I took the lid off my Livingstone firewall, 90% air. I took the lid off my 2501, 90% air. Why do Cisco/Lucent/etc. think that comms equiptment has to be big to be any good. I't just like the old shitty Amstrad hifis of yonder. 90% Air.
OK, the 'housed inside one computer' aspect may not be brilliant, but the simple fact that thye've proven that this kind of technology can be miniturised. Shame on the big companies for lagging.
Ever heard of alpha releases and beta releases?
That's how you ship shoddy goods, by telling people that they're shoddy in advance. They know what they're getting.
If it was alpha I've have interpreted it as "we know it doesn't work fully, help us fix it by finding and hopefully isolating bugs"
If it was beta I'd have interpreted it as "we think it works, go break it, I dare you".
It was marked as neither alpha nor beta; it truth it appeared to be pre-alpha, which could be why.
It's not "hoarding the code". It's simply not releasing garbage that could well _confuse_ anyone that looks at it. If you can't code it, don't - let someone else who can do it. That's Open Source collaboration.
The way I have interpreted several of the articles regarding AMD "dropping" musthang (just made that up!) is as follows.
"We have decided that we don't want it in the _marketplace_, but if we need it, we could probably roll it out without too much delay".
It's probably because they don't want to have a smooth transition to their next generation chips (the 64 bit ones, my what a novel concept*). If they try to flood the high end market with Xeon-bashers, then they'll not have any market for the 64 bit chips. Better to wait and then ship Xeon-anihilators, so there's no confusion about what to by and when to upgrade.
Rant rant rant, all I want from them is SMP, rant rant rant!
Linguistics is _descriptive_ not _proscriptive_ or _prescriptive_.
The proof of this is the existance of the words proscriptive and prescriptive to mean the opposite of each other. (Both roots break down to "written in advance".)
The trailing slash is not optional.
If you leave it off the server will respond that there is no such file.
It will also suggest that you look for the directory with the trailing slash instead.
Your browser will almost certainly then send a request for the directory as advised.
Yes, but "em" is not the valid name for a program on my system here, yet when I type
em
emacs starts.
It's a simple matter of working out what is most sensible to do with something that doesn't fit your schema. If you're Amaya you throw it away (hey, it should refuse to display pages with grammatical and spelling errors too, surely). If you're Netscape then you work out what was most probably wanted. It's called usability.
Anyway there is noting in the standards about how a user should input a URL, is there.
you could have radio-buttons for the protocol part, drop-down menus for specifying.net,.com or.org, and then a textbox for the rest. The standard specifies the computer-computer interface, not the HMI.
The truth is _if they haven't pulled up a window with a form in and see it just plain not work_, then they haven't tested it enough (at all, more like). It is _so far_ away from working that it should not have been released.
So NO, if they aren't going to release something that's worthy of release, I'm not going to waste one second more of my time longer than it takes to type 'rm -rf'.
If it was close (say had lasted 15 minutes before annoying the hell out of me rather than 15 seconds), then yes, I'd invest more time in helping them fix it.
I contribute to several Open Source projects myself - ones that are released when they are good and ready.
Forms just don't work.
I couldn't post this using Amaya because.
1) I couldn't see what I was typing - if I press return it jumps somewhere and refuses to let me enter the text box again. And if I don't press return the text flows out of the text box and off to the side of the window into oblivion.
2) The submit button took me to preview and after that nothing else worked
3) the passwosrd field didn't work, slashdot thought I was still anonymous coward.
4) It also doesn't support the X clipboard properly - after writing this rant once and it 'losing it', I did it again, but this time I cut a copy in case it did it again, which it did. However, Paste didn't work.
5) GIFs kept causing it to print error messages to t the terminal I launched it from.
As soon as I've sent this I shall pop back to the shell window and type rm -rf...
Someone's got to disagree with soething in that rant, let it be me!
Personally I think that the RIAA has screwed this whole issue up so badly, that it has become a laughingstock and an object of ridicule. If they had acted in a manner befitting of supply and demand in a consumer-friendly fashion, they'd have promoted and used the new medium from the outset. They'd (individually for sure) have set up their own MP3.com-style distribution 'outlets'. They'd have pulled themselves out of the mid-1900s.
which included the new (at the time) high resolution fax mode.
Incidentally, it wasn't even 100*200, the original ITU spec (T.4 I think) specified 196*98 dpi.
However, you're right, after that it evolved even further.
Best bit of code I ever wrote was a T6 (group 4 Fax) decoder.
And the MP3's of my band are going to start the flashing lights saying "sounds like stevie ray, but can't make out which song. wait! it's all of them!"
It's as good an idea as the Strategic Defense Initiative.
And it will be as succesful.
Relatively may tell you that you're lagged*, but it also tells you that it doesn't matter.
Unless you want to interact with it, in which case it's not the speed of light and the _time_ lag that's stopping you, it's simply the distance.
FatPhil
* Actually the fixed speed of light is a postulate that special relativity uses as an input not a conclusion from relativity, but I digress.
I went to the article and the first thing I see is
"an artists rendering of a neutron star".
I can imagine when he was drawing that, an astronomer goes up to him and says "oooh, I like the yellows, but can you cut down on the greens a bit, however those black flecks are wonderful".
Has the artist seen one? Has the astronomer seen one with visible light? No, and No.
Artists impression, tish.
So this is not just twice that, but with 3 independent colours, you can use sub-pixel antialiasing and it appears substantially better than fax resolution-wise. Even ordinary greyscale antialiasing makes it appear higher quality than a fax.
I can wait 5 years. But everything already looks a blur to me anyway!
Hmmm, the Chinese on the menus at my local Chinese resautant in Cambridge took up about 4 times th space of the English. The characters had to be twice the height as well as wider than the Latin characters due to resolution issues. Maybe they were just being more descriptive, but they seemed to have the same redundancy in them as the English, so I assumed they were in exact equivalence.
I can't agree with your "basic rule of information". I can see nothing about it in my copy of Cover and Thomas. Kolmogorov or Chaitin have stuff to say about this kind of thing.
Wide guage trains physically cannot come to _CENTRAL_ Eurpoe, where the 6" narrower guage is used.
However, I can hop on a wide guage train here in Helsinki which goes all the way to Moscow.
You see not all of Europe is CENTRAL Europe.
I'm sure you'd agree that not all of America is Central America. Screw it, I don't need your agreement, your opinion is less than worthless.
Now safe me the fucking effort and go kill yourself.
The problem that I see is that everyone seems to be taking the thing out of context.
The internet is no bigger than a combination of the telephone ("poll"/"pull" technology) and television ("push" technology). (Which admitedly were big). It's what I call an "enabling technology".
It's no more a technological panacea for all modern ills than the telephone was in its day.
One lesson we can learn from TV as a "push" technology is that, as in the USA now, a very low signal to noise ration medium evolves.
However, for the subject of ethics, there are intant parallels that could be drawn, but seem to be overlooked. OK, "wrongs" can be had/done, but...
A kid can view www.pr0n.jp, yeah, but he can phone 0047980084102398 for "big bosomed bimbos".
People can download a copy of "American Pie II, The Cherry's Revenge" illegally and ftp it to mates. However, he can set his dish to pick up the feed _to_ regional TV stations, and therefore get Babylon 5 intended for broadcast the next day not only early, but with all the adverts removed.
I could go on.
However, that would make me as boring as Jon Katz.
Why do I reply to his threads, they just wind me up.
Yes. Chinese has a tonal phonetic component.
I think you can at least have
"middle", "rising", "falling" and "high"
versions of the same sound, and they can all have different characters associated with them. I'm not sure if a "low" version exists in Chinese.
Other languages have "rising then falling" versions too!
Woooo!
If you can't be understood over a 6bit connection then it's a lousy language!
6 bits is expressive enough to even include smileys in English. (Though sacrificing upper/lower case annoys some.)
5 bits has been used historically in America and the UK. You needed excape codes to flip into numeric mode.
I think that Colossus was 5-bit. It simply had to decypher single-case letters.
There was such a thing as a Chinese Typewriter. It had 300 keys and required multiple presses (Shift, Ctrl, Meta, Alt, Hyper etc. style)
to generate characters.
Slashdot Mirror
I took the lid off my Livingstone firewall, 90% air. I took the lid off my 2501, 90% air. Why do Cisco/Lucent/etc. think that comms equiptment has to be big to be any good. I't just like the old shitty Amstrad hifis of yonder. 90% Air.
OK, the 'housed inside one computer' aspect may not be brilliant, but the simple fact that thye've proven that this kind of technology can be miniturised. Shame on the big companies for lagging.
FP
My hours don't ovelap much with other people's here. However, we have one principle when it comes to communication
"If it isn't written down it didn't happen."
So stuff gets handled via e-mail and the bug/feature tracking system.
Given that we collaborate with other sites in other countries, hours of the day are irrelevant.
FP
Ever heard of alpha releases and beta releases?
That's how you ship shoddy goods, by telling people that they're shoddy in advance. They know what they're getting.
If it was alpha I've have interpreted it as "we know it doesn't work fully, help us fix it by finding and hopefully isolating bugs"
If it was beta I'd have interpreted it as "we think it works, go break it, I dare you".
It was marked as neither alpha nor beta; it truth it appeared to be pre-alpha, which could be why.
It's not "hoarding the code". It's simply not releasing garbage that could well _confuse_ anyone that looks at it. If you can't code it, don't - let someone else who can do it. That's Open Source collaboration.
FP
Should have previewed...
em{TAB}{RET}
turns into
emacs
due to filename completion. A user-interface aid.
"prefix http:// completion" is a perfectly valid user interface aid.
Don't confuse the 2 interfaces.
You're rteplyiong to someone with a who's had a 64bit processor with 4MB of cache for several years. 1-2MB just doesn't impress me any more.
FP
If you wish to have stretch and shear, then you don't need 8 virtual springs. 6 will suffice.
a---b
/ \ / \
f---x---c
\ / \ /
e---d
Bend can be added using another 3 springs, a-d, b-e, c-f. 9 springs rather than 12.
Remember that the trianglular lattice is used for most things anyway (see the wire frame pictures on the second page for an example).
Et voila, 25% faster!
FP
The way I have interpreted several of the articles regarding AMD "dropping" musthang (just made that up!) is as follows.
"We have decided that we don't want it in the _marketplace_, but if we need it, we could probably roll it out without too much delay".
It's probably because they don't want to have a smooth transition to their next generation chips (the 64 bit ones, my what a novel concept*). If they try to flood the high end market with Xeon-bashers, then they'll not have any market for the 64 bit chips. Better to wait and then ship Xeon-anihilators, so there's no confusion about what to by and when to upgrade.
Rant rant rant, all I want from them is SMP, rant rant rant!
FP
(* Alpha owner for _years_)
You're kinda right, but
Linguistics is _descriptive_ not _proscriptive_ or _prescriptive_.
The proof of this is the existance of the words proscriptive and prescriptive to mean the opposite of each other. (Both roots break down to "written in advance".)
So there is no absolute "right" as such.
FP
The trailing slash is not optional.
If you leave it off the server will respond that there is no such file.
It will also suggest that you look for the directory with the trailing slash instead.
Your browser will almost certainly then send a request for the directory as advised.
Totally different client-server transaction.
Phil
Yes, but "em" is not the valid name for a program on my system here, yet when I type
.net, .com or .org, and then a textbox for the rest. The standard specifies the computer-computer interface, not the HMI.
em
emacs starts.
It's a simple matter of working out what is most sensible to do with something that doesn't fit your schema. If you're Amaya you throw it away (hey, it should refuse to display pages with grammatical and spelling errors too, surely). If you're Netscape then you work out what was most probably wanted. It's called usability.
Anyway there is noting in the standards about how a user should input a URL, is there.
you could have radio-buttons for the protocol part, drop-down menus for specifying
Sheesh,
FP
The truth is _if they haven't pulled up a window with a form in and see it just plain not work_, then they haven't tested it enough (at all, more like). It is _so far_ away from working that it should not have been released.
So NO, if they aren't going to release something that's worthy of release, I'm not going to waste one second more of my time longer than it takes to type 'rm -rf'.
If it was close (say had lasted 15 minutes before annoying the hell out of me rather than 15 seconds), then yes, I'd invest more time in helping them fix it.
I contribute to several Open Source projects myself - ones that are released when they are good and ready.
FP
OK, so the windows version is as bad as the linux one.
Re 3.
Because it makes it harder to use, and if it's harder to used it must be aimed at more intelligent people, and therefore is better.
Oh yeah.
Fortunately I'm too stupid to use it.
FP
It's crap. It's unusable.
Forms just don't work.
I couldn't post this using Amaya because.
1) I couldn't see what I was typing - if I press return it jumps somewhere and refuses to let me enter the text box again. And if I don't press return the text flows out of the text box and off to the side of the window into oblivion.
2) The submit button took me to preview and after that nothing else worked
3) the passwosrd field didn't work, slashdot thought I was still anonymous coward.
4) It also doesn't support the X clipboard properly - after writing this rant once and it 'losing it', I did it again, but this time I cut a copy in case it did it again, which it did. However, Paste didn't work.
5) GIFs kept causing it to print error messages to t the terminal I launched it from.
As soon as I've sent this I shall pop back to the shell window and type rm -rf...
FP
Someone's got to disagree with soething in that rant, let it be me!
Personally I think that the RIAA has screwed this whole issue up so badly, that it has become a laughingstock and an object of ridicule. If they had acted in a manner befitting of supply and demand in a consumer-friendly fashion, they'd have promoted and used the new medium from the outset. They'd (individually for sure) have set up their own MP3.com-style distribution 'outlets'. They'd have pulled themselves out of the mid-1900s.
There, that was different enough wasn't it?
FP
By the time it had reached the PC, it had evolved.
Here's a snippet from a DCA/Intel spec for an early API:
"
1 1 Transfer type:
0 - 200x200 dpi, fax mode.
1 - 100x200 dpi, fax mode.
2 - File transfer mode.
"
which included the new (at the time) high resolution fax mode.
Incidentally, it wasn't even 100*200, the original ITU spec (T.4 I think) specified 196*98 dpi.
However, you're right, after that it evolved even further.
Best bit of code I ever wrote was a T6 (group 4 Fax) decoder.
FP
If you hadn't AC'd you'd probably got a +1 funny.
FP
And the MP3's of my band are going to start the flashing lights saying "sounds like stevie ray, but can't make out which song. wait! it's all of them!"
It's as good an idea as the Strategic Defense Initiative.
And it will be as succesful.
FatPhil
Don't worry.
Relatively may tell you that you're lagged*, but it also tells you that it doesn't matter.
Unless you want to interact with it, in which case it's not the speed of light and the _time_ lag that's stopping you, it's simply the distance.
FatPhil
* Actually the fixed speed of light is a postulate that special relativity uses as an input not a conclusion from relativity, but I digress.
I went to the article and the first thing I see is
"an artists rendering of a neutron star".
I can imagine when he was drawing that, an astronomer goes up to him and says "oooh, I like the yellows, but can you cut down on the greens a bit, however those black flecks are wonderful".
Has the artist seen one? Has the astronomer seen one with visible light? No, and No.
Artists impression, tish.
FatPhil
Firstly, fax is 200x100 dpi
So this is not just twice that, but with 3 independent colours, you can use sub-pixel antialiasing and it appears substantially better than fax resolution-wise. Even ordinary greyscale antialiasing makes it appear higher quality than a fax.
I can wait 5 years. But everything already looks a blur to me anyway!
FatPhil
Hmmm, the Chinese on the menus at my local Chinese resautant in Cambridge took up about 4 times th space of the English. The characters had to be twice the height as well as wider than the Latin characters due to resolution issues. Maybe they were just being more descriptive, but they seemed to have the same redundancy in them as the English, so I assumed they were in exact equivalence.
I can't agree with your "basic rule of information". I can see nothing about it in my copy of Cover and Thomas. Kolmogorov or Chaitin have stuff to say about this kind of thing.
FatPhil
Why do fuckwits hide behind AC?
Wide guage trains physically cannot come to _CENTRAL_ Eurpoe, where the 6" narrower guage is used.
However, I can hop on a wide guage train here in Helsinki which goes all the way to Moscow.
You see not all of Europe is CENTRAL Europe.
I'm sure you'd agree that not all of America is Central America. Screw it, I don't need your agreement, your opinion is less than worthless.
Now safe me the fucking effort and go kill yourself.
FatPhil
The problem that I see is that everyone seems to be taking the thing out of context.
The internet is no bigger than a combination of the telephone ("poll"/"pull" technology) and television ("push" technology). (Which admitedly were big). It's what I call an "enabling technology".
It's no more a technological panacea for all modern ills than the telephone was in its day.
One lesson we can learn from TV as a "push" technology is that, as in the USA now, a very low signal to noise ration medium evolves.
However, for the subject of ethics, there are intant parallels that could be drawn, but seem to be overlooked. OK, "wrongs" can be had/done, but...
A kid can view www.pr0n.jp, yeah, but he can phone 0047980084102398 for "big bosomed bimbos".
People can download a copy of "American Pie II, The Cherry's Revenge" illegally and ftp it to mates. However, he can set his dish to pick up the feed _to_ regional TV stations, and therefore get Babylon 5 intended for broadcast the next day not only early, but with all the adverts removed.
I could go on.
However, that would make me as boring as Jon Katz.
Why do I reply to his threads, they just wind me up.
FatPhil
Yes. Chinese has a tonal phonetic component.
I think you can at least have
"middle", "rising", "falling" and "high"
versions of the same sound, and they can all have different characters associated with them. I'm not sure if a "low" version exists in Chinese.
Other languages have "rising then falling" versions too!
Woooo!
If you can't be understood over a 6bit connection then it's a lousy language!
6 bits is expressive enough to even include smileys in English. (Though sacrificing upper/lower case annoys some.)
5 bits has been used historically in America and the UK. You needed excape codes to flip into numeric mode.
I think that Colossus was 5-bit. It simply had to decypher single-case letters.
FatPhil
There was such a thing as a Chinese Typewriter. It had 300 keys and required multiple presses (Shift, Ctrl, Meta, Alt, Hyper etc. style)
g es/typewrit.gif
to generate characters.
This is a really crap picture of one:
http://acc6.its.brooklyn.cuny.edu/~phalsall/ima
So many keys each one is barely distinguishable from the next (that's also poor photo quality though)
If fell into disuse fairly swiftly because it was slower than script.
Our typewriters were invented so that they could be faster than script.
They lose.
FatPhil