Either the author interviewed himself, or he has a formatting problem. If you are listening, there are no breaks or boldface to demark question and answer sections. Disconcerting to read.
Interesting read though. Here's an idea, how about taking advantage of reusability in open source by producing a software toolkit to enhance user feedback before and afer development?
Talkback is neat, I am thinking now of a really simple-looking "push-to-talk" button that (if your computer is set up correctly of course) would let people actually speak about their gripes so developers can get an in-your-face gritty idea of how others find it to use. In a few days of using OpenOffice which I like a lot heavily, I took the time to write up two pages of dense bugs and user issues. But it takes a while to type, and even way more if you want to input into a bug tracking system. I think many users would find that too hard/daunting. Assumes you have a mic working, which is unfortunately a big assumption with computers these days, but I think it could be really useful. Comments?
Reality Science Channel: Reality TV meets Science TV. The History Channel's for my Dad, this new one's for me! (Proposal for a new channel, hopefully available on the Net)
This new channel shows what scientists do all day, following them through a project from conception, selling it to a sponsor, trials and tribulations, testing and success (!) finally what happens thereafter and how their work fits into pageant of science and/or millionaire status.
Why? Sure I watch TV to unwind and use the Net to learn. But science tv is good for society and would reduce kids interested in science from being picked on for being nerds. And because I'd like to see the whole story of Burt Rutan's saga, this would be a great subject. It is almost criminal that video journalists were not assigned by some organization to follow the progress of all Ansari X Prize competitors, after all this was history in the making.
I think people (from kids to grownups, non-science people to professional researchers) would be interested in seeing exactly how these heroes think, what they went through and what happened along the way. Far more interesting than what people call "Reality TV", which is actually not at all realistic.
The closest thing is The Apprentice, although it is selling the "self-confidence will make you rich" bit a little strongly don't you think? And being marooned on a desert island? Come on! Of course the only problem with my Reality Science Channel idea is that you don't know who is going to be a hero, you can only try to pick up on leading people, news-worthy projects, and maybe ask other scientists who is worth watching. If the TV show would sponsor the scientist's research too it could be extremely profitable all around! How about focusing on the guys trying to build a nanotube space elevator?? What about the mag-beam and other advanced propulsion cowboys?? You aren't going to see these things on the History Channel in 50 years if you don't make the documentary now. This could be the best thing to happen to the U.S. which is unfortunately subject to utter demagoguery, corrupt media, money says PR is more important than science, etc. etc. otherwise the country is going seriously down as far as science goes. Look at it this way, I took a first year chemistry course at Cornell in 85 and the teacher was Roald Hoffmann, a Nobel Prize winner. Holy shit I thought! I was too dumb then to actually try to talk to the guy and find out how he thinks of course. Wish I had though. If you spend time with really great people some of their thinking rubs off on you. Which I noticed when I had a totally by chance opportunity once several years ago to spend some hours in the vicinity of an apparent billionaire. No, alas I was still too dumb to say anything worthwhile to him but could see how he reacted to things. I think it is something that could be captured by video (hi-res please) and audio (high bitrate please), and some extremely good talent. Come to think of it this doesn't only go for science. Currently U.S. elementary and high-schools, and even universities, really do almost nothing to help prepare a student in terms of how to think and how to approach the world. So an awful lot of time is wasted on kids blowing off studies, being cool, going through throes of emotion, taking the easy road, etc.
With the Net and some good reporting, every kid could find out way in advance what people do all day and whether this kind of a career might be good for him or her. This is not the only way to get science onto TV, and a net-based program would also be okay, even say Stargate Atlantis used as a laboratory set a la Sagan's Cosmos would be useful! Gee, maybe if like 1/20 the money spent on Iraq was put into the educational system we might get something useful out of it.
The most memorable science TV program I remember in recent years is a very beautiful astronomy program made by a French outfit, i saw it in Japanese on Japanese TV. It had delicious illustrated animations that helped y
There is one guy who's my hero, a young scientist-type (or maybe science teacher type) who shows you how to make all kinds of extremely cool things. The best show I think was the one where they show how to simulate an aurora, and go to shots of earth from outer space, jupiter, etc. Did you know the aurorae actually look like rings of fire around the poles? Very cool and the aurora he built (the vacuum pump was maybe beyond kids' abilities) showed a beautiful bluish flame that had some characteristics of the big scale aurorae. Very nice!
Leapt out at me something like the 2.147 in the 2GB limit (2^31). No it's a bit more than 1 gig (which is 1.074).
But, and I'll thank you to forget that we are moving past each other so it is only true for the moment, but here is an easy way I just figured to remember the distance to Titan. Or T1T42 in my l33t-sp34k. (leet speak). Well the 2 is an N sideways okay?
So anyway, remove the T's (for terameter), and you get 142. 1,427,000,000 kilometers is 1,427,000,000,000 meters, or 1.427 terameters. Who cares about rounding up, we're flying through space at x meters per second! So Titan is only about a terameter and a half away from here.
OOo is great, so great I try extremely hard to use it and not word for work. Result is I use it in fear. I have a long list of painstakingly recorded issues I got in an intensive job using OOo over a few days, and there are too many to put here or even input into the bug system (which I have used in the past).
Instead of moldering on my hd, I put it up on my server here.
I was thinking of just uploading the sxw file but didn't want people new to OOo to wonder if it could carry a word-like macro virus (which I believe it cannot of course). The headings are:
INTRODUCTION
X INTERACTION / WINDOWING / FILE MANAGEMENT / DISPLAY / BASICS
TEXT BOXES
MENUS
HELP SYSTEM
OUTLINING
TABLES
Autocompletion / Autocorrection
FONT MENUS
FIND/REPLACE
STYLES
FEATURE REQUESTS
For what it's worth, lately I have been using OOo mainly in WindowMaker on RH9, on my Dell Inspiron 7.5K laptop in Japanese locale. Mostly recently for translating things from Japanese to English. I keep open 3 kterm shells, one to view a saved job request (converted with nkf -le to view in euc with more), one to run xjdic_sa which is a great dictionary, and one to save words I look up in a studylist in vi (though I am usually an XEmacs person). Sometimes also firefox, maybe jwpce under wine. Have to say copy/paste between apps sux, could use that applet from kde. Well that's about it for now. Can't tell you about printing since I don't have my brother MFC-410CN printer working yet under linux.
Great! Then they should have all those scifi books people liked and put up on alt.binaries. or was it books.flood? Always had trouble finding an nntp that carried it. Obviously they aren't telling publishers how they typed the books in, wouldn't it be ironic if fans were responsible for most of the books searched on in Google Print Beta?
Anyway, Google is being totally half-assed. Picking up a really old idea and adding some political correctness is crap. They are big enough and smart enough to be able to do away with that, just deal with publishers who see the light and see how fast it grows.
Google should be making a system like that described in Heinlein's book Friday, search for the phrase (if you can) "feed the elephant". It was describing a terminal that had unlimited access (for a steep fee obviously) to just about any kind of research, which you could then follow via links and graph data against that found in other documents, etc. To get that far will need a semantic-aware web or maybe a markup language for graphs, but certainly Google ought to be able to put together a consortium of the publishers who are willing to try it for a flat fee. Of course all those books that don't make it to your local bookstore, and all those pages were likely in a digital file at one point. Could you imagine what it would be like to be able to do any kind of cross-referencing, searching, READING, and ANNOTATING (for yourself or your group) say the entire Library of Congress and beyond? How about all science journals regardless of where they were published? Conference proceedings, meeting minutes. It would be for now like the Internet was for me when I was 12 (25 years ago), a misty word heard floating on the air, but try as I could, I could never find out how to get online (well eventually I did through the Source i.e. compuserve).
No, it would be even more incredible, because it would include all the words people have agonized over and spent years of their lives to put in the right order. Maybe some of us already do a little of that for fun with their own files. Personally I think there is a case for fair use (if I buy the same thing once, twice, three times over the years I darn well ought to be able to use a digital version), there is a case for usage on the premises of public libraries and probably also within their cyber-precinct online, and then there is a case for total information awareness of all high-qualiy information sources, so long as people get paid for their products, there should be a way to get past all the red tape and "feed the elephant's child" i.e. free the mind to roam through knowledge.
Here is an excerpt from Robert A. Heinlein's neat novel, "Friday".
Three hours later, after a hasty lunch, we were in San Jose. Two APVs were shuttling between Pajaro Sands and the National Plaza; Wainwright was getting rid of us as fast as possible-I saw two flatbed trucks, big ones, each drawn by six horses, being loaded as we left, and Papa Perry looking harried. I wondered what was being done with Boss's library-and felt a little separate, selfish sadness that I might never again have such an unlimited chance to feed the Elephant's Child. I'll never be a big brain but I'm curious about everything and a terminal hooked directly to all the world's best libraries is a luxury beyond price.
...
(Nor had I, and now I probably never would. I longed for a few hours at the unlimited-service terminal I had had at Pajaro Sands. What directors if any had been killed on Red Thursday and its sequelae? What had the stock market done? I suspect that all really important answers never get into the history books. Boss had been requiring me to learn the sort of things that would eventually have led me to the answers-but he had died and my education stopped abruptly. For now. But I would still feed the Elephant's Child! Someday.)
Yesterday wrapped up over a week of intense Bioinformatics seminars, poster sessions, exhibitions, and brainbusting studying at Bio Japan in Tokyo and related links. I just saw a presentation on the H-Invitationaldatabase which though in Japan also combines the content of foreign databases. It is extremely impressive, and they combine lots of online calculators and results visualizers that are really impressive.
Also figuring out biology seems to be a lot harder than figuring out networking, at least there are all kinds of nefarious things but also serendipitous things found. Like one presentation I just heard had a U.S. scientist who announced that they had discovered an entire signalling network in human cells that was like the one found in yeast cells. And apparently more proteins can be encoded than the number of genes, because of alternate orderings (counting from different displacements in the gene, I think, ask a real bioinformatics expert). One talk I heard a year ago that stuck with me was a scientist who had devised a way to find signalling pathways in cells quickly; by forcing the cell to die if certain requirements were not met, he created a parallel computer that allowed him to discover a whole swath at once. There is also a lot of math and statistics, as well as a lot of biological knowledge behind it, it is not strange to see various statistical tests, references to different computer programs they used for analysis, or a mention of simulated annealing (well maybe that one not so often, came up yesterday though).
One interesting thing is that they (the H-Invitational people / Japan Bioinformatics Consortium) have I believe twice held what they call annotation jamborees, much like a hackfest! In 2002 they had 120 scientists gather (mostly Japan but from all over the world) in a big room with a computer per person. They locked them in for 10 days, and annotated IIRC over 20,000 genes, basically doing a figure some man years of work in a week, inputting data so it can be searched, analyzed, and crossreferenced.
They do have a comparison between mouse and human genome there, I wonder if something similar could be done in open source in terms of annotating and indexing a libary of open source code in different languages, really all in one pseudo language would be more useful perhaps. Anyway biologists are learning from computer scientists learning from mathematicians, and someone famous has said that in the future, all science will be computer science.
Bioinformatics people are doing text mining and data mining, but also there are many flavors and types of analysis programs designed to penetrate and match up information as encoded by tiny molecules, folded proteins, genes, and so on. Here are some links to get started. Also note the perl for bioinformatics books, and there was a big oreilly bioinformatics conference archived from 2003 and other links too (see bio.oreilly.org link below).
I cannot speak for everyone, but I can convey what I have heard, that there have long been communication gaps that have held back some of this, actually cultural differences. For example physicists like pure math and biologists deal in dirty, wet things.. when people successfully combine different perspectives in this area [more] discoveries start getting made. In Japan at least they are trying to figure out how to grow more bioinformaticists, since students tend to go only towards either biology or towards computer science (why study twice as hard). But there seems to be a lot of interesting stuff in there for both sides.
I've developed for the Palm and have a bunch. But I've lost everything on my palm at least 3 times, when the batteries went dead, and losing my memos really, really sucked. I have a 64MB memory stick but there was no easy way to back up the Memo pad, that is you would have to search through zillions of files manually, and then decide whether to overwrite the older copy on your stick (did I back up after the last crash or before it). It was great having a vaio laptop with integral memory stick port, very easy to copy files back and forth. But when I spilled a latte on that (and pilot suddenly stopped working with RH9) I have somehow learned to deal without it. I will never go back to the Palm unless (1) it gets nonvolatile memory, and (2) it gets some faster input. I'm saving up for a linux Sharp zaurus, or maybe an OQO.
There is a black and white round one called "Uzumaki Anpan". Uzumaki means whirlpool, coil, eddy or vortex. Something spinning around (uzu means swirl, maki means wrap as in wrapped sushi). As for the second term, An is sweet black miso paste, and pan is a loan word from the Portuguese for bread. Anpan is a hugely popular round puffy donut with the sweet paste inside. So the title roughly means, Vortex Jelly Donut. Rudy Rucker probably has some good words for it, I'll borrow one: Yarrr!
You've taken a bit of flak this time but don't sweat it, you are still one of my favorite writers, and the idea is cool! The bit about the UN scares me a little though. I don't think I want the UN moving any faster than it is now, they already do enough damage. Though the CIA may thank you. The idea is neat though, shades of the worldnet game played by Laura's poor husband in Islands in the Net, that image has embedded itself like a wedge in my brain for over a decade. (Good book!)
So I think it would be really neat if this network blackholed the UN, but covered energetic young, energetic government people in different countries since they are the one's who will do anything unifying, the people who send info up to the top and prioritize it. The secret will be let out on a need-to-know basis. By the time these younguns grow up, say 20 years from now, all governments will be internetworked with officials who still use the nostalgic World Wide Web of Nations or whatever they (you) call it, as it reminds them of their starry-eyed idealistic youth and they get some good gossip from it too.
For fun I tried a little search and replace, to make the last paragraph a little more real for some of us. At least those into flattening society and reducing some of the deadweight on top. Partly tongue in cheek..
Here's the secret of the megacorp management period: CEOs at the office in megacorps do practically nothing. They have lunch there, basically. All the real work gets done by legions of midlevel managers. These summiteering technocrats handle the choice of issues, drafts of documents, rules of order, agenda-setting, prioritizing... the tangle of management fooforaw that is the life and death of megacorps. Midlevel managers are a digitally under-served group. Managers still do their labors face to face, in big industry conferences. Nobody's come up with a good way to do serious midlevel-manager-work online. A legitimate, accountable, binding, electronic, Net-based way.
Hope I didn't wreck what you meant to say. My guess is those sherpas are really using MS Word but they are too scared of the corporate(government) firewall to send RFCs to their potential friends in other countries. Might shortcut a lot of the process and serve to keep Libya and Sudan of the board though!
If Google is my hands for the web, Clusty is going to be my eye. I can swipe my hand through water in a pond, or sandhills on the beach, and get an idea of what is out there on the web, *in the order of popularity* (because backlinking is so important).
I have no problem with this way Google works, I found backlinking to be tremendously useful when implementing a gigabyte-sized database on htdig, and Google "just works".
Clusty on the other hand works to reduce my information saturation, it will reduce the overload and make me feel better. It seems similar to NorthernLight which did clustering a long time ago, but I believe stopped their public engine and are now going after the enterprise (apparently successfully? They have a linux download too).
I may be biased as I am also very interested now in faceted metadata search engine design, and that seems to be what Clusty is doing. I can't tell if it is the same categories as dmoz.org (which Overture says they leverage), but it seems to work. For example I typed in Northern Light and it gave me the categories of Search Engine, Reviews, Aurora, and even Crude Oil. Crude Oil disappeared when I put quotation marks around the search terms, so I'm impressed, they've taken the trouble to match phrases.
I tried some nonsense words, and discovered connections I didn't know exist (mostly foreign language) - I tried splik, splike, and spli*. Try it yourself in google and clusty. Note Google gives you ten pages for splike while Clusty tells you the knowledge domains they fit into. No more clicking here and there in the google screen list to try and find less-popular links. And Clusty turned spli* into split. And click Details in clusty, and a little yellow information window descends, telling you the different sites (Reuters included) and how many hits from each.
Look at their clustering, it seems good and useful. I searched for something I'm interested in now, the search term was: free bioinformatics tutorials.
Clusty gives me categories like Genomics, some institutes, and the Bioinformatics FAQ. It lets me expand more than one section at a time, and the tiny "More" link at the bottom of the category list continually extends that list each time you click it. That's useful. This leads me to other categories including some C++ libraries, a Computational Biology heading, MDL Chime, and a bunch more. Wow! I haven't studied it much more yet, but I'd like to be able to show a lot of categories the first time (no More button clicking), have more screen width given to the categories column, and display the associations that made it pick certain categories. Also I'd like a yellow popup when I mouse over a category to show the next inner level's category list (at th e moment not too many levels it seems) the way Berkeley's Flamenco does. There is a legend below the category list with a line describing the plus mark as "Expand clusters", but I wanted this to expand all clusters and give me all the categories. About the way I just checked the Flamenco site.. I had to use Google. The first time I typed Flamenco into Clusty and it didn't give me any category called Search Engine, which surprised me. I selected cluster by URL instead of Topic, and when I clicked on berkeley.edu I got a Clusty Error which was reproduceable then but not later. I found it on Google by typing in Flamenco and Berkeley. To be fair, Google took me to an old page that redirected me to the right page. When I went back to Clusty and typde in Berkeley as well and searched by topic, it was fine and took me to the right server the first time. Also the berkeley.edu links worked okay then too, so I want to give them the benefit of the doubt.
About the tech, I'm not sure they went as far as they could even though it works well for me. I thought it seemed to be a faceted metadata engine in some ways because they show the number of hits in each section, th
Okay slashdotters! Time for a timely/fiction check. (does not require that you create a new root "fiction" directory but it might help).
1) What black and white scifi movie features a scientist who predicts correctly, and in part has a hand in, a widely moving seismic phenomenon that traces a closed loop, so that the tremendous subterranean pressures throw a huge flaming chunk of the Earth into orbit? I don't think aliens are at all involved though the net seems to. There are also a cute couple who try to survive it all. Neat!
2) What contemporary scifi novel features a visionary seismologist who uses (still unavailable) high-tech sensor networks to predict, correctly and repeatedly, the time and place of earthquakes around the world, and profits on it for a while? Also neat! and has a similar cute couple I believe.
3) Here's a hard one. What novel from the Golden Age of science fiction features a beam of light that crosses time and space to plunge into our hero's skull and warp or seriously bend the plotline? I don't remember anything seismic being involved but there were some good robots, maybe a latent memory brought this one up. Also I would give this one an extremely neat! times 10^8.
Thank you very, very much for your considerate, detailed reply. I think your comment is great!
I'll take your advice. I do remember the first time I touched Tolkien I was probably way too young, and had the same experience as with Marion Zimmerman Bradley (Halcion, I think?) - that it was way too boring. I'll put all the Tolkien books back on my reading list for one day and look forward to seeing all the movies on the extended set on a vacation some time.
He has some good points. Some not so hot in fact quite chilly ones too. But he's more knowledgeable and friendlier than Bush, Kerry , or anyone in their retinues, to Slashdot (that is if Slashdot asked them for comments, I didn't catch the outcome on that).
My family's always been "Republican" but I'm quite fed up with the achievements such as they are of the Bush family, and I agree with much of what the poster says. I also cannot forgive Bush for what he did to Colin Powell, the only high U.S. official I remember being fiercely impressed with.
But I don't think he's going to be able to get all those things rammed down Congress' throat if he wins. My immediate problems are: overuse of the word racist in a written comment, no question elimination of nuclear power, slash of the military soon after 9/11 and oh, does he remember N. Korea threatening nuclear war? That last one bugs me a bit since I think he was saying he would turn the city I am currently in (Tokyo) into a sea of fire or some such (again). I think his stance requires realistic alternatives (or some kind of proof.. links?) to say that solar power can save us all, etc. Also I'd like to hear about his position on Burt Rutan's crew and space exploration in general. And how about info about how to handle the food and water shortage (water is here, food will be too when GM is theoretically outlawed). Unfortunately the comments come across as a sweeping, charismatic work of fiction which are well scaled for mayoral elections perhaps but not for solving all of our massive intertwined problems. I think his ideas on health, law, freedom, schools, and voting are all interesting and should at least be carried in the NY Times as-is so people can see what the contenders have to say. Should be good for the Greens to have to defend what they say (and they are probably better at it overseas already..)
It just sounds like as it is, if/when he actually entered office it would be like a sandbag dropping on his shoulders when the reality of it all hit him. Might overcome it with a stellar team, haven't heard anything about them, maybe it's the conspiracy (maybe real but come on)? Finally this is the most brainpower I want to expend on a candidate who himself does not in fact seem to intend to win this election. Heck with him!
Well I figure my absentee vote will go to Kerry as he is the lesser of two evils, and in the current voting system that will help get Bush out of office more than voting for anyone else would. Sounds like the Greens are based on loftiness and ignorance, plus a few really ingenious ideas which it would be nice for one of the major parties to pick up. Too bad, I'd be ten times more impressed if they could get someone well known and respected to run. Of course they couldn't pay a successful CEO.. hmm are these guys even interested in capitalism? Only game in town for now, it seems to work to a point. Maybe they should ask Soros? Oh never mind. How about if all the contenders joined together? Nader as President, this guy as VP, Soros as Secretary of State or something, etc. Or maybe Kerry should listen to all these guys' rhetoric, steal a few lines, get a massage to loosen up, and have a real showdown with Bush that gets him the vote of both intelligent and unintelligent Americans. Doesn't seem he's doing too well on either side.
Here's another suggestion.. how about somebody making a realistic, convincing suggestion for a world government? (Not one ruled solely by U.S.' superpower military force). Come to think of it, slashdot has more science fiction lovers I would expect than any other audience for a political discussion, people are therefore you might think a little more imaginative or open to freewheeling discussions along these lines. I'm curious about what people would say if asked to imagine the ideal world society for the 21st century, and sketch out in anecdotes what the U.S. would be like in such a world. Aside from say the nanotechnology of 50-100 years from now, how ought the world look by the end of the Century, and what are the key features necessary in the U.S. to approach it, so that we can have the ideal society of the future today. 'Course someone is just going to ask for free movies and mp3z..
What a terrible loss. My deepest sympathies to the bereaved family, and hope the survivors return to health quickly.
This is a time to think about how much all of the wonderful work in the free software world is based on the unselfish actions of precious individuals. Perhaps someone would like to post an accepted, confirmed email or physical address for people to send condolences or offers of assistance.
One question to slashdot, I did not see anything yet about drinking and driving. So maybe the "turn down a glass department" byline is, while a good idea in general when you are the driver, in this case perhaps inappropriate.
Wow that is great that Sphinx-4 is open! A-And guess what, Galaxy Communicator also has snuck onto sourceforge too, quietly, a year ago. A year or so ago I had written one of the partners to try to get a copy with no reply.. but some googling found it. Most slashdotters probably don't know Galaxy but it is the same partners - CMU, MITRE, DARPA etc. It is the plug and play hub
for related technologies. This stuff has been used to make voice-recognizing automated telephone information services for weather and flight info I believe. Well what I found on sourceforge is 2002-2003 version (when grant ran out?) and has a list of modules which could use some updating i.e. about how Sphinx-4 is available. So can we expect a new Galaxy Communicator distro? I always had trouble finding out about it because each participating institution had their own site, their own distro, some focusing on different things, etc. I remember looking at CMU and I think Colorado U., anyway.
Note in the 2002 version that the dialog server is not included, this would be great to have too. MIT also has some very cool technologies in this area - SUMMIT, TINA, GENESIS,... - which I do not believe are public, they just show little bits and pieces of PR about them, but include natural language parsing, question answering, sentence generation, etc. It would be cool if someone on the inside could document just what things are available, what works with what, what is definitely ready for prime time, etc. There must be some people who hacked on this in the past few years and are still developing things, it would be cool if some of their experimentation was available to the open source community so people could get an idea of what things are possible. When I did my survey just about 1 year ago, Communicator was daunting, intriguing, and it looked like you could do tons of stuff if you had some secret decoder docs and a spare year to hack. Maybe now's the time to dig into it hip deep?
> Seriously though, if you don't see the > movies because of the lack of a > specific scene then you're just stupid
This is you being serious? Okay you could be right. But personally that was the only scene I wanted to see, I am not a big LoTR fanatic but I know what I like, and I fell in love with this scene and read it over and over in the book. I don't remember it to be full of windy speeches, what I remember is a truly magical, wonderful place that had more care and majesty built into it than most any other work I can remember. (Perhaps there are other good parts of Tolkien's books, if so please let me know). Perhaps there was some sexism in there, I don't remember from the years ago when I read it, but I do remember quite well the woman in the valley, and his love and longing for her. Perhaps I misinterpreted it at the time?
I'm the kind of guy who likes the first 5 or 10 minutes of movies the best, when things are quiet and the director takes the time to build his world up for you. If I see enchanting environments - there were some in the League of Extraordinary Gentlemen too - I would like to see more of them and just enjoy being shown around them. Maybe I'm part of a demographic of future full-immersive media one day.
I didn't stop seeing LoTR because it was just "missing one scene". It struck me while watching the movie that it was filmed in a relatively crass way to me, in particular I felt that the parts that would have required the most imagination and probably the most financial investment in computer graphics, were simply dropped. To me (wrong or not) Tom Bombadil's valley would have been a masterpiece if done by a true artist with an unlimited budget (or maybe just a true artist with just an ordinary budget, you know?), and it felt like a total cop-out. Other parts of the film caused this realization to resonate in me and I was not looking forward to seeing more of what just seemed like characters being forced to slog from one scene to another in relatively uninspired fashion.
So I realize this is coming from someone who is not perhaps a major LoTR fan, nor even knowledgeable enough about the trilogy to argue intelligently about it or its directors, and I probably will buy the extended set one day. But personally - and there just might be more like me out there - I would pay 5 times the normal entrance fee for the film if I could just see the quiet, beautiful parts of the film, and if Tom Bombadil was done right.
I boycotted LoTR films after realizing they cut my favorite scene in the entire series - the valley of Tom Bombadil. I'll buy the whole thing on DVD though if all his scenes are in there. Is it worth hoping for?
Verisign's business is built on cryptography, captive markets, and authority. This initiative is the perfect way to encroach arbitrarily on children's rights (and those of adults, when they grow up) with little recourse. That a (public or private) school will have the master list in a digital file is clear.
IANA cypherpunk but.. in the sense that a small amount of cleartext is sufficient to break open an encrypted channel, if you consider the Total Information Awareness of a child to be something to be cracked, I would tend to believe that tying age and gender to an id, even if the master list is not made public directly, is easily sufficient signal to discover the child's identity, photograph, school and home address, after a relatively small number of id-enabled transactions.
In addition the school and the child's parents are not information security experts. I expect one or two of the points made here will become apparent after a few badly thought out implementations are made around the country. And you wonder why the world laughs at the U.S.? This is hideous, embarassing, evil, corporate speak in a no-go zone, and generally a really bad idea. And it is also completele unnecessary and unwarranted for the putative purpose.
I think I can afford to be cynical since I expected something like the war in Iraq, in the general geographical area, with the identical aspects of prevarication, failed weapons searches, damned lies, deaths on both sides, damage coverage, Colin Powell (who I really like and pity) being hired to lie in the U.N. etc. for about 20 years. The point being not that I am a cynic about projection of military power in the middle east, but that when the powers at be want to do something, it gets done, and the justification can be just about anything. People stop talking about the justification when you own their ass. This is another one of those, and the ironic thing is it probably was initially conceived by someone who really wanted to protect kids in chat forums. Watch it MORPH! (Handy guide follows)
So here are a few other uses I thought up.
Adult site verification when user grows up a little. Driver's liscense and insurance tie-in free pass through "antiterrorist" security at airports, public attractions, etc. tying of token id to other info to track minors by government, finance, or arbitrary moneyed organization track academic achievers early and target children for additional education, training, hiring, messing with brains, etc. tying to physical and genetic data for future scary purposes tracking of athletes in presidential athletic competition, school competitions, olympics, etc. tracking of drug use for criminal or athletic monitoring by matching id to urine / hair sample at periodic physicals sale to toy stores, credit card companies (can't start too young), armed forces removal of anonymity from a young age so kids will never know what they're missing purchase of digital textbooks selection of computer crime suspects proof of attendance identity check for standardized tests (schools know who is who of course) identity check for reservation of computing resources measurement of advertising viewer demographics in online media detection of precocious children in adult online areas detection of precocious children in over their heads access to locked school premises in unsafe areas or at night access to student pcs/tablets/pdas/accounts access to online diaries medical checkups at school storage of grades in usb fob or keyed to id child hands parent access to online life with key ditto for any adult in educational establishment but kids can make a few bucks doing transactions for adults sometimes so not all bad right?
Thank you for the information. No need to post nastiness on the web for posterity though. Yes I work in IT but no I don't do massive databases. Biggest to now was 1GB. No I am not going to put a DVD on a database obviously, I was reacting to the quote, "..which is more than adequate for all but the most demanding applications", which sounded much like Gates' famous quote. Sybase sounds great though, and I just got a job offer to work with it even. Will take your advice, and very happy to hear about the documentation and stored procedures. Thank you for your reply.
Some more/. anti-news. How about a new metric: Is this earth-shattering or just nuked meatloaf?
(I'm not knocking meatloaf but a meatloaf icon would help).
My team built 3d chat with avatars at Cyber Technologies International in Tokyo, a fun hack in like a week. The year was 1995.
I think it would be a smart idea to (1) double or triple the number of articles on the top page, and (2) for each one, denote by icon or coloration the "notmeatloafitude" as ranked by mods or perhaps by users (weight by avg karma per post?). What we are getting now, compared to earlier/., is a high percentage of meatloaf that causes interesting threads to scroll off the top page into infinity. Keeping on top page prolongs the length of time a discussion can run.
I also would like to know. But what about the db Sybase released as open source I thought about 1 year ago?
Anyway you should be on your guard when anyone tells you they are being really nice but you "shouldn't ever need the code" and "that is plenty for any reasonable application". Come on, 5 gigs is not enough to hold one DVD. Sounds interesting as a microsoft killer for small companies but then again those companies should probably be going with postgres not mssql or oracle anyway. I for one would like to know what is so great about Sybase and is it worth getting into it.
Consider these points (click on expert in the computing page):
If similar to the compression rate quoted for smaller project on the homepage,
60% compression of 20TB result set possible to 8TB. But this will still take a week to download at 100Mbps.
Article quotes higher figures than I found on hompage, but says 4.2 teraflops, 812 cpus, 2TB memory.
However in comparison, the GRAPE-6 (GRAvity PipE) system is 64 teraflops and a typical simulation is 1 million stars x 100 million timesteps (1.6 Tflops).
So obviously why didn't they ask to use GRAPE-6 instead of this outdated equipment, is it because they needed more system memory?
This page shows the kind of cones they are talking about (click for variations of the giant image below).
The snapshots page (click on an image size, needs javascript) shows that they can test for different values of physical constants, this is when speed of light is infinite.
So is this system used because of memory requirements or what? Sounds like If they asked to use the GRAPE-6 they would get another magnitude of resolution or more timesteps.
surprised the secret service is not knocking on the door of slashdot's parent company about now. This is dumb. Even if there were other people publicizing this originally, etc. etc., still slashdot's editors have willingly made sensitive information public.
What happens if fraudulent use of a credit card is ultimately found to be due to slashdot publication of said cards? It's not like this is news at all, the problem's been around for decades. Just now some dumb kid who wants to be a writer and look cool in front of other geeks has provided tons more reach. Or does slashdot believe only "nice people" access their website. as if.
That you can use perl syntax (ellipses) for a numerical range is interesting but not particularly relevant to anything except self-serving "exposes" like this one. How about some news for a change? You can look at some of the other things people have submitted but not had published after getting caught in your "value" filter. hmph!
Okay I would love to have one of these just like I was drooling over SGI Octanes some years ago. I'm curious about graphics support on the motherboard. Can this thing drive a high-res video wall like one rich person was mentioned on slashdot some time ago? I haven't used that many cards on linux yet but I understand the number of agp ports matters. Perhaps another tower standing next to it with a bunch of graphics cards and some more of that 10Gbps fabric? Thinking private planetaria and snowcrash..
Slashdot Mirror
Either the author interviewed himself, or he has a formatting problem. If you are listening, there are no breaks or boldface to demark question and answer sections. Disconcerting to read.
Interesting read though. Here's an idea, how about taking advantage of reusability in open source by producing a software toolkit to enhance user feedback before and afer development?
Talkback is neat, I am thinking now of a really simple-looking "push-to-talk" button that (if your computer is set up correctly of course) would let people actually speak about their gripes so developers can get an in-your-face gritty idea of how others find it to use. In a few days of using OpenOffice which I like a lot heavily, I took the time to write up two pages of dense bugs and user issues. But it takes a while to type, and even way more if you want to input into a bug tracking system. I think many users would find that too hard/daunting. Assumes you have a mic working, which is unfortunately a big assumption with computers these days, but I think it could be really useful. Comments?
Reality Science Channel: Reality TV meets Science TV. The History Channel's for my Dad, this new one's for me! (Proposal for a new channel, hopefully available on the Net)
This new channel shows what scientists do all day, following them through a project from conception, selling it to a sponsor, trials and tribulations, testing and success (!) finally what happens thereafter and how their work fits into pageant of science and/or millionaire status.
Why? Sure I watch TV to unwind and use the Net to learn. But science tv is good for society and would reduce kids interested in science from being picked on for being nerds. And because I'd like to see the whole story of Burt Rutan's saga, this would be a great subject. It is almost criminal that video journalists were not assigned by some organization to follow the progress of all Ansari X Prize competitors, after all this was history in the making.
I think people (from kids to grownups, non-science people to professional researchers) would be interested in seeing exactly how these heroes think, what they went through and what happened along the way. Far more interesting than what people call "Reality TV", which is actually not at all realistic.
The closest thing is The Apprentice, although it is selling the "self-confidence will make you rich" bit a little strongly don't you think? And being marooned on a desert island? Come on! Of course the only problem with my Reality Science Channel idea is that you don't know who is going to be a hero, you can only try to pick up on leading people, news-worthy projects, and maybe ask other scientists who is worth watching. If the TV show would sponsor the scientist's research too it could be extremely profitable all around! How about focusing on the guys trying to build a nanotube space elevator?? What about the mag-beam and other advanced propulsion cowboys?? You aren't going to see these things on the History Channel in 50 years if you don't make the documentary now. This could be the best thing to happen to the U.S. which is unfortunately subject to utter demagoguery, corrupt media, money says PR is more important than science, etc. etc. otherwise the country is going seriously down as far as science goes. Look at it this way, I took a first year chemistry course at Cornell in 85 and the teacher was Roald Hoffmann, a Nobel Prize winner. Holy shit I thought! I was too dumb then to actually try to talk to the guy and find out how he thinks of course. Wish I had though. If you spend time with really great people some of their thinking rubs off on you. Which I noticed when I had a totally by chance opportunity once several years ago to spend some hours in the vicinity of an apparent billionaire. No, alas I was still too dumb to say anything worthwhile to him but could see how he reacted to things. I think it is something that could be captured by video (hi-res please) and audio (high bitrate please), and some extremely good talent. Come to think of it this doesn't only go for science. Currently U.S. elementary and high-schools, and even universities, really do almost nothing to help prepare a student in terms of how to think and how to approach the world. So an awful lot of time is wasted on kids blowing off studies, being cool, going through throes of emotion, taking the easy road, etc.
With the Net and some good reporting, every kid could find out way in advance what people do all day and whether this kind of a career might be good for him or her. This is not the only way to get science onto TV, and a net-based program would also be okay, even say Stargate Atlantis used as a laboratory set a la Sagan's Cosmos would be useful! Gee, maybe if like 1/20 the money spent on Iraq was put into the educational system we might get something useful out of it.
The most memorable science TV program I remember in recent years is a very beautiful astronomy program made by a French outfit, i saw it in Japanese on Japanese TV. It had delicious illustrated animations that helped y
There is one guy who's my hero, a young scientist-type (or maybe science teacher type) who shows you how to make all kinds of extremely cool things. The best show I think was the one where they show how to simulate an aurora, and go to shots of earth from outer space, jupiter, etc. Did you know the aurorae actually look like rings of fire around the poles? Very cool and the aurora he built (the vacuum pump was maybe beyond kids' abilities) showed a beautiful bluish flame that had some characteristics of the big scale aurorae. Very nice!
That's a cool number you have there pardner.
Leapt out at me something like the 2.147 in the 2GB limit (2^31). No it's a bit more than 1 gig (which is 1.074).
But, and I'll thank you to forget that we are moving past each other so it is only true for the moment, but here is an easy way I just figured to remember the distance to Titan. Or T1T42 in my l33t-sp34k. (leet speak). Well the 2 is an N sideways okay?
So anyway, remove the T's (for terameter), and you get 142. 1,427,000,000 kilometers is 1,427,000,000,000 meters, or 1.427 terameters. Who cares about rounding up, we're flying through space at x meters per second! So Titan is only about a terameter and a half away from here.
Instead of moldering on my hd, I put it up on my server here.
I was thinking of just uploading the sxw file but didn't want people new to OOo to wonder if it could carry a word-like macro virus (which I believe it cannot of course). The headings are:
INTRODUCTION
X INTERACTION / WINDOWING / FILE MANAGEMENT / DISPLAY / BASICS
TEXT BOXES
MENUS
HELP SYSTEM
OUTLINING
TABLES
Autocompletion / Autocorrection
FONT MENUS
FIND/REPLACE
STYLES
FEATURE REQUESTS
For what it's worth, lately I have been using OOo mainly in WindowMaker on RH9, on my Dell Inspiron 7.5K laptop in Japanese locale. Mostly recently for translating things from Japanese to English. I keep open 3 kterm shells, one to view a saved job request (converted with nkf -le to view in euc with more), one to run xjdic_sa which is a great dictionary, and one to save words I look up in a studylist in vi (though I am usually an XEmacs person). Sometimes also firefox, maybe jwpce under wine. Have to say copy/paste between apps sux, could use that applet from kde. Well that's about it for now. Can't tell you about printing since I don't have my brother MFC-410CN printer working yet under linux.
Hope this helps!
Anyway, Google is being totally half-assed. Picking up a really old idea and adding some political correctness is crap. They are big enough and smart enough to be able to do away with that, just deal with publishers who see the light and see how fast it grows.
Google should be making a system like that described in Heinlein's book Friday, search for the phrase (if you can) "feed the elephant". It was describing a terminal that had unlimited access (for a steep fee obviously) to just about any kind of research, which you could then follow via links and graph data against that found in other documents, etc. To get that far will need a semantic-aware web or maybe a markup language for graphs, but certainly Google ought to be able to put together a consortium of the publishers who are willing to try it for a flat fee. Of course all those books that don't make it to your local bookstore, and all those pages were likely in a digital file at one point. Could you imagine what it would be like to be able to do any kind of cross-referencing, searching, READING, and ANNOTATING (for yourself or your group) say the entire Library of Congress and beyond? How about all science journals regardless of where they were published? Conference proceedings, meeting minutes. It would be for now like the Internet was for me when I was 12 (25 years ago), a misty word heard floating on the air, but try as I could, I could never find out how to get online (well eventually I did through the Source i.e. compuserve).
No, it would be even more incredible, because it would include all the words people have agonized over and spent years of their lives to put in the right order. Maybe some of us already do a little of that for fun with their own files. Personally I think there is a case for fair use (if I buy the same thing once, twice, three times over the years I darn well ought to be able to use a digital version), there is a case for usage on the premises of public libraries and probably also within their cyber-precinct online, and then there is a case for total information awareness of all high-qualiy information sources, so long as people get paid for their products, there should be a way to get past all the red tape and "feed the elephant's child" i.e. free the mind to roam through knowledge.
Here is an excerpt from Robert A. Heinlein's neat novel, "Friday".
Also figuring out biology seems to be a lot harder than figuring out networking, at least there are all kinds of nefarious things but also serendipitous things found. Like one presentation I just heard had a U.S. scientist who announced that they had discovered an entire signalling network in human cells that was like the one found in yeast cells. And apparently more proteins can be encoded than the number of genes, because of alternate orderings (counting from different displacements in the gene, I think, ask a real bioinformatics expert). One talk I heard a year ago that stuck with me was a scientist who had devised a way to find signalling pathways in cells quickly; by forcing the cell to die if certain requirements were not met, he created a parallel computer that allowed him to discover a whole swath at once. There is also a lot of math and statistics, as well as a lot of biological knowledge behind it, it is not strange to see various statistical tests, references to different computer programs they used for analysis, or a mention of simulated annealing (well maybe that one not so often, came up yesterday though).
One interesting thing is that they (the H-Invitational people / Japan Bioinformatics Consortium) have I believe twice held what they call annotation jamborees, much like a hackfest! In 2002 they had 120 scientists gather (mostly Japan but from all over the world) in a big room with a computer per person. They locked them in for 10 days, and annotated IIRC over 20,000 genes, basically doing a figure some man years of work in a week, inputting data so it can be searched, analyzed, and crossreferenced.
They do have a comparison between mouse and human genome there, I wonder if something similar could be done in open source in terms of annotating and indexing a libary of open source code in different languages, really all in one pseudo language would be more useful perhaps. Anyway biologists are learning from computer scientists learning from mathematicians, and someone famous has said that in the future, all science will be computer science.
Bioinformatics people are doing text mining and data mining, but also there are many flavors and types of analysis programs designed to penetrate and match up information as encoded by tiny molecules, folded proteins, genes, and so on. Here are some links to get started. Also note the perl for bioinformatics books, and there was a big oreilly bioinformatics conference archived from 2003 and other links too (see bio.oreilly.org link below).
I cannot speak for everyone, but I can convey what I have heard, that there have long been communication gaps that have held back some of this, actually cultural differences. For example physicists like pure math and biologists deal in dirty, wet things.. when people successfully combine different perspectives in this area [more] discoveries start getting made. In Japan at least they are trying to figure out how to grow more bioinformaticists, since students tend to go only towards either biology or towards computer science (why study twice as hard). But there seems to be a lot of interesting stuff in there for both sides.
PLoS Bio article
some clusty
faq
I've developed for the Palm and have a bunch. But I've lost everything on my palm at least 3 times, when the batteries went dead, and losing my memos really, really sucked. I have a 64MB memory stick but there was no easy way to back up the Memo pad, that is you would have to search through zillions of files manually, and then decide whether to overwrite the older copy on your stick (did I back up after the last crash or before it). It was great having a vaio laptop with integral memory stick port, very easy to copy files back and forth. But when I spilled a latte on that (and pilot suddenly stopped working with RH9) I have somehow learned to deal without it. I will never go back to the Palm unless (1) it gets nonvolatile memory, and (2) it gets some faster input. I'm saving up for a linux Sharp zaurus, or maybe an OQO.
There is a black and white round one called "Uzumaki Anpan". Uzumaki means whirlpool, coil, eddy or vortex. Something spinning around (uzu means swirl, maki means wrap as in wrapped sushi). As for the second term, An is sweet black miso paste, and pan is a loan word from the Portuguese for bread. Anpan is a hugely popular round puffy donut with the sweet paste inside. So the title roughly means, Vortex Jelly Donut. Rudy Rucker probably has some good words for it, I'll borrow one: Yarrr!
You've taken a bit of flak this time but don't sweat it, you are still one of my favorite writers, and the idea is cool! The bit about the UN scares me a little though. I don't think I want the UN moving any faster than it is now, they already do enough damage. Though the CIA may thank you. The idea is neat though, shades of the worldnet game played by Laura's poor husband in Islands in the Net, that image has embedded itself like a wedge in my brain for over a decade. (Good book!)
So I think it would be really neat if this network blackholed the UN, but covered energetic young, energetic government people in different countries since they are the one's who will do anything unifying, the people who send info up to the top and prioritize it. The secret will be let out on a need-to-know basis. By the time these younguns grow up, say 20 years from now, all governments will be internetworked with officials who still use the nostalgic World Wide Web of Nations or whatever they (you) call it, as it reminds them of their starry-eyed idealistic youth and they get some good gossip from it too.
For fun I tried a little search and replace, to make the last paragraph a little more real for some of us. At least those into flattening society and reducing some of the deadweight on top. Partly tongue in cheek..
Hope I didn't wreck what you meant to say. My guess is those sherpas are really using MS Word but they are too scared of the corporate(government) firewall to send RFCs to their potential friends in other countries. Might shortcut a lot of the process and serve to keep Libya and Sudan of the board though!If Google is my hands for the web, Clusty is going to be my eye. I can swipe my hand through water in a pond, or sandhills on the beach, and get an idea of what is out there on the web, *in the order of popularity* (because backlinking is so important).
I have no problem with this way Google works, I found backlinking to be tremendously useful when implementing a gigabyte-sized database on htdig, and Google "just works".
Clusty on the other hand works to reduce my information saturation, it will reduce the overload and make me feel better. It seems similar to NorthernLight which did clustering a long time ago, but I believe stopped their public engine and are now going after the enterprise (apparently successfully? They have a linux download too).
I may be biased as I am also very interested now in faceted metadata search engine design, and that seems to be what Clusty is doing. I can't tell if it is the same categories as dmoz.org (which Overture says they leverage), but it seems to work. For example I typed in Northern Light and it gave me the categories of Search Engine, Reviews, Aurora, and even Crude Oil. Crude Oil disappeared when I put quotation marks around the search terms, so I'm impressed, they've taken the trouble to match phrases.
I tried some nonsense words, and discovered connections I didn't know exist (mostly foreign language) - I tried splik, splike, and spli*. Try it yourself in google and clusty. Note Google gives you ten pages for splike while Clusty tells you the knowledge domains they fit into. No more clicking here and there in the google screen list to try and find less-popular links. And Clusty turned spli* into split. And click Details in clusty, and a little yellow information window descends, telling you the different sites (Reuters included) and how many hits from each.
Look at their clustering, it seems good and useful. I searched for something I'm interested in now, the search term was: free bioinformatics tutorials.
Clusty gives me categories like Genomics, some institutes, and the Bioinformatics FAQ. It lets me expand more than one section at a time, and the tiny "More" link at the bottom of the category list continually extends that list each time you click it. That's useful. This leads me to other categories including some C++ libraries, a Computational Biology heading, MDL Chime, and a bunch more. Wow! I haven't studied it much more yet, but I'd like to be able to show a lot of categories the first time (no More button clicking), have more screen width given to the categories column, and display the associations that made it pick certain categories. Also I'd like a yellow popup when I mouse over a category to show the next inner level's category list (at th e moment not too many levels it seems) the way Berkeley's Flamenco does. There is a legend below the category list with a line describing the plus mark as "Expand clusters", but I wanted this to expand all clusters and give me all the categories. About the way I just checked the Flamenco site.. I had to use Google. The first time I typed Flamenco into Clusty and it didn't give me any category called Search Engine, which surprised me. I selected cluster by URL instead of Topic, and when I clicked on berkeley.edu I got a Clusty Error which was reproduceable then but not later. I found it on Google by typing in Flamenco and Berkeley. To be fair, Google took me to an old page that redirected me to the right page. When I went back to Clusty and typde in Berkeley as well and searched by topic, it was fine and took me to the right server the first time. Also the berkeley.edu links worked okay then too, so I want to give them the benefit of the doubt.
About the tech, I'm not sure they went as far as they could even though it works well for me. I thought it seemed to be a faceted metadata engine in some ways because they show the number of hits in each section, th
Okay slashdotters! Time for a timely /fiction check. (does not require that you create a new root "fiction" directory but it might help).
1) What black and white scifi movie features a scientist who predicts correctly, and in part has a hand in, a widely moving seismic phenomenon that traces a closed loop, so that the tremendous subterranean pressures throw a huge flaming chunk of the Earth into orbit? I don't think aliens are at all involved though the net seems to. There are also a cute couple who try to survive it all. Neat!
2) What contemporary scifi novel features a visionary seismologist who uses (still unavailable) high-tech sensor networks to predict, correctly and repeatedly, the time and place of earthquakes around the world, and profits on it for a while? Also neat! and has a similar cute couple I believe.
3) Here's a hard one. What novel from the Golden Age of science fiction features a beam of light that crosses time and space to plunge into our hero's skull and warp or seriously bend the plotline? I don't remember anything seismic being involved but there were some good robots, maybe a latent memory brought this one up. Also I would give this one an extremely neat! times 10^8.
Dear Hast,
Thank you very, very much for your considerate, detailed reply. I think your comment is great!
I'll take your advice. I do remember the first time I touched Tolkien I was probably way too young, and had the same experience as with Marion Zimmerman Bradley (Halcion, I think?) - that it was way too boring. I'll put all the Tolkien books back on my reading list for one day and look forward to seeing all the movies on the extended set on a vacation some time.
Thanks!
Matt
He has some good points. Some not so hot in fact quite chilly ones too. But he's more knowledgeable and friendlier than Bush, Kerry , or anyone in their retinues, to Slashdot (that is if Slashdot asked them for comments, I didn't catch the outcome on that).
My family's always been "Republican" but I'm quite fed up with the achievements such as they are of the Bush family, and I agree with much of what the poster says. I also cannot forgive Bush for what he did to Colin Powell, the only high U.S. official I remember being fiercely impressed with.
But I don't think he's going to be able to get all those things rammed down Congress' throat if he wins. My immediate problems are: overuse of the word racist in a written comment, no question elimination of nuclear power, slash of the military soon after 9/11 and oh, does he remember N. Korea threatening nuclear war? That last one bugs me a bit since I think he was saying he would turn the city I am currently in (Tokyo) into a sea of fire or some such (again). I think his stance requires realistic alternatives (or some kind of proof.. links?) to say that solar power can save us all, etc. Also I'd like to hear about his position on Burt Rutan's crew and space exploration in general. And how about info about how to handle the food and water shortage (water is here, food will be too when GM is theoretically outlawed). Unfortunately the comments come across as a sweeping, charismatic work of fiction which are well scaled for mayoral elections perhaps but not for solving all of our massive intertwined problems. I think his ideas on health, law, freedom, schools, and voting are all interesting and should at least be carried in the NY Times as-is so people can see what the contenders have to say. Should be good for the Greens to have to defend what they say (and they are probably better at it overseas already..)
It just sounds like as it is, if/when he actually entered office it would be like a sandbag dropping on his shoulders when the reality of it all hit him. Might overcome it with a stellar team, haven't heard anything about them, maybe it's the conspiracy (maybe real but come on)? Finally this is the most brainpower I want to expend on a candidate who himself does not in fact seem to intend to win this election. Heck with him!
Well I figure my absentee vote will go to Kerry as he is the lesser of two evils, and in the current voting system that will help get Bush out of office more than voting for anyone else would. Sounds like the Greens are based on loftiness and ignorance, plus a few really ingenious ideas which it would be nice for one of the major parties to pick up. Too bad, I'd be ten times more impressed if they could get someone well known and respected to run. Of course they couldn't pay a successful CEO.. hmm are these guys even interested in capitalism? Only game in town for now, it seems to work to a point. Maybe they should ask Soros? Oh never mind. How about if all the contenders joined together? Nader as President, this guy as VP, Soros as Secretary of State or something, etc. Or maybe Kerry should listen to all these guys' rhetoric, steal a few lines, get a massage to loosen up, and have a real showdown with Bush that gets him the vote of both intelligent and unintelligent Americans. Doesn't seem he's doing too well on either side.
Here's another suggestion.. how about somebody making a realistic, convincing suggestion for a world government? (Not one ruled solely by U.S.' superpower military force). Come to think of it, slashdot has more science fiction lovers I would expect than any other audience for a political discussion, people are therefore you might think a little more imaginative or open to freewheeling discussions along these lines. I'm curious about what people would say if asked to imagine the ideal world society for the 21st century, and sketch out in anecdotes what the U.S. would be like in such a world. Aside from say the nanotechnology of 50-100 years from now, how ought the world look by the end of the Century, and what are the key features necessary in the U.S. to approach it, so that we can have the ideal society of the future today. 'Course someone is just going to ask for free movies and mp3z..
What a terrible loss. My deepest sympathies to the bereaved family, and hope the survivors return to health quickly.
This is a time to think about how much all of the wonderful work in the free software world is based on the unselfish actions of precious individuals. Perhaps someone would like to post an accepted, confirmed email or physical address for people to send condolences or offers of assistance.
One question to slashdot, I did not see anything yet about drinking and driving. So maybe the "turn down a glass department" byline is, while a good idea in general when you are the driver, in this case perhaps inappropriate.
Matthew Rosin
Note in the 2002 version that the dialog server is not included, this would be great to have too. MIT also has some very cool technologies in this area - SUMMIT, TINA, GENESIS, ... - which I do not believe are public, they just show little bits and pieces of PR about them, but include natural language parsing, question answering, sentence generation, etc. It would be cool if someone on the inside could document just what things are available, what works with what, what is definitely ready for prime time, etc. There must be some people who hacked on this in the past few years and are still developing things, it would be cool if some of their experimentation was available to the open source community so people could get an idea of what things are possible. When I did my survey just about 1 year ago, Communicator was daunting, intriguing, and it looked like you could do tons of stuff if you had some secret decoder docs and a spare year to hack. Maybe now's the time to dig into it hip deep?
> Seriously though, if you don't see the
> movies because of the lack of a
> specific scene then you're just stupid
This is you being serious? Okay you could be right. But personally that was the only scene I wanted to see, I am not a big LoTR fanatic but I know what I like, and I fell in love with this scene and read it over and over in the book. I don't remember it to be full of windy speeches, what I remember is a truly magical, wonderful place that had more care and majesty built into it than most any other work I can remember. (Perhaps there are other good parts of Tolkien's books, if so please let me know). Perhaps there was some sexism in there, I don't remember from the years ago when I read it, but I do remember quite well the woman in the valley, and his love and longing for her. Perhaps I misinterpreted it at the time?
I'm the kind of guy who likes the first 5 or 10 minutes of movies the best, when things are quiet and the director takes the time to build his world up for you. If I see enchanting environments - there were some in the League of Extraordinary Gentlemen too - I would like to see more of them and just enjoy being shown around them. Maybe I'm part of a demographic of future full-immersive media one day.
I didn't stop seeing LoTR because it was just "missing one scene". It struck me while watching the movie that it was filmed in a relatively crass way to me, in particular I felt that the parts that would have required the most imagination and probably the most financial investment in computer graphics, were simply dropped. To me (wrong or not) Tom Bombadil's valley would have been a masterpiece if done by a true artist with an unlimited budget (or maybe just a true artist with just an ordinary budget, you know?), and it felt like a total cop-out. Other parts of the film caused this realization to resonate in me and I was not looking forward to seeing more of what just seemed like characters being forced to slog from one scene to another in relatively uninspired fashion.
So I realize this is coming from someone who is not perhaps a major LoTR fan, nor even knowledgeable enough about the trilogy to argue intelligently about it or its directors, and I probably will buy the extended set one day. But personally - and there just might be more like me out there - I would pay 5 times the normal entrance fee for the film if I could just see the quiet, beautiful parts of the film, and if Tom Bombadil was done right.
I boycotted LoTR films after realizing they cut my favorite scene in the entire series - the valley of Tom Bombadil. I'll buy the whole thing on DVD though if all his scenes are in there. Is it worth hoping for?
Verisign's business is built on cryptography, captive markets, and authority. This initiative is the perfect way to encroach arbitrarily on children's rights (and those of adults, when they grow up) with little recourse. That a (public or private) school will have the master list in a digital file is clear.
IANA cypherpunk but.. in the sense that a small amount of cleartext is sufficient to break open an encrypted channel, if you consider the Total Information Awareness of a child to be something to be cracked, I would tend to believe that tying age and gender to an id, even if the master list is not made public directly, is easily sufficient signal to discover the child's identity, photograph, school and home address, after a relatively small number of id-enabled transactions.
In addition the school and the child's parents are not information security experts. I expect one or two of the points made here will become apparent after a few badly thought out implementations are made around the country. And you wonder why the world laughs at the U.S.? This is hideous, embarassing, evil, corporate speak in a no-go zone, and generally a really bad idea. And it is also completele unnecessary and unwarranted for the putative purpose.
I think I can afford to be cynical since I expected something like the war in Iraq, in the general geographical area, with the identical aspects of prevarication, failed weapons searches, damned lies, deaths on both sides, damage coverage, Colin Powell (who I really like and pity) being hired to lie in the U.N. etc. for about 20 years. The point being not that I am a cynic about projection of military power in the middle east, but that when the powers at be want to do something, it gets done, and the justification can be just about anything. People stop talking about the justification when you own their ass. This is another one of those, and the ironic thing is it probably was initially conceived by someone who really wanted to protect kids in chat forums. Watch it MORPH! (Handy guide follows)
So here are a few other uses I thought up.
Adult site verification when user grows up a little.
Driver's liscense and insurance tie-in
free pass through "antiterrorist" security at airports, public attractions, etc.
tying of token id to other info to track minors by government, finance, or arbitrary moneyed organization
track academic achievers early and target children for additional education, training, hiring, messing with brains, etc.
tying to physical and genetic data for future scary purposes
tracking of athletes in presidential athletic competition, school competitions, olympics, etc.
tracking of drug use for criminal or athletic monitoring by matching id to urine / hair sample at periodic physicals
sale to toy stores, credit card companies (can't start too young), armed forces
removal of anonymity from a young age so kids will never know what they're missing
purchase of digital textbooks
selection of computer crime suspects
proof of attendance
identity check for standardized tests (schools know who is who of course)
identity check for reservation of computing resources
measurement of advertising viewer demographics in online media
detection of precocious children in adult online areas
detection of precocious children in over their heads
access to locked school premises in unsafe areas or at night
access to student pcs/tablets/pdas/accounts
access to online diaries
medical checkups at school
storage of grades in usb fob or keyed to id
child hands parent access to online life with key
ditto for any adult in educational establishment
but kids can make a few bucks doing transactions for adults sometimes so not all bad right?
Okay I've had enough. How about you, kids?
Thank you for the information. No need to post nastiness on the web for posterity though. Yes I work in IT but no I don't do massive databases. Biggest to now was 1GB. No I am not going to put a DVD on a database obviously, I was reacting to the quote, "..which is more than adequate for all but the most demanding applications", which sounded much like Gates' famous quote. Sybase sounds great though, and I just got a job offer to work with it even. Will take your advice, and very happy to hear about the documentation and stored procedures. Thank you for your reply.
Some more /. anti-news. How about a new metric: Is this earth-shattering or just nuked meatloaf?
/., is a high percentage of meatloaf that causes interesting threads to scroll off the top page into infinity. Keeping on top page prolongs the length of time a discussion can run.
(I'm not knocking meatloaf but a meatloaf icon would help).
My team built 3d chat with avatars at Cyber Technologies International in Tokyo, a fun hack in like a week. The year was 1995.
I think it would be a smart idea to (1) double or triple the number of articles on the top page, and (2) for each one, denote by icon or coloration the "notmeatloafitude" as ranked by mods or perhaps by users (weight by avg karma per post?). What we are getting now, compared to earlier
How about it, slashdot?
I also would like to know.
But what about the db Sybase released as open source I thought about 1 year ago?
Anyway you should be on your guard when anyone tells you they are being really nice but you "shouldn't ever need the code" and "that is plenty for any reasonable application". Come on, 5 gigs is not enough to hold one DVD. Sounds interesting as a microsoft killer for small companies but then again those companies should probably be going with postgres not mssql or oracle anyway. I for one would like to know what is so great about Sybase and is it worth getting into it.
If similar to the compression rate quoted for smaller project on the homepage,
60% compression of 20TB result set possible to 8TB. But this will still take a week to download at 100Mbps.
Article quotes higher figures than I found on hompage, but says 4.2 teraflops, 812 cpus, 2TB memory.
However in comparison, the GRAPE-6 (GRAvity PipE) system is 64 teraflops and a typical simulation is 1 million stars x 100 million timesteps (1.6 Tflops).
So obviously why didn't they ask to use GRAPE-6 instead of this outdated equipment, is it because they needed more system memory?
Requires 70 hours x 512 cpus x 128MB/cpu memory. Modelling 1 billion point masses I do not see any use of Gravity Pipe (GRAPE) hardware. Currently Japan's GRAPE has more computing power for gravitational simulations than any other Top 500 computer. Of interest in GRAPE: http://www.sit.ac.jp/user/kawai/pkg/grape5/g5cata
This page shows the kind of cones they are talking about (click for variations of the giant image below).
The snapshots page (click on an image size, needs javascript) shows that they can test for different values of physical constants, this is when speed of light is infinite.
So is this system used because of memory requirements or what? Sounds like If they asked to use the GRAPE-6 they would get another magnitude of resolution or more timesteps.
surprised the secret service is not knocking on the door of slashdot's parent company about now. This is dumb. Even if there were other people publicizing this originally, etc. etc., still slashdot's editors have willingly made sensitive information public.
What happens if fraudulent use of a credit card is ultimately found to be due to slashdot publication of said cards? It's not like this is news at all, the problem's been around for decades. Just now some dumb kid who wants to be a writer and look cool in front of other geeks has provided tons more reach. Or does slashdot believe only "nice people" access their website. as if.
That you can use perl syntax (ellipses) for a numerical range is interesting but not particularly relevant to anything except self-serving "exposes" like this one. How about some news for a change? You can look at some of the other things people have submitted but not had published after getting caught in your "value" filter. hmph!
Okay I would love to have one of these just like I was drooling over SGI Octanes some years ago. I'm curious about graphics support on the motherboard. Can this thing drive a high-res video wall like one rich person was mentioned on slashdot some time ago? I haven't used that many cards on linux yet but I understand the number of agp ports matters. Perhaps another tower standing next to it with a bunch of graphics cards and some more of that 10Gbps fabric? Thinking private planetaria and snowcrash..