James Bamford's book The Puzzle Palace is an excellent, though sometimes dry, account of the formation of the NSA, and includes a chapter dedicated to the USA/UK/Canada/Australia/NZ cooperative group UKUSA. The book is old -- published in 1983 -- so it's somewhat out of date. It's fascinating stuff, though the book can be boring at times, but if this spook stuff interests you, it's worth a read.
...then again, I wouldn't like it if the USA was judged entirely based on how the morons in our Senate and House vote.
What recourse do our Aussie friends have to fight this law? In the US, we fought the CDA in the courts with the First Amendment to our Constitution. And with phone calls to our local Congressmoron and ribbons on web pages, of course.
[This is only slightly off-topic, but since Hemos mentioned CoSource, I'll go with it. (It's also posted to the right discussion this time; first try, I posted to the wrong one.)]
Speaking of Cosource, this seems like a good time to let everybody know that I received a great response to the essay I posted earlier this year about Open-Source funding and escrow agencies. I'm currently going through the responses and preparing a second essay to make recommendations to people who want to contribute money to Open-Source development efforts. My review will include organizations such as the Free Software Bazaar and CoSource. Unfortunately, my day job keeps getting in the way, or I would have posted my follow-up sooner.
This seems a good time to let everybody know that I received a great response to the essay I posted earlier this year about Open-Source funding and escrow agencies. I'm currently going through the responses and preparing a second essay to make recommendations to people who want to contribute money to Open-Source development efforts. My review will include organizations such as the Free Software Bazaar and CoSource. Unfortunately, my day job keeps getting in the way, or I would have posted my follow-up sooner.
Do we complain about Jar Jar? Only if we also complained when Luke Skywalker did the same sorts of things.
Not so -- Luke's behavior never generated this kind of a furor. Besides, Luke's whining, like it or not, was an essential part of his character. He whined because the Princess didn't return his affections. He whined because he was asked to take on tasks that he felt were too difficult. He whined because he didn't understand his destiny, and didn't like his parent. Jeeze, these are things I can relate to. I don't like his whining, but I understand it.
I can't say the same for Jar-jar. He's an idiot. A buffoon. He'd be a sympathetic character if he were trying to change himself. That's one of the things that makes a character come alive: we see him struggle with himself, we can relate to something similar in our own life, and then we want him to succeed. Or we fail with him if he fails. This is the essence of good character development. Unfortunately, it doesn't happen much in TPM, and it doesn't happen at all in Jar-Jar. He's happy to just clown along.
Then there's the matter of proportion. Do you really find Luke annoying to the same degree as Jar-jar? I don't. They've taken annoying, overclocked it, given it steroids, turbocharged it, then added an afterburner. Please don't try to equate this with Luke Skywalker; the two are way out of proportion.
And Jar Jar actually has some character development - so if you complained about the lack of character development, stop complaining about Jar Jar. He has a REASON to be there - he provides a conversation piece for some of the characters (getting Anakin and Amidala talking), he provides the link to the Gungans, and he provides us with a focus inside the battle later on (nowhere else in the saga do we have a battle shown "third person" without one of the heroes actually in it).
And he could have done all those things without being so damned annoying.
I can understand all these people falling over themselves to defend Episode One. You like Star Wars -- the whole concept, lock, stock and barrel. You like it and you're going to defend it no matter what. But keep things in perspective.
For example: what if Jar-jar were played by a human actor -- say, Jim Carrey in makeup and latex -- instead of being a gee-whiz piece of computer-generated technology. Would you really tolerate that kind of behavior from a human actor? You would not. You'd be lining up, every one of you, to declare that George Lucas had lost his mind. But make him a cute CG alien and you're accept him, to downplay him to merely as annoying as Luke Skywalker.
Hey, I'm glad you liked TPM. I don't have any problem with that. But don't expect me to buy these weak excuses, and don't expect me to accept the comparison to New Hope. No sale.
...if he thinks this was a good movie. It was a bad movie with some terrific action sequences. Or, as I said before you could look at it as two movies in one: a bad one that lacks adequate character development but in substitute has lots of spastic plot development, followed seamlessly by a wonderful, action-packed second movie chock full o' awesomely cool battle scenes, grand special effects, and thrilling music.
"Not a perfect movie". Indeed, Rob, and Windows NT isn't a wonderful, stable, bug-free operating system. And Jar-jar is orders of magnitude more annoying that Hamil ever dreamed of.
This kind of thing is part of the price to be paid for linux's success. Redhat wants to be taken seriously by Those With The Big Money, and part of that is protecting their trademark. I'm not saying you have to like it (and I don't), but you do have to expect it.
The "Texas Persistent Store", developed at the University of Texas, is an object persistence database similar to ODI's ObjectStore. I've never used Texas myself, and it may not have been kept up to date, but I've done considerable programming with ObjectStore, and it's a great way to store and retrieve C++ objects.
Objectstore has a couple of very appealing features: first, it requires no modifications at all to the class definitions of stored objects, and requires no special inheritance. Second, it's fast -- objects are paged into memory, there's no overhead to access them.
ObjectStore probably isn't available for linux, but if Texas has been kept up to date with g++, then it's worth at least a look.
Mindcraft is participating in this third round of testing at their own expense, as they point out in bold text on the invitation page. They are doing this, I believe, to recover some of the credibility they lost by conducting their first benchmark in an extremely sloppy and biased manner.
And why are they doing this? Because for a company like Mindcraft their credibility is their cash cow -- if their test results can't be believed, no one's going to pay for them. So before we linux advocates get ourselves all worked up over the opportunity to prove what linux can do, we must ask ourselves: "what's the ultimate goal of this test?". Or perhaps that should be phrased "who is the ultimate audience of this test?".
The answer, I believe, is that the ultimate audience, the target, of this 3rd benchmark is Mindcraft's collective future customers, including, me must presume, those customers from which Mindcraft might expect repeat business. In a word, Microsoft.
So, while I'm encouraged by the news that linux will get another run at the benchmark, I'm not entirely satisfied that this will be a completely unbiased test. Although it's encouraging that Mindcraft has opened the test to tuning by linux experts, they still have dictated the structure of the test, and it seems to me that there's room there for bias.
BTW, I visited the Mindcraft web site shortly after the publication of the initial test results. Their home page included some text that read something like (paraphrasing here) we work with the customer to identify their test goals, then design a test to produce the desired results. In other words, Microsoft got what they paid for. It seems interesting now, in the aftermath of the Mindcrap Affair, that those rather damning words seem to have disappeared from their site.
A nice mahogany cabinet. I saw the wood cases, and didn't much care for them. Say -- what about a mix of nice wood, leather, and textured black plastic -- something like the inside of a Lexus? That would be cool.
Let's see, we have Lime, Strawberry, Grape, Orange... and what's that? Blackish green? Or is that brackish green? Yuck.
Folks, these things are just plain butt-ugly. Let's face it: PCs are just not going to be sexy no matter how much plastic you wrap around one. You can put a bikini on your great Aunt Selma, but that won't get her in Sports Illustrated.
Just run your PC with the case off like I do. Now, if I could get a nice mahogany cabinet... that might be nice.
There's an old quote, attributed to Ghandi, and often cited in linux advocacy:
First they ignore you. Then they laugh at you. Then they fight you. Then you win.
These four stages of victory map nicely onto what's happened and is happening between Microsoft and Linux:
First they ignore you. Microsoft did this for years, not really surprising anybody.
Then they laugh at you This comes from from all levels, including Gates himself, and mostly takes the form of FUD. Do you really want an OS developed in some guy's garage? Is linux going to be here tomorrow? Linux has no roadmap. Can linux really be well-tested? I consider all this FUD to be a form of laughing at linux; it's really too indirect to be considered fighting.
Then they fight you The Mindcrap Affair places us full-square in stage three. Microsoft is actively fighting, trying to bloody the penguin's nose (beak?). Granted, they're fighting dirty, but they are fighting. And get used to it; we're probably going to see a lot more of this from Microsoft.
So why is this good news? Because it puts linux one step closer to stage four: Then you win. And it won't happen soon enough for me.
I have found happiness, thank you, in my wife, my beautiful children, my friends, my job, and in being a "spiritual" person. Oh, and I know my purpose in life, just as I know that each person must find their own.
Can it really be 20 years since GEB came out? It doesn't seem possible. I guess it had been out for three or four years when I discovered it on the shelves of my university bookstore. I had never heard of Douglas Hofstadter, but I knew about Bach and Escher, and Martin Gardner's words printed on the back cover were the clincher. Every few years since then, I get out GEB again and re-read -- sometimes cover-to-cover, sometimes just the fun parts. It never fails to entertain and enthrall.
BTW, speaking of AI... a coworker here -- PhD, AI expert, former NASA flight controller, and hacker -- has told me that Alice in Wonderland is one of the best AI books ever. Don't know whether he was talking about just Alice's Adventures or both that and Through the Looking Glass, but I intend to go re-read both to see what he was talking about.
What strikes me about the entire "Mindcrap Affair" is the resulting coverage. I can recall seeing only one press article covering the original story (the "benchmarking"), but I have seen many press articles covering the resulting controversy. Of course, my impression may be biased because I take pointers to news stories from Slashdot and Linux Today. On the other hand, I have done some looking outside of the "linux community", at sites such as CNet News, and they definitely seem more interested in covering the fiasco than in the original benchmark. Maybe these sites too can smell a rat.
Can anyone here give us a meaningful comparison between JPEG 2000 and AT&T's DjVu compression, which is also supposed to be wavelet-based? Are these two similar, or are we talking apples and oranges?
Also, it was unclear in the JPEG2K article whether the new image format maintained the current distinction between compression and file format. Currently most "JPEG" files use a format called JFIF, but the file format and compression are separate -- so the file format can be used to store information other than the image, or could be used to store images compressed with other compression algorithms. Conversely, you can have JPEG-compressed images stored in other file formats. Some digital cameras like the Kodak DC-260 do this -- use JPEG compression but not the JFIF file format.
Anyway, that seemed like a good design, but it seems clear that the new JPEG2K requires both new compression (wavelet) and a new file format (for multiple channels). I hope they manage to keep the two separated as in the original JPEG.
Q: What machine runs NT best? A: A slide projecter.
Yeah, I know, you've heard it before.
A coworker who is very experienced with NT says he can configure a department mail/file/web server so that it doesn't need rebooting more than every 3 months. I believe the guy knows what he's talking about. He knows what services to turn off that make NT slow/unstable; he also goes into the registry to tweak things.
After talking with this fellow, I believe that NT 4.0 has at its core a stable, reasonably good operating system well-suited for small to medium-sized department-level servers. But you have to be an expert to get that -- it doesn't seem to come "out of the box". So the results of this survey don't surprise me much: if you take NT beyond its capabilities, or aren't an expert at tuning it, you're going to struggle.
Let's face it, though: NT is popular. That is, it sells well. If many of these customers are finding that NT isn't all it's supposed to be, well, you live and learn.
The lesson from Microsoft, again, would be that marketing excellence is better than technical excellence.
(BTW, my NT coworker is also a longtime linux/unix user.)
The nerd culture and the spiritual one have little to do with one another, unless you consider the Mp3 player a miracle, as I do.
I guess that if by spiritual culture you mean the bible-thumping, proselytizing, tent-revival crowd, then you're probably right. Or even if you're just talking about the church-going crowd. But I disagree that geeks and the spiritual don't go together.
My disagreement is based more on your use of the term spiritual. What you describe I would call religious or more specifically, Christian, and I don't see either of those as synonymous with spiritual.
Although there may be much of the spiritual in religion, and in Christianity, I like to see a broader definition used. This is not without precedent: don't we sometimes speak of a "spirited" horse, or a "spirited" wine? Have you ever heard a critic say that the orchestra played "with spirit"? There are probably a thousand other examples.
So why does a "spiritual" person have be one that's religious, or one that believes in the literal existence of God? Why, in fact, does a "spiritual" person have to be some that believes in the literal existence of the spirit, or soul?
I'm an atheist. I don't believe that I have a soul -- something that will live on beyond my body and still be me. But I like to think of myself as a spiritual person, because I like to contemplate matters that are traditionally associated with the "spirit": who am I, really? Does life have any purpose, or do I have to define my own? What is the nature of mind, and why does my "self" feel so real, so permanent?
Etcetera, etcetera, etcetera...
My point is that the spiritual and the religious are not the same, and that if you use a broader definition of "spiritual" then geeks and the spiritual are not so distant. The Spiritual is as much a state of mind as anything -- a transcendent moment when the sense of self expands to encompass, embrace, to grok someone or something else. When that other becomes a part of self, and you take away something of the other even after the Spiritual moment passes.
I have found the Spiritual in contemplating the universe and my place in it. I have found the Spiritual in really good sex. I have even found the Spiritual in a meditative moment with a glass of fine Scotch.
I am a geek and I am Spiritual. But please don't confuse me with the religous. Thank you.
--JT
A Quality filter, not an Opinion filter.
on
ShutUp Software
·
· Score: 1
...posters do use them to eliminate opinions they don't like.
I have to disagree with this. The moderation system that Rob has set up does not rate the opinion, it rates the quality of the statement. The purpose is not to quash statements because the moderator disagrees with the opinion, but to reward posters who have put some time into both thinking through their position, and into composing a thoughtful post. It's a noise filter -- it causes the good comments, those worth considering, to float to the top, while the mindless flames sink to the bottom.
Furthermore, I would hope that Rob's moderators would have the guts and the decency to give good ratings to thoughtful posts even if they disagree with the opinion expressed. Even if that's not the case, Rob doesn't select his moderators based on what their opinions are. He selects them based their ability to discriminate between which posts are "signal" and which are "noise".
He also chooses a fairly large number of moderators, enough that all opinions are represented, and in roughly equals numbers to their percentages in the Slashdot population. This helps to ensure that, on the average, the moderators' ratings don't favor one opinion over the other.
Last year, I led a project to port an AP101 emulator (virtual machine) from RS/6000 assembly language on AIX to portable C++. We didn't generate a huge new codebase, but we were very productive. Some very productive days, I didn't write a single line of code -- I disassembled and documented RS6K assembly trying to understand how the emulator worked (the original programmer was long since gone and didn't comment his code).
Lots of programming jobs in this country involve porting. Lots of others, especially as we approach Y2K, are involved in maintenance of existing codebases. Many other tasks consist of tweaking and tuning existing code. Still others are integration projects -- taking existing bodies of code and making them work together.
Given that the US has been using computers as long or longer than any other country, it's possible (probable?) that we have a higher percentage of our programmers in these maintenance-type jobs. I'd bet that if you compare productivity of programmers whose jobs are exclusively to generate new code, the US would stack up better.
For a slick, mass-market type e-zine, Salon has very good coverage of Linux and Open-Source stuff. As an added bonus, they seem to understand the hacker/cracker distinction. If only CNN and NYTimes would follow their lead...
Excuse me for getting pedantic, but linux's entire history isn't long enough to have "age old" anything. And the question of whether commercialism is good or bad for linux is fairly recent, and becoming more relevant since Big Business has discovered linux in the past year or so. No one seemed to question linux commerce back when it was just Slackware and Yggrasil.
But then, maybe I'm just an old fart who's getting crochety in his declining years!
Slashdot Mirror
James Bamford's book The Puzzle Palace is an excellent, though sometimes dry, account of the formation of the NSA, and includes a chapter dedicated to the USA/UK/Canada/Australia/NZ cooperative group UKUSA. The book is old -- published in 1983 -- so it's somewhat out of date. It's fascinating stuff, though the book can be boring at times, but if this spook stuff interests you, it's worth a read.
--JT
...then again, I wouldn't like it if the USA was judged entirely based on how the morons in our Senate and House vote.
What recourse do our Aussie friends have to fight this law? In the US, we fought the CDA in the courts with the First Amendment to our Constitution. And with phone calls to our local Congressmoron and ribbons on web pages, of course.
--JT
As an adjective, it also means "of the Kzinti" or "from the Kzinti". Like the nicks "Dutch" or "Irish".
--JT
[This is only slightly off-topic, but since Hemos mentioned CoSource, I'll go with it. (It's also posted to the right discussion this time; first try, I posted to the wrong one.)]
Speaking of Cosource, this seems like a good time to let everybody know that I received a great response to the essay I posted earlier this year about Open-Source funding and escrow agencies. I'm currently going through the responses and preparing a second essay to make recommendations to people who want to contribute money to Open-Source development efforts. My review will include organizations such as the Free Software Bazaar and CoSource. Unfortunately, my day job keeps getting in the way, or I would have posted my follow-up sooner.
--JT (Jim Thompson, "kzinti" on slashdot)
This seems a good time to let everybody know that I received a great response to the essay I posted earlier this year about Open-Source funding and escrow agencies. I'm currently going through the responses and preparing a second essay to make recommendations to people who want to contribute money to Open-Source development efforts. My review will include organizations such as the Free Software Bazaar and CoSource. Unfortunately, my day job keeps getting in the way, or I would have posted my follow-up sooner.
--JT (Jim Thompson, "kzinti" on slashdot)
Do we complain about Jar Jar? Only if we also complained when Luke Skywalker did the
same sorts of things.
Not so -- Luke's behavior never generated this kind of a furor. Besides, Luke's whining, like it or not, was an essential part of his character. He whined because the Princess didn't return his affections. He whined because he was asked to take on tasks that he felt were too difficult. He whined because he didn't understand his destiny, and didn't like his parent. Jeeze, these are things I can relate to. I don't like his whining, but I understand it.
I can't say the same for Jar-jar. He's an idiot. A buffoon. He'd be a sympathetic character if he were trying to change himself. That's one of the things that makes a character come alive: we see him struggle with himself, we can relate to something similar in our own life, and then we want him to succeed. Or we fail with him if he fails. This is the essence of good character development. Unfortunately, it doesn't happen much in TPM, and it doesn't happen at all in Jar-Jar. He's happy to just clown along.
Then there's the matter of proportion. Do you really find Luke annoying to the same degree as Jar-jar? I don't. They've taken annoying, overclocked it, given it steroids, turbocharged it, then added an afterburner. Please don't try to equate this with Luke Skywalker; the two are way out of proportion.
And Jar Jar actually has some character development - so if you
complained about the lack of character development, stop complaining about Jar Jar. He
has a REASON to be there - he provides a conversation piece for some of the characters
(getting Anakin and Amidala talking), he provides the link to the Gungans, and he
provides us with a focus inside the battle later on (nowhere else in the saga do we have a
battle shown "third person" without one of the heroes actually in it).
And he could have done all those things without being so damned annoying.
I can understand all these people falling over themselves to defend Episode One. You like Star Wars -- the whole concept, lock, stock and barrel. You like it and you're going to defend it no matter what. But keep things in perspective.
For example: what if Jar-jar were played by a human actor -- say, Jim Carrey in makeup and latex -- instead of being a gee-whiz piece of computer-generated technology. Would you really tolerate that kind of behavior from a human actor? You would not. You'd be lining up, every one of you, to declare that George Lucas had lost his mind. But make him a cute CG alien and you're accept him, to downplay him to merely as annoying as Luke Skywalker.
Hey, I'm glad you liked TPM. I don't have any problem with that. But don't expect me to buy these weak excuses, and don't expect me to accept the comparison to New Hope. No sale.
--JT
...if he thinks this was a good movie. It was a bad movie with some terrific action sequences. Or, as I said before you could look at it as two movies in one: a bad one that lacks adequate character development but in substitute has lots of spastic plot development, followed seamlessly by a wonderful, action-packed second movie chock full o' awesomely cool battle scenes, grand special effects, and thrilling music.
"Not a perfect movie". Indeed, Rob, and Windows NT isn't a wonderful, stable, bug-free operating system. And Jar-jar is orders of magnitude more annoying that Hamil ever dreamed of.
Gimme a break.
--JT
This kind of thing is part of the price to be paid for linux's success. Redhat wants to be taken seriously by Those With The Big Money, and part of that is protecting their trademark. I'm not saying you have to like it (and I don't), but you do have to expect it.
--JT
...Slashdot can claim "over one billion served"?
--JT
The "Texas Persistent Store", developed at the University of Texas, is an object persistence database similar to ODI's ObjectStore. I've never used Texas myself, and it may not have been kept up to date, but I've done considerable programming with ObjectStore, and it's a great way to store and retrieve C++ objects.
Objectstore has a couple of very appealing features: first, it requires no modifications at all to the class definitions of stored objects, and requires no special inheritance. Second, it's fast -- objects are paged into memory, there's no overhead to access them.
ObjectStore probably isn't available for linux, but if Texas has been kept up to date with g++, then it's worth at least a look.
See texas* at ftp://ftp.cs.utexas.edu/pub/garbage/"
--JT
Mindcraft is participating in this third round of testing at their own expense, as they point out in bold text on the invitation page. They are doing this, I believe, to recover some of the credibility they lost by conducting their first benchmark in an extremely sloppy and biased manner.
And why are they doing this? Because for a company like Mindcraft their credibility is their cash cow -- if their test results can't be believed, no one's going to pay for them. So before we linux advocates get ourselves all worked up over the opportunity to prove what linux can do, we must ask ourselves: "what's the ultimate goal of this test?". Or perhaps that should be phrased "who is the ultimate audience of this test?".
The answer, I believe, is that the ultimate audience, the target, of this 3rd benchmark is Mindcraft's collective future customers, including, me must presume, those customers from which Mindcraft might expect repeat business. In a word, Microsoft.
So, while I'm encouraged by the news that linux will get another run at the benchmark, I'm not entirely satisfied that this will be a completely unbiased test. Although it's encouraging that Mindcraft has opened the test to tuning by linux experts, they still have dictated the structure of the test, and it seems to me that there's room there for bias.
BTW, I visited the Mindcraft web site shortly after the publication of the initial test results. Their home page included some text that read something like (paraphrasing here) we work with the customer to identify their test goals, then design a test to produce the desired results. In other words, Microsoft got what they paid for. It seems interesting now, in the aftermath of the Mindcrap Affair, that those rather damning words seem to have disappeared from their site.
--JT
A nice mahogany cabinet. I saw the wood cases, and didn't much care for them. Say -- what about a mix of nice wood, leather, and textured black plastic -- something like the inside of a Lexus? That would be cool.
--JT
Let's see, we have Lime, Strawberry, Grape, Orange... and what's that? Blackish green? Or is that brackish green? Yuck.
Folks, these things are just plain butt-ugly. Let's face it: PCs are just not going to be sexy no matter how much plastic you wrap around one. You can put a bikini on your great Aunt Selma, but that won't get her in Sports Illustrated.
Just run your PC with the case off like I do. Now, if I could get a nice mahogany cabinet... that might be nice.
--JT
There's an old quote, attributed to Ghandi, and often cited in linux advocacy:
These four stages of victory map nicely onto what's happened and is happening between Microsoft and Linux:First they ignore you. Microsoft did this for years, not really surprising anybody.
Then they laugh at you This comes from from all levels, including Gates himself, and mostly takes the form of FUD. Do you really want an OS developed in some guy's garage? Is linux going to be here tomorrow? Linux has no roadmap. Can linux really be well-tested? I consider all this FUD to be a form of laughing at linux; it's really too indirect to be considered fighting.
Then they fight you The Mindcrap Affair places us full-square in stage three. Microsoft is actively fighting, trying to bloody the penguin's nose (beak?). Granted, they're fighting dirty, but they are fighting. And get used to it; we're probably going to see a lot more of this from Microsoft.
So why is this good news? Because it puts linux one step closer to stage four: Then you win. And it won't happen soon enough for me.
--JT
Thou Art God
I have found happiness, thank you, in my wife, my beautiful children, my friends, my job, and in being a "spiritual" person. Oh, and I know my purpose in life, just as I know that each person must find their own.
--JT
Can it really be 20 years since GEB came out? It doesn't seem possible. I guess it had been out for three or four years when I discovered it on the shelves of my university bookstore. I had never heard of Douglas Hofstadter, but I knew about Bach and Escher, and Martin Gardner's words printed on the back cover were the clincher. Every few years since then, I get out GEB again and re-read -- sometimes cover-to-cover, sometimes just the fun parts. It never fails to entertain and enthrall.
BTW, speaking of AI... a coworker here -- PhD, AI expert, former NASA flight controller, and hacker -- has told me that Alice in Wonderland is one of the best AI books ever. Don't know whether he was talking about just Alice's Adventures or both that and Through the Looking Glass, but I intend to go re-read both to see what he was talking about.
--JT
What strikes me about the entire "Mindcrap Affair" is the resulting coverage. I can recall seeing only one press article covering the original story (the "benchmarking"), but I have seen many press articles covering the resulting controversy. Of course, my impression may be biased because I take pointers to news stories from Slashdot and Linux Today. On the other hand, I have done some looking outside of the "linux community", at sites such as CNet News, and they definitely seem more interested in covering the fiasco than in the original benchmark. Maybe these sites too can smell a rat.
--JT
Can anyone here give us a meaningful comparison between JPEG 2000 and AT&T's DjVu compression, which is also supposed to be wavelet-based? Are these two similar, or are we talking apples and oranges?
Also, it was unclear in the JPEG2K article whether the new image format maintained the current distinction between compression and file format. Currently most "JPEG" files use a format called JFIF, but the file format and compression are separate -- so the file format can be used to store information other than the image, or could be used to store images compressed with other compression algorithms. Conversely, you can have JPEG-compressed images stored in other file formats. Some digital cameras like the Kodak DC-260 do this -- use JPEG compression but not the JFIF file format.
Anyway, that seemed like a good design, but it seems clear that the new JPEG2K requires both new compression (wavelet) and a new file format (for multiple channels). I hope they manage to keep the two separated as in the original JPEG.
--JT
I'm reminded of a joke I heard back before NT 3:
Q: What machine runs NT best?
A: A slide projecter.
Yeah, I know, you've heard it before.
A coworker who is very experienced with NT says he can configure a department mail/file/web server so that it doesn't need rebooting more than every 3 months. I believe the guy knows what he's talking about. He knows what services to turn off that make NT slow/unstable; he also goes into the registry to tweak things.
After talking with this fellow, I believe that NT 4.0 has at its core a stable, reasonably good operating system well-suited for small to medium-sized department-level servers. But you have to be an expert to get that -- it doesn't seem to come "out of the box". So the results of this survey don't surprise me much: if you take NT beyond its capabilities, or aren't an expert at tuning it, you're going to struggle.
Let's face it, though: NT is popular. That is, it sells well. If many of these customers are finding that NT isn't all it's supposed to be, well, you live and learn.
The lesson from Microsoft, again, would be that marketing excellence is better than technical excellence.
(BTW, my NT coworker is also a longtime linux/unix user.)
--JT
The nerd culture and the spiritual one have little to do with one another, unless you consider the Mp3 player a miracle, as I do.
I guess that if by spiritual culture you mean the bible-thumping, proselytizing, tent-revival crowd, then you're probably right. Or even if you're just talking about the church-going crowd. But I disagree that geeks and the spiritual don't go together.
My disagreement is based more on your use of the term spiritual. What you describe I would call religious or more specifically, Christian, and I don't see either of those as synonymous with spiritual.
Although there may be much of the spiritual in religion, and in Christianity, I like to see a broader definition used. This is not without precedent: don't we sometimes speak of a "spirited" horse, or a "spirited" wine? Have you ever heard a critic say that the orchestra played "with spirit"? There are probably a thousand other examples.
So why does a "spiritual" person have be one that's religious, or one that believes in the literal existence of God? Why, in fact, does a "spiritual" person have to be some that believes in the literal existence of the spirit, or soul?
I'm an atheist. I don't believe that I have a soul -- something that will live on beyond my body and still be me. But I like to think of myself as a spiritual person, because I like to contemplate matters that are traditionally associated with the "spirit": who am I, really? Does life have any purpose, or do I have to define my own? What is the nature of mind, and why does my "self" feel so real, so permanent?
Etcetera, etcetera, etcetera...
My point is that the spiritual and the religious are not the same, and that if you use a broader definition of "spiritual" then geeks and the spiritual are not so distant. The Spiritual is as much a state of mind as anything -- a transcendent moment when the sense of self expands to encompass, embrace, to grok someone or something else. When that other becomes a part of self, and you take away something of the other even after the Spiritual moment passes.
I have found the Spiritual in contemplating the universe and my place in it. I have found the Spiritual in really good sex. I have even found the Spiritual in a meditative moment with a glass of fine Scotch.
I am a geek and I am Spiritual. But please don't confuse me with the religous. Thank you.
--JT
...posters do use them to eliminate opinions they don't like.
I have to disagree with this. The moderation system that Rob has set up does not rate the opinion, it rates the quality of the statement. The purpose is not to quash statements because the moderator disagrees with the opinion, but to reward posters who have put some time into both thinking through their position, and into composing a thoughtful post. It's a noise filter -- it causes the good comments, those worth considering, to float to the top, while the mindless flames sink to the bottom.
Furthermore, I would hope that Rob's moderators would have the guts and the decency to give good ratings to thoughtful posts even if they disagree with the opinion expressed. Even if that's not the case, Rob doesn't select his moderators based on what their opinions are. He selects them based their ability to discriminate between which posts are "signal" and which are "noise".
He also chooses a fairly large number of moderators, enough that all opinions are represented, and in roughly equals numbers to their percentages in the Slashdot population. This helps to ensure that, on the average, the moderators' ratings don't favor one opinion over the other.
--JT
How many lines of code a year do they produce?
--JT
Last year, I led a project to port an AP101 emulator (virtual machine) from RS/6000 assembly language on AIX to portable C++. We didn't generate a huge new codebase, but we were very productive. Some very productive days, I didn't write a single line of code -- I disassembled and documented RS6K assembly trying to understand how the emulator worked (the original programmer was long since gone and didn't comment his code).
Lots of programming jobs in this country involve porting. Lots of others, especially as we approach Y2K, are involved in maintenance of existing codebases. Many other tasks consist of tweaking and tuning existing code. Still others are integration projects -- taking existing bodies of code and making them work together.
Given that the US has been using computers as long or longer than any other country, it's possible (probable?) that we have a higher percentage of our programmers in these maintenance-type jobs. I'd bet that if you compare productivity of programmers whose jobs are exclusively to generate new code, the US would stack up better.
--JT
For a slick, mass-market type e-zine, Salon has very good coverage of Linux and Open-Source stuff. As an added bonus, they seem to understand the hacker/cracker distinction. If only CNN and NYTimes would follow their lead...
--JT
...age old question...
Excuse me for getting pedantic, but linux's entire history isn't long enough to have "age old" anything. And the question of whether commercialism is good or bad for linux is fairly recent, and becoming more relevant since Big Business has discovered linux in the past year or so. No one seemed to question linux commerce back when it was just Slackware and Yggrasil.
But then, maybe I'm just an old fart who's getting crochety in his declining years!
--JT