Note that all convicted felons -- not just sex offenders -- have lost their right to vote.
That's only true for federal elections and certain states. It's a common misconception that it's true everywhere, which leads to tons of felons who are eligible to vote for state and municipal issues not voting.
So I thought I'd point that out before the urban legend spreads further.
Yeah, I'm in the same boat now. I dropped out of high school, fucked around for a while, worked in the computer industry, and eventually decided I wanted to take a few classes again. Once I went back (when I was ready), I realized how interesting school can be.
Now I'm a math major and hope to go on to get a PhD... not because I want to "do something" with my degree (I like programming, so I'll just keep doing that) but because leaning is fun.
Dropping out was really a great thing for me, really. I had fun and crazy times rather than sitting in school wishing I was having fun and crazy times. Now I'm older (and know how to manage the somewhat-less-crazy fun around a schedule better) and can be in school and enjoy it.
It would seem that the more sensational a case is, the more potential there is for an EFF/ACLU to get involved, no matter the merits.
Here's what I don't get about your "point": There's nothing about this case that makes it sensational. There were no naked people, no animals hurt, no child molestation, etc.
If you think this case is "sensational" you think so because the very idea of the government clobbering free speech without even giving an explanation is an injustice. If you disagree with that sentiment, there's nothing "sensational" to this story at all!
So, what sorts of cases do you think the EFF/ACLU should pursue that aren't sensational?
I think perhaps you're confusing "sensational" with high-profile. The problem is that it's often the EFF/ACLU's involvement that makes a case high profile. Like when the ACLU argued that Nike should be allowed to lie in marketing materials: that case really only became high profile because the ACLU got involved, not the other way around.
It is believed that the FBI seized it on the request of either the Italian or the Swiss government.
Since the FBI isn't talking, no one is quite sure who requested the actual seizure. Getting that information from the FBI is the first step towards unravelling this case.
But, my main point is that basing your decision on who to vote for entirely on who waffles or who went AWOL is not logically sound.
ven if a candidate espouses all the issues I care about in a way that is perfect to me... if he was just completely lying in order to get my vote, what good is that? You have to know enough about the person to trust they're going to do what they say they will. You have to know enough about the person to feel okay with their votes on future issues you haven't thought of yet, etc. Are they the type of person who will, say, lead us into a illegal war based on false pretenses? Well they certainly never brought that up in the 2000 debates!
The candidate's stance on current issues is one thing worth considering, but we're not electing issues!
I'm voting for Kerry, but even I think the attacks on him as a flip-flopper are valid if they're true. The point they're trying to make is that he just says/votes in a way that is politically convenient to him at the time. If anti-abortion suddenly becomes fashionable, is he going to change his position? It's a point worth debating if you ask me.
FireFox extensions aren't written in C. They GUI is written in XUL and the logic is written in Javascript. Since XUL is an XML dialect, there isn't really an "API" to speak of.
I've read this book and it was pretty good, though I didn't actually use it to develop any applications, so I can't really say how helpful it was. I mostly just read it to get an idea of what this whole XUL thing was about. It seems interesting, but pretty weird, and not necessarily much easier than writing a Java app, for example. But again, I never actually tried it, so what do I know?
Anyway, the whole process is sufficiently different from "normal" application development that you'll probably need a somewhat lengthy tutorial to get started. Unfortunately, I don't know of any online ones. (Which isn't to say that they don't exist, just that I haven't looked around enough to know.)
Next time, just pick the pieces you want and assemble it yourself and save a grand or two...
Not necessarily... Dell can get parts CHEAP. I just bought a dell "server" (no OS) for $350. Throw in some more RAM (Dell overcharges on the RAM) and a better video card (it's a server, so it comes with some shitty PCI card) and you're ready to go. But you'd never get an equivalent case+motherboard+processor as cheap as I got it from Dell, even off pricewatch. I tried.
Yet Tanenbaum vehemently insists that Torvalds wrote Linux from scratch, which means from a blank computer screen to most people. No books, no resources, no notes...
So, what he's apparently claiming is that Linux is stolen code because Linus used BOOKS when he wrote it.
All true hackers were born with knowledge of C. Anyone who had to read a book about it is a thief.
Interesting that the word "niche" (pronounced 'neesh'), can be mis-pronounced as 'nitch' by so many people, that it will then become phonetically mis-spelled as "nitch" by someone.
My dictionaries list both pronounciations as correct. Guess it's time for you to find something new to whine about.
The content was displayed fine and that's what counts.
In most classes/situations, I'd agree. This class, however, was a technical writing class, and the way you formatted the information was just as important as the actual information.
Oh, interesting. Do you happen to know what font that is? I have all the MS core TT fonts installed (uhhh, I think). Is it in "wingdings" or something? I have "webdings", but no "wingdings"...
Granted, these were fairly complex documents with lots of embedded graphics and stuff... And I was also opening a dozen (or more) of documents every week from about two dozen authors, presumably with different versions of Word, etc.
The error rate wasn't bad, but it just wasn't good enough.
That's not totally openoffice's fault. If your friend would have sent you the file in an open format, then you wouldn't have had a problem.
Uh, I made no mention of faults. Show me the part of my post where I claimed that it was OpenOffice's fault (whatever that means). Believe me, I would've much rather used OpenOffice than installing VMWare, Windows, and Word.
I tried to use OpenOffice for an online Technical Writing class last term (just ended last week). It worked fairly well. I was always able to get the information out of the documents. Only formatting was ever broken.
Unfortunately that's not always good enough. After too many times correcting "mistakes" that weren't actually mistakes (e.g. suggesting that a classmate put bullets in his list, even though there already WERE bullets, OpenOffice just wasn't showing them) I ended up switching back to Word.
OpenOffice is good at reading Word documents, but it's definitely not good enough for everyone's needs.
Also, for Canon, RAW != TIFF so maybe the files aren't as big as you're thinking. My 6 megapixel Canon 10-D generates 5-6MB RAW images (they vary in size because they have a jpeg embedded in them).
They vary in size because they're compressed, mostly.
Further, for an interesting scene (i.e. not with the lens cap on), this is relatively uncompressible data, so even if you could in some way encode the raw CCD data in PNG format, you wouldn't see much of a gain.
That's not true. Even in an interesting scene, you will have large fields of similar colors which can still be compressed losslessly with good results. ZIP won't get you the best results because it doesn't understand how the data is structured. It's just like how FLAC gets much better compression than ZIP for audio, even though both are lossless. If you understand the structure of the data and where the common patterns emerge, you can tune your compression algorithm to those andcan get decent results.
That's why.RAW files (which ARE compressed) are smaller than uncompressed TIFF files.
Oh. I am glad that is what you thought you knew. Unfortunately, you're wrong.
Here is a definition for the word raw:
2. a. Being in a natural condition; not processed or refined: raw wool.
Canon.RAW images fit this description as the image has had no post-processing on it. It's exactly as it comes off the CCD. Lossless compression and addition of metadata do not change the actual image, so it still fits that definition of "raw".
I'm not saying your more rigorous definition of it isn't a valid one, but it's not the one Canon chooses to use.
If you want to check what you think know before posting incorrect information to slashdot you could try google. A search for "canon raw lossless" gets lots of results showing exactly how wrong you are.
I'm sorry I'm being a snide dick, but posting incorrect information to slashdot once is fine, we've all done it. But when someone corrects you and you say that you still think they are wrong without even doing 30 seconds of research... well, shit, man. That's annoying.
I think the point of this is that you wouldn't NEED to type the TLD. They want to make this TLD the default search domain on mobile devices.
So, for example, http://google/ would take you to google.mobile on a cell phone.
That's the impression I got from the article, anyway: The application could turn out to be more politically charged than its proponents hope, because the mobile domain is not just another Internet domain like.biz, extending the address space. Instead, it is a new text-based user friendly addressing scheme for phones and mobile devices, which could replace and extend the power of phone numbers - just as the current Internet domain scheme did for numeric Internet addresses, replacing 207.46.245.214 with "microsoft.com", for instance.
Before reading this, let the record show that I am a subversion fanboy. But I am only a Subversion fanboy because it solved almost all of my complaints about CVS. I am not involved with the project at all.
Do developers out there voice the need to store binaries?
Uh, most projects of any size will have at least a few binary files in their repository... icons, etc. But you could store those in CVS without too many problems.
Also, have there been many problems that required atomic commits? Can someone explain why this is important?
Rolling back changes without atomic commits is a pain in fucking ass. Have you ever had to do it? You have to track down every file that you changed (somehow... hopefully you can remember), check which version was the version prior to your commit, and get all those versions of files. For example "Okay, I need version 1.7 of foo.c and version 1.8 of barf.c and version 1.13 of foo.h." It's totally annoying.
Plus atomic commits just makes it much, much easier to keep track of what changes have gone it. This is my biggest, biggest complaint about CVS. File-level commits just make no sense. There is no time, ever, that I can think of when the ability to commit an entire changeset at once isn't better than committing a single file at a time.
Also, Subversions says that it is much faster at things like tagging, but tagging is not a very frequent operation...
Depends on your development process. During beta periods, it's common to make a tag or two per day, and if each tag takes ten minutes, well... it's not a big thing, but it's certainly annoying.
To me it sounds like a great product but I am not able to see a compelling reason why most development shops out there who are currently in CVS would rush to switch.
Certainly not every shop is going to "rush to switch". But, regardless, I imagine that every shop will switch eventually. It may take years, but subversion's advantages are significant enough that in my opinion it will become the new version control standard.
Also note that CVS was crufty and adding new features was almost impossible. Subversion targetted CVS features as their 1.0 milestone. But more importantly, the Subversion code base is a much better baseline to work from when adding new features. So you can expect that it will only get better in the future.
Slashdot Mirror
Note that all convicted felons -- not just sex offenders -- have lost their right to vote.
That's only true for federal elections and certain states. It's a common misconception that it's true everywhere, which leads to tons of felons who are eligible to vote for state and municipal issues not voting.
So I thought I'd point that out before the urban legend spreads further.
Yeah, I'm in the same boat now. I dropped out of high school, fucked around for a while, worked in the computer industry, and eventually decided I wanted to take a few classes again. Once I went back (when I was ready), I realized how interesting school can be.
Now I'm a math major and hope to go on to get a PhD... not because I want to "do something" with my degree (I like programming, so I'll just keep doing that) but because leaning is fun.
Dropping out was really a great thing for me, really. I had fun and crazy times rather than sitting in school wishing I was having fun and crazy times. Now I'm older (and know how to manage the somewhat-less-crazy fun around a schedule better) and can be in school and enjoy it.
The good news is that the underlying architecture should be portable to other storage types, and this is supposedly going to be coming eventually.
Actually there's already another storage type in 1.1.
It would seem that the more sensational a case is, the more potential there is for an EFF/ACLU to get involved, no matter the merits.
Here's what I don't get about your "point": There's nothing about this case that makes it sensational. There were no naked people, no animals hurt, no child molestation, etc.
If you think this case is "sensational" you think so because the very idea of the government clobbering free speech without even giving an explanation is an injustice. If you disagree with that sentiment, there's nothing "sensational" to this story at all!
So, what sorts of cases do you think the EFF/ACLU should pursue that aren't sensational?
I think perhaps you're confusing "sensational" with high-profile. The problem is that it's often the EFF/ACLU's involvement that makes a case high profile. Like when the ACLU argued that Nike should be allowed to lie in marketing materials: that case really only became high profile because the ACLU got involved, not the other way around.
It is believed that the FBI seized it on the request of either the Italian or the Swiss government.
Since the FBI isn't talking, no one is quite sure who requested the actual seizure. Getting that information from the FBI is the first step towards unravelling this case.
Uh, no.
In 2003, Sen. John Kerry had $395,000 in taxable income
Capital gains are "taxable income". So were the royalties from his book. You don't ADD those to the 395K; those are PART OF the 395K.
Check his tax return for yourself if you don't believe me.
But, my main point is that basing your decision on who to vote for entirely on who waffles or who went AWOL is not logically sound.
ven if a candidate espouses all the issues I care about in a way that is perfect to me... if he was just completely lying in order to get my vote, what good is that? You have to know enough about the person to trust they're going to do what they say they will. You have to know enough about the person to feel okay with their votes on future issues you haven't thought of yet, etc. Are they the type of person who will, say, lead us into a illegal war based on false pretenses? Well they certainly never brought that up in the 2000 debates!
The candidate's stance on current issues is one thing worth considering, but we're not electing issues!
I'm voting for Kerry, but even I think the attacks on him as a flip-flopper are valid if they're true. The point they're trying to make is that he just says/votes in a way that is politically convenient to him at the time. If anti-abortion suddenly becomes fashionable, is he going to change his position? It's a point worth debating if you ask me.
FireFox extensions aren't written in C. They GUI is written in XUL and the logic is written in Javascript. Since XUL is an XML dialect, there isn't really an "API" to speak of.
I've read this book and it was pretty good, though I didn't actually use it to develop any applications, so I can't really say how helpful it was. I mostly just read it to get an idea of what this whole XUL thing was about. It seems interesting, but pretty weird, and not necessarily much easier than writing a Java app, for example. But again, I never actually tried it, so what do I know?
Anyway, the whole process is sufficiently different from "normal" application development that you'll probably need a somewhat lengthy tutorial to get started. Unfortunately, I don't know of any online ones. (Which isn't to say that they don't exist, just that I haven't looked around enough to know.)
Next time, just pick the pieces you want and assemble it yourself and save a grand or two...
Not necessarily... Dell can get parts CHEAP. I just bought a dell "server" (no OS) for $350. Throw in some more RAM (Dell overcharges on the RAM) and a better video card (it's a server, so it comes with some shitty PCI card) and you're ready to go. But you'd never get an equivalent case+motherboard+processor as cheap as I got it from Dell, even off pricewatch. I tried.
I'd say that there's no more market tested and carefully chosen names than car model names. The Chevy Nova notwithstanding. :)
p
http://www.snopes.com/business/misxlate/nova.as
Check out this, though:
Yet Tanenbaum vehemently insists that Torvalds wrote Linux from scratch, which means from a blank computer screen to most people. No books, no resources, no notes...
So, what he's apparently claiming is that Linux is stolen code because Linus used BOOKS when he wrote it.
All true hackers were born with knowledge of C. Anyone who had to read a book about it is a thief.
Interesting that the word "niche" (pronounced 'neesh'), can be mis-pronounced as 'nitch' by so many people, that it will then become phonetically mis-spelled as "nitch" by someone.
My dictionaries list both pronounciations as correct. Guess it's time for you to find something new to whine about.
The content was displayed fine and that's what counts.
In most classes/situations, I'd agree. This class, however, was a technical writing class, and the way you formatted the information was just as important as the actual information.
Oh, interesting. Do you happen to know what font that is? I have all the MS core TT fonts installed (uhhh, I think). Is it in "wingdings" or something? I have "webdings", but no "wingdings"...
No, this was OpenOffice 1.1.
Granted, these were fairly complex documents with lots of embedded graphics and stuff... And I was also opening a dozen (or more) of documents every week from about two dozen authors, presumably with different versions of Word, etc.
The error rate wasn't bad, but it just wasn't good enough.
That's not totally openoffice's fault. If your friend would have sent you the file in an open format, then you wouldn't have had a problem.
Uh, I made no mention of faults. Show me the part of my post where I claimed that it was OpenOffice's fault (whatever that means). Believe me, I would've much rather used OpenOffice than installing VMWare, Windows, and Word.
But it doesn't really matter whose fault it was. I was responding to a guy who claimed that you could use OpenOffice in a school environment without any problems. My experience tells me that might be true for some classes, but is absolutely not true for classes where exact reproduction of formatting is important.
I tried to use OpenOffice for an online Technical Writing class last term (just ended last week). It worked fairly well. I was always able to get the information out of the documents. Only formatting was ever broken.
Unfortunately that's not always good enough. After too many times correcting "mistakes" that weren't actually mistakes (e.g. suggesting that a classmate put bullets in his list, even though there already WERE bullets, OpenOffice just wasn't showing them) I ended up switching back to Word.
OpenOffice is good at reading Word documents, but it's definitely not good enough for everyone's needs.
There's very little serious music--opera, "Classical", traditional jazz, sacred--to be had there, other than the "top 20"
What an annoyingly limited definition of "serious music". Basically, when you say "serious", you mean "everything I like", right?
Because everything you don't like is just crap turned out by no-talent hacks, right?
PNG and JPEG use 24 bit color(plus 8 bits of alpha for PNG), while the cameras can produce 36 bit color.
Actually, PNG supports up to 48 bits of color.
I don't know about JPEG.
Also, for Canon, RAW != TIFF so maybe the files aren't as big as you're thinking. My 6 megapixel Canon 10-D generates 5-6MB RAW images (they vary in size because they have a jpeg embedded in them).
.RAW files (which ARE compressed) are smaller than uncompressed TIFF files.
They vary in size because they're compressed, mostly.
Further, for an interesting scene (i.e. not with the lens cap on), this is relatively uncompressible data, so even if you could in some way encode the raw CCD data in PNG format, you wouldn't see much of a gain.
That's not true. Even in an interesting scene, you will have large fields of similar colors which can still be compressed losslessly with good results. ZIP won't get you the best results because it doesn't understand how the data is structured. It's just like how FLAC gets much better compression than ZIP for audio, even though both are lossless. If you understand the structure of the data and where the common patterns emerge, you can tune your compression algorithm to those andcan get decent results.
That's why
Oh. I am glad that is what you thought you knew. Unfortunately, you're wrong.
.RAW images fit this description as the image has had no post-processing on it. It's exactly as it comes off the CCD. Lossless compression and addition of metadata do not change the actual image, so it still fits that definition of "raw".
Here is a definition for the word raw:
2. a. Being in a natural condition; not processed or refined: raw wool.
Canon
I'm not saying your more rigorous definition of it isn't a valid one, but it's not the one Canon chooses to use.
If you want to check what you think know before posting incorrect information to slashdot you could try google. A search for "canon raw lossless" gets lots of results showing exactly how wrong you are.
I'm sorry I'm being a snide dick, but posting incorrect information to slashdot once is fine, we've all done it. But when someone corrects you and you say that you still think they are wrong without even doing 30 seconds of research... well, shit, man. That's annoying.
RAW means it's the image data taken directly from the CCD. Canon's RAW format does, in fact, have lossless compression.
Yeah, you're right. Reading it again, it sounds like that's what they meant.
I think the point of this is that you wouldn't NEED to type the TLD. They want to make this TLD the default search domain on mobile devices.
.biz, extending the address space. Instead, it is a new text-based user friendly addressing scheme for phones and mobile devices, which could replace and extend the power of phone numbers - just as the current Internet domain scheme did for numeric Internet addresses, replacing 207.46.245.214 with "microsoft.com", for instance.
So, for example, http://google/ would take you to google.mobile on a cell phone.
That's the impression I got from the article, anyway:
The application could turn out to be more politically charged than its proponents hope, because the mobile domain is not just another Internet domain like
Before reading this, let the record show that I am a subversion fanboy. But I am only a Subversion fanboy because it solved almost all of my complaints about CVS. I am not involved with the project at all.
Do developers out there voice the need to store binaries?
Uh, most projects of any size will have at least a few binary files in their repository... icons, etc. But you could store those in CVS without too many problems.
Also, have there been many problems that required atomic commits? Can someone explain why this is important?
Rolling back changes without atomic commits is a pain in fucking ass. Have you ever had to do it? You have to track down every file that you changed (somehow... hopefully you can remember), check which version was the version prior to your commit, and get all those versions of files. For example "Okay, I need version 1.7 of foo.c and version 1.8 of barf.c and version 1.13 of foo.h." It's totally annoying.
Plus atomic commits just makes it much, much easier to keep track of what changes have gone it. This is my biggest, biggest complaint about CVS. File-level commits just make no sense. There is no time, ever, that I can think of when the ability to commit an entire changeset at once isn't better than committing a single file at a time.
Also, Subversions says that it is much faster at things like tagging, but tagging is not a very frequent operation...
Depends on your development process. During beta periods, it's common to make a tag or two per day, and if each tag takes ten minutes, well... it's not a big thing, but it's certainly annoying.
To me it sounds like a great product but I am not able to see a compelling reason why most development shops out there who are currently in CVS would rush to switch.
Certainly not every shop is going to "rush to switch". But, regardless, I imagine that every shop will switch eventually. It may take years, but subversion's advantages are significant enough that in my opinion it will become the new version control standard.
Also note that CVS was crufty and adding new features was almost impossible. Subversion targetted CVS features as their 1.0 milestone. But more importantly, the Subversion code base is a much better baseline to work from when adding new features. So you can expect that it will only get better in the future.