Summing up: While a good pseudorandom algorithm in a computer can make sequences of numbers that seem random, in reality it is deterministic, meaning that there is a system behind it. It's not apparent, it can (should) be very complex, but it exists.
A die, as well, will always be biased. There is no such thing as a perfect cube in real life. The approximation can be good enough for all practical purposes, but it can never be truly random.
Quantom and decay-based randomness is believed to be truly random. There is no "hidden clockwork" or countdown mechanism that decides when an emission from a radioactive nucleus will happen. It just happens when it happens, and yes, it boggles the mind:)
There is no reason why you can't observe emissions and extract randomness from their timing for use by a computer, and this has been done over and over. Have a look at this page for an example: http://www.fourmilab.ch/hotbits/
I still hear people over on the other side of the pond claiming that ID is taught in most US schools.
I'm from across the pond and a little to the north. Most people around here that care at all are aware that ID in US schools is only an issue in certain areas. It's definitely not 'most'.
The scary thing is that it is being introduced in some of your science classes *at all*, by people who has somehow aquired the power to do so. These people also have voting rights for your government, and probably have quite a bit of power in your society.
for, say, anyone with a modicum of taste, this site is less than useless.
Yup, definitely. Try the 'bong' one for a surprise (or not). Actually, what you don't know is that the site automatically inludes the keyword 'nude' for you on every tag:)
The intended use is probably not to locate images depicting whatever, but more to enable you to publish specific ones which you can then distribute a link to.
BTW, there are som nice ones with the keyword 'space'.
VMware includes a virtual cpu, the host cpu is irrelevant.
I just wondered: How does it work that you can install a 64 bit OS on a VM, but only if the physical processor is 64 bit? This works even if the host OS is 32 bit, as long as you have the right hardware (I've tried).
As far as I know VMWare isn't capable of emulating a 64 bit CPU if you have a 32 bit one in your computer, doesn't that disagree with your scenario?
I can take MS DRM'd audio files and strip them of their DRM quickly and painlessly, in full digital quality.
A little nitpicking: It's probably originally a compressed, lossy format, and you capture the decompressed signal. If you recompress to any lossy format, you'll degrade the quality significantly. Lossy compression removes information, and applying it twice will give poor results. You could go with lossless formats like Monkey's Audio, but that would not be as good as it increases the file size for the same quality.
Then again, people DO watch cam rips, maybe it's not that important to most.
Ideally you'd want to strip off just the encryption, leaving the original data intact as wma or whatever. This could be very difficult with the advent of TPM chips and friends, I must admit that I'm not too knowledgeable in that field. It would be interesting if someone who knows more would care to comment?
it's perfectly feasible for two separate events to be seen occurring in different orders
For a simple explanation with animations of one such case, check this: http://www.puttypeg.com/train.html It's a perfect link to send to someone in response to "Physics? But that's boring!":)
This is inane, you're probably joking. On the other hand I've heard buddies say the same thing. In case you're not joking: I'd rather leave the RAM and heavy-duty CPU unbought and unpaid for in the store.
I use Win2k Pro on my gaming partition. Faster than XP, less hassle, reasonably stable for a Windows (more so than XP in my experience), and no incompatibilities with games. Only a couple of games have claimed to only run on XP, they're easily fooled into thinking they do, and then run happily ever after. Recommended!
Got to love it when a country that supposedly has one of these competition-stifling, bureaucracy-laden welfare states...
Good to see we surprise you:) I must live in a different Norway than the one you've heard of. We're only doing what all sane countries should, smack down on corporate BS when it threatens healthy competition. Our system is in place to ensure fair competition, not to "stifle it". It works very well, and discourages dirty business practices.
Time to shamelessly plug my articles about compression.
I agree with the others here, incredibly good articles! A very thorough introduction, and still easy to follow for a lay-person. Recommended! You wouldn't happen to have written any other works of similar quality you'd like to share with us?:)
A question as well: Do you know if this Photoshop plugin (j2k) is a good implementation of jpeg2000? Maybe it's a stupid question, but I have no idea how strict the standard is, or if there are differences between implementations at all.
why the hell is the music so loud that i have to yell to the person beside me?
Because they sell more beer that way. I have thought about it, and I believe the reasons may be:
guests get more thirsty when they need to speak loudly
that they don't speak as much, and have more time to drink beer
guests get more agitated when the music is loud, and want to drink more
Whatever the reason, anyone that has worked in a bar for a while can tell you that this is the case.
You need to balance it, though, so that people don't actually leave because of the loud music. I tend to leave. Just as you, I go to the pub to talk to my friends, not yell at them:)
Something very strange must be going on behind the scene.
Something is going on, but it's not very strange.
I work at an academic publishing house. The scientists submit in all sorts of formats, and we handle it. They rarely have any computer experience to speak of, and use whatever pops up when they hunt for a word processor on their menu. It's not their concern, neither should it be.
As much as I would love for them to use specific formats, the response would be "Huh? No, I locked my office before leaving, it's not open". We cope with it.
You'd thing something TeX-based would be more suited for this purpose
Maybe for writing it, but not for submissions. You tend to run into all sorts of conversion problems, font incompatibility among other things. Most printing houses only accept PDF from professional clients.
Word is a surprisingly common format in the publishing business. I work at an academic publishing house, handling the preparation of documents for printing. We publish most of the theses for a large university, as well as ~70 books and other publications a year.
Regarding books and similar projects, we try to accept any format we can convert to something you can import into a typesetting application. The thing is that among academics, more than the most basic knowledge of computers is uncommon. They use whichever program is available, most commonly Word. Formulae, graphs, even tables, are ofthen created in a suitable program, and inserted into the document as an image. We have the technical expertise to convert whatever they submit into something printable. It is not their concern, neither should it be.
I don't get why the journals would balk at any specific format, they should have the means to convert it anyway. Let the scientists worry about the science, and the publisher handle the preparation of the manuscript. In the worst case you request better source material, but that should be quite rare.
Still, I would love for all our authors to use something better than Word:)
This is really nitpicking, but isn't it just as fast to hit search terms, which will take you to the search bar? One key instead of g. Oh well. Somebody please beat my nitpicking by pointing out that using your index finger and thumb is as fast as your pinky, as you can hit g<Space> almost simultaneously.
Let's see... If the accident you were in five years ago wasn't your fault, why did you specify "clear of at fault"? If you didn't have any more accidents in the last five years, why did you specify "clear of at fault"?
What he inferred is, as far as I can see, completely logical conclusions from your statement. Since one is lead to believe that you would try to put yourself in a good light, one would think that you would not include the "at fault" if those two conclusions weren't true, even if "at fault" accidents are a subset of accidents in general.
As others have pointed out, neither does "not at fault" mean that you couldn't have avoided it by being a better driver.
And yes, I see that you claimed something different later. Save it.
BTW, I was at fault in an accident. I learned _a lot_ from that, luckily there were no injuries. No accidents since.
Of course you're right; although sometimes I find it amusing to claim (rightly) that I have more legs than the average number among the population. Think about it:)
It's even worse than that. When he does cause an accident, it will probably be at a higher speed than a cautious driver would be driving at due to his confidence in his abilities.
He's right about watching out for stupid drivers though - if I had some way of identifying him on the road, I _would_ be keeping my distance.
Dude, there has never been this pixel perfect rendition between different Word versions
I agree with you completely, and raise 2 cents.
Try the same version on the same OS.
I work in the publishing business, and you kan never rely on a word document looking the same on any two computers. Things like OS language, printer margins, the phase of the moon, and even more obscure factors will ensure that it never happens.
OpenOffice is, despite its other shortcomings, a lot better in this respect.
When a customer wants to deliver a "ready for press" document we demand PDF. Even then you run into problems with font substitutions, missing fonts, ligatures that the production machine can't handle, and so on.
The only sure way to get a pixel perfect replication is... a bitmap. And even then you depend on the production machine's ripping process not mangling it, wich often happens if you try to achieve exactly THAT shade of gray by rasterizing manually in Photoshop (tested on a Xerox DocuTech 6135, 6180, and DocuColor 2040). Have fun:)
I always wondered how the hell English-speaking people manage to get this wrong. Even to me it looks completely moronic (note my sig, I'm not a native speaker). They are completely different concepts, for Pete's sake!
If you say the item is in bin 6A and it's really in bin 7C, there is generally no easy way to find it other than searching bin by bin.
This is actually an easy way to do inventory. You don't go through all the bins looking for product XYZ, you count them all at once periodically.
When I was a student I used to drive a forklift at a warehouse of pharmaceutical drugs. We had various storage systems, including an immense automated one designed for pallets. It was 13 pallet-heights (you know what I mean:) and pretty expansive, only accessible from a loading area. From here you could retrieve pallets with a forklift or pick up things from them manually, from several loading stations. Not all pallets were fully loaded.
Of course things got misplaced, but inventory once in a while was a breeze as you could just put a bunch of people in the loading area and have all the pallets come to them.
Regarding security: As the general site security was tight, explicit internal access control were only enforced at the class A and B drug areas. Now, counting all those woo-woo homeopathical sugar pills in their tiny bottles in another storage area, that's another story:)
I very much agree with you, but it's not always feasible. It depends a lot on the purpose of your document. I work at a publishing house as a computer guy / technical editor. Needless to say, we're very concerned about formatting:) The problem is that most of our authors have no idea how to format a document so that it is suitable for making a readable and professional-looking publication.
They are mostly academics at the top of their fields, and prefer to focus on their expertise. If we get PDFs, most of the time we have to ask the author for an.rtf or.doc instead, because PDF breaks the text flow, and we have to apply proper layout anyway. Not even Adobe Indesign is able to import most PDFs well as flowable text.
Of course, when we send a publication to our printing service, PDF or PS is the only way to go. Sending almost anything else would be madness (yes, dvi would work if your printing service can read it, and they have the exact same fonts. Amusingly enough I once tried to explain this to a CS teacher, who grumbled about us using only the Microsoft formats PS and PDS). For the ones we receive it's only impractical.
To any budding authors out there, especially of scientific works with lots of chapters and sections: Don't care about visual layout. Publishers are very good at that. Even I wouldn't author a manuscript in InDesign. Use a simple format in which you can properly style everything as paragraphs, and do so. In addition to making what you intended a lot clearer to us it will help you mantain an overview of your work during your creative process.
Style headers, footnotes, quotes and regular text correctly, examine that TOC to make sure your publication is coherent and sensibly sectioned. We import that into a DTP application and make it look good. For your italics and other in-paragraph text formatting, use character styles.
As a side note: having used both OOo Writer and MS Office professionally, I prefer the former from my perspective as technical editor. Its handling of styles is less buggy and easier for non-professional users.
Now, I only wish I had followed my own advice to make my post more coherent:)
Slashdot Mirror
Summing up: While a good pseudorandom algorithm in a computer can make sequences of numbers that seem random, in reality it is deterministic, meaning that there is a system behind it. It's not apparent, it can (should) be very complex, but it exists.
:)
A die, as well, will always be biased. There is no such thing as a perfect cube in real life. The approximation can be good enough for all practical purposes, but it can never be truly random.
Quantom and decay-based randomness is believed to be truly random. There is no "hidden clockwork" or countdown mechanism that decides when an emission from a radioactive nucleus will happen. It just happens when it happens, and yes, it boggles the mind
There is no reason why you can't observe emissions and extract randomness from their timing for use by a computer, and this has been done over and over. Have a look at this page for an example: http://www.fourmilab.ch/hotbits/
HTH!
Most people around here that care at all are aware that ID in US schools is only an issue in certain areas. It's definitely not 'most'.
The scary thing is that it is being introduced in some of your science classes *at all*, by people who has somehow aquired the power to do so. These people also have voting rights for your government, and probably have quite a bit of power in your society.
The intended use is probably not to locate images depicting whatever, but more to enable you to publish specific ones which you can then distribute a link to.
BTW, there are som nice ones with the keyword 'space'.
As far as I know VMWare isn't capable of emulating a 64 bit CPU if you have a 32 bit one in your computer, doesn't that disagree with your scenario?
It's probably originally a compressed, lossy format, and you capture the decompressed signal. If you recompress to any lossy format, you'll degrade the quality significantly. Lossy compression removes information, and applying it twice will give poor results. You could go with lossless formats like Monkey's Audio, but that would not be as good as it increases the file size for the same quality.
Then again, people DO watch cam rips, maybe it's not that important to most.
Ideally you'd want to strip off just the encryption, leaving the original data intact as wma or whatever. This could be very difficult with the advent of TPM chips and friends, I must admit that I'm not too knowledgeable in that field. It would be interesting if someone who knows more would care to comment?
It's a perfect link to send to someone in response to "Physics? But that's boring!"
In case you're not joking: I'd rather leave the RAM and heavy-duty CPU unbought and unpaid for in the store.
Only a couple of games have claimed to only run on XP, they're easily fooled into thinking they do, and then run happily ever after.
Recommended!
Ow, that was a bad one.
Good to see we surprise you
I must live in a different Norway than the one you've heard of. We're only doing what all sane countries should, smack down on corporate BS when it threatens healthy competition. Our system is in place to ensure fair competition, not to "stifle it". It works very well, and discourages dirty business practices.
A very thorough introduction, and still easy to follow for a lay-person. Recommended!
You wouldn't happen to have written any other works of similar quality you'd like to share with us?
A question as well: Do you know if this Photoshop plugin (j2k) is a good implementation of jpeg2000? Maybe it's a stupid question, but I have no idea how strict the standard is, or if there are differences between implementations at all.
Whatever the reason, anyone that has worked in a bar for a while can tell you that this is the case.
You need to balance it, though, so that people don't actually leave because of the loud music. I tend to leave. Just as you, I go to the pub to talk to my friends, not yell at them
I work at an academic publishing house. The scientists submit in all sorts of formats, and we handle it. They rarely have any computer experience to speak of, and use whatever pops up when they hunt for a word processor on their menu. It's not their concern, neither should it be.
As much as I would love for them to use specific formats, the response would be "Huh? No, I locked my office before leaving, it's not open". We cope with it.
Maybe for writing it, but not for submissions. You tend to run into all sorts of conversion problems, font incompatibility among other things. Most printing houses only accept PDF from professional clients.
Word is a surprisingly common format in the publishing business. I work at an academic publishing house, handling the preparation of documents for printing. We publish most of the theses for a large university, as well as ~70 books and other publications a year.
Regarding books and similar projects, we try to accept any format we can convert to something you can import into a typesetting application. The thing is that among academics, more than the most basic knowledge of computers is uncommon. They use whichever program is available, most commonly Word. Formulae, graphs, even tables, are ofthen created in a suitable program, and inserted into the document as an image. We have the technical expertise to convert whatever they submit into something printable. It is not their concern, neither should it be.
I don't get why the journals would balk at any specific format, they should have the means to convert it anyway. Let the scientists worry about the science, and the publisher handle the preparation of the manuscript. In the worst case you request better source material, but that should be quite rare.
Still, I would love for all our authors to use something better than Word
This is really nitpicking, but isn't it just as fast to hit search terms, which will take you to the search bar? One key instead of g.
:)
Oh well. Somebody please beat my nitpicking by pointing out that using your index finger and thumb is as fast as your pinky, as you can hit g<Space> almost simultaneously.
I really need to get some sleep now
FWIW, if you remove the "_thumb" from the url you end up with a legible version.
Let's see...
If the accident you were in five years ago wasn't your fault, why did you specify "clear of at fault"?
If you didn't have any more accidents in the last five years, why did you specify "clear of at fault"?
What he inferred is, as far as I can see, completely logical conclusions from your statement.
Since one is lead to believe that you would try to put yourself in a good light, one would think that you would not include the "at fault" if those two conclusions weren't true, even if "at fault" accidents are a subset of accidents in general.
As others have pointed out, neither does "not at fault" mean that you couldn't have avoided it by being a better driver.
And yes, I see that you claimed something different later. Save it.
BTW, I was at fault in an accident. I learned _a lot_ from that, luckily there were no injuries. No accidents since.
Of course you're right; although sometimes I find it amusing to claim (rightly) that I have more legs than the average number among the population. :)
Think about it
It's even worse than that. When he does cause an accident, it will probably be at a higher speed than a cautious driver would be driving at due to his confidence in his abilities.
He's right about watching out for stupid drivers though - if I had some way of identifying him on the road, I _would_ be keeping my distance.
Anyway, I suspect we've been trolled.
I agree with you completely, and raise 2 cents.
Try the same version on the same OS.
I work in the publishing business, and you kan never rely on a word document looking the same on any two computers. Things like OS language, printer margins, the phase of the moon, and even more obscure factors will ensure that it never happens.
OpenOffice is, despite its other shortcomings, a lot better in this respect.
When a customer wants to deliver a "ready for press" document we demand PDF. Even then you run into problems with font substitutions, missing fonts, ligatures that the production machine can't handle, and so on.
The only sure way to get a pixel perfect replication is... a bitmap. And even then you depend on the production machine's ripping process not mangling it, wich often happens if you try to achieve exactly THAT shade of gray by rasterizing manually in Photoshop (tested on a Xerox DocuTech 6135, 6180, and DocuColor 2040). Have fun
Heh, good one
I always wondered how the hell English-speaking people manage to get this wrong. Even to me it looks completely moronic (note my sig, I'm not a native speaker). They are completely different concepts, for Pete's sake!
Oh well.
This is actually an easy way to do inventory. You don't go through all the bins looking for product XYZ, you count them all at once periodically.
When I was a student I used to drive a forklift at a warehouse of pharmaceutical drugs. We had various storage systems, including an immense automated one designed for pallets.
It was 13 pallet-heights (you know what I mean
Of course things got misplaced, but inventory once in a while was a breeze as you could just put a bunch of people in the loading area and have all the pallets come to them.
Regarding security: As the general site security was tight, explicit internal access control were only enforced at the class A and B drug areas.
Now, counting all those woo-woo homeopathical sugar pills in their tiny bottles in another storage area, that's another story
I very much agree with you, but it's not always feasible. It depends a lot on the purpose of your document. :)
.rtf or .doc instead, because PDF breaks the text flow, and we have to apply proper layout anyway. Not even Adobe Indesign is able to import most PDFs well as flowable text.
:)
I work at a publishing house as a computer guy / technical editor. Needless to say, we're very concerned about formatting
The problem is that most of our authors have no idea how to format a document so that it is suitable for making a readable and professional-looking publication.
They are mostly academics at the top of their fields, and prefer to focus on their expertise.
If we get PDFs, most of the time we have to ask the author for an
Of course, when we send a publication to our printing service, PDF or PS is the only way to go. Sending almost anything else would be madness (yes, dvi would work if your printing service can read it, and they have the exact same fonts. Amusingly enough I once tried to explain this to a CS teacher, who grumbled about us using only the Microsoft formats PS and PDS). For the ones we receive it's only impractical.
To any budding authors out there, especially of scientific works with lots of chapters and sections: Don't care about visual layout. Publishers are very good at that. Even I wouldn't author a manuscript in InDesign. Use a simple format in which you can properly style everything as paragraphs, and do so. In addition to making what you intended a lot clearer to us it will help you mantain an overview of your work during your creative process.
Style headers, footnotes, quotes and regular text correctly, examine that TOC to make sure your publication is coherent and sensibly sectioned. We import that into a DTP application and make it look good. For your italics and other in-paragraph text formatting, use character styles.
As a side note: having used both OOo Writer and MS Office professionally, I prefer the former from my perspective as technical editor. Its handling of styles is less buggy and easier for non-professional users.
Now, I only wish I had followed my own advice to make my post more coherent