Domain: mcgill.ca
Stories and comments across the archive that link to mcgill.ca.
Comments · 245
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Re:Doesn't work, at least with the original DOS ga
Try VDM Sound. It provides sound and joystick support to the DOS VDM in Windows NT (and XP and 2k).
I use it to play DOS CD version of TIE fighter (the best version IMO) and it works great.
I hate the graphics updates for the Windows versions; they use very low color depth and resolution textures that make the ships look... dirty. The vector based gouraud shading looked much better to me. Also, there is this really annoying engine sound that plays way too loud and has this short repeating sample (no, it can't be tured off).
They ruined the music entirely. There used to be this great, original, MIDI soundtrack, but the Windows version replaces it with some low-quality generic Star Wars movie music ripoff. Think about turning the Star Wars soundtrack into elevator music.
I'm not sure, but I get the feeling that they altered the laser firing rate to be faster in the Windows version. It seems different.
Plus, you can still have the high-res (640x480) flight mode in the DOS Tie CD. -
Greedo
I hope Greedo doesn't shoot first in this version!!!
http://www.arts.mcgill.ca/programs/polisci/faculty /rexb/greedo.html
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Oona Goota Solo? -
Another case: 100k lives vs. hair removalAs I'd commented in Open Source for Biotechnology:"as others have pointed out, software development isn't as expensive as biotech / pharma development. On the other hand, the potential cost to human lives of closed vs. open source development for biotech is also huge. We should be talking about it at least as much as we talk about SCO. We have to talk about the real costs and benefits of how our patents and methods affect people.
One example: trypanosomiasis- sleeping sickness. Infects 500,000/year, kills 100,000/year. And it drives you mad before you go into a coma and die. The older treatment Melarsoprol contains arsenic (and anti-freeze) and kills over 5% of patients taking it. It also feels like injecting bleach into the body. Another newer treatment (Eflornithine) works better and has far less severe side effects. It was used throughout the 90's as the best treatment. However, Eflornithine was only commercially manufactured as a potential cancer treatment-- once found to not work on cancer, there was no reason to continue making it, and Aventis ended production of eflornithine in 1999. As the last of the old stock ran out, patients had to go back to the dangerous and painful arsenic treatment.
Luckily for those 500,000 people per year, eflornithine was later found to have one important use: its a fine facial hair depilatory cream . So as the production of this drug was re-started to prevent the horror of unwanted facial hair, 500k people get the side-benefit of a non-arsenic treatment for a deadly disease. But only because eflornithine was found to treat excess hair, not because it prevents painful death.
This is just one anecdote- one illness. Because this is Slashdot, got to have some software analogies... they can be made. In the software world of closed source, Microsoft can discontinue support for a product, and people suffer from the time and money to upgrade. Or you can be the country of Iceland, volunteering to do all the work to make an Icelandic language verion of Windows 98, and Microsoft can just refuse you. In the biotech/med world of closed source, you can be 500,000 people not wanting to inject arsenic in their veins, and Aventis can still discontinue support for for your non-arsenic drug treatment.
It could be argued that eflornithine wouldn't have existed without closed-source drug development: but that doesn't seem to be the case here. First, while drug production is closed-source, basic research is at heart open-source. Sencond, Al Sjoerdsma, the scientist who first discovered its properties was apparently more of a Tim Berners-Lee type than a Gates or Darl McBride type. Other posters in here have pointed out how many patented drugs often are first found in university labs (taxpayer funded, open source methods) before disappearing into a licencing hole.
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Another case: 100k lives vs. hair removalAs I'd commented in Open Source for Biotechnology:"as others have pointed out, software development isn't as expensive as biotech / pharma development. On the other hand, the potential cost to human lives of closed vs. open source development for biotech is also huge. We should be talking about it at least as much as we talk about SCO. We have to talk about the real costs and benefits of how our patents and methods affect people.
One example: trypanosomiasis- sleeping sickness. Infects 500,000/year, kills 100,000/year. And it drives you mad before you go into a coma and die. The older treatment Melarsoprol contains arsenic (and anti-freeze) and kills over 5% of patients taking it. It also feels like injecting bleach into the body. Another newer treatment (Eflornithine) works better and has far less severe side effects. It was used throughout the 90's as the best treatment. However, Eflornithine was only commercially manufactured as a potential cancer treatment-- once found to not work on cancer, there was no reason to continue making it, and Aventis ended production of eflornithine in 1999. As the last of the old stock ran out, patients had to go back to the dangerous and painful arsenic treatment.
Luckily for those 500,000 people per year, eflornithine was later found to have one important use: its a fine facial hair depilatory cream . So as the production of this drug was re-started to prevent the horror of unwanted facial hair, 500k people get the side-benefit of a non-arsenic treatment for a deadly disease. But only because eflornithine was found to treat excess hair, not because it prevents painful death.
This is just one anecdote- one illness. Because this is Slashdot, got to have some software analogies... they can be made. In the software world of closed source, Microsoft can discontinue support for a product, and people suffer from the time and money to upgrade. Or you can be the country of Iceland, volunteering to do all the work to make an Icelandic language verion of Windows 98, and Microsoft can just refuse you. In the biotech/med world of closed source, you can be 500,000 people not wanting to inject arsenic in their veins, and Aventis can still discontinue support for for your non-arsenic drug treatment.
It could be argued that eflornithine wouldn't have existed without closed-source drug development: but that doesn't seem to be the case here. First, while drug production is closed-source, basic research is at heart open-source. Sencond, Al Sjoerdsma, the scientist who first discovered its properties was apparently more of a Tim Berners-Lee type than a Gates or Darl McBride type. Other posters in here have pointed out how many patented drugs often are first found in university labs (taxpayer funded, open source methods) before disappearing into a licencing hole.
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100k deaths vs. facial hair removal: an anecdoteI'd written about the need for open source genetics in a Slashdot article on Smart Breeding to Beat Biotechnology. Locked-hood genetics is like proprietary software in many ways, including:
- The (food/software) itself is secondary to locking you into a company's support products and support cycle treadmill
- The proprietary product is often based on (taken from / stolen from) older open source projects.
- they have all or nothing security models
- They break standards.
- they're closed source, top-down implementations that lead to monocultures.
For example, look at trypanosomiasis- sleeping sickness. Infects 500k/year, kills 100k/year, drives you mad before you go into a coma and die. The older treatment (Melarsoprol) contains arsenic (and anti-freeze) and kills over 5% of patients taking it. It also feels like injecting bleach into the body. Another newer treatment (Eflornithine) works better and has far less severe side effects. It was used throughout the 90's as the best treatment. However, Eflornithine was only commercially manufactured as a potential cancer treatment-- once found to not work on cancer, there was no reason to continue making it, and Aventis ended production of eflornithine in 1999. As the last of the old stock ran out, patients had to go back to the dangerous and painful arsenic treatment.
Luckily for those 500,000 people per year, eflornithine was later found to have one important use: its a fine facial hair depilatory cream . So as the production of this drug was re-started to prevent the horror of unwanted facial hair, 500k people get the side-benefit of a non-arsenic treatment for a deadly disease. But only because eflornithine was found to treat excess hair, not because it prevents painful death.
This is just one anecdote- one illness. The analogy to software can still be made: when Microsoft discontinues support for a product, people suffer from the time and money to upgrade. When Aventis discontinues support for a product, people suffer as well. It could be argued that eflornithine wouldn't have existed without closed-source drug development: but that doesn't seem to be the case here. First, while drug production is closed-source, basic research is at heart open-source. Sencond, Al Sjoerdsma, the scientist who first discovered its properties was apparently more of a Tim Berners-Lee type than a Gates or Darl McBride type.
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100k deaths vs. facial hair removal: an anecdoteI'd written about the need for open source genetics in a Slashdot article on Smart Breeding to Beat Biotechnology. Locked-hood genetics is like proprietary software in many ways, including:
- The (food/software) itself is secondary to locking you into a company's support products and support cycle treadmill
- The proprietary product is often based on (taken from / stolen from) older open source projects.
- they have all or nothing security models
- They break standards.
- they're closed source, top-down implementations that lead to monocultures.
For example, look at trypanosomiasis- sleeping sickness. Infects 500k/year, kills 100k/year, drives you mad before you go into a coma and die. The older treatment (Melarsoprol) contains arsenic (and anti-freeze) and kills over 5% of patients taking it. It also feels like injecting bleach into the body. Another newer treatment (Eflornithine) works better and has far less severe side effects. It was used throughout the 90's as the best treatment. However, Eflornithine was only commercially manufactured as a potential cancer treatment-- once found to not work on cancer, there was no reason to continue making it, and Aventis ended production of eflornithine in 1999. As the last of the old stock ran out, patients had to go back to the dangerous and painful arsenic treatment.
Luckily for those 500,000 people per year, eflornithine was later found to have one important use: its a fine facial hair depilatory cream . So as the production of this drug was re-started to prevent the horror of unwanted facial hair, 500k people get the side-benefit of a non-arsenic treatment for a deadly disease. But only because eflornithine was found to treat excess hair, not because it prevents painful death.
This is just one anecdote- one illness. The analogy to software can still be made: when Microsoft discontinues support for a product, people suffer from the time and money to upgrade. When Aventis discontinues support for a product, people suffer as well. It could be argued that eflornithine wouldn't have existed without closed-source drug development: but that doesn't seem to be the case here. First, while drug production is closed-source, basic research is at heart open-source. Sencond, Al Sjoerdsma, the scientist who first discovered its properties was apparently more of a Tim Berners-Lee type than a Gates or Darl McBride type.
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Re:Face recognition
Yes, for example, the eigenfaces method converts each image into a vector, and constructs a new subspace based on the highest ranked common features between them (using Principal Component Analysis, aka the Karhunen Lòeve Transform). Then new images are projected into this space and the shortest distance between the new vector and the previously computed ones is found.
It was the first thing that popped into my head while reading the article too
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Re:Attempting to model the real world on this scal
may be this would help...
ieee
computing the weather -
Re:There is no Python sandbox
The problem with your suggest is that Python has no sandboxed execution stack
Hmm. That's a weird thing to say, why would
sandboxing need to be part of the language? -
Re:K[insert application name]
1: Users are forced to use antialiasing, or the fonts look like haywire.
I've no idea what "haywire" means. They will certainly look jaggy -- such is life without antialiasing. The same thing will happen with the Windows font renderer with aa text disabled.
2: If antialiased, they look fat and unreadable UNLESS you have a version of freetype and whatever fontserver you use, compiled *with the patentet hinting technology turned ON*.
(a) Most current apps use Xft and thus client-side font rendering, making poking at the fontserver unnecessary.
(b) Would you happen to provide the name of the font that looks "fat"? Does the following image (all lines generated using the autohinter) look "fat" to you? (note: image produced without using subpixel rendering, so if you're viewing this on an LCD, it won't look as nice as it could). This is a bit older (freetype 2.1.4 rather than current), but it shouldn't be too old to be roughly on top of things. -
Re:linux in canadian universities...
I've been an undergrad at Concordia , and am now a grad student at McGill , and having been turned onto Linux in the former, I've noticed the following (qualitative!) trends at both Montreal institutions:
Sysadmins :
All sysadmins I've encountered at either Univ. are definite LInux LOverS, running clusters at home and upgrading daily, and spending most of their day time patrolling univ. machines as root. They also seem to enjoy dealing with Linux-related problems, despite taking much longer to solve them.
Professors:
My supervisors at Concordia and McGill have both equated Microsoft with Beelzebub, and make rude remarks about Redmond in their lectures.
Students:
The general undergraduate population are Microsoft peons, but the proportion of Linux users increases as you move to higher percentiles grade-wise. Also, I've been told that most undergraduates drink heavily.
Research Labs:
All research group machines I've used run Linux (save for an IRIX machine at McGill), but the grads/postdocs tend to prefer Windows.
General-purpose Labs:
At Concordia I dare say Linux was run on ~90% of the general lab machines (granted, most were double-booted). At McGill, only ~20% of lab machines run Linux. Both schools have "Linux-only" rooms, which are equivalent to either "VIP lounges" or "Smoking Section", depending on the last digit of the square root of 2.
Hector Savage -
A few suggestions
Note that I'm not considering OS in this. These are general suggestions.
* Anything in the "programming game" genre. When doing this, a player designs a robot to go through some kind of puzzle or challenge (or theoretically fight, though as much of this is rather abstract, it may work under your violence issues). The original game in this genre is "Core Wars" (despite the name, if you consider this violent, I will be impressed), where little bits of code struggled desperately to try to control more memory. There are other games in this genre, like "Mindrover". I found a quick list of games in the genre here
* There are a number of simulation games that would work. Most games in the sim genre really *are* okay. The SimCities have been in the educational market forever for a good reason (makes me realize how dated my educational software knowledge is, though). For Linux, Lincity is good -- plays quite different from SimCity, with distribution of goods and power more of an emphasis than utilitiy coverage.
* Many puzzle games can be considered educational. Go to Info-Mac or another Mac software site and look under "Puzzle". I'm personally rather fond of sobokan and clones, where one pushes boxes around in a "warehouse" into proper locations. It's untimed, but fun.
* The Simple End User Linux (SEUL) project maintains a lot of links to software (including educational software) for Linux. Open source software has a way of getting ported, and I suspect you'll find that a fair amount works on OS X. Take a look here
* Ultimately, I'd say that web-browsing can be an awfully educational experience (seriously, I've learned so much of what I know from the Internet that it's nuts -- almost anything you want to know is out on the Web somewhere), more so than most "educational" games. If they have a laptop, they can browse the web, no?
I never thought much of the whole brand of "educational" software. The ones that simply included some interesting facts, like Oregon Trail or Sim City, seemed to provide a relatively low amount of knowledge for the amount of effort that gets put into them. The ones that made you do math quickly to play the game just doesn't seem to help real-world math skills much. When I learned to do math rapidly in my head, it was not using a video game.
The Web is a fantastic research tool -- boy, it's irritating when teachers try to discourage students from using any Web sources. As a matter of fact, I'd consider having a web browser always available to be one of the most valuable educational resources available. When I didn't know what a word meant, my mother always tried to train me and my siblings to go find a dictionary and look it up. The problem is that it's a real pain in the ass to do so, especially if I'm comfortably reading a book. If I have a nice, fast, stable-and-not-swapping system with a web browser up that doesn't need to run through a modem (most people used to get this in university for the first time), I'd very inclined to look up words and concepts that I'm interested about. Just recently, I read an article on "The Onion", a decidedly non-educational piece of satire that alluded to the Dauphin, some sort of French nobility. I got curious. I never, ever would have done this if I had to use paper encyclopedias, because of the effort involved, but I read up on the Dauphin, and ended up reading for much of the day about French political and military history. -
Try 2-way uncompresseed surround sound and video.
A friend at McGill university is writing code that has been used to demonstrate 2-way video conferencing with uncompressed video and 12 channels of uncompressed high-quality audio. With this software, they've managed to have musicians in Ottawa and Montreal collaborate in live jam sessions. The demo's have been quite impresive, and you can get the code here. (Not yet open source, although they're working towards that.)
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2 years ago
Up until 2002, the final exams schedule at my university were only available through gopher. Oh, and to register for classes, you had to call that incredibly sucky automated phone system that really did NOT like you interrupting it by pressing numbers before being told to. They finally upgraded that ancient piece of crap system, now everything is done through the web.
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Re:Well, there go the logfiles
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Re:14 point?12 points = 1 pica = 1/6 of an inch height, which I have often seen ignored.
The point size of a font refers to the height of the ancient lead type, where every letter is sitting on a rectangular piece of lead. Some fonts are designed to never reach the borders of that rectangle, i.e. a parenthesis "(" in a 12-point font can actually be a bit less than 12 pt high. Only if a "(" is more than the specified 12pt, then something is really wrong.
Furthermore, 12 points are NOT the same as 1/6 inch. There are actually 72.27 (American printer's) points in an inch, but someday, Adobe decided that for digital typesetting, a round number such as 72 points per inch was easier. (The number 72.27 pt/in is easy to remember, but that is pure coincidence. See point units.)
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Deja Vu
Vocaloid has been covered on Slashdot before. It is one of the many impressive projects to have at least in part come out of the Music Technology Group at Institut Universitari de L'Audiovisual in Barcelona.
This is one of many impressive Music Technology groups in the world who is kind enough to provide us with open source software such as CLAM. Similarly there are some groups out there doing interesting things. Needless to say, I could link all day...
I am a graduate student in this field -
Re:MOON THEFT
Umm.... I don't recall signing that treaty.
Indeed - only 8 countries were signatories of the Moon Treaty(1979), which didn't include the United States. However, the Outer Space Treaty (1967) was signed by 91 countries and has similar principles to the Antarctic Treaty (1959).
The Outer Space Treaty of 1967 explicitly forbids any government from claiming a celestial resource such as the Moon or a planet. The Moon Treaty forbids the exploitation of Space, the Moon and other celestial bodies for profit motives. According to the Moon Treaty, individuals may not claim the Moon and other celestial bodies.
However, there's just one small, minor problem: The Treaty was never ratified. Of all the approximately 185 member states of the UN only six states supported it. All others, including all space faring nations (USA, Russia, China etc) refused to sign it and did not sign it. That is something that does not seem to be well known. The USA explicitly refused to sign it as it would inhibit the exploitation of Lunar and other celestial resources for profit by corporations and individuals. -
Re:Honor Code
IIRC, my university's policy was to put a blotch on your academic transcripts (goodbye graduate school), and if you're caught again, you're expelled for academic dishonesty. Most Canadian universities have similar policies, so I don't doubt McGill is the same.
From a blurb they have on the policy http://www.mcgill.ca/integrity/strategies/student
/ , it seems they also have a problem my university had... professors who like to keep the incident behind closed doors.I recall once there was an outrageous attempt by a group of people I was living with to plagarise. Six people, living on the same floor in the same residence all took the same paper, and handed it in. Stunning really. Only one of them took the time to reword it, but the others just handed it in. The situation was so completely over the top, that although it was reported to the dean, the dean decided not to put it on their transcripts... they were all forced to repeat the assignment to keep it off their records, the professor's full late penalties applied (mark was cut in half). They got off very light in my opinion, but the professor was widely perceived to be a bit of a joke, and oddly enough, knowing them better than the dean or the professor, I can honestly say that they normally weren't plagarists... I think the group-mentality just set in and they all did something very stupid.
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Re:fuckedcompany? no.. fuckedrepublic
Sigh.
from Wikipedia
The inclusion of a charter of rights in the constitution was a much debated issue. Prime Minister Pierre Trudeau very much wanted it but many of the provincial leaders did not. Trudeau thus was forced to include the notwithstanding clause to allow provinces to opt out of certain areas of the charter. Pressure from the left in the country, especially the New Democratic Party, prevented Trudeau from including any rights protecting private property
from McGill Law Journal
the Charter does not prohibit the "establishment" of religion, nor does it protect property rights explicitly.
also links from here
really good discussion of property rights in Canada here
Read this one if your ignore all the rest - good article.
I suggest you find something other than Slashdot for your research.
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Re:IBM model M keyboardSame here, I nearly forgot about that. I have one of the Model-M's that were manufactured by Lexmark, and don't have the detachable cord. Best keyboard ever, I'm keeping it around, even if it is a bit loud.
Besides that, I have an Elsa Gladiac, the first Geforce 2 card on the market, and a zip drive from 1997 in my current desktop computer. Both get the job done decently.
But, I have a fully functional 486sx I keep around for games. I don't use it now that I found VDMsound to let me run old stuff on my current hardware without fighting sound compaibility (the worst part or trying to run old games).
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Come to Canada instead
C'mon up to Canada for your education. The tuition is about half (or less) of what it is in the states, if you're gay you can get married, and we're about to decriminalize marijuana.
Better yet, you don't have to pay to see our rankings:
1 Toronto
2 Queen's
*3 McGill
*3 Western
5 UBC
6 Montreal
7 Alberta
8 Sherbrooke
9 Ottawa
10 McMaster
11 Dalhousie
12 Saskatchewan
13 Laval
14 Calgary
15 Manitoba -
Hexapod robot: same as earlier Slashdot Story
There was an earlier story on Slashdot about RHex, as part of the Aqua project. Videos are available on the ARL website at McGill.
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Re:Sensationalism
I have to agree with a previous post, the news report is covering an article in a peer reviewed journal. Now given that the journal posted a news release writ big on their website royal society proceedings bio you can perhaps accuse them of causing a bit of hype. Unfortunatly the article isn't in print yet, or at least not online. But, and keep in mind I've only read the press releases, they might run afoul of a few people given their choice of neuropsychological tests.
It isn't exactly elegant to use the Raven matrix reasoning task. With a sample of 45, you should have time to run a full test of IQ. The short form of the WASI doesn't take that long (30 mins tops). The other issue is their measure of digit span. In my experience most people use a very simplistic measure of digit span that involves 2 trials per level (ie: give a subject 2 trials at 6 digits, 2 trials at 7 etc.) Where I work at the MNI , we've developed our own test that involves 8 trials per digit level, allowing the subject time to try out new strategies and reducing the effect of chance errors and/or successes.
But again, until the paper is published I can't really say if it's a bad study. I've faith enough in peer-review even if it does let in some bad studies now and again. -
Re:use reputation propagation
Hm. I haven't found much on this class of idea yet. Could you send me your paper? I would be very eager to read it. You can find me here
... look in the Alumni list for Miecznikowski. Thank you very much! -
Thanks. Need help?
Gads...an informed post on security and the CC My complements.
Thanks.
EAL7 is the highest defined Common Criteria Evaluation Assurance Level. EAL2 is one of the lower ones and can be achieved by minimal documentation efforts. [....] For the original post to say "highest" is to say the writer misunderstood the significance of the IBM announcement.
I'm glad you pointed that out. Taco's "highest" comment was just plain silly.
I'm aware of only one OS aspiring to a greater than EAL5 level for a general purpose operating system, DigitalNet's STOP which is currently in evaluation, has been for 8 months and will be for several more months.
I didn't know you guys were doing that. It looks like you guys have built a ground up proprietary security OS with XTS-400. Am I reading that correctly? If so, that's much more ambitious than the Solaris/Linux proprietary modules Argus is using in pitbull.
PS - if you know anyone who needs the services of a CISSP, let me know... ;-) -
Re:Any way to extend this to modern games?
Try VDMSound. Despite its name, it emulates more than just sound, making it possible to play quite a few otherwise unplayable games under 2000 or XP. It only works with these two flavors of Windows, though. And it does not fix the problem with old Sierra games and processors over 500 MHz.
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CANADA!!!!
hmm.. canada....
well, you should really see the expo stadium in montreal, which is really just magnificent.. its a work of art.
only costs like 5 bucks to go to the top, iirc, and its a nice view of montreal anyways...
umm.. cathedral de notre dame is really cool.. very intricate... almost made me wanna stop being an athiest! ;)
(which of course makes it an absolute must if you ARE religious)
other than that... oh, by the water theres this really cool place that you MUST go.. just trust me on this, you wont regret it even if it doesnt sound *that* amazing -- it really is. i dont remember exactly where it is, just that its along the water (yes, there is alot of places along the water -- but you'll end up there, trust me.) actually, its a few blocks away from notre dame iirc... you can see the expo 67 habitat from it (which btw is also a must-see... just check the link i jsut provided to see what i mean. --yes, those are apartments.)
anyways.. you'll be walking along the street and you will come to a fork in the road. there will be this giant wedge shaped building.. that is where you want to go.
basically, it is this building where they found ruins of old civilizations.... you go in, and go down some stairs... and suddenly it is all stone. theyve left these big native graves untouched, and you can see the remains... then it goes across the street, all the while gaining time --- literally. as it goes back up to street level, you'll see all these civilizations that have been uncovered after like 1000 years... really crazy. i just cant express how underrated it is. umm.. thats about it for montreal i guess. we'll skip ottawa, which is cool, but most of the attractions there are museums; and what isnt is really only cool in the wintertime (the rideau canal -- worlds longest public skating rink) on to toronto..... you MUST check out the CN tower, still the worlds tallest free-standing structure. YES! the worlds tallest structure IS in canada! http://www.skyscraperpage.com/cities/?buildingID=2 1&drawingID=21 the sears tower, 2nd tallest roof-wise (otherwise the Ostankino Television Tower in moscow is actually higher -- 540 meter antenna BUT it only has a 385 meter roof) is still only 442 meters tall (527m w/ anttena) whereas the CN tower is 553 with antenna, 457 without. so yeah, thats a must-see. downtown toronto is just really nice, spend at least a day or two here just taking everything in... try the areas around the eatons center, the docks, and some cultural areas (little italy, the danforth (greek)...) umm... thats about it from my personal experience Canada-wise. US-wise, cape canaveral is a must, i mean.. its cape canaveral. 'nuff said. -
Re:Bullet-proof
I thought that McBride was insane -- totally reckless or totally corrupt. But now, I'm starting to think the man is just stupid
Hanlon's razor -- "Never attribute to malice that which can be adequately explained by stupidity." -
I disagree.We tend to have such an ego about ourselves
Depends on the person.
We think that we are the only ones who've ever had running septic systemsYou mean like the Romans? who moved mountains You mean the pyramids? , and now, it appears, to use binary [maybe we're the first, maybe not. Base-60 was Babylonian, from which we get our hour. Chinese developed base-5 music, base ten is from our hands. Cultures develop number systems that are useful to them.]
The more we learn, the more we forget. Nice aphorism, but is it true? For example, who can tell me the best mix of Bronze? Start Here, once you know your application. Your "best mix" is always application-dependent. Not many now. No, just most ESMs and metallurgical engineers. There can't be more than 30 of those that graduate from each Tech University each year, so that would be about 120,000 in America. How about what's best to plant after sowing rye for two years? Ummm. That would be Lithuanian farmers. Their biggest crop is rye, possibly after potatoes, so they definitely would know. But it depends on a lot of things -- start here. But I expect most Aggie schools could tell you, depending on where you live.
As we move into a more technological society, there is quite a bit of knowledge we are losing. Not true at all. You just are not aware of it. The knowledge is being maintained and built on every single year. This is largely because of population growth. Get a population crash, and I grant that it is possible for information to be lost, though that information that is *preserved* in books can later be relearned. Books, not computers, since books last a good bit longer, provided that the paper is non-acidic.
Not only that, but information which *was* lost, due to population crashes, is being rediscovered through modern technology.
So we aren't losing information -- far from it. We are keeping the information, and gaining it. But you, yourself, like any other one person, cannot keep abreast of it all, so you *think* we are losing information. And that, really, is my point.
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Using FPGAs to really speed things up
This thesis shows a system that a guy from McGill University built to use Field Programmable Gate Arrays to generate possible moves. Since FPGAs allow you to do man simple tasks in parallel instead of trying to do one thing at a time very fast as in software, he was able to get an order-of-magnitude speed increase. Special chess computers like Big Blue used custom-designed ASICs for this same purpose, but FPGAs are a much more accessible solution and will blow a software solution out of the water.
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Re:Glory days
what, you don't like september? but halloween's right around the corner!
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National Geographic "Science Times" Video
Check out this video footage to see the gecko in action. (The video is about biomimetic robots, so it's got more than just the gecko research)
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Re:Security camera?
Given a geometry of a room you can calculate how many cameras you need and where to place them. There's a geometric algorithm which will determine this for you. Its commonly referred to as the guarding an art gallery problem. Pretty cool stuff.
:-) -
Re:OS X font smoothing kicks `Cleartype`s ass
stock freetype has a long way to go, but if you replace your libfreetype.so with the one on this page, i think you'll find that X/Linux can be even better than the Mac.
I did a comparison of my kde desktop a while back with that hack (without with) versus stock xft/freetype and the difference is (ahem) clear. The "smooth" hinting he's doing now is even better than the "slight" hinting in those screenshots.
IMO the order is:
- (best) Xft/Freetype with David Chester's hack
- Mac OS X
- Windows XP's cleartype
- Stock Xft/Freetype
- (worst) Windows 2000 and older
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Re:copyright, etc
Copyright laws are strange in this respect. You can't copyright the look of your font, just its name. More information here.
Type foundries have (ab)used this oversight for decades, producing clones of other foundries' popular fonts, with different names.
That's why there's Swiss from Bitstream and Arial from Monotype, both Linotype Helvetica clones, Book Antiqua from Monotype, a Linotype Palatino clone, and hundreds of others.
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Bit Torrent, Linux, and irony
Hmmm....
Did you notice that you have to use Mozilla to view the graphics that describe how a plugin for IE works?
Anybody find that just a bit ironic?
(Yeah, you can get the source, but how the !@# do you install that for Moz on *nix?) -
sci-fi eh?
McGill University has a sci-fi lit course. I haven't taken it but I found an old syllabus.
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Check your links, jaime.
Here's an animated graphic (.mng, currently viewable only in Mozilla) of a torrent transfer.
Uhh.. it worked fine for me in IE6. Not only that, but the graphic was a .gif, not an mng. -
Re:I'll be getting one...
I agree with you, but all hope is not lost.
First of all, build yourself a MAME cab, you wont regret it.
Second, Sammy is making great new 2d fighters (Guilty Gear X2). They also have new arcade hardware out ("Atomiswave") that is based on Sega's NAOMI hardware. Expect them (and, by rumour, maybe SNK/Playmore) to make all kinds of nice 2d games for this system and port it to your favorite next gen console.
Keep your chin up, soldier! :)
-Mani -
Re:307 days of uptime on YDL!One of my servers managed to get 344 days of uptime running YDL. The only reason why we shut it down was because we needed to move to bigger hardware. Not sure why the uptime is no longer in the netcraft database. Anyway, I recorded the uptime just before I retired the machine:
Wed Jan 8 01:13:35 EST 2003
1:13am up 344 days, 15:07, 1 user, load average: 0.20, 0.31, 0.32
My Desktop machine is doing well also. It serves as a YDL mirror and a simple website for the McGill LUG.
Apple makes great, robust hardware. It is just too bad that their CPUs are getting on the slow side. Hopefully the rumoured 2.5GHz PPC970's will resolve that. -
Re:307 days of uptime on YDL!One of my servers managed to get 344 days of uptime running YDL. The only reason why we shut it down was because we needed to move to bigger hardware. Not sure why the uptime is no longer in the netcraft database. Anyway, I recorded the uptime just before I retired the machine:
Wed Jan 8 01:13:35 EST 2003
1:13am up 344 days, 15:07, 1 user, load average: 0.20, 0.31, 0.32
My Desktop machine is doing well also. It serves as a YDL mirror and a simple website for the McGill LUG.
Apple makes great, robust hardware. It is just too bad that their CPUs are getting on the slow side. Hopefully the rumoured 2.5GHz PPC970's will resolve that. -
Re:307 days of uptime on YDL!One of my servers managed to get 344 days of uptime running YDL. The only reason why we shut it down was because we needed to move to bigger hardware. Not sure why the uptime is no longer in the netcraft database. Anyway, I recorded the uptime just before I retired the machine:
Wed Jan 8 01:13:35 EST 2003
1:13am up 344 days, 15:07, 1 user, load average: 0.20, 0.31, 0.32
My Desktop machine is doing well also. It serves as a YDL mirror and a simple website for the McGill LUG.
Apple makes great, robust hardware. It is just too bad that their CPUs are getting on the slow side. Hopefully the rumoured 2.5GHz PPC970's will resolve that. -
Re:As I've asked before.
Why ruin a perfectly good system with Mac OS X and install Linux over it?
Well, to each his own I guess. My experience with MacOS X hasn't been that good. We have over 15 Macs in our office (all G4s or iMac G4s) - most of them running MacOS X but mine only run YDL. For the most part, I get much better performance/response than my colleagues, even after Apple has added yet another beta browser to MacOS X. The anti-aliasing of everything in MacOS X also gives me a headache on CRT monitors after about an hour.
Also, call me old fashioned, but I still believe in free (as in "Freedom"), and MacOS X ain't. I use YDL, because they are a small company that *only* does PPC, so I know that their attention will be on *my* hardware and not some entirely different architecture.
While I'm starting to dislike MacOS X less, I still can't work with it anywhere near as quickly as Linux. And, with YDL on my Powerbook, I can setup a micro version of my servers and develop on a closed system while on the train, etc. with the exact same paths/etc. as my servers (IBM Xseries running RedHat, YellowDog briQs and G4s running YDL). Running the same OS on all my hardware makes it really easy to move the code around different architectures. It also means that I'm not forced to use a specific architecture, and can get the hardware that best suits the needs.
So, while YDL might not be for you, but if you own/like Apple hardware, having a distro that keeps your hardware relavant for longer is a good thing for you - whether you use it or not. -
Re:The Price
I remember there being a sound blaster pro emulator for windows, acessing
google ... ...
Item Found!
You could also try doing the right click, compatibility mode thing, not sure if
it'll work though.
--toq
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One journalist failed geography...
>"Ethnobotanist Timothy Johns, of McGill University in Toronto, found Bartoshuk's work..."
Talk about inspiring confidence in the sources.
McGill is in Montreal, it has two campuses, but neither is in Toronto, just goto McGill, look up Timothy Johns in the directory, then consult a campus map - his office is in Ste. Anne de Bellevue, Quebec (~10 miles South-West of downtown Montreal).
Why not write "MIT is in New York City"? -
Re:Not just Pachinko (sexy)
me and some friends really got obsessed with playing that game on my mame cabinet. think three red-eyed young men furiously tapping one button for a good 3 hours (we started around midnight).
yes, on that fateful evening we finished Pachinko Sexy Reaction.
-Mani -
Re:Screenshots
For even better looking fonts on a KDE Desktop, use Andale Sans (at font size 10 to 13, depending on your resolution) and David Chester's Xft + Freetype hack.
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BitTorrent Links for 5.0 release
Since Slashdot had to link to the FTP, maybe this will help lighten the stress on the mirrors : http://tacos.sus.mcgill.ca/~hperes/BT_BSD5.0/ has BitTorrent files for the i386 release ISOs.
BitTorrent is a peer to peer fileswarmer. It's Free and Open Source, and comes in flavors for *ix, win32, and MacOS X. Clients are avaiable @ http://bitconjurer.org/BitTorrent/
...Once you have finished the download, please keep the window open as long as possible so that others can get the file as well. Thanks !
The download might be a little slow at the beginning, but as more and more people hop on, it should get really fast. Just give it a couple of minutes.
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Geekroom saves the marriage!
I still have the first machine I ever owned (C-64), as well as *some* of my early machines. I finally moved into an apartment big enough that it wasn't a strain on my marriage to keep them. I now have my own room for them.
:-)
Unfortunately some of my favorite old machines didn't survive the 'Please get rid of this shit' requests. This post is dedicated to their memory (bad pun not intended).
RIP Amiga 2000, Apple IIfx, Q840AV, PPC6100