Fermilab and CERN are only competitors under a quite loose definition of the word. ATLAS and CMS are competitors, CDF and D0 are competitors, Fermilab and CERN are not really. Actually, most of the people working at CERN either also work at or have worked at Fermilab (or one of the other accelerator labs). Most of the people at Fermilab are anticipating working at CERN in the next few years. I myself have been working at Fermilab for the last few years, but I am starting work at CERN this summer.
CERN is a continuation of what Fermilab has been working on, not a rival.
The CAPTCHA is "footstep". Appropriate. CERN is following in Fermilab's footsteps (and then going quite a bit further).
The BSD license is more permissive, and the GPL is more free.
By putting the driver code under the BSD license (illegally), the BSD dev opened up the possibility for Broadcom to take the driver code and use, distribute, and sell it under a non-free license. This is precisely what the original author (who does have and should have (nearly) complete authority to say how other people use his work) wanted to avoid, and hence why he put it under the GPL originally. He did not want his code to be used under a non-free license, and the BSD dev essentially handed it to Broadcom to do precisely that with it.
Then, the original dev offered to relicense it so that BSD could use it legally, which was a rather generous move on his part, as it winds up allowing exactly what he didn't want to have happen. This was a peace offering to say "hey, you (BSD guy) are in the wrong, but because I value the peace between us more than the correctness of your action, I'll fix things so that you are not in the wrong anymore.". The BSD dev and Theo both threw a hissy fit at this, which is absurd and a mystery to me.
There's nothing stopping any musician from putting down music in uncompressed raw format and handing it out. There's nothing stopping us, as customers, from storing it. No "format" involved really, more like "lack of a format."
There is no such thing as "lack of a format". Not at all. There isn't even any such thing as just pure "raw" format. The bits by themselves are just bits, nothing more. Unless you describe to somebody (whether in English, by writing some software, or by building some specialized hardware) how to translate those bits into time-variable pressures in the air, they don't represent a sound. That description is the format. PCM (wav, aiff) is far and away the most widely used uncompressed format, but it is still a format. And even then, just saying PCM still doesn't completely specify things: endianness, stereo/mono/more channels, mu-law/a-law, bitrate, sampling rate, signedness, etc. etc. etc.
BTW, storage is not even remotely the driving force behind compression of music and video. Network bandwidth is. Suppose you have an mp3 and a wav of the same piece of music. The wav is typically going to be somewhere on the order of 10 times the size of the mp3. Now, with typical home bandwidths today, streaming the mp3 will work fairly well. It might have to stop and rebuffer just occasionally, but it will usually do quite well. Now, try sending ten times as much data down the same pipe in the same amount of time. It just ain't gonna work. Or, even if it did, you'd still be better served by increasing the quality (bitrate, sampling rate) of the sound, and still using the mp3.
CPU time is much more available than network bandwidth. Audio compression isn't going away, nor should it. Video is an enormously more difficult proposition than audio, so video compression isn't going away either, nor should it.
FWIW, there are free compressed formats out there. Any of the Ogg formats are free, for instance.
At some point it is all about (re) aligning the frequencies of matter (since that all energy & matter are -- frequencies.) That is indeed possible, we just have to wait to develop our mental powers (again) and/or build a machine to help.
I was wondering if you could expand upon this a little bit. Especially the bit about frequencies, as it sounds like an interesting physics, although in many ways rather unlike the current most-well-accepted accountings of physics. Also I'm curious about the bit about mental powers. Do you mean X-men, Jean Grey style, or do you mean we just have to get smarter?
I was once waiting to be seated at a restaurant. A man came in, while talking on his cell phone. Obviously I was trying not to eavesdrop, but with some people, you'd have to gouge out your eardrums to avoid it. And this guy clearly (as you will see) wanted to be heard by those around him. His speech involved phrases like "million dollars", "stock", "sell", etc. etc. etc. You get the picture.
OTOH, IIRC, there are numerous other studies which show the exact opposite: When you give solely a verbal presentation, or when you give solely a visual presentation (article), retention of information (which is a different thing perhaps than comprehension) is tremendously lower than when you give a verbal presentation bolstered by a visual presentation. Which are we to believe? Or is it just the difference between comprehension and retention? If you are trying to get someone to understand something, then you should pick one, but if you are trying to get someone to remember something, then you should use both?
My seventh grade english teacher did this! Except not while reading slides, but while reading Tom Sawyer out loud to us. It was very disconcerting to hear her suddenly stop in midsentence for 10-15 seconds, and then pick back up exactly where she had been as if the preceding time interval had never existed. We called it ${Teacher's last name}'s Disease.
Whoa there, friend. First, only a very small minority AFAIK is seizing on technology as a force that is "corrupting the children". Nearly everybody who is trying to censor for their kids at all realizes that it is not the fault of technology. They want their kids to be able to use the technology, otherwise, like my uncle for a long time, they just wouldn't purchase internet access.
Second, the most vocal proponents of religion are not identical to the people calling for censorship in various forms. I'm not quite sure how you made that leap, but it is not justified. Sure, a lot of the desire for censorship is fueled by religious concerns, but not all of it is. Some of the proponents of censorship are also vocal proponents of religion. The two sets have a non-empty intersection. This is not equivalent to saying that the two sets are equal. Most of the people wanting censorship are really just normal everyday people like your neighbors. Not exactly what most people would call the most vocal proponents of religion.
Aside from that, your point is very good. In fact, it stands up just fine without the last half of your comment. Thinking that the goal is feasible is far out there. Arguably a nice goal, but an unattainable one.
So, I read a little bit of the Manna story thing. The first thing that was actually somewhat creepy also happened to be the first thing that was implausible unless the AI people have really made some huge (read world-changing) breakthroughs that I haven't heard about.
In Chapter 2, Manna prevents the walmart workers from running into each other while they are working, because the time spent talking to one another makes them slightly less efficient. Either the Manna system came up with this idea on its own or it didn't. Suppose it didn't. Then it must have been programmed to do so. While this is a nasty thing to have done, it is still a human nasty thing to have done, and not really at all surprising or terribly creepy. Suppose it came up with the idea on its own. This requires, as I mentioned earlier, an enormous breakthrough in AI which hasn't happened, and doesn't look likely to happen.
Thus, on the strength of this observation, I conclude that the whole Manna story is rather implausible and a gratuitous scare attempt.
Yes, I realize that I am judging it without reading the whole thing. But, I've still got some proofs to write before I go to bed, so that's all the time I really have for it.
our sprawl is contained - our housing is affordable
So, in other words, you're really cramped in. Some of us actually like a bit of room to stretch our arms, our legs, and our lungs occasionally. And we prefer to do it without breathing somebody else's belches, kicking the schmuck in front of us, and sticking our fingers in the eyes of the next door neighbors.
I would, if only it were possible to buy from them without installing bloody iTunes on my computer! If someone knows of a way to do that which I just haven't found yet, please let me know.
Nobody seems to have read the summary very closely (surprise!). The judge didn't say "You absolutely cannot ever examine the third knife."; he said "On the basis of what you've presented and argued so far, I see no reason that you should want or need to examine the third knife, if there even is a third knife.".
I don't think I defined either, really, I was relying on people's general understandings of the terms. I just wanted to point out that the set of people who would usually be considered "power users" is not equal to the set of people who prefer a fairly busy interface ("clutter users"). I don't think the sets are disjoint, either, but they are certainly not equal. Yes, "clutter user" sounds rather derogatory, and it was not intentionally so. But, if I had used a different term, the disconnect with the summary would have been great enough that nobody would have really understood what I was talking about.
Typically, power user (in the context of UIs) is understood to be someone who understands their system thoroughly enough to be able to tweak it as much as it can be tweaked, and in most cases is picky enough about their aesthetic that they have a drive to tweak it.
Anyway, the point was, if you want to appeal to "power users", your approach shouldn't necessarily to be to cram everything possible onto the screen at once.
One of the common complaints that some Linux users have over KDE is that it is too cluttered. And by addressing this need without putting off the power users,
Don't conflate power users with clutter users. Some power users like the clutter, but many want the cleanest interface possible (without sacrificing any power, hence the name "power" users...). For instance, you see a fair number of power users running things like fluxbox, ratpoison, and evilwm instead of the window managers from KDE or Gnome.
Most experimental physics labs use Linux extensively, and they use a lot of machines: desktops, cluster nodes, and servers. The head of my group has bought several machines through the university (and thus from Dell), and then the university had to put Linux on them. This will save quite a bit of trouble for a lot of physicists in years to come. Since these are work machines, not personal tinkering machines, we want them to come out of the box ready to go.
Well, if people complained about "all that Carbon and Oxygen in the atmosphere", well, that would be about as ridiculous as complaining about the environmental "uncoolness" of silicon. The elements themselves are harmless.
Believe you me, I have an immensely greater knowledge of science than an 8th grade level understanding. Take a quick gander at the URL listed below my nick. I work there. Currently I am working on improving the acceptance of Z boson selection by allowing the use of electrons in the plug region of the calorimeter to an analysis measuring the cross section for production of a bottom jet in events with a Z boson. Just in case you were wondering about my credentials to bloviate on matters scientific.
I also do know that the processes which produce silicon electronics are incredibly nasty. However, the silicon itself is not a pollutant, and it is not environmentally "uncool" at all. Clearly, as with any element commonly found on the Earth, the problem lies not in the element itself, nor even its presence in the environment, but the particular form it is in, or the side effects of processes necessary to bring it into some desired form.
Slashdot Mirror
Fermilab and CERN are only competitors under a quite loose definition of the word. ATLAS and CMS are competitors, CDF and D0 are competitors, Fermilab and CERN are not really. Actually, most of the people working at CERN either also work at or have worked at Fermilab (or one of the other accelerator labs). Most of the people at Fermilab are anticipating working at CERN in the next few years. I myself have been working at Fermilab for the last few years, but I am starting work at CERN this summer.
CERN is a continuation of what Fermilab has been working on, not a rival.
The CAPTCHA is "footstep". Appropriate. CERN is following in Fermilab's footsteps (and then going quite a bit further).
The BSD license is more permissive, and the GPL is more free.
By putting the driver code under the BSD license (illegally), the BSD dev opened up the possibility for Broadcom to take the driver code and use, distribute, and sell it under a non-free license. This is precisely what the original author (who does have and should have (nearly) complete authority to say how other people use his work) wanted to avoid, and hence why he put it under the GPL originally. He did not want his code to be used under a non-free license, and the BSD dev essentially handed it to Broadcom to do precisely that with it.
Then, the original dev offered to relicense it so that BSD could use it legally, which was a rather generous move on his part, as it winds up allowing exactly what he didn't want to have happen. This was a peace offering to say "hey, you (BSD guy) are in the wrong, but because I value the peace between us more than the correctness of your action, I'll fix things so that you are not in the wrong anymore.". The BSD dev and Theo both threw a hissy fit at this, which is absurd and a mystery to me.
BTW, storage is not even remotely the driving force behind compression of music and video. Network bandwidth is. Suppose you have an mp3 and a wav of the same piece of music. The wav is typically going to be somewhere on the order of 10 times the size of the mp3. Now, with typical home bandwidths today, streaming the mp3 will work fairly well. It might have to stop and rebuffer just occasionally, but it will usually do quite well. Now, try sending ten times as much data down the same pipe in the same amount of time. It just ain't gonna work. Or, even if it did, you'd still be better served by increasing the quality (bitrate, sampling rate) of the sound, and still using the mp3.
CPU time is much more available than network bandwidth. Audio compression isn't going away, nor should it. Video is an enormously more difficult proposition than audio, so video compression isn't going away either, nor should it.
FWIW, there are free compressed formats out there. Any of the Ogg formats are free, for instance.
Or some form of mild narcolepsy? I don't know. She might have been diagnosed and treated by now for all I know, that was quite some time ago.
When some of the potentially interfered-with calls are 911 calls, erring on the side of caution starts to sound a little bit better, at least to me.
I was once waiting to be seated at a restaurant. A man came in, while talking on his cell phone. Obviously I was trying not to eavesdrop, but with some people, you'd have to gouge out your eardrums to avoid it. And this guy clearly (as you will see) wanted to be heard by those around him. His speech involved phrases like "million dollars", "stock", "sell", etc. etc. etc. You get the picture.
Then his phone rang.
OTOH, IIRC, there are numerous other studies which show the exact opposite: When you give solely a verbal presentation, or when you give solely a visual presentation (article), retention of information (which is a different thing perhaps than comprehension) is tremendously lower than when you give a verbal presentation bolstered by a visual presentation. Which are we to believe? Or is it just the difference between comprehension and retention? If you are trying to get someone to understand something, then you should pick one, but if you are trying to get someone to remember something, then you should use both?
My seventh grade english teacher did this! Except not while reading slides, but while reading Tom Sawyer out loud to us. It was very disconcerting to hear her suddenly stop in midsentence for 10-15 seconds, and then pick back up exactly where she had been as if the preceding time interval had never existed. We called it ${Teacher's last name}'s Disease.
Clearly, because he wasn't in class to find out how the prof wanted the code commented.
Whoa there, friend. First, only a very small minority AFAIK is seizing on technology as a force that is "corrupting the children". Nearly everybody who is trying to censor for their kids at all realizes that it is not the fault of technology. They want their kids to be able to use the technology, otherwise, like my uncle for a long time, they just wouldn't purchase internet access.
Second, the most vocal proponents of religion are not identical to the people calling for censorship in various forms. I'm not quite sure how you made that leap, but it is not justified. Sure, a lot of the desire for censorship is fueled by religious concerns, but not all of it is. Some of the proponents of censorship are also vocal proponents of religion. The two sets have a non-empty intersection. This is not equivalent to saying that the two sets are equal. Most of the people wanting censorship are really just normal everyday people like your neighbors. Not exactly what most people would call the most vocal proponents of religion.
Aside from that, your point is very good. In fact, it stands up just fine without the last half of your comment. Thinking that the goal is feasible is far out there. Arguably a nice goal, but an unattainable one.
I can almost imagine a Beowulf gallon of these!
So, I read a little bit of the Manna story thing. The first thing that was actually somewhat creepy also happened to be the first thing that was implausible unless the AI people have really made some huge (read world-changing) breakthroughs that I haven't heard about.
In Chapter 2, Manna prevents the walmart workers from running into each other while they are working, because the time spent talking to one another makes them slightly less efficient. Either the Manna system came up with this idea on its own or it didn't. Suppose it didn't. Then it must have been programmed to do so. While this is a nasty thing to have done, it is still a human nasty thing to have done, and not really at all surprising or terribly creepy. Suppose it came up with the idea on its own. This requires, as I mentioned earlier, an enormous breakthrough in AI which hasn't happened, and doesn't look likely to happen.
Thus, on the strength of this observation, I conclude that the whole Manna story is rather implausible and a gratuitous scare attempt.
Yes, I realize that I am judging it without reading the whole thing. But, I've still got some proofs to write before I go to bed, so that's all the time I really have for it.
Hopefully they won't cross-class and figure out how to extract profit from microbes. Or worse, how to extract DNA from millions of underpants...
I would, if only it were possible to buy from them without installing bloody iTunes on my computer! If someone knows of a way to do that which I just haven't found yet, please let me know.
Nobody seems to have read the summary very closely (surprise!). The judge didn't say "You absolutely cannot ever examine the third knife."; he said "On the basis of what you've presented and argued so far, I see no reason that you should want or need to examine the third knife, if there even is a third knife.".
I don't think I defined either, really, I was relying on people's general understandings of the terms. I just wanted to point out that the set of people who would usually be considered "power users" is not equal to the set of people who prefer a fairly busy interface ("clutter users"). I don't think the sets are disjoint, either, but they are certainly not equal. Yes, "clutter user" sounds rather derogatory, and it was not intentionally so. But, if I had used a different term, the disconnect with the summary would have been great enough that nobody would have really understood what I was talking about.
Typically, power user (in the context of UIs) is understood to be someone who understands their system thoroughly enough to be able to tweak it as much as it can be tweaked, and in most cases is picky enough about their aesthetic that they have a drive to tweak it.
Anyway, the point was, if you want to appeal to "power users", your approach shouldn't necessarily to be to cram everything possible onto the screen at once.
Somebody should turn that 3d bubble sort you linked to into an xscreensaver hack.
I think that "Vista sucks!" is probably a more popular headline, and that only in the last few months. It is hard to beat three or four per day.
Most experimental physics labs use Linux extensively, and they use a lot of machines: desktops, cluster nodes, and servers. The head of my group has bought several machines through the university (and thus from Dell), and then the university had to put Linux on them. This will save quite a bit of trouble for a lot of physicists in years to come. Since these are work machines, not personal tinkering machines, we want them to come out of the box ready to go.
Well, if people complained about "all that Carbon and Oxygen in the atmosphere", well, that would be about as ridiculous as complaining about the environmental "uncoolness" of silicon. The elements themselves are harmless.
Believe you me, I have an immensely greater knowledge of science than an 8th grade level understanding. Take a quick gander at the URL listed below my nick. I work there. Currently I am working on improving the acceptance of Z boson selection by allowing the use of electrons in the plug region of the calorimeter to an analysis measuring the cross section for production of a bottom jet in events with a Z boson. Just in case you were wondering about my credentials to bloviate on matters scientific.
I also do know that the processes which produce silicon electronics are incredibly nasty. However, the silicon itself is not a pollutant, and it is not environmentally "uncool" at all. Clearly, as with any element commonly found on the Earth, the problem lies not in the element itself, nor even its presence in the environment, but the particular form it is in, or the side effects of processes necessary to bring it into some desired form.