Not really. Although Falun Gong was popularized in 1992 (accompanied by semi-founded accusations of cultism), it is essentially a form of Qigong, an ancient Chinese medical technique.
"For those of us who do not read Japanese, does that read "internet explorer" or whatever the japanese equivalent might be?"
"Intaanetto Ekusupuroa" to be precise. And fortunately for those of us who are still learning to read Japanese, it's written in Katakana and not Kanji.
I'd just like to point out that Flemming pretty did nothing with penicillin besides discover its existance (1928)-- he gave up on it after 6 months. It took a whole new generation of doctors and a world war 15 years later to actually make it useful.
That's slightly unfair. While all the key work was indeed done by Chain and Florey some 12 years later (for which they shared the Nobel prize but not the recognition), Fleming did do two very important things with his discovery: he ran toxicity tests; and he published. He was not a chemist, and could not have isolated the active antibacterial element. It was just a pity that others did not spot the "wonder drug" potential a few years earlier.
The statistics aparently refer to the number of people who have *ever* downloaded music. Which means that you'd be fairly surprised if they didn't rise. No?
(And since they also refer only to Americans aged 12 and over, it is even conceivable that absolutely *no-one* is presently downloading music, and the 'increase' comes simply from counting all the former 9-year old Napster users for the first time.)
When will surveys start asking the right questions?
...but there has always been a good historical president for it:
Not a grammar nazi, just for those who are interested: (I always thought the president/precedent mix-up was an odd one for slashdot, because a similar distinction exists in most other European languages)
president/président/Präsident/daitouryou: one appointed or elected to preside.
precedent/précédent/Präzedenzfall/senrei: a preceding instance used as an example for subsequent cases.
I remember them demonstrating some of their technology at a careers fair at Cambridge University. It was pretty spectacular.
For example, take a look at some of the applications of their Sentient Computing Project.
Pitman mentions that all the ()s in Lisp make it easier to edit and help avoid problems with operator precedence. This true, but beside the point - the real reason behind the "program is data" paradigm is the amazing thing called Lisp macros.
Most production-level Lisp programs may well never encounter a single list during their execution. Hashtables, structures and arrays are all primitive types in Common Lisp, and CLOS lets you build multiply-inheriting object classes to your heart's desire. But these programs will all still be lists. This means that you can use LISP's list-processing tools to write and rewrite them.
Which is where macros come in. Unlike other languages, Lisp macros are not just a simple preprocessor. They put the entire language at your disposal in constructing the expressions you want. Hence you can add new control constructs to the language - with 5 lines of code you can add a for, as in (for (x 1 10) (print x)). You can introduce new tools for updating generalized variables - (setf (aref a n) x) and (setf (property object) v) are equivalent to a[n]=x and object.property=v, but what about a user-defined (setf (min l) n) that changes all values in l smaller than n to n, thereby enforcing the identity? You can even embed entire languages on top of Lisp, and write your programs in that. And because this is all handled at compile time, not only will you not incur the cost associated with using high-level interfaces, you could also use this opportunity to perform extra computation while compiling, based on values potentially already known.
The most obvious analogy is to XML. It too obeys the "program is data" paradigm and has delimiters everywhere (though its are more verbose). This means you can rewrite your XML content using the XSLT stylesheets, which themselves are XML documents and hence can be rewritten too. The main difference here is that XSLT is nowhere near as well equipped to deal with language rewriting as Lisp is (ever tried even a simple recurse across more than one axis?).
For a very promising (if unfinished) public domain alternative, try Civ Evolution. It's gradually evolving away from its Civ II inspiration, to focus more on the strategy and AI aspects of the game. It also looks very pretty, if somewhat Civ II-like: shot1, shot2, shot3. At the moment it's Windows only, but the source is out there...
Tip: if Evolution seems to load up really slowly then you probably need to restart your oaf server. Just run killev followed by oaf-slay and Presto. Or else follow the windows approach and wait for your next reboot:)
Screenshot: check out the funky new (and configurable) summary page!
I just don't get slashdot. CmdrTaco will routinely support typo-sites, most of which abuse trademarks for purely commercial reasons (such as advertising). Yet legitimate satire and criticism, which is clearly stated as such, appears to have "few redeeming qualities" in Timothy's eyes.
This development is particularly frustrating, since up to now UK.gov sites have generally been very standards compliant. In fact the open.gov.uk initiative even has a W3C standards statement. I quote:
"The most important aspect of publishing information on the internet is to ensure that it is available to all, not just a select few who happen to have the newest browser, all the latest plugins and a top of the range, superfast PC.
UK public sector information must be accessible, legible and fast to download."
And indeed, the vast majority of.gov sites are very well designed, browsable by anyone, and (shock horror!) contain lots of interesting information about what the government is up to: e.g. the Foreign Office and the Home Office sites.
And this is best seen by one of the few truly innovative Free Software projects: Galeon. In a very short time span it has moved from being just a lightweight replacement for Mozilla to what is IMO the best web browser available under any platform.
Consider a few of its features:
Hybrid Tabbed/Windowed Mode: Browse in a combination of multiple windows (with DnD) and a tabbed notebook format (very useful for opening lots of messagess, or for popups to appear in). Fullscreen mode is also available.
Advanced Filtering: per-site image blocking (for ads), popup disabling, advanced cookie management, and stopping JavaScript from writing annoying stuff in the status bar - to name a few.
Advanced Bookmark Management: smart bookmarks (bookmarks with parameters - e.g. a google search box), ability to create multiple bookmark toolbars and attach bookmarks to right-click context menu, bookmark nicks, temporary bookmarks (for quick access), autobookmarks (generated from browsing history), dynamically generated portal site containing all your bookmarks (with a customizable style sheet), windows bookmark icon support, great bookmark editor...
Advanced Session Support: session save and crash recovery, powerful searchable History dock (or window)
Other Browsing Improvements: searches for regular expressions, up button to browse directory structure, easy font size control (size spinner, or wheelmouse),...
Great UI: quick access to useful features on a per-site basis (use own fonts, disable animated images, block images/cookies...), full keyboard support, customizable and unintrusive interface.
Add this to the huge number of other thriving GNOME/GTK+ applications (Evolution, GIMP, XMMS, Gnumeric, AbiWord, Dia, Guppi, gPhoto, Gnapster, Grip, X-Chat, Pan, Gabber, Gaim, and so on...), the continually improving user interface (task grouping in the task list, task control in the menu panel...), and the increasing number of well-designed bonobo components (very efficient embedded images, postscripts, pdfs, man pages, and so on...), and I think it's safe to say that rumours of GNOME's death are greatly exagerated.
For decent framerate on a <1GHz computer...
on
PanQuake
·
· Score: 1
...I strongly recommend reducing the number of slices to something like 5. If your pride can let you, that is (it's not easy admitting to yourself that the top-end computer you bought last year, is now legacy... *sigh*).
Yeah, that would be really cool! The Evolution executive-summary page and Nautilus sidebar also give easy access to RDF feeds (and CVS Nautilus is actually quick enough to make this worthwile;-)
Until then though, I'd recommend that if people have time, they go browse www.xmltree.com, as a source of lots of useful (and useless) RDF feeds.
"Ars Technica puts it through its paces with a very thorough review."
Thorough and interesting, yes, but also quite opiniated and arsey. Every point seems to become a 'huge, glaring misfeature', and they often assume that their way of doing things is automatically the right one.
For example, they got rather annoyed at Finder for truncating long names in the middle, rather than at the end (which, they claim, is clearly correct behaviour!). Personally, I quite enjoy being able to differentiate between "Complete System Backup - 01-04" and "Complete System Backup - 95-01". In fact, since the important information is usually either at the beinning of the name or at the end (version number, date, etc), Finder's approach seems quite sensible to me.
Ah well. At least they had lots of nice screenshots:)
Slashdot Mirror
One man's cliché is another man's stereotype.
If by 'ancient' you mean '1985'
Not really. Although Falun Gong was popularized in 1992 (accompanied by semi-founded accusations of cultism), it is essentially a form of Qigong, an ancient Chinese medical technique.
"For those of us who do not read Japanese, does that read "internet explorer" or whatever the japanese equivalent might be?"
"Intaanetto Ekusupuroa" to be precise. And fortunately for those of us who are still learning to read Japanese, it's written in Katakana and not Kanji.
I'd just like to point out that Flemming pretty did nothing with penicillin besides discover its existance (1928)-- he gave up on it after 6 months. It took a whole new generation of doctors and a world war 15 years later to actually make it useful.
That's slightly unfair. While all the key work was indeed done by Chain and Florey some 12 years later (for which they shared the Nobel prize but not the recognition), Fleming did do two very important things with his discovery: he ran toxicity tests; and he published. He was not a chemist, and could not have isolated the active antibacterial element. It was just a pity that others did not spot the "wonder drug" potential a few years earlier.
The statistics aparently refer to the number of people who have *ever* downloaded music. Which means that you'd be fairly surprised if they didn't rise. No?
(And since they also refer only to Americans aged 12 and over, it is even conceivable that absolutely *no-one* is presently downloading music, and the 'increase' comes simply from counting all the former 9-year old Napster users for the first time.)
When will surveys start asking the right questions?
Small addition/clarification: the BBC actually have 8 nationally-broadcast terrestrial channels - except 6 of them are only broadcast digitally. Furthermore, the BBC is at the head of a consortium, which includes BSkyB, that is about to start broadcasting 30 or so channels as free-to-view digital terrestrial.
Not a grammar nazi, just for those who are interested: (I always thought the president/precedent mix-up was an odd one for slashdot, because a similar distinction exists in most other European languages)
...says "something smells fishy!"
My usual rule of thumb with stats like this is to divide by 10 and then start thinking about whether that makes sense.
You're so right. I realized something fishy was going on when they started claiming 52% of the world was female...
I remember them demonstrating some of their technology at a careers fair at Cambridge University. It was pretty spectacular. For example, take a look at some of the applications of their Sentient Computing Project.
In it's traditional form, [e^(pi*i)]+1=0, it relates the 5 most important constants in math...
...and is beaten only by 0*i*pi*e = 1+-1
There is NEWS which describes some of the recent changes
Actually, that's GNUS. After all, we mustn't ignore the 15 years of hard work by the GNU Project, which has made all existence possible.
We request the right to force you to remove a link to our site.
And I demand that I am Vroomfondel!
Pitman mentions that all the ()s in Lisp make it easier to edit and help avoid problems with operator precedence. This true, but beside the point - the real reason behind the "program is data" paradigm is the amazing thing called Lisp macros.
Most production-level Lisp programs may well never encounter a single list during their execution. Hashtables, structures and arrays are all primitive types in Common Lisp, and CLOS lets you build multiply-inheriting object classes to your heart's desire. But these programs will all still be lists. This means that you can use LISP's list-processing tools to write and rewrite them.
Which is where macros come in. Unlike other languages, Lisp macros are not just a simple preprocessor. They put the entire language at your disposal in constructing the expressions you want. Hence you can add new control constructs to the language - with 5 lines of code you can add a for, as in (for (x 1 10) (print x)). You can introduce new tools for updating generalized variables - (setf (aref a n) x) and (setf (property object) v) are equivalent to a[n]=x and object.property=v, but what about a user-defined (setf (min l) n) that changes all values in l smaller than n to n, thereby enforcing the identity? You can even embed entire languages on top of Lisp, and write your programs in that. And because this is all handled at compile time, not only will you not incur the cost associated with using high-level interfaces, you could also use this opportunity to perform extra computation while compiling, based on values potentially already known.
The most obvious analogy is to XML. It too obeys the "program is data" paradigm and has delimiters everywhere (though its are more verbose). This means you can rewrite your XML content using the XSLT stylesheets, which themselves are XML documents and hence can be rewritten too. The main difference here is that XSLT is nowhere near as well equipped to deal with language rewriting as Lisp is (ever tried even a simple recurse across more than one axis?).
For a very promising (if unfinished) public domain alternative, try Civ Evolution. It's gradually evolving away from its Civ II inspiration, to focus more on the strategy and AI aspects of the game. It also looks very pretty, if somewhat Civ II-like: shot1, shot2, shot3. At the moment it's Windows only, but the source is out there...
Tip: if Evolution seems to load up really slowly then you probably need to restart your oaf server. Just run killev followed by oaf-slay and Presto. Or else follow the windows approach and wait for your next reboot :)
Screenshot: check out the funky new (and configurable) summary page!
I just don't get slashdot. CmdrTaco will routinely support typo-sites, most of which abuse trademarks for purely commercial reasons (such as advertising). Yet legitimate satire and criticism, which is clearly stated as such, appears to have "few redeeming qualities" in Timothy's eyes.
This development is particularly frustrating, since up to now UK .gov sites have generally been very standards compliant. In fact the open.gov.uk initiative even has a W3C standards statement. I quote:
"The most important aspect of publishing information on the internet is to ensure that it is available to all, not just a select few who happen to have the newest browser, all the latest plugins and a top of the range, superfast PC.
UK public sector information must be accessible, legible and fast to download."
And indeed, the vast majority ofThe EU Report on the Echelon System = "Oh, oh! Must encrypt ethernet, oe else..."
;)
(Well it's only one letter out
"Small island + tons of antennas"
380,000 sq km is hardly small. Around the same size as California, if I recall correctly. Much more densly populated, though.
And this is best seen by one of the few truly innovative Free Software projects: Galeon. In a very short time span it has moved from being just a lightweight replacement for Mozilla to what is IMO the best web browser available under any platform.
Consider a few of its features:
- Hybrid Tabbed/Windowed Mode: Browse in a combination of multiple windows (with DnD) and a tabbed notebook format (very useful for opening lots of messagess, or for popups to appear in). Fullscreen mode is also available.
- Advanced Filtering: per-site image blocking (for ads), popup disabling, advanced cookie management, and stopping JavaScript from writing annoying stuff in the status bar - to name a few.
- Advanced Bookmark Management: smart bookmarks (bookmarks with parameters - e.g. a google search box), ability to create multiple bookmark toolbars and attach bookmarks to right-click context menu, bookmark nicks, temporary bookmarks (for quick access), autobookmarks (generated from browsing history), dynamically generated portal site containing all your bookmarks (with a customizable style sheet), windows bookmark icon support, great bookmark editor...
- Advanced Session Support: session save and crash recovery, powerful searchable History dock (or window)
- Other Browsing Improvements: searches for regular expressions, up button to browse directory structure, easy font size control (size spinner, or wheelmouse),
...
- Great UI: quick access to useful features on a per-site basis (use own fonts, disable animated images, block images/cookies...), full keyboard support, customizable and unintrusive interface.
Add this to the huge number of other thriving GNOME/GTK+ applications (Evolution, GIMP, XMMS, Gnumeric, AbiWord, Dia, Guppi, gPhoto, Gnapster, Grip, X-Chat, Pan, Gabber, Gaim, and so on...), the continually improving user interface (task grouping in the task list, task control in the menu panel...), and the increasing number of well-designed bonobo components (very efficient embedded images, postscripts, pdfs, man pages, and so on...), and I think it's safe to say that rumours of GNOME's death are greatly exagerated....I strongly recommend reducing the number of slices to something like 5. If your pride can let you, that is (it's not easy admitting to yourself that the top-end computer you bought last year, is now legacy... *sigh*).
Yeah, that would be really cool! The Evolution executive-summary page and Nautilus sidebar also give easy access to RDF feeds (and CVS Nautilus is actually quick enough to make this worthwile ;-)
Until then though, I'd recommend that if people have time, they go browse www.xmltree.com, as a source of lots of useful (and useless) RDF feeds.
"Ars Technica puts it through its paces with a very thorough review."
:)
Thorough and interesting, yes, but also quite opiniated and arsey. Every point seems to become a 'huge, glaring misfeature', and they often assume that their way of doing things is automatically the right one.
For example, they got rather annoyed at Finder for truncating long names in the middle, rather than at the end (which, they claim, is clearly correct behaviour!). Personally, I quite enjoy being able to differentiate between "Complete System Backup - 01-04" and "Complete System Backup - 95-01". In fact, since the important information is usually either at the beinning of the name or at the end (version number, date, etc), Finder's approach seems quite sensible to me.
Ah well. At least they had lots of nice screenshots