Slashdot Mirror

I don't know if it's quite what you are looking for, but cvsgraph makes graphs from cvs repositories. Might be a good starting point.

What the hell is this guy bellowing about?

I don't know how to do the correct mathematical notation in HTML. But there is an image here.

Gues who had an advertisement on the page when I saw it?

... was the cold fusion experiment mentioned above a bust: yep....

Sigh. Above where? Not in this thread Someone else didn't read the article's abstracts, the Navy tech teport, or any of their cited peer-reviewed scientific publications.

Please stop living in 1990. The last peer-reviewed report of negative research results was in late 1994, and now the positive results outnumber the negative about 2-to-1.

If you're looking for something novel that always works, try codeposition fusion. It was invented by the U.S. Navy in San Diego, and that's what the tech report in the parent article is all about.

... The evidence is not there....

Looks like someone didn't read the article's abstracts, nor their peer-reviewed citations, nor the multi-megabyte U.S. Navy SPAWAR/San Diego technical report.

Unsurprising.

If you want to count, instead of making unsubstantiated claims, look for the strings "res+" and "res-" in Dieter Britz's Cold Fusion Bibliography which contains nearly every peer-reviewed cold fusion article ever published in the scientific literature. The negative results got off to a strong early lead (hence the controversy and ridicule) but the positive results now lead the negative results about 450 to 250. The most important thing to note is that there have been NO negative results published since 1995. I guess people figured it out after five years. Too bad the public's mass consciousness is seemingly indelibly etched.

The evidence IS there. Take a look!

Next they'll go after little "Evil Inside" logos that constitute fair use in free speech (as satire, political protest) as laid down by Falwell v. Flint and the First Amendment. Heck, one can make a completely valid argument that the same would apply to "Linux Inside. How can someone own a trademark on the expression of one object being within another?

"Yoga Inside" has no chance of diluting the Intel brand; however, Intel's behaviour does. Nobody's going to run around and say that they're computer is a "Yoga Inside". Your rant is spurrious.

I'm deeply suspicious of changes to trademark law. Got to love the recent changes that have been made to copyright law.

<sarcasm>Thanks, Disney!</sarcasm>. If this trademark stuff gets as out-of-whack, maybe we'll be using XPortholes instead of XWindows a few years down the road.

Yep, and Lomborg, who was denied an opportunity to respond has addressed this hatchet job on one of his sites:
Lomborg's Responses

Your google cache link does not work. This link does. The contributions to the debate are all in pdf format for some reason.

Lombord has taken the time to write detailed responses to those rebuttals.

> the screen-shot still shows the flaws of antialiasing under Linux

You are right that the k and the W don't look good, but that does not have anything to do with your kernel, but rather the fact that Verdana and Times should not be antialiased at that size. Antialiasing these fonts at that size with hinting enabled is really font murder.

You don't want hinting enabled with antialiasing at that size, because hinting is a way to distort the fonts so that they can be rendered at very low resolution, and antialiasing is essentially a cheasy way to increase resolution. That is why you see the weird "k": the hints don't expect the resolution to be this high.

Here is a piece of an actual screenshot, showing Verdana mostly un-antialiased, and antialiased in the preview box in the fontselector.

As others pointed out, to match Windows in quality you will need high quality fonts. Of couse, the MS/Monotype fonts (Ariel, Verdana, Trebuchet, etc) are well done and especially well-hinted (if you don't antialias them at sizes where they shouldn't be), but actually the Luxi fonts that are shipping with XFree86 4.2 are not bad - their hints just need some work.

For fun, I hinted Luxi Sans (with the Gimp) at a few sizes. This is not a real screenshot, but it does show how it could look with better hints. (Note that the bold antialiased Luxi Serif is not hinted at all - a bit of careful hinting would probably improve it somewhat).

> anti-aliasing algorithms itself could
> probably be much improved, although the
> Freetype page points out that Apple patents

This is nonsens. The Apple patent covers the interpreter for the hints in TrueType fonts. Most distributions turn the interpreter on, regardless of the patent, and in fact the bad rendering of the "k" that you complain about is there precisely because both interpreter and antialiasing were used.

> the screen-shot still shows the flaws of antialiasing under Linux

You are right that the k and the W don't look good, but that does not have anything to do with your kernel, but rather the fact that Verdana and Times should not be antialiased at that size. Antialiasing these fonts at that size with hinting enabled is really font murder.

You don't want hinting enabled with antialiasing at that size, because hinting is a way to distort the fonts so that they can be rendered at very low resolution, and antialiasing is essentially a cheasy way to increase resolution. That is why you see the weird "k": the hints don't expect the resolution to be this high.

Here is a piece of an actual screenshot, showing Verdana mostly un-antialiased, and antialiased in the preview box in the fontselector.

As others pointed out, to match Windows in quality you will need high quality fonts. Of couse, the MS/Monotype fonts (Ariel, Verdana, Trebuchet, etc) are well done and especially well-hinted (if you don't antialias them at sizes where they shouldn't be), but actually the Luxi fonts that are shipping with XFree86 4.2 are not bad - their hints just need some work.

For fun, I hinted Luxi Sans (with the Gimp) at a few sizes. This is not a real screenshot, but it does show how it could look with better hints. (Note that the bold antialiased Luxi Serif is not hinted at all - a bit of careful hinting would probably improve it somewhat).

> anti-aliasing algorithms itself could
> probably be much improved, although the
> Freetype page points out that Apple patents

This is nonsens. The Apple patent covers the interpreter for the hints in TrueType fonts. Most distributions turn the interpreter on, regardless of the patent, and in fact the bad rendering of the "k" that you complain about is there precisely because both interpreter and antialiasing were used.

Codeposition fusion might not only relieve a significant portion of our dependence on foreign oil (and we all know how important that is), but it might also be a natural way to retrofit our dangerous, dirty fission nuclear plants. Codeposition fusion produces nearly zero ionizing radiation of any kind, and no nuclear waste products.

Here are three good references:

"Calorimetry of the Pd + D Codeposition," by S. Szpak, P. Boss, and M.H. Miles, in Fusion Technology, volume 36 (Sept. 1999), pp. 234-241. search near the end of this page for the abstract ("...excellent reproducibility, high power outputs....")

"On the behavior of the cathodically polarized Pd/D system: Search for emanating radiation," by S. Szpak, P.A. Mosier-Boss, and J.J. Smith, in Physics Letters A, volume 210 (1996) pp. 382-390. (Phys Lett A is much easier to find than Fusion [Science and] Technol.)

"Calorimetry of Pd+D Codeposition in a Fleischmann-Pons Dewar Cell," by M.H. Miles, S. Szpak, P. Boss, and Martin Fleischmann (March 2001) abstract on web only

In short, codeposition fusion reliably produces a 500% power gain without fast neutrons, high-energy radiation, or radioactive waste. The peak of the energy produced is in the infrared, with x-ray production just 9% above the baseline in a lead cave, and gamma-ray production only 2% above a lead cave's background levels. There is a very high likelihood that codeposition fusion will soon be commercialized to drive electrical generation turbines, helping to reduce our dependence on fossil fuels and, given sufficient electric vehicles, foreign oil. The cost of codeposition fusion electricity is likely to be less than one cent per kilowatt hour.

You may have heard that cold fusion was discredited. Early experiments used smooth, solid palladium cathodes, which did not produce reliable results. Some such smooth, solid cathodes would run for weeks without producing excess heat, and then would do so for perhaps a few days, and often would never do so again. Over 400 studies in the peer-reviewed scientific literature -- see: the Dieter Britz bibliography [about a megabyte] -- have confirmed that the effect is certainly real, but is only reproduceable in less than one out of ten attempts. Those who have studied codeposition fusion get 99+% reproducibility, and precise control of the effect. The crucial difference is that codeposition cathodes are mossy and dendritic, instead of smooth and solid. Any kind of mossy, high surface area cathodes produce much better results than any smooth cathodes, but they were not in common use until a couple years after the poor early results had discredited the entire field.

Of the six laboratories in the U.S. publishing cold fusion research, three are in California, one is in Mountain View (First Gate Energies), and one is in Menlo Park (SRI International.) Szpak et al's lab is in San Diego. The governments of Italy, France, Russia, Japan, and China all sponsor cold fusion research in their own national laboratories. However, the budget for cold fusion here in the U.S. is very small, because the entrenched plasma fusion "big science" community (whose most optimistic estimates indicate that plasma fusion will not be viable for another thirty years -- and even then it will produce nuclear waste; perhaps more than fission does) keeps funding away from cold fusion (which does not produce nuclear waste or dangerous radiation) through continued, unfair ridicule.

Cheers,
James

The Agenda VR3 has a ti-85 emulator. I haven't yet tried it, but it is supposed to be pretty good. You do need an actual ROM from a ti-85 though. With two sitting around my house it shouldn't be a problem.

And at the risk of grinding my universitys server into the ground ;-) here's a link to a complete mirror (except the .zip's, don't want to be a complete jackass)... mirror at Aarhus Uni (denmark)

The old classics xpilot and xblast are still alive. I just participated in the official world championships of xpilot. The good old game xblast is also still goin strong. They are writing a new client based version, so that you can play international games.

There's a piece about kids programming Lego Mindstorms at last years RoboCup in Sweden, where they found that 7-14 year old non-nerd non-geek children were able to program them to score a goal in ~30 minutes or so. Here's the link. If only they had that kind of fun when I was that age...

Some months ago, I saw a demonstration at my local university (University of Aarhus, Denmark - I don't have the direct link to the project) of a novel way of giving commands. It uses a "gesturing" system where waving the mouse "just so" selects the fill tool (it was a vector-drawing app), moving it "just so" selected the text tool and so on. It looked to actually work great - you could teach the system how to interpret your personal moves.
It was combined with a two-miced (sp?) interface, to make a really cool GUI. With one mouse you'd move the fill tool over an area (it would have a kind of color palette) and the other mouse would select the color to apply to the area, by simply placing the color on top of the area and clicking on it. I thought that was an incredibly efficent and intuitive way to fill many small areas with different colors.

The closest thing to what is being described in terms of a non-experimental/non-academic language seems to me to be either Haskell or BETA. Haskell is free and available for Linux, Beta is also free and comes with an extensive development environment (called Mjølner) and it is also available for Linux (yay!). Both of these langauges are very interesting.

Most of the other systems that implement new ideas are experimental and not available AFAIK, but papers describing them are available.

Some good papers to look at are:

• Kim Bruce's Papers: pretty much everything he lists under research is related to this thread.
  
• Luca Cardelli's Papers: most of the stuff that relates is under Types and Semantics, but the other catagories have worthwhile stuff too.
  
• Phillip Wadler has so many fascinating papers on so many interesting topics that I'm just gonna link to his main page... what else can I do?
  

These are good starting points. For more places to look see my list of language bookmarks , especially under people & projects (or specific languages).

BOTH are available on-line:

Visit to a Weird Planet here and here.

Visit to a Weird Planet Revisited (the better story I reckon) is available here

Consciousness is not what it thinks it is
Thought exists only as an abstraction

BOTH are available on-line:

Visit to a Weird Planet here and here.

Visit to a Weird Planet Revisited (the better story I reckon) is available here

Consciousness is not what it thinks it is
Thought exists only as an abstraction