My old workhorse was the Epson MX-80, back when I had my TRaSh-80. It worked for the many years I had it, but then again I barely printed anything (what the hell was there to print without a network connection?) That thing was cool, it came with the schematics, and the printer manual was funny as hell. After explaining some of the control codes for directly controling the individual dot-matrix pins, it would say stuff like "Whoa, now before you rush off to forge a copy of the Mona Lisa, here are some other useful codes", etc.
Ahh, the good old days in 4th grade, when I spent time converting rows of 7 pixels at a time (or was it 8?) of homemade pictures on small graph paper from binary to decimal numbers to send to the dot-matrix printer. egads, I was stupid too because I don't think I ever wrote any program to do the adding for me.
I couldn't be sure, but it seems to me that to prevent buffeting, you'd need about at least an acre of land per turbine (an acre being something like 200x200 feet, i think.) I know it's not the best source, but in the movie "seven", the finale is located on a wind farm
I drove through Altamont Pass in California a few years ago, which has tons of wind turbines, and might have been where they filmed that scene in "Seven". The windmills were maybe 100-200 meters apart. Maybe more, but definitely a lot further than 6 meters apart (which would be the distance for that 36 sq. meters number quoted above).
Also, this location was in a mountain pass that is really windy, so this was probably an exceptional place for harnessing the wind. Other places probably need to space the towers farther apart to ensure enough room such that the turbines aren't located in each others wind shadows.
You were joking I hope... because of all the buildings in all the cities of all the world, none interfere with the wind.
Are you joking? Have you ever seen a series of high-rise buildings that channel the wind and create a wind-tunnel effect? Read
this report for some info about how Canada is dealing with this common effect.
You seem to miss my argument completely. Wind turbines are purposely designed to extract as much kinetic energy from the wind as possible.
Buildings, on the other hand, are (mostly) static objects that can channel and redirect wind. They don't take away it's kinetic energy (except a tiny fraction through friction from shear flows).
If you have any documentation that will demonstrate that the reduced convective flows will not affect regional temperatures or tailwinds used for migratory birds, or other large-scale environmental impacts, then please show me. I haven't seen any reports refuting these concerns, and windfarm advocates sidestep this issue.
the drag on wind flow from all the turbines would be tiny compared to the lost drag caused by deforestation over the past decade alone.
Do you have numbers for those claims? Wind turbines are designed to specifically remove kinetic energy from the wind. Trees will only remove kinetic energy of the wind through friction as the branches sway in the breeze.
Are you bullshitting, or do you have actual information on your claim?
Did you know that the entire U.S. electrical grid could be powered by less than 150,000 modern wind turbines?
Global wind transports are an important atmospheric commodity to transport heat around the globe. They're also very important for spreading pollen and seeds, and other biological necessities.
Sure, windpower doesn't produce CO2 or other pollutants. But most proponents entirely ignore the other environmental impacts it would have, such as reducing intra-continental air transfer (ie, there's less wind as you put up more turbines), altering the trade-winds (loosely affecting air flights that make use of tailwinds, but greatly affecting avid sailboaters and kite-flyers). Plus other effects that would probably manifest themselves if we put up too many windfarms.
If intra-contintal crosswinds are greatly cut down, expect countries away from the equator to remain colder as less warm tropical air can travel up there, and vice-versa with the tropical countries. I assume you were talking about the USA power grid. How would Canadians farmers (and all other citizens too) feel if their air temperature dropped because we prevent adequate transfer of warm air to their country?
I don't know the numbers for these questions, but wind is an important ecological force that many people take for granted, and proponents of wind-farms like to ignore.
Room temp superconductivity is nifty. What's (literally) incredible is that the guy is claiming to have produced "Bose-Einstein-type condensate" at room temperature, as opposed to the usual few-billionths of a degree above absolute zero [colorado.edu].
The article skimped out on theoretical details, but the Bose-Enstein-type condensate refers to the superconducting phase-transition where the electrons form Cooper-pairs (through an electron-lattice-electron interaction). These Cooper pairs are spin-zero (the electrons pair anti-symetrically into the singlet state), and act like bosons, which can condense into the Bose-Einstein condensate.
Note that this is NOT exactly like a Bose-Einstein condensate because the bosons themselves contain two fermions, which are effectively coupled. These are similar, but not the same as the rubidium atoms in the BEC experiment you linked to. So it is kind of a BEC, but not exactly.
Now regarding your mention of a few-billionths of a degree above absolute zero, that is for the rubidium-atom experiment. THe superconducting phase-transition, which is what this article was referring to, happens in many elements at a few Kelvins, and in High-Tc materials up to the record of 150 K (I think).
Beyond that, there is other stuff that is sketchy, such as the professor retiring and not verifying that the diamond superconductors demonstrate the Meissner Effect (magnetic field expulsion from the interior of a superconductor) and other things. If this was really superconducting, I'd be sure he'd stay on as emeritus for at least a few years and keep going with these experiments, where he has a head-start over all other groups. If this is really room-temp Tc material that the article purports it to be, then this is HUGE news, and he should stay emeritus than quit research entirely. Hmmm...
I don't remember ever using the monitor that came with the 1000/TL. My father and I used a modded CGA monitor we bought for $50 at the Trenton Computer Show (one of the older computer shows on the east coast). It had no casing, it just had a styrofoam protective cover, and we had to build a set of isolation transformers into it, and hack an extra control board into it to get the intensity bit working (So it would have 16 colors, not just 8).
This was my first x86 box, and also my last Tandy computer. I got into computers back when the TRS-80 Model 1 came out (I was only a few years old), and then sometime in like 1986 or so I convinced my Dad to buy for $20 a hacked-up Tandy CoCo 1, as-is, also at the Trenton Computer Show. Amazingly, it worked for awhile, but then it shorted itself out (I say hacked up, the guy before wired some connectors to the mainboard, which IMHO shorted some vital component but we never bothered to probe it further). Still got our $20 out of the thing, and I was psyched, my first color computer (what I wanted since the commodore came out, no more B&W TRS-80).
With a Tandy 1000/TL, I was able to routinely use 320x200 at 16 colors, and occasionaly 640x200 at 16 colors when software specifically accessed Tandy-specific memory space. Made my friends jealous when they only had CGA graphics at 320x200 at 4 colors. It made playing Leisure Suit Larry so much better!!!
That said, did anyone else have a Tandy 1000, or specifically the 1000/TL? It was actually pretty sharp back in the day, and may have been the last custom computer Radio Scrap offered. It had the operating system (older version of MS-DOS, I forget which one) in ROM on the D drive, so it booted insanely fast.
It also came with some windows/office kind of software called Deskmate, which sort of resembled Windows 1.0. It was a desktop environment with a word processor and some other stuff, which was graphic-based, but the text was the same size/font as the standard IBM-PC text at 80x25 character resolution. Anybody else besides me ever use that? I don't remember anything else about it, though.
Classical computing deals with bits which are exactly in one of two states, 0 and 1.
In quantum mechanics, the 0 and 1 state are two eigenstates for a single qubit. However, each qubit can be in a linear combination of these two eigenstates (state must be normalized to 1).
If you measure whether the state of a single qubit is a 0 or 1, then you've collapsed the wavefunction, and the particle is forever in that specific state (if no future interactions occur).
That in itself isn't too interesting. But if you make a system of several qubits, you can overlap the wavefunctions, or entangle the qubits, in such a way that an operator acted on the system relates to a specific process you're trying to measure (ie, factoring a number), and the multi-qubit eigenstates of that operator. This means that the intermediate qubits, which are in linear combinations of the states 0 and 1, interact amongst each other, and measurement of the entire system yields a value of the measurement operator
by letting the qubits interfere nearly simultaneously. This is why many apparent operations can happen in parallel in a quantum computer.
I don't know the specifics of how to apply Shor's algorithm or any other quantum computing algorithms, but that's the basic gist of it. Interference of the wavefunctions of several individual qubits can do some interesting things.
That said, there are several ways of creating a qubit. One way exploits the fluxoid quantization of a superconducting loop. Any loop of a superconductor MUST have a total magnetic flux through it equal to an integer multiple of the fundamental flux quanta. So, if you apply a magnetic field such that you are applying exactly half this value, superconducting currents must thenflow around the loop to give extra magnetic flux (Ampere's law) to make the total flux an integer multiple of the flux quanta. These currents can flow to either enhance the applied field, giving 1 flux quanta, or they can destroy the applied field, giving 0 flux quanta.
However, until the current is measured, it isn't known whether it flows clockwise or counterclockwise. The state of this qubit is thus in a state 1/sqrt(2)[clockwise] +1/sqrt(2)[counterclockwise].
Other ways to make a qubit make use of spintronics, which use the two spin states of an electron as the basis for the two qubit states. This is an upcoming approach, as spintronics research is really taking off quickly now.
People have also used NMR to produce the qubits, which I don't know the details of. But IIRC, this was the method used by the group that prime factored 15.
The Beatles did this too at the very end of the Sgt. Pepper's album. The second-to-last thing you hear (or don't hear) is a very high audio frequency, lasting a few seconds, which probably most audio equipment of the time couldn't reproduce well, but John Lennon said it was put there just to annoy your dog.
Even cooler is the last about 4 seconds of the album, which is an endless loop (when played on vinyl), where the needle stays in the same circular track ad infinitum. On CD, they play the loop a few times before ending the track.
While on the subject of cool vinyl tricks, supposedly (I haven't seen it), Monty Python had a comedy record with two intertwined spiral tracks. So when you played the same side, sometimes you'd get one track, and sometimes the other. Must have totally tripped out some folks.
ya know, you're right. I jumped on that too fast. I usually like not knowing too much about a movie, so I skimmed those slides, and thought I saw those octapods. Their heads looked like how I envisioned the octpods from the books, though. forgot about those spider-bots...
Actually, when they were describing her attempts at intercourse with the old man, and tricks to arouse him, I had to skim thru that as quickly as possible.
Wrong! It's not the original Rama that returns, it's a second Rama-vehicle that visits the Solar system.
Actually, that's open to interpretation. While it was the same Rama that visited Earth the 2nd and 3rd times, and extrapolating backwards (taking into account the groups of 3, it implies that it is highly likely the 2nd Rama was also the same as the 1st.
Begin Spoiler
The sequence of slides shows what roughly look like the Octopods, so it seems this movie will span several of the books. End Spoiler
The first book is the best IMHO, but is mainly hard sci-fi, and would make a movie that would probably please geeks, but definitely not the general public. Though the plots are vastly different, a movie made of the first book would remind me of the movie Andromeda Strain. In this movie, lots of cool science is done (in a cool high-tech secret lab). But I bet most people not interested in science thought the movie was mostly boring. I envision a movie based on the first book only to be like this.
Going into parts of books 2,3,4, then adding some fantasy flightsy kind of stuff, it'll he more in line for an actual movie plot that Joe Public would be used to and possibly enjoy.
BTW, you should read RWR regardless of this movie. It's a pleasant read, and goes quite quickly. In fact, it's one of the two books that I've read in a single day (the other being the first book of Hitchiker's Guide).
Hmmm, sounds like they are mixing Rendezvous with Rama and Rama II.
Potential Spoiler but nothing you won't see on the back of the flap.
.
.
In the first book, astronauts visit Rama, but are only taken several AU through the solar system. They explore the ship, but must leave Rama before it's course takes them straight through the sun (IIRC).
In Rama II, then Rama returns to Earth, this time taking some humans with it on an interstellar journey that spans the next 3 books (which degrade in quality in each subsequent book).
So, if the astronauts are really taken across the universe, as the poster has suggested, it sounds like this movie will be a mix of several of the Rama books (or at least with many more creative liberties).
Or some purist will say that a trip of only a few AU within the solar system is still technically a trip around the universe.
Vote in two Bush's and you get a war for oil everytime
Look to the hippies for advice.
Clinton really DID follow the peaceful adage of Make Love, Not War. Unfortunately, the Republicans decided to impeach him for the said making of love, or at least the said denial of love-like relations with Ms. Lewinsky.
I've heard that it is relatively easy for a Go newcomer to beat some of the most sophisticated Go computer programs. I believe there are even rewards available for writing Go programs that can beat advanced players.
That said, can someone venture an explanation why Go is so difficult to program? (I don't know how to play). Do the possible future moves diverge much more quickly than chess? (I've seen a Go board, and it seems to have significantly more spaces than a chess board, which taken to the Nth power can add up bigtime). Is it such that a computer can't practically look too far ahead in the game?
If that's the reason, then Go is really interesting because a computer cannot just brute-force it's strategies, and some semblence of actual AI (stress the I) needs to be accounted for.
Makes some sense about FSF not fighting it unless it's signed over to them, but the GPL still needs to be proven in court. BTW, I'm the poster that responded to my own post saying FSF not GNU.
RMS and other folks at GNU typically respond to issues such as these. That is, when people/companies have not followed the licencsing of GPL'd software. I believe the offending party has usually changed their policies and was never actually taken to court.
IIRC, RMS has actually been anticipating for a serious GPL breach to rear its head, so it can provide an actual legal acid test of the GPL. I don't believe any organization/company has ever gone to court over GPL violations. Winning any courtroom legal victory would be a huge boon to for the GPL, as it would demonstrate it's legal resiliance. IANAL, of course.
I think I saw that highly-illogical ASCII-fied Spock on the back cover (or maybe front cover?) of one of the Creative Computing anthologies from times of yore.
I dunno about finding the 'source' for it, though.
P4's at 3.06 GHz and higher sold in the last few months are supposed to support hyperthreading. Does anybody know, though, whether slower P4's also do? K just bought a 1.8 GHz P4, and I'd really like to know whether I can hyperthread on it. (running linux)
On that note, does one also need a hyperthreading mobo? I've searched, but after reading several linux kernel archives that google pointed me to, I'm still not sure whether my lowly 1.8 GHz P4 can hyperthread.
You mean, the ones that the Debian installer asks if you want to add when you first configure the system? Are those the hard-to-find "different sources"?
And don't forget that many of the prominent software packages that are either too new to go into unstable, or have other such issues preventing their official inclusion, can be found at apt-get.org.
For example, if you're interested in mplayer, apt-get tells you that you can add
deb http://marillat.free.fr/ unstable main
to your sources.list file, which allows easy download and install of mplayer (you even have your option of optimizations for 686, k7, and others) as well as W32 codecs, etc.
If you try out debian again, one item that is sure to help you out immensely is the APT HOWTO. This helped me out to resolve some annoying apt-errors, and allowed me to keep a relatively up-to-date distribution which shys away from the bleeding-edge, unless necessary.
Read up on the section for keeping a mixed system. You can set apt to prefer the testing distribution, but go to unstable only when necessary. Or, if you're more conservative, prefer stable and go to testing when necessary. I get some errors every now and then when I try to apt-get install a package, but this is usually because I have a mixed system, and hence the testing/unstable packages might depended on different library versions. On my system thus far, this has always been successfully resolved by having apt-get prefer the unstable version for that particular package by using "apt-get -t unstable install packagename" Regarding unstable packages, I don't think I've run into any errors by using them (at least to my knowledge).
If you don't like the install process putting alot of crap in, you can opt to do what I do. Skip out of both dselect and tasksel when the debian installer drops you there to setup your system. You will be left with a rather minimal system, which is one of the reasons I went to debian in the first place. Then you can try apt-getting all the desired packages you need. So "apt-get install perl" should (hopefully) handle all your dependencies for you.
You also probably want to keep a copy of your XF86 config file, as the debian debconf setup has never worked well for me in that regard either.
Other than that, it's (hopefully) relatively smooth sailing. Good luck.
Slashdot Mirror
Ahh, the good old days in 4th grade, when I spent time converting rows of 7 pixels at a time (or was it 8?) of homemade pictures on small graph paper from binary to decimal numbers to send to the dot-matrix printer. egads, I was stupid too because I don't think I ever wrote any program to do the adding for me.
I drove through Altamont Pass in California a few years ago, which has tons of wind turbines, and might have been where they filmed that scene in "Seven". The windmills were maybe 100-200 meters apart. Maybe more, but definitely a lot further than 6 meters apart (which would be the distance for that 36 sq. meters number quoted above).
Also, this location was in a mountain pass that is really windy, so this was probably an exceptional place for harnessing the wind. Other places probably need to space the towers farther apart to ensure enough room such that the turbines aren't located in each others wind shadows.
Are you joking? Have you ever seen a series of high-rise buildings that channel the wind and create a wind-tunnel effect? Read this report for some info about how Canada is dealing with this common effect.
You seem to miss my argument completely. Wind turbines are purposely designed to extract as much kinetic energy from the wind as possible.
Buildings, on the other hand, are (mostly) static objects that can channel and redirect wind. They don't take away it's kinetic energy (except a tiny fraction through friction from shear flows).
If you have any documentation that will demonstrate that the reduced convective flows will not affect regional temperatures or tailwinds used for migratory birds, or other large-scale environmental impacts, then please show me. I haven't seen any reports refuting these concerns, and windfarm advocates sidestep this issue.
Do you have numbers for those claims? Wind turbines are designed to specifically remove kinetic energy from the wind. Trees will only remove kinetic energy of the wind through friction as the branches sway in the breeze.
Are you bullshitting, or do you have actual information on your claim?
Global wind transports are an important atmospheric commodity to transport heat around the globe. They're also very important for spreading pollen and seeds, and other biological necessities.
Sure, windpower doesn't produce CO2 or other pollutants. But most proponents entirely ignore the other environmental impacts it would have, such as reducing intra-continental air transfer (ie, there's less wind as you put up more turbines), altering the trade-winds (loosely affecting air flights that make use of tailwinds, but greatly affecting avid sailboaters and kite-flyers). Plus other effects that would probably manifest themselves if we put up too many windfarms.
If intra-contintal crosswinds are greatly cut down, expect countries away from the equator to remain colder as less warm tropical air can travel up there, and vice-versa with the tropical countries. I assume you were talking about the USA power grid. How would Canadians farmers (and all other citizens too) feel if their air temperature dropped because we prevent adequate transfer of warm air to their country?
I don't know the numbers for these questions, but wind is an important ecological force that many people take for granted, and proponents of wind-farms like to ignore.
The article skimped out on theoretical details, but the Bose-Enstein-type condensate refers to the superconducting phase-transition where the electrons form Cooper-pairs (through an electron-lattice-electron interaction). These Cooper pairs are spin-zero (the electrons pair anti-symetrically into the singlet state), and act like bosons, which can condense into the Bose-Einstein condensate.
Note that this is NOT exactly like a Bose-Einstein condensate because the bosons themselves contain two fermions, which are effectively coupled. These are similar, but not the same as the rubidium atoms in the BEC experiment you linked to. So it is kind of a BEC, but not exactly.
Now regarding your mention of a few-billionths of a degree above absolute zero, that is for the rubidium-atom experiment. THe superconducting phase-transition, which is what this article was referring to, happens in many elements at a few Kelvins, and in High-Tc materials up to the record of 150 K (I think).
Beyond that, there is other stuff that is sketchy, such as the professor retiring and not verifying that the diamond superconductors demonstrate the Meissner Effect (magnetic field expulsion from the interior of a superconductor) and other things. If this was really superconducting, I'd be sure he'd stay on as emeritus for at least a few years and keep going with these experiments, where he has a head-start over all other groups. If this is really room-temp Tc material that the article purports it to be, then this is HUGE news, and he should stay emeritus than quit research entirely. Hmmm...
This was my first x86 box, and also my last Tandy computer. I got into computers back when the TRS-80 Model 1 came out (I was only a few years old), and then sometime in like 1986 or so I convinced my Dad to buy for $20 a hacked-up Tandy CoCo 1, as-is, also at the Trenton Computer Show. Amazingly, it worked for awhile, but then it shorted itself out (I say hacked up, the guy before wired some connectors to the mainboard, which IMHO shorted some vital component but we never bothered to probe it further). Still got our $20 out of the thing, and I was psyched, my first color computer (what I wanted since the commodore came out, no more B&W TRS-80).
That said, did anyone else have a Tandy 1000, or specifically the 1000/TL? It was actually pretty sharp back in the day, and may have been the last custom computer Radio Scrap offered. It had the operating system (older version of MS-DOS, I forget which one) in ROM on the D drive, so it booted insanely fast. It also came with some windows/office kind of software called Deskmate, which sort of resembled Windows 1.0. It was a desktop environment with a word processor and some other stuff, which was graphic-based, but the text was the same size/font as the standard IBM-PC text at 80x25 character resolution. Anybody else besides me ever use that? I don't remember anything else about it, though.
Classical computing deals with bits which are exactly in one of two states, 0 and 1.
In quantum mechanics, the 0 and 1 state are two eigenstates for a single qubit. However, each qubit can be in a linear combination of these two eigenstates (state must be normalized to 1). If you measure whether the state of a single qubit is a 0 or 1, then you've collapsed the wavefunction, and the particle is forever in that specific state (if no future interactions occur).
That in itself isn't too interesting. But if you make a system of several qubits, you can overlap the wavefunctions, or entangle the qubits, in such a way that an operator acted on the system relates to a specific process you're trying to measure (ie, factoring a number), and the multi-qubit eigenstates of that operator. This means that the intermediate qubits, which are in linear combinations of the states 0 and 1, interact amongst each other, and measurement of the entire system yields a value of the measurement operator by letting the qubits interfere nearly simultaneously. This is why many apparent operations can happen in parallel in a quantum computer.
I don't know the specifics of how to apply Shor's algorithm or any other quantum computing algorithms, but that's the basic gist of it. Interference of the wavefunctions of several individual qubits can do some interesting things.
That said, there are several ways of creating a qubit. One way exploits the fluxoid quantization of a superconducting loop. Any loop of a superconductor MUST have a total magnetic flux through it equal to an integer multiple of the fundamental flux quanta. So, if you apply a magnetic field such that you are applying exactly half this value, superconducting currents must thenflow around the loop to give extra magnetic flux (Ampere's law) to make the total flux an integer multiple of the flux quanta. These currents can flow to either enhance the applied field, giving 1 flux quanta, or they can destroy the applied field, giving 0 flux quanta. However, until the current is measured, it isn't known whether it flows clockwise or counterclockwise. The state of this qubit is thus in a state 1/sqrt(2)[clockwise] +1/sqrt(2)[counterclockwise].
Other ways to make a qubit make use of spintronics, which use the two spin states of an electron as the basis for the two qubit states. This is an upcoming approach, as spintronics research is really taking off quickly now.
People have also used NMR to produce the qubits, which I don't know the details of. But IIRC, this was the method used by the group that prime factored 15.
Even cooler is the last about 4 seconds of the album, which is an endless loop (when played on vinyl), where the needle stays in the same circular track ad infinitum. On CD, they play the loop a few times before ending the track.
While on the subject of cool vinyl tricks, supposedly (I haven't seen it), Monty Python had a comedy record with two intertwined spiral tracks. So when you played the same side, sometimes you'd get one track, and sometimes the other. Must have totally tripped out some folks.
ya know, you're right. I jumped on that too fast. I usually like not knowing too much about a movie, so I skimmed those slides, and thought I saw those octapods. Their heads looked like how I envisioned the octpods from the books, though. forgot about those spider-bots...
Shudder.
Actually, that's open to interpretation. While it was the same Rama that visited Earth the 2nd and 3rd times, and extrapolating backwards (taking into account the groups of 3, it implies that it is highly likely the 2nd Rama was also the same as the 1st.
The sequence of slides shows what roughly look like the Octopods, so it seems this movie will span several of the books.
End Spoiler
The first book is the best IMHO, but is mainly hard sci-fi, and would make a movie that would probably please geeks, but definitely not the general public. Though the plots are vastly different, a movie made of the first book would remind me of the movie Andromeda Strain. In this movie, lots of cool science is done (in a cool high-tech secret lab). But I bet most people not interested in science thought the movie was mostly boring. I envision a movie based on the first book only to be like this.
Going into parts of books 2,3,4, then adding some fantasy flightsy kind of stuff, it'll he more in line for an actual movie plot that Joe Public would be used to and possibly enjoy.
BTW, you should read RWR regardless of this movie. It's a pleasant read, and goes quite quickly. In fact, it's one of the two books that I've read in a single day (the other being the first book of Hitchiker's Guide).
.
.
In the first book, astronauts visit Rama, but are only taken several AU through the solar system. They explore the ship, but must leave Rama before it's course takes them straight through the sun (IIRC).
In Rama II, then Rama returns to Earth, this time taking some humans with it on an interstellar journey that spans the next 3 books (which degrade in quality in each subsequent book).
So, if the astronauts are really taken across the universe, as the poster has suggested, it sounds like this movie will be a mix of several of the Rama books (or at least with many more creative liberties).
Or some purist will say that a trip of only a few AU within the solar system is still technically a trip around the universe.
Look to the hippies for advice.
Clinton really DID follow the peaceful adage of Make Love, Not War. Unfortunately, the Republicans decided to impeach him for the said making of love, or at least the said denial of love-like relations with Ms. Lewinsky.
That said, can someone venture an explanation why Go is so difficult to program? (I don't know how to play). Do the possible future moves diverge much more quickly than chess? (I've seen a Go board, and it seems to have significantly more spaces than a chess board, which taken to the Nth power can add up bigtime). Is it such that a computer can't practically look too far ahead in the game?
If that's the reason, then Go is really interesting because a computer cannot just brute-force it's strategies, and some semblence of actual AI (stress the I) needs to be accounted for.
Makes some sense about FSF not fighting it unless it's signed over to them, but the GPL still needs to be proven in court. BTW, I'm the poster that responded to my own post saying FSF not GNU.
See subject.
Tis the folks at FSF that challenge GPL violations. Of course not folks at GNU, since GNU ain't no place or organization.
IIRC, RMS has actually been anticipating for a serious GPL breach to rear its head, so it can provide an actual legal acid test of the GPL. I don't believe any organization/company has ever gone to court over GPL violations. Winning any courtroom legal victory would be a huge boon to for the GPL, as it would demonstrate it's legal resiliance. IANAL, of course.
I dunno about finding the 'source' for it, though.
On that note, does one also need a hyperthreading mobo? I've searched, but after reading several linux kernel archives that google pointed me to, I'm still not sure whether my lowly 1.8 GHz P4 can hyperthread.
And don't forget that many of the prominent software packages that are either too new to go into unstable, or have other such issues preventing their official inclusion, can be found at apt-get.org.
For example, if you're interested in mplayer, apt-get tells you that you can add
deb http://marillat.free.fr/ unstable main
to your sources.list file, which allows easy download and install of mplayer (you even have your option of optimizations for 686, k7, and others) as well as W32 codecs, etc.
Read up on the section for keeping a mixed system. You can set apt to prefer the testing distribution, but go to unstable only when necessary. Or, if you're more conservative, prefer stable and go to testing when necessary. I get some errors every now and then when I try to apt-get install a package, but this is usually because I have a mixed system, and hence the testing/unstable packages might depended on different library versions. On my system thus far, this has always been successfully resolved by having apt-get prefer the unstable version for that particular package by using "apt-get -t unstable install packagename" Regarding unstable packages, I don't think I've run into any errors by using them (at least to my knowledge).
If you don't like the install process putting alot of crap in, you can opt to do what I do. Skip out of both dselect and tasksel when the debian installer drops you there to setup your system. You will be left with a rather minimal system, which is one of the reasons I went to debian in the first place. Then you can try apt-getting all the desired packages you need. So "apt-get install perl" should (hopefully) handle all your dependencies for you.
You also probably want to keep a copy of your XF86 config file, as the debian debconf setup has never worked well for me in that regard either.
Other than that, it's (hopefully) relatively smooth sailing. Good luck.
stupid typo, i'm so UN-31337.
I typed 311t instead if 1337. but y'all probably figured that out.