It is related to density however - consider a large cosmic object, like a star. As it collapses, the total mass doesn't change (of course) but the same mass is present in a smaller volume (hence a higher density). It's the concentration of mass that creates extremely high gravitational fields when near to the centre of mass. So a reference object situated (say) 1 metre away from the CoM experiences a certain attractive force from the combined mass only 1 metre away!
When this same mass is uncompressed (i.e. the original star in a 'normal' state) and the same reference object is placed 1 metre away from the CoM (effectively *inside* the star) it is surrounded in every direction by roughly the same amount of 'stuff'. The gravitational attraction from all this mass almost cancels each other out.
Even standing on the surface of the star, the gravitational attraction from the mass on the far side is much less (due to the non-linear diminishing factor).
So it is about density in a way - too much stuff too close by 'sucks things up'... The only way you can get enough mass close enough is for it to have an extremely high density, otherwise it simply takes up too much space and the closest you can get to it is too limiting due to the inverse distance factor.
Anyway, that's my simple laymans understanding. I'm not a physicist and I'm ignoring all that stuff about singularities and stuff. I'm sure it gets a lot more complicated than that.
In New Zealand, we did away with 1 and 2 cent coins some time ago. This means all 'real' cash transactions are multiples of 5 cents (e.g. $9.95) and giving change is pretty straightforward and requires less mathematical 'effort'. We use the 'swedish' (or was it 'swiss'...) rounding system where products aren't priced like this (e.g. in supermarkets) to convert to the nearest 5c multiple.
For 'virtual' cash like credit card, EFTPOS cards, etc, the value is not rounded and the exact price is paid via the electronic point-of-sale terminal. Same with cheques I think, but with the advent of EFTPOS, cheques are becoming very rare for daily transactions.
BTW, if your country doesn't have EFTPOS yet, you're missing out:) New Zealand was the first country in the world to introduce it (twice in fact) and we've never looked back (well, except that first time...)
This competition is similar, although in my opinion has more engineering merit. I spent a year developing a team for the 2002 Korea competition but unfortunately we were beset with a poor budget (NZ$5000 - things got tight) and outrageous shipping delays (6 months for motors) and never completed the team.
It was interesting because not only did you have to develop the AI to allow the robots to 'play the game', but you also had to develop a computer colour vision system to 'read' the state of play, as well as a suitable control system for the robots themselves. The use of H bridges and avoiding burning out the motors or circuitry when suddenly reversing direction brought in some interesting research from the university's mechanical engineering department. Wireless comms also came into it, with a one-way FM link. A great project bringing many different areas into one 'arena'.
FIRA has several different classes of competition (we were working towards Mirosot) including a 'simulation only' class.
I wasn't being sarcastic or ironic - I was being practical and, in my opinion, interesting and maybe even +1 insightful...:)
"Your attitude is precisely the reason why linux will remain a fringe geekdom thing."
My point was that it can be done. It's not hard for someone to layer a GUI application on top of this sort of thing to do the same as the original poster suggested, thereby perhaps making it easier for your grandmother. You don't have to use the command line, but my goal was merely to illustrate how powerful the underlying GNU tools can be (and therefore nullify the original poster's statement about Longhorn's FS).
Classify files for you? GNU can do this easily provided you organise your files semi-coherently. For example, if every user on your GNU/Linux PC has a home directory and stores their photos in ~/photos then a simple:
Easy! Of course there's more than one way to do this, but to state blatently that this system is more powerful than GNU/Linux is uninformed at best, trolling at worst, and wishful thinking either way.
You don't need special features like you suggest in a filesystem to manage your files properly - most if not all popular Linux file systems contain all the information you will ever need. What's next? A filesystem with a GUI? Yikes...
Or... maybe [hushed silence]... he/she reads slashdot...! Heck, I live on the other side of the Pacific and even I know what Best Buy is (thru reading said website). Would the point be as well made if he/she had said Noel Leemings Ltd or L.V. Martins Ltd? Do *you* know what those businesses sell?
Oi! You! Yes, you! North America! How many times do you have to be told, you're not the only continent on Earth, no matter how hard you try to be!
btw, do NOT use acetone to clean your credit card after using it to spread the thermal paste... as I said before, acetone cuts through almost anything, including the surface of credit cards. At least mine still has a magnetic stripe.
In the USA and perhaps a few other countries perhaps - the rest of the world isn't drowning itself in stupid laws quite like the USA is at the moment. Microsoft has a long legal reach but it doesn't extend over the entire planet.
I can imagine 7 years or more down the track, when innovation has been finally eradicated from the US economic landscape, India (for example) will have observed and learned from the USA's mistakes, and become the largest economic superpower on Earth.
Once again, it makes me feel all warm and fuzzy inside to know deep in my heart that no matter how you look at it, I don't live or work in the USA:)
It's common courtesy to acknowledge the source of a quote, rather than try and pass it off as your own - in this case Kristian Wilson, Nintendo, Inc, 1989.
The main point about this quote is that it was made some time before the 'raves' of the 1990's became popular, and in hindsight is therefore interesting and somewhat amusing. Although I suspect Wilson realised the irony at the time.
I didn't say that I think VS exclusively sells 'crappy' SM-based monitors - but I did say that the ones I use at work are crappy, because, well, they are!
I had no doubts that VS has AG monitors in their line, but thanks for the info anyway.
(apologies if I posted this twice - having trouble with my firewall)
I agree with you. I have two Mitsubishi Trinitron monitors at home (one about 2 years old, the other about 4 years old) and both work flawlessly and still look great. After working on crappy Viewsonic CRT's all day it's a great relief to come home and stare at a fantastic display for a few hours...
The technology that Trinitron monitors use is called 'Aperture Grille' which, IIRC, consists of high-tension wires strung across a loom, of sorts. The two semi-noticable horizontal lines characterising Trinitron displays are actually the shadows from two horizontal wires used to space the vertical ones (or so I am led to believe). You don't notice them after a while, but occasionally they 'reappear'.
Aperture Grille gives a much sharper picture than traditional 'shadow mask' monitors, because the pixels are arranged in a rectangular array rather than triangles of RGB. This gives a distinct and crisp look to on-screen right angles, such as the corners of desktop windows.
The tube is also blacker, giving much better contrast. And it's flat:)
Anyway, I would certainly recommend Mitsubishi trinitron monitors. I've heard some bad rumours but my personal experience has been 100% good. And besides, everyone has a bad story to tell about anything.
You can also do that ClearType/sub-pixel rendering trick with trinitron monitors (which you can certainly do on LCD monitors with startling results!) because the pixels are laid out differently from those on a standard monitor.
I think the point is that you have to continue to pay for the privileges of those 'free' upgrades, even though you have transferred the OS to someone else (and technically you don't own^H^H^H have the right to use that particular copy of the OS any more).
I am a bit pissed about this - I submitted an informative story to Slashdot about this early yesterday NZ time (only hours after it was announced) and my story was rejected on the grounds that it was an April Fools Day joke!
Sheesh! I'm glad about freedom of speech for once because I can catagorically state that *that* particular Slashdot editor is a complete moron.
I *knew* this story would break internationally, and if the editor wasn't such a complete retard you would have all found out about it 24 hours earlier...
ok, this is offtopic and I'm probably going to get flamed, but I really wanted to post something interesting here - my original submission to Slashdot got rejected (how this minimalist icon piece of rubbish got accepted instead I do not know...).
Today, Peter Jackson (of Lord of the Rings fame - the slashdot editors don't seem to have heard of him) announced that he *will* be filming a remake of KING KONG, in New Zealand. Details are at http://stuff.co.nz/stuff/0,2106,2371077a10,00. html
The coolest thing is the intention to build a replica of early 1900's New York in a farm paddock!
The model part of bzip2 uses an implementation of the Burroughs-Wheeler transform. The BWT involves sorting a block of data based on 'context' (for text, this is usually the first few letters or so of a word or sentence) a special reversible way. This results in a block of data with similar contexts grouped together, thereby better fitting a predictive model and therefore compressing better than the original when passed through a probability-based encoder. Duplicating the file contents is unlikely to 'assist' compression because the block size restricts the model's 'view' (and the BWT isn't a perfect sort either).
The bzip2 program incorporates this transform with a Huffman encoder.
Gzip on the other hand uses a form of LZ78 compression that looks for previous matches and back-references them. So, duplicating the contents of a file as you suggest would suit gzip quite well, provided that the 'context buffer' length incorporates most, if not all of the first half of the file. The 'level of compression' parameter for the gzip algorithm (gzip -#) simply changes the size of the look-back buffer (i.e. the context length). Making it larger increases processing time because of the increased amount of context comparisons involved, but it usually results in better compression because matches are more likely to be found.
Do you have a system where the local council calculates property rates partially based on how many 'inputs' to the sewage system you have? (I think this becomes more important with large structures like office buildings and schools) Or is there some other organisation that deals with water/sewage infrastructure?
And I guess it's harder to measure sewage flow than water flow.
Slashdot Mirror
It is related to density however - consider a large cosmic object, like a star. As it collapses, the total mass doesn't change (of course) but the same mass is present in a smaller volume (hence a higher density). It's the concentration of mass that creates extremely high gravitational fields when near to the centre of mass. So a reference object situated (say) 1 metre away from the CoM experiences a certain attractive force from the combined mass only 1 metre away!
When this same mass is uncompressed (i.e. the original star in a 'normal' state) and the same reference object is placed 1 metre away from the CoM (effectively *inside* the star) it is surrounded in every direction by roughly the same amount of 'stuff'. The gravitational attraction from all this mass almost cancels each other out.
Even standing on the surface of the star, the gravitational attraction from the mass on the far side is much less (due to the non-linear diminishing factor).
So it is about density in a way - too much stuff too close by 'sucks things up'... The only way you can get enough mass close enough is for it to have an extremely high density, otherwise it simply takes up too much space and the closest you can get to it is too limiting due to the inverse distance factor.
Anyway, that's my simple laymans understanding. I'm not a physicist and I'm ignoring all that stuff about singularities and stuff. I'm sure it gets a lot more complicated than that.
Nasty, Fire Ants with +18 lightning damage... yikes
In New Zealand, we did away with 1 and 2 cent coins some time ago. This means all 'real' cash transactions are multiples of 5 cents (e.g. $9.95) and giving change is pretty straightforward and requires less mathematical 'effort'. We use the 'swedish' (or was it 'swiss'...) rounding system where products aren't priced like this (e.g. in supermarkets) to convert to the nearest 5c multiple.
:) New Zealand was the first country in the world to introduce it (twice in fact) and we've never looked back (well, except that first time...)
For 'virtual' cash like credit card, EFTPOS cards, etc, the value is not rounded and the exact price is paid via the electronic point-of-sale terminal. Same with cheques I think, but with the advent of EFTPOS, cheques are becoming very rare for daily transactions.
BTW, if your country doesn't have EFTPOS yet, you're missing out
This competition is similar, although in my opinion has more engineering merit. I spent a year developing a team for the 2002 Korea competition but unfortunately we were beset with a poor budget (NZ$5000 - things got tight) and outrageous shipping delays (6 months for motors) and never completed the team.
It was interesting because not only did you have to develop the AI to allow the robots to 'play the game', but you also had to develop a computer colour vision system to 'read' the state of play, as well as a suitable control system for the robots themselves. The use of H bridges and avoiding burning out the motors or circuitry when suddenly reversing direction brought in some interesting research from the university's mechanical engineering department. Wireless comms also came into it, with a one-way FM link. A great project bringing many different areas into one 'arena'.
FIRA has several different classes of competition (we were working towards Mirosot) including a 'simulation only' class.
I wasn't being sarcastic or ironic - I was being practical and, in my opinion, interesting and maybe even +1 insightful... :)
"Your attitude is precisely the reason why linux will remain a fringe geekdom thing."
My point was that it can be done. It's not hard for someone to layer a GUI application on top of this sort of thing to do the same as the original poster suggested, thereby perhaps making it easier for your grandmother. You don't have to use the command line, but my goal was merely to illustrate how powerful the underlying GNU tools can be (and therefore nullify the original poster's statement about Longhorn's FS).
Classify files for you? GNU can do this easily provided you organise your files semi-coherently. For example, if every user on your GNU/Linux PC has a home directory and stores their photos in ~/photos then a simple:
$ find ~john/photos -printf "%h/%f %t\n" | grep " Feb "
Easy! Of course there's more than one way to do this, but to state blatently that this system is more powerful than GNU/Linux is uninformed at best, trolling at worst, and wishful thinking either way.
You don't need special features like you suggest in a filesystem to manage your files properly - most if not all popular Linux file systems contain all the information you will ever need. What's next? A filesystem with a GUI? Yikes...
Or... maybe [hushed silence]... he/she reads slashdot...! Heck, I live on the other side of the Pacific and even I know what Best Buy is (thru reading said website). Would the point be as well made if he/she had said Noel Leemings Ltd or L.V. Martins Ltd? Do *you* know what those businesses sell?
Oi! You! Yes, you! North America! How many times do you have to be told, you're not the only continent on Earth, no matter how hard you try to be!
how ironic that you should mention this - I just posted a comment about the exact same thing - acetone + credit card... :(
btw, do NOT use acetone to clean your credit card after using it to spread the thermal paste... as I said before, acetone cuts through almost anything, including the surface of credit cards. At least mine still has a magnetic stripe.
I totally agree. I tried the isopropyl alcohol when trying to remove that pink wax pad thing (PCM?) from a heatsink - completely useless...
but acetone... wow, what great stuff!! It cuts through everything. Great stuff. I'll never be without my tin of acetone again.
In the USA and perhaps a few other countries perhaps - the rest of the world isn't drowning itself in stupid laws quite like the USA is at the moment. Microsoft has a long legal reach but it doesn't extend over the entire planet.
:)
I can imagine 7 years or more down the track, when innovation has been finally eradicated from the US economic landscape, India (for example) will have observed and learned from the USA's mistakes, and become the largest economic superpower on Earth.
Once again, it makes me feel all warm and fuzzy inside to know deep in my heart that no matter how you look at it, I don't live or work in the USA
I completely agree:
"Although I suspect Wilson realised the irony at the time."
You finally regretting that Arts degree huh?
It's common courtesy to acknowledge the source of a quote, rather than try and pass it off as your own - in this case Kristian Wilson, Nintendo, Inc, 1989.
The main point about this quote is that it was made some time before the 'raves' of the 1990's became popular, and in hindsight is therefore interesting and somewhat amusing. Although I suspect Wilson realised the irony at the time.
I didn't say that I think VS exclusively sells 'crappy' SM-based monitors - but I did say that the ones I use at work are crappy, because, well, they are!
I had no doubts that VS has AG monitors in their line, but thanks for the info anyway.
(apologies if I posted this twice - having trouble with my firewall)
yes, impressive.
I agree with you. I have two Mitsubishi Trinitron monitors at home (one about 2 years old, the other about 4 years old) and both work flawlessly and still look great. After working on crappy Viewsonic CRT's all day it's a great relief to come home and stare at a fantastic display for a few hours...
:)
The technology that Trinitron monitors use is called 'Aperture Grille' which, IIRC, consists of high-tension wires strung across a loom, of sorts. The two semi-noticable horizontal lines characterising Trinitron displays are actually the shadows from two horizontal wires used to space the vertical ones (or so I am led to believe). You don't notice them after a while, but occasionally they 'reappear'.
Aperture Grille gives a much sharper picture than traditional 'shadow mask' monitors, because the pixels are arranged in a rectangular array rather than triangles of RGB. This gives a distinct and crisp look to on-screen right angles, such as the corners of desktop windows.
The tube is also blacker, giving much better contrast. And it's flat
Anyway, I would certainly recommend Mitsubishi trinitron monitors. I've heard some bad rumours but my personal experience has been 100% good. And besides, everyone has a bad story to tell about anything.
You can also do that ClearType/sub-pixel rendering trick with trinitron monitors (which you can certainly do on LCD monitors with startling results!) because the pixels are laid out differently from those on a standard monitor.
I think the point is that you have to continue to pay for the privileges of those 'free' upgrades, even though you have transferred the OS to someone else (and technically you don't own^H^H^H have the right to use that particular copy of the OS any more).
technicians - perhaps a little too broad, but still accurate.
I am a bit pissed about this - I submitted an informative story to Slashdot about this early yesterday NZ time (only hours after it was announced) and my story was rejected on the grounds that it was an April Fools Day joke!
Sheesh! I'm glad about freedom of speech for once because I can catagorically state that *that* particular Slashdot editor is a complete moron.
I *knew* this story would break internationally, and if the editor wasn't such a complete retard you would have all found out about it 24 hours earlier...
ok, this is offtopic and I'm probably going to get flamed, but I really wanted to post something interesting here - my original submission to Slashdot got rejected (how this minimalist icon piece of rubbish got accepted instead I do not know...).
. html
Today, Peter Jackson (of Lord of the Rings fame - the slashdot editors don't seem to have heard of him) announced that he *will* be filming a remake of KING KONG, in New Zealand. Details are at
http://stuff.co.nz/stuff/0,2106,2371077a10,00
The coolest thing is the intention to build a replica of early 1900's New York in a farm paddock!
No it's not an April 1st Joke.
The model part of bzip2 uses an implementation of the Burroughs-Wheeler transform. The BWT involves sorting a block of data based on 'context' (for text, this is usually the first few letters or so of a word or sentence) a special reversible way. This results in a block of data with similar contexts grouped together, thereby better fitting a predictive model and therefore compressing better than the original when passed through a probability-based encoder. Duplicating the file contents is unlikely to 'assist' compression because the block size restricts the model's 'view' (and the BWT isn't a perfect sort either).
The bzip2 program incorporates this transform with a Huffman encoder.
Gzip on the other hand uses a form of LZ78 compression that looks for previous matches and back-references them. So, duplicating the contents of a file as you suggest would suit gzip quite well, provided that the 'context buffer' length incorporates most, if not all of the first half of the file. The 'level of compression' parameter for the gzip algorithm (gzip -#) simply changes the size of the look-back buffer (i.e. the context length). Making it larger increases processing time because of the increased amount of context comparisons involved, but it usually results in better compression because matches are more likely to be found.
It's finding that one tiny cell that's the hard part
Do you have a system where the local council calculates property rates partially based on how many 'inputs' to the sewage system you have? (I think this becomes more important with large structures like office buildings and schools) Or is there some other organisation that deals with water/sewage infrastructure?
And I guess it's harder to measure sewage flow than water flow.
someone has to ask... what's your favourite movie?