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http://ee.lbl.gov/vat

From data on nucleosynthesis (thermonuclear reaction hydrogen-> deuterium, tritium, helium, lithium and a little bit of other stuff) and from recent Boomerang data we know that most of the mass in Universe is not in hydrogen or other baryonic matter. It is a simple argument, actually. If density of gas is high, thermonuclear reactions would go much faster and isotopes that are fast to be consumed (deutherium, Helium3) would not survive to our time. But there exist deuterium and other fast burning isotopes in interstellar gas. Therefore, there were not enough gas to account for all mass in the Universe. See this link for details. There is other evidence as well for dark matter that is not hydrogen or other baryonic gas. Hey, I wrote it right this time --- baryons ;-)

What does CorelDRAW provide that GIMP doesn't (or couldn't)?

CorelDraw 9 is actually a small suite of packages, including CorelDraw, Corel Photo-Paint, a font navigator, a texture explorer, a bitmap-to-vector tracing package and various image distortion tools. So, to answer your question, the functionality provided by CorelDraw 9 that the GIMP doesn't do is vector-based artwork, rather than pixmap. This is still an area of the Linux application base that is not fully up to speed yet - there are various applications which do vector-art/vector-design on Linux, such as Dia, Sketch, KIllustrator, Xfig (ancient but still useful) and it's successor GTKFig, GYVE and Impress but many of these are as yet incomplete or have fallen by the wayside. That's not to say that CorelDraw 9 is necessarily the best vector art package out there - I'd like to see the latest Adobe Illustrator on Linux too - but it is a welcome filling-out of the application base.

There are several things in the Windows package which it will be very interesting to see what Corel do with regards to porting them, or if they are simply ommitted. For example, the MS Visual Basic for Applications scripting language used for automation of CorelDraw 9 - drop or replace? - and the Digimarc Digital Watermarking software, something I'm currently unaware of anything like this on the Linux platform. Plus the usual glut of a thousand TrueType and Type1 fonts you get with any vector or DTP package these days.

Whether Corel Photo-paint 9 holds a candle to the GIMP (I don't honestly know, since I haven't used Photopaint since v5) is vaguely irrelevent, since it is the vector art package in this lot that will probably be of most interest to most people.

Cheers,

Toby Haynes

IBM, and not quite. Her e's the scoop, and note that STMs are very big, very finicky, very energy-intensive machines.

In 1989 two IBM researchers penned their employer's acronym by manipulating 35 xenon atoms with a scanning tunneling microscope-a device that dragged the atoms across a nickel surface. The atoms moved because of chemical bonding interactions that occurred when the microscope's tungsten tip came to within a tenth of a nanometer or so of each atom. Jones notes the difficulties involved: The IBM logo was created in an extremely high vacuum at the supercooled temperature of liquid helium using inert xenon atoms. Outside this rarefied environment, the world becomes much less stable. "Single atoms of more structurally useful elements at or near room temperature are amazingly mobile and reactive," Jones writes. "They will combine instantly with ambient air, water, each other, the fluid supporting the assemblers, or the assemblers themselves."

Recalling that normal matter is made up of atomic particles, which themselves are composed of subparticles (quarks and leptons). Quarks summarized here. "Strange matter" is simply matter that is made up mainly of the quark with the flavor "strange" (the name comes from the strangeness of their long lifetimes compared with other known particles).

It holds a relationship to normal matter something akin to antimatter's, although it is not antimatter (there is "normal" strange matter and "antimatter" strange matter). Basically, it looks like normal matter but isn't made up of the same kinds of subparticles. I think that strange matter in general is nowhere near as stable as normal matter.
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Lake Effect, a weblog

Of course, if you're primarily doing graphics for a living, you're better off sticking with your Mac for that, as I don't imagine there will be Pantone support in any Free Unix anytime soon.

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Just to make things clear, I'm a grad student in physics, working on the BaBar experiment (at SLAC in SanFran). My analysis involves kaons, which are bound states of strange quarks and up/down quarks. And yes, physics has produced many, many kaons over the years. So I think I know what I'm talking about.

--Bob

Linux is not embraced by the academic community in the same way as many of the BSD-derived stacks (e.g. Solaris)

Well, not according to this article which says Solaris is a reimplementation that doesn't use BSD, just like Linux's IP stack.

It also says Solaris isn't very good at sticking to the standards, rather like Linux 1.0, but unlike Linux 2.0.30 and 2.1.34 which are pretty good (and I bet 2.2 is better).

I wonder whether Holger Kruse ever mailed any bug reports to the Linux kernel folks. I think that would be simpler than implementing workarounds in his stack.

This article is the major reference for the RFC and is written by the same guy as the RFC. It also has a lot of tough criticism of other systems, including Solaris and several BSD-dervived stacks. Windows gets a fairly clean bill, and they are very critical of Trumpet Winsock.

I tried to check Dawson's paper, but his server seems to be down.

For the other problems in the RFC they were either clearly marked as BSD problems, or I couldn't follow up the references. (Either because there weren't any, or because they were paper and not online.) The RFC doesn't name names, so it's impossible to say which of the others Linux has been guilty of, or is guilty of.

I think Holger Kruse should tell us what his 4 workarounds are, that he has been forced to put in to work around Linux. Linux has plenty of stuff put in to work around other people's mistakes of course. I guess having to put that sort of thing in your code can make you arrogant.

The Flux Capacitor?

Please, not only can Linux teleconference, it can multicast them out.

There is, 'vic' which probably the most popular for multicasts.

I'm sure you can find others (which don't require multicasting) if you look hard enough :)