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If you're handy with a soldering iron, you might want to try something like this.

I looked up Klatt, like the AC mentioned - here are some links for the rest of us...

GPL'd Klatt Synth Source

RSynth Speech Synthesizer - Klatt based synth - go to /soundapps to download gzipped code

KPE80 - A Klatt Synthesiser and Parameter Editor

Worldcom - Generation Duh!

Earth's atmospheric pressure is 1 atm or converting to kPa, 100 kPa. Martian atmospheric pressure is about 1% of Earth's or about 1 kPa (10^3 Pa on the chart). Average Martian surface temperatures at the equator are -53C or 220K. Now looking at our chart again, we see that at this point, water cannot exist as a liquid, but only as a solid (ice). As day/night termperatures shift, water will alternate between solid and gas only, never even passing through the liquid state, and once a gas, not likely to collect on the ground, but remain suspended as ice crystals high in the air. So for now, the collecting frozen water from near the poles, storing it in canisters , and transporting those to any camps remains the only realistic wat of getting water on Mars.

12" vinyl records have much dynamic. More punch.

They're also impractical for use in moving automobiles or around small children.

Because a CD has only 16 bits of dynamic, music is overcompressed.

Each bit of linear PCM after the first provides about 6 dB of dynamic range, giving CDs approximately 90 dB of range. If you turn up the volume so as to hear the sound at 0 dB (threshold of hearing at 1-4 kHz), the sound at 90 dB may damage your hearing. Even THX movie soundtracks are mixed at 75 dB for dialogue, and most home theater setups run things 6 to 10 dB lower than that. Heck

Vinyl records sold in the 1970s have more punch than CDs sold today not because of limitations of the CD format but because of limitations of FM radio. According to the Myths section at r3mix (which uses JavaShit to prevent deep linking), the real cause for modern CDs' lack of dynamic range is the application of heavy dynamic compression to get the music to sound louder on the radio.

I'll tell you why the quality of British engineering has declined: because Engineers are treated terribly in the UK. For a start, "Engineer" isn't a protected title, as it is in the US and even in Europe, where it has similar standing to the title of a medical doctor. In the UK, the electrician who installs your cable TV probably calls himself an "Electrical Engineer". If someone asks you what you do for a living and you say "Mechanical Engineer", in the UK they will think you are a car mechanic. (These are of course necessary and worthy jobs, but you don't need a 4-year degree and 4 years of professional experience to do them, as you do to become an Engineer). Also, an Engineer in the UK is unlikely to be well paid, compared to a similarly qualified lawyer or finance professional.

I have a degree in Mechanical Engineering from UCL, one of the top 3 universities in the UK, and like many of my graduating class, I didn't even apply to engineering firms. We went straight into consulting, banking, software and similar jobs - where our talents would be respected and rewarded.

I believe that these factors are more important than Lego -vs- Meccano. Remember, we all started off *wanting* to be Engineers - it was only when we realised what it was really like that we changed our minds.

Try RAT (robust audio tool) too.

We've used RAT from UCL quite sucessfully for VoIP calls in Linux (and between Linux and other platforms). It uses RTP for things like video and audio synching too and has handy gateway transcoding services available to it to translate between codecs. There's also a companion video client, VIC and a whiteboard system too.
Some of the releases are a touch tempremental but you should be able to make one of them work!

You're absolutely right. A better experiment would involve manipulating ping times or other network factors (while managing to keep players blind to their experimental condition) and measuring things like satisfaction, score, etc.

Interestingly, even if you can't tell that you've got a bad connection you may show physiological signs of stress. Check out this cool paper which looks at the effects of frame rate (in video conferencing) on physiological symptoms such as heart rate and palm sweat. Even when people didn't know that the frame rate was reduced, they showed signs of stress.

That being said, I think this was a cool use of available data, with implications about judgments and preferences rather than about performance.

So, dig this: suppose the time-frame of compulsory education has been hiked up for the purpose of keeping children off the job market longer, so as to not devalue labor and thereby devalue the labor system.

Suppose the compulsory educational system, which is economically (and therefore ideologically) linked to every other industry, is regearing to keep the middle class from further expanding and gaining power.

Suppose that, with all the psychological research that's been done, someone actually thought ahead and said, "Okay, if we can institutionalize middle-class children within the first 2 decades of their life, we'll be able to not only increase the size of the prison-industrial-military complex, but also to grab more power for ourselves and our friends overall" Just the same way some retailer once said, "Let's hire some of these behavioral psychologists to figure out how to organize the store in the most influential possible way[s]."

The net effect of our compulsory school system is obvious: 23% illiteracy in America, 13% prevalence of social phobia, Major depression (18.9%), generalized anxiety (14.8%), and the 'Suicide Rate Among U.S. Teens Keeps Increasing'.

And I nearly left out the continuous rise in teenage violence...

You see, the problem is, as Adam Yauch is quoted in the last link, that "Being on either end of a violent situation, whether you seem to have come out with the upper hand or whether you don't seem to, it doesn't resolve anything. It escalates the problem. Hatred leads to more hatred. Violence leads to more violence." Violence is not by any means limited to its overt outbreaks; it is a sadist/masochistic cycle which perpetuates itself. Our "educational" system suffers the Disney syndrome: the violence of management over the tenderness of interaction.

"Nature once had a chance to run riot in South Florida, producing jungles and swamps; now nature must submit to control. " And nature (which, yes children, is very much alive in each and every one of us) is pissed.

________________________________________________ __

http://www-mice.cs.ucl.ac.uk/multimedia/software/r at/index.html This is a very cool audio conferencing tool, runs on Linux, Windows, Solaris, SunOS, Irix, FreeBSD, NetBSD... and is open source. have fun!

Run Apache, sign your business over to Stallman the Communist.

It has to be said: you're programming Communism.

(The above link is probably going to /. this guy's page out of existence, but the original copy of this at perlguy.net doesn't seem to be there any more. Sorry, O. Hodson!)

Caution: contents may be quarrelsome and meticulous!

And a prophet, no less.

Moderators: Tiny posting, but exactly what he wants.

Streaming Server does not do encoding, it's just an RTSP server. You're gonna need an encoding platform that can do RTP broadcasting in addition.

You're choices for these are VIC(open source), Sorenson Broadcaster, and Sorenson+LiveICE

Note that sorenson alone can only do H263 in realtime on a Mac which is the same as Vic, but LiveICE is supposed to actually do the sorenson codec (although it will cost you).

I've done a lot of work in this area. Here's what I think:

Rule 1: don't use real. They have very good audio codecs, but the video stuff isn't worth it because you have to pay for everything.

If you are looking for quality, go with Windows Media. Get a Quad processor beast with an Osprey 500 and serve live MPEG 4. All the software is free if you don't count the operating systam costs.

If you want an Open Source solution use Vic with Darwin Streaming Server I think an Osprey 200 is your best bet for a capture card, but I haven't actually tried this out yet. Note that this uses the H263 codec which isn't much to talk about. If you want to use sorenson codec to stream live to quicktime, well good luck. There's something called LiveIce but it costs 6 grand and it only runs on NT, but you might want to look into that.

Here's some good links to get you going:
Choosing a Streaming Video Technology
previous slashdot article
technical primer on rt*p protocols

5{o be possible to use vic or the Java Media Framework with the H.263 codec instead of Sorenson Broadcaster.

At a conference a few weeks ago (Learning to Behave - TWLT17 in Twente), there was a speaker from University College Londen who talked about "Efficient Cloth Model for Dressing Animated Virtual People".
I couldn't find the whole article online, but a very rough overview is here.

Found this ;he re:
LETTERS TO THE EDITOR: Interception and the rights of individuals
Financial Times, Aug 8, 2000, 174 words

>From Patricia Hewitt MP.

Sir, Your article "Companies snooping on staff face curbs" (August 3)
suggests that the draft lawful business practice regulations, currently the
subject of a public consultation, will entail a "legal clampdown" on
companies' monitoring of electronic communications by "bringing private
business under the scope of interception laws for the first time".

This is not accurate. The regulations will actually reduce the burden on
business by making exceptions to the general rules on interception set out
in the regulation of investigatory powers act. They will permit businesses
to intercept communications on their own systems without consent for certain
purposes such as providing evidence of a commercial transaction, preventing
crime, or protecting a network against viruses or hackers. The regulations
will therefore help legitimate business practices regarding interception
while at the same time providing a high degree of protection to individuals'
civil rights.

The regulations have been drafted in the light of informal discussions with
business and other interests. We have already taken on board some of their
suggestions and I will take careful account of any further ones.

Patricia Hewitt, Minister for e-commerce, Dept of Trade and Industry, 1
Victoria Street, London SW1H 0ET

Not strictly accurate. The government (at the time) wanted to decrease unemployment amongst the young, and to be seen to be "doing something", so they made the decision to convert the polytechnics into universities. I'm not sure how to map this directly onto US education concepts, but the basic difference is that a university is an academic institution that can award its own degrees, whereas a polytechnic was more vocational, and franchised degree programmes from external authorities.

So what we ended up with is a system in which degrees from traditional universities (Oxford, Cambridge, London, a few others) have retained their elite status (as they have the resources and reputation to be very selective in admission and rigourous in examinations) and the ex-polys offering courses in "media studies" or "art history" or other vaguely-defined subjects.

Because it was so easy to get into a "university", and because education is (quite rightly) preceived as valuable, there was a huge influx of people, but the quality of the average graduate plummeted. Despite their reputation, people of ability from *all* backgrounds have always been able to get into some of the elite UK colleges, which are meritocratic in the extreme (for example, UCL) with others such as Durham admitting people based on their social background.

As the student population increased, the cost of supporting them while studying went up, also more people weren't working or paying taxes, and of those people, a smaller overall percentage of graduates were able to enter the workforce in graduate-level roles, because rather than studying engineering or whatever (UK Bachelors degrees are typically more difficult than US ones, but fewer UK grads take a Masters, so I guess it balances out) they had studied things that weren't relevant to industry.

Given this, it makes a good deal of sense to adopt the US system, where people can study whatever they please, so long as they pay for it themselves. The only economically viable alternative would be to shut all the ex-polys, and return a university education to only the most academically able. A third possibility is of course an additional tax on graduates, but the Labour government (currently in power, and responsible for dismantling the grant system and introducing tuition fees) remember the last time the UK suffered a "brain drain" under their rule.

(I completed a Mechanical Engineering degree in the UK, and worked part time during it).

What if you put a link on your page that says this is not a link to the DeCSS source code?

Accordingly, there may be no injunction against, nor liability for, linking to a site containing circumvention technology, the offering of which is unlawful under the DMCA, absent clear and convincing evidence that those responsible for the link (a) know at the relevant time that the offending material is on the linked-to site, (b) know that it is circumvention technology that may not lawfully be offered, and (c) create or maintain the link for the purpose of disseminating that technology.

The problem for Slashdot is, who are "those responsible for the link"? Does it mean me for submitting the link? Or CmdrTaco for allowing it to be submitted?

Does Slashdot have a responsibility to prevent me from submitting links to the source code? To enforce that interpretation you'd have to shut down every news site and message board in the US.

Well maybe I'm responsible for the link. But I'm in the UK, outside the jurisdiction of Judge Kaplan, the Supreme Court and the DMCA. They can't stop me submitting comments to American sites.

How's this ban on linking supposed to work again?

Accordingly, there may be no injunction against, nor liability for, linking to a site containing circumvention technology, the offering of which is unlawful under the DMCA, absent clear and convincing evidence that those responsible for the link (a) know at the relevant time that the offending material is on the linked-to site, (b) know that it is circumvention technology that may not lawfully be offered, and (c) create or maintain the link for the purpose of disseminating that technology.

The problem for Slashdot is, who are "those responsible for the link"? Does it mean me for submitting the link? Or CmdrTaco for allowing it to be submitted?

Does Slashdot have a responsibility to prevent me from submitting links to the source code? To enforce that interpretation you'd have to shut down every news site and message board in the US.

Well maybe I'm responsible for the link. But I'm in the UK, outside the jurisdiction of Judge Kaplan, the Supreme Court and the DMCA. They can't stop me submitting comments to American sites.

How's this ban on linking supposed to work again?

Accordingly, there may be no injunction against, nor liability for, linking to a site containing circumvention technology, the offering of which is unlawful under the DMCA, absent clear and convincing evidence that those responsible for the link (a) know at the relevant time that the offending material is on the linked-to site, (b) know that it is circumvention technology that may not lawfully be offered, and (c) create or maintain the link for the purpose of disseminating that technology.

The problem for Slashdot is, who are "those responsible for the link"? Does it mean me for submitting the link? Or CmdrTaco for allowing it to be submitted?

Does Slashdot have a responsibility to prevent me from submitting links to the source code? To enforce that interpretation you'd have to shut down every news site and message board in the US.

Well maybe I'm responsible for the link. But I'm in the UK, outside the jurisdiction of Judge Kaplan, the Supreme Court and the DMCA. They can't stop me submitting comments to American sites.

How's this ban on linking supposed to work again?

Accordingly, there may be no injunction against, nor liability for, linking to a site containing circumvention technology, the offering of which is unlawful under the DMCA, absent clear and convincing evidence that those responsible for the link (a) know at the relevant time that the offending material is on the linked-to site, (b) know that it is circumvention technology that may not lawfully be offered, and (c) create or maintain the link for the purpose of disseminating that technology.

The problem for Slashdot is, who are "those responsible for the link"? Does it mean me for submitting the link? Or CmdrTaco for allowing it to be submitted?

Does Slashdot have a responsibility to prevent me from submitting links to the source code? To enforce that interpretation you'd have to shut down every news site and message board in the US.

Well maybe I'm responsible for the link. But I'm in the UK, outside the jurisdiction of Judge Kaplan, the Supreme Court and the DMCA. They can't stop me submitting comments to American sites.

How's this ban on linking supposed to work again?

Accordingly, there may be no injunction against, nor liability for, linking to a site containing circumvention technology, the offering of which is unlawful under the DMCA, absent clear and convincing evidence that those responsible for the link (a) know at the relevant time that the offending material is on the linked-to site, (b) know that it is circumvention technology that may not lawfully be offered, and (c) create or maintain the link for the purpose of disseminating that technology.

The problem for Slashdot is, who are "those responsible for the link"? Does it mean me for submitting the link? Or CmdrTaco for allowing it to be submitted?

Does Slashdot have a responsibility to prevent me from submitting links to the source code? To enforce that interpretation you'd have to shut down every news site and message board in the US.

Well maybe I'm responsible for the link. But I'm in the UK, outside the jurisdiction of Judge Kaplan, the Supreme Court and the DMCA. They can't stop me submitting comments to American sites.

How's this ban on linking supposed to work again?

Accordingly, there may be no injunction against, nor liability for, linking to a site containing circumvention technology, the offering of which is unlawful under the DMCA, absent clear and convincing evidence that those responsible for the link (a) know at the relevant time that the offending material is on the linked-to site, (b) know that it is circumvention technology that may not lawfully be offered, and (c) create or maintain the link for the purpose of disseminating that technology.

The problem for Slashdot is, who are "those responsible for the link"? Does it mean me for submitting the link? Or CmdrTaco for allowing it to be submitted?

Does Slashdot have a responsibility to prevent me from submitting links to the source code? To enforce that interpretation you'd have to shut down every news site and message board in the US.

Well maybe I'm responsible for the link. But I'm in the UK, outside the jurisdiction of Judge Kaplan, the Supreme Court and the DMCA. They can't stop me submitting comments to American sites.

How's this ban on linking supposed to work again?

Accordingly, there may be no injunction against, nor liability for, linking to a site containing circumvention technology, the offering of which is unlawful under the DMCA, absent clear and convincing evidence that those responsible for the link (a) know at the relevant time that the offending material is on the linked-to site, (b) know that it is circumvention technology that may not lawfully be offered, and (c) create or maintain the link for the purpose of disseminating that technology.

The problem for Slashdot is, who are "those responsible for the link"? Does it mean me for submitting the link? Or CmdrTaco for allowing it to be submitted?

Does Slashdot have a responsibility to prevent me from submitting links to the source code? To enforce that interpretation you'd have to shut down every news site and message board in the US.

Well maybe I'm responsible for the link. But I'm in the UK, outside the jurisdiction of Judge Kaplan, the Supreme Court and the DMCA. They can't stop me submitting comments to American sites.

How's this ban on linking supposed to work again?

Accordingly, there may be no injunction against, nor liability for, linking to a site containing circumvention technology, the offering of which is unlawful under the DMCA, absent clear and convincing evidence that those responsible for the link (a) know at the relevant time that the offending material is on the linked-to site, (b) know that it is circumvention technology that may not lawfully be offered, and (c) create or maintain the link for the purpose of disseminating that technology.

The problem for Slashdot is, who are "those responsible for the link"? Does it mean me for submitting the link? Or CmdrTaco for allowing it to be submitted?

Does Slashdot have a responsibility to prevent me from submitting links to the source code? To enforce that interpretation you'd have to shut down every news site and message board in the US.

Well maybe I'm responsible for the link. But I'm in the UK, outside the jurisdiction of Judge Kaplan, the Supreme Court and the DMCA. They can't stop me submitting comments to American sites.

How's this ban on linking supposed to work again?

These lists don't appear to be totally reliable. Some of the labels listed as independent, found on the sites you refer to, can also be found on the RIAA's list of members.

For example, 4AD is listed on both:
http://www.cs.ucl.ac.uk/external/T.Wi cks/ill/
http://www.riaa.com/About-Members-1.cfm

The same applies to programming languages. For many programming tasks, the imperative model will serve you well, but there are times -- especially when repetitive, recursive or just plain mathematically complex tasks are involved -- that a good functional language is exactly what you need.

P.S. While probably not the best way to compare languages, you might want to check out this web page that compares how you'd get verious programming languages to output the complete lyrics to the "99 bottles of beer" song. (At last, an almost on-topic posting about beer!)

I just found a link that works for the "Bermuda Statement." It's here.

The idea is essentially to "open source" the Human Genome. This is why Celera's stock has dropped to a third of its highest value and it's being massively sued by shareholders.

Main gist:

• Primary Genomic Sequence Should be in the Public Domain
  It was agreed that all human genomic sequence information, generated by centres funded for large-scale human sequencing, should be freely available and in the public domain in order to encourage research and development and to maximise its benefit to society.

A little known and excellent set of free multimedia and confrerencing tools have been quietly developed for the MBONE. They are intended, naturally, for use in multi-cast environments, but most will work in point-to-point environments as well. Take a look at the University College of London Networked Multimedia Research Group web pages for details and a software archive.

Finally, here are further links to, for example, the crypto law survey which will give you an idea of the legality of Crypto in various countries.

Good luck, and we will look forward to seeing your report if you choose to post it to the web.
--

On the upside, it makes more sense for major corporations to invest in the process if you allow patents to be issued.

However, on the downside again, by awarding patents you discourage the use of new, innovative techniques to map out DNA sequences. By this I mean that people who can dump massive amounts of resources into sequencing DNA using existing technologies may get results faster than researchers who look for new, faster, or more reliable ways to do the same thing. In the long run, having newer, faster and more reliable ways would be better, in case we ever want to sequence the DNA of other things.

A good link to check out is HUGO's (HUman Genome Organization) statement on patenting DNA sequences.

I am very curious to know what other people's opinions on this are.

Have you messed with Chord keyboards? How about the Bat Keyboard? I found some research here as well.

Searching for MBONE only turned up 3 hits on freshmeat, but http://www-mice.cs.ucl.ac.uk/multim edia/software is a site that has updated versions of some of the tools I used in 1994. It looks like a lot of them are covered by the Berkeley license, but there are some precompiled linux binaries.

There's a port in the works, latest patches were sent today (if it's 4.1. 2000 in where you're from).

Address is http://www.mssl.ucl.ac.uk/~atp/linux-vax/ and there's a link to all source and cross-tools and the patches.

However, there's always NetBSD.

John Hopfield, Carlos Brody & Sam Roweis.
Computing with Action Potentials.
Neural Information Processing Systems 10 (NIPS'97) pp.166-172

It's online at http://www.gatsby.ucl.ac.uk/ ~roweis/papers/hopnips.pdf

The big idea is to get a neuron to generate a spike train whose intervals slowly get longer and longer, so that the phase of the spike train relative to a system clock represents the log of the time since the feature was detected.

Having the log(time elapsed since feature) means you can then thumbprint the word by the ratios of the time-intervals between different combinations of features appearing and disappearing (in this case, the presence of power in particular bands). The system is thus invariant to whether the word is said quickly or slowly.

It would be intersting to know if the USC system is similar.

I don't know if this is that reference, but the maps they have there are cool nonetheless. All sorts of stuff, going back to the "original" ARPANET map.

The point surely is that if we consider interactions between atomic orbitals slowly being 'turned on' as a perturbation (the infamous hypothetical black box controller), then there are strong interactions between say orbitals on adjacent bonding atoms. The independent atomic orbitals are a approximation; so it is very sensible to think of joint orbitals, representing chemical bonds or functional groups.

Going to the next level, we can now (conceptually) allow the functional-group orbitals to become aware of each other. This means further interactions, so a truer picture (at least at the level of a single electron linearisation) is that the molecule has molecule-wide electron orbitals. But in practice these interactions are much weaker, so taking them into account via the full quantum mechanics makes little difference to the overall electron density distribution.

Also, although the molecular orbitals are the right solution for a well isolated molecule doing its own thing, in practice chemists are often more interested in reactions & mechanisms. These involve applying local perturbations to the electrons' environment which are much stronger than the comparatively weak interactions between the groups; so taking group orbitals as a conceptual base is a better and more appropriate first-order approximation than molecular orbitals.

But in other cases, Molecular Orbitals are the more useful conceptual approximation -- eg for thinking about electron transfer between different levels, which is the basis for the beautiful biological miniaturised electron tunnelling spectroscopes that give us the sense of smell in our noses.

Inhabitants of the "UKcrypto" mailing list, for discussing government cryptology policy, have come to the conclusion that this story is a complete fabrication, "cut from whole cloth" by GCHQ (the UK equivalent of the NSA) to spread bad words about strong crypto and encourage regulation.

The original story has bizarre references to "hackers" holding up banks "with crypto" - I know it's a munition, but you can't point it at a bank teller!

See for example thi s article by highly respected cryptologist and computer security expert Ross Anderson, who is also co-author of AES candidate Serpent. Note also thi s observation on bank panic stories, or read the whole thread (search for "today's Times").

I'll also echo the comments here about Jonathan Ungoed-Thomas's hilarious attempts to cover security issues, among other iGaffes.
--

Inhabitants of the "UKcrypto" mailing list, for discussing government cryptology policy, have come to the conclusion that this story is a complete fabrication, "cut from whole cloth" by GCHQ (the UK equivalent of the NSA) to spread bad words about strong crypto and encourage regulation.

The original story has bizarre references to "hackers" holding up banks "with crypto" - I know it's a munition, but you can't point it at a bank teller!

See for example thi s article by highly respected cryptologist and computer security expert Ross Anderson, who is also co-author of AES candidate Serpent. Note also thi s observation on bank panic stories, or read the whole thread (search for "today's Times").

I'll also echo the comments here about Jonathan Ungoed-Thomas's hilarious attempts to cover security issues, among other iGaffes.
--

Inhabitants of the "UKcrypto" mailing list, for discussing government cryptology policy, have come to the conclusion that this story is a complete fabrication, "cut from whole cloth" by GCHQ (the UK equivalent of the NSA) to spread bad words about strong crypto and encourage regulation.

The original story has bizarre references to "hackers" holding up banks "with crypto" - I know it's a munition, but you can't point it at a bank teller!

See for example thi s article by highly respected cryptologist and computer security expert Ross Anderson, who is also co-author of AES candidate Serpent. Note also thi s observation on bank panic stories, or read the whole thread (search for "today's Times").

I'll also echo the comments here about Jonathan Ungoed-Thomas's hilarious attempts to cover security issues, among other iGaffes.
--

Some members of a mailing list I subscribe to (ukcrypto) have suggested that this is simply a scare story whipped up by GCHQ (think British NSA) to try to get big companies to use their consulting services.

See this archive.

FYI: There's a port of Linux to VAX architecture being developed as well. Although it's not as far along as NetBSD's.


http://www.mssl.ucl.ac.uk/~atp/linux-vax/

...and there's probably more out there as well :o)

This piece just comes across as another sore *BSD user wondering why Linux is getting all the press. I might shed a little light as to why Linux is more popular.

OK so basically Linux is past the point of being a hacker OS and normal people are starting to use it. I've seen evidence of this as work mates (who use Linux at work) have started installing Linux at home. The major difference is then that Linux is damn easy to install now compared to a couple of years ago. I've got a FreeBSD installation at home because I wanted experience in installing it - and I must say that at several times I was pretty baffled during the installation process - and this after 7 years of Unix admin experience.

The conclusion *BSD's are still the domain of hackers/sysadmins - it's a great OS - but linux is making quicker inroads to the normal user market.

*BSDers will probably argue that the installation process is more powerful and that it's actually easy. But the fact is that it's just not that easy for Joe Public.

• http://www.star.ucl.ac.uk/~apod/ apod/astropix.html, UK,(London)
• http://www.phy.mtu.edu/apod/astropix.html , US (Midwest)
• http://mirrors.inside.net/apod/, Switzerland
• http://www.sai.msu.su/apod/: Russia
• http://phyhp.phy. ncku.edu.tw/~astrolab/mirrors/apod/astropix.html Taiwan (Chinese)
• http://phyhp.ph y.ncku.edu.tw/~astrolab/mirrors/apod_e/astropix.ht ml: Taiwan (English)
• http://apod.aguianet.com.br/: Brazil
• http://www.astro.cz/apod/

These all point to the picture of the day (which is of Earth, though it doesn't look like it!), of course: you'll have to head to the archives to find the eclipse picture. They've been carrying loads of eclipse pictures recently, and they're beautiful.

Donald Turcotte

Dr. Steve Bramwell

John Harte

Another site with cool maps is http://www.geog.ucl.ac.uk/ca sa/martin/atlas/atlas.html .

CyberGeography mirrored: here and here

You first have to define what you mean by bandwidth. Clearly it's the capacity of some communications link in terms of symbols per unit time. This is a function of the physical properties of the materials with which this link is built (which is also called bandwidth; confusing, isn't it?).

To throw a bunch of tapes on a truck and call it a high-bandwidth link is really misleading. That's a short burst of data; it's unsustainable. In comparing communications throughout history, what you really want to compare is the theoretical maximum sustained rate of transfer of individual symbols (bits)

e.g. give a bit (0 or 1) to the pony expressman and as soon as he leaves, give another expressman the next bit, and so on and so on (assuming an infinite supply of horses!). After a sufficient time such that latency becomes negligible (say, a year), add up the bits received and divide by the total time. So if a horse leaves every 5 seconds, your bandwidth is 1/5=0.2 bits per second.

Note that latency becomes neglible for sustained transfers of data. You don't care how many hops your ftp of the 2.2 kernel takes; you care how long it takes for you to complete the transfer.

Here you'll find an explanation of Shannon's theoretical limit on the bandwidth of a channel: "There is a theoretical maximum to the rate at which information passes error free over the channel. This maximum is called the channel capacity C. The famous Hartley-Shannon Law states that the channel capacity C is given by: C=B*log2(1+S/N) bits/second. Note that S/N is linear in this expression. For example, a 10KHz channel operating in a SNR of 15dB has a theoretical maximum information rate of 10000log2(31.623) = 49828 b/s. "

So, brothers and sisters, the growth of bandwidth is a function of the growth in bandwidth of the materials making up our communications links, and the SNR of these links. I expect the graph would be a nice exponential. Good night.zzzzzzzzzzzzzz