Octave uses GiNaC for its symbolic stuff. Currently, part of why Octave's symbolics aren't better, is not that the library doesn't do it, but that the "glue" hasn't been written.
Not only that, with GPL code, you don't even need to accept the license to use it.
The GPL basically says "if you accept this license, you can overlook copyright law, which forbids copying, and copy under a different set of conditions (provide the source), instead."
The first hard disk we had was 20 MB, and it was huge when you consider only a few executables and text files. Granted, we ran Stacker on it to compress the contents and approximately double the capacity.
When my brother went to university, he replaced his 40 MB disk with a 560 MB; unfortunately, his BIOS only supported 512 MB, so his new disk wasted more space than the old disk had available.
We had a word processor, spreadsheet, drawing program, and so on with only a 20 MB drive. Heck, we ran a BBS. 512 MB of disk would feel like heaven, with appropriate software.
I've had useful GNU/Linux installations on disks smaller than that.
Since I'm using a multi-user operating system, I created an extra user called "untrusted", who runs my web browser. This way, the worst that anything can do is destroy my browser settings. "untrusted" doesn't own any valuable files.
They're actually doing considerably more than the bare minimum, though I agree they should do more.
The bare minimum would be to provide, on request, to customers, the source code of the product shipped to the customer. This means they'd only give you their code when you ask for it, once it's out the door. The fact that we even have this acid test code, which might never ship, is proof that they're doing more than the "bare minimum".
Copyright law was created to encourage development, in recognition that works are easy to copy. If works are easy to copy, so the though is, the law can make it illegal to copy them, so publishers can hope to recover the cost of licensing the work from the author.
With encryption of the data, the work is no longer easy to copy; it is redundant to also have legal protection. There isn't copyright protection on a physical device; I can copy a coffee mug, it's just easier to buy one.
I say you get to choose; release in an easily-copyable form, and get copyright protection on that version, or release in a difficult to copy form, and trust that your encryption is adequate.
(And copyright should be no longer than 14 years, renewable once, but that's a different story:) )
So Knuth's METAFONT does something useful; when you compile a TeX document, the font stored in the resulting file is bitmapped, so not subject to copyright.
Newer LaTeX setups with vector fonts could be subject to this, if the fonts are GPL'd.
It seems to me that having a relatively low-intensity UV light projected on the keyboard, or perhaps just flashing an irregular intervals, would kill the germs.
Reminds me of a line from a high-ranking officer in Bush Sr.'s Iraq war; when bombing bunkers suspected of holding anthrax, they would attack early in the morning on a clear, still day; the sunlight destroys the spores. (And it's safer than using nukes!)
In highschool my English marks from year to year were highly variable, approximately CCACA in 5 years. The best explanation I could think of was that my writing style is strange, and those teachers which like my strange style give good marks, and the others don't.
The computer is highly likely to suffer from this, except it'll be the same program every year (different criteria from the teacher, admittedly), so it might give me all 'A's, but it might just as well give me all 'C's.
A certain amount of strangeness is required for creativity. This is dangerous.
Moreover the calculus book requires specialist typesetting, less of a problem nowadays but the average printing house isn't set up for printing sigmas.
That's why most textbooks nowadays are formatted using LaTeX. Besides, most printing houses for textbooks require camera-ready, so it's the author's problem to get those wacky symbols onto paper.
I strongly support the concept of having works for which the copyright
holder cannot be identified fall into the public domain.
It has been suggested that there should be a registry of copyrighted
works, along with contact information for the holder. This "orphan
works" proposal would permit the free market to form such a
registry. Copyright holders would want themselves to be identifiable
to retain their copyright, so being registered, by a "copyright
registrar" would ensure this identifiability. The system could be
similar to that used currently for Internet domain names.
Call me when one of them has broad market acceptance.
Why is that a prerequisite? I'm using a Kinesis keyboard. It doesn't bother me that other people use normal keyboards, and it doesn't seem to bother anyone that I use a funky keyboard.
Since there are a relatively small number of memorable domain names, most of which are only applicable to a small physical area, I'd like to see a local-forwarding service. This system would know your physical location, or have a decent guess from your IP, and forward domain name requests (or more likely just do a HTTP redirect) to the registered "local" version.
For example, Moe's tavern in Springfield could register moestavern.springfield.usa.global, which is annoying to remember or write down. It would advertise as being at "moestavern.local", or some such. Going to "moestavern.local" would cause a database lookup for the closest appropriate site, and redirection by CNAME or HTTP redirect.
So if I was in Boston, the local dive called "Moe's" could also advertise "moestavern.local", but when browsing there I would be redirected to moestavern.boston.ma.usa.global.
Some search facility would be required, for cases when one was searching for a site in a different city.
Do Canadians get fingerprinted and photographed at the border like all us other foreign criminals?
No, we don't get fingerprinted or photographed.
Incidentally, flying from Canada to the US from most cities, the US customs stage takes place within Canada. The only exception I am aware of is flying from Halifax (though the plan is to add this by 2008 (?)).
There are three major pieces of symbolic software: Maple, Mathematica, and GiNaC.
Maple is great, especially for Calculus students. I consider Mathematica to be evil since they apparently bought out the major players in Reduce (an older symbolic math system still used in Russia), tried to buy out a major GiNaC developer, and send him threats when he refused. They're not as successful as Microsoft, but they might be giving MS's evilness some competition.
GiNaC is a GPL'd library for symbolic computation. You interface with it using C++. It's particulary good for physics, but if you use it, you can make it do what you need it to do....
The symbolic processing in Octave [-Forge] uses GiNaC.
Periodically, there will be discussion on the Freeciv mailing lists as to whether Tibet and Taiwan should be included in the list of nations. Chinese developers disagree with this, and it never happens. See one such discussion here.
Heh, maybe we should remove China from the game.:)
Retrofitting isn't too tricky, if the need is sufficiently dire. Consider Oxford St. in London; the last I saw it, perhaps 10 years ago, it was buses and taxis only.
Just say "these streets are buses only", and you're done. It'll help build demand for the buses too.:)
As with modern cell phones, this will not be adopted first in the USA. Japan is investing a large amount of capital into this technology, and there is simultaneously a greater desire for such electronics. Consider "navigation computers", displaying maps and such. They are emerging in the US, but have been available in Japan for a long time. Again, Japan is less litigious than the US, so it will be easier to do this; also, since the government is in favour of saving lives by replacing human drivers with robots, it likely will provide some protection for the manufacturer. If robots cut fatalities by 90%, the few accidents that still occur should not punish the manufacturer unduly.
1) Slow compared to Mozilla - requires the use of the moox optimized builds
Now, I'm not denying that your experience is slow, but I run it at work on a 3 GHz P4, and at home on a 300 MHz P2. It may be a bit snappier at work, but it's fine at home too.
I'm much more concerned about the bugginess, losing focus so I can't type or use the scroll wheel, crashing on bad code, etc.
It's quite clear what he's trying to do --- when the sea levels rise, the first US folks to drown will be those pinkos that voted against him, most of which live on the coasts. True, God-fearing, Republican-voting Americans live in the interior, and will be safe. They'll even be well armed to prevent a huge influx of Aetheist Commies from Massachusetts!
Slashdot Mirror
Octave uses GiNaC for its symbolic stuff. Currently, part of why Octave's symbolics aren't better, is not that the library doesn't do it, but that the "glue" hasn't been written.
What are you waiting for? :)
I can see the headline now, from when somebody cracks this technology:
"Wave of the future breaks" :)
Not only that, with GPL code, you don't even need to accept the license to use it.
The GPL basically says "if you accept this license, you can overlook copyright law, which forbids copying, and copy under a different set of conditions (provide the source), instead."
Give me a break.
The first hard disk we had was 20 MB, and it was huge when you consider only a few executables and text files. Granted, we ran Stacker on it to compress the contents and approximately double the capacity.
When my brother went to university, he replaced his 40 MB disk with a 560 MB; unfortunately, his BIOS only supported 512 MB, so his new disk wasted more space than the old disk had available.
We had a word processor, spreadsheet, drawing program, and so on with only a 20 MB drive. Heck, we ran a BBS. 512 MB of disk would feel like heaven, with appropriate software. I've had useful GNU/Linux installations on disks smaller than that.
Since I'm using a multi-user operating system, I created an extra user called "untrusted", who runs my web browser. This way, the worst that anything can do is destroy my browser settings. "untrusted" doesn't own any valuable files.
They're actually doing considerably more than the bare minimum, though I agree they should do more.
The bare minimum would be to provide, on request, to customers, the source code of the product shipped to the customer. This means they'd only give you their code when you ask for it, once it's out the door. The fact that we even have this acid test code, which might never ship, is proof that they're doing more than the "bare minimum".
Copyright law was created to encourage development, in recognition that works are easy to copy. If works are easy to copy, so the though is, the law can make it illegal to copy them, so publishers can hope to recover the cost of licensing the work from the author.
With encryption of the data, the work is no longer easy to copy; it is redundant to also have legal protection. There isn't copyright protection on a physical device; I can copy a coffee mug, it's just easier to buy one.
I say you get to choose; release in an easily-copyable form, and get copyright protection on that version, or release in a difficult to copy form, and trust that your encryption is adequate.
(And copyright should be no longer than 14 years, renewable once, but that's a different story :) )
This is interesting.
So Knuth's METAFONT does something useful; when you compile a TeX document, the font stored in the resulting file is bitmapped, so not subject to copyright.
Newer LaTeX setups with vector fonts could be subject to this, if the fonts are GPL'd.
It seems to me that having a relatively low-intensity UV light projected on the keyboard, or perhaps just flashing an irregular intervals, would kill the germs.
Reminds me of a line from a high-ranking officer in Bush Sr.'s Iraq war; when bombing bunkers suspected of holding anthrax, they would attack early in the morning on a clear, still day; the sunlight destroys the spores. (And it's safer than using nukes!)
In highschool my English marks from year to year were highly variable, approximately CCACA in 5 years. The best explanation I could think of was that my writing style is strange, and those teachers which like my strange style give good marks, and the others don't.
The computer is highly likely to suffer from this, except it'll be the same program every year (different criteria from the teacher, admittedly), so it might give me all 'A's, but it might just as well give me all 'C's.
A certain amount of strangeness is required for creativity. This is dangerous.
Moreover the calculus book requires specialist typesetting, less of a problem nowadays but the average printing house isn't set up for printing sigmas.
That's why most textbooks nowadays are formatted using LaTeX. Besides, most printing houses for textbooks require camera-ready, so it's the author's problem to get those wacky symbols onto paper.
Right, but how are you going to configure it?
Uh, use a control panel? The default could be to heavily damp the mouse, so you can access the control panel and adjust it appropriately.
If you really want a knob, a USB device has a knob and reports how far it is turned would be sufficient; such a device could have other uses, too.
I just sent the following comment:
I strongly support the concept of having works for which the copyright holder cannot be identified fall into the public domain.
It has been suggested that there should be a registry of copyrighted works, along with contact information for the holder. This "orphan works" proposal would permit the free market to form such a registry. Copyright holders would want themselves to be identifiable to retain their copyright, so being registered, by a "copyright registrar" would ensure this identifiability. The system could be similar to that used currently for Internet domain names.
Remeber your ancient TNT graphics card that had 16MB of memory?
Uh, I remember when a friend's ZX81 computer was much nicer because it had the 16 kByte RAM module, ours had only 1 kByte.
Call me when one of them has broad market acceptance.
Why is that a prerequisite? I'm using a Kinesis keyboard. It doesn't bother me that other people use normal keyboards, and it doesn't seem to bother anyone that I use a funky keyboard.
Diversity is necessary for functional capitalism.
Since there are a relatively small number of memorable domain names, most of which are only applicable to a small physical area, I'd like to see a local-forwarding service. This system would know your physical location, or have a decent guess from your IP, and forward domain name requests (or more likely just do a HTTP redirect) to the registered "local" version.
For example, Moe's tavern in Springfield could register moestavern.springfield.usa.global, which is annoying to remember or write down. It would advertise as being at "moestavern.local", or some such. Going to "moestavern.local" would cause a database lookup for the closest appropriate site, and redirection by CNAME or HTTP redirect.
So if I was in Boston, the local dive called "Moe's" could also advertise "moestavern.local", but when browsing there I would be redirected to moestavern.boston.ma.usa.global.
Some search facility would be required, for cases when one was searching for a site in a different city.
Thoughts?
Help me get a free Mac Mini, and get your own.
Do Canadians get fingerprinted and photographed at the border like all us other foreign criminals?
No, we don't get fingerprinted or photographed.
Incidentally, flying from Canada to the US from most cities, the US customs stage takes place within Canada. The only exception I am aware of is flying from Halifax (though the plan is to add this by 2008 (?)).
There are three major pieces of symbolic software: Maple, Mathematica, and GiNaC.
Maple is great, especially for Calculus students. I consider Mathematica to be evil since they apparently bought out the major players in Reduce (an older symbolic math system still used in Russia), tried to buy out a major GiNaC developer, and send him threats when he refused. They're not as successful as Microsoft, but they might be giving MS's evilness some competition.
GiNaC is a GPL'd library for symbolic computation. You interface with it using C++. It's particulary good for physics, but if you use it, you can make it do what you need it to do....
The symbolic processing in Octave [-Forge] uses GiNaC.
The communal mind produces a savage strategy, yet no one could predict that this vicious crossbreed would unravel the secret of steel.
This is what democratic rights are for....
Are you suggesting your democratic rights are less effective than those of the Dutch?
'Cause you know, I would never even imply that. :P
We're not unaffected by this.
Periodically, there will be discussion on the Freeciv mailing lists as to whether Tibet and Taiwan should be included in the list of nations. Chinese developers disagree with this, and it never happens. See one such discussion here.
Heh, maybe we should remove China from the game. :)
Retrofitting isn't too tricky, if the need is sufficiently dire. Consider Oxford St. in London; the last I saw it, perhaps 10 years ago, it was buses and taxis only.
Just say "these streets are buses only", and you're done. It'll help build demand for the buses too. :)
As with modern cell phones, this will not be adopted first in the USA. Japan is investing a large amount of capital into this technology, and there is simultaneously a greater desire for such electronics. Consider "navigation computers", displaying maps and such. They are emerging in the US, but have been available in Japan for a long time. Again, Japan is less litigious than the US, so it will be easier to do this; also, since the government is in favour of saving lives by replacing human drivers with robots, it likely will provide some protection for the manufacturer. If robots cut fatalities by 90%, the few accidents that still occur should not punish the manufacturer unduly.
1) Slow compared to Mozilla - requires the use of the moox optimized builds
Now, I'm not denying that your experience is slow, but I run it at work on a 3 GHz P4, and at home on a 300 MHz P2. It may be a bit snappier at work, but it's fine at home too.
I'm much more concerned about the bugginess, losing focus so I can't type or use the scroll wheel, crashing on bad code, etc.
It's quite clear what he's trying to do --- when the sea levels rise, the first US folks to drown will be those pinkos that voted against him, most of which live on the coasts. True, God-fearing, Republican-voting Americans live in the interior, and will be safe. They'll even be well armed to prevent a huge influx of Aetheist Commies from Massachusetts!
(It's a joke, darnit.)