I think PDF is more like PS, in that it describes the page rather than giving general tags about the importance or meaning of text.
I hate PDF precisely because of the trouble in parsing the text. The reader I use (xpdf) doesn't allow me to highlight and cut and paste, etc, for quoting things. Not a real help if you want to cut and paste a paragraph from the latest microsoft court ruling.
It knows enough to do that if it wanted to, because it highlights the text when you search for a string.
I say either ascii, html, or postscript, and then gzip them as necessary. We can make the readers and browser plugins look at the extension and magic number and decompress on the fly.
I never created pdf's at all, and I always hated using them.
It's time to start demanding non-pdf downloads of data sheets, court decisions, etc. Because it will cost them in the document providers who no longer feel obliged to buy something to create pdfs with (and yes, most of these people have no idea how to make a pdf without using commercial tools).
We need to break the vision of pdf as a universal portable document format. Replace it with html, ps, anything that adobe doesn't make money off of.
Forget contact numbers -- a certified mail letter to the CEO of Netpliance (look up the address in the filing on sec.gov or somewhere) is usually good at getting a check out of people like this.
Calling, emailing, calling and claiming you are recording it, whatever, nothing works the magic like that certified letter, in my experience.
The parent post is rated as Troll, but I feel it makes a very good point. Most of what Steve talks about is pretty ordinary stuff. Words like "Danger" should reserved for things that are really dangerous. Running a web site is a pain in the ass, and some of the stalkers out there might have the potential to be dangerous, but until medical bills or jail is factored in, it's all just words.
In fact, many trolls would be delighted to get the attention that coatse is getting. I mean, there are all the big guys like the WIPO Troll and Feces Thrower, but the vast majority of trolls post their best work, which they have sweated and bled over, into a void of nothingness and get no response. A portscan would be nice, thank you very much, and a personal visit from some FBI agents down to their parent's basement could be inspiration for a lifetime of work.
Re:EGCS is now officially obsolete!
on
GCC 3.0 Released
·
· Score: 1
Our user id's are only one different.
But I haven't found the palindrome guy we both just missed, 450054.
Computers today have one processor per computer. Sure, there are a beowulf projects, but those are a tiny market (if you can call an industry running off of donated machines and free code a "market") consisting largely of scientists playing "mine is bigger" because they have no girlfriends. And while you can buy a dual processor motherboard, software doesn't really take advantage of it -- because anyone who needed speed enough to pay for the programming could just buy a faster processor for less. (OK, there are exceptions in the server market.)
Think about it this way: if your teacher had concentrated on teaching the basics of parallel programming, his students would be unemployed now. (Or grad students -- same thing, a welfare parasite is a welfare parasite.) If he had instead taught them as much of Knuth as he could stuff in their heads in the same time, those kids would each month earn what he earned in an entire year.
Your teacher saw that parallel programming is cool and interesting. Guess what -- it still is. But it's disuse is part of the bust of the 5th generation AI crap. After all, neural nets and lisp are used here and there and are still cool also.
Just like those "global warming people"? You don't acknowledge that fact?
Which fact ? The global warming hypesters have a lot of little psuedo maybe-facts wrapped up in their stuff. Has the earth gotten warmer in the past 20 years ? Yes. Was it due to CO2 ? That hypothesis requires a huge amount of tweaking specialized computer models to make it match up with the data -- predicting Florida election returns with trained neural nets is more respectable, in my opinion. Remember, less than 20 years ago these same "scientists" were trying to get us all riled up about a coming ice age. Will the sea level rise or fall if the average temperature increases ? They can tweak their models either way. Some of them even say that there will be more snowfall in glacial areas, and invent a process which puts us all in an ice age. The one constant in all the models is that we are just flick of a butterfly's wing away from a cascade of causes and effects that ends in total disaster. Because otherwise, the study would not be published.
If the US found a cheap, safe, pollution and CO2 free way to make as much energy as we wanted tomorrow, the Sierra Club and the European Greens would fight it tooth and nail. Why ? Because they don't care about these "facts" of global warming and oil shortages and whatever; what they have is a religion, a faith that says the United States and other industrial nations committed some sin by being rich, and we must pay for it, preferably by giving away a lot of stuff to third world countries, and by sacrificing and suffering and walking around in hemp sandles instead of riding SUV's until our minds are appropriately aligned with the sanctioned TRUTH. Greens and Sierre Clubers would find a technical escape from their invented apocalpse extremely upsetting. That's the main reason why I'm for nuclear and wind energy, not because I actually want to save the world or anything stupid like that -- it's just a great troll of those stupid Kaczynskites.
. . . announcing to slashdotters the depth of your ignorance. ..
That never stopped me before . . .
. . . the fact that you have done NO research in any of these subjects . ..
Well, all of my nasty sniping and hyperbole aside, you would probably be surprised to know what I've done and read. Of course, I took it beyound your level of browsing a couple of articles in Scientific American and Discover, and then masturbating to the thought of how enlightened and politicaly correct I was. Get of the net moron, I think there is a cup of wheat grass or carrot juice or $6 coffee calling your name somewhere.
You still loose a little charge from a charged object in space. This is due to various particle radiation that you are being bombarded with. Of course, the particles charged the same as you will deflect from you; those charged like you will stick to you, lowering the charge. And of course some fast moving neutral stuff will hit you, blasting off a tiny bit of your charge to go flying off. So it can't store energy indefinitely.
The other problem is how do you charge up the plates. If you charge them on earth, then you sending a big charged capacitor up on rocket, which is a disaster begging to happen. (Ok maybe I'm in favor of that.) If you charge them once you are up in space, that means you have a decent power source up there -- then why not just fly the power souce to the asteroid, and use a little ion gun rocket to gradually nudge it away ?
Well, no explosion is involved. I admitt, if Nasa is going to spend billions on some stupid project (yes I think moving an asteroid which will probably hit in the pacific ocean or some worthless place like France is stupid, especially since if we saw it coming in time enough to deflect it, and it wasn't hitting France or China, the US is rich enough to move a few tens of millions of people for a few weeks and then rebuild the infrastructure there) then I want a huge explosion, god damn it. Bang ! Bright Lights ! Give me something for my tax dollars !
I have long held the opinion that in the modern era easy access to cars, alcohol, and firearms has greatly speeded up evolution. Some people seem to believe that because of modern medicine and industrial society human evolution has halted, but I see hope in every prom night car crash.
And I see hope in your idiotic wish to take your genetic legacy on top of a pile of Russian built explosives and ride them into a zone of intense cosmic radiation for a few days. All I ask is that you do it BEFORE you breed.
If I could put you in a metal barrel, shake you around a bit, lower you into a uranium mine for a couple of days and let you drink Tang while you were down there, would you pay me 20 million ?
Slashdot Mirror
I think PDF is more like PS, in that it describes the page rather than giving general tags about the importance or meaning of text.
I hate PDF precisely because of the trouble in parsing the text. The reader I use (xpdf) doesn't allow me to highlight and cut and paste, etc, for quoting things. Not a real help if you want to cut and paste a paragraph from the latest microsoft court ruling.
It knows enough to do that if it wanted to, because it highlights the text when you search for a string.
I say either ascii, html, or postscript, and then gzip them as necessary. We can make the readers and browser plugins look at the extension and magic number and decompress on the fly.
I never created pdf's at all, and I always hated using them.
It's time to start demanding non-pdf downloads of data sheets, court decisions, etc. Because it will cost them in the document providers who no longer feel obliged to buy something to create pdfs with (and yes, most of these people have no idea how to make a pdf without using commercial tools).
We need to break the vision of pdf as a universal portable document format. Replace it with html, ps, anything that adobe doesn't make money off of.
Forget contact numbers -- a certified mail letter to the CEO of Netpliance (look up the address in the filing on sec.gov or somewhere) is usually good at getting a check out of people like this.
Calling, emailing, calling and claiming you are recording it, whatever, nothing works the magic like that certified letter, in my experience.
The parent post is rated as Troll, but I feel it makes a very good point. Most of what Steve talks about is pretty ordinary stuff. Words like "Danger" should reserved for things that are really dangerous. Running a web site is a pain in the ass, and some of the stalkers out there might have the potential to be dangerous, but until medical bills or jail is factored in, it's all just words.
In fact, many trolls would be delighted to get the attention that coatse is getting. I mean, there are all the big guys like the WIPO Troll and Feces Thrower, but the vast majority of trolls post their best work, which they have sweated and bled over, into a void of nothingness and get no response. A portscan would be nice, thank you very much, and a personal visit from some FBI agents down to their parent's basement could be inspiration for a lifetime of work.
Our user id's are only one different.
But I haven't found the palindrome guy we both just missed, 450054.
No, your teacher was wrong.
Computers today have one processor per computer. Sure, there are a beowulf projects, but those are a tiny market (if you can call an industry running off of donated machines and free code a "market") consisting largely of scientists playing "mine is bigger" because they have no girlfriends. And while you can buy a dual processor motherboard, software doesn't really take advantage of it -- because anyone who needed speed enough to pay for the programming could just buy a faster processor for less. (OK, there are exceptions in the server market.)
Think about it this way: if your teacher had concentrated on teaching the basics of parallel programming, his students would be unemployed now. (Or grad students -- same thing, a welfare parasite is a welfare parasite.) If he had instead taught them as much of Knuth as he could stuff in their heads in the same time, those kids would each month earn what he earned in an entire year.
Your teacher saw that parallel programming is cool and interesting. Guess what -- it still is. But it's disuse is part of the bust of the 5th generation AI crap. After all, neural nets and lisp are used here and there and are still cool also.
Which fact ? The global warming hypesters have a lot of little psuedo maybe-facts wrapped up in their stuff. Has the earth gotten warmer in the past 20 years ? Yes. Was it due to CO2 ? That hypothesis requires a huge amount of tweaking specialized computer models to make it match up with the data -- predicting Florida election returns with trained neural nets is more respectable, in my opinion. Remember, less than 20 years ago these same "scientists" were trying to get us all riled up about a coming ice age. Will the sea level rise or fall if the average temperature increases ? They can tweak their models either way. Some of them even say that there will be more snowfall in glacial areas, and invent a process which puts us all in an ice age. The one constant in all the models is that we are just flick of a butterfly's wing away from a cascade of causes and effects that ends in total disaster. Because otherwise, the study would not be published.
If the US found a cheap, safe, pollution and CO2 free way to make as much energy as we wanted tomorrow, the Sierra Club and the European Greens would fight it tooth and nail. Why ? Because they don't care about these "facts" of global warming and oil shortages and whatever; what they have is a religion, a faith that says the United States and other industrial nations committed some sin by being rich, and we must pay for it, preferably by giving away a lot of stuff to third world countries, and by sacrificing and suffering and walking around in hemp sandles instead of riding SUV's until our minds are appropriately aligned with the sanctioned TRUTH. Greens and Sierre Clubers would find a technical escape from their invented apocalpse extremely upsetting. That's the main reason why I'm for nuclear and wind energy, not because I actually want to save the world or anything stupid like that -- it's just a great troll of those stupid Kaczynskites.
. . . announcing to slashdotters the depth of your ignorance. . .
That never stopped me before . . .
. . . the fact that you have done NO research in any of these subjects . . .
Well, all of my nasty sniping and hyperbole aside, you would probably be surprised to know what I've done and read. Of course, I took it beyound your level of browsing a couple of articles in Scientific American and Discover, and then masturbating to the thought of how enlightened and politicaly correct I was. Get of the net moron, I think there is a cup of wheat grass or carrot juice or $6 coffee calling your name somewhere.
You still loose a little charge from a charged object in space. This is due to various particle radiation that you are being bombarded with. Of course, the particles charged the same as you will deflect from you; those charged like you will stick to you, lowering the charge. And of course some fast moving neutral stuff will hit you, blasting off a tiny bit of your charge to go flying off. So it can't store energy indefinitely.
The other problem is how do you charge up the plates. If you charge them on earth, then you sending a big charged capacitor up on rocket, which is a disaster begging to happen. (Ok maybe I'm in favor of that.) If you charge them once you are up in space, that means you have a decent power source up there -- then why not just fly the power souce to the asteroid, and use a little ion gun rocket to gradually nudge it away ?
Well, no explosion is involved. I admitt, if Nasa is going to spend billions on some stupid project (yes I think moving an asteroid which will probably hit in the pacific ocean or some worthless place like France is stupid, especially since if we saw it coming in time enough to deflect it, and it wasn't hitting France or China, the US is rich enough to move a few tens of millions of people for a few weeks and then rebuild the infrastructure there) then I want a huge explosion, god damn it. Bang ! Bright Lights ! Give me something for my tax dollars !
And what makes us thinks you will "get a chance" to read any response we should post ?
Don't ask stupid questions. Instead, find out the answers and post those.
If you care.
I have long held the opinion that in the modern era easy access to cars, alcohol, and firearms has greatly speeded up evolution. Some people seem to believe that because of modern medicine and industrial society human evolution has halted, but I see hope in every prom night car crash.
And I see hope in your idiotic wish to take your genetic legacy on top of a pile of Russian built explosives and ride them into a zone of intense cosmic radiation for a few days. All I ask is that you do it BEFORE you breed.
If I could put you in a metal barrel, shake you around a bit, lower you into a uranium mine for a couple of days and let you drink Tang while you were down there, would you pay me 20 million ?
I sure as hell would.
In fact, I'm kind of snickering at just the thought of it.