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Gotta love a country where the majority of the residents still think "Waltzing Matilda" should be the national anthem.

Although, after a brief google, I see it has rather a more complex meaning than I would've ever guessed.

c'mon... THIS is ugly?!?!?! I can see where the other poster is coming from about jdoom not being close to its roots, the models and textures can seem too "bright" for the dark and gothic feel of doom, but I don't think it looks ugly to say the least. :-S

I've played most of the other source ports, this is still my favorite though. I love doom legacies bots, wish jdoom had them. :-( Haven't tried zdoom yet though... what features does it have that jdoom doesn't? (It's home page is a bit spartan and I feel the need to play through tnt again. :-D)

Why is this modded funny? The Zeroth law (see Zeroth Law) was for me something that I always considered very important in the Asimov world.

I already mentioned this in another post, but these people created a ray tracer with non-instantaneous values of c, like 1m/s. They have a few interesting animations on their site that simulate doppler shift and some of the relativistic effects that occur when travelling at speeds approaching c.

-jim

Cool! They've changed the speed of light!

I know you're joking, but these people really did make a ray tracer where you can change the value of c. They have a few animations where they set the speed of light to small values like 1m/s.

-jim

the client had about 6 GB of compressed data and wanted to send it to all of their stores nightly.

I'm curious, was that 6GB of completely new data every night? I would've thought that there aren't many businesses that generate that quantity of new data daily. If not why don't you send the differences and save money and operator/transmission time? rsync is your friend.

---

User friendly Windows/XP.
User unfriendly Windows/XP license.

I went and reread some of the articles on that particular experiment, and if you are right, then it seems these articles are wrong (not unknown in reporting a highly technical field, but one of the is the Quantum Optics Group press release).

That press release says "the objects transported are extremely small particles like electrons and photons". That sounds like physical teleportation, not teleportation of an abstract (like information).

Another article quotes the lead scientist: "What we have demonstrated here is that we can take billions of photons, destroy them simultaneously, and then recreate them in another place," Dr Lam says. (BBC).

That sounds a lot like teleportation to me. Also, if the beam is destroyed and an existing beam is modified to become a replica of the first, what happens to the energy in the first beam? I understood "destroyed" to mean gone, not transformed into another type of energy. If one beam is destroyed (not transformed), and another not created, isn't that a net loss of energy?

The Canberra Times - I read it in the dead tree version - had a piece a week or so ago where a researcher from RSES,ANU saying that the crater was obviously volcanic from the nature of the rocks.

And right now some law firm could be tracking down every use of the phrase 'Murphy's law' on behalf of the family of Capt. Edward A. Murphy and some other law firm could be tracking down every use of 'Spoonerism' for the family of The Reverend W. A. Spooner... They'll get to Furphy sooner or later, as well.

Not to mention McDonald's absurd claim of trademark on the 'Mc' prefix!

This is the insanity that the concept of 'Intellectual Property' has condemned us to. When will the public get fed-up enough to rebel and prod the Congress to moderate the law?

What you just described is basically rsync done badly. I think squid was working on incorporating it.

And I thought MS Windows was supposed to be easier to install than other OSs, say Linux, where the general complaint by Windows users trying Linux out is that the installation is a complicated matter, not the easy, put in CD and sit back, watching the pretty little windows do their work. I must have misread your post that I have to manually configure things to provide a secure web access to Windows Update to get the patches I thought came when you installed "out of the box". [I always chuckle to myself when I think of this.]

He copies a proprietary protocol and he expects Microsoft to make sure their implementation is interoperable with his?

Since when was SMB Microsoft property. (hint: Microsoft networking is an implementation of SMB.)

It is perfectly fine to criticise a company that takes an open protocol and the attempts to make their implementation incompatible with the others.

Anyone know of a raytracer that correctly reproduces the double-slit experiment? :)

No, but there is one that models the effects of relativity.

-jim

Linkage: The Internationale.

I absolutely agree.
CD-R's are for daily/frequent use.
For serious archiving, keep copies on multiple hard drives. Tools like
rsync make this very easy.

Australia has a long history of introduced species causing damage. The most obvious to people living in sydney at the moment is the Indian Mynah, after humans themselves ;-)

Too right, Sun never make good use of technology they didn't invent ! Oh, wait...

"Isn't it about time we ditched SCP for something http://samba.anu.edu.au/rsync/better?"

Rsync. You can even have it checksum your files. . .

In the scramjet reasearch buisiness, 10 seconds is an eternity. Most institutions who are researching this technology are universities and the like who don't have access to B-52s, rocket boosters, and the other equipment needed to actually flight test scramjets. Rather, they are forced to rely on less expensive wind tunnels. To simulate >mach 6 airflow (scramjet operational range), they either use an enourmous piston driven system, or a series of pressure build ups with a simultaneaous release. Regardless of the method, these techniques generally can't provide more than 5 milliseconds of flow time to test the engine. If you compare testing engines in 5 ms bursts to one sustained 10 s flight, the perspective kind of changes your opinion on how long 10 s is.

If you want a good paper on the subject, I suggest this one from the Australian National University.

Yeah right. Observatory right in the middle of a pine forrest. Great news until it catches fire and burns down your telescope, like what happened at Mt Stromlo observatory in australia 18months ago. See here.

Compile Anal Cox's Linux kernel with gcc -O3 -s and the first several thousand bytes show the Communist Manifesto. No joke. Pure ascii text, check it out in a hex editor!

Manifesto of the Communist Party

That is an excellent point. And there is actually a paper discussing the privacy implications of Orkut, Friendster, Plaxo, etc... here.

why the big quote from the U.S. Constitution? . . . Can't you quote someting Australian? :-)

No, sorry. Can't quote anything Australian on the issue of freedom of speech or the press. Australia has no constitutional clause or bill of rights on this topic. These issues seem to be decided by Australia's High Court, which since 1992 has said that there is an implied right in the Australian constitution to freedom of expression of public political topics, but not on much else.

What the Australian constitution does say is, "Chapter I. Sec. 51.The Parliament shall, subject to this Constitution, have power to make laws for the peace, order, and good government of the Commonwealth with respect to: ... (xviii.) Copyrights, patents of inventions and designs, and trade marks." This is a great deal simpler than the version found in the U.S. Constitution: "Article I. Section 8. The Congress shall have power . . . To promote the progress of science and useful arts, by securing for limited times to authors and inventors the exclusive right to their respective writings and discoveries". The actual Australian Copyright Law of 1968 makes for pretty dense reading.

IANA Australian (in fact, IAA American), but it seems that Australia lacks a rallying cry to match that part of the U.S. constitution that the *IAA keeps trying to monopolize for themselves: Amendment I. Congress shall make no law . . . abridging the freedom of speech, or of the press. . . .

None of this should be taken as a disparagement of Australia, of course. For instance, the U.S. copyright laws are at least as dense and a good deal more restrictive besides. It just seems that prohibiting the ownership and use of presses (e.g. CD burners) in the U.S. would involve slightly more hypocrisy than doing so in Australia. It is an equally bad idea in both places.

At ANU, we learnt assembly alongside Modula-2 (a designed-for-education procedural programming language, afaik) in first year. Was great fun. I still remember the snickers emitted when discussing our text: "Oh My! Modula-2"

Thinking back, I remember shortly after our 3rd assignment how we all loved assembly, cause we got to code in octal instead of using binary instructions!

It's a combination of Linux, MySQL, and Apache. Three of the open sores communities' prized "technologies" have shown they cannot scale and are hopelessly behind Microsoft. Find a server with Windows Server 2003, MS SQL Server, and IIS and you'll see benchmarks that blows away Free software.

I use mine as a firewall & router for my personal network, which unfortunately sits on dialup. It works great with IPFilter (http://coombs.anu.edu.au/ipfilter/)
and Solaris 9.

I intend to use it with a cable modem after I move elsewhere and get broadband. I have a 2nd PCI NIC installed, a Linksys I bought for $5 off eBay, using drivers from here-- http://garrett.damore.org/software/ethernet/suppor t.shtml
configured as 'afe0'. Although I don't currently use it, so I haven't really "stress tested" it yet.

1. Buckley's
2. None
   
   For all you furry-ners it means pretty much the same as "Sweet FA" / "A SnowBall in Hell" / "Hell Freezes Over".Buckley's Chance William Buckley

From poking around on their website, here's a preprint article, and there's another paper which discusses spectroscopic confirmation.

These are Lyman emitting galaxies, initially identified using a special camera with narrow band filters targeted at this redshift (a previously known z = 2.38 cluster was in the field which I think is why they picked it). They then used a multi-object spectrograph (2dF) to spectroscopically confirm the redshifts (second paper).

Doug

An interesting conjecture, but you'd have to provide some sort of evidence to back it up. The "famous" bible codes are clearly nonsense - you can tweak the algorithm to extract just about anything from any text (see here for an example). Do you have some alternative code that stands up better to scrutiny?

Also, at the time the books in the bible were written, accurate transcription wasn't considered nearly as important as it is today. The stories were part of an oral tradition anyway, and would have evolved in the telling before ever being committed to paper. Early scribes were aware of this and would not have thought twice about "correcting" parts of the story that didn't, to them, seem to be right.

Another rabbit virus called callicivirus was introduced about 10 years ago, which has also helped to bring the population down to a less damaging level.

There are dozens of other introduced pests that hugely damage the Australian natural environment and agricultural productivity, from cats, to weeds like Paterson's Curse. Due to this, and past successes, Australian governments throw a lot of money at research into biological control.

Use ipfilter, which has a nat module built in. Works like a champ. I've used this setup on FreeBSD and OpenBSD, even on older hardware (200Mhz Pentium Pro) it can handle 3 zones on a (almost) saturated T1.

Didn't Robin Williams do this already in Bicentennial Man? There was even a scene where they talked abou the three laws of robotics.

Actually, not very many anthropologists these days do much linguistic work. That's partly because linguistics has developed as a separate field and partly because cultural anthropology was largely taken over by Postmodernists, as a result of which it has nearly died. Most research on "exotic" languages these days is done either by linguists or by missionaries (who want to translate the New Testament).

I am a linguist and have done extensive fieldwork, mostly on Carrier, the native language of a large region of northern British Columbia. (I also hack a little. Once upon a time I wrote the head-final shell mentioned in Charles Dodgson's comment.) Software is increasingly used for this kind of work, but for the most part it is not the sort of NLP software provided on the Morphix-NLP CD. A lot of that software is useful primarily if you've got a large corpus to work with, and it often presupposes that some basic resources exist, such as a lexicon, or at least a wordlist with part of speech information. For many languages even basic resources such as a lexicon don't exist or aren't available in electronic form, and when you're dealing with really small languages, there aren't any ready-made corpora, such as news text. If you want a text corpus, you've got to make it yourself, usually by recording people telling stories or whatever, and transcribing it. This is an important part of fieldwork, but its incredibly slow and tedious.

There are some tools designed specifically for this kind of linguistic research. One is Transcriber, a tool that assists a human being in transcribing audio recordings. One of the older tools is Shoebox a dictionary database program for field linguists, originally written to run under DOS.

Some of us have used Unix tools to extract and process information, e.g. grep to do regular expression searches. Ken Church at Bell Labs used to give a tutorial "Unix for Poets" on how to use Unix tools for linguistics. Here is his handout. For example, I've produced dictionaries of several dialects of Carrier using scripts written mostly in AWK plus the usual Unix tools, controlled by elaborate Makefiles. Some of us also use emacs a lot, not only as an editor but for doing searches. If you're interested in what kinds of software are of interest to linguists, you might check out the Computational Resources for Linguistic Research page.

It is worth mentioning that spread of the internet has made available a lot of useful material for linguistic research. There are now quite a few languages for which you can obtain a good chunk of text (say at least 100K words), and often you can find parallel text (that is, the language you're interested in plus a translation into English or another language that is useful to you). But this works mostly for relatively big languages, that is, say, languages with a million or more speakers. There are around 340 such languages, depending on how you count, about 2% of the world's oral languages.

One topic that concerns some of us is how software and other technology can speed up the process of documenting dying languages. Languages are rapidly become extinct - some experts estimate that as many as 90% of the languages currently spoken will be extinct in 100 years. [Computer languages may be proliferating at the same rate.:)] The late Ken Hale had seven languages die on him. If we don't find a way to speed up the documentation, or slow down the rate of extinction, most of those languages are going to die without very much being known about them.

ACT is *the capital* city of Australia, seat of federal government, part time home of australian pollies (politicians), home of australian federal public service, houses adf hq (moved from vic barracks in melbourne - my home), home of various australian intelligence agencies (asis, asio) , location for diplomatic embassies, etc. Also home of Australian National University, Andrew Tridgell of Samba and rsync fame.

Canberra is *not underfunded*. It is in a sense an *artifical* city created as a political compromise to house the australian capital - after a fight broke betweem Victoria and Sydney around federation around 1901. The solution Canberra, a territory created in the NSW outback. Its sole purpose it to house government and its associated functions.

as for being less influential ... in australia its the national capital and houses the federal government - q.e.d. As for the rest of the world ... what does it matter?

ACT is *the capital* city of Australia, seat of federal government, part time home of australian pollies (politicians), home of australian federal public service, houses adf hq (moved from vic barracks in melbourne - my home), home of various australian intelligence agencies (asis, asio) , location for diplomatic embassies, etc. Also home of Australian National University, Andrew Tridgell of Samba and rsync fame.

Canberra is *not underfunded*. It is in a sense an *artifical* city created as a political compromise to house the australian capital - after a fight broke betweem Victoria and Sydney around federation around 1901. The solution Canberra, a territory created in the NSW outback. Its sole purpose it to house government and its associated functions.

as for being less influential ... in australia its the national capital and houses the federal government - q.e.d. As for the rest of the world ... what does it matter?

ACT is *the capital* city of Australia, seat of federal government, part time home of australian pollies (politicians), home of australian federal public service, houses adf hq (moved from vic barracks in melbourne - my home), home of various australian intelligence agencies (asis, asio) , location for diplomatic embassies, etc. Also home of Australian National University, Andrew Tridgell of Samba and rsync fame.

Canberra is *not underfunded*. It is in a sense an *artifical* city created as a political compromise to house the australian capital - after a fight broke betweem Victoria and Sydney around federation around 1901. The solution Canberra, a territory created in the NSW outback. Its sole purpose it to house government and its associated functions.

as for being less influential ... in australia its the national capital and houses the federal government - q.e.d. As for the rest of the world ... what does it matter?

Dr Gerard Bord is a beaut person. He's at the Plasma Research Laboratory (PRL) at the Australian National University (ANU) in Canberra.

He agreed to do two talks at an Amateur Radio conference OneTech'02 that I organised a year ago: one on BushLAN (actually delivered very ably by a graduate student, Ben Heslop) and another on "Using plasma to produce dynamically configurable antenna and lens structures". (i.e. turning what amounts to a flourescent light into an antenna)

I've met him several times since then at various meetings, and he is always approachable and very helpful with his knowledge.

Dr Gerard Bord is a beaut person. He's at the Plasma Research Laboratory (PRL) at the Australian National University (ANU) in Canberra.

He agreed to do two talks at an Amateur Radio conference OneTech'02 that I organised a year ago: one on BushLAN (actually delivered very ably by a graduate student, Ben Heslop) and another on "Using plasma to produce dynamically configurable antenna and lens structures". (i.e. turning what amounts to a flourescent light into an antenna)

I've met him several times since then at various meetings, and he is always approachable and very helpful with his knowledge.

True - a nice real time map of ionosphere reflection characteristics can be found here . The researchers themselves don't ever mention ionospheric bouncing.

On an unrelated not, the university I work at runs their own ionosonde. They used to have trouble with the station being vandalised until they put up a sign "Warning: this facility frequently bathed in high frequency electromagnetic radiation". The HF radiation in question was sunlight, but there hasn't been any problems since.

They seems very serious and it looks like a lot of thought has gone into it, judging by their publication list. For some retarded reason all the actual documents are in a restricted directory. I remember when academia was all about sharing ideas, now everyone's worried that someone else might beat them to the start up company.

ANU... go to bottom of page

Conquering that 'last mile'

Pioneering work by physicists and engineers at ANU to build a cheap, simple and robust wireless communication system may soon see regional Australia getting a workable connection to the Internet. The system is called BushLAN, and it's all about bridging that 'last mile'.

Regional Australia has never had adequate access to the Internet. It's either not available, too expensive or unreliable. A major part of the problem is the 'last mile' of access. This 'last mile' is the connection between the central communications hub in a local town to individual residences and businesses. Unfortunately, the 'last mile' is usually much more than just a mile. In rural areas such as Cowra, for example, the last mile has been measured to be anywhere from three to 100 kilometres from the town centre. In more isolated areas it can be much greater.

The cost of cabling to only a few customers over these distances is prohibitive and current wireless solutions aren't practical. Satellite connections are expensive and usually require a cable connection for a user to send information out (ie they receive downloads from a satellite but send information out via the telephone). There are ground-based wireless connections commercially available but these operate in microwave frequencies using directional antennas that require a clear line of sight to function. Given Australia's sparse population and frequently hilly terrain this would require a large number of repeater stations.

Dr Gerard Borg is a plasma physicist at the Research School of Physical Sciences and Engineering. His work with radio transmission has convinced him that the last mile could be effectively bridged using the low-VHF radio spectrum. This part of the radio spectrum has much longer wavelengths than the microwave frequencies used by other wireless systems and this allows signals to be transmitted further without the need for expensive repeaters or satellites. What's more, it doesn't depend on line of sight as the signal has the ability to go around mountains and other large obstacles in the landscape. At the moment the low VHF radio spectrum is used to transmit TV signals but with the decommissioning of some analogue TV bands in 2008 (digital TV uses higher frequency radio) there's an opportunity to switch this unused spectrum over to data connections for regional Australia.

BushLAN (Bush - Local Area Network), as the system is called, has the potential to provide remote users in regional Australia with a permanent, high-quality Internet connection (at more than 100 kb/sec) at an affordable price. However, to get BushLAN up and running, many technical and marketing aspects of this multi-faceted system have to be developed first. To achieve his goal, Dr Borg has enlisted the assistance of a wide range of students from the Faculty of Engineering and Information Technology who have taken on the various jobs associated with the system as part of their Honours, Masters or Doctoral projects.

"The practical nature of BushLAN and its relevance to regional Australia really attracts the students," says Dr Borg. "Once they're involved, they become highly motivated about what we're trying to achieve. Quite often they finish the formal part of their work for their thesis, but then they stay on working on the project through the Christmas vacation."

The next step for BushLAN is to set up local trials to test transmissions, and then work with interested Internet service providers to see how BushLAN can be integrated into existing information systems. The hope is that with BushLAN as part of the system, the 'final mile' will no longer be an unbeatable hurdle.

Science Reporter is brought to you by the National Institute of Bioscience, the National Institute of Engineering and Information Sciences, the National Institute for the Environment, the National Institute of Health and Human Sciences and the National Institute of Physical Sciences. Written by David Salt.

For more information on any of the stories presented here please visit http://ni.anu.edu.au/

Nature is pretty robust.

Don't worry about nature. There are plenty of examples that we'll make it worse for ourselves by continuing being ignorant and claiming to be backed up by science (it's NOT, science cannot back up something that is unknown and unproven).

A simple example on the back off my head: Imported rabbits in Australia: http://rubens.anu.edu.au/student.projects/rabbits/ home.html

Check out this website: http://www.alternativescience.com

Perhaps it's like The Bible Code? Look hard enough into the moderation patterns and you can make predictions of the future.

Oooh look, Duke Nukem Forever!

Best wishes,
Mike.

We all know which backwater these litigation crazed reptiles (aka music industry executives) were bred in. Kill them now, before they get a chance to breed.

You have to understand: it's not that music industry executives always reproduce at that rate. It's just that Australia doesn't have any natural predators to counter-act the growth of the entertainment industry. Here in America, for example, our high population of lawyers and politicians ensures that there will always be _someone_ who wants to eat a music executive.

Stable Isotope analysis of coral by ANU's Research School suggests a global effect.

http://wwwrses.anu.edu.au/environment/eePages/eeCu rrentResearch/research_Hendy2.html

Is there a special prize for 1st post and karma whore in one?

Here goes my entry:

These folks are some of the same great people who are supposed to be working for you anyway, plus a smattering of teenagers too young to work at Redmond, hackers, virus creators, and a menagerie of others with whom you will feel great pride in entrusting your IT infrastructure.

Tridge (defined here and here), the smartest man in Australian IT, obviously qualifies and Bill Gates does not (except in his own humble eyes). The only problem remaining is, where does Tridge fit in Howard's categories? Is he your employee? No. Is he a teenager, albeit a smattered one? Not for a long time, to Susan's immense relief. I must mention in defense of teenagers, though, that at least one well-known project has been managed by a 13-year-old, and managed well. A hacker? Since Howard evidently means "cracker", that's a resounding "no". Virus creators? No, although I'm sure SaMBa has transported and safely stored quite a few viruses in its day. I guess he fits in "menagerie of others", which is to say, no category at all. I could run up a list of another hundred or so such people in one day.

Not to put too fine a point on it, Howard Strauss is talking out of his rear, so has evidently forgotten that magic rule: "'tis better to remain silent and be thought a fool, than to open your mouth and remove all doubt."

rsync , anyone?

Perhaps you are wanting to say "look at linux, the product of many that is inherently better." I will respond by asking you to look at Mandrake, SuSe, and Red Hat. All of them are companies, smaller than the ones you hate, but companies nonetheless.

And you hate politics and politicians who have no regard for a small few? Would you like it if they always had regard for the minority? Think about it, there is a minority of people who would like kiddie porn to be legal. There is a minority that would like us to put a military base on the moon. If the minority were represented all the time, no decisions could be effectively made, and if they were, it would only be the minority of those who have power.

Do you dislike your representative? Campaign to have them removed. Do you dislike a certain law that might be passed? Campaign to have it killed. The key is that it is all in your hands. The louder noise you make, the more people will listten. Indeed, for you to be spitting drivel out in any way requires you to make an action to back it up -- something that is unique in our modern world. It's never been brighter because the little guy can raise some hell.

Bully back to you. Without freedom, you reap those profits only at the pleasure of those in power. And without privacy, there is no freedom. Try this one, or talk to anyone who lived in England in the '60s and '70s.

No, SMB is and always has been a very published spec.

See this informative page:
http://samba.anu.edu.au/cifs/docs/what-is-smb.html