Pari is a command line calculator with graphing capabilities. It was developed by Henri Cohen, a number theorist. It has an incredible number of functions, plus it can calculate really big numbers.
From the FAQ:
PARI/GP is a widely used computer algebra system designed for fast computations in number theory (factorizations, algebraic number theory, elliptic curves...), but also contains a large number of other useful functions to compute with mathematical entities such as matrices, polynomials, power series, algebraic numbers, etc., and a lot of transcendental functions.
You'll see these fairly often at tradeshows. They make it easy to see the software from a relative distance during a software demonstration.
I bought a large screen LCD for my company to use during such a software demo. We wanted to keep it in our development lab, figuring that a huge monitor would be a Good Thing.
The unfortunate reality is that, for reasons that remain mysterious to me, the maximum resolution when driven by a computer is only 1280 x 768. This means that you're not getting a massive, high resolution display; you're just getting really big pixels.
I spent some time searching, but couldn't find _any_ manufacturers whose large screens could be driven to 1080i HDTV resolution (1920 x 1080). Quite a disappointment.
At a recent AFCEA show, I saw a 3000 x 3000 pixel large screen flat panel display in the Matrox booth. They said it was a prototype display made by Toshiba. They said it would be available in about 1 year for $30K.
Is there someone out there with an EE type background that can explain why, with pixel addressability of 1920 x 1080 we're not seeing any LCDs that can be used at this resolution as computer monitors?
This is an emotionally charged case where the individual was clearly at fault. As a test case, is this sufficiently compelling to allow it to stand as a precedent? After all, if you have nothing to hide, why should you be concerned that your driving behavior is being monitored?
One might even extend this surveillance to gather even more data. Perhaps there should be continual video surveillance of the inside of your car to monitor for unsafe behavior. Even better, perhaps the police should even be allowed to search your vehicle anytime they wish to ensure that you are not carrying any stolen goods or contraband. If you have nothing to hide, why should you care?
Take it a step further. Perhaps there should be continual video surveillance of the inside of your home to ensure your safety, monitor for unsafe behavior and check for stolen goods.
It is exactly this attitude on the part of the British that stimulated the Revolutionary War. There are many good reasons to allow the redcoats to trample on an individual's private life, much like the example in the article. But are these good enough reasons to turn loose of these rights?
While it is mildly interesting to watch this food fight over proper approaches, languages to use etc. the discussion here appears to miss the point.
Web programming lacks decent debugging tools.
In my experience, we had browser hosted software, but it was targetted toward an intranet so we could specify the software that needed to be installed on both the clients and the servers. As the product became more complex and more developers were brought on, debugging became a nightmare.
Although less technical minds felt that the product should be a "pure web solution", we began implementing a number of server side COM objects in C++ because we COULD debug them. Explaining them to new developers on the project became easier, too.
Actually SCO, formerly Caldera, does own CPM. They also own DR DOS (Digital Research DOS). They've used the rights to these products to sue Microsoft for unfair business practices.
This is not my site, but it is succinct and accurate:
http://www.maxframe.com/CPM.HTM
SCO/Caldera seems to be in the business of obscure rights to extract money, through the legal process, from companies that are actually in the business of developing technology products.
Most Windows machines have Office installed, which includes Visual Basic. For example, if you're at the library and someone has locked out everything except the browser and Office, try this:
1. Open an Office app, type alt-F11.
2. You should be looking at a VB editor. From the menu, select Insert/Module.
3. Enter this code:
Sub CmdWin()
Shell ("cmd.exe") End Sub
4. Click the arrow button. Now you should be looking at a shell window.
Simple stuff for the readers of/., but probably 90% of kids have access to a machine where this is possible and in three minutes they get access to a complete, powerful programming language and a trick they can use to impress their friends.
When Douglas Engelbart was active (inventor of the mouse, early hypermedia developer) he wanted to create systems to augment the human intellect. Today, we HAVE systems for acquiring, storing and retrieving vast amounts of rich media. All of your textbooks from college, or even graduate school, or even all of the books you'll ever be able to read can be stored on a handheld system. Napster, all hoopla aside, was a library of all music you ever might like to listen.
But, the lawyers won't let us use these systems.
Ted Nelson, inventor of the word hypertext, warned against the "Balkanization" of information systems as early as the 70s.
Well, here we are. The dream of universal information access, the telco commercial for "all movies ever made in every language", and tools for augmenting human intellect, these things may just be unreachable not for technical reasons but for business reasons.
Does anyone remember Plato's Republic and the story of the invisibility ring? He felt that a person's true nature would be revealed if he could act with total anonymnity. Some folks are good, some folks are bad. Now we have the technology, so it is no longer a gedanken experiment.
Expert C Programming by Peter van der Linden. Not just how or why, but how it got to be that way. Not only is it deep and insightful, but it is great bathroom reading and has a picture of an ugly fish on the cover.
Building Application Frameworks : Object-Oriented Foundations of Framework Design by Mohamed Fayad (Editor), Douglas C. Schmidt (Editor). Discusses all of the important application frameworks libraries. The library is not the same as the language, but the structure of the library impacts your design. If you think CWindow is part of the C++ language or that Thread is a part of the Java language or even that printf is part of the C language, then you should read this book.
Computers as Theatre, Brenda Laurel, 1993. Real people use your software. How do they perceive it? Software, to a large extent, is about shaping perceptions. Good software maps well to the user's understanding of the problem it was meant to solve.
Is there a legal precedent set in the telecom industry that either allows or disallows people to attach their own devices to telecom networks that would be applicable to cable TV?
Didn't we go through this battle with modems, where we were required to notify the phone company if we used a modem and they had the right to approve or disapprove?
The real question I'm asking is this: Can we hook up our own PVR to our cable feed or can the cable company lawfully deny us such access and require us to use their device? Second, is there any reason that we can't get descrambling technology, lawfully licensed, from a third party or ever write our own?
"The study, funded by The Clorox Co., analyzed more than 7,000 samples from personal work spaces and common areas in offices in Tucson, New York, San Francisco and Tampa, Fla."
Hmm. What is the ratio of workspace surface area to toilet seat area? What is the ratio of Clorox money spent phrasing the results of the "scientific study" in such a way that it would cause readers to think about buying Clorox products to the amount spent on calculating this outrageous result? Is the inside of our mouths or stomachs dirtier than a toilet seat ("more bacteria")?
It is extremely amusing to see SlashDotters who, as a group, feel they have a right to P2P, fair use etc. adopt EXACTLY the same viewpoint the content owners adopt when the individuals under consideration are their own user group and the issue is their own jobs.
The nice people at Autodesk, thinking far into the future back in 1987, invested in a project to commercialize orbitting space debris. After all, wouldn't the government attempt to solve the problem in the most expensive, least expensive way?
Yet another Mac history revision lesson, where the "only way" to do it was with a Mac and now it is "even better" using a Mac.
It seems to me that Sarnoff Labs (RCA) devloped a digital video system that would play back from CD-ROM around 1983, then sold it to Intel in the late 80s which was productized as DVI by around 1990. Subsequently, Microsoft and Apple trumpeted their respective file formats (Quicktime and AVI) but in reality both formats used essentially the same codecs.
If anyone remembers the San Francisco Canyon/Apple/Microsoft/Intel debacle, you'll know just how similar these technologies really are. The Sarnoff Labs technology is likely the progenitor, much the same way that Mosaic is the progenitor of all of the major web browsers.
Early in my WinDev days (c.1991) I carefully went through an app I had written and added additional error checking including a number of error/warning dialogs. Just to be safe, I tested for errors that could never occur. Feeling cocky (and a little tired) the title bar for one read "Dumb Shit User Error". There were some other silly ones, too. After several demos, none of them showed up. Then one day, during a demo to my boss's boss's boss the "Dumb Shit User Error" cropped up. To make it worse, the app was so stable they let him use it during the demo, which is when the error started to show. Needless to say, I no longer use silly text anywhere in my apps.
The key to education is ensuring sufficient repetition to make concepts stick. Techniques range from drill, which makes kids unhappy, to games which are supposed to keep the kids coming back. In reality, kids seem to understand games pretty quickly, with boredom following soon after.
I'd recommend teaching them to make animations, say with a GIF tool, and teach them to email them to each other. For an advanced topic, show them how to embed them in a web page.
While this seems simple, never underestimate the amount of basic skills that a beginner lacks. This exercise puts people with little or no contact with computers through most of the activities they are likely to face with any software, plus it is open-ended. With these basic skills, kids can expand their expertise either in class or with software that they are likely to find on any computer that they find themselves using.
Those nasty content owners want to have it all. This new Firewire technology, and it's ability to to link up to 64 devices at 400 mbps just makes my blood boil. How it is being used for encryption doesn't seem to be in the article, though.
What the Times isn't reporting is the Cathode Ray Tube conspiracy. Using Cathode Ray Tube technology television producers can control EXACTLY WHAT THEY WANT YOU TO SEE! While the details are a mysterious secret, only those segments of their digital or analog content that THEY CHOOSE for you to see are visible on the Cathode Ray Tube! We need to put a stop to this before the nefarious Flat Screen Technology is used to lock down analog and digital content!
On a less silly note, choosing not to watch is an option that hits them in the checkbook. Ensuring that digital distribution remains available for non-copyrighted material is still a laudable goal.
Scientists do not provide the articles/reports free of charge. They actually pay page charges to have them published. Page charges are typically charged to research grants, which are typically funded using money collected from taxes. The journal publishers make out by charging at both ends. On the other hand, there are only so many articles they can fit into an issue and only so many people interested in subscribing to (for example) Journal of Neuroimmunology. Just like software developers, they deserve to make money from their efforts.
Slashdot Mirror
I often use Pari/GP:
http://pari.math.u-bordeaux.fr/
Pari is a command line calculator with graphing capabilities. It was developed by Henri Cohen, a number theorist. It has an incredible number of functions, plus it can calculate really big numbers.
From the FAQ:
PARI/GP is a widely used computer algebra system designed for fast computations in number theory (factorizations, algebraic number theory, elliptic curves...), but also contains a large number of other useful functions to compute with mathematical entities such as matrices, polynomials, power series, algebraic numbers, etc., and a lot of transcendental functions.
You'll see these fairly often at tradeshows. They make it easy to see the software from a relative distance during a software demonstration.
I bought a large screen LCD for my company to use during such a software demo. We wanted to keep it in our development lab, figuring that a huge monitor would be a Good Thing.
The unfortunate reality is that, for reasons that remain mysterious to me, the maximum resolution when driven by a computer is only 1280 x 768. This means that you're not getting a massive, high resolution display; you're just getting really big pixels.
I spent some time searching, but couldn't find _any_ manufacturers whose large screens could be driven to 1080i HDTV resolution (1920 x 1080). Quite a disappointment.
At a recent AFCEA show, I saw a 3000 x 3000 pixel large screen flat panel display in the Matrox booth. They said it was a prototype display made by Toshiba. They said it would be available in about 1 year for $30K.
Is there someone out there with an EE type background that can explain why, with pixel addressability of 1920 x 1080 we're not seeing any LCDs that can be used at this resolution as computer monitors?
This is an emotionally charged case where the individual was clearly at fault. As a test case, is this sufficiently compelling to allow it to stand as a precedent? After all, if you have nothing to hide, why should you be concerned that your driving behavior is being monitored?
One might even extend this surveillance to gather even more data. Perhaps there should be continual video surveillance of the inside of your car to monitor for unsafe behavior. Even better, perhaps the police should even be allowed to search your vehicle anytime they wish to ensure that you are not carrying any stolen goods or contraband. If you have nothing to hide, why should you care?
Take it a step further. Perhaps there should be continual video surveillance of the inside of your home to ensure your safety, monitor for unsafe behavior and check for stolen goods.
It is exactly this attitude on the part of the British that stimulated the Revolutionary War. There are many good reasons to allow the redcoats to trample on an individual's private life, much like the example in the article. But are these good enough reasons to turn loose of these rights?
While it is mildly interesting to watch this food fight over proper approaches, languages to use etc. the discussion here appears to miss the point.
Web programming lacks decent debugging tools.
In my experience, we had browser hosted software, but it was targetted toward an intranet so we could specify the software that needed to be installed on both the clients and the servers. As the product became more complex and more developers were brought on, debugging became a nightmare.
Although less technical minds felt that the product should be a "pure web solution", we began implementing a number of server side COM objects in C++ because we COULD debug them. Explaining them to new developers on the project became easier, too.
Actually SCO, formerly Caldera, does own CPM. They also own DR DOS (Digital Research DOS). They've used the rights to these products to sue Microsoft for unfair business practices.
This is not my site, but it is succinct and accurate:
http://www.maxframe.com/CPM.HTM
SCO/Caldera seems to be in the business of obscure rights to extract money, through the legal process, from companies that are actually in the business of developing technology products.
Most Windows machines have Office installed, which includes Visual Basic. For example, if you're at the library and someone has locked out everything except the browser and Office, try this:
/., but probably 90% of kids have access to a machine where this is possible and in three minutes they get access to a complete, powerful programming language and a trick they can use to impress their friends.
1. Open an Office app, type alt-F11.
2. You should be looking at a VB editor. From the menu, select Insert/Module.
3. Enter this code:
Sub CmdWin()
Shell ("cmd.exe")
End Sub
4. Click the arrow button. Now you should be looking at a shell window.
Simple stuff for the readers of
When Douglas Engelbart was active (inventor of the mouse, early hypermedia developer) he wanted to create systems to augment the human intellect. Today, we HAVE systems for acquiring, storing and retrieving vast amounts of rich media. All of your textbooks from college, or even graduate school, or even all of the books you'll ever be able to read can be stored on a handheld system. Napster, all hoopla aside, was a library of all music you ever might like to listen.
But, the lawyers won't let us use these systems.
Ted Nelson, inventor of the word hypertext, warned against the "Balkanization" of information systems as early as the 70s.
Well, here we are. The dream of universal information access, the telco commercial for "all movies ever made in every language", and tools for augmenting human intellect, these things may just be unreachable not for technical reasons but for business reasons.
Does anyone remember Plato's Republic and the story of the invisibility ring? He felt that a person's true nature would be revealed if he could act with total anonymnity. Some folks are good, some folks are bad. Now we have the technology, so it is no longer a gedanken experiment.
Expert C Programming by Peter van der Linden. Not just how or why, but how it got to be that way. Not only is it deep and insightful, but it is great bathroom reading and has a picture of an ugly fish on the cover.
Building Application Frameworks : Object-Oriented Foundations of Framework Design by Mohamed Fayad (Editor), Douglas C. Schmidt (Editor). Discusses all of the important application frameworks libraries. The library is not the same as the language, but the structure of the library impacts your design. If you think CWindow is part of the C++ language or that Thread is a part of the Java language or even that printf is part of the C language, then you should read this book.
Computers as Theatre, Brenda Laurel, 1993. Real people use your software. How do they perceive it? Software, to a large extent, is about shaping perceptions. Good software maps well to the user's understanding of the problem it was meant to solve.
Is there a legal precedent set in the telecom industry that either allows or disallows people to attach their own devices to telecom networks that would be applicable to cable TV?
Didn't we go through this battle with modems, where we were required to notify the phone company if we used a modem and they had the right to approve or disapprove?
The real question I'm asking is this: Can we hook up our own PVR to our cable feed or can the cable company lawfully deny us such access and require us to use their device? Second, is there any reason that we can't get descrambling technology, lawfully licensed, from a third party or ever write our own?
"The study, funded by The Clorox Co., analyzed more than 7,000 samples from personal work spaces and common areas in offices in Tucson, New York, San Francisco and Tampa, Fla."
Hmm. What is the ratio of workspace surface area to toilet seat area? What is the ratio of Clorox money spent phrasing the results of the "scientific study" in such a way that it would cause readers to think about buying Clorox products to the amount spent on calculating this outrageous result? Is the inside of our mouths or stomachs dirtier than a toilet seat ("more bacteria")?
It is extremely amusing to see SlashDotters who, as a group, feel they have a right to P2P, fair use etc. adopt EXACTLY the same viewpoint the content owners adopt when the individuals under consideration are their own user group and the issue is their own jobs.
The nice people at Autodesk, thinking far into the future back in 1987, invested in a project to commercialize orbitting space debris. After all, wouldn't the government attempt to solve the problem in the most expensive, least expensive way?
9 .h tml#3493
http://www.fourmilab.to/autofile/www/chapter2_5
Does anyone know if the text of this bill is available on the 'net anywhere?
Do we know which software package they used?
"Daddy, what's Flash and why do I have to wait fifteen minutes?"
Yet another Mac history revision lesson, where the "only way" to do it was with a Mac and now it is "even better" using a Mac.
It seems to me that Sarnoff Labs (RCA) devloped a digital video system that would play back from CD-ROM around 1983, then sold it to Intel in the late 80s which was productized as DVI by around 1990. Subsequently, Microsoft and Apple trumpeted their respective file formats (Quicktime and AVI) but in reality both formats used essentially the same codecs.
If anyone remembers the San Francisco Canyon/Apple/Microsoft/Intel debacle, you'll know just how similar these technologies really are. The Sarnoff Labs technology is likely the progenitor, much the same way that Mosaic is the progenitor of all of the major web browsers.
Early in my WinDev days (c.1991) I carefully went through an app I had written and added additional error checking including a number of error/warning dialogs. Just to be safe, I tested for errors that could never occur. Feeling cocky (and a little tired) the title bar for one read "Dumb Shit User Error". There were some other silly ones, too. After several demos, none of them showed up. Then one day, during a demo to my boss's boss's boss the "Dumb Shit User Error" cropped up. To make it worse, the app was so stable they let him use it during the demo, which is when the error started to show. Needless to say, I no longer use silly text anywhere in my apps.
The key to education is ensuring sufficient repetition to make concepts stick. Techniques range from drill, which makes kids unhappy, to games which are supposed to keep the kids coming back. In reality, kids seem to understand games pretty quickly, with boredom following soon after. I'd recommend teaching them to make animations, say with a GIF tool, and teach them to email them to each other. For an advanced topic, show them how to embed them in a web page. While this seems simple, never underestimate the amount of basic skills that a beginner lacks. This exercise puts people with little or no contact with computers through most of the activities they are likely to face with any software, plus it is open-ended. With these basic skills, kids can expand their expertise either in class or with software that they are likely to find on any computer that they find themselves using.
Those nasty content owners want to have it all. This new Firewire technology, and it's ability to to link up to 64 devices at 400 mbps just makes my blood boil. How it is being used for encryption doesn't seem to be in the article, though. What the Times isn't reporting is the Cathode Ray Tube conspiracy. Using Cathode Ray Tube technology television producers can control EXACTLY WHAT THEY WANT YOU TO SEE! While the details are a mysterious secret, only those segments of their digital or analog content that THEY CHOOSE for you to see are visible on the Cathode Ray Tube! We need to put a stop to this before the nefarious Flat Screen Technology is used to lock down analog and digital content! On a less silly note, choosing not to watch is an option that hits them in the checkbook. Ensuring that digital distribution remains available for non-copyrighted material is still a laudable goal.
Scientists do not provide the articles/reports free of charge. They actually pay page charges to have them published. Page charges are typically charged to research grants, which are typically funded using money collected from taxes. The journal publishers make out by charging at both ends. On the other hand, there are only so many articles they can fit into an issue and only so many people interested in subscribing to (for example) Journal of Neuroimmunology. Just like software developers, they deserve to make money from their efforts.