...as a rocket scientist I feel most compelled to answer
http://slashdot.org/comments.pl?sid=44937&; cid=4658776
...I run a successful London-based dot com
http://slashdot.org/comments.pl?sid=44933&cid =4658433
... As a lawyer myself, I can state that
http://slashdot.org/comments.pl?sid=44912&ci d=4658097
... I'm an avid open-source supporter
http://slashdot.org/comments.pl?sid=211 28&cid=2238414
...I am an avid supported of the open-source movement [sounds familiar? that's because it is -ed]
http://slashdot.org/comments.pl?sid=20824&ci d=2207372
...I'm an avid supported of the open source movement [we know -ed]
http://slashdot.org/comments.pl?sid=20761&ci d=2204471
... I am a passionate supported of the open-source movement [geez -ed] http://slashdot.org/comments.pl?sid=20760&ci d=2204422
So, pray tell, what is the better - originality or banal repostings?
Nowadays, modules and so forth are built to last a certain timeframe. If a vital component is guaranteed to fail after, say, eighteen months and yet the overall length of the project is sixteen months, NASA won't bother to find an alternative (despite there, on occaision, being a cheaper and longer-lasting solution) as time is the motivating money factor.
But as a rocket scientist I feel most compelled to answer.
O'Keefe, whilst being a highly respectable man, is really not the man for the job. He's an accountant-scientist, more concerned with meeting the budget than pushing for more reasearch money.
How long do we have to wait until NASA becomes as ingenious as they were in the sixties?
By having to ask for skill ideas you are highlighting a much bigger problem with yourself - that is to say, you are willing to let your skills slip and then accept advice on the matter from random strangers.
No good will come from this - it will, ironically enough, hinder your progress. Possible employers shall note to ignore you in the future due to this.
Now, before someone else chips in, asking for help is a good personality trait, this much is true. However, "there's a time and a place for everything" would be rather more advisable.
As a lawyer myself, I can state that Stan Lee hasn't a hope in hell of winning anything. Were I to be defending the film studio, there is a very simple line of defense that could be used:
It's fair use - A film as bad as Spiderman could in no way, shape nor form be mistaken for a genuine Spiderman product.
Perhaps if Mr. Lee had given his say from the start and had actually worked with the studio to produce a "proper" Spiderman movie then things would be different.
There are two schools of thought when it comes to computers and the world around us.
One might say that computers and ourselves are becoming too involved with each other, us being dependant on the computers.
The other says that each technological breakthrough is a good thing, advancing us to a greater extent each time.
I subscribe to the latter view.
Taking in this point, cheaper chips are something that we should really be striving to produce. If we could come up with microchips so cheap that they cost fractions of pennies yet had the processing power of, I don't know, an Atari ST (8Mhz IIRC) then think of the places we could put them - and cheaply !
For example, The London Underground 'tube' network in England is currently trialing a new ticketing system whereby rather than having a cardboard ticket with a magnetic stripe down one side, they issue tickets which have so-called 'smart chips' inside them.
The flipside is good for LU - think how much extra effort it would be to forge a ticket.
For the everyday train user it makes life just that bit easier. No more scrabbling around for your ticket, as long as it's somewhere on your person you'll able to walk straight through the ticket barrier without having to even think about it.
Think of CJD, the so-called human form of BSE.
The USA and Canada no longer accept blood donations from people who were in possible BSE infected countries for fear of passing on CJD... so that's just wiped out quite a lot of possible stock, has it not ?
This is truly fantastic news. No matter where you are in the world, blood is a required substance which is in finite quantities, not to mention the different blood types which mean that you might be lucky and share a common group, or you might be unlucky and... well, not.
If you don't share a commond blood group (A rhesus negative ? Is that one ? Can't quite remember) then not only could you find yourself in difficulty, once you are out of hospital you will no doubt be bombarded with requests for you to give blood... and often.
Now toss into the formula the growing number of countries who won't accept blood donations from people who have been in countries around the time of the BSE crisis and you start to realise quite how needed this discovery is.
One question that does come to mind... does this mean that certain religious groups will no longer have a reason to refuse blood transfusions, blood as in synthetic blood ?
Animal testing's wrong ? In principal or in practise ?
Yes, a lot of companies out there screw around with animals, and I'd agree with you that they are wrong. However, if it was a case of an animal getting a nasty side effect from a cancer-curing drug... well, what you rather have ? Would *you* volunteer ?
It will be truly interesting to observe the effects of mars gravity on mice.
A while back I remember reading about the changes that would happen to man were we to habitate Mars. Such changes would include, but were not limited to:
1) Growth. People nowadays are tall, but it's not inconceivable that we would grow more than ten feet tall. This is due to the lack of gravity, thus our bodies having much less force against them growing skywards.
2) Chest size. Some people like bigs tits / pecs. Well, were we to live on mars, another size effect of the lack of gravity would be a massive swelling of the chest area to immense proportions. This would accomodate a much greater lung capacity as well.
I for one can't wait to see qute what happens to the mice.
I'm an avid open-source supporter, using windows NT at work, 95 at home, and ME on my laptop.
Now, this story seems quite interesting. In this day and age where we are increasing only interested how quickly we can churn out things, it's good that a developer (or rather, group) has decided to admit that things do need time, in this case a year, to be improved and have the features users want implemented to a satisfactory level.
Look at Netscape 4 - definately a rush job, as anyone who has to get CSS and / or javascript working with it will tell you - it's pretty obvious that little testing took place on it, hence even *really* obvious bugs stick out like a sore thumb.
Whilst users always like new features, ooh-ing and ahh-ing over them, it's no good if the features themselves are ridden with bugs. If a few more developers were to spend enough time testing and really ironing out the problems in their applications, the program would slowly come together, gaining a reputation for itself as it does so.
The only problem with this is that in a year, people will be looking at BSD, hoping for some king of uber operating system. I really do hope that the developers live up to expectations - it would be a real shame if they didn't.
This is the kind of information that should be free. What if someone were to decide to patent the AIDS bug ? If you were to be infected with it, could you be charged for violating their IP and therefore have no alternative but to buy the cure off them ?
Maybe this is a viable business plan that I should attempt !
Of course it's not libel - the internet has no one "home country" hence NO laws apply. A simple proof of this is the amount of explicit porn out there along with hacking and bomb-making guides.
Yet again Microsoft has seemed to manage to let us down again, which is a great shame.
This is the shining example of why open-source is so great: we have no need to use such negative propaganda. No ! We produce such great software that it screams from the heights of the skyscrapers, yet without a single person uttering it.
Yes, it truly resonates around the planet.
I am an avid supported of the open-source movement, using Windows 2000 at work, and running MacOS at home. I like the flexibility and the amount of options that open-source brings. So why does Microsoft have to go and ruin the open-source movement's name with something like this ?
MS has been producing quality open-source software for what ? Twenty years ?
WHY do they have to tarnish out name with this ?
It's absolutely pointless ? Or is it ? If they start doing this then they'll start being laughed at more and more. This is a good thing.
Then the true commercial success story, Linux, will jump to the desktop prooving one again that you can't trust open-source software such as windows, No you can't at all.
Linux shall only get stronger from this kind of press.
I must admit that I have neither read the story or any views about it, but must comment on the story nevertheless.
The finite matrix is quite an interesting idea. As those of you who have done discreet mathematics will appreciate, Matrixes are quite a complex subject, and are often best solved using coat hangers with bits of paper hanging off them.
Matrixes are interesting because they are so difficult to visualise. One of their best applications is the parity-check matrix, which can be used to encode data being sent anywhere where it might well be corrupted.
Such example of this would be crafts being sent to mars... when they beam back down their information, it's a fair chance that a lot of the information is going to be corrupted by cosmic radiation.
We can use parity-check matrixes to pad-out the information transmitted.
e.g. 10001000 could become 11010100101011001010 or something of that order.
By using the parity check matrix, we could check to see which bits have become corrupted and CORRECTLY ascertain their original value.
This is truly a good thing and for this very reason it has been used in a variety of different applications.
The finite matrix is truly an interesting if rather pointless name for a sci-fi journal. Why not the infinite matrix ? I think that this would be a much more interesting name as it would lead us to look at a number, such as pi, in binary and attempt to use a matrix to decode it.
Sadly, pi goes on forever and so we would never truly know the answer, only gaining a bit of information a bit at a time.
This could well be likened to evolution, but in the electronic sense.
MAME is a really, really, good thing - great emulation at almost no cost - thanks guys:-)
I'm an avid supported of the open source movement, so I can't wait to see the X-Box - it's meant to be really impressive, and the change to stick something open-source on it is just too much to resist.
I know someone who's developing for the X-Box and it's meant to be, like, *so* impressive, all these really cool built-in functions that address the chips without any effort from his programs (which are all written in perl, naturally).
My only problem is that I don't exactly agree with games-playing - I think that there are so many other ways to spend your time that sitting in front of a computer screen is all rather sad. This is what annoys me most about the whole open-source movement, is that you're expected to give up your own free time to write code. Why do that ? I'd rather be down the pub or going out for a walk. Leave it to those who get paid for it is what I say.
I am a passionate supported of the open-source movement, using NT at work and ME at home.
I don't see what all the complaints about ext3 are - there doesn't seem to be any reason about.
People like to have choice - RedHat is simply adding a lot more choice open to the public. Surely this is a good thing, is it not ?
From what I've heard, ext2 is really easy to deal with, is a delight to write low-level (such as perl or python). By including it in the distribution, RedHat are offering not only to the consumer but to the developer as well.
As it is, ext2 is widely used in other Liunx distro's, so what's the problem ? It means that if you decided to change distro's to RedHat then you'd no longer have to do a backup and reformat all your drives. No! Your old linux installation running ext2 will now be able to be read by RedHat.
Admitedly there are a few problems with ext2 - such as if you suffer from a power failure and say you have an eighty-gig drive... that's gonna take a *long* time to check. This is not good.
I just can't wait until ext3 is finally out - but who knows how long it'll take RedHat to come up with it ? Hopefully not as long as it's taken them to start supporting ext2!
Slashdot Mirror
http://slashdot.org/comments.pl?sid=44937&; cid=4658776
http://slashdot.org/comments.pl?sid=44933&cid =4658433
http://slashdot.org/comments.pl?sid=44912&ci d=4658097
http://slashdot.org/comments.pl?sid=211 28&cid=2238414
http://slashdot.org/comments.pl?sid=20824&ci d=2207372
http://slashdot.org/comments.pl?sid=20761&ci d=2204471
http://slashdot.org/comments.pl?sid=20760&c
So, pray tell, what is the better - originality or banal repostings?
D'oh!
;)
Think before writing next time, old man
But, none the less, my point still stands. Just look at the early Apollo missions.
One word: Voyager.
Nowadays, modules and so forth are built to last a certain timeframe. If a vital component is guaranteed to fail after, say, eighteen months and yet the overall length of the project is sixteen months, NASA won't bother to find an alternative (despite there, on occaision, being a cheaper and longer-lasting solution) as time is the motivating money factor.
Alas, we all share this loss.
But as a rocket scientist I feel most compelled to answer.
O'Keefe, whilst being a highly respectable man, is really not the man for the job. He's an accountant-scientist, more concerned with meeting the budget than pushing for more reasearch money.
How long do we have to wait until NASA becomes as ingenious as they were in the sixties?
I run a successful London-based dot com (yes, they do exist :) and we've been having to run around like headless chickens all day because of this.
Is it really too much trouble to do an MD4?
It's the one problem with the open-source community - there's no-one to pay me to pay my staff for the lost man-hours caused by this.
By having to ask for skill ideas you are highlighting a much bigger problem with yourself - that is to say, you are willing to let your skills slip and then accept advice on the matter from random strangers.
No good will come from this - it will, ironically enough, hinder your progress. Possible employers shall note to ignore you in the future due to this.
Now, before someone else chips in, asking for help is a good personality trait, this much is true. However, "there's a time and a place for everything" would be rather more advisable.
What? Are you seriously suggesting that I trust a Microsoft-affliated website?
As a lawyer myself, I can state that Stan Lee hasn't a hope in hell of winning anything. Were I to be defending the film studio, there is a very simple line of defense that could be used:
It's fair use - A film as bad as Spiderman could in no way, shape nor form be mistaken for a genuine Spiderman product.
Perhaps if Mr. Lee had given his say from the start and had actually worked with the studio to produce a "proper" Spiderman movie then things would be different.
Infrared isn't red as you're thinking. Nothing to do with the color red.
A red filter will block out all light on the at the wavelength we associate the color red with.
Infrared is on a whole different wavelength.
Therefore, a 'red' filter will only filter out those on the red wavelength... which infrared is not.
There are two schools of thought when it comes to computers and the world around us.
One might say that computers and ourselves are becoming too involved with each other, us being dependant on the computers.
The other says that each technological breakthrough is a good thing, advancing us to a greater extent each time.
I subscribe to the latter view.
Taking in this point, cheaper chips are something that we should really be striving to produce. If we could come up with microchips so cheap that they cost fractions of pennies yet had the processing power of, I don't know, an Atari ST (8Mhz IIRC) then think of the places we could put them - and cheaply !
For example, The London Underground 'tube' network in England is currently trialing a new ticketing system whereby rather than having a cardboard ticket with a magnetic stripe down one side, they issue tickets which have so-called 'smart chips' inside them.
The flipside is good for LU - think how much extra effort it would be to forge a ticket.
For the everyday train user it makes life just that bit easier. No more scrabbling around for your ticket, as long as it's somewhere on your person you'll able to walk straight through the ticket barrier without having to even think about it.
Think of CJD, the so-called human form of BSE.
The USA and Canada no longer accept blood donations from people who were in possible BSE infected countries for fear of passing on CJD... so that's just wiped out quite a lot of possible stock, has it not ?
This is truly fantastic news. No matter where you are in the world, blood is a required substance which is in finite quantities, not to mention the different blood types which mean that you might be lucky and share a common group, or you might be unlucky and... well, not.
If you don't share a commond blood group (A rhesus negative ? Is that one ? Can't quite remember) then not only could you find yourself in difficulty, once you are out of hospital you will no doubt be bombarded with requests for you to give blood... and often.
Now toss into the formula the growing number of countries who won't accept blood donations from people who have been in countries around the time of the BSE crisis and you start to realise quite how needed this discovery is.
One question that does come to mind... does this mean that certain religious groups will no longer have a reason to refuse blood transfusions, blood as in synthetic blood ?
Animal testing's wrong ? In principal or in practise ?
Yes, a lot of companies out there screw around with animals, and I'd agree with you that they are wrong. However, if it was a case of an animal getting a nasty side effect from a cancer-curing drug... well, what you rather have ? Would *you* volunteer ?
It will be truly interesting to observe the effects of mars gravity on mice.
A while back I remember reading about the changes that would happen to man were we to habitate Mars. Such changes would include, but were not limited to:
1) Growth. People nowadays are tall, but it's not inconceivable that we would grow more than ten feet tall. This is due to the lack of gravity, thus our bodies having much less force against them growing skywards.
2) Chest size. Some people like bigs tits / pecs. Well, were we to live on mars, another size effect of the lack of gravity would be a massive swelling of the chest area to immense proportions. This would accomodate a much greater lung capacity as well.
I for one can't wait to see qute what happens to the mice.
I'm an avid open-source supporter, using windows NT at work, 95 at home, and ME on my laptop.
Now, this story seems quite interesting. In this day and age where we are increasing only interested how quickly we can churn out things, it's good that a developer (or rather, group) has decided to admit that things do need time, in this case a year, to be improved and have the features users want implemented to a satisfactory level.
Look at Netscape 4 - definately a rush job, as anyone who has to get CSS and / or javascript working with it will tell you - it's pretty obvious that little testing took place on it, hence even *really* obvious bugs stick out like a sore thumb.
Whilst users always like new features, ooh-ing and ahh-ing over them, it's no good if the features themselves are ridden with bugs. If a few more developers were to spend enough time testing and really ironing out the problems in their applications, the program would slowly come together, gaining a reputation for itself as it does so.
The only problem with this is that in a year, people will be looking at BSD, hoping for some king of uber operating system. I really do hope that the developers live up to expectations - it would be a real shame if they didn't.
developing photolithography
More of the above
Process description
A summer photolithography project
Really are the scum of the universe.
This is the kind of information that should be free. What if someone were to decide to patent the AIDS bug ? If you were to be infected with it, could you be charged for violating their IP and therefore have no alternative but to buy the cure off them ?
Maybe this is a viable business plan that I should attempt !
Of course it's not libel - the internet has no one "home country" hence NO laws apply. A simple proof of this is the amount of explicit porn out there along with hacking and bomb-making guides.
I would hardly call this a laughing matter - it really does make a difference to how our fine country opperates.
If MS lobbied the government hard enough, they'd take away the right to bear arms - and don't pretend you think it wouldn't happen.
Yet again Microsoft has seemed to manage to let us down again, which is a great shame.
This is the shining example of why open-source is so great: we have no need to use such negative propaganda. No ! We produce such great software that it screams from the heights of the skyscrapers, yet without a single person uttering it.
Yes, it truly resonates around the planet.
I am an avid supported of the open-source movement, using Windows 2000 at work, and running MacOS at home. I like the flexibility and the amount of options that open-source brings. So why does Microsoft have to go and ruin the open-source movement's name with something like this ?
MS has been producing quality open-source software for what ? Twenty years ?
WHY do they have to tarnish out name with this ?
It's absolutely pointless ? Or is it ? If they start doing this then they'll start being laughed at more and more. This is a good thing.
Then the true commercial success story, Linux, will jump to the desktop prooving one again that you can't trust open-source software such as windows, No you can't at all.
Linux shall only get stronger from this kind of press.
I must admit that I have neither read the story or any views about it, but must comment on the story nevertheless.
The finite matrix is quite an interesting idea. As those of you who have done discreet mathematics will appreciate, Matrixes are quite a complex subject, and are often best solved using coat hangers with bits of paper hanging off them.
Matrixes are interesting because they are so difficult to visualise. One of their best applications is the parity-check matrix, which can be used to encode data being sent anywhere where it might well be corrupted.
Such example of this would be crafts being sent to mars... when they beam back down their information, it's a fair chance that a lot of the information is going to be corrupted by cosmic radiation.
We can use parity-check matrixes to pad-out the information transmitted.
e.g. 10001000 could become 11010100101011001010 or something of that order.
By using the parity check matrix, we could check to see which bits have become corrupted and CORRECTLY ascertain their original value.
This is truly a good thing and for this very reason it has been used in a variety of different applications.
The finite matrix is truly an interesting if rather pointless name for a sci-fi journal. Why not the infinite matrix ? I think that this would be a much more interesting name as it would lead us to look at a number, such as pi, in binary and attempt to use a matrix to decode it.
Sadly, pi goes on forever and so we would never truly know the answer, only gaining a bit of information a bit at a time.
This could well be likened to evolution, but in the electronic sense.
Well done I say !
I'm an avid supported of the open source movement, so I can't wait to see the X-Box - it's meant to be really impressive, and the change to stick something open-source on it is just too much to resist.
I know someone who's developing for the X-Box and it's meant to be, like, *so* impressive, all these really cool built-in functions that address the chips without any effort from his programs (which are all written in perl, naturally).
My only problem is that I don't exactly agree with games-playing - I think that there are so many other ways to spend your time that sitting in front of a computer screen is all rather sad. This is what annoys me most about the whole open-source movement, is that you're expected to give up your own free time to write code. Why do that ? I'd rather be down the pub or going out for a walk. Leave it to those who get paid for it is what I say.
Yeah, Mame rocks!
I don't see what all the complaints about ext3 are - there doesn't seem to be any reason about.
People like to have choice - RedHat is simply adding a lot more choice open to the public. Surely this is a good thing, is it not ?
From what I've heard, ext2 is really easy to deal with, is a delight to write low-level (such as perl or python). By including it in the distribution, RedHat are offering not only to the consumer but to the developer as well.
As it is, ext2 is widely used in other Liunx distro's, so what's the problem ? It means that if you decided to change distro's to RedHat then you'd no longer have to do a backup and reformat all your drives. No! Your old linux installation running ext2 will now be able to be read by RedHat.
Admitedly there are a few problems with ext2 - such as if you suffer from a power failure and say you have an eighty-gig drive... that's gonna take a *long* time to check. This is not good.
I just can't wait until ext3 is finally out - but who knows how long it'll take RedHat to come up with it ? Hopefully not as long as it's taken them to start supporting ext2!
It's really easy to get involved with, and you can find a link to its homepage here
Good work Sam - you've really pulled one out of the hat here !
Read and enjoy !