If no-one should park in front of fire hydrant, make a small barrier so that no-one CAN park in front of said hydrant. Seems easy to me (and could be done quite cheaply).
Forget about whether it crashes or not, NT (and 95, 98, et al) needs a reboot for even the most INNOCUOUS of system configuration changes (a small adjustment of the networking configuration for example)
That is it's BIG flaw, IMO.
In UNIX, it is usually just/etc/rc.d/init.d/network restart (or equivalent).
Re:cutting edge 3d....done on Linux of course(NOT)
on
Review:Toy Story 2
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· Score: 1
For Titanic, they used Alpha workstations running Linux, not Intel. (Large file support was required). They also used a lot of other brands and OS'es. And it didn't look all that convincing (IMO), except the bit that ILM did (the ship breaking in two).
Those are all clips from older Pixar shorts (which I'm sure are collected together on videotape somewhere). "Geri's Game", "Luxor Jr", and "Knickknack" are the ones you mentioned.
Actually, I think they considered the journey impossible because they DID know (roughly) the circumference of the earth, and assumed he would run out of provisions before he hit Asia. But, "The New World" intervened and he survived; and everything changed.
I don't know what my CSC chances are w/ d.net (server's offline right now:), But I get a kick out of looking at my RC5 stats and seeing something like:
"The odds are 1 in a billion trillion that this participant will find the key before anyone else does."
And in addition (aand I've said this here before), lawyer's and plaintiffs should NOT be allowed to profit from punitive damages (they are PUNISHMENTS, not rewards). The punitive fees should be distributed to the community (somehow).
Amen! I suffered for a year and a half w/ their awful drivers, continually upgrading when new drivers were released (after being pushed back and back...). Upgrades often broke more things than they fixed (Grim Fandango, for example). Basically, everyone's drivers suck, but ATI's especially.
When the time comes, some company or individual could release a distribution targeted specifically for musicians, with all the kernel mods they might need, and the sound utilities included and configured. Not a problem.
BS. I could start a class action suit for the amount of time that is wasted at my company waiting for NT reboots. Change ANY IP parameter? Reboot! Change the FONTS(??) on your display? Reboot! Install some new software that shouldn't have anything to do with the operating system? Reboot! etc, etc... It is the BIGGEST fault of Windows (IMO). Sure, in a totally static environment, you may not need to do this. But static environements are boring, and we need to adapt our network and setups to incorporate new hardware, or shift resources, etc. Linux (and our other Unix boxes) do NOT generally require nearly as many reboots (perhaps one when all the configuration has been completed)
So yes, in my experience, NT requires at least an order of magnitude more reboots than Linux/Unix systems for similar amounts of configuration, installation, administration, etc.
Your point MAY be valid for production servers, but NOT for desktops.
The sblive drivers currently do NOT work in SMP systems, so you might want to wait to see if the Open Source drivers can be adapted for dual rigs (and if someone is willing to do the work)
Punitive damages should NOT be awarded to the plaintiff or their lawyer. They should go directly into the social security pot (where politicians will have some trouble stealing from). They are PUNISHMENTS, and should not be given as an incentive to the lawyers to pursue bad cases. Make that one change, and I swear that these cases will plummet.
If I had a hot (and I mean HOT) cup of coffee, I'd keep it far FAR away from my gentitalia. The woman made a bad mistake. But serving such hot coffee to people in their cars, is just asking for trouble.
Re:I'm not too familiar with compression but..
on
David Huffman is Dead
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· Score: 1
What you describe is probably feasible (although the increase in complexity may not be worth it for an RLE code).
The LZH algorithm (Lempil-Ziv-Huffman) basically does this, though. The LZ77 part compresses by creating "tokens" which point back into a window of recently seen symbols, which is kind of like RLE except the "run" can be a mixture of symbols. These "tokens" then have a non-uniform distribution, which can be further compressed by Huffman codes (ie, give the more common tokens a shorter codelength). So the basic idea (tacking a Huffman (or arithmetic) coding step onto a front end pattern matching compressor), is a sound one.
Actually, I think this is the technique that gzip and PKZip use as well (Maybe LZH is slightly different) Anyone?
And those of us who did know him personally don't need to explain that it is a sad thing that he died... Of course it is! But David lived a long life (74) and did much with it; I don't think he left feeling like he wasted his time.
Believe me (to the original poster), wishing I had been able to talk to him one last time may sound selfish, but learning that he had passed hit me like a ton of bricks. Many others who knew him no doubt feel the same way.
Well, I think I'd take exception to the statement that "it was clear he hated having to teach us". After all, the guy was teaching well into his 70's, and I don't think he had to. I asked him once whether he was employed as a researcher, and had to do teaching as well, and he said, "No, I'm employed to teach".
I do believe he was generally a bit annoyed by the many students who were unprepared to take his classes (in his mind). He was demanding, to be sure (I generally spent ~ 15 hours each week on his homework alone; but I was woefully unprepared:), but I think he honestly did enjoy it when he saw his students begin to "get it." I know many didn't like his methods, but I enjoyed how he did NOT teach directly from a book, and instead, prepared class notes and assignments for each lecture; clearly he wasn't just phoning it in.
BTW. I'm class of '93; when were you there?
Re:Proof that it's optimal? I don't believe that.
on
David Huffman is Dead
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· Score: 2
Just a quick note about arithmetic coding: It can (essentially) produce codes of fractional length, unlike Huffman codes, so in the simple model above where only the frequency of single characters is modelled, it would almost certainly beat a similarly modelled Huffman code. The trick is that it holds more state information about the code, and can "delay" outputting bits until the fractional codelength fills up the next bit completely. Thus, it can produce shorter length codes than Huffman (using simpler statistical modelling), but you have to wait an indefinite amount of time for the next bit to be output.
It can be shown to be "theoretically optimal" in this sense as well. I believe Glen Langdon has shown that both techniques are eqipotent, in that, given sufficiently powerful modelling techniques, neither can outdo the other as a coding method (ie. they both can approach the entropy limits). However, as a practical method of coding, they each have their different strengths and weaknesses, and their different applications.
Well, I was fortunate enough to learn David Huffman's compression coding technique from the man himself. While at UC Santa Cruz, I took every course that he taught, and I think I learned more in those 4 classes than nearly all my other technical courses combined. Professor Huffman really was a genius, and taught me some amazing things about insight into a problem. I had no idea he was ill, and had been planning to talk to him about a few things (such as publishing his class notes and lectures; his problem sets were EXCELLENT teaching tools). He also wrote a recommendation for me to get into graduate school, and I never properly thanked him for it, which I deeply regret.
In any case, the story above seems mostly accurate; Huffman's teacher was in fact Richard Fano, who along with Claude Shannon, was one of the early architects of "information theory". Every aspect of our modern life, from our use of CD players, to wireless phones (to name but a few) came as a result of these ideas. In fact, Shannon-Fano compression coding is a related form that was developed before Hufmann's technique. However, since Shannon and Fano knew it wasn't "optimal" (a much abused word), and spent much time trying to come up with an optimal algorithm, they thought it was impossible. So, by giving the assignment to Huffman as a project, he hoped to show him how such as easy sounding question was in fact quite difficult (or impossible).
Well, Professor Huffman was brilliant at boiling problems down to their most basic nature, but after about a week of thinking about it on and off, he realized that he probably wouldn't be able to figure it out, and that it was a much harder problem than it at first seemed. So he crumbled up all his notes and began to prepare for the final, but as he tossed his notes into the garbage can, he says he had a moment of clarity, and suddenly realized the process was actually quite simple.
So when the time came to present his "project", Professor Fano called on David to discuss his method of producing minimum redundancy codes, assuming of course that David would have come up with a non-optimal method, or have to admit that it seemed very hard or impossible. Instead, Huffman went to the chalkboard and gave a quick explanation of how to produce what we now call "Huffman codes", then sat down. Fano apparently slapped his forehead in amazement and said (in French) something like, "It CAN'T be that easy!". But it was, and Huffman, never having been told that this problem was "impossible", dutifully solved it.
Huffman's achievements go well beyond his coding technique, and are well worth looking up (among other things, he produced some novelty papers about optical illusions that have become very useful in machine vision circles). I can tell you, as a former student, that he was both loved and loathed, but as someone who was willing to put in the work, his classes were incredibly enlightening.
Occasionally, a local access station here will show an Amiga Guru meditation (a red blinking box in the upper part of the display indicating a terminal error). Amiga's were (and still are, apparently) often used as video devices due to the nature of their display hardware.
The problem is that this station will often be broadcasting this image for MONTHS!!! 24 hrs a day of Guru meditaion. You'd think someone would come in and Ctrl-Amiga-Amiga...
Turing was one of the great pioneers of computing, just as if it were not for Ritchie, Knuth, Charles Babbage, Ada Lovelace, Grace Hooper and even Linus Torvalds, my computer would not be the same.
Without Turing it is highly unlikely linux users would be able to be able to type ls -l *.txt or windows users can click and point to sort by file name.
Actually, I'd put Stallman, Joy, and at least a few others in there too. After all, linux has little to do with what happens when you type "ls".:)
Slashdot Mirror
If no-one should park in front of fire hydrant, make a small barrier so that no-one CAN park in front of said hydrant. Seems easy to me (and could be done quite cheaply).
Forget about whether it crashes or not, NT (and 95, 98, et al) needs a reboot for even the most INNOCUOUS of system configuration changes (a small adjustment of the networking configuration for example)
/etc/rc.d/init.d/network restart (or equivalent).
That is it's BIG flaw, IMO.
In UNIX, it is usually just
For Titanic, they used Alpha workstations running Linux, not Intel. (Large file support was required). They also used a lot of other brands and OS'es. And it didn't look all that convincing (IMO), except the bit that ILM did (the ship breaking in two).
PS. I love Linux and GNU.
Those are all clips from older Pixar shorts (which I'm sure are collected together on videotape somewhere). "Geri's Game", "Luxor Jr", and "Knickknack" are the ones you mentioned.
Actually, I think they considered the journey impossible because they DID know (roughly) the circumference of the earth, and assumed he would run out of provisions before he hit Asia. But, "The New World" intervened and he survived; and everything changed.
I don't know what my CSC chances are w/ d.net (server's offline right now :), But I get a kick out of looking at my RC5 stats and seeing something like:
"The odds are 1 in a billion trillion that this participant will find the key before anyone else does."
And in addition (aand I've said this here before), lawyer's and plaintiffs should NOT be allowed to profit from punitive damages (they are PUNISHMENTS, not rewards). The punitive fees should be distributed to the community (somehow).
Amen! I suffered for a year and a half w/ their awful drivers, continually upgrading when new drivers were released (after being pushed back and back...). Upgrades often broke more things than they fixed (Grim Fandango, for example). Basically, everyone's drivers suck, but ATI's especially.
When the time comes, some company or individual could release a distribution targeted specifically for musicians, with all the kernel mods they might need, and the sound utilities included and configured. Not a problem.
You're friggin' kidding me, right? Say it is so.
BS. I could start a class action suit for the amount of time that is wasted at my company waiting for NT reboots. Change ANY IP parameter? Reboot! Change the FONTS(??) on your display? Reboot! Install some new software that shouldn't have anything to do with the operating system? Reboot! etc, etc... It is the BIGGEST fault of Windows (IMO). Sure, in a totally static environment, you may not need to do this. But static environements are boring, and we need to adapt our network and setups to incorporate new hardware, or shift resources, etc. Linux (and our other Unix boxes) do NOT generally require nearly as many reboots (perhaps one when all the configuration has been completed)
So yes, in my experience, NT requires at least an order of magnitude more reboots than Linux/Unix systems for similar amounts of configuration, installation, administration, etc.
Your point MAY be valid for production servers, but NOT for desktops.
The sblive drivers currently do NOT work in SMP systems, so you might want to wait to see if the Open Source drivers can be adapted for dual rigs (and if someone is willing to do the work)
Punitive damages should NOT be awarded to the plaintiff or their lawyer. They should go directly into the social security pot (where politicians will have some trouble stealing from). They are PUNISHMENTS, and should not be given as an incentive to the lawyers to pursue bad cases. Make that one change, and I swear that these cases will plummet.
If I had a hot (and I mean HOT) cup of coffee, I'd keep it far FAR away from my gentitalia. The woman made a bad mistake. But serving such hot coffee to people in their cars, is just asking for trouble.
That's why I ALWAYS sat in the back row!
What you describe is probably feasible (although the increase in complexity may not be worth it for an RLE code).
The LZH algorithm (Lempil-Ziv-Huffman) basically does this, though. The LZ77 part compresses by creating "tokens" which point back into a window of recently seen symbols, which is kind of like RLE except the "run" can be a mixture of symbols. These "tokens" then have a non-uniform distribution, which can be further compressed by Huffman codes (ie, give the more common tokens a shorter codelength). So the basic idea (tacking a Huffman (or arithmetic) coding step onto a front end pattern matching compressor), is a sound one.
Actually, I think this is the technique that gzip and PKZip use as well (Maybe LZH is slightly different) Anyone?
And those of us who did know him personally don't need to explain that it is a sad thing that he died... Of course it is! But David lived a long life (74) and did much with it; I don't think he left feeling like he wasted his time.
Believe me (to the original poster), wishing I had been able to talk to him one last time may sound selfish, but learning that he had passed hit me like a ton of bricks. Many others who knew him no doubt feel the same way.
Well, I think I'd take exception to the statement that "it was clear he hated having to teach us". After all, the guy was teaching well into his 70's, and I don't think he had to. I asked him once whether he was employed as a researcher, and had to do teaching as well, and he said, "No, I'm employed to teach".
:), but I think he honestly did enjoy it when he saw his students begin to "get it." I know many didn't like his methods, but I enjoyed how he did NOT teach directly from a book, and instead, prepared class notes and assignments for each lecture; clearly he wasn't just phoning it in.
I do believe he was generally a bit annoyed by the many students who were unprepared to take his classes (in his mind). He was demanding, to be sure (I generally spent ~ 15 hours each week on his homework alone; but I was woefully unprepared
BTW. I'm class of '93; when were you there?
Just a quick note about arithmetic coding: It can (essentially) produce codes of fractional length, unlike Huffman codes, so in the simple model above where only the frequency of single characters is modelled, it would almost certainly beat a similarly modelled Huffman code. The trick is that it holds more state information about the code, and can "delay" outputting bits until the fractional codelength fills up the next bit completely. Thus, it can produce shorter length codes than Huffman (using simpler statistical modelling), but you have to wait an indefinite amount of time for the next bit to be output.
It can be shown to be "theoretically optimal" in this sense as well. I believe Glen Langdon has shown that both techniques are eqipotent, in that, given sufficiently powerful modelling techniques, neither can outdo the other as a coding method (ie. they both can approach the entropy limits). However, as a practical method of coding, they each have their different strengths and weaknesses, and their different applications.
Well, I was fortunate enough to learn David Huffman's compression coding technique from the man himself. While at UC Santa Cruz, I took every course that he taught, and I think I learned more in those 4 classes than nearly all my other technical courses combined. Professor Huffman really was a genius, and taught me some amazing things about insight into a problem. I had no idea he was ill, and had been planning to talk to him about a few things (such as publishing his class notes and lectures; his problem sets were EXCELLENT teaching tools). He also wrote a recommendation for me to get into graduate school, and I never properly thanked him for it, which I deeply regret.
In any case, the story above seems mostly accurate; Huffman's teacher was in fact Richard Fano, who along with Claude Shannon, was one of the early architects of "information theory". Every aspect of our modern life, from our use of CD players, to wireless phones (to name but a few) came as a result of these ideas. In fact, Shannon-Fano compression coding is a related form that was developed before Hufmann's technique. However, since Shannon and Fano knew it wasn't "optimal" (a much abused word), and spent much time trying to come up with an optimal algorithm, they thought it was impossible. So, by giving the assignment to Huffman as a project, he hoped to show him how such as easy sounding question was in fact quite difficult (or impossible).
Well, Professor Huffman was brilliant at boiling problems down to their most basic nature, but after about a week of thinking about it on and off, he realized that he probably wouldn't be able to figure it out, and that it was a much harder problem than it at first seemed. So he crumbled up all his notes and began to prepare for the final, but as he tossed his notes into the garbage can, he says he had a moment of clarity, and suddenly realized the process was actually quite simple.
So when the time came to present his "project", Professor Fano called on David to discuss his method of producing minimum redundancy codes, assuming of course that David would have come up with a non-optimal method, or have to admit that it seemed very hard or impossible. Instead, Huffman went to the chalkboard and gave a quick explanation of how to produce what we now call "Huffman codes", then sat down. Fano apparently slapped his forehead in amazement and said (in French) something like, "It CAN'T be that easy!". But it was, and Huffman, never having been told that this problem was "impossible", dutifully solved it.
Huffman's achievements go well beyond his coding technique, and are well worth looking up (among other things, he produced some novelty papers about optical illusions that have become very useful in machine vision circles). I can tell you, as a former student, that he was both loved and loathed, but as someone who was willing to put in the work, his classes were incredibly enlightening.
A pathetic attempt... Next time, try live, fresh flamebait, or leave it to the masters.
Robert Harris, not Thomas Harris. :)
Occasionally, a local access station here will show an Amiga Guru meditation (a red blinking box in the upper part of the display indicating a terminal error). Amiga's were (and still are, apparently) often used as video devices due to the nature of their display hardware.
The problem is that this station will often be broadcasting this image for MONTHS!!! 24 hrs a day of Guru meditaion. You'd think someone would come in and Ctrl-Amiga-Amiga...
Well, spelling is syntax, not grammar. Thank you.
hyuk hyuk.
Without Turing it is highly unlikely linux users would be able to be able to type ls -l *.txt or windows users can click and point to sort by file name.
Actually, I'd put Stallman, Joy, and at least a few others in there too. After all, linux has little to do with what happens when you type "ls". :)
Good point, however.