Power is going the same way, as can be evidenced by the collapse of the California power grid. How long will the state pay for the power companies to stay solvent until the state becomes the primary power-provider?
Not likely really. California is the only state that fucked up power management that badly, and it took a lot of different fuck-ups to reach that point -- twenty years of demand increases outpacing power-plant construction combined with a botched half-"deregulation" attempt and an unluckily dry winter (which meant the hydroelectric plants in the west produced less power than usual, driving up prices). For a better example, see Texas, whose deregulation is going just fine (with the exception of Enron, but they died for reasons entirely unrelated to power provision).
You're comparing a seven year old version of Microsoft Word to the current version of StarOffice. How about either comparing Word 95 to other word processors available in 1995 or comparing Word XP to the current version of StarOffice?
I don't like that idea. If your station doesn't have enough bandwidth to serve its listeners, I don't see using my bandwidth to serve some of them as a legitimate solution.
Same goes with the game companies who want to use this method to save bandwidth costs on game demo downloads. I see no reason that they should be able to use my bandwidth to serve their content to other people.
This is one particular issue on which the conservatives seem to be on the right side. Hollings, the sponsor of the bill, is a Democrat after all, and the biggest problem the bill is likely to face in its passage is that Rep. Howard Coble, a Republican and chairman of the House Judiciary Committee Subcommittee on Courts, the Internet & Intellectual Property, is opposed to it.
Part of it is that the media industry and Hollywood have traditionally been Democratic supporters, while the big tech companies (Intel, Microsoft, etc.) are the "big business" that Republicans tend to like, and they're all opposed to the bill.
When you actually talk to the Congresscritter make sure to convert S-2K back to S-2048 or they'll be wondering why you're ranting that a bill to amend the IRS code to provide depreciation allowances on certain property is going to kill the technology industry.
At the hearings Sen. Hollings held, Intel co-founder (and Executive VP) Leslie Vadasz was the only person there who spoke out against the SSSCA, earning him charges of "supporting piracy" from the other people there. Send him a letter indicating that you appreciate his and his company's support of consumer rights; if you purchase Intel products (not just chips, they make a ton of stuff) let him know that too. I know a lot of you aren't fans of Intel, but for whatever reason when a company does the Right Thing we should let them know we support it (in hopes of encouraging them to take similar stands in the future).
See the EFF page on the issue for contact info and additional information.
I don't think anyone is denying that there was any effect; some people are merely arguing that the effect is insignificant. I.e. if of the current warming trend, 99% is the result of an increase in solar power output and 1% is the result of human activities, then you are correct -- humans have contributed to global warming -- but it's also irrelevant, because they've contributed so little that it might as well be 0.
Yes, that's the German interpretation of classical Greek. As Germans were the leading classicists for most of the 20th century, it's accepted as the "standard" way of pronouncing ancient Greek, but it's really nothing more than mispronouncing Greek with a German accent. If you speak to any Greek person you won't find any pronounciations remotely similar to that (whether they're speaking modern or ancient Greek).
I'm speaking of modern Greek, in which the Greek letter X, or "Chi," is supposed to sound like an "H". The hard G sound is created through two ways -- either a double-gamma dipthong or a gamma-kappa dipthong.
Note also that this most Greeks pronounce ancient Greek in this way. It is only non-Greeks who pronounce classical Greek in the way you describe, and this interpretation is not accepted by any Greek scholars I know of. There's really very little evidence either way for how classical Greek was pronounced, so most Greeks think that the fact that most classicists pronounce classical Greek with similar sounds as those found in German is simply a result of them being mostly Germans, not because this is actually the correct way to pronounce it.
Simply put, most classicists can't pronounce Greek, so they mispronounce it in their own language and decree that this is how it "used to sound".
This still doesn't solve the problem that LaTeX documents rendered to either PDF or PS are generally best suited for printing onto an actual piece of paper, and pretty poorly suited to reading on-screen. For example, most LaTeX documents are 2-column, which is annoying on a computer screen -- either you have to zoom out to see the entire page, so that your font is too small to read easily, or you have to scroll down and up continuously to follow the columns.
Even if you don't have columns, LaTeX's entire paradigm is based on pagination, which is inherently unsuited to online display.
I tend to agree, LaTeX/TeX is pretty horrible for computer-readable stuff. It's basically designed for typesetting printed pages, and is only really good at that. But many papers are available like that because the authors are writing them primarily for journals, and outputting to a PDF they put up on their website is the easiest way to publish it online.
So yes, for web stuff, I think MathML is the best choice. It's now supported by default in the latest Mozilla; I don't know about other browsers. Unfortunately it's not usable in a standard HTML document, but only in XHTML documents (XML/CSS basically), which makes it have a bit of a learning curve. But then again LaTeX certainly has a learning curve...
The main argument I've seen against MathML by mathematicians is that it's clumsier than LaTeX to use a lot, especially for those who are already used to LaTeX. Basically this is due to the nature of XML tags -- and pairs are going to be more clumsy to use a lot than LaTeX's \( and \) commands.
MathML is intended to be such. Without some additional formatting work it wouldn't be a good typesetting language though, as (in the tradition of HTML) it merely specifies the mathematical formulae, leaving their exact rendering up to the browser (while for typesetting you probably want some more exact control).
According to Knuth the last character of the official name is actually a capital Greek "Chi," not a Latin 'X'. Thus most Americans will pronounce it "tech." However, the Greek letter usually written in English as "Chi" is actually pronounced as an 'H' in Greek. Thus TeX really *should* be pronounced with an "h" sound at the end. I'm not sure how you'd write this in English (as "teh" would make the 'h' silent). Of course this goes for all other Greek-derived words ("character" and so on) as well.
1. How am I going to store my video files in a simple text based format? The goal of Microsoft's filesystem is to allow indexing of metadata about any file. This includes both those which are binary files but logically contain text (.DOC, etc.), but also includes those which are binary files because they logically contain binary data (images, video, etc.). Microsoft's proposal would render the various in-file incompatible metadata systems (ID3, ID3v2, APE, Vorbis tagging, MPEG comment blocks, JPG comment blocks, etc.) obsolete, and would make searching across formats far easier.
1. ASCII is obsolete. You cannot render most languages in ASCII, as it only defines 127 characters, of which a good 25% are control codes. Most systems have extended it to allow 255 characters, but these extensions are incompatible and font-dependent (for example, what does ò look like? It's an 'o' with a grave accent in most Windows fonts and some UNIX fonts, but a "greater than or equal to" sign symbol the default DOS font and some UNIX fonts. There's no standard way to render either of those symbols so that they'll appear properly on all systems. So if you're doing text, it should be Unicode.
2. HTML is really really horrible for presentation. It's designed for content markup, not presentation markup. CSS makes things a bit better, but is not widely supported in a standard way (especially CSS2) and still really kludgy. If you're making a website, sure, but if you're making slides for a presentation I would never use HTML. LaTeX would be your best text-based markup language to use for this, but from an information-search point of view it's not all-text -- you embed PostScript images in LaTeX, and it does not include them directly (you link to an external file) until you render to the final PostScript or PDF output, which contains the finished product.
3. I believe Microsoft is well-aware of the Windows "Find" functionality, and as such they are aware of its drawbacks and limitations. This proposal is a way to improve "Find" so that it is faster and more generally useful.
As for "upgrading" to get the latest bugs, I've found that Windows 2000 is far less buggy than Windows 98.
Google doesn't 'grep' its entire data repository of text each time you do a search. It uses an indexed database, much like what Microsoft is proposing to use (only Google's is designed to scale much much higher). So sure, you can store everything in ASCII, but then you still need some sort of indexing to make searching of a reasonable speed when you get up to large (hundreds of gigabytes) filesystems. And if you're going to do that anyway, you might as well extend it and allow yourself to store textual metadata about binary files instead of limiting yourself to 100% ASCII files.
Slashdot Mirror
I have one particular computer science professor who can barely program worth a damn. But he sure is good at discrete math.
A continuous three Megabits per second works out to somewhere just under a Terabyte a month. Not going to be cheap.
Two consecutive Slashdot stories:
-- Platform Independent Gaming?
-- Ask Slashdot: Most Outrageous Vendor Lie Ever Told?
You're comparing a seven year old version of Microsoft Word to the current version of StarOffice. How about either comparing Word 95 to other word processors available in 1995 or comparing Word XP to the current version of StarOffice?
I don't like that idea. If your station doesn't have enough bandwidth to serve its listeners, I don't see using my bandwidth to serve some of them as a legitimate solution.
Same goes with the game companies who want to use this method to save bandwidth costs on game demo downloads. I see no reason that they should be able to use my bandwidth to serve their content to other people.
I'm glad you agree that Microsoft Word is proven to be one of the best programs in existence. =]
This is one particular issue on which the conservatives seem to be on the right side. Hollings, the sponsor of the bill, is a Democrat after all, and the biggest problem the bill is likely to face in its passage is that Rep. Howard Coble, a Republican and chairman of the House Judiciary Committee Subcommittee on Courts, the Internet & Intellectual Property, is opposed to it.
Part of it is that the media industry and Hollywood have traditionally been Democratic supporters, while the big tech companies (Intel, Microsoft, etc.) are the "big business" that Republicans tend to like, and they're all opposed to the bill.
When you actually talk to the Congresscritter make sure to convert S-2K back to S-2048 or they'll be wondering why you're ranting that a bill to amend the IRS code to provide depreciation allowances on certain property is going to kill the technology industry.
So did you legitimately get into the beta and play on Battle.net, or did you (ahem) "get your hands on it" and play on bnetd for the review?
At the hearings Sen. Hollings held, Intel co-founder (and Executive VP) Leslie Vadasz was the only person there who spoke out against the SSSCA, earning him charges of "supporting piracy" from the other people there. Send him a letter indicating that you appreciate his and his company's support of consumer rights; if you purchase Intel products (not just chips, they make a ton of stuff) let him know that too. I know a lot of you aren't fans of Intel, but for whatever reason when a company does the Right Thing we should let them know we support it (in hopes of encouraging them to take similar stands in the future).
See the EFF page on the issue for contact info and additional information.
I disagree. There's plenty of dumb girls at Mudd. Plenty of dumb guys too.
Hint: just because you can memorize equations doesn't mean you're smart.
I don't think anyone is denying that there was any effect; some people are merely arguing that the effect is insignificant. I.e. if of the current warming trend, 99% is the result of an increase in solar power output and 1% is the result of human activities, then you are correct -- humans have contributed to global warming -- but it's also irrelevant, because they've contributed so little that it might as well be 0.
That actually looks pretty useful.
Yes, that's the German interpretation of classical Greek. As Germans were the leading classicists for most of the 20th century, it's accepted as the "standard" way of pronouncing ancient Greek, but it's really nothing more than mispronouncing Greek with a German accent. If you speak to any Greek person you won't find any pronounciations remotely similar to that (whether they're speaking modern or ancient Greek).
I'm speaking of modern Greek, in which the Greek letter X, or "Chi," is supposed to sound like an "H". The hard G sound is created through two ways -- either a double-gamma dipthong or a gamma-kappa dipthong.
Note also that this most Greeks pronounce ancient Greek in this way. It is only non-Greeks who pronounce classical Greek in the way you describe, and this interpretation is not accepted by any Greek scholars I know of. There's really very little evidence either way for how classical Greek was pronounced, so most Greeks think that the fact that most classicists pronounce classical Greek with similar sounds as those found in German is simply a result of them being mostly Germans, not because this is actually the correct way to pronounce it.
Simply put, most classicists can't pronounce Greek, so they mispronounce it in their own language and decree that this is how it "used to sound".
This still doesn't solve the problem that LaTeX documents rendered to either PDF or PS are generally best suited for printing onto an actual piece of paper, and pretty poorly suited to reading on-screen. For example, most LaTeX documents are 2-column, which is annoying on a computer screen -- either you have to zoom out to see the entire page, so that your font is too small to read easily, or you have to scroll down and up continuously to follow the columns.
Even if you don't have columns, LaTeX's entire paradigm is based on pagination, which is inherently unsuited to online display.
The last half of the last sentence should read "-- and and pairs are..."
I tend to agree, LaTeX/TeX is pretty horrible for computer-readable stuff. It's basically designed for typesetting printed pages, and is only really good at that. But many papers are available like that because the authors are writing them primarily for journals, and outputting to a PDF they put up on their website is the easiest way to publish it online.
So yes, for web stuff, I think MathML is the best choice. It's now supported by default in the latest Mozilla; I don't know about other browsers. Unfortunately it's not usable in a standard HTML document, but only in XHTML documents (XML/CSS basically), which makes it have a bit of a learning curve. But then again LaTeX certainly has a learning curve...
The main argument I've seen against MathML by mathematicians is that it's clumsier than LaTeX to use a lot, especially for those who are already used to LaTeX. Basically this is due to the nature of XML tags -- and pairs are going to be more clumsy to use a lot than LaTeX's \( and \) commands.
MathML is intended to be such. Without some additional formatting work it wouldn't be a good typesetting language though, as (in the tradition of HTML) it merely specifies the mathematical formulae, leaving their exact rendering up to the browser (while for typesetting you probably want some more exact control).
From what I understand, nroff/troff are still used to typeset mathematics (and other things).
According to Knuth the last character of the official name is actually a capital Greek "Chi," not a Latin 'X'. Thus most Americans will pronounce it "tech." However, the Greek letter usually written in English as "Chi" is actually pronounced as an 'H' in Greek. Thus TeX really *should* be pronounced with an "h" sound at the end. I'm not sure how you'd write this in English (as "teh" would make the 'h' silent). Of course this goes for all other Greek-derived words ("character" and so on) as well.
1. How am I going to store my video files in a simple text based format? The goal of Microsoft's filesystem is to allow indexing of metadata about any file. This includes both those which are binary files but logically contain text (.DOC, etc.), but also includes those which are binary files because they logically contain binary data (images, video, etc.). Microsoft's proposal would render the various in-file incompatible metadata systems (ID3, ID3v2, APE, Vorbis tagging, MPEG comment blocks, JPG comment blocks, etc.) obsolete, and would make searching across formats far easier.
1. ASCII is obsolete. You cannot render most languages in ASCII, as it only defines 127 characters, of which a good 25% are control codes. Most systems have extended it to allow 255 characters, but these extensions are incompatible and font-dependent (for example, what does ò look like? It's an 'o' with a grave accent in most Windows fonts and some UNIX fonts, but a "greater than or equal to" sign symbol the default DOS font and some UNIX fonts. There's no standard way to render either of those symbols so that they'll appear properly on all systems. So if you're doing text, it should be Unicode.
2. HTML is really really horrible for presentation. It's designed for content markup, not presentation markup. CSS makes things a bit better, but is not widely supported in a standard way (especially CSS2) and still really kludgy. If you're making a website, sure, but if you're making slides for a presentation I would never use HTML. LaTeX would be your best text-based markup language to use for this, but from an information-search point of view it's not all-text -- you embed PostScript images in LaTeX, and it does not include them directly (you link to an external file) until you render to the final PostScript or PDF output, which contains the finished product.
3. I believe Microsoft is well-aware of the Windows "Find" functionality, and as such they are aware of its drawbacks and limitations. This proposal is a way to improve "Find" so that it is faster and more generally useful.
As for "upgrading" to get the latest bugs, I've found that Windows 2000 is far less buggy than Windows 98.
Google doesn't 'grep' its entire data repository of text each time you do a search. It uses an indexed database, much like what Microsoft is proposing to use (only Google's is designed to scale much much higher). So sure, you can store everything in ASCII, but then you still need some sort of indexing to make searching of a reasonable speed when you get up to large (hundreds of gigabytes) filesystems. And if you're going to do that anyway, you might as well extend it and allow yourself to store textual metadata about binary files instead of limiting yourself to 100% ASCII files.
You named exactly one format: TeX (LaTeX is just a macro package on top of TeX).
And TeX is really a pain in the ass. Powerful, yes. Intuitive (even for a programmer) or consistent in its programming paradigms, no.