but it happened to other old names like Eaton's and the sky didn't fall. Of course, Eaton's just went out of business because they kept mailing Maple Leafs jerseys to kids in small-town Quebec.
As my English teacher used to say. "If it's needless to say, why say it?"
One day, that same English teacher may teach you about irony and how it can be used to reinforce a story or anecdote, and make it more colourful and interesting to the reader. I believe this is how the fragment "Needless to say..." is most properly used in modern writing.
(For those of you, like the parent, who are a little slow, or are just tuning in, the idea is that the part which was "needless to say", is the "punchline", or more interesting part of the story, and hence is actually quite essential, contrary to what the phrase may suggest. It's subtle, I know.)
It's been reported in vent failures when a magnet quenched that it rained oxygen; liquid helium is substantially colder than liquid oxygen.
On a somewhat lighter note (since no one was hurt), an MR tech colleague of mine recounted the story (which I may be mangling a bit) of an intentional quench of an MRI at the facility where she worked previously. (I believe the magnet was either being decommissioned, or at least being moved to a different building -- regardless, they needed to release the helium).
Apparently, they put out an announcement that morning (and earlier in the week), notifying everyone at the facility that the quench would be occurring at some specified time, and not to be alarmed. One of the senior researchers had been away at a conference for a few days, and arrived just as the quench was occurring. As they opened the vents to the roof and released the liquid helium, the suddenly-expanding cold gas shot up in column for a bit, condensing moisture in the air around it, before expanding out, and forming a wider ball.
Needless to say, this researcher was quite shocked to get back to work in time to see a mushroom cloud over the building.:)
Hmm... that may be feasible in the not-too-distant future. If you think about the hot touch-screen features of the iPhone, they should be able to move that over to a tablet (especially if the iPhone is indeed running OS X).
The common wisdom (for what it's worth) seems to be that Apple doesn't release something until they can do it well. So, with a decent touchscreen interface, and their already popular laptops, they may just be reaching that point for a tablet.
I'm not going to hold my breath, but it at least seems reasonable that the planets are aligning nicely to make an Apple tablet seem releasable.
Rather than a four point diamond, I find a simple 2D Cartesian grid with axes representing economic policy (socialist vs. free market) and views on personal liberties (authoritarian vs. libertarian) more intuitive.
Of course, it's not my idea. I was introduced to it years ago from the (very similar) quiz at The Political Compass.
Assuming a [-10,10] range for each of the axes (in the order stated above), I would think of the US Libertarian ideal as falling in the lower right (free market libertarian). The nice thing is that you can get convenient scores on the two axes independently, and compare with other people, without necessarily using the potentially loaded nomenclature from the quiz on theadvocates.org. (Also standard orthogonal axes make more sense to me than a diamond. I don't get why they thought a 45 degree rotation would be a good idea.)
And you can use your mouse as a scanner while you're playing music on your real scanner.
Yeah, but then you'd need to set up a pair of linearly independent highly-directional speakers hooked up to your sound card, pointing at a microphone you slide across your desk as a pointing device.
This sounds to me kind of like the situation in a university Unix network. I'm not entirely sure I understand what you necessarily need that wouldn't be available (though I would like to know, to get a better understanding of the question). Certainly, at the university I attended, we didn't have sudo access, but we were able to develop some rather powerful applications.
I can see an adjustment period of a couple of months, where applications you regularly use aren't available, so you ask for them to be installed. After that, assuming they don't see the general need for an application (or they don't want to have to officially support it), you could theoretically install applications under your home directory. (I was thrilled when I became a grad student, and got 100MB of disk quota, so I could compile and run Blackbox as my window manager instead of the crappy twm we were generally stuck with. In fact, I made it globally executable, so my friends could use it as their window manager. In fact, I received a phonecall once from one of the admins, asking me what this spinning "blackbox" process was running on one of undergrad servers, since I was the only grad student or professor (and therefore in the phone directory) who also ran it.)
These days, as part of my regular job, I am one of the unofficial sysadmins of a Beowulf cluster (largely because I'm the one of the only ones who have developed MPI applications that run on it). I get the odd request from other users who want me to hook them up with some library or such. I compile and install it under/usr/local/whatever, and tell them how to set up their LD_LIBRARY_PATH to link against it, and they're good to go.
Again, I have to ask what you need that requires root or sudo access, that can't be solved by the rare admin call or installing under $HOME. (I really don't mean this in an insulting way. I do want to know. The story post is a little brief.)
I'm just glad this story was here to remind me to reinstall the Firesomething extension.
Incidentally, Firesomething still works in newer versions of Firefox, if you're willing to screw with it. Just go to about:config, change app.extensions.version to "0.10", install Firesomething, exit Firefox, restart, go back to about:config, and reset app.extensions.version to the default value (by right-clicking and choosing "reset").
The idea is that you put down a deposit equal to or greater than the value of the item you are borrowing.
Sure, you could lose your $15 and run off with the library's copy of The Terror State, but you could just as easily buy yourself a brand new copy (which has never had anyone else's grubby little fingers or coffee stains on it) for less than $15 at Amazon. If you do run off with the library's copy, they can order a new one with the money you gave them.
Use one fairly hard (but still memorable) password locally to protect the random unmemorizable passwords you send across potentially insecure environments.
Sure, if someone who's out to get me busts into my apartment, they might be able to figure out the password for my password database (since it's easy enough for me to remember) or perhaps bruteforce it (assuming they own have the processing power). At that point though, since they have access to my home, they could just eat all my food, kill my dog, and spraypaint profanity on my walls (or eat my walls, kill my food, and spraypaint profanity on my dog), which is as much of an inconvenience to me as if they drained my meagre bank account.
Remember that the important thing about security is not to make it impossible to screw you over, but rather to make it so it's just not worth it.
(I believe that list may only include the papers which Microsoft has copyright to freely distribute, as opposed to papers in refereed journals, of which Microsoft employees have many.)
They may be the "evil empire", but they do have a lot of smart people working for them.
I don't understand why projecting something on a larger screen would require a higher DPI. In fact, because the audience is farther from the screen, it would be precisely the opposite (i.e. individual pixels implicitly look small, simply because they are far away).
Furthermore, digital cinema simply does not use a resolution far beyond that of modern PC video. Doing a quick Google search for "digital cinema resolution", I ended up at a little blurb which mentions that the digital version of Attack of the Clones was recorded at 1920x1080 (which, granted, is higher than the 352x240 NTSC output needed by a console, but not by the discussed orders of magnitude.) Even looking at DPX (digital picture exchange) 2K, we only get a resolution of 2048x1556.
Well, no wonder he has trouble finding food.. They took the list of pizza places in Canberra off of the Samba documention page. Furthemore, the Samba FAQ no longer seems to list ways of sending pizza to the Samba developers.
The explanation I heard was that it's superstition built around the Christian story of Jesus' death, and the last supper.
Jesus died on "Good Friday", and at the last supper, he was sitting with his twelve disciples. 13 people at the table, on a Friday, and the leader gets killed.
Of course, since the death of Jesus is supposedly considered the high-point in Christianity (with Easter being the most important Christian holiday), this explanation seems slightly counterintuitive to me. Of course, superstition never really needs to make sense, I guess.
If you don't understand why they're using it, I don't think you fully appreciate what zeitgeist means.
It is pretty much the only word we have that conveys the notion of "spirit of the times". (It would literally translate as "time ghost".) In some sense, it was the lack of a suitable word in english that resulted in the german word being added to our dictionary.
A "year-end summary" doesn't properly convey the idea that we are seeing a snapshot of the underlying culture and interests of the period.
Having learned to use the GIMP years ago (and later being incredibly frustrated at how little I could "intuitively" do on a friend's PC running Photoshop), I would disagree that the learning curve is "enormously steep". It does take a little bit of learning, though.
To anyone out there who would like to try the GIMP out, I would suggest installing and then heading directly to the tutorials page. With approximately a half-hour of tutorial work, you can get the hang of the most of the UI (at which point it becomes much easier to "discover" other features).
Maybe it would be helpful if a few tutorials were included with the GIMP distribution (so people might actually give them a try before giving up).
Umm... I don't think the "Linux Standards Base" is the hundredth project of its type you'd have seen since the inception of Linux. Whereas there have perhaps been other attempts at standardization by small groups of individuals, the LSB has been (more or less) the first major attempt amongst the distros and major vendors to come up with binary standards.
Check out the membership of the Free Standards Group (which governs the LSB) here. Note that it includes essentially all the significant commercial Linux distros, as well as the big corporate supporters (IBM, HP, Sun). (Although I'm sure many on Slashdot scoff at the notion of Sun being associated with truly "free" standards, nonetheless they are a big corp with ties to Linux and OSS.)
Furthermore, you talk about the LSB as though it is a new project. It has actually been around for a number of years, and has been mentioned on Slashdot many times over the years. (See e.g. here, here, here, and here.) Version 1.0 started in 2000. I believe 1.1 came out in 2001, followed by 1.2 and 1.3 in 2002. Version 2.0 came out in September of this year (with 2.0.1 released in late October). Currently, there is a 2.1 release candidate available.
"patience" is spelled correctly. In context, it's probably the wrong word, but it's still spelled correctly.
In the case of an email from the CFO of a corporation (as presented earlier), I would imagine that "patience" is the correct word. If one works in a hospital, however, I would expect the word "patients" to come up (unless one is looking for "patience with the patients", or perhaps "patients with patience").
Article number two on Anandtech right now is a first look at nVidia's nForce4 chipset, which (in the more expensive version) will support dual PCI Express video (to support the GeForce 6 series SLI capabilities). Essentially, there is a 16-channel PCI Express slot which can be split into two 8-channel slots.
They also make a passing reference to a chipset from VIA which will support PCI Express for the Athlon 64.
Toward the end of the article, they mention that nForce 4 boards from Asus and MSI should be out soonish.
Specifically, I am actually getting roughly double the performance. Although that is still safely within the bounds of reason, it is pleasantly close to the theoretical potential speedup (particularly since the parallelism was a badly-hacked afterthought). Before working with this cluster, I didn't realize just how easy it can be to give scientific applications some extra kick by throwing some more machines in.
I should have mentioned exactly how much faster it was in my original post.
You can get an 8 proc Opteron cluster for about $10k from Rocketcalc. I can't speak for their new systems, but I am currently running some simulations on one of their older 8 node P3 1Ghz clusters. It absolutely blows my desktop P4 3 Ghz out of the water (even with some rather poor parallelism in my code.)
I could be mistaken, but it looks like the "standard" version is cheaper than the old base version. I suspect that the professional version is a little closer to the old base version, and it still supports multiple users. So, it looks to me like they may have just introduced a lower-end version without the same level of support and the multi-user capabilities.
Again, I could actually be talking from my posterior. I don't remember for sure what the pricing used to be.
An interesting bit that can be added to the parent is the fact that the actual bootstrapping process for a fresh install of Gentoo doesn't actually need an installation CD.
I set up my home PC using a 1.4rc CD, but at work, I tried the "Knoppix install". You use a Knoppix CD (which is handy to have around anyway) to boot up, and set up your partitions. Then, you download the Stage 1 tarball from Gentoo, get the portage tools set up, and emerge the rest of your system. An advantage is that you can play games on the running Knoppix system while Gentoo is building itself.:)
Slashdot Mirror
One day, that same English teacher may teach you about irony and how it can be used to reinforce a story or anecdote, and make it more colourful and interesting to the reader. I believe this is how the fragment "Needless to say
(For those of you, like the parent, who are a little slow, or are just tuning in, the idea is that the part which was "needless to say", is the "punchline", or more interesting part of the story, and hence is actually quite essential, contrary to what the phrase may suggest. It's subtle, I know.)
On a somewhat lighter note (since no one was hurt), an MR tech colleague of mine recounted the story (which I may be mangling a bit) of an intentional quench of an MRI at the facility where she worked previously. (I believe the magnet was either being decommissioned, or at least being moved to a different building -- regardless, they needed to release the helium).
Apparently, they put out an announcement that morning (and earlier in the week), notifying everyone at the facility that the quench would be occurring at some specified time, and not to be alarmed. One of the senior researchers had been away at a conference for a few days, and arrived just as the quench was occurring. As they opened the vents to the roof and released the liquid helium, the suddenly-expanding cold gas shot up in column for a bit, condensing moisture in the air around it, before expanding out, and forming a wider ball.
Needless to say, this researcher was quite shocked to get back to work in time to see a mushroom cloud over the building.
Actually, I believe you could achieve the desired effect by walking out your front door, and declaring yourself to be inside the house.
The C64 came with "BASIC V2" and "38911 BASIC BYTES", free!
Man I loved that game.
Hmm... that may be feasible in the not-too-distant future. If you think about the hot touch-screen features of the iPhone, they should be able to move that over to a tablet (especially if the iPhone is indeed running OS X).
The common wisdom (for what it's worth) seems to be that Apple doesn't release something until they can do it well. So, with a decent touchscreen interface, and their already popular laptops, they may just be reaching that point for a tablet.
I'm not going to hold my breath, but it at least seems reasonable that the planets are aligning nicely to make an Apple tablet seem releasable.
Rather than a four point diamond, I find a simple 2D Cartesian grid with axes representing economic policy (socialist vs. free market) and views on personal liberties (authoritarian vs. libertarian) more intuitive.
Of course, it's not my idea. I was introduced to it years ago from the (very similar) quiz at The Political Compass.
Assuming a [-10,10] range for each of the axes (in the order stated above), I would think of the US Libertarian ideal as falling in the lower right (free market libertarian). The nice thing is that you can get convenient scores on the two axes independently, and compare with other people, without necessarily using the potentially loaded nomenclature from the quiz on theadvocates.org. (Also standard orthogonal axes make more sense to me than a diamond. I don't get why they thought a 45 degree rotation would be a good idea.)
Yeah, but then you'd need to set up a pair of linearly independent highly-directional speakers hooked up to your sound card, pointing at a microphone you slide across your desk as a pointing device.
This sounds to me kind of like the situation in a university Unix network. I'm not entirely sure I understand what you necessarily need that wouldn't be available (though I would like to know, to get a better understanding of the question). Certainly, at the university I attended, we didn't have sudo access, but we were able to develop some rather powerful applications.
/usr/local/whatever, and tell them how to set up their LD_LIBRARY_PATH to link against it, and they're good to go.
I can see an adjustment period of a couple of months, where applications you regularly use aren't available, so you ask for them to be installed. After that, assuming they don't see the general need for an application (or they don't want to have to officially support it), you could theoretically install applications under your home directory. (I was thrilled when I became a grad student, and got 100MB of disk quota, so I could compile and run Blackbox as my window manager instead of the crappy twm we were generally stuck with. In fact, I made it globally executable, so my friends could use it as their window manager. In fact, I received a phonecall once from one of the admins, asking me what this spinning "blackbox" process was running on one of undergrad servers, since I was the only grad student or professor (and therefore in the phone directory) who also ran it.)
These days, as part of my regular job, I am one of the unofficial sysadmins of a Beowulf cluster (largely because I'm the one of the only ones who have developed MPI applications that run on it). I get the odd request from other users who want me to hook them up with some library or such. I compile and install it under
Again, I have to ask what you need that requires root or sudo access, that can't be solved by the rare admin call or installing under $HOME. (I really don't mean this in an insulting way. I do want to know. The story post is a little brief.)
I'm just glad this story was here to remind me to reinstall the Firesomething extension.
Incidentally, Firesomething still works in newer versions of Firefox, if you're willing to screw with it. Just go to about:config, change app.extensions.version to "0.10", install Firesomething, exit Firefox, restart, go back to about:config, and reset app.extensions.version to the default value (by right-clicking and choosing "reset").
I think you misunderstand the example given.
The idea is that you put down a deposit equal to or greater than the value of the item you are borrowing.
Sure, you could lose your $15 and run off with the library's copy of The Terror State, but you could just as easily buy yourself a brand new copy (which has never had anyone else's grubby little fingers or coffee stains on it) for less than $15 at Amazon. If you do run off with the library's copy, they can order a new one with the money you gave them.
Use one fairly hard (but still memorable) password locally to protect the random unmemorizable passwords you send across potentially insecure environments.
Sure, if someone who's out to get me busts into my apartment, they might be able to figure out the password for my password database (since it's easy enough for me to remember) or perhaps bruteforce it (assuming they own have the processing power). At that point though, since they have access to my home, they could just eat all my food, kill my dog, and spraypaint profanity on my walls (or eat my walls, kill my food, and spraypaint profanity on my dog), which is as much of an inconvenience to me as if they drained my meagre bank account.
Remember that the important thing about security is not to make it impossible to screw you over, but rather to make it so it's just not worth it.
Actually, Microsoft does produce some pretty fantastic research.
l t.aspx/
http://research.microsoft.com/research/pubs/defau
(I believe that list may only include the papers which Microsoft has copyright to freely distribute, as opposed to papers in refereed journals, of which Microsoft employees have many.)
They may be the "evil empire", but they do have a lot of smart people working for them.
The parent post doesn't really make much sense.
I don't understand why projecting something on a larger screen would require a higher DPI. In fact, because the audience is farther from the screen, it would be precisely the opposite (i.e. individual pixels implicitly look small, simply because they are far away).
Furthermore, digital cinema simply does not use a resolution far beyond that of modern PC video. Doing a quick Google search for "digital cinema resolution", I ended up at a little blurb which mentions that the digital version of Attack of the Clones was recorded at 1920x1080 (which, granted, is higher than the 352x240 NTSC output needed by a console, but not by the discussed orders of magnitude.) Even looking at DPX (digital picture exchange) 2K, we only get a resolution of 2048x1556.
Well, no wonder he has trouble finding food.. They took the list of pizza places in Canberra off of the Samba documention page. Furthemore, the Samba FAQ no longer seems to list ways of sending pizza to the Samba developers.
See here for an old copy.
The explanation I heard was that it's superstition built around the Christian story of Jesus' death, and the last supper.
Jesus died on "Good Friday", and at the last supper, he was sitting with his twelve disciples. 13 people at the table, on a Friday, and the leader gets killed.
Of course, since the death of Jesus is supposedly considered the high-point in Christianity (with Easter being the most important Christian holiday), this explanation seems slightly counterintuitive to me. Of course, superstition never really needs to make sense, I guess.
If you don't understand why they're using it, I don't think you fully appreciate what zeitgeist means.
It is pretty much the only word we have that conveys the notion of "spirit of the times". (It would literally translate as "time ghost".) In some sense, it was the lack of a suitable word in english that resulted in the german word being added to our dictionary.
A "year-end summary" doesn't properly convey the idea that we are seeing a snapshot of the underlying culture and interests of the period.
Having learned to use the GIMP years ago (and later being incredibly frustrated at how little I could "intuitively" do on a friend's PC running Photoshop), I would disagree that the learning curve is "enormously steep". It does take a little bit of learning, though.
To anyone out there who would like to try the GIMP out, I would suggest installing and then heading directly to the tutorials page. With approximately a half-hour of tutorial work, you can get the hang of the most of the UI (at which point it becomes much easier to "discover" other features).
Maybe it would be helpful if a few tutorials were included with the GIMP distribution (so people might actually give them a try before giving up).
Umm... I don't think the "Linux Standards Base" is the hundredth project of its type you'd have seen since the inception of Linux. Whereas there have perhaps been other attempts at standardization by small groups of individuals, the LSB has been (more or less) the first major attempt amongst the distros and major vendors to come up with binary standards.
Check out the membership of the Free Standards Group (which governs the LSB) here. Note that it includes essentially all the significant commercial Linux distros, as well as the big corporate supporters (IBM, HP, Sun). (Although I'm sure many on Slashdot scoff at the notion of Sun being associated with truly "free" standards, nonetheless they are a big corp with ties to Linux and OSS.)
Furthermore, you talk about the LSB as though it is a new project. It has actually been around for a number of years, and has been mentioned on Slashdot many times over the years. (See e.g. here, here, here, and here.) Version 1.0 started in 2000. I believe 1.1 came out in 2001, followed by 1.2 and 1.3 in 2002. Version 2.0 came out in September of this year (with 2.0.1 released in late October). Currently, there is a 2.1 release candidate available.
In the case of an email from the CFO of a corporation (as presented earlier), I would imagine that "patience" is the correct word. If one works in a hospital, however, I would expect the word "patients" to come up (unless one is looking for "patience with the patients", or perhaps "patients with patience").
Article number two on Anandtech right now is a first look at nVidia's nForce4 chipset, which (in the more expensive version) will support dual PCI Express video (to support the GeForce 6 series SLI capabilities). Essentially, there is a 16-channel PCI Express slot which can be split into two 8-channel slots.
They also make a passing reference to a chipset from VIA which will support PCI Express for the Athlon 64.
Toward the end of the article, they mention that nForce 4 boards from Asus and MSI should be out soonish.
Specifically, I am actually getting roughly double the performance. Although that is still safely within the bounds of reason, it is pleasantly close to the theoretical potential speedup (particularly since the parallelism was a badly-hacked afterthought). Before working with this cluster, I didn't realize just how easy it can be to give scientific applications some extra kick by throwing some more machines in.
I should have mentioned exactly how much faster it was in my original post.
You can get an 8 proc Opteron cluster for about $10k from Rocketcalc. I can't speak for their new systems, but I am currently running some simulations on one of their older 8 node P3 1Ghz clusters. It absolutely blows my desktop P4 3 Ghz out of the water (even with some rather poor parallelism in my code.)
I could be mistaken, but it looks like the "standard" version is cheaper than the old base version. I suspect that the professional version is a little closer to the old base version, and it still supports multiple users. So, it looks to me like they may have just introduced a lower-end version without the same level of support and the multi-user capabilities.
Again, I could actually be talking from my posterior. I don't remember for sure what the pricing used to be.
An interesting bit that can be added to the parent is the fact that the actual bootstrapping process for a fresh install of Gentoo doesn't actually need an installation CD.
:)
I set up my home PC using a 1.4rc CD, but at work, I tried the "Knoppix install". You use a Knoppix CD (which is handy to have around anyway) to boot up, and set up your partitions. Then, you download the Stage 1 tarball from Gentoo, get the portage tools set up, and emerge the rest of your system. An advantage is that you can play games on the running Knoppix system while Gentoo is building itself.