OK - so you get 30-50 submissions per story that are usable...
Why not then pick one of those submissions that links to the story itself - rather than a submission that links to a blog that has innane commentary on a story and a link on to the real story.
Submissions that contain links that are directly relevant to the subject should IMHO be given priority over submissions containing indirect links.
I don't want to read a blog of somebody's opinion about a scientific discovery that gives a link to NewScientist - I'd rather read the NewScientist article directly.
Of course, as has been pointed out by other people, gravity is a two way thing so the spacecraft is pulling the asteroid towards it as well as the asteroid pulling the spacecraft. You exert a gravitational pull on the Earth - not enough to be of any significance mind you.
Some kind of ion drive would probably work for the rocket - they're very fuel efficient, can keep going for a long time, and they don't provide all that much acceleration which in this case would be useful. However they might have a problem moving a 20t ship.
One problem that concerned me on reading the brief, and was pointed out in the article, is they have to be careful with the rocket exhaust. Fire your rocket at the asteroid and it will push the asteroid away from you, negating part of the gravitational pull.
Another problem would be that the bulk of the ship mass would be fuel. This will inevitably reduce as the fuel gets spent, thus reducing the gravitational pull between the two objects and the deflection ability over time.
(All rockets, even ones driven by nuclear reactors, work by throwing matter out the back of the ship, pushing the ship off that matter.)
I checked the URLs this mirror uses for the images. They all point to the original host machine, thus are not mirrored.
Since the images are the bulk of the web page in question this mirror is basically worthless - all it's saved is the original host pumping out the HTML which is a small proportion of the demand.
So much for mirrordot dealing with the slashdot effect...
I'm an MCSD.NET - I have more than a passing familiarity with the.NET frameworks, C# and VB.NET. I'm also a Mac developer, with more than a passing familiarity of Cocoa and Objective-C.
About 90% of the things I can do in.NET have direct equivalents in Cocoa, and vice versa.
Yes, there is that other 10%... Those things have indirect equivalents between the two.
Thing is Cocoa and.NET use slightly different programming paradigms. Cocoa generally uses a clean MVC model to designing and building applications, encouraging clear separation between Model, View, and Controller objects..NET, on the other hand, is not as clean in its design and these roles are often slightly muddled. It can make moving between the two interesting..NET has a very small number of wizzier features than Cocoa which make it seem more developer friendly. Cocoa has a cleaner design which makes it actually more developer friendly.
The "lack of apps" is largely illusory. There's plenty of Mac apps if you go looking for them.
And you don't have to either. It's possible to use Obj-C classes from plain C.
Give me a way to use it with a language I'm comfortable with, or you've lost me. C++ would be nice. EcmaScript/JavaScript/ActionScript would be nice too. Maybe even Java.
Well, on the Mac Java is a supported language for most of Cocoa. Obj-C++ lets you mix in C++ code with Objective-C without needing to use the plain C calling conventions. Apple's widget stuff also gives some bridges to Cocoa for JavaScript.
GNUstep will catch up with Apple's stuff eventually.
GNUstep has a fairly complete implementation of CoreFoundation which includes a whole host of m18n support functionality.
Oolite had a few problems recompiling on Linux (and Windows) with GNUstep because it used a few features of the Mac OS X Cocoa libraries that haven't been completely implemented in GNUstep, especially in relation to OpenGL integration.
Graphics can be fairly easily changed. As has been pointed out elsewhere there's various skins for GNUStep that make it look quite pretty.
The default/original look and feel of GNUstep was closely modeled after NeXTstep. It's not pretty to our modern eyes, since we're now used to high-colour anti-aliased widgets all over the shop. We're not used to seeing a menu stack at the top left, and not used to seeing an essentially greyscale UI. Saying that GNUstep keeps its menus and options in strange places is only a reflection of what you're used to. Why is it less valid to put the main menu of an application in a stack at the top left than across the top of the screen, or the top of a window? Had you no conditioning about where a menu should be it wouldn't be so confusing. It's actually incredibly easy to get used to.
(Cue the "why do I have to get used to it" type whining here. Blah. I use Macs, Windows PCs, and a few varieties of Linux regularly - I have never had any problems adapting to the idiosyncracies of the various GUIs I come across. Yes, my favourite is the prettiest, which also happens to be the most powerful IMHO.)
I'm not discounting the importance of the appearance of a GUI completely, however you have to bear in mind that appearance is mostly a marketting issue, not a technology one.
The problem is that Cocoa is a moving target. Mac OS X 10.3 had a major update when they added in Data Bindings along with associated technologies of Key-Value Observing, Key-Value Coding and Key-Value Validation. 10.4 has had the addition of Core Data - there's quite a few new classes in that lot.
With a bit of luck though Gorm will get people more enthusiastic about GNUstep and bring more developers along to work on the core APIs, helping to fill in the gaps in Cocoa compatibility.
As we all know, how pretty your user interface looks is the best barometer of how easy it is to use, how simple it is to program for, how much leverage applications get from the underlying API, and how powerful applications written using the underlying toolkit will be.
American readers should append the word "NOT" onto the end of the last paragraph.
Gorm and GNUstep are mostly about the underlying API. It's possible to rapidly build incredibly powerful applications using Gorm - significantly faster than you can with the KDE or GNOME toolkits.
One slight jab at the precious Gnome or KDE and you're bound to get over-reactions from people who don't understand what GNUstep and Gorm are all about.
GNUstep is all about the API folks. It's a dynamic object oriented API. Alien concepts to GNOME and KDE folks who are used to their static C/C++ APIs. It lets very cool things be possible, as can be seen in the demonstration videos for Gorm.
The downers are it's a bit of a different paradigm, and effective use of the API requires a dynamic OO language such as Objective-C or SmallTalk. Obj-C is very easy to learn though - a few hours and you'll be flying.
By the logic that says that "America" is a single "super-continent" incorporating both North and South America, one must also say that Africa, Europe and Asia are also a single landmass/super-continent, apparently called Afrasia according to the Wikipedia.
This is however all rather absurd and meaningless IMHO, since very few people beyond a few odd historians have adopted this kind of model. Indeed it's only a small step to go from that to considering that Afrasia and America should be considered a single super-continent, since they were connected by a land-bridge in the not too distant past (only a few thousand years back - a mere blink of the eye really). And indeed Australia isn't all that disconnected from south east Asia, and Antarctica is not all that far away from the end of South America. Go down this path, and we all live on the same super-continent.
North and South America are no more the same continent than Europe, Asia and Africa are.
Having travelled around, I found that few people in the Americas consider the northern and southern continents to be the same thing. Many people I spoke with would like to be able to call themselves "American", since it's less clumsy than "South American" or "North American", but feel that the term is seriously tainted by the fact that people from the USA call themselves American, and they don't want to be associated with that country. Certainly none of my Canadian friends want to be described as American.
North and South America are separate continents that happen to share a name. They only have the same name because the Europeans that travelled over there and gave them those names didn't realise they were two different and distinct continents.
Scotty doesn't trade the formula for transparent aluminium for a small run of the stuff. He trades for a quantity of perspex.
Dr. Nichols says it'll take him "years to even calculate the matrix". Besides that, the stuff they delivered and installed was clearly perspex - it would have been much thinner had it been transparent aluminium.
The BBC claim that this utilises P2P technology. The fact that it also uses DRM is not incompatible with this - the two can live together just fine. There is no evidence at all that this does not use P2P, and you can distribute DRM'ed files over any existing P2P network. It is the player application that enforces the DRM.
The BBC are of course hosting the files themselves on their own servers, and these are high bandwidth seeds in the P2P network.
It'll be a cold day in hell when a Korean institution drops support for IE. There's basically nothing but Windows in Korea - mostly Win98 at that.
Very few web sites in Korea work correctly on anything besides IE - you're SOL if you want to access your bank in Korea from a Mac, Linux, or using Firefox.
This kind of isolationist shite is why the world hates the US.
Your dumb customers probably really do think that they don't need international email. Of course they probably also don't understand that a great many addresses in root domains (.com,.org, and.net) are servers outside the US.
Most of the time on the Internet you don't have a clue as to what country the person is in that you're communicating with. The guy that wrote that cool application you like might write in perfect English, and be in England of all places, not the USA, for example.
But please keep the blocks in place. Us foreigners don't want such small minded xenophobes on the internet.
Yeah, there is the problem with iTunes that some material is available on one store that's not available on others.
I work for a music download web site, and we suffer from the same problem. We haven't gone down the store per country route that iTunes has - we have just one store which serves the whole world. We also don't have DRM, which helps make our lives easier. However the material we get from many record labels is restricted for sale in certain countries. These rights vary immensely from one label, artist, and even album and track to another. We have to ensure that people can only buy tracks that we are allowed to sell them. It's a gnarly problem.
The reason for this is that the rights for sale in certain material gets licensed to other labels for different territories. This is usually a physical world thing. The idea is that a label might be able to effectively market to the US, but may not have the time, budget, or market knowledge to effectively operate in Europe, or vice-versa. You therefore get European labels licensing material from US labels, and US labels licensing European material. There's also the manufacture and distribution problem to take into account, which especially applies to small labels.
For breaking acts and large established acts this often happens as the labels try to exploit their material to the best of their ability. Changing rights is also a big problem for us, where we get labels inform us that from a certain date we're no longer allowed to sell certain releases in certain places.
In the new digital world we will start seeing more and more material available globally. However this will remain a problem for many years to come, and existing material that is released on multiple labels in different countries will stay that way.
Curiously though the Mac mini has within it what appears to be most of the circuitry for an iPod dock connector.
So if we do have an Apple DVR based on the mini then the iPod would appear to have a role in this world as a portable storage unit, and for good measure it will probably also be able to play movies.
GPUs are of course specialist processors and not the same as CPUs as you state - I am well aware of the one letter difference. However my understanding is that the processing units in GPUs are rather similar to the likes of the SSE units within Pentium's and Altivec units in PowerPC chips. They are essentially linear vector processors, from what I understand.
We're talking about algorithms here - if you can express an algorithm in code for one type of processor chip then you can express it in code for another type of chip. That's a basic of programming that everyone here should understand. Your statement that GPUsort can't run on a CPU is false.
Now it may be impractical to implement GPUsort on a CPU, but it's not impossible.
Presumably though the algorithm they used in GPUsort can be made to work on a Pentium IV. Comparing only against qsort looks suspicious to me - they should have compared GPUsort on the CPU as well as with it on the GPU and qsort.
This isn't exactly a fair test as I see it. As far as I can make out they've put a custom sorting algorithm up against the standard C library qsort. How about some comparisons of this GPUsort against other sorting algorithms run on the CPU?
The real, simple, explanation for why the Newton failed was the marketting emphasis on handwriting recognition, as Tesler said in his piece.
Apple UK's Newton division realised this. One of their favorite standard demos was an app that I wrote for Cannon, an interactive sales guide for colour photocopiers. The key to the app was it didn't use any handwriting; all interaction was just tapping. It really sold on what such machines are good at.
Tapping on things was really what the Newton and all other well designed handheld apps are all about. Anything that relies heavily on other forms of input tends to be very cumbersome, even today.
Personally the recogniser usually worked quite well for me. It's sad that handwriting recognition gets all the attention too - Newton had great shape and gesture recognisers too.
Finally, it is curious that the standard PocketPC handwriting recognition software is exactly the same recogniser as the first generation Newton. You hear few complaints these days about its quality, probably because having learnt from Apple's mistake Microsoft doesn't make a big fuss about handwriting recognition.
China has a population of about 1.3 billion. The USA has a population of about 295 million. South Korea has a population of approximately 48 million, less than a fifth that of the US, and under 1/20th that of China, yet it has about half the number of zombies of the US.
Proportionally South Korea is by far the worst offender on the list.
How difficult is it to keep your OS up to date and run virus scanners?
The "May Top 10" chart on CipherTrust's web site of course features the "European Union", yet on the same list we see Germany, France, UK and Spain, all member states of the EU.
Slashdot Mirror
OK - so you get 30-50 submissions per story that are usable...
Why not then pick one of those submissions that links to the story itself - rather than a submission that links to a blog that has innane commentary on a story and a link on to the real story.
Submissions that contain links that are directly relevant to the subject should IMHO be given priority over submissions containing indirect links.
I don't want to read a blog of somebody's opinion about a scientific discovery that gives a link to NewScientist - I'd rather read the NewScientist article directly.
Of course, as has been pointed out by other people, gravity is a two way thing so the spacecraft is pulling the asteroid towards it as well as the asteroid pulling the spacecraft. You exert a gravitational pull on the Earth - not enough to be of any significance mind you.
Some kind of ion drive would probably work for the rocket - they're very fuel efficient, can keep going for a long time, and they don't provide all that much acceleration which in this case would be useful. However they might have a problem moving a 20t ship.
One problem that concerned me on reading the brief, and was pointed out in the article, is they have to be careful with the rocket exhaust. Fire your rocket at the asteroid and it will push the asteroid away from you, negating part of the gravitational pull.
Another problem would be that the bulk of the ship mass would be fuel. This will inevitably reduce as the fuel gets spent, thus reducing the gravitational pull between the two objects and the deflection ability over time.
(All rockets, even ones driven by nuclear reactors, work by throwing matter out the back of the ship, pushing the ship off that matter.)
The idea though does seem pretty credible to me.
I checked the URLs this mirror uses for the images. They all point to the original host machine, thus are not mirrored.
Since the images are the bulk of the web page in question this mirror is basically worthless - all it's saved is the original host pumping out the HTML which is a small proportion of the demand.
So much for mirrordot dealing with the slashdot effect...
Nice troll there.
.NET frameworks, C# and VB.NET. I'm also a Mac developer, with more than a passing familiarity of Cocoa and Objective-C.
.NET have direct equivalents in Cocoa, and vice versa.
.NET use slightly different programming paradigms. Cocoa generally uses a clean MVC model to designing and building applications, encouraging clear separation between Model, View, and Controller objects. .NET, on the other hand, is not as clean in its design and these roles are often slightly muddled. It can make moving between the two interesting. .NET has a very small number of wizzier features than Cocoa which make it seem more developer friendly. Cocoa has a cleaner design which makes it actually more developer friendly.
I'm an MCSD.NET - I have more than a passing familiarity with the
About 90% of the things I can do in
Yes, there is that other 10%... Those things have indirect equivalents between the two.
Thing is Cocoa and
The "lack of apps" is largely illusory. There's plenty of Mac apps if you go looking for them.
I don't *want* to use Obj-C or Smalltalk.
And you don't have to either. It's possible to use Obj-C classes from plain C.
Give me a way to use it with a language I'm comfortable with, or you've lost me. C++ would be nice. EcmaScript/JavaScript/ActionScript would be nice too. Maybe even Java.
Well, on the Mac Java is a supported language for most of Cocoa. Obj-C++ lets you mix in C++ code with Objective-C without needing to use the plain C calling conventions. Apple's widget stuff also gives some bridges to Cocoa for JavaScript.
GNUstep will catch up with Apple's stuff eventually.
GNUstep has a fairly complete implementation of CoreFoundation which includes a whole host of m18n support functionality.
Oolite had a few problems recompiling on Linux (and Windows) with GNUstep because it used a few features of the Mac OS X Cocoa libraries that haven't been completely implemented in GNUstep, especially in relation to OpenGL integration.
Graphics can be fairly easily changed. As has been pointed out elsewhere there's various skins for GNUStep that make it look quite pretty.
The default/original look and feel of GNUstep was closely modeled after NeXTstep. It's not pretty to our modern eyes, since we're now used to high-colour anti-aliased widgets all over the shop. We're not used to seeing a menu stack at the top left, and not used to seeing an essentially greyscale UI. Saying that GNUstep keeps its menus and options in strange places is only a reflection of what you're used to. Why is it less valid to put the main menu of an application in a stack at the top left than across the top of the screen, or the top of a window? Had you no conditioning about where a menu should be it wouldn't be so confusing. It's actually incredibly easy to get used to.
(Cue the "why do I have to get used to it" type whining here. Blah. I use Macs, Windows PCs, and a few varieties of Linux regularly - I have never had any problems adapting to the idiosyncracies of the various GUIs I come across. Yes, my favourite is the prettiest, which also happens to be the most powerful IMHO.)
I'm not discounting the importance of the appearance of a GUI completely, however you have to bear in mind that appearance is mostly a marketting issue, not a technology one.
Good luck to them with the Cocoa compatibility.
The problem is that Cocoa is a moving target. Mac OS X 10.3 had a major update when they added in Data Bindings along with associated technologies of Key-Value Observing, Key-Value Coding and Key-Value Validation. 10.4 has had the addition of Core Data - there's quite a few new classes in that lot.
With a bit of luck though Gorm will get people more enthusiastic about GNUstep and bring more developers along to work on the core APIs, helping to fill in the gaps in Cocoa compatibility.
Yes folks.
As we all know, how pretty your user interface looks is the best barometer of how easy it is to use, how simple it is to program for, how much leverage applications get from the underlying API, and how powerful applications written using the underlying toolkit will be.
American readers should append the word "NOT" onto the end of the last paragraph.
Gorm and GNUstep are mostly about the underlying API. It's possible to rapidly build incredibly powerful applications using Gorm - significantly faster than you can with the KDE or GNOME toolkits.
Here here!
One slight jab at the precious Gnome or KDE and you're bound to get over-reactions from people who don't understand what GNUstep and Gorm are all about.
GNUstep is all about the API folks. It's a dynamic object oriented API. Alien concepts to GNOME and KDE folks who are used to their static C/C++ APIs. It lets very cool things be possible, as can be seen in the demonstration videos for Gorm.
The downers are it's a bit of a different paradigm, and effective use of the API requires a dynamic OO language such as Objective-C or SmallTalk. Obj-C is very easy to learn though - a few hours and you'll be flying.
By the logic that says that "America" is a single "super-continent" incorporating both North and South America, one must also say that Africa, Europe and Asia are also a single landmass/super-continent, apparently called Afrasia according to the Wikipedia.
This is however all rather absurd and meaningless IMHO, since very few people beyond a few odd historians have adopted this kind of model. Indeed it's only a small step to go from that to considering that Afrasia and America should be considered a single super-continent, since they were connected by a land-bridge in the not too distant past (only a few thousand years back - a mere blink of the eye really). And indeed Australia isn't all that disconnected from south east Asia, and Antarctica is not all that far away from the end of South America. Go down this path, and we all live on the same super-continent.
North and South America are no more the same continent than Europe, Asia and Africa are.
Having travelled around, I found that few people in the Americas consider the northern and southern continents to be the same thing. Many people I spoke with would like to be able to call themselves "American", since it's less clumsy than "South American" or "North American", but feel that the term is seriously tainted by the fact that people from the USA call themselves American, and they don't want to be associated with that country. Certainly none of my Canadian friends want to be described as American.
North and South America are separate continents that happen to share a name. They only have the same name because the Europeans that travelled over there and gave them those names didn't realise they were two different and distinct continents.
OK, but WHY did they have to get perspex?
:-)
Easy. Because it wouldn't have looked as cool.
Scotty doesn't trade the formula for transparent aluminium for a small run of the stuff. He trades for a quantity of perspex.
Dr. Nichols says it'll take him "years to even calculate the matrix". Besides that, the stuff they delivered and installed was clearly perspex - it would have been much thinner had it been transparent aluminium.
The BBC claim that this utilises P2P technology. The fact that it also uses DRM is not incompatible with this - the two can live together just fine. There is no evidence at all that this does not use P2P, and you can distribute DRM'ed files over any existing P2P network. It is the player application that enforces the DRM.
The BBC are of course hosting the files themselves on their own servers, and these are high bandwidth seeds in the P2P network.
It'll be a cold day in hell when a Korean institution drops support for IE. There's basically nothing but Windows in Korea - mostly Win98 at that.
Very few web sites in Korea work correctly on anything besides IE - you're SOL if you want to access your bank in Korea from a Mac, Linux, or using Firefox.
This kind of isolationist shite is why the world hates the US.
.org, and .net) are servers outside the US.
Your dumb customers probably really do think that they don't need international email. Of course they probably also don't understand that a great many addresses in root domains (.com,
Most of the time on the Internet you don't have a clue as to what country the person is in that you're communicating with. The guy that wrote that cool application you like might write in perfect English, and be in England of all places, not the USA, for example.
But please keep the blocks in place. Us foreigners don't want such small minded xenophobes on the internet.
Yeah - it definitely seems screwed.
I usually browse at +5, which means I'm looking at a front page here with no comments to read on any article.
Yeah, there is the problem with iTunes that some material is available on one store that's not available on others.
I work for a music download web site, and we suffer from the same problem. We haven't gone down the store per country route that iTunes has - we have just one store which serves the whole world. We also don't have DRM, which helps make our lives easier. However the material we get from many record labels is restricted for sale in certain countries. These rights vary immensely from one label, artist, and even album and track to another. We have to ensure that people can only buy tracks that we are allowed to sell them. It's a gnarly problem.
The reason for this is that the rights for sale in certain material gets licensed to other labels for different territories. This is usually a physical world thing. The idea is that a label might be able to effectively market to the US, but may not have the time, budget, or market knowledge to effectively operate in Europe, or vice-versa. You therefore get European labels licensing material from US labels, and US labels licensing European material. There's also the manufacture and distribution problem to take into account, which especially applies to small labels.
For breaking acts and large established acts this often happens as the labels try to exploit their material to the best of their ability. Changing rights is also a big problem for us, where we get labels inform us that from a certain date we're no longer allowed to sell certain releases in certain places.
In the new digital world we will start seeing more and more material available globally. However this will remain a problem for many years to come, and existing material that is released on multiple labels in different countries will stay that way.
Agreed.
Curiously though the Mac mini has within it what appears to be most of the circuitry for an iPod dock connector.
So if we do have an Apple DVR based on the mini then the iPod would appear to have a role in this world as a portable storage unit, and for good measure it will probably also be able to play movies.
:-)
In this case the beer afterwards should, of course, be at Scotland Yard, the pub, on The Esplanade. A very nice pub.
I miss living in Toronto.
Chill dude!
GPUs are of course specialist processors and not the same as CPUs as you state - I am well aware of the one letter difference. However my understanding is that the processing units in GPUs are rather similar to the likes of the SSE units within Pentium's and Altivec units in PowerPC chips. They are essentially linear vector processors, from what I understand.
We're talking about algorithms here - if you can express an algorithm in code for one type of processor chip then you can express it in code for another type of chip. That's a basic of programming that everyone here should understand. Your statement that GPUsort can't run on a CPU is false.
Now it may be impractical to implement GPUsort on a CPU, but it's not impossible.
Presumably though the algorithm they used in GPUsort can be made to work on a Pentium IV. Comparing only against qsort looks suspicious to me - they should have compared GPUsort on the CPU as well as with it on the GPU and qsort.
This isn't exactly a fair test as I see it. As far as I can make out they've put a custom sorting algorithm up against the standard C library qsort. How about some comparisons of this GPUsort against other sorting algorithms run on the CPU?
The real, simple, explanation for why the Newton failed was the marketting emphasis on handwriting recognition, as Tesler said in his piece.
Apple UK's Newton division realised this. One of their favorite standard demos was an app that I wrote for Cannon, an interactive sales guide for colour photocopiers. The key to the app was it didn't use any handwriting; all interaction was just tapping. It really sold on what such machines are good at.
Tapping on things was really what the Newton and all other well designed handheld apps are all about. Anything that relies heavily on other forms of input tends to be very cumbersome, even today.
Personally the recogniser usually worked quite well for me. It's sad that handwriting recognition gets all the attention too - Newton had great shape and gesture recognisers too.
Finally, it is curious that the standard PocketPC handwriting recognition software is exactly the same recogniser as the first generation Newton. You hear few complaints these days about its quality, probably because having learnt from Apple's mistake Microsoft doesn't make a big fuss about handwriting recognition.
As ever there are lies, damn lies and statistics.
China has a population of about 1.3 billion. The USA has a population of about 295 million. South Korea has a population of approximately 48 million, less than a fifth that of the US, and under 1/20th that of China, yet it has about half the number of zombies of the US.
Proportionally South Korea is by far the worst offender on the list.
How difficult is it to keep your OS up to date and run virus scanners?
The "May Top 10" chart on CipherTrust's web site of course features the "European Union", yet on the same list we see Germany, France, UK and Spain, all member states of the EU.