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The EGM article unambiguously exemplies the sexual objectification of women. What I find particularly disturbing are the invasive and almost abusive questions asked in the EGM America's Sexiest Gamer article. For example, in the article the interviewer asks "What's the best game to use as foreplay?", "What's your favorite position...to play games in?", and "Are vibrating controllers sexy?". Based on her asexual responses, I would be willing to argue that the sexual nature of the line of questioning was nonconsensual.

I submit that you are not prude, rather I believe you are simply taking offense at the blatant objectification.

Michael.

Yes Spencer, I do know of ways to improve "brain power". (You did ask a yes or no question didn't you?)

Thank you for your question, which I assume was actually just a vehicle to let us all know how extremely high you feel your intelligence is (based on what people tell you).

Mod this as flamebait. Thank you.

Michael.

Exactly. Sort of.

I mean it both in the good and bad way. Linux is a VolksOS (people's OS) much the same way that Volkswagen was the people's car. Yet at the same time Apple and Mercedes enjoy a certain prestige that sets them apart from their competitors. On the negative side I think that most Apple hardware is priced out of my reach much like most Mercedes are and sometimes Linux can be very difficult to get things done with.

What do I run? I use both. I have a Linux server, a Linux gaming machine, and two Apple Powerbooks. I enjoy them both for their individual strengths and feel I'm better off having used both of them.

Michael.

Use your nervous energy to organize a union. When the union is formed, initiate worker contracts that would guarantee a 2-month notice before termination. In return you would provide your employer with a 2-month notice, if you're quitting.

The benefits to both are obvious. Workers can focus on their work without waiting for the axe to fall. Employers will benefit from the increased productivity. Additionally, employers will also be freed from the onerous burden of treating humans like objects, something for which I'm sure they feel much guilt.

Michael.

If you mean the part about the integral, here it is really quickly.

An integral is a way of finding the area under a curve between two points. These two points are called limits. If you evaluate the integral with the limits accidentally reversed, your answer will be negative.

An integral is used in calculus and is basically the same thing as multiplication in algebra. Here's an example of the punch line using algebra. If you have a long piece of wood that is 10-cm tall and you need to cut a piece out of the middle, say from the 3-cm point to the 13-cm point, the area of that piece would be:
area = width * length = 10 * (13 - 3) = 100.

The cut points, 3 cm and 13 cm, are exactly the same as the limits in calculus. If you reverse them you get the negative answer:
10 * (3 - 13) = -100.

Michael.

KDE does that too, silly goose.

Drag and drop a Desktop icon or Konqueror file into a Konsole and it is quoted and the tcsh shell supports case-insensitive file name completion as well if "set complete = enhance" is set.

*Lick lick* Your tears of sorrow taste so sweet. :)

Michael.

I'm the original poster and I agree with you totally! I do not tollerate spaces in my Unix filenames with the sole exception of mp3 files.

As a matter of fact, that's one of the main reasons I wrote my ren-regexp perl script. For files with unsightly spaces I simply type:
ren-regexp "s/ /-/g" *\ *
and my files are sane again.

Isn't that strange that I prefer my mp3 file names with spaces? I never really thought about it until now. :)

Michael.

I'm the original poster and I agree with you totally! I do not tollerate spaces in my Unix filenames with the sole exception of mp3 files.

As a matter of fact, that's one of the main reasons I wrote my ren-regexp perl script. For files with unsightly spaces I simply type:
ren-regexp "s/ /-/g" *\ *
and my files are sane again.

Isn't that strange that I prefer my mp3 file names with spaces? I never really thought about it until now. :)

Michael.

• ren-regexp - A perl script that renames many files in parallel using a series of regular expressions from the command line. It's a profoundly useful script for those who are command-line and regexp power users.
• mp3-ren-nice - A perl script that attemts to clean up munged mp3 file names downloaded from P2P networks. For example running the script on "artist-title_title.2.MP3" will yield "Artist - Title Title.mp3".
• newpl - A perl script that creates an empty perl script template complete with GetOptions code and a POD skeleton for writing more scripts that manipulate mp3 files.

• ren-regexp - A perl script that renames many files in parallel using a series of regular expressions from the command line. It's a profoundly useful script for those who are command-line and regexp power users.
• mp3-ren-nice - A perl script that attemts to clean up munged mp3 file names downloaded from P2P networks. For example running the script on "artist-title_title.2.MP3" will yield "Artist - Title Title.mp3".
• newpl - A perl script that creates an empty perl script template complete with GetOptions code and a POD skeleton for writing more scripts that manipulate mp3 files.

• ren-regexp - A perl script that renames many files in parallel using a series of regular expressions from the command line. It's a profoundly useful script for those who are command-line and regexp power users.
• mp3-ren-nice - A perl script that attemts to clean up munged mp3 file names downloaded from P2P networks. For example running the script on "artist-title_title.2.MP3" will yield "Artist - Title Title.mp3".
• newpl - A perl script that creates an empty perl script template complete with GetOptions code and a POD skeleton for writing more scripts that manipulate mp3 files.

• ren-regexp - A perl script that renames many files in parallel using a series of regular expressions from the command line. It's a profoundly useful script for those who are command-line and regexp power users.
• mp3-ren-nice - A perl script that attemts to clean up munged mp3 file names downloaded from P2P networks. For example running the script on "artist-title_title.2.MP3" will yield "Artist - Title Title.mp3".
• newpl - A perl script that creates an empty perl script template complete with GetOptions code and a POD skeleton for writing more scripts that manipulate mp3 files.

• ren-regexp - A perl script that renames many files in parallel using a series of regular expressions from the command line. It's a profoundly useful script for those who are command-line and regexp power users.
• mp3-ren-nice - A perl script that attemts to clean up munged mp3 file names downloaded from P2P networks. For example running the script on "artist-title_title.2.MP3" will yield "Artist - Title Title.mp3".
• newpl - A perl script that creates an empty perl script template complete with GetOptions code and a POD skeleton for writing more scripts that manipulate mp3 files.

I satisfy my corporate requirement for Microsoft by running it under Linux in VMware.

As a client or a host, Linux with VMware is a much better decision than cygwin with XP hacks to make the UI feel like Linux. It never completely satisfies.

Michael.

My favorite feature is the ability to search for items using regular expressions. Just type the string "site:/^[cs].*?edu$/" and BAM! You get jack squat.

Some day our Linux search engine heros will grace us with regular expressions.

Open Source Industrial Music.
Michael.

I've been waiting with great anticipation for the new perl release for years, having picked it up, while I was a systems adminstrator for Unixops at the University of Colorado. I've since been living and breathing perl, whether it's via Mason in the perl scripts that run my website, as an aid to data analysis in my research, or for one of the many command-line scripts I've written over the years.

My current favorite is ren-regexp, a utility which allows the renaming of many files on the command line using one or more regular expressions. I look forward to rewriting it with the future additions and modifications to regular expression in Perl 6.

Michael.

I've been waiting with great anticipation for the new perl release for years, having picked it up, while I was a systems adminstrator for Unixops at the University of Colorado. I've since been living and breathing perl, whether it's via Mason in the perl scripts that run my website, as an aid to data analysis in my research, or for one of the many command-line scripts I've written over the years.

My current favorite is ren-regexp, a utility which allows the renaming of many files on the command line using one or more regular expressions. I look forward to rewriting it with the future additions and modifications to regular expression in Perl 6.

Michael.

I've been waiting with great anticipation for the new perl release for years, having picked it up, while I was a systems adminstrator for Unixops at the University of Colorado. I've since been living and breathing perl, whether it's via Mason in the perl scripts that run my website, as an aid to data analysis in my research, or for one of the many command-line scripts I've written over the years.

My current favorite is ren-regexp, a utility which allows the renaming of many files on the command line using one or more regular expressions. I look forward to rewriting it with the future additions and modifications to regular expression in Perl 6.

Michael.

I've been waiting with great anticipation for the new perl release for years, having picked it up, while I was a systems adminstrator for Unixops at the University of Colorado. I've since been living and breathing perl, whether it's via Mason in the perl scripts that run my website, as an aid to data analysis in my research, or for one of the many command-line scripts I've written over the years.

My current favorite is ren-regexp, a utility which allows the renaming of many files on the command line using one or more regular expressions. I look forward to rewriting it with the future additions and modifications to regular expression in Perl 6.

Michael.

The upgrade has been quite good to me! Before the upgrade a search for my name would rank my website many pages down and then only secondary links not the root site. Now I rank number one! It looks like all my slashdot posting has finally paid off.

Ahh. The small victories of the computer geek.

Michael.

The upgrade has been quite good to me! Before the upgrade a search for my name would rank my website many pages down and then only secondary links not the root site. Now I rank number one! It looks like all my slashdot posting has finally paid off.

Ahh. The small victories of the computer geek.

Michael.

Programmable ergonomic hardware on Linux with a vertical shape and click and hold?
Sure! Tape the keyboard to your monitor and use vi.

Mod all vi jokes as Funny unless you're an emacs user, then mod them as Flamebait.

Michael.

GarageBand does take quite a bit of horsepower. Previewing and rendering even these songs required me to turn my 1-GHz Titanium laptop's CPU performance to "full", when I'm on the go.

GarageBand notifies the user of the system load by changing the color of a clear time-indicator jewel as it sweeps across the samples. It's a brilliant way to display the system load directly in a program. I speculate that the update affects not just the dialogues but also the subsystem which monitors and displays the CPU usage. (Hey, now I'm making up news just like CNN does.)

Michael

GarageBand does take quite a bit of horsepower. Previewing and rendering even these songs required me to turn my 1-GHz Titanium laptop's CPU performance to "full", when I'm on the go.

GarageBand notifies the user of the system load by changing the color of a clear time-indicator jewel as it sweeps across the samples. It's a brilliant way to display the system load directly in a program. I speculate that the update affects not just the dialogues but also the subsystem which monitors and displays the CPU usage. (Hey, now I'm making up news just like CNN does.)

Michael

You are 100% correct! While I wasn't clear in my original post, you said it better than I could have. First and foremost it is the standards compatibility followed by the high quality of its output.

Michael.

I used to code for Mozilla due to its strong adherence to standards and support for transparency in PNGs. However, now that I've added an Apple G5 to my collection of Linux machines, I find myself developing my website content exclusively for Safari. As long as it works perfectly in Safari, I'm satisfied.

The sole reason is that Safari's output is immaculate. The output (specifically the fonts) is so perfectly rendered that the HTML almost looks like it is typeset in LaTeX. Thus, to answer your question, I recommend Safari over other browsers for the same reason I recommend LaTeX over word processors. It's one step up.

Michael.

I used to code for Mozilla due to its strong adherence to standards and support for transparency in PNGs. However, now that I've added an Apple G5 to my collection of Linux machines, I find myself developing my website content exclusively for Safari. As long as it works perfectly in Safari, I'm satisfied.

The sole reason is that Safari's output is immaculate. The output (specifically the fonts) is so perfectly rendered that the HTML almost looks like it is typeset in LaTeX. Thus, to answer your question, I recommend Safari over other browsers for the same reason I recommend LaTeX over word processors. It's one step up.

Michael.

The jump to link this observed creation of ozone with the popularly held belief that power lines adversely affect health is erroneous.

In the original study which created the popular myth that power lines cause illness, the authors correctly found a correlation between living in the proximity of power lines and leukemia rates but never found causation. After much debate it was revealed years later that traffic density has an even greater correlation with the observed leukemia rates and provides a well understood and now obvious causation -- pollution. It just happens that power lines exist in areas of greater traffic density. Unfortunately, the general public was never copied on the second corrected paper and to this day believe that power lines have adverse health effects, when they instead should be worried about pollution from traffic.

Although the article states that the creation of ozone around power lines could be a health risk, the quantity of ozone created for various transmission structures is never quantified and nor compared with ambient urban polution. Thus at worst it is yet another vehicle for the propagation of a scientific urban legend or at best a warning to shut of indoor air ionizers whose output of ozone can lead to concentrations in excess those present of ambient pollution levels.

Michael.

Kris Gleason implemented a similar scheme in his gettyps code back in the 90s (it still available and in most distributions). For the "knock" one would dial into a modem (or any serial port) and let it ring a specified number of times. If the right number of rings was received before disconnect, gettyps would allow the next call to connect.

Michael.

There are several methods by which this could be accomplished.

The first is to create a link budget using the two-ray approximation (1/R^4 attenuation) and the estimated antenna patterns. This allows one to bound the maximum range as a function of antenna orientation and receiver sensitivity. Most likely this is the analysis that was done when installing the network.

A second and much more enjoyable way is to use a ray-trace simulation program such as Wireless InSite to model your campus. This model will pick up multipath effects and folliage losses.

The most time consuming but most accurate method is to walk around with an antenna, measuring the power as one goes. It should be noted that when one measures in a given location the power will change over time sometimes quickly. Known as Rayleigh fading, it is due to time-varying multipath from a dynamic environment.

I recommend tracking down a communications professor in EE and borowing their copy of Wireless InSite. If you pitch it right you could even get a credit of independent study from it.

Michael.

The problem with menu systems is that they are static trees organized by catagorical metadata. For instance "Utilities", "Applications", "Games". This guarantees that because the trees are organized by nonstandard catagorical metadata you must hunt under catagories, which are different from system to system and user to user, for a program. Even worse is that entries don't always reflect what is and is not on the disk. As the number of applications increase in time the overhead required for searching grows by O(n). Desktop icons are not useful for large numbers of applications due to obvious limitations in area.

One solution is to keep things flat. In unix a single word on the command line will invoke an application with no overhead.

A complication of a such a flat structure is, when the number of available applications becomes very large, it is difficult for users to remember all the commands. It is thus necessary to provide a database that allows users to search for applications with a desired functionality. For instance, although MacOS uses a directory listing of "/Applications" for its menu, because there is no database to search, one must do a serial lookup of all programs to find the one of interest. (Again with the O(n)!)

Currently the only system which provides this "future solution" is unix. It has a method to invoke applications with zero overhead (the command line) and a database to search for useful programs (man -k mkfs). Thus, unix, the 25-year-old operating system is your future solution.

Michael.

I must warn you not to purchase the IBM Wireless Navigator Pro Keyboard (SK-8810) . Although it has a great layout and an integrated mouse, it has usable range of about a meter. Beyond that it starts dropping letters. Nt vry usefl for typng meangfl contnt and evn wrse for the cmmand lne.

If you are fortunate enough to have invested in Apple hardware, I cannot recommend enough the new Apple Bluetooth keyboard and mouse. They're flawless.

Michael.

I have been waiting with great anticipation for GarageBand to arrive and after a night of playing with the program, I can say that it does not disappoint. It's 3:30 a.m. and I've just finished up my first two songs.

Follow this link to listen to the mp3 files and to download their GarageBand source.

Michael.

I have been waiting with great anticipation for GarageBand to arrive and after a night of playing with the program, I can say that it does not disappoint. It's 3:30 a.m. and I've just finished up my first two songs.

Follow this link to listen to the mp3 files and to download their GarageBand source.

Michael.

I attended MacWorld in San Francisco a week ago and was able to demo the new iLife applications first hand. When I returned home that evening, I immediately went to the Apple Store and purchased iLife. While the incremental upgrades certainly justify the cost, the reason for the immediate purchase was special.

What is so special? GarageBand!

I've been looking for a similar program on MacOS for about a year and have been frustrated to find that they typically cost hundreds of dollars. Now apple releases GarageBand for a fraction of the cost and they throw in improvements to all their other applications. As a music enthusiast with beginer's skills I cannot wait to make my own music tracks using prerecorded loops and my own samples.

I left MacWorld not questioning why they would charge for iLife but wondering how they can afford to put out such high-quality software at such a low price. (My guess is subsidies from their hardware.)

Michael.

I was a newbie sysadmin who didn't fully grasp the concept of the tar command. I untared an entire /usr/X11 directory ontop of an existing /usr/X11 directory. The painful part was that the distributions were binary incompatible -- one was compiled for sun4u processors and the other for sun4m processors.

I knew I made a mistake when exclamations, gasps, and quizzical mutterings began to fill an otherwise quiet graduate laboratory. Before I had a chance to fully grasp what I did, my three supervisors walked in the door, having seen my command scroll across their syslog terminals.

Michael.

Flamebait was misspelled on purpose to identify that the above was not only a flamebait post but also a humorous post.

Imagine my chagrin when not only was I modded redundant (it was clearly a flamebait) but also my tongue-in-cheek misspelling was misinterpreted. *sigh* I suppose I'll have to keep a little simpler when I'm writing to the Flamebait crowd. :P

Michael.

I've seen better.

Seriously though. How hard can it be?

Michael.

I've seen better.

Seriously though. How hard can it be?

Michael.

I disagree totally. A first-order approximation is a first-order approximation. Additionally, there really is no other way to come up with an off-the-cuff, order-of-magnitude estimate of rotational kinetic energy. Aside from writing a finite element code to simulate the fluidic mantle, you're stuck with an algebraic or calculus-based approximation.

Further, it seems nonsensical to state that the "approximation is such to prevent its use here", when there exists no other easily accessible approximation and "here" refers to slashdot where the required accuracy is zero.

If I were paid to solve this problem, I would next bound the minimum and maximum total rotational kinetic energy assuming ideal flows with and against the rotation of the crust to bound the solution (leaving algebra behind for simple calculus). I fully expect that the first-order approximation would lie between those bounds.

IMichael.

Oops. I have the correct constant in my matlab script and supporting analysis but dropeed it when I wrote my slashdot post.

The kinetic energy and ratio in the post are correct.

I'm always in such a hurry to make my slashdot post, in order to try score a better mod. *sigh*

Thanks,
Michael.

Oops. I have the correct constant in my matlab script and supporting analysis but dropeed it when I wrote my slashdot post.

The kinetic energy and ratio in the post are correct.

I'm always in such a hurry to make my slashdot post, in order to try score a better mod. *sigh*

Thanks,
Michael.

Oops. I have the correct constant in my matlab script and supporting analysis but dropeed it when I wrote my slashdot post.

The kinetic energy and ratio in the post are correct.

I'm always in such a hurry to make my slashdot post, in order to try score a better mod. *sigh*

Thanks,
Michael.

I know that the Earth is an inhomogenous oblate spheroid with a fluidic mantle, however closed-form algebraic equations to estimate the rotational kinetic energy of such a structure do not exist. Thus, I used an approximation (note the "if A is assumed to be B" clause).

Although it is just an approximation, it nonetheless provides the order-of-magnitude energy that is either stored in the Earth's mantle or transfered to the Earth-Moon system. I just thought this would be understood.

Michael.

If the Earth is assumed to be a homogeneous sphere and the rotational axis is assumed to be the straight line passing through the north and south geographic poles, the moment of inertia of the Earth is I = MR^2 where M is the total mass of the Earth and R is its radius. The kinetic energy of a rotating Earth is given by K = 1/2 I w^2, where w is the angular velocity.

The energy associated with an angular velocity which is increased by 1 second over a year is equivalent to an extra 1.6e22 Joules of energy or 40 times the annual energy consumption of mankind (DoE 1999). A detailed analysis and matlab script are available here

Yeah, this is a rereply. Whatever. It's a holiday. Nothing else to reply to. :)

Michael.

If the Earth is assumed to be a homogeneous sphere and the rotational axis is assumed to be the straight line passing through the north and south geographic poles, the moment of inertia of the Earth is I = MR^2 where M is the total mass of the Earth and R is its radius. The kinetic energy of a rotating Earth is given by K = 1/2 I w^2, where w is the angular velocity.

The energy associated with an angular velocity which is increased by 1 second over a year is equivalent to an extra 1.6e22 Joules of energy or 40 times the annual energy consumption of mankind (DoE 1999). A detailed analysis and matlab script are available here

Yeah, this is a rereply. Whatever. It's a holiday. Nothing else to reply to. :)

Michael.

I didn't really have a point when I wrote that. I was just curious how much rotational kinetic energy is normally sapped from the earth due to lunar tidal forces.

Generating energy from the Earth, as you suggest is already done in a fashion. By generating energy from the ebb and flow of the tides we are increasing the resistance to the flow of the water, thus slightly slowing down the Earth. Additionally, when a spacecraft receives a gravitational boost from a planet, the spacecraft is actually decreasing the planet's potential energy, pushing the planet into an orbit slightly closer to the sun.

As I understand it, the majority of the lost kinetic energy is transfered to the Earth-Moon system in the form of potential energy. As the Earth's rotation slows, the moon is pushed into a higher orbit. Eventually the Earth will "tidal lock" to the moon such that our rotational period equals the moon's orbital period -- the same side of the Earth will always face the moon. (The moon has already tidal locked to us, which is why we never see the far side of the moon.)

Michael.

Make that "a 1-second shorter-than-expected year".

How am I ever going to earn the title of "Science Troll" if I keep making errors. :)
Michael.

If the Earth is assumed to be a homogeneous sphere and the rotational axis is assumed to be the straight line passing through the north and south geographic poles, the moment of inertia of the Earth is I = MR^2 where M is the total mass of the Earth and R is its radius. The kinetic energy of a rotating Earth is given by K = 1/2 I w^2, where w is the angular velocity.

The energy associated with a 1-second shorter-than-expected day is equivalent to an extra 1.6e22 Joules of energy or 40 times the annual energy consumption of mankind (DoE 1999). The matlab script is here.

Michael.

If the Earth is assumed to be a homogeneous sphere and the rotational axis is assumed to be the straight line passing through the north and south geographic poles, the moment of inertia of the Earth is I = MR^2 where M is the total mass of the Earth and R is its radius. The kinetic energy of a rotating Earth is given by K = 1/2 I w^2, where w is the angular velocity.

The energy associated with a 1-second shorter-than-expected day is equivalent to an extra 1.6e22 Joules of energy or 40 times the annual energy consumption of mankind (DoE 1999). The matlab script is here.

Michael.