Think of it as an extended hologram
on
Stop, Light.
·
· Score: 1
As others have pointed out, what's really happening here is not that photons are somehow stopped (they have zero rest mass) but that they are storing their information in the spin of the rubidium atoms. The light beam is stored with the help of a second beam used to excite the atoms.
This is analogous to a hologram, which manages to store phase information from light, using a reference beam (normally split off from the illuminating beam). This slow light is more thn just a hologram, though, because of all the extra information that is archived.
I'm switching. I can't stand another six months with X windows. KDE and Gnome make the best of it, but even they can't seem get me a real clipboard, one that works with more than just text, and works the same on all apps.
I've been using Linux for 3 years, and I'm going to be jumping for joy the day I can finally get a UI that is more than skin deep.
For years, I've been wanting to put my class notes up on the web for my students, in a hyperlinked form. The problem has always been that I could get good looking equations by just putting up a PDF, or I could get hyperlinks by using one of the TeX to HTML converters, but I've never been able to get both. Of course, even when MathML allows good TeX to HTML conversion, I'm still going to have a good time trying to get the converters to work with all the AMS-Latex extension macros (ever try to use HyperLaTeX and AMSLaTeX at the same time? Ugh!). It's going to be plain LaTeX for a long time, folks.
Right at the very end of the article is the most important point of general corporate security. Namely, that by far the biggest threats are from within, by employees or other authorized users. It's certainly more sensational to be cracked, but it's a lot more damaging to be scammed by somebody who knows exactly where you keep the crown jewels.
Ah yes. A review clearly written by a fan of the Iron Eagle genre of meaningless films. The guy obviously isn't married, or he would not have been able to help but appreciate the marital subplot -- which was very well done. His problem is he wanted to see X-Men and bought a ticket for Unbreakable. If you like contemplative cinema (which few guys do) this movie is excellent. I thought it was like a merger of Chocolat with a comic book.
Of course, Katz gets it wrong too. He appreciates the movie but partially just because it allows him to obsess more about persecution.
It sure would be nice to substitute a shell script or a small C program for that Perl script. Many folks run full Linux distros on their desktop and relegate the firewalling duties to small routers running something like LRP without software packages as huge as Perl.
Does anybody else find it amusing that Ektanoor, on very little sleep, writes with the fractured syntax of an 8th grader while claiming he is completely unaffected?
Wow. First we hear alcohol drops your cholesterol. Then we get the Atkins diet, where you're supposed live on steak and chocolate to cure obesity. Now we get this, where video games cure your ADD. When do we get to the part where partying improves your grades, dozing improves your driving, and lying makes you popular?
Umm, he's not dead. And as ranking member of the Senate Appropriations Committee, his hiney has been kissed about as much as anyone's in D.C
Oops. Change that to present tense. And just think, after all that ass-kissing and all those years in the public eye, some fool citizen didn't even know he was still alive. He needs a couple more telescopes;-)
Isn't it sad that the telescope should be named for a senator (already famous) rather than a scientist?
Don't get me wrong -- I think it's better to have the telescope than not, even if you have to kiss a little senatorial hiney in order to get funding. Byrd was a respectable fellow. But it's a real commentary on the motives of America's politicians (who I think are underpaid and thus feel justified in seeking compensatory perks, like this one).
That's actually pretty much what we do, though with a bit more code here and there. I'm no expert on the subject, but I've never heard of any fundamentally different exception-based error handling in C. I assume this is more or less what goes on, even in C derivatives that "do it for you".
The problem is not so much this piece as making sure everybody uses the system, properly, for handling their errors. Some of our people are hard to talk out of using (ugh!) passed parameters for error indication.
When the error handling is "part of the language" as it is, say, in Python, people tend to agree to use it (and learn how).
One good point -- too much C in open software
on
KDE Strikes Back
·
· Score: 5
Powell has one point that has often bugged me about open source software. Far too much of it is written in portable assembly language (a.k.a. "C"). I appreciate the advantages of this as much as the next guy -- it's good to have a lingua franca, C is widely portable, and a lot of tools for programming it are already there. Nevertheless, C is really primitive, and it's difficult to write reusable bits of code for it. Up until 1997, I had a job where we wrote code in object-oriented languages (C++ and Objective C). Since 1997, I've worked at a place where everything must be ANSI C. That has paid dividends in portability, but we've expended tremendous effort doing things like
* writing array structures, and functions to operate on them (pseudo-objects)
* writing standardized error handling
* synchronizing related structures
* fixing memory bugs
* avoiding that oh-so-tempting copy/paste by generalizing function arguments
all of which would have been alleviated by using some flavor of object-oriented language (or even C++!;-} ).
If you look at the code for open-source projects, you can see them inventing the wheel, over and over. I suppose you could argue that things are going slowly in the Java direction, which is fine. But that just means that Gnome is in retrograde motion.
- Brian K Boonstra (who can't wait to start using Mac OS X)
It killed the weaker one, the one that would have most likely been the representative of our evolutionary ancestor.
Extraterrestrial bacteria (if they exist) are likely to come from harsher environments than the Earth's surface (where bacteria have grown soft and weak, resistant tuberculosis notwithstanding). It is reasonable to expect that extraterrestrial bacteria might be a little more like radiodurans
OK, first of all, for those who are afraid that whatever replaces X might not have remote window servers over a network, relax. The feature is not that difficult to do. NeXTStep had it a decade ago, Aqua has it now, and I'll bet you get it in Berlin and BeOS as well.
Second, some people claim that X windows is "just fine". That's crazy -- I can't even copy a sentence from my Netscape window and paste it in my xterm. That's really frustrating. Now you might say that it's not the fault of X, since X is supposed to be a lower-level protocol. But then where does the fault lie? Do you really think it is realistic to expect applications developers to agree on, and conform to, pasteboard standards? While other platforms get dragon drop interfaces even for their file compression utilities (viz. WinZip/EasyZip), my Debian woody box can't even handle text properly.
however, XWindows was written to be a client-server application. Do you know another GUI that lets you do that?
Well, sure. How about NeXTStep, which has let you do it (look on that page for NXHost and NSHost) for 10 years. Or perhaps you would be interested in Mac OS X, which retains the feature. It's not really all that hard to do, you know (I would be unsurprised to find that BeOS works in client-server as well). The NeXT and OS X GUI's are about as elegant as the traditional Mac GUI, and are about as draconian in enforcing standards, yet they work quite transparently with remote clients.
You seem to think X Windows is the only client-server GUI ever written. Look around a little!
By the way, while I can certainly see how you would have inferred from the author's phrasing that he thought Linux was created in '95, if you read carefully, you will see that another interpretation is possible: that Linux first started to reach a critical mass of popularity in '95. That's certainly consistent with my recollection.
Quite right. I tried just last week to find out how to paint the exterior of my house. I'm a decent search engine pilot, but I found nothing useful. The library (and bookstore) had this topic covered nicely.
Well, physicists as a whole are known more for their skill at physics than their abilities of self-expression. Add to this the fact that the conference probably covered plenty of cutting edge research, where people were struggling with issues they barely understood, and it's not surprising there were plenty of poor sentences.
A more interesting comparison would be between, say, physicists at a party (hard to find, I know), versus others at a party.
LyX may be OK for somebody with just a few equations to typeset, but it is WAY too buggy to use professionally. I've tried it on several different occasions with ultimate disappointment.
I teach some fairly mathematical classes, and after I wrote some of the notes in LyX I decided it wouldn't do. Unfortunately, the migration to regular LaTeX was so bad that I just gave up and rewrote most everything.
I'll stay a pure TeX diehard for now. Long live NEdit! Long live OpenStep! Long live TeXEdit!
Taken from a lecture this winter by Carl Pomerance of Bell Labs/Lucent:
- The conjecture is true for numbers less than 10^14
- All sufficiently large even numbers are the sum of a prime and (the product of 2 primes). Note that this product is thus composite, but not very!! So this fact is kinda close to the GC.
- All sufficiently large odd numbers are the sum of 3 primes.
- If the generalized Riemann Hypothesis is true, all odd numbers bigger than 5 are the sum of 3 primes.
- There will generally be multiple representations of a given number as the sum of two primes. The count of these representations is large, and is suspected to go as n/( log(n)*log(n) )
This is probably too late to reach many people, but oh, well.
From what I see here, Slade is going to have to give up without a court fight, yet (as so many people have pointed out) this is a great opportunity for proving the GPL in court.
Wouldn't it be nice if somebody (even JC himself, heh) backed Slade up with some money to fight the case, so that we could avoid the inevitable settlement?
I just installed NEdit, and it looks to have all of the features I deem most precious. I'll have to play with it more, but it may take the #1 item off that list.
To respond to the AC, I can only say that the types of text files I need to edit are best handles with a GUI. I do a lot of random accessing and minor corrections. Of course, the article isn't really about me, and I think it's fairly clear to anybody that GUI text editors are a good thing in general. My real point is that no really good free one exists.
Insofar as the GIMP goes, maybe I missed some plugins, but it sure seems nigh impossible to do some basic things, like draw regular polygons, and do a magic selection inside a region. I also found the pasting behavior tough to control--I forget why. Anyway, my overall impression is that lots of plugins supply very cool but ultimately unused features, while some basics get neglected. In contrast, in the area of draw programs, I've liked xfig a lot more.
I'm not a user-type, and even I have eschewed free software with ugly UI's for better commercial version. Here's a brief list:
1. Text Editing This is obviously a touchy issue for many. For me, they need a good GUI. On Linux, I use gEdit, which is buggy and feature-poor, but OK. When I want to get real work done, though, I use OpenStep's Edit.app. And yes, I know how to use vi, emacs, joe, and even ed when I must.
2. CD Burning To burn an audio CD on my Linux system, I spent 2 hours(!) reading manuals -- for xcdroast, cdrdao, etc. Then I went to burn, and still screwed it up. I rebooted in Windows, used the free utility that came with my CD-RW, and was ready to burn in 5 minutes. Success.
3. Copying and Pasting Anytime I will have to do a lot of copying and pasting between apps, I switch to an OS where the keys for doing so are always the same. And where there's a real clipboard.
4. Matlab Octave successfully duplicates the command line interface, but (surprise!) has nothing like a more convenient notebook interface.
5. Paint programs Sure, the GIMP is all right. But (unless I'm missing some motherlode of plugins) it is feature-poor, and the interface for some tools in nonstandard.
Is there ANY free software that makes you want to switch to it, just for the UI?
...but there is a slump in one way you seem to have overlooked. Tech jobs. Granted things were a mite overheated before, but a lot of wheat is being fired along with the chaff.
Slashdot Mirror
As others have pointed out, what's really happening here is not that photons are somehow stopped (they have zero rest mass) but that they are storing their information in the spin of the rubidium atoms. The light beam is stored with the help of a second beam used to excite the atoms.
This is analogous to a hologram, which manages to store phase information from light, using a reference beam (normally split off from the illuminating beam). This slow light is more thn just a hologram, though, because of all the extra information that is archived.
I'm switching. I can't stand another six months with X windows. KDE and Gnome make the best of it, but even they can't seem get me a real clipboard, one that works with more than just text, and works the same on all apps.
I've been using Linux for 3 years, and I'm going to be jumping for joy the day I can finally get a UI that is more than skin deep.
For years, I've been wanting to put my class notes up on the web for my students, in a hyperlinked form. The problem has always been that I could get good looking equations by just putting up a PDF, or I could get hyperlinks by using one of the TeX to HTML converters, but I've never been able to get both.
Of course, even when MathML allows good TeX to HTML conversion, I'm still going to have a good time trying to get the converters to work with all the AMS-Latex extension macros (ever try to use HyperLaTeX and AMSLaTeX at the same time? Ugh!). It's going to be plain LaTeX for a long time, folks.
Right at the very end of the article is the most important point of general corporate security. Namely, that by far the biggest threats are from within, by employees or other authorized users. It's certainly more sensational to be cracked, but it's a lot more damaging to be scammed by somebody who knows exactly where you keep the crown jewels.
Ah yes. A review clearly written by a fan of the Iron Eagle genre of meaningless films. The guy obviously isn't married, or he would not have been able to help but appreciate the marital subplot -- which was very well done. His problem is he wanted to see X-Men and bought a ticket for Unbreakable. If you like contemplative cinema (which few guys do) this movie is excellent. I thought it was like a merger of Chocolat with a comic book.
Of course, Katz gets it wrong too. He appreciates the movie but partially just because it allows him to obsess more about persecution.
It sure would be nice to substitute a shell script or a small C program for that Perl script. Many folks run full Linux distros on their desktop and relegate the firewalling duties to small routers running something like LRP without software packages as huge as Perl.
Does anybody else find it amusing that Ektanoor, on very little sleep, writes with the fractured syntax of an 8th grader while claiming he is completely unaffected?
Next time he or she commits a crime, there'll be no worries about the DNA evidence! I can just see it now...
"Can you explain how your unique DNA got onto this crowbar?"
"Well, not exactly, sir, but you can see it's the official crowbar of the 2000 Olympics."
- Brian
Wow. First we hear alcohol drops your cholesterol. Then we get the Atkins diet, where you're supposed live on steak and chocolate to cure obesity. Now we get this, where video games cure your ADD. When do we get to the part where partying improves your grades, dozing improves your driving, and lying makes you popular?
Umm, he's not dead. And as ranking member of the Senate Appropriations Committee, his hiney has been kissed about as much as anyone's in D.C
;-)
Oops. Change that to present tense. And just think, after all that ass-kissing and all those years in the public eye, some fool citizen didn't even know he was still alive. He needs a couple more telescopes
Isn't it sad that the telescope should be named for a senator (already famous) rather than a scientist?
Don't get me wrong -- I think it's better to have the telescope than not, even if you have to kiss a little senatorial hiney in order to get funding. Byrd was a respectable fellow. But it's a real commentary on the motives of America's politicians (who I think are underpaid and thus feel justified in seeking compensatory perks, like this one).
That's actually pretty much what we do, though with a bit more code here and there. I'm no expert on the subject, but I've never heard of any fundamentally different exception-based error handling in C. I assume this is more or less what goes on, even in C derivatives that "do it for you".
The problem is not so much this piece as making sure everybody uses the system, properly, for handling their errors. Some of our people are hard to talk out of using (ugh!) passed parameters for error indication.
When the error handling is "part of the language" as it is, say, in Python, people tend to agree to use it (and learn how).
Powell has one point that has often bugged me about open source software. Far too much of it is written in portable assembly language (a.k.a. "C"). I appreciate the advantages of this as much as the next guy -- it's good to have a lingua franca, C is widely portable, and a lot of tools for programming it are already there. Nevertheless, C is really primitive, and it's difficult to write reusable bits of code for it. Up until 1997, I had a job where we wrote code in object-oriented languages (C++ and Objective C). Since 1997, I've worked at a place where everything must be ANSI C. That has paid dividends in portability, but we've expended tremendous effort doing things like
;-} ).
* writing array structures, and functions to operate on them (pseudo-objects)
* writing standardized error handling
* synchronizing related structures
* fixing memory bugs
* avoiding that oh-so-tempting copy/paste by generalizing function arguments
all of which would have been alleviated by using some flavor of object-oriented language (or even C++!
If you look at the code for open-source projects, you can see them inventing the wheel, over and over. I suppose you could argue that things are going slowly in the Java direction, which is fine. But that just means that Gnome is in retrograde motion.
- Brian K Boonstra (who can't wait to start using Mac OS X)
It killed the weaker one, the one that would have most likely been the representative of our evolutionary ancestor.
Extraterrestrial bacteria (if they exist) are likely to come from harsher environments than the Earth's surface (where bacteria have grown soft and weak, resistant tuberculosis notwithstanding). It is reasonable to expect that extraterrestrial bacteria might be a little more like radiodurans
OK, first of all, for those who are afraid that whatever replaces X might not have remote window servers over a network, relax. The feature is not that difficult to do. NeXTStep had it a decade ago, Aqua has it now, and I'll bet you get it in Berlin and BeOS as well.
Second, some people claim that X windows is "just fine". That's crazy -- I can't even copy a sentence from my Netscape window and paste it in my xterm. That's really frustrating. Now you might say that it's not the fault of X, since X is supposed to be a lower-level protocol. But then where does the fault lie? Do you really think it is realistic to expect applications developers to agree on, and conform to, pasteboard standards? While other platforms get dragon drop interfaces even for their file compression utilities (viz. WinZip/EasyZip), my Debian woody box can't even handle text properly.
Ridiculous.
however, XWindows was written to be a client-server application. Do you know another GUI that lets you do that?
Well, sure. How about NeXTStep, which has let you do it (look on that page for NXHost and NSHost) for 10 years. Or perhaps you would be interested in Mac OS X, which retains the feature. It's not really all that hard to do, you know (I would be unsurprised to find that BeOS works in client-server as well). The NeXT and OS X GUI's are about as elegant as the traditional Mac GUI, and are about as draconian in enforcing standards, yet they work quite transparently with remote clients.
You seem to think X Windows is the only client-server GUI ever written. Look around a little!
By the way, while I can certainly see how you would have inferred from the author's phrasing that he thought Linux was created in '95, if you read carefully, you will see that another interpretation is possible: that Linux first started to reach a critical mass of popularity in '95. That's certainly consistent with my recollection.
Quite right. I tried just last week to find out how to paint the exterior of my house. I'm a decent search engine pilot, but I found nothing useful. The library (and bookstore) had this topic covered nicely.
Well, physicists as a whole are known more for their skill at physics than their abilities of self-expression. Add to this the fact that the conference probably covered plenty of cutting edge research, where people were struggling with issues they barely understood, and it's not surprising there were plenty of poor sentences.
A more interesting comparison would be between, say, physicists at a party (hard to find, I know), versus others at a party.
LyX may be OK for somebody with just a few equations to typeset, but it is WAY too buggy to use professionally. I've tried it on several different occasions with ultimate disappointment.
I teach some fairly mathematical classes, and after I wrote some of the notes in LyX I decided it wouldn't do. Unfortunately, the migration to regular LaTeX was so bad that I just gave up and rewrote most everything.
I'll stay a pure TeX diehard for now. Long live NEdit! Long live OpenStep! Long live TeXEdit!
- Brian
Taken from a lecture this winter by Carl Pomerance of Bell Labs/Lucent:
- The conjecture is true for numbers less than 10^14
- All sufficiently large even numbers are the sum of a prime and (the product of 2 primes). Note that this product is thus composite, but not very!! So this fact is kinda close to the GC.
- All sufficiently large odd numbers are the sum of 3 primes.
- If the generalized Riemann Hypothesis is true, all odd numbers bigger than 5 are the sum of 3 primes.
- There will generally be multiple representations of a given number as the sum of two primes. The count of these representations is large, and is suspected to go as n/( log(n)*log(n) )
This is probably too late to reach many people, but oh, well.
- Brian
From what I see here, Slade is going to have to give up without a court fight, yet (as so many people have pointed out) this is a great opportunity for proving the GPL in court.
Wouldn't it be nice if somebody (even JC himself, heh) backed Slade up with some money to fight the case, so that we could avoid the inevitable settlement?
Hey, AC, thanks!
I just installed NEdit, and it looks to have all of the features I deem most precious. I'll have to play with it more, but it may take the #1 item off that list.
To respond to the AC, I can only say that the types of text files I need to edit are best handles with a GUI. I do a lot of random accessing and minor corrections. Of course, the article isn't really about me, and I think it's fairly clear to anybody that GUI text editors are a good thing in general. My real point is that no really good free one exists.
Insofar as the GIMP goes, maybe I missed some plugins, but it sure seems nigh impossible to do some basic things, like draw regular polygons, and do a magic selection inside a region. I also found the pasting behavior tough to control--I forget why. Anyway, my overall impression is that lots of plugins supply very cool but ultimately unused features, while some basics get neglected. In contrast, in the area of draw programs, I've liked xfig a lot more.
I'm not a user-type, and even I have eschewed free software with ugly UI's for better commercial version. Here's a brief list:
1. Text Editing
This is obviously a touchy issue for many. For me, they need a good GUI. On Linux, I use gEdit, which is buggy and feature-poor, but OK. When I want to get real work done, though, I use OpenStep's Edit.app. And yes, I know how to use vi, emacs, joe, and even ed when I must.
2. CD Burning
To burn an audio CD on my Linux system, I spent 2 hours(!) reading manuals -- for xcdroast, cdrdao, etc. Then I went to burn, and still screwed it up. I rebooted in Windows, used the free utility that came with my CD-RW, and was ready to burn in 5 minutes. Success.
3. Copying and Pasting
Anytime I will have to do a lot of copying and pasting between apps, I switch to an OS where the keys for doing so are always the same. And where there's a real clipboard.
4. Matlab
Octave successfully duplicates the command line interface, but (surprise!) has nothing like a more convenient notebook interface.
5. Paint programs
Sure, the GIMP is all right. But (unless I'm missing some motherlode of plugins) it is feature-poor, and the interface for some tools in nonstandard.
Is there ANY free software that makes you want to switch to it, just for the UI?
- Brian
...but there is a slump in one way you seem to have overlooked. Tech jobs. Granted things were a mite overheated before, but a lot of wheat is being fired along with the chaff.
- Brian