I'll add a data point to that: regular (non-diet) Coke takes a lot lower temperature to freeze and explode than does Diet Coke. The sugar in Coke depresses the freezing point way more than does the tiny amount of artifical sweetener in Diet Coke. That said, the Diet Coke is a heck of a lot easier to clean up.
(Leaving unopened cans in the car overnight in winter also demonstrates this principle.)
The selection may not match Blockbusters', but around here the King Soopers grocery stores (Kroegers some other places) rent recent releases for about $2.50 and older ones for $1.00 (and for 5 nights on the latter).
Many public libraries also have videos/DVDs you can borrow free, -- one local branch here has a pretty impressive collection.
I don't remember the last time I paid Blockbuster prices.
In any given election there are a relatively small number of positions and candidates. The number of combinations of all that is high, but not beyond easily pre-calculating the MD5 hash of all combinations and comparing that against somebody's receipt.
An added thought -- random checking of the paper ballots/receipts (ie, check all the votes from a couple of randomly selected polling places) against the electronic totals also help keep everything honest even in the absence of a formal challenge.
You're quite correct. I think the terminology is confusing. The logical thing is to deposit the paper receipt in a ballot box before leaving the polling place. The ballot boxes need only be opened and the receipts examined in the case of a challenge.
Indeed, you don't want the voter to take it away with him as that provides a verification method for vote buying schemes. As it is now, you can bribe someone to go in and vote for your favorite candidate(s), but you have no guarantee that that's who they actually voted for.
If anyone (in the Denver, CO, area) is interested in hearing about Jabber and XMPP from St Peter himself, he'll be speaking about it at the next meeting of the Denver Java User's Group in a couple of weeks. Matt Miller will also talk a bit about the JSO (Jabber Streaming Objects) library for Java. See DJUG website (link above) for details.
It's free, including the food (if you get there before it's all gone;-)
There are still problems and lack of voice and video chat
For voice chat there's a wonderful invention that already has significant installed infrastructure. Originally developed by some guy named Bell. It's called the telephone.
it lacks a lot of conveniences other IM protocols have to offer.
Um, HTTP usually uses sockets, too. HTTP is also not stream-oriented the way XMPP is -- although you can get around that to some extent with keep-alive and session ID cookies. (It's just ugly as hell.)
Raw sockets don't work with many proxies and firewalls that I'm facing.
There are probably some work arounds (Jabber proxy?), myself I just make sure the port is open.
Isn't the art of good coding to make things as efficient as possible?
No. (As a rule, although it depends on what you mean by 'things', 'efficient' and 'as possible'.) The art of good coding is to make the code as correct and easy to maintain, in the least amount of coding time, as possible. Optimize (make efficient) only after doing that and profiling to find the bottlenecks.
With a binary format the data can usually in whole or part be mapped direct onto a C structure.
Not at all helpful if the client on the other end is written in Perl, Python, Java, Tcl, Ada, etc, etc. (And even if both ends use C, it's problematic if your source and destination machines use different byte order or word size.)
If someone can just run tcpdump on a LAN they can read all the correspondance going on.
And this differs from SMTP, HTTP, and NNTP just how, exactly? (And in fact XMPP provides for secure messaging.)
Nope, Ice Age was distributed by 20th Century Fox, and the production studios were Blue Sky and Fox Animation Studios. I hope we see more from them.
Yeah, Anastasia was cool (who did that?), although the Rasputin character a bit too intense for my then 3yr old daughter. (Part of the coolness factor was that my wife and I had visted Leningrad/St. Petersburg a few years before and visited the Hermitage and some of the other places where some of the scenes take place.)
Emperor's New Groove turned out better than I was expecting, lots of good comedic moments and an animation style different from the usual Disney. I'd rank it higher than Treasure Planet.
At first the whole concept of Treasure Planet revolted me (I'm a fan of the book, and have seen several different adaptations of it including "Muppet Treasure Island" (which is a hoot, and Tim Curry does a great John Silver) and even as a stage play). Once I got past that and suspended a ton of disbelief over the whole sailing ships in space thing, it wasn't half bad. I about fell out of my chair at the scene where Doppler (David Hyde Pierce -- Niles on "Frasier" - - doing the voice) who is tending to the injured captain, turns to young Hawkins and says "Damnit, Jim, I'm an astronomer, not a doctor!".
But on the whole, other studios are doing much better stuff than Disney-without-Pixar. Think Shrek, Road to El Dorado, Ice Age, all great animated family fare (meaning that it's kid watchable but enough stuff to keep the adults entertained too.) Heck, I'll throw Jimmy Neutron in there too;-)
Will slashdot ever drag itself into the year 2004 and provide the ability to edit posts?
No forum should provide the ability to edit posts -- although I wouldn't argue against an option to delete one's own posts (leaving some kind of "deleted by author" tombstone).
I'm not going to go into the arguments again -- I developed the (text based) CoSy computer conferencing software (used by BIX, CIX, a number of universities, NLzero, etc) about 20 years ago, and that request crops up from time to time. I'll never allow it in my software, and won't use any forum that permits it.
The moving finger writes, and having writ, moves on.
I'm hoping that that was intended to be funny. I know British humour is dry, and I'm of British birth myself, so I'll take it that way.
Just on the off chance that it wasn't, however:
You, sir, clearly know no Latin.
I took three years of it in high school. Admittedly, two of those were the same one twice. (sigh)
With reference to this jargon file entry for 'ascii'
You do know, of course, that that entry is a joke. That's not the real explanation for the name of the American Standard Code for Information Interchange, which adopted the name as an acronym for A Set of Characters for Exchanging Information, except that everyone kept trying to prounounce ASCEI with a soft 'C', and "assy" was deemed in poor taste.
Why is the plural of virus viruses? One octopus and many octopi. One cactus, many cacti. Why not one virus, many virii?
Then why spell it with two 'i's? "Viri" would be correct by your example.
However, in the original latin, "virus" is a collective rather than singular noun (eg "snow" vs "snowflake", although the original meaning is more like "slime".) Perhaps whoever first applied the word to the infectious microscopic critters should have used "virum" as the singular (like "bacterium") in which case the plural would be "vira", but s/he didn't, so we're stuck with "virus" as the singular and an argument over "viri[i]"/"viruses" as the plural.
Personally I think it should be "viruses". You wouldn't say "many doofii", would you? It's "one doofus, many doofuses".
Hmm, combine that computer with this flexible display technology (running a flashy screensaver) and put anyone else's loud tie to shame.
Or just use the tie as your monitor, although it'd have to curl up so you could read it more easily. Now what nerd do we know that wears a curling up necktie...
Yes, but the second shuttle would have suffered the same flaw which they couldn't have fixed in time.
What makes you think so? What are the odds on the same size chunk of foam falling from the same place on the tank at the same time (== velocity) into the launch and hitting the Orbiter? Especially if the ground crew had a pretty darn good idea that that was the problem in the first place (and they would, if they knew of the problem at all).
(Also, the External Tank for Columbia had sat out on the pad (or been ferried back and forth to the VAB) for quite a while because of various delays, and had been rained on quite a bit.)
You just design the whole crew cabin as an ejection pod. Just add some insulation and some parachutes to the capsule and everyone rides that down. (Or at least rides it down far enough to bail out -- like the original Russian Vostok reentry system.)
A more rational approach, though, is to design the launch vehicle so that it either has no throwaway parts or such that the throwaway parts cannot damage the main vehicle.
In Challenger, a throwaway part (the SRB -- okay, technically reusable in a "crash and salvage" sort of way) caused flame to impinge on another throwaway part (the External Tank and attachment strut) until the latter disintegrated (and the fuel caught fire).
In Columbia, a piece of throwaway foam from the throwaway External Tank came off and broke a massive hole in the wing's heat shield.
With previous manned spacecraft (including Russian and Chinese designs), the only throwaway pieces beside or upstream of the main crew vehicle were/are the launch escape rockets designed to pull the crew vehicle away from the (throwaway) booster if it blows, and those just sit there passively during routine launch.
Better yet would be design the whole thing so that you can safely abort (ie, land) at any time during the launch. The DC-X experimental rocket successfully landed (vertically, as per design) after an external explosion at launch (an unexpected build up of vented hydrogen gas) blew off a good piece of the vehicle's fuselage. As soon as observers noticed the problem (big pieces falling off!) the ascent was halted and the thing went into autoland mode. Try that with something that uses solid boosters, or takes off vertically but has to land horizontally.
The likelihood of getting another shuttle prepped in time was almost nill
Actually the shuttle for the next mission was already at the pad and mostly prepped, the launch date was about a month away.
Step up the prep rate for that launch and put Columbia into survival mode (minimal power use, ration the consumables, etc) and they might have done it -- assuming they'd realized the problem right after launch rather than after a week in orbit squandering supplies.
Edison, in contrast, patented everything under the sun and sued people black and blue over trivial or non-existent issues.
He (and/or his company) was not above infringeing upon others' patents and copyrights, either. For example, the classic film "Le Voyage a la Lune" was pirated by Edison employees while it was playing in London and had pretty much played out to American audiences by the time legal copies made it to the the US. Then there are the dirty tricks he pulled to "prove" that his DC power transmission system was much safer than Tesla's AC system. (Probably also proved the TCO was lower, too.)
Perhaps. It's just rather ironic that someone complaining that man pages are poorly written demonstrates a an inability to use the language correctly, one that I've not seen in man pages.
In an informal technical discussion, grammar and spelling can often be forgiven if the main point is clear. When the main point is complaining about writing, grammar and spelling become rather relevant to the point.
How would the 650 page GCC manual look as a man page?
Like it was done by someone who didn't understand the Unix documentation scheme.
The man pages were never the entire body of Unix documentation, just the first volume. The second volume consisted of longer, more tutorial or in depth documents for the programs that needed it. (Like some compilers, or awk, or [t]roff, etc.)
Way back in prehistory I worked with a port of Version 7 Unix (UTS) that came with a complete set of printed manuals -- the man pages were only half the documentation.
That said, info is lame, and commands that have no man page because they have info doubly so.
Slashdot Mirror
I'll add a data point to that: regular (non-diet) Coke takes a lot lower temperature to freeze and explode than does Diet Coke. The sugar in Coke depresses the freezing point way more than does the tiny amount of artifical sweetener in Diet Coke. That said, the Diet Coke is a heck of a lot easier to clean up.
(Leaving unopened cans in the car overnight in winter also demonstrates this principle.)
Well, a google for the phrase "jabber over http" turns up a bunch of hits, so it looks like you can find what you need.
Where can you get a rental for $2?
The selection may not match Blockbusters', but around here the King Soopers grocery stores (Kroegers some other places) rent recent releases for about $2.50 and older ones for $1.00 (and for 5 nights on the latter).
Many public libraries also have videos/DVDs you can borrow free, -- one local branch here has a pretty impressive collection.
I don't remember the last time I paid Blockbuster prices.
In any given election there are a relatively small number of positions and candidates. The number of combinations of all that is high, but not beyond easily pre-calculating the MD5 hash of all combinations and comparing that against somebody's receipt.
An added thought -- random checking of the paper ballots/receipts (ie, check all the votes from a couple of randomly selected polling places) against the electronic totals also help keep everything honest even in the absence of a formal challenge.
You're quite correct. I think the terminology is confusing. The logical thing is to deposit the paper receipt in a ballot box before leaving the polling place. The ballot boxes need only be opened and the receipts examined in the case of a challenge.
Indeed, you don't want the voter to take it away with him as that provides a verification method for vote buying schemes. As it is now, you can bribe someone to go in and vote for your favorite candidate(s), but you have no guarantee that that's who they actually voted for.
If anyone (in the Denver, CO, area) is interested in hearing about Jabber and XMPP from St Peter himself, he'll be speaking about it at the next meeting of the Denver Java User's Group in a couple of weeks. Matt Miller will also talk a bit about the JSO (Jabber Streaming Objects) library for Java. See DJUG website (link above) for details.
;-)
It's free, including the food (if you get there before it's all gone
There are still problems and lack of voice and video chat
For voice chat there's a wonderful invention that already has significant installed infrastructure. Originally developed by some guy named Bell. It's called the telephone.
it lacks a lot of conveniences other IM protocols have to offer.
Name three.
Or am I missing something?
Apparently.
uses HTTP as transport instead of sockets
Um, HTTP usually uses sockets, too. HTTP is also not stream-oriented the way XMPP is -- although you can get around that to some extent with keep-alive and session ID cookies. (It's just ugly as hell.)
Raw sockets don't work with many proxies and firewalls that I'm facing.
There are probably some work arounds (Jabber proxy?), myself I just make sure the port is open.
Isn't the art of good coding to make things as efficient as possible?
No. (As a rule, although it depends on what you mean by 'things', 'efficient' and 'as possible'.) The art of good coding is to make the code as correct and easy to maintain, in the least amount of coding time, as possible. Optimize (make efficient) only after doing that and profiling to find the bottlenecks.
With a binary format the data can usually in whole or part be mapped direct onto a C structure.
Not at all helpful if the client on the other end is written in Perl, Python, Java, Tcl, Ada, etc, etc. (And even if both ends use C, it's problematic if your source and destination machines use different byte order or word size.)
If someone can just run tcpdump on a LAN they can read all the correspondance going on.
And this differs from SMTP, HTTP, and NNTP just how, exactly? (And in fact XMPP provides for secure messaging.)
Wasn't Ice Age a Disney movie?
Nope, Ice Age was distributed by 20th Century Fox, and the production studios were Blue Sky and Fox Animation Studios. I hope we see more from them.
Yeah, Anastasia was cool (who did that?), although the Rasputin character a bit too intense for my then 3yr old daughter. (Part of the coolness factor was that my wife and I had visted Leningrad/St. Petersburg a few years before and visited the Hermitage and some of the other places where some of the scenes take place.)
Emperor's New Groove turned out better than I was expecting, lots of good comedic moments and an animation style different from the usual Disney. I'd rank it higher than Treasure Planet.
;-)
At first the whole concept of Treasure Planet revolted me (I'm a fan of the book, and have seen several different adaptations of it including "Muppet Treasure Island" (which is a hoot, and Tim Curry does a great John Silver) and even as a stage play). Once I got past that and suspended a ton of disbelief over the whole sailing ships in space thing, it wasn't half bad. I about fell out of my chair at the scene where Doppler (David Hyde Pierce -- Niles on "Frasier" - - doing the voice) who is tending to the injured captain, turns to young Hawkins and says "Damnit, Jim, I'm an astronomer, not a doctor!".
But on the whole, other studios are doing much better stuff than Disney-without-Pixar. Think Shrek, Road to El Dorado, Ice Age, all great animated family fare (meaning that it's kid watchable but enough stuff to keep the adults entertained too.) Heck, I'll throw Jimmy Neutron in there too
Will slashdot ever drag itself into the year 2004 and provide the ability to edit posts?
No forum should provide the ability to edit posts -- although I wouldn't argue against an option to delete one's own posts (leaving some kind of "deleted by author" tombstone).
I'm not going to go into the arguments again -- I developed the (text based) CoSy computer conferencing software (used by BIX, CIX, a number of universities, NLzero, etc) about 20 years ago, and that request crops up from time to time. I'll never allow it in my software, and won't use any forum that permits it.
The moving finger writes, and having writ, moves on.
I'm hoping that that was intended to be funny. I know British humour is dry, and I'm of British birth myself, so I'll take it that way.
Just on the off chance that it wasn't, however:
You, sir, clearly know no Latin.
I took three years of it in high school. Admittedly, two of those were the same one twice. (sigh)
With reference to this jargon file entry for 'ascii'
You do know, of course, that that entry is a joke. That's not the real explanation for the name of the American Standard Code for Information Interchange, which adopted the name as an acronym for A Set of Characters for Exchanging Information, except that everyone kept trying to prounounce ASCEI with a soft 'C', and "assy" was deemed in poor taste.
Why is the plural of virus viruses? One octopus and many octopi. One cactus, many cacti. Why not one virus, many virii?
Then why spell it with two 'i's? "Viri" would be correct by your example.
However, in the original latin, "virus" is a collective rather than singular noun (eg "snow" vs "snowflake", although the original meaning is more like "slime".) Perhaps whoever first applied the word to the infectious microscopic critters should have used "virum" as the singular (like "bacterium") in which case the plural would be "vira", but s/he didn't, so we're stuck with "virus" as the singular and an argument over "viri[i]"/"viruses" as the plural.
Personally I think it should be "viruses". You wouldn't say "many doofii", would you? It's "one doofus, many doofuses".
Hmm, combine that computer with this flexible display technology (running a flashy screensaver) and put anyone else's loud tie to shame.
Or just use the tie as your monitor, although it'd have to curl up so you could read it more easily. Now what nerd do we know that wears a curling up necktie...
Yes, but the second shuttle would have suffered the same flaw which they couldn't have fixed in time.
What makes you think so? What are the odds on the same size chunk of foam falling from the same place on the tank at the same time (== velocity) into the launch and hitting the Orbiter? Especially if the ground crew had a pretty darn good idea that that was the problem in the first place (and they would, if they knew of the problem at all).
(Also, the External Tank for Columbia had sat out on the pad (or been ferried back and forth to the VAB) for quite a while because of various delays, and had been rained on quite a bit.)
You just design the whole crew cabin as an ejection pod. Just add some insulation and some parachutes to the capsule and everyone rides that down. (Or at least rides it down far enough to bail out -- like the original Russian Vostok reentry system.)
A more rational approach, though, is to design the launch vehicle so that it either has no throwaway parts or such that the throwaway parts cannot damage the main vehicle.
In Challenger, a throwaway part (the SRB -- okay, technically reusable in a "crash and salvage" sort of way) caused flame to impinge on another throwaway part (the External Tank and attachment strut) until the latter disintegrated (and the fuel caught fire).
In Columbia, a piece of throwaway foam from the throwaway External Tank came off and broke a massive hole in the wing's heat shield.
With previous manned spacecraft (including Russian and Chinese designs), the only throwaway pieces beside or upstream of the main crew vehicle were/are the launch escape rockets designed to pull the crew vehicle away from the (throwaway) booster if it blows, and those just sit there passively during routine launch.
Better yet would be design the whole thing so that you can safely abort (ie, land) at any time during the launch. The DC-X experimental rocket successfully landed (vertically, as per design) after an external explosion at launch (an unexpected build up of vented hydrogen gas) blew off a good piece of the vehicle's fuselage. As soon as observers noticed the problem (big pieces falling off!) the ascent was halted and the thing went into autoland mode. Try that with something that uses solid boosters, or takes off vertically but has to land horizontally.
The likelihood of getting another shuttle prepped in time was almost nill
Actually the shuttle for the next mission was already at the pad and mostly prepped, the launch date was about a month away.
Step up the prep rate for that launch and put Columbia into survival mode (minimal power use, ration the consumables, etc) and they might have done it -- assuming they'd realized the problem right after launch rather than after a week in orbit squandering supplies.
Edison, in contrast, patented everything under the sun and sued people black and blue over trivial or non-existent issues.
He (and/or his company) was not above infringeing upon others' patents and copyrights, either. For example, the classic film "Le Voyage a la Lune" was pirated by Edison employees while it was playing in London and had pretty much played out to American audiences by the time legal copies made it to the the US. Then there are the dirty tricks he pulled to "prove" that his DC power transmission system was much safer than Tesla's AC system. (Probably also proved the TCO was lower, too.)
Perhaps. It's just rather ironic that someone complaining that man pages are poorly written demonstrates a an inability to use the language correctly, one that I've not seen in man pages.
In an informal technical discussion, grammar and spelling can often be forgiven if the main point is clear. When the main point is complaining about writing, grammar and spelling become rather relevant to the point.
I can understand how someone who is so illiterate as to put an apostrophe in "lots" might have trouble reading man pages.
The fact is, however, that most people who would refer to them will have no problem at all.
(Nor does a preemptive attempt to avoid a troll rating make it any less a troll.)
How would the 650 page GCC manual look as a man page?
Like it was done by someone who didn't understand the Unix documentation scheme.
The man pages were never the entire body of Unix documentation, just the first volume. The second volume consisted of longer, more tutorial or in depth documents for the programs that needed it. (Like some compilers, or awk, or [t]roff, etc.)
Way back in prehistory I worked with a port of Version 7 Unix (UTS) that came with a complete set of printed manuals -- the man pages were only half the documentation.
That said, info is lame, and commands that have no man page because they have info doubly so.
may hold clues to Mars' watery past... scientists say the fragments are magmatic rocks.
Heck, they'd even more clues to Mars' water past if they were sedimentary rocks...
Igneous, Holmes!
Sedimentary, my dear Watson.
A note from The Columbia Guide to Standard American English? The title itself is an oxymoron on several levels.
;-)
Next you'll be citing Webster's as an authoritative dictionary.