Having owned an old car a few years ago, I often would run to AutoZone to get some spare parts (that was a time, when I experimented with Caldera Linux on one of my boxes...) Autozone's IT made a good impression. Their database impressed me. They always came up with the right spare parts within seconds. Not to mention that the mechanics there were ready to share advise or even lend me some tools.
This is just what I like about the gimp.I dislike to be framed in on the desktop, especially when working simultaneously with different programs. This software is absolutely fantastic. I prefer it over photoshop. Especially the fast startup time (maybe thanks to the lack of unnecessary clutter with additional frames...).
The next cube (PDF) had already an optical disc. And that was in the 80'ies. While different from the CD technology, it had already all the principles described in the silly patent "Recordable CDROM accessing system".
How does a backscatter analysis prove that the site was attacked from the outside? The first thing a "wanna be victim" would do when faking an attack is to make sure that the effect can indeed be measured from the outside.
An open standard to provide embedded video and sound as well as a decent programming language is badly missing. SVG does not address all needs yet but it is a good start. Mostly needed are good sound and movie import abilities. Here, Flash is unchallenged. Its compression abilities are remarkable and that will be an issue with SVG. It is good news that SVG will be implemented by default into browsers like Mozilla. That will give SVG a boost.
Flash is only a temporary alternative for me as long it is not possible to author it decently on an open operating system (it is of course possible to do it using vmware on linux) and without a guarantee that this product will continue to exist. There were countless examples of implementations for sound or graphics for the web which died and we have no guarantee that Flash will exist in 10 year unless the entire Flash story becomes an open standard (not only file formats like swf). For web developers on Linux, command line tools like
will already be a good start besides already existing exports of simple presentations like in open-office. But lets face it, these are tiny subsets of the possibilities Flash offers now, especially with the action script programming language which is quite nice.
Every software update is a risk. Especially OS updates. With software, I always fear that beside enhancements, also restrictions will be built in (happend with quicktime once years ago). Therefore, I usually keep a copy of the old software or to make full backups before upgrading the OS. Updating software is not trivial because it X + A + B is not equal X + B + A : the update A can and will in general change something of the modification B. After a few such operations it becomes very difficult to keep track about all possible states the users can have on their machine.
My experiences from updates:
- even for modern Linux distributions, it is a good idea
to make full new installs rather then upgrading. I personally
always had problems with upgrades and almost never had problems
with full reinstalls.
- the OS X updates went all smooth so far. Still, I always upgrade
first one machine, wait to see if everything works fine before
updating the others.
- XP updates. No problem with vmware. Just keep an copy of the
old virtual machine around. If something screws up or one of
the software has decided to "upgrade" itself:
rm -rf winXPHome
mv old.winXPHome winXPHome
Virtual machines can also easily be copied from one machine to
an other.
When visiting
mathtutor
one can see that even 200 years ago, many important discoveries
were done in the later stages of the Mathematicians career.
Stories like the ones about Abel or Galois distort the picture.
More and more discoveries of younger mathematicians are
achieved through collaboration or by standing on the
shoulders of people with more experience (who tend also to
be more generous with sharing their ideas without expecting
credit).
Mathematical knowledge continues to accumulate in a fast
pace and only few of this knowledge has been absorbed
in books. Chances grow that a young mathematician will
discover something already known or to be a special
case of a much more general result. Fortunately, there are
better and better online
databases but
it also needs more and more time to dig through that material.
The most productive age for a mathematician will grow also
in the future. The same will happen in physics or
computer science (as a previous post has pointed out already).
> Is this the start of the BioTech revolution?"
At least you will be able to eat the plates before
giving the rest away to prevent
revealing their secrets.
- mail bob <file.tex (send file file.tex to bob) - mpack -s "photo" photo.jpg bob (send photo.jpg as attachment to user bob) - for i in *.gif; do convert $i $i.jpg; done (convert all gif files to jpg) - lynx -dump -nolist www.slashdot.org (grab latest slashdot posting) - xv -root -smooth background.jpg (put a new background picture) - strings file.doc|more (read content of MS Word document) - rm -rf ~/.mozilla/*/*/Cache (clean out Mozilla Cache) - tar -czpf/backup/home.tgz/home (backup home directory) - scanimage -mode binary >file.pnm (scan image from scanner) - cdrecord -eject -v dev=0,0 cdimage.iso (burn CD) - mkisofs -r -d -o cdimage.iso/etc (make CD image of/etc directory) - mpg123 -k 25 -n 100 -w file.wav file.mp3 (cut out part of an MP3 file) - lame file.wav file.mp3 (convert.wav file to.mp3) - perl -p -i -e 's/AAA/BBB/g' *.html (change all AAA to BBB in all html files)
Here some of my Unix haters issues:
- tar -xzyf test.bz2/bin (-y option is now deprecated) - dvips -o file.ps file.dvi but dvipdf file.dvi (inconsistent behavior) - find . -name test.txt (why not just allow 'find test.txt') - required TABS in Makefile
BTW: many poins mentioned in the unix haters book are no more an issue in a modern Unix OS.
It might be too late to correct some things in XML. Good about XML is, that whatever will emerge in the future, it will always be possible to convert old documents into any new form, using simple tools.
There is a point with critics: Unlike Latex or HTML which can be written easily by hand, XML can become too bloated to be authored directly by humans.
You can write complicated formulas in Latex directly but it is almost impossible to do so in MathML, where one has to rely on tools to generate it (i.e. export it with Mathematica or TeX -> MathML converters). Wouldn't it be nice if browsers would understand a basic version of LateX? (That it is possible has been shown with IBM's texexplorer plugin).
Would somebody know why mozilla would show http://www.mozilla.org/catalog/web-developer /examp les/kitchensink.xml correctly but when opening the same file locally file://localhost/home/user/kitchensink/ki tchensink.xml it would produce an XML Parsing Error in Linux? (Happens to me both with Mozilla 1.2.1, and 1.3, works fine for me with Mozilla 1.2.1 in OS X).
while java work now quite well with Mozilla 1.2 (jpi-version=1.3.1_02), it does not work yet with the phoenix unfortunately, at least not for me. By the way: realaudio or flash plugins for mozilla work well for phonix 0.5.
As kids, we often played that game (without computer). We called it "Serata". It is also known under the name "Mankala" programmed in Tcl/Tk. See http://www.elf.org/tclplugin/mankala.html A javascript implementation can be found at http://imagiware.com/mancala
Slashdot Mirror
Some good reading about this topic can be found here.
- stability: the OS will work today
- openness: the OS will be available in the future
- control: the OS does not control me
Having owned an old car a few years ago, ...)
I often would run to AutoZone to get some
spare parts (that was a time, when I experimented
with Caldera Linux on one of my boxes
Autozone's IT made a good impression. Their
database impressed me. They always came up
with the right spare parts within seconds.
Not to mention that the mechanics there were
ready to share advise or even lend me some tools.
This is just what I like about the gimp.I dislike to be framed in on the desktop, especially when working simultaneously with different programs. This software is absolutely fantastic. I prefer it over photoshop. Especially the fast startup time (maybe thanks to the lack of unnecessary clutter with additional frames...).
The next cube (PDF) had already an optical disc. And that was in the 80'ies. While different from the CD technology, it had already all the principles described in the silly patent "Recordable CDROM accessing system".
How does a backscatter analysis prove that the site was attacked from the outside? The first thing a "wanna be victim" would do when faking an attack is to make sure that the effect can indeed be measured from the outside.
An open standard to provide embedded
video and sound as well as a decent programming
language is badly missing. SVG does not address
all needs yet but it is a good start. Mostly
needed are good sound and movie import abilities.
Here, Flash is unchallenged. Its compression
abilities are remarkable and that will be an issue
with SVG. It is good news that SVG will be
implemented by default into browsers like Mozilla.
That will give SVG a boost.
Flash is only a temporary alternative for me as
long it is not possible to author it decently on
an open operating system (it is of course possible to
do it using vmware on linux) and without a guarantee that
this product will continue to exist. There were
countless examples of implementations for sound
or graphics for the web which died and we have no guarantee
that Flash will exist in 10 year unless the entire Flash story
becomes an open standard (not only file formats like swf).
For web developers on Linux, command line tools like
avi2swf movie.avi movie.swf
wav2swf sound.wav sound.swf
svg2swf graphics.svg graphics.swf
will already be a good start besides already existing exports of
simple presentations like in open-office. But lets face it,
these are tiny subsets of the possibilities Flash offers now,
especially with the action script programming language which
is quite nice.
SCOby-doo Be afraid. Be kind of afread!
Every software update is a risk. Especially OS updates. With software, I always fear that beside enhancements, also restrictions will be built in (happend with quicktime once years ago). Therefore, I usually
keep a copy of the old software or to make full backups before upgrading the OS. Updating software is not trivial because it X + A + B is not equal X + B + A : the update A can and will in general change something of the modification B. After a few such operations it becomes very difficult to keep track about all possible
states the users can have on their machine.
My experiences from updates:
- even for modern Linux distributions, it is a good idea
to make full new installs rather then upgrading. I personally
always had problems with upgrades and almost never had problems
with full reinstalls.
- the OS X updates went all smooth so far. Still, I always upgrade
first one machine, wait to see if everything works fine before
updating the others.
- XP updates. No problem with vmware. Just keep an copy of the
old virtual machine around. If something screws up or one of
the software has decided to "upgrade" itself:
rm -rf winXPHome
mv old.winXPHome winXPHome
Virtual machines can also easily be copied from one machine to
an other.
When visiting mathtutor one can see that even 200 years ago, many important discoveries were done in the later stages of the Mathematicians career. Stories like the ones about Abel or Galois distort the picture.
More and more discoveries of younger mathematicians are achieved through collaboration or by standing on the shoulders of people with more experience (who tend also to be more generous with sharing their ideas without expecting credit).
Mathematical knowledge continues to accumulate in a fast pace and only few of this knowledge has been absorbed in books. Chances grow that a young mathematician will discover something already known or to be a special case of a much more general result. Fortunately, there are better and better online databases but it also needs more and more time to dig through that material.
The most productive age for a mathematician will grow also in the future. The same will happen in physics or computer science (as a previous post has pointed out already).
> Is this the start of the BioTech revolution?"
At least you will be able to eat the plates before giving the rest away to prevent revealing their secrets.
Here are some Unix Lovers commands:
/backup/home.tgz /home (backup home directory) /etc (make CD image of /etc directory) .wav file to .mp3)
/bin (-y option is now deprecated)
- mail bob <file.tex (send file file.tex to bob)
- mpack -s "photo" photo.jpg bob (send photo.jpg as attachment to user bob)
- for i in *.gif; do convert $i $i.jpg; done (convert all gif files to jpg)
- lynx -dump -nolist www.slashdot.org (grab latest slashdot posting)
- xv -root -smooth background.jpg (put a new background picture)
- strings file.doc|more (read content of MS Word document)
- rm -rf ~/.mozilla/*/*/Cache (clean out Mozilla Cache)
- tar -czpf
- scanimage -mode binary >file.pnm (scan image from scanner)
- cdrecord -eject -v dev=0,0 cdimage.iso (burn CD)
- mkisofs -r -d -o cdimage.iso
- mpg123 -k 25 -n 100 -w file.wav file.mp3 (cut out part of an MP3 file)
- lame file.wav file.mp3 (convert
- perl -p -i -e 's/AAA/BBB/g' *.html (change all AAA to BBB in all html files)
Here some of my Unix haters issues:
- tar -xzyf test.bz2
- dvips -o file.ps file.dvi but dvipdf file.dvi (inconsistent behavior)
- find . -name test.txt (why not just allow 'find test.txt')
- required TABS in Makefile
BTW: many poins mentioned in the unix haters book are no more an issue in a modern Unix OS.
Niels Provos website is ...
http://niels.xtdnet.nl/honeyd
This info is of course just for people who are allowed to access it
yes, indeed, worked now also for me with the latest
dosemu version.
tried unsuccessfully to run it under wine, winex
or dosemu (no surprise). vc.com runs however fine
with vmware under linux (no surprise neither).
I have still an old apple laser writer 4/600 at home
which works fine. It is 10 years old and a bit
slow but it still does the job.
It might be too late to correct some things in XML.
Good about XML is, that whatever will emerge in the future,
it will always be possible to convert old documents into any
new form, using simple tools.
There is a point with critics: Unlike Latex or HTML which
can be written easily by hand, XML can become too bloated to
be authored directly by humans.
Similar problem with MathML:
Latex: $x^5+3x-9=0$
MathML:
<mrow>
<mrow>
<msup>
<mi>x</mi>
<mn>5</mn>
</msup>
<mo>+</mo>
<mrow>
<mn>3</mn>
<mo>⁢</mo>
<mi>x</mi>
</mrow>
<mo>-</mo>
<mn>9</mn>
</mrow>
<mo>=</mo>
<mn>0</mn>
</mrow>
You can write complicated formulas in Latex directly but it is
almost impossible to do so in MathML, where one has to rely
on tools to generate it (i.e. export it with Mathematica or
TeX -> MathML converters). Wouldn't it be nice if browsers
would understand a basic version of LateX? (That it is possible
has been shown with IBM's texexplorer plugin).
the snapshot filesystem like the
.snapshot
/ adilger/s napfs/
NetApp's WAFL file system
would be at the top of my wishlist for linux.
It's great to be able to something
% cd
% ls
hourly.0/ hourly.3/ nightly.0/
nightly.3/ nightly.6/ hourly.1/
hourly.4/ nightly.1/ nightly.4/
weekly.0/ hourly.2/ hourly.5/
nightly.2/ nightly.5/ weekly.1/
and cd back in time.
Seems that development has started at some places:
http://www-mddsp.enel.ucalgary.ca/People
Would somebody know why mozilla would showr /examp les/kitchensink.xmli tchensink .xml
http://www.mozilla.org/catalog/web-develope
correctly but when opening the same file locally
file://localhost/home/user/kitchensink/k
it would produce an XML Parsing Error in Linux?
(Happens to me both with Mozilla 1.2.1, and 1.3,
works fine for me with Mozilla 1.2.1 in OS X).
Based on an older idea? http://chattanooga.net/~cdp/wrims/wrims.htm
"There" seems to require Windows.
Too bad, they follow only that track.
while java work now quite well with Mozilla 1.2
(jpi-version=1.3.1_02), it does not work yet with the phoenix unfortunately, at least not for me.
By the way: realaudio or flash plugins for mozilla
work well for phonix 0.5.
An advantage of having a unix box for games
is the ability to say remotely, its time to go to sleep:
pid=$(ps -ax|grep warcraft|grep -v grep| awk '{ print $1 }'); kill $pid
there is an easy explanation:
read Ruckers Book: "The Hacker and the ants"
see also http://www.fourmilab.ch
As kids, we often played that game (without
computer). We called it "Serata".
It is also known under the name "Mankala"
programmed in Tcl/Tk. See
http://www.elf.org/tclplugin/mankala.html
A javascript implementation can be found at
http://imagiware.com/mancala