For pete's sake, timothy, it's "Rio Rancho", not "Rio Ranch". The submitter spelled it correctly twice, and you didn't double-check before "correcting" it for the title?
If you've been following this story, you see that the musicians aren't being replaced merely for the sake of autmation. The issue is that the particular theater is tiny, and the musician's pit can hold only about a dozen musicians.
The producer's viewpoint is that people who go to see Les Mis want to hear the full Les Mis sound, so he's using recorded music to fill in the for the people that the pit doesn't hold.
Funny is good, but it doesn't always age well. Let me name an
author who probably won't be read 50 years from
now.
As I'm writing this, there are about 600 comments in the
story, and no one has yet mentioned P.G. Wodehouse. Wodehouse is
most famous for his "Wooster and Jeeves" stories, which poked fun
at the low end of upper-class life. They're truly
rolling-on-the-floor hilarious, and were widely read enough that
the name Jeeves has become assiciated with the "perfect butler".
Wodehouse wrote in the mid-30's. He's not really read
anymore. (Did you know who the "Jeeves" of
askjeeves.com referred to?) He's still funny, but his humor value
is fading because it's dated. Horse races, boarding schools,
terrifying aunts, and meetings of the Young Communists club
require the reader to laugh about situations which are becoming
more and more unfamiliar.
I'm not disputing that Pratchett is funny, just pointing out
that the things people laugh at change. Everybody seems to want to
find something new to laugh about, and this usually shifts their
judgment so that the old humor seems much thinner.
Bleagh. timothy has silently edited/corrected both the story title and masem's submitted text, without even providing a sentence notifying readers that he's done so?
Welcome to the ephemeral web, I guess. I wish the editor would at least *tell* us that he is changing history, otherwise taniwha's post makes little sense.
Some of these satellite photos are really fun. One of my favorites also uses data from the Defense Meteorological Satellites Program (DMSP). They spent months taking pictures of the night time earth, and assembled a beautiful composite image of all light-emitting sources on the earth's surface.
It's a map of light sources, and shows some really interesting structures. The Nile is much brighter than the rest of Egypt, the central U.S. is a grid of cities, and there's a railroad stretching across Russia to the Pacific Ocean.
The parent post said:
My memory tells me that Sircam DOES NOT send documents.
Your memory is telling you incorrect things. Sircam DOES send documents. In fact, this helps lure the user into a sense of complacency. Double click on the "GeForce2.doc.pif" file (whose.pif extension is never visible in Window's file browser), and MSWord opens up the GeForce2.doc file that SirCam mailed from the infected computer. The user thinks "odd, why was I mailed this document?", and might not worry about it being a virus.
Of course experimental reproducibility is important, but don't knock peer review.
How is a journal editor supposed to tell if an experiment is reproducible just by reading the submitted article? They ask a third party, "does this paper look reasonable?". That is peer review.
Some papers are theoretical papers. Theory is right so long as the equations are right, although "right" is not the same as "useful". How do the editors know which theories to publish in the front of the journal as the significant ones and which ones to dump in the back? Ask a third party "what do you think of this?"
Peer review weeds out crap. It's a lot like slashdot's moderation of comments, except that peer review happens before the article is published rather than while it is published. Asking for more emphasis on good journal articles and less emphasis on review is about as useful as asking slashdot for more good comments and less moderation of comments.
(Yes, I'm a scientist. Don't get me started about academic karma whores. They exist.)
I would trust the original poster to know their own needs. Some of us are old enough to remember working with b/w displays and remember what they're good for. The story submitter described uses that 1-bit displays are perfectly suited for.
I'm a little concerned about whether OS's and applications are still designed to work with 1-bit displays, though. I haven't seen one in use for the past four years or so, which suggests that application developers might have stopped checking to make sure that their programs work well in b/w mode. (As an example, you wouldn't be able to distinguish between the red underlines vs green underlines that MSWord uses to mark words with bad spelling vs words with bad grammar.)
Also of interest is the way Windows NT seems to use more memory more efficiently. The WU completion times decreased with the installation of the second 128 MB DIMM. The other operating systems did not show this behavior.
because I would have come to a different conclusion.
I would have said "it is interesting that Windows NT cannot run a WU at full speed with less than 128M of RAM. Other operating systems make effective use of 128M of memory, but NT needs 256M."
I'd disagree with your conclusion. The most effective TV commercials might be entertaining ones, but remember that most people's goal when watching television is to be entertained. Web sites vary, but most of the ones I see emphasize information more than they emphasize entertainment. If I'm reading the web looking for stuff to read, even if it's fun reading material, I'm more likely to click through ads that seem to match my current goal than I am to click on ads that are funny.
The best advertisements are the ones that make the viewer think "look at that! yes, this is what I want". Exactly what will make a viewer think this depends on how well you match your ad to the viewers frame of mind.
I first ordered from amazon.com in 1997, and I cannot recall ever getting spam from Amazon. The only mail I've received from them are order confirmations, and announcements that I subscribed to (in my case, announcements that some new book matching my customized search terms is available).
This is in fact my reason for liking Amazon; I know that other people have lower prices, but Amazon has respected my preference not to be bothered with email.
(They're not completly perfect: when I visited family last Christmas I had an order shipped to this new address. While I was there a credit card company called and asked to speak to me. There's only one way the company could have known thought that I'd be there, and that's if Amazon told them. Sigh. But as far as email goes, I haven't been bothered by Amazon.)
The transparent cases look nice, but it seems that the makers forgot about (or didn't care about) electromagnetic shielding. At the least, these cases are unlikely to pass the FCC's "this device does not generate radiation, and is tolerant of received radiation". At the worst, the computer might act up if you put your cellphone/microwave too close to it.
I suspect that most slashdot readers are generally against censorship. However, informed arguments are much more effective than uninformed flamings.
If you care about censorship, go and read the thoughts of one organization whose job it is to implement censorship before posting all the "censorship sucks" replies.
(The full policy statement is linked to from the second page above, or you can jump
straight to the pdf file using this link.)
The FCC explains why they're in the business of censorship (ans: because there's a federal law that the FCC is not in control of, and Congress instructs FCC to enforce this law), gives examples of the court cases involving the FCC's censorship, and summarizes how the FCC decides if broadcast material violates the federal law.
In a bonus section at the end, two FCC commissioners explain why they support issuing this new policy statement, and a third commissioner explains why she thinks the statement should not be issued.
It's definitely worth reading, if you care about censorship.
(As an example of what's in the document; do you know exactly what the definition of "obscene" is? The definition used by the FCC is that material must satisfy all three of the following:
an average person, applying contemporary community standards, must find that the material, as a whole, appeals
to the prurient interest;
the material must depict or describe, in a patently offensive way, sexual conduct
specifically defined by applicable law; and
the material, taken as a whole, must lack serious literary, artistic,
political, or scientific value.
Keep a few things in mind when reading the mercurycenter article, and note some things that you may not have known when you read the leader above.
(1) Percentage-wise, the Philippines are heavily Catholic.
(2) People in the Philippines have a choice of ISPs. One ISP (initiated by the Catholic Bishops' Conference) is attempting to cater to what it thinks Catholics want. Are you angry that they are successful?
(3) If you don't want CBCPNet to filter your internet connections, all you have to do is fill out a request asking them not to.
(4) CBCPNet tells you how to report sites that you think were incorrectly filtered (either blocked when they shouldn't have been, or not blocked when they should have been.)
I know that a lot of people go berzerk when they hear the words "internet filtering" or "censorship", but it doesn't seem like this is worth getting worked up about. The gist of the article is that if you live in the Philippines, you have the option of using an ISP whose default configuration blocks access to pornographic sites. The popularity of this option surprised Mercury News, so they wrote an article about it.
I encourage you to read the CBCPNet faq (http://www.cbcpnet.com/faq/index.htm) or "About Us" page (http://www.cbcpnet.com/aboutus/index.htm), but I'll quote three questions here for ease of reference:
What if I find an objectionable site that gets through the filter?
Simply notify us and we will evaluate the site for addition to our blocked list.
What if I find a site that is unnecessarily blocked?
Simply notify us and we will evaluate the site to allow access.
Can I request RCNet to turn off filtering for me?
Yes, either when you sign up for service or anytime afterward. We can turn it back on for you anytime you request.
TeX, sendmail, emacs, and Perl are all projects which were created for their own merits; they did not merely mimic existing commercial software.
The world has changed, though. Nowadays the software projects that attract the most attention are "office productivity suites" and "desktop environments". A major part of such a project is its GUI, and the problem with GUIs is that they are *HARD*.
So, your comment about past OSS projects being "reactions to existing commercial software" is inaccurate. I would agree, though, that the majority of present projects fall in that category.
Be aware that ORBS doesn't block the *incoming* MX servers. It blocks the servers which deliver *outgoing* mail, which are often different machines. (MIT, for example, has continual problems with ORBS blacklisting our outgoing mail servers. They are not the same as our incoming mail servers.)
Actually, you can tell from the suerscript-one's that Jon doesn't use a Unix box either. He in fact typed the text on a Mac.
The oldest Mac-charset to ISO-charset converters will turn Macintosh curly-quotes into ISO-8859-1 superscript-one characters, because the ISO encoding doesn't contain curly-quote entities. (For more information, read these Guidelines to use 8-bit character codes.)
As for speculation about which product might be doint this to his writing: I have Microsoft Office 98 for Macintosh, and Word does not do this when I save curly-quotes either as text or as html. This is a guess, but a more likely culprit is the Fetch FTP application, which has a setting that controls whether Fetch does ISO-charset to Macintosh-charset conversion of data in text file transfers. The default setting of this option is "on", which would lead to the corruption in Jon's posted answers.
The usual gauge of whether someone is culpable for an act is to consider whether he committed it with full knowledge of what he was doing, and if he consented to doing it.
If a tool-maker did not know that her tool could be used for bad ends, she is less blamable if it is used in that way. (I don't think it arises very often is software development, but if she were somehow forced to build it against her will, she is similarly less blamable.) Same argument for if a user does not know that a tool will have bad consequences, or if the user is forced to use it.
But if a user knows that use of a tool is wrong and deliberately uses it anyway, he has responsibility for wrongdoing. If a developer knows that the net effect of a tool will be wrong, and creates it anyway, she has responsibility for the wrong done because of it.
(The really hairy question is to ask how the developer judges if the "net effect" of a tool will be bad. I leave this as your homework exercise.)
Slashdot Mirror
For pete's sake, timothy, it's "Rio Rancho", not "Rio Ranch". The submitter spelled it correctly twice, and you didn't double-check before "correcting" it for the title?
Ah, found the link I was looking for.
This BBC article is from a few weeks ago, and describes the negotiations before the issue was settled.
If you've been following this story, you see that the musicians aren't being replaced merely for the sake of autmation. The issue is that the particular theater is tiny, and the musician's pit can hold only about a dozen musicians.
The producer's viewpoint is that people who go to see Les Mis want to hear the full Les Mis sound, so he's using recorded music to fill in the for the people that the pit doesn't hold.
it's 400 degrees F (~750 celsius)
I think you converted in the wrong direction: 400 degrees F is only about 200 degrees C.
Funny is good, but it doesn't always age well. Let me name an author who probably won't be read 50 years from now.
As I'm writing this, there are about 600 comments in the story, and no one has yet mentioned P.G. Wodehouse. Wodehouse is most famous for his "Wooster and Jeeves" stories, which poked fun at the low end of upper-class life. They're truly rolling-on-the-floor hilarious, and were widely read enough that the name Jeeves has become assiciated with the "perfect butler".
Wodehouse wrote in the mid-30's. He's not really read anymore. (Did you know who the "Jeeves" of askjeeves.com referred to?) He's still funny, but his humor value is fading because it's dated. Horse races, boarding schools, terrifying aunts, and meetings of the Young Communists club require the reader to laugh about situations which are becoming more and more unfamiliar.
I'm not disputing that Pratchett is funny, just pointing out that the things people laugh at change. Everybody seems to want to find something new to laugh about, and this usually shifts their judgment so that the old humor seems much thinner.
Bleagh. timothy has silently edited/corrected both the story title and masem's submitted text, without even providing a sentence notifying readers that he's done so?
Welcome to the ephemeral web, I guess. I wish the editor would at least *tell* us that he is changing history, otherwise taniwha's post makes little sense.
It's a map of light sources, and shows some really interesting structures. The Nile is much brighter than the rest of Egypt, the central U.S. is a grid of cities, and there's a railroad stretching across Russia to the Pacific Ocean.
A small version of the image was an astronomy picture of the day last November (http://antwrp.gsfc.nasa.gov/apod/ap001127.html), and a larger version of the image is also available (http://antwrp.gsfc.nasa.gov/apod/image/0011/earth lights_dmsp_big.jpg). There's a short writeup at http://earthobservatory.nasa.gov/Study/Lights/.
Your memory is telling you incorrect things. Sircam DOES send documents. In fact, this helps lure the user into a sense of complacency. Double click on the "GeForce2.doc.pif" file (whose .pif extension is never visible in Window's file browser), and MSWord opens up the GeForce2.doc file that SirCam mailed from the infected computer. The user thinks "odd, why was I mailed this document?", and might not worry about it being a virus.
Of course experimental reproducibility is important, but don't knock peer review.
How is a journal editor supposed to tell if an experiment is reproducible just by reading the submitted article? They ask a third party, "does this paper look reasonable?". That is peer review.
Some papers are theoretical papers. Theory is right so long as the equations are right, although "right" is not the same as "useful". How do the editors know which theories to publish in the front of the journal as the significant ones and which ones to dump in the back? Ask a third party "what do you think of this?"
Peer review weeds out crap. It's a lot like slashdot's moderation of comments, except that peer review happens before the article is published rather than while it is published. Asking for more emphasis on good journal articles and less emphasis on review is about as useful as asking slashdot for more good comments and less moderation of comments.
(Yes, I'm a scientist. Don't get me started about academic karma whores. They exist.)
I would trust the original poster to know their own needs. Some of us are old enough to remember working with b/w displays and remember what they're good for. The story submitter described uses that 1-bit displays are perfectly suited for.
I'm a little concerned about whether OS's and applications are still designed to work with 1-bit displays, though. I haven't seen one in use for the past four years or so, which suggests that application developers might have stopped checking to make sure that their programs work well in b/w mode. (As an example, you wouldn't be able to distinguish between the red underlines vs green underlines that MSWord uses to mark words with bad spelling vs words with bad grammar.)
Argh, slashdot eats angle brackets in subjects. The subject should have read "WinNT needs >128M ram"
I would have said "it is interesting that Windows NT cannot run a WU at full speed with less than 128M of RAM. Other operating systems make effective use of 128M of memory, but NT needs 256M."
I'd disagree with your conclusion. The most effective TV commercials might be entertaining ones, but remember that most people's goal when watching television is to be entertained. Web sites vary, but most of the ones I see emphasize information more than they emphasize entertainment. If I'm reading the web looking for stuff to read, even if it's fun reading material, I'm more likely to click through ads that seem to match my current goal than I am to click on ads that are funny.
The best advertisements are the ones that make the viewer think "look at that! yes, this is what I want". Exactly what will make a viewer think this depends on how well you match your ad to the viewers frame of mind.
I first ordered from amazon.com in 1997, and I cannot recall ever getting spam from Amazon. The only mail I've received from them are order confirmations, and announcements that I subscribed to (in my case, announcements that some new book matching my customized search terms is available).
This is in fact my reason for liking Amazon; I know that other people have lower prices, but Amazon has respected my preference not to be bothered with email.
(They're not completly perfect: when I visited family last Christmas I had an order shipped to this new address. While I was there a credit card company called and asked to speak to me. There's only one way the company could have known thought that I'd be there, and that's if Amazon told them. Sigh. But as far as email goes, I haven't been bothered by Amazon.)
The transparent cases look nice, but it seems that the makers forgot about (or didn't care about) electromagnetic shielding. At the least, these cases are unlikely to pass the FCC's "this device does not generate radiation, and is tolerant of received radiation". At the worst, the computer might act up if you put your cellphone/microwave too close to it.
I suspect that most slashdot readers are generally against censorship. However, informed arguments are much more effective than uninformed flamings. If you care about censorship, go and read the thoughts of one organization whose job it is to implement censorship before posting all the "censorship sucks" replies. (The full policy statement is linked to from the second page above, or you can jump straight to the pdf file using this link.)
The FCC explains why they're in the business of censorship (ans: because there's a federal law that the FCC is not in control of, and Congress instructs FCC to enforce this law), gives examples of the court cases involving the FCC's censorship, and summarizes how the FCC decides if broadcast material violates the federal law.
In a bonus section at the end, two FCC commissioners explain why they support issuing this new policy statement, and a third commissioner explains why she thinks the statement should not be issued.
It's definitely worth reading, if you care about censorship.
(As an example of what's in the document; do you know exactly what the definition of "obscene" is? The definition used by the FCC is that material must satisfy all three of the following:
- an average person, applying contemporary community standards, must find that the material, as a whole, appeals
to the prurient interest;
- the material must depict or describe, in a patently offensive way, sexual conduct
specifically defined by applicable law; and
- the material, taken as a whole, must lack serious literary, artistic,
political, or scientific value.
)For those readers without much database experience, Philip Greenspun has written a readable introduction to databases and RDBMSes.
Keep a few things in mind when reading the mercurycenter article, and note some things that you may not have known when you read the leader above.
(1) Percentage-wise, the Philippines are heavily Catholic.
(2) People in the Philippines have a choice of ISPs. One ISP (initiated by the Catholic Bishops' Conference) is attempting to cater to what it thinks Catholics want. Are you angry that they are successful?
(3) If you don't want CBCPNet to filter your internet connections, all you have to do is fill out a request asking them not to.
(4) CBCPNet tells you how to report sites that you think were incorrectly filtered (either blocked when they shouldn't have been, or not blocked when they should have been.)
I know that a lot of people go berzerk when they hear the words "internet filtering" or "censorship", but it doesn't seem like this is worth getting worked up about. The gist of the article is that if you live in the Philippines, you have the option of using an ISP whose default configuration blocks access to pornographic sites. The popularity of this option surprised Mercury News, so they wrote an article about it.
I encourage you to read the CBCPNet faq (http://www.cbcpnet.com/faq/index.htm) or "About Us" page (http://www.cbcpnet.com/aboutus/index.htm), but I'll quote three questions here for ease of reference:
What if I find an objectionable site that gets through the filter?
Simply notify us and we will evaluate the site for addition to our blocked list.
What if I find a site that is unnecessarily blocked?
Simply notify us and we will evaluate the site to allow access.
Can I request RCNet to turn off filtering for me?
Yes, either when you sign up for service or anytime afterward. We can turn it back on for you anytime you request.
TeX, sendmail, emacs, and Perl are all projects which were created for their own merits; they did not merely mimic existing commercial software.
The world has changed, though. Nowadays the software projects that attract the most attention are "office productivity suites" and "desktop environments". A major part of such a project is its GUI, and the problem with GUIs is that they are *HARD*.
So, your comment about past OSS projects being "reactions to existing commercial software" is inaccurate. I would agree, though, that the majority of present projects fall in that category.
Be aware that ORBS doesn't block the *incoming* MX servers. It blocks the servers which deliver *outgoing* mail, which are often different machines. (MIT, for example, has continual problems with ORBS blacklisting our outgoing mail servers. They are not the same as our incoming mail servers.)
Actually, you can tell from the suerscript-one's that Jon doesn't use a Unix box either. He in fact typed the text on a Mac.
The oldest Mac-charset to ISO-charset converters will turn Macintosh curly-quotes into ISO-8859-1 superscript-one characters, because the ISO encoding doesn't contain curly-quote entities. (For more information, read these Guidelines to use 8-bit character codes.)
As for speculation about which product might be doint this to his writing: I have Microsoft Office 98 for Macintosh, and Word does not do this when I save curly-quotes either as text or as html. This is a guess, but a more likely culprit is the Fetch FTP application, which has a setting that controls whether Fetch does ISO-charset to Macintosh-charset conversion of data in text file transfers. The default setting of this option is "on", which would lead to the corruption in Jon's posted answers.
For more reading, see
The usual gauge of whether someone is culpable for an act is to
consider whether he committed it with full knowledge of what
he was doing, and if he consented to doing it.
If a tool-maker did not know that her tool could be used for bad
ends, she is less blamable if it is used in that way. (I don't
think it arises very often is software development, but if she
were somehow forced to build it against her will, she is
similarly less blamable.) Same argument for if a user does not
know that a tool will have bad consequences, or if the user is
forced to use it.
But if a user knows that use of a tool is wrong and deliberately
uses it anyway, he has responsibility for wrongdoing. If a developer
knows that the net effect of a tool will be wrong, and creates it
anyway, she has responsibility for the wrong done because of it.
(The really hairy question is to ask how the developer judges if
the "net effect" of a tool will be bad. I leave this as your
homework exercise.)