... I mean, how many millions of people have meteor strikes or volcanoes killed in the last 1,000 years? How many millions do diseases like malaria kill EACH year... and that's only business as usual. If something really nasty comes along, like a version of influenza that has a high deathrate. Well our vaccines most likely wont work, we wont be immune to this new strain and it will have modern transport to supercharge it around the world.
No we didn't. We've never used kilo consistently. See above - we've talked about CPU speeds in terms of kHz and MHz, meaning 10^3, 10^6, and talked about kilobits/second meaning 10^3 bits per second, talked about kilobytes/second meaning 10^3 bytes/second, and turned around and talked about file sizes where kilobyte means 1024 bytes.
True. But when kilo was used to prefix the word byte it was always assumed to be 1024. However, when the term 'megabyte' came into use it was a not as clear cut. We all 'knew' it should be 1024 * 1024, but it was just easier to say that it meant a million. 1024 is easy to say but 1048756 is just making life difficult. But we were still pissed off when the drive makers stopped using 2^20 as their definition and started using 10^9 (its nice to get a bit extra, and not nice to get less than you might have).
I don't lament MB = 10^9.. But I'd argue that kilobyte still has a very particular meaning. When you are doing low level stuff you don't think in megabytes you think in blocks of bytes, usually in powers of 2 and then kilobyte has its place.
Not only are there usually no written specs but the code will also have undocumented obscure fixes for particular problems. If you don't know what the problem is you can't test for it. It may be that under special circumstances for a particular customer certain things need to be done so that for most customers ripping out the code to conform to some half baked spec you just thought of will work. This is so common in legacy code its almost a law. Joel had a bit to say on this in his essay on why you shouldn't re-write code (oh gees do I have to give a link... ok for the google impaired here)
Yeah I used to have it on Windows and Linux (worse on Linux for some reason). Then someone pointed out (wish I could remember who the slashdotter was to thank him) that they had traced the problem to the way a particular gif was rendered . Then just using the Adblock feature to block that image almost fixed the problem. Later I found a couple of other suspect gif's and dealt with them. Since then no problems. The original image is called "pix.gif". If it's still about. Block it and your life will be easier. Anyway later versions of FF should correct the rendering problem anyway.
As a non-Brit (Aussie) I have to say I've always had a high opinion of the BBC, which just seems to get better. OK influenced a bit by recent events.
Last night I watched the second installment of the BBC series "Grumpy Old Men" gotta be the funniest documentary I have ever seen. Brilliant idea, well executed. And inspired by these "grumpy old men" of my gen I have decided to be a boring and obnoxious old fart and have my own rant!
OK. Last Sunday here the ABC (Oz's weak but welcome clone of the BBC) screened the BBC production of Supervolcano... which I have to say is the best disaster movie I have seen... an eerie doco that looks more like a blockbuster with nice interviews interlaced into the story that reminds me of "The Third World War" some years back. In some ways the interviews are the most disturbing parts. Well acted too.
I remember hearing the original HHGTTG series that was broadcast on double-J locally. The ABC mainstream stations wouldn't touch it, so they gave it to the rock station. Somehow appropriate. Nice to listen again online.mmmmmm
Hmmph. Ranted out. BTW, agree about Utlraviolet, nice idea... was too busy at the time to follow it but interesting... a war between intelligence agencies and vampires treating them as spies.
... the number of logical fallacies per sentence is close to maximum. That takes effort. Well done.
And no I wont answer your question because you really don't want to know the answer do you? But that's ok, if it makes you happy... just don't expect the rest of us to go along.
I've heard this suggestion before about a small amount of O2 in the atmosphere at the time (around 1-2%). But it never made sense to me. I mean even if it existed there must have been a lot of incoming comets, outgassing etc with H2 and CH4 to soak it up.
Quite possibly you are. It is an extremely well written series. The story line had me perplexed at first (cos I couldn't see where it was going) then I realised what SF story it was based on... and that only made it more brilliant.
OK. Spoiler Warning (kinda): hollywood has trashed this story many times but I'm talking about the original novel now, goes by the name "F-----------". Think about it, it makes so much sense. Suddenly the Cylon plan is both clear and surprising.
Its almost as intriguing as wondering when someone is going to ask the big question that everyone (human) in the series is in denial about: "Why did the Cylons rebel?"
Robots can explore far more cheaply than humans, so for any particular amount of money, we can do more exploration with robots than with humans.
You mean giant mecha robots piloted by angst ridden teenagers with multiple double crosses. The only way to do space exploration in Japan.
On a more serious note. Asia was eclipsed by the West for the last century or so, I'm sure they want to restore their pride by showing their own people what they can achieve.
Random hint... how useful. Look, random hints are crap. Yeah we've all seen them but they don't help you when you want help with a particular thing... are you going to click 'Next' ad infinitum hoping to find a hint that helps you ? Gotta be one of the dumbest comments I've seen in a while.
I wrestled with this too at first. Maybe GIMP should have a hints section of their help files. Stuff that doesn't need a tutorial, just a mention. I'm not a big user of GIMP myself so I think those of us who just use it infrequently probably need some kind of quick hints section. Disclaimer: I use image manipulation progs so rarely that when I used GIMP and photoshop I thought they were pretty similar.
In truth, we should have expected trouble when Gnome started shouting about how wonderful Nautilus was
Personally, I started on slack then RH and now back on slack (tried Mandrake... yuck). Recently tried FC3... did nothing for me (yep the marriage is over) and am now trying Ubuntu. Ubuntu is very nice and I was tempted to move across from Slack. But then I did something totally foolish I decided to copy my personal files from slack to Ubuntu using Nautilus... I mean it used to be buggy as shit 4 years ago... but 4 years is a lifetime on Linux. So I did the copy and started having errors... and then noticed that the errors were that if a file contained a name like a reserved word e.g. "access.h" or "filesystem.c" then Nautilus couldn't copy it... what? What bullshit ! This in a 'mature' product? No f*cking way gnome. I loved gnome way back but if they can't even make a file manager that works after 5 years then I'm not going down the gnome path... looking forward to Kubuntu... then again I still do like slack.
... so you make the analysis by talking to people, writing about it. Specify the requirements in writing and the logic flow. Then you want to translate these linear constructs into a visual medium? It seems woefully inefficient to me and prone to error. It also is not the way people think. I consider myself a very visual person, but any visual reasoning I perform is not based on logic but a higher heuristic level or simply plain simulation.
The argument in TFA is to send the details of a trading machine out so that the other civ can build it. If anyone has read (or old enough like me to have seen the TV series) A For Andromeda this tells of the receipt of a message with designs for a computer, the same scenario is played out in detail. Its purpose is not revealed, it is assumed it is here to help, but there are sinister overtones. The story is never about black and white issues, always trying to guess the motivations of an alien civilisation. An extremely good story about SETI. Then imagine that the details are not received by us but by someone else, how much will THEY trust the machine. Will it have ulterior motives.
I was just wondering if some Aussie could explain what the issues were that lead to Howard winning
Well. Back in 2001, before Sept.11, Howard was losing popularity fast. He looked doomed. Then he decided to pump an enormous amount of money into the housing sector by subsidising first home buyers (a policy which their opponents had once used). There was an instant boom as all the budget surplus was funnelled into this. Then came Sept-11 and the flight of capital from the US. It appears enough Asian or other interests thought the starting boom in Australia was worth investing in.The basic economic fundamentals were good, but he huge amount of spending wasn't. In the end now 4 years later Aussies are in debt up to their eyeballs... In such a climate when Howard said in the last election campaign that interest rates were higher under Labor than his own party then you can guess who they backed. Since then there has been an interest rate rise and coincidently the week afterfor the first time labor is leading the Libs in the opinion polls.
My opinion. People aren't too bright. A basic rule I've learnt is : when an election is called decide then and there who you back because from that moment on all you will hear will be lies and distortion. People forgot the reasons they were about to throw Howard out, and thought him their best PM ever, don't be surprised if their opinions change again. The party is over, time for the hangover -- my opinion of course.
I recently tried unpacking a bzip2 package under windows. It took me ages to find something that would recognize it and extract it. Which is a shame because it is a nice format... if you aren't doing this a lot since it takes more time.
However, winzip out of the box will open tarballs and of course zip. And gzip / unzip are pretty much universal on *nix. I have however found that very large tarballs can be a problem with Winzip (like 100+ MB) but that was a long time ago.
And I would never, for the original poster's purpose, use anything with a proprietary licence like RAR. It could easily end up like the GIF fiasco all over again.
It's very pretty. It has some wonderful set-pieces and amusing character ideas (Stephenson-sama, for example. And Scarlett.) but boy does the Grand Finale go on for far too long.
Agreed. I saw it late last year and the artwork was wonderful but it just didn't have the intensity that anime often delivers. I wouldn't say I was disappointed but I had hoped for more. Actually one of the few really bright spots were the credits at the end where the background images told a story in their own right similar (but richer) to the one at the end of Wings of Honneamise (sp?).
Note the matching rise of Python and dip of Java from about Mar 04 and then a slight reversal for both. Maybe some people were using Java for scripting purposes. Or they thought Python was a better match for the problem (but thought better of it later).
I find this to be very odd. About 15 years ago I worked for a company that was doing crypto work for one of the big four local banks. And part of the work I had to do was design a validation scheme for Security Control Modules that were supplied by another company (which I more recently worked for) and also writing my company's supporting libraries that used DES and implement 3DES. The SCM modules were basically PCs running OS/2. Their features were required to include 3DES as well as a host of other functions required for key management, very interesting stuff. But 3DES is a simple extension of DES. Sure there would be obstacles to converting the ATMs over but converting the OS/2 crypto libraries would not be the problem and this is real money stuff so there is a big incentive to have something secure. Obviously I don't know what the real motives are here but it all seems very dodgy.
More likely they are using hardened wintel boxes specifically made for this purpose (tamper proof and all) with a plug-in PCI card for the crypto work. Probably they can't get suitable libraries from the suppliers for OS/2 compilers (sorry don't know much about compiling stuff on OS/2). But then again I'm just guessing.
Slashdot Mirror
... I mean, how many millions of people have meteor strikes or volcanoes killed in the last 1,000 years? How many millions do diseases like malaria kill EACH year ... and that's only business as usual. If something really nasty comes along, like a version of influenza that has a high deathrate. Well our vaccines most likely wont work, we wont be immune to this new strain and it will have modern transport to supercharge it around the world.
No we didn't. We've never used kilo consistently. See above - we've talked about CPU speeds in terms of kHz and MHz, meaning 10^3, 10^6, and talked about kilobits/second meaning 10^3 bits per second, talked about kilobytes/second meaning 10^3 bytes/second, and turned around and talked about file sizes where kilobyte means 1024 bytes.
True. But when kilo was used to prefix the word byte it was always assumed to be 1024. However, when the term 'megabyte' came into use it was a not as clear cut. We all 'knew' it should be 1024 * 1024, but it was just easier to say that it meant a million. 1024 is easy to say but 1048756 is just making life difficult. But we were still pissed off when the drive makers stopped using 2^20 as their definition and started using 10^9 (its nice to get a bit extra, and not nice to get less than you might have).
I don't lament MB = 10^9 .. But I'd argue that kilobyte still has a very particular meaning. When you are doing low level stuff you don't think in megabytes you think in blocks of bytes, usually in powers of 2 and then kilobyte has its place.
Not only are there usually no written specs but the code will also have undocumented obscure fixes for particular problems. If you don't know what the problem is you can't test for it. It may be that under special circumstances for a particular customer certain things need to be done so that for most customers ripping out the code to conform to some half baked spec you just thought of will work. This is so common in legacy code its almost a law. Joel had a bit to say on this in his essay on why you shouldn't re-write code (oh gees do I have to give a link ... ok for the google impaired here)
I actually think the stuff is divine. Yumm. Not as sweet as chocolates etc, which I also like, but still nice. Depends on the person I guess.
Yeah I used to have it on Windows and Linux (worse on Linux for some reason). Then someone pointed out (wish I could remember who the slashdotter was to thank him) that they had traced the problem to the way a particular gif was rendered . Then just using the Adblock feature to block that image almost fixed the problem. Later I found a couple of other suspect gif's and dealt with them. Since then no problems. The original image is called "pix.gif". If it's still about. Block it and your life will be easier. Anyway later versions of FF should correct the rendering problem anyway.
Kids these days! In my day we only had 2 J's and liked it!
As a non-Brit (Aussie) I have to say I've always had a high opinion of the BBC, which just seems to get better. OK influenced a bit by recent events.
Last night I watched the second installment of the BBC series "Grumpy Old Men" gotta be the funniest documentary I have ever seen. Brilliant idea, well executed. And inspired by these "grumpy old men" of my gen I have decided to be a boring and obnoxious old fart and have my own rant!
OK. Last Sunday here the ABC (Oz's weak but welcome clone of the BBC) screened the BBC production of Supervolcano ... which I have to say is the best disaster movie I have seen ... an eerie doco that looks more like a blockbuster with nice interviews interlaced into the story that reminds me of "The Third World War" some years back. In some ways the interviews are the most disturbing parts. Well acted too.
I remember hearing the original HHGTTG series that was broadcast on double-J locally. The ABC mainstream stations wouldn't touch it, so they gave it to the rock station. Somehow appropriate. Nice to listen again online.mmmmmm
Hmmph. Ranted out. BTW, agree about Utlraviolet, nice idea ... was too busy at the time to follow it but interesting ... a war between intelligence agencies and vampires treating them as spies.
Time to go back to sleep ..............
Tsk tsk. Common guys this is a classic of literature. Google for Mary Shelley.
Don't you hate it when you think of a smart reply and send it to the wrong person. Sorry sport. Wrong target.
... the number of logical fallacies per sentence is close to maximum. That takes effort. Well done.
And no I wont answer your question because you really don't want to know the answer do you? But that's ok, if it makes you happy ... just don't expect the rest of us to go along.
I've heard this suggestion before about a small amount of O2 in the atmosphere at the time (around 1-2%). But it never made sense to me. I mean even if it existed there must have been a lot of incoming comets, outgassing etc with H2 and CH4 to soak it up.
Quite possibly you are. It is an extremely well written series. The story line had me perplexed at first (cos I couldn't see where it was going) then I realised what SF story it was based on ... and that only made it more brilliant.
OK. Spoiler Warning (kinda): hollywood has trashed this story many times but I'm talking about the original novel now, goes by the name "F-----------". Think about it, it makes so much sense. Suddenly the Cylon plan is both clear and surprising.
Its almost as intriguing as wondering when someone is going to ask the big question that everyone (human) in the series is in denial about: "Why did the Cylons rebel?"
Can't find said article. Could you supply a link please.
Robots can explore far more cheaply than humans, so for any particular amount of money, we can do more exploration with robots than with humans.
You mean giant mecha robots piloted by angst ridden teenagers with multiple double crosses. The only way to do space exploration in Japan.
On a more serious note. Asia was eclipsed by the West for the last century or so, I'm sure they want to restore their pride by showing their own people what they can achieve.
Random hint ... how useful. Look, random hints are crap. Yeah we've all seen them but they don't help you when you want help with a particular thing ... are you going to click 'Next' ad infinitum hoping to find a hint that helps you ? Gotta be one of the dumbest comments I've seen in a while.
I wrestled with this too at first. Maybe GIMP should have a hints section of their help files. Stuff that doesn't need a tutorial, just a mention. I'm not a big user of GIMP myself so I think those of us who just use it infrequently probably need some kind of quick hints section. Disclaimer: I use image manipulation progs so rarely that when I used GIMP and photoshop I thought they were pretty similar.
In truth, we should have expected trouble when Gnome started shouting about how wonderful Nautilus was
Personally, I started on slack then RH and now back on slack (tried Mandrake ... yuck). Recently tried FC3 ... did nothing for me (yep the marriage is over) and am now trying Ubuntu. Ubuntu is very nice and I was tempted to move across from Slack. But then I did something totally foolish I decided to copy my personal files from slack to Ubuntu using Nautilus ... I mean it used to be buggy as shit 4 years ago ... but 4 years is a lifetime on Linux. So I did the copy and started having errors ... and then noticed that the errors were that if a file contained a name like a reserved word e.g. "access.h" or "filesystem.c" then Nautilus couldn't copy it ... what? What bullshit ! This in a 'mature' product? No f*cking way gnome. I loved gnome way back but if they can't even make a file manager that works after 5 years then I'm not going down the gnome path ... looking forward to Kubuntu ... then again I still do like slack.
... so you make the analysis by talking to people, writing about it. Specify the requirements in writing and the logic flow. Then you want to translate these linear constructs into a visual medium? It seems woefully inefficient to me and prone to error. It also is not the way people think. I consider myself a very visual person, but any visual reasoning I perform is not based on logic but a higher heuristic level or simply plain simulation.
The argument in TFA is to send the details of a trading machine out so that the other civ can build it. If anyone has read (or old enough like me to have seen the TV series) A For Andromeda this tells of the receipt of a message with designs for a computer, the same scenario is played out in detail. Its purpose is not revealed, it is assumed it is here to help, but there are sinister overtones. The story is never about black and white issues, always trying to guess the motivations of an alien civilisation. An extremely good story about SETI. Then imagine that the details are not received by us but by someone else, how much will THEY trust the machine. Will it have ulterior motives.
I was just wondering if some Aussie could explain what the issues were that lead to Howard winning
Well. Back in 2001, before Sept.11, Howard was losing popularity fast. He looked doomed. Then he decided to pump an enormous amount of money into the housing sector by subsidising first home buyers (a policy which their opponents had once used). There was an instant boom as all the budget surplus was funnelled into this. Then came Sept-11 and the flight of capital from the US. It appears enough Asian or other interests thought the starting boom in Australia was worth investing in.The basic economic fundamentals were good, but he huge amount of spending wasn't. In the end now 4 years later Aussies are in debt up to their eyeballs... In such a climate when Howard said in the last election campaign that interest rates were higher under Labor than his own party then you can guess who they backed. Since then there has been an interest rate rise and coincidently the week afterfor the first time labor is leading the Libs in the opinion polls.
My opinion. People aren't too bright. A basic rule I've learnt is : when an election is called decide then and there who you back because from that moment on all you will hear will be lies and distortion. People forgot the reasons they were about to throw Howard out, and thought him their best PM ever, don't be surprised if their opinions change again. The party is over, time for the hangover -- my opinion of course.
I recently tried unpacking a bzip2 package under windows. It took me ages to find something that would recognize it and extract it. Which is a shame because it is a nice format ... if you aren't doing this a lot since it takes more time.
However, winzip out of the box will open tarballs and of course zip. And gzip / unzip are pretty much universal on *nix. I have however found that very large tarballs can be a problem with Winzip (like 100+ MB) but that was a long time ago.
And I would never, for the original poster's purpose, use anything with a proprietary licence like RAR. It could easily end up like the GIF fiasco all over again.
... why the terminator was so pissed off with Sarah Connor. Not a 900 lb weakling anymore lady.
It's very pretty. It has some wonderful set-pieces and amusing character ideas (Stephenson-sama, for example. And Scarlett.) but boy does the Grand Finale go on for far too long.
Agreed. I saw it late last year and the artwork was wonderful but it just didn't have the intensity that anime often delivers. I wouldn't say I was disappointed but I had hoped for more. Actually one of the few really bright spots were the credits at the end where the background images told a story in their own right similar (but richer) to the one at the end of Wings of Honneamise (sp?).
Note the matching rise of Python and dip of Java from about Mar 04 and then a slight reversal for both. Maybe some people were using Java for scripting purposes. Or they thought Python was a better match for the problem (but thought better of it later).
I find this to be very odd. About 15 years ago I worked for a company that was doing crypto work for one of the big four local banks. And part of the work I had to do was design a validation scheme for Security Control Modules that were supplied by another company (which I more recently worked for) and also writing my company's supporting libraries that used DES and implement 3DES. The SCM modules were basically PCs running OS/2. Their features were required to include 3DES as well as a host of other functions required for key management, very interesting stuff. But 3DES is a simple extension of DES. Sure there would be obstacles to converting the ATMs over but converting the OS/2 crypto libraries would not be the problem and this is real money stuff so there is a big incentive to have something secure. Obviously I don't know what the real motives are here but it all seems very dodgy.
More likely they are using hardened wintel boxes specifically made for this purpose (tamper proof and all) with a plug-in PCI card for the crypto work. Probably they can't get suitable libraries from the suppliers for OS/2 compilers (sorry don't know much about compiling stuff on OS/2). But then again I'm just guessing.