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User: zonx+lebaam

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  1. Notation Formats on Project Gutenberg Volunteers Partial IMSLP Hosting · · Score: 1

    Actually having facsimile images of the Public Domain editions online is incredibly useful, and is, I believe, the most platform neutral (despite the presence of lilypond). There is quite a handful of competing file formats for sheet music notation at this point in time. Gutenberg itself accepts a number of them, including at least two proprietary ones (in semi-contrast to their .txt policy for literary works). Not only is the "population that's capable [of creating computer notated music] markedly smaller than the population who can do this with books", but there are additional problems both theoretical and practical that make this more difficult for even that population, as opposed to the philological problems for text that are generally easy to sidestep in the context of project Gutenberg.

  2. Gutenberg site on Project Gutenberg Volunteers Partial IMSLP Hosting · · Score: 1

    Can anyone find anything confirming this on the gutenberg site? I don't see anything on the main page, the news page, or even the sheet music section. Even if it just happened (or didn't quite happen yet) I would have expected to see some kind of announcement or link or something, or maybe I just don't know where to look.

  3. Right time to fork on Sun Refuses LGPL for OpenOffice; Novell forks · · Score: 1

    A good choice of organization to do a fork right now would in fact be the FSF. Actually, I really wish they would. They could name it the "Gnu Open Office Distribution (GOOD)" People are keeping a cautious eye on Novell right now, so I don't see how they would really believe in getting community support necessary to succeed in forking. I don't envision IBM or Google throwing strong support their way right now either. On the other hand they don't appear to be really trying to fork at this time (although maybe they are testing the waters).

  4. The equals sign. on Pthreads vs Win32 threads · · Score: 1

    There's a lot of languages out there, and the equals sign is a very popular symbol. In ML (which, like Lisp, is a functional language), '=' is used for both equality tests and assignment. On the procedural side, try Pascal (which used to be one of the most well-known languages). Equality is tested with '=' and assignment is indicated with ':='.

  5. Re:Quid Pro Quo? on Michael Dell Returns to CEO Role at Dell · · Score: 1

    > ... Maybe we'll see in few years OSX as a platform running INSIDE Windows Vista ... Or maybe it'll be running inside BSD Unix instead. :)

  6. virii on How Encrypted Binaries Work In Mac OS X · · Score: 1
    This is the same as the "boxen" joke, about which people also get tied up in knots. But playing with words is fun. Of course you have to have enough background to know when it is being done (its funny precisely because of the misapplication (or even as you point out a misimplementation) of a "regular" rule) ... which admittedly some people don't. One also needs a weird sense of humour (which a lot of slashdotters do have indeed).

    Have a nice rainy day.

    Sincerely,

    The Hawaiian Skiing Duck-Billed-Platypi Team.

  7. Re:Having recently been through this... on 611 Defects, 71 Vulnerabilities Found In Firefox · · Score: 1

    It's probably not enough of a big deal to spend lots of time on it, but you could always provide a controllerinterface_cleanup() routine of some sort that your user could (optionally) call during their exit processing. The cleanup routine could of course free walk down your datastructures freeing all the intentionally persistant malloc data (someday it might be useful for other processing as well). If the analysis programs still have some complaints, those complaints will have a higher chance of being valid. Plus, it might make you or your customers subjectively feel that the code is cleaner (different people's sense of style seems to vary dramatically).

  8. More than one instance ... on Top 8 Reasons HCI is in its Stone Age · · Score: 1

    Well, anything that modifies its own code on the fly sorta should live in separate instances. Of course if your doing this in multiple instances, you're probably into automata, and then it's not really a big issue, because then you probably want a bunch of them umbrellad by same controller process anyway. In fact, its probably worth the performance hit to emulate each of them in it's own world anyway.

  9. Re:If you're confused too... on Stroustrup on the Future of C++ · · Score: 2, Funny

    A glimpse at the true power of operator overloading!

  10. Re:DVORAK for vi on Advocating Dvorak · · Score: 1
    I was worried about that too when I decided to switch, but it turned out to be a non-issue. 'j' and 'k' are conveniently next to each other (where 'c' and 'v' are in QWERTY), and I discovered I don't use 'h' and 'l' that much - I usually navigate through a line with 'w', 'b', 'e' or 'f.;'. I was a little worried that I typed vi commands from muscle-memory, but it turns out that I at least know what keys I'm typing even if I don't think of them.

    In summary, I don't think the fact that I use vi made things any worse than if I used a mouse-based editor. In any case, after about 3 days I stopped feeling uncomfortable with Dvorak, and in about two weeks I was whizzing along. There's a few things that feel weird in Dvorak (like typing "ls" into the shell, which requires three different pinky keys for me), but there are other words that feel real good because you can "snap them out" fast and easy.

  11. Re:Math Culture? on Mathematicians Become Hollywood Consultants · · Score: 2, Funny
    OK, here's some "Math Culture"

    Mathematicians are just machines for transforming coffee into theorems ...

  12. Re:Pity on Rave Reviews for Mac OS X 10.4 Tiger · · Score: 1
    But system-wide incremental search? Now this is a new feature.

    It isn't for those for whom EMACS *is* their OS ...

  13. Re:50 million downloads on Firefox nears 50 Million Downloads · · Score: 1
    On the other hand, did you see today's APOD? http://antwrp.gsfc.nasa.gov/apod/astropix.html

    It is a multiple frame sequence of a dust-devil on Mars, courtesy of the martian rover. Very cool, and worth the bandwidth (yes - I don't mean the local bandwidth, I mean the interplanetary transmission, for which bits are in somewhat limited supply).

  14. Re:"Rediculous" on "English" Not Threatened By Webspeak · · Score: 1
    ... Hindi/Punjabi - 2 different written forms, but mostly the same spoken form ...

    Perhaps you mean Hindi/Urdu?

  15. Re:What's up with "grammer"? on "English" Not Threatened By Webspeak · · Score: 1

    It is also a regionalism for "Grandma".

  16. Re:The clones were better than Apple's machines on Re-Imagining Apple · · Score: 1
    Yeah, my Starmax is hanging in there too.

    In fact it is not just capable of running, but it is still a primary machine and does real work everyday. It's still booting off of the original hard disk. The only thing I've replaced in fact, is the mouse.

    A nice solid stout reliable computer.

  17. Re:Patch covers a bit more ... on Apple Plugs IDN Spoof Bug · · Score: 1

    Has Apple been giving this kind of credit to bugfinders for a long time, or is this new? I can't remember seeing them in their update blurbs in the past.

  18. Re:A good solution on Apple Plugs IDN Spoof Bug · · Score: 1
    Or perhaps allowing the user to choose *a single* primary script which is always rendered as is, and using punyscript/colorizing/other to for other scripts.

    This is similar to the roman-default solution used now, but more general.

    Note that it is less general than the total solution now presented which allows the savvy user to activate multiple scripts with similar looking glyphs, but better protects said savvy users from phishing.

  19. Triviality on Programming Contest: Efficient Editor Usage · · Score: 1
    This is a great problem - I'm sorry I don't have time to really try to work on a submission :(.

    Finding a shortest edit on any one of those lines would be trivial.
    Perhaps I'm being thick here, but I can't really see how to do this. For example, consider trying to reduce the problem using maximal length shared substrings (sort of like doing greedy regex searches). Consider transforming this:

    AABCDE

    into this

    AAABCD
    Even though the shared substring takes up most of the example, trying to preserve it makes for an expensive solution (because of the penalty for inserting characters in front). Of course one can insert in the second position much more cheaply than the first, but it "ruins" the substring that starts in the zeroth column.

    In fact, I'm sort of starting to wonder if finding "the solution" to this problem is intractable (at least for the specified input sizes and CPU time max). This means that heuristics are the name of the game, and the problem does lend itself to some interesting ones.

    Finding the shortest edit on all of the lines simultaneously would be interesting
    Indeed. Particularly intriguing is the topological characteristic that it is fast and cheap to jump (or even delete) one's way to the start or end of a line, but expensive to get to a place in the middle. One can wormhole around this by virtue of having lines of different lengths to go into and out of (as alluded to in parent). A final strategic observation is that as one starts to close in on the endgame, and the strings start to get long again (short strings at the beginning make for less maneuvering), one would like to be more or less appending things to the end.

    Can anyone come up with a convincing argument that the single-line subproblem is easy/hard?

  20. Re:vim-like? on Programming Contest: Efficient Editor Usage · · Score: 3, Interesting
    Perhaps they should have said TECO-like (to give us the idea without raising vi-religious hackles), but, of course, that wouldn't address your actual point that the problem rules aren't targetted at as rich a command space as vi (or ed or TECO either (by a long shot)).

    In that regard, I think the problem is quite cleverly designed, as the choice of commands is small yet sufficient to invite complex solutions (beyond just finding the smallest diff between the inputs).

  21. OCD, Music, and "Mad Scientists" on Donald Knuth On NPR · · Score: 1
    He's a brilliant mathematician and computer scientist, and that's all.

    He's also an accomplished performer on the organ (see his webpage). But does this not also add to the "mad scientist" image/stereotype that I think is being (inappropriately) referred to here as OCD?

  22. Re:Interoperability on Spain Prepares For 14,000-User Linux Installation · · Score: 5, Interesting
    Some quick mental (or sliderule or google or whatever) arithmetic gives c. USD2400 per user. Although that's not *real* expensive, it would certainly indicate that IBM is going to be supplying some fair amount of development/maintenance/support value.

    When the four years are up, if they didn't like the IBM experience, they could pay someone else, and not lose all of their previous investment.

    If astute, they can be training staff to "insource" the work at the end of the support period. Then they will be in the somewhat enviable position of maintaining and using their own (working) system to their longterm evolving needs.

    At least in theory ...

  23. Re:Updates on Mac OS X 10.3.6 Update Available · · Score: 1
    How about -

    Mostly Harmless

  24. Re:open source is like proofreading on Apple Cites Open Source Core Security · · Score: 1
    Nice idea.

    Perhaps it can be done using a mechanism modeled on the slashcode karma/moderation/metamoderation system. (It seems that this might be valuable CVS functionality for some kinds of projects).

    The peer review of code is somewhat different from sifting the chaff in slashdot, but the parallel is there, and the automated negative feedback process that the slashadmins invented certainly solves some of the problems.

  25. Farewell Symphony on Harmless Pranks During a Downsizing? · · Score: 1

    An interesting related prank is Joseph Haydn's Symphony #45 "Farewell", which he pulled off in the late 18th century. The musicians weren't getting laid off, but rather wanted to be granted a leave so they could visit their families. Using humor and a gentle programmatic hint, the composer (successfully) got his subtle message to the management. In the last movement of the symphony, the musicians drop out one by one, blow out their candle, and leave stage until only a single violinist is left.