Seriously, if Damage developed software with someone who worked at SCO conceivably SCO if it got even a little bit crazier might see that as a potential revenue source, based either on ancient code, gpl code, the employee's (probably secret) nda, patents, trademarks, pending lawsuits against various companies, etc. I feel for the code monkeys but even when that company dies it probably will still be one of the undead, liable to walk the graveyard at midnight from time to time. It is a bit of fear nobody needs. Maybe the employees should sue SCO?
It is a bilingual project, you use a tcl based client on windows or *nix and it will upload/rebuild your online system via ftp as needed. Very simple, could use a little work, but I just found it and got to like it.
Someone also mentioned but I was thinking.. the article about blaster and the power grid mentions at the bottom a few links to huge outages caused by Microsoft vulnerabilities - railways, police stations, etc. Sure we've heard about these on and off lately.
Now has anybody actually made a study of how much was lost, and what statistically would be the amount you can expect to lose if you deploy M$ systems? Something like a 5% chance of losing 20 million bucks, etc.? Was just thinking this should be included in any TCO studies M$ is funding.
Bruce Schneier is great! Unfortunately, his 'slight risk of attack' may be a bit higher considering the number of drunk geeks in his town at night who think they know how to get his passwords. I agree with him but there is no point issuing a challenge to these guys right? Hard to imagine he is willfully announcing that he carries on his person at all times but maybe they are encrypted with solitaire?
This is fabulous work! As it happens I've been looking for good NLP tools for a while now and wading through the concepts in computational linguistics.. but you see while interested in it I am not a computational linguist, having only absorbed enough to be able to read most of Ulrich Callmeier's thesis which I managed to find though I probably don't get the jokes..
It strikes me that your implementation of these systems in the real world is of an immense help to people who would like to mess around with these linguistic tools but don't have a degree in the field. It would be very interesting if you would consider separating your distillation of language processing algorithms and code into a module which could be used by other applications? Presumably (though it a trivial system in comparison) you are already considering this vis a vis the RDF store you mentioned to?
The intersection I think came to mind at a meeting I went to last night for blog-related developers in Tokyo. A developer next to me which morphological analyzer I used (chasen and kakasi) which is an important algorithm for a Japanese search engine but it blew my mind that it was on *his* mind! Anyway recently I have been doing more research in this area to determine what is possible for an upcoming project. I sense the timing is absolutely right for this stuff.
One question I have, will you attempt to automatically do document clustering and try to determine the names of new document categories based on the text?
Well it seems that with your mind, it would be a quantum leap for linux if you provided access to these tweaked and digested algorithms. (Which can also be seen as carrying on in the tradition of Ullrich's integration work, with a dose of open source and real world issues.) And it would be nice to see a section on your site about the tools you use. So I guess this is asking about whether your computational linguistics work will remain buried in your system or be provided as a general-purpose parsing/analysis service. Oh, I also just added a whole set of links to my NLP bookmark list after reading your posts. Thank you and good luck!
Well I'm not going to stick my neck out but their copy protection can be easily broken by a popular unix tool that I found after ten minutes of searching the net for it. Starts with "cdp" if that helps..
I had been presented with an EMI audio cd with their lousy Copy Control CD protection scheme, actually this is I think Macrovision/Cactus Data Shield's thing which Avex proceeded to dump all over Japan. There's windows stuff which does it too it seems.
Well I had just seen this concert as a guest of the producer and I got the CD for free. I get back for a long coding session over the weekend and want to play it on my linux laptop of course..
Well after some swearing and wasted a lot of time I solved my personal problem and no, I'm not sharing it to the masses.
Even though I suspect EMI has either done a bad job of the production, or has suffered reduced quality due to this scheme (I don't know if it is true but I read somewhere that these are really just 46 kbps wmf files.. if so that is robbery).
I told the producer that they should stop using that protection which in addition to making the cd not work on my laptop or in car stereos, also is quite easy to break, plus the recording either sucks or it is made worse by the protection scheme. I certainly wouldn't buy a cd with that protection on it normally.
I don't know if this is going to make a difference but I hope these organizations get as many complaints as possible from people who are seriously pissed about this situation. The artist of course knows nothing about the issue, it is not really considered by most people in the business either yet, the protection scheme just gets steamrolled everywhere as a matter of policy I'm sure. If you have a similar situation (especially if you've actually paid for the cd, since I got mine free) please tell them.
"videophones; moon colonies; food in pills; cars that drive themselves; jet packs; and moving sidewalks.... "
Videophones - on sale now in Tokyo Food in pills - well aren't protein and amino acides food? Cars that drive themselves - today's/. on a parking car, and there already is a truck that can drive the highway.. Moving sidewalks - already used widely in Tokyo, usually in 1 to 3 segments of 50 meters each..
You could very well be right, no tin foil hat may be needed. After all Windows just interpenetrates *everything* these days. Still big companies have been struck at before, I predict nothing will come of this latest suit though and I still believe Microsoft must have some agreements with the U.S. government which are not well known, beyond making a pile of cash to shore up the economy.
Just for the record, I've read Atlas Shrugged a few times, I love capitalism, I am not pro-communism, and I think open source is good for a lot of things including making money. Possibly if Brazil has a similar number of smart people as other countries they will be able to take advantage of building on knowledge and creating new solutions, instead of duplicating efforts and paying some American software billionaire more money.
As for free connectivity, this is not only possible it is de rigeur at most national universities around the world in case you haven't noticed. Of course it costs money. But this is really very little money in the scheme of things, the important thing is "free to the end user/student/programmer/small company" and it can be paid for with a tiny bit of taxes, or possibly even gotten really for free from a company which wants other things in return.
Anyway I don't see any reason to pursue this flamebait any more I just am doing this for posterity.
That awesome icon resizing wheel widget you get in SGI desktops. I've wanted one for years and years, didn't get one with BeOS, and now finally I'm gonna get one!! Hooray!!
For anyone who has not used an SGI machine before, windows often have one or two widgets (if two then one would be oriented on the horizontal axis, the other on the vertical) which resemble long, thin, ridged wheels. When you click and drage so as to rotate the wheel showing in a file manager window the file icons will all resize automatically in realtime and smoothly, since it is all drawn in vectors. To me this would make a graphic desktop in linux a lot more useable.
That, and the way you can use a mouse and three buttons in OpenInventor windows to navigate/manipulate in three dimensions are a couple of the best things about SGI user interfaces to my mind.
A picture of an IRIX desktop with an icon resizing wheel is here
While Microsoft could arguably win the prize for leading judges by the nose, the practice of stealing secrets from smaller companies and dumping them is not unique to Microsoft. It is practiced by all giant predatory companies. How do you think they got so big? They lie, cheat, and steal.
The wild thing here is that Bill Gates thinks people will never wise up.
These corporate horrors are propped up by all the money they make, and people imagine that only a giant company like that can do big business. You need a big oil company to do oil exploration, and so on. But you don't *really* need a big company to make good software, a medium size one would do it. You only need a really big software company to dominate.
Cynically, I personally believe that Microsoft uses the size of its firm, and its cash flow to dominate the software world economically, while the U.S. government uses Microsoft's ability to dominate this area for the purposes of spying. Just for argument's sake, how much of the intelligence used by the War on Terrorism, the War on Drugs, or any other policy is actually derived from intentionally engineered holes and spyware associated with Microsoft products? Seems a word processor, a spreadsheet, and an email program ought to be a good place to put a keylogger..
To me this is the only possible reason Microsoft could still exist. I mean, their lawyers are only human. There is nothing occult going on here. It is just a superpower that has developed a nasty addiction to software solutions from the same company that makes consumer operating systems.
Call me paranoid, but then again I expected the wars in the middle east for the past ten years, and expected them to be backed by just as flimsy reasons as they are now. Of course I didn't expect the horrors of 911, so I thought the U.S. president would be in more trouble. However Tony Blair seems to be on the receiving end a bit these days.
Anyway, unless someone has a better answer, I go for Occam's Razor. It is impossible that Microsoft can get out of such repeated hideous offenses.. the only public anger of the U.S. government at Microsoft was when a recent version of windows was shipped with all of its ports wide open. Perhaps they took their pledge for INsecurity too far? Anyway, the next simplest answer beyond Bill getting supernatural help in the courts is that he's already got a few much bigger deals with the government and feels protected. Of course it doesn't hurt to have a pile of money too.
Our office of 50 people just removed McAfee from all computers and installed Virus Buster (Japanese edition) by Trend Micro (antivirus.com). Check it out, you might find it is useful.
Duh, that should be "your LEGAL mp3 file MD5 hash sums". Or maybe "LEGAL mp3 files" is better English.. (a sum is a mathematical calculation on a physical file, hence you cannot update a calculation)..anyway WTF?
Why leave yourself open to prosecution by mindless riaa-drones? Do you guys have a death wish or what?
what would happen. Thank God I never succumbed! Even if you can read Japanese these things can be extremely confusing. Mainly because out of all the different sized buttons, not a single one will actually flush the toilet! I count myself lucky every time I get out of one of these things alive.
One definitely good idea is to heat the seats (in the winter at least).
This is great news for not only Brazil but for everyone in the open source using/developing community.
Someone asked "Why so happy?". Well now there will be many people working in parallel to use open source software in a large enterprise environment, and don't tell me you have to speak English to be a (good) hacker. People will solve problems, submit patches and improvements (if welcomed), and develop new software which we can use and leverage too.
Also it should divert money that would have gone to the richest man in the world, to pay programmers, and to encourage young people to study programming, starting with open source as a given not as an eccentricism. It is entirely possible that you will get an environment in Brazil in which Windows becomes a minority. Could you imagine what kind of things would be possible when the magnifying power of open source is combined with even a small budget? I'm looking forward to hearing stories about Brazil in the future where it becomes famous for a "can-do" attitude (and they actually do it!), when solutions are shared by many and developers are able to enjoy exponential successes.
If this can be documented and nurtured it just might suggest that there is another path for human development in general - capitalism is great but for some sociological or economic reason it hasn't done well in Brazil. Maybe open source can be used in programming and many other fields to codify knowledge and give Brazilians a boost so the money they do spend is most effectively disposed.
I think this goes beyond the general idea that the network is stronger the more nodes it has. We are talking about people who are going to be getting tools put in their hands, the equivalent of an investment of millions or billions of dollars worth of software, and they are going to attack problems and solve them by both tapping into support from the world at an individual level and by recognizing that problems can indeed be solved. The only things I would like to add are that food, sanitation, safety, machines, and free telecom are prerequisites for this. If the government has anybody with a clue (sounds like they do!) they will figure out a way to provide free highspeed internet connectivity. Conceivably this could be done around libraries or community centers, perhaps someone from Brazil or other countries with such experiences can provide some ideas. I am very interested in hearing what the result of this would be if started from Brazilian values, perhaps it could be refreshing.
One thing I can tell you is that one mature person educated in the world can make a difference. A journalist friend of mine has been able to build a hospital, orphanage, newspaper, and a hundred schools in Cambodia from donations around the world. I would guess that Brazil is far, far ahead of Cambodia, at least they have still got their brainpower among the living! Let's help them!
Nope, I had 200 emails to delete this a.m. So how do I find the guy sending me all this shit? I've done lots of detective forays and unsubscriptions but the spam just keeps coming.
I'm thinking it would be useful if I could forward say a hundred spams to an address which would analyze them with other people's spam and figure out the top targets for detective work. Then when anybody gets enough energy/anger to do some calling around everybody benefits.. a kind of spammer scalping engine.
Wasn't there a story about some guy in Argentina recently? Go for it!
Okay this is Slashdot but how come only 1% of the posts are actual requests? Not that most of them are for Cydonia.
Well I have a couple though I am not too far along in areography. If anyone knows the best way to get a navigable copy of a radar map and maybe a mineral content map for Mars at high resolution I'd like to know. Otherwise will look myself some time..
If anyone knowledgeable has any comments on these ideas I would find them very interesting. Also how to get them to NASA.
Request 1. High resolution shots of mountainous areas within 500km of viable (flat) landing spots. This might have the following merits
- higher resolution of more vertical planes should increase the apparent resolution of three-dimensional models to which these images are mapped.
- these areas may also be rephotographed later on and compared to seek changes due to wind, sand or water springs.
- If robust fleets of robotic explorers are sent as has been mentioned, the robots might even be able to get nearby and shoot telephoto images from other angles
Request 2:
How about looking for small regions at the lowest altitude (i.e. farthest below "sealevel") in radar maps and shooting those with high resolution cameras?
- Conceivably there could be a deep crater or canyon which provides shelter from weather as well as possibly slightly higher atmospheric pressure
- Maybe such areas could have interesting cracks which lead even farther down.
- Possibly siting a manned expedition in a canyon would reduce the (not so dangerous but more than a nuclear power plant worker gets) radiation?
- Possibly geographical features in the near vicinity, crater/canyon rim, etc. could be utilized for stringing radio antennae or even anchoring observation kites/balloons
- Conceivably wind caught in such an area would increase the apparent air pressure in the area temporarily
Request 3. How about photographing a broad swath in all directions around proposed landing sites so that it is possible for earthlings to do lengthy walkabouts (flythroughs)?
Request 4. How about shooting interesting areas multiple times from different angles to attain stereo and also make possible extraction of higher resolution data through computation?
- reasons would be various but basically same as #3.
- different orbits will be a little off anyway so slightly different angle is possible right off the bat..
- shots taken from farther away may be able to catch a given location at a later local time (i.e. shoot at 2pm where the satellite is but it is 3 pm in the next time zone where you are focussing) to get different shadows that will let you extract some more topology. Of course if the camera can tilt..
- of course shooting the same place again will also help if the first time was messed up by a sandstorm.
Request 5. Shots of horizon with Deimos/Phobos/other planets rising/setting above it.
Request 6. Shots of places that aren't bright orange (are there any?)
- I'd like to see what different landscapes look like to get an overall idea of what it is like to be on the other planet.
Request 7. A series of overlapping high resolution shots which form lines crisscrossing Mars in a pretty much balanced "brocade".
- This will allow virtual voyagers to travel all over
- It will be relatively easy to shoot more photos to link a previously uncovered area to the hi-res web
- It guarantees that all areas can be viewed in relation to a nearby context
- Perhaps the brocades should be instead of a diamond pattern, follow latitude and longitude lines and be closer to the equator. This might make it possible to simulate landings and takeoffs on Mars from equatorial orbit (if that is the orbit that would be used).
You make some good suggestions. Although I would also add that my definition of the community includes enterprises like RedHat as well as individual developers.
And, you might want to consider other nonprofit institutions which do advertise and have large budgets to do so, for example those related to wildlife, environment, health, developing countries, political action, etc. I am not particularly knowledgeable about it but do know that in the U.S. at least lots of people make tax-deductible donations. For these groups advertising pays off, which would translate into *more* money for community-funded software development projects and *more* market for people who want to make a living doing open source software.
While it is certainly possible to waste money, advertising per se is not a dirty word, in fact it is only valid if it returns value for your money. What remains is how creative an ad you can make, and how much money you spend. For example I spent a lot of money (for me) on magazine ads when I first started an ISP in 94 but I was taught how to get away with spending no money and getting a steady stream of articles.
If we have things like the Perl Foundation which can afford to pay computer scientists salaries, and legal defense from the FSF or perhaps funded by RedHat, it is not a great leap to recognize the possibility of advertising for open source business solutions paid for by the community.
Mr. Ball sounds like a practical businessman, he sounds passionate and as if he enjoys what he does. I wonder if he would be receptive to a business proposition in which he would be featured in commercial advertisements and perhaps provide more precise figures about what it costs him (as he said that analysts are too pessimistic).
As more people like Mr. Ball speak out, the open source community is gaining more people who understand business and can convince other businesses. This man understands that free software can still cost money, and he has the personal experience and business acumen to be able to boil things down to the most important, concise points. He mentiones several important points in his interview, and probably has tons more knowledge that would be useful to making open source a better business solution, and making open source profitable.
It might not be such a bad idea for companies and individuals who are considering funding open source projects to listen to such people when considering project goals. And it would not be so difficult for free software organizations to initiate commerical projects including creating advertisements and articles based on solid, no-nonsense business cases for open source featuring real-world successes like Ernie Ball.
Surprised nobody has commented in this, how convenient for people to be fighting about how many rads per year you get at the surface of Mars.
It seems extremely conservative to me that Russia would take 30 years to get to Mars, especially considering their stated plan is to build a reactor - they'll get to Mars faster if the reactor is in fact what gets them to Mars in the first place.
The U.S. has had a working nuclear rocket engine for forty years, according to a PDF on the ROVER/Nerva project off this page. These are relatively simple engines which shoot hydrogen out the back.
Of course the reference to "already built" is bizarre, who cares if it is already built if they are going to take 30 years to do it? No reason to mention that unless maybe they are talking about tested submarine reactors.
Of course the U.S. has a deal according to this March 2003 article to get Russian nuclear rocket fuels for the nuclear rocket program of Project Prometheus through 2009.
This pdf says that using the NERVA rockets of the 1970s we could get to the moon in a day, or to Mars in 4 months. The article by a Los Alamos researcher is interesting as it talks about the social problems versus technical problems. In all it seems that the nuclear rocket costs half as much, is twice as powerful, and is safe (at least from this paper it seems that reactor core products stay in the reactor). Also from about page 21 there is an interesting section on radiation and human exploration.
It talks about using a gas core nuclear rocket (GCNR) in which we are talking about how to shield crew from radiation in flight, not on the ground, but that this will mean we can get to and from Mars in much less than NASA's planned (1998) mission of 3 years. With a specific impulse of over 3000 seconds, a GCNR ship can have a 3 month transit to Mars, 2 months on the planet, and 4 months back - thus reducing psychological stress factors by keeping the mission to 6-7 months' duration.
There is also the physical deterioration from a long flight.. Apparently the current U.S.-Russia program is aiming for even better, perhaps 2 months each way using small reactors for an unlimited fuel supply and three times better propulsion.
I always wondered if I turned on my laptop in a car should I maybe put the drive to sleep when going around tight curves or over bumpy roads. 'Course I no longer have that problem as the battery died, but does anybody know? Someone with knowledge of precession too.. would it be better to hold the drive vertical or horizontal? I thought smaller drives were stronger, does anyone know how much and whether the speedup for these drives hurts them in reliability?
I think I'd mostly like these to put a huge raid in a laptop or small case.
Be worried. M$ has bitten the bullet and deployed enough linux in a place visible enough to get press, they are serious about going after linux.
This may fuel FUD which is harder to analyze, but it is more likely to help them create demos which show easier use or better feature set than a comparable linux application. Possibly this was in response to big customers saying "show me where you are better and I'll think about it".
This visibility is most likely on purpose though in addition to being aimed at big customers. But I would also be worried considering that if it is true they have this deal with the NSA then most of the backdoors they added for them have been biting the dust recently. Beware of Microsoft issuing binary-only patches or tools to be run on linux boxes. In fact I'd be very paranoid of even GPL'd source code coming from them as it is plenty possible it could contain something subtle though I would expect it to be jumped on by white hats faster than you can say T R O J A N.
Okay, first off I can tell you I flunked a Chem exam ten years ago which was easy, but I decided to try programming a hypersphere into my Mac instead of studying for it. So that's not what you do.
The obvious answers of course are exercise and turning off your fucking computer or at least getting off the Net and not coming to Slashdot. Rewarding yourself etc is great. BUT in college unless you are a CS major (are you?) you don't need a computer that much.
It is much more important to get the information into your brain and integrated than to get it into your computer. And, there are very few (any?) computer-based tools which will make your life easier now. Seriously. I can say this because I powered down 25 kanji a day for 9 weeks in my off time at Middlebury college one summer and it was just pencil, paper, and a 1 cm window I tore with my fingernail. People's brains just don't need computers except to manipulate big information complexes. You don't have that problem now. Also I remember (maybe I'm just wierd) that I could usually remember what part of a page an illustration or quote was on (a biology textbook), and in that summer of learning Japanese my head got so meshed with one book (Nelson's kanji dictionary, awesome) that I would be able to somehow turn to exactly the right section I needed the first time my thumb hit the edge of the book. Try being creative. At least it will be interesting, will save your eyes, and will make sure you are only looking at things you need for your work.
I will tell you that I had a wonderful time looking for quiet places to study. I found the beautiful law school library (at Cornell), carrels (little desks) deep in library stacks, the President's library, the ABC cafe, and other quiet areas successfully.
But here is some advice that might help you even after you've gone through everything else. I once spent a few days of a summer internship with a customer who happened to be a Billionaire with a capital B. I have to tell you, it made a big impression. Just being in close proximity to someone and understanding how they think makes you sharper. In your case, find a friend who is really good at studying and ask if they can show you where to study. Or find someone in the same shoes as you are and make a deal to beat each other up to get your work done.
Anyway if anything else I recommend trying to turn off the computer and using paper and pencil/pen and other paper-based technology. Sometimes I know you just feel too energetic or too zoned out to do anything. Those times I recommend doing exercise and working up a sweat. Your body metabolism will get charged and after you cool down your brain chemistry or whatever it is will probably be more crystal clear. Or, go for a walk by yourself in the evening with your books, find somewhere you don't know, sit down and just start working. If you post more about what your work is people might have more answers for you but the best answer I think is to remove all the barriers to learning you have, including low energy/blood sugar levels, distractions, visual input, muscular aches, and so on. Oh yeah, you can also go do your laundry at a laundromat.
Slashdot Mirror
..safely kept in /dev/null.
Seriously, if Damage developed software with someone who worked at SCO conceivably SCO if it got even a little bit crazier might see that as a potential revenue source, based either on ancient code, gpl code, the employee's (probably secret) nda, patents, trademarks, pending lawsuits against various companies, etc. I feel for the code monkeys but even when that company dies it probably will still be one of the undead, liable to walk the graveyard at midnight from time to time. It is a bit of fear nobody needs. Maybe the employees should sue SCO?
at tclog.sourceforge.jp
It is a bilingual project, you use a tcl based client on windows or *nix and it will upload/rebuild your online system via ftp as needed. Very simple, could use a little work, but I just found it and got to like it.
Now has anybody actually made a study of how much was lost, and what statistically would be the amount you can expect to lose if you deploy M$ systems? Something like a 5% chance of losing 20 million bucks, etc.? Was just thinking this should be included in any TCO studies M$ is funding.
Bruce Schneier is great! Unfortunately, his 'slight risk of attack' may be a bit higher considering the number of drunk geeks in his town at night who think they know how to get his passwords. I agree with him but there is no point issuing a challenge to these guys right? Hard to imagine he is willfully announcing that he carries on his person at all times but maybe they are encrypted with solitaire?
It strikes me that your implementation of these systems in the real world is of an immense help to people who would like to mess around with these linguistic tools but don't have a degree in the field. It would be very interesting if you would consider separating your distillation of language processing algorithms and code into a module which could be used by other applications? Presumably (though it a trivial system in comparison) you are already considering this vis a vis the RDF store you mentioned to?
The intersection I think came to mind at a meeting I went to last night for blog-related developers in Tokyo. A developer next to me which morphological analyzer I used (chasen and kakasi) which is an important algorithm for a Japanese search engine but it blew my mind that it was on *his* mind! Anyway recently I have been doing more research in this area to determine what is possible for an upcoming project. I sense the timing is absolutely right for this stuff.
One question I have, will you attempt to automatically do document clustering and try to determine the names of new document categories based on the text?
Well it seems that with your mind, it would be a quantum leap for linux if you provided access to these tweaked and digested algorithms. (Which can also be seen as carrying on in the tradition of Ullrich's integration work, with a dose of open source and real world issues.) And it would be nice to see a section on your site about the tools you use. So I guess this is asking about whether your computational linguistics work will remain buried in your system or be provided as a general-purpose parsing/analysis service. Oh, I also just added a whole set of links to my NLP bookmark list after reading your posts. Thank you and good luck!
I had been presented with an EMI audio cd with their lousy Copy Control CD protection scheme, actually this is I think Macrovision/Cactus Data Shield's thing which Avex proceeded to dump all over Japan. There's windows stuff which does it too it seems.
Well I had just seen this concert as a guest of the producer and I got the CD for free. I get back for a long coding session over the weekend and want to play it on my linux laptop of course..
Well after some swearing and wasted a lot of time I solved my personal problem and no, I'm not sharing it to the masses. Even though I suspect EMI has either done a bad job of the production, or has suffered reduced quality due to this scheme (I don't know if it is true but I read somewhere that these are really just 46 kbps wmf files.. if so that is robbery).
I told the producer that they should stop using that protection which in addition to making the cd not work on my laptop or in car stereos, also is quite easy to break, plus the recording either sucks or it is made worse by the protection scheme. I certainly wouldn't buy a cd with that protection on it normally.
I don't know if this is going to make a difference but I hope these organizations get as many complaints as possible from people who are seriously pissed about this situation. The artist of course knows nothing about the issue, it is not really considered by most people in the business either yet, the protection scheme just gets steamrolled everywhere as a matter of policy I'm sure. If you have a similar situation (especially if you've actually paid for the cd, since I got mine free) please tell them.
"videophones; moon colonies; food in pills; cars that drive themselves; jet packs; and moving sidewalks. ... "
/. on a parking car, and there already is a truck that can drive the highway..
Videophones - on sale now in Tokyo
Food in pills - well aren't protein and amino acides food?
Cars that drive themselves - today's
Moving sidewalks - already used widely in Tokyo, usually in 1 to 3 segments of 50 meters each..
You could very well be right, no tin foil hat may be needed. After all Windows just interpenetrates *everything* these days. Still big companies have been struck at before, I predict nothing will come of this latest suit though and I still believe Microsoft must have some agreements with the U.S. government which are not well known, beyond making a pile of cash to shore up the economy.
Just for the record, I've read Atlas Shrugged a few times, I love capitalism, I am not pro-communism, and I think open source is good for a lot of things including making money. Possibly if Brazil has a similar number of smart people as other countries they will be able to take advantage of building on knowledge and creating new solutions, instead of duplicating efforts and paying some American software billionaire more money.
As for free connectivity, this is not only possible it is de rigeur at most national universities around the world in case you haven't noticed. Of course it costs money. But this is really very little money in the scheme of things, the important thing is "free to the end user/student/programmer/small company" and it can be paid for with a tiny bit of taxes, or possibly even gotten really for free from a company which wants other things in return.
Anyway I don't see any reason to pursue this flamebait any more I just am doing this for posterity.
For anyone who has not used an SGI machine before, windows often have one or two widgets (if two then one would be oriented on the horizontal axis, the other on the vertical) which resemble long, thin, ridged wheels. When you click and drage so as to rotate the wheel showing in a file manager window the file icons will all resize automatically in realtime and smoothly, since it is all drawn in vectors. To me this would make a graphic desktop in linux a lot more useable.
That, and the way you can use a mouse and three buttons in OpenInventor windows to navigate/manipulate in three dimensions are a couple of the best things about SGI user interfaces to my mind.
A picture of an IRIX desktop with an icon resizing wheel is here
The wild thing here is that Bill Gates thinks people will never wise up.
These corporate horrors are propped up by all the money they make, and people imagine that only a giant company like that can do big business. You need a big oil company to do oil exploration, and so on. But you don't *really* need a big company to make good software, a medium size one would do it. You only need a really big software company to dominate.
Cynically, I personally believe that Microsoft uses the size of its firm, and its cash flow to dominate the software world economically, while the U.S. government uses Microsoft's ability to dominate this area for the purposes of spying. Just for argument's sake, how much of the intelligence used by the War on Terrorism, the War on Drugs, or any other policy is actually derived from intentionally engineered holes and spyware associated with Microsoft products? Seems a word processor, a spreadsheet, and an email program ought to be a good place to put a keylogger..
To me this is the only possible reason Microsoft could still exist. I mean, their lawyers are only human. There is nothing occult going on here. It is just a superpower that has developed a nasty addiction to software solutions from the same company that makes consumer operating systems.
Call me paranoid, but then again I expected the wars in the middle east for the past ten years, and expected them to be backed by just as flimsy reasons as they are now. Of course I didn't expect the horrors of 911, so I thought the U.S. president would be in more trouble. However Tony Blair seems to be on the receiving end a bit these days.
Anyway, unless someone has a better answer, I go for Occam's Razor. It is impossible that Microsoft can get out of such repeated hideous offenses.. the only public anger of the U.S. government at Microsoft was when a recent version of windows was shipped with all of its ports wide open. Perhaps they took their pledge for INsecurity too far? Anyway, the next simplest answer beyond Bill getting supernatural help in the courts is that he's already got a few much bigger deals with the government and feels protected. Of course it doesn't hurt to have a pile of money too.
Our office of 50 people just removed McAfee from all computers and installed Virus Buster (Japanese edition) by Trend Micro (antivirus.com). Check it out, you might find it is useful.
Duh, that should be "your LEGAL mp3 file MD5 hash sums". Or maybe "LEGAL mp3 files" is better English.. (a sum is a mathematical calculation on a physical file, hence you cannot update a calculation) ..anyway WTF?
Why leave yourself open to prosecution by mindless riaa-drones? Do you guys have a death wish or what?
what would happen. Thank God I never succumbed!
Even if you can read Japanese these things can be extremely confusing. Mainly because out of all the different sized buttons, not a single one will actually flush the toilet! I count myself lucky every time I get out of one of these things alive.
One definitely good idea is to heat the seats (in the winter at least).
Someone asked "Why so happy?". Well now there will be many people working in parallel to use open source software in a large enterprise environment, and don't tell me you have to speak English to be a (good) hacker. People will solve problems, submit patches and improvements (if welcomed), and develop new software which we can use and leverage too.
Also it should divert money that would have gone to the richest man in the world, to pay programmers, and to encourage young people to study programming, starting with open source as a given not as an eccentricism. It is entirely possible that you will get an environment in Brazil in which Windows becomes a minority. Could you imagine what kind of things would be possible when the magnifying power of open source is combined with even a small budget? I'm looking forward to hearing stories about Brazil in the future where it becomes famous for a "can-do" attitude (and they actually do it!), when solutions are shared by many and developers are able to enjoy exponential successes.
If this can be documented and nurtured it just might suggest that there is another path for human development in general - capitalism is great but for some sociological or economic reason it hasn't done well in Brazil. Maybe open source can be used in programming and many other fields to codify knowledge and give Brazilians a boost so the money they do spend is most effectively disposed.
I think this goes beyond the general idea that the network is stronger the more nodes it has. We are talking about people who are going to be getting tools put in their hands, the equivalent of an investment of millions or billions of dollars worth of software, and they are going to attack problems and solve them by both tapping into support from the world at an individual level and by recognizing that problems can indeed be solved. The only things I would like to add are that food, sanitation, safety, machines, and free telecom are prerequisites for this. If the government has anybody with a clue (sounds like they do!) they will figure out a way to provide free highspeed internet connectivity. Conceivably this could be done around libraries or community centers, perhaps someone from Brazil or other countries with such experiences can provide some ideas. I am very interested in hearing what the result of this would be if started from Brazilian values, perhaps it could be refreshing.
One thing I can tell you is that one mature person educated in the world can make a difference. A journalist friend of mine has been able to build a hospital, orphanage, newspaper, and a hundred schools in Cambodia from donations around the world. I would guess that Brazil is far, far ahead of Cambodia, at least they have still got their brainpower among the living! Let's help them!
Utterly fabulous! I was even more pissed off at M$ when they tried (and I thought succeeded) in getting it canned. Hackers will rise to the top..
Nope, I had 200 emails to delete this a.m. So how do I find the guy sending me all this shit?
I've done lots of detective forays and unsubscriptions but the spam just keeps coming.
I'm thinking it would be useful if I could forward say a hundred spams to an address which would analyze them with other people's spam and figure out the top targets for detective work. Then when anybody gets enough energy/anger to do some calling around everybody benefits.. a kind of spammer scalping engine.
Wasn't there a story about some guy in Argentina recently? Go for it!
Okay this is Slashdot but how come only 1% of the posts are actual requests? Not that most of them are for Cydonia.
Well I have a couple though I am not too far along in areography. If anyone knows the best way to get a navigable copy of a radar map and maybe a mineral content map for Mars at high resolution I'd like to know. Otherwise will look myself some time..
If anyone knowledgeable has any comments on these ideas I would find them very interesting. Also how to get them to NASA.
Request 1. High resolution shots of mountainous areas within 500km of viable (flat) landing spots. This might have the following merits
- higher resolution of more vertical planes should increase the apparent resolution of three-dimensional models to which these images are mapped.
- these areas may also be rephotographed later on and compared to seek changes due to wind, sand or water springs.
- If robust fleets of robotic explorers are sent as has been mentioned, the robots might even be able to get nearby and shoot telephoto images from other angles
Request 2:
How about looking for small regions at the lowest altitude (i.e. farthest below "sealevel") in radar maps and shooting those with high resolution cameras?
- Conceivably there could be a deep crater or canyon which provides shelter from weather as well as possibly slightly higher atmospheric pressure
- Maybe such areas could have interesting cracks which lead even farther down.
- Possibly siting a manned expedition in a canyon would reduce the (not so dangerous but more than a nuclear power plant worker gets) radiation?
- Possibly geographical features in the near vicinity, crater/canyon rim, etc. could be utilized for stringing radio antennae or even anchoring observation kites/balloons
- Conceivably wind caught in such an area would increase the apparent air pressure in the area temporarily
Request 3. How about photographing a broad swath in all directions around proposed landing sites so that it is possible for earthlings to do lengthy walkabouts (flythroughs)?
Request 4. How about shooting interesting areas multiple times from different angles to attain stereo and also make possible extraction of higher resolution data through computation?
- reasons would be various but basically same as #3.
- different orbits will be a little off anyway so slightly different angle is possible right off the bat..
- shots taken from farther away may be able to catch a given location at a later local time (i.e. shoot at 2pm where the satellite is but it is 3 pm in the next time zone where you are focussing) to get different shadows that will let you extract some more topology. Of course if the camera can tilt..
- of course shooting the same place again will also help if the first time was messed up by a sandstorm.
Request 5. Shots of horizon with Deimos/Phobos/other planets rising/setting above it.
Request 6. Shots of places that aren't bright orange (are there any?)
- I'd like to see what different landscapes look like to get an overall idea of what it is like to be on the other planet.
Request 7. A series of overlapping high resolution shots which form lines crisscrossing Mars in a pretty much balanced "brocade".
- This will allow virtual voyagers to travel all over
- It will be relatively easy to shoot more photos to link a previously uncovered area to the hi-res web
- It guarantees that all areas can be viewed in relation to a nearby context
- Perhaps the brocades should be instead of a diamond pattern, follow latitude and longitude lines and be closer to the equator. This might make it possible to simulate landings and takeoffs on Mars from equatorial orbit (if that is the orbit that would be used).
And, you might want to consider other nonprofit institutions which do advertise and have large budgets to do so, for example those related to wildlife, environment, health, developing countries, political action, etc. I am not particularly knowledgeable about it but do know that in the U.S. at least lots of people make tax-deductible donations. For these groups advertising pays off, which would translate into *more* money for community-funded software development projects and *more* market for people who want to make a living doing open source software.
While it is certainly possible to waste money, advertising per se is not a dirty word, in fact it is only valid if it returns value for your money. What remains is how creative an ad you can make, and how much money you spend. For example I spent a lot of money (for me) on magazine ads when I first started an ISP in 94 but I was taught how to get away with spending no money and getting a steady stream of articles.
Mr. Ball sounds like a practical businessman, he sounds passionate and as if he enjoys what he does. I wonder if he would be receptive to a business proposition in which he would be featured in commercial advertisements and perhaps provide more precise figures about what it costs him (as he said that analysts are too pessimistic).
As more people like Mr. Ball speak out, the open source community is gaining more people who understand business and can convince other businesses. This man understands that free software can still cost money, and he has the personal experience and business acumen to be able to boil things down to the most important, concise points. He mentiones several important points in his interview, and probably has tons more knowledge that would be useful to making open source a better business solution, and making open source profitable.
It might not be such a bad idea for companies and individuals who are considering funding open source projects to listen to such people when considering project goals. And it would not be so difficult for free software organizations to initiate commerical projects including creating advertisements and articles based on solid, no-nonsense business cases for open source featuring real-world successes like Ernie Ball.
It seems extremely conservative to me that Russia would take 30 years to get to Mars, especially considering their stated plan is to build a reactor - they'll get to Mars faster if the reactor is in fact what gets them to Mars in the first place.
The U.S. has had a working nuclear rocket engine for forty years, according to a PDF on the ROVER/Nerva project off this page. These are relatively simple engines which shoot hydrogen out the back.
Of course the reference to "already built" is bizarre, who cares if it is already built if they are going to take 30 years to do it? No reason to mention that unless maybe they are talking about tested submarine reactors.
Of course the U.S. has a deal according to this March 2003 article to get Russian nuclear rocket fuels for the nuclear rocket program of Project Prometheus through 2009.
This pdf says that using the NERVA rockets of the 1970s we could get to the moon in a day, or to Mars in 4 months. The article by a Los Alamos researcher is interesting as it talks about the social problems versus technical problems. In all it seems that the nuclear rocket costs half as much, is twice as powerful, and is safe (at least from this paper it seems that reactor core products stay in the reactor). Also from about page 21 there is an interesting section on radiation and human exploration.
It talks about using a gas core nuclear rocket (GCNR) in which we are talking about how to shield crew from radiation in flight, not on the ground, but that this will mean we can get to and from Mars in much less than NASA's planned (1998) mission of 3 years. With a specific impulse of over 3000 seconds, a GCNR ship can have a 3 month transit to Mars, 2 months on the planet, and 4 months back - thus reducing psychological stress factors by keeping the mission to 6-7 months' duration.
There is also the physical deterioration from a long flight.. Apparently the current U.S.-Russia program is aiming for even better, perhaps 2 months each way using small reactors for an unlimited fuel supply and three times better propulsion.
More info:
link
link
link
pro-nuclear space space group with more information
I think I'd mostly like these to put a huge raid in a laptop or small case.
Hello. Could be some spyware. But that has nothing to do with the more interesting (I think) questions above.
This may fuel FUD which is harder to analyze, but it is more likely to help them create demos which show easier use or better feature set than a comparable linux application. Possibly this was in response to big customers saying "show me where you are better and I'll think about it".
This visibility is most likely on purpose though in addition to being aimed at big customers. But I would also be worried considering that if it is true they have this deal with the NSA then most of the backdoors they added for them have been biting the dust recently. Beware of Microsoft issuing binary-only patches or tools to be run on linux boxes. In fact I'd be very paranoid of even GPL'd source code coming from them as it is plenty possible it could contain something subtle though I would expect it to be jumped on by white hats faster than you can say T R O J A N.
The obvious answers of course are exercise and turning off your fucking computer or at least getting off the Net and not coming to Slashdot. Rewarding yourself etc is great. BUT in college unless you are a CS major (are you?) you don't need a computer that much.
It is much more important to get the information into your brain and integrated than to get it into your computer. And, there are very few (any?) computer-based tools which will make your life easier now. Seriously. I can say this because I powered down 25 kanji a day for 9 weeks in my off time at Middlebury college one summer and it was just pencil, paper, and a 1 cm window I tore with my fingernail. People's brains just don't need computers except to manipulate big information complexes. You don't have that problem now. Also I remember (maybe I'm just wierd) that I could usually remember what part of a page an illustration or quote was on (a biology textbook), and in that summer of learning Japanese my head got so meshed with one book (Nelson's kanji dictionary, awesome) that I would be able to somehow turn to exactly the right section I needed the first time my thumb hit the edge of the book. Try being creative. At least it will be interesting, will save your eyes, and will make sure you are only looking at things you need for your work.
I will tell you that I had a wonderful time looking for quiet places to study. I found the beautiful law school library (at Cornell), carrels (little desks) deep in library stacks, the President's library, the ABC cafe, and other quiet areas successfully.
But here is some advice that might help you even after you've gone through everything else. I once spent a few days of a summer internship with a customer who happened to be a Billionaire with a capital B. I have to tell you, it made a big impression. Just being in close proximity to someone and understanding how they think makes you sharper. In your case, find a friend who is really good at studying and ask if they can show you where to study. Or find someone in the same shoes as you are and make a deal to beat each other up to get your work done.
Anyway if anything else I recommend trying to turn off the computer and using paper and pencil/pen and other paper-based technology. Sometimes I know you just feel too energetic or too zoned out to do anything. Those times I recommend doing exercise and working up a sweat. Your body metabolism will get charged and after you cool down your brain chemistry or whatever it is will probably be more crystal clear. Or, go for a walk by yourself in the evening with your books, find somewhere you don't know, sit down and just start working. If you post more about what your work is people might have more answers for you but the best answer I think is to remove all the barriers to learning you have, including low energy/blood sugar levels, distractions, visual input, muscular aches, and so on. Oh yeah, you can also go do your laundry at a laundromat.