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1. This is Fraunhofer we're talking about here, and they were quite aggressive in ridding the world of those damned pesky free MP3 encoders. This announcement may be news for nerds, but it ain't stuff that matters to the free & open-source community (technically speaking)..

2. As another post points out, wave field synthesis is hardy a new thing. Marije Baalman demonstrated her recent work at the last Linux audio conference in April, you can check out her implementation of the system at http://gigant.kgw.tu-berlin.de/~baalman/program/in dex.html.
Cool stuff...

Umm, I think you are attacking some unrelated generalization you've heard in the past, not the actual poster's comment. He made no statement about hydrogen or solving fossil fuel dependancy.

But, since you are on that topic, there are a number of avenues besides fossil fuel for generating the electricity or heat or whatever for creating hydrogen:

Bacteria. Some scientist at UCLA did some calculations, and determined that a decent sized canyon in the Mojave desert covered 2 feet of water and a sheet to collect the hydrogen produced by the bacteria would be enough for all of Southern California.

Geothermal

Photovoltaics

Tidal

Convection

Fission

Fusion

Biomass Fuels

Solar Thermal

Wind

Hydroelectric

So, who are you swinging your fists at? Certainly not the original poster?

LS

http://irb.cs.tu-berlin.de/~zuse/history/eniac-pm. jpg

Shoot... thats one big machine. I would love to see the truck you would need to transport that thing.

DE is hardly classic, considering that Evolution Strategies (working with floats) have their roots in the early sixties, developed before the bitstring Genetic Algorithm.

If it takes that long to shoot an entire cylinder, what prevents stuff from appearing twice in the picture, if it's quick enough? I mean, you could stand in front of the camera until it's got enough of you in the picture, and then run to the opposite spot so it scans you again, or some weird maneuver like that.

Nothing stops stuff appearing twice. It's that simple - the camera starts rotating and adds each slice to the current picture. You can then do all sorts of weird pictures in crowds or any scenario where there is a lot of movement.

I do wonder whether the CCD is 70 Mpixels or just the final image (and I haven't read the specs). I suspect the latter, as all you need is a CCD with, say, 4000 sensors mounted in an vertical array and the moving slit/lens combo allows you to read out the array every 7.5ms or so giving you 16000 horizontal pixels for the two minute scan. That's closer to the way existing film-based 360' panorama cameras work - just expose a long strip of film progressively as the camera rotates.

Still extremely cool.

For those of you who want to muck around with panoramic photos and you don't own a 360' camera like this, you should take a look at the various panorama tools available. I particularly like Hugin although I also use autopano-sift to do some of the setup.

Cheers,
Toby Haynes

Anyone realized that the Zuse-Logo remarkably resembles that of Zope ?

CC.

Apple for some strange reason developed their own somewhat inferior and closed lossless format called (funnily enough) Apple Lossless.

You mean MPEG-4 ALS which is an MPEG standard.

• Harvard Mark 1 (1939 - 1944) - semi-programmable electromechanical computing machine.
• Zuse Z3 (1938-1941) - small general purpose relay computer. Good architecture, but limited by relay speeds to a 5Hz (yes, Hz) clock. First floating point unit. No jump instruction, due to a low budget. The later Z4 (1945-1949) had jumps and conditional branches.
• Atanasoff-Berry (1937-1942) Programmable, electronic arithmetic, binary, but memory was a rotating drum of capacitors.
• Colossus (1944?) Special-purpose key-testing machine.
• ENIAC (1943-1946) - plugboard-programmed tube machine. No general purpose memory, just registers. Tube ALU.
• IBM 603 Electronic Multiplier (1946) - first commercial electronic computing product. Punched card I/O, not truly programmable, but electronic multiplication and division.

Most of these machines had electronic arithmetic units. The big problem was memory. There were no good memory technologies yet, and none of those machines had much memory. They all basically had a few registers, like a calculator. Each bit of memory required a relay, a tube, or a discrite capacitor and switchgear.

Finally, the memory problem was solved. EDVAC, (1947-1952), had 1K of mercury-tank delay line memory. This was a lousy main memory technology (you had to wait for the word you wanted to come around, like a disk), but allowed reasonable memory sizes. It was clunky, but at last, there was memory.

With the memory problem partially solved, various groups started building machines. Pilot ACE, ACE, and IAS date from this period.

The UNIVAC I (1948-1951) had it all - memory (1K words, in mercury tanks), console, tape drives, console typewriter, programmability, electronic arithmetic, a reasonable instruction set, and self-checking. It was built, sold, and used. UNIVAC I was the first of these machines that a modern programmer would consider usable.

Anybody see the need (well, want) for a real open source FPS engine?

It more likely is MPEG 4 lossless audio coding

A quick google search for 'mpeg4 lossless audio' turns up this link:
http://www.nue.tu-berlin.de/forschung/projekte/los sless/mpeg4als.html
Which in turn points to this link as the basis for the standard:
http://www.nue.tu-berlin.de/wer/liebchen/lpac.html

Possibly this is what they're using?

A quick google search for 'mpeg4 lossless audio' turns up this link:
http://www.nue.tu-berlin.de/forschung/projekte/los sless/mpeg4als.html
Which in turn points to this link as the basis for the standard:
http://www.nue.tu-berlin.de/wer/liebchen/lpac.html

Possibly this is what they're using?

I think Apple's lossless codec might be MPEG-4-ALS (the lossless codec for MPEG-4).

There are a few reasons to go that way, not the least of which is Apple's heavy backing of MPEG standards. And then there's the format's use of MPEG-4 container files and streams, and the fact that they're probably already paying for licensing it anyway with all their other MPEG-4 stuff in iTunes and Quicktime.

And of course, the guys who developed ALS having the iTunes logo at the top of their website is kind of a hint...

AFAICT it compresses better than JPEG, is patent-free, also compresses selected areas of the image [big PDF, see part 6] differently for better effect, and (hooraw!) believes in an Alpha channel and other "sideband" information.

I think the Z3 was a fully functional/fully programmable computer. http://irb.cs.tu-berlin.de/~zuse/Konrad_Zuse/en/Re chner_Z3.html

You are correct that it did not have a jump instruction (although it implimented one internally for float arithmetic).

So you could not represent "Goto D" but goto is not required to be fully programmable.

But you could represent "if A then B else C" since it is just shorthand for "if A then B" "if !A then C"

Java has a few zillion too.

Sun have a chance !

a Sun Virtual Machine ( SVM ) that has libs for java and can be targeted well by other langs

start with the JVM fix the Java memory model
(JSR 133, which has been active for nearly three years see article on fixing it and links at bottom located at )

let ADA and fortran target it well
(i.e. think about take floating point IEEE754 seriously but get it out there and tune later)

really not that hard look at Programming Languages for the Java Virtual Machine

Start with something you know well and adapt it

if it was refered to the ITU I bet they would love it and make it a standard !

regards

John Jones

DotNet, by providing a strong language independent platform for all syntaxes to be built on opens the door for me to use exactly the right syntax for the problem at hand at a fine grained level and have the classes produced in solving each problem all contribute to a single large scale program. Java can't (or more accurately, won't) touch that.

If DotNet is such a miracle of langauge support, then Java must be even more spectacular with some 143 languages compiling to Java bytecode. The only difference? No-one has created a unified tool to stuff many of these languages into one environment, as there is little need to do so (or someone would have done it). Obviosuly some of those languages are more real than others, but a number of them have widespread use.

You may be thinking that all syntaxes become equal under DotNet, but I haven't found that to be the case. It is still vastly easier, for example, to utilize regular expressions from Perl than from C#. So, C# is not even close to threatening Perl for the text processing applications that Perl shines on.

Because just about all the languages you've used are pretty much equivilent. Sure stuff like Perl regex use is going to be really similar in the .Net version of Perl. It's when you get into more interesting languages that you have issues.

I still don't see hardly any real-life systems of any size using the mixed-language features. In a real project of any size it would be a nightmare if you had a few guys coding in perl, and a few in C#.

It seems like even with Perl, although the language would be simialr the library support would fall mostly to calling common .Net libraries. Not being that familiar with Perl I could not say what exactly is missing.

Of course, everyone here probably recognizes the ulterior motive of this design. DotNet isn't a language and it isn't a development studio. It is plain and simply the new windows API that will finally allow Win32 to be replaced. When Longhorn comes around, the underlying windows calls will be reduced from over 56,000 to under 8,000. Those 8,000 remaining calls will be geared to very closely match the needs of the DotNet runtime. The Win32 compatibility will be supplied via a conversion layer. So, even if Mono succeeds, they will only end up expanding a market for software that will run best on a Microsoft OS because the OS was designed from the ground up to run it.

I agree with that. They did need to simplify their API's, it just would have been easier on everyone if they had used Java as the base - they could have compiled it to native code the way they do right now. They could have built the multi-language IDE around it. But instead they figured that would mean you could write code for something other than Windows and that must not be encouraged, so they figure. They could not stand to not be in control and follow the will of a real standards bodies cotrolling the direction of language or libraries. It's NIH on a massive scale.

Show me *any* compression format that does a better job in this scenario.

Every non-lossy compression format. FLAC, Shorten, LPAC, Monkey's Audio, WavPack, etc.

I don't think you get it. I'm saying the quality is also relevent when converting to other formats, and when buying music, I absolutely demand non-lossy formats, as lossy formats are inherently low-quality when transcoding.

- The java bytecode format is so specific that it is impossible or rather hard (there was once a java backend for egcs, admitted) to get other languages like C/C++ to run on it. Why does one have to chose the platform java with the language java? I don't know .NET, but from what I heard, multiple frontends for arbitrary languages are possible.

to just learning and mastering level design? While level design is an art form in and of itself, you will be much more marketable if you have skills in other areas of game development. Get one of the cheap engines, like Torque - $100(http://www.garagegames.com) or even a free one like Crystal Space 3D (http://crystal.sourceforge.net) and learn as much as you can about the overall process of making games. There's TONS of them available (3D Engine List) and you'll be one step up on everyone else. Soon you'll be on your way to making the real money in the game industry... which is being a producer. Just my 2 cents...

Eg this Wednesday you are invited to a Parliamentary Evening in Berlin. Other events at Paris, Brussels (FOSDEM),Leuven (yet another conference), Rome, Stockholm etc can be found via the calendar at the events page.

National mailing lists (meet your reps before European Parliament elections in June!) can be subscribed via aktiv.ffii.org.

Here are the mirror links for the program and the data update in case telestra.org goes down again. There is nothing posted there besides this list anyway.

Maestro for Windows XP/2000/Me/98

Download from NASA Download from Freecache Download from USF FTP (Florida) (Internet II - university students start here) Download from LibertyOutreach Download from KNCL FTP (Texas) Download from Lakewebs (Oklahoma) Download from NJIT (New Jersey) Download from UALR (Arkansas) (Internet II - university students start here) Download from Emporia State Univ. (Kansas) (Internet II - university students start here) Download from TU-Budapest (Hungary) Download from TU-Berlin (Germany) Download via BitTorrent (what's this?) Download via ed2k (what's this?)

Maestro for Mac (requires Java3D)

Download from NASA Download from FreeCache Download from USF FTP (Florida) (Internet II - university students start here) Download from KNCL FTP (Texas) Download from Lakewebs (Oklahoma) Download from NJIT (New Jersey) Download from UALR (Arkansas) (Internet II - university students start here) Download from Emporia State Univ. (Kansas) (Internet II - university students start here) Download from TU-Budapest (Hungary) Download from TU-Berlin (Germany) Download via ed2k (what's this?)

Maestro for Linux

Download from NASA Download from Freecache Download from USF FTP (Florida) (Internet II - university students start here) Download from KNCL FTP (Texas) Download from Lakewebs (Oklahoma) Download from NJIT (New Jersey)

Here are the mirror links for the program and the data update in case telestra.org goes down again. There is nothing posted there besides this list anyway.

Maestro for Windows XP/2000/Me/98

Download from NASA Download from Freecache Download from USF FTP (Florida) (Internet II - university students start here) Download from LibertyOutreach Download from KNCL FTP (Texas) Download from Lakewebs (Oklahoma) Download from NJIT (New Jersey) Download from UALR (Arkansas) (Internet II - university students start here) Download from Emporia State Univ. (Kansas) (Internet II - university students start here) Download from TU-Budapest (Hungary) Download from TU-Berlin (Germany) Download via BitTorrent (what's this?) Download via ed2k (what's this?)

Maestro for Mac (requires Java3D)

Download from NASA Download from FreeCache Download from USF FTP (Florida) (Internet II - university students start here) Download from KNCL FTP (Texas) Download from Lakewebs (Oklahoma) Download from NJIT (New Jersey) Download from UALR (Arkansas) (Internet II - university students start here) Download from Emporia State Univ. (Kansas) (Internet II - university students start here) Download from TU-Budapest (Hungary) Download from TU-Berlin (Germany) Download via ed2k (what's this?)

Maestro for Linux

Download from NASA Download from Freecache Download from USF FTP (Florida) (Internet II - university students start here) Download from KNCL FTP (Texas) Download from Lakewebs (Oklahoma) Download from NJIT (New Jersey)

To alter the program sequence, the machine had to be modified.
Hmm, no. See, e.g., the discussion of Zuse's architecture vs. v. Neumann's. And the Turing machine, as described in Turing's famous 1936 paper "On Computable numbers", of course, needs just an infinite tape to "calculate any recursive function, decide any recursive language, and accept any recursively enumerable language. According to the Church-Turing thesis, the problems solvable by a universal Turing machine are exactly those problems solvable by an algorithm or an effective method of computation, for any reasonable definition of those terms." (From wikipedia) Aiken's Harvard architecture differs from the v. Neumann architecture mainly by having code storage separate from data storage (which, btw, is what modern processors implement in the L1 cache...)

Or why not join the autopilot project at SourceForge. ;-)

Java runs more languages than .NET! There are over a hundred compilers targeting JVM bytecode.

OpenCable uses MHP for its middleware, it's based on Java and all the specs are available from ETSI, open implementations should be possible, of course this is only part of OpenCable but if everything is encrypted to start with it doesn't matter if you can implement open versions, you're stuffed (until its broken).

I don't think the mono developers care if they're compatible or not. For them, it's an emerging technology with the posiblity to change computing for the better.

It's not an emerging technology and it won't change computing. There's nothing new in .net which isn't already present in Java, very little that wasn't already present in the UCSD p-system in 1973, and not a lot which wasn't already present in BCPLin 1967

The timeline goes like this:

1. BCPL, 1967: Single source language (BCPL) compiles to CINTCODE, which runs on a virtual machine with standard libraries; virtual machine is ported to multiple architectures, allowing the same binary to run on all architectures.
2. P-System, 1973: Several source languages (including Pascal, Fortran and others) compile to 'P-Code', which runs on a virtual machine with standard libraries; virtual machine is ported to multiple architectures, allowing the same binary to run on all architectures.
3. Java, 1991: Several hundred source languages (including Ada, BASIC, C++, Cobol, Forth, Fortran, JavaScript, LISP, Modula, Oberon, Occam, Pascal, Prolog, Python, Ruby, Scheme, Smalltalk, TCL, and anything which GCC compiles) compile to JVM code, which runs on a virtual machine with standard libraries and network transparency; virtual machine is ported to multiple architectures, allowing the same binary to run on all architectures.
4. .NET, 2000: Innovation! Celebration! Microsoft do more of the same!

Not that it really matters, except that the A is ASCII is "American", so Western Europeans will accuse you of being U.S.-centric.

Despite the name, the "ANSI Character set" was never any kind of standard. Microsoft claims they call Microsoft Latin1 "ANSI" because it's based on an ANSI draft that eventually became ISO Latin1. But I think it has to do with the "ANSI" software that used to be in MS-DOS. This emulated an "ANSI Terminal" (better known as a DEC VT-100) and allowed the ANSI graphics BBS people used to be so fond of. Not the same character set as Latin1, of course, but it's not suprising that the tech writers would confuse the two.

Further confusion: when I was documenting Delphi, explaining the exact meaning of the AnsiString character type took some skill. Its characters were never any kind of "ANSI" character set. In fact, it's not even a single-byte character set. It is, in fact, UTF-8, which is also a superset of ASCII, but which uses multi-byte characters to represent the more exotic stuff.

Yet further confusion: Slashdot seems to use ISO Latin1, but sends an HTTP header claiming to use UTF-8! Doesn't matter most of the time...

You could ask them what JRE they are using. I doubt the 60 Mb footprint of 1.4.2 will run on a cell phone. Then we get to basic point again: "What is Java?", besides being a Sun Microsystem trademark to cover multiple unrelated things.

OK, Java is a language. It's slightly confused with the JVM, which, of course, supports multiple languages. 'Java 2 Standard Edition' is the Java language bundled with a collection of standard libraries. But Java is not the same as J2SE. Java is just a language. J2ME and J2EE are the same language bundled with different sets of standard libraries.

In my opinion Java is at least a brilliant grammar. If you strip the bloat, the class libraries are also nicely done.

<rant>You've obviously had nothing to do with java.util.Date, then. Or java.util.GregorianCalendar. Or the fact that java.sql.SQLException can't distinguish between a bad connection, an authentication failure, and a fscking syntax error. Or...</rant>

However, for the most part, it sort of works...

• jython (python running on the java vm - the fastest python implementation?)
• eiffel
• smalltalk
• nice (indeed a very nice ;) language - a little bloated syntax though)
• sather
• ada
• ruby
• javascript (rhino)
• aspectj (first AOP language)
• forth
• fortran and last but not least a very promising language called
• Kava http://www.research.ibm.com/people/d/dfb/papers.ht ml#Bacon01Kava

web services : ok it is an interesting feature, but to be clear COM/DCOM was there much before ;-)
Another point is that web services do not scale (if you compare them to IIOP based architecture for instance). You can not build a multi-thier application with dotnet, it just not scale. Why did MS just forgot to put IIOP into dotnet ? This is just stupid even a child whould have guess it has to be done !

About multi language. This is just FUD. First you've got lots of language in Java that compiles to bytecode and they were build longtime before MS ever think of running away from Java to create they clone (the famous "COOL" project).
Now point is that multilanguage is useless. Clearly, how can you beleive that a Cobol user will smoothly goes to Cobol.net ? Those languages are complete new paradigm that sticks to the platform (so cauled "flavorished" languages). Looking at Cobol.net and you will think of the C# counterpart. The real language of MS.net is C# and the other are just here to push some FUD. Ever seen a Cobol.net project in the place ? or blurb.net ?

As a conclusion, i will just said just look at where is .net in more than 3years, and will all the money invested by MS, then you will come to the question :

Will MS soon drop .net as a platform ?
(i am not talking of the API or the tools but the core platform that use IL and so on..)

Anyway, day after day MS customer are moving to J2EE ... and MS will have to react soon or later or the only project they will still have will be the small part.

Gartner forcasted few years ago, that MS.net and J2EE will be respectively 1/3 and 2/3 of the market but this dream for MS never happend. Because MS did not gained new customer but just transfered some of their existing customer to their new tech, and an important percent that are looking for alternatives ;-)

SLK

>you can have 1 developer using Perl, another using C#. Try that in Java. Try any cross language development in Java.

Well, who didn't read the label before applying? Java is any object code that passes JVM validation, not the source code, which a little lawsuit from Sun should have made clear. See "about 165 different systems" that produce Java object code.

If Mono ever finishes, the platform-specific CLR can run most code. Even though Java's done it for a long time, you're tied to one language: Java.

I'm not sure how many times I've seen this single point refutued, but your not tied to a single language to use the the JVM. Want proof, here you go. That's COBOL to Eifel with all the good bits in the middle.

The question is, what do you mean by "Java". There is the programming language "Java". There is the Java Virtual Machine. There is the set of standard class libraries, etc... This is where I think the confusion comes in.

I also like the fact that I can code in C#, Smalltalk, Eiffel, ilasm (yeah right;)) or some other language, and if a Visual Basic programmer want to use my classes (s)he can just use them, like they were native classes.. No modifications needed. No wrappers needed.

I never said .NET was bad, but after all, it is still a Java clone.
The point is, if you were starting fresh, why on earth would you use a tool beholden to MS? The only advantage is if you are already stuck on windows and would like to dig a deeper hole.

And Mono is nice, but until MS indemnify them against patent infringement claims its really hard to use without getting scared.

More languages? Really?

I agree that .NET is useful, but I for one am hoping that its main use will be to get Sun to get its act together, and admit to a difference between the VM and the language, sort out JNI, get rid of checked exceptions, etc etc.

This is awesome!

Since .NET's original annoucnement, I've thought that it was a really cool potential technology. As a Mac and Linux guy, I kept myself from getting too excited, as there was little chance MS would do a port themselves to these platforms. But then Mono and dotGNU were announced. And the potential of this couldn't be denied- Mono was/is a project led by *the* Miguel nonetheless. So now, as a Mac and Linux guy, a *free* implementation of .NET was within reach. I probably wouldn't have been as hopeful if it was just some SourceForge page someone put up, but no, big names were behind Mono.

We have been seeing very steady progress for a while, and now we are getting something quite meaty indeed. If running Eclipse on Mono isn't proof that Mono is becoming a viable solution for many coders, I don't know what is. .NET provides many technical advantages over Java and other systems. Hell, I would even go so far as to say that MS *innovated* with its creation. It was a pretty bold thing to base their future on. The technology to do something like .NET has been around for a while, but never before has it been done in a way that interop between languages was so transparent and seamless.

Sure, you've been able to run other languages on the Java VM for a while. You've been able to run other languages on various Smalltalk VMs for longer. You've been able to run other languages on Lisp VMs for even longer than that! However, none of the attempts before .NET provided such a neat little package for such a system.

I occassionally laugh when some Java advocate points to the Java languages page when someone else brings up that .NET can do seamless interop between many languages. Even if I have Jython and Bistro installed, there is no (relatively simple) way that I can subclass classes written in Java in Bistro/Smalltalk, write some of the methods in Jython, and then do the scripting in JTcl. It could be done with a hefty amount of additional code to call various evalLanguage()-ish methods, but luckily, we don't have to do that with .NET.

I am a Smalltalk programmer. I am a Mac and Linux user. I am also an ecologist. The last thing I want to do is switch to Java just so I could have access to a few more libraries for data analysis. I think it is silly for Sun to expect every programmer in the world to switch to its language without hestitation. It may work on the C++ guys, who are usually moving up in the language food chain by switching to the Java language on the Java platform, but for me, it'd be a downgrade. A decrease in productivity. A decrease in flexibility. Etc. The list goes on. However, with .NET, I don't have to use the One True Language that any one vendor hath ordained, and with Mono, I don't even have to use the One True Runtime Implementation. With the newly released #Smalltalk, things are looking pretty damn good from here. ANSI Smalltalk, yet access to all classes and code written for the .NET VM available like any other Smalltalk class. And if someone else wants to use my code later on, she won't have to convert it, open up the parts she wants to some RPC protocol or anything else like that- she can just subclass it. Or instantiate it... like it should be.

Christ, I rambled plenty for this post...

Many thanks to the Mono team!

Supposedly it runs vxWorks (I got a link to this site, in the same discussion: http://www-hft.ee.tu-berlin.de/~strauman/airport/a irport.html):

Important Note About the New Airport Base Station (AKA "Snow")

The new model of the Airport Base Station which features two Ethernet ports is a completely different device. Don't even dream about using etherboot and the linux port discussed here on that one.

* The old "graphite" station is an embedded i486-PC running an embedded BIOS and the KarlBridge software.
* The new "snow" station uses an embedded (860 series) PowerPC and it runs vxWorks. While it should certainly be possible to port Linux to that device, too, no efforts have been undertaken, however. I have previously run linux on the 860 - a neat device.
* This little utility helps extracting a zlib compressed part from a binary file by using brute force :-). You must not use it on the "snow" firmware binary, though, as this could violate the license.


The site discusses the use of the earlier version which uses a 486-chip, also AMD ? to run Linux on.

Well, kinda.

The project hasn't been updated in a couple of months, and it breaks Ethernet bridging, but the idea of running Linux on a sleek little gadget from Apple is still geeky enough to be interesting.

The Airport is great, but to configure it you need to be running OS 9 or X - horrid news for a high school that I was working at a few months ago. Every machine was running OS 8.6, including the one teacher-owned laptop. Every student-owned laptop was Windows-based.
I brought in my laptop (which runs Debian) and gave the Airport Base Station Configurator a try, but to no avail.

So - cool device, but it needs to be easier to configure or modify.

This is not true. From here : The Z1 is today considered to be the first freely programmable computer of the world. It was completed in 1938 and financed completely from private funds.

Also, look at this overview of his Plankalkül programming language, one of the first (if not the first) high-level prgramming languages.

For a more complete comparison of the architecture of Zuse's computers with von Neumann computers, click here.

This is not true. From here : The Z1 is today considered to be the first freely programmable computer of the world. It was completed in 1938 and financed completely from private funds.

Also, look at this overview of his Plankalkül programming language, one of the first (if not the first) high-level prgramming languages.

For a more complete comparison of the architecture of Zuse's computers with von Neumann computers, click here.

This is not true. From here : The Z1 is today considered to be the first freely programmable computer of the world. It was completed in 1938 and financed completely from private funds.

Also, look at this overview of his Plankalkül programming language, one of the first (if not the first) high-level prgramming languages.

For a more complete comparison of the architecture of Zuse's computers with von Neumann computers, click here.

Hydrogen is very abundant in nature.

There are many interesting ways people may be able to produce it.

In my sporadic but sometimes intense investigations of alternate energy sources, I was always the most taken with hydrogen.

It is very clean. It is relatively efficient. I'd prefer a liquid fuel, but then again, I'd prefer a non-volatile, non-toxic fuel, too. You can't always get what you want.

The attractive things about hydrogen are its real abundance. There are so many interesting possibilties for how to make it. I saw a fascinating series of papers (curse me for not being able to find the original links - although you can get familiar with the ideas with some simple google searches, i.e. this conference poster) on the use of genetically engineered bacteria that produce hydrogen when eating various things, even waste products.

"Electric" has massive drawbacks both in storage and distribution, which are both dirty and highly inefficient. Methanol/Ethanol are probably even dirtier, though potentially renewable, but there are questions about how sustainable, for instance, corn power really is. Geothermal and hydro are obviously limited in place and abundance... Solar, wind and tides are ideal but unpredictable and expensive. I'm excited to hear about big improvements in solar power systems, but the big stuff (70%+ efficiencies) still seem a ways away for commercial use.

To me, that leaves good old hydrogen (in combustion? in a fuel cell?) - attractive both for its unparalleled cleanliness and the interesting potential sources. Why not?

Broadband via cable TV is available, but cable modems are a fairly new thing over there and many apartments don't have the cable lines anyway. (Take a look at any apartment building in Japan and you'll see dozens of those mini satellite dishes perched on the balconies.) However, if you want cable TV and broadband Internet, you can get a pretty good deal by combining the two -- about 80 USD/month. You might need a local friend to help you, though, because most cable providers don't have English-speaking customer service.

If you just want the Internet access, a better option is ADSL, which has exploded in popularity over the last couple of years. Before ordering, you first need to decide whether you want land-line (as opposed to cellular) phone service. If you want a land line, get ADSL Type I, which includes phone service and Internet access. If you plan to get a cell phone in Japan, choose ADSL Type II, which provides Internet access only, but for a lower price.

The cheapest ADSL service is probably Yahoo! Japan BB, but they don't provide any English support, not even for sales. You're better off going with a company that has a dedicated English-speaking support line such as Global OnLine or eAccess. Unfortunately, these providers usually serve only the larger metropolitan areas, so if you're in a suburb or a smaller town, your only choice might be good old NTT. All you have to do is call the English-speaking sales line for NTT (the number depends on whether you live in the east or in the west) and tell them you want ADSL Type II. They'll be happy to hook you up for about 25 USD/month, and you can rent an ADSL modem from them for another 5 USD/month. Important tip: NTT will send you a CD-ROM containing PPPoE drivers that only work with the Japanese version of Windows, so you should download the freeware program RASPPPOE before you go and bring it along with you. It's compatible with NTT's ADSL modems.

There's another catch: Because NTT only provides the physical ADSL connection, you'll need to find an ISP that supports ADSL. I got mine through OCN for about 20 USD/month. They offer sales and support in English.

The Macintosh has about the same percentage of market share in Japan as in the U.S. (in other words, not much), so you can expect the same level of support and availability over there that you'll find here. I expect it's entirely possible to hook up your Mac to a Japanese ADSL modem, but don't expect much technical support if things go wrong. (I had no trouble connecting through my Linux laptop once I got the Roaring Penguin configuration set up right.) As for 802.11b, coverage is almost non-existent, although just about everyone over there does email wirelessly through their cell phone. Text messaging and services like DoCoMo are far more popular than the Internet in Japan, at least for now.

You should visit the ISP Japan FAQ for more details. You might also want to check out my Japan page for tips on living and working in Japan.

Heh, i dont know about others on slashdot, but recently ive found myself coming to the limits of what is "fun" with the x86 arch, and have been looking for other architectures to play with. Thats the reason i currently have 2 RS/600s, a Alpha, numberous suns, SGI systems etc etc. Its fun to see jsut how different systems are. I have a apple airport coming, and am going to have a bash sticking linux on it.

its tiresome for me to have to respond to your ignorance but here is the same old link.

"If I wanted to write a LISP interpreter in .NET (god forbid), I can do so in any .NET-supported language without first having to write that language in Java."

I believe what your parent was saying was that there are many languages which can compile to java bytecode. You don't even have to write the language in java, you just have to be able to produce (using C, or whatever) java bytecode from your language of choice. Most do seem to be written in Java, although J-Eiffel is a Eiffel compiler with JVM bytecode generation, and SmalltalkJVM compiler currently produces 100% Java class files fully compatible with the Sun JVM specification.

Kawa is a Scheme environment, written in Java, and that compiles Scheme code into Java byte-codes. Likewise Jython is Python written in Java. Jacl, pronunced "Jackal", is a Tcl interpreter written in Java. SmalltalkJVM compiler currently produces 100% Java class files fully compatible with the Sun JVM specification. I could go on, but checkout Programming Languages for the Java Virtual Machine, it lists 160 different languages for the JVM.

Java is language centric

The java bytecode is not language centric. Programming languages for the java virtual machine. There are 50+ languages listed in the above link. I would bet there are many more languages currently available for the java bytecode than for the .NET bytecode.

People need to realize that .NET and the java VM are just virtual machines that run bytecode and have huge libraries associated with them. The bytecode for either VM can be generated from many different languages.

It is correct to point out that much of .NET's library is not portable while java's library is 100% portable to many different platforms.