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1. I'm not sure what exactly Project is, but I doubt there's too many people who would miss it short of a few much disliked suits.

It's a project planning tool. Think glorified Gantt charts, (though if you don't know what a Gantt chart is, you might want to take a very few minutes searching and reading so you don't look irrelevent to PHBs).

MS Project is a fairly good project planning tool, but by no means the best. If you manage projects of moderate size, you need something like it or you will drive yourself nuts.

My immediate boss uses MS Project and he's not a PHB; he kicks ass. (I'm slowly pulling him into thinking about open source more, though it will take a while; old dogs can be retrained.)

In good-old-Microsoft style, though, almost nothing reads the files it creates MS Project files. Because of that, I've occasionally had to grab a Windows desktop or VNC into one to use MS Project. I've seen a web-based viewer for MS Project files, though that one is not gratas let alone open, so convincing someone to pay for it is unlikely.

Here ya go.

slashdot_commentator wrote:

...What will change after SCO vs IBM that will get either side to start sniping at one another?

See my comment, IBM, Linux.

I don't believe Lyons has a clue about what IBM has in store for Linux. The referenced comment is my own take on what may be brewing. I believe that the Linux community will react negatively to what could emerge as strategies to completely co-opt free, open-source Linux by controlling and licensing the platforms available for it to run on or by controlling and licensing obscure access mechanisms without which the platforms can't be used.

If I run a gravel yard I could charge you by weight or volume for the gravel you remove, or I could charge you an access fee measured by the type and size of truck you use, or any of a number of other schemes. If for any reason gravel is supposed to be "free," I wouldn't charge you for the gravel but for something essential you would need in order to remove, transport or use the gravel. I could rent you the shovel or backhoe while prohibiting the entry of "foreign" tools such as those you might wish to bring with you. I could charge you for using the road into the gravel pit. I could charge you for a license to breathe the air floating in and around my gravel pit. I could cover the pit and then charge you for light to work by. The are lots of ways to make the gravel seem to be "free" but to make money in direct or indirect consequence of you removing or using the gravel.

The model IBM is using seems to be analogous to a periodic "gate fee" to a sector of the yard. Usage is unlimited but the fee only gets you access to a certain resource area and you have to pay periodically.

Oddly, Andrew Odlyzko's new paper on network pricing, which unavoidably touches on canal, turnpike and other network toll and fee mechanisms in recent centuries, offers a lot of insight into how IBM can make money from free Linux and in fact how and why the computer industry could adopt a toll or fee model, although he doesn't take it that far.

Gravel can't easily be controlled after it leaves the gravel pit, but CPUs can be controlled after they leave the factory, most effectively by a cryptographic dependency that gives the CPU manufacturer continuing control over the software environment the CPU will be willing to run in.

It's no secret that Micro$leaze would very much like to move to a lease model for its software. It' such a pain for them to have to keep inventing new reasons for us to buy a new version of Windows every year. Intel might become interested in joining with Micro$loth to lease the privilege of using their CPU chips. Digital Rights Management could be the vehicle they will both use to close the BIOS and the CPU, publicly just to "protect the rights of IP owners," but ultimately to shift both Windows and the Intel CPU to a licensed, lease basis.

My referenced essay tried to point out that IBM is already doing this, not only with their traditional mainframe processors and operating systems, but now also with Linux in more than one of their platform product lines. I thought it was worth taking the time to write the essay because I haven't seen any discussion of this aspect of IBM embracing Linux. On the contrary, at least some in the Linux community seem to think IBM embraced Linux out of altruism or in admission of the defeat of proprietary software. Nothing could be farther from the truth.

including hundreds of golden eagles, red-tailed hawks, kestrels and other raptors

including hundreds of golden eagles, red-tailed hawks, kestrels and other raptors

including hundreds of golden eagles, red-tailed hawks, kestrels and other raptors

I think they're an example of a self sustaining molecule - one that catalyzes the creation of itself from another molecule.

That's probably the best way to look at it. It's just like Vonnegut's ice-nine, except it works on a particular mammalian brain protein instead of water.

Infective particles pass through 30 nm filters and survive immersion for long periods of time in formaldehyde. They are relatively impervious to radiation and can survive the heat of a rendering plant. Unlike the normal protein, the prion form is not attacked by proteases such as those present in a mammalian digestive system.

When the protein mutates to form a prion, a small beta pleated sheet region near the protein's N-terminus nucleates a much larger one that consumes an alpha helix and almost the entire N-terminal half of the protein. Apparently this can happen two ways. A non-mutant form can spontaneously mutate to the prion form. Since the prion's conformational energy appears to be lower from all the beta-pleating, this is thermodynamically possible and there must be high kinetic barriers in the way to prevent it from happening all the time. (While spontaneous cases are extremely rare, they do imply that we will never see these diseases completely eradicated.) The more likely mechanism is exposure to an already-mutant prion particle, which overcomes the kinetic barrier by acting as a catalyst.

The prion's beta pleated sheets apparently give it structural integrity against heat, chemical, and protease attack. They are also what imparts the self-replication ability of the prion to induce the same alpha-helix to beta-pleated-sheet conformational changes in neighboring proteins, in a mechanism that is probably similar to crystal growth. The beta sheet forming peptides aggregate to form amyloid fibrils, and this kills neurons through apoptosis.

See this page on transmissable spongiform encephalopathies for more info. There is a decent animation of the folding event here.

Well you can take up your complaint about the definition of a war crime with the growing body of international lawyers. I didn't define it.

Any perceived moral equivalency between Hirohito and Bush doesn't really strengthen your claim that Bush is a war criminal. Although I don't know the history of the claim against Hirohito myself, but my guess would be that his war crimes were in the conduct of war, not the simple fact of beginning wars.

I would like to direct you to the first modern definition of war crimes (modern being WWII forward). Note that they are differentiated from Crimes Against the Peace. Crimes Against Peace include invasion and agression. War Crimes deal with conduct falling outside the laws of war (some of which fall under Customary International Law, some of which have been codified in treaties like the Geneva Conventions).

You also say that the war begun by Bush was unjust. This doesn't help your argument either, as the justice of war has nothing to do with whether or not it is legal. I think most people agreed at the time that the US war in Kosovo was legitimate and just (even Kofi Annan said as much), but under the UN Charter it certainly wasn't legal.

Before you start making such bold claims you really ought to do some very basic research. If you want to say that Bush has committed crimes against the peace you'll at least make some sort of sense.

• reiserfs is a little bit faster than xfs
• xfs gives you 2 times bigger CPU usage than reiserfs
• both are still much better than jfs
• the reliability of both xfs and reiserfs is satisfactory
• the results are still order of magnitude worse than those I get with UFS2 with softupdates on FreeBSD 5.1

was the MMPI or a variant of it.
Here's the place that developed the test. 565 questions... I've taken it several times.
Plenty of companies use it.
I remember questions like:
I want to be a florist.
I'm afraid of doorknobs.

Here's an alternative to the MMPI, I claim no responsibility for it, I just found it today. MLMPI

OK, this post may be long. I've had a number of iterations of hardware, OS and apps over the years, but I'll give a couple of them to you with some comments.

1st Gen:
The first iteration of my paper-less setup was a Newton MP2100, keyboard, 8 MB flash card, and 3com ethernet card. I owned 3 other PDAs before this (Newton OMP, MP120/OS 1.3, and a VTech Helio running Linux), though none of them were this good. In most ways, this Newton was still the best PDA I've ever had. It was by far the best PDA I had for taking notes. Any PDA has notetaking software that let allow you to sketch the notes rather than only enter text. A decent PDA will have software that allows you to mix text and sketches in the same note. But only the Newton allowed you to write your notes in text or sketches in the same note, and allow some of those sketches to be searchable, just like the text stuff. Naturally, some sketched things aren't recognizable, but there were times where I wanted to enter something in text mode for one reason or another, but still be represented as text if need be.

There is also the convenience of being able to manipulate your text and drawings; the Newton takes input as Text (typed, recognized, Graffiti, etc), Ink Text (treated like text, but your handwriting is retained), Sketches (just drawings), and Shapes (vector graphics). It was normal to enter a graph in Shapes mode, and if I needed to make one axis longer or something, I could easily just pull it out, without warping the rest of the drawing. It's great not to have to use an eraser, but just to select and move, delete, modify your drawings and writings.

Built-in Newton OS Notes all > Built-in PocketPC Notes app > IQNotes for the Zaurus (Unfortunately the best notes app for the Zaurus)

And that's a logarithmic scale. No joke.

I did a little experiment when I first started taking my notes on the Newton- I made my class notes from General Biology I available online. All taken on my Newton.

The Newton was also the most powerful PDA in other ways unrelated to notes. It was a hackers dream- it was a fully object oriented system, and with a debugging/inspecting tool like ViewFrame, you could explore the entire system by taking a trip through Object Wonderland. :) For instance, I used a spreadsheet app called QuickFigure Works. Like any spreadsheet, it has functions; and like any spreadsheet, invarably there are functions I wished I had but didn't. On most platforms, you'd be stuck with defining it in the terms of existing spreadsheet functions, on a desktop system you would have a BASIC scripting language, though. On the Newton you had access to NewtonScript, something far more powerful and elegant. The original authors didn't intend me to do this, but with the power of NewtonScript at my disposal, I simply opened up a view on the QuickFigure Works app, had a look around and found the array of available spreadsheet functions. I then just added a new one, writing the body in NewtonScript. I could make a proper package out of it later if I wanted to, to make the addition permanent, or to share with others.

The beauty of that is that I could do that without having explicit support from the author of the app itself- it was just a feature of an extensively dynamic, consistent, introspective, reflective and just plain cool OO system.

2nd Gen:
Then I went to Windows CE. My girlfriend told me it wouldn't work, but I was determined- while the Newton was powerful (162 MHz StrongARM CPU in the days when the fastest PocketPC was still 206 MHz- and I could upgrade the Newton to 220 if I wanted) and very capable, I wanted to run Squeak Smalltalk, my programming weapon of choice. A port to the NewtonOS would be very hard for a number of reasons. It was tried, but never made it to fruition. So I wanted a WinCE machine, which could run Squeak.

I first bought an iPA

Looking at the Project Website linked in the article, the scope of the project is as follows. This is a long-term project, and each stage will provide outstandingly interesting communication opportunities for sustainable development: Announcement of the project on 28 th November 2003 ; Design and construction of the first prototype in 2004-2005; First flight tests of the first prototype early in 2006; Complete night in the air during the first 36 hour solar flight in June 2007; First flight tests of the second prototype from end 2007; Solar flights lasting several days from start of 2009. I'm on the University of Minnesota's Solar Vehicle Project team. The major concern with projects like these is not in running under total sunlight conditions, since most solar arrays would be able to run with the necessary efficiency. However, their mission is to be able to store power and fly at night, much as ours is to be able to "rayce" in any conditions.

What tools do you use to help you decide which movies to see?

The site has been improved a lot since I was at the U, and I still use it to tell me whether or not I should see a new movie.

If you cross a chameleon with a cow, do you get cow that changes it spots when it senses danger?

They will change from a holstein to a jersey. If the chameleon blood is particularly powerful, it may morph into an angus.

Mirror

They've released the "manual" for blender on their FTP site.

This book used to be sold, but I suspect with the new interface there will be a new book out for sale at some point. The differences between the old interface and the new interface are, of course, not in this version of the book but the basic interface and keyboard commands are pretty much the same. It's a good start anyhow.

Nope. Flat rate is a different _kind_ of pricing than metered, and consumers strongly prefer flat rate, a pattern in telecommunications pricing that has been true for 150 years, as shown by the economist Andrew Odlyzko in his survey of telecom economics, Internet pricing and the history of communications (PDF). Companies offer flat-rate pricing have an advantage over companies offering metered service, no matter how cheap the metering is. (This, of course, is also why micropayments never catch on among consumers.)

Just because the college sells them for a high price doesn't mean they are making a profit. Their purchasers might not be trying to get the cheapeast price as much as they are just ordering the books for whatever price.

For instance, I had a lab-kit for an EE lab class. The kit was about $80.00, but I KNOW there was not $80.00 in parts. Most of the kit contained 74LS series logic chips, a few lm393 op amps, a couple LEDs, about 15 sorted resistors, and about 10 sorted caps, a plastic box, and a wire cutter/stripper. I priced out everything but the wire cutter/stripper and plastic box from Digikey, and it only totalled about $15.00 -- and that is with no quantity. My univ goes through some place called like school electronic supply or something like that. They must be making a killing off of these lab kits. Must between $60 and $70 per kit. If you have at least 100 people per semester taking the class, thats $7,000 per semester at one univ for this class alone.

Second, data providers should be publishing their data using OpenGIS standards such as Web Map Services and Web Feature Services, so I can use any OGC compliant interface (or implement my own).

My favourite online mapping software is Mapserver because it's open source, and compares really well with any of the commercial offerings.

Of course, good software counts for squat unless you have good data behind it. Good geocoded address/driving data takes time and money to compile.

Xix.

According to this page, the avrage red bloodcell is about 9um in diameter, so pouring blood down a channel just 10um wide is asking for trouble. The downside is that - as far as I can understand the article - that the size of the channel is vital for the functioning of the generator.

*ponders* Hmm... urine is mostly water, isn't it... ?

If I'm not mistaken, we've taken down GIMP's FTP. Here's a mirror. I didn't get to see the contents of the original FTP, so I can't vouch for the completeness of this one.

here you go: Voter registration software in postgresql and How to: Steal an election and practice vote fraud

here you go: Voter registration software in postgresql and How to: Steal an election and practice vote fraud

The data could be made available to the public through a Web Map Server following the Open GIS Consortium specs OpenGIS.org.

This data could then be incorporated into your own personal Web enabled apps utilizing an open source product like U of MN Mapserver

On the slime page, the shape of that borate ion is a little bit suspicious...

They're Nazi's! Just take a look at the bottom-center of this diagram.

</joke>

The instructions by themselves are not particularly instructive: "the procedure can be followed from the slime procedure above."
This is mentioned here. There's a bunch of other cool stuff in the same section, too.

The instructions by themselves are not particularly instructive: "the procedure can be followed from the slime procedure above."
This is mentioned here. There's a bunch of other cool stuff in the same section, too.

Another slime recipe can be found here as well.

>The Wikipedia has a "computer bug" entry that lists some other "famous bugs" including the fictional HAL 9000 bug.

Yeah, it lists them, but doesn't really link to good stories -- so...

An error in a single FORTRAN statement resulted in the loss of the first American probe to Venus.

Software reboot during the Apollo 11 landing forced Armstrong to manually land the lunar lander.

An Iraqi Scud missile hit Dhahran barracks, leaving 28 dead and 98 wounded. The incoming missile was not detected by the Patriot defenses, whose clock had drifted .36 seconds during the 4-day continuous siege, the error increasing with elapsed time since the system was turned on. This software flaw prevented real-time tracking. The specifications called for aircraft speeds, not Mach 6 missiles, for 14-hour continuous performance, not 100. Patched software arrived via air one day later.

The Ariane 5 satellite launcher malfunction was caused by a faulty software exception routine resulting from a bad 64-bit floating point to 16-bit integer conversion.

lots more here and here.

UMM, I don't know, what?

I know everyone probably already knows about it, but I like to use Rotten Tomatoes instead of/in addition to IMDb. IMDb is great for finding out information and how popular a movie was, but the ratings and the reviews can just be written by anybody so they're more often than not very unintelligent. Rotten Tomatoes tallies up professional critics' responses. I also listen to Ebert and Roeper's audio reviews every week. Sometimes they're way off, but they're fairly reasonable most of the time. Still, I give Rotten Tomatoes more weight. I recently found out about m o v i e l e n s, which uses an algorithm to guess what you'd rate movies based on previous ratings. You have to spend a lot of time rating initially for the ratings to be accurate. I find it pretty accurate, though occasionally it will be way off with movies you hate or love for weird reasons. It gave Antitrust a low rating for me, but I gave it five stars based just on how much I enjoyed the fantasy of taking down Microsoft (*sigh*), and it gave a high rating for Atarnajuat: The Fast Runner, which I absolutely abhorred due to the terrible amateurish filming and editing.

So when are we going to get the Smalltalk equivalent of JBoss, or JoNaS? The number of "extensions" that Java has is huge.

I've never worked with JBoss or JOnAS specifically, but Squeak has had a few application servers for a while. Seaside is the higher-level app server I've been using, but there are a couple others that implement similar functionality at different levels. Squeak has an very large library of extensions, not as large as Java, but very substantial. Swazoo is another app server for Smalltalk that comes to mind.

Outside of what you can do in Squeak, there are a handful of other application servers for Squeak, including VisualWave for VisualWorks, IBM's WebSphere and GemStone/S. These are hard-core enterprise app servers. Depending on your needs, there's an option.

And when is the graphics going to improve in Squeak? Right now it looks like a cartoon, instead of a serious tool.

Squeak has looked like more than a cartoon for a long time. This is what my Squeak desktop looks like now, save for a for desktop extensions not in the shot. No, it doesn't look like Windows or OS X, but it's far from looking like a cartoon. You can use any IceWM theme with Squeak, and in that screenshot, I choose a BlueCurve look-a-like theme. A project called Zurgle is working towards some UI beautification that goes beyond IceWM/color themes. You can find some screenshots here showing the WinXP Luna and Borg themes.

The graphic system in Squeak itself is quite powerful, regardless if you are displaying actual cartoons or a more boring business-like desktop.

When is Smalltalk going to have their CSPAN equivalent?

CSPAN? I am guessing you mean CPAN, but if you mean something related to television news, let me know.

Squeak has had something called SqueakMap for the last few point releases. It has a similar goal as CPAN, although isn't a clone. It does some things differently. However, when I download a fresh copy of Squeak 3.6, I can open it up, click the menu option for opening the Package Loader, and simply select an application or library and install it. Usually less than a minute later, whatever I downloaded it installed and ready to use. It's a nice system.

When is code doing to be compatiable across VMs?

It already is, to an extent. A lot of the different Smalltalks use different GUI frameworks, and I don't expect any compatability layers to show up anytime soon. But then again, you wouldn't expect code written for SWT to work for Swing and AWT, would you?

When is the documentation going to improve?

This is an ongoing process. This is an area which really needs work, especially for Squeak. The commercial Smalltalks have good documentation already, which makes sense. Luckily, folks have taken this up lately and are working on better tutorials for beginners and trying to improve other documentation.

It may sound crazy to an armchair hater, but it's not the most glamorous thing, writing documentation. People come into the Squeak community, figure things out and want to start writing code. You know, creating new things or improving existing ones. It's not the easiest thing to find folks who want to write docs. It hurts the community in the end, yes, but that doesn't make it any more fun. If Squeak had the budget of Java, a company like Sun throwing literally millions and millions of dolars at it, I imagine it would have documentation of similar quality and quantity. But alas, that's not the case.

Likewise, all that waste is sitting around in pools (though warm as they are, I wouldn't want to swim in them) because Carter signed an executive order banning reprocessing (known as Presidential Directive 8, subsequently reaffirmed as President Clinton's Presidential Directive 13.) There are certainly issues to consider with reprocessing, but it's a fact that we wouldn't have all this nuclear waste lying around if we recycled it into useful component elements.

Interesting discussion:
PBS Frontline
University of Minnesota Technology newsletter

Have you checked out current? We just rolled it out a few weeks ago in our lab and it is working great. If you have a big investment in 8.0 you could roll your own RPMs once support dies at the end of the year. A big pain compared to the old way, but you should be able to tweak the sources or upgrade the few packages you need from the current redhat version for a few years (i.e., when Redhat releases a security update, grab thier SRPM and rebuild it on 8.0, or use it to patch the 8.0 version. This can get kinda tricky, but I have done similar things before

Out of the box, Squeak has the potential to be really ugly; but with recent changes (in the last year or two), it's cleaned up quite a bit. For a while, there's been the capability to load IceWM themes... C'mon- it isn't that ugly.

• Simulate protein folding
• Simulate an entire human cell
• Compute the Born-Oppenheimer (sp?) wavefunction using a huge basis set and CCSD(T) for something with more than a few atoms
• Run genetic algoritms to search for the answers to things like model Hamiltonions.

God, I could just go on forever. As a compuational chemist, I basically spend my life being clever because the machines at the supercomputer institute aren't fast enough to finish a calculation before I die, or don't have 6000GB of memory to hold a matrix of all of my possible configurations.

Odlyzko is a premere researcher in compution the zeros of the Zeta function. Here is his site.

The same thing goes for BSE (the beef brain wasting disease). The US has almost certainly covered up their incidents of this disease. Canada had a single case that they were unable to pinpoint on any Canadian source, and now it appears that the BSE infection ,came in from the United States beef industry, which is (was) intricately tied to the Canadian industry. Do you hear anything about this in the US media though? Hell no, that would involve Americans admitting to something which might cost them money.

The school I attend, University of Minnesota Duluth uses Mozilla and Netscape 7 as the exclusive web browsers on our nearly 300 SunRay thin-clients. Some patches applied to the servers earlier this year caused IE to stop working and M$ will not (of course!) give us any support for IE on unix. We use a product called Mulberry (imap client) for our email.

Another previously-unmentioned medical application of nanotubes involves liquid crystals. If the molecules of a material are in a liquid phase, yet are significantly longer than they are wide, they tend to line up, creating crystalline properties. Things that do this include the amphiphillic molecules in our cell membranes and many proteins, like that which causes Bovine Spongiform Encephalopathy (Mad-Cow Disease). Using nanotubes as a nucleation site, scientists may be able to cause BSE proteins to clump up in infected cells, neutralizing the disease and effectively halting any spread. Cool. -Xander

In a sense, maybe my site isn't entirely "free" (freedom), but not having any advertising ensures that the music itself stays "free" in just about every sense of the word.

It's the music that's most important to fans of the band, and to operators of fan sites. I've never had a problem with the fact that I can't make money on a product the band gives me for free.

Even if I could, I wouldn't.

Jon

One very nice implementation of the wiki concept is TWiki. My school's CS department has its own TWiki set up, divided into subwebs for many different courses. The courses on our wiki are almost all Computer Science courses, but there are a few First Year Seminar webs (located here, here, and here) that might give you some ideas as to how to use a wiki in a non-technical class.

One very nice implementation of the wiki concept is TWiki. My school's CS department has its own TWiki set up, divided into subwebs for many different courses. The courses on our wiki are almost all Computer Science courses, but there are a few First Year Seminar webs (located here, here, and here) that might give you some ideas as to how to use a wiki in a non-technical class.

One very nice implementation of the wiki concept is TWiki. My school's CS department has its own TWiki set up, divided into subwebs for many different courses. The courses on our wiki are almost all Computer Science courses, but there are a few First Year Seminar webs (located here, here, and here) that might give you some ideas as to how to use a wiki in a non-technical class.

One very nice implementation of the wiki concept is TWiki. My school's CS department has its own TWiki set up, divided into subwebs for many different courses. The courses on our wiki are almost all Computer Science courses, but there are a few First Year Seminar webs (located here, here, and here) that might give you some ideas as to how to use a wiki in a non-technical class.

One very nice implementation of the wiki concept is TWiki. My school's CS department has its own TWiki set up, divided into subwebs for many different courses. The courses on our wiki are almost all Computer Science courses, but there are a few First Year Seminar webs (located here, here, and here) that might give you some ideas as to how to use a wiki in a non-technical class.

One very nice implementation of the wiki concept is TWiki. My school's CS department has its own TWiki set up, divided into subwebs for many different courses. The courses on our wiki are almost all Computer Science courses, but there are a few First Year Seminar webs (located here, here, and here) that might give you some ideas as to how to use a wiki in a non-technical class.

The call to my boss may actually be after legal, actually. I do not want any part of this action. Since there have been incidents of this type here, the policies have since been clarified. (Pervo pleads guilty, sentenced in porn case -- and yes, Pervo is the perpetrators last name.)

If you're looking for example policies, the University of Minnesota policy library is public: Policy library.

The call to my boss may actually be after legal, actually. I do not want any part of this action. Since there have been incidents of this type here, the policies have since been clarified. (Pervo pleads guilty, sentenced in porn case -- and yes, Pervo is the perpetrators last name.)

If you're looking for example policies, the University of Minnesota policy library is public: Policy library.