Battersea Library 29/3/99 Certainty level: 60% This one is quite dull. During the month of March 1999, MI5 made another determined attempt to "get" me, substantially through radio programmes, through Jon Snow on Channel Four News, and through abuse in public, of which this is one example. Recorded on my minidisc-walkman on Monday 29 March 1999, this audio file consists of two girls talking. One says to the other, "he's got something wrong with him." The usual words. How many millions a year do the Security Service waste on this? But they've denied it - how silly of me to forget. And they're not liars either, are they? 7112 -- Posted via NewsDemon.com - Premium Uncensored Newsgroup Service ------->>>>>>http://www.NewsDemon.com<<<<<<------ Unlimited Access, Anonymous Accounts, Uncensored Broadband Access

On Nov 17, 1:04 am, Doug McDonald <mcdonald@SnPoAM_scs.uiuc.edu> wrote: > > Java specifies > a specific float formant that is incompatible with the 80x86, > a major, major, major problem. So big that strict Java is > in fact useless for 99.5% of the computers in the world. Are you sure about this? The Java spec <http://java.sun.com/docs/books/ jls/third_edition/html/typesValues.html#4.2.3> seems to dictate the use of IEEE-754, which is exactly what is used in the 80x87 <http:// en.wikipedia.org/wiki/8087>. No doubt the endian-ness is different, but I'm quite certain it's optimized away internally, just like it is for integers. Also, the Java Math docs <http://java.sun.com/javase/6/docs/api/java/ lang/Math.html> recommend implementations use "native libraries or microprocessor instructions". I will admit that the strict math library will be slow, as it is specified to use a float-point library written in C, but Java is giving you a choice: use the regular library for speed, or choose to use the strict library when you must have bit-identical calculations no matter on what platform your software ends up running. Andrew

Ravenscourt Park 20/3/99 Certainty level: 70% On Saturday I went to Hammersmith, specifically Ravenscourt Park. There had recently been a resurgence of persecution activity, following the Capital spams. I went to the cafe in the park and had a cup of coffee outside, with my mother. As I went inside the cafe to return the cups, a woman shouted a sexual obscenity (not present on this audio file - don't ask), and she said loudly "something's wrong with him". You can just about hear it in the audio file; listen very carefully, several times; it is distinguishable. Much less subtle is the male voice shouting "take care he's a nutter" immediately after the woman's voice. As on the other recordings there's a lot of noise, but what the people say can be clearly heard. Given that I take medication and look and behave quite sanely, and that there had been increased abuse over the last couple of weeks, it seems pretty unlikely that this incident was just spontaneous.... of course, you couldn't prove otherwise, but then that's the way MI5 mean their abuse to look. 4937 -- Posted via NewsDemon.com - Premium Uncensored Newsgroup Service ------->>>>>>http://www.NewsDemon.com<<<<<<------ Unlimited Access, Anonymous Accounts, Uncensored Broadband Access

On Thu, 15 Nov 2007 21:25:16 -0800, Dennis Lee Bieber <wlfraed@ix.netcom.com> wrote: >On Thu, 15 Nov 2007 21:35:26 +0000, Ian Goddard <goddai01@hotmail.co.uk> >declaimed the following in soc.genealogy.computing: > >> If you want a simple data model let me offer you the humble 6x4 index >> card. Extract the data from evidence, e.g. >> > Where'd you find those cards? I've always lived with 3x5 <G> And there were add-ons to PAF that used to be able to print on both! -- Steve Hayes from Tshwane, South Africa Web: http://hayesfam.bravehost.com/stevesig.htm Blog: http://methodius.blogspot.com E-mail - see web page, or parse: shayes at dunelm full stop org full stop uk

Doug McDonald wrote: > You want bloat and full specification, there are languages for you, > for instance Ada and Java. Both are near-useless because Obviously knows nothing about Ada and not enough about Java. -- Wes Groleau "A man with an experience is never at the mercy of a man with an argument." -- Ron Allen

Ian Goddard wrote: > Does anyone know of a software package which offers that flexibility? ? For all its flaws, GEDCOM is still more flexible than most of the software I've tried. -- Wes Groleau Answer not a fool according to his folly, lest thou also be like unto him. Answer a fool according to his folly, lest he be wise according to his own conceit. -- Solomon Are you saying there's no good way to answer a fool? -- Groleau

On 2007-11-16, Doug McDonald <mcdonald@SnPoAM_scs.uiuc.edu> wrote: > > ... > > You want bloat and full specification, there are languages for you, > for instance Ada and Java. Both are near-useless because > of exact specification disasters: for instance, Java specifies > a specific float formant that is incompatible with the 80x86, > a major, major, major problem. So big that strict Java is > in fact useless for 99.5% of the computers in the world. Useless, you say? Hardly! Since about March of 2003, I have been using Java on X86 with Linux, a system type massively more numerous than 0.5% of computers in the world. (Before that, it was Java on Alpha.) It has been quite useful for parsing HTML, producing and parsing XML, archiving data, graphically displaying data, generating time series models from data, and optimizing the parameters for black-box simulation. Oh, and for a tie-in to genealogy, it works just fine with the FamilySearch indexing program. -- Robert Riches spamtrap42@verizon.net (Yes, that is one of my email addresses.)

Doug McDonald wrote: [SNIP] > You want bloat and full specification, there are languages for you, > for instance Ada and Java. Both are near-useless because > of exact specification disasters: for instance, Java specifies > a specific float formant that is incompatible with the 80x86, > a major, major, major problem. So big that strict Java is > in fact useless for 99.5% of the computers in the world. I suspect that we're heading increasingly off-topic, but as someone who programs in both C and Java, I have to disagree with that characterisation of Java. The Java language itself is actually rather elegant and compact. It follows the tradition of C in that respect. You can summarise the essential features of either language on a single sheet of paper. The Java API contains several thousand classes, which can be quite daunting to a novice, but the folks at Sun were wise enough to organise them into a set of packages according to type of functionality: I/O, networking, text manipulation, database connectivity and so forth. Compare that with the API which C programmers need to achieve the same functionality. That too runs into thousands of functions, both under Windows and the various flavours of Unix, and as a programmer, I find that far more of a hassle than Java's API. Java does indeed stipulate the endian-ness both of integers and of floating-point numbers, but the only people who ever need to worry about that are the programmers who are unlucky enough to have to write Java code to read binary data produced by non-Java software. For them, the Java API provides a rich set of conversion functions, so reading and writing 80x86 native-format binary data is actually very easy. Java is widely used on the Intel-based Windows and Linux systems which make up the bulk of the world's computers. Evidently, Java's stipulation of big-endian numbers is not a major problem at all. David Harper Cambridge, England

David Harper wrote: > singhals wrote: >> Tony Proctor wrote: >> [snip] >> >>> The older ANSI C and ANSI SQL specs are abomininations resulting from a >>> design-by-committee approach. You can understand the approach taken with >>> Java whereby it was designed and evolved as a proprietary standard >>> before >>> being considered for an international standard. >> >> >> Remind me again please -- what makes _their_ design-by-committee >> results worse than what _your_ project committee could come up with? >> >> If standards in the genealogical software community need to be >> agreed-upon rather than forced-upon, you're going to get >> designed-by-committee standards. >> >> If it's bad when I (or Bob V) do it, then it's bad when you do it. >> Ancient adage roughly translated as sauce for the gander. > > I guess what Tony is trying to say is that large committees tend to have > a wide range of conflicting (and often irreconcilable) goals. In the > context of committees whose remit is to design some kind of standard, > the result is a standard that is bloated, confusing and often impossible > to implement effectively. > > The best standards seem to come from very small committees, or better > still, two or three very talented and highly-focussed individuals. Look > at the standards which underpin the Internet -- IP, TCP, SMTP, HTTP -- > which each originated as the work of one or two people. Likewise, > languages such as C and Fortran, which were created by one person and a > team of half a dozen, respectively. (And John Backus's Fortran team not > only specified the language, but implemented the world's first > optimizing compiler on a computer which had less memory than your > cellphone!) > > David Harper > Cambridge, England You can add Pascal as another compact one-man designed standard. -- Ian Hotmail is for spammers. Real mail address is igoddard at nildram co uk

Kurt wrote: > "singhals" <singhals@erols.com> wrote in message > news:OvWdnQzTU8o5LKHanZ2dnUVZ_jednZ2d@rcn.net... > >>It was one of those once-in-a-lifetime days, and of course >>my digital camera chose to malfunction. The flash worked >>when it felt like it and not otherwise. >> >>So, I have several photos of a cake with burning candles, >>except the flash decided there was enough light that it >>didn't have to exert itself. >> >>Anyone with any suggestions what I need to adjust to be able >>to see the cake rather than the bonfires? >> >>Thanks! >> >>Cheryl > > > On my camera I can chose to make the flash compulsory. > It must be a general function, unless you have an extremely cheap > camera. The camera had the ability, but it malfunctioned. I wouldn't have called it Cheap, but it was low-end for my convenience ... I like being able to shoot without fussing with all the dials. Cheryl

Nicholas Adams wrote: > "Kurt" <kurt.fredriksson@ieee.org> schrieb: > > >>"singhals" <singhals@erols.com> wrote in message >>news:OvWdnQzTU8o5LKHanZ2dnUVZ_jednZ2d@rcn.net... >> >>>It was one of those once-in-a-lifetime days, and of course >>>my digital camera chose to malfunction. The flash worked >>>when it felt like it and not otherwise. >>> >>>So, I have several photos of a cake with burning candles, >>>except the flash decided there was enough light that it >>>didn't have to exert itself. >>> >>>Anyone with any suggestions what I need to adjust to be able >>>to see the cake rather than the bonfires? >>> >>>Thanks! >>> >>>Cheryl >> >>On my camera I can chose to make the flash compulsory. >>It must be a general function, unless you have an extremely cheap >>camera. >> >>Kurt F > > ...but that wasn't the question. > > > > Just send me the photo's and I'll do my best to get them right. > > Nicholas Thanks. See: http://bottonycross.purpleflowers.net/birthday/ Cheryl

tim sewell wrote: > "singhals" <singhals@erols.com> wrote in message > news:OvWdnQzTU8o5LKHanZ2dnUVZ_jednZ2d@rcn.net... > >>It was one of those once-in-a-lifetime days, and of course my digital >>camera chose to malfunction. The flash worked when it felt like it and >>not otherwise. >> >>So, I have several photos of a cake with burning candles, except the flash >>decided there was enough light that it didn't have to exert itself. >> >>Anyone with any suggestions what I need to adjust to be able to see the >>cake rather than the bonfires? >> > > Cheryl, > > Try posting the image(s) on one of the image hosting sites (eg fotopic), > then post the relevant URL here and wait... > > You may well end up with a surfeit of (visible) Birthday Cake. :-) > EXCELLENT Idea. http://bottonycross.purpleflowers.net/birthday/ Birthday6 is the cake picture and the one I'm most interested in getting cleaned up. The burning candles "flare" :( The flash failed to function at all. Birthday15 would be nice to have, and is offered in case someone wants to try their hand there too. The flash was early. The camera was a fairly inexpensive one meant for point'n'shoot which is my style with pictures. It had been working fine up until the day these were taken when it began eating a battery an hour. It _has_ been replaced. (g) Cheryl

David Harper wrote: > Doug McDonald wrote: > [SNIP] >> You want bloat and full specification, there are languages for you, >> for instance Ada and Java. Both are near-useless because >> of exact specification disasters: for instance, Java specifies >> a specific float formant that is incompatible with the 80x86, >> a major, major, major problem. So big that strict Java is >> in fact useless for 99.5% of the computers in the world. > > I suspect that we're heading increasingly off-topic, but as someone who > programs in both C and Java, I have to disagree with that > characterisation of Java. > > The Java language itself is actually rather elegant and compact. It > follows the tradition of C in that respect. You can summarise the > essential features of either language on a single sheet of paper. > > The Java API contains several thousand classes, which can be quite > daunting to a novice, but the folks at Sun were wise enough to organise > them into a set of packages according to type of functionality: I/O, > networking, text manipulation, database connectivity and so forth. > > Compare that with the API which C programmers need to achieve the same > functionality. C itself has only a few dozen library functions. I think you are here referring to operating system calls, not the language per se. > > Java does indeed stipulate the endian-ness both of integers and of > floating-point numbers, but the only people who ever need to worry about > that are the programmers who are unlucky enough to have to write Java > code to read binary data produced by non-Java software. For them, the > Java API provides a rich set of conversion functions, so reading and > writing 80x86 native-format binary data is actually very easy. But the endianness of Java is enshrined in disk and other files .... and since it is the wrong choice, a conversion speed disaster ensues. > > Java is widely used on the Intel-based Windows and Linux systems which > make up the bulk of the world's computers. Evidently, Java's > stipulation of big-endian numbers is not a major problem at all. The endianness in general only causes minor slowness problems, since Java internally, for integers, can use the native endianness of the hardware. The major disaster is that Java specifies a floating point format that is incompatible with Intel hardware. And the semantics of Java require that calculations actually be carried out using that format, which is incompatible with Intel hardware. Unlike integers, you can't use native Intel float internally. This means with strict Java you have to do float in SOFTWARE which is abysmally slow. Now normally of course on the PC you don't use Sun Java but Microsoft's native-float clone, which gives identical answers except in the edge cases where Sun and Intel floats differ. C has none of these problems. Its only problem in this regard is in reading binary files from non-native hardware. Doug McDonald

"singhals" <singhals@erols.com> wrote in message news:OvWdnQzTU8o5LKHanZ2dnUVZ_jednZ2d@rcn.net... > It was one of those once-in-a-lifetime days, and of course my digital > camera chose to malfunction. The flash worked when it felt like it and > not otherwise. > > So, I have several photos of a cake with burning candles, except the flash > decided there was enough light that it didn't have to exert itself. > > Anyone with any suggestions what I need to adjust to be able to see the > cake rather than the bonfires? > Cheryl, Try posting the image(s) on one of the image hosting sites (eg fotopic), then post the relevant URL here and wait... You may well end up with a surfeit of (visible) Birthday Cake. :-) -- Cheers, Tim S. (please delete myfairlyobviousspamtrap if you wish to reply directly)

In article <5q31lqFtm61qU2@mid.individual.net>, Dave Hinz <DaveHinz@gmail.com> writes >On Thu, 15 Nov 2007 05:48:59 -0800 (PST), huangsinwhu@gmail.com ><huangsinwhu@gmail.com> wrote: >> When you bought your Fuji digital camera, you knew you were buying a >> product with a name you could trust. > >Your shill spamming, nym-shifting, and poor writing style, for a blog >that is astonishingly off-topic for his group - you're doing it wrong on >about 8 leves of fail. > >Go away and stay there. You won't attract traffic to a site by showing >the world you can't read, write, Hark who's talking! -- Roy Bailey West Berkshire.

David Harper wrote: > singhals wrote: > >> Tony Proctor wrote: >> [snip] >> >>> The older ANSI C and ANSI SQL specs are abomininations resulting from a >>> design-by-committee approach. You can understand the approach taken with >>> Java whereby it was designed and evolved as a proprietary standard >>> before >>> being considered for an international standard. >> >> >> >> Remind me again please -- what makes _their_ design-by-committee >> results worse than what _your_ project committee could come up with? >> >> If standards in the genealogical software community need to be >> agreed-upon rather than forced-upon, you're going to get >> designed-by-committee standards. >> >> If it's bad when I (or Bob V) do it, then it's bad when you do it. >> Ancient adage roughly translated as sauce for the gander. > > > I guess what Tony is trying to say is that large committees tend to have > a wide range of conflicting (and often irreconcilable) goals. In the > context of committees whose remit is to design some kind of standard, > the result is a standard that is bloated, confusing and often impossible > to implement effectively. > > The best standards seem to come from very small committees, or better > still, two or three very talented and highly-focussed individuals. Look > at the standards which underpin the Internet -- IP, TCP, SMTP, HTTP -- > which each originated as the work of one or two people. Likewise, > languages such as C and Fortran, which were created by one person and a > team of half a dozen, respectively. (And John Backus's Fortran team not > only specified the language, but implemented the world's first > optimizing compiler on a computer which had less memory than your > cellphone!) > > David Harper > Cambridge, England That's what it sounded like to me, all right. Cheryl

David Harper <devnull@obliquity.u-net.com> writes: > singhals wrote: > > Tony Proctor wrote: > > [snip] > > > >> The older ANSI C and ANSI SQL specs are abomininations resulting from a > >> design-by-committee approach. You can understand the approach taken with > >> Java whereby it was designed and evolved as a proprietary standard before > >> being considered for an international standard. > > > > > > Remind me again please -- what makes _their_ design-by-committee results > > worse than what _your_ project committee could come up with? > > > > If standards in the genealogical software community need to be > > agreed-upon rather than forced-upon, you're going to get > > designed-by-committee standards. > > > > If it's bad when I (or Bob V) do it, then it's bad when you do it. > > Ancient adage roughly translated as sauce for the gander. > > I guess what Tony is trying to say is that large committees tend to have > a wide range of conflicting (and often irreconcilable) goals. In the > context of committees whose remit is to design some kind of standard, > the result is a standard that is bloated, confusing and often impossible > to implement effectively. More often, controversial items are left as implementation-defined. ANSI rules, for instance, say that a standard has to be derived by consensus. If consensus can't be reached on a point, it can't be in the standard. > The best standards seem to come from very small committees, or better > still, two or three very talented and highly-focussed individuals. Look > at the standards which underpin the Internet -- IP, TCP, SMTP, HTTP -- > which each originated as the work of one or two people. Likewise, > languages such as C and Fortran, which were created by one person and a > team of half a dozen, respectively. (And John Backus's Fortran team not > only specified the language, but implemented the world's first > optimizing compiler on a computer which had less memory than your > cellphone!) > > David Harper > Cambridge, England

You pretty much said it David - thanks! The standards designed/specified by big committees full of big-wig vendors who have vested interests they want to protect, and "edges" over other vendors that they want to enhance, tend to be a disaster as the resulting spec is too vague. My issue with the ANSI C spec, for instance, was that it left so much "undefined" or "unspecified" that you could drive a bus through all the holes. As a consequence, C is not the portable language that it was hoped to be. Smaller, more focused, committees tend to define cleaner standards. However, rather than being an "ivory tower", they would nowadays put out RFIs to gather requirements, and have peer reviews for the drafts. There's a subtle difference is considering lots of valid inputs, and having the specification actually defined by a large number of subjective people. Tony Proctor "David Harper" <devnull@obliquity.u-net.com> wrote in message news:0Oa%i.16594$ib1.15815@newsfe3-win.ntli.net... > singhals wrote: > > Tony Proctor wrote: > > [snip] > > > >> The older ANSI C and ANSI SQL specs are abomininations resulting from a > >> design-by-committee approach. You can understand the approach taken with > >> Java whereby it was designed and evolved as a proprietary standard before > >> being considered for an international standard. > > > > > > Remind me again please -- what makes _their_ design-by-committee results > > worse than what _your_ project committee could come up with? > > > > If standards in the genealogical software community need to be > > agreed-upon rather than forced-upon, you're going to get > > designed-by-committee standards. > > > > If it's bad when I (or Bob V) do it, then it's bad when you do it. > > Ancient adage roughly translated as sauce for the gander. > > I guess what Tony is trying to say is that large committees tend to have > a wide range of conflicting (and often irreconcilable) goals. In the > context of committees whose remit is to design some kind of standard, > the result is a standard that is bloated, confusing and often impossible > to implement effectively. > > The best standards seem to come from very small committees, or better > still, two or three very talented and highly-focussed individuals. Look > at the standards which underpin the Internet -- IP, TCP, SMTP, HTTP -- > which each originated as the work of one or two people. Likewise, > languages such as C and Fortran, which were created by one person and a > team of half a dozen, respectively. (And John Backus's Fortran team not > only specified the language, but implemented the world's first > optimizing compiler on a computer which had less memory than your > cellphone!) > > David Harper > Cambridge, England

Tony Proctor wrote: > You pretty much said it David - thanks! > > The standards designed/specified by big committees full of big-wig vendors > who have vested interests they want to protect, and "edges" over other > vendors that they want to enhance, tend to be a disaster as the resulting > spec is too vague. My issue with the ANSI C spec, for instance, was that it > left so much "undefined" or "unspecified" that you could drive a bus through > all the holes. As a consequence, C is not the portable language that it was > hoped to be. > To specify what is unspecified in C would make it bloated and thus no better than any other bloated language. For example, you would have to specify endian-ness and the exact size of integer types. C is specifically designed to be non-bloated. In this it succeeds most magnificently! It is supposed to map directly to hardware. It does this well on the PDP-11, the VAX, and the 80x86 and successors. As you are aware, the 80x86 successors rule the world. You want bloat and full specification, there are languages for you, for instance Ada and Java. Both are near-useless because of exact specification disasters: for instance, Java specifies a specific float formant that is incompatible with the 80x86, a major, major, major problem. So big that strict Java is in fact useless for 99.5% of the computers in the world. Doug McDonald

>>> If you want a simple data model let me offer you the humble 6x4 index >>> card. Extract the data from evidence, e.g. >>> >> Where'd you find those cards? I've always lived with 3x5 <G> Well, where I live (the USA) 4x6 cards are a standard size. All our school or art supply stores have them. It is also a standard size for photo prints. Doug McDonald