Oh, and if your system isn't built on a CLI, as mentioned above... consider how the programming tools are constructed. Do you code a real Mac application by drawing pictures?
You can if you use the Prograph programming language. It lets you build real Mac applications using the Classic Toolbox by dragging and dropping icons to construct dataflow diagrams.
It's been recently ported to Windows from its origins on the Mac, and I encourage programmers who like learning different languages to download the demo and try it out. It's literally unlike any other programming language I've used.
Have touch screen print out the completed ballot
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eLection '04
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· Score: 2
The obvious enhancement to a touch screen machine at the voting place would be for the touch screen device not to count your vote directly, but print it out. You then take your "receipt" and deposit that in the ballot box.
Pros
the voter can see exactly who they voted for before depositing the ballot
the machine would refuse to print an invalid ballot (ie, voting for two candidates in the same race)
ballots are available as evidence for recounts and suchlike
prevents the voter from voting multiple times in the booth
ballots can be printed in a way to make them easily scannable (such a bar code beside the name)
The first two properties solve most of the problems reported in Palm Beach. There would be no 19,000 spoiled ballots with two presidential candidates marked off, and people voting for Buchanan by mistake would see it (best print the ballots in large print!) before putting the ballot in the box, and have a chance to fix their ballot.
Cons
any of the increasingly automated systems being suggested makes it difficult to write in a candidate or spoil a ballot deliberately
doesn't help voting from home any
touch screen user interface still needs careful attention to design
There is a serious class segregation between the urban 'haves' and the rural 'have nots' in the information age.
It's not as bad as that in other rural areas. I just got back from spending a weekend in rural Saskatchewan visiting my grandparents. Both sets of them live in the same small town, and they've both bought PCs in the past couple of years and have Internet access. According to a guy I know at the Radio Shack in that town, they've been selling computers to seniors briskly for a while now.
So, given this and the fact that everyone in my extended family has at least one computer and an email address, I can believe that the growth in computer sales is flattening.
Breaking languages good example for cryptanalysis
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The Code Book
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· Score: 2
Most unusual, Singh includes the story of the decoding of Linear B and Egyptian Hieroglyphics. In other books, these chapters might seem very much out of place, as neither language was developed as a tool to keep things secret, and they are therefore distinctly out of place when next to commercial and military cyphers.
I don't think that this is unusual. The landmark book for the history of cryptography, David Kahn's The Codebreakers, also contains a chapter on Linear B and the Rosetta stone. Decoding unknown languages is a good, lucid way to demonstrate how cryptanalysis proceeds without a lot of mathematics, and has the advantage of having all of the details openly published. For the casual reader without a strong background in computers or cryptography, showing how linquists decipher an unknown written language is the best way I can think of to show the thought processes of a cryptanalyst.
Canada is just as dysfunctional as the U.S. when it comes to national elections. In some ways it's even worse, since our smaller population is so unevenly distributed it makes concentrations of power very significant. In the last federal election, the two right-wing parties (Reform and the Progressive Conservatives) both polled about 20% of the popular vote. But, since Reform's support was concentrated in the West, and the PC's support was dispersed across the whole country, Reform got 60 seats to the PC's 20.
The next federal election here will be decided in Ontario, because the other regions of the country either have small populations (the Maritimes) or vote for parties that can never form a majority government (Quebec with the Bloc Quebecois). If right-wing voters in Ontario concentrate their votes for one party, it'll win, otherwise the Liberals will coast to another majority government.
Just as the U.S. is essentially a two-party system where occasionally one the parties changes, so is Canada. The Liberals and Progressive Conservatives have been alternating government since Confederation. I argue that we're currently in the midst of a change where the slightly right-of-center party is morphing from the PCs to the new Canadian Alliance party (which used to be Reform). If that fails and we remain with five strong parties, the Liberals will continue to win elections as long as they don't become too corrupt to alienate their core constituency in Ontario.
The mostly two-party system even holds for provincial elections, although with a little more variety, since which two parties vie for power varies from province to province (and within provinces, changes on the timescale of decades). I agree with the other posters that this appears to be a consequence of the first past the post system, and a proportional system of some sort (or even just runoff elections where there was no clear majority) would better reflect the populace.
So, now the iBook will actually ship with enough RAM to run the OS. That's great. What does OS 9 need to run? Somewhere near 40MB...and the orignal iBooks shipped with OS9 and only 32MB of RAM.
Actually, the very first iBooks shipped with MacOS 8.6, which is much less memory hungry than 9. When I got my iBook, the 32 MB of RAM was sufficient for running a single application at a time (even Netscape!), until I upgraded to OS 9. Then I had to upgrade the RAM real quick, as the amount of swapping with only 32 MB made the machine nearly unusable.
Re:What's going on in Canada?
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Lawsuits Suck
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· Score: 1
2.Is there a Canadian branch or analog of the EFF?
I can't answer the rest of your questions, but this one is easy. Yes, there is - Electronic Frontier Canada.
Glancing at the issues in their archive page, I'd say Canadians don't have too much to worry about now. But unfortunately, American governmental stupidity always seems to be contagious where the Canadian government is concerned.
Unfortunately, with Netscape 4.61 on an HP-UX TrueColor display (visual), 7 of the 22 really safe colors display GIF-BGCOLOR mismatches.
I see the same thing with Netscape 4.72 on an 8-bit HP-UX display.
Of course, some of the supposedly non-safe colors may work OK on my display, but if you're trying to be truly cross-platform, the number is reduced to 15 safe colors.
It's probably worse than that. I'll bet there's some platform out there that screws up some of these 15 safe colors, too. In the end, the only colors you can rely on to be the same across all color platforms are the eight at the vertices of the color cube:
Black (000000)
Red (FF0000)
Green (00FF00)
Blue (0000FF)
Cyan (00FFFF)
Magenta (FF00FF)
Yellow (FFFF00)
White (FFFFFF)
And here I was hoping that the world had long since left the CGA palette behind.:)
Reading through the sf-lovers digest, I was struck by the poll on what the price of an average paperback book prices would be in 2001. Now that we're only one year away, this is one prediction that I'm glad didn't come true:
Date: 26 May 81 15:20-PDT
From: mclure at Sri-Unix
Subject: paperback
Thanks to the people who responded to my query about paperback book
prices.
The replies varied greatly, some people predicting the disappearance
of books altogether, to be replaced by electronic tablets and plug-in
libraries. Perhaps.
But assuming this doesn't happen, and there are no major upsets in the
paperback publishing industry, we arrive at the figure of $20 - $22
for an "average" book in 2001.
Gee, libraries are looking better all the time...
For comparison, a quick glance at my bookshelf doesn't turn any paperbacks with prices more than about $7 US, and books these days are a lot thicker (more pages) than was common in 1981.
As for my take on the original article, I've also noticed a strong correlation between geeks and anime fans. I suspect the reason is probably due to the fact that the American entertainment establishment isn't providing much good right now. Babylon 5 was the last thing on TV that really spoke to me, and the failure of Crusade shows how unlikely it is that a worthy successor to it will appear.
According to The Codebreakers by David Kahn, this must be one of several cryptographic-related inventions Friedman made. In 1956, Congress gave Friedman $100,000 in compensation for the profits lost because several of his inventions were classified. On page 391, Kahn says:
Involved were nine inventions made from 1933 to 1944, two with Rowlett's aid, though the bill was not limited to them. Two were so secret that no patent applications had ever been filed. Four are held in secrecy in the Patent Office: three of these pertained to the Converter M-134-C, a rotor machine, and one to the Converter M-228. Three have been issued as patents: a strip form of the Jefferson cylinder; the Converter M-325, another rotor machine; and a facsimile enciphering system.
I presume that this is the first of the four patents held in the Patent Office, which implies that three more will appear over the next few years. This is one of the rotor machines, but I'm not sure which of them it is. I'm really curious about the inventions so secret that they never had a patent application for them.
Near as I can tell from a quick glance through the book, in 1933 Friedman would have been working for a cryptographic section of the U.S. Army Signal Corps, to which I suppose the NSA is today's successor.
Can't remember the name of it or even the author, but it's an interesting concept. Basically there have been these "alien" signals picked up for the last 20 years, repeating same time every day, with a different "image" on each one. They finally stop, one person puts the puzzle together and they build this machine that allows them to view the world in the 4th dimension. The authors take on the 4th dimension was kind of an "overmind" which could be used to view all peoples thoughts/memories etc. The aliens that have been broadcasting this message have also been travelling towards earth the entire time and they finally get here, the 2 overminds from the different planets finally touch and everybody on the world experiences true empathy.
You're thinking of Factoring Humanity, by Robert Sawyer. It's a good book, particularly in the way he ties together such apparently unrelated fields as topology, quantum physics, and psychology.
The crypto fans on Slashdot will be amused by the subplot, wherein the protagonist's husband, a computer scientist, invents a quantum computer capable of easily performimg prime factorizations of large numbers, and thus breaking most of the world's cryptographic capability. He starts to get visits from mysterious characters who want to sequester the work.
About time that Apple fixed the keyboard and mouse
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Apple Cube Confirmed
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· Score: 1
It took them a while, but Apple appears to have fixed the problems with both its mouse and keyboard.
It's about time. Mac people have been complaining vociferously about the teensy little keyboards and mice since the iMac first came out. It's worth noting that these are available separately, so owners of older Macs can finally get normal-sized Apple keyboards and mice.
I just got a G4/450 last month, and I definitely found the keyboard and mouse to be a disappointment. Until now I've held off getting replacements because I've yet to find a USB keyboard as good as my old Apple Extended Keyboard II or a good USB mouse. Also, Macintouch has been reporting problems caused by using third-party USB keyboards with recent Macs, which this will avoid.
As soon as the new keyboard shows up on the Canadian Apple Store, I'll be ordering one. I'm not so sure about the new mouse, which if nothing else, looks unbelievably cool, since I'd really prefer a 2 button mouse for LinuxPPC. I imagine there will be a bunch of other G3 and G4 owners also throwing out their old keyboards and/or mice with cries of joy.
I don't think this would help; by the law of conservation of momentum, the only propulsion you could get from that is equivalent to the momentum of the photons (but as they have no mass...:-)
Lasers can be used for propulsion other by simply transferring momentum. The advantage is that the (usually heavy) power supply no longer has to be aboard the spacecraft.
Use as energy source to ignite onboard propellant (not very useful, since current propellants are all highly combustible).
Use a pulse laser to heat air trapped inside a bell-shaped cavity at the bottom of the spacecraft. Turn the laser on, the air inside the cavity expands and tries to escape downwards, giving upward thrust. Turn the laser off, cooler air from outside flows back in. Repeat this cycle a lot, and it could be used to launch cargos into orbit (might need a small rocket booster to gain altitude outside the atmosphere, or use mode #1 above instead).
Laser as energy source for an electric drive. Shine the laser on a photoelectric panel to generate electricity to power an ion drive or maybe something like a magsail.
Laser as momentum transfer device. Not practical for surface-to-orbit, but could be useful for interplanetary or interstellar missions if you have a really big laser array. Check out the appendix of Rocheworld by Robert L. Forward for an explanation of how it could work and some nifty diagrams.
Even if we had an efficient energy-to-matter converter, the overall momentum of the matter/antimatter would be nothing, and hence no propulsion.
Antimatter behaves the same with respect to regular matter for momentum, so this is wrong. Antimatter is rare and expensive, so you wouldn't want to use it as reaction mass, anyways. The most likely use for antimatter in propulsion is to use the energy given off when matter and antimatter combine to heat a propellant (say, hydrogen) to high temperatures as exhaust.
Tell you what, I'll read that help menu as soon as you give me a coherent, relevant, and competant description of how to turn on the iBook in question without it bombing due to a rotating cast of type 11, bus, and address errors at startup, before the extention loading phase.
I have an iBook, and this sounds like a serious hardware problem. You'll want to take it back to your dealer or Apple to be repaired, not search the Internet for software fixes. This is no different than if you were getting memory access errors on startup on an x86 laptop running Windows or Linux.
I know yall hate the DMCA, but doesn't the.exe provided by Microsoft fall under it's rule?
Most of the posts that Microsoft wants to censor said, in effect, "Oh, it's just a zip file. Use WinZip or WinRAR to open it." If saying that is criminal under the DMCA, than I sincerely hope that it goes before the Supreme Court soon to be struck down as grossly unconstitutional.
Besides, looking at the sections of the DMCA you quoted, I'm hard-pressed to see how Microsoft could make a case under it. I'll grant that the self-extracting.exe with the EULA is probably a technological measure under 3B, but provisions 2A and 2B hardly apply to the case.
A message saying to use WinZip is not "technology, product, service, device, component, or part thereof", but WinZip itself might be considered to be. But WinZip doesn't meet any of the requirements 2A, 2B, or 2C:
WinZip is not "primarily designed or produced for the purpose of circumventing a technological measure that effectively controls access to a work protected under this title", it was primarily designed to open Zip archives.
WinZip has far more than "limited commercially significant purpose or use other than to circumvent a technological measure" - people were buying copies of it long before Microsoft posted the protected work in question.
As for 2C, I sincerely doubt that WinZip's creators are marketing it "for use in circumventing a technological measure".
Unlike the DeCSS case, WinZip is obviously not designed or marketed solely for the purpose of circumventing copy protection, even to a technologically challenged judge. So using the DMCA to argue against WinZip or advocating using it to open the.exe seems like a losing proposition.
China Mountain Zhang is pretty impressive considering that it's a first novel. After being blown away by the strong characterization and convincing, detailed world, I had high expectations for McHugh's second novel.
Half the Day is Night shares the same strong world-building as her first book, but I found it plodding and lifeless. I wasn't able to get inside the characters the way I did for China Mountain Zhang. I was quite disappointed - it almost feels like it was by a completely different author.
I haven't encountered McHugh's third book, Mission Child, yet, so I don't know how it compares to her first two. But I can't emphasize enough how good China Mountain Zhang is, and I encourage everybody to go read it.
Yes, because it's the basic unit of record company contracts. An artist signs a contract agreeing to create a certain number of albums, not a certain number of songs.
well-crafted songs are one thing, but an album represents a hour-ish long attempt to create a coherent/cohesive mood and statement.
Sometimes, but rarely in my experience. Most of the time an album sounds just like the collection of all songs written since the last album was released. And all too often there's the phenomena of an artist putting out an album, not because the creative juices are flowing, but because of being obliged to do so by their contract.
Keep in mind that thanks to radio and MTV, people are used to thinking of songs as the basic unit of music, not the album. One of the strengths of MP3 is the ease with which it lets a person create a personal jukebox, freeing them from the tyranny of having to listen to the songs album by album, always in the same order.
The first article is about iCraveTV's effort, and the second talks about Digital Island, who offers the service today and claims a 96% accuracy rate. Both articles are shy on technical details, but mention is made of making arrangements with big ISPs to learn about how their IP address range is distributed geographically.
I suspect that this will prove to be another reason why anonymizing proxies are useful and necessary.
okay its not at the top of the file itself, it in that files resource fork
No. MacOS file and creator data is stored with the file metadata (in the HFS and HFS+ equivalents of an inode), along with the name, modification and creator dates, and so forth. All files get them, not just those with resource forks.
I think the lastest few versions of MacOS and Finder (and possibly even older versions) can use file extensions if one is specifed.
The third-party public domain package Internet Config has been available for years, and provides (among other things), the ability to map downloaded files to a Mac file/creator type by file extension. Apple rolled it into the MacOS as the Internet control panel in MacOS 8.5. It's also used for mapping file types from DOS disks mounted on a Mac. It's also possible to setup the latest version of netatalk to use the Internet Config database, so that fileshares from UNIX also get types and creators.
Even with IC, it's still clumsy to change type and creator when they're work, and only power users do it. Something like the BeOS MIME typing for all objects in the system would be nicer, but it would also have to use something like IC to deal with files created on other OSes.
Too bad no PC vendors will bundle it, and Apple probably won't either because of the UI design "violations"
I suspect that Apple will ship Mozilla, at least when it's the official Netscape release. Despite Steve Jobs proclaiming his love for Internet Explorer, MacOS 9 does install Netscape as well, but just not as the default browser. The current Mozilla builds are pretty hideous on the Mac from a conformance to the Human Interface Guidelines view, but with Mozilla's themeability that could be cleaned up quite a bit.
(I'll bet MS has Apple under contract to not 'support' Mozilla with code contributions, like they have supported Apache. This is pure speculation however).
Probably wrong. According to the Fizzilla (MacOS X port) page, Apple has already contributed patches to Mozilla to help get it running on OS X. I don't know if Microsoft has committed to a Carbon version of IE yet, so Mozilla might be the only way that MacOS X gets a native browser.
In snooping around the Mozilla home page to check on the status of the Mac FE, I also discovered that Apple is helping add ColorSync support to Mozilla.
It is NOT true that you don't need to comment python. Who came up with that nonsense? I keep hearing it.
It's probably because Python encourages clean, readable code, and has mechanisms that make it easy for code to be self-documenting.
Which brings up one of the features I love about Python that hasn't been mentioned so far -- document strings. Modules, functions, classes and methods can have a constant string before any statements that is available at runtime as the __doc__ attribute. I find that this encourages me to write one for each of these entities as I create them, so that's there always a brief description of what a given procedure or class is meant to do.
Because they're available at runtime, they can serve to document code even when the source is unavailable. For example, a couple of weeks ago I was working with one of the libraries in the MacPython distribution that wraps part of the Mac toolbox. This library wasn't documented and was only provided as a binary shared library, so it wasn't clear how it was to be used. Since a module in Python can be used as a dictionary of functions and classes, I was able to find what functions the library provided by importing it and looking at its contents. For each of the functions, the document string gave a one line explanation of how to use it.
I agree whole-heartedly, but there's another important factor in the C-64's dominance that you've neglected to mention.
Of course, little did the parents know that most kids wouldn't know how to do anything more than LOAD "*",8,1.
And the parents often didn't know that the kids had a box of floppies with copied games on them to type that command for. I didn't have a C-64 myself, but I knew lots of people who did. Invariably, they all had hundreds of copied games, and knew where to get more if they wanted to. Compared to the Atari, whose cartridge games were easily copyable, this was an important factor in making the C-64 the gaming machine in the early 80s.
Mars is farmer friendly
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On to Mars
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· Score: 1
The problem with Mars is that there is no there there. The compelling reason of getting mankind off of this rock could also be met with a few Terra-Solar Lagrange space habitats, and it might not cost us as much to build these habitats on the moon as it would take to build a major moon base.
What is it that we need on Mars, besides a rock to sit on and maybe some atmosphere to process?
Mars is the prime candidate for space colonization because it's easy to build greenhouses there. For colonization to succeed, a self-sustaining food supply is key.
To grow food to support colonists on a space habitat or the Moon is going to take hydroponics. It requires complicated equipment, a great deal of water, and energy-expensive high-power lamps. Or, you build expensive vacuum proof greenhouses to take advantage of sunlight for energy, but that imposes difficulty due to the either continuous light (for a habitat) or fortnight-long day (for the Moon).
By contrast, a greenhouse on Mars is a pressurized plastic tent. The Martian day is very close in length to that of Earth, so the plants are already adapted to it. With some biological work, the Martian regolith can be turned into dirt for growing crops in the ground.
In addition to being able to easily support agriculture, Mars has all of the other materials needed for civilization - volatiles, metals, and so forth. For founding a second branch of human civilization, Mars is clearly the best choice.
Brooks's Law still applies to free software projects. They just handle it differently. This was the topic of the keynote presentation that Alan Cox gave at the Ottawa Linux Symposium last summer. In essence, if I recall it correctly, he said that free software projects work around it by using communication structures quite different than in commercial development.
Free software projects still tend to have one prime architect who has final say over what goes into the project and what doesn't (e.g. Linux for Linux). These architects tend to be supported by a small team of core developers, an arrangement which recalls the "surgical" team model in MMM.
The size of project teams is limited by the n-squared communications cost. Cox suggested that the useful limit is about six people. More than that, and they spend more time talking than working. Free software projects tend to live to this limitation by aggressive modularization. Whenever a project gets too big, it fissions into a group of smaller subprojects with well-defined interfaces. He gave the GNOME project as a good example of this, as well as the Linux kernel.
Free software projects do have a different communication and training style than the commercial development that Brooks focused on. In free software, you're encouraged to contact directly the person who can answer your question, instead of passing messages up and down the management heirarchy to get permission to do so. Training is somewhat reduced, since new contributors are expected to read the source code before jumping in. One method that Cox mentioned was that an experienced developer will give a new contributor some small individual piece to work - in effect, a new subproject.
Still, as noted elsewhere in this discussion, the biggest advantage free software has in this regard is flexible deadlines. Projects aren't done until they really are done, since there's typically no sales department or management to set a deadline.
Slashdot Mirror
You can if you use the Prograph programming language. It lets you build real Mac applications using the Classic Toolbox by dragging and dropping icons to construct dataflow diagrams.
It's been recently ported to Windows from its origins on the Mac, and I encourage programmers who like learning different languages to download the demo and try it out. It's literally unlike any other programming language I've used.
The obvious enhancement to a touch screen machine at the voting place would be for the touch screen device not to count your vote directly, but print it out. You then take your "receipt" and deposit that in the ballot box.
Pros
The first two properties solve most of the problems reported in Palm Beach. There would be no 19,000 spoiled ballots with two presidential candidates marked off, and people voting for Buchanan by mistake would see it (best print the ballots in large print!) before putting the ballot in the box, and have a chance to fix their ballot.
Cons
It's not as bad as that in other rural areas. I just got back from spending a weekend in rural Saskatchewan visiting my grandparents. Both sets of them live in the same small town, and they've both bought PCs in the past couple of years and have Internet access. According to a guy I know at the Radio Shack in that town, they've been selling computers to seniors briskly for a while now.
So, given this and the fact that everyone in my extended family has at least one computer and an email address, I can believe that the growth in computer sales is flattening.
I don't think that this is unusual. The landmark book for the history of cryptography, David Kahn's The Codebreakers, also contains a chapter on Linear B and the Rosetta stone. Decoding unknown languages is a good, lucid way to demonstrate how cryptanalysis proceeds without a lot of mathematics, and has the advantage of having all of the details openly published. For the casual reader without a strong background in computers or cryptography, showing how linquists decipher an unknown written language is the best way I can think of to show the thought processes of a cryptanalyst.
Canada is just as dysfunctional as the U.S. when it comes to national elections. In some ways it's even worse, since our smaller population is so unevenly distributed it makes concentrations of power very significant. In the last federal election, the two right-wing parties (Reform and the Progressive Conservatives) both polled about 20% of the popular vote. But, since Reform's support was concentrated in the West, and the PC's support was dispersed across the whole country, Reform got 60 seats to the PC's 20.
The next federal election here will be decided in Ontario, because the other regions of the country either have small populations (the Maritimes) or vote for parties that can never form a majority government (Quebec with the Bloc Quebecois). If right-wing voters in Ontario concentrate their votes for one party, it'll win, otherwise the Liberals will coast to another majority government.
Just as the U.S. is essentially a two-party system where occasionally one the parties changes, so is Canada. The Liberals and Progressive Conservatives have been alternating government since Confederation. I argue that we're currently in the midst of a change where the slightly right-of-center party is morphing from the PCs to the new Canadian Alliance party (which used to be Reform). If that fails and we remain with five strong parties, the Liberals will continue to win elections as long as they don't become too corrupt to alienate their core constituency in Ontario.
The mostly two-party system even holds for provincial elections, although with a little more variety, since which two parties vie for power varies from province to province (and within provinces, changes on the timescale of decades). I agree with the other posters that this appears to be a consequence of the first past the post system, and a proportional system of some sort (or even just runoff elections where there was no clear majority) would better reflect the populace.
Actually, the very first iBooks shipped with MacOS 8.6, which is much less memory hungry than 9. When I got my iBook, the 32 MB of RAM was sufficient for running a single application at a time (even Netscape!), until I upgraded to OS 9. Then I had to upgrade the RAM real quick, as the amount of swapping with only 32 MB made the machine nearly unusable.
I can't answer the rest of your questions, but this one is easy. Yes, there is - Electronic Frontier Canada.
Glancing at the issues in their archive page, I'd say Canadians don't have too much to worry about now. But unfortunately, American governmental stupidity always seems to be contagious where the Canadian government is concerned.
I see the same thing with Netscape 4.72 on an 8-bit HP-UX display.
It's probably worse than that. I'll bet there's some platform out there that screws up some of these 15 safe colors, too. In the end, the only colors you can rely on to be the same across all color platforms are the eight at the vertices of the color cube:
And here I was hoping that the world had long since left the CGA palette behind. :)
Reading through the sf-lovers digest, I was struck by the poll on what the price of an average paperback book prices would be in 2001. Now that we're only one year away, this is one prediction that I'm glad didn't come true:
For comparison, a quick glance at my bookshelf doesn't turn any paperbacks with prices more than about $7 US, and books these days are a lot thicker (more pages) than was common in 1981.
Some followup information for your post:
Record of Lodoss War
This was someone's Dungeons and Dragons campaign, I'm sure.
It was. See this article in Ex for the rather complicated history of the Lodoss story.
Tenchi Muyo!
I liked the original OAVs, which aren't on DVD.
Yes they are, I know, because I bought them yesterday. Look for the Tenchi Muyo Ultimate Edition boxed set.
As for my take on the original article, I've also noticed a strong correlation between geeks and anime fans. I suspect the reason is probably due to the fact that the American entertainment establishment isn't providing much good right now. Babylon 5 was the last thing on TV that really spoke to me, and the failure of Crusade shows how unlikely it is that a worthy successor to it will appear.
According to The Codebreakers by David Kahn, this must be one of several cryptographic-related inventions Friedman made. In 1956, Congress gave Friedman $100,000 in compensation for the profits lost because several of his inventions were classified. On page 391, Kahn says:
I presume that this is the first of the four patents held in the Patent Office, which implies that three more will appear over the next few years. This is one of the rotor machines, but I'm not sure which of them it is. I'm really curious about the inventions so secret that they never had a patent application for them.
Near as I can tell from a quick glance through the book, in 1933 Friedman would have been working for a cryptographic section of the U.S. Army Signal Corps, to which I suppose the NSA is today's successor.
You're thinking of Factoring Humanity, by Robert Sawyer. It's a good book, particularly in the way he ties together such apparently unrelated fields as topology, quantum physics, and psychology.
The crypto fans on Slashdot will be amused by the subplot, wherein the protagonist's husband, a computer scientist, invents a quantum computer capable of easily performimg prime factorizations of large numbers, and thus breaking most of the world's cryptographic capability. He starts to get visits from mysterious characters who want to sequester the work.
It took them a while, but Apple appears to have fixed the problems with both its mouse and keyboard.
It's about time. Mac people have been complaining vociferously about the teensy little keyboards and mice since the iMac first came out. It's worth noting that these are available separately, so owners of older Macs can finally get normal-sized Apple keyboards and mice.
I just got a G4/450 last month, and I definitely found the keyboard and mouse to be a disappointment. Until now I've held off getting replacements because I've yet to find a USB keyboard as good as my old Apple Extended Keyboard II or a good USB mouse. Also, Macintouch has been reporting problems caused by using third-party USB keyboards with recent Macs, which this will avoid.
As soon as the new keyboard shows up on the Canadian Apple Store, I'll be ordering one. I'm not so sure about the new mouse, which if nothing else, looks unbelievably cool, since I'd really prefer a 2 button mouse for LinuxPPC. I imagine there will be a bunch of other G3 and G4 owners also throwing out their old keyboards and/or mice with cries of joy.
Lasers can be used for propulsion other by simply transferring momentum. The advantage is that the (usually heavy) power supply no longer has to be aboard the spacecraft.
- Use as energy source to ignite onboard propellant (not very useful, since current propellants are all highly combustible).
- Use a pulse laser to heat air trapped inside a bell-shaped cavity at the bottom of the spacecraft. Turn the laser on, the air inside the cavity expands and tries to escape downwards, giving upward thrust. Turn the laser off, cooler air from outside flows back in. Repeat this cycle a lot, and it could be used to launch cargos into orbit (might need a small rocket booster to gain altitude outside the atmosphere, or use mode #1 above instead).
- Laser as energy source for an electric drive. Shine the laser on a photoelectric panel to generate electricity to power an ion drive or maybe something like a magsail.
- Laser as momentum transfer device. Not practical for surface-to-orbit, but could be useful for interplanetary or interstellar missions if you have a really big laser array. Check out the appendix of Rocheworld by Robert L. Forward for an explanation of how it could work and some nifty diagrams.
Even if we had an efficient energy-to-matter converter, the overall momentum of the matter/antimatter would be nothing, and hence no propulsion.Antimatter behaves the same with respect to regular matter for momentum, so this is wrong. Antimatter is rare and expensive, so you wouldn't want to use it as reaction mass, anyways. The most likely use for antimatter in propulsion is to use the energy given off when matter and antimatter combine to heat a propellant (say, hydrogen) to high temperatures as exhaust.
I have an iBook, and this sounds like a serious hardware problem. You'll want to take it back to your dealer or Apple to be repaired, not search the Internet for software fixes. This is no different than if you were getting memory access errors on startup on an x86 laptop running Windows or Linux.
Most of the posts that Microsoft wants to censor said, in effect, "Oh, it's just a zip file. Use WinZip or WinRAR to open it." If saying that is criminal under the DMCA, than I sincerely hope that it goes before the Supreme Court soon to be struck down as grossly unconstitutional.
Besides, looking at the sections of the DMCA you quoted, I'm hard-pressed to see how Microsoft could make a case under it. I'll grant that the self-extracting .exe with the EULA is probably a technological measure under 3B, but provisions 2A and 2B hardly apply to the case.
A message saying to use WinZip is not "technology, product, service, device, component, or part thereof", but WinZip itself might be considered to be. But WinZip doesn't meet any of the requirements 2A, 2B, or 2C:
Unlike the DeCSS case, WinZip is obviously not designed or marketed solely for the purpose of circumventing copy protection, even to a technologically challenged judge. So using the DMCA to argue against WinZip or advocating using it to open the .exe seems like a losing proposition.
China Mountain Zhang is pretty impressive considering that it's a first novel. After being blown away by the strong characterization and convincing, detailed world, I had high expectations for McHugh's second novel.
Half the Day is Night shares the same strong world-building as her first book, but I found it plodding and lifeless. I wasn't able to get inside the characters the way I did for China Mountain Zhang. I was quite disappointed - it almost feels like it was by a completely different author.
I haven't encountered McHugh's third book, Mission Child, yet, so I don't know how it compares to her first two. But I can't emphasize enough how good China Mountain Zhang is, and I encourage everybody to go read it.
Yes, because it's the basic unit of record company contracts. An artist signs a contract agreeing to create a certain number of albums, not a certain number of songs.
well-crafted songs are one thing, but an album represents a hour-ish long attempt to create a coherent/cohesive mood and statement.Sometimes, but rarely in my experience. Most of the time an album sounds just like the collection of all songs written since the last album was released. And all too often there's the phenomena of an artist putting out an album, not because the creative juices are flowing, but because of being obliged to do so by their contract.
Keep in mind that thanks to radio and MTV, people are used to thinking of songs as the basic unit of music, not the album. One of the strengths of MP3 is the ease with which it lets a person create a personal jukebox, freeing them from the tyranny of having to listen to the songs album by album, always in the same order.
Salon did a pair of articles on this topic a couple of weeks ago:
The first article is about iCraveTV's effort, and the second talks about Digital Island, who offers the service today and claims a 96% accuracy rate. Both articles are shy on technical details, but mention is made of making arrangements with big ISPs to learn about how their IP address range is distributed geographically.
I suspect that this will prove to be another reason why anonymizing proxies are useful and necessary.
No. MacOS file and creator data is stored with the file metadata (in the HFS and HFS+ equivalents of an inode), along with the name, modification and creator dates, and so forth. All files get them, not just those with resource forks.
I think the lastest few versions of MacOS and Finder (and possibly even older versions) can use file extensions if one is specifed.The third-party public domain package Internet Config has been available for years, and provides (among other things), the ability to map downloaded files to a Mac file/creator type by file extension. Apple rolled it into the MacOS as the Internet control panel in MacOS 8.5. It's also used for mapping file types from DOS disks mounted on a Mac. It's also possible to setup the latest version of netatalk to use the Internet Config database, so that fileshares from UNIX also get types and creators.
Even with IC, it's still clumsy to change type and creator when they're work, and only power users do it. Something like the BeOS MIME typing for all objects in the system would be nicer, but it would also have to use something like IC to deal with files created on other OSes.
I suspect that Apple will ship Mozilla, at least when it's the official Netscape release. Despite Steve Jobs proclaiming his love for Internet Explorer, MacOS 9 does install Netscape as well, but just not as the default browser. The current Mozilla builds are pretty hideous on the Mac from a conformance to the Human Interface Guidelines view, but with Mozilla's themeability that could be cleaned up quite a bit.
(I'll bet MS has Apple under contract to not 'support' Mozilla with code contributions, like they have supported Apache. This is pure speculation however).Probably wrong. According to the Fizzilla (MacOS X port) page, Apple has already contributed patches to Mozilla to help get it running on OS X. I don't know if Microsoft has committed to a Carbon version of IE yet, so Mozilla might be the only way that MacOS X gets a native browser.
In snooping around the Mozilla home page to check on the status of the Mac FE, I also discovered that Apple is helping add ColorSync support to Mozilla.
It's probably because Python encourages clean, readable code, and has mechanisms that make it easy for code to be self-documenting.
Which brings up one of the features I love about Python that hasn't been mentioned so far -- document strings. Modules, functions, classes and methods can have a constant string before any statements that is available at runtime as the __doc__ attribute. I find that this encourages me to write one for each of these entities as I create them, so that's there always a brief description of what a given procedure or class is meant to do.
Because they're available at runtime, they can serve to document code even when the source is unavailable. For example, a couple of weeks ago I was working with one of the libraries in the MacPython distribution that wraps part of the Mac toolbox. This library wasn't documented and was only provided as a binary shared library, so it wasn't clear how it was to be used. Since a module in Python can be used as a dictionary of functions and classes, I was able to find what functions the library provided by importing it and looking at its contents. For each of the functions, the document string gave a one line explanation of how to use it.
I agree whole-heartedly, but there's another important factor in the C-64's dominance that you've neglected to mention.
Of course, little did the parents know that most kids wouldn't know how to do anything more than LOAD "*",8,1.And the parents often didn't know that the kids had a box of floppies with copied games on them to type that command for. I didn't have a C-64 myself, but I knew lots of people who did. Invariably, they all had hundreds of copied games, and knew where to get more if they wanted to. Compared to the Atari, whose cartridge games were easily copyable, this was an important factor in making the C-64 the gaming machine in the early 80s.
Mars is the prime candidate for space colonization because it's easy to build greenhouses there. For colonization to succeed, a self-sustaining food supply is key.
To grow food to support colonists on a space habitat or the Moon is going to take hydroponics. It requires complicated equipment, a great deal of water, and energy-expensive high-power lamps. Or, you build expensive vacuum proof greenhouses to take advantage of sunlight for energy, but that imposes difficulty due to the either continuous light (for a habitat) or fortnight-long day (for the Moon).
By contrast, a greenhouse on Mars is a pressurized plastic tent. The Martian day is very close in length to that of Earth, so the plants are already adapted to it. With some biological work, the Martian regolith can be turned into dirt for growing crops in the ground.
In addition to being able to easily support agriculture, Mars has all of the other materials needed for civilization - volatiles, metals, and so forth. For founding a second branch of human civilization, Mars is clearly the best choice.
Brooks's Law still applies to free software projects. They just handle it differently. This was the topic of the keynote presentation that Alan Cox gave at the Ottawa Linux Symposium last summer. In essence, if I recall it correctly, he said that free software projects work around it by using communication structures quite different than in commercial development.
Free software projects still tend to have one prime architect who has final say over what goes into the project and what doesn't (e.g. Linux for Linux). These architects tend to be supported by a small team of core developers, an arrangement which recalls the "surgical" team model in MMM.
The size of project teams is limited by the n-squared communications cost. Cox suggested that the useful limit is about six people. More than that, and they spend more time talking than working. Free software projects tend to live to this limitation by aggressive modularization. Whenever a project gets too big, it fissions into a group of smaller subprojects with well-defined interfaces. He gave the GNOME project as a good example of this, as well as the Linux kernel.
Free software projects do have a different communication and training style than the commercial development that Brooks focused on. In free software, you're encouraged to contact directly the person who can answer your question, instead of passing messages up and down the management heirarchy to get permission to do so. Training is somewhat reduced, since new contributors are expected to read the source code before jumping in. One method that Cox mentioned was that an experienced developer will give a new contributor some small individual piece to work - in effect, a new subproject.
Still, as noted elsewhere in this discussion, the biggest advantage free software has in this regard is flexible deadlines. Projects aren't done until they really are done, since there's typically no sales department or management to set a deadline.
You can listen to the keynote in MP3 at ftp://ftp.ottawalinuxsymposi um.org/ols1999/keynote.mp3.