Without the cruft? Your definition of non-cruft would seem to be very broad.
"Nice" or not, most Wikipedia editors I worked with had very set notions about the "right" way to do things. Even if you have the official guidelines on your side, it's very hard to get anybody to change their minds. When I participated in the "request for deletion" discussions (I think they're called something else now) people mostly had their notions of what was notable and what wasn't, and that was that. Sometimes they'd even refuse to explain their opinions.
It really doesn't matter whether the discussion are polite or not, because they never go anywhere. It's a myth that Wikipedia is edited by consensus. Content is controlled by those who outstubborn everybody else.
A common mistake, though a little disappointing to see it in a headline written by the Taco Man.
Here's what a lot of people don't get: it's possible to compress data without discarding any of it. You just transform to a scheme that doesn't use 8 bits for every byte. Byte values that are extremely common (like the letter "e" in a word processor file) use fewer bits, while less common values have more. That, in an oversimplified nutshell, is lossless compression.
To understand lossy compression, you have to understand that the human brain is really good at putting in data that should be there but actually isn't. For example, everybody has a defect in their eyes that creates a blind spot in their field of vision. Usually it doesn't matter, because your eyes are always moving. But if you stare at a fixed point, your brain adds in the missing details you should be seeing. And sometimes it gets it wrong.
Lossy formats like JPEG, MPEG, and MP3 all discard some of the data they convert. They use mathematical formulas to select data that can theoretically be spared because the human brain will just interpolate it back. In practice, the perceived quality of the image or sound depends on the acuity of the audience and the amount of data discarded. Exactly how much data gets discarded is determined by a parameter which is usually an adjustable software parameter. It's instructive to fiddle with the parameter when you save a JPEG or rip a CD.
Of course, using the FAT filing system means that most file attributes from other filesystems will get lost when a file is copied there.
That's kind of beside the point, since you don't want to do a by-file copy: you're wasting a little space by allocating trailing blocks and a lot of space by not using compression. You have to use an archiver anyway, and it isn't hard to find one that will preserve all the file attributes you care about.
What's really painful about FAT is that no one file can be more than 2 GB. So if you anticipate creating an archive that's bigger than that (after compression), you need to use an archiver that knows how to do multivolume archives
We'll never find it because of the distances involved...
Never? Do you have any idea how long "never" is?
That's a favorite quip of mine, which I stole from a camera commercial circa 1980. But in this case you really don't know how long "never" is. The universe is big not just in space but in time. If the human race lasts long enough, there will be plenty of time to search out the galaxy. Say it takes us 10,000 years to colonize the nearest star system. (If we can survive that long without destroying ourselves, mere interstellar travel is nothing!) Then suppose it takes another 10,000 years for the two inhabited systems to colonize two others, and you have 4 inhabited star systems. Iterate a mere 47 times, and real-estate prices skyrocket (forgive the pun) because 2^47 is about 140 billion — and there's only about 100 billion stars in our galaxy.
So, if humanity survives a mere 470,000 years, and there are any other civilizations in our galaxy, we'll have met them. And half a million years is nothing on a cosmic scale.
And that, alas, is the big argument for there not being any ETs. If it takes less than a million years to go from flint axes to colonizing an entire galaxy, how come nobody's done it? Yeah yeah, some of them will have destroyed themselves, some will have evolved into something we wouldn't even recognize, and some just don't like to travel. But obviously there's a small chance of avoiding such hazards. So in a galaxy with billions of stars that is 11 billion years old, there's no explaining why nobody else has had their million-year spree yet. Unless there is nobody else.
And please don't tell me I'm being anthrocentric. I've been reading science fiction since before we landed on the moon. I want to share water with the ancient Martians and discuss philosophy with the Venusian Dragons. It kills me that there's this big universe out there and there's nobody home!
As a rule, it seems that people who work in electronics retail know little or nothing at all about electronics. I am speaking of consumer electronics, of course.
It isn't what they don't know that's the problem. It's what they do know that's utter BS!
Mr. Rabinovitch (no relation to me — Rabinovitch is the judeo-slavic equivalent of "Smith") is completely right. Problem is, it's much too late to be having this conversation. Right now we're halfway through the conversion from analog to digital TV. Backing out of this conversion is a non-starter: too many people have already spent too much money. And I'm not just talking about the hardware makers that are driving the process. I'm talking about all those broadcasters forced to spend money on digital transmitters. Imagine the political fallout if they're told "Hey, remember those expensive transmitters who said you have to buy? Never mind!"
Nor can we maintain the status quo. As long as broadcast TV is occupying both the analog and the digital frequencies, emergency responders are stuck with their current hodge-podge of comm frequencies. That's costing lives.
So even though it was a bad idea, digital TV is what we're stuck with. The good news for most of us is that most digital TV is and will probably continue to be Standard Definition. That allows broadcasters to carry four channels in the bandwidth allocated for one High Definition channel. So those of us who refuse to pay for cable will have more choices. Those of you who spent $5K for fancy boxes will have to settle for the odd football game.
I told him I'd wait for the prices to come down, and the for some content to show up -- he shook his finger at me, "These prices [$10,000 for the unit I was looking at] won't come down and might go up! And, there's more and more new HD content available every day"
Mind-boggling that somebody who works in electronics retail would not know about Moore's law. (Please, don't give me a hard time about exactly what Moore's law is; collapsing electronics prices are an effect thereof.) Then again, maybe he did: some salespeople will claim that their gadgets will cure cancer if they think they can get away with it.
She did, however, come up with the idea that computer programming languages could be designed that were more like English and, thus, be easier to use.
Commonly known as "Hopper's Non-Sequitur". Designing your computer language so that it's a subset of English doesn't mean that anybody who speaks English already knows the language. Quite the contrary: you can't say things like "add all the numbers up". You have to know what precise constructs are in the language. And since COBOL constructs lack the elegance of other programming languages, you end up with the worst of both worlds.
I heard Hopper interviewed one or two times, and I was most unimpressed. Not a lot of good insights. If she didn't rank so high on "the first woman who" lists, nobody would have ever heard of her.
And where does this notion that COBOL/FLOWMATIC was the first compiled language? FORTRAN was there first. Not a gem of a language either, but at least it made mistakes that we could learn from.
In a story which has raised concerns of racial profiling, police brutality and the health risks of taser use, the ubiquity of video cell phone technology has given us a first hand record of an incident which might otherwise have been a he-said, she-said affair.
An opinion piece should never be labeled an "article". Especially when the piece is by John Dvorak, who's the absolutely the most ignorant computer pundit in the business. Which says a lot, given how sloppy computer pundits are with the facts.
In theory, SDelete, or any other deletion utility that meets DOD standards These work by overwriting data with crap that's suppose to make the data very hard to recover. Maybe not impossible — but certainly requiring more resources than your average identity thief or muckracking journalist has.
Actually, that particular law probably got struck down by a recent Supreme Court decision, but you're wrong in believing that nobody ever got arrested for violating it. People got charged with "sodomy" (which includes gay sex, but also a lot of "unnatural" heterosexual stuff) all the time. Usually it was in connection with another crime, such as rape or sexual battery. But it was not unknown for police to bust into a house on some pretext, and "while I was searching for contraband, I observed two individuals engaging in oral sex."
I always groan when I hear the term "Speculative Fiction". Writers use it to distance themselves from the pulp fiction reputation of Science Fiction. It's a way of saying, "I'm not a hack — I write real literature." That's fair enough when you're a mainstream writer who's dabbling in genre fiction. (Margret Atwood and Oryx and Crake come to mind.) But more often it's used by people like Harlan Ellison, who really are hacks, and seek to deny it with a lot of pretentious prose and hyperbole.
Now don't get me wrong: there's nothing wrong with being a hack. It just identifies a writer with a different set of priorities than the "literary" writer. Some of my favorite writers are widely considered hacks, and even refer to themselves as hacks. Robert Sheckley often refers to himself as a "renaissance hack", because of all the different kinds of genre fix he does.
I'm not going to try to apply the "hack" label to Heinlein. But I do know the man hated pretense, and he certainly would have sneered at anybody who described his work with pretentious labels like "speculative fiction".
Like a lot of people (including most early Java enthusiasts) you're equating Java with web applets. Now, you're quite right in thinking that there are very few important web sites that rely on applets. But that doesn't mean that very few web sites use Java. In many cases, Java is used to run the software that makes the sites work. It's also big in server-side apps that the public never sees, but are key to the infrastructure of a lot of big companies.
Sun's biggest screwup in Java's early days had two parts: First they oversold Java as a platform-independent alternative to Windows for deploying GUI applications; Second, they did a really bad job of supporting GUI apps in early versions of Java! That's why so many people associate Java with broken promises. But there's a lot more to computing than creating GUIs, and Java actually has a lot of fans in those realms.
Indeed. His offering his resignation yet again is less interesting than Bush accepting it. Obviously W. doesn't want to fight with the Demos about keeping him.
The poster is incorrect in saying this offer is only available in Germany and Austria. I noticed that the web site he pointed to was de.fon.com. I changed the "de" to an "en" and got the English version of the site — which will ship a router to a U.S. for 5 bucks.
Well, excuse us for disturbing your complacent nihilism. But you must have noticed by now that most Slashdotters still suffer from the illusion that their lives matter!
Slashdot Mirror
Without the cruft? Your definition of non-cruft would seem to be very broad.
"Nice" or not, most Wikipedia editors I worked with had very set notions about the "right" way to do things. Even if you have the official guidelines on your side, it's very hard to get anybody to change their minds. When I participated in the "request for deletion" discussions (I think they're called something else now) people mostly had their notions of what was notable and what wasn't, and that was that. Sometimes they'd even refuse to explain their opinions.
It really doesn't matter whether the discussion are polite or not, because they never go anywhere. It's a myth that Wikipedia is edited by consensus. Content is controlled by those who outstubborn everybody else.
As, in fact, most data is. Get a life, dude.
A common mistake, though a little disappointing to see it in a headline written by the Taco Man.
Here's what a lot of people don't get: it's possible to compress data without discarding any of it. You just transform to a scheme that doesn't use 8 bits for every byte. Byte values that are extremely common (like the letter "e" in a word processor file) use fewer bits, while less common values have more. That, in an oversimplified nutshell, is lossless compression.
To understand lossy compression, you have to understand that the human brain is really good at putting in data that should be there but actually isn't. For example, everybody has a defect in their eyes that creates a blind spot in their field of vision. Usually it doesn't matter, because your eyes are always moving. But if you stare at a fixed point, your brain adds in the missing details you should be seeing. And sometimes it gets it wrong.
Lossy formats like JPEG, MPEG, and MP3 all discard some of the data they convert. They use mathematical formulas to select data that can theoretically be spared because the human brain will just interpolate it back. In practice, the perceived quality of the image or sound depends on the acuity of the audience and the amount of data discarded. Exactly how much data gets discarded is determined by a parameter which is usually an adjustable software parameter. It's instructive to fiddle with the parameter when you save a JPEG or rip a CD.
I have to ask: do you really make as living off of voluntary payments? Or do you have other revenue streams?
That's kind of beside the point, since you don't want to do a by-file copy: you're wasting a little space by allocating trailing blocks and a lot of space by not using compression. You have to use an archiver anyway, and it isn't hard to find one that will preserve all the file attributes you care about.
What's really painful about FAT is that no one file can be more than 2 GB. So if you anticipate creating an archive that's bigger than that (after compression), you need to use an archiver that knows how to do multivolume archives
Nobody here is going to disagree with you, much less throw stuff at you.
http://www.xs4all.nl/~jcdverha/scijokes/1_7.html#H ardy_2
It's already taken care of. However, the Union Leader has a special mod filter that ignores any downmods from people to the left of Genghis Khan.
Never? Do you have any idea how long "never" is?
That's a favorite quip of mine, which I stole from a camera commercial circa 1980. But in this case you really don't know how long "never" is. The universe is big not just in space but in time. If the human race lasts long enough, there will be plenty of time to search out the galaxy. Say it takes us 10,000 years to colonize the nearest star system. (If we can survive that long without destroying ourselves, mere interstellar travel is nothing!) Then suppose it takes another 10,000 years for the two inhabited systems to colonize two others, and you have 4 inhabited star systems. Iterate a mere 47 times, and real-estate prices skyrocket (forgive the pun) because 2^47 is about 140 billion — and there's only about 100 billion stars in our galaxy.
So, if humanity survives a mere 470,000 years, and there are any other civilizations in our galaxy, we'll have met them. And half a million years is nothing on a cosmic scale.
And that, alas, is the big argument for there not being any ETs. If it takes less than a million years to go from flint axes to colonizing an entire galaxy, how come nobody's done it? Yeah yeah, some of them will have destroyed themselves, some will have evolved into something we wouldn't even recognize, and some just don't like to travel. But obviously there's a small chance of avoiding such hazards. So in a galaxy with billions of stars that is 11 billion years old, there's no explaining why nobody else has had their million-year spree yet. Unless there is nobody else.
And please don't tell me I'm being anthrocentric. I've been reading science fiction since before we landed on the moon. I want to share water with the ancient Martians and discuss philosophy with the Venusian Dragons. It kills me that there's this big universe out there and there's nobody home!
Mr. Rabinovitch (no relation to me — Rabinovitch is the judeo-slavic equivalent of "Smith") is completely right. Problem is, it's much too late to be having this conversation. Right now we're halfway through the conversion from analog to digital TV. Backing out of this conversion is a non-starter: too many people have already spent too much money. And I'm not just talking about the hardware makers that are driving the process. I'm talking about all those broadcasters forced to spend money on digital transmitters. Imagine the political fallout if they're told "Hey, remember those expensive transmitters who said you have to buy? Never mind!"
Nor can we maintain the status quo. As long as broadcast TV is occupying both the analog and the digital frequencies, emergency responders are stuck with their current hodge-podge of comm frequencies. That's costing lives.
So even though it was a bad idea, digital TV is what we're stuck with. The good news for most of us is that most digital TV is and will probably continue to be Standard Definition. That allows broadcasters to carry four channels in the bandwidth allocated for one High Definition channel. So those of us who refuse to pay for cable will have more choices. Those of you who spent $5K for fancy boxes will have to settle for the odd football game.
Commonly known as "Hopper's Non-Sequitur". Designing your computer language so that it's a subset of English doesn't mean that anybody who speaks English already knows the language. Quite the contrary: you can't say things like "add all the numbers up". You have to know what precise constructs are in the language. And since COBOL constructs lack the elegance of other programming languages, you end up with the worst of both worlds.
I heard Hopper interviewed one or two times, and I was most unimpressed. Not a lot of good insights. If she didn't rank so high on "the first woman who" lists, nobody would have ever heard of her.
And where does this notion that COBOL/FLOWMATIC was the first compiled language? FORTRAN was there first. Not a gem of a language either, but at least it made mistakes that we could learn from.
Excuse me? What's he advertising? His eBay auction hasn't even started yet.
An opinion piece should never be labeled an "article". Especially when the piece is by John Dvorak, who's the absolutely the most ignorant computer pundit in the business. Which says a lot, given how sloppy computer pundits are with the facts.
In theory, SDelete, or any other deletion utility that meets DOD standards These work by overwriting data with crap that's suppose to make the data very hard to recover. Maybe not impossible — but certainly requiring more resources than your average identity thief or muckracking journalist has.
Actually, that particular law probably got struck down by a recent Supreme Court decision, but you're wrong in believing that nobody ever got arrested for violating it. People got charged with "sodomy" (which includes gay sex, but also a lot of "unnatural" heterosexual stuff) all the time. Usually it was in connection with another crime, such as rape or sexual battery. But it was not unknown for police to bust into a house on some pretext, and "while I was searching for contraband, I observed two individuals engaging in oral sex."
I stand corrected. But I'm afraid you took down my esteem for the dude a small notch.
I always groan when I hear the term "Speculative Fiction". Writers use it to distance themselves from the pulp fiction reputation of Science Fiction. It's a way of saying, "I'm not a hack — I write real literature." That's fair enough when you're a mainstream writer who's dabbling in genre fiction. (Margret Atwood and Oryx and Crake come to mind.) But more often it's used by people like Harlan Ellison, who really are hacks, and seek to deny it with a lot of pretentious prose and hyperbole.
Now don't get me wrong: there's nothing wrong with being a hack. It just identifies a writer with a different set of priorities than the "literary" writer. Some of my favorite writers are widely considered hacks, and even refer to themselves as hacks. Robert Sheckley often refers to himself as a "renaissance hack", because of all the different kinds of genre fix he does.
I'm not going to try to apply the "hack" label to Heinlein. But I do know the man hated pretense, and he certainly would have sneered at anybody who described his work with pretentious labels like "speculative fiction".
Like a lot of people (including most early Java enthusiasts) you're equating Java with web applets. Now, you're quite right in thinking that there are very few important web sites that rely on applets. But that doesn't mean that very few web sites use Java. In many cases, Java is used to run the software that makes the sites work. It's also big in server-side apps that the public never sees, but are key to the infrastructure of a lot of big companies.
Sun's biggest screwup in Java's early days had two parts: First they oversold Java as a platform-independent alternative to Windows for deploying GUI applications; Second, they did a really bad job of supporting GUI apps in early versions of Java! That's why so many people associate Java with broken promises. But there's a lot more to computing than creating GUIs, and Java actually has a lot of fans in those realms.
Indeed. His offering his resignation yet again is less interesting than Bush accepting it. Obviously W. doesn't want to fight with the Demos about keeping him.
The poster is incorrect in saying this offer is only available in Germany and Austria. I noticed that the web site he pointed to was de.fon.com. I changed the "de" to an "en" and got the English version of the site — which will ship a router to a U.S. for 5 bucks.
Well, excuse us for disturbing your complacent nihilism. But you must have noticed by now that most Slashdotters still suffer from the illusion that their lives matter!