Re:As a Caltech Student....
on
Infiltration
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· Score: 1
No, silly, Blacker just pretends they're into tunnelling and construction to confuse the incoming freshmen into thinking they want to live in Blacker; in fact the Moles are most famous for sitting in their rooms playing computer games, in between attending Caltech Christian Fellowship meetings.
But you're in one of those unidentifiable North Houses, so you wouldn't know better.
</obHouseFlame>
Re:Steam Tunnels: what are they?
on
Infiltration
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· Score: 1
A major benifit of using a central steam plant for a complex of buildings is efficiency. Central steam is a very efficient way to heat several buildings, AND the unused heat can be reclaimed and turned into electricity back at the central plant (Caltech saves 20-40% on their electric bills this way.)
Look, on a modern automatic-transmission car, only park, reverse, and (over)drive are used by 90% of the
people.
That's because you can accomplish most things that you would want to do with a car with just those three gears. The extra gears may make you a better driver if you know how to use them, but they are not strictly required.
There are a dozen buttons
on my blender, and I don't understand what eight of them do, but I don't hear anybody claiming that blenders are
overly complicated devices.
Because you can accomplish whatever you want to do using only the four buttons. The extra buttons may may make the belnder work more efficiently in some situations, but they are not required.
Only a tiny subsset of the vocabulary of most languages is used by the vast majority
of the people, but nobody's calling on the Academie Francaise to eliminate 90% of the French vocabulary.
Because you can walk around France and take care of yourself quite well using only a very small subset of French.
No one objects to having more buttons, but people object to being required to learn what they all do in any particular situation. Imagine if you had a blender which required you to set every parameter using all 12 buttons before it would even start blending things for you--and if you pressed the buttons incorrectly, it would just sit there or maybe even ruin your food. You'd be up in arms about the confusing interface.
The interface to your manual-transmission car only has one more lever than the interface to an auto, so it's not much more complicated--but the mere presence of the clutch lever is not what makes a manual transmission more difficult to use, it's the fact that you're required to learn and understand the clutch in order to make your car move at all.
"Middle mouse button paste" (and the automatic selection->copy) of X is exactly the same
as Drag and Drop! EXACTLY!
Yelling it doesn't make it so. I just opened up my text editor, selected a paragraph, and DRAGGED it above another paragraph. The two paragraphs switched locations. I tried the same in emacs using hte middle-button buffer. Now I have two copies of the paragraph I selected. That's EXACTLY the same?
Unfortunately there are a lot of X programs (my own stuff included) that use the same buffer
for the middle mouse click and for the ^X^C.
So even in your own programs, which implement ^C^V, when I select something it erases my ^C clipboard buffer. That's DIFFERENT BEHAVIOR from what drag&drop does.
Your proposed solution is all right, but until things work that way, don't go around screaming that everyhting is "exactly the same," because it isn't.
Unfortunately some people have strange hangups about language. For example RMS, for whatever reason, urges GNU programmers to write ANSI C and *only* ANSI C. So you get things like GNOME and GTK, which, though thoroughly object-oriented in design, have to be written is the object-oriented C idiom.
Looking through the sources of GNOME and GTK is quite a trip--it *seems* well-organized, and probably is. But the language idioms used are frightening--it's C, and legal C at that, but at what cost? No one offers training in this dialect--universities use object-friendly languages when teaching object-oriented design, and businesses use object-friendly languages when they need object-oriented design.
The clearest book on C++ I've read comes in near 1000 pages. If I want to contribute to most GNU projects, I have to generate the knowledge of their equally complicated pidgin OOP-C for myself by staring at reams of barely-commented source code. If written in C++, the code would be identically fast and have 25% the footprint, and probably fewer bugs too. But RMS says no, so they don't do it that way.
Apple gives the Quicktime player away to everyone in order to entice them to buy the $30 unlocked version. Why not follow the same strategy with Linux?
For those who complain about the "inability to replace" with the middle mouse, I will have to point out (yet again) that the X behavior is exactly the same as the much-lauded "drag and drop" except you don't have to hold the damn mouse button down as you move to the drop site.
First of all, "Drag and drop" doesn't mess with your clipboard, so the X behavior is NOT the same.
Secondly, talking about "drag and drop" in response to the "inability to replace" criticism is apples and orages, to put it nicely. MacOS and Windows provide drag and drop IN ADDITION to, and INDEPENDENT OF the clipboard. Whereas in UNIX desktops, if you select some text in your word processor, it automatically erases whatever was in the clipboard. I think the point you were trying to make is that drag and drop, and the X clipboard are so close in functionality that they are mutually exclusive. WhereasMacOS and Windows provide two different mechanisms that are useful in different ways, increasing the usability of the system.
The lesson is this. Say that "copy and paste" is a wrench, and "drag and drop" is a pair of pliers. Bear with me... Both tools are similar. You can turn a nut, poorly, with a pair of pliers, and you can bend a sheet of metal, poorly, with a wrench. (that is to say, any task involving movign around text can be accomplished, after a fashion, with either mechanism.) But you're much more productive if you have access to both tools. If the tools are independent (as in MacOS and Windows) you can accomplish more complicated things, like (metaphorically speaking) holding one end of something with the pliers while turning the other end with a wrench. (or keeping a couple of important sentences in the clipboard while rearranging other sentences using drag-and-drop.) What X gives you is a monstrous "multi-tool" with a wrench on one end and a pliers on the other, made so that you can't use both at the same time. (or, while you try to move sentences around with drag and drop, your clipboard disappears. Useful, that.)
As for "having to hold the mouse button down," well, it's not hard to map one of your plethora of mouse buttons to a drag-lock. "Mechanisms, not policy," remember?
As a PPC Linux user, I find that for any reasonably large package, if no one's made a binary package for my platform available, there's about a 10% chance that that package will compile and run successfully.
Now, if you follow good programming practice one can avoid the common mistakes (usually endian errors and assumptions about the number of bits associated with certain types) but most people don't follow good programming practice. So releasing binary packages for multiple platforms is a good indication that the programmers are on the ball.
As a PPC Linux user, I find that for any reasonably large package, if no one's made a binary package for my platform available, there's about a 10% chance that that package will compile and run successfully.
Now, if you follow good programming practice one can avoid the common mistakes (usually endian errors and assumptions about the number of bits associated with certain types) but most people don't follow good programming practice. So releasing binary packages for multiple platforms is a good indication that the programmers are on the ball.
ok , but at least raalize that if hte decoder is in flux and isn't satisfactorily implemented, then it's in no condition to be put in the firmware of a cd player.
My opinion of commercial software is that it ought to have considerable merit if I'm going to pay for it. If its functionality can be duplicated by freelance hackers in their spare time, then they (the commercial software people) ought to think about solving a more difficult problem. (well, they can work on anything they want to, but my point is that they have to compete for my money.)
For example, there is no acceptable free equivalent for MATLAB or Mathematica, or for high-end 3d modeling software, or for good CAD/electronics design software, etcetera. These are the kinds of things that my livelihood depends on. Virtualization machines are a mere convenience.
The lact of a free MATLAB equivalent actually bugs me quite a lot. It really seems to me that a bunch of college students could cobble together a MATLAB equivalent (everything therein is based on well-known algorithms, all you need to do is look them up in a CS/applied math journal and implement them, one at a time...) and actually have something useful that could save them quite a bit of money.
My private theory has always been that colours are analogous to musical tones. Under this theory, while there may be an infinite number of frequencies and hence an infinite number of distinct "colours", they actually sort themselves out into a limited number of hues analogous to the tones of the musical scale.
Confused--what do you mean by "hue" as opposed to "color?" Do you mean that we perceptually segregate colors into hues?
In the brain, the three types of color receptors (call them R, G, and B) feed input to circuits in the lateral genticulate nucleus (LGN). In the LGN there are circuits which recombine the colors to form three new axes: and "intensity" axis (R+G+B), a "red-green" axis (R-G) and a "yellow-blue" axis (R+G-B) This is because the "red" and "green" photoreceptors actually overlap over most of their range, so to get useful information out of them, you need to take the difference. This also has the peculiar result that most beople can't imagine colors that are in between green and red, or betwen blue and yellow.
(actually, what I should say is that it is known that the monkey LGN works this way, and we have no reason to believe that the human LGN works differently.)
Since the top (violet) end of our visual range is less than twice the frequency (more than half the wavelength) of the bottom (red) end, we perceive less than one full visual "octave".
The reason that very high frequency light looks purplish (hence "ultraviolet" instead of "ultrablue") is because it starts to excite the red photoreceptors in addition to the blue ones. If it only excited the blue receptors, it would look blue. It happens that some very high frequency where the blue receptors are barely excited (remember the response of a photoreceptor, plotted against frequency, looks like a bell curve--receptors respond to a range of frequencies.) is twice a frequency that is near the bottom of the red range. There is a resonance phenomenon (ask a quantum chemist, I'm just a neurobiology student;) that means that the red photopigment can be excited weakly by radiation at twice the frequency of its fundamental. So near-ultraviolet light is picked up by both red and blue receptors.
They seem to be focusing on print documents (LizardTech mentions using it to present a catalog online, for example.) I have a hard time believing their claims of being smaller than PDF for that purpose--their figures for improved compression appear to be derived from pdf's made by scanning a print document in full color at high resolution. Who makes pdf's that way? It might be useful for archival purposes, but anyone who's distributing catalogs and non-archival documents online is going to make pdf's the correct way (ie, ps2pdf or some other way of making a pdf that isn't just a big bitmap.) anywho, PDF is a vector format, and when used correctly, will be smaller than anything DjVu can accomplish, Their "comparison" is an astonishing case of apples and oranges.
Because the refractive index of a material depends on the speed of light in that material. For this ratio to be negative you would need the speed of light to be NEGATIVE in that material.
s/speed/phase velocity/. The "Phase velocity" is not a speed, nor is it the speed of light. In the ionosphere, for example, the phase velocity of some radiation is greaterthan c. This does not mean that information is transmitted faster then the speed of light, or that particles move faster then the speed of light.
Speed by definition is a scalar quantity that cannot be negative.
No, a velocity can indeed be negative. I can start walking west and ask you, "with what velocity am I moving east?" The answer is negative.
So it is physically impossible to have a negative refractive index. This guy is a moron.
You have only shown that by your definition of a refractive index, which was wrong, there cannot be a negitive refractive index. It's not a physical argument at all, it's a mathematical argument that started with the wrong definitions.. And as such, is worthless.
If a light wave in vacuum is incident (at right angles) to a sheet of some substance, and within the substance there is a light wave travelling at some velocity (in the opposite direction) to meet the incident light wave, and Maxwell's field equations are satisfied everywhere, then the material has a negative index of refraction. There is nothing intrinsic in Maxwell's equations or any other known physical laws that would prevent this from happening.
Indices of refraction whith are less than one or negative are discussed in any decent wave mechanics text (Berkely Physics Course, Vol. 3: Waves by Crawford, for example.) The man the article describesd did not originate the idea of a negative index of refraction, as that possibility is inherent in the definition of hte index. He has only shown that if such a material exists (and as the article said, there are materials whcih have negative indices of refraction for microwaves and radio waves) then it could be put to some interesting uses. "Moron" indeed.
sort of ironic
that a medium supposed to cross borders and remove international boundaries has had the opposite effect in this case
But that's exactly what's happening-- events in the US are "crossing borders" and "removing international boundaries," having more impact overseas than they normally would--homogenizing the world to create the Ultimate Global Monoculture. (seen any Coca-Cola ads in the past year? That shit's scary.)
How about an air powered bike/scooter? Surely that would have some market value for people. I have a lot of friends who commute on motorcycles partly because of the fuel economy. This would be even better.
How so? Does calling for a boycott of your publisher negate their obligation to pay your royalties? Is this something
written into these kinds of contracts?
Royalties are based on the number of books sold, no? If there is a boycott of the book, fewer copies will be sold, no? So you will get fewer royalties, no? So, encouraging a boycott of your own book/publisher hurts you financially, no?
I could explain it again if you want....
Relating to open-source textbooks, there's a very good, anti-copyrighted text on applied mathematics here. It was written over the author's many years of TAing the required applied math course at Caltech.
What? The Luxor has a matrix of spotlights coming out the top pointing straight up, and a series of animated flashbulbs running up and down the edges of the pyramid. No displays on the actual building (unless it's changed in the two months since I was at Vegas last.)
Ok, I know that Gnome and KDE have Mac-lookalike widget themes, so that takes care of widgets (sorta...)
Now as for the Window server, it shouldn't be that hard to write a window server that actually uses MacOS windows. That seems to be the only big piece that's missing.
THAT'S why I'm voting for Nader. Bush and, to a slightly lesser extent, Gore are both working for Big Business.
"And obviously, of course, [the Democrats are] the biggest promoters among the two parties of corporate welfare; they're far in excess of the Republicans, who have some modest ideological restraints on it." --Ralph Nader
In the sc review they say: "The dd process consistently failed when the output file reached 2,147,483,647 bytes, just one byte short of 2^31(2,147,648). Then we wrote a script to break the output file into pieces suitable for burning to CD-ROM. ".....
Sadly, they did not include this script.
What you want is:
dd(1), split(1), and a pipe.
"Don't bother me. I'm eating."
For the reverse process you can use cat(1), a pipe, and dd(1).
Slashdot Mirror
No, silly, Blacker just pretends they're into tunnelling and construction to confuse the incoming freshmen into thinking they want to live in Blacker; in fact the Moles are most famous for sitting in their rooms playing computer games, in between attending Caltech Christian Fellowship meetings.
But you're in one of those unidentifiable North Houses, so you wouldn't know better.
</obHouseFlame>
A major benifit of using a central steam plant for a complex of buildings is efficiency. Central steam is a very efficient way to heat several buildings, AND the unused heat can be reclaimed and turned into electricity back at the central plant (Caltech saves 20-40% on their electric bills this way.)
That's because you can accomplish most things that you would want to do with a car with just those three gears. The extra gears may make you a better driver if you know how to use them, but they are not strictly required.
There are a dozen buttons on my blender, and I don't understand what eight of them do, but I don't hear anybody claiming that blenders are overly complicated devices.
Because you can accomplish whatever you want to do using only the four buttons. The extra buttons may may make the belnder work more efficiently in some situations, but they are not required.
Only a tiny subsset of the vocabulary of most languages is used by the vast majority of the people, but nobody's calling on the Academie Francaise to eliminate 90% of the French vocabulary.
Because you can walk around France and take care of yourself quite well using only a very small subset of French.
No one objects to having more buttons, but people object to being required to learn what they all do in any particular situation. Imagine if you had a blender which required you to set every parameter using all 12 buttons before it would even start blending things for you--and if you pressed the buttons incorrectly, it would just sit there or maybe even ruin your food. You'd be up in arms about the confusing interface.
The interface to your manual-transmission car only has one more lever than the interface to an auto, so it's not much more complicated--but the mere presence of the clutch lever is not what makes a manual transmission more difficult to use, it's the fact that you're required to learn and understand the clutch in order to make your car move at all.
Yelling it doesn't make it so. I just opened up my text editor, selected a paragraph, and DRAGGED it above another paragraph. The two paragraphs switched locations. I tried the same in emacs using hte middle-button buffer. Now I have two copies of the paragraph I selected. That's EXACTLY the same? Unfortunately there are a lot of X programs (my own stuff included) that use the same buffer for the middle mouse click and for the ^X^C.
So even in your own programs, which implement ^C^V, when I select something it erases my ^C clipboard buffer. That's DIFFERENT BEHAVIOR from what drag&drop does.
Your proposed solution is all right, but until things work that way, don't go around screaming that everyhting is "exactly the same," because it isn't.
Looking through the sources of GNOME and GTK is quite a trip--it *seems* well-organized, and probably is. But the language idioms used are frightening--it's C, and legal C at that, but at what cost? No one offers training in this dialect--universities use object-friendly languages when teaching object-oriented design, and businesses use object-friendly languages when they need object-oriented design.
The clearest book on C++ I've read comes in near 1000 pages. If I want to contribute to most GNU projects, I have to generate the knowledge of their equally complicated pidgin OOP-C for myself by staring at reams of barely-commented source code. If written in C++, the code would be identically fast and have 25% the footprint, and probably fewer bugs too. But RMS says no, so they don't do it that way.
Apple gives the Quicktime player away to everyone in order to entice them to buy the $30 unlocked version. Why not follow the same strategy with Linux?
First of all, "Drag and drop" doesn't mess with your clipboard, so the X behavior is NOT the same.
Secondly, talking about "drag and drop" in response to the "inability to replace" criticism is apples and orages, to put it nicely. MacOS and Windows provide drag and drop IN ADDITION to, and INDEPENDENT OF the clipboard. Whereas in UNIX desktops, if you select some text in your word processor, it automatically erases whatever was in the clipboard. I think the point you were trying to make is that drag and drop, and the X clipboard are so close in functionality that they are mutually exclusive. WhereasMacOS and Windows provide two different mechanisms that are useful in different ways, increasing the usability of the system.
The lesson is this. Say that "copy and paste" is a wrench, and "drag and drop" is a pair of pliers. Bear with me... Both tools are similar. You can turn a nut, poorly, with a pair of pliers, and you can bend a sheet of metal, poorly, with a wrench. (that is to say, any task involving movign around text can be accomplished, after a fashion, with either mechanism.) But you're much more productive if you have access to both tools. If the tools are independent (as in MacOS and Windows) you can accomplish more complicated things, like (metaphorically speaking) holding one end of something with the pliers while turning the other end with a wrench. (or keeping a couple of important sentences in the clipboard while rearranging other sentences using drag-and-drop.) What X gives you is a monstrous "multi-tool" with a wrench on one end and a pliers on the other, made so that you can't use both at the same time. (or, while you try to move sentences around with drag and drop, your clipboard disappears. Useful, that.)
As for "having to hold the mouse button down," well, it's not hard to map one of your plethora of mouse buttons to a drag-lock. "Mechanisms, not policy," remember?
"In theory? In theory, communism works! In theory...." --Homer Simpson
Why doesn't someone start duplicating the Quicktime API, so that its codecs can be used in other operating systems?
Now, if you follow good programming practice one can avoid the common mistakes (usually endian errors and assumptions about the number of bits associated with certain types) but most people don't follow good programming practice. So releasing binary packages for multiple platforms is a good indication that the programmers are on the ball.
Now, if you follow good programming practice one can avoid the common mistakes (usually endian errors and assumptions about the number of bits associated with certain types) but most people don't follow good programming practice. So releasing binary packages for multiple platforms is a good indication that the programmers are on the ball.
ok , but at least raalize that if hte decoder is in flux and isn't satisfactorily implemented, then it's in no condition to be put in the firmware of a cd player.
For example, there is no acceptable free equivalent for MATLAB or Mathematica, or for high-end 3d modeling software, or for good CAD/electronics design software, etcetera. These are the kinds of things that my livelihood depends on. Virtualization machines are a mere convenience.
The lact of a free MATLAB equivalent actually bugs me quite a lot. It really seems to me that a bunch of college students could cobble together a MATLAB equivalent (everything therein is based on well-known algorithms, all you need to do is look them up in a CS/applied math journal and implement them, one at a time...) and actually have something useful that could save them quite a bit of money.
Confused--what do you mean by "hue" as opposed to "color?" Do you mean that we perceptually segregate colors into hues?
In the brain, the three types of color receptors (call them R, G, and B) feed input to circuits in the lateral genticulate nucleus (LGN). In the LGN there are circuits which recombine the colors to form three new axes: and "intensity" axis (R+G+B), a "red-green" axis (R-G) and a "yellow-blue" axis (R+G-B) This is because the "red" and "green" photoreceptors actually overlap over most of their range, so to get useful information out of them, you need to take the difference. This also has the peculiar result that most beople can't imagine colors that are in between green and red, or betwen blue and yellow.
(actually, what I should say is that it is known that the monkey LGN works this way, and we have no reason to believe that the human LGN works differently.)
Since the top (violet) end of our visual range is less than twice the frequency (more than half the wavelength) of the bottom (red) end, we perceive less than one full visual "octave".
The reason that very high frequency light looks purplish (hence "ultraviolet" instead of "ultrablue") is because it starts to excite the red photoreceptors in addition to the blue ones. If it only excited the blue receptors, it would look blue. It happens that some very high frequency where the blue receptors are barely excited (remember the response of a photoreceptor, plotted against frequency, looks like a bell curve--receptors respond to a range of frequencies.) is twice a frequency that is near the bottom of the red range. There is a resonance phenomenon (ask a quantum chemist, I'm just a neurobiology student ;) that means that the red photopigment can be excited weakly by radiation at twice the frequency of its fundamental. So near-ultraviolet light is picked up by both red and blue receptors.
s/speed/phase velocity/. The "Phase velocity" is not a speed, nor is it the speed of light. In the ionosphere, for example, the phase velocity of some radiation is greaterthan c. This does not mean that information is transmitted faster then the speed of light, or that particles move faster then the speed of light.
Speed by definition is a scalar quantity that cannot be negative.
No, a velocity can indeed be negative. I can start walking west and ask you, "with what velocity am I moving east?" The answer is negative.
So it is physically impossible to have a negative refractive index. This guy is a moron.
You have only shown that by your definition of a refractive index, which was wrong, there cannot be a negitive refractive index. It's not a physical argument at all, it's a mathematical argument that started with the wrong definitions.. And as such, is worthless.
If a light wave in vacuum is incident (at right angles) to a sheet of some substance, and within the substance there is a light wave travelling at some velocity (in the opposite direction) to meet the incident light wave, and Maxwell's field equations are satisfied everywhere, then the material has a negative index of refraction. There is nothing intrinsic in Maxwell's equations or any other known physical laws that would prevent this from happening.
Indices of refraction whith are less than one or negative are discussed in any decent wave mechanics text (Berkely Physics Course, Vol. 3: Waves by Crawford, for example.) The man the article describesd did not originate the idea of a negative index of refraction, as that possibility is inherent in the definition of hte index. He has only shown that if such a material exists (and as the article said, there are materials whcih have negative indices of refraction for microwaves and radio waves) then it could be put to some interesting uses. "Moron" indeed.
But that's exactly what's happening-- events in the US are "crossing borders" and "removing international boundaries," having more impact overseas than they normally would--homogenizing the world to create the Ultimate Global Monoculture. (seen any Coca-Cola ads in the past year? That shit's scary.)
How about an air powered bike/scooter? Surely that would have some market value for people. I have a lot of friends who commute on motorcycles partly because of the fuel economy. This would be even better.
Notice how much uglier it is from the back side...
Royalties are based on the number of books sold, no? If there is a boycott of the book, fewer copies will be sold, no? So you will get fewer royalties, no? So, encouraging a boycott of your own book/publisher hurts you financially, no?
I could explain it again if you want....
Relating to open-source textbooks, there's a very good, anti-copyrighted text on applied mathematics here. It was written over the author's many years of TAing the required applied math course at Caltech.
What? The Luxor has a matrix of spotlights coming out the top pointing straight up, and a series of animated flashbulbs running up and down the edges of the pyramid. No displays on the actual building (unless it's changed in the two months since I was at Vegas last.)
Ok, I know that Gnome and KDE have Mac-lookalike widget themes, so that takes care of widgets (sorta...)
Now as for the Window server, it shouldn't be that hard to write a window server that actually uses MacOS windows. That seems to be the only big piece that's missing.
far out.....
"And obviously, of course, [the Democrats are] the biggest promoters among the two parties of corporate welfare; they're far in excess of the Republicans, who have some modest ideological restraints on it." --Ralph Nader
To which lesser extent?
What you want is:
dd(1), split(1), and a pipe.
"Don't bother me. I'm eating."
For the reverse process you can use cat(1), a pipe, and dd(1).