In the State of New York all of the non-profit orgs have to get approval before they can make any purchases over a certain amount of money. I'm not sure ofthe exact amount, but I've heard that it is an amount that commonly comes up in day-to-day purchases.
I feel confident that 99% percent of the buearacrats don't have any clue what open-source software is and they would have a hard time approving any kind of expense.
There are a couple of examples of non-profit type of groups that develop open-source software. They tend to be university research groups or funded with a grant. lon-capa was one that I could find. lon-capa appears to be funded via the NSF. I'm not sure if they have non-profit status or not.
To protect taxpayers' information whilst it is being sent to us, we are using the strongest
available level of security. This is known as 128-bit encryption.
The browser that you are using does not appear to support this level of security. If you are
sure that your browser supports 128-bit encryption, click here to enter the service.
If you are not sure whether your browser supports 128-bit encryption, could you please
upgrade it by visiting the Netscape or Microsoft web site and downloading the necessary
software.
I don't think that these reports need to have these types of legal messages tagged to them. I tend to disagree with these types of messages altogether!
All content, references, and ideas presented in this post are copyright 2001, grammar nazi. All rights reserved. You may reference or quote this comment in your own comment on Slashdot, however your PROHIBITED from quoting, referencing, or using ideas contained herein on other web forumns, both public and private. If you wish to print out the contents of this message and page. Please contact the grammar nazi at nospam@nospam.nospam.
With all due respect MrChips, I've had one undergraduate course and one graduate course in Thermodynamics, and I've never heard of this. In addition, I've done much electron microscopy using liquid nitrogen from a large tank, that was completely sealed and at room temperature.
According to physics, the liquid will stay a liquid. It will exert a high pressure, but it will remain a liquid and it will remain at room temperature.
I'm sorry if this surprises you.
Keeping the superconductor below temperature has to do with vaporizing *some* of the Liquid N2, just enough to keep the cable cold. The room temperature liquid is kept separate from the superconductor until it is needed.
Yes, but this would be useless for superconducting applications. The whole point is for it to be cold, or
else the superconductor won't work.
Thermodynamics 101:
1. Pressure is released from room temperature Liquid nitrogen.
2. Liquid Nitrogen becomes gas.
... Wait, it can't become a gas unless it slurps up enough energy to cover it's latent heat of condensation. Enough energy get's absorbed to cause the surroundings to get cold (-195 Deg C. cold).
5. Cable gets cold and becomes a superconductor. Nitrogen is still piped around at room temperature or, more accurately, underground temperature. The only cold nitrogen was the stuff that was allowed to escape to become a gas.
Liquid nitrogen is cheap!!. If the nitrogen is kept at the right pressure, then it doesn't even have to be kept cold. Pressurized lines are already in use for gas and steam. I'm sure that liquid nitrogen isn't much different.
Of course, if you are a Chem E and you I am wrong, then please enlighten us!!
I know that 2 summers ago, there were many problems with rolling brownouts and whatnot, do to a screwed up grid in the Detroit area. This cable will be a welcome relief!
The grammar nazi happens to have a large amount of Stock in DTE Energy, hence anything that makes money for Edison, eventually lines the grammar nazi's pockets!!
Your post reminded me of what my friend and I used to do late at night in college. We would each work on a master's degree thesis until 4-5 am every morning. We would leave sometimes leave our offices and do the following:
Find the roof. Every building has a roof and 90% of them have some method to get onto the roof that isn't a locked. When you've been frustrated for the past 4 hours, and then you and a friend sit on the roof on a summer night drinking soda, that is the best feeling in the world.
Find the utility rooms. Utility rooms can be nearly as fun as the rooftops. For example, in one of the utility rooms at my university, there was a huge square pit that dropped at least 5 floors with large ventalation tubing going down it. We promptly nicknamed it the 'Luke Skywalker Pit', since, it looked like the one that he lost his arm in. Basements and tunnels can also lead to cool things, too!
Denny's. Although a work setting may not allow for trips to Denny's at 4 am, I can assure you that Denny's is nice and peaceful after the bar crowd leaves (~3:30am) and before the senior citizens arrives (~5:30am).
Hallway Bowling!
The Iopener craze hit at the height of our thesis work. Basically, we wouldn't do anything on our theses then. We spent about 2 weeks straight spending the nights making HD cables, compiling kernels, etc.
I highly recommend getting to know the night staff. At our college we would always talk and hang out with the night staff. They would invite us down for dinners and they were all really cool people.
With all of these fun things to do, it's amazing that I ever finished my thesis...wait... I didn't finish my thesis! Oh well   -)
Did you notice the following statement at the bottom:
Note: To build a Beowulf, a Linux-based cluster, we think the following 230-page book is an excellent introduction: T. L. Sterling, J. Salmon, D. J. Becker, and D. F. Savarese,How to Build a Beowulf, [MIT Press, Cambridge, MA, USA, 1999
I think they are making fun of the difficulty of building a Beowulf cluster since they refer to the 250 page book at the end of their single page OS 9 clustering guide.
I don't hate MS, rather, I like the idea of a 'Free' product providing more value than the best commercial 'non-free' version of the same product. THat's what I'm happy about.
This sux since the first cybercafe in Tehran was only opened 3 years ago. It is still the only cybercafe at net cafe guide. Of course, from nmit at Georgetown, there doesn't appear to be much internet access available besides the internet cafes. Of course, this is why the government is restricting it, because it is a stranglehold. Don't fear, because there are many other reasons to visit Tehran if you are interested in a vacation.
Just think of what a superconducting quantum wire could do for the speed of your future pocket computer!
Not much, since you would still need a refridgeration unit to keep the 'wire' cold. Super low means on the order of a few Kelvin. High-temp superconductors means about the same temperature of Liquid Nitrogen or better.
A refridgeration unit in your pocket would be heavy, probably involve condensation (i.e. wet pocket), and it would emit heat.
I have to start a new thread for this comment because _every_ comment that I've read has failed to mention the following solutions.
As a systems engineer for a gov contractor, I needed to make a survey for documentation revision control software. Due to my CS background, I immediately thought about CVS, sourcesafe, and other source code revision control packages. The source code revision control packages were not up to the task of documentation revision control. Since systems engineers deal with requirements, and requirments are stored via documentation, every requirements analysis package comes with documentation revision control software. These packages also help to create documents from templates and databases. Depending upon your needs, these documents keep track of customer requirements from concept through delivery/installation, into maintenance.
There are many systems engineering tools that handle requirements analysis in various ways. Many of them work with MS Office (prolly what your writers currently use), and have built in versioning control. My best source for information on these tools was at the INCOSE tools website. This sites lists tools and checks them for the following features...
Store standard document outlines - used as starting points? User definable templates or modifiable?
Produce architecture views from functional and object oriented (OO) perspectives? Examples: WBS, functional , physical, data flow, state diagrams
Support various physical architectures? (View from a number of levels, Black box, Rack, circuit board, chip)
Enable tailoring to specific standards and requirements, IEEE, ISO, MIL-STD?
User friendly & menu driven (drag and drop capabilities)?
Support a single user or multiple concurrent users?
Input document change / comparison analysis
Visibility into existing links from source to implementation--i.e. follow the links.
History of requirement changes, who, what, when, where, why, how.
Baseline/Version control
Access control (modification, viewing, etc.)
. Support of concurrent review, markup, and comment
Multi-level assignment/access control Plus many more features.
It is my opinion, that the following packages are up to the task:
Cradle
Doors
rtm
rdt
Caliber rm
If you go the page that I linked, it provides an in depth review of each of these tools plus many more.
In related news, the price of Clay Pigeons is expected to return to normal. Charlton Heston of the Shotgun Association of America stated at a press conference, "Our recent sources of cheap plastic clay pigeons are expected to dry up. We will be returning to clay clay pigeons."
Suppose I want to find out information about the Ikeda Attractor. I do a search on 'Ikeda Attractor' and it results with a few pages with pictures of it, but nothing really describes what it is. From the images I realize that it is a chaotic attractor, so I do a search on 'chaotic attractors'. The 2nd search results with more pages that describe the phenomenon of chaos. These pages, however have links to other pages that describe chaos in general and how to represent chaotic attractors. I have to then follow these links to get to the pages that describe exactly what an attractor is. Many of these include the Ikeda attractor as a specific example. Search completed.
This is similar to any research oriented search. In a university library, the preliminary survey of Scientific Citations Index, or whatever literature search tool that you use rarely turns up good results. These initial results, typically, are only good for directing you to further results via the bibliography (the articles usually tell you which other papers are good for what topic in the introduction). You then get locate the referenced papers and sometimes you look at the references in those. I usually need to read the intros to about 5-6 articles for every good foundation type paper that I come across.
Search engines in general, won't improve any time soon because every search is personal and customized. A little bit of effort and a little bit of experience is all that you need.
Finally, I'm not going to proof read this, since I'm late for work, but I hope it all makes sense.
Don't forget that bussinesses do not want to own anything. If they lease items, then they don't have to pay taxes on it as an asset. That's why many companies lease computers for 3 years and at the end they are offered the chance to purchase the computer for $1. That's how SGI and IBM did it at the old CAD firm that I worked for.
MS is leasing software so that companies don't have to claim it as an asset, hence they don't pay as many taxes. Leased assets are even a tax deduction in most places.
I'm sure somebody who knows more about this will step in and correct me if I'm wrong. I welcome that.
Ouch! Normally I'm the grammar nazi, but for this post I'm going to play stick-in-the-mud Nazi.
You're link is to an article that talks about hepititus. You can avoid this 100% by going to a reputable tattoo artist and not a hole in the wall place.
Finally I think that your comment about seeing a psychiatrist is a little overboard. I would hardly refer to a tattoo as currently cool and trendy.
Tattoos have been cool and trendy for hundreds of years now. They are here to stay. Hard mathematics has been accurate and around for hundreds of years. Thus, tattoos of hard mathematics are not a temporary fad.
Okay, my logic isn't 100% sound, but you get the point. Now shove off, pal!
Algebraic fundamental formula: Although Euler's formula is very beautiful, I would opt for, the more algebraic, Lagrange's Theorem...
|G|=|H|[G:H]
Where H is a subgroup of a finite group G. Here is a theorem that is at the very basis of algebra and numbers.
Number thoery cool formula: Another equation that would be good for a tattoo is Hardy and Ramanujan's equation for the number of partitions of a number n, p(n). I will TeX the equation since I can't do it justice with HTML. If you don't use LaTeX, then refer to Number Theory, by George Andrews, p. 150 (it's a Dover book so it's $6.95 and excellent).
An interesting thing about this equation is that it doesn't actually converge. You can make it converge to an answer by replacing the exp with a sinh and remove the 2 in the very first denominator, but Hardy and Ramanujan never figured that out.
Simple Chaotic Formula: One of the simplist equations to display a period 3 orbit, and hence chaotic behavior, is the logistic map:
f( x(n+1) )= 4 x(n) ( 1- x(n) )
I would recommend using subcripts in place of (n) and (n+1).
Fourier Series: Finally, nothing in mathematics is more beautiful and elegant than Fourier series. The following equation is at the heart of the MP3 piracy debate and it is responsible for most video and sound encoding. I don't know any equations for Fast Fourier Transforms, but here's one for the general Fourier series (in complex form, because that makes a better tattoo).
Slashdot Mirror
In the State of New York all of the non-profit orgs have to get approval before they can make any purchases over a certain amount of money. I'm not sure ofthe exact amount, but I've heard that it is an amount that commonly comes up in day-to-day purchases.
I feel confident that 99% percent of the buearacrats don't have any clue what open-source software is and they would have a hard time approving any kind of expense.
There are a couple of examples of non-profit type of groups that develop open-source software. They tend to be university research groups or funded with a grant. lon-capa was one that I could find. lon-capa appears to be funded via the NSF. I'm not sure if they have non-profit status or not.
All content, references, and ideas presented in this post are copyright 2001, grammar nazi. All rights reserved. You may reference or quote this comment in your own comment on Slashdot, however your PROHIBITED from quoting, referencing, or using ideas contained herein on other web forumns, both public and private. If you wish to print out the contents of this message and page. Please contact the grammar nazi at nospam@nospam.nospam.
Sorry. I guess a was a little to forward with my comments. I'll make sure I only post what I completely understand from now one.
According to physics, the liquid will stay a liquid. It will exert a high pressure, but it will remain a liquid and it will remain at room temperature.
I'm sorry if this surprises you.
Keeping the superconductor below temperature has to do with vaporizing *some* of the Liquid N2, just enough to keep the cable cold. The room temperature liquid is kept separate from the superconductor until it is needed.
1. Pressure is released from room temperature Liquid nitrogen.
2. Liquid Nitrogen becomes gas.
... Wait, it can't become a gas unless it slurps up enough energy to cover it's latent heat of condensation. Enough energy get's absorbed to cause the surroundings to get cold (-195 Deg C. cold).
5. Cable gets cold and becomes a superconductor. Nitrogen is still piped around at room temperature or, more accurately, underground temperature. The only cold nitrogen was the stuff that was allowed to escape to become a gas.
Of course, if you are a Chem E and you I am wrong, then please enlighten us!!
The grammar nazi happens to have a large amount of Stock in DTE Energy, hence anything that makes money for Edison, eventually lines the grammar nazi's pockets!!
Your post reminded me of what my friend and I used to do late at night in college. We would each work on a master's degree thesis until 4-5 am every morning. We would leave sometimes leave our offices and do the following:
Find the roof. Every building has a roof and 90% of them have some method to get onto the roof that isn't a locked. When you've been frustrated for the past 4 hours, and then you and a friend sit on the roof on a summer night drinking soda, that is the best feeling in the world.
Find the utility rooms. Utility rooms can be nearly as fun as the rooftops. For example, in one of the utility rooms at my university, there was a huge square pit that dropped at least 5 floors with large ventalation tubing going down it. We promptly nicknamed it the 'Luke Skywalker Pit', since, it looked like the one that he lost his arm in. Basements and tunnels can also lead to cool things, too!
Denny's. Although a work setting may not allow for trips to Denny's at 4 am, I can assure you that Denny's is nice and peaceful after the bar crowd leaves (~3:30am) and before the senior citizens arrives (~5:30am).
Hallway Bowling!
The Iopener craze hit at the height of our thesis work. Basically, we wouldn't do anything on our theses then. We spent about 2 weeks straight spending the nights making HD cables, compiling kernels, etc.
I highly recommend getting to know the night staff. At our college we would always talk and hang out with the night staff. They would invite us down for dinners and they were all really cool people.
With all of these fun things to do, it's amazing that I ever finished my thesis...wait ... I didn't finish my thesis! Oh well    ;-)
What about a Jynnan tonnyx, geeN'N-T'N-ix, jinond-o-nix, chinanto/mnigs, or a tzjin-anthonyu-ks? Does this bar serve any or all of these??
I don't hate MS, rather, I like the idea of a 'Free' product providing more value than the best commercial 'non-free' version of the same product. THat's what I'm happy about.
Heh, Please mod me up!!
Not much, since you would still need a refridgeration unit to keep the 'wire' cold. Super low means on the order of a few Kelvin. High-temp superconductors means about the same temperature of Liquid Nitrogen or better.
A refridgeration unit in your pocket would be heavy, probably involve condensation (i.e. wet pocket), and it would emit heat.
As a systems engineer for a gov contractor, I needed to make a survey for documentation revision control software. Due to my CS background, I immediately thought about CVS, sourcesafe, and other source code revision control packages. The source code revision control packages were not up to the task of documentation revision control. Since systems engineers deal with requirements, and requirments are stored via documentation, every requirements analysis package comes with documentation revision control software. These packages also help to create documents from templates and databases. Depending upon your needs, these documents keep track of customer requirements from concept through delivery/installation, into maintenance.
There are many systems engineering tools that handle requirements analysis in various ways. Many of them work with MS Office (prolly what your writers currently use), and have built in versioning control. My best source for information on these tools was at the INCOSE tools website. This sites lists tools and checks them for the following features...
Store standard document outlines - used as starting points? User definable templates or modifiable?
Produce architecture views from functional and object oriented (OO) perspectives? Examples: WBS, functional , physical, data flow, state diagrams
Support various physical architectures? (View from a number of levels, Black box, Rack, circuit board, chip)
Enable tailoring to specific standards and requirements, IEEE, ISO, MIL-STD?
User friendly & menu driven (drag and drop capabilities)?
Support a single user or multiple concurrent users?
Input document change / comparison analysis
Visibility into existing links from source to implementation--i.e. follow the links.
History of requirement changes, who, what, when, where, why, how.
Baseline/Version control
Access control (modification, viewing, etc.)
. Support of concurrent review, markup, and comment
Multi-level assignment/access control
Plus many more features.
It is my opinion, that the following packages are up to the task:
Cradle
Doors
rtm
rdt
Caliber rm
If you go the page that I linked, it provides an in depth review of each of these tools plus many more.
In related news, the price of Clay Pigeons is expected to return to normal. Charlton Heston of the Shotgun Association of America stated at a press conference, "Our recent sources of cheap plastic clay pigeons are expected to dry up. We will be returning to clay clay pigeons."
All the dinosaurs know that size doesn't matter. It's how you handle it.
Suppose I want to find out information about the Ikeda Attractor. I do a search on 'Ikeda Attractor' and it results with a few pages with pictures of it, but nothing really describes what it is. From the images I realize that it is a chaotic attractor, so I do a search on 'chaotic attractors'. The 2nd search results with more pages that describe the phenomenon of chaos. These pages, however have links to other pages that describe chaos in general and how to represent chaotic attractors. I have to then follow these links to get to the pages that describe exactly what an attractor is. Many of these include the Ikeda attractor as a specific example. Search completed.
This is similar to any research oriented search. In a university library, the preliminary survey of Scientific Citations Index, or whatever literature search tool that you use rarely turns up good results. These initial results, typically, are only good for directing you to further results via the bibliography (the articles usually tell you which other papers are good for what topic in the introduction). You then get locate the referenced papers and sometimes you look at the references in those. I usually need to read the intros to about 5-6 articles for every good foundation type paper that I come across.
Search engines in general, won't improve any time soon because every search is personal and customized. A little bit of effort and a little bit of experience is all that you need.
Finally, I'm not going to proof read this, since I'm late for work, but I hope it all makes sense.
Actually, Mr. T Always said, 'Shut up foo!' This proves that Mr. T was a computer geek at some point in his life!
MS is leasing software so that companies don't have to claim it as an asset, hence they don't pay as many taxes. Leased assets are even a tax deduction in most places.
I'm sure somebody who knows more about this will step in and correct me if I'm wrong. I welcome that.
No. I saw a photograph of Sealand once, thus some of the data went directly to the USA without going through the EU Internet infrastructure.
...and I thought the grammar nazi was the only one with this problem!
the new image rendering library was known as libpr0n to all of the developers.
You're link is to an article that talks about hepititus. You can avoid this 100% by going to a reputable tattoo artist and not a hole in the wall place.
Finally I think that your comment about seeing a psychiatrist is a little overboard. I would hardly refer to a tattoo as currently cool and trendy.
Tattoos have been cool and trendy for hundreds of years now. They are here to stay. Hard mathematics has been accurate and around for hundreds of years. Thus, tattoos of hard mathematics are not a temporary fad.
Okay, my logic isn't 100% sound, but you get the point. Now shove off, pal!
Algebraic fundamental formula: Although Euler's formula is very beautiful, I would opt for, the more algebraic, Lagrange's Theorem...
|G|=|H|[G:H]
Where H is a subgroup of a finite group G. Here is a theorem that is at the very basis of algebra and numbers.
Number thoery cool formula: Another equation that would be good for a tattoo is Hardy and Ramanujan's equation for the number of partitions of a number n, p(n). I will TeX the equation since I can't do it justice with HTML. If you don't use LaTeX, then refer to Number Theory, by George Andrews, p. 150 (it's a Dover book so it's $6.95 and excellent).
p(n)=\frac{1}{2\pi\sqrt{2}}\frac{d}{d n}\left{ \frac{\exp \left( \frac{2\pi}{\sqrt{6}} \sqrt{n-\frac{1}{24}} \right) }{\sqrt{n-\frac{1}{24}}}
An interesting thing about this equation is that it doesn't actually converge. You can make it converge to an answer by replacing the exp with a sinh and remove the 2 in the very first denominator, but Hardy and Ramanujan never figured that out.
Simple Chaotic Formula: One of the simplist equations to display a period 3 orbit, and hence chaotic behavior, is the logistic map:
f( x(n+1) )= 4 x(n) ( 1- x(n) )
I would recommend using subcripts in place of (n) and (n+1).
Fourier Series: Finally, nothing in mathematics is more beautiful and elegant than Fourier series. The following equation is at the heart of the MP3 piracy debate and it is responsible for most video and sound encoding. I don't know any equations for Fast Fourier Transforms, but here's one for the general Fourier series (in complex form, because that makes a better tattoo).
\Phi(x)=\sum^{\infty}_{n=-\infty} c_n e^{in\pi x/l}
For further reading in Fourier series (at an undergraduate level), I recommend Partial Differential Equations, an Introduction by Strauss
This slashdot story has inspired me to get a tattoo!