"I don't know what language engineers will be using in 100 years to talk to computers, but I *know* they'll call it FORTRAN."
The language won't die and it looks less and less like the original beast every year. Fortran is analogous to George Washington's axe: "The handle has been replaced several times, and in the earily 1900's the head rusted-throgh so it was scrapped and re-cast with a better quality steel, but this is the very axe he used to chop down the famous cherry tree."
...from your mother in-law and you will be stuck with douche and "feminine napkin" adds for months.
Or, more "correctly." Collecting the data isn't the problem. The absence of a way to signal that the data currently being collected (or say, that was collected last week) is abberant to your normal houshold patterns is the problem.
In still other words: If you don't want to have your TV viewing experence skewed to the hip-hopp make sure your house sitter is interested in the same things you are every time you go on vacation.
Essentially, for this "service" to serve anyone what they *really* need is a pair of buttons on the remote:
1) "Don't ever show me that crap again".
2) "Clear History Cache"
You'll never see either since it would be against the preceived interest of the programmers to have the audience "vote away" a well paying ad campeign, and the "fear" of abbuse of the clear button being misused.
You think the wife isn't going to notice that after you have spent all weekend watching bay-watch-brests and network-battle-of the T&A that the comercials arn't a tad late-night-ish? Don't you bet that every guy who does watch broadcast-pr0n is going to press that button before any date he brings into the house?
The single thing that a local manager can do that a "corporate entity" can't is "recognize the value of play". In every good shop I have ever worked in, the quality and quantity of work was directly proportional to the lattitude for play allowed.
'puters are brain work, and brain work can't go on uninterrupted for eight "good" hours a day. Some of your best programmers and brain-workers do their best as "sprinters". I have worked in places where the entire open-air office (eight-or-nine people) break out into koosh(tm)-throwing wars spontaneously.
If the *accountants* got wind of that they'd have had kittens about the "waste" of corporate time.
Lets face it, it is not in the corporations best interest to be able to track their employees byond a certian granularity (in the information systems development arena at least). Now keeping people from playing grab-ass near the twenty-ton press is important for life an limb, but the sheer stupidity of corporate america with respect to handling their mental-talent pool is legendary. They *REALLY* *DONT* want the non-geek-savvy people to have access to the geeky-mind's work log.
I do not suffer from CTS (but I play someone who does on tv? sorry, mandatory joke 8-). The simple fact is that a neurologist can measure the neurologcal "static" associated with CTS. That means that it can't be "faked" in the presence of an honest and well-informed practitioner. This makes it "not a good candidate" for false claims. The test stings like a bitch if you aren't under general anestetic. A fact that alone could be responsible for the fakers taking a powder.
Factoid #1: There are exercises that can almost completely releive/remove the phenominia if started before the inflamation reaches the point of no return and a good sports-medicine doctor should be able to teach them to you. If you have reached the aforementioned point the exercises *can* bring you back but they are agonizing and so the sufferer usually can't stick to the regimine(sp?)
Factoid #2: The medical community sucks. A family friend (doctor) commited suicide after taking years abbuse from his coleagues in the AMA because he was trying to get general approval for a procedure where the neurologist would be in the opperating room taking measurements durring CTS surgery. Cutting to proceed until, and only until, the "static" was gone. His success rate was near 100%. Operating times were drastically lowered. Nobody had to come back for a second opperation. Virtually no complications. Recovery rates were usually 1/3 the time of the "normal" proceedure. In short it was faster _CHEAPER_ and better.
He was hounded to death.
Frankly there are a lot of things like this happening all around you, medically speaking. If you are male go to your doctor and tell him you have the symptoms of "Fibromyalgia" and you will get dismissed outright. "It only happens to women, men never get it." (and it's not like prostate cancer where there is some gender-unique feature of the body involved). With the predisposition of doctors to their views I wouldn't be surprised if cancer whent away "statistically" if it were declared financially unprofitable, and all those people were suddenly rediagnosed as having an imbalance of green and yellow bile...
Don't get me wrong. I am a great fan of doctors. At least the ones who will pay attention to you and work for you instead of an HMO or otherwise try to keep themselves "up stat". A truely good doctor combined with a good insurance carrier can be a breathtakingly positive and useful experience. If you are poor, uninsured, or not used to standing up to authority to get yourself heard-out your medical experience will, of course, suck.
Its great you can monitor something trashing your Registry. We don't have a registry to trash. Which is better?
I have seen mentions of "Tripwire" but I don't know what it does. I have *used* "truss" on Solaris and since it will (optionally) follow eihter or both branches of a fork and all internal threads if you use it wisely, and have any skill as chosing options and processing text files with "grep" etc I would be it beats the hell out of FileMon.
SMS will always mean "Shitcan My System" to me, but I may be biased. 8-)
As always, reguardless of platform or action is us about the admin knowing what question to ask more than it is about the platforms ability to magically disgorge "just the right answers".
MY general rule is, If I can phrase the question, likely someone with more drive than I has already written a program to provide the answer. If not, it's time to whip out the old compiler and do my share for the war effort...
I, having read some of the other comentary, withdraw some of the above. While I clearly think that the DNA-gamete nature of the monilith and the monkey-human analysis holds. I withdraw any assertion as to delebrateness of the parallel 8-)
Reapplying OCCAMS RAZOR, TMA is, well, a good Three Letter Acronym, which always works well on the surface. (ASK IBM) and I guess any TLA would sound like DNA if it ends in "A" 8-).
I till suspect that it stood for "the moon artifact" cause that is just too obvious.
Again, as initally stated, I was just working from the odd response to the unseen review of the book I will never read... 8-)
Pardon me. My bad. It should have been: "There is no I-DIDNT-HAVE-TO-BUY-A-$100-PACKAGE-IT-WAS-JUST-BUI LT-IN method to do this on a windoze install wizard platform.
You ever try to *READ* or *USE* the "recordings" made by CleanSweep etc? I have. Since the aforementioned products don't actually follow the actions of a hierarchy of programs (they, typically, record a delta on the system between two time points) you don't get a picture of what an installer did. You get a picture of all the system changes that happened while an install was running.
The difference being that if you didn't completely quiet every other potential action on the system you get a set of changes that are potentially larger than what the installer is responsible for.
Even worse, if the installing app spanws sub-installs (e.g. if the Thumbs Plus installer, for a randomly chosen concrete example, preforms a sub-install of ODBC updates) then you get fragmentary logs. Some of "what does this do" is in one place while the rest of it is in another.
But clearly I have no experience in these matters.
Also My Bad. On a reread, it wasn't totally clear that I was still talking about installing to a mock-up system in a sub directory. --prefix is what you use if the package is relocatable and you want the install to "work" in the overall live system. Let's split the 0-point karma we'll get for the thread 8-)
Odd, my manual page for RPM, in the install section, says "--root", "--prefix" being reserved for parts of scripts where the variable "PREFIX" is used, while "--root" is for prepending to all paths (presumably using chroot I guess).
OK, you are wrong. But only near the end there. The author and filmmaker apparently were co-originators. The book, it seems, didn't predate the movie.
So you are replying to an author's response to a reader's review of that author's analysis of a filmmaker and colabrative author's creative statement about the human condition?
I used to keep a mock-up of a minimal system (or you can use a disposable separate computer) in a sub-directory and I would do test installs to that sub-directory using a chroot(ed) shell. This gave the opportunity to deconstruct things nicely. It was only used after other suspicous nonsense happened with a package or source.
If this is an RPM on a linux box use "--root somedir" to prefix things like/usr with "somdir". Other install methods like SVR4 "pkgadd" have similar relocate facilities.
If it is just a tar/cpio archive and an associated script to install, read the scripts.
In short, there is no one tool to do this stuff, but it *is* doable by a number of means (on a *nix box) where it is otherwize impossible to do it on a windoze install-wizzard bundle.
Hope this helps some.
Rob.
PS I have also had some luck by looking at the errors generated after trying to run the install as a normal, non priveliged, user.
Having read your annalisis of his analisis I have to give at least one-half a vote for "loony".
The first duity of alagory is relevance. The second duty is accessability. These things you propose in your rebuttal (I havn't read the original work nor Cliff's comentary so I judge only by the rebuttal) overreach the period and import of the more accessable and relevant things.
TMA-1. "The Moon Artifact" is more accessable and relevant as a reference to "DNA" which, at the time of the book and movie (I don't know which is the originator of the TMA designation) is brand new science and much on the minds of the scientist and public. Twice the monalith functions as gamite: monolith + monkey = man and later monalith + man = starchild. "TMA-ONE == NO MEAT" becomes artifical and unnecessary in the presence of "TMA sound like DNA".
"The Discovery" is clearly a sperm analogy. The sperm is the carrier of the fertalizing gamite (bowman) and must be discarded. The other half of the crew being removed for cause (poole) is very much in fitting with the seminal (pun intended) understanding of the reproductive gamite dance. An alagorical reference to the idea that the "prupose of man must not be caught up in his love for technology" which is an A.C. Clark favorite-harpstring is all over the place, as is the idea that hal is the part discarded from the technological DNA of the egg is arguably true. One may also visit the fact that HAL isn't destroyed really, he is labotimized, his goals and higher functions surpressed in the interest of mans, but he is not killed alltogether, his value in other areas is recognized and preserved.
Sure, "the Odesy" parallels are there, running, disabled crewmen, etc but your inability to transcend and release the parallels when considering the realms of significance of the other symbolism is, well, self limiting. You spend so much effort to look back to the classic that you forget that both of these people (Clark and Kubric) were communicators and men of their times if not the relative future. What was the social dialog of *THEIR* time, how were they trying to be relevant to the world around them and comming up fast? What were they trying to say about the dawn of the new melenium? The absence of these parts from your analysis is why I have to give it the "slightly loony" rating. You *seem* to have let the scolarly and historic totally blot out the relevant.
To that end, "sometimes a cigar is just a cigar". Quite frankly the idea that the engines are excretory and the little hexagons are bathroom references is kind of a push for me. I never saw it as that, but barring some comment from kubrek(sp?) I'd have to say no. The vision of the future in force a the time of the production was one of Space = Size and Power. Our ships are massive rockets damnit, and rockets have, well rocket engines. Space is precise, detailed, and well constructed. No more will we buy the flash-gordon losenge-with-fins rocketship. We want angles and exciting futuristic shapes. Rockets have nozzles and we have all seen them on TV so package a bunch of them on a nice angular and futuristic engine mount. In short I want interesting, functional looking, unexplained outcroppings. I want stacked hexagons (very beehive, very scientific, very natrual science meets the man of the future) and I want them now. In short "You there, model guy, build me a space-sperm and make it look good and next-melenial..."
Not *everything* has to be symbolic, try to make every element of a production symbolic an you end up boring and heavy handed.
I have an optical mouse. Supposed to be great cause you don't have to clean it. I have found this to be false. While the cleaning chore is reduced, the little opening where the optics are periodically picks up liffle tufts of cat hair and then my mouse goes crazy as the cat hair interacts with the table and twirls and such.
So will this new identity technology program my computer to start barking at my cat whenever it detects the cat is getting hair in my mouse?
That is the only useful thing I can think of having this stuff do.
Clearly, everyone here has missed out on the fact that all computer equipment functions because of the presence of Magic Blue Smoke(tm). As long as the smoke is inside the chips the computer works just fine, but let even a little of the smoke out and things start to go wrong. Let out a lot and the computer stops dead.
As an example, take the case off your computer and then plug an Ethernet transceiver into your PC compatable joystick port. Poof, the joystick/sound card and perhaps other parts, will begin venting their Magic Blue Smoke and thereafter refuse to play games.
Take a physics class out of petty cash and try again.
Thermodynamics only requires that energy in exceed energy out. While it does take more energy to make the liquid nitrogen than the LN will take out of the cable in the form of heat there is no one-to-one relationship between the power taken to do the N to LN conversion and the energy transmitted by the LN cooled conductor. (There *is* a relationship but it is the intersection graph of several curves.)
Since there is a big bucket of energetic electrons being poored into the system at one end "simple" applications of Thermodynamics do not apply.
Complex, system-wide annalysis only requires that the energy cost of manufacturing the LN be less than the total energy "gain" of the power *not* lost in carrying the electrons through the cooled material.
Consider (metaphorically and super over-simplifiedly 8-) that as energetic electrons are pushed through a material they must "leap" from molicule to molicule. Those molicules are moving around and represent hard-to-hit targets. When you cool the materials you line up the molicules and pack them closer together making that jump easier. The molicules themselves are also more still so the little arcs of the electrons as they pass through them are smoother and so less of the energetic state of the electron is burned up maintaining orbit. OF course the leaping and orbiting itself applies forces to the atoms and "wants" to move the molicules, which is why the passing current makes heat.
Your initial question is more about the heat-engine principles of the state change of the Nitrogen. Were the Nitrogen to be used as the energy transmission device (like water in a nuclear power plant), like if the source energy was used to make the LN and then a turbine was used at the receiving end, spun by the expanding Nitrogen gas, you would end up with a serious loss to Thermodynamics that made the process unworkable.
Ok that was a little off... Consider the cost to manufacture a rubber ducky. Lots of oil and energy. Now consider shipping a lot of rubber duckies across town. If you were to put postage on each duckie and mail it you would loose a lot of duckies and piss off a lot of postal workers. There is a considerable cost to putting the duckies in boxes, the boxes on paleets, the palletts on trucks, and driving those trucks across town. That cost of orderly shiping is significant but it is still far lower than individually mailing them. The bigger the palletts, the bigger the trucks, and the tigher you can pack the duckies into each box, the cheaper per-duckie cost of shipping. You also lose fewer duckes because the individual postal workers wont be ditching the individual duckies and only a large-scale thief will take a pallet of the things. What normal/honest warehouse worker needs a whole pallet of bathroom toys? This model happens all the time in every form of industry, it's called "the economy of scale".
The duckies are electrons and the shipping infrastructure is the wire. Cooling the superconductor is basically bribing the union reps not to strike. 8-)
I bought one of those PVRs only to discover that my local cable company broadcasts the analog copy protect signal on all channels from 8:00pm sharp to sometime in the wee hours of the morning.
So I took it back, wrote a scalding letter to Sony which was likely ignored, and bought an Radeon All-In-Wonder for my PC. The "Guide Plus" software needs some work (and there is no feedback option on their web pages, Guide Plus being provided not by ATI but a third party) but it generally does what I need it to when I want it to do it and no pesky prime-time blue-screens (except when windows is involved)
Now if only there were proper Linux drivers for the PVR features...
don't be dumb... you have to print todays papper yesterday and next weeks magizine last week otherwise people realize that today's paper covers yesterday and this weeks magizene is all about the trends going on last month just by looking at the date. With the current system they only catch on to the information lag time if they are otherwise sentient and informed....
er... no offense... 8-)
-- Rob White, Cv - Cv = 0 Therefore there is an absolute frame of reference.
here you have made a fundamental mistake. While commonly referred to as "completely not protected", yelling 'fire' in a theater is protected, when the theater is crouded the protection is "trumped" by other rights of the people in the theater.
Consider: your have a right to keep an bare arms, you even, therefore have a right to discharge those arms. I, on the other hand have a right not to be gunned down outside my local Circle-K. That right trumps yours such that if you gun me down you will suffer penalties.
You have a right to smoke, I have a right not to, you have no right to *make* *me* smoke, we have equal right to a public accomidation, therefore to exercise your right to smoke you and not I must go outside while the smoking happens.
For the whole fire-in-a-theater thing, the trier of fact (offical-generic term for judge or jury as approprate) has to decide if the number of people in the theater devided by its capacity qualified it as "crowded" before they can decide whether you were fully protected in your speach. The "right" being preserved on behalf of the individuals of the "crowd" is the right not to be trampled to death by a panicing mob. Thats right, you can pretty-much yell fire to your hearts content if the movie/play is suffiecntly unpopular.
Tricky thing the law, that is why it is so easy to prevert if you know what you are talking about, or if you are sufficently ignorant...
-- Rob White, Cv - Cv = 0 Therefore there is an absolute frame of reference.
heck you can't sell the motorcycles *OR* the celophane anymore either. Then you'd be MAKING A PROFIT selling something that MIGHT INFRINGE on the aformentioned art...
-- Rob White, Cv - Cv = 0 Therefore there is an absolute frame of reference.
To the question of DeCCS and the danger of whole-works piracy and the presence of same happening today...
Once "decrypted" an entire DVD movie is too large to store effectively, transmit in resonable time, or keep around for a long period of time. An hour of high quality mpg is something like a 1.5 gigabites. Windows 98 et al has a file size limit of just over 2 gig. The average PC platform machine has two IDE controllers with up to two drives each. If one of those four is a DVD player used as a source reader that leaves three. At current tech levels a home user might be able to put 80 gig on each drive slot for 240 gig total. There are no DVD capacity media writers in general market price avialibality.
So, a person could spend about $4,000 to create a dedicated hardware library of about 60 movies.
The econmy of scale simply says that this isn't going to happen. Stealing a whole song is practical, particular at a degraded quality, stealing and transmitting a whole movie simply isnt. At the most a home user (the common copyright theif in these suppositions) migh DeCCS a movie and cut a clip out of it for some purpose, but that supposes he also has some sort of producer software that can clip an mp2.
So is taking a choice three minute clip out of a twop hour movie would be about 2.5% of the overall movie...?
It is far cheaper and easier to bounce a playback of a DVD through a normal external recorder to make a clip, which just gets us back to VCRs.
There is virtually no practical use of DeCCS with respect to a whole movie, and clipping is "doubtful", and 2.5% access would be well within fair use provisions by any standard anyway.
The only "use" of CCS in the first place seems to be to make sure that a DVD sold in europe can not be played in the US. It isn't "copy protection" it is "market/price control" plain and simple.
-- Rob White, Cv - Cv = 0 Therefore there is an absolute frame of reference.
It is actually the definition of simplicity to show that a program is, or at least could be, "art" in a way that can be demonstrated to a judge.
First: can we make a working definition of art? For starters, the absolute "function" of a free-standing piece of statuary is basicly to hold down a patch of earth... It is the form and not the function of some things, like statuary, that makes it "art".
So can a thing with an overridingly significant function still participate as art even as it performs its duty with respect to function? Culturally this is well established. Walk through any city. The function of office buildings is to house blocks of offices, but communities pay a premimum to have their buildings sculpted to various tastes. "A pillar" needs only to be structurally sound but we have names for the types and "ages" of pillar decoration and people spend their entire lives studying and commenting on pillar building and decoraton throgh the ages.
A "valid" piece of art should generall aspire to some ideals. Some of these ideals are tagged onto the pieces as "movements" such as, for paintings, "minimalism" and "realisim" and "cubism" and so forth. Other ideals center around content, "does it make a statement?"; "does it educate?"; "does it inspire?". In some senses art speaks most when it selects between diverse and opposing ideals to provoke thought in the preceiver.
So is computer code itself participant in, and may its creator select between, ideals durring its creation? Most assuredly. The infinitely ideal body of code performs its function in zero time and zero space. No such ideal code exists, but for any given task there are a nearly infinite number of possible coded solutions. The selection between time and space is the *classic* defining choice made by a programmer. Beyond that club-over-the-head there are myriad ideals of "look and feel", does the program even participate with a user? Does it just drop silently into the well and bubble back up an hour later with an answer or does it take a user by the hand and lead them throug a maze of options. Are the menus "prety" and/or "intuitive", "exhaustive" or "novice-level-options-only". To get from problem statement to solution is not a straight nor unswerving task. The programmer exercises both his science and his art to hack a path through a forest of possiblities. His expression of that journy is both the executable program and the source code and libraries created and/or chosen to make it.
Are those ideals, when and as approached, apreciable to a preceptive audience? Absolutely. When I create a particularly clever bit of code I will often share it with peers and coworkers with personal pride and in so doing I submit it and my reasoning behind it to cretique by those peers. When code is sent out onto the net is is routinely criticized by those who take the time to look, using words we associate with art; like "ugly", "elegant" and/or "sublime"; for its construction or execution. And code is constantly studied by programmers looking to gain insight into theoretical programming issues like "building a better sort" or "seeking transitive colsure over the set of all graphs of some distributed process" or some such.
So is code-as-art accessable to everyone? Clearly not, but that isn't even a partial requirement of art. The theory behind any given art only needs to be "reasonably accessable" to those who chose to persue it. I, personally, couldn't draw a distinction between a "modern" and a "post modern" painting to save my life, but if I chose to persue it I would have to expend effort *and* I would have to have "the eye" to some degree. Code is the same way, to participate in code as art you have to acquire the knowledge of language and structure and you have to, in the end, find or possess the artistic sense of it. There are more than enough bad artists in more traditional forms of art to more than explain away the existence of bad programmers who don't, or can't, appreciate the concept of artistic code.
A "cheap and easy" version of the whole question is addressed by the question "has anybody ever exhibited functionally sound source code, solely as art, regardless of the value of the function of that code?" The answer is, of course, yes. The "Oobfuscated C Contest" anually soliticits and exhibits functional code purely for its asthetic value.
Finally, a piece of art must be defined by the exercise of choice by the artest. If, to perform its function, a thing must be created without options, then it is hard to consider it art. An example is a 2 milimeter steel ball-berring. The berring is constrained to shape and hardness and essentailly *all* its traits. The measure of the berrings "quality", its only really variable trait, is real, but a truely high-quality berring isn't art. The production of the berring may, however, be. The temprature of the steel at casting time, selection of tools and methods to achieve a high degree of roundness and so forth are valid factors. Before it could be decided you'd have to ask the people who know... the metalurgests. If they say there is a measure of "art" in their "craft" we have to either study craft exhaustively; or we can just ask a bunch of them and if enough of them say there is "art" there we take their word for it.
Giving credit to a thing as "art" when we ourselves don't see anything but "stuff" is, in a very real respect, the fundimental nature of most art. The question "will this art survive the test of time" is always nicely open for those who call a give form of art "trash".
-- Rob White, Cv - Cv = 0 Therefore there is an absolute frame of reference.
Slashdot Mirror
"I don't know what language engineers will be using in 100 years to talk to computers, but I *know* they'll call it FORTRAN."
The language won't die and it looks less and less like the original beast every year. Fortran is analogous to George Washington's axe: "The handle has been replaced several times, and in the earily 1900's the head rusted-throgh so it was scrapped and re-cast with a better quality steel, but this is the very axe he used to chop down the famous cherry tree."
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...from your mother in-law and you will be stuck with douche and "feminine napkin" adds for months.
Or, more "correctly." Collecting the data isn't the problem. The absence of a way to signal that the data currently being collected (or say, that was collected last week) is abberant to your normal houshold patterns is the problem.
In still other words: If you don't want to have your TV viewing experence skewed to the hip-hopp make sure your house sitter is interested in the same things you are every time you go on vacation.
Essentially, for this "service" to serve anyone what they *really* need is a pair of buttons on the remote:
1) "Don't ever show me that crap again".
2) "Clear History Cache"
You'll never see either since it would be against the preceived interest of the programmers to have the audience "vote away" a well paying ad campeign, and the "fear" of abbuse of the clear button being misused.
You think the wife isn't going to notice that after you have spent all weekend watching bay-watch-brests and network-battle-of the T&A that the comercials arn't a tad late-night-ish? Don't you bet that every guy who does watch broadcast-pr0n is going to press that button before any date he brings into the house?
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The single thing that a local manager can do that a "corporate entity" can't is "recognize the value of play". In every good shop I have ever worked in, the quality and quantity of work was directly proportional to the lattitude for play allowed.
'puters are brain work, and brain work can't go on uninterrupted for eight "good" hours a day. Some of your best programmers and brain-workers do their best as "sprinters". I have worked in places where the entire open-air office (eight-or-nine people) break out into koosh(tm)-throwing wars spontaneously.
If the *accountants* got wind of that they'd have had kittens about the "waste" of corporate time.
Lets face it, it is not in the corporations best interest to be able to track their employees byond a certian granularity (in the information systems development arena at least). Now keeping people from playing grab-ass near the twenty-ton press is important for life an limb, but the sheer stupidity of corporate america with respect to handling their mental-talent pool is legendary. They *REALLY* *DONT* want the non-geek-savvy people to have access to the geeky-mind's work log.
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I do not suffer from CTS (but I play someone who does on tv? sorry, mandatory joke 8-). The simple fact is that a neurologist can measure the neurologcal "static" associated with CTS. That means that it can't be "faked" in the presence of an honest and well-informed practitioner. This makes it "not a good candidate" for false claims. The test stings like a bitch if you aren't under general anestetic. A fact that alone could be responsible for the fakers taking a powder.
Factoid #1: There are exercises that can almost completely releive/remove the phenominia if started before the inflamation reaches the point of no return and a good sports-medicine doctor should be able to teach them to you. If you have reached the aforementioned point the exercises *can* bring you back but they are agonizing and so the sufferer usually can't stick to the regimine(sp?)
Factoid #2: The medical community sucks. A family friend (doctor) commited suicide after taking years abbuse from his coleagues in the AMA because he was trying to get general approval for a procedure where the neurologist would be in the opperating room taking measurements durring CTS surgery. Cutting to proceed until, and only until, the "static" was gone. His success rate was near 100%. Operating times were drastically lowered. Nobody had to come back for a second opperation. Virtually no complications. Recovery rates were usually 1/3 the time of the "normal" proceedure. In short it was faster _CHEAPER_ and better.
He was hounded to death.
Frankly there are a lot of things like this happening all around you, medically speaking. If you are male go to your doctor and tell him you have the symptoms of "Fibromyalgia" and you will get dismissed outright. "It only happens to women, men never get it." (and it's not like prostate cancer where there is some gender-unique feature of the body involved). With the predisposition of doctors to their views I wouldn't be surprised if cancer whent away "statistically" if it were declared financially unprofitable, and all those people were suddenly rediagnosed as having an imbalance of green and yellow bile...
Don't get me wrong. I am a great fan of doctors. At least the ones who will pay attention to you and work for you instead of an HMO or otherwise try to keep themselves "up stat". A truely good doctor combined with a good insurance carrier can be a breathtakingly positive and useful experience. If you are poor, uninsured, or not used to standing up to authority to get yourself heard-out your medical experience will, of course, suck.
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"Segaony".... but you can only play "Aliens" genre games on it because of the implicit omage to "Segaony Weaver"
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Clearly it *is* satire, even if that wasn't the original intent, and even though the courts are too hide-bound to summarily declare it so.
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Its great you can monitor something trashing your Registry. We don't have a registry to trash. Which is better?
I have seen mentions of "Tripwire" but I don't know what it does. I have *used* "truss" on Solaris and since it will (optionally) follow eihter or both branches of a fork and all internal threads if you use it wisely, and have any skill as chosing options and processing text files with "grep" etc I would be it beats the hell out of FileMon.
SMS will always mean "Shitcan My System" to me, but I may be biased. 8-)
As always, reguardless of platform or action is us about the admin knowing what question to ask more than it is about the platforms ability to magically disgorge "just the right answers".
MY general rule is, If I can phrase the question, likely someone with more drive than I has already written a program to provide the answer. If not, it's time to whip out the old compiler and do my share for the war effort...
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I, having read some of the other comentary, withdraw some of the above. While I clearly think that the DNA-gamete nature of the monilith and the monkey-human analysis holds. I withdraw any assertion as to delebrateness of the parallel 8-)
Reapplying OCCAMS RAZOR, TMA is, well, a good Three Letter Acronym, which always works well on the surface. (ASK IBM) and I guess any TLA would sound like DNA if it ends in "A" 8-).
I till suspect that it stood for "the moon artifact" cause that is just too obvious.
Again, as initally stated, I was just working from the odd response to the unseen review of the book I will never read... 8-)
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Pardon me. My bad. It should have been: "There is no I-DIDNT-HAVE-TO-BUY-A-$100-PACKAGE-IT-WAS-JUST-BUI LT-IN method to do this on a windoze install wizard platform.
You ever try to *READ* or *USE* the "recordings" made by CleanSweep etc? I have. Since the aforementioned products don't actually follow the actions of a hierarchy of programs (they, typically, record a delta on the system between two time points) you don't get a picture of what an installer did. You get a picture of all the system changes that happened while an install was running.
The difference being that if you didn't completely quiet every other potential action on the system you get a set of changes that are potentially larger than what the installer is responsible for.
Even worse, if the installing app spanws sub-installs (e.g. if the Thumbs Plus installer, for a randomly chosen concrete example, preforms a sub-install of ODBC updates) then you get fragmentary logs. Some of "what does this do" is in one place while the rest of it is in another.
But clearly I have no experience in these matters.
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Also My Bad. On a reread, it wasn't totally clear that I was still talking about installing to a mock-up system in a sub directory. --prefix is what you use if the package is relocatable and you want the install to "work" in the overall live system. Let's split the 0-point karma we'll get for the thread 8-)
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Odd, my manual page for RPM, in the install section, says "--root", "--prefix" being reserved for parts of scripts where the variable "PREFIX" is used, while "--root" is for prepending to all paths (presumably using chroot I guess).
Take that Mr. Smarty-pants
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OK, you are wrong. But only near the end there. The author and filmmaker apparently were co-originators. The book, it seems, didn't predate the movie.
....
So you are replying to an author's response to a reader's review of that author's analysis of a filmmaker and colabrative author's creative statement about the human condition?
But very nicely summarized.
Of course now I am replying to
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I used to keep a mock-up of a minimal system (or you can use a disposable separate computer) in a sub-directory and I would do test installs to that sub-directory using a chroot(ed) shell. This gave the opportunity to deconstruct things nicely. It was only used after other suspicous nonsense happened with a package or source.
/usr with "somdir". Other install methods like SVR4 "pkgadd" have similar relocate facilities.
If this is an RPM on a linux box use "--root somedir" to prefix things like
If it is just a tar/cpio archive and an associated script to install, read the scripts.
In short, there is no one tool to do this stuff, but it *is* doable by a number of means (on a *nix box) where it is otherwize impossible to do it on a windoze install-wizzard bundle.
Hope this helps some.
Rob.
PS I have also had some luck by looking at the errors generated after trying to run the install as a normal, non priveliged, user.
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Greetings,
Having read your annalisis of his analisis I have to give at least one-half a vote for "loony".
The first duity of alagory is relevance. The second duty is accessability. These things you propose in your rebuttal (I havn't read the original work nor Cliff's comentary so I judge only by the rebuttal) overreach the period and import of the more accessable and relevant things.
TMA-1. "The Moon Artifact" is more accessable and relevant as a reference to "DNA" which, at the time of the book and movie (I don't know which is the originator of the TMA designation) is brand new science and much on the minds of the scientist and public. Twice the monalith functions as gamite: monolith + monkey = man and later monalith + man = starchild. "TMA-ONE == NO MEAT" becomes artifical and unnecessary in the presence of "TMA sound like DNA".
"The Discovery" is clearly a sperm analogy. The sperm is the carrier of the fertalizing gamite (bowman) and must be discarded. The other half of the crew being removed for cause (poole) is very much in fitting with the seminal (pun intended) understanding of the reproductive gamite dance. An alagorical reference to the idea that the "prupose of man must not be caught up in his love for technology" which is an A.C. Clark favorite-harpstring is all over the place, as is the idea that hal is the part discarded from the technological DNA of the egg is arguably true. One may also visit the fact that HAL isn't destroyed really, he is labotimized, his goals and higher functions surpressed in the interest of mans, but he is not killed alltogether, his value in other areas is recognized and preserved.
Sure, "the Odesy" parallels are there, running, disabled crewmen, etc but your inability to transcend and release the parallels when considering the realms of significance of the other symbolism is, well, self limiting. You spend so much effort to look back to the classic that you forget that both of these people (Clark and Kubric) were communicators and men of their times if not the relative future. What was the social dialog of *THEIR* time, how were they trying to be relevant to the world around them and comming up fast? What were they trying to say about the dawn of the new melenium? The absence of these parts from your analysis is why I have to give it the "slightly loony" rating. You *seem* to have let the scolarly and historic totally blot out the relevant.
To that end, "sometimes a cigar is just a cigar". Quite frankly the idea that the engines are excretory and the little hexagons are bathroom references is kind of a push for me. I never saw it as that, but barring some comment from kubrek(sp?) I'd have to say no. The vision of the future in force a the time of the production was one of Space = Size and Power. Our ships are massive rockets damnit, and rockets have, well rocket engines. Space is precise, detailed, and well constructed. No more will we buy the flash-gordon losenge-with-fins rocketship. We want angles and exciting futuristic shapes. Rockets have nozzles and we have all seen them on TV so package a bunch of them on a nice angular and futuristic engine mount. In short I want interesting, functional looking, unexplained outcroppings. I want stacked hexagons (very beehive, very scientific, very natrual science meets the man of the future) and I want them now. In short "You there, model guy, build me a space-sperm and make it look good and next-melenial..."
Not *everything* has to be symbolic, try to make every element of a production symbolic an you end up boring and heavy handed.
Then again, I could be wrong... 8-)
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I have an optical mouse. Supposed to be great cause you don't have to clean it. I have found this to be false. While the cleaning chore is reduced, the little opening where the optics are periodically picks up liffle tufts of cat hair and then my mouse goes crazy as the cat hair interacts with the table and twirls and such. So will this new identity technology program my computer to start barking at my cat whenever it detects the cat is getting hair in my mouse? That is the only useful thing I can think of having this stuff do.
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Favorite Sig Ever: "Dress for success, wear a white penis"
Favorite Disclaimer: Author shall not be bound within the limits of any consumers ability to read.
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Clearly, everyone here has missed out on the fact that all computer equipment functions because of the presence of Magic Blue Smoke(tm). As long as the smoke is inside the chips the computer works just fine, but let even a little of the smoke out and things start to go wrong. Let out a lot and the computer stops dead.
As an example, take the case off your computer and then plug an Ethernet transceiver into your PC compatable joystick port. Poof, the joystick/sound card and perhaps other parts, will begin venting their Magic Blue Smoke and thereafter refuse to play games.
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Take a physics class out of petty cash and try again.
Thermodynamics only requires that energy in exceed energy out. While it does take more energy to make the liquid nitrogen than the LN will take out of the cable in the form of heat there is no one-to-one relationship between the power taken to do the N to LN conversion and the energy transmitted by the LN cooled conductor. (There *is* a relationship but it is the intersection graph of several curves.)
Since there is a big bucket of energetic electrons being poored into the system at one end "simple" applications of Thermodynamics do not apply.
Complex, system-wide annalysis only requires that the energy cost of manufacturing the LN be less than the total energy "gain" of the power *not* lost in carrying the electrons through the cooled material.
Consider (metaphorically and super over-simplifiedly 8-) that as energetic electrons are pushed through a material they must "leap" from molicule to molicule. Those molicules are moving around and represent hard-to-hit targets. When you cool the materials you line up the molicules and pack them closer together making that jump easier. The molicules themselves are also more still so the little arcs of the electrons as they pass through them are smoother and so less of the energetic state of the electron is burned up maintaining orbit. OF course the leaping and orbiting itself applies forces to the atoms and "wants" to move the molicules, which is why the passing current makes heat.
Your initial question is more about the heat-engine principles of the state change of the Nitrogen. Were the Nitrogen to be used as the energy transmission device (like water in a nuclear power plant), like if the source energy was used to make the LN and then a turbine was used at the receiving end, spun by the expanding Nitrogen gas, you would end up with a serious loss to Thermodynamics that made the process unworkable.
Ok that was a little off... Consider the cost to manufacture a rubber ducky. Lots of oil and energy. Now consider shipping a lot of rubber duckies across town. If you were to put postage on each duckie and mail it you would loose a lot of duckies and piss off a lot of postal workers. There is a considerable cost to putting the duckies in boxes, the boxes on paleets, the palletts on trucks, and driving those trucks across town. That cost of orderly shiping is significant but it is still far lower than individually mailing them. The bigger the palletts, the bigger the trucks, and the tigher you can pack the duckies into each box, the cheaper per-duckie cost of shipping. You also lose fewer duckes because the individual postal workers wont be ditching the individual duckies and only a large-scale thief will take a pallet of the things. What normal/honest warehouse worker needs a whole pallet of bathroom toys? This model happens all the time in every form of industry, it's called "the economy of scale".
The duckies are electrons and the shipping infrastructure is the wire. Cooling the superconductor is basically bribing the union reps not to strike. 8-)
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I bought one of those PVRs only to discover that my local cable company broadcasts the analog copy protect signal on all channels from 8:00pm sharp to sometime in the wee hours of the morning.
So I took it back, wrote a scalding letter to Sony which was likely ignored, and bought an Radeon All-In-Wonder for my PC. The "Guide Plus" software needs some work (and there is no feedback option on their web pages, Guide Plus being provided not by ATI but a third party) but it generally does what I need it to when I want it to do it and no pesky prime-time blue-screens (except when windows is involved)
Now if only there were proper Linux drivers for the PVR features...
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don't be dumb... you have to print todays papper yesterday and next weeks magizine last week otherwise people realize that today's paper covers yesterday and this weeks magizene is all about the trends going on last month just by looking at the date. With the current system they only catch on to the information lag time if they are otherwise sentient and informed....
er... no offense... 8-)
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Rob White,
Cv - Cv = 0 Therefore there is an absolute frame of reference.
here you have made a fundamental mistake. While commonly referred to as "completely not protected", yelling 'fire' in a theater is protected, when the theater is crouded the protection is "trumped" by other rights of the people in the theater.
Consider: your have a right to keep an bare arms, you even, therefore have a right to discharge those arms. I, on the other hand have a right not to be gunned down outside my local Circle-K. That right trumps yours such that if you gun me down you will suffer penalties.
You have a right to smoke, I have a right not to, you have no right to *make* *me* smoke, we have equal right to a public accomidation, therefore to exercise your right to smoke you and not I must go outside while the smoking happens.
For the whole fire-in-a-theater thing, the trier of fact (offical-generic term for judge or jury as approprate) has to decide if the number of people in the theater devided by its capacity qualified it as "crowded" before they can decide whether you were fully protected in your speach. The "right" being preserved on behalf of the individuals of the "crowd" is the right not to be trampled to death by a panicing mob. Thats right, you can pretty-much yell fire to your hearts content if the movie/play is suffiecntly unpopular.
Tricky thing the law, that is why it is so easy to prevert if you know what you are talking about, or if you are sufficently ignorant...
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Rob White,
Cv - Cv = 0 Therefore there is an absolute frame of reference.
Goody, a technology Czar... Will he be in charge of the US Government's "war on thought"?
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Rob White,
Cv - Cv = 0 Therefore there is an absolute frame of reference.
heck you can't sell the motorcycles *OR* the celophane anymore either. Then you'd be MAKING A PROFIT selling something that MIGHT INFRINGE on the aformentioned art...
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Rob White,
Cv - Cv = 0 Therefore there is an absolute frame of reference.
A quick after-thought...
To the question of DeCCS and the danger of whole-works piracy and the presence of same happening today...
Once "decrypted" an entire DVD movie is too large to store effectively, transmit in resonable time, or keep around for a long period of time. An hour of high quality mpg is something like a 1.5 gigabites. Windows 98 et al has a file size limit of just over 2 gig. The average PC platform machine has two IDE controllers with up to two drives each. If one of those four is a DVD player used as a source reader that leaves three. At current tech levels a home user might be able to put 80 gig on each drive slot for 240 gig total. There are no DVD capacity media writers in general market price avialibality.
So, a person could spend about $4,000 to create a dedicated hardware library of about 60 movies.
The econmy of scale simply says that this isn't going to happen. Stealing a whole song is practical, particular at a degraded quality, stealing and transmitting a whole movie simply isnt. At the most a home user (the common copyright theif in these suppositions) migh DeCCS a movie and cut a clip out of it for some purpose, but that supposes he also has some sort of producer software that can clip an mp2.
So is taking a choice three minute clip out of a twop hour movie would be about 2.5% of the overall movie...?
It is far cheaper and easier to bounce a playback of a DVD through a normal external recorder to make a clip, which just gets us back to VCRs.
There is virtually no practical use of DeCCS with respect to a whole movie, and clipping is "doubtful", and 2.5% access would be well within fair use provisions by any standard anyway.
The only "use" of CCS in the first place seems to be to make sure that a DVD sold in europe can not be played in the US. It isn't "copy protection" it is "market/price control" plain and simple.
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Rob White,
Cv - Cv = 0 Therefore there is an absolute frame of reference.
It is actually the definition of simplicity to show that a program is, or at least could be, "art" in a way that can be demonstrated to a judge.
First: can we make a working definition of art? For starters, the absolute "function" of a free-standing piece of statuary is basicly to hold down a patch of earth... It is the form and not the function of some things, like statuary, that makes it "art".
So can a thing with an overridingly significant function still participate as art even as it performs its duty with respect to function? Culturally this is well established. Walk through any city. The function of office buildings is to house blocks of offices, but communities pay a premimum to have their buildings sculpted to various tastes. "A pillar" needs only to be structurally sound but we have names for the types and "ages" of pillar decoration and people spend their entire lives studying and commenting on pillar building and decoraton throgh the ages.
A "valid" piece of art should generall aspire to some ideals. Some of these ideals are tagged onto the pieces as "movements" such as, for paintings, "minimalism" and "realisim" and "cubism" and so forth. Other ideals center around content, "does it make a statement?"; "does it educate?"; "does it inspire?". In some senses art speaks most when it selects between diverse and opposing ideals to provoke thought in the preceiver.
So is computer code itself participant in, and may its creator select between, ideals durring its creation? Most assuredly. The infinitely ideal body of code performs its function in zero time and zero space. No such ideal code exists, but for any given task there are a nearly infinite number of possible coded solutions. The selection between time and space is the *classic* defining choice made by a programmer. Beyond that club-over-the-head there are myriad ideals of "look and feel", does the program even participate with a user? Does it just drop silently into the well and bubble back up an hour later with an answer or does it take a user by the hand and lead them throug a maze of options. Are the menus "prety" and/or "intuitive", "exhaustive" or "novice-level-options-only". To get from problem statement to solution is not a straight nor unswerving task. The programmer exercises both his science and his art to hack a path through a forest of possiblities. His expression of that journy is both the executable program and the source code and libraries created and/or chosen to make it.
Are those ideals, when and as approached, apreciable to a preceptive audience? Absolutely. When I create a particularly clever bit of code I will often share it with peers and coworkers with personal pride and in so doing I submit it and my reasoning behind it to cretique by those peers. When code is sent out onto the net is is routinely criticized by those who take the time to look, using words we associate with art; like "ugly", "elegant" and/or "sublime"; for its construction or execution. And code is constantly studied by programmers looking to gain insight into theoretical programming issues like "building a better sort" or "seeking transitive colsure over the set of all graphs of some distributed process" or some such.
So is code-as-art accessable to everyone? Clearly not, but that isn't even a partial requirement of art. The theory behind any given art only needs to be "reasonably accessable" to those who chose to persue it. I, personally, couldn't draw a distinction between a "modern" and a "post modern" painting to save my life, but if I chose to persue it I would have to expend effort *and* I would have to have "the eye" to some degree. Code is the same way, to participate in code as art you have to acquire the knowledge of language and structure and you have to, in the end, find or possess the artistic sense of it. There are more than enough bad artists in more traditional forms of art to more than explain away the existence of bad programmers who don't, or can't, appreciate the concept of artistic code.
A "cheap and easy" version of the whole question is addressed by the question "has anybody ever exhibited functionally sound source code, solely as art, regardless of the value of the function of that code?" The answer is, of course, yes. The "Oobfuscated C Contest" anually soliticits and exhibits functional code purely for its asthetic value.
Finally, a piece of art must be defined by the exercise of choice by the artest. If, to perform its function, a thing must be created without options, then it is hard to consider it art. An example is a 2 milimeter steel ball-berring. The berring is constrained to shape and hardness and essentailly *all* its traits. The measure of the berrings "quality", its only really variable trait, is real, but a truely high-quality berring isn't art. The production of the berring may, however, be. The temprature of the steel at casting time, selection of tools and methods to achieve a high degree of roundness and so forth are valid factors. Before it could be decided you'd have to ask the people who know... the metalurgests. If they say there is a measure of "art" in their "craft" we have to either study craft exhaustively; or we can just ask a bunch of them and if enough of them say there is "art" there we take their word for it.
Giving credit to a thing as "art" when we ourselves don't see anything but "stuff" is, in a very real respect, the fundimental nature of most art. The question "will this art survive the test of time" is always nicely open for those who call a give form of art "trash".
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Rob White,
Cv - Cv = 0 Therefore there is an absolute frame of reference.