The main problem I've had with graphing engineering data in Excel is that it's limited to 32768 (or maybe 65536, I forget) rows. I'd often exceed that trying to pull in data from, say, a digital scope or logic analyzer. Other than that, I found it had some screwy defaults but otherwise worked reasonably well. For my data, anyway; YMMV. I mostly used it to plot XY data.
You're right, though, that it's primarily designed for pie charts. I never did find a way to get it to automatically export the equation from the regression curve back to a worksheet so I could use it in further calculations. Or a way to get it to just plot an equation without me having to creating a table of sampled XY values.
The subtle difference between killing 1000 people at once, and walking up to each individually and shooting them in the face/stabbing them/beating them to death?
Yeah. The mass killing is just so... impersonal, don't you think? Now, individual, hand-crafted, artisan killing... That's more like it!
I just ran the Ubuntu live CD which didn't want to give me a higher screen resolution than 1024 by 768 and didn't get the network running.:-( Such things really need to be resolved, because even if _I_, in discussion with others, would be able to resolve all problems, my grandparents surely wouldn't.
Amen. I agree totally that Linux is not ready for the non-power-user desktop. It's not an easy "just plug it in" experience, it takes a lot of time and effort to set up typical end-user stuff which is simple on a Windows box.
Now, I've been using Linux since about the early 90's; I think I started with 0.99 installed from a pile of floppies. I love it -- for a server. I just recently installed it as the desktop OS (Debian w/KDE) on my work machine, and I'm less than happy. It meets my primary need as a development machine better than Windows could, but it gives me problems with things that should be really easy to do.
I live by my Palm Pilot, but KPilot crashes on me during a sync at least once a week. When it does, it leaves a dangling/dev/pilot symlink which I have to manually delete before restarting. Actually, it's the underlying pilot-link package that's failing, not KPilot itself. But from a high-level perspective that doesn't matter. Syncing is broken.
Another issue is that I haven't been able to find a desktop PIM package which really works well. Kontact is the best I've found, but it doesn't handle memos gracefully. I need to run the KNotes daemon to sync memos from my Palm at all, but every time I've tried it ended up deleting or duplicating entries. I've even tried installing Palm Desktop under Wine, but it wouldn't run. Again, from the high level, syncing is broken.
Music. I like amaroK, though it crashes daily. (And yes, I send in the crash reports. Hopefully they help somebody.) I haven't found any one package which "just works" for the majority of multimedia formats. Video is especially a problem. Yeah, some of the codecs used in the Apple and Windows worlds aren't available because they're proprietary. So what? As an end user I don't care why they don't work. I end up using a hodgepodge of amaroK, Juk, Noatun, Totem, and XMMS. And I still can't participate in the local networked iTunes shares. Likewise, I haven't found the appropriate incantations to play most embedded media files in Firefox.
And let's not even get started on the wireless networking. I end up having to edit/etc/network/interfaces to switch between different wireless networks. There's sure to be a better way, but I haven't found it. The KDE networking control panel looks like it should do the job, but for whatever reason it doesn't.
As I said, I've been using Linux for a long time. I've put some amount of effort into each of the items listed above, but haven't come up with satisfactory solutions. Overall, for what I need to do, it's better than Windows. But I can't see how it's a face that anyone but a developer could love.
There are a lot of things wrong with this idea, but that isn't one of them. You had to have a broadband connection to get the movie in the first place and the format only allows the movie to be played on a computer... Where exactly is the limitation there?
The limitation is that travellers would be unable to download a movie to their laptops and watch it in the car/plane/train later. It's easy to imagine situations like this where you'd have access to broadband for the download, but not at the time of playback.
I agree with a lot of others here that the combination of price + DRM restrictions will kill it. Lower either and it might fly. People might pay a couple bucks to download a heavily restricted movie; they might pay full price to download something they can burn to an ordinary DVD-R. I can't imagine anyone paying full price to download something so limited.
In what way is honey not sugar? It's almost entirely sugar in one form or another. Which is exactly why it's "just as sweet". I'm not buying the "much healthier" claim, either. Honey might be marginally healthier, but you'd be better off reducing your total sugar intake rather than switching to another form of it.
I think it depends on where you are in Japan. I've seen indications that 1-13 are allowed in some places, only 14 in others. Some countries, like Mexico, have different power restrictions depending on whether the item is used indoors or outdoors. I have no idea how AP manufacturers possibly manage to untangle all the wacky per-country regulations.
You're acting like George Lucas, insisting that one needs an excuse (Lucas's official line is that Han shooting Greedo first makes him seem cold and heartless, nevermind the fact that Greedo had a gun pointed at him, and besides, "cold and heartless" is how we like Han, anyway).
That's the thing that really bothered me about the change. Lucas, after the other movies came out, didn't want Han to seem cold and heartless at the beginning when we see later that he's not such a bad guy. You know, most people call that "character development" and consider it a good thing. You want him to seem cold and heartless up front; that makes it so much better when he saves the day.
But what do I know, I'm just an engineer, not Cinematic Master...
I wrote my new CV today. They wanted it in "doc, pdf or txt" - certainly a non-choice. Hello, vi! Other formats available on request;)
Mind you, plaintext has its pitfalls too - I'd hate for the people to discard it on grounds of "it looks like a mess!" because they opened it in Notepad...
You're right, it's a non-choice. PDF! It doesn't matter what program you use to create the content, and it'll look practically the same in any viewer on any OS. As you note, "plain text" is vague and open to interpretation. Line endings and tabs are especially subject to mangling, and carefully laid-out columns are destroyed if the reader is using a proportional font.
Other than ink on paper, PDF is the most reliable path I know to WYSIWIS (What You See Is What I See).
(Though I agree with you about content creation with vi. The original format of my resume is HTML created in vi, which I then load into OpenOffice to produce text, doc, pdf, or anything else someone might ask for.)
Hell, even I do that half the time, and I've been using the net since before Tim Berners-Lee first put together the letters W-W-W. It's just habit; I use the search bar more often than the address bar, so that's where I gravitate to. Since Google pulls up the right page more often than not it's not a habit that's worth correcting.
Typosquatting is a problem, but not enough of one to insist that search engines somehow try to filter out terms that look like URLs or domain names and break a very useful (if unintentional) feature.
That's the one I got, too. I can't decide whether it's from BlueSecurity, or from someone trying to discredit them. The message is weird either way you look at it. If it is legit (meaning, sent by BlueSecurity), then spamming me is a pretty odd way of trying to get me to help them fight spam. On the other hand, if it's sent by spammers as part of a campaign against BlueSecurity, why are they doing it in a way that's likely to get more people to download and run their software? The links all go to Blue Security's actual web page, after all. (In fact, they're not even links. Just URLs, sent in plain-text.)
I've never heard of BlueSecurity or Blue Frog before. I managed to browse their site a little and I wasn't able to determine whether or not their software actually does what this message claims it does. If they're just running some sort of mass opt-out service, that's fine. (I don't think it'll work, but no harm done.) If they're actually counter-attacking spammers then I'd say they're no better themselves.
Given that the average student probably had a fake driver's license to get drunk a couple of years back, it would quite suprising if there are not a few fake MMR certs out there.
You don't even need to fake it. All you need is a doctor's note stating that the vaccine would be harmful for this individual. It's easy to find some newage quack with a chiropractic degree who's willing to sign off against anything not homeopathic.
Look at the games they've been releasing. Is "Pikmen" a good game? I liked it. yet it's not selling nearly as well as "Tetris" or "Brain Age" or "Nintendogs" - the latter are games that you don't have to think about
They're also titles that tell you immediately what the game is about. "Pikmin", on the other hand, is more abstract. It requires the potential buyer to learn more about the game than just its name before they're equipped to make a decision. (It apparently isn't all that memorable, either, if an advocate of it like yourself fails to get the spelling correct.)
"Tetris" tells you nothing about the game. It's an abstract name that implies "four", but four what? Four sides? Four-in-a-row? Four-score-and-twenty-years-ago? The only reason it "tells you immediately what the game is about" is because you're already familiar with the game from previous incarnations! It's like "chess". The name of that game is only obvious if you already know what the name of the game is.
And "Brain Age"? Sounds like some sort of a puzzle game to me. Might be a zombie game. Look it up... Oh, jolly. Math drills. Cognitive tests. Guess that title didn't tell me much about it.
I don't think "Wii" is the world's greatest name either, but honestly I think a week after the console's released nobody's going to give a damn what it's called. They'll like it or they won't, regardless of the name. And it'll still be just "the Nintendo" to everyone but game historians, just like every Nintendo console has been all the way back to the Nintendo Entertainment System. "Where's Billy?" "In the basement, playing on the Nintendo." Yup, works for me.
BG has gone from strength to strength. Who'd have thought it, for a remake of such a camp piece o'crap. I went in with EXCEEDINGLY low expectations. Maybe that's the secret.
Maybe it is. I went in with medium expectations, thinking "This might actually be good." Then I saw the pilot "mini-series". (How does a single movie-length work shown over 2 nights rate the term "mini-series", anyway?) I was disappointed. It had its high points, such as the the actress playing Starbuck. She's nailed that role! But it had a lot of complete and utter crapola. I hated the space scenes filmed in ShakyCam(tm). No, you can't make CGI look more realistic by wobbling the virtual camera as if it was filmed by an epileptic amateur with a camcorder. I hated the indistinguishable-from-humans Cylons. I probably hated some other stuff, too, that I've thankfully blotted from my memory.
Of course, I hated the Babylon 5 pilot, too, but the series was excellent. I've dropped in on Galactica a few times hoping that it's improved. It hasn't, IMHO. It's not the campy crap from the 70's -- It's all new pretentious crap for the 21st century!
That's what MVPs do - share their knowledge in the community for free, in exchange for being able to demand large consulting fees from companies.
The last MVP to answer a question I had essentially said, "It's that way because Bill says so, now STFU and move into the 21st century." (In response to a question about how to get XP to treat the dash character as significant when sorting filenames. And no, turning off "smart sorting" or whatever they call it doesn't work.)
There's enough bad attitude and unhelpful "experts" to go around for every OS.
I wouldn't be surprised if he hadn't heard about it; I hadn't heard of it. You could have mentioned that DSL stands for Damn Small Linux, a 50 MB desktop Linux distribution intended for use on a business card PCs, flash drives and other small portable media.
I'm glad you posted this. I've been scratching my head trying to figure out what the hell "Digital Subscriber Line" had to do with a small-footprint Linux...
That doesn't mean you need to supply the compilers/parsers/toolchain.
It just means you need the Makefiles / install scripts etc.
That's not entirely clear. The next sentence is:
However, as a special exception, the source code distributed need not include anything that is normally distributed (in either source or binary form) with the major components (compiler, kernel, and so on) of the operating system on which the executable runs, unless that component itself accompanies the executable.
(Emphasis mine.) If I'm cross-compiling for an embedded system then my toolchain can't be considered a major component of the OS on which the executable runs, and thus is not granted this special exemption. So am I obligated to distribute it or not? You could reasonably argue that one either way.
Even if I don't need to distribute the compiler and other standard tools for my platform, I'd still be required to distribute any custom tools I might have written which are necessary for building or installing the executable. It's more hassle than it's worth, so I avoid GPL'd code in my firmware.
That's what I dig about the BSD license. It comes without the attitude and ideological baggage. It actually is free software, no strings attached. It's not a shoehorn to get you to buy into a philosophy.
Most embedded systems are one big statically-linked executable. If you use any GPL code at all, you're required to place the entire work under the GPL. Not only that, but you must provide the tools needed to compile and install it. This is the bit that most GPL vendors miss -- Can you get the tools to compile and install the firmware for the Sony TV mentioned here?
For an executable work, complete source code means all the source code for all modules it contains, plus any associated interface definition files, plus the scripts used to control compilation and installation of the executable. GNU GENERAL PUBLIC LICENSE, Version 2, June 1991
I do play by the rules, and when I'm doing embedded work I don't choose to give away the entire farm by incorporating GPL'd code in my product. I may not even be legally able to give away the tools, since they're probably not open-source themselves. Even the LGPL requires that you give away the tools so that the end-user can relink your binaries against a new version of the LGPL library.
I'll gladly fuck off rather than burden myself with all the GPL baggage.
Someting in a loop waiting for an event to work on is a pretty good description of what an operating system actually does. According to my CS class on operating systems an OS is "a program that controls all resources, starts and stops tasks (processes, programs...) and assigns ressources to and withdraws them from the tasks".
That's a pretty broad definition of "OS". And even so, it doesn't fit many embedded systems. The "starts and stops tasks" bit just plain doesn't exist for simple event-loop driven systems. There is only one task (process, thread): the main loop. And you can hardly call the resources "managed". The bit that needs the serial port diddles the UART directly. Ditto for other peripherals. An OS usually provides services for an application to use; in much of the embedded world, the OS and application are one and the same.
Linux is overkill for most embedded systems. I'm shocked that 17% of the survey respondants are "likely to use Linux soon". That's huge for an industry that customarily rolls their own from the ground up. Even if this is the figure for the subset of systems which use a third-party OS (discounting all the simple event-loop devices) it's still huge. There are dozens of different real-time operating systems out there. To think that any one has 17% of the market is incredible.
Oh, good. I thought that maybe the "<3" meant that Google Romance was being prejudiced against polyamory, and that their service was only good for arranging romance among "less than three" people. One could also infer that their search engine might find that you deserve to be in a relationship of 1 person (just yourself) or 0 people (even you can't stand to be with you).
I'm so glad to learn that the "<3 <3 <3" stands for three hearts, and as such is poly-friendly.
Tron 2.0 a wonderful game if you have any fond memories of the movie. The game is fully intended to be the sequel to the movie and brings back many of the original actors to do the voices. Definately worth a trip to the bargain bin.
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The main problem I've had with graphing engineering data in Excel is that it's limited to 32768 (or maybe 65536, I forget) rows. I'd often exceed that trying to pull in data from, say, a digital scope or logic analyzer. Other than that, I found it had some screwy defaults but otherwise worked reasonably well. For my data, anyway; YMMV. I mostly used it to plot XY data.
You're right, though, that it's primarily designed for pie charts. I never did find a way to get it to automatically export the equation from the regression curve back to a worksheet so I could use it in further calculations. Or a way to get it to just plot an equation without me having to creating a table of sampled XY values.
Yeah. The mass killing is just so... impersonal, don't you think? Now, individual, hand-crafted, artisan killing... That's more like it!
Even simpler:
4) Write a trojan to wipe out what people apparently consider to be important just because the trojan writer is a prick.
Amen. I agree totally that Linux is not ready for the non-power-user desktop. It's not an easy "just plug it in" experience, it takes a lot of time and effort to set up typical end-user stuff which is simple on a Windows box.
Now, I've been using Linux since about the early 90's; I think I started with 0.99 installed from a pile of floppies. I love it -- for a server. I just recently installed it as the desktop OS (Debian w/KDE) on my work machine, and I'm less than happy. It meets my primary need as a development machine better than Windows could, but it gives me problems with things that should be really easy to do.
As I said, I've been using Linux for a long time. I've put some amount of effort into each of the items listed above, but haven't come up with satisfactory solutions. Overall, for what I need to do, it's better than Windows. But I can't see how it's a face that anyone but a developer could love.
The limitation is that travellers would be unable to download a movie to their laptops and watch it in the car/plane/train later. It's easy to imagine situations like this where you'd have access to broadband for the download, but not at the time of playback.
I agree with a lot of others here that the combination of price + DRM restrictions will kill it. Lower either and it might fly. People might pay a couple bucks to download a heavily restricted movie; they might pay full price to download something they can burn to an ordinary DVD-R. I can't imagine anyone paying full price to download something so limited.
In what way is honey not sugar? It's almost entirely sugar in one form or another. Which is exactly why it's "just as sweet". I'm not buying the "much healthier" claim, either. Honey might be marginally healthier, but you'd be better off reducing your total sugar intake rather than switching to another form of it.
I think it depends on where you are in Japan. I've seen indications that 1-13 are allowed in some places, only 14 in others. Some countries, like Mexico, have different power restrictions depending on whether the item is used indoors or outdoors. I have no idea how AP manufacturers possibly manage to untangle all the wacky per-country regulations.
That's what this world needs! RFID boob jobs! The ultimate fusion of silicon and silicone.
"My, Miss Moneypenny, what lovely... antennas you have."
That's the thing that really bothered me about the change. Lucas, after the other movies came out, didn't want Han to seem cold and heartless at the beginning when we see later that he's not such a bad guy. You know, most people call that "character development" and consider it a good thing. You want him to seem cold and heartless up front; that makes it so much better when he saves the day.
But what do I know, I'm just an engineer, not Cinematic Master...
You're right, it's a non-choice. PDF! It doesn't matter what program you use to create the content, and it'll look practically the same in any viewer on any OS. As you note, "plain text" is vague and open to interpretation. Line endings and tabs are especially subject to mangling, and carefully laid-out columns are destroyed if the reader is using a proportional font.
Other than ink on paper, PDF is the most reliable path I know to WYSIWIS (What You See Is What I See).
(Though I agree with you about content creation with vi. The original format of my resume is HTML created in vi, which I then load into OpenOffice to produce text, doc, pdf, or anything else someone might ask for.)
Hell, even I do that half the time, and I've been using the net since before Tim Berners-Lee first put together the letters W-W-W. It's just habit; I use the search bar more often than the address bar, so that's where I gravitate to. Since Google pulls up the right page more often than not it's not a habit that's worth correcting.
Typosquatting is a problem, but not enough of one to insist that search engines somehow try to filter out terms that look like URLs or domain names and break a very useful (if unintentional) feature.
That's the one I got, too. I can't decide whether it's from BlueSecurity, or from someone trying to discredit them. The message is weird either way you look at it. If it is legit (meaning, sent by BlueSecurity), then spamming me is a pretty odd way of trying to get me to help them fight spam. On the other hand, if it's sent by spammers as part of a campaign against BlueSecurity, why are they doing it in a way that's likely to get more people to download and run their software? The links all go to Blue Security's actual web page, after all. (In fact, they're not even links. Just URLs, sent in plain-text.)
I've never heard of BlueSecurity or Blue Frog before. I managed to browse their site a little and I wasn't able to determine whether or not their software actually does what this message claims it does. If they're just running some sort of mass opt-out service, that's fine. (I don't think it'll work, but no harm done.) If they're actually counter-attacking spammers then I'd say they're no better themselves.
You don't even need to fake it. All you need is a doctor's note stating that the vaccine would be harmful for this individual. It's easy to find some newage quack with a chiropractic degree who's willing to sign off against anything not homeopathic.
I'd pay money for a pin-up of RMS and ESR wrestling nude in a pool of lime Jell-O.
"Tetris" tells you nothing about the game. It's an abstract name that implies "four", but four what? Four sides? Four-in-a-row? Four-score-and-twenty-years-ago? The only reason it "tells you immediately what the game is about" is because you're already familiar with the game from previous incarnations! It's like "chess". The name of that game is only obvious if you already know what the name of the game is.
And "Brain Age"? Sounds like some sort of a puzzle game to me. Might be a zombie game. Look it up... Oh, jolly. Math drills. Cognitive tests. Guess that title didn't tell me much about it.
I don't think "Wii" is the world's greatest name either, but honestly I think a week after the console's released nobody's going to give a damn what it's called. They'll like it or they won't, regardless of the name. And it'll still be just "the Nintendo" to everyone but game historians, just like every Nintendo console has been all the way back to the Nintendo Entertainment System. "Where's Billy?" "In the basement, playing on the Nintendo." Yup, works for me.
Maybe it is. I went in with medium expectations, thinking "This might actually be good." Then I saw the pilot "mini-series". (How does a single movie-length work shown over 2 nights rate the term "mini-series", anyway?) I was disappointed. It had its high points, such as the the actress playing Starbuck. She's nailed that role! But it had a lot of complete and utter crapola. I hated the space scenes filmed in ShakyCam(tm). No, you can't make CGI look more realistic by wobbling the virtual camera as if it was filmed by an epileptic amateur with a camcorder. I hated the indistinguishable-from-humans Cylons. I probably hated some other stuff, too, that I've thankfully blotted from my memory.
Of course, I hated the Babylon 5 pilot, too, but the series was excellent. I've dropped in on Galactica a few times hoping that it's improved. It hasn't, IMHO. It's not the campy crap from the 70's -- It's all new pretentious crap for the 21st century!
The last MVP to answer a question I had essentially said, "It's that way because Bill says so, now STFU and move into the 21st century." (In response to a question about how to get XP to treat the dash character as significant when sorting filenames. And no, turning off "smart sorting" or whatever they call it doesn't work.)
There's enough bad attitude and unhelpful "experts" to go around for every OS.
I'm glad you posted this. I've been scratching my head trying to figure out what the hell "Digital Subscriber Line" had to do with a small-footprint Linux...
That's not entirely clear. The next sentence is:
(Emphasis mine.) If I'm cross-compiling for an embedded system then my toolchain can't be considered a major component of the OS on which the executable runs, and thus is not granted this special exemption. So am I obligated to distribute it or not? You could reasonably argue that one either way.
Even if I don't need to distribute the compiler and other standard tools for my platform, I'd still be required to distribute any custom tools I might have written which are necessary for building or installing the executable. It's more hassle than it's worth, so I avoid GPL'd code in my firmware.
Dear God, why does anyone use JPGs for screen caps of high-contrast line art? The amount of artifacting is painful.
That's what I dig about the BSD license. It comes without the attitude and ideological baggage. It actually is free software, no strings attached. It's not a shoehorn to get you to buy into a philosophy.
Most embedded systems are one big statically-linked executable. If you use any GPL code at all, you're required to place the entire work under the GPL. Not only that, but you must provide the tools needed to compile and install it. This is the bit that most GPL vendors miss -- Can you get the tools to compile and install the firmware for the Sony TV mentioned here?
I do play by the rules, and when I'm doing embedded work I don't choose to give away the entire farm by incorporating GPL'd code in my product. I may not even be legally able to give away the tools, since they're probably not open-source themselves. Even the LGPL requires that you give away the tools so that the end-user can relink your binaries against a new version of the LGPL library.
I'll gladly fuck off rather than burden myself with all the GPL baggage.
That's a pretty broad definition of "OS". And even so, it doesn't fit many embedded systems. The "starts and stops tasks" bit just plain doesn't exist for simple event-loop driven systems. There is only one task (process, thread): the main loop. And you can hardly call the resources "managed". The bit that needs the serial port diddles the UART directly. Ditto for other peripherals. An OS usually provides services for an application to use; in much of the embedded world, the OS and application are one and the same.
Linux is overkill for most embedded systems. I'm shocked that 17% of the survey respondants are "likely to use Linux soon". That's huge for an industry that customarily rolls their own from the ground up. Even if this is the figure for the subset of systems which use a third-party OS (discounting all the simple event-loop devices) it's still huge. There are dozens of different real-time operating systems out there. To think that any one has 17% of the market is incredible.
Oh, good. I thought that maybe the "<3" meant that Google Romance was being prejudiced against polyamory, and that their service was only good for arranging romance among "less than three" people. One could also infer that their search engine might find that you deserve to be in a relationship of 1 person (just yourself) or 0 people (even you can't stand to be with you).
I'm so glad to learn that the "<3 <3 <3" stands for three hearts, and as such is poly-friendly.
Um, I'm pretty sure that the concept of the "donkey show" predates the Internet by quite a long time.
Tron 2.0 a wonderful game if you have any fond memories of the movie. The game is fully intended to be the sequel to the movie and brings back many of the original actors to do the voices. Definately worth a trip to the bargain bin.