Slashdot Mirror

Here is a paper I had to write on the subject; it is in draft form as the class did not call for a final version.
Quantum Computing

Saturday the file sizes and dates changed on some of the mirrors for Mandrake RC1. Upon downloading, and installing, it appears that this is the final. I grabbed mine here here

btw: It looks great!

The most widely deployed Turing Complete machine/language is a close race beteween Javascript and the Wintel machine code, with Java a distant 3rd. Since there is a problem with reliance on machine code for dynamic installation of software over the network, that leaves Javascript the most obvious candidate in which to write other languages. Most people never thought of Javascript as anything but an afterthought to HTML so they might have their eyes opened a bit to the power of Turing Completeness by seeing the TIBET virtual machine written in about a 100K Javascript embeded in a web site's (gzipped) HTML. It gets away with this by dynamically patching (Perl-config style) Javascript incompatibilities and building out from the set of features thereby supported cross-browser.

As I've written elsewhere, this isn't the ultimate language by any means -- but it is a critically needed repair to the foundation of the web that can be followed by more advanced VM's later on.

Short Biography

more and better info here. Salient quote:

SOLED - Stacked Organic Light Emitting Device
This display is composed of three stacked layers of TOLEDs (red, green, and blue). This means that there is an almost 100% fill factor for each pixel no matter the color, leading to higher resolution displays and better color tunability. The resolution on these displays has the potential of being three times that of normal displays because of the stacked as opposed to the side-by-side layout of old. Pixels can also be made as large as wanted. Because of the stacked display, it would no longer be possible to see the individual color pixels, just the one full-color pixel. This will be most useful in small displays and very large high definition displays (like a movie screen, perhaps?).

In the cursher claw the closer muscle is composed entirely of slow fibers, and in the cutter claw it has 65 to 75 percent fast fibers and 25 to 35 percent slow fibers. While claw placement in the adult is essentially random, it can be demonstrated in two ways that the muscle fiber properties are not genetically fixed: (i)if one claw is removed in the fourtyh and early fifth stages, the remaining closer muscle develops all slow muscle fibers, and *ii) if the animals are raised in smooth-bottomed containers, both claws can become cutter types, having closer muscles with more than 50 percent fast fibers. Thus, as in vertebrate skeletal muscle, the proprties of lobster closer muscle fibers can be transformed by various experimental manipulations.

Alas, lots of microwave ovens these day have mode stirrers, metal spinners that spray the microwaves more evenly throughout the cavity. The goal is to reduce hot spots, possibly enough to ruin the nice pattern in the marshmallows.

The Segway HT also seems a bit too heavy. 65 pounds is a lot of weight to carry in and out of the office every day. Also, these things will be very hard to secure. There's an encrypted key associated with each unit, but that's hardly going to stop a thief from tearing the ignition guts out and "hot-wiring" it like a car, or--even simpler--tackling you as you round a dark corner and whizzing away with both $3,000 scooter and key intact. A bicycle, by comparison, is easier to nick but requires far less mazuma to replace, thereby making it less attractive to steal.

I may be cynical, but b/c these things are so expensive that my unscientific estimate of the frequency of attempted nicking incidents would be something on the order of "every time you turn it on."

Lots of potential, to be sure, but this is still the proof-of-concept/early adopter stage. In other words, it's a nifty toy for trust-funded ecology fanatics and "Hammacher Schlemmer" subscribers.

I'm kind of bummed b/c I thought it was going to use a revolutionary engine of some kind. Something totally wild and super efficient, like a high-torque Stirling or hydrogen-powered Wankel (rotary). In that case the engine itself would have been a revolutionary "core technology," not these self-balancing whirligigs that he uses to balance the scooter.

The Segway is definitely cool, but it doesn't quite live up to its billing as the Next Leap Forward in human progress. In my mind, it's not much compared to such low-tech miracles as the HippoRoller and the Pot-in-Pot Cooling System (story 1), (story 2)).

At Oregon State University, we have a 'baccalaureate core' that consists of 48 credits and a writing-intensive course (WIC). 48 credits is roughly a year of teaching. What I find interesting is that the courses are typically high school level courses, in that everybody should have learned most of the stuff while in high school. And it's a state school.. Shows how much faith they have in the schools here.

On top of that, these courses, which everybody has to take to get a BA or BS are taught by the most burned out grad students ever. With classes of over 100 people, it's pathetic how little you come away with. And don't expect any help from the instructors or anything, they don't have the time or inclination to be helpful given the class population.

[steps off his soapbox]

Potato Association of America Handbook: Potato Varieties.

Off-colour vegetables.

Who says watermelon must be red?

Potatoes of note. (Potatos or potatoes, either is acceptable. Just not potatoe).

I know that libraries use a similar system for their online catalogs to locate volumes that may be in different branch libraries. I've seen the system also used between libraries that aren't necessarily afilliated (like interlibrary loan).

Some links to systems set up like this (there's others, these are just the ones I know about):
Longview Public Library is linked with the Lower Columbia College library
Oregon State University Valley Library; via Telnet
Oregon Union List of Serials

Introducing this as a desktop device at this late date seems pointless. On portable devices it might make more sense. What's needed is a cell phone with a chord keyboard for messaging. Make it in colors with a cute shape and sell it to mobile girls in Japan.

At the moment, scietists don't know what makes up at least 88% of the universe. This claim has been verified by scientists' observing the effects of gravity on objects in the night sky. To account for odd galatic rotational curves and inexpicable escape velocities, cosmologists coined a term - "dark matter."

Recently, a friend of mine was fortunate enough to beta-test an alpha-version of the QuickTake 1500sq. I suggested that he try snapping a shot of the sky using the QuickTake and a new NikkorSquant telephoto lens. Our results were astounding. Here's a picture of the night sky that I made with my Nikkon Coolpix; and for comparison, here is one that my friend took with the 1500sq.

If you have a new squant-enabled monitor, it is obvious that a great deal of the matter in the universe is actually squant-colored.

"Why haven't other astronomers discovered this truth?" you may ask. Well, most astronomers are near-sighted and wear glasses. Unfortunately, at present, all glasses are manufactured with materials that are opaque to squant and do not transmit the new hue properly. Also, all telescopes currently in use do not have squant-compliant optics; as a result, squant cannot be detected on any equipment of this sort. Squant optics are so expensive and so volatile that most scientists will not be enchanted with the idea of having to retrofit Keck with squant optics.

In the 1930s, Zwicky and Smith, two fellows who were observing the Coma cluster and Virgo cluster of galaxies' velocities, were criticized for their work. They were attempting to estimate the mass of the clusters given escape velocity. However, these fellows were critized for a phenomenon known as 'contamination.'

However, I hypothesize that this 'contamination' was actually the presence of large varieties of Squant-colored mass (SCM) inside of the Virgo cluster. This 'contamination' was actually caused by spectral absorption of squant-colored emissions by other matter present in the cluster. This matter was excited by the squant-colored radiant energy and re-emitted light at lower wavelengths - much more like the better-known phenomina of "phosphorescence." Perhaps "squantphorescence" would be a more appropriate term for this sort of visual contamination.

At the moment, scietists don't know what makes up at least 88% of the universe. This claim has been verified by scientists' observing the effects of gravity on objects in the night sky. To account for odd galatic rotational curves and inexpicable escape velocities, cosmologists coined a term - "dark matter."

Recently, a friend of mine was fortunate enough to beta-test an alpha-version of the QuickTake 1500sq. I suggested that he try snapping a shot of the sky using the QuickTake and a new NikkorSquant telephoto lens. Our results were astounding. Here's a picture of the night sky that I made with my Nikkon Coolpix; and for comparison, here is one that my friend took with the 1500sq.

If you have a new squant-enabled monitor, it is obvious that a great deal of the matter in the universe is actually squant-colored.

"Why haven't other astronomers discovered this truth?" you may ask. Well, most astronomers are near-sighted and wear glasses. Unfortunately, at present, all glasses are manufactured with materials that are opaque to squant and do not transmit the new hue properly. Also, all telescopes currently in use do not have squant-compliant optics; as a result, squant cannot be detected on any equipment of this sort. Squant optics are so expensive and so volatile that most scientists will not be enchanted with the idea of having to retrofit Keck with squant optics.

In the 1930s, Zwicky and Smith, two fellows who were observing the Coma cluster and Virgo cluster of galaxies' velocities, were criticized for their work. They were attempting to estimate the mass of the clusters given escape velocity. However, these fellows were critized for a phenomenon known as 'contamination.'

However, I hypothesize that this 'contamination' was actually the presence of large varieties of Squant-colored mass (SCM) inside of the Virgo cluster. This 'contamination' was actually caused by spectral absorption of squant-colored emissions by other matter present in the cluster. This matter was excited by the squant-colored radiant energy and re-emitted light at lower wavelengths - much more like the better-known phenomina of "phosphorescence." Perhaps "squantphorescence" would be a more appropriate term for this sort of visual contamination.

At least in 1988 to 1992, the difference between computer engineering and electrical engineering was a small handful of classes. CpE required about 6 classes in algorithms and other programming related topics, which replaced EE classes about machines/motors, transmission lines (all the wierd stuff that happens when you don't terminate a cable, like forgetting that 50 ohm resistor on 10BaseT), and a couple more more advanced math classes. Other than switching this small handful of classes, there really weren't any differences between CpE and traditional EE. In the final year of EE, there is some choice about what classes to take, such as control/feedback, communication theory (math), analog electronics, high power systems/circuits, computer/digital architecture, and microcontroller-based design. If you went the CpE route, you'd take the courses in these last two groups.

personally i havent read the book, but i know that he has written some excellent books on languages and it sounds similar to what you are talking about.

personally i havent read the book, but i know that he has written some excellent books on languages and it sounds similar to what you are talking about.

Today's world is so much nicer... "./configure", "make", "make install" (well, I'm a bit wary of that last part, as it usually needs root). When this very nice process doesn't work, usually the configure script tells you when you need to do. Pretty cool.

Still, there are source-only distributions that fail to build. Now I can understand this if it's from an up-to-the-minute CVS, but from a tarball on a web page or ftp server, that's not so cool. As a programmer, the software needs to be something pretty special for me to go dig in and fix the build process. It's just not fun work (particularily for a large project), and unless you've got quite a bit of experience, it can be nearly impossible.

So if you're an open/free source author and you don't offer binaries, make sure the code builds on the systems you're hoping your users have.

Having worked so much on my personal pages, and having seen others that are really great, it's a bit distubing to hear an attitude like "all of the best of the Internet ... NO porn or personal websites".

There certainly are a lot of cases of personal sites that are arguably better than a good portion of their commercial counterparts. Phil's Photo.net comes easily to mind. Jakob Nielsen's Useit.com is probably another well known example. How about mp3projects.com, which is hosted on freeservers.com.

So I'm wondering what is it, exactly, that makes a personal website, well, a personal site that they're above indexing?

• Contact info for the author, instead of a generic webmaster@ ??
• Having the tilde ("~") in the URL?
• Authored by a real person who cared instead of a by-the-hour web consulting firm?
• Not selling any products?
• Not being a company or institution (w/ a logo)?
• A main page lacking over-done graphical design and/or flash-based intro?
• Black-n-Yellow "Under Construction" signs?

Still, the attitude expressed about personal websites is a bit disturbing. You'd think folks building an index of the net would know a bit more about some the truely great personal sites.

nicholas
http://squat.net/ascii

A somwhat useable RS4 implementation with vbscript
If you search the site for the word "encryption" there are a few follow-up articles that you should check out as well if yer into that sort of thing.

--Clay

For four years, my web site was hosted by the Oregon State University Electrical Engineering Webserver, at this url that was widely linked and in all the search engines' first result page for a number of keywords.

Well, all good things (actually their server was not very reliable) come to an end, and the university was under a big scare, supposedly because of some lawsuit somewhere, regarding old accounts from former students. I got a message that I would need to move my site.

I did indeed move the page, to it's new and permanent location, but even after over a year, the old site still gets lots of hits. Forunately, they have been nice enough to keep my redirector page in place all this time.

At first, I did what seemed like the obvious thing and I set the HTTP-EQUIV meta tag to redirect, in zero seconds. Seemed like a good idea. It was actually like that for months, and I was totally unaware of the problem. I finally got an angry e-mail from someone who was upset that I messed with his back button, but as far as I could tell, nothing on my site would do that. Indeed, nothing on my site was doing anything with the back button.... by that time I hardly gave any though to the old urls anymore, so it didn't even occur to me at the time to try going to the old url and then seeing if the back button still worked. Even if I'd typed the old URL, to experience what an ordinary web surfer got, I would have had to find my url from a link (not hard, since the search engines don't update well anymore, even if you fill out their forms to rescan your url).

Well, several weeks later, I learned what had happened while reading Jokob Nielsen's Alertbox Column, Top Ten New Mistakes of Web Design. Breaking the back button was his number 1 offense, and I was guilty... and until that moment I didn't even know it.

My point in all this, dear reader (and you're still reading after all this rambling), is that it's easy to need to redirect users, because old URLs don't stop getting hits, even after a year.

Some people have said that the web design should use a location redirect in the HTTP header. I tried this, but the browsers generally don't honor that from within the HTTP-EQUIV meta tag (even though they should), and I have no control over the configuration of the server itself, only the html content.

It's easy to say the commercial companies are different, since their web servers are for their corporate missing (whatever that is), but I can easily see how the "web designer" only has control over the content within the html file itself, and not the web server config... often times controlled by an admin who isn't helpful, or a third party hosting company.

For four years, my web site was hosted by the Oregon State University Electrical Engineering Webserver, at this url that was widely linked and in all the search engines' first result page for a number of keywords.

Well, all good things (actually their server was not very reliable) come to an end, and the university was under a big scare, supposedly because of some lawsuit somewhere, regarding old accounts from former students. I got a message that I would need to move my site.

I did indeed move the page, to it's new and permanent location, but even after over a year, the old site still gets lots of hits. Forunately, they have been nice enough to keep my redirector page in place all this time.

At first, I did what seemed like the obvious thing and I set the HTTP-EQUIV meta tag to redirect, in zero seconds. Seemed like a good idea. It was actually like that for months, and I was totally unaware of the problem. I finally got an angry e-mail from someone who was upset that I messed with his back button, but as far as I could tell, nothing on my site would do that. Indeed, nothing on my site was doing anything with the back button.... by that time I hardly gave any though to the old urls anymore, so it didn't even occur to me at the time to try going to the old url and then seeing if the back button still worked. Even if I'd typed the old URL, to experience what an ordinary web surfer got, I would have had to find my url from a link (not hard, since the search engines don't update well anymore, even if you fill out their forms to rescan your url).

Well, several weeks later, I learned what had happened while reading Jokob Nielsen's Alertbox Column, Top Ten New Mistakes of Web Design. Breaking the back button was his number 1 offense, and I was guilty... and until that moment I didn't even know it.

My point in all this, dear reader (and you're still reading after all this rambling), is that it's easy to need to redirect users, because old URLs don't stop getting hits, even after a year.

Some people have said that the web design should use a location redirect in the HTTP header. I tried this, but the browsers generally don't honor that from within the HTTP-EQUIV meta tag (even though they should), and I have no control over the configuration of the server itself, only the html content.

It's easy to say the commercial companies are different, since their web servers are for their corporate missing (whatever that is), but I can easily see how the "web designer" only has control over the content within the html file itself, and not the web server config... often times controlled by an admin who isn't helpful, or a third party hosting company.

For four years, my web site was hosted by the Oregon State University Electrical Engineering Webserver, at this url that was widely linked and in all the search engines' first result page for a number of keywords.

Well, all good things (actually their server was not very reliable) come to an end, and the university was under a big scare, supposedly because of some lawsuit somewhere, regarding old accounts from former students. I got a message that I would need to move my site.

I did indeed move the page, to it's new and permanent location, but even after over a year, the old site still gets lots of hits. Forunately, they have been nice enough to keep my redirector page in place all this time.

At first, I did what seemed like the obvious thing and I set the HTTP-EQUIV meta tag to redirect, in zero seconds. Seemed like a good idea. It was actually like that for months, and I was totally unaware of the problem. I finally got an angry e-mail from someone who was upset that I messed with his back button, but as far as I could tell, nothing on my site would do that. Indeed, nothing on my site was doing anything with the back button.... by that time I hardly gave any though to the old urls anymore, so it didn't even occur to me at the time to try going to the old url and then seeing if the back button still worked. Even if I'd typed the old URL, to experience what an ordinary web surfer got, I would have had to find my url from a link (not hard, since the search engines don't update well anymore, even if you fill out their forms to rescan your url).

Well, several weeks later, I learned what had happened while reading Jokob Nielsen's Alertbox Column, Top Ten New Mistakes of Web Design. Breaking the back button was his number 1 offense, and I was guilty... and until that moment I didn't even know it.

My point in all this, dear reader (and you're still reading after all this rambling), is that it's easy to need to redirect users, because old URLs don't stop getting hits, even after a year.

Some people have said that the web design should use a location redirect in the HTTP header. I tried this, but the browsers generally don't honor that from within the HTTP-EQUIV meta tag (even though they should), and I have no control over the configuration of the server itself, only the html content.

It's easy to say the commercial companies are different, since their web servers are for their corporate missing (whatever that is), but I can easily see how the "web designer" only has control over the content within the html file itself, and not the web server config... often times controlled by an admin who isn't helpful, or a third party hosting company.

I don't know about calcium, but vitamin C is safe to consume *far* in excess of USRDA recommendations. The USRDA of C is 60mg, and I consume 2000mg everyday with no ill effects. Linus Pauling (incidentally, Mr. Torvalds was named after him) was a Nobel Prize-winning researcher who consumed/recommended 16000mg daily (in four equal doses of 4000mg powdered C mixed in a glass of water).

The University may cut the final check, but it's the students' dime in the end.

Well, no. Especially in state universities, like the referenced oregon state student tuition and fees pay a miniscule *fraction* of the costs of the university.

The statement would be "It's the students' 0.16 cents in the end."

ftp://ftp. orst.edu/pub/packages/linux/redhat/redhat-6.1/iso/ 6.1-i386.iso

It's not like this is anything new. The Peltier effect seems quite similar (the use of two dissimilar semiconductors to direct heat). I read an interesting article that explains it quite well. I assume this new "insulator" is something similar, or works on the same principle.

It's not like this is anything new. The Peltier effect seems quite similar (the use of two dissimilar semiconductors to direct heat). I read an interesting article that explains it quite well. I assume this new "insulator" is something similar, or works on the same principle.