> So for those of you wondering why some of us
> always use "he" in the unknown or general
> case, it could very well be because we're
> speaking English, rather than engaging in an
> Orwellian campaign to change the way people
> think by modifying the language.
Absolutely right!
I however switch to a deliberate misuse of the English pronouns whenever I think:
a) it will be funny
or
b) it might challenge preconceptions.
Banzai! I win twice today!
(It is particularly entertaining when reading Babelfish translations from German out loud - people are usually 'it').
Actually, the technology used in these bikes is more akin to that used in the space and aerospace industries, (or sometimes in Formula 1) than in conventional car making.
The materials are all cutting edge - aluminium is now in mainstream bikes, the top end machines are using titanium and carbon fibre.
Weaver is looking at running air pumps off the rear wheel to give the machine active aerodynamics - air pumped out at strategic locations to encourage laminar flow. This is cutting edge even in aerospace, and is unlikely ever to make it into cars.
Basically a car has so much power that a lot of these cutting edge techniques would have no measurable benfit. For both bikes and spacecraft, every last gram of weight and thousandth of drag coefficient is critical.
So you have a Turing machine running in a life grid. It'll need a bit more memory, but the hard part is done.
Next you port Bochs to the Turing machine.
Then you run DeCSS under Bochs.
Finally, you get a contract to tile some large area, and tile it with black and white tiles corresponding to some snapshot of the Life matrix.
I don't want to know how big the matrix would have to be though:(...
Another thought - seeing that Conway's rules seem to be the simplest possible set which allows the formation of complex dynamic structures, howabout etching life patterns into deep space probes?
One of the first programs I compiled to run on my first Linux PC back in '94 was 'xlife'. This was a superb implementation of Conway's life, and came with some quite complex patterns.
The most memorable was the prime number seive. This consisted of two trains heading away from a central point in perpendicular directions, leaving a trail of mirrors. A third train produced a glider which would bounce back and forth between the mirrors.
A slow-period glider gun at the origin fires a stream of gliders diagonally between the two rows of mirrors. For any non prime number, the new glider will hit one of the bouncing gliders and be destroyed, leaving the bouncing glider intact. The result is that only prime numbered gliders from the central gun can escape.
There was also a cute pseudo-random sequence generator.
Yup, that was what you said. But if that was what you meant, its a wonder you bothered.
Because it is a meaningless test. To find out how long IE takes to start when none of its components are pre-loaded you *must* install 98lite.
After the original anti-trust verdict a few years back MS distributed the IE componenets amongst a load of core dll's, and so disabling the loading of explore.exe makes no difference - the IE componenets still get loaded.
There seems to be a lot of snchronicity in TV at the moment. Or possibly companies who are not licensing shows from overseas.
Big Brother and WWTBAMillionare get licensed all around the world, and yet other shows spawn derivatives rather than clones, either because the producers think they can improve on the format, or beause they don't want to buy the licsense. I wonder which?
I presume that Battle Bots owes something to the success of the BBC Robot Wars, which in turn is derived (and I think licensed) from the original US Robot Wars (which I think went bust): Can anyone confirm this chronology?
Can anyone who sees both tell us how much robot builders are peeking across the pond? Mauler sounds like a clone of Hypnodisc, which must have first competed in the UK about 15 months ago, and reached the final, but was beaten by Chaos-2, a flipper-bot whose flipper is powerful enough to throw other robots right out of the arena. But of course it could be the other way round, or they could be independent.
How long has the US Junkyard show been running? I think Scrapheap Challenge is now in its third season.
Are there any other US shows in this genre that we might see imported anytime soon?
As eveyone knows, Steven Hawking is the world's leading authority on climate and atmospheric chemistry.
Unfortunately expertise does not transfer well across specialities in science, so his ramblings on unified field theories and cosmology are not taken seriously in academic circles.
OK, that overstates the case a little, journalling is still better when transactions have to complete as early as possible. But for most purposes Daniel Phillips' 'Tux2' phase-tree filesystem looks as though it may well be superior to journalling - it provides the same guarantees of a consistent filesystem as data+metadata journalling, without the performance hit.
It is also proof that open source software does not just 'chase tail lights' - the work is substantially innovative.
Phillips is also implementing tailmerging (a feature from ReiserFS to efficiently store small files) for ext2/ext3/tux2.
For more details, check his web pages here, and the linux-fsdevel mailinglist.
While I like GNOME a lot, and KDE 2 looks great, if I had a machine with less than 48M I wouldn't try to run either. Windowmaker, Afterstep, and XFce are all good options in such a case.
I think that this argument contains a false appeal to romanticism.
Workers were being offered heavy, regulated, industrial work in exchange to a farming lifestyle. But to characterise the exchange as uniformly bad is probably unfair.
Farming is hard. It involves long hours, in all weathers. The results are far less predictable than factory work - bad conditions can mean famine. Many farmers lived in poverty. The plight of the Irish was particularly desparate.
Some people were being offered worse jobs in exchange for better ones. But I think that many of the Luddites were, as commonly characterised, afraid of change.
No, its not all resolved. Any software created by linking a `GPL-without-special-implied-permission' component with a QT2.2 library remains unlicensed. An example of such code is the wv (formerly mswordview) code used in the Kword-MSword input filter. Such software has no legal license and therefore cannot be distributed.
By granting retrospective permission, the FSF has rendered all such software which uses FSF-copyright code legal. Other copyright holders may or may not chose to follow suit.
Of course there is now no barrier to futuer incorporation of GPL code. Gimp/QT (KIMP) is suddenly back on the cards.
The prospect of merging some of the better features also looks more promising these days, since both projects seem to be de-integrating some of their components. For example, gdk-pixbuf can now be built without GTK, DCOP objects are not dependent on QT. Maybe Gnome will follow KDE and replace esd with aRTs.
Often an algroithm needs to buzz around my brain for a while before coding it. If I sit around and DO NOT CODE for a couple of weeks, drawing flowcharts, data diagrams, doodles, reading books of algorithms and suchlike, then usually I reach a point where the whole program just suddenly spews out complete and right.
On the other hand, if I force myself to code, I get stressed, take much longer, and end up with something that needs rewriting.
How many SlashDot users/readers are there? Realistically? A few hundred?
And then on the line before:
(User #174382 Info)
Hint: there were nearly 175,000 registered ID's before you arrived. Many are nodoubt defunct or duplicates. But many people also read and post as AC's. I was an AC for a year before I registered.
It was called the Delta Clipper, and later 'Clipper Graham' in honour of someone or other.
It lost out in the X-33 funding selection stage to the Venturestar, which is probably going to fold becuase the composite fueltanks leak. (I believe the Delta Clipper was also going to have composite fuel tanks, so it would have faced the same problems).
There was a third proposal, a sort of single stage Shuttle-2.
All these proposals aimed at achieving a single stage to orbit by use of lighter matrials, slightly exotic engine/fuel combinations, and different landing approaches to achieve the necessary mass fraction to get to orbit: more than 90% of the launch weight must be fuel. This is difficult at best, and means that you need a huge vehiicle for even quite a modest payload.
I don't think this will ever be done cheaply. The alternatives are not carrying all your fuel: e.g. air-breathing, magnetic launchers, and staging. Currently staging is the only approach which is not science fiction.
In other words, I disagree with the paper. I think the reasons are largely technical.
Its a good point, and my immediate response was that the Win2k results are so much worse that something must be very wrong.
However, if you go further down the results list, Mindcraft have also submitted a set of benchmark results which are broadly comparable to the Dell results on a different but comparable setup. It doesn't seem likely that both companies have made the same crippling mistake.
So it looks as though Red Hat hove done some serious magic with their threaded web server to me. Will they release the source I wonder?
Oooh - I'll see your special theory and raise you a general theory!
But seriously, while 'simultaneous' does not have any absolute meaning outside a light cone, there are obvious 'subjective' meanings which make perfect sense in the context.
For example, the events could be simultaneous when obsered by and observer at the centre of mass of the galaxy, or at the centre of mass of the affected stars. Either of these uses would have useful 'local' significance.
Indeed, by comparing the times of the three events and postulating that they were initiated simultaneously by a single entity, you could calculate the intertial frame of that observer.
My website has been GIF free for a year, and from fall-throughs to old pages I guess that less that 10% of users had problems. The situation will be better now.
The benefits of PNG, apart from the patent issues, are that you can do greater colour depths and the files are often much smaller than the corresponding GIFs.
In other words, I wouldn't even consider using GIFs any more.
MNG support is however almost non-existent outside M17.
There is no problem updating the GPL to fix loopholes, because almost all GPL'ed code is specifically licensed under 'Version X or later'.
So existing code mostly allows a later version of the GPL to be applied. If at some point in the future we all start using GPL v3, the presumably future modifications to the GPL'ed codebase will be placed under that license. The derived work consists of part which can be licensed under GPLv3, and part which can be licensed under GPLv2 or v3. The only license under which the derived work can be distributed in GPLv3.
I've had a university account for the last decade, and I use it for exaclty this purpose. Initially it just gave me a constant email address, but I've gradually moved to keeping more and more useful information in a private directory. This includes addresses and phone numbers, any projects I'm working on, data for tax returns and so on.
The benefits are enormous, especially if you are reasonably mobile, and even more so if you live in more than one country.
But I can only do it because I have a university account. I could just about get by using the personal webspace provided on an ISP account, but using encryption, grep,.forward and other tools would be much more difficult.
If Microsoft are looking to offer this service then I think they are making a sensible move. It would make more sense for ISP's to put together an appropriate service, but despite fierce competition non-one seems to be doing so.
Maybe an Apache module would kick some ISPs into action? Maybe Microsoft will catalyse the creation of such a tool.
Slashdot Mirror
> So for those of you wondering why some of us
> always use "he" in the unknown or general
> case, it could very well be because we're
> speaking English, rather than engaging in an
> Orwellian campaign to change the way people
> think by modifying the language.
Absolutely right!
I however switch to a deliberate misuse of the English pronouns whenever I think:
a) it will be funny
or
b) it might challenge preconceptions.
Banzai! I win twice today!
(It is particularly entertaining when reading Babelfish translations from German out loud - people are usually 'it').
This is just like the deCSS hack - a good piece of work exposing a flawed implementation of a rights management scheme.
.wma files on Linux - the decoder still requires the MS dll to get the keys out for you.
However, at the moment two little differences are apparent:
1. This doesn't allow you to decode
2. The author has remained anonymous! No DMCA prosecutions here, assuming she has covered her tracks properly.
Actually, the technology used in these bikes is more akin to that used in the space and aerospace industries, (or sometimes in Formula 1) than in conventional car making.
The materials are all cutting edge - aluminium is now in mainstream bikes, the top end machines are using titanium and carbon fibre.
Weaver is looking at running air pumps off the rear wheel to give the machine active aerodynamics - air pumped out at strategic locations to encourage laminar flow. This is cutting edge even in aerospace, and is unlikely ever to make it into cars.
Basically a car has so much power that a lot of these cutting edge techniques would have no measurable benfit. For both bikes and spacecraft, every last gram of weight and thousandth of drag coefficient is critical.
- Masters Of Orion
- Battle At Antares
- Wrath Of Orion's Founders
(For the coffee deprived: think acronym).Or maybe 'More Everlasting Orion Wars'
OK, this is really sick, I know...
:( ...
So you have a Turing machine running in a life grid. It'll need a bit more memory, but the hard part is done.
Next you port Bochs to the Turing machine.
Then you run DeCSS under Bochs.
Finally, you get a contract to tile some large area, and tile it with black and white tiles corresponding to some snapshot of the Life matrix.
I don't want to know how big the matrix would have to be though
Another thought - seeing that Conway's rules seem to be the simplest possible set which allows the formation of complex dynamic structures, howabout etching life patterns into deep space probes?
One of the first programs I compiled to run on my first Linux PC back in '94 was 'xlife'. This was a superb implementation of Conway's life, and came with some quite complex patterns.
The most memorable was the prime number seive. This consisted of two trains heading away from a central point in perpendicular directions, leaving a trail of mirrors. A third train produced a glider which would bounce back and forth between the mirrors.
A slow-period glider gun at the origin fires a stream of gliders diagonally between the two rows of mirrors. For any non prime number, the new glider will hit one of the bouncing gliders and be destroyed, leaving the bouncing glider intact. The result is that only prime numbered gliders from the central gun can escape.
There was also a cute pseudo-random sequence generator.
Yup, that was what you said. But if that was what you meant, its a wonder you bothered.
Because it is a meaningless test. To find out how long IE takes to start when none of its components are pre-loaded you *must* install 98lite.
After the original anti-trust verdict a few years back MS distributed the IE componenets amongst a load of core dll's, and so disabling the loading of explore.exe makes no difference - the IE componenets still get loaded.
There seems to be a lot of snchronicity in TV at the moment. Or possibly companies who are not licensing shows from overseas.
Big Brother and WWTBAMillionare get licensed all around the world, and yet other shows spawn derivatives rather than clones, either because the producers think they can improve on the format, or beause they don't want to buy the licsense. I wonder which?
I presume that Battle Bots owes something to the success of the BBC Robot Wars, which in turn is derived (and I think licensed) from the original US Robot Wars (which I think went bust): Can anyone confirm this chronology?
Can anyone who sees both tell us how much robot builders are peeking across the pond? Mauler sounds like a clone of Hypnodisc, which must have first competed in the UK about 15 months ago, and reached the final, but was beaten by Chaos-2, a flipper-bot whose flipper is powerful enough to throw other robots right out of the arena. But of course it could be the other way round, or they could be independent.
How long has the US Junkyard show been running? I think Scrapheap Challenge is now in its third season.
Are there any other US shows in this genre that we might see imported anytime soon?
the cameras are ... each smaller than a 2 pence (50 cent) piece!
Methinks their UK-US Babelfish is broken, unless a 50 cent piece has been introduced recently in the US?
A 2 pence piece is about an inch in diameter, which I guess is just slightly larger than a quarter (I don't have one to hand).
As eveyone knows, Steven Hawking is the world's leading authority on climate and atmospheric chemistry.
Unfortunately expertise does not transfer well across specialities in science, so his ramblings on unified field theories and cosmology are not taken seriously in academic circles.
It is also proof that open source software does not just 'chase tail lights' - the work is substantially innovative.
Phillips is also implementing tailmerging (a feature from ReiserFS to efficiently store small files) for ext2/ext3/tux2.
For more details, check his web pages here, and the linux-fsdevel mailinglist.
For me, the point is that it is small.
While I like GNOME a lot, and KDE 2 looks great, if I had a machine with less than 48M I wouldn't try to run either. Windowmaker, Afterstep, and XFce are all good options in such a case.
Workers were being offered heavy, regulated, industrial work in exchange to a farming lifestyle. But to characterise the exchange as uniformly bad is probably unfair.
Farming is hard. It involves long hours, in all weathers. The results are far less predictable than factory work - bad conditions can mean famine. Many farmers lived in poverty. The plight of the Irish was particularly desparate.
Some people were being offered worse jobs in exchange for better ones. But I think that many of the Luddites were, as commonly characterised, afraid of change.
QT2.2 should of course have read QT<2.2.
Forgot the htmlization, sorry.
No, its not all resolved. Any software created by linking a `GPL-without-special-implied-permission' component with a QT2.2 library remains unlicensed. An example of such code is the wv (formerly mswordview) code used in the Kword-MSword input filter. Such software has no legal license and therefore cannot be distributed.
By granting retrospective permission, the FSF has rendered all such software which uses FSF-copyright code legal. Other copyright holders may or may not chose to follow suit.
Of course there is now no barrier to futuer incorporation of GPL code. Gimp/QT (KIMP) is suddenly back on the cards.
The prospect of merging some of the better features also looks more promising these days, since both projects seem to be de-integrating some of their components. For example, gdk-pixbuf can now be built without GTK, DCOP objects are not dependent on QT. Maybe Gnome will follow KDE and replace esd with aRTs.
Been there, done that, often.
Often an algroithm needs to buzz around my brain for a while before coding it. If I sit around and DO NOT CODE for a couple of weeks, drawing flowcharts, data diagrams, doodles, reading books of algorithms and suchlike, then usually I reach a point where the whole program just suddenly spews out complete and right.
On the other hand, if I force myself to code, I get stressed, take much longer, and end up with something that needs rewriting.
I guess its a variety of Eureka phenomena.
Of course, some pointy hairded bosses may object.
And Russian launches are cheaper than Arianne, and would be cheaper still if it weren't for price-fixing agreements with the US.
Why do you think Boeing uses a Russian rocket for its Sealaunch programme?
Here's a link: http://www.hq.nasa.gov/offic e/pao/History/x-33/dc-xa.htm I can't find any of the movies online anymore, but they are probably hiding somewhere.
It was called the Delta Clipper, and later 'Clipper Graham' in honour of someone or other.
It lost out in the X-33 funding selection stage to the Venturestar, which is probably going to fold becuase the composite fueltanks leak. (I believe the Delta Clipper was also going to have composite fuel tanks, so it would have faced the same problems).
There was a third proposal, a sort of single stage Shuttle-2.
All these proposals aimed at achieving a single stage to orbit by use of lighter matrials, slightly exotic engine/fuel combinations, and different landing approaches to achieve the necessary mass fraction to get to orbit: more than 90% of the launch weight must be fuel. This is
difficult at best, and means that you need a huge vehiicle for even quite a modest payload.
I don't think this will ever be done cheaply. The alternatives are not carrying all your fuel: e.g. air-breathing, magnetic launchers, and staging. Currently staging is the only approach which is not science fiction.
In other words, I disagree with the paper. I think the reasons are largely technical.
Its a good point, and my immediate response was that the Win2k results are so much worse that something must be very wrong.
However, if you go further down the results list, Mindcraft have also submitted a set of benchmark results which are broadly comparable to the Dell results on a different but comparable setup. It doesn't seem likely that both companies have made the same crippling mistake.
So it looks as though Red Hat hove done some serious magic with their threaded web server to me. Will they release the source I wonder?
Oooh - I'll see your special theory and raise you a general theory!
But seriously, while 'simultaneous' does not have any absolute meaning outside a light cone, there are obvious 'subjective' meanings which make perfect sense in the context.
For example, the events could be simultaneous when obsered by and observer at the centre of mass of the galaxy, or at the centre of mass of the affected stars. Either of these uses would have useful 'local' significance.
Indeed, by comparing the times of the three events and postulating that they were initiated simultaneously by a single entity, you could calculate the intertial frame of that observer.
My website has been GIF free for a year, and from fall-throughs to old pages I guess that less that 10% of users had problems. The situation will be better now.
The benefits of PNG, apart from the patent issues, are that you can do greater colour depths and the files are often much smaller than the corresponding GIFs.
In other words, I wouldn't even consider using GIFs any more.
MNG support is however almost non-existent outside M17.
There is no problem updating the GPL to fix loopholes, because almost all GPL'ed code is specifically licensed under 'Version X or later'.
So existing code mostly allows a later version of the GPL to be applied. If at some point in the future we all start using GPL v3, the presumably future modifications to the GPL'ed codebase will be placed under that license. The derived work consists of part which can be licensed under GPLv3, and part which can be licensed under GPLv2 or v3. The only license under which the derived work can be distributed in GPLv3.
The FSF have done their homework here.
I've had a university account for the last decade, and I use it for exaclty this purpose. Initially it just gave me a constant email address, but I've gradually moved to keeping more and more useful information in a private directory. This includes addresses and phone numbers, any projects I'm working on, data for tax returns and so on.
.forward and other tools would be much more difficult.
The benefits are enormous, especially if you are reasonably mobile, and even more so if you live in more than one country.
But I can only do it because I have a university account. I could just about get by using the personal webspace provided on an ISP account, but using encryption, grep,
If Microsoft are looking to offer this service then I think they are making a sensible move. It would make more sense for ISP's to put together an appropriate service, but despite fierce competition non-one seems to be doing so.
Maybe an Apache module would kick some ISPs into action? Maybe Microsoft will catalyse the creation of such a tool.