"It is possible to synthesize excited bromide in an argon matrix! Yes, it's an excimer, frozen in its excited state... As soon as we apply a field, we couple to a state that is radiatively coupled to the ground state. I figure we can extract at least 10 to the 21st photons per cubic centimeter which will give one kilojoule per cubic centimeter at 600 nanometers, or, one megajoule per liter."
"Looks at the facts: Very high power. Portable. Limited firing time. Unlimited range. All you'd need is a big spinning mirror and you could vaporize a human target from space.
Way back in 1993, thanks to a three month schedule delay in shipping the original Apple Power PC hardware, Graphing Calculator 1.0 had the luxury of four months of QA, during which a colleague and I added no features and did an exhaustive code review. Combine that with being the only substantial PowerPC native application, so everyone with prototype hardware played with it a lot, resulted in that product having a more thorough QA than anything I had ever worked on before or since. It also helped that we started with a mature ten year old code base which had been heavily tested while shipping for years. Combine that with a complete lack of any management or marketing pressure on features, allowed us to focus solely on stability for months.
As a result, for ten years Apple technical support would tell customers experiencing unexplained system problems to run the Graphing Calculator Demo mode overnight, and if it crashed, they classified that as a *hardware* failure. I like to think of that as the theoretical limit of software robustness.
Sadly, it was a unique and irreproducible combination of circumstance which allowed so much effort to be focused on quality. Releases after 1.0 were not nearly so robust.
I once spent a year of unproductive meetings, politics and ego, learning how the organization functioned. Then, getting laid off removed most barriers to progress. No managers meant no meetings. Lacking a place in the org chart made it much easier to cross departmental boundaries, maintain informal lines of communication, and acquire needed help and resources. Our project's existential ambiguity protected us from outside interference.
I have long considered releasing GC under an open source license. While I have total sympathy and support for the open source movement and philosophy, my analysis is a pragmatic one. My goal is to best serve my users, and adopt a strategy to best accomplish that. (I think the events of the story give proof to that.)
Remember that my software's users are primarily high school students or younger.
An open source release would cause the existing revenue stream to vanish, making it impossible to continue to support existing customers or maintain and develop the code base. Pacific Tech has provided free support for its customers and would like to continue to do so, and continue to maintain the product on Mac OS and on Windows. The reason GC is useful is the ease-of-learning and ease-of-use of its user interface. I do not know of a product which demonstrates the open source community's ability to produce excellent user interfaces.
In a high school classroom where any time spent on software is time taken away from teaching, usability is the most important feature of our product. In these respects, open sourcing the code could prove to be a large disservice to our customers.
This is educational software for high school users. There are remarkably few people in high schools, either students or teachers, with both the skills and the time to contribute to open source development. This removes one of the major motivations for open source development - the "I need this tool for myself" reason for working on something.
Furthermore, the reason this software is so useful to schools is not how powerful it is or how many features it has - it is completely unlike the classical monolithic mathematical applications of yore. It is useful due to the restraint in choosing a minimalist feature set and interface to address teachers' and students' needs with elegance. I fear that as an open source project, the incentive structures would lead down the slippery slope of creeping featuritis, which, while it might create something cool for hackers, will do little to help children learn math and like math.
I would like to find a way to have the best of both worlds. Genuinely open and free software, for all that that implies, and the ability to continue to create great software for people that are not programmers, for people that hate math, and know nothing about computers, and to have it installed at the factory, so that it actually reaches the people that need it where it can do some good.
I really enjoyed the commentary at http://www.j-bradford-delong.net/movable_type/2005 -3_archives/000024.html#more "I've seen things you people wouldn't believe... Sun monitors on fire off the side of the multimedia lab. I've seen NTU lights glitter in the dark near the Mail Gate. All these things will be lost in time -- like the root partition last week. Time to die..."
-- Peter Gutmann
That is 1.4b3. It is still in beta testing. We're still working on it. I need to do is fix those example files which were created for the full version. If you type y=x^2 into a new empty document, it will work. For a comparison of the features in 1.4 vs. 3.5, see http://www.pacifict.com/FreeStuff.html. The 150-page PDF book, "Learning Math" in the help menu is almost entirely devoted to the features of the free version. You can download that by itself or browse it at http://www.pacifict.com/Books.html
heh. If there are any PovRay developers reading this, send me an e-mail. I'd like to discuss this. It's on the big list of features for future releases. http://www.PacificT.com/TheList.html
No. There was a line in the story that got dropped on the editing room floor. I was offered a job as an employee on a new project when the old project was cancelled. I just wasn't interested in the new project. I prefered to be working on educational software.
>No, the graphing calculator doesn't come with OS X.
It is available for OS X now. You can download the free release from http://www.PacificT.com/FreeStuff.html (Well, at least you will be able to after the server recovers from the Slashdot Effect.:)
>I hope we don't hear from this person's significant other soon... I was dating a high school math teacher at the time, but, unsurprisingly, the relationship did not survive the events of the story.
The basic idea is to make the sender responsible for mail storage shifting costs onto the sender in a way that makes large mailing lists simpler.
>Some ramifications of this concept > >Each message is stored under the sender's disk quota at the sender's >ISP. ISPs accept messages only from authorized local users. > >The sender's ISP, rather than the receiver's ISP, is the >always-online post office from which the receiver picks up the >message. > >The message isn't copied to a separate outgoing mail queue. The >sender's archive is the outgoing mail queue. > >The message isn't copied to the receiver's ISP. All the receiver >needs is a brief notification that a message is available. > >After downloading a message from the sender's ISP, the receiver can >efficiently confirm success. The sender's ISP can periodically >retransmit notifications until it sees confirmation. The sender can >check for confirmation. There's no need for bounces. > >Recipients can check on occasion for new messages in archives that >interest them. There's no need for mailing-list subscriptions. > >Some advantages > >In the old Internet mail infrastructure, keeping track of >undelivered messages takes a lot of work. The mail client (e.g., >ezmlm) and mail transfer agent (e.g., qmail) have to support >variable envelope return paths; bounce messages then have to be >parsed by an automated bounce handler that matches bounces with >original messages. In IM2000, each message in the sender's archive >carries its own delivery status. > >In the old Internet mail infrastructure, bounce messages are often >misdirected by low-quality software. Users end up receiving bounce >messages that should have been sent to an automated bounce handler. >In IM2000, there are no bounce messages. > >In the old Internet mail infrastructure, mailing-list managers have >to keep track of mailing-list subscriptions. Typical subscription >protocols are slow, complicated, unreliable, difficult to automate, >and trivially subject to forgery. In IM2000, mailing lists are a >purely local matter for the receiver's software. > >In the old Internet mail infrastructure, the receiver's ISP has to >carefully write every message to disk, so that messages will not be >lost if the computer crashes. This limits the amount of mail that >can be received. In IM2000, the receiver's ISP can keep >notifications in memory. > >In the old Internet mail infrastructure, a message to a large >mailing list is written to disk on a huge number of computers. In >IM2000, a message to a large mailing list is written to disk only by >a few receivers who want to save local copies of the message.
Visualizing functions of a complex variable
on
Imagining Numbers
·
· Score: 2, Informative
As a shameless self-plug, here's pages on visualizing complex variables with the software I write:
"Since the Internet first extended its reach into the popular consciousness--and, truth be told, for quite a while before that--a plague has spread throughout the Internet community, propagating itself viruslike through the Web and into our e-mail boxes. Like the worst infections, it started out innocuously and became malignant so gradually that most of us have yet to realize how detrimental it truly is.
I refer, of course, to the joke haiku.
Like a hideous genetic mutation in a 1950s-era grade-B science fiction film, these seventeen-syllable poems have been borrowed from classical Japanese culture by well-meaning would-be humorists and distorted so completely from their original intended use that they threaten to permanently warp our capacity for humorous expression, if they are not stopped.
I therefore make this proposal to you, my fellow Internet enthusiasts: that as of right now, we agree to completely eliminate the production and propagation of joke haiku on the Internet. Don't write them, don't forward them to your friends, don't even acknowledge their existence. Only through concerted effort can we stamp out this menace completely....
He doesn't mention Project Pluto! It doesn't really support his repetition of perfectly safe and all that.
http://www.merkle.com/pluto/
"What they came up with was SLAM, for Supersonic Low-Altitude Missile. SLAM was to use a revolutionary new type of propulsion: nuclear ramjet power. The project to build the weapon's nuclear reactor was given the code name "Pluto," which also came to refer to the weapon itself.
SLAM's simple but revolutionary design called for the use of nuclear ramjet power, which would give the missile virtually unlimited range. Air forced into a duct as the missile flew would be heated by the reactor, causing it to expand, and exhaust out the back, providing thrust.
Pluto's namesake was Roman mythology's ruler of the underworld -- seemingly an apt inspiration for a locomotive-size missile that would travel at near-treetop level at three times the speed of sound, tossing out hydrogen bombs as it roared overhead. Pluto's designers calculated that its shock wave alone might kill people on the ground. Then there was the problem of fallout. In addition to gamma and neutron radiation from the unshielded reactor, Pluto's nuclear ramjet would spew fission fragments out in its exhaust as it flew by. (One enterprising weaponeer had a plan to turn an obvious peace-time liability into a wartime asset: he suggested flying the radioactive rocket back and forth over the Soviet Union after it had dropped its bombs.)"
This is a feature of Connectix Virtual PC which can also host Linux. Of course, it has the advantage that it is simulating all the hardware in software.
Slashdot Mirror
"It is possible to synthesize excited bromide in an argon matrix! Yes, it's an excimer, frozen in its excited state ... As soon as we apply a field, we couple to a state that is radiatively coupled to the ground state. I figure we can extract at least 10 to the 21st photons per cubic centimeter which will give one kilojoule per cubic centimeter at 600 nanometers, or, one megajoule per liter."
"Looks at the facts: Very high power. Portable. Limited firing time. Unlimited range. All you'd need is a big spinning mirror and you could vaporize a human target from space.
- RonPacific Tech
"Lisa! In this house we obey the law of thermodymanics" - Homer Simpson.
Way back in 1993, thanks to a three month schedule delay in shipping the original Apple Power PC hardware, Graphing Calculator 1.0 had the luxury of four months of QA, during which a colleague and I added no features and did an exhaustive code review. Combine that with being the only substantial PowerPC native application, so everyone with prototype hardware played with it a lot, resulted in that product having a more thorough QA than anything I had ever worked on before or since. It also helped that we started with a mature ten year old code base which had been heavily tested while shipping for years. Combine that with a complete lack of any management or marketing pressure on features, allowed us to focus solely on stability for months.
As a result, for ten years Apple technical support would tell customers experiencing unexplained system problems to run the Graphing Calculator Demo mode overnight, and if it crashed, they classified that as a *hardware* failure. I like to think of that as the theoretical limit of software robustness.
Sadly, it was a unique and irreproducible combination of circumstance which allowed so much effort to be focused on quality. Releases after 1.0 were not nearly so robust.
Flipping a coin would be a more accurate lie-detector test that traditional polygraphs.
http://bobpark.physics.umd.edu/WN03/wn041803.html
I once spent a year of unproductive meetings, politics and ego, learning how the organization functioned. Then, getting laid off removed most barriers to progress. No managers meant no meetings. Lacking a place in the org chart made it much easier to cross departmental boundaries, maintain informal lines of communication, and acquire needed help and resources. Our project's existential ambiguity protected us from outside interference.
I have long considered releasing GC under an open source license. While I have total sympathy and support for the open source movement and philosophy, my analysis is a pragmatic one. My goal is to best serve my users, and adopt a strategy to best accomplish that. (I think the events of the story give proof to that.)
Remember that my software's users are primarily high school students or younger.
An open source release would cause the existing revenue stream to vanish, making it impossible to continue to support existing customers or maintain and develop the code base. Pacific Tech has provided free support for its customers and would like to continue to do so, and continue to maintain the product on Mac OS and on Windows. The reason GC is useful is the ease-of-learning and ease-of-use of its user interface. I do not know of a product which demonstrates the open source community's ability to produce excellent user interfaces.
In a high school classroom where any time spent on software is time taken away from teaching, usability is the most important feature of our product. In these respects, open sourcing the code could prove to be a large disservice to our customers.
This is educational software for high school users. There are remarkably few people in high schools, either students or teachers, with both the skills and the time to contribute to open source development. This removes one of the major motivations for open source development - the "I need this tool for myself" reason for working on something.
Furthermore, the reason this software is so useful to schools is not how powerful it is or how many features it has - it is completely unlike the classical monolithic mathematical applications of yore. It is useful due to the restraint in choosing a minimalist feature set and interface to address teachers' and students' needs with elegance. I fear that as an open source project, the incentive structures would lead down the slippery slope of creeping featuritis, which, while it might create something cool for hackers, will do little to help children learn math and like math.
I would like to find a way to have the best of both worlds. Genuinely open and free software, for all that that implies, and the ability to continue to create great software for people that are not programmers, for people that hate math, and know nothing about computers, and to have it installed at the factory, so that it actually reaches the people that need it where it can do some good.
I really enjoyed the commentary at http://www.j-bradford-delong.net/movable_type/2005 -3_archives/000024.html#more
"I've seen things you people wouldn't believe... Sun monitors on fire off the side of the multimedia lab. I've seen NTU lights glitter in the dark near the Mail Gate. All these things will be lost in time -- like the root partition last week. Time to die..." -- Peter Gutmann
That is 1.4b3. It is still in beta testing. We're still working on it. I need to do is fix those example files which were created for the full version. If you type y=x^2 into a new empty document, it will work. For a comparison of the features in 1.4 vs. 3.5, see http://www.pacifict.com/FreeStuff.html. The 150-page PDF book, "Learning Math" in the help menu is almost entirely devoted to the features of the free version. You can download that by itself or browse it at http://www.pacifict.com/Books.html
Thank you! May I quote you on our web site?
Ok. Done.
heh. If there are any PovRay developers reading this, send me an e-mail. I'd like to discuss this. It's on the big list of features for future releases. http://www.PacificT.com/TheList.html
> a company that canned me
No. There was a line in the story that got dropped on the editing room floor. I was offered a job as an employee on a new project when the old project was cancelled. I just wasn't interested in the new project. I prefered to be working on educational software.
>No, the graphing calculator doesn't come with OS X. :)
It is available for OS X now. You can download the free release from http://www.PacificT.com/FreeStuff.html (Well, at least you will be able to after the server recovers from the Slashdot Effect.
>I hope we don't hear from this person's significant other soon...
I was dating a high school math teacher at the time, but, unsurprisingly, the relationship did not survive the events of the story.
There is a different proposal, to change the economics of spam at
http://cr.yp.to/im2000.html
The basic idea is to make the sender responsible for mail storage shifting
costs onto the sender in a way that makes large mailing lists simpler.
>Some ramifications of this concept
>
>Each message is stored under the sender's disk quota at the sender's
>ISP. ISPs accept messages only from authorized local users.
>
>The sender's ISP, rather than the receiver's ISP, is the
>always-online post office from which the receiver picks up the
>message.
>
>The message isn't copied to a separate outgoing mail queue. The
>sender's archive is the outgoing mail queue.
>
>The message isn't copied to the receiver's ISP. All the receiver
>needs is a brief notification that a message is available.
>
>After downloading a message from the sender's ISP, the receiver can
>efficiently confirm success. The sender's ISP can periodically
>retransmit notifications until it sees confirmation. The sender can
>check for confirmation. There's no need for bounces.
>
>Recipients can check on occasion for new messages in archives that
>interest them. There's no need for mailing-list subscriptions.
>
>Some advantages
>
>In the old Internet mail infrastructure, keeping track of
>undelivered messages takes a lot of work. The mail client (e.g.,
>ezmlm) and mail transfer agent (e.g., qmail) have to support
>variable envelope return paths; bounce messages then have to be
>parsed by an automated bounce handler that matches bounces with
>original messages. In IM2000, each message in the sender's archive
>carries its own delivery status.
>
>In the old Internet mail infrastructure, bounce messages are often
>misdirected by low-quality software. Users end up receiving bounce
>messages that should have been sent to an automated bounce handler.
>In IM2000, there are no bounce messages.
>
>In the old Internet mail infrastructure, mailing-list managers have
>to keep track of mailing-list subscriptions. Typical subscription
>protocols are slow, complicated, unreliable, difficult to automate,
>and trivially subject to forgery. In IM2000, mailing lists are a
>purely local matter for the receiver's software.
>
>In the old Internet mail infrastructure, the receiver's ISP has to
>carefully write every message to disk, so that messages will not be
>lost if the computer crashes. This limits the amount of mail that
>can be received. In IM2000, the receiver's ISP can keep
>notifications in memory.
>
>In the old Internet mail infrastructure, a message to a large
>mailing list is written to disk on a huge number of computers. In
>IM2000, a message to a large mailing list is written to disk only by
>a few receivers who want to save local copies of the message.
http://www.PacificT.com/ComplexFunctions.html ,
http://www.PacificT.com/Exponential.html.
"Peter Schwartz s a partner in the Monitor Group and chair of Global Business Network... [and] a former futurist for Shell Oil"
h tml,
I think I better trust the motives and analysis of the MIT folks. http://www.scienceblog.com/community/article1205.
http://www.phenry.org/junkdrawer/haiku/index.html
...
"Since the Internet first extended its reach into the popular consciousness--and, truth be told, for quite a while before that--a plague has spread throughout the Internet community, propagating itself viruslike through the Web and into our e-mail boxes. Like the worst infections, it started out innocuously and became malignant so gradually that most of us have yet to realize how detrimental it truly is.
I refer, of course, to the joke haiku.
Like a hideous genetic mutation in a 1950s-era grade-B science fiction film, these seventeen-syllable poems have been borrowed from classical Japanese culture by well-meaning would-be humorists and distorted so completely from their original intended use that they threaten to permanently warp our capacity for humorous expression, if they are not stopped.
I therefore make this proposal to you, my fellow Internet enthusiasts: that as of right now, we agree to completely eliminate the production and propagation of joke haiku on the Internet. Don't write them, don't forward them to your friends, don't even acknowledge their existence. Only through concerted effort can we stamp out this menace completely.
"What they came up with was SLAM, for Supersonic Low-Altitude Missile. SLAM was to use a revolutionary new type of propulsion: nuclear ramjet power. The project to build the weapon's nuclear reactor was given the code name "Pluto," which also came to refer to the weapon itself. SLAM's simple but revolutionary design called for the use of nuclear ramjet power, which would give the missile virtually unlimited range. Air forced into a duct as the missile flew would be heated by the reactor, causing it to expand, and exhaust out the back, providing thrust. Pluto's namesake was Roman mythology's ruler of the underworld -- seemingly an apt inspiration for a locomotive-size missile that would travel at near-treetop level at three times the speed of sound, tossing out hydrogen bombs as it roared overhead. Pluto's designers calculated that its shock wave alone might kill people on the ground. Then there was the problem of fallout. In addition to gamma and neutron radiation from the unshielded reactor, Pluto's nuclear ramjet would spew fission fragments out in its exhaust as it flew by. (One enterprising weaponeer had a plan to turn an obvious peace-time liability into a wartime asset: he suggested flying the radioactive rocket back and forth over the Soviet Union after it had dropped its bombs.)"
This is a feature of Connectix Virtual PC which can also host Linux. Of course, it has the advantage that it is simulating all the hardware in software.
The Crackpot Index (http://math.ucr.edu/home/baez/crackpot.html)
A simple method for rating potentially revolutionary contributions to physics.