I can't talk 100WPM but I can get close to that on a keyboard
Actually, you probably talk well over 100 WPM. Time yourself: I just checked myself and reading fairly technical text ("Experiments in Physical Chemistry", Shoemaker et al.) at my normal speaking speed I got about 250 WPM. When excited I easily do 300 WPM, which my students sometimes hate.
I used to debate in high school and college. I "spread" at about 700 WPM: I knew folks who could easily top 1000WPM. However, I suspect it's going to be many years before voice recognition gets to the point of understanding that.
And of course, I had problems posting that last message. Clicked submit, waited a few minutes and got a half-finished page without any notification about it being posted.
Check again: well it got posted. Decided to write this message. Took 3 attempts to get the post comment page, and so far at least one failure to post...
I have this problem frequently./. simply won't respond for 10-15 minutes. When it does it's glacial- a minute or two to load a page with ten comments.
Intermediate links? They're all fine: pings and traceroutes go through without problems in tens of milliseconds. It's just/.- it's by far the least reliable site I visit often. (Phillynews.com is a distant second.)
Just make your own. Go to the Deja power search page, save the form bits, wrap HTML around it, fill in the defaults you want (For example, change the default "all languages" to English for those like me who are language challenged.) and you're done. One less network connection to fail.
NiftyTelnet has a free SSH version. I haven't tested it yet though. Now that I have some down time over the summer, I'm going to try to turn off telnet on my (Linux) server in favor of SSH.
Come on- 20 gauge shotgun? 45 cal? Of course this stuff doesn't do much damage- to get through armor you need real kinetic energy- i.e., velocity. (KE = 1/2mv^2- faster is better than heavier)
Try it with a NATO 7.62 or a sabot round for that Mossberg.
Sadly, I'm out of tanks these days, or I'd take up a collection for testing with.50 cal or 105mm..50 would have reduced any of these to junk in a single shot, 105mm sabot would drill a nice neat hole and 105mm HEAT practice (non-explosive) wouldn't have left anything much bigger than a marble.
Did the pulse exit before it entered OR was there a "leading edge".
Warning: I'm only a long rusty physical chemist, not a physicist.
I think your confusion is over the type of pulse. You're probably thinking this is a square wave pulse: 0, 1, 0. In reality you can't build one of those: you can only build an approximation of one which will have a definite shape to the wave front. What the article seems to indicate is that the cesium atoms figure out the entire shape of the wave packet from the wave front. (I'd love to know how!)
As far as superliminal info transfer, the article indicates it's still up in the air. I would think it would work > c: imagine two cells in a row. The second will see the accelerated pulse wave front and move it forward as well: the wave front must contain all the information of the entire pulse or the first cell couldn't do its thing.
Then again, having taken a fair amount of QM and even taught a bit, I've long realized that the world as awfully wierd and thus I'm probably wrong.
Does anyone but me worry about the impact on the Mac of this breakup?
Without Office/MSIE, the Mac would be a third rate platform today: there are no other high end office suites available, Netscape for the Mac truly blows, Mozilla is worse than a disgrace and iCab is nice but not at the level of MSIE yet.
IMHO, the Mac division of MS is being kept around mostly to placate Justice: it ranges from slightly profitable (Office) to a major loss (MSIE). Certainly the Mac version of MSIE wouldn't survive the split into 3. (It may even be dead now if you believe Macintouch rumors.) Office might well not: talented coders could be better used elsewhere in MS Apps writing more profitable Windows apps.
It would be truly ironic if the first impact of the suit would be to lower platform diversity. Eric
How did Netscape make money? (I mean, before it was bought by AOL)
It sold its server products. The browser never made a majority of the money, even when they charged for it. So IIS and the rest would have to come over with part #3, and of course they'll have to start charging for IIS and MSIE.
Now there's a big win for the customer! A company that has to now charge for something that was free. I know it's a/. wet dream, but the point here is to punish/prevent, not to destroy the company.
Not gonna happen guys. MS will opensource W2K before Apple opens OSX. It makes no sense whatsoever for Apple to do this: they're going to make a fortune on OSX sales, both from upgrades as well as folks buying Apple-PPC hardware instead of Intel/W2K/Linux systems. (If OSX doesn't make a fortune, Apple's toast- they need to update MacOS bad. I've been waiting for this update since the Copland days...)
What benefit does Apple get from open-source? $5 CheapBytes CDs? A port of OSX to x86 hardware? Oh yeah, Steve loves those ideas...
I do know what it means. I've used lots of beta software, including web browsers. I even mention in the post that a lot of the sluggishness is probably due to debug code.
But Mozilla/NT isn't good enough at this point to call it beta. (Haven't tried it on my Linux server, but that's a building away and I don't have X installed.) For example, I've used a half-dozen different beta versions of the web broswer iCab. Every one is faster, prettier and less buggy than Mozilla.
10 seconds of 100% CPU use on a K6/2-300 to open the security manager? 5 seconds to just close a window? Graphical glitches at the level of misdrawn text dialogs on the very first thing a Mozilla user sees? Missing seriously useful features available on MSIE?
./ posters love to point out how MS does nothing but ship buggy beta-quality code while open-source generates fast, stable apps. If MSIE5 is beta-quality, I'm not sure what to call Mozilla.
Well, I'm posting from Mozilla. (Sue me, I like the name Mozilla.)
Some quick notes: I started using the web back when beta versions of Mosaic were the height of sophistication. I used Netscape up until the 4.x days on Unix, NT, and Mac, when I switched to MSIE on both NT and Mac. Why? It was better, a lot better in some cases.
Mozilla Win32 impressions so far: not so great.
The activation script is hideous- lots of graphical glitches that remind me of student written X programs.
The browser overall isn't faster than MSIE5. Opening menus is slowwww- just scrolling back and forth across the menubar will cause the menus to lag. Opening/closing windows is also slow, at least compared to MSIE. Hopefully this is just debug code and the real Mozilla will be faster.
So far no crashes. Doesn't say much, but some of the stuff I've thrown at Mozilla would have already killed Netscape4.
Why, oh why doesn't Mozilla mark where I was in a previous document when I hit the back key? Why doesn't it copy MSIE's autocomplete function? Both are serious reasons I might not use this over MSIE.
Many of my old Java applets don't display correctly. This might just be my bad programming, but given my horrible memories of trying to get applets to function under Netscape/Mac I'm a bit worried.
The Chime plug-in doesn't work- it doesn't display anything. This alone will keep me from using it until it's fixed. (To be fair, Chime is a tricky plug-in- MSIE has had problems with it for years.) Have to send a bug report.
Thanks guys, for letting me kill AOL IM. I stopped using Netscape on the Mac the day a new version installed IM even when I told it not to.
Will I use it? Maybe, at least to check out sites I write. But it's not enough to make me switch for good on NT/Mac, especially since MSIE5 is out for the Mac as well.
Eric
What, no kremvax? Buncha pathetic newbies :^)
on
Hoax-a-go-go!
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Way before most folk's time, but I still have to give nod to the original "Chernenko here: USSR is now on Internet" hoax way back in 1984. Three whole computers: kremvax, moskvax and of course the dreaded kgbvax. Posted on April 1st, or course.
I've got Code Rush on the local PBS, but I haven't seen WFG since I lived in Toronto.
If you haven't seen it, do so. I aspire to be Diana someday: she's my role model for what I want to be when I'm 70- cranky, opinionated and accepting crap from nobody.
My younger sister is going to be traveling all around the world this year, from the Ecuadorian rain forests, to Tasmania and the Australian outback, to good old Great Britian. Alone. She understandably wants some way to call for help in emergencies.
Inmarsat might work for her. http://www.inmarsat.org/index3.html The phones are a lot bigger, but what she needs already exists. Not cheap though.
Just my perception but it's all politics... Currently NT is not C2, and making a C2 product is not easy... and Linux is not C2.. yet.. Yet NT is accepted...
No politics about it. NT4 is C2. http://www.radium.ncsc.mil/tpep/epl/entries/TTAP-C SC-EPL-99-001.html
Yes, that's with network. (3.5 was the one without.)
But now that Chess is basically solved, maybe people will concentrate on Go
Careful about the word "solved". Chess and checkers have not been solved, they've merely reached the point where computers can beat the best humans. Solved would mean that we know if the game is a white win/black win/draw before any moves have been made, assuming optimal play by both sides. Tic-Tac-Toe has been solved (draw). Checkers has been solved for, IIRC, 9 pieces or less on the board. (Chinook's endgame database.)
I do agree on the AI for Go. As a beginning Go player, I'd love to have a better computer to practice on- even at my level I see the computer do just totally boneheaded things. (GnuGo for the Pilot is so bad I uninstalled it after about 4 games.)
Sadly, the folks answering these questions don't understand what the original poster wanted. (Witness people bringing up Octave all the time- it's not in the same class as Mathematica.)
He and I don't care about numerical solutions. (Well, we do, but not all the time.) Numerical solvers are a dime a dozen. We want symbolic math. Macsyma appears to be about the only free option here.
For example, in the physical chemistry class I'm teaching now you can occasionally get some ugly integrals or differential equations. I want to get back the functional form of those integrals, not some number. That's what's hard, and lacking from virtually every freeware/open source code out there.
While it looks like a nice start, it and a couple of the others I quickly looked at (Hartmath, etc) are seriously lacking in functionality.
Speaking as another (ex) quantum chemist/theorist, unless the package can do symbolic solutions of integrals and differential equations it's not of very much use for what I suspect the original poster wants. (It wouldn't be for me.) I suspect that most of these open source packages are going to get stuck at this point: it's fairly easy to do matrix stuff, arbitrary precision algebra and even derivatives and the like, but writing a general symbolic integrator is a lot harder. I don't even want to think about writing code to do general solutions of partial differential equations- it makes my head hurt.
Eric
Quantum corrals- great teaching tool.
on
Nano Logo
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IBM has done some really neat molecule size atomic artwork. They figured out how to move atoms with a Scanning Tunneling Microscope (STM) and then arranged them on a substrate to write the IBM logo, among other things.
Forget the IBM logo, that's just art. Look instead at the quantum corrals. I'm teaching quantum mechanics this semester and used two of the images since they are perfect examples of a 2-D particle in a box, one of the simplest QM systems you can solve analytically. The second of the images is so good you can even tell the quantum state of the electron. (nx = 3, n5 = 5)
I wouldn't condemn Microsoft for telling their users to report bugs (if they had a bug tracking system) - actually that would be a good idea.
They do have one, they just seem to move the pages every now and then. (Why MS reorganizes its website so often I don't know.) Do a search on "bug report" from the home page and you'll get a list of bug report forms for various products. I've reported several bugs to MS. Some have even been fixed. (Sadly, the most annoying one hasn't, but it's an interaction between MSIE and the Chime plug-in that neither side seems to want to take responsibility for.)
I wonder what percentage of them will end up running Linux, FreeBSD or Hurd anyway.
Well under 1%. I'd put serious money that it will never be even 0.1%. The only people that might would be the engineers, and they already have home machines better than this.
My brother-in-law works for Ford on an assembly line- these are the folks who don't have machines now. (Although they make good money.) Trust me, getting most of them to use Win98 will be hard enough- Linux is so far beyond the average assembly line worker as to be Urdu. They aren't techies. (Although I'd daresay that most can do work on cars that the average./'er could only dream about.)
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I can't talk 100WPM but I can get close to that on a keyboard
Actually, you probably talk well over 100 WPM. Time yourself: I just checked myself and reading fairly technical text ("Experiments in Physical Chemistry", Shoemaker et al.) at my normal speaking speed I got about 250 WPM. When excited I easily do 300 WPM, which my students sometimes hate.
I used to debate in high school and college. I "spread" at about 700 WPM: I knew folks who could easily top 1000WPM. However, I suspect it's going to be many years before voice recognition gets to the point of understanding that.
What advice would give someone wanting to get his pilot's license? Is it worth the time? Is it worth the money?
Speaking as a student pilot, Yes and Yes.
It's not cheap. Budget at least $5k. Budget a lot of time as well: you'll need a fair number of lessons, ground school, study time and the like.
But you get to fly!
Eric, who's off in ten minutes to go work on tracking VORs.
Check again: well it got posted. Decided to write this message. Took 3 attempts to get the post comment page, and so far at least one failure to post...
Sigh
Intermediate links? They're all fine: pings and traceroutes go through without problems in tens of milliseconds. It's just /.- it's by far the least reliable site I visit often. (Phillynews.com is a distant second.)
Eric
Eric
Eric
Eric
What does the fact that the entropy of a pure, perfect crystal of the most stable form of an element is 0 at 0K have to do with RAMBUS? Eric
Try it with a NATO 7.62 or a sabot round for that Mossberg.
Sadly, I'm out of tanks these days, or I'd take up a collection for testing with .50 cal or 105mm. .50 would have reduced any of these to junk in a single shot, 105mm sabot would drill a nice neat hole and 105mm HEAT practice (non-explosive) wouldn't have left anything much bigger than a marble.
Eric the mostly recovered
Did the pulse exit before it entered OR was there a "leading edge".
Warning: I'm only a long rusty physical chemist, not a physicist.
I think your confusion is over the type of pulse. You're probably thinking this is a square wave pulse: 0, 1, 0. In reality you can't build one of those: you can only build an approximation of one which will have a definite shape to the wave front. What the article seems to indicate is that the cesium atoms figure out the entire shape of the wave packet from the wave front. (I'd love to know how!)
As far as superliminal info transfer, the article indicates it's still up in the air. I would think it would work > c: imagine two cells in a row. The second will see the accelerated pulse wave front and move it forward as well: the wave front must contain all the information of the entire pulse or the first cell couldn't do its thing.
Then again, having taken a fair amount of QM and even taught a bit, I've long realized that the world as awfully wierd and thus I'm probably wrong.
Eric
Without Office/MSIE, the Mac would be a third rate platform today: there are no other high end office suites available, Netscape for the Mac truly blows, Mozilla is worse than a disgrace and iCab is nice but not at the level of MSIE yet.
IMHO, the Mac division of MS is being kept around mostly to placate Justice: it ranges from slightly profitable (Office) to a major loss (MSIE). Certainly the Mac version of MSIE wouldn't survive the split into 3. (It may even be dead now if you believe Macintouch rumors.) Office might well not: talented coders could be better used elsewhere in MS Apps writing more profitable Windows apps.
It would be truly ironic if the first impact of the suit would be to lower platform diversity. Eric
How did Netscape make money? (I mean, before it was bought by AOL)
It sold its server products. The browser never made a majority of the money, even when they charged for it. So IIS and the rest would have to come over with part #3, and of course they'll have to start charging for IIS and MSIE.
Now there's a big win for the customer! A company that has to now charge for something that was free. I know it's a /. wet dream, but the point here is to punish/prevent, not to destroy the company.
How does/will Napster make money?
It doesn't. They're hoping to get bought out.
Eric
here's to hoping that Apple will open up all OSX.
Not gonna happen guys. MS will opensource W2K before Apple opens OSX. It makes no sense whatsoever for Apple to do this: they're going to make a fortune on OSX sales, both from upgrades as well as folks buying Apple-PPC hardware instead of Intel/W2K/Linux systems. (If OSX doesn't make a fortune, Apple's toast- they need to update MacOS bad. I've been waiting for this update since the Copland days...)
What benefit does Apple get from open-source? $5 CheapBytes CDs? A port of OSX to x86 hardware? Oh yeah, Steve loves those ideas...
Eric
Why don't people realise what BETA means?
I do know what it means. I've used lots of beta software, including web browsers. I even mention in the post that a lot of the sluggishness is probably due to debug code.
But Mozilla/NT isn't good enough at this point to call it beta. (Haven't tried it on my Linux server, but that's a building away and I don't have X installed.) For example, I've used a half-dozen different beta versions of the web broswer iCab. Every one is faster, prettier and less buggy than Mozilla.
10 seconds of 100% CPU use on a K6/2-300 to open the security manager? 5 seconds to just close a window? Graphical glitches at the level of misdrawn text dialogs on the very first thing a Mozilla user sees? Missing seriously useful features available on MSIE?
./ posters love to point out how MS does nothing but ship buggy beta-quality code while open-source generates fast, stable apps. If MSIE5 is beta-quality, I'm not sure what to call Mozilla.
Eric
Well, I'm posting from Mozilla. (Sue me, I like the name Mozilla.)
Some quick notes: I started using the web back when beta versions of Mosaic were the height of sophistication. I used Netscape up until the 4.x days on Unix, NT, and Mac, when I switched to MSIE on both NT and Mac. Why? It was better, a lot better in some cases.
Mozilla Win32 impressions so far: not so great.
The activation script is hideous- lots of graphical glitches that remind me of student written X programs.
The browser overall isn't faster than MSIE5. Opening menus is slowwww- just scrolling back and forth across the menubar will cause the menus to lag. Opening/closing windows is also slow, at least compared to MSIE. Hopefully this is just debug code and the real Mozilla will be faster.
So far no crashes. Doesn't say much, but some of the stuff I've thrown at Mozilla would have already killed Netscape4.
Why, oh why doesn't Mozilla mark where I was in a previous document when I hit the back key? Why doesn't it copy MSIE's autocomplete function? Both are serious reasons I might not use this over MSIE.
Many of my old Java applets don't display correctly. This might just be my bad programming, but given my horrible memories of trying to get applets to function under Netscape/Mac I'm a bit worried.
The Chime plug-in doesn't work- it doesn't display anything. This alone will keep me from using it until it's fixed. (To be fair, Chime is a tricky plug-in- MSIE has had problems with it for years.) Have to send a bug report.
Thanks guys, for letting me kill AOL IM. I stopped using Netscape on the Mac the day a new version installed IM even when I told it not to.
Will I use it? Maybe, at least to check out sites I write. But it's not enough to make me switch for good on NT/Mac, especially since MSIE5 is out for the Mac as well.
Eric
Eric
I've got Code Rush on the local PBS, but I haven't seen WFG since I lived in Toronto.
If you haven't seen it, do so. I aspire to be Diana someday: she's my role model for what I want to be when I'm 70- cranky, opinionated and accepting crap from nobody.
Eric
My younger sister is going to be traveling all around the world this year, from the Ecuadorian rain forests, to Tasmania and the Australian outback, to good old Great Britian. Alone. She understandably wants some way to call for help in emergencies.
Inmarsat might work for her. http://www.inmarsat.org/index3.html The phones are a lot bigger, but what she needs already exists. Not cheap though.
Eric
No politics about it. NT4 is C2. http://www.radium.ncsc.mil/tpep/epl/entries/TTAP-C SC-EPL-99-001.html
Yes, that's with network. (3.5 was the one without.)
Eric
But now that Chess is basically solved, maybe people will concentrate on Go
Careful about the word "solved". Chess and checkers have not been solved, they've merely reached the point where computers can beat the best humans. Solved would mean that we know if the game is a white win/black win/draw before any moves have been made, assuming optimal play by both sides. Tic-Tac-Toe has been solved (draw). Checkers has been solved for, IIRC, 9 pieces or less on the board. (Chinook's endgame database.)
I do agree on the AI for Go. As a beginning Go player, I'd love to have a better computer to practice on- even at my level I see the computer do just totally boneheaded things. (GnuGo for the Pilot is so bad I uninstalled it after about 4 games.)
Eric
Sadly, the folks answering these questions don't understand what the original poster wanted. (Witness people bringing up Octave all the time- it's not in the same class as Mathematica.)
He and I don't care about numerical solutions. (Well, we do, but not all the time.) Numerical solvers are a dime a dozen. We want symbolic math. Macsyma appears to be about the only free option here.
For example, in the physical chemistry class I'm teaching now you can occasionally get some ugly integrals or differential equations. I want to get back the functional form of those integrals, not some number. That's what's hard, and lacking from virtually every freeware/open source code out there.
Speaking as another (ex) quantum chemist/theorist, unless the package can do symbolic solutions of integrals and differential equations it's not of very much use for what I suspect the original poster wants. (It wouldn't be for me.) I suspect that most of these open source packages are going to get stuck at this point: it's fairly easy to do matrix stuff, arbitrary precision algebra and even derivatives and the like, but writing a general symbolic integrator is a lot harder. I don't even want to think about writing code to do general solutions of partial differential equations- it makes my head hurt.
Eric
IBM has done some really neat molecule size atomic artwork. They figured out how to move atoms with a Scanning Tunneling Microscope (STM) and then arranged them on a substrate to write the IBM logo, among other things.
Forget the IBM logo, that's just art. Look instead at the quantum corrals. I'm teaching quantum mechanics this semester and used two of the images since they are perfect examples of a 2-D particle in a box, one of the simplest QM systems you can solve analytically. The second of the images is so good you can even tell the quantum state of the electron. (nx = 3, n5 = 5)
Eric
They do have one, they just seem to move the pages every now and then. (Why MS reorganizes its website so often I don't know.) Do a search on "bug report" from the home page and you'll get a list of bug report forms for various products. I've reported several bugs to MS. Some have even been fixed. (Sadly, the most annoying one hasn't, but it's an interaction between MSIE and the Chime plug-in that neither side seems to want to take responsibility for.)
Eric
I wonder what percentage of them will end up running Linux, FreeBSD or Hurd anyway.
Well under 1%. I'd put serious money that it will never be even 0.1%. The only people that might would be the engineers, and they already have home machines better than this.
My brother-in-law works for Ford on an assembly line- these are the folks who don't have machines now. (Although they make good money.) Trust me, getting most of them to use Win98 will be hard enough- Linux is so far beyond the average assembly line worker as to be Urdu. They aren't techies. (Although I'd daresay that most can do work on cars that the average ./'er could only dream about.)
Eric