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The big deal about web mapping services for GIS shops is whether or not they work with the back end systems. In my state, more than 90% of the state, county, and local GIS departments run on ESRI software for their actual data services, so for them, putting data on the web with ESRI's ARCIMS web software is an easy way to go. Unfortunately, ESRI software is massively expensive. Fortunately, you can buy it in modules, so the web service is seperate from the database. Government agencies at all levels could probably benefit from open source web mapping tools, as long as those tools are compatible with the back end. Another very popular open source GIS web application is UMN's MapServer.

MapServer is an OpenSource development environment for constructing spatially enabled Internet-web applications. The software builds upon other popular OpenSource or freeware systems including Shapelib, FreeType, Proj.4, GDAL/OGR. MapServer will run where most commercial systems won't or can't, on Linux/Apache platforms. MapServer is known to compile on most versions of UNIX/Linux, Microsoft Windows and even MacOS.

Of all the reasons not to use Skype, this university has the lamest I've heard:

OIT Security discourages the use of Skype on the University network...The Skype User Agreement makes the user agree to provide services to Skype for resources owned by the University. Individual users are not empowered to give such consent. Obviously they haven't heard The Internet, or simply the Net, is the publicly accessible worldwide system of interconnected computer networks...

Of COURSE individual users are empowered to provide University services to other networks. That's how the Internet works.

This is the same university who provides you with geocities-style "personal web space" and then bills you if you want shell access or, god forbid, if you actually want to use a script in your web page. The terms are so commercial it makes me think they are just reselling the hosting services from some other provider.

I've said it before and I'll say it again until more people know. Here are some concrete reasons why Skype is kind of a bad thing.

Mad cow/scrappies/Chronic Wasting Disease-CWD/curu-CJD (all prions) is/are such that it takes years for it to show up, with no test for it. What many have missed here, is that it has been showing up in Colorado,Idaho and Montana in humans.

Keep in mind that CDC knew about AIDS in 1980/1981, and was trying to get money to slow it down. Reagan turned them down when they requested funding in 81,82,and 83. Keep in mind, that in 1981 when reagan turned down CDC request for 50 million to be spent on it, there was fewer than 1000 in the USA with it. It was possible that they could have caught more than 50% of the infected when it would have been easy and made a difference.

Now, the CDC is focused on this pandamic, and GWB is only now starting to consider it. Considering that influenza is an unstable virus, it is very mutangenic. When H5N1 comes into contact with a flu that supports human-human transmision, it will most likely pick up the ability. Once that happens, the morbidity rate is about 50% amongst HEALTHY people (the vast majority of infected has been healthy). According to CDC and WHO, last week they announced that it was not stoppable. It is now a matter of when.

And they are outlined in great length here.

there was also the (in)famous Patriot rounding bug, involving 28 dead and 100 injured people: http://www.ima.umn.edu/~arnold/disasters/patriot.h tml/

I'm really surprised that the Prius recall got in there over this bug:
http://www.ima.umn.edu/~arnold/455.f96/disasters.h tml.

Maybe I'm old fashioned, but loss of life is a bigger problem than loss of profit.

In any event, it's not fair to compare red meat to cigarettes. Red meat has significant nutritional value, but some people overdo it and get high cholesterol.

The fact is that it is harmful in more ways than one, if you really want to get down to it the amount of grain and energy it takes to produce a pound of meat, the nutritional value of that grin compared to the beef and the harm that beef causes the human body you will see that the "significant nutritional value" is a farce.

And the health threats go far beyond cholesterol.

see Supersize Me, the guy who ate two big macs every day but no fries

I'm not saying that it's not true but I kinda take these new "dcoumentories" with a grain of salt (no pun intended) after finding that the majority of Ferenheit 911 was, at best, edited to suit Moore's idealogy. It's odd how we don't hold "journalists" up to the same standards in responsiblity and honesty that we like to judge politicians by. It's another rant I can to not get into here.

I'll also throw out a couple of sites our research lab runs. MovieLens is a long-running personalized movie recommender that has a reasonably active, large userbase and that has generated a lot of research in collaborative filtering and HCI. More specific to the movies-and-wiki theme, we've got a fairly new site WikiLens that combines community addition of content (based on PhpWiki) with ratings and recommendations. Neither is a replacement for IMDb but many people have found MovieLens to be darn useful and we're hoping WikiLens will take off as well.

Well, if you insist on the livecds... Here is the x86 livecd or torrent. Here is the PowerPC livecd or torrent. Here is the AMD64 version and the torrent. Happy now?

Well, if you insist on the livecds... Here is the x86 livecd or torrent. Here is the PowerPC livecd or torrent. Here is the AMD64 version and the torrent. Happy now?

Well, if you insist on the livecds... Here is the x86 livecd or torrent. Here is the PowerPC livecd or torrent. Here is the AMD64 version and the torrent. Happy now?

Well, if you insist on the livecds... Here is the x86 livecd or torrent. Here is the PowerPC livecd or torrent. Here is the AMD64 version and the torrent. Happy now?

Well, if you insist on the livecds... Here is the x86 livecd or torrent. Here is the PowerPC livecd or torrent. Here is the AMD64 version and the torrent. Happy now?

Well, if you insist on the livecds... Here is the x86 livecd or torrent. Here is the PowerPC livecd or torrent. Here is the AMD64 version and the torrent. Happy now?

What do you define as IM? I sit on IRC all day, and a lot of the other folks who are on Freenode are wage slaves who are on IRC all day. I use IRC for my IMing as well as group-chat-type stuff. I also sit on AIM all day so that a couple people who I know who does use IRC can get a hold of me. I sit on Jabber, as a few co-workers use it- the Univ of Minnesota runs their own jabber server (chat.umn.edu). my girlfriend's place of employment has a proprietary secure IM server for everyone at her workplace, who are spread among many buildings/houses. I use IRC/IM to communicate with my girlfriend those sorts of "bring home some milk and bread" messages, rather than email or the phone. I'm relatively young, 25. But I don't use IMing like the 18 year olds I see coming into the University system...

So yeah, it's not just for 13 year olds.

What I don't understand is why conservatives support this guy.

A lot of true conservatives don't support that guy. The question is really why do so many Democrats support him?

This site is interesting. Is it supported by your group, and is it updated manually or automatically?

[...] Two or three hundred years ago, you could read every book ever written.
 
I agree with your main point ... but dude ... This went on in the 200's B. C., and it is interesting to note that there were already so many works in existence that obtaining a copy of each would have been an impossible undertaking even then. Even just in English around the early 18th century you would have been in trouble.

You should read "Content is not King" by Andrew Odlyzko who was as AT&T at the time (2001).

pdf : http://www.dtc.umn.edu/~odlyzko/doc/history.commun ications2.pdf

html : http://www.firstmonday.org/issues/issue6_2/odlyzko /

For the two largest counties in Minnesota, one has some sort of response to election security problems.

In Hennepin County the scanner system, not Diebold scanner machines, the precinct results were no longer modemed in to the county office but hand delivered in the September election.

Ramsey County Minnesota uses Diebold scanners with the suspect central counting software. Public Test of Ramsey Voting Systems

chinese in space... what to eat... hmm... how about this? Or this?

There *IS* a pretty decent benchmark out there which actually correlates well with processing power in terms of data processing speed.

It was called the HINT benchmark and it was developed by a guy at Iowa State University Ames Laboratory. I think they tried to commercialize it but it didn't get off the ground. It was released under the GPL. It's out there in various places.

If you can find a copy of the software then compile it up, and it produces some very interesting data. It produces a curve of "quality improvements per second" as a function of memory usage...

It requires a full potential energy surface to work with. And that would be either empirical (MM, which is incapable of breaking/forming bonds) or non-empirical (QM, which is way too expensive to do any kind of PES scanning).

I mentioned Darrin York because he recently gave a presentation on semi-empirical QM potentials. Basically, he performs hundreds of ab initio simulations of a certain type of reaction (he chose phosphorylations by a kinase protein) and then fits a semi-empirical model of the force field of the reaction. The potential is very accurate, but only for phosphorylation reactions. Then he performs QM/MM simulations using the semi-empirical force field, which is much faster now that the original ab initio calculations have already been completed.

That's wrong though. The transition-state is easily defined
That assumes there's only one transition state. Really, there's an ensemble of transition states where the potential energy is at a local maxima. The potential field in the large 6N-dim phase space is never very smooth, anyways, so there's always a ton of saddle nodes around the transition state 'region'.

Then again, there could be more than one 'region' of the phase space with local maxima. These are simply alternative mechanisms of the same reaction.

But I think you already know this and were simplifying it for me. ;)

My advisor does MD simulations of protein-protein and protein-DNA interactions as well as kinetic Monte Carlo (mesoscale stochastic simulation) of large networks of biological components. (The latter is what I do.)

-Howard

*Sigh*

No. Decreasing the size of something -increases- the surface area compared to the volume of the object, increasing it's overall ability to dissipate heat.

http://www.me.umn.edu/education/courses/me5221/Tut orials/Scaling/scaling.html%5BUniversity of Minnesota, Mechanical engineering]

Get your physics straight.

If mod points could go higher than the "5, Insightful" that you already have, I'd throw some of my mod points at you. Instead, I'll blow them in a reply.

I second pretty much all that you have written here: Linux is ready for the corporate desktop (we have had several Linux desktops in my corporate area for a few years now); Linux is ready for the home user. The downside is that you need to check hardware compatibility (scanners, etc) and you can't be afraid to jump to the command line and do 'yum -y install' for some apps that didn't show up with your distro. Fortunately, you don't need to do that very often.

At home, my wife has been a Linux user since Red Hat Linux 7.1. Today, she's a happy Fedora Core user. She's definitely a non-technical user (she doesn't understand what "USB" is, but she knows our printer is "USB" and can recognize the right slot for the plug.) But she's become a complete Linux devotee, even to the point where she decided she's going to upgrade to an Intel Mac when they're available next year - and insisted that I install Linux on it! :-)

At work, I gave a presentation to our CIO a year ago about Linux on the desktop, and it was enough to convince him to install Linux for himself on a scratch desktop machine. He loves it, and we've had no problem with considering Linux part of our "enterprise desktop solution." When we look at new tools and software for the enterprise, Linux desktop support gets equal attention to Mac and Windows.

When giving that presentation to our CIO, I found that (briefly) walking him through the evolution of the Linux & UNIX desktop really helped. TWM .. olvwm ... Motif/MWM ... fvwm ... fvwm95 ... AfterSTEP ... GNOME. Somewhere in there, he recognized a Linux desktop that he was familiar with - and by the time we got to GNOME, he was totally impressed with the state of the current Linux desktop. He said he hadn't realized that Linux had progressed so far and had become so easy to use.

To sum up though, Linux is on par with Windows. Now if we can just get those pesky hardware drivers nailed down...

Your main cost in your scenario is maintenance... I guess I am just salivating to luck into a $500 a month maintenance contract on something as simple and maintenance free as a wifi setup. Hell if you arent going to charge for it, it just means a $39 wifi router and thats about it.
Technical problems with the proposed setup are between slim and none, barring a hardware failure.

I'm guessing now that you get my point, that it shoudn't cost much for a cafe to offer free WiFi.

Gee, my brother is en engineer for shell and my sister belongs in an asylum... and my brother in law is an aircraft mechanic, but what does that have to do with what I am talking about?

The reason I brought up my family is was to show that though I don't personally have experience starting or running a business other than when I was in the JA, Junior Achievement, I have access to those who do have business startup and financial experience. Your brother in law's an aircraft mechanic? So was my dad, he retired from the Air Force but while in he was a mechanic on B52s. Guess that's in part why I love flying and want to get my private pilot's license as well as build my own plane though I doubt I ever will.

You helpfully told me all about your family, but nothing about yourself?

Currently I'm a student. I'm just finishing a degree in web programming from a technical college. However I'm planning to transfer to my local university, UM Twin Cities. There I'll work on a multidiciplary major or Program for Individualized Learning where I can choose a major field of study, probably EE (electrical/electronic engineering), CE (computer engineering), or IT (information technology). Then one or more areas of minor study, maybe one or more of the following as I haven't decided yet what, business, economics, finance, international business, and international development. One thing I know I'll take there is Portguese as I want to go the Brazil as a study abroad student and the university's program requires 2 years college-level Portuguese or Spanish or 1 year Spanish + 1 year Portuguese.

Having said the above it may seem I'm a youngster but in fact I'm over 40. I'm in the difficult position of having to start my life over again after having an accident I almost died from (and it would of been better if I had). The accident left me with a TBI, Traumatic Brain Injury. As some of the therapists I had used to say, "you're alive because of stubborness", and I don't want to live a meaningless life.

Your main cost in your scenario is maintenance... I guess I am just salivating to luck into a $500 a month maintenance contract on something as simple and maintenance free as a wifi setup. Hell if you arent going to charge for it, it just means a $39 wifi router and thats about it.
Technical problems with the proposed setup are between slim and none, barring a hardware failure.

I'm guessing now that you get my point, that it shoudn't cost much for a cafe to offer free WiFi.

Gee, my brother is en engineer for shell and my sister belongs in an asylum... and my brother in law is an aircraft mechanic, but what does that have to do with what I am talking about?

The reason I brought up my family is was to show that though I don't personally have experience starting or running a business other than when I was in the JA, Junior Achievement, I have access to those who do have business startup and financial experience. Your brother in law's an aircraft mechanic? So was my dad, he retired from the Air Force but while in he was a mechanic on B52s. Guess that's in part why I love flying and want to get my private pilot's license as well as build my own plane though I doubt I ever will.

You helpfully told me all about your family, but nothing about yourself?

Currently I'm a student. I'm just finishing a degree in web programming from a technical college. However I'm planning to transfer to my local university, UM Twin Cities. There I'll work on a multidiciplary major or Program for Individualized Learning where I can choose a major field of study, probably EE (electrical/electronic engineering), CE (computer engineering), or IT (information technology). Then one or more areas of minor study, maybe one or more of the following as I haven't decided yet what, business, economics, finance, international business, and international development. One thing I know I'll take there is Portguese as I want to go the Brazil as a study abroad student and the university's program requires 2 years college-level Portuguese or Spanish or 1 year Spanish + 1 year Portuguese.

Having said the above it may seem I'm a youngster but in fact I'm over 40. I'm in the difficult position of having to start my life over again after having an accident I almost died from (and it would of been better if I had). The accident left me with a TBI, Traumatic Brain Injury. As some of the therapists I had used to say, "you're alive because of stubborness", and I don't want to live a meaningless life.

Your main cost in your scenario is maintenance... I guess I am just salivating to luck into a $500 a month maintenance contract on something as simple and maintenance free as a wifi setup. Hell if you arent going to charge for it, it just means a $39 wifi router and thats about it.
Technical problems with the proposed setup are between slim and none, barring a hardware failure.

I'm guessing now that you get my point, that it shoudn't cost much for a cafe to offer free WiFi.

Gee, my brother is en engineer for shell and my sister belongs in an asylum... and my brother in law is an aircraft mechanic, but what does that have to do with what I am talking about?

The reason I brought up my family is was to show that though I don't personally have experience starting or running a business other than when I was in the JA, Junior Achievement, I have access to those who do have business startup and financial experience. Your brother in law's an aircraft mechanic? So was my dad, he retired from the Air Force but while in he was a mechanic on B52s. Guess that's in part why I love flying and want to get my private pilot's license as well as build my own plane though I doubt I ever will.

You helpfully told me all about your family, but nothing about yourself?

Currently I'm a student. I'm just finishing a degree in web programming from a technical college. However I'm planning to transfer to my local university, UM Twin Cities. There I'll work on a multidiciplary major or Program for Individualized Learning where I can choose a major field of study, probably EE (electrical/electronic engineering), CE (computer engineering), or IT (information technology). Then one or more areas of minor study, maybe one or more of the following as I haven't decided yet what, business, economics, finance, international business, and international development. One thing I know I'll take there is Portguese as I want to go the Brazil as a study abroad student and the university's program requires 2 years college-level Portuguese or Spanish or 1 year Spanish + 1 year Portuguese.

Having said the above it may seem I'm a youngster but in fact I'm over 40. I'm in the difficult position of having to start my life over again after having an accident I almost died from (and it would of been better if I had). The accident left me with a TBI, Traumatic Brain Injury. As some of the therapists I had used to say, "you're alive because of stubborness", and I don't want to live a meaningless life.

Your main cost in your scenario is maintenance... I guess I am just salivating to luck into a $500 a month maintenance contract on something as simple and maintenance free as a wifi setup. Hell if you arent going to charge for it, it just means a $39 wifi router and thats about it.
Technical problems with the proposed setup are between slim and none, barring a hardware failure.

I'm guessing now that you get my point, that it shoudn't cost much for a cafe to offer free WiFi.

Gee, my brother is en engineer for shell and my sister belongs in an asylum... and my brother in law is an aircraft mechanic, but what does that have to do with what I am talking about?

The reason I brought up my family is was to show that though I don't personally have experience starting or running a business other than when I was in the JA, Junior Achievement, I have access to those who do have business startup and financial experience. Your brother in law's an aircraft mechanic? So was my dad, he retired from the Air Force but while in he was a mechanic on B52s. Guess that's in part why I love flying and want to get my private pilot's license as well as build my own plane though I doubt I ever will.

You helpfully told me all about your family, but nothing about yourself?

Currently I'm a student. I'm just finishing a degree in web programming from a technical college. However I'm planning to transfer to my local university, UM Twin Cities. There I'll work on a multidiciplary major or Program for Individualized Learning where I can choose a major field of study, probably EE (electrical/electronic engineering), CE (computer engineering), or IT (information technology). Then one or more areas of minor study, maybe one or more of the following as I haven't decided yet what, business, economics, finance, international business, and international development. One thing I know I'll take there is Portguese as I want to go the Brazil as a study abroad student and the university's program requires 2 years college-level Portuguese or Spanish or 1 year Spanish + 1 year Portuguese.

Having said the above it may seem I'm a youngster but in fact I'm over 40. I'm in the difficult position of having to start my life over again after having an accident I almost died from (and it would of been better if I had). The accident left me with a TBI, Traumatic Brain Injury. As some of the therapists I had used to say, "you're alive because of stubborness", and I don't want to live a meaningless life.

Your main cost in your scenario is maintenance... I guess I am just salivating to luck into a $500 a month maintenance contract on something as simple and maintenance free as a wifi setup. Hell if you arent going to charge for it, it just means a $39 wifi router and thats about it.
Technical problems with the proposed setup are between slim and none, barring a hardware failure.

I'm guessing now that you get my point, that it shoudn't cost much for a cafe to offer free WiFi.

Gee, my brother is en engineer for shell and my sister belongs in an asylum... and my brother in law is an aircraft mechanic, but what does that have to do with what I am talking about?

The reason I brought up my family is was to show that though I don't personally have experience starting or running a business other than when I was in the JA, Junior Achievement, I have access to those who do have business startup and financial experience. Your brother in law's an aircraft mechanic? So was my dad, he retired from the Air Force but while in he was a mechanic on B52s. Guess that's in part why I love flying and want to get my private pilot's license as well as build my own plane though I doubt I ever will.

You helpfully told me all about your family, but nothing about yourself?

Currently I'm a student. I'm just finishing a degree in web programming from a technical college. However I'm planning to transfer to my local university, UM Twin Cities. There I'll work on a multidiciplary major or Program for Individualized Learning where I can choose a major field of study, probably EE (electrical/electronic engineering), CE (computer engineering), or IT (information technology). Then one or more areas of minor study, maybe one or more of the following as I haven't decided yet what, business, economics, finance, international business, and international development. One thing I know I'll take there is Portguese as I want to go the Brazil as a study abroad student and the university's program requires 2 years college-level Portuguese or Spanish or 1 year Spanish + 1 year Portuguese.

Having said the above it may seem I'm a youngster but in fact I'm over 40. I'm in the difficult position of having to start my life over again after having an accident I almost died from (and it would of been better if I had). The accident left me with a TBI, Traumatic Brain Injury. As some of the therapists I had used to say, "you're alive because of stubborness", and I don't want to live a meaningless life.

This still doesn't hold a candle to a good university library site. Finding good academic articles is still all about context context context. You need to know what journals you want, what authors aren't crackpots, etc ec. My own university's library system (U of Minnesota), www.lib.umn.edu, has great research guides to help provide that context.

As an example, A Google Scholar search for Kafka doens't have the sort of literary references I'm looking for until the third page. Is it just that scientific articles are more likely the be available on the web?

One very good thing about Google Scholar is that it specifically searches references. This is an advance, and further work on the engine should be in this direction (I'm thinking a visual web of articles). The first thing you do when you find a halfway decent article is check out its references and then go and grab those, *especially* if more than one article references something. It's often hard to know what the really important watershed articles and books are in a given subject when you're new to it (again with the context). A quick, visual chart or web of articles and the articles they reference would be awesome for figuring that out. Something like their score for web pages but based solely on references. This is already how it works (hits are sorted by the number of articles that have cited them), but it sure would be nice to be able to, say, check articles that fit your search genre and uncheck those that don't. I could then uncheck the scientific articles and watch the literary ones move up on my search.

Rambling now. Done now

http://www.stat.umn.edu/users/stat-lisp-news/msg00 095.html

I don't think ethanol will be going away anytime soon, assuming we can find better ways to use it (or if the auto manufacturers embrace it more readily).

Last year, a newsblurb came out from the U of MN (got corn?) regarding:
The first reactor capable of producing hydrogen from a renewable fuel source - ethanol - efficiently enough to hold economic potential...
Full Text Here

In the 2003 race, the media stops were usually at some more prominent place. I.e. Lincoln Land Community College, EDS in St. Louis, MO (Race Sponsor) UMR Campus, etc. Race rules limit speeds to 65mph. Anyways most cars cannot go the speed limit the entire way. In '03 we followed old Route 66, so there were lots of towns and such where you had to go 25, 35, etc, etc. Oh yea... http://www.umn.edu/umnsvp/ Go Gophers!

Ka-Map is an interface api based on Mapserver which allows you to create and navigate tiled maps ala Google Maps. Check out a demo site here

It is a fairly young project, just waiting for a few more talented programmers to help push it along. I would love to see a open source alternative to Google Maps and Yahoo Maps providing base maps to these services.

"[...] a 3,300-foot-high column of steam rising from the Pacific Ocean off the island of Iwo Jima. The vapor was reported Saturday after Japanese troops stationed on the small island observed the massive cloudy plume rise from the sea [...]"

Wait. Didn't we kick them off Iwo Jima? What are they doing back there? Didn't we leave a flag?

Those sneaky Japanese...

OsgPlanet can stream imagery from any MapServer using WMS protocol. (Check JPL's wms server for one http://wms.jpl.nasa.gov/) It builds a 3D model of the world on the fly using SRTM terrain data that you can download from the USGS for most of the globe.

The difference between this and something like Google maps is that osgPlanet and Vplanet let you actually fly around in the terrain, instead of just looking down at it.

But only if you hold onto the stocks and the stocks pay dividends.

Otherwise, you're 100% accurate. The "buy low, sell high" stock market mantra is pure speculation and speculation just moves the existing money around without creating anything of value.

http://www.bell.lib.umn.edu/Products/tulips.html

What happens is lots of money goes to a few people who spend lavishly on extravagent luxuries. That money comes from the many losers in that game.

And that is the problem with the current "investments" in the stock market. It's great when you're the winner, but there are far more losers than winners. No one likes to look at what happens if you aren't one of the winners.

Actually from my own research, it's much more likely that the participants knew that it was wrong but have developed fairly compex ways of justifying their activity. It's called "neutralization", whereby deviants 'neutralize' the social controls that normally inhibit illegal behaviour. This theory was originally put forward in 1957 by Sykes and Matza, and you can read about it here and here.

GRASS http://grass.itc.it/ is the primary open source GIS solution. The summary could have at least mentioned it in passing.

Odd that they mention AutoDesk too, considering their mapping software doesn't feature as nice spatial analysis stuff as ArcGIS does, although I haven't used it enough to make any other conclusions about it.

Now if GRASS would only improve their text interface and revamp their GUI.

Another critical open source GIS application for webmaps is MapServer http://mapserver.gis.umn.edu/

I've found that doing the data analysis with ArcGIS and displaying it with mapserver is the only way to go. ArcIMS is a bit too complex, at least compared to mapserver.

Mapserver is a CGI-based program for making maps. It has an interface (mapscrpt) in Perl, Python, PHP. PostGIS spatiall-enables Postgres. Great software.

Glen McCready's got a good item on it, when Microsoft reality conllides with everyone elses(Fri, 28 Aug 1998 09:26:58 -0400):

I've been attending the USENIX NT and LISA NT (Large Installation Systems Administration for NT) conference in downtown Seattle this week.

One of those magical Microsoft moments(tm) happened yesterday and I thought that I'd share. Non-geeks may not find this funny at all, but those in geekdom (particularly UNIX geekdom) will appreciate it.

Greg Sullivan, a Microsoft product manager (henceforth MPM), was holding forth on a forthcoming product that will provide Unix style scripting and shell services on NT for compatibility and to leverage UNIX expertise that moves to the NT platform. The product suite includes the MKS (Mortise Kern Systems) windowing Korn shell, a windowing PERL, and lots of goodies like awk, sed and grep. It actually fills a nice niche for which other products (like the MKS suite) have either been too highly priced or not well enough integrated.

An older man, probably mid-50s, stands up in the back of the room and asserts that Microsoft could have done better with their choice of Korn shell. He asks if they had considered others that are more compatible with existing UNIX versions of KSH.

The MPM said that the MKS shell was pretty compatible and should be able to run all UNIX scripts.

The questioner again asserted that the MKS shell was not very compatible and didn't do a lot of things right that are defined in the KSH language spec.

The MPM asserted again that the shell was pretty compatible and should work quite well.

This assertion and counter assertion went back and forth for a bit, when another fellow member of the audience announced to the MPM that the questioner was, in fact David Korn of AT&T (now Lucent) Bell Labs. (David Korn is the author of the Korn shell)

Uproarious laughter burst forth from the audience, and it was one of the only times that I have seen a (by then pink cheeked) MPM lost for words or momentarily lacking the usual unflappable confidence. So, what's a body to do when Microsoft reality collides with everyone elses?

Here's where else you might've heard "monad" before.

See Gottfried Leibniz's "Monadology" - here, and with
background info here.

Then check out Gilles Delezue's The Fold -- here. Deleuze is a total nutjob, like so many other French "theorists" or "literary theorists" (whatever that means), but he writes almost cogently about Leibniz.

I assure you that Haskell is not the "one other context" for the concept of a "monad."

When I was a student studying Fish and Wildlfe Management, I had a summer job with the local Conservation Authority. One of my tasks was to perform a bio-inventory of a wetland they owned. One day I found a plant which was listed as rare in Ontario. I actually phoned the people who were responsible for maintaining the list, only to be told it was now upgraded to common. Seems they had been doing a lot of surveys of wetlands recently and were finding this plant more often than they expected. It was this lovely little orchid: http://cedarcreek.umn.edu/plants/newslides/11899.j pg (Ramshead Ladyslipper - Cypripedium arietinum).

Now, I am a major geek, well sort of...but I have a strong love of nature, and I do not find the two conflicting, in fact I like to call myself a technopagan - although I really only fit in with the last line as it is defined here on wikipedia - http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Technopaganism

In addition to the news, classical, and local/indie/rock flavors of the MPR, we have a very good jazz station , the U of M's station , and a terrific community station .

The great thing about these choices is that they're all non-commercial (in both senses of the word). Depending on my mood, I can almost always find something worth listening to on one of them.

Which is a really good thing. I've developed such a distaste for obnoxious advertising that I simply cannot listen to commercial radio anymore. (No, I don't watch much TV, either.)

Of course, as I've just shown, the Miracle of the Internet allows you to hear these stations anywhere you're connected, not just in the Twin Cities. But for those of us who live here, it's nice to be able to tune in with any radio when you're offline.

There is a newly released interface to the mapserver application called Ka-Map that adopts a tiled map approach, similar to Google Maps. Pretty speedy considering maptools.org doesn't have anything close to Googles resources.

Sera

This website gives you an aggregate rating of people who have similar tastes with your own.

http://movielens.umn.edu/