the book-scanning process is completely automated.
Well if it really is automated, how comes it that some of the scanned pages show part of the hand (complete with finger rings!) of the person who was doing the scanning? It looks as if the scanning was done by someone who didn't realise that the text can't be read if there's a hand between the page and the scanner-glass!
The employer can only claim copyright over the portion of the work that was created under their employ. However, the sticky bit is that they licensed the original work under the GPL, so they must not distribute their additional code and, if they do, they must make it available under the GPL AND share copyright on the code with the original author.
Yes, and perhaps another way of putting it is like this. The contract between the employer and employee can obligate the employee to transfer his rights. But in such a transfer the employer can't receive wider rights than the employee had in the first place before he handed them over.
Previous Ubuntu versions, during install, would overwrite the master boot record without giving the user any choice about where to put Ubuntu's boot-loader (no choice of which partition to locate it) -- nor even any warning. But it seems the Ubuntu folk didn't consider that a bug. Does it still do that? -wb-
As long as the books themselves are perfectly fine (which they seem to be),
Well, some are really good and well scanned, but others are a mess. From some organizations that do the scanning, you get missing pages and mangled pages. You get pages where the person doing the scanning sometimes put their hand between the page and the glass, so you can read the rings on their fingers but not the text on the page. (Books scanned at NY Public Library for example.) If ever there is a fold-out, you get at max half of it.
The Google Books organization doesn't seem to want to know, there is a mechanism for reporting single page defects but when 50 defects occur in a book it gets hard to work through them all using the button-clicks: I tried it for two books and also sent a message to Google Books, there was an automated reply and no action after several months.
So much for 'As long as the books themselves are perfectly fine....', I'm afraid.
Just think of the 'advantages' of having bitterness classified as a mental illness/disorder:
All those awkward folk who get themselves wronged and deprived of justice -- they can be reclassified as mentally ill, and maybe compulsorily treated with some happy pill, maybe locked up. And finally, they'll come to realize that there is justice after all, and they'll get to love Big Brother.....
On that note has anyone tried the option on google books to report unreadable pages and if so do they do anything about it?
Yes, and while I guess instant action is hardly to be expected, on last check it had taken nearly three months after a report of three volumes with dozens of defectively-scanned pages, with nothing doing. (A separate message to the google people had produced only the (semi-automated?) response 'use the option'.) So, it seems like nothing is done about it.
De-warping sounds useful, but there are problems that it probably won't solve --
Like the operator who scans a book page with his/her fingers or hand stuck between the page and the scanner-glass. For example, the dreaded 'New York Hand' or its fingers can be seen occupying the place of part of the text or figures on many pages of books scanned for Google-Books from the New York Public Library. On some pages, the impression of the fingers is clear enough to show the rings worn by the Hand that was doing the scanning.:(
It will take more than a de-warping patent to solve that one.....
I can see the sense in using a basic text editor to begin. I like that too.
At the present, though, I have a headache while drafting a piece which can hardly avoid a few math/tech symbols. My usual text editors don't participate in a standard for math and technical symbols.
After a few experiments in dumping various wp outputs to.RTF, and then retrieving/re-editing from.RTF --- it's seldom that the symbols are preserved. I'm trying to use as few different ones as possible, but I can't even identify a small few that are treated in a standard way. This is starting to drive me crazy.
It clearly seems like LG was in the wrong here, but this was a case where both parties actually produce and sell goods using the patents they own. Has the US Supreme Court had anything to say about the numerous cases involving patent squatters/submarine patents? That seems like it ought to be a more serious issue.
If you look at the Supreme Court's decision (http://www.supremecourtus.gov/opinions/07pdf/06-937.pdf) it will be clear how it turns, first, on whether the patent license to Intel permits Intel to sell goods that practice the patents, and second, did the goods sold by Intel practice the patents. The answer to both questions was yes, triggering the application of the doctrine of exhaustion of patent rights with respect to the product that was sold. That was true even where the patent had method claims, and when those would not be completely practiced until the sold product was combined with other components. The rationale for that aspect was that the sold items practiced the patent by embodying all of the inventive matter and having in practice no other use except to practice the patent: the components left to be added were standard stuff, while all of the inventive content was in the items sold.
None of that depended in any way on the question whether the patent licensor engaged in manufacture on its own account. The court did not need to consider that. So the decision clearly applies to patent holders who grant licenses to others to sell patented products, irrespective of whether the licensors themselves do manufacturing or not.
Funny, I don't recall any tests having to be passed when public fair use rights were massively cut down -- for example, as they were under the European Copyright Directive a few years back. (No fair use now in connection with any activity that can't count as non-commercial, for example.)
It would take an ingenious lawyer to argue that any of the fair use rights that coexisted happily with the Berne Convention for most of a century, are somehow in conflict with it now if there is any movement to revive or restate them.
(Well, there's already been a flood of posts on this one, but anyways.... )
[1] FWIW I think the idea of a copyright tax is a good one, for the sake of making commerically unimportant copyrights available.
[2] The tax doesn't have to be a big one to be effective, and any realistic tax would have to be on a uniform basis and a reasonable level to be administratively workable. Patent renewal fees already exist and are like that, and they do result in many patents being abandoned to the public domain before their term is up.
[3] An additional advantage of a copyright tax would be that in the case of items that might look like 'abandonware' but are not, the tax register would help people's efforts to find the person claiming the copyright, if they want to fix up any kind of proper licensing permission.
[4] A big difficulty in the way of implementation, is that copyright law conditions are now set by international treaty, the Berne Convention. This says that copyright has to be available without formality. So it isn't any longer up to Congress just to alter the law, unless they also want to leave (denounce) the Berne Convention (this would result in lack of mutuality of copyright protection between the US and just about every other country, an inconvenience and cause of loss and expense to copyright holders that caused the US to join the Convention in the first place.)
So, international negotiations would be needed to insert some kind of 'sunset' clause into the Berne Convention. Or else, the tax could perhaps be brought in for some other effect, short of ending the copyright, like maybe avoiding a presumption of licensing-as-of-right: this could be legislatively created for untaxed copyright works. (But I'm not sure that even that would be compatible with the existing Berne Convention anyway.)
[5] So, all in all, the idea sounds good, but is probably impractical until the international climate (in which the US govt currently has a big influence) moves away from the tendency to tighten IP nooses, and starts loosening up.
Maybe there will be some hope that the court would draw some inspiration from the Constitutional authorization for the patent system, and limit the current excess of claims for ideas, cutting out a whole load of worthless and oppressive patents. The aim of the constitutional authorization for patents was 'to promote the progress of... the useful arts'. 'Useful arts' used to mean hands-on making useful things.
The last thing the world needs is incontestable rights that were wrongly granted in the first place.
I can just hear the bill's defenders saying 'but this limitation would not be incontestability'. But patents are rights that can be asserted against the public generally. So this limitation on who can contest them, would be incontestability by a large section of the persons affected by the rights.
I agree with the parent post that...... this gripe with over-commenting is fundamentally flawed:
IMHO there's a deep fallacy in the flip comment that... If the code is written well, it will speak for itself.
Real-world program code is written for at least four 'audiences': the author, the machine, the user, and the maintainer.
The first three of these need only 'worry', in the aggregate and at a minimum, about the code compiling and running ok with correct results.
But the fourth has an additional worry: to know about the design (or at least part of it), and its purpose.
For these audience members, the code must amount -- somehow or other -- to a sufficiently explanatory description. The question is, what is sufficient?
(Clearly it's of no use at all in anything except an exercise for language-learners to comment at the level that int i=0; declares and initializes an integer.)
How much real background you give to explain a story depends, mainly, on what you think your audience already knows.
Code itself can intrinsically give only part of a story -- the concrete operations or conditions that are to be performed or set up. That doesn't in itself tell the maintainer why it is being done. (Sometimes it doesn't even indicate when it is going to be done -- in any way that illustrates the purpose.)
Some coders seem to think, that they should be able to ignore any members of their audience who don't know or understand as much background as they do themselves. They may have reasons of pecking order, or maybe it's a matter of imagined professional honor. Some coders may even think, that if they give out more than a very few snippets of explanation, they may even be letting themselves or their colleagues down, with a risk of giving out some kind of a subtext message, that they believe their audience doesn't know or understand very much. (Such factors as these could also explain the tones of scorn and contempt that sometimes seem to creep into these discussions.)
But it's important to acknowledge frankly that there can be all kinds of reasons why the audience, especially the maintainer, may not be acquainted with the reason for this or that aspect of the code.
(At the moment I'm writing some code that is full of arbitrary-looking numbers and features that come from outside standards. Maybe it's an extreme case. But it's been a non-trivial issue here even to determine on checks for correctness -- let alone actually carry out the checks, and very hard to know where and how to put in any modifications. That's true already for me, let alone anyone else who may come to it later on. So my comments here are for my own benefit as well as for any later-comer. The comments cite external sources and reasons for the commented features, including literature-references and a few words about what they stand for. This is code that can't possibly speak for itself.
But I've seen code with equally-strong dependence on the outside world, 'cleaned up' and 'prettified', by getting put through a formatter that strips out comments, indents 'nicely', and then substitutes all the meaningful variable-names with totally meaningless ones. The result is totally unintelligible and uncheckable -- and valueless.)
So my take on this is -- if in any doubt (and that's practically always), tell the story.
I completely agree. I only have 384MB on the machine from which I'm writing this. There isn't room on the mb for any more than that. I got totally tired of the system seizing up when I used to use Firefox. So I switched to Opera. That's not completely immune to seize-up/memory concumption problems either. So I'll keep an eye open for significant improvements to FF, and just possibly switch back if they fix the memory bugs.
I hope they won't totally forget the folks using older-specification systems, but I have my worries about the FF debugging process: I looked at the blog that was referenced in the article header, and some of the comments sound ominous for quality. The way some of them read, makes it seem as if patches to force memory-release in various situations are just going to be grafted on top of the buggy code. That looks like a recipe for performance loss, compared with the result of fixing the problems at their root?
I'm not sure that a version announced using the word 'growing' is a good thing at all. My ooo installation, on Mandriva Linux, already takes up 440 Mbytes and is sloooow! This is too much already! I'm considering getting rid of it and changing to something less bloated before it engulfs the whole machine!
I've never understood how 'perfect pitch' can mean anything, or anything musical, unless the pitch, whatever it is, stands in good relation to other pitches.
And yet, there is plenty of evidence that the relative pitch-sense of many modern ears has been dulled, compared to what was more common two to three hundred years ago.
The parent poster wrote: 4 half-steps 2^(4/12) (major third) gets you very close to a 5:4 3 half-steps 2^(3/12) (minor third) gets you very close to a 6:5
'Very close'??? The difference between -- the 2^(4/12) 'major third' of four semitones on the standard piano keyboard, -- and the pure major third of 5:4, is jarring to some, at almost one-seventh of a semitone too sharp! (Nearly 14 cents at 400 (equal-tempered) relative to 386 (5:4), is almost a seventh of a semitone.)
About the same goes for the minor third: on a standard keyboard it's more than a seventh of a semitone too flat for acoustic purity (about 16 cents, at 300 (equal-tempered) relative to 316 (pure 6:5)).
The standard equal-tempered keyboard is so dominant and close to universal, that probably many people have never even _heard_ pure harmony involving major or minor thirds. Quite a lot of musicians stick with equal temperament even when they don't have a keyboard as part of the group. I sense that the dominance of the standard keyboard with equal temperament has just about relegated pure harmony to a minority place. I play a string instrument myself, and on the basis of some tests with pitch-measurement, I find that I've been just about drilled into producing usually a close approximation to equal-temperament -- even though I do try to adjust to purer harmony with the others when I'm playing in a small group with a part to myself and when it's specially needed. Plenty of others play like that too. But pure harmony makes a stunning sound when it really is purely in tune, and it sharpens the ears and the pitch-sense to try to produce it.
Equally-tempered pitch-relations gained currency and dominance as music became generally more adventurous with its discords over the last couple of centuries, the keyboards had to be made to accommodate them, and the other players had to accommodate to the fixed-tuned keyboards whenever they played with them. The price was to throw away the pure concords. In an earlier age, when pure harmony was prized, a critic wrote of listening to harmonies based on equal temperament as like 'eating rotten meat and vinegar' -- and that's what is now the standard. Progress is not always up!
So my candidate for what has probably made modern ears less discerning is not the standard A 440, or any other standard pitch: it is the out-of-tune compromise in the pitch-relations of the standard equal-tempered keyboard.
(Or else maybe someone could explain what 'perfect pitch' is supposed to be, if it is really anything more than a pointlessly good memory for a tone that happens to be there as an arbitrary pitch on an intentionally out-of-tune keyboard?:) )
'as Pluto passes overhead through New Mexico's excellent night skies, it be declared a planet.'
Teacher: When is Pluto a planet today? Student: Today from Albuquerque Pluto is overhead between 2:28am and 1:00pm. It's night before 7:23am and after 7:10pm. Answer: 2:28am-7:23am and 7:10pm-midnight.
Sorry, NM (and zero marks for the student, there) but Pluto never gets 'overhead' in NM.
Pluto may be somewhere _above the horizon_ some time today, but that doesn't make it overhead.
To get 'overhead' anytime at the latitude of NM, Pluto would need to reach a north declination of more than about 31 degrees (or whatever NM's southern border latitude is exactly). In fact Pluto's orbit never takes it to a north declination of more than approx 23 degrees. Today, and for about the next hundred years, Pluto is even south of the equator, and isn't due to get anywhere north of the equator again until sometime around 2109.
So NM has a really long time to wait before its 'declaration' gets to be effective:)
Patent 6,379,553: Method to Display Failure Information A method and system are provided for displaying failure information on a limited resource computing device. Unparseable textual messages are displayed upon failure.... 4. The method of claim 3, in which the screen is blanked before the message is displayed. 5. The method of claim 4, in which the message is displayed on a blue background. --- As you see, React cannot legally implement the Blue Screen of Death.
Yeah well, humor and legal comments are not very compatible with each other! So probably the parent poster should have said that the 'blue screen of death' patent idea was a joke. On the USPTO website, patent 6,379,553 isn't even about computing:-- "United States Patent 6,379,553 -- Hogrefe April 30, 2002 Polymerase enhancing factor (PEF) extracts, PEF protein complexes, isolated PEF proteins, and methods for purifying and identifying same"
Well, as another/.er who used to keep bees, I could point to some possible explanations that are simpler too:
Hive-based diseases such as mites and fungi tend to kill bees in and around the hive.
One common cause of bees failing to return home after foraging is poisoning by recently-applied pesticides. It's not pesticide use in general that's responsible, it happens more when a farmer applies pesticide close to when a crop is in bloom and attracting the bees. For just this reason, some agricultural pesticides come with instructions not to apply them within a window of time related to crop blooming, but like many instructions, users do not always read and follow them. If there is a new pesticide around, or a new fashion for how to apply an existing one, this could have big consequences for bee mortality.
Then again, if the bees are not dying, but just not returning, this could be behavior based on the strain of bees. It could follow a change in strain chosen by large-scale bee-breeders and beekeepers. Colonies of some strains are bad at staying put in their hive, they tend to abscond, ie relocate, specially when short of stores and brood. Absconding is a bit different than swarming, where a nucleus of bees is left behind to carry on the old colony. Africanized bees, for example, are known as bad absconders as well as swarmers.
Slashdot Mirror
the book-scanning process is completely automated.
Well if it really is automated, how comes it that some of the scanned pages show part of the hand (complete with finger rings!) of the person who was doing the scanning? It looks as if the scanning was done by someone who didn't realise that the text can't be read if there's a hand between the page and the scanner-glass!
I reckon that's a manual process.
-wb-
The employer can only claim copyright over the portion of the work that was created under their employ. However, the sticky bit is that they licensed the original work under the GPL, so they must not distribute their additional code and, if they do, they must make it available under the GPL AND share copyright on the code with the original author.
Yes, and perhaps another way of putting it is like this. The contract between the employer and employee can obligate the employee to transfer his rights. But in such a transfer the employer can't receive wider rights than the employee had in the first place before he handed them over.
-wb-
Thanks, that's useful info.
-wb-
Previous Ubuntu versions, during install, would overwrite the master boot record without giving the user any choice about where to put Ubuntu's boot-loader (no choice of which partition to locate it) -- nor even any warning. But it seems the Ubuntu folk didn't consider that a bug. Does it still do that?
-wb-
Bugs are an error in the process, not the code. If you find a bug, you need to find the process error that allowed that bug to occur.
Not in the code?
Of course bugs are errors in the code. Duh! And sure, bugs may be errors in the process as well.
But why the false antithesis?
-wb-
As long as the books themselves are perfectly fine (which they seem to be),
Well, some are really good and well scanned, but others are a mess. From some organizations that do the scanning, you get missing pages and mangled pages. You get pages where the person doing the scanning sometimes put their hand between the page and the glass, so you can read the rings on their fingers but not the text on the page. (Books scanned at NY Public Library for example.) If ever there is a fold-out, you get at max half of it.
The Google Books organization doesn't seem to want to know, there is a mechanism for reporting single page defects but when 50 defects occur in a book it gets hard to work through them all using the button-clicks: I tried it for two books and also sent a message to Google Books, there was an automated reply and no action after several months.
So much for 'As long as the books themselves are perfectly fine ....', I'm afraid.
-wb-
Just think of the 'advantages' of having bitterness classified as a mental illness/disorder:
All those awkward folk who get themselves wronged and deprived of justice -- they can be reclassified as mentally ill, and maybe compulsorily treated with some happy pill, maybe locked up. And finally, they'll come to realize that there is justice after all, and they'll get to love Big Brother .....
-wb- :(
On that note has anyone tried the option on google books to report unreadable pages and if so do they do anything about it?
Yes, and while I guess instant action is hardly to be expected, on last check it had taken nearly three months after a report of three volumes with dozens of defectively-scanned pages, with nothing doing. (A separate message to the google people had produced only the (semi-automated?) response 'use the option'.) So, it seems like nothing is done about it.
-wb-
De-warping sounds useful, but there are problems that it probably won't solve --
Like the operator who scans a book page with his/her fingers or hand stuck between the page and the scanner-glass. For example, the dreaded 'New York Hand' or its fingers can be seen occupying the place of part of the text or figures on many pages of books scanned for Google-Books from the New York Public Library. On some pages, the impression of the fingers is clear enough to show the rings worn by the Hand that was doing the scanning. :(
It will take more than a de-warping patent to solve that one .....
-wb-
Without a full investigation, I'd hypothesize tha the status is "laying in many pieces on the ice somewhere in Antarctica."
I don't know what an investigation might find: or maybe, that some of the oil interests are sleeping easier at nights?
"Latency enabled."
. :) ... Garrison Keillor, is that you? Mod parent up, please?
I can see the sense in using a basic text editor to begin. I like that too.
At the present, though, I have a headache while drafting a piece which can hardly avoid a few math/tech symbols. My usual text editors don't participate in a standard for math and technical symbols.
After a few experiments in dumping various wp outputs to .RTF, and then retrieving/re-editing from .RTF --- it's seldom that the symbols are preserved. I'm trying to use as few different ones as possible, but I can't even identify a small few that are treated in a standard way. This is starting to drive me crazy.
-wb-
It clearly seems like LG was in the wrong here, but this was a case where both parties actually produce and sell goods using the patents they own. Has the US Supreme Court had anything to say about the numerous cases involving patent squatters/submarine patents? That seems like it ought to be a more serious issue.
If you look at the Supreme Court's decision (http://www.supremecourtus.gov/opinions/07pdf/06-937.pdf) it will be clear how it turns, first, on whether the patent license to Intel permits Intel to sell goods that practice the patents, and second, did the goods sold by Intel practice the patents. The answer to both questions was yes, triggering the application of the doctrine of exhaustion of patent rights with respect to the product that was sold. That was true even where the patent had method claims, and when those would not be completely practiced until the sold product was combined with other components. The rationale for that aspect was that the sold items practiced the patent by embodying all of the inventive matter and having in practice no other use except to practice the patent: the components left to be added were standard stuff, while all of the inventive content was in the items sold.
None of that depended in any way on the question whether the patent licensor engaged in manufacture on its own account. The court did not need to consider that. So the decision clearly applies to patent holders who grant licenses to others to sell patented products, irrespective of whether the licensors themselves do manufacturing or not.
-wb-
Funny, I don't recall any tests having to be passed when public fair use rights were massively cut down -- for example, as they were under the European Copyright Directive a few years back. (No fair use now in connection with any activity that can't count as non-commercial, for example.)
It would take an ingenious lawyer to argue that any of the fair use rights that coexisted happily with the Berne Convention for most of a century, are somehow in conflict with it now if there is any movement to revive or restate them.
-wb-
Yes: I've always wondered what Windows 2000 and upwards is doing when it grinds the disk so much on startup.
On or two linux distros also seem to have much more disk access than others:
What's all this for, besides prematurely wearing out the disk?
-wb-
(Well, there's already been a flood of posts on this one, but anyways .... )
[1] FWIW I think the idea of a copyright tax is a good one, for the sake of making commerically unimportant copyrights available.
[2] The tax doesn't have to be a big one to be effective, and any realistic tax would have to be on a uniform basis and a reasonable level to be administratively workable. Patent renewal fees already exist and are like that, and they do result in many patents being abandoned to the public domain before their term is up.
[3] An additional advantage of a copyright tax would be that in the case of items that might look like 'abandonware' but are not, the tax register would help people's efforts to find the person claiming the copyright, if they want to fix up any kind of proper licensing permission.
[4] A big difficulty in the way of implementation, is that copyright law conditions are now set by international treaty, the Berne Convention. This says that copyright has to be available without formality. So it isn't any longer up to Congress just to alter the law, unless they also want to leave (denounce) the Berne Convention (this would result in lack of mutuality of copyright protection between the US and just about every other country, an inconvenience and cause of loss and expense to copyright holders that caused the US to join the Convention in the first place.)
So, international negotiations would be needed to insert some kind of 'sunset' clause into the Berne Convention. Or else, the tax could perhaps be brought in for some other effect, short of ending the copyright, like maybe avoiding a presumption of licensing-as-of-right: this could be legislatively created for untaxed copyright works. (But I'm not sure that even that would be compatible with the existing Berne Convention anyway.)
[5] So, all in all, the idea sounds good, but is probably impractical until the international climate (in which the US govt currently has a big influence) moves away from the tendency to tighten IP nooses, and starts loosening up.
-wb-
Maybe there will be some hope that the court would draw some inspiration from the Constitutional authorization for the patent system, and limit the current excess of claims for ideas, cutting out a whole load of worthless and oppressive patents. The aim of the constitutional authorization for patents was 'to promote the progress of ... the useful arts'. 'Useful arts' used to mean hands-on making useful things.
Maybe there will be some useful amicus briefs.
-wb-
The last thing the world needs is incontestable rights that were wrongly granted in the first place.
I can just hear the bill's defenders saying 'but this limitation would not be incontestability'. But patents are rights that can be asserted against the public generally. So this limitation on who can contest them, would be incontestability by a large section of the persons affected by the rights.
-wb-
I agree with the parent post that ... ... this gripe with over-commenting is fundamentally flawed:
...
IMHO there's a deep fallacy in the flip comment that
If the code is written well, it will speak for itself.
Real-world program code is written for at least four 'audiences': the author, the machine, the user, and the maintainer.
The first three of these need only 'worry', in the aggregate and at a minimum, about the code compiling and running ok with correct results.
But the fourth has an additional worry: to know about the design (or at least part of it), and its purpose.
For these audience members, the code must amount -- somehow or other -- to a sufficiently explanatory description. The question is, what is sufficient?
(Clearly it's of no use at all in anything except an exercise for language-learners to comment at the level that int i=0; declares and initializes an integer.)
How much real background you give to explain a story depends, mainly, on what you think your audience already knows.
Code itself can intrinsically give only part of a story -- the concrete operations or conditions that are to be performed or set up. That doesn't in itself tell the maintainer why it is being done. (Sometimes it doesn't even indicate when it is going to be done -- in any way that illustrates the purpose.)
Some coders seem to think, that they should be able to ignore any members of their audience who don't know or understand as much background as they do themselves. They may have reasons of pecking order, or maybe it's a matter of imagined professional honor. Some coders may even think, that if they give out more than a very few snippets of explanation, they may even be letting themselves or their colleagues down, with a risk of giving out some kind of a subtext message, that they believe their audience doesn't know or understand very much. (Such factors as these could also explain the tones of scorn and contempt that sometimes seem to creep into these discussions.)
But it's important to acknowledge frankly that there can be all kinds of reasons why the audience, especially the maintainer, may not be acquainted with the reason for this or that aspect of the code.
(At the moment I'm writing some code that is full of arbitrary-looking numbers and features that come from outside standards. Maybe it's an extreme case. But it's been a non-trivial issue here even to determine on checks for correctness -- let alone actually carry out the checks, and very hard to know where and how to put in any modifications. That's true already for me, let alone anyone else who may come to it later on. So my comments here are for my own benefit as well as for any later-comer. The comments cite external sources and reasons for the commented features, including literature-references and a few words about what they stand for. This is code that can't possibly speak for itself.
But I've seen code with equally-strong dependence on the outside world, 'cleaned up' and 'prettified', by getting put through a formatter that strips out comments, indents 'nicely', and then substitutes all the meaningful variable-names with totally meaningless ones. The result is totally unintelligible and uncheckable -- and valueless.)
So my take on this is -- if in any doubt (and that's practically always), tell the story.
-wb-
I completely agree. I only have 384MB on the machine from which I'm writing this. There isn't room on the mb for any more than that. I got totally tired of the system seizing up when I used to use Firefox. So I switched to Opera. That's not completely immune to seize-up/memory concumption problems either. So I'll keep an eye open for significant improvements to FF, and just possibly switch back if they fix the memory bugs.
I hope they won't totally forget the folks using older-specification systems, but I have my worries about the FF debugging process: I looked at the blog that was referenced in the article header, and some of the comments sound ominous for quality. The way some of them read, makes it seem as if patches to force memory-release in various situations are just going to be grafted on top of the buggy code. That looks like a recipe for performance loss, compared with the result of fixing the problems at their root?
-wb-
I'm not sure that a version announced using the word 'growing' is a good thing at all. My ooo installation, on Mandriva Linux, already takes up 440 Mbytes and is sloooow! This is too much already! I'm considering getting rid of it and changing to something less bloated before it engulfs the whole machine!
-wb-
I've never understood how 'perfect pitch' can mean anything, or anything musical, unless the pitch, whatever it is, stands in good relation to other pitches.
:) )
And yet, there is plenty of evidence that the relative pitch-sense of many modern ears has been dulled, compared to what was more common two to three hundred years ago.
The parent poster wrote:
4 half-steps 2^(4/12) (major third) gets you very close to a 5:4
3 half-steps 2^(3/12) (minor third) gets you very close to a 6:5
'Very close'??? The difference between
-- the 2^(4/12) 'major third' of four semitones on the standard piano keyboard,
-- and the pure major third of 5:4,
is jarring to some, at almost one-seventh of a semitone too sharp! (Nearly 14 cents at 400 (equal-tempered) relative to 386 (5:4), is almost a seventh of a semitone.)
About the same goes for the minor third: on a standard keyboard it's more than a seventh of a semitone too flat for acoustic purity (about 16 cents, at 300 (equal-tempered) relative to 316 (pure 6:5)).
The standard equal-tempered keyboard is so dominant and close to universal, that probably many people have never even _heard_ pure harmony involving major or minor thirds. Quite a lot of musicians stick with equal temperament even when they don't have a keyboard as part of the group. I sense that the dominance of the standard keyboard with equal temperament has just about relegated pure harmony to a minority place. I play a string instrument myself, and on the basis of some tests with pitch-measurement, I find that I've been just about drilled into producing usually a close approximation to equal-temperament -- even though I do try to adjust to purer harmony with the others when I'm playing in a small group with a part to myself and when it's specially needed. Plenty of others play like that too. But pure harmony makes a stunning sound when it really is purely in tune, and it sharpens the ears and the pitch-sense to try to produce it.
Equally-tempered pitch-relations gained currency and dominance as music became generally more adventurous with its discords over the last couple of centuries, the keyboards had to be made to accommodate them, and the other players had to accommodate to the fixed-tuned keyboards whenever they played with them. The price was to throw away the pure concords. In an earlier age, when pure harmony was prized, a critic wrote of listening to harmonies based on equal temperament as like 'eating rotten meat and vinegar' -- and that's what is now the standard. Progress is not always up!
So my candidate for what has probably made modern ears less discerning is not the standard A 440, or any other standard pitch: it is the out-of-tune compromise in the pitch-relations of the standard equal-tempered keyboard.
(Or else maybe someone could explain what 'perfect pitch' is supposed to be, if it is really anything more than a pointlessly good memory for a tone that happens to be there as an arbitrary pitch on an intentionally out-of-tune keyboard?
-wb-
'as Pluto passes overhead through New Mexico's excellent night skies, it be declared a planet.'
:)
Teacher: When is Pluto a planet today?
Student: Today from Albuquerque Pluto is overhead between 2:28am and 1:00pm. It's night before 7:23am and after 7:10pm. Answer: 2:28am-7:23am and 7:10pm-midnight.
Sorry, NM (and zero marks for the student, there) but Pluto never gets 'overhead' in NM.
Pluto may be somewhere _above the horizon_ some time today, but that doesn't make it overhead.
To get 'overhead' anytime at the latitude of NM, Pluto would need to reach a north declination of more than about 31 degrees (or whatever NM's southern border latitude is exactly). In fact Pluto's orbit never takes it to a north declination of more than approx 23 degrees. Today, and for about the next hundred years, Pluto is even south of the equator, and isn't due to get anywhere north of the equator again until sometime around 2109.
So NM has a really long time to wait before its 'declaration' gets to be effective
-wb-
Patent 6,379,553: Method to Display Failure Information ...
A method and system are provided for displaying failure information on a limited resource computing device. Unparseable textual messages are displayed upon failure.
4. The method of claim 3, in which the screen is blanked before the message is displayed.
5. The method of claim 4, in which the message is displayed on a blue background.
---
As you see, React cannot legally implement the Blue Screen of Death.
Yeah well, humor and legal comments are not very compatible with each other!
So probably the parent poster should have said that the 'blue screen of death' patent idea was a joke. On the USPTO website, patent 6,379,553 isn't even about computing:--
"United States Patent 6,379,553 -- Hogrefe April 30, 2002
Polymerase enhancing factor (PEF) extracts, PEF protein complexes, isolated PEF proteins, and methods for purifying and identifying same"
-wb-
Well, as another /.er who used to keep bees, I could point to some possible explanations that are simpler too:
Hive-based diseases such as mites and fungi tend to kill bees in and around the hive.
One common cause of bees failing to return home after foraging is poisoning by recently-applied pesticides. It's not pesticide use in general that's responsible, it happens more when a farmer applies pesticide close to when a crop is in bloom and attracting the bees.
For just this reason, some agricultural pesticides come with instructions not to apply them within a window of time related to crop blooming, but like many instructions, users do not always read and follow them. If there is a new pesticide around, or a new fashion for how to apply an existing one, this could have big consequences for bee mortality.
Then again, if the bees are not dying, but just not returning, this could be behavior based on the strain of bees. It could follow a change in strain chosen by large-scale bee-breeders and beekeepers. Colonies of some strains are bad at staying put in their hive, they tend to abscond, ie relocate, specially when short of stores and brood. Absconding is a bit different than swarming, where a nucleus of bees is left behind to carry on the old colony. Africanized bees, for example, are known as bad absconders as well as swarmers.
-wb-