If you want the fonts, use scans. You can't preserve the fonts in any sane transcription medium, and nobody tries.
TOC
Historically, PG doesn't lose the table of contents. It's usually pretty trivial to reconstruct, even if lost, and most PG to HTML converters do so automatically.
If texts really had been formatted in WordPerfect or RTF, a converter could easily be written (have been for years, actually) to convert the texts to any other format.
And each time you did that, it would get uglier and hairer, and quite likely lose some of the detail that you worked on encoding into the RTF. You can't really go from one of those formats to HTML and get a sane output.
It is however a great way to research the classics for info and reports.
That's quite a failure on some levels, if that's all we're doing. One of my personal favorite authors in PG, J. S. Fletcher, is never going to be considered part of the "classics". But he's a nice read for mystery lovers who like Victorian London.
I still like to hunt around old bookshops, and often I can find those works for a buck or two.
Which books? Some of our books can not be found that cheap and many of the ones which can, might take a lot of searching. We're not just the big name classics; we handle a lot of non-fiction and obscure fiction, too.
If gutenberg is serious about making their work more accessible, they should think about the simple concern of ensuring consistency in the header text format.
It's part of the big plan to convert everything over to XML. But this really isn't a big concern of Gutenberg, as most people don't use the entire archive as a corpus, and removing the headers and footers from even a couple dozen texts is no big deal.
But look at the scientists who develop weapons, landmines, chemical warfare agents, do you not believe that they could show a little more compassion in their daily lives.
And look at the soliders who lay them, the politicians who order them, the people who elect and support the politicians who do so. And think about who much more compassionate they would have been if they hadn't invented any weapons and they let dictators conqueror the world.
If you think that most religions in the world are out to hurt people,
First place, religions aren't out to do anything; the people who believe in them are. And I get the impression that religions have their fair share of the people who are out to hurt people. In any case, the road to hell is paved with good intentions; the preacher who encourages parents to deny their children proper medical care for religious reasons are probably more sure of their moral correctness than those scientists you so disapprove of.
Pretty much every programming language runs on the as-if rule. The C code "a = b + c;" doesn't necessarily perform an addition and store; in theory, it could create a new closure a that includes references to the static values of b and c at that time and an addition operator, like might be done on a machine designed around lazy-evaluation functional programming.
Even on a normal architecture with GCC, GCC could possibly change that to "a = b;" (if it knew c was 0), or delete it all together (if it was unused, or only used in an if statement that could be proved to be constant), or hoisted outside a loop.
It's quite possible the gc won't run if it just run, or is currently running, or is below a certain memory usage.
"the U.S. Department of Energy has decided that recent results justify a fresh look at cold fusion."
That is, the DoE is going to spend my money to study this. If he were selling me something, I could refuse; but he's taking my money indirectly. I have plenty of right to complain loudly.
RMS is NOT divine. He's just a guy. His opinion is no more relevant than anyone else's.
But it is. Because he's been around, and he's been doing this for so much longer, and has well-thought out reasons for his actions. You may disagree with his opinions, but they should be taken into account.
Can you honestly say that you don't value any one's opinion? Are the only opinions you listen to are your own?
I don't like using binary-only NVidia drivers any more than the rest of you. But I like it a hell of a lot better than using X in 640x480 stdVGA mode on my shiny new $150 video card. Get the idea?
So? I'm sure some people find POV-Ray an important program to keep around, but they don't whine when Debian puts it in non-free. If you want to use programs in non-free, that's your problem.
An over the shoulder glance of those using it (as well as a proxy log) showed an abundance of porn and webmail usage - somewhere in the region of 75% - and very little usage for actual research purposes.
Have you taken out the fiction section, too? Webmail is often a research tool; there's no better way, and sometimes no other way to follow important mailing list like the Unicode/Unicore list and the Linux Kernel list, than webmail. At worst, it's a way people communicate across the world and across families.
That problem was that most DM's never developed to the point where the rules are left behind.
DM's who want to be storytellers can be storytellers. DM's who want to run a big Mortal Kombat game can run a big Mortal Kombat game. Why is one better than the other?
If digital cameras are to replace film cameras then the lossy JPG format will have to go!
Digital cameras are about as likely to replace film cameras as automobiles are to replace horses. But for a lot of us, digital cameras already have replaced film cameras. The concerns of professionals rarely have much to do with that of the average user.
You have no idea what you're talking about. No compression on your digital camera? Do you really want your 5-megapixel camera to use 15 MBs a picture? I've got a lot of photographs that are just fine as JPEGs. Why do I want to turn a 200K JPG into a 1.8M PNG, especially on expensive camera storage media?
Yes, JPEG isn't the compression format to end all formats. But it won its position because it offered a great compression rate compared to lossless compression formats. Don't turn the compression up too high, and you'll rarely be bothered by the lossy nature, especially not on photographs.
everyone deserves fair slice of the cake for what they have created, even if it is small.
Only in a communist system. In a capitalist system, you only get cake if you get people to pay for what you created.
If the guy produced a lame product, or used lame marketing: then at least he knows that he failed because of what he did, not because someone avoided paying, but enjoyed the pleasure of playing.
Then what excuse would the programmers and marketers have? The numbers on piracy are certainly up in the air, but they don't seem to change the relative success of games. If it doesn't sell, it sucks, and if it does sell, it's good, and the pirates are irrelevant.
Do people really pirate the lame-ass games? The pirated games I've seen have been the ones that are selling like hotcakes at the store and people actually want to play them.
GPS's accuracy can be degraded at any time on the US Military's whim.
And this system can be shut down at any time on any local judge's injunction. Which is a lot more likely than the US Military degrading something large parts of the US has come to depend on.
IF there were a Civilian GPS, then this would/almost/ always be a solution.
So you believe they'll turn off the military GPS on a whim, but will have absolutely no plan to deal with civilian GPS?
What if there's some other feature about the region blocking satelite traffic, but not wireless traffic
How high probability is that? What about the converse, when the region gets satelite traffic, but your cell phone doesn't get a signal (say you're in some country where you don't speak the language and it's not covered by your cellphone company?)
Opensource it and you will have serious issues with version control and compatibility.
C, C++, Lisp, Fortran and dozens of other languages have serious issues with version control and compatibility. None of them had open sourced reference implemenations, and part of their problem is people implementing them and reimplementing them. Java is starting to have that problem; there are a half-dozen different Java interpreters/compilers in Debian, and all of them have different bugs.
Perl, Python and Ruby are all languages that have had open sourced implementations. For the most part, there has been only one seriously used implementation, with only compatibility problems between versions (which is inevitable.)
I once saw a psychology experiment written in Pascal (why? I don't know!)
Because the author of the program knew Pascal. And because it wasn't a program that needed to be maintained, or have speed or memory requirements, or diddle with hardware, it just needed to be written, so she used the hammer she had, instead of worrying about whether the problem was more screwlike.
If the body in question exerts a measurable gravitational force on another planet, then it's a planet.
What wasn't measurable a hundred years ago is measurable today, and what's not measurable today will be measurable in a hundred years. Plant some reflectors on Mars like we have on the Moon and launch an orbital laser/telescope, and we'll be able to watch every tiny wobble in Mars' orbit.
On the flip side, unless you're counting the Moon, I wouldn't be surprised if the Earth's gravity is hard to measure on other planets.
Thirdly, gravity is just a function of mass and distance. If we had an easy bright-line test based on mass and distance, we'd all agree on what a planet is by now.
I guess all those numbers in Drake's equation just skyrocketed...
The number of planets per system would skyrocket, but probability that a planet is in the life-zone or harbors life would drop to counterbalance that.
When looking at the vast differences in other planets, is there yet a significant scientific reason to classify Pluto as something different.
It's the smallest of the planets, it's the farthest away, it's in a collection of other objects of similar size that aren't considered planets, and it's got an elliptical orbit.
Really, it's like an artist trying to make a painting, and going out and buying a self-cleaning, featherweight, self-balancing $1K paintbrush. That's way beyond the point, isn't it?
No, but a painter isn't going to use the same paint brushes that come with your Intro to Painting class, and may have a $1K brush if it's made of just the right material to paint like the painter wants.
Language features don't make programmers write better programs; discipline does.
If you're talking about memory leakage, then language features do make programs less leaky. Language features can turn root holes from buffer overflows into denial of service attacks, and can often discourage writing the code that produces buffer overflows. Lisp programers don't tend to have buffer overflows, because the language makes it simple to just add it on to a list. C programers do, because the language encourages the use of fixed-width arrays and discourages lists (by not including them in the base language, and making it hard not to leak memory.)
Java and C++ don't count as different languages
Then you aren't using them right. There's a lot of superfical similarity, but also a lot of difference at the cores.
Instead of perfecting systems within the confines of a limited amount of resources,
If you're working with a system that is fast enough and has enough memory to handle every problem you through at, you write code like
for I in Board_Rows'Range do
Row (I):= foo; end loop;
for I in Board_Column'Range do
Column (I):= bar; end loop;
But if you need that extra ten percent, you write
for I in 1.. 8 do
Row (I):= foo;
Column (I):= bar; end loop;
It becomes more complex to simply reason about it; the first one covers every possible row and column, obviously. The second may or may not. It certainly isn't better code, though it may run faster.
Likewise the theoretical possibility of cases where someone makes a true, provable, accusation, and loses a libel case (with the court agreeing that the allegation is true) is a possibility.
In Britain, but not in the US. A famous early case in US history has a man charged with libel, and as the British judge reminds the jury that just because it's true doesn't mean it's not libelous, the American lawyer tells the jury that if it's true, you must acquit. The jury acquited. I don't know of any jurisidiction in the US that will makes true statements ever libelous.
What do you think the American press and government would call it, if someone did the same thing to us?
I don't think the CIA would admit that they had stolen the software, so the press would call it a horrible accident and blame the US companies involved; some American officials would blame the Soviet, just like they would if the USSR offered some country food to stop a famine, and others would realize that the KGB pulled one over us and be embarressed and look to fix our problems that caused it.
Don't you ever listen to Shrub? It's only a terrorist act when someone else does it. The government's allowed to do anything it wants to protect the security of the American people, and little things like the constitution and international law should not be allowed to get in the way.
What does this have to do with Shrub? The government has to protect the security of the American people, and such direct, discreet tit-for-tat action against a nation that was in a state of Cold War against us is one of the easiest, cleanest, and most justifiable actions. Every President from Wilson to Bush Sr took action against the Soviet Union, and this was mild compared to many of those actions.
As for international law, it is frequently unrealistic and usually discreetly ignored whenever necessary by any nation. You don't have to be a Shrub-lover to see that dismantling the CIA and ceasing any under-the-table action is leaving us open to sabotage by nations willing to commit those actions, including just about every nation in the world.
Slashdot Mirror
loss of fonts
If you want the fonts, use scans. You can't preserve the fonts in any sane transcription medium, and nobody tries.
TOC
Historically, PG doesn't lose the table of contents. It's usually pretty trivial to reconstruct, even if lost, and most PG to HTML converters do so automatically.
If texts really had been formatted in WordPerfect or RTF, a converter could easily be written (have been for years, actually) to convert the texts to any other format.
And each time you did that, it would get uglier and hairer, and quite likely lose some of the detail that you worked on encoding into the RTF. You can't really go from one of those formats to HTML and get a sane output.
It is however a great way to research the classics for info and reports.
That's quite a failure on some levels, if that's all we're doing. One of my personal favorite authors in PG, J. S. Fletcher, is never going to be considered part of the "classics". But he's a nice read for mystery lovers who like Victorian London.
I still like to hunt around old bookshops, and often I can find those works for a buck or two.
Which books? Some of our books can not be found that cheap and many of the ones which can, might take a lot of searching. We're not just the big name classics; we handle a lot of non-fiction and obscure fiction, too.
If gutenberg is serious about making their work more accessible, they should think about the simple concern of ensuring consistency in the header text format.
It's part of the big plan to convert everything over to XML. But this really isn't a big concern of Gutenberg, as most people don't use the entire archive as a corpus, and removing the headers and footers from even a couple dozen texts is no big deal.
But look at the scientists who develop weapons, landmines, chemical warfare agents, do you not believe that they could show a little more compassion in their daily lives.
And look at the soliders who lay them, the politicians who order them, the people who elect and support the politicians who do so. And think about who much more compassionate they would have been if they hadn't invented any weapons and they let dictators conqueror the world.
If you think that most religions in the world are out to hurt people,
First place, religions aren't out to do anything; the people who believe in them are. And I get the impression that religions have their fair share of the people who are out to hurt people. In any case, the road to hell is paved with good intentions; the preacher who encourages parents to deny their children proper medical care for religious reasons are probably more sure of their moral correctness than those scientists you so disapprove of.
Note the "suggests". No guarantees...
Pretty much every programming language runs on the as-if rule. The C code "a = b + c;" doesn't necessarily perform an addition and store; in theory, it could create a new closure a that includes references to the static values of b and c at that time and an addition operator, like might be done on a machine designed around lazy-evaluation functional programming.
Even on a normal architecture with GCC, GCC could possibly change that to "a = b;" (if it knew c was 0), or delete it all together (if it was unused, or only used in an if statement that could be proved to be constant), or hoisted outside a loop.
It's quite possible the gc won't run if it just run, or is currently running, or is below a certain memory usage.
This guy is not selling you anything.
"the U.S. Department of Energy has decided that recent results justify a fresh look at cold fusion."
That is, the DoE is going to spend my money to study this. If he were selling me something, I could refuse; but he's taking my money indirectly. I have plenty of right to complain loudly.
RMS is NOT divine. He's just a guy. His opinion is no more relevant than anyone else's.
But it is. Because he's been around, and he's been doing this for so much longer, and has well-thought out reasons for his actions. You may disagree with his opinions, but they should be taken into account.
Can you honestly say that you don't value any one's opinion? Are the only opinions you listen to are your own?
I don't like using binary-only NVidia drivers any more than the rest of you. But I like it a hell of a lot better than using X in 640x480 stdVGA mode on my shiny new $150 video card. Get the idea?
So? I'm sure some people find POV-Ray an important program to keep around, but they don't whine when Debian puts it in non-free. If you want to use programs in non-free, that's your problem.
What?!? Bubble sort is O(n^2), but sorting algorithms can be O(n log n), like quicksort.
An over the shoulder glance of those using it (as well as a proxy log) showed an abundance of porn and webmail usage - somewhere in the region of 75% - and very little usage for actual research purposes.
Have you taken out the fiction section, too? Webmail is often a research tool; there's no better way, and sometimes no other way to follow important mailing list like the Unicode/Unicore list and the Linux Kernel list, than webmail. At worst, it's a way people communicate across the world and across families.
That problem was that most DM's never developed to the point where the rules are left behind.
DM's who want to be storytellers can be storytellers. DM's who want to run a big Mortal Kombat game can run a big Mortal Kombat game. Why is one better than the other?
If digital cameras are to replace film cameras then the lossy JPG format will have to go!
Digital cameras are about as likely to replace film cameras as automobiles are to replace horses. But for a lot of us, digital cameras already have replaced film cameras. The concerns of professionals rarely have much to do with that of the average user.
You have no idea what you're talking about. No compression on your digital camera? Do you really want your 5-megapixel camera to use 15 MBs a picture? I've got a lot of photographs that are just fine as JPEGs. Why do I want to turn a 200K JPG into a 1.8M PNG, especially on expensive camera storage media?
Yes, JPEG isn't the compression format to end all formats. But it won its position because it offered a great compression rate compared to lossless compression formats. Don't turn the compression up too high, and you'll rarely be bothered by the lossy nature, especially not on photographs.
everyone deserves fair slice of the cake for what they have created, even if it is small.
.
Only in a communist system. In a capitalist system, you only get cake if you get people to pay for what you created.
If the guy produced a lame product, or used lame marketing: then at least he knows that he failed because of what he did, not because someone avoided paying, but enjoyed the pleasure of playing
Then what excuse would the programmers and marketers have? The numbers on piracy are certainly up in the air, but they don't seem to change the relative success of games. If it doesn't sell, it sucks, and if it does sell, it's good, and the pirates are irrelevant.
Do people really pirate the lame-ass games? The pirated games I've seen have been the ones that are selling like hotcakes at the store and people actually want to play them.
GPS's accuracy can be degraded at any time on the US Military's whim.
/almost/ always be a solution.
And this system can be shut down at any time on any local judge's injunction. Which is a lot more likely than the US Military degrading something large parts of the US has come to depend on.
IF there were a Civilian GPS, then this would
So you believe they'll turn off the military GPS on a whim, but will have absolutely no plan to deal with civilian GPS?
What if there's some other feature about the region blocking satelite traffic, but not wireless traffic
How high probability is that? What about the converse, when the region gets satelite traffic, but your cell phone doesn't get a signal (say you're in some country where you don't speak the language and it's not covered by your cellphone company?)
Opensource it and you will have serious issues with version control and compatibility.
C, C++, Lisp, Fortran and dozens of other languages have serious issues with version control and compatibility. None of them had open sourced reference implemenations, and part of their problem is people implementing them and reimplementing them. Java is starting to have that problem; there are a half-dozen different Java interpreters/compilers in Debian, and all of them have different bugs.
Perl, Python and Ruby are all languages that have had open sourced implementations. For the most part, there has been only one seriously used implementation, with only compatibility problems between versions (which is inevitable.)
Seems like the evidence disagrees with you.
I once saw a psychology experiment written in Pascal (why? I don't know!)
Because the author of the program knew Pascal. And because it wasn't a program that needed to be maintained, or have speed or memory requirements, or diddle with hardware, it just needed to be written, so she used the hammer she had, instead of worrying about whether the problem was more screwlike.
If that last "do" were changed to loop, it would be valid Ada.
If the body in question exerts a measurable gravitational force on another planet, then it's a planet.
What wasn't measurable a hundred years ago is measurable today, and what's not measurable today will be measurable in a hundred years. Plant some reflectors on Mars like we have on the Moon and launch an orbital laser/telescope, and we'll be able to watch every tiny wobble in Mars' orbit.
On the flip side, unless you're counting the Moon, I wouldn't be surprised if the Earth's gravity is hard to measure on other planets.
Thirdly, gravity is just a function of mass and distance. If we had an easy bright-line test based on mass and distance, we'd all agree on what a planet is by now.
I guess all those numbers in Drake's equation just skyrocketed...
The number of planets per system would skyrocket, but probability that a planet is in the life-zone or harbors life would drop to counterbalance that.
When looking at the vast differences in other planets, is there yet a significant scientific reason to classify Pluto as something different.
It's the smallest of the planets, it's the farthest away, it's in a collection of other objects of similar size that aren't considered planets, and it's got an elliptical orbit.
Really, it's like an artist trying to make a painting, and going out and buying a self-cleaning, featherweight, self-balancing $1K paintbrush. That's way beyond the point, isn't it?
No, but a painter isn't going to use the same paint brushes that come with your Intro to Painting class, and may have a $1K brush if it's made of just the right material to paint like the painter wants.
Language features don't make programmers write better programs; discipline does.
If you're talking about memory leakage, then language features do make programs less leaky. Language features can turn root holes from buffer overflows into denial of service attacks, and can often discourage writing the code that produces buffer overflows. Lisp programers don't tend to have buffer overflows, because the language makes it simple to just add it on to a list. C programers do, because the language encourages the use of fixed-width arrays and discourages lists (by not including them in the base language, and making it hard not to leak memory.)
Java and C++ don't count as different languages
Then you aren't using them right. There's a lot of superfical similarity, but also a lot of difference at the cores.
Instead of perfecting systems within the confines of a limited amount of resources,
:= foo;
:= bar;
.. 8 do := foo; := bar;
If you're working with a system that is fast enough and has enough memory to handle every problem you through at, you write code like
for I in Board_Rows'Range do
Row (I)
end loop;
for I in Board_Column'Range do
Column (I)
end loop;
But if you need that extra ten percent, you write
for I in 1
Row (I)
Column (I)
end loop;
It becomes more complex to simply reason about it; the first one covers every possible row and column, obviously. The second may or may not. It certainly isn't better code, though it may run faster.
Likewise the theoretical possibility of cases where someone makes a true, provable, accusation, and loses a libel case (with the court agreeing that the allegation is true) is a possibility.
In Britain, but not in the US. A famous early case in US history has a man charged with libel, and as the British judge reminds the jury that just because it's true doesn't mean it's not libelous, the American lawyer tells the jury that if it's true, you must acquit. The jury acquited. I don't know of any jurisidiction in the US that will makes true statements ever libelous.
What do you think the American press and government would call it, if someone did the same thing to us?
I don't think the CIA would admit that they had stolen the software, so the press would call it a horrible accident and blame the US companies involved; some American officials would blame the Soviet, just like they would if the USSR offered some country food to stop a famine, and others would realize that the KGB pulled one over us and be embarressed and look to fix our problems that caused it.
Don't you ever listen to Shrub? It's only a terrorist act when someone else does it. The government's allowed to do anything it wants to protect the security of the American people, and little things like the constitution and international law should not be allowed to get in the way.
What does this have to do with Shrub? The government has to protect the security of the American people, and such direct, discreet tit-for-tat action against a nation that was in a state of Cold War against us is one of the easiest, cleanest, and most justifiable actions. Every President from Wilson to Bush Sr took action against the Soviet Union, and this was mild compared to many of those actions.
As for international law, it is frequently unrealistic and usually discreetly ignored whenever necessary by any nation. You don't have to be a Shrub-lover to see that dismantling the CIA and ceasing any under-the-table action is leaving us open to sabotage by nations willing to commit those actions, including just about every nation in the world.