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http://www.doc.ic.ac.uk/~sue/475/cruft.html

There are actually two pieces to this question:

1. Compression.
2. Decompression.

Kolmogorov compression is defined in terms of the minimal bit string (usually as program running on a Turing-complete machine) it takes to describe another bit string. In order verify a contestant has won some increment of the K-Prize, it would be necessary to make his minimal bit string public so that anyone could "execute" the description to produce the original corpus.

This would produce the valuable result that the language model he is using would be published. The language model itself is very valuable since it contains the model, not just of the language, but of the conceptual world represented by the corpus. This model would be very valuable -- particularly as it began to exceed normal human capabilities to compress the corpus -- for it would contain many novel and quantifiably valuable philosophical, scientific and practical concepts.

The program used to compress the corpus might be very valuable as well or it might be just the "dictionary" of concepts used to compress the corpus. An example of the former is given by some work with advanced inductive logic programming systems that invent predicates. An example of the latter is given by the approach Cycorp has taken for 2 decades (without much success yet) where they hire a bunch of philosophers to describe, in a variety of "microtheories", various aspects of "common sense".

Lately Cycorp has, very wisely, given up the ghost with the idea of having really smart humans try to produce all the concepts and has started using some predicate invention logic.

So very soon now I predict there will be some very profound breakthroughs -- if for no other reason than the long dark ages of AI, where high priests are relied upon for all wisdom, are terminally ill and recognized as such by the high-priests of the "church" of AI.

For that reason I think it wise to demand that the compression algorithm be made public.

This is getting childish guys. It was an analogy, it was even in quotes ("copyright terrorist"). Going into detailed semantics on strict definitions misses the point of an analogy. The point is that Senator Hatch is using extreme tactics, including the use of fear, to force people to conform to an ideal that they disagree with but that he believes in strongly. There is an analogy to terrorism in there, but of course it does not fit a strict definition of the meaning. Just like the Monte Carlo method has nothing to do with the city, a seahorse is not related to a horse, and neural networks don't actually use neurons.

In the FUTURE, single core processors will be dual core processors where one side didn't pass quality control. Someone will eventually figure out how to hack the chip to use both halves anyways, and the market will be flooded with cheap dual core chips that don't always work.

Brilliant! Will we be able to destroy the circuit that disables the second core by drilling a hole through the chip, like they did with the Intel 486SX? (cough!)

No, they routinely visit properties that don't have a license registered at that address. According to this site and USENET, though, you're not obliged to let them in unless they have a warrant.

We're not quite a police state yet, despite the previous and present government's moves to turn it into one (CJA, RIPA, ID Cards + ID database, Anti-Terrorism Act etc. etc.).

Yes, but you know that there are tighly coupled clusters with hundreds or thousands of nodes available on the grid that looks/acts like a single resource on the grid. There are also vector supercomputers like Cray's and NEC's available if one need the capabilities these provide.

Here is a link to a cool Java applet that shows all jobs running on the European research grid:

LCG2 Real Time Grid Monitor

You forgot singing about the London Underground too!

(warning, don't play the link on speakers if you're in an office full of easily offended people)

I do agree that there's not enough understanding of these topics in the database community. But what's needed is more practical stuff. Like an intuitive knowledge of database normalization. Not sophisticated formalisms that are difficult to learn and rarely applied.

Yes you need to replace them sometime after 20+ years. In order to curb this waste people are working on organic solar panels to both bring down the cost of solar and reduce the environmental impact that the panels have when thrown away.

The system described here is not your average random number generator with a text line output that any high-school kid can write. Let us look at the system as it is designed to perform. If you were the system you would be put into a room with some objects. Only thing that you will know are things of interest. 'Paper with rock drawn on it is important', 'Paper with .......' and so on. You would also know when somebody shouts 'I WON' its a good thing for them. Essentially it has in its knowledge base a tiny number of features which somebody else has guaranteed to be of significance to its task. The first challenge in building such a system is sensor fusion: i.e fusing the available audio and visual data to detect a state or an event of interest (I use the word event in the same sense as a trigger, something that prompts the change in state). The next and the biggest challenge is building the model of the game. Please check out http://www.doc.ic.ac.uk/~shm/ilp.html, for a better description of Inductive logic programming. Seriously; the neatest thing about CogVis is not its ability to play Rock, Paper and Scissors, but its ability to actually go into an environment it has very little knowledge of and then observe, deduce and , not a blackbox model, as in say Neural Networks, but a human understandable model in first order logic

An AS is *not* a range of IP numbers delegated to an ISP.

see here

A kind of stereotypical Usenet lamer, a bit like the kids who use l33t-5p34k these days. See the FOLDOC reference.

My 15 year old friend was interviewed 3 times for a job a the "love sack" store. They sell bean bag chairs. He would just have been a sales clerk. They called him back for a forth interview but he just blew them off because he was sick of it.

Why was a bean-bag store hiring programmers for a now obselete computer language anyway?

You should read about XP (extreme programming)...

I have. And way back into last century even. :-)

You're right that the initial idea is always different after seeing prototypes. But for this exact reason you shouldn't document your code. Code should be disposable, so don't waste time writing other than what the computer needs.

And this is where I'll have to strongly disagree with you. Even "Extreme Programming Installed" (a book I personally belive wonders off a bit from Beck's best XP) says to use UML.

Additionally, some of what I've seen in the best projects is the use of good Javadoc, DOC++, Doxygen or some such comments. The best time to write those is while the design is fresh in people's minds, such as in writing up initial tests or first writing each class. Additionally, it's much easier to keep up to date, and helps greatly as people need to go in and refactor code. Oh, and Eclipse has good Javadoc support, and having Javadoc comments helps it work even better.

Of course, I've gone Extreme myself on different projects by writing Docs in XML. Just poke a single XML with different XSLT stylesheets and get end-user API documentation, internal implementor guide documentation, and full test case source code all from that single sparse XML source. (But especially with all the workflow benefits one gets in Eclipse from having proper Javadoc comments around, those are well more that "disposable").

You should read about XP (extreme programming)...

I have. And way back into last century even. :-)

You're right that the initial idea is always different after seeing prototypes. But for this exact reason you shouldn't document your code. Code should be disposable, so don't waste time writing other than what the computer needs.

And this is where I'll have to strongly disagree with you. Even "Extreme Programming Installed" (a book I personally belive wonders off a bit from Beck's best XP) says to use UML.

Additionally, some of what I've seen in the best projects is the use of good Javadoc, DOC++, Doxygen or some such comments. The best time to write those is while the design is fresh in people's minds, such as in writing up initial tests or first writing each class. Additionally, it's much easier to keep up to date, and helps greatly as people need to go in and refactor code. Oh, and Eclipse has good Javadoc support, and having Javadoc comments helps it work even better.

Of course, I've gone Extreme myself on different projects by writing Docs in XML. Just poke a single XML with different XSLT stylesheets and get end-user API documentation, internal implementor guide documentation, and full test case source code all from that single sparse XML source. (But especially with all the workflow benefits one gets in Eclipse from having proper Javadoc comments around, those are well more that "disposable").

Until I got to the end of the blurb I thought this was about user mode linux...and now, of course, I have no idea what it is.

Well, I'm definitely not trying to troll here or anything, but in this instance I'd be willing to give the poster the benefit of the doubt on the TLA use here. Given the target audience (Slashdot tech-heads), and the prevalence of UML in the tech field (among other things there are literally hundreds of available books on the modeling language, but no easily found ones on User Mode Linux), it's not that unreasonable to assume that most would know the Unified Modeling Language, and that those aware of User Mode Linux would fall in the group that probably 'should' know about the UML.

Of course, writing it out long-hand is always handy, and a few links sprinkled around could help.

Until I got to the end of the blurb I thought this was about user mode linux...and now, of course, I have no idea what it is.

Well, I'm definitely not trying to troll here or anything, but in this instance I'd be willing to give the poster the benefit of the doubt on the TLA use here. Given the target audience (Slashdot tech-heads), and the prevalence of UML in the tech field (among other things there are literally hundreds of available books on the modeling language, but no easily found ones on User Mode Linux), it's not that unreasonable to assume that most would know the Unified Modeling Language, and that those aware of User Mode Linux would fall in the group that probably 'should' know about the UML.

Of course, writing it out long-hand is always handy, and a few links sprinkled around could help.

Until I got to the end of the blurb I thought this was about user mode linux...and now, of course, I have no idea what it is.

Well, I'm definitely not trying to troll here or anything, but in this instance I'd be willing to give the poster the benefit of the doubt on the TLA use here. Given the target audience (Slashdot tech-heads), and the prevalence of UML in the tech field (among other things there are literally hundreds of available books on the modeling language, but no easily found ones on User Mode Linux), it's not that unreasonable to assume that most would know the Unified Modeling Language, and that those aware of User Mode Linux would fall in the group that probably 'should' know about the UML.

Of course, writing it out long-hand is always handy, and a few links sprinkled around could help.

Until I got to the end of the blurb I thought this was about user mode linux...and now, of course, I have no idea what it is.

Well, I'm definitely not trying to troll here or anything, but in this instance I'd be willing to give the poster the benefit of the doubt on the TLA use here. Given the target audience (Slashdot tech-heads), and the prevalence of UML in the tech field (among other things there are literally hundreds of available books on the modeling language, but no easily found ones on User Mode Linux), it's not that unreasonable to assume that most would know the Unified Modeling Language, and that those aware of User Mode Linux would fall in the group that probably 'should' know about the UML.

Of course, writing it out long-hand is always handy, and a few links sprinkled around could help.

Disk space is memory: http://foldoc.doc.ic.ac.uk/foldoc/foldoc.cgi?memor y.

Er...uh...I don't think so. CP/M was there years before the Apple, and there was a big (for the time) user base of CP/M computers. Not just in business, but hobbyists as well.

Looking at the Linux and GNU section I noticed one of the last paragraphs which reads:

"Addendum: Aside from GNU, one other project has independently produced a free Unix-like operating system. This system is known as BSD, and it was developed at UC Berkeley. It was non-free in the 80s, but became free in the early 90s. A free operating system that exists today is almost certainly either a variant of the GNU system, or a kind of BSD system.

"People sometimes ask whether BSD too is a version of GNU, like GNU/Linux. The BSD developers were inspired to make their code free software by the example of the GNU Project, and explicit appeals from GNU activists helped persuade them, but the code had little overlap with GNU. BSD systems today use some GNU programs, just as the GNU system and its variants use some BSD programs; however, taken as wholes, they are two different systems that evolved separately. The BSD developers did not write a kernel and add it to the GNU system, and a name like GNU/BSD would not fit the situation."

Or maybe from the other GNU/Linux referenced site.

I'm confused on this...isn't the reasons for calling linux GNU/Linux because it makes use of GNU products (like the compiler, libraries, applications - EMACS, etc) as part of the environment or distribution as a whole? By that same logic, I still don't see way GNU/BSD does not fit by RMS's own words. Does BSD have a completely different set of libraries, applications, compilers, etc that aren't GNU based?

I know of the split between ATT based Unix and the Berkley version of UNIX, but still...

Oh well...I guess in the end it's a to-mA-to, verses to-mah-to symantic argument..

For my course in VHDL last year, I completed the courseworks using GHDL for simulation and GTKWave 2 to view the waveforms. The combination was fine for my purpose but I can imagine it failing with more complex projects. For synthesis I can choose from tools by Altera, Xilinx and Synplicity, although that wasn't necessary for the coursework.

I was actually thinking of simply switching to Verilog. One language doesn't really offer any advantages over the other anyway.

"You don't understand, in order to get the contract we have to hide the manipulation in the source code. This program is needed to control the vote in South Florida." I was shocked that they were actually trying to steal the election and told her that neither I nor anyone else could produce such a program.

Guess the programmer never heard of Perl, eh?

Ken Thompson's 1983 Turing Award lecture to the ACM revealed the existence of a back door in early Unix versions that may have qualified as the most fiendishly clever security hack of all time. The C compiler contained code that would recognise when the "login" command was being recompiled and insert some code recognizing a password chosen by Thompson, giving him entry to the system whether or not an account had been created for him.

Normally such a back door could be removed by removing it from the source code for the compiler and recompiling the compiler. But to recompile the compiler, you have to use the compiler - so Thompson also arranged that the compiler would recognise when it was compiling a version of itself, and insert into the recompiled compiler the code to insert into the recompiled "login" the code to allow Thompson entry - and, of course, the code to recognise itself and do the whole thing again the next time around! And having done this once, he was then able to recompile the compiler from the original sources; the hack perpetuated itself invisibly, leaving the back door in place and active but with no trace in the sources.

The talk that revealed this truly moby hack was published as ["Reflections on Trusting Trust", "Communications of the ACM 27", 8 (August 1984), pp. 761--763].

Cheers,
Craig

I went to Sheffield Hallam, a University that also isn't particularly well recognised for computer science. Nevertheless, I was very happy at University, the course was as practically based as it could be for computing (if you get too much into specifics it'll be out of date before you finish). I ended up with a decent grade, a 2:1 (I don't think Merkin Universities allocate grades on the same scale). By contrast a friend of mine went to Imperial College, a very well respected University, and I'm not afraid to admit I was a little jealous of him for getting in there.

Fast-forward to three years after leaving University, he hated his time there and finishd up with only a 2:2. He's doing a rather dull database administrator job whilst I'm a Senior Systems Administrator, working on a large Linux network doing a job I enjoy. And whilst I don't think one should get too hung-up on money, I think it's relevant to say that I earn more than double his salary.

Essentially, I believe that it's more important for you to be at a Univeristy where you are interested in the course and happy with your surroundings. You don't (or shouldn't) go to Uni to say 'I studied at XYZ', you go to learn. You can do this wherever you are, although obviously it helps to have good teaching staff. Since finishing my course I have found that most employers aren't actually too concerned about what University one went to, or even what grade one got or course one studied. They're far more interested in employing someone they feel can fulfil the needs of the role they're interviewing for. If you work hard at University, you know your stuff and you can show it, it really doesn't matter where you studied.

If you're happy at your current University, you like the people you're studying with and the course seems to be covering the topics you want to cover, stick with it.

I don't think so. No real commercial flightschool training 747 pilots would use flightgear or something like that. They use real flight simulators, not something aimed at the consumer market. On the other hand, if you learned flying with flightgear, and then get into a Cessna, you will get what you deserve....

> Please. I find that such distrust in the machinations of Nature
> itself shows us how narrow minded these "scientists" are. "I
> can't understand it, so God must have done it," essentially.
> This does not open the door to further research and
> understanding. On the contrary it closes the door because
> there is nothing more to be understood beyond "God did it".

That's my thoughts too. Looking at something like evolved electronic circuits that act in ways that arent understood easily, but use every single possible property of whatever components are used in the layout of these electronics, so is the same with nature. it just says there is more that we need to know about how these interactions work. We can model only so much when its all based on incomplete knowledge.

Its also a bit like the story of Mel, a real programmer who not only used features of the programming language but many other little timing tricks to do with the hardware right down to the spinning of drum discs. They are all available to nature because they do product effects. And so they are part of the "language" in dna. Much more than we might just presume at first.

The iPod Lite Project taking orders soon.

You call this a *leak* ?

I don't see how that's an appropriate description of the issue. You've got allocated memory that's not being used. This is hardly the same as the classic C-language memory leak, where memory is in use and the OS or containing application are not entirely in agreement about it... such that the memory perhaps can't even be reclaimed or deallocated, pointers running past the ends of arrays, that sort of thing. Now THAT is what I'd call a "leak"

Allocating a big thing and forgetting you have it, that's just inefficient use of resources. But in the stated example, you are NOT finished using that memory, you just haven't released it yet.

Google thinks this is a well-liked definition of "memory leak":

I suppose we can quibble about whether it supports or refutes my position, but "leak" seems to imply some failure of structure that prevents reclamation.

Our department uses Extreme hardware throughout in a fairly large network deployment.

We have two Linux clusters -- Viking, a 512 processor P4 cluster, and Mars, a 400 processor Opteron cluster (being commissioned). We also host a number of large Sun machines, including SunSite Northern Europe.

The department also hosts a 250+ node teaching lab and several floors of staff and research desktops, each with 100Mbit+ to the desk and a 1Gbit uplink from each switch. At the middle of our network are two Black Diamonds, one of which is the new 10ks which we helped Extreme beta-test (now in production). A third BD is being set up at a second site with 10Gbit fibre links.

The rest of the network ('the edge') is also made up of Extreme switches, ranging from Summit 1s, 24s, 48s to some of their newer 400-series 1u switches on Mars and elsewhere. (The 400-series can run 10Gbit fibre uplinks, and each copper port runs at up to 1Gbit, which is ideal for a cluster environment.)

Plus, they're are all coloured a nice shade of purple.

Not true. We've been using pumped storage reservoirs for quite a long time - water is pumped up when demand is low and released through hydro-electric turbines when needed. The facility in Wales provides an essential buffer to the national grid without which we'd waste Gigawatts. The efficiency is not even at all bad either.

But I mean the standard cheap electronic store definition of router.

A standard router is "A device which forwards packets between networks. The forwarding decision is based on network layer information and routing tables, often constructed by routing protocols."

Nothing about stopping incoming worms there.

Looks like you're really talking about a "NAT router/firewall", which sometimes has reduced routing capabilites. I recently went to PC World (not hoping for much success) looking for a router, since I have a block of 8 public IPs on my LAN, and wanted routing between them and the Internet. I ended up buying one of the 'net since the guy at PC world was a little confused about what routers do and couldn't tell me if they actually sold a real router.

these numbers have nothing to do with the technology of the devices

There never was a reason to capitalize "Internet"?!
Or perhaps Wired News simply don't know what they're talking about?
The "internet" is any set of networks connected with routers. The "Internet" is the largest such network, that uses TCP/IP.

From FOLDOC:

Internet
internet

There never was a reason to capitalize "Internet"?!
Or perhaps Wired News simply don't know what they're talking about?
The "internet" is any set of networks connected with routers. The "Internet" is the largest such network, that uses TCP/IP.

From FOLDOC:

Internet
internet

Programming a computer was like "tweaking a little brain".

I'm sure someone has already said this to you, but you should really take a look at artificial neural networks as a research area to play with. It's exactly like "tweaking a little brain" because the field was motivated in large part by modelling little brains. Take a look at this neural networks in java site for a fun quick overview.

"Wonder what comes after tera"

Like the old 486SX and DX (SX I understood was a disabled/failed math co-processor

Ah this is when their terminology really starts hurting us.

1 terabyte = 1,000,000,000,000 bytes

Try 1024^4 = 1,099,511,627,776.. wait, where'd my 100 gigs go?

Due to the exponential nature this little white lie hurts a bit more for every increment, here sacrificing just about 10% of the storage. I'm surprised they don't say 1000 gigs just to dodge the 10% mark.

For those who insist that tera means one trillon for bytes, I reference
Here, here , here, here, here, and how about here. Now I'll admit the wikipedia entry has the trillion byte definition, but they basically said it is used in storage advertising.

Doing Grad work is quite a bit difficult w/o a 4 year degree though in some fields and at some schools it is possible, and for your information here is a link to ICL

I started "throwing around qualifications because of the parents comment that creationists couldn't pass science classes at a decent school, thus I put forth the argument that I as a creationist not only did pass those classes, but went on to do Grad work in a respected research field and was qualified to teach the same classes that they were saying I couldn't pass. I am not one to flaunt credentials normally. [As a side note regarding credentials when it comes to my CV (effectively a resume) I try to play down my experience in most things otherwise they will not even bring me in to talk about p/t and or contract jobs (I have gone back to school starting this summer with an eye on post grad and post doctoral work] You will also find in my other posts that none of this qualifies me for this discussion as an expert in the specific field but it does give me sufficient background to look at the underlying facts and arguments.

For me there is far too much circular logic in evolutionary theories, and far too many people trying to make a name for themselves and falsifying evidence to do so. The evidence is often overturned but not until years later and it is never removed from lower materials. Lucy and archaeopteryx are prime examples of that Lucy's evidence was faked and that was shown to and then accepted by the scientific community right around 20 years ago. Lucy still is touted as truth however in books, museums and in common(esque) conversation. As for archaeopteryx, it was a full true bird, not some primitive mixture of lizard and avian stock or transitional form. I can understand why evolution proponents would believe this as until 1993 no full fossil of an archaeopteryx had ever been found. However below is a clip from a book titles Biomechanics in Evolution (p194).

"The most striking feature of Archaeopteryx is its well-developed feathered wings.  These wings are not significantly different in size and shape from those of modern birds such as magpies or coucals, and they give every indication that Archaeopteryx was a flying bird.  The feathers also appear to be strong evidence of flight ability . . . . In Archaeopteryx the feathers are remarkably similar to those of modern birds.  They have a stiffened central shaft to transmit aerodynamic forces generated over the feather vanes to the body, and this would not be expected if the feathers had no mechanical function.  More significantly, the feather shaft is set asymmetrically against the vanes of the feather.  This permits the feather to distort optimally to compensate for bending in flight due to aerodynamic loads, and is important in both gliding and flapping flight. . . vane asymmetry is characteristic of modern flying birds, but the feathers of most modern flightless birds are symmetrical."

There are other issues such as time to cause fossilisation, time to lay down strata, original ratios of elements (K/Ar etc.) which were used to derive each other. we say that this fossil exists in this time frame because we found it in this strata That was al well and fine so long as there was no real evidence saying it wasn't since after all part of science is accepting what fits the model until something changes that model) Then we look at information that has been gathered in the past 20 years or so and apply the same logic to it and suddenly you find that Mt St Helens last erupted over 100,000 years ago and that there were trees, houses and dogs around it at the time. When this comes up you have to take a look and wonder again since we can logically derive that a house built in the past 60 years was not in fact built over 100,000 years ago. The same kind of thing goes with stratification and fossilisation, we have always (in modern reckoning) that for something to b

Are you sure that's not a typo?

World War II might have gone a different way if not for "operational research," which sought decision-making rules for the precise allocation of resources. I hope that anyone with an MBA has heard at least of the Simplex Algorithm from 1947, and thinks of Game Theory as something absolutely precise about best strategies given well-defined input. Even dumbass Excel comes with a suite of tools, both linear and nonlinear, for performing optimizations, and today's desktops are capable of running what-if scenarios that would have required supercomputers just 10 years ago.

This 2x2 matrix idea seems awfully damned fluffy, considering how much is known about optimizing complex systems. Definitely an "airport book," as another Slashdotter described it.

It is completely wrong as shown in this screen shot. The actual version is Mozilla 1.5.

I am currently working on a web site with CSS driven menus. To get IE to work, we have to override event handlers in Javascript to get IE to behave properly.

I too feel your pain! Not only that, if you want the CSS to validate properly the "behaviour" thang in the IE the CSS hover hack is non standard so will make the W3C validator barf. So you (still) have to do browser detection, but for the CSS instead of the HTML! I've had to hack and slash to get my home page working any where near reasonably. Even then, I got it working ok in IE5, looked at it in IE6 and it's ridiculously different. In case you are wondering all the HTML pages validate perfectly, as do the CSS. So they should not look fundamentally different!

As far as CSS goes, great idea. How about *someone* implementing it correctly? Even Mozilla (which is far better than IE) does a lousy job occasionally (for example font manipulation is non existent). For a prime example of rubbish CSS handling, go to any page on my home page in Mozilla and do "print preview". For some reason it barfs on the drop caps (of course IE doesnt *do* the drop caps anyhow). Moz formats them fine in screen view but not in print preview, (the CSS just hides the columns and widens the content part for printing). If I want it to avoid looking totally stupid I have to get rid of the drop caps. Bah!

Speaking of Mozilla (4.78) it's not even all that stable, for instance it crashes when visiting The Guardian

Aaargh! I feel like going off on a rant again.... Time to go home!

I am currently working on a web site with CSS driven menus. To get IE to work, we have to override event handlers in Javascript to get IE to behave properly.

I too feel your pain! Not only that, if you want the CSS to validate properly the "behaviour" thang in the IE the CSS hover hack is non standard so will make the W3C validator barf. So you (still) have to do browser detection, but for the CSS instead of the HTML! I've had to hack and slash to get my home page working any where near reasonably. Even then, I got it working ok in IE5, looked at it in IE6 and it's ridiculously different. In case you are wondering all the HTML pages validate perfectly, as do the CSS. So they should not look fundamentally different!

As far as CSS goes, great idea. How about *someone* implementing it correctly? Even Mozilla (which is far better than IE) does a lousy job occasionally (for example font manipulation is non existent). For a prime example of rubbish CSS handling, go to any page on my home page in Mozilla and do "print preview". For some reason it barfs on the drop caps (of course IE doesnt *do* the drop caps anyhow). Moz formats them fine in screen view but not in print preview, (the CSS just hides the columns and widens the content part for printing). If I want it to avoid looking totally stupid I have to get rid of the drop caps. Bah!

Speaking of Mozilla (4.78) it's not even all that stable, for instance it crashes when visiting The Guardian

Aaargh! I feel like going off on a rant again.... Time to go home!

I checked this out at FOLDOC, and got a simple definition in two short paragraphs. Unless the author thinks he needs to describe in great, redundant detail every service now used over broadband, I find it hard to see how he got past ten pages or so, even with a long section guessing what might be done with it in the future. I don't think I'm going to bother buying it.

A defect is not just a bug; rather, it's a bug that has been found, documented, and fixed using a software engineering process.

I think what you are trying to say is something we all agree with: zero bug reports doesn't imply zero bugs.

• Hugin is getting really good as a frontend for panotools. It'll be really great when alpha layers become available too!
• Getting the camera to take remote piccies is possible as well (although getting access to all the manual parameters maybe a problem -- no luck there with my canon a40)
• A stepper motor and its RS-232 interface is not that expensive or hard to find anymore (50 quid at Milford instruments).
• Or... you can build your own out of a floppy drive connected to the parallel port. Maybe a better solution, the milford stuff is getting pretty hot after a while and requires 9-15V

Has anybody built a tripod like this? What did you guys use?

The HOPL is an "Interactive historical roster of computer languages". It has more languages, but also contain non-programming languages (like query-languages).

The editor of the site has made two color-coded posters: Version 1 and Version 2.

Other lists are here, here and here.

Ulrik

Because you are mistaken about the nature of computer languages. Machine code (which you refer to as binary) is not a language.

• First Generation Language
• Second Generation Language
• Third Generation Language
• Fourth Generation Language

Incidently, my dad started with computers before first level languages; back when they still *shudder* had to move the wires.

Because you are mistaken about the nature of computer languages. Machine code (which you refer to as binary) is not a language.

• First Generation Language
• Second Generation Language
• Third Generation Language
• Fourth Generation Language

Incidently, my dad started with computers before first level languages; back when they still *shudder* had to move the wires.