In 1984, Big Brother made up his own 'truth' as convenient for the moment. If was was expedient to change it, then the 'truth' changed.
In news reporting, an initial story may have inaccuracies. One hopes that with each revision, the reported story becomes closer and closer to the actual truth. It is fairly unlikely that the original story is better than the revised one.
Most consumers of news aren't interested in older and less-accurate versions of a story. It's quicker and easier to read the most-accurate-so-far version than to read the initial version and then mentally overlay all the updates.
I guess the latter approach appeals more to geek-types because we tend to be more interested in the mechanics of things. Irrelevant details matter to geeks 8-)
I don't think it's really a contender, but try xns.org. The original aim seemed to be more or less what you describe, but they seem to have diluted it a bit since then.
Epson cartridges are not pressurised. They use a piezo action to 'kick' the ink droplet out. The reservoir is vented to atmosphere through a tiny hole just like every other manufacturers' ink cartridge. (The small hiss you hear when you remove the blue tape before installing a new cartridge is air going into the cartridge through the vent hole.)
Why should science be concerned with religion's opinon on anything?
It is interesting to note that the roots of what we know as modern science grew out of Christianity. One of the key foundations of science is that the universe is both rational and contingent.
Rational - that it can be understood, that it is not random, experiments can be repeated and get the same answer, etc.
Contingent - that it needn't be the way it is, that it is necessary to study it to find out what it is really like. You can't get all the answers just by philosophising about it.
These principles grow naturally from a Christian view of the world. Christians believe that the universe was created by a rational God. Physical 'laws' can be seen as an expression of God's rationality and faithfulness. The Bible even says that God holds the universe together from moment to moment. And since Christians believe that God created the universe through his own choice, it is reasonable to suppose that it could have been different - i.e. it's contingent on God's choice. Scientists have often seen their vocation as exploring the works of God - a noble pursuit because it is about learning more about God. God's character is, up to a point, seen througout the universe.
I've never seen a convincing argument outside Christianity for why there should be any laws of physics at all (other than the 'anthropic principle' that if the universe were not as it is, we would not be here to ask the question).
Finally, if Christianity is worth believing at all, then Christians have absolutely nothing to fear from new scientific discoveries. If the Christian faith is right, then a correct understanding of science will not contradict a correct understanding of Christianity. If there is a contradiction, we need to honestly address it, remembering that we don't yet have all the answers or a perfect understanding of either.
I didn't name human potential as greater than god. Read again. I said it had the potential to be greater than god.
A bit of a leap of faith, don't you think?
I think it's flawed anyway. What exactly is ‘human potential’? Humans have made some pretty impressive things, but they've also by-and-large made a pretty impressive mess of the world they inhabit.
But to return to the original point, what basis is there of thinking that the potential of the created is greater than the potential of the creator?
If this is his camera, how did he take the pictures in the article?
Seriously, I've often wondered whether there could be a good way of using a lens/projector to blow up the size of a negative/slide on my flatbed scanner. I've been surprised to find that my Epson GT7000 does a better job of getting details from the shadows of slides than a dedicated Canon 2700 slide scanner, but the resolution is of course much lower. Before I borrowed the slide scanner, I tried things like projecting a slide onto the glass plate and scanning that, but although the light rays are focused properly, they are travelling in the wrong direction to be picked up by the CCD. As Matthias mentioned in his article, using a ground glass screen might be an option, but a poor one.
Would it help to remove the scanner's own lens, and focus the projector somewhere below the glass plate, do you think? (I've already discovered I can improve the detail on scanned slides by tweaking the lens, so removing it completely is not difficult.) But the prism optics in the scanning bar might screw things up a bit... Hmm. Buy a decent slide scanner I think.
I think you've hit the nail on the head. One of the great things about Doom I/II was the simplicity of the gameplay. Right hand on the cursor keys, left hand on shift-ctrl-alt-space. You didn't need any of this fancy look-up/look-down stuff.
It just worked. The game-play was king. It was all about atmosphere/anticipation and quick aiming. I guess I just can't get my fingers around the plethora of keys in the newer games—I spend more time fiddling with the mechanics of controlling the character than playing the game.
Yes, getting my Epson GT7000 (SCSI) scanner working with Mandrake 8.1 required absolutely nothing on my part. It Just Worked. (I did have minor problems with devfs though, meaning if the scanner is not switched on when I last booted, I have to reboot.) Unfortunately, the colour matching in SANE is much inferior to the Windows Epson driver, especially in transparency mode.
Needless to say, my Epson Stylus 740 works very well. It's just a pity that some of the very dark tones seem to lose colour saturation under GIMP Print compared to the Windows driver.
Some of these old computers are still in use, but it is getting harder and harder to find spare parts when they break down.
One way to ensure longevity is to port the software, but this is not always easy. I am currently involved in a project to port a control system that runs on PDP11s to Microware's OS9. The code was all written in CORAL66, so we have to convert it to C first. For efficiecy reasons when the code was originally written, much of it is hard to understand, and there are global variables and horrible interdependencies between modules everywhere. Then there's all the hardware-dependent stuff to sort out. Altogether, it is a pretty big and ugly undertaking.
An alternative is to emulate a PDP11 on a modern machine. This is a twin stragegy (to porting) that we are also pursuing. So emulation is important, and projects like the Computer History Simulation Project are a good thing.
The reduction in artifacts is the real benefit IMO. Sometimes you just have to push the quality level up to ridiculous levels to get acceptable images with JPEG, and as the quality goes above around 90, the file size starts ballooning.
For a particularly excruciating example, see this image of Buddhist prayer flags against a plain blue sky from my recent holiday. (Blue skys seem to be particularly susceptible to artifacts.) IIRC, the qualitly level here is 85, and really, it is not acceptable. The trouble was, even at 85, the file was rather bigger than I wanted.
People think that so long as validator.w3.org passes you then you must have done everything right.
I've often worried about this, but don't really know how to go further than the validator. Things like using the right sort of tag, e.g. <h2> instead of <b><big> are obvious, and general accessibity issues, but what about the things I don't think of checking?
Is there any rigerous process I can use to make sure my pages are really truly and thoroughly good and proper HTML? Short of testing them with every possible browser (which is really somewhat missing the point anyway)?
a user's freedom to do anything they like with the code (a BSD-style license) means they can take away another user's freedom to do the same (close the source.)
Sorry, I don't get it. If Fred takes something written under the BSD license, makes some alterations and closes the source, how is that taking someone else's freedom away? What have they lost that they would have had if Fred had never been involved?
The point I'm making is that the version that Fred forked away from still exists and is still open for anyone to use under the BSD license. Fred might not have added anything, but he's not removed anything either.
IMO, the BSD license seems to give everyone freedom, but does however allow the possibility of someone benefitting from another's work without giving anything back. I can understand that this may feel wrong to some people - hence the GPL. But I don't see a freedom issue here.
Have you ever had a Zip disk die for no apparent reason?
Imagine a partially corrupted zip disk and a partially corrupted paper record. From which one can you recover the uncorrupted information without specialist help?
Doesn't it depend how big those pixels are? 12px text at 640x480 is just the same size as 24px text at 1280x960. More jagged, but to someone with poor eyesight, the jaggedness will be less obvious. I have a collegue who insists on running his 21" monitor at 800x600 so he can read the small text.
They said that paper is used as an intermediary. It represents thoughts that are not yet complete.
It is only if paper's usefulness is in the information written directly on it that it must be stored. If its usefulness lies in the promotion of ongoing creative thinking, then, once that thinking is finished, the paper becomes superfluous.
('Creative' is used in a very wide sense here, e.g. including tracking and predicting the progress of aircraft.) They still advocate electronic storage for information that must be kept and will be referred to again in the future. I thought it was an excellent article.
This is the 6.0 beta. I found some of the bitmaps were broken - they seemed to disintegrate into horizontal lines and blank areas, and the text that was supposed to flow around them partially overlapped or became obscured.
Here in the UK, I've never come across cubicles. At university, I shared an office with 4 others. I was not keen on moving to an open-plan office when I started my current job, but now I think it is much better.
I work in a 'pen' of 4 corner desks. Between each desk, there is either a cupboard, a workstation trolley, or the way into the pen. We have a reasonably large desk area, and plenty of space to pace around in the pen. Between pens, there is a chest-high partition. When I'm sitting, I can't see over it. If I stand up, I can see the people in the next pen.
Noise is only rarely a problem. The worst is that the pen next to mine is the secretaries', and occasionally they get going on a serious bitching session (this is not a general slur on secretaries - it just happens to be the case where I work). Mostly it's quiet and easy to concentrate. It's sociable, and we have quite a humourous atmosphere. It's nice being able to talk to someone else in the pen or just over the partition without getting up.
Temperature can be a problem, but that is mostly due to the inadequacies of our system not responding quickly enough to changes.
Finally, I'm amazed to hear that some people are used to listening to music while they work. I've never heard of anyone doing that here, at least during office hours. Music always kills my concentration stone-dead. Maybe that's because I'm a musician and I always end up analysing it instead of working. Actually, I'm very intolerant of noise. I get exhausted if I have to work in a machine room for long.
It depends what you are doing. If you are a Word power-user and use it for medium-duty page layout, expect lots of problems. For example, documents containing a lot of graphics in floating frames with text flowing around in my experience do not convert well. On the other hand, I've had no problems at all with letter- and report-type documents.
Slashdot Mirror
There is a huge difference though.
In 1984, Big Brother made up his own 'truth' as convenient for the moment. If was was expedient to change it, then the 'truth' changed.
In news reporting, an initial story may have inaccuracies. One hopes that with each revision, the reported story becomes closer and closer to the actual truth. It is fairly unlikely that the original story is better than the revised one.
Most consumers of news aren't interested in older and less-accurate versions of a story. It's quicker and easier to read the most-accurate-so-far version than to read the initial version and then mentally overlay all the updates.
I guess the latter approach appeals more to geek-types because we tend to be more interested in the mechanics of things. Irrelevant details matter to geeks 8-)
I don't think it's really a contender, but try xns.org. The original aim seemed to be more or less what you describe, but they seem to have diluted it a bit since then.
You can't just let the market decide because there is no competition. These folks would have a monopoly over .pro
.pro does sound like it will be a “kind of upper class boys club”. So what? Let them get on with it.
The competition is the other domains. Yes,
Why not just let the market decide?
.pro domain. There are after all other choices.
If people want to pay, that's fine. No one is forcing anyone to have a
I don't think there is really anything wrong with allowing people to pay for what is, in effect, a premium brand. (I won't be buying one.)
Epson cartridges are not pressurised. They use a piezo action to 'kick' the ink droplet out. The reservoir is vented to atmosphere through a tiny hole just like every other manufacturers' ink cartridge. (The small hiss you hear when you remove the blue tape before installing a new cartridge is air going into the cartridge through the vent hole.)
Taken right from the page:
Well, within a year of building this contraption, I bought a digital camera anyways.
Yes, I know. Sorry I forgot the smiley...
Why should science be concerned with religion's opinon on anything?
It is interesting to note that the roots of what we know as modern science grew out of Christianity. One of the key foundations of science is that the universe is both rational and contingent.
Rational - that it can be understood, that it is not random, experiments can be repeated and get the same answer, etc.
Contingent - that it needn't be the way it is, that it is necessary to study it to find out what it is really like. You can't get all the answers just by philosophising about it.
These principles grow naturally from a Christian view of the world. Christians believe that the universe was created by a rational God. Physical 'laws' can be seen as an expression of God's rationality and faithfulness. The Bible even says that God holds the universe together from moment to moment. And since Christians believe that God created the universe through his own choice, it is reasonable to suppose that it could have been different - i.e. it's contingent on God's choice. Scientists have often seen their vocation as exploring the works of God - a noble pursuit because it is about learning more about God. God's character is, up to a point, seen througout the universe.
I've never seen a convincing argument outside Christianity for why there should be any laws of physics at all (other than the 'anthropic principle' that if the universe were not as it is, we would not be here to ask the question).
Finally, if Christianity is worth believing at all, then Christians have absolutely nothing to fear from new scientific discoveries. If the Christian faith is right, then a correct understanding of science will not contradict a correct understanding of Christianity. If there is a contradiction, we need to honestly address it, remembering that we don't yet have all the answers or a perfect understanding of either.
I didn't name human potential as greater than god. Read again. I said it had the potential to be greater than god.
A bit of a leap of faith, don't you think?
I think it's flawed anyway. What exactly is ‘human potential’? Humans have made some pretty impressive things, but they've also by-and-large made a pretty impressive mess of the world they inhabit.
But to return to the original point, what basis is there of thinking that the potential of the created is greater than the potential of the creator?
If this is his camera, how did he take the pictures in the article?
Seriously, I've often wondered whether there could be a good way of using a lens/projector to blow up the size of a negative/slide on my flatbed scanner. I've been surprised to find that my Epson GT7000 does a better job of getting details from the shadows of slides than a dedicated Canon 2700 slide scanner, but the resolution is of course much lower. Before I borrowed the slide scanner, I tried things like projecting a slide onto the glass plate and scanning that, but although the light rays are focused properly, they are travelling in the wrong direction to be picked up by the CCD. As Matthias mentioned in his article, using a ground glass screen might be an option, but a poor one.
Would it help to remove the scanner's own lens, and focus the projector somewhere below the glass plate, do you think? (I've already discovered I can improve the detail on scanned slides by tweaking the lens, so removing it completely is not difficult.) But the prism optics in the scanning bar might screw things up a bit... Hmm. Buy a decent slide scanner I think.
I think you've hit the nail on the head. One of the great things about Doom I/II was the simplicity of the gameplay. Right hand on the cursor keys, left hand on shift-ctrl-alt-space. You didn't need any of this fancy look-up/look-down stuff.
It just worked. The game-play was king. It was all about atmosphere/anticipation and quick aiming. I guess I just can't get my fingers around the plethora of keys in the newer games—I spend more time fiddling with the mechanics of controlling the character than playing the game.
Yes, getting my Epson GT7000 (SCSI) scanner working with Mandrake 8.1 required absolutely nothing on my part. It Just Worked. (I did have minor problems with devfs though, meaning if the scanner is not switched on when I last booted, I have to reboot.) Unfortunately, the colour matching in SANE is much inferior to the Windows Epson driver, especially in transparency mode.
Needless to say, my Epson Stylus 740 works very well. It's just a pity that some of the very dark tones seem to lose colour saturation under GIMP Print compared to the Windows driver.
Some of these old computers are still in use, but it is getting harder and harder to find spare parts when they break down.
One way to ensure longevity is to port the software, but this is not always easy. I am currently involved in a project to port a control system that runs on PDP11s to Microware's OS9. The code was all written in CORAL66, so we have to convert it to C first. For efficiecy reasons when the code was originally written, much of it is hard to understand, and there are global variables and horrible interdependencies between modules everywhere. Then there's all the hardware-dependent stuff to sort out. Altogether, it is a pretty big and ugly undertaking.
An alternative is to emulate a PDP11 on a modern machine. This is a twin stragegy (to porting) that we are also pursuing. So emulation is important, and projects like the Computer History Simulation Project are a good thing.
In MS Windows, there are a number of places that programs get started from on system startup.
s ion\Rune rsion\Run Oncei on\Run OnceEx
1) Start Menu\Programs\Startup
2) Control Panels -> Services (Windows NT etc)
3) Registry keys:
HKLM\SOFTWARE\Microsoft\Windows\CurrentVer
HKLM\SOFTWARE\Microsoft\Windows\CurrentV
HKLM\SOFTWARE\Microsoft\Windows\CurrentVers
You may be amazed at the trash that can accumulate there. Alternatively, check out the rather excellent freeware Startup Manager.
The reduction in artifacts is the real benefit IMO. Sometimes you just have to push the quality level up to ridiculous levels to get acceptable images with JPEG, and as the quality goes above around 90, the file size starts ballooning.
For a particularly excruciating example, see this image of Buddhist prayer flags against a plain blue sky from my recent holiday. (Blue skys seem to be particularly susceptible to artifacts.) IIRC, the qualitly level here is 85, and really, it is not acceptable. The trouble was, even at 85, the file was rather bigger than I wanted.
People think that so long as validator.w3.org passes you then you must have done everything right.
I've often worried about this, but don't really know how to go further than the validator. Things like using the right sort of tag, e.g. <h2> instead of <b><big> are obvious, and general accessibity issues, but what about the things I don't think of checking?
Is there any rigerous process I can use to make sure my pages are really truly and thoroughly good and proper HTML? Short of testing them with every possible browser (which is really somewhat missing the point anyway)?
a user's freedom to do anything they like with the code (a BSD-style license) means they can take away another user's freedom to do the same (close the source.)
Sorry, I don't get it. If Fred takes something written under the BSD license, makes some alterations and closes the source, how is that taking someone else's freedom away? What have they lost that they would have had if Fred had never been involved?
The point I'm making is that the version that Fred forked away from still exists and is still open for anyone to use under the BSD license. Fred might not have added anything, but he's not removed anything either.
IMO, the BSD license seems to give everyone freedom, but does however allow the possibility of someone benefitting from another's work without giving anything back. I can understand that this may feel wrong to some people - hence the GPL. But I don't see a freedom issue here.
Especially go after the guy who just received a parcel containing a mobile phone and is now standing outside on the window ledge.
Paper will never replace computers until it supports the tag!
Have you ever had a Zip disk die for no apparent reason?
Imagine a partially corrupted zip disk and a partially corrupted paper record. From which one can you recover the uncorrupted information without specialist help?
People can read text just fine at 12 pixels high.
Until you are 25 perhaps.
Doesn't it depend how big those pixels are? 12px text at 640x480 is just the same size as 24px text at 1280x960. More jagged, but to someone with poor eyesight, the jaggedness will be less obvious. I have a collegue who insists on running his 21" monitor at 800x600 so he can read the small text.
You missed the point of the article.
They said that paper is used as an intermediary. It represents thoughts that are not yet complete.
It is only if paper's usefulness is in the information written directly on it that it must be stored. If its usefulness lies in the promotion of ongoing creative thinking, then, once that thinking is finished, the paper becomes superfluous.
('Creative' is used in a very wide sense here, e.g. including tracking and predicting the progress of aircraft.) They still advocate electronic storage for information that must be kept and will be referred to again in the future. I thought it was an excellent article.
Nah! Save 4 bytes:
swap (int *a, int *b)
{
*a ^= *b;
*b ^= *a;
*a ^= *b;
}
The sad thing is I had to look up the C operator for exclusive-or.
This is the 6.0 beta. I found some of the bitmaps were broken - they seemed to disintegrate into horizontal lines and blank areas, and the text that was supposed to flow around them partially overlapped or became obscured.
Here in the UK, I've never come across cubicles. At university, I shared an office with 4 others. I was not keen on moving to an open-plan office when I started my current job, but now I think it is much better.
I work in a 'pen' of 4 corner desks. Between each desk, there is either a cupboard, a workstation trolley, or the way into the pen. We have a reasonably large desk area, and plenty of space to pace around in the pen. Between pens, there is a chest-high partition. When I'm sitting, I can't see over it. If I stand up, I can see the people in the next pen.
Noise is only rarely a problem. The worst is that the pen next to mine is the secretaries', and occasionally they get going on a serious bitching session (this is not a general slur on secretaries - it just happens to be the case where I work). Mostly it's quiet and easy to concentrate. It's sociable, and we have quite a humourous atmosphere. It's nice being able to talk to someone else in the pen or just over the partition without getting up.
Temperature can be a problem, but that is mostly due to the inadequacies of our system not responding quickly enough to changes.
Finally, I'm amazed to hear that some people are used to listening to music while they work. I've never heard of anyone doing that here, at least during office hours. Music always kills my concentration stone-dead. Maybe that's because I'm a musician and I always end up analysing it instead of working. Actually, I'm very intolerant of noise. I get exhausted if I have to work in a machine room for long.
It depends what you are doing. If you are a Word power-user and use it for medium-duty page layout, expect lots of problems. For example, documents containing a lot of graphics in floating frames with text flowing around in my experience do not convert well. On the other hand, I've had no problems at all with letter- and report-type documents.