If you see these immediate warning signs," WAVE America will announce, "violence is a serious possibility":
loss of temper on a daily basis
frequent physical fighting
significant vandalism or property damage
increase in use of drugs or alchohol
increasing risk-taking behavior
detailed plans to commit acts of violence.
announcing threats or plans for hurting others
carrying a weapon
This is a list prepared by experts? It basically reads like "If you are doing X it is likely you will do X". If you see someone fighting daily, it is likely that they will fight again. The thing that really worries me about this list is the question of escalation - this list assumes that doing something very slightly out of line will become something dire and disasterous in the future.
Hey - I can run through this list quickly and see if I can match up any of these traits to myself? Hmm. Loss of temper - well I may pull my hair out occassionally looking for a bug in code, so that might count. Frequent physical fighting - well I used to do Taekwondo and that is most definitely a sparring sport, so that would have counted (until I dislocated my shoulder that is...). Drugs and alcohol increase - well some nights I don't have wine, and some nights I do, so any night with a glass of wine following a 'dry' night is an increase. Detailed plans on commiting acts of violence - well I might have drawn up some strategy for my dwarves to explode the opposition in an online game of Myth II. Tee hee. In fact that might account for several of the others!:-) And I carry a penknife for those times when my glasses have fallen apart and I can't find the jewellers screwdrivers.
Wow. This list is dynamite. In fact it works out just like Astrology - if you try hard enough you can fit most traits to most people. That is amazingly dangerous - vague lists like this can be mis-applied by well meaning people and could wreck lives. Possibly permanently - if you ended up getting thrown out of school because of badly thought-through lists like this, you might never achieve that University place that you should have got. Or even that vocational course in motor mechanics that you really wanted to do.
Not that the Pinkerton corporation seems to care about the result of their initiative though - they seem to basically look on it as a business opportunity without risk - they act as a collector of information from anonymous sources and distribute it after consideration under some unknown criteria, getting paid along the way. Amazing that in this enlightened day and age we would allow a corporation to wield such power over peoples lives.
The thing that really confused me was the references in the article to this software being Itanium optimized. Fair enough then, Intel's motives could be seen as carrot dangling to persuade consumers to migrate more enthusiastically to a nascent technology platform. Then I was left wondering exactly how source code would be Itanium optimized. Surely it could be optimally tweaked and recompiled for any platform, even non-intel architectures
Possibly it is just a buzz-word. The Itanium is going to have to do good things for Intel otherwise they are going to be up the proverbial creek as far as 64 bit processors goes, and this is not a playing field they have to themselves (with 64 bit POWER, Alpha and AMD Sledgehammer processors also featuring). I suspect however that the source code makes copious use of things that the Itanium is supposed to do well - lots of use of 64 bit and longer integers in math processing, and accesses of memory in 64 bit lengths. Of course, that means that the current Athlon will also do well on the same code (see Aces hardware for an article on K7 memory access). So yes, you can write C code which favours a particular processor, as long as you understand it's strengths and weaknesses and have some appreciation of what the compiler does to your code. But I strongly suspect that knowing the most optimal set of compiler flags for a particular processor is also important in getting a given set of code to run as fast as possible.
I think the music industry has a right to fight napster. The way it seems, napster's primary purpose is to allow people to pirate music on a wider scale. This deprives the industry of money that it could have earned through the sale of CDs, etc.
Wow. You have been listening to the noise put out by the RIAA far too much. Would you like to substantiate your claim that "napster's primary purpose" is piracy? If you actually look at what Napster provides, nowhere in there is piracy of copyrighted music an implicit part of its use. Napster allows you to share and acquire MP3's easily - there ARE legally available MP3's - take a look at MP3.com for example. The history of free distribution of electronic format music goes back a long way - look at the vast numbers of music tracks available in the Amiga archives for example dating back into the late eighties. People are often happy just to know that someone enjoyed their work - there is reward in knowing that even one person liked it. The idea that people might like to distribute their work entirely without financial gain seems to have been totally missed by the RIAA in their quest to squash Napster.
This is not to say that Napster is not being used to distribute copyrighted songs in MP3 format. But there is no point in shooting the messenger - that is why the postal service is not responsible for the material which is posted via them, why Internet routing companies are not responsible for the traffic flowing through them. Realistically, RIAA and similar conglomerates must come to some reasonable method for distributing their products in this new media. My personal beef over all of this is that the artists who are signed up to these large record companies see very little of the cost of the CD I buy. Why should the artist, who is after all the person who created this original music, getting less than 10% of the CD cost (often much less than 10% of the CD cost). That tells me that somewhere along the line, someone is scooping a substantial profit at the expense of the artist. Whatever you say, MP3s are not the same quality as CDs - they lack depth, especially in complex pieces, and I'm certain that there is money to be made from the following business model:
Set up a recording studio - this is the major capital cost
Encourage artists to make use of the studio by either allowing an up-front fee, a cut of the profits of the eventual music or some combination of the two.
Set up a web site to distribute the music in MP3 format, complete with advertising to support the site.
Sell CDs through mail order at reasonable prices. If I can buy Naxos CDs for Can$10 featuring superb musicianship, I'd like to know why it can't be done for all those top 10 CDs.
Why could this work? What advantage does a web-based business have? The main answer is distribution and audience - once you get people used to the idea of try-before-you-buy and reasonable prices, along with the concept that music could even be selected on a track-by-track basis and custom CDs sold at a slight premium over conventional CDs, you do NOT have to spend so much money getting your ads into the mainstream press. You can let distribution systems like Napster do your advertising for you - make sure the site name is in the title of the MP3s you distribute, so you get peoples interest. Advertising seems to consume vast quantities of budget these days, so cut those costs and make use of the distribution offered by the web.
I hate to sound like a conspiracy nut, but Corel has to make some cash somehow: I'm wondering how strong the commitment to OpenSource is. Is anyone else worried that future versions of Corel-owned Linux software are going to be closed? I wouldn't be too terribly surprised.
I don't see Corel as being a strictly Open Source company at all. But this is not a bad thing - personally I don't think that Linux is just about open source. From where I'm sitting, I see Corel's business movements as a realignment of their business model towards providing a version of Linux that is easy to use for beginners, and to additionally provide as wide a range of familiar programs to those new users as possible. The average Linux newbie is likely to be used to paying for software so this gambit is probably feasable as a source of income. Plus the rest of us have the option to buy software which fulfills specific needs which are not currently addressed by the available open source projects, such as CorelDraw 9.
In fact, I see Corel's movements as being a definite boon to Linux. They will pull new users to the world of Linux and will provide yet more software into the Linux world. Just because it is likely that they will be selling software doesn't automatically make them into the Evil Empire. To be able to stay in Linux and use Bryce, or Poser, or whatever would be a great help for many users. If they price it too high they will suffer the usual market drought that afflicts over-priced products. And the GPL/LGPL stops Corel from closing their sources on code that adds onto existing GPL/LGPL code bases so don't panic. If they write their own software and they want to sell it - fine!
I think people should be able to say, "Please don't spider this page" (robots.txt for example, but it gets stickier with copyrighted content) but I don't think anyone should ever be able to say, "You may not link this page" since that is fundamentally the anti-point of the Web.
I agree. The very nature of the web would suggest that the act of accessing a web page was making a copy of it. Therefore it is difficult to see how anyone could say "You may not copy this page" because by the time you see this message you have already made a copy. Now - can this argument be extended to making links to a web page? If you consider web pages as a broadcast, rather than a published work, then I see no problems with unaltered content being mirrored, as this is merely an extension of the broadcast route. Mirrors and partial mirrors may prove less obvious. If in the process of making a partial copy you imply something derogatory or contrary to the original by changing the context of the page, then this is covered by libel or slander laws anyway if the case is sufficiently serious. Not to say that this doesn't happen already in the newsprint media - quotes are truncated and put out of context all over the place. Of course, the waters are further muddied with trademarks and other such concerns, but I don't believe that changes the base rules. It would be a sad day if the courts stopped linking to other sites - it wouldn't be a web anymore.
Oh wow! Oh wow oh wow! A Linux client which will talk to Lotus Notes servers?
Picture an office populated by Outlook clients and an Exchange server or a Lotus Notes server; we can infiltrate that place from the bottom up by making Evolution talk to those Exchanges or Notes servers.
Now this really does have me interested. While I do cross-platform development as the rule, I still end up getting tied to Windows to access my mail and calendaring tools in Lotus Notes. And no, I can't escape them totally, although VMWare and Exceed both provide some solution to the problem. As Lotus currently have no plans to produce a Linux client for Lotus Notes, I wonder whether this sort of development will force their hand. Given the market for Lotus Notes style organisation tools, this could be a significant gain for the GNOME project if this comes off.
Cheers,
Toby Haynes
GCC without any licensing issues (i.e. CYGWIN.DLL)
on
GCC For Windows NT?
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· Score: 4
You could try Mingw32 - a port of GCC which uses MSVCRT.dll or MSCRT.dll runtime libraries instead of CYGWIN.dll and thereby avoids any licensing issues which you might run into by having to distribute CYGWIN with all your binaries. I've used it successfully for porting some of my own code without any real problems (just hiccups caused by using function names which are already used by MS libraries but not by Linux ones, or by defines which are already set up on Windows such as NOERROR or NO_ERROR).
It is important to note that this in no way affects the credibility of DeCSS as a tool for the playback of DVDs on systems that do not yet have a software DVD player. Those systems may no longer include Linux, but they DO still include AmigaOS, BeOS, several commercial Unixes, OS/2, and BSD, among others.
Linux is far more than just x86 platforms. When I see source code (preferably clearly legally available) for a Linux DVD player, then we can say that there truely is a Linux DVD player. Until that time we can all suffer with kernel incompatabilities (especially once 2.4 comes out) caused by a binary-only release, along with a complete absence of support for platforms like Alpha, StrongARM, PPC, etc.
Will the move to automated driving systems make our journeys out on the highways any better though? Will we end up leaning out of the window and yelling "Stupid MS Driver"? Will we have robots giving us the finger (arm, apendage, tentacle if bioengineering gets going) as they overtake us on the hard shoulder? Will people hack their robot driver to go faster, park on rear-bumper doing 100mph or cut more corners in an effort to avoid traffic lights/ pedestrians/ the police? Will we be attacked with a denial of driving attack by some script kiddie? Or worse, have a UCITA-like end-of-license removal where the originator of the driving OS produces a new version and wants us to upgrade? Stay tuned... I like the look of the bicycle personally:-)
First, Linux is certainly not "the last 15% of the market". I love it, but let's not start lying.
More like 5% of the market IIRC. On the other hand it now is close to or larger than the Apple market share.
Second, OS X doesn't use X. It uses Quartz. QT being a highly graphical thing, most of the code that would need to be ported would probably deal with the video setup, which is completely different in Windows, Mac, and Unix. That's the biggest reason there's no QT for UNIX, I'm sure.
Even if OS X doesn't use X at all, this is not the point. All we need to get QT going is to have the codecs to go from encoded source stream to decoded image stream. The video setup is irrelevant - putting the movie on the screen is easy once you have the decoded images. You can make good use of any windowing toolkit you care to mention once you can decode the original format.
My old astronomy lab have a group working on optical interferometry, and have a working optical interferometry complete with four (or possibly now five) telescopes linked together. If you are interested in the details, there is a good introduction and more detailed information here. Now the interesting thing here is that it is very important to keep the telescopes at exactly the same distance apart or compensate in some way (here there are trolleys running up and down a long (30m) optical bench and the telescopes are concreted into the ground. The problems inherent in doing optical interferometry in space present many of the same problems examined in this project, plus the limitation that you can't just stick an optical bench on a satellite and hope to get it off the ground. On the other hand, ten years ago people were highly sceptical of getting optical interferometry working on anything more than a rudimentary basis and felt that map making was many years away, so maybe those problems can be solved too.
This article seems to be out of date on the day it's published. Or maybe this is subtler than it appears. For example:
Overall CPU speeds will increase as the year goes forward. No surprise there. 1GHz Pentium IIIs may hit the after market in late Q3 or Q4 2000. At this time, it does not look like Pentium III CPU speeds will go over 1GHz this year, or possibly ever, though Intel assures us that there is still performance headroom in the Coppermine design.
Now is this information pertaining to on-the-shelf availability of the 1GHz PIII's? If so, there are going to be a lot of 1GHz Athlon processors sitting on the store shelves months ahead of the Intel shipments. And if the news that the 1GHz PIII is all that we will see this year, then I suspect that AMD may have more of a march on Intel than we thought. Of course, Intel may well be banking more heavily on Willamette getting out earlier than planned to make up for the shortfall, in which case it will be interesting to see how AMD develop the Athlon line with its new faster caches in order to keep parity.
From where I'm sitting, Intel currently has an interesting problem. Their flagship processor line, the Pentium III Coppermine, tops out at 1GHz . But there aren't that many around, and the current crop of PIIICu's seem to top out at 800MHz. Overclockers can squeeze this up a bit, but it seems that the PIIICu's in the shop are close to their limits anyway. Celeron's have always proved to be seriously overclockable - most 500MHz will go to 600MHz plus, which leads me to believe that Intel is not being anything like as strict in the CPU speeds it's binning its processors into.
In other words, the Celeron processors are not being tested hard as they come off the production line as there is an adequate supply of the speeds that Intel wishes to see. Why doesn't Intel want it's Celerons to be sold as close to the limiting speeds as possible? In my opinion, it's because they don't want to eclipse their PIIICu flagship chips with Celeron chips running at the same clockspeed as this would dilute their market with their own product.
So what you cry? None of this would matter so much if AMD wasn't quietly pulling ahead in the high-speed chip fabrication stakes. With the Athlon coming off the production lines at clock speeds 850, 900, 950 and 1GHz, there is considerable pressure on the PIIICu's to remain visible in the marketplace, since they are the direct competitor to the Athlon. The Celeron 2 looks to be throttled by it's bus speed (66MHz?) in comparison to the Athlon at 200MHz, and won't compete in heavy memory fetching tasks, such as games, art programs, complex DTP etc. Until Intel can successfully ramp up the speeds on it's headline brand, the increasing speeds of the Celerons and Celeron 2's present an interesting dilemma.
Interesting to note the positive tone of the reply when asked about open sourcing the older projects:
We haven't considered that yet - but it might be an interesting way to keep interest in our games high for future years.
Now, with several companies starting to put their older games out into the open source community (Descent 1 & 2, Doom, Quake I, Marathon 2 to name a few), how do we go about convincing some more of the software companies that releasing source code to old classics is a worthwhile thing to do? Which ones would people most like to see - I note several attempts at producing clones of games like Warcraft and Ultima 7, so there must still be interest in these games? Is it only multiplayer games that are worth upgrading or revising or are there some single player ones which would benefit from smarter AI or better collision detection?
But my opinion is, let them exist. Let the CONSUMER Choose. NOT a lawyer. I feel you are doing the BIGGEST Injustice by making my choices for me in court. Microsoft has NEVER prevented anyone from making a compatible system, had they done that it would have been anticompetitve. But simply existing without anything better or no one stepping up to the bat does not make microsoft an evil empire.
In my opinion, choice has been the first thing to go out the window (sic) since MS reached such a high level of market share. Until about 1 year ago (well after the case started) there was effectively little or no choice to be had when buying a computer for home use. You either bought a pre-loaded Window machine, often with MS Office bundled, or an Apple machine. In many ways, the bundling of MS Windows + Office has done more to throttle the development of competing apps than anything else - it is an insidious method of halting the competition before it has begun. How many people will buy a second Office suite to replace their pre-bundled one? Only those who know precisely what they can or can't do with the MS Office suite, and that does NOT represent a majority of the computer-buying market.
Sure some of you don't like the "Windows Tax" when you buy a new PC
So you think I should pay for something I may never use, may format off my hard drive as soon as the computer is powered up for the first time? Again the situation is better now - more vendors provide computers with alternatives (i.e. Linux), but the MS dominance of the bundled solution market is still extremely widespread.
Why would someone want to choose something that is Niche when they can choose something that is a standard?
When I work, I want to work with an environment of my choosing. When I need to exchange files with other users I want those OPEN standards to be available so that my file can be interpretted by their system, regardless of their operating system. For interoperability, all we need is exchangable file formats and open networking standards to allow us to communicate and pass information between systems.
I would feel sorry for the thousands of employees, the foundations that Gates supports, the 5,000+ college students that could loose scholarships, the grants and donations to the city and areas of which microsoft works (redmond receives lots of support from microsoft).
So you are arguing that because MS contributes so much in charitable ways, its sharp business practices and leveraging of its market positioning to its own ends is acceptable? That argument is extremely fatuous.
SGI, Sun, Sparc, Alpha, Mac, Amiga, RISC OS, RS2000, Aix, FreeBSD, NeXT, DOS, Novell DOS, CPM, TRS 80. They were all your choices. You chose a PC witch Built its foundation in Windows. You didn't Choose a 10,000 dollar Sparc to not run Solaris on it, so why should it be any different here.
Why would I necessarily run Solaris on Sparc hardware? There are other choices. But this is a diversion - take a look back at the previous contender in the PC marketplace - OS/2. What happened there? MS leveraged its market position and made it difficult for OS/2 to get a foothold in the market. Result: another choice goes west (although you can still get OS/2, although it hasn't really changed a lot in the last few years).
What you seem to miss entirely is that MS has managed to make the OS market into a MS-only field for 95% of computer users. And in my opinion, they have acheived this by leveraging their marketing might to remove any competition in the field. So yes, most applications are written for MS Windows, because that is where the market has ended up. My concern is that had there been a wider playing field, we would now be in a better position to choose which OS we wanted to run, and that interoperability between systems and OS's would be vastly improved over the situation we have today.
Finally, this servers as an example what drunk driving can lead to. Just don't do it. Get on a bike or bus instead...
I agree about the bus, but DONT BIKE! Believe me, having watched dozens of students on their way home after a particularly good party wondering which side of the road to cycle on, biking is not a really sensible option. Okay - so you don't pose quite the same danger as a drunk driver in an SUV, but the end results could easily result in death or injury for you, the driver of the vehicle which hits you or swerves to avoid you, or a bystander. If you have a bike, use it as a mobile crutch - a walking stick with wheels. Oh - and in the UK you can be breathalized while cycling, be fined and have points on your driving license for cycling while drunk. Probably applies elsewhere too - you are in charge of a vehicle on a public highway when cycling.
What basically happens is that the data comes in off the telescope, and when ORAC-DR sees it, the data gets reduced. It automagically removes any sorts of defects that are common to CCD observations (flat-fields, bias levels, sky levels), and often produces publication-quality results. We were joking that astronomers wouldn't even have to write their papers. We'd just reduce the data, fill in some fields on a paper template, then ship the paper off to the appropriate journal.
Yes - you could make an Astronomer version of Lorem Ipsum tied into the LyX. I'm sure half the referees would pass it, and the other half would take it as a direct assault on their chosen field of expertize:-) Just joking folks!
Having done three nights of observing on UKIRT doing IR spectroscopy, having the automated reduction facility makes life a lot easier. Alas in our case it told our target object kept falling out of the slit, something later (i.e. after we left) found to be a problem with the telescope. Now fixed, but I don't think I'll get another chance at those observations. But such is life - and you really can't complain when you have to travel to Hawaii to do your observing:-)
And by the way, I'm glad to hear that Frossie's jeep is still in one piece - it was brand spanking new when I was there, and it was great fun bounding over the lava fields in it! Hiya to Tim too - long time no see - thanks for the accommodation!
This version of QT without X looks very nice for running on Set-top boxes - anti-aliased text and all. In this sort of environment, the 'display anywhere' X protocol is just excess baggage and a more direct route to the screen makes a lot of sense, especially if you are a company intent on providing a cheap device for general home use and want to get maximum speed out of the hardware. This does of course assume that the license for QT/Embedded is reasonably set... On the flip side, just how much software are you cutting yourself off from if you don't provide X libraries? Quite a lot I suspect unless QT/Embedded is providing some extra coverage.
Does anyone know the Acorn Archimedes? In its own time (around the 286) it was way ahead of its time, it did things which just became possible when the PC architecture reached 386+ and the 486. Now I ask you; before reading this article did the name "Archimedes" ring a bell?
Funny you should mention this, particularly in this thread. Acorn binned their workstation division two or three years ago, and it looked like the Acorn line was finally hitting the same wall that Amiga hit so many years earlier - a small computer firm with an enthusiastic user and programming community suddenly decides that all that good will in the grass roots can go hang.
At this point, I assumed that that was the end. Finito. Kaputt. Amazingly, and in rather less time than the Amiga people, several firms have stepped into the breach and produced new machines, such as continuations of the original RiscPC designs, the RiscStation, the Imago, RISC OS Ltd has produced a new, faster, leaner OS and things are looking more hopeful for the fan base. So even a small computer platform can maintain itself outside the Mac/Windows hegemony, and it doesn't hurt the mainstream to have something different at the edges. Besides, the Open Source movement has facilitated the development and porting of numerous tools to these platforms, extending the minority platforms usefulness further. And Linux ports exist for those who need some more mainstream OS stuff from time to time.
And to those of you who keep pontificating that we don't need another platform, one of the things I like about Linux is that it provides me with choice. One of the things I like about lots of platform is that it gives me choice.
Every now and then you stumble across something which is an interesting fusion of several interests. One such find was around the late 80's, I bought a Music 500 system (like a Hybrid Music 5000) for my BBC B microcomputer. Basically this was an RM, FM synth linked into the system via a 1MHz port with 16 voices. What was interesting about this system was the method of driving it - it came with it's own Forth-like language - AMPLE (Advanced Music Programming Language Environment) for writing music, building sound sets (by combining voices together, using ring-modulation), controling volume and stereo position, and of course it also came with programming control structures such as loops, conditional execution and other such wonders.
While today's technology far outstrips the equipment that I used then, the AMPLE language provided a interesting (to a programmer who plays keyboard and oboe, anyway) method of creating and playing music, and not necessarly just playing music using conventional tools. The letters A-G represented notes, with capital letters implying go up and lowercase mean go down the scale, note lengths were easily specified (48, implies a crotchet, 24, implies a quaver and so forth), ties and slurs could be implemented and chords could be played on. As an example, a bar of music for one voice including chords might look like
24,C(48,ge)b~48,a(fc)96,C(ac)
which equates to quavers playing notes C down to B while G and E below are played and held, with the B quaver tied to a crotchet chord AFC and semibreve CAC to end the bar.
Several times I saw suggestions that the language should be revived and tied in to some modern MIDI or sample-based system, but to my knowledge nobody has ever taken up the challenge. If anyone knows differently, I like to hear from them!
I'm getting 580 g -- if I'm remembering the dimensional stuff correctly -- gotta convert w to radians and r to meters, right?:
I had the disc diameter as 10cm, so radius r = 0.05m, not 0.01m as you have in your calculation. So I get 580 * 5 = 2900 g (I just let g = 10 m/s^2 for simplicity, hence the rounding error). Of course, I don't know the actual diameter of the disc - I just took an order of magnitude guess:-)
There's quite a lot of information at http://www.urbanlegends.com/science/glass.flow/ that suggests glass flow is indeed a myth.
Interesting. Having actually stood looking at one of the examples of 'glass flow' in a Cathedral (which one escapes me) where there was a thin piece of glass surrounding a hole and much thicker glass at the bottom, the above information makes interesting reading. To summarize the findings of the urbanlegends site, pure glass has next to no chance of flowing at room temperature. Glass carefully laced with particular additives, such as lead crystal or borosilicate glasses, can have further altered properties. Several interesting things do spring to notice though. Firstly, the presence of imperfections in the glass can have a macro effect on the properties of the glass, changing it's maximum tensile strength and possibly the conditions for plastic deformation (which is after all what we are talking about) so with ancient glass the distinctly impure nature of the glass may have an impact. The other point which caught my interest was the part about temperature-dependant plastic flow - the quoted critical figure (for infinite time) here is 270'C. Now I would be worried about my hard drive if it got to that temperature...:-) Still, a platter spinning at 7200rpm with a diameter of 10cm would experience an acceleration of 2800 g at the edge if I've done my sums correctly (w^2 r for those who are interested, where w is the angular velocity and r is the radius). Of course, its a while since I did my physics degree so I may have got the equation wrong...:-)
How do they make the glass strong enough? Is it somehow reinforced with strengthening fibers or similar?
It doesn't need strengthening - glass has a greater tensile strength than aluminium. What glas s does suffer though is brittle fracture, so I suspect that there is some interesting method for checking the surface for minor cracks which might later propagate through the platter.
What I wonder about is what happens to the platters after a long period of use. Glass is a viscous liquid after all - 400 year old glass windows are measurably thicker at the bottom than at the top because of this flow. If you consider that the centripetal force required to keep the disc together is much higher than gravity, I wonder how long it would take for the glass to flow towards the outside of the disc.
Please explain to me why we're getting so worked up about it. Open Source / Free Software does NOT need patents. We design a program/device and release it to the public. If somebody goes off and patents it after that point, we just point to our reference model and say 2 magic words: "prior art", and the problem disappears.
We wish this were true. But it's not. Prior art can be used to demonstrate that a patent application is not valid. To overturn an existing patent on the basis of prior art will often require time in court - simply appealing to the USPTO is not enough. How many open source developers are prepared to spend lots of money fighting off patents which have been erroneously granted? Even the EFF has limited funds - don't think that we can always leave this to the EFF to cover us.
Patent reform, and a USPTO which doesn't view numbers of patents granted as a basis for productivity payments to the patent officials, is needed, badly. Just because you believe that the wolf howling outside your window won't eat you doesn't mean you shouldn't try and shut the doors.
How on earth do you screen connections by geography? Okay, so you could do a DNS lookup on the IP address you are looking at and compare it against a database to see where it came from, and allow it if it has a '.ca' on the end, but that it worse than useless - a vast number of people will be connecting through ISPs with.com addresses or will have IP numbers which are not available in the DNS database. And most large multinationals have blocks of IP numbers to work from, which I suspect are not necessarily strictly partitioned across country borders?
So is this more a marketing gimick from ICrave? - after all, under Canadian law, rebroadcasting of a signal is an allowable act - the question raised in the US courts (because the ICraveTV name is registered in the States) was how to limit the propagation of the signal, and ICraveTV was criticised for not having the technology to do this.
If they have a method of blocking connections, I suspect it is much like the normal blocking of people connecting from outside a domain as used on some of the UK academic sites to limit connections to academic servers during work hours - but there all the academic machines allowed to connect are neatly inside the.ac.uk tree and can easily be selected.
In other words, it's probable that any blocking software based on geography is going to be as reliable as the censorware used in some libraries. Go figure.
Slashdot Mirror
If you see these immediate warning signs," WAVE America will announce, "violence is a serious possibility":
This is a list prepared by experts? It basically reads like "If you are doing X it is likely you will do X". If you see someone fighting daily, it is likely that they will fight again. The thing that really worries me about this list is the question of escalation - this list assumes that doing something very slightly out of line will become something dire and disasterous in the future.
Hey - I can run through this list quickly and see if I can match up any of these traits to myself? Hmm. Loss of temper - well I may pull my hair out occassionally looking for a bug in code, so that might count. Frequent physical fighting - well I used to do Taekwondo and that is most definitely a sparring sport, so that would have counted (until I dislocated my shoulder that is...). Drugs and alcohol increase - well some nights I don't have wine, and some nights I do, so any night with a glass of wine following a 'dry' night is an increase. Detailed plans on commiting acts of violence - well I might have drawn up some strategy for my dwarves to explode the opposition in an online game of Myth II. Tee hee. In fact that might account for several of the others! :-) And I carry a penknife for those times when my glasses have fallen apart and I can't find the jewellers screwdrivers.
Wow. This list is dynamite. In fact it works out just like Astrology - if you try hard enough you can fit most traits to most people. That is amazingly dangerous - vague lists like this can be mis-applied by well meaning people and could wreck lives. Possibly permanently - if you ended up getting thrown out of school because of badly thought-through lists like this, you might never achieve that University place that you should have got. Or even that vocational course in motor mechanics that you really wanted to do.
Not that the Pinkerton corporation seems to care about the result of their initiative though - they seem to basically look on it as a business opportunity without risk - they act as a collector of information from anonymous sources and distribute it after consideration under some unknown criteria, getting paid along the way. Amazing that in this enlightened day and age we would allow a corporation to wield such power over peoples lives.
Cheers,
Toby Haynes
The thing that really confused me was the references in the article to this software being Itanium optimized. Fair enough then, Intel's motives could be seen as carrot dangling to persuade consumers to migrate more enthusiastically to a nascent technology platform. Then I was left wondering exactly how source code would be Itanium optimized. Surely it could be optimally tweaked and recompiled for any platform, even non-intel architectures
Possibly it is just a buzz-word. The Itanium is going to have to do good things for Intel otherwise they are going to be up the proverbial creek as far as 64 bit processors goes, and this is not a playing field they have to themselves (with 64 bit POWER, Alpha and AMD Sledgehammer processors also featuring). I suspect however that the source code makes copious use of things that the Itanium is supposed to do well - lots of use of 64 bit and longer integers in math processing, and accesses of memory in 64 bit lengths. Of course, that means that the current Athlon will also do well on the same code (see Aces hardware for an article on K7 memory access). So yes, you can write C code which favours a particular processor, as long as you understand it's strengths and weaknesses and have some appreciation of what the compiler does to your code. But I strongly suspect that knowing the most optimal set of compiler flags for a particular processor is also important in getting a given set of code to run as fast as possible.
Cheers,
Toby Haynes
I think the music industry has a right to fight napster. The way it seems, napster's primary purpose is to allow people to pirate music on a wider scale. This deprives the industry of money that it could have earned through the sale of CDs, etc.
Wow. You have been listening to the noise put out by the RIAA far too much. Would you like to substantiate your claim that "napster's primary purpose" is piracy? If you actually look at what Napster provides, nowhere in there is piracy of copyrighted music an implicit part of its use. Napster allows you to share and acquire MP3's easily - there ARE legally available MP3's - take a look at MP3.com for example. The history of free distribution of electronic format music goes back a long way - look at the vast numbers of music tracks available in the Amiga archives for example dating back into the late eighties. People are often happy just to know that someone enjoyed their work - there is reward in knowing that even one person liked it. The idea that people might like to distribute their work entirely without financial gain seems to have been totally missed by the RIAA in their quest to squash Napster.
This is not to say that Napster is not being used to distribute copyrighted songs in MP3 format. But there is no point in shooting the messenger - that is why the postal service is not responsible for the material which is posted via them, why Internet routing companies are not responsible for the traffic flowing through them. Realistically, RIAA and similar conglomerates must come to some reasonable method for distributing their products in this new media. My personal beef over all of this is that the artists who are signed up to these large record companies see very little of the cost of the CD I buy. Why should the artist, who is after all the person who created this original music, getting less than 10% of the CD cost (often much less than 10% of the CD cost). That tells me that somewhere along the line, someone is scooping a substantial profit at the expense of the artist. Whatever you say, MP3s are not the same quality as CDs - they lack depth, especially in complex pieces, and I'm certain that there is money to be made from the following business model:
Why could this work? What advantage does a web-based business have? The main answer is distribution and audience - once you get people used to the idea of try-before-you-buy and reasonable prices, along with the concept that music could even be selected on a track-by-track basis and custom CDs sold at a slight premium over conventional CDs, you do NOT have to spend so much money getting your ads into the mainstream press. You can let distribution systems like Napster do your advertising for you - make sure the site name is in the title of the MP3s you distribute, so you get peoples interest. Advertising seems to consume vast quantities of budget these days, so cut those costs and make use of the distribution offered by the web.
Cheers,
Toby Haynes
I hate to sound like a conspiracy nut, but Corel has to make some cash somehow: I'm wondering how strong the commitment to OpenSource is. Is anyone else worried that future versions of Corel-owned Linux software are going to be closed? I wouldn't be too terribly surprised.
I don't see Corel as being a strictly Open Source company at all. But this is not a bad thing - personally I don't think that Linux is just about open source. From where I'm sitting, I see Corel's business movements as a realignment of their business model towards providing a version of Linux that is easy to use for beginners, and to additionally provide as wide a range of familiar programs to those new users as possible. The average Linux newbie is likely to be used to paying for software so this gambit is probably feasable as a source of income. Plus the rest of us have the option to buy software which fulfills specific needs which are not currently addressed by the available open source projects, such as CorelDraw 9.
In fact, I see Corel's movements as being a definite boon to Linux. They will pull new users to the world of Linux and will provide yet more software into the Linux world. Just because it is likely that they will be selling software doesn't automatically make them into the Evil Empire. To be able to stay in Linux and use Bryce, or Poser, or whatever would be a great help for many users. If they price it too high they will suffer the usual market drought that afflicts over-priced products. And the GPL/LGPL stops Corel from closing their sources on code that adds onto existing GPL/LGPL code bases so don't panic. If they write their own software and they want to sell it - fine!
Cheers,
Toby Haynes
In the /. intro, it says
I think people should be able to say, "Please don't spider this page" (robots.txt for example, but it gets stickier with copyrighted content) but I don't think anyone should ever be able to say, "You may not link this page" since that is fundamentally the anti-point of the Web.
I agree. The very nature of the web would suggest that the act of accessing a web page was making a copy of it. Therefore it is difficult to see how anyone could say "You may not copy this page" because by the time you see this message you have already made a copy. Now - can this argument be extended to making links to a web page? If you consider web pages as a broadcast, rather than a published work, then I see no problems with unaltered content being mirrored, as this is merely an extension of the broadcast route. Mirrors and partial mirrors may prove less obvious. If in the process of making a partial copy you imply something derogatory or contrary to the original by changing the context of the page, then this is covered by libel or slander laws anyway if the case is sufficiently serious. Not to say that this doesn't happen already in the newsprint media - quotes are truncated and put out of context all over the place. Of course, the waters are further muddied with trademarks and other such concerns, but I don't believe that changes the base rules. It would be a sad day if the courts stopped linking to other sites - it wouldn't be a web anymore.
Cheers,
Toby Haynes
Oh wow! Oh wow oh wow! A Linux client which will talk to Lotus Notes servers?
Picture an office populated by Outlook clients and an Exchange server or a Lotus Notes server; we can infiltrate that place from the bottom up by making Evolution talk to those Exchanges or Notes servers.
Now this really does have me interested. While I do cross-platform development as the rule, I still end up getting tied to Windows to access my mail and calendaring tools in Lotus Notes. And no, I can't escape them totally, although VMWare and Exceed both provide some solution to the problem. As Lotus currently have no plans to produce a Linux client for Lotus Notes, I wonder whether this sort of development will force their hand. Given the market for Lotus Notes style organisation tools, this could be a significant gain for the GNOME project if this comes off.
Cheers,
Toby Haynes
You could try Mingw32 - a port of GCC which uses MSVCRT.dll or MSCRT.dll runtime libraries instead of CYGWIN.dll and thereby avoids any licensing issues which you might run into by having to distribute CYGWIN with all your binaries. I've used it successfully for porting some of my own code without any real problems (just hiccups caused by using function names which are already used by MS libraries but not by Linux ones, or by defines which are already set up on Windows such as NOERROR or NO_ERROR).
Cheers,
Toby Haynes
It is important to note that this in no way affects the credibility of DeCSS as a tool for the playback of DVDs on systems that do not yet have a software DVD player. Those systems may no longer include Linux, but they DO still include AmigaOS, BeOS, several commercial Unixes, OS/2, and BSD, among others.
Linux is far more than just x86 platforms. When I see source code (preferably clearly legally available) for a Linux DVD player, then we can say that there truely is a Linux DVD player. Until that time we can all suffer with kernel incompatabilities (especially once 2.4 comes out) caused by a binary-only release, along with a complete absence of support for platforms like Alpha, StrongARM, PPC, etc.
Cheers,
Toby Haynes
Will the move to automated driving systems make our journeys out on the highways any better though? Will we end up leaning out of the window and yelling "Stupid MS Driver"? Will we have robots giving us the finger (arm, apendage, tentacle if bioengineering gets going) as they overtake us on the hard shoulder? Will people hack their robot driver to go faster, park on rear-bumper doing 100mph or cut more corners in an effort to avoid traffic lights/ pedestrians/ the police? Will we be attacked with a denial of driving attack by some script kiddie? Or worse, have a UCITA-like end-of-license removal where the originator of the driving OS produces a new version and wants us to upgrade? Stay tuned ... I like the look of the bicycle personally :-)
Cheers,
Toby Haynes
First, Linux is certainly not "the last 15% of the market". I love it, but let's not start lying.
More like 5% of the market IIRC. On the other hand it now is close to or larger than the Apple market share.
Second, OS X doesn't use X. It uses Quartz. QT being a highly graphical thing, most of the code that would need to be ported would probably deal with the video setup, which is completely different in Windows, Mac, and Unix. That's the biggest reason there's no QT for UNIX, I'm sure.
Even if OS X doesn't use X at all, this is not the point. All we need to get QT going is to have the codecs to go from encoded source stream to decoded image stream. The video setup is irrelevant - putting the movie on the screen is easy once you have the decoded images. You can make good use of any windowing toolkit you care to mention once you can decode the original format.
Cheers,
Toby Haynes
My old astronomy lab have a group working on optical interferometry, and have a working optical interferometry complete with four (or possibly now five) telescopes linked together. If you are interested in the details, there is a good introduction and more detailed information here. Now the interesting thing here is that it is very important to keep the telescopes at exactly the same distance apart or compensate in some way (here there are trolleys running up and down a long (30m) optical bench and the telescopes are concreted into the ground. The problems inherent in doing optical interferometry in space present many of the same problems examined in this project, plus the limitation that you can't just stick an optical bench on a satellite and hope to get it off the ground. On the other hand, ten years ago people were highly sceptical of getting optical interferometry working on anything more than a rudimentary basis and felt that map making was many years away, so maybe those problems can be solved too.
Cheers,
Toby Haynes
This article seems to be out of date on the day it's published. Or maybe this is subtler than it appears. For example:
Overall CPU speeds will increase as the year goes forward. No surprise there. 1GHz Pentium IIIs may hit the after market in late Q3 or Q4 2000. At this time, it does not look like Pentium III CPU speeds will go over 1GHz this year, or possibly ever, though Intel assures us that there is still performance headroom in the Coppermine design.
Now is this information pertaining to on-the-shelf availability of the 1GHz PIII's? If so, there are going to be a lot of 1GHz Athlon processors sitting on the store shelves months ahead of the Intel shipments. And if the news that the 1GHz PIII is all that we will see this year, then I suspect that AMD may have more of a march on Intel than we thought. Of course, Intel may well be banking more heavily on Willamette getting out earlier than planned to make up for the shortfall, in which case it will be interesting to see how AMD develop the Athlon line with its new faster caches in order to keep parity.
Cheers,
Toby Haynes
From where I'm sitting, Intel currently has an interesting problem. Their flagship processor line, the Pentium III Coppermine, tops out at 1GHz . But there aren't that many around, and the current crop of PIIICu's seem to top out at 800MHz. Overclockers can squeeze this up a bit, but it seems that the PIIICu's in the shop are close to their limits anyway. Celeron's have always proved to be seriously overclockable - most 500MHz will go to 600MHz plus, which leads me to believe that Intel is not being anything like as strict in the CPU speeds it's binning its processors into.
In other words, the Celeron processors are not being tested hard as they come off the production line as there is an adequate supply of the speeds that Intel wishes to see. Why doesn't Intel want it's Celerons to be sold as close to the limiting speeds as possible? In my opinion, it's because they don't want to eclipse their PIIICu flagship chips with Celeron chips running at the same clockspeed as this would dilute their market with their own product.
So what you cry? None of this would matter so much if AMD wasn't quietly pulling ahead in the high-speed chip fabrication stakes. With the Athlon coming off the production lines at clock speeds 850, 900, 950 and 1GHz, there is considerable pressure on the PIIICu's to remain visible in the marketplace, since they are the direct competitor to the Athlon. The Celeron 2 looks to be throttled by it's bus speed (66MHz?) in comparison to the Athlon at 200MHz, and won't compete in heavy memory fetching tasks, such as games, art programs, complex DTP etc. Until Intel can successfully ramp up the speeds on it's headline brand, the increasing speeds of the Celerons and Celeron 2's present an interesting dilemma.
Cheers,
Toby Haynes
Interesting to note the positive tone of the reply when asked about open sourcing the older projects:
We haven't considered that yet - but it might be an interesting way to keep interest in our games high for future years.
Now, with several companies starting to put their older games out into the open source community (Descent 1 & 2, Doom, Quake I, Marathon 2 to name a few), how do we go about convincing some more of the software companies that releasing source code to old classics is a worthwhile thing to do? Which ones would people most like to see - I note several attempts at producing clones of games like Warcraft and Ultima 7, so there must still be interest in these games? Is it only multiplayer games that are worth upgrading or revising or are there some single player ones which would benefit from smarter AI or better collision detection?
Cheers,
Toby Haynes
But my opinion is, let them exist. Let the CONSUMER Choose. NOT a lawyer. I feel you are doing the BIGGEST Injustice by making my choices for me in court. Microsoft has NEVER prevented anyone from making a compatible system, had they done that it would have been anticompetitve. But simply existing without anything better or no one stepping up to the bat does not make microsoft an evil empire.
In my opinion, choice has been the first thing to go out the window (sic) since MS reached such a high level of market share. Until about 1 year ago (well after the case started) there was effectively little or no choice to be had when buying a computer for home use. You either bought a pre-loaded Window machine, often with MS Office bundled, or an Apple machine. In many ways, the bundling of MS Windows + Office has done more to throttle the development of competing apps than anything else - it is an insidious method of halting the competition before it has begun. How many people will buy a second Office suite to replace their pre-bundled one? Only those who know precisely what they can or can't do with the MS Office suite, and that does NOT represent a majority of the computer-buying market.
Sure some of you don't like the "Windows Tax" when you buy a new PC
So you think I should pay for something I may never use, may format off my hard drive as soon as the computer is powered up for the first time? Again the situation is better now - more vendors provide computers with alternatives (i.e. Linux), but the MS dominance of the bundled solution market is still extremely widespread.
Why would someone want to choose something that is Niche when they can choose something that is a standard?
When I work, I want to work with an environment of my choosing. When I need to exchange files with other users I want those OPEN standards to be available so that my file can be interpretted by their system, regardless of their operating system. For interoperability, all we need is exchangable file formats and open networking standards to allow us to communicate and pass information between systems.
I would feel sorry for the thousands of employees, the foundations that Gates supports, the 5,000+ college students that could loose scholarships, the grants and donations to the city and areas of which microsoft works (redmond receives lots of support from microsoft).
So you are arguing that because MS contributes so much in charitable ways, its sharp business practices and leveraging of its market positioning to its own ends is acceptable? That argument is extremely fatuous.
SGI, Sun, Sparc, Alpha, Mac, Amiga, RISC OS, RS2000, Aix, FreeBSD, NeXT, DOS, Novell DOS, CPM, TRS 80. They were all your choices. You chose a PC witch Built its foundation in Windows. You didn't Choose a 10,000 dollar Sparc to not run Solaris on it, so why should it be any different here.
Why would I necessarily run Solaris on Sparc hardware? There are other choices. But this is a diversion - take a look back at the previous contender in the PC marketplace - OS/2. What happened there? MS leveraged its market position and made it difficult for OS/2 to get a foothold in the market. Result: another choice goes west (although you can still get OS/2, although it hasn't really changed a lot in the last few years).
What you seem to miss entirely is that MS has managed to make the OS market into a MS-only field for 95% of computer users. And in my opinion, they have acheived this by leveraging their marketing might to remove any competition in the field. So yes, most applications are written for MS Windows, because that is where the market has ended up. My concern is that had there been a wider playing field, we would now be in a better position to choose which OS we wanted to run, and that interoperability between systems and OS's would be vastly improved over the situation we have today.
Cheers,
Toby Haynes
Finally, this servers as an example what drunk driving can lead to. Just don't do it. Get on a bike or bus instead ...
I agree about the bus, but DONT BIKE! Believe me, having watched dozens of students on their way home after a particularly good party wondering which side of the road to cycle on, biking is not a really sensible option. Okay - so you don't pose quite the same danger as a drunk driver in an SUV, but the end results could easily result in death or injury for you, the driver of the vehicle which hits you or swerves to avoid you, or a bystander. If you have a bike, use it as a mobile crutch - a walking stick with wheels. Oh - and in the UK you can be breathalized while cycling, be fined and have points on your driving license for cycling while drunk. Probably applies elsewhere too - you are in charge of a vehicle on a public highway when cycling.
Cheers,
Toby Haynes
What basically happens is that the data comes in off the telescope, and when ORAC-DR sees it, the data gets reduced. It automagically removes any sorts of defects that are common to CCD observations (flat-fields, bias levels, sky levels), and often produces publication-quality results. We were joking that astronomers wouldn't even have to write their papers. We'd just reduce the data, fill in some fields on a paper template, then ship the paper off to the appropriate journal.
Yes - you could make an Astronomer version of Lorem Ipsum tied into the LyX. I'm sure half the referees would pass it, and the other half would take it as a direct assault on their chosen field of expertize :-) Just joking folks!
Having done three nights of observing on UKIRT doing IR spectroscopy, having the automated reduction facility makes life a lot easier. Alas in our case it told our target object kept falling out of the slit, something later (i.e. after we left) found to be a problem with the telescope. Now fixed, but I don't think I'll get another chance at those observations. But such is life - and you really can't complain when you have to travel to Hawaii to do your observing :-)
And by the way, I'm glad to hear that Frossie's jeep is still in one piece - it was brand spanking new when I was there, and it was great fun bounding over the lava fields in it! Hiya to Tim too - long time no see - thanks for the accommodation!
Cheers,
Toby Haynes
This version of QT without X looks very nice for running on Set-top boxes - anti-aliased text and all. In this sort of environment, the 'display anywhere' X protocol is just excess baggage and a more direct route to the screen makes a lot of sense, especially if you are a company intent on providing a cheap device for general home use and want to get maximum speed out of the hardware. This does of course assume that the license for QT/Embedded is reasonably set... On the flip side, just how much software are you cutting yourself off from if you don't provide X libraries? Quite a lot I suspect unless QT/Embedded is providing some extra coverage.
Cheers,
Toby Haynes
Does anyone know the Acorn Archimedes? In its own time (around the 286) it was way ahead of its time, it did things which just became possible when the PC architecture reached 386+ and the 486. Now I ask you; before reading this article did the name "Archimedes" ring a bell?
Funny you should mention this, particularly in this thread. Acorn binned their workstation division two or three years ago, and it looked like the Acorn line was finally hitting the same wall that Amiga hit so many years earlier - a small computer firm with an enthusiastic user and programming community suddenly decides that all that good will in the grass roots can go hang.
At this point, I assumed that that was the end. Finito. Kaputt. Amazingly, and in rather less time than the Amiga people, several firms have stepped into the breach and produced new machines, such as continuations of the original RiscPC designs, the RiscStation, the Imago, RISC OS Ltd has produced a new, faster, leaner OS and things are looking more hopeful for the fan base. So even a small computer platform can maintain itself outside the Mac/Windows hegemony, and it doesn't hurt the mainstream to have something different at the edges. Besides, the Open Source movement has facilitated the development and porting of numerous tools to these platforms, extending the minority platforms usefulness further. And Linux ports exist for those who need some more mainstream OS stuff from time to time.
And to those of you who keep pontificating that we don't need another platform, one of the things I like about Linux is that it provides me with choice. One of the things I like about lots of platform is that it gives me choice.
Cheers,
Toby Haynes
Every now and then you stumble across something which is an interesting fusion of several interests. One such find was around the late 80's, I bought a Music 500 system (like a Hybrid Music 5000) for my BBC B microcomputer. Basically this was an RM, FM synth linked into the system via a 1MHz port with 16 voices. What was interesting about this system was the method of driving it - it came with it's own Forth-like language - AMPLE (Advanced Music Programming Language Environment) for writing music, building sound sets (by combining voices together, using ring-modulation), controling volume and stereo position, and of course it also came with programming control structures such as loops, conditional execution and other such wonders.
While today's technology far outstrips the equipment that I used then, the AMPLE language provided a interesting (to a programmer who plays keyboard and oboe, anyway) method of creating and playing music, and not necessarly just playing music using conventional tools. The letters A-G represented notes, with capital letters implying go up and lowercase mean go down the scale, note lengths were easily specified (48, implies a crotchet, 24, implies a quaver and so forth), ties and slurs could be implemented and chords could be played on. As an example, a bar of music for one voice including chords might look like
24,C(48,ge)b~48,a(fc)96,C(ac)
which equates to quavers playing notes C down to B while G and E below are played and held, with the B quaver tied to a crotchet chord AFC and semibreve CAC to end the bar.
Several times I saw suggestions that the language should be revived and tied in to some modern MIDI or sample-based system, but to my knowledge nobody has ever taken up the challenge. If anyone knows differently, I like to hear from them!
Cheers,
Toby Haynes
I'm getting 580 g -- if I'm remembering the dimensional stuff correctly -- gotta convert w to radians and r to meters, right?:
I had the disc diameter as 10cm, so radius r = 0.05m, not 0.01m as you have in your calculation. So I get 580 * 5 = 2900 g (I just let g = 10 m/s^2 for simplicity, hence the rounding error). Of course, I don't know the actual diameter of the disc - I just took an order of magnitude guess :-)
Cheers,
Toby Haynes
There's quite a lot of information at http://www.urbanlegends.com/science /glass .flow/ that suggests glass flow is indeed a myth.
Interesting. Having actually stood looking at one of the examples of 'glass flow' in a Cathedral (which one escapes me) where there was a thin piece of glass surrounding a hole and much thicker glass at the bottom, the above information makes interesting reading. To summarize the findings of the urbanlegends site, pure glass has next to no chance of flowing at room temperature. Glass carefully laced with particular additives, such as lead crystal or borosilicate glasses, can have further altered properties. Several interesting things do spring to notice though. Firstly, the presence of imperfections in the glass can have a macro effect on the properties of the glass, changing it's maximum tensile strength and possibly the conditions for plastic deformation (which is after all what we are talking about) so with ancient glass the distinctly impure nature of the glass may have an impact. The other point which caught my interest was the part about temperature-dependant plastic flow - the quoted critical figure (for infinite time) here is 270'C. Now I would be worried about my hard drive if it got to that temperature ... :-) Still, a platter spinning at 7200rpm with a diameter of 10cm would experience an acceleration of 2800 g at the edge if I've done my sums correctly (w^2 r for those who are interested, where w is the angular velocity and r is the radius). Of course, its a while since I did my physics degree so I may have got the equation wrong... :-)
Cheers,
Toby Haynes
How do they make the glass strong enough? Is it somehow reinforced with strengthening fibers or similar?
It doesn't need strengthening - glass has a greater tensile strength than aluminium. What glas s does suffer though is brittle fracture, so I suspect that there is some interesting method for checking the surface for minor cracks which might later propagate through the platter.
What I wonder about is what happens to the platters after a long period of use. Glass is a viscous liquid after all - 400 year old glass windows are measurably thicker at the bottom than at the top because of this flow. If you consider that the centripetal force required to keep the disc together is much higher than gravity, I wonder how long it would take for the glass to flow towards the outside of the disc.
Cheers,
Toby Haynes
Please explain to me why we're getting so worked up about it. Open Source / Free Software does NOT need patents. We design a program/device and release it to the public. If somebody goes off and patents it after that point, we just point to our reference model and say 2 magic words: "prior art", and the problem disappears.
We wish this were true. But it's not. Prior art can be used to demonstrate that a patent application is not valid. To overturn an existing patent on the basis of prior art will often require time in court - simply appealing to the USPTO is not enough. How many open source developers are prepared to spend lots of money fighting off patents which have been erroneously granted? Even the EFF has limited funds - don't think that we can always leave this to the EFF to cover us.
Patent reform, and a USPTO which doesn't view numbers of patents granted as a basis for productivity payments to the patent officials, is needed, badly. Just because you believe that the wolf howling outside your window won't eat you doesn't mean you shouldn't try and shut the doors.
Cheers,
Toby Haynes
How on earth do you screen connections by geography? Okay, so you could do a DNS lookup on the IP address you are looking at and compare it against a database to see where it came from, and allow it if it has a '.ca' on the end, but that it worse than useless - a vast number of people will be connecting through ISPs with .com addresses or will have IP numbers which are not available in the DNS database. And most large multinationals have blocks of IP numbers to work from, which I suspect are not necessarily strictly partitioned across country borders?
So is this more a marketing gimick from ICrave? - after all, under Canadian law, rebroadcasting of a signal is an allowable act - the question raised in the US courts (because the ICraveTV name is registered in the States) was how to limit the propagation of the signal, and ICraveTV was criticised for not having the technology to do this.
If they have a method of blocking connections, I suspect it is much like the normal blocking of people connecting from outside a domain as used on some of the UK academic sites to limit connections to academic servers during work hours - but there all the academic machines allowed to connect are neatly inside the .ac.uk tree and can easily be selected.
In other words, it's probable that any blocking software based on geography is going to be as reliable as the censorware used in some libraries. Go figure.
Cheers,
Toby Haynes