Re:Is Chess a Sport? Go? Backgammon? Bridge? Poker
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Is Math A Sport?
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· Score: 1
p.s. I was wrong, it was allstars 83-84 and we were Montclair Kimberley Academy. And it says 38 teams so I think the hundreds number must have been from the pre-finals. I remember now the road trip to get there. If you have a road trip and fans, it must be a sport no? Try your hand at the programming problems..
Is Chess a Sport? Go? Backgammon? Bridge? Poker?
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Is Math A Sport?
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· Score: 1
caveat I don't play chess
However competitive chess attracts large numbers of people, has newspaper columns and tv shows. Go is similar and I sometimes watch tv shows in Japan that have a man/woman team who explain all the moves. (The man is the expert, the woman is usually a little less expert but far cuter!) I enjoy it and don't know go to well, it is kind of like watching sumo wrestling but more meditative.. you get a droning rhythm from another invisible man who calls out 20 seconds, 10 seconds, 5 seconds for how much time is left each turn.
Another data point. In high school I was the youngest member on a team that competed in the American Computer Science League (ACSL) which at the time was a contest between 900 schools. Despite my terrible contribution somehow our team won against the archrival which always won in the past. Anyway I remember very well doin well with kleene stars as if it was a scored goal. And we played "We are the champions" on a big boom box. (Steve Hayes if you are out there write back!) this was 1985 so it must be bigger now. A much better publicized event is the robocon I believe it's called, where tons of highschools build robots to battle each other (in Japan, televised with huge audiences). The winners generally are very talented and undoubtedly go on to get great jobs.
I see the ACSL now has a website. There seem to be less schools now but the prizes are better.. digital cameras! Also the winners get Microsoft subscriptions which sounds like a booby prize to me. Wouldn't it be nice if they could get some books on Haskell, a copy of mathematica, or (if there is one) a nice open source math-related program?
IANA Mathematician but a common saying is that a mathematical truth is "discovered", in other words it always existed in a sort of mathematical field that interpenetrates the universe. Math is our window on the universe. One physicist recently is said to have proved that mathematical logic in fact is the basis of the universe.
But you can have intellectual sports, and there is a mathematical element in most competitions in one way or another. If the word "sport" is a problem then it can be called something else.
And who knows, the making of universes may even be a sport, to Someone, though I hope not on a level of the punning in this thread. It's all a matter of perspective.
Your development sounds wonderful and I'd like one on my wall too. What exactly do you find patentable though, this is great but every element would appear to be prior. It just seems there is a lot of prior art in visualization and cscw.
I have used a ClearBoard and it was cool and I wanted one immediately. I suspect your app will be another good reason for me to get a Mac again.
I also was a little involved with Muse 2000, cscw visualization and collaborative simulation/cad construction software in an n-dimensional universe (the 3d view for example in construction of the ISS had video windows positioned in 3d space).
Also there is of course the CAVE/CAVERN which seems topologically related. For example display two connected caves on two adjacent walls. And, you can use another wall for text/desktop which is how people debug cave stuff.. something similar to what you are talking about is crudely possible there.
I think lots of people have done really interesting work. I also for example found a pdf googling about work at Tokyo U. I believe that focused on photos of desktops and detecting skin with infraread, finding centers of palms, etc.. one image looked a lot like yours with an icon being touched by a fingertip. And Ishii's ClearBoard is of course transparent, albeit transparent all over the desk not just in a document window.
Anyway I don't know if it is patentable and am pretty sure I don't want you to be patenting something which may include some creative thinking but is so heavily based on Mac tech and the artists and researchers behind that, that you made a prototype in 45 minutes.
It would be extremely helpful if you would state exactly what part you are patenting since most people who know about this area are wavering being ultimately pissed at you and thinking hey he made something cool. I'd prefer to buy a Mac and pay you a royalty for your open app (this is slashdot no software patents remember?).
It seems like a nice app but I think considering the amount of work out there the burden is on you to show what part is original to the point of being patentable.
Put it another way. Would you *PLEASE* consider patenting and signing it over to the FSF?
New antispam algorithms are wonderful stuff, kudos to the author. I would have liked to hear more about how exactly it stacks up against say SpamAssassin which has made the news recently for its high quality.
Also it was not clear to me the connection with biology.. that is, it seems that genetic analysis tools might be very useful, and the ideas about how spam acts like an organism and has "genes" is great. But, it was not clear that this has anything to do with the programming strategy.
For example, the use of a perceptron might be a great idea but to someone not trained in them it is hard to see how a multilayer perceptron would be especially good. Also it is not clear that this is what is used in real world genetic analyses. (For example it would have been interesting if genetic databases and bioinformatics tools like BLAST were mentioned). Also the Chromosome object does not obviously have anything to do with a real chromosome; it is confusing and made me wonder if there was something I was missing, or was it named that way to sound "cool"? Also it was not clear to me if any of the dynamics of genetic transcription and whether gene crossover, mutation, and selection have anything to do with this project.
Also I am curious about the choice of programming language. Being a perl fanatic I wonder why that is not being used, and of course perl is great at text, and pattern matching, and the important parts of many modules are invariably in C or C++ already, etc.. But also perl is a language of choice for bioinformatics, and there are a number of existing modules
for example BioPerl
which wraps other programs
and Boulder which is an interesting format that could be used to pipe spam genes to other people's filters. Now I don't know if existing bioinformatics tools could be applicable but certainly these are things that ought to come to mind.. and what these tools do is not trivial, and if genes are a valid metaphor for spam components then there is a potential for existing code to be used too. That is something that would be cool.
There are also documented, easy to extend perl modules related to using genetic algorithms or for rolling your own analysis modules, I'm thinking of Genetics
and AI::Genetic.
Finally I note the use of the term Corpus. This is really interesting, and suggests the author is into computational linguistics which also represents a massive amount of existing, nontrivial pattern resolution code.
So I'd like to know more about the relationship of both computational biology and computational linguistics to spam. For example, one big part is going to be how to identify genes, or whether you need a generator of pattern matchers that will be able to identify the existence of a gene.
Also there is a short bit about stopping spam by making it literally not pay to spam. I'd like to hear more about how that might be linkable to the biological metaphor.
I don't mean to detract from the work represented by this article, not at all. But I would like to know more about how the system analyzes and exploits the realities of biological dynamics to make a superior antispam tool. For example it would appear that some "genes" might be postulated for links to websites or even mail servers (the vectors of the disease). And some linguistics tools might even help link references to product types as genes.
Finally, and this is just brainstorming really not criticism, I was bothered by the development of a 0 to 1 probability of ham or spam. This is to me the biggest problem with automated filters. I know it can be done, since my antispam method consists of hitt
You need a major rethink. Right now you are your own worst enemy since you have demonstrated to all potential customers that you are in a fragile, undependable state.
It seems ironic that your situation seems so similar to one ordinary programmers can fall into, I suppose you just replace outsouring to India with peaceniks in charge, and you get similar results?
Your whining has had another effect. Now a lot of people are thinking maybe you might be a target of some secret service. I think in your situation you should worry more about your neighbors, but then maybe nobody in your town knows what your business is yet? You are trying to put your talents into lowering the bar so that more people can have weapons against which there is no defense. Isn't it about time to put your own ego aside and ask yourself whether this is a worthy thing to do? I have never heard of freelance weapons manufacturers with the disruptive technology and immaturity you display. Really you take the cake.
It seems clear that you live in a peaceful country that unfortunately has allowed to train yourself into such a dangerous man and left you to cause trouble. There is no intrinsic reason why you must create tools that are meant to kill people in order to support a family in such an inexpensive economy. The only reason you have gone this far is that you can only think about yourself and also of course have hardly anything in the way of ethics. Otherwise I don't think you could suggest that you might be making cruise missiles for a terrorist organization, or that you would be comparing such an organization to democratic governments.
I also feel your juxtaposition of unrelated historic events to your own situation has zero semantic content. You mention atomic bombings by the U.S. without mentioning they were to end a world war started by a sneak attack, and suggest some kind of evil measures taken by Israel but do not say this was to defend against a host of countries that want to extermintate it (even to the point of writing it into the constitution, and don't forget this is also the homeland of a people scattered throughout the world and half exterminated in WWII already). Your take on history is not very interesting, but your attempt to use this kindergarten viewpoint to justify your pursuit of the most dangerous cheap weapon you can imagine is not only ethically, logically and philosophically bankrupt, it also just comes off as really silly.
I suppose you aren't really that dangerous, since you could be easily picked off later by somebody, unless perhaps you chose to educate some real terrorists over the net maybe.
I would like to honestly suggest a few things to you, just because I am simultaneously repulsed by your attitude, respectful of your apparent hacker ability, and slightly sympathetic since superficially you remind me of myself some years ago when I made myself a slave for six months for an untrustworthy friend on a software job that I didn't need to do. Of course once I got out of the job I made in the next month twice what I made in the previous half a year and the light started to dawn.
So, here are the options I can see. 1. As you mentioned, you can die somehow and maybe your wife will get the money, dunno about that. Publishing on the net would probably be a quick way to buy it, but it doesn't suggest she would get big bucks for it since you would I suppose be a traitor. 2. You can continue to starve and try to get a job building missiles. Good luck, not. I think you have a 97% chance of not finding an employer. 3. You can retire and live off your wife's income (she goes to work). Maybe you teach physics in a highschool or college somewhere. Personally I think that would give you too much free time to make trouble. 4. You take this opportunity to look back on your life, think about what is really important. Maybe you even realize the world does not need a DIY cruise missile. About this time you start thinking about what else you might get involved in.
I've checked out Orkut and I think I have an account there too, not that I remember ever wanting to go back into it after a couple times. Could be just me, I wasn't drawn in like I am to Slashdot, for what - years now?
Orkut felt nice, it just wasn't compelling at the time. Maybe it is more so now. Maybe they will make something new.
Last week I responded (apparently after the thread closed) on the previous discussion of patents, about somebody having patented the jelly sandwich or something like it. It is hard to tell if it is even meant to be frivolous or not.
Actually it is a patent for a crimped bread sandwich that holds the insides intact. The patent is from 1998 and it has been on the market since the 80s in Japan, would this not be prior art? Called the manufacturer here in Japan to let them know but they are so behind they cannot even set up email for customers (granted they are one of the biggest bread companies here). Previous posts: 1
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I don't think this is really the most pressing patent to trash but perhaps an easy one for even grade school kids to understand.. might be a good one for them (the EFF) to attack after all.
Sept. 16, 2003 I gave a talk at GLOCOM called
"Open Source, Open Knowledge: The New Alliance of Academia, Industry and Governments from East to West".
That organization is an industrial / academic policy think tank and so I described open source, different uses of it, and suggested use of the GPL-like liscenses for research in bio/nanotechnology.
I covered most of the objections stated in this thread but also noted an online talk by agricultural biotech people from around the world that was very interesting. Third world agriculture has been attacked by unethical corporations like Monsanto which use a suffocating mixture of intellectual property and biotechnology to make it impossible to develop without them, forever. These stakeholders suggested something like Open Source Life Sciences.
However I also noted that while proteomics and discovery of pathways has until now been research given as a freebie to drug companies, at least in Japan it has been recognized that new legislation is necessary to enable development in these areas based on something like a patent.
Nanotech (as the general public imagines it) however requires a far greater amount of basic research being farther away from becoming a product (of course it already is in lots of products, I am talking about machinery etc.) and so could benefit more from a GPL.
The biggest drawback besides how to fund development and coordinate with commercial ventures is of course security a la Bill Joy ("some things we shouldn't make; we should monitor scientists"). And I have nothing against capitalism, I am simply interested in how to improve communication among scientists and use the Net to speed development. If money is what does it fine.
But there seemed to me a number of interesting fields in which the open source / GPL paradigm could be useful and provide effective advantages especially for commercially disadvantaged participants.
This is a followup to my responses to the mention in this thread of a patent in 1999,
U.S. Patent No. 6004596 on a peanut butter and jelly sandwich (actually on a crimped edge sandwich with different fillings).
I got a reply from the owner of the Japanese Lunchpack Research Lab site (http://metro.fw.cx/lunch/lindex.html) which has 39 recent examples with photos of similar stuffed crimped sandwiches sold by Yamazaki Bread Co. in Japanese convenience stores. They are massively popular. The reply confirmed that Yamazaki has been selling these since around the early 1980s, though more information can be gotten from the company itself.
I wondered if I should tell the USPO or Yamazaki about this lousy patent and get rid of it. It doesn't sound like it was intentionally made frivolously, and it seems to me the less dumb patents the better.
Unfortunately I lost what I typed when I back buttoned anyway, have found a post seemingly in 1998, also one about them having been around for about 10 years, etc. But no obviously dated picture so really have to get company to answer this one. But I am pretty sure that patent is TOAST! (yes I just had to).
That really ticked me off, I eat crimped edge sandwiches all the time, the kind made with white bread and sold in convenience stores in Japan. I decided to ask some people in Japan where I am about prior art. So far I have posted on the Lunchpak Research Lab homepage such a request.
There you can see a list with photos of 39 such sandwiches. These are the LunchPak series by Yamazaki Pan Co. (Yamazaki Bread) and Funwari Sando (Fluffy Sandwich) by Kimuraya. I can tell you the "The Peanuts", tuna onion, teriyaki chicken, and croquette crimped sandwiches definitely rock. The latest few (as of 5/13/2004) are from top to bottom, Yubari Melon, Meatloaf and Mayonnaise, Mandarin Orange and Milk, Chocolate Bar and Chocolate Creme (93 points!), etc. 100 points were given to Cookies and Chocolate Creme of 2003-05-22. Anyway I asked them if there was prior art and am thinking about emailing Yamazaki or others. Almost positive they (single filling ones) existed before Dec. 1999.
I believe I have attempted the triple layer to seal in the jelly myself long ago but failed to take a picture, anyway it sticks to the roof of your mouth and does not in fact produce a good seal anyway because the water based jelly and oil based peanut butter in fact do not mix, so the act of eating, bending the sandwich (unless of course crimped) can create jelly/air vacuoles that promote leakage in my opinion. Also peanut butter keeps better on its own.
If you are doing a real 3-D crossword, presumably you would visualize say a 10 x 10 x 10 puzzle as a stack of layers, each layer of which has 100 cubes (you have to write a letter into each little cube), obviously if you write 2 dimensionally this means you would want to write on a piece of paper lodged in the bottom of the layer, or maybe floating halfway through the layer. 4-D puzzles are maybe going to give you 4-D letter boxes I guess, which when you project them onto paper will be extremely difficult to make out, not only will they be skewed in shape but maybe invisible depending on the projection angle..
Anyway let:s just talk about 3D crosswords. If it is a cube with a 10x10 crossword on each face you could of course just make a cube that looks like that, and forget the interior. It could be handled as origami, just publish something you need to fold into a cube.
Other amazing origami shapes can allow you to print something on paper or web but require 3D procedures to solve, for example two halves of a word meet up on a mountain fold, etc.
Also there are some hyper-aspects which are really just 3D, but you can make a chinese fortune cookie origami which we used to make as kids, that you can open and close, and lift up tabs to see what is underneath. Possibly making one of these with two or more differently cut sheets of paper could allow you to provide instructions that require the user to lift up the second sheaf under the tab you see when you solve another crossword question.
There are also software methods for visualizing n-dimensions, but probably the easiest would be a straightforward rotatable, zoomable display of a transparent cube. I suppose you will need a lot of black boxes (make them maybe a light green transparent color so you can see through them) but you can still make rows that start and end deep inside the cube.
There is also a well known puzzle, the Rubik's cube you know. Puzzles that require mechanical rotation are another possibility.
This was great news to hear that there is soolid confirmation that we have a lot of physics to learn! As for the quote of another poster..
*Anyway, since it's not very likely that the knowledge of dark matter will have a significant impact on the daily life anytime soon, relax and enjoy the (slow-moving) show.*
Some things take an awful long time, cosmological events are one of them. But considering the amount of stuff we don't know that is staring us in the face, I'd be surprised if we didn't get a lot of amazing info a lot sooner than not. Or consider the ratios in the article.. however you add them up we can only see 4% of the universe and 80% or 90% of everything is made of something we are nearly clueless about!
It means there is a ton of physics we don't know about, and there is probably a lot of dark matter hanging around right here on planet Earth that we are likewise clueless about. With all that material to cover hanging over our heads like a massive midterm exam, it would be stupendously clueless to assume that it will have little to do with us any time soon.
Also we can assume that the other intelligences we expect to be out there already know all this material and are likewise talking to each other on darkphones at the speed of dark while jetting back and forth in their dark-powered darktaxis. Considering the amount of radiation we've been pumping into space announcing our presence it would be a very good idea to assume it has a lot to do with us here and now, it is right up there after good nutrition and education, and if anything we need more people to pay attention to it.
I tried it in Japan this week. Take a photo with your camera phone and it decodes the message. Superimposed cropmark-like crosshairs ensure the entire encoded field is captured.
A simplified version of sound rendering certainly is possible, for specific cases, as you know. A friend of mine (from MIT Media Lab) some years ago I believe consulted with a major music company on developing a simulation of a physical stringed instrument. This worked extremely well compared to old fashioned oscillators, and was much easier than modelling say a wind instrument, for reasons you mention. I am not convinced that it is impossible to do useful sound synthesis though if it is possible to describe a material at a low resolution (think spring connected voxels) and based on actual resonant properties of blocks of various substances of different sizes.
I don't know what these guys are doing, the blurb on their site is funny but I don't want an IE plugin. However, it is possible they are a couple computational linguistics grads..
I did a survey of literature, coming at it from a layman developer's angle, and it seems the one area of natural language recognition (hence their name naturally open?) where computers are trustworthy and even exceed humans, is pronoun extraction. Not semantic recognition where meaning is understood, but just getting the who/where/what of proper nouns and being able to also link pronouns to them correctly. It's somewhere around 95% accurate and apparently better than a human volunteer in average accuracy, in one test.
This is accomplished not by dividing into sentences but looking at passages of multiple sentences. Perhaps theirs does some of this too, but even a very simple product searcher could just look for words not in its dictionary and google them. So it is not obvious what the merits of their approach are. Personally I'm interested in text-based interaction and news retrieval with open NLP tools.
Ok, thanks for responding carefully to my rant. Much appreciaited. I am sure you are right about several points and I do in fact use GIMP mostly now on windows and linux, though I happened to have paint shop pro on an nt box and I found that to be very useable, and very fast. Anyway. I am not so sure windows gimp is up to the same version but anyway I like gimp, and apparently the latest version is quite changed. Yeah, I knew about tearoff menus.
I was a big BeOS lover too and was getting into developing for it when they changed to the appliance strategy and then tanked. That was horrible.
And I have registered other OO bugs in the past, though the one I just mentioned seems to have been fixed in 1.1 on linux anyway, we shall see with windows one day when I get a better connection. I just switched from a T1 to an expensive dialup (I just got a $300 bill!) and suddenly cannot afford to do all the hot updates needed to make these things work.
I will take some more looks at the GNOME info you mentioned. And GUI is certainly much better. But I was mainly trying (not so well) to point out that open source development would benefit from 1) more investment, yes Sun is great but they are but one, and I think that making non-bloated useful software is maybe not their top priority. And 2) to get design, documentation, and project management people more involved is crucial for taking it to the real world. By real world, I mean I just got a bunch of translation jobs and they require MS Word which bent me out of shape. I still used OO on some jobs but when it doesn't work I lose time/money. It had a big effect on what gets on to my tiny desk in my temporary office - the win98 and linux laptops are in a pile to be hooked up and off daily, the giant winnt box is taking over the desk until I can do something about it, and a real nice linux box is in cardboard. I would like to see the positions reversed.
Well my Apple II Integer Basic was pretty special then with the language card pascal was pretty special. I still think Apple P.I.E. (programmer's editor) was awesome. My brother's woz-signed IIgs was neat. And the Apple/// was pure ecstasy to me, that was sheer amazingness. Of course Apple dropped it the jerks! The Apple III was sheer love and I never wanted anything else, until they dropped it (the bastards!) When they dropped it (damn! damn! damn!) I was scarred for life, the disillusionment distorted my personality.. hee hee.. bwahahahah!!!!
Oh and my fat mac was great, then when I got a hard drive to replace a floppy port that was awesome, my Quadra 950 shipped from the U.S. when it came out that was fantastic. My dual cpu 9600 was great especially with BeOS on it. And finally MacOSX which has some nice touches, too much candy, a fabulous non-apple OS under it which is not used enough, and could be great. I think however that Apple research used to be insanely great and now appears to have let a lot of air out of its sails. I remember the god who ran it quit at one time, Quicktime was used to appease M$, (though I found enough of the Mac toolbox in QT for windows that I was able to port a giant Quark XPress type program from MacOS in 6 months) and never since then have they focussed on insanely great research, if you judge from marketing. Of course they are great at marketing which is why they are taking over the music industry but I wouldn't mind if they took that money and put some serious brainpower onto some next generation OSs now. I mean now we have gotten to where the desktop always should have been and it works great with mostly Apple's GUI integration. Now it would be nice for something new again. BWAHAHA!
I filled out Gyration's form. What I really want is something small that gives an absolute 3D vector. Don't need a full polyhemous rig, can be recalibrated each session. About like the little gyration box or flatter. Anyone? P.S. Found this..:)
Thanks but I'll not have my hard-earned money being sent to SCO under any guise or excuse. Like lots of others also think, EV1's move made me wonder if they were paid to make this high-profile announcement, one of the first companies to take SCO seriously. They should have been able to protect linux users' rights with RedHat indemnification. I had been looking seriously at EV1 but now am also glad I managed to stay away from what I now hear is a notorious porn farm which hosts Hamas!! But they have no moral responsibility eh?? I'm sure that's one well-surveilled hosting company!
Well I have made my purchase decision, and so far am very happy with my sparkling new virtual private server at globalservers.com.
Well listen, for far less than your lowest level linux server I get a dual hyperthreaded xeon (looks like 4 cpus) running at load 0.00, mucho gigs of ram, 10 gigs of RAID disk space, 100GB transfer, unlimited domains, a free domain name for a year, phone calls direct to a very able engineer, and guaranteed uptime! (The guarantee won me over from linode.com but that is also seems good.. and I am from overseas but pair.com also sounds good.)
And guess what, it turns out you only pay a month at a time even at the yearly rate! I had just put to clients on it and not even set up my new ASP service, and I already made back a year's worth of VPS III fees, three times over, within a week of launching it. Bwahahahah!! Globalservers.com RULES Planet Earth!! Mars is too good for brothers Daryl & Marsh! I will put all of my clients on globalservers.com in the future.
Sincerely overjoyed with globalservers.com,
Matt Rosin
CEO, Telebody.com
P.S. GS' VPS III is way cheaper and RAID with guaranteed uptime. Ask if they will give you a free month to switch! Do you really need 100gigs? Or would you like something cheaper, well managed, and always on?
Okay let's take my own experience yesterday. I am a linux lover, developer, and have just moved the contents of my office into a tiny apartment where I had only space to open a small win98 laptop I had used for email.
Now I'm talking about both linux and windows based free software.
I had a deadline, one day's work on a Word document I had been emailed. OpenOffice 1.0 which I had faithfully installed would crash on opening it. Now I wanted to upgrade but it would take days and money to download 80MB for OOo1.1 on my 64Kbps. So, I installed OpenOffice 1.1 on my VPS halfway around the world and tried over X (ouch,laggy) I was able to open it but it was too laggy.
Maybe I would have given up sooner if I had not had a remote resource to try the next version, but I had put OO1.0 on my Win98 laptop and waited impatiently for the next localized version.
What was wrong with 1.0?
Well, everyone was waxing romantic about OOo but I could NEVER get satisfactory Japanese printing from it just for one example. And it seldom took advantage of the printer drivers that worked fine for other Windows apps. MS Word outlines had the leading symbol turned into an S mark. Also it would wreck MS Word generated documents with tables, like a resume which has the sections divided into boxes. To the point that I wasn't sure if saving as Word would produce something readable by my colleagues, and how could I check with out loading up Word? Oh and I forgot to mention that the HTML Editor while the idea is great, totally sucks in 1.0 (haven't tried 1.1 yet) as it is completely unintuitive, you spend ages adjusting lines manually in hopes it will work out, the raw HTML editor is inconsistent, constantly overwritten by the GUI editor and only understands a limited number of metaphors, and always tries to reinterpret your HTML to 'clean it up'. There is no way on earth that these functions would have ever been released by a professional development company and called production ready by anyone, yet I battled at trying to learn the buggy interface even so.
So I spent half a day unpacking a WinNT machine where I was suddenly able to do high speed work and even download a dictionary program to skip using the ISDN - this is on an old 128MB/1 GB machine. I did have trouble finding my old account (it was an NT logon so now I am Unknown User) so did this job as Administrator. But except for time posting on/., I am on schedule. Knowing it would work on linux OOo1.1 was not enough since there was no way to upgrade over low-bandwidth for my own linux machine.
Now this is just one tiny idioscyncratic example. But also having run Suse and RH on my Inspiron 128MB laptop for some years, I believe modern use of linux highly depends on high bandwidth, a good deal of memory, and in general as little interaction with the Windows world as possible. Each interaction can probably be solved for time and money, spent once and then the problem is solved.
OOo in general seems to work but to tell you the truth it seems they intentionally tried to make it different from Windows and it would have been better to just make a clone I think. Or some kind of learning transition for users who just want to start working.
I also was using Gimp the other day on same heroic Win98 machine. Win Gimp is old. But between my Linux Gimp experience and the wonderful online manual (which I did not want to read however) I solved the problem and figured out how to do alpha masking to make a logo for a new website. To me the Gimp interface compared to Photoshop sucks, it takes much longer to do things and there is not as much visual integration with docking pallettes that help you do things half automatically, whereas with Gimp it's half-done contextual menu idea always has you searching a single menu tree, until you break parts of it off every time.
So in addition to needing large cpu and ram to run a satisfactory desktop gui )I am thinking kde but maybe less so for gnome) and large bandwidth (or periodic cds) I thi
Hmm I think I'd like to do this, email a moviemail to a server, or send what is normally a lousy video stream from a FOMA phone to a server and do it there. Seen this sort of algorithm around in Siggraph once upon a time, wonder if there is anything linuxy that can be bent into shape to use the cycles on my new VPS..
(To me this looks like what was documented in Graphica Obscura - projective warping of multiple photos - by SGI researcher Paul Haeberli. Actually his site has lots of info (I haven't seen code though) for doing wild things with color, depth of field, resolution, and so on using neat algorithms, style, and mucho fast computers. But now we can approach more closely the power he had 10 years ago. I love how slashdot forces me to look for sites I loved and lost. This seems to be a repetitive cycle for me with a period of a year. Help Mr. Gerlernter!
Here is more info from the original article. It is a quickie so if someone wants to take a shot at translating the whole thing it might be good.
This is jointly announced by NEC and Nara Advanced Science and Technology University Graduate Program, which were working together as an example of biz-academic collaborations the government has been trying to foster.
It's based on two technologies, "mosaicing" and "ultra high resolution imaging". Mosaicing is defined as making an image of a flat surface or virtually flat distant scene with a wider angle than the camera is normally capable of capturing, by changing the position and angle of the camera, and later composing the resulting images into a single one. (So this is just a definition of a mosaic)
Ultra-res imaging technology is defined as oversampling by turning the object through slightly different angles and composing the resulting images into a single one. (So this is like Magellan's oversampling).
It says they were aiming at using consumer video cameras and camera-equipped phones to make a low-cost, low-annoyance way to do imaging, with a goal of say 15 megapixels, or like what you would get with an A4 page scanned at 400dpi.
The development was done without any special sensors or whatnot, and claim they are able to get similar quality to what a scanner would get by just using a consumer video camera to scan an A4 sheet of paper with this technique.
Then there's some marketing speak and it is presented as research results, no discussion of exactly what the system is or if it will be provided to the public.
- Hachiya is looking for a test pilot for the first version made this past year. Applications accepted up to March 15.
- The faq has another picture including something that looks more like an ordinary glider. To answer the question "What kind of project is this?" he writes, "The final goal of the 'Open Sky Project' is to produce a 'personal jet glider' that can be ridden by a single person (a girl up to 50kg)." Phase 2 which he is working on now includes consideration of ideas like those in the photo.
- He is being assisted in phase 2 by Aircraft OLYMPOS, looks like this guy (Mr. Shibe? Yobe? The name reads like "four doors"..heh) knows his planes.. and he says he thinks it is possible.
- The part about a girl being needed is basically a matter of image.. no reason can't be a guy. The point is to have someone as light and strong as possible, so 40kg plus or minus 5 kg, say 55kg max with full equipment. There is a training program for the pilot budgeted. And since he wouldn't put anyone on it without doing it himself first, he's in training now too. Sounds more ballsy and realistic than at first, no? I think we're back to "KEWL!"
- For phase 2 it will be called another name, not Moewe since if there did happen to be an accident Studio Ghibli (Nausicaa creators) would be inconvenienced. Also because when he looked it up it turns out that Mazda owns a trademark for a plane called Mehbeh. He wonders if they are actually thinking of building it?!?!
- Answering the question "Is this Open Source?" he says "Funny you should ask about that, the was originally developed as an Impac project but since it ended up not getting realized there I decided to do it by by myself. Even this phase I plan to make it open source to some degree, for example releasing diagrams and discussing problem points openly and so on. But as for completely open source hardware (?) I've given up on it. That is, when constructing the body someone should take responsibility for designing it, and when putting someone on it, obviously should take responsibility for that. And considering that kind of responsibility, I don't think it's possible to do that and try to get opinions about an under construction aircraft, or get advice on important parts of the project. However, I am looking for staff (link), so if anybody is interested they are welcome."
- Hey people this sounds like it is maybe real. And while he is an artist not an aeronautics engineer, he does have a good deal of clout and Nausicaa is a powerful image in Japan among the general public, in particular I think among engineers.
I'd like to mention the opinion of an older man who took me out for sushi tonight as I think it may be salient. We were talking about the way sushimaking is taught.. He said the difference between Japan and the U.S. is that Japan is a nation of craftsmen, and they don't teach just anyone what they know. In the U.S. everything is written in a manual, anyone (even someone who doesn't really *care*) can learn whatever is needed. In Japan the expert is not going to teach the young man the trade unless he has fire in his eyes.. Oh so you really *want* to know huh? And the student has to "steal" the information.
Well maybe this is a bit off and might have more to do with chefs than aircraft and open source, but I think it is safe to say at any rate whether this has anything to do with it or not, that a huge percentage of aircraft engineers in Japan have long dreamed of building something like Moewe, compared to their U.S. counterparts, and Hachiya does have a pretty strong way of grabbing people's attention with his designs. Anyway I'd like to hear if people think he is right and if open source aircraft is impossible. Seems it is possible but litigous..
By the way I just caught "BPS: Battle Programmer Shirashi" a (new?) Japanese cartoon. Whit
Slashdot Mirror
p.s. I was wrong, it was allstars 83-84 and we were Montclair Kimberley Academy. And it says 38 teams so I think the hundreds number must have been from the pre-finals. I remember now the road trip to get there. If you have a road trip and fans, it must be a sport no? Try your hand at the programming problems..
However competitive chess attracts large numbers of people, has newspaper columns and tv shows. Go is similar and I sometimes watch tv shows in Japan that have a man/woman team who explain all the moves. (The man is the expert, the woman is usually a little less expert but far cuter!) I enjoy it and don't know go to well, it is kind of like watching sumo wrestling but more meditative.. you get a droning rhythm from another invisible man who calls out 20 seconds, 10 seconds, 5 seconds for how much time is left each turn.
Another data point. In high school I was the youngest member on a team that competed in the American Computer Science League (ACSL) which at the time was a contest between 900 schools. Despite my terrible contribution somehow our team won against the archrival which always won in the past. Anyway I remember very well doin well with kleene stars as if it was a scored goal. And we played "We are the champions" on a big boom box. (Steve Hayes if you are out there write back!) this was 1985 so it must be bigger now. A much better publicized event is the robocon I believe it's called, where tons of highschools build robots to battle each other (in Japan, televised with huge audiences). The winners generally are very talented and undoubtedly go on to get great jobs.
I see the ACSL now has a website. There seem to be less schools now but the prizes are better.. digital cameras! Also the winners get Microsoft subscriptions which sounds like a booby prize to me. Wouldn't it be nice if they could get some books on Haskell, a copy of mathematica, or (if there is one) a nice open source math-related program?
IANA Mathematician but a common saying is that a mathematical truth is "discovered", in other words it always existed in a sort of mathematical field that interpenetrates the universe. Math is our window on the universe. One physicist recently is said to have proved that mathematical logic in fact is the basis of the universe.
But you can have intellectual sports, and there is a mathematical element in most competitions in one way or another. If the word "sport" is a problem then it can be called something else.
And who knows, the making of universes may even be a sport, to Someone, though I hope not on a level of the punning in this thread. It's all a matter of perspective.
Well that was pretty good work I'd say for a side gig. Looking forward to see what your 'real job' turns up!
Your development sounds wonderful and I'd like one on my wall too. What exactly do you find patentable though, this is great but every element would appear to be prior. It just seems there is a lot of prior art in visualization and cscw.
I have used a ClearBoard and it was cool and I wanted one immediately. I suspect your app will be another good reason for me to get a Mac again.
I also was a little involved with Muse 2000, cscw visualization and collaborative simulation/cad construction software in an n-dimensional universe (the 3d view for example in construction of the ISS had video windows positioned in 3d space).
Also there is of course the CAVE/CAVERN which seems topologically related. For example display two connected caves on two adjacent walls. And, you can use another wall for text/desktop which is how people debug cave stuff.. something similar to what you are talking about is crudely possible there.
I think lots of people have done really interesting work. I also for example found a pdf googling about work at Tokyo U. I believe that focused on photos of desktops and detecting skin with infraread, finding centers of palms, etc.. one image looked a lot like yours with an icon being touched by a fingertip. And Ishii's ClearBoard is of course transparent, albeit transparent all over the desk not just in a document window.
Anyway I don't know if it is patentable and am pretty sure I don't want you to be patenting something which may include some creative thinking but is so heavily based on Mac tech and the artists and researchers behind that, that you made a prototype in 45 minutes.
It would be extremely helpful if you would state exactly what part you are patenting since most people who know about this area are wavering being ultimately pissed at you and thinking hey he made something cool. I'd prefer to buy a Mac and pay you a royalty for your open app (this is slashdot no software patents remember?).
It seems like a nice app but I think considering the amount of work out there the burden is on you to show what part is original to the point of being patentable.
Put it another way. Would you *PLEASE* consider patenting and signing it over to the FSF?
Also it was not clear to me the connection with biology.. that is, it seems that genetic analysis tools might be very useful, and the ideas about how spam acts like an organism and has "genes" is great. But, it was not clear that this has anything to do with the programming strategy.
For example, the use of a perceptron might be a great idea but to someone not trained in them it is hard to see how a multilayer perceptron would be especially good. Also it is not clear that this is what is used in real world genetic analyses. (For example it would have been interesting if genetic databases and bioinformatics tools like BLAST were mentioned). Also the Chromosome object does not obviously have anything to do with a real chromosome; it is confusing and made me wonder if there was something I was missing, or was it named that way to sound "cool"? Also it was not clear to me if any of the dynamics of genetic transcription and whether gene crossover, mutation, and selection have anything to do with this project.
Also I am curious about the choice of programming language. Being a perl fanatic I wonder why that is not being used, and of course perl is great at text, and pattern matching, and the important parts of many modules are invariably in C or C++ already, etc.. But also perl is a language of choice for bioinformatics, and there are a number of existing modules for example BioPerl which wraps other programs and Boulder which is an interesting format that could be used to pipe spam genes to other people's filters. Now I don't know if existing bioinformatics tools could be applicable but certainly these are things that ought to come to mind.. and what these tools do is not trivial, and if genes are a valid metaphor for spam components then there is a potential for existing code to be used too. That is something that would be cool.
There are also documented, easy to extend perl modules related to using genetic algorithms or for rolling your own analysis modules, I'm thinking of Genetics and AI::Genetic.
Finally I note the use of the term Corpus. This is really interesting, and suggests the author is into computational linguistics which also represents a massive amount of existing, nontrivial pattern resolution code.
So I'd like to know more about the relationship of both computational biology and computational linguistics to spam. For example, one big part is going to be how to identify genes, or whether you need a generator of pattern matchers that will be able to identify the existence of a gene.
Also there is a short bit about stopping spam by making it literally not pay to spam. I'd like to hear more about how that might be linkable to the biological metaphor.
I don't mean to detract from the work represented by this article, not at all. But I would like to know more about how the system analyzes and exploits the realities of biological dynamics to make a superior antispam tool. For example it would appear that some "genes" might be postulated for links to websites or even mail servers (the vectors of the disease). And some linguistics tools might even help link references to product types as genes.
Finally, and this is just brainstorming really not criticism, I was bothered by the development of a 0 to 1 probability of ham or spam. This is to me the biggest problem with automated filters. I know it can be done, since my antispam method consists of hitt
You need a major rethink. Right now you are your own worst enemy since you have demonstrated to all potential customers that you are in a fragile, undependable state.
It seems ironic that your situation seems so similar to one ordinary programmers can fall into, I suppose you just replace outsouring to India with peaceniks in charge, and you get similar results?
Your whining has had another effect. Now a lot of people are thinking maybe you might be a target of some secret service. I think in your situation you should worry more about your neighbors, but then maybe nobody in your town knows what your business is yet? You are trying to put your talents into lowering the bar so that more people can have weapons against which there is no defense. Isn't it about time to put your own ego aside and ask yourself whether this is a worthy thing to do? I have never heard of freelance weapons manufacturers with the disruptive technology and immaturity you display. Really you take the cake.
It seems clear that you live in a peaceful country that unfortunately has allowed to train yourself into such a dangerous man and left you to cause trouble. There is no intrinsic reason why you must create tools that are meant to kill people in order to support a family in such an inexpensive economy. The only reason you have gone this far is that you can only think about yourself and also of course have hardly anything in the way of ethics. Otherwise I don't think you could suggest that you might be making cruise missiles for a terrorist organization, or that you would be comparing such an organization to democratic governments.
I also feel your juxtaposition of unrelated historic events to your own situation has zero semantic content. You mention atomic bombings by the U.S. without mentioning they were to end a world war started by a sneak attack, and suggest some kind of evil measures taken by Israel but do not say this was to defend against a host of countries that want to extermintate it (even to the point of writing it into the constitution, and don't forget this is also the homeland of a people scattered throughout the world and half exterminated in WWII already). Your take on history is not very interesting, but your attempt to use this kindergarten viewpoint to justify your pursuit of the most dangerous cheap weapon you can imagine is not only ethically, logically and philosophically bankrupt, it also just comes off as really silly.
I suppose you aren't really that dangerous, since you could be easily picked off later by somebody, unless perhaps you chose to educate some real terrorists over the net maybe.
I would like to honestly suggest a few things to you, just because I am simultaneously repulsed by your attitude, respectful of your apparent hacker ability, and slightly sympathetic since superficially you remind me of myself some years ago when I made myself a slave for six months for an untrustworthy friend on a software job that I didn't need to do. Of course once I got out of the job I made in the next month twice what I made in the previous half a year and the light started to dawn.
So, here are the options I can see.
1. As you mentioned, you can die somehow and maybe your wife will get the money, dunno about that. Publishing on the net would probably be a quick way to buy it, but it doesn't suggest she would get big bucks for it since you would I suppose be a traitor.
2. You can continue to starve and try to get a job building missiles. Good luck, not. I think you have a 97% chance of not finding an employer.
3. You can retire and live off your wife's income (she goes to work). Maybe you teach physics in a highschool or college somewhere. Personally I think that would give you too much free time to make trouble.
4. You take this opportunity to look back on your life, think about what is really important. Maybe you even realize the world does not need a DIY cruise missile. About this time you start thinking about what else you might get involved in.
from VA or whomever owns it now.. OSDL?
I've checked out Orkut and I think I have an account there too, not that I remember ever wanting to go back into it after a couple times. Could be just me, I wasn't drawn in like I am to Slashdot, for what - years now?
Orkut felt nice, it just wasn't compelling at the time. Maybe it is more so now. Maybe they will make something new.
Actually it is a patent for a crimped bread sandwich that holds the insides intact. The patent is from 1998 and it has been on the market since the 80s in Japan, would this not be prior art? Called the manufacturer here in Japan to let them know but they are so behind they cannot even set up email for customers (granted they are one of the biggest bread companies here). Previous posts: 1 , 2 , 3
I don't think this is really the most pressing patent to trash but perhaps an easy one for even grade school kids to understand.. might be a good one for them (the EFF) to attack after all.
That organization is an industrial / academic policy think tank and so I described open source, different uses of it, and suggested use of the GPL-like liscenses for research in bio/nanotechnology.
I covered most of the objections stated in this thread but also noted an online talk by agricultural biotech people from around the world that was very interesting. Third world agriculture has been attacked by unethical corporations like Monsanto which use a suffocating mixture of intellectual property and biotechnology to make it impossible to develop without them, forever. These stakeholders suggested something like Open Source Life Sciences.
However I also noted that while proteomics and discovery of pathways has until now been research given as a freebie to drug companies, at least in Japan it has been recognized that new legislation is necessary to enable development in these areas based on something like a patent.
Nanotech (as the general public imagines it) however requires a far greater amount of basic research being farther away from becoming a product (of course it already is in lots of products, I am talking about machinery etc.) and so could benefit more from a GPL.
The biggest drawback besides how to fund development and coordinate with commercial ventures is of course security a la Bill Joy ("some things we shouldn't make; we should monitor scientists"). And I have nothing against capitalism, I am simply interested in how to improve communication among scientists and use the Net to speed development. If money is what does it fine.
But there seemed to me a number of interesting fields in which the open source / GPL paradigm could be useful and provide effective advantages especially for commercially disadvantaged participants.
I got a reply from the owner of the Japanese Lunchpack Research Lab site (http://metro.fw.cx/lunch/lindex.html) which has 39 recent examples with photos of similar stuffed crimped sandwiches sold by Yamazaki Bread Co. in Japanese convenience stores. They are massively popular. The reply confirmed that Yamazaki has been selling these since around the early 1980s, though more information can be gotten from the company itself.
I wondered if I should tell the USPO or Yamazaki about this lousy patent and get rid of it. It doesn't sound like it was intentionally made frivolously, and it seems to me the less dumb patents the better.
Unfortunately I lost what I typed when I back buttoned anyway, have found a post seemingly in 1998, also one about them having been around for about 10 years, etc. But no obviously dated picture so really have to get company to answer this one. But I am pretty sure that patent is TOAST! (yes I just had to).
That really ticked me off, I eat crimped edge sandwiches all the time, the kind made with white bread and sold in convenience stores in Japan. I decided to ask some people in Japan where I am about prior art. So far I have posted on the Lunchpak Research Lab homepage such a request.
There you can see a list with photos of 39 such sandwiches. These are the LunchPak series by Yamazaki Pan Co. (Yamazaki Bread) and Funwari Sando (Fluffy Sandwich) by Kimuraya. I can tell you the "The Peanuts", tuna onion, teriyaki chicken, and croquette crimped sandwiches definitely rock. The latest few (as of 5/13/2004) are from top to bottom, Yubari Melon, Meatloaf and Mayonnaise, Mandarin Orange and Milk, Chocolate Bar and Chocolate Creme (93 points!), etc. 100 points were given to Cookies and Chocolate Creme of 2003-05-22. Anyway I asked them if there was prior art and am thinking about emailing Yamazaki or others. Almost positive they (single filling ones) existed before Dec. 1999.
I believe I have attempted the triple layer to seal in the jelly myself long ago but failed to take a picture, anyway it sticks to the roof of your mouth and does not in fact produce a good seal anyway because the water based jelly and oil based peanut butter in fact do not mix, so the act of eating, bending the sandwich (unless of course crimped) can create jelly/air vacuoles that promote leakage in my opinion. Also peanut butter keeps better on its own.
Matt
If you are doing a real 3-D crossword, presumably you would visualize say a 10 x 10 x 10 puzzle as a stack of layers, each layer of which has 100 cubes (you have to write a letter into each little cube), obviously if you write 2 dimensionally this means you would want to write on a piece of paper lodged in the bottom of the layer, or maybe floating halfway through the layer. 4-D puzzles are maybe going to give you 4-D letter boxes I guess, which when you project them onto paper will be extremely difficult to make out, not only will they be skewed in shape but maybe invisible depending on the projection angle..
Anyway let:s just talk about 3D crosswords. If it is a cube with a 10x10 crossword on each face you could of course just make a cube that looks like that, and forget the interior. It could be handled as origami, just publish something you need to fold into a cube.
Other amazing origami shapes can allow you to print something on paper or web but require 3D procedures to solve, for example two halves of a word meet up on a mountain fold, etc.
Also there are some hyper-aspects which are really just 3D, but you can make a chinese fortune cookie origami which we used to make as kids, that you can open and close, and lift up tabs to see what is underneath. Possibly making one of these with two or more differently cut sheets of paper could allow you to provide instructions that require the user to lift up the second sheaf under the tab you see when you solve another crossword question.
There are also software methods for visualizing n-dimensions, but probably the easiest would be a straightforward rotatable, zoomable display of a transparent cube. I suppose you will need a lot of black boxes (make them maybe a light green transparent color so you can see through them) but you can still make rows that start and end deep inside the cube.
There is also a well known puzzle, the Rubik's cube you know. Puzzles that require mechanical rotation are another possibility.
This was great news to hear that there is soolid confirmation that we have a lot of physics to learn! As for the quote of another poster..
*Anyway, since it's not very likely that the knowledge of dark matter will have a significant impact on the daily life anytime soon, relax and enjoy the (slow-moving) show.*
Some things take an awful long time, cosmological events are one of them. But considering the amount of stuff we don't know that is staring us in the face, I'd be surprised if we didn't get a lot of amazing info a lot sooner than not. Or consider the ratios in the article.. however you add them up we can only see 4% of the universe and 80% or 90% of everything is made of something we are nearly clueless about!
It means there is a ton of physics we don't know about, and there is probably a lot of dark matter hanging around right here on planet Earth that we are likewise clueless about. With all that material to cover hanging over our heads like a massive midterm exam, it would be stupendously clueless to assume that it will have little to do with us any time soon.
Also we can assume that the other intelligences we expect to be out there already know all this material and are likewise talking to each other on darkphones at the speed of dark while jetting back and forth in their dark-powered darktaxis. Considering the amount of radiation we've been pumping into space announcing our presence it would be a very good idea to assume it has a lot to do with us here and now, it is right up there after good nutrition and education, and if anything we need more people to pay attention to it.
I tried it in Japan this week. Take a photo with your camera phone and it decodes the message. Superimposed cropmark-like crosshairs ensure the entire encoded field is captured.
A simplified version of sound rendering certainly is possible, for specific cases, as you know. A friend of mine (from MIT Media Lab) some years ago I believe consulted with a major music company on developing a simulation of a physical stringed instrument. This worked extremely well compared to old fashioned oscillators, and was much easier than modelling say a wind instrument, for reasons you mention. I am not convinced that it is impossible to do useful sound synthesis though if it is possible to describe a material at a low resolution (think spring connected voxels) and based on actual resonant properties of blocks of various substances of different sizes.
Matt Rosin
mattr at telebody dotdotdot com
I don't know what these guys are doing, the blurb on their site is funny but I don't want an IE plugin. However, it is possible they are a couple computational linguistics grads..
I did a survey of literature, coming at it from a layman developer's angle, and it seems the one area of natural language recognition (hence their name naturally open?) where computers are trustworthy and even exceed humans, is pronoun extraction. Not semantic recognition where meaning is understood, but just getting the who/where/what of proper nouns and being able to also link pronouns to them correctly. It's somewhere around 95% accurate and apparently better than a human volunteer in average accuracy, in one test.
This is accomplished not by dividing into sentences but looking at passages of multiple sentences. Perhaps theirs does some of this too, but even a very simple product searcher could just look for words not in its dictionary and google them. So it is not obvious what the merits of their approach are. Personally I'm interested in text-based interaction and news retrieval with open NLP tools.
Ok, thanks for responding carefully to my rant. Much appreciaited. I am sure you are right about several points and I do in fact use GIMP mostly now on windows and linux, though I happened to have paint shop pro on an nt box and I found that to be very useable, and very fast. Anyway. I am not so sure windows gimp is up to the same version but anyway I like gimp, and apparently the latest version is quite changed. Yeah, I knew about tearoff menus.
I was a big BeOS lover too and was getting into developing for it when they changed to the appliance strategy and then tanked. That was horrible.
And I have registered other OO bugs in the past, though the one I just mentioned seems to have been fixed in 1.1 on linux anyway, we shall see with windows one day when I get a better connection. I just switched from a T1 to an expensive dialup (I just got a $300 bill!) and suddenly cannot afford to do all the hot updates needed to make these things work.
I will take some more looks at the GNOME info you mentioned. And GUI is certainly much better. But I was mainly trying (not so well) to point out that open source development would benefit from 1) more investment, yes Sun is great but they are but one, and I think that making non-bloated useful software is maybe not their top priority. And 2) to get design, documentation, and project management people more involved is crucial for taking it to the real world. By real world, I mean I just got a bunch of translation jobs and they require MS Word which bent me out of shape. I still used OO on some jobs but when it doesn't work I lose time/money. It had a big effect on what gets on to my tiny desk in my temporary office - the win98 and linux laptops are in a pile to be hooked up and off daily, the giant winnt box is taking over the desk until I can do something about it, and a real nice linux box is in cardboard. I would like to see the positions reversed.
Thanks again, Matt
Well my Apple II Integer Basic was pretty special then with the language card pascal was pretty special. I still think Apple P.I.E. (programmer's editor) was awesome. My brother's woz-signed IIgs was neat. And the Apple /// was pure ecstasy to me, that was sheer amazingness. Of course Apple dropped it the jerks! The Apple III was sheer love and I never wanted anything else, until they dropped it (the bastards!) When they dropped it (damn! damn! damn!) I was scarred for life, the disillusionment distorted my personality.. hee hee.. bwahahahah!!!!
Oh and my fat mac was great, then when I got a hard drive to replace a floppy port that was awesome, my Quadra 950 shipped from the U.S. when it came out that was fantastic. My dual cpu 9600 was great especially with BeOS on it. And finally MacOSX which has some nice touches, too much candy, a fabulous non-apple OS under it which is not used enough, and could be great. I think however that Apple research used to be insanely great and now appears to have let a lot of air out of its sails. I remember the god who ran it quit at one time, Quicktime was used to appease M$, (though I found enough of the Mac toolbox in QT for windows that I was able to port a giant Quark XPress type program from MacOS in 6 months) and never since then have they focussed on insanely great research, if you judge from marketing. Of course they are great at marketing which is why they are taking over the music industry but I wouldn't mind if they took that money and put some serious brainpower onto some next generation OSs now. I mean now we have gotten to where the desktop always should have been and it works great with mostly Apple's GUI integration. Now it would be nice for something new again. BWAHAHA!
Cheap VR
Well I have made my purchase decision, and so far am very happy with my sparkling new virtual private server at globalservers.com.
Well listen, for far less than your lowest level linux server I get a dual hyperthreaded xeon (looks like 4 cpus) running at load 0.00, mucho gigs of ram, 10 gigs of RAID disk space, 100GB transfer, unlimited domains, a free domain name for a year, phone calls direct to a very able engineer, and guaranteed uptime! (The guarantee won me over from linode.com but that is also seems good.. and I am from overseas but pair.com also sounds good.)
And guess what, it turns out you only pay a month at a time even at the yearly rate! I had just put to clients on it and not even set up my new ASP service, and I already made back a year's worth of VPS III fees, three times over, within a week of launching it. Bwahahahah!! Globalservers.com RULES Planet Earth!! Mars is too good for brothers Daryl & Marsh! I will put all of my clients on globalservers.com in the future.
Sincerely overjoyed with globalservers.com,
Matt Rosin
CEO, Telebody.com
P.S. GS' VPS III is way cheaper and RAID with guaranteed uptime. Ask if they will give you a free month to switch! Do you really need 100gigs? Or would you like something cheaper, well managed, and always on?
Now I'm talking about both linux and windows based free software.
I had a deadline, one day's work on a Word document I had been emailed. OpenOffice 1.0 which I had faithfully installed would crash on opening it. Now I wanted to upgrade but it would take days and money to download 80MB for OOo1.1 on my 64Kbps. So, I installed OpenOffice 1.1 on my VPS halfway around the world and tried over X (ouch,laggy) I was able to open it but it was too laggy.
Maybe I would have given up sooner if I had not had a remote resource to try the next version, but I had put OO1.0 on my Win98 laptop and waited impatiently for the next localized version.
What was wrong with 1.0? Well, everyone was waxing romantic about OOo but I could NEVER get satisfactory Japanese printing from it just for one example. And it seldom took advantage of the printer drivers that worked fine for other Windows apps. MS Word outlines had the leading symbol turned into an S mark. Also it would wreck MS Word generated documents with tables, like a resume which has the sections divided into boxes. To the point that I wasn't sure if saving as Word would produce something readable by my colleagues, and how could I check with out loading up Word? Oh and I forgot to mention that the HTML Editor while the idea is great, totally sucks in 1.0 (haven't tried 1.1 yet) as it is completely unintuitive, you spend ages adjusting lines manually in hopes it will work out, the raw HTML editor is inconsistent, constantly overwritten by the GUI editor and only understands a limited number of metaphors, and always tries to reinterpret your HTML to 'clean it up'. There is no way on earth that these functions would have ever been released by a professional development company and called production ready by anyone, yet I battled at trying to learn the buggy interface even so.
So I spent half a day unpacking a WinNT machine where I was suddenly able to do high speed work and even download a dictionary program to skip using the ISDN - this is on an old 128MB/1 GB machine. I did have trouble finding my old account (it was an NT logon so now I am Unknown User) so did this job as Administrator. But except for time posting on /., I am on schedule. Knowing it would work on linux OOo1.1 was not enough since there was no way to upgrade over low-bandwidth for my own linux machine.
Now this is just one tiny idioscyncratic example. But also having run Suse and RH on my Inspiron 128MB laptop for some years, I believe modern use of linux highly depends on high bandwidth, a good deal of memory, and in general as little interaction with the Windows world as possible. Each interaction can probably be solved for time and money, spent once and then the problem is solved.
OOo in general seems to work but to tell you the truth it seems they intentionally tried to make it different from Windows and it would have been better to just make a clone I think. Or some kind of learning transition for users who just want to start working.
I also was using Gimp the other day on same heroic Win98 machine. Win Gimp is old. But between my Linux Gimp experience and the wonderful online manual (which I did not want to read however) I solved the problem and figured out how to do alpha masking to make a logo for a new website. To me the Gimp interface compared to Photoshop sucks, it takes much longer to do things and there is not as much visual integration with docking pallettes that help you do things half automatically, whereas with Gimp it's half-done contextual menu idea always has you searching a single menu tree, until you break parts of it off every time.
So in addition to needing large cpu and ram to run a satisfactory desktop gui )I am thinking kde but maybe less so for gnome) and large bandwidth (or periodic cds) I thi
Hmm I think I'd like to do this, email a moviemail to a server, or send what is normally a lousy video stream from a FOMA phone to a server and do it there. Seen this sort of algorithm around in Siggraph once upon a time, wonder if there is anything linuxy that can be bent into shape to use the cycles on my new VPS..
(To me this looks like what was documented in Graphica Obscura - projective warping of multiple photos - by SGI researcher Paul Haeberli. Actually his site has lots of info (I haven't seen code though) for doing wild things with color, depth of field, resolution, and so on using neat algorithms, style, and mucho fast computers. But now we can approach more closely the power he had 10 years ago. I love how slashdot forces me to look for sites I loved and lost. This seems to be a repetitive cycle for me with a period of a year. Help Mr. Gerlernter!
Here is more info from the original article.
It is a quickie so if someone wants to take a shot at translating the whole thing it might be good.
This is jointly announced by NEC and Nara Advanced Science and Technology University Graduate Program, which were working together as an example of biz-academic collaborations the government has been trying to foster.
It's based on two technologies, "mosaicing" and "ultra high resolution imaging". Mosaicing is defined as making an image of a flat surface or virtually flat distant scene with a wider angle than the camera is normally capable of capturing, by changing the position and angle of the camera, and later composing the resulting images into a single one. (So this is just a definition of a mosaic)
Ultra-res imaging technology is defined as oversampling by turning the object through slightly different angles and composing the resulting images into a single one. (So this is like Magellan's oversampling).
It says they were aiming at using consumer video cameras and camera-equipped phones to make a low-cost, low-annoyance way to do imaging, with a goal of say 15 megapixels, or like what you would get with an A4 page scanned at 400dpi.
The development was done without any special sensors or whatnot, and claim they are able to get similar quality to what a scanner would get by just using a consumer video camera to scan an A4 sheet of paper with this technique.
Then there's some marketing speak and it is presented as research results, no discussion of exactly what the system is or if it will be provided to the public.
Thanks zioncat are you in Japan?
Matt
- Hachiya is looking for a test pilot for the first version made this past year. Applications accepted up to March 15.
- The faq has another picture including something that looks more like an ordinary glider. To answer the question "What kind of project is this?" he writes, "The final goal of the 'Open Sky Project' is to produce a 'personal jet glider' that can be ridden by a single person (a girl up to 50kg)." Phase 2 which he is working on now includes consideration of ideas like those in the photo.
- He is being assisted in phase 2 by Aircraft OLYMPOS, looks like this guy (Mr. Shibe? Yobe? The name reads like "four doors"..heh) knows his planes.. and he says he thinks it is possible.
- The part about a girl being needed is basically a matter of image.. no reason can't be a guy. The point is to have someone as light and strong as possible, so 40kg plus or minus 5 kg, say 55kg max with full equipment. There is a training program for the pilot budgeted. And since he wouldn't put anyone on it without doing it himself first, he's in training now too. Sounds more ballsy and realistic than at first, no? I think we're back to "KEWL!"
- For phase 2 it will be called another name, not Moewe since if there did happen to be an accident Studio Ghibli (Nausicaa creators) would be inconvenienced. Also because when he looked it up it turns out that Mazda owns a trademark for a plane called Mehbeh. He wonders if they are actually thinking of building it?!?!
- Answering the question "Is this Open Source?" he says "Funny you should ask about that, the was originally developed as an Impac project but since it ended up not getting realized there I decided to do it by by myself. Even this phase I plan to make it open source to some degree, for example releasing diagrams and discussing problem points openly and so on. But as for completely open source hardware (?) I've given up on it. That is, when constructing the body someone should take responsibility for designing it, and when putting someone on it, obviously should take responsibility for that. And considering that kind of responsibility, I don't think it's possible to do that and try to get opinions about an under construction aircraft, or get advice on important parts of the project. However, I am looking for staff (link), so if anybody is interested they are welcome."
- Hey people this sounds like it is maybe real. And while he is an artist not an aeronautics engineer, he does have a good deal of clout and Nausicaa is a powerful image in Japan among the general public, in particular I think among engineers.
I'd like to mention the opinion of an older man who took me out for sushi tonight as I think it may be salient. We were talking about the way sushimaking is taught.. He said the difference between Japan and the U.S. is that Japan is a nation of craftsmen, and they don't teach just anyone what they know. In the U.S. everything is written in a manual, anyone (even someone who doesn't really *care*) can learn whatever is needed. In Japan the expert is not going to teach the young man the trade unless he has fire in his eyes.. Oh so you really *want* to know huh? And the student has to "steal" the information.
Well maybe this is a bit off and might have more to do with chefs than aircraft and open source, but I think it is safe to say at any rate whether this has anything to do with it or not, that a huge percentage of aircraft engineers in Japan have long dreamed of building something like Moewe, compared to their U.S. counterparts, and Hachiya does have a pretty strong way of grabbing people's attention with his designs. Anyway I'd like to hear if people think he is right and if open source aircraft is impossible. Seems it is possible but litigous..
By the way I just caught "BPS: Battle Programmer Shirashi" a (new?) Japanese cartoon. Whit