I've never set up PGP because it's pointless. Until we get really good IP-level encryption and logically-impenetrable software (yeah, this *does* require that your assumptions are accurate) at a consumer level, PGP is a strong point...but surrounded by thousands of holes.
This is true, but misses the point.
PGP software should be seamless. I may be greedy, but I want zero effort on my part to use it.
You are being greedy. Public key encryption, like door locks, require a bit of effort to use. That said, I found PGP5's plugin for Eudora on Windows to be pretty close to seamless--point, click, enter passphrase.
Speaking of, why are we pushing pgp? gpg is a free, GLP'd implementation that doesn't involve patented algoritms. A much better option on Linux, anyway.
ssh without authentication...I shouldn't have to establish and propogate private keys then when installing ssh. That would be nice.
The default setup just asks you if you want to trust this host when it seens a key it doesn't recognize. You can always say 'yes' if you want that level of security.
I have to use a remote college box via unencrypted telnet.
That's too bad. You could always ask them to install something safer...my remote college box turned out to have it installed already.:)
BTW, there is a version of telnet hacked up to use SSL (if it's available) which makes a nice drop-in replacement. I've only used the version that comes with Debian, and don't see the original off hand. However, you can get the source here, or read about it here. It requires support at both ends, though, so it's only helpful if the server admin is friendly.
Using the Mac SSH *is* a PAIN. Especially since BetterTelnet is the best Mac telnet, and I don't know whether it supports the same plug-ins that NCSA Telnet and NiftyTelnet does.
Hmm, what do you like so much about BetterTelnet? I gave up waiting for ssh support and switched to NiftyTelnet some time ago. I haven't had any trouble with it. (here's the encrypting version) BTW, the BetterTelnet faq seems to indicate that there is a working plugin, but doesn't say were to get it. That's an improvement over the last time I checked.
Just trying to help you feel less down on yourself.:)
We have our own load (based on Red Hat) that has some kernel tweaks provided by our engineers to optimize performance on our systems. The only way you can get this version of Linux is with a VA system.
Ouch, you make that sound like a GPL violation! Before anybody flames them, they do appear to have the modified kernels on ftp.varesearch.com. Maybe you should have left off that last sentence?
I'd also like to say that VA has been doing great things to support the community. They're supporting a number of developers full time, and the services they provide through on.openprojects.net are just wonderful. Way to go, guys!
It's inefficient to use more processing power than you have to.
Personally, I hold efficient use of resources to be a higher value than whatever's prompting people to defend the status quo here. It's one of the best features of hacker culture.
I had a friend once who said, "Why should I conserve paper? The trees are already cut down."
Interesting, in my experience, I have found CVS to be quite stable. Far better than some of the commercial VC's I've used.
That may well be. As I said, cvs is the only tool like this I've used. Mostly I've noticed a problem with zombie locks on cvs.on.openprojects.net...see all the complaints on the mesa-dev list.
Personally I found the admin setup and getting a secure version very straightforward and simple
Perhaps you'd consider writing a how-to (or patching the manual) with some of the tricks for doing this? I found the documentation a bit scattered on the subject of security, especially with anonymous access. Perhaps I'm just dumb, but I think some step-by-step instructions, or a list of what needs what permissions would help a lot.
Which you can remove directories from the tree -- not intuitively, but that is why getting directory handling better is on the todo list.
Hmm, is there a way to do it while still being able to access the structure under the old revision numbers?
So all in all, I would agree cvs has some issues (mine actually aren't any of those listed, has to do with the cvs edit feature). Of course the issues I am concerned about I am writing patcheds to fix:).
More than I can say! Hmm, is cvs in cvs anywhere? Hopefully SourceGear will set up a more open up the development infrastructure.
Personally, I think it's wonderful. My most extensive experience with it has been in the glx project, and it's worked very well. Not being a professional programmer, it's the most sophisticated system I've every used. From talking to some of my friends, I understand it has some advantages over a lot of the commercial offerings, so we may not be missing much.:) I also use it to keep track of the data and analysis routines for my scientific work.
That said, there are lots of problems. It's not been terribly stable in my experience. It has poor support for binary files. Administration isn't fun (or easy) and it's difficult to set up securely. It's not very smart: particularly glaring ommisions are that you can't remove directories once they're added to the source tree (!), and moving files around is a pain. The notion of "code branches" could be more powerful and easier to use. (This is probably the part linus objected to--I couldn't imagine trying to track all the kernel patches that way. maybe with a gui front-end and database to keep track of the options...:) It's not easy to perform clean backups or mirrors either, and the command line options are neither elegant nor consistent. Oh yes, and it could be faster. That's my personal list so far.
Basically, it's a hack on top of rcs, and it's starting to show. It could probably benifit from a complete rewrite in the next year or so, with the addition of things like a security model and support for distributed (and mirrored) repositories. bitkeeper is something like this, but not free software. prcs is another, gpl'd, attempt headed by Josh MacDonald, author of xdelta; there's no client/server for it yet, though. Personally, I'd like to see a cross between cvs, an eternity server, and Debian's apt package tool.:)
Nevertheless, I think it works fine for medium sized projects and really helps facilitate/speed up internet-based development. Beats mailing patches around!
Personally, I think it's wonderful. My most extensive experience with it has been in the glx project, and it's worked very well. Not being a professional programmer, it's the most sophisticated system I've every used. From talking to some of my friends, I understand it has some advantages over a lot of the commercial offerings, so we may not be missing much.:) I also use it to keep track of the data and analysis routines for my scientific work.
That said, there are lots of problems. It's not been terribly stable in my experience. It has poor support for binary files. Administration isn't fun (or easy) and it's difficult to set up securely. It's not very smart: particularly glaring ommisions are that you can't remove directories once they're added to the source tree (!), and moving files around is a pain. The notion of "code branches" could be more powerful (and easier to use). It's not easy to perform clean backups or mirrors either, and the command line options are neither elegant nor consistent. That's my personal list so far.:)
Basically, it's a hack on top of rcs, and it's starting to show. It could probably benifit from a complete rewrite in the next year or so, with the addition of things like a security model and support for distributed (and mirrored) repositories. bitkeeper is something like this, but not free software. prcs is another, gpl'd, attempt headed by Josh MacDonald, author of xdelta; there's no client/server for it yet, though.
Re:make that three issues (extracting MS fonts)
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what version of unzip are you using?
Ah, I spoke too soon. unzip works on the Win 3.1 versions (I think it just skips the executable part and looks for the zip header). The Win32 versions don't work--you're right--and some of them aren't available in the old format.
I tried wine on them, but the (older--981018) version I had handy didn't work. Other options: borrow a Mac or Windows machine, or try decoding the mac format one. There are some tools for doing that under linux, but I didn't have any luck.
make that three issues (and some solutions)
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Personally, I find that TrueType fonts look very nice in X (with RedHat 6.0's xfs (freetype) or xfstt). I've compared them with the local NT box with a 'real' TT font renderer, and they are at least as good.
Indeed they do look quite nice if you use a good font. However, you're forgotting about antialiasing. That's part of what makes Windows tt rendering so good. Freetype already supports this, so it shouldn't be too hard to hack something in, though the proper way is to use alpha-blended drawables, I expect. Perhaps with the hardware accelerated Imlib extension in XFree 5.0?
2) Many of the standard XFree fonts were donated and they weren't really high quality.
This is definitely true. Microsoft, oddly enough, has commissioned some very good truetype screen fonts. Unfortunately, there're not redistributable, but you can download them here for free; unzip works on the Windows 'self-extracting'.exe files.
One thing to remeber is that Netscape is broken as regards scaleable fonts. That's why some pages look really odd with tiny fonts. However, if you do a trick (deals with typing in the font size in preferences), my Netscape fonts look as good as NT's on all pages.
I think this is more a function of the lack of resolution-independence in the OS. Most operating systems make different (wrong) assumptions about the physical resolution of your monitor, so a webpage that looks reasonable under one OS won't on another. See this tidbits article for details.
How do collisions with an energy greater than the equivalent of two gold nuclei bumping into each other at 99.9% of the speed of light at an angle of 180 degrees occur naturally? Please enlighten me, as I know very little about cosmic radiation.
I don't either, really, but the energies of some cosmic rays are just insane. The introduction to the RHIC documentation gives an upper bound for the beam energies of 100 GeV/nucleon. Cosmic rays have been seen with energies in excess of 100TeV (1000 times larger).
These are very rare, of course, but we certainly see several every year. This is why studying cosmic rays is still a useful thing, even though we have these amazing accelerators.:)
Checkout glx.on.openprojects.net if you're interested in the development drivers. There's cvs source and binary packages available.
The drivers provide hardware-accelerated OpenGL support for the Matrox G200 (and maybe G400) cards and the nvidia riva series under linux and other unix-ish systems using Xfree 3.3. They're still under heavy development, but quite usable if you stay away from the bleeding edge features (mesa 3.1, dma/agp support).
Typo, the last paragraph of my post got mangled. It should say:
I've seen this sort of thing tried by a few people, mostly selling CD-ROMs like irtc.org or cdrom.com, I've never actually bought one though, so perhaps this model doesn't work so well. For me, the issue is often price. I'm usually not willing to pay US$25 for what's on the CD, even with the donation. OTOH, I often check the 'give $5 to debian' box when ordering from cheapbytes.
I like the suggestion of a 'click here to donate' button, and this is perhaps more like 'street performers' work. In my town it doesn't seem very lucrative (simple begging often seems to get better money) but the vastly larger audience available online might make all the difference.
Another point I rarely see mentioned is the value of physical objects. Perhaps I'm being retro here, but much of what I'm willing to pay money for is the physical medium the content comes on. The CD with liner notes, the nicely bound volume. I don't want everything that way, and I agree that selling content doesn't work very well. However, producing and distributing media costs money and it makes sense to me to pay for them. This is a lot like the model behind commercial linux distributions, but I rarely hear it applied to artistic works.
This means no intellectual property, you can release the content freely, but feed back a little bit of the purchase price for distributed media to the artist . copyleft runs sort of like this. Publish on demand could help with this (and to some extent solve the problem of how to serialize a novel) by letting the publisher collect orders in batches and then fire off a run. This should scale well with the popularity of the work. CDs are a case where the technology is better developed: lots up to 100 or so can be done with with CD burners, 500-10000 with short run pressings.
There is the worry that another publisher will take the released content and undersell without supporting the author. This is quite likely to happen, but there are couteracting forces: If we've decided that a material object is what we're charging money for we can compete on the basis of quality, design and packaging. Even if the content is freely distributable, the cover doesn't have to be. People can buy the 'official' version because it's recommended by the author, because it donates to a cause they believe in, because it has better cover art/liner notes. Some will go with the cheaper edition, but who's to say that's bad. Is it really worse than the current system of giving most of the profit to the retailer and the publisher (as distinct from the author)?
I've seen this sort of thing tried by a few people, mostly selling CD-ROMs like irtc.org or cdrom.comcheapbytes.
The 'ant' hack in the xscreensaver package also implements Langston's ant. Only works with the X windowing system, though.
It claims to be based on A.K. Dewdney's "Computer Recreations", Scientific American Magazine Sep 1989 pp 180-183, Mar 1990 p 121. Also used Ian Stewart's "Mathematical Recreations", Scientific American Jul 1994 pp 104-107.
grab a.deb, change its suffix to.tar.gz (or.tgz as you like), and untar/gunzip it.
This isn't precisely correct. You have to unar it first to get the tar.gz files. Coincidentally, there are detailed instructions for this in the accellerated glx project faq.
Re:Consumer DVD-ROM Support for Linux?
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I've also heard that someone got documentation for the mpeg2 daughterboard matrox sells for the g100/200/400 graphics cards. They were going to write a driver for it, but I haven't heard anything since. I think there's supposed to be a website at livid.on.openprojects.net sometime soon, but there's nothing there as of this posting.
See also mpeg.openprojects.net for a what progress there's been on an open software decoder. Unfortunately, the MPEG2/DVD standard is pretty well tied up with patents (worse than mp3).
That's an interesting suggestion in terms of Brin's argument.
On the one hand, the Culture is held up as some sort of endpoint for the rational questioning of all things in society and the ultimate permissiveness of individual tastes: the egalitarian utopia which Brin asks us to struggle toward. It has no money, no laws, no violence or coercion, no secrecy outside your own head. (Plenty of values and social norms, though.)
On the other hand, the gap in power between the Minds and the human population is effectively disenfranchising. Most of the humans give their lives over to the one thing where competition with machines doesn't mean anything: having a good time. One could argue most of the machines are up to the same, but where the moral exercise of power requires the most complete understanding of the consequences of your actions, the important decisions must lie with the Minds. More to the point, the stories always focus around the experience of a single protagonist, often a person to some degree outside the human norms of the culture. A "throwback" or a "barbarian". These characters act as demigods to the societies the Culture intervenes in, usually by natural talent, other times by technological or ethical fiat, but they are also shown to have been instruments of the Minds that are the real movers behind the plot.
What little is described of the Culture's origins says they developed from a splinter group of humans who started a somewhat radical society and left the mainstream when it got unfriendly. (secessionist fandom anyone?) From isolation it grew into one of the dominant civilations in the galaxy, either by luck or the strength of its open development model. Presumedly they still work this way, because the Minds see it as the most efficient way to run things. Indeed, it seems to be be their evolution, not that of the humans, that's keep to society stable for millenia. Marain, the language the humans speak was designed by the Minds, and humans tend to drift into less utopian modes of thought when they stop speaking it. Witness the "almost inhuman detached passion" required to prosecute antagonists in a way least damaging to both sides, or the common occurence of characters gone native in "primitive" (meaning less egalitarian) societies. Perhaps this is an unfortunate 'way out' a la LeGuin's Disposessed.
How-we-get-there-from-here aside, I'd like to ask, "The best way to keep things running compared to what?" We're led to believe it's "compared to everything", like RMS's contention that open development makes sense from a rational point of view without an appeal to ideology. This has always rung false to me, like Star Trek's claim that the the android Data has no emotions. I think the Vulcans got it right: logic tells you the consequences of your actions, but it doesn't tell you with of those consequences you'll prefer. That comes down to values, or feelings, or something we don't understand from a technical point of view yet.
The message I've always taken from the Culture novels is that it's the values the society is based on, the values the Minds grew up with, that make it what it is. The consequences of our power to affect each other, which has only been magnified by technology, can't be avoided. Our only hope is to find ways of dealing with each other that improve our lives and avoid the miseries of the past for all of us. And that's what David Brin is talking about.
I just went and got the 1000x1000 double precision benchmark from netlib.org. I grabbed the lapack library and g77 from the debian website (Debian 2.1/slink versions)
On my 400MHz K6-2, I get 16 Mflops without optimization, 20 with -O3. Not quite what was listed in the performance document, but that might have been with a hand-tuned library.
For comparison, my home machine (a 300 HHz K6-2) gets 13 Mflops unoptimized, 20 with. It's running Debian 2.2pre/potato which uses egcs, so the optimization is probably better. Both machines have 100 MHz fsb and 1 MB L2 cache.
There's a fun java version on the LINPACK benchmark as well. I get 1.4 Mflops.:)
The problem is archiving. Ten, twenty, one hundred years down the line, we still need to be able to get at the document. Computers aren't good at that. (...) Opening a document that was created even two years ago can be an adventure -- imagine what that will be like in a century.
This is a very important point, and something that makes me nervous about the current trends in 'full text online' journal websites. My student subscription to the Biophysical Journal, to take an example, includes password access to the full text of the journal. Very nice, but I can't exactly cite it since it's not open access and may disappear (or re-arrange) at any time. I don't even get a CD out of the deal.
There are two obvious ways to approach this. Printing paper copies has already been mentioned, and this is certainly a good idea. The other is just to budget for data migration. University libraries and the publishing organization should both take responsibility for this. One has to plan on migrating data to new media once a decade anyway, and that might be a good time to translate the data format as well. I think the comment about two year old documents is a little specious. This is true of proprietary data formats, but not widely adopted open ones. It gets harder the older the format is, but the time constant is a little more manageable. Four year old html is still perfectly readable, and so is 10 year old TeX, to pick a more challenging example. Storing all that paper takes resources; data is no different.
Open distribution licenses would immediately help with alot of this as well. I think that's the only way citation of online resources would ever work--as some kind of meta-reference into a distributed archive, much like the eprint system now provides ( gr-qc/9905084). I've always found it rediculous that journals expect me to sign over the copyright to the articles I write.
Whatever happened to a review system for the eprint archives anyway?
I dunno. I saw Rexx on OS/2, it's native platform (next to mainframe), and it beat the hell out of DOS batch files.
I once tried to maintain a database-backed website whose glue was in Rexx. Yes, it blew the doors off DOS batch files. Quite a complete little language with some nice features. Unfortunately, I had the same allergic reaction to it that I always have when I try to read FORTRAN. Its design was very much rooted in the IBM mainframe culture, and it gave me the heebie-jeebies. I'm not being fascitious; something about its worldview bothered me in a very visceral way.
I'd be interested to hear what people who've worked in mainframe culture think about Rexx. I'm very much a *nix person, and just don't understand that point of view. How did it feel to use something like that on the desktop? What's your reaction to today's unix (or windows) dominated environment (and people like me)?
REBOL at least seems to have lost those awful capital letters, despite its retro 70s-language name. They need a retro-chiq logo to go with the name, instead of copying wired
AMD has make specs form 3DNow available--nothings stopping you from writing support for it into egcs yourself.
Yes, it would have been nice if they'd paid someone to work on this (not that SIMD optimization is exactly a solved problem:) but I sometimes think we need reminding that the linux kernel doesn't exist because of corporate support. Same goes for the GNU utilities, the Gimp, and the a lot of the rest of free software.
Don't complain that AMD didn't give us a compiler, complain that there is no compiler.
theforce.net has a quote from the Boston Globe article mentioned in another comment. It goes like this:
Many of you have noted that the Boston Globe article we mentioned previously WAS referring to Duel of the Fates when saying the lyrics were sanskrit. So now we've got Devanshu Mehta with a possible solution. Keep in mind that none of us here have any clue about Sanskrit, so Devanshu could tell us it translates to "Great Jumpin' Horny Toads!" and we'd never know the difference:
I live in India and know a good bit of sanskrit. What they are saying in Duel of Fates seems to be 'Khara Matha, Khara Rathama' Khara means dreadful/enemy or something similar; matha means head; rathama actually means chariot. So you can make what you want of it. I suppose it means that all the enemies are actually in your head.
Seems an appropriate description of the Dark Side's power. Can anyone confirm this interpretation? Maybe it's a quote from literature?
The original Globe article is available here but requires a fee for access.
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I've never set up PGP because it's pointless. Until we get really good IP-level encryption and logically-impenetrable software (yeah, this *does* require that your assumptions are accurate) at a consumer level, PGP is a strong point...but surrounded by thousands of holes.
:)
:)
This is true, but misses the point.
PGP software should be seamless. I may be greedy, but I want zero effort on my part to use it.
You are being greedy. Public key encryption, like door locks, require a bit of effort to use. That said, I found PGP5's plugin for Eudora on Windows to be pretty close to seamless--point, click, enter passphrase.
Speaking of, why are we pushing pgp? gpg is a free, GLP'd implementation that doesn't involve patented algoritms. A much better option on Linux, anyway.
ssh without authentication...I shouldn't have to establish and propogate private keys then when
installing ssh. That would be nice.
The default setup just asks you if you want to trust this host when it seens a key it doesn't recognize. You can always say 'yes' if you want that level of security.
I have to use a remote college box via unencrypted telnet.
That's too bad. You could always ask them to install something safer...my remote college box turned out to have it installed already.
BTW, there is a version of telnet hacked up to use SSL (if it's available) which makes a nice drop-in replacement. I've only used the version that comes with Debian, and don't see the original off hand. However, you can get the source here, or read about it here. It requires support at both ends, though, so it's only helpful if the server admin is friendly.
Using the Mac SSH *is* a PAIN. Especially since BetterTelnet is the best Mac telnet, and I don't know whether it supports the same plug-ins that NCSA Telnet and NiftyTelnet does.
Hmm, what do you like so much about BetterTelnet? I gave up waiting for ssh support and switched to NiftyTelnet some time ago. I haven't had any trouble with it. (here's the encrypting version) BTW, the BetterTelnet faq seems to indicate that there is a working plugin, but doesn't say were to get it. That's an improvement over the last time I checked.
Just trying to help you feel less down on yourself.
We have our own load (based on Red Hat) that has some kernel tweaks provided by our engineers to optimize performance on our systems. The only way you can get this version of Linux is with a VA system.
Ouch, you make that sound like a GPL violation! Before anybody flames them, they do appear to have the modified kernels on ftp.varesearch.com. Maybe you should have left off that last sentence?
I'd also like to say that VA has been doing great things to support the community. They're supporting a number of developers full time, and the services they provide through on.openprojects.net are just wonderful. Way to go, guys!
It's inefficient to use more processing power than you have to.
Personally, I hold efficient use of resources to be a higher value than whatever's prompting people to defend the status quo here. It's one of the best features of hacker culture.
I had a friend once who said, "Why should I conserve paper? The trees are already cut down."
Interesting, in my experience, I have found CVS to be quite stable. Far better than some of the commercial VC's I've used.
:).
That may well be. As I said, cvs is the only tool like this I've used. Mostly I've noticed a problem with zombie locks on cvs.on.openprojects.net...see all the complaints on the mesa-dev list.
Personally I found the admin setup and getting a secure version very straightforward and simple
Perhaps you'd consider writing a how-to (or patching the manual) with some of the tricks for doing this? I found the documentation a bit scattered on the subject of security, especially with anonymous access. Perhaps I'm just dumb, but I think some step-by-step instructions, or a list of what needs what permissions would help a lot.
Which you can remove directories from the tree -- not intuitively, but that is why getting directory handling better is on the todo list.
Hmm, is there a way to do it while still being able to access the structure under the old revision numbers?
So all in all, I would agree cvs has some issues (mine actually aren't any of those listed, has to do with the cvs edit feature). Of course the issues I am concerned about I am writing patcheds to fix
More than I can say! Hmm, is cvs in cvs anywhere? Hopefully SourceGear will set up a more open up the development infrastructure.
Personally, I think it's wonderful. My most extensive experience with it has been in the glx project, and it's worked very well. Not being a professional programmer, it's the most sophisticated system I've every used. From talking to some of my friends, I understand it has some advantages over a lot of the commercial offerings, so we may not be missing much. :) I also use it to keep track of the data and analysis routines for my scientific work.
:) It's not easy to perform clean backups or mirrors either, and the command line options are neither elegant nor consistent. Oh yes, and it could be faster. That's my personal list so far.
:)
That said, there are lots of problems. It's not been terribly stable in my experience. It has poor support for binary files. Administration isn't fun (or easy) and it's difficult to set up securely. It's not very smart: particularly glaring ommisions are that you can't remove directories once they're added to the source tree (!), and moving files around is a pain. The notion of "code branches" could be more powerful and easier to use. (This is probably the part linus objected to--I couldn't imagine trying to track all the kernel patches that way. maybe with a gui front-end and database to keep track of the options...
Basically, it's a hack on top of rcs, and it's starting to show. It could probably benifit from a complete rewrite in the next year or so, with the addition of things like a security model and support for distributed (and mirrored) repositories. bitkeeper is something like this, but not free software. prcs is another, gpl'd, attempt headed by Josh MacDonald, author of xdelta; there's no client/server for it yet, though. Personally, I'd like to see a cross between cvs, an eternity server, and Debian's apt package tool.
Nevertheless, I think it works fine for medium sized projects and really helps facilitate/speed up internet-based development. Beats mailing patches around!
Personally, I think it's wonderful. My most extensive experience with it has been in the glx project, and it's worked very well. Not being a professional programmer, it's the most sophisticated system I've every used. From talking to some of my friends, I understand it has some advantages over a lot of the commercial offerings, so we may not be missing much. :) I also use it to keep track of the data and analysis routines for my scientific work.
:)
That said, there are lots of problems. It's not been terribly stable in my experience. It has poor support for binary files. Administration isn't fun (or easy) and it's difficult to set up securely. It's not very smart: particularly glaring ommisions are that you can't remove directories once they're added to the source tree (!), and moving files around is a pain. The notion of "code branches" could be more powerful (and easier to use). It's not easy to perform clean backups or mirrors either, and the command line options are neither elegant nor consistent. That's my personal list so far.
Basically, it's a hack on top of rcs, and it's starting to show. It could probably benifit from a complete rewrite in the next year or so, with the addition of things like a security model and support for distributed (and mirrored) repositories. bitkeeper is something like this, but not free software. prcs is another, gpl'd, attempt headed by Josh MacDonald, author of xdelta; there's no client/server for it yet, though.
what version of unzip are you using?
Ah, I spoke too soon. unzip works on the Win 3.1 versions (I think it just skips the executable part and looks for the zip header). The Win32 versions don't work--you're right--and some of them aren't available in the old format.
I tried wine on them, but the (older--981018) version I had handy didn't work. Other options: borrow a Mac or Windows machine, or try decoding the mac format one. There are some tools for doing that under linux, but I didn't have any luck.
Personally, I find that TrueType fonts look very nice in X (with RedHat 6.0's xfs (freetype) or xfstt). I've compared them with the local NT box with a 'real' TT font renderer, and they are at least as good.
.exe files.
Indeed they do look quite nice if you use a good font. However, you're forgotting about antialiasing. That's part of what makes Windows tt rendering so good. Freetype already supports this, so it shouldn't be too hard to hack something in, though the proper way is to use alpha-blended drawables, I expect. Perhaps with the hardware accelerated Imlib extension in XFree 5.0?
2) Many of the standard XFree fonts were donated and they weren't really high quality.
This is definitely true. Microsoft, oddly enough, has commissioned some very good truetype screen fonts. Unfortunately, there're not redistributable, but you can download them here for free; unzip works on the Windows 'self-extracting'
One thing to remeber is that Netscape is broken as regards scaleable fonts. That's why some pages look really odd with tiny fonts. However, if you do a trick (deals with typing in the font size in preferences), my Netscape fonts look as good as NT's on all pages.
I think this is more a function of the lack of resolution-independence in the OS. Most operating systems make different (wrong) assumptions about the physical resolution of your monitor, so a webpage that looks reasonable under one OS won't on another. See this tidbits article for details.
How do collisions with an energy greater than the equivalent of two gold nuclei bumping into each other at 99.9% of the speed of light at an angle of 180 degrees occur naturally? Please enlighten me, as I know very little about cosmic radiation.
:)
I don't either, really, but the energies of some cosmic rays are just insane. The introduction to the RHIC documentation gives an upper bound for the beam energies of 100 GeV/nucleon. Cosmic rays have been seen with energies in excess of 100TeV (1000 times larger).
These are very rare, of course, but we certainly see several every year. This is why studying cosmic rays is still a useful thing, even though we have these amazing accelerators.
Checkout glx.on.openprojects.net if you're interested in the development drivers. There's cvs source and binary packages available.
The drivers provide hardware-accelerated OpenGL support for the Matrox G200 (and maybe G400) cards and the nvidia riva series under linux and other unix-ish systems using Xfree 3.3. They're still under heavy development, but quite usable if you stay away from the bleeding edge features (mesa 3.1, dma/agp support).
Typo, the last paragraph of my post got mangled. It should say:
I've seen this sort of thing tried by a few people, mostly selling CD-ROMs like irtc.org or cdrom.com, I've never actually bought one though, so perhaps this model doesn't work so well. For me, the issue is often price. I'm usually not willing to pay US$25 for what's on the CD, even with the donation. OTOH, I often check the 'give $5 to debian' box
when ordering from cheapbytes.
I like the suggestion of a 'click here to donate' button, and this is perhaps more like 'street performers' work. In my town it doesn't seem very lucrative (simple begging often seems to get better money) but the vastly larger audience available online might make all the difference.
Another point I rarely see mentioned is the value of physical objects. Perhaps I'm being retro here, but much of what I'm willing to pay money for is the physical medium the content comes on. The CD with liner notes, the nicely bound volume. I don't want everything that way, and I agree that selling content doesn't work very well. However, producing and distributing media costs money and it makes sense to me to pay for them. This is a lot like the model behind commercial linux distributions, but I rarely hear it applied to artistic works.
This means no intellectual property, you can release the content freely, but feed back a little bit of the purchase price for distributed media to the artist . copyleft runs sort of like this. Publish on demand could help with this (and to some extent solve the problem of how to serialize a novel) by letting the publisher collect orders in batches and then fire off a run. This should scale well with the popularity of the work. CDs are a case where the technology is better developed: lots up to 100 or so can be done with with CD burners, 500-10000 with short run pressings.
There is the worry that another publisher will take the released content and undersell without supporting the author. This is quite likely to happen, but there are couteracting forces: If we've decided that a material object is what we're charging money for we can compete on the basis of quality, design and packaging. Even if the content is freely distributable, the cover doesn't have to be. People can buy the 'official' version because it's recommended by the author, because it donates to a cause they believe in, because it has better cover art/liner notes. Some will go with the cheaper edition, but who's to say that's bad. Is it really worse than the current system of giving most of the profit to the retailer and the publisher (as distinct from the author)?
I've seen this sort of thing tried by a few people, mostly selling CD-ROMs like irtc.org or cdrom.comcheapbytes.
The 'ant' hack in the xscreensaver package also implements Langston's ant. Only works with the X windowing system, though.
It claims to be based on A.K. Dewdney's "Computer Recreations", Scientific American Magazine Sep 1989 pp 180-183, Mar 1990 p 121.
Also used Ian Stewart's "Mathematical Recreations", Scientific American Jul 1994 pp 104-107.
grab a .deb, change its suffix to .tar.gz (or .tgz as you like), and untar/gunzip it.
This isn't precisely correct. You have to unar it first to get the tar.gz files. Coincidentally, there are detailed instructions for this in the accellerated glx project faq.
I've also heard that someone got documentation for the mpeg2 daughterboard matrox sells for the g100/200/400 graphics cards. They were going to write a driver for it, but I haven't heard anything since. I think there's supposed to be a website at livid.on.openprojects.net sometime soon, but there's nothing there as of this posting.
See also mpeg.openprojects.net for a what progress there's been on an open software decoder. Unfortunately, the MPEG2/DVD standard is pretty well tied up with patents (worse than mp3).
Finally, the original Berkeley group demonstration code is still available.
You know, a simple "I hated english class" would have done...
:)
This is a joke.
Try the "culture" universe from Iain Banks.
That's an interesting suggestion in terms of Brin's argument.
On the one hand, the Culture is held up as some sort of endpoint for the rational questioning of all things in society and the ultimate permissiveness of individual tastes: the egalitarian utopia which Brin asks us to struggle toward. It has no money, no laws, no violence or coercion, no secrecy outside your own head. (Plenty of values and social norms, though.)
On the other hand, the gap in power between the Minds and the human population is effectively disenfranchising. Most of the humans give their lives over to the one thing where competition with machines doesn't mean anything: having a good time. One could argue most of the machines are up to the same, but where the moral exercise of power requires the most complete understanding of the consequences of your actions, the important decisions must lie with the Minds. More to the point, the stories always focus around the experience of a single protagonist, often a person to some degree outside the human norms of the culture. A "throwback" or a "barbarian". These characters act as demigods to the societies the Culture intervenes in, usually by natural talent, other times by technological or ethical fiat, but they are also shown to have been instruments of the Minds that are the real movers behind the plot.
What little is described of the Culture's origins says they developed from a splinter group of humans who started a somewhat radical society and left the mainstream when it got unfriendly. (secessionist fandom anyone?) From isolation it grew into one of the dominant civilations in the galaxy, either by luck or the strength of its open development model. Presumedly they still work this way, because the Minds see it as the most efficient way to run things. Indeed, it seems to be be their evolution, not that of the humans, that's keep to society stable for millenia. Marain, the language the humans speak was designed by the Minds, and humans tend to drift into less utopian modes of thought when they stop speaking it. Witness the "almost inhuman detached passion" required to prosecute antagonists in a way least damaging to both sides, or the common occurence of characters gone native in "primitive" (meaning less egalitarian) societies. Perhaps this is an unfortunate 'way out' a la LeGuin's Disposessed.
How-we-get-there-from-here aside, I'd like to ask, "The best way to keep things running compared to what?" We're led to believe it's "compared to everything", like RMS's contention that open development makes sense from a rational point of view without an appeal to ideology. This has always rung false to me, like Star Trek's claim that the the android Data has no emotions. I think the Vulcans got it right: logic tells you the consequences of your actions, but it doesn't tell you with of those consequences you'll prefer. That comes down to values, or feelings, or something we don't understand from a technical point of view yet.
The message I've always taken from the Culture novels is that it's the values the society is based on, the values the Minds grew up with, that make it what it is. The consequences of our power to affect each other, which has only been magnified by technology, can't be avoided. Our only hope is to find ways of dealing with each other that improve our lives and avoid the miseries of the past for all of us. And that's what David Brin is talking about.
I just went and got the 1000x1000 double precision benchmark from netlib.org. I grabbed the lapack library and g77 from the debian website (Debian 2.1/slink versions)
:)
On my 400MHz K6-2, I get 16 Mflops without optimization, 20 with -O3. Not quite what was listed in the performance document, but that might have been with a hand-tuned library.
For comparison, my home machine (a 300 HHz K6-2) gets 13 Mflops unoptimized, 20 with. It's running Debian 2.2pre/potato which uses egcs, so the optimization is probably better. Both machines have 100 MHz fsb and 1 MB L2 cache.
There's a fun java version on the LINPACK benchmark as well. I get 1.4 Mflops.
Don't know if I'm reading it correctly, but the linpack benchmark gives 61 Mflop/s for a 350HHz K6-2 Seems a little high to me?
The problem is archiving. Ten, twenty, one hundred years down the line, we still need to be able to get at the document. Computers aren't good at that. (...) Opening a document that was created even two years ago can be an adventure -- imagine what that will be like in a century.
This is a very important point, and something that makes me nervous about the current trends in 'full text online' journal websites. My student subscription to the Biophysical Journal, to take an example, includes password access to the full text of the journal. Very nice, but I can't exactly cite it since it's not open access and may disappear (or re-arrange) at any time. I don't even get a CD out of the deal.
There are two obvious ways to approach this. Printing paper copies has already been mentioned, and this is certainly a good idea. The other is just to budget for data migration. University libraries and the publishing organization should both take responsibility for this. One has to plan on migrating data to new media once a decade anyway, and that might be a good time to translate the data format as well. I think the comment about two year old documents is a little specious. This is true of proprietary data formats, but not widely adopted open ones. It gets harder the older the format is, but the time constant is a little more manageable. Four year old html is still perfectly readable, and so is 10 year old TeX, to pick a more challenging example. Storing all that paper takes resources; data is no different.
Open distribution licenses would immediately help with alot of this as well. I think that's the only way citation of online resources would ever work--as some kind of meta-reference into a distributed archive, much like the eprint system now provides ( gr-qc/9905084). I've always found it rediculous that journals expect me to sign over the copyright to the articles I write.
Whatever happened to a review system for the eprint archives anyway?
netwiz opined:
I once tried to maintain a database-backed website whose glue was in Rexx. Yes, it blew the doors off DOS batch files. Quite a complete little language with some nice features. Unfortunately, I had the same allergic reaction to it that I always have when I try to read FORTRAN. Its design was very much rooted in the IBM mainframe culture, and it gave me the heebie-jeebies. I'm not being fascitious; something about its worldview bothered me in a very visceral way.
I'd be interested to hear what people who've worked in mainframe culture think about Rexx. I'm very much a *nix person, and just don't understand that point of view. How did it feel to use something like that on the desktop? What's your reaction to today's unix (or windows) dominated environment (and people like me)?
REBOL at least seems to have lost those awful capital letters, despite its retro 70s-language name. They need a retro-chiq logo to go with the name, instead of copying wired
try botspot.com
:)
They have some good links if you dig around a bit, as well as things you can play around with.
AMD has make specs form 3DNow available--nothings stopping you from writing support for it into egcs yourself.
:) but I sometimes think we need reminding that the linux kernel doesn't exist because of corporate support. Same goes for the GNU utilities, the Gimp, and the a lot of the rest of free software.
Yes, it would have been nice if they'd paid someone to work on this (not that SIMD optimization is exactly a solved problem
Don't complain that AMD didn't give us a compiler, complain that there is no compiler.
Hmph! None of the mirrors I've checked have it.
Don't they push these things?
theforce.net has a quote from the Boston Globe article mentioned in another comment. It goes like this:
Many of you have noted that the Boston Globe article we mentioned previously WAS referring to Duel of the Fates when saying the lyrics were sanskrit. So now we've got Devanshu Mehta with a possible solution. Keep in mind that none of us here have any clue about Sanskrit, so Devanshu could tell us it translates to "Great Jumpin' Horny Toads!" and we'd never know the difference:
Seems an appropriate description of the Dark Side's power. Can anyone confirm this interpretation? Maybe it's a quote from literature?
The original Globe article is available here but requires a fee for access.