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Go here for a pre-built mingw32 package with gcc 2.95 and all the fixin's.

So, you're saying that any software that isn't Open Source(tm) and subjected to "peer review" is software that isn't good for anything?

I'll make the effort of chewing the statement for you so it will fit nicely in your spoon.

"Don't confuse hobbyist, price-free software (which is also good...) with software which seeks to benefit from peer"

Hobbyist price-free software implies binary-only. When people involved with free software say "price free", it's to differentiate it from what has been termed as "Open Source" by some. As we can see from the "(which is also good)" part, he's not saying that software without source is not good for anything.

"They often overlap, but there's no intrinsic reason why the one is a subset of the other."

This means that programming can be a completely profitless venture as either open source or binary only. Or it can involve profit either way.

Regarding peer review, the concept of also has a strong foothold in cryptographical circles, where what amounts to tarballs are often reviewed. Any closed algorithm tends to not get much regard. Since software in general relies on the same principles, I don't see how that's a stretch at all. If anything, the peer review is more necessary because there are more oppurtunities for bugs the larger the codebase gets. Regarding credentials, if you can come up with a way to crack an cipher, or find a bug in some source code, I don't think anyone is going to ask for your certifications or degree before listening to your input.

As before, this doesn't mean that any given piece of peer-reviewed code is *always* going to be better than any given piece of non-reviewed code. Peer reviewed way has demonstrated to uncover and get fixed shortcomings and bugs better than similar closed-source endeavors, though.

For instance, when testing standard system tools, GNU tools had a lower failure rate than any of the proprietary UNIX tools. Take a look at http://www.cs.wisc.edu/Dienst/UI/2.0/Describe/ncst rl.uwmadison/CS-TR-95-1268 for details.

To quote a bit of it:

"The failure rate of utilities on the commercial versions of UNIX that we tested . . . ranged from 15-43%." "The failure rate of the utilities on the freely-distributed Linux version of UNIX was second-lowest, at 9%." "The failure rate of the public GNU utilities was the lowest in our study, at only 7%.

Further, the number of coders producing what will be a publically-sold software package is *far* outnumbered by people doing custom in-house jobs. If you're using tools that are less prone to failure and allow you to combine them in new and useful ways, your chances of being asked to do more work and advancing your career tend to be better. :) In case you need this explained too, it means "you can feed your family working with and producing Free Software".

I used to use matlab at Cornell, because Cornell had a site licence. But to have it on a workstation outside school running Linux? Thousands of dollars, depending on the toolboxes. And this every year!

I discovered Octave, the GNU workalike, and that makes me happy. It can't do all that the matlab toolboxes can (not by a long shot), but to be honest I never used them unless it was during a course that specifically required some special toolbox.

One less customer for Matlab.

While not exactly of the same style as the article (um, threads?), we've created a distrubited batch system called Condor that uses an oppertunistic model of batch queueing. In it we can run job-parallel (i.e. you run 100 jobs that all do a part of the problem), or PVM (Parallel virtual machine - message passing).

That said, if it was really nice and easy to make a program parallel, it would be done by now. The closest thing I've ever seen is some nifty magic done by the SGI power-compilers to take advantage of SMP machines... but thats only for one machine. That doesn't even touch inter-machine problems.

Now, if you are re-writing your code from scratch (as the paper seems to indicate that you'll have to), then by all means you can use an existing package (most likely MPI or PVM) to get the parallelism that you are looking for...

The University of Wisconsin's Web site has a story about this.

The Moon is 20% oxygen by weight but most is tightly locked in minerals. One which might not be too hard is iron oxide, such as the Apollo 17 orange soil.

There is 10 billion tons of hydrogen in the surface rocks due to volatiles in the solar wind, which is 96 percent hydrogen. I don't know if we could collect H directly from solar wind.

The Moon is 20% oxygen by weight but most is tightly locked in minerals. One which might not be too hard is iron oxide, such as the Apollo 17 orange soil.

There is 10 billion tons of hydrogen in the surface rocks due to volatiles in the solar wind, which is 96 percent hydrogen. I don't know if we could collect H directly from solar wind.

I work on a project called Condor that many people use to queue up things like renders.

Its an oppertunistic batch queueing system. Meaning that it will run jobs on your machine when you are not there. In the lab I work in, I'll easially be able to get a month of CPU time out of the machines on people's desks that would otherwise go unused...

Freeware

http://www.amanda.org/ - Amanda

ftp://ftp.zn-gmbh.com/pub/linux/ - afbackup

http://www.cs.wisc.edu/~jmelski/burt/ - Burt

http://www.estinc.com/features.html - BRU

http://www.estinc.com/qsdr.html - Quickstart

Commercial

http://www.unitrends.com/bp.html - Backup Professional

http://www.unitrends.com/ctar.html - CTAR

http://www.unitrends.com/ctarnet.html - CTAR:NET

http://www.unitrends.com/pcpara.html - PC ParaChute

http://www.arkeia.com/ - Arkeia

http://www.legato.com/Pro ducts/html/legato_networker.html - Legato Networker Linux client

http://feral.com/networker.html - Legato Networker server

But I agree, there's lots of prior art for claim 1. Here's another solid one: the Psion 3a palmtop was released in 1993, and has everything claimed in claim 1. Including "a keypad for effecting control of said apparatus" (what will these people think of next!).

Hmm.. Actually, claim 1 says compressed. Prior art for this, pre 1995?

I know that US patent law differs from every other country's (it's AFAIK the only country to use date-of-invention rather than date-of-filing, which causes a lot of trouble), but I'd be disappointed if most of the claims 2-17 didn't fail on the grounds of obviousness, even if prior art didn't exist. (And, for instance, claim 16 is predated by the NICAM system in Europe - I don't know if digital interleaved audio is used on TV in the USA)

Debunking the Software Patent Myths
U.S. Patent 4,555,775: The League [for Programming Freedom] describes AT&T's backup store patent as "Too Obvious to Publish." Yet, in a letter in this issue of CACM, Dennis Richie points out that this technology was published in the ACM[ 35] and was recently called "a seminal paper" whose ideas are seen in X Windows, Macintosh and many other windows systems [ 14]. While AT&T has sent notification letters on this patent, it has put the patent into reexamination and has not threatened suit or sued anyone on this patent.

Is this a case of "hindsight is 20/20" and wasn't obvious at the time of patenting? (just playing devil's advocate)

You can also check out Octave which may have somethings. This is a language similar to MATLAB. There is a toolbox that will work under MATLAB (and maybe Octave) from the Technical University of Denmark located here. By the structure of MATLAB and Octave, the source code is usually "open" (read: you can look at it) and it is in this case as well.

afbackup is pretty painless to setup, speedy backups, can run over ssh, prompts by email when tape changes are needed, reasonable restores of entire backup sets, but is very slow for selected file restores.

burt is wicked fast for backups, tcl-based interface, imho elegant, and can run over ssh. afbackup was better documented and offered an emergency restore option that i preferred at the time.

i ruled out amanda because it is complex and tends to want a holding disk the size of an entire backup set.

There is a free matlab work-a-like called Octave. http://www.che.wisc.edu/octave/octave.ht ml Works well.

Getting the ions moving quickly isn't the only problem -- you also need to have a lot of them reacting and you need to have them interacting for a long time. The cross section for simple binary collisions between ions is much larger than the fusion cross section, and so the ions must undergo many scattering collisions before fusing -- so you have to keep them around for a while. (This is why we don't simply fire two beams of D and T at one another -- which is the easiest way to get a fast collision between two ions). The solution to this is to let the ions collide and become thermal, but keep them trapped long enough to fuse (hence the tokamak, RFP, FRC, spheromak, etc...).

Using electrostatic forces to try to trap ions in fusion is problematic because you need huge potentials to trap a reasonable number of ions (you have to overcome the potential the ions themselves create). You need something like 10^13 /cc density to get a reasonable fusion power, and electrostatic traps can get up to (I think) 10^8 /cc if they are really clever.

There is an experiment similar to the one you mention at U. Wisconsin (at least it was there when I was visiting grad schools a few years back). They are more interested in using it as a thruster for spacecraft, though (no fusion involved here). I couldn't find a link for it on www.wisc.edu, though.

In fusion science circles "alternative" fusion research usually means studying thermonuclear devices that aren't tokamaks (for instance, NSTX, the spherical tokamak (they call it a torus now) here at PPPL). Other alternative research devices are Reverse Field Pinches (MST at Wisconsin), Stellerators (LHD in japan, there's also a big one in Germany and one under development here at Princeton), Field Reverse Configurations (U. Wash, my experiment here at PPPL can be run as an FRC)....

High-temperature fusion has basically turned into a game of controlling turbulence. Nobody can contain the plasmas. As a physicist, I think the cutting of funding in the field is a good idea until the turbulence is better understood. There was a plan to build ITER (International Thermonuclear Experimental Reactor). The thing was huge -- like 4 stories, and would have cost several billion. Needless to say it was cancelled. It might have contained the plasmas by brute force, but at ~billions per reactor, this is hardly an improvement over fission.

Here are some links for the curious:

Madison Symmetric Torus

A dynamo experiment

National Energy Science web site

MEDUSA experiment (a low aspect ratio tokamak)

Pegasus Tokamak

The Stellarator

High-temperature fusion has basically turned into a game of controlling turbulence. Nobody can contain the plasmas. As a physicist, I think the cutting of funding in the field is a good idea until the turbulence is better understood. There was a plan to build ITER (International Thermonuclear Experimental Reactor). The thing was huge -- like 4 stories, and would have cost several billion. Needless to say it was cancelled. It might have contained the plasmas by brute force, but at ~billions per reactor, this is hardly an improvement over fission.

Here are some links for the curious:

Madison Symmetric Torus

A dynamo experiment

National Energy Science web site

MEDUSA experiment (a low aspect ratio tokamak)

Pegasus Tokamak

The Stellarator

High-temperature fusion has basically turned into a game of controlling turbulence. Nobody can contain the plasmas. As a physicist, I think the cutting of funding in the field is a good idea until the turbulence is better understood. There was a plan to build ITER (International Thermonuclear Experimental Reactor). The thing was huge -- like 4 stories, and would have cost several billion. Needless to say it was cancelled. It might have contained the plasmas by brute force, but at ~billions per reactor, this is hardly an improvement over fission.

Here are some links for the curious:

Madison Symmetric Torus

A dynamo experiment

National Energy Science web site

MEDUSA experiment (a low aspect ratio tokamak)

Pegasus Tokamak

The Stellarator

High-temperature fusion has basically turned into a game of controlling turbulence. Nobody can contain the plasmas. As a physicist, I think the cutting of funding in the field is a good idea until the turbulence is better understood. There was a plan to build ITER (International Thermonuclear Experimental Reactor). The thing was huge -- like 4 stories, and would have cost several billion. Needless to say it was cancelled. It might have contained the plasmas by brute force, but at ~billions per reactor, this is hardly an improvement over fission.

Here are some links for the curious:

Madison Symmetric Torus

A dynamo experiment

National Energy Science web site

MEDUSA experiment (a low aspect ratio tokamak)

Pegasus Tokamak

The Stellarator

High-temperature fusion has basically turned into a game of controlling turbulence. Nobody can contain the plasmas. As a physicist, I think the cutting of funding in the field is a good idea until the turbulence is better understood. There was a plan to build ITER (International Thermonuclear Experimental Reactor). The thing was huge -- like 4 stories, and would have cost several billion. Needless to say it was cancelled. It might have contained the plasmas by brute force, but at ~billions per reactor, this is hardly an improvement over fission.

Here are some links for the curious:

Madison Symmetric Torus

A dynamo experiment

National Energy Science web site

MEDUSA experiment (a low aspect ratio tokamak)

Pegasus Tokamak

The Stellarator

As you pointed out, while strings will give you some juicy tidbits, you can't extract the full macro contents that way (does MS tokenize their VB text?). Neither word2x nor mswordview do anything with macros. LAOLA includes a tool called ELSER which dumps out embedded macros, but it doesn't work with Word97 documents (which Melissa is). The mswordview site even linked to a DOS program called List Word Macros which I tried, and it doesn't support Word97 either.

I'd really like to see a dump of this virus, because I'm curious to see exactly what kind of insecurities a macro language would need to have in order to let the author both scan an address book and send email, without doing anything too suspicious in the UI. Does anyone have any better tools for looking at this file?

I just did it this weekend, and it works flawlessly. Get the Aladdin Ghostscript. It will come with a whole slew of bjc610nX.upp files, where n=a or b and X= 0-7. There's a different driver for every resolution(360 & 720)/paper type combination.

This gets hairy, because the GS command to print, for example, 720x720 on coated paper is something like:
gs @bjc610b2.upp -sOutputFile foo.pdf -c -quit
So I made a bunch of shell scripts for different resolutions/paper types, which shortens the command to "7c foo.pdf" Much better. Simple, really.

I suppose if I wanted to work at being really lazy I could make multiple printer icons on my KDE desktop and have drag'n'drop printing for every resolution/paper type. =D Right now I have 1 icon set at a "rough draft" setting (360 dpi, high speed, plain paper).

Here is a listing of the BJC-610 uniprint drivers, what they do, etc.

This should do ya up right proper-like. Have fun!
--

You might try Ghostscript...

Not the GNU version -- Try the Aladdin version (version 5.50)....

It has support for the Cannon BJ10e, BJ200, BJC-600, BJC-4000, BJC-70, BJC-800, and BJ300...

See http://www.cs.wisc.edu/~ghost/aladdin/ or http://www.cs.wisc.edu/~ghost/al addin/devices.html

I've got my epson stylus photo 700 set up with a ghostscript filter through /etc/printcap and lpr/lpd. It works great. One just has to remember to send postscript, not plaintext, to the printer. Programs like nenscript are useful for this...

You might try Ghostscript...

Not the GNU version -- Try the Aladdin version (version 5.50)....

It has support for the Cannon BJ10e, BJ200, BJC-600, BJC-4000, BJC-70, BJC-800, and BJ300...

See http://www.cs.wisc.edu/~ghost/aladdin/ or http://www.cs.wisc.edu/~ghost/al addin/devices.html

I've got my epson stylus photo 700 set up with a ghostscript filter through /etc/printcap and lpr/lpd. It works great. One just has to remember to send postscript, not plaintext, to the printer. Programs like nenscript are useful for this...

Have you tried Ghostscript?

Not the GNU version -- Try the Aladdin version (version 5.50)....

It claims to support:

cdj550 H-P DeskJet 550C/560C/660C/660Cse

See http://www.cs.wisc.edu/~ghost/aladdin/ or http://www.cs.wisc.edu/~ghost/al addin/devices.html

I've got my epson stylus photo 700 set up with a ghostscript filter through /etc/printcap and lpr/lpd. It works great. One just has to remember to send postscript, not plaintext, to the printer. Programs like nenscript are useful for this...

Have you tried Ghostscript?

Not the GNU version -- Try the Aladdin version (version 5.50)....

It claims to support:

cdj550 H-P DeskJet 550C/560C/660C/660Cse

See http://www.cs.wisc.edu/~ghost/aladdin/ or http://www.cs.wisc.edu/~ghost/al addin/devices.html

I've got my epson stylus photo 700 set up with a ghostscript filter through /etc/printcap and lpr/lpd. It works great. One just has to remember to send postscript, not plaintext, to the printer. Programs like nenscript are useful for this...

If anyone cares, it's:

The Baffler.
----------
mphall@cstone.nospam.net

Even the way in which NCL software reverts to GPL after two years is identical to the way Aladdin Ghostscript reverts to GNU ghostscript after one year. That doesn't make NCL software free software.

The NCL is not a copyleft as defined by the Free Software Foundation. The Aladdin Free Public License is not a free license as defined by the Free Software Foundation. Please do not be misled by these abuses of the terms "free" and "copyleft." Recognize these licenses for what they are: non-free licenses.

When you say that "there is no dogma of atheism", you are incorrect. It is possible for atheism to be held and propagated based upon shallow dogma. I know this to be true because I've met dogmatic atheists before.

On the other hand, there are atheists who, rather than being dogmatic, have a policy of not entertaining nondisprovable hypotheses, which means that the god-question doesn't pass muster for consideration. The link in the above paragraph asks, at the end, whether or not science is a virus of the mind. I think that's the real question one needs to ask about atheism: while it's possible to be an atheist based upon the policy of the selective-system of the scientific method, it's also possible to blindly propagate atheism as a mental virus. And that, to me, is the real defining characteristic of "religion".

In case anyone wants to read about an _innovative_ way of doing this, check out http://www.cs.wisc.edu/~seitz/inte rp/vmorph.html for links to the '96 SIGGRAPH paper. It also has a cool MPEG of the Mona Lisa rotating back and forth, using only the one original image (plus the mirror image).

As has been noted, Earth Shoes were in their heyday in the '70s. I've been scanning in old newsletters from WORT (Madison, WI community radio station) as part of an archival project, and there are several Earth Shoes ads in those newsletters. If anyone's interested see this link as well as some of the other newsletter links, they're logically named. Beware, the images are kinda big (~400 KB or so) and I'm not done cleaning them up. From the brief news.com article it appears this new company ``acquired the [Earth Shoes] trademark'', which probably means the old Earth Shoes trademark was no longer valid, or the new company bought it. My honey tells me the original Earth Shoes were uncomfortable as hell. They sure were ugly!

Leigh

If you're the sort of person who thinks the Jargon File (The New Hacker's Dictionary) is a good reference, "hack" has 9 definitions, including:

"6. vi. To interact with a computer in a playful and exploratory rather than goal-directed way. 'Whatcha up to?' 'Oh, just hacking.'"

-- The Jargon File

Yes, installing a Windows printer driver really is easy. But it wasn't for Jon. And it isn't for people across the world. No amount of pretty user interface will help people get over their fear of computers. If anything, insulating people in a layer of protection designed to make their computer "user friendly" increases their fear and panic when something goes wrong.

Jon's not here to laugh with us as how much Microsoft products suck (We do that well enough :-). He's here to talk about the experience of computers with people. His experience with the printer is typical of thousands of people every day. His writings are a strong argument that perhaps there is a down side of "user friendliness", and something to be said for learning about the internals of your system.

If you're the sort of person who thinks the Jargon File (The New Hacker's Dictionary) is a good reference, "hack" has 9 definitions, including:

"6. vi. To interact with a computer in a playful and exploratory rather than goal-directed way. 'Whatcha up to?' 'Oh, just hacking.'"

-- The Jargon File

Yes, installing a Windows printer driver really is easy. But it wasn't for Jon. And it isn't for people across the world. No amount of pretty user interface will help people get over their fear of computers. If anything, insulating people in a layer of protection designed to make their computer "user friendly" increases their fear and panic when something goes wrong.

Jon's not here to laugh with us as how much Microsoft products suck (We do that well enough :-). He's here to talk about the experience of computers with people. His experience with the printer is typical of thousands of people every day. His writings are a strong argument that perhaps there is a down side of "user friendliness", and something to be said for learning about the internals of your system.

If you're the sort of person who thinks the Jargon File (The New Hacker's Dictionary) is a good reference, "hack" has 9 definitions, including:

"6. vi. To interact with a computer in a playful and exploratory rather than goal-directed way. 'Whatcha up to?' 'Oh, just hacking.'"

-- The Jargon File

Yes, installing a Windows printer driver really is easy. But it wasn't for Jon. And it isn't for people across the world. No amount of pretty user interface will help people get over their fear of computers. If anything, insulating people in a layer of protection designed to make their computer "user friendly" increases their fear and panic when something goes wrong.

Jon's not here to laugh with us as how much Microsoft products suck (We do that well enough :-). He's here to talk about the experience of computers with people. His experience with the printer is typical of thousands of people every day. His writings are a strong argument that perhaps there is a down side of "user friendliness", and something to be said for learning about the internals of your system.

Also, there is no mention of any 1998 revisit to the study, nor did Prof. Miller mention it while I was working for him in the first half of last year. The "last modified" date on the file is in 1995, so there was probably not a revisit last year.