The problem with gold or similar physical standard is that the amount of gold available is not tied to the size of the economy...
Versus fiat money that has an arbitrary value and is highly, highly subject to inflation from the government running more money out of the presses. Want to do a $160B "economic stimulus" program? Just write some checks, no problem, but if you don't cut spending by $160B you've just devalued the money supply by $160B, thus inflation.
IANAEconomist, but I'm far too pessimistic to believe politicians will control spending to prevent inflation. The current state of affairs in the US serves as great evidence of that (sans Ron Paul's voting record against deficits). $9.2T in debt is no small potatoes and it's not getting any smaller.
We're stuck with XML for a loooong time
on
The Future of XML
·
· Score: 2, Interesting
XML is easy to understand because of the prevalence of HTML knowledge. XML is easy because it's text. XML is easy because, like perl, you can store the same thing in 15 ways. XML is easy because there is only one data type: text. XML is flexible because you can nest to your heart's content.
All these things are why people use it.
All these things are why people abuse it.
All these things are why we won't be able to get rid of it soon.
TFA has nothing to say about the future of XML but the tools to use XML. XQuery and XML databases. Whoopity do. The threshold for getting posted on/. steps down yet another notch. IMHO: if you loathe/hate XML then you should think about a change in career because it's not going away any time soon...
The question was not "Do you oppose Federal Marijuana laws..." it was "What are you going to do to protect me from being arrested".
You do realize that by striking marijuana (ACSCN 7360) and THC (ACSCN 7370) from the list of Schedule I drugs (from the controlled substances act) would mean you can't go to jail for smoking marijuana (unless it's in law somewhere else...)?
Never mind that the president can't do that, but Representative Paul could do it since he's a sitting member of congress. This was a horribly, crappy question to ask since the only thing the president could do is pardon those arrested and convicted for marijuana possession. You can't pardon someone who wasn't arrested so the only answer is to make it not illegal.
Honestly, I don't know how you could make that a whole lot simpler.
Yeah, that's brilliantly simple. Except when you have no clue what you're doing.
Look at the documentation provided by jabberpy. It's computer-generated pydoc with pseudo code on making a simple client. Did they have time to write an entire jabber library but couldn't taken the 45 seconds you did to write actual code instead of pseudo code?
Now when you take your bare example and try to receive messages then your simplicity isn't there any more. Thrown in presence and rosters and your "it's that easy" argument goes out the window for someone whose only resource with "the answers" is the RFCs themselves.
After all, if trying to do server glue (as the story summary promotes) then that necessitates handling reception of messages, presences, and the other stuff that comes with it. I can't even remember how long it took me to realize I was getting disconnected from the server for idle timeout and then finding a suitable means to "ping" the server.
None of this is explained anywhere in anything resembling succinctness. Even the library you promote doesn't have it (if it does it's not in an obvious location). Like I said in another reply: when time is money the utility is much more important. If XMPP is "right around the corner" for mass-adoption then I must be using the wrong search engine because I can't find any GOOD XMPP documentation for those who want to use it and not write a dissertation on it.
there must be an unwritten agreement that it's no use for each library to re-explain the workings of XMPP...
I don't need the library to hold my hand and explain XML, the concept of "online" vs. "away", etc. I want a page that says you have to: connect, authenticate, pull down a roster, send presence notifications, and then send messages. If RFCs are the sole course of using XMPP then you've missed my point completely.
Seriously, if your answer to "I want to send a message via an XMPP library" is to read the RFCs then your library isn't worth using. I'm all for understanding how protocols work ("oooo, presence stanzas have priority levels?!") but when time is money the utility is much more important.
Perhaps it is just the library I've used to develop an XMPP client, but I found implementing a client a complete PITA. Most specifically I couldn't find *anything* that simply stated you have to do X, Y, and Z to "do" XMPP. It required a lot of trial-and-error (lots of XMPP packet dumping) with another XMPP client to "subscribe" to someone else (aka get on their buddy list), to notify everyone you're online, and to send messages. All of the RFCs and JEPs are neat if you know what you're doing, but otherwise it just confuses the hell out of you trying to figure out exactly what it takes to make even the most basic client.
XMPP also requires you to keep a fair amount of state information. Stuff I seemingly would think should be kept by the server. I suppose by making the server really dumb (basically a router) you really put the eXtensible in XMPP but at the cost of a more complex client.
On its surface XMPP looks great: an open-source IM protocol!! Once you, the newb, get into it it gets really ugly.
Then again, maybe I made a poor choice in a python package or I just happened to not find that key page with google that basically explains my problem away (and that's all it is is acclimation, it's not terribly difficult once you "get it"). Not even the wikipedia page explains inner-working details of XMPP. And FWIW, I was *trying* to do what this story was saying XMPP is going to be so great for: server glue for a distributed web-based application. Where I sit now with what [little] I know: I completely disagree until someone wraps it all up into a super-easy library (which shouldn't be too hard).
Industrial cutting lasers are a single wavelength backed by kilowatts of power. This is a flash light with a large band of light frequencies that is nowhere as coherent as a laser. I don't believe for a second that it is the light itself causing the fire. I believe it's the actual heat generated by the bulb. The site http://www.wickedlasers.com/lasers/wicked_lights-74-0.htm seems to be slashdotted so I can't get to anything resembling specifications (bulb type, battery type, etc.) to further justify my position.
A typical 200W 120V conventional incandescent bulb puts out 3900 lumens (says the wikipedia). When was the last time you saw a 200W bulb catch something on fire because it produces just so much light? Good thing they don't make 300W or bigger: we'd have a fire just waiting to start with the flick of a switch.
Misunderstanding of science never ceases to amaze me: it's really bright AND PORTABLE ergo the light itself is causing the fire...nevermind the filament of a conventional incandescent bulb (let alone halogen or xenon arc) is on the order of thousands of degrees. No, it has to be the light!
My horoscope said my misanthropy for today was a 10, now I know why.
You buy DRMed music with the understanding that it's useless to other people, and therefore you're unlikely to be able to sell it.
I don't think there is anything "understood" between seller and consumer of any DRM product. (Especially when the consumer has no clue what DRM is.) And, frankly, that's not my understanding of it at all.
DRM doesn't affect the copyrighted work. (The words and presentation in my ebook are identical to your's; the notes and vocals in my song are identical to your's.) That work itself is identical to another copy. The only difference is the controls outside the bounds of the work that specifies ownership. First-sale doctrine effectively says the copyright owner cannot dictate the ownership, which DRM is clearly doing.
The work itself holds value to other people, but I am forcibly prevented from transferring meaningful ownership of the work because of DRM. Having a copy of the binary data does not make the holder the owner thus "selling" it to someone else hasn't transferred ownership.
Approaching my same argument above but from a different angle. There is no equivalent to DRM for tangible property that can prevent first-sale rights. Going back to the premise of copyrights -- to make a non-scarce work scarce thus retaining some intrinsic value -- I find it beyond absurd that it would be more restrictive than any inherently scarce object (say, a shovel). There is nothing you can do to my shovel that would make it have value to me (and only me) but absolutely no one else simultaneously. Nothing.
Frankly, to consider an argument that an intangible, non-scarce copy of a song affords the copyright owner more rights than the maker of my tangible, scarce shovel...is absurd. I'd need to see an argument that the copyright owner has more rights (and constitutionally should) to logically even consider that DRM is "just an aspect of the product". If the copyright owner has equivalent rights to my shovel maker then it's wholly irrelevant if DRM is an aspect of the product or not because it prevents meaningful ownership transfer (which seems to me the entire point of transferring ownership in the first place) thus breaking first-sale rights to that copy.
First-sale is really quite natural. Copyrights are placed on a non-scarce resource to make them scarce. It would be absolutely ludicrous to purchase a shovel and not be able to sell it for whatever someone else is willing to pay for it. If copyright wants to push IP to equal footing (no pun intended) of shovels then you should be able to sell your iTune or CD for whatever anyone is willing to pay.
The illusion that you can't/shouldn't/must not resell it is Big Media (TM) overencroaching on your rights. Fair use is but only one victim of DRM and first-sale is another.
I could make a similar argument against software that can be licensed only once (Steam: I'm looking at you!). MS products are another example of this.
When a language dies out, a small piece of humanity and human achievement goes with it. We are all lessened by the death of each language, and with it each culture that dies out.
I have to take a natural selection point of view on this. By the same token, we are lessened as a living species when another species dies off. I'm not for killing off species but I'm not distraught when one dies off because it couldn't adapt. (If the pangs of Life bother you that much then I dare not ask you about your own guaranteed mortality.) If a language is killed off (e.g., a law passed against using it) then I think it's a damn shame, but I'm also not distraught if no one cares enough to keep speaking it.
Effectively, this story post and your post are attempting to appeal to emotion by using guilt. "How dare you monolinguals not care! A piece of you dies with each language. How can you live with yourself for not caring about your humanity?" This point is exemplified by calling it a "crisis". Coincidently, this is the same tactic people use when they talk about dying species.
On somewhat of a tangent, I see commonalities between your argument and preserving all information in the digital age. It seems to be of utmost urgency that we preserve anything and everything that is a product of the digital age. You know, just in case that email from 9 years ago about the color of socks to buy somehow becomes important to remember in 80 years when your grandchildren are researching if you bought your socks from K-Mart or JC Penney. I know I'm guilty to some extent, though I try to be more liberal with the delete button in gmail than the creators of gmail want me to be ("why delete when you can archive?"). We are so hyper-concerned about storing digital data that we mostly ignore that we have no long-term, permanent method for storing digital data. But I digress.
Everyone has topics they are passionate about and that's fine with me if dying and dead languages is your topic, but stop trying to force your passion onto other people. At the end of the day I think it's more important to live than to remember how any and every culture and micro-culture has lived. I'm not advocating a 100/0 stance on this, but it's nowhere near 50/50 to me nor even 90/10. It's been long ago that we modern humans could be generalists and also know a lot about everything.
Our understanding of science alone has outgrown the bounds of understanding of any one person. If you want to understand everything about even a niche of knowledge then you have to dedicate your life to it. You can't name every living plant; speak every language; write texts on quantum chromodynamics; explain the life story of Captain Kirk; and know the World of Warcraft better than your own neighborhood. If it's ignorance and selfishness on my part that puts dying and dead languages out of my "scope of caring" because I have my own list of passions, then so be it.
I'm sorry for you that you do not understand this, but I hope your exploration of dead & dying cultures and languages teaches this to you some day. Maybe then you'll stop guilting people for it.
In fact, this is why I haven't bought into HDTV yet -- if I spend a couple grand on a TV and extra per month for HD channels only to see compression artifacts in high resolution, something's getting sent through the front window.
I "enjoy" going to Best Buy and the like to look at the TVs and laugh. With those giant screens you can really see the artifacting!
Back in my Continuous Signals and Systems class, my professor said that a digital channel has less bandwidth than an analog channel. Granted, you can do lossless compression and save space (FLAC usually gets me 60% of the original size) but seeing the horrid digital quality...I think I can guess what the situation is.
1080p doesn't matter if the quality isn't there to back up the resolution. You'd think that they would have an exceptional video source to show off the TVs at stores but, then again, 99.999% of people wouldn't know an MPEG artifact from a LEGO block.
Does that mean I can be jailed? Just because I'm taking advantage of someone else's screwup?
I don't know if you can legally be jailed. However, you are a dirty, dishonest scumbag. It's situations like yours where you prove whether or not you're a good person. You're not one.
If roles were reversed and if you think a company would give you your money back then you're delusional...or you don't live in the US. Or an ultra-idealized, removed-from-reality college student.
Fraud requires some level of presenting a falsity. Theft means taking something for your own use, or someone else's, without authorization to do so.
Purchasing gas at a sub-market value fits neither. Purchasing gas is a contract. Period. They offer gas at a price. You accept that price. IANAL, but what I know about contract law says that consideration (ie, what you pay) need not be market value nor adequate (like selling property for a dollar).
If this were with a charity, I'd probably agree with you. Defrauding, stealing, or taking advantage of an organization intended to serve others is pathetic. *But* it's a purchasing contract with someone who's only goal is to take as much of your money as they can.
Welcome to capitalism: dog eat dog. I hope your naivete doesn't bite you where it hurts later.
Americans tend to mistakenly think in terms of rights granted by their federal constitution.
I have been a fan of Alexander Hamilton since I learned he opposed a bill of rights. From the Federalist No. 84:
I go further, and affirm that bills of rights, in the sense and in the extent in which they are contended for, are not only unnecessary in the proposed constitution, but would even be dangerous. They would contain various exceptions to powers which are not granted; and on this very account, would afford a colorable pretext to claim more than were granted. For why declare that things shall not be done which there is no power to do? Why for instance, should it be said, that the liberty of the press shall not be restrained, when no power is given by which restrictions may be imposed? I will not contend that such a provision would confer a regulating power; but it is evident that it would furnish, to men disposed to usurp, a plausible pretense for claiming that power.
I think Hamilton hit the nail on the head. Read the bill of rights and think of how many times those are blatantly, or pushed, or broken on a technicality of interpretation. Imprisoning journalists for their sources while questioning if they are, indeed, a "journalist." In many places you cannot freely assemble a large, peaceful group without a permit. Arguing if an assault weapon ban is legal because individuals aren't a milita. No need for warrants for email, etc. Holding people in guantanamo, abusing them, and not affording them due process because they are "prisoners of war" or whatever the current defense is. Then there's the whole civil rights movements: where does it say the government has the power to rescind the right to vote based on race or gender such that it was *necessary* to amend the constitution to rescind the government's power to do so?
I would like to hear what Hamilton would have to say today with a few centuries proving him right...
Oh and also the whole small business vs. home office crap. What an annoyance how they both contain the exact same machines with just very slight differences.
I bought an Inspiron 1501 a month ago. Small business offered it with Vista and XP; home offered only Vista. Simple question: why?:)
Changing the filter, or removing it entirely, does not change the amount of signal one bit.
A filter does not alter the signal? In what universe is this true? Putting a red filter blocks everything but red. That DEFINITELY alters the signal in both intensity and frequency. That's what it is called a "filter".
This claim that the CMY to RGB conversion increases noise is nonsense.
That depends on your assumption of noise. If your noise has equal power across the visible spectrum, then which colors you filter by won't change the noise. However, if you have a noise spike at green then you will probably get less noise by going with cyan & magenta.
As you word it you can be right or wrong, but you haven't stated your assumptions nor mentioned PSD differences (in fairness, neither did the gp post).
That is wrong. Sunlight varies dramatically and no such generalization can be made but "daylight" is quite well balanced; it is not biased toward green.
Over here you can find an excel sheet with the AM0 spectrum density. I would definitely not consider that flat and a maximum irradiance at ~481 nm with a definite heavy tail across the greenish band. I don't claim to be an expert, but I think you need a little bit more to convince me that I'm wrong other than "That is wrong." The evidence shows you to the contrary.
No, the Bayer filter has twice as many green pixels because (a) there are 4 pixels and only 3 colors so one color is going to get twice as many as the other...
There are absolutely, 100% not "3 colors". Color is a continuous spectrum and it just so happens that you can "fake it" pretty well with just 3 discrete colors. Shining red & blue light (two distinct wavelengths) does not magically give you a wavelength in the violet area. It "tricks" your eye to see purple by stimulating the cones just as if a violet light was being shown.
I prefer not to get too insulting but you don't seem to grasp the fundamentals here. You can EASILY create a 3 color filter with equal percentage of each color per unit of area like so:
RGB GBR BRG
but it is a 3x3 filter while the Bayer filter is 2x2. So you are neither limited to "4 pixels" nor "only 3 colors". The pattern you choose will depend on your mathematical model of light and heavily influence your interpolation algorithm such that you get R, G, & B (or whatever colors you're designing for) at each pixel location as accurately as possible.
Adding more [green] pixels does not in any way take advantage of this extra green light you claim exists (but doesn't).
It absolutely does because the values of the pixels are interpolated to get R, G, & B at each pixel location. If you have twice as much green data then you've got a bias toward green. I'd love to see your math that shows to the contrary. Consider this: if your camera had an all green filter with a single red pixel, then you better bet that your image will be green. One single pixel of red intensity does not give you enough information to make a red & green image let alone give any information about blue. Believing to the contrary is beyond absurd. Advocating such is foolish.
Come back when you're more informed, please. I will grant your correction on my statement about incandescent & fluorescent. Fluorescent lights are centered on green but have definite power spikes in the violet/ultraviolet area (thanks mercury). Fluorescent is definitely more blueish than incandescent and if you put them next to each other, fluorescent has a "blueish tint."
This way, by simply switching color space, the camera becomes twice as sensitive to light. I.e. instead of...
The issue is that the spectral density of sunlight is not flat. (I can't seem to find a good image for you.) Basically, it peaks at about 500 nm (yellowish-green) and tapers off toward infrared and ultraviolet. The Bayer filter has twice as many green pixels as red or blue, which reflects the sunlight power spectral density more than having one cyan, one magenta, one yellow, and one intensity would. In other words, sunlight is more green than red and blue.
It is no coincidence (I suppose it's arguable if you call evolution a "theory" (with quotes)) that our eye is most sensitive to green light.:) Notice that of the three cone cells in our eyes, two heavily favor (534 & 564 nm) the yellow-green end of the spectrum. IMHO, the ideal colors for a camera filter would match the three peaks in our cones which decently lines up with the sunlight PSD.
As a side note, the need for white balance on cameras is that spectral density for different light sources are not the same. Incandescents differ from fluorescents which differ from sunlight which is why incandescents have an orangeish tint and fluorescents have a blueish tint (that's where their frequencies have their peak power).
(The theory behind why chlorophyll is green (which means it reflects green and, thus, does not absorb the frequencies with the most power) are quiet interesting to boot.)
...pull both the cable and another pullstring so you can keep adding stuff.
Or use a single string just a bit longer than twice the length of your conduit. Tie something on each end (bigger than the conduit like half of a racquetball or something) so it doesn't accidentally pull through. Also tie a loop in the middle to easily tie your new wire to for when it gets pulled through.
If you start adding all kinds of technical gizmos and gadgets to your house, you will become a slave to maintaining them.
I see linux as the same way. It's much easier to just install Windows (or just buy Windows on a machine) and move on with life. But I don't want Windows. I don't mind the tweaking and such to get things to work the way I want them to work. I don't think this is the kind of place that merits arguments over open source, etc. so I'll skip it.:)
Then again, I also don't want to recompile a kernel every day or manually tweak my Xorg mode lines every day.
The level of intrusion depends on what you want from it (and what your family will tolerate). If you don't mind rewiring everything every day, then rock on. If you want the bulk to be a once-off with occasional tweakings and playings, then rock on. If you want COTS, then rock on.
So I think your point should be more so of "let technology intrude to the point you and your family are comfortable" rather than a blanket "don't let technology intrude and ru(i)n your life".:)
People who buy DSLRs don't buy them to put pictures up on flickr
While i agree that the article is terrible i don't think your comment is any better
Did you bother reading the sentence before that which you quoted? Or, heck, any part of my post?
Let me try my hand at these baseless assumptive statements. People who buy DSLRs don't buy them to put pictures up on flickr.
I think it's pretty clear I'm calling out the baseless assumptions (hey, look, it's the subject of my post too!) the submitter made and then made up my own to demonstrate my point.
...but given that most people resize images to put on Flickr, we could start to see a decline in dedicated digital cameras sales and an increase in camera phone sales.
Sorry, but what complete and utter horseshit. People who buy DSLRs don't buy them to put pictures up on flickr. People who buy thousand dollar lenses and up (e.g., me) don't buy them to put pictures on flickr.
Let me try my hand at these baseless assumptive statements. People who buy camera phones to be their primary camera do so to put their pictures up on flickr. People who compare the merits of a camera phone to a DSLR are people who put their pictures on flickr. (Hey, baseless statements are pretty easy!)
I've stated for a long time in "defending" my ownership of an SLR and canon L-series lenses is that its a tool for how I want to take pictures. I'm the first one to admit that lugging my equipment around is not something I want to do 24/7 so it is by no means convenient. The camera on my phone, however, is extremely convenient and I have found it to be useful in its own times. So my beef with the/. summary is that predicting a sales trend on the assumption that the majority of people are flickr users is beyond absurd, it's stupid and reckless. And, of course, 4 cameras is sufficient sampling to draw such conclusions to boot (where's the top-of-the-line camera with top-of-the-line lens to compare against the bottom-of-the-barrel camera phone?).
Honestly, it's crap story submissions like this that just grinds me about slashdot.
Then someone showed me Snipshot. Check it out, it is pretty intersting. Although it only does very basic photo editing right now, I could see where, in the future, it could support most (all?) the features of Photoshop.
Interesting: yes. I will grant it that but that's about all I'll give it. Let me know when it can zoom and edit pixels with the speed of MS Paint (let alone Photoshop or GIMP) then we can label Snipshot a real photo editor. Until then, it's a "photo tweaker" in my book.
The problem with Snipshot is that it will never attain the performance of a desktop app is because it's instructing the server to do all the work and any visual updates require sending another image back to the client after the server has performed them. The browser does zero actual work; it's the only way it can be done within the HTML/JS confines.
It will be the same issue as with video or audio but worse because both are more bandwidth intensive.
My primary complaint about any web app is speed/performance (and I'm not a performance freak, just impatient). The operations Snipshot is performing are trivial and they take a helluva lot longer than GIMP could do them in. Gmail can be dreadfully, painfully slow and is tolerable because I want the convenience.
If my prediction/opinion matters: the end result will be a hybrid with shared data. Sometimes, I just need that raw GIMP power to get crap done. Sometimes, I might be stuck on someone else's computer and not have GIMP and the handful of functions Snipshot can do may be sufficient. The marriage of desktop and web will be when I can tote those images to either app that I need them in at the time I need it. Ditto for email. I want gmail and thunderbird to sync. I want google calendar to sync with my phone and kontact. I want picasaweb to sync with kuickshow/gwenview/ee/name-your-slideshow-desktop- app.
The endgame is proper sharing of data to the app suited for the use. (Psst, just like everything else in life!) No one paradigm will "win" for every application and problem.
Slashdotters, for the love of god, please stop complaining that after shopping around for the cheapest deal you're not getting top-of-the-line service. This is as annoying as the people who buy all their airfares at the cheapest possible price and then complain that they don't have legroom.
Is this not the essence of capitalism? Consumers want the most product for their money. Producers want the most money for their product. It's a tug-of-war. This is why airliners want less legroom (more people -> more tickets -> more money) while passengers want more legroom (it's *my* money dammit). Just because I bought a cheap ticket it doesn't mean I want to be a sardine.
Slashdot has a high rate of RAID, which is a bad thing. Which is a bad thing. It has been a whole 9 days. Slashdot needs a story moderation system so dupe articles can get modded out of existance. Ditto for slashdot editors who do the duping!:) (I have long since disabled tagging since 99% of the tags were completely worthless: "yes", "no", "maybe", "fud", etc. If tagging is actually useful now, please let me know!)
Slashdot Mirror
IANAEconomist, but I'm far too pessimistic to believe politicians will control spending to prevent inflation. The current state of affairs in the US serves as great evidence of that (sans Ron Paul's voting record against deficits). $9.2T in debt is no small potatoes and it's not getting any smaller.
XML is easy to understand because of the prevalence of HTML knowledge. XML is easy because it's text. XML is easy because, like perl, you can store the same thing in 15 ways. XML is easy because there is only one data type: text. XML is flexible because you can nest to your heart's content.
/. steps down yet another notch. IMHO: if you loathe/hate XML then you should think about a change in career because it's not going away any time soon...
All these things are why people use it.
All these things are why people abuse it.
All these things are why we won't be able to get rid of it soon.
TFA has nothing to say about the future of XML but the tools to use XML. XQuery and XML databases. Whoopity do. The threshold for getting posted on
Never mind that the president can't do that, but Representative Paul could do it since he's a sitting member of congress. This was a horribly, crappy question to ask since the only thing the president could do is pardon those arrested and convicted for marijuana possession. You can't pardon someone who wasn't arrested so the only answer is to make it not illegal.
Look at the documentation provided by jabberpy. It's computer-generated pydoc with pseudo code on making a simple client. Did they have time to write an entire jabber library but couldn't taken the 45 seconds you did to write actual code instead of pseudo code?
Now when you take your bare example and try to receive messages then your simplicity isn't there any more. Thrown in presence and rosters and your "it's that easy" argument goes out the window for someone whose only resource with "the answers" is the RFCs themselves.
After all, if trying to do server glue (as the story summary promotes) then that necessitates handling reception of messages, presences, and the other stuff that comes with it. I can't even remember how long it took me to realize I was getting disconnected from the server for idle timeout and then finding a suitable means to "ping" the server.
None of this is explained anywhere in anything resembling succinctness. Even the library you promote doesn't have it (if it does it's not in an obvious location). Like I said in another reply: when time is money the utility is much more important. If XMPP is "right around the corner" for mass-adoption then I must be using the wrong search engine because I can't find any GOOD XMPP documentation for those who want to use it and not write a dissertation on it.
http://pyxmpp.jajcus.net/ How do you get javascript from that?!?!?!
As for this part:I don't need the library to hold my hand and explain XML, the concept of "online" vs. "away", etc. I want a page that says you have to: connect, authenticate, pull down a roster, send presence notifications, and then send messages. If RFCs are the sole course of using XMPP then you've missed my point completely.
Seriously, if your answer to "I want to send a message via an XMPP library" is to read the RFCs then your library isn't worth using. I'm all for understanding how protocols work ("oooo, presence stanzas have priority levels?!") but when time is money the utility is much more important.
Perhaps it is just the library I've used to develop an XMPP client, but I found implementing a client a complete PITA. Most specifically I couldn't find *anything* that simply stated you have to do X, Y, and Z to "do" XMPP. It required a lot of trial-and-error (lots of XMPP packet dumping) with another XMPP client to "subscribe" to someone else (aka get on their buddy list), to notify everyone you're online, and to send messages. All of the RFCs and JEPs are neat if you know what you're doing, but otherwise it just confuses the hell out of you trying to figure out exactly what it takes to make even the most basic client.
XMPP also requires you to keep a fair amount of state information. Stuff I seemingly would think should be kept by the server. I suppose by making the server really dumb (basically a router) you really put the eXtensible in XMPP but at the cost of a more complex client.
On its surface XMPP looks great: an open-source IM protocol!! Once you, the newb, get into it it gets really ugly.
Then again, maybe I made a poor choice in a python package or I just happened to not find that key page with google that basically explains my problem away (and that's all it is is acclimation, it's not terribly difficult once you "get it"). Not even the wikipedia page explains inner-working details of XMPP. And FWIW, I was *trying* to do what this story was saying XMPP is going to be so great for: server glue for a distributed web-based application. Where I sit now with what [little] I know: I completely disagree until someone wraps it all up into a super-easy library (which shouldn't be too hard).
Industrial cutting lasers are a single wavelength backed by kilowatts of power. This is a flash light with a large band of light frequencies that is nowhere as coherent as a laser. I don't believe for a second that it is the light itself causing the fire. I believe it's the actual heat generated by the bulb. The site http://www.wickedlasers.com/lasers/wicked_lights-74-0.htm seems to be slashdotted so I can't get to anything resembling specifications (bulb type, battery type, etc.) to further justify my position.
A typical 200W 120V conventional incandescent bulb puts out 3900 lumens (says the wikipedia). When was the last time you saw a 200W bulb catch something on fire because it produces just so much light? Good thing they don't make 300W or bigger: we'd have a fire just waiting to start with the flick of a switch.
Misunderstanding of science never ceases to amaze me: it's really bright AND PORTABLE ergo the light itself is causing the fire...nevermind the filament of a conventional incandescent bulb (let alone halogen or xenon arc) is on the order of thousands of degrees. No, it has to be the light!
My horoscope said my misanthropy for today was a 10, now I know why.
DRM doesn't affect the copyrighted work. (The words and presentation in my ebook are identical to your's; the notes and vocals in my song are identical to your's.) That work itself is identical to another copy. The only difference is the controls outside the bounds of the work that specifies ownership. First-sale doctrine effectively says the copyright owner cannot dictate the ownership, which DRM is clearly doing.
The work itself holds value to other people, but I am forcibly prevented from transferring meaningful ownership of the work because of DRM. Having a copy of the binary data does not make the holder the owner thus "selling" it to someone else hasn't transferred ownership.
Approaching my same argument above but from a different angle. There is no equivalent to DRM for tangible property that can prevent first-sale rights. Going back to the premise of copyrights -- to make a non-scarce work scarce thus retaining some intrinsic value -- I find it beyond absurd that it would be more restrictive than any inherently scarce object (say, a shovel). There is nothing you can do to my shovel that would make it have value to me (and only me) but absolutely no one else simultaneously. Nothing.
Frankly, to consider an argument that an intangible, non-scarce copy of a song affords the copyright owner more rights than the maker of my tangible, scarce shovel...is absurd. I'd need to see an argument that the copyright owner has more rights (and constitutionally should) to logically even consider that DRM is "just an aspect of the product". If the copyright owner has equivalent rights to my shovel maker then it's wholly irrelevant if DRM is an aspect of the product or not because it prevents meaningful ownership transfer (which seems to me the entire point of transferring ownership in the first place) thus breaking first-sale rights to that copy.
First-sale is really quite natural. Copyrights are placed on a non-scarce resource to make them scarce. It would be absolutely ludicrous to purchase a shovel and not be able to sell it for whatever someone else is willing to pay for it. If copyright wants to push IP to equal footing (no pun intended) of shovels then you should be able to sell your iTune or CD for whatever anyone is willing to pay.
The illusion that you can't/shouldn't/must not resell it is Big Media (TM) overencroaching on your rights. Fair use is but only one victim of DRM and first-sale is another.
I could make a similar argument against software that can be licensed only once (Steam: I'm looking at you!). MS products are another example of this.
Effectively, this story post and your post are attempting to appeal to emotion by using guilt. "How dare you monolinguals not care! A piece of you dies with each language. How can you live with yourself for not caring about your humanity?" This point is exemplified by calling it a "crisis". Coincidently, this is the same tactic people use when they talk about dying species.
On somewhat of a tangent, I see commonalities between your argument and preserving all information in the digital age. It seems to be of utmost urgency that we preserve anything and everything that is a product of the digital age. You know, just in case that email from 9 years ago about the color of socks to buy somehow becomes important to remember in 80 years when your grandchildren are researching if you bought your socks from K-Mart or JC Penney. I know I'm guilty to some extent, though I try to be more liberal with the delete button in gmail than the creators of gmail want me to be ("why delete when you can archive?"). We are so hyper-concerned about storing digital data that we mostly ignore that we have no long-term, permanent method for storing digital data. But I digress.
Everyone has topics they are passionate about and that's fine with me if dying and dead languages is your topic, but stop trying to force your passion onto other people. At the end of the day I think it's more important to live than to remember how any and every culture and micro-culture has lived. I'm not advocating a 100/0 stance on this, but it's nowhere near 50/50 to me nor even 90/10. It's been long ago that we modern humans could be generalists and also know a lot about everything.
Our understanding of science alone has outgrown the bounds of understanding of any one person. If you want to understand everything about even a niche of knowledge then you have to dedicate your life to it. You can't name every living plant; speak every language; write texts on quantum chromodynamics; explain the life story of Captain Kirk; and know the World of Warcraft better than your own neighborhood. If it's ignorance and selfishness on my part that puts dying and dead languages out of my "scope of caring" because I have my own list of passions, then so be it.
I'm sorry for you that you do not understand this, but I hope your exploration of dead & dying cultures and languages teaches this to you some day. Maybe then you'll stop guilting people for it.
Back in my Continuous Signals and Systems class, my professor said that a digital channel has less bandwidth than an analog channel. Granted, you can do lossless compression and save space (FLAC usually gets me 60% of the original size) but seeing the horrid digital quality...I think I can guess what the situation is.
1080p doesn't matter if the quality isn't there to back up the resolution. You'd think that they would have an exceptional video source to show off the TVs at stores but, then again, 99.999% of people wouldn't know an MPEG artifact from a LEGO block.
Fraud requires some level of presenting a falsity. Theft means taking something for your own use, or someone else's, without authorization to do so.
Purchasing gas at a sub-market value fits neither. Purchasing gas is a contract. Period. They offer gas at a price. You accept that price. IANAL, but what I know about contract law says that consideration (ie, what you pay) need not be market value nor adequate (like selling property for a dollar).
If this were with a charity, I'd probably agree with you. Defrauding, stealing, or taking advantage of an organization intended to serve others is pathetic. *But* it's a purchasing contract with someone who's only goal is to take as much of your money as they can.
Welcome to capitalism: dog eat dog. I hope your naivete doesn't bite you where it hurts later.
I think Hamilton hit the nail on the head. Read the bill of rights and think of how many times those are blatantly, or pushed, or broken on a technicality of interpretation. Imprisoning journalists for their sources while questioning if they are, indeed, a "journalist." In many places you cannot freely assemble a large, peaceful group without a permit. Arguing if an assault weapon ban is legal because individuals aren't a milita. No need for warrants for email, etc. Holding people in guantanamo, abusing them, and not affording them due process because they are "prisoners of war" or whatever the current defense is. Then there's the whole civil rights movements: where does it say the government has the power to rescind the right to vote based on race or gender such that it was *necessary* to amend the constitution to rescind the government's power to do so?
I would like to hear what Hamilton would have to say today with a few centuries proving him right...
As you word it you can be right or wrong, but you haven't stated your assumptions nor mentioned PSD differences (in fairness, neither did the gp post).
I prefer not to get too insulting but you don't seem to grasp the fundamentals here. You can EASILY create a 3 color filter with equal percentage of each color per unit of area like so:
RGB
GBR
BRG
but it is a 3x3 filter while the Bayer filter is 2x2. So you are neither limited to "4 pixels" nor "only 3 colors". The pattern you choose will depend on your mathematical model of light and heavily influence your interpolation algorithm such that you get R, G, & B (or whatever colors you're designing for) at each pixel location as accurately as possible.It absolutely does because the values of the pixels are interpolated to get R, G, & B at each pixel location. If you have twice as much green data then you've got a bias toward green. I'd love to see your math that shows to the contrary. Consider this: if your camera had an all green filter with a single red pixel, then you better bet that your image will be green. One single pixel of red intensity does not give you enough information to make a red & green image let alone give any information about blue. Believing to the contrary is beyond absurd. Advocating such is foolish.
Come back when you're more informed, please. I will grant your correction on my statement about incandescent & fluorescent. Fluorescent lights are centered on green but have definite power spikes in the violet/ultraviolet area (thanks mercury). Fluorescent is definitely more blueish than incandescent and if you put them next to each other, fluorescent has a "blueish tint."
It is no coincidence (I suppose it's arguable if you call evolution a "theory" (with quotes)) that our eye is most sensitive to green light.
As a side note, the need for white balance on cameras is that spectral density for different light sources are not the same. Incandescents differ from fluorescents which differ from sunlight which is why incandescents have an orangeish tint and fluorescents have a blueish tint (that's where their frequencies have their peak power).
(The theory behind why chlorophyll is green (which means it reflects green and, thus, does not absorb the frequencies with the most power) are quiet interesting to boot.)
Then again, I also don't want to recompile a kernel every day or manually tweak my Xorg mode lines every day.
The level of intrusion depends on what you want from it (and what your family will tolerate). If you don't mind rewiring everything every day, then rock on. If you want the bulk to be a once-off with occasional tweakings and playings, then rock on. If you want COTS, then rock on.
So I think your point should be more so of "let technology intrude to the point you and your family are comfortable" rather than a blanket "don't let technology intrude and ru(i)n your life".
I mean honestly!
Let me try my hand at these baseless assumptive statements. People who buy camera phones to be their primary camera do so to put their pictures up on flickr. People who compare the merits of a camera phone to a DSLR are people who put their pictures on flickr. (Hey, baseless statements are pretty easy!)
I've stated for a long time in "defending" my ownership of an SLR and canon L-series lenses is that its a tool for how I want to take pictures. I'm the first one to admit that lugging my equipment around is not something I want to do 24/7 so it is by no means convenient. The camera on my phone, however, is extremely convenient and I have found it to be useful in its own times. So my beef with the
Honestly, it's crap story submissions like this that just grinds me about slashdot.
The problem with Snipshot is that it will never attain the performance of a desktop app is because it's instructing the server to do all the work and any visual updates require sending another image back to the client after the server has performed them. The browser does zero actual work; it's the only way it can be done within the HTML/JS confines.
It will be the same issue as with video or audio but worse because both are more bandwidth intensive.
My primary complaint about any web app is speed/performance (and I'm not a performance freak, just impatient). The operations Snipshot is performing are trivial and they take a helluva lot longer than GIMP could do them in. Gmail can be dreadfully, painfully slow and is tolerable because I want the convenience.
If my prediction/opinion matters: the end result will be a hybrid with shared data. Sometimes, I just need that raw GIMP power to get crap done. Sometimes, I might be stuck on someone else's computer and not have GIMP and the handful of functions Snipshot can do may be sufficient. The marriage of desktop and web will be when I can tote those images to either app that I need them in at the time I need it. Ditto for email. I want gmail and thunderbird to sync. I want google calendar to sync with my phone and kontact. I want picasaweb to sync with kuickshow/gwenview/ee/name-your-slideshow-desktop
The endgame is proper sharing of data to the app suited for the use. (Psst, just like everything else in life!) No one paradigm will "win" for every application and problem.
Slashdot has a high rate of RAID, which is a bad thing. Which is a bad thing. It has been a whole 9 days. Slashdot needs a story moderation system so dupe articles can get modded out of existance. Ditto for slashdot editors who do the duping!
Can we get redundant posting on the story about google's paper?