And no, this is not aimed at power/personal/home/soho users. Who would accept them anyway, would you, you power/home/personal user ?
A lot of the people in the physics department where I work use NCD X-terms for their work. It's a nice solution: all your data is backed up for you, you have most of the apps you need(Latex, netscape, emacs, vi, etc.) And most importantly you have access to a really powerful cpu when you need it. A pc might be nice but I want to be on the alpha server when my apps start tossing around arrays of 10,000 double precision floating point numbers.
Does anyone know how these things boot up? Do they boot from ROM or from TFTP?
The NCD X-Term I'm using boots up using TFTP but I think it also has a pcmcia slot if you want to add local storage. The newer NCDs are really nice, the one I'm using has a nice 17 inch monitor and the NCD has a telnet, and www clients builtin in the rom. It also has a jvm or something since it can run java apps!
If you don't see how writing code or producing theory is equivalent to engineering functional paradigmns then please step away from the compiler before you hurt anyone dependent on your output...
I'm sorry but I don't see how examining something like algorithms in finite groups(a course in the cs department at my university) is equivalent to "engineering functional paradigms."
If what you're saying is true then mathematics also fits into "engineering functional paradigms." I'm sure its news to joe-schmoe the algebraic topologist.
How do you test boundary conditions on an evolved circuit which may have "extra" boundaries inside? Maybe it has developed an accumulator that counts to 33 in analog, skips 34 (it counts 33 twice), and is fine from 35 up - that just happens to work under the test conditions that don't care about #3. Better examples anyone?
Some researchers were trying to train neural networks to identify tanks in photographs. After the neural network worked extremely well on the training set, they tested it on new data and it failed horribly. Turns out the pictures with tanks in them that they were using were dark and the pictures without tanks were light. The neural networks that been trained to determine whether the pictures were light or dark and didn't care about the presence or absence of tanks in the pictures.
And this is what I think scares people about genetic algorithms, etc. We are locked into black-and-white, deterministic systems, and think thusly about so many things. It escapes people that many of the things we use in real life are based on or made by non-deterministic, statistical systems
Unfortunately having an idea of how the solution works helps to determine whether its valid or not. For example, there was an experiment where neural networks were trained to identify tanks. After a while the researchers thought the network was working properly but it failed horribly on some date from outside the training set. Turns out the pictures in the training set with tanks were dark and the pictures without the tanks were light. The neural network was actually detecting whether the picture was light or dark rather than whether their were any tanks in it.
The problem with genetic algorithms and neural networks is that you're never quite sure whether the solutions are testing/doing the what you want it to or whether something else in the training set/test date is being examined. Therefore you never know if it will fail miserably when the environment is changed or new data is being examined. I think that's why a lot of people aren't very confident/trusting of these types of solutions.
Re:Whoop dee do. Life or no life, doesn't matter.
on
Extraterrestrial Water
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· Score: 1
Warp" drive already exists in theory.
To bad the postulated warp drive require unreasonable amounts of mass or the existence negative mass. Negative mass hasn't been found and there really isn't any reason for it to be around.
It's like the whole "if you're on a train going just under the speed of light, and you run to the front of the train, you traveled faster than the speed of light, but didn't violate reletivity because relative to the train you were going pretty slow
According to relativity you won't be going faster than the speed of light. Velocity vector additions aren't u+v in relativity rather its more like (u+v)/c(there's a division by c in there, the equation isn't correct however, I need to check a book on special relativity). This means that if the train were going.99c your speed would be.999c relative to an observer stationary with respect to the train.
VC++ may be the best product microsoft has done but that's not saying much. When a simple program (in the order of hello world) takes 20 minutes to compile and results in a 1meg binary with some of the poorest code ever known to man generated
I happen to use visual c++ and it certainly doesn't take 20 minutes to compile. The project I'm working on right now is a few thousand lines and takes about 10 seconds to compile. The compiled executable is about 260K and this is a debugable version that is using rtti, exceptions, and a few other c++ features. gcc 2.7.2.1 produces a debug executable twice that size for a few 100 lines of c+++ that only uses the iostream library.(I realize gcc 2.7.2.1 is pretty bad about c++)
Some of the IDE features such as giving the function prototype when you start typing in the function name and listing class or struct members are useful and handy. It's sort of like a tab completion for programming. But on the downside, it doesn't handle parathetical matching and indentation as well as emacs or xemacs does.
Can you elaborate on this point? (I don't code gui's, so I know nothing about gui specific problems. But I've always found C++ pretty slow & useless.) What's the scoop? What is an example of the problem & how does C++ solve it?
I think the original poster was refering to the problem that arises when you extend a data structure. For example:
Suppose you have data structures foo and bar and function f that takes foo and bar and does something with them. Now suppose you decide to extend foo and bar to foo2 and bar2 and leave foo and bar around so existing code doesn't break. Now suppose you want to extend f to work with foo2 and bar2. This means you'll probably need 4 versions of f to handle the different combinations of foo, foo2, bar, and bar2 that can arise.
With C++ you can either make foo and bar classes and derived foo2 and bar2 from them. This means that if function f deals with foo or bar pointers or references you can use the existing f without modifications. Or you can overload f to handle the different combinations. I believe the first solution limits you to the original functionality of the foo and bar classes but that may be okay. The second solution makes maintaining the library a little harder but the users of the library won't have to worry about which version of function f to use since the compiler takes care of it. There are probably other solutions involving virtual functions for classes foo and bar. INAC++ expert so take this with a grain of salt.
Real World." Right. Like 7 semi-employed 20somethings living in an aparment in Waikiki that probably costs around 8000/month is real.
Actually I think the place was in Kahala and I believe that the pricetag was 4 million. Waikiki apartments are generally below 1000 a month. A lot of retired people live there. However, all in all Manoa, Kaneohe, or Kailua have the best location on Oahu.
Perhaps a more intelligent example would be the Viet Cong against the US military...
The Viet Cong had the support of virtually all of the population in rural areas. The US had to "relocate" the people in villages to hamlets in order to "protect" the populace. Of course, the villages then had to be bombed to prevent the Viet Cong from using them (nevermind the fact that some of the villagers were still living there).
Vietnam isn't really a good example since in that case most of the populace supported the Viet Cong (in an UN sponsored election the Viet Cong recieved 80-90 percent of the vote,of course the US managed to ignore this). It's a little hard to wage war in a country when no one really supports your side.
Ask the Christians and educated people of Cambodia if it's a red herring.
FWIW, the US government happened to wage a bombing campaign on a lot of Cambodia and then proceeded to support the Khmer Rouge. In the eighties, I believe the Khmer Rouge got something like 50 million a year from the US.
In any case, guns even something like an assualt rifle does little against a laser guided bomb or artillery fire.
Linux disproved this general theory by creating a stable, fast, portable OS with a monolithic kernel.... The HURD may be the politically correct OS in your mind, but it is rather uninteresting when compared to linux, BeOS, QNX, ect
Interestingly you mention QNX since QNX is a microkernel based OS that does damn well as a realtime OS. I believe AmigaOS was another microkernel OS that was really fast. Microkernels are more elegant from a technical standpoint and seem to be able to offer some advantages that monolithic kernels don't but the downside is that it seems like microkernels take significantly more effort to implement well.
As an X-ray astrophysicist working on Chandra as well as XMM and Astro-E (two other X-ray observatories to be launched within a year), I'd say one of the greatest free software needs in X-ray astronomy is a free equivalent to IDL. It plots data well, and can manipulate data pretty well too, but it's not free in either sense (freedom or price). As far as I know the source code is unavailable and unmodifiable, and on top of that, extremely expensive.
How does IDL compare with PAW and HBOOK? I know both of them are free and the source is available at the CERN site. Also both of them are used fairly widely within the HEP community.
The only problem with PAW is that its pretty cryptic and odd at times. Basically its 4 or 5 packages that have been glued together. Also its pretty fortran oriented and supports vms type abbreviations(e.g. v/cr can be used instead of vector/create) in the macros so reading other people's source can be difficult.
The fact of the matter is, there was risk involved. No matter how small, it was enough to make these scientists take extra precautions.
There's always risk involved in anything. There's a risk right now that a lighting strike will send a surge through the wires and electrocute you while you're using the computer. There's also a risk that a metorite will hit you while you watch tv. That doesn't mean that you will stop using the computer and live in a bunker does it? If the risk is small enough then most rational people will choose to disregard it as being essentially impossible. I don't see why it is necessary to put the lives of people at risk, no matter how small, for a largely trivial end
What about the risk that an airplane will crash into a city or that a car driving down the street will suddenly swerve and hit people. I don't see why we use airplanes and cars just to get to other places quicker when there is that risk. I would argue that the ends that airplanes and cars are used for are more trivial than the ends that Cassini is being used for.
The problem lies in negative energy, which flows backward in time as opposed to our positive energy and our negative but positive anti-matter which flows forward in time
I've never heard of negative energy mentioned anywhere in standard physics texts or articles. There really is no evidence for its existence and I don't think anyone in the community really believes of it except for a few theories that say it may be possible.
Apparently, San Bernadino County in California thinks "old" systems are useless. I just came from a surplus auction, I bid on a 4year old IBM mainframe, 3 year old Sparc, 4 HP netservers, 34gb of RAID, 96 P100-P133 systems, several 20+ inch monitors, etc, etc,etc. It's insane what these people throw away...I didn't bid more than $30 on any of it, and I'm most likely to win it all...don't ask me what the hell I'm gonna do with a 600gb IBM storage mainframe, but its there.
I've seen some of the older ibm mainframe storage systems and the biggest problem with them is that they run on nonstandard power. The ones I've seen needed something like a 450V power supply running at 120Hz instead of the normal 200V at 60Hz that wall sockets provide. The ibm mainframe systems you got may be similar.
s it because the energy, nutrients, and cells required to perform these functions (with such a small immune system) would detract from the overall health of the individual and it's ability to overcome the obstacle?
Mainly because with a smaller number of cells there will be a certain percentage of antigens that can not be recognized at all. This means that the organism will not gain an immunity to them at all. Coupled with the energetic costs required to mantain the immunological functions, the costs outwiegh the benefits.
The PowerBook has an "Enter" key because for some reason Macs treat "Enter" and "Return" differently.
I've noticed that some of the lisp/scheme/ml interpeters/compilers differentiate between the enter and return keys. Return goes to the next line and enter submits the current line to the compiler/interpeter.
f we can't keep guns, how are we to overthrow our government if it becomes too bloated and corrupt to function? That is part of what the US was founded on.
I don't believe that reasoning is used anywhere in the constitution. The second amendment seems to say that the right to bear arms is predicated on the necessity for the state to have an armed milita not on the citizenery's need to possibly overthrow the government.
c) you never have to upgrade their systems, only the central server. unless of course you do something stupid like buy the a 14" b&w NCD...:P as long as they have a 17" color one
I wish you were the IT person here cause I have to work with a 14' B&W NCD Terminal in my office. Using one seems like a great way to check out how well web pages are designed though. Some pages show up with black text on a black background on my terminal. =(
by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday August 10, @07:46AM EDT (#) why is it so obvious the binary measures need new names? they are far more universal measures than the decimal ones, so why not come up with new names for them instead! MB = 1024*1024, like it should be
This is a joke right? The other prefixes have been in use for at least 100 years in scientific literature and is used by people everywhere but the US.
The change your proposing is sort of like changing the C standard to conform to say microsoft's visual c's quirks .
I believe that he broke into computer systems that he was not authorized to use. That consitutes a crime. Specific to Mitnick's actions, who was hurt and in what way?
Regardless of whether he did any actual damage to the systems intentionally, the fact that he broke in meant that the sysadmin of the system had to put in a bunch of time to fix it up.
The standard procedure with most breakins is to reinstall the system from scratch and add all the vendor patches/fixes that are applicable. Not only does this take up the sysadmin's time but it prevents anyone from using the system while its being repaired.
According to clonal selection theory, our bodies can react to every conceived and nonconceived antigen.
I think in reality there are epitopes that the immune system will not recognize. Some people have advanced the theory that this is why there is a lower limit to the size of the immune system, if the system gets below a certain size the gaps are big enough that immunological functions are a net minus to the organism. Rev. Modern Physics that an interesting article on this a while back.
'd say it wastes more bits than that. 3-digit base-4 number can present 4*4*4 == 64 alternatives. So it wastes 44/48 of the 3rd digit. If you translate this to bits, it wastes the entire most significant bit and 12/16 of the next bit.
The extra space is not really wasted. There are several duplicate encodings for some amino acids so a mutation in one of the genes in the codon will not change the amino acid to another or at least will change the codon to code for a similar amino acid.
In a way you can think of the extra information as redundancy to correct for errors.
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And no, this is not aimed at power/personal/home/soho users. Who would accept them anyway, would you, you power/home/personal user ?
A lot of the people in the physics department where I work use NCD X-terms for their work. It's a nice solution: all your data is backed up for you, you have most of the apps you need(Latex, netscape, emacs, vi, etc.) And most importantly you have access to a really powerful cpu when you need it. A pc might be nice but I want to be on the alpha server when my apps start tossing around arrays of 10,000 double precision floating point numbers.
Does anyone know how these things boot up? Do they boot from ROM or from TFTP?
The NCD X-Term I'm using boots up using TFTP but I think it also has a pcmcia slot if you want to add local storage. The newer NCDs are really nice, the one I'm using has a nice 17 inch monitor and the NCD has a telnet, and www clients builtin in the rom. It also has a jvm or something since it can run java apps!
I'm sorry but I don't see how examining something like algorithms in finite groups(a course in the cs department at my university) is equivalent to "engineering functional paradigms."
If what you're saying is true then mathematics also fits into "engineering functional paradigms." I'm sure its news to joe-schmoe the algebraic topologist.
How do you test boundary conditions on an evolved circuit which may have "extra" boundaries inside? Maybe it has developed an accumulator that counts to 33 in analog, skips 34 (it counts 33 twice), and is fine from 35 up - that just happens to work under the test conditions that don't care about #3. Better examples anyone?
Some researchers were trying to train neural networks to identify tanks in photographs. After the neural network worked extremely well on the training set, they tested it on new data and it failed horribly. Turns out the pictures with tanks in them that they were using were dark and the pictures without tanks were light. The neural networks that been trained to determine whether the pictures were light or dark and didn't care about the presence or absence of tanks in the pictures.
Unfortunately having an idea of how the solution works helps to determine whether its valid or not. For example, there was an experiment where neural networks were trained to identify tanks. After a while the researchers thought the network was working properly but it failed horribly on some date from outside the training set. Turns out the pictures in the training set with tanks were dark and the pictures without the tanks were light. The neural network was actually detecting whether the picture was light or dark rather than whether their were any tanks in it.
The problem with genetic algorithms and neural networks is that you're never quite sure whether the solutions are testing/doing the what you want it to or whether something else in the training set/test date is being examined. Therefore you never know if it will fail miserably when the environment is changed or new data is being examined. I think that's why a lot of people aren't very confident/trusting of these types of solutions.
Warp" drive already exists in theory.
.99c your speed would be .999c relative to an observer stationary with respect to the train.
To bad the postulated warp drive require unreasonable amounts of mass or the existence negative mass. Negative mass hasn't been found and there really isn't any reason for it to be around.
It's like the whole "if you're on a train going just under the speed of light, and you run to the front of the train, you traveled faster than the speed of light, but didn't violate reletivity because relative to the train you were going pretty slow
According to relativity you won't be going faster than the speed of light. Velocity vector additions aren't u+v in relativity rather its more like (u+v)/c(there's a division by c in there, the equation isn't correct however, I need to check a book on special relativity). This means that if the train were going
I happen to use visual c++ and it certainly doesn't take 20 minutes to compile. The project I'm working on right now is a few thousand lines and takes about 10 seconds to compile. The compiled executable is about 260K and this is a debugable version that is using rtti, exceptions, and a few other c++ features. gcc 2.7.2.1 produces a debug executable twice that size for a few 100 lines of c+++ that only uses the iostream library.(I realize gcc 2.7.2.1 is pretty bad about c++)
Some of the IDE features such as giving the function prototype when you start typing in the function name and listing class or struct members are useful and handy. It's sort of like a tab completion for programming. But on the downside, it doesn't handle parathetical matching and indentation as well as emacs or xemacs does.
I think the original poster was refering to the problem that arises when you extend a data structure. For example:
Suppose you have data structures foo and bar and function f that takes foo and bar and does something with them. Now suppose you decide to extend foo and bar to foo2 and bar2 and leave foo and bar around so existing code doesn't break. Now suppose you want to extend f to work with foo2 and bar2. This means you'll probably need 4 versions of f to handle the different combinations of foo, foo2, bar, and bar2 that can arise.
With C++ you can either make foo and bar classes and derived foo2 and bar2 from them. This means that if function f deals with foo or bar pointers or references you can use the existing f without modifications. Or you can overload f to handle the different combinations. I believe the first solution limits you to the original functionality of the foo and bar classes but that may be okay. The second solution makes maintaining the library a little harder but the users of the library won't have to worry about which version of function f to use since the compiler takes care of it. There are probably other solutions involving virtual functions for classes foo and bar. INAC++ expert so take this with a grain of salt.
Real World." Right. Like 7 semi-employed 20somethings living in an aparment in Waikiki that probably costs around 8000/month is real.
Actually I think the place was in Kahala and I believe that the pricetag was 4 million. Waikiki apartments are generally below 1000 a month. A lot of retired people live there. However, all in all Manoa, Kaneohe, or Kailua have the best location on Oahu.
The Viet Cong had the support of virtually all of the population in rural areas. The US had to "relocate" the people in villages to hamlets in order to "protect" the populace. Of course, the villages then had to be bombed to prevent the Viet Cong from using them (nevermind the fact that some of the villagers were still living there).
Vietnam isn't really a good example since in that case most of the populace supported the Viet Cong (in an UN sponsored election the Viet Cong recieved 80-90 percent of the vote,of course the US managed to ignore this). It's a little hard to wage war in a country when no one really supports your side.
FWIW, the US government happened to wage a bombing campaign on a lot of Cambodia and then proceeded to support the Khmer Rouge. In the eighties, I believe the Khmer Rouge got something like 50 million a year from the US.
In any case, guns even something like an assualt rifle does little against a laser guided bomb or artillery fire.
Linux disproved this general theory by creating a stable, fast, portable OS with a monolithic kernel. ... The HURD may be the politically correct OS in your mind, but it is rather uninteresting when compared to linux, BeOS, QNX, ect
Interestingly you mention QNX since QNX is a microkernel based OS that does damn well as a realtime OS. I believe AmigaOS was another microkernel OS that was really fast. Microkernels are more elegant from a technical standpoint and seem to be able to offer some advantages that monolithic kernels don't but the downside is that it seems like microkernels take significantly more effort to implement well.
How does IDL compare with PAW and HBOOK? I know both of them are free and the source is available at the CERN site. Also both of them are used fairly widely within the HEP community.
The only problem with PAW is that its pretty cryptic and odd at times. Basically its 4 or 5 packages that have been glued together. Also its pretty fortran oriented and supports vms type abbreviations(e.g. v/cr can be used instead of vector/create) in the macros so reading other people's source can be difficult.
There's always risk involved in anything. There's a risk right now that a lighting strike will send a surge through the wires and electrocute you while you're using the computer. There's also a risk that a metorite will hit you while you watch tv. That doesn't mean that you will stop using the computer and live in a bunker does it? If the risk is small enough then most rational people will choose to disregard it as being essentially impossible.
I don't see why it is necessary to put the lives of people at risk, no matter how small, for a largely trivial end
What about the risk that an airplane will crash into a city or that a car driving down the street will suddenly swerve and hit people. I don't see why we use airplanes and cars just to get to other places quicker when there is that risk. I would argue that the ends that airplanes and cars are used for are more trivial than the ends that Cassini is being used for.
The problem lies in negative energy, which flows backward in time as opposed to our positive energy and our negative but positive anti-matter which flows forward in time
I've never heard of negative energy mentioned anywhere in standard physics texts or articles. There really is no evidence for its existence and I don't think anyone in the community really believes of it except for a few theories that say it may be possible.
Apparently, San Bernadino County in California thinks "old" systems are useless. I just came from a surplus auction, I bid on a 4year old IBM mainframe, 3 year old Sparc, 4 HP netservers, 34gb of RAID, 96 P100-P133 systems, several 20+ inch monitors, etc, etc,etc. It's insane what these people throw away...I didn't bid more than $30 on any of it, and I'm most likely to win it all...don't ask me what the hell I'm gonna do with a 600gb IBM storage mainframe, but its there.
I've seen some of the older ibm mainframe storage systems and the biggest problem with them is that they run on nonstandard power. The ones I've seen needed something like a 450V power supply running at 120Hz instead of the normal 200V at 60Hz that wall sockets provide. The ibm mainframe systems you got may be similar.
s it because the energy, nutrients, and cells required to perform these functions (with such a small immune system) would detract from the overall health of the individual and it's ability to overcome the obstacle?
Mainly because with a smaller number of cells there will be a certain percentage of antigens that can not be recognized at all. This means that the organism will not gain an immunity to them at all. Coupled with the energetic costs required to mantain the immunological functions, the costs outwiegh the benefits.
I've noticed that some of the lisp/scheme/ml interpeters/compilers differentiate between the enter and return keys. Return goes to the next line and enter submits the current line to the compiler/interpeter.
f we can't keep guns, how are we to overthrow our government if it becomes too bloated and corrupt to function? That is part of what the US was founded on.
I don't believe that reasoning is used anywhere in the constitution. The second amendment seems to say that the right to bear arms is predicated on the necessity for the state to have an armed milita not on the citizenery's need to possibly overthrow the government.
Example: UK. Owning guns is pretty illegal, with some exceptions. Many cities have surveilance cameras capable of viewing large areas.
Counterexamples: How about Japan? People usually don't have guns,its not a police state. Or how about Germany, France, Canada?
c) you never have to upgrade their systems, only the central server. unless of course you do something stupid like buy the a 14" b&w NCD... :P as long as they have a 17" color one
I wish you were the IT person here cause I have to work with a 14' B&W NCD Terminal in my office. Using one seems like a great way to check out how well web pages are designed though. Some pages show up with black text on a black background on my terminal. =(
This is a joke right? The other prefixes have been in use for at least 100 years in scientific literature and is used by people everywhere but the US.
The change your proposing is sort of like changing the C standard to conform to say microsoft's visual c's quirks .
I believe that he broke into computer systems that he was not authorized to use. That consitutes a crime. Specific to Mitnick's actions, who was hurt and in what way?
Regardless of whether he did any actual damage to the systems intentionally, the fact that he broke in meant that the sysadmin of the system had to put in a bunch of time to fix it up.
The standard procedure with most breakins is to reinstall the system from scratch and add all the vendor patches/fixes that are applicable. Not only does this take up the sysadmin's time but it prevents anyone from using the system while its being repaired.
According to clonal selection theory, our bodies can react to every conceived and nonconceived antigen.
I think in reality there are epitopes that the immune system will not recognize. Some people have advanced the theory that this is why there is a lower limit to the size of the immune system, if the system gets below a certain size the gaps are big enough that immunological functions are a net minus to the organism. Rev. Modern Physics that an interesting article on this a while back.
The extra space is not really wasted. There are several duplicate encodings for some amino acids so a mutation in one of the genes in the codon will not change the amino acid to another or at least will change the codon to code for a similar amino acid.
In a way you can think of the extra information as redundancy to correct for errors.