Hell, somewhere in a box here I've got a reprint of an old Gernsback magazine from the 50's which has a sound-triggered flash unit with delay. It uses a single valve as a class C amp (to give an adjustable threshold & immunity from background noise), a longish-timebase switchable R-C filter as an adjustable delay, and another single valve output stage to drive (IIRC) a B-C flash.
Also, didn't Doc Egerton publish the schematics of his strobes (not the same thing, admittedly, but close) back in the 30's?
I guess the point of both of our comments is that this sort of thing was "News for Nerds" 50 or more years ago. Today, not so much...
Basically, it's labelled "evolution" when something succeeds in adapting to the change but "extinction" when it doesn't. Often, it's the pace of change which makes the difference.
If, for example, the now-extinct North American camels developed random mutations (or had a latent genetic ability) that allowed one of them to, say, start climbing giant redwoods and breeding before being eaten by their human predators, then you'd possibly have American Tree Camels today.
Random chance + selective pressure + sufficient time = evolution. The article indicates that it wasn't a continuous pressure either, which probably helped speed things up. e.g.
Year one: 99% of fish die, 1% survive & spend the next 364 days breeding resistant offspring... Year 500 or so: 50% die, 50% survive & spend the next 364 days breeding more resistant offspring... Current times: 10% die, 90% survive & spend the next 364 days breeding very resistant offspring...
It's not so uncommon really; the 'religious' aspect is merely a teaser giving the atheist fundies something to tease the creationist fundies with. For instance, I'm involved with researching pest insects that have developed high-level resistance to fumigants that have only been in use since WWII. In some cases, visible morphological and behavioural changes have resulted. If that ain't evolution I don't know what is, and I'm sure that if people had ritual rather than practical reasons for gassing silos we could be having the same discussion about bugs...
Ye Gods, I didn't think of that - an "Adobe Updater" sitting and running TSR / background, as efficient and unobtrusive as only Adobe software can be...
"Adobe Updater is currently downloading a security update for Flash. Would you also like to install Acrobat Reader [Y/N]?" > N "Did you know that almost 1 in 10,000 PDFs cannot be read by Preview? You can avoid problems by installing the latest version of Acrobat Reader. Would you like to install Acrobat Reader now [Y/N]?" > N "Thanks to Adobe's ongoing efforts, more security vulnerabilities are uncovered in Acrobat Reader than in any other product. Now, you can be part of this Continuous Improvement Project! Would you like to not install Acrobat Reader by Adobe [Y/N]?" > N "Thank you for not choosing to not install Adobe Acrobat Reader. Downloading Adobe Acrobat Reader Installer Installer... done." "Installing Adobe Acrobat Reader Installer Installer... done." "Running Adobe Acrobat Reader Installer Installer..." "Adobe Acrobat Reader Installer Installer is now downloading the Adobe Acrobat Reader Installer... done." "Installing Adobe Acrobat Reader Installer... done." "Running Adobe Acrobat Reader Installer..." "Adobe Acrobat Reader Installer is now downloading the Adobe Acrobat Reader. Your Internet speed is estimated to be 1.2MBps; download ETA is 10hours 13 minutes. Please remain seated in from of your computer until the download is complete. Please refrain from running any non-Adobe software until the download has completed and Adobe Acrobat Reader is installed."
No, you're missing the point. They don't want TV to be equal to the internet; they want the internet to be the equivalent of TV. Demand - at least, what the existing inhabitants demand - also has very little to do with it; they're experts at steering the wants and demands of the incoming population by supply-side manipulation. They've also got the temperament to wait until the tide turns their way, the experience to know that it almost inevitably will, and the deep pockets to stumble around making expensive mistakes until it does.
What, you think/. or other similar crowsourced-ish news/blog sites are the future? No, if you want a glimpse at the future, it's more Fox and Gawker Media than anything else.
They're instilling it with the sacred and revered ability to generate lots of "A USB device has requested more power than the hub can provide. Windows cannot enable the device. Remove the device and restart your computer" error messages.
(It's an unpowered hub by the looks of it; best not plug in anything that wants more than the default 100mA...)
"Now hopefully they won't pull a gracenote with all of that user contributed content."
Like IMDB did? I've been around the 'net long enough to remember when it was the user-contributed 'rec.arts.movies movie database', a collection of text files and shell scripts, before it even moved to the web as the 'Cardiff University Movie Database'. What happened after that was like a beginners HOWTO for the CDDB guys.
But apart from that, anyone who relies on IMDB for accurate info has rocks in their head. Anything pre early-90's that's not a Hollywood production or an international classic is almost guaranteed to have multiple errors.
"They just sell substandard junk with a kiddie interface to brainwashable marketting prone snobs.
I'm confused - would this be the 'substandard junk' hardware that a reasonable proportion of the/. audience feels is worth buying specifically to run Linux on? Or the 'kiddie interface' OS that another reasonable proportion of the/. audience wishes would run on commodity PC hardware, and sometimes hacks to do so?
Now, strictly speaking that's not trademark dilution - but it's bloody close. If the iPod had instead been called a 'Chazzwazzer', we'd be downloading 'chazzcasts' now...
Did you watch the bits where he demonstrated the difference between 8-bit linear audio vs 8-bit -law by manipulating the audio of his voice Or showed what clipping and Nyquist frequency aliasing sound like? Or showed the content contained in the Y, U, and V video channels by displaying them onscreen?
Try *that* with a book.
Actually, I've seen all of those quite well presented in magazine articles & books, using graphs, images, and waveform diagrams which have the advantage of actually showing you what's going on (e.g. decreased dynamic range / increased SNR; flattened waveforms from clipping; the effects of sub-Nyquist sampling in both the temporal and frequency domains (non-representative sampling & 'wrap-around / mirror' effect); separate colour images & graphs of their relative sensitivity to the human eye (which leads in nicely to how colourspace sub-sampling & compression works in both analogue & digital realms); etc.)
As my snarky co-commenter points out: if only there were some way of distributing text, images, audio, and video together to weave a deep, engaging, and coherent narrative for anybody to peruse at their leisure...
And as is often the case with information videos, they ignore an important corollary to an old maxim: While a picture may be worth a thousand words, a thousand words often beats 24 pictures a second.
But as long as the next one patiently explains to the average person the difference between containers, codecs, and contents, I'll be a happy man. I'm getting sick of explaining why "it's an.avi file!" is a useless thing to tell me when a file won't play...
Everyone's getting all wrapped up in the technical solutions - why not look at how others have already solved this?
Basically, my university's rules state: 1) Bilingual dictionaries only - if your native language is English, and you can't understand the exam paper written in English, tough titty. 2) Paper dictionaries only. 3) No specialist dictionaries - you should have at least learned the English terms applicable to your subject. 4) No inserts, notes, or marginalia in books - highlighting is OK, additional notations not OK. Checked by the invigilators before / during exams. 5) Standard or basic scientific calculators only - nothing that can store commonly-used functions, formulas, or text. 6) Specific models of advanced scientific or graphing calculators may be allowed on a subject-by-subject basis - approved devices are listed in the course outline at the beginning of semester. 7) Anything outside of this is by prior written arrangement with the lecturer or head of department only, on a case by case basis. 8) No non-approved materials allowed - this includes radios, pagers, phones, mp3 players, multipurpose devices (e.g. iPods, smartphones, etc), or devices not approved under point 6 or 7. Leave that shit in your bag / locker. 9) All devices allowed under point 6 or 7 must be reset either by or in front of the invigilator or lecturer on request immediately prior to exam commencement. 10) Regardless, the invigilators are allowed to confiscate any suspect materials devices from a student at any time during the exam, and this is recorded on the attendance sheet. It is up to the student to request return of confiscated materials upon completion of the exam.
An onerous list? Yup, sure, to look at. In practice it basically boils down to "these are the specific things you can take into an exam; if you need to take something else then get prior approval; if you take anything suspect in, it may be confiscated for the duration".
Huh? DVD player and TV manufacturers normally buy hardware decoder chips, they don't implement the standards themselves.
True for the MPEG decoder, not so much for the virtual machine that controls all aspects of DVD playback. VM implementations vary from manufacturer to manufacturer, and sometimes even from model to model from the same manufacturer. Without naming names, sometimes it's a crapshoot of things like 'where is this particular player going to get the AR info from - the IFO file? The VOB header? The MPEG-2 stream headers? Will it have a branching bug, or a generic register overflow bug? '
I recall one memorably bad model which seemed to clear GP registers when executing a Compare-Link instruction, effectively making certain complex menus useless...
Lest this seem esoteric, I'll point out that both Matroska (the basis of the WebM file format) and bits of MPEG-4 (e.g. part 16, part 21) allow for similar DVD menu and control-like functionality (although last I looked it remain incomplete and largely unimplemented in Matroska).
They do know they plow the cables into the sea bed floor. Something like 2m down.
Only where practicable / desirable - usually on the continental shelves & near the coast, where there's a danger of it being snagged by a fishing trawler or anchor.
AFAIK, the record depth for burying cable is still ~1600m. By comparison, the average depth of the Atlantic is apparently 3339m, and the Pacific ~4100m
I've also just been looking up some recent, roughly equivalent, restricted area declarations locally. They range from 100m around Jessica Watson's Pink Lady on her return, 1NM (~6000') around ship-ship LNG & fuel oil transfers, to 1.75NM-wide (>10,000') exclusion zone during the start of a local yacht race.
In that light, allowing boats not involved in the actual cleanup operations within 20m looks exceedingly generous!
People who disagree might like to look up what the restrictions are for private boats around their nearest port. Where I am, the clearances are a recommended minimum 50m (~160'), and an enforced 30m (~100'), when ships are berthed. Clearances areas around ships during berthing and tug operations are higher.
Legally, you can't even cast a line off the shore any closer than 30m to an operating or non-operating wharf around here.
"If we could invent a "Go Back to where I wanted to be" button that the user clicked only once, this would be more useful but receive fewer clicks."
FF had that, more or less - note the little down-arrows adjacent to the back and fwd buttons here; they showed a dropdown menu of the history in each direction.
For some reason the allegedly "professional UX designers" (to quote someone upthread) thought combining the separate fwd and back buttons into a Vista-aping keyhole, removing those extra indicators, combining the separate histories into one, and accessing that combined history by right-click, was a step forwards.
Even worse was their decision to ape the butt-ugly Safari for the default OS X theme...
Mail:.mbox (open)... If you no longer wanted to use Mail.app for your email all your messages are in.mbox format and are easily portable to any other system (unlike, for example, Outlook's.pst format).
Not since... umm, Tiger (10.4.x)? It now uses individual message.emlx files; not a 'standard' standard, but easily reverse-engineered.
IIRC, although it doesn't use them by default, Mail.app can still export.mbox files.
"... not by pushing it out to chrome because fuck all people use chrome."
You might be surprised, though - I certainly was. At my uni, in the last 2~3 months Chrome has become almost the de facto browser amongst students because the default IE (dunno what version; I suspect 7) works woefully with the Windows Live student email accounts. Despite the current version of FF (which, strangely, works better with the student webmail than IE) being pre-installed in the SoE, every time I'm in there I hear someone being told to download and use Chrome instead - by the helpdesk, faculty, and other students.
Like I said, that surprised the hell out of me - one, that Windows Live Mail works so badly with a still widely-deployed version of IE; and two, that even people who know nothing more about computers than how to turn them on and log into Facebook are adopting Chrome.
"Upper House: parliament... The Lower House: The Senate..."
Ummm... you do know you got that exactly wrong, don't you?
The Upper House is the Senate. The Lower House is the House of Representatives. Together, they make the Parliament of Australia.
And voting anything other than Labor / Coalition in the House of Reps is far from a wasted vote. It's been a while, but we have had minority governments that've had to cuddle up to minor parties in the HoR in the past. It's not quite like the crazy 'major parties take all' system in the US. Not yet, anyway...
Yeah, my bad, I conflated 2 or 3 things & mucked it up badly while simplifying. Framerate & nominal bitrate is in the sequence header, GOPs contain *a* timestamp (not the PTS) for the first frame in the GOP. Given that info though, which is all stored pretty much 'in the clear' & easily extractable by the splitter (or you can just binary read the stream until you see the correct header flags), it's still relatively easy to calculate the ballpark position in the file / buffer for a given playing time position without too much effort. Incorrect bitrate flagging, VBR, changing GOP sizes, & multiple GOPs per sequence (1 for DVD but, IIRC, up to 16 is valid in DVB?) makes it more difficult, but still somewhat do-able if you can guess that info from previously-played frames.
Yeah, the problem with.ogg seeking is down to the way they don't implement a standard timestamp; timestamps are dependent on the codec used. The original original article covers this well, but it makes you wonder why they chose to implement not only a container where data packets can be any size smaller or larger than a frame (the only timestamps, granules in Ogg-speak, relate to the end of the current frame), but one that (in the canonical case of Vorbis in.ogg) requires you to decode the Vorbis-compressed audio to PCM in order to seek within the frame!
That's great. What container are they going to put it in again?
(Less snarky version: VP8 is a codec. Ogg (& MKV, & AVI, & etc) are container formats that hold data encoded with various codecs. The situation is muddied somewhat with MPEG, as the various versions encompass both a codec and a container. DivX too, but the DivX container is nothing more than a bastardised.AVI container containing video encoded with the DivX codec.)
Really? I don't think I ever saw a single VCD on a store shelf. I recall they existed, and I think I even watched one once, but basically they were a brief fad that completely failed to make a measurable dent in the VHS market and rapidly disappeared without a trace. That's not what I'd call "massively popular".
It may not have been popular in the US (it certainly wasn't obvious here in Australia) - but just about every Chinese home in Australia I went to (in the course of my job) from the mid-90's onwards had at least 1 VCD player (and often one for each TV), and discs were common in the local Asian shops and markets.
Even now, if you buy Asian movies from any of the on-line Asian retailers you'll see plenty of VCD versions.
That's because MPEG Transport Streams have an easily-accessible Presentation Time Stamp (PTS) in each GOP header, and it's reasonably easy to calculate the increment between PTSs (which will vary with framerate). The simplistic explanation is that the GOP header has the bit rate* & framerate; you can calculate the PTS increment either from the framerate or examining adjacent blocks, you then check the current PTS, calculate the desired PTS from that, and can then jump to the appropriate part of the file to find the PTS you're after.
(That's assuming you're working with a TS file, where the player can examine the first & last block to determine file length. With streaming, you're restricted to working with what's in the buffer (& hopefully your app knows how long the buffer is, since it allocated it!))
Ogg, AFAIK, doesn't have that info in the block header - IIRC it relies on the bitstream having presentation timing stored in it (i.e. none, in the case of most audio formats), which means you have to decode the block to find it. It was done that way to allow for variable framerates to be stored without having to build a huge index. MKV is a bit better in this respect, but it's a remarkably fragile container.
* It falls down a bit sometimes, particularly where the bitrate in the block header is set to max (15Mbps), or where you're using VBR. With the latter the calculation will usually get you in the ballpark; with both cases, some splitters/decoders calculate the bitrate themselves while playing, store it, and use that for seeking.
However, standard practice here in Australia, as required by telecommunication's law is actually 2 pairs. Red & Black and Green & Black I think. Never was a techie, just did line programming & cable records.
I was a techie (exchange mtce), then got suckered into liney-land via DSL installs / faults.
2 pairs - White & Blue, Red & Black (mostly) - but that's only for the lead-in from the pit to the NBP (first socket / external J-box), or maybe from the building MDF or IDFs to the unit/townhouse. In theory, internal stuff should be at least 2pr, but you've gotta remember 90+% of it these days is installed by builders (i.e. as cheaply as possible) & signed off by their pet electricians, so that's not a given. Plenty of single-pair in internal cabling, although that's rapidly being superseded by CAT-5 - which they usually manage to put a staple through, crush under sheeting, or just plain stretch so you're *lucky* to get a single pair that works...
(Seriously - I've forgotten how many brand-spankin'-new installs I'd attended where I had to split all 4 pairs differently around the house just to get a single line to all points.)
And let's not talk about the so-called "technician" contractors Telstra passes the lead-in installs & replacements to. I've seen lead-in buried solid (with just short lengths of conduit at the building and pit end end so it passes inspection), and CAT-5 lead-in that's such crap it's gone low IR 40 minutes after getting damp...
Besides, as a cable assigner you'd know the real problem is the lack of free/working pairs in the mains to the pillar, or especially the O-side street cabling. A 2pr lead-in is fine, but there's nowhere near enough capacity to extend 2 pairs for more than a few people all the way back to the pillar, let alone the exchange or local cabinet...
And my point is that while wild-caught or naturally-occurring *anything* might be better for you, and sticking to foods that aren't intensively farmed is a fair enough personal choice to make, there's no way in hell a world without highly developed agriculture or aquaculture can support even the current 6.5 billion+ people.
On top of that, I'd be wary of any claims that certain fisheries are 'sustainable' - even with the current state of ecological modelling, there's a dire lack of knowledge and understanding of the totality of factors and processes that drive fish abundance. You've just got to Google 'fisheries collapse' to see all the examples of what were thought to be 'sustainable' fishing practices that turned out wrong - sardines, pilchards, salmon, Atlantic Cod, etc, etc, etc, not to mention the cascade effect on other species that depended upon them. The Beverton-Holt model isn't all it's cracked up to be, and it's certainly not an accurate model of even a single fishery's ecosystem...
Oh, and while you're Googling, you might want to check how your belief about the Japanese being "the ones who do all the illegal fishing in international waters crap" stand up to scrutiny. You'd be surprised...
The same thing happens with Pacific salmon when hatchery fish are used to supplement wild populations, as has been (is still?) done in the Pacific Northwest.
Slashdot Mirror
Hell, somewhere in a box here I've got a reprint of an old Gernsback magazine from the 50's which has a sound-triggered flash unit with delay. It uses a single valve as a class C amp (to give an adjustable threshold & immunity from background noise), a longish-timebase switchable R-C filter as an adjustable delay, and another single valve output stage to drive (IIRC) a B-C flash.
Also, didn't Doc Egerton publish the schematics of his strobes (not the same thing, admittedly, but close) back in the 30's?
I guess the point of both of our comments is that this sort of thing was "News for Nerds" 50 or more years ago. Today, not so much...
Basically, it's labelled "evolution" when something succeeds in adapting to the change but "extinction" when it doesn't. Often, it's the pace of change which makes the difference.
If, for example, the now-extinct North American camels developed random mutations (or had a latent genetic ability) that allowed one of them to, say, start climbing giant redwoods and breeding before being eaten by their human predators, then you'd possibly have American Tree Camels today.
Random chance + selective pressure + sufficient time = evolution. The article indicates that it wasn't a continuous pressure either, which probably helped speed things up. e.g.
Year one: 99% of fish die, 1% survive & spend the next 364 days breeding resistant offspring...
Year 500 or so: 50% die, 50% survive & spend the next 364 days breeding more resistant offspring...
Current times: 10% die, 90% survive & spend the next 364 days breeding very resistant offspring...
It's not so uncommon really; the 'religious' aspect is merely a teaser giving the atheist fundies something to tease the creationist fundies with. For instance, I'm involved with researching pest insects that have developed high-level resistance to fumigants that have only been in use since WWII. In some cases, visible morphological and behavioural changes have resulted. If that ain't evolution I don't know what is, and I'm sure that if people had ritual rather than practical reasons for gassing silos we could be having the same discussion about bugs...
Ye Gods, I didn't think of that - an "Adobe Updater" sitting and running TSR / background, as efficient and unobtrusive as only Adobe software can be...
"Adobe Updater is currently downloading a security update for Flash. Would you also like to install Acrobat Reader [Y/N]?" ... done." ... done." ..." ... done." ... done." ..."
> N
"Did you know that almost 1 in 10,000 PDFs cannot be read by Preview? You can avoid problems by installing the latest version of Acrobat Reader. Would you like to install Acrobat Reader now [Y/N]?"
> N
"Thanks to Adobe's ongoing efforts, more security vulnerabilities are uncovered in Acrobat Reader than in any other product. Now, you can be part of this Continuous Improvement Project! Would you like to not install Acrobat Reader by Adobe [Y/N]?"
> N
"Thank you for not choosing to not install Adobe Acrobat Reader. Downloading Adobe Acrobat Reader Installer Installer
"Installing Adobe Acrobat Reader Installer Installer
"Running Adobe Acrobat Reader Installer Installer
"Adobe Acrobat Reader Installer Installer is now downloading the Adobe Acrobat Reader Installer
"Installing Adobe Acrobat Reader Installer
"Running Adobe Acrobat Reader Installer
"Adobe Acrobat Reader Installer is now downloading the Adobe Acrobat Reader. Your Internet speed is estimated to be 1.2MBps; download ETA is 10hours 13 minutes. Please remain seated in from of your computer until the download is complete. Please refrain from running any non-Adobe software until the download has completed and Adobe Acrobat Reader is installed."
No, you're missing the point. They don't want TV to be equal to the internet; they want the internet to be the equivalent of TV . Demand - at least, what the existing inhabitants demand - also has very little to do with it; they're experts at steering the wants and demands of the incoming population by supply-side manipulation. They've also got the temperament to wait until the tide turns their way, the experience to know that it almost inevitably will, and the deep pockets to stumble around making expensive mistakes until it does.
What, you think /. or other similar crowsourced-ish news/blog sites are the future? No, if you want a glimpse at the future, it's more Fox and Gawker Media than anything else.
They're instilling it with the sacred and revered ability to generate lots of "A USB device has requested more power than the hub can provide. Windows cannot enable the device. Remove the device and restart your computer" error messages.
(It's an unpowered hub by the looks of it; best not plug in anything that wants more than the default 100mA...)
"Now hopefully they won't pull a gracenote with all of that user contributed content."
Like IMDB did? I've been around the 'net long enough to remember when it was the user-contributed 'rec.arts.movies movie database', a collection of text files and shell scripts, before it even moved to the web as the 'Cardiff University Movie Database'. What happened after that was like a beginners HOWTO for the CDDB guys.
But apart from that, anyone who relies on IMDB for accurate info has rocks in their head. Anything pre early-90's that's not a Hollywood production or an international classic is almost guaranteed to have multiple errors.
I'm confused - would this be the 'substandard junk' hardware that a reasonable proportion of the /. audience feels is worth buying specifically to run Linux on? Or the 'kiddie interface' OS that another reasonable proportion of the /. audience wishes would run on commodity PC hardware, and sometimes hacks to do so?
Obvious troll is obvious. No mods for you!
FWIW, I wouldn't give them 'Pod' either - but I would give them 'Podcast'. Nobody cared about downloading 'digital media files (either audio or video) that are released episodically and often downloaded through web syndication' when they were called 'webcasts'. It wasn't until someone - not Apple, btw, but a Guardian columnist - linked them with the iPod that the term 'podcast' came into fashion.
Now, strictly speaking that's not trademark dilution - but it's bloody close. If the iPod had instead been called a 'Chazzwazzer', we'd be downloading 'chazzcasts' now...
Actually, I've seen all of those quite well presented in magazine articles & books, using graphs, images, and waveform diagrams which have the advantage of actually showing you what's going on (e.g. decreased dynamic range / increased SNR; flattened waveforms from clipping; the effects of sub-Nyquist sampling in both the temporal and frequency domains (non-representative sampling & 'wrap-around / mirror' effect); separate colour images & graphs of their relative sensitivity to the human eye (which leads in nicely to how colourspace sub-sampling & compression works in both analogue & digital realms); etc.)
As my snarky co-commenter points out: if only there were some way of distributing text, images, audio, and video together to weave a deep, engaging, and coherent narrative for anybody to peruse at their leisure...
And as is often the case with information videos, they ignore an important corollary to an old maxim: While a picture may be worth a thousand words, a thousand words often beats 24 pictures a second.
But as long as the next one patiently explains to the average person the difference between containers, codecs, and contents, I'll be a happy man. I'm getting sick of explaining why "it's an .avi file!" is a useless thing to tell me when a file won't play...
Everyone's getting all wrapped up in the technical solutions - why not look at how others have already solved this?
Basically, my university's rules state:
1) Bilingual dictionaries only - if your native language is English, and you can't understand the exam paper written in English, tough titty.
2) Paper dictionaries only.
3) No specialist dictionaries - you should have at least learned the English terms applicable to your subject.
4) No inserts, notes, or marginalia in books - highlighting is OK, additional notations not OK. Checked by the invigilators before / during exams.
5) Standard or basic scientific calculators only - nothing that can store commonly-used functions, formulas, or text.
6) Specific models of advanced scientific or graphing calculators may be allowed on a subject-by-subject basis - approved devices are listed in the course outline at the beginning of semester.
7) Anything outside of this is by prior written arrangement with the lecturer or head of department only, on a case by case basis.
8) No non-approved materials allowed - this includes radios, pagers, phones, mp3 players, multipurpose devices (e.g. iPods, smartphones, etc), or devices not approved under point 6 or 7. Leave that shit in your bag / locker.
9) All devices allowed under point 6 or 7 must be reset either by or in front of the invigilator or lecturer on request immediately prior to exam commencement.
10) Regardless, the invigilators are allowed to confiscate any suspect materials devices from a student at any time during the exam, and this is recorded on the attendance sheet. It is up to the student to request return of confiscated materials upon completion of the exam.
An onerous list? Yup, sure, to look at. In practice it basically boils down to "these are the specific things you can take into an exam; if you need to take something else then get prior approval; if you take anything suspect in, it may be confiscated for the duration".
True for the MPEG decoder, not so much for the virtual machine that controls all aspects of DVD playback. VM implementations vary from manufacturer to manufacturer, and sometimes even from model to model from the same manufacturer. Without naming names, sometimes it's a crapshoot of things like 'where is this particular player going to get the AR info from - the IFO file? The VOB header? The MPEG-2 stream headers? Will it have a branching bug, or a generic register overflow bug? '
I recall one memorably bad model which seemed to clear GP registers when executing a Compare-Link instruction, effectively making certain complex menus useless...
Lest this seem esoteric, I'll point out that both Matroska (the basis of the WebM file format) and bits of MPEG-4 (e.g. part 16, part 21) allow for similar DVD menu and control-like functionality (although last I looked it remain incomplete and largely unimplemented in Matroska).
Only where practicable / desirable - usually on the continental shelves & near the coast, where there's a danger of it being snagged by a fishing trawler or anchor.
AFAIK, the record depth for burying cable is still ~1600m. By comparison, the average depth of the Atlantic is apparently 3339m, and the Pacific ~4100m
And when it was a slightly larger, less backwater independent nation, it was famous for its piracy of other art forms...
In fact, here's a cite for my previous comment.
I've also just been looking up some recent, roughly equivalent, restricted area declarations locally. They range from 100m around Jessica Watson's Pink Lady on her return, 1NM (~6000') around ship-ship LNG & fuel oil transfers, to 1.75NM-wide (>10,000') exclusion zone during the start of a local yacht race.
In that light, allowing boats not involved in the actual cleanup operations within 20m looks exceedingly generous!
You're not wrong.
People who disagree might like to look up what the restrictions are for private boats around their nearest port. Where I am, the clearances are a recommended minimum 50m (~160'), and an enforced 30m (~100'), when ships are berthed. Clearances areas around ships during berthing and tug operations are higher.
Legally, you can't even cast a line off the shore any closer than 30m to an operating or non-operating wharf around here.
FF had that, more or less - note the little down-arrows adjacent to the back and fwd buttons here; they showed a dropdown menu of the history in each direction.
For some reason the allegedly "professional UX designers" (to quote someone upthread) thought combining the separate fwd and back buttons into a Vista-aping keyhole, removing those extra indicators, combining the separate histories into one, and accessing that combined history by right-click, was a step forwards.
Even worse was their decision to ape the butt-ugly Safari for the default OS X theme...
Not since ... umm, Tiger (10.4.x)? It now uses individual message .emlx files; not a 'standard' standard, but easily reverse-engineered.
IIRC, although it doesn't use them by default, Mail.app can still export .mbox files.
You might be surprised, though - I certainly was. At my uni, in the last 2~3 months Chrome has become almost the de facto browser amongst students because the default IE (dunno what version; I suspect 7) works woefully with the Windows Live student email accounts. Despite the current version of FF (which, strangely, works better with the student webmail than IE) being pre-installed in the SoE, every time I'm in there I hear someone being told to download and use Chrome instead - by the helpdesk, faculty, and other students.
Like I said, that surprised the hell out of me - one, that Windows Live Mail works so badly with a still widely-deployed version of IE; and two, that even people who know nothing more about computers than how to turn them on and log into Facebook are adopting Chrome.
Ummm ... you do know you got that exactly wrong, don't you?
The Upper House is the Senate.
The Lower House is the House of Representatives.
Together, they make the Parliament of Australia.
And voting anything other than Labor / Coalition in the House of Reps is far from a wasted vote. It's been a while, but we have had minority governments that've had to cuddle up to minor parties in the HoR in the past. It's not quite like the crazy 'major parties take all' system in the US. Not yet, anyway...
Yeah, my bad, I conflated 2 or 3 things & mucked it up badly while simplifying. Framerate & nominal bitrate is in the sequence header, GOPs contain *a* timestamp (not the PTS) for the first frame in the GOP. Given that info though, which is all stored pretty much 'in the clear' & easily extractable by the splitter (or you can just binary read the stream until you see the correct header flags), it's still relatively easy to calculate the ballpark position in the file / buffer for a given playing time position without too much effort. Incorrect bitrate flagging, VBR, changing GOP sizes, & multiple GOPs per sequence (1 for DVD but, IIRC, up to 16 is valid in DVB?) makes it more difficult, but still somewhat do-able if you can guess that info from previously-played frames.
Yeah, the problem with .ogg seeking is down to the way they don't implement a standard timestamp; timestamps are dependent on the codec used. The original original article covers this well, but it makes you wonder why they chose to implement not only a container where data packets can be any size smaller or larger than a frame (the only timestamps, granules in Ogg-speak, relate to the end of the current frame), but one that (in the canonical case of Vorbis in .ogg) requires you to decode the Vorbis-compressed audio to PCM in order to seek within the frame!
That's great. What container are they going to put it in again?
(Less snarky version: VP8 is a codec. Ogg (& MKV, & AVI, & etc) are container formats that hold data encoded with various codecs. The situation is muddied somewhat with MPEG, as the various versions encompass both a codec and a container. DivX too, but the DivX container is nothing more than a bastardised .AVI container containing video encoded with the DivX codec.)
It may not have been popular in the US (it certainly wasn't obvious here in Australia) - but just about every Chinese home in Australia I went to (in the course of my job) from the mid-90's onwards had at least 1 VCD player (and often one for each TV), and discs were common in the local Asian shops and markets.
Even now, if you buy Asian movies from any of the on-line Asian retailers you'll see plenty of VCD versions.
That's because MPEG Transport Streams have an easily-accessible Presentation Time Stamp (PTS) in each GOP header, and it's reasonably easy to calculate the increment between PTSs (which will vary with framerate). The simplistic explanation is that the GOP header has the bit rate* & framerate; you can calculate the PTS increment either from the framerate or examining adjacent blocks, you then check the current PTS, calculate the desired PTS from that, and can then jump to the appropriate part of the file to find the PTS you're after.
(That's assuming you're working with a TS file, where the player can examine the first & last block to determine file length. With streaming, you're restricted to working with what's in the buffer (& hopefully your app knows how long the buffer is, since it allocated it!))
Ogg, AFAIK, doesn't have that info in the block header - IIRC it relies on the bitstream having presentation timing stored in it (i.e. none, in the case of most audio formats), which means you have to decode the block to find it. It was done that way to allow for variable framerates to be stored without having to build a huge index. MKV is a bit better in this respect, but it's a remarkably fragile container.
* It falls down a bit sometimes, particularly where the bitrate in the block header is set to max (15Mbps), or where you're using VBR. With the latter the calculation will usually get you in the ballpark; with both cases, some splitters/decoders calculate the bitrate themselves while playing, store it, and use that for seeking.
I was a techie (exchange mtce), then got suckered into liney-land via DSL installs / faults.
2 pairs - White & Blue, Red & Black (mostly) - but that's only for the lead-in from the pit to the NBP (first socket / external J-box), or maybe from the building MDF or IDFs to the unit/townhouse. In theory, internal stuff should be at least 2pr, but you've gotta remember 90+% of it these days is installed by builders (i.e. as cheaply as possible) & signed off by their pet electricians, so that's not a given. Plenty of single-pair in internal cabling, although that's rapidly being superseded by CAT-5 - which they usually manage to put a staple through, crush under sheeting, or just plain stretch so you're *lucky* to get a single pair that works...
(Seriously - I've forgotten how many brand-spankin'-new installs I'd attended where I had to split all 4 pairs differently around the house just to get a single line to all points.)
And let's not talk about the so-called "technician" contractors Telstra passes the lead-in installs & replacements to. I've seen lead-in buried solid (with just short lengths of conduit at the building and pit end end so it passes inspection), and CAT-5 lead-in that's such crap it's gone low IR 40 minutes after getting damp...
Besides, as a cable assigner you'd know the real problem is the lack of free/working pairs in the mains to the pillar, or especially the O-side street cabling. A 2pr lead-in is fine, but there's nowhere near enough capacity to extend 2 pairs for more than a few people all the way back to the pillar, let alone the exchange or local cabinet...
And my point is that while wild-caught or naturally-occurring *anything* might be better for you, and sticking to foods that aren't intensively farmed is a fair enough personal choice to make, there's no way in hell a world without highly developed agriculture or aquaculture can support even the current 6.5 billion+ people.
On top of that, I'd be wary of any claims that certain fisheries are 'sustainable' - even with the current state of ecological modelling, there's a dire lack of knowledge and understanding of the totality of factors and processes that drive fish abundance. You've just got to Google 'fisheries collapse' to see all the examples of what were thought to be 'sustainable' fishing practices that turned out wrong - sardines, pilchards, salmon, Atlantic Cod, etc, etc, etc, not to mention the cascade effect on other species that depended upon them. The Beverton-Holt model isn't all it's cracked up to be, and it's certainly not an accurate model of even a single fishery's ecosystem...
Oh, and while you're Googling, you might want to check how your belief about the Japanese being "the ones who do all the illegal fishing in international waters crap" stand up to scrutiny. You'd be surprised...
The same thing happens with Pacific salmon when hatchery fish are used to supplement wild populations, as has been (is still?) done in the Pacific Northwest.