Domain: cam.ac.uk
Stories and comments across the archive that link to cam.ac.uk.
Comments · 1,846
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Re:reasonably efficient?
To put things in perspective - the highest recorded for a passenger vehicle is 10240 miles per gallon.
http://www.phy.cam.ac.uk/camphy/outreach/physics_a t_work_2003/exhibitor/team_crocodile.htm -
OhmmmmmmDunno what this connectix crap is all about.
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ever tried to use one for serious work....?
If you have ever tried to use a tablet, you will probably come to the same conclusion we have. They suck as a form-factor. They are undoubtedly cool, but in the long run, they really don't let you do any serious work.
I have worked with both the Fujitsu-Siemens as well as the Compaq tablets, have run Linux as well as Windows on both, and they simply get in between yourself and serious work.
The interface requires too much attention of the user, and the handwriting recognition, while pretty good on Windows, also requires too much attention. On Linux you would have to use some palm-type strok business, or even better, the excellent Dasher application.
Besides specialist applications, such as in hospitals for example, the form factor only really comes into its own during meetings, but it simply does not (yet) offer the simplicity of the two primary office tools: The humble pen and paper.
This is not a marketing or cost issue, it is a form-factor issue. They are cool, but all our demo and test models have their novelty worn off, and are currently going unused. At least we did not pay for them..... -
Re:The universe could be shaped like a soccer ball
???
The ISO date standard is YYYY-MM-DD. So be international and do like Sweden for example, following that standard. :-) -
Re:No hard infoYou get this sort of notions out of the hardware guys (anyone remember the Intel 432?). There is a long history of announcements from hardware organizations that leave software folks puzzled. Just because someone has a good grasp of how to design a CPU chip does not mean they have any clue about software.
Putting multiple CPUs on the same die is not a bad idea, but all the hardware (including the CPUs) will be controlled by one manager. The manager could be Linux, could be Windows, could be a virtualization layer like Xen. If you are going to run multiple operating systems on the same machine, the software is going to require the same sort of virtualization as on an ordinary single-CPU system.
About the only (minor) advantage is when more than one operating system is trying to be active concurrently. With multiple CPUs you can keep latency short without playing troublesome scheduling games in the virtualization layer. When one of the guest operating systems goes CPU-bound, you have a simpler time keeping response times with the other guest operating systems predictable.
Note that this works out the same either the CPUs are on the chip or separate chips.
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Re:Not really like VMWare
Yes they may not have better performance over VMWare yet but once they make their emulator support multiple processors for the guest OS it will kick butt!
Excerpt from their TODO list posted on their website: Xen currently only supports uniprocessor guest OSes. We have designed the Xen interface with MP guests in mind, and plan to build an MP Linux guest in due course. Basically, an MP guest would consist of multiple scheduling domains (one per CPU) sharing a single memory protection domain. The only extra complexity for the Xen VM system is ensuring that when a page transitions from holding a page table or page directory to a write-able page, we must ensure that no other CPU still has the page in its TLB to ensure memory system integrity. One other issue for supporting MP guests is that we'll need some sort of CPU gang scheduler, which will require some research.
Link to the TODO -
Why Microsoft+Intel? NGSCB backward compatibility!A quick glance over Xen group's paper leaves me very impressed with the performance these techniques can achieve. That the Xen group has decided to relase the code under the GPL leaves me very greatful. However, that both Intel Research and Microsoft Research has funded it, leave me somewhat concerned.
As I have stated before about Microsoft's purchase of Connectix's Virtual Server technology
In my opinion Microsoft's acquisition of Connectix's Virtual Server technology has very little to do with running any other vendors operating system.
The Electronic Frontier Foundation are about to publish a paper criticizing a component of the "trusted computing" technology promoted by Microsoft, IBM and other technology companies, calling the feature a threat to computer users..Microsoft needs a Virtual Server for backward compatibility for it's NGSCB ( Next Generation Secure Computing Base ) DRM ( Denial of Rights Mechanism ) platform.
Just as Microsoft's XP backward Win9x compatability opens up many locally exploitable API to gain SystemLocal privilege access, to the point where many programs need Adminstrator privilege to run, existing XP and win2k software would open up too many opportunities for helpfull hacker to bypass Microsoft's NGSCB DRM mechanisms.
Microsofts all too obvious solution is to provide a "Virtual" PC mode, running a modified XP and WinME, with the NGSCB providing virtual filesystems and hardware access. All, access of course, with the NGSCB DRM scanning and control.
Where do you want to go tomorrow?
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BitTorrent link available
Grab the BitTorrent from here (and leave your windows open for a while!)
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Re:This is probably...
The Win32 accessibility API sucks. Massively. It doesn't work as documented, and even if it did it would be less capable than the Gnome one. I've been working on integrating Dasher (site possibly down at the moment due to a power cut) into the accessibility functions available. Gnome was a piece of cake. Win32 was pain beyond belief.
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Re:Indeed you are...For any person living in a country run by a benevolent government, it's easy to agree with you (public accountability). That is however also the key to the problem with surveillance of the general public.
We tend to assume (we definitely hope) that our governments will continue to be benevolent. Yet, looking in the history books we see democracies going over the edge into the -ism of the day, becoming more or less totalitarian. It seems reasonable to assume that this will happen again in the future, only then with a dictator's dream of surveillance systems readily installed and in use.
Those of you who have read Ross Anderson's FAQ on Trusted Computing, can easily add a further dimension to that "dream", remote censorship.
One of the news stories today in Sweden is how a swedish TV reporter, Cats Falck, was murdered in Stockholm by the DDR government's Stasi security agency 19 years ago, after she had digged into and found out too much about technology, weapons and ammunitions smuggling from Sweden to the DDR according to today's Berliner Zeitung. The case is still open and a person has now been arrested, but the commando group that killed Falck and her friend apparently consisted of three persons. Stasi, it has been revealed after the fall of the DDR, even collected the smell of people's behind by having them sit down on cushions and then stored (archived, really) the cushions in plastic bags. These were to be used when they wanted to use dogs to hunt someone down. Now think about it. Would Stasi have wanted ubiquitous video surveillance? Would they have wanted Microsoft's version of Trusted Computing (where Microsoft holds the key to your computer and you are the untrusted party)? You bet.
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Re:Peter Gutmann and tinc
There are some points where tinc could certainly be improved (some of it already planned for 2.0), but we don't believe the "real problem" he mentions actually exists.
So which flaws do you plan on fixing?
the 32 bit predictable IV
This is simple to fix, just fix it. Don't waste your time on whether or not it may or may not be a problem in the "real world", computer security is like programming Satan's Computer, always expect the unexpected and preempt any possible attack.
The messages encrypted with RSA are indeed not padded, but padding is, AFAIK, only necessary when the message is shorter than the RSA key. In our case, the message is exactly as long as the RSA key.
Sigh. Why do you think that? RSA should not be used "raw" -- that is without padding for either encryption or signing. -
Re:Replacing CRC in CIPE
How easy would it be to replace CRC-32 with
something else in CIPE?
It is not just changing a few hundred lines of code. The network protocol was insecure by design not just in its implementation. To make off the cuff attempts to fix it are worthless, a good security protocol needs to be designed. Designed to resist known attacks, and in a manner to try to minimise damage from unknown attacks.
It takes alot of work and very hard to get a security protocol right, Security Engineering by Prof. Ross Anderson describes how a published 3 line protocol (written in BAN logic, a very high level pseudo code) had a flaw for over 10 years.
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Really an Award for Best Ear Transplant TechniqueFrom the Methuselah Mouse FAQ on how they will prove the mice are as old as is claimed:
Our approach is to use special identification tags.
Obviously, therefore, the way to win this contest is to develop a way to successfully transplant mouse ears without leaving a noticeable scar. ... attached to the ear in such a way that they cannot be undetectably re-attached after breakage, so it is impossible to attach one to a younger mouse. -
Re:Get the "restricted computing" meme going!
Every place you would ever refer to "trusted" computing, use the phrase "restricted computing" instead.
I like this idea: it's both technically accurate (after all, we currently have unfettered digital rights) and has the ability to make an impression on the general public. Read up on restricted computing (that page has lots of references), and also read this description to learn about some of the implications of placing ultimate trust in (whose?) hands. -
Re:Another blind M$ hater?
You might want to start first with Linus.
I don't particularly care what Linus thinks. As both a Windows and UNIX programmer, an Electrical Engineer, and an academic I think that in the long term 'trusted computing' will prove to be to the detriment of society. Here's a nice reference so you can read up on the issue. -
Not false advertising.
What does "Giga" literally mean? One billion.
"Mega" literally means "One million."
What about the design of hard drives would make one think that the way that their storage works naturally lends towards binary trees?
If you don't like the way your OS reports disk space, which is all this is about, then edit the source code to df.
How many bytes is a megabyte? Is it 1000x1000? 1024x1000? 1024x1024?
Who decides this? What about Microsoft or other disk utility programmers makes them more authoritative about that definition than the metric system? Further, what about the way drives work would make one naturally want to choose 1024x1024 as the definition over 1000x1000, and why are drive manufacturers being sued instead of those that report the sizes. Should either be sued? Probably not.
Next, let's sue powerplants for measuring kilowatt hours in groups of 1000W instead of 1024.
On this planet, we use a base-10 numbering system, regardless of the numbering system that one particular niche of products happens to use. "kilo" was chosen for 2^10 because it was conveniently close, not because it was meant to be legally binding! -
Dasher
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Re:Response Time & Dot Pitch?
T.Vs and Monitors (CRT) don't have a response time (or more to the point its the same as the refresh) because on a CRT screen the previous frame is not remembered as the "pixels" on a CRT so to speak, need to be constatly energised to display anything, so the second that the cathode ray stops hitting the phosphor the image dissapears, thus no reponse time.
What I think you meant to say was that the response time of a CRT is much smaller than the response time of an LCD.
The way a CRT works is that the electron beam hits the phosphorous (that doesn't actually contain any phosporous) which is excited and emits the desired component of light for some time after having been energized.
So there's a definite response time, there has to be otherwise you'd see a very flickery screen, and it's actually shorter than the time to next refresh. If we had faster eyes we'd see it, and with suitable detectors you can actually recover the CRT image (pdf) from the diffuse reflection (TV glow), since the phosphoruous doesn't glow nearly long enough to smear the picture in the time domain. (Cool bit of research that).
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Cross-licensing and the patent scare factor.
I don't like software patents, either. But had MS ever actually sued another company over one of their software patents?
No large patent holder has to actually do this. IBM holds the most patents and they said in their "Think" magazine that they get 10X the value from cross-licensing that they do from licensing patents. Considering suing for infringement involves spending money, not necessarily making money, it stands to reason that cross-licensing would still be far more valuable than winning patent infringement lawsuits too.
Also, consider the scare factor.
RMS happened to browse the weekly patent column in the New York Times when he came across a listing for a patent that appeared to cover a data compression method that the GNU project was going to use in a compressor they were about to release. That patent, and the implicit threat of losing an infringement lawsuit, killed this program before it was released. Nobody had to sue the FSF to get this result. Later the GNU project released gzip which went on to become a defacto standard, but it would have been nice if we could compete (as you say) "on actually making and selling software" instead of locking up ideas in an artificial economy so as to kill competition before it has a chance to benefit the end-user. RMS describes the experience and explodes the myth of patents benefitting software developers in his talk (or if you prefer, read the transcript).
Bill Gates once said:"If people had understood how patents would be granted when most of today's ideas were invented and had taken out patents, the industry would be at a complete standstill today. [...] The solution is patenting as much as we can. A future startup with no patents of its own will be forced to pay whatever price the giants choose to impose. That price might be high. Established companies have an interest in excluding future competitors."
Patents push people into an arms race of sorts--as Gates obliquely illustrates, the patent system makes people react out of fear, not what's in the best interests of community or consumers. By creating this system and issuing software patents, the US Government has abdicated any desire to allow consumers to benefit by picking from a healthy competitive marketplace. After hearing what RMS has to say, I don't see how anyone can come away thinking those who don't sue for infringement are substantially better than those who do.
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Re:I'm sorry but totally avoid TCPA
Yes, I've read your group's papers - of solid academic interest. Yes, I believe as do most truly independent observers outside TCPA that TCPA will be used to enforce DRM and in its current for that's going to hurt ordinary people using home computers. Ordinary people can be educated about the true long-term out-of-pocket costs and threats posed by TCPA. No, I didn't say or even assume DRM enforcement is the only valid use of TCPA but unless TCPA is modified to guarantee the endorsement key(s) can always be copied by the current owner of any TCPA hardware , then DRM is the single most important issue with TCPA and the best reason to reject it totally.
What is interesting and not very surprising is that the public supporters of TCPA such as yourself, never try to give a convincing rebuttals for all of the strong arguments against TCPA. That "Score:-3 Mis-informative" you mentioned is actually for you.
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Re:Energy and sound
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Re:On the team
Good question. If you look at the ripple image (generated by unsharp masking), you'll see the waves aren't perfectly spaced, so there's an error there. We estimate a wavelength of about 11 kpc. You then need the sound speed, which is a function of temperature (about 1170 km/s in gas of about 5 keV). The calculation of the period of 10^7 years is probably a good estimate, but it isn't precise. If you're really interested in the details read the original paper here.
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Re:On the team
Good question. If you look at the ripple image (generated by unsharp masking), you'll see the waves aren't perfectly spaced, so there's an error there. We estimate a wavelength of about 11 kpc. You then need the sound speed, which is a function of temperature (about 1170 km/s in gas of about 5 keV). The calculation of the period of 10^7 years is probably a good estimate, but it isn't precise. If you're really interested in the details read the original paper here.
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Webcam #1: The Original CoffeCam
No article on webcams would be complete without mentioning the coffeecam, arguably the world's first webcam.
It came online in November 1993 (the camera was actually put in service late 1991) but sadly, monitored its last pot of coffee on 22 Aug 2001.
R.I.P., Number One. -
Webcam #1: The Original CoffeCam
No article on webcams would be complete without mentioning the coffeecam, arguably the world's first webcam.
It came online in November 1993 (the camera was actually put in service late 1991) but sadly, monitored its last pot of coffee on 22 Aug 2001.
R.I.P., Number One. -
Webcam #1: The Original CoffeCam
No article on webcams would be complete without mentioning the coffeecam, arguably the world's first webcam.
It came online in November 1993 (the camera was actually put in service late 1991) but sadly, monitored its last pot of coffee on 22 Aug 2001.
R.I.P., Number One. -
Re:Fringe science, or valid?
Superstring theory has been superceeded by M-theory, which addresses many of the inconsistencies that made superstring theory seem a bit dubious.
Essentially, the quantum gravity theorists were right and the superstring theorists were wrong, especially regarding numbers of dimensions. M-theory replaces both theories, solidifying what we now know and have experimentally observed. I'm sure it receives a bit of resistance from people in positions to profit from superstring theory as it is now, but it's negligable.
I know "M" doesn't sound as catchy as "superstring", but do try to keep up. These articles on a geek site like slashdot are like a chemist's journal still discussing classical alchemy. -
Re:Fringe science, or valid?
Superstring theory has been superceeded by M-theory, which addresses many of the inconsistencies that made superstring theory seem a bit dubious.
Essentially, the quantum gravity theorists were right and the superstring theorists were wrong, especially regarding numbers of dimensions. M-theory replaces both theories, solidifying what we now know and have experimentally observed. I'm sure it receives a bit of resistance from people in positions to profit from superstring theory as it is now, but it's negligable.
I know "M" doesn't sound as catchy as "superstring", but do try to keep up. These articles on a geek site like slashdot are like a chemist's journal still discussing classical alchemy. -
Re:Using a JRE is silly.Remember that for embedded stuff, you want low power consumption.
I didn't mention imbedded stuff. I'm only interested in building a computer, not using it for something practical - there's plenty of off-the shelf stuff for that.
Learn C. It's pretty similar to Java, but is far more suitable for writing embedded controller software. Remember that you are going to be controlling things, not drawing widgets on a screen, so an OO language is not really necessary (or even desirable). Instead, you will be reading and writing IO ports, which will involve a certain amount of bare metal programming. Java won't really let you do this. You could use FORTH, which was invented for writing controller software for steerable telescopes.
Umm, how shall I put this? Are you old enough to remember BCPL? That was when I started using C-family languages, though I did more work with K&R. I'd imagine almost everyone here is familiar with at least ANSI C. I just happen to prefer Java for playing around. Either language will need some tailoring of the run-times to work on a new machine - admittedly C would probably be easier, but it would be interesting to look at what's involved in porting a JRE.
BTW, with suitable attention to issues like garbage collection, yes you could use Java to run a soft real-time system such as ABS. Not what I'd choose for such a simple problem, but Java on a modern processor will run a lot faster than assembler on some of the old crates I used to do real time work on, and ABS is a really undemanding problem. Memory consumption is more of an issue.
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This isn't new, nor is it innovative. Prior art:
Canon has used ultrasonic piezoelectric motors in their lenses for years. These are the "mexican wave" (wtf?) motors that the New Scientist article mentions. I'm not sure why they'd be any more expensive than the origami motors described here.
Piezoelectric stick-slip actuators are nothing new. Those units built at Cambridge apparently pre-date the units mentioned in the article, but the surface preparation technique is somewhat different. -
Re:What am I to say?
Me too! I remember an article on SciAm on the correlation between these clouds and ozone layer destruction. Ok, googled a couple of minutes and found this.
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Re:applicability to the real world
I'm guessing from your post you studied a science at Cambridge?
Engineering
The male--female ratio is low in most colleges...
Was about 50/50 at my college, though CUSU has it at 40% women in the out-of-date alt prospectus.
the state-public school ratio is low in most colleges
Compared to other universities this is true, but the situation is certainly improving as admissions tutors increase the amount of positive discrimination in response to government threats.
the colored-white british national ratio is low in most colleges
Worryingly few black students (a handful out of ~400 at Pembroke), but plenty of British asian students.
many of the science subjects encourage you to do some kind of low-paid summer research.
I never encountered this, and worked for a large IT company and a large bank during the summer holidays. Short terms meant that I could do 11 weeks in the summer and still take a holiday.
I don't honestly think they provide "cheap good lodgings".
Whilst the prices are going up, they were still significantly below market rates, and with the exception of my second year I had better rooms than any of my friends at other universities. Also, because the houses I lived in were college owned, I only paid rent when I was there. Cambridge Colleges do, however, stiff you for 100 a term as "Kitchen Fixed Charge", which should be called "Fellows' Wine Levy". Factoring in the various sums of money I received from college to go on holiday and stay in Cambridge during the easter vacation to revise I reckon I got a pretty good deal. It wasn't a patch, however, on what my sister gets at Johns.
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Re:Digital Cameras in freezers on rockets.Things in space inevitably drift a little, but the beauty of digital cameras is that you don't have to do the exposure all at once. You could pause, re-aim the telescope then begin again.
Indeed. The Hubble Deep Field images were assembled in exactly this way.
By the way, the parent post is modded Funny. Why is that?
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Yin and Yan on the environmental front?
Hard to say which is the loony toon. The "And how do you pillage the ocean..." or the reply with it's "... human intervention most likely...". In the former case declining fisheries is a valid counter. In the latter, well:
a) the natural ocean background radiation
far exceeds the meagre amounts humans have dumped unless you're sitting right next to the dumped core;
b) recent volvanic activity (above (Mt. St. Helen's) and below (black
smokers) the ocean) has contributed considerably more "pollution" than human industry has (recall some recent eruptions have tangibly affected the atmosphere _globally_); and
c) research (e.g. work of Jan Veizer) has pointed out far more plausible climate altering effects than our meagre industrial effluent. Speaking of which, we still do not have a proven climate model let alone one of the role of various chemicals within the atmosphere except in the most very general sense.
So is humankind the big baddie? We really don't know. Is it blameless? We really don't know. But why is natural pollution OK, but "unatural"(?) pollution bad? Why does it seem that human activity beyond the most primitive animal functions is "bad"?
It might just be that we humans neither appreciate how truly huge this planet is, how truly insignificant we are, and how profoundly ignorant we still are about all that is around us. -
Consumer backlash and corporate reactions
As alarming as many of the recent seemingly "invasive" technologies are, the response to consumer anger from some of the organizations which employ those technologies has been a bit comforting. Before we have seen the termination of serial numbers on Pentium 3 CPU's, the removal of DRM in TurboTax software and even Microsoft allowing OEM's to omit product activation with WindowsXP.
All of these were the result of massive consumer backlash and lack of benefits for the producer. With Gillette's action added to this, it seems that Palladium/TCPA/etc. might not be in for a very warm reception, and possibly a very quick withdrawal. And it seems that some corporations care more about consumer feelings than it seems at first. -
Mounting a lawsuit is prohibitively expensive.
There is plenty the free software community can do to protect themselves. All they have to do is publish their work before any of the "megacoporations" go out and file their patents.
This only describes part of the process (and thus only part of the problem with software patents). The other part is raising this prior art in court as a defense to patent infringement or to get a patent overturned. Either is very expensive, in fact it is so expensive I wouldn't be surprised if there were organizations who would rather simply not engage in the patented process than pay for a lengthy and possibly fruitless patent defense or overturning lawsuit.
At its heart, this is a part of the problem with software patents--people say software patents are okay because the court can resolve any problems in the system without acknowledging the adverse impact on those who can't afford lawyers. Court action generally discriminates against the poor (which can include the people who are ostensibly supposed to be so well-served by the patent system by allowing them to monopolize their "inventions"). The rich can afford to buy patents by acquiring organizations that have them. Large corporations probably have a lot of patents and can afford to cross-license (a practice which exposes an interesting fatal flaw with software patents).
RMS' talk on the dangers of software patents is most enlightening, I highly recommend listening to it or reading the transcript.
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Re:And dates?
That argument (sorting by dates) leads one to the ISO date format -- YYYY-MM-DD -- which sorts files even better. None of this Jan 1, 2001 comes before Jan 2, 2002 stuff like your system.
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Ross Anderson's opinion
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Re:It makes sense
It makes sense that they don't want their code to be open source, because then ALL the bugs will be found.
Care to back that claim up? According to this paper by Dr. Ross Anderson, Cambridge University Computer Lab, not all flaws will be found by the good guys (i.e. the honest public) and fixed. Even with many times the resources of a single enemy. -
Re:It makes sense
It makes sense that they don't want their code to be open source, because then ALL the bugs will be found.
Care to back that claim up? According to this paper by Dr. Ross Anderson, Cambridge University Computer Lab, not all flaws will be found by the good guys (i.e. the honest public) and fixed. Even with many times the resources of a single enemy. -
Sourceforge statisticsI co-wrote a paper which tackles exactly this question by looking at Sourceforge download and page hit statistics. We found a Pareto (aka Power Law) distribution of activity with a bottom end cut-off of around a 200-400 hits per month, and a large population of dead projects with no accesses. It seems that there is a critical mass required to sustain a project, and you have it.
As far as "success" goes, you do need to define success before you can decide if you have it. There is no single definition. Only you can decide if your project is meeting the goals you have set for it. I'd say that if you have a user community, active development and a roadmap for the future then your project is successful. One of the implications of a Pareto distribution is that the vast majority of projects are "small" in terms of users, developers and activity. So don't think you have failed just because you are not mentioned in the same breath as Apache, Samba and the Linux Kernel.
Paul.
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elvish and Plan 9
Sure you can write in elvish in Plan 9, I'm glad you asked. After all, those are the people who brought you UTF-8!
Screenshot here!
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Re:morse could be wayuseful for ultraportable deviPerhaps that should have been
Graffiti : Morse
:: Yankee Clipper : MayflowerYeah, it works, but it was a serious pain and we have much better things now.
The current "one-button" interface [heck, you can fit a jog wheel+button in that space] would be Dasher in my not-so-humble opinion.
But wait for Moore's law to catch up with software and we may yet end up with the microphone+speaker interface to the computer.
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analogy ... um ...
"With a new computer database available at every campus this fall, teachers can keep a virtual eye on every student
..... educators can look up a student's attendance, discipline, immigration status, grades, and test scores at one source and use that information to predict dropouts .
... .. "All students will know someone is watching them, tracking them, and is interested in their success," school board member Laurie Bricker said at a press conference today.' Hooray for surveillance in the HISD."Ok now I feel safer, I thought it was something against privacy but it seems like something
... um really ... um interesting ... for our children.I have a name for it: "Trusted Education®".
Professor: Hello my dears, starting from today, we got a new tool called `Trusted Education®'.
Students: What is it ?
Professor: We will track you down until you will all get the required level to enter Standford. That is why we call it trusted.
Students: But this is not right ! We have rights !
Professor: But this is for you, you will probably thank me later, if you do not suicide before getting a job in a big company. *Maybe I was too direct*.
Students: So why is this called `Trusted Education®'? I don't see why I should trust it at all!
Professor: It's almost an in-joke. In the US Department of Defense, a `trusted system or component' is defined as `one which can break the security policy'. This might seem counter-intuitive at first, but just stop to think about it. The mail guard or firewall that stands between a Secret and a Top Secret system can - if it fails - break the security policy that mail should only ever flow from Secret to Top Secret, but never in the other direction. It is therefore trusted to enforce the information flow policy.
(this part is from Trusted Computing Frequently Asked Questions)Student: So a `Trusted Education®' is one that can break into my personal details?
Professor: Now you've got it.
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Re:Change the font size!
Yes, text in dialogue boxes scales nowadays, but icons still remain a constant size. Perhaps you're right that this is no big deal (you don't really need to see icons clearly, just have a vague visual memory of which is which).
It does suck that Windows doesn't allow any more fine-grained control than Small, Large or Extra Large fonts. You should just be able to tell it the size of your monitor and have fonts displayed at the *correct* size, dammit. By which I mean a ten-point font should display with characters ten points high. I don't know how well GNOME and KDE handle this, but there is a way to tell the X server your real display resolution.
(A point is roughly 1/72 inches, I think. http://www.cl.cam.ac.uk/~mgk25/metric-typo/ makes a good argument for abandoning the whole 'points' mess and simply stating font size in millimetres.) -
A little Third Worlder perspective
A little background story. I've always been a Malaysian citizen although I went to school and university in the UK. My first job was in the IT department of a rather large investment bank and I recently got made redundant.
As a graduate of a university of some repute and with 18 months of work experience under my belt, I would expect to have exactly the same job prospects as any other British university graduate here in the UK. Unfortunately (for me), work permits are hard to come by as companies have to prove that they've advertised for positions in local newspapers/trade journals for a minimum of two months before they are allowed to tap the international job market and, as a result, I've had no jobs coming my way. The result of this is that I've accepted a job in my home country for an 80% pay cut (my new job is paying US$ 790 per month).
Folks, I've seen a few posts which either directly or indirectly imply that we Third World workers are nowhere as productive as Americans. I agree this is most probably true for world-class programmers, you can't realistically expect me to believe that EVERY SINGLE American university graduate is that much better. The company that I'll be working for was founded by an Oxford graduate, several of the directors have been educated in England and the United States, and we're all working for substantially less than what you in the West are used to.
Keeping that in mind, please tell me what incentive large corporations actually have for employing an American (or European) worker if you can get quality work done for much cheaper elsewhere.
It's not all doom and gloom, guys. I've been thinking about the situation and there are sectors in which jobs should still be available. I doubt it's that worthwhile for smaller IT outfits to offshore their work, having no infrastructure in place in India (for example). You also have many more contacts and knowledge about your respective countries (be it the USA, the UK, Finland, or whatever) than Ranjit from Bangalore or Abu from Kuala Lumpur. Use that as leverage.
I do wish everyone the best of luck, though I don't expect it to be very pretty in the short term. -
Re:An apropos blast from the past
And by "Trustworthy", what Gates means is that "Microsoft, Sony, the RIAA and other content producers can trust that our fiendish users won't pirate our goods". It is a campaign of control and profiteering, and has little to do with improving the security situation for M$ users.
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Re:virtual keyboard
this would be a great opportunity to use Dasher, a very interesting alternative input method. Like any input device, it takes a little while to get used to. But it learns over time, and can be quite fast and even a bit entertaining! it is available for Linux, MacOSX, Windows, and WinCE. Palm support is supposed to be coming.
visit earth2willi.com ! -
AbsolutelyI am a mathematics major, with research experience. All my papers, reports, and even a few physics labs I had to do have been written in LaTeX, which makes automatic section labeling, theorem/proposition/proof labeling, table of contents generation, and bibliography generation a snap. Not only have I found that LaTeX has allowed me to create truly beautiful documents, but *every* handout I have received from any professor in Math, Physics, or CS has been in LaTeX (okay, there have been a few execptions--but not many!). This includes tests, homeworks, syllabi, etc. There have even been a couple times when a professor has stopped mid-lecture to wax romantic about how great LaTeX is and how easy it makes his/her life. Every journal expects papers to be submitted in TeX or LaTeX, and every researcher in the field knows it.
As for previous comments saying that LaTeX is not extensible and that the formatting and content are not separate, that is bunk. You can write your own macros, people have written image drawing programs (for diagram generation) in LaTeX, and anything else imaginable. The formatting is done for you 99%. You just specify where paragraphs, sections, whatever start, and LaTeX takes care of the rest.
The only capacity in which SGML or XML (including MathML) is used to publish scientific content (i.e., containing lots of equations and document structions such as sections, theorems, proofs, etc.) is to first write the LaTeX, then to use latex2html (or a similar program). Seriously, it is totally impractical to write MathML yourself. take a look at some sample code if you want. It is designed to be output by a computer program such as LaTeX.
The learning curve on LaTeX is pretty low. Just google around for stuff, and it will be easy to find what you are looking for (usually). Start with the following references (there is *no* need to ever buy a book on LaTeX): but google is your best bet. I usually just type "latex ..." into google where ... is whatever I need help on (e.g., tables, infinite series, vectors, labelling theorems, etc.). You can't go wrong. Happy TeX-ing. -
Re:C++0x?