I was also a student of his, and had many dealings with him as a member of the Wesley College Council. He was a wonderful man. Exceptionally intelligent, compassionate and fun-loving. A great story-teller, wily politician and above all, an exceptional teacher.
I had the opportunity to attend the memorial service held for him at the College, and was touched by the effect that he had on so many people at a personal and professional level. He was a fine man who's loss certainly diminished the world, and touched my very personally. I hope that his work on the Antikythera and Babbage machines will continue to prove useful and interesting.
As far as Santa Clara gettings X% of its power from this and that source... nonsense! It gets its power off the grid like everybody else does.
What a pointless statement. This is like me saying "I get money for writing code." and you saying "Nonsense! You get money from a bank like everybody else does."
A software company puts some money into the bank because I did some work for them.
A hydro-electric generation company puts some power into the grid because the Santa Clara retailer pays them to do so.
It's not the same electrons in the grid, and it's not the same dollars in the bank, but in both cases the net effect is a transfer of something from one party to another. Just because the medium is shared doesn't mean that there is not a transaction going on between the parties at either end of it.
As someone with a Bachelor's Degree in chemistry, and a long involvement with the Australian and International Chemistry Olympiads, please allow me to make a few humble suggestions.
Physical Chemistry: The bible here is Atkins.
I have the third edition, and it can be a little dense at times (actually, a lot of times). If your mathematics and physics education is not up to following thermodynamic proofs that skip several derivation steps, you might find it frustrating. I hear that the more recent editions are somewhat better in this regard, and have also have better pictures.
Inorganic Chemistry: A great book to have for this is Chemistry of the Elements by Greenwood and Earnshaw. This is not a comprehensive coverage of the discipline, but a great reference and an interesting read.
Analytical Chemistry: A somewhat specialised field, but if it floats your boat we have another bible here, or rather several. Vogel has books on qualitative and quantitative analysis that are exceptionally comprehensive.
Organic Chemistry: I really don't have a clear recommendation here. Vogel (above) has a book called "Practical Organic Chemistry" which is probably good, given the quality of his other works.
These books are all great references that I've used in my studies of chemistry, but none of them are for beginners in the field. I suggest that if you don't have a fairly good understanding of chemistry already that you find out what books are used at your local University and buy a few second-hand copies from students there. As a smart chappie, you may find some of it a bit pedestrian, but if you are self-educating then you're free to rip through those sections quickly and spend more time on the more interesting and challenging parts.
Good luck. I hope you find that you enjoy chemistry as much as I do.
They just say, "get and listen to this next", ad infinitum.
An interesting idea, but I believe it will be let down by the unreliability of P2P networks. Downloading a particular piece of content from current P2P services often requires a long period of trying various sources for an open download slot. In a real-time medium like radio this delay would be unacceptable.
Which of the top 20 MediaMetrix websites are designed by these "more realistic and knowledgeable" techies today?
Yahoo!
Started by techies way back in the Dark Ages, and still a great example of a good-looking, useable collection of web applications. What's good about it?
It's mostly text
It uses simple graphics that actually enhance the useability rather than obfuscating a lack of content.
Applications like the web-based mail interface allow selection of no-frames/no-javascript version.
It has been suggested before, and I think it's a great idea, so I'll re-iterate.
Why not have unlimited TLDs? The rule would be that anybody could register any TLD that they like, but nobody could own it or restrict the second-level domains that are attached to it. So microsoft could register support.microsoft, but not prevent me from registering idontlike.microsoft.
The idea here is that there would be so many possible TLDs that there could never be the insane gold-rush that happens with limited TLDs.
Quite true. The conductivity of pure water is miniscule. I can't remember the formula for calculating conductivity from ionic strength, but the concentration of ions in pure water at room temperature is only 2x10^-7 M.
The problem is that it's not pure water once you put your mother board in it...
protopkg and autoslack were interesting concepts,
but really little more that than in my view.
As a long time (5 years) user of The Slack, I have come to know how to maintain the package database with simple tools like ls and grep, how to build new packages from source with only 1-2 minutes overhead on the normal build time, and how to use rsync and wget to keep my package store current. David's tools were
just a way of automating what I do automatically anyway.
I don't mean to down-play his work, just emphasise that these were tools to make life a little easier -- especially for those with a little less time and/or experience. They were not there to bring Slack "out of the stoneage", and the are not necessary for the continued vitality of the distribution.
(By the way, what stoneage is the poster talking about? The lack of framebuffer eye-candy in the install? The lack of a package management system that can't handle alien packages? The lack of non-standard compilers, kernel and C library?)
I don't see Slackware dying any time soon.
Things have surely slowed down on the official development front since the developers stopped being paid to work on the distro, but security patches and updates to important packages (kde, vim, emacs) are still coming out.
Slack has gone through some slow periods before, but often there is work going on behind the scenes. Just recently there was a long but very active "unstable" cycle, with many updates and improvements, leading up to the release of 8.0 (which contrary to popular belief DOES contain recent versions of core software). I think it is understandable that the distro is now in a "maintenance" phase, keeping important thing up-to-date but not embarking on major changes or attempting to keep every package at the bleeding edge. I'm confident that development will begin again when Patrick sees value in it.
Indeed killall is handy, but if you get into the
Linux (or is it GNU) habbit of using it to kill processes by name, then you will get into a lot of bother when you use it on a system (not sure which flavours) where it reall does "kill all" and you end up with no init(1).
The problem of radiation leakage can be solved by the use of a waveguide. We have been using such waveguides to transport energy for some time actually -- they are called "wires".
So, sod all the bird-frying microwave bullshit and make a nice fat cable-to-space with a crystalline graphite shell and a superconducting core.
The power station can climb the cable until it finds a nice place outside the Earth's shadow then start pumping juice back down the superconductor.
If the performance and scalability were better on 2.2 than 2.4 then there may be a bug or missing feature in 2.4 that should be looked into.
If the performance is comperable for 2.2 and 2.4 then the problem is most likely a bottleneck in your hardware (like the IDE bus contention mentioned by another poster).
I have a cell phone here in the UK.
I fly home to Australia, and want to call my sister to come pick me up from the airport or train station.
There is no payphone.
I have to take a cab.
That sucks.
There is nothing worse than arriving in a country to find that the public telephone system is screwed. The US-centic/. audience obviously don't travel much. Maybe Americans just don't use payphones because they have the worst public phone system I've ever seen. Let me tell you a few stories:
In 1992, I was in the USA and wanted to call home.
Me: Collect call to Australa please.
Operator: Which carrier?
Me: What?
Oper: Which carrier do you want to use?
Me: How the fuck should I know, and why the fuck should I care? (picks ranomd name)AT&T
Oper: You'll get the call cheaper if you call this string of 16 digits before the nmber.
Me: JUST CONNECT THE CALL DAMNIT!
I hate to think how I would have got on if I didn't speak (American) English.
In 1996, I again arrived in the USA. I landed in Newark, and was to connect to Raleigh-Durham where someone was waiting. My flight was cancelled, so I went to call them.
First, I have to pay to get directory assistance. Then, they ask me for like $3.25 in quaters to even connect the call. WTF? In Australia the minimum payphone charge is 40 cents. That buys you an UNLIMITED length local call, or timed call to ANYWHERE. Sure, if I call 1/2 way across the continent I'll get about a 10 second call, but at least I get connected and the other party know I'm there.
If the phone companies made an easy-to-use public phone system using robust equipment (e.g. steel reinforced handset cables and gum-proof coin-slots) then more people would use it.
I have 2 Promise ATA100 cards in these beast also, for a total of 6 IDE channels Curious... according to ls/dev/hd?, linux only supports 8 ide devices, which would be 4 channels. Are the offboard IDE cards you can by possible to boot off of? Can you disable the onboard IDE it it's two channels "suck", and use all offboard cards.
I have a Promise ATA/100 card which I have been running using Andre's ide patches for 2.2.x and it kicks serious posterior.
It runs 2x30GB IBM 75GXP - one on each channel
I also have a UDMA/33 HDD and a DVD-ROM on the BX chipset built-in PIIX controller.
I boot off it as follows.
1) Disable built-in HPT366 piece of shit
2) Enable booting from "SCSI"
3) pci=reverse in the kernel command line
4) I now have hda and hdc on the ATA/100 and hde and hdg on the built-in PIIX
5) I dual-boot Windows95 off a partition on hda which is correctly detected as C:. My hde is dedicated to windows and shows up as d: e: etc.
We were going to use Jabber on a project I'm working on as part of the application. We've now decided against that until the clients become more stable and more usable.
Well, everybuddy now has jabber client support in the CVS version. Give it a try.
The difference is that print-media ads are often content in themselves.
Look at a newspaper ad for a financial institution -- you will often see statistics and comparisons to competitors.
Look at an ad in a lifestyle magazine -- it shows you an example of current fashion.
Look at an alcohol ad -- they're usually funny.
Print-media ads give you something for free, and subtly build brand-awareness and goodwill towards the advertiser.
Banner ads are too small to provide useful content, so they resort to trickery (like the fake Win95 alerts). People don't like being tricked, and quickly come to loath and distrust all banner ads.
the Big Blue Room is the first one on the left in the first level of Doom ][. You know, the one with the super shotgun in the middle and the armour in the corner.
there are most definitely physicochemical non-biological processes that produce assymetric molecules
Well yes, there are. Many processes have been designed, and are in use industrially, that produce optically pure products from achrial reagents using various catalysts. These processes are very valuable, particularly to the pharmaceutical and polymer industries. However, I know of none of these processes or catalysts occur naturally -- they have all been designed by lengthy research and are usually very costly.
If a naturally-occuring process on Mars produces optically pure chemicals with activity against biologically important molecules like sugars, then it would be a breakthrough for chemistry, even if it turns out to be a disappointment for the exobiologists.
Slashdot Mirror
I hoped that someone would mention Alan here.
I was also a student of his, and had many dealings with him as a member of the Wesley College Council. He was a wonderful man. Exceptionally intelligent, compassionate and fun-loving. A great story-teller, wily politician and above all, an exceptional teacher.
I had the opportunity to attend the memorial service held for him at the College, and was touched by the effect that he had on so many people at a personal and professional level. He was a fine man who's loss certainly diminished the world, and touched my very personally. I hope that his work on the Antikythera and Babbage machines will continue to prove useful and interesting.
What a pointless statement. This is like me saying "I get money for writing code." and you saying "Nonsense! You get money from a bank like everybody else does."
A software company puts some money into the bank because I did some work for them.
A hydro-electric generation company puts some power into the grid because the Santa Clara retailer pays them to do so.
It's not the same electrons in the grid, and it's not the same dollars in the bank, but in both cases the net effect is a transfer of something from one party to another. Just because the medium is shared doesn't mean that there is not a transaction going on between the parties at either end of it.
As someone with a Bachelor's Degree in chemistry, and a long involvement with the Australian and International Chemistry Olympiads, please allow me to make a few humble suggestions.
Physical Chemistry: The bible here is Atkins. I have the third edition, and it can be a little dense at times (actually, a lot of times). If your mathematics and physics education is not up to following thermodynamic proofs that skip several derivation steps, you might find it frustrating. I hear that the more recent editions are somewhat better in this regard, and have also have better pictures.
Inorganic Chemistry: A great book to have for this is Chemistry of the Elements by Greenwood and Earnshaw. This is not a comprehensive coverage of the discipline, but a great reference and an interesting read.
Analytical Chemistry: A somewhat specialised field, but if it floats your boat we have another bible here, or rather several. Vogel has books on qualitative and quantitative analysis that are exceptionally comprehensive.
Organic Chemistry: I really don't have a clear recommendation here. Vogel (above) has a book called "Practical Organic Chemistry" which is probably good, given the quality of his other works.
These books are all great references that I've used in my studies of chemistry, but none of them are for beginners in the field. I suggest that if you don't have a fairly good understanding of chemistry already that you find out what books are used at your local University and buy a few second-hand copies from students there. As a smart chappie, you may find some of it a bit pedestrian, but if you are self-educating then you're free to rip through those sections quickly and spend more time on the more interesting and challenging parts.
Good luck. I hope you find that you enjoy chemistry as much as I do.
An interesting idea, but I believe it will be let down by the unreliability of P2P networks. Downloading a particular piece of content from current P2P services often requires a long period of trying various sources for an open download slot. In a real-time medium like radio this delay would be unacceptable.
Which of the top 20 MediaMetrix websites are designed by these "more realistic and knowledgeable" techies today?
Yahoo!
Started by techies way back in the Dark Ages, and still a great example of a good-looking, useable collection of web applications. What's good about it?
It has been suggested before, and I think it's a great idea, so I'll re-iterate.
Why not have unlimited TLDs? The rule would be that anybody could register any TLD that they like, but nobody could own it or restrict the second-level domains that are attached to it. So microsoft could register support.microsoft, but not prevent me from registering idontlike.microsoft.
The idea here is that there would be so many possible TLDs that there could never be the insane gold-rush that happens with limited TLDs.
Quite true. The conductivity of pure water is miniscule. I can't remember the formula for calculating conductivity from ionic strength, but the concentration of ions in pure water at room temperature is only 2x10^-7 M.
The problem is that it's not pure water once you put your mother board in it...
protopkg and autoslack were interesting concepts, but really little more that than in my view. As a long time (5 years) user of The Slack, I have come to know how to maintain the package database with simple tools like ls and grep, how to build new packages from source with only 1-2 minutes overhead on the normal build time, and how to use rsync and wget to keep my package store current. David's tools were just a way of automating what I do automatically anyway.
I don't mean to down-play his work, just emphasise that these were tools to make life a little easier -- especially for those with a little less time and/or experience. They were not there to bring Slack "out of the stoneage", and the are not necessary for the continued vitality of the distribution.
(By the way, what stoneage is the poster talking about? The lack of framebuffer eye-candy in the install? The lack of a package management system that can't handle alien packages? The lack of non-standard compilers, kernel and C library?)
I don't see Slackware dying any time soon. Things have surely slowed down on the official development front since the developers stopped being paid to work on the distro, but security patches and updates to important packages (kde, vim, emacs) are still coming out.
Slack has gone through some slow periods before, but often there is work going on behind the scenes. Just recently there was a long but very active "unstable" cycle, with many updates and improvements, leading up to the release of 8.0 (which contrary to popular belief DOES contain recent versions of core software). I think it is understandable that the distro is now in a "maintenance" phase, keeping important thing up-to-date but not embarking on major changes or attempting to keep every package at the bleeding edge. I'm confident that development will begin again when Patrick sees value in it.
killalll (sic) is handy...
Indeed killall is handy, but if you get into the Linux (or is it GNU) habbit of using it to kill processes by name, then you will get into a lot of bother when you use it on a system (not sure which flavours) where it reall does "kill all" and you end up with no init(1).
Does Mozilla support Java applets on OS X yet? Netscape 6.1 preview for OS X does not.
Actually, a triangular wheele is worse than a square wheel, because the "bump" is bigger and thus requires more force to overcome.
A polygon approaches a circle as the number of sides increases. I think this was well known by at least the time of Euclid, if not well before.
The (excuse pun) pivotal advancement made in the world of wheels was the axle. That is what differentiates a wheel from a roller.
I think you'll find that there are 2^256 possible keys in a 256-bit symmetric encryption system. This is a number substantially higher than 256
Try this one (http://www.eet.com/story/OEG20010924S0101)
Blah, blah. Lameness filter doesn't like short posts so I'll put a little padding here. Sorry to ramble, but you know how it is...
The problem of radiation leakage can be solved by the use of a waveguide. We have been using such waveguides to transport energy for some time actually -- they are called "wires".
So, sod all the bird-frying microwave bullshit and make a nice fat cable-to-space with a crystalline graphite shell and a superconducting core.
The power station can climb the cable until it finds a nice place outside the Earth's shadow then start pumping juice back down the superconductor.
Did you ever try software RAID on a 2.2 kernel?
If the performance and scalability were better on 2.2 than 2.4 then there may be a bug or missing feature in 2.4 that should be looked into.
If the performance is comperable for 2.2 and 2.4 then the problem is most likely a bottleneck in your hardware (like the IDE bus contention mentioned by another poster).
I have a cell phone here in the UK.
/. audience obviously don't travel much. Maybe Americans just don't use payphones because they have the worst public phone system I've ever seen.
I fly home to Australia, and want to call my sister to come pick me up from the airport or train station.
There is no payphone.
I have to take a cab.
That sucks.
There is nothing worse than arriving in a country to find that the public telephone system is screwed. The US-centic
Let me tell you a few stories:
In 1992, I was in the USA and wanted to call home.
Me: Collect call to Australa please.
Operator: Which carrier?
Me: What?
Oper: Which carrier do you want to use?
Me: How the fuck should I know, and why the fuck should I care? (picks ranomd name)AT&T
Oper: You'll get the call cheaper if you call this string of 16 digits before the nmber.
Me: JUST CONNECT THE CALL DAMNIT!
I hate to think how I would have got on if I didn't speak (American) English.
In 1996, I again arrived in the USA. I landed in Newark, and was to connect to Raleigh-Durham where someone was waiting. My flight was cancelled, so I went to call them.
First, I have to pay to get directory assistance. Then, they ask me for like $3.25 in quaters to even connect the call. WTF? In Australia the minimum payphone charge is 40 cents. That buys you an UNLIMITED length local call, or timed call to ANYWHERE. Sure, if I call 1/2 way across the continent I'll get about a 10 second call, but at least I get connected and the other party know I'm there.
If the phone companies made an easy-to-use public phone system using robust equipment (e.g. steel reinforced handset cables and gum-proof coin-slots) then more people would use it.
And here is the HTML version kindly genereated by freviewer.
actually, it dumps random data until you get something (like \0 ?) that Netscape interprets as EOF -- The most I get is about 3 lines.
I have 2 Promise ATA100 cards in these beast also, for a total of 6 IDE channels /dev/hd?, linux only supports 8 ide devices, which would be 4 channels. Are the offboard IDE cards you can by possible to boot off of? Can you disable the onboard IDE it it's two channels "suck", and use all offboard cards.
Curious... according to ls
I have a Promise ATA/100 card which I have been running using Andre's ide patches for 2.2.x and it kicks serious posterior.
It runs 2x30GB IBM 75GXP - one on each channel
I also have a UDMA/33 HDD and a DVD-ROM on the BX chipset built-in PIIX controller.
I boot off it as follows.
1) Disable built-in HPT366 piece of shit
2) Enable booting from "SCSI"
3) pci=reverse in the kernel command line
4) I now have hda and hdc on the ATA/100 and hde and hdg on the built-in PIIX
5) I dual-boot Windows95 off a partition on hda which is correctly detected as C:. My hde is dedicated to windows and shows up as d: e: etc.
Acutally, the monolith has 0 size in the fourth dimension, so nobody forgot anything
Now were left with units based on 'logical' things such as the distance between the equator and pole.
And this is different from measures based on the length of the King's big toe (==inch) in what way?
The difference is that print-media ads are often content in themselves.
Look at a newspaper ad for a financial institution -- you will often see statistics and comparisons to competitors.
Look at an ad in a lifestyle magazine -- it shows you an example of current fashion.
Look at an alcohol ad -- they're usually funny.
Print-media ads give you something for free, and subtly build brand-awareness and goodwill towards the advertiser.
Banner ads are too small to provide useful content, so they resort to trickery (like the fake Win95 alerts). People don't like being tricked, and quickly come to loath and distrust all banner ads.
the Big Blue Room is the first one on the left in the first level of Doom ][. You know, the one with the super shotgun in the middle and the armour in the corner.
Well yes, there are. Many processes have been designed, and are in use industrially, that produce optically pure products from achrial reagents using various catalysts. These processes are very valuable, particularly to the pharmaceutical and polymer industries. However, I know of none of these processes or catalysts occur naturally -- they have all been designed by lengthy research and are usually very costly.
If a naturally-occuring process on Mars produces optically pure chemicals with activity against biologically important molecules like sugars, then it would be a breakthrough for chemistry, even if it turns out to be a disappointment for the exobiologists.