Slashdot Mirror

Try here They were distributed on floppies as well
RKRM_Devices.lha Part 1 of 4 of Amiga ROM Kernel

RKRM_Lib1.lha Part 2 of 4 of Amiga ROM Kernel

RKRM_Lib2.lha Part 3 of 4 of Amiga ROM Kernel Manuals

RKRM_Lib3.lha Part 4 of 4 of Amiga ROM Kernel Manuals

Try here They were distributed on floppies as well
RKRM_Devices.lha Part 1 of 4 of Amiga ROM Kernel

RKRM_Lib1.lha Part 2 of 4 of Amiga ROM Kernel

RKRM_Lib2.lha Part 3 of 4 of Amiga ROM Kernel Manuals

RKRM_Lib3.lha Part 4 of 4 of Amiga ROM Kernel Manuals

Try here They were distributed on floppies as well
RKRM_Devices.lha Part 1 of 4 of Amiga ROM Kernel

RKRM_Lib1.lha Part 2 of 4 of Amiga ROM Kernel

RKRM_Lib2.lha Part 3 of 4 of Amiga ROM Kernel Manuals

RKRM_Lib3.lha Part 4 of 4 of Amiga ROM Kernel Manuals

Try here They were distributed on floppies as well
RKRM_Devices.lha Part 1 of 4 of Amiga ROM Kernel

RKRM_Lib1.lha Part 2 of 4 of Amiga ROM Kernel

RKRM_Lib2.lha Part 3 of 4 of Amiga ROM Kernel Manuals

RKRM_Lib3.lha Part 4 of 4 of Amiga ROM Kernel Manuals

Try here They were distributed on floppies as well
RKRM_Devices.lha Part 1 of 4 of Amiga ROM Kernel

RKRM_Lib1.lha Part 2 of 4 of Amiga ROM Kernel

RKRM_Lib2.lha Part 3 of 4 of Amiga ROM Kernel Manuals

RKRM_Lib3.lha Part 4 of 4 of Amiga ROM Kernel Manuals

Try here They were distributed on floppies as well
RKRM_Devices.lha Part 1 of 4 of Amiga ROM Kernel

RKRM_Lib1.lha Part 2 of 4 of Amiga ROM Kernel

RKRM_Lib2.lha Part 3 of 4 of Amiga ROM Kernel Manuals

RKRM_Lib3.lha Part 4 of 4 of Amiga ROM Kernel Manuals

GNU EMACS for the Amiga is obtainable here. Fairly old version though.

However, I find the attitude of the BSD proponents on this subject somewhat strange. By choosing the BSD license, you are giving people the right to do whatever they want with their work. This means that company could take your code and include it in a proprietory app, without releasing improvements back to the community.

BSD licensed projects are often funded by loose consortiums of companies who want to able to build proprietary products on top of the open source project. One example that comes to mind is ACE and TAO which has many corporate sponsors and is incorporated into several products - both open source and proprietary. IIRC, Doug Schmidt, the project leader (and author of gperf - so he certainly understands both the GPL and BSD licenses), felt that a GPL license for ACE would have made it harder to attract corporate sponsors.

This means that company could take your code and include it in a proprietory app, without releasing improvements back to the community. By their decision to license under BSD, developers indicate that they are okay with this.

In practice, while consortium members or other users may want to use the BSD'd product in a proprietary product of their own, they still do not want the headache of maintaining a local fork of the BSD'd code. Most are more than happy to return bug fixes and enhancements back to the the BSD'd code maintainers even though they are not strictly required to.

However, I find the attitude of the BSD proponents on this subject somewhat strange. By choosing the BSD license, you are giving people the right to do whatever they want with their work. This means that company could take your code and include it in a proprietory app, without releasing improvements back to the community.

BSD licensed projects are often funded by loose consortiums of companies who want to able to build proprietary products on top of the open source project. One example that comes to mind is ACE and TAO which has many corporate sponsors and is incorporated into several products - both open source and proprietary. IIRC, Doug Schmidt, the project leader (and author of gperf - so he certainly understands both the GPL and BSD licenses), felt that a GPL license for ACE would have made it harder to attract corporate sponsors.

This means that company could take your code and include it in a proprietory app, without releasing improvements back to the community. By their decision to license under BSD, developers indicate that they are okay with this.

In practice, while consortium members or other users may want to use the BSD'd product in a proprietary product of their own, they still do not want the headache of maintaining a local fork of the BSD'd code. Most are more than happy to return bug fixes and enhancements back to the the BSD'd code maintainers even though they are not strictly required to.

However, I find the attitude of the BSD proponents on this subject somewhat strange. By choosing the BSD license, you are giving people the right to do whatever they want with their work. This means that company could take your code and include it in a proprietory app, without releasing improvements back to the community.

BSD licensed projects are often funded by loose consortiums of companies who want to able to build proprietary products on top of the open source project. One example that comes to mind is ACE and TAO which has many corporate sponsors and is incorporated into several products - both open source and proprietary. IIRC, Doug Schmidt, the project leader (and author of gperf - so he certainly understands both the GPL and BSD licenses), felt that a GPL license for ACE would have made it harder to attract corporate sponsors.

This means that company could take your code and include it in a proprietory app, without releasing improvements back to the community. By their decision to license under BSD, developers indicate that they are okay with this.

In practice, while consortium members or other users may want to use the BSD'd product in a proprietary product of their own, they still do not want the headache of maintaining a local fork of the BSD'd code. Most are more than happy to return bug fixes and enhancements back to the the BSD'd code maintainers even though they are not strictly required to.

mars isn't the "death planet" - that moniker is reserved for venus:

• surface temperature of 480c
• surface pressure of 96x earth's
• clouds of sulfuric acid

now that's a death planet... and yet the soviets managed to drop a lander on it successfully way back in 1982 and even sent back some pictures

There was an old episode of Murphy Brown where Murphy, scoffing at silly art critics, has a painting done by her toddler child entered in an art exhibit. One critic naturally finds it profound, wonderful, etc, while the other calls it amateurish garbage. The point was well made -- you can't dump everyone into a category.

Finally, regarding the author's attempt at deconstruction:

It is not generally claimed that John F. Kennedy was a homosexual. Since it is not an issue, why would anyone choose to explicitly declare that he was not a homosexual unless they wanted to make it an issue? Clearly, the reader is left with a question, a lingering doubt which had not previously been there. If the text had instead simply asked, "Was John F. Kennedy a homosexual?", the reader would simply answer, "No." and forget the matter. If it had simply declared, "John F. Kennedy was a homosexual.", it would have left the reader begging for further justification or argument to support the proposition. Phrasing it as a negative declaration, however, introduces the question in the reader's mind, exploiting society's homophobia to attack the reputation of the fallen President. What's more, the form makes it appear as if there is ongoing debate, further legitimizing the reader's entertainment of the question. Thus the text can be read as questioning the very assertion that it is making.

That's actually the comment in the article I found most controversial. The types of memories he references are called 'flashbulb memories,' and study after study (including one about memories of the Challenger disaster) shows that flashbulb memories are rather inaccurate, even to the extent of simple things like where the person was when they heard the news. This memories are heavily influenced by others' stories, the media, and simply memory decay.

In reality, strong emotions make for strong confidence in the memory.

He made it sound like it was a well-known and undisputed fact, and that's definitely not the case. Some recent research on 9/11 flashbulb memories even suggest that accuracy degrades at the same rate as normal memories, yet confidence degrades at a much slower rate.

An article about the inaccuracy of flashbulb memories of JFK's assassination:

Flashbulb memories of JFK's assassination may not be so accurate

Should kernel.org be slow for you, use a mirror, such as this one.

OSG is also the basis for the Blue Marble Viewer, which is a really cool demonstration of what OSG can do.

BMV uses NASA data, and on the OSG list somebody also mentioned Mars Orbiter Laser Altimeter (MOLA) data. I don't read the list anymore, this could be integrated into BMV or some other osg app by now.

In that session, Republican did press their advantage to gerrymander Texas congressional districts, just as the Democrats had done every decade they were in charge of Texas.

Oh, well, then it's okay.

Screw assigning blame. No matter which side is doing it, it's bullshit.

What's good for the goose is good for the gander, and to the victor goes the spoils.

And might makes right.

A cliche isn't an argument.

There are many things to dislike about gerrymandering, but the Supreme Court has ruled that it is prefectly legal and constitutional as long as its not done for the purpose of racial discrimination.

Just because it's legal doesn't mean it's right. The Supreme Couty ruled that slavery was legal at one point. Should previous generations simply have shrugged and said, "Hey, the Supreme Court says it's legal, I guess I can't complain"? If something is truly wrong you need to stand up against, even if it's legal.

Try the ACE classes. It will work on any platform, even embeded ones (at least with the serial port). (the classes you would be interested in are ACE_DEV_IO and ACE_DEV_Connector).

You can get a piece of a meteorite with these pre-solar grains (diamonds) here. Here is a little more explaination about them, and the meteorites that have them, sorry it is a bit dry! :-) These are the most ancient intact objects ever found.

Just a rough copy-and-paste. I'm not posting it AC because nobody trusts AC text reposts anymore. Too many troll text insertions (sometimes funny, sometimes just dumb). I've left out the footnotes and tables that don't format well -- if this piques your curiosity, download the original .pdf.

Heavy metal frost on Venus
Laura Schaefer and Bruce Fegley, Jr.
Planetary Chemistry Laboratory
Department of Earth & Planetary Sciences
Washington University
St. Louis, MO 63130-2302 USA
Submitted to Icarus
12 September 2003
Revised: 13 November 2003
Pages: 20
Tables: 2
Figures: 4

Proposed Running Head: Heavy metal frost on Venus
Editorial correspondence to:
Bruce Fegley, Jr.
Department of Earth and Planetary Sciences
Campus Box 1169
Washington University
St. Louis, MO 63130-4899
Phone: (314) 935-4852
Fax: (314) 935-4853
E-mail: bfegley@levee.wustl.edu

ABSTRACT
Chemical equilibrium calculations of volatile metal geochemistry on Venus show that
high dielectric constant compounds of lead and bismuth such as PbS (galena), Bi2S3
(bismuthite) or Pb-Bi sulfosalts condense in the Venusian highlands and may be
responsible for the low radar emissivities observed by Magellan and Pioneer Venus. Our
calculations also show that elemental tellurium is unstable on Venus? surface and will not
condense below 46.6 km. This is over 30 km higher than Maxwell Montes, the highest
point on Venus? surface. Elemental analyses of Venus? highlands surface by laser
induced breakdown spectroscopy (LIBS) and/or X-ray fluorescence (XRF) can verify the
identity of the heavy metal frost on Venus. The Pb-Pb age of Venus could be determined
by mass spectrometric measurements of the Pb207/Pb204 and Pb206/Pb204 isotopic ratios in
Pb-bearing frosts. All of these measurements are technologically feasible now.
Key Words: Venus, geochemistry, trace elements, Te, Pb, Bi, dielectric constant,

INTRODUCTION
Pioneer Venus and Magellan radar observations of Venus? surface reveal a
puzzling shift in radar properties at a planetary radius of ~6054 km (Pettengill et al. 1982,
1996, 1997, Ford & Pettengill 1983). Below this altitude and over most of Venus, the
radar properties are typical for anhydrous rocks, such as dry basalt. In contrast, higher
elevation regions have lower radar emissivity indicating the presence of semiconducting
minerals with high dielectric constants (Pettengill et al. 1996). A number of models have
been proposed to explain the unusual radar properties of the Venusian highlands. Among
these are: volumetric scattering from decimeter sized voids in surface rock (Pettengill &
Ford 1993), the presence of a low-loss soil layer (Tryka & Muhleman 1992), the loading
of surface rock with small conductors or dielectrics such as pyrite (Pettengill et al. 1982,
Ford & Pettengill 1983) or perovskite (Fegley et al. 1992), the presence of ferroelectric
minerals (Shepard et al. 1994), and the vapor phase deposition of high dielectric constant
metallic compounds (Brackett et al. 1995). However, Magellan bistatic radar
observations of the Maxwell Montes highlands (Pettengill et al. 1996) are best explained
by the metallic frost model (Pettengill et al. 1996, Brackett et al. 1995).
Brackett et al. (1995) proposed that the low emissivity minerals in the Venusian
highlands are metal halides or chalcogenides produced by volcanic outgassing. Halides
and/or chalcogenides of several volatile metals (e.g., Cu, As, Pb, Sb, Bi) occur around
terrestrial volcanic vents and fumaroles or are present in volcanic gases (Brackett et al.
1995). Although volcanic outgassing may occur anywhere on Venus? surface, the volatile
metals and their compounds only condense in the cooler Venusian highlands, which are
cold traps for the heavy metal frost.
Pettengill et al. (1996) suggested that the metalli

Is this not precisely what one would use to filter out, say, unwanted political documents going in/out of China? To, say, spot a specific MP3 file being traded on a P2P network and stop it?

I wish I saw this story when it first came out. If you check the PDF on page 6 you will see a sample image listing an entry for "Copyrighted movie" and that entry belongs to "Movie Company". On page 10 it says:

A system has been developed that not only blocks the spread of Internet worms and computer viruses, but also has utility for a range of other applications, including data security, copyright protection and the documentation and management of digital transactions.

The system includes a block mode and an alert mode. With the block mode all internet service providers would be required to block copyrighted data. They could also be required to block a P2P application for "contributory infringment".

They also say: facilitating the streamlining and simplification of e-commerce transactions, by moving the point of purchace for goods and services to the local Internet Service providers and other network aggregation points, in essence, bringing the retailer to a computer user's home or office.

With the alert mode it could watch for data coming in or going out and trigger a billing record. Then it wouldn't matter if you downloaded it over P2P or from an official website, at the end of the month X-dollars would be added to your internet bill. Of course you're also going to be billed X-dollars at the end of the month if you receive some other file that happens to match the short tag they scan for.

-

I go to Wash U in St. Louis and actually know one the guys working on the project. I've also met Jon Turner, however I haven't met Lockwood. Him and some other professors sold some ATM technology to cisco back in the dot-com era and got crazy rich.

Anyway, you can find out all about their project at the applied research labratory FRX website:

http://www.arl.wustl.edu/arl/projects/fpx/

Conversely sometimes a "Founding Father" has had the time to let it all settle into his brain and produce a concise and clear book that leaves one banging the desk yelling "Why aren't ALL Math/Science books like this!"

For example, "Richard W. Hamming. Coding and Information Theory."

E.T.Jaynes Probability as Extended Logic is a wonder as well. Rip out all those stuffed shirt probability theorists out of the universities and replace them "Probability as Extended Logic" and the world will be a _much_ better place.

But it also comes prepackaged with ACE !

BTW There is a free version of it that is downloadable.

I am the webmaster for declared Green Party pre-candidate David Cobb. It's a Zope/Plone site running on BSD. i also run the site for Cynthia McKinney, but I haven't put much time into her site recently, and don't plan to until she gives a stronger indication that she's interested in us.

Cobb's site will be growing in the near future, as the web team expands.

And for those of you who want to post crap about Nader spoiling in 2000, first read this, this, and especially this, which contains a whole string of surprises.

The above posting is somewhat more insightful that it appears at first glance. Consider this: I have yet to attend or visit an institution where the CS/EE departments did not have their own computing services departments.

I can quite specifically point to CRL at UIUC and CTS at Wash U. Both are "wholly owned subsidiaries" of their respective CS departments (although CTS provides support for other deparments...for a price). And both are far more competant than any of the other IT staffs at their institutions.

Now, why is this interesting? Think--CS and EE departments make much heavier use of Unix (especially free Unix) than other departments. Their respective IT departments manage to keep these abused and Unix-heavy infrastructures up and running far more effectively with far less fuss than the underutilized and MS-heavy infrastructures of other departments (actually, to be fair, the Olin B-School does have a better-than-average IT support staff. Nowhere near as good as CRL or CTS, but better than average. Something to do with hiring a bunch of employees with a 25% turnover rate).

Let's summarize the interesting facts:

1. CS and EE departments make punishing use of their computing resources.
2. CS and EE departments tend to be Unix-centric, especially Linux and BSD (although HP and Sun do have a strong yet diminishing presence).
3. As a result, CS and EE departments tend to have thier own, separate facilities.
4. As a result, CS and EE departments cannot take advantages of the enormous economies of scale inheirent in large-scale administration (it should be roughly as easy to admin 1000 machines as 100 or 10000).
5. Despite this, CS and EE departments tend to enjoy fairly reliable, trouble free computing.
6. In contrast, other departments suffer from poor-performing, unreliable computing.

If this is computing with no QC, no support, and no accountability, someone needs to sue those bastards pushing 6-sigma for screwing everybody else over.

The above posting is somewhat more insightful that it appears at first glance. Consider this: I have yet to attend or visit an institution where the CS/EE departments did not have their own computing services departments.

I can quite specifically point to CRL at UIUC and CTS at Wash U. Both are "wholly owned subsidiaries" of their respective CS departments (although CTS provides support for other deparments...for a price). And both are far more competant than any of the other IT staffs at their institutions.

Now, why is this interesting? Think--CS and EE departments make much heavier use of Unix (especially free Unix) than other departments. Their respective IT departments manage to keep these abused and Unix-heavy infrastructures up and running far more effectively with far less fuss than the underutilized and MS-heavy infrastructures of other departments (actually, to be fair, the Olin B-School does have a better-than-average IT support staff. Nowhere near as good as CRL or CTS, but better than average. Something to do with hiring a bunch of employees with a 25% turnover rate).

Let's summarize the interesting facts:

1. CS and EE departments make punishing use of their computing resources.
2. CS and EE departments tend to be Unix-centric, especially Linux and BSD (although HP and Sun do have a strong yet diminishing presence).
3. As a result, CS and EE departments tend to have thier own, separate facilities.
4. As a result, CS and EE departments cannot take advantages of the enormous economies of scale inheirent in large-scale administration (it should be roughly as easy to admin 1000 machines as 100 or 10000).
5. Despite this, CS and EE departments tend to enjoy fairly reliable, trouble free computing.
6. In contrast, other departments suffer from poor-performing, unreliable computing.

If this is computing with no QC, no support, and no accountability, someone needs to sue those bastards pushing 6-sigma for screwing everybody else over.

The above posting is somewhat more insightful that it appears at first glance. Consider this: I have yet to attend or visit an institution where the CS/EE departments did not have their own computing services departments.

I can quite specifically point to CRL at UIUC and CTS at Wash U. Both are "wholly owned subsidiaries" of their respective CS departments (although CTS provides support for other deparments...for a price). And both are far more competant than any of the other IT staffs at their institutions.

Now, why is this interesting? Think--CS and EE departments make much heavier use of Unix (especially free Unix) than other departments. Their respective IT departments manage to keep these abused and Unix-heavy infrastructures up and running far more effectively with far less fuss than the underutilized and MS-heavy infrastructures of other departments (actually, to be fair, the Olin B-School does have a better-than-average IT support staff. Nowhere near as good as CRL or CTS, but better than average. Something to do with hiring a bunch of employees with a 25% turnover rate).

Let's summarize the interesting facts:

1. CS and EE departments make punishing use of their computing resources.
2. CS and EE departments tend to be Unix-centric, especially Linux and BSD (although HP and Sun do have a strong yet diminishing presence).
3. As a result, CS and EE departments tend to have thier own, separate facilities.
4. As a result, CS and EE departments cannot take advantages of the enormous economies of scale inheirent in large-scale administration (it should be roughly as easy to admin 1000 machines as 100 or 10000).
5. Despite this, CS and EE departments tend to enjoy fairly reliable, trouble free computing.
6. In contrast, other departments suffer from poor-performing, unreliable computing.

If this is computing with no QC, no support, and no accountability, someone needs to sue those bastards pushing 6-sigma for screwing everybody else over.

Enterprise apps aren't a big deal. Most of them are so well defined and have been done so often that they are pretty much considered "cookie-cutter" applications.
For some real hard-core programming work, you should probably check out what is being done with ACE and TAO and CIAO. These applications are definitely way above the knowledge of a typical novice user. Mainly this is the case because they encompass everything from the highest levels (Model Driven Architecture) down to the lowest levels (embedded hard realtime systems, device drivers, assembly language) -- and everything in between (distributed/multi-platform, fault-tolerant development, etc). If a novice can do all that, basically, they are not a novice.

Back in the mid-90's, I was an education student at a mid-size university, and I worked at the education lab (which was, of course, all Macs). I got a friend of mine a job there, and he ended up getting the job I wanted (tech support for the school of education), while I sat there in the lab and helped people print out their papers or work on their Hypercard projects. I was often very bored, so one night I decided to install Radiation & Trigger, a Mac app/extension combo that allowed you to display any error message on a target computer that had the Radiation extension, on every machine in the lab. I was really bored that night.

Anyway, my friend was working early one morning before the lab was open, so I fired up Trigger and sent the default error message to all the Macs in the lab:

"The radiation shield on your monitor has failed. Please step back 5 feet."

Figuring that would crack my friend up, I called a couple minutes later to check out the damage. Unfortunately, he wasn't even there - he was off fixing some professor's computer, and my boss answered the phone instead. I asked where Andy was, and she asked me if I knew anything about a radiation shield, because she had opened the lab early that day so the graduate students could work on their theses.

I quit less than a week later to avoid being fired.

I'm sure you know this already.
http://wuarchive.wustl.edu/mirrors/kernel.org/linu x/kernel/SillySounds/

Lee-nucks. Which is how someone would say Lihnux with a longer i.

As someone who was heavily involved in college radio for all of his undergraduate years, I cannot understand why the RIAA is demanding the payment of these silly royalties by radio stations who want to webcast. My alma mater spends tens of thousands of dollars each year toward radio station maintenance to advertise the RIAA's music at no cost to the RIAA. On top of this they pay things like ASCAP public performance fees. The webcast is of lower quality than the air signal (which is pretty crappy itself by the way), so from the RIAA's perspective it is clearly advertising and not a way for people to get bit-perfect copies of the music. And yet they want people to pay them for the right to advertise for them for free.

The same record labels that demand these royalties will also happily send piles of promo CDs, related swag, free concert tickets, and on occasion an actual breathing representative to try and get college stations to play their albums.

Seems strange to me, but maybe it's just because I'm young and idealistic...

You know, people criticise Slashdot for doing it -- Just copying small pieces of an article, then aiming a link at it. It's not real journalism. Ok, maybe not. But I was a little surprised when, following links for this story, there were two separate articles ( at Innovations Report and at Washington University) which have almost completely identical content, right down to the captions on the pictures... Oh, wait, the Slashdot version doesn't include the pictures. I guess that's what they call editing. Next best thing to journalism.

The article at Washington University is, of course, the original. So, while we're link farming, here is the doctor's homepage.

You know, people criticise Slashdot for doing it -- Just copying small pieces of an article, then aiming a link at it. It's not real journalism. Ok, maybe not. But I was a little surprised when, following links for this story, there were two separate articles ( at Innovations Report and at Washington University) which have almost completely identical content, right down to the captions on the pictures... Oh, wait, the Slashdot version doesn't include the pictures. I guess that's what they call editing. Next best thing to journalism.

The article at Washington University is, of course, the original. So, while we're link farming, here is the doctor's homepage.

Sorry, but just because you can date art, casting ores, and water doesn't mean you can date rocks:

• Rock art is usually made from vegetable (which are made of carbon) or mineral paint. Can you guess what mineral is used to make black?
• To make metal hot enough to cast you stick it in a fire, to make a fire you burn wood, wood is made of...?
• I'm not sure about carbon dating water, but there are similar dating methods.

However, you can uranium date rocks that contain no carbon much as the water is oxygen dated. Unfortunately, dating Stonehenge is still difficult.

http://www.cs.wustl.edu/~schmidt/TAO.html

[*] It's not actually GPL, though; more of a BSD-ish license.

But, I'd hesitate to call it easy to use. The standard C++ language bindings in particular are astonishingly bad:

• they were originally designed long before C++ had standard string and container types and so use char * (with invisible attributes like the const-ness of a pointer controlling vital behaviour like who is responsible for freeing the object) along with their own unique way of dealing with arrays and iterators
• early CORBA implementors supported either fast-but-dumb pointers or slower-but-safe reference-counted smart pointers, so when the standard finally caught up it standardized both (typename_ptr and typename_var), with predictably disastrous results (crashes or memory leaks if you mix-n-match them, which may be unavoidable if you use third-party libraries)

The situation is reported to look better from other languages, and I can personally confirm that the Java bindings are a delight to work with by comparison (of course in Java it's even easier to just use RMI).

As for the wire-level protocol, I have no complaints about IIOP now that it has readable corbaloc: URLs (the CDR marshalling details are still messy but unless you are writing your own ORB they are taken care of for you). I'm actually a bit surprised that IIOP isn't more widely used on the Internet and in the open source world (outside of GNOME of course) -- it's the distributed computing open standard, it interoperates across languages and OSes, it has numerous open-source implementations, and It Just Works(tm).

Instead we are getting stuff like web services and SOAP, whose wire format is just as incomprehensible to humans (don't kid yourself that XML is easy to read -- have a look at a fully-decked-out SOAP message some day) while using many times as much bandwidth and memory and taking at least ten times as long to parse. (And I say this even though I currently write SOAP gateways for a living.)

Yes, I know there are also articles claiming that sapiens and neandertalis didn't interbreed, people seem to need them every few years to reassure themselves that all of those hybrid skeletons are just phantasms. The last page above references several articles which address this very issue.

The lead scientist is a professer at Washington University in St. Louis. There is more info at the university's web site. It turns out there was more than a jawbone found, but the rest of the bones haven't been analyzed yet.

The lead scientist is a professer at Washington University in St. Louis. There is more info at the university's web site. It turns out there was more than a jawbone found, but the rest of the bones haven't been analyzed yet.

Time for me to plug the mirror I'm affiliated with...

Wuarchive's kernel.org mirror

... if I had the time:

Bretthorst-style Bayesian periodic signal detection with a sliding window to pull out individual dots/dashes. Adaption of the Gregory-Loredo pulsar detection algorithm for Gaussian noise would be better. If you wanted to build a serious dedicated program, you could incorporate more prior knowledge about the structure of the signal (e.g. that it's composed of single-frequency dots and dashes of specific probable duration, and you could even tell it to look specifically for only codes appearing in the list of station call signs).

... if I had the time:

Bretthorst-style Bayesian periodic signal detection with a sliding window to pull out individual dots/dashes. Adaption of the Gregory-Loredo pulsar detection algorithm for Gaussian noise would be better. If you wanted to build a serious dedicated program, you could incorporate more prior knowledge about the structure of the signal (e.g. that it's composed of single-frequency dots and dashes of specific probable duration, and you could even tell it to look specifically for only codes appearing in the list of station call signs).

Looks like the ACE and TAO frameworks are heavily used in military applications for some cool stuff with fighter jets, helicopters, radar systems, satellites, and a heck of a lot more.
Of course C++ is used for many cool non-military applications as well.
So, learning ACE and TAO and C++ probably won't hurt you.

There was a case back in 88 that demonstrates the role of the ACLU in all its irony. If you remember that year, you probably remember Bush the First packing as many Hot Button Keywords into his presidential campaign speeches as possible. One really nasty example is that he repeatedly referred to his opponent as a "card-carrying member of the ACLU", terminology obviously meant to evoke left wing associations.

Now somewhere in the midwest (I think it was Ohio) a woman tried to put "Elect Bush" signs on her front lawn, only to be told she was violating local zoning ordinances. She placed a call to the local ACLU chapter -- and got a callback from the state chairman, who informed her that she had raised a vital free speech issue, and the state ACLU would back her and her Bush signs with everything it had!

Of course, that's not the biggest irony connected with the ACLU -- it doesn't come close to all those Nazi and White Supremicist bozos who turn to the ACLU for legal representation, which often comes in the form of Jewish or African-American lawyers! But it's all part of the same idea: that for the Constitution to work, its protections have to be extended to everybody: pedophiles, Nazis, and even people who attack the ACLU itself.

Which makes association with the ACLU pretty difficult: you have to accept that your dues are going to go to protect the legal rights of a lot of people you happen to despise.

I actually have no problem with this: I'm a Jewish American who happens to think that everybody should read The Turner Diaries. The more appalling an idea is, the more you need to bring it out in the open. Anyway, freedom of thought (including stupid thought) is the most fundamental of rights.

I do have a major issue with the ACLU. Not their rabid defense of the rights of despised minorities, but rather their assumption that litigation is the only way to do it. Lawyers do play an important role in protecting the rights of their clients. But the courts aren't always the best protector of personal liberties. As Dred Scott learned, they often give a high priority to maintaining the status quo. And even when they don't, having a social change mandated by a federal judge is no guarantee of the change actually happening. Any African American trying to find a place to live will tell you that!

> There are already a million monkeys on a million typewriters, and Slashdot is NOTHING like Shakespeare...

Alas, Poor Yorick?

When I heard the story this morning, I thought of bone marrow transplants. In that case, aren't you getting someone else's blood-generating cells? And wouldn't your blood cells then contain someone else's DNA?

It seems like they'd make a Law & Order or CSI episode from this: a career criminal arranges to get a bone marrow transplant from someone whose DNA is known to authorities, but who hasn't yet been apprehended (ooh, big word!). Then, the real bad guy can leave all the blood he wants at the crime scene, and never worry about being tracked.

Of course, the side effects would probably make a lifestyle of violent crime a bit more difficult than, say, the odd embezzlement here and there.

I mean a more flagrant example of illicit "sampling" could not be imagined. A whole field of art based on found materials would be litigated out of existence.

What about Andy Warhol's soup cans? You think those would survive today's IP environment?

Yes ;-) and no. PHP provides a bit less control on choosing the appropriate trade-off between size and speed: an issue born with data structures and algorithms, much older than Java.

How is this scalable, say, to multiple computers?

Performance is a matter of software design and not of language or bytecode or whatever. It's like the "don't debug, verify correctness" principle of eXtreme Programming. Here it's: "don't optimize your code, design it to be fast and scalable".
On multiples computers, your design should also reflect the same principle: avoid reprocessing the same things again and again. The difference is only about granularity. Caesar's "divide and conquer" principle is very useful too.
You may specialize some machines on some subsets of data so each can have in memory the data they need most of the time, let each work on it, and finally merge all sub-results. That's how Google manage its huge index for instance.
You may also keep databases but use them through Active Objects to "decouple method execution from method invocation to enhance concurrency". I often use a LRU cache to address the issue of what should be kept in memory and what should not.

Can you point to a document that explains some of this stuff without using words like 'enterprise enabled'?

That's a very wide topic covering most of computer science: data structures and algorithms, design patterns, architectures of OS, ...
With some experience, I discover OOP and system programming are very similar. Programmers of both worlds often argue although they in fact agree: they simply don't use the same words for the same things!
I therefore suggest you have a look at Design patterns from Gamma and al., Pattern Languages of Program Design from Vlissides and al., read any good book about the architecture of modern OS (paper on I/O aspect), and for god sake keep off "The ultimate /my-favorite-language/ Programming Bible ;-).

IMHO, every programmer should know about design patterns, even if he doesn't consider ever practicing OOP, and about how wonderfully OS are designed, even if he doesn't consider ever leaving Java to write a device driver or an I/O library in C.
In addition to improving software around, it would also make a true miracle: terminate the weekly Biggest Di*k Contest about languages on /.

In fact, gravimetric data has been collected from Mars orbiters, although the precision is nothing like what the Texas researchers are doing.

I doubt that gravimetric data will be of much use in high-end physics research, unless it's somehow used to support experiments for the detection of gravitational waves, for instance. The data is very useful for putting better constraints on various models of geodynamics, though.

Link.

They have one of the largest earthen mounds in the world.