FlorinAndrei

The first thing I did after the DiggBar was released, was to turn it off.

Always divide the load average by the number of cores.

Maybe we should re-define load average, as the old definition divided by the number of cores.

Think of telescopes.

You can advance the theory of astronomy all you want, but unless you build a bigger mirror to better see the stuff actually going on up in the skies, you won't get very far.

My first attempt. Here's the before:

http://i.imgur.com/LHvih.jpg

Here's the after:

http://i.imgur.com/jSRoy.jpg

Not perfect, but not too bad either, given that it took 30 seconds to do it. I'm sure the size and shape of the selection changes the result, and then the filter has a "radius" parameter which by default is set to 100 and can be changed, and I guess it will change the result.

You also need gimp-plugin-registry if it's not installed. It contains the smart-remove filter.

On Ubuntu 9.10, the packages you need to install are:

gimp-plugin-registry (it contains the smart-remove filter)

gimp-resynthesizer

Cool. So as long as I'm my own CA and I use self-signed certificated (distributed off-band) then I'm safe.

Marginally related:

MP4 as a container, H.264 (AVC) for the video track, AAC for the audio track - this video file format is playable everywhere. Windows, Linux, Mac, PS3, PSP, iPhone... if the kitchen sink had a display, it would probably play it.

When I get a new file, if it's playable on the devices where it's supposed to be viewed, I don't do anything. Otherwise, I convert it to the format indicated above. No deliberation, I just convert it by default to MP4 AVC/AAC. Often I'll use MeGUI if I need some kind of GUI to simplify the process.

Very often, .flv files from Youtube are just AVC/AAC (I think they use x264 to encode the video track) encapsulated as Flash - a simple re-encapsulation (ffmpeg on Linux, Yamb on Windows) solves the problem and - voila - the result is an MP4 that is playable pretty much anywhere.

Blu-Ray and AVCHD disks use AVCHD (H.264 at high rez) almost always. HD camcorders use AVCHD. And so on.

So, I guess my point is - H.264 is already used by many people. It's more or less everywhere. Very likely, it's here to stay.

Careful with fundamentalist materialism (as with any fundamentalism in general). At the end of that road lie all sorts of aberrations such as "computer programs do not exist" and so on. Really? There's a whole industry built on the opposite idea. :)

EDIT: Are you also saying that the subconscious does not exist?

It's pretty funny having this sort of conversations with compsci people. They tend to be pretty hardcore and either-black-or-white on issues that do not lend themselves to this sort of treatment at all.

That "guru"'s particular flavor of religion has very peculiar morals indeed. I don't think I'm exaggerating too much when I say Tantra is basically incomprehensible for the typical Western audience.

"You know gods and goddesses do not exist."

Do not exist as physically-independent entities, yes. That means you define "existence" as in "this rock exists."

They might be quite real (and even somewhat powerful) as entities populating one's subconscious mind. That is the position adopted, by the way, by some buddhist schools. In that sense, the gods might "exist" very well.

The programs running on your computer "exist" on the same level as the subconscious gods anyway.

Also, E=mc^2 needs to be considered.

opstache

clostache

Shorter this way.

> They had a theory of the disease that made sense, fit the evidence, but was utterly wrong. They had arrived at the idea of an undetectable substance in their food, present in trace quantities, with a direct causative relationship to scurvy, but they thought of it in terms of a poison to avoid. In one sense, the additional leap required for a correct understanding was very small. In another sense, it would have required a kind of Copernican revolution in their thinking.

Fascinating.

"we're creating evolutionary pressure on the germs to become resistant to our countermeasures"

I thought that's what we were doing anyway.

What's your native tongue?

Fascinating, thank you.

I wonder if it seems close to the languages one is familiar with.

My native tongue is Romanian and I grew up on the border with Serbia - I used to speak Serbian near-fluently (but lost it after 2+ decades of not using it); I also know a little bit of Russian. This language seemed similar to Serbian to me.

Whoa. My native language is in the Romance group, and I could pretty much muddle through a paragraph of Interlingua with no help. I think the comprehension level was about 90%.

"negatively strange"

Is that, like, "boring", "commonplace", "average" matter?

Even with 9.10, booting up takes very little time. It's very impressive. I don't even think of using suspend now.

And v10 is supposed to boot even faster. Yay! :)

Right. So, don't run it down a lot, and don't charge it to 100% unless you have to.

Oh, the "computer" (read: the manufacturer) has it all figured out already, rest assured. They just don't want to give up on a few performance percentage points.

Sure they can. But they're called iPads.

Spam from @gmail.com is increasing nowadays, AFAICT.

Ha ha! Nice!

I was a chemistry geek in high school, with a penchant for highly exothermic reactions if you know what I mean. Thanks for the trip down memory lane.

Conquered by some other tribe?

Short term? (the "hookup phase") Maybe not, what with daily showers and deodorants and what not.

Long term? It likely plays an important role.

He means eschew the hyper-daisychained ELSE from hell.

I wish I had some kind of glasses like that a decade ago, when my monitor was a small crappy CRT. That thing was painful to use, in the proper sense.

Nowadays, I don't care that much, the currently available LCDs are pretty good.