Domain: tu-muenchen.de
Stories and comments across the archive that link to tu-muenchen.de.
Comments · 31
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Re:SAGE is an interesting project
A problem with Metamath is that it is very labor-intensive to develop proofs.
This is not the only problem. Another one is with the readibility of the proofs. Mathematicians want to know why theorems are true. Trying to understand a Metamath proof is like trying to understand an algorithm by reading assembler code. An ideal solution would be a high level formal proof language (like Isar) with a theorem prover that "compiles" it to Metamath for independent verification. -
Re:Both and Neither
Not really, Win32 is a very thin wrapper in this case. All the Win32 thread functions have identical equivalents in the native API. E.g. CreateThread becomes NtCreateThread. And NtCreateThread is just a syscall into the kernel.
http://www13.informatik.tu-muenchen.de/lehre/prakt ika/SS02/bsprakt/inside_the_native_api.html -
Re:Please tell me...
To give some more follow up information, I noticed that
This site from TU-muenchen has relatively recent HINT benchmark graphs for Opteron and P4 and Xeon processors. -
Re:Seems solid
Dammit, that should be:
http://wwwradig.informatik.tu-muenchen.de/~dressle r/jokes.html#Solutions%20for%20a%20small%20Planet
Sorry... -
Waiting for Si Defeat
Diamond has long held a special unattainable allure, not only because of its unparalleled hardness, Youngs modulus, dielectric properties and thermal conductivity (hold a big diamond in your hand and it will feel cold as it draws heat quickly - hence the moniker "ice"), but because of the possibility of making semiconductors from it.
IIRC, it has a really interesting wide band gap, but that two big practical problems exist:
- growing layers of diamond that are sufficiently defect-free. Last I heard, even the best CVD process seems to put down polycrystalline diamond layers.
- n doping is difficult to do well for diamond.
If these barriers could be surmounted, diamond devices would become a more widespread and useful technology.
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Re:They can tell 2600 Hz when they hear it
That's called absolute pitch, and it's not exclusive to blind people.
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Bad bugs
Chalk up another one for the most disasterous software bugs in history. This one should give the Ariane 5 explosion a go for no 1.
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List of worst bugs
Here are some bad bugs.
The more things change, the more they stay the same. Well, except that instead of miscalculating your home budget you could rain nuclear destruction upon the world... -
media.xiph.org
We've been collecting what freely-redistributable clips we can find at media.xiph.org. There's not much there, but it's still worth a look. Particularly interesting for your case are some public domain HD test clips made available by TU München LDV. Of course, they're quite short given the size of uncompressed HD frames.
Please let us know if you find anything else, that's exactly what the collection is for.
In general, the suggestions of contacting copyright holders for permission is the best one. There are various collections of test clips and movies online, but they're generally either small and without audio, or already compressed. Plus, the more content we get under free licenses, the better the world will be.
:-)The Internet Archive does have a collection of movies with contact information, so that might be an easy place to start.
Good luck!
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How about...
some of these bugs.
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This week's most dangerous inventions.
Two words:
Kitchen Fire
Virutally every cook book, and even packaging pre-prepared foods say not to leave the cooking food unattended. Now they're not only giving you a way to not attend it, but to not be there when it starts.
Here's a few references to read before we start:
A few fatally famous Software Bugs,
The Therac-25 Radiation Overdose accidents from 1975 to 1987.
and
Microsoft makes hackers obsolete
---> Worst case scenerio 1:
Hacker A finds this device. He manages to figure out how to get into it.
Victim B is someone at home preparing to use the microwave. They open the door. Hacker A sees the indication that the door is open, and activates the oven at 100% power.
---> Worse Case Scenerio 2:
User A is driving home, expecting that the frozen dinner is still in the oven. He activates the oven 15 minutes prior to his arrival home.
Kid B is home early, sees the frozen dinner in the oven, pulls it out, and puts in popcorn instead. Due to a programming error, the oven activates while he's still rearranging foods, and the door is open.
---> Worse Case Scenerio 3:
User A put frozen dinner in oven before he left home. Being it was 5am, he wasn't thinking very well.
User A remembers on his way home, that he put food in the oven, and activates it while driving.
User A forgot to take the food out of the box, or that part of the packaging contained foil.
User A comes home to a house fire which has been going for approx 15 minutes.
I'm not sure I like this invention. I'm no technophobe, but this sounds kind of dangerous.
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State of the Art in Zorro
ICY is an IC controller card suitable for all Amiga models equipped with a Zorro II / III compatible bus.
Or am i just short of state of the art of Zorro... It's hard to tell these daysR -
Re:That's because we live in interesting times
I am a software engineer but I'd be ashamed to show my face at a mechanical or civil engineer convention - the buildings and machines they make don't blow up all the time, repeatedly, for no reason at all.
The responsibility placed on engineers (particularly civil engineers) is greater than that of many software engineers. Civil engineers are held liable for the failures of their designs. The civil engineer field book is a legal document. It must written in black pencil. Nothing may be erased. Corrections must be written with red pencil. A single stroke of red should be used to strike out an error. The point is that not only are civil engineers held accountable for their designs, but they are also required to keep consistant records of their work.
Now, contrast this to responsibility taken by certain firms whose software has failed to perform. I seem to remember for instance that the Navy had a brand-new, trick-out ship a few years ago that ended up being pretty useless for a while because of its software.
I don't know if NASA ever got any satisfaction from the subcontractor that wrote the system that screwed the Mars Polar Lander.
This is the only industry that I know of where we actually reward companies for putting out a faulty product (i.e. pay bug fixes). As Wally once said, "I'm going go write me a minivan."
-Jennifer
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Re:I remember the last one...
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Link to a page with loads of incidents...
...some unbelievably stupid. Here
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Re:already..
or better still check out
Collection of Software Bugs
then open wide and say ahhhh.
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Good site
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That was an easy setup
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[OT] VirtualDub on Linux
VirtualDub runs quite well under (recent?) incarnations of Wine. As do many other video-related tools. Oh, and of course there's also Broadcast2000 (originally found here, but now also to be found here), and (for the more adventurous) its successor Cinelerra, which is not on their main site but lives on the Sourceforge project site. Beware, compiling Cinelerra is not for the faint of heart.
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Re:but will they port it to the Amiga...
The whole point is that they don't have to port it to the Amiga. The games are platform independent.
Just download and install Java for your amiga and the latest Quake4 based game will look as good on your Amiga as it does on the newest and fastest multiprocessor PC. Well, nearly. -
unixutil
No need for cygwin.
Find unixutil here. -
Related stuff
There is some ongoing work on hibernation and process checkpointing. ACPI4Linux
is an attempt at implementing the ACPI specification for Linux. This is different from APM though, and the product is quite preliminary. There's also an interesting site on process checkpointing, migration and resumption. Basically, its implemented as a kernel module that upon invocation, freezes the scheduler, dumps all process-related information into a separate hibernation partition and shuts off.
HTH,
Shankar -
Navite Win32 utilities.
I think it is great that there will be a cygwin-w32 architecture available through the Debian packaging system. However, what I would really like to see are native ports of GNU & other freeware packages. I've used Emacs, Vim, and MiKTeX on windows, as well as many file-utils and devel-utils have been ported, partially listed here or here (compiled primarily the MinGW or DJGPP compilers), but they are not centrally available or managed. I would also argue that the Debian branch for cygwin programs should be called w32-cygwin, and the native programs be under w32.
Just some more thoughts to fuel the fire. -
Traditionally UNIX utils on Win32
Here are just a few of the tools that are considered traditionally in UNIX/Linux/BSD territory that are available for Win32. In all actuality, there's enough out there to get as much of Linux running on Win32 as Win32 running under WINE.
XFree86: http://sources.redhat.com/cygwin/xfree/
KDE: http://kde-cygwin.sourceforge.net/
GTK/PHP/Libglade: http://gtk.php.net/download.php
Apache: http://www.apache.org
PHP: http://www.php.net
PHPTriad: http://www.phpgeek.com
Perl: http://www.activestate.com
Ruby: http://www.pragmaticprogrammer.com/ruby/downloads/ ruby-install.html
Python: http://www.python.org/download/download_windows.ht ml
TCL/TK: http://www.pconline.com/%7Eerc/tclwin.htm
MySQL: http://www.mysql.com
MySQL ODBC: http://www.mysql.com/downloads/api-myodbc.html
PostgreSQL: Included in cygwin (only works on NT)
ATT's U/WIN* Unix for Windows: http://www.research.att.com/sw/tools/uwin/
Cygwin: http://sourceware.cygnus.com/cygwin/
DJGPP: http://www.delorie.com/djgpp/
Native UNIX command-line binaries: http://www.wzw.tu-muenchen.de/~syring/win32/UnxUti ls.html
vi: http://www.cs.vu.nl/~tmgil/vi.html
Emacs: http://www.cs.washington.edu/homes/voelker/ntemacs .html
OpenOffice: http://www.openoffice.org
Mozilla: http://www.mozilla.org
GIMP: http://user.sgic.fi/~tml/gimp/win32/
List of GNU software for Windows: http://www.gnusoftware.com/
And so on . . .
There's a list over at DMOZ.org of a lot of this. -
Re:This is not a good trend to cheer.
Where does it end though? If you can steal IP to save AIDS patients then surely I can steal all your stuff to pay for my heart transplant, right?
You might possibly benefit from learning a little bit about logical arguments.
If you can lift a can of beer, then surely you can single-handedly raise the Titanic. Doesn't this sound idiotic? It's the same construction you used...
It ends somewhere in the middle, as nearly always. Note that e.g. they are not taking anything from Roche but a small part of the possible future earnings. Note also that on the other hand we have the continued life and productivity of a couple of hundred thousand people.
By the way, I am giving away most of my intellectual property anyways. You can get it from the E theorem prover page. Hope it helps you in getting a transplant.
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Re:Benchmark the Itanium on a 64bit OS w/ 64bit coDid you suggest using gcc on UltraSparc and POWER processors for benchmark comparisons? You've got to be mad. Those are CPUs where the commercial compilers, such as Sun Workshop (SunPro) and xlc (or Visual Age C or whatever IBM calls it these days), frankly kick the crap out of gcc...
I have repeatedly heard this rumour. While there may be true aspects to it, it certainly is not true in general. I have compiled my equational theorem prover E with both the SunPro compiler suite and gcc 2.95.2, with optimization for fastest code used with both compilers, and have not noted a significant difference in running time (and yes, E is CPU bound and eats up cycles like nothing, and it is complex enough that optimization is difficult and helps a lot in general).
These results are for the 32 bit userland on Solaris, for a program that does mostly integer and only a few floating point operations. At least in this case gcc is on par with SUN's "commercial" compilers, with the added bonus that gcc is widely portable (and hence so is code written for it).
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Re:worth it?
Yes, dammit! Given that my old Acorn A3000 (based on an 8MHz ARM2, 2MB memory) had anti-aliased fonts switched on by default, and the desktop still flew along nicely (the rendering might have been slow, but the bitmap cache ensured that the desktop was always responsive for a fairly modest outlay of memory). Here's a nice shot of the font rendering. No, I don't use it any more, so I can't possibly be a rabid advocate, but I know from experience that anti-aliasing isn't hard to do efficiently.
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Re:its more than enoughI've never seen a hacker compiling a kernel in a plane. Humm... may be Eric Raymond?
I am not Eric Raymond, but I have done it occasionally - more often, however, on a train, and more often compiling not kernels, but other systems (most likely my equational theorem prover E . And higher speeds also come in handy for LaTeX-ing large documents.
I generally agree that it makes sense to trade speed for longer battery life. However, given that I can work for about 5 hours on my new notebook (P3 600 with SpeedStep, 64 MB Memory under Linux, the current technological compromise is quite ok for me.
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Windows TipsWhen I'm sitting down at a Windows box, I find myself constantly wishing that I had "grep", "tail", "less","cat",etc. The best thing I've found for Windows in a long time is the native GNU utilities. Sure, you can always download CygWin, which is a kinda emulation layer, emulating the Linux API with the Win32 API, but I find that the native GNU utilities mentioned about (native Win32) are quite cool. It's the first thing I put onto a Windows box I'm working on. Oh, that and, if it's a Windows 98 box, 98 Lite. This thing takes out a lot of the useless rubbish (bloatfiles) in Windows 98. The free version removes Internet Explorer from the OS, making it quite a lot faser sicne IE doesn't have to bog down the system by being "integrated" into it.
Cheers
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I just want -one- that works!
The survey is missing my choice - a browser that works, don't much care whose.
Over the few years on NetBSD, I've tried Chimera (surprisingly good), Arena (you call that a GUI?), Lynx, Netscape (remotely), possibly Amaya, Plume, w3/xemacs, probably others I don't remember... oh, yeah, kfm of course (It was wonderful until it quit showing GIFs and PNGs for a reason I've never figured out). I've been on pins and needles for Opera to come out; it came to be the only reason to use Winduhs and if it ultimately is only for Linux I may switch from NetBSD.
I finally got so desperate for a browser that I implemented one in TCL around TkHTML. I don't need Java or plugins or cookies or frames or all that junk - even CSS can go, I just need HTML/3.2, GIF (if permitted), PNG, JFIF, and a few standard protocols!! It's a pretty pass when what I can cobble together in a week is better for me than the other stuff... (PS: Hmmp. My forms usually work, but
/. won't take 'em... I'll have to use Lynx.)Why don't I work on Mozilla or kfm or Konqueror? I don't much feel like playing with DLing ±30 MB (you're lucky to have 28800 kb/s here) of C++ (I could never grok C++) and then try to fight to have my changes taken back.)
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Water really convenient.Water is not essential, but it would be very convenient. It is easy to purify or separate and has many uses either as water or as hydrogen and oxygen. Having water there would be much easier than transporting or making more.
The Moon is 20% oxygen by weight but most is tightly locked in minerals. One which might not be too hard is iron oxide, such as the Apollo 17 orange soil.
There is 10 billion tons of hydrogen in the surface rocks due to volatiles in the solar wind, which is 96 percent hydrogen. I don't know if we could collect H directly from solar wind.