Did you ever try to build XFree from source? Well, did you?
I've done it. A while back I was fooling around with X joystick support. Because this module wasn't compiled by default I had to screw around with config files and then build the entire ball of wax. After some days of such tom-foolery I had an X desktop which I could use the joystick like a mouse. Woo... Never did that again.
I'll take autotools over IMAKE any day. At least I have a somewhat tenuous grasp of how autotools function, which is more than I can say for IMAKE, since its only used for compiling XF86.
When my wife came walking in the door with a cheap Mr. Coffee espresso maker, I admit that I was pretty skeptical. Now I start my day with a nice mug full of four shots of espresso and thats all the coffee I drink all day now. I used to walk around with a giant thermal mug until noon.
That thing does make a decent cup of java, I'll give it that much.
"We take eighteen ounces of sizzling ground beef, and then soak it in rich creamery butter. Then we top it off with bacon, ham and a fried egg. We call it . . . the Good Morning Burger."
Intel sure seems like they have shot themselves in the foot. They worked for years making sure that Intel X86 was king of the hill, then they tried to switch to Itanium, and AMD blew past them in the meantime. Intel has been still selling well just because of inertia, but it looks like the market is starting to jump over to AMD now finally.
Personally, I don't care. In fact I'd rather be using something with a sensible machine programming scheme and more grokkable architecture. PowerPC, ARM and Sparc are basically the three remaining competitors to X86. Mips, PA-RISC, Alpha, and others are still around, but I don't forsee them making much of a comeback, maybe Mips.
You're probably right if you consider X86-64 to be "Intel-based." It would be cool to see a supercomputer based on something like ARM if they could add FPU's and Vector processors, but by then it probably wouldn't be an ARM anymore.
Sun and IBM probably have the best hope of making non-x86 processors which might be viable for supercomputers. Especially IBM.
That's pretty subjective. If you're talking about "the Linux kernel" then while it was originally designed to just be a monolithic unix kernel clone for x86 machines, over the recent years, big boys like IBM have made some significant contributions to the source tree to make Linux an effective kernel on big iron.
If you're talking about Linux as in "GNU Userland" there's no reason it can't be run on big iron. You can probably build quite a lot of the GNU utilities against a non-Linux kernel and generic libc without serious problems. Personally, I like the GNU versions better than proprietary ones just because of the more consistent command line switch syntax and usually the extra features.
I know about zero concerning supercomputers though. Presumably you would access them using a graphics terminal of some type. Whatever the underlying OS might be, the most important thing for a supercomputer seems to be the ability to run massively parallel programs to solve huge matrix problems and otherwise process massive amounts of data quickly. No matter what OS they run, as long as you have your special FORTRAN compiler (or whatever it is they use on those things) to write super-programs, I don't see why Linux isn't at least as good a choice as any others.
I use Linux with ALSA, and some large wavetable midi patch sets, and I can get absolutely great sound from midi's. Typically I author up my background tracks in midi, jack my electric guitar in analog, and jam away.
Midi is definately copyrighted because its the same as sheet music. Whatever laws apply to sheet music apply to midi files because they are interchangable. Just because windows midi players suck and most people ignore these music files doesn't mean they can't be made to sound righteous and that they shouldn't be subject to the same copyright laws as written music. Thats all it is is sheet music and your midi synth is the orchestra that is playing the music for you. The better your synth the better the overall result.
These people pushing ID don't give a crap about learning, they want their kids indoctrinated into their religious cult.
Probably true. I'm an engineer and scientist. I was formerly an atheist, until I saw God. Jesus said in the Sermon on the Mount: "Blessed is he who is pure in heart, for he shall see God."
Well, I saw God, and yes, I was fairly pure in heart (at that time at least, now I don't know). One thing I can tell you is that if you see God, you will most likely believe in God from that point on. I do.
Even still ID theory is crap. God made us using evolution, its completely obvious. ID theory is wrong and stupid. Science class should teach evolution, and the preacher in church should explain that God "grew us up from the Earth."
Its wrong because ID says that evolution is impossible due to the complexity of the genetic changes. ID basically says that every life form on Earth was specifically designed and created by God and that no evolution has ever occured.
ID is not what you think, it is not God tweaking with DNA, ID contends that everything was designed by God with NO EVOLUTION OF ANY KIND.
ID theory is silly in my opinion, God is a farmer, not a micro-manager. I believe in God absolutely, but ID theory is stupid. God planted the seeds, maybe tweaked them, but He let things grow and evolve. ID theory says this is wrong and that everything was "designed and created as-is". Its not creationism or guided evolution or anything like that, ID theory is non-intelligent.
I must say, unless you are a diehard Linux fan and absolutely cannot be seen running Windows, stick with Microsoft's OS. In my experience with it and gaming, it just works. Linux needed sh1tl0ads of configuration and tweaking to get it to work right.
There is some wisdom here. I've been using Linux for over ten years, and you will be hard pressed to find somebody that likes it more than I do; however, the sad fact of life is that if you like playing modern games, you probably need to keep a windows partition around.
I do, and always have dual (and triple) booted my systems. I currently keep FreeDOS, Linux, and Win2k bootable on my personal home system. I also have Hurd and L4/Hurd somewhat bootable for experimental fooling around.
I use FreeDOS as basically a recovery system and have my GRUB bootloader's home on the FreeDOS drive. Other than that, I rarely boot it, but then again it only requires about 350MB so I keep it around just in case something really bad happens to my system.
Linux is my main system, and I run Gentoo (I'm very experienced with Linux, remember). I have an excellent Linux gaming system going with Nvidia 5900, full power OpenGL, Wine, and lots of Loki games. I regularly download Linux beta versions of games from Sourceforge and install into either my home or/usr/local to play around with them. Linux is my home system and I have a massive development infrastructure installed there. I'm an engineer, and if I want to make a science program, I boot to Linux and fire up Python.
I keep Windows 2000 as my bootable windows system. I use it mostly for games and CAD. If I can migrate a game to Linux in Wine, then I do so eventually, but if not I don't sweat it. It is a major hassle keeping my win2k system updated with virus protection and all that horseshit, but its necessary if you want to play games. I like win2k because its a no-nonsense windows version and I'm not looking forward to the time when I have to upgrade it.
There's no shame in dual-booting. At least you are learning Linux and using it when appropriate. In maybe 10 or 20 years, Linux will be a real powerhouse, and I've used it since it was a baby, but until it comes into its prime, use it when it makes sense and don't be a zealot.
But is it not an abstraction layer over the related linux APIs? In that case, it is similar to emulation in that it has to translate all the API calls to native API calls. That takes time, though I'll conceed that the time it takes to translate is much lower than the time it takes to execute. Still, there IS a performance hit.
Actually, as I understand it, it isnt. The windows API was written in C, and the Wine API is written in C. The difference is only the c-library which it is linked against. In some cases, the windows clib is faster, in other cases glibc is faster. Stuff like Direct-X has to be translated into OpenGL and Linux sound calls, but the performance hit isn't as bad as you would think.
Typical Wine and Cedega apps run slightly slower overall but more smoothly in my experience. The lack of stuttering laggy behavior often results in the user perception that Wine is slightly faster, which is probably not true. However, a game which runs well on Wine or Cedega is often more playable because of the overall smoothness and the percieved playing experience is very enjoyable when it all comes together.
Actually, I disagree with that. My Loki version of Jagged Alliance 2 doesn't work anymore, and so I just use Wine to play the Windows version in Linux now. I don't know if Cedega has fixed whatever problem they were having, but regular old CVS Wine ran the game about 20 times faster than Cedega did. Same deal with Fallout Tactics (which I see is now offically supported).
There are some games that for whatever reason just run screamingly fast in CVS Wine but run slow as hell in Cedega.
Cedega is probably a good choice for any of their supported games, but if you are having problems running an older windows game, by all means download the latest regular Wine from CVS, compile and install, and give it a go. You might be surprised.
Yes, ID apparently claims that the "Intelligent Designer" was not powerful enough to create a system that evolves, and therefore must have micro-managed everything.
O_o
Umm, yeahhh... Gotcha. Yep, them numbers just don't add up. I mistakenly assumed that "Intelligent Design" was actually an intelligent hypothesis made by intelligent people.
God, to me, seems to be more of a "sower and reaper" type. Maybe Angels were created using Intelligent Design, but I think He used other means to manufacture us hoomans. We're a bit of an unknown to God, otherwise why would He have to keep slapping us back in the right direction every time our civilizations get all wicked and decadent? Its obvious we're being farmed.
I'm a scientist, and student of philosophy, but I do actually believe in God. And yes I do believe that God is some kind of cosmic genetic engineer and physicist, among other things, but I fail to understand why this ID argument rages like it does on/. and why its such a big deal.
You can never "prove" that God exists by any kind of logical argument. The best you can do is conjecture that all this had to get here somehow; i.e. you can't make something out of nothing. Even the Big Bang theory doesn't explain that.
There's no reason why God couldn't have lit the big bang firecracker and known at that point that humans would eventually evolve, especially if God exists outside of space-time. Or you can say that He maybe tinkered around a bit here and there, inducing an occasional mutuation into some DNA, then waiting for the ecosystem to readjust after the changes.
Isn't this ID or are they claiming something different? I just don't see what the big deal is with all this. Science class should teach evolution theory because its provable. Intelligent design theory should be a matter of faith or philosophical argument because it attempts to go a step further than evolutionary theory and it can't be either proven or disproven.
Just because some clowns in some rural church of ignorance want crazy antiquated theories included in the science books doesn't mean that a public school should even consider it.
Those folks have every right to home-school their kids and teach them whatever nonsense they want, and thats the bottom line.
I'm still real happy with my FX 5900, and I'm not planning on upgrading it anytime soon. If you can find one of these they are much better than the other 5xxx series. I've always used Nvidia cards myself, and they work nicely in Linux.
Exactly! I personally love reading up on all these crackpots and their improbable theories. This is perfect for/. because what better to cut up and poke fun at than hoaxsters and con men and their loony ideas, because we at/. are obviously the intellectual elite.
They should get a picture of that goofy 1920's umbrella flying machine thing that tries to stroke itself up into the sky for the icon, lol.
Allright. Then lets examine what this fellow claims to be doing.
He is apparently / claims to be inducing the 1s orbital to somehow contract. Normally this orbital is defined as a probability function where the electron will remain at the nominal radius most of the time. However, since its a probability curve, the electron itself can and often will be somewhat closer or further away from the nucleus a significant portion of the time. So there's no denying that the electron can get closer to the nucleus, it just usually doesn't.
I'm going to leap out into sci-fi mode now and hypothesize that this guy is treating the orbital as a standing wave, with the radius as a wavelength. Using that you could calculate a corresponding frequency lambda = h * v. Suppose he is somehow exciting the atom at the first harmonic, perhaps using x-rays or something, this would increase the probability that the electron might jump into an orbit of half the wavelength.
In chemistry, you can induce a lot of unfavorable reactions through the mechanism of a catalyst. Doing this doesn't invalidate the laws of thermodynamics, it just means that you are using some clever tricks to make the probability of something happening a lot more likely.
I don't know if this guy is for real or not, but I wouldn't completely discount him. I guess time will tell. Interestingly enough, he doesn't have all the usual "Energy Conspiracy" crap that most of these free energy hucksters go on about. That in itself speaks volumes.
Hey, maybe this will get more people interested in the Hurd, since they appear pondering a change to a EROS/Coyotos microkernel thingy.
Actually, Hurd is moving to the L4 Microkernel. This is (I think) the same kernel used by EROS/Coyotos but I'm not positive. I do know that the Coyotos developers have been contributing to the L4/Hurd project lately, and that they are working on adding some of the features of the latter to the former. Development on the Mach microkernel based Hurd has essentially been dropped as of about 2 years ago.
I've been a long-time Hurd "interested party" and I actually have the old GnuMach version installed and bootable. I hacked the GNU Pth package to make it compile in Hurd so I could build the Dillo browser and surf the web from Hurd X11 several years ago. I dutifully submitted my patch upstream and it was incorporated into the source:-)
I periodically compile L4/Hurd and boot it up to see where it's at. I just like fooling around with weird operating systems more than anything. I know enough to be able to compile, install, and boot the things, but I've found I don't know the first thing about kernels from following the L4/Hurd mailing list. Its interesting stuff, but I don't have the CS background to really understand a lot of the concepts being discussed.
My guess, L4/Hurd might be minimally functional within a year or two on a very limited set of hardware. You can sort of boot it into debug mode now, and the libc is becoming functional slowly, but it's really basic right now.
When I was back in HS, I actually worked briefly for a guy who was running a Xenix sweatshop. He was hiring kids to hack out C code for Xenix on a TRS-80 Model II. This must have been around 1984 or so.
Back then I could program in BASIC, but had no exposure to C prior to that. I lasted about a week before I admitted to myself that I had no fscking idea what was going on there.
something wierd happens here and we don't really know why.
Well, if you do a root-locus plot of an oscillating function, you will get complex conjugate poles at points which correspond to the harmonic resonance frequency. The poles shoot up to infinity like a huge mountain sticking up out of the plane. There's nothing really mysterious about it.
Singularities tend to imply some sort of harmonic resonance, at least in the mechanical realm.
Dia is a really useful tool, thanks. Care to share anymore about the lesser programs you use?
Dia is OK, like one of the poster's here mentioned, its nowhere near as good as Visio, but it's allright for simple flow charts.
Other stuff is Blender, windows specific stuff like AVG Free, Spyware Blaster, GVim for windows is pretty cool, the GNAT Ada compiler is kind of fun to play with, you can compile most of ImageMagick in Cygwin, HAPEdit is a pretty good HTML editor, InfoZip and 7Zip are nice. You can get LyX and LaTeX for windows which is handy. Thats about the rundown on what I consider a reasonably functional windoze system.
I do most of my work in Linux, with OOo, there's no reason not to really. I boot into windows to play games and do drafting mostly, but its nice to have these open source apps installed to flesh out the system.
Unless an application is running on a system in which the processor design, motherboard schematics and BIOS firmware are 100% Open Source, it can not claim to be Open Source.
I don't personally agree with this statement. This is one of those logical fallacies, maybe a Straw Man. Running on proprietary hardware has little or nothing to do with the fact that the software itself is Open Source.
I always kind of felt that Stallman and his crew basically made the GNU userland so that when their expensive UNIX licenses expired on their proprietary mainframes, they could just replace the OS with their own and spend the money on more worthy projects, like buying better hardware.
If you look at some of the checks that autoconf does, especially on really old versions of GNU software, its interesting to note that its checking for AT&T UNIX, DEC Ultrix, and all kinds of proprietary host systems. That software was made to install on "hostile" hosts at least until the Linux's became the platform of choice.
I personally use almost 100% open source stuff on my windows machines, but thats because of the following:
I'm already a long time Linux user
For me, its a productivity boost to use familiar apps
I'm not trying to convince somebody else to use it.
I'd rather spend my extra money on other things.
I routinely install Cygwin, OpenOffice, Dia, Python, Ghostscript, GIMP, and several other lesser apps on my own personal windows machines. Aside from games and CAD, I can get a pretty complete system using free software.
It is true though that for some unknown reason, corporate IT people won't even consider an open source app most of the time. Why businesses continue to hire these wastrels is beyond me though. Companies will throw millions of dollars into crappy proprietary software, then cut jobs when the red ink starts appearing.
Married, wife in college, kids, house, horrific student loans. I'm usually lucky to be able to keep the bills paid and thats about it.
I wasn't aware that TurboCAD was available for OS/X now. That would definately suit me well then. Thanks for all the tips.
One of these days I might see some blue sky, but its been bad for about five years now. My student loans are what really crush my finances. They are more than my house payment is.
He can make Apple's zealots believe pretty much anything, not me. The fact the Linux share on the desktop now accedes Apple's pretty much confirms that I am not alone in this regard. Apple's slogan really should be "Suckers wanted!"
I think that's a bit harsh. Yes, Apple has made some dog-turd computers here and there, but even a lemon Mac II is pretty much a joy to use compared to a brain dead Windows PC.
I've never been able to afford a cutting edge Apple computer, heck, I have to make my own PC's out of Ebay parts and then slap Linux and some dated version of Windows on it. Forget Office, I praise my lucky stars for OOo.
I have bought a couple old cheapo Mac II's on Ebay though and played with them. They run well for what they are. I wouldn't mind having a nice Apple workstation going with OS/X at all. My only problem is that as an engineer, I need CAD, and cheap CAD at that. I'm not doing bad with TurboCAD, but I don't know what I could use on OS/X for 3D drafting that would even be in the same ball park.
I can live without Windows games, but I absolutely need a good CAD package. I don't have thousands of dollars to shell out either, so it has to be cheap and good.
I think Apple stuff is really cool, but it is so far beyond my budget that its basically impossible that I could ever afford to set up a Mac the way I need a computer to be. I'm like how Linus used to be, I can't afford the real thing so I have to make do the best I can with what I can afford.
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I've done it. A while back I was fooling around with X joystick support. Because this module wasn't compiled by default I had to screw around with config files and then build the entire ball of wax. After some days of such tom-foolery I had an X desktop which I could use the joystick like a mouse. Woo... Never did that again.
I'll take autotools over IMAKE any day. At least I have a somewhat tenuous grasp of how autotools function, which is more than I can say for IMAKE, since its only used for compiling XF86.
That thing does make a decent cup of java, I'll give it that much.
Yumm.... *stomach rumbles*
Intel sure seems like they have shot themselves in the foot. They worked for years making sure that Intel X86 was king of the hill, then they tried to switch to Itanium, and AMD blew past them in the meantime. Intel has been still selling well just because of inertia, but it looks like the market is starting to jump over to AMD now finally.
Personally, I don't care. In fact I'd rather be using something with a sensible machine programming scheme and more grokkable architecture. PowerPC, ARM and Sparc are basically the three remaining competitors to X86. Mips, PA-RISC, Alpha, and others are still around, but I don't forsee them making much of a comeback, maybe Mips.
You're probably right if you consider X86-64 to be "Intel-based." It would be cool to see a supercomputer based on something like ARM if they could add FPU's and Vector processors, but by then it probably wouldn't be an ARM anymore.
Sun and IBM probably have the best hope of making non-x86 processors which might be viable for supercomputers. Especially IBM.
That's pretty subjective. If you're talking about "the Linux kernel" then while it was originally designed to just be a monolithic unix kernel clone for x86 machines, over the recent years, big boys like IBM have made some significant contributions to the source tree to make Linux an effective kernel on big iron.
If you're talking about Linux as in "GNU Userland" there's no reason it can't be run on big iron. You can probably build quite a lot of the GNU utilities against a non-Linux kernel and generic libc without serious problems. Personally, I like the GNU versions better than proprietary ones just because of the more consistent command line switch syntax and usually the extra features.
I know about zero concerning supercomputers though. Presumably you would access them using a graphics terminal of some type. Whatever the underlying OS might be, the most important thing for a supercomputer seems to be the ability to run massively parallel programs to solve huge matrix problems and otherwise process massive amounts of data quickly. No matter what OS they run, as long as you have your special FORTRAN compiler (or whatever it is they use on those things) to write super-programs, I don't see why Linux isn't at least as good a choice as any others.
Midi is definately copyrighted because its the same as sheet music. Whatever laws apply to sheet music apply to midi files because they are interchangable. Just because windows midi players suck and most people ignore these music files doesn't mean they can't be made to sound righteous and that they shouldn't be subject to the same copyright laws as written music. Thats all it is is sheet music and your midi synth is the orchestra that is playing the music for you. The better your synth the better the overall result.
Hang around outside by yourself and see what happens.
Probably true. I'm an engineer and scientist. I was formerly an atheist, until I saw God. Jesus said in the Sermon on the Mount: "Blessed is he who is pure in heart, for he shall see God."
Well, I saw God, and yes, I was fairly pure in heart (at that time at least, now I don't know). One thing I can tell you is that if you see God, you will most likely believe in God from that point on. I do.
Even still ID theory is crap. God made us using evolution, its completely obvious. ID theory is wrong and stupid. Science class should teach evolution, and the preacher in church should explain that God "grew us up from the Earth."
ID is not what you think, it is not God tweaking with DNA, ID contends that everything was designed by God with NO EVOLUTION OF ANY KIND.
ID theory is silly in my opinion, God is a farmer, not a micro-manager. I believe in God absolutely, but ID theory is stupid. God planted the seeds, maybe tweaked them, but He let things grow and evolve. ID theory says this is wrong and that everything was "designed and created as-is". Its not creationism or guided evolution or anything like that, ID theory is non-intelligent.
There is some wisdom here. I've been using Linux for over ten years, and you will be hard pressed to find somebody that likes it more than I do; however, the sad fact of life is that if you like playing modern games, you probably need to keep a windows partition around.
I do, and always have dual (and triple) booted my systems. I currently keep FreeDOS, Linux, and Win2k bootable on my personal home system. I also have Hurd and L4/Hurd somewhat bootable for experimental fooling around.
I use FreeDOS as basically a recovery system and have my GRUB bootloader's home on the FreeDOS drive. Other than that, I rarely boot it, but then again it only requires about 350MB so I keep it around just in case something really bad happens to my system.
Linux is my main system, and I run Gentoo (I'm very experienced with Linux, remember). I have an excellent Linux gaming system going with Nvidia 5900, full power OpenGL, Wine, and lots of Loki games. I regularly download Linux beta versions of games from Sourceforge and install into either my home or /usr/local to play around with them. Linux is my home system and I have a massive development infrastructure installed there. I'm an engineer, and if I want to make a science program, I boot to Linux and fire up Python.
I keep Windows 2000 as my bootable windows system. I use it mostly for games and CAD. If I can migrate a game to Linux in Wine, then I do so eventually, but if not I don't sweat it. It is a major hassle keeping my win2k system updated with virus protection and all that horseshit, but its necessary if you want to play games. I like win2k because its a no-nonsense windows version and I'm not looking forward to the time when I have to upgrade it.
There's no shame in dual-booting. At least you are learning Linux and using it when appropriate. In maybe 10 or 20 years, Linux will be a real powerhouse, and I've used it since it was a baby, but until it comes into its prime, use it when it makes sense and don't be a zealot.
Balance in all things grasshopper.
Actually, as I understand it, it isnt. The windows API was written in C, and the Wine API is written in C. The difference is only the c-library which it is linked against. In some cases, the windows clib is faster, in other cases glibc is faster. Stuff like Direct-X has to be translated into OpenGL and Linux sound calls, but the performance hit isn't as bad as you would think.
Typical Wine and Cedega apps run slightly slower overall but more smoothly in my experience. The lack of stuttering laggy behavior often results in the user perception that Wine is slightly faster, which is probably not true. However, a game which runs well on Wine or Cedega is often more playable because of the overall smoothness and the percieved playing experience is very enjoyable when it all comes together.
Actually, I disagree with that. My Loki version of Jagged Alliance 2 doesn't work anymore, and so I just use Wine to play the Windows version in Linux now. I don't know if Cedega has fixed whatever problem they were having, but regular old CVS Wine ran the game about 20 times faster than Cedega did. Same deal with Fallout Tactics (which I see is now offically supported).
There are some games that for whatever reason just run screamingly fast in CVS Wine but run slow as hell in Cedega.
Cedega is probably a good choice for any of their supported games, but if you are having problems running an older windows game, by all means download the latest regular Wine from CVS, compile and install, and give it a go. You might be surprised.
O_o
Umm, yeahhh... Gotcha. Yep, them numbers just don't add up. I mistakenly assumed that "Intelligent Design" was actually an intelligent hypothesis made by intelligent people.
God, to me, seems to be more of a "sower and reaper" type. Maybe Angels were created using Intelligent Design, but I think He used other means to manufacture us hoomans. We're a bit of an unknown to God, otherwise why would He have to keep slapping us back in the right direction every time our civilizations get all wicked and decadent? Its obvious we're being farmed.
You can never "prove" that God exists by any kind of logical argument. The best you can do is conjecture that all this had to get here somehow; i.e. you can't make something out of nothing. Even the Big Bang theory doesn't explain that.
There's no reason why God couldn't have lit the big bang firecracker and known at that point that humans would eventually evolve, especially if God exists outside of space-time. Or you can say that He maybe tinkered around a bit here and there, inducing an occasional mutuation into some DNA, then waiting for the ecosystem to readjust after the changes.
Isn't this ID or are they claiming something different? I just don't see what the big deal is with all this. Science class should teach evolution theory because its provable. Intelligent design theory should be a matter of faith or philosophical argument because it attempts to go a step further than evolutionary theory and it can't be either proven or disproven.
Just because some clowns in some rural church of ignorance want crazy antiquated theories included in the science books doesn't mean that a public school should even consider it.
Those folks have every right to home-school their kids and teach them whatever nonsense they want, and thats the bottom line.
I'm still real happy with my FX 5900, and I'm not planning on upgrading it anytime soon. If you can find one of these they are much better than the other 5xxx series. I've always used Nvidia cards myself, and they work nicely in Linux.
They should get a picture of that goofy 1920's umbrella flying machine thing that tries to stroke itself up into the sky for the icon, lol.
Allright. Then lets examine what this fellow claims to be doing.
He is apparently / claims to be inducing the 1s orbital to somehow contract. Normally this orbital is defined as a probability function where the electron will remain at the nominal radius most of the time. However, since its a probability curve, the electron itself can and often will be somewhat closer or further away from the nucleus a significant portion of the time. So there's no denying that the electron can get closer to the nucleus, it just usually doesn't.
I'm going to leap out into sci-fi mode now and hypothesize that this guy is treating the orbital as a standing wave, with the radius as a wavelength. Using that you could calculate a corresponding frequency lambda = h * v. Suppose he is somehow exciting the atom at the first harmonic, perhaps using x-rays or something, this would increase the probability that the electron might jump into an orbit of half the wavelength.
In chemistry, you can induce a lot of unfavorable reactions through the mechanism of a catalyst. Doing this doesn't invalidate the laws of thermodynamics, it just means that you are using some clever tricks to make the probability of something happening a lot more likely.
I don't know if this guy is for real or not, but I wouldn't completely discount him. I guess time will tell. Interestingly enough, he doesn't have all the usual "Energy Conspiracy" crap that most of these free energy hucksters go on about. That in itself speaks volumes.
Actually, Hurd is moving to the L4 Microkernel. This is (I think) the same kernel used by EROS/Coyotos but I'm not positive. I do know that the Coyotos developers have been contributing to the L4/Hurd project lately, and that they are working on adding some of the features of the latter to the former. Development on the Mach microkernel based Hurd has essentially been dropped as of about 2 years ago.
I've been a long-time Hurd "interested party" and I actually have the old GnuMach version installed and bootable. I hacked the GNU Pth package to make it compile in Hurd so I could build the Dillo browser and surf the web from Hurd X11 several years ago. I dutifully submitted my patch upstream and it was incorporated into the source :-)
I periodically compile L4/Hurd and boot it up to see where it's at. I just like fooling around with weird operating systems more than anything. I know enough to be able to compile, install, and boot the things, but I've found I don't know the first thing about kernels from following the L4/Hurd mailing list. Its interesting stuff, but I don't have the CS background to really understand a lot of the concepts being discussed.
My guess, L4/Hurd might be minimally functional within a year or two on a very limited set of hardware. You can sort of boot it into debug mode now, and the libc is becoming functional slowly, but it's really basic right now.
Back then I could program in BASIC, but had no exposure to C prior to that. I lasted about a week before I admitted to myself that I had no fscking idea what was going on there.
Well, if you do a root-locus plot of an oscillating function, you will get complex conjugate poles at points which correspond to the harmonic resonance frequency. The poles shoot up to infinity like a huge mountain sticking up out of the plane. There's nothing really mysterious about it.
Singularities tend to imply some sort of harmonic resonance, at least in the mechanical realm.
Dia is OK, like one of the poster's here mentioned, its nowhere near as good as Visio, but it's allright for simple flow charts.
Other stuff is Blender, windows specific stuff like AVG Free, Spyware Blaster, GVim for windows is pretty cool, the GNAT Ada compiler is kind of fun to play with, you can compile most of ImageMagick in Cygwin, HAPEdit is a pretty good HTML editor, InfoZip and 7Zip are nice. You can get LyX and LaTeX for windows which is handy. Thats about the rundown on what I consider a reasonably functional windoze system.
I do most of my work in Linux, with OOo, there's no reason not to really. I boot into windows to play games and do drafting mostly, but its nice to have these open source apps installed to flesh out the system.
I don't personally agree with this statement. This is one of those logical fallacies, maybe a Straw Man. Running on proprietary hardware has little or nothing to do with the fact that the software itself is Open Source.
I always kind of felt that Stallman and his crew basically made the GNU userland so that when their expensive UNIX licenses expired on their proprietary mainframes, they could just replace the OS with their own and spend the money on more worthy projects, like buying better hardware.
If you look at some of the checks that autoconf does, especially on really old versions of GNU software, its interesting to note that its checking for AT&T UNIX, DEC Ultrix, and all kinds of proprietary host systems. That software was made to install on "hostile" hosts at least until the Linux's became the platform of choice.
I routinely install Cygwin, OpenOffice, Dia, Python, Ghostscript, GIMP, and several other lesser apps on my own personal windows machines. Aside from games and CAD, I can get a pretty complete system using free software.
It is true though that for some unknown reason, corporate IT people won't even consider an open source app most of the time. Why businesses continue to hire these wastrels is beyond me though. Companies will throw millions of dollars into crappy proprietary software, then cut jobs when the red ink starts appearing.
I wasn't aware that TurboCAD was available for OS/X now. That would definately suit me well then. Thanks for all the tips.
One of these days I might see some blue sky, but its been bad for about five years now. My student loans are what really crush my finances. They are more than my house payment is.
I think that's a bit harsh. Yes, Apple has made some dog-turd computers here and there, but even a lemon Mac II is pretty much a joy to use compared to a brain dead Windows PC.
I've never been able to afford a cutting edge Apple computer, heck, I have to make my own PC's out of Ebay parts and then slap Linux and some dated version of Windows on it. Forget Office, I praise my lucky stars for OOo.
I have bought a couple old cheapo Mac II's on Ebay though and played with them. They run well for what they are. I wouldn't mind having a nice Apple workstation going with OS/X at all. My only problem is that as an engineer, I need CAD, and cheap CAD at that. I'm not doing bad with TurboCAD, but I don't know what I could use on OS/X for 3D drafting that would even be in the same ball park.
I can live without Windows games, but I absolutely need a good CAD package. I don't have thousands of dollars to shell out either, so it has to be cheap and good.
I think Apple stuff is really cool, but it is so far beyond my budget that its basically impossible that I could ever afford to set up a Mac the way I need a computer to be. I'm like how Linus used to be, I can't afford the real thing so I have to make do the best I can with what I can afford.