What you'll come to find out (through multiple experiences) is that the deja-vu, when it happens, doesn't have a defined cue to attach itself to. For some reason the seen-before-search area gets triggered and it happens without context. So whatever you were thinking about (the last 3 minutes of conversation, a scene that occured, a song you were trying to remember) will seem familiar overall.
But as soon as you conciously try to pick it apart or take each piece in context, the feeling goes away.
Usually the sensation is triggered by external stimuli that arrive in the brain with a time skew that prevents them from being correlated. This triggers the seen-before paths but since it isn't memory-retrieval the sensation is not attached to the stimuli but whatever you are currently thinking or focusing on.:-/
Most everything in Windows 2000 and up is now reckoned relative to abstract locations. At boot time, the boot.ini doesn't have a notion of "C: drive". It's an hardware-relative path to the partition and specific kernel image you want to boot. Once booted, the "C:" drive is just what's substituted for %SYSTEMDRIVE%, which is the partition you booted from. It's a fixed alias, really. Consider it the same thing as the unix root '/'.
All other volumes can either be mounted at "new roots" (other drive letters) or to paths in the root file system (like in Unix).
Unlike in 95/98, in 2000+ just changing the order of drives in the system doesn't change the letters. Windows stores volume IDs and serial numbers in the registry along with the last mount point or volume label. You set it and it stays like that.
You don't have to worry too much about (properly written) programs fucking up because you relocate a volume. Registry settings are supposed to be made from relative constants derived at boottime. By relocating the pointer in the registry that defines the property, you can then move the volume, and reboot without much issue.
%SYSTEMROOT%, %PROGRAMFILES% for the system, %APPDATA% and %USERPROFILE% for logged in users. And in the registry: [HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SOFTWARE\Microsoft\Windows NT\CurrentVersion\ProfileList] ProfileDirectory=%SYSTEMDRIVE%\Documents and Setings
Most of Windows itself in XP that I've noticed is clean in this regard. I've moved around Program Files and Documents and Settings folders without issue.
Also, there's soft links in NTFS. They're called reparse points. Unfortunately you need to get the 2000/2003 Resource kits to get the tool to manage/use them. They're transparent to OS software, which is good. Unfortunately (or maybe not) there's no evidence of it or exposure through the windows shell.
Hibernation on machines with lots of memory takes forever, and it never works reliably (considering that most hardware isn't designed with power state friendly-ness in mind... laptops maybe, and even then thats not a given). However, many VM systems are quite speedy and allow you to pause a Guest OS so it doesn't take any resources (essentially the same as hibernating, except the Guest doesn't explictly need to support it, and the hardware is virtual so power management isn't an issue).
I wonder if Xen or GSX Serer would allow you to suspend the primary guest while running within the secondary...
I "smelled" it on her breath. It was like she was getting her period at the wrong time, and it was different. If you pay attention you can pick up pheremones and hormones. It feels like smell, but it isn't really.
It's the same feeling when you can tell a loved one or close friend has been a room and left recently. It's the pheremones.
Dream memory and the long term areas of the brain can be notoriously unreliable. I'd feel differently if you had kept a dream journal or something and could pinpoint to it, but I'd have to point back at Deja Vu. Deja Vu is a bitch. It can taint all your sensory input and short term memory with the "seen before/long term memory" paintbrush and totally fuck you up. You start reeling, trying to remember where you saw this stuff before, and you end up randomly correlating details with things you remember from meditation or dreams (or things you THINK you remembered from dreams, PM me about that) and post-hoc formulate that you fore-saw the events in the past.
I always hate when it happens. It makes me feel out of control of my own head.
There is an energy equivalent to information, and thus a mass equivalent. Information can neither be created nor destroyed, and it "behaves" much like light does. In one sense, any force carriers are carrying information, as it were (they relay it as kinetic->potential energy interactions and the "information" is stored as a configuration of potential energy).
Thoughts are simply an emergent phenomenon of the interchange of information (in the case of humans, primarily between nerve synapses in the form of electrical charge and neurotransmitters).
The propogation of thought is limited by the propogation of information that embodies the thoughts.
But you can't make a thought appear somewhere else using action at a distance. Because the propogation and configuration of energies in matter that ultimately form "knowledge" or "a thought" necessitates the movement of force carriers, which are limited by C.
The action at a distance stuff does not allow reading and writing, you can effect one side, but by reading the other side you "destroy" the original. It isn't very useful in this sense.
Screw the double slit experiment. Why do photons spontaneously turn into particle/anti-particle pairs (with increasing probability with increasing energy?) No one "knows". But since the laws of thermodynamics allow it, and as long as energy is conserved, it happens. No one "knows" why particles do any of the things they do. We just develop models that explain all the behavior and provide a framework that makes useful predictions.
And you only remember the times when there was a correlation. (And at certain points in your life, news that seems life changing is silly in retrospect) That last comment isn't supposed to be a barb, since I don't know how old you are. Just a thought...
But my siblings and I _regularly_ buy my parents the same cards from occaision to occaision. I think it's partly due to the fact that we already know what kind of card a person wants (funny, mushy, religious, plain), and there usually isn't much selection turn-over from year to year. Have you ever picked up the same card for someone's birthday like 3 times in a row? I have. WHY DON'T THEY FIND NEW PEOPLE TO MAKE CARDS ANYWAY? Ugh.
So what you're saying is:
on
Beginning GIMP
·
· Score: 1
GIMP isn't for the average user. And you're right. I mean, we go out and buy a scroll mouse for easier HCI. We figure out how to use a tablet AND a mouse in X, or we learn shortcut keys. We use all the interface devices we have at our fullest potential. I don't want GIMP to start catering to the lowest common denominator because then its going to become MORE cumbersome to use. I don't want it cluttering up my windowing environment with a space-reducing MDI and toolbar. I'm just fine letting WM hints take care of it. I don't want it to add an extra menubar that I have to move my mouse to when I can just keep it where it is and right click.
You know what I mean? Let the lazy/artist types keep their photoshop. I'm one who actually appreciate that GIMP tries to create a different interface for people with more advanced ways of using their computer.
AMD is still king of multi-path IO, NUMA, and low latency. For medium to large workstations and servers, Opteron all the way.
Although I am totally sold on Core Duo for single socket, 2-way 1Us and smaller workstation.
I'm not sure what the problem with that is.
on
Beginning GIMP
·
· Score: 1
Every person I ever showed the GIMP to, I told them one thing up front:
If you're not trying to use a tool or a brust, right-click on the thing you want to do something to, and all the relevant things will be there.
And that's it. That's how the GIMP works.
You have a tool palette. This is how you do stuff on the active layer with your left mouse button or a tablet. If you hold down CTRL, ALT or SHIFT, you expose common tools modes (selection add/union/subtract, angled lines, path operations, clone brush modes, etc.)
You have dockable status windows. This is how you get feedback on things, or manipulate whole image attributes (like layers, an undo history, the color palette for indexed color images, etc.)
Finally, you have the right-click context menu. If you right click on the tool palette, you get additional tool options. If you right click on the image, all of the image operations are shown. This includes "save this image as...", filters, and the like.
I'm not sure what the problem with this is? How the hell are people who can't manipulate a pointing device (the disabled) supposed to use photo manipulation software anyway? I mean, the could just do everything with a braille input device and Script-Fu, which is very possible, BTW. Try that in Photoshop.
But I don't think that's what GIMP is useful for anyway.
I think you need to take your document preparation process and split it into a few steps. In the design phase you work up your rasters in GIMP and produce intermediary images. Then you bring the artifacts into a tool for creating press-ready documents. This will allow you to do last minute adjustments and such.
So rather than just asking for a Pantone color in GIMP, you find a color close to the one you want, and then build some grayscale layer masks in each process color. Once you are satisfied with the overall composition, bring the layers as seperate entites into the press tool (discarding whatever mockup color you were using) and at that point "color" them by the "real" pantone color, saving it into the native press-ready format.
I think trying to make GIMP anything but a tool that lets you interactively manipulate screen-rasters is too large of a target to cover. Someone should create an open compositing tool for import artifacts from like the GIMP and InkScape and allowing you to create entities that are press-ready.
Honestly, I don't know why people put up with "Enthusiast" boards or the FX lines of chips because it's all overpriced crap. ASUS makes workstation boards with one or two sockets and they let you play with your FSB and often allow you to play with the CPU multiplier as well, even with Opterons.
A lower-priced 265HE (dual core) with a FSB boost is very stable on air cooling and sips power. Insane memory bandwidth + decent CPU performance = stability / cost / performance wins.
I mean... A 265HE is about $370 right now. *2 = $750, tops, with shipping. Comapred to like an FX-anything which is at least $750, or more.
The AMD 76X pros were much better. I made the mistake of buying some 760s when the came out on the market, I should have waited 3 months. We got the 76Xs when we bought addt. units and yeah, they were much better (faster FSB speeds too).
It's kinda sad, we've EOL'd all of our 1Us based on that platform. I'll sure miss those guys. *tear*
There is a reason Super Mario Bros. 3 is still, to this day, the number #1 game in units sold.
But I somehow have to think that majority isn't with you on this one.
No, I think the majority of us still find the old side-scrollers (Mario especially) quite entertaining. The sidescrollers have only been ported to all the handhelds in existance (with the exception of the PSP, but even the wonderswan had them). And if you can't get a copy ported bn a first party, then you can certainly find an emulator for it.
IBM has many customers, Govt. and Civilian. Northup Grummond, Lockheed, TRW, etc. live and die by Govt. contracts and are not interested in new-fangled web-to-oh and wikiki-macalits or anything else "trendy" in the computing world. They have no relationship to maintain with the computing public at large, if you will. I would wager that the use of OSS internally and for the customer is due to close relationships with Uni. labs and the graduates that come into those workplaces who know the territory.
But you know, if ONR or somebody is auditing some OSS and they make some patches I would expect them to be a lot more hip to back-contributing since they are supposedly working in the general interest of the US.
It's more like: I mean think of the paperwork involved in a public release of auditing results and patches from somewhere like SAIC. What project manager would want that headache unless there was a business case for it? I work for a non-profit who regularly contributes to OSS and it's a pain in the ass even then.:-D
My thinking was along the lines of someone say in a contractor working for the DoD since they don't have a lot of internal manpower for things like that. What talent they do have for efforts like that are probably tied up evaluating any custom code that they deploy widely. On the other hand, most DefCons rarely contribute fruits of labor back to OSS projects because it is viewed as some kind of intellectual hemmorage which doesn't maximize shareholder value.:-|
Why let your competitors enjoy the fruits of your labor?
The Def Con would rather use that audited OSS stack as a baseline for a COE which they maintain (support contracts, YAY!)
Of course if the military does a code audit on Linux they would have contribute back the patches so it is a win win situation.
Show me the section of the GPL that stipulates this. Don't bother, it isn't in there.
The Government (or any contractor) is under no obligation to release the results of any derivative works back to an upstream source. If a contractor like Northup Grummond did do a code audit and made patches, they'd only have to release these improvements to the customer (DoD). DoD could take or leave the source code.
That's what people forget about the GPL, just because you sell something to one customer doesn't put you under any obligation to provide source to anyone else. It's a requirement of distribution, but it doesn't dictate your DISTRIBUTION GROUP.
Which is why it irks me when people complain about the viral-ness of the GPL. It's not like it'll enable China to see your source code or anything if you use it as a government contractor.
It's not the highly parallel clustered racks of custom-designed linux servers that makes Google Google. That's an enabling feature. Rather, it's their custom engineered application-level operating environment, if you will, which runs on top of that. It's good at keeping data, indexing attributes, finding it, breaking problems down, and intelligently routing work and results. The search engine and all their other apps are built on top of this, and it allows their engineers to leverage this common distributed platform in all of their external and internal applications.
=== End Elevator Summary ===
Not many companies are willing to write their own application layers to deploy services. Most companies CAN'T. It's just not worth it. It's worth it to Google because developing and deploying world-wide information retrieval services is their business.
However, a standardized Application OE that can run and take advantages of the resources of many potentially unreliable computing resources would be very valuable to many businesses. Grid technologies, web services, J2EE, and clustering technologies are just scratching the surface.
They use Oracle Financials on your typical "five-9s" hardware. They had a big fight switching to that, before that they were using (drum roll please), QUICKEN!!! (lol)
Although the HR apps are custom written. Exciting:3
Slashdot Mirror
What you'll come to find out (through multiple experiences) is that the deja-vu, when it happens, doesn't have a defined cue to attach itself to.
:-/
For some reason the seen-before-search area gets triggered and it happens without context.
So whatever you were thinking about (the last 3 minutes of conversation, a scene that occured, a song you were trying to remember) will seem familiar overall.
But as soon as you conciously try to pick it apart or take each piece in context, the feeling goes away.
Usually the sensation is triggered by external stimuli that arrive in the brain with a time skew that prevents them from being correlated. This triggers the seen-before paths but since it isn't memory-retrieval the sensation is not attached to the stimuli but whatever you are currently thinking or focusing on.
I think not!
Most everything in Windows 2000 and up is now reckoned relative to abstract locations.
At boot time, the boot.ini doesn't have a notion of "C: drive". It's an hardware-relative path to the partition and specific kernel image you want to boot.
Once booted, the "C:" drive is just what's substituted for %SYSTEMDRIVE%, which is the partition you booted from.
It's a fixed alias, really.
Consider it the same thing as the unix root '/'.
All other volumes can either be mounted at "new roots" (other drive letters) or to paths in the root file system (like in Unix).
Unlike in 95/98, in 2000+ just changing the order of drives in the system doesn't change the letters. Windows stores volume IDs and serial numbers in the registry along with the last mount point or volume label. You set it and it stays like that.
You don't have to worry too much about (properly written) programs fucking up because you relocate a volume. Registry settings are supposed to be made from relative constants derived at boottime. By relocating the pointer in the registry that defines the property, you can then move the volume, and reboot without much issue.
%SYSTEMROOT%, %PROGRAMFILES% for the system,
%APPDATA% and %USERPROFILE% for logged in users.
And in the registry:
[HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SOFTWARE\Microsoft\Windows NT\CurrentVersion\ProfileList]
ProfileDirectory=%SYSTEMDRIVE%\Documents and Setings
Most of Windows itself in XP that I've noticed is clean in this regard. I've moved around Program Files and Documents and Settings folders without issue.
Also, there's soft links in NTFS. They're called reparse points. Unfortunately you need to get the 2000/2003 Resource kits to get the tool to manage/use them. They're transparent to OS software, which is good. Unfortunately (or maybe not) there's no evidence of it or exposure through the windows shell.
Hibernation on machines with lots of memory takes forever, and it never works reliably (considering that most hardware isn't designed with power state friendly-ness in mind... laptops maybe, and even then thats not a given).
However, many VM systems are quite speedy and allow you to pause a Guest OS so it doesn't take any resources (essentially the same as hibernating, except the Guest doesn't explictly need to support it, and the hardware is virtual so power management isn't an issue).
I wonder if Xen or GSX Serer would allow you to suspend the primary guest while running within the secondary...
I "smelled" it on her breath.
It was like she was getting her period at the wrong time, and it was different.
If you pay attention you can pick up pheremones and hormones.
It feels like smell, but it isn't really.
It's the same feeling when you can tell a loved one or close friend has been a room and left recently. It's the pheremones.
Dream memory and the long term areas of the brain can be notoriously unreliable.
I'd feel differently if you had kept a dream journal or something and could pinpoint to it, but I'd have to point back at Deja Vu.
Deja Vu is a bitch. It can taint all your sensory input and short term memory with the "seen before/long term memory" paintbrush and totally fuck you up.
You start reeling, trying to remember where you saw this stuff before, and you end up randomly correlating details with things you remember from meditation or dreams (or things you THINK you remembered from dreams, PM me about that) and post-hoc formulate that you fore-saw the events in the past.
I always hate when it happens. It makes me feel out of control of my own head.
There is an energy equivalent to information, and thus a mass equivalent.
Information can neither be created nor destroyed, and it "behaves" much like light does. In one sense, any force carriers are carrying information, as it were (they relay it as kinetic->potential energy interactions and the "information" is stored as a configuration of potential energy).
Thoughts are simply an emergent phenomenon of the interchange of information (in the case of humans, primarily between nerve synapses in the form of electrical charge and neurotransmitters).
The propogation of thought is limited by the propogation of information that embodies the thoughts.
But you can't make a thought appear somewhere else using action at a distance. Because the propogation and configuration of energies in matter that ultimately form "knowledge" or "a thought" necessitates the movement of force carriers, which are limited by C.
The action at a distance stuff does not allow reading and writing, you can effect one side, but by reading the other side you "destroy" the original. It isn't very useful in this sense.
Screw the double slit experiment.
Why do photons spontaneously turn into particle/anti-particle pairs (with increasing probability with increasing energy?)
No one "knows". But since the laws of thermodynamics allow it, and as long as energy is conserved, it happens.
No one "knows" why particles do any of the things they do. We just develop models that explain all the behavior and provide a framework that makes useful predictions.
And you only remember the times when there was a correlation.
(And at certain points in your life, news that seems life changing is silly in retrospect)
That last comment isn't supposed to be a barb, since I don't know how old you are. Just a thought...
But my siblings and I _regularly_ buy my parents the same cards from occaision to occaision.
I think it's partly due to the fact that we already know what kind of card a person wants (funny, mushy, religious, plain), and there usually isn't much selection turn-over from year to year.
Have you ever picked up the same card for someone's birthday like 3 times in a row? I have. WHY DON'T THEY FIND NEW PEOPLE TO MAKE CARDS ANYWAY? Ugh.
GIMP isn't for the average user.
And you're right.
I mean, we go out and buy a scroll mouse for easier HCI. We figure out how to use a tablet AND a mouse in X, or we learn shortcut keys.
We use all the interface devices we have at our fullest potential. I don't want GIMP to start catering to the lowest common denominator because then its going to become MORE cumbersome to use.
I don't want it cluttering up my windowing environment with a space-reducing MDI and toolbar. I'm just fine letting WM hints take care of it.
I don't want it to add an extra menubar that I have to move my mouse to when I can just keep it where it is and right click.
You know what I mean? Let the lazy/artist types keep their photoshop. I'm one who actually appreciate that GIMP tries to create a different interface for people with more advanced ways of using their computer.
AMD is still king of multi-path IO, NUMA, and low latency.
For medium to large workstations and servers, Opteron all the way.
Although I am totally sold on Core Duo for single socket, 2-way 1Us and smaller workstation.
Every person I ever showed the GIMP to, I told them one thing up front:
If you're not trying to use a tool or a brust, right-click on the thing you want to do something to, and all the relevant things will be there.
And that's it. That's how the GIMP works.
You have a tool palette. This is how you do stuff on the active layer with your left mouse button or a tablet. If you hold down CTRL, ALT or SHIFT, you expose common tools modes (selection add/union/subtract, angled lines, path operations, clone brush modes, etc.)
You have dockable status windows. This is how you get feedback on things, or manipulate whole image attributes (like layers, an undo history, the color palette for indexed color images, etc.)
Finally, you have the right-click context menu. If you right click on the tool palette, you get additional tool options. If you right click on the image, all of the image operations are shown. This includes "save this image as...", filters, and the like.
I'm not sure what the problem with this is? How the hell are people who can't manipulate a pointing device (the disabled) supposed to use photo manipulation software anyway?
I mean, the could just do everything with a braille input device and Script-Fu, which is very possible, BTW. Try that in Photoshop.
But I don't think that's what GIMP is useful for anyway.
I think you need to take your document preparation process and split it into a few steps. In the design phase you work up your rasters in GIMP and produce intermediary images.
Then you bring the artifacts into a tool for creating press-ready documents. This will allow you to do last minute adjustments and such.
So rather than just asking for a Pantone color in GIMP, you find a color close to the one you want, and then build some grayscale layer masks in each process color. Once you are satisfied with the overall composition, bring the layers as seperate entites into the press tool (discarding whatever mockup color you were using) and at that point "color" them by the "real" pantone color, saving it into the native press-ready format.
I think trying to make GIMP anything but a tool that lets you interactively manipulate screen-rasters is too large of a target to cover.
Someone should create an open compositing tool for import artifacts from like the GIMP and InkScape and allowing you to create entities that are press-ready.
Windows 2003 x64 is pretty common.
If I were dual booting a 64-bit platform that would be my Windows-OS of choice.
Honestly, I don't know why people put up with "Enthusiast" boards or the FX lines of chips because it's all overpriced crap.
ASUS makes workstation boards with one or two sockets and they let you play with your FSB and often allow you to play with the CPU multiplier as well, even with Opterons.
A lower-priced 265HE (dual core) with a FSB boost is very stable on air cooling and sips power. Insane memory bandwidth + decent CPU performance = stability / cost / performance wins.
I mean...
A 265HE is about $370 right now. *2 = $750, tops, with shipping.
Comapred to like an FX-anything which is at least $750, or more.
You have a VIA KT3xx chipset. Or an AMD 760.
The AMD 76X pros were much better. I made the mistake of buying some 760s when the came out on the market, I should have waited 3 months.
We got the 76Xs when we bought addt. units and yeah, they were much better (faster FSB speeds too).
It's kinda sad, we've EOL'd all of our 1Us based on that platform. I'll sure miss those guys. *tear*
There is a reason Super Mario Bros. 3 is still, to this day, the number #1 game in units sold.
But I somehow have to think that majority isn't with you on this one.
No, I think the majority of us still find the old side-scrollers (Mario especially) quite entertaining. The sidescrollers have only been ported to all the handhelds in existance (with the exception of the PSP, but even the wonderswan had them). And if you can't get a copy ported bn a first party, then you can certainly find an emulator for it.
n/t
Please someone moderate up this funny +1. Bonus points if you use a computer with NT Technology.
IBM has many customers, Govt. and Civilian.
:-D
Northup Grummond, Lockheed, TRW, etc. live and die by Govt. contracts and are not interested in new-fangled web-to-oh and wikiki-macalits or anything else "trendy" in the computing world. They have no relationship to maintain with the computing public at large, if you will.
I would wager that the use of OSS internally and for the customer is due to close relationships with Uni. labs and the graduates that come into those workplaces who know the territory.
But you know, if ONR or somebody is auditing some OSS and they make some patches I would expect them to be a lot more hip to back-contributing since they are supposedly working in the general interest of the US.
It's more like: I mean think of the paperwork involved in a public release of auditing results and patches from somewhere like SAIC. What project manager would want that headache unless there was a business case for it? I work for a non-profit who regularly contributes to OSS and it's a pain in the ass even then.
My thinking was along the lines of someone say in a contractor working for the DoD since they don't have a lot of internal manpower for things like that. What talent they do have for efforts like that are probably tied up evaluating any custom code that they deploy widely. On the other hand, most DefCons rarely contribute fruits of labor back to OSS projects because it is viewed as some kind of intellectual hemmorage which doesn't maximize shareholder value. :-|
Why let your competitors enjoy the fruits of your labor?
The Def Con would rather use that audited OSS stack as a baseline for a COE which they maintain (support contracts, YAY!)
Of course if the military does a code audit on Linux they would have contribute back the patches so it is a win win situation.
Show me the section of the GPL that stipulates this.
Don't bother, it isn't in there.
The Government (or any contractor) is under no obligation to release the results of any derivative works back to an upstream source. If a contractor like Northup Grummond did do a code audit and made patches, they'd only have to release these improvements to the customer (DoD). DoD could take or leave the source code.
That's what people forget about the GPL, just because you sell something to one customer doesn't put you under any obligation to provide source to anyone else. It's a requirement of distribution, but it doesn't dictate your DISTRIBUTION GROUP.
Which is why it irks me when people complain about the viral-ness of the GPL. It's not like it'll enable China to see your source code or anything if you use it as a government contractor.
n/t
It's not the highly parallel clustered racks of custom-designed linux servers that makes Google Google. That's an enabling feature. Rather, it's their custom engineered application-level operating environment, if you will, which runs on top of that. It's good at keeping data, indexing attributes, finding it, breaking problems down, and intelligently routing work and results. The search engine and all their other apps are built on top of this, and it allows their engineers to leverage this common distributed platform in all of their external and internal applications.
=== End Elevator Summary ===
Not many companies are willing to write their own application layers to deploy services. Most companies CAN'T. It's just not worth it. It's worth it to Google because developing and deploying world-wide information retrieval services is their business.
However, a standardized Application OE that can run and take advantages of the resources of many potentially unreliable computing resources would be very valuable to many businesses.
Grid technologies, web services, J2EE, and clustering technologies are just scratching the surface.
They use Oracle Financials on your typical "five-9s" hardware.
:3
They had a big fight switching to that, before that they were using (drum roll please), QUICKEN!!! (lol)
Although the HR apps are custom written. Exciting