Slashdot Mirror

Give a try to Unison.

It does the same as rsync (ie. move only the bits that changed), but is two-way. With the GTK interface (well, or directly the text files configurations), you can build some "profile" that lets you sync at will say, only your brownsing stuff, all your /home, etc.

Or without extensions: Unison. Efficient and fast, multi-platform synchronization of files or whole directory trees over practically every imaginable transmission medium (but who cares as long as it does SSH =). All you need is the executable on both ends.

Put this thing's GUI on menu, start it up and synchronize, go to the other place, use all you want, get back home, hit synchronize again, and it's up to date.

• Harvard Mark 1 (1939 - 1944) - semi-programmable electromechanical computing machine.
• Zuse Z3 (1938-1941) - small general purpose relay computer. Good architecture, but limited by relay speeds to a 5Hz (yes, Hz) clock. First floating point unit. No jump instruction, due to a low budget. The later Z4 (1945-1949) had jumps and conditional branches.
• Atanasoff-Berry (1937-1942) Programmable, electronic arithmetic, binary, but memory was a rotating drum of capacitors.
• Colossus (1944?) Special-purpose key-testing machine.
• ENIAC (1943-1946) - plugboard-programmed tube machine. No general purpose memory, just registers. Tube ALU.
• IBM 603 Electronic Multiplier (1946) - first commercial electronic computing product. Punched card I/O, not truly programmable, but electronic multiplication and division.

Most of these machines had electronic arithmetic units. The big problem was memory. There were no good memory technologies yet, and none of those machines had much memory. They all basically had a few registers, like a calculator. Each bit of memory required a relay, a tube, or a discrite capacitor and switchgear.

Finally, the memory problem was solved. EDVAC, (1947-1952), had 1K of mercury-tank delay line memory. This was a lousy main memory technology (you had to wait for the word you wanted to come around, like a disk), but allowed reasonable memory sizes. It was clunky, but at last, there was memory.

With the memory problem partially solved, various groups started building machines. Pilot ACE, ACE, and IAS date from this period.

The UNIVAC I (1948-1951) had it all - memory (1K words, in mercury tanks), console, tape drives, console typewriter, programmability, electronic arithmetic, a reasonable instruction set, and self-checking. It was built, sold, and used. UNIVAC I was the first of these machines that a modern programmer would consider usable.

• Harvard Mark 1 (1939 - 1944) - semi-programmable electromechanical computing machine.
• Zuse Z3 (1938-1941) - small general purpose relay computer. Good architecture, but limited by relay speeds to a 5Hz (yes, Hz) clock. First floating point unit. No jump instruction, due to a low budget. The later Z4 (1945-1949) had jumps and conditional branches.
• Atanasoff-Berry (1937-1942) Programmable, electronic arithmetic, binary, but memory was a rotating drum of capacitors.
• Colossus (1944?) Special-purpose key-testing machine.
• ENIAC (1943-1946) - plugboard-programmed tube machine. No general purpose memory, just registers. Tube ALU.
• IBM 603 Electronic Multiplier (1946) - first commercial electronic computing product. Punched card I/O, not truly programmable, but electronic multiplication and division.

Most of these machines had electronic arithmetic units. The big problem was memory. There were no good memory technologies yet, and none of those machines had much memory. They all basically had a few registers, like a calculator. Each bit of memory required a relay, a tube, or a discrite capacitor and switchgear.

Finally, the memory problem was solved. EDVAC, (1947-1952), had 1K of mercury-tank delay line memory. This was a lousy main memory technology (you had to wait for the word you wanted to come around, like a disk), but allowed reasonable memory sizes. It was clunky, but at last, there was memory.

With the memory problem partially solved, various groups started building machines. Pilot ACE, ACE, and IAS date from this period.

The UNIVAC I (1948-1951) had it all - memory (1K words, in mercury tanks), console, tape drives, console typewriter, programmability, electronic arithmetic, a reasonable instruction set, and self-checking. It was built, sold, and used. UNIVAC I was the first of these machines that a modern programmer would consider usable.

Actually, the word window has been borrowed into Dutch as a generic computing term. A while back I did a little research into this, reported here, using Google and easily found examples of window used in this way on Dutch-language websites, including examples in which Dutch suffixes were added, which demonstrates that the word has been incorporated into Dutch. So I think that the Dutch court was wrong in ruling that window is not a generic term in Dutch.

Good to see that the style of Jonathan Swift's famous modest proposal for aleviating poverty in Ireland is still around. His idea was to treat impoverished Irish children as livestock to be fattened up for consumption. A tongue cannot become more firmly embedded in a cheek!

You know it is real bad when This becomes the BEST available choice.

But the broader question is whether this is really a good idea. The result is going to be huge files, which will be messy, hard to read, and will lack an index or table of contents. Seems like a case of profs with too much ego and not enough willingness to put their own work into more useful form.

Here's the original post from robots.net...

A recent National Science Foundation press release includes photos and video clips of the latest Scout emergency response robots. Scout is a small (100mm x 35mm) two wheeled, tube-shaped robot containing a video camera, IR range sensors, light sensors, pyroelectric sensors, and two-way radio links that support frequency hopping and encryption. MegaScout is a larger version that will eventually carry manipulator arms, grappling hooks, and may act as a mothership for the smaller scouts. The robots are designed to survive a six story fall or being thrown up to 100 feet into a disaster area. The Scouts are built entirely from off-the-shelf parts. The robots are being deveoped by Nikos Papanikolopoulos
and other researchers from the University of Minnesota Distributed Robotics Lab, the University of Pennsylvania GRASP Lab, and the Caltech Robotics Group. More video of the robots performing amazing feats is available on the UMN website.

Although the CNN article focuses on the US experience, the UK has had successful and profitable online grocery shopping for several years. UK chain Tesco was one of the first - with an in-house developed software system - and now most of the UK major chains have followed suit with similar systems.

The Tesco system was initially thought to be un-economic as it simply comprised staff going round existing stores and loading carts that where then delivered using small vans to homes in the locality - but apparently its been profitable since the outset.

Tesco's approach is compared to that of WebVan (who feature in the CNN article) in this document written by a Prof at Wharton (free - but registration required)

More recently, a WebVan style UK Grocery operation called Occado has started too - working with upmarket Grocer Waitrose. Their approach is to use central warehouses to fill orders and distribute.

All this competition has resulted in competition between providers both on price (several offer the service 'free' for spends over a threshold of about 75) and quality (for example, discounts if delivery times are missed, or the goods / brands you order are not in stock etc.)

IV. PRIONS Prions are extremely resistant to conventional inactivation procedures including irradiation, boiling, dry heat and chemicals (formalin, betapropiolactione, alcohols). Most procedures reduce infectivity rather than eliminate it. All treated contaminated materials should be discarded through the infectious waste stream and incinerated. Use DISPOSABLE plastic labware whenever possible.

1. Complete and sign the Notification of the Proposed Destruction of Select Agents Form
2. EHRS will notify the PI or lab manager when destruction is approved.
3. Inactivate prions by one of the following methods:
4. * Autoclave dry waste at 132 C for 4.5 hours.
5. * Treat large volumes of infectious liquid waste containing prions with 1N NaOH (final concentration) followed by autoclaving at 132 C for 4.5 hours.
6. * Treat with phenol (1:1); guanidine hydrochloride or isocyanate (>4 mol/L); 1N NaOH (final concentration); sodium hypochlorite (>2% free chlorine) for 24 hours.
7. Dispose of inactivated prion waste as infectious waste.

Never mind, apparently I skimmed over the link to the actual research report that was cleverly titled "here".

I still think OCR was overkill, but I guess he claims to have done it.

I stopped reading the article about "economic research" right around the moment I noticed the word "coz."

Maybe this one would be better

McCarthy was ultimately defeated by his 'fellow' Anti-communists, because he was an opportunist loonie who did more damage to the cause of freedom than even most Communists.

And he didn't have 'FBI drones.'

Hmmm...I think you need to read...

Please read up on Lillian Hellman's file regarding suuposed "communist ties". Her file contained the following information:

The plays and memoirs of Lillian Hellman (1905-1984) may well outlast the continuing criticism of her by old and newright professional Red baiters. They have judged her, above all else, by her strong liberal views and not by her writings. In this writer's opinion, some of her critics envied her long romantic association with Dashiell Hammett, the idealized author of The Maltese Falcon and other pioneering works in the field of detective fiction. Hellman haters fell in step behind J. Edgar Hoover and witch hunting congressional committees who despised what she had to say, the organizations she belonged to, her admittedly abrasive style and her financial rewards from writing.

Miss Hellman's FBI file contained 307 censored pages; 37 of these pages were denied...

This was an excerpt from The Univerity of Pennsylvania in an analysis of McCarthyism and individual Americans (linked from the University of Colorado.

Clearly McCarthy had FBI drones who were sent to quash those whose ideas were not the same as certain congressional members.

As for your statement about McCarthy being "an opportunist loonie who did more damage to the cause of freedom than most Communists"...

How do you explain what the Patriot Act is? Sure sounds like it was written by an "opportunist loonie who did more to damage the cause of freedom than most" terrorists. Doesn't it? Its both yours and my constitutional rights that are now in jeaopardy. Again...I reiterate...history repeats itself (and yes I know my McCarthy history).

There is a definite trend of US politics having a detrimental effect on science.

This trend is actually at least half-century old. There is at least one known case of a Nobel prize lost by Americans due to politics. It's the case of Linus Pauling attempt to break the gene code. Pauling would most likely do what Watson & Crick did later, but he had no access to the X-Ray photos of the DNA crystal done by Maurice Wilkins & Rosalinde Franklin. He was in the "land of the free", the photos were in the good ol' UK. Pauling wanted to go to UK to see the photos, but was denied passport according to the infamous McCarran Act. That's how the USA lost the race for at least one Nobel. However, there were more less direct cases like this - Maccarthyism destroyed the status of America as the worldwide recognized icon of liberty, gained in 1930's. The brain drain surely continued aftewards, but the scientists coming to the USA were coming for the dollars, not freedom.

Try this

A good parallel to understand is if you were an ant living on the surface of a basketball. Your travels can go in any direction at any point, as if you were on a plane. If you had no memory, you may not noticed that when you travelled you were visiting places you had already been and you might think that you lived on a plane. In fact, the outside observer can see that your universe is curved.

If you haven't read Flatland it is a gem that illustrates these notions of higher-dimenstional space wonderfully. It was written in 1888 and is in the public domain now, availble free online through Project Gutenberg or for a buck or two as a physical book.

A wonderfully-done video is The Shape of Space, produced at the Geometry Center and uses nice animations to make these points. If you haven't see the Shape of Space or two of its Geometry Center sibling videos (Not Knot and Inside Out) you are seriously missing out.

Actually, a fair case can be made that in at least some languages other than English the word "window" is used as a generic computer term. That is, "window" may not mean the kind of window you find in the wall of a house, but it does mean "window on a computer display". I made exactly this argument in this post on Language Log. It took me only a few minutes to turn up examples of the word "window" used as a generic computer term in Dutch.

Here you go...

University of Pennsylvania Veterinary School

There are other bits if you google for "breathable liquid"

Don't bother with any of the kernel-mode disconnected file systems. For those kinds of situations, the Unison file synchronizer is a good choice: it performs bidirectional synchronization and uses an efficient protocol that only needs to send differences and some checksums across the wire. It also detects conflicts and (optionally) lets you resolve them automatically. It works on UNIX/Linux, Windows, and MacOS.

--
Evan

The problem isn't raw materials for construction. We're literally swimming in 'em. The problem is going to be energy production. Oil and coal will be around for a little bit longer, but 50 years down the line when the rest of the 3rd world (and all of China) is turning on their lights at night, and you're talking about serious energy concerns. "Alternative" isn't an option, it's going to be a necessity.

The other problem is that NASA is dealing with space exploration in the completely wrong way. I wish they were bigger Sci-Fi geeks, because just about every single example of our future's spacecrafts are designed and built in space. It's stupid to be expending this much effort to go up and down when you could be having interstellar flights lasting months for the same amount of energy.

What the X-Prize is really all about is that we need to be able to get into space reliably and back again, it should be cheap, and it should be relatively safe. NASA has been spending a large part of its dough in past years to develop something that is fully capable of being produced by commercial interests today. But for real space travel, you need scientists on board for long periods to work "in-the-field" so to speak. If you need them to go to the surface of a planet, you just use shuttle craft.

What annoys me is that they (NASA) should be putting their cash in interstellar space vehicle design, in-space production, and power requirements for these ships. There's no reason we can't have people studying Mars while orbitting it -- if you need food for three months, you just tack on an extra cargo hold to your ship and have only the mass / energy considerations to think about.

Nowadays the primary concern is "I've only got so much payload because this thing has to break loose of the Earth's gravity intact." So they're flinging satellites to the far edges of our solar system, keeping their fingers crossed for the sometimes decade-long wait to find out if their fragile, expensive equipment functions correctly.

Why does NASA ignore what is so obvious to the rest of the imaginative world? Most sci-fi and anime fans already knows there are escape velocity/atmosphere vehicles, and interstellar vehicles (and know that the two don't mix very well with each other).

But if the book is still in copyright, I can't legally give those photocopies to someone else

That's an oversimplification, of course. To give just one example, I believe that photocopying one chapter from a book to distribute to students in a class for educational reasons, charging them no more than the cost of the coyping itself, has generally been held to be fair use.

Here's a reference with some further details on copying for educational purposes. (Not that educational justifies any copying, or that it is the only such justification. But it's one good source of examples.)

--Bruce Fields

Take the example of those executives. Why do investors turn their money over to individuals who have nothing to lose by running the company into the ground? I certainly don't.

This is a big one. I think a tendency is to want to regulate executive contracts and pay, but I believe there's another solution. Instead of attacking this symptom directly with hard to enforce laws, attack it at the source.

I'm talking about the role of financial analysts. It's a bit suspicious to me when 30 out of 30 analysts all decide to make the same call on a company in the same day, when there was no activity in the prior three months. I also think that analysts should somehow demonstrate a knowledge of the industry they're following.

I remember awhile back when Merrill finally canned Henry Blodget, the guy who made the self fullfilling call on Amazon. The guy was still recommending buys on stocks that were tanking. Here's an article that goes into a bit more detail - the short version being that these jokers recommend 100 buys for every sell.

Rant aside, these CEOs are encouraged into doing short term, risky, and often times very ill-thought out things in the name of their stock price. If analysts would cry foul when they're supposed to, I think you would finally start to see the market correct itself in what might otherwise be ethical or behavorial issues.

Re SCO, I think a group of analysts that a) knew what they were doing, and b) felt they were there to work for the stock buyer (you and me), would have saved the day already. Darl would have seen his stock hitting the floor, been reading the bad press, and stopped his action. I think Enron is another obvious example, with the same conclusion.

Rant over, sorry.

A really odd way to commit suicide.

100 cups could very well do the trick (cause death), and if not, give you an entirely rotten day.

This excerpt is from here: http://members.aol.com/seanborg/mtdew/caffeine.htm #2

----

The LD_50 of caffeine (that is the lethal dosage reported to kill 50% of the population) is estimated at 10 grams for oral administration. As it is usually the case, lethal dosage varies from individual to individual according to weight. Ingestion of 150mg/kg of caffeine seems to be the LD_50 for all people. That is, people weighting 50 kilos have an LD_50 of approx. 7.5 grams, people weighting 80 kilos have an LD_50 of about 12 grams.

In Mountain Dew the LD_50 is about 200 12 ounce cans or about 50 vivarins (200mg each).

-----

Keep in mind death could happen quicker because caffeine is in a bunch of other items you may have already eaten...

http://www.cis.upenn.edu/~udani/caffeine.html

http://www.dietsite.com/NutritionFacts/Caffeine%20 Content%20of%20Selected%20Foods.htm

On a side issue, if you are depressed, don't do it, ask for some help. I took about 16 vivarin in one day (200mg x 16 = 3.2g) when I was in high school (very depressed) and it was one of the worst days of my life, not the going up, as I had to keep popping them to stop from crashing, but the last half of the day I was screaming and pulling my hair and twitching and running all over the place. And considering this, a death this way would utterly suck.

Here ;-)

Actually, the Dutch boy succeeded!

Hans Brinker, or The Silver Skates.

I attend the University of Pennsylvania (go Quakers.) and I was beginning to seriously consider realizing my old passing and going for a Computer Science degree with Mathematics and (maybe) Linguistics on the side. I'm not interested in software engineering as much as I am in the more theoretical side of Computer Science. Am I setting myself up for failure in the long run? I figure I could enter the academy if jobs/research opportunites really do all magically transport to India (not to shun academia, mind you). Here is a link to our Computer Science department.

On this subject, I always liked Max Tegmark's speculations on the topic, which includes some assessment of why we have only one, and not zero or two or more temporal dimensions.

There's lots of other cool stuff on Max Tegmark's site too if you want to procrastinate on whatever else you're doing. (He's a physics (astrophysics?) professor at U.Penn.)

--LP

On this subject, I always liked Max Tegmark's speculations on the topic, which includes some assessment of why we have only one, and not zero or two or more temporal dimensions.

There's lots of other cool stuff on Max Tegmark's site too if you want to procrastinate on whatever else you're doing. (He's a physics (astrophysics?) professor at U.Penn.)

--LP

Unison?

I'm definitely not going anywhere near that stuff then

Cambridge:
http://www.cl.cam.ac.uk/UoCCL/intro/
http://www.cl.cam.ac.uk/site-maps/gates.html

+ Washington:
http://www.law.washington.edu/GatesHall/

+ Stanford:
http://www-db.stanford.edu/pub/keller/gates-map.ht ml

+ Pennsilvania:
http://www.facilities.upenn.edu/mapsBldgs/view_map .php3?id=401

+ MIT:
http://www-tech.mit.edu/V119/N20/20lcs.20n.html

+ RIBA:
http://www.riba.org/go/RIBA/About/About_162.html

+ Southern Indiana:
http://www.usi.edu/visit/map/housing.asp

+ Michigan:
http://www.admin.mtu.edu/admin/prov/facbook/ch9/9c hap-37.htm


= University Building Monopoly !!!!

I noticed this post was copied from somewhere and thought that proper credit should be given to Sean.

Robocup is the real world cup of robot soccer, about 5 years in the running. The 2004 American Open is happening in late April, and it will supposedly be open to the public. And for the really hardcore fans, there's Robocup 2004 in Portugal. See ya there ;) Failing that, you should at least watch a match (4-legged league).

> I think our approach to designing products aimed at the lowest common denominator
> might actually be responsible for all of this

This is a consequence, not the cause. The problem is our education system and the way it encourages stupidity. Read about that and the solution to it in the Montessori Method. It's old and, sadly, is the sort of stuff nobody teaches children any more.

Already done

While the interview is light on details, there is more information available online.

Don't forget how the system works. Darpa basically hands out money for research into areas it finds interesting. Coincidently, I've been involved for a short time in a research project dealing with exchanging present day IP (mostly the heavyweight gorilla listening to the name TCP) with smaller, more adaptable alternatives.

Two projects in this field that I've heard of
are

the knowledge plane and
application private networks

The basic idea, AFAIK, is to do away with the one size fits all model of networking and replace it with a more adaptive lego-like stack. For this to work you need information on the state of the network in order to build your optimal dynamic stack. A possible source for this might be the discussed knowledge plane. Also, actual micro-protocols need to be created and some sort of decision making system must be in place (APnets). Shameless plug of my own work
here.

I don't know of other projects, but if Darpa has opened its wallet for this cause you can expect many other universities to have similar initiatives underway.

Funny, I had no problems reading The Autobiography of Benjamin Franklin, even though it was written in the late 1700s. English hasn't changed that much. I think a Latin textbook from 1800-1922 would be perfectly acceptable, assuming it was a decent textbook to start with.

I would not be so worried about the government collecting such information if it were not for the knowledge that they have tried to collect it in the past and used it in less than ethical ways.

Is it any wonder people are paranoid about them doing it again in the future or the people who defend some of the governments actions?

There is a single feature of Outlook 2003 that I fell in love with. I use Pine and SquirrelMail (in that order, depending if ssh is available to me) for my own e-mail, but at work we are on a Windows domain and have an Exchange server.

I am responsible for 3 sites throughout the metropolitan area, and have some users who have to do work from home. Before me, they would connect through the VPN and either use Windows Offline Files or Terminal Services to access their work. Their Outlook 2000 client (2002/XP is no better) would read every message from the server every time it even thought you might want to see that message. The whole thing was horribly slow.

I quickly replaced this situation with Unison to synchronize their My Documents folders, including a .pst so they'd have quicker access. The problem is that synchronizing a 100MB .pst with perhaps 3 new messages is both painstakingly slow and unreliable. I fought with this for months.

When we opened up our third site in the city, we got new computers that came with Office 2003. I asked myself, "Self, why did Microsoft bring us a new version of Office just a year after the last version was new, with no new features other than the bubblegum interface?" In setting up their e-mail access, however, I stumbled across Outlook 2003's ability to synchronize per-message, and the question then was "Self, why did Microsoft screw me for so many months with previous versions of Outlook, when this is so easy?"

I don't have a lot of pro-Microsoft testimonials to give, and Outlook 2003 has a few really obnoxious features, too, but for its ability to synchronize with an Exchange server, I say "Thank you, Microsoft."

What about EROS? Or KeyKOS? Were they excluded from the study for some reason? Using only few other possibilities to compare with, I could be the world prettiest and smartest man as well...

Second, I'd like everybodies suggestions for other cool devices from anime you'd like to see created in real life.

Here's a couple I'd like.
An e-frame from Exosquad.
Obligatory Veritech Fighter.
A new keyboard setup, with hand enhancement like in Ghost in the Shell.
Kaneda's bike.
Make people fear you even if you're old with the Roujin Z setup.
A pokeball, so I can finally do something about that annoying dog next door.
Appleseed had the right idea.
You know you want capsules like in DBZ.
Um....I guess I want a Chii Persocon too.....
I'm done.

Oh, I wasn't implying that's what you meant. I should have been more explicit in my wording: there are a lot worse things out there than Bush. I do understand your sentiment though. What we have is a never-ending parade of self-indulgent babies who wish nothing more than to promote themselves and their petty agendas, to hell with everyone else.

Yes, there was a revolution in the 30's, and the revolutionaries won. FDR helped the revolutionaries win. He helped to permanently install socialism in the United States.

However, that wasn't actually what I was talking about. I was talking about his actions during the war. He signed EO9066 and EO9102, removing the rights of 120,000 Americans, stripping them of their property and dignity, and incarcerating them without due process for 4 years.

He forced 10,110,114 American men into involuntary servitude, stripping them of more rights than the 12,000 affected by EO9066. Many of them were ordered to their deaths against their will, the ultimate betrayal of individual rights.

FDR was also complicit in the bombing of Pearl Harbor, based on now-declassified documents pertaining to the breaking of the Japanese military code. They knew in advance.

He transformed the inalienable right to enjoy the fruits of ones' labor into a privilege to be granted or revoked by the government by creating a tax on the privilege of being employed, and the privilege of employing (neither of which are privileges, but absolute rights). When the Supreme Court laid the smack down on him, he extorted their complicity by threatening to destroy the integrity of the Judicial Branch by flooding the Court with partisans.

He removed the United States from a monetary standard backed by tangible wealth to one backed by nothing more than faith. After all, paper is worth what people believe it is, and nothing more.

FDR did not believe in Constitutional checks and balances - he tried to destroy and was prepared to defy the Supreme Court and Congress.

FDR signed legislation in order to fix prices and insulate people from the consequences of defaulting on contracts (ie the consequences of their actions as outlined clearly in contracts they agreed to).

Personally, I can't think of one good thing that FDR accomplished, but I can see a lot of people who are worse-off as a result. Just look at the abject failure of Social Security. Not only did it strip everyone of the right to work and enjoy all the fruits of their labors, but it has made generations of older people dependent on it, instead of having a family safety net. The family is busy paying taxes to fund the exact cost of Social Security at the current moment and so have nothing left to help support their elders and keep a family life together. All the surplus is spent on $1000.00 hammers and $800.00 toilet seats, or on renovating government offices to install a new spa or gym.

No, FDR wasn't a great president. He was the scum of the earth, and was only interested in acting along the same lines as his contemporaries Stalin and Churchill: an arrogant, power-hungry populist who had more ego and power than he had sense.

The only wartime president worth a damn in the entire history of the United States was Washington, and even he had his faults. At least he also had intelligence and principles, and was a reluctant leader. Those are the best.

You can read about what I did here. It's a headless Pentium 350 running Winamp on top of Windows 98 (yes, really). Winamp plugins let me control it through a web browser and automatically search the network for mp3s. The files are kept on a separate machine with a big hard drive.

I recently added a next-generation user interface device called a 'three-button mouse', but I haven't updated my web page yet. The 3 buttons are 'stop', 'next' and 'play', which is pretty much all I need. On the rare occaision I want to mess with the playlist I use the web interface.

Not the most elegant or advanced solution, but it was all done with stuff that I had already or could download for free and it fit my existing setup with minimal hassle.

I am a happy user of Common Lisp, which supports imperative, functional, OO etc. out of the box. But what is more important is that the language itself is extensible. It is a rather common approach to write applications by first extending the language, and such extensions can go quite far. For example, people have integrated prolog style logic programming into Lisp, there are libraries that support nondeterministic evaluation and backtracking, prototype-based alternatives to the native OO system, dataflow, you can use it as a dynamic markup language etc. The nice thing is that all this gets part of the Lisp system just like the builtins, so that a programmer can mix and match all of these, and the features of CL itself.

Paul Graham has written a really cool book on that topic, which is freely available.

From Language Log:

"The story about Inuit (or Inuktitut, or Yup'ik, or more generally, Eskimo) words for snow is completely wrong. People say that speakers of these languages have 23, or 42, or 50, or 100 words for snow --- the numbers often seem to have been picked at random. The spread of the myth was tracked in a paper by Laura Martin (American Anthropologist 88 (1986), 418-423), and publicized more widely by a later humorous embroidering of the theme by G. K. Pullum (reprinted as chapter 19 of his 1991 book of essays The Great Eskimo Vocabulary Hoax). But the Eskimoan language group uses an extraordinary system of multiple, recursively addable derivational suffixes for word formation called postbases. The list of snow-referring roots to stick them on isn't that long: qani- for a snowflake, api- for snow considered as stuff lying on the ground and covering things up, a root meaning "slush", a root meaning "blizzard", a root meaning "drift", and a few others -- very roughly the same number of roots as in English. Nonetheless, the number of distinct words you can derive from them is not 50, or 150, or 1500, or a million, but simply unbounded. Only stamina sets a limit.

That does not mean there are huge numbers of unrelated basic terms for huge numbers of finely differentiated snow types. It means that the notion of fixing a number of snow words, or even a definition of what a word for snow would be, is meaningless for these languages. You could write down not just thousands but millions of words built from roots that refer to snow if you had the time. But they would all be derivatives of a fairly small number of roots. And you could write down just as many derivatives of any other root: fish, or coffee, or excrement."

To understand how so many smart and skilled programmers can work at Microsoft and they can still produce such crap, read the chapter titled "The Fight Against Genius". As you read it, realize that the corporate culture has changed a bit from the 1950's -- most good corporate leaders have also read "The Organization Man," and they take specific steps to attempt to counteract the stifling effect of a large organization. Microsoft's research spending, like Xerox's in 1970s, is a conscious effort to escape these effects. However, as at Xerox, just because you do the research, doesn't mean you can actually beat the fossilizing effects of being a big company.

> backup HD with an image of your OS

Also, get a USB2/FW 2.5" HD enclosure, and synchronization software like unison. Synchronize every day/week/month (depending how valuable your data is to you) for backup. If you go somewhere with a computer present, you don't need to bring the laptop, just sync, bring the HD, and sync again when you're home. If your laptop HD dies, just swap in the backup and buy a new one for the enclosure.

What will happen to this? (Already discussed in Slashdot here)

Wait a minute... gutenberg.net.au seems to be offline. Were they ALREADY sunk?

I wonder how great of a chance this has of becoming policy, considering that one of the individuals quoted with a disparaging remark in the article, David Farber, is considered the grand father of the Internet as well as serving as the Chief Technologist for Federal Communications Commission.