Slashdot Mirror

See here for a short introduction to the Hall and Quantum Hall effect.

ArXiv is great, but the problem is the non-refereed aspect of it. We need properly refereed free (or cheap :) journals... and there is really no reason why not. People don't get paid to referee papers, or submit papers... there is just this man in the middle eating all this money for no net gain to the community.

A journal that had all its articles freely available electronically could easily charge for paper copies as long as it was reputable. All we need is for some big names to get their act together. An example where they *have* got their act together is from my University:

Geometry & Topology

This is a peer reviewed journal on (guess what) geometry and topology. All the articles published in the journal are freely available electronically, or you can order the paper version at a low price.

I don't see any reason for any extra distribution fee.

(I'm a network administrator at the University of Warwick, by the way.

So: If anybody has detailed hardware/instruction set/IO specs, i'd love to see them.

Right off the bat, I'd like to state that I think whoever moded this down was clueless. ("flamebait"? As if the 604 User Group is going to respond in outrage? Get real.)

Second, in answer to your direct question, I don't have an documenation on it--at least, a quick search of my bookshelf didn't turn up anything older than the 1602--but I'll let you know if I come across anything.

Finally, you may be interested in a simulation of EDSAC, "the world first stored program computer to operate a regular service." I also enjoyed reading "The First Computers" (by Rojas & Hashagen, MIT press), which goes into a number of the claiments for "first" in the field.

-- MarkusQ

When I was studying there, Warwick University ran a similar course. I think it was only 10 week, but if they still run it they should have a summary on the web.

I thought that soap can only guarantee a local minimum for travelling salesman, not necessarily the global shortest path. Also, if the problem is sufficiently complicated (millions or more nodes, multiple dimensions, etc) it becomes prohibitive to construct a physical representation.

That said, it's likely that organic or quantum solutions are the right approach due to their built-in massive parallelisms.

Interesting to see Michael's take on individual creators and corporations. Quoth your Constitution, with his response:

"to promote the progress of science and useful arts, by securing for limited times to authors and inventors the exclusive right to their respective writings and discoveries" (U.S. Constitution, Article I, Section 8).

Hmm, do you notice it doesn't say to publisher or manufacturers. . .I wonder if there would be a possible lawsuit for the cases in which the publishers get the first copyright. . .even on "works for hire". . . ?

Indeedy. For the benefit of US-based readers: the mainstream of international law doesn't have a "work for hire" concept. The mainstream isn't copyright at all, it's Authors' Rights, and they are personal rights: principally the right to be identified as the author, and the right to defend the integrity of your work. Economic rights flow from these, which are akin to human rights - the opposite of the case in English-speaking countries where copyright is a commodity.

In the USofA, no author has either of these badly-named "moral rights" (except an artist who creates a work in a signed and numbered edition of less than 200). There's a current of opinion that this puts the USA in flagrant breach of international law - that Berne Convention.

Except that when it came to writing laws covering authors of software, all the people who understood the law didn't understand software. So the software companies snuck "work made for hire" into Authors' Rights countries.

/.ers shouldn't have too much trouble imagining a parallel universe in which software authors have the right to a byline and the right to stop marketdroids interfering with the poetry of their code. Hell, in this world it would probably be compulsory for every error message to have a personal by-line. Which would be nice.

Summary: there's a world of difference between laws which protect individual rights of authorship, and those which protect the Moloch Media Corp. Unfortunately, the US and the UK have the wrong kind. I'm trying to work out how to change that. See this paper on moral rights and the Tasini -v- Times case about to go before the Supremes.

After a great deal of mucking about, the general situation in europe is that numbers outside your local area start with '0', followed by an area code and a local number.

Numbers outside your local country start with '00' followed by a country code, an area code, and a local number.

Of course we do it differently over here to the way the USA does it, but I think that atleast the '00' seems more logical.

It follows that when dialling other planets, one should simply dial '000' followed by the planet code, country code, area code, and local number.

Galaxy-wide that becomes '0000' (assuming inhabitants of other galaxies have ten fingers/tentacles/etc. or we WILL be counting in hexadecimal)

However, the area codes in the UK have been playing silly b****rs over recent years. Down here in Portsmouth, Hampshire, the area code was once 705, so dialling Portsmouth from, say, London was 0705 xxxxxx.

The first major change was to change the London '01' code to 071 and 081; depending on whether you were in inner or outer London (071 for inner london), this left the 01 prefix free.

The second major change was to add a '1' to the front of the vast majority of area codes in the UK, so Portsmouth went from 0705 to 01705. Some cities opened up new codes starting 011, such as Bristol, where 0272 became 0117, and to keep the length of all national dialled numbers constant, the local numbers were extended from their old 6-digits to 7-digits, by sticking a '9' on the front of existing numbers. So 0272 654321 became 0117 9654321.

Next up, as local number ranges started to run out of numbers, as everyone got second lines for internet use, and the number of local telco's, each with different number block assignments exploded, some areas started to run out of numbers.

One of the affected cities was Portsmouth, and together with Southampton, they were allocated the new area code 023, with local numbers being prefixed with 92 for Portsmouth, and 80 for Southampton, so we had to put up with two number changes in just a few years. Old numbers like 0705 654321 became 023 92654321.

At the end of the day, it's not particularly difficult to remember, and lots of publicity went into the changeover, although that was local to the UK. I dread to think of the number of misdialled international calls; a number of countries charge for unconnected international calls. Ouch.

Anyway, the UK telephone system now appears to approaching some sort of consistency. National area codes now all begin 01xxx, or 02x, with room for expansion into 03x. Special rate numbers start 08xxx, and premium rate (some as high as GBP 5.00/minute) are 09xxx.

Over here is a list of all of the information you never wanted to know about UK telephone code assignments, but were too bored to ask.

There a rep bindings to SQL here: http://www.dcs.warwick.ac.uk/~john/sw/rep-sql.html
The link to squile was broken when I tried it. Maybe google will turn up something.

The best I could dig up was his e-mail address: hins@maths.warwick.ac.uk. The really curious might want to e-mail him.

-m

• Industrial processes
• Environmental toxins and pollutants
• Space station air quality
• Medicine / body functions
• Food processing
• Military enviromnent
• Toxicology

• Quotidiano: Researchers developing an electronic nose
• JSOnline: Electronic nose takes on a higher profile
• Electronic Nose Club
• Electronic Nose Inspects Cheese, Hints At Human Sense of Smell Caltech Microelectronic Research Group
• Warwick-Southampton Electronic Nose Group
• Isoen2000 Olfactory and Electronic Nose 2000
• Press Releases: Electronic Nose Sniffs Out Fresh Fruit
• Electronic Nose Workshop
• Food Explorer Electronic Nose
• Electronic Nose User Forum
• An Electronic Nose For Business, NSF, NASA, and Others
• Wired: Electronic Nose

• Industrial processes
• Environmental toxins and pollutants
• Space station air quality
• Medicine / body functions
• Food processing
• Military enviromnent
• Toxicology

• Quotidiano: Researchers developing an electronic nose
• JSOnline: Electronic nose takes on a higher profile
• Electronic Nose Club
• Electronic Nose Inspects Cheese, Hints At Human Sense of Smell Caltech Microelectronic Research Group
• Warwick-Southampton Electronic Nose Group
• Isoen2000 Olfactory and Electronic Nose 2000
• Press Releases: Electronic Nose Sniffs Out Fresh Fruit
• Electronic Nose Workshop
• Food Explorer Electronic Nose
• Electronic Nose User Forum
• An Electronic Nose For Business, NSF, NASA, and Others
• Wired: Electronic Nose

IANAL (I should have mentioned that before), but I read that somewhere, don't remember where. Here's a link I know found in google.
There it says:

A computer program is protected by copyright because it constitutes a literary work under the Copyright Designs and Patents Act 1988.[2] From a purchaser's point of view, unless there is some agreement with the owner of the intellectual property in the program, it is almost impossible to use software without infringing the copyright. This is because, in order to load and run a program, the program has to be copied from its permanent storage medium, into the computer. Legitimate use of software therefore depends on having the permission of the owner of the copyright.

So how could someone downloading the beos.tar.gz from an ftp-server know he acted legal unless he finds a text inside giving him the permission to do so.
It was stated that the linux-package wasn't announced on beos.com. Perhaps I'm ignorant, but downloading something isn't legal just because you can.

Oh: "Language of the Future"? This kind of typechecking dates back to the late 1970's.

(Btw. does anyone else see "functional" above? Some problem with SlashDot's breaking of long URL's?)

Of course, you'll need to use the mouse to initially configure your key bindings.

hmmmm. Although I have nothing but the utmost respect for the Enlightenment team, I recently switched to the Sawmill window manager. I found it to have a more focused development effort, to me much more lightweight than enlightenment, and IMHO it's easier to create themes for. Congratulations to the Enlightenment though!

E 0.16 has Anti-Aliasing in its titlebars via its built-in truetype font renderer. All that you need is a font which supports Anti-Aliasing and the theme to use E's TTF engine instead of X's.

The only thing Warwick's department has is a talent for self-advertisement.

Not to be confused with the University of Warwick's computer science department, of course :-)

I graduated from Warwick Uni last year. I did a double-take whenever I read Prof. Warwick's name in the article and in Slashdot's discussion :-)

-Stephen

Am I the only one to remember playing Sabre Wolfe on the Spectrum ... that was a game that really packed in the code.

One of the most impressive games of the time I thought, although Manic Miner and Chuckie egg were also pretty cool.

The Chuckie Egg Appreciation Society has information on ports to other platforms..

Steve

A lot of people are finding sawmill to be a very nice GNOME wm.

Let's inject a little reality here. Most of the world's application seats are green screens. Think bank, think ATM, think fast-food. These work and work fine. Web applications using forms can replace these quite well.

Okay, I suppose that's our different assumptions behind the word 'application'. I was considering only the kinds of software tradionally thought of as 'computer' software; your definition is somewhat wider, encompassing, presumably, a range of single-purpose and consumer devices.

I've no problem with web applications replacing forms-based interfaces; their speed is not a great handicap in this sphere and hiding the browser navigation isn't difficult. This is essentially replacing a forms interface with a somewhat better-looking forms interface. The only problem is a minor one of implementation thanks to browser problems in forms/Javascript.

Going up from there, there a whole slew of applications on the web that work fine for me. Mapquest is a bit clunky, but I'm glad I have it.

Again I think the difference is semantic. I don't consider Mapquest an 'application' as such, I consider it a 'document' - the map data - with a front-end on the web to display it.

The model of viewing everything meant to be read by humans as a document and then having the one ubiquitous client that does a good job of serving up documents is incredibly powerful.

I agree with this. But! HTML is too loose and hacky to be the universal document language, and it's so fragmented there is no universal client for it. (XML is promising in this regard.) And HTML is not geared up to providing complex application logic; Javascript is a syntactically ugly, fragmented language with a poor development path and debugging tools. CGI (and ASP, and the like) mixes document, application and presentation together making development and maintenance costly.

I'll wager MapQuest's implementation is pretty damned hairy, and, good though the service is, it doesn't (and can't) do the range of tasks you could do with some map documents and a desktop viewer app. What if I wanted to print a vector version of a map, or calculate route distances, or stuff. Features like this take *much* longer to add to a web application because there is so much more interface work. Where MapQuest scores over a traditional application is that it can build in pointers to "virtual community" stuff (erk! buzzword!) like local guides and gubbins.

I'm getting more and more long-winded and off-topic. Ah, well, what's Slashdot for?

Like with Web-based Help systems, you can connect to updated, corrected documentation somewhere out there on the Web.

Okay, using the MS help system as an example may have been a bit disingenuous, but I was annoyed with it. :-) Though a help system is indeed something that could work well on the web(*) - since it is, more or less, a document rather than an application - MS's help system exhibits many of the bad points of web applications, and doesn't actually use any of the advantages!

(The HTML administration interface to IIS might be a better example of applications been moved to the web for no good reason; there is a *reason* for it, just not a good one - viz. Windows being so poor at remote admin. And my argument may be undermined by the fact that the non-web version of the application, MMC, is also very, very bad!)

It would be nice if the help system *did* connect to updated help information on the MS site. Unfortunately it connects to the information it came with when you installed it on your system. And requires your system to work properly to access it. Which might be considered a Bad Thing when the help is for the system itself. D'oh!

(*) I like to think the manual for one of my applications is more effective; that went on-line ages ago and seems to work fine. MS are, verily, poo.

This just shows that one interface isn't ideal for all applications, which is a point you are trying to make, I think.

Yes, exactly. I was frustrated with the blind rush towards making everything webby, throwing out years of UI design experience. I fear that web applications will be more oriented to performing single tasks; instead of having a window full of objects to interact with, we'll get a few, limited commands, because of the difficulty of using direct manipulation methods on the web, and the large effort required to implement features. This will result in a much more modal interface than we're used to now, although horrible horrible wizards are heading in that direction too. (The fact the anyone needs wizards in the first place proves how broken MS's original interfaces were.)

Actually putting applications out there is harder and opens you up to criticism.

Yep. I'm there. By your definition of application, I suppose one of the things I'm working on is just that. http://elj.warwick.ac.uk/global/ if you're really interested, though without a privileged account there's not a lot you can see at the moment since we haven't really launched yet.

I find it ironic that you use all this HTML formatting in your post and then seem to imply that the web is not good for documentation creation and e-mail.

Heh! Actually, I think it's not. Slashdot is a great resource, an example of the web doing what it does best - quickly-updating documents, and communications - but it's a pig for creating these comments. I'm typing an over-long (sorry) message here in a tiny little <textarea> that's pretty inconvenient. I can't use the usual text editor tools I like. I have to use 'Preview' to check whether it works properly, and I'm only using HTML formatting at all because I wanted to quote parts of your message, and the wrapping style of the web means I can't use the Usenet '>' convention reliably.

And if that damned broken blockstackers object causes IE to drop the page and display an error message once more I'll... ooh, I'll... be quite cross. Probably.

What do you propose as the interchange format for email that has the features that you seem to want? RTF?

sob.

No, that's not fair, you weren't to know what problems the RTF format has given me recently. Parsing RTF gives one a really, really good insight into how smegged up the internal design of MS Word must be.

Something like HTML might be good for marking up e-mail. Perhaps a subset of HTML, au Slashdot. But that's a different thing to actually using the web to send the mail. And it's also a different thing to the kind of HTML e-mail I receive in my mailbox which makes elm very unhappy and contains a ton of <font> tags, tables, <br>s and other crud.

But that's another complaint altogether. And I've already gone on far too long.

Erm, we were talking about X, yeah? Erm... ObX: isn't Netscape for X slow and buggy?! Blimey!