Re fractal compression, people have been hyping it up for years but as far as I know it never really delivered. I'm dubious about any claims to some mysterious program which compresses anything amazingly well without strong evidence.
A program called Real Fractals has been in use by people who make very large blowups of images for years. It's pretty much standard practice to conver to Real Fractals before making a very big enlargement (like more than a few feet on a side).
I tried to use this and couldn't find a version that didn't leave my router pretty goofed up. I finally went back to the last public Swansea release.
When I checked last there wasn't any indication of the stability of any given release. It looked like it had practically no effective management whatsoever.
eh, I don't really care. Besides, I'm in the country, you'd have to come into my driveway to hit my WAP. It's in the basement intentionally so I can get it from inside the house, but it gets rapidly attenuated when outside.
I used to work for a company (now out of business) that built some of the first touch-tone-directed ordering systems. One of them was a system that Michigan liquor retailers used to reorder stock from the Liquor Control Commission (the state regulating body).
We had listen-only handsets we could plug into the modular sockets on the front of any of a row of several dozen cards and listen to calls in progress. We did this while debugging systems in the field so we could see if the system was working, what sort of problems people were having, etc.
I've seldom heard the equal of the language used by old liquor store owners who are trying to order a hundred various bottles of liquor by typing touch-tones into a fully-automated system that wasn't cooperating with them. I'm surprised the phone didn't melt.
I dunno. At my house, I haven't changed my SSID, don't see the point since it's the only WAP for half a mile at least, but I've got all the encryption turned on, a good password, MAC filtering with only one wireless card allowed, AND you have to go through an authenticated proxy (the address of which is not advertised in any way) to get out on ports 80 or 443.
The one that I refer to is that Belkin thought that it was a "good idea" to hijack every 1000th (or something) web page request and redirect users to a Belkin page that tried to sell them stuff.
It's bad enough if a company makes buggy products. It's another thing completely if they build a product that intentionally works in a manner different than advertised in order to line their pockets. It's not much different than unkillable porn popup storms, in principle.
That's all very well. However, does anyone remember why we don't like Belkin? The fiasco with their redirecting routers a year or so ago? I swore them off back then. It's hard not to buy Belkin though, they have some great rebate deals, but I've stuck to it so far.
The current BigDrive standard is 48 bits. That's 144 petabytes. I think we're good for a while now.
I'm glad they stopped screwing around just doubling (or even quadrupling, or whatever) the standard. As long as you're having to redo a standard, might as well get all the pain over with at once.
Sure, it's not actually legal, but a lot of people are posting messages that they are burning CDs.
At our house we only use iTunes to manage MP3s ripped from our CDs to put on the iPod so it's not an issue for us, but I didn't think there was a reason to actually burn to CD anymore.
Kudos to that guy. I also used to be one of the officers in a small business. We (the officers) took pay cuts before any employees when business dropped down. Eventually I left the company because it didn't need 3 partners drawing officer's salary, and they could do better without me.
I don't condone what they did, but there's no loyalty on EITHER side. Sure they write you a check, but most employers won't think twice about firing you if it suits their financial interest. If you're not getting loyalty, you tend not to give it back. I admire loyalty, but there are situations where it's not warranted. Most corporations have chosen not to give or reward loyalty, so they get back in turn.
Right, and that happens when they feel that science is disproving their faith, which I believe comes from people believing that their favorite religious text was dictated verbatim by God. If they instead realize that the text is at best an interpretation into the culture of the time it was written, and live by the ideas behind the text instead of the words (which in the case of the Bible are 2nd+ generation translations of texts written hundreds of years after the events) they wouldn't feel so threatened.
I'm reminded of a scene in Red Dwarf where Rimmer is explaining his parent's religion, based on a misprint in their copy of the Bible which said "faith, hop, and charity, and the greatest of these is hop" - so they spent all day sunday jumping around on one leg.
There's no problem with God and science. It doesn't even require the hack of intelligent design to do it. The only conflict lies between science and a dogmatic belief in the infallible literal truth of (pick your favorite religious text).
If you're willing to believe in the truth behind the religious text rather than the (translated x times) literal words themselves, most people have no trouble reconciling that with scientific discovery.
I know a jesuit brother who's a professional astronomer and meteorite collection curator. He works directly for the Vatican. HE has no problem between science and faith.
Yes, I think telemarketers should go to Mars. Here's a buck.
Re:Regular rentals worked out for me....
on
Time Sharing Cars
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· Score: 1
So basically, what you are saying is that you are spending the same amount of money, but this way you don't actually end up owning anything?
Yes, but what's the advantage to owning it?
You get to deal with a huge headache if it's ever wrecked, versus calling the rental company, filling out a form, and getting another car.
You get to deal with trying to get off work or whatever to get the thing to the mechanic periodically.
You get to have one vehicle, no matter whether it's what you need for a particular job or not, versus having a truck, SUV, compact car, or whatever it is you really need.
You get to go through the hassle and generally a lot of stress of buying a new car once in a while, and you get to have it on your credit report that you owe another $20,000, which isn't good if you're looking to borrow money for something. Cars are not very useful as collateral.
Seems to me if you can get away from owning a car, even if it saves you $zero, it's a good deal.
Having the shower at work is a must if you're cycling more than a mile or two. But the rest can be dealt with. I love my carbide-studded snow tires (really; google for "Nokian"). And if you're cycling in the dark, you need lights.
The biggest problem with cold weather is getting overheated; cycling generates much more heat than most people realize, and they wind up overdressing. Until I got used to it, I had to stop on the way to work and take OFF a layer or even two.
Cycling in 10*F weather is not really a problem; just a couple of very thing polypro layers and a windbreaker shell and you're good. I haven't tried it yet at 0*F but I will be before the end of winter and I don't expect problems.
One thing I've noticed; people are just complete wimps when it comes to weather. People are just amazed when I cycle in the rain, even in the summer. WTF? People do not dissolve in the water. Now that I've been doing it for almost a year, I find being out in the rain and snow to actually be a lot of fun. I used to think the same when I was a kid, but I lost that when I "grew up". I'm glad to have that attitude back again.
Just use a light bee instead of those old-fashioned fixed emitters and it'll be able to go where he wants. Be sure to use the upgraded hard-light bee though, it won't be a useful doctor if it can't touch anything.
Yup, UPC codes are just 3-of-9 1D barcodes. Heck, I wrote a library to print them out of our companys software in about 4 hours with about 20 minutes research on google. Give me some graph paper and the number printed under the barcode and I'll draw them by hand.
This really bugs me too. Heck, why is "char" default signed, even when used in a string? How many times do you want SIGNED when you say char* ?
Yet if you try to use unsigned char*, you have trouble because so much code uses the default signed that you wind up having to do a ton of useless typecasting. It's easier just to live with the useless signage.
It's already sliding, and we haven't been monitoring it much. I doubt we know enough about the area to know that we could touch it and not CAUSE a full collapse.
RTFA. No, we're not ready, because we choose not to be.
Paraphrasing the article:
A warning would result in the possibility of evacuating tens of millions of people for what could be weeks or months and maybe nothing will happen. Nobody wants to do that.
OTOH, nobody wants to get the warning, not order an evacuation, and be responsible for millions of deaths.
So the "smart" politician's winning game is to not set up the systems where there would be a warning. So there are not enough seismometers to know if there's something about to happen.
Slashdot Mirror
Whups, sorry, that's Genuine Fractals from LizardTech.
Re fractal compression, people have been hyping it up for years but as far as I know it never really delivered. I'm dubious about any claims to some mysterious program which compresses anything amazingly well without strong evidence.
A program called Real Fractals has been in use by people who make very large blowups of images for years. It's pretty much standard practice to conver to Real Fractals before making a very big enlargement (like more than a few feet on a side).
I tried to use this and couldn't find a version that didn't leave my router pretty goofed up. I finally went back to the last public Swansea release.
When I checked last there wasn't any indication of the stability of any given release. It looked like it had practically no effective management whatsoever.
eh, I don't really care. Besides, I'm in the country, you'd have to come into my driveway to hit my WAP. It's in the basement intentionally so I can get it from inside the house, but it gets rapidly attenuated when outside.
I used to work for a company (now out of business) that built some of the first touch-tone-directed ordering systems. One of them was a system that Michigan liquor retailers used to reorder stock from the Liquor Control Commission (the state regulating body).
We had listen-only handsets we could plug into the modular sockets on the front of any of a row of several dozen cards and listen to calls in progress. We did this while debugging systems in the field so we could see if the system was working, what sort of problems people were having, etc.
I've seldom heard the equal of the language used by old liquor store owners who are trying to order a hundred various bottles of liquor by typing touch-tones into a fully-automated system that wasn't cooperating with them. I'm surprised the phone didn't melt.
I dunno. At my house, I haven't changed my SSID, don't see the point since it's the only WAP for half a mile at least, but I've got all the encryption turned on, a good password, MAC filtering with only one wireless card allowed, AND you have to go through an authenticated proxy (the address of which is not advertised in any way) to get out on ports 80 or 443.
That's a good one too.
The one that I refer to is that Belkin thought that it was a "good idea" to hijack every 1000th (or something) web page request and redirect users to a Belkin page that tried to sell them stuff.
It's bad enough if a company makes buggy products. It's another thing completely if they build a product that intentionally works in a manner different than advertised in order to line their pockets. It's not much different than unkillable porn popup storms, in principle.
That's all very well. However, does anyone remember why we don't like Belkin? The fiasco with their redirecting routers a year or so ago? I swore them off back then. It's hard not to buy Belkin though, they have some great rebate deals, but I've stuck to it so far.
The current BigDrive standard is 48 bits. That's 144 petabytes. I think we're good for a while now.
I'm glad they stopped screwing around just doubling (or even quadrupling, or whatever) the standard. As long as you're having to redo a standard, might as well get all the pain over with at once.
Sure, it's not actually legal, but a lot of people are posting messages that they are burning CDs.
At our house we only use iTunes to manage MP3s ripped from our CDs to put on the iPod so it's not an issue for us, but I didn't think there was a reason to actually burn to CD anymore.
Kudos to that guy. I also used to be one of the officers in a small business. We (the officers) took pay cuts before any employees when business dropped down. Eventually I left the company because it didn't need 3 partners drawing officer's salary, and they could do better without me.
But that's not usual.
FWIW, the process is exactly the same for a Windows box with iTunes.
IOW, it's about as hard as putting the songs on an iPod. Anyone who can handle one can handle the other.
I don't condone what they did, but there's no loyalty on EITHER side. Sure they write you a check, but most employers won't think twice about firing you if it suits their financial interest. If you're not getting loyalty, you tend not to give it back.
I admire loyalty, but there are situations where it's not warranted. Most corporations have chosen not to give or reward loyalty, so they get back in turn.
Right, and that happens when they feel that science is disproving their faith, which I believe comes from people believing that their favorite religious text was dictated verbatim by God. If they instead realize that the text is at best an interpretation into the culture of the time it was written, and live by the ideas behind the text instead of the words (which in the case of the Bible are 2nd+ generation translations of texts written hundreds of years after the events) they wouldn't feel so threatened.
I'm reminded of a scene in Red Dwarf where Rimmer is explaining his parent's religion, based on a misprint in their copy of the Bible which said "faith, hop, and charity, and the greatest of these is hop" - so they spent all day sunday jumping around on one leg.
There's no problem with God and science. It doesn't even require the hack of intelligent design to do it.
The only conflict lies between science and a dogmatic belief in the infallible literal truth of (pick your favorite religious text).
If you're willing to believe in the truth behind the religious text rather than the (translated x times) literal words themselves, most people have no trouble reconciling that with scientific discovery.
I know a jesuit brother who's a professional astronomer and meteorite collection curator. He works directly for the Vatican. HE has no problem between science and faith.
Yes, I think telemarketers should go to Mars. Here's a buck.
So basically, what you are saying is that you are spending the same amount of money, but this way you don't actually end up owning anything?
Yes, but what's the advantage to owning it?
You get to deal with a huge headache if it's ever wrecked, versus calling the rental company, filling out a form, and getting another car.
You get to deal with trying to get off work or whatever to get the thing to the mechanic periodically.
You get to have one vehicle, no matter whether it's what you need for a particular job or not, versus having a truck, SUV, compact car, or whatever it is you really need.
You get to go through the hassle and generally a lot of stress of buying a new car once in a while, and you get to have it on your credit report that you owe another $20,000, which isn't good if you're looking to borrow money for something. Cars are not very useful as collateral.
Seems to me if you can get away from owning a car, even if it saves you $zero, it's a good deal.
Having the shower at work is a must if you're cycling more than a mile or two. But the rest can be dealt with. I love my carbide-studded snow tires (really; google for "Nokian"). And if you're cycling in the dark, you need lights.
The biggest problem with cold weather is getting overheated; cycling generates much more heat than most people realize, and they wind up overdressing. Until I got used to it, I had to stop on the way to work and take OFF a layer or even two.
Cycling in 10*F weather is not really a problem; just a couple of very thing polypro layers and a windbreaker shell and you're good. I haven't tried it yet at 0*F but I will be before the end of winter and I don't expect problems.
One thing I've noticed; people are just complete wimps when it comes to weather. People are just amazed when I cycle in the rain, even in the summer. WTF? People do not dissolve in the water. Now that I've been doing it for almost a year, I find being out in the rain and snow to actually be a lot of fun. I used to think the same when I was a kid, but I lost that when I "grew up". I'm glad to have that attitude back again.
Just use a light bee instead of those old-fashioned fixed emitters and it'll be able to go where he wants. Be sure to use the upgraded hard-light bee though, it won't be a useful doctor if it can't touch anything.
Yup, UPC codes are just 3-of-9 1D barcodes. Heck, I wrote a library to print them out of our companys software in about 4 hours with about 20 minutes research on google. Give me some graph paper and the number printed under the barcode and I'll draw them by hand.
Timothy Ferris is good in the cosmology realm as well, similar to Brian Greene in the theoretical physics arena.
This really bugs me too. Heck, why is "char" default signed, even when used in a string? How many times do you want SIGNED when you say char* ?
Yet if you try to use unsigned char*, you have trouble because so much code uses the default signed that you wind up having to do a ton of useless typecasting. It's easier just to live with the useless signage.
It's already sliding, and we haven't been monitoring it much. I doubt we know enough about the area to know that we could touch it and not CAUSE a full collapse.
RTFA. No, we're not ready, because we choose not to be.
Paraphrasing the article:
A warning would result in the possibility of evacuating tens of millions of people for what could be weeks or months and maybe nothing will happen. Nobody wants to do that.
OTOH, nobody wants to get the warning, not order an evacuation, and be responsible for millions of deaths.
So the "smart" politician's winning game is to not set up the systems where there would be a warning. So there are not enough seismometers to know if there's something about to happen.
You're right, it's unfair. Rape should carry a much longer sentence.