So it happens that I work at the Library of Congress, and I'm working on transferring big piles of data over the Internet. Imagine how worried I am that my boss is going to see this and ask me why ANYTHING should ever take more than 15 minutes, given a 4 LoC/hr rate.
Fortunately it's possible to receive HD cable programming without one of their HD boxes... Oh, wait, you can't... Sure you can. Most cable companies don't encrypt the digital QAM feed for at least the local broadcast channels (and sometimes quite a few more channels), so a QAM tuner (built into many HD TVs, or available as an set top box or as a computer peripheral) will let you get HD content to do with as you will. I get something like 8 HD channels unencrypted. plus a few dozen SD digital channels, as a regular analog customer with no cable company-provided box.
Re:DBA, please. "unique pluggable"?
on
Pro MySQL
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· Score: 1, Offtopic
Help me out here, because I've only really worked with PostgreSQL for the last seven years. Why is it important to support multiple database engine types, rather than settling on one good one? I'm given to believe that the general choices are between "ACID/correct/stable" and "WIKKED AWESUM FASSSST", but why this is a choice a DBA should have to make (per table? per database?) is unclear to this PostgreSQL user. Is there more to it? What keeps people from embracing the One Good One at this point?
You're mixing the tautologically meaningless and the just plain stupid. Of course librarians lean leftward, because if your job is to encourage the use and understanding of information, you're doing liberal works by definition. What possible analogy can you draw between 'leftists' and the Taliban that isn't purely retarded? The Taliban are religious conservatives, you moron; they're book-burning art-cleansing opposition-killing zealot fanatics, just like we have in the US, and in the US I can assure you those folks aren't voting Democratic.
I happen to be fortunate enough to work in a library that gets evacuated on occasion, because of actual terrorist threats, like airplanes heading toward it. In 2001, this place was closed because of anthrax in the ventilation. Also, it's sitting a block away from a likely target of Flight 93 on 9/11/01. Do you dare accuse the people who come to work here of hating America, because their politics differ from yours, while you sit in some podunk little town that's never going to be a terrorist target because it's hundreds of miles away and several decades in the past? You myopic imbecile.
Speaking only for myself, of course, and not for liberals, librarians, or anyone else, I will confess that part of my reason for working in libraries is to ensure that by preserving and sharing human knowledge, and not just the parts your favorite party deems acceptable, that mindless thuggish fascism will inevitably be overcome, and basic Jeffersonian American values won't be called "hating our country" by people like you.
You seem confused. Nobody hates our country, especially not librarians. We just hate you.
Librarians are not a "core moonbat constituency". Librarians are the people most acquainted with "knowledge", which is a kind of useful information that the right has no particular acquaintance with. Many librarians are also familar with "history", and "reading comprehension", and several other fields and skills that, again, the right has generally discarded as inconvenient. So, from the reality-based community's perspective, librarians are just doing what they have always done; it's just that the right isn't particularly fond of core values like the open flow of information or free inquiry.
A couple of gigabytes?! Only if you burn it first. There's something like 10^8 books, nevermind the other stuff. How do you compress any given book into 100 bytes?
The "20 TB" figure comes from the smallest possible measure, treating the flat books as ASCII text. Even just considering current digital content, it's also inaccurately small by >1 order of magnitude.
Say! that's brilliant! I'm going to go down the hall and mention that to the LC IT guys! . . . Oh. Apparently it had occurred to them. Well, thanks, just the same. You think of anything else, please, drop us a line!
I would say, scupper copyrights for all volumes owned by LoC.
The US Copyright Office, incidentally, is a part of the Library of Congress. The quote you offered should help, since they're well known to be heavily influenced by Vulcan (and to a lesser extent, Elvish) culture, but you might still be facing a little bit of an uphill battle. Best of luck!
Well, the Library of Congress includes an enormous amount of non-US content; something over half their content is not in English, if I remember correctly. Just sticking to LC content would keep one busy for a good while.
Even the third estimate is low, because it still assumes the books are stored as ASCII text instead of scanned pages, which is what Kahle's talking about (and, really, what would be the point of scanning millions of books and keeping only an ASCII representation?)
It's a great big bunch of disk space, is what it is.
Imagine if a terrorist detonated a nuclear bomb there and destroyed the largest library in the world. What a loss that would be.
What? Sir, don't be absurd, sir. The Library of Congress is over one block away from the US Capitol. That's several hundred yards. Why, that's more than far enough away from any sort of potential terrorist target. Nothing to worry about!
Oh, it isn't, either. Will you people knock it off already with the Library of Congress == 20TB comparison? It's some sort of inane computation made as if the collection were only books, and all the books were represented as ASCII text only. Well, guess what? It's not, and they're not.
American Memory alone is a good bunch of terabytes, and that's just a wee digitized slice, just several million objects, of all the stuff in the Library. There's a lot. Of Stuff. A lot a lot a lot. Pictures. Maps. Movies. Big ol' stuff.
"RIAA" there is probably referring to the RIAA equalization curve. Simplified, you have to post-process the raw signal on a record according to that curve, because the original signal was written to the record with the inverse of that curve.
Embarrassed that I remember it. Early 1994, Primus's "Hello Skinny/Constantinople" MP2, from the IUMA when it was an FTP site, downloaded on a 14.4kbps modem to a 386/25. And then split into a multi-file ZIP on floppies.
> What's the best free/open X Terminal for Windows? If I have to run Windows then at least give me a reasonable way to reach Linux on another box (VNC is nice but the lag time hurts).
Well, XFree86 runs under Cygwin (see http://www.cygwin.com/xfree/). But if you've got lag problems under VNC, I reckon X might not make things better...
The guy has proven again and again that he gets it. Pulling an old track out of the vaults (this one's basically a 12 year old track, I think) doesn't cost him anything, and it might engender at least a few new, interesting tunes out of it. Plus, his voice is so distinctive you'll never miss the fact that it's a Public Enemy track, almost no matter what the backing track sounds like. A smart, talented guy and a true artist.
No, this isn't comparable to that case at all. This concerns the default logging package available to all Java classes. With a standard implementation (which log4j quite arguably has been in the Java community, for several years) every code package can be written to use the same logging interface, knowing that it's up to the application to actually decide where and how and at what level the logging should be presented.
By providing a different, incompatible log interface in JDK 1.4, Sun provides strong incentive to developers to stop using log4j and instead switch to the "new standard". The result is that an existing "community standard" gets shoved out of the way by Sun's strongarm. The result is confusion, as developers waste time deciding which log package to use instead of just writing code. This is especially bizarre when log4j is an Jakarta project at apache.org; Jakarta is heavily supported by Sun, and there's no way Sun hadn't heard of log4j, given its widespread use. One must assume, then, that weird politics were involved...
The submitter of the question, it should be noted, is the author of log4j, but that doesn't invalidate his very good question, or his excellent and widely used work. Me, I'm just a happy user of log4j; if you write Java, you should be too.
According to the Cygwin project, XFree86 4.0 already compiles and runs under cygwin without patching, and has for some time. I was very surprised to learn this a few weeks ago; I would think many people would have the same excited reaction, but it's not a well-publicized part of the Cygwin project.
(PostgreSQL 7.1 also compiles under cygwin without patches. Cygwin rocks.)
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So it happens that I work at the Library of Congress, and I'm working on transferring big piles of data over the Internet. Imagine how worried I am that my boss is going to see this and ask me why ANYTHING should ever take more than 15 minutes, given a 4 LoC/hr rate.
Help me out here, because I've only really worked with PostgreSQL for the last seven years. Why is it important to support multiple database engine types, rather than settling on one good one? I'm given to believe that the general choices are between "ACID/correct/stable" and "WIKKED AWESUM FASSSST", but why this is a choice a DBA should have to make (per table? per database?) is unclear to this PostgreSQL user. Is there more to it? What keeps people from embracing the One Good One at this point?
You're mixing the tautologically meaningless and the just plain stupid. Of course librarians lean leftward, because if your job is to encourage the use and understanding of information, you're doing liberal works by definition. What possible analogy can you draw between 'leftists' and the Taliban that isn't purely retarded? The Taliban are religious conservatives, you moron; they're book-burning art-cleansing opposition-killing zealot fanatics, just like we have in the US, and in the US I can assure you those folks aren't voting Democratic.
I happen to be fortunate enough to work in a library that gets evacuated on occasion, because of actual terrorist threats, like airplanes heading toward it. In 2001, this place was closed because of anthrax in the ventilation. Also, it's sitting a block away from a likely target of Flight 93 on 9/11/01. Do you dare accuse the people who come to work here of hating America, because their politics differ from yours, while you sit in some podunk little town that's never going to be a terrorist target because it's hundreds of miles away and several decades in the past? You myopic imbecile.
Speaking only for myself, of course, and not for liberals, librarians, or anyone else,
I will confess that part of my reason for working in libraries is to ensure that by preserving and sharing human knowledge, and not just the parts your favorite party deems acceptable, that mindless thuggish fascism will inevitably be overcome, and basic Jeffersonian American values won't be called "hating our country" by people like you.
You seem confused. Nobody hates our country, especially not librarians. We just hate you.
Librarians are not a "core moonbat constituency". Librarians are the people most acquainted with "knowledge", which is a kind of useful information that the right has no particular acquaintance with. Many librarians are also familar with "history", and "reading comprehension", and several other fields and skills that, again, the right has generally discarded as inconvenient. So, from the reality-based community's perspective, librarians are just doing what they have always done; it's just that the right isn't particularly fond of core values like the open flow of information or free inquiry.
A couple of gigabytes?! Only if you burn it first. There's something like 10^8 books, nevermind the other stuff. How do you compress any given book into 100 bytes?
The "20 TB" figure comes from the smallest possible measure, treating the flat books as ASCII text. Even just considering current digital content, it's also inaccurately small by >1 order of magnitude.
It's a really really really big library.
Say! that's brilliant! I'm going to go down the hall and mention that to the LC IT guys!
.
.
.
Oh. Apparently it had occurred to them. Well, thanks, just the same. You think of anything else, please, drop us a line!
Actually, you're wrong, and right. This proposal for Binary XML is ASN.1, according to Tim Bray's blog posting.
You appear to be radically confused.
iTunes is not a downloading tool.
It's an MP3 player, ripper, burner, library manager, and tagger that just happens to recently have had on-line purchasing added into it.
(What's with this whitespace thing, anyway?)
It does a better job of handling multi-thousand file archives than anything else I've found.
You can replace the iPod battery.
The US Copyright Office, incidentally, is a part of the Library of Congress. The quote you offered should help, since they're well known to be heavily influenced by Vulcan (and to a lesser extent, Elvish) culture, but you might still be facing a little bit of an uphill battle. Best of luck!
Well, the Library of Congress includes an enormous amount of non-US content; something over half their content is not in English, if I remember correctly. Just sticking to LC content would keep one busy for a good while.
Even the third estimate is low, because it still assumes the books are stored as ASCII text instead of scanned pages, which is what Kahle's talking about (and, really, what would be the point of scanning millions of books and keeping only an ASCII representation?)
It's a great big bunch of disk space, is what it is.
What? Sir, don't be absurd, sir. The Library of Congress is over one block away from the US Capitol. That's several hundred yards. Why, that's more than far enough away from any sort of potential terrorist target. Nothing to worry about!
How do you mean, serial number is a free-form text field? BIND zone files are not the same thing as DNS. See RFC 1035 -- serial is 32 bits.
What was wrong with it? RFC1035 is what was wrong with it. The serial field in the SOA is 32 bits, sparky.
But it's good that you pointed it out to them, because it otherwise might not occur to anyone.
How many Library of Congresses is this?
50
Oh, it isn't, either. Will you people knock it off already with the Library of Congress == 20TB comparison? It's some sort of inane computation made as if the collection were only books, and all the books were represented as ASCII text only. Well, guess what? It's not, and they're not.
American Memory alone is a good bunch of terabytes, and that's just a wee digitized slice, just several million objects, of all the stuff in the Library. There's a lot. Of Stuff. A lot a lot a lot. Pictures. Maps. Movies. Big ol' stuff.
Well, I feel better. Thanks!
"RIAA" there is probably referring to the RIAA equalization curve. Simplified, you have to post-process the raw signal on a record according to that curve, because the original signal was written to the record with the inverse of that curve.
Embarrassed that I remember it. Early 1994, Primus's "Hello Skinny/Constantinople" MP2, from the IUMA when it was an FTP site, downloaded on a 14.4kbps modem to a 386/25. And then split into a multi-file ZIP on floppies.
I count at least one, looking at Windows Media Player for OS X on my G4. Is this a quiz of some sort?
Might want to check your RFCs on that claim. Section 4.3.3 "Wildcards" of RFC 1034 is a good place to start your reading.
Like it's spelled.
skl (like in diSCLaimer)
ya (like in YAhoo!)
rov (like in... umm... ROV)
Now run those three together fairly quickly; roll the R a little bit; maybe swallow the "V" a little; and you're set.
> What's the best free/open X Terminal for Windows? If I have to run Windows then at least give me a reasonable way to reach Linux on another box (VNC is nice but the lag time hurts).
Well, XFree86 runs under Cygwin (see http://www.cygwin.com/xfree/). But if you've got lag problems under VNC, I reckon X might not make things better...
My wish list for backing track producers:
No, this isn't comparable to that case at all. This concerns the default logging package available to all Java classes. With a standard implementation (which log4j quite arguably has been in the Java community, for several years) every code package can be written to use the same logging interface, knowing that it's up to the application to actually decide where and how and at what level the logging should be presented.
By providing a different, incompatible log interface in JDK 1.4, Sun provides strong incentive to developers to stop using log4j and instead switch to the "new standard". The result is that an existing "community standard" gets shoved out of the way by Sun's strongarm. The result is confusion, as developers waste time deciding which log package to use instead of just writing code. This is especially bizarre when log4j is an Jakarta project at apache.org; Jakarta is heavily supported by Sun, and there's no way Sun hadn't heard of log4j, given its widespread use. One must assume, then, that weird politics were involved...
The submitter of the question, it should be noted, is the author of log4j, but that doesn't invalidate his very good question, or his excellent and widely used work. Me, I'm just a happy user of log4j; if you write Java, you should be too.
According to the Cygwin project, XFree86 4.0 already compiles and runs under cygwin without patching, and has for some time. I was very surprised to learn this a few weeks ago; I would think many people would have the same excited reaction, but it's not a well-publicized part of the Cygwin project.
(PostgreSQL 7.1 also compiles under cygwin without patches. Cygwin rocks.)