maybe this will be one push that open source developers need to finally produce a system that Joe
Average would be willing/able to use.
(First, remember developers are not here to make Linux or *BSD easier for Joe Average to use; we're here to scratch our own itches. It just so happens that while scratching those itches, we come up with stuff that Joe Average can use.)
And this brings us to Ogg Vorbis! It's here today. Plugins are available for Winamp and Sonique, on Windows. On Linux, I use freeamp to play.ogg files. I don't rip my CDs to MP3 any more; I make oggs.
Ogg Vorbis, although it comes from the Gnu camp, is not under GPL; it's more like a BSD style license. (RMS even agreed with this decision!) Furthermore it's patent and royalty free. If Winamp wants to implement a super-high-performance encoder/decoder for Ogg, they don't have to pay any royalties to anyone.
any of you arrogant linux users out there who still feel the need to keep linux 'pure'...
And this is the attitude that raises the hackles of the free software developers! (Not mine, of course, I'm gracious and caring and I welcome all criticism!)
When you say a
system that Joe Average would be willing/able to use, do you mean the whole O/S+software bundle? Ordinary users should not have to deal with installing operating systems. Joe Average should be able to buy a computer with everything already installed. And today we have a system that Joe Average can use (if not install). For example, Mandrake 7.2 with KDE2 is such a system.
The problem is not ease of use (or installation) any more; it's advertising and marketing. Joe Average needs to be told during the Super Bowl and Friends and Survivor and... that Mandrake/KDE2 or whatever is a viable alternative for him. Slowly the word will percolate to vendors like Gateway2K or whoever Joe A. buys machines from. Vendors like Quicken will naturally release all their products for Linux also. It will be just another aspect of the whole computer thing: which kind of system do you run, Linux or Windows or Mac or... (And that's the day that monkeys will fly out of my butt, I guess.)
... with this economy all the leverage is on the
employer's side.
Only if you're an HTML "programmer". For anyone with solid technical skills - design/development, testing, sysadmin, network people - it's still very much an employee's market. Sure, you won't have the outrages perks that used to be common a year ago, or silly "team-building" jaunts to Disneyworld or whatever, but if you don't have very specific requirements (e.g. geographical) it's no problem.
At least here in California.
The only real way for everyone to win is to remove these insane laws that give intellectual monopolies
in the first place.
Just abolish the whole idea of "intellectual property". Copyrights may be ok, but patents (software as well as business practice) must go.
There are lots of voice over packet office phone systems out there. For example, Selsius (acquired by Cisco) has a Voice Over IP (H.323) system that may match your needs...
http://www.selsius.com/warp/public/cc/pd/tlhw/. Of course it's not going to be cheap, but they do work - used them at a previous job.
The advantage of IP phones in an office intercom scenario is: cabling cost - all Cat5, no separate "key system" or phone wiring; all ethernet instead of separate punch-down blocks and junctions.
So you got that right; the speed of
sound is proportional to the density of the medium.
The speed of sound is independent of density, it depends only on the temperature. It is proportional to the square of the temperature. So yes, the speed of sound decreases with increasing altitude - but only till you get to the top of the troposphere, the tropopause (at about 36,000' or 12,000m). In the stratosphere, the temperature stays constant with altitude although density keeps decreasing; the speed of sound stays constant in the stratosphere.
NASA has made two movies of the X-34A (Hyper-X) - one of the separation from the B-52 carrier ship, and another of the flight itself. (MPEG-2 is available, use xine to view on Linux.)
The speed of sound depends on temperature (and hence altitude). Even at sea level, sound travels at around 760mph. At altitudes that jets like (approx. 36,000') the air temperature is -70F and the speed of sound is 295 m/s or about 660mph.
Therefore Mach 5 == 3300 mph.
At sea level, v = 340 m/s so Mach 5 is 3800mph. The exact relationship is that v = sqrt(\gamma R T) where R is the gas constant, T is the absolute temperature in Kelvin, and \gamma is the specific heat ratio, which is about 1.4 for air.
Why not just forget doing all this and give the TV/Radio bands up for wireless internet?
Bandwidth. TV/Radio is broadcast, so about 100kHz of spectrum will serve up FM stereo music to everyone who wants to listen; "Internet" is point to point so each listener needs about 30kbps additional bandwidth. IP Multicast will help if it actually can get widely deployed.
The VHF spectrum just doesn't have a lot of bandwidth. If we throw all users off VHF, there's probably a few hundreds of Mbps of data bandwidth. (As a very coarse zeroth-order approximation, max. data-rate is roughly equal to the frequency of the carrier. VHF is 30MHz to 300MHz.)
And carrying TV will require around 1-4 Mbps of bandwidth (depending on the codec) for each video stream. If all the people currently watching broadcast TV switch to watching IP streams... well, let's just say that we won't have that sort of bandwidth for a few years.
Sure there's a lot of tech dreaming and hand-waving about spread-spectrum and all that. Just remember: TANSTAAFL. If you have a certain amount of spectrum available and a certain level of background noise, there is an absolute limit on how many bits you can cram through. Read Shannon's work. (That man was a genius.)
Another benifit of this would be that it would allow anyone
to start thier own station with little more than a camera, computer and net access.
Let's say you settle for MPEG-1 (quarter screen TV). You want to pay for 1 Mbps of upstream bandwidth for each viewer of your TV station? (Widespread multicast is a long way off.)
I used to get my DSL via PacBell but I finally gave up - not only did the service go down, but the worst was the tech support. I have never dealt with such clueless idiots. I was trying to tell them that the DSL modem didn't sync and they kept telling me to reboot the computer or to reset the password on my ISP's shell account. Madre de dios!
Now I'm with speakeasy - service has been fine, they know *BSD and encourage free software, they gave me a static IP and no restrictions on running servers. And when there's a line problem they seem to know who to talk to inside PacBell to get things up again.
If you want to send pure LaTeX, which HEAVILY depends on the local installation
of the files, then have you seen how slow the latex command is (along with the font creation, etc...)?
First: I'm not necessarily saying that LaTeX for the web is a good or bad idea.
If LaTeX were to be used on the web, it would be a simple matter to only allow a well-defined set of.sty files - call those the "LaTeX on the Web" environment.
In this "LaTeX on the Web" environment, only some well-defined fonts would be available - perhaps the original "LaserWriter 13", or (preferably) set in the preferences of the browser that's doing the rendering. These fonts could be rasterised at the screen resolution in the common sizes ahead of time, so display of the DVI would be fast. A document wouldn't be able to use arbitrary fonts; you could only say things like \bfseries [which means use bold and bold-italic] instead of specifying fonts by name. You'd stick to \emph for italic and \begin{verbatim}...\end{verbatim} for monospaced/typewriter for the most part.
Of course all this will never happen, because then web sites would actually have to be about content.
If your latex file contains a few graphics and several pages it can take absolutely ages to generate a.ps file from it.
If you wanted to display a LaTeX file on the screen, why would you need to generate a PostScript file? You'd just have to run another expensive program to render the PostScript to the screen.
The translator tex reads TeX/LaTeX files and generates a DVI file, which is a device (and resolution) independent description of the page. Rendering DVI to the screen is not too expensive.
If your document has any graphics files in it, those are represented as links (called \special) in the DVI file - i.e. no additional overhead in the process. It's when you're generating PostScript that embedded graphics files are a pain in the ass, because then you have to read the graphics file, convert it all to an ASCII hex format that a PostScript command like colorimage can use and then write out that (possibly huge) file.
Latex does has the content and the presentation intertwined.
Spoken like an idiot without a clue.
LaTeX discourages layout commands. If you have specific layout needs, you write a style file that describes it; your document should only have semantic commands like \chapter and \emph.
An example: graduate schools have very rigid requirements on how PhD dissertations are typeset. Usually these requirements are really stupid and were designed for a world where everyone used typewriters. So when I was writing my PhD dissertation I wrote a style file that described the stupid requirements; then my actual dissertation started with:
\documentclass{az-dissertation}
That version was for the bureaucracy only. For the "normal people's version" i.e. for researchers and students who wanted to read the dissertation, I just replaced that first line with
\documentclass[11pt]{book}
Voila! A well-typeset (i.e. readable) dissertation.
...but isn't LaTeX designed for print? Fixed page size, for visual reading only.
Yes, it comes from a typesetting tradition so you could say it's designed for "print". But there's nothing about fixed page sizes in LaTeX. (If anyone out there is using sizing, layout or positioning commands in a LaTeX document they're either real experts or complete idiots who have missed the point. The latter is much more likely.)
Does it address scalability for different display sizes
A LaTeX document doesn't say anything about display sizes, page sizes, font sizes or any of that ugly shit. LaTeX is a tool for writers, not typesetters. It makes you think about your content instead of futzing around with stupid colour and font tricks. (Of course in the so-called "real world" content has no value, it's all glitz and flash.) So yes, LaTeX is ideally suited to everything from paper to 26" monitors to PDAs. TeX is not a rendering engine, it is a layout engine.
Does it support semantic tagging for accessibility support?
I'm not yet fully buzzword-compliant so I don't know what this "semantic tagging" is. However, if it means what I think it means: LaTeX documents have things like \chapter{The Name of the Chapter} and
\begin{quotation}This is some quoted text.\end{quotation}. LaTeX is closer in spirit to SGML than anything.
With latex, you are still worried about laying out your document, I was under
the impression that the next big thing was to worry about describing your document, and using a translator (ala xslt...)
of course, I could be wrong...
You're wrong.
LaTeX is all about describing the semantic units of the document. You say things like \chapter{The Name of the Chapter} and \begin{quotation}This is some quoted text.\end{quotation}.
Plain TeX documents often have a lot of positioning commands (although you don't need to, and stylistically they shouldn't appear anywhere but in the "setup" part at the top so it's maintainable). In LaTeX, however, you are discouraged from using any positioning and layout commands.
The translator takes your LaTeX source and produces a DVI file that is a device independent description of all the pages. TeX/LaTeX predate HTML, and DVI predates PostScript.
TeX still has the best automatic layout engine available anywhere for any price. Only a good (human) professional typesetter can do better.
Define "culture." Jazz music? Painting? Opera? These things are just the pretentious tools of a quaint and nostalgic 19th and mid-20th
century bourgeois class.
Surely a troll, eh?
That said, there's plenty of culture in the USA. Sure, you might not find a lot of it in Rexburg, Idaho; but if culture is important to you, you won't live there. New York, San Francisco etc. have a vibrant and active art and cultural scene. That's why I live in San Francisco.
Why is testing and debugging not considered "work".
Exactly!
Testing and debugging are just as much "software development" as writing code. Just like design is an essential part of development.
Unfortunately certain large companies with headquarters in the Evergreen State don't seem to believe that design, testing or debugging is part of developing a product....
(The real question is: what percentage of a programmer's time is spent surfing the web, downloading MP3's, playing games,...) (Not that those are bad things - if we couldn't do those things at work I think programmer productivity would plummet.)
Just think how handy it would be to have a tail, when you're trying to solder something. One hand for soldering
iron, one hand for solder, one tail to hold it all steady. Youch! But not likely a reproductive advantage. Just because it's handy
doesn't make it necessarily a reproductive advantage.
Remember, natural selection is not the only shaping force! The other big one is sexual selection. If the opposite sex find prehensile tails more desirable, this trait will spread in the population. Just like peacocks' tails.
daughter has a
50/50 chance of being a pentachromat.... daughters would be pentachromatic. Now, if we can mutate one blue cone, we
can go for hexachromatic kids.
Before people get too carried away.... it's not just enough to alter those genes; the new genes should produce a photo-sensitive pigment that has the spectral response you're looking for. So if the blue-sensitive pigment has a peak sensitivity at 6000nm [just a guess, I don't really know the response of the B pigment] then we need to design a pigment with a peak at 6800nm and then mutate the B pigment gene to make that pigment; and also make sure that the neurological system - the optic nerves and the visual cortex - actually receives that information and can act on it.
'Important' is a subjective term, you see, and the only people we know of capable of applying it as an idea is Homo Sapiens
Sapiens.
Personally, I think what makes us really cool and significant is the fact that we want to learn more about everything, even if everything we learn reminds us how insignificant we are.
Hold out both your arms as wide as you can. If your arm span represents the life of the earth, with the beginning at your left hand: multi-cellular life arose at your right wrist; dinosaurs appeared at the base of your fingers; and Homo sapiens - well, one flick with a nail file will remove the total time we've been around. But so what? Why should that affect how we feel about ourselves?
Lover, Poet, Artiste, Aesthete, Programmer.
You need to work on your sense of aesthetics. I see art and poetry in everything that we learn about our universe.
Einsteins Relativity theory and
the uncertainties of Quantum Mechanics have filtered down into the Moral Relativism and uncertainty we see around us today,
via the medium of failed religion and collapsed world views.
Perhaps the most ridiculous and pethetic thing I've seen on slashdot in a along time!
What "moral relativism"? And "failed religion"? The sooner these damn cults and superstitions die, the better off we will all be.
I only ask that scientists be careful and responsible,...
Scientists are careful and responsible when they talk about the truth and do everything they can to debunk superstition and irrational power-hungry cults. Yes, in the universe humans are insignificant. So? In our world, we are not; we have a responsibililty to humanity, to each other, to our ethics.
2): This misalignment, wouldnt it appear even if the pyramids were built at some other date, as long as their relative ages
remained the same?
No; the misalignment corresponds to the two particular stars used. If they'd used other stars' simultaneous transits, the relative errors would have been different.
3): Since this alignment only occurred in a very limited time period, isnt it odd that the pyramids were built just around that time
then? What are the chances of that?
If they'd been building the pyramids some other time, they'd have found two other stars that were across the celestial pole from each other, or were on the same meridian (or whatever circles of equal RA are called - RA as in right ascension, not the sun god!). With a couple of thousand rather bright stars available, this wouldn't have been a huge problem.
the momentum generated from the Big Bang,... all trajectories of all particals were away from point zero,...
There is nopoint zero. Space itself is expanding. There is no momentum in the conventional sense here.
It's not like an explosion; in an explosion you can identify the point at the center that everything started at. There is no `central point' in the universe that identifies a `location' for the initial singularity (the Big Bang).
How does this phenomenon fit into the expanding universe model? Perhaps my understanding of the model is too simplistic or
flawed, but I would have thought that in general the galaxies would all be flying apart from eachother at some relatively high
speed - making this apparent head on colosion a bit improbable.
Well, for one thing, it's space itself that is expanding. Things aren't flying away from each other in the same way that a billiard ball flies away from the tip of the cue.
Now, in this expanding space, it is certainly possible for objects - whether they be galaxies or billiard balls - to collide with each other. It's just that galaxies are a little further apart than billiard balls.
Spoken like an Anonymous Coward! (Why did this get moderated +1???)
Why is it rubbish? Why should it have been overhauled or rewritten from scratch years ago?
You've obviously never used X11 to any real extent. Or write any code using Xlib or Xt but are just trolling. Only someone who has written Xlib or Xt code really knows about X11's ugliness, and people like that wouldn't post a one-line gratuitous dig anonymously on slashdot.
From an end-user's standpoint, X11 is simply marvellous. The network transparency alone is worth more than any crap coming out of Redmond. And it's free!
Slashdot Mirror
And this brings us to Ogg Vorbis ! It's here today. Plugins are available for Winamp and Sonique, on Windows. On Linux, I use freeamp to play .ogg files. I don't rip my CDs to MP3 any more; I make oggs.
Ogg Vorbis, although it comes from the Gnu camp, is not under GPL; it's more like a BSD style license. (RMS even agreed with this decision!) Furthermore it's patent and royalty free. If Winamp wants to implement a super-high-performance encoder/decoder for Ogg, they don't have to pay any royalties to anyone.
And this is the attitude that raises the hackles of the free software developers! (Not mine, of course, I'm gracious and caring and I welcome all criticism!)When you say a system that Joe Average would be willing/able to use, do you mean the whole O/S+software bundle? Ordinary users should not have to deal with installing operating systems. Joe Average should be able to buy a computer with everything already installed. And today we have a system that Joe Average can use (if not install). For example, Mandrake 7.2 with KDE2 is such a system.
The problem is not ease of use (or installation) any more; it's advertising and marketing. Joe Average needs to be told during the Super Bowl and Friends and Survivor and ... that Mandrake/KDE2 or whatever is a viable alternative for him. Slowly the word will percolate to vendors like Gateway2K or whoever Joe A. buys machines from. Vendors like Quicken will naturally release all their products for Linux also. It will be just another aspect of the whole computer thing: which kind of system do you run, Linux or Windows or Mac or... (And that's the day that monkeys will fly out of my butt, I guess.)
But who will pay for the ad/marketing campaigns?
At least here in California.
Just abolish the whole idea of "intellectual property". Copyrights may be ok, but patents (software as well as business practice) must go.The advantage of IP phones in an office intercom scenario is: cabling cost - all Cat5, no separate "key system" or phone wiring; all ethernet instead of separate punch-down blocks and junctions.
Drop from the B-52
Booster rocket drop and free flight
Therefore Mach 5 == 3300 mph.
At sea level, v = 340 m/s so Mach 5 is 3800mph. The exact relationship is that v = sqrt(\gamma R T) where R is the gas constant, T is the absolute temperature in Kelvin, and \gamma is the specific heat ratio, which is about 1.4 for air.
The VHF spectrum just doesn't have a lot of bandwidth. If we throw all users off VHF, there's probably a few hundreds of Mbps of data bandwidth. (As a very coarse zeroth-order approximation, max. data-rate is roughly equal to the frequency of the carrier. VHF is 30MHz to 300MHz.)
And carrying TV will require around 1-4 Mbps of bandwidth (depending on the codec) for each video stream. If all the people currently watching broadcast TV switch to watching IP streams... well, let's just say that we won't have that sort of bandwidth for a few years.
Sure there's a lot of tech dreaming and hand-waving about spread-spectrum and all that. Just remember: TANSTAAFL. If you have a certain amount of spectrum available and a certain level of background noise, there is an absolute limit on how many bits you can cram through. Read Shannon's work. (That man was a genius.)
Let's say you settle for MPEG-1 (quarter screen TV). You want to pay for 1 Mbps of upstream bandwidth for each viewer of your TV station? (Widespread multicast is a long way off.)-s
Of course they use absolute sizes in <font> tags, so it's still unreadable on my display.
-s
Now I'm with speakeasy - service has been fine, they know *BSD and encourage free software, they gave me a static IP and no restrictions on running servers. And when there's a line problem they seem to know who to talk to inside PacBell to get things up again.
If LaTeX were to be used on the web, it would be a simple matter to only allow a well-defined set of .sty files - call those the "LaTeX on the Web" environment.
In this "LaTeX on the Web" environment, only some well-defined fonts would be available - perhaps the original "LaserWriter 13", or (preferably) set in the preferences of the browser that's doing the rendering. These fonts could be rasterised at the screen resolution in the common sizes ahead of time, so display of the DVI would be fast. A document wouldn't be able to use arbitrary fonts; you could only say things like \bfseries [which means use bold and bold-italic] instead of specifying fonts by name. You'd stick to \emph for italic and \begin{verbatim}...\end{verbatim} for monospaced/typewriter for the most part.
Of course all this will never happen, because then web sites would actually have to be about content.
The translator tex reads TeX/LaTeX files and generates a DVI file, which is a device (and resolution) independent description of the page. Rendering DVI to the screen is not too expensive.
If your document has any graphics files in it, those are represented as links (called \special) in the DVI file - i.e. no additional overhead in the process. It's when you're generating PostScript that embedded graphics files are a pain in the ass, because then you have to read the graphics file, convert it all to an ASCII hex format that a PostScript command like colorimage can use and then write out that (possibly huge) file.
LaTeX discourages layout commands. If you have specific layout needs, you write a style file that describes it; your document should only have semantic commands like \chapter and \emph.
An example: graduate schools have very rigid requirements on how PhD dissertations are typeset. Usually these requirements are really stupid and were designed for a world where everyone used typewriters. So when I was writing my PhD dissertation I wrote a style file that described the stupid requirements; then my actual dissertation started with:
\documentclass{az-dissertation}
That version was for the bureaucracy only. For the "normal people's version" i.e. for researchers and students who wanted to read the dissertation, I just replaced that first line with
\documentclass[11pt]{book}
Voila! A well-typeset (i.e. readable) dissertation.
LaTeX is all about describing the semantic units of the document. You say things like \chapter{The Name of the Chapter} and \begin{quotation}This is some quoted text.\end{quotation}.
Plain TeX documents often have a lot of positioning commands (although you don't need to, and stylistically they shouldn't appear anywhere but in the "setup" part at the top so it's maintainable). In LaTeX, however, you are discouraged from using any positioning and layout commands.
The translator takes your LaTeX source and produces a DVI file that is a device independent description of all the pages. TeX/LaTeX predate HTML, and DVI predates PostScript.
TeX still has the best automatic layout engine available anywhere for any price. Only a good (human) professional typesetter can do better.
That said, there's plenty of culture in the USA. Sure, you might not find a lot of it in Rexburg, Idaho; but if culture is important to you, you won't live there. New York, San Francisco etc. have a vibrant and active art and cultural scene. That's why I live in San Francisco.
Testing and debugging are just as much "software development" as writing code. Just like design is an essential part of development.
Unfortunately certain large companies with headquarters in the Evergreen State don't seem to believe that design, testing or debugging is part of developing a product....
(The real question is: what percentage of a programmer's time is spent surfing the web, downloading MP3's, playing games, ...) (Not that those are bad things - if we couldn't do those things at work I think programmer productivity would plummet.)
Unfortunately I don't think it's going to happen.
Any genetic designers here?
Hold out both your arms as wide as you can. If your arm span represents the life of the earth, with the beginning at your left hand: multi-cellular life arose at your right wrist; dinosaurs appeared at the base of your fingers; and Homo sapiens - well, one flick with a nail file will remove the total time we've been around. But so what? Why should that affect how we feel about ourselves?
You need to work on your sense of aesthetics. I see art and poetry in everything that we learn about our universe.What "moral relativism"? And "failed religion"? The sooner these damn cults and superstitions die, the better off we will all be.
Scientists are careful and responsible when they talk about the truth and do everything they can to debunk superstition and irrational power-hungry cults. Yes, in the universe humans are insignificant. So? In our world, we are not; we have a responsibililty to humanity, to each other, to our ethics.I've always thought that the name of the angel Moroni was missing a trailing 'c'.
There is no point zero. Space itself is expanding. There is no momentum in the conventional sense here.
It's not like an explosion; in an explosion you can identify the point at the center that everything started at. There is no `central point' in the universe that identifies a `location' for the initial singularity (the Big Bang).
Well, for one thing, it's space itself that is expanding. Things aren't flying away from each other in the same way that a billiard ball flies away from the tip of the cue.
Now, in this expanding space, it is certainly possible for objects - whether they be galaxies or billiard balls - to collide with each other. It's just that galaxies are a little further apart than billiard balls.
Why is it rubbish? Why should it have been overhauled or rewritten from scratch years ago?
You've obviously never used X11 to any real extent. Or write any code using Xlib or Xt but are just trolling. Only someone who has written Xlib or Xt code really knows about X11's ugliness, and people like that wouldn't post a one-line gratuitous dig anonymously on slashdot.
From an end-user's standpoint, X11 is simply marvellous. The network transparency alone is worth more than any crap coming out of Redmond. And it's free!