It's always cool to see governments trying to enact these kinds of laws and watch the Microsoft backlash against them:)."
Not Cool. Very uncool
OTOH, Here's the summary of the big long letter:
From reading the Bill it will be clear that once passed: -the law does not forbid the production of proprietary software -the law does not forbid the sale of proprietary software providing that the source code is included with the purchase -the law does not specifiy which concrete software to use -the law does not dictate the supplier from whom software will be bought -the law does not limit the terms under which a software product can be licensed, providing that the entire source code is included with the product.
What the Bill does express clearly, is that, for software to be acceptable for the state it is not enough that it is technically capable of fulfilling a task, but that further the contractual conditions must satisfy a series of requirements reguarding the license, without which the State cannot guarantee the citizen adequate processing of his data, watching over its integrity, confidentiality, and accessibility throughout time, as these are very critical aspects for its normal functioning.
He then goes on to describe the advantages of open sourced software. Everybody on Slashdot has heard these arguments, so there's not really much to read. The above quote, however, describes the law, so I figured you might look at that.
I ment to say MuPad. It's not as good as Mathematica or Maple, but it's a close third. None of the other CAS packages are in the same category as these three (unless they use Maple as the engine).
If you don't agree with the Copyright terms, then don't listen to the music. It's a consumers market. The reason that the RIAA affiliates force commercialized pop crap down everybodies throat is because we buy it.
I download songs from the internet. I sometimes purchase albums from artists whos songs I've downloaded or found out about on the internet. I don't use the latter argument to justify the former.
Stealing is stealing. It doesn't matter if you are stealing a *copy* or stealing the CD from a store. It is not ethical because the legal agreement between the artist, recording company, and you is being broken.
If you don't like this contract, then wait things out. Capitalism is a great engine to spur innovations. Eventually, somebody, somewhere, will have a distribution model that works better than what the creative geniuses </sarcasm> in the recording industry can come up with and the *consumers* (that's you and me) will buy into it. Eventually this model will be one that the RIAA can't squash.
In the mean time, our only job is to remind the government that people, not corporations, have rights.
route the cable near the edge of the laptop, dremel a small hole, poke the cable through, get an
*GASPS*
dremel a small hole in my TiBook?? Are you out of your mind? I barely had the courage to insert a theatre light-gel behind the screen so that my glowing apple glows red.
The best solution is PDF. LaTeX2html is okay if you can get away with html, and it handles equations the best of any (if converting to a GIF is best). 'tth' is nice, but again, only use it if html is acceptable. 'tth' changes equations into tables and symbol font, which is ideal for simple formulas but LaTeX2html is better for heavy complicated equations.
'ttm' will supposedly convert equations into MathML, but I doubt that the non-DVI/PDF/PS crowd will have anything on their computers to read MathML.
Everything that I ever converted to word/wordperfect, I had to rewrite the equations by hand. There is no other way about it.
Summary: If you are submitting a DVI file to a journal, and that journal requires MSWord, than you had better get a graduate student (they come cheap) to rewrite it in MSWord.
I seen a few other solutions, which consisted of providing documentation/multimedia in a *linear* course style flow. They, however, were far from a training course. I assume that in a training course, you want to evaluate the students/trainees. Lon-CAPA provides for this. They way that the courses are set up lends itself nicely to Multimedia/any content in small components, which build up a section. Small sections, which build up a course, and small courses that build up a curriculum. Actually, it's abstract, so you can build up whatever you want, from whatever you want.
It's been used at many Universities for a few years and is very mature, despite being in constant development.
It's also GPLed software. It doesn't just rival most commercial software packages, it does much more than *any* commercial software packages. The entire philosophy of Lon-CAPA is different than that of the other packages. Lon-CAPA is based around the student/admin/instructor, whereas other packages are based around the course material. This significant difference provides for a much easier and more intuitive experience.
Octave's random number generator is as slow as molasses!!!
If you install Octave and plan to do any sort of Monte Carlo simulations, then the first thing you should do is install a faster random number generator. There's a few available from Sourceforge, so go there. This simple step sped up my simulations, by a factor of 2 (took 50% as long to run).
Comparing MATLAB to Mathematica is like comparing apples to oranges.
Mathematica offers a great symbolic algebra tool, a functional scripting language, a good plotting data visualization tools.
MATLAB offers a great procedural scripting language, awesome array/matrix handling, and good plotting data visualization tools. Although, overall, MATLAB scripts run very slowly, when it comes to array/image manipulations, our best coders couldn't write C code that would perform as quickly as a well-written MATLAB script.
I have extensive educational experience with Mathematica and extensive proffesional experience with MATLAB. One is good for some things the other is good for other things. For basic math projects or assignments, probably either tool is equally good, and tools such as Octave or SigmaPad are effective and free alternatives for MATLAB or Mathematica, respectively.
MATLAB and Mathematica shine, however, when it comes to toolboxes. At Lockheed Martin, I used the Neural Network and Image Processing toolboxes extensively, and I was very happy with them. Also, MATLAB lends itself nicely to reprogramming your code in C, or using MEX wrappers to program in C or insert C code into MATLAB.
Although I don't have much experience with Mathematica add-ins (except for the Statistics Toolbox), I imagine that they are also well written and efficient. I would guess that Mathematica would have better *analytical* toolboxes, whereas MATLAB would have better *numerical* toolboxes.
Not if you are a Linux/Apple owner with a G4! Why would they have G3 optimizations rather than G4 optimizations? I was under the opinion that the G3 was *very* similar to a PowerPC chip. The G4 is the chip that has the extra stuff added that might be *optimized* for.
Also, does this support my TiBook 667? Most Linux distro's do not support the newer TiBook's Radeon Video card. I've heard of many headache's from people who have funky resolutions and what not since the card is not supported.
What the/. article fails to mention is that this hack was developed by a 12 year old kid.
Re:Titanium is also very flexible.
on
The Sexiest Metal
·
· Score: 5, Informative
This is the thing. Apple chose Titanium more because it was sexy than anything else. You see a lot of things advertised as "Titanium", and often times the Titanium plays no important role in the product. There are some golf balls out there that has some Titanium in one of the resins close to the core, but the Ti is not in metal form, and is really only there in minute quantities.
Titanium Dioxide, commonly referred to as rutile, is a form of titanium. This is commonly found in most white pigments and dies. Chances are, the white golf ball has rutile, and thus titanium, in the dyed plastic coating. Gold balls are usually white, and I wouldn't be surprised if most of them contained rutile.
Kitchen sinks, stoves, refrigerator, bath tubs, many have a porcelain coating and rutile is the whiteness in the coating. Even your green stove has a white rutile base prior to adding green pigment.
That being said, I agree that structurally, it would have been better to use steel or alluminum for the case of the PowerBook. However I own a powerBook, and, although flexible, I prefer it's titanium, although polished aluminum would be cool too.
The coolest thing about titanium, that often get's looked over is its resiliancy. It makes it ideal for applications where steel and aluminum are useless. Look at bicycle frames, for example. Steel frames have been around for years and they have been optimized to be ultralight, strong, yet flexible enough for a comfortable ride. Aluminum came along, and although lighter than steel, it made for a rigid stiff frame and a toothshattering bike ride. The *design* of the aluminum frames could have been altered to allow for more resiliency, but the problem with aluminum is it fatigues and breaks if it flexes to much, so redesigning the frame to be more flexible was out of the question. Fortuneatly, suspension bicycles need a high stiffness in order to keep hinges/shocks/etc. lined up straight, so aluminum is ideal for this purpose.
Titanium, although not as strong as steel and not as light as aluminum, offers resilience. The first Ti mountain bike frames were awful, built similar to their steel counterparts, and compared to riding a wet-noodle rather than a bicycle. Over the years, the design of Ti bikes has caught so that the frames are resilient in all of the right places, while still remaining sturdy in the other places. Some frames have even used this resilience as the suspension and put a damper/shock into the frame to allow for suspension travel and damping in a metal frame with NO hinges.
For the same job that I comment on above, I wrote a Perl script to find duplicate files. It worked well. If I remember correctly, it was based upon a similar program in the "Perl Cookbook" (Christianson). It would output a text file. I would then cat the text file in a shell script to modify the duplicated files (e.g. rm then). One problem, was the IRIX 'rm' (or any shell command) barfs if it gets passed too many arguments (i.e. 32k filenames). This wasn't to hard to work around.
Conclusions: 1. GNU Tools are the shiznit when it comes to managing large batches of data (CLI beats out GUI every time). 2. Even when GNU Tools are difficult to use (i.e. 32K files), there are work-arounds and they still blow the pants off of GUI file management tools.
I used to get all upset, because NONE of the "File-managers" work worth a darn when it comes to actually managing files!
Re:ACDSee image browser and graphics manipulation
on
Viewers for Large Images?
·
· Score: 4, Informative
I remember being very impressed with the size of images that ACDSee can handle. It was my image browser of choice at my old job where the average tiff files were ~35MB and the PGM files were much larger.
ACDSee does choke, however, if the directory has a few thousand images in it. We were training image recognition algorithms and a typical truth category might have as many as 10,000 images. With this many images in a directory, ACDSee became unuseable because it constantly would update the directory contents, filesizes, filetypes (of a network drive) and wouldn't allow user input until it was finished.
Don't forget that a materials heat conductivity is always exactly proportional to its electrical conductivity. Maybe we can use this new material for low density semiconductors!!
leave the contact paper on until after everything is glued, drilled, cut, assembled.
Any saw, power or hand saw will cut through the stuff. Drills make easy work of the plexiglass. Epoxy is the best bet for an adhesive, although some will prefer the look of bolted or bracketed corners. Even if you do use bolts and brackets, then still use epoxy, since the bolts/brackets will loosen over time and epoxy won't.
Be carefull of which chemicals you use to clean the plexiglass with. I forgot which ones damage the plastic, but some of them do.
A nice touch is to cut a shape or letters as a hole out of paper or aluminum foil. Tape the aluminum foil to the plexiglass (with contact paper removed) and sand away the plexiglass with some steel wool or sandpaper. This will create a frosted shape of whatever you cut out on the plexiglass. Practice this a few times on a spare piece, but I've seen the results and it looks professional and nice.
Remember, that with plexiglass, the looks of the internals of your PC will be as important as the looks of the case. SPend a little time replacing LED's with blue LED's. Try putting some reflectors near the internal LCDs so that the light reflects around the insides. Buy a few LED's just to hook up to the powersupply that don't do anything. One nice effect is to have all of the LEDs hidden from view, but the light that they create will cause the innerds of the computer to glow.
Bundle wires together.
Remove RF shielding wherever possible (unless you think it will cause 747s to crash in your backyard). If you want an overall RF shield when you are done, then use window screen materials and attach it to the inside or outside of the plexiglass case.
I would appreciate and other ideas or comments/suggestions on these ideas since I am planning to make one too.
I hate to reply to my own comment, but this thing is *ugly*! Not to mention that the 360 degree rotation shows that it has about 5 degrees of available tilt for the LCD panel.
I have to mention how harddrive platters and CD/DVD drives or more efficient and less noisy when mounted horizontally as opposed to slanted as they are in this monstrosity.
The only thing that might save this monster was if it came with a wireless keyboard and mouse (which is doesn't).
I forgot to mention that this runs WindowsXP rather than OS X (that's another thing the Gateway machine has going against it.
I remember reading about it on Slashdot. We nerds were against it back then. Maybe it took a nasty law such as the DMCA getting passed in order to realize just how important it is to stand up for a liberties.
Sometimes, being part of a Democracy can take hard work. Let this be a call to action for everybody to send a letter to their senator (mine's Hillary) to tell them what we believe in and why you don't support the SSSCA.
So... just how Realtime can the Linux Kernel be? Has anybody compared these latencies with WindowsNT, which according to my former employer, has a very low latency.
Is there a formal difference between low latency and a realtime OS?
What about the Timesys kernel patches? How do things match up to QNX another realtime OS??
This isn't news. We've known that they were going to do this for a while now. OEM's, especially HP have never been particularly friendly or supportave of things such as repartitioning and what not.
Every time I would call Dell Desktop tech-support, they would tell me to run a command from a boot floppy that would restore the computer to an as-recieved state.
That's not really *support* for the problem. IMHO it's a last resort. Not something that Dell, HP, home-user-OEM should be using all of the time.
Anyways, this rant lasted too long and I probably no longer have first post.
Slashdot Mirror
Not Cool. Very uncool
OTOH, Here's the summary of the big long letter:
He then goes on to describe the advantages of open sourced software. Everybody on Slashdot has heard these arguments, so there's not really much to read. The above quote, however, describes the law, so I figured you might look at that.I ment to say MuPad. It's not as good as Mathematica or Maple, but it's a close third. None of the other CAS packages are in the same category as these three (unless they use Maple as the engine).
What about the 1/2 year that there isn't any light? Even though the images would also be dark, I want to see the stars above the horizon!!
If you don't agree with the Copyright terms, then don't listen to the music. It's a consumers market. The reason that the RIAA affiliates force commercialized pop crap down everybodies throat is because we buy it.
I download songs from the internet. I sometimes purchase albums from artists whos songs I've downloaded or found out about on the internet. I don't use the latter argument to justify the former.
Stealing is stealing. It doesn't matter if you are stealing a *copy* or stealing the CD from a store. It is not ethical because the legal agreement between the artist, recording company, and you is being broken.
If you don't like this contract, then wait things out. Capitalism is a great engine to spur innovations. Eventually, somebody, somewhere, will have a distribution model that works better than what the creative geniuses </sarcasm> in the recording industry can come up with and the *consumers* (that's you and me) will buy into it. Eventually this model will be one that the RIAA can't squash.
In the mean time, our only job is to remind the government that people, not corporations, have rights.
dremel a small hole in my TiBook?? Are you out of your mind? I barely had the courage to insert a theatre light-gel behind the screen so that my glowing apple glows red.
'ttm' will supposedly convert equations into MathML, but I doubt that the non-DVI/PDF/PS crowd will have anything on their computers to read MathML.
Everything that I ever converted to word/wordperfect, I had to rewrite the equations by hand. There is no other way about it.
Summary: If you are submitting a DVI file to a journal, and that journal requires MSWord, than you had better get a graduate student (they come cheap) to rewrite it in MSWord.
I seen a few other solutions, which consisted of providing documentation/multimedia in a *linear* course style flow. They, however, were far from a training course. I assume that in a training course, you want to evaluate the students/trainees. Lon-CAPA provides for this. They way that the courses are set up lends itself nicely to Multimedia/any content in small components, which build up a section. Small sections, which build up a course, and small courses that build up a curriculum. Actually, it's abstract, so you can build up whatever you want, from whatever you want.
It's been used at many Universities for a few years and is very mature, despite being in constant development.
It's also GPLed software. It doesn't just rival most commercial software packages, it does much more than *any* commercial software packages. The entire philosophy of Lon-CAPA is different than that of the other packages. Lon-CAPA is based around the student/admin/instructor, whereas other packages are based around the course material. This significant difference provides for a much easier and more intuitive experience.
If you install Octave and plan to do any sort of Monte Carlo simulations, then the first thing you should do is install a faster random number generator. There's a few available from Sourceforge, so go there. This simple step sped up my simulations, by a factor of 2 (took 50% as long to run).
Mathematica offers a great symbolic algebra tool, a functional scripting language, a good plotting data visualization tools.
MATLAB offers a great procedural scripting language, awesome array/matrix handling, and good plotting data visualization tools. Although, overall, MATLAB scripts run very slowly, when it comes to array/image manipulations, our best coders couldn't write C code that would perform as quickly as a well-written MATLAB script.
I have extensive educational experience with Mathematica and extensive proffesional experience with MATLAB. One is good for some things the other is good for other things. For basic math projects or assignments, probably either tool is equally good, and tools such as Octave or SigmaPad are effective and free alternatives for MATLAB or Mathematica, respectively.
MATLAB and Mathematica shine, however, when it comes to toolboxes. At Lockheed Martin, I used the Neural Network and Image Processing toolboxes extensively, and I was very happy with them. Also, MATLAB lends itself nicely to reprogramming your code in C, or using MEX wrappers to program in C or insert C code into MATLAB.
Although I don't have much experience with Mathematica add-ins (except for the Statistics Toolbox), I imagine that they are also well written and efficient. I would guess that Mathematica would have better *analytical* toolboxes, whereas MATLAB would have better *numerical* toolboxes.
Also, does this support my TiBook 667? Most Linux distro's do not support the newer TiBook's Radeon Video card. I've heard of many headache's from people who have funky resolutions and what not since the card is not supported.
Please answer my questions!!
What the /. article fails to mention is that this hack was developed by a 12 year old kid.
Kitchen sinks, stoves, refrigerator, bath tubs, many have a porcelain coating and rutile is the whiteness in the coating. Even your green stove has a white rutile base prior to adding green pigment.
That being said, I agree that structurally, it would have been better to use steel or alluminum for the case of the PowerBook. However I own a powerBook, and, although flexible, I prefer it's titanium, although polished aluminum would be cool too.
The coolest thing about titanium, that often get's looked over is its resiliancy. It makes it ideal for applications where steel and aluminum are useless. Look at bicycle frames, for example. Steel frames have been around for years and they have been optimized to be ultralight, strong, yet flexible enough for a comfortable ride. Aluminum came along, and although lighter than steel, it made for a rigid stiff frame and a toothshattering bike ride. The *design* of the aluminum frames could have been altered to allow for more resiliency, but the problem with aluminum is it fatigues and breaks if it flexes to much, so redesigning the frame to be more flexible was out of the question. Fortuneatly, suspension bicycles need a high stiffness in order to keep hinges/shocks/etc. lined up straight, so aluminum is ideal for this purpose.
Titanium, although not as strong as steel and not as light as aluminum, offers resilience. The first Ti mountain bike frames were awful, built similar to their steel counterparts, and compared to riding a wet-noodle rather than a bicycle. Over the years, the design of Ti bikes has caught so that the frames are resilient in all of the right places, while still remaining sturdy in the other places. Some frames have even used this resilience as the suspension and put a damper/shock into the frame to allow for suspension travel and damping in a metal frame with NO hinges.
Conclusions:
1. GNU Tools are the shiznit when it comes to managing large batches of data (CLI beats out GUI every time).
2. Even when GNU Tools are difficult to use (i.e. 32K files), there are work-arounds and they still blow the pants off of GUI file management tools.
I used to get all upset, because NONE of the "File-managers" work worth a darn when it comes to actually managing files!
ACDSee does choke, however, if the directory has a few thousand images in it. We were training image recognition algorithms and a typical truth category might have as many as 10,000 images. With this many images in a directory, ACDSee became unuseable because it constantly would update the directory contents, filesizes, filetypes (of a network drive) and wouldn't allow user input until it was finished.
The electrical implimentations are limitless!!
--Ender (Orson Scott Card)
...then don't fix it!!
Any saw, power or hand saw will cut through the stuff. Drills make easy work of the plexiglass. Epoxy is the best bet for an adhesive, although some will prefer the look of bolted or bracketed corners. Even if you do use bolts and brackets, then still use epoxy, since the bolts/brackets will loosen over time and epoxy won't.
Be carefull of which chemicals you use to clean the plexiglass with. I forgot which ones damage the plastic, but some of them do.
A nice touch is to cut a shape or letters as a hole out of paper or aluminum foil. Tape the aluminum foil to the plexiglass (with contact paper removed) and sand away the plexiglass with some steel wool or sandpaper. This will create a frosted shape of whatever you cut out on the plexiglass. Practice this a few times on a spare piece, but I've seen the results and it looks professional and nice.
Remember, that with plexiglass, the looks of the internals of your PC will be as important as the looks of the case. SPend a little time replacing LED's with blue LED's. Try putting some reflectors near the internal LCDs so that the light reflects around the insides. Buy a few LED's just to hook up to the powersupply that don't do anything. One nice effect is to have all of the LEDs hidden from view, but the light that they create will cause the innerds of the computer to glow.
Bundle wires together.
Remove RF shielding wherever possible (unless you think it will cause 747s to crash in your backyard). If you want an overall RF shield when you are done, then use window screen materials and attach it to the inside or outside of the plexiglass case.
I would appreciate and other ideas or comments/suggestions on these ideas since I am planning to make one too.
I have to mention how harddrive platters and CD/DVD drives or more efficient and less noisy when mounted horizontally as opposed to slanted as they are in this monstrosity.
The only thing that might save this monster was if it came with a wireless keyboard and mouse (which is doesn't).
I forgot to mention that this runs WindowsXP rather than OS X (that's another thing the Gateway machine has going against it.
http://www.gateway.com/work/prod/sb_profileb3se-d_ ProdDetail.shtml for a better product description than the article links.
Sometimes, being part of a Democracy can take hard work. Let this be a call to action for everybody to send a letter to their senator (mine's Hillary) to tell them what we believe in and why you don't support the SSSCA.
Or how about "a thurough review".
California Considering Luxury Tax^H^H^H^H^H Recycling Fees on PCs
Is there a formal difference between low latency and a realtime OS?
What about the Timesys kernel patches? How do things match up to QNX another realtime OS??
Every time I would call Dell Desktop tech-support, they would tell me to run a command from a boot floppy that would restore the computer to an as-recieved state.
That's not really *support* for the problem. IMHO it's a last resort. Not something that Dell, HP, home-user-OEM should be using all of the time.
Anyways, this rant lasted too long and I probably no longer have first post.