Hrm, couldn't you just convert TeX output into PDF files and post them? Not really a great choice, but I don't think having TeX as a rendering engine would work well. Maybe just for math equations, but not for whole pages
Yes, TeX is a typesetting language, made for printing. Web pages are (supposidly) independant of sizes, fonts, colors, etc. In Tex you say {\it this is emphasized}. This specifies exactly what kind of font should be used. In html you say <em>this is emphasized</em>, and the renderer is basically told "I should emphasize this". Netscape uses italics, while an html to speach browser for the blind would, well, emphasize that text.
TeX is not html and html is not TeX. Both are meant for different things; TeX is about the final product (a printed paper), while html is about the source. I could do all kind of hacks in a TeX paper trying to get it to look just right, and my proff wouldn't notice in the final product. I could also set up tons of tables, images, frames, javascript, etc on a web page so that it looks just right on my web browser, but try to view it on another (or at a different screen resolution, or color depth) and it's brocken.
I'm all for using a TeX rendering engine for imbedding math in html; have a <tex> tag equivalent to $$, but then you would have to support LaTeX too, and who knows what other kinds of TeX would want thier equations to render as well.
I think we should ditch this MathML stuff, and simply have TeX-like syntax:
<tex>$$z\equiv \rho e^{i\pi\theta}$$</tex>
would work rather nicely. I don't know why somebody decided to rewrite the wheel, making something more complex than necessary. I like coding things by hand, and MathML makes that rather difficult. I'll just render my TeX formulae with the gimp, and display them as png's anyway. I don't think real mathematitions will ever go with this MathML thing.
I suggest you use TeX and Metafont, then. Thier versions have been approaching pi and e for some time now, and when Knuth dies, they will be equal those beautiful numbers, and will be perfect. Any `bugs' found after this point will really be features, and will never be `corrected'. I think I much prefer Knuth's versioning scheme, but I suppose that's mature software, while linux would in a few years have hundreds of digits of pi for its version.
pi is still fun to use for a source of random digits (I have used it as such on several occations when I didn't like my rand() function). I downloaded 200 million digits from some japaneese site, and have found them quite fun to play with.
Downloadload a good html file; I choose this article. Make a program that inputs real numbers and outputs thier fourier transform. I did this in fortran. Hexdump the html file in decimal, cut out the offset, pipe that through your program, strip out the real part (the imaginary part averages to zero), and take its average:
The slashdot page gives me -12325.8228197622, while a `Liv Tyler nude' page gives out 4473.59578107183. Now we have some hard, numerical judgment on a pages quality. And plus, it's complicated enough that people may actually think it's valid...
I tell all my students that if they can't turn in thier report because its floppy went bad, that they should give me the floppy. Linux is really quite good at getting the data off the things. I have a couple ways of getting thier data:
Try mounting the thing as if it were good. Sometimes the drive they tried it on was flakey, and it works just fine for me. mount/dev/fd0/mnt -t msdos. Email them thier word file so they can print it for me.
If the floppy really is bad, then do a direct dump to a file: dd if=/dev/fd0 of=floppy.img. This will probably die at some point, but we'll see how much we get first. Do a strings floppy.img | more to see what's there. If thier text from thier report shows up, copy it to a file and print it out. Formatting will be gone, but that's what they get for saving to MSWord
If the error shows up before their data is found, then I can start the dd at a higher block, and bypass it.
If it's the word file that's corrupt or the disk is virus ridden, the strings program will also work quite nicely.
I'm glad to see I've been using the right encoder (BladeEnc) for all my classical music. I can't remember why I started using it (I don't think I've used anything else), but now I see that it beats the others as far as tonality goes. Classical music is all about the right pitches (I even have perfect pitch), so perhaps that's why all those bad sounding classical mp3's off napster sound so bad (or they were ripped off records...).
I would be willing to bet that that is an sgi machine anyway.
Have you ever used an SGI? The window manager they ship with looks nothing at all like that. Of course that doesn't mean that the owner couldn't install something cooler, but then why not just have a linux box to start with? I've never seen an SGI use anything but the standard Irix window manager.
I think we should choose Latin as the official language. Being a `dead' language, choosing it does not give special treatment to any country. It is highly structured, and makes sense. It's also a much prettier language than English, with soft consonants and clear vowels. It spent over a millenium being the official language of intellects, so is up for the job of being the One True Language. Ditch English, and learn a language worth knowing!
This is a Dilbert thing. Become a DNRC (Dogbert New Ruling Class) member, read all the old newsletters, and you'll find your answer. (I believe it comes from an Old English word, but I forget exactly).
So you want a button for everything? Let's think about those poor folks stuck at 800x600 or less who don't have the screen space for tons of buttons or menu entries. I stay at 1600x1200, and I seldom even use the toolbox supplied. It's extremely easy to set new keyboard shortcuts, so I don't even have to use the menu very often (I type in `l' for levels adjustment, `b' for gaussian blur, etc.). I think the gimp developers are doing a _great_ job, and a better job than the photoshop people in several cases (like the jpeg saver).
Pi is infinitely long, the corresponding sequence must be in there somewhere.
We don't have that much pi calculated. The amound of pi you need increases exponentially with the number of required matching numbers in your string. Anyway, reporting the position would take an awfull lot of space (perhaps the number would be impossible to represent in the physical world even). Nice idea, though.
Seriously now, anyone have trouble seeing anything at all on that page?
It requires javascript. Just look at the source. I had to look at the source for AMD's site because they chose a font size of "1", which on my system equates with "a few pixels". I'm not even going to enable javascript to look at PACT's site. If they don't care about security minded people then I don't care about them.
And BTW, 2^300 is the first time when 1 [whatever]byte will be 2*10^[something or other] bytes, so things will be really misleading then if you still think in bytes.
Well, where I am going to school, many of the experiments require liquid helium. That's at less than -269C, or 4Kelvin. I would like to see a computer submerged in that. Of course, since the LN2 appeared to be too cold for these people's system to operate, I imagine LHe would completely kill the computer. It would still be fun...
I'm not so sure about that one. When I took real analysis (basically an advanced math course where things are prooved), we had to use your statement as an axiom; we could not proove it. We couldn't have gotten very far in the class without assuming it, so lots of math depends on this assumption. This assumption does not, however, depend on any math, so to summerize: we don't know if one equals zero or not. Don't show me one object and no object to try and convince me otherwise; there is a big difference between something that makes sense and a formal proof, and intuition is not a valid method of prooving theorems. I suppose this whole computer thing might be based off of nothing then. It's amazing computer work at all...
There is more to a computer than its speed. Sure, good looks are nice to have, but I consider that secondary. What is it that makes a BMW different that a ford? It could very likely be that the ford gets better mileage, can go faster, seats more people, looks sportier, etc. Yet the BMW is `better', not necessarily in normal performance measurments, but in quality. The new fords are made of cheep components, put together in a cheep fation, so that they can be sold cheeply. BMW's are made with quality in mind, and the end product is something the driver can be proud of. Since I know next to nothing about cars, and even less about macs, don't take me too seriously. I think the idea might be about right though. One thing I can say, is that the new gateways are flakey. They do wierd things like stop responding for a few seconds, and crashing occationally with no reason. The CPU, RAM, etc tells me they should be good machines, but they left out the quality part, so the boxes are junk for my purposes.
But, you still can't control what people do with information they see...
Well, they can't tell anyone if they aren't allowed to leave the office. Just set up some cots in a spare office, and they can sleep there. Have a caffeteria so they can eat, and give them free coffee. They can only be married to other employees (if they ever want to see thier spouse), and thier kids will have to go to the company schoolhouse where they can learn to code and become productive by the time they're 10 years old (you could also breed out concepts such as freedom with the right schooling). Anyone caught trying to leave will be taken to the department of love for permanant dismissal...
Well, at the school I did my undergraduate in, the connection was slow as heck (only a T1), and constantly maxed out. The internal network was fine, though. Since I wanted to be able to surf the net at a reasonable speed, I considered setting up an intermal mp3 server. That way, students could just get everything local and leave the T1 for surfing. I never did it, but thought it would be a great idea. I should have suggested that Info Tech set up an official server for this purpose, and have it writable so the students can add mp3s to it. In relation to your comment, he provided everyone at his school with a rather fast connection to a good mp3 server. Since that's mostly what students download anyway, he did them a favor. Of course, if he was making a big dent in the campus bandwidth, a good netadmin would track it down and fix the problem long before the RIAA gave them a call. Of course, we know netadmins like mp3s as much as the rest of us...
How could anyone proove that he had stuff on his site without circumventing any password protection on his site? If his school hacked his site, that's the school's bad. If it was noticed that there was alot of traffic coming from his box, they could inquire what he was up to, but to get access to his computer if access is not granted should be illeagal. Of course, he probably signed an agreement when he started school, or got an IP, or somethings like that, and so he doesn't have any rights.
Slashdot Mirror
You actually need to type in http:// in the "Open" field at the top of the screen.
Hey, then check out my website! Hmm...
Hrm, couldn't you just convert TeX output into PDF files and post them? Not really a great choice, but I don't think having TeX as a rendering engine would work well. Maybe just for math equations, but not for whole pages
Yes, TeX is a typesetting language, made for printing. Web pages are (supposidly) independant of sizes, fonts, colors, etc. In Tex you say {\it this is emphasized}. This specifies exactly what kind of font should be used. In html you say <em>this is emphasized</em>, and the renderer is basically told "I should emphasize this". Netscape uses italics, while an html to speach browser for the blind would, well, emphasize that text.
TeX is not html and html is not TeX. Both are meant for different things; TeX is about the final product (a printed paper), while html is about the source. I could do all kind of hacks in a TeX paper trying to get it to look just right, and my proff wouldn't notice in the final product. I could also set up tons of tables, images, frames, javascript, etc on a web page so that it looks just right on my web browser, but try to view it on another (or at a different screen resolution, or color depth) and it's brocken.
I'm all for using a TeX rendering engine for imbedding math in html; have a <tex> tag equivalent to $$, but then you would have to support LaTeX too, and who knows what other kinds of TeX would want thier equations to render as well.
I think we should ditch this MathML stuff, and simply have TeX-like syntax:
would work rather nicely. I don't know why somebody decided to rewrite the wheel, making something more complex than necessary. I like coding things by hand, and MathML makes that rather difficult. I'll just render my TeX formulae with the gimp, and display them as png's anyway. I don't think real mathematitions will ever go with this MathML thing.I suggest you use TeX and Metafont, then. Thier versions have been approaching pi and e for some time now, and when Knuth dies, they will be equal those beautiful numbers, and will be perfect. Any `bugs' found after this point will really be features, and will never be `corrected'. I think I much prefer Knuth's versioning scheme, but I suppose that's mature software, while linux would in a few years have hundreds of digits of pi for its version.
Yes, if Bush's answers could be moderated, he would get (Score:-1, Flaimbait) on several.
There are some things you just don't say on slashdot and expect to get away with.
Actually, pi=2.0
Draw a line segment of length 2.0
Connect the ends with a semicircular arc
The length of the arc is 2pi/2=pi
Now instead make two semicircular arcs of half the radius, and align them so they span the line segment. Picture of all this here.
The length of the arcs sums to pi again
Repeat with four semicircles of 0.25 radius, and so on
The semicircles converge to the line segment, so the arc length=pi converges to the line segment length=2.0
Thus, pi=2.0
pi is still fun to use for a source of random digits (I have used it as such on several occations when I didn't like my rand() function). I downloaded 200 million digits from some japaneese site, and have found them quite fun to play with.
Here's something more fun:
Downloadload a good html file; I choose this article. Make a program that inputs real numbers and outputs thier fourier transform. I did this in fortran. Hexdump the html file in decimal, cut out the offset, pipe that through your program, strip out the real part (the imaginary part averages to zero), and take its average:
hexdump -d slashdot.html | cut -c10- | ./fft | cut -c2- | awk -F , '{print $1}' | average
The slashdot page gives me -12325.8228197622, while a `Liv Tyler nude' page gives out 4473.59578107183. Now we have some hard, numerical judgment on a pages quality. And plus, it's complicated enough that people may actually think it's valid...
I tell all my students that if they can't turn in thier report because its floppy went bad, that they should give me the floppy. Linux is really quite good at getting the data off the things. I have a couple ways of getting thier data:
Try mounting the thing as if it were good. Sometimes the drive they tried it on was flakey, and it works just fine for me. mount /dev/fd0 /mnt -t msdos. Email them thier word file so they can print it for me.
If the floppy really is bad, then do a direct dump to a file: dd if=/dev/fd0 of=floppy.img. This will probably die at some point, but we'll see how much we get first. Do a strings floppy.img | more to see what's there. If thier text from thier report shows up, copy it to a file and print it out. Formatting will be gone, but that's what they get for saving to MSWord
If the error shows up before their data is found, then I can start the dd at a higher block, and bypass it.
If it's the word file that's corrupt or the disk is virus ridden, the strings program will also work quite nicely.
I'm glad to see I've been using the right encoder (BladeEnc) for all my classical music. I can't remember why I started using it (I don't think I've used anything else), but now I see that it beats the others as far as tonality goes. Classical music is all about the right pitches (I even have perfect pitch), so perhaps that's why all those bad sounding classical mp3's off napster sound so bad (or they were ripped off records...).
I would be willing to bet that that is an sgi machine anyway.
Have you ever used an SGI? The window manager they ship with looks nothing at all like that. Of course that doesn't mean that the owner couldn't install something cooler, but then why not just have a linux box to start with? I've never seen an SGI use anything but the standard Irix window manager.
I think we should choose Latin as the official language. Being a `dead' language, choosing it does not give special treatment to any country. It is highly structured, and makes sense. It's also a much prettier language than English, with soft consonants and clear vowels. It spent over a millenium being the official language of intellects, so is up for the job of being the One True Language. Ditch English, and learn a language worth knowing!
This is a Dilbert thing. Become a DNRC (Dogbert New Ruling Class) member, read all the old newsletters, and you'll find your answer. (I believe it comes from an Old English word, but I forget exactly).
So you want a button for everything? Let's think about those poor folks stuck at 800x600 or less who don't have the screen space for tons of buttons or menu entries. I stay at 1600x1200, and I seldom even use the toolbox supplied. It's extremely easy to set new keyboard shortcuts, so I don't even have to use the menu very often (I type in `l' for levels adjustment, `b' for gaussian blur, etc.). I think the gimp developers are doing a _great_ job, and a better job than the photoshop people in several cases (like the jpeg saver).
Pi is infinitely long, the corresponding sequence must be in there somewhere.
We don't have that much pi calculated. The amound of pi you need increases exponentially with the number of required matching numbers in your string. Anyway, reporting the position would take an awfull lot of space (perhaps the number would be impossible to represent in the physical world even). Nice idea, though.
Seriously now, anyone have trouble seeing anything at all on that page?
It requires javascript. Just look at the source. I had to look at the source for AMD's site because they chose a font size of "1", which on my system equates with "a few pixels". I'm not even going to enable javascript to look at PACT's site. If they don't care about security minded people then I don't care about them.
And I guesse they include the reserved sectors for when bad sectors show up too. Or is that just for single drives, and not important for RAID?
Allow me to break our `bc' and calculate those exponents:
1 kilobyte =1024 bytes
1 kilobytes=1048576 bytes
1 gigabyte =1073741824 bytes
1 terabyte =1099511627776 bytes
1 petabyte =1125899906842624 bytes
1 Exabyte =1152921504606846976 bytes
1 Zettabyte=1180591620717411303424 bytes
1 Yottabyte=1208925819614629174706176 bytes
And BTW, 2^300 is the first time when 1 [whatever]byte will be 2*10^[something or other] bytes, so things will be really misleading then if you still think in bytes.
Well, where I am going to school, many of the experiments require liquid helium. That's at less than -269C, or 4Kelvin. I would like to see a computer submerged in that. Of course, since the LN2 appeared to be too cold for these people's system to operate, I imagine LHe would completely kill the computer. It would still be fun...
A computer knows this: one is not equal to zero.
I'm not so sure about that one. When I took real analysis (basically an advanced math course where things are prooved), we had to use your statement as an axiom; we could not proove it. We couldn't have gotten very far in the class without assuming it, so lots of math depends on this assumption. This assumption does not, however, depend on any math, so to summerize: we don't know if one equals zero or not. Don't show me one object and no object to try and convince me otherwise; there is a big difference between something that makes sense and a formal proof, and intuition is not a valid method of prooving theorems. I suppose this whole computer thing might be based off of nothing then. It's amazing computer work at all...
There is more to a computer than its speed. Sure, good looks are nice to have, but I consider that secondary. What is it that makes a BMW different that a ford? It could very likely be that the ford gets better mileage, can go faster, seats more people, looks sportier, etc. Yet the BMW is `better', not necessarily in normal performance measurments, but in quality. The new fords are made of cheep components, put together in a cheep fation, so that they can be sold cheeply. BMW's are made with quality in mind, and the end product is something the driver can be proud of. Since I know next to nothing about cars, and even less about macs, don't take me too seriously. I think the idea might be about right though. One thing I can say, is that the new gateways are flakey. They do wierd things like stop responding for a few seconds, and crashing occationally with no reason. The CPU, RAM, etc tells me they should be good machines, but they left out the quality part, so the boxes are junk for my purposes.
But, you still can't control what people do with information they see...
Well, they can't tell anyone if they aren't allowed to leave the office. Just set up some cots in a spare office, and they can sleep there. Have a caffeteria so they can eat, and give them free coffee. They can only be married to other employees (if they ever want to see thier spouse), and thier kids will have to go to the company schoolhouse where they can learn to code and become productive by the time they're 10 years old (you could also breed out concepts such as freedom with the right schooling). Anyone caught trying to leave will be taken to the department of love for permanant dismissal...
Well, at the school I did my undergraduate in, the connection was slow as heck (only a T1), and constantly maxed out. The internal network was fine, though. Since I wanted to be able to surf the net at a reasonable speed, I considered setting up an intermal mp3 server. That way, students could just get everything local and leave the T1 for surfing. I never did it, but thought it would be a great idea. I should have suggested that Info Tech set up an official server for this purpose, and have it writable so the students can add mp3s to it. In relation to your comment, he provided everyone at his school with a rather fast connection to a good mp3 server. Since that's mostly what students download anyway, he did them a favor. Of course, if he was making a big dent in the campus bandwidth, a good netadmin would track it down and fix the problem long before the RIAA gave them a call. Of course, we know netadmins like mp3s as much as the rest of us...
How could anyone proove that he had stuff on his site without circumventing any password protection on his site? If his school hacked his site, that's the school's bad. If it was noticed that there was alot of traffic coming from his box, they could inquire what he was up to, but to get access to his computer if access is not granted should be illeagal. Of course, he probably signed an agreement when he started school, or got an IP, or somethings like that, and so he doesn't have any rights.
I got it at $1; I hope nobody bids higher...