In previous years, the percentages of computer users who actually were real computer users and not just people who owned one for email or web browsing was certainly higher.
That's true, but I believe that nowadays there is a second tier in piracy: that is, people are no more making copies for their personal use, but rather making a business by selling at reduced price the copies they make in bulk quantity.
This should be no more the case for office (lowercase:-) ) suites, true: but in that case
licensing had come to terms anyway.
If it is more than an address book then give me a da*n keyboard and bigger screen. Wait, I already have one of those. I call it a laptop and it is about as small as I can stand a real computer being.
My old Psion 5mx has a keyboard (which I actually manage to use), and a screen that is small, but lets me do something useful. It's a shame that nobody wants to build it anymore.
Come to think of it, I won't feel safe until everyone is naked.
Do you? Think at all those kamikaze, who are
ready to eat a clockwork bomb and to spread their
guts all around the place.
True, a bomb is quite difficult to swallow, but maybe some surgeoning may do the trick.
ciao,.mau.
I may have missed the point, but Unicode is a character set. Once you have converted the characters in Unicode, you still have to store them. Instead than using UCS-2 (two bytes per character), you may store them in UTF-8, where codes (0-127) are represented exactly like in ASCII.
There are some 'known' problems, leaking resources, threads and not relaunching applets when a java 1 applet is loaded in a java2 VM
Call me stupid (I am used), but neither with 0.9.3 nor with 0.9.4 on Windows 2000 I am able to see Java applets. And yes, in Preference/Advanced Java is enabled. Could someone give me a hint?
I remain on the idea that it's easier that Short's opponent has been a computer. Three minutes for a whole play is a really short time frame, and starting with apparently random moves led probably Nigel to a loss, since he had to think at what to do in a novel situation.
This is no problem for a computer, however: in its "judgement", it had just not no peruse its handbook of opening moves.
As for the chat, why should Fischer give hints about being really him? Why should he care about this? It does not match his aura. It's true that on the 'Net nobody knows that you are a dog, and it's also true that a chess champion needs to play: but I am still skeptical.
ciao,.mau.
Scarcity is in the eye of the domain (be)holder
on
ICANN At-Large Study
·
· Score: 1
Domain names are primarily valuable currently because they are a scarce resource.
I don't know what the meaning of "scarce resource" is. Two months ago, I decided I wanted a domain just-for-me, and I got xmau.com . A four-letter name in the most crowded TLD, the first choice I searched for. This for scarceness.
We may argue whether there is a need for indefinite number of Top Level Domains: my personal opinion is that either there is some body who "owns" TLDs and checks whether the requirer har genuine interest in the field named by the TLD, or we end up having.microsoft ,.ibm ,.whatever instead of microsoft.com, ibm.com, whatever.com. What an enlargement of the namespace!
I have serious doubts about the utility of ICANN-At-Large, but I do not believe either that liberalization of TLD is the Graal.
I remember when we had to go to another room to work on the Tandy, TRS-80's.
well, you would have needed a try to carry a TRS-80, especially because of the monitor...
Progress is a fantastic thing, isn't it? Think at when our grandchildren will be able to fire up their IntelliPrompter(TM), instead than asking Dad to do the homework for them!
something like this begs to be continued beyond the author. I think the majority of you know what I'm leading to.
I don't think that Professor Knuth would agree
with that. As some of you may happen to know, we
could take TeX and METAfont as examples: nowadays,
only allowed modifications are bugfixes which
get a new decimal digit, and he dictated that when he will die, the reference code shall be frozen, any further bug will be promoted to feature, and their version number will be \pi and e.
DEK is utterly mad: nobody could stop writing TAOCP because of unsatisfaction about how the books were printed, then study typography and coming out with TeX and MF.
But this is why we love him.
ciao,.mau.
ps: I'd really love to see him playing his pipe organ
I basically agree with you. QoS is necessary when you have a streaming flow which you want to have control upon: if people come to think about it, the reason why a large buffer has to be set up when hearing radio on the net is that it's easy to get average 28.8 Kb/s, even here in Italy:-(, but it's more difficult to have constant bitrate. And to do this, you must allocate bandwidth at all steps of your path.
There is no real gain in having QoS when browsing Internet or sending email... The real power of IPv6 is that you may have your "real" address. If UMTS will ever be deployed, this will be the killer app, which will make the need for addresses surge!
ciao,.mau.
What are "mathematical rules"?
on
Share The Pi!
·
· Score: 2
what happens when a rule of mathematics is challenged? For example, some definitions seem so arbitrary to me. 1 is not considered a prime number because it has only itself as a factor...
Every mathematical "definition" is arbitrary. The logic in mathematics lies in the derivations from the definitions, not in the definition themselves.
You may have useless definitions (which are in contrast with "usual" maths), fruitful definitions (which let people find a lot of new things), or boring definitions, which do not give a lot of interesting results.
In the case of factorization, 1 is called "a unity", that is something separated from the prime numbers, because the most important result is the unique factorization ( up to unities!!!) in the group of integer numbers with the usual "multiplication" operation.
Notice that there are also a lot of theorems
which have to distinguish the case of 2 and of another prime: the reason is not that 2 is the only even prime number, but rather than in the field generated from the first 2 numbers, "1" and "-1" are the same thing. But those results are not so important to deserve a modification of
the definition of prime numbers to cast out 2.
A last comment: it is not difficult to write down a number which is normal in base 10. It suffices to digit 0.1234567891011121314151617181920... But if someone ever shows that \pi (or e, or a "common" irrational number) is normal in a certain base, it would be a really important result - for mathematicians, that is. The practical importance would be zero.
AFAIK, there is a number of different cables between Europe and the States. (more than 10, just to give an estimate. A byproduct of having a lot of national telecoms)
This means that there is enough redundancy to survive loss of one or two cables.
ciao,.mau.
I always had the impression that Perl wants to be a Jack-of-all-trades-yet-master-of-none. Therefore, I don't worry about having new
features thrown in a seemingly random way.
I am much more worried about the changes in syntax. I had problem in recovering from using bare @ in email addresses... let's hope for the better!
ciao,.mau.
What's the usefulness of SETI@home?
on
Optical SETI
·
· Score: 1
I always wondered - besides the nice screensaver - why people should search for alien signals. As long as we do not find wormholes, I don't think we can gain a lot by knowing that at just 1000 parsecs there is somebody (er... let's say someBEING). Neither think I that it is possible to get from the beginning the broadcast of the hit "how could you build a FTL spaceship".
I prefer to waste my CPU searching for Mersenne numbers: at least everyone knows that's useless.
ciao,.mau.
Slashdot Mirror
In previous years, the percentages of computer users who actually were real computer users and not just people who owned one for email or web browsing was certainly higher.
That's true, but I believe that nowadays there is a second tier in piracy: that is, people are no more making copies for their personal use, but rather making a business by selling at reduced price the copies they make in bulk quantity.
This should be no more the case for office (lowercase :-) ) suites, true: but in that case
licensing had come to terms anyway.
just my opinion, .mau.
If it is more than an address book then give me a da*n keyboard and bigger screen. Wait, I already have one of those. I call it a laptop and it is about as small as I can stand a real computer being.
My old Psion 5mx has a keyboard (which I actually manage to use), and a screen that is small, but lets me do something useful. It's a shame that nobody wants to build it anymore.
ciao,Come to think of it, I won't feel safe until everyone is naked. Do you? Think at all those kamikaze, who are ready to eat a clockwork bomb and to spread their guts all around the place. True, a bomb is quite difficult to swallow, but maybe some surgeoning may do the trick. ciao, .mau.
I may have missed the point, but Unicode is a character set. Once you have converted the characters in Unicode, you still have to store them. Instead than using UCS-2 (two bytes per character), you may store them in UTF-8, where codes (0-127) are represented exactly like in ASCII.
There are some 'known' problems, leaking resources, threads and not relaunching applets when a java 1 applet is loaded in a java2 VM
.mau.
Call me stupid (I am used), but neither with 0.9.3 nor with 0.9.4 on Windows 2000 I am able to see Java applets. And yes, in Preference/Advanced Java is enabled. Could someone give me a hint?
ciao,
I remain on the idea that it's easier that Short's opponent has been a computer. Three minutes for a whole play is a really short time frame, and starting with apparently random moves led probably Nigel to a loss, since he had to think at what to do in a novel situation.
.mau.
This is no problem for a computer, however: in its "judgement", it had just not no peruse its handbook of opening moves.
As for the chat, why should Fischer give hints about being really him? Why should he care about this? It does not match his aura. It's true that on the 'Net nobody knows that you are a dog, and it's also true that a chess champion needs to play: but I am still skeptical.
ciao,
I don't know what the meaning of "scarce resource" is. Two months ago, I decided I wanted a domain just-for-me, and I got xmau.com . A four-letter name in the most crowded TLD, the first choice I searched for. This for scarceness.
We may argue whether there is a need for indefinite number of Top Level Domains: my personal opinion is that either there is some body who "owns" TLDs and checks whether the requirer har genuine interest in the field named by the TLD, or we end up having .microsoft , .ibm , .whatever instead of microsoft.com, ibm.com, whatever.com. What an enlargement of the namespace!
I have serious doubts about the utility of ICANN-At-Large, but I do not believe either that liberalization of TLD is the Graal.
ciao,well, you would have needed a try to carry a TRS-80, especially because of the monitor...
Progress is a fantastic thing, isn't it? Think at when our grandchildren will be able to fire up their IntelliPrompter(TM), instead than asking Dad to do the homework for them!
ciao,A German magazine did a similar thing a while ago, only they included MSIE. It won hands on in every discipline from speed to adherence to standards.
.mau.
Pity that XML support in IE5.x is piecewise (to be fair, Opera has no support, and Netscape is a mess).
I switched for a while to IE5.5 for lack of alternatives: now I am using Mozilla 0.9.3 and I find myself rather comfortable.
ciao,
something like this begs to be continued beyond the author. I think the majority of you know what I'm leading to.
I don't think that Professor Knuth would agree with that. As some of you may happen to know, we could take TeX and METAfont as examples: nowadays, only allowed modifications are bugfixes which get a new decimal digit, and he dictated that when he will die, the reference code shall be frozen, any further bug will be promoted to feature, and their version number will be \pi and e.
DEK is utterly mad: nobody could stop writing TAOCP because of unsatisfaction about how the books were printed, then study typography and coming out with TeX and MF.
But this is why we love him.
ciao,ps: I'd really love to see him playing his pipe organ
I basically agree with you. QoS is necessary when you have a streaming flow which you want to have control upon: if people come to think about it, the reason why a large buffer has to be set up when hearing radio on the net is that it's easy to get average 28.8 Kb/s, even here in Italy :-(, but it's more difficult to have constant bitrate. And to do this, you must allocate bandwidth at all steps of your path.
There is no real gain in having QoS when browsing Internet or sending email... The real power of IPv6 is that you may have your "real" address. If UMTS will ever be deployed, this will be the killer app, which will make the need for addresses surge!
ciao,Every mathematical "definition" is arbitrary. The logic in mathematics lies in the derivations from the definitions, not in the definition themselves. You may have useless definitions (which are in contrast with "usual" maths), fruitful definitions (which let people find a lot of new things), or boring definitions, which do not give a lot of interesting results.
In the case of factorization, 1 is called "a unity", that is something separated from the prime numbers, because the most important result is the unique factorization ( up to unities!!!) in the group of integer numbers with the usual "multiplication" operation.
Notice that there are also a lot of theorems which have to distinguish the case of 2 and of another prime: the reason is not that 2 is the only even prime number, but rather than in the field generated from the first 2 numbers, "1" and "-1" are the same thing. But those results are not so important to deserve a modification of the definition of prime numbers to cast out 2.
A last comment: it is not difficult to write down a number which is normal in base 10. It suffices to digit 0.1234567891011121314151617181920... But if someone ever shows that \pi (or e, or a "common" irrational number) is normal in a certain base, it would be a really important result - for mathematicians, that is. The practical importance would be zero.
ciao,AFAIK, there is a number of different cables between Europe and the States. (more than 10, just to give an estimate. A byproduct of having a lot of national telecoms) This means that there is enough redundancy to survive loss of one or two cables. ciao, .mau.
I always had the impression that Perl wants to be a Jack-of-all-trades-yet-master-of-none. Therefore, I don't worry about having new features thrown in a seemingly random way. I am much more worried about the changes in syntax. I had problem in recovering from using bare @ in email addresses... let's hope for the better! ciao, .mau.
I always wondered - besides the nice screensaver - why people should search for alien signals. As long as we do not find wormholes, I don't think we can gain a lot by knowing that at just 1000 parsecs there is somebody (er... let's say someBEING). Neither think I that it is possible to get from the beginning the broadcast of the hit "how could you build a FTL spaceship". I prefer to waste my CPU searching for Mersenne numbers: at least everyone knows that's useless. ciao, .mau.