I don't know whether it's the same condition, but I had one hyperplastic tooth, i.e. it emerged with no enamel. It was soft and excessively sensitive. I never actually had any cavities in it, but it was quite uncomfortable, and bits would occasionally break off; I had it patched up a couple of times.
My grandfather had many more teeth with the same condition, and ended up with dentures at the age of eighteen or so.
Fortunately, I only had one of them, and it was right at the back. So when I had my wisdom teeth removed (all six, but that's another story), they removed the hyperplastic molar and left one wisdom tooth in its place.
OK, this is a shameless troll but I'm really peeved by the GTK file selector and the way it hides what directory you're in unless you press this tiny little arrow. Is that going to confuse people or what?
That's not a troll at all - it's a reasonable opinion backed with a coherent justification. That said, I've got my own reasons for disliking the GTK+ file selector, but this isn't one of them. In fact, it's the way that applications work on the Mac, which has influenced many Gnome design decisions.
Having fielded enough anguished calls from relatives and acquaintances who have 'lost' their files by accidentally saving them in another directory, I don't think it's a bad idea. I'm talking about people whose clicking speed is far faster than their speed of reading comprehension, especially of computer jargon. The fewer opportunities they are given to click the wrong thing, the better, I think. Hiding extra details is just simpler for the large numbers of people for whom directory hierarchies are an esoteric mystery, and it still works for those who understand it. And, in fact, if you tend to save all the files from a given application in a specific location, it will work well.
If you want complexity and myriad configuration options, KDE is for you. But the simplicity of Gnome is entirely appropriate for non-specialist users, in my opinion - in fact, it's probably a better fit for those people.
As others have pointed out, 88 is 'four-twenty-eight'. If, however, you say it in the equivalent English, as 'four score and eight', it suddenly doesn't sound quite so alien. The Gettysburg Address begins: 'Fourscore and seven years ago...'
The really convoluted ones in French are the seventies and nineties: 74 = 'soixante-quatorze' (sixty-fourteen) 99 = 'quatre-vingt-dix-neuf' (four-twenty-ten-nine)
However, it's far simpler in Belgian French: they still use the old French words for seventy and ninety: 74 = 'septante-quatre' (seventy-four) 99 = 'nonante-neuf' (ninety-nine)
The vigesimal system in Europe is believed to have come either from the Basques or from the Normans.
I've been thinking quite a lot about security on OS X, and I've been trying to work out methods by which even a suspicious user could be tricked into revealing his password. Here's what I came up with:
Malware runs as regular user in the background.
Malware monitors process table to determines when an installer has been executed.
Malware pops up dialog box asking for password. "The installer needs your password to continue."
I haven't tried it, but it seems that by asking for a password at a time when one would be expected, a nefarious program could easily persuade a user to give it away. I have no reason to believe that this strategy wouldn't work.
That's my experience, too. Even if they don't require ActiveX, very few Korean websites will actually display properly in another browser - even fewer if you use a pop-up blocker. I don't think that anyone tests on anything else.
Korean computer culture seems to be even more homogenised than it is in other countries. Everyone uses Windows; everyone's on MSN Messenger; everyone has a Cyworld Mini-hompy[1]. My iBook received interesting responses: those that had heard of Macs thought that they were tools for graphic artists.
In addition, there's a big limitation in that SEED, a Korean 128-bit encryption system used in online banking since the days of US 40-bit-only export restrictions, is only supported in IE; although there are moves to port it to Firefox, it hasn't been completed yet, as far as I know.
1. Mini-homepage, a sort of personalised blog/music/photo-sharing site. They are literally miniature, too: even on a large monitor, the 'mini-hompy' is limited to a few hundred pixels in each direction in the centre of the page.
Spot on. Rich is a Marketingese word that covers a number of concepts which, in English, can variously be expressed using words like shiny, gaudy, flashy, non-standard, confusing, and, depressingly often, unreliable.
One could presumably also use the remains of other creatures, such as politicians, lawyers, and estate agents.
"In theory".
Left hand is more useful in Qwerty
on
Perl Best Practices
·
· Score: 2, Interesting
I had a theory about this, so I checked it out with this frequency table and Gnumeric.
In the Qwerty layout, more of the most commonly-used letters are located under the left hand. Taking the limit as T, G, B, you can hit about 57% of letters by frequency. If you include occasional jumps as far as U, J, N (within reach of my relatively small hand), it's nearly 73%. Thus, it's more useful to keep the left hand on the keyboard. You can of course argue that one could move the right hand across, but the left hand starts from an advantageous position for one-handed typing.
For what it's worth, I agree with you. However, since acronym is commonly used to encompass all abbreviations formed in this way, pronounceable words or not, there's no point in being prescriptive about it. Linguistically speaking, there is no "correct" usage: there is only convention, and conventions change.
How long did China insinuate the moon landings were a hoax?
I don't know: you tell me. But plenty of Americans also seem to believe that the moon landings were some kind of Potemkin exercise.
As for Europe, lots of good research comes out of there...but then, so does lots of bullshit like anti-gravity and zero-point energy.
I'll see your European zero-point energy and raise you an American Orgone box! (Admittedly, the inventor was Austrian, but he settled in NY.)
Seriously, that kind of pseudo-science seems to be at least as prevalent in the New World as the Old. You're misguided if you think that what you poetically describe as "bullshit" is scientific orthodoxy. It's not taken seriously by scientifically knowledgeable people anywhere - not even in Europe!
Actually, I don't think you can change the ".com" - the TLDs need to match still - but you can do even better: the Cyrillic and Greek alphabets contain numerous letters that look exactly like Roman letters.
Including archaic and variant forms present in Unicode, the following lower-case characters can be spoofed:
Cyrillic has a, e, o, p, c, y, x, and s. Greek has v, o, c, j.
And that's before you start on the close matches (gamma, rho, upsilon, omega.) which might easily be mistaken at small point sizes.
Although your theory deserves attention, I'd like to suggest that equal consideration be given to Pastafarianism.
The Flying Spaghetti Monster faith teaches us us directly about the causes of global warming, and how they are directly related to shrinking numbers of pirates in the world.
We can argue about CO2 reduction all day; increasing piracy, however, is something that we can all start immediately. Give pirates a chance!
Most of the accepted rules of punctuation and capitalisation have been around for longer than Global Warming. If he hasn't yet accepted the former, I fear that he won't be convinced by the latter for a long time to come.
Most of those watermarks just work by inducing aliasing patterns in the digital rendition of the page. However, this only works when the resolution of the scanner is low. With a sufficiently high resolution, you can just reproduce the original pattern - and it turns out that 600 dpi is plenty.
If you want to know the details about how this works, look at the sampling theorem.
I've tried that in the past, on occasions when I haven't had immediate access to a scanner.
It's a passable "poor-man's" solution: it works, but the image tends to be geometrically distorted, with colour fringing around letters. Lighting can be a bit tricky, too. (These problems can be fixed with the right equipment, but scanners are cheap; certainly cheaper than the requisite photographic equipment.)
If you need a record in a hurry, it's an option. I'm not sure that the output would work well in most OCR software, though, and photos of photos lose a lot of quality.
I, too, have a LiDE 20, and I'm very happy with it. Having no wall-wart is wonderful - especially since that's the component that failed on my previous scanner. It also means that it's easy to drag it out, plug in one USB connection, and use it: there's no need to have it permanently set up.
Realistically, 600 dpi is more than enough for anything I've ever needed to do. That doesn't include slide or negative scanning, but it's plenty for photographs and drawings. (Remember that 600 dpi on a scanner is not comparable to the same resolution on an inkjet printer.)
The Mac interface *will not* execute even files that are marked as executable! It will only execute.APP directories, which means that the attacker would need to pack the app into a DMG file, then somehow convince the user to extract and run the file. None of this "mydoc.doc.pif" crap.
Not strictly true. You can do a "mydoc.doc.pif"-style trick on OS X.
I have made a proof-of-concept trojan horse that appears to be a JPEG file, opens a JPEG in Preview, and to the layman appears to be a JPEG file. In fact, it's an Application in the form of a.app directory.
OS X is smart enough to realise that an app called "foo.jpeg.app" is nefarious, and displays its full name. If, however, the first period is replaced with a similar-looking Unicode punctuation character, the OS displays just "foo.jpeg". With a suitable application icon, it looks a lot like a genuine image. (The only obvious difference is the absence of size information under the filename, but I think most people wouldn't notice that.)
Admittedly, you still have to package it as a.dmg or.zip, so it's not as gaping a vulnerability as on Windows.
That is an excellent prank! It would be even better if they had set it to filter or change gender-specific content (or even introduce random spurious comments).
It reminds me of the time I made a troll-bot on IRC. The bot would sit in two channels and relay dismissive comments about the other group backwards and forwards, changing words as necessary. You just had to start it off with a stupid comment about channel #Y in channel #X, and watch as the two channels trolled each other.
If you use en_US.UTF-8, en_GB.UTF-8, and probably any other en_XX.UTF-8 as a locale on Linux, you'll have Unicode trouble in a lot of apps: not just PostgreSQL. This is due to weirdness in the locale tables on glibc.
This problem does not affect other European languages, whose tables are coded correctly.
For a demonstration, look at this file. It shows the erroneous output of strxfrm under en_XX.UTF-8 locales, compared to other locales. Note, for example, how all Japanese kana evaluate to the same value, giving totally broken results for comparisons.
As you say, perhaps MS will come around to supporting OpenDocument when it becomes a common government purchasing criterion. However, given their past record (such as the POSIX interface in Windows and Internet Explorer's idiosyncratic view of HTML), one can expect that it will turn out either to be subtly broken or simply a lowest-common-denominator of support, present only to grab contracts and not intended seriously to be used.
In other words, I don't ever expect to see full-featured, comprehensive support of OpenDocument from MS.
So I'm somewhat curious as to why you feel so strongly about using a PPC chip.
Did you read what he wrote? The original poster said:
Personally I just have a whole bunch of personal Altivec code and I don't want to have to rewrite it.
That's why. His code won't run without rewriting, so getting his job done in the quickest manner means using the optimised code he already has. Rewriting it for SSE3 or whatever not only may not be as fast, it's a lot of extra effort.
I'm not sure that Gang of Four are the best poster boys for the capitalist way, given that they take their name from a group of Chinese communist politicians blamed for the Cultural Revolution!
BAE Automated Systems of Carrollton, Tex., which designed the system, has since been liquidated, and no one associated with the effort could be reached for comment.
I think you're confusing it with BAe, formerly British Aerospace.
Slashdot Mirror
Create a software modem to connect through a VoIP service like Skype and you can get free dial-up over broadband(!).
I imagine that the connection speed will be totally old-skool as well!
I don't know whether it's the same condition, but I had one hyperplastic tooth, i.e. it emerged with no enamel. It was soft and excessively sensitive. I never actually had any cavities in it, but it was quite uncomfortable, and bits would occasionally break off; I had it patched up a couple of times.
My grandfather had many more teeth with the same condition, and ended up with dentures at the age of eighteen or so.
Fortunately, I only had one of them, and it was right at the back. So when I had my wisdom teeth removed (all six, but that's another story), they removed the hyperplastic molar and left one wisdom tooth in its place.
OK, this is a shameless troll but I'm really peeved by the GTK file selector and the way it hides what directory you're in unless you press this tiny little arrow. Is that going to confuse people or what?
That's not a troll at all - it's a reasonable opinion backed with a coherent justification. That said, I've got my own reasons for disliking the GTK+ file selector, but this isn't one of them. In fact, it's the way that applications work on the Mac, which has influenced many Gnome design decisions.
Having fielded enough anguished calls from relatives and acquaintances who have 'lost' their files by accidentally saving them in another directory, I don't think it's a bad idea. I'm talking about people whose clicking speed is far faster than their speed of reading comprehension, especially of computer jargon. The fewer opportunities they are given to click the wrong thing, the better, I think. Hiding extra details is just simpler for the large numbers of people for whom directory hierarchies are an esoteric mystery, and it still works for those who understand it. And, in fact, if you tend to save all the files from a given application in a specific location, it will work well.
If you want complexity and myriad configuration options, KDE is for you. But the simplicity of Gnome is entirely appropriate for non-specialist users, in my opinion - in fact, it's probably a better fit for those people.
As others have pointed out, 88 is 'four-twenty-eight'. If, however, you say it in the equivalent English, as 'four score and eight', it suddenly doesn't sound quite so alien. The Gettysburg Address begins: 'Fourscore and seven years ago ...'
The really convoluted ones in French are the seventies and nineties:
74 = 'soixante-quatorze' (sixty-fourteen)
99 = 'quatre-vingt-dix-neuf' (four-twenty-ten-nine)
However, it's far simpler in Belgian French: they still use the old French words for seventy and ninety:
74 = 'septante-quatre' (seventy-four)
99 = 'nonante-neuf' (ninety-nine)
The vigesimal system in Europe is believed to have come either from the Basques or from the Normans.
I've been thinking quite a lot about security on OS X, and I've been trying to work out methods by which even a suspicious user could be tricked into revealing his password. Here's what I came up with:
I haven't tried it, but it seems that by asking for a password at a time when one would be expected, a nefarious program could easily persuade a user to give it away. I have no reason to believe that this strategy wouldn't work.
That's my experience, too. Even if they don't require ActiveX, very few Korean websites will actually display properly in another browser - even fewer if you use a pop-up blocker. I don't think that anyone tests on anything else.
Korean computer culture seems to be even more homogenised than it is in other countries. Everyone uses Windows; everyone's on MSN Messenger; everyone has a Cyworld Mini-hompy[1]. My iBook received interesting responses: those that had heard of Macs thought that they were tools for graphic artists.
In addition, there's a big limitation in that SEED, a Korean 128-bit encryption system used in online banking since the days of US 40-bit-only export restrictions, is only supported in IE; although there are moves to port it to Firefox, it hasn't been completed yet, as far as I know.
1. Mini-homepage, a sort of personalised blog/music/photo-sharing site. They are literally miniature, too: even on a large monitor, the 'mini-hompy' is limited to a few hundred pixels in each direction in the centre of the page.
Spot on. Rich is a Marketingese word that covers a number of concepts which, in English, can variously be expressed using words like shiny, gaudy, flashy, non-standard, confusing, and, depressingly often, unreliable.
One could presumably also use the remains of other creatures, such as politicians, lawyers, and estate agents.
"In theory".
I had a theory about this, so I checked it out with this frequency table and Gnumeric.
In the Qwerty layout, more of the most commonly-used letters are located under the left hand. Taking the limit as T, G, B, you can hit about 57% of letters by frequency. If you include occasional jumps as far as U, J, N (within reach of my relatively small hand), it's nearly 73%. Thus, it's more useful to keep the left hand on the keyboard. You can of course argue that one could move the right hand across, but the left hand starts from an advantageous position for one-handed typing.
For what it's worth, I agree with you. However, since acronym is commonly used to encompass all abbreviations formed in this way, pronounceable words or not, there's no point in being prescriptive about it. Linguistically speaking, there is no "correct" usage: there is only convention, and conventions change.
How long did China insinuate the moon landings were a hoax?
I don't know: you tell me. But plenty of Americans also seem to believe that the moon landings were some kind of Potemkin exercise.
As for Europe, lots of good research comes out of there...but then, so does lots of bullshit like anti-gravity and zero-point energy.
I'll see your European zero-point energy and raise you an American Orgone box! (Admittedly, the inventor was Austrian, but he settled in NY.)
Seriously, that kind of pseudo-science seems to be at least as prevalent in the New World as the Old. You're misguided if you think that what you poetically describe as "bullshit" is scientific orthodoxy. It's not taken seriously by scientifically knowledgeable people anywhere - not even in Europe!
True, except the 's'. There is no such a thing in Cyrillic [...]
Actually, there is: it's used in the Macedonian version of the Cyrillic alphabet.
It's in Unicode, too: U+0455 CYRILLIC SMALL LETTER DZE
example: hötmail.çom
Actually, I don't think you can change the ".com" - the TLDs need to match still - but you can do even better: the Cyrillic and Greek alphabets contain numerous letters that look exactly like Roman letters.
Including archaic and variant forms present in Unicode, the following lower-case characters can be spoofed:
Cyrillic has a, e, o, p, c, y, x, and s.
Greek has v, o, c, j.
And that's before you start on the close matches (gamma, rho, upsilon, omega.) which might easily be mistaken at small point sizes.
Although your theory deserves attention, I'd like to suggest that equal consideration be given to Pastafarianism.
The Flying Spaghetti Monster faith teaches us us directly about the causes of global warming, and how they are directly related to shrinking numbers of pirates in the world.
We can argue about CO2 reduction all day; increasing piracy, however, is something that we can all start immediately. Give pirates a chance!
Most of the accepted rules of punctuation and capitalisation have been around for longer than Global Warming. If he hasn't yet accepted the former, I fear that he won't be convinced by the latter for a long time to come.
Most of those watermarks just work by inducing aliasing patterns in the digital rendition of the page. However, this only works when the resolution of the scanner is low. With a sufficiently high resolution, you can just reproduce the original pattern - and it turns out that 600 dpi is plenty.
If you want to know the details about how this works, look at the sampling theorem.
I've tried that in the past, on occasions when I haven't had immediate access to a scanner.
It's a passable "poor-man's" solution: it works, but the image tends to be geometrically distorted, with colour fringing around letters. Lighting can be a bit tricky, too. (These problems can be fixed with the right equipment, but scanners are cheap; certainly cheaper than the requisite photographic equipment.)
If you need a record in a hurry, it's an option. I'm not sure that the output would work well in most OCR software, though, and photos of photos lose a lot of quality.
I, too, have a LiDE 20, and I'm very happy with it. Having no wall-wart is wonderful - especially since that's the component that failed on my previous scanner. It also means that it's easy to drag it out, plug in one USB connection, and use it: there's no need to have it permanently set up.
Realistically, 600 dpi is more than enough for anything I've ever needed to do. That doesn't include slide or negative scanning, but it's plenty for photographs and drawings. (Remember that 600 dpi on a scanner is not comparable to the same resolution on an inkjet printer.)
The Mac interface *will not* execute even files that are marked as executable! It will only execute .APP directories, which means that the attacker would need to pack the app into a DMG file, then somehow convince the user to extract and run the file. None of this "mydoc.doc .pif" crap.
.app directory.
.dmg or .zip, so it's not as gaping a vulnerability as on Windows.
Not strictly true. You can do a "mydoc.doc.pif"-style trick on OS X.
I have made a proof-of-concept trojan horse that appears to be a JPEG file, opens a JPEG in Preview, and to the layman appears to be a JPEG file. In fact, it's an Application in the form of a
OS X is smart enough to realise that an app called "foo.jpeg.app" is nefarious, and displays its full name. If, however, the first period is replaced with a similar-looking Unicode punctuation character, the OS displays just "foo.jpeg". With a suitable application icon, it looks a lot like a genuine image. (The only obvious difference is the absence of size information under the filename, but I think most people wouldn't notice that.)
Admittedly, you still have to package it as a
That is an excellent prank! It would be even better if they had set it to filter or change gender-specific content (or even introduce random spurious comments).
It reminds me of the time I made a troll-bot on IRC. The bot would sit in two channels and relay dismissive comments about the other group backwards and forwards, changing words as necessary. You just had to start it off with a stupid comment about channel #Y in channel #X, and watch as the two channels trolled each other.
Puerile, but entertaining.
If you use en_US.UTF-8, en_GB.UTF-8, and probably any other en_XX.UTF-8 as a locale on Linux, you'll have Unicode trouble in a lot of apps: not just PostgreSQL. This is due to weirdness in the locale tables on glibc.
This problem does not affect other European languages, whose tables are coded correctly.
For a demonstration, look at this file. It shows the erroneous output of strxfrm under en_XX.UTF-8 locales, compared to other locales. Note, for example, how all Japanese kana evaluate to the same value, giving totally broken results for comparisons.
As you say, perhaps MS will come around to supporting OpenDocument when it becomes a common government purchasing criterion. However, given their past record (such as the POSIX interface in Windows and Internet Explorer's idiosyncratic view of HTML), one can expect that it will turn out either to be subtly broken or simply a lowest-common-denominator of support, present only to grab contracts and not intended seriously to be used.
In other words, I don't ever expect to see full-featured, comprehensive support of OpenDocument from MS.
So I'm somewhat curious as to why you feel so strongly about using a PPC chip.
Did you read what he wrote? The original poster said:
Personally I just have a whole bunch of personal Altivec code and I don't want to have to rewrite it.
That's why. His code won't run without rewriting, so getting his job done in the quickest manner means using the optimised code he already has. Rewriting it for SSE3 or whatever not only may not be as fast, it's a lot of extra effort.
I'm not sure that Gang of Four are the best poster boys for the capitalist way, given that they take their name from a group of Chinese communist politicians blamed for the Cultural Revolution!
According to the Fine Article:
BAE Automated Systems of Carrollton, Tex., which designed the system, has since been liquidated, and no one associated with the effort could be reached for comment.
I think you're confusing it with BAe, formerly British Aerospace.