SETI should also be using STM microscopy to look for sub-quantum alien worlds on the surface of electrons - its just as likely a location as deep space.
I have tried this concentrated coffee stuff, and I have to say its fsking NUTS... I have never been so wired. Its great for iced coffee and tastes normal (if you thin it out enough...)
Actually there is a head-shop nearby where I live where you can buy powdered-crystal caffiene... you can snort this stuff or whatever you want (I am NOT recommending this!) but NODOZ, Vivran and those other pills have additives that make you sick if you take too much.
Math is the best general subject to teach anyone... especially at a young age. With a firm grasp of higher mathematics he/she will be able to enter pretty much any cutting edge scientific field, as well as programming, etc. Don't waste time with coding Java at age 9... very bad idea. Math is a great subject because it is both cutting edge, being pretty much the pinnacle of human intellectual capacity, and at the same time it is very stable in that many of the challenging problems in modern mathematics have been outstanding for 100+ years.
yet again mass media mangles science beyond comprehension.
thanks for an article that basically said nothing. Not only was the headline an incorrect assumption (kind of like 'bush is president') but it also failed to really explain what tetracolor really is - whatever it really is, its definately not an 'extra primary color'.
When Intel first announced the Pentium, I was looking forward sooo much to the release of the Sexium and Septium to follow... but instead it looks like its going to be the Pentium n as n goes to infinite. What a let down.
Reading over the legal mumbo jumbo from the case, they mention that Timberline software turned up an internal memo demonstrating they -knew- the bug existed and could reproduce it by meeting only 4 explict conditions. The memo was dated 1993. The memo states that the 4 conditions are "unlikely" so therefore the bug is "unimportant".
Sheesh! Silly people.
I think this just gives more props to the virtues of GPL software -- it gives the -user- the power to decide if a bug is "important" or not.
I have to agree that the design of the site basically sucks... but the informational content is really outstanding... I had no idea that registrars could bend the legal rules so much.. whatever happened to ICANN providing escrow for domain names?
What is it with today's amazing variety of so-called "disorders" which provide the vast number of shrinks in the US with enough money to live like kings? I mean first it was things like "dyslexia" which is just an excuse for children who are lazy or stupid to get away without learning
I hate to say it but this comment could not be more incorrect. Unfortunately, a vast majority of people hold this ignorant view of mental illness. Unfortunate because in countries like the US, it leads to a massive human rights catastrophe for the millions of mentally ill who are denied treatement - who end up homeless on the streets - and a significant percentage end up dead.
These so called "disorders" are for the most part actually physical disfunctions of the brain. I thought it was all nonsense also until someone very close to me emerged with schizophrenia and I did some research. In the scientific community, the validity of these disorders is -very- well established. Furthermore, it has been shown that treatment with drugs is often the most effective way of handling the symptoms because there is basically no known cure at this time. You can't just "get over it" when you are hearing audible voices constantly telling you that you are worthless shit.
As to the link between programming and such disorders, this is a highly speculative statement... there is a sizeable percentage of people with mental illness, as high as 1% or more, so in any profession or activity you will find them. Some association has been proposed between highly creative individuals and mental disorders since both lead to "unorthodox" thinking, but it is largely unknown if this is actually correct.
The problem with -most- perl/cgi heavy sites is when they are poorly designed - eg perl scripts all over the cgi-bin directory and lots of heavy ? get strings... If you use mod_rewrite, php or something similar it is possible to make a more friendly site by having url directories for navigation instead of cryptic get commands. Point is, the interaction with the cgi layer -is- part of the UI.
See 'explain' command for information about optimization.
If you are using full joins in -any- sizeable database you are a fool... see 'left join'... a full join with three tables with only a few hundred entries each can force mysql to perform millions of comparisons... a left join will cut it down to.. oh, about 100 or so!
Read some database theory books before talking about performance.
I love mySQL for its brutish speed but I wish it had transactions-- I don't even need rollback, just a mechanism for making multiple statements atomic.
Creation of a symbolic directory link into it's own directory can also create black hole - not due to any error. In fact such a feature can be useful for cookie-based session information storage since a cookie can be configured to be sent only when the browser is in a certain subdirectory.
Also with Apache webserver one can 'PorceType' a directory to actually be a cgi/php program and when the program loads it can analyze the directory structure as the source for its dynamic arguments - thus a dynamically generated page can be based only on directory information - so excluding a url based on normal ?blah=blah cgi variables is not sufficient.
1. At 23 million hits daily (reference: Doubleclick - AV's ad agent) they are not doing so badly... Many would agree that in today's market an established brand name and a history as the first in the market it the more important than product, revenue or anything else. Google might get the attentitive young slashdot geeks but this is not the general market. 2. I doubt CMGI will sellout to MSFT very easily. 3/4. If the stock market falls on Y2K, BUY!!! Seriously, I think the kind of people who are honestly afraid of Y2K already took out all their assets in gold and moved to Utah. 5. Yeah.. but BeOS is not an internet company. Hey, so maybe Altavista doesn't see the stick price triple on the first day.. it sure isn't as easy as it used to be - but then again, remeber that their underwriter gaurentees sale of all their stock... so even if their stock sits exactly at opening price, they will make some $80 million in hard cash, no strings attached... (almost)
A large part of the revenue which these companies claim is based on an usual metric of worth that is very specific to the internet. Example: a site which is participating in a banner exchange network can claim revenue (and loss) based on the number of times their banner loads on the network. It is very weird... but it still makes sense.. it is part of the new economy.
The fact that the democratic and republican parties are commonly associated as a 'subdivision' of the house is really just a sad result of the lack of political diversity in USG. No single party should ever be able to claim that it is an integral part of the government..gov domains should be reserved exclusively for the offices and branches of the government... a party is just a private interest group of people.
Pretty much all work in anthropology before 1950 was completely bogus - but that does not mean what anthropologists do now is bogus. Likewise, ignorant claims about dvorak superiority do not mean anything about the -truth-.
Just tell me which string contains the more common characters in the english language: "aoeuhtns" or "asdfjk;l".
PHP is a great concept for a language - being entirely internet oriented it makes code more compact than, say perl CGI.
I use PHP very seriously. I also use a Linux platform, and would strongly recommend that.
PHP3 has some big problems. 1) effeciency is not very good, especially noticeable on a large website. As I understand it, PHP3 has no capacity to cache the result of parsing code. Thus everytime a function is called or a file included, the parser must re-check the code. 2) OOP sucks! Reference support is extremely bad. Be prepared to undergo major hacks to get OOP working with PHP3.
I have used PHP4 beta 2 for over a month now with no glitches. It is a wonderful thing. OOP actually works great! And the parsing engine caches results (similar to Perl). Also lots of other handy stuff has been added... including output buffering (enables you to send HTTP headers even after HTML output) and a bunch of other functions that you will see in the PHP3 manual that look great and have a footnote saying "added to PHP version 4".
As I understand the licencing for PHP4, PHP4 itself is open source and free. Something called "Zend" is the parsing engine for PHP4, which you must pay for if you intend to take the Zend code and use it within a commercial application.
There is something called PHPLIB available for PHP3 which takes care of a lot of web authentication, page rendering, etc with some high-level object code. I looked at PHPLIB and decided not to use it because use PHP4, and I prefer to know every little detail of how my code behaves. However, PHPLIB gives a good structure for how a complex PHP-driven website can be built, so it is a good starting point for anyone.
1. 95% of all patents in the software realm are improperly awarded. This applies also the pharmacueticals/chemical processes. Why? Computer Science is a very well established field built upon the work of hundreds of thousands of programmers. If a corporation creates a algorithm for something like speech analysis, it is likely that 99% of their work uses existing ideas, and perhaps they finished the last little bit... even still, it really is not that innovative. I think the same thing is true of the chemical/medical industries... a new compound is really built up of thousands of "public domain" procedures for creating the components of the reaction at each point. The point is, human knowledge is cumulative - built up over centuries by the billions of minds. How can we isolate a single idea and call it unique?
2. Patents are a fact of capitalist society because, as you pointed out - no one is going to spend money making something unless they will get money back. The problem with the patent is the absolutism to which this is taken. Key Example: Drug companies have created new drugs which delay the onset of AIDS to the extent where a reasonable lifespan is possible. Sure, they poured millions of dollars into researching this, but does that mean that they are entitled to 1- -billions- of dollars in return, and 2- denial of these drugs to 3rd world countries where the AIDS epedemic is killing people by the millions?? Patent law can violate human rights.
Okay... so patent law is a nasty mess... but what do we do now? The corporations will surely not change... but maybe the researchers can - perhaps by conducting independent research and then placing patents on the methods under public licence.
Better yet, let the public decide which keys shall be opened. Example: A terrible crime is committed, such as a major bombing, and a suspect is found -- yet it looks like the evidence is locked up in some encrypted files. Need to get inside? Try distributed computing. If the American public really cares about resolving this case, they will happily donate their computer time. If the majority of the people don't think that cracking the key is a worthwhile cause (e.g. it is a "political crime" that seems bogus) then people will ignore the government's request for CPU cycles.
As long as we have our open source crypto tools, distributed computing is really the only hope for opening up crypto keys.
ala cold fusion style embedded script in your html: use PHP. Free. Open source. Woo hoo. PHP4 is really good. Fast. OOP. php.net. (but don't use PHP3 if you can get 4beta2).
Last I checked, IDEs don't work over a low bandwidth remote shell. I think I will stick with vi, thanks.
The secret to constructing these things is using self-assembled monolayers. They use a material.. gold or something, I think... and the rotoxane molecules will lie down in a perfectly uniform pattern all on their own... quite nice, really. Conclusion is, they can't really manipulate them individually - for construction of a nanorobot, say.
Didn't this happen a few weeks ago? I remember the media was all hyped up on it.
Apparently from the article I read in Chemical & Engineering News, the transistors in the test-chip are one-way: that is, once they are switched from 0 to 1, they can't go back. Talk about planned obsolecence - you can only do one calculation on thing and its useless.
Slashdot Mirror
proof that geeks lack sense of humor.
sigh. No wonder we get such a bad rap.
SETI should also be using STM microscopy to look for sub-quantum alien worlds on the surface of electrons - its just as likely a location as deep space.
I have tried this concentrated coffee stuff, and I have to say its fsking NUTS... I have never been so wired. Its great for iced coffee and tastes normal (if you thin it out enough...)
Actually there is a head-shop nearby where I live where you can buy powdered-crystal caffiene... you can snort this stuff or whatever you want (I am NOT recommending this!) but NODOZ, Vivran and those other pills have additives that make you sick if you take too much.
Math is the best general subject to teach anyone... especially at a young age. With a firm grasp of higher mathematics he/she will be able to enter pretty much any cutting edge scientific field, as well as programming, etc. Don't waste time with coding Java at age 9... very bad idea. Math is a great subject because it is both cutting edge, being pretty much the pinnacle of human intellectual capacity, and at the same time it is very stable in that many of the challenging problems in modern mathematics have been outstanding for 100+ years.
lets bring back cold fusion and the perpetual motion bicyle while we're at it.
yet again mass media mangles science beyond comprehension.
thanks for an article that basically said nothing. Not only was the headline an incorrect assumption (kind of like 'bush is president') but it also failed to really explain what tetracolor really is - whatever it really is, its definately not an 'extra primary color'.
When Intel first announced the Pentium, I was looking forward sooo much to the release of the Sexium and Septium to follow... but instead it looks like its going to be the Pentium n as n goes to infinite. What a let down.
"Death is nature's way of saying `Howdy'".
... the login quotes.
andyschm@norbert:~$
Reading over the legal mumbo jumbo from the case, they mention that Timberline software turned up an internal memo demonstrating they -knew- the bug existed and could reproduce it by meeting only 4 explict conditions. The memo was dated 1993. The memo states that the 4 conditions are "unlikely" so therefore the bug is "unimportant".
Sheesh! Silly people.
I think this just gives more props to the virtues of GPL software -- it gives the -user- the power to decide if a bug is "important" or not.
I have to agree that the design of the site basically sucks... but the informational content is really outstanding... I had no idea that registrars could bend the legal rules so much.. whatever happened to ICANN providing escrow for domain names?
What is it with today's amazing variety of so-called "disorders" which provide the vast number of shrinks in the US with enough money to live like kings? I mean first it was things like "dyslexia" which is just an excuse for children who are lazy or stupid to get away without learning
I hate to say it but this comment could not be more incorrect. Unfortunately, a vast majority of people hold this ignorant view of mental illness. Unfortunate because in countries like the US, it leads to a massive human rights catastrophe for the millions of mentally ill who are denied treatement - who end up homeless on the streets - and a significant percentage end up dead.
These so called "disorders" are for the most part actually physical disfunctions of the brain. I thought it was all nonsense also until someone very close to me emerged with schizophrenia and I did some research. In the scientific community, the validity of these disorders is -very- well established. Furthermore, it has been shown that treatment with drugs is often the most effective way of handling the symptoms because there is basically no known cure at this time. You can't just "get over it" when you are hearing audible voices constantly telling you that you are worthless shit.
As to the link between programming and such disorders, this is a highly speculative statement... there is a sizeable percentage of people with mental illness, as high as 1% or more, so in any profession or activity you will find them. Some association has been proposed between highly creative individuals and mental disorders since both lead to "unorthodox" thinking, but it is largely unknown if this is actually correct.
Re: Perl is not the problem...
The problem with -most- perl/cgi heavy sites is when they are poorly designed - eg perl scripts all over the cgi-bin directory and lots of heavy ? get strings... If you use mod_rewrite, php or something similar it is possible to make a more friendly site by having url directories for navigation instead of cryptic get commands. Point is, the interaction with the cgi layer -is- part of the UI.
See 'explain' command for information about optimization.
.. oh, about 100 or so!
If you are using full joins in -any- sizeable database you are a fool... see 'left join'... a full join with three tables with only a few hundred entries each can force mysql to perform millions of comparisons... a left join will cut it down to
Read some database theory books before talking about performance.
I love mySQL for its brutish speed but I wish it had transactions-- I don't even need rollback, just a mechanism for making multiple statements atomic.
Creation of a symbolic directory link into it's own directory can also create black hole - not due to any error. In fact such a feature can be useful for cookie-based session information storage since a cookie can be configured to be sent only when the browser is in a certain subdirectory.
Also with Apache webserver one can 'PorceType' a directory to actually be a cgi/php program and when the program loads it can analyze the directory structure as the source for its dynamic arguments - thus a dynamically generated page can be based only on directory information - so excluding a url based on normal ?blah=blah cgi variables is not sufficient.
1. At 23 million hits daily (reference: Doubleclick - AV's ad agent) they are not doing so badly... Many would agree that in today's market an established brand name and a history as the first in the market it the more important than product, revenue or anything else. Google might get the attentitive young slashdot geeks but this is not the general market.
2. I doubt CMGI will sellout to MSFT very easily.
3/4. If the stock market falls on Y2K, BUY!!! Seriously, I think the kind of people who are honestly afraid of Y2K already took out all their assets in gold and moved to Utah.
5. Yeah.. but BeOS is not an internet company. Hey, so maybe Altavista doesn't see the stick price triple on the first day.. it sure isn't as easy as it used to be - but then again, remeber that their underwriter gaurentees sale of all their stock... so even if their stock sits exactly at opening price, they will make some $80 million in hard cash, no strings attached... (almost)
A large part of the revenue which these companies claim is based on an usual metric of worth that is very specific to the internet. Example: a site which is participating in a banner exchange network can claim revenue (and loss) based on the number of times their banner loads on the network. It is very weird... but it still makes sense.. it is part of the new economy.
The fact that the democratic and republican parties are commonly associated as a 'subdivision' of the house is really just a sad result of the lack of political diversity in USG. No single party should ever be able to claim that it is an integral part of the government. .gov domains should be reserved exclusively for the offices and branches of the government... a party is just a private interest group of people.
just makes me wonder...
everyone here was so cocky about the 'infailability' of the cassini probe, and now this...
???
That article was totally pointless.
Pretty much all work in anthropology before 1950 was completely bogus - but that does not mean what anthropologists do now is bogus. Likewise, ignorant claims about dvorak superiority do not mean anything about the -truth-.
Just tell me which string contains the more common characters in the english language:
"aoeuhtns" or "asdfjk;l".
The end.
PHP is a great concept for a language - being entirely internet oriented it makes code more compact than, say perl CGI.
I use PHP very seriously. I also use a Linux platform, and would strongly recommend that.
PHP3 has some big problems. 1) effeciency is not very good, especially noticeable on a large website. As I understand it, PHP3 has no capacity to cache the result of parsing code. Thus everytime a function is called or a file included, the parser must re-check the code. 2) OOP sucks! Reference support is extremely bad. Be prepared to undergo major hacks to get OOP working with PHP3.
I have used PHP4 beta 2 for over a month now with no glitches. It is a wonderful thing. OOP actually works great! And the parsing engine caches results (similar to Perl). Also lots of other handy stuff has been added... including output buffering (enables you to send HTTP headers even after HTML output) and a bunch of other functions that you will see in the PHP3 manual that look great and have a footnote saying "added to PHP version 4".
As I understand the licencing for PHP4, PHP4 itself is open source and free. Something called "Zend" is the parsing engine for PHP4, which you must pay for if you intend to take the Zend code and use it within a commercial application.
There is something called PHPLIB available for PHP3 which takes care of a lot of web authentication, page rendering, etc with some high-level object code. I looked at PHPLIB and decided not to use it because use PHP4, and I prefer to know every little detail of how my code behaves. However, PHPLIB gives a good structure for how a complex PHP-driven website can be built, so it is a good starting point for anyone.
The problem I see with patents is multifold.
1. 95% of all patents in the software realm are improperly awarded. This applies also the pharmacueticals/chemical processes. Why? Computer Science is a very well established field built upon the work of hundreds of thousands of programmers. If a corporation creates a algorithm for something like speech analysis, it is likely that 99% of their work uses existing ideas, and perhaps they finished the last little bit... even still, it really is not that innovative. I think the same thing is true of the chemical/medical industries... a new compound is really built up of thousands of "public domain" procedures for creating the components of the reaction at each point. The point is, human knowledge is cumulative - built up over centuries by the billions of minds. How can we isolate a single idea and call it unique?
2. Patents are a fact of capitalist society because, as you pointed out - no one is going to spend money making something unless they will get money back. The problem with the patent is the absolutism to which this is taken. Key Example: Drug companies have created new drugs which delay the onset of AIDS to the extent where a reasonable lifespan is possible. Sure, they poured millions of dollars into researching this, but does that mean that they are entitled to 1- -billions- of dollars in return, and 2- denial of these drugs to 3rd world countries where the AIDS epedemic is killing people by the millions?? Patent law can violate human rights.
Okay... so patent law is a nasty mess... but what do we do now? The corporations will surely not change... but maybe the researchers can - perhaps by conducting independent research and then placing patents on the methods under public licence.
Better yet, let the public decide which keys shall be opened. Example: A terrible crime is committed, such as a major bombing, and a suspect is found -- yet it looks like the evidence is locked up in some encrypted files. Need to get inside? Try distributed computing. If the American public really cares about resolving this case, they will happily donate their computer time. If the majority of the people don't think that cracking the key is a worthwhile cause (e.g. it is a "political crime" that seems bogus) then people will ignore the government's request for CPU cycles.
As long as we have our open source crypto tools, distributed computing is really the only hope for opening up crypto keys.
ala cold fusion style embedded script in your html: use PHP. Free. Open source. Woo hoo. PHP4 is really good. Fast. OOP. php.net. (but don't use PHP3 if you can get 4beta2).
Last I checked, IDEs don't work over a low bandwidth remote shell. I think I will stick with vi, thanks.
The secret to constructing these things is using self-assembled monolayers. They use a material.. gold or something, I think... and the rotoxane molecules will lie down in a perfectly uniform pattern all on their own... quite nice, really. Conclusion is, they can't really manipulate them individually - for construction of a nanorobot, say.
Didn't this happen a few weeks ago? I remember the media was all hyped up on it.
Apparently from the article I read in Chemical & Engineering News, the transistors in the test-chip are one-way: that is, once they are switched from 0 to 1, they can't go back. Talk about planned obsolecence - you can only do one calculation on thing and its useless.