That same warning is also on the carrying case for the buckyballs and on the manual.
The full text of it is: WARNING Keep Away From All Children! Do not put in nose of mouth. Swallowed magnets can stick to intestines causing serious injury or death. Seek immediate medical attention if magnets are swallowed in inhaled.
http://www.fastmail.fm/ is still around, for a reasonnable 40$/year, and is a very good option which provides pretty much any feature you might want...
Making a parrallel with Edsger Dijkstra's article?
on
Threads Considered Harmful
·
· Score: 2, Insightful
You know the big difference between TFA and Edsger Dijkstra's paper?
The second one made an argument, showed alternatives that were at least summarili demonstrated to be better and used reasoning.
The first one just says "Edsger Dijkstra's paper said goto was harmful and he ended up being right, thus if I say threads are harmful, I'm also right. Oh and here are some threading libraries I've found in a quick google search, they might be better."
The point is now about it holding in court. Lindows held in courts. The problem is that Microsoft is harrassing them by suing them in every country one after another, and Lindows got tired of spending resources defending all those cases.
So the point is to find a name that will not make Microsoft want to sue them again. Thus it's not clear that Lindos is good in that respect...
Erm, I don't recall seeing much selling of music on Kazaa, so I guess this is a bad analogy... If you are asking if it is ok to copy music for free, the law seems to say something along the line of "yes, if you only give it to people you know".
IMO, this kind of gray areas have no place in law, and it should either be "yes, you can give away copies of music for free" or "no, everyone has to buy a copy of everything they listen to". I vote for the former. You maybe think the latter will allow you to live a better life as an independent musician. It might or might not be the case(the old argument about whether distributing free music helps sales by expanding the people who know about you or hurts them because no one will buy what they can get for free will probably never be really settled). I, in any event, think the only people it hurts are the extremely popular artists that will not gain significantly more exposure by it, while reducing their sales. Is it right to deny them the possibility of making millions and reducing it to, maybe, only hundred of thousands? I don't think it is. Some people might.
That's what living in a free country means, one of the option has to be chosen, according to what most people see as right. For now, it seems that the law favors the RIAA. If most of the population think it should not be the case, maybe the law should be revised.
And that is exactly what the article says. When Microsoft entered the browser war, they threw all resources they could in developing IE as a very good browser, and I have to admit that they succeeded and surpassing every other at the time. But, as is the topic of this article, Microsoft has long stopped innovating for IE, and other browser have caught up, and surpassed it. Opera owns IE so much it's not even the same league anymore(although I'm sure it would only take a couple months for Microsoft to get up to that point if they again threw all their resources at it), and Mozilla can also hold up its own pretty well against IE.
This is not the only problem the article addresses though. As it is now, there are already tons of old file formats for which the software needed to read it is nearly impossible(or totally impossible) to find. Documents written in those file formats could contain useful, or at the least interesting content, but we can't get to that content.
We are talking here about file formats 30 years old, or even less. Try to imagine what will happen in 200 years. Most of our history will be written to electronic media, and for people that will live in 200 years, the file format used for that media will very probably be undecipherable.
What is the solution? Some say that we need to convert all documents in a more recent file format every x years. That will really become a pain in the ass as the number of archives go higher and higher.
Another trick could be to describe in whole the file format used and attach that description to every file. That, of course, brings up the problem of what file format to use for that description... (will even plain ascii files still exist in 200 years? Maybe not, but I think it is reasonnable to expect that people will at least still have an idea of how to read them...)
Comparing this to the problem faced for dead languages gives a good idea of the repercussions... There is already countless documents written in very old ages that we cannot decipher because the language used to write it is loss. People are working all their lives trying to understand a dead language. But with computers, we're not talking about something that happened 4000 years ago, but 30 years ago... That means that in the course of your lifetime, You could see obsolete file formats 3 times!
Someone will need to find a solution for this, and preferably before the problem happens for real...
It is well known that Kernigham had nothing to do with the creation of C. The K&R you are referring too are the authors of the BOOK, "The C Programming Language", that Kernigham wrote with Dennis Ritchie(which is the main inventor of C).
So, we still have K&R, just as before. Only now, maybe some readers understand better that K&R is not the names of the C inventors, but the name of the people who wrote the book about how to use C;)
Well, a standard to which nobody comforms 100% to, but at least brings everybody a little closer together, is way better than no standard at all.
It is true that for computers, standard have a long history of not being very well followed. Nevertheless, they have played a major role in the speed at which the computer field has evolved since it started. Not only that, but they also are the main reason why we can now so easily share information on the internet(although some would say too much information, but that is another story...).
The RIAA are indeed 'acting tough'. Their tactic is simple: Scare people away from P2P. Once it is clear that P2P is illegal, and that people are either going to jail or get fined big bucks for it, they assume that most 'ordinary' people will stop downloading files from P2P networks.
Of course, that might or might not happen, as we know the public to be easily scared and all. On the other hand, it is very possible that it will not work, like things do not work for, say, marijuana. Of course, the penalties the RIAA wants to impose on file-sharers are orders of magnitude worst than the penalty for simple possession of marijuana, but it is my opinion that these penalties will not hold for long once they start applying it to too many people.
As for the smaller, encrypted P2P networks, I don't think the RIAA is after them for now, as they don't really cause them that much trouble. Just as music-sharing before the era of P2P, a P2P network of 30 people does not make as much noise as one of millions of users, and arguably, in the eyes of the RIAA at least, not as many missed sales.
In the end, the first people who get caught in RIAA scare tactics and decide to fight back(there shouldn't be too many of them) will be the ones who will decide of big P2P network's future. If they manage to win their case, or even bring the penalty to something affordable and acceptable for a 'normal' person, there will no longer be any way for the RIAA to scare people. On the other hand, if they end up having to pay 1000$ a month or worse for the rest of their lives, you can expect that a lot of users will shy away from the network, making them less and less efficient...
But what if he DID protect himself from theft, by doing a backup of the music CD prior to it being stolen?
And what if that backup happens to be in mp3 format, on his computer?
Should he go to jail for 5 years if that mp3 is thereafter found, because he can't prove that he created it from a legally owned CD?
Its not "bad" for business, it is just business. It is competition. If walmart undercuts NetFlix by.50c, netflix can A) price to match, B) add a benefit that makes their slightly higher-than-the-otherguy price worth it, C) go out of business. Either way, its good for the consumer, and thats pretty much the bottom line.
Well, when smaller companies compete against the likes of Wal-Mart, usually you can be pretty sure C) will happen. And then, Wal-Mart is alone. No competition. No competition = bad. They can then raise the prices up to whatever highest price they know the customers will still accept.
Here in Canada, big oil companies did that. We had a lot of independant gas station owners that kept the gas price at a reasonable price. Then one day, the big guys thought they'd like to lose the competition, so they lowered their price so ridicully low, much lower than the price they themselves paid for the gas. With their big money, they could take the loss for a while, and all the independant guys were forced out of business. Then, with no competition left, the big ones raised their prices, a little at a time, to heights never known before here. And no one could do a thing about it. And no one wants to start an independant station anymore, as they know they risk getting hit by the same trick, and losing all their money...
Don't think that Wal-Mart or other big multinationals are the kind of companies to suffer any competition. They'll crush it, and then collect.
Okay, then, children of the modern age (where we live in a world so tied together
with wires that Pangaea ain't goin' nowhere!), you tell me if this is a predicament or not.
In the 1980s, you could look up from your Commodore 64,
hours after purchasing it,
with a glossy feeling of empowerment, achieved by the pattern of notes spewing from the
speaker grille in an endless loop. You were part of the movement to help machines sing!
You were a programmer! The Atari 800 people had BASIC.
They know what I'm talking about.
And the TI-994A
guys don't need to say a word, because the TI could
say it for them!
The old machines don't compare to the desktops of today, or to the consoles of today.
But, sadly, current versions of Windows have no immediately accessible programming languages.
And what's a kid going to do with Visual Basic? Build a modal dialog? Forget coding for XBox.
Requires registration in the XBox Developer Program. Otherwise, you gotta crack the sucker
open. GameCube? GameBoy? Playstation 2?
Coding Just Isn't Accessible
Yes, there are burgeoning freeSDKs
for many of these platforms. But they are obscure
and most children have no means of actually deploying or executing the code on their own
hardware! This is obvious to us all and likely doesn't seem such a big deal. But ask yourself
what might have happened had you not had access to a programming language on an Atari 800 or
a Commodore. You tell me if this is a predicament.
It turns out, most of the kids in my neighborhood are exposed to coding through the
TI calculator.
A handful of languages
are available on the TI and its processor is interesting enough to
evoke some curiousity. But this hasn't spread to its PDA big brothers, where young people
could have more exposure to programming. And undoubtedly the utility of a language on the Palm,
Pocket PC and others would be useful to many.
So what's the problem here? We have no shortage of new languages, but they become
increasingly distanced from the populace. Are the companies behind these platforms
weary of placing the power of a programming language in the hands of users?
Is there not a demand any longer? It's got to be some kind of greed, power, money thing,
right?
Perhaps this is just another reason to push Linux and BSD on
consumer systems. Still, are scripting languages easily accessible to
beginners on those systems? OSX has made several scripting languages available
(including Ruby and Python), but most users are unaware of their presence.
I should mention that Windows is equipped with its own scripting host for developing
in JScript and VBScript. But the use of the scripting host is (I believe) under-documented
and limited for beginners. Try doing something useful in a script without using
Server.CreateObject. Let's not let kids touch the COM objects, please!
The Christmas List
I'm thinking a toy language for consoles and desktops alike could be monumental. I'm
not saying it needs to be cross-platform. A language for GameCube that took advantage of
platform-specific features could be more appealing to GameCube users than a language that
used a reduced featureset, but could execute on a handheld. Really, we live in a world
where both choices should be available.
As for essential features:
1. Transportable code.
On my TI-994A, I could make a little, animated Optimus Prime from pixels. Insert cassette. Record. Pass aroun
Two people can also share a cake, but if they do, they'll both get less than if they ate it alone...
OTOH, they might get less fat...
Come to think of it, that analogy is pretty good... When you share an internet connection, you both get less bandwidth, and that might drive you to leave your seat and do something else, and thus get less fat...
Here is a more practical explanation for the less math/computer-wise.
Basically, Amdahl's law says that you can only optimize to a point before it becomes pointless. Also, it is often used to demonstrate that it is useless to optimize a single aspect of a system when the other aspects are still unoptimized.
For example, let's say you have a computer that executes something within 10 seconds. 5 of those seconds are spent reading from disk, 5 are spent doing calculations on the CPU.
Now if you upgrade the disk to a disk twice as good, you're gonna get an execution time of 7.5 seconds(5 for CPU, 2.5 for disk). So you gained 2.5 seconds.
Let's say you still think it's too slow, and upgrade the disk again to a disk twice as good. You're now getting an execution time of 6.25 seconds(5 for CPU, 1.25 for disk). You thus gained 1.25 seconds.
You should get the trend here, if you continue upgrading only the disk, it will come to a point where, even by increasing the speed of the disk tenfold, you will only gain small fractions of second on your execution time, and small fractions of second over more than 5 seconds is definitely not a good improvement.
The same reasonning can be applied(this is the original intent of Amdahl's law) to multi-processor machines. Assuming only 50% of a program is runnable in parrallel processing, it comes to a point where adding processors brings very little improvement, even were you to increase the number of processors tenfold. (The explanation for this is left as an exercise to the reader... Hint: it's the same explanation as the disk/cpu above.)
The attack is based on timing (calculating the time taken by the server to respond to the client, and deducing part of a password from that time), so I guess one way to defeat it would be to insert some random delay before sending a response, so the attacker can no longer rely on the timing meaning anything...
Heh, I heard about stealing comments from another article in a desperate attempt to get karma, but this is the first time I actually notice someone doing in within the same article...
Ah karma, is there any thing people won't do for you?
http://www.newsfactor.com/perl/story/20147.html, first sentence:
According to a study funded by Microsoft (Nasdaq: MSFT) , Windows 2000 is generally cheaper for businesses to run and support than similar products based on Linux.
http://www.webwereld.nl/nieuws/13388.phtml, first sentence:
Uit een door Microsoft gesponsorde studie blijkt dat de totale kosten van Windows 2000 voor bedrijven lager zijn dan die van Linux.
Looks like a lot of microsoft sponsoring is going on in there. Anyone has any real articles?
Oy, The only other broadband provider in Canada? Excuse me? You can try taking a look at CanadianISP, you'll see there is PLENTY of broadband providers in Canada, most of which have better prices and better service than sympaticrap.
As for another respondant saying it's been like that for two years, I was a Sympatico user when they indroduced the 5GB limit 4 months(not two years) ago. I still am now, but in the process of switching to others, as I don't think paying 45$ CAN/month for 5 GB is anything remotely acceptable(Ok, I lived with it for 4 months already, but that's just the inescapable power of inertia at work).
This guy did it about 8 years ago, and he was in high school. You can see his two projects here and here.
Building a cyclotron is not that difficult technically, but finding all the needed material might be(high voltage for the magnet, and especially the vacuum pump able to get it down to about 10^-5 atmospheres...)
In all cases, it certainly is an interesting project to take up if you have interest in physics, as it touches a lot of different fields of physics and teaches you a thing or two about how simple it can be to make such a complicated experiment work in theory, while being such a pain in the friggin a** in practice...
Design Patterns are good ideas that experienced programmers have developed to solve different classes of problems using object oriented programmation. This would allow people to profit from work of more experienced people, and thus greatly reduce the time needed to solve a given programmation problem. The original idea of the GoF was to publish a collection of the most useful patterns and give a name to each one of them so people could then speak about them in a conversation and be understood.
Slashdot Mirror
Here is that same package from another angle:
http://imageshack.us/photo/my-images/534/cimg0101l.jpg/
and from slightly above:
http://imageshack.us/photo/my-images/818/cimg0105s.jpg/
That same warning is also on the carrying case for the buckyballs and on the manual.
The full text of it is:
WARNING
Keep Away From All Children!
Do not put in nose of mouth.
Swallowed magnets can stick to intestines causing serious injury or death.
Seek immediate medical attention if magnets are swallowed in inhaled.
http://www.fastmail.fm/ is still around, for a reasonnable 40$/year, and is a very good option which provides pretty much any feature you might want...
You know the big difference between TFA and Edsger Dijkstra's paper?
The second one made an argument, showed alternatives that were at least summarili demonstrated to be better and used reasoning.
The first one just says "Edsger Dijkstra's paper said goto was harmful and he ended up being right, thus if I say threads are harmful, I'm also right. Oh and here are some threading libraries I've found in a quick google search, they might be better."
So the point is to find a name that will not make Microsoft want to sue them again. Thus it's not clear that Lindos is good in that respect...
Erm, I don't recall seeing much selling of music on Kazaa, so I guess this is a bad analogy... If you are asking if it is ok to copy music for free, the law seems to say something along the line of "yes, if you only give it to people you know".
IMO, this kind of gray areas have no place in law, and it should either be "yes, you can give away copies of music for free" or "no, everyone has to buy a copy of everything they listen to". I vote for the former. You maybe think the latter will allow you to live a better life as an independent musician. It might or might not be the case(the old argument about whether distributing free music helps sales by expanding the people who know about you or hurts them because no one will buy what they can get for free will probably never be really settled). I, in any event, think the only people it hurts are the extremely popular artists that will not gain significantly more exposure by it, while reducing their sales. Is it right to deny them the possibility of making millions and reducing it to, maybe, only hundred of thousands? I don't think it is. Some people might.
That's what living in a free country means, one of the option has to be chosen, according to what most people see as right. For now, it seems that the law favors the RIAA. If most of the population think it should not be the case, maybe the law should be revised.
And that is exactly what the article says. When Microsoft entered the browser war, they threw all resources they could in developing IE as a very good browser, and I have to admit that they succeeded and surpassing every other at the time. But, as is the topic of this article, Microsoft has long stopped innovating for IE, and other browser have caught up, and surpassed it. Opera owns IE so much it's not even the same league anymore(although I'm sure it would only take a couple months for Microsoft to get up to that point if they again threw all their resources at it), and Mozilla can also hold up its own pretty well against IE.
We are talking here about file formats 30 years old, or even less. Try to imagine what will happen in 200 years. Most of our history will be written to electronic media, and for people that will live in 200 years, the file format used for that media will very probably be undecipherable.
What is the solution? Some say that we need to convert all documents in a more recent file format every x years. That will really become a pain in the ass as the number of archives go higher and higher.
Another trick could be to describe in whole the file format used and attach that description to every file. That, of course, brings up the problem of what file format to use for that description... (will even plain ascii files still exist in 200 years? Maybe not, but I think it is reasonnable to expect that people will at least still have an idea of how to read them...)
Comparing this to the problem faced for dead languages gives a good idea of the repercussions... There is already countless documents written in very old ages that we cannot decipher because the language used to write it is loss. People are working all their lives trying to understand a dead language. But with computers, we're not talking about something that happened 4000 years ago, but 30 years ago... That means that in the course of your lifetime, You could see obsolete file formats 3 times!
Someone will need to find a solution for this, and preferably before the problem happens for real...
So, we still have K&R, just as before. Only now, maybe some readers understand better that K&R is not the names of the C inventors, but the name of the people who wrote the book about how to use C ;)
It is true that for computers, standard have a long history of not being very well followed. Nevertheless, they have played a major role in the speed at which the computer field has evolved since it started. Not only that, but they also are the main reason why we can now so easily share information on the internet(although some would say too much information, but that is another story...).
Of course, that might or might not happen, as we know the public to be easily scared and all. On the other hand, it is very possible that it will not work, like things do not work for, say, marijuana. Of course, the penalties the RIAA wants to impose on file-sharers are orders of magnitude worst than the penalty for simple possession of marijuana, but it is my opinion that these penalties will not hold for long once they start applying it to too many people.
As for the smaller, encrypted P2P networks, I don't think the RIAA is after them for now, as they don't really cause them that much trouble. Just as music-sharing before the era of P2P, a P2P network of 30 people does not make as much noise as one of millions of users, and arguably, in the eyes of the RIAA at least, not as many missed sales.
In the end, the first people who get caught in RIAA scare tactics and decide to fight back(there shouldn't be too many of them) will be the ones who will decide of big P2P network's future. If they manage to win their case, or even bring the penalty to something affordable and acceptable for a 'normal' person, there will no longer be any way for the RIAA to scare people. On the other hand, if they end up having to pay 1000$ a month or worse for the rest of their lives, you can expect that a lot of users will shy away from the network, making them less and less efficient...
But what if he DID protect himself from theft, by doing a backup of the music CD prior to it being stolen?
And what if that backup happens to be in mp3 format, on his computer?
Should he go to jail for 5 years if that mp3 is thereafter found, because he can't prove that he created it from a legally owned CD?
Can't believe I've been a windows user since year 3.1 and never even noticed that!!!
Well, when smaller companies compete against the likes of Wal-Mart, usually you can be pretty sure C) will happen. And then, Wal-Mart is alone. No competition. No competition = bad. They can then raise the prices up to whatever highest price they know the customers will still accept.
Here in Canada, big oil companies did that. We had a lot of independant gas station owners that kept the gas price at a reasonable price. Then one day, the big guys thought they'd like to lose the competition, so they lowered their price so ridicully low, much lower than the price they themselves paid for the gas. With their big money, they could take the loss for a while, and all the independant guys were forced out of business. Then, with no competition left, the big ones raised their prices, a little at a time, to heights never known before here. And no one could do a thing about it. And no one wants to start an independant station anymore, as they know they risk getting hit by the same trick, and losing all their money...
Don't think that Wal-Mart or other big multinationals are the kind of companies to suffer any competition. They'll crush it, and then collect.
Okay, then, children of the modern age (where we live in a world so tied together with wires that Pangaea ain't goin' nowhere!), you tell me if this is a predicament or not.
In the 1980s, you could look up from your Commodore 64, hours after purchasing it, with a glossy feeling of empowerment, achieved by the pattern of notes spewing from the speaker grille in an endless loop. You were part of the movement to help machines sing! You were a programmer! The Atari 800 people had BASIC. They know what I'm talking about. And the TI-994A guys don't need to say a word, because the TI could say it for them!
The old machines don't compare to the desktops of today, or to the consoles of today. But, sadly, current versions of Windows have no immediately accessible programming languages. And what's a kid going to do with Visual Basic? Build a modal dialog? Forget coding for XBox. Requires registration in the XBox Developer Program. Otherwise, you gotta crack the sucker open. GameCube? GameBoy? Playstation 2?
Coding Just Isn't Accessible
Yes, there are burgeoning free SDKs for many of these platforms. But they are obscure and most children have no means of actually deploying or executing the code on their own hardware! This is obvious to us all and likely doesn't seem such a big deal. But ask yourself what might have happened had you not had access to a programming language on an Atari 800 or a Commodore. You tell me if this is a predicament.
It turns out, most of the kids in my neighborhood are exposed to coding through the TI calculator. A handful of languages are available on the TI and its processor is interesting enough to evoke some curiousity. But this hasn't spread to its PDA big brothers, where young people could have more exposure to programming. And undoubtedly the utility of a language on the Palm, Pocket PC and others would be useful to many.
So what's the problem here? We have no shortage of new languages, but they become increasingly distanced from the populace. Are the companies behind these platforms weary of placing the power of a programming language in the hands of users? Is there not a demand any longer? It's got to be some kind of greed, power, money thing, right?
Perhaps this is just another reason to push Linux and BSD on consumer systems. Still, are scripting languages easily accessible to beginners on those systems? OSX has made several scripting languages available (including Ruby and Python), but most users are unaware of their presence.
I should mention that Windows is equipped with its own scripting host for developing in JScript and VBScript. But the use of the scripting host is (I believe) under-documented and limited for beginners. Try doing something useful in a script without using Server.CreateObject. Let's not let kids touch the COM objects, please!
The Christmas List
I'm thinking a toy language for consoles and desktops alike could be monumental. I'm not saying it needs to be cross-platform. A language for GameCube that took advantage of platform-specific features could be more appealing to GameCube users than a language that used a reduced featureset, but could execute on a handheld. Really, we live in a world where both choices should be available.
As for essential features:
1. Transportable code.
OTOH, they might get less fat...
Come to think of it, that analogy is pretty good... When you share an internet connection, you both get less bandwidth, and that might drive you to leave your seat and do something else, and thus get less fat...
Basically, Amdahl's law says that you can only optimize to a point before it becomes pointless. Also, it is often used to demonstrate that it is useless to optimize a single aspect of a system when the other aspects are still unoptimized.
For example, let's say you have a computer that executes something within 10 seconds. 5 of those seconds are spent reading from disk, 5 are spent doing calculations on the CPU.
Now if you upgrade the disk to a disk twice as good, you're gonna get an execution time of 7.5 seconds(5 for CPU, 2.5 for disk). So you gained 2.5 seconds.
Let's say you still think it's too slow, and upgrade the disk again to a disk twice as good. You're now getting an execution time of 6.25 seconds(5 for CPU, 1.25 for disk). You thus gained 1.25 seconds.
You should get the trend here, if you continue upgrading only the disk, it will come to a point where, even by increasing the speed of the disk tenfold, you will only gain small fractions of second on your execution time, and small fractions of second over more than 5 seconds is definitely not a good improvement.
The same reasonning can be applied(this is the original intent of Amdahl's law) to multi-processor machines. Assuming only 50% of a program is runnable in parrallel processing, it comes to a point where adding processors brings very little improvement, even were you to increase the number of processors tenfold. (The explanation for this is left as an exercise to the reader... Hint: it's the same explanation as the disk/cpu above.)
The attack is based on timing (calculating the time taken by the server to respond to the client, and deducing part of a password from that time), so I guess one way to defeat it would be to insert some random delay before sending a response, so the attacker can no longer rely on the timing meaning anything...
Heh, I heard about stealing comments from another article in a desperate attempt to get karma, but this is the first time I actually notice someone doing in within the same article...
Ah karma, is there any thing people won't do for you?
I can't get to the first article.
The other three talk about the same IDC study.
http://www.newsfactor.com/perl/story/20147.html, first sentence:
According to a study funded by Microsoft (Nasdaq: MSFT) , Windows 2000 is generally cheaper for businesses to run and support than similar products based on Linux.
http://www.webwereld.nl/nieuws/13388.phtml, first sentence:
Uit een door Microsoft gesponsorde studie blijkt dat de totale kosten van Windows 2000 voor bedrijven lager zijn dan die van Linux.
Looks like a lot of microsoft sponsoring is going on in there. Anyone has any real articles?
The troll from Harry Potter got beaten up by Harry Potter and two other kids. I don't think I need to say more.
As for another respondant saying it's been like that for two years, I was a Sympatico user when they indroduced the 5GB limit 4 months(not two years) ago. I still am now, but in the process of switching to others, as I don't think paying 45$ CAN/month for 5 GB is anything remotely acceptable(Ok, I lived with it for 4 months already, but that's just the inescapable power of inertia at work).
Building a cyclotron is not that difficult technically, but finding all the needed material might be(high voltage for the magnet, and especially the vacuum pump able to get it down to about 10^-5 atmospheres...) In all cases, it certainly is an interesting project to take up if you have interest in physics, as it touches a lot of different fields of physics and teaches you a thing or two about how simple it can be to make such a complicated experiment work in theory, while being such a pain in the friggin a** in practice...
As far as I can tell, people ARE downloading apache, and using it more than it's closed source counterparts...
Yeah I mean even virus software developers are not immune to the "It works on my machine" syndrome...
Design Patterns are good ideas that experienced programmers have developed to solve different classes of problems using object oriented programmation. This would allow people to profit from work of more experienced people, and thus greatly reduce the time needed to solve a given programmation problem. The original idea of the GoF was to publish a collection of the most useful patterns and give a name to each one of them so people could then speak about them in a conversation and be understood.