Algorithms aren't artistic magic (like music, photos, stories and other right brained endeavors that appeal to mood and the human soul). They are structured and require forethought with the proper amount of big picture direction.
Yes but the part requiring forethought is often tiny compared to the details that need to be written down. Programs are more similar to traffic directions than geographic proofs. Think of how you could get to London if you had to leave tomorrow (fairly obvious steps form in your head immediately). Now start writing them down: pick up the phone. Call travel agent. Reserve a ticket. Hang up the phone. Go to your front door. Open the door. Walk through the door. Close and lock the door. Walk to your car. Get in the car. Start the car. [Insert another 20 or so steps that could be summarized as "drive to the airport".] You get the idea.
Some people like to visualize all the code before they even start typing it. I do that sometimes. Others like the feedback of seeing each statement on the screen before entering the next one. Either way, the individual lines of code are so many levels away from the idea you're implementing that the bits about structure and forethought are just a platitude. Yes of course you need structure and forethought--the "compose at the keyboard" question is about what you do after you've done the forethought part.
Stravinsky wrote in his autobiography about his composing habits. As a student, he'd sit in front of his piano picking out melodies, playing them different ways and changing them til he got them the way he wanted, and then he'd write them down. He envied composers like Mozart, who'd compose entirely in their head and then write the composition directly on paper, and he thought maybe he wasn't doing something right. So he asked his composition professor about the problem.
The professor replied basically "there are two kinds of composers: those who use an instrument when composing and those that don't. You're one of the ones that does. Don't worry about it". Stravinsky stopped worrying and did fine.
It's like building a modernized Wright Brothers plane (or maybe DC-3) with a graphite composite airframe instead of one like the original. (Using a modern cpu would be like adding a jet engine).
If you're trying for authenticity, stick with the original design. If you're trying for something that runs the old software, you're better off just running a Z80 emulator on your modern PC. Performance will be much higher than the original, etc. And if you're trying to make something that looks cool (front panel with switches and blinky lights), that's fine too, but why not put a modern computer inside instead of bothering with the Z80 innards?
Let me get this straight, 802.11 and cell phones are very limited in power emission to (sensibly) keep our microwave exposure to safe levels, but now these light bulbs are going to be everywhere that emit enough microwaves to drown out wireless data stuff? Will the light bulbs give us cancer or sterilize us? That seems like a much more pressing question than the energy-savings vs. broadband access tradeoff.
Oil field development contracts are often competitively bid. Finding out the amount of your bid ahead of time can be worth billions to your competitor, so there's tons of industrial espionage. Even finding out ahead of time whether interest rates will go up tomorrow (one bit) can be worth billions to the right entity. Overall I'd say the question is meaningless. How much would the string "terrorists will crash planes into the WTC tomorrow" have been worth on September 10?
Not just the mono voice mic; the PDA should have quality a-d converters and a stereo mic jack capable of mic or line level input, similar to a quality stereo cassette walkman. That and a fast cpu should make it possible to record live music to the internal flash card in MP3 or Ogg format.
For example, if you're a banker or accountant, you are required to take 2 weeks vacation every year and let someone else do your job for you while you're gone. It is not optional and postponements are not allowed--when your vacation time comes, you must go whether you want to or not, and you're not allowed back in the office til the vacation is over.
The reason is obvious: if you've been cooking the books, you won't want to let them out of your sweaty little clutches, so it's a basic security precaution that you be thrown out of the office every so often, letting somebody else take over your work materials so they'll notice if you've been trying to pull a fast one.
Kind of different from programming, where managers are constantly trying to get you to postpone or skip or shorten your vacations.
Agendas were sold at Fry's (on closeout I think) for $100 or so about 6 months ago. Frankly I can't think of many reasons to buy one. They're a cute piece of hardware but a dead end. Meanwhile, you can find developer Zauruses (similar to the retail version but with only 32 MB of memory instead of 64MB) on Ebay, typically closing in the $300 range.
Call one of those local shops that sells its own boxes (i.e. they install Asus motheroards into generic cases, etc.) and tell them your situation. You have a bunch of PC's and you want them to swap out the motherboards and maybe upgrade the hard drives, plus sell you some spare PC's as needed, and continue to do such upgrades over time.
Also, I'd be surprised if you really need to upgrade all your PC's. 400 mhz is still a pretty good box by most standards. And you needn't upgrade to the highest-end Athlon stuff except for maybe a few of the most power-hungry users (CAD, image rendering, etc). For most typical office applications, 400 mhz PII with enough ram (maybe all you need is more ram?) is quite useable and a 1000 mhz Celeron or Duron is plenty. I'm using a 750 mhz PIII right now and it wouldn't occur to me to spend money upgrading it.
Kramnik and Kasparov played a match for the championship and Kasparov lost, so Kramnik is the champion. Kasparov himself says so and refers to Kramnik as the champion. It's like the world series in baseball--whoever wins it is the champ, even if the other team really is better in some objective sense. All the losing team can do is try again next year.
Kasparov pretty clearly wasn't playing at his best during the Kramnik match and Kasparov said afterwards that he expected to get a rematch and win the championship back. I agree and my money would be on Kasparov in such a rematch, though Kramnik is definitely no slouch, and anything could happen.
The thing about Kasparov ducking out of the Dortmund cycle is new to me (I haven't been following this stuff closely). I wonder if Kasparov is just sick of chess. He often has shown signs of that in recent years.
The power law may be the same as the Pareto distribution, which models the distribution of income in an economy. Economists have observed it experimentally for decades though the theoretical reasons for it have only recently become understood.
The underlying mechanism could well amount to the same thing. Some economists might like to take a look at the web link data. There are probably interesting comparisons to be made between link distribution and income distribution.
The colo places around here charge hundreds of bucks a month for a 1U rack slot. Admittedly a 1U enclosure can hold a fullblown ATX motherboard and a couple of 3.5" hard drives, but this OQO thing looks plenty powerful enough for most smaller web sites that don't want to virtual host. And it looks like you can put at least half a dozen of them in a 1U slot. That alone is worth the price of admission. Wow!
from here.
Annoying license that's only free-as-in-beer, but the source code is there, and the security should be pretty good. It uses Diffie-Hellman key exchange to set up the cryptography instead of making you agree on a password like Speak Freely does, and it has some low-bit-rate speech compressors that even work over cellular phones.
It's not a gem, just sort of a mathematical troll.
If Mahtworld forgot to say the manifold had to be compact, they made a minor misstatement that they probably ought to corrected in the interest of painstaking precision, but it's no big deal. It's obvious what they meant.
Here's some further info on the Poincare conjecture.
This proof does just d=3 and it's interesting that it's essentially combinatorial. Smale's proof for d>=5 was based on differential topology, a grand and beautiful branch of pure higher math. Freedman's proof for d=4 used Yang-Mills theory developed in particle physics. d=3 looks like essentially a computer scientist's proof.
Disclaimer:
I don't understand this stuff in any detail--these remarks
are based on looking at the preprint and remembering stuff that I heard in math class long ago. Also, I think I'll wait to hear what the math community says, before believing the problem is really finally solved.
I haven't studied the patent and don't know how or whether Samba will be affected. Things could get interesting:-(.
Personally, I think it's hypocritical as hell for GPV advocates to bash M$ for doing exactly what they claim in the first place: license their code as they wish.
That's not what's going on here. The GPL doesn't affect implementations that don't use other people's GPL'd code. If you want to interoperate with my GPL'd toolkit and don't want to ship source, don't use my code--write your own compatible implementation and license it any way you want, and you'll have no GPL problems.
This Microsoft thing is different. Because of the patents, it claims to control your licensing even if you wrote your implementation 100% by yourself. The GPL never attempts anything like that.
1.6 "Necessary Claims" shall mean those claims of a patent or patent
application, including without limitation, United States Patents
Nos. 5,265,261 and 5,437,013, which (a) are owned, controlled or
sublicenseable by Microsoft without payment of a fee to an
unaffiliated third party; and (b) are necessarily infringed by
implementing the CIFS communication protocol as set forth in the
Technical Reference, wherein a claim is necessarily infringed only
when there are no technically reasonable alternatives to such
infringement.
indicates you can't implement CIFS without a license for those patents. The "Royalty-Free CIFS Technical Reference License Agreement"
is the patent license, but it has an anti-GPL clause, and nothing else licenses you the patents.
It's an antimatter version of the GPL, like a GPL from the parallel Star Trek universe where everyone was evil.
And this is old stuff. Technically it almost certainly works the same way as sort-of-useful browser extensions like the Google toolbar and Yahoo companion. There was a company a year or so ago that had a product that let you do your own--I've forgotten the url and don't know if it's still around.
It's inappropriate to criticize the advertisers for doing stuff like this though. That would be like criticizing bacteria for causing illness. It's just the nature of advertisers in an "ecosystem" that if they have an opportunity to do something that obnoxious, they'll do it. The problem is in browsers that give too much control to the web site being browsed, and the real culprit is in Redmond.
Note, at least, that code downloads like Yahoo Companion require you to grant permission before the software can install itself. That isn't so great (people grant permission way too easily) but it's better than nothing. I don't know quite how much IE will let sites customize the navbar without a download, though. Sigh.
The only way he could be damaged is if his VR stuff caused some kind of permanent change to his brain by replacing part of its normal function, sort of like (imagine) if you lived in a weightless environment for long enough, you might lose your ability to walk in normal gravity. That change of course would be a very slow, gradual process that came from wearing the electronics for years.
The electronics are bound to fail sooner or later. If they were really causing some physical change in him, then if they ran for a few more years before failing, the change would have progressed that much further and the damage would have been worse. So if removing the stuff caused damage, it's good that he found out about it now while the effects aren't as bad.
But I agree with the Linuxjournal comment from the guy claiming to be a doctor, saying Mann is probably just looking for an excuse to sue. If that VR removal really caused brain damage, two things should happen:
Medical researchers should be swarming all over Mann, examining him to figure out exactly what happened.
The VR stuff should be regulated by the FDA, installed only under medical supervision, and nobody should be allowed to wear it for such extended periods.
Personal certificates are for signing email and they're a lot cheaper or free. Verisign and Thawte both have free 30 day personal certs. If you don't want to keep generating new ones you can get 1-year certs for $15 a year or so. I don't know many people who really use them. There just isn't that much public interchange of S/MIME encrypted email. Generally if you're using it at all, it's with someone you know, so you end up generating your own cert or CA and telling your friend (offline) to trust it.
Slashdot Mirror
Some people like to visualize all the code before they even start typing it. I do that sometimes. Others like the feedback of seeing each statement on the screen before entering the next one. Either way, the individual lines of code are so many levels away from the idea you're implementing that the bits about structure and forethought are just a platitude. Yes of course you need structure and forethought--the "compose at the keyboard" question is about what you do after you've done the forethought part.
The professor replied basically "there are two kinds of composers: those who use an instrument when composing and those that don't. You're one of the ones that does. Don't worry about it". Stravinsky stopped worrying and did fine.
Sounds like it's the same way with programming.
If you're trying for authenticity, stick with the original design. If you're trying for something that runs the old software, you're better off just running a Z80 emulator on your modern PC. Performance will be much higher than the original, etc. And if you're trying to make something that looks cool (front panel with switches and blinky lights), that's fine too, but why not put a modern computer inside instead of bothering with the Z80 innards?
It all makes no sense to me.
Let me get this straight, 802.11 and cell phones are very limited in power emission to (sensibly) keep our microwave exposure to safe levels, but now these light bulbs are going to be everywhere that emit enough microwaves to drown out wireless data stuff? Will the light bulbs give us cancer or sterilize us? That seems like a much more pressing question than the energy-savings vs. broadband access tradeoff.
Oil field development contracts are often competitively bid. Finding out the amount of your bid ahead of time can be worth billions to your competitor, so there's tons of industrial espionage. Even finding out ahead of time whether interest rates will go up tomorrow (one bit) can be worth billions to the right entity. Overall I'd say the question is meaningless. How much would the string "terrorists will crash planes into the WTC tomorrow" have been worth on September 10?
Not just the mono voice mic; the PDA should have quality a-d converters and a stereo mic jack capable of mic or line level input, similar to a quality stereo cassette walkman. That and a fast cpu should make it possible to record live music to the internal flash card in MP3 or Ogg format.
Give me a break. Next they'll ban remote controls that let you turn the sound off during ads.
The reason is obvious: if you've been cooking the books, you won't want to let them out of your sweaty little clutches, so it's a basic security precaution that you be thrown out of the office every so often, letting somebody else take over your work materials so they'll notice if you've been trying to pull a fast one.
Kind of different from programming, where managers are constantly trying to get you to postpone or skip or shorten your vacations.
that uses a PCMCIA or CF ethernet card. You can find stuff like that on Ebay real cheap.
Agendas were sold at Fry's (on closeout I think) for $100 or so about 6 months ago. Frankly I can't think of many reasons to buy one. They're a cute piece of hardware but a dead end. Meanwhile, you can find developer Zauruses (similar to the retail version but with only 32 MB of memory instead of 64MB) on Ebay, typically closing in the $300 range.
Also, I'd be surprised if you really need to upgrade all your PC's. 400 mhz is still a pretty good box by most standards. And you needn't upgrade to the highest-end Athlon stuff except for maybe a few of the most power-hungry users (CAD, image rendering, etc). For most typical office applications, 400 mhz PII with enough ram (maybe all you need is more ram?) is quite useable and a 1000 mhz Celeron or Duron is plenty. I'm using a 750 mhz PIII right now and it wouldn't occur to me to spend money upgrading it.
Kasparov pretty clearly wasn't playing at his best during the Kramnik match and Kasparov said afterwards that he expected to get a rematch and win the championship back. I agree and my money would be on Kasparov in such a rematch, though Kramnik is definitely no slouch, and anything could happen.
The thing about Kasparov ducking out of the Dortmund cycle is new to me (I haven't been following this stuff closely). I wonder if Kasparov is just sick of chess. He often has shown signs of that in recent years.
The power law may be the same as the Pareto distribution, which models the distribution of income in an economy. Economists have observed it experimentally for decades though the theoretical reasons for it have only recently become understood. The underlying mechanism could well amount to the same thing. Some economists might like to take a look at the web link data. There are probably interesting comparisons to be made between link distribution and income distribution.
The colo places around here charge hundreds of bucks a month for a 1U rack slot. Admittedly a 1U enclosure can hold a fullblown ATX motherboard and a couple of 3.5" hard drives, but this OQO thing looks plenty powerful enough for most smaller web sites that don't want to virtual host. And it looks like you can put at least half a dozen of them in a 1U slot. That alone is worth the price of admission. Wow!
from here. Annoying license that's only free-as-in-beer, but the source code is there, and the security should be pretty good. It uses Diffie-Hellman key exchange to set up the cryptography instead of making you agree on a password like Speak Freely does, and it has some low-bit-rate speech compressors that even work over cellular phones.
Did they want to issue this turkey on April 1 but somehow not get it out til April 9 because of slow bureaucratic wheels? Let's hope.
It's not a gem, just sort of a mathematical troll. If Mahtworld forgot to say the manifold had to be compact, they made a minor misstatement that they probably ought to corrected in the interest of painstaking precision, but it's no big deal. It's obvious what they meant.
This proof does just d=3 and it's interesting that it's essentially combinatorial. Smale's proof for d>=5 was based on differential topology, a grand and beautiful branch of pure higher math. Freedman's proof for d=4 used Yang-Mills theory developed in particle physics. d=3 looks like essentially a computer scientist's proof.
Disclaimer: I don't understand this stuff in any detail--these remarks are based on looking at the preprint and remembering stuff that I heard in math class long ago. Also, I think I'll wait to hear what the math community says, before believing the problem is really finally solved.
This Microsoft thing is different. Because of the patents, it claims to control your licensing even if you wrote your implementation 100% by yourself. The GPL never attempts anything like that.
It's an antimatter version of the GPL, like a GPL from the parallel Star Trek universe where everyone was evil.
Microsoft has gone ballistic. It has begun.
I've been googling for this story and can't find further info. Got any details, or a URL? What were the names of the defendants, etc.?
It's inappropriate to criticize the advertisers for doing stuff like this though. That would be like criticizing bacteria for causing illness. It's just the nature of advertisers in an "ecosystem" that if they have an opportunity to do something that obnoxious, they'll do it. The problem is in browsers that give too much control to the web site being browsed, and the real culprit is in Redmond.
Note, at least, that code downloads like Yahoo Companion require you to grant permission before the software can install itself. That isn't so great (people grant permission way too easily) but it's better than nothing. I don't know quite how much IE will let sites customize the navbar without a download, though. Sigh.
The only way he could be damaged is if his VR stuff caused some kind of permanent change to his brain by replacing part of its normal function, sort of like (imagine) if you lived in a weightless environment for long enough, you might lose your ability to walk in normal gravity. That change of course would be a very slow, gradual process that came from wearing the electronics for years.
The electronics are bound to fail sooner or later. If they were really causing some physical change in him, then if they ran for a few more years before failing, the change would have progressed that much further and the damage would have been worse. So if removing the stuff caused damage, it's good that he found out about it now while the effects aren't as bad.
But I agree with the Linuxjournal comment from the guy claiming to be a doctor, saying Mann is probably just looking for an excuse to sue. If that VR removal really caused brain damage, two things should happen:
Personal certificates are for signing email and they're a lot cheaper or free. Verisign and Thawte both have free 30 day personal certs. If you don't want to keep generating new ones you can get 1-year certs for $15 a year or so. I don't know many people who really use them. There just isn't that much public interchange of S/MIME encrypted email. Generally if you're using it at all, it's with someone you know, so you end up generating your own cert or CA and telling your friend (offline) to trust it.