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There's a study of oysters. down 88%. A model claiming cod biomass is down 96%

I'm pretty sure that at least one plant was previously identified as American , and that would be the sunflower. These botanists have taken the idea a lot further though. Their paper is well researched, but I will leave it to the peer review process to ultimately determine its veracity. The identification of Nahuatl words in the script seems a bit of a stretch IMHO.

This is the result of a few years of work by Alexandre Oliva (FSFLA), who worked on the Linux-libre project and travelled to give presentations about the amount of non-free software in the default Linux kernel.

http://www.lsd.ic.unicamp.br/~oliva/
http://www.fsfla.org/svnwiki/selibre/linux-libre/

(it's also generally thanks to the gNewSense guys, Paul O'Malley & Brian Brazil in Ireland, who worked on the general issue of non-free software in distros, but the specific work on the kernel was championed by Alexandre.)

Java is already fragmented. The result of open sourcing Java will actually be consolidation, i.e. killing of competing VMs. And a huge open source test suite will greatly benefit all surviving JVMs, which is a good thing.

How can you not see this?

Javas problem is not that it might get fragmented, the problem is that it IS fragmented. Do something about it! Let Java free!

And Linux lacks the one big thing MacOS has -- easy support for the most comment media types, including Windows Media, and Quicktime. Trying to get Linux to support both of these is an exercise in futility. Sure it can be done, but not by Joe Schmoe.

1. Add http://www.las.ic.unicamp.br/pub/debian-marillat/ to /etc/apt/sources.list
   
2. apt-get install w32codecs
   

...many are asking. It's hard to find introductory materials on the NFS, because the number of people who actually understand the algorithm is probably in the hundreds, if not less, and most are worried about research not teaching. For those interested in a high-level view, plus some low-level details, of the (special and general) NFS, you can have a look at the slides for a talk that I gave on exactly this topic at a crypto workshop a couple of months ago. I won't even try to summarize the NFS here, because anything other than a very high level, handwaving, bird's eye view of NFS would take the better part of a page to explain. However, in this thread I can answer specific questions that anyone might have about the talk above.

Now for those with the mathematical maturity to delve into the algorithm, I suggest the book Prime Numbers: A Computational Perspective by R. Crandall and C. Pomerance (link to Amazon.com lifted from Google, no referrals), which is certainly one of the best introductions to the algorithm that I have read.

By the way, if anyone wants to help perform huge factorizations in a distributed computing network, check out the NFSNET, although they mostly apply SNFS on values from the Cunningham tables, no cryptographic targets.

There is a really neat Brazilian Linux Live CD called "Kurumin" (it means "boy" or "young man" in the Tupi language, which is used by some Brazilian indians tribes).

It is based on Knoppix/Debian and it is supported by the Federal Government here in Brazil, being developed at the state university of campinas (http://www.unicamp.br/). It is used at schools and telecenters which supports the Digital Inclusion program. I've tryied it once here at my home and it worked great, it is fully in portuguese language.

More info available at http://www.kuruminlinux.com.br/

Actually, both books are usually available online from the opengl website.
Here is the red book for OpenGL version 1.1. Obviously, it doesn't cover the newest version, but if you just want a quick intro and don't want to drop money on the book, this will do just fine. I use the reference manual online for all but the newest and greatest stuff.

I've heard very good things about txt2tags but I haven't used it myself. It's used to generate the pages of Dicas-L which hosts a famous Brazilian mailing list which sends daily computer related tips.

The Campinas State University (Unicamp) has made this on July 2003. It wasn't a small device, but the technology was there, with the sugar-cane ethanol. For those who want to try some portuguese, This is the official release from Unicamp. Surely the Minnesota guys may have done a good work, but reinvent the wheel is not a great deal.

The Campinas State University (Unicamp) has made this on July 2003. It wasn't a small device, but the technology was there, with the sugar-cane ethanol. For those who want to try some portuguese, This is the official release from Unicamp. Surely the Minnesota guys may have done a good work, but reinvent the wheel is not a great deal.

And seems like cheap options have long been available DOS/Windows NFS clients for a long time. In 1994, this summary mentions XFS (shareware NFS client from Germany, not the SGI filesystem) TSoft and Sun's PC-NFS.

Nowdays you also have at least these option, and you are right, many are not cheap.

• HummingBird $300 My past impressions were always of good quality and features.
• Reflection $88 I know this name.
• ProNFS $40 (shareware?)
• DiskAccess $179
• SuperNFS $160 Found with google.

it seems to me that where the burden lies is not so clear. If I found a 4+ century old manuscript in an unknown language, I would assume it to be real, unless proven otherwise.

Here is what is known about the manuscript

It is not a moden hoax, as old letters have been found after its rediscovery that refer to it.

It has 234 pages (plenty long enough for statistical analysis) and appears to have been copied by a professional. It also has a number of images of various sorts, with "labels" and the words used in the labels also appear in the text near the images.

(BTW, I do not see how you get that in a "grill" system hoax.)

There are, however, no apparent images of the usual alchemical signs, occult signs, etc. - the sort of stuff that might impress an occult minded royal buyer.

It appears to have been written in (at least) two langauges or dialects or jargons, based on word use, with each page being in only one "language"

Here is a plot showing the correlation of word usage between pages in the manuscript - color coded with red meaning more words in common, black meaning the fewest, with page one in the upper left hand corner.

I would expect a grill method to produce a random version of this image - which is clearly not random.

The text follows roughly the 1st. and 2nd. Zipf's laws of word frequencies.

The word length distribution is very different from Latin, German, English, French or Italian, and, in fact, is similar to various Asian languages like Chinese - words are uniformly short.

Again, I don't see why a grill method would do this.

The 2nd. order entropy is too low for an European language using a simple substitution cipher, and the third and fourth are too high. (Also, download this pdf.)

What does this mean ? It means that the second character of a word in the manuscript is more predictable than in a typical European language, and that the third and fourth characters are _less_ predictable.

It is very hard for me to see how this could come from the grill method.

So, regardless of where the burden of proof lies, I, for one, am not convinced.

I've studied the Voynich manuscript before, and the possibility of a hoax seems just as unlikely as many of the theories that have been floating about. Yes, the language of the Voynich manuscript could be an elaborate hoax, but Rugg's analysis only proves what is already widely known.

The problem of creating such an elaborate hoax is that even Rugg's theory doesn't explain all the features of the Voynich manuscript. Furthermore, it seems unlikely that a sixteenth-century forger would go to the trouble of creating something that would have all the qualities of a real language and would include techniques that would deliberately resemble an actual document when viewed with analytical techniques that wouldn't be developed later. Occam's Razor makes it seem more likely that there some kind of language operating in the manuscript than a random system of patterns. Then again, there's no real way of knowing.

There are some images of the text of the Voynich Manuscript available here. Analysis of the text and the illustrations support the theory that the manuscript has defined sections on astrology, herbal medicine, and other subjects. There have been some serious and some rediculous theories about the manuscript from the intriguing notion that the Voynich text is mathematically similar to East Asian languages like Chinese or Vietnamese, or that the Voynich manuscript is written in an ancient form of Ukrainian. (I've read the supposed translation of it from the Ukrainian, and it hardly makes sense given that the manuscript's illustations don't match the text of the supposed translation.)

In the meantime, this site offers more information on modern translation efforts including a font for the Voynich script. (Which would make a lovely way of annoying co-workers by switching their default system font to Voynich text...)

Don't give all us humans a credit for being qualified to discern quality from drivel Some of us can do a lot worse than a computer!

The paper has been published in Foundation of Physics Letters. This journal doe not have a good reputation. The Editor in Chief of the Letters is listed as a member of the infamous AIAS. Read here and here. and links therein. In particular read this paper. Chances are that indeed the "Zeno paper" is a disinfo paper. ark

Third best thing? The way the patches are organized inside a SRPM (Source RPM). The patches are all separated, which makes it very easy to extract, disable or to add new ones. For people who work with source packages (doing customization, security fixes/auditing, etc), it's one of the best things of RPM.

I must confess I'm not very familiar with the .deb format, so maybe I'm just ignorant, but getting a single patch from a debian source package is a real pain (you get a single, huge patch with all the changes done by the packager). With RPM if you want, let's say, a security fix, you just have to download the SRPM and look for something like foobar-1.1-buff_ovflow-fix.patch inside it.

(And it's not hard to find a package with 300+ patches).

BTW, an excelent tutorial from IBM-DW: Packaging Software with RPM, Part I , II , and III

• Addition and substraction are exact: The identity x - x = 0 holds, unlike interval arithmetic.
• The error in the output is quadratically related to the error in the input (instead of intervals' linear relation).
• For every calculation, you can extract an estimate of the gradient, as a side effect.

Unfortunately, I've decided that it would be too much work for me to rigorously bound rounding errors, which would be necessary to get the "machine proof" of correctness you mention. I currently have my own interval library as part of the implementation, but I might use Boost's, if it works well enough.

Actually, the other reason I haven't tried to bound rounding errors is that rounding control is broken in GNU Libc on pretty much every architecture.

Please mod up parent. (Note that the link contains about 100 additional pages scanned at fairly high resolution, but of low quality photos. It also appears that the server is either very or has already been slashdotted.)

By the way I have figured it out. Voynich ManuScript is abbreviated VMS and so clearly isn't meant to be decipherable by humans and is therefore an obvious hoax.

Just to follow up on my previous post, here are some resources:

• Memetic Algorithms' Home Page
• A Simple Heuristically Guided Search for the Timetable Problem
• (extract from the comp.ai.genetic FAQ)
• An honour's thesis on the topic
• Taiwanese site (in English) with links to papers, etc
• paper and paper available on citeseer

No, this is not a problem for the faint of heart.

"LOS ALTOS, CALIFORNIA, U.S.A., 1989 OCT 27 (NB) -- The author of Zoomracks, a popular shareware program for the PC and Atari ST, has filed suit against Apple Computer, charging that its HyperCard software violates a patent he obtained on screen displays.

"Paul Heckel of Quickview Systems in Los Altos, California, created Zoomracks in 1985. Available as shareware from such firms as PC-SIG, Zoomracks allows portions of information from various fields to be combined and displayed in an electronic version of file cards. Heckel won a patent for the design -- patent number 4,486,857. Two years later, the suit contends, the design showed up in HyperCard from Apple."

[...]

The rest is at http://ftp.unicamp.br/pub/lpf/patent.events

I am the Raxis.

It seems that there's already a couple of develoeprs in Brazil. Check a list in this page. It includes Windowmaker and curl.

Problem is, about one year and a half ago, I got contacted for a start-up company to a promising job in IBM products. I got this job, I am a sort of support person/installer/implementor/do-it-all. It is a good job and the company more than doubled throughout this time, and is about to double again.

I was very frustrated with college at the time I was contacted, and I don't regret it. This job taught me more than a few great lessons.

But, now, apart from unwilling to get back to that ugly chairs and desks and seeing the face of a teacher who knows less than me on several subjects, I can't reserve the time to *finish* these 5 disciplines. I have already postponed my year 2 times - and I can't do it anymore, subject to expulsion.

How do I handle this situation? I don't know. At one side, there is my job - and my future lies within it (it is a full-time job, I work almost 14 hours a day, most times even in holiday) - and at the other side, there's college - I can't step on to that same future without getting that rolled paper which certifies me as being 'capable' of doing what I do WELL for one year and a half.

I have already tried to attend college while studying. My college is about 130 km far from my work, so I take about two hours driving (apart that my job puts me traveling to distant places most of my time). Fortunately it was a discipline which was taught only once every two weeks, but even then I couldn't succeed to accompany it and I failed.

Any suggestions? I hope there was a magic recipe for succeeding in this kind of situation, which I believe to being highly parallel to yours, yet in a different context.

BTW - I don't think it would be easy to get a transfer to where I live, and even then, I would lose a whole set of disciplines and the big status of the college I attend to.

Patola