shellac

I've attempted to get researchers to use lossless H.264 to encode CT scans. They typically use directories full of tiffs. Even with intra-slice compression (i.e. tiff compression) they are pretty huge. But H.264 will let you recover the original images to the individual bit, and save a huge amount of space thanks to inter-slice similarities.

They are still using directories of tiff, though.

> The German acronym (DDR) is much better known among Eastern Europeans.

And in the UK. Presumably because it was used in athletic meetings and on cars. Never seen 'GDR', we'd just use 'East Germany'.

The river Taff flows through Cardiff, and 'taffy' was used as a derogatory term for Welsh people from this origin.

I can't pretend I've heard anyone use it since the 80s.

'Anonymisation' schemes are a little like encryption, in that they just get monotonically weaker over time as people work out attacks. But the attacks tend to be much worse. I work in academic open data publishing, and the netflix prize (https://arxiv.org/abs/cs/0610105) hangs over our heads.

But what this illustrates to me is that researchers are just really careless, despite everything we make them agree to in data transfer agreements. It seems absurd to have little cubicles like this https://safepodnetwork.ac.uk/ (think Mission Impossible 1) but I do despair.

--DRESS means your clothes with fall off.

I think this has just been fixed. A bit of dark mode was leaking into light in the css.

My (really limited) understanding is that 'British subject' was the status of people in the British empire. It's now reduced to just some people born pre-1949 in Ireland and India. They have many of the rights of citizens, and can become citizens via a simpler route than other non-nationals.

Then somebody needs to let the government know, because the relevant 1981 act is "[a]n Act to make fresh provision about citizenship and nationality". In that 'British subjects' are a quite limited subset of citizens. Most British people are citizens, not subjects.

https://www.legislation.gov.uk/ukpga/1981/61/contents

No, Braun invented the cathode ray tube.

It's in the article. Not sure it had his name, but certainly his family name since he looked for records concerning his relatives.

Curses, I was close. Also: yikes to the design.

Not exactly true, but they deprecated absolutely everything that made it a date. It expresses deep regret in the medium of annotations:

https://javaalmanac.io/jdk/1.2/api/java/util/Date.html

(I can't find the 1.1 docs, but they were the same)

It's one of my favourite examples of how languages pretty much always get date and time hopelessly wrong initially. Java now has one of the best temporal APIs.

Are you saying WebDAV doesn't support range requests?

> This isn't a pyramid?

Thank you for saying this. It immediately drove me crazy.

Academic publishing is _notoriously_ profitable. Authorship and the bulk of the editorial process is done by others for free, and these days you often aren't even creating a physical copy. Their overheads are really pretty minimal. What the money (subscriptions and / or APCs) gets is the kudos associated with the publication.

It is reasonable to say: well if they aren't providing anything of value then the market ought to bypass them. The reality is that the publishers have been very canny in protecting their position, and sharp practice is rife.

> Instead of journals getting revenue from subscribers, they charge authors an “Article Processing Charge” (APC)

Just to be clear this is specifically _gold open access_. There are other options like green (author can make article available elsewhere for free) and diamond (gold with no charge).

> QL-looking for the Spectrum

I was going to object, but probably right to just skip the horror of the true Spectrum keyboard.

It sounds like this will include Teesworks, one of the dodgiest land deals of recent years. For a small investment two people essentially held the entire thing to ransom and secured options on an astonishing amount government money.

You can hear Richard Brooks summarise the situation (in 2023) here: https://www.private-eye.co.uk/podcast/76

The author works in Google developer relations, and while devrel aren't quite marketing they will use the latest and greatest Google hammer.

The article states "I currently run an Ampere Arm server in my rack with Linux and ZFS as my primary storage server" and this is just explaining how to try it out on the Pi, which I found surprisingly interesting. I am glad people like the N100s and wish they would find more relevant articles to talk about them.

> Are there any good Linux distros left with 32-bit x86 support?

When your kernel stopped support over a decade ago (iirc) it does seem inevitable that distros will slowly evaporate.

It's a minor thing, but:

> Most of my open source work followed Unix philosophy, so the packages did one thing at a time.

Nobody has suggested that libc -- to take the most obvious example -- is against the Unix philosophy. Debates occur around whether whether commands / daemons do too much (recent poster child being systemd) or aren't composable.

> Containerization executes each Linux container inside of its own lightweight virtual machine.

That’s an interesting difference from other Mac container systems. Also (more obvious) use Rosetta 2.

If I had to guess, colima? But there are a number of open source projects using Apple's virtualisation technologies to run a linux VM to host docker-type containers.

Once you have an engine podman might be the best choice to manage containers, or docker.

Java has two somewhat related projects in this space, and it does add a substantial cost to language changes (assuming you commit to keep expression trees up to date). https://openjdk.org/projects/babylon/ is the most interesting to me, as a linq+++ potentially.

Not that you have to use all caps for acronyms, e.g. scuba, radar, laser.

Trade deficit is a partial view of matters, and may not mean much anyway. It's a partial view in that there are a bunch of things it doesn't cover like inward investment. And it may not mean much in the same way my household runs a trade deficit with the local shop, which I have sustained for decades with no obvious ill effect beside my waistline.

Hard links are only used on HFS+. APFS has snapshot support.

Article 10 of the European Convention on Human Rights is enshrined in legislation in the UK and Ireland, and offers protections for signatories of the convention.

(Edit: Oh, and the Bill of Rights gives parliamentarians quite an extreme version)

> over pip

It's a much more complete tool than pip. If you've used poetry, or (in other languages) cargo, bundler, maven, then it's like that (and faster than poetry).

If you haven't, in addition to installing dependencies it will manage and lock their versions (no requirements.txt, and much more robust), look after the environment (no venv step), hold your hand creating projects, and probably other things.

Edit to add: the one thing it won't do is replace conda et al, nor is it intended to.