Nuclear never paid off on the claims of "too cheap to meter".
Got any evidence of the nuclear industry EVER making that claim? I didn't think so.
No, not on me, but I definitely remember seeing a British Public Information Film from the 50s that did indeed make that proud boast.
Of course, whether that was a genuine opinion from within the nuclear industry, or just deliberate false propaganda to keep public opinion onside while they built their nuclear-bomb factory (Windscale, now known as Sellafield), I don't know.
Talking of Sellafield, I'm no hippy, and am not always comfortable with everything Greenpeace do, but nevertheless this makes rather worrying reading...read the note at the bottom.Also, it looks like the U.K. needs to build its own version of this site to deal with all our own waste.
But back to the original question. One quick Google later, if this rather dodgy looking webpage is correct, the phrase was used by the Chairman of the Atomic Energy Commission on 16th Sept 1954 in a speech to the National Association of Science Writers, although to be fair the nuclear industry was already retracting it within four years.
you would have to inhale a large amount of it for it to have any chance of staying in your lungs and doing any damage...each person would have a 1 in 30,000,000,000,000(maybe another set of zeros, not sure) chance that their particle of plutonium would cause cancer in them that they could eventually die from.
Oh well, in that case I'd better NOT ring up my Finnish friend who came down with thyroid cancer a few months after Chernobyl (and was told his symptoms were utterly consistent with having a particle of plutonium lodged in his throat) and ask him for any lottery numbers. He's obviously dreadfully unlucky. Although to be fair, he didn't die of it. Yet.
Yeah, that occurred to me too. Of course, according to urban-ish myth, loads of misfortune and stuff DID befall the people who excavated it and those who came in contact with them.
In fact didn't several of them fall ill with some unknown disease? Could that not have been what the Tut Curse was warning of?
True enough, but it ain't 768...
704 for analogue
720 for digital
864 (868? I forget) for total including blanking
and less than 720 for various safe areas...
No it doesn't - not exactly. I *believe* it rotates back and forth ever so slightly by a few degrees or less, so sometimes you can see a little way round more one side than the other, but not by very much. It's basically locked in place.
"Halls of the Things" was another clever one. First loaded a fiendishly clever custom loader that loaded the screenshot at the same time as the code (rather than the screenshot first, then the code). It took me longer to crack than any other Speccy game, and when you did, there was a message in ASCII giving some phone number and claiming to be that of a massage parlour.
There were actually amusing ASCII messages for the hacker scattered throughout the whole code. I'll never forget laughing my arse off as I scrolled through the hex with my trusty copy of Devpac, saw the trademark Spectrum ASCII key decoder table (the mapping from key layout to ASCII), thought "aha!", and then on the very next page of hex, being told, in ASCII, "Yes cunt, a keyboard table!" And so on...
Yup. On the original "PET 2001" series (the one with the yucky square keyboard and integral tape deck), it disabled the logic that prevented the CPU and display refresh logic accessing memory at the same time, thus allowing faster screen refresh at the expense of "snow" on the screen.
On the later "PET 3008/16/32" series (with decent keyboard and external tape deck) it collapsed the display to 4 lines and started some chips smoking (it put them in contention with each other). You could get away with it for a few seconds (I was another 15 year old kid with my finger on the off switch!) but no longer, apparently.
ATSC (the broken US DTV system) has a data rate is 19 Mb/s, using 8VSB modulation. DVB (used system nearly everywhere else) uses COFDM modulation..
Fine. I won't attempt to disagree with you as I'm not familiar with the finer points of US digital TV transmission. I'd heard somewhere that they were doing 30Mb/s, but I'm quite prepared to admit I'm wrong on this point. However if that's the case it bodes rather ill for the HD picture quality those folks will be getting.
...HD resolution is 1920 x 1080...full frame...is 2200 x 1125
First, digital HD is flexible and doesn't have a single precise dimension or frame rate...
You don't need to tell ME that!:-) I write software for high-definition broadcast video switchers ("vision mixers" in some English dialects)... I did point this out in my original message:
In one fairly common variant of the HD standard anyway, there are so many...<grin>
...as indeed there are. The SMPTE-260M, 274M, 292M & 296M standards and an RP or two define no less than 17 different HD standards, with frame rates varying from 23.98Hz to 60Hz, and active picture areas from 1440x720 to 1920x1080; and recently people are threatening even more... I could list their titles from memory (I sorted out the menu list for them in the damn switcher myself!), but it would be more fun to list them with all their intimate details, but to be honest I don't keep those in the house, sorry. Maybe tomorrow night...
There are acquisition dimensions, post processing dimensions, emission dimensions, and display dimensions...
Quite so, but as far as us switcher designers are concerned, there's the active picture area (how much we have to actually process) and the total frame area (how much data we have overall). And as we move from analogue to digital transmission, many of these apertures become the same. For the most common HDTV standard in use today (1080i) I gave the correct figures (although I simplified by saying the frame rate was 60Hz when in fact it's more usually 59.94Hz, resulting in a bit rate that's not *quite* 1.485Gb/s but is in fact (1.485/1.001)Gb/s)
And if watching a 24 fps movie 24 fps is a sensible frame rate, but if watching basketball 60 fps is much more appropriate...
I couldn't agree more, as do ABC, among others, who have adopted the *other* most popular HDTV standard, 720p/59.94. 60ish progressive frames per second much better for that sort of thing than interlacey crap.
Second, digital TV doesn't transmit analogue blanking areas as part of a raster, and it doesn't put audio in these non-existent blanked picture areas either.
What digital TV does or doesn't *transmit* I know not. However uncompressed HD video, as shipped around studios at 1.485Gb/s on coax, which is what I was talking about at that point, most certainly DOES transmit large amounts of blanking (ridiculously so in 50Hz standards) into which is placed various control data including embedded digital audio. Fact.
Third, though there are multiple ways to code color, for human consumption they all require 3 values, but your example suggests "chroma" is a single value.
Yup, I oversimplified. So sorry. This was because this was an answer to a comment about the amount of bandwidth needed to ship compressed HD video round a house, rather than a full dissertation on broadcast video techniques (I was worried that I'd overdone it as it was).
The full story? Well no, because I'm not a colorimetry expert and am not about to start quoting RGB->YCbCr (a.k.a. but not quite the same as YUV, YIQ, YPbPr) conversion equations. So let's aim somewhere in between...
Broadcast digital telly, as shipped around inside studios, be it standard definition (SDI = 270Mb/s) or high definition (HD-SDI = 1.485Gb/s) has half the horizontal color resolution than it does luma resolution. So SDTV has a horizontal resolution (active area) of 720 luma pixels, but only 360 chroma pixels (or more strictly speaking, samples). Likewise HDTV has - usually - either 1920 or 1440 luma pixels across but only 960 or 720 chroma pixels across. The samples are transmitted thusly: Cb Y Cr Y Cb Y Cr Y... where Y is a luma sample, Cb is a blue-related sample (B-Y) and Cr is a Red-related sample (R-Y). The Cb and Cr samples taken together specify the color for their two adjacent Y samples.
In my original piece it was quicker and easier just to say "* 2 samples (Luma & Chroma) per pixel" rather than go into all that, n'est-ce pas?
An important reason for having a luma and two color signals is to give luma more bits and spend fewer bits for color (which matches the human vision system).
Exactly. The above is what is known as 4:2:2 encoding (or strictly speaking, in HD, 22:11:11); however some camcorder-type and semi-pro formats take things further by reducing the number of chroma samples even more. Two common schemes are to have one pair of chroma samples horizontally for every four luma samples (4:1:1, which is really quite grotty) or to keep the ratio 2:1 horizontally but also make it 2:1 vertically (so each pair of chroma samples covers two pixels and two lines), known as 4:2:0.
In RGB one has to give all the colors the same number of bits.
True...more or less. Don't some palette systems allocate 16 bits to RGB as 5:6:5, on the grounds that Green has the most luma content? Not in broadcast, though...we only deal with RGB at the *very* sharp end of the camera and in the middle of chroma keyers...
I was a user, then a point on Fido in the UK from about 1991 to 1994 or so. I took a wide variety of echoes and archived the lot. I should still have them on the 500MB Conner in my old 486DX/33 in the corner (plus some were ZIPped onto floppy to save space). The early ones will be in.OLX (Offline Express) format, the later ones in PPoint database format (pre V2.00).
Being in the UK they're nearly all Region 25 echoes (most notably COMMON_ROOM and READING_ROOM), although there was the odd transatlantic one (e.g. WHO, moderated by Steve Quarrella if I remember correctly). Nevertheless, anyone interested? (I've been meaning to run up the old box and transfer that stuff over to this machine for ages.)
Hardly any of the ones listed under Google's fidonet are familar.
Macphee, the Mackie, Liz Currell, where are ye all now, to mention but a few?
Hi definition uncompressed video is more than 100Mb/sec - but 1Gb/sec over copper is on the horizon.
Actually, high-definition uncompressed video (HD-SDI, as used in broadcast facilities) is 1.485Gb/s*, but you're very unlikely to find that in the home (or indeed, on any equipment costing less than $x0,000 dollars). And yes, it does run over copper! I forget for how long, but it's at least 50 metres, maybe 100.
I believe the usual US standard bit-rate for transmitting compressed HD video over the airwaves is 30Mb/s. (Compare to SD (normal) TV where the figures are 270Mb/s and 6Mb/s, the ratio's about the same.)
So, you ain't gonna need much more than 30Mb/s in a domestic situation, even for HD video - unless you're going to be installing a full HD production suite,;-) and copper should handle it just fine.
* - 2200 pixels * 1125 lines * 2 samples (Luma & Chroma) per pixel * 10 bits per sample * 30 frames/second = 1.485e9. And before some smartarse points out that HD resolution is 1920 x 1080, that's only the active picture area. The full frame including blanking (which is used for things like embedded audio etc.) is 2200 x 1125. In one fairly common variant of the HD standard anyway, there are so many...<grin>
Sincere apologies to any of you who've seen this one before...
Choosing a Programming Language
Which language shall I use...?
The proliferation of modern programming languages that seem to have
stolen countless features from each other sometimes makes it difficult
to remember which language you're using.This guide is offered as a
public service to help programmers in such dilemmas.
C: You shoot yourself in the foot.
Assembler: You crash the OS and overwrite the root disk.The system
administrator arrives and shoots you in the foot.After a
moment of contemplation, the administrator shoots himself
in the foot and then hops around the room rabidly shooting
at everyone in sight.
APL: You hear a gunshot, and there's a hole in your foot, but
you don't remember enough linear algebra to understand
what the intervening processes were.
C++: You accidentally create a dozen instances of yourself and
shoot them all in the foot.Providing emergency medical
care is impossible since you can't tell which are bitwise
copies and which are just pointing at others and saying,
"That's me, over there."
Microsoft C++ with Windows SDK: You write about 100 lines of code to print "Hello, world!"
in a dialogue box, only to have a UAE pop up when you
click on OK.This shuts down the program manager, leaving
you nothing but a screensaver.You then fly to Seattle
and shoot Bill Gates in the foot.
Ada: If you are dumb enough to actually use this language, the
United States Department of Defense will kidnap you, stand
you up in front of a firing squad, and tell the soldiers,
"Shoot at his feet."
Modula-2:After realising that you can't actually accomplish
anything in the language, you shoot yourself in the head.
Pascal:Same as Modula-2, except the bullets are the wrong type
and won't pass through the barrel.The gun explodes.
sh,csh,etc.: You can't remember the syntax for anything, so you spend
five hours reading manual pages before giving up.You
then shoot the computer and switch to C.
Smalltalk: You spend so much time playing with the graphics and
windowing system that your boss shoots you in the foot,
takes away your workstation, and makes you develop in
COBOL on a character terminal.
FORTRAN: You shoot yourself in each toe, iteratively, until you run
out of toes, then you read in the next foot and repeat.
If you run out of bullets, you continue anyway because you
have no exception-processing ability.
ALGOL: You shoot yourself in the foot with a musket.The musket
is aesthetically fascinating, and the wound baffles the
adolescent medic in the emergency room.
COBOL: USEing a COLT45 HANDGUN, AIM gun at LEG.FOOT, THEN place
ARM.HAND.FINGER on HANDGUN.TRIGGER, and SQUEEZE.THEN
return HANDGUN to HOLSTER.Check whether shoelace needs
to be retied.
BASIC: Shoot self in foot with water pistol.On big systems,
continue until entire lower body is waterlogged.
SNOBOL:You grab your foot with your hand, then rewrite your hand
to be a bullet.The act of shooting the original foot
then changes your hand/bullet into yet another foot (a
left foot).
LISP:You shoot yourself in the appendage which holds the gun
with which you shoot yourself in the appendage which holds
the gun with which you shoot yourself in the appendage
which holds the gun with which you shoot yourself in the
appendage which holds...
SCHEME:You shoot yourself in the appendage which holds the gun
with which you shoot yourself in the appendage which holds
the gun with which you shoot yourself in the appendage
which holds the gun with which you shoot yourself in the
appendage which holds...but none of the other appendages
are aware of this happening.
FORTH: You push the words GUN and FOOT onto the stack, followed
by the word SHOOT.Almost instantly they are all replaced
by the word HOLE.Unfortunately you have no idea what
this word actually means.
Prolog:You tell your program you want to be shot in the foot. The
program figures out how to do it, but the syntax doesn't
allow it to explain.
Logo:You tell a turtle to draw a picture of a foot and a gun,
then shoot the turtle.
SQL: You select all instances of feet from the database, lock
them (to prevent anyone else trying to shoot any of them
at the same time), order them by size and handedness,
identify your own, shoot it, and then release the lock so
that others may shoot themselves in their own feet again.
Perl:!($foot =-/left/)
Java:You attempt to shoot yourself in the foot using a bullet
that will work in any gun in the world. But you discover
that the "Microsoft Gun" is actually a bow and arrow.
Visual Basic: You'll shoot yourself in the foot, but you'll have so much
fun doing it that you won't care.
Delphi:Drop a gun and a foot onto a new form.Set the gun's
target property to Foot1.Click on the OnTriggerPull
handler and enter "Bang;".Press F9 and a hole appears.
C++ Builder: As above except you need to enter "Bang();"
VHDL:You design a device to shoot you in the foot.You try to
simulate it but find that the bullet passes from the gun
to the floor in 0 seconds meaning that it didn't pass
through your foot at all.You think for a while and then
realise that the simulator doesn't understand about time
by default!You spend a while explaining time to the
simulator and eventually it simulates the bullet coming
out of the gun, crossing the space between the gun and
your foot, hitting your foot (exactly in the middle) and
passing out of the other side before stopping in the
floor.The bullet hole looks very realistic.You can
even wind the simulation backwards and forwards, checking
from every angle to see that it correctly shoots you in
the foot every time.You build the device and try it out.It shoots you in the hand!
English: You put your foot in your mouth, then bite it off.
Spot on, except that I thought it was Seagate who did the dirty deed first, and that Connor were forced to follow.
Someone mod this guy up.
As someone else in this thread has pointed out, you're now supposed to use "Kibibytes", "Mebibytes" & "Gibibytes" for the powers of 2 versions. Yecccch.
Actually, that isn't so bad.It's better than I ever got out of "her".Perhaps that says something about me. <g>
I particularly liked the answers to "wood chuck" and "resistance is futile", even if that is probably just a sign of a large database.I still can't believe how wobbly the parser seems - but then who am I to criticise, I've never written one...
My sentiments exactly.I'm just utterly amazed that there's nothing better out there been made in the 21 years since I painstakingly typed Eliza into a Commodore PET!
Ah...but who's to say that the combination of the room, the instructions, and the non-Chinese guy who interprets them doesn't create an artificial intelligence?After all, the instructions had to be created by an intelligent entity in the first place.
The trouble with The Chinese Room analogy - interesting although it is - is that it then leads into serious philosophical discussions as to what exactly defines intelligence.
To take a ficticious example: Data from Star Trek TNG.Imagine if he really existed.Is he artificially intelligent?Surely by any reasonable definition he must be...but surely he could also be implemented by an amazingly complex Chinese Room.Doesn't that lead one to suspect that - to paraphrase Clarke - any sufficiently advanced Chinese Room is indistinguishable from intelligence?
I don't think so in this case...I believe "noosphere" is a real term, quite possibly invented by Karl Popper.Also, the second "o" should have an umlaut over it.
Mind you, my source for most of this is a lengthy snippet of some highbrow radio programme that found its way onto the first Orb album, so I don't claim to be an expert. <g>
Meanwhile I'm inclined to agree with the other people here who say ALICE is pants.I played with her (oo-er!) a couple of months ago and was seriously disappointed that she seemed no cleverer than the ELIZA implementation I painstakingly typed into a Commodore PET 21 years ago, albeit "she" does seem to have a rather larger vocabulary.But the parser seems just as lame.
I really would have thought more progress would have been made since then...and am amazed to find "she"'s been judged the best going...
Ok - so someone's really decided there needs to be separate categories for "Atheist" and "None".
Yup!The people who replied to the census, I guess.
The categories simply reflect what people wrote in the Religion box.
Thus more than 10,000(*) people wrote "Atheist", more than 10,000 people wrote "Agnostic", more than 10,000 people wrote "Heathen" and so on.The only ambiguity is whether "None" only refers to the people who wrote "None" or whether it also includes those who left the question blank (as they were entitled to do).
The Register story has since been updated to reinforce this point:
The official line: the Census does not provide recognition to any religion in the official statistics nor does it attempt to define religion. The list that you can see by checking out the pdf file above is merely a list of possible answers that people have been known to put in the box marked religion...it's...simply to identify the number of people in the UK that have given a particular answer to a particular question.
It's presumably up to those who do the next stage of statistical analysis how they take this raw data and lump the categories together how they wish.
Mind you, the way the census has chosen to group the numbers is a different story...(Jedi, Heathen and Atheist together in the 890s, whereas Agnostic is 305, Humanist is 319, Secularist is 333, etc.) - I wonder why?
Slashdot Mirror
Finland is not part of Scandinavia. It may well be next to them geographically, but politically it isn't. Don't ask me why. ;-)
Since light itself would take around 3000 / 186282 = 16.1ms to cross the continent, ~70ms difference isn't THAT bad, considering.
Got any evidence of the nuclear industry EVER making that claim? I didn't think so.
No, not on me, but I definitely remember seeing a British Public Information Film from the 50s that did indeed make that proud boast.
Of course, whether that was a genuine opinion from within the nuclear industry, or just deliberate false propaganda to keep public opinion onside while they built their nuclear-bomb factory (Windscale, now known as Sellafield), I don't know.
Talking of Sellafield, I'm no hippy, and am not always comfortable with everything Greenpeace do, but nevertheless this makes rather worrying reading...read the note at the bottom.Also, it looks like the U.K. needs to build its own version of this site to deal with all our own waste.
But back to the original question. One quick Google later, if this rather dodgy looking webpage is correct, the phrase was used by the Chairman of the Atomic Energy Commission on 16th Sept 1954 in a speech to the National Association of Science Writers, although to be fair the nuclear industry was already retracting it within four years.
Does that answer your question?
Oh well, in that case I'd better NOT ring up my Finnish friend who came down with thyroid cancer a few months after Chernobyl (and was told his symptoms were utterly consistent with having a particle of plutonium lodged in his throat) and ask him for any lottery numbers. He's obviously dreadfully unlucky. Although to be fair, he didn't die of it. Yet.
Yeah, that occurred to me too. Of course, according to urban-ish myth, loads of misfortune and stuff DID befall the people who excavated it and those who came in contact with them.
In fact didn't several of them fall ill with some unknown disease? Could that not have been what the Tut Curse was warning of?
Did none of you guys spot that TWX's post was a joke based on a Space 1999 reference? (TV sci-fi show from the mid-70s)
Apparently not.
704 for analogue
720 for digital
864 (868? I forget) for total including blanking
and less than 720 for various safe areas...
but not, I think, 768...
But I could be wrong.
720 x 576.
There were actually amusing ASCII messages for the hacker scattered throughout the whole code. I'll never forget laughing my arse off as I scrolled through the hex with my trusty copy of Devpac, saw the trademark Spectrum ASCII key decoder table (the mapping from key layout to ASCII), thought "aha!", and then on the very next page of hex, being told, in ASCII, "Yes cunt, a keyboard table!" And so on...
On the later "PET 3008/16/32" series (with decent keyboard and external tape deck) it collapsed the display to 4 lines and started some chips smoking (it put them in contention with each other). You could get away with it for a few seconds (I was another 15 year old kid with my finger on the off switch!) but no longer, apparently.
Fine. I won't attempt to disagree with you as I'm not familiar with the finer points of US digital TV transmission. I'd heard somewhere that they were doing 30Mb/s, but I'm quite prepared to admit I'm wrong on this point. However if that's the case it bodes rather ill for the HD picture quality those folks will be getting.
First, digital HD is flexible and doesn't have a single precise dimension or frame rate...
You don't need to tell ME that! :-) I write software for high-definition broadcast video switchers ("vision mixers" in some English dialects)... I did point this out in my original message:
In one fairly common variant of the HD standard anyway, there are so many...<grin>
...as indeed there are. The SMPTE-260M, 274M, 292M & 296M standards and an RP or two define no less than 17 different HD standards, with frame rates varying from 23.98Hz to 60Hz, and active picture areas from 1440x720 to 1920x1080; and recently people are threatening even more... I could list their titles from memory (I sorted out the menu list for them in the damn switcher myself!), but it would be more fun to list them with all their intimate details, but to be honest I don't keep those in the house, sorry. Maybe tomorrow night...
There are acquisition dimensions, post processing dimensions, emission dimensions, and display dimensions...
Quite so, but as far as us switcher designers are concerned, there's the active picture area (how much we have to actually process) and the total frame area (how much data we have overall). And as we move from analogue to digital transmission, many of these apertures become the same. For the most common HDTV standard in use today (1080i) I gave the correct figures (although I simplified by saying the frame rate was 60Hz when in fact it's more usually 59.94Hz, resulting in a bit rate that's not *quite* 1.485Gb/s but is in fact (1.485/1.001)Gb/s)
And if watching a 24 fps movie 24 fps is a sensible frame rate, but if watching basketball 60 fps is much more appropriate...
I couldn't agree more, as do ABC, among others, who have adopted the *other* most popular HDTV standard, 720p/59.94. 60ish progressive frames per second much better for that sort of thing than interlacey crap.
Second, digital TV doesn't transmit analogue blanking areas as part of a raster, and it doesn't put audio in these non-existent blanked picture areas either.
What digital TV does or doesn't *transmit* I know not. However uncompressed HD video, as shipped around studios at 1.485Gb/s on coax, which is what I was talking about at that point, most certainly DOES transmit large amounts of blanking (ridiculously so in 50Hz standards) into which is placed various control data including embedded digital audio. Fact.
Third, though there are multiple ways to code color, for human consumption they all require 3 values, but your example suggests "chroma" is a single value.
Yup, I oversimplified. So sorry. This was because this was an answer to a comment about the amount of bandwidth needed to ship compressed HD video round a house, rather than a full dissertation on broadcast video techniques (I was worried that I'd overdone it as it was).
The full story? Well no, because I'm not a colorimetry expert and am not about to start quoting RGB->YCbCr (a.k.a. but not quite the same as YUV, YIQ, YPbPr) conversion equations. So let's aim somewhere in between...
Broadcast digital telly, as shipped around inside studios, be it standard definition (SDI = 270Mb/s) or high definition (HD-SDI = 1.485Gb/s) has half the horizontal color resolution than it does luma resolution. So SDTV has a horizontal resolution (active area) of 720 luma pixels, but only 360 chroma pixels (or more strictly speaking, samples). Likewise HDTV has - usually - either 1920 or 1440 luma pixels across but only 960 or 720 chroma pixels across. The samples are transmitted thusly:
Cb Y Cr Y Cb Y Cr Y...
where Y is a luma sample, Cb is a blue-related sample (B-Y) and Cr is a Red-related sample (R-Y). The Cb and Cr samples taken together specify the color for their two adjacent Y samples.
In my original piece it was quicker and easier just to say "* 2 samples (Luma & Chroma) per pixel" rather than go into all that, n'est-ce pas?
An important reason for having a luma and two color signals is to give luma more bits and spend fewer bits for color (which matches the human vision system).
Exactly. The above is what is known as 4:2:2 encoding (or strictly speaking, in HD, 22:11:11); however some camcorder-type and semi-pro formats take things further by reducing the number of chroma samples even more. Two common schemes are to have one pair of chroma samples horizontally for every four luma samples (4:1:1, which is really quite grotty) or to keep the ratio 2:1 horizontally but also make it 2:1 vertically (so each pair of chroma samples covers two pixels and two lines), known as 4:2:0.
In RGB one has to give all the colors the same number of bits.
True...more or less. Don't some palette systems allocate 16 bits to RGB as 5:6:5, on the grounds that Green has the most luma content? Not in broadcast, though...we only deal with RGB at the *very* sharp end of the camera and in the middle of chroma keyers...
Happy now? ;-)
Being in the UK they're nearly all Region 25 echoes (most notably COMMON_ROOM and READING_ROOM), although there was the odd transatlantic one (e.g. WHO, moderated by Steve Quarrella if I remember correctly). Nevertheless, anyone interested? (I've been meaning to run up the old box and transfer that stuff over to this machine for ages.)
Hardly any of the ones listed under Google's fidonet are familar.
Macphee, the Mackie, Liz Currell, where are ye all now, to mention but a few?
Hi definition uncompressed video is more than 100Mb/sec - but 1Gb/sec over copper is on the horizon.
Actually, high-definition uncompressed video (HD-SDI, as used in broadcast facilities) is 1.485Gb/s*, but you're very unlikely to find that in the home (or indeed, on any equipment costing less than $x0,000 dollars). And yes, it does run over copper! I forget for how long, but it's at least 50 metres, maybe 100.
I believe the usual US standard bit-rate for transmitting compressed HD video over the airwaves is 30Mb/s. (Compare to SD (normal) TV where the figures are 270Mb/s and 6Mb/s, the ratio's about the same.)
So, you ain't gonna need much more than 30Mb/s in a domestic situation, even for HD video - unless you're going to be installing a full HD production suite, ;-) and copper should handle it just fine.
* - 2200 pixels * 1125 lines * 2 samples (Luma & Chroma) per pixel * 10 bits per sample * 30 frames/second = 1.485e9. And before some smartarse points out that HD resolution is 1920 x 1080, that's only the active picture area. The full frame including blanking (which is used for things like embedded audio etc.) is 2200 x 1125. In one fairly common variant of the HD standard anyway, there are so many...<grin>
Choosing a Programming Language
Which language shall I use...?
The proliferation of modern programming languages that seem to have stolen countless features from each other sometimes makes it difficult to remember which language you're using.This guide is offered as a public service to help programmers in such dilemmas.
C: You shoot yourself in the foot.
Assembler: You crash the OS and overwrite the root disk.The system administrator arrives and shoots you in the foot.After a moment of contemplation, the administrator shoots himself in the foot and then hops around the room rabidly shooting at everyone in sight.
APL: You hear a gunshot, and there's a hole in your foot, but you don't remember enough linear algebra to understand what the intervening processes were.
C++: You accidentally create a dozen instances of yourself and shoot them all in the foot.Providing emergency medical care is impossible since you can't tell which are bitwise copies and which are just pointing at others and saying, "That's me, over there."
Microsoft C++ with Windows SDK: You write about 100 lines of code to print "Hello, world!" in a dialogue box, only to have a UAE pop up when you click on OK.This shuts down the program manager, leaving you nothing but a screensaver.You then fly to Seattle and shoot Bill Gates in the foot.
Ada: If you are dumb enough to actually use this language, the United States Department of Defense will kidnap you, stand you up in front of a firing squad, and tell the soldiers, "Shoot at his feet."
Modula-2: After realising that you can't actually accomplish anything in the language, you shoot yourself in the head.
Pascal: Same as Modula-2, except the bullets are the wrong type and won't pass through the barrel.The gun explodes.
sh,csh,etc.: You can't remember the syntax for anything, so you spend five hours reading manual pages before giving up.You then shoot the computer and switch to C.
Smalltalk: You spend so much time playing with the graphics and windowing system that your boss shoots you in the foot, takes away your workstation, and makes you develop in COBOL on a character terminal.
FORTRAN: You shoot yourself in each toe, iteratively, until you run out of toes, then you read in the next foot and repeat. If you run out of bullets, you continue anyway because you have no exception-processing ability.
ALGOL: You shoot yourself in the foot with a musket.The musket is aesthetically fascinating, and the wound baffles the adolescent medic in the emergency room.
COBOL: USEing a COLT45 HANDGUN, AIM gun at LEG.FOOT, THEN place ARM.HAND.FINGER on HANDGUN.TRIGGER, and SQUEEZE.THEN return HANDGUN to HOLSTER.Check whether shoelace needs to be retied.
BASIC: Shoot self in foot with water pistol.On big systems, continue until entire lower body is waterlogged.
SNOBOL: You grab your foot with your hand, then rewrite your hand to be a bullet.The act of shooting the original foot then changes your hand/bullet into yet another foot (a left foot).
LISP: You shoot yourself in the appendage which holds the gun with which you shoot yourself in the appendage which holds the gun with which you shoot yourself in the appendage which holds the gun with which you shoot yourself in the appendage which holds...
SCHEME: You shoot yourself in the appendage which holds the gun with which you shoot yourself in the appendage which holds the gun with which you shoot yourself in the appendage which holds the gun with which you shoot yourself in the appendage which holds...but none of the other appendages are aware of this happening.
FORTH: You push the words GUN and FOOT onto the stack, followed by the word SHOOT.Almost instantly they are all replaced by the word HOLE.Unfortunately you have no idea what this word actually means.
Prolog: You tell your program you want to be shot in the foot. The program figures out how to do it, but the syntax doesn't allow it to explain.
Logo: You tell a turtle to draw a picture of a foot and a gun, then shoot the turtle.
SQL: You select all instances of feet from the database, lock them (to prevent anyone else trying to shoot any of them at the same time), order them by size and handedness, identify your own, shoot it, and then release the lock so that others may shoot themselves in their own feet again.
Perl: !($foot =-/left/)
Java: You attempt to shoot yourself in the foot using a bullet that will work in any gun in the world. But you discover that the "Microsoft Gun" is actually a bow and arrow.
Visual Basic: You'll shoot yourself in the foot, but you'll have so much fun doing it that you won't care.
Delphi: Drop a gun and a foot onto a new form.Set the gun's target property to Foot1.Click on the OnTriggerPull handler and enter "Bang;".Press F9 and a hole appears.
C++ Builder: As above except you need to enter "Bang();"
VHDL: You design a device to shoot you in the foot.You try to simulate it but find that the bullet passes from the gun to the floor in 0 seconds meaning that it didn't pass through your foot at all.You think for a while and then realise that the simulator doesn't understand about time by default!You spend a while explaining time to the simulator and eventually it simulates the bullet coming out of the gun, crossing the space between the gun and your foot, hitting your foot (exactly in the middle) and passing out of the other side before stopping in the floor.The bullet hole looks very realistic.You can even wind the simulation backwards and forwards, checking from every angle to see that it correctly shoots you in the foot every time.You build the device and try it out.It shoots you in the hand!
English: You put your foot in your mouth, then bite it off.
...this thread has the most comments I've ever seen apart from the WTC threads.It's obviously struck a chord...are we ALL so disaffected?
Who is General Failure and why is he reading my Drive A: ?
Someone mod this guy up.
As someone else in this thread has pointed out, you're now supposed to use "Kibibytes", "Mebibytes" & "Gibibytes" for the powers of 2 versions. Yecccch.
Was that a Mix or a Wipe?Supermix?Or perhaps even a DVE move?
Actually, that isn't so bad.It's better than I ever got out of "her".Perhaps that says something about me. <g>
I particularly liked the answers to "wood chuck" and "resistance is futile", even if that is probably just a sign of a large database.I still can't believe how wobbly the parser seems - but then who am I to criticise, I've never written one...
My sentiments exactly.I'm just utterly amazed that there's nothing better out there been made in the 21 years since I painstakingly typed Eliza into a Commodore PET!
Ah...but who's to say that the combination of the room, the instructions, and the non-Chinese guy who interprets them doesn't create an artificial intelligence?After all, the instructions had to be created by an intelligent entity in the first place.
The trouble with The Chinese Room analogy - interesting although it is - is that it then leads into serious philosophical discussions as to what exactly defines intelligence.
To take a ficticious example: Data from Star Trek TNG.Imagine if he really existed.Is he artificially intelligent?Surely by any reasonable definition he must be...but surely he could also be implemented by an amazingly complex Chinese Room.Doesn't that lead one to suspect that - to paraphrase Clarke - any sufficiently advanced Chinese Room is indistinguishable from intelligence?
Mind you, my source for most of this is a lengthy snippet of some highbrow radio programme that found its way onto the first Orb album, so I don't claim to be an expert. <g>
Meanwhile I'm inclined to agree with the other people here who say ALICE is pants.I played with her (oo-er!) a couple of months ago and was seriously disappointed that she seemed no cleverer than the ELIZA implementation I painstakingly typed into a Commodore PET 21 years ago, albeit "she" does seem to have a rather larger vocabulary.But the parser seems just as lame.
I really would have thought more progress would have been made since then...and am amazed to find "she"'s been judged the best going...
Anyone remember Miniscribes? Now they WERE pants.Did anybody buy them out or did they just go bust on their own?
Yup!The people who replied to the census, I guess.
The categories simply reflect what people wrote in the Religion box.
Thus more than 10,000(*) people wrote "Atheist", more than 10,000 people wrote "Agnostic", more than 10,000 people wrote "Heathen" and so on.The only ambiguity is whether "None" only refers to the people who wrote "None" or whether it also includes those who left the question blank (as they were entitled to do).
The Register story has since been updated to reinforce this point:
The official line: the Census does not provide recognition to any religion in the official statistics nor does it attempt to define religion. The list that you can see by checking out the pdf file above is merely a list of possible answers that people have been known to put in the box marked religion...it's...simply to identify the number of people in the UK that have given a particular answer to a particular question.
It's presumably up to those who do the next stage of statistical analysis how they take this raw data and lump the categories together how they wish.
Mind you, the way the census has chosen to group the numbers is a different story...(Jedi, Heathen and Atheist together in the 890s, whereas Agnostic is 305, Humanist is 319, Secularist is 333, etc.) - I wonder why?
(*) - 10,000 seems to be the minimum number of replies necessary to gain a separate category; see the original Register story from back in April at http://www.theregister.co.uk/content/archive/18203 .html