Hey, is there any tech out there similar to Bittorrent that would allow a distributed nearly-live stream. I realize that conferences like SIGGRAPH don't have the bandwidth funds to stream their presentations, but is there a tech that would enable them to seed a stream and then have other people pick it up and help distribute the broadcast costs?
If there isn't such a thing, get to work, guys! I've got too much stuff to do:-)
Check out the Nat'l Imaging and Mapping Agency (NIMA)'s database of placenames:
http://earth-info.nga.mil/gns/html/cntry_files.h tm l
This is the db (200M compressed, 700M un) of foreign placenames. I actually used the US placenames file that NIMA has (don't have the URL, but it should be free for US residents) for zips, counties and cities of the US. Each "placename" has the latitude and longitude as well.
Note that db's like these need to be scrubbed and massaged before they can be properly read into a relational db. That's where the true expertise comes in; that's also where perl shines as a language. Once you get the data clean and in, everything should be easy after that.
Note that I had a paying gig that worked with this NIMA data as the basis for a worldwide db for locating the nearest service center to a user's location. Learning to be able to compute distance from two lat/long coord pairs is an interesting and real-world exercise.
I am quite happy with having "outsourced" my email to yahoo mail, especially with their recent bump to 100meg and 10meg attachments. Their spam filter is excellent, though I still have to check for false positives, which are quite rare, though my email use is rather minimal. If everyone used yahoo or gmail or somesuch, that would pretty much prevent spam and allow for pretty accurate filtering.
Of course, being web-based is excellent, as I was able to access email the exact same way from Finland as from here in the states. Call me lazy, but setting up POP3 or whatever has always been a pain, anyway. If only yahoo had an "export-to-XML" option, then I'd be perfectly content.
it would probably make me happy if *you* did. And take your friends, too! I mean, really, earth would be a great place if it wasn't for the people.
On a more serious note, though, until we can travel at the speed-of-thought and *then* find a suitable earth-like planet, I'd rather we spent our time trying to fix our damaged ecological and societal systems.
Well, yes, but I'm not trying to put that on everyone else.
But, specifically, I'm speaking of *public servants*. We elect them. We pay them. The control our tax dollars. Therefore, they serve us. If they are serving themselves, we are being royally screwed.
But back to me, I do believe in an open society, not by regulation, but by choice. There would be no child porn if everyone was accountable for what they upload and what they download, right? And, while the necessity of having free speech to challenge unfair laws and regimes must be kept at all costs, the use of modern communication networks for organizing activities such as child porn and terrorism must be stopped.
How to strike the balance between freedom and prevention of misuse is, perhaps, the single greatest social issue of today; right after getting our public servants to not serve themselves and "big money".
to solve our government problems is to prevent their secrecy. We need to create a movement where *all* candidates take a stand on one simple issue: will they allow all their public dealings to be recorded and put in the public domain.
Those that have something to hide or an agenda to keep hidden (which is probably 99% of them) will say something about security. The only need for secrecy resides in a very few elements of military decision making. All other policy decisions, especially those that go before congress, must be compeletely on the record.
The fuckers are supposed to be "public servants", so let's make them be just that. Servants don't have privacy. If they really want to serve us, then they don't want to hide anything, right?! The only time they are not on record is when they are in rooms with their spouse that have no communication devices.
Simple. This will be the only way to draw a line between the persons who seek to serve the community and those who are seeking to serve themselves.
Nope, looks like marketroid hype to me. Answer me this: what is the point of comparing two separate identical runs of a computer, except in the case of testing platform equivalence, in which case the output of a test set can simply be diff'd.
The key to their idea is that The user first formulates a set of assertions about key data structures, which equals traditional techniques. The reason such traditional techniques have failed and continue to fail is that those assertions are always an order of magnitude simpler than the code itself. These people forget that a program *is* a set of assumptions. Dumbing it down to "x must be > y" doesn't help with the complex flow of information.
I'm in the same boat as the question poser, and I've got some questions to ask:
Does CVS/Subversion automatically track changes to directory trees of code over time, or do you have to somehow "stamp" a save point or snapshot or somesuch?
I do a fair bit of code generation (due to C# and C having no generics), so will a version control system be able to track changes to data that is relevant to my code. As well, I use text and Excel files as design docs, so can they be included in the "files that matter" set?
Sorry to sound like such a n00b, but I've always been the lone programmer, even on large projects. It seems very hard for me to believe that I will gain a cost benefit (as per time invested) from a version control system. Sure, I've not read up on the different packages, but what I'm asking here is for the expert synopsis, if someone would break down the flow for me, please.
While I agree with the utility of this, I disagree on the architecture. I would prefer a design where local users didn't pay the performance penalty for the network abstraction. I think that if the core kernel manager is coded properly, adding a network interface on top of that would be the proper way to do things, instead of the other way around. That way, a local desktop-style user doesn't pay for something they never use. On the rare occasion that a power user needs remote functionality, the local user (via SSH perhaps) just starts the "server" process (which must be tightly coupled with the owner of the video device) which can facilitate remote windows.
I don't see why *everything* has to have a network substrate. Is it not possible that Unix's failure to grab game market share has a bit to do with the difficulty of getting "on the metal". I mean, I imagine Doom 3 needs direct access to the video card's 3d registers, and I don't really see that possible under X (and if Doom 3 doesn't directly, then the opengl engine certainly *does*). At least, it would be a kludgy solution. I think that X fails this because 3d hardware was in its infancy as late as 93/94. I was a mainframe help desk guy at UVa where we had a room full of SGI Irix machines. Massive money was spent on that room, but those were a serious rarity in terms of the graphics hardware. X was just not designed from the ground up to interface smoothly with such hardware ~ everything ends up as an ugly kludge.
Also, my experience with the Xlib interface is that it is in serious need of refactoring.
You seem to be saying that you have tried to resist MS in the past, and it's too dificult. Now you've just relinquished the good fight.
Well, I haven't relinquished the good fight, as you say; I am merely waiting for the other browsers to mature. When I tried Netscape in the pre-Mozilla days, it was a nightmare, and I just haven't felt like investing the effort in trying to get Mozilla working on my machine. Also, I assume that I will have to rather regularly update it, as by my peripheral internet-reading, it is still a work-in-progress. Now, while I truly despise IE, it requires no work on my part to keep going, so, in that respect, its being bundled with my OS makes it simpler and more time-effective for me.
So, as we are using the same platform for our desktop OS, can you recommend Mozilla as a stable and well-rendered browser? I mean, does it crash? Would it be a waste of my time to put it on my machine? How much upkeep would I have to do?
Second, I whole-heartedly agree with your love for open source, and I have great respect for those folks. The instant, I mean the nano-second, I can run a viable development desktop on top of FreeBSD, I will jump on it. No doubt. But, to me, it's about maturity. And as much as I want 3rd world countries to have access to free software, the damage for-profit corporations do to those countries is horrendous. I feel it would be best to make the for-profit corporations pay for the software that allows their machines to clunk along. And, should I ever release software of my own, I don't see any reason that I can't give it away to needy and/or socially-conscious folks while charging the baddies for it at the same time. Sure they could rip me off, but that karma may just come back to bite `em in the ass.
Yes, I'm as familiar with X as one can be after programming with it professionally on Sparcs back in the day (92'ish). How many volumes were in the Xlib reference set? Like 6, plus that God-aweful Motif stuff. Blech.
Yes, *every* window manager / windowing toolkit gives that functionality, but X's underlying layer is network-based, so getting the Display and Screen handles is a level of abstraction better done away with, IMO.
Well, I'd like to say that I contributed by saying that ie users should use a custom zone and disable everything. I did that before the advisory, due to intuition based upon 20 years experience.
And, as far as spending my time finding something that can replace ie, well, as my post said, interoperability is something microsoft designs against. From the days of "DOS ain't done `till Lotus won't run" to the DOJ's antitrust case, the song remains the same.
And the reason that I'm not spending my time trying to wedge a square peg browser into the irregular-pentagon-shaped beast that is Windows is that I *am* spending my time trying to create something better. But I'm dang sure not going to give it away. Why? I've got hungry mouths to feed! And truth to spread. And buildings to build and stuff like that.
Why in the world would I let the corporations of the world who have enslaved the world to their "bottom-line" benefit from my software. I love the people in the open-source movement -- in theory, it's truly beautiful. In practice, however, the corporations are using that brilliance to further their world dominance. So I say, fight fire with fire. If they want to use my software, they're going to pay a premium for it, or break copyright law to use it for free.
When I can use their communication networks for free, eat their food for free and live on their land for free, they can use my software for free.
In a perfect world, all software and hardware would be open-source; but my 34 years has taught me the hard way that we are dang near in the antithesis of a perfect world.
I use a "custom level" for my internet zone. I basically turn off *everything*. I don't need java, and "active scripting" should be re-worded to say "give web pages access to God-knows-what?".
Besides, I really despise the "AppletTransition Sensor" that ESPN and other sites use. Screw `em. Just give me the dang HTML and, please, IE, just render it for me. No code, no scripts, no popups, no crap.
Websites that require JavaScript piss me off. The stupid Washington Post can't even render a page without JavaScript. What a terd.
Now, if only I could get IE to stop displaying the "Your browser doesn't allow ActiveX controls" message that pops up on pages where the designer used some crap control. I've made ActiveX controls and I *know* they can do anything they want on my system. Arg.
And wtf is with "install desktop items"? This is a *web* *browser*, not the control panel, for crying out loud.
And, last but not least, when I disable all this crap and then hit apply, it gives me a confirm warning message, but when I (because I need to use JavaScript on some crappy page) restore the default "cheap-whore-mode" settings, it doesn't say a word! Nice emphasis, Microsoft.
Yeah, I know, use a different browser (or OS), but we all know Windows is *designed* to not interoperate well with those things, right? Sometimes, it wastes time to try to fight inertia.
Anyhow, my feeling is that the desktop situation on Linux and BSD won't be solved until X is ditched completely. Just give me the dang screen buffer(s) and some basic routines and I'll draw my own shtuff. X is a 25-year-old terd, designed for machines with, like, 4k of memory (warning: hyperbole). Just give me font, line, point, ellipse, bitblt and friggin window data structures -- straight to the video card. And access to the video card reg's would be nice too.
Won't all these relatively linear improvements to the fabrication tech be irrelevant once purely optical chips are rolling. Even though they are many years away, it seems to me that they will be *many* orders of magnitude faster than our current electricity-based chips. Does anyone here know if these current fab techs will be used for optical based chips? I would imagine that optical chips would require an entirely different production means. Also, wouldn't the optical chips run *much* more cooly?
Sorry for the basic questions, but I'm just a programmer:-)
Nope. Any prog lang is ok, but the executable must be able to run on their platform, which in the past was a variant of Linux, if I remember correctly.
I think they are simply putting the functional langs up against all comers. The winners of the last couple of contests have been ocaml, (once again) if I remember correctly.
Good to hear from you, spun, and thank you for your kind words.
Well, I had a bit of a realization about free will a couple of weeks ago. You see, I, too, am a pretty hardcore scientist (believe it or not from my religious bent) in that I look at all the chains of causality within the micro and macro worlds of which we are and we are part of, and can see no obvious *physical* cause for there being any possibility for our having any kind of real free will. In other words, I agree, free will very much *looks* like an illusion.
My realization is simple, but revelatory for me: that free will is, indeed, truly a personal *free will* (and therefore very real) for human beings for the simple fact that that is the design of creation. In other words, we have a true free will because our Creator purposefully made us that way.
Now, it may sound overly simplistic but when one really evaluates the magnitude of complexity and true unfathomness of this creation, it becomes vitally intermixed with other important facts of our human nature, whose laws operate at a higher level than those of, say, normal physics.
The most important of these facts is that our choices are *very* important. I mean not only that our destination upon the Judgement Day (which exists for the sole fact that God is The Just, or El Adl in arabic, and would not consign the selfless servant of humanity to the same fate as that of, say, Lenin or Hussein) hinges upon their sum total fruits, but even that the further events of our lives are determined by the past choices we have made.
One great misunderstanding that over 90% of human beings have is what God wants from us. One word: happiness. Plain and simple, but the system is designed (there's that word again) such that ignoring our Creator and not seeking to do His Will makes us more and more unhappy. Sure, hooking up with a different cute girl every weekend brings *pleasure* (if you can pull it off:-), but its long-term result will be unhappiness. Why? It's built into the system. Same with alcohol or drugs (including marijuana): short-term pleasure, long-term distress.
These are the only reasons that God has given us commands to live by: when we obey them, we prosper and grow more happy; when we disobey them, the system has negative feedback built into it to attempt to *persuade* us to make better choices. Note that all of this hinges upon the concept that our choices are very meaningful determinants of our future options.
Other cultures call this concept "karma". And, believe it or not, within Sufism, we have the same exact concept. If you get angry and haul off and punch someone, you're bound to get the same, or worse, right back at you in the future.
So, free will, like any powerful gift, can bring us success or bring us ruin. As Chris Rock says: "Some people say life is short; no it ain't! It's looong, especially if you make the wrong choices."
Now, the physical substrate to the actuality of our human free will (and, no, no other creatures in our physical dimension have free will -- not the animals) relates to our being tripartite beings, made up of three bodies, one physical, one spiritual (the good "angel") and the soul (the bad "angel" that can be cleansed of its 19 vices and filled with the 19 corresponding virtues.). The two energy bodies (spirit and soul) are constantly working to convince the free will (which uses our local conditioned variant of the universal mind) as to what it should do with the physical body.
That is the human nature, like it or not. And the Jihad that is mentioned in the Qur'an is about the free will's epic battle to choose between the spirit's and the soul's suggestions. The good thing about all this is that it is possible to completely cleanse the soul of the vices and therfore become completely happy by virtue of being completely submitted to the Will of God, whose design is such that it always works to improve the happiness of everyone (with the exception of t
Actually, the current models are wrong. Our physical universe is just one of the six layers of the onion within which our spacial dimension co-exists. Because the other dimensions' masses are not taken into consideration, the current models *cannot* accurately measure the speed of expansion. Note that this is the so-called "dark matter".
It is strange that we have created much anti-matter in our labratories, yet we deny that they are members to our "anti-physical universe". One of the great physists, however, did postulate just that (sorry, I don't remember which one), yet his theories were swept out by other theories.
FYI, the dimensions are created in pairs and what we refer to as a photon is simply a pair of neutrinos that has one counterpart in our physical universe and another in the anti-physical universe. That is why photons that hit the lead shield split into two particles that have mass, even though the photon itself has no mass. The problem with the current models is that they don't take into consideration negative mass (which is negative because of our physical universe's relationship with its anti-physical dimension) and, as such, will never properly model a photon. BTW, the photon's wave properties are the result of how the two neutrinos orbit each other.
The basic answer is that creation is all about change, and change can only happen with respect to time.
Now, I know that this sounds simple (and it is, in a way), but there are some very important ideas about change via time that people should understand, namely that this entire creation is created for us, the human beings, and that our ability to utilize the creation to its fullest depends upon how we *consciously* change over time.
How do I know this? Well, believe it or not, our Creator *wants* us to know about this creation. This is why we have been given this great mind: to understand this creation (including ourselves). Our free will, on the other hand, has been given to us as the gift that allows us to explore creation via our mind at our own discretion.
BTW, time ends when the universe stops expanding. Closely following the stoppage, the kinetic energy of the universe (so-called 'dark energy' which prevents the matter from collapsing back upon itself) will no longer be able to hold gravity in check and then comes the Big Crunch, though that is much more highly accelerated than the expansion phase.
[Puts on flame suit]
After that, comes the viewing of our *two* life films (as to how we used our free will), one for actions and one for thoughts (for the judgement of intention, which gives weight to our actions).
For those of you who doubt this, just ask your Creator; that is, if you believe "knock and the door shall be opened, seek and ye shall find".
Mathematics will never *explain* these facts, thought mathematical models may describe this process.
Oops! I didn't see the tiny white blocks they use for scroll bars in the middle of the image. Sorry, the pictures a pretty but it's a terrible website, from my total "function first, form afterwards" perspective.
Slashdot Mirror
Hey, is there any tech out there similar to
:-)
Bittorrent that would allow a distributed
nearly-live stream. I realize that conferences
like SIGGRAPH don't have the bandwidth funds
to stream their presentations, but is there a
tech that would enable them to seed a stream
and then have other people pick it up and
help distribute the broadcast costs?
If there isn't such a thing, get to work, guys!
I've got too much stuff to do
Peace & Blessings,
bmac
Yup, good 'ol Javascript & ECMAScript.
Have fun.
Peace & Blessings,
bmac
Check out the Nat'l Imaging and Mapping
h tm l
Agency (NIMA)'s database of placenames:
http://earth-info.nga.mil/gns/html/cntry_files.
This is the db (200M compressed, 700M un) of
foreign placenames. I actually used the US
placenames file that NIMA has (don't have the
URL, but it should be free for US residents)
for zips, counties and cities of the US. Each
"placename" has the latitude and longitude as
well.
Note that db's like these need to be scrubbed
and massaged before they can be properly
read into a relational db. That's where the
true expertise comes in; that's also where
perl shines as a language. Once you get the
data clean and in, everything should be easy
after that.
Note that I had a paying gig that worked with
this NIMA data as the basis for a worldwide
db for locating the nearest service center to
a user's location. Learning to be able to
compute distance from two lat/long coord
pairs is an interesting and real-world
exercise.
Good luck,
bmac
I am quite happy with having "outsourced"
my email to yahoo mail, especially with
their recent bump to 100meg and 10meg
attachments. Their spam filter is excellent,
though I still have to check for false
positives, which are quite rare, though my
email use is rather minimal. If everyone
used yahoo or gmail or somesuch, that would
pretty much prevent spam and allow for pretty
accurate filtering.
Of course, being web-based is excellent, as
I was able to access email the exact same way
from Finland as from here in the states. Call
me lazy, but setting up POP3 or whatever has
always been a pain, anyway. If only yahoo
had an "export-to-XML" option, then I'd be
perfectly content.
Peace & Blessings,
bmac
it would probably make me happy if
*you* did. And take your friends, too!
I mean, really, earth would be a great
place if it wasn't for the people.
On a more serious note, though, until
we can travel at the speed-of-thought
and *then* find a suitable earth-like
planet, I'd rather we spent our time
trying to fix our damaged ecological
and societal systems.
Peace & Blessings,
bmac
That's only 44 days. How could that possibly
be good for anything other than a disposal
camera?
Peace & Blessings,
bmac
Well, yes, but I'm not trying to put that
on everyone else.
But, specifically, I'm speaking of *public
servants*. We elect them. We pay them.
The control our tax dollars. Therefore,
they serve us. If they are serving
themselves, we are being royally screwed.
But back to me, I do believe in an open
society, not by regulation, but by choice.
There would be no child porn if everyone
was accountable for what they upload and
what they download, right? And, while the
necessity of having free speech to challenge
unfair laws and regimes must be kept at
all costs, the use of modern communication
networks for organizing activities such as
child porn and terrorism must be stopped.
How to strike the balance between freedom
and prevention of misuse is, perhaps, the
single greatest social issue of today;
right after getting our public servants to
not serve themselves and "big money".
Peace & Blessings,
bmac
to solve our government problems is to prevent
their secrecy. We need to create a movement
where *all* candidates take a stand on one
simple issue: will they allow all their public
dealings to be recorded and put in the public
domain.
Those that have something to hide or an agenda
to keep hidden (which is probably 99% of them)
will say something about security. The only
need for secrecy resides in a very few elements
of military decision making. All other policy
decisions, especially those that go before
congress, must be compeletely on the record.
The fuckers are supposed to be "public servants",
so let's make them be just that. Servants don't
have privacy. If they really want to serve us,
then they don't want to hide anything, right?!
The only time they are not on record is when
they are in rooms with their spouse that have
no communication devices.
Simple. This will be the only way to draw a
line between the persons who seek to serve the
community and those who are seeking to serve
themselves.
I'm sick of this shit.
Peace & Blessings,
bmac
Nope, looks like marketroid hype to me. Answer me this: what is the point of comparing two separate identical runs of a computer, except in the case of testing platform equivalence, in which case the output of a test set can simply be diff'd.
The key to their idea is that The user first formulates a set of assertions about key data structures, which equals traditional techniques. The reason such traditional techniques have failed and continue to fail is that those assertions are always an order of magnitude simpler than the code itself. These people forget that a program *is* a set of assumptions. Dumbing it down to "x must be > y" doesn't help with the complex flow of information.
Peace & Blessings,
bmac
How could you write a virus in just 15 bytes anyway.
:-)
It wouldn't be a "15 byte virus", it would be a dll-sized virus that behaves badly because of 15 changed bytes
Just because you're paranoid...
Peace & Blessings,
bmac
I'm in the same boat as the question poser, and I've got some questions to ask:
Does CVS/Subversion automatically track changes to directory trees of code over time, or do you have to somehow "stamp" a save point or snapshot or somesuch?
I do a fair bit of code generation (due to C# and C having no generics), so will a version control system be able to track changes to data that is relevant to my code. As well, I use text and Excel files as design docs, so can they be included in the "files that matter" set?
Sorry to sound like such a n00b, but I've always been the lone programmer, even on large projects. It seems very hard for me to believe that I will gain a cost benefit (as per time invested) from a version control system. Sure, I've not read up on the different packages, but what I'm asking here is for the expert synopsis, if someone would break down the flow for me, please.
Thanks in advance.
Peace & Blessings,
bmac
While I agree with the utility of this, I disagree on the architecture. I would prefer a design where local users didn't pay the performance penalty for the network abstraction. I think that if the core kernel manager is coded properly, adding a network interface on top of that would be the proper way to do things, instead of the other way around. That way, a local desktop-style user doesn't pay for something they never use. On the rare occasion that a power user needs remote functionality, the local user (via SSH perhaps) just starts the "server" process (which must be tightly coupled with the owner of the video device) which can facilitate remote windows.
I don't see why *everything* has to have a network substrate. Is it not possible that Unix's failure to grab game market share has a bit to do with the difficulty of getting "on the metal". I mean, I imagine Doom 3 needs direct access to the video card's 3d registers, and I don't really see that possible under X (and if Doom 3 doesn't directly, then the opengl engine certainly *does*). At least, it would be a kludgy solution. I think that X fails this because 3d hardware was in its infancy as late as 93/94. I was a mainframe help desk guy at UVa where we had a room full of SGI Irix machines. Massive money was spent on that room, but those were a serious rarity in terms of the graphics hardware. X was just not designed from the ground up to interface smoothly with such hardware ~ everything ends up as an ugly kludge.
Also, my experience with the Xlib interface is that it is in serious need of refactoring.
Peace & Blessings,
bmac
Two possibilities here:
:-)
1) You are one of the few, the proud who can call themselves "1337".
2) The other, less likely possibility, is that this is a manual virus, in which case I say "nice try"
Regardless, there's no way on earth I'm going to edit my dll. Thanks anyway.
Peace & Blessings,
bmac
Thanks, but I actually just installed FireFox, and am *very* impressed.
*Homer voice* Mmmm, tabbed browsing...
Peace & Blessings,
bmac
Thanks is too small a word.
Peace & Blessings,
bmac
You seem to be saying that you have tried to resist MS in the past, and it's too dificult. Now you've just relinquished the good fight.
Well, I haven't relinquished the good fight, as you say; I am merely waiting for the other browsers to mature. When I tried Netscape in the pre-Mozilla days, it was a nightmare, and I just haven't felt like investing the effort in trying to get Mozilla working on my machine. Also, I assume that I will have to rather regularly update it, as by my peripheral internet-reading, it is still a work-in-progress. Now, while I truly despise IE, it requires no work on my part to keep going, so, in that respect, its being bundled with my OS makes it simpler and more time-effective for me.
So, as we are using the same platform for our desktop OS, can you recommend Mozilla as a stable and well-rendered browser? I mean, does it crash? Would it be a waste of my time to put it on my machine? How much upkeep would I have to do?
Second, I whole-heartedly agree with your love for open source, and I have great respect for those folks. The instant, I mean the nano-second, I can run a viable development desktop on top of FreeBSD, I will jump on it. No doubt. But, to me, it's about maturity. And as much as I want 3rd world countries to have access to free software, the damage for-profit corporations do to those countries is horrendous. I feel it would be best to make the for-profit corporations pay for the software that allows their machines to clunk along. And, should I ever release software of my own, I don't see any reason that I can't give it away to needy and/or socially-conscious folks while charging the baddies for it at the same time. Sure they could rip me off, but that karma may just come back to bite `em in the ass.
Peace & Blessings,
bmac
Yes, I'm as familiar with X as one can be after programming with it professionally on Sparcs back in the day (92'ish). How many volumes were in the Xlib reference set? Like 6, plus that God-aweful Motif stuff. Blech.
Yes, *every* window manager / windowing toolkit gives that functionality, but X's underlying layer is network-based, so getting the Display and Screen handles is a level of abstraction better done away with, IMO.
Peace & Blessings,
bmac
Well, I'd like to say that I contributed by saying that ie users should use a custom zone and disable everything. I did that before the advisory, due to intuition based upon 20 years experience.
And, as far as spending my time finding something that can replace ie, well, as my post said, interoperability is something microsoft designs against. From the days of "DOS ain't done `till Lotus won't run" to the DOJ's antitrust case, the song remains the same.
And the reason that I'm not spending my time trying to wedge a square peg browser into the irregular-pentagon-shaped beast that is Windows is that I *am* spending my time trying to create something better. But I'm dang sure not going to give it away. Why? I've got hungry mouths to feed! And truth to spread. And buildings to build and stuff like that.
Why in the world would I let the corporations of the world who have enslaved the world to their "bottom-line" benefit from my software. I love the people in the open-source movement -- in theory, it's truly beautiful. In practice, however, the corporations are using that brilliance to further their world dominance. So I say, fight fire with fire. If they want to use my software, they're going to pay a premium for it, or break copyright law to use it for free.
When I can use their communication networks for free, eat their food for free and live on their land for free, they can use my software for free.
In a perfect world, all software and hardware would be open-source; but my 34 years has taught me the hard way that we are dang near in the antithesis of a perfect world.
Peace & Blessings,
bmac
I use a "custom level" for my internet zone. I basically turn off *everything*. I don't need java, and "active scripting" should be re-worded to say "give web pages access to God-knows-what?".
Besides, I really despise the "AppletTransition Sensor" that ESPN and other sites use. Screw `em. Just give me the dang HTML and, please, IE, just render it for me. No code, no scripts, no popups, no crap.
Websites that require JavaScript piss me off. The stupid Washington Post can't even render a page without JavaScript. What a terd.
Now, if only I could get IE to stop displaying the "Your browser doesn't allow ActiveX controls" message that pops up on pages where the designer used some crap control. I've made ActiveX controls and I *know* they can do anything they want on my system. Arg.
And wtf is with "install desktop items"? This is a *web* *browser*, not the control panel, for crying out loud.
And, last but not least, when I disable all this crap and then hit apply, it gives me a confirm warning message, but when I (because I need to use JavaScript on some crappy page) restore the default "cheap-whore-mode" settings, it doesn't say a word! Nice emphasis, Microsoft.
Yeah, I know, use a different browser (or OS), but we all know Windows is *designed* to not interoperate well with those things, right? Sometimes, it wastes time to try to fight inertia.
Anyhow, my feeling is that the desktop situation on Linux and BSD won't be solved until X is ditched completely. Just give me the dang screen buffer(s) and some basic routines and I'll draw my own shtuff. X is a 25-year-old terd, designed for machines with, like, 4k of memory (warning: hyperbole). Just give me font, line, point, ellipse, bitblt and friggin window data structures -- straight to the video card. And access to the video card reg's would be nice too.
End of Rant, enjoy your day.
Peace & Blessings,
bmac
Won't all these relatively linear improvements to the fabrication tech be irrelevant once purely optical chips are rolling. Even though they are many years away, it seems to me that they will be *many* orders of magnitude faster than our current electricity-based chips. Does anyone here know if these current fab techs will be used for optical based chips? I would imagine that optical chips would require an entirely different production means. Also, wouldn't the optical chips run *much* more cooly?
:-)
Sorry for the basic questions, but I'm just a programmer
Peace & Blessings,
bmac
Nope. Any prog lang is ok, but the executable must be able to run on their platform, which in the past was a variant of Linux, if I remember correctly.
I think they are simply putting the functional langs up against all comers. The winners of the last couple of contests have been ocaml, (once again) if I remember correctly.
Peace & Blessings,
bmac
Good to hear from you, spun, and thank you for your kind words.
:-), but its long-term result will be unhappiness. Why? It's built into the system. Same with alcohol or drugs (including marijuana): short-term pleasure, long-term distress.
Well, I had a bit of a realization about free will a couple of weeks ago. You see, I, too, am a pretty hardcore scientist (believe it or not from my religious bent) in that I look at all the chains of causality within the micro and macro worlds of which we are and we are part of, and can see no obvious *physical* cause for there being any possibility for our having any kind of real free will. In other words, I agree, free will very much *looks* like an illusion.
My realization is simple, but revelatory for me: that free will is, indeed, truly a personal *free will* (and therefore very real) for human beings for the simple fact that that is the design of creation. In other words, we have a true free will because our Creator purposefully made us that way.
Now, it may sound overly simplistic but when one really evaluates the magnitude of complexity and true unfathomness of this creation, it becomes vitally intermixed with other important facts of our human nature, whose laws operate at a higher level than those of, say, normal physics.
The most important of these facts is that our choices are *very* important. I mean not only that our destination upon the Judgement Day (which exists for the sole fact that God is The Just, or El Adl in arabic, and would not consign the selfless servant of humanity to the same fate as that of, say, Lenin or Hussein) hinges upon their sum total fruits, but even that the further events of our lives are determined by the past choices we have made.
One great misunderstanding that over 90% of human beings have is what God wants from us. One word: happiness. Plain and simple, but the system is designed (there's that word again) such that ignoring our Creator and not seeking to do His Will makes us more and more unhappy. Sure, hooking up with a different cute girl every weekend brings *pleasure* (if you can pull it off
These are the only reasons that God has given us commands to live by: when we obey them, we prosper and grow more happy; when we disobey them, the system has negative feedback built into it to attempt to *persuade* us to make better choices. Note that all of this hinges upon the concept that our choices are very meaningful determinants of our future options.
Other cultures call this concept "karma". And, believe it or not, within Sufism, we have the same exact concept. If you get angry and haul off and punch someone, you're bound to get the same, or worse, right back at you in the future.
So, free will, like any powerful gift, can bring us success or bring us ruin. As Chris Rock says: "Some people say life is short; no it ain't! It's looong, especially if you make the wrong choices."
Now, the physical substrate to the actuality of our human free will (and, no, no other creatures in our physical dimension have free will -- not the animals) relates to our being tripartite beings, made up of three bodies, one physical, one spiritual (the good "angel") and the soul (the bad "angel" that can be cleansed of its 19 vices and filled with the 19 corresponding virtues.). The two energy bodies (spirit and soul) are constantly working to convince the free will (which uses our local conditioned variant of the universal mind) as to what it should do with the physical body.
That is the human nature, like it or not. And the Jihad that is mentioned in the Qur'an is about the free will's epic battle to choose between the spirit's and the soul's suggestions. The good thing about all this is that it is possible to completely cleanse the soul of the vices and therfore become completely happy by virtue of being completely submitted to the Will of God, whose design is such that it always works to improve the happiness of everyone (with the exception of t
Actually, the current models are wrong. Our physical universe is just one of the six layers of the onion within which our spacial dimension co-exists. Because the other dimensions' masses are not taken into consideration, the current models *cannot* accurately measure the speed of expansion. Note that this is the so-called "dark matter".
It is strange that we have created much anti-matter in our labratories, yet we deny that they are members to our "anti-physical universe". One of the great physists, however, did postulate just that (sorry, I don't remember which one), yet his theories were swept out by other theories.
FYI, the dimensions are created in pairs and what we refer to as a photon is simply a pair of neutrinos that has one counterpart in our physical universe and another in the anti-physical universe. That is why photons that hit the lead shield split into two particles that have mass, even though the photon itself has no mass. The problem with the current models is that they don't take into consideration negative mass (which is negative because of our physical universe's relationship with its anti-physical dimension) and, as such, will never properly model a photon. BTW, the photon's wave properties are the result of how the two neutrinos orbit each other.
Peace & Blessings,
bmac
The basic answer is that creation is all about change, and change can only happen with respect to time.
Now, I know that this sounds simple (and it is, in a way), but there are some very important ideas about change via time that people should understand, namely that this entire creation is created for us, the human beings, and that our ability to utilize the creation to its fullest depends upon how we *consciously* change over time.
How do I know this? Well, believe it or not, our Creator *wants* us to know about this creation. This is why we have been given this great mind: to understand this creation (including ourselves). Our free will, on the other hand, has been given to us as the gift that allows us to explore creation via our mind at our own discretion.
BTW, time ends when the universe stops expanding. Closely following the stoppage, the kinetic energy of the universe (so-called 'dark energy' which prevents the matter from collapsing back upon itself) will no longer be able to hold gravity in check and then comes the Big Crunch, though that is much more highly accelerated than the expansion phase.
[Puts on flame suit]
After that, comes the viewing of our *two* life films (as to how we used our free will), one for actions and one for thoughts (for the judgement of intention, which gives weight to our actions).
For those of you who doubt this, just ask your Creator; that is, if you believe "knock and the door shall be opened, seek and ye shall find".
Mathematics will never *explain* these facts, thought mathematical models may describe this process.
For more info, check out www.mihr.com.
Peace & Blessings,
bmac
Oops! I didn't see the tiny white blocks they use for scroll bars in the middle of the image. Sorry, the pictures a pretty but it's a terrible website, from my total "function first, form afterwards" perspective.
Peace & Blessings,
bmac