A research project called dasher allows you to type with only a moving cursor. It employs clever language models to make it efficient. An eyeball tracker on a PDA with this software may be easier and faster than fiddling around with a stylus. It is GPL'd, source and binaries are available.
The only problem with using your own domain for all email is that given your domain, people can find out where you live. I would like to stay anonymous when giving an address to most websites thank you.
"Researchers at the Palomar Observatory have measured the most accurate value of a stellar distance to date"
This is not true; as the article says, they found the most accurate value of a stellar distance for a Cepheid variable. To do this they had to use clever interferometric techniques. However, a lot of closer stars can be measured more accurately using a parallax method. This involves observing the difference in position of the star over 6 month interval.
Anyone who has done a physics course will know that measured physical quantities always come with an uncertainty attached. It just so happens that the uncertainties with these measurements are very large. Proper papers will always quote those uncertainties. By the time it filters to the general press they have probably been stripped as 'the public wouldn't understand'.
Unless you have a particular interest in the subject, the important thing is to look at the order of magnitude of the result. They are able to say that the star is nearer 1,000 ly than 10,000 ly. That is still very useful. Do you think an engineer can tell you exactly what his bridge can hold? Of course he can't, but he'll estimate, as you put it, a capacity from an approximate model. Then you'll know you can put 100 cars on it, but not 1000.
As for you second point, horoscopes are based on positions of constellations at certain times; the distance of the stars from the earth is irrelevant. Incidentally, the constellations are no longer in the same positions in the sky as they were when the star signs were invented. But I won't start an astrology rant...
Re:How does this affect the Hubble Constant?
on
Stellar Distances
·
· Score: 1
Firstly, just to be picky, this was about a Cepheid variable star. It is too far away to measure by parallax (which only works out to about 50 parsecs).
As to your main point, I think it is just a matter of standard error statistics. If you take n independant samples of something, then you reduce the standard error by root(n). The Hubble constant is derived from the values taken from many galaxies, so its value is more precisely known than the distance of any one star.
This point is illustrated well on this image. As you can see if you pick one star/galaxy at random you could get a value for the hubble constant in a range of about 50-100. However, just looking at the graph, it is fairly clear that if H0 takes just one value, it would be sensible to give it a smaller range than that.
Wide-spread problems like these are happening all the time. This Register article from today has another exploit (not a bug, but very common misconfiguration) that has recently been used to compromise 160+ sites in the UK. A full explanation was helpfully dumped on one of the compromised sites, and they still haven't noticed (source www.ntk.net). If you read the explanation of the exploit it could have been used for any purpose including DDOS.
It is amazing how many computers can go down in one blow. As the hacker left in his explanation: "If you think education is expensive, then try ignorance"
If you just want a choice of either Perl or PHP for each page, it is (clearly) no problem. You just set up both and get them to handle MIME types properly, so that Perl pages are.pl and PHP pages are.php. BTW I find it much easier to use.php then.php3 or.php4 or whatever, you'll only regret it otherwise when you upgrade.
I assume that you actually want each page to be parsed by both. I don't know how it 'should' be done, but I can think of a couple of hacky ways of doing it. Firstly, you could write a script that pipes the output of parsing by one interpretor into the other. However, this would lose the performance advantage of using the server modules. Instead, you could use this fun fact from the php manul:
As long as support for the "URL fopen wrapper" is enabled when you configure PHP (which it is unless you explicitly pass the --disable-url-fopen-wrapper flag to configure), you can use HTTP and FTP URLs with most functions that take a filename as a parameter, including the require() and include() statements.
Note: You can't use remote files in include() and require() statements on Windows.
So as long as you aren't using windows (haha) you could include a.pl page from your server in a php document. Then the results of the Perl parsed page would get interpreted by php. You could then set the location of the.pl's as readable only by the local server, so that remote users would have to read the pages through php as well as perl. HTH.
Actually I was planning to try Atheos this weekend. I assumed it would work - but graphics support is a bit dodgy on non-supported platforms, so I can believe it doesn't. It is a shame as Atheos warns that the native FS is beta and using it might trash your drive. A virtual environment is definately the way to try something like that out. Anyone know if it works in Bochs?
I may have been told that PHP is lighter than perl, but that could be complete FUD. But surely it doesn't matter? IMHO the main cost in web development is developer time and ease of management. If you know the nuances of mod_perl, are happy with it and it does what you want, why change? There are very big web sites using both Perl and PHP that work - so clearly both are perfectly viable and will be around for a long time to come.
These books may be useful, but mostly everything I have needed has been online. The PHP manual is pretty comprehensive and easy to navigate. If you do not have it, download it now!
I have found a lot of help on http://www.phpbuilder.com/ this has a lot of source code, configuration help and helpful forums. From just these two sources you could certainly produce something of slashcode complexity if you have some programming experience.
If you would only use VMWare to emulate win95 or win98 then this alternative would seem to offer a better solution. Because it works differently, it takes up much less memory.
However, I use VMWare for testing new Linux, BSD or NT setups, or for playing with BeOS, Atheos, QNX or whatever else is around. You cannot do these things with Win4Lin as it is designed just to give a windows replacement.
Win2k professional would reboot itself. It did this a couple of times a week. No rhyme or reason, it would just reboot itself.
This problem is due to the system rebooting itself on failure. You can stop this (default) behaviour:
Type Windoze-Key break, advanced tab, Startup and Recovery button, uncheck "automatically reboot".
Then when the system crashes you get a blue screen telling you why. When I've had crashes it has been due to a bad driver - with MS approved drivers your uptime should be of the order of months not weeks.
I'd pass that on to your colleague, it should really help.
The opening page is at
http://www.flashvos.com/page_1.htm. Their site is fairly amateurish and incomplete, however, you can get a feel for what they are doing. They should really get some design consultants if they are actually serious.
Incidentally www.vos.com links to an adult resource, which can't chuff the company for its professional looking prospects.
Often education is much more about life skills than people think. At some point, most people have complained to their teachers that what they are learning is pointless. The answer always comes back that we are not just learning the material but also study skills. In the work I have done I have not learnt much about computers but I have learnt a lot about working for people (they never know what they want and they force you to do stupid things). If you work for people, they may force you to work in their standard environment. They may force you to use a commenting style you are not used to. They may make you use libraries that you do not like. The teacher here, while making life easier for himself is mirroring what some companies will do. Now is the time you have to learn to be flexible, even if you think the people in charge are wrong.
[new algorithm] is 12 times smaller than MPEG4 and 6 times smaller than the previously best published algorithm
In other words we could already do twice better than MPEG4. This would be very significant for downloads, yet I don't see videos twice as compressed as MPEG4 on the net...do you? Somehow I think it will be a long time until this is put into standards and implemented. Sad.
What annoys me is how so many daemons are far too keen to show off exactly what they are. My web server does not need to reveal that it is Megatronic-httpd V1.03.23b; although it will do because Megatron Corp wants the server to appear highly in netcraft surveys.
When I am university I get a lot of probes on my machine, these are almost always site wide probes. Script kiddies keep databases of IP's and what daemons they are running. This means that as soon as an exploit is found they can immediately go to a load of hosts they know about. I check security bulletins but not twice a day like a lot of script kiddies will.
Of course with open software it is easier to remove any version reporting. I'm not arguing against open software. However, rubbishing obscurity of all kinds is foolish. Sometimes it will buy you just enough time to keep ahead of the kiddies.
I put the link there because I thought it would be genuinely useful for some people. Especially as just as people were figuring out the "www->partners" loophole they changed the scheme.
What I think is a shame is that an A/C posted seconds before me with the same link. My comment was modded up and the A/C's was left alone. This shows that the moderators are not browsing at 0, while IMHO they should be browsing at -1. That is a shame.
Exactly, providing free software for windows is an excellent way to show the benefits of the open source model. Convincing a boss or a sysadmin to change OS on machines is difficult. However, if the tools that are available under free OS's are also available on windows, a migration path will be much easier.
You always had to pay for mysql under Micro$oft operating systems. Will the windows source base be GPL'd too? If it is not, I take it the GPL would allow someone else to port the *nix code?
I know the average slashdot user hates windows, but a lot of people still use it.
Slashdot Mirror
A research project called dasher allows you to type with only a moving cursor. It employs clever language models to make it efficient. An eyeball tracker on a PDA with this software may be easier and faster than fiddling around with a stylus. It is GPL'd, source and binaries are available.
The only problem with using your own domain for all email is that given your domain, people can find out where you live. I would like to stay anonymous when giving an address to most websites thank you.
This is not true; as the article says, they found the most accurate value of a stellar distance for a Cepheid variable. To do this they had to use clever interferometric techniques. However, a lot of closer stars can be measured more accurately using a parallax method. This involves observing the difference in position of the star over 6 month interval.
Anyone who has done a physics course will know that measured physical quantities always come with an uncertainty attached. It just so happens that the uncertainties with these measurements are very large. Proper papers will always quote those uncertainties. By the time it filters to the general press they have probably been stripped as 'the public wouldn't understand'.
Unless you have a particular interest in the subject, the important thing is to look at the order of magnitude of the result. They are able to say that the star is nearer 1,000 ly than 10,000 ly. That is still very useful. Do you think an engineer can tell you exactly what his bridge can hold? Of course he can't, but he'll estimate, as you put it, a capacity from an approximate model. Then you'll know you can put 100 cars on it, but not 1000.
As for you second point, horoscopes are based on positions of constellations at certain times; the distance of the stars from the earth is irrelevant. Incidentally, the constellations are no longer in the same positions in the sky as they were when the star signs were invented. But I won't start an astrology rant...
Firstly, just to be picky, this was about a Cepheid variable star. It is too far away to measure by parallax (which only works out to about 50 parsecs).
As to your main point, I think it is just a matter of standard error statistics. If you take n independant samples of something, then you reduce the standard error by root(n). The Hubble constant is derived from the values taken from many galaxies, so its value is more precisely known than the distance of any one star.
This point is illustrated well on this image. As you can see if you pick one star/galaxy at random you could get a value for the hubble constant in a range of about 50-100. However, just looking at the graph, it is fairly clear that if H0 takes just one value, it would be sensible to give it a smaller range than that.
Wide-spread problems like these are happening all the time. This Register article from today has another exploit (not a bug, but very common misconfiguration) that has recently been used to compromise 160+ sites in the UK. A full explanation was helpfully dumped on one of the compromised sites, and they still haven't noticed (source www.ntk.net). If you read the explanation of the exploit it could have been used for any purpose including DDOS.
It is amazing how many computers can go down in one blow. As the hacker left in his explanation: "If you think education is expensive, then try ignorance"
If you just want a choice of either Perl or PHP for each page, it is (clearly) no problem. You just set up both and get them to handle MIME types properly, so that Perl pages are .pl and PHP pages are .php. BTW I find it much easier to use .php then .php3 or .php4 or whatever, you'll only regret it otherwise when you upgrade.
I assume that you actually want each page to be parsed by both. I don't know how it 'should' be done, but I can think of a couple of hacky ways of doing it. Firstly, you could write a script that pipes the output of parsing by one interpretor into the other. However, this would lose the performance advantage of using the server modules. Instead, you could use this fun fact from the php manul:
So as long as you aren't using windows (haha) you could include a .pl page from your server in a php document. Then the results of the Perl parsed page would get interpreted by php. You could then set the location of the .pl's as readable only by the local server, so that remote users would have to read the pages through php as well as perl. HTH.
Actually I was planning to try Atheos this weekend. I assumed it would work - but graphics support is a bit dodgy on non-supported platforms, so I can believe it doesn't. It is a shame as Atheos warns that the native FS is beta and using it might trash your drive. A virtual environment is definately the way to try something like that out. Anyone know if it works in Bochs?
Timothy needs to remove the following:
</TD></TR></TBODY></TABLE>
From the article source, just after:
"The PHP Pocket Reference from Fatbrain"
to fix the problem. Surely putting a Perl html validator into slashcode, wouldn't be hard. Oh but slashcode doesn't pass the w3 validator anyway...
I may have been told that PHP is lighter than perl, but that could be complete FUD. But surely it doesn't matter? IMHO the main cost in web development is developer time and ease of management. If you know the nuances of mod_perl, are happy with it and it does what you want, why change? There are very big web sites using both Perl and PHP that work - so clearly both are perfectly viable and will be around for a long time to come.
These books may be useful, but mostly everything I have needed has been online. The PHP manual is pretty comprehensive and easy to navigate. If you do not have it, download it now!
I have found a lot of help on http://www.phpbuilder.com/ this has a lot of source code, configuration help and helpful forums. From just these two sources you could certainly produce something of slashcode complexity if you have some programming experience.
If you would only use VMWare to emulate win95 or win98 then this alternative would seem to offer a better solution. Because it works differently, it takes up much less memory.
However, I use VMWare for testing new Linux, BSD or NT setups, or for playing with BeOS, Atheos, QNX or whatever else is around. You cannot do these things with Win4Lin as it is designed just to give a windows replacement.
The link given for PGP says:
So if that doesn't mean you (it is not I) go to the international site. The link given has versions for many platforms.
Right click on "My Computer" on the desktop and choose properties for the same effect as WindowsKey-Break.
This problem is due to the system rebooting itself on failure. You can stop this (default) behaviour:
Type Windoze-Key break, advanced tab, Startup and Recovery button, uncheck "automatically reboot".
Then when the system crashes you get a blue screen telling you why. When I've had crashes it has been due to a bad driver - with MS approved drivers your uptime should be of the order of months not weeks.
I'd pass that on to your colleague, it should really help.
The opening page is at http://www.flashvos.com/page_1.htm. Their site is fairly amateurish and incomplete, however, you can get a feel for what they are doing. They should really get some design consultants if they are actually serious.
Incidentally www.vos.com links to an adult resource, which can't chuff the company for its professional looking prospects.
Often education is much more about life skills than people think. At some point, most people have complained to their teachers that what they are learning is pointless. The answer always comes back that we are not just learning the material but also study skills. In the work I have done I have not learnt much about computers but I have learnt a lot about working for people (they never know what they want and they force you to do stupid things). If you work for people, they may force you to work in their standard environment. They may force you to use a commenting style you are not used to. They may make you use libraries that you do not like. The teacher here, while making life easier for himself is mirroring what some companies will do. Now is the time you have to learn to be flexible, even if you think the people in charge are wrong.
[new algorithm] is 12 times smaller than MPEG4 and 6 times smaller than the previously best published algorithm
In other words we could already do twice better than MPEG4. This would be very significant for downloads, yet I don't see videos twice as compressed as MPEG4 on the net...do you? Somehow I think it will be a long time until this is put into standards and implemented. Sad.
What annoys me is how so many daemons are far too keen to show off exactly what they are. My web server does not need to reveal that it is Megatronic-httpd V1.03.23b; although it will do because Megatron Corp wants the server to appear highly in netcraft surveys.
When I am university I get a lot of probes on my machine, these are almost always site wide probes. Script kiddies keep databases of IP's and what daemons they are running. This means that as soon as an exploit is found they can immediately go to a load of hosts they know about. I check security bulletins but not twice a day like a lot of script kiddies will.
Of course with open software it is easier to remove any version reporting. I'm not arguing against open software. However, rubbishing obscurity of all kinds is foolish. Sometimes it will buy you just enough time to keep ahead of the kiddies.
I put the link there because I thought it would be genuinely useful for some people. Especially as just as people were figuring out the "www->partners" loophole they changed the scheme.
What I think is a shame is that an A/C posted seconds before me with the same link. My comment was modded up and the A/C's was left alone. This shows that the moderators are not browsing at 0, while IMHO they should be browsing at -1. That is a shame.
Here.
http://www1 0.nytimes.com/library/tech/00/07/biztech/articles/ 17lab.html
Yes, and the MySQL site used to say that it took them 3 times longer to develop it for windows. I was just wondering if their stance had changed.
Exactly, providing free software for windows is an excellent way to show the benefits of the open source model. Convincing a boss or a sysadmin to change OS on machines is difficult. However, if the tools that are available under free OS's are also available on windows, a migration path will be much easier.
You always had to pay for mysql under Micro$oft operating systems. Will the windows source base be GPL'd too? If it is not, I take it the GPL would allow someone else to port the *nix code?
I know the average slashdot user hates windows, but a lot of people still use it.