Err.. I know we haven't got that to work reliably yet (they usually don't open fast enough, so you walk into them if you try to treat them like Trek actors do...), but we're at least taking steps toward that one.
# Computers that play __3-D chess__ ! # (People that play 3-D chess)
OK, if you were an alien, where would you land? Somehow anywhere in the United States seems to be not a very bright idea. Stupid Roswell aliens...
An interesting question. Depends on the goals of the mission, I suspect.
A couple of profiles thrown off the top of my head:
- Make contact with global leaders
Assuming the aliens make judgments in the same way we do, I would go for either Eastern USA, Western Europe or Japan. If an assumption is made of global government, Eastern USA looks better developed so I would aim for there. If the working assumption is continental governments, there seems to be a greater degree of centralisation in Western Europe, so I'd head for either Madrid or Paris, figuring that one of those two is likely to be the European administration centre. Probably Paris, due to its more central location.
- Study the behaviour of the technology possessing inhabitants of this world
I'd head for an area on the edge of a bright patch, but far enough away that I'm likely to be able to go unnoticed. West China, East Russia, and North Africa all look quite appealing, with little to distinguish between them. I'd probably visit all three, on the basis that there might be regional variation in behaviour.
Coral is my girlfriend and this thread keeps getting weirder.
That's because its all a bizarre dream. I mean, really. You have nothing better to do than post amusing comments on slashdot. You don't _really_ have a girlfriend!;)
I think it only works in the presence of a controlling system that knows the location of every object you're interested in. This certainly ain't the case for roads, so probably it'll be a while.
It's standard practice to put magazines on sale about a week or so before the cover date. I'd guess that most places would have it by today, and that'll be what the editors are working on. Otherwise, the stories from it wouldn't be up on the web site yet -- if you could get them on the web significantly before the print edition, why would you buy the print edition? You'd have read all the stories by the time it came out!:)
The phrase "limited lethality" refers, I believe, to the fact that it is only lethal within a small range of where it hits. Not that is unlikely to be lethal at all, or anything like that.
It probably is, too. I remember reading in Wired back in '97 or so about a unit that was training Marines using a Doom 2 mod they'd written. They've probably moved over to UT in the mean time, but I think they might consider moving back...
Actually the council kindly stuck some "abandoned car" stickers on it, then towed it away a few weeks later, but that is another story:D
They are getting rather overzealous with those. I have a friend who had the police knocking on his door to find out if the 5 year old Escort parked outside his house was his... because it had been reported as abandoned. If he'd been away for two weeks, it would have been towed away. If he'd been away for eight, it might have been scrapped before he found out about it.
From what I've heard, this is the way the next release of Windows will work -- all windows will be drawn to independent buffers in video RAM and then composited once per refresh to produce a smooth display. Options such as rotating and scaling windows will be available.
If I designed a window system today, it would have themeable standard widgets, and the protocol (function calls for local, some sort of RPC for remote) would only have to specify the widgets to be used, as opposed to all the drawing operations, which is what X11 does.
Agreed; I'd also suggest having the widgets being specified as interfaces, with a per-user database to decide which implementation to use for which interface, thus allowing radical changes in behaviour in addition to appearance.
Also, it wouldn't require each and every event (mouse move, click,...) to be communicated between server and client.
I do believe X11 supports this. I remember from my brief foray into Xlib programming having to specifically enable events that I wanted to receive.
All this is simultaneously going to do away with the many competing and incompatible GUI toolkits for X
I believe you could even re-implement them to use your underlying features.
I suspect the main difference is that on WIndows there's one company responsible for the GUI and libraries, and they've put in a special case in the library to deal with this.
That's a good point. There are a lot of special cases in Windows that just put little touches like this on the UI -- another example is that when an application is starting you get the 'background processing' mouse cursor... and if the application crashes before displaying a window, it goes back to the normal one. KDE puts a little animation next to the cursor (iff you started the application through a standard KDE process... start it from konsole and it won't happen), but if the program crashes you end up sitting there waiting until it times out.
Are you proposing that the windowing system should not provide straightforward access to plain drawable windows unless it also provides an easier to use interface for a widget set?
I'm not suggesting limiting functionality -- of course it should be _possible_ for applications to directly draw on their windows if they want to. Any function that is unique to an individual application should be performed this way.
But any common functions should be implemented as part of a standard widget set.
oes that mean that the windowing part of the project *must* *not* be released for testing before the widget part?
No. In fact, it would likely be impossible to develop the widget implementations before the window management side was complete.
If GTK+ included an X server, would that satisfy your requirements so that QT developers "specifically override [your] choices".
Probably not. I'll admit I don't know much about GTK+ at a technical level, but I believe it only supports overriding the drawing mechanisms as part of its theme mechanism. What I'm proposing is an interface where the application is unaware of the specific implementation of the widget, which is chosen by the user. So, for example, I could replace multi-line edit boxes with either a vi or an emacs implementation if I so chose.
If GTK+ did support this feature level, then that would be a reasonable implementation... although the API to use it should be as lightweight as possible, preferably requiring only one or two small shared libraries to be loaded into the application. The shared libraries implementing the controls would be loaded by the server, meaning that the OS doesn't have to waste resources on mapping them into each client (which is part of the reason why environments like Gnome/KDE are so slow -- the huge number of dependencies their applications have).
You know that the GTK+ library and the QT library could be made to draw on any window system that provides OpenGL/GLUT or a canvas from which events can be obtained, so the mere existence of GTK+ and QT makes it trivial to produce applications that conflict with any "standard" widget look and feel for a window system.
Of course. And I'm not suggesting making this impossible -- what I am suggesting is that the presence of a standard encourages people to code for it. Particularly when that standard implements easily what they want to do.
I suspect it would be fairly easy to modify GTK+ and QT to use the widget sets provided by the server, and once this had been done any applications using either of those toolkits would function adequately. Any other system designed for cross platform portability is likely to be portable to the new functions of the server, also.
Gravity is a field. Therefore the force at your head is ever so slightly less than the force at your feet, theoretically.
Consider a gravity field produced by an extremely massive object at a distance which is very large compared to the distance you are able to move to make your measurements.
By choosing the correct values of 'extremely massive' and 'very large' you should be able to reduce the discrepancies caused to lower than than the absolute limit of ability to measure gravity.
Try downgrading to v5. It can handle 95% of the documents out there, and uses about a quarter of the load time of v6 and above. Version 4 is even faster, but there are significantly more documents it won't open.
You forgot to define a schema and use namespaces to reference all your tags, as most modern XML based systems seem to do. Here's a revised version:
<?xml version="1.0" encoding="ISO-8859-1"?> <argument:objection xmlns:argument="http://www.mynamespaceserver.com/n amespaces/argument" tone="disgusted"> <argument:body>xml is too sodding verbose for any use ever anywhere. Satan himself recoils before its horror. </argument:body> </argument:objection>
Is the concept of an "open patent" even applicable legally? I hope so, because I have some ideas that I would like to open up (and I have the feeling i'm not the only one).
Yes. You can get the patent and then offer anyone who wants one a free, fully transferable, irrevocable license. You would specifically want to grant such a license to several organisations who may be interested in spreading it farther (e.g. FSF, EFF, popular Linux distributors, etc.).
The problem with this is that patents are expensive. My understanding is that you can count on spending in the region of $2000 US to acquire one. Obviously, this isn't the kind of money most people are prepared to spend for the good of all concerned -- you'd probably have to start a 'patent charity'; and then you'd have to worry about what exactly your donors wanted patented, etc.
Thank you. I had remembered that description, but had somehow associated with Multics (I think the book I found it in had case studies on both of them), which explains why I couldn't find any info about it...
Claim 1 depends on an "administrative security process accepting a request from a user process executing under the non-administrative privilege level to initiate a particular administrative method". I don't think 'su' or 'sudo' or anything like it match this, because there isn't any such process. They provide a more direct way of achieving the same result... they are run by the non-administrative user and start with the privileges of the administrative user (i.e. root).
Now, I can tell you how to set up a Unix compatible system to work in the way this system defines: you need to replace 'su' with something like 'rsh -l root localhost'. So, anybody who's published details of a system that works like that _is_ prior art, at least for claims 1, 2 and 3. That doesn't do claim 4, though.
Forget about sudo, what about the OS itself? One function of most OS's is to let a process request a function, which is priv'd (the process has no other way of doing it except through the OS) and then carrying out that function in the privileged context of the OS.
I see what you are saying... but I also see the subtle difference in MS's approach, which is that the process is not part of the OS kernel (it is just an ordinary process running as a priveleged user... you _could_ do the same on unix with a process running as root, for instance) and what it does is start another process as the user that requests it.
MS hasn't sued Palm over the double clicking of hardware buttons in PDAs, for example. Why? Because they're slow? Nah. Because they risk losing.
No, I suspect its because Palms don't actually do what MS patented, which was very specific, IIRC -- clicking once launched an application, clicking twice launched the application _and_ opened the last document you were using it to work on. In fact, I don't think Palms process double clicks (or taps or presses or whatever) at all.
Slashdot Mirror
Doors that swish open when you walk towards them
Err.. I know we haven't got that to work reliably yet (they usually don't open fast enough, so you walk into them if you try to treat them like Trek actors do...), but we're at least taking steps toward that one.
# Computers that play __3-D chess__ !
# (People that play 3-D chess)
See here
Glasses (or contacts) that automatically fog up when looking at a beautiful foreign woman that you're destined to seduce and abandon
Huh?
The problem with the Alcubierre drive is that it requires large quantities of negative mass. As far as we know, negative mass is probably impossible.
Tinfoill hat are made of tin.
Like, duh!
Unfortunately, you're overlooking the fact that tinfoil is made from alumin[i]um.
This is largely because it is frequently used in food storage and preparation, and tin is poisonous, so isn't a good choice.
OK, if you were an alien, where would you land? Somehow anywhere in the United States seems to be not a very bright idea. Stupid Roswell aliens...
An interesting question. Depends on the goals of the mission, I suspect.
A couple of profiles thrown off the top of my head:
- Make contact with global leaders
Assuming the aliens make judgments in the same way we do, I would go for either Eastern USA, Western Europe or Japan. If an assumption is made of global government, Eastern USA looks better developed so I would aim for there. If the working assumption is continental governments, there seems to be a greater degree of centralisation in Western Europe, so I'd head for either Madrid or Paris, figuring that one of those two is likely to be the European administration centre. Probably Paris, due to its more central location.
- Study the behaviour of the technology possessing inhabitants of this world
I'd head for an area on the edge of a bright patch, but far enough away that I'm likely to be able to go unnoticed. West China, East Russia, and North Africa all look quite appealing, with little to distinguish between them. I'd probably visit all three, on the basis that there might be regional variation in behaviour.
Oh, and there's an apostrophe in "it's" (meaning "it is").
So how is Coral doing with her reefs. Learn english, its coral reefs not "corals reefs".
When one asks a question in English (note the capital E), it is usual to use a question mark rather than a full stop at the end of the sentence.
Also, in order to interpret it as you did, it would need to be "Coral's Reefs".
Coral is my girlfriend and this thread keeps getting weirder.
;)
That's because its all a bizarre dream. I mean, really. You have nothing better to do than post amusing comments on slashdot. You don't _really_ have a girlfriend!
I think it only works in the presence of a controlling system that knows the location of every object you're interested in. This certainly ain't the case for roads, so probably it'll be a while.
It's standard practice to put magazines on sale about a week or so before the cover date. I'd guess that most places would have it by today, and that'll be what the editors are working on. Otherwise, the stories from it wouldn't be up on the web site yet -- if you could get them on the web significantly before the print edition, why would you buy the print edition? You'd have read all the stories by the time it came out! :)
The phrase "limited lethality" refers, I believe, to the fact that it is only lethal within a small range of where it hits. Not that is unlikely to be lethal at all, or anything like that.
That's military code for "Doom 3."
It probably is, too. I remember reading in Wired back in '97 or so about a unit that was training Marines using a Doom 2 mod they'd written. They've probably moved over to UT in the mean time, but I think they might consider moving back...
Actually the council kindly stuck some "abandoned car" stickers on it, then towed it away a few weeks later, but that is another story :D
They are getting rather overzealous with those. I have a friend who had the police knocking on his door to find out if the 5 year old Escort parked outside his house was his... because it had been reported as abandoned. If he'd been away for two weeks, it would have been towed away. If he'd been away for eight, it might have been scrapped before he found out about it.
From what I've heard, this is the way the next release of Windows will work -- all windows will be drawn to independent buffers in video RAM and then composited once per refresh to produce a smooth display. Options such as rotating and scaling windows will be available.
If I designed a window system today, it would have themeable standard widgets, and the protocol (function calls for local, some sort of RPC for remote) would only have to specify the widgets to be used, as opposed to all the drawing operations, which is what X11 does.
...) to be communicated between server and client.
Agreed; I'd also suggest having the widgets being specified as interfaces, with a per-user database to decide which implementation to use for which interface, thus allowing radical changes in behaviour in addition to appearance.
Also, it wouldn't require each and every event (mouse move, click,
I do believe X11 supports this. I remember from my brief foray into Xlib programming having to specifically enable events that I wanted to receive.
All this is simultaneously going to do away with the many competing and incompatible GUI toolkits for X
I believe you could even re-implement them to use your underlying features.
I suspect the main difference is that on WIndows there's one company responsible for the GUI and libraries, and they've put in a special case in the library to deal with this.
That's a good point. There are a lot of special cases in Windows that just put little touches like this on the UI -- another example is that when an application is starting you get the 'background processing' mouse cursor... and if the application crashes before displaying a window, it goes back to the normal one. KDE puts a little animation next to the cursor (iff you started the application through a standard KDE process... start it from konsole and it won't happen), but if the program crashes you end up sitting there waiting until it times out.
Are you proposing that the windowing system should not provide straightforward access to plain drawable windows unless it also provides an easier to use interface for a widget set?
I'm not suggesting limiting functionality -- of course it should be _possible_ for applications to directly draw on their windows if they want to. Any function that is unique to an individual application should be performed this way.
But any common functions should be implemented as part of a standard widget set.
oes that mean that the windowing part of the project *must* *not* be released for testing before the widget part?
No. In fact, it would likely be impossible to develop the widget implementations before the window management side was complete.
If GTK+ included an X server, would that satisfy your requirements so that QT developers "specifically override [your] choices".
Probably not. I'll admit I don't know much about GTK+ at a technical level, but I believe it only supports overriding the drawing mechanisms as part of its theme mechanism. What I'm proposing is an interface where the application is unaware of the specific implementation of the widget, which is chosen by the user. So, for example, I could replace multi-line edit boxes with either a vi or an emacs implementation if I so chose.
If GTK+ did support this feature level, then that would be a reasonable implementation... although the API to use it should be as lightweight as possible, preferably requiring only one or two small shared libraries to be loaded into the application. The shared libraries implementing the controls would be loaded by the server, meaning that the OS doesn't have to waste resources on mapping them into each client (which is part of the reason why environments like Gnome/KDE are so slow -- the huge number of dependencies their applications have).
You know that the GTK+ library and the QT library could be made to draw on any window system that provides OpenGL/GLUT or a canvas from which events can be obtained, so the mere existence of GTK+ and QT makes it trivial to produce applications that conflict with any "standard" widget look and feel for a window system.
Of course. And I'm not suggesting making this impossible -- what I am suggesting is that the presence of a standard encourages people to code for it. Particularly when that standard implements easily what they want to do.
I suspect it would be fairly easy to modify GTK+ and QT to use the widget sets provided by the server, and once this had been done any applications using either of those toolkits would function adequately. Any other system designed for cross platform portability is likely to be portable to the new functions of the server, also.
Gravity is a field. Therefore the force at your head is ever so slightly less than the force at your feet, theoretically.
Consider a gravity field produced by an extremely massive object at a distance which is very large compared to the distance you are able to move to make your measurements.
By choosing the correct values of 'extremely massive' and 'very large' you should be able to reduce the discrepancies caused to lower than than the absolute limit of ability to measure gravity.
Try downgrading to v5. It can handle 95% of the documents out there, and uses about a quarter of the load time of v6 and above. Version 4 is even faster, but there are significantly more documents it won't open.
* 897 FETCH (ENVELOPE ("Sat, 21 Aug 2004 15:39:35 +0100" "Re:Don't remember who it was..." (("Julian Hall" NIL "jules" "acris.co.uk")) (("Julian Hall" NIL "jules" "acris.co.uk")) (("Julian Hall" NIL "jules" "acris.co.uk")) (("Julian Hall" NIL "jules" "acris.co.uk")) NIL NIL NIL "") BODY[1] {32}
What, you mean like IMAP does?
)
You forgot to define a schema and use namespaces to reference all your tags, as most modern XML based systems seem to do. Here's a revised version:
n amespaces/argument" tone="disgusted">
<?xml version="1.0" encoding="ISO-8859-1"?>
<argument:objection xmlns:argument="http://www.mynamespaceserver.com/
<argument:body>xml is too sodding verbose for any use ever anywhere. Satan himself recoils before its horror.
</argument:body>
</argument:objection>
Is the concept of an "open patent" even applicable legally? I hope so, because I have some ideas that I would like to open up (and I have the feeling i'm not the only one).
Yes. You can get the patent and then offer anyone who wants one a free, fully transferable, irrevocable license. You would specifically want to grant such a license to several organisations who may be interested in spreading it farther (e.g. FSF, EFF, popular Linux distributors, etc.).
The problem with this is that patents are expensive. My understanding is that you can count on spending in the region of $2000 US to acquire one. Obviously, this isn't the kind of money most people are prepared to spend for the good of all concerned -- you'd probably have to start a 'patent charity'; and then you'd have to worry about what exactly your donors wanted patented, etc.
Thank you. I had remembered that description, but had somehow associated with Multics (I think the book I found it in had case studies on both of them), which explains why I couldn't find any info about it...
Sorry, I don't believe you're right. Here's why:
Claim 1 depends on an "administrative security process accepting a request from a user process executing under the non-administrative privilege level to initiate a particular administrative method". I don't think 'su' or 'sudo' or anything like it match this, because there isn't any such process. They provide a more direct way of achieving the same result... they are run by the non-administrative user and start with the privileges of the administrative user (i.e. root).
Now, I can tell you how to set up a Unix compatible system to work in the way this system defines: you need to replace 'su' with something like 'rsh -l root localhost'. So, anybody who's published details of a system that works like that _is_ prior art, at least for claims 1, 2 and 3. That doesn't do claim 4, though.
Forget about sudo, what about the OS itself?
One function of most OS's is to let a process
request a function, which is priv'd (the process
has no other way of doing it except through
the OS) and then carrying out that function in
the privileged context of the OS.
I see what you are saying... but I also see the subtle difference in MS's approach, which is that the process is not part of the OS kernel (it is just an ordinary process running as a priveleged user... you _could_ do the same on unix with a process running as root, for instance) and what it does is start another process as the user that requests it.
Kind of like 'getty', if you think about it...
MS hasn't sued Palm over the double clicking of hardware buttons in PDAs, for example. Why? Because they're slow? Nah. Because they risk losing.
No, I suspect its because Palms don't actually do what MS patented, which was very specific, IIRC -- clicking once launched an application, clicking twice launched the application _and_ opened the last document you were using it to work on. In fact, I don't think Palms process double clicks (or taps or presses or whatever) at all.