Perhaps the Perl community could calculate some recommended annual contribution per line of code for companies that use Perl. (E.g. 100k lines of code at $0.01/line/year = $1000.) Do some comparisons with how much companies pay for commercial compilers compared to how many lines of code they have to show them that they are getting a good deal (applying corrections for the absence of tech support and manuals not being included in the price.)
Of course, the Perl Foundation is not the only ligitimate recipient of such contributions.
Well at least in my part of the world, if I'd had to figure out from the advertising what it was, I'd have thought it was a web browser. It was all "your tool to connect to the internet" stuff.
Make the title (that which appears in the title bar of your browser window) describe what the page is. At least on my browser, when you bookmark a page, this title is what appears in the bookmarks list. In this context, "Welcome", "Home", "Buy Online" etc. are very unhelpful, but "Acme Products Mail Order" lets me find your site again.
Others have commented on font - I'll just point to an example of how not to do it. Here is a story from Aviation Week. Notice how, having used a minscule font, they then add to the effect by using mid-grey for the text on a white background.
Checkout also the interface hall of shame, although this is aimed more at applications than web pages.
The actor who played "Renko" (?) in Hill Street Blues (?Charles Haid?) came to New Zealand many years ago (when HSB was still running) for some charity fundraising, and I heard him speak. The contrast between him (discussing the character of Renko as a 'Shakespearian low comic') and the character was stunning.
Anna Paquin has managed the transition from child star to adult career pretty well. So did Christina Ricci. I don't think it is rare.
I hated the Westley Crusher character too. I saw the pilot of ST:TNG and the only thing that made it bearable was compiling the list of the order in which I'd space the characters. (He was second after the empath.) I pretty much haven't watched ST since.
This doesn't match my memory of ACC's descriptions of this. As I recall, the thought of patenting geostationary orbit only came up years after the initial publication, by which time it was unpatentable by reason of already being published.
Other than your first link, none of the references claim he tried to patent the idea. The first link does not provide references. Do you have a primary source (i.e. statement by The Man himself) that he tried to patent the idea?
Even if he had patented the idea in 1946ish, a 17 year patent term would expire in 1963. I'm not sure if geostationary orbit had been used by then, but at best it was very lightly used.
The 'legal issues' link above relates to an opinion I've stated on slashdot before: methods and goals should be separately considered for 'obviousness' in patent applications. In this case, neither the method (rocketry) or the goal (geostationary satellite) were obvous, and arguably one should be patentable without the existence of the other. Genetically engineered cotton, at the time it was first patented, was an inobvious method (patentable by my reasoning) but an obvious goal (not patentable - contrary to what the patent attempted to claim.)
The current cloning technology is 'take an entire nucleus, put it in an ovum.' If you have no viable nucleus, it won't work. Unless fresh cells were cryogenically frozen and kept on ice ever since, I don't think there will be a viable nucleus.
We've had similar speculation on this side of the Tasman about resurecting the Huia (a bird, last seen alive c1906) but I don't rate the chances of this any higher.
Disclaimer: My training is in astronomy, not biology, so none of this is authoratative.
A good movie or book suspends disbelief. Anything that makes that disbelief harder to suspend is a flaw (although other advantages may outweigh the flaw.)
Technically, they'd be better using our genes as a fill in, rather than frogs - dinosaurs are more closely related to us than frogs. Chicken DNA would be even better.
I don't think that mitoconrial DNA is a big issue for the validity of the cloned animal. It does much the same thing in all animals.
The big problem (I'm talking about real life ressurection of Tazmanian Devils here, not fictional dinosaurs) is getting viable DNA. You need all* of it pretty much 100% error free, which seems quite implausible from a stuffed museum exibit. I don't think this will be possible until we can take many samples, read each one, and merge to get a full good run.
* All the functional DNA anyhow. Large amounts of DNA is nonfunctional repetitive gunge, more or less "This page intentionally left blank".
What I want to see MST3Ked are "Independence Day" (Oh, so nobody fleeing alien invaders is prepared to drive on the wrong side of the freeway?) and "Deep Impact" (We made underground accomodation for 2 million people in a few months - and kept it a complete secret. We just painted 100,000 workers and 10,000 trucks camoflage green so the press wouldn't see them.)
I doubt they could afford the rights to do this, however.
For my master's thesis (late 80s) I worked on a cosmic ray shower detector. Basically it was a bunch of particle detectors spread over a mountain side. The atmosphere can be considered to be part of the detector, as it turns the primary cosmic ray into a shower of millions of lower energy particles, which we detect. If they can claim the ice as part of their detector, we can claim a few cubic km of atmosphere as part of ours (and ours was not one of the biggest such arrays - it covered a few hectares at ground level.)
(It was the "JANZOS" array, and it was disassembled a few years ago.)
Thanks. Of course, 7% by weight means you've lost a factor of 14 on that 'pound for pound most energy.' I think that the 'pound for pound' statement is misleading because of these sorts of storage requirements.
You can get 25% hydrogen by weight by storing methane (a gas, so will generally require a heavy tank for presurized storage) or 12.5% by storing methanol or long chain hydrocarbons (e.g. petrol/gasoline). However, on top of these you need to factor in the energy and equipment to extract the hydrogen from these fuels. (For that matter, you can get 11% by weight by storing it as water, but it won't do you much good as a fuel.)
"Pound for pound, hydrogen packs more chemical energy than any other known fuel."
But litre for litre, it is lousy. I've seen pictures of designs for (liquid) hydrogen fueled jetliners - they are very significantly larger to contain the fuel.
This is one of the reasons people are so interested in 'reforming' methane or methanol to form the hydrogen on the spot - they are so much easier to store compactly. (This does, however, mean you now need much more *weight* for your energy.)
I'm not particularly convinced by the answers so far. Yes, RISC does more with a MHz than CISC - but 8 years ago, Alpha had a 2.5 times advantage in clock speed over Intel, an unheard of clock speed for the time. If it was so good at high clock speeds then, why is the design mediocre at clock speed now? Surely even a very modest R&D effort could increase clock speed by more than a factor of 3 given 8 years of advances in semiconductor fabrication technology.
George Walker Bush says:
"clock speed has been more important for the Pentium... The alpha... pure clock speed has not been such a priority."
The question is not 'why is it 2.5 times slower now', it is 'why is it 2.5 times slower now given that it was 2.5 times faster 8 years ago.' (I realize 800 MHz is more than respectable for a RISC chip - I've used top-of-the-line SGI and Sun machines with fewer MHz than this (although with 20 to 32 processors.))
Pagercam2 writes:
"Intel has boat loads of cash..."
tcc writes:
"over 2 years, not much work or funding has been put on Alpha... same chip with more cache, reducing die size to increase clock speed"
I would have thought the 'simple' changes tcc describes alone would allow for more than a factor of 3 in 8 years.
What was the source of Alpha's big clock speed advantage 8 years ago, and why does this advantage no longer apply today?
I remember about 8 years ago, the Pentium was just released with a maximum clock of 100MHz. At the same time, Alpha chips had clock speeds of 275MHz. How come Intel chips have increased clock speed by a factor of 20 while Alpha have increased by a factor of 3?
(Yes, I know that performance depends on much more than just clock speed.)
A sad day indeed. I've used HP since I was old enough to know what a calculator was. My first was an HP32E. I still have my father's HP45, and my succession of calculators: HP32E, HP41C and HP48SX. Then I went overboard and started buying old calculators, getting (from memory) 15C, 16C, 19C, 19BII, 21, 25, 35, 46, 55, 65, 67, 80, 97.
(Some people have a greatly exagerated idea of the value of a 35 (the first scientific pocket calculator.) Lots were made. Of the list above, I would rate the 19C, 46, 65, 67 and 97 as rarer and more valuable.)
I've consulted my local Latin expert, and this is what he says.
"Without a dictionary handy, I'll have to take the slashdotter's word for "rigidium".
I'm not familiar with the imperative being formed from ne+infinitive, only with noli+infinitive (for one orderee) or nolite+infinitive (for many). It's possible that it was meant to be a jussive subjunctive, which is less emphatic than an imperative: "may you not erase...", but that would have been "Ne deleas...".
Apart from that, it looks fine. I'm inclined to dismiss the "dare" part as an idiomatic flourish on the English side of the translation."
So "Nolite delere orbum rigidium meum" may be better. (I'm assuming you are telling many people not to erase your hard disk, not just one.)
My attempt at putting this into Latin was:
"Non audere orbiculum rigidum mei deles."
but had several* mistakes and was corrected to
"Nolite audere orbiculum rigidum meum delere."
I have explicitly translated the 'don't dare' (audere - to dare) in my version, and used 'orbiculum' (a small disk or pully) rather than 'orbis' (any round thing) and used 'rigidum' rather than 'rigidium' because that's what the online Latin dictionary I refered to said.
* three mistakes in 6 words - 50% is a pass, isn't it?
"Truely, my deprived, rigid self is obliterated by you"?
(With assistence from The Perseus Digital Library and a very rudimentary knowledge of Latin. This dictionary doesn't believe in the word "rigidium", but does believe in "rigidum".)
So I may have to exchange my geek insult "couldn't figure out the logarithm to the base 2 of 65536 without a calculator" into "couldn't figure out the logarithm to the base 3 of 19683 without a calculator."
On the gripping hand, if the exploit code is sent to the closed source developer, but just the description published, then the developer has a lead-time when they have the test case but the hundreds of blackhats are still coding it.
When a blackhat open sources their exploit, then whitehats will get to see it and report to the closed source developer that it is now 'in the wild' to spur them on, if necessary. Furthermore, the 'wild' exploit won't propagate as fast underground as a CERT advisory.
(I'm not sure I believe all this, but why should that stand in the way of a good argument? The best counterargument I've seen is "We tried it that way, and companies just ignored the holes until they started to be exploited.")
More networking + more devices + more subtle, automatic behaviour of devices - human oversight = many more security holes.
Looking for Massacre on Seasame St
on
Bert Is Evil
·
· Score: 2, Offtopic
I remember many years ago seeing on Usenet a series of three newspaper reports.
The first was a 'siege in progress' report - Big Bird had flipped and gone into an apartment building and fired shots, and police had the building surrounded.
The second was immediately post-siege - Big Bird had killed Ernie and wounded several, and been shot dead by police storming the building.
The third was several days later, the bulk of it being Bert's eulogy at Ernie's funeral.
Does anyone have a copy of these? I'd love to read them again.
This is not the toy I was looking for. OK, it is exactly the same idea, and looks better than the ones I'd seen, but is even more expensive. The set I'd seen had much shorter edges in multiple colours, and the edges had a narrow bit in the middle (not cylindrical) and were multiple colours.
Just recently I came across a toy with little rods with magnets at each end (edges) and ball bearings (verticies.) This looks great for playing around with polyhedrae, latices, etc. There were three disadvantages: It was pretty expensive for what it was, there is only one length of edge, and there is insufficient room for 12 edges to come from one vertex, which rules out some latices. Sorry, I can't remember the name of the toy.
Show me the country where the bombs had to fall
Show me the ruins of the buildings once so tall
And I'll show you a young land with so many reasons why
There but for fortune go you or I.
Only stuff that goes very close to the center of the galaxy can get sucked into the black hole - i.e. only matter with a very low angular momentum (relative to galactic center.) The total angular momentum of the system is conserved, so there is only so much you can feed the hole before you 'run out' of 'low angular momentum'. This is a likely reason why such black holes cause quasars in young galaxies, but they aren't being fed fast enough to do this in older galaxies.
I expect that if you could let the galaxy run for long enough (ignoring collisions with Andromeda, exhaustion of fuel for stars, proton decay, evaporation of black holes etc.) you would end up with some fraction of the mass eaten by the hole and the rest in circular orbits in a flat disk - as this is the minumum energy configuration for a given amount of angular momentum.
Actually, if you're prepared to wait a really long time, the angular momentum will be shed by gravitational radiation and the black hole wins after all. (Or would, if it hasn't evaporated.)
Slashdot Mirror
Perhaps the Perl community could calculate some recommended annual contribution per line of code for companies that use Perl. (E.g. 100k lines of code at $0.01/line/year = $1000.) Do some comparisons with how much companies pay for commercial compilers compared to how many lines of code they have to show them that they are getting a good deal (applying corrections for the absence of tech support and manuals not being included in the price.)
Of course, the Perl Foundation is not the only ligitimate recipient of such contributions.
Well at least in my part of the world, if I'd had to figure out from the advertising what it was, I'd have thought it was a web browser. It was all "your tool to connect to the internet" stuff.
Make the title (that which appears in the title bar of your browser window) describe what the page is. At least on my browser, when you bookmark a page, this title is what appears in the bookmarks list. In this context, "Welcome", "Home", "Buy Online" etc. are very unhelpful, but "Acme Products Mail Order" lets me find your site again.
Others have commented on font - I'll just point to an example of how not to do it. Here is a story from Aviation Week. Notice how, having used a minscule font, they then add to the effect by using mid-grey for the text on a white background.
Checkout also the interface hall of shame, although this is aimed more at applications than web pages.
Three unrelated followup comments:
The actor who played "Renko" (?) in Hill Street Blues (?Charles Haid?) came to New Zealand many years ago (when HSB was still running) for some charity fundraising, and I heard him speak. The contrast between him (discussing the character of Renko as a 'Shakespearian low comic') and the character was stunning.
Anna Paquin has managed the transition from child star to adult career pretty well. So did Christina Ricci. I don't think it is rare.
I hated the Westley Crusher character too. I saw the pilot of ST:TNG and the only thing that made it bearable was compiling the list of the order in which I'd space the characters. (He was second after the empath.) I pretty much haven't watched ST since.
This doesn't match my memory of ACC's descriptions of this. As I recall, the thought of patenting geostationary orbit only came up years after the initial publication, by which time it was unpatentable by reason of already being published.
Other than your first link, none of the references claim he tried to patent the idea. The first link does not provide references. Do you have a primary source (i.e. statement by The Man himself) that he tried to patent the idea?
Even if he had patented the idea in 1946ish, a 17 year patent term would expire in 1963. I'm not sure if geostationary orbit had been used by then, but at best it was very lightly used.
The 'legal issues' link above relates to an opinion I've stated on slashdot before: methods and goals should be separately considered for 'obviousness' in patent applications. In this case, neither the method (rocketry) or the goal (geostationary satellite) were obvous, and arguably one should be patentable without the existence of the other. Genetically engineered cotton, at the time it was first patented, was an inobvious method (patentable by my reasoning) but an obvious goal (not patentable - contrary to what the patent attempted to claim.)
Sorry about the mixup in species names.
The current cloning technology is 'take an entire nucleus, put it in an ovum.' If you have no viable nucleus, it won't work. Unless fresh cells were cryogenically frozen and kept on ice ever since, I don't think there will be a viable nucleus.
We've had similar speculation on this side of the Tasman about resurecting the Huia (a bird, last seen alive c1906) but I don't rate the chances of this any higher.
Disclaimer: My training is in astronomy, not biology, so none of this is authoratative.
A good movie or book suspends disbelief. Anything that makes that disbelief harder to suspend is a flaw (although other advantages may outweigh the flaw.)
Technically, they'd be better using our genes as a fill in, rather than frogs - dinosaurs are more closely related to us than frogs. Chicken DNA would be even better.
I don't think that mitoconrial DNA is a big issue for the validity of the cloned animal. It does much the same thing in all animals.
The big problem (I'm talking about real life ressurection of Tazmanian Devils here, not fictional dinosaurs) is getting viable DNA. You need all* of it pretty much 100% error free, which seems quite implausible from a stuffed museum exibit. I don't think this will be possible until we can take many samples, read each one, and merge to get a full good run.
* All the functional DNA anyhow. Large amounts of DNA is nonfunctional repetitive gunge, more or less "This page intentionally left blank".
What I want to see MST3Ked are "Independence Day" (Oh, so nobody fleeing alien invaders is prepared to drive on the wrong side of the freeway?) and "Deep Impact" (We made underground accomodation for 2 million people in a few months - and kept it a complete secret. We just painted 100,000 workers and 10,000 trucks camoflage green so the press wouldn't see them.)
I doubt they could afford the rights to do this, however.
For my master's thesis (late 80s) I worked on a cosmic ray shower detector. Basically it was a bunch of particle detectors spread over a mountain side. The atmosphere can be considered to be part of the detector, as it turns the primary cosmic ray into a shower of millions of lower energy particles, which we detect. If they can claim the ice as part of their detector, we can claim a few cubic km of atmosphere as part of ours (and ours was not one of the biggest such arrays - it covered a few hectares at ground level.)
(It was the "JANZOS" array, and it was disassembled a few years ago.)
Thanks. Of course, 7% by weight means you've lost a factor of 14 on that 'pound for pound most energy.' I think that the 'pound for pound' statement is misleading because of these sorts of storage requirements.
You can get 25% hydrogen by weight by storing methane (a gas, so will generally require a heavy tank for presurized storage) or 12.5% by storing methanol or long chain hydrocarbons (e.g. petrol/gasoline). However, on top of these you need to factor in the energy and equipment to extract the hydrogen from these fuels. (For that matter, you can get 11% by weight by storing it as water, but it won't do you much good as a fuel.)
"Pound for pound, hydrogen packs more chemical energy than any other known fuel."
But litre for litre, it is lousy. I've seen pictures of designs for (liquid) hydrogen fueled jetliners - they are very significantly larger to contain the fuel.
This is one of the reasons people are so interested in 'reforming' methane or methanol to form the hydrogen on the spot - they are so much easier to store compactly. (This does, however, mean you now need much more *weight* for your energy.)
I'm not particularly convinced by the answers so far. Yes, RISC does more with a MHz than CISC - but 8 years ago, Alpha had a 2.5 times advantage in clock speed over Intel, an unheard of clock speed for the time. If it was so good at high clock speeds then, why is the design mediocre at clock speed now? Surely even a very modest R&D effort could increase clock speed by more than a factor of 3 given 8 years of advances in semiconductor fabrication technology.
... The alpha ... pure clock speed has not been such a priority."
... same chip with more cache, reducing die size to increase clock speed"
George Walker Bush says:
"clock speed has been more important for the Pentium
The question is not 'why is it 2.5 times slower now', it is 'why is it 2.5 times slower now given that it was 2.5 times faster 8 years ago.' (I realize 800 MHz is more than respectable for a RISC chip - I've used top-of-the-line SGI and Sun machines with fewer MHz than this (although with 20 to 32 processors.))
Pagercam2 writes:
"Intel has boat loads of cash..."
tcc writes:
"over 2 years, not much work or funding has been put on Alpha
I would have thought the 'simple' changes tcc describes alone would allow for more than a factor of 3 in 8 years.
What was the source of Alpha's big clock speed advantage 8 years ago, and why does this advantage no longer apply today?
I remember about 8 years ago, the Pentium was just released with a maximum clock of 100MHz. At the same time, Alpha chips had clock speeds of 275MHz. How come Intel chips have increased clock speed by a factor of 20 while Alpha have increased by a factor of 3?
(Yes, I know that performance depends on much more than just clock speed.)
A sad day indeed. I've used HP since I was old enough to know what a calculator was. My first was an HP32E. I still have my father's HP45, and my succession of calculators: HP32E, HP41C and HP48SX. Then I went overboard and started buying old calculators, getting (from memory) 15C, 16C, 19C, 19BII, 21, 25, 35, 46, 55, 65, 67, 80, 97.
(Some people have a greatly exagerated idea of the value of a 35 (the first scientific pocket calculator.) Lots were made. Of the list above, I would rate the 19C, 46, 65, 67 and 97 as rarer and more valuable.)
I've consulted my local Latin expert, and this is what he says.
...", but that would have been "Ne deleas ...".
"Without a dictionary handy, I'll have to take the slashdotter's word for "rigidium".
I'm not familiar with the imperative being formed from ne+infinitive, only with noli+infinitive (for one orderee) or nolite+infinitive (for many). It's possible that it was meant to be a jussive subjunctive, which is less emphatic than an imperative: "may you not erase
Apart from that, it looks fine. I'm inclined to dismiss the "dare" part as an idiomatic flourish on the English side of the translation."
So "Nolite delere orbum rigidium meum" may be better. (I'm assuming you are telling many people not to erase your hard disk, not just one.)
My attempt at putting this into Latin was:
"Non audere orbiculum rigidum mei deles."
but had several* mistakes and was corrected to
"Nolite audere orbiculum rigidum meum delere."
I have explicitly translated the 'don't dare' (audere - to dare) in my version, and used 'orbiculum' (a small disk or pully) rather than 'orbis' (any round thing) and used 'rigidum' rather than 'rigidium' because that's what the online Latin dictionary I refered to said.
* three mistakes in 6 words - 50% is a pass, isn't it?
Ne delere orbum rigidium meum.
"Truely, my deprived, rigid self is obliterated by you"?
(With assistence from The Perseus Digital Library and a very rudimentary knowledge of Latin. This dictionary doesn't believe in the word "rigidium", but does believe in "rigidum".)
So I may have to exchange my geek insult "couldn't figure out the logarithm to the base 2 of 65536 without a calculator" into "couldn't figure out the logarithm to the base 3 of 19683 without a calculator."
On the gripping hand, if the exploit code is sent to the closed source developer, but just the description published, then the developer has a lead-time when they have the test case but the hundreds of blackhats are still coding it.
When a blackhat open sources their exploit, then whitehats will get to see it and report to the closed source developer that it is now 'in the wild' to spur them on, if necessary. Furthermore, the 'wild' exploit won't propagate as fast underground as a CERT advisory.
(I'm not sure I believe all this, but why should that stand in the way of a good argument? The best counterargument I've seen is "We tried it that way, and companies just ignored the holes until they started to be exploited.")
Speaking as someone who wrote a thesis using radio astronomy data, we'd rather have 500 huge radio telescopes on earth, and let you keep the change.
More networking + more devices + more subtle, automatic behaviour of devices - human oversight = many more security holes.
I remember many years ago seeing on Usenet a series of three newspaper reports.
The first was a 'siege in progress' report - Big Bird had flipped and gone into an apartment building and fired shots, and police had the building surrounded.
The second was immediately post-siege - Big Bird had killed Ernie and wounded several, and been shot dead by police storming the building.
The third was several days later, the bulk of it being Bert's eulogy at Ernie's funeral.
Does anyone have a copy of these? I'd love to read them again.
This is not the toy I was looking for. OK, it is exactly the same idea, and looks better than the ones I'd seen, but is even more expensive. The set I'd seen had much shorter edges in multiple colours, and the edges had a narrow bit in the middle (not cylindrical) and were multiple colours.
Just recently I came across a toy with little rods with magnets at each end (edges) and ball bearings (verticies.) This looks great for playing around with polyhedrae, latices, etc. There were three disadvantages: It was pretty expensive for what it was, there is only one length of edge, and there is insufficient room for 12 edges to come from one vertex, which rules out some latices. Sorry, I can't remember the name of the toy.
Show me the country where the bombs had to fall
Show me the ruins of the buildings once so tall
And I'll show you a young land with so many reasons why
There but for fortune go you or I.
Only stuff that goes very close to the center of the galaxy can get sucked into the black hole - i.e. only matter with a very low angular momentum (relative to galactic center.) The total angular momentum of the system is conserved, so there is only so much you can feed the hole before you 'run out' of 'low angular momentum'. This is a likely reason why such black holes cause quasars in young galaxies, but they aren't being fed fast enough to do this in older galaxies.
I expect that if you could let the galaxy run for long enough (ignoring collisions with Andromeda, exhaustion of fuel for stars, proton decay, evaporation of black holes etc.) you would end up with some fraction of the mass eaten by the hole and the rest in circular orbits in a flat disk - as this is the minumum energy configuration for a given amount of angular momentum.
Actually, if you're prepared to wait a really long time, the angular momentum will be shed by gravitational radiation and the black hole wins after all. (Or would, if it hasn't evaporated.)