Slightly OT, but just to mention that imaging microwave radar (as those mounted in the ENVISAT or ERS satellites, for example) is also being used to monitor small changes in elevation, using a technique based on interferometric SAR (which is behind the Shuttle Radar Topography Mission.
The benefit of using a satellite orbiting around the Earth is that you don't need to deploy all the "base stations". If you want to find out more, google for "differential interferometry" or somesuch:-)
I guess that they are using differential GPS, by which the time delay at a known location is compared to the time-delay at the location of interest. This enables for very accurate estimation of where you are.
On the other hand, at least in California (where they have a GPS network for earthquake monitoring), the network might well be permanent, hence you can do a nice sort of averaging over time. We have found that even with normal GPS, you get nice accuracies over a time period.
For many administrations, the political point of Free Software is clear: no vendor lock-in, spurn local economy and so on. While this works quite well in places like Germany at all levels within the administration, in other areas, where the "Free Software Fever" has only caught partial areas of interest, M$ is doing just what it says in the memo. For example, in Peru.
Last week, Steve Ballmer was in Spain. which some of you might know spurned the Linex Linux distribution (in Spanish), proposed a small autonomous community (a bit like a state, for the benefit of American Slashdot readers:D), which is now being deployed in other autonomouse communities, as seen here.
Steve Ballmer was giving Free Software a bollocing, saying that it was a waste of time and so on. I didn't see the story in/., but it was covered in both Barrapunto (the Spanish-speaking/.), and in some other blogs. Ballmer offered the Spanish government 25 M EUR worth of software (by that, read Windows/Office licenses) for education.
Clearly, M$ is seeing that local efforts can be thwarted by giving 500000US$ (in the case of Peru), or 25M ? (in the case of Spain) worth of licenses. The aim is to stop the local movements spreading, as it is seen in Spain (where other regions are taking interest in Linex) to a national level. In Germany, as the push comes from the top (or so it seems), these techniques don't work.
We'll see where all this leds us to in a few years, tho'...
Well, the topic says it all:D. The Gnutemberg Free Documentation Database has links to a large(ish) number of documents written using Free (FDL and the like) licenses.
I'd really like to see a simple plug-in that adds only one visible element to the standard interface, a smiley/frownie face, ala iCab [www.icab.de], that indicates whether the HTML of the page actually validates to the DTD declared in the document itself. Clicking on a frownie face would bring up a list of validation errors.
There is a simple solution, and it is to use JS favelets that connect to the W3 server with the URL details. Basically, you need a link to a JS link, such as this:
javascript:window.open('http://validator.w3.org/ch eck?uri='+location);void%200 (and I'm just copying and pasteing from my website). You can put this in the navigation bar, and off you go:-)
There are plenty of bookmarklets which are quite useful. Some of them:
In my (limited) experience, it really boils down to disk access. If you have nice fast, mean SCSI disks, the the boot-up time improves dramatically (both on Windows and Linux). I can't give any figures, because we did the test at work. But it was a significant increase.
This is not to say that OOo boots quickly or is perfect, but maybe to suggest what the cause of the problem is (are there any "armchair programmers", similar to "armchair generals"?):D)
Having said that, CSS makes it difficult to do some things that tables can do easily (columnar layout), which is why many people still use very simple tables for basic layout, without going to the extremes of spacer gifs, multiply-nested tables, etc.
I take offence to that:-) !! It is quite simple to do. For some examples, see Glish.com, or (shameless plug) a site I have mostly finished coding:-)
A problem with CSS layouts is that the table hacks (by now pretty much standarised in most usual browsers) need to be translated into CSS hacks. Stuff like Gecko, newer IE, Opera and all are making progress, but still hacks are needed.
The beauty of XHTML+CSS layouts is that if you don't have the latest compliant browser, the page should still be useable in your browser. As an example, a website I put up for some course I taught in the past at skint.shef.ac.uk is still useable if you for example disable JS (I use a very crude hack to select what CSS to serve depending on the offending browser).
And yes, I know it is a crass way of doing things, but I don't have time to do all the hacks so that the site works in NN4, Gecko, Opera and IE.
Only useful for dynamic sites?
on
Gzip on a PCI card
·
· Score: 2, Interesting
I guess that this would only be useful for dynamic sites, wouldn't it? Otherwise, static pages would be cached on the server, only needing compression the first time they are served:-?
At any rate, most of the visitors to my site rarely get the gzipped pages, as their browsers don't seem to support it:(
Re:Separating Content from Presentation a Good Thi
on
Office 2003 and XML
·
· Score: 1
I think the point is that if you save to their XML specification, you will loose all your document formatting.
Indeed. See how OpenOffice deals with the problem: you get a zip archive with a file called content.xml, with your text. Equataions are stored in something similar (or possibly in) MathML... The rest of the files in the archive have all the other information that would be stored in the the standard.doc document.
While much of the talk here is about either seeing celebrities naked baking under the Mediterranean sun or spying axis-of-evil governments and the such, the main use these images will have is that they are the first imagery of the Earth from space available. They do record images of the poles from where ice cover can be estimated. Again, forest cover can also be estimated from a time before civilian satellites were a reality. In other words, these images provide us remote sensing data from quite a long while ago. This should help the investigation of better climatic models and so on.
There's a book by Gilbert Strang. I have only browsed through it, but it looked reasonable. If any of his previous work on linear algebra (and applied maths in general) can be used as a metric for the quality of this one, it could be a very good piece of work.
I guess this is good news. For a start, it is quite important to us European what the EU recommends. A well-funded, unbiased and "robust" study of Linux and free software should be welcomed. To start with, it will provide Linux with plenty of limelight. It will also point out things which need to be sorted out, and it will give more clout to people in European (or elsewhere) organisations that need pretty PDF documents with "this page is left blank intentionally" in order to be convinced.
It would be great if this study actually comes up with reasonable comments and maybe a HOWTO. If you speak Spanish, you can see what I guess is the desired output of this project (as applied to one of Spain's ministeries) here. Also, note that this is mainly a desktop study, not a server or file format study (the EU has already carred out a number of these in the past). So someone is taking Linux seriously!:-)
And the biggest advantage of this solution is also brought up the the press release: "SuSE Linux Office Desktop seamlessly enables the continued use of existing data".
I agree, and while I may be wandering off-topic...
I think that seamless integration with older MS OFfice is a must. To start with, while everyone at your workplace might love OOo, people outside might not. So you still get all these e-mail attachments which sortta work on OOo. My question is whether it would be feasible to have a single computer in your organisation's network which runs MS Office, it receives the documents which are problematic, opens them in the proper MS office, and then saves them as OOs XML documents. The advantage is that MS Office is guaranteed to read the document in as it is intended (or close enough:D), and because.sxw is an open format, the rendering could be implemented easily (ish).
Of course, I don't know how to program anything for office, but this could get over the problem of having a free suite that covers with around 90% of the documents being used, and having this as a solution for the other 10%.
Apologies for the off-topic and (possibly) mis-informed rant.
A couple of years ago, we had submitted a bid for a (substantial) research contract. The results of the bid were held in the website, but were easily reached by typing the correct URL. Indeed, we found out about it just by using their search engine, which did index the offending pages. We were aware of the bid not being succesful (sigh!) about a week before the official announcement. It was a bit embarassing when at the official announcement most of the institutions who had not been succesful had all had a good excuse for not turning up:-)
Interesting article, and a suggestion...
on
Benchmarks For gcc-3.1
·
· Score: 3, Interesting
In reality, what the article is showing is that the GCC team
have optimised the gcc compiler by a great deal in a very short
amount of time. They deserve recognition for this.
One of the reasons for using gcc is that it compiles my code everywhere
without any headaches. I develop on GNU/Linux, and run
the code on Solaris (sometimes on SGI, but not too often).
The code runs as expected. What would be interesting to see
is how well gcc compares to optimised compilers on other
non-x86 architectures. For my code, gcc is slower than Sun's CC,
but I am using an oldish version of gcc.
There's Zope, which has a number of projects to put courses online. I have considered using ZQuest.
It is easy to use and easy to administer. Moreover, once it is installed, it is fairly easy to deal with "teacher" accounts (so that other teachers can publish their stuff). It's easy to use for the end user as well, and can be translated into a number of languages out of the box. There's a demo website for ZQuest.
There is quite a lot of interest in PF in the radar remote sensing community. However, one of the most interesting things that RS (EO for American/. readers:D) is the fact that it can produce (I hope) accurate predictions of crop yield. This is very important, as agricultural logistics can be simplified a lot by knowing even small time/yeild differentials.
The fact that radar is all-weather, night and day also means that it can be used in countries such as the UK, where the presence of clouds would be a major hassle:-) Some links:
OK, I come from an amiga background, and I am quite happy to see developments on the Amiga front still happening. On the other hand, I am puzzled, as I do not know how the Amiga is being used today, and why people bother starting companies with it. I don't understand why you'd want to pay 150 euro for this emulator when Apidya II works fine on UAE:-) You seem to get some software with it, but that's not particularly ground-breaking software (or is it? A WP, a graphics package...).
I don't know, I just don't see the point of pushing the Amiga further like that. I'd be quite happy to play around with an amiga-ish system, but _not_ for that kind of cash.
I know I'm going to get flamed for this, but here it goes anyway...
I do use a mix'n'match approach to mathematical programming. Usually, I deal with numerical methods, and in principle, all languages are good. However, I find that using Fortran95 (see, you were going to flame me) I code faster and easily to-maintain code. The compilers (though not Free as of yet, but see the G95 homepage) produce fast code, which is easy to port between my Linux box and the Tru64, Solaris boxen in some of the labs.
Another good option is python. The numerical extension and the many modules already developed make it really nice (and quite fast). Additionally, you can add C and Fortran routines to it.
For profiling, I tend to use either Octave or Scilab, and then convert that on to F95
Disclaimer: I am not particularly savvy when
it comes to CRM or stuff like that.
However, by looking at the sourceforge list, it looks as if
there is an overlap of different projects trying to achieve
exactly the same thing. Am I right in thinking this? I guess
that a good package, which is easy to customise (maybe using
python or scheme, and maybe using point-and-click approaches
for some tasks) would be really useful.
Just a question: is this distribution's approach similar to the BSDs?
I think if not the same, it is very similar to the ports system,
a very useful and clever approach in a lot of respects.
On the other hand, I don't think that many people would
be that keen to recompile KDE/Gnome
from scratch every time! Specially in legacy (i.e., more than
3 months old) hardware. However, for a (say) dedicated
web server or something like that, it might have its uses...
I have been using 2.4.16 on one of my server boxen for about a month. Usually the load is low (it is a webserver with proftpd used for teaching). However, when the load rises (students uploading stuff and viewing pages), the response of the FTP server used to drop greatly, up to one or two minutes _just_ to get a directory listing (with 5 or 6 simultaneous users). With the new kernel, the response is much improved, and directory listings take a maximum of 10 seconds, even under high load. Note that this is in an oldish computer (486/66), with not that much memory.
In this case, the new kernels have made a major difference.
Slashdot Mirror
Slightly OT, but just to mention that imaging microwave radar (as those mounted in the ENVISAT or ERS satellites, for example) is also being used to monitor small changes in elevation, using a technique based on interferometric SAR (which is behind the Shuttle Radar Topography Mission.
The benefit of using a satellite orbiting around the Earth is that you don't need to deploy all the "base stations". If you want to find out more, google for "differential interferometry" or somesuch :-)
I guess that they are using differential GPS, by which the time delay at a known location is compared to the time-delay at the location of interest. This enables for very accurate estimation of where you are.
On the other hand, at least in California (where they have a GPS network for earthquake monitoring), the network might well be permanent, hence you can do a nice sort of averaging over time. We have found that even with normal GPS, you get nice accuracies over a time period.
For many administrations, the political point of Free Software is clear: no vendor lock-in, spurn local economy and so on. While this works quite well in places like Germany at all levels within the administration, in other areas, where the "Free Software Fever" has only caught partial areas of interest, M$ is doing just what it says in the memo. For example, in Peru.
Last week, Steve Ballmer was in Spain. which some of you might know spurned the Linex Linux distribution (in Spanish), proposed a small autonomous community (a bit like a state, for the benefit of American Slashdot readers :D), which is now being deployed in other autonomouse communities, as seen here.
Steve Ballmer was giving Free Software a bollocing, saying that it was a waste of time and so on. I didn't see the story in /., but it was covered in both Barrapunto (the Spanish-speaking /.), and in some other blogs. Ballmer offered the Spanish government 25 M EUR worth of software (by that, read Windows/Office licenses) for education.
Clearly, M$ is seeing that local efforts can be thwarted by giving 500000US$ (in the case of Peru), or 25M ? (in the case of Spain) worth of licenses. The aim is to stop the local movements spreading, as it is seen in Spain (where other regions are taking interest in Linex) to a national level. In Germany, as the push comes from the top (or so it seems), these techniques don't work.
We'll see where all this leds us to in a few years, tho'...
Well, the topic says it all :D. The Gnutemberg Free Documentation Database has links to a large(ish) number of documents written using Free (FDL and the like) licenses.
The big plus of GFDD is that not only can you find programming manuals and so on, but also a number of course notes, such as "A Radically Modern Approach to Introductory Physics".
There is a simple solution, and it is to use JS favelets that connect to the W3 server with the URL details. Basically, you need a link to a JS link, such as this: javascript:window.open('http://validator.w3.org/ch eck?uri='+location);void%200 (and I'm just copying and pasteing from my website). You can put this in the navigation bar, and off you go :-)
There are plenty of bookmarklets which are quite useful. Some of them:
I am sure there are many more cool uses around
--
Free as in freedom
In my (limited) experience, it really boils down to disk access. If you have nice fast, mean SCSI disks, the the boot-up time improves dramatically (both on Windows and Linux). I can't give any figures, because we did the test at work. But it was a significant increase.
This is not to say that OOo boots quickly or is perfect, but maybe to suggest what the cause of the problem is (are there any "armchair programmers", similar to "armchair generals"?) :D)
I take offence to that
A problem with CSS layouts is that the table hacks (by now pretty much standarised in most usual browsers) need to be translated into CSS hacks. Stuff like Gecko, newer IE, Opera and all are making progress, but still hacks are needed. The beauty of XHTML+CSS layouts is that if you don't have the latest compliant browser, the page should still be useable in your browser. As an example, a website I put up for some course I taught in the past at skint.shef.ac.uk is still useable if you for example disable JS (I use a very crude hack to select what CSS to serve depending on the offending browser).
And yes, I know it is a crass way of doing things, but I don't have time to do all the hacks so that the site works in NN4, Gecko, Opera and IE.
I guess that this would only be useful for dynamic sites, wouldn't it? Otherwise, static pages would be cached on the server, only needing compression the first time they are served :-? :(
At any rate, most of the visitors to my site rarely get the gzipped pages, as their browsers don't seem to support it
Absolutely! Now, if only we could have the same for Word (for Excel, gnumeric/OOo work quite well), that'll be it!
While much of the talk here is about either seeing celebrities naked baking under the Mediterranean sun or spying axis-of-evil governments and the such, the main use these images will have is that they are the first imagery of the Earth from space available. They do record images of the poles from where ice cover can be estimated. Again, forest cover can also be estimated from a time before civilian satellites were a reality. In other words, these images provide us remote sensing data from quite a long while ago. This should help the investigation of better climatic models and so on.
There's a book by Gilbert Strang. I have only browsed through it, but it looked reasonable. If any of his previous work on linear algebra (and applied maths in general) can be used as a metric for the quality of this one, it could be a very good piece of work.
I guess this is good news. For a start, it is quite important to us European what the EU recommends. A well-funded, unbiased and "robust" study of Linux and free software should be welcomed. To start with, it will provide Linux with plenty of limelight. It will also point out things which need to be sorted out, and it will give more clout to people in European (or elsewhere) organisations that need pretty PDF documents with "this page is left blank intentionally" in order to be convinced. :-)
It would be great if this study actually comes up with reasonable comments and maybe a HOWTO. If you speak Spanish, you can see what I guess is the desired output of this project (as applied to one of Spain's ministeries) here.
Also, note that this is mainly a desktop study, not a server or file format study (the EU has already carred out a number of these in the past). So someone is taking Linux seriously!
I think that seamless integration with older MS OFfice is a must. To start with, while everyone at your workplace might love OOo, people outside might not. So you still get all these e-mail attachments which sortta work on OOo. My question is whether it would be feasible to have a single computer in your organisation's network which runs MS Office, it receives the documents which are problematic, opens them in the proper MS office, and then saves them as OOs XML documents. The advantage is that MS Office is guaranteed to read the document in as it is intended (or close enough
Of course, I don't know how to program anything for office, but this could get over the problem of having a free suite that covers with around 90% of the documents being used, and having this as a solution for the other 10%.
Apologies for the off-topic and (possibly) mis-informed rant.
A couple of years ago, we had submitted a bid for a (substantial) research contract. The results of the bid were held in the website, but were easily reached by typing the correct URL. Indeed, we found out about it just by using their search engine, which did index the offending pages. We were aware of the bid not being succesful (sigh!) about a week before the official announcement. It was a bit embarassing when at the official announcement most of the institutions who had not been succesful had all had a good excuse for not turning up :-)
In reality, what the article is showing is that the GCC team have optimised the gcc compiler by a great deal in a very short amount of time. They deserve recognition for this. One of the reasons for using gcc is that it compiles my code everywhere without any headaches. I develop on GNU/Linux, and run the code on Solaris (sometimes on SGI, but not too often). The code runs as expected. What would be interesting to see is how well gcc compares to optimised compilers on other non-x86 architectures. For my code, gcc is slower than Sun's CC, but I am using an oldish version of gcc.
There's Zope, which has a number of projects to put courses online. I have considered using ZQuest. It is easy to use and easy to administer. Moreover, once it is installed, it is fairly easy to deal with "teacher" accounts (so that other teachers can publish their stuff). It's easy to use for the end user as well, and can be translated into a number of languages out of the box. There's a demo website for ZQuest.
The fact that radar is all-weather, night and day also means that it can be used in countries such as the UK, where the presence of clouds would be a major hassle
Some links:
NA Software (and I don't work for them)
OK, I come from an amiga background, and I am quite happy to see developments on the Amiga front still happening. On the other hand, I am puzzled, as I do not know how the Amiga is being used today, and why people bother starting companies with it. I don't understand why you'd want to pay 150 euro for this emulator when Apidya II works fine on UAE :-) You seem to get some software with it, but that's not particularly ground-breaking software (or is it? A WP, a graphics package...).
I don't know, I just don't see the point of pushing the Amiga further like that. I'd be quite happy to play around with an amiga-ish system, but _not_ for that kind of cash.
I know I'm going to get flamed for this, but here it goes anyway...
I do use a mix'n'match approach to mathematical programming. Usually, I deal with numerical methods, and in principle, all languages are good. However, I find that using Fortran95 (see, you were going to flame me) I code faster and easily to-maintain code. The compilers (though not Free as of yet, but see the G95 homepage) produce fast code, which is easy to port between my Linux box and the Tru64, Solaris boxen in some of the labs.
Another good option is python. The numerical extension and the many modules already developed make it really nice (and quite fast). Additionally, you can add C and Fortran routines to it.
For profiling, I tend to use either Octave or Scilab, and then convert that on to F95
For non-numerical stuff, macsyma is quite nice
Disclaimer: I am not particularly savvy when it comes to CRM or stuff like that.
However, by looking at the sourceforge list, it looks as if there is an overlap of different projects trying to achieve exactly the same thing. Am I right in thinking this? I guess that a good package, which is easy to customise (maybe using python or scheme, and maybe using point-and-click approaches for some tasks) would be really useful.
Just a question: is this distribution's approach similar to the BSDs? I think if not the same, it is very similar to the ports system, a very useful and clever approach in a lot of respects.
On the other hand, I don't think that many people would be that keen to recompile KDE/Gnome from scratch every time! Specially in legacy (i.e., more than 3 months old) hardware. However, for a (say) dedicated web server or something like that, it might have its uses...
I have been using 2.4.16 on one of my server boxen for about a month. Usually the load is low (it is a webserver with proftpd used for teaching). However, when the load rises (students uploading stuff and viewing pages), the response of the FTP server used to drop greatly, up to one or two minutes _just_ to get a directory listing (with 5 or 6 simultaneous users). With the new kernel, the response is much improved, and directory listings take a maximum of 10 seconds, even under high load. Note that this is in an oldish computer (486/66), with not that much memory. In this case, the new kernels have made a major difference.