>> Self-important dick... Man, everybody hated that guy.
>
> Recurring dream: Going back in time to school with the knowledge and
> confidence I have now. But then I would probably see what sad examples
> of humanity the male teachers were and give up in disgust.

There was a kid at school who used to bully me constantly. I used to 
dream about doing terrible things to him.

And then one day I thought to myself "Wait a minute. Your dad is an 
alcoholic, your whole family lives on welfare in a rundown council 
flat... there is basically NOTHING I COULD DO that would make your life 
anybody miserable than it already is. HAVE A NICE DAY!" :-D

> At least you probably weren't belted (beaten with a leather belt).

I do remember two kids got the slipper. (You're probably not allowed to 
do that, but they did.) The first kid stood there and took it like a 
man. The second was a screaming wreck.

-- 
http://blog.orphi.me.uk/
http://www.zazzle.com/MathematicalOrchid*

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On 8/21/2011 0:41, Le_Forgeron wrote:
> Below IP is not a network (in IT terminology), but links.

It depends on what IP travels over. If it's IP-over-ATM, there's most 
certainly a network there. If it's IP over dial-up, less so.

> (such as video distribution: better skip a frame than freezing.

Sure. And the point I was trying to make is that it's better to reserve 
bandwidth than skipping a frame, but IP doesn't support that.

> TCP covers 95% of applications, but there is more than TCP under the sun.

Yep. And I'm saying that the primary reason people don't use TCP is to 
compensate for a lack of things like bandwidth allocation and routing 
assurance. Nobody used TP4 over a network that will work fine with TP0.

-- 
Darren New, San Diego CA, USA (PST)
   How come I never get only one kudo?

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On 8/21/2011 2:37, Orchid XP v8 wrote:
> More like "it keeps the students quiet so we don't have to think up any
> *real* tasks for them to do".

I will say that I never had an art class before grad school that actually 
wasn't of the busywork type. Very few of those sorts of classes actually 
taught anything. I would have loved to go to music class where they actually 
taught some music theory or something, or an art class where they talked 
about the proportions for drawing people or the golden rectangle or 
something like that.

-- 
Darren New, San Diego CA, USA (PST)
   How come I never get only one kudo?

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On 8/21/2011 3:38, Orchid XP v8 wrote:
> NOTHING I COULD DO that would make your life anybody

Sounds like a Holly Lisle book.

Gabriel: "But God, the devils are breaking their contract. Thay're cheating!"

God: "Of course they are, Gabriel. They're devils."

Gabriel: "But ... but ... you should punish them!"

God: "They're already damned to hell, Gabriel. What would you have me do?"

A very amusing book, overall. I recommend at least the first 2 or 3 for 
silly light reading.

-- 
Darren New, San Diego CA, USA (PST)
   How come I never get only one kudo?

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On 21/08/2011 04:06 PM, Darren New wrote:
> On 8/21/2011 2:37, Orchid XP v8 wrote:
>> More like "it keeps the students quiet so we don't have to think up any
>> *real* tasks for them to do".
>
> I will say that I never had an art class before grad school that
> actually wasn't of the busywork type. Very few of those sorts of classes
> actually taught anything. I would have loved to go to music class where
> they actually taught some music theory or something, or an art class
> where they talked about the proportions for drawing people or the golden
> rectangle or something like that.

In our music class, they made us play musical instruments.

Oh, until the old teacher left and we got that *other* person, who 
couldn't make kids do stuff for toffee...

We didn't even *have* art classes. Though we did have pottery classes, 
where we actually made pots. I still have some of them.

-- 
http://blog.orphi.me.uk/
http://www.zazzle.com/MathematicalOrchid*

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Le 21/08/2011 17:04, Darren New nous fit lire :
> Nobody used TP4 over a network that will work fine with TP0.

Unless the "network" is only a part of the path.
(Interconnecting 2 Lan/Ethernet with pair of X.25 links: the system on
the lan are probably better using TP4 and the X.25 gateways just have to
push the clnp packets in the X.25 links. On these gateways, it's
probably simpler to have the application use also a TP4, even if they
could simplify the connections crossing only X.25 to use only a TP0).

Now, if I could have convinced the customer to use IS-IS on the
redundent four gateways per lan, that would have saved a few nightmares
about the routing table on the lan... and less money for my company on
the long run ;-)

Regarding IP-over-ATM, it depends from where you look (as you are
smashing the model inside another instance):
From IP (layer 3), ATM is simply a link (or set of links) (layer 2)
From ATM, it is providing nearly level 4 service. (and even more)

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On 8/21/2011 3:19 AM, Orchid XP v8 wrote:

>> I seems only fitting that by 2036 the US might be so fucking stupid that
>> they couldn't build a log cabin from his time, let alone work out why
>> living in one would be preferable to huddling under a tree, or wearing
>> animal skins in a cave... Or, so it sometimes seems the trajectory of
>> some of this stupid shit is headed.
>
> I think sometimes it's hard to tell whether the entire world is stupid,
> or just a vocal minority.
>
Vocal minority, plus a big non-vocal minority, who just want shit to 
work, but not why or how. Just had one bozo on MSNBC last night all but 
*admit* that Rick Perry, the Texas governor, who has driving his state 
into a worse condition than the rest of the country, but now wants to 
run to be president, is selling his constituents his own ideas, based on 
fear, deception, and misinformation, because, "people are reacting to 
what they feel is wrong, not the facts. The facts, such as Bush's last 
days being a hemorrhaging of jobs, while Obama managed to at least 
stabilize things, are basically irrelevant to the process of deciding 
who the next Republican candidate is, or whether he will be elected."

The mans entire argument seemed to hinge in this being perfectly OK, 
nothing wrong with it, for the most part, and entirely irrelevant to the 
well being of the country. It was just how the right wing had to "sell" 
the problem to their ignorant, stupid, angry, and wanting things to get 
better, constituents. The fact that none of what was being sold to them 
can or will solve the problems, most of it is stuff that caused them in 
the first place, and that actually basing your policies of reality is 
*necessary* to fix things, where all meaningless. My jaw would have 
dropped, but it still hadn't receded from the floor from earlier, when 
Bachman claimed that people where still afraid of the rising power of 
the USSR (yeah, Soviet Russia), which she apparently failed to not the 
fall of, while working cleverly inside the IRS to undermine the federal 
tax system, before she decided to run for office some place else.

Fact is, most people don't want to know anything. Its inconvenient to do 
so. So, the end game of that is that what sells, i.e., what speaks to 
the gut at the time, matters, and silly things like facts, statistics, 
truth.. well, those just don't sell as well, so fewer people will listen 
to them. As long as people, "trust their gut", which has the brains of 
Homer Simpson...

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On 8/21/2011 3:16 AM, Orchid XP v8 wrote:
>>> What part of
>>>
>>> | U x V | = |U| * |V| * cos a
>>>
>>> do you *not* understand? :-P
>
>> Would be a lot simpler if the damn stuff you have to use it in
>> "understood" all that shit, natively. The problem I always run into is
>> that you can find a perfectly comprehensible form of something some
>> place, but it is only applicable is you a) do it by hand, or b) know how
>> to derive some completely bloody different set of equations, that the
>> damn computer will understand. Its like knowing, sort of, how to speak
>> some obscure Chinese dialect, but then finding out that you need to
>> *write* the information down in German, which for which the only work
>> you know is the one applying to yourself, Dummkopf.
>>
>> Well, not exactly the same case, but if you don't have all the other
>> stuff in between the two concepts, understanding what the math is doing
>> in the "human" version won't get you any closer to understanding how the
>> hell the computer needs to deal with it.
>
> I'm having difficulty following what you're trying to say here.
>
Just that, in such a case, the problem isn't just translating between 
languages, its knowing "which" of perhaps dozens of words might 
correctly convey the original details. You could, without a lot of 
problems, pick German words that muddle the meaning so badly its hard to 
work out what the original even meant. This is actually even more the 
case if you went from German to Chinese, since there is like a small 
handful, and one major, written form of it, but like I don't know how 
many dialects. Its the only language in the world where you write dog 
nearly the same way in every single case, but there are 20 ways to "say" 
it, some of them nothing at all alike.

If you don't know what the "intended" meaning is, i.e., the stuff in 
between, the result is going to end up being complete nonsense.

>> The original post in this, describing deriving the two equations needed
>> for Mandelbrot, from the original non-computer usable one, is a perfect
>> example. My reaction is, "Show the math, step by step, because WTF?" lol
>
> Yeah. All the textbooks advanced enough to talk about complex dynamical
> systems assume that you *already* know everything there is to know about
> complex numbers (a much less advanced topic, comparatively speaking).
>
> The first equation *is* useable in some software packages. But usually
> you need to expand out the real and imaginary parts seperately - a step
> which isn't mentioned anywhere and isn't described in any detail because
> it's presumed to be "obvious".
>
>
>
> I assume that was a rhetorical question, but I'll answer anyway...
>...

Uh.. Will go over that some time and try to work out what you did. lol 
Though, I could probably, based on the stuff he already gave, at least 
make an attempt at it without you having helped. I did get far enough in 
math to do some of that. I just am not sure I remember all the factoring 
and other stuff clearly enough to get it right.

But, yeah, exactly. If you don't know all the stuff "between", you won't 
get any place, other than confused.

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On 8/21/2011 3:58 PM, Patrick Elliott wrote:
> Vocal minority, plus a big non-vocal minority
That should have been "plus a big non-vocal majority".

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On 20/08/2011 03:43 PM, Darren New wrote:
> On 8/20/2011 4:11, Warp wrote:
>> Drawing an accurate antialiased line (of certain width) is not a trivial
>> problem. Basically for each pixel you need to calculate how much of it is
>> covered by the line. Doing this accurately with integer math only can be
>> complicated.
>
> I am not sure you can do it accurately with integer math at all, given
> that there's a "portion of a pixel" involved in there somewhere. At best
> you'd be working in scaled fixed-point.

You realise that all of the quantities involved are rational, right? And 
that a rational number is just two integers?

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