I can't find one good source of all the XML data lists....give me a list of XML sites
so I can actually finish my app
Hmm? I know XML, but I have absolutely no
idea what you are talking about.
If you really want people to answer your
plea, I suggest you be a lot more specific
about what you are asking for.
documents becomes available for processing by any programmer with a Perl script and a bit of intelligence, all sorts of wonderful new things can be invented
This is just a return to part of what
made Unix so powerful in the first place:
text formats that can be manipulated by
the whole suite of command line tools.
"Those who don't understand Unix are doomed
to re-invent it, poorly" (Henry Spencer).
Back in the 70s we used nroff/troff for
document formatting, producing in some
cases professional-quality camera-ready
books...but the source code was easily
fed to spell checkers, formatting-command-strippers, sort, wc, etc etc etc.
XML is ok...not bad as a meta-format...but
it's not some kind of new magic; it's just more
of the same as what we always used to do.
The great step forward is moving away from the
crud that happened in the middle: proprietary
underdocumented binary formats that couldn't
be fed to filter pipelines.
In this case, moving backwards is progress.
But expecting something amazing to be invented
is a bit much; it was already invented a long
time ago.
P.S. pet peeve...people credit Knuth (admittedly
an amazing guy for the Art of Computer Programming) for reinventing
typesetting with TeX.
Now, TeX is nicer than nroff/troff in
multiple ways, but it's worse in
some others (TeX is not set up for
command line filters!), and in
any case is only an incremental
improvement, not a revolution over
the older Unix tools. Credit is
not properly being given.
Why, is it because without him there would be no Linux?
I don't believe this is true, having both
lived/programmed through that era and also
having read all the various histories...but
at best you're speculating that the existence
of Minix was important historically...
I didn't think so at the time, although it
was somewhat interesting. People might
say the same thing about Xinu, Bill Jolitz'
Unix efforts, Cromemco Unix, Xenix, etc etc etc.
I saw and see nothing critically important about
Minix, even though, yes, Linus was interested
in it. If Minix had not existed, something
else would have taken its place.
(The same is true of Linux, BTW...if Linus hadn't
done Linux, something similar would
nonetheless have risen to similar popularity.
Nature abhors a vacuum, and lots of us in the
field had been KEENLY interested in a freeware
version of Unix since the late 70s...BSD didn't
mostly-lose due to technical inferiority, it
got clobbered by *ssh*le lawyers. But I digress.)
But anyway, I said "original". I never heard
anyone claim that there was something "original"
about Minix, whether it was historically
important or not. Similarly with Tanenbaum's
books (only one of which I've read)...
they may or may not be good books (let's
say they're good, for the sake of the argument)...
but is there anything original in them?
Lastly, you're assuming that the Torvalds-Tanenbaum flame war is why I'm down on
Tanenbaum, but you'd be wrong. I met him
in Real Life well before Linus ever started
messing with Minix, and Tanenbaum irritated
the hell out of me when I talked to him
face to face...the Linus flamewar just added
fuel to the fire for me.
As to the flamewar itself, I've always been
interested in microkernels, as an OS designer
myself, but Tanenbaum was arrogantly presumptuous
on the subject even back then, and certainly in
hindsight now...microkernels have both pluses and minuses, and any prof who would assign a failing grade just because of someone's choice, is merely proving that they themselves are jerks, by elevating a matter of taste up to pretending it's a matter of right and wrong. Tanenbaum does not belong in teaching, regardless of his other virtues,
when he grades on the basis of his own ego rather
than on the student's work.
To paraphrase, neither microkernels nor monolithic kernels are perfect, but Tanenbaum is a perfect jerk, ok?:-)
["Never underestimate the bandwidth of a vanload of tapes barrelling down the highway"]
I've seen this a couple times before, but Google seems to come up with nothing useful for it.
That's because the original is "station wagon"
(or "stationwagon"). Another common variant is "a 747 full of...". See e.g.
this story
And no, it's certainly not Tannenbaum 1996; it was (IIRC) mentioned in Bentley's "Programming Pearls" CACM column/book in the 1980s.
It's unclear that anything original can be attributed to Tannenbaum (okay, that's flamebait, but Tannenbaum irritates me).
Windows is flawed because it wasn't designed to be secure from the beginning
True, but far worse: Microsoft quite intentionally
continues to make Windows and Office etc insecure
on PURPOSE, as a side effect of
offering full programmability of email, Excel, etc.
There wouldn't be any email viruses nor spreadsheet
viruses nor Word document viruses if these apps
were lobotomized -- if they could not be programmed.
But Microsoft continually makes the business decision
that adding the power of programmability to every
app is much more important than the resulting
insecurity.
The vast majority of Linux apps do not allow that
kind of programmability -- even when extension languages
like Guile/elisp/etc are available in Unix apps, programs
aren't automatically and blindly run whenever some
hapless user receives email or views a spreadsheet or
whatever.
Conversely, whenever that kind of programmability
is added to Unix apps, if it is triggerable just by
receiving/viewing a file, then Unix viruses will become
far more rampant. (A small saving grace is that the
Unix viruses mostly, but not always, will run as
some user rather than as root, but this is really
only a small issue.)
This should be a wake-up call to teams like Gnumeric;
just yesterday on Slashdot Gnumeric was criticized
for not supporting every single MS Excel feature,
and Jody Goldberg replied that hopefully it would
include those by next year. But any Unix app
that is 100% compatible with a MS app will be
virus prone!
Quote from a poster on that story:
Worksheet functions are great, but a lot of Excel's draw comes from its embedded VBA. Companies that rely on workbooks with embedded VBA probably wont be willing to switch to Gnumeric until it has support for VBA, or something very similar.
The really sad thing is that the marketplace clearly
agrees with Microsoft about this tradeoff: corporate
and personal users are far more concerned with
having the power of macros/Visual Basic/etc built
in to everything than with even basic security.
Why don't you read the literature not only from the NSA, but
from the other various institutions
In particular I recommend
"Real World Linux
Security"
, second edition, by Bob Toxen,
which contains a wealth of useful information.
Full disclosure: I know the author; I am
doubtless biased. But I like the book and
have found it quite handy.
Here's an excerpt from an Amazon reviewer:
Bob goes far beyond a simple how-to, teaching best security practices and his "Rings of
Security" approach to keeping your information safe. The depth of knowledge contained within
will appeal to security administrators across the enterprise.
The book is by far the most useful security book on my shelf, and I continue to go back to it for
reference.
Re:In all non-decimal systems..
on
Eleventy What?
·
· Score: 1
GigaHertz, like giga-everything else, really does start with a "j" sound because it comes from the same root word as "gigantic
Nope. E.g.
www.m-w.com says either pronunciation is ok:
Main Entry: giga-
Pronunciation: 'ji-g&, 'gi-
Function: combining form
Etymology: International Scientific Vocabulary, from Greek gigas giant
: billion ; gigahertz; gigawatt
My previous understanding was that the J
pronunciation was primarily British where
American was primarily G, but I
certainly hear J from time to time
in the U.S.
Back when microwave communications technicians were working those frequencies
Huh? They never stopped. And more recently
cpu clock speeds hit gigahertz.
and computer people relied on ferrite beads strung on wires for memory there wasn't the present misunderstanding about this
What on earth does core memory have to do
with all this? (That's a rhetorical question;
the answer is "nothing at all")
I have a master's in linguistics, specialising in speech processing and the like, and I don't really believe in phonemes....In the beginning, there was the word. And the word was spoken...
...sure, your hidden Markov model-based systems working with sequences of two or three phonemes are pretty effective, but they'll never be 100% successful in my opinion.
This is not a very coherent argument. You might
as well say that you doubt the existence
of musical notes, since you've diagrammed
the power spectrum of middle C on a piano
and various other instruments, and always
you see a really complex waveform, not
a simple 440 hertz sine wave. And sometimes
there is even a complete absence of energy
at that frequency. The situation indeed is
so complex that no algorithm has ever been
developed that can reliably detect the
supposed period/frequency of the supposed
musical note (especially in human voices).
But despite those complex observations, there
is every reason to think that musical notes
exist. It's just that there are difficult
intertwined subjects here; the physics is
difficult (if you try to accurately model
the non-linearities of the resonating chambers),
the math is difficult (the signal is non-stationary, so Fourier analysis is a really
bad approximation of the truth), and
the brain is, as always, extremely complex,
so we don't understand the psycho-acoustics,
either.
And yet, musical notes exist.
And so do phonemes, despite the fact that they
blur together etc etc.
On a final note, don't forget that even
the word
"word" has no concrete rigorous definition
widely agreed upon in the linguistics community.
Naively it seems simple, but when you look
closely at the subject, the notion of "word"
also gets really complex. So one could
deny that words exist...but I don't think
that would be a smart stance.
As a side note I'm not real thrilled about
your history of written language. I suggest
you take a refresher on ancient Egyptian.:-)
Masters in Linguistics, eh? Hopefully you
are moving on to a PhD?
P.S. Yes, I have done work in computational
linguistics...and shipped product! The topics
are very difficult, indeed, but in the
commercial world, failure to solve problems
is not an option.:-)
BSD is Unix. Based off of the original Berkley Unix code
Since I worked on the earliest versions of
Berkeley Unix, I can clarify this (the terse
version is "BSD used to be UNIX, but that
was a long time ago"):
The original Berkeley Unix was indeed a
set of mods to the Bell Labs Unix code
(which unfortunately were not accepted
by Bell Labs/AT&T in a hissy fit of Not
Invented Here Syndrome).
However licensing issues kept getting in the
way of efforts of people like Bill Jolitz
to make BSD Unix available on PCs (386 PCs,
back then). This was another really nasty
battle that reflected quite badly on AT&T,
and caused untold trauma for Jolitz, other
BSD developers, and of course the teeming
masses that wanted affordable Unix on their
PCs.
Therefore a huge effort was made to strip
out all of the original Bell Labs
source code.
Modern BSD distributions, like FreeBSD, therefore
have none of the original Unix code, and
properly should be called workalikes, just
like Linux.
I've been using Linux for lo, these many years,
so I'm out of touch with BSD issues, however
there's every reason to think that BSD is a more
exact workalike than Linux, since it started
out as Unix and only gradually had
each component rewritten as a close copy of
the functionality of the original. Some purists
care about this, I don't.
Except where functionality is actually removed. E.g. Stallman insists that
man pages are obsolete and refuses to support
them, which is incredibly wrongheaded.
BSD is superior in that regard, and in
a few other places. (Many places where
BSD had a similar edge in the past are
now obsolete issues; Linux has mostly caught up.)
Rant #4: Only problems that have a one bit solution (yes or no, true or false) can be NP complete. Others are "hard".
Don't forget the class of problems that can
be transformed into a one-bit solution.
Traveling Salesman doesn't initially have
a one bit solution, but it's still NP-complete
rather than NP-hard because it can be
thus transformed.
No, it's a bad thing, because it renders Gutenberg near useless for anything other than English, and it cripples it for creating PDFs, TeX files for printing, and the like
Strangely enough, people have actually
addressed this, notably with the Gutenmark
program to convert Gutenberg text into
nicely formatted documents in a variety
of markup formats (including PDF and TeX,
using postprocessing filters).
It never ceases to amaze me that, when
people see something that only addresses
90% of their own problem, they call it
useless, rather than doing a web search
to see whether someone has addressed
the remaining 10% of their problem.
Gutenberg is an amazingly important
project; I urge everyone to support it.
It's true that the US government (military, CIA, etc) did do some rather illicit experiments with
various hallucinagens (and other drugs, and
radioactive treatments, and diseases, etc).
This is one of those semi-correct, semi-urban-legend
things.
I think that Plato was the first one to
start this rumor going ("there are only
3 plots -- man against the gods, man against
man, and man against himself"... but I may
be remembering both the source and the quote
incorrectly).
More recently, the turn-of-the-20th-century
Polti published a book giving the number as
37; see
But that's just one old fart's opinion (umm,
I mean Polti, not me:-) -- although
it does seem to be the source of all of the
modern rumors.
Others have said that literature is inexhaustible,
for instance, fans of science fiction, which
is sometimes called "the literature of ideas" --
surely ideas are inexhaustible?
But fiction, as opposed to non-fiction,
almost always revolves around people;
science fiction without people-plots
tends to be unreadable (or let's say,
not very popular).
So it tends to come back to basic things
like boy-meets-girl, boy-loses-girl...blah blah.
But even then, I think that the total
number of combinations/permutations is
astronomically large, and that any of these
claims that "there are only N plots possible"
is similar to saying "there are only N
organisms possible in any world, no
matter how many worlds there are
in the universe, and no matter how
various their biologies". Bullpunky.
Ideas, thoughts, and people/sentients are
incredibly complex, and their interactions
in a narrative rise exponentially.
Your eye can't pick up more than 60 fps anyway. If you think it can, you're high on crack
A little knowledge is a dangerous thing.
You're superficially quoting something that
admittedly is often quoted, but this is a very
complex subject, and your summary of it is
so simplistic as to be wrong.
For one thing, the "critical flicker fusion rate"
is not simply a universal "60 frames per second".
It depends on:
ambient lighting conditions (brightness and contrast of the room)
ambient lighting continuity (the flicker of flourescent lights can, and does, interfere with the flicker of the screen)
the viewer (some people are much more sensitive to flicker than others; I'm in between extremes, so 60fps is usually not quite enough, but 70-72fps is always enough for me personally...other people may need 80fps)
That's part of why movie theaters get away with a mere 48fps (24 unique frames, but each is double shuttered). They turn the ambient lights down to almost zero, and that helps a lot.
You're also mildly confused about tv, which in
the US does use 30 unique frames per second, but by using interlace, increases that
up to more reasonable 60fps...however most people
will definitely see flicker on US tv at some times
in some conditions. Sophisticated broadcasters
usually try to minimize the issues on their end,
but that's not always enough.
Europe of course has 25 unique frames, interlaced
up to 50 total frames per second (to match the
frequency of their wall current, just as 60 Hertz matches US wall current frequency), and TV's
in Europe are often perceived to flicker, as
opposed to rarely.
It also depends on which aspect of perception
under discussion; cartoons sometimes use as few
as 4 unique frames per second (each displayed
repeatedly to end up with a total of 48 or 60
or whatever fps), because that's adequate for
a perception of motion. But it's jerky motion.
And now we have come to the heart of the issue
of why it can be desirable to have even higher
rates than 60 to 80fps. We are strobing objects
in continuous motion, and the faster they move,
the more the strobed snapshot of them is subject
to motion blur (potentially...never mind whether
this happens e.g. Quake in particular).
In real life, objects being viewed are in
a continuous domain, and our perceptual system
does something similar to discrete sampling.
That will never mathematically be identical
to discrete sampling of a discrete sequence
at another rate; there's always issues of
aliasing. This is a huge issue for digital
signal processing in every domain, whether
audio, visual, or other.
At any rate, in theory, certain very rapidly moving
objects should be perceived more crisply at
(say) 150 fps than at 80fps, even though
that's way over that critical flicker fusion rate --- there are more issues involved than just that.
What's the strangest thing readers have found, or left, on a hard drive?"
True story: some years back my wife was doing
web design for various clients, one of whom
had a graphic artist on staff, who gave her
a Mac 100M Zip disk that supposedly had some
nice artwork on it for my wife to put on the
client's web site.
But the disk appeared to be completely empty,
so my wife gave it to me to try to recover the
missing files.
No problem under Linux...I recovered a full
100 megabytes of files...but they were all
kinky porn!!!
We decided to let the guy off easy and didn't
tell his employers what he was doing with
company computers and media, but my
wife was always a bit leery of working
with that guy after that.
(Yes, I did of course save the more, ah,
artistic images for, um, later personal, uh,
research.;-)
This kind of amusing leftovers on media is
probably extremely common, but most people
don't have any motivation to pry around into
deleted files. As I recall, this particular
disk just had a bit of file system damage
that made it appear empty at first, rather
than literally having deleted files, so
file system repair was enough to get all
of the originals back.
Name a feature of UNIX that is not in a previous system.
Some very important ones:
pipes (not just any message passing, pipes
in particular, because of following items)
utilities designed to *work* with pipes
(grep, sed, etc).
command interpreters that allow pipe connections
between utilities with only a single keystroke
(the "|" symbol)
command interpreters that are in user space,
not in the kernel, and can be changed at
will by users
Support of regular expressions in the
command interpreter, utilities (like sed),
and in the editor.
The philosophy of having each utility and app
do just one thing and do that well
(see the famous Bell Systems Tech Journal
report on Unix). Stallman doesn't understand
this, which is why GNU tools are ridiculously
heavyweight, with far far more features than
is healthy. GNU basically never factors out
common elements, they just accrete.
And you yourself listed 3 innovations,
although you disputed whether they are
indeed innovations.
They are; e.g. you seem to have missed the fact that
the voting has been over for a long, long time.
Unix was correct to avoid putting structured
files like ISAM etc into the kernel.
Database vendors who need something fancier
than vanilla files turn out not to want
to add ISAM/etc support to the kernel,
instead they universally want an entire
disk partition in which to build accellerated
database structures.
If you take out the layered applications you are left with the kernel, the shell and mostly a lot of dreck
that could be cleaned out without most people noticing.
That is just pathetically wrong. The
*only* decent command line systems in existence
are (1) Unix command interpreters, and (2)
strict copies of Unix command interpreters.
Even Microsoft and Macintosh developers
depend heavily on Unix-flavored command
lines. There's never been a GUI built that
could completely substitute for Unix-like
command lines.
MULTICS was innovative, but it was also
largely a failure (yeah, I know, it was
in use until just recently, but there
were never many installations).
Following your line of argument, the
correct conclusion would be that Unix
was a second generation of Multics
that *was* successful, by doing so much
right.
When was the last time you played a UNIX
console game?
A few weeks ago. Rogue. Oh, was that
supposed to be a rhetorical question?
Your failures of the imagination are staggering.
Quake and Half Life etc are cool,
but there's never been a good graphical
replacement for Rogue-like games, and
many of them are still very popular.
Nethack, I think, might be the one that's
most popular, rather than Rogue itself.
Don't be a dork. As Henry Spencer said,
"those who do not understand Unix are
condemned to reinvent it -- poorly".
You obviously are aware of a fair number
of things about Unix and its history,
but equally obviously, you don't
understand Unix worth a damn,
in Spencer's sense.
the job listing was most likely a job in redmond washington, but posted in an indian job listing to specifically recruit indian guys.
It's not necessary to carefully avoid reading
the very short page that this story is about.
It's not necessary to make a (completely wrong)
wild speculation
that is trivial to double-check just by glancing
at the final line of the job posting.
It's not necessary to embarass yourself
in public.
The final sentence of the job posting says:
This position is in Hyderabad, India.
Of course, this is the first time anyone on
Slashdot ever posted something incorrect without
reading the story in question, and
doubtless no one will ever do something
that silly ever again.
And it wouldn't even help to say "oldest
surviving" or some such. Netcom the corporation
was acquired by Earthlink, but it didn't
go away...I still have my original 1988
email address!
Some people might try to quibble by saying that
initially Netcom only offered shell accounts
with Internet access, so it didn't count, but
I say that is wrong...many of us used the
commercial TIA or the freeware "dipd" to
forward TCP/IP from our home systems to
the dialed-up shell. But even neglecting this,
we were able to ftp, telnet, ping, etc any
site on the net...I say that counts!
In the early days Netcom had only one
server, and the founder, Bob Reiger, was
initially the only sys admin...so if the
system lost internet access in the wee
hours of the morning, we would call the
poor guy at home, wake him up and beg
him to go fix it.
His wife insisted that he hire a night
watch sys admin pretty early on.;-)
Slashdot Mirror
Hmm? I know XML, but I have absolutely no idea what you are talking about. If you really want people to answer your plea, I suggest you be a lot more specific about what you are asking for.
This is just a return to part of what made Unix so powerful in the first place: text formats that can be manipulated by the whole suite of command line tools. "Those who don't understand Unix are doomed to re-invent it, poorly" (Henry Spencer).
Back in the 70s we used nroff/troff for document formatting, producing in some cases professional-quality camera-ready books...but the source code was easily fed to spell checkers, formatting-command-strippers, sort, wc, etc etc etc.
XML is ok...not bad as a meta-format...but it's not some kind of new magic; it's just more of the same as what we always used to do.
The great step forward is moving away from the crud that happened in the middle: proprietary underdocumented binary formats that couldn't be fed to filter pipelines.
In this case, moving backwards is progress. But expecting something amazing to be invented is a bit much; it was already invented a long time ago.
P.S. pet peeve...people credit Knuth (admittedly an amazing guy for the Art of Computer Programming) for reinventing typesetting with TeX. Now, TeX is nicer than nroff/troff in multiple ways, but it's worse in some others (TeX is not set up for command line filters!), and in any case is only an incremental improvement, not a revolution over the older Unix tools. Credit is not properly being given.
I suggest you cut/paste your post and put it on your web site, for the sake of historians who are always researching stuff like this.
(Well, I'm always trying to research stuff like this, anyway :-)
Give it long enough, and posterity
will too, as they say. Or will say.)
But influential nontheless.
Guess I can't argue with that.
And my irritations aside, he's got his good points, too.
I don't believe this is true, having both lived/programmed through that era and also having read all the various histories...but at best you're speculating that the existence of Minix was important historically... I didn't think so at the time, although it was somewhat interesting. People might say the same thing about Xinu, Bill Jolitz' Unix efforts, Cromemco Unix, Xenix, etc etc etc.
I saw and see nothing critically important about Minix, even though, yes, Linus was interested in it. If Minix had not existed, something else would have taken its place.
(The same is true of Linux, BTW...if Linus hadn't done Linux, something similar would nonetheless have risen to similar popularity. Nature abhors a vacuum, and lots of us in the field had been KEENLY interested in a freeware version of Unix since the late 70s...BSD didn't mostly-lose due to technical inferiority, it got clobbered by *ssh*le lawyers. But I digress.)
But anyway, I said "original". I never heard anyone claim that there was something "original" about Minix, whether it was historically important or not. Similarly with Tanenbaum's books (only one of which I've read)... they may or may not be good books (let's say they're good, for the sake of the argument)... but is there anything original in them?
Lastly, you're assuming that the Torvalds-Tanenbaum flame war is why I'm down on Tanenbaum, but you'd be wrong. I met him in Real Life well before Linus ever started messing with Minix, and Tanenbaum irritated the hell out of me when I talked to him face to face...the Linus flamewar just added fuel to the fire for me.
As to the flamewar itself, I've always been interested in microkernels, as an OS designer myself, but Tanenbaum was arrogantly presumptuous on the subject even back then, and certainly in hindsight now...microkernels have both pluses and minuses, and any prof who would assign a failing grade just because of someone's choice, is merely proving that they themselves are jerks, by elevating a matter of taste up to pretending it's a matter of right and wrong. Tanenbaum does not belong in teaching, regardless of his other virtues, when he grades on the basis of his own ego rather than on the student's work.
To paraphrase, neither microkernels nor monolithic kernels are perfect, but Tanenbaum is a perfect jerk, ok? :-)
That's because the original is "station wagon" (or "stationwagon"). Another common variant is "a 747 full of...". See e.g. this story
And no, it's certainly not Tannenbaum 1996; it was (IIRC) mentioned in Bentley's "Programming Pearls" CACM column/book in the 1980s. It's unclear that anything original can be attributed to Tannenbaum (okay, that's flamebait, but Tannenbaum irritates me).
True, but far worse: Microsoft quite intentionally continues to make Windows and Office etc insecure on PURPOSE, as a side effect of offering full programmability of email, Excel, etc.
There wouldn't be any email viruses nor spreadsheet viruses nor Word document viruses if these apps were lobotomized -- if they could not be programmed.
But Microsoft continually makes the business decision that adding the power of programmability to every app is much more important than the resulting insecurity.
The vast majority of Linux apps do not allow that kind of programmability -- even when extension languages like Guile/elisp/etc are available in Unix apps, programs aren't automatically and blindly run whenever some hapless user receives email or views a spreadsheet or whatever.
Conversely, whenever that kind of programmability is added to Unix apps, if it is triggerable just by receiving/viewing a file, then Unix viruses will become far more rampant. (A small saving grace is that the Unix viruses mostly, but not always, will run as some user rather than as root, but this is really only a small issue.)
This should be a wake-up call to teams like Gnumeric; just yesterday on Slashdot Gnumeric was criticized for not supporting every single MS Excel feature, and Jody Goldberg replied that hopefully it would include those by next year. But any Unix app that is 100% compatible with a MS app will be virus prone!
Quote from a poster on that story:
Mmm-hmm, and there goes security.
(Story link: Gnumeric Now Supports All Excel Worksheet Functions )
The really sad thing is that the marketplace clearly agrees with Microsoft about this tradeoff: corporate and personal users are far more concerned with having the power of macros/Visual Basic/etc built in to everything than with even basic security.
In particular I recommend "Real World Linux Security" , second edition, by Bob Toxen, which contains a wealth of useful information.
Full disclosure: I know the author; I am doubtless biased. But I like the book and have found it quite handy.
Here's an excerpt from an Amazon reviewer:
Nope. E.g. www.m-w.com says either pronunciation is ok:
My previous understanding was that the J pronunciation was primarily British where American was primarily G, but I certainly hear J from time to time in the U.S.Back when microwave communications technicians were working those frequencies
Huh? They never stopped. And more recently cpu clock speeds hit gigahertz.
and computer people relied on ferrite beads strung on wires for memory there wasn't the present misunderstanding about this
What on earth does core memory have to do with all this? (That's a rhetorical question; the answer is "nothing at all")
This is not a very coherent argument. You might as well say that you doubt the existence of musical notes, since you've diagrammed the power spectrum of middle C on a piano and various other instruments, and always you see a really complex waveform, not a simple 440 hertz sine wave. And sometimes there is even a complete absence of energy at that frequency. The situation indeed is so complex that no algorithm has ever been developed that can reliably detect the supposed period/frequency of the supposed musical note (especially in human voices).
But despite those complex observations, there is every reason to think that musical notes exist. It's just that there are difficult intertwined subjects here; the physics is difficult (if you try to accurately model the non-linearities of the resonating chambers), the math is difficult (the signal is non-stationary, so Fourier analysis is a really bad approximation of the truth), and the brain is, as always, extremely complex, so we don't understand the psycho-acoustics, either.
And yet, musical notes exist.
And so do phonemes, despite the fact that they blur together etc etc.
On a final note, don't forget that even the word "word" has no concrete rigorous definition widely agreed upon in the linguistics community. Naively it seems simple, but when you look closely at the subject, the notion of "word" also gets really complex. So one could deny that words exist...but I don't think that would be a smart stance.
As a side note I'm not real thrilled about your history of written language. I suggest you take a refresher on ancient Egyptian. :-)
Masters in Linguistics, eh? Hopefully you are moving on to a PhD?
P.S. Yes, I have done work in computational linguistics...and shipped product! The topics are very difficult, indeed, but in the commercial world, failure to solve problems is not an option. :-)
Since I worked on the earliest versions of Berkeley Unix, I can clarify this (the terse version is "BSD used to be UNIX, but that was a long time ago"):
The original Berkeley Unix was indeed a set of mods to the Bell Labs Unix code (which unfortunately were not accepted by Bell Labs/AT&T in a hissy fit of Not Invented Here Syndrome).
However licensing issues kept getting in the way of efforts of people like Bill Jolitz to make BSD Unix available on PCs (386 PCs, back then). This was another really nasty battle that reflected quite badly on AT&T, and caused untold trauma for Jolitz, other BSD developers, and of course the teeming masses that wanted affordable Unix on their PCs.
Therefore a huge effort was made to strip out all of the original Bell Labs source code.
Modern BSD distributions, like FreeBSD, therefore have none of the original Unix code, and properly should be called workalikes, just like Linux.
I've been using Linux for lo, these many years, so I'm out of touch with BSD issues, however there's every reason to think that BSD is a more exact workalike than Linux, since it started out as Unix and only gradually had each component rewritten as a close copy of the functionality of the original. Some purists care about this, I don't.
Except where functionality is actually removed. E.g. Stallman insists that man pages are obsolete and refuses to support them, which is incredibly wrongheaded. BSD is superior in that regard, and in a few other places. (Many places where BSD had a similar edge in the past are now obsolete issues; Linux has mostly caught up.)
For those of you who came in late, Unix and its workalikes (Linux etc) have grown in use exponentially since 1980.
Don't forget the class of problems that can be transformed into a one-bit solution. Traveling Salesman doesn't initially have a one bit solution, but it's still NP-complete rather than NP-hard because it can be thus transformed.
Strangely enough, people have actually addressed this, notably with the Gutenmark program to convert Gutenberg text into nicely formatted documents in a variety of markup formats (including PDF and TeX, using postprocessing filters).
See GutenMark home
It never ceases to amaze me that, when people see something that only addresses 90% of their own problem, they call it useless, rather than doing a web search to see whether someone has addressed the remaining 10% of their problem.
Gutenberg is an amazingly important project; I urge everyone to support it.
Not even close; it was created over 50 years ago by a Swiss researcher working for an ordinary pharmaceutical company.
See this timeline , for instance.
It's true that the US government (military, CIA, etc) did do some rather illicit experiments with various hallucinagens (and other drugs, and radioactive treatments, and diseases, etc).
But they didn't invent any of those things.
I'm sure you could find counter-examples,
if you're clever about it (see my response
to the parent article you're commenting on).
This is one of those semi-correct, semi-urban-legend things. I think that Plato was the first one to start this rumor going ("there are only 3 plots -- man against the gods, man against man, and man against himself" ... but I may
be remembering both the source and the quote
incorrectly).
More recently, the turn-of-the-20th-century Polti published a book giving the number as 37; see
But that's just one old fart's opinion (umm, I mean Polti, not me :-) -- although
it does seem to be the source of all of the
modern rumors.
Others have said that literature is inexhaustible, for instance, fans of science fiction, which is sometimes called "the literature of ideas" -- surely ideas are inexhaustible?
But fiction, as opposed to non-fiction, almost always revolves around people; science fiction without people-plots tends to be unreadable (or let's say, not very popular).
So it tends to come back to basic things like boy-meets-girl, boy-loses-girl...blah blah. But even then, I think that the total number of combinations/permutations is astronomically large, and that any of these claims that "there are only N plots possible" is similar to saying "there are only N organisms possible in any world, no matter how many worlds there are in the universe, and no matter how various their biologies". Bullpunky.
Ideas, thoughts, and people/sentients are incredibly complex, and their interactions in a narrative rise exponentially.
The proposed copy protections are extremely unfair and unreasonable. Why should we allow ourselves to be bribed to permit such a thing?
The question of whether copyright limits should be shorter (I sure think so!) should be independent.
Personally I think eventually we consumers will win all of these battles. There's no reason to even think of accepting bribes from a corrupt industry.
A little knowledge is a dangerous thing. You're superficially quoting something that admittedly is often quoted, but this is a very complex subject, and your summary of it is so simplistic as to be wrong.
For one thing, the "critical flicker fusion rate" is not simply a universal "60 frames per second". It depends on:
That's part of why movie theaters get away with a mere 48fps (24 unique frames, but each is double shuttered). They turn the ambient lights down to almost zero, and that helps a lot.
You're also mildly confused about tv, which in the US does use 30 unique frames per second, but by using interlace, increases that up to more reasonable 60fps...however most people will definitely see flicker on US tv at some times in some conditions. Sophisticated broadcasters usually try to minimize the issues on their end, but that's not always enough.
Europe of course has 25 unique frames, interlaced up to 50 total frames per second (to match the frequency of their wall current, just as 60 Hertz matches US wall current frequency), and TV's in Europe are often perceived to flicker, as opposed to rarely.
It also depends on which aspect of perception under discussion; cartoons sometimes use as few as 4 unique frames per second (each displayed repeatedly to end up with a total of 48 or 60 or whatever fps), because that's adequate for a perception of motion. But it's jerky motion.
And now we have come to the heart of the issue of why it can be desirable to have even higher rates than 60 to 80fps. We are strobing objects in continuous motion, and the faster they move, the more the strobed snapshot of them is subject to motion blur (potentially...never mind whether this happens e.g. Quake in particular).
In real life, objects being viewed are in a continuous domain, and our perceptual system does something similar to discrete sampling. That will never mathematically be identical to discrete sampling of a discrete sequence at another rate; there's always issues of aliasing. This is a huge issue for digital signal processing in every domain, whether audio, visual, or other.
At any rate, in theory, certain very rapidly moving objects should be perceived more crisply at (say) 150 fps than at 80fps, even though that's way over that critical flicker fusion rate --- there are more issues involved than just that.
Humor, d00d, it was humor. You don't have to check your sense of humor at the door...oh wait, you're kidding too? Ah, good.
True story: some years back my wife was doing web design for various clients, one of whom had a graphic artist on staff, who gave her a Mac 100M Zip disk that supposedly had some nice artwork on it for my wife to put on the client's web site.
But the disk appeared to be completely empty, so my wife gave it to me to try to recover the missing files.
No problem under Linux...I recovered a full 100 megabytes of files...but they were all kinky porn!!!
We decided to let the guy off easy and didn't tell his employers what he was doing with company computers and media, but my wife was always a bit leery of working with that guy after that.
(Yes, I did of course save the more, ah, artistic images for, um, later personal, uh, research. ;-)
This kind of amusing leftovers on media is probably extremely common, but most people don't have any motivation to pry around into deleted files. As I recall, this particular disk just had a bit of file system damage that made it appear empty at first, rather than literally having deleted files, so file system repair was enough to get all of the originals back.
But if you use VIM, you won't need psychiatric help, whereas with Emacs, of course you do, so of course it provides it. ;-)
Some very important ones:
And you yourself listed 3 innovations, although you disputed whether they are indeed innovations.
They are; e.g. you seem to have missed the fact that the voting has been over for a long, long time. Unix was correct to avoid putting structured files like ISAM etc into the kernel. Database vendors who need something fancier than vanilla files turn out not to want to add ISAM/etc support to the kernel, instead they universally want an entire disk partition in which to build accellerated database structures.
If you take out the layered applications you are left with the kernel, the shell and mostly a lot of dreck that could be cleaned out without most people noticing.
That is just pathetically wrong. The *only* decent command line systems in existence are (1) Unix command interpreters, and (2) strict copies of Unix command interpreters. Even Microsoft and Macintosh developers depend heavily on Unix-flavored command lines. There's never been a GUI built that could completely substitute for Unix-like command lines.
MULTICS was innovative, but it was also largely a failure (yeah, I know, it was in use until just recently, but there were never many installations).
Following your line of argument, the correct conclusion would be that Unix was a second generation of Multics that *was* successful, by doing so much right.
When was the last time you played a UNIX console game?
A few weeks ago. Rogue. Oh, was that supposed to be a rhetorical question?
Your failures of the imagination are staggering. Quake and Half Life etc are cool, but there's never been a good graphical replacement for Rogue-like games, and many of them are still very popular. Nethack, I think, might be the one that's most popular, rather than Rogue itself.
Don't be a dork. As Henry Spencer said, "those who do not understand Unix are condemned to reinvent it -- poorly".
You obviously are aware of a fair number of things about Unix and its history, but equally obviously, you don't understand Unix worth a damn, in Spencer's sense.
It's not necessary to carefully avoid reading the very short page that this story is about. It's not necessary to make a (completely wrong) wild speculation that is trivial to double-check just by glancing at the final line of the job posting. It's not necessary to embarass yourself in public. The final sentence of the job posting says:
Of course, this is the first time anyone on Slashdot ever posted something incorrect without reading the story in question, and doubtless no one will ever do something that silly ever again.
BS. Propaganda. I got a Netcom account in 1988 (after being dissatisfied with portal.com, who were even earlier, but who sucked)
See Netcom in computing dictionary
And it wouldn't even help to say "oldest surviving" or some such. Netcom the corporation was acquired by Earthlink, but it didn't go away...I still have my original 1988 email address!
Some people might try to quibble by saying that initially Netcom only offered shell accounts with Internet access, so it didn't count, but I say that is wrong...many of us used the commercial TIA or the freeware "dipd" to forward TCP/IP from our home systems to the dialed-up shell. But even neglecting this, we were able to ftp, telnet, ping, etc any site on the net...I say that counts!
In the early days Netcom had only one server, and the founder, Bob Reiger, was initially the only sys admin...so if the system lost internet access in the wee hours of the morning, we would call the poor guy at home, wake him up and beg him to go fix it.
His wife insisted that he hire a night watch sys admin pretty early on. ;-)