120,000,000 gigabits per year / ~30,000,000 seconds per year = 4gbps of continuous transmission. They could run a fiber across the Atlantic that could handle 4gbps.
I doubt they are going to dump *all* of their raw data on the poor ol' US of A, or they would have built the accelerator on this side of the Atlantic in the first place. In fact, it's highly unlikely that they are going to dump all of their raw data on *themselves*, as a major part of these experiments is filtering, cutting, and compressing the data in real time to bring the volume down to the storage farm's throughput capacity. Furthermore, the detector is not simply on or off; it can be turned on in various modes, with various types of beam, and various subdetectors enabled or disabled. Huge amounts of data are collected with pretty much nothing happening, to measure sensors' "dark current" response, or to measure the effects produced by cosmic rays. And vast volumes of calibration data are collected, in which no interesting physics is expected to occur. Nobody wants *all* of this data. The data from these special runs will get broken out into different analysis streams for statistical control. Particular teams will only grab certain streams from certain runs that pertain to their jobs, and pull those down to their local labs, which are located all over the world, not just the USA.
And the major job of early analysis passes is data reduction. For example, converting collections of sensor readings to energy and time of flight values, converting collections of those to particle tracks, converting those to particle identifications, etc. Anyone requiring a "big picture" data set to do some high-level physics with is going to be grabbing a reduced data set such as this, and the data volume will be much lower.
It's a distinction without a difference. The goal/end of a journey is the finale/end of the journey. There only seems to be a distinction in cases where the finale is unreachable because the goal is too idealistic.
I've known about this for at least 15 years, and I've never even studied biology, so I'm certainly not learning about it from cutting-edge sources. Considering the time it takes for ideas like this to percolate down to the layman, this news must be decades old.
Actually I own a web company and we do all our layouts with CSS only... thanks for playing. But hey if enough people think it can't be done they'll keep paying people like me to do it:)
I'm really not sure what your argument is...
The argument is that if you do all your layouts with CSS, you aren't doing much in the way of layout. That's been my experience in my own web company. Don't get me wrong, I use CSS-based layout all the time, but that means I'm running into its limitations all the time, and when that happens, there's usually a simpler HTML solution than trying to find a cross-browser, javascript-free CSS solution.
If you're arguing that tables are better then it simply makes no sense. All you get with tables is columns and rows, which seems worse since even if your assertion about CSS were true, you still don't get the separation of content and presentation.
It's not that tables are better, just that there are a handful of layout problems that are WAY easier to solve using tables than CSS, but you pay the price of mashing up your content and design. A few examples:
a multi-column layout with more than one liquid column
a multi-column layout with bordered columns
any multi-cell layout that doesn't involve absolute positioning
any multi-cell layout that needs to be maintained by non-experts (eg. anything in a user-friendly CMS)
Lastly, the problem of mashing up your content and presentation is increasingly irrelevant, because CMS systems keep them separated far better than CSS does. CSS doesn't really give true separation of content and design, because you have to mark-up everything in wrapper DIVs to signal the stylesheet what rules to apply. Sure, the mark-up is minimalist, but it's still there, and content maintainers still have to be aware of it in order to have things formatted properly. However, if you use a decent CMS, the contents of the DIVs can be completely separated from the DIVs themselves using some kind of templating scheme, eg.
<div id="foo"> $foo_html </div>
If you're doing something like this, then CSS is somewhat irrelevant, since your content and presentation are fully separated to a degree that CSS can only dream of. $foo might not even be HTML; it might be passed through a filter first before being inlined into the template, in which case the content maintainers work with it in a native format. In this case, CSS not a content-separation tool, but merely an optimization to reduce page bloat by using cacheable stylesheets. This frees you up to use tables or whatever else gets the job done most efficiently. When you require new presentation, you simply point your content at a new template, rather than pointing it at a new stylesheet. Since the new template also includes new stylesheets, this approach solves a superset of problems that CSS alone does.
I'm a slug at vi, but thanks for letting me know who to blame for some of the idiotic keybindings in emacs. ^B for back and ^F for forward always makes me want to slap some two-finger typist up the side of the head. Obviously designed by a programmer who didn't know how to type (the unix sysadmin comment above was probably close to the mark) - it's perfectly logical, until you look at the key placement.
The golden age of computer keyboarding was probably in the late 1980s. The control key was where it was supposed to be, and everyone used sensible WordStar keybindings.
</nostalgia>
doing a decent layout with just HTML requires tables which in the end creates tag-soup because they weren't designed for page layout. CSS eliminates that problem.
Apparently you haven't actually tried to do real layout with CSS. There's only a small number of basic layouts that actually work, and even those may require ridiculous hacks that exploit browser bugs to hide rules from certain browsers, and use image backgrounds to create the appearance of cells. Google for 3-column page layouts to see the contortions you have to go through to make a basic 3-column layout with one liquid column. And that's a pretty damn trivial layout. Anything more complicated than that and you're in for a world of pain.
Small wonder then, that everyone seems to have standardized on 2- and 3-column presentation. It's pretty much the most you can do without a Ph.D. in web voodoo. But let's not pretend that this is a holy advance in the world of design. It's the opposite - a set of handcuffs for the designer, for the sake of getting one useful feature (namely, separation of content and design).
To be fair, I am referring to CSS as it has been implemented, not as it has been designed. There are a ton of fabulous CSS features that address all my complaints. It's just that none of them work out there in the real world.
The technology that enables the Internet and the Web were primarily created by large boring companies
That's rather meaningless, because every innovation is "enabled" by what came before. The Apple I was created in a garage, but it was enabled by microprocessor technologies that came from Motorola, which were in turn enabled by semiconductor technologies that came from other big corps like Texas Instruments. Does that mean the Apple I was not created by hobbyists?
Notwithstanding that, the Internet as we know it started in 1983, and was an academic (NSF) initiative to link up universities on a wide-area backbone. Not to be confused with ARPANET, which goes back to '69, but was also academic (first node was at UCLA). The Web started in 1991 and was also an academic (CERN) initiative to link up physics research labs.
The last major innovation to come out of big business was probably the GUI (Xerox) in the 1970s, approximately the same time that hobbyists and startups were creating the first PCs, the virst video game consoles, and the first spreadsheet programs.
Again with the marketshare. Everyone goes on about marketshare, but nobody seems to understand what it actually means. Why would anyone think it's important who possesses 97% of a negative-margin market dominated by spambots and technical illiterates? If success in any business depended on NOT being the marketshare leader, I would think free webmail would be at the top of that list. There are a large number of markets in which the average customer causes you to LOSE money. Those who succeed in those markets figure out ways to move those customers to their competitors.
The real trend in the server room is to commodity x86 servers, not Windows. Of course, Windows has benefited from that trend, but Linux has benefited more, and both have benefited by taking share from bigger iron.
How do you define "segments that matter"?
The creative sectors in computing are in academia, start-ups, and the high-end of the hobbyist community. These people define what we will be doing in 5-10 years. Every important new trend of the last 20 years has come out of this sector, including the Internet and Web itself. 20 years ago, most people in this sector used Microsoft OSes, because the IBM PC platform was the most open and hackable platform for expressing their creativity, and Microsoft had the hackable OS of choice for that platform. 10 years ago, Unix and Unix-like OSes were making inroads, but the Microsoft PC was still cheaper and easier to work with in most respects. Today, the PC is still the hackable hardware platform of choice, but the difference is that there are better hacker-friendly OSes to run on it. And not just one, but at least four (counting Linux, OS X, BSD, and OpenSolaris). Meanwhile, Windows is becoming less hackable, with all of its protected paths and DRM and unnecessary levels of complexity that even Microsoft can't seem to keep sorted out.
Seriously, when Apple makes an OS that is more friendly to hackers than yours is, you know you've taken the wrong path.
If you're not spending your time working in Dilbert land, or maintaining the computers of your inexpert family and friends, then yes, absolutely. Windows is for PCs that don't matter to the future of computing, and its marketshare in the segments that do matter is nowhere remotely close to 96%.
That answers your question right there, doesn't it? High-end IT workstations need to play nice with Unix server farms, not Windows. Macs are a very economical solution compared to Solaris workstations, and very maintainable compared to Linux. Windows doesn't really enter into the picture.
it was adequate for your basic web surfing, emailing, and Microsoft Office type tasks
Good thing then, that the Mini has a 1.8 GHz Core Duo and supports a 23" HD display, because it would suck trying to do those demanding tasks on anything less. I mean, I remember trying to do word processing and email on my 386/33 with 14" VGA, and it was really, um,... actually, it was just fine. Never mind. I'd hate to have to deal with your email, I guess.
Your understanding of adaptation is unnecessarily rigid. An organism can very well adapt to new environments. Our individual capacity for adaptation is, in fact, the primary evolutionary advantage of our own species.
But even simple organisms can do it. You write as though an organism is genetically coded to work within a very precise set of environmental parameters, and is guaranteed to fail outside those parameters. In fact, organisms are coded to work in a range of environments, typically corresponding to the range they are naturally found in, and their performance varies depending on where in this range they fall. Moving such an organism into the edges of this range may very well stress the organism, and this stress may cause physiological effects as the organism struggles to cope with the hostile environment (think of sweating, shivering, exhaustion, etc., or even just the difficulty of finding a mate). Those physiological effects are the individual's adaptation to the environment. If the stresses of adapting are enough to bear, and if the if the organism is stressed less than its competitors, then if may very well be a profitable ecological niche to push into. Future generations will presumably adapt further (using evolutionary mechanisms as well as physiological ones) as they are selected for the environment, but it is that ancestral organism's struggle to survive in a hostile but liveable environmental niche that starts it all. Without that initial struggle to adapt, there is no evolutionary pressure to begin with, and the species would likely remain in evolutionary stasis in its comfortable niche.
It is becoming a pet peeve of mine that faith has taken the meaning of "unwavering belief in the face of evidence to the contrary". This is not faith, it is stupidity.
Faith is loyalty, plain and simple. A dog is faithful to its master. A knight is faithful to his king. And the person is faithful to their god. This does not mean that the Bible is correct. It may very well mean the Bible is a load of bollocks. But just because it is a load of bollocks, and everyone who thinks they know what is in the heart of God is an arrogant fool, and science has shown that the ancient goat herders got pretty much everything wrong, and evil runs rampant in the world no matter what we do -- these are not reasons to forsake Jehovah and take up with some other god who might try and offer you a better deal. It's right there in the commandments - numbers 2, 3, and 4. Not to mention the whole freakin' Book of Job.
So faith is not "unwavering belief in the face of evidence to the contrary". It is loyalty to God, even when you are forced to accept incontrovertible evidence that something previously understood to be a miracle, is in fact not.
but there are (last time I checked) two separate ways to use a clipboard. The Linux way that you just described (select and middle-click), or the Windows way (Ctrl-C/Ctrl-V).
Sorry, but I'm going to be a bit pedantic here.
You have described one clipboard (Ctrl-C/Ctrl-V), and it's the Mac way, not the Windows way. Macs originally implemented this with Cmd-C, Cmd-V (and -X, of course) because the Apple UI people were smart enough to realize that Ctrl-C and Ctrl-X already had some important (and somewhat dangerous [kill, cancel]) standardized meanings that shouldn't be messed with. Early PCs did not have a command key, so early Windows versions decided to copy this feature, but using the Ctrl key instead, and to hell with standards.
The Linux way you describe is actually an X11 feature that predates Linux (and probably Windows cut/paste), and it's not really a clipboard at all. Middle-click copies the "primary selection", not the clipboard. The distinction is lost on many (I said I was going to be pedantic...) but technically selections are a protocol for implementing clipboards. By default there is a primary, secondary, and a clipboard selection, and those can contain many separate buffers of data. (The xclipboard client lets you manipulate the clipboard buffers, if you're curious.) But middle-click in X doesn't hit the clipboard selection at all, but rather the primary selection. You can use this to copy/paste stuff without messing with the contents of your clipboard, which might doing more important things.
So X selections are really a superset of clipboards. As with everything in Unixland, this imparts a lot of power for those who have been initiated into its mysteries, but creates confusion in those who have not, and hostility in those who think the broken Windows way is the right way.
I bet when much of that code was written, DEC was a puny upstart whose survival was entirely uncertain. After all, this is Fortran we're talking about, not a modern language like COBOL.
(Only half-joking. I migrated several hundred thousand lines of VAX Fortran to g77 in the 90's, so I feel the GP's pain. But I still have a soft spot for Fortran.)
How about them cursing you for having trashed the economy so their standard of living is far below that of your time - and no resources are available for solving whatever the REAL problems of their day are - while instituting a global totalitarian repression to accomplish the "better safe" goals?
Well, when you put it that way, the Kyoto folks hardly seem alarmist at all.
Methinks thou dost protest too much. This image is faked to a degree that only an incompetent human being could fake. The technical minutiae of the particular method of fakery is beside the point - to my eyes it looks more like a pattern fill than a clone stamp (due to the regular repetition you note), but we could argue about that all day. The dead give-away that unscrupulous human beings are to blame are to be found at the edges of the doctored areas. No general-purpose algorithm is going to expand the cloud of smoke preferentially in one direction, and then suddenly terminate the billowing edge of the smoke cloud against a clear sky, because general-purpose image enhancement algorithms do not model the behaviour of billowing smoke clouds. No general-purpose algorithm is going to cut out whole buildings and transplant them perfectly to other parts of the neighbourhood, because general-purpose algorithms do not recognize where buildings start and end against a backdrop of other buildings. It takes a highly advanced image processing tool (namely a human being) to select meaningful subsections of an image (a particular building, a particlar part of a cloud) and reproduce it somewhere else in the image that makes sense to an intelligent viewer.
In other words, if a generic photoshop filter were to move buildings around the city, and enhance billowing smoke clouds in such a way as to enhance just the cloud without randomly chopping up other parts of the image, as was done in this image, then we could conclusively state that we have achieved artificial intelligence in commercial software. The fact that the result was lame is moot, because the necessary filters to clean up/smudge the lameness are dead easy, compared to the filters that made the initial image edits.
But the fact that a 10-year-old (or someone with equivalent aesthetics) could have made those photo edits in 10 minutes seems a somewhat more plausible explanation than the notion that we have HAL 9000 embedded in Photoshop.
PS. you're right that it sucks. But as everyone in IT knows, or ought to know, sucky but ubiquitous platforms kick the snot out of superior tech, every time.
Slashdot Mirror
I doubt they are going to dump *all* of their raw data on the poor ol' US of A, or they would have built the accelerator on this side of the Atlantic in the first place. In fact, it's highly unlikely that they are going to dump all of their raw data on *themselves*, as a major part of these experiments is filtering, cutting, and compressing the data in real time to bring the volume down to the storage farm's throughput capacity. Furthermore, the detector is not simply on or off; it can be turned on in various modes, with various types of beam, and various subdetectors enabled or disabled. Huge amounts of data are collected with pretty much nothing happening, to measure sensors' "dark current" response, or to measure the effects produced by cosmic rays. And vast volumes of calibration data are collected, in which no interesting physics is expected to occur. Nobody wants *all* of this data. The data from these special runs will get broken out into different analysis streams for statistical control. Particular teams will only grab certain streams from certain runs that pertain to their jobs, and pull those down to their local labs, which are located all over the world, not just the USA.
And the major job of early analysis passes is data reduction. For example, converting collections of sensor readings to energy and time of flight values, converting collections of those to particle tracks, converting those to particle identifications, etc. Anyone requiring a "big picture" data set to do some high-level physics with is going to be grabbing a reduced data set such as this, and the data volume will be much lower.
It's a distinction without a difference. The goal/end of a journey is the finale/end of the journey. There only seems to be a distinction in cases where the finale is unreachable because the goal is too idealistic.
From what I've gathered about Vista, XP outperforms it in that respect, also.
My AMD system has 1000 fans. They manage to keep it fairly cool.
With Microsoft, the saying should be, "First you win, then they fight you, then they ridicule you, then they ignore you."
We seem to be at step 3.
I've known about this for at least 15 years, and I've never even studied biology, so I'm certainly not learning about it from cutting-edge sources. Considering the time it takes for ideas like this to percolate down to the layman, this news must be decades old.
The argument is that if you do all your layouts with CSS, you aren't doing much in the way of layout. That's been my experience in my own web company. Don't get me wrong, I use CSS-based layout all the time, but that means I'm running into its limitations all the time, and when that happens, there's usually a simpler HTML solution than trying to find a cross-browser, javascript-free CSS solution.
It's not that tables are better, just that there are a handful of layout problems that are WAY easier to solve using tables than CSS, but you pay the price of mashing up your content and design. A few examples:
Lastly, the problem of mashing up your content and presentation is increasingly irrelevant, because CMS systems keep them separated far better than CSS does. CSS doesn't really give true separation of content and design, because you have to mark-up everything in wrapper DIVs to signal the stylesheet what rules to apply. Sure, the mark-up is minimalist, but it's still there, and content maintainers still have to be aware of it in order to have things formatted properly. However, if you use a decent CMS, the contents of the DIVs can be completely separated from the DIVs themselves using some kind of templating scheme, eg.
If you're doing something like this, then CSS is somewhat irrelevant, since your content and presentation are fully separated to a degree that CSS can only dream of. $foo might not even be HTML; it might be passed through a filter first before being inlined into the template, in which case the content maintainers work with it in a native format. In this case, CSS not a content-separation tool, but merely an optimization to reduce page bloat by using cacheable stylesheets. This frees you up to use tables or whatever else gets the job done most efficiently. When you require new presentation, you simply point your content at a new template, rather than pointing it at a new stylesheet. Since the new template also includes new stylesheets, this approach solves a superset of problems that CSS alone does.
I'm a slug at vi, but thanks for letting me know who to blame for some of the idiotic keybindings in emacs. ^B for back and ^F for forward always makes me want to slap some two-finger typist up the side of the head. Obviously designed by a programmer who didn't know how to type (the unix sysadmin comment above was probably close to the mark) - it's perfectly logical, until you look at the key placement.
The golden age of computer keyboarding was probably in the late 1980s. The control key was where it was supposed to be, and everyone used sensible WordStar keybindings.
</nostalgia>
Apparently you haven't actually tried to do real layout with CSS. There's only a small number of basic layouts that actually work, and even those may require ridiculous hacks that exploit browser bugs to hide rules from certain browsers, and use image backgrounds to create the appearance of cells. Google for 3-column page layouts to see the contortions you have to go through to make a basic 3-column layout with one liquid column. And that's a pretty damn trivial layout. Anything more complicated than that and you're in for a world of pain.
Small wonder then, that everyone seems to have standardized on 2- and 3-column presentation. It's pretty much the most you can do without a Ph.D. in web voodoo. But let's not pretend that this is a holy advance in the world of design. It's the opposite - a set of handcuffs for the designer, for the sake of getting one useful feature (namely, separation of content and design).
To be fair, I am referring to CSS as it has been implemented, not as it has been designed. There are a ton of fabulous CSS features that address all my complaints. It's just that none of them work out there in the real world.
More impressive than you think... 2001-2007 is less than half the timeframe from 1979-1995.
That's rather meaningless, because every innovation is "enabled" by what came before. The Apple I was created in a garage, but it was enabled by microprocessor technologies that came from Motorola, which were in turn enabled by semiconductor technologies that came from other big corps like Texas Instruments. Does that mean the Apple I was not created by hobbyists?
Notwithstanding that, the Internet as we know it started in 1983, and was an academic (NSF) initiative to link up universities on a wide-area backbone. Not to be confused with ARPANET, which goes back to '69, but was also academic (first node was at UCLA). The Web started in 1991 and was also an academic (CERN) initiative to link up physics research labs.
The last major innovation to come out of big business was probably the GUI (Xerox) in the 1970s, approximately the same time that hobbyists and startups were creating the first PCs, the virst video game consoles, and the first spreadsheet programs.
Again with the marketshare. Everyone goes on about marketshare, but nobody seems to understand what it actually means. Why would anyone think it's important who possesses 97% of a negative-margin market dominated by spambots and technical illiterates? If success in any business depended on NOT being the marketshare leader, I would think free webmail would be at the top of that list. There are a large number of markets in which the average customer causes you to LOSE money. Those who succeed in those markets figure out ways to move those customers to their competitors.
The real trend in the server room is to commodity x86 servers, not Windows. Of course, Windows has benefited from that trend, but Linux has benefited more, and both have benefited by taking share from bigger iron.
The creative sectors in computing are in academia, start-ups, and the high-end of the hobbyist community. These people define what we will be doing in 5-10 years. Every important new trend of the last 20 years has come out of this sector, including the Internet and Web itself. 20 years ago, most people in this sector used Microsoft OSes, because the IBM PC platform was the most open and hackable platform for expressing their creativity, and Microsoft had the hackable OS of choice for that platform. 10 years ago, Unix and Unix-like OSes were making inroads, but the Microsoft PC was still cheaper and easier to work with in most respects. Today, the PC is still the hackable hardware platform of choice, but the difference is that there are better hacker-friendly OSes to run on it. And not just one, but at least four (counting Linux, OS X, BSD, and OpenSolaris). Meanwhile, Windows is becoming less hackable, with all of its protected paths and DRM and unnecessary levels of complexity that even Microsoft can't seem to keep sorted out.
Seriously, when Apple makes an OS that is more friendly to hackers than yours is, you know you've taken the wrong path.
If you're not spending your time working in Dilbert land, or maintaining the computers of your inexpert family and friends, then yes, absolutely. Windows is for PCs that don't matter to the future of computing, and its marketshare in the segments that do matter is nowhere remotely close to 96%.
And this is a relatively new trend.
That answers your question right there, doesn't it? High-end IT workstations need to play nice with Unix server farms, not Windows. Macs are a very economical solution compared to Solaris workstations, and very maintainable compared to Linux. Windows doesn't really enter into the picture.
Good thing then, that the Mini has a 1.8 GHz Core Duo and supports a 23" HD display, because it would suck trying to do those demanding tasks on anything less. I mean, I remember trying to do word processing and email on my 386/33 with 14" VGA, and it was really, um, ... actually, it was just fine. Never mind. I'd hate to have to deal with your email, I guess.
Your understanding of adaptation is unnecessarily rigid. An organism can very well adapt to new environments. Our individual capacity for adaptation is, in fact, the primary evolutionary advantage of our own species.
But even simple organisms can do it. You write as though an organism is genetically coded to work within a very precise set of environmental parameters, and is guaranteed to fail outside those parameters. In fact, organisms are coded to work in a range of environments, typically corresponding to the range they are naturally found in, and their performance varies depending on where in this range they fall. Moving such an organism into the edges of this range may very well stress the organism, and this stress may cause physiological effects as the organism struggles to cope with the hostile environment (think of sweating, shivering, exhaustion, etc., or even just the difficulty of finding a mate). Those physiological effects are the individual's adaptation to the environment. If the stresses of adapting are enough to bear, and if the if the organism is stressed less than its competitors, then if may very well be a profitable ecological niche to push into. Future generations will presumably adapt further (using evolutionary mechanisms as well as physiological ones) as they are selected for the environment, but it is that ancestral organism's struggle to survive in a hostile but liveable environmental niche that starts it all. Without that initial struggle to adapt, there is no evolutionary pressure to begin with, and the species would likely remain in evolutionary stasis in its comfortable niche.
It is becoming a pet peeve of mine that faith has taken the meaning of "unwavering belief in the face of evidence to the contrary". This is not faith, it is stupidity.
Faith is loyalty, plain and simple. A dog is faithful to its master. A knight is faithful to his king. And the person is faithful to their god. This does not mean that the Bible is correct. It may very well mean the Bible is a load of bollocks. But just because it is a load of bollocks, and everyone who thinks they know what is in the heart of God is an arrogant fool, and science has shown that the ancient goat herders got pretty much everything wrong, and evil runs rampant in the world no matter what we do -- these are not reasons to forsake Jehovah and take up with some other god who might try and offer you a better deal. It's right there in the commandments - numbers 2, 3, and 4. Not to mention the whole freakin' Book of Job.
So faith is not "unwavering belief in the face of evidence to the contrary". It is loyalty to God, even when you are forced to accept incontrovertible evidence that something previously understood to be a miracle, is in fact not.
Sorry, but I'm going to be a bit pedantic here.
You have described one clipboard (Ctrl-C/Ctrl-V), and it's the Mac way, not the Windows way. Macs originally implemented this with Cmd-C, Cmd-V (and -X, of course) because the Apple UI people were smart enough to realize that Ctrl-C and Ctrl-X already had some important (and somewhat dangerous [kill, cancel]) standardized meanings that shouldn't be messed with. Early PCs did not have a command key, so early Windows versions decided to copy this feature, but using the Ctrl key instead, and to hell with standards.
The Linux way you describe is actually an X11 feature that predates Linux (and probably Windows cut/paste), and it's not really a clipboard at all. Middle-click copies the "primary selection", not the clipboard. The distinction is lost on many (I said I was going to be pedantic...) but technically selections are a protocol for implementing clipboards. By default there is a primary, secondary, and a clipboard selection, and those can contain many separate buffers of data. (The xclipboard client lets you manipulate the clipboard buffers, if you're curious.) But middle-click in X doesn't hit the clipboard selection at all, but rather the primary selection. You can use this to copy/paste stuff without messing with the contents of your clipboard, which might doing more important things.
So X selections are really a superset of clipboards. As with everything in Unixland, this imparts a lot of power for those who have been initiated into its mysteries, but creates confusion in those who have not, and hostility in those who think the broken Windows way is the right way.
I bet when much of that code was written, DEC was a puny upstart whose survival was entirely uncertain. After all, this is Fortran we're talking about, not a modern language like COBOL.
(Only half-joking. I migrated several hundred thousand lines of VAX Fortran to g77 in the 90's, so I feel the GP's pain. But I still have a soft spot for Fortran.)
Well, when you put it that way, the Kyoto folks hardly seem alarmist at all.
Methinks thou dost protest too much. This image is faked to a degree that only an incompetent human being could fake. The technical minutiae of the particular method of fakery is beside the point - to my eyes it looks more like a pattern fill than a clone stamp (due to the regular repetition you note), but we could argue about that all day. The dead give-away that unscrupulous human beings are to blame are to be found at the edges of the doctored areas. No general-purpose algorithm is going to expand the cloud of smoke preferentially in one direction, and then suddenly terminate the billowing edge of the smoke cloud against a clear sky, because general-purpose image enhancement algorithms do not model the behaviour of billowing smoke clouds. No general-purpose algorithm is going to cut out whole buildings and transplant them perfectly to other parts of the neighbourhood, because general-purpose algorithms do not recognize where buildings start and end against a backdrop of other buildings. It takes a highly advanced image processing tool (namely a human being) to select meaningful subsections of an image (a particular building, a particlar part of a cloud) and reproduce it somewhere else in the image that makes sense to an intelligent viewer.
In other words, if a generic photoshop filter were to move buildings around the city, and enhance billowing smoke clouds in such a way as to enhance just the cloud without randomly chopping up other parts of the image, as was done in this image, then we could conclusively state that we have achieved artificial intelligence in commercial software. The fact that the result was lame is moot, because the necessary filters to clean up/smudge the lameness are dead easy, compared to the filters that made the initial image edits.
But the fact that a 10-year-old (or someone with equivalent aesthetics) could have made those photo edits in 10 minutes seems a somewhat more plausible explanation than the notion that we have HAL 9000 embedded in Photoshop.
This same conversation took place in the 1940s.
His grandfather: at some point watching newsreels from a broadcasting service will become a better solution than running your own home projector.
Your grandfather: I'm going to have to disagree with you on that one.
Anyone who thinks *any* office suite is "good enough" for writing letters must write some seriously nasty letters.
Dude, it's already happened.
PS. you're right that it sucks. But as everyone in IT knows, or ought to know, sucky but ubiquitous platforms kick the snot out of superior tech, every time.