I ported Working Software's Spellswell spelling checker from the Classic Mac OS to BeOS back in 1987. On Mac OS, Spellswell could link to word processors via the Word Services Apple Event Suite. On BeOS I defined a conceptually similar protocol based on BMessages.
For all these years, I have held onto the Spellswell source code, and kept it safe, knowing that someday the Phoenix of Haiku would rise from the ashed of Be, Inc. (Or rather, I just don't like to ever throw anything away.)
I also still have all the protocol specification documents. I just gotta organize them and throw them up on the web again.
Word Services actually still works on Mac OS X, but not yet with Spellswell. We never did Carbonize it. Eventually Working Software was dissolved, and we all went our separate ways. But I expect I'll release an OS X-Native Spellswell at some point as well.
Some things never die... Spellswell was originally published by Green, Johnson Inc. before Mike Green and Dave Johnson split up into Cassady and Green and Working Software. My understanding is that it could check Microsoft Word 1.0 documents on the 128k Mac. It was a huge hit, before Microsoft added a built-in speller to Word.
A lot of that code from 1984 is still in there, for example an incredibly elaborate dictionary file format that provides compression while at the same time being editable.
Not just me, as a consultant, but all his employees. The reason for this was that he found it tedious to make out all our paychecks.
So tedious that one month he went on a month-long vacation cruise without paying us. Again, not just me - but all his employees.
You'd think that he'd be more careful, given the dependency his operation had on his employee's dedication.
But no, he also played a little game with us. He wouldn't pay anyone sometimes, until someone complained about their paycheck being late. And then that poor hapless victim would get a stern lecture about how they ought to save more of their money, so that a late check wouldn't be such a big deal.
Simple cruelty is what it was. I hope he rots in Hell. He was the very first thing I thought of when I read about how the quants were the likely cause of the world-wide economic collapse. I haven't heard from those folks in years, but I would be astonished if his economic model had any allowance for the subprime meltdown. I bet - I hope - he's flipping burgers now.
A "Quant" is a quantitative investor; basically they have software that gives them a license to print money - or tries to. We have all seen the result of that practice.
It slipped my mind just now that I actually used to work for a quant myself, as a consultant. It was a futures hedge fund. That is, it would buy and sell pork belly and crude oil contracts in such a way as to... print money.
The guy who owned the fund is the richest person I have ever met, or am ever likely to meet. Yet they tried to stiff me out of my last month's paycheck, and wouldn't pay me unless I removed from my homepage what their directory of research said of me: "Your code is by far the best in our codebase."
I just violated my termination contract by telling you that. Fuck 'em - I shouldn't have had to sign that contract just to get the paycheck they owed me anyway.
I guess that million-dollar salary is evidence of their desperation.
At least every day for the past three or four years I've gotten inquiries from recruiters for Solomon-Page and Bloomberg, and occasionally other New York City investment firms. They specifically want C++ coders, which is what I'm best at.
If I respond at all, it's to say that I don't want to live in new york city.
However, the last time any of them named a specific salary potential was back in 2002 or so. I guess the pay scale has increased since then.
My theory is that they're hoping that some manner of Software Magic is going to fix all their fux0r3d mortgage-backed securities lossage. If one could really do that with quantitative investment software, then one would earn such a collosal salary, but I would hate to have to live with all the pressure they would be putting on me.
During the French Revolution, the revolutionaries portrayed Marie Antoinette as a lesbian, for example. This back when that wasn't something one would be willingly out about.
I can't think of any specific examples, but my hazy memory suggests that the American revolutionaries portrayed the British in general, and the British royalty in ways that were less than factual.
Ms. Port refers to the anonymous publication of The Federalist Papers. She actually does have a point there. A few years back there was a lawsuit over anonymously published political tracts. Federal campaign finance law required that the funding source for those pamphlets be publicly stated, and it wasn't. If I remember correctly, the Supreme Court upheld the right of the publisher to speak anonymously.
HOWEVER...
If she really does go through with the lawsuit, contract law will be the deciding factor here, specifically whether Google's Terms of Service promised any kind of anonymity. I expect it doesn't.
Let this be a lesson to all the bloggers out there, to post using TOR.
My ex was a biologist, and told me that the way the healing of wounds is implemented is that cells multiply when there aren't other cells next to them. If there is a hole, then the cells will divide to fill in the gap, with the signal to stop occuring when the dividing cells finally close up the hole.
The problem is that that signal to stop gets screwed up somehow sometimes - either it's not produced, or its ignored. There is only a small probability of this happening, but if you are repeatedly wounded, then the probability increases.
Some people have a habit of biting the insides of their cheeks. I understand that doing so can cause cancers where you bite.
... it if he ever tried making vampire fangs, not like the plastic ones but made of stainless steel and porcelain like my cap. And he said yes he did, he once made himself a set to wear to a Halloween party.
(I have a cap because someone through a spoon at me once.:-()
A friend of mine had a baby girl, unaware until late in her pregnancy that she and the father were both carriers for the recessive form of polycystic kidney disease. Babies with this condition rarely survive gestation, and almost all of those that are born alive die within a month of birth.
Her baby's kidneys were both removed when she was less than a week old. My friend has been a hero to her child, lavishing her not just with the usual motherly love, but also expert medical care that she learned from the doctors and nurses. As a result her baby has survived over a year now.
When her daughter gets big enough to accept it, my friend will donate one of her own kidneys.
This sort of research holds out hope that more such babies will have a chance at survival.
If you analyzer your logs with a tool such as Analog, you'll find that a significant number of your web sites' visitors are still running Explorer or Netscape versions 3 or 4. At least that's what I find for my sites - and it's been that way for a long time.
There are lots of reasons for this. Some people cannot afford the new hardware required for Mac OS X. Some of those who could buy the hardware have a big investment in software that uses Apple Desktop Bus (ADB) dongles that wouldn't work on OS X even if the newer Macs were equipped with ADB - they haven't been for years.
Some software has been discontinued, with the vendors out of business, and so will never be ported to OS X-native. If the software is useful enough to the end user, then they'll keep running Mac OS 9.
Finally, some people simply don't know how to upgrade. Until very recently a relative of mine was running Internet Explorer 5.0 on Mac OS X 10.2 - no doubt riddled with well-known security holes, but she simply didn't know better. I bought her Mac OS X Tiger for Christmas (Leopard won't run on her G3), then visited soon after and installed it for her, then downloaded and installed all the updates.
All of these are reasons that I plan for Ogg Frog to support the Classic Mac OS.
(And there are many Macs out there that are too old to run Mac OS 9; they'll be running 8.6 or some such.)
I have been a software engineer for twenty-one years, at one time having the role of "Debug Meister" as a system software engineer at Apple Computer - this because I'm a wizard at assembly debugging and reverse engineering.
For example, I was once able to give Microsoft the exact byte offset in Word's binary where their bug lay, that would cause a very rare, difficult to reproduce system crash - this was way before Mac OS X, so application faults would hang the whole machine.
I have Bipolar-Type Schizoaffective Disorder. Because it's just like being manic depressive and schizophrenic at the same time, it is one of the very worst mental illnesses that one can have.
It is very rare, poorly understood and notoriously difficult to treat. My symptoms include depression, which has been suicidal at times - I've attempted in a serious way twice - a profoundly euphoric state called mania, auditory hallucinations and, in my case, visual hallucinations that coordinate with a profound paranoia that leads me to believe that a shadowy, secret law enforcement agency I call The Thought Police are coming, not to arrest me, but to kill me.
I call them The Thought Police because they are The Police Inside My Head. You see, I know very well that they're not real. Unfortunately, just knowing that one is paranoid doesn't make the paranoia go away. When I look directly at my attackers, I can see that they're not there, but when I turn away I can feel their presence again.
But Wait, There's More!
There are Five Axes of psychiatric diagnosis. That is, one's Madness is a point in a sort of five-dimensional vector space.
Schizoaffective disorder, schizophrenia and manic depression are all biochemical axis diseases; they are caused by screwed up brain chemistry. They are thought to be genetic, although there is some evidence that schizophrenia can be caused by infectious disease when one is either in the womb or very young.
Biochemical axis illnesses are generally incurable, but their symptoms can often be relieved with medication. I know very well what would happen to me should I ever weary of my life on the run and decide to turn myself in to The Thought Police - and so I am very diligent at taking my daily dose of the powerful, expensive, mind-altering drug which gives me the comfort of staying a step - but just a step - ahead of Them.
There is also a neurotic axis. Neuroses are purely psychological in origin and are usually caused by some kind of unresolved trauma, usually experienced as a child such as sexual abuse, but it can arise in adults too, as with the war veteran's Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder.
Ironically, many neurosis originate as adaptive strategies, that enable the neurotic to survive their terrible ordeal. Thus the soldier who learns to dive for cover at every sharp sound survives the war, but is unable to return to civilian life after returning home - because he still feels the need to dive for that safety.
The little girl who survives her pedophile by imagining his advances to be courtship by a handsome prince my not find her Castle in the Sky such a wonderful place to live when she grows up, gets married and has children of her own.
The neurotic axis illnesses can all be cured, and through "talk therapy" alone, without the use of any drugs - in fact, using drugs to relieve one's symptoms can actually relieve one of the need to ever get better.
Unfortunately, the cure generally takes many years and is collossally expensive. In my case I estimate that I paid just one therapist sixty thousand dollars for thirteen years of weekly psychotherapy sessions.
While there is a large overlap between the approved Free Software Licenses and the approved Open Source Licenses, the fact that a project has a license that is in both lists doesn't make it both Open Source and Free Software.
Consider the GPL - it's approved by both. But Red Hat doesn't publish Free Software, it publishes Open Source - and software written by Richard Stallman isn't Open Source - it's Free Software, and RMS is happy to explain the difference.
You see, the distinction isn't the license - it's the purpose behind making the project either Open or Free.
As Stallman explains, Open Source is about efficiency - volunteer coders, and "many eyeballs" finding and correcting bugs and security holes. Free Software is about creating a community - Stallman has made it very clear he hopes to get back to the way things were back in the day, when source was shared openly with no non-disclosure agreements, copyrights or licenses.
Unfortunately, the English language has a problem: Free can mean "as in Freedom", or "without cost". When I speak of my Free Software project to non-techie people, they think I'm just not going to charge money for it, and question my sanity. They have no clue about the meaning behind Free Software.
Spanish doesn't have that problem: Free as in Freedom is "Libre", free as in beer is "gratis". But those words don't make sense to English speakers.
I have developed a convention, but it's too subtle for most to take notice. Perhaps they will if you join me: I capitalize the "F" if it's "Free as in Freedom", but use lowercase for "free as in beer". I think that emphasizes the difference, and maybe if we all wrote it that way, more people would understand.
Stallman is a great man, IMHO, but he has a marketing and image problem: very few non-technical people have the first clue as to what Free Software means. Most think it means "freeware".
But Open Source doesn't have that problem; many who don't know source code from Shinola do understand what Open Source is all about.
Thus I long ago gave up trying to describe Ogg Frog as Free Software in casual conversation. I only say that when speaking to others who will likely understand. Most of the time I describe it as Open Source, but feel guilty in doing so. I feel like Matthew in these verses:
Peter said unto him, Lord, why cannot I follow thee now? I will lay down my life for thy sake. Jesus answered him, Wilt thou lay down thy life for my sake? Verily, verily, I say unto thee, The cock shall not crow, till thou hast denied me thrice. -- John 13, 37-38
(BTW - there's no Ogg Frog to download yet, not even CVS or Subversion. Out of consideration for my non-technical target market, I'm not releasing anything until it reaches it's planned 1.0 feature set, and is reasonably bug free. At least for non-technical users, I feel The Cathedral is better than The Bazaar.
As was the practice with many silent films: a live pianist would play the music during the film.
The first time I saw it, in a theatre, that piano score was on the soundtrack, and it added a great deal to the whole film. It was very clear that the music was carefully composed to work with Fritz Lang's vision.
Later, a colorized version came out with a modern Heavy Metal score. I didn't care for it at all. It's not that I dislike Heavy Metal, but that the music chosen really didn't work for the film.
I read somewhere that Adolf Hitler was really into Metropolis, and that he held it up as an example that all filmmakers should strive for. Food for thought.
After the reunification of Germany, the story came out that there was a single room in the Stasi headquarters that could tap any phone in the country.
I was absolutely appalled to hear about that, and really felt for the terror that the citizens of East Germany had to face under Communism: say the wrong thing on the phone, and the heavy bootheels of the state police might come kicking down your door, to drag you away to a dungeon, work camp or firing squad.
Absolutely appalled, indeed.
Well, we've got that now, in the US: the entire US telcom system can be tapped from a single location, and not just that, by remote control!
And not just phone conversations: Internet traffic and financial transactions as well.
Get ready to send some heavy bootheels my way: George W. Bush is a war criminal. My greatest hope is that he shall be tried for his crimes by the next administration - or turned over to the UN Tribunal in The Hague - and that he be imprisoned for the rest of his days for what he has done, not only to his country, but to so many innocent people all around the world.
How many Iraqis had to die, or be horribly maimed, so we could take control of their oil? It was never about terrorism; if it ever had been, the military would have focussed on Afghanistan, the Taliban and bin Laden. By not having done so, the Taliban has become resurgent.
Yo! Homeland Security, lissen up: when you subpoena Slashdot's logs, I have Stephouse IDSL and live in Sunnyvale, California.
Cowering in fear, -- Mike
I don't understand why you object to surveillance.
on
The Privacy Paradox
·
· Score: 5, Funny
Surely if you've done nothing wrong, then you've got nothing to hide.
An uncoated mirror actually does oxidize, but it does so in a very nice way, forming an optically-homogenious layer of very tough aluminum oxide.
In that respect it's completely different from iron oxidation.
The other way is to overcoat it with something tough and transparent; traditionally silicon monoxide was used.
One can both protect the aluminum and enhance its reflectivity by giving it multiple layers of tough, transparent minerals. Interference effects cause it to reflect better than aluminum would alone.
That's how laser mirrors work - they're not aluminized. It's the same principle as antireflective coatings on camera and eyeglass lenses, but a different choice of refractive indices and thicknesses causes it to enhance rather than cancel reflections.
The maksutov and the schmidt camera. The Maksutov uses a correcting lens with two steeply spherical, parallel faces. The schmidt uses a nearly flat lens whose surface is actually a fourth-order polynomial.
You can't really make very big maksutovs. You can make big schmidts - there is a 48-inch one at Palomar that is used for all-sky surveys, but they have a very practical problem that the focal surface is a very strongly curved sphere!
It's very easy to make a lens that has a wider field than a schmidt - any wide-angle 35mm camera lens is an example; what's hard is to make it big so it can capture a lot of light, and so see faint objects.
What I wonder about the camera in TFA is what they are going to use for a sensor? If it were a photographic plate, it would need to be eight feet across or so. What would work better would be a CCD that big - but making one would be a big job! No doubt it will be composed of many smaller ones.
The biggest lens in the world currently is the 40-inch Yerkes Observatory refactor, followed closely by the 36-inch Lick at Mt. Hamilton, overlooking Silicon Valley.
But for many years the biggest mirror was the 200-inch Hale Telescope at Palomar Mountain near San Diego. Nowadays there are several monolithic 8-metre mirrors, and the two 10-meter Keck telescopes atop Mauna Kea, Hawaii; they are composed of carefully aligned hexagonal subsections.
Why the big disparity?
With a lens, you have to grind and polish both sides, and what's worse, a single lens won't do because all glass refracts different colors differently, giving rise to chromatic aberration. A minimum of two lenses is required, for four surfaces to fabricate.
For both lenses and mirrors, the tolerance of the surface is a small fraction of a wavelength of light across the whole surface. But for lenses, all the surfaces must also be very accurately parallel.
But really the worst problem is that with a lens, the light goes through the thickness of the glass. The glass must therefore be very uniform and free of internal stresses that could alter the index of refraction in different places.
Such glass is very difficult to make; no doubt these lenses are only possible because of recent advances in optical glass manufacture.
That's not a problem for mirrors; observatory telescopes use "first-surface" mirrors, which are aluminized on the front, so the light doesn't go through the glass. Mirror glass therefore doesn't need such careful tolerances.
But my guess is that they are using lenses because they have a much wider field of view; it's quite easy to make a lens with a sixty degree field of view, but with a mirror the field of view is typically a fraction of a degree. With small amateur scopes, the maximum field is about a degree, twice that of the full moon.
That seems clear from the photo, because of the steep curvature of the glass; wide-angle lenses usually have very strong curves.
And yes, I know what I'm talking about - I'm an avid amateur telescope maker, and at one time was a Caltech astronomy student. I've published in the Astrophysical Journal, and have done observing runs at the Palomar 60 and 200 inch telescopes.
Amazon S3 would only work for artists who have day jobs such as sysadmin or programming.
If a musician is to run their own website at all, all but a few would need managed hosting, where the bandwidth is much more expensive.
I know this very well, because I'm designing the website for a musician who wasn't capable of downloading and installing Adobe Reader on her own computer - and she was completely flummoxed when I sent her a link to my MP3s.
This is not an unintelligent woman; she is a virtuoso pianist, and has a Master's degree from a top conservatory.
... run the government. In democratic countries at least, the government serves at the pleasure of the people, not the corporations.
And yes I'm well aware of the corrupting influence of campaign donations and lobbyists. If those lead to bad laws being passed, it's because the voters don't care about their own rights.
There are definitely more voters than corporations, so it's well-within our abilities to put those who pass bad laws out of a job.
Slashdot Mirror
For all these years, I have held onto the Spellswell source code, and kept it safe, knowing that someday the Phoenix of Haiku would rise from the ashed of Be, Inc. (Or rather, I just don't like to ever throw anything away.)
I also still have all the protocol specification documents. I just gotta organize them and throw them up on the web again.
Word Services actually still works on Mac OS X, but not yet with Spellswell. We never did Carbonize it. Eventually Working Software was dissolved, and we all went our separate ways. But I expect I'll release an OS X-Native Spellswell at some point as well.
Some things never die... Spellswell was originally published by Green, Johnson Inc. before Mike Green and Dave Johnson split up into Cassady and Green and Working Software. My understanding is that it could check Microsoft Word 1.0 documents on the 128k Mac. It was a huge hit, before Microsoft added a built-in speller to Word.
A lot of that code from 1984 is still in there, for example an incredibly elaborate dictionary file format that provides compression while at the same time being editable.
So tedious that one month he went on a month-long vacation cruise without paying us. Again, not just me - but all his employees.
You'd think that he'd be more careful, given the dependency his operation had on his employee's dedication.
But no, he also played a little game with us. He wouldn't pay anyone sometimes, until someone complained about their paycheck being late. And then that poor hapless victim would get a stern lecture about how they ought to save more of their money, so that a late check wouldn't be such a big deal.
Simple cruelty is what it was. I hope he rots in Hell. He was the very first thing I thought of when I read about how the quants were the likely cause of the world-wide economic collapse. I haven't heard from those folks in years, but I would be astonished if his economic model had any allowance for the subprime meltdown. I bet - I hope - he's flipping burgers now.
It slipped my mind just now that I actually used to work for a quant myself, as a consultant. It was a futures hedge fund. That is, it would buy and sell pork belly and crude oil contracts in such a way as to... print money.
The guy who owned the fund is the richest person I have ever met, or am ever likely to meet. Yet they tried to stiff me out of my last month's paycheck, and wouldn't pay me unless I removed from my homepage what their directory of research said of me: "Your code is by far the best in our codebase."
I just violated my termination contract by telling you that. Fuck 'em - I shouldn't have had to sign that contract just to get the paycheck they owed me anyway.
At least every day for the past three or four years I've gotten inquiries from recruiters for Solomon-Page and Bloomberg, and occasionally other New York City investment firms. They specifically want C++ coders, which is what I'm best at.
If I respond at all, it's to say that I don't want to live in new york city.
However, the last time any of them named a specific salary potential was back in 2002 or so. I guess the pay scale has increased since then.
My theory is that they're hoping that some manner of Software Magic is going to fix all their fux0r3d mortgage-backed securities lossage. If one could really do that with quantitative investment software, then one would earn such a collosal salary, but I would hate to have to live with all the pressure they would be putting on me.
During the French Revolution, the revolutionaries portrayed Marie Antoinette as a lesbian, for example. This back when that wasn't something one would be willingly out about. I can't think of any specific examples, but my hazy memory suggests that the American revolutionaries portrayed the British in general, and the British royalty in ways that were less than factual.
HOWEVER...
If she really does go through with the lawsuit, contract law will be the deciding factor here, specifically whether Google's Terms of Service promised any kind of anonymity. I expect it doesn't.
Let this be a lesson to all the bloggers out there, to post using TOR.
My ex was a biologist, and told me that the way the healing of wounds is implemented is that cells multiply when there aren't other cells next to them. If there is a hole, then the cells will divide to fill in the gap, with the signal to stop occuring when the dividing cells finally close up the hole. The problem is that that signal to stop gets screwed up somehow sometimes - either it's not produced, or its ignored. There is only a small probability of this happening, but if you are repeatedly wounded, then the probability increases. Some people have a habit of biting the insides of their cheeks. I understand that doing so can cause cancers where you bite.
(I have a cap because someone through a spoon at me once. :-()
Her baby's kidneys were both removed when she was less than a week old. My friend has been a hero to her child, lavishing her not just with the usual motherly love, but also expert medical care that she learned from the doctors and nurses. As a result her baby has survived over a year now.
When her daughter gets big enough to accept it, my friend will donate one of her own kidneys.
This sort of research holds out hope that more such babies will have a chance at survival.
Make Your Aria.
What about artists who don't want to charge money for their work?
There are lots of reasons for this. Some people cannot afford the new hardware required for Mac OS X. Some of those who could buy the hardware have a big investment in software that uses Apple Desktop Bus (ADB) dongles that wouldn't work on OS X even if the newer Macs were equipped with ADB - they haven't been for years.
Some software has been discontinued, with the vendors out of business, and so will never be ported to OS X-native. If the software is useful enough to the end user, then they'll keep running Mac OS 9.
Finally, some people simply don't know how to upgrade. Until very recently a relative of mine was running Internet Explorer 5.0 on Mac OS X 10.2 - no doubt riddled with well-known security holes, but she simply didn't know better. I bought her Mac OS X Tiger for Christmas (Leopard won't run on her G3), then visited soon after and installed it for her, then downloaded and installed all the updates.
All of these are reasons that I plan for Ogg Frog to support the Classic Mac OS.
(And there are many Macs out there that are too old to run Mac OS 9; they'll be running 8.6 or some such.)
For example, I was once able to give Microsoft the exact byte offset in Word's binary where their bug lay, that would cause a very rare, difficult to reproduce system crash - this was way before Mac OS X, so application faults would hang the whole machine.
I have Bipolar-Type Schizoaffective Disorder. Because it's just like being manic depressive and schizophrenic at the same time, it is one of the very worst mental illnesses that one can have.
It is very rare, poorly understood and notoriously difficult to treat. My symptoms include depression, which has been suicidal at times - I've attempted in a serious way twice - a profoundly euphoric state called mania, auditory hallucinations and, in my case, visual hallucinations that coordinate with a profound paranoia that leads me to believe that a shadowy, secret law enforcement agency I call The Thought Police are coming, not to arrest me, but to kill me.
I call them The Thought Police because they are The Police Inside My Head. You see, I know very well that they're not real. Unfortunately, just knowing that one is paranoid doesn't make the paranoia go away. When I look directly at my attackers, I can see that they're not there, but when I turn away I can feel their presence again.
There are Five Axes of psychiatric diagnosis. That is, one's Madness is a point in a sort of five-dimensional vector space.
Schizoaffective disorder, schizophrenia and manic depression are all biochemical axis diseases; they are caused by screwed up brain chemistry. They are thought to be genetic, although there is some evidence that schizophrenia can be caused by infectious disease when one is either in the womb or very young.
Biochemical axis illnesses are generally incurable, but their symptoms can often be relieved with medication. I know very well what would happen to me should I ever weary of my life on the run and decide to turn myself in to The Thought Police - and so I am very diligent at taking my daily dose of the powerful, expensive, mind-altering drug which gives me the comfort of staying a step - but just a step - ahead of Them.
There is also a neurotic axis. Neuroses are purely psychological in origin and are usually caused by some kind of unresolved trauma, usually experienced as a child such as sexual abuse, but it can arise in adults too, as with the war veteran's Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder.
Ironically, many neurosis originate as adaptive strategies, that enable the neurotic to survive their terrible ordeal. Thus the soldier who learns to dive for cover at every sharp sound survives the war, but is unable to return to civilian life after returning home - because he still feels the need to dive for that safety.
The little girl who survives her pedophile by imagining his advances to be courtship by a handsome prince my not find her Castle in the Sky such a wonderful place to live when she grows up, gets married and has children of her own.
The neurotic axis illnesses can all be cured, and through "talk therapy" alone, without the use of any drugs - in fact, using drugs to relieve one's symptoms can actually relieve one of the need to ever get better.
Unfortunately, the cure generally takes many years and is collossally expensive. In my case I estimate that I paid just one therapist sixty thousand dollars for thirteen years of weekly psychotherapy sessions.
They could use Jabber for instant messaging, and Asterix for voice communications.
Consider the GPL - it's approved by both. But Red Hat doesn't publish Free Software, it publishes Open Source - and software written by Richard Stallman isn't Open Source - it's Free Software, and RMS is happy to explain the difference.
I'm squarely in Stallman's camp; my audio project Ogg Frog is definitely Free Software, not Open Source.
You see, the distinction isn't the license - it's the purpose behind making the project either Open or Free.
As Stallman explains, Open Source is about efficiency - volunteer coders, and "many eyeballs" finding and correcting bugs and security holes. Free Software is about creating a community - Stallman has made it very clear he hopes to get back to the way things were back in the day, when source was shared openly with no non-disclosure agreements, copyrights or licenses.
Unfortunately, the English language has a problem: Free can mean "as in Freedom", or "without cost". When I speak of my Free Software project to non-techie people, they think I'm just not going to charge money for it, and question my sanity. They have no clue about the meaning behind Free Software.
Spanish doesn't have that problem: Free as in Freedom is "Libre", free as in beer is "gratis". But those words don't make sense to English speakers.
I have developed a convention, but it's too subtle for most to take notice. Perhaps they will if you join me: I capitalize the "F" if it's "Free as in Freedom", but use lowercase for "free as in beer". I think that emphasizes the difference, and maybe if we all wrote it that way, more people would understand.
Stallman is a great man, IMHO, but he has a marketing and image problem: very few non-technical people have the first clue as to what Free Software means. Most think it means "freeware".
But Open Source doesn't have that problem; many who don't know source code from Shinola do understand what Open Source is all about.
Thus I long ago gave up trying to describe Ogg Frog as Free Software in casual conversation. I only say that when speaking to others who will likely understand. Most of the time I describe it as Open Source, but feel guilty in doing so. I feel like Matthew in these verses:
(BTW - there's no Ogg Frog to download yet, not even CVS or Subversion. Out of consideration for my non-technical target market, I'm not releasing anything until it reaches it's planned 1.0 feature set, and is reasonably bug free. At least for non-technical users, I feel The Cathedral is better than The Bazaar.
The first time I saw it, in a theatre, that piano score was on the soundtrack, and it added a great deal to the whole film. It was very clear that the music was carefully composed to work with Fritz Lang's vision.
Later, a colorized version came out with a modern Heavy Metal score. I didn't care for it at all. It's not that I dislike Heavy Metal, but that the music chosen really didn't work for the film.
I read somewhere that Adolf Hitler was really into Metropolis, and that he held it up as an example that all filmmakers should strive for. Food for thought.
You know, micro-chipping your kids can help get them home safely if they're ever lost or, God forbid, kidnaped.
I was absolutely appalled to hear about that, and really felt for the terror that the citizens of East Germany had to face under Communism: say the wrong thing on the phone, and the heavy bootheels of the state police might come kicking down your door, to drag you away to a dungeon, work camp or firing squad.
Absolutely appalled, indeed.
Well, we've got that now, in the US: the entire US telcom system can be tapped from a single location, and not just that, by remote control!
And not just phone conversations: Internet traffic and financial transactions as well.
Get ready to send some heavy bootheels my way: George W. Bush is a war criminal. My greatest hope is that he shall be tried for his crimes by the next administration - or turned over to the UN Tribunal in The Hague - and that he be imprisoned for the rest of his days for what he has done, not only to his country, but to so many innocent people all around the world.
How many Iraqis had to die, or be horribly maimed, so we could take control of their oil? It was never about terrorism; if it ever had been, the military would have focussed on Afghanistan, the Taliban and bin Laden. By not having done so, the Taliban has become resurgent.
Yo! Homeland Security, lissen up: when you subpoena Slashdot's logs, I have Stephouse IDSL and live in Sunnyvale, California.
Cowering in fear, -- Mike
Surely if you've done nothing wrong, then you've got nothing to hide.
In that respect it's completely different from iron oxidation.
The other way is to overcoat it with something tough and transparent; traditionally silicon monoxide was used.
One can both protect the aluminum and enhance its reflectivity by giving it multiple layers of tough, transparent minerals. Interference effects cause it to reflect better than aluminum would alone.
That's how laser mirrors work - they're not aluminized. It's the same principle as antireflective coatings on camera and eyeglass lenses, but a different choice of refractive indices and thicknesses causes it to enhance rather than cancel reflections.
You can't really make very big maksutovs. You can make big schmidts - there is a 48-inch one at Palomar that is used for all-sky surveys, but they have a very practical problem that the focal surface is a very strongly curved sphere!
It's very easy to make a lens that has a wider field than a schmidt - any wide-angle 35mm camera lens is an example; what's hard is to make it big so it can capture a lot of light, and so see faint objects.
What I wonder about the camera in TFA is what they are going to use for a sensor? If it were a photographic plate, it would need to be eight feet across or so. What would work better would be a CCD that big - but making one would be a big job! No doubt it will be composed of many smaller ones.
But for many years the biggest mirror was the 200-inch Hale Telescope at Palomar Mountain near San Diego. Nowadays there are several monolithic 8-metre mirrors, and the two 10-meter Keck telescopes atop Mauna Kea, Hawaii; they are composed of carefully aligned hexagonal subsections.
Why the big disparity?
With a lens, you have to grind and polish both sides, and what's worse, a single lens won't do because all glass refracts different colors differently, giving rise to chromatic aberration. A minimum of two lenses is required, for four surfaces to fabricate.
For both lenses and mirrors, the tolerance of the surface is a small fraction of a wavelength of light across the whole surface. But for lenses, all the surfaces must also be very accurately parallel.
But really the worst problem is that with a lens, the light goes through the thickness of the glass. The glass must therefore be very uniform and free of internal stresses that could alter the index of refraction in different places.
Such glass is very difficult to make; no doubt these lenses are only possible because of recent advances in optical glass manufacture.
That's not a problem for mirrors; observatory telescopes use "first-surface" mirrors, which are aluminized on the front, so the light doesn't go through the glass. Mirror glass therefore doesn't need such careful tolerances.
But my guess is that they are using lenses because they have a much wider field of view; it's quite easy to make a lens with a sixty degree field of view, but with a mirror the field of view is typically a fraction of a degree. With small amateur scopes, the maximum field is about a degree, twice that of the full moon.
That seems clear from the photo, because of the steep curvature of the glass; wide-angle lenses usually have very strong curves.
And yes, I know what I'm talking about - I'm an avid amateur telescope maker, and at one time was a Caltech astronomy student. I've published in the Astrophysical Journal, and have done observing runs at the Palomar 60 and 200 inch telescopes.
While I wrote that several years ago, the page has gotten about five million hits.
I have more such essays in the works - I'll make sure that my many Slashdot friends are the first to know when they are published.
If a musician is to run their own website at all, all but a few would need managed hosting, where the bandwidth is much more expensive.
I know this very well, because I'm designing the website for a musician who wasn't capable of downloading and installing Adobe Reader on her own computer - and she was completely flummoxed when I sent her a link to my MP3s.
This is not an unintelligent woman; she is a virtuoso pianist, and has a Master's degree from a top conservatory.
And yes I'm well aware of the corrupting influence of campaign donations and lobbyists. If those lead to bad laws being passed, it's because the voters don't care about their own rights.
There are definitely more voters than corporations, so it's well-within our abilities to put those who pass bad laws out of a job.