For those who are so inclined, there's a substantial community of people interested in the geeky mechanics of antiquarian books. See, for instance, Rare Book School.
Also, you should not underestimate the l337ness of librarians -- they are all over the database world, fans of the semantic web, and friends of freedom of speech and even open source.
> BTW. We *have* sent nuclear reactors into space - you don't think Voyager is running on car batteries, do you?
Good point, bad example. Voyager uses heat from the decay of radioactive material to drive a thermal gradient that generates power from thermocouples -- it's a Radioisotope Thermoelectric Generator, or RTG.
For a critical-pile, actively-cooled, fission reactor, you need to go to Soviet (and possibly also American) spy satellites. As for safety, there's even already been a space-based fission reactor accident -- google "Cosmos 954" and learn some interesting space history. (Fun irony: The reactor *was* well shielded, which allowed the fissionable material to reach the ground, instead of dispersing in the high atmosphere...)
Of course, a lunar surface reactor would be much less likely to have the "unscheduled re-entry" problem, but let's remember that, where space technology is concerned, safety is a relative term.
> I remember the day when my PC was finally faster than the processor on the Virge...
My first-ever stand-alone video accelerator was an S3 ViRGE (I even remember the acronym expansion -- "Video Rendering Graphics Engine"). For some games, software emulation was faster than the ViRGE. It did look sweet, though...
OK, I'm no general relativist, but I am a computational physicist -- what could the article possibly mean when it says earlier attempts were "plagued by computer crashes -- the equations were far too complex"?
I can imagine a situation where a poorly-arranged computation of an equation might give you an underflow in an intermediate result, or where a badly-arranged summation might give you noise. But crashing the computer? Sounds more like array-bounds, which can happen no matter how simple the equations are.
I'm reasonably happy with the current situation. I run several proprietary drivers on my system (nVidia, in particular). I like that the stock kernel isn't tainted and is redistributable and hackable (not that I ever hack it, it's the principle.) And I like that proprietary closed-source drivers are nevertheless available to me.
But most of all, I like that *I* get to choose when and whether to use them -- this is the very core of free software.
Making it easier to link proprietary drivers into the kernel would be a reasonable step, provided kernel stability is protected, but actually including them in the stock kernel source would be a mistake -- corporate behemoths could and would leverage them to make the stock kernel friendly to them and hostile to their competitors.
For mass distribution to non-knowledgeable users, an intermediate packaging and distribution layer could take care of negotiating with vendors for redistribution rights to proprietary code. Such a layer is probably required for Linux to be accessible and popular anyways, so it's a natural fit. We can call them "Red Hat"...
> Why can't people think that God put an devolved form of life on the planet and we evolved like the Scientists say?
(a) Many non-vocal religious people think precisely that, but they're not the sort of people who make the news.
(b) Many people believe that God is revealed to mankind primarily by scripture, even if they are not scriptural literalists. Scripture does not describe the creation of being which then change over time.
It's worth noting, incidentally, that fidelity to scripture was originally a response to a corrupt organization's monopoly on religious interpretation. Scripture is the source code of doctrine,
> I just don't understand why, with the success that Spirit and Opportunity have had, they don't build these as a platform.
You'll be pleased to know that they did this once already -- Spirit and Opportunity are themselves descendants of the Sojourner rover, using the same landing system and tetrahedral platform with solar panels.
According to the "Nova" show I saw about these, though, they're already at about the limit of this technology -- these rovers had a lot of extra complicated features which allowed a much larger instrument package and greater range to be put in the same size of box as the Sojourner mission.
There are other reasons, as well, of course -- technology marches on, and you want to use the aerobraking performance data from this mission to aerobrake a bigger, more powerful platform next time, for instance. Plus, the cost of the landed hardware is a small fraction of the cost of the mission -- there are launch vehicles and Deep Space Network bandwidth to be paid for, too.
I don't know if it's "the original", but a canonical version of this occurs in the classic Humphrey Bogart movie, "Casablanca". The brave anti-Nazi dissident has arrived, and Major Strosser, the Nazi "liaison" to the Vichy French civic government in Casablanca, orders Rick's Cafe closed down, so that dissident conspiracies cannot be hatched there. The prefect of police, Captain Reynard (brilliantly played by Claude Rains), comes up with a pretext. He blows his whistle, and announces that the place is to be closed because he is shocked -- SHOCKED -- to discover that *gambling* is taking place in this establishment! As he is finishing his sentence, the croupier comes up to him and hands him his winnings, which he politely accepts.
There's more to Capt. Reynard's corruption, of course, he also has a sideline in providing exit visas to young couples in exchange for time alone with the young women, and it is implied that he does better-than-random at the roulette table.
ObGrouch: You kids today ought to see more *good* movies. And get off my lawn!
That's cute, but historically, the food production problem was solved in large measure by the application of copious quantities of fossil fuels, not only to power the machines of high-yield mechanized agriculture, but also to provide feedstocks for the manufacture of chemical fertilizers and pesticides. Your post is thus a rare example of actually begging the question.
I don't know about safety-deposit boxes, but there are legal protections for apartments in most jurisdictions. In the District of Columbia, you can legally require that your landlord give you 24 hours notice before entering your unit, and there are legal remedies available to you if these conditions are violated. DC is a tenant-friendly jurisdiction, but landlords generally like this sort of thing too, it protects them from liability for being accessories to malfeasance on their property.
Storing your index in the Google server is *not* like renting space. For one thing, you don't pay rent, but the flip side of that is, there's no contract, and consequently Google has no custodial obligations. They're not competing for your money (they compete for advertiser's money), and they can protect themselves from liability by rolling over for the cops whenever they're asked.
> Those who would give up Essential Liberty to purchase a little Temporary Safety, deserve neither Liberty nor Safety - Ben Franklin
I believe I love liberty as much as any red-blooded American, but I hate this quote because, in all honesty, I don't get it. I just don't understand it at all.
I trade liberty for safety all the time. Sometimes I trade liberty for comfort. I enter into contracts, I take a job, I give up my time, and my choices about what to do with that time, so I can get money to buy things I want. Am I undeserving? Is this treason?
I think my problem with it is that "liberty" and "safety" are both kind of amorphous concepts, and talking about "essential" liberty and "temporary" safety doesn't clear it up all that much. Isn't safety always temporary, for instance?
Maybe I'm thick. I'm scared by the domestic surveillance program, but it's not because I "get" this Franklin epigram in any meaningful sense.
It's because of my own species of laziness -- I pretty much just always use "dist-upgrade", and then I don't even have to remember that the other one exists. With sources.list configured in the appropriate way, there's no danger of suddenly getting "etch" by surprise, so it's just easier. Actually, now that I think of it, it occurs to me that I don't think I know the actual difference between upgrade and dist-upgrade. If they really are the same, then your laziness wins, it's still only one command, and less typing. Hmm...
> There are source patches available. That's fine for you and me, but it's no good for the increasing number of "normal" users who are moving to Linux, who wouldn't be able to apply them if you showed them how...
Ought to be part of any installation these days. My systems are Debian, and the patch was already in place -- apt-get update, apt-get dist-upgrade, and you're done. These days, I would imagine most popular distros have something similar.
> If chinese Rolex knockoffs are achieving market parity with real Rolexes, it's because, for the people buying them, they're the same thing. Or, at least, the people buying them have decided they'd rather have 1,000 chinese "rolexes" over their lifetime than a single real thing.
If indeed that's the reason, then that's fine, of course, but your analysis goes out the window if there is deception. If consumers were promised a genuine Rolex for a low price, and got a fake, then that's fraud, and it damages the market by taking away the consumer's agency -- the consumer didn't make the decision.
You can argue that consumers are stupid, if you like, but it remains true that they didn't get what they wanted. Deception takes away the "voluntary" part of the "voluntary transactions" which are supposed to be the liberating part of the market. Yes, the system is complex and evolves, but the principles are simple, and do not evolve, and when the principles are broken, the system is broken.
(1) It's the museum of *natural* history. It's permissible to believe in supernatural history, but it's a category error to suppose that supernatural history deserves a place alongside natural history. It's a bit like demanding that, say, computer stores should sell nutritious meals, because nothing is more important than nutrition.
(2) Rightly or wrongly, creationism and intelligent design are extreme minority viewpoints within the scientific community, and the museum, with limited resources, should concentrate on the scientific mainstream. In this respect, they are no different than the National Gallery showing paintings whose importance lies in their position in mainstream painting history, or the Air and Space museum concentrating on historically important air and spacecraft.
I have a more visceral objection, myself, which however is less defensible, namely that "balance" is not, in and of itself, a virtue. If it were, you'd never get past the flat-earthers and holocaust deniers and creationists and zero-point energy enthusiasts.
Several other responders have mentioned IrfanView and GIMP and other fine products, but the actual answer to your question is yes, there is a mini-photoshop, it's called "Photoshop Elements" and it's designed specifically for editing photos. It's semi-free -- you can purchase it from Adobe if you want, for a lot less than $600, but I got mine because it was bundled with my digital camera or scanner or something.
Re:Better than post-it notes
on
Too Many Passwords
·
· Score: 4, Insightful
This can fail to comply with password rules -- the password for, e.g., your web-request-line account for WXKE radio, zGZuvwaY, doesn't have any numeric or punctuation characters.
I think a lot of people fail to distinguish between cases where strong passwords are needed, and where they aren't. For Amazon.com, with its stored credit-card data, and PayPal, and my bank, and my user account at work, obviously strong passwords are a good idea. But for slashdot, nytimes.com, and other sites that just require them for your user-state info, crappy passwords that never change are just fine, and putting those on post-it notes on the monitor is also fine.
This won't work if his ISP is Verizon -- they won't relay mail traffic through their SMTP servers unless it has a "*@verizon.net" address in the "From:" header.
Which he could do, but again, it defeats the purpose of owning a domain and running a webserver.
> I've been waiting for something like this to start happening. I don't have a television, don't want a television, don't intend to get one. But I like to watch sports.
This baffles me -- professional sports is the one thing for which the TV model makes perfect sense. There's a mass audience that all want to watch the same thing in real time, and, in fact, timely delivery of the content is a big part of the added value. The mass-ness of the audience means one provider and many receivers (broadcasting) is reasonable, and time-shifting is unlikely to enhance the value greatly.
Internet delivery of content makes sense for large-time-shift movies or point-to-point communications of any size, but it's poorly adapted to the one-provider, many-consumers situation, as the routine slashdotting of anything and everything demonstrates repeatedly.
This is a serious question -- as a sports enthusiast, particularly if you want US major-league stuff, isn't TV pretty much perfect?
The K desktop environment has things called "KIOslaves" which recognize certain pseudo-protocols on the Konqueror location bar (and other places).
Internet examples include "deb:" for Debian package searches, "rf:" for rpmfind, "gg:" for Google, "ggl:" for Google-I-feel-lucky, and "rfc:" for getting RFC text from the IETF website, and "wp:" for Wikipedia. There are lots of these.
Non-internet examples include "man:" for viewing man pages, and "info:" for viewing those otherwise horrible GNU info pages.
Unsurprisingly, Debian already lets you do this -- if you keep your sources.list pointed at "testing" all the time, you would get more or less this behavior, with the caveat that cruft would probably never be removed. (Python 1.5.2, anyone?)
I am planning to do this with one of my boxes at home, for that best-of-both-worlds feeling.
Punch cards? Luxury! Why, I remember back when real computer users set the front-panel switches for each byte and then pressed "load". And we didn't have ones or zeros, we had to use lower-case ells and capital ohs...
Slashdot Mirror
For those who are so inclined, there's a substantial community of people interested in the geeky mechanics of antiquarian books. See, for instance, Rare Book School.
Also, you should not underestimate the l337ness of librarians -- they are all over the database world, fans of the semantic web, and friends of freedom of speech and even open source.
There's even a library webcomic.
> BTW. We *have* sent nuclear reactors into space - you don't think Voyager is running on car batteries, do you?
Good point, bad example. Voyager uses heat from the decay of radioactive material to drive a thermal gradient that generates power from thermocouples -- it's a Radioisotope Thermoelectric Generator, or RTG.
For a critical-pile, actively-cooled, fission reactor, you need to go to Soviet (and possibly also American) spy satellites. As for safety, there's even already been a space-based fission reactor accident -- google "Cosmos 954" and learn some interesting space history. (Fun irony: The reactor *was* well shielded, which allowed the fissionable material to reach the ground, instead of dispersing in the high atmosphere...)
Of course, a lunar surface reactor would be much less likely to have the "unscheduled re-entry" problem, but let's remember that, where space technology is concerned, safety is a relative term.
> I remember the day when my PC was finally faster than the processor on the Virge...
My first-ever stand-alone video accelerator was an S3 ViRGE (I even remember the acronym expansion -- "Video Rendering Graphics Engine"). For some games, software emulation was faster than the ViRGE. It did look sweet, though...
OK, I'm no general relativist, but I am a computational physicist -- what could the article possibly mean when it says earlier attempts were "plagued by computer crashes -- the equations were far too complex"?
I can imagine a situation where a poorly-arranged computation of an equation might give you an underflow in an intermediate result, or where a badly-arranged summation might give you noise. But crashing the computer? Sounds more like array-bounds, which can happen no matter how simple the equations are.
I'm reasonably happy with the current situation. I run several proprietary drivers on my system (nVidia, in particular). I like that the stock kernel isn't tainted and is redistributable and hackable (not that I ever hack it, it's the principle.) And I like that proprietary closed-source drivers are nevertheless available to me.
But most of all, I like that *I* get to choose when and whether to use them -- this is the very core of free software.
Making it easier to link proprietary drivers into the kernel would be a reasonable step, provided kernel stability is protected, but actually including them in the stock kernel source would be a mistake -- corporate behemoths could and would leverage them to make the stock kernel friendly to them and hostile to their competitors.
For mass distribution to non-knowledgeable users, an intermediate packaging and distribution layer could take care of negotiating with vendors for redistribution rights to proprietary code. Such a layer is probably required for Linux to be accessible and popular anyways, so it's a natural fit. We can call them "Red Hat"...
> Why can't people think that God put an devolved form of life on the planet and we evolved like the Scientists say?
(a) Many non-vocal religious people think precisely that, but they're not the sort of people who make the news.
(b) Many people believe that God is revealed to mankind primarily by scripture, even if they are not scriptural literalists. Scripture does not describe the creation of being which then change over time.
It's worth noting, incidentally, that fidelity to scripture was originally a response to a corrupt organization's monopoly on religious interpretation. Scripture is the source code of doctrine,
> I just don't understand why, with the success that Spirit and Opportunity have had, they don't build these as a platform.
You'll be pleased to know that they did this once already -- Spirit and Opportunity are themselves descendants of the Sojourner rover, using the same landing system and tetrahedral platform with solar panels.
According to the "Nova" show I saw about these, though, they're already at about the limit of this technology -- these rovers had a lot of extra complicated features which allowed a much larger instrument package and greater range to be put in the same size of box as the Sojourner mission.
There are other reasons, as well, of course -- technology marches on, and you want to use the aerobraking performance data from this mission to aerobrake a bigger, more powerful platform next time, for instance. Plus, the cost of the landed hardware is a small fraction of the cost of the mission -- there are launch vehicles and Deep Space Network bandwidth to be paid for, too.
Today's "Slate" has a link to an older article about that.
It was, in fact, written by the guy who won it, so he may know
what he's talking about.
http://www.slate.com/id/2114925/
I don't know if it's "the original", but a canonical version of this occurs in the classic Humphrey Bogart movie, "Casablanca". The brave anti-Nazi dissident has arrived, and Major Strosser, the Nazi "liaison" to the Vichy French civic government in Casablanca, orders Rick's Cafe closed down, so that dissident conspiracies cannot be hatched there. The prefect of police, Captain Reynard (brilliantly played by Claude Rains), comes up with a pretext. He blows his whistle, and announces that the place is to be closed because he is shocked -- SHOCKED -- to discover that *gambling* is taking place in this establishment! As he is finishing his sentence, the croupier comes up to him and hands him his winnings, which he politely accepts.
There's more to Capt. Reynard's corruption, of course, he also has a sideline in providing exit visas to young couples in exchange for time alone with the young women, and it is implied that he does better-than-random at the roulette table.
ObGrouch: You kids today ought to see more *good* movies. And get off my lawn!
You'd think that one would be the easiest to remember for fanatically devoted Monty Python enthusiasts.
Amongst our weaponry are such diverse elements as... fear, surprise, fanatical devotion...
That's cute, but historically, the food production problem was solved in large measure by the application of copious quantities of fossil fuels, not only to power the machines of high-yield mechanized agriculture, but also to provide feedstocks for the manufacture of chemical fertilizers and pesticides.
Your post is thus a rare example of actually begging the question.
I don't know about safety-deposit boxes, but there are legal protections for apartments in most jurisdictions. In the District of Columbia, you can legally require that your landlord give you 24 hours notice before entering your unit, and there are legal remedies available to you if these conditions are violated. DC is a tenant-friendly jurisdiction, but landlords generally like this sort of thing too, it protects them from liability for being accessories to malfeasance on their property.
Storing your index in the Google server is *not* like renting space. For one thing, you don't pay rent, but the flip side of that is, there's no contract, and consequently Google has no custodial obligations. They're not competing for your money (they compete for advertiser's money), and they can protect themselves from liability by rolling over for the cops whenever they're asked.
> Those who would give up Essential Liberty to purchase a little Temporary Safety, deserve neither Liberty nor Safety - Ben Franklin
I believe I love liberty as much as any red-blooded American, but I hate this quote because, in all honesty, I don't get it. I just don't understand it at all.
I trade liberty for safety all the time. Sometimes I trade liberty for comfort. I enter into contracts, I take a job, I give up my time, and my choices about what to do with that time, so I can get money to buy things I want. Am I undeserving? Is this treason?
I think my problem with it is that "liberty" and "safety" are both kind of amorphous concepts, and talking about "essential" liberty and "temporary" safety doesn't clear it up all that much. Isn't safety always temporary, for instance?
Maybe I'm thick. I'm scared by the domestic surveillance program, but it's not because I "get" this Franklin epigram in any meaningful sense.
Obviously, because "athiest" is the superlative -- you know, athey, athier, athiest.
It's because of my own species of laziness -- I pretty much just always use "dist-upgrade", and then I don't even have to remember that the other one exists. With sources.list configured in the appropriate way, there's no danger of suddenly getting "etch" by surprise, so it's just easier. Actually, now that I think of it, it occurs to me that I don't think I know the actual difference between upgrade and dist-upgrade. If they really are the same, then your laziness wins, it's still only one command, and less typing. Hmm...
> There are source patches available. That's fine for you and me, but it's no good for the increasing number of "normal" users who are moving to Linux, who wouldn't be able to apply them if you showed them how...
Ought to be part of any installation these days. My systems are Debian, and the patch was already in place -- apt-get update, apt-get dist-upgrade, and you're done. These days, I would imagine most popular distros have something similar.
> If chinese Rolex knockoffs are achieving market parity with real Rolexes, it's because, for the people buying them, they're the same thing. Or, at least, the people buying them have decided they'd rather have 1,000 chinese "rolexes" over their lifetime than a single real thing.
If indeed that's the reason, then that's fine, of course, but your analysis goes out the window if there is deception. If consumers were promised a genuine Rolex for a low price, and got a fake, then that's fraud, and it damages the market by taking away the consumer's agency -- the consumer didn't make the decision.
You can argue that consumers are stupid, if you like, but it remains true that they didn't get what they wanted. Deception takes away the "voluntary" part of the "voluntary transactions" which are supposed to be the liberating part of the market. Yes, the system is complex and evolves, but the principles are simple, and do not evolve, and when the principles are broken, the system is broken.
I can think of two objections off the top:
(1) It's the museum of *natural* history. It's permissible to believe in supernatural history, but it's a category error to suppose that supernatural history deserves a place alongside natural history. It's a bit like demanding that, say, computer stores should sell nutritious meals, because nothing is more important than nutrition.
(2) Rightly or wrongly, creationism and intelligent design are extreme minority viewpoints within the scientific community, and the museum, with limited resources, should concentrate on the scientific mainstream. In this respect, they are no different than the National Gallery showing paintings whose importance lies in their position in mainstream painting history, or the Air and Space museum concentrating on historically important air and spacecraft.
I have a more visceral objection, myself, which however is less defensible, namely that "balance" is not, in and of itself, a virtue. If it were, you'd never get past the flat-earthers and holocaust deniers and creationists and zero-point energy enthusiasts.
Several other responders have mentioned IrfanView and GIMP and other fine products, but the actual answer to your question is yes, there is a mini-photoshop, it's called "Photoshop Elements" and it's designed specifically for editing photos. It's semi-free -- you can purchase it from Adobe if you want, for a lot less than $600, but I got mine because it was bundled with my digital camera or scanner or something.
This can fail to comply with password rules -- the password for, e.g.,
your web-request-line account for WXKE radio, zGZuvwaY, doesn't have any
numeric or punctuation characters.
I think a lot of people fail to distinguish between cases where strong
passwords are needed, and where they aren't. For Amazon.com, with its
stored credit-card data, and PayPal, and my bank, and my user account
at work, obviously strong passwords are a good idea. But for slashdot,
nytimes.com, and other sites that just require them for your user-state
info, crappy passwords that never change are just fine, and putting those
on post-it notes on the monitor is also fine.
This won't work if his ISP is Verizon -- they won't relay mail traffic through their SMTP servers unless it has a "*@verizon.net" address in the "From:" header.
Which he could do, but again, it defeats the purpose of owning a domain and running a webserver.
> I've been waiting for something like this to start happening. I don't have a television, don't want a television, don't intend to get one. But I like to watch sports.
This baffles me -- professional sports is the one thing for which the TV model makes perfect sense. There's a mass audience that all want to watch the same thing in real time, and, in fact, timely delivery of the content is a big part of the added value. The mass-ness of the audience means one provider and many receivers (broadcasting) is reasonable, and time-shifting is unlikely to enhance the value greatly.
Internet delivery of content makes sense for large-time-shift movies or point-to-point communications of any size, but it's poorly adapted to the one-provider, many-consumers situation, as the routine slashdotting of anything and everything demonstrates repeatedly.
This is a serious question -- as a sports enthusiast, particularly if you want US major-league stuff, isn't TV pretty much perfect?
The K desktop environment has things called "KIOslaves" which recognize certain pseudo-protocols on the Konqueror location bar (and other places).
Internet examples include "deb:" for Debian package searches, "rf:" for rpmfind, "gg:" for Google, "ggl:" for Google-I-feel-lucky, and "rfc:" for getting RFC text from the IETF website, and "wp:" for Wikipedia. There are lots of these.
Non-internet examples include "man:" for viewing man pages, and "info:" for viewing those otherwise horrible GNU info pages.
Unsurprisingly, Debian already lets you do this -- if you keep your sources.list pointed at "testing" all the time, you would get more or less this behavior, with the caveat that cruft would probably never be removed. (Python 1.5.2, anyone?)
I am planning to do this with one of my boxes at home, for that best-of-both-worlds feeling.
Punch cards? Luxury! Why, I remember back when real computer users set the front-panel switches for each byte and then pressed "load". And we didn't have ones or zeros, we had to use lower-case ells and capital ohs...