They are already old when they win and the ones who dies young can't win. Noble stated that no dead person could win the Nobel Prize. Many often object that Rosalind Franklin the Prize with Watson and Crick but the fact is that she was already dead and Nobel Prize didn't have the power to name her even if they believed that she was deserving.
Yeah but so far they were not able to mess with TCP/IP and C++ very much. The idea is to have the spec AND an conformance suite. Ideally with an independent standard body who will evaluate conformance and emit the certification. TCP/IP and C++ don't even have a conformance suite but they still resists. I can't tell why some standard resist extention but there is no doubt that a standard doubled with a conformance suite will witstand the most vicious attacks.
Sorry, but as far as I know, flash specification is open
You are wrong, the licence of the spec explicitly deny you the right to reimplement it:
3)a. You may not use the Specification in any way to create or develop a runtime, client, player, executable or other program that reads or renders.swf files.
Whats a person to do? I'm pretty happy with minority governments and hope they become more common. It should hopefully serve as a check to keep any party from getting too ideological.
You could push for the proportional vote. STV, especially something like BC-STV, fixes many problems that our "vote for the less bad" system have. I don't care if the party I vote for don't stand a chance to form a government, I will never vote for fascists. With STV, any party that receive ~4% of the vote nation wide can combine those vote in a single candidate. Having a single MP don't give much power but at least you can propose bills.
I voted CPC last election, but if they take away my fair use rights they will not get my vote again. Ever.
You mean that even after the war in Afghanistan, the dropping of the Kyoto Accord, the cut on funding for the provinces, the fight against same sex marriage and the approval of the Israel bombings you would still vote for them?
Re:Performance, anyone?
on
Lisp and Ruby
·
· Score: 1
Yes, I'm not a native speaker either and we sometime try to use cleaver shortcuts that the language offers with suboptimal results. It is usually safer to spell things out explicitly but you probably figured that out by now. For your original post. Common Lisp is fast because of the declarations. You can infer the types up to some point (you can infer a lot actually, take a look at OCaml) but the keep aspect of fast compilation is that you can discard some generic operations when you know you won't need them. To get the same performace boost in Ruby, Python, Perl or some other language would require some declaration system or that some basic operations have specific types like in OCaml. The OCaml way doesn't play that nice with operator overloading and stuff like that. It's not that Common Lisp compilers are really smart, it is just that they have more information to begin with. You might like to read Lisp in Small Pieces. You'll find plenty of info on efficient implementation of many of the language constructs like lexical scoping, closures and multiple namespaces. Seeing how they are implemented makes the whole easier to visualize.
Re:Performance, anyone?
on
Lisp and Ruby
·
· Score: 1
Saying "take lisp" means nothing. Lisp is a family of languages. Some dialects have fast implementations and some don't. Common Lisp, as an example, have both really fast implementations (CMUCL and SBCL) and kind of slow though extremely portable ones (Clisp and a few others). You have the same duality with Scheme (another Lisp dialect). Gambit C is pretty darn fast while Guile is slower but easier to embed into another program. Don't take my word for it, check the existing benchmarks. Keep in mind that those are trivial tasks and don't take into account the development cycle of a program or the easy of coding in a given language. You'll notice that SBCL has nothing to envy to Ruby performance wise. The annotated Common Lisp code is ugly but the idea is that you can easily code your app, debug it and then, profile it and add annotations in the time critical parts. Contrast this with using swig to recode parts of your app in C like you would do with other dynamic languages, including Ruby, and you have a net win.
... it is the solution. There are RIAA free radios (Epiphany Radio is a pretty good one). This law will just push the other radios to play RIAA free content and it will finally promote the people without a label. At the moment the popular artists are pushed by the payola and you see internet radios without any payola benefits (though I might be wrong on that) pushing the same overrated artists just to sound like "real" radios. It annoys me and I'm glad to learn that we will now see a sustainable promotion platform for independent artists. With adequate radio playtime those artits will get known and will attract people at theirs shows and will sell the swags and everything. Radios play a really important role in the music world: they filter out crap. Yeah, in the independent world their is a lot of crap too and the home listener should not be expected to dig into that haystack in search of the proverbial needle.
You misread me. If the invention are published for the review process you don't need to grant the patent to get the knowledge and in that case the public would be dumb to grant the patent. I'm not completely against patents; having a way to promote publication of inventions is a good thing. Obviously the current system is wrong: 20 years is too long and obvious ideas get patented. If the patent was valid for a shorter term the inventor would be more likely to try to push his idea into a working product instead of waiting for someone to reinvent the thing and to sue him. I just don't know that public review at large is a good idea since as long as the public has the knowledge of the invention there is no point in granting the patent.
Why would the public approve a single patent? Patents are never in the interest of the general public. Patents take away something from the public and give it to the inventor in hope that the inventor will publish more of his ideas.
Don't try to make a graphical app on a text based terminal. Just do a good text based intercafe with readline. Be it gdb, the python shell, mysql client, or just bash, a good readline enabled app is fun and efficient to use. You can TAB-complete (not enabled by default in python but you can have it), search history with CTRL-r and cut/yank a bunch of tokens at a time when you edit your command. OK the line editing shortcuts are usually over optimized for emacs users (did you know that M-u upcase a word in bash?) but you are free to rebind them.
There are significant advantages to LED bulbs: progressive failure, almost infinite lifetime, low heat emission. How do the compare with CFLs in terms of efficiency and impact on the environment? Yeah I know, they still cost a bundle. What I'd like is a cheap way to create an illuminated floor à la 2001. OK that probably isn't the most efficient way to light a room but you have to admit that it is really relaxing.
...such as Star War's liberal use of "Triumph of Will", "Forbidden Planet" and several WWII films.
Did you actually watch Triumph of Will? I think you pull you accusation from an other source like Wikipedia. The graphical elements that are common to both films are military formations and I don't think that Riefenstahl had much to say on the way the SAs were to line up. Triumph of Will shows a bunch of guys getting ready for the speech (which include washing and shaving beside their tents and preparing food in industrial quantities) and a lengthy pitch by Hitler.
Triumph of the will is in the Public Domain so I suggest that you watch it and refrain from claims that certain movies "liberally use" it until you witness anything like that yourself. Yes you read that kind of claims everywhere and I don't know where it comes from. I think people studying cinema have to write long essays on early movies and somehow at some point a vague suggestions was taken too seriously by someone who didn't actually watch the said movie...
In fact when I discovered this wonderful option in Konqueror to turn off gif animations I realized that it was the animations that was annoying me, not the adds (save for popups). Now I don't block the adds, I just turn off animations (and popups, of course). When I see someone with a "dancing browser", I pity the poor user. How can you say that he likes that? Anyone could see that he is about to go postal.
I pretty sure that even though most web users are not horrified by animations they would prefer a still web. It would be interesting to see a study were people are asked to use a web site with and without animations. Judicious use of animations could indeed be good but since 99.9% web sites put way too much animations that serve no purpose it is simply easier to disable the whole thing and to enable only for a few sites. People don't complain because they don't know there is a way out.
Err nothing? I like my web without animations. I never install Flash and I don't allow gif animations (thank you Konqueror). The web instantly become almost as readable as a book. If you must provide cinematic content, a link do download a divx is perfectly fine with me. Please don't embed moving stuff in the area where I'm supposed to read. Respect your visitors and they might return.
Kick spamassassin, rules based filters are not what you need to keep-up. Install greylistd and spamoracle. No more than 0.5% of the spam hits my inbox. Spamoracle will detect anything that isn't an image. Greylistd for some reason kill 99% of the images. Yeah spamers are lame and they could get around this setup but for now you have a pretty good solution that will take 30 mins to setup.
Unless what you are installing on doesnt have a network connection. Then having a proper cd based distro is important.
What parent means is probably that Etch is good enough since 2006-12-11, when they froze it. I was running on Sarge long before the release it. When the testing version of Debian is forzen, it makes a pretty good distro. You don't get the CDs but who care? You can install everything from the network anyway. I tried to stay on Testing (aka Etch) after the Sarge release but that was a mistake. Things fall apart when the devs are free to do anything they want! But now that Etch is frozen I'll sure give it a try. At this point they can wait as long as they want before they release, the network install of Etch will still be a kick ass distro.
DISCLAIMER: I didn't try a recent snapshot of Etch yet.
It would be interesting to know how many active API users there were, and at what rate new ones were signing up, if at all. It may well be that continuing to support that API wasn't considered a useful (read: profitable) part of their business.
Come on, it was only a toy. With only 1000 query a day (or was it even less) you can't build anything usefull with it. I tried it, it was fun but when I want to do datamining (what else would you want the API for?) I parse the HTML. They let you hammer the thing pretty badly before you get banned. I was running at ~3 query/sec for a few hours before I got banned. Yeah you feel really stupid when you can't use Google anymore... At ~1/2 query/sec I was able to fetch about 30k pages without problems. There was interesting infos that you could only get with the API but I can live without it. If they had increased the query limit, there would be serious users out there, with the current restrictions, I don't think there are any.
You have the source code for all the programs on a typical GNU/Linux box. You need to read code if you want to learn the "real" stuff. You don't need to read every lines of a program, you need to find your way and to study only the aspect that puzzle you. A good approach can be to run Doxygen on the source or just to use grep. When I started I used Doxygen a lot but now I find the overhead annoying so I mostly use grep. Anything that the program does is not that hard and most projects are well structured so you can study only one "module" without much thought about the rest. When I started Open Beat Box (defuct but there are still screenshots on freshmeat) I had absolutely no idea how a skinable GUI could be implemented.
I studied XMMS and it turned out to be an ugly hack with only two static image, the active and the inactive one, when a "button" is pressed that region on the active image is pasted over the inactive image. I studied Noatun and they opted to re-implement the whole widget set and used only Qt for events and blitting of static images. A complete multimedia player can be complicated, there is the visualization with FFTs, hot plugins loading, decoding of various file formats, network streaming and many other aspects. Taken individually all those features are easy to understand and you are lucky to have the source, use it. Most projects will answer implementation questions if you demonstrate any effort to study the code.
There are no books, if you want to learn you need to get your hands dirty. You can't become a blacksmith without playing with hot metal.
GSM clip the antenna power at 2W, analogues can go above that. Back then with the specs of a phone they listed the antenna power. There was something to brag about since more power meant better reception. Now you won't find this information anymore, partly because it is specified by the protocol. I recall seeing phones at ~0.5W and the steady increase in power as the batteries got better but I can't get my hands on spec sheets from the old days. GSM has the option of operating at low power when reception is good enough, I don't know the avg power output. It must depend on the usage pattern but it would be interesting to see if it's usually 1.9W or 0.19W...
You are right, the thyroid was shown to be vulnerable to particle emission but not much focus was put on the effects of electro magnetic radiation on that particular glad. That is not to say that you won't find several papers documenting averse effect of electro magnetic radiation. Radiation kills, what we don't know is if cell phones operate at a safe power for the part of the spectrum they use. For IR, our skin is pretty good at sensing when we are about to cook, for other part of the spectum we need careful studies to set the safe level of exposure. Just take UV as an example. We don't sense when what are being cooked by UV. We can stand a good deal of daily exposure but as little as 30 mins beyond your safe limit under the summer sun and you can expect your skin to peel of in the following days. Just because you can safely absorb some amount of radiation in a given part of the spectrum don't make it automatically safe for 5 times that amount. Hence, a study on exposure to cell phones 1/5 the power of current devices don't mean that we are currently safe.
Putting a device that emits radiation next to your head is harmful.
And you could give me what evidence for that statement? What study are you quoting? Or did you just make it up on the spot? I'm guessing the latter.
In a scientific argument, requiring citations for well know facts might be overkill. The grand parent didn't do so because who would sound pedantic. But if you insist, there are plenty evidences on
Pubmed. In particular, the
thyroid cancer is highly correlated with exposure to radiations. I shall remind you that the
thyroid glad is located in the neck which implies high exposure if the radiation emission device is applied to the head of the subject.
After further inspection, it looks like the OASIS standard was approved by ISO without modifications. This is good but I still don't get why ISO charges ~280$ for the PDF...
Slashdot Mirror
They are already old when they win and the ones who dies young can't win. Noble stated that no dead person could win the Nobel Prize. Many often object that Rosalind Franklin the Prize with Watson and Crick but the fact is that she was already dead and Nobel Prize didn't have the power to name her even if they believed that she was deserving.
Yeah but so far they were not able to mess with TCP/IP and C++ very much. The idea is to have the spec AND an conformance suite. Ideally with an independent standard body who will evaluate conformance and emit the certification. TCP/IP and C++ don't even have a conformance suite but they still resists. I can't tell why some standard resist extention but there is no doubt that a standard doubled with a conformance suite will witstand the most vicious attacks.
Yes, I'm not a native speaker either and we sometime try to use cleaver shortcuts that the language offers with suboptimal results. It is usually safer to spell things out explicitly but you probably figured that out by now. For your original post. Common Lisp is fast because of the declarations. You can infer the types up to some point (you can infer a lot actually, take a look at OCaml) but the keep aspect of fast compilation is that you can discard some generic operations when you know you won't need them. To get the same performace boost in Ruby, Python, Perl or some other language would require some declaration system or that some basic operations have specific types like in OCaml. The OCaml way doesn't play that nice with operator overloading and stuff like that. It's not that Common Lisp compilers are really smart, it is just that they have more information to begin with. You might like to read Lisp in Small Pieces. You'll find plenty of info on efficient implementation of many of the language constructs like lexical scoping, closures and multiple namespaces. Seeing how they are implemented makes the whole easier to visualize.
Saying "take lisp" means nothing. Lisp is a family of languages. Some dialects have fast implementations and some don't. Common Lisp, as an example, have both really fast implementations (CMUCL and SBCL) and kind of slow though extremely portable ones (Clisp and a few others). You have the same duality with Scheme (another Lisp dialect). Gambit C is pretty darn fast while Guile is slower but easier to embed into another program. Don't take my word for it, check the existing benchmarks. Keep in mind that those are trivial tasks and don't take into account the development cycle of a program or the easy of coding in a given language. You'll notice that SBCL has nothing to envy to Ruby performance wise. The annotated Common Lisp code is ugly but the idea is that you can easily code your app, debug it and then, profile it and add annotations in the time critical parts. Contrast this with using swig to recode parts of your app in C like you would do with other dynamic languages, including Ruby, and you have a net win.
... it is the solution. There are RIAA free radios (Epiphany Radio is a pretty good one). This law will just push the other radios to play RIAA free content and it will finally promote the people without a label. At the moment the popular artists are pushed by the payola and you see internet radios without any payola benefits (though I might be wrong on that) pushing the same overrated artists just to sound like "real" radios. It annoys me and I'm glad to learn that we will now see a sustainable promotion platform for independent artists. With adequate radio playtime those artits will get known and will attract people at theirs shows and will sell the swags and everything. Radios play a really important role in the music world: they filter out crap. Yeah, in the independent world their is a lot of crap too and the home listener should not be expected to dig into that haystack in search of the proverbial needle.
You misread me. If the invention are published for the review process you don't need to grant the patent to get the knowledge and in that case the public would be dumb to grant the patent. I'm not completely against patents; having a way to promote publication of inventions is a good thing. Obviously the current system is wrong: 20 years is too long and obvious ideas get patented. If the patent was valid for a shorter term the inventor would be more likely to try to push his idea into a working product instead of waiting for someone to reinvent the thing and to sue him. I just don't know that public review at large is a good idea since as long as the public has the knowledge of the invention there is no point in granting the patent.
Why would the public approve a single patent? Patents are never in the interest of the general public. Patents take away something from the public and give it to the inventor in hope that the inventor will publish more of his ideas.
Don't try to make a graphical app on a text based terminal. Just do a good text based intercafe with readline. Be it gdb, the python shell, mysql client, or just bash, a good readline enabled app is fun and efficient to use. You can TAB-complete (not enabled by default in python but you can have it), search history with CTRL-r and cut/yank a bunch of tokens at a time when you edit your command. OK the line editing shortcuts are usually over optimized for emacs users (did you know that M-u upcase a word in bash?) but you are free to rebind them.
There are significant advantages to LED bulbs: progressive failure, almost infinite lifetime, low heat emission. How do the compare with CFLs in terms of efficiency and impact on the environment? Yeah I know, they still cost a bundle. What I'd like is a cheap way to create an illuminated floor à la 2001. OK that probably isn't the most efficient way to light a room but you have to admit that it is really relaxing.
Triumph of the will is in the Public Domain so I suggest that you watch it and refrain from claims that certain movies "liberally use" it until you witness anything like that yourself. Yes you read that kind of claims everywhere and I don't know where it comes from. I think people studying cinema have to write long essays on early movies and somehow at some point a vague suggestions was taken too seriously by someone who didn't actually watch the said movie...
In fact when I discovered this wonderful option in Konqueror to turn off gif animations I realized that it was the animations that was annoying me, not the adds (save for popups). Now I don't block the adds, I just turn off animations (and popups, of course). When I see someone with a "dancing browser", I pity the poor user. How can you say that he likes that? Anyone could see that he is about to go postal.
I pretty sure that even though most web users are not horrified by animations they would prefer a still web. It would be interesting to see a study were people are asked to use a web site with and without animations. Judicious use of animations could indeed be good but since 99.9% web sites put way too much animations that serve no purpose it is simply easier to disable the whole thing and to enable only for a few sites. People don't complain because they don't know there is a way out.
Err nothing? I like my web without animations. I never install Flash and I don't allow gif animations (thank you Konqueror). The web instantly become almost as readable as a book. If you must provide cinematic content, a link do download a divx is perfectly fine with me. Please don't embed moving stuff in the area where I'm supposed to read. Respect your visitors and they might return.
Kick spamassassin, rules based filters are not what you need to keep-up. Install greylistd and spamoracle. No more than 0.5% of the spam hits my inbox. Spamoracle will detect anything that isn't an image. Greylistd for some reason kill 99% of the images. Yeah spamers are lame and they could get around this setup but for now you have a pretty good solution that will take 30 mins to setup.
What parent means is probably that Etch is good enough since 2006-12-11, when they froze it. I was running on Sarge long before the release it. When the testing version of Debian is forzen, it makes a pretty good distro. You don't get the CDs but who care? You can install everything from the network anyway. I tried to stay on Testing (aka Etch) after the Sarge release but that was a mistake. Things fall apart when the devs are free to do anything they want! But now that Etch is frozen I'll sure give it a try. At this point they can wait as long as they want before they release, the network install of Etch will still be a kick ass distro.
DISCLAIMER: I didn't try a recent snapshot of Etch yet.
You have the source code for all the programs on a typical GNU/Linux box. You need to read code if you want to learn the "real" stuff. You don't need to read every lines of a program, you need to find your way and to study only the aspect that puzzle you. A good approach can be to run Doxygen on the source or just to use grep. When I started I used Doxygen a lot but now I find the overhead annoying so I mostly use grep. Anything that the program does is not that hard and most projects are well structured so you can study only one "module" without much thought about the rest. When I started Open Beat Box (defuct but there are still screenshots on freshmeat) I had absolutely no idea how a skinable GUI could be implemented.
I studied XMMS and it turned out to be an ugly hack with only two static image, the active and the inactive one, when a "button" is pressed that region on the active image is pasted over the inactive image. I studied Noatun and they opted to re-implement the whole widget set and used only Qt for events and blitting of static images. A complete multimedia player can be complicated, there is the visualization with FFTs, hot plugins loading, decoding of various file formats, network streaming and many other aspects. Taken individually all those features are easy to understand and you are lucky to have the source, use it. Most projects will answer implementation questions if you demonstrate any effort to study the code.
There are no books, if you want to learn you need to get your hands dirty. You can't become a blacksmith without playing with hot metal.
GSM clip the antenna power at 2W, analogues can go above that. Back then with the specs of a phone they listed the antenna power. There was something to brag about since more power meant better reception. Now you won't find this information anymore, partly because it is specified by the protocol. I recall seeing phones at ~0.5W and the steady increase in power as the batteries got better but I can't get my hands on spec sheets from the old days. GSM has the option of operating at low power when reception is good enough, I don't know the avg power output. It must depend on the usage pattern but it would be interesting to see if it's usually 1.9W or 0.19W...
You are right, the thyroid was shown to be vulnerable to particle emission but not much focus was put on the effects of electro magnetic radiation on that particular glad. That is not to say that you won't find several papers documenting averse effect of electro magnetic radiation. Radiation kills, what we don't know is if cell phones operate at a safe power for the part of the spectrum they use. For IR, our skin is pretty good at sensing when we are about to cook, for other part of the spectum we need careful studies to set the safe level of exposure. Just take UV as an example. We don't sense when what are being cooked by UV. We can stand a good deal of daily exposure but as little as 30 mins beyond your safe limit under the summer sun and you can expect your skin to peel of in the following days. Just because you can safely absorb some amount of radiation in a given part of the spectrum don't make it automatically safe for 5 times that amount. Hence, a study on exposure to cell phones 1/5 the power of current devices don't mean that we are currently safe.
After further inspection, it looks like the OASIS standard was approved by ISO without modifications. This is good but I still don't get why ISO charges ~280$ for the PDF...