I don't know why you're so strung up. I'm not criticising Linux, or even Gentoo which is my distro of choice for most tasks. I was merely answering the original poster by stating that in some cases having software phone home, even for as good a reason as an install or an update, can be highly undesirable.
And when you are on the cold field, no matter how well you plan, shit happens regularly. It's Murphy's law incarnate.
QNX has some of the best real-time features of any OS and its message passing architecture is reliable and pretty simple to use. The main problem so far was its price, lack of source and overall lack of applications. This will likely change quickly if it is open-sourced. I can see it become a serious contender to the various complex and poorly documented patches to turn Linux into a real-time system. Excellent news indeed.
Get off your high horses. There are some distros that are basically unusable after a CD install and that require a lenghty internet connection to get everything patched up and running. If you need to do a reinstall of Gentoo on the field, you are basically screwed. Similar with a personal copy of XP, the minute of satellite phone connection was 7$ so the first words of any support call were a screamed "Don't put me on hold I'm calling from Antarctica!".
I worked with equipment that was 3000+km and 10 months away from the closest internet connection, so anything that requires a net-activated key is an absolute no-no. We are still using Win2K for that purpose, and more Linux all the time (although you have to select a distro that won't try to download itself all over again once a week).
You don't need to go this far: I spent the last 3 weeks on the road with my laptop: Matlab ceased to function as soon as the license key manager got out of touch of the license server. I hate that macromedia shit.
IF your machine is NOT an HP or Compaq, you can remove the drive...
I had a brand new HP fail to boot 2 weeks after purchase. Since I already had Gentoo on it, I removed the hard drive and sent it back with the magic words: "I work for the government and I am not allowed to give access to the content of the drive to anyone". Which is a white lie that worked.
...Meade DSI color camera... Then you are better than me as I've never been able to get anything out of that thing. But then I tried to use it in what were not the easiest settings to say the least. And you are right about the patience bit, it's just easier to just read the magazines or hop to the APOD.
Secondly, you're going to want a high quality right-ascension drive motor. It's possible to get by without one, though tedious and limiting, but don't bother with a cheap one. The gearing is insufficient for astrophotography and will cause jerking and backlash resulting in awful pictures. I'm not sure if this really applies anymore. Nowadays with a digital SLR attached you can take short exposures (just a few minutes) where the defects in alignment and stability won't show, and then stack the images in software. As an introduction to astrophoto it beats blowing thousands on an arch-stable mount.
Douglas Hofstadter's Godel, Escher and Bach is a must-read for both its english language surprises and its science eye-opening. It's a big books but you can select some parts for class reading. The 'group intelligence of ants' chapter introduction comes to mind. Many intros read like Lewis Carol, and I'm pretty sure it was written with that intent. Note: english is not my prime language, but this is the 3rd english book I've read when I was 15 (after Orwell's Animal Farm as a warmup and Tolkien's trilogy which is the whole point why I learnt english in the first place)...
Re:Full-time Erlang programmer gives his view :]
on
Programming Erlang
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· Score: 1
I tried Erlang last year, trying to preemptively find a possible 'multi-core aware' language for the future. I'm not used to VM languages so my first question was 'how do I make a self contained executable with that thing?'. I failed to find a way. Then I tried to understand the difference between the language threads and the OS threads and it appears the former are contained in the VM, so any optimisation is then linked in how well the VM fits into the OS, i.e. not well at all. Then final straw, the development environment was abysmal (think VT100 terminal mode). When we start seeing plugins for KDevelop, Eclipse or (Gates forbid) Visual Studio, with nativev threads, then we'll talk.
That's why these paper "books" will never catch on. No backlighting! And it's exactly what I've been waiting for forever. I'm sick of having a light shining in my face all the time, be it a screen or a cop with an interogation lamp !!! I want a passive screen with the same quality of reflexion as a book or magazine. Much more confortable for the eyes. Why exactly do you want backlighting ?!?
Interesting. I'm doing my own little 'experiment' in a similar vein. I have a cell phone contract in a country I no longer live in (I keep the phone as an emergency or when going to said country which is about one week a year). I've had it for 12 years and this type of contract has long disapeared, replaced by better and cheaper offers. At the begining I was wondering when they would offer something cheaper. Then I started wondering if they'd upgrade my services. Then I started wondering when they'd cut me off since they'd obviously completely forgotten about me, having refused to perform my multiple address change requests. I just keep it up as curiosity and as a reminder of what a really crappy service is like. Of course they aren't forgetting about the monthly fee...
A thought just occured to me (hah!). When doing image related work on the computer, it is now standard to use a color calibration probe to calibrate your monitor in order to get 'correct' colors. There are plenty of models available, they are usualy USB sensors in the 100$ range you place in front of your monitor once in a while to generate a color profile.
Why don't calibration sensors exist for PC sound as well ? Some kind of microphone with a known response curve. Place it where you normally stand, generate various freqs on the speakers, generate a response curve and then apply it to all the sounds going to the speaker. The maths are very easy (I've done it for scientific sound equipment, not for music). So why isn't it done ?
Just a side note: having a 'perfect' sound is not always desirable; at home I lower the bass otherwise my wife and/or neighbors can feel them in the next room, even at low volume.
s there any point to these "huge" caches? Depends on your use... I work with a lot of images and my drive has a 16Mb cache. When I save an image that's <16Mb, it's almost instant and I can start work on the next one. If the image is >16Mb, it takes a good 5~15 seconds for the drive to thrash around until it's saved it. For me, yeas, a large cache makes a difference as most of my images are in the 10~50Mb range.
Thanks for trying. Excellent classic greek story. And I get your point about your haiku being readable on several different levels. I guess I'm just impervious to poetry after being tortured with too much of it at school...
Is there a higher order of increase? And what are all those kinds of operations called? Yes, there are plenty of functions which grow faster than an exponential.
Some of the most well known (and easier to understand) include the Knuth up-arrow, the hyper operator, the Conway chained arrow...
What's interesting to note is that some of those functions like the busy beaver (!), although well defined and somewhat simple, cannot even be computed. We only know that they are BIG !
I've seen plenty of haikus over the years and read the wikipedia entry about them, but something escapes me entirely: what makes a haiku 'pretty' (or anything other than a complete waste of time by both the writer and the readers) ?!? For me it's just a bunch of text put in an arbitrarily hard to read configuration.
One thing I'd really like to see, and wether it's a problem for the browser implementation or the HTML specs is unclear, is a way to display the ALT text of an image together with the image. Currently you have to duplicate it as such:
<DIV>
<IMG SRC=... ALT="This image represents..."> <P>This image represents...</P> </DIV>
It would be nice to have a way to have an option to control where and how the ALT tag is displayed.
Something similar was a classic of war prisonners camps: get some to betray those who are planning escapes, with promises of liberation. Then once the deal is done, thank the wistle blower in front of the remaining prisonners... That'll soon be one fewer mouth to feed and you also keep your hands clean.
A quick look at your page shows why I'm still stuck with Windows: font aliasing (or whatever it's called) is truly horrible to read. My eyes keep trying to focus on it, and they can't because of the blury sub-aliasing. How can anyone want to read blurry text instead of some font optimised for the pixel size ?!?
It was the main reason why I ditched my mac in late 2000, and why I use Linux through X on a Windows machine. Why, why, why can't you get a proper, readable font in those 2 OSes ?!? Aliases fonts are good for graphic work when you need to manipulate them as bitmaps without aliasing problems, they are not meant for reading. I've looked all around, asked on forums, etc, but if you disable font aliasing in those OSes, the display is even more horrible.
It would be nice if stories that I have opened to read would not scroll off when more come through I concur, particularly when you leave the page open and come back to it after a while. The scrolling stops in the meanwhile. If you click on a title to read the story, all the new submission resume and the story you wanted to read scrolls off. It should stop at the one you try to open, at least for a few minutes.
Can anyone recommend a precise mouse for graphic work ?
I'm actually very surprised that the original poster says that he finds trackballs more precise than mice. I've tried one and I don't: you can't control the exact direction of the rotation.
I currently have a 'good' optical MS mouse, but lately I've found it less and less precise. Old classic mice used to accumulate crud and require regular cleaning but I don't see anything getting dirty with an optical one. So, anyone has a recommendation ?!? Thanks.
Your comment striked me and I actually googled for a USB (2.0?) punched card reader. Fortunately for me such bastard hardware doesn't seem to exist... That was a close one !
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And when you are on the cold field, no matter how well you plan, shit happens regularly. It's Murphy's law incarnate.
QNX has some of the best real-time features of any OS and its message passing architecture is reliable and pretty simple to use. The main problem so far was its price, lack of source and overall lack of applications. This will likely change quickly if it is open-sourced. I can see it become a serious contender to the various complex and poorly documented patches to turn Linux into a real-time system. Excellent news indeed.
Get off your high horses. There are some distros that are basically unusable after a CD install and that require a lenghty internet connection to get everything patched up and running. If you need to do a reinstall of Gentoo on the field, you are basically screwed. Similar with a personal copy of XP, the minute of satellite phone connection was 7$ so the first words of any support call were a screamed "Don't put me on hold I'm calling from Antarctica!".
Sorry about the mistake. Probably because I have a high dislike of either company...
You don't need to go this far: I spent the last 3 weeks on the road with my laptop: Matlab ceased to function as soon as the license key manager got out of touch of the license server. I hate that macromedia shit.
...Meade DSI color camera... Then you are better than me as I've never been able to get anything out of that thing. But then I tried to use it in what were not the easiest settings to say the least. And you are right about the patience bit, it's just easier to just read the magazines or hop to the APOD.Douglas Hofstadter's Godel, Escher and Bach is a must-read for both its english language surprises and its science eye-opening. It's a big books but you can select some parts for class reading. The 'group intelligence of ants' chapter introduction comes to mind. Many intros read like Lewis Carol, and I'm pretty sure it was written with that intent. Note: english is not my prime language, but this is the 3rd english book I've read when I was 15 (after Orwell's Animal Farm as a warmup and Tolkien's trilogy which is the whole point why I learnt english in the first place)...
I tried Erlang last year, trying to preemptively find a possible 'multi-core aware' language for the future. I'm not used to VM languages so my first question was 'how do I make a self contained executable with that thing?'. I failed to find a way. Then I tried to understand the difference between the language threads and the OS threads and it appears the former are contained in the VM, so any optimisation is then linked in how well the VM fits into the OS, i.e. not well at all. Then final straw, the development environment was abysmal (think VT100 terminal mode). When we start seeing plugins for KDevelop, Eclipse or (Gates forbid) Visual Studio, with nativev threads, then we'll talk.
Except for a possible 'Above:', 'Right:' or 'Left:' I don't see why there should be any difference. Care to elaborate on that ?
Interesting. I'm doing my own little 'experiment' in a similar vein. I have a cell phone contract in a country I no longer live in (I keep the phone as an emergency or when going to said country which is about one week a year). I've had it for 12 years and this type of contract has long disapeared, replaced by better and cheaper offers. At the begining I was wondering when they would offer something cheaper. Then I started wondering if they'd upgrade my services. Then I started wondering when they'd cut me off since they'd obviously completely forgotten about me, having refused to perform my multiple address change requests. I just keep it up as curiosity and as a reminder of what a really crappy service is like. Of course they aren't forgetting about the monthly fee...
Why don't calibration sensors exist for PC sound as well ? Some kind of microphone with a known response curve. Place it where you normally stand, generate various freqs on the speakers, generate a response curve and then apply it to all the sounds going to the speaker. The maths are very easy (I've done it for scientific sound equipment, not for music). So why isn't it done ?
Just a side note: having a 'perfect' sound is not always desirable; at home I lower the bass otherwise my wife and/or neighbors can feel them in the next room, even at low volume.
Thanks for trying. Excellent classic greek story. And I get your point about your haiku being readable on several different levels. I guess I'm just impervious to poetry after being tortured with too much of it at school...
What's interesting to note is that some of those functions like the busy beaver (!), although well defined and somewhat simple, cannot even be computed. We only know that they are BIG !
I've seen plenty of haikus over the years and read the wikipedia entry about them, but something escapes me entirely: what makes a haiku 'pretty' (or anything other than a complete waste of time by both the writer and the readers) ?!? For me it's just a bunch of text put in an arbitrarily hard to read configuration.
One thing I'd really like to see, and wether it's a problem for the browser implementation or the HTML specs is unclear, is a way to display the ALT text of an image together with the image. Currently you have to duplicate it as such:
<DIV>
<IMG SRC=... ALT="This image represents...">
<P>This image represents...</P>
</DIV>
It would be nice to have a way to have an option to control where and how the ALT tag is displayed.
Something similar was a classic of war prisonners camps: get some to betray those who are planning escapes, with promises of liberation. Then once the deal is done, thank the wistle blower in front of the remaining prisonners... That'll soon be one fewer mouth to feed and you also keep your hands clean.
- Molecular Gastronomy: Exploring the Science of Flavor
- Kitchen Mysteries: Revealing the Science of Cooking
- In the Kitchen with Pierre Gagniere and Louis XIV
He's also a nice guy and I've exchanged cooking tips with him by email !It was the main reason why I ditched my mac in late 2000, and why I use Linux through X on a Windows machine. Why, why, why can't you get a proper, readable font in those 2 OSes ?!? Aliases fonts are good for graphic work when you need to manipulate them as bitmaps without aliasing problems, they are not meant for reading. I've looked all around, asked on forums, etc, but if you disable font aliasing in those OSes, the display is even more horrible.
Note: I'm not trolling and I really want to know.
Can anyone recommend a precise mouse for graphic work ? I'm actually very surprised that the original poster says that he finds trackballs more precise than mice. I've tried one and I don't: you can't control the exact direction of the rotation. I currently have a 'good' optical MS mouse, but lately I've found it less and less precise. Old classic mice used to accumulate crud and require regular cleaning but I don't see anything getting dirty with an optical one. So, anyone has a recommendation ?!? Thanks.
Your comment striked me and I actually googled for a USB (2.0?) punched card reader. Fortunately for me such bastard hardware doesn't seem to exist... That was a close one !