makes use of almost no ideograms, as such. It's mainly a picture of a man and woman, the spacecraft, and a diagram illustrating how to get to the sun, provided you know about some pulsars and the center of the galaxy.
Anyway, I doubt they'd even want to put any kind of language on the plaque, even if they did it again. Simply put, it's impossible to encode so much informational redundancy that it cannot be interpreted to meen something bad/aggressive/insulting. Although the same thing said about 100 times, in different languages, all encoded for maximum redundancy, could conceivably be effective at showing that we have language, I doubt even that could prevent 'them' from thinking we meant them harm (if that's what they wanted to think).
As for your assertion that music grads make the best programmers, I think you have a far too narrow and biased view of the skills and talents required to produce good software.
IBM et al. sought out both mathematicians and musicians. Well, rather, they noticied that the people who were good at programming were mathematicians and musicians, then began seeking them out. Turing, von Neumann, and others were not primarily musicians (if they were at all). They were mathematicians first and foremost.
tuxedo.org does house some of ESR's libertarian/anti-gun control stuff. It could be that they (being the censorware folks) consider such 'radical' pro-2nd amendment rights and anti-current-form-of-government opinions to be offensive.
From scanning through the (japanese) page it looks like it'll have 16MB of RAM and 3.6MB of flash ROM. That compares somewhat favorably to Windows CE apps, but I dunno how much I like the idea of 16MB to fit the OS and apps and data into. Since it has a CF slot, I'd definitely buy a 64MB CF card. Maybe even more, I dunno. Problem is, doing something like that would likely make a (probably) already expensive device even more so. The pictures do look pretty sweet though.
That's ridiculous. We don't have accurate temperature data from earlier than the 1800s, and even then the data wasn't collected from a diverse set of locations. So, then, how could we know that "the current Global warming trend is 10 to 100 faster than any previous naturally occurring trend."? The simple answer is, we can't.
We can know about CO2 trends through antarctic ice cores, but we don't really know how closely CO2 correllates with global temperatures. What those CO2 trends do reveal, though, is that a great deal of the carbon dioxide is due to natural causes, such as volcanos.
The usual environmentalist response at this point is to start raving about sulfur dioxiode, CFCs, and water vapor and how they matter more than CO2. If that's the case, then why rant about CO2 in the first place? Speaks volumes to me about how well thought out the environmentalist argument is.
The codec was (re)designed so that most actual spam would decode into a message, even if it was gibberish? Would certainly improve the steganography aspect, I think.LI>
The codec was (re)designed so as to be irreducibly computationally expensive to decode messages, thus making scanning difficult, but on a modern machine decoding
Admittedly I'm not an expert on spamming methods, but it seems to me like most spam appears to be addressed to one recipient anyway, so I don't think the 'one recipient therefore fake spam' correlation holds, as some have suggested.
Honestly, if these ideas were to be implemented (well, the first two, anyway), I don't think they would need to open source the program. That is, one could just as easily be made up with those goals in mind, since a complete rewrite would be necessary anyway.
To me, this seems like a potential way to produce 'ubiquitous encryption.' If the codec was remade so that it was computationally expensive and regular spam decodes without errors, then it would dramatically improve the percentage of encrypted mail.
Or, better yet, since regular spam would decrypt to 'gibberish,' why not have the decrypted output be code for use with an actual cypher? Suddenly I imagine a PGP->Spam encoder and decoder...imagine, every spam message is potentially a PGP message! That'd really mess up carnivore/echelon. It'll probably never happen, though. But the possibility is certainly tantalizing...
Why can't someone develop something creative out of food products (or whatever) that disintegrates in harmless stuff after a few days of exposure to natural elements?
There exists such a thing, and I've received many things packed with it. They come in the form of cylindrical peanuts that have the appearance of normal foam peanuts, although they're a light brown instead of white. Anyway, they're made from starch, so they dissolve quite easily in water (takes about 4-5 seconds in lukewarm water) and are safe to eat (well, to a point, anyway...after enough I'm sure the cardboard dust et al would pose a threat). I dunno how well they stand up to sunlight and such, but I'm sure your friendly neighborhood bacteria would have no problem with them after they hit the landfill.
"So let me get this straight:
Raising genetically altered mammals for industrial purposes is cool, but growing industrial hemp is a crime. Custom-designing living beings is all good, but ingesting RU486 in the first trimester is murder."
Actually, nobody said any of this is 'cool' or all good.' I imagine that many of the same groups that oppose hemp and abortion will undoubtedly oppose industrial transgenics. Sheesh, just because some small company has done it doesn't mean that it somehow gets a mandate from heaven. I imagine the anti-hemp and anti-abortion folks (or hell, much of anybody!) probably haven't even yet heard of Nexia.
WRT the '142% improvement' benchmarks floating around, there are several issues. First, they used make clean, not make mrproper between compiles. make clean leaves some stuff lying around (and consequently speeds up the compile). Second, they used -j3 on the dual compile but not -j2 on the regular one. -j2 can speed up compiles on uniprocessor systems not insignificantly. But, even with that, I can't imagine the difference getting too far away from 100% improvement. Not that that's suprising...compiles are 'embarassingly parallel.'
The page is immensely, well, fluffy. There's almost no actual information ("STT: Super Thin Technology," anyone?). The Press Release is particularly telling. It's basically a pep-talk/biography for the founder of DTC (Randi Altchul). Apparently she's 'taking her Toy Mentality to the Technology and Telecom Industries and having a lot of fun along the way!!!' Sounds pretty fake to me. The Press Release claims that she's been granted more than 20 patents (including ones for the 'PAPER LAP TOP'), but there are no links or even direct references to said patents (like, say, patent numbers) anywhere on the webiste. Almost certainly a hoax or a scam.
One of the many 2.4 backports that 2.2.18 contains (since somewhere in the -pre series...around 11, I think) is the DRM (direct rendering manager, the part of the kernel that controls access to the hardware through DRI, the direct rendering infratstructure). Anyway, unfortunately, it's not very useful because it only supports DRI v2, and the current XFree86 code uses v1. Until the XFree86 code is upgraded, 3d acceleration under XFree86 4 still won't work. Ah well. At least the codebase is there.
I'm aware of the anthologies. The thing is that nobody sells the Quest for Glory anthology anymore, not even Sierra. I emailed them about any copies they might have in a dusty warehouse somewhere, but they don't have any.
The King's Quest anthology is still available, but to my knowledge does not contain quite everything in the series (for instance, the -first- version of KQ1...with pixels the size of fists, to borrow a CmdrTaco phrase). At least you can still buy it, though.
There are many games that I would gladly pay for, if they were still published (the Quest for Glory series, Shadows of Yserbius and sequels, Moraff's Revenge and sequels, etc). But, since they are not (and believe me, I've tried...I emailed Sierra many times and I've called Moraffware), I am forced to scour the abandonware sites. And, indeed, I've been pretty successful. The fact that these people, who are doing something ostensibly illegal, can keep up with these games but the original companies (all of whom are still around, for the games I listed) can't is ridiculous. $5/download...$10/download...I'd pay.
Sure, some people would still 'share' it, but the real fans would pay for it. I'd especially like to pay $5-$10 for games that I no longer have the original media for (Wing Commander I and II, much of the early Kings Quest games, etc).
I wouldn't even care if they didn't offer support. I'd understand.
Anyway, I think it's patently foolish for companies not to offer these games for (for pay) download. Free would be nice, but I'd understand if they still wanna make a buck or two.
I believe what the question was getting at is that could WINE be made to function on top of Darwin running on x86 with XFree86 as the X server. I can't think of any reason why this couldn't be done (WINE is, to my knowledge, POSIX compliant...at least enough that it runs under the BSDs as well as Linux). However, what real benefit this would serve (until x86 Darwin is useful for something other than being technically interesting) is not clear. It would seem more practical to just run WINE under Linux, thus benefitting from the many as of yet unported Linux applications (unless someone duplicates the BSD Linux emulation under Darwin; I apologize if they have already).
Re:... to feed the hungry or to save your soul?
on
Geek Charities?
·
· Score: 1
"> charity is something you should do because you
> want to
I find this line of reasoning disgusting. "
Oh come off it man. How can you think that the idea that charity should be voluntary is 'disgusting?'
"This Christian mindset causes an unknown amount of tradegy (sic) every year, when followers of it fight the use of alternative efficient motivations for giving charity. Only charity given "for (sic) the goodness of the heart" is valuable in saving the givers soul."
Check it: nearly all Christian charity organizations (even missionaries) give to all people, irregardless of whether or not they are or become a Christian. Any that would not need to read the Bible a little more.
As far as motivation 'mattering' goes, well, in a sense it does. After all, which is better: giving to a poor child because he is poor or giving to a poor child because then his attractive sister will be more likely to date you? Obviously one is charitable and the other is sickly manipulative.
However, that has nothing to do with anybody's soul (at least not directly). As a Christian, I don't condemn those who give for essentially selfish reasons (like corps who give to enter a lower tax bracket), but I do consider it a plus if the giving is 'from the heart,' as would most people, I should think.
And as for your 'saving the givers' soul reasoning...it's pure bull. There is absolutely nothing in the Bible about charity or giving being necessary for (or even contributing towards) getting to Heaven.
So, anyway, check your facts and maybe consult some actual Christians before spouting off about the 'Christian mindset.'
The SoundBlaster Live! mp3+ was touted as having onboard mp3 encoding capability (through the firmware...it's the same card as the others). Specifically, it claimed a 5x acceleration up to 320kbps. As far as I can tell (I've got one), the acceleration is only used by the included mp3 encoding software.
The thing is, with that and a p3-500 I can turn an album's worth of wav's into mp3s in about, oh, 10 minutes (vs. about 50 minutes in software using BladeEnc).
I've got a friend with an 850MHz Athlon and a Kenwood TrueX 72X drive. With the Xing encoder he can do an album in 5 minutes flat...from the CD! The 72X drives are a MUST for mp3 encoding...the drive speed will almost certainly be your bottleneck.
Slashdot Mirror
That story was on slashdot some time ago. That's why it was rejected. Sometimes the editors do actually remember previous posts.
The voyager plaque
i ct ure=/images/h_pioneer_update_02.gif
http://www.space.com/cgi-bin/click2enlarge.pl?p
makes use of almost no ideograms, as such. It's mainly a picture of a man and woman, the spacecraft, and a diagram illustrating how to get to the sun, provided you know about some pulsars and the center of the galaxy.
Anyway, I doubt they'd even want to put any kind of language on the plaque, even if they did it again. Simply put, it's impossible to encode so much informational redundancy that it cannot be interpreted to meen something bad/aggressive/insulting. Although the same thing said about 100 times, in different languages, all encoded for maximum redundancy, could conceivably be effective at showing that we have language, I doubt even that could prevent 'them' from thinking we meant them harm (if that's what they wanted to think).
As for your assertion that music grads make the best programmers, I think you have a far too narrow and biased view of the skills and talents required to produce good software.
IBM et al. sought out both mathematicians and musicians. Well, rather, they noticied that the people who were good at programming were mathematicians and musicians, then began seeking them out. Turing, von Neumann, and others were not primarily musicians (if they were at all). They were mathematicians first and foremost.
tuxedo.org does house some of ESR's libertarian/anti-gun control stuff. It could be that they (being the censorware folks) consider such 'radical' pro-2nd amendment rights and anti-current-form-of-government opinions to be offensive.
Correction. Moore's Law (paraphrased) states that processor speed will double every 18 months. So...
:)
518400/2^(6000/1.5) = 3.932 * 10^1199 seconds.
Pretty substantial difference....sort of.
From scanning through the (japanese) page it looks like it'll have 16MB of RAM and 3.6MB of flash ROM. That compares somewhat favorably to Windows CE apps, but I dunno how much I like the idea of 16MB to fit the OS and apps and data into. Since it has a CF slot, I'd definitely buy a 64MB CF card. Maybe even more, I dunno. Problem is, doing something like that would likely make a (probably) already expensive device even more so. The pictures do look pretty sweet though.
2001-03-16 11:42:55
(good gosh. lameness filter says that the post (minus these parenthetical expressions) is all caps and like yelling. very silly)
That's ridiculous. We don't have accurate temperature data from earlier than the 1800s, and even then the data wasn't collected from a diverse set of locations. So, then, how could we know that "the current Global warming trend is 10 to 100 faster than any previous naturally occurring trend."? The simple answer is, we can't.
We can know about CO2 trends through antarctic ice cores, but we don't really know how closely CO2 correllates with global temperatures. What those CO2 trends do reveal, though, is that a great deal of the carbon dioxide is due to natural causes, such as volcanos.
The usual environmentalist response at this point is to start raving about sulfur dioxiode, CFCs, and water vapor and how they matter more than CO2. If that's the case, then why rant about CO2 in the first place? Speaks volumes to me about how well thought out the environmentalist argument is.
The codec was (re)designed so that most actual spam would decode into a message, even if it was gibberish? Would certainly improve the steganography aspect, I think.LI>
The codec was (re)designed so as to be irreducibly computationally expensive to decode messages, thus making scanning difficult, but on a modern machine decoding
Admittedly I'm not an expert on spamming methods, but it seems to me like most spam appears to be addressed to one recipient anyway, so I don't think the 'one recipient therefore fake spam' correlation holds, as some have suggested.
Honestly, if these ideas were to be implemented (well, the first two, anyway), I don't think they would need to open source the program. That is, one could just as easily be made up with those goals in mind, since a complete rewrite would be necessary anyway.
To me, this seems like a potential way to produce 'ubiquitous encryption.' If the codec was remade so that it was computationally expensive and regular spam decodes without errors, then it would dramatically improve the percentage of encrypted mail.
Or, better yet, since regular spam would decrypt to 'gibberish,' why not have the decrypted output be code for use with an actual cypher? Suddenly I imagine a PGP->Spam encoder and decoder...imagine, every spam message is potentially a PGP message! That'd really mess up carnivore/echelon. It'll probably never happen, though. But the possibility is certainly tantalizing...
There exists such a thing, and I've received many things packed with it. They come in the form of cylindrical peanuts that have the appearance of normal foam peanuts, although they're a light brown instead of white. Anyway, they're made from starch, so they dissolve quite easily in water (takes about 4-5 seconds in lukewarm water) and are safe to eat (well, to a point, anyway...after enough I'm sure the cardboard dust et al would pose a threat). I dunno how well they stand up to sunlight and such, but I'm sure your friendly neighborhood bacteria would have no problem with them after they hit the landfill.
Actually, nobody said any of this is 'cool' or all good.' I imagine that many of the same groups that oppose hemp and abortion will undoubtedly oppose industrial transgenics. Sheesh, just because some small company has done it doesn't mean that it somehow gets a mandate from heaven. I imagine the anti-hemp and anti-abortion folks (or hell, much of anybody!) probably haven't even yet heard of Nexia.
Chill, man.
WRT the '142% improvement' benchmarks floating around, there are several issues. First, they used make clean, not make mrproper between compiles. make clean leaves some stuff lying around (and consequently speeds up the compile). Second, they used -j3 on the dual compile but not -j2 on the regular one. -j2 can speed up compiles on uniprocessor systems not insignificantly. But, even with that, I can't imagine the difference getting too far away from 100% improvement. Not that that's suprising...compiles are 'embarassingly parallel.'
The patent will be valid, but a court might not support you. Trademarks become invalid if they aren't enforced, not patents.
The patent is still valid, but a court will probably not support you. Trademarks legally become invalid if not enforced. Get it right.
The page is immensely, well, fluffy. There's almost no actual information ("STT: Super Thin Technology," anyone?). The Press Release is particularly telling. It's basically a pep-talk/biography for the founder of DTC (Randi Altchul). Apparently she's 'taking her Toy Mentality to the Technology and Telecom Industries and having a lot of fun along the way!!!' Sounds pretty fake to me. The Press Release claims that she's been granted more than 20 patents (including ones for the 'PAPER LAP TOP'), but there are no links or even direct references to said patents (like, say, patent numbers) anywhere on the webiste. Almost certainly a hoax or a scam.
Just wanted to put forth that I donated $5. I figure I've gotten way more than $5 out of Linux, but, hey, I'm a poor student, right? ;)
One of the many 2.4 backports that 2.2.18 contains (since somewhere in the -pre series...around 11, I think) is the DRM (direct rendering manager, the part of the kernel that controls access to the hardware through DRI, the direct rendering infratstructure). Anyway, unfortunately, it's not very useful because it only supports DRI v2, and the current XFree86 code uses v1. Until the XFree86 code is upgraded, 3d acceleration under XFree86 4 still won't work. Ah well. At least the codebase is there.
I'm aware of the anthologies. The thing is that nobody sells the Quest for Glory anthology anymore, not even Sierra. I emailed them about any copies they might have in a dusty warehouse somewhere, but they don't have any.
The King's Quest anthology is still available, but to my knowledge does not contain quite everything in the series (for instance, the -first- version of KQ1...with pixels the size of fists, to borrow a CmdrTaco phrase). At least you can still buy it, though.
There are many games that I would gladly pay for, if they were still published (the Quest for Glory series, Shadows of Yserbius and sequels, Moraff's Revenge and sequels, etc). But, since they are not (and believe me, I've tried...I emailed Sierra many times and I've called Moraffware), I am forced to scour the abandonware sites. And, indeed, I've been pretty successful. The fact that these people, who are doing something ostensibly illegal, can keep up with these games but the original companies (all of whom are still around, for the games I listed) can't is ridiculous. $5/download...$10/download...I'd pay.
Sure, some people would still 'share' it, but the real fans would pay for it. I'd especially like to pay $5-$10 for games that I no longer have the original media for (Wing Commander I and II, much of the early Kings Quest games, etc).
I wouldn't even care if they didn't offer support. I'd understand.
Anyway, I think it's patently foolish for companies not to offer these games for (for pay) download. Free would be nice, but I'd understand if they still wanna make a buck or two.
I believe what the question was getting at is that could WINE be made to function on top of Darwin running on x86 with XFree86 as the X server. I can't think of any reason why this couldn't be done (WINE is, to my knowledge, POSIX compliant...at least enough that it runs under the BSDs as well as Linux). However, what real benefit this would serve (until x86 Darwin is useful for something other than being technically interesting) is not clear. It would seem more practical to just run WINE under Linux, thus benefitting from the many as of yet unported Linux applications (unless someone duplicates the BSD Linux emulation under Darwin; I apologize if they have already).
here
"> charity is something you should do because you
> want to
I find this line of reasoning disgusting. "
Oh come off it man. How can you think that the idea that charity should be voluntary is 'disgusting?'
"This Christian mindset causes an unknown amount of tradegy (sic) every year, when followers of it fight the use of alternative efficient motivations for giving charity. Only charity given "for (sic) the goodness of the heart" is valuable in saving the givers soul."
Check it: nearly all Christian charity organizations (even missionaries) give to all people, irregardless of whether or not they are or become a Christian. Any that would not need to read the Bible a little more.
As far as motivation 'mattering' goes, well, in a sense it does. After all, which is better: giving to a poor child because he is poor or giving to a poor child because then his attractive sister will be more likely to date you? Obviously one is charitable and the other is sickly manipulative.
However, that has nothing to do with anybody's soul (at least not directly). As a Christian, I don't condemn those who give for essentially selfish reasons (like corps who give to enter a lower tax bracket), but I do consider it a plus if the giving is 'from the heart,' as would most people, I should think.
And as for your 'saving the givers' soul reasoning...it's pure bull. There is absolutely nothing in the Bible about charity or giving being necessary for (or even contributing towards) getting to Heaven.
So, anyway, check your facts and maybe consult some actual Christians before spouting off about the 'Christian mindset.'
What are you smoking? I've -played- Castlevania: SOTN on the PlayStation and own the soundtrack (which is pretty good, btw).
The SoundBlaster Live! mp3+ was touted as having onboard mp3 encoding capability (through the firmware...it's the same card as the others). Specifically, it claimed a 5x acceleration up to 320kbps. As far as I can tell (I've got one), the acceleration is only used by the included mp3 encoding software.
The thing is, with that and a p3-500 I can turn an album's worth of wav's into mp3s in about, oh, 10 minutes (vs. about 50 minutes in software using BladeEnc).
I've got a friend with an 850MHz Athlon and a Kenwood TrueX 72X drive. With the Xing encoder he can do an album in 5 minutes flat...from the CD! The 72X drives are a MUST for mp3 encoding...the drive speed will almost certainly be your bottleneck.