So Robert Graves told Lizzie where she could shove her pommel? Almost brings my respect for the historian back to the levels it stood at before I discovered that I was working with one of his sons (and regretting it!). I almost pissed myself laughing whe I heard that they'd been stupid enough to offer a KCBE (IIRC) to Benjamin Zephaniah. Someon had a serious hangover the day they thought he'd accept the insult.
...Apple Mail has done this since Panther came out. Emails can be viewed as threaded discussions.
I don't know this "Panther" thing (but then again, it's 4 years since I saw a Mac switched on), but when I started to use email and news (at home - we still aren't allowed to use it [officially] at work) I was using a system that treated email and news with exactly the same user interface. That was in 1992. I doubt that MS would be able to patent this, not that it'll stop them trying).
So 'Mutt' did this in the Ancient Days? Fine. Suits me. MS-Mutt will probably cost 20 times as much as GNU-Mutt in TCO, require a quad-Xeon instead of a 386sx-16 and run at 1/4 of the speed. But no way could anyone compete with MS on providing security patches!
BTW, the mail/ news system is Virtual Access, and is working it's way through the process of going Open Source (stripping out the 3rd-party libraries and code segments, that sort of stuff. IANAP.)
> The only ones that may possibly benefit will > be the ones that get in early, as they may > be allowed to keep the machine after Metonomy > goes under.
Exactly what I'm hoping for (but not really expecting). I've filled out the forms honestly. But I anticipate not fitting their "desired demographic" - single male, living alone, no kids. But since I've told them up-front, then they've got the choice of giving me a SETI-client or seeing me in court for the injury to my feelings (Metronomy: "You're not a multi-sprogged dumbfuck, so we won't bombard you with adverts for cheap loans"; me: "see you in court")
It's more fun then pulling the wings off flies, because flies don't know why you're doing this to them.
> somebody will physically come and take the > computer away
Yeah. right. Ever tried to get one of these companies to take something away? Years ago I rented a washing machine, because a lodger insisted on getting one. Lodger left, the year-minimum rental of the WM came up, and I phoned them to come and take it away. They practically begged me to keep on having it - discount on rental rate, discount on buying it out, discount this, discount that, yadda yadda.
Took them 3 months to send someone round to collect the lump of ironmongery. And this was people from a store in town.
Totally fucks up their business model.
PS: why no desire for a WM? I do about 3 kilos washing/month - much more sound ecologically to use a laundrette. Plus, there's a bar beside the laundrette.
and is a 50% shareholder in the biggest pay TV company.'"
People still pay for TV?
Why?
I've recently moved from a place where it's illegal for me to watch TV (because I didn't have a reception license), and where I didn't have TV reception equipment, to a place where there is both TV reception equipment and an appropriate license.
Naturally, having seen what is available on TV, my watching has decreased.
Are people still falling for this spam-ridden fool-trap?
It's not just isostatic rebound. There's this thing in southern Europe called the ALPS. They stick up high, and so are being eroded. Most of the resultant debris is being shifted to the north and dumped in the Rhine delta. (To a geologist, the Rhine delta stretches from central Belgium to the middle of the North Sea; if it weren't for a temporary abberation of sea level, the Humber would be a minor tributary of the lower Rhine.) That's a lot of weight, which has depressed the London-Brabant massif a kilometer below it's pre-Rhine level, and in pockets in the North Sea the sediment load is up to two km thick. This has been going on for a fair while - about 40 million years. It isn't going to change soon.
And yes, tilting is OLD news. ISTR that the first data confirming it started coming out of the joint efforts of the Admiralty and the Ordnance Survey as they established their series of benchmarks (strict sense), triangulation points, tide gauges and assorted yadda. That was back in the first half of the 19th century. Since then improvements in precision of measurement has failed to overtake the precision from a tape measure, a tide gauge, and a long time series.
An astronomy club in my former home town is planning to build an observatory out in the wilds. They're still looking at possible sites on publically accessible land, so nothing is fixed in stone - yet. They're doing it "right", contacting the landowners to ask for permission, and are generally getting favourable responses. But one possible problem is coming up for several sites - although it's not widely advertised, one of the leading possible sites is in the vicinity of several breeding sites for rare birds of prey, and the local police take an "act now, ask later" attitude to cars parked late at night in isolated areas, or even to cars-not-known-to-belong-to-locals being seen at all. This could be a major crimp on the utility of the site, and the information to avoid problems is simply not published anywhere (imagine Mr Evil Egg-Thief looking at a map that says "No visitors between March and September, please". You think he's going to be attracted there? Correct. That's why the only time I saw an osprey I kept my trap shut about the location, and I still do. And I'm not a birder.)
Anyway, I think the average/.-ter can see the potential for conflict between geocaching and park officials who really don't object to geocaching, but can't say why.
There might be some pretty bits of the world out there, but there's some awful ugly humans.
--
Aidan, recently ejected from sub-tropical Aberdeen (Scotland)
There was a claim a couple of years ago of the recovery of viable bacteria from water trapped in a salt crystal that (for good reasons) is strongly believed to have been intact for ~250 million years.
Translating that to "microorganisms can survive a million years inside an asteroid" is not directly justified. The temperature range experienced in an asteroid with an Earth-crossing orbit, and the variable radiation experienced in anything other than a quite large asteroid (~10m - one that we'd notice hitting Earth) over that sort of time interval, would make survival of this specific type of bacterium much more arguable.
First, the martian origin of those SNC meteorites is not yet fully demonstrated.
Wrong.
To the best accuracy that science can provide, there is no doubt that the ALH84001 sample came from Mars. To summarise the evidence and reasoning:
When examined geochemically and petrologically (long words? look 'em up) a number of meteorites were very dissimilar to the bulk of meteorites. In particular achondrite meteorites Shergotty, Nakhla, and Chassigny were unusual and more similar to each other than to other meteorites, forming a natural group known as "SNC" meteorites. (Meteorite Zagami was later associated with this group, once it had fallen to Earth in 1962.)
In 1975 and 1976 a couple of landers were sent to examine conditions on Mars. You might remember them - the Viking missions - memory coming back yet? It's only 26 years ago after all.
When the Viking landers got there, one of the many things they did was to measure the isotopic composition of the atmosphere. Within experimental error, the two instruments, separated by over a thousand km, reported the same composition for the atmosphere, including minor compositions and isotopic compositions. That they differed appreciably from the compositions n Earth surprised no-one.
When fresh, unaltered specimens of SNC-type meteorites became available (from the samples of Zagami discovered soon after the fall, and from the arid cold of Antarctica), it became possible to examine the composition of gases trapped within glass pockets within the meteorites.
The gas compositions inside the meteorites matched those reported by the Viking instruments. QED.
References: not by any means a comprehensive selection, but a couple of the relevant papers. If you want to follow up on this further, any work in the field since will probably refer to one or several of these papers. Science Citation Index is your friend. Note that the arguements about the fact of Mars->Earth transport were essentially over by the late 80's (though there was further debate about the details of mechanisms and rates).
Science, v221, p651, 1983, Bogard & Johnson, "Martian Gases in an Antarctic Meteorite"; The first paper to really lock the evidence down - Ar40/Ar36 and Xe129/Xe132 ratios in EM79001 (an achondrite from the Elepehant Moraine searches.
Science, v237, p738, Melosh & Vickery, "The Large Crater Origin of SNC Meteorites", discusses the energetics of blowing chips off Mars and them arriving on Earth. Melosh originally published the hypothesis in Icarus, v59, p234, in 1984.
Science v267 p1981, 1995, Marti et al, "Signatures of the Martian Atmosphere in Glass of the Zagami Meteorite", Essentially the same evidence as Bogard & Johnson showed for EM79001 is presented, nailing it's Martian origin.
If so, where would they have come from in the first place? Earth as a wild guess sounds likely, as many meteorites coming from our planet have spread in the solar system in those early ages.
There is a very serious energetic problem with this - to get a sample of rock from Mars to Earth, it needs to get out of the Martian gravity well, then hit Earth. To get from Earth to Mars it needs to get out of the terrestrial gravity well (10 times as deep as for Mars), then get UP part of the Sun's gravity well, then hit Mars. To do that, the meteorite needs a LOT more energy, so the initial impactor needs to be a lot bigger, which makes sufficient impacts much rarer. The statistics are a bit flexible, but the flux (in numbers and mass) of meteorites from Mars to Earth is around 100 to 1000 times that from Earth to Mars.
For example, the crater found under the North Sea (where I mostly work) last week, is too small to have ejected anything from Earth to anywhere, and precious little from Mars. (Even if it had occurred on land or in shallow water - there was probably a hundred metres or more water over this impact site at the time of impact, which greatly slows the ejecta.)
2 points:
Firstly many people are reading the questioner's comment about "100lbs of TECHNICAL books" to mean "100lbs of COMPUTER books". Just looking over to my bookshelves, sure ther's a good few computer books out there; also about 30 kilos of reference works on palaeontology, some with print runs that made it to 3 figures; also a few tens of kilos of mineralogy references; lots of oilfield structure and stratigraphy analyses and reports... Very little chance of any of them being on the web anywhere, particularly the "in-house" ones 25 years old.
Second point: a number of the learned journals are addressing this very issue because of library storage space issues. Go to Jstor and particularly to the process description to see how one industrial-scale program goes about doing this. Note in particular the twin parallel paths they use: OCR to produce searchable indices but delivering fax quality PDF images of the original journal pages to preserve complex images, typograpcy and editorial quality.
Another interesting source might be http://www.octavo.com , who amongst other things produce high-quality PDF distributions of historical documents, again linked to a searchable back end produced by OCR again.
The combination of batch, offline OCR and PDF'd images to automatically generate some sort of useable indices to the images seems to have been selected by a number of independant groups.
If you can't be bothered to go the whole hog to build a database, at least scan in the indices so you can do as much searching in the scanned books as you could in the originals.
Not JPEG images - TIFF or PNG. That's a no-brainer. Image contrast is the issue here (for the text sections at least), not absolute image size. My reference library stretches to 1.6GB and is growing steadily (and yes, most of it is copyrighted and legal).
Re:Data Spam and DOS Attacks
on
Wireless Spam?
·
· Score: 1
A friend had a similar problem: he'd configured one of the machines (his desktop?) on the small office network he administered so it would send him a "Help!" SMS if it couldn't see the networks {main servers, DNS boxes, whatever}. A few weeks later, my friend was a couple of hundred miles out of town (for an extended party) when The Boss did something inadvisable and the network went to ratshit showing all the usual suspects of network hell. The trusty desktop box picks up it's modem and starts SMSing "Help". Every 15 seconds when it sees there to be problems. Oh dear. Naturally, when the phone's battery died, there were no chargers available. IIRC a land-line connection had to be used eventually to get the system sane again. First operation on returning to work was to LART The Boss; then put a bit more intelligence into the "Help!" scripts; then to get a second phone charger. Lessons were learned.
Actually, academics have created 100GHz transistors out of GaAs. 10GHz isn't that great compared to these ultra-fast ones
If my memory serves correctly (and it's normally pretty reliable), it was about 18 months ago, and they weren't just showcasing transistors, but were showing off shift registers operating at 100GHz. Still not a full-blown processor, but a necessary component. I think the details were published in `Nature' (because I was a subscriber at the time- go to www.nature.com if you've got an active subscription or £120 going begging). I can't remember much more though- it was pretty much "100GHz chips, Film at 11" non-news.
I'm just going to be happy when my local shop delivers that dual P3-700 for the Casino-21 project (remember that?).
The basic assumption made in the article seems to be that
"PDA" EQUALS "input through touch screen - ONLY".
No ifs, buts or maybes. As long-time Psion users (I'm on my third, mostly due to cracking screens when falling off my bike) know, this is simply a false equality.
The standard SlashDot assumption of
"America" EQUALS "all there is in the universe"
seems to be in full grip, as usual. But over here in Europe, Psion is still a vital force and an excellent PDA. Having said that, I know from repeated complaints in Compuserve's Palmtops/Psion forum that the Psion repair and maintainance service in the 'States is less than marvellous. Often terrible in fact. Which is probably why the 'Palm' style of PDA managed to get started at all.
Completely off topic, but I'm collecting little snippets like you signed off with (If it ain't broke . . ..) which will eventually go into my MOTD file. Who the blazes is Scott Adams? The name rings a bell, but prehaps it's something American, so we don't hear much of him on the East side of the Pond?
Here's one in return: [concerning miracles]: "a wise man proportions his belief to the evidence" David Hume, Enlightenment period philosopher ca. 1760.
While all the Americans are jabbering on about their DSLs and ADSLs and things, are there any Brits or Europeans in/.-land who knows the current status on fast access methods in the UK? I took a look at getting BT's "HomeHighway" ISDN product into the house about six months ago, but on examining the costings discovered it would about double my phone bills so I gave them the finger. Does the ITU's apporval of a DSL-type modem standard mean there is *any* chance of these things actually being *implemented* in the UK?
Sorry folks, that last post got mangled. This is my second ever post to/.! You guessed? The line: the sale. ). Si ou non?
missed a chunk, which I now precis: -end of quote -MS would claim there is linkage between computer hardware and software (which there is) though proving that this means i86a computers *absolutely* require MS software is another question. The answer is not one MS would like to go to court to prove! -The original poster was from France?
Slashdot Mirror
So Robert Graves told Lizzie where she could shove her pommel? Almost brings my respect for the historian back to the levels it stood at before I discovered that I was working with one of his sons (and regretting it!).
I almost pissed myself laughing whe I heard that they'd been stupid enough to offer a KCBE (IIRC) to Benjamin Zephaniah. Someon had a serious hangover the day they thought he'd accept the insult.
...Apple Mail has done this since Panther came out. Emails can be viewed as threaded discussions.
I don't know this "Panther" thing (but then again, it's 4 years since I saw a Mac switched on), but when I started to use email and news (at home - we still aren't allowed to use it [officially] at work) I was using a system that treated email and news with exactly the same user interface. That was in 1992. I doubt that MS would be able to patent this, not that it'll stop them trying).
So 'Mutt' did this in the Ancient Days? Fine. Suits me. MS-Mutt will probably cost 20 times as much as GNU-Mutt in TCO, require a quad-Xeon instead of a 386sx-16 and run at 1/4 of the speed. But no way could anyone compete with MS on providing security patches!
BTW, the mail/ news system is Virtual Access, and is working it's way through the process of going Open Source (stripping out the 3rd-party libraries and code segments, that sort of stuff. IANAP.)
> The only ones that may possibly benefit will
> be the ones that get in early, as they may
> be allowed to keep the machine after Metonomy
> goes under.
Exactly what I'm hoping for (but not really expecting). I've filled out the forms honestly. But I anticipate not fitting their "desired demographic" - single male, living alone, no kids. But since I've told them up-front, then they've got the choice of giving me a SETI-client or seeing me in court for the injury to my feelings (Metronomy: "You're not a multi-sprogged dumbfuck, so we won't bombard you with adverts for cheap loans"; me: "see you in court")
It's more fun then pulling the wings off flies, because flies don't know why you're doing this to them.
> somebody will physically come and take the
> computer away
Yeah. right. Ever tried to get one of these companies to take something away? Years ago I rented a washing machine, because a lodger insisted on getting one. Lodger left, the year-minimum rental of the WM came up, and I phoned them to come and take it away. They practically begged me to keep on having it - discount on rental rate, discount on buying it out, discount this, discount that, yadda yadda.
Took them 3 months to send someone round to collect the lump of ironmongery. And this was people from a store in town.
Totally fucks up their business model.
PS: why no desire for a WM? I do about 3 kilos washing/month - much more sound ecologically to use a laundrette. Plus, there's a bar beside the laundrette.
and is a 50% shareholder in the biggest pay TV company.'"
People still pay for TV?
Why?
I've recently moved
from a place where it's illegal for me to watch TV (because I didn't have a reception license), and where I didn't have TV reception equipment,
to a place where there is both TV reception equipment
and an appropriate license.
Naturally, having seen what is available on TV, my watching has decreased.
Are people still falling for this spam-ridden fool-trap?
It's not just isostatic rebound. There's this thing in southern Europe called the ALPS. They stick up high, and so are being eroded. Most of the resultant debris is being shifted to the north and dumped in the Rhine delta. (To a geologist, the Rhine delta stretches from central Belgium to the middle of the North Sea; if it weren't for a temporary abberation of sea level, the Humber would be a minor tributary of the lower Rhine.) That's a lot of weight, which has depressed the London-Brabant massif a kilometer below it's pre-Rhine level, and in pockets in the North Sea the sediment load is up to two km thick.
This has been going on for a fair while - about 40 million years. It isn't going to change soon.
And yes, tilting is OLD news. ISTR that the first data confirming it started coming out of the joint efforts of the Admiralty and the Ordnance Survey as they established their series of benchmarks (strict sense), triangulation points, tide gauges and assorted yadda. That was back in the first half of the 19th century. Since then improvements in precision of measurement has failed to overtake the precision from a tape measure, a tide gauge, and a long time series.
An astronomy club in my former home town is planning to build an observatory out in the wilds. They're still looking at possible sites on publically accessible land, so nothing is fixed in stone - yet. They're doing it "right", contacting the landowners to ask for permission, and are generally getting favourable responses. But one possible problem is coming up for several sites - although it's not widely advertised, one of the leading possible sites is in the vicinity of several breeding sites for rare birds of prey, and the local police take an "act now, ask later" attitude to cars parked late at night in isolated areas, or even to cars-not-known-to-belong-to-locals being seen at all. This could be a major crimp on the utility of the site, and the information to avoid problems is simply not published anywhere (imagine Mr Evil Egg-Thief looking at a map that says "No visitors between March and September, please". You think he's going to be attracted there? Correct. That's why the only time I saw an osprey I kept my trap shut about the location, and I still do. And I'm not a birder.)
Anyway, I think the average /.-ter can see the potential for conflict between geocaching and park officials who really don't object to geocaching, but can't say why.
There might be some pretty bits of the world out there, but there's some awful ugly humans.
-- Aidan, recently ejected from sub-tropical Aberdeen (Scotland)
There was a claim a couple of years ago of the recovery of viable bacteria from water trapped in a salt crystal that (for good reasons) is strongly believed to have been intact for ~250 million years.
Translating that to "microorganisms can survive a million years inside an asteroid" is not directly justified. The temperature range experienced in an asteroid with an Earth-crossing orbit, and the variable radiation experienced in anything other than a quite large asteroid (~10m - one that we'd notice hitting Earth) over that sort of time interval, would make survival of this specific type of bacterium much more arguable.
--
RockDoctor
Wrong.
To the best accuracy that science can provide, there is no doubt that the ALH84001 sample came from Mars. To summarise the evidence and reasoning:
If so, where would they have come from in the first place? Earth as a wild guess sounds likely, as many meteorites coming from our planet have spread in the solar system in those early ages.
There is a very serious energetic problem with this - to get a sample of rock from Mars to Earth, it needs to get out of the Martian gravity well, then hit Earth. To get from Earth to Mars it needs to get out of the terrestrial gravity well (10 times as deep as for Mars), then get UP part of the Sun's gravity well, then hit Mars. To do that, the meteorite needs a LOT more energy, so the initial impactor needs to be a lot bigger, which makes sufficient impacts much rarer. The statistics are a bit flexible, but the flux (in numbers and mass) of meteorites from Mars to Earth is around 100 to 1000 times that from Earth to Mars.
For example, the crater found under the North Sea (where I mostly work) last week, is too small to have ejected anything from Earth to anywhere, and precious little from Mars. (Even if it had occurred on land or in shallow water - there was probably a hundred metres or more water over this impact site at the time of impact, which greatly slows the ejecta.)
2 points: ... Very little chance of any of them being on the web anywhere, particularly the "in-house" ones 25 years old.
Firstly many people are reading the questioner's comment about "100lbs of TECHNICAL books" to mean "100lbs of COMPUTER books". Just looking over to my bookshelves, sure ther's a good few computer books out there; also about 30 kilos of reference works on palaeontology, some with print runs that made it to 3 figures; also a few tens of kilos of mineralogy references; lots of oilfield structure and stratigraphy analyses and reports
Second point: a number of the learned journals are addressing this very issue because of library storage space issues. Go to Jstor and particularly to the process description to see how one industrial-scale program goes about doing this. Note in particular the twin parallel paths they use: OCR to produce searchable indices but delivering fax quality PDF images of the original journal pages to preserve complex images, typograpcy and editorial quality.
Another interesting source might be http://www.octavo.com , who amongst other things produce high-quality PDF distributions of historical documents, again linked to a searchable back end produced by OCR again.
The combination of batch, offline OCR and PDF'd images to automatically generate some sort of useable indices to the images seems to have been selected by a number of independant groups.
If you can't be bothered to go the whole hog to build a database, at least scan in the indices so you can do as much searching in the scanned books as you could in the originals.
Not JPEG images - TIFF or PNG. That's a no-brainer. Image contrast is the issue here (for the text sections at least), not absolute image size. My reference library stretches to 1.6GB and is growing steadily (and yes, most of it is copyrighted and legal).
A friend had a similar problem: he'd configured one of the machines (his desktop?) on the small office network he administered so it would send him a "Help!" SMS if it couldn't see the networks {main servers, DNS boxes, whatever}. A few weeks later, my friend was a couple of hundred miles out of town (for an extended party) when The Boss did something inadvisable and the network went to ratshit showing all the usual suspects of network hell. The trusty desktop box picks up it's modem and starts SMSing "Help". Every 15 seconds when it sees there to be problems. Oh dear.
Naturally, when the phone's battery died, there were no chargers available. IIRC a land-line connection had to be used eventually to get the system sane again. First operation on returning to work was to LART The Boss; then put a bit more intelligence into the "Help!" scripts; then to get a second phone charger. Lessons were learned.
If my memory serves correctly (and it's normally pretty reliable), it was about 18 months ago, and they weren't just showcasing transistors, but were showing off shift registers operating at 100GHz. Still not a full-blown processor, but a necessary component. I think the details were published in `Nature' (because I was a subscriber at the time- go to www.nature.com if you've got an active subscription or £120 going begging). I can't remember much more though- it was pretty much "100GHz chips, Film at 11" non-news.
I'm just going to be happy when my local shop delivers that dual P3-700 for the Casino-21 project (remember that?).
The basic assumption made in the article seems to be that
"PDA" EQUALS "input through touch screen - ONLY".
No ifs, buts or maybes. As long-time Psion users (I'm on my third, mostly due to cracking screens when falling off my bike) know, this is simply a false equality.
The standard SlashDot assumption of
"America" EQUALS "all there is in the universe"
seems to be in full grip, as usual. But over here in Europe, Psion is still a vital force and an excellent PDA. Having said that, I know from repeated complaints in Compuserve's Palmtops/Psion forum that the Psion repair and maintainance service in the 'States is less than marvellous. Often terrible in fact. Which is probably why the 'Palm' style of PDA managed to get started at all.
Completely off topic, but I'm collecting little snippets like you signed off with (If it ain't broke . . . .) which will eventually go into my MOTD file.
Who the blazes is Scott Adams? The name rings a bell, but prehaps it's something American, so we don't hear much of him on the East side of the Pond?
Here's one in return:
[concerning miracles]: "a wise man proportions his belief to the evidence"
David Hume, Enlightenment period philosopher ca. 1760.
While all the Americans are jabbering on about their DSLs and ADSLs and things, are there any Brits or Europeans in /.-land who knows the current status on fast access methods in the UK?
I took a look at getting BT's "HomeHighway" ISDN product into the house about six months ago, but on examining the costings discovered it would about double my phone bills so I gave them the finger.
Does the ITU's apporval of a DSL-type modem standard mean there is *any* chance of these things actually being *implemented* in the UK?
Sorry folks, that last post got mangled. This is my second ever post to /.!
You guessed?
The line:
the sale. ). Si ou non?
missed a chunk, which I now precis:
-end of quote
-MS would claim there is linkage between computer hardware and software (which there is) though proving that this means i86a computers *absolutely* require MS software is another question. The answer is not one MS would like to go to court to prove!
-The original poster was from France?
Does that make more sense?