I don't know what "UBA emulation" is, but looking at the product on the website the GP pointed to shows a device that looks and acts like a floppy drive, even using the floppy drive controller, while accessing a usb flash drive. In fact this device is advertised specifically for the implementations the GP indicated. I do not believe "UBA emulation" even plays into this.
I'm very glad the GP posted this link. I had no idea such a product existed. Even right now I can think of an older MIDI player piano that this could be used in.
You don't want your screen to be 300 dpi? You actually want your text to be fuzzy and/or pixelated? Very strange. For me the higher resolution the better. Nice, crisp letters rendered using more pixels means things look better. Combine that with vector graphics for UI elements and things start to look very good indeed. 72-point fonts are still going to be 1" tall, but on the higher resolution monitor they will have much better shape and be clearer.
If higher resolution just makes everything smaller, then you're doing it wrong. On my Fedora 12 machines, the UI scales quite nicely as screen resolution increases. Firefox is a bit of an odd one as it sometimes doesn't pick up the desktop dpi properly. But most apps should adapt to higher resolution screens quite nicely.
If everyone had good cheap connectivity in their cars, it would spell the end of broadcast radio as we know it. I have mixed feelings about that, but I for one would love to be able to pick up on-line radio stations while driving long distances. Or stream audio books from my own server, or even, heaven forbid, some kind of audio book rental service. Heck why do you need an ipod when you can listen to streaming music on-demand anywhere? Of course the RIAA is likely to jump on this idea and push the entire market to a stream-only, pay-per-play market.
No not really. Mono isn't used by any core parts of Gnome and the things that are based on mono (fspot, etc), are based on things (C# and the CLR) that are either in the EMCA spec, or have nothing to do with Microsoft at all (GTK#). So Gnome is not in danger. I agree that C# apps should be removed from the standard distribution and replaced with apps written in C, C++, Python, etc, and that is already happening. Tomboy has pretty much been replace with gnote.
But in general I cannot agree that harm has been done to Gnome.
The real harm De Icaza has caused is in the other parts of.NET he implemented, such as winforms, the web application serving parts, and Moonlight. Any developer who buys into those has suddenly adopted a huge liability risk. At the same time De Icaza has helped push proprietary technology lock-in with the false promise that it will remain accessible on non-Windows platforms.
Since Boeing is only just barely starting to use composites in commercial aircraft (the 787), I highly doubt the Comet has anything to do with it. And the Comet's wings didn't fall off. Rather the aircraft suffered explosive decompression of the cabin itself because of metal fatigue around the square windows. Like almost all Boeing's current planes, the comet's fuselage was constructed of riveted and epoxied aluminum. But aluminum metal fatigue was not well understood back then. It took several mysterious Comet crashes before the true cause of the Comet failures was discovered. As I recall they immersed an entire Comet fuselage in a tank and simulated hundreds of pressurization cycles until a failure occurred. Thanks to the Comet, Boeing has now been flying aluminum airplanes with windows successfully for more than 40 years. Nothing to do with composites.
Finally, even if you could prove that a computer problem brought down the Air France flight, that still doesn't prove that fly-by-wire is inherently flawed. The failure rate of Airbus fly-by-wire aircraft is no different than Boeing's failure rate. And actually the different between Airbus and Boeing isn't so much fly-by-wire (the 777 is fly by wire) but rather the control feedback (airbus has none) and the control law that the computers implement. Airbus flight law sets hard limits that the computer will not let the pilot exceed whereas Boeing flight law sets soft limits at which the airplane will complain (feedback through the stick, for example), but will let the pilot do anything he wants, even if it will bring the plane down.
In the case of the Air France flight, there is evidence supporting pilot error. It appears that the pilots chose to not change their flight path around the storm because that might add too many miles on the trip, which would violate ETOPS flight rules. Had they diverted, and had the airspeed sensor still failed, it is unlikely the plane would have crashed as it is entirely possible to fly an Airbus plane manually without airspeed information, although it's obviously dangerous.
Another somewhat controversial article suggested that despite the fact that Scully was a good pilot, the safe water landing was exactly because of Airbus's fly-by-wire system.
I forward Google Voice regularly to two different 403 numbers. Not going to help you in NS, but just saying that Google indeed does forward to *some* canadian numbers.
You can use an iPhone or a Touch with Linux without jailbreaking it. Apparently someone has reverse-engineered the usb protocol and produced a program called iFuse that lets you mount the filesystem. As far as I know people are syncing their 3.0 devices with rhythmbox.
Sounds like you haven't read very much on the subject that was accurate.
Theologically, Mormons are not creationists in the same sense as evangelical Christians. Mormons do not believe in creation ex nihilo. Nor do Mormons hold to a literal 6 24-hour days creation, or that the earth is only 6000 years old. Creation came about over millions of years through natural processes, which science is doing an admiral job discovering. Since Mormons believe that human agency is the most important part of existence, then it makes sense that all of creation can come about and be explained without seeing or knowing God. There are no signatures on glaciers. No one is forced to believe in God. To say otherwise (like the intelligent designer folks) is to say that God is weak, meaning that if his works can be explained or understood through processes and principles, then he cannot be God.
Religion deals more with why, not how. Thus to Mormons, there should be no conflict between belief and science. And officially, the LDS church has no position on evolution either. Most LDS scientists recognize it as a principle of nature, and various leaders throughout the last 100 years or so have stated their personal opinions that evolution is not wrong.
Anyway, the bones are there and they have been dated. Mormons accept this and the science behind palaeontology, and study it, enjoy dinosaur museums, and even wonder what the Bonneville Lake was like back in the day.
Actually it is a pretty big deal. In most embedded systems that need to be instant on, a manufacturer would likely use highly customized code with highly customized hardware. The big deal here is that a (relatively) full linux kernel and system boots in the same time as all that custom code giving a manufacturer a solid, generic, and cheap base to work from. In other words, rather than having to rely on highly customized, specific firmware for the device, a more generic linux-based system platform can be used. This makes everything cheaper and thus must more profitable. This is proof that Linux is flexible and agile enough to be used from the smallest devices all the way up the line. Same kernel-level APIs everywhere. Same tools. A tremendous advantage for embedded device makers rushing to get to market.
In short, yes, there is soul behind music, even though it is based on certain mathematical rules that machines can easily understand, and even the inadvertent borrowing of phrases from other works.
Certainly a computer could likely generate the tune for the next hit pop song. Or perhaps generate a movie soundtrack (scary notes at the right time, sad notes, happy notes). Or come up with better versions of John Cage's 4'33".
But as of yet I doubt a computer could come up with music that is thematic, poetic, and emotionally expressive. One compilation of music that comes to mind right now is Respighi's Symphonic Poems. Each piece could be deconstructed mathematically, but I doubt a computer could come up with a theme (Rome, in this case) and paint us a musicological picture covering a whole gambit of emotions relating to this theme--from awe and grandeur (Pines of the Appian way) to melancholy and reflective, hopeful and joyful (Pines near a Catacomb, for example). Another great music-painting is Vivaldi's Four Seasons. Others find deep emotional meaning in various kinds of religious music.
For most musicians music is an emotional expression that happens to use a mathematical structure, or even borrowed motifs and sequences. As long as this is true, I don't think there's much to worry about. A computer might be able to simulate emotional music, but there'd be no underlying emotional message.
On the other hand if a computer generates a nice piece of music that could become associated by us with an emotional scene, it could "come alive" as it were. The line would further be blurred by the use of computers by artists to generate music for them. I don't see a problem in that.
But the point of the article is that it is possible to do it correctly. As many posts have pointed out, the standard gamma for sRGB images where the gamma is not specified is 2.2. Not taking that into account is, in fact, an error. If the image data are not linear to begin with, then why are we applying algorithms to the image as if they were?
Changing the image's gamma value during scaling is an error, plain and simple, especially when we know what the gamma of the image is to begin with!
Programs like Picasa and other photography programs certainly should be taking this into account.
Most professional photographers capture all their images to raw format. I think raw images are linear and are mapped to a gamma in post-production. So they probably will be less affected by this error. This may be why the pain/gain ratio for Adobe, for example, would be too large.
This comment struck me as kind of funny as one of the main, original, purposes of HDR imaging was to try to capture an image more like how the eye actually sees it. The eye can handle much broader ranges of light levels than most cameras, which means you can look out through a window and see the bright sky and still see the interior of the room pretty well.
Our modern light sensors already have a pretty broad exposure range now, though, beyond the capabilities of our file formats and displays, so it seems to me you just plug them in to the optic nerves and voila. HDR (in other words, normal) vision. Tone-mapping is really done on computers because our monitors have such lowsy dynamic range. Of course the funky color maps can be used to artistic effect.
But you're also thinking along the lines of Star trek's "VISOR" that La Forge was wearing. For some reason that no writer has adequately explained, the VISOR took this huge spectrum (well beyond visible light) and either compressed it all into the visual light range, or just dumped the whole range onto the optic nerve somehow, leaving it to the brain to sort out. Neither explanation has sounded right. Seemed a bit silly to me, but I guess it works as a plot device ("special" powers, etc). I kind of doubt the optic nerve and the visual cortex has the range and resolution to resolve a wider spectrum. But who knows.
Yes, actually, there is legitimate competition, as can be seen here. The Sony products are very good, the iRex Iliad seems absolutely the best but way too expensive. The Hanlin readers seem good too (and have been around for quite a while).
The Kindle has only 2 advantages over the competition really, one is Amazon's supply of ebooks (albeit DRMed). The other is that it is relatively cheap (compared to the Iliad especially). Other than that, there's not a lot about the Kindle to recommend it over Sony.
Wireless is a feature, but one of only marginal utility compared to the rest of the idea of what an ebook reader is for (IE reading). It's handy for renting new books from Amazon. Or grabbing a book from Gutenberg. But for most of us who have our ebook libraries already on our computers in txt, pdf, and other forms, dumping it via mass storage is probably the quickest and easiest.
I'd like an ebook reader that was open such that I can easily write my own software for it, without restrictions. Kindle's SDK will be out soon, but we'll have to see if it will be as restrictive as Apple's SDK has been thus far. I know that the Kindle can be hacked and you can get access to the file system and run your own apps (some guy recently built the Qt framework for the Kindle), but I don't want to have to break into a device I own to be able to do things with it. Plus any future update from Amazon could close the holes, leaving me high and dry. In short, the Kindle is a gamble. Is it a better gamble than the Sony? I don't know. It's hard to tell.
Right now the best e-book readers that would probably fit the requirements of the anti-kindle slashdotters, is the Hanlin series of readers. But unfortunately you can't buy them from any US retailer and shipping from China is pretty expensive, especially for a device I cannot see and hold before buying.
I maintained an OS X Server box for 4 years. Very nice hardware, but the OS had a lot of issues (10.3 and 10.4) and support from Apple was non-existent. We struggled with a race condition in Apple's directory services architecture (the glue between the system and LDAP) for years. Apple really wouldn't do anything about it until some guy on a forum managed to come up with step-by-step instructions on how to trigger the condition. finally Apple acknowledged the problem and, to my amazement, said, "we've fixed it in our new OS, please upgrade." We're talking a full OS upgrade from 10.3 to 10.4. I tried to explain to them that OS's are upgraded in an enterprise normally with the hardware cycle and that we cannot take a production server down for a full system upgrade. Even MS understands that.
Additionally, the lifespan of Apple's server OS was tied exactly to their consumer OS. So instead of 5-6 years that we expect from RH and MS, apple supports their server OSs for about 2 years only. Even within major versions, updating was a real pain. Each and every OS update required a reboot. It was just silly. Of course the bug brought our system down every month or so, so I guess that worked out.
Another time a disk died in our XServe RAID. So we called to get a warranty replacement. The guy on the phone said, "are you sure it has died? Put it back in the array and see what happens." Dumbfounded, I told him this was a production array with mission-critical data on it and that I simply could not trust any disk that had been kicked out of the RAID. The risk was too great for data loss. Had to go through a local rep to lean on apple to just replace the disk.
After I finally figured out how to make my OpenLDAP server on Linux look and act like Apple's OpenDirectory (making Mac client access seamless with no custom ldap mappings required), I ditched the OS X server and will never go back.
A google search reveals a lot of information on using bibtex with OO.org. Not sure exactly what bibtxt is that you mention, but bibtex seems to be the standard. The program Zotero (http://www.zotero.org/) seems to be very promising in replacing endnote.
Well the real issue is that all this is so unnecessary. It does nothing to actually stop the "piracy problem" while at the same time simply hassling users, most of which are legitimate. And those that aren't will not be convinced to buy Windows by any of this. That's why slashdot complains about this kind of thing. It's a senseless waste on the part of Microsoft, but the cost is largely born by those of us who have to use Windows on occasion. So yes, when something like this comes along and makes it harder for me to use stuff I bought the way I want to use it, then I complain.
In the meantime, as evil as Apple is, at least I don't have to activate OS X (there's this rather large expensive dongle required though).
Now that linux runs so well on my laptop, I actually finally do have an alternative to windows, so I can say to Microsoft, "no thanks" when offered Windows 7's "genuine advantage."
In addition to a real telescope, programs like Celestia[1] and Stellarium[2] may be appropriate for classroom use. They are both available on Mac, Linux, and Windows. Stellarium can show you the sky as you'd see it with the naked eye, with a telescope, or up close (say to a planet). I remember thinking how interesting it was to use Celestia to fly a long ways away from the earth and see the constellations change and move kind of like Star Trek's Stellar Cartography. It's kind of fun to fly directly to the stars in Orion's belt and have everything move accurately. Really reinforced the idea the constellations only make sense from here on earth and that they are really stars in 3-D, which is easy to forget just gazing up at the sky. Fascinating stuff.
Maybe with a couple of LCD projectors you could build your own planetarium with Stellarium[3].
Beyond that, in future years, doing your own CCD photography may be beneficial for the kids you teach. People are taking pretty neat pictures with backyard reflectors, such as yours, and hacked web cams.
I've been looking for something to replace my ageing PowerBook 12" for a long time. Mainly the fact that Linux ran like crap on most laptops prevented me from replacing it before. I thought about a 12" thinkpad, but at the time Linux still didn't run worth a darn on the thing and didn't like the use of a nub instead of a trackpad[1].
I discovered the Lenovo S12 and decided to buy it. The S12 is a bit pricey for a netbook, meaning it's over $400. But not too bad. Sure I could buy an el cheapo 15" semi-portable "laptop" for that price, but it wouldn't have near the utility to me. It has pretty good battery life, about 4-5 hours, depending on use. It doesn't have a ton of horsepower, but its portability and usability are quite good. It's very light, has a wonderful screen, and a full-size keyboard. It's still called a netbook because it doesn't have a screaming hot core 2 duo processor. But frankly it doesn't need one. I can easily add a SSD to my lenovo (spare Mini PCI-e slot) and spin the hard drive down 90% of the time, which could extend battery life. Obviously a large screen back light will drain some. But everything is a trade-off.
It's pretty eerie to have a Linux laptop that consistently sleeps and wakes up. The Gnome stuff in Fedora 12 impressed me as well. The Network Manager handled wireless, wired, and VPN in a very nice, OSX-ish way. Put Windows XP to shame, that's for sure.
I think netbooks are redefining the subnotebook space, which is what this really is. If you ridicule the 12" netbook, odds are you either a) actually need a real laptop or b) you've never tried a 12" netbook.
[1] Linux gurus always claim that Linux runs well on thinkpads, but their idea of run well was different than mine. No sleep, terrible battery life, etc. That's mostly changed now it appears.
Are you serious? You do realize that you own the copyright to your code and you can license it however you please to businesses? Basically you're saying that businesses are attracted to your code because they can use it for free without compensating you in anyway. If your code is really as good and attractive as you say it is, why not sell it to these companies that are so interested? If they are just taking your BSD code for free and using it in proprietary products, are they not telling you that your code is worth nothing? But I guess, as you say, much of the code you work with comes from other BSD sources and anytime you don't own the copyright for, you cannot re-license without permission. So I guess I can understand your position, however I feel that it is a position that is somewhat limiting.
Developers who own copyright on valuable code might be better off to dual-license the code. Proprietary/GPL. Give your code a life of its own if it is that valuable to you, while at the same time allowing companies who really do value your code to have access to it under terms that are agreeable to you and to their business aims. This idea was related very well by the guy who said he writes code under the GPL because he wants to make money on his code if someone else wants to benefit from it monetarily.
I agree about your point on the end users. License is immaterial. One nice thing about the GPL, though, is that it has no bearing on users of the software, only distributors. I think it is wonderful that you don't have to agree to the GPL just to use GPL'd software.
VNC is definitely not in the same league as SPICE. SPICE more directly compares with and competes with Citrix and MS Terminal Server. It not only ports the display, it can port individual apps, connects drives and printers, and is capable of doing fancy graphical things like movie playback in a way that's much more optimal and efficient than VNC can do. SPICE might compare in some measure to NX, but NX is really about optimizing an X11 command stream, which is only an X11 thing, so it's of more limited use than what SPICE is intended to be.
Whether SPICE turns out to be anything useful to the community at large, as NX has become, I don't know.
As you can see the messages are nested according to which message a message is replying too. This is essential for dealing with mailing lists as a topic of conversation can often break into different branches. Google's conversation view has no facilities for dealing with this problem.
Interestingly enough, Google Wave actually does employ true threading, although Wave doesn't currently let you reply to parts of a message separately. IE you can't quote a message and interleave your reply; you have to reply to the entire message. There is no quoting at all in the Wave idea. However Wave does essentially make top-posting a thing of the past, so that's a good thing.
Gmail's conversation view would be better if it actually was threaded. As it is it is just a flat he said you said view (like an IM log). This doesn't work well at all for mailing lists, or for any conversation involving more than 2 people.
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I don't know what "UBA emulation" is, but looking at the product on the website the GP pointed to shows a device that looks and acts like a floppy drive, even using the floppy drive controller, while accessing a usb flash drive. In fact this device is advertised specifically for the implementations the GP indicated. I do not believe "UBA emulation" even plays into this.
I'm very glad the GP posted this link. I had no idea such a product existed. Even right now I can think of an older MIDI player piano that this could be used in.
You don't want your screen to be 300 dpi? You actually want your text to be fuzzy and/or pixelated? Very strange. For me the higher resolution the better. Nice, crisp letters rendered using more pixels means things look better. Combine that with vector graphics for UI elements and things start to look very good indeed. 72-point fonts are still going to be 1" tall, but on the higher resolution monitor they will have much better shape and be clearer.
If higher resolution just makes everything smaller, then you're doing it wrong. On my Fedora 12 machines, the UI scales quite nicely as screen resolution increases. Firefox is a bit of an odd one as it sometimes doesn't pick up the desktop dpi properly. But most apps should adapt to higher resolution screens quite nicely.
If everyone had good cheap connectivity in their cars, it would spell the end of broadcast radio as we know it. I have mixed feelings about that, but I for one would love to be able to pick up on-line radio stations while driving long distances. Or stream audio books from my own server, or even, heaven forbid, some kind of audio book rental service. Heck why do you need an ipod when you can listen to streaming music on-demand anywhere? Of course the RIAA is likely to jump on this idea and push the entire market to a stream-only, pay-per-play market.
No not really. Mono isn't used by any core parts of Gnome and the things that are based on mono (fspot, etc), are based on things (C# and the CLR) that are either in the EMCA spec, or have nothing to do with Microsoft at all (GTK#). So Gnome is not in danger. I agree that C# apps should be removed from the standard distribution and replaced with apps written in C, C++, Python, etc, and that is already happening. Tomboy has pretty much been replace with gnote.
But in general I cannot agree that harm has been done to Gnome.
The real harm De Icaza has caused is in the other parts of .NET he implemented, such as winforms, the web application serving parts, and Moonlight. Any developer who buys into those has suddenly adopted a huge liability risk. At the same time De Icaza has helped push proprietary technology lock-in with the false promise that it will remain accessible on non-Windows platforms.
Since Boeing is only just barely starting to use composites in commercial aircraft (the 787), I highly doubt the Comet has anything to do with it. And the Comet's wings didn't fall off. Rather the aircraft suffered explosive decompression of the cabin itself because of metal fatigue around the square windows. Like almost all Boeing's current planes, the comet's fuselage was constructed of riveted and epoxied aluminum. But aluminum metal fatigue was not well understood back then. It took several mysterious Comet crashes before the true cause of the Comet failures was discovered. As I recall they immersed an entire Comet fuselage in a tank and simulated hundreds of pressurization cycles until a failure occurred. Thanks to the Comet, Boeing has now been flying aluminum airplanes with windows successfully for more than 40 years. Nothing to do with composites.
Finally, even if you could prove that a computer problem brought down the Air France flight, that still doesn't prove that fly-by-wire is inherently flawed. The failure rate of Airbus fly-by-wire aircraft is no different than Boeing's failure rate. And actually the different between Airbus and Boeing isn't so much fly-by-wire (the 777 is fly by wire) but rather the control feedback (airbus has none) and the control law that the computers implement. Airbus flight law sets hard limits that the computer will not let the pilot exceed whereas Boeing flight law sets soft limits at which the airplane will complain (feedback through the stick, for example), but will let the pilot do anything he wants, even if it will bring the plane down.
In the case of the Air France flight, there is evidence supporting pilot error. It appears that the pilots chose to not change their flight path around the storm because that might add too many miles on the trip, which would violate ETOPS flight rules. Had they diverted, and had the airspeed sensor still failed, it is unlikely the plane would have crashed as it is entirely possible to fly an Airbus plane manually without airspeed information, although it's obviously dangerous.
Another somewhat controversial article suggested that despite the fact that Scully was a good pilot, the safe water landing was exactly because of Airbus's fly-by-wire system.
I forward Google Voice regularly to two different 403 numbers. Not going to help you in NS, but just saying that Google indeed does forward to *some* canadian numbers.
You can use an iPhone or a Touch with Linux without jailbreaking it. Apparently someone has reverse-engineered the usb protocol and produced a program called iFuse that lets you mount the filesystem. As far as I know people are syncing their 3.0 devices with rhythmbox.
http://ubuntuforums.org/showthread.php?t=953381
Of course this is all a bunch of needless crap since Apple should have implemented usb mass storage support to begin with.
I'd love to have an iPod-Touch-like android device. I don't want a phone. Just a good media player that runs android.
Sounds like you haven't read very much on the subject that was accurate.
Theologically, Mormons are not creationists in the same sense as evangelical Christians. Mormons do not believe in creation ex nihilo. Nor do Mormons hold to a literal 6 24-hour days creation, or that the earth is only 6000 years old. Creation came about over millions of years through natural processes, which science is doing an admiral job discovering. Since Mormons believe that human agency is the most important part of existence, then it makes sense that all of creation can come about and be explained without seeing or knowing God. There are no signatures on glaciers. No one is forced to believe in God. To say otherwise (like the intelligent designer folks) is to say that God is weak, meaning that if his works can be explained or understood through processes and principles, then he cannot be God.
Religion deals more with why, not how. Thus to Mormons, there should be no conflict between belief and science. And officially, the LDS church has no position on evolution either. Most LDS scientists recognize it as a principle of nature, and various leaders throughout the last 100 years or so have stated their personal opinions that evolution is not wrong.
Anyway, the bones are there and they have been dated. Mormons accept this and the science behind palaeontology, and study it, enjoy dinosaur museums, and even wonder what the Bonneville Lake was like back in the day.
Actually it is a pretty big deal. In most embedded systems that need to be instant on, a manufacturer would likely use highly customized code with highly customized hardware. The big deal here is that a (relatively) full linux kernel and system boots in the same time as all that custom code giving a manufacturer a solid, generic, and cheap base to work from. In other words, rather than having to rely on highly customized, specific firmware for the device, a more generic linux-based system platform can be used. This makes everything cheaper and thus must more profitable. This is proof that Linux is flexible and agile enough to be used from the smallest devices all the way up the line. Same kernel-level APIs everywhere. Same tools. A tremendous advantage for embedded device makers rushing to get to market.
In short, yes, there is soul behind music, even though it is based on certain mathematical rules that machines can easily understand, and even the inadvertent borrowing of phrases from other works.
Certainly a computer could likely generate the tune for the next hit pop song. Or perhaps generate a movie soundtrack (scary notes at the right time, sad notes, happy notes). Or come up with better versions of John Cage's 4'33".
But as of yet I doubt a computer could come up with music that is thematic, poetic, and emotionally expressive. One compilation of music that comes to mind right now is Respighi's Symphonic Poems. Each piece could be deconstructed mathematically, but I doubt a computer could come up with a theme (Rome, in this case) and paint us a musicological picture covering a whole gambit of emotions relating to this theme--from awe and grandeur (Pines of the Appian way) to melancholy and reflective, hopeful and joyful (Pines near a Catacomb, for example). Another great music-painting is Vivaldi's Four Seasons. Others find deep emotional meaning in various kinds of religious music.
For most musicians music is an emotional expression that happens to use a mathematical structure, or even borrowed motifs and sequences. As long as this is true, I don't think there's much to worry about. A computer might be able to simulate emotional music, but there'd be no underlying emotional message.
On the other hand if a computer generates a nice piece of music that could become associated by us with an emotional scene, it could "come alive" as it were. The line would further be blurred by the use of computers by artists to generate music for them. I don't see a problem in that.
But the point of the article is that it is possible to do it correctly. As many posts have pointed out, the standard gamma for sRGB images where the gamma is not specified is 2.2. Not taking that into account is, in fact, an error. If the image data are not linear to begin with, then why are we applying algorithms to the image as if they were?
Changing the image's gamma value during scaling is an error, plain and simple, especially when we know what the gamma of the image is to begin with!
Programs like Picasa and other photography programs certainly should be taking this into account.
Most professional photographers capture all their images to raw format. I think raw images are linear and are mapped to a gamma in post-production. So they probably will be less affected by this error. This may be why the pain/gain ratio for Adobe, for example, would be too large.
This comment struck me as kind of funny as one of the main, original, purposes of HDR imaging was to try to capture an image more like how the eye actually sees it. The eye can handle much broader ranges of light levels than most cameras, which means you can look out through a window and see the bright sky and still see the interior of the room pretty well.
Our modern light sensors already have a pretty broad exposure range now, though, beyond the capabilities of our file formats and displays, so it seems to me you just plug them in to the optic nerves and voila. HDR (in other words, normal) vision. Tone-mapping is really done on computers because our monitors have such lowsy dynamic range. Of course the funky color maps can be used to artistic effect.
But you're also thinking along the lines of Star trek's "VISOR" that La Forge was wearing. For some reason that no writer has adequately explained, the VISOR took this huge spectrum (well beyond visible light) and either compressed it all into the visual light range, or just dumped the whole range onto the optic nerve somehow, leaving it to the brain to sort out. Neither explanation has sounded right. Seemed a bit silly to me, but I guess it works as a plot device ("special" powers, etc). I kind of doubt the optic nerve and the visual cortex has the range and resolution to resolve a wider spectrum. But who knows.
Oh, the irony.
At first glance that blows my mind. That's absolutely huge. Then I check my linux box and /usr/lib64 is 1.7 GB.
Yes, actually, there is legitimate competition, as can be seen here. The Sony products are very good, the iRex Iliad seems absolutely the best but way too expensive. The Hanlin readers seem good too (and have been around for quite a while).
The Kindle has only 2 advantages over the competition really, one is Amazon's supply of ebooks (albeit DRMed). The other is that it is relatively cheap (compared to the Iliad especially). Other than that, there's not a lot about the Kindle to recommend it over Sony.
Wireless is a feature, but one of only marginal utility compared to the rest of the idea of what an ebook reader is for (IE reading). It's handy for renting new books from Amazon. Or grabbing a book from Gutenberg. But for most of us who have our ebook libraries already on our computers in txt, pdf, and other forms, dumping it via mass storage is probably the quickest and easiest.
I'd like an ebook reader that was open such that I can easily write my own software for it, without restrictions. Kindle's SDK will be out soon, but we'll have to see if it will be as restrictive as Apple's SDK has been thus far. I know that the Kindle can be hacked and you can get access to the file system and run your own apps (some guy recently built the Qt framework for the Kindle), but I don't want to have to break into a device I own to be able to do things with it. Plus any future update from Amazon could close the holes, leaving me high and dry. In short, the Kindle is a gamble. Is it a better gamble than the Sony? I don't know. It's hard to tell.
Right now the best e-book readers that would probably fit the requirements of the anti-kindle slashdotters, is the Hanlin series of readers. But unfortunately you can't buy them from any US retailer and shipping from China is pretty expensive, especially for a device I cannot see and hold before buying.
Haven't posted my findings anywhere just yet. If you are interested I can send you details.
I maintained an OS X Server box for 4 years. Very nice hardware, but the OS had a lot of issues (10.3 and 10.4) and support from Apple was non-existent. We struggled with a race condition in Apple's directory services architecture (the glue between the system and LDAP) for years. Apple really wouldn't do anything about it until some guy on a forum managed to come up with step-by-step instructions on how to trigger the condition. finally Apple acknowledged the problem and, to my amazement, said, "we've fixed it in our new OS, please upgrade." We're talking a full OS upgrade from 10.3 to 10.4. I tried to explain to them that OS's are upgraded in an enterprise normally with the hardware cycle and that we cannot take a production server down for a full system upgrade. Even MS understands that.
Additionally, the lifespan of Apple's server OS was tied exactly to their consumer OS. So instead of 5-6 years that we expect from RH and MS, apple supports their server OSs for about 2 years only. Even within major versions, updating was a real pain. Each and every OS update required a reboot. It was just silly. Of course the bug brought our system down every month or so, so I guess that worked out.
Another time a disk died in our XServe RAID. So we called to get a warranty replacement. The guy on the phone said, "are you sure it has died? Put it back in the array and see what happens." Dumbfounded, I told him this was a production array with mission-critical data on it and that I simply could not trust any disk that had been kicked out of the RAID. The risk was too great for data loss. Had to go through a local rep to lean on apple to just replace the disk.
After I finally figured out how to make my OpenLDAP server on Linux look and act like Apple's OpenDirectory (making Mac client access seamless with no custom ldap mappings required), I ditched the OS X server and will never go back.
A google search reveals a lot of information on using bibtex with OO.org. Not sure exactly what bibtxt is that you mention, but bibtex seems to be the standard. The program Zotero (http://www.zotero.org/) seems to be very promising in replacing endnote.
Well the real issue is that all this is so unnecessary. It does nothing to actually stop the "piracy problem" while at the same time simply hassling users, most of which are legitimate. And those that aren't will not be convinced to buy Windows by any of this. That's why slashdot complains about this kind of thing. It's a senseless waste on the part of Microsoft, but the cost is largely born by those of us who have to use Windows on occasion. So yes, when something like this comes along and makes it harder for me to use stuff I bought the way I want to use it, then I complain.
In the meantime, as evil as Apple is, at least I don't have to activate OS X (there's this rather large expensive dongle required though).
Now that linux runs so well on my laptop, I actually finally do have an alternative to windows, so I can say to Microsoft, "no thanks" when offered Windows 7's "genuine advantage."
In addition to a real telescope, programs like Celestia[1] and Stellarium[2] may be appropriate for classroom use. They are both available on Mac, Linux, and Windows. Stellarium can show you the sky as you'd see it with the naked eye, with a telescope, or up close (say to a planet). I remember thinking how interesting it was to use Celestia to fly a long ways away from the earth and see the constellations change and move kind of like Star Trek's Stellar Cartography. It's kind of fun to fly directly to the stars in Orion's belt and have everything move accurately. Really reinforced the idea the constellations only make sense from here on earth and that they are really stars in 3-D, which is easy to forget just gazing up at the sky. Fascinating stuff.
Maybe with a couple of LCD projectors you could build your own planetarium with Stellarium[3].
Beyond that, in future years, doing your own CCD photography may be beneficial for the kids you teach. People are taking pretty neat pictures with backyard reflectors, such as yours, and hacked web cams.
[1] http://www.shatters.net/celestia
[2] http://www.stellarium.org/
[3] http://www.stellarium.org/wiki/index.php/Building_your_own_dome
I've been looking for something to replace my ageing PowerBook 12" for a long time. Mainly the fact that Linux ran like crap on most laptops prevented me from replacing it before. I thought about a 12" thinkpad, but at the time Linux still didn't run worth a darn on the thing and didn't like the use of a nub instead of a trackpad[1].
I discovered the Lenovo S12 and decided to buy it. The S12 is a bit pricey for a netbook, meaning it's over $400. But not too bad. Sure I could buy an el cheapo 15" semi-portable "laptop" for that price, but it wouldn't have near the utility to me. It has pretty good battery life, about 4-5 hours, depending on use. It doesn't have a ton of horsepower, but its portability and usability are quite good. It's very light, has a wonderful screen, and a full-size keyboard. It's still called a netbook because it doesn't have a screaming hot core 2 duo processor. But frankly it doesn't need one. I can easily add a SSD to my lenovo (spare Mini PCI-e slot) and spin the hard drive down 90% of the time, which could extend battery life. Obviously a large screen back light will drain some. But everything is a trade-off.
It's pretty eerie to have a Linux laptop that consistently sleeps and wakes up. The Gnome stuff in Fedora 12 impressed me as well. The Network Manager handled wireless, wired, and VPN in a very nice, OSX-ish way. Put Windows XP to shame, that's for sure.
I think netbooks are redefining the subnotebook space, which is what this really is. If you ridicule the 12" netbook, odds are you either a) actually need a real laptop or b) you've never tried a 12" netbook.
[1] Linux gurus always claim that Linux runs well on thinkpads, but their idea of run well was different than mine. No sleep, terrible battery life, etc. That's mostly changed now it appears.
Are you serious? You do realize that you own the copyright to your code and you can license it however you please to businesses? Basically you're saying that businesses are attracted to your code because they can use it for free without compensating you in anyway. If your code is really as good and attractive as you say it is, why not sell it to these companies that are so interested? If they are just taking your BSD code for free and using it in proprietary products, are they not telling you that your code is worth nothing? But I guess, as you say, much of the code you work with comes from other BSD sources and anytime you don't own the copyright for, you cannot re-license without permission. So I guess I can understand your position, however I feel that it is a position that is somewhat limiting.
Developers who own copyright on valuable code might be better off to dual-license the code. Proprietary/GPL. Give your code a life of its own if it is that valuable to you, while at the same time allowing companies who really do value your code to have access to it under terms that are agreeable to you and to their business aims. This idea was related very well by the guy who said he writes code under the GPL because he wants to make money on his code if someone else wants to benefit from it monetarily.
I agree about your point on the end users. License is immaterial. One nice thing about the GPL, though, is that it has no bearing on users of the software, only distributors. I think it is wonderful that you don't have to agree to the GPL just to use GPL'd software.
VNC is definitely not in the same league as SPICE. SPICE more directly compares with and competes with Citrix and MS Terminal Server. It not only ports the display, it can port individual apps, connects drives and printers, and is capable of doing fancy graphical things like movie playback in a way that's much more optimal and efficient than VNC can do. SPICE might compare in some measure to NX, but NX is really about optimizing an X11 command stream, which is only an X11 thing, so it's of more limited use than what SPICE is intended to be.
Whether SPICE turns out to be anything useful to the community at large, as NX has become, I don't know.
For those that are unfamiliar with what threading actually is, this is a good example:
http://kozmic.pl/archive/2008/05/01/alt.net-thunderbird-configuration.aspx
As you can see the messages are nested according to which message a message is replying too. This is essential for dealing with mailing lists as a topic of conversation can often break into different branches. Google's conversation view has no facilities for dealing with this problem.
Interestingly enough, Google Wave actually does employ true threading, although Wave doesn't currently let you reply to parts of a message separately. IE you can't quote a message and interleave your reply; you have to reply to the entire message. There is no quoting at all in the Wave idea. However Wave does essentially make top-posting a thing of the past, so that's a good thing.
Gmail's conversation view would be better if it actually was threaded. As it is it is just a flat he said you said view (like an IM log). This doesn't work well at all for mailing lists, or for any conversation involving more than 2 people.