How many of these laws have to get struck down, with court fees awarded to the plaintiffs challenging them, before legislatures will decide that it's just not worth it to pass them?
When a patent is under examination, others can submit examples of prior art. However, if they do and the patent is subsequently granted, the patent cannot be challenged in court on the basis of that prior art. That's why nobody does it -- they assume the examiners are idiots and prefer to take their shot in court instead. So - does this website count the same way? If so, it might not be such a great idea...
Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike is not exactly an onerous or hard-to-comply-with license. It is also fairly easy to understand and interpret (unlike, say, the GFDL).
Commons has different image policies than Wikipeida. It will take pretty much any picture as long as it is of passable quality and acceptable copyright status.
For any German speakers out there: Most (all?) of these pictures lack English captions. I'm sure the people on Commons could use all the assistance they can get translating the German captions (especially into English). You can register an account on Commons and help.
"Only drawback is they need to be supercooled, something that may be addressed by improving the materials used." - that last part is a bit of an understatement. We're still decades (centuries?) away from room temperature superconductors.
Re - "It is the wish of my client." -- I'm reminded of what Richard Nixon's lawyer famously said while arguing before the US Supreme Court in US v. Nixon: "The President wants me to argue that he is as powerful a monarch as Louis XIV, only four years at a time, and is not subject to the processes of any court in the land except the court of impeachment." He knew it was a nutty position to take, so he explicitly stated that it was his client's position, not his.
It's fair to criticize Linpack for being a one-trick pony. It measures system performance for dense linear algebra, and nothing else. Jack Dongarra (the guy who wrote Linpack and maintains the top 500 lists) is quite up-front about Linpack's limitations, and he thinks that using a single number as the end-all-be-all of a computer's performance is a bad idea. It's a simple fact of life that certian kinds of computers do better on certain problems. The good guys out at Berkeley even sat down a couple years ago and enumerated all of the problems they found in real-world HPC applications (See the tables on pages 11-12). The real truth here is that people should stop treating Linpack like it's the final measure of system performance. If you are doing pure linear algebra problems, it's a pretty good measurement for your purposes; if you are not, then you use it at your own peril.
At the risk of starting a programming language holy war, can someone explain to me why someone would choose to start a new project in Perl instead of Python? From what I've seen, they both do essentially the same things in the same ways, and they're both (roughly) the same as far as language overhead (from language interpretation) is concerned. But from a readability perspective, there's no question that Python is miles ahead. (Perl's readability, or lack thereof, is literally the source of jokes) In the long run, this translates into lower total development budgets, which is something businesses like to hear. So, why would anyone choose Perl over Python?
Shareholder reports are usually the most gloomy documents known to man. A corporation is liable if something goes wrong and they didn't warn the shareholders in the quarterly report, so the reports typically cover *every conceivably thing* that could possibly go wrong. It's not the sort of thing you want to put spin into. I can't understand why they would be doing it...
Using procedural methods to prevent an undesirable bill from coming up for a vote is *quite* common and happens every parliamentary body in the world. The bill itself has no chance of passing, but by preventing it from coming up for a vote, the Senators who would vote against it prevent themselves from going on the record as being "for higher gas prices" (or that's how their opponents would spin it, anyway)
The 160/12 comparison is in Al Franken's "Lies and the Lying Liars". I don't have a page number handy because I don't have a copy of the book right now.
Republicans in Congress had ~160 hours of hearings into allegations that the Clinton administration vandalized the White House before turning it over to Bush. (They failed to find a single instance of vandalism) They spent ~12 hours investigating the 9/11 attacks. That's why they are now in the minority - because they cannot govern worth a damn. Today's stunt - ignoring the rules of procedure to grandstand for environmentally damaging policies that won't make a difference in gas prices for decades if ever - shows they have not learned their lesson.
If Wikipedia is the only (major) site using Ogg Theora - and as far as I am aware, it is - then this announcement affects only people who visit Wikipedia and and play its media content. But, Wikipedia already has support for embedded Theora and Vorbis. About a year ago, Mediawiki introduced a java player so that ogg Theora and Vorbis videos could be embedded and played within pages.
The built-in Firefox player will effectively replace Mediawiki's java player (for people using Firefox, at least) but functionally it will not affect user experience. So like I said - this is a good step in the right direction, but it's not ground shaking.
It's "available for Windows" in the same sense that all open source software is -- they provide the source, and (assuming you have a compiler on your windows systems) you do the job of compiling it yourself. That's so far from usable for the vast majority of windows users that I do not count it.
After some time spent googling and figuring out how to use Mencoder and Ffmpeg to do the rotation and theora transcoding, I wrote a Python script to do the heavy lifting. So that takes care of my problem, but that won't work for 99.9% of people who have this problem.
The instructions you cite were originally copied from the English Wikipedia guide (and its associated talk page), which I wrote:)
My current solution is a bit more elegant than the ones on that page. I wrote a python script (which wraps around ffmpeg) to convert directories full of quicktime movies (which is what my camera creates) to ogg theora.
ffmpeg does support conversion to ogg theora. The problem is that (a) ffmpeg is Linux only, which means that it won't serve any more than a niche audience for the purposes of putting content on Wikimedia commons, and (b) ffmpeg is an 800 pound gorilla. Trying to read through its man page to figure out the correct options to output to theora is *painful* (on the occasions I've used it, I had much more success simply googling for the right command)
I've put more Theora videos on Wikipedia commons than almost anyone else. The problem is, ffmpeg2theroa (which is the most direct way of generating theora videos, by transcoding them from other video formats) is not all that great. I've tried to get three features included in ffmpeg2theora with no success at all. The developers don't have bugzilla and don't respond to email. (For anyone interested, those three features are: [1] a command line option to use whatever resolution the target video uses rather than manually specifying it [2] the ability to rotate by 90 degrees, and [3] because many cameras (including mine) tend to set a couple of bits wrong when creating quicktime movies, ffmpeg2theora need to be less picky about following certain file specifications. Right now, it errors out without producing any output)
So yes, this is good news. But until there's more content to actually view using this - and that necessitates better production-side software - it's not all that big of a deal.
At Supercomputing 2006, they had a wonderful panel where they discussed the future of computing in general, and tried to predict what computers (especially Supercomputers) would look like in 2020. Tom Sterling made what I thought was one of the most insightful observations of the panel -- most of the code out there is sequential (or nearly so) and I/O bound. So your home user checking his email, running a web browser, etc is not going to benefit much from having all that compute power. (Gamers are obviously not included in this) Thus, he predicted, processors would max out at a "relatively" low number of cores - 64 was his prediction.
Slashdot Mirror
Seriously, screw 'em. They've wrecked one good show after another. I hope another network - any network - picks it up rather than them.
How many of these laws have to get struck down, with court fees awarded to the plaintiffs challenging them, before legislatures will decide that it's just not worth it to pass them?
Freeciv
Battle of Wesnoth
UFOAI (although this is in perpetual alpha)
The tutorial he links to - A Byte of Python - is the best Python tutorial in existence. It's perfect for such a course.
When a patent is under examination, others can submit examples of prior art. However, if they do and the patent is subsequently granted, the patent cannot be challenged in court on the basis of that prior art. That's why nobody does it -- they assume the examiners are idiots and prefer to take their shot in court instead. So - does this website count the same way? If so, it might not be such a great idea...
Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike is not exactly an onerous or hard-to-comply-with license. It is also fairly easy to understand and interpret (unlike, say, the GFDL).
Commons has different image policies than Wikipeida. It will take pretty much any picture as long as it is of passable quality and acceptable copyright status.
For any German speakers out there: Most (all?) of these pictures lack English captions. I'm sure the people on Commons could use all the assistance they can get translating the German captions (especially into English). You can register an account on Commons and help.
Also, props go to Wikimedia Deutchland, which arranged this donation.
"Only drawback is they need to be supercooled, something that may be addressed by improving the materials used." - that last part is a bit of an understatement. We're still decades (centuries?) away from room temperature superconductors.
Re - "It is the wish of my client." -- I'm reminded of what Richard Nixon's lawyer famously said while arguing before the US Supreme Court in US v. Nixon: "The President wants me to argue that he is as powerful a monarch as Louis XIV, only four years at a time, and is not subject to the processes of any court in the land except the court of impeachment." He knew it was a nutty position to take, so he explicitly stated that it was his client's position, not his.
It's fair to criticize Linpack for being a one-trick pony. It measures system performance for dense linear algebra, and nothing else. Jack Dongarra (the guy who wrote Linpack and maintains the top 500 lists) is quite up-front about Linpack's limitations, and he thinks that using a single number as the end-all-be-all of a computer's performance is a bad idea. It's a simple fact of life that certian kinds of computers do better on certain problems. The good guys out at Berkeley even sat down a couple years ago and enumerated all of the problems they found in real-world HPC applications (See the tables on pages 11-12). The real truth here is that people should stop treating Linpack like it's the final measure of system performance. If you are doing pure linear algebra problems, it's a pretty good measurement for your purposes; if you are not, then you use it at your own peril.
At the risk of starting a programming language holy war, can someone explain to me why someone would choose to start a new project in Perl instead of Python? From what I've seen, they both do essentially the same things in the same ways, and they're both (roughly) the same as far as language overhead (from language interpretation) is concerned. But from a readability perspective, there's no question that Python is miles ahead. (Perl's readability, or lack thereof, is literally the source of jokes) In the long run, this translates into lower total development budgets, which is something businesses like to hear. So, why would anyone choose Perl over Python?
The grandparent post was asking for a source for the 160/12 claim, not a primary source.
Shareholder reports are usually the most gloomy documents known to man. A corporation is liable if something goes wrong and they didn't warn the shareholders in the quarterly report, so the reports typically cover *every conceivably thing* that could possibly go wrong. It's not the sort of thing you want to put spin into. I can't understand why they would be doing it...
Using procedural methods to prevent an undesirable bill from coming up for a vote is *quite* common and happens every parliamentary body in the world. The bill itself has no chance of passing, but by preventing it from coming up for a vote, the Senators who would vote against it prevent themselves from going on the record as being "for higher gas prices" (or that's how their opponents would spin it, anyway)
The 160/12 comparison is in Al Franken's "Lies and the Lying Liars". I don't have a page number handy because I don't have a copy of the book right now.
Republicans in Congress had ~160 hours of hearings into allegations that the Clinton administration vandalized the White House before turning it over to Bush. (They failed to find a single instance of vandalism) They spent ~12 hours investigating the 9/11 attacks. That's why they are now in the minority - because they cannot govern worth a damn. Today's stunt - ignoring the rules of procedure to grandstand for environmentally damaging policies that won't make a difference in gas prices for decades if ever - shows they have not learned their lesson.
If Wikipedia is the only (major) site using Ogg Theora - and as far as I am aware, it is - then this announcement affects only people who visit Wikipedia and and play its media content. But, Wikipedia already has support for embedded Theora and Vorbis. About a year ago, Mediawiki introduced a java player so that ogg Theora and Vorbis videos could be embedded and played within pages.
The built-in Firefox player will effectively replace Mediawiki's java player (for people using Firefox, at least) but functionally it will not affect user experience. So like I said - this is a good step in the right direction, but it's not ground shaking.
The script is here
It's "available for Windows" in the same sense that all open source software is -- they provide the source, and (assuming you have a compiler on your windows systems) you do the job of compiling it yourself. That's so far from usable for the vast majority of windows users that I do not count it.
After some time spent googling and figuring out how to use Mencoder and Ffmpeg to do the rotation and theora transcoding, I wrote a Python script to do the heavy lifting. So that takes care of my problem, but that won't work for 99.9% of people who have this problem.
The instructions you cite were originally copied from the English Wikipedia guide (and its associated talk page), which I wrote :)
My current solution is a bit more elegant than the ones on that page. I wrote a python script (which wraps around ffmpeg) to convert directories full of quicktime movies (which is what my camera creates) to ogg theora.
ffmpeg does support conversion to ogg theora. The problem is that (a) ffmpeg is Linux only, which means that it won't serve any more than a niche audience for the purposes of putting content on Wikimedia commons, and (b) ffmpeg is an 800 pound gorilla. Trying to read through its man page to figure out the correct options to output to theora is *painful* (on the occasions I've used it, I had much more success simply googling for the right command)
I've put more Theora videos on Wikipedia commons than almost anyone else. The problem is, ffmpeg2theroa (which is the most direct way of generating theora videos, by transcoding them from other video formats) is not all that great. I've tried to get three features included in ffmpeg2theora with no success at all. The developers don't have bugzilla and don't respond to email. (For anyone interested, those three features are: [1] a command line option to use whatever resolution the target video uses rather than manually specifying it [2] the ability to rotate by 90 degrees, and [3] because many cameras (including mine) tend to set a couple of bits wrong when creating quicktime movies, ffmpeg2theora need to be less picky about following certain file specifications. Right now, it errors out without producing any output)
So yes, this is good news. But until there's more content to actually view using this - and that necessitates better production-side software - it's not all that big of a deal.
At Supercomputing 2006, they had a wonderful panel where they discussed the future of computing in general, and tried to predict what computers (especially Supercomputers) would look like in 2020. Tom Sterling made what I thought was one of the most insightful observations of the panel -- most of the code out there is sequential (or nearly so) and I/O bound. So your home user checking his email, running a web browser, etc is not going to benefit much from having all that compute power. (Gamers are obviously not included in this) Thus, he predicted, processors would max out at a "relatively" low number of cores - 64 was his prediction.