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I've also heard of people using radioactive decay for properly decent random data -- a la Hotbits. Apparently the Pentium III and P4 include a truly random number generator. I was impressed by this, but I'm not sure how the hell one uses it. It seems that most software still used pseduo generators. I suppose it takes additional work to call upon this feature. Here's what Intel said in a press release:
"Present software pseudo-random number generators still have a pattern that a very sensitive code breaker can ultimately detect and break the encrypted message."

3. Prohibit any corporation from owning a copyright. Corporations create nothing; they?re consensual hallucinations and exist at our pleasure. I don?t know about you, but I?m not much pleased any more.

I guess that the director can only go into business for himself. No company can own the copyright, so he has to use his personal budget for funding the film. If it flops, he has to declare personal bankruptcy, instead of letting some corporation absorb the hit. How is this supposed to make things better?

I agree with the rest of the article. It's the first time I've seen this stated so well. I'm just curious about how he expects this last point to work.

ps: He should run the Demoroniser over his MS-Word documents before publishing them to the web!

Home Planet does a good job, and has an orrery display as well as a sky view. you'll also want the orbital elements, which can be put into the cometnew.csv file so you know where all the latest comets are (including Ikeya-Zhang)

I can't find the lavalamp page at sgi anymore, probably due to budget restraints.
Another interesting random number generator is Hotbits.

Other people mentioned applications, but there is a website that let's you do it too.

I think a very good point is raised here. Considering the difficulty that even other humans have had deciphering the signal sent out by humans in Nov. 1974 (though I can't really take it as a serious attempt at communication - sent towards M13, so we oughtn't expect a hypothetical response for around 45,000 years, give or take), I wonder how difficult it will be to decipher a signal sent by anyone who is not like us, assuming we can actually FIND one (the ostensible goal of SETI@home).

In the mid 70s, a lot of science magazines created similar messages and had contests for the readers to try to figure them out (not a lot of people managed to - mainly mathematicians, as I recall). There were also a lot of articles about how scientists here on Earth tried to untangle the Arecibo message themselves - but failed (of course, I can't find much about it on the web - anyone got any good links on the subject? Most web searches now bring up the script for Contact... :-)

For fun and edification, try the following: Take the entire binary sequence of the Aricebo message, and just lay it out as one long string. From there, forget all the exlpanations you've ever read about how it's been constructed. Also try to forget you're a member of the same species. Then take into account signal degradation over distance. Then try to forget that it's NOT just random noise from a big celestial event. Then try to figure it out! This ought to give you some idea about what we're looking at as far as actually getting a message. This site has a similar disclaimer, plus a link to the message itself (just scroll down and look for the big block o' binary). Some questions that come to my mind are, "What is it? Does it mean anything? Is it a 23x79 grid, or is it 79 23-bit words? 23 79-bit words? If it's a 23x79 grid, do the images I percieve mean anything? Am I looking at it upside down? Am I reading too much into random stellar noise? Did I even receive the whole message? 1679 bits seems not random, but what if I'm missing some of it?"

That said, I think that there is a lot to be said in favor of SETI@home. The first thing is (here's more of that subjective stuff again) - I think it's cool! I personally don't have much hope for it ever finding anything really interesting or useful, but it's a really neat project. I like to consider it the first really well-handled attempt at massively distributed computing. It is something of a pioneering project and has shown many of the pitfalls awaiting future distributed projects (like the bandwidth problem!).

In a more serious vein, without SETI@home, I don't think that distributed computing would have taken off like it has. By stimulating imaginations (despite the obvious problems involved in finding a signal at all, I think most of us are still REALLY intrigued by the concept - enough to participate in a frankly goofy project with miniscule chance of success in the hope that MAYBE something interesting will turn up), it provided a good vehicle for getting the whole notion that distributed computing can actually WORK into the world at large. I don't think it matters that the proof-of-concept was applied to SETI, rather it is simply sufficient that it was a good proof-of-concept.

In all, I believe that without SETI@home, we wouldn't have all the other interesting distributed computing projects going on to the extent that they are. I'd be willing to bet that other distributed computing project groups (especially the cash-poor ones) are watching to see how the SETI@home folks handle the bandwidth crunch (aside from throwing money that they really haven't got at it). Many of the resolutions proposed in these comments seem to have a lot of validity, and I'd hope that the SETI@home folks reading them can use the suggestions to come up with something that works - and that they can afford. I'd hope, though, that they can avoid using too many commercial partnerships - I think that the research end of it would best avoid the specter of undue influence. I've known several good research projects that lost legitimacy (and I think that the driving goal behind SETI@home needs to hold on to all the legitimacy it can!) simply by being associated with a commercial entity - even though there was NO influence on the direction of research. But that would be another topic altogether.

I think a very good point is raised here. Considering the difficulty that even other humans have had deciphering the signal sent out by humans in Nov. 1974 (though I can't really take it as a serious attempt at communication - sent towards M13, so we oughtn't expect a hypothetical response for around 45,000 years, give or take), I wonder how difficult it will be to decipher a signal sent by anyone who is not like us, assuming we can actually FIND one (the ostensible goal of SETI@home).

In the mid 70s, a lot of science magazines created similar messages and had contests for the readers to try to figure them out (not a lot of people managed to - mainly mathematicians, as I recall). There were also a lot of articles about how scientists here on Earth tried to untangle the Arecibo message themselves - but failed (of course, I can't find much about it on the web - anyone got any good links on the subject? Most web searches now bring up the script for Contact... :-)

For fun and edification, try the following: Take the entire binary sequence of the Aricebo message, and just lay it out as one long string. From there, forget all the exlpanations you've ever read about how it's been constructed. Also try to forget you're a member of the same species. Then take into account signal degradation over distance. Then try to forget that it's NOT just random noise from a big celestial event. Then try to figure it out! This ought to give you some idea about what we're looking at as far as actually getting a message. This site has a similar disclaimer, plus a link to the message itself (just scroll down and look for the big block o' binary). Some questions that come to my mind are, "What is it? Does it mean anything? Is it a 23x79 grid, or is it 79 23-bit words? 23 79-bit words? If it's a 23x79 grid, do the images I percieve mean anything? Am I looking at it upside down? Am I reading too much into random stellar noise? Did I even receive the whole message? 1679 bits seems not random, but what if I'm missing some of it?"

That said, I think that there is a lot to be said in favor of SETI@home. The first thing is (here's more of that subjective stuff again) - I think it's cool! I personally don't have much hope for it ever finding anything really interesting or useful, but it's a really neat project. I like to consider it the first really well-handled attempt at massively distributed computing. It is something of a pioneering project and has shown many of the pitfalls awaiting future distributed projects (like the bandwidth problem!).

In a more serious vein, without SETI@home, I don't think that distributed computing would have taken off like it has. By stimulating imaginations (despite the obvious problems involved in finding a signal at all, I think most of us are still REALLY intrigued by the concept - enough to participate in a frankly goofy project with miniscule chance of success in the hope that MAYBE something interesting will turn up), it provided a good vehicle for getting the whole notion that distributed computing can actually WORK into the world at large. I don't think it matters that the proof-of-concept was applied to SETI, rather it is simply sufficient that it was a good proof-of-concept.

In all, I believe that without SETI@home, we wouldn't have all the other interesting distributed computing projects going on to the extent that they are. I'd be willing to bet that other distributed computing project groups (especially the cash-poor ones) are watching to see how the SETI@home folks handle the bandwidth crunch (aside from throwing money that they really haven't got at it). Many of the resolutions proposed in these comments seem to have a lot of validity, and I'd hope that the SETI@home folks reading them can use the suggestions to come up with something that works - and that they can afford. I'd hope, though, that they can avoid using too many commercial partnerships - I think that the research end of it would best avoid the specter of undue influence. I've known several good research projects that lost legitimacy (and I think that the driving goal behind SETI@home needs to hold on to all the legitimacy it can!) simply by being associated with a commercial entity - even though there was NO influence on the direction of research. But that would be another topic altogether.

I use Speak Freely, because it is a great cross-platform application for for audio conferencing.

It has a lot of cool features, such as an enhanced answering machine, ICQ interoperability and it supports about a dozen compression algorithms, including GSM and 128-bit Blowfish.

SF is a very fine product, and it's available on Windows and Unix

It's very cool because it's licensed under the GPL, it's source code is available. And it has a cool name :)

I was trying to decode this, but was having trouble with it until I figured out that it is in base64 encoding, not uuencode (as it appeared at first). If your Linux or Unix distribution does not have base64 installed by default, you can get it at http://www.fourmilab.ch/webtools/base64/. Thank you, Fair Use Guy, for promoting this tool.

...at least as far as creating press releases without those moronic broken quotes. Maybe they need a quick tap upside the head with the demoroniser?

check out Speak Freely - its site is here

it supports encryption and is multi platform.

oh and if you're a windows developer the original speak freely site has lots of good points.

The demoroniser keeps you from looking dumber than a bag of dirt when your Web page is viewed by a user on a non-Microsoft platform.

Hot Bits uses a Geiger-Muller tube pointed at a radiation source. About as random as you can get.

I'm also trying to change my way of living significantly enough that I won't have to go to the gym 4 days a week for the rest of my life just to maintain.

A friend of mine swears by the Hacker's Diet ... I've started reading it before (it's free), I like the ideas as well as the author's background (some famous Autodesk guy, I believe), but I really don't know if it would work... but then, mileages vary with every diet out there.

Now, If only I could get over my feelings of being perceived as the "Dumpy Computer Guy" in the gym while surrounded by semi-pro weightlifters and sweaty women who could kick the crap out of me if they caught me looking...

>Not to mention the fact that one side of the
>moon faces the sun at all times! Any solar
>collectors on Earth are subject to day/night
>cycles. The moon would rarely be impacted, when
>the lunar eclipses happen.

Doh! One side of the moon always faces the EARTH! (synchronous rotation). We had never seen the far side of the moon until we sent something "back there" to take pictures.

So: that being the case, is it really possible that one side of the moon is always bathed in the light of the sun? If so, then how did we ever get visible pictures of the OTHER SIDE of the moon? Did we use a gigantic flashbulb, or something? ;)

Map of the entire surface including the far side

The Far Side of the Moon Consider how this picture would look if it had been taken during a "full moon:" since during a full moon the entire side of the moon that is facing the Earth is lit up, only the portion of the moon in this photograph that is said to be visible from Earth (see the pic's caption) would have any sunlight on it.

Far Side of the Moon, with animation showing the same side of the moon always toward the Earth. This doesn't show where the sun is in relation to the animation; but figure that the sun is way off the screen from the animation...the darkened part of the moon in the animation is representing the side of the moon we never see from Earth, NOT how the light hits the moon (the Earth does not illuminate the moon, although it does sometimes reflect a little of the sun's light onto the dark portion of the quarter moon...)

So, taking this into account, will it be useful to build these lasers on the moon, especially the power plant?

Apollo 11 Laser Ranging Retroreflector Experiment. "Laser beams are used because they remain tightly focused for large distances. Nevertheless, there is enough dispersion of the beam that it is about 7 kilometers in diameter when it reaches the Moon and 20 kilometers in diameter when it returns to Earth. Because of this very weak signal, observations are made for several hours at a time. By averaging the signal for this period, the distance to the Moon can be measured to an accuracy of about 3 centimeters (the average distance from the Earth to the Moon is about 385,000 kilometers)."

Add to this, the fact that the moon wobbles...

Ah yes, here's a thought... ;)

>Not to mention the fact that one side of the
>moon faces the sun at all times! Any solar
>collectors on Earth are subject to day/night
>cycles. The moon would rarely be impacted, when
>the lunar eclipses happen.

Doh! One side of the moon always faces the EARTH! (synchronous rotation). We had never seen the far side of the moon until we sent something "back there" to take pictures.

So: that being the case, is it really possible that one side of the moon is always bathed in the light of the sun? If so, then how did we ever get visible pictures of the OTHER SIDE of the moon? Did we use a gigantic flashbulb, or something? ;)

Map of the entire surface including the far side

The Far Side of the Moon Consider how this picture would look if it had been taken during a "full moon:" since during a full moon the entire side of the moon that is facing the Earth is lit up, only the portion of the moon in this photograph that is said to be visible from Earth (see the pic's caption) would have any sunlight on it.

Far Side of the Moon, with animation showing the same side of the moon always toward the Earth. This doesn't show where the sun is in relation to the animation; but figure that the sun is way off the screen from the animation...the darkened part of the moon in the animation is representing the side of the moon we never see from Earth, NOT how the light hits the moon (the Earth does not illuminate the moon, although it does sometimes reflect a little of the sun's light onto the dark portion of the quarter moon...)

So, taking this into account, will it be useful to build these lasers on the moon, especially the power plant?

Apollo 11 Laser Ranging Retroreflector Experiment. "Laser beams are used because they remain tightly focused for large distances. Nevertheless, there is enough dispersion of the beam that it is about 7 kilometers in diameter when it reaches the Moon and 20 kilometers in diameter when it returns to Earth. Because of this very weak signal, observations are made for several hours at a time. By averaging the signal for this period, the distance to the Moon can be measured to an accuracy of about 3 centimeters (the average distance from the Earth to the Moon is about 385,000 kilometers)."

Add to this, the fact that the moon wobbles...

Ah yes, here's a thought... ;)

FatPhil

FatPhil

Did someone forget to demoronise their MS-HTML? Or are you really that unsure of yourself?

First of all, it wasn't meant as a serious comment, and second of all, as you can read in this by Mr. E himself there's nothing that exactly prohibits energy from going faster.

By the way, ----- GREAT ARTICLE !!! ------ (see the above link or click here
I really like your Rocket A Day Keeps the High Costs Away article. It makes a strong case.

Some private/corporate groups are developing the launchers and hoping, though -Burt Rutan's EZ Rocket plane (xcor.com) and Pioneer Astronautics at pioneerastro.com.

What I hope for is NASA will get back to doing what it does best - research and development. It's not supposed to be a commercial venture. The entrenched interests of Boeing and Lockheed are in keeping the shuttle flying when we really need Big Dumb Booster(s).

NASA should stick with engineering studies that like characterizing components (studying all parameters and testing the heck out of different configurations). Example: turbocompressor pump designs (needed for rocket engines), high temperature and pressure effects on LOX, kerosene, ethanol, isopropyl alcohol, methoanol, etc. as fluids going through straight and bendy pipes of various sizes, looking at fluid breakdowns, viscous effects, etc. That way, engineers from rocket-building companies don't have to do repeat work and can just build the darn things.

my five cents, anyway. Again, Great article.

Right, but these guys did not put together the type of reliable system that a lot of other uses requires. If NASA launches a satellite that costs $50,000 and it fails too early on orbit, they really lost a lot more. Launch costs, ground station costs, support costs, public opinion to name a few.

Cheap satellites are quite possible, but too cheap is worse than too expensive in most applications. The real key though is to drive down launch costs. And the key to that is A Rocket a Day Keeps the High Costs Away

If only they used the demoroniser!!!

Nobody ever accused a browser's <TEXTAREA> box of being a modern word processor.

If only people would stick to the textarea editor instead of pasting text typed in moronic MS Word...

For anyone still paying attention to this article, there is a great article on how to reduce launch costs (they are not really dominated by fuel) at http://www.fourmilab.ch/documents/rocketaday.html

Please read it

He would probably be in jail for violating the DMCA or some such silly law. Just check out this 1864 paper on Picking Locks and Deciphering

Hacker/genius John Walker (founder of Autodesk) proposes the construction of minerats, autonomous mine-clearing robots.

k., Lego Minestorms?

True. The Analytical Engine was never built, and so far as I know, no replica exists. An artist's impression of the AE graces the cover of the William Gibson/Bruce Sterling collaboration The Difference Engine, making it easy to conflate the two.

The link to John Walker's site, however, does contain software that emulates the AE. The colorado.edu link has a replica of a Difference Engine. So I suppose it's like showing a picture of an Intel 4004-based calculator to someone who wanted to see a picture of a computer. The raw materials (chips, PCB, keypad, display) are the same, so I guess it's a difference in degree, not kind. I guess.

Now you've got me confused.

All I can say is imagine a Beowulf ClustBZZZZT GAAAAAAHHHH!

k.

Now, if you want to talk about mechanical computers, what I *really* would like to see, if it's even possible, is a working model of Babbage's Analytical Engine. ;-) Probably not possible, since very few of his drawings survived, but it would still be fascinating to see that machine run .. bit offtopic, I'll agree, but thought I'd indulge ..

John Walker, founder of Autodesk, has had an insightful, if perhaps dystopian, essay [fourmilab.ch] on this topic on his web site [fourmilab.ch] for some time.

He describes a hypothetical ``Unicard'' (universal ID card) that one might see as an advanced version of the card Ellison proposes and the future society that might result from its implementation.

Abstract:

Threats to privacy are often seen as efforts launched by governments or large corporations, using their power to circumscribe individuals' rights. Yet often individuals voluntarily surrender their privacy for promises of security or, more frequently, pure convenience. Based on technologies already available or certain to appear within the next few years, this paper explores how much convenience could be gained, and how much privacy lost as these technologies enter the mainstream.

Read the essay, then reconsider Ellison's proposal. Right now, yes, we have near-universal identification cards, but we have lots of near-univeral cards, so no one organization has the complete picture--and the resulting complete control.

John Walker, founder of Autodesk, has had an insightful, if perhaps dystopian, essay [fourmilab.ch] on this topic on his web site [fourmilab.ch] for some time.

He describes a hypothetical ``Unicard'' (universal ID card) that one might see as an advanced version of the card Ellison proposes and the future society that might result from its implementation.

Abstract:

Threats to privacy are often seen as efforts launched by governments or large corporations, using their power to circumscribe individuals' rights. Yet often individuals voluntarily surrender their privacy for promises of security or, more frequently, pure convenience. Based on technologies already available or certain to appear within the next few years, this paper explores how much convenience could be gained, and how much privacy lost as these technologies enter the mainstream.

Read the essay, then reconsider Ellison's proposal. Right now, yes, we have near-universal identification cards, but we have lots of near-univeral cards, so no one organization has the complete picture--and the resulting complete control.

your post, viewed on netscape, is lttered with question marks where there should be single quotes. This is usually (tho not always) the result of using Microschlock software. See http://www.fourmilab.ch/webtools/demoroniser/ for more information. (And my apologies if you weren't using MS crapware.)

The API has barely changed in the last 25 years. A friend of mine has an application that's been running unchanged since the 1970s. It has contined to work across generations of hardware. And it's in assembler.

They had the advantage that their OS was decades ahead of its time. UNIVAC had symmetrical multiprocessing with threads in a protected mode environment thirty years ago.. And threads were designed in, not bolted on like UNIX.

OK, I'm just jealous 'cuz my Lego mass spectrum analyzer isn't working yet. :-)

.

I think you're missing the point if you think it's all about competition. Imagine Microsoft opened it's code... now let's say some medium size company that has been paying a few thousand dollars to license all of it's employees to use Windows and Office. Now this company only has to buy a CD for $30 and pass it around to everyone in the company. Microsoft's profit just decreased by several orders of magnitude. I would expect the NASDAQ to collapse shortly thereafter

.

Well, I ought to come clean here just a little - checking back on my user history might have given you a clue to my response to your comment.

In essence, companies can healthily expand their presentation of even crucial systems and knowledge to the public. There's good reason for this to become a worthwhile social and economic function of corporations, just like they file accounts with the SEC or whoever. Companies so often die, without a trace of heir experience being left or else enclose knowledge within themselves that no - one can ever learn from their mistakes, or their learning processes. I remember coming across the Autofile some time back and realising what a power of information it was to see how a small company started. Good coders can extrapolate the same experience within software.

I'm not going to tell you that everythng should be GPL'd - I didn't say that. Nor did I say that you could cookie cutter / rip / or compile any "freed" code for commercial advantage.

For that to happen you'd have to uproot nearly a century of copyright law development. And I refer you, in part, to some of my earlier posts by way of a quick but sparse advocates's explanation.

You can't simply take someone's ideas and work and re -use it.

The real reason why big corps are still scared of open - cource, even non - GPL open - source is because free distribution tends to imply a free license to use _for_personal_interests_ in copyright law.

That's the same basis of argument that you can keep a copy of a newspaper or CD you bought but not sell copies to other people. Which is a freedom which DMCA et.al - or rather the process of Case Law interpretations driven by ill advised commercial protagonism of a poorly written law, could manage to infringe.

There's nothing to say that by my "freeing" some code you have any right to circumvent my right to charge a fee for its use. Technicians in the audience might now comment how a corp has become equivalent to a person in law (it has rights, and can be sued for manslaughter and be held accountable) but I can only assure you that whilst corp = person for some analogies, corp != person in legal reality.

You might use my "freed" code and burn your own CD for your own use, non - profit. But could you explain to me how a company - as distinct from a non - profit organisation - could claim it was not using my code for gain?

Amusingly, - nay, importantly - most of copyright and asociated trademark and IP law is derived from the concept of Tort of Deception - that you gain something by being not what you purport to be, or that you get advantage by assuming the "makeup" of another person's work.

That, if you think about it, would be applicable to the code scenario you suggest. A user without an explicit license to derive benefit from my ("freed" code) work would be using their computer to pose as the results of my original effort. I hope that's some help. By way of disclaimer I manage and regularly defend IP property for a living, when not writing code or postng to /.

We used to create worms on punch cards and you had to mail them around to get infected!

Actually there WAS a game in the mid 70's that reproduced itself on UNIVAC's with tapes that were send around; details here.

Somebody involved in this story is not a Linux company - either MySQL, NuSphere, or maybe LinuxGram. Why do I say this? The article is full of those ?smart quotes? that need to be demoronised. Since the dumb quotes are throughout the article, I'm thinking that LinuxGram is running things on Windows somewhere. That's pretty sad, really.

Here's the output of John Walker's ent program for 512 megabits of Pi:

Entropy = 7.999997 bits per byte.

Optimum compression would reduce the size of this 67108864 byte file by 0 percent.

Chi square distribution for 67108864 samples is 245.38, and randomly would exceed this value 50.00 percent of the times.

Arithmetic mean value of data bytes is 127.4938 (127.5 = random).
Monte Carlo value for Pi is 3.142281720 (error 0.02 percent).
Serial correlation coefficient is -0.000145 (totally uncorrelated = 0.0).

I've also done some testing with other transcendental numbers, such as e (2.718281828...), and they all seem to show great randomness properties, in the information-theoretic sense at least. However, I have a feeling to "trust" Pi more than e, given that you can write e in form of continued fractions with repeating patterns, and nobody has yet found a pattern in the continued fractions of Pi.

As for my pseudo-random library project, my programming skills are quite bad, but if you have some knowledge of scientific computing (multiplication algorithms using FFTs, for example), you can contact me and I might revive the idea.

• Are you one of those rare software people whose productivity is hundreds of times above average?

  Autodesk, Inc., the leader in computer-aided design, founded by people like yourself, invites you to join us.

  We're The Best: You're The Best

  Our company was built by people who never said, ``I can't do that.'' If you're the person we're looking for, you'll be able to design, implement, test, and debug complex software, both alone and collaboratively. The code you write will meet the highest standards of efficiency, maintainability, and modularity. You'll know how to integrate changes in large, complicated programs, and you'll combine design and implementation skills with an intuitive feel for the evolution of the product as a whole and for its position in the marketplace.

  You'll be able to find or develop the theory you need to get your job done. You'll be literate, and able to communicate complicated technical concepts in simple and readable language. Your work documentation will meet the standards of the best tech writers and be suitable for immediate inclusion in our user manuals. You'll be able to express yourself clearly and persuasively, whether in a design session or while speaking with prospective customers at a trade show. And you'll take personal responsibility for all your work, as a matter of course.

  You'll care enough for the commercial success of your programs that you'll work effectively with marketing and sales people, contributing ideas to best promote the benefits of the products you'll be developing. You'll take an active interest in the work of other people in the company, and be willing to apply your expertise to help with their problems and develop their skills.

  We Don't Want Less Than The Best

  What will we do? We'll pay you more than anybody else in the industry. Your pay here can start as high as $60,000 and rise as high as your contributions justify. There's no ceiling on the pay scale for technical people here; you can earn $100,000 if you're worth it and prove it to us. We give our workers stock options that mean something. Unlike companies that look at options as a way of enslaving employees, we intend our options to let you share in the success you'll be helping to create. If we do our job, you won't want to leave. And since we're a public company, your options represent real stock with real value, not funny money.

They were quite serious about this. Note the criteria. Autodesk insisted on people who were literate. All their key programmers wrote well, often for publication. And a strong interest in theory was expected.

Then around 1990, Autodesk got "adult supervision" in the form of Carol Barth, the new CEO, and proceeded to underperform the Dow for a decade, after being the fastest growing company of the 1980s and profitable from the first months.

"You know, the golf course is the only place he isn't handicapped."

"You know, the golf course is the only place he isn't handicapped."

John Walker, founder of AutoDesk, put the lie to the above quote in his paper "A Rocket a Day Keeps the High Costs Away".

Basically, the problem is operationalizing launches so you can walk down the learning curve the way you do with other industries -- and that means launch frequently. The closest anyone ever came to this was the USSR when it had those big bulky film camera spy satellites that had to be launched once a week. They got the actual operational costs of launch far lower than NASA has achieved, despite all their promises.

replacement = /local/images/ad-killer.gif
http://*.doubleclick.net/*ad/*
http://images.slashdot.org/banner/*
etc.

Which was great until I switched to using Mozilla as my browser of choice. (WWWOFFLE doesn't seem to like Mozilla's HTTP/1.1 requests - which is fair enough as it's an HTTP/1.0 proxy - and sometimes pages are truncated).

Which is a pity, 'cos WWWOFFLE has lots of other cool features too. Like de-animating GIFs, removing <BLINK> tags, demoronising MS non-Latin1 characters. (As well as being quite a cool caching/offline proxy).

Ok, so this is out of context...

correct me if I'm wrong

Gladly...

Regarding Babbage - first off, the concepts underlying the Difference Engine came to Babbage in 1812 (and, since Babbage was born in 1792 - that would make him 19 or 20 years old at the time!), as he was thinking on logarithms and the inacuracies that could occur during their calculation. He didn't follow up on his ideas until 1819, at which point he began building a small Difference Engine, finishing it in 1822. In 1823 he applied for and got a grant to build a larger engine (which was not completed). The Difference Engine, however, was more a calculator, and not a computer. The later Analytical Engine (began in 1833 - also not completed) was a true programmable device. More information can be found here and here...

Ada Lovelace, however - didn't invent the loom you refer to - that goes to Joseph Marie Jacquard, who invented the Jacquard Loom in 1802 - which utilised a series of punched cards to control warp threads on each pass of the weft thread. Ada obviously knew quite a bit about these looms (as did Babbage, who conceived of using punch cards for the control of Analytical Engine, presumably after seeing such a loom in action - indeed, the names he settled upon for what we today call the CPU (Mill) and memory (the Store), happen to be derived from terms used in the weaving industry at the time!), and so wrote in her Sketch of the Analytical Engine in 1842:

The distinctive characteristic of the Analytical Engine, and that which has rendered it possible to endow mechanism with such extensive faculties as bid fair to make this engine the executive right-hand of abstract algebra, is the introduction into it of the principle which Jacquard devised for regulating, by means of punched cards, the most complicated patterns in the fabrication of brocaded stuffs. It is in this that the distinction between the two engines lies. Nothing of the sort exists in the Difference Engine. We may say most aptly, that the Analytical Engine weaves algebraical patterns just as the Jacquard-loom weaves flowers and leaves.

Indeed - even she understood the value of the Analytical Engine over that of the Difference Engine - its programmability (weavability?)!

I could indeed go on - you neglect to mention Konrad Zuse, as well as the contribution of Atanasoff and Berry (the ABC) for the first electronic stored program computer.

But I will stop here...

Worldcom - Generation Duh!

Ok, so this is out of context...

correct me if I'm wrong

Gladly...

Regarding Babbage - first off, the concepts underlying the Difference Engine came to Babbage in 1812 (and, since Babbage was born in 1792 - that would make him 19 or 20 years old at the time!), as he was thinking on logarithms and the inacuracies that could occur during their calculation. He didn't follow up on his ideas until 1819, at which point he began building a small Difference Engine, finishing it in 1822. In 1823 he applied for and got a grant to build a larger engine (which was not completed). The Difference Engine, however, was more a calculator, and not a computer. The later Analytical Engine (began in 1833 - also not completed) was a true programmable device. More information can be found here and here...

Ada Lovelace, however - didn't invent the loom you refer to - that goes to Joseph Marie Jacquard, who invented the Jacquard Loom in 1802 - which utilised a series of punched cards to control warp threads on each pass of the weft thread. Ada obviously knew quite a bit about these looms (as did Babbage, who conceived of using punch cards for the control of Analytical Engine, presumably after seeing such a loom in action - indeed, the names he settled upon for what we today call the CPU (Mill) and memory (the Store), happen to be derived from terms used in the weaving industry at the time!), and so wrote in her Sketch of the Analytical Engine in 1842:

The distinctive characteristic of the Analytical Engine, and that which has rendered it possible to endow mechanism with such extensive faculties as bid fair to make this engine the executive right-hand of abstract algebra, is the introduction into it of the principle which Jacquard devised for regulating, by means of punched cards, the most complicated patterns in the fabrication of brocaded stuffs. It is in this that the distinction between the two engines lies. Nothing of the sort exists in the Difference Engine. We may say most aptly, that the Analytical Engine weaves algebraical patterns just as the Jacquard-loom weaves flowers and leaves.

Indeed - even she understood the value of the Analytical Engine over that of the Difference Engine - its programmability (weavability?)!

I could indeed go on - you neglect to mention Konrad Zuse, as well as the contribution of Atanasoff and Berry (the ABC) for the first electronic stored program computer.

But I will stop here...

Worldcom - Generation Duh!

Judging by the lack of certain bits of punctuation, the Lexington Herald-Leader needs to use The Demoronizer. Badly. Not everyone uses Microsoft.

You're kidding, right?

How often, in every day life, do you notice diffraction and interference? I never do. Consider also that the size of objects which cause diffraction are the same order of magnatude in size as the wavelength of light (i.e. 10^-7m). Which, BTW, is far smaller than you can see. Now imagine you're going to keep track of polygons/voxels 10^-7 in size, for a room that's 10m by 10m by 3m. That's 10*10*3/(10^-7)^3 =~ 3*10^23 voxels to keep track of. Forget it. There are far better ways to simulate diffraction, if you really wanted it.

What I have seen, that's really cool, are Relativistic ray tracing. Do that Nsuck^H^H^H^Hvidia!

--Bob

The point is not whether that's how the Egyptians did it - the point is that they COULD have done it this way, as well as in many other ways. We should not get stuck in our mental image of ramps and countless slaves which isn't based on much concrete evidence, either.

This reminds me of a wonderful experiment which shows that Archimedes could have suspected the universality of gravity and prove it with tools and materials available at the time.

-

Here is a nice read about the one's complement logic used in Univac.

Programmers used to add zero (an obvious no-op on today's computers) to weed the negative zeroes out before using bitwise operations. Smart.

Something's just bugging me in that -0 + +0 = +0, though...

Speak Freely for Linux might be what you need.