What gets to me about this is the fact that we will truly be seeing something that no human being has ever seen before...
What I've thought was so cool about all of this
is that they've taken IR pictures throgh the haze. They can
see things, but they haven't a clue what they're
looking at. Now that's cool!
I've seen Titan myself many times, but only
as a tiny spark of light along for the
ride with Saturn. I've seen 5 of the 35 moons
through my backyard telescope.
I too use my magic box and have no complaints
with it. I've done some interesting things with it, too.
Some years ago when Nelson Mandela turned 70,
the evening news mentioned the jail where he was (they
hadn't turned him loose yet). So I called Cape
Town information, got the number, phoned Polsmoor, and left a message for
him. It sounded like the guy who answered the
phone had been taking a lot of messages
that day. He also very carefully took
down my particulars, and I suspect there
would have been no point in trying to get a visa
to visit South Africa until the government changed.
Another fun one was the preparations for
Expo 88 in Brisbane. I phoned to see if there
was any information they might be able to send
me about the event. They must have concluded
I was a VIP (casually calling half way around the
world, y'know) and sent me bales of stuff
about the fair, business opportunities in Queensland,
and so on. Great fun.
Ever since I left home to go to university
I've phoned my Mom and Dad on Sunday morning.
Dad's gone now, but I still phone Mom. Even
if I'm out of town, even when I phoned from Australia
and had to phone early Monday morning to get
our usual time Sunday.
I've been messing around with computers and
other languages for a while...
One early experience, while doing email
development, was flipping a coin and setting my
desktop email client to run in Spanish. I thought
the messages it sent might hit some different parts
of our server code (they did). It also resulted
in phone calls like "Hi Laura, I'm going
to Costa Rica next month, could you help me
with my hotel reservations?"
Another time I wrote some nice Mac software
and undertook to translate it to French -
partly for the hell of it, partly for an upcoming trade show in Europe, and partly to smoke out localization bugs. It worked out fine, though, as usual,
the translated text strings were almost invariably
longer than their English equivalents. The usual
"language" for localization tests was pig Latin,
but I thought it was more fun to use a real language instead. Besides,
we could sell the results to customers.
I've never messed with multi-byte character sets,
or those with special rendering requirements. I have an excellent
article in my files from Scientific American
some years ago about the issues in rendering text in
multiple languages.
The sort of example that makes life interesting was rendering the phrase "Welcome to the United States of America", where the "Welcome to" part was in Arabic (right to left), while the "United States of America" was in English (left to right).
How do you break lines and wrap text to make this readable, and to generally look "right"? Being
a cursive script, Arabic has a large number of
mandatory ligatures. Each letter has
(potentially) 4 different forms. Software
must take all this in to account when it displays text.
The article also talked about Korean (clumps
of syllables), Thai and Hindi (letters morph
all over the place), Hebrew (books for kids have
marking for vowels; books for adults don't). And so on.
Some languages (such as Bulgarian) have separate verbs for imperfective and perfective forms.
I find that I undestand perfect vs imperfect
verbs perfectly in French (and, by extension, German, Spanish and Russian). Don't ask me to explain it in English, because
the concept doesn't really exist. Any
explanation will be only an approximation.
In French it's just how you conjugate the
verb (e.g. je parlais (impf) vs j'ai parle (pf)). In Russian the
perfect and imperfect forms may be related (e.g. pisat' vs napisat', "to write"), or may be
different stems entirely (govorit' vs skazat', "to say/to tell"). Just for fun the Slavic languages
worry about perfect vs imperfect in future
as well as past tenses.
Imagine a people who found it so important to know the reliability of information given to them, that they created two past tenses to be able to tell the difference...
The Tariana
language does this, and more. When stating a fact
you must specify as part of the grammar
whether you know it because you saw it yourself,
or because somebody told you, or you deduced
it from other evidence, or you know it as a general
principle.
Yes, it would have interesting an effect
on political debates.
...laura who will stick to Russian verb aspects for now
The coolest (techie-cool, anyway) cars I see around Vancouver are
the Toyota Prius, and the
Smart. I wouldn't mind
driving either.
I've only seen a handful of Smarts so far, but
zillions of Priuses. One taxi company run
a fleet of them. Two people in my office
whirr in to the parking lot in them.
On well-connected sites I routinely hit 1.5 MBPS
downstream (handy for new Linux
kernels:-), and my line would support 9 MBPS if I
was prepared to fork over the $$$.
It costs me about $CDN 30.00 a month.
I own my modem, though Telus would happily
rent me one for 5 bucks a month.
For color, if Ciba is still producing Cibachrome, it is supposed to have a very long life, being based upon much more stable dies.
The Cibachrome process
was bought by Illford years ago and is now called
Ilfochrome. It's easy to use and produces
beautiful results (I speak from
personal experience), but is obscenely
expensive to use. Apparently the dyes
are ultra-stable, but it will take a while
to verify this...
Properly cared for, black and white negatives
will keep for a very long time. Nobody knows exactly
how long "a long time" is, but negatives
from the turn of the last
century are still perfectly viable.
Colour materials are another matter. Because they
are based on chemical dyes instead of silver crystals,
they are subject to chemical change (i.e. fading).
Current films quote longevity of 50 to 100
years.
On Silicon Graphics 64-bit machines, this was solved by having two ABIs, one 32-bit, one 64-bit.
Sun machines with UltraSPARC processors
do this too. They run 64 bit kernels,
and applications are 32 bits. Unless you
actually need 64 bits, in which case you feed the compiler
some differnet options and it makes a 64 bit
executable for you.
Both Solaris and Linux do it the same way.
When you build a kernel for Linux on an UltraSPARC machine
the part about kernel support for different
kinds of executables offers you
(among other options) 32 bit ELF (which you need), 64 bit ELF (optional), and
Solaris emulation (never tried it...).
...laura
Re:SCTP (and other neat protocols)
on
Replacing TCP?
·
· Score: 2, Interesting
SCTP is indeed interesting. I've
tangled with it when playing with SIGTRAN,
i.e. SS7 over IP. The nightmares ceased
a while ago.:-)
One of the more interesting special-purpose protocols
I've ever messed with was the
PACSAT Broadcast
protocol, used for downloading files from satellites.
It makes
the assumption that downloaded files are of general interest, so
it broadcasts them. Which files it broadcasts
is in response to requests from ground stations.
Ground stations can also request fills, pieces of
files they haven't received yet. The protocols
have hooks to allow files to be downloaded in pieces,
over several orbits, since individual passes
rarely exceed 20 minutes, and the downlink
bit rate isn't all that high. This all runs over
a protocol analogous to UDP.
You can get files by just listening, if
you want to.
WARNING! Do Not Look Into Laser With Remaining Eye.
A former colleague works with laser optics and
has this sign (among others) above his work bench.
The lasers he usually works with are typically
15 watts of infrared. Yes, you can burn holes
in things with them.
An earlier generation of the technology
used infrared lasers, but doubled their
frequency to green and used that to burn holes
in things (they had their reasons). The
current
products use infrared directly.
2a. Do not allow any registrations to generic email services. NO hotmail, yahoo, gmail, etc accounts are valid for registration. Has to be an account that is at least in theory trackable back to a real person someplace.
There are lots of perfectly legitimate users
of hotmail et al. There are perfectly legitimate reasons
to use a hotmail account, even one under a
pseudonym. Consider the subject matter of
the forum under discussion, and
that not everybody involved might want to be completely
public.
...laura whose hotmail account dates back to 1996 and is moderately famous in some circles
They buy a computer, and the OS comes with it. The idea of buying an OS-less computer isn't something that J.Q.Public does, nor will they when Longhorn comes out. The OEM PCs will be preloaded with it, and that will be that.
I think it's more fundamental than that for
most users: they buy a computer. Period. They plug it
in, turn it on and get a desktop with
applications where they
can do things. The fact that there
is a special program sitting between them
and the hardware is not something they
think about. The fact that there are other
such special programs, each with their own
strengths and weaknesses, would not occur to them.
It's been a long time since I've seen
the Muppet Show, but I too was very much
a fan of Muppet Labs, where the Future is Being Made Today,
with Dr. Bunsen Honeydew and his faithful
assistant Beaker.
Doctor Honeydew looked remarkably like a science
teacher I had in high school. Liked to
sprinkle nitrogen triiodide around the school
at Hallowe'en. Bang!
Curiously, when I think of fictional (television or otherwise)
women scientists, the two
that come to mind (Professor Sam Ryan and
Dr. Kay Scarpetta) are both forensic pathologists.
Hmmm...
One industry that knows about colour
perception is the folks who process film
and print pictures. The staff who run those
1 hour minilab photo places are almost
entirely women. The people who do the
hiring know exactly why.
I recently bought a CD from Fnac - "Face A/Face B" by
Axelle
Red.
It says right on it that it incorporates
copy-protection technology, though it
also carries the official CD logo.
The results:
Linux: plays.
Windows: loads their CD player
without asking, crashes system.
Car CD player: plays.
Portable Discman-style CD player: doesn't play.
Each track plays about 9 seconds in then gets stuck in
a loop skipping back a couple of seconds.
Since the Philips webcams work so well (I have half a dozen
myself in various applications, most
with the
9.0 beta 2 driver), I'm surprised
nobody has ever attempted
to reverse-engineer the USB traffic and create
a completely open, non-tainted-by-NDA
decompression module.
It wouldn't be the first time Linux
developers had ignored an uncooperative
device manufacturer.
Yep. I've seen too many times where a question
was asked, the answer was given (correctly,
IMHO) as
"look in any book on the subject published
in the past 50 years", and people
perceived it as a deadly insult.
So is this the reason why people seem to be so much more rude on the Internet?
Personally, I see two phenomena at work:
One is that the Internet, with its lack of
visual feedback, magnifies badness. It's
very easy to be perceived as rude when
it's just words, without gestures and facial
expressions behind them.
The other is the level of cluelessness
that pervades so many forums, and the
frustration that arises from such cluelessness.
One that came to my attention today
was this
one. Is this bullying? Is it rude? Or
is it just trying to tell people not to be
so silly?
Slashdot Mirror
What I've thought was so cool about all of this is that they've taken IR pictures throgh the haze. They can see things, but they haven't a clue what they're looking at. Now that's cool!
I've seen Titan myself many times, but only as a tiny spark of light along for the ride with Saturn. I've seen 5 of the 35 moons through my backyard telescope.
I wish the ESA folks all the best.
...laura
Oops. Sorry 'bout that. Here we go:
Mum
brizz-bn
al-yew-min-ee-um
strawl-yah, myte?
gooey-duck (a kind of clam from these parts)
pew-all-up (a town between Seattle and Tacoma)
Have to be careful with all these Yanks around. :-)
...laura
I too use my magic box and have no complaints with it. I've done some interesting things with it, too.
Some years ago when Nelson Mandela turned 70, the evening news mentioned the jail where he was (they hadn't turned him loose yet). So I called Cape Town information, got the number, phoned Polsmoor, and left a message for him. It sounded like the guy who answered the phone had been taking a lot of messages that day. He also very carefully took down my particulars, and I suspect there would have been no point in trying to get a visa to visit South Africa until the government changed.
Another fun one was the preparations for Expo 88 in Brisbane. I phoned to see if there was any information they might be able to send me about the event. They must have concluded I was a VIP (casually calling half way around the world, y'know) and sent me bales of stuff about the fair, business opportunities in Queensland, and so on. Great fun.
Ever since I left home to go to university I've phoned my Mom and Dad on Sunday morning. Dad's gone now, but I still phone Mom. Even if I'm out of town, even when I phoned from Australia and had to phone early Monday morning to get our usual time Sunday.
It's old tech, but it works.
...laura
I don't suppose you remember which article it was? eg month/year?
Not exactly, and a look through my files suggests my copy was a casualty of one of the times I have moved since then.
Try 1982 +/- a year or two.
...laura
I've been messing around with computers and other languages for a while...
One early experience, while doing email development, was flipping a coin and setting my desktop email client to run in Spanish. I thought the messages it sent might hit some different parts of our server code (they did). It also resulted in phone calls like "Hi Laura, I'm going to Costa Rica next month, could you help me with my hotel reservations?"
Another time I wrote some nice Mac software and undertook to translate it to French - partly for the hell of it, partly for an upcoming trade show in Europe, and partly to smoke out localization bugs. It worked out fine, though, as usual, the translated text strings were almost invariably longer than their English equivalents. The usual "language" for localization tests was pig Latin, but I thought it was more fun to use a real language instead. Besides, we could sell the results to customers.
I've never messed with multi-byte character sets, or those with special rendering requirements. I have an excellent article in my files from Scientific American some years ago about the issues in rendering text in multiple languages.
The sort of example that makes life interesting was rendering the phrase "Welcome to the United States of America", where the "Welcome to" part was in Arabic (right to left), while the "United States of America" was in English (left to right). How do you break lines and wrap text to make this readable, and to generally look "right"? Being a cursive script, Arabic has a large number of mandatory ligatures. Each letter has (potentially) 4 different forms. Software must take all this in to account when it displays text.
The article also talked about Korean (clumps of syllables), Thai and Hindi (letters morph all over the place), Hebrew (books for kids have marking for vowels; books for adults don't). And so on.
...laura
I find that I undestand perfect vs imperfect verbs perfectly in French (and, by extension, German, Spanish and Russian). Don't ask me to explain it in English, because the concept doesn't really exist. Any explanation will be only an approximation.
In French it's just how you conjugate the verb (e.g. je parlais (impf) vs j'ai parle (pf)). In Russian the perfect and imperfect forms may be related (e.g. pisat' vs napisat', "to write"), or may be different stems entirely (govorit' vs skazat', "to say/to tell"). Just for fun the Slavic languages worry about perfect vs imperfect in future as well as past tenses.
Great fun.
...laura
The Tariana language does this, and more. When stating a fact you must specify as part of the grammar whether you know it because you saw it yourself, or because somebody told you, or you deduced it from other evidence, or you know it as a general principle.
Yes, it would have interesting an effect on political debates.
...laura who will stick to Russian verb aspects for now
I guess us Canadians are just plain cooler.
The coolest (techie-cool, anyway) cars I see around Vancouver are the Toyota Prius, and the Smart. I wouldn't mind driving either.
I've only seen a handful of Smarts so far, but zillions of Priuses. One taxi company run a fleet of them. Two people in my office whirr in to the parking lot in them.
...laura
I have ADSL from Telus, the local phone company.
On well-connected sites I routinely hit 1.5 MBPS downstream (handy for new Linux kernels :-), and my line would support 9 MBPS if I
was prepared to fork over the $$$.
It costs me about $CDN 30.00 a month.
I own my modem, though Telus would happily rent me one for 5 bucks a month.
...laura
The Cibachrome process was bought by Illford years ago and is now called Ilfochrome. It's easy to use and produces beautiful results (I speak from personal experience), but is obscenely expensive to use. Apparently the dyes are ultra-stable, but it will take a while to verify this...
...laura
Properly cared for, black and white negatives will keep for a very long time. Nobody knows exactly how long "a long time" is, but negatives from the turn of the last century are still perfectly viable.
Colour materials are another matter. Because they are based on chemical dyes instead of silver crystals, they are subject to chemical change (i.e. fading). Current films quote longevity of 50 to 100 years.
...laura
Sun machines with UltraSPARC processors do this too. They run 64 bit kernels, and applications are 32 bits. Unless you actually need 64 bits, in which case you feed the compiler some differnet options and it makes a 64 bit executable for you.
Both Solaris and Linux do it the same way. When you build a kernel for Linux on an UltraSPARC machine the part about kernel support for different kinds of executables offers you (among other options) 32 bit ELF (which you need), 64 bit ELF (optional), and Solaris emulation (never tried it...).
...laura
SCTP is indeed interesting. I've tangled with it when playing with SIGTRAN, i.e. SS7 over IP. The nightmares ceased a while ago. :-)
One of the more interesting special-purpose protocols I've ever messed with was the PACSAT Broadcast protocol, used for downloading files from satellites.
It makes the assumption that downloaded files are of general interest, so it broadcasts them. Which files it broadcasts is in response to requests from ground stations. Ground stations can also request fills, pieces of files they haven't received yet. The protocols have hooks to allow files to be downloaded in pieces, over several orbits, since individual passes rarely exceed 20 minutes, and the downlink bit rate isn't all that high. This all runs over a protocol analogous to UDP.
You can get files by just listening, if you want to.
...laura
There are lots of perfectly legitimate users of hotmail et al. There are perfectly legitimate reasons to use a hotmail account, even one under a pseudonym. Consider the subject matter of the forum under discussion, and that not everybody involved might want to be completely public.
...laura whose hotmail account dates back to 1996 and is moderately famous in some circles
I think it's more fundamental than that for most users: they buy a computer. Period. They plug it in, turn it on and get a desktop with applications where they can do things. The fact that there is a special program sitting between them and the hardware is not something they think about. The fact that there are other such special programs, each with their own strengths and weaknesses, would not occur to them.
...laura
You don't need google to see where the degrees everybody else uses and the degrees the U.S. uses coincide.
Let x be that temperature.
Then from the usual conversion formula:
f = c * 1.8 + 32
x = x * 1.8 + 32
-0.8 x = 32
x = -40
Q.E.D.
Not that it matters all that much; all civilized countries figured out celsius degrees years ago.
...laura
Naaahhhh...this section needs a good logo.
The first thing that came to mind was a steaming pile of bullshit.
...laura, even more cynical than usual
It's been a long time since I've seen the Muppet Show, but I too was very much a fan of Muppet Labs, where the Future is Being Made Today, with Dr. Bunsen Honeydew and his faithful assistant Beaker. Doctor Honeydew looked remarkably like a science teacher I had in high school. Liked to sprinkle nitrogen triiodide around the school at Hallowe'en. Bang!
Curiously, when I think of fictional (television or otherwise) women scientists, the two that come to mind (Professor Sam Ryan and Dr. Kay Scarpetta) are both forensic pathologists. Hmmm...
...laura
One industry that knows about colour perception is the folks who process film and print pictures. The staff who run those 1 hour minilab photo places are almost entirely women. The people who do the hiring know exactly why.
...laura
I recently bought a CD from Fnac - "Face A/Face B" by Axelle Red. It says right on it that it incorporates copy-protection technology, though it also carries the official CD logo.
The results:
Linux: plays.
Windows: loads their CD player without asking, crashes system.
Car CD player: plays.
Portable Discman-style CD player: doesn't play. Each track plays about 9 seconds in then gets stuck in a loop skipping back a couple of seconds.
"My name is L...Laura..."
Sorry. Friday afternoon. A bit punchy.
...laura
Memo to Microsoft: it may be spelled correctly, but that doesn't guarantee it's the right word.
...laura
Since the Philips webcams work so well (I have half a dozen myself in various applications, most with the 9.0 beta 2 driver), I'm surprised nobody has ever attempted to reverse-engineer the USB traffic and create a completely open, non-tainted-by-NDA decompression module.
It wouldn't be the first time Linux developers had ignored an uncooperative device manufacturer.
...laura
Yep. I've seen too many times where a question was asked, the answer was given (correctly, IMHO) as "look in any book on the subject published in the past 50 years", and people perceived it as a deadly insult.
I dunno.
...laura
Personally, I see two phenomena at work:
One is that the Internet, with its lack of visual feedback, magnifies badness. It's very easy to be perceived as rude when it's just words, without gestures and facial expressions behind them.
The other is the level of cluelessness that pervades so many forums, and the frustration that arises from such cluelessness. One that came to my attention today was this one. Is this bullying? Is it rude? Or is it just trying to tell people not to be so silly?
...laura