[This was originally posted waaaay down in the discussion, in response to another comment, but I'm hoping it might be seen better as a parent thread of its own. All the Kubrick bashing here saddens me, and I'd like to try to speak against the herd here...]
Show me another story by Clark or Kubrick with many meaningful anagrams and I'd be willing to believe they were hiding them here.
Kubrick used them all the time! Just to give a few after a bit of Googling:
Check out Dr Strangelove for some great examples. Among other things, there is a scene where Peter Sellers, in the role of the British captain Mandrake, plays around with variations on the letters P. O. E., trying to figure out the code to call back the planes. One relevant POE phrase would be "peace on earth", which is exactly what he was trying to save.
Consider the drug Alex is given in "Clockwork Orange" -- CRM-114. CRM is, of course, a SeRuM, so the name fits. CRM-114 is also the license plate of the car Alex & his gang go joyriding in, as well the name of the radio on the B-52 in Strangelove, the serial number of Discovery in 2001, and in Eyes Wide Shut is a hospital room -- "C [r[oo]m] 114" (and it shows up in other movies too, like "Back to the Future", but that's an aside).
In Kubrick's version of "Lolita", he has a character named Vivian Darkbloom, an anagram for Vladimir Nabokov -- the author that wrote the original book.
In Eyes Wide Shut, there are a lot of examples of anagrams, puns, & general word play. A password is "fidelio", echoing the Latin for 'faithful' as well as an opera by Beethoven (which involved similar themes as EWS).
Or consider the much debated connection between "HAL" and "IBM." Maybe a coincidence, maybe not, but the connection is strong enough to resonate with people.
Or consider the very famous scene from "The Shining", where the kid walks around shouting "RED RUM! RED RUM!", which is of course "MURDER" backwards.
You might not accept all of these examples. Fair enough. I know many of them aren't anagrams per se, but puns, allusions, and so on. So be it. I hope the pattern is clear enough all the same. Kubrick infused his movies with a lot of word play, and this all contributes to the larger meaning of each film. Did he do it deliberatey? I don't doubt that at least some of it was deliberate, but I also accept that a lot of it was probably done unconsciously -- the meaning may be there but perhaps not deliberately so. That's fine with me. But it's there all the same. That's what makes his films great.
As for the hexagonal exhaust thing, well, I can't really comment much on that one. It's worth noting though that, as the movie's FAQ page notes, food is a big symbol in 2001. The early apes feast on raw meat, while the early space travellers have increasingly bland foods, up through the pastey goo that Discovery's crew gets. It's not unreasonable to take that thread a bit burther & comment on how the 2nd monolith had "no meat", or about Discovery's "anus". Certainly our overreliance on technology is a big theme, and the fact that space travellers need machines even to eat & defecate is a very potent symbol to work into a movie like this.
Cut the guy some slack. I haven't read the critique in question, but this review & these comments are being way too harsh. Kubrick's films in general, and 2001 in particular, are a rich source of allegory. Just because you only wanna dwell on the techno-nerd aspects doesn't mean that the larger themes aren't there. Come out of your cubicle & look at the bigger picture. One of the articles on the Kubrick FAQ draws comparisons between the director and James Joyce, and they seem to be about spot on to me. Among other parallels, it cites a common use of puns (cf. examples above et al), encoded meanings (POE from Strangelove, "NO MEAT" from 2001, etc), portmanteau words (compound or layered meaning), and of course both of them set their masterpieces against the Homerian epic poem.
Is it too easy to find these kinds of patterns everywhere? I dunno, maybe, but who cares? Patterns are fun! Whether or not they were "deliberately placed", like the lunar monolith (a ha! another one!), they exist and are being found. Deny them if you want to, but it's much more fun to try to figure out what they mean. I'd be willing to give this book a shot, if it could go any deeper than the critical interpretations I've already read on Kubrick & 2001.
Hell, the Slashdot groupthink crowd has dismissed it, so it must be good!;)
Show me another story by Clark or Kubrick with many meaningful anagrams and I'd be willing to believe they were hiding them here.
Kubrick used them all the time! Just to give a few after a few minutes of Googling:
Check out Dr Strangelove for some great examples. Among other things, there is a scene where Peter Sellers, in the role of the British captain Mandrake, plays around with variations on the letters P. O. E., trying to figure out the code to call back the planes. One relevant POE phrase would be "peace on earth", which is exactly what he was trying to save.
Consider the drug Alex is given in "Clockwork Orange" -- CRM-114. CRM is, of course, a SeRuM, so the name fits. CRM-114 is also the license plate of the car Alex & his gang go joyriding in, as well the name of the radio on the B-52 in Strangelove, the serial number of Discovery in 2001, and in Eyes Wide Shut is a hospital room -- "C [r[oo]m] 114" (and it shows up in other movies too, like "Back to the Future", but that's an aside).
In Kubrick's version of "Lolita", he has a character named Vivian Darkbloom, an anagram for Vladimir Nabokov -- the author that wrote the original book.
In Eyes Wide Shut, there are a lot of examples of anagrams, puns, & general word play. A password is "fidelio", echoing the Latin for 'faithful' as well as an opera by Beethoven (which involved similar themes as EWS).
Or consider the much debated connection between "HAL" and "IBM." Maybe a coincidence, maybe not, but the connection is strong enough to resonate with people.
Or consider the very famous scene from "The Shining", where the kid walks around shouting "RED RUM! RED RUM!", which is of course "MURDER" backwards.
You might not accept all of these examples. Fair enough. I know many of them aren't anagrams per se, but puns, allusions, and so on. So be it. I hope the pattern is clear enough all the same. Kubrick infused his movies with a lot of word play, and this all contributes to the larger meaning of each film. Did he do it deliberatey? I don't doubt that at least some of it was deliberate, but I also accept that a lot of it was probably done unconsciously -- the meaning may be there but perhaps not deliberately so. That's fine with me. But it's there all the same. That's what makes his films great.
As for the hexagonal exhaust thing, well, I can't really comment much on that one. It's worth noting though that, as the movie's FAQ page notes, food is a big symbol in 2001. The early apes feast on raw meat, while the early space travellers have increasingly bland foods, up through the pastey goo that Discovery's crew gets. It's not unreasonable to take that thread a bit burther & comment on how the 2nd monolith had "no meat", or about Discovery's "anus". Certainly our overreliance on technology is a big theme, and the fact that space travellers need machines even to eat & defecate is a very potent symbol to work into a movie like this.
Cut the guy some slack. I haven't read the critique in question, but this review & these comments are being way too harsh. Kubrick's films in general, and 2001 in particular, are a rich source of allegory. Just because you only wanna dwell on the techno-nerd aspects doesn't mean that the larger themes aren't there. Come out of your cubicle & look at the bigger picture. One of the articles on the Kubrick FAQ draws comparisons between the director and James Joyce, and they seem to be about spot on to me. Among other parallels, it cites a common use of puns (cf. examples above et al), encoded meanings (POE from Strangelove, "NO MEAT" from 2001, etc), portmanteau words (compound or layered meaning), and of course both of them set their masterpieces against the Homerian epics.
Is it too easy to find these kinds of patterns everywhere? I dunno, maybe, but who cares? Patterns are fun! Whether or not they were "deliberately placed", like the lunar monolith (a ha! another one!), they exist and are being found. Deny them if you want to, but it's much more fun to try to figure out what they mean.
A cow-orker and I were discussing this just yesterday, actually. How come MS makes it so hard to work with "wrong" filesystems?
For example, MS seems pretty comfortable with the idea that there are a lot of offices that run both Windows and Macintosh computers, and as long as they can sell software for both sides, this doesn't seem to bother them. And yet, try to put a Mac formatted floppy in your Win98 box and you'll be cheerfully informed that "this disc is not formatted, would you like to format it now? [y/n]". How hard could it be to just have Mac filesystem drivers available for Windows, even optionally. [Pleading ignorance -- it's possible that such a thing exists and I just don't know about it...].
That was the discussion yesterday. This example works even better. As common as heterogeneous Win/Mac offices are, heterogeneous Win9x/NT offices are surely much more common. And yet again the same problem comes up. It's not bad to move from 9x -> NT, but why not the other way? Isn't it in their interests to support this market?
Of course, the standard response at this point would be something like "yeah, well, if it was open source then we wouldn't have to wait for them to provide it." Fair enough, but not really the point. They aren't open source, they're not providing it, and yet there is a need for it. It seems that their solution, rather than accomodating the users' current needs, is to drive them all into the burden of 'upgrading' to the more resource hungry NT line. *sigh*
From Linux the read/write access to files on NTFS partitions is not as reliable as FAT/32. The NTFS driver is still in "experimental" stage (At least in kernel 2.2.x, I didn't check 2.4.x). If you don't use Linux, this is not a problem.
One solution would be to consider multiple partitions. Your C: drive can be NTFS, and is the home of the system files & major applications. A D: drive can be FAT32, storing data and other applications. (Then you give the other half of the hard drive over to Linux &/or BeOS...:). One benefit of this is that whenever you listen to someone's "I don't understand that registry thing you're talking about, but I tried this and it was drastic but it worked for me" advice to reformat & reinstall Windows, you can be reasonably secure in knowing that your data and programs are safe elsewhere. The FAT partition acts a common area, accessible to any operating system available, and as noted you can use any DOS applications that would barf on an NTFS partition.
This is basically the setup I use on my computer at work. I divided the drive in thirds, giving the first slice to NT on NTFS, the second to a FAT32 partition, and the third for BeOS. Both OSes get full read-write access to 2/3 of the hard drive, which seems like a reasonable compromise to me. It's a compromise that sacrifices full use of some of the neat properties of both NTFS and BFS, but it seems like an optimal use of resources.
Re:BS, FreeBSD has had a stable NTFS Driver...
on
NTFS vs. FAT32
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· Score: 1
Is it read/write, or read-only? I've only seen read-only drivers for Linux & BeOS, though I've heard of others.
It drives me nuts that it's so hard to work with my NT partitions when I boot my laptop into BeOS. I keep a "neutral" FAT32 partition just so that both systems can share files.
I'm sure it would be too much to expect a BFS driver for NT, but a BeOS port of a FreeBSD driver for NTFS would A-OK with me.
Sadly, this explanation has all the in-depth technical knowledge that is typical of Mac users everywhere.
Sadly, this comment has all the sarcastic technical condescension that is typical of Slashdot readers everywhere.
The guy gave a decent, functional, one line description of what a Mac resource file does. He was careful to say it "kind of" does what he's saying, but doesn't elaborate on details. You then give you sophomoric tirade against the guy for giving a superficial answer, and yet:
You don't actually know if he's as clueless as you indicate, and
You don't make any effort to fill in the blanks here, thus giving the impression that you are the hand-waving know-nothing here.
If the guy's description of resource forks was really that bad, fine. If there's really a lot of important details to know, let's have them. I'd certainly like to be clued up on this one, being new to Macland and an emigrant from Unixland that am just coming over on HMS OSX.
The beauty of Mac OS[0-9] was that they allowed a user to develop a sophisticated grasp of how to use the system, without burdening those users with having to learn details about what's going on under the hood. You could use OS9 the rest of your life, being extremely efficient & productive the whole time, and never once come across resource forks. That's beautiful.
The beauty of Unix is that there is no hood, and everyone that uses it gets to see pretty much everything about how it works. You have no choice but to be an expert if you want to get anything done (like, say, cut & paste, or print a document, or play a cd, all of which involve insanely complex tinkering that would be inexcusable in Macland).
The beauty of OSX is that there's a very pretty hood that is easily propped out of the way, allowing the more ambitious users to tinker around just like the old Unix nerds. Best of both worlds. You can skim along the surface and never learn about, say, a plist file or hell a tcsh prompt, or you can dig in to your heart's contentment. Everyone's happy.
The point is, neither way is "better". If having to spend hours getting your GUI up & running is your idea of a good time, great, have at it. But it's a bit crazy to condescend others that would rather put their effort into actually getting things done with an up & running system, as millions of old school Macland people have been doing for years now, just because you happen to know how the bits get flipped in the background.
Guess what? No one cares! The nice engineers went out of their way to make it so that no one has to care, so please don't slap all those people in the face for their supposed ignorance. It isn't ignorance. It's indifference. There are more interesting things to think about.
I've heard a couple variations. IIRC -- and it's been a while, so corrections or updates would be nice:
on the aggregate, hardware doubles in speed every 18 months
memory capacity doubles every 12 months
networking speed doubles every 24 months
general prices tend to fall by half every 18 months
I'm just parroting half-remembered info here. Knowing the readership around here, someone more authoritative or ambitious than me might be able to refine or refute these numbers, but I seem to remember that this was about the pace things moved at.
Well, there is a degree of structure to it, but it not nearly as regular as other examples. The point I was trying to make is that, given that there is a range of "structuredness", binary formats as a whole generally fall somewhere in the middle of the range, with some versions falling more to one side or the other.
Ascii is so structured that decoding it is trivial. Unicode is still structured, but not as trivial. Mp3 might be much more hairy, and then the ones you describe almost sound like "meta-formats", which provide a framework for bundling other formats together -- thus leading to high level structure & low level disorder, or at least complex & hard to decode order.
Agreed -- maybe I shouldn't have used it as an example, but I was trying to think of better ones & couldn't (& still can't). In a way, XML falls into the binary category in the same way that sonnets do -- it has a regularly defined structure that is, in a way, self-describing and thus structured, but compared to CSV or fixed-length formats it's very unstructured. I probably should have come up with a better example.
Let me get this straight. Somebody publishes a book telling everyone -- including you -- how to use Perl to analyse & leverage your data, and you want to censor it because people you don't like could use the same techniques? How exactly does this help Free Software?
I thought the GPL implies that you shouldn't discriminate who gets to use your code, and I thought that the Open Source Definitionexplicitly says that one "[5] must not discriminate against any person or group of persons [and [6]] must not discriminate against any person or group of persons."
I'm looking & looking, but I just do see anything anywhere about it being okay to only pay attention the parts you find convenient or expedient. Maybe you can point me in the right direction here?
In the meantime, this is for me, a non-spammer, regular working shmoe, a very educational & useful book. I'm not gonna support a boycott of it just because it doesn't jibe with your situational ethics...
XML is structured data. Log files are generally fairly structured data. CSV files are structured data.
Free flowing ASCII text is unstructured data. Shakespeare's sonnets, however well formed, are unstructured data (unless you can come up with a parser that recognizes iambic pentameter...:).
Falling somewhere in the middle is binary data. It has a structured format but freeform contents. Consider the various sound, image, and video formats. Maybe Shakespeare's sonnets could fall into this category too...:)
There are situations where you could want to analyze each form. Parsing Apache log files is a slightly different task than analysing formal XML documents or sloppy HTML pages or messy ASCII email. This book helps give you a feel for which situation you may be dealing with, and thus what tools & techniques might be useful for that situation.
Though some will tell you otherwise, this book has nothing to do with "Buffy the Vampire Slayer." Sorry, grep.
Cygwin? No, FSF -- installed various GNU utilities on my work computer so that I would have a semi-functional command line.
Turns out to be really easy to augment the existing cmd.exe shell with this stuff (either add the files to SYSTEM_ROOT/system32 or add a fsf/bin directory to your path...). And just yesterday I found an application that creates multiple virtual desktops (yay!).
Now if I could just scroll-shade my windows I'd have a system almost as functional as, say, BeOS. (OSX needs that too, for that matter. OS whore? Me? Nah...:) NT will never be as pretty as Be, but perhaps it can be nearly as usable.;)
Windows may be a pain in the ass, but if you have to use it all day then you might as well try to get the most out of it....
Well, what I meant was that I don't keep up with these sorts of kneejerk flamewars, that really aren't much more illuminating than emacs vs. vi or kde vs. gnome.
My half-paying-attention understanding was that, among "serious" server systems (that is, neither mainframes nor desktops), the main databases included Oracle, DB2, Informix, and SQLServer/Sybase (with several others, notably open source ones like MySQL and PostgreSQL, trying to get a foothold).
Given that, I was a little bit surprised to see that SQLServer wasn't mentioned in the article or writeup. I realize that it could be seen as, oh, say, "Access Server Edition", but I also realize that real companies are putting it to real use and are quite happy with it. As a flagship demo, Terraserverruns a pretty serious load on such a Windows/Intel based SQLServer system.
Now I realize that that might be all marketing hogwash, tweaked to hell to handle that kind of load or running an application that may be of no relevance to other uses (e.g. web business etc). But nonetheless, it seems pretty respectable to me. If that's "a toy", it looks like a damn powerful toy. Like I say, I don't really keep up with such things, and maybe the competitors can do even more interesting workloads.
The main players in database leader struggle will be Oracle and IBM
<naive> Microsoft & SQL Server? </naive>
I don't really keep up with such things (though I probably should), but does this really mean that "no one" is running SQL Server? I thought it was doing well enough that some naive people -- marketing drones, purchase mismanagers, etc -- see the term "SQL" as being synonymous with the M$ product instead of, oh, say, 'structured query language'.
I'm not even trying to start a flamewar here (though Slashdot is oh so good at that), but I didn't think M$ was a player to be dismissed in this area. Am I wrong?
Disclaimer: I didn't actually get the mail in question, so there may have been a subject line. I'm sure about the message body though. Quoting from the original email I learned about it from:
>>>>DO NOT WORRY THIS IS NOT REAL
<<<<
The original, perhaps 'all your base are belong to us'-eventually-rivalling, was DO NOT LEAVE IT IS NOT REAL, sent by a receptionist at [$company] because they were doing a fire drill that went wrong because the alarm kept going, but she sent it to everybody in [$office] including the people, such as myself, in the other building where we were unaware of the fire, so we just got a message saying DO NOT LEAVE IT IS NOT REAL from out of nowhere.
I'm going to use it a lot in the future.
I got this message at the beginning of March & I'm still laughing....
This friend, let's call him Arp, works for a company big enough that they're in at least two buildings. One day, everyone in the company got a message reading, quite simply:
From: receptionist@company.co.uk
To: everyone@company.co.uk
Subject:
Date: whatever
DO NOT LEAVE IT IS NOT REAL
And that, well, was that.
Apparently there had been a false fire alarm at one building, and in a panic the receptionist was told to have everyone ignore it. She didn't think to filter out the people who worked at a different facility & weren't aware of the alarm, and she didn't take the time to fill in the blank about what, exactly, it is that is not real.
My delete key doesn't help me though -- Pine just ignores it. On my work account, I used to use it with Eudora...until the key wore out. That was tolerable for a while, as I could just click on the trash icon with the mouse, but the mouse button wore out too, and now it's all just piling up and I keep getting warnings about my "bit bucket overflowing". How can I drain it now?
;)
Facetiousness aside, Spammers place a significant burden on the internet as a whole, in terms of time wasted deleting the mails, resources wasted in having to accomodate the extra mail traffic, etc. It's not "free", they just get other people to pay for it. At least with paper junk mail, the money comes out of their pockets, not mine & my ISP's.
Pointing out how easy it is to delete an individual spam message kinda misses the point that it's not as easy to delete hundreds of them, or to route all those bits around.
I seem to remember him having a rant on there about the diminishing value of a graduate+ education, but I can't seem to find it now, and the content I'm thinking of seems to have been folded into the page above. *shrug*
It's particularly weird for me, because my fiance was born there, and yet I can't really talk to her about her background. In a way, she doesn't seem interested in the subject, and so my questions about her thoughts always seem to go unanswered or unspoken. Like you say, it barely comes up: we're both American and that's that.
As for the Japanese schools, it's a big row right now actually, in that the governments of countries such as Korea are complaining that the textbooks are glossing over Japanese atrocities, and the people writing the books don't really know how to come out & say it. I'm not sure that it's illegal per se, but it seems semi-taboo. Ahh, here we go:
The Japanese authorities have approved a controversial school history textbook condemned by other Asian nations for allegedly glossing over Japanese atrocities during World War Two.
Yeah, I'm very interested, but I'm also very busy. If you can find anything without too much trouble then I'll take a look, but otherwise don't worry about it...
Slashdot Mirror
Kubrick used them all the time! Just to give a few after a bit of Googling:
You might not accept all of these examples. Fair enough. I know many of them aren't anagrams per se, but puns, allusions, and so on. So be it. I hope the pattern is clear enough all the same. Kubrick infused his movies with a lot of word play, and this all contributes to the larger meaning of each film. Did he do it deliberatey? I don't doubt that at least some of it was deliberate, but I also accept that a lot of it was probably done unconsciously -- the meaning may be there but perhaps not deliberately so. That's fine with me. But it's there all the same. That's what makes his films great.
As for the hexagonal exhaust thing, well, I can't really comment much on that one. It's worth noting though that, as the movie's FAQ page notes, food is a big symbol in 2001. The early apes feast on raw meat, while the early space travellers have increasingly bland foods, up through the pastey goo that Discovery's crew gets. It's not unreasonable to take that thread a bit burther & comment on how the 2nd monolith had "no meat", or about Discovery's "anus". Certainly our overreliance on technology is a big theme, and the fact that space travellers need machines even to eat & defecate is a very potent symbol to work into a movie like this.
Cut the guy some slack. I haven't read the critique in question, but this review & these comments are being way too harsh. Kubrick's films in general, and 2001 in particular, are a rich source of allegory. Just because you only wanna dwell on the techno-nerd aspects doesn't mean that the larger themes aren't there. Come out of your cubicle & look at the bigger picture. One of the articles on the Kubrick FAQ draws comparisons between the director and James Joyce, and they seem to be about spot on to me. Among other parallels, it cites a common use of puns (cf. examples above et al), encoded meanings (POE from Strangelove, "NO MEAT" from 2001, etc), portmanteau words (compound or layered meaning), and of course both of them set their masterpieces against the Homerian epic poem.
Is it too easy to find these kinds of patterns everywhere? I dunno, maybe, but who cares? Patterns are fun! Whether or not they were "deliberately placed", like the lunar monolith (a ha! another one!), they exist and are being found. Deny them if you want to, but it's much more fun to try to figure out what they mean. I'd be willing to give this book a shot, if it could go any deeper than the critical interpretations I've already read on Kubrick & 2001.
Hell, the Slashdot groupthink crowd has dismissed it, so it must be good! ;)
Kubrick used them all the time! Just to give a few after a few minutes of Googling:
You might not accept all of these examples. Fair enough. I know many of them aren't anagrams per se, but puns, allusions, and so on. So be it. I hope the pattern is clear enough all the same. Kubrick infused his movies with a lot of word play, and this all contributes to the larger meaning of each film. Did he do it deliberatey? I don't doubt that at least some of it was deliberate, but I also accept that a lot of it was probably done unconsciously -- the meaning may be there but perhaps not deliberately so. That's fine with me. But it's there all the same. That's what makes his films great.
As for the hexagonal exhaust thing, well, I can't really comment much on that one. It's worth noting though that, as the movie's FAQ page notes, food is a big symbol in 2001. The early apes feast on raw meat, while the early space travellers have increasingly bland foods, up through the pastey goo that Discovery's crew gets. It's not unreasonable to take that thread a bit burther & comment on how the 2nd monolith had "no meat", or about Discovery's "anus". Certainly our overreliance on technology is a big theme, and the fact that space travellers need machines even to eat & defecate is a very potent symbol to work into a movie like this.
Cut the guy some slack. I haven't read the critique in question, but this review & these comments are being way too harsh. Kubrick's films in general, and 2001 in particular, are a rich source of allegory. Just because you only wanna dwell on the techno-nerd aspects doesn't mean that the larger themes aren't there. Come out of your cubicle & look at the bigger picture. One of the articles on the Kubrick FAQ draws comparisons between the director and James Joyce, and they seem to be about spot on to me. Among other parallels, it cites a common use of puns (cf. examples above et al), encoded meanings (POE from Strangelove, "NO MEAT" from 2001, etc), portmanteau words (compound or layered meaning), and of course both of them set their masterpieces against the Homerian epics.
Is it too easy to find these kinds of patterns everywhere? I dunno, maybe, but who cares? Patterns are fun! Whether or not they were "deliberately placed", like the lunar monolith (a ha! another one!), they exist and are being found. Deny them if you want to, but it's much more fun to try to figure out what they mean.
A cow-orker and I were discussing this just yesterday, actually. How come MS makes it so hard to work with "wrong" filesystems?
For example, MS seems pretty comfortable with the idea that there are a lot of offices that run both Windows and Macintosh computers, and as long as they can sell software for both sides, this doesn't seem to bother them. And yet, try to put a Mac formatted floppy in your Win98 box and you'll be cheerfully informed that "this disc is not formatted, would you like to format it now? [y/n]". How hard could it be to just have Mac filesystem drivers available for Windows, even optionally. [Pleading ignorance -- it's possible that such a thing exists and I just don't know about it...].
That was the discussion yesterday. This example works even better. As common as heterogeneous Win/Mac offices are, heterogeneous Win9x/NT offices are surely much more common. And yet again the same problem comes up. It's not bad to move from 9x -> NT, but why not the other way? Isn't it in their interests to support this market?
Of course, the standard response at this point would be something like "yeah, well, if it was open source then we wouldn't have to wait for them to provide it." Fair enough, but not really the point. They aren't open source, they're not providing it, and yet there is a need for it. It seems that their solution, rather than accomodating the users' current needs, is to drive them all into the burden of 'upgrading' to the more resource hungry NT line. *sigh*
One solution would be to consider multiple partitions. Your C: drive can be NTFS, and is the home of the system files & major applications. A D: drive can be FAT32, storing data and other applications. (Then you give the other half of the hard drive over to Linux &/or BeOS... :). One benefit of this is that whenever you listen to someone's "I don't understand that registry thing you're talking about, but I tried this and it was drastic but it worked for me" advice to reformat & reinstall Windows, you can be reasonably secure in knowing that your data and programs are safe elsewhere. The FAT partition acts a common area, accessible to any operating system available, and as noted you can use any DOS applications that would barf on an NTFS partition.
This is basically the setup I use on my computer at work. I divided the drive in thirds, giving the first slice to NT on NTFS, the second to a FAT32 partition, and the third for BeOS. Both OSes get full read-write access to 2/3 of the hard drive, which seems like a reasonable compromise to me. It's a compromise that sacrifices full use of some of the neat properties of both NTFS and BFS, but it seems like an optimal use of resources.
It drives me nuts that it's so hard to work with my NT partitions when I boot my laptop into BeOS. I keep a "neutral" FAT32 partition just so that both systems can share files.
I'm sure it would be too much to expect a BFS driver for NT, but a BeOS port of a FreeBSD driver for NTFS would A-OK with me.
Sadly, this comment has all the sarcastic technical condescension that is typical of Slashdot readers everywhere.
The guy gave a decent, functional, one line description of what a Mac resource file does. He was careful to say it "kind of" does what he's saying, but doesn't elaborate on details. You then give you sophomoric tirade against the guy for giving a superficial answer, and yet:
If the guy's description of resource forks was really that bad, fine. If there's really a lot of important details to know, let's have them. I'd certainly like to be clued up on this one, being new to Macland and an emigrant from Unixland that am just coming over on HMS OSX.
The beauty of Mac OS[0-9] was that they allowed a user to develop a sophisticated grasp of how to use the system, without burdening those users with having to learn details about what's going on under the hood. You could use OS9 the rest of your life, being extremely efficient & productive the whole time, and never once come across resource forks. That's beautiful.
The beauty of Unix is that there is no hood, and everyone that uses it gets to see pretty much everything about how it works. You have no choice but to be an expert if you want to get anything done (like, say, cut & paste, or print a document, or play a cd, all of which involve insanely complex tinkering that would be inexcusable in Macland).
The beauty of OSX is that there's a very pretty hood that is easily propped out of the way, allowing the more ambitious users to tinker around just like the old Unix nerds. Best of both worlds. You can skim along the surface and never learn about, say, a plist file or hell a tcsh prompt, or you can dig in to your heart's contentment. Everyone's happy.
The point is, neither way is "better". If having to spend hours getting your GUI up & running is your idea of a good time, great, have at it. But it's a bit crazy to condescend others that would rather put their effort into actually getting things done with an up & running system, as millions of old school Macland people have been doing for years now, just because you happen to know how the bits get flipped in the background.
Guess what? No one cares! The nice engineers went out of their way to make it so that no one has to care, so please don't slap all those people in the face for their supposed ignorance. It isn't ignorance. It's indifference. There are more interesting things to think about.
Gee, it sounds like you could use a Practical Extraction & Reporting Language. Eh?
I'm just parroting half-remembered info here. Knowing the readership around here, someone more authoritative or ambitious than me might be able to refine or refute these numbers, but I seem to remember that this was about the pace things moved at.
Perl needs a Parser::Pony::Postings module...
(Hi Dave... :)
Ascii is so structured that decoding it is trivial. Unicode is still structured, but not as trivial. Mp3 might be much more hairy, and then the ones you describe almost sound like "meta-formats", which provide a framework for bundling other formats together -- thus leading to high level structure & low level disorder, or at least complex & hard to decode order.
Agreed -- maybe I shouldn't have used it as an example, but I was trying to think of better ones & couldn't (& still can't). In a way, XML falls into the binary category in the same way that sonnets do -- it has a regularly defined structure that is, in a way, self-describing and thus structured, but compared to CSV or fixed-length formats it's very unstructured. I probably should have come up with a better example.
I thought the GPL implies that you shouldn't discriminate who gets to use your code, and I thought that the Open Source Definition explicitly says that one "[5] must not discriminate against any person or group of persons [and [6]] must not discriminate against any person or group of persons."
I'm looking & looking, but I just do see anything anywhere about it being okay to only pay attention the parts you find convenient or expedient. Maybe you can point me in the right direction here?
In the meantime, this is for me, a non-spammer, regular working shmoe, a very educational & useful book. I'm not gonna support a boycott of it just because it doesn't jibe with your situational ethics...
Log files are generally fairly structured data.
CSV files are structured data.
Free flowing ASCII text is unstructured data. :).
Shakespeare's sonnets, however well formed, are unstructured data
(unless you can come up with a parser that recognizes iambic pentameter...
Falling somewhere in the middle is binary data. It has a structured format but freeform contents. Consider the various sound, image, and video formats. Maybe Shakespeare's sonnets could fall into this category too... :)
There are situations where you could want to analyze each form. Parsing Apache log files is a slightly different task than analysing formal XML documents or sloppy HTML pages or messy ASCII email. This book helps give you a feel for which situation you may be dealing with, and thus what tools & techniques might be useful for that situation.
Though some will tell you otherwise, this book has nothing to do with "Buffy the Vampire Slayer." Sorry, grep.
Turns out to be really easy to augment the existing cmd.exe shell with this stuff (either add the files to SYSTEM_ROOT/system32 or add a fsf/bin directory to your path...). And just yesterday I found an application that creates multiple virtual desktops (yay!).
Now if I could just scroll-shade my windows I'd have a system almost as functional as, say, BeOS. (OSX needs that too, for that matter. OS whore? Me? Nah... :) NT will never be as pretty as Be, but perhaps it can be nearly as usable. ;)
Windows may be a pain in the ass, but if you have to use it all day then you might as well try to get the most out of it....
My half-paying-attention understanding was that, among "serious" server systems (that is, neither mainframes nor desktops), the main databases included Oracle, DB2, Informix, and SQLServer/Sybase (with several others, notably open source ones like MySQL and PostgreSQL, trying to get a foothold).
Given that, I was a little bit surprised to see that SQLServer wasn't mentioned in the article or writeup. I realize that it could be seen as, oh, say, "Access Server Edition", but I also realize that real companies are putting it to real use and are quite happy with it. As a flagship demo, Terraserver runs a pretty serious load on such a Windows/Intel based SQLServer system.
Now I realize that that might be all marketing hogwash, tweaked to hell to handle that kind of load or running an application that may be of no relevance to other uses (e.g. web business etc). But nonetheless, it seems pretty respectable to me. If that's "a toy", it looks like a damn powerful toy. Like I say, I don't really keep up with such things, and maybe the competitors can do even more interesting workloads.
I'm here to learn -- enlighten me, flamethrower.
<naive> Microsoft & SQL Server? </naive>
I don't really keep up with such things (though I probably should), but does this really mean that "no one" is running SQL Server? I thought it was doing well enough that some naive people -- marketing drones, purchase mismanagers, etc -- see the term "SQL" as being synonymous with the M$ product instead of, oh, say, 'structured query language'.
I'm not even trying to start a flamewar here (though Slashdot is oh so good at that), but I didn't think M$ was a player to be dismissed in this area. Am I wrong?
I'm assuming you can tell the telco to not leave a forwarding number, can't you? I have no idea, but if not, then you're still leaving a trail.....
As they say, "nuke the bastards from orbit -- it's the only way to be sure..."
I got this message at the beginning of March & I'm still laughing....
This friend, let's call him Arp, works for a company big enough that they're in at least two buildings. One day, everyone in the company got a message reading, quite simply:
And that, well, was that.
Apparently there had been a false fire alarm at one building, and in a panic the receptionist was told to have everyone ignore it. She didn't think to filter out the people who worked at a different facility & weren't aware of the alarm, and she didn't take the time to fill in the blank about what, exactly, it is that is not real.
Heh.
;)
Facetiousness aside, Spammers place a significant burden on the internet as a whole, in terms of time wasted deleting the mails, resources wasted in having to accomodate the extra mail traffic, etc. It's not "free", they just get other people to pay for it. At least with paper junk mail, the money comes out of their pockets, not mine & my ISP's.
Pointing out how easy it is to delete an individual spam message kinda misses the point that it's not as easy to delete hundreds of them, or to route all those bits around.
;)
I seem to remember him having a rant on there about the diminishing value of a graduate+ education, but I can't seem to find it now, and the content I'm thinking of seems to have been folded into the page above. *shrug*
A plugin that allows you to do this in Word would be very cathartic, but I'd be willing to settle for a Flash animation that shows the same effect.
Too bad I've never gotten around to learning to use Flash. Hmm.....
It's particularly weird for me, because my fiance was born there, and yet I can't really talk to her about her background. In a way, she doesn't seem interested in the subject, and so my questions about her thoughts always seem to go unanswered or unspoken. Like you say, it barely comes up: we're both American and that's that.
As for the Japanese schools, it's a big row right now actually, in that the governments of countries such as Korea are complaining that the textbooks are glossing over Japanese atrocities, and the people writing the books don't really know how to come out & say it. I'm not sure that it's illegal per se, but it seems semi-taboo. Ahh, here we go:
Yeah, I'm very interested, but I'm also very busy. If you can find anything without too much trouble then I'll take a look, but otherwise don't worry about it...