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-jdm

>What you need is to get some folks on the Supreme Court.

SC Justices aren't elected though, are they?

I'm pretty sure they are nominated by the pres and confirmed by congress, no? I remember Clarence Thomas being nominated by Bush sr. and the drawn-out confirmation hearings in 1991. (Anita Hill?)

Are any of the justices due to retire during Bush's current term? Who are the front-runner candidates for a Bush SC nomination?

I think I should make a counter-plug for lclint (which I haven't worked on, only used), a kind of lint-on-steroids that lets you annotate your program with various kinds of assertions and have them statically checked - those most common being 'this pointer may not be null'. I haven't tried BetterC but I'll have a look. I wonder how well lclint and BetterC interoperate.

Further to this, see Douglas Hofstadter's fine piece on the subject, an unauthorized copy of which can be found here.

Alexis de Tocqueville,
Democracy in America

Try this link for a start. (Replying as an AC to the AC, no need to trouble people with OT chat..)

I go to VT, and while we don't drive our honor code up the wall like some other school, our CS dept very much discourages any group work whatsoever. Basically, if you haven't holed yourself up in complete isolation till the program is due, you've probably violated the honor code somewhere along the line. They're so fervent about it they have a program running(i forget what's it's called, moss something or other) that will look for similarities between everyone's code. I'm not sure how well it works, but i know a few friends of mine who were caught cheating on a program their freshman year(though they submitted identicle code, so as far as i can tell they deserved it).

This document could be all the more interesting and useful if it were marked up with SMIL. Using this, we could synchronize the display of a transcript, including the names of all the speakers. Last fall at the Virginia Center for Digital History I saw a demo of a similar treatment of some audio surrounding Kennedy's administration and the Cuban Missile Crisis.

Greets!

The reason that 3D isn't popular or practical - paper. Our current metaphor for information derives from Xerox Parc, a PAPER company. A faithful emulation of an office desk is NOT the best way to represent the complex infoverse we live in.

And the current web is not the best way to represent it either. Go back to hypertextual research before the web - look at Guide, look at Microcosm, before the brain damage of HTML and Mosaic set in.

Even better, go and look at Xanadu and ZigZag - representing information and the relationships between individual pieces of it is a complex task, perhaps made harder by our current metaphors. See ANYTHING by Ted Nelson, such as his technical briefing at the latest Hypertext conference.Read Vannevar Bush's "As we may think"

I would argue that we don't need 3D browsers, but MULTIDIMENSIONAL infoviewers, that can let us define the relationships and properties that we are interested at any moment, AND LET US CHANGE THEM easily and intuitively - I still remember the only good part of Johnny Mnemonic - zooming around cyberspace - also, to a lesser degree Lawnmower Man.

This is the way forward, and we need to learn from the games industry - Look at Homeworld, Q3D, even Elite - these are the kind of intuitive navigational and representational metaphors we ned to adopt to allow people to create, browse, populate and interact with their information.

Let us be imaginative, and move forwards to a representation of information as something we can use, rather than something we write down.

Links:
Microcosm:(Home) http://www.iam.ecs.soton.ac.uk/
(Review)http://www.man.ac.uk/MVC/SIMA/mcosm/toc.ht ml
Guide: http://www.iath.virginia.edu/elab/hfl0142.html
HyperText Conference: http://www.ht01.org/
GZigZag - http://gzigzag.sf.net
Xanadu: http://www.udanax.com
http://www.xanadu.com
As We May Think: http://www.theatlantic.com/unbound/flashbks/comput er/bushf.htm
The electronic labyrinth - a good intro to hypertext, slanted toward literature http://www.iath.virginia.edu/elab/elab.html

Greets!

The reason that 3D isn't popular or practical - paper. Our current metaphor for information derives from Xerox Parc, a PAPER company. A faithful emulation of an office desk is NOT the best way to represent the complex infoverse we live in.

And the current web is not the best way to represent it either. Go back to hypertextual research before the web - look at Guide, look at Microcosm, before the brain damage of HTML and Mosaic set in.

Even better, go and look at Xanadu and ZigZag - representing information and the relationships between individual pieces of it is a complex task, perhaps made harder by our current metaphors. See ANYTHING by Ted Nelson, such as his technical briefing at the latest Hypertext conference.Read Vannevar Bush's "As we may think"

I would argue that we don't need 3D browsers, but MULTIDIMENSIONAL infoviewers, that can let us define the relationships and properties that we are interested at any moment, AND LET US CHANGE THEM easily and intuitively - I still remember the only good part of Johnny Mnemonic - zooming around cyberspace - also, to a lesser degree Lawnmower Man.

This is the way forward, and we need to learn from the games industry - Look at Homeworld, Q3D, even Elite - these are the kind of intuitive navigational and representational metaphors we ned to adopt to allow people to create, browse, populate and interact with their information.

Let us be imaginative, and move forwards to a representation of information as something we can use, rather than something we write down.

Links:
Microcosm:(Home) http://www.iam.ecs.soton.ac.uk/
(Review)http://www.man.ac.uk/MVC/SIMA/mcosm/toc.ht ml
Guide: http://www.iath.virginia.edu/elab/hfl0142.html
HyperText Conference: http://www.ht01.org/
GZigZag - http://gzigzag.sf.net
Xanadu: http://www.udanax.com
http://www.xanadu.com
As We May Think: http://www.theatlantic.com/unbound/flashbks/comput er/bushf.htm
The electronic labyrinth - a good intro to hypertext, slanted toward literature http://www.iath.virginia.edu/elab/elab.html

From James Joyce's The Dead: Better pass boldly into that other world, in the full glory of some passion, than fade and wither dismally with age.

I'm not religious either but at times I've felt the impulse to be part of something larger than myself, to make some sacrifice that would distinguish an ordinary life. People without that particular impulse may find it hard to understand people that have it.

With the benefit of hindsight, it's an impulse that is generally best resisted. It means that people will die heroically for a bad cause as easily as a good one. People will commit atrocities for a good cause as easily as a bad one.

In normal times it makes one suspicious of all creeds and causes. After the events of September 11, however, one realizes that one must choose a side with all its faults or be justly labeled a traitor and a coward. Like it or not, one is part of something larger than oneself.

I'm not religious but I turn to Psalm 144:

Blessed be the LORD my strength, which teacheth my hands to war, and my fingers to fight:
Bow thy heavens, O LORD, and come down: touch the mountains, and they shall smoke.
Cast forth lightning, and scatter them: shoot out thine arrows, and destroy them
Send thine hand from above; rid me, and deliver me out of great waters, from the hand of strange children;
Whose mouth speaketh vanity, and their right hand is a right hand of falsehood

The cited article doesn't say anything profound. (I got particularly worried when he said, "global variables and GOTO statements ... may be exactly what the software needs to marry form with function," and when his example of beautiful software turned out to be a fragment of Visual Basic. "It is practically impossible to teach good programming to students that have had a prior exposure to BASIC: as potential programmers they are mentally mutilated beyond hope of regeneration." --said, tongue at most partly in cheek, by Edsger W. Dijkstra, in "How do we tell truths that might hurt?")

Richard P. Gabriel (whose essay on "Mob Programming" was recently discussed on Slashdot) has a far more profound take on the subject. He has a summary of Christopher Alexander's work on architecture and "The Quality Without A Name," and how it relates to software; you can read the PDF version on his Web site, or Google's cached text version.

Excerpts: "there are programs we can look at and about which we say, 'no way I'm maintaining that kluge' ... and there are other programs about which we can say, 'wow, who wrote this!'" He suggests how you can recognize software with The Quality: "every part of the code is transparently clear -- there are no sections that are obscure to gain effciency; everything about it seems familiar; I can imagine changing it, adding some functionality; I am not afraid of it, I will remember it." There are even suggestions, not how to make more beautiful software, but how to learn to do so.

Gabriel helped start the "patterns movement" in the object-oriented community. Aside from the Design Patterns book, patterns (and especially generative pattern languages) have yet to make a significant inpact on software development. Maybe someday, maybe not.

My favorite is the vacuum-tube unit they use to store ONE decimal digit of data...

My favorite is the vacuum-tube unit they use to store ONE decimal digit of data...

The format of the NASA tapes is not mentioned, but the physical format was probably one of the above. There are plenty of such tape drives available, some are new and most are used.

Reading the tape should not involve any dead people, so the problem probably is with the format of the data.

Then, let the contest do the work for you. Watch as your prima donna gets functionally mauled and then garbage collected into oblivion by some of the most talented programmers in the world. Most likely, your elite coder boy won't even understand the challenge task. (Anybody remember the '99 task? Ouch.)

From that point on, subtle reminders of his contest performance will keep your boy in check. "Gee, I thought you would have managed to finish the first part of the challenge task, at least. You must have been sick or something. Well, there's always next year's contest!"

Try not to chuckle aloud when he mentions that he won't be entering next year because of vacation plans.

They are making an unforgivable marketing mistake: for the sake of "partnering" with publishers, they are stunting the size of their own market. All the failed e-books, the tepid reception to Microsoft Reader, and a huge untapped opportunity for Adobe all can be attributed to the fact they did not emphasize free perfectly legal and legitimate content.

Microsoft links (rather shyly, burying the link under all the paid content links) to the University of Virginia Library Etext Center but this source has only 1600 books. That's less than 1% of well-known books, and a tiny fraction of all books that have no copyright coverage. There is a lot of free (speech, beer) text out there but very little is formatted for an acceptable online (or print-on-demand) reading experience. And e-books take up a tiny fraction of the space of MP3s.

If you really want to throw a bomb into the IPR world, get the Library of Congress or whatever your nation's corresponding institution is to provide a high-quality e-text of all materials that are no longer under copyright.

> Brewster's Millions 2000:"30 million in a month,
> eh?" *picks up phone* "BUY NORTEL! BUY LINUX!
> TECH TECH TECH!"

If memory serves, one of the provisions in the deal was that Brewster had to get value for his money. I'm not sure buying tech stocks counts.

BTW, did you know that "Brewster's Millions" was originally a novel by George Barr McCutcheon (published 1902), and that according to IMDB it's been made into a movie at least six times? You can read the novel online thanks to UVa's Electronic Text Center.

Yes, I know it's only a C compiler, but you'd be surprised how coding in the Win32API instead of MFC can speed up and un-bloat your code.

The only contact with MS you really need is to download the PSDK, which so far has been free and anonymous, and even then the PSDK is just nice to have, not essential.

Doug Lea (well known C++ programmer and writer; teaches at SUNY/Oswego)

Kevin Sullivan (U. of Virginia)

A couple of less positive articles from Australia.

An article at O'Reilly.

Granted, I know that I'm posting a little bit later than usual on this topic, but I felt that the need existed for Mister Jefferson's Academical Institution to be mentioned.
True, there is an exit, 118, that let's one off there at one of the medical research centers from I-64, but that is not the point that is not the subject to discuss today.
The University of Virginia used to have Dr. Solomon loaded onto all computers that were in computer labs as well as PCs that students ordered through the bookstore. This practice ended three years ago when all lab computers were loaded with Norton Antivirus, ordered computers still came with Dr. Solomon.
This past year, the IT&C (more commonly known as ITC), purchased a site license for the University to have the Enterprise edition of Norton. All computers in labs and PCs that were bought through the school run this stuff and I definitely will say that the number of virus reports this year is down. The only catch of course is that a lot of lazy students don't give a rip about security and so there are still viruses around. The typical way of handling this is a traceroute where the IP address is blocked. Most students haven't a clue why they're ethernet connection isn't working and call up ITC and ask and then are told to install the Norton software and it's all good. Nonetheless, UVA is definitely big on security this year. I suggest giving them a looksie up. . .http://www.itc.virginia.edu

The evidence is pretty anecdotal, but each person's internal map of pecking orders and trust networks seems to grow not much beyond that size. You and I can track coolness factors for about 150 of our closest friends, no more.

This is not entirely true. I know that this has been the result of some experiment in social psychology, but there is enough evidence that the sizes of individual ego networks may vary greatly, often beyond those 150 heads. These results have been problematic mainly due to the environmental settings their test persons were subject to, i.e. their role within Western culture. However, if you look at the ego network of someone really prominent within one's society (a famous scholar, a politician etc., someone who knows and has to communicate with lots of people independently and intensively), you'll find that they are often larger. I know of no historical examples where there are scientific surveys, but one is currently in preparation about an Arabic scholar in 18th century Egypt who had intensive scholarly contacts all over Northern Africa, Arabia and most of Asia, and his ego network comprised of well over one thousand individuals.

Of course, this does not invalidate your idea.

Personally, I find the idea to have something like a permanent trend database collected from what individual users considered "cool" at a given time rather fascinating. It allows for some really interesting social analyses, for example whether coolness trends originate from individuals who are in the position of "hubs" in a social network or rather from individuals more to the edge and so on.

However, the proposal definitely has the problem of anonymity. When individual user's trends are trackable, individual anonymity can no longer be guaranteed; effectively, DoubleClick already does quite a lot of what you want the trend database to do! I doubt whether just anonymizing the data will solve this fairly basic problem; social networks are very often harder or even impossible to reconstruct when the data is fully anonymized (because it is much harder to reconstruct who interacts with whom), and partial anonymization is practically equivalent to no anonymization at all, because when you speak of "User A" instead of "Joe User", but keep track of his taste, his age, gender and so on, as well as his social interaction within the observed framework, you may just as well keep the name because it would be rather easy to correlate the data with external material and thus recover the individual's identity.

And just to give the crowd some material regarding social networks, here are some social network-related links:

• The Oracle of Bacon - play and delve into the network of Hollywood actors (i.e. who acted with whom)
• Visualizing Social Networks - paper by Linton S. Freeman, social network scientist, that explains some of the theory, with applications
• Freeman's personal homepage, with links and papers - no, I'm not associated with him in any way :-)
• The International Network for Social Network Analysis - scientific association with fairly self-referential name, with links

Mary Shelley could not have written Frankenstein in 1803, I doubt she wrote anything back then - since she was only six years old in 1803. She was born in 1797 and wrote Frankenstein around 1816. It was published in 1818. You can read more about her life at http://www.kimwoodbridge.com/maryshel/life.shtml. The full text of the book can be found here.
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When Professor Gies talks of "the community of trust," he is specifically speaking about the University of Virginia Honor Code. This is a formalized institution at UVa, consisting of the following components.

1) In order to be accepted to the University, a student must read and sign the Honor Code rules and regulations (mainly don't cheat, don't help others cheat, turn in cheaters, understand that everyone will be doing this, too). I think in 1986 when I applied to UVa (I didn't go there), one of the essays on the application required me to tell the University what I thought about the Honor Code.

(2)Whenever anyone takes an exam or turns in a project at UVa, they are required to append and sign a statement that says something to the extent of "On my honor, I have neither given nor received aid on this work."

3) Anyone caught cheating is tried before a council of students, not professors, and can be expelled from the university.

As you can see, the University has tried to create a community where honesty and personal integrity are created and maintained by the student body, not imposed by the University Administration. I'm certain that this is the "community of trust" that was referred to.

BTW, this accusation of wide spread cheating is a huge black eye to the University. They pride themselves in the Honor Code as something that sets them apart from other schools. If it turns out that their students are ignoring it, part of their self-perceived elite reputation is seriously tarnished.

My dad, who works with Professor Bloomfield at U.Va. brought the original article in Charlottesville's local paper to my attention earlier this week (I tried to provide a link to this article but it's no longer on their web site). This is the culmination of Bloomfield's LONG fight with the Honor system at U.Va. A few years ago, he told my dad he had basically given up on trying to catch cheaters. His class is SO popular (it fulfills the Universities basic physical science requrements for non-science majors) that we (my dad and I) had to rig up a way to "tele-conference" in 2 other class rooms of students (I used to run the video camera in the main lecture hall, too). Because of its popularity, he's had to deal with so many people (who don't care about the science but just want to graduate and play football) blatently cheating on the final paper (which is worth 25% of your course grade, BTW). I, personally, can't believe how many people scheduled for graduation are taking a course intended to first-year students (the 100 designation at U.Va.).

However, almost nothing has been done by the honor committee on his previous referalls. I think this is mostly due to U.Va.'s 'single-sanction' policy (see http://www.student.virginia.edu/~honor/ ) and a student jury refusing to pass a judgement that will result in expulsion. Lou said it was too much work for him and nothing ever came of it.

I'm glad he decided to have one more go at it, though. Maybe they'll listen to him this time.

When you say stuff like 'The whole concept of software 'use license' is wrongheaded and has no sound legal basis' why do you limit the scope of what you say? You should just come out and say there's no basis for private property and be honest with us.

I'll leave the discussions about the general basis of private property to guys like Proudhon, thanks. As for "intellectual property", it is defintely artifical, but it does have some small legal basis in Congress's constitutional power to grant copyrights and patents. (Although it is a significant error to consider these temporary state-created monopolies as "property".)

However, even "intellectual property" notions of copyright do not justify user licences! The justification is that loading a program into memory is making a copy. Nonsense. Loading a program is no more copying it than reading a book in making a copy in my brain.

We've seen you on this board prattling and spreading your crap for ages now, and it's always the same.

Shouldn't you be out there handing out leaflets or something, or hacking the party Paper?

Tom Swiss | the infamous tms | http://www.infamous.net/

Okay, I'm a NEC/HNSX Supercomputers employee, on the verge of becoming a Cray employee (because of the agreement they signed), but I'm not speaking for anyone else but me here, of course. :-)

I don't know why people bother with such a news. Sun's gonna provide the I/O processor for a not-so-high-end supercomputer. And?

A few weeks ago, there was a real bombshell: Cray would drop the anti-dumping legal action, re-opening the US market to japanese supercomputers. Cray will even become the sole reseller of the NEC SX Series in North America!

If you go take a look at www.cray.com, you'll see that this agreement with Sun occupies a single line in their news listing, while the NEC agreement is a big framed box that occupies about half of my screen here.

For some time now, american supercomputer customers were petitioning to get japanese machines, because it been a long time the american machines had been up to any good. Instead, we hear about the SV2, which will barely surpass the few years old SX-5 processing power, with less memory throughput than the SX-5.

I won't deal with the "no need for big clunky vector supercomputers, we have clusters". I believe a whole lot into clusters, but they're freakin' hard to program, and some things just won't be as fast (hey, the SX-5 CPU has a 256 bytes wide memory path! that's not bits, that's bytes! what can you do with your puny gigabit ethernet cluster interconnections?).

Look at these bandwidth benchmark scores. The closest thing to a cluster, the Origin machines, are literally crushed to bits by the SX-5. And they're doing twice as good than the SV1.

As for using old big iron machines for stuff like fridges and so on, there was a cool thing at one of our customer site, at the University of Stuttgart: a Cray coffee table. :-)

Nothing beats talking about supercomputer technology while drinking some orange juice on top of a Cray machine. NOTHING.

There is a big difference between a vector supercomputer and some random collection of microcomputers. It's bandwidth and the ability to efficiently handle large datasets. See the Stream Benchmark.

How many people realize that this sound bite originated as a lame rationalization?

The case in question, Schenck v. United States, arose from the prosecution of Schenck for distributing anti-draft leaflets in violation of the Espionage Act of 1917. The analogy between peaceful distribution of literature and causing a panic with a false fire alarm is dubious, to say the least. Less generously (but more accurately), the analogy is an intellectually dishonest evasion of the Constitution.
/.

Thanks for the pointer; it looks like the paper you referenced is the one at http://www.cs.virginia.edu/~evans/cs551/saltzer/ "The Protection of Information in Computer Systems". Interesting paper.

Razor 1911, one of the world's largest IT piracy conglomerates, announced its newest software distribution yesterday. Sold under the name (version number?) of "31337," the package is causing quite a stir among PC enthusiasts, especially Windows users. RabidWarth0g, a courier for Razor 1911, described for us a few of the most important new features in the 12-CD package.

"Users of proprietary software no longer have to struggle with an incomplete set of tools, difficult installation procedures, and high maintenance costs. Our new solution, 31337, brings the user interface of the quality Windows 98 operating system up-to-date with that of the technically inferior 'Linux' and 'BSD' distributions, which were long preferred for their ease of use and extensive lineup of applications. Our new system, 31337, combines the stability and power of Windows with the ease of use traditionally ascribed only to UNIX-like systems. In short: 31337! j00 ph33r!"

The new system is installed and automatically maintained by the use of the new "Razor Package Manager," or RPM. RPM checks compressed .diz files for virii and trojans, installs their binaries into the proper directories, enters the required serialz, and patches the Windows registry as required. RPM maintains a database of the thousands of appz, gamez, mp3z, t-filez, gifz, jpgz, phreakz, and other filez installed on a system so that any package may be cleanly uninstalled at any time. 31337 also contains sophisticated remote administration tools such as BO2K and Netbus installed by default. An animated paper clip on the desktop guides users through difficult parts of the installation.

User groups applauded the distro's completeness-it includes networking tools (IE 5.0, AOL Instant Messenger, Microsoft Outlook), text processing software (Microsoft and WordPerfect Office 2000), a warez replacement for Postscript capabilities (Acrobat), and many, many games that -- surprisingly -- run as well as they do on Linux (Quake, Unreal, Solitaire). Affirming Razor's commitment to the pirated software community, the distribution also includes development tools such as hex editors and ripping tools for various media formats.

A 14 year old sKr!p7 k!DD!3 told our reviewers, "This operating system is very advanced. I was able to use my skillz to set up Quake and its networking in under an hour." His parents noted the AI features: "That cute little paper clip is so smart! He even opens our e-mail attachments for us!"

In addition to its extensive lineup of programs (none of the 12 CDs are bloated by source code), 31337 offers improved hardware compatibility over other distributions of proprietary software. Many peripherals are detected and configured after just a few reboots. Additionally, some manufacturers offer drivers for download. While bleeding-edge technologies such as real memory protection, symmetric multi-processing, and RAID are not yet supported, 31337 may work with them as soon as next year's kernel is cracked.

However, free software advocates insisted on spreading FUD about the new distribution. According to the gnu.org "Warez Mythz" page:

"The system's closed-source development methods are completely unreliable. Bugfixes, as usual, will take weeks or months to appear on developers' websites and in retail stores. So-called 'Service Packz' only serve to protect Razor 1911's interests in keeping the system incompatible with freedom."

Warth0g replied to these accusation by pointing to Razor 1911's long reputation for being the first on the scene with the latest hackz, crackz, and ripz. He also quoted part three of the Warez Advocacy-HOWTO:

"Relax with some free beer."

Authors of the software bundled by 31337's have been strangely quiet about the matter, neither refuting nor accepting GNU's accusations. Microsoft, Corel, Symantec, Adobe, Id, and others seemed to pretend that they had never even heard of this enormous collaborative development effort.

Released at the end of April in Russia, Africa, and South Asia, the CD-ROM version of 31337 will be available in the United States as soon as licensing issues are worked out. Until then, get 31337 from your friendly local warez d00d.

The full version (avaliable only from Razor 1911 distribution centers) also includes 100 megs of .nfo documentation and two months of 0-day updates.

Posted on Wed 24 May 05:49:39 2000 PDT

Written by Anand Desai ad3u@virginia.edu

His book The protestant ethic and the spirit of capitalism traces the historical antecedents very clearly. Check out Chapter 2 (54k) in particular for an exposition of how maximising business profit became a devout obligation.

Ironically, now we anticipate the Flood (global warming) that is the direct consequence of this sequence of thoughts and behaviours.

His book The protestant ethic and the spirit of capitalism traces the historical antecedents very clearly. Check out Chapter 2 (54k) in particular for an exposition of how maximising business profit became a devout obligation.

Ironically, now we anticipate the Flood (global warming) that is the direct consequence of this sequence of thoughts and behaviours.

Batch systems have been around a long time in the HPC world. Gridware was orginally developed by GENIAS Software GmbH. GENIAS produced a batch scheduler called Codine, which was a commercial version of DQS. In fact, Sun's Grid Engine FAQ even states that Sun Grid Engine is a new name for CODINE.

Of course, DQS/Codine/Grid isn't the only batch-scheduling/cycle-scavenging game around. Other players are:

• Condor
• openPBS and it's commercial version PBS Pro
• Load Leveler (which IIRC is IBM's commercial implementation derived from Condor)
• LSF which is the product Sun was previously co-marketing until they purchased Gridware (probably because of the high per CPU cost of LSF).
• and lots of others that I've forgotten, many based on the once-common NQS/NQE batch system.
• There are also systems like Legion that represent a sort of ``next step'' computing enviroment.

Many of these predate newcomers like SETI@home and Mosix by serveral years. Most also provide hooks into parallel computing APIs like MPI, PVM, openMP, or something similar.

Batch scheduling and cycle-scavening are old concepts. Having wasted away my years as a graduate student submitting large quantum chem jobs to Crays, it's nice to see lots of groups continuing to squeeze every useful cycle out of existing hardware. Sun's recent annoucements are just the latest update to an old product---not a new idea, and not a Mosix/SETI rip-off.

• U+1D000..U+1D0F5 - Byzantine Musical Symbols
• U+1D100..U+1D1DD - Western Musical Symbols

FYI, other Unicode editors for Unix are available, e.g. yudit. Good luck!

They will avoid 2.4 GHz, not because of the resonant frequency of water (Which it is NOT, check this link). When the frequency was chosen for microwave ovens, they chose 2.45 GHz because they knew that it would interfere with other forms of communication, and they wanted to keep the interferers all in one (relatively unused at the time) place. Enough RF at virtually any frequency will heat things.

There are other frequencies used for heating things, they are in what is called ISM (Industrial, Scientific, Medical) bands. These bands are a bit more "anything goes" than other frequencies. The FCC rules are in this hefty tome. I'll leave it up to you to find the applicable parts. That's why Bluetooth and 802.11 work in the 2.4 GHz region. They have more free reign for what you can do, but you also have to accept interference without complaint.

Distribution of binaries is of the utmost importance for platforms like Windows, where a compiler does not come with the operating system, and the compilers that are readily available are often non-free.

So what if MinGW or Cygwin doesn't come with the system? They're both easy to download and install, and they're both GPL'd free software (based on GCC and other GNU stuff). Or, you can use the (non-free but free beer) LCC compiler. However, Mac OS 9 systems (that can't run OS X because don't have a G3 mobo and 128 MB of RAM), on the other hand, don't even have a command line; good luck getting GNU anything to work.

The Memex idea may also be worth mentioning.

I am right. I direct you to this graphic for the proof.

Don't challenge a guy who got a 99% on his Civic final! ;-)

For info on a prototype, look here. I can't tell you much more about it, except that the solar car team (which I am on) shares a lab with them and they often leave doughnuts laying around.

Provide a source for your information please.

Yep, ok. The first part (Eric licensed the rights to CRC) was stated on his website (http://www.astro.virginia.edu/~eww6n/), which used to advertise the book. The second part is clear because his website has (or always used to have) a request for entries to be contributed on those areas of maths which are not yet covered.

BTW AFAIK CRC always "tolerated" the treasure trove being online, at least in the days when Eric used to randomly block 10 letters of the alphabet (so, e.g. the entries for words beginning with A,G,K,L,N,P,S,T,V,Y would be unaccessable). I guess they've just decided to have a problem with it now that he's (apparently) working for Wolfram.

Well, I am generally socially liberal and fiscally moderate-to-conservative. Which puts me more in line with Gore than with any other candidate, including Nader. But what really solidifies my vote is the future of the supreme court: "Even while disavowing any anti-abortion litmus test, Republican nominee-apparent George W. Bush has said he will seek to appoint more Justices like Scalia and Thomas to the Supreme Court." While these justices claim to want to follow the original intent, they seem to ignore the intent of James Madison regarding the rights of conscience. Additionally, when individual rights and liberties come in conflict with the powers of a civil authority, they almost always vote to support the civil authority. That is the biggest reason I'll be voting for Gore.

Cheers,

Craig

--

What the hell, I did look it in a book called, "Archi med es' Revenge" written by Paul Hoffman in 1988

In that book he devotes a chapter to the mathematics of voting. He constructed an example to show that if one candidate actually increases his popularity in the polls, it would cause him to lose an election using the "Plurality with Elimination" scheme.

This shows an example of the paradox in action.

--R

Microsoft has cooked up a proprietary file format and a proprietary Windows-only ebook-reader that, if successful, would create yet another barrier to the open sharing of information.

See http://etext.lib.virginia.edu ... where well over a thousand works in the public domain have been converted to Microsoft's proprietary format.

Among the "advantages" of Microsoft's format is encryption -- an anti-"piracy" measure. I don't know much about it, since Microsoft's Web page on that subject is all buggered up and won't display properly with Netscape.

There is an Open Ebook Forum that has documented a text format, but it has not documented anything about encryption, rights management, etc.

It is not merely the prospect of a single company controlling the "standard" that I find chilling; it is the opportunity for the standard to be abused in the ways the DVD cartel has abused its power. By companies, or by governments.

Imagine geocoding that keeps out bad thoughts from other countries.

Imagine some 14-year-old programmer getting arrested for making it possible to read.

Pascal is dead? I hope nobody tells my employer. It's paying me a lot of money to document Pascal APIs!

Seriously, though, you raise an interesting point, if you rephrase from "what killed Pascal" to "why C overtook Pascal as a standard language." I don't think you can blame Berkeley Pascal. I can't cite specific figures, but I doubt if Berkeley Pascal was ever as widely used as any commercial Pascal compiler, especially Turbo Pascal.

Pascal probably suffered more from the ascendency of Unix, which is closely tied to C. And in general, C is better than older dialects of Pascal for writing APIs. Kernighan has a classic paper on the topic. (Apologies for the unstable link. Bell Labs appears to be re-organizing their web site.)

But on rereading "Why Pascal is not my Favorite Program Language" for the first time in many years, I made an interesting discovery. All of Kernighan comments are insightful, but all but one point is now simply out of date. (For example, Borland's Object Pascal is much more extensible than Wirth's original classroom language.) The one point he makes that still applies after a couple of decades is this: Pascal is designed to be compiled in a single pass. Kernighan objects that this makes for source code that reads "from the bottom up" and to related limitations on the order of declarations.

what makes this interesting is that this one "limitation" of Pascal works out very well in Borland's current Delphi product. In a RAD tool, source code organization is the IDE's problem, not the programmer's. And having a single-pass language means you can have IDE features that rely on on-the-fly parsing, such as automatic code completion. Borland's C++ Builder (which is essentially a tool for writing Delphi programs in C++) also has this feature, but it is much less usable in that product, due to the multiple passes you need to resolve a reference in C++.

And of course, Pascal programs compile a lot faster than equivalent C++. I was recently playing with a Linux Pascal compiler (I think you can guess which one) and was somewhat bemused to find that roughly 40% of my compile time was used up by the copyright notice displayed at the beginning of each compile!

"The team winning first prize in the competition will be awarded: ...

* Peer recognition: Finally, the context judges agree to state at least once during the presentation of the awards that the winning team's programming language is ``the programming tool of choice for discriminating hackers.''"

1999 was writing an optimizer for their fictitious NPC language, and 1998 was to implement a program that plays pousse.

Nope. Thomas Jefferson in a letter to James Madison:

"I hold it that a little rebellion, now and then, is a good thing..."

More Jefferson quotes are here.

Was it Lenin that said "A little revolution now and then is a good thing."

Maybe Corel should try the same tactic.

This term seems to be under some discussion here, so I thought it apropo to find a legal definition of the term. This is a paper that I found discussing the definition of a trade secret, how a company demonstrates that something is such, a quick history of the law and a description of the elements that have to be included in a lawsuit alleging that a secret has been stolen. Very interesting, and it seems that, yes, just about any piece of information can be classified as a trade secret provided some relatively vague standards are met.