Really? Did you follow those links, at all? There's lots of zip files full of.dlls and.exes, but I couldn't find any source files under sourceforge for versions later than 1.40. Sure, they might have been there. But after pulling down 5.zip files and finding nothing, I quickly lost patience. How many did you try?
% ls NeoAudio1.50.6.zip % unzip NeoAudio1.50.6.zip Archive: NeoAudio1.50.6.zip creating: NeoAudio-1.50.6/ inflating: NeoAudio-1.50.6/ASFErr.h [...] % find . -type f -print | xargs grep Faber ./ASFErr.h:** Copyright (C) 1999 Albert Faber ./AsyncEncoder.cpp:** Copyright (C) 1999-2002 Albert Faber ./AsyncEncoder.h:** Copyright (C) 1999 - 2002 Albert Faber ./AudioFile.cpp:** Copyright(C) 1999 - 2002 Albert Faber ./AudioFile.h:** Copyright (C) 1999 - 2002 Albert Faber ./AutoDetect.cpp:** Copyright (C) 1999 Albert Faber ./AutoDetect.h:** Copyright (C) 1999 Albert Faber [...]
They may have removed the copyright notices in the past, but they seem to be there now. I was going to do a quick diff of the CDex and NeoAudio sources just for giggles, but it's actually easier to find the NeoAudio source than the current CDex 1.50pre6 sources to do the diff; I scrounged around the CDex website for about 5 minutes before giving up.
In the past year or so, our team has run into bugs where compilers, trying to optimize, would skip loops insead of unrolling them. Or would optimize a function call within another function call into nothing if you tried to use interprocedural analysis. Or wouldn't let you pass pointers to functions in modules.
Or just randomly give wrong results for reasons we still don't understand, and the vendor doesn't care.
We've ran into hardware bugs that kept crashing a Linux cluster. We've had OS `upgrades' that made P^2 point-to-point communications more efficient than log P collective communications.
We've had debuggers that crash. Profiling routines which don't, due to library incompatibilities. I/O libraries with bugs.
SCSI controllers which eat a RAID periodically.
And your worst bug, the bug that took you forever to figure out, was that the rounding behavior of a round function was something you hadn't understood, and which the top result of a Google search explains completely?
Wouldn't bugs tend to increase the U.S. economy? Yes, someone has to pay, but that means someone is getting paid.
Well, sure, in the same sence that cleaning up after preventable forest fires and industrial accidents `increase the economy'. Stuff gets paid for; money flows.
The difference is that this money is spent to no productive end. In the case of buggy software, people are being paid to wait for their computers to reboot or to repair trashed database tables when their salary could have been paying for them to do stuff which is productive in itself -- helping their buisness produce more widgets, which consumers would buy, or other buisnesses would buy to help *them* produce gizmos. Thus, there's a net loss to the economy.
They're starting with different initial conditions and hoping that some subset results in 50 years of weather?
No. The term `starting conditions' appears in the BBC article, but if you go to
the website it says:
The only systematic way to estimate future climate change is to run hundreds of thousands of state-of-the-art climate models with slightly different physics in order to represent uncertainties.
In large-scale simulations such as these, there are often bits of physics/chemistry/weather that have to be put in by hand because, usually, the relevant bits of science would be too expensive to calculate, or couldn't be seen on the resolution of the simulation. While it's usually pretty doable to come up with reasonable models for the unresolved effects, there are often parameters in the models that could take a range of values.
This ensemble of models allows for the callibration of the model parameters against
50 years of data; this gives some confidence
in the predictive power of the models for the next 50 years.
This sort of parameter estimation based on calibration is very common for models of complex systems, and not just for computer models. Ideally, one wants to get to the point where such things aren't necessary and you can directly calculate all the science a priori of course, but these model calibrations are often useful steps along the way.
The letter makes points that I hadn't considered before, especially about the importance of government records being in open formats. This is so convincing that I'm going to draft a letter to my representatives immediately, encouraging such a bill.
But my main point is that the letter is just beautiful, even in translation; I really wish I read Spanish well enough to be able to read the original, because it must be wonderful. My favorite, by far:
To continue; you note that:" 2. The bill, by making the use of open source software compulsory, would establish discriminatory and non competitive practices in the contracting and purchasing by public bodies..."
This statement is just a reiteration of the previous one, and so the response can be found above. However, let us concern ourselves for a moment with your comment regarding "non-competitive practices..."
Senator Ted Stevens, R-Alaska, is widely considered to have a safe seat. While it's certainly worth keeping an eye on, especially given that the ANWR drilling, which he campaigned hard for, didn't survive the Senate, he is in pretty good shape -- he won with 77% of the vote last election, and already has about $1.4
million in the war chest for this election. you'll never guess where he got it. There aren't
any serious opponents.
Schiff is a more interesting possibility. He's a rookie representative, just come from the state senate. He won in 2000 largely by spending
possibly more than anyone in US history on a
House of Representatives election ($10 Million (search for Schiff)). It's hard to say if he has a safe seat or not, since it's a new seat created by redistricting. Oh, and
if you want another reason to dislike him, the guy he defeated went on to be chief of everyone's
favourite gov't agency,
The US patent office.
It looks like Schiff will be facing
Jim Scileppi, although you have to be skeptical of a political site hosted at attbi.com.
I know, by ensuring W3C compiance you can be sure it will work in almost all browsers, but I don't necessarily care. I only worry about Mozilla and Internet Explorer. (Sorry Opera users, but it's bad enough dealing with two browsers on 3 different operating systems.)
Are you listening to yourself? That's exactly the point. If you just write standard HTML, you don't have
the problem of ``it's bad enough dealing with two browsers on 3 different operating systems''.
SETI@home can't be used for things like this, as it turns out.
Running programs in parallel is pretty difficult; you have to figure out how to divide the problem amongst different processors. Some problems (which are said to be `embarrassingly parallel') are easy to do this -- every different processor just searches a different part of key-space for a key to decrypt a code, or a different part of frequency-space looking for a signal. There doesn't have to be any sort of inter-process communication to speak of in these problems.
A fluids or mechanical (or combined) simulation, however, requires lots of communication between computational elements. Each processor is simulating some region of space, and it constantly needs information about the fluid all around it to know what to do next. (Is a shock wave coming from the left?)
And even fluids/mechanics simulations are simpler than simulations involving long-range forces like gravity. In that case, every single computational element probably needs at least some information from every other computational element!
In cases like that, highly-distributed computing a la SETI@home won't work. Whereas for brute-force code-cracking, or searching for signals in reams of indepdendant data, it's perfect.
In a recently posted article,
there was an article about malicous people working for Microsoft, and several people said things like
`Oh, don't worry, QA and code-review, you know, people can't sneak bad code in.'
I don't believe anything like this is malicious,
obviously, nor do I think this is an MS-specific problem. But to everyone who takes closed-source peer-review and QA procedures a little to seriously, please take note: a piece of brand new code in a flagship product of a multi-billion dollar software firm released in 2001 has a buffer overrun exploit. Which
any teenage coder wannabe would have been able to catch had they simply had access to the code.
It's really not that obnoxious. Broadcast stations -- TV, Radio -- need by FCC regulations to identify themselves; this is a
(comparitively) un-obtrusive way of doing this.
Further, it means that if their shows are copied -- whether taped on a VCR, or stills shown on entertainment news or whatever -- that there's a little ``hey, this is the work of CBS/NBC/ABC/...'' sign in the bottom, which doesn't seem all that unreasonable.
just out of curiosity, if I am at a terminal in the US, but remotely logged into a machine outside the US, does that count as exporting my code?
Yes. It counts as exporting it to the US from the country you're logged in to, and actually having
put the code there in the first place (even the act of creating it over the ssh connection) is exporting it.
Further, the code is `deemed exported' even if you let a foriegn national LIVING INSIDE THE US
look at the code: See
the BXA Regs for more information.
The `orthogonality' here refers to polarization. For a little intro, see a page like
this one at Case Western. Light's an electromagnetic wave, consisting of an electrical and a magnetic field at right angles to each other.
The beams in this article are orthogonal in the sense that channel #1 has it's E-field pointed prependicular to channel #2's E-field so they won't interfere with each other (so they're `orthogonal' in the usual compu-geek sense of the term, too.)
The german team seems to have solved two big engineering problems with sending two channels of information this way. One is to send a mean-polarized signal so that you can compare the two channels against it (kind of a carrier signal for polarization) to see which channel is which.
The other I confess to not understanding. Apparently there are sync problems -- signals carried one polarization may travel faster than the other polarization. I can only guess that this is a problem caused by inhomogenaities in fibre.
Whatever its caused by, they've managed to measure it and compensate for it.
As for your other question, they definately can and do use frequency as a way of encoding information. Just like with radio signals, you can use the brightness of the light (amplitude modulation, or AM) or its color (frequency modulation, FM). In practice, FM is less problematic; the amplitude of a signal is easily confused by noise, whereas frequency is much less so.
And like all fuels, is highly reactive. It's main safety advantage over hydrocarbons is that, since
hydrogen really wants to be a gas at STP, it won't `pool' like oil would if you were to spill it. This
means, given a spill, a lot of it would just waft away rather than their being a contained region of fuel to catch fire.
This is good news, to be sure, but a plane crash is clearly not the same as an oil spill. How the burning would proceed would depend completely on how the fuel was contained in the plane, and what happened to the containment. Clearly, it has the potential to burn just as hot as hydrocarbons -- it has to contain the same amount of energy as the jet fuel, 'cuz the plane still has to fly.
Since, as far as I know, no one is even remotely close to building plane-engine-type hydrogen-powered engines (fuel cells are about as close as its gotten) discussion about relative safety is all going to be wild speculation.
They lost the desktop, added better font handling,
and do XML... this is great.
One thing I couldn't see -- and I can't get
at the downloads to check -- is to see if their
Presentation software, Impress, can play movies
in slides now. This is actually a big thing; in the hard sciences, where a lot
of people use non-Windows and give presentations, one of the major problems
for people who want to switch to Linux is that if you have results you want to show in movie form, you're pretty much stuck with using PowerPoint, or
exiting your presentation and starting up xanim or something...
What can we do by inspecting the rocks in person we can't do remotely? We should be able to do everything except touch it.
There's a limit to how much experimental equipment
you can shove onto a Mars probe. Some amazingly
cool things have been done, but once you get the
rocks back to Earth, you can unleash everything
you've got in the lab on 'em.
What other benefits do we get out of the mission?
Anything which pushes the boundaries of the
engineering -- getting the unmanned probe to
launch itself back to Earth -- will have great
impact on both the Space program and terrestrial
spin-offs. And that's quite apart from the
science.
It is exactly the FTC's job
to enforce legislation against deceptive trade practices. These `typo' sites
are exactly that, and fall under the same
laws that would apply to Real-World marketing
under names intentionally similar to trademarks.
If we can get over our precedents maybe we wouldn't have to worry so much about the future. Things can be decided on a case-by-case basis.
Riiight. That way, instead of the law being applied consistantly to all cases, each new trial judge would apply their own interpretation of the law, making it impossible
for people to effectively plead their case unless
they know how this particular judge interprets
the law in question. Yeah, that would be WAY better.
Stare decisis, or precedent, exists for
a reason, as anyone with the
sence to google and read something on the
subject (say, any first year notes) can tell you.
I would suppose that Starfleet would be a derivative of the USAF,
Starfleet was pretty clearly modelled after the navy, not the AF. This makes sense; sure, space
is `up' and so are planes, but month- or year- long missions with large crews in close quarters is
clearly more a navy thing than an airforce thing.
Like Iridium? Never would be my guess. If you think cost of cellular data networks is prohibitive, don't even dream of using a swarm of low-orbit satellites.
It's actually worse than this. Even once everything's decided on and approved, time from
design to bird-in-orbit is typically 3-5 years.
That means space-based bandwidth is going to be
running on equipment that is out of date the minute it is turned on. Even more so since you're
not going to put cutting-edge technology on a satellite anyway, since you can't reliably fix it once its up.
Trying to estimate demand 5 years ahead of time and then satisfiy it with the technology of the
day is why we're not going to see widespread
satellite-provided bandwidth any time soon.
It's against the law in this country (and many
others) to engage in deceptive advertising
practices, and that includes displaying paid advertising without making it clear that it is
indeed advertising.
Previous posters have brought up some poor analogies. Newspaper ads are clearly ads (and newspapers can get in serious trouble when this isn't the case). The yellow pages are entirely advertisement.
A better example is infomercials . These are clearly a `free service', too, as is all of broadcast television.
That emphatically does not exempt
them from the requirement to clearly distinguish paid ads from normal programming.
Now, you could argue about whether or not paid-for
placement between `normal' links is the same as a tv commercial which is paid for in-between `normal' programming, but it's not a completely unreasonable stretch.
Slashdot Mirror
Really? Did you follow those links, at all? There's lots of zip files full of .dlls and .exes, but I couldn't find any source files under sourceforge for versions later than 1.40. Sure, they might have been there. But after pulling down 5 .zip files and finding nothing, I quickly lost patience. How many did you try?
We've ran into hardware bugs that kept crashing a Linux cluster. We've had OS `upgrades' that made P^2 point-to-point communications more efficient than log P collective communications. We've had debuggers that crash. Profiling routines which don't, due to library incompatibilities. I/O libraries with bugs. SCSI controllers which eat a RAID periodically.
And your worst bug, the bug that took you forever to figure out, was that the rounding behavior of a round function was something you hadn't understood, and which the top result of a Google search explains completely?
AARRRGGGHHH!!!
Well, sure, in the same sence that cleaning up after preventable forest fires and industrial accidents `increase the economy'. Stuff gets paid for; money flows.
The difference is that this money is spent to no productive end. In the case of buggy software, people are being paid to wait for their computers to reboot or to repair trashed database tables when their salary could have been paying for them to do stuff which is productive in itself -- helping their buisness produce more widgets, which consumers would buy, or other buisnesses would buy to help *them* produce gizmos. Thus, there's a net loss to the economy.
No. The term `starting conditions' appears in the BBC article, but if you go to the website it says:
In large-scale simulations such as these, there are often bits of physics/chemistry/weather that have to be put in by hand because, usually, the relevant bits of science would be too expensive to calculate, or couldn't be seen on the resolution of the simulation. While it's usually pretty doable to come up with reasonable models for the unresolved effects, there are often parameters in the models that could take a range of values.
This ensemble of models allows for the callibration of the model parameters against 50 years of data; this gives some confidence in the predictive power of the models for the next 50 years.
This sort of parameter estimation based on calibration is very common for models of complex systems, and not just for computer models. Ideally, one wants to get to the point where such things aren't necessary and you can directly calculate all the science a priori of course, but these model calibrations are often useful steps along the way.
But my main point is that the letter is just beautiful, even in translation; I really wish I read Spanish well enough to be able to read the original, because it must be wonderful. My favorite, by far:
Heehee.
Right, which is why it not going through could have potentially negative effects for Stevens.
Schiff is a more interesting possibility. He's a rookie representative, just come from the state senate. He won in 2000 largely by spending possibly more than anyone in US history on a House of Representatives election ($10 Million (search for Schiff)). It's hard to say if he has a safe seat or not, since it's a new seat created by redistricting. Oh, and if you want another reason to dislike him, the guy he defeated went on to be chief of everyone's favourite gov't agency, The US patent office. It looks like Schiff will be facing Jim Scileppi, although you have to be skeptical of a political site hosted at attbi.com.
Are you listening to yourself? That's exactly the point. If you just write standard HTML, you don't have the problem of ``it's bad enough dealing with two browsers on 3 different operating systems''.
Running programs in parallel is pretty difficult; you have to figure out how to divide the problem amongst different processors. Some problems (which are said to be `embarrassingly parallel') are easy to do this -- every different processor just searches a different part of key-space for a key to decrypt a code, or a different part of frequency-space looking for a signal. There doesn't have to be any sort of inter-process communication to speak of in these problems.
A fluids or mechanical (or combined) simulation, however, requires lots of communication between computational elements. Each processor is simulating some region of space, and it constantly needs information about the fluid all around it to know what to do next. (Is a shock wave coming from the left?)
And even fluids/mechanics simulations are simpler than simulations involving long-range forces like gravity. In that case, every single computational element probably needs at least some information from every other computational element!
In cases like that, highly-distributed computing a la SETI@home won't work. Whereas for brute-force code-cracking, or searching for signals in reams of indepdendant data, it's perfect.
You mean, like, information from Sources that are Open, eg, not classified?
For pity's sake. This term long predates OSS/FSF/...
I don't believe anything like this is malicious, obviously, nor do I think this is an MS-specific problem. But to everyone who takes closed-source peer-review and QA procedures a little to seriously, please take note: a piece of brand new code in a flagship product of a multi-billion dollar software firm released in 2001 has a buffer overrun exploit. Which any teenage coder wannabe would have been able to catch had they simply had access to the code.
Further, it means that if their shows are copied -- whether taped on a VCR, or stills shown on entertainment news or whatever -- that there's a little ``hey, this is the work of CBS/NBC/ABC/...'' sign in the bottom, which doesn't seem all that unreasonable.
Further, the code is `deemed exported' even if you let a foriegn national LIVING INSIDE THE US look at the code: See the BXA Regs for more information.
About a week later, I got a very sincere-sounding form letter response. I can only assume my ticket got marked RESOLVED_WONTFIX
A toy that is sold with a wrench is just cool.
The beams in this article are orthogonal in the sense that channel #1 has it's E-field pointed prependicular to channel #2's E-field so they won't interfere with each other (so they're `orthogonal' in the usual compu-geek sense of the term, too.)
The german team seems to have solved two big engineering problems with sending two channels of information this way. One is to send a mean-polarized signal so that you can compare the two channels against it (kind of a carrier signal for polarization) to see which channel is which.
The other I confess to not understanding. Apparently there are sync problems -- signals carried one polarization may travel faster than the other polarization. I can only guess that this is a problem caused by inhomogenaities in fibre. Whatever its caused by, they've managed to measure it and compensate for it.
As for your other question, they definately can and do use frequency as a way of encoding information. Just like with radio signals, you can use the brightness of the light (amplitude modulation, or AM) or its color (frequency modulation, FM). In practice, FM is less problematic; the amplitude of a signal is easily confused by noise, whereas frequency is much less so.
This is good news, to be sure, but a plane crash is clearly not the same as an oil spill. How the burning would proceed would depend completely on how the fuel was contained in the plane, and what happened to the containment. Clearly, it has the potential to burn just as hot as hydrocarbons -- it has to contain the same amount of energy as the jet fuel, 'cuz the plane still has to fly.
Since, as far as I know, no one is even remotely close to building plane-engine-type hydrogen-powered engines (fuel cells are about as close as its gotten) discussion about relative safety is all going to be wild speculation.
One thing I couldn't see -- and I can't get at the downloads to check -- is to see if their Presentation software, Impress, can play movies in slides now. This is actually a big thing; in the hard sciences, where a lot of people use non-Windows and give presentations, one of the major problems for people who want to switch to Linux is that if you have results you want to show in movie form, you're pretty much stuck with using PowerPoint, or exiting your presentation and starting up xanim or something...
There's a limit to how much experimental equipment you can shove onto a Mars probe. Some amazingly cool things have been done, but once you get the rocks back to Earth, you can unleash everything you've got in the lab on 'em.
Anything which pushes the boundaries of the engineering -- getting the unmanned probe to launch itself back to Earth -- will have great impact on both the Space program and terrestrial spin-offs. And that's quite apart from the science.Oh, for pity's sake.
It is exactly the FTC's job to enforce legislation against deceptive trade practices. These `typo' sites are exactly that, and fall under the same laws that would apply to Real-World marketing under names intentionally similar to trademarks.
Stare decisis, or precedent, exists for a reason, as anyone with the sence to google and read something on the subject (say, any first year notes) can tell you.
Starfleet was pretty clearly modelled after the navy, not the AF. This makes sense; sure, space is `up' and so are planes, but month- or year- long missions with large crews in close quarters is clearly more a navy thing than an airforce thing.
It's actually worse than this. Even once everything's decided on and approved, time from design to bird-in-orbit is typically 3-5 years. That means space-based bandwidth is going to be running on equipment that is out of date the minute it is turned on. Even more so since you're not going to put cutting-edge technology on a satellite anyway, since you can't reliably fix it once its up.
Trying to estimate demand 5 years ahead of time and then satisfiy it with the technology of the day is why we're not going to see widespread satellite-provided bandwidth any time soon.
Previous posters have brought up some poor analogies. Newspaper ads are clearly ads (and newspapers can get in serious trouble when this isn't the case). The yellow pages are entirely advertisement.
A better example is infomercials . These are clearly a `free service', too, as is all of broadcast television. That emphatically does not exempt them from the requirement to clearly distinguish paid ads from normal programming.
Now, you could argue about whether or not paid-for placement between `normal' links is the same as a tv commercial which is paid for in-between `normal' programming, but it's not a completely unreasonable stretch.