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not a real info :P * Brazilian government is well known for use FOSS (here, some links for you: http://serpro.gov.br/ / http://ccsl.ime.usp.br/ / http://softwarelivre.org/ / http://www.ufrgs.br/soft-livre... [sorry: all in pt_BR...])

GP must go to the right theaters, that don't play blockbusters... In the city I live: http://www.sescsp.org.br/sesc/programa_new/indexbusca.cfm?Unidade_ID=2&data=0&Atividade_ID=0&olodum=1&first=1&Contador=1&page=1&Palavra=>http://www.sescsp.org.br/sesc/programa_new/indexbusca.cfm?Unidade_ID=2&data=0&Atividade_ID=0&olodum=1&first=1&Contador=1&page=1&Palavra= http://www.bb.com.br/portalbb/page501,128,10163,0,0,1,1.bb?&codigoMenu=9904&codigoMenu=9899 http://cinemateca.gov.br/ http://www.usp.br/cinusp/

it does put a 5 or 10% dent in the CO2 production

Actually, you would need to slash those numbers in half. Scientific studies on the total life cycle impact of replacing gasoline with 100% bioethanol in Europe report around 30-50 % reductions in CO2 compared to gasoline. See e.g. slide 12 of this presentation.

in ui design I learned that people are sufficiently similar that you can test on 7 randomly chosen subject and if your ui work on all of them it will be good for 95% of the population, those 5% be damned. People are not that different inside so unless you are looking for a 1/100000 effect you don't need a big sample, around 30 will be sufficient in most of the case, I don't remember the mathematical proof but it exist.

However if your are doing a research on something with a great variance like food preferences you will need a bigger sample. You can read more about the optimal sample size in those paper : http://www.ime.usp.br/~abe/ICOTS7/Proceedings/PDFs/InvitedPapers/3J3_ALIA.pdf and http://nordbotten.com/articles/OptSampleSize.pdf

They tried, but they failed because of the difficulty of reverse-engineering the Apple hardware at the time, not because of some stupid DRM law.

I didn't find redesigning the Mac particularly hard, though I see why others might think so.

In this case Apple prevented a clone from being sold through direct government to government action.

About the current story, trying to make its software run only on its hardware didn't work out too well for IBM nor for Data General and it would be a good thing for Pystar's lawyers to remind people of that.

I have been experimenting with javascript and SVG to make animations for the browser.

Look at this game: http://bighead.poli.usp.br/~juca/code/svg/minigame/minigame.svg

I am now considering to use this to help my teenager cousin. He wants to lear programming and my parents asked me to provide some help.

I agree that it would be great to provide immediate visual gratification. Then, that is why I suggest SVG+javascript instead of the usual HTML+javascript. Because it is much more interesting to draw an SVG in Inkscape, open it in a text editor and attach a script tag than it would be to explain to the boy all those crazy, non-intuitive CSS stuff.

Also, it is a field that provides good oportunities for teaching various concepts, such as XML, (let the boy see the SVG both in an editor such as Inkscape and also in a text editor), DOM handling (getElementById, setAttribute), and even AJAX (when the kid wants something more advanced)!

The benefits:

1) the kid will be learning reusable concepts. All he/she learns can be used also in html. Learning these in an intuitive and friendly environment first makes the html/css stuff less frightening I guess.

2) it will be based on web standards

3) after a quick class about hosting files on a server, the kid will be glad to show his work instantaneously to his friends online. Before that he/she can perfectly work offline editing local files.

Recently my University bought a supercomputer listed between the top500 computer systems in the world. During a class of Computational Physics, my Professor was commenting this issue and noted that the system was intended to serve about 80 research groups with tasks that demand parallel processing. The reality were much more modest though: only two groups were actually using the system (one of them was my Professor's research group), and of this two groups, only his group were taking advantage of parallel programming techniques to use the system the way it should be used.

He said that a new policy would be implanted, this was about 3 or 4 months ago, so I don't know how it is right now. But this reflects the lack of preparation to use such a system, they've wasted tons of cash with something they don't really know how to use properly.

Good catch davidwr! Arthur Clarke is credited with having discovered the geosynchronous orbit used by so many comm satellites today. He once said that he had the most lucrative idea of the space age but never made any money off it.

In modern times, there was an outfit by the name of Ellipso which attempted to patent the elliptical orbits they were going to put the birds in.

Arthur C. Clarke's original paper describing his scheme is reproduced widely throughout the net, the first hit I got is here .

PS: Good one! LOL! "...3 satellites" I'd mod you up if I could

> Actually, I can think of one. Arthur C. Clarke is credited with inventing the communications satellite on the strength of fiction.

On the strength of fiction? More like on the strength of a paper that he wrote on the subject that was published in Wireless World in 1945.

Debian / Ubuntu has had a program to conjugate verbs from the infinitive form for ages:

[pjssilva@catirina:~]$ apt-cache show brazilian-conjugate
Package: brazilian-conjugate
Priority: extra
Section: universe/text
Installed-Size: 224
Maintainer: Rafael Laboissiere
Architecture: all
Source: br.ispell
Version: 2.4.really.3.0.beta4-9.1
Suggests: ibrazilian
Filename: pool/universe/b/br.ispell/brazilian-conjugate_2.4. really.3.0.beta4-9.1_all.deb
Size: 64292
MD5sum: 64f1590f3d7122030d0f742316acb666
Description: Brazilian Portuguese verb conjugator
  This package contains a interactive program (conjugue) capable of
  conjugating portuguese verbs, as spoken in Brazil. The upstream version
  is numbered 1.0, but as it is distributed together with the Ispell
  dictionary for Brazilian Portuguese, it has the same version number as the
  ibrazilian package for Debian.
  .
  Homepage: http://www.ime.usp.br/~ueda/br.ispell/
Bugs: mailto:ubuntu-users@lists.ubuntu.com
Origin: Ubuntu

Here is the example of conjugue in action:

[pjssilva@catirina:~]$ conjugue
Conjugue -- conjugador de verbos para a língua portuguesa
versão 1.1 (outubro de 99) por Ricardo Ueda Karpischek
envie correções, críticas ou sugestões para ueda@ime.usp.br.

Use por sua própria conta e risco.

Tanto o programa quanto o banco de verbos que o acompanha
são distribuídos sob os termos da licença GNU GPL. Isso
significa que podem ser livremente copiados e que trabalhos
derivados devem também ser disponibilizados através dessa
mesma licença.

"?" exibe um pequeno guia de utilização.
"n" exibe algumas notas importantes.

aguarde o término da leitura do banco...
lidos 83 paradigmas
lidos 3991 verbos
: amar
# paradigma: cantar (regular)
IS:amasse:amasses:amasse:amássemos:amásseis:amasse m
FI:amarei:amarás:amará:amaremos:amareis:amarão
TI:amaria:amarias:amaria:amaríamos:amaríeis:amaria m
II:amava:amavas:amava:amávamos:amáveis:amavam
FN:amar:amando:amado
PS:ame:ames:ame:amemos:ameis:amem
MI:amara:amaras:amara:amáramos:amáreis:amaram
IN:ames:ame:amemos:ameis:amem
IA:ama:ame:amemos:amai:amem
FS:amar:amares:amar:amarmos:amardes:amarem
PI:amo:amas:ama:amamos:amais:amam
IP:amar:amares:amar:amarmos:amardes:amarem
EI:amei:amaste:amou:amamos:amastes:amaram

Debian/Ubuntu has had a Portuguese verb program to conjugate verbs for a long time:

[pjssilva@catirina:~]$ apt-cache show brazilian-conjugate
Package: brazilian-conjugate
Priority: extra
Section: universe/text
Installed-Size: 224
Maintainer: Rafael Laboissiere
Architecture: all
Source: br.ispell
Version: 2.4.really.3.0.beta4-9.1
Suggests: ibrazilian
Filename: pool/universe/b/br.ispell/brazilian-conjugate_2.4. really.3.0.beta4-9.1_all.deb
Size: 64292
MD5sum: 64f1590f3d7122030d0f742316acb666
Description: Brazilian Portuguese verb conjugator
  This package contains a interactive program (conjugue) capable of
  conjugating portuguese verbs, as spoken in Brazil. The upstream version
  is numbered 1.0, but as it is distributed together with the Ispell
  dictionary for Brazilian Portuguese, it has the same version number as the
  ibrazilian package for Debian.
  .
  Homepage: http://www.ime.usp.br/~ueda/br.ispell/
Bugs: mailto:ubuntu-users@lists.ubuntu.com
Origin: Ubuntu

First of all, I am not a user of *BSD, although I do appreciate their goals. I am a Debian user and have been one for quite some time now.

One fact to appreciate about Debian is that it is loosing its ties to the Linux kernel and becoming more and more general, now including even BSD efforts (like the kfreebsd5 port).

So, even though I am a Debian user, I have this secret appreciation for all the work that the BSD people have done and continue to do and I am downloading the OpenBSD release from the torrent site listed in the parent post (that is http://openbsd.somedomain.net/).

We all know that these smaller projects don't have big companies supporting them financially and one thing that other people could do to help visibility (and, in the long term, more users, and, perhaps, even commercial support) is to promote OpenBSD.

This starts with being kind on their servers and helping with the serving of the release for others, keeping your torrent clients open and serving others. Please, do help others "free" their machines with Free Software.

I'm doing my small share helping others to "get their foot wet" with the support for the torrent.

Regards, Rogério Brito.

After all the Hindenburg and her brother zeppelins were meant to ferry not only passengers but mail. Call this the next generation of airship communications, although using balloons. I had even thought of this a few years back; mount cell transponder equipment on blimps and have them hover over populated areas to act as relays for mobile phones and wireless Internet.

But if you're going to go to the degree of high altitude balloons, why stop there? Satellites would be the ultimate answer. Ask Arthur C. Clarke. A globe-girdling satellite network along the lines of GPS but carrying voice and data. I know, satellite phones are big and clunky, but so were cell phones at one time. It's possible to get a satellite phone right now, though I doubt they are going to be as cheap as cell phones for a while.

But i still think it's more useful to know where i would stop if I dig a very deep hole

I heard this from Dantzing himself in a pleneray at the International Synmposium on Mathematical Programming at Lausanne in 1997:

In that old days, where computers were new toys, the term programmin had the conotation of "planning". If I remember well, Dantzing said that one of the first uses of the Simplex was to help the Air Force to plan its operations during the war.

As for the non-implementability of gradient based methods in computers. They are as implementable as ODE solvers. This is the domain of floating point numbers, there is no exact implementations of methods. However, there are many good solvers out there solving thousands of real world problems every day. Since I come from academia, I can said some good solvers emerging from universities: the Galahad library, whose web page also provides a list of other good solver like Minos, Knitro, Snopt, Loqo. There is also TANGO which was written and is mantained by some good friends of mine, and the Open Source (CPL) IPOPT.

Things don't stop there. There also many methods non non-smooth problems that employ generalization of the classical concept of gradient and Hessians, like bundle methods from Lemarechal and company, or generalized Newton methos (from Qi and company) and much more.

Optimization is a very rich field from both practical and theoretical aspects. That's why work with it.

I also enjoy learning languages, but the Flashcards I found the most useful are the traditional paper-based ones. I can take those with me and read while I'm in the subway, waiting on a line for something etc. I scripted a program to automatize a little the process, you can check it here.

> But is it POSIX? The government shouldn't be in
> the business of dictating implementations, but
> interfaces. Links?

No POSIX, sorry. In fact, my microprocessor will probably never even have a C compiler for it so this wouldn't make much of a difference anyway. But it is not possible to make a really modern OS if you demand POSIX compatibility - you will just end up with a Unix with a very odd (and irrelevant) kernel or exo-kernel or whatever.

Compatibility with the Internet standard can get you pretty far these days, no matter what your computer looks like on the inside.

My company's link is included in the header of all my posts, right? But though even more outdated, my pages from the 1990s were better organized. Yuck - the main page is trashed :-(

Do you mean something like the WTFPL? :-)

And DLADSPA, as in "distributed ladspa" (written by yours truly): http://gsd.ime.usp.br/~lago/masters.

Just so you know, my masters was about developing such a system for LADSPA: http://gsd.ime.usp.br/~lago/masters. The research and the beta-level, proof-of-concept implementation were concluded in April.

"Search the American Physical Society for the "What's New" newsletter archives. Bob Park and other renown scientists can give you plenty to chew on regarding the utility of low-G manufacturing."

I refer you to Clarke's First and Second Laws .

Particularly the First Law.

Here is a pic of the new Amiga.

This was on my Physics undergraduate course; a rather nice technique. Releated resources from my lecture notes give:

An abstract, a presentation on applying similar techniques to volcanoes, a citation [L. Alvarez et al, Science 167, 832 (1970)] (accessible only to subscribers of Science, I'm afraid), a Physics Today article, a useful paper.

is the conference where the experiment was originally proposed.

On the subject of paedophilia, I've done some digging. The reason I remember about it was that Prince Charles was going to go to Sri Lanka to knight ACC, but that was cancelled because of the allegations. According to this article he was cleared eventually, so I guess he has more than earned the benefit of the doubt. ;-)

He certainly didn't "invent" communications satellites though (at least not in the sense that I use invent, as he didn't give any details of their construction, just the principles involved). I found a copy of his original paper here and it's pretty interesting to read. I especially like the "atomic power" option. Not sure how acceptable that would be today!

Clark has his own set of laws, most of which you have mentioned. He reportably created the first three because Isaac Asimov had three, however over time, a 4th has been added. ACC Laws
1) "When a distinguished but elderly scientist states that something is possible he is almost certainly right. When he states that something is impossible, he is very probably wrong."
2) "The only way of discovering the limits of the possible is to venture a little way past them into the impossible."
3) "Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic."
69th) "Reading computer manuals without the hardware is as frustrating as reading sex manuals without the software."

While this isn't a feature of Evolution per-se, you can integrate bogofilter into it pretty easily. I use it myself and other than a bunch of false positives from a few mailing lists, it's great.

(See also here if you want to know what Clarke meant by 'elderly'.)

It's Clarke's Third Law. Look here. The page includes the book it was published in. Google for "clarke's law" for more.

I prefer the the contrapositive form of his third law:
Any technology distinguishable from magic is insufficiently advanced.

Clarke's three laws, curtesy of Wikipedia ( http://en2.wikipedia.org/wiki/Clarkes_Three_Laws)

• Clarke's First Law When a distinguished but elderly scientist states that something is possible he is almost certainly right. When he states that something is impossible, he is very probably wrong.
• Clarke's Second Law: The only way of discovering the limits of the possible is by venturing a little way past them into the impossible.
• Clarke's Third Law: Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic.

mjm

Now at a station near you !
Windows : Linorg Projeto Brasil ISC | IndianaU | BinaryCode | ibiblio.org | PAIR | SecsUp | Telentente | Umbc Vienna UT

Linux : IndianaU | ISC | BehrSolutions | BinaryCode | ibiblio.org | pair | SecsUp | Telentente | Umbc Vienna UT Belnet | KULeuvenNet CVUT Sunsite FUNET

Look here for a counter argument.

The same thought I had -- about Arthur Clarke's 2001.
About `2001' check this

I agree. Most programming today (at least, the programming I`m doing) is implementing/adapting/optimizing algorithms. This is engineering (although optimizing requires a bit of intuition (I`d rather say "magic", sometimes :-) )).

But to design an algorithm, or prove that one works fine, is more to maths than to engineering, and IMHO that`s what Comp Sci is about. The above paragraph refers to Comp Engineering (these are two different subjects (and courses BTW) where I study).

I thought it was named corporativism . Nevermind, I am not a native speaker...

--
you should have signed a NDA to read my sig

"However, I suspect that it will be anti-US and nationalistic attitudes of countries like Brazil that will bring the OSS revolution to fruition."

ItÂs not an anti-US action, it is all about trying to have the most affordable solution. Brazil is a poor country and we are currently cutting costs everywere. ItÂs better doing this by saving money with M$ licenses than saving money with education and health care.
Brazil is also a large country with population about 180,000,000 distributed over an area 8,511,965 sq km (which is more than US, if you donÂt consider Alaska). I donÂt have many estimates about how many computers our government has, or how many M$ licenses per year are acquired, but I hope it will save us mony and improve our IT knowledge and skills.
We are not India, but we are ready for that. After all IT local costs are low. I have a MSc and BSc degree in CS on a top brazilian university and my salary is less than U$ 15,000 per year. And I am currently unemployed, I think if our government invests in local techonology it will help our country as a whole.

How about Arthur C. Clarke, who practically invented the idea of communications satellites?
Relevant or not, here are some of his "recent" predictions.

I like the 2004 one about human cloning.
Didn't some crack-pot group claim this last year? (I'm too lazy to google it)

I'm surprised no-one has mentioned Arthur C. Clarke and the geosynchronous satellite. Yessir, it was Clarke who proposed the idea of a satellite rotating in the equatorial plane with the same angular velocity of the earth so that it always remains above the same spot on the Earth's surface. Ok, so it was in a scientific paper and not a story, but still I'm sure he originally thought of it as a plot for one of his stories.
You can see his article here.

LADC is the Latin American Symposium on Dependable Computing, the most important event on Dependable Systems in Latin America, in cooperation with IFIP wg 10.4

The proper format for a haiku is 7-5-7.

When a distinguished but elderly scientist states that something is possible he is almost certainly right. When he states that something is impossible, he is very probably wrong.

:-) Depending on my "technology level", this hypothesis (the second one) might be way simpler than the first one, even including the hole in the wall and everrything - and this is my point: Occam's razor is highly dependant on the technology level of the analyst. So are the hypothesis might you answer me. But I might include a "magical" hypothesis on my list (like, in my example, the quartz story, or something fuzzier, or like the soul explanation at the root of this thread). To that, I will use Clark's third law: Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic. Sometime, "magic" is the right answer... even if the details are still fuzzy. ;-)

The timing of this article seems impecable, since I am myself trying to learn about Bayesian Statistics.

I am a Computer Science student studying Computational Biology (more specifically, Sequence Alignments) and while I have a bit of background on Classical Statistics, I was (and still am) completely ignorant about Bayesian Statistics.

It is only now that I'm trying to learn about Hidden Markov Models and its applications to Sequence Alignment that Ifinally decided to learn the basic hypothesis about Bayesian Statistics and how it differs from the hypothesis made by the Classical Statistics.

During my searches for finding introductory material on Bayesian Statistics, I found this course page which has some nice introductory notes, including Bayesian Statistics.

I hope that other people find this resource as useful as I did.

The timing of this article seems impecable, since I am myself trying to learn about Bayesian Statistics.

I am a Computer Science student studying Computational Biology (more specifically, Sequence Alignments) and while I have a bit of background on Classical Statistics, I was (and still am) completely ignorant about Bayesian Statistics.

It is only now that I'm trying to learn about Hidden Markov Models and its applications to Sequence Alignment that Ifinally decided to learn the basic hypothesis about Bayesian Statistics and how it differs from the hypothesis made by the Classical Statistics.

During my searches for finding introductory material on Bayesian Statistics, I found this course page which has some nice introductory notes, including Bayesian Statistics.

I hope that other people find this resource as useful as I did.

My recommendations reflect my reading biases. I like sci-fi that:
Expands our concept of what is possible.
Uses non-contempory settings, or alien worlds to allow the author to explore societies and individuals without the encumbrance of researching a real culture or history. (Speculative fiction)

That said, gadget heavy sci-fi, and sci-fi that relies on mystery and thriller techniques for it's tension, annoys me.

I'll recommend:

Anything by Arthur C Clark(Unathorised fan site). Childhood's End, while several decades old, still reads like a shocking new novel.

Almost anything by Ursula LeGuin(Link skips entry page). The Dispossessed Is a classic. She is far towards the speculative fiction end of the genre.

Philip K Dick is responsible for the short stories behind some of the more interesting sci-fi movies. Blade Runner, Total Recall, Minority Report, to name a few. The short stories behind them, of course, have much more substance. I've just read Ubik which left me dizzy for a week

No, Nicola Tesla did.

"The Great Radio Controversy
He (Tesla) invented Wireless radio, but Guglielmo Marconi was given the credit until June 1943,
when The U. S. Supreme Court finally settled the matter, after 16 months of investigating patent records and scientific publications,
and declared that Nikola Tesla was the true inventor of modern radio technology.
This was known as the Great Radio Controversy.
Unfortunately, most school children are still taught that it was Marconi, which shows
how simple it is for us to regurgitate uncorroborated legends, without checking on the up to date facts."

Also...along the Bell lines...

Bell Labs invented the "cellular concept"...many stations sharing common channels...

Satellite communications were another first.
(And yes, Arthur C. Clarke invented the idea of
geosynchronous orbits which the first Bell Labs Comm Satellite used.
This orbit is also known as the "Clarke Orbit")

http://www.globalideasbank.org/BOV/BV-393.HTML

The biggest problem about getting science fiction applied in what is laughingly called 'the real world' is the old Catch-22. It is best exemplified by Arthur C. Clarke's explanation of why he is not rather better off than he actually is. When he first had the idea of the communications satellite, he tried to get it patented. 'Come, come, Mr Clarke,' said the people at the Patent Office. 'We're a serious outfit, we haven't got time to waste on fantastic ideas like this.' Years later, when the first satellite (with which Arthur was actively involved) actually went up, and the nations were queuing to get their own satellites up, Arthur went back to the Patent Office. 'But, Mr Clarke,' they said, 'the satellite already exists. You should have come to us earlier.'

Typical Bureaucratic bungling.

and there is more:

The very first paper describing the very first constellation, consisting of three satellites in geostationary orbit. Allegedly the only accurate science-fiction prediction ever. Authored by the famous Arthur C. Clarke, before the space race, before Sputnik 1, and before Arthur C. Clarke became a famous author. (There's a mirror of the paper. And now we call it the Clarke orbit, and you can simulate the original proposal.

This Page also discusses the legal issues because at the time Clarke wrote his paper, there was no way to get a satellite into orbit to begin with.

http://www.globalideasbank.org/BOV/BV-393.HTML

The biggest problem about getting science fiction applied in what is laughingly called 'the real world' is the old Catch-22. It is best exemplified by Arthur C. Clarke's explanation of why he is not rather better off than he actually is. When he first had the idea of the communications satellite, he tried to get it patented. 'Come, come, Mr Clarke,' said the people at the Patent Office. 'We're a serious outfit, we haven't got time to waste on fantastic ideas like this.' Years later, when the first satellite (with which Arthur was actively involved) actually went up, and the nations were queuing to get their own satellites up, Arthur went back to the Patent Office. 'But, Mr Clarke,' they said, 'the satellite already exists. You should have come to us earlier.'

Typical Bureaucratic bungling.

and there is more:

The very first paper describing the very first constellation, consisting of three satellites in geostationary orbit. Allegedly the only accurate science-fiction prediction ever. Authored by the famous Arthur C. Clarke, before the space race, before Sputnik 1, and before Arthur C. Clarke became a famous author. (There's a mirror of the paper. And now we call it the Clarke orbit, and you can simulate the original proposal.

This Page also discusses the legal issues because at the time Clarke wrote his paper, there was no way to get a satellite into orbit to begin with.

I'm sure /. will be inundated by people making this connection, but Arthur C. Clarke came up with the idea for communications satellites in geostationary orbits in 1945 (about 25 years before their actual use). However, his idea wasn't outlined in a novel, but in his paper, "Extra-terrestrial Relays. Which is still an interesting read, almost 57 years after its publishing.

When a distinguished but elderly scientist states that something is possible he is almost certainly right. When he states that something is impossible, he is very probably wrong.

They didn't use legos though. Instead they used big robotic arms. I think it was a project at the USP AI lab. They actually taught their robot how to solve the cube, rather than downloading someone else's code from an FTP site. The Lego solution probably wins on the geek factor though.