I've never understood why people feel it is reasonable to translate something to a language and then translate it back as a test of a translator.
If your critique was regarding superficial, stylistic issues of the language generated, it would be justified. However, if what you get back does not make any sense whatsoever, it is reasonable to assume that the intermediary version in the 'other' language doesn't make any sense either, and that the translator is absolutely worthless. Thus it is reasonable to perform such a test.
Aber naturlich ist es selten von Nachteil, mehr als nur einer Sprache maechtig zu sein. --> babelfish --> But it is rare naturally from disadvantage to be powerful more than only one language. --> babelfish --> Aber es ist selten natuerlich vom Nachteil, bedeutende mehr als nur eine Sprache zu sein.
IANANES (I am not a native English speaker), please don't look at this comment too closely;-)
I don't like spell checkers. They catch all the trivial mistakes that you mostly just read over anyway, give you a nice feeling that the text is okay, but then they leave the really grave, embarrassing mistakes in. Most spell checkers should more accurately be called typo checkers. I English, they're able to also analyse grammar a little, beause it isn't all too complicated, but firstly this is absolutely not an option in most other languages and secondly I have to ask if we really want to help people who can't tell 'its' (_one_ word, possessive form of the pronoun it) apart from 'it's' (_two_ words, contraction of it is) in a way that makes them think even less about such things?
It would bring the lift to the most motivated persons (the one pressing faster).
It would bring the lift to hyperactive kids who haven't got anything important to do, but are impatient anyways. It would bring the lift to people who wouldn't mind developing a routine of constantly pounding the button while waiting, two hundred times per minute. An algorithm that covers the requested routes in the least amount of time possible and maybe also assigns a little priority on avoiding having some people wait for too long is always going to be the most fair. On top of that, emergency modes with extra buttons could be helpful, some lifts have that.
The one that always gets me shaking my head is when someone turns a thermostat fully to the max (or min) position, presumably to make the temperature change more quickly.
If the thermostat sensor is located near the heating/air conditioner, it registers temperature changes faster than the average room temperature actually changes, so it will throttle the device too early. In this case, setting it to the max until the temperature is about right and then doing the fine tuning might actually work, no?
No, it doesn't. 'Sic' is a latin word. I don't speak latin and I'm too lazy to look it up, so I only recall the approximate meaning, which is something alone the lines of 'such', 'thus'. The implied meaning is "yes, what I just wrote indeed was in the original text just like this". So, your explanation of the concept is not bad at all, but your concrete answer is plain wrong.
When I wrote that comment above, I asked myself, "are there pronouns, too?", and you managed to find one---cool! Let's have a further look at OO: Objects are nouns... then their properties would be adjectives, and the syntactic elements most closely resembling verbs would be operators. Methods are kind of like functions, so they could also be verbs, but the way they're attached to the nouns, hmm... maybe there would be a better analogy?
Classic is not a broad genre, it is a certain period of music history, like baroque or rococo. While it is true that musicians back then didn't have electric guitars or synthesizers, it doesn't really have anything to do with referring to orchestral or instrumental music in particular. The term is _also_ used for music that is much _like_ classical music, and for lots of other things, in a metaphorical sense.
Thanks for the info om software RAID-1, I didn't know that at all! No, my four drives aren't huge, I just never upgraded the two harddisks as they fit my needs perfectly (30 gigs for linux, 8 gigs for windows), and the other two are optical drives:-)
It wouldn't be too difficult for me to set up mirroring, and harddisks are cheap indeed, so you have a point. But I'm a bit confused by your reference to operating systems... wouldn't RAID-1 be a hardware solution and OS independent? Also, for that I'd need a new controller; the cheapest I can find are about EUR 45.
If you mean just mirroring in software, once a day, I'd still need a new controller, since my computer, as it is, can only handle four IDE devices, and there already are four in it. Also, in that case, the disk that holds the images would have to have twice the capacity of the disks that currently hold my data. You need two images of everything, because you cannot overwrite your latest image with a new one. If you do that, and your primary disk fails while the image is written to the backup disk, you have one borked drive and one good drive with bogus data on it.
I'm not sure how well this would work under Windows, it has always been a problem for me that you can't mirror a full disk or even just copy a whole directory tree while it's running, because it always holds handles to a couple of files and you can't do anything about that AFAIK.
I have received two new drives without any hazzles what so ever
Replacing drives, even if you can stay at home with your computer and have them delivered to your front door quickly, is always a hassle. Of course, if you don't have a backup, it's your own fault, but for most people it wouldn't be reasonable to do a _daily_ backup (automatic incremental backups are convenient and don't use up much space, but most users don't want to set them up and test if they really work), and also most people don't have images of their drives, but only copies of their data, so they have to reinstall their OS and all their apps. I haven't had a hard drive failure in over ten years, so I think it's very reasonable to spend a day or two recovering if and when it happens instead of spending a lot of time on cloning my drives every day. But the day it does happen, it will be a hassle.
When you refresh the screen (or a large window) upside down, CRT refreshes, which always go from top to bottom, become much more obtrusive.
You have to update the pixels on screen while none are drawn, in the short period of time in which the cathod ray beam returns from the bottom of the screenback to the top. If you don't do this, you get flicker anyway, and if your system is not powerful enough to handle this, graphics will be unresponsive and ugly anyway. But if you do it right, it doesn't matter in which order the pixels are arranged in a file, because in memory you'll want to have them exactly like they need to be on the graphics card, so you can copy whole blocks of pixels at once. Moving every single pixel individually is painfully slow and to be avoided.
Oops... we just gave MS a chance to say keeping the source secret keeps flaws like this secret as well.:)
... which would in turn give others a chance to explain why this argument is bullshit. At least since the recent scandal about the flaw that was in the wild and also known by MS for six whole months, the press is less MS-friendly and does give critics a voice as well in their coverage. (Well, you know that, obviously, I'm just elaborating a little here.)
I have to wonder if using two separate accounts would help, if you are using the same computer to access both.
Amazon will in fact use other means to determine who is who when you're not logged in. I don't know if they only use cookies, or even a bare IP address, and I can't confirm that they send spam based on what I browsed. I just noticed when you open the site two times, the second time a sidebar will contain items you browsed previously. This is rather harmless, but can be unpleasant if you check out some porn movies and afterwards your mother uses the same computer and also uses Amazon. Logging in is a way to avoid this. They can't rely on the IP address, since it's common that many people share one. So if you log in as Mr. Big Spender one time and as Mr. Anonymous Reviewer the other time, they will believe you and not correlate data they have about the two.
That's just playing the score and paying attention to the conductor. When actors are talking, it is expected that they're sometimes a little faster and a little slower at other times, so of course the score is flexible in that parts. But when something unforseen happens while an actor is singing or dancing, and you'd like the musicians to react in a way that has never been rehearsed, that's another story.
Change the license terms and withdraw all support for older versions, thus forcing everyone to upgrade and pay the bucks?
1. Blackmail and piss off the whole world, even though open source implementations of your technology are getting better by the day.
2. ?????
3. Profit!
> "what the hell is the purpose of collecting full names from their creators?"
They collect your name when you sign up for an account, and usually you give them the real one because you want the books you order to arrive. I assume they keep data on who posted which review so they have it when they discover inappropriate language of something, so they can ban that user.
I'm also sick of sites collecting my data, and accidents like that one confirm that my concerns are justified. However, I have never been denied any service or content when I supplied a pseudonym. On the Amazon site, you could use one account with your real data for ordering, and another one with a pseudonym for everythig else (community features etc.)
By the way, most of the discussions I saw at this page are totally pointless for exactly this reason: Amazon can't check if every review was postet by someone who seriously is of the opinion stated and not related to the author in any way. That some authors used their own accounts for reviewing their own books was dumb, dumb, dumb, but if the 'anonymous' feature hadn't been there, they'd have used a different account from the start.
The parent post must have been modded to 5, insightful by clueless ppl who haven't RTFA. Okay, I also haven't read it yet, but I know Sinfonia. This isn't just a synthesizer that reproduces MIDI data coming out of a can, it is an instrument that allows the stored score to be interpreted by a musician, in real time. There is still a musician who follows the conductor closely, who sees the stage and reacts to everything happening there. He is just able to play the parts of several 'traditional' musicians at once, and it would be hard to argue that this really poses any disadvantage for the audience. Once single musician might even be able to do more. If a dancer stumbles, a conductor might want his orchestra to repeat the last two bars, but there is no chance of this actually happening, if they tried to do this, they would be thrown completely off track. With Sinfonia, however, this is no problem at all.
It is true that good musicians sound much better than a machine just reading notes off a sheet. However, Sinfonia _is_ fed with good interpretations played by good musicians. The same interpretations will be used in every show, while a real musician's performance would vary. But who's going to complain about that?
As a side not 60 fps is not a decent frame rate, though it's far more tolerable on an lcd than on a crt.
Either you're mixing up frame rate with refresh rate, or you actually mean that while 60 fps is a little too low for the really 31337 gamerz, higher frame rates don't make that much of a difference on an LCD. There's no way that an LCD would make a low frame rate more tolerable in any way, except if the fps were _really_ low (like 10) and the LCD was bizarrely, absurdly crappy and blend the single frames into each other, hiding the jerkiness of the animation.
why the heck do you have to create and instantiate an object just to write a simple procedure with no inputs and no outputs?
Well, what else are you going to do with a 5GHz 64bit processor?
You two missed something there: It is true that in Java you can't do anything without defining a class. So, even when you write a trivial 'hello world' program, it would be good to have kind of a clue about what classes and objects are. However, you don't need to instanciate anything to run your method. If you realize that it doesn't make any sense to call that method through an object (which, by the way, is rather unlikely if that method has neither input nor output parameters *g*), then just make it a class method.
Pure object orientation, in the sense of ignoring that there might be other paradigms that could also be helpful, is bad of course. But it has absolutely nothing to do with 5GHz 64bit processors.
You're missing a most essential point here. In the proprietary software world, every comapnay makes its own, proprietary licences. If you want to know the contents of one, you have to fight your way through the legalese, full length. On the open source side, however, most projects use one of only a couple of licences, all of which have very simple rights and restrictions attached to them. The legalese is just for the lawyer types, most users can get away just reading the very easily understandable summaries. Creative Commons is not a waste of time, it adresses issues that haven't been adressed before, in other licences. In fact, they do insanely useful things, for example they adress one issue you brought up: making the same license compatible with the legal system of many countries.
Now supposing I decided as an admin on one of the machines I -obviously ADMIN - I decide to go with the "non commercial" license.
Huh? WTF? You have to choose a licence when you release a work. Your administrative tasks are not something you release, they're not a work your users are copying... I don't get it.
I don't understand why we can't have REAL power buttons still. It's quite satisfying to punch the button, hear/feel the click and instant power off.
Usually you do hear and feel a click when you press a power button. And you can tell your BIOS that you want the machine to switch off instantly. You won't be able to tell the difference. But anyway, it still makes more sense to have a REAL power button that cuts the power to monitor, scanner, printer and speakers as well, so they don't burn energy in sleep mode.
Slashdot Mirror
Aber naturlich ist es selten von Nachteil, mehr als nur einer Sprache maechtig zu sein. --> babelfish --> But it is rare naturally from disadvantage to be powerful more than only one language. --> babelfish --> Aber es ist selten natuerlich vom Nachteil, bedeutende mehr als nur eine Sprache zu sein.
See?
IANANES (I am not a native English speaker), please don't look at this comment too closely ;-)
I don't like spell checkers. They catch all the trivial mistakes that you mostly just read over anyway, give you a nice feeling that the text is okay, but then they leave the really grave, embarrassing mistakes in. Most spell checkers should more accurately be called typo checkers. I English, they're able to also analyse grammar a little, beause it isn't all too complicated, but firstly this is absolutely not an option in most other languages and secondly I have to ask if we really want to help people who can't tell 'its' (_one_ word, possessive form of the pronoun it) apart from 'it's' (_two_ words, contraction of it is) in a way that makes them think even less about such things?
When I wrote that comment above, I asked myself, "are there pronouns, too?", and you managed to find one---cool! Let's have a further look at OO: Objects are nouns ... then their properties would be adjectives, and the syntactic elements most closely resembling verbs would be operators. Methods are kind of like functions, so they could also be verbs, but the way they're attached to the nouns, hmm ... maybe there would be a better analogy?
Classic is not a broad genre, it is a certain period of music history, like baroque or rococo. While it is true that musicians back then didn't have electric guitars or synthesizers, it doesn't really have anything to do with referring to orchestral or instrumental music in particular. The term is _also_ used for music that is much _like_ classical music, and for lots of other things, in a metaphorical sense.
Thanks for the info om software RAID-1, I didn't know that at all! No, my four drives aren't huge, I just never upgraded the two harddisks as they fit my needs perfectly (30 gigs for linux, 8 gigs for windows), and the other two are optical drives :-)
It wouldn't be too difficult for me to set up mirroring, and harddisks are cheap indeed, so you have a point. But I'm a bit confused by your reference to operating systems ... wouldn't RAID-1 be a hardware solution and OS independent? Also, for that I'd need a new controller; the cheapest I can find are about EUR 45.
If you mean just mirroring in software, once a day, I'd still need a new controller, since my computer, as it is, can only handle four IDE devices, and there already are four in it. Also, in that case, the disk that holds the images would have to have twice the capacity of the disks that currently hold my data. You need two images of everything, because you cannot overwrite your latest image with a new one. If you do that, and your primary disk fails while the image is written to the backup disk, you have one borked drive and one good drive with bogus data on it.
I'm not sure how well this would work under Windows, it has always been a problem for me that you can't mirror a full disk or even just copy a whole directory tree while it's running, because it always holds handles to a couple of files and you can't do anything about that AFAIK.
An animated BMP? Rrrrright.
By the way, does anyone know why the bitmap formap is writte upside down?
That's just playing the score and paying attention to the conductor. When actors are talking, it is expected that they're sometimes a little faster and a little slower at other times, so of course the score is flexible in that parts. But when something unforseen happens while an actor is singing or dancing, and you'd like the musicians to react in a way that has never been rehearsed, that's another story.
2. ?????
3. Profit!
> "what the hell is the purpose of collecting full names from their creators?"
They collect your name when you sign up for an account, and usually you give them the real one because you want the books you order to arrive. I assume they keep data on who posted which review so they have it when they discover inappropriate language of something, so they can ban that user.
I'm also sick of sites collecting my data, and accidents like that one confirm that my concerns are justified. However, I have never been denied any service or content when I supplied a pseudonym. On the Amazon site, you could use one account with your real data for ordering, and another one with a pseudonym for everythig else (community features etc.)
By the way, most of the discussions I saw at this page are totally pointless for exactly this reason: Amazon can't check if every review was postet by someone who seriously is of the opinion stated and not related to the author in any way. That some authors used their own accounts for reviewing their own books was dumb, dumb, dumb, but if the 'anonymous' feature hadn't been there, they'd have used a different account from the start.
The parent post must have been modded to 5, insightful by clueless ppl who haven't RTFA. Okay, I also haven't read it yet, but I know Sinfonia. This isn't just a synthesizer that reproduces MIDI data coming out of a can, it is an instrument that allows the stored score to be interpreted by a musician, in real time. There is still a musician who follows the conductor closely, who sees the stage and reacts to everything happening there. He is just able to play the parts of several 'traditional' musicians at once, and it would be hard to argue that this really poses any disadvantage for the audience. Once single musician might even be able to do more. If a dancer stumbles, a conductor might want his orchestra to repeat the last two bars, but there is no chance of this actually happening, if they tried to do this, they would be thrown completely off track. With Sinfonia, however, this is no problem at all.
It is true that good musicians sound much better than a machine just reading notes off a sheet. However, Sinfonia _is_ fed with good interpretations played by good musicians. The same interpretations will be used in every show, while a real musician's performance would vary. But who's going to complain about that?
Pure object orientation, in the sense of ignoring that there might be other paradigms that could also be helpful, is bad of course. But it has absolutely nothing to do with 5GHz 64bit processors.
Huh? WTF? You have to choose a licence when you release a work. Your administrative tasks are not something you release, they're not a work your users are copying