deep seated belief that laws, rules, and regulations will do exactly what their author says, and no more. It hasn't always been this way, though. That's why the original conception of the US government was so baroque. We had locally elected congress, state legislature appointed senators, a nationally elected president, and a supreme court that serves for life. All those wildly diverse bodies had to be in agreement about a law in order for it to pass and stand up to judicial review. The founding fathers clearly wanted their to be as few rules as possible over the head of the citizens. Unfortunately, over time, we have come to basically abandom a lot of those principles of the founders. Combined with our puritanical traditions which force us to insist that we need to ban things to protect people from things we don't like. (Or, at least, things we don't like *them* to like.)
Consequently, we prohibit prostitution, which means only criminals are pimps, the profession is incredibly violent, and there is no way to regulate safe practices or disease testing. We won't legalize it any time soon, because we are convinced that banning it makes it less common. This ignores the fact that it is extremely common despite being banned.
Likewise, drugs.
And, underage alcohol use. We know we don't want kids to be alcoholics, so we decide that banning it will make it less common. Unfortunately, this means that a 20 year old can't responsibly have a watered down glass of wine in a restaurant while having dinner with his parents. American kids usually don't learn a culture of responsible alcohol use because they only encounter it at wild parties with their friends. Consequently, we have a very high rate of alcohol abuse.
I blame it as a result of a culture where we have professional legislators. I mean, if you really think about how absurd it is to have a person who dedicates his whole life to professionally inventing new laws, you can hardly be surprised when the culture as a whole starts to see meddlesome rules as the correct way to do almost everything.
Your physics department sounds like a nice place. I'll add it to my list of reasons to make it to Sweden.
Well, I agree that a SETI success is probably very unlikely, how "useful" is anything that a radiotelescope does? It's only purpose is to observe, collect data, and maybe blow our minds. Until it collects the data, we can have no idea if the likeliest, biggest mind blowing factoid will have to do with black holes, galaxies, planet formation, pulsars, or little green men. If we knew what we'd find, we wouldn't need to look for any of it.
As for the aftermath not being worthwhile. Well, I think that just the knowledge that they exist is enough. It would put humanity in a completely different context and potentially have dramatic, sweeping social implications. If we managed to actually understand their signals, and maybe decipher their language, it would be even more amazing. Even if we never learn anything from their equivalent of Mr. Wizard.
Fair enough, an automated car can't guarantee passenger safety. Neither can a manual car.
I think this will never happen. A completely automated roadway system is not needed, and would be a big waste. What might happen is that around 2020, every new car is legally required to have car to car wireless networking, and by 2030, every car registered for public roads is required to have it, regardless of age. Antique cars may not have the AI, but they would at least be required to have the networking tranceivers so all cars will know their position, velocity, etc. so they know to stay well clear of the human-driven cars. A few years after that, most roads will be illegal to drive manually.
So, a parallel system of roads for automated cars would only have any sort of use for about twenty years. After that, it would serve no purpose. And, I really don't see it as that big of a deal for an AI car to drive well on a mostly-manual road. The DARPA grand challenge has already proven that we are way ahead of where I thought we'd be by now. Commercial products like Boujou has proven that computer vision is already miles ahead of where I figured we might get in my lifetime. Another ten years of research at the same pace of the last ten, and I don't doubt that I'll be able to just input a destination and take a nap while my car takes me wherever I'm headed.
Do you still need a driver's license once they start taking steering wheels out of cars?
Honestly, I would expect that in the retail channel, the vast majority of PC's sold with Vista are running Vista. In a corporate environment, a lot of IT departments are probably not bothering with Vista while others beta test it, and won't have any interest in investigating deploying it until SP1 is well understood. On the common home user front, however, people use whatever their machine came with. most of them don't know what the difference is between Office and Windows. Hell, some of them have trouble grasping the difference between "MSN Windows" and "AOL Instant Messenger." Yes, really.
Vista may drive some people to insist that their new machine be made to "work like the old one." But the vast majority of the consumer base just isn't well educated enough in the subject to be able to make a choice between XP and Vista. They are still using Windows 98, and just want to replace the old busted one as conveniently as possible.
It seems that all the statistics and reports about how Vista is doing well, or Vista is doing badly seem to ignore the fact that when it comes to consumer sales, the average buyer is simply incapable of being "excited about the new hotness" or of "rejecting the new beast." Whenever you read these sorts of information tidbits, just assume that about a third of all computers are sold to iguanas.
Uhhh... I would assume that all the systems were imaged using Ghost or something similar. They would have been anyway with Vista in order to avoid manually setting them up for deployment, so no additional time was spent versus deploying with Vista, and the site license would mean that no dollars were spent versus Vista. So, that hardly seems like an act of pigheaded ignorance. I would have done exactly the same thing, under the circumstances.
Indeed. If we spent 40 billion dollars on automatic self-driving cars, we could basically elliminate roadway accidents and save many thousands of lives. Or make a high speed train network that doesn't have the dangers or air travel. Or, we could just save 40 billion dollars and call it a victory. Spending 40 billion dollars to develop an anti missile system is just absurd given that it sort of theoretically might possibly save one plane load of people. I mean, saving that hundred people or so would be great, but the cost-benefit analysis is just fucking stupid.
I'm in America, which does require captioning for broadcast. I don't personally need captions except for foreign programming. I just think it would be beneficial to world harmony and awesomeness if captions were included as a matter of course in the stuff I download. All the TV I watch is generally from downloaded pirate sources, rather than broadcast.
For many apps, looking like the OS is a very valid design goal. There are, however, a great many applications that value consistency across platforms much more than they value fitting into the platform. Lightwave and Shake leap to mind for me personally, though a lot of high end graphics programs use the same philosophy. Both apps have supported Mac OS X, Irix, and Windows. Between them they have also supported Solaris and Linux and more. Neither tries to look particularly like the host OS so that you can move a Shake artist from Irix to Mac OS X without any retraining - they feel right at home. It's a valid design goal, if it suits your user base.
Shake also has a completely unique file picker dialog which is uniquely suited to dealing easily with file sequences, just as a nother example.
Well, it's both wrong, and not wrong. "Translation" is often used in a very broad sense to say things like source code is translated into an executable form by a compiler. Programmers who work with text might well have a background in things like compilers, and do i18n using that sort of terminology. Translation also means to take some semantic meaning and express it in another natural language, which is obviously not what this is. So, depending on what exactly the author meant, it may or may not have been an incorrect usage.
And, best of all, it's completely valid to also have the argument about whether identical letters from different writing systems are the same letter or not. In some contexts they are. In other contexts, they have almost no relation. From the perspective of a person looking at a letter, the shape and appearance is absolutely the only thing that matters. For the DNS server, the only thing that matters is naturally the sequence of bits that appear in a query.
The best term in place of translation is probably "transliteration" which refers to changing between two different writing systems without concern for meaning, but trying to preserve pronunciation. Even if it's the word I'd use, I can hardly argue it ought to be the only word that is correct. You know, some days, you just want to conquer the world and make all but one writing system illegal and burn the rest. I don't really acre which one we wind up with.
Sadly, none of the American TV I download ever has subs/captions. I don't need them, but I can see how they would be useful. OTOH, there is a ton of Japanese stuff that naturally comes with English language subtitles when you download it. You may not be able to find something you like, but it is probably worth a look if you are bored and looking for some novel video content.
As far as support, I know ogg, mkv, and QuickTime movies all support test tracks. I don't think AVI does at all, except burned into the image, and I have no idea about WMV, so I wouldn't be surprised if Windows Media Player has pretty poor support. You'll probably never see 100% of Internet content with captions, but one of the good things about the Internet is the relative ease of interaction between creator and audience. Hopefully, you and others in your situation will be able to convince a large number of producers of the value of including text tracks. If nothing else, it'll expand the international appeal of content because it is a hell of a lot easier to translate something for yourself when you see it written down than when you are going, "I wonder what the hell that guy just said."
Huzzah! to your wordsmithery, sir. If I should happen to remember that word, I have a feeling I'll have enough use for it to become annoying. hypefomercial.
As a Colorado resident, I have to say I wasn't expecting this sort of a move. It seems like most people I talk to about this sort of issue are grossly anti-informed, and try to dismiss anybody talking ill of the new magic electro voting machines must be a luddite incapable of understanding the issues.
:)
I have been considering rambling for five minutes about voting machines at the next Freak Train in January. (It's an open mic show in Denver at the Bug Theater on a Monday at the Bug Theater.) I was sort of assuming it wouldn't be worth my trouble, but with this local news as a starting point, I may just do it.
BTW, if anybody local knows of any good venues for talking about these sorts of things, I enjoy rambling in front of an audience.
The vast majority of (bachelors level) computer science degrees don't involve anywhere near enough focus on hardware issues for the "blueprint" of their CPU to be of any real use. The low level source of a CPU is of direct use to a vanishingly small subset of people. But, so is the source of the Linux kernel. I've never submitted a patch to the kernel. I wouldn't know where to start, frankly. And, I'm moderately qualified to do so, having done a fair amount of C, and a bit of embedded programming. I'm certainly more qualified to tinker with the kernel than I am with CPU source.
But, that sort of isn't the point. The fact that you and I wouldn't know where to start with something like that doesn't change the fact that such people do exist. And, there are some people who can't do anything with it, but are really curious to know more about what it is, and this may be the spark that makes them decide to learn. You and I may get the result of one of those guys having access to this. so, even though my own project plans won't be influenced by the availablity, I do expect that you and I will be effected by it indirectly.
It doesn't. It does, however, require a 32 bit integer data type (which the OP said). long has to be 32 bits on a conformant implementation.
Try studying quantum mechanics.
Very few people will go to YouTube specifically looking for medical information. However, I imagine a great many people will meander from one thing to another on YouTube, find these sorts of videos, and then have their content stuck in their heads. If anything, I think the fact that people being swayed by these sorts of videos *aren't* looking for authoritative information is part of the reason that they may have the ability to sway so many minds. Anybody looking for authoritative information will be thinking about where the information comes from, and have a better chance of having their skeptic shields up. Just stumbling across information leaves a lot of people more inclined to feel that they have made a significant "discovery."
And, then they send the link to the video to their friends. Their friends are naturally more accepting of the information in the videos because it was given to them by a friend, and they necessarily tend to trust their friends, so thanks to subconscious "guilt by association," they tend to trust anything that comes from their friends.
I was actually thinking the same thing. I mean, I'm all in favor of a new form of broadband to promote competition, but IMHO wiping out HAM to do it just isn't worth the price. Frankly, I wouldn't mind a few states including a few weeks of basic HAM instruction as part of the standard high school curriculum so that people are more aware of an incredibly important resource in emergencies.
How do you say "Relaxen und watchen das Blinkenkraters" in fake chinese?
I'm sorry, but that's absurd. When I was in middle school, we had a computer lab full of Macs, and a lot of the parents were in a little tizzy about how Windows is the only thing that gets used in the real world, so it was the only thing that should be used for teaching. So, a great effort was made to use the handful of Windows 3.1 machines that were around at the school at that time. Of course, at this point, transferring skills from Win3.1 to Vista is actually not the slightest bit easier than transferring skills from System 7. Learning how to do basic word processing and typing, and whatnot was all we needed, and it didn't make a lick of difference what exactly we used because years later when we finally entered the work force, everything had changed.
The only point when it really matters what you use for teaching skills is in college. Any earlier and the tools will change enough that the only useful thing you can teach is general theory. Sure, show the kids Photoshop if it is handy. But, teach the kids about color spaces, alpha channels, and all that good stuff using a couple of tools, and they'll be able to get up to speed of Photoshop Pro CS17 Deluxe when the time comes.
This isn't the document format's fault. People doing stupid things with PDF's would do things just as stupidly in any other format. I know a lot of those government PDF's are apparently made by somebody grabbing a copy of whatever document they need as a PDF, scanning it in, and calling it a day. The result is that you just have high resolution images of each page. Yes, that results in a large file size, but there really isn't any document format where a user is incapable of doing something similar. Maybe if scanning programs defaulted to trying to OCR scanned images, or had a lower default resolution, more of the PDF's you run across would be smaller, but that is a tool issue, not a format issue.
The whole point of standardization is that it doesn't matter what Adobe does. Anybody can impliment the standard without too much trouble. Though, in practice, it was a DeFacto standard anyway, and there is already a ton of software that supports PDF. I haven't used Adobe's PDF reader in years.
xpdf, kpdf, Preview.app, Foxit Reader, etc. all work and between them probably support damn near any platform you would want to use. I use Foxit on my Windows machines, and I find it to be very convenient software which is fast, light, and mostly stays out of my way.
I used to sing the same song, but it really doesn't apply any more. The parts of the chip that are genuinely X86 specific are quite small on a modern CPU. Consequently, a change in instruction set would actually have a very slight impact on a modern CPU, except for probably making it slower. If AMD had been using this design to build a souped up MIPS processor, there is absolutely no reason to suspect that they wouldn't have run into exactly the same sort of trouble. Sadly, if somebody wanted to make a really modern architecture, they'd want to make some sort of uber CISC which actually operates directly on a compressed instruction stream to make maximal use of cache space and instruction fetch bandwidth. Thankfully, nobody has had the stomach to invent such an abomination!
Well, AMD doesn't sell used processors, as far as I'm aware, so where else would AMD have problems than in brand new processors? I mean, seriously, if a bug was found today in 1 GHz Durons that required a slowdown to work around, the headline wouldn't be "AMD Processor has bug," it would be, "AMD QA fucking incompetent, take years to notice problem with processor." You would rather they just ignored the problem until they came out with something newer so that the problem wouldn't be in a brand new processor?
Ah, but even though Ron Paul is against abortion, he wouldn't support a federal level ban. He considers it a state issue, so if he were president, he wouldn't be actively pushing for a ban. That's part of the reason I consider him harmless, I though I strongly disagree with him on issues such as abortion. "The Federal Government should have no say in X" is a sort of "agree to disagree stance that I can live with. Apparently he doesn't really like gays, either. But, at least he won't push for nonesense like a federal gay marriage ban.