You're supposed to infer from the choice of n as the variable that it's restricted to being a natural number. Notice that the other variables are early letters in the Latin alphabet, in lowercase, so they presumably are real numbers, unless stated otherwise.
Without these assumptions, anyone who's had a modern algebra class could come along and trivially solve the thing by defining a new group of numbers that makes it work.
Okay, so 33 people want cupcakes, but three of them are babies and will only eat one, so you can expect about 63 to be eaten. It is imperative that you round that figure up by at least 5% to account for people who eat three (or four; with that many teenagers, somebody's going to be a pig) or who said they didn't like cupcakes and then eat one anyway because everybody else is, so rounding up to the nearest dozen that means six dozen cupcakes total, which you can bake in two batches if you have three muffin-tin pans. I'd make them all chocolate with chocolate frosting plus chocolate sprinkles, which pretty much ought to cover all the bases, unless you've got somebody who's allergic to chocolate (poor soul).
> This is really stupid. We are all excited about making more money, > but not worried about the impacts.
The impacts of making money, or the impacts of the ice melting? We can't do a whole lot, one way or the other, to impact whether the ice melts or not. Even the people who advocate things like the Kyoto protocol admit that no matter how many nations implement it, it would be nothing like enough, and those are the fans; the skeptics question whether it could have any impact at all. It's an issue of scale: the atmosphere is *big*, and attempting to reduce the amount of carbon dioxide in it is like trying to reduce the amount of salt in the ocean. You can install a few desalination plants on the coast that pump salt water out, desalinate it, and pour the fresh water back in, but it's expensive, and then you've got to put trillions of tons of salt *somewhere*, and it's very hard to guarantee that it won't get back into the ocean, and even harder to guarantee that if it doesn't, that won't have a worse environmental impact than the salt did in the first place. It's a very large undertaking, and the Kyoto protocol fundamentally is a token gesture, not any kind of meaningful solution.
Making money, OTOH, is something people seem to know how to do something about, at least sometimes. People like to have attainable goals.
> Grammar checkers are often incorrect in their analysis, > particularly if you write fiction and technical works
Yeah, fiction, or technical works, or formal research papers, or general-interest non-fiction, or, you know, pretty much anything else with more complicated grammar than Dick and Jane.
> What does LaTeX have to do with checking English grammar?
Latex is what you make the whip out of, that you use to convince your English professor that your paper's grammar must be okay, since the grammar checker didn't notice any problems. Without the latex whip, it may be difficult to convince the professor of this obvious fact.
> A grammar checker would be a good idea if: It is well implemented, from what > I hear, Wordperfect's Grammatik used to be almost always correct
I seriously doubt it, although I have not seen that specific one. However, grammar is notoriously AI-complete, and I have a really hard time imagining that grammar checking is any better solved than translation.
The best grammar checkers available, as far as I am aware, are correct just about often enough to get a D in high school English class -- maybe a C if you stick to simple one-clause sentences (because the grammar checker can mostly handle the grammar on those, but you'll be severely downgraded for style).
There are only three reasons I can think of to use a grammar checker.
The most obvious reason is if your own knowledge of the language is really that bad (which, it seems, is true for a rather larger percentage of the populace than it is comfortable for me to contemplate at length).
Another reason would be if you are sending a document to someone (e.g., your boss or a business partner) and you know they are using a given piece of word processing software, which includes this feature; you might then want to use the same grammar checker so that you can "adjust" your grammar to match its peculiar ideas of correct usage and so avoid potentially-embarrassing green squigglies.
Finally, the *best* reason to use a grammar checker is for entertainment. It is marvelously entertaining to feed the poor innocent grammar checker excerpts of real (and well-written) literature and watch it raise hilariously spurious objections. (Always feed it good material, not bad writing; false negatives are much less entertaining than false positives.)
Personally I would like grammar checkers a lot better if they came with big red warning labels disclaiming any notions of accuracy.
Incidentally, the corresponding US assumption would be that everyone has a checking account, and that the major overhead cost associated with writing a personal check is the negligible cost of having the checks printed. Also, checks are of course all in US funds drawn on a US bank; zipcodes have exactly five digits, phone numbers have exactly ten, and names match/[A-Z][a-z]+ ([A-Z][.]? )?(Mc|Mac|Van)?[A-Z][a-z]*/
> Perhaps then I (in Germany) would never again have to see all that > spam from the US to the US (can be identified by US cultural > assumptions like "everyone has a credit card",...)
That's not so much a US cultural assumption as a target-demographic cultural assumption. There are a *lot* of people in the US without credit cards, and a lot more who have a credit card or two of them "for emergencies" (the line the banks always pitch) but are not interested in using them on a regular basis or to purchase anything on the internet. Such people, however, are usually not part of the target demographic of spam. (People who are careful about their spending and/or their identifying information? Bah!) The only reason we (by "we" here I mean people without credit cards) even *get* spam is because spammers don't have an easy way to determine which email addresses correspond to people like us.
> 240000 hits/day is just under 3 hits/second, after all.
Average, yeah. What's the standard deviation? What's the peak? (I don't know anything at all about the site in question, I'm just saying, averages don't tell the whole story.)
> Whatever the reason, I find dark text on a light background easier; > black on white is fine, as long as the brightness isn't turned up > too far.
I wouldn't even like black on medium gray. I like the background color to be less than 30% of the way from black to white.
> People seem perfectly happy to read stuff on paper using black on > white, after all, so it ought to work reasonably well on screen too.
First, the books people read for any length of time at once (especially fiction) do not generally use white paper as such, but a somewhat milder hue, off-white or even bordering on yellow-beige. Textbooks use black on white, but if you try to read textbooks for more than about four hours at a time your eyes will rebell (if your brain doesn't rebell first, that is).
Second, and more important, paper is an absorptive medium, rather than a luminant one, so the considerations are rather different. A paper book does not beam waves of photons at your retina sixty times a second.
> IHNTA, but that is a classic color scheme. Who is it that first came > up with the wheat/darkslategray combination? is it some CDE thing?
I'm not sure. The situation wherein *I* first ran into it was when I installed RedHat 6, and those were the default colours in Emacs (when running under X11; at the time, console-mode Emacs didn't support color).
The really notable thing about this color combination is that (assuming a decent refresh rate and incandescent rather than fluorescent lighting in the room) you can stare into an 18"-viewable CRT for sixteen hours a day and not go blind or get headaches. It's even better than the amber on black that the better dumb terminals used. I think it's a combination of two factors: first, it has exactly the right amount of contrast. (Too little contrast and it's hard to read; too much, and your eyes get tired.) Second, the background is the darker colour, which reduces the total amount of light your eyes have to deal with, which, over the course of a few hours, significantly reduces eyestrain.
It's not very exciting to look at, but then, that's the point. Too much excitement, amortized over too much time, can be a bad thing. If in doubt, set your colors to lime green on magenta and see how long you can take it. Black on white isn't as bad as that, but it's not good either.
The name "Gerusami Sarathi" springs immediately to mind. He may not be of the specific ethnicities you listed, though. (In fact, his name sounds rather Hindustani to my ear, though I don't actually know).
> I'm sure many more people would have a cleaner house if cleaning their house was fun.
There actually are people who think cleaning stuff up is a real blast. Most of us are convinced they're certifiably loony, but they're so useful to have around that very seldom does anyone have one of them committed to a mental institution. The usual response is more like, "Hey, that's great, glad you're having such a good time. Maybe I'll buy you a new mop out of my next paycheck. No, don't thank me, I just love it when you have a good time, really."
There are not very *many* of these people around, though. Perhaps one or two per thousand, not nearly enough to keep all the world's households clean. Which is probably for the best -- I think it would be kinda scary if there were too many of them.
Um, I would have called DAT a success. What *other* formats are there for backup tapes? DAT is the only major one I can think of that's common across multiple hardware vendors. It's what the AlphaServer DS10 at work (which runs OpenVMS) uses, and it's also what the Dell PowerEdge 2800 (running Windows Server 2003, which is not my fault) uses. Apart from Jaz, what else is there?
Granted, these days the writable optical formats are starting to edge out backup tapes for the lower-capacity markets, but really those are an entirely different technology, not just a different more-or-less-equivalent format like Betamax versus VHS or Blu-Ray versus HD-DVD.
And as has been pointed out, Sony also backed CD, which was a resounding success. On the other end of the spectrum, I suspect Betamax is rather better known than some of their other failed formats. Some of their formats gain widespread adoption, and some don't. The thing that makes Betamax noteworthy in this regard is that they put significant effort into attempting to gain widespread consumer adoption, and it didn't pan out the way they wanted. Betamax is the only Sony format I can think of (so far, the jury still being out on Blu-Ray) for which that is true.
My own prediction for the Blu-Ray versus HD-DVD format war is that while they're still duking it out, enough consumers will wait to see which one wins that meanwhile some newer, shinier, higher-capacity format will come along and eat both their lunches. That's what happened to the various higher-capacity-floppy formats (e.g., LS120 SuperDrive): everyone kept waiting to see which one was going to take hold in the market, and it took so long that iOmega came along and stole the whole show with the Zip drive (although, that also was ecclipsed rather severely when CD burners became affordable, largely because CD was already a successful format).
> sometimes typing in the search field completely locks up the machine (I believe by spiking > the CPU). [...] It locks the machine (all applications unresponsive as well as OS control > sequences) for about 5-15 seconds at a time.
There may be a bug in Firefox that *triggers* this behavior, but the the problem you're seeing without question must involve either an operating system bug (probably in kernel space (but not necessarily in the scheduler; it could be in the memory management or a device driver, for instance)) or *possibly* a hardware problem (but an OS bug is far more likely). If the operating system were doing its job 100% correctly, on stable hardware, Firefox *itself* could lock up hard, but other applications would still be responsive (although they could be a little slower than usual, especially if the system is I/O bound). This is called "preemptive multitasking", and all major operating systems are *supposed* to do this, but sometimes there's a bug that allows an edge case to slip through, usually because the code that's looping or otherwise unresponsive is exempt from pre-emption, probably because it's part of the OS itself, usually kernel-space code. This can happen in any multitasking OS, at least potentially, but you wouldn't normally expect the same Firefox bug to trigger it in completely different OSes. (Are you sure it happens in both Windows and Linux, and that other apps become unresponsive on both? That's not totally impossible, but it would definitely be unusual. OTOH, it would not be unusual for Firefox itself to become unresponsive on both OSes, but only one of them experience the OS bug that makes other apps unresponsive as well. That seems much more likely...)
With that said, Firefox obvously should, to the greatest extent possible, avoid triggering such a thing, if nothing else because even if only the browser itself locks up that's still a very palpable bug. If the firefox developers can figure out what's causing this thing (or if you can *help* them figure it out... since it happens to you, you're potentially in a good position to do that), then the triggering bug should get fixed in Firefox. (As for the underlying OS issue, well, that's another matter.)
If you can't come up with a set of steps that always triggers it, perhaps you could at least capture stack traces or something. (I know, I know, capturing stack traces is a *pain*... you have to use a debugger... ugh. However, somebody needs to do this if the bug is to be tracked down and fixed. So, umm, how *badly* do you want the bug fixed? As for me, I've for one reason or another never seen it happen, so I'm not a good candidate for tracking it down.)
Or you could wait for someone else to track it down. It is, however, hard to predict when someone else will run into the issue and have the gumption to do that.
> Just in case some OSS developer reads this post, use the following names for > your next text editor: Tlaloc, Escuintle, Vivanderix or Parangaracutirimicuaro. > Highly descriptive names, right?
The obvious problem with those names is, they are all easily pronounceable to the English-speaking tongue; even the last one is, once you break it into syllables: Par ang ar ac ut ir im ic u ar o. Instead, you should try words with a worse balance of consonants and vowels (preferably either no consonants at all, or else five or six consonants per vowel), more letters with high scrabble values, such as x and q, and, if at all possible, unusual capitalization anomolies. For instance, you could call the HTML editor "mRurmx", the file duplicator "oAEuilio", and the trolling tool "BrnqTju".
Or you could name them he, fd, and sdt. Or ghtmled, gfdup, and gtroll. Or xHTMLed, XFileDup, and XTroll. Or KWebEd, KDuplikator, and KTroller. Or gnoHTML, gnofileduper, and gnotroll. The problem with these naming schemes is that you have clearly categorized your program as belonging Unix, with the Gnu tool suite, with the X Window System, with KDE, or with Gnome, respectively. Similarly with WinHTML, WinDuplicator, and WinTroller, or with MacHTML, MacDuplicator, and MacTroller, or for that matter BeWebmaster, BeDouble, and BeTroll. You could attempt to be more platform-agnostic, open, and generic, by naming them things like OpenHTMLEditor, FileDuplicator, and OpenTroller, but then the names start sounding very verbose, and at that point you might as well make them OpenHTMLEditor.org, FileDuplicator.org, and OpenTroller.org, so that people know where to find them.
Indeed, if you're going to be *verbose*, you could give them names that're both descriptive *and* branded, e.g., Zotso HTML Editor, Vincto File Duplicator, or the Xpanta Smagoric Slashdot Troller. Then again, if you're going to do that, you could go with recursive acronyms: ZWE Web Editor, VFD File Duplicator, and the XSST Spantasmagoric Slashdot Troller. Then people can at least shorten it (ZWE, VFD, XSST) when they're trying to be more terse.
Oh, wait, you wanted a *good* name? Well, that's harder. Names like "Mandriva" have the advantage of being simple and clearly unique; they're not descriptive, but calling it "Desktop-Oriented Linux Distribution", besides sounding awefully generic, will end up getting shortened to DOLD, which sounds very dull.
> A star destroyer would below the crap out of the enterprise, A, B, C, D or E. Any enterprise > is completely outclassed by something the size of a star destroyer.
Sure, in terms of hardware. The size ratio is something like a thousand to one, and the firepower ratio is pretty unballanced too. But the star destroyer (unless it happens to be Vader's flagship, and even then to a large extent) is run pretty much entirely by bumbling dolts who don't understand the first thing about running a starship, much less a military exercise.
They couldn't even handle the Millennium Falcon when it pulled simple tricks like hiding in an asteroid field or behind the backside of the star destroyer's own control deck, and that's *with* Vader's guidance. What makes you think they're going to be able to handle a ship (any ship) run by intelligent protagonists who know how to recalibrate deflector relays and reverse tachyon fields? Heck, Spock and Scotty could probably take on the average star destroyer (sans Vader) in a shuttlecraft, with a tricorder, a pair of hand phasers, and some spare superconductor wire. It would seem impossible, sure, but then the Empire's bumbling admirals would stand around looking puzzled and giving stupid orders like "Track them!" and making inane comments like "No ship that small has a cloaking device!", and meanwhile the protagonists would be crawling through ductwork, hacking into the central computer, mapping out a path to the bridge, and improvising weapons out of parts stolen from access panels during the process of patching into the ship's power, weapons, and life support systems.
Now, that's an interesting one. On the one hand, the star destroyer is MUCH larger (even than the Galaxy-class Enterprise D). On the other hand, the Enterprise has a competent crew of protagonists onboard.
I know, it's not a print magazine per se, but it's at least as good. If you read every article featured on oreilly.com you will not go far wrong in terms of having the software technology angle covered. (Hardware is another matter; O'Reilly doesn't cover that nearly as well, so you'll want another source for that.)
> PLAY can take advantage of a sound card [in some versions] if used properly.
This is the first I have ever heard of this, despite that I have done *substantial* QBasic programming. (The prof in my Data Structures and Algorithm Analysis course told me I did things in QBasic that should not be done [in QBasic]. I used it for all of my assignments for that course, and then proceeded to continue to use it for the bulk of the programming I did for several more years until I learned Perl.)
Are you certain you aren't thinking of QuickBasic?
> Spoken like someone who's never seen it in action.
I've seen the big plasma displays in stores, and the image quality gnaws on rocks.
> when next gen stuff brings along 1080p - way above what your typical 21" will do
1080? Are you serious? Maybe you've been using LCD displays too long and have completely lost track of what a *real* monitor can do.
I have yet to see a 19" CRT that doesn't support 1600x1200 (the cheapest 19" monitors and even many of the better 17" monitors will display that); a 21" one will support higher resolutions, typically 2560x2048. Granted, not everyone's eyes can see that much detail on that size screen, so many people find it preferable to run their 21" monitors at 1024x768 or even 800x600, but still, touting the high-quality of enormous TV displays that can't even do 1600x1200 seems more than a little disingenuous.
Slashdot Mirror
> Uhmm, if n = 0, that is not true.
You're supposed to infer from the choice of n as the variable that it's restricted to being a natural number. Notice that the other variables are early letters in the Latin alphabet, in lowercase, so they presumably are real numbers, unless stated otherwise.
Without these assumptions, anyone who's had a modern algebra class could come along and trivially solve the thing by defining a new group of numbers that makes it work.
> 311311222112
13211321322112 comes next, then 1113122113121113222112
Now, prove by induction that none of the numbers in this infinite series ever contain digits other than 1, 2, or 3.
Okay, so 33 people want cupcakes, but three of them are babies and will only eat one, so you can expect about 63 to be eaten. It is imperative that you round that figure up by at least 5% to account for people who eat three (or four; with that many teenagers, somebody's going to be a pig) or who said they didn't like cupcakes and then eat one anyway because everybody else is, so rounding up to the nearest dozen that means six dozen cupcakes total, which you can bake in two batches if you have three muffin-tin pans. I'd make them all chocolate with chocolate frosting plus chocolate sprinkles, which pretty much ought to cover all the bases, unless you've got somebody who's allergic to chocolate (poor soul).
> Spoken like someone who hasn't sat in on a high school English
> class in a while.
Oh, come on, 1993 wasn't *that* long ago?
Was it?
Guys? Hey! I said, it wasn't that long ago, was it?
[crickets chirping]
*sigh*.
> This is really stupid. We are all excited about making more money,
> but not worried about the impacts.
The impacts of making money, or the impacts of the ice melting? We can't do a whole lot, one way or the other, to impact whether the ice melts or not. Even the people who advocate things like the Kyoto protocol admit that no matter how many nations implement it, it would be nothing like enough, and those are the fans; the skeptics question whether it could have any impact at all. It's an issue of scale: the atmosphere is *big*, and attempting to reduce the amount of carbon dioxide in it is like trying to reduce the amount of salt in the ocean. You can install a few desalination plants on the coast that pump salt water out, desalinate it, and pour the fresh water back in, but it's expensive, and then you've got to put trillions of tons of salt *somewhere*, and it's very hard to guarantee that it won't get back into the ocean, and even harder to guarantee that if it doesn't, that won't have a worse environmental impact than the salt did in the first place. It's a very large undertaking, and the Kyoto protocol fundamentally is a token gesture, not any kind of meaningful solution.
Making money, OTOH, is something people seem to know how to do something about, at least sometimes. People like to have attainable goals.
> Grammar checkers are often incorrect in their analysis,
> particularly if you write fiction and technical works
Yeah, fiction, or technical works, or formal research papers, or general-interest non-fiction, or, you know, pretty much anything else with more complicated grammar than Dick and Jane.
> What does LaTeX have to do with checking English grammar?
Latex is what you make the whip out of, that you use to convince your English professor that your paper's grammar must be okay, since the grammar checker didn't notice any problems. Without the latex whip, it may be difficult to convince the professor of this obvious fact.
> A grammar checker would be a good idea if: It is well implemented, from what
> I hear, Wordperfect's Grammatik used to be almost always correct
I seriously doubt it, although I have not seen that specific one. However, grammar is notoriously AI-complete, and I have a really hard time imagining that grammar checking is any better solved than translation.
The best grammar checkers available, as far as I am aware, are correct just about often enough to get a D in high school English class -- maybe a C if you stick to simple one-clause sentences (because the grammar checker can mostly handle the grammar on those, but you'll be severely downgraded for style).
There are only three reasons I can think of to use a grammar checker.
The most obvious reason is if your own knowledge of the language is really that bad (which, it seems, is true for a rather larger percentage of the populace than it is comfortable for me to contemplate at length).
Another reason would be if you are sending a document to someone (e.g., your boss or a business partner) and you know they are using a given piece of word processing software, which includes this feature; you might then want to use the same grammar checker so that you can "adjust" your grammar to match its peculiar ideas of correct usage and so avoid potentially-embarrassing green squigglies.
Finally, the *best* reason to use a grammar checker is for entertainment. It is marvelously entertaining to feed the poor innocent grammar checker excerpts of real (and well-written) literature and watch it raise hilariously spurious objections. (Always feed it good material, not bad writing; false negatives are much less entertaining than false positives.)
Personally I would like grammar checkers a lot better if they came with big red warning labels disclaiming any notions of accuracy.
Incidentally, the corresponding US assumption would be that everyone has a checking account, and that the major overhead cost associated with writing a personal check is the negligible cost of having the checks printed. Also, checks are of course all in US funds drawn on a US bank; zipcodes have exactly five digits, phone numbers have exactly ten, and names match /[A-Z][a-z]+ ([A-Z][.]? )?(Mc|Mac|Van)?[A-Z][a-z]*/
> Perhaps then I (in Germany) would never again have to see all that
> spam from the US to the US (can be identified by US cultural
> assumptions like "everyone has a credit card",...)
That's not so much a US cultural assumption as a target-demographic cultural assumption. There are a *lot* of people in the US without credit cards, and a lot more who have a credit card or two of them "for emergencies" (the line the banks always pitch) but are not interested in using them on a regular basis or to purchase anything on the internet. Such people, however, are usually not part of the target demographic of spam. (People who are careful about their spending and/or their identifying information? Bah!) The only reason we (by "we" here I mean people without credit cards) even *get* spam is because spammers don't have an easy way to determine which email addresses correspond to people like us.
> 240000 hits/day is just under 3 hits/second, after all.
Average, yeah. What's the standard deviation? What's the peak? (I don't know anything at all about the site in question, I'm just saying, averages don't tell the whole story.)
> Whatever the reason, I find dark text on a light background easier;
> black on white is fine, as long as the brightness isn't turned up
> too far.
I wouldn't even like black on medium gray. I like the background color to be less than 30% of the way from black to white.
> People seem perfectly happy to read stuff on paper using black on
> white, after all, so it ought to work reasonably well on screen too.
First, the books people read for any length of time at once (especially fiction) do not generally use white paper as such, but a somewhat milder hue, off-white or even bordering on yellow-beige. Textbooks use black on white, but if you try to read textbooks for more than about four hours at a time your eyes will rebell (if your brain doesn't rebell first, that is).
Second, and more important, paper is an absorptive medium, rather than a luminant one, so the considerations are rather different. A paper book does not beam waves of photons at your retina sixty times a second.
> IHNTA, but that is a classic color scheme. Who is it that first came
> up with the wheat/darkslategray combination? is it some CDE thing?
I'm not sure. The situation wherein *I* first ran into it was when I installed RedHat 6, and those were the default colours in Emacs (when running under X11; at the time, console-mode Emacs didn't support color).
The really notable thing about this color combination is that (assuming a decent refresh rate and incandescent rather than fluorescent lighting in the room) you can stare into an 18"-viewable CRT for sixteen hours a day and not go blind or get headaches. It's even better than the amber on black that the better dumb terminals used. I think it's a combination of two factors: first, it has exactly the right amount of contrast. (Too little contrast and it's hard to read; too much, and your eyes get tired.) Second, the background is the darker colour, which reduces the total amount of light your eyes have to deal with, which, over the course of a few hours, significantly reduces eyestrain.
It's not very exciting to look at, but then, that's the point. Too much excitement, amortized over too much time, can be a bad thing. If in doubt, set your colors to lime green on magenta and see how long you can take it. Black on white isn't as bad as that, but it's not good either.
The name "Gerusami Sarathi" springs immediately to mind. He may not be of the specific ethnicities you listed, though. (In fact, his name sounds rather Hindustani to my ear, though I don't actually know).
> The politically correct terminology is Serif-American text.
I'm using a sans-serif font, you insensitive clod!
(Come to think of it, I'm not using black on white either, but #FFE6BC on #294D4A...)
> I'm sure many more people would have a cleaner house if cleaning their house was fun.
There actually are people who think cleaning stuff up is a real blast. Most of us are convinced they're certifiably loony, but they're so useful to have around that very seldom does anyone have one of them committed to a mental institution. The usual response is more like, "Hey, that's great, glad you're having such a good time. Maybe I'll buy you a new mop out of my next paycheck. No, don't thank me, I just love it when you have a good time, really."
There are not very *many* of these people around, though. Perhaps one or two per thousand, not nearly enough to keep all the world's households clean. Which is probably for the best -- I think it would be kinda scary if there were too many of them.
> Use of SIOX will most likely increase Fark and Worth 1000 entries.
> No comment on if this is a good or bad thing...
Yes. Yes, it is a good or bad thing.
> Sony also backed DATs
Um, I would have called DAT a success. What *other* formats are there for backup tapes? DAT is the only major one I can think of that's common across multiple hardware vendors. It's what the AlphaServer DS10 at work (which runs OpenVMS) uses, and it's also what the Dell PowerEdge 2800 (running Windows Server 2003, which is not my fault) uses. Apart from Jaz, what else is there?
Granted, these days the writable optical formats are starting to edge out backup tapes for the lower-capacity markets, but really those are an entirely different technology, not just a different more-or-less-equivalent format like Betamax versus VHS or Blu-Ray versus HD-DVD.
And as has been pointed out, Sony also backed CD, which was a resounding success. On the other end of the spectrum, I suspect Betamax is rather better known than some of their other failed formats. Some of their formats gain widespread adoption, and some don't. The thing that makes Betamax noteworthy in this regard is that they put significant effort into attempting to gain widespread consumer adoption, and it didn't pan out the way they wanted. Betamax is the only Sony format I can think of (so far, the jury still being out on Blu-Ray) for which that is true.
My own prediction for the Blu-Ray versus HD-DVD format war is that while they're still duking it out, enough consumers will wait to see which one wins that meanwhile some newer, shinier, higher-capacity format will come along and eat both their lunches. That's what happened to the various higher-capacity-floppy formats (e.g., LS120 SuperDrive): everyone kept waiting to see which one was going to take hold in the market, and it took so long that iOmega came along and stole the whole show with the Zip drive (although, that also was ecclipsed rather severely when CD burners became affordable, largely because CD was already a successful format).
> sometimes typing in the search field completely locks up the machine (I believe by spiking
> the CPU). [...] It locks the machine (all applications unresponsive as well as OS control
> sequences) for about 5-15 seconds at a time.
There may be a bug in Firefox that *triggers* this behavior, but the the problem you're seeing without question must involve either an operating system bug (probably in kernel space (but not necessarily in the scheduler; it could be in the memory management or a device driver, for instance)) or *possibly* a hardware problem (but an OS bug is far more likely). If the operating system were doing its job 100% correctly, on stable hardware, Firefox *itself* could lock up hard, but other applications would still be responsive (although they could be a little slower than usual, especially if the system is I/O bound). This is called "preemptive multitasking", and all major operating systems are *supposed* to do this, but sometimes there's a bug that allows an edge case to slip through, usually because the code that's looping or otherwise unresponsive is exempt from pre-emption, probably because it's part of the OS itself, usually kernel-space code. This can happen in any multitasking OS, at least potentially, but you wouldn't normally expect the same Firefox bug to trigger it in completely different OSes. (Are you sure it happens in both Windows and Linux, and that other apps become unresponsive on both? That's not totally impossible, but it would definitely be unusual. OTOH, it would not be unusual for Firefox itself to become unresponsive on both OSes, but only one of them experience the OS bug that makes other apps unresponsive as well. That seems much more likely...)
With that said, Firefox obvously should, to the greatest extent possible, avoid triggering such a thing, if nothing else because even if only the browser itself locks up that's still a very palpable bug. If the firefox developers can figure out what's causing this thing (or if you can *help* them figure it out... since it happens to you, you're potentially in a good position to do that), then the triggering bug should get fixed in Firefox. (As for the underlying OS issue, well, that's another matter.)
If you can't come up with a set of steps that always triggers it, perhaps you could at least capture stack traces or something. (I know, I know, capturing stack traces is a *pain*... you have to use a debugger... ugh. However, somebody needs to do this if the bug is to be tracked down and fixed. So, umm, how *badly* do you want the bug fixed? As for me, I've for one reason or another never seen it happen, so I'm not a good candidate for tracking it down.)
Or you could wait for someone else to track it down. It is, however, hard to predict when someone else will run into the issue and have the gumption to do that.
> Just in case some OSS developer reads this post, use the following names for
> your next text editor: Tlaloc, Escuintle, Vivanderix or Parangaracutirimicuaro.
> Highly descriptive names, right?
The obvious problem with those names is, they are all easily pronounceable to the English-speaking tongue; even the last one is, once you break it into syllables: Par ang ar ac ut ir im ic u ar o. Instead, you should try words with a worse balance of consonants and vowels (preferably either no consonants at all, or else five or six consonants per vowel), more letters with high scrabble values, such as x and q, and, if at all possible, unusual capitalization anomolies. For instance, you could call the HTML editor "mRurmx", the file duplicator "oAEuilio", and the trolling tool "BrnqTju".
Or you could name them he, fd, and sdt. Or ghtmled, gfdup, and gtroll. Or xHTMLed, XFileDup, and XTroll. Or KWebEd, KDuplikator, and KTroller. Or gnoHTML, gnofileduper, and gnotroll. The problem with these naming schemes is that you have clearly categorized your program as belonging Unix, with the Gnu tool suite, with the X Window System, with KDE, or with Gnome, respectively. Similarly with WinHTML, WinDuplicator, and WinTroller, or with MacHTML, MacDuplicator, and MacTroller, or for that matter BeWebmaster, BeDouble, and BeTroll. You could attempt to be more platform-agnostic, open, and generic, by naming them things like OpenHTMLEditor, FileDuplicator, and OpenTroller, but then the names start sounding very verbose, and at that point you might as well make them OpenHTMLEditor.org, FileDuplicator.org, and OpenTroller.org, so that people know where to find them.
Indeed, if you're going to be *verbose*, you could give them names that're both descriptive *and* branded, e.g., Zotso HTML Editor, Vincto File Duplicator, or the Xpanta Smagoric Slashdot Troller. Then again, if you're going to do that, you could go with recursive acronyms: ZWE Web Editor, VFD File Duplicator, and the XSST Spantasmagoric Slashdot Troller. Then people can at least shorten it (ZWE, VFD, XSST) when they're trying to be more terse.
Oh, wait, you wanted a *good* name? Well, that's harder. Names like "Mandriva" have the advantage of being simple and clearly unique; they're not descriptive, but calling it "Desktop-Oriented Linux Distribution", besides sounding awefully generic, will end up getting shortened to DOLD, which sounds very dull.
> A star destroyer would below the crap out of the enterprise, A, B, C, D or E. Any enterprise
> is completely outclassed by something the size of a star destroyer.
Sure, in terms of hardware. The size ratio is something like a thousand to one, and the firepower ratio is pretty unballanced too. But the star destroyer (unless it happens to be Vader's flagship, and even then to a large extent) is run pretty much entirely by bumbling dolts who don't understand the first thing about running a starship, much less a military exercise.
They couldn't even handle the Millennium Falcon when it pulled simple tricks like hiding in an asteroid field or behind the backside of the star destroyer's own control deck, and that's *with* Vader's guidance. What makes you think they're going to be able to handle a ship (any ship) run by intelligent protagonists who know how to recalibrate deflector relays and reverse tachyon fields? Heck, Spock and Scotty could probably take on the average star destroyer (sans Vader) in a shuttlecraft, with a tricorder, a pair of hand phasers, and some spare superconductor wire. It would seem impossible, sure, but then the Empire's bumbling admirals would stand around looking puzzled and giving stupid orders like "Track them!" and making inane comments like "No ship that small has a cloaking device!", and meanwhile the protagonists would be crawling through ductwork, hacking into the central computer, mapping out a path to the bridge, and improvising weapons out of parts stolen from access panels during the process of patching into the ship's power, weapons, and life support systems.
> Star destroyer Vs Enterprise
Now, that's an interesting one. On the one hand, the star destroyer is MUCH larger (even than the Galaxy-class Enterprise D). On the other hand, the Enterprise has a competent crew of protagonists onboard.
I know, it's not a print magazine per se, but it's at least as good. If you read every article featured on oreilly.com you will not go far wrong in terms of having the software technology angle covered. (Hardware is another matter; O'Reilly doesn't cover that nearly as well, so you'll want another source for that.)
> PLAY can take advantage of a sound card [in some versions] if used properly.
This is the first I have ever heard of this, despite that I have done *substantial* QBasic programming. (The prof in my Data Structures and Algorithm Analysis course told me I did things in QBasic that should not be done [in QBasic]. I used it for all of my assignments for that course, and then proceeded to continue to use it for the bulk of the programming I did for several more years until I learned Perl.)
Are you certain you aren't thinking of QuickBasic?
> Spoken like someone who's never seen it in action.
I've seen the big plasma displays in stores, and the image quality gnaws on rocks.
> when next gen stuff brings along 1080p - way above what your typical 21" will do
1080? Are you serious? Maybe you've been using LCD displays too long and have completely lost track of what a *real* monitor can do.
I have yet to see a 19" CRT that doesn't support 1600x1200 (the cheapest 19" monitors and even many of the better 17" monitors will display that); a 21" one will support higher resolutions, typically 2560x2048. Granted, not everyone's eyes can see that much detail on that size screen, so many people find it preferable to run their 21" monitors at 1024x768 or even 800x600, but still, touting the high-quality of enormous TV displays that can't even do 1600x1200 seems more than a little disingenuous.