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And please, let's not forget:

HELLO CTHULHU

> The only thing we need government for is to
> build roads, and fund the police and military.

You read slashdot, that means you respect numbers, right? These industrialized countries which have national health care achieve longer life expectancies than the U.S. with its profit-driven corporate-extortion system, at between 50 and 75 percent of our cost.

Returning to the subject, which is public primary schools, I know of no country in all the world that entrusts the whole of its elementary education to private enterprise. You want us to be the first? You want to experiment? With my kids?

Yours WDK - WKiernan@concentric.net

> The only thing we need government for is to
> build roads, and fund the police and military.

You read slashdot, that means you respect numbers, right? These industrialized countries which have national health care achieve longer life expectancies than the U.S. with its profit-driven corporate-extortion system, at between 50 and 75 percent of our cost.

Returning to the subject, which is public primary schools, I know of no country in all the world that entrusts the whole of its elementary education to private enterprise. You want us to be the first? You want to experiment? With my kids?

Yours WDK - WKiernan@concentric.net

Well, one obvious approach is called eugenics. I has a really, and I mean really, bad reputation.

http://us.history.wisc.edu /hist102/photos/html/1150.html

You don't need to have a dedicated cluster - Condor started life as a scavenger of idle workstations. We run Condor on every workstation here at CS, and routinely recover several thousand CPU-hours a day that otherwise would have been wasted. You can configure Condor to run with any policy you want on a per-workstation level - only run jobs at night, only run jobs from this group, only run jobs if the wind is blowing from the west - whatever makes sense to the workstation's owner.

Best of all, we're free-as-in-beer.

If you have any questions, send us mail at condor-admin@cs.wisc.edu

You don't need to have a dedicated cluster - Condor started life as a scavenger of idle workstations. We run Condor on every workstation here at CS, and routinely recover several thousand CPU-hours a day that otherwise would have been wasted. You can configure Condor to run with any policy you want on a per-workstation level - only run jobs at night, only run jobs from this group, only run jobs if the wind is blowing from the west - whatever makes sense to the workstation's owner.

Best of all, we're free-as-in-beer.

If you have any questions, send us mail at condor-admin@cs.wisc.edu

http://www.devolution.com/~slouken /SDL/Xmingw32/ http://www.xraylith.wisc.edu /~khan/software/gnu-win32/ I use xmingw32, emacs, gdb, and cygwin as a pretty much comprehensive development platform for the game I'm working on, Reel Deal Slots ( A slot machine casino.... I know, not exactly a product targeted for geeks, but heh, I thought if I had to work on something like that, I might as well get some fun out of it! Close in the running to becoming the first hybrid Linux/Win32 game on same cd too.... www.phantomefx.com for details... ) SDL is pretty cool for us cross-platform people too.. Check it out: http://www.devolution.com/~slouken/SDL/ Also, I'm working on getting a cross-debugger for Win32 ( Debug a windows hosted program from a remote Linux station ), anyone else out there got something like this going? Jeremy Peterson.

The page is here

Could someone please correct the flaws in my thinking? [snip] MS making it virtually impossible to write decent software for their OS without shelling out huge amounts of money to them?

Certainly. Mr Borland would like a word with you, even if you insist on using The J word. Even one of Mr Stallman's followers could help you out if you promise not to grass them up.

Nothing you can do about the price of the target platform though.

Dave :)

The thing about static compilers is that they have no idea what happens at run-time. Profiling has been used to mitigate this somewhat, but it's still a huge problem.

Accesses through memory are slow, so you want to get rid of them. One way to do this is through register allocation. Unfortunately, even if an infinite number of registers was available, you couldn't allocate everything to registers.

Why? Because we use pointers. There are multiple names for the same data running around in our little electronic brain. When you allocate something to a register, you bind it to one name. This is by definition incorrect for aliased data (data with multiple names).

Optimizations like register promotion try to get around this by allocating things in regions where the compiler can prove it only has one name. But this is exceedingly difficult when you have things like function calls which must be assumed to access and modify lots of data.

I won't even get into the problem of static instruction scheduling or other optimizations like partial redundancy elimination.

In short, aliasing through memory is nearly impossible to track accurately at static compile time. At run-time, the machine knows exactly which memory accesses reference which data, so things like run-time register allocation can do a better job. Crusoe does this to a limited extent.

Dynamo is essentially a software trace cache. Except that when forming the trace, it does transformations like Common Subexpression Elimination and other traditional compiler manipulations.

IBM has the Daisy project, which does code morphing from PPC to a VLIW ISA. I believe it also does some run-time optimizations. Projects like DyC and Tempo have been compiling at run-time for a while now.

I like to think of dynamic compilation in terms of the stock market. Which would you rather do: trade stocks with only limited information about their past behavior (and sometimes none at all), or trade stocks after having observed the absolutely most recent trends? I'll bet that if you pick the first strategy and I pick the second, I'll beat you every time.

That said, there are tricks ou can pull with static compilation. IA64 has the ALAT, which lets the machine track when store addresses match load addresses. This lets the static compiler speculatively move a load ahead of the store. If the store conflicts, the machine will execute some compiler-provided code to fix up the error. Essentially, the compiler is making an assumption that the load and store do not reference the same data and is communicating that assumption to the machine. The machine checks the assumption and invokes some fixup code if it proves to be incorrect.

--

This sounds like the Condor system at the University of Wisconsin, Madison. I have only read a little about it but as I understand, it works as you describe. Check out their homepage at http://www.cs.wisc.edu/condor.

I believe ghostscript was derived from reverse egnineering of the ps and pdf formats. http://www.cs.wisc.edu/~ghost/ pdf2ps -->ps2ascii-->manipulate?


john

There is a program produced under the GNU GPL called octave that supposedly interprets matlab commands. Never tried it because it barfed on my libc version.

I can confirm that Octave is a very useful piece of free software. It provides an essentially complete Matlab 4 environment, and some current development effort is going into Matlab 5 compatibility.

Octave's author, John W. Eaton, has put an amazing amount of effort into the project, and is willing to do more as funding for the project allows. Coders and documenters are also welcome, I believe. A curious point about Octave has been that, despite being a godsend for those who need it worst (starving students), it hasn't "caught on" in the Free Software community as thoroughly as you might suppose.

Meanwhile, if you couldn't use Octave due to an unreported library incompatibility, it would probably be nice to mention this to somebody who could fix it...

There is a program produced under the GNU GPL called octave that supposedly interprets matlab commands. Never tried it because it barfed on my libc version.

I can confirm that Octave is a very useful piece of free software. It provides an essentially complete Matlab 4 environment, and some current development effort is going into Matlab 5 compatibility.

Octave's author, John W. Eaton, has put an amazing amount of effort into the project, and is willing to do more as funding for the project allows. Coders and documenters are also welcome, I believe. A curious point about Octave has been that, despite being a godsend for those who need it worst (starving students), it hasn't "caught on" in the Free Software community as thoroughly as you might suppose.

Meanwhile, if you couldn't use Octave due to an unreported library incompatibility, it would probably be nice to mention this to somebody who could fix it...

One of the grad students here at the UW Madison Chem. Engineering Dept. Is heading up this project. I've been told it's exactly like Matlab. You can find it at The Official Site

You should have a look at GNU Octave, which is mostly compatible with Matlab.

I tried it under Solaris and Linux and it works quite well. If you have the opportunity to compare Matlab and Octave running on the same platform, you will find that Octave is a bit slower and consumes more resources, but not up to the point that it becomes a problem. Several of the Matlab examples can be ported to Octave and they run fine.

You can find Octave in the latest Debian and SuSE Linux distributions. If you want to compile it yourself, you will need a recent version of gcc (with support for C++ and FORTRAN), the C++ library and optionally gnuplot for the graphics. You will also need some disk space and some patience while the stuff compiles, but the package is reasonably easy to configure, compile and install. Good luck!

You mean like Octave? (get it here) 'course, that isn't symbolic math.

Octave is a GPL numerical computation tool that is like MATLAB, but better. :-) Most scripts that don't rely on commercial matlab toolkits run fine right out of the box.

Of course, the symbolic toolkit that comes with matlab is probably what you're looking for. Perhaps we should work on creating a symbolic toolkit for Octave? Perhaps someone already has? Stay tuned!

See FAQ

Octave is a high-level interactive language, primarily intended for numerical computations that is mostly compatible with MATLAB.

-p

There's a symbolic math package called Octave that's opensource & such... I remember running it under Solaris, Linux, and AIX... http://www.che.wisc.edu/octave/

I have a fairly simple machine, PII 333 with two 4gig harddrives. I have it dual booted with Linux (Redhat 6.0) and NT 4.0 with LILO being the bootloader.

Here's the interesting part: when I boot under NT I can use VMWare to get at the raw Linux partition, and when I boot under Linux I can use VMWare to get to the raw NT partition. Each OS has a specific configuration depending on whether it's a guest or host (using Hardware Profiles under NT and VMWare's dualconf under Linux).

Then it starts getting complex with host-only networking under VMWare for each environment. I actually have 5 different IPs for my one machine:

192.168.0.2: Native (host) NT or native Linux
192.168.101.1: VMNet Bridge
192.168.101.2: NT host/Linux host
192.168.101.3: Linux guest
192.168.101.4: NT guest

So while I have NT as a host, I can use samba to send files to Linux and then test them out. As far as development goes on NT, I have Visual Studio 6.0, Borland's free compiler, and Cygnus's cygwin (with mingw32 built under cygwin). I also have cross tools under cygwin that target Linux and MSDOS (djgpp).

When I use Linux as a host (99.5% of the time), again I can use samba to send executables to the NT guest and try them out *immediately* after compilation. This is a plus for libraries such as SDL, etc. I use pgcc-2.95.2 targetted to mingw32, cygwin (for the hell of it), ms-dos, and Sony PlayStation.

The main reason I use this setup is for hardware/processor feasibility, I have a TNT2 Ultra that isn't supported in any way under VMWare, therefore booting NT means I get 3DSMax, etc. that takes full advantatge of my hardware. Also, I have an ISA card that talks to my PlayStation, and the majority of dev-tools (with the major exception of psxdev) for the PSX are Win32 only (VMWare can't handle non-standard hardware).

How I set this up:

Install NT on the second harddrive

Configure all drivers, etc. for NT (might want to wait for this step to make creating Hardware Profiles easier)

Install Linux on the first harddrive w/ LILO

Setup VMWare on Linux to talk to NT as a guest (using raw disk partitions)

Boot *NATIVELY* into NT and copy your existing profile into a new Hardware Profile (System Control Panel)

Disable any devices in your new profile (call it "Virtual Machine") that VMWare doesn't support (Devices Control Panel)

At this point if you want you can setup VMWare for NT to access Linux as a raw partition

Boot into Linux and test your NT under VMWare, if some drivers fail, disable them under the Devices Control Panel

If you installed VMWare for NT, tweak your Linux dualconf configuration (I had to manually add a condition for switching the links to the X server)

Setup Host-only networking, samba, etc.

I know I didn't go into any detail, I don't have the time to write everything out and I'm not at my machine so I might have missed something. I'll post a couple articles at my site, etc. when I have some time (this weekend?).

Marcus

Also, Aladdin recently had a run-in with the FSF about including hooks for readline support into Aladdin Ghostscript. An excerpt from the build docs:

Aladdin Ghostscript does not include an interface to GNU readline. A user contributed code for this purpose, which we spent significant time debugging and then updating to track internal architectural changes in Ghostscript. The contributor was willing to assign the copyright to Aladdin Enterprises, and to allow the code to be distributed with the Aladdin Free Public License (AFPL) as well as the GNU License (GPL). However, even though the GPL allows linking GPLed code (such as the GNU readline library package) with non-GPLed code (such as all the rest of Aladdin Ghostscript) if one doesn't distribute the result, the Free Software Foundation, creators of the GPL, have told us that in their opinion, the GPL forbids distributing non-GPLed code that is merely intended to be linked with GPLed code. We understand that FSF takes this position in order to prevent the construction of software that is partly GPLed and partly not GPLed, even though the text of the GPL does not actually forbid this (it only forbids distribution of such software). We think that FSF's position is legally questionable and not in the best interest of users, but we do not have the resources to challenge it, especially since FSF's attorney apparently supports it. Therefore, even though we added the user-contributed interface to GNU readline in internal Aladdin Ghostscript version 5.71 and had it working in version 5.93 (one of the last beta versions before the 6.0 release), we removed it from the Aladdin Ghostscript 6.0 distribution.

List of Jargon Resources Mirror Sites USA:

• http://www.akrotech.com/~darkstar/jargon
• http://memes.org/jargon
• http://www.journalism.wisc.edu/jargon/
• http://www.mindspring.com/~li mbert/hacking/jargon.htm
• http://www.iscvt.org/jargon/jargon.html
• http://www.babcom.com/jargon/index.html
• http://www.hackboy.com/jargon
• http://www.pulhas.org/
• http://www2.netdoor.com/~lhand
• http://avatar.deva.net/
• http://www.blee.net/jargon
• http://www.fortuneci ty.com/skyscraper/jolt/15/jargonindex.html
• http://www.jargon.8hz.com/
• http://culture.0wnz-u.org/
• http://www.houseofhack.com/jargon
• http://jollyrogers.com/jargon/
• http://handel.math.psu.edu/jargon

• http://celestrion.totalaccess.net/do cs/jargon/
• http://www.pir.net/pir/jargon/
• http://www.technozen.com/tetsuo/jargon/
• http://ude.org/jargon
• http://web.chad.org/usr/doc/jargon-file/

• http://karnak.nmc.siu.edu/jargon/

Australia:

• http://ecco.bsee.swin.edu.au/text/jargon/

• http://ecco.bsee.swin.edu.au/text/jargon

Czechoslovakia: ttp://www.instinct.org/texts/jargon-file/

Finland: http://zone.pspt.fi/jargon/

Germany:

• http://www.ude.org/jargon
• http://www.ghks.de/computer/jargon/
• http://www.math.fu-berlin.de/~rene/jargo n/
• http://hex.rz.ruhr-uni-bochum.de/jargon/
• http://www.informatik.hu-berlin.de /~bergt/jargon

Gret Britain: http://jargon.strugglers.net

Greece: http://www.hack.gr/jargon

Italy: http://beatles.cselt.stet.it/mirrors/jargon

Japan: http://www.vacia.is.tohoku.ac.jp/jargon/

Norway: http://www.pvv.ntnu.no/misc/jargon/ Poland: http://www.uci.agh.edu.pl/jargon/

Spain: http://www.undersec.com/jargon

Sweden: http://ftp.sunet.se/jargon/

U.K.:

• http://www.new.ox.ac.uk/admin/jargon/
• http://g.pet.cam.ac.uk/g/jargon/

PostScript level 2 - accept nothing else. The various HPGL's are nice too but nothing beats PS. It's the standard. Accept no substitutes ("It's just like PostScript" - yeah - right.) Save the worry and get the real thing.

If not, why the addiction to postscript? See this listing of Ghostscript based printers

However, when I hooked a Plextor SCSI CD-ROM to it and wrote it off to my 10,000 RPM SCSI drive, I could not even tell that anything was running on my machine.

FWIW, you can get PCI UltraSCSI cards that work perfectly on the Ultra 5's and Ultra 10's for about $80. See my Using CD-R or CD-RW drives on Solaris page for details.

Several years ago, there was a T. rex fossil (Nicknamed "Sue") unearthed by the Black Hills Institute of Geological Research. The fossil was the largest and most complete T. rex skeleton ever found, and it became the center of a fierce legal battle that raised questions over such issues as legal aspects of collecting fossils and the possible of a specimen to science. The T. rex was eventually auctioned off by Sotheby's, to the Field Museum of Natural History in Chicago for over 8 million dollars.

For a little background on sue, here's a link to a little piece at The Why Files.

Bruce Campbell *is* uber macho. He is the coolest person in the entire world.

Betcher ass! Check this out. Meeting Bruce was one of the coolest things in my life (so far.) A group on the UW-Madison campus that shows films arranged for him to attend and hold a question and answer session after a showing of Army of Darkness. He is completely personable and doesn't have an ounce of star attitude. Anyone not knowing who he was would think is just some ordinary Joe. He spent about 1-2 hours after the movie answering questions and telling stories (some hilarious ones about Sam Raimi) and then another 2-3 hours signing autographs and talking to people in the autograph line. I wish I had had a video camera with me.

Wrong!

alt.comp.virus FAQ

There's another page with some serious analysis of the Latin words

right here

Even if Red Hat goes bankrupt tomorrow, all their code will be around for anyone to use. And just as importantly, their code will not be used in a way that is harmful to the Open Source communitiy, such as in a closed source distro by Microsoft or another giant corporation. Why? Because of the GPL.

The commercial BSD vendor, Berkeley Software Design, Inc., and Eric Allman's companym, Sendmail, Inc., share several characterics. (Note: I may be wrong about some of the following. Corrections welcome) They both started with free software. They both added proprietary enhancements. The both sell their value-added product as a revenue source. Both give you source code to the product you bought. And both forbid you from redistributing that source or changes to it to those who don't hold a licence.

Two critical questions are:

1. What's the current technology transfer? To what extend do corporate BSDI enhancements return to the free BSD distributions?
2. If these companies go down, what happens to their code? Licence holders still have the source, but so what? Is it dead?

To add one more pair of companies to the stack, consider John Ousterhout's TCL-based Scriptics company, or the Canadian Perl-related firm, ActiveState. My understanding is that there's more technology transfer between these two companies and their core free software roots than might be immediately obvious with the previous pair. I cannot really speak of the TCL world, but in the case of the Perl one, that firm funds not only the salary of the Perl release manager, they also fund development for porting to non-free systems. For example, they've made Perl's fork() call work "right" on Microsoft systems (actually, Microsoft paid for that work!) and have immediately returned those corporately funded enhancements back to the world of free software.

Yes, that means that the current developer release of Perl, version 5.005_63, supports fork(2) with Unix semantics even on Microsoft. Hurray!

If you want other mixed-mode business models, think about Alladin Ghostscript. The interesting issue of licensing is covered in the FAQ. There's also Sleepycat Software, whose database product, Berkeley DB, was used in Netscape with neither credit nor compensation, thus triggering a good bit of bad blood on the authors' parts because of lack of public recognition and appreciate for their work. The resulting `poison pill' licence seeks to avoid a repeat of this unpleasantry.

Now, we have in contrast to those situations, look at companies that are making a business, or trying to make a business, out of GPL'd software. The two most obvious examples, RHAT and LNUX, are hardly typical cases due to their current market valuations, which are obviously astronomically overvalued. But even in their cases, you'll find things that aren't what you would call "free software". In fact, they aren't even open source; look at the way Redhat ships "demo versions" of things without source. Now, I would be willing to argue that this is in fact a good thing because it shows people that Redhat's operating system is a viable platform for traditional licensed software. Others, however, dispute this, pointing out that that software would be orphaned if the company who produces it were to die.

My point is that I believe we now have a sufficiently long list of corporate endeavours which are based, at least with respect to some definitions of the term, free software. That means we have actual cases to look at, not hypothetical cases. I'm sure I've only named a couple of them here. What about other companies? I'm not talking about simple packagers and distributors. I mean firms that do serious development work based on free software. (I would mention Cygnus, but they've recently become an acquisition by Redhat.)

Do we have examples of companies that have died or otherwise abandoned their work in these areas? The university Ingress experience and Britten-Lee? Can we come up with other examples to look at? What has happened to the product of their work? Has it truly gone the way of all things, or did humanity derive some benefit from it?

Even if Red Hat goes bankrupt tomorrow, all their code will be around for anyone to use. And just as importantly, their code will not be used in a way that is harmful to the Open Source communitiy, such as in a closed source distro by Microsoft or another giant corporation. Why? Because of the GPL.

The commercial BSD vendor, Berkeley Software Design, Inc., and Eric Allman's companym, Sendmail, Inc., share several characterics. (Note: I may be wrong about some of the following. Corrections welcome) They both started with free software. They both added proprietary enhancements. The both sell their value-added product as a revenue source. Both give you source code to the product you bought. And both forbid you from redistributing that source or changes to it to those who don't hold a licence.

Two critical questions are:

1. What's the current technology transfer? To what extend do corporate BSDI enhancements return to the free BSD distributions?
2. If these companies go down, what happens to their code? Licence holders still have the source, but so what? Is it dead?

To add one more pair of companies to the stack, consider John Ousterhout's TCL-based Scriptics company, or the Canadian Perl-related firm, ActiveState. My understanding is that there's more technology transfer between these two companies and their core free software roots than might be immediately obvious with the previous pair. I cannot really speak of the TCL world, but in the case of the Perl one, that firm funds not only the salary of the Perl release manager, they also fund development for porting to non-free systems. For example, they've made Perl's fork() call work "right" on Microsoft systems (actually, Microsoft paid for that work!) and have immediately returned those corporately funded enhancements back to the world of free software.

Yes, that means that the current developer release of Perl, version 5.005_63, supports fork(2) with Unix semantics even on Microsoft. Hurray!

If you want other mixed-mode business models, think about Alladin Ghostscript. The interesting issue of licensing is covered in the FAQ. There's also Sleepycat Software, whose database product, Berkeley DB, was used in Netscape with neither credit nor compensation, thus triggering a good bit of bad blood on the authors' parts because of lack of public recognition and appreciate for their work. The resulting `poison pill' licence seeks to avoid a repeat of this unpleasantry.

Now, we have in contrast to those situations, look at companies that are making a business, or trying to make a business, out of GPL'd software. The two most obvious examples, RHAT and LNUX, are hardly typical cases due to their current market valuations, which are obviously astronomically overvalued. But even in their cases, you'll find things that aren't what you would call "free software". In fact, they aren't even open source; look at the way Redhat ships "demo versions" of things without source. Now, I would be willing to argue that this is in fact a good thing because it shows people that Redhat's operating system is a viable platform for traditional licensed software. Others, however, dispute this, pointing out that that software would be orphaned if the company who produces it were to die.

My point is that I believe we now have a sufficiently long list of corporate endeavours which are based, at least with respect to some definitions of the term, free software. That means we have actual cases to look at, not hypothetical cases. I'm sure I've only named a couple of them here. What about other companies? I'm not talking about simple packagers and distributors. I mean firms that do serious development work based on free software. (I would mention Cygnus, but they've recently become an acquisition by Redhat.)

Do we have examples of companies that have died or otherwise abandoned their work in these areas? The university Ingress experience and Britten-Lee? Can we come up with other examples to look at? What has happened to the product of their work? Has it truly gone the way of all things, or did humanity derive some benefit from it?

Following that last post, I decided that instead of continuing this flamewar indefinately, I'd actually do some quick research on the web. The following is what I pulled off the first few pages of Yahoo! and Hotbot when I searched for "LGN cortex".

Here: "The LGN organizes inputs from the retina, and slows them down before sending signals to the ocipital lobe (the visual cortex)."

Here: "Incoming sensory signals are not simply relayed to the cerebral cortex. Instead, these afferent signals are first actively gated and modified in the thalamus. Our research is focused on understanding the modulation of visual signals in the lateral geniculate nucleus (LGN), the thalamic station in the pathway that subserves conscious visual perception. The LGN presents a single locus where vision, in a broad sense, can be impacted economically before visual signals are disseminated throughout the cortex. All subsequent cortical processing depends critically upon the nature of the signals that are conveyed by the LGN."

Here: "...to learn how information transmission from the retina to the visual cortex through the LGN is controlled."

This shows the information pathways involved in visual processing: retina-Pretectal area, retina-Superior Colliculus, retina-LGN and LGN-cortex.

There were others, but Netscape crashed (naturally) and I don't want to restep the entire search process.

Retina: I meant to check for info on retinal processing, but the search engines are clogged with retina simulators and other unhelpful pages. But I did find this which mentions the preprocessing of which I was speaking in my first post.

Offtopic slightly, I know, but here's the shamless plug, and pointer, to the BOFH Excuse server.

Cheers.

For the humor impaired: everything in bold is sarcasm

--Bob

Despite the fact that this is probably a troll (witness the "as well as the heavy reliance on free software, most of which _sucks ass_" line), I'll address some of your points.

I haven't used either KDE or GNOME really heavily, so I con't comment on your first complaint. From what I've hard, though KDE sounds quite good. I also don't know of any video editing software. It's not an area in which I've done a lot of work.

A GNU Mathematica equivalent? Try Octave. I probably haven't used the thing to its fullest capabilities (I'm only an undergraduate), but it's been able to handle everything I've thrown at it.

Why do you think that GCC is not a good compiler? It certainly seems to be working well for me.

Now if I'm confusing the issue of open source and linux, it's because the original post seemed to, and lots of people are talking about the end of the software business. Open source is great for things like a web server, or a kernel, or a compiler. But bigger stuff? Like antenna simulation software? Things like that? Forget it. No one is going to write something like that and just give it away.

So, it may not look like anyone will write a free version of software program <Q>, but you just might be surprised at what the free software world can do.

Finally, you had some complaints about specific programs. If you have problems, please take the time to file a bug report. The whole point of free software is that it gives everyone the freedom to rewrite the program. Even if you, personally, can't fix the problem, at least let others know that you had a problem so they can go looking for it. (I'll also note that there are many, many CD players out there. If one doesn't work for you, try another.)

Just for fun, when the Fred Moody article came out, I calculated how long it would take a Brookhaven-style mini black hole to consume the Earth (calculations summarized here.

It takes about 10^59 years to consume one atom, let alone the whole Earth!

I do research on decentralized processors, the technology you mention. My thesis advisor likes to use this term, but please keep in mind that there is no common term for this type of architectures.

Sun's new processor, MAJC, is doing this; and Alpha 21364 will, too. Alpha 21264 already employs a similar technique.

You are completely right in thinking that this is the next step. The trend in the last 3-4 years has been in this direction. Decentralization is an active research topic in many institutions and processor companies in various forms: Multiscalar processing, superthreading, etc. You might want to take a look at the Multiscalar pages at Univ. of Wisconsin, where some of the pioneering work has been done.

I hacked a Java gravity simulator I wrote last year to show the hypothetical Planet 10 slingshotting comets into the inner solar system. The physics is quite realistic, but the scenario is very simplistic. I did just as a tool to show how knowing the trajectory of a number of comets can hint at the orbit of a perturbing body.

The href is http://www.astro.wisc. edu/~dolan/java/planet10/Planet10.html

Please send comments/complaints by email instead of posting.

P.S. if you want a pretty accurate simulation of the solar system, crank the timstep down to a few days, zoom in and turn on the planets (options screen).

Here's how to set up your Unix machine to try out the Dvorak layout. You need X windows to do this.

First, print out a picture of the Dvorak layout. A GIF and a PDF version are on Marcus Brooks' page.

Now, follow these instructions IN ORDER (or you'll have trouble changing back to Qwerty). Download the following xmodmap scripts:
Qwerty and Dvorak

Then, make an alias to change back and forth easily:

% alias asdf 'xmodmap ~/dvorak.xmodmap'
% alias aoeu 'xmodmap ~/qwerty.xmodmap'

I chose the alias so the same four keys are typed in either Qwerty or Dvorak mode. So just type "asdf" to toggle between them. Then you can decide for yourself and avoid all the flame-ridden commotion. :)

Here's how to set up your Unix machine to try out the Dvorak layout. You need X windows to do this.

First, print out a picture of the Dvorak layout. A GIF and a PDF version are on Marcus Brooks' page.

Now, follow these instructions IN ORDER (or you'll have trouble changing back to Qwerty). Download the following xmodmap scripts:
Qwerty and Dvorak

Then, make an alias to change back and forth easily:

% alias asdf 'xmodmap ~/dvorak.xmodmap'
% alias aoeu 'xmodmap ~/qwerty.xmodmap'

I chose the alias so the same four keys are typed in either Qwerty or Dvorak mode. So just type "asdf" to toggle between them. Then you can decide for yourself and avoid all the flame-ridden commotion. :)

In 1969, an infant born at 28 weeks would typically die. In 1999, that same infant has a probability of survival greater than 0.90. That doesn't come without cost - personal as well as financial - I can assure.

http://www.techreview.com/articles/apr95/Soloman.h tml
http://www2.medsch.wisc.edu/childrenshosp/parents_ of_preemies/survival.html

So, what happens when a "preemie" or preterm infant is born? What disabilities can they face?

http://www2.medsch.wisc.edu/childrenshosp/parents_ of_preemies/index.html

I contend that having the ability and freedom to discuss concepts of euthanasia and heroic efforts to save lives raises awareness in society. Individuals born as preterm infants live today because people can talk about the issues, and can subsequently choose to act or not.

Graham

In 1969, an infant born at 28 weeks would typically die. In 1999, that same infant has a probability of survival greater than 0.90. That doesn't come without cost - personal as well as financial - I can assure.

http://www.techreview.com/articles/apr95/Soloman.h tml
http://www2.medsch.wisc.edu/childrenshosp/parents_ of_preemies/survival.html

So, what happens when a "preemie" or preterm infant is born? What disabilities can they face?

http://www2.medsch.wisc.edu/childrenshosp/parents_ of_preemies/index.html

I contend that having the ability and freedom to discuss concepts of euthanasia and heroic efforts to save lives raises awareness in society. Individuals born as preterm infants live today because people can talk about the issues, and can subsequently choose to act or not.

Graham

Actually, I didn't mention nuclear power. There's a lot of fuel for that also, as there are uncollected radioactives everywhere. And as an S-type asteroid probably has an assortment of metals, there will be some with a lot of fissionables. As well as a lot of tritium and other possible fusion fuels on the Moon's surface.

There are at least two things that you can do when attempting to reverse engineer a piece of software. The first one (not legal in several countries) is to decompile the code: take a debugger or decompiler and check what instructions are executed. The second one (legal in most countries) is the "blackbox" approach: consider the software as something that produces some output(s) depending on its input(s), and try to guess what is inside.

This second approach is the "real" reverse engineering. By carefully crafting some inputs and observing the outputs, you can often draw some conclusions about how the software behaves. With some patience and a lot of trial and error on simple inputs, you can find some patterns in the software: stuff that does not change, stuff that changes depending only on one of the inputs, and so on.

In the good old days (well, five years ago), I was the author of DEU (Doom Editing Utilties), the first program that was able to create new levels for Doom. I also contributed to Matt Fell's Unofficial Doom Specs and Olivier Montannuy's Unofficial Quake Specs, the documents that describe the WAD and PAK file formats and other internal details about Doom and Quake. Almost everything in the Unofficial Doom Specs was gathered by reverse-engineering. It was only later (with the release of Doom II) that id Software released some information to the community, presumably after they saw that editing Doom levels was a very popular activity. I am grateful for id Software's support of the editing community in their later games, but the first informations about Doom had to be found the hard way.

Most of my efforts in decoding Doom's WAD file format (and later Quake's PAK file format) involved an hex editor for viewing and editing the raw files, and custom tools that I built along the way for making editing easier (or tools that I received from other people, like DEU 3.0 from Brendon Wyber). A key thing is also to share as much information as possible with other people who are progressing on the same front because you often get more in return than what you found by yourself. For WAD files, it was easy to find that the file was organized a bit like a tar archive: a header, a directory containing names of objects and offsets within the file, and the data for the objects. Then the trial and error starts: try to guess what an object might be, modify a few bytes, run the game and see what happens. If your changes produced something useful, write it down and share the info with others. If the game crashed, try again. Repeat until you have understood everything.

Sometimes, you will find data structures that you do not understand. That was the case for Doom's NODES, SEGS and SSECTORS data. If you share enough information with others, maybe someone will have an idea and find that the data structures are related to something that they know. This is exactly what happened for Doom: Alistair Brown and a group of students from Bradford suggested that the unknown data might be a BSP tree. After reading some papers on that topic (I didn't know anything about BSP trees), I was able to implement a first BSP builder in DEU. And then it became possible to create brand new levels for Doom, instead of only changing the textures and location of the monsters as we did in the first few months. Releasing the source code for the tools has probably helped a lot. Other people were able to create their own tools based on that, and then the next reverse-engineering steps became much easier when the other games based on the same engine were released (Doom II, Heretic, Hexen, Strife,...)

Ah well... The good old times... Sigh!

xpdf, the free alternative to acrobat reader
comes with a PDF to ASCII converter. You can
find it here:


http://www.foolabs.com/xpdf/
.

Another tool is pstotext which can be found here:


http://www.cs.wisc.edu/~ghost/pstotext.html
.

Just planting a flag does NOT make the land your territory if you've already signed a treaty agreeing not to claim it. The USA made just such a commitment when they signed the Outer Space Treaty of 1967.

Who owns Antarctica? It's the same thing. The Antarctic Treaty guarantees that no country will claim it.

There's a good summary of the Outer Space Treaty at wisc.edu

The full text of the treaty is available here

/peter

Check out the following web page and ftp site:

http://www.xraylith. wisc.edu/~khan/software/gnu-win32/gcc.html
ftp://ftp.xraylith. wisc.edu/pub/khan/gnu-win32/mingw32/gcc-2.95

I personally use these tools.
Here is a link to a Win32 API help file as well.
http://www.borlan d.com/devsupport/borlandcpp/patches/BC52HLP1.ZIP

Check out the following web page and ftp site:

http://www.xraylith. wisc.edu/~khan/software/gnu-win32/gcc.html
ftp://ftp.xraylith. wisc.edu/pub/khan/gnu-win32/mingw32/gcc-2.95

I personally use these tools.
Here is a link to a Win32 API help file as well.
http://www.borlan d.com/devsupport/borlandcpp/patches/BC52HLP1.ZIP

i've built cross-mingw32-gcc-2.95 compiler on linux so i can build win32 executables on linux. I also made it into a crossmingw32 rpm. I've used to to build wxWindows library and GUI binaries for windows, on linux. this information is here and the build istructions are here note that cygnus is _slow_ unix emulation for windows. mingw32 is a native compiler for windows, without all that slowness.