Re:Mother of God
on
Singing Science
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· Score: 3, Informative
Oh, c'mon... this is pretty durn standard stuff. I have a box of cassettes of this kind of music, and a rack of CDs. It's called Filk, and there's both Science and Science Fiction variants. Back before it had a name, it was just music done by scientists and professors. Tom Lehrer was singing about the elements, Wernher Von Braun and New Math starting in the late 50s, and I have a songbook of Medieval students songs that predates that by several centuries.
Heck, I've written songs about Polyethylene terephthalate and patch panels... they are things I work with and like. I also write and sing songs about corsets and myths and the SCA. Pretty much anything that somebody likes or is into, if they are a musician, gets written about. I have lyrics about the tetramanganese cluster in Photosystem II because my fiance worked with it.
It's not "nerdy", it's simply people singing about what they do, work and play with. Pretty much the same as all the songs about the railroad, playing baseball or about steelworkers, only these happen to be written by people in the sciences. If you're riding on a railroad, you write "City of New Orleans". If you're working with NMR spec, you write a song about spectroscopy.
The drummer is the least significant component of any rock band. How these guys managed to call the tune is beyfond me. Just sit at the back and bash the pads, would you
You are clearly not a Grateful Dead fan... or at least have not listened to the long jam sessions in their live shows. The reason they have two drummers is because they are real percussionists -- rather than being in the band because they were "Nick's friend who owns a kit". The two of them work together and do some very spacey and complex stuff.
Unlike in most bands, the bassist doesn't simply repeat six notes and the drummers not only actually work hard, they use more than just the one drum kit in one song (another reason for two drummers -- so one can keep the beat while the other is running to a new instrument). Much of the quality that people like about the Dead is the fact that the underlying music is complex and slowly rotates across a long jam.
Red Hat and Fedora aren't as dominant as people might think in the US. SUSE and K/Ubuntu enjoy quite a healthy mindshare here. It's the popular binary split... there's something internally satisfying about reducing things to simplistic "people use foo in area A and bar in area B", when in reality there are statistical variations rather than hard absolutes.
Hell, I live in a townhouse at least 30 years old in a well populated college town, and I have tried typing my address in in a wide variety of ways and I can't get it to work.
It's really pissing me off. I use KDE, here's an announcement, and most of the conversation involves Gnome. I don't give a pissant about Gnome, AutoCAD, CharGrill cooking methods, Yamaha motorcycles or spray cheese... these are all things I don't use.
But I do use KDE, this announcement is about KDE, and everybody's talking about something I don't use or care about.
It makes me want to start a discussion on why I like my Weber grill the next time there's a Gnome announcement.
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Evan
Re:"Stable?" "Stable" is for Isotopes
on
KDE 3.5 Released
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· Score: 1
Stable is the release for people to use. Unstable is often non-working or uncompilable as it is in the middle of being rewritten for the next stable release. Unstable releases are for developers, stable releases are for users. Beta and RC releases are for users willing to accept potential problems in exchange for new features.
It has nothing to do with Linux, it has to do with how software is developed. All software companies do the same thing, it's just that most closed source companies don't release their unstable versions to the public... the concept of doing so is part of how open source works.
Yeah... I generally think about data structures, how to structure some minor utility I'm working on, maybe some sort of...
DAMMIT! Why the hell did she take the last roll of TP from my bathroom? She knows that I use this bathroom during the day so I don't have to leave the office part of the house... now I have to get downstairs for another roll. Ick.
So, yeah. I do lots of thinking, but very little problem solving while sitting.
It's already started shipping demo units to select big media clients. The same way they have loaner equipment for many different types of new tech (cutting lasers, backup systems, network appliances) for large corporations. It's a perk for clients, a PR tease, and a way to get quotes from "CTO of BigCorp" to be used in their sales literature.
That's usually a pretty good (but not absolute) indicator that it's about to ship. It's also often an indicator that it's priced for mid to large sized corporations, not for small companies or individuals.
See the Wikipedia article for more fascinating information...
I did, before I posted that. There's nothing about the smell in the Urea entry, and I won't draw assumptions from usage. Plenty of things that reek by themselves are used for various flavoring and scenting purposes.
A bit more research reveals this under the wikipedia entry for urine: "However, after that, bacteria that contaminate the urine will convert chemicals in the urine into smelling chemicals that are responsible for the distinctive odor of stale urine; in particular, ammonia is produced from urea".
And now I go to one last source...
Okay, my fiance pursuing a PhD in chemistry has worked with urea and says it has a strong odor. It smells like ammonia, but she can't recall offhand if it's the actual smell of urea or a result of it breaking down into actual ammonia.
My recollection is hazy, with plenty of room for it to be "it's the urea that smells because it breaks down into ammonia".
Interesting little side tangent here.
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Evan
Re:Low Flush *wastes* water, Oil based don't work
on
To Flush Or Not To Flush
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· Score: 3, Interesting
I thought the distinctive smell was urea? Maybe it's just a top note?
Regardless, the new no flush urinals do have a significantly reduced smell, although I have no idea whatsoever if it is due to them not having been used as long. The urinals at the newly rebuilt Pennsylvania Military Museum are several months old and have no whiff around them (other than a general "clean public bathroom" smell).
You can do that with PHP... as somebody notes up above, it's pretty common with the Windows version. On linux you use standard.so library files.
Most packaged PHP (a la debian and ubuntu apt-get and SUSE repositories) handle it the way you're looking for - shared libraries. I think pear handles it that way as well. I'm not sure; I don't often use it. All of the closed source third party libraries are, of course, done that way as well.
I'm not sure where you got the idea that PHP can't use new shared binary libraries. You can certain choose to compile libraries directly into PHP... maybe you took the fact that it is an option as a mandatory requirement?
There are no significant digits, it's a date. It may be written oddly, but that seems to be popular these days. Same goes for telephone numbers - people like to write them with periods, but that doesn't mean that 800.588.7726 has significant numbers. Nor does the 2005.11.25 sitting up in my clock.
That's a silly comparison. Every upstart that has taken down an established company has started out with far less revenue that the big company. Sometimes they even become big companies themselves (or create enough room for somebody else to sneak in and become the new big company). The trick is knowing which ones to watch.
Wireless will always dominate where possible to use.
I believe the poster's point is that the current technology becomes impossible to use as a natural consequence of it being used. It's a specific point dealing with a problem with current versions, not a general one.
No idea if he's right, but I've noticed the problem he is referring to. It exists as a practical issue.
Yes, but this one was based on an older engraving... and the source for the image burned was from the Dover Archive, not the O'Reilly book that used it (they even link to the original engraving provided to the public). Plus the coverage of this is from Make Magazine, published by O'Reilly.
I have a feeling they are okay with it, plus the burned image is derived from the original, not from O'Reilly. I'm not sure that you read the article at all.
How about the part where they promised at the last conference not to use RF badges and then had RF strips hidden in the badges instead?
I'm not sure, but when the conference decides to outlaw something and security's reaction is to keep doing it and just hide it instead, there's a problem.
Yes. Yes it is. That would be the point -- to challenge the students.
But we're not discussing Latin, Greek or even Old or Middle English. We're discussing a Modern English author. It does require effort to figure out the references and some of the vocabulary. That effort is what makes it a worthwhile exercise.
I'd imagine a good mathematician could make all the problems in math textbooks easier. They would be accessible to a wider audience. But the point of scholastic work is not to be easy.
For one thing, this cell phone Shakespeare crap will probably die within weeks of its publication
I don't think the cell phone translations are intended to be taught or used as anything but parody. There is a long history of recreational and parody translations of Shakespeare, from Klingon to Conehead. These aren't intended to be used in any educational setting, nor will they be (other than possibly as a fun side item).
May be just us turning into our "kids nowadays" parents.
Possibly. I don't have any problem whatsoever with an annotated Shakespeare. It is when they cut the actual writings of Shakespeare out of the study *of* Shakespeare's writings that it becomes questionable.
Sixteenth-century english is very different from the contemporary language. What's wrong with translating it?
Because they are fairly lightweight stories. Shakespeare's genius lay in the way that he wove the language together: the cadence and flow of the words. The whole point of studying Shakespeare is studying the way he wrote.
It's as if somebody was teaching math without those pesky numbers or science without including either method or facts. It's surgically eliminating the specific thing that makes the subject worth studying. Sure the language requires work to fully understand. That depth is why it's worth studying.
No, in fact I even said that I do (amarok), and that I enjoy it. My only dismissive comment is that I don't spent much time *actively* listening to music (i.e., inside the interface). Most of the time it's a "hit play and ignore" type of application similar to the clock in my desktop bar. Once configured, it's done, and when the application is actually active, it's in the background. But that really has little to do with this discussion other than to point out that music players are, especially if you just listen to music, a slightly different category of application: one you use for long periods, but are actively using for very short periods.
My comment was pretty much in line with yours... I manage projects with many file types. In other words, I don't move from "images" to "music" to "text", I move from "this client" to "that client" to "SCA research" to "calligraphy". One nifty thing I've done is moved all my bookmarks into my file system so I can manage them as parts of subprojects rather than having to drill down through both my bookmark list and through a file system.
So, what project manager handles many file types? Well, it's not a type specific manager like this guy is talking about. It's a general purpose file manager... or for the CLI inclined, a shell. Project managers that extend to many file types eventually become file managers.
Let's put it this way... what is the difference between a "Type Manager" that can handle a wide variety of types of files and link them together in groups and a "File Manager" that can handle a wide variety of types of files and link them together in groups? In Konqueror, I can filter by type of file or by substring in the name, locate all files of a given type across the drive, edit, move and delete files. I can edit the meta information within files (title, track, etc. in mp3s), and preview, edit or view/play them.
The idea is like a database using the primary format as the key, but the database can store more than just the primary format.
Then aren't type specific and general managers aiming at the same goals? Isn't the ultimate version of either the same application? Something that allows you to manage all your different files/data and view lists of them in various ways, annotate, filter, link and edit them?
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Heck, I've written songs about Polyethylene terephthalate and patch panels... they are things I work with and like. I also write and sing songs about corsets and myths and the SCA. Pretty much anything that somebody likes or is into, if they are a musician, gets written about. I have lyrics about the tetramanganese cluster in Photosystem II because my fiance worked with it.
It's not "nerdy", it's simply people singing about what they do, work and play with. Pretty much the same as all the songs about the railroad, playing baseball or about steelworkers, only these happen to be written by people in the sciences. If you're riding on a railroad, you write "City of New Orleans". If you're working with NMR spec, you write a song about spectroscopy.
--
Evan
You are clearly not a Grateful Dead fan... or at least have not listened to the long jam sessions in their live shows. The reason they have two drummers is because they are real percussionists -- rather than being in the band because they were "Nick's friend who owns a kit". The two of them work together and do some very spacey and complex stuff.
Unlike in most bands, the bassist doesn't simply repeat six notes and the drummers not only actually work hard, they use more than just the one drum kit in one song (another reason for two drummers -- so one can keep the beat while the other is running to a new instrument). Much of the quality that people like about the Dead is the fact that the underlying music is complex and slowly rotates across a long jam.
--
Evan
Yes it does. Go to Settings, Configure Sieve Filters. I use procmail and local mbox delivery, so I can't comment on what it does, but it's there.
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Evan
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Evan
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Evan
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Evan
But I do use KDE, this announcement is about KDE, and everybody's talking about something I don't use or care about.
It makes me want to start a discussion on why I like my Weber grill the next time there's a Gnome announcement.
--
Evan
It has nothing to do with Linux, it has to do with how software is developed. All software companies do the same thing, it's just that most closed source companies don't release their unstable versions to the public... the concept of doing so is part of how open source works.
--
Evan
DAMMIT! Why the hell did she take the last roll of TP from my bathroom? She knows that I use this bathroom during the day so I don't have to leave the office part of the house... now I have to get downstairs for another roll. Ick.
So, yeah. I do lots of thinking, but very little problem solving while sitting.
--
Evan
That's usually a pretty good (but not absolute) indicator that it's about to ship. It's also often an indicator that it's priced for mid to large sized corporations, not for small companies or individuals.
--
Evan
I did, before I posted that. There's nothing about the smell in the Urea entry, and I won't draw assumptions from usage. Plenty of things that reek by themselves are used for various flavoring and scenting purposes.
A bit more research reveals this under the wikipedia entry for urine: "However, after that, bacteria that contaminate the urine will convert chemicals in the urine into smelling chemicals that are responsible for the distinctive odor of stale urine; in particular, ammonia is produced from urea".
And now I go to one last source...
Okay, my fiance pursuing a PhD in chemistry has worked with urea and says it has a strong odor. It smells like ammonia, but she can't recall offhand if it's the actual smell of urea or a result of it breaking down into actual ammonia.
My recollection is hazy, with plenty of room for it to be "it's the urea that smells because it breaks down into ammonia".
Interesting little side tangent here.
--
Evan
Regardless, the new no flush urinals do have a significantly reduced smell, although I have no idea whatsoever if it is due to them not having been used as long. The urinals at the newly rebuilt Pennsylvania Military Museum are several months old and have no whiff around them (other than a general "clean public bathroom" smell).
--
Evan
Most packaged PHP (a la debian and ubuntu apt-get and SUSE repositories) handle it the way you're looking for - shared libraries. I think pear handles it that way as well. I'm not sure; I don't often use it. All of the closed source third party libraries are, of course, done that way as well.
I'm not sure where you got the idea that PHP can't use new shared binary libraries. You can certain choose to compile libraries directly into PHP... maybe you took the fact that it is an option as a mandatory requirement?
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Evan
Using dates as a version number is pretty common.
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Evan
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Evan
I believe the poster's point is that the current technology becomes impossible to use as a natural consequence of it being used. It's a specific point dealing with a problem with current versions, not a general one.
No idea if he's right, but I've noticed the problem he is referring to. It exists as a practical issue.
--
Evan
I have a feeling they are okay with it, plus the burned image is derived from the original, not from O'Reilly. I'm not sure that you read the article at all.
--
Evan
I'm not sure, but when the conference decides to outlaw something and security's reaction is to keep doing it and just hide it instead, there's a problem.
--
Evan
Yes. Yes it is. That would be the point -- to challenge the students.
But we're not discussing Latin, Greek or even Old or Middle English. We're discussing a Modern English author. It does require effort to figure out the references and some of the vocabulary. That effort is what makes it a worthwhile exercise.
I'd imagine a good mathematician could make all the problems in math textbooks easier. They would be accessible to a wider audience. But the point of scholastic work is not to be easy.
--
Evan
I don't think the cell phone translations are intended to be taught or used as anything but parody. There is a long history of recreational and parody translations of Shakespeare, from Klingon to Conehead. These aren't intended to be used in any educational setting, nor will they be (other than possibly as a fun side item).
--
Evan
Possibly. I don't have any problem whatsoever with an annotated Shakespeare. It is when they cut the actual writings of Shakespeare out of the study *of* Shakespeare's writings that it becomes questionable.
--
Evan
Because they are fairly lightweight stories. Shakespeare's genius lay in the way that he wove the language together: the cadence and flow of the words. The whole point of studying Shakespeare is studying the way he wrote.
It's as if somebody was teaching math without those pesky numbers or science without including either method or facts. It's surgically eliminating the specific thing that makes the subject worth studying. Sure the language requires work to fully understand. That depth is why it's worth studying.
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Evan
That scares the hell out of me.
--
Evan
No, in fact I even said that I do (amarok), and that I enjoy it. My only dismissive comment is that I don't spent much time *actively* listening to music (i.e., inside the interface). Most of the time it's a "hit play and ignore" type of application similar to the clock in my desktop bar. Once configured, it's done, and when the application is actually active, it's in the background. But that really has little to do with this discussion other than to point out that music players are, especially if you just listen to music, a slightly different category of application: one you use for long periods, but are actively using for very short periods.
My comment was pretty much in line with yours... I manage projects with many file types. In other words, I don't move from "images" to "music" to "text", I move from "this client" to "that client" to "SCA research" to "calligraphy". One nifty thing I've done is moved all my bookmarks into my file system so I can manage them as parts of subprojects rather than having to drill down through both my bookmark list and through a file system.
So, what project manager handles many file types? Well, it's not a type specific manager like this guy is talking about. It's a general purpose file manager... or for the CLI inclined, a shell. Project managers that extend to many file types eventually become file managers.
Let's put it this way... what is the difference between a "Type Manager" that can handle a wide variety of types of files and link them together in groups and a "File Manager" that can handle a wide variety of types of files and link them together in groups? In Konqueror, I can filter by type of file or by substring in the name, locate all files of a given type across the drive, edit, move and delete files. I can edit the meta information within files (title, track, etc. in mp3s), and preview, edit or view/play them.
The idea is like a database using the primary format as the key, but the database can store more than just the primary format.
Then aren't type specific and general managers aiming at the same goals? Isn't the ultimate version of either the same application? Something that allows you to manage all your different files/data and view lists of them in various ways, annotate, filter, link and edit them?
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Evan
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Evan