My view of the BSD license is this: OK, I busted my ass on this great piece of software, you can steal it, change the name and sell it.
But my view of the BSD license may be: I busted my ass on this great piece of software, you can use it if you wish, change the name if you wish and even try to make money out of it if you think you can. Good for you. I still have my software and so does everyone else who wants a copy for whatever reason.
Perhaps users of the BSD license are more philanthropic than those who distribute under the GPL. Not only can everyone get a copy of the software, use it, study it, modify it and redistribute it, they are also allowed to sell it as they wish without in anyway preventing the original software from being treated in the same way by anyone else.
Scintillate scintillate globule vivific.
Fain would I fathom thy nature specific.
Loftily poised in the aether capacious
And strongly resembling a gem carbonaceous.
Secondly, striping isn't Jupiter's style - it prefers spots, especially great red ones.
Have you ever actually looked at Jupiter with your own eyes, suitably assisted with a telescope? Even a 10cm telescope is sufficient to see plenty of detail.
I can assure you it is most certainly striped (or "zoned" and "belted" as the professionals call it). The spots are much harder to see. Only the GRS is invariably present and even that can be difficult to see at times when its colour fades.
Want something more impressive? 50,000-year-old paleolithic stone hammers that still work like the day they were new. Now that's quality construction.
Agreed, though hammers are relatively simple technology.
I have a flint hand axe which is still in perfect working condition, the edge as good as new. It fits nicely in my right hand and the guy who made it chose his materials well. The flint is not only the right size but the part that fits in the palm is nicely rounded and there is a groove for the thumb in exactly the right place. Those features were formed naturally on one side of the original flint. The other side was removed to leave a nice smooth plane and the cutting edge created afterwards. All in all a very nice piece of workmanship and still fully functional.
It's amazing what can be found in the debris of a building site.
The English language has some quirks. this is one of them.
Most possessives use an apostrophe, some don't:
Its
His
Hers
Ours
Theirs
Mine
There are possibly others, but these make a good start. Note that 'mine' doesn't even have an "s"
Another in standard, though somewhat archaic English is "Thine". Some dialects use "Yourn" for the second person singular, to distinguish from the plural "Yours". I've heard it used quite a bit around the Liverpool area and, indeed, use it myself moderately often but only in speech and, up to now, never in writing. I'm fairly sure this posting is the first time I've used it in text. Note that neither of these has either an apostrophe nor an 's'.
Ob-on-topic: IMO, it doesn't matter a whit what license is used on the code written by the MSR people. The researchers are doing research, not selling apps. Now that the ideas are being published they can be implemented by anyone and the results distributed under any license. There may be patents involved, I don't know, but if so they can be circumvented (use different ideas to gain the same overall effect); accommodated (abide by Microsoft's licensing requirements); or out-lived (wait until the patents have expired).
Many companies (IBM for instance) have technical bulletin libraries for exactly this purpose; if they can't justify the cost of the patent process for a particular idea, then they publish the idea to record a date for prior art 'discussions'.
I'd say they are very much getting it. They are using brand recognition in one area to expand in another. Many, many successful corporations do that. Google, for instance, exploits their superb brand recognition gained from a web search engine to branch out into news.
Anyway, it's their party and they'll invite who they want to. You don't have to go there if you don't like those terms.
Wake me when AMD or Intel realizes that with the same amount of silicon, they could have dozens of Pentium 3s/Athlons at close to the same clock speed, providing much better performance at a much lower R&D and silicon cost
And much higher software development cost though, to be fair, most of that would not be done by AMD or Intel.
I've written code to run on medium scale clusters and have made very good use of them.
On the right sort of application, a 32-cpu cluster of PII-300 machines beats a single 3GHz P4 hands-down and a 32-cpu cluster of PIII-1000 blows it completely out of the water. I've extensive experience with both clusters. Unfortunately such applications are very much a minority interest. My interest is in computational number theory. There are a few others, but most people just can't make cost-effective use of more than a few processors.
Also unfortunately, writing code for medium sized clusters is not easy and it can be very difficult to find any parallelism in a task let alone exploit it efficiently. If it were easy, we would have seen clusters in widespread use for several decades now.
I don't see why a manufacturer like Dell should stick to only one CPU. If they offer their customers the choice, they would have many more customers
You are probably right.
However, would they have sufficiently more customers to cover the cost of having to stock a greater range of parts? Such considerations are extremely important when working at the insanely low profit margins where Dell and the like make their living.
In the UK we have a saying: pile it high and sell it cheap. That's exactly what Dell is doing.
So who in this debate about ammonia is right, please?
I would claim that I am.
I would also strongly recommend that you do some independent investigation. You are much more likely to come up with a satisfying answer that way than by asking on a forum like this. Google is your friend, as are public libraries if such are accessible.
BTW, I should have picked up on the claim about ammonia not having sufficiently strong van der Waals forces. That one is also untrue or, at least, misguided. In highly polar molecules (such as water, methanol, hydrogen fluoride and ammonia), the hydrogen atoms carry a significant positive charge which is attracted to the negative charge on its bonded atom (oxygen, oxygen, fluorine and nitrogen respectively) in neighboring atoms. This attraction is usually called a hydrogen bond and is responsible for many otherwise anomalous effects, including the raised melting and boiling points and the fact that ice at the freezing point is less dense than the liquid at the same temperature.
NH3 Polar, well, yes, as you point out, but if you don't mind me qualifying it a bit, I'd say NH3 isn't usefully polar, in that it doesn't have the equivalent of Van der Walls forces between liquid molecules at a strength sufficient to much help stretch the range of liquidity (a tiny bit, but not much).
By a hell of a lot, actually. Compare its liquid range with methane, which has essentially the same molecular weight (CH4 = 16, NH3=17, H2O=18).
NH3 is also usefully polar in that it allows a good many salts, acids and bases to disolve in it, again like H2O. Methane doesn't.
The 2 Hydrogens in a water molecule don't line up on the opposite sides with the oxygen atom in the middle, but form a rather pronounced bend.
Correct.
By contrast the three hydrogens in Ammonia don't leave the Nitrogen sticking out by itself. They may not maintain perfect 120 degree angles in a flat plane around the N's "equator" under all conditions, but they are pretty close to it.
Incorrect. The NH3 molecule is substantially pyramidal. The H-N-H angle is close to 107 degreesIt's the flipping between the pyramidal configurations that's the basis for the ammonia maser. (Actually, it isn't, really, but unless you want a digression into molecular quantum mechanics that explanation is good enough and will have to do.)
Now as regards life forms, what applies to a relatively pure liquid is more than usually not something we can extrapolate too much to a mixture, so I wouldn't read too much into it. Our one example of liquid oceans is not exactly pure H2O, after all, and showing that there are some reasons life is less likely in close to pure Methane or Ammonia doesn't limit a lot of other possibilities.
Good! It is extremely unlikely that an ocean would be pure ammonia, any more than our oceans are pure water. It's rather likely, I suggest, that a predominantly ammonia ocean would contain a large amount of disolved water, which would raise the liquid range and make the chemistry both different and probably more interesting from a biochemical point of view.
If it's just that, then there is at least one precedent at Oxford, as a number of passwords of POP users were captured by a compromised linux box (vanilla, unpatched RedHat 3 or 4, iirc) in about 98 or 99. OUCS detected the box, and then the sniffing, within one or two hours and froze all accounts, which I thought was pretty good going for such a huge place.
If it's the incident I remember, it would be 97. Otherwise, after I left.
Yes, OUCS staff, and a good number of others elsewhere in the university were paying attention. I hope they still are.
the cops told the Uni that it was something that should be resolved "internally".
Translated: We've got better things to do, so stop wasting our time or we'll nick you.
As someone who, in the company of the University Marshal, has actually briefed the Oxford police about a computer security incident involving an Oxford undergraduate, I can state authoritatively that it is extremely unlikely to be an accurate translation.
A more plausible translation, though please remember that I have no personal knowledge of the present case and so everything is hypothetical, is that the police said something along the lines: we could take action, but this would take a lot of time and involve a lot of expense for all concerned. You (meaning the University) are in a much better position to deal with these people.
Added to which, I wouldn't be surprised if the Proctors have very little understanding of exactly what has been done or how. They will assume the worst. They probably just want to be seen to be taking the matter seriously and don't know exactly how serious it really is or what reaction is appropriate.
If the Proctors didn't have very much understanding before stuff hit the fan, they do now. They are not stupid. They are drawn from the academic body and serve for a year each. Although they may be world-class experts in French Literature or Assyriology or whatever, they know how and where to find relevant experts to bring them up to date on what they need to know.
In a previous life I was one such expert. My job description included keeping on top of computer security at Oxford University. It also included taking preemptive measures, reacting to incidents and performing forensic investigations afterwards. I briefed the Proctors and other University officials on several occasions and invariably found that they very rapidly picked up and understood the information presented.
My sympathies go out to my ex-colleagues and my successor(s) in the post.
Neutrinos might be an interesting communication solution, but you also have the problem of having to point them in the right direction.
Not really. You take a beam of, say electrons, moving at ultrarelativistic energies and smash them into a target thereby generating, amongst other things, relativistic muons. The latter are emitted in a well collimated beam and as they decay to electrons and muon-antineutrinos, the latter are themselves created in a highly collimated beam. All you have to arrange is that the initial electron particle beam is pointing in the correct direction. It's not entirely trivial but neither is it excessively difficult to use strong magnetic fields to do the job.
This very technique was used at Fermilab recently to direct a neutrino beam at a neutrino telescope in order to calibrate it.
Also, if the Navy could actually produce gravitational waves, the thought arises that we wouldn't actually need a navy at all...
The Navy can actually produce gravitational waves. My fingers are emitting gravitational waves as they move to type this response. Matter in non-uniform motion generates gravitational waves.
In both cases the waves are far too weak to be detected, let alone be used for communication.
Perhaps he/she is a Brit, or someone else who correctly spells the word as "defence", and not as the Americans do "defense". The MOD is Ministry of Defence; the DOD is Department of Defense.
Apparently Israel is spending $500M on defence this year. Defence is thirty feet high and goes all around Israel.
Give the linux admin cfengine and he'll be able to handle hundreds of linux servers, and won't be running around like a headless chicken windoze admin.
Someone admining hundreds of windoze boxes ought to be running SMS instead of running around like a headless chicken. SMS may not be perfect but it does a good job.
The choice is having an H-Bomb or Smallpox gas spray. The possiblity of maybe getting a disease or being instantly vaporized.
The lucky minority get instantly vaporized. The unlucky majority get flash-fried on one side, or have their clothes melt into their skin, or get skewered by the flying shards of glass and metal, or spend the rest of their lives buried under rubble, or take weeks to die of radiation poisoning or of diseases contracted from eating, drinking and just generally living in areas with no functioning sanitation or...
The experience of the only nuclear war we've had so far is that the "instant vaporization" scenario is of only relatively minor importance.
Except during the several month long, planet-wide dust storms (see Mariner 9).
That's a good point. Anyone know how much visible light gets filtered out by those things? They certainly scatter a lot, or we'd be able to see through them, but if you're standing on the ground how dark does it get?
Plants here on earth have evolved to live in diffused sunlight (think forest floors or predominantly cloudy areas) and so if a Martian dust storm lets through enough light that in itself won't be a killer.
Slashdot Mirror
But my view of the BSD license may be: I busted my ass on this great piece of software, you can use it if you wish, change the name if you wish and even try to make money out of it if you think you can. Good for you. I still have my software and so does everyone else who wants a copy for whatever reason.
Perhaps users of the BSD license are more philanthropic than those who distribute under the GPL. Not only can everyone get a copy of the software, use it, study it, modify it and redistribute it, they are also allowed to sell it as they wish without in anyway preventing the original software from being treated in the same way by anyone else.
Paul
Fain would I fathom thy nature specific.
Loftily poised in the aether capacious
And strongly resembling a gem carbonaceous.
Paul
Have you ever actually looked at Jupiter with your own eyes, suitably assisted with a telescope? Even a 10cm telescope is sufficient to see plenty of detail.
I can assure you it is most certainly striped (or "zoned" and "belted" as the professionals call it). The spots are much harder to see. Only the GRS is invariably present and even that can be difficult to see at times when its colour fades.
Paul
Agreed, though hammers are relatively simple technology.
I have a flint hand axe which is still in perfect working condition, the edge as good as new. It fits nicely in my right hand and the guy who made it chose his materials well. The flint is not only the right size but the part that fits in the palm is nicely rounded and there is a groove for the thumb in exactly the right place. Those features were formed naturally on one side of the original flint. The other side was removed to leave a nice smooth plane and the cutting edge created afterwards. All in all a very nice piece of workmanship and still fully functional.
It's amazing what can be found in the debris of a building site.
Paul
Paul
The English language has some quirks. this is one of them.
Most possessives use an apostrophe, some don't:
- Its
- His
- Hers
- Ours
- Theirs
- Mine
There are possibly others, but these make a good start. Note that 'mine' doesn't even have an "s"Another in standard, though somewhat archaic English is "Thine". Some dialects use "Yourn" for the second person singular, to distinguish from the plural "Yours". I've heard it used quite a bit around the Liverpool area and, indeed, use it myself moderately often but only in speech and, up to now, never in writing. I'm fairly sure this posting is the first time I've used it in text. Note that neither of these has either an apostrophe nor an 's'.
Ob-on-topic: IMO, it doesn't matter a whit what license is used on the code written by the MSR people. The researchers are doing research, not selling apps. Now that the ideas are being published they can be implemented by anyone and the results distributed under any license. There may be patents involved, I don't know, but if so they can be circumvented (use different ideas to gain the same overall effect); accommodated (abide by Microsoft's licensing requirements); or out-lived (wait until the patents have expired).
Paul
Maybe http://research.microsoft.com/research/pubs/defaul t.aspx is another example of such a library.
Not saying it definitely is, you understand, nor that it definitely is not. Just floating the possibility.
Paul
"Intrinsically serial" is the phrase I've seen used for such things.
Paul
I'd say they are very much getting it. They are using brand recognition in one area to expand in another. Many, many successful corporations do that. Google, for instance, exploits their superb brand recognition gained from a web search engine to branch out into news.
Anyway, it's their party and they'll invite who they want to. You don't have to go there if you don't like those terms.
Paul
And much higher software development cost though, to be fair, most of that would not be done by AMD or Intel.
I've written code to run on medium scale clusters and have made very good use of them. On the right sort of application, a 32-cpu cluster of PII-300 machines beats a single 3GHz P4 hands-down and a 32-cpu cluster of PIII-1000 blows it completely out of the water. I've extensive experience with both clusters. Unfortunately such applications are very much a minority interest. My interest is in computational number theory. There are a few others, but most people just can't make cost-effective use of more than a few processors.
Also unfortunately, writing code for medium sized clusters is not easy and it can be very difficult to find any parallelism in a task let alone exploit it efficiently. If it were easy, we would have seen clusters in widespread use for several decades now.
Paul
Paul
You are probably right.
However, would they have sufficiently more customers to cover the cost of having to stock a greater range of parts? Such considerations are extremely important when working at the insanely low profit margins where Dell and the like make their living.
In the UK we have a saying: pile it high and sell it cheap. That's exactly what Dell is doing.
Paul
I would claim that I am.
I would also strongly recommend that you do some independent investigation. You are much more likely to come up with a satisfying answer that way than by asking on a forum like this. Google is your friend, as are public libraries if such are accessible.
BTW, I should have picked up on the claim about ammonia not having sufficiently strong van der Waals forces. That one is also untrue or, at least, misguided. In highly polar molecules (such as water, methanol, hydrogen fluoride and ammonia), the hydrogen atoms carry a significant positive charge which is attracted to the negative charge on its bonded atom (oxygen, oxygen, fluorine and nitrogen respectively) in neighboring atoms. This attraction is usually called a hydrogen bond and is responsible for many otherwise anomalous effects, including the raised melting and boiling points and the fact that ice at the freezing point is less dense than the liquid at the same temperature.
Paul
By a hell of a lot, actually. Compare its liquid range with methane, which has essentially the same molecular weight (CH4 = 16, NH3=17, H2O=18).
NH3 is also usefully polar in that it allows a good many salts, acids and bases to disolve in it, again like H2O. Methane doesn't.
The 2 Hydrogens in a water molecule don't line up on the opposite sides with the oxygen atom in the middle, but form a rather pronounced bend.
Correct.
By contrast the three hydrogens in Ammonia don't leave the Nitrogen sticking out by itself. They may not maintain perfect 120 degree angles in a flat plane around the N's "equator" under all conditions, but they are pretty close to it.
Incorrect. The NH3 molecule is substantially pyramidal. The H-N-H angle is close to 107 degreesIt's the flipping between the pyramidal configurations that's the basis for the ammonia maser. (Actually, it isn't, really, but unless you want a digression into molecular quantum mechanics that explanation is good enough and will have to do.)
Now as regards life forms, what applies to a relatively pure liquid is more than usually not something we can extrapolate too much to a mixture, so I wouldn't read too much into it. Our one example of liquid oceans is not exactly pure H2O, after all, and showing that there are some reasons life is less likely in close to pure Methane or Ammonia doesn't limit a lot of other possibilities.
Good! It is extremely unlikely that an ocean would be pure ammonia, any more than our oceans are pure water. It's rather likely, I suggest, that a predominantly ammonia ocean would contain a large amount of disolved water, which would raise the liquid range and make the chemistry both different and probably more interesting from a biochemical point of view.
Paul
If it's the incident I remember, it would be 97. Otherwise, after I left.
Yes, OUCS staff, and a good number of others elsewhere in the university were paying attention. I hope they still are.
Paul
As someone who, in the company of the University Marshal, has actually briefed the Oxford police about a computer security incident involving an Oxford undergraduate, I can state authoritatively that it is extremely unlikely to be an accurate translation.
A more plausible translation, though please remember that I have no personal knowledge of the present case and so everything is hypothetical, is that the police said something along the lines: we could take action, but this would take a lot of time and involve a lot of expense for all concerned. You (meaning the University) are in a much better position to deal with these people.
Paul
If the Proctors didn't have very much understanding before stuff hit the fan, they do now. They are not stupid. They are drawn from the academic body and serve for a year each. Although they may be world-class experts in French Literature or Assyriology or whatever, they know how and where to find relevant experts to bring them up to date on what they need to know.
In a previous life I was one such expert. My job description included keeping on top of computer security at Oxford University. It also included taking preemptive measures, reacting to incidents and performing forensic investigations afterwards. I briefed the Proctors and other University officials on several occasions and invariably found that they very rapidly picked up and understood the information presented.
My sympathies go out to my ex-colleagues and my successor(s) in the post.
Paul
Not really. You take a beam of, say electrons, moving at ultrarelativistic energies and smash them into a target thereby generating, amongst other things, relativistic muons. The latter are emitted in a well collimated beam and as they decay to electrons and muon-antineutrinos, the latter are themselves created in a highly collimated beam. All you have to arrange is that the initial electron particle beam is pointing in the correct direction. It's not entirely trivial but neither is it excessively difficult to use strong magnetic fields to do the job.
This very technique was used at Fermilab recently to direct a neutrino beam at a neutrino telescope in order to calibrate it.
Paul
The Navy can actually produce gravitational waves. My fingers are emitting gravitational waves as they move to type this response. Matter in non-uniform motion generates gravitational waves.
In both cases the waves are far too weak to be detected, let alone be used for communication.
Paul
Apparently Israel is spending $500M on defence this year. Defence is thirty feet high and goes all around Israel.
Paul
Someone admining hundreds of windoze boxes ought to be running SMS instead of running around like a headless chicken. SMS may not be perfect but it does a good job.
Paul
ITYM "I've thirteen channels of shit on the tv to choose from."
HTH, HAND.
Paul
Not here it isn't. It's 20.03mm in diameter.
Unless, of course, it's been worn down in circulation.
Paul
The lucky minority get instantly vaporized. The unlucky majority get flash-fried on one side, or have their clothes melt into their skin, or get skewered by the flying shards of glass and metal, or spend the rest of their lives buried under rubble, or take weeks to die of radiation poisoning or of diseases contracted from eating, drinking and just generally living in areas with no functioning sanitation or ...
The experience of the only nuclear war we've had so far is that the "instant vaporization" scenario is of only relatively minor importance.
Paul
That's a good point. Anyone know how much visible light gets filtered out by those things? They certainly scatter a lot, or we'd be able to see through them, but if you're standing on the ground how dark does it get?
Plants here on earth have evolved to live in diffused sunlight (think forest floors or predominantly cloudy areas) and so if a Martian dust storm lets through enough light that in itself won't be a killer.
Paul