How do you enable autosave? A coworker of mine was doing the hoppy-screamy peg-leg pirate dance because OO died and took his work with it. (Yes, he was an idjit for not saving.) When he opened the document again, none of his changes were there. Where's the autosave?
Isn't PCL a yecchy-looking binary language? I remember seeing some raw PCL output and thinking that it looked like line noise. I've seen raw PostScript, which at least one can lex with the naked eye, if not parse.
I sometimes find myself agreeing with his premise, but when he gets into one of those frothy paragraphs where he's talking about "spread-thighed enlightenment" or whatnot, he's kinda lost me. I can just imagine him, a balding, ponytailed ex-hippie, hanging around at Berkeley and trying his so-tired-it's-fresh free-love schtick on the local young and impressionables.
A lot of applications with Windows seem to need admin equivalent access and then want that ongoing to change anything.
I hear this a lot, but aside from installing new programs (which generally requires root access on a Linux machine as well), can you give me an example of a Windows app, once installed, that won't do something particularly useful without Administrator privileges?
Dude! I remember Executor! Well, mainly I remember my brother saying it could run Mac things, and then not being able to boot it, probably because we didn't have a boot ROM. We gave up, and went back to playing "Blake Stone: Aliens of Gold" or whatever the hot warez were that week.
But it was the first I ever learned of emulation, before ZSNES and Nesticle. Ah, those were the days.
Well, depends what you mean by "design heritage". We all use binary and programmable machines, so we're all indebted to Zuse's Z3 in some fashion.
But I am curious---what sorts of design elements were present in the Intel 4004 which are discernible in the Pentium 4? My knowledge of chip architecture is pretty sketchy, but I'd be interested to know what's survived over the years, even if it's something totally idiosyncratic and meaningless.
Say, if you were that deeply involved in its creation, is there any chance you could donate a nice PNG screenshot (if it had a distinctive-looking interface), or maybe some informative but really obscure tidbits to the article.
Just sayin'. Yeah, it's writing for free, but you're already doing it on Slashdot, and you'd be adding to the sum total of human knowledge that's in an easily-accessible form. Shiny!
Comparing TeX to PS or PDF doesn't really make sense. PostScript and PDF are output languages, while TeX is a typesetting program. It's like comparing the merits of Photoshop versus JPEG.
I don't think anyone really writes PS directly, unless they're l33t hackers. (There is that tiny snowflake program that prints a different snowflake every time. That's pretty darn nifty.
But little to do with typesetting. You'd want to compare TeX to Adobe InDesign or QuarkXPress, I suppose. Comparing it to MS Word is a frickin' joke.
Oh, come on. Adequacy has produced some good trolls (though I can't remember any from the top of my head), but this... is just sloppy.
like, for example, page numbering starting on a number other than 1
\pageno=10
I didn't know how to do that. I googled for it. No nine megabytes of C code involved. And a real troll would have seized on TeX being written in WEB, the Pascal-like "literate programming" language that Knuth designed himself. A real troll would have further complained that most hacking is really done using TeX's own macro system, which can be weird and baroque a lot of the time.
And how did "Knuth" become "Bluth" halfway through? If it's a joke about the Mormon animator, follow it through.
And dear god, man, there may be better ways of separating content and presentation---standards-compliant HTML with CSS, anyone?---but MS Word is not it. I've seen documents that have gone through many hands, serious works that involve difficult formatting... and it ain't pretty. Word is simply not a serious typesetting tool. Talk about InDesign or QuarkXPress if you want to go on about that.
LaTeX also allows the use of standard PostScript fonts with a quick
\usepackage{times}
in the preamble, but I kinda like the cm fonts myself.
Also, I'm not sure where the complaints about needing to edit incomprehensible jargon to correct typos came from. Text is represented as... plain old text. When is it any other way? Math is hard to read if it's badly written or you're not used to it, but it's no worse than it has to be, to my eyes.
Is it a sign of the incredible good design of TeX that the Adequacy people couldn't find very many real flaws to harp on? Or does Adequacy simply suck ass? I fear it to be the latter; I have plenty of nits to pick with TeX, but this reads like it was written by someone who heard of TeX once, and decided to write a rant about it. Frickin' weak.
Well, for one thing, the '98 machine down the hall actually locks up, freezes, crashes when I try to copy things from a scratched CD, whereas a 2000 box may refuse to copy it, but at least it doesn't crash the whole system when I do it.
But from the standpoint of security, despite myriad changes in the basic architecture, it seems to have made very little difference where it counts---in the number of active remote exploits.
You mean like writing a little shell script that would do an
#!/bin/bash insmod foobar1 insmod foobar2
and one that would do an
#!/bin/bash rmmod foobar2 rmmod foobar1
and chowning them to root, then chmodding them 755?
Sorry to ask, but I've never had to look at this particular problem and was wondering if that was what you were suggesting. It seems like a good enough idea to me. Except I'm not familiar with how setuid-root works.
Great Gauss, why? If astroturfers got horribly burned by some *cough* anonymous people with l33ter skills than mine, perhaps they'd stop trying to peddle their crap to us. It's like spam---one in ten thousand Slashdot readers will buy this crap, but that makes it well worth Alain Aisenberg's time.
The only way to make it stop is to make it not worth Aisenberg's time.
If the editors won't do something about it, perhaps some of the readers should.
I must have had an old version of QuickTime, because the OSX 10.2 machine's QT player barfed on the MP4 files I got. (They were from Apple's site, if I remember, so they were likely good.)
I fail to see why we need another proprietary container format like MP4 when those of us fortunate enough to own general-purpose computing machines can use Ogg or Matroska.
Also, AVI is hardly "abandoned". It's not used for streaming video, but unless you're getting anime, any TV-rips you score from BitTorrent are either VCD MPEGs or XviD AVIs. Also, if you're pulling miniDV tapes in over FireWire, there's a good chance you're capturing to AVI if you're on a PC. (MOV on a Mac, but that's pretty obvious...)
I forgot to mention. XviD is an MPEG-4 codec. As such, it's proprietary. Oh! And AAC is an MPEG standard as well. (That's why it's on DVDs.)
So, in fact, no part of your MPEG-4/XviD/AAC combo is non-proprietary.
Now, something like Matroska/Dirac/Vorbis or Ogg/Theora/Vorbis would be free and non-proprietary. But it tends to be unsupported. Which, really, is the rub.
But, hey, if you don't care about the free-as-in-speech implications (and for a lot of uses, it's stupid to care about them) then go right ahead. But don't confuse free-as-in-beer and non-proprietary.
.AVI [...] mp3 audio is basically hacked into working with this
Not exactly. Constant bitrate audio works fine with AVI. Variable bitrate audio, MP3 or not, requires a bit of hackery (you needed to mux with Nandub back in the day; I don't know what the tools are now), but it still works.
MPEG-4 [...] not proprietary
Wrong. I don't care if it's freely available, it's still proprietary. There's a discussion on meta-Wikipedia on this. Like MP3s, they're patent-encumbered.
No, this likely doesn't make a grain of difference to your average video content provider. But it can matter to some people. (Like Wikipedia policy wonks, who tend to be rather religious about using open formats---Vorbis audio instead of MP3, for instance.)
MPEG-anything isn't open. It's licensed in a relaxed way, but it ain't open.
You also left out Matroska. It's free and open, it works, is no more difficult to support than.OGG, and supports streaming, internal DVD-type menus, and the like.
So, do you refuse to tongue-kiss someone who's had their tonsils out? Or have butt-sex with someone who's had an appendectomy?
Comparing the off-slicing of a not particularly useful and occasionaly inconvenient bit of skin to the loss of the ability to walk around without a crutch or prosthesis is a little tasteless, isn't it?
Try Babylon 5. It's dark in places, but on the whole the plot is pretty darn uplifting once you get to the end. Yes, Earthgov is taken over by a sinister xenophobic junta with little regard for civilian life, but the good guys are our viewpoint characters, and hops springs eternal.
Except for Londo. Londo is cursed. So sad.
And most people cry at the last episode. But they're happy tears.
Look, any time someone complains that doing something is too hard, they're really just saying that they're incompetent. Whining about it isn't an answer. Babylon 5 did a self-consistent time travel plot without turning it into a big pile of confusion.
Random people on the internet have commented on ways to fix Trek; it is a tribute to the incompetence of the show's producers that they are unable to match the cleverness of some unpaid guy in his pajamas. (I can't speak for seasons 3 and 4 of ENT, as I haven't seen 'em. But hell, the average TNG ep was light years behind the average B5 ep.)
The reason I, like so many other people, rag on Trek is because it displaces everything else. As Justin Rye said, "I remember the days (up until about 1985) when the BBC used to produce SF, as opposed to kiddy fantasy spoofs or half-hearted technothrillers. This will never happen again while they can get hot and cold running Roddenberry." How much equally worthy SF (and let's be clear that Trek itself is rarely SF, with its vague and inexplicable pseudoscience) has been forced off television because Trek is known, Trek is safe.
I may have to watch newer Enterprise, but unless it's really fucking amazing, I'm standing by my original position.
"Oh, it's hard to make TV that isn't purely derivative crap" is not an excuse. In general, "it's hard" is never an excuse. While Trek fans were whining about how hard it is to make some episodes that aren't repetitive junk, Firefly was out there actually doing it. Imagine that.
I've had problems in the past getting.mp4 files to play out of the box on both Linux and Windows systems. Certainly it can be done with the addition of some codecs or whatnot, but then you're back where you started, and it's no improvement over the.avi wrapper format, which has been a standard for quite some time now.
It's really you, is it? Thanks again for the 'Nerds' essay.
And yes, after I posted that I read Re: What You Can't Say and realized that I'd been trolled, that the essay was meant to have just that effect on me. Well played.
'Course, I could point you to the Bogdanov Affair to point out that physics is not without its fanatics and true believers. But we dorks have such a great big hard-on for physics (and to a lesser extend the other hard sciences) that we'd prefer not to think about that. Sure, the Bogdanov paper was published on a very edgy subject, in a jounral far from the mainstream. So was Sokal's. Neither invalidates the field it purports to criticize.
All the experience I can summon tells me that business majors got credit for learning to use MS Office, and WS majors got credit for reading books and stories, and writing essays expressing their opinions. (I did not have the opportunity to see what would happen if these opinions were anathema to our instructors.) But I'm a little wary of casting aspersions on the humanities as a whole. I think we dorks talk a lot of smack, and I don't feel that all of it is justified.
Fine arts, on the other hand, I'll agree is mostly postmodern crap that could have been done by a disinterested infant. They're like the venial Ayn Rand villains who make endless, offensively banal, incestuously self-referential crap and call it a great work. Irony has replaced sincerity, and art suffers. ('Course, commercial art---comics and the like---have gotten steadily better over the years. I never liked fine artists anyway.)
Slashdot Mirror
Yeah.. Puppy Helmet! Popcorn Eyeglasses! Peanut-Butter Monkey!!
--grendel drago
How do you enable autosave? A coworker of mine was doing the hoppy-screamy peg-leg pirate dance because OO died and took his work with it. (Yes, he was an idjit for not saving.) When he opened the document again, none of his changes were there. Where's the autosave?
--grendel drago
Isn't PCL a yecchy-looking binary language? I remember seeing some raw PCL output and thinking that it looked like line noise. I've seen raw PostScript, which at least one can lex with the naked eye, if not parse.
--grendel drago
I sometimes find myself agreeing with his premise, but when he gets into one of those frothy paragraphs where he's talking about "spread-thighed enlightenment" or whatnot, he's kinda lost me. I can just imagine him, a balding, ponytailed ex-hippie, hanging around at Berkeley and trying his so-tired-it's-fresh free-love schtick on the local young and impressionables.
--grendel drago
A lot of applications with Windows seem to need admin equivalent access and then want that ongoing to change anything.
I hear this a lot, but aside from installing new programs (which generally requires root access on a Linux machine as well), can you give me an example of a Windows app, once installed, that won't do something particularly useful without Administrator privileges?
--grendel drago
Dude! I remember Executor! Well, mainly I remember my brother saying it could run Mac things, and then not being able to boot it, probably because we didn't have a boot ROM. We gave up, and went back to playing "Blake Stone: Aliens of Gold" or whatever the hot warez were that week.
But it was the first I ever learned of emulation, before ZSNES and Nesticle. Ah, those were the days.
--grendel drago
Well, depends what you mean by "design heritage". We all use binary and programmable machines, so we're all indebted to Zuse's Z3 in some fashion.
But I am curious---what sorts of design elements were present in the Intel 4004 which are discernible in the Pentium 4? My knowledge of chip architecture is pretty sketchy, but I'd be interested to know what's survived over the years, even if it's something totally idiosyncratic and meaningless.
--grendel drago
Its memory lives on on Wikipedia, at least.
Say, if you were that deeply involved in its creation, is there any chance you could donate a nice PNG screenshot (if it had a distinctive-looking interface), or maybe some informative but really obscure tidbits to the article.
Just sayin'. Yeah, it's writing for free, but you're already doing it on Slashdot, and you'd be adding to the sum total of human knowledge that's in an easily-accessible form. Shiny!
--grendel drago
Comparing TeX to PS or PDF doesn't really make sense. PostScript and PDF are output languages, while TeX is a typesetting program. It's like comparing the merits of Photoshop versus JPEG.
I don't think anyone really writes PS directly, unless they're l33t hackers. (There is that tiny snowflake program that prints a different snowflake every time. That's pretty darn nifty.
But little to do with typesetting. You'd want to compare TeX to Adobe InDesign or QuarkXPress, I suppose. Comparing it to MS Word is a frickin' joke.
--grendel drago
like, for example, page numbering starting on a number other than 1 I didn't know how to do that. I googled for it. No nine megabytes of C code involved. And a real troll would have seized on TeX being written in WEB, the Pascal-like "literate programming" language that Knuth designed himself. A real troll would have further complained that most hacking is really done using TeX's own macro system, which can be weird and baroque a lot of the time.
And how did "Knuth" become "Bluth" halfway through? If it's a joke about the Mormon animator, follow it through.
And dear god, man, there may be better ways of separating content and presentation---standards-compliant HTML with CSS, anyone?---but MS Word is not it. I've seen documents that have gone through many hands, serious works that involve difficult formatting... and it ain't pretty. Word is simply not a serious typesetting tool. Talk about InDesign or QuarkXPress if you want to go on about that.
LaTeX also allows the use of standard PostScript fonts with a quickin the preamble, but I kinda like the cm fonts myself.
Also, I'm not sure where the complaints about needing to edit incomprehensible jargon to correct typos came from. Text is represented as... plain old text. When is it any other way? Math is hard to read if it's badly written or you're not used to it, but it's no worse than it has to be, to my eyes.
Is it a sign of the incredible good design of TeX that the Adequacy people couldn't find very many real flaws to harp on? Or does Adequacy simply suck ass? I fear it to be the latter; I have plenty of nits to pick with TeX, but this reads like it was written by someone who heard of TeX once, and decided to write a rant about it. Frickin' weak.
--grendel drago
Well, for one thing, the '98 machine down the hall actually locks up, freezes, crashes when I try to copy things from a scratched CD, whereas a 2000 box may refuse to copy it, but at least it doesn't crash the whole system when I do it.
But from the standpoint of security, despite myriad changes in the basic architecture, it seems to have made very little difference where it counts---in the number of active remote exploits.
--grendel drago
Sorry to ask, but I've never had to look at this particular problem and was wondering if that was what you were suggesting. It seems like a good enough idea to me. Except I'm not familiar with how setuid-root works.
--grendel drago
But I'll stop there.
Great Gauss, why? If astroturfers got horribly burned by some *cough* anonymous people with l33ter skills than mine, perhaps they'd stop trying to peddle their crap to us. It's like spam---one in ten thousand Slashdot readers will buy this crap, but that makes it well worth Alain Aisenberg's time.
The only way to make it stop is to make it not worth Aisenberg's time.
If the editors won't do something about it, perhaps some of the readers should.
--grendel drago
Well, if you go check out Elfen Lied, the catgirls also all have tentacles. It's a win-win situation!
--grendel drago
I must have had an old version of QuickTime, because the OSX 10.2 machine's QT player barfed on the MP4 files I got. (They were from Apple's site, if I remember, so they were likely good.)
I fail to see why we need another proprietary container format like MP4 when those of us fortunate enough to own general-purpose computing machines can use Ogg or Matroska.
Also, AVI is hardly "abandoned". It's not used for streaming video, but unless you're getting anime, any TV-rips you score from BitTorrent are either VCD MPEGs or XviD AVIs. Also, if you're pulling miniDV tapes in over FireWire, there's a good chance you're capturing to AVI if you're on a PC. (MOV on a Mac, but that's pretty obvious...)
--grendel drago
I forgot to mention. XviD is an MPEG-4 codec. As such, it's proprietary. Oh! And AAC is an MPEG standard as well. (That's why it's on DVDs.)
So, in fact, no part of your MPEG-4/XviD/AAC combo is non-proprietary.
Now, something like Matroska/Dirac/Vorbis or Ogg/Theora/Vorbis would be free and non-proprietary. But it tends to be unsupported. Which, really, is the rub.
But, hey, if you don't care about the free-as-in-speech implications (and for a lot of uses, it's stupid to care about them) then go right ahead. But don't confuse free-as-in-beer and non-proprietary.
--grendel drago
.AVI [...] mp3 audio is basically hacked into working with this
.OGG, and supports streaming, internal DVD-type menus, and the like.
Not exactly. Constant bitrate audio works fine with AVI. Variable bitrate audio, MP3 or not, requires a bit of hackery (you needed to mux with Nandub back in the day; I don't know what the tools are now), but it still works.
MPEG-4 [...] not proprietary
Wrong. I don't care if it's freely available, it's still proprietary. There's a discussion on meta-Wikipedia on this. Like MP3s, they're patent-encumbered.
No, this likely doesn't make a grain of difference to your average video content provider. But it can matter to some people. (Like Wikipedia policy wonks, who tend to be rather religious about using open formats---Vorbis audio instead of MP3, for instance.)
MPEG-anything isn't open. It's licensed in a relaxed way, but it ain't open.
You also left out Matroska. It's free and open, it works, is no more difficult to support than
--grendel drago
So, do you refuse to tongue-kiss someone who's had their tonsils out? Or have butt-sex with someone who's had an appendectomy?
Comparing the off-slicing of a not particularly useful and occasionaly inconvenient bit of skin to the loss of the ability to walk around without a crutch or prosthesis is a little tasteless, isn't it?
--grendel drago
... I think it means he funded research and technology initiatives which led to advances in networking technology.
What, did you interpret that as "I invented the internet"?
The whole thing is way outta proportion.
--grendel drago
Try Babylon 5. It's dark in places, but on the whole the plot is pretty darn uplifting once you get to the end. Yes, Earthgov is taken over by a sinister xenophobic junta with little regard for civilian life, but the good guys are our viewpoint characters, and hops springs eternal.
Except for Londo. Londo is cursed. So sad.
And most people cry at the last episode. But they're happy tears.
--grendel drago
Look, any time someone complains that doing something is too hard, they're really just saying that they're incompetent. Whining about it isn't an answer. Babylon 5 did a self-consistent time travel plot without turning it into a big pile of confusion.
Random people on the internet have commented on ways to fix Trek; it is a tribute to the incompetence of the show's producers that they are unable to match the cleverness of some unpaid guy in his pajamas. (I can't speak for seasons 3 and 4 of ENT, as I haven't seen 'em. But hell, the average TNG ep was light years behind the average B5 ep.)
The reason I, like so many other people, rag on Trek is because it displaces everything else. As Justin Rye said, "I remember the days (up until about 1985) when the BBC used to produce SF, as opposed to kiddy fantasy spoofs or half-hearted technothrillers. This will never happen again while they can get hot and cold running Roddenberry." How much equally worthy SF (and let's be clear that Trek itself is rarely SF, with its vague and inexplicable pseudoscience) has been forced off television because Trek is known, Trek is safe.
I may have to watch newer Enterprise, but unless it's really fucking amazing, I'm standing by my original position.
Trek Must Die.
--grendel drago
"Oh, it's hard to make TV that isn't purely derivative crap" is not an excuse. In general, "it's hard" is never an excuse. While Trek fans were whining about how hard it is to make some episodes that aren't repetitive junk, Firefly was out there actually doing it. Imagine that.
--grendel drago
I've had problems in the past getting .mp4 files to play out of the box on both Linux and Windows systems. Certainly it can be done with the addition of some codecs or whatnot, but then you're back where you started, and it's no improvement over the .avi wrapper format, which has been a standard for quite some time now.
So, ah, why the weird new container format?
--grendel drago
It's really you, is it? Thanks again for the 'Nerds' essay.
And yes, after I posted that I read Re: What You Can't Say and realized that I'd been trolled, that the essay was meant to have just that effect on me. Well played.
'Course, I could point you to the Bogdanov Affair to point out that physics is not without its fanatics and true believers. But we dorks have such a great big hard-on for physics (and to a lesser extend the other hard sciences) that we'd prefer not to think about that. Sure, the Bogdanov paper was published on a very edgy subject, in a jounral far from the mainstream. So was Sokal's. Neither invalidates the field it purports to criticize.
All the experience I can summon tells me that business majors got credit for learning to use MS Office, and WS majors got credit for reading books and stories, and writing essays expressing their opinions. (I did not have the opportunity to see what would happen if these opinions were anathema to our instructors.) But I'm a little wary of casting aspersions on the humanities as a whole. I think we dorks talk a lot of smack, and I don't feel that all of it is justified.
Fine arts, on the other hand, I'll agree is mostly postmodern crap that could have been done by a disinterested infant. They're like the venial Ayn Rand villains who make endless, offensively banal, incestuously self-referential crap and call it a great work. Irony has replaced sincerity, and art suffers. ('Course, commercial art---comics and the like---have gotten steadily better over the years. I never liked fine artists anyway.)
--grendel drago