The actors in Incubo didn't actually know Esperanto... they just memorized the dialog by sound. That is, apparently, why it sounds so terrible. Allegedly the director wanted a language that would sound foreign to all people (apparently considering the population of fluent esperantists to be negligible:-) and hence chose Esperanto. The only other Esperanto film reference I know is that the announcements in Gattaca are supposedly in Esperanto, although I haven't re-watched the film to verify that.
You're right that he should not use JPEG for this, but for the wrong reasons. JPEG is simply the wrong format for images that are not like photographs. Specifically, JPEG is not appropriate for images with high spatial frequencies (ie, distinct lines and shapes, and a small number of colors). Raster-based formats (GIF, PNG, TIFF, etc) are the appropriate format for scanned text, diagrams, etc. PNG is not a replacement for JPEG.
Furthermore, if you want animations, you are overlooking the new, cool computer technology called MNG.
Although this problem is an especially serious one when it comes to journalism, it's a general problem with the WWW. Sometimes one wants to link to a specific version of a webpage or examine the changes that have made. One solution is to use RCS to keep track of page versions, and use a web server extension (such as an apache module) that allows access to the changelog and to past versions. I would love to see this implemented widely...
I hacked up a little perl script demonstrating the idea. Now each of my web pages can have a "this page contains version information" link to its changelog.
And then there's VMS which has versioning built into the filesystem...
Well, there is only one kind of neutron, which is a heavy, composite particle made up of a combination of one "up" quark and two "down" quarks. Quarks have flavors too. They are up, down, strange, charm, top (or truth), and bottom (or beauty). And they have colors: red, green, and blue. But of course, you're right, all these names are entirely arbitrary, and it would work just as well to have chocolate, strawberry, and vanilla neutrinos rather than electron (e), muon (), and tau ().
In the "standard model" of particle physics, there are sixteen "elementary" particles, and their anti-particles. Three of these particles are the neutrinos, which come in three different flavors. It's long been known that their masses must be very small, and it's been thought that neutrinos might have zero mass, like the photon. However, neutrino oscillation implies that there is a mass *difference* between neutrino flavors, and a mass difference means that they can't all be zero. Thus this means that neutrinos have mass, and that's a very important theoretical issue!
I find it ironic that the point is specifically made that one should avoid the term geek, yet in its place, the author selects the term Einstein. It sounds like elementary school all over again.
Anyway, I wanted to point out an internet resource I found long ago called The Hacker Employment FAQ which pretty much addresses the same audience as this book, except it uses the much more appropriate label Hacker rather than resorting to names of great physicists of the twentieth century.
The problem is not with the rights to your homework problems, the problem is with the rights to code created as part of paid research programs. If you aren't paid for your work and you haven't signed any contracts then you retain all the rights to your creations. However, when the Federal Government gives a University a grant to research some topic and produce some code, it's less clear how the results of that project can or should be licensed.
PRCS, the Project Revision Control System, is the front end to a set of tools that (like CVS) provide a way to deal with sets of files and directories as an entity, preserving coherent versions of the entire set.
Excellent! now those little green men out there in other planetary systems will receive something useful in the radio transmissions from earth instead of endless daytime TV re-runs... but how many thousands of years will it take to get there?
I thought that the "opencola" thing was pretty nifty... but it turns out, as you might expect, that it's just a PR stunt, although admittedly one for an open source supporting company. The source (recipe) they give does not generated the binaries (cola) they distribute. From the website:
An important note: this is *not* the recipe for "OpenCola" -- that is, the canned beverage from OpenCola that you may have received at a trade show, or other venue or outlet. Making canned cola requires millions of dollars in abstruse gear and manufacturing gizmos. It's easier to make nerve gas than manufacture cola. This is a kitchen-sink recipe that you can make all on your own. It is *our* kitchen-sink recipe. We figured it out somewhere between coding the COLA SDK and debugging the Linux build of the clerver.
Even so, it would be fun to try making some. But there's nothing new here: cola recipes have been around for decades, and the folklore process that propagates them is the original form of open source.
Re:The best way to convert people from Microsoft..
on
Borking Outlook Express
·
· Score: 5, Insightful
This post is in reply to your "exclude microsoft users" post, and the attitude in the article exemplified by this quote: ``It's true that I run a mailing list that does not allow posting from Windows users. Many people complain about this, but in my mind I see it as no different than a restaurant or dance hall having a dress code.''
When did we become such elitists? When users are arbitrarily excluded and abused in the name of "free software," I begin to think that pehaps these same people now toting the supremacy of their operating system might in another time promote the supremacy of their language, nationality, or race.
I see nothing productive in this article or the attitude of its creator. The point of our movement is to produce good, useful software, and to make it available to everyone. The point is not to force them to use it, or to punish those who don't. Where's the freedom in that?
How did NR ever lead you to believe that numerical programs can be cleanly written in C? The C code in Numerical Recipes is terrible. The authors basically transplanted their Fortran code directly to C, resulting in unreadable programs. They ignore C conventions, for example by using Fortan-style arrays based at 1 instead C's 0-based arrays. Variable names are most often uninformative, at most two letters. Furthermore their algorithms often implement special rather than general cases of the problems they seek to solve. Finally, while the prose can enlightening, it's been questioned whether the authors are even qualified to write such a book. But don't take my word for it, read NASA/JPL's page `Why not use Numerical Recipes,' which begins with the statement, ``We have found Numerical Recipes to be generally unreliable.''
On the topic of OpenGL, your logic doesn't follow. The mathematical content of the 3D graphics routines is implemented within the OpenGL library (not so much the game itself), and these routines are implemented in C, assembly, and hardware, not because these media provide for the most eloquent expression of mathematics, but because they provide for the fastest implementation, and speed is of primary importance in 3D graphics.
``All this disruption for a campaign that killed five people''
What a short-sighted thing to say. You're whining that protections against the launch of a biological attack might erase your digital camera pictures? Firstly, it is the postal service's precautions that have limited the death toll to five; and secondly, if you mean to imply that a mere five deaths doesn't warrant this astounding level of inconvenience, then what death toll would be needed to justify these measures? ie, how long would you wait? This isn't like holding secret military tribunals or any of the other civil-liberty-violating measures that have been discussed -- this is a simple, safe, effective, and prudent thing to do. I'm sure that the first time a UPS package or FedEx package is found to contain Anthrax or anything similar, then the private couriers will immediately begin irradiating their packages too. In fact, it might even become required by law.
If you're sending something by mail that could perhaps be damaged by certain handling in the mail, you can write a message on the outside of the package requesting special handling. ``Photographs: do not bend.'' ``Perishable: do not freeze.'' Sensitive materials ranging from high speed film to live queen bees are routinely sent through the mail, and it works just fine. I'm sure ``Sensitive: Do not irradiate'' or something of that nature would work just fine. Your mail might be ever so slightly delayed due to the alternate handling, but you'll live.
Why bother replacing the failed DIMM module when you can just install the ``badram'' kernel patch that will let Linux work around bad bits in a memory module? Don't let a few bad bits spoil an entire module... (-:
Although the Hindenburg disaster is the posterchild for the flammability and hence perceived danger of Hydrogen, you might want to read ``Hydrogen Didn't Cause Hindenburg Fire''
The reason why it is unsafe to store, for example, gasoline in your home is because the vapors from gasoline are heavy. They flow like an invisible fluid. If the vapor reaches an ignition source, it will catch fire/explode. The dangerous part is that the flame will follow the vapor trail *back to its source*, where there may be an entire tank of the stuff. Something like hydrogen disperses much more readily, thus alleviating the vapor trail hazard. However, as someone else pointed out, this thing probably doesn't use gaseous hydrogen.
And for everyone who's complaining about how expensive this fuel cell unit is... well, are you really surprised? Things that are new are always expensive! It takes awhile for technology to come down in price after it has been introduced to the commercial market.
Slashdot Mirror
The actors in Incubo didn't actually know Esperanto... they just memorized the dialog by sound. That is, apparently, why it sounds so terrible. Allegedly the director wanted a language that would sound foreign to all people (apparently considering the population of fluent esperantists to be negligible :-) and hence chose Esperanto. The only other Esperanto film reference I know is that the announcements in Gattaca are supposedly in Esperanto, although I haven't re-watched the film to verify that.
http://www.floridatoday.com/space/explore/special/ slc6/slc6.htm
Let me know when I can take the train from San Francisco to Los Angeles (for less than the time to drive and less than the cost to fly).
Convergence of P2P and Grid?? Well, DUH. They're basically two names for the same thing. Almost.
I hope to see some of plan 9 in "the grid". Need another CPU? Mount it into the filesystem...
You're right that he should not use JPEG for this, but for the wrong reasons. JPEG is simply the wrong format for images that are not like photographs. Specifically, JPEG is not appropriate for images with high spatial frequencies (ie, distinct lines and shapes, and a small number of colors). Raster-based formats (GIF, PNG, TIFF, etc) are the appropriate format for scanned text, diagrams, etc. PNG is not a replacement for JPEG.
Furthermore, if you want animations, you are overlooking the new, cool computer technology called MNG.
Although this problem is an especially serious one when it comes to journalism, it's a general problem with the WWW. Sometimes one wants to link to a specific version of a webpage or examine the changes that have made. One solution is to use RCS to keep track of page versions, and use a web server extension (such as an apache module) that allows access to the changelog and to past versions. I would love to see this implemented widely...
I hacked up a little perl script demonstrating the idea. Now each of my web pages can have a "this page contains version information" link to its changelog.
And then there's VMS which has versioning built into the filesystem...
Well, there is only one kind of neutron, which is a heavy, composite particle made up of a combination of one "up" quark and two "down" quarks. Quarks have flavors too. They are up, down, strange, charm, top (or truth), and bottom (or beauty). And they have colors: red, green, and blue. But of course, you're right, all these names are entirely arbitrary, and it would work just as well to have chocolate, strawberry, and vanilla neutrinos rather than electron (e), muon (), and tau ().
In the "standard model" of particle physics, there are sixteen "elementary" particles, and their anti-particles. Three of these particles are the neutrinos, which come in three different flavors. It's long been known that their masses must be very small, and it's been thought that neutrinos might have zero mass, like the photon. However, neutrino oscillation implies that there is a mass *difference* between neutrino flavors, and a mass difference means that they can't all be zero. Thus this means that neutrinos have mass, and that's a very important theoretical issue!
I find it ironic that the point is specifically made that one should avoid the term geek, yet in its place, the author selects the term Einstein. It sounds like elementary school all over again.
Anyway, I wanted to point out an internet resource I found long ago called The Hacker Employment FAQ which pretty much addresses the same audience as this book, except it uses the much more appropriate label Hacker rather than resorting to names of great physicists of the twentieth century.
That photo is from the ceremony where Bill was awarded an honorary Doctorate by KTH, the Royal Institute of Technology in Stockholm.
Why they decided to do that, I do not know.
The problem is not with the rights to your homework problems, the problem is with the rights to code created as part of paid research programs. If you aren't paid for your work and you haven't signed any contracts then you retain all the rights to your creations. However, when the Federal Government gives a University a grant to research some topic and produce some code, it's less clear how the results of that project can or should be licensed.
Excellent! now those little green men out there in other planetary systems will receive something useful in the radio transmissions from earth instead of endless daytime TV re-runs... but how many thousands of years will it take to get there?
Even so, it would be fun to try making some. But there's nothing new here: cola recipes have been around for decades, and the folklore process that propagates them is the original form of open source.
This post is in reply to your "exclude microsoft users" post, and the attitude in the article exemplified by this quote: ``It's true that I run a mailing list that does not allow posting from Windows users. Many people complain about this, but in my mind I see it as no different than a restaurant or dance hall having a dress code.''
When did we become such elitists? When users are arbitrarily excluded and abused in the name of "free software," I begin to think that pehaps these same people now toting the supremacy of their operating system might in another time promote the supremacy of their language, nationality, or race.
I see nothing productive in this article or the attitude of its creator. The point of our movement is to produce good, useful software, and to make it available to everyone. The point is not to force them to use it, or to punish those who don't. Where's the freedom in that?
The push (which is a compression wave) travels at the speed of sound in the dowel, much slower than the speed of light.
How did NR ever lead you to believe that numerical programs can be cleanly written in C? The C code in Numerical Recipes is terrible. The authors basically transplanted their Fortran code directly to C, resulting in unreadable programs. They ignore C conventions, for example by using Fortan-style arrays based at 1 instead C's 0-based arrays. Variable names are most often uninformative, at most two letters. Furthermore their algorithms often implement special rather than general cases of the problems they seek to solve. Finally, while the prose can enlightening, it's been questioned whether the authors are even qualified to write such a book. But don't take my word for it, read NASA/JPL's page `Why not use Numerical Recipes,' which begins with the statement, ``We have found Numerical Recipes to be generally unreliable.''
On the topic of OpenGL, your logic doesn't follow. The mathematical content of the 3D graphics routines is implemented within the OpenGL library (not so much the game itself), and these routines are implemented in C, assembly, and hardware, not because these media provide for the most eloquent expression of mathematics, but because they provide for the fastest implementation, and speed is of primary importance in 3D graphics.
You are right that C++ has some interesting applications in mathematics. See for example Yet Another Computer Algebra System.
It wasn't so long ago that slashdot published this similarly ridiculous claim.
Obviously, some other means will be used to inspect the package.
``All this disruption for a campaign that killed five people''
What a short-sighted thing to say. You're whining that protections against the launch of a biological attack might erase your digital camera pictures? Firstly, it is the postal service's precautions that have limited the death toll to five; and secondly, if you mean to imply that a mere five deaths doesn't warrant this astounding level of inconvenience, then what death toll would be needed to justify these measures? ie, how long would you wait? This isn't like holding secret military tribunals or any of the other civil-liberty-violating measures that have been discussed -- this is a simple, safe, effective, and prudent thing to do. I'm sure that the first time a UPS package or FedEx package is found to contain Anthrax or anything similar, then the private couriers will immediately begin irradiating their packages too. In fact, it might even become required by law.
If you're sending something by mail that could perhaps be damaged by certain handling in the mail, you can write a message on the outside of the package requesting special handling. ``Photographs: do not bend.'' ``Perishable: do not freeze.'' Sensitive materials ranging from high speed film to live queen bees are routinely sent through the mail, and it works just fine. I'm sure ``Sensitive: Do not irradiate'' or something of that nature would work just fine. Your mail might be ever so slightly delayed due to the alternate handling, but you'll live.
Subduction zones also have the most and the strongest earthquakes.... great place for fragile containers of nuclear waste!
Are you familiar with the home-made flame-thrower videos distributed with the earlier versions of the BeOS?
Why bother replacing the failed DIMM module when you can just install the ``badram'' kernel patch that will let Linux work around bad bits in a memory module? Don't let a few bad bits spoil an entire module... (-:
Although the Hindenburg disaster is the posterchild for the flammability and hence perceived danger of Hydrogen, you might want to read ``Hydrogen Didn't Cause Hindenburg Fire''
The reason why it is unsafe to store, for example, gasoline in your home is because the vapors from gasoline are heavy. They flow like an invisible fluid. If the vapor reaches an ignition source, it will catch fire/explode. The dangerous part is that the flame will follow the vapor trail *back to its source*, where there may be an entire tank of the stuff. Something like hydrogen disperses much more readily, thus alleviating the vapor trail hazard. However, as someone else pointed out, this thing probably doesn't use gaseous hydrogen.
And for everyone who's complaining about how expensive this fuel cell unit is... well, are you really surprised? Things that are new are always expensive! It takes awhile for technology to come down in price after it has been introduced to the commercial market.