Sure, you need to break a big project into pieces
to keep your sanity, make it doable, and reduce errors. Seems there are a lot of people who think the maintainability issue alone is reason enough to tell you no.
Well, guess what, Linux is pretty darn big and yep it's written in lots of languages. And Corba is built to let you do the same kind of thing for big systems. As long as you aren't building a time bomb maintenance-wise, you should consider carefully the post above about the design pattern for alternation of hard and soft layers. It's not cut and dry.
I just posted in a previous thread reasoning about using Perl in a large project. For one thing, Perl is already a big system and it is written in Perl, C, C++, and whatever else you may want. You can call object code modules from Perl, wrap them in Perl Modules, and even write code from other languages inline inside your Perl programs (compiled automatically).
I do think you should seriously consider scrapping PHP. It is really not that great and if you are
using Perl there is no excuse not to separate design from code. Also it is backwards to control Perl, a high-level language, with C++, a low-level language. The final answer is that there are valid systems for both multi-language and single-language implementations, but your choice is likely to have a big effect on the performance, maintainability, packability, and development schedule/paradigm so think hard about it!
(But please stop lobotomizing Perl by calling it from C++!)
Just as guerilla and terrorist tactics are effective responses to contemporary warfare, networked resource scanners and some degree of AI will become part of the arsenal of cyber theives and soldiers.
Problem is, as government-funded tools filter out into public networks it will spark a discussion of these tools in a public forum, which once they are decompiled and attack modes are diagnosed, will give tons of people the ability to launch more sophisiticated attacks. Either it's someone who reengineers it and hands it to script kiddies, or it's other organizations or nations which will feel an imperative to grab the next escalated technology level.
Consider: the article says "levels the playing field with criminals" or something to that effect. It also means the FBI will use tools criminals use. It is easy to see this becoming espionage when used against a foreign firm by the FBI or by someone else who has appropriated their technology.
Few firms have virus-busting firewalls or antivirus packages which can handle new attacks before they cause damage or hide in archived material. Perhaps the scariest thing is that if a new variant is created for a specific "sting", it could quickly take over many computers over a large geographical area (consider Code Red graphs) before antivirus manufacturers or the public at large come up with a patch. In the past there has been a chance at getting a patch before infection.
But with the public funding a combination of email hole, pc based server, network scanner, key logger, and encryption program defeater, it seems that we are *very* quickly going to enter a much more dangerous situation than ever before.
It is not possible that this technology will never be misused by the government.
It is not possible that this technology will remain in the hands of the FBI.
It is not possible that this will not accelerate worldwide efforts to provide more and more dangerous security-breaking software/services.
Because it is so cheap to develop this kind of a weapon, it is my opinion that it is 100% likely that terrorists, multinationals, and national security organizations around the world *will* coopt this technology or will develop something identical to it (or more powerful) on their own.
This is the part that scares me. No more Net!
Who will ever install a binary from a public server? Who will ever trust interactive content and the plugins which it requires? Who will be trusted to hold the keys?
The FBI is moving a physical wiretap capability highly limited by timing and resources, into a software wiretap regime of high speed, exponential viral growth, widespread destablization of security prior to a court order, and extremely low cost of deployment.
This attempt to coopt the entire networked computing base as a wiretap infrastructure is the most dangerous force I can identify to the world economy and spread of the Internet in all facets of life. It is very hard to have reasonable security for most people at broadband speeds, but one could be forgiven for hoping that problems would be solved in time. Not when the crackers' growth metric takes off exponentially and leaves pro-security forces behind.
I don't think I'd mind if this was used against the people who have attacked the U.S. In fact I'd be surprised if something more powerful wasn't used already. But now we are going to start getting a trickle-down of progressively military weaponry operating silently in our homes.
The cat is out of the bag.. and the technology obviously already exists. The only choice we have is to promote some kind of open source, open science project which could have some hope of markedly improving security in general, could dampen the effects of for example thousands of concurrent Magic Lantern - style attacks from every part of the world. To me, an open, international project is the only way to protect computing in the future.
The FBI already has plenty of tools, and there is no reason it can't improve its cyber attack capability without building such a dangerous system. I certainly don't want to protect the mafia. But unless proven otherwise I think we have to assume that things will get worse all around before they get better.
If you want to see a simulation of the "gray goo" doomsday of nanotechnolgy, simply wait a few months for the next wave of network pathogens.
We will not be safe until we have the U.S. and other governments on the side of the public, with a law against cyber-germ warfare and a well-funded infrastructure to combat cyber-pathogens which do appear with some kind of human and computer based immune system before we enter the age of the network-borne pandemic.
The short answer to you questions is: Probably Perl. I think it matches your tentative decisions and is the only reasonable answer to your timeframe.
Perl *is* C and it constitutes the most robust
(secure against buffer attacks too) cross platform
library you could ask for. You can also do all the things you need to do (and it will work even better on Unix so you can look forward to that). Networking, I/O, forking servers, it is all already done for you and tested in the CPAN (search.cpan.org). It will save you time and make the six month timeframe realistic for you (can't see it happening with C/C++ or Java frankly). It can do Qt, Tk and other GUI toolkits and can handle C and C++ like a charm. Unlike Java, which babysits you so you don't make mistakes, Perl's theme is "There's More Than One Way To Do It" (TMTOWTDI) which may be refreshing. You can still write everything in C/C++ but first get yourself a Perl architecture on top of it.
It is faster to program in Perl and you will be able to use C/C++ for the parts in which you need speed. You can even type C inline in you Perl program and it will compile it for you automatically.
You will be able to take advantage of lots of easy to find algorithms and can prototype a network-aware system extremely quickly. One event loop architecture for client apps called POE may be interesting for you.
To be fair, you could also do it in Java. Though I don't think it magically solves cross-platform issues, it costs more money, and there is a limited number of situations in which you really need to build a Java system. This system might be one of those however. It is usually a matter of what your team knows (although you get more power faster out of Perl). Then I expect you would skip Qt, and stop all the C/C++ work you are doing. If you have a Java team ready you might want to use Java then. Until the next version of Perl it is faster, though Perl usually uses precompiled C/C++ code for time-dependent things.
I am a Perl programmer and have managed Java e-commerce site development in the past (on WebLogic and Tomcat). It depends on the experience of your team as to whether you pick Perl or Java. If you want to build an animated client that talks to servers, or do large corporate multi-tier intranets, maybe Java is best. But I don't see you doing that in your time frame and I don't see it as being important to you. And of course you can make Perl-based clients, either encapsulated in an exe file or very thin and based on top of a local Perl installation.
You will probably be able to prototype the full functionality in straight Perl, optimizing later with into C/C++ on a per package (module) basis. So you need to first design yourself a clean, modular architecture of black boxes. I'd recommend doing use-case design to help discover all human-machine interaction and identify priorities; this will help you with risk management too and is applicable to any language.
You might even want to use CORBA or something similar so that these modules are providing networked services and can be changed to whatever language or system you like without fear. It seems likely that the most important thing to your client will be not the language but the ability to see a prototype, know it is extensible and scalable, and be able to get all the functionality (plus the feature creep functionality) for minimum cost.
Also Perl can run Java! And it can use commands like catch-throw and switch-case because Perl is an extensible, postmodern language that is getting very scarily powerful. In case you haven't noticed I'd recommend Perl in particular because of your timeframe, your leaning toward C/C++/Qt, and probably many other needs you will begin to appreciate such as glue to current systems, talking to devices, other information services, and so on. I have not been impressed with Java performance either engineering wise or in terms of cost, but if you have a trained team with plenty of time, lots of money, and a need for very high traffic transaction systems, Java and something like WebLogic is probably best. But you are not the phone company and I think the answer is obvious. Time to upgrade to Perl!
Some references are perl.com, perlmonks.org, and cpan.org. I think you will be pleasantly surprised. Just to reinforce the message, Java is still a totally valid option and probably most people will say Java, and something that is only Java and nothing else does have a beautiful elegance to it. I think though that you will probably save a lot of time and get tons more efficiencies from available code, being able to use different languages, being able to prototype more quickly, and being able to start *now* when it is still a reasonable amount of time instead of doing more technology surveys. You might want to post your question to both perlmonks.org and a Java site and see what people say, it might be interesting.
Haven't seen the movie yet though I've read the books a couple of times. Reading the Wired
online article about people trying to get the books banned from schools because they promote witchcraft, I was struck by 1) the unlimited gall of fundamentalists in the U.S. and 2) that this would be a great way to boost kids' self confidence for those who need it. I mean this is the ultimate nerd movie, and seems to have a message for non-nerds that nerd is cool. Best at this I've seen since Animal House and Buckaroo Banzai. This could be a good force for stopping the shootings in American schools. In these stories, as mentioned in other messages, there are lots of good morals stories but also it shows a kid who regularly gets picked on becoming a hero for use of his head and inner talents. Educators should get as many kids to see it as possible!
Saw a wonderful meteor shower this morning.
The location was in northern Tokyo, in a parking lot on top of a hill that used to be Inatsuke castle, and is now a residential area, in Akabane.
Though still part of the metropolis, this made it possible to keep most street lights out of the eyes of the 8 people or so who appeared. Very good conditions, with clouds moving around the lower sky but straight up and most of the sky you could see with your eyes wide open staring high up to the South-southwest or high up to the East was available. It was so clear I thought I could see Jupiter's moons (but no binox so unlikely). Seat of my pants timing seemed to match the predictions, with the peak at 3:30 showing something like a meteor every few seconds. I viewed from 3:00 to 4:00 a.m., and it seemed there was at least a meteor every ten seconds. Some very bright ones, once or twice I saw three at a time, and once or twice very bright red ones. One or two bolide explosions at the end. Some meteor trails were very short, fast ones, there were also long dim ones and the best were big smokers.. the trail looked like a ships wake or an aircraft contrail, smoky and it would fade out to a long, dim glimmer. If you've ever seen a big white double contail in the day time, it looked very similar, sometimes with two parallel trails it seemed, and much fatter. Easy to imagine it as a big smoking trail.
Easy to imagine bouncing radio messages off such big ones, they did resemble recent meteor movies which tells me those animators did their homework. The most impressive of all was the huge red meteor trail maybe 30 degrees long (there were a number of this length that were not red) I saw some time after 3:30, in the Northern sky about 20 degrees over Cassiopeia. I used this guide to eyeball distances in the sky. Thought the red might be sunrise reflected off the trails, but then realized after seeing a greenish smoking trail soon thereafter that differences in meteor composition was a more likely cause.
Answer: No.
Reasons: (and proposal at the end)
1. It is too expensive for almost all pages anyway.
2. Variable pricing needed to make business sense i.e. to reimburse authors and copyright holders. Maybe a penny per page is an acceptable way to initially calculate a subscription to a newspaper or magazine, but there is no reason to require integer rates, nor is does it make sense to assume national currency. Currency fluctuations are another ball of wax.
3. Bizarre to hear "per page" when we are getting into the broadband (per play) and wireless (opportunity cost) era.. obsolete scheme.
4. The Net does not belong to America, or to mega-corporations, or to marketing weenies. Almost any price that makes sense to its promoters is an unacceptable high fee and restraint on trade to other countries' citizens.
5. Makes it impossible to practically run a new search engine, indexing/mapping service, or Sherlock session without requiring the accretion of yet more information and business schemes. You can't scan pages automatically without downloading them. So forget intelligent use of Perl's LWP, or unix's wget, or CGI, or mirroring software. Google.com may be the only ones to survive if they sign lots of contracts allowing them to search sites, and nobody will be able to create a competitor.
6. Redefining the terms client and server based on relative upstream-downstream position ignores realities of computing and networking, and is a transparent attempt by business people to put one over on consumers. PC software can be client, server or both, and the idea of "downstream" only has meaning within the context of a passively received service. Packets flow both ways, and any host can be the root server of its own private network or VPN. If we are talking about "per page" in particular your IP address has nothing to do with whether you are buying or selling.
7. The easiest way to get money from consumers for online services is to embed it in a utility bill they are already paying every month. The idea of giving local ISPs, phone, or cable companies political power (defining upstream-downstream and client-server based on their position on the end of the 24x7 network) on top of the money they will make as a percentage of such a monthly commercial services fee is unacceptable, irresponsible, and also impossible to support as that ISP would have to provide reasonable alternatives to all content on the Net. The result of ISP-controlled topology is uncompetitive pricing for stagnant content offerings.
8. "Penny-per-page" is bigotry of port 80 and seems to imply that only a web browser software package could participate. What we need is a way to pay for generic data, whether it is a web page, an encrypted key, or code controlling a live operation, and not implicitly bind that payment scheme to how the data gets into your hands.
Conclusion:
This is a good way to destroy the Internet. So long global mind. Bye-bye third-world education. Goodbye Free Software, Free Services, Privacy, and Hello Microsoft Passport.
A good example of a service that is a runaway success is NTT DoCoMo's i-Mode. A no-brainer, unimpressive service, it's just a menu of sites.
But as it happens, they are also the phone company and when you buy your i-Mode phone, you agree to
i-Mode fees. All they have to do is provide links to content within a framework that you already understand is commercial.
The reason this exists is that NTT worked very, very hard as the nation's phone monopoly to kill the Internet for a very long time (I know, I started an ISP in '94 - one of the first few in Japan), and these moneys were spent on opening up the wireless market in an unsophisticated marketplace.
What happened is, everyone jumped on the bandwagon, i-Mode is huge, and the company is the only success story in Japanese business today. The person who started the service admits it was totally luck, but now they have leveraged themselves into the one e-commerce portal in Japan. Nobody else is doing much (except kiosks now in convenience stores, which I was involved in building). At the moment one very interesting service is selling games for Java phones, which lets you download a selection of arcade games into your applet folder in your phone for 300 yen (under $3) per month.
The rest of the world can be more sophisticated. ISPs, cable, credit card, and other companies have a good location - not with regard to the packet stream, but with regard to the stream of bills they send you. These companies could provide a unified, undifferentiated line item that is your net wallet. There is no reason for the entire network to be balkanized, or for arbitrary metrics such data size, session length, or time of day in a given time zone, or exchange rate in a given bank to hold sway.
Of course if individuals can hold their own electronic money certificates then wallet software on the pc is useful. But consumer pcs are generally a dangerous place to put money; they crash and so on.
The one service that is absolutely necessary is a central payments server which will provide a single point of billing for the consumer while signing electronic invoices for commercial content with every content provider. Possibly "1 cent per page" might be one of the payment schemes this server could support, but it would be unnatural for this "automated wallet proxy" to decide how much content is worth. Whether the product is a newspaper, a song, a long distance call, or a day at the library, the company selling the product should be able to set its own fees (or choose to be free) on an otherwise free network.
It seems very likely (I do not have inside information to support this idea though) that DoCoMo's work to enter the N. American market will be to set up a similarly billed i-Mode service. There is not a lot of time left if you want to design your own future.
From what I could get out of their bizarre applet
and help from a
GNIS server,
It looks like Tokyo (Ikebukuro=3543'00"N,13943'00"E) shower will peak at 450/hour (telling the applet we're "downtown"), between 2 and 4 a.m. morning of 11/19
But the prediction at aero.org mentions both models, the more interesting of which says there will be much more (same time frame, 2-4 a.m. 11/19) as follows..
The second significant peak will begin around 12 noon EST and last until 2 pm EST on the 18th of November. The best viewing for this peak will be over Australia and the Far East. The level of activity for this event could be anywhere from 7000 to 15000 meteors per hour!
Anybody who can corroborate..
No security on this device yet
on
New AIBO Demo'd
·
· Score: 2
I saw a demo of the new Aibo a few weeks ago at a seminar in Tokyo,
and it was pretty cool. Remote control of the
aibo from a laptop over 802.11 was shown and the
graphic interface is really neat, looks like
a cross between a dashboard simulator for a submarine game and Kai's Power Tools. You get live video (I don't think it had sound..) and can
make it do tricks by pushing buttons on the screen.
Afterwards though I asked the person who built it about the possibility of session hijacking and he
said "security is the next thing we have to work on". So maybe you can sit in on the session now. Sticking the memory stick up the Aibo's butt was pretty hilarious though. The rest was pretty dry discussion of overall software idea and market, not a lot of meat for engineering types since I guess they don't want it to be hacked..
There are two new models that look like cute little pandas which most diehards don't like but young people seem to find cute enough to watnt to purchase.
Also Omron just came out with a
robotic cat which I saw in a store (RanKing RanQueen, Shibuya Station 2F) two days ago. It looks like a hell kitty, in that it is a BIG cat (not a kitten) and while made up to look realistic it really isn't. Kind of like a cat nightmare. But it did have a number of interesting cat-like reactions to me even though it was stuck inside a plexiglass box.
No info yet on future networking possibilities with it, but seems like it would be pretty easy to slide your own packages under the fur without anyone noticing!
Some extremely large, well known hosting companies have trouble providing "reasonable" (trustworthy, timely, competent) support to corporate website virtual hosting clients, and I have repeatedly seen all hell break loose in the case of deadlines to push staging to live server from many time zones away.. for some reason I still don't understand, we were never allowed to touch the live server so we never even knew its directoy contents. Sheer hell. In this situation you seldom know if it's going to work on the live server (which is *not* the same as staging no matter what was promised) until D-Day.
I was even offered root access once to fix this provider's host but I had to refuse due to responsibility for all the other clients with virtual websites. The problems generally do not come from things that would crash a kernel, but from the economics of getting individuals to apply appropriate knowledge in the right place at the right time, within the context of a number of companies working together with their own agendas.
Using this virtual server patch, I can see a *lot* of time, effort, danger, stress, complaints, etc. all swept away into history!
Run a virtual servers on your local dev box and the remote staging and live machines, then use rsync from local to staging. Ssh into staging and rsync again, or have the admin staff do so. But the live machine can be isolated network-wise, so it is more likely that the user could be allowed onto the live server themselves.
Of course, 1) it isn't a real compartment with your own filesystem and everything, so for example installing Perl modules, tweaking boot scripts, or tweaking security ain't happening. 2) it isn't strong compartmentalization. And 3) you have to be running a linux kernel in the first place. And 4) the above problems tend to involve Suns, not linux boxes.
Seems this kind of idea is killer though. It would be really interesting if we could run something like this or (maybe better yet) user-mode-linux efficiently as a process inside a SunOS environment. Sounds like IBM had the right idea running a bunch of complete OS images on their heavy iron.
Forgot to mention in my list, Leiji Matsumoto's
comic books and films in the Galaxy Express 999
(Ginga Tetsudo 999) are going to last a long time.
Also Gainax' Evangelion series, though that is just film as far as I know.
Rudy Rucker, particularly Transreal!, freeware
Douglas Adams - The "Trilogy" and the online site
Robert Heinlein, especially The Number of the Beast and Stranger in a Strange Land
A. E. Van Vogt - The Weapon Shops of Isher series, the World of Null-A, and other novels.
E.E. "Doc" Smith - The Lensman series.
Ursula K. LeGuin - A Wizard of Earthsea, the Earthsea trilogy. Lasted this long and going strong online!
Edgar Rice Burroughs - Mars series
William Burroughs - Naked Lunch and others
William Gibson - The Gernsbach Continuum, Burning Chrome
J. G. Ballard - Crash
Bruce Sterling - Islands in the Net
Neal Stephenson - Snow Crash, Cryptonomicon, The Diamond Age
Nancy Kress - Beggars and Choosers trilogy
Philip K. Dick - The Zap Gun, Martian Time Slip, lots of others
Michael Crichton - Travels, Andromeda Strain, Timeline, Rising Sun
Stanislaw Lem - The Cyberiad
Greg Bear - Blood Music, many others
David Brin - Uplift Trilogy, Earth
Carl Sagan - Contact, many others
Arthur C. Clarke - 2001, many others
Frank Herbert - Dune series
Samuel R. Delaney - Night and the Loves of Joe Dicostanzo, Stars in My Pocket Like Grains of Sand, Dhalgren
Vernor Vinge - Realtime series
Isaac Asimov - The Foundation series, The Robot series
Larry Niven - Ringworld series
Jerry Pournelle (with Larry Niven) - The Mote in God's Eye
C. S. Lewis - The Narnia series, Perelandra series
Ray Bradbury - Fahrenheit 451
Kurt Vonnegut - Cat's Cradle
Some others which may not make it into history but might be good to keep..
Charles de Lint - Moonheart and others
A. A. Attanasio - Radix tetrad
Jack L. Chalker - Well of Souls series
James P. Hogan - The Genesis Machine
John Varley - Titan
Peter F. Hamilton - The Reality Dysfunction
Stephen Baxter - Timelike Infinity
Alexander Besher - RIM
www.tor.com has a number of these artists.
there are some other great ones from early 80s for which I can't remember author/title.. help?
1 - another cool one, author/title unknown. a message from aliens that resembles an animated sequence of hypnotically merging venn diagrams drives every genius who sees it crazy with its seductive, inescapable logic. A lesser man who gets around the intelligence test gains access to a interstellar library beam. A key scene is inside a spaceship built from this ("Omnivox?") technology, in which the beam de-evolves the crew into liquid which can stand heavy accelleration, then re-evolves them back. One bad guy suffers a mishap in which he ends up a starfish! Predates the public Internet and tells you what may happen when we light it up one day with atomic lasers.
2 - a more recent, fun novel which features an American Indian whose sand paintings prove to be alien warps in time and information space. (Not Jack Haldeman's High Steel)
3 - another novel which features "neurolinguistic programming", which according to this fsf novel is a special language used by the sumerians that is rediscovered and gives its speakers over others.
4 - Hollywood (or maybe California) Dreamtime, by unknown author. Involving description of virtual reality technology and funhouses of the future. A fsf mystery.
There is more info about lidar here.
Also, the everpresent nanites that act as airborne border patrols in
Neal Stephenson's Diamond Age
are supposed to use lidar for navigation. Interesting to note that in his
book, those flying bots which need to communicate by radio have to trail
whip antenna long enough to carry the appropriate wavelength.
It is already being used in autonomous robots for its superiority over
sonar at Helpmate with funding from NIST, for use in hospital robots.
Yes, Linux is working on it, mostly, but
does anyone know if there is any reason the new
IBM 48GH hard drive (5400rpm, 48gigs) wouldn't
work in it? Plenty of space for it, and it works
in say the Inspiron 8000.
I viewed similar work at Tokyo University's Production Lab (Seisanken). A grad student had
built an system (which could only be used at
night due to vibration) which hooked an atomic
force microscope (or what you call the one with a
needle that senses atomic height) to an SGI box.
You could see a visual representation of the atoms
but it was slow to render. The more interesting
part was a tube-like haptic i/o device in which
one would slide his/her index finger to not only feel the atoms but even pick them up and move them, or flick them across the surface. This was a couple years ago.
Sorry meant solar eclipse. The story being that
physicists have found that neutrinos oscillate between three "flavors" during their trip from the Sun to us, and that a different ratio of these flavors is found when they are detected after passing through the Earth. For neutrinos, ordinary matter is as thin as air is to us, but I'd imagine a black hole would put a kink in their travel plans! Some physicist help!
If blackholes are created through natural atmospheric events, then would it not follow
as night the day, that a small number could last a long time if they found matter to absorb before evaporating?
Perhaps we have some near the Earth's core, or maybe there is a much smaller but more accesible number
in the Lagrangian Points. IANA astrophysicist but it would seem quite likely that the moon's core would have such black holes. If so, might black holes in the lunar core be detected through perturbation of neutrino density during lunar eclipses?
On another note might microscopic black holes be able to change the ratio of neutrino flavors seen when solar neutrinos are viewed after passing through the Earth? Fascinating subject!
Can't wait to store my data in those extra dimensions.. hard disk will never get full! (not)
Even though I had left off downloading it for a while I luckily found it again.
Seems to me that if you sign a disclaimer saying you wouldn't dream of suing them for bugs it should be okay no?
Coming from someone who'se seen production with a custom mac premiere/raid system I can tell you crashes and such are not unknown in the commercial world.. anyway.
Should be a nifty tool and a mother lode of knowledge for anyone who wants to learn about video programming!
I don't know if this will work with the
subject of this story, but if the Inline
module is supported it will let you also
use Python, Java, C, C++, Tcl, Assembler,
Guile, and whatever somebody else feels
like glueing in.
Palm gets fantastic multimedia capabilities and
unix, Be gets cash, a new hardware platform with
a ton of market share, and becomes de facto
presentation unit for a palm.. who needs a PC?
Maybe we'll get light tablets with smooth video,
wireless, device connectivity, and GPL software
in the hands of the public.
We (might) get unix drivers for all those little
hardware doodads that will plug into the palm..
If SD devices can roll out much larger memory
capacities I bet this will give Sony's memory stick vision a run for the money. It's basically
200 companies (in SD, pushing SDIO) against the
Sonies. Hmm this could all be a war of whose batteries last longer. If so Sony's way ahead.
It was found that the force of the impact on pendulums made of different materials
does not depend on the material but is only proportional to the mass of the sample.
Pendulums of different mass demonstrated equal deflection at constant voltage.
This was proved by a large number of measurements using spherical samples of
different mass and diameter.
This seems to suggest either 1) antigravity etc
or 2) paramagnetism. It would seem to rule out contamination with iron as someone else suggested.
It would also be nice to know from some of the physicists around here whether or not there is a
lot of experience with magnetic fields of this
strength at this temperature.
Considering how deadly this kind of research must
be to your career, you have to admire this scientist. It would seem obvious that if we began to
understand it we would be able to control it in
some way, that it would seem like a logical
course of scientific inquiry.
When I read the article I immediately realized
what that sound was, and listening to the realaudio stream confirmed my nightmare.
This is not the first time that sound has appeared. You see, horror movie directors have
hit upon it time and again.. trying to reproduce
the sound that signals a fight or flight response
like when you hear something (a bear, a murderer,
a grue, whatever) sneaking up behind you.
Maybe ten years ago or so we used to play with
making the sound from one horror movie, which
sounds like "Ch-ch-ch-ch-ch Ah-ah-ah-ah-ah", as
if you just said the Ch and the Ah into a circuit
which generates reverberating echoes.
It also sounds a lot like the sound of the daleks
in Doctor Who which scared the shit out of me..
guess I'm susceptible to that kind of sound.
But listening to the audio, it seems that they are
going way overboard on their application of the
sound. I think it is going to give some people
heart attacks and make genuinely frantic, not
simply provide directional cues but actually get
people into a nervous, crowd stampede state of
mind, as if one was running through a nightmare.
Also, you usually run *away* from such sounds,
not towards them. It is going to be a lot more
effective if they can just add a small crackling
component to ordinary rings and buzzes if necessary and forgoe a full sonic rendition of
your worst childhood nightmare.
Finally, user selection of ring tones, to the point
of symphonic midi rendition of popular songs, is
already big business in Japan. You can even
compose your own with a system my friend made
called theta, at mobile.yamaha.com. Only unimaginative people will find themselves picking up their phone at the wrong time, most people have
something interesting and people around them laugh and appreciate neat, beautiful music instead of
irritating rings. That "whose phone is it" thing
may be true but it is also a canard, based on low tech in the U.S. and Europe in this regard.
I think people are going to have to be very careful implementing this because it can be dangerous, in the same way that Japan Rail now
has to tell people over and over again to not use
their phones on the train because they interfere
with pacemakers. You might get more hypertension
and people with nervous conditions if such nerve-
wracking sounds become prevalent. Once you open
Pandora's box.. it could be like being submerged
in an Indiana Jones style nightmare of endless slithering insectoid things.
Mysql AB skimming over the question
on
MySQL & Nusphere
·
· Score: 2
of what the heck Nusphere paid them a quarter
million dollars for.
I use and recommend Mysql quite a lot in my work
and I think all users have a big stake in it
improving specifically with regard to transactions
, advanced DB administration, and operation under heavy load. At least the first two seem to be
addressed by Nusphere, which I will try out as soon as they provide the source code.
Since Mr. Mickos has made several public announcements about the case, in effect appealing
to mysql's users and accusing Nusphere of criminal
intent, I'd say he owes it to us to explain what
exactly that $300K was for and what Nusphere got
out of it. Mysql has neglected that little fact.
It sounds almost like they took the money and expected that any guarantees would evaporate the
next time the last digit of the version number
changes. I doubt Nusphere is ignoring the GPL
in a way that is hurting anybody yet.. besides themselves (heard about code review?)
It sounds more to me that they are reluctant to
give Mysql AB anything else until the responsibilities of both parties are made perfectly clear by a court.
Unfortunately they
must be in serious trouble having paid so much
money to Mysql for what Mysql seems to think is nothing at all. I thought their site was over the
top at first too but now hearing Mickos' responses
I'm not sure that Nusphere is so much in the wrong. So what's the real story Mr. Mickos?
Mysql has done great work, but TANSTAAFL. You can't selectively disclose facts to maybe the biggest online group of Mysql users and think
you will gain good will.
I'd sure like to feel better about
Mysql and Nusphere both before I use their software again, as it is I'm waiting for that
PostgreSql alpha we've heard about to make it into production
servers.
Personally I don't like the idea of paying for the
honor of searching my books, and the use of Java in this case is idiotic.
Obviously you should use Perl and search via
keyword, subject, or regex. That way you can
even learn about regexes by using them.
If you want to search on another computer, you
can figure a way to do that with Perl.
You are going to have a Perl interpreter on your
machine if you are using the CD. They could
bundle a Perl distribution probably too. And obviously
it is a pretty good bet that the purchaser also
will have a Perl CGI capable web server running
on his or her machine, one of the gazillions that
run Perl. So you know, you could use CGI to search on your own computer. Not so tough to find
such a server on the net even if someone installs it, they'd
probably sell more to companies that want to set
up such a CGI server in-house too.
And you can
probably make a crossplatform binary with perlcc.
Better yet, just include a perl DBM or flat file
with all this index and a specification for it,
then make building specific plugins to the search engine "extra-credit" problems!
Slashdot Mirror
Well, guess what, Linux is pretty darn big and yep it's written in lots of languages. And Corba is built to let you do the same kind of thing for big systems. As long as you aren't building a time bomb maintenance-wise, you should consider carefully the post above about the design pattern for alternation of hard and soft layers. It's not cut and dry.
I just posted in a previous thread reasoning about using Perl in a large project. For one thing, Perl is already a big system and it is written in Perl, C, C++, and whatever else you may want. You can call object code modules from Perl, wrap them in Perl Modules, and even write code from other languages inline inside your Perl programs (compiled automatically).
I do think you should seriously consider scrapping PHP. It is really not that great and if you are using Perl there is no excuse not to separate design from code. Also it is backwards to control Perl, a high-level language, with C++, a low-level language. The final answer is that there are valid systems for both multi-language and single-language implementations, but your choice is likely to have a big effect on the performance, maintainability, packability, and development schedule/paradigm so think hard about it! (But please stop lobotomizing Perl by calling it from C++!)
Problem is, as government-funded tools filter out into public networks it will spark a discussion of these tools in a public forum, which once they are decompiled and attack modes are diagnosed, will give tons of people the ability to launch more sophisiticated attacks. Either it's someone who reengineers it and hands it to script kiddies, or it's other organizations or nations which will feel an imperative to grab the next escalated technology level.
Consider: the article says "levels the playing field with criminals" or something to that effect. It also means the FBI will use tools criminals use. It is easy to see this becoming espionage when used against a foreign firm by the FBI or by someone else who has appropriated their technology.
Few firms have virus-busting firewalls or antivirus packages which can handle new attacks before they cause damage or hide in archived material. Perhaps the scariest thing is that if a new variant is created for a specific "sting", it could quickly take over many computers over a large geographical area (consider Code Red graphs) before antivirus manufacturers or the public at large come up with a patch. In the past there has been a chance at getting a patch before infection.
But with the public funding a combination of email hole, pc based server, network scanner, key logger, and encryption program defeater, it seems that we are *very* quickly going to enter a much more dangerous situation than ever before.
It is not possible that this technology will never be misused by the government.
It is not possible that this technology will remain in the hands of the FBI.
It is not possible that this will not accelerate worldwide efforts to provide more and more dangerous security-breaking software/services.
Because it is so cheap to develop this kind of a weapon, it is my opinion that it is 100% likely that terrorists, multinationals, and national security organizations around the world *will* coopt this technology or will develop something identical to it (or more powerful) on their own. This is the part that scares me. No more Net! Who will ever install a binary from a public server? Who will ever trust interactive content and the plugins which it requires? Who will be trusted to hold the keys?
The FBI is moving a physical wiretap capability highly limited by timing and resources, into a software wiretap regime of high speed, exponential viral growth, widespread destablization of security prior to a court order, and extremely low cost of deployment.
This attempt to coopt the entire networked computing base as a wiretap infrastructure is the most dangerous force I can identify to the world economy and spread of the Internet in all facets of life. It is very hard to have reasonable security for most people at broadband speeds, but one could be forgiven for hoping that problems would be solved in time. Not when the crackers' growth metric takes off exponentially and leaves pro-security forces behind.
I don't think I'd mind if this was used against the people who have attacked the U.S. In fact I'd be surprised if something more powerful wasn't used already. But now we are going to start getting a trickle-down of progressively military weaponry operating silently in our homes.
The cat is out of the bag.. and the technology obviously already exists. The only choice we have is to promote some kind of open source, open science project which could have some hope of markedly improving security in general, could dampen the effects of for example thousands of concurrent Magic Lantern - style attacks from every part of the world. To me, an open, international project is the only way to protect computing in the future.
The FBI already has plenty of tools, and there is no reason it can't improve its cyber attack capability without building such a dangerous system. I certainly don't want to protect the mafia. But unless proven otherwise I think we have to assume that things will get worse all around before they get better.
If you want to see a simulation of the "gray goo" doomsday of nanotechnolgy, simply wait a few months for the next wave of network pathogens.
We will not be safe until we have the U.S. and other governments on the side of the public, with a law against cyber-germ warfare and a well-funded infrastructure to combat cyber-pathogens which do appear with some kind of human and computer based immune system before we enter the age of the network-borne pandemic.
Perl *is* C and it constitutes the most robust (secure against buffer attacks too) cross platform library you could ask for. You can also do all the things you need to do (and it will work even better on Unix so you can look forward to that). Networking, I/O, forking servers, it is all already done for you and tested in the CPAN (search.cpan.org). It will save you time and make the six month timeframe realistic for you (can't see it happening with C/C++ or Java frankly). It can do Qt, Tk and other GUI toolkits and can handle C and C++ like a charm. Unlike Java, which babysits you so you don't make mistakes, Perl's theme is "There's More Than One Way To Do It" (TMTOWTDI) which may be refreshing. You can still write everything in C/C++ but first get yourself a Perl architecture on top of it.
It is faster to program in Perl and you will be able to use C/C++ for the parts in which you need speed. You can even type C inline in you Perl program and it will compile it for you automatically.
You will be able to take advantage of lots of easy to find algorithms and can prototype a network-aware system extremely quickly. One event loop architecture for client apps called POE may be interesting for you.
To be fair, you could also do it in Java. Though I don't think it magically solves cross-platform issues, it costs more money, and there is a limited number of situations in which you really need to build a Java system. This system might be one of those however. It is usually a matter of what your team knows (although you get more power faster out of Perl). Then I expect you would skip Qt, and stop all the C/C++ work you are doing. If you have a Java team ready you might want to use Java then. Until the next version of Perl it is faster, though Perl usually uses precompiled C/C++ code for time-dependent things.
I am a Perl programmer and have managed Java e-commerce site development in the past (on WebLogic and Tomcat). It depends on the experience of your team as to whether you pick Perl or Java. If you want to build an animated client that talks to servers, or do large corporate multi-tier intranets, maybe Java is best. But I don't see you doing that in your time frame and I don't see it as being important to you. And of course you can make Perl-based clients, either encapsulated in an exe file or very thin and based on top of a local Perl installation.
You will probably be able to prototype the full functionality in straight Perl, optimizing later with into C/C++ on a per package (module) basis. So you need to first design yourself a clean, modular architecture of black boxes. I'd recommend doing use-case design to help discover all human-machine interaction and identify priorities; this will help you with risk management too and is applicable to any language.
You might even want to use CORBA or something similar so that these modules are providing networked services and can be changed to whatever language or system you like without fear. It seems likely that the most important thing to your client will be not the language but the ability to see a prototype, know it is extensible and scalable, and be able to get all the functionality (plus the feature creep functionality) for minimum cost.
Also Perl can run Java! And it can use commands like catch-throw and switch-case because Perl is an extensible, postmodern language that is getting very scarily powerful. In case you haven't noticed I'd recommend Perl in particular because of your timeframe, your leaning toward C/C++/Qt, and probably many other needs you will begin to appreciate such as glue to current systems, talking to devices, other information services, and so on. I have not been impressed with Java performance either engineering wise or in terms of cost, but if you have a trained team with plenty of time, lots of money, and a need for very high traffic transaction systems, Java and something like WebLogic is probably best. But you are not the phone company and I think the answer is obvious. Time to upgrade to Perl!
Some references are perl.com, perlmonks.org, and cpan.org. I think you will be pleasantly surprised. Just to reinforce the message, Java is still a totally valid option and probably most people will say Java, and something that is only Java and nothing else does have a beautiful elegance to it. I think though that you will probably save a lot of time and get tons more efficiencies from available code, being able to use different languages, being able to prototype more quickly, and being able to start *now* when it is still a reasonable amount of time instead of doing more technology surveys. You might want to post your question to both perlmonks.org and a Java site and see what people say, it might be interesting.
Haven't seen the movie yet though I've read the books a couple of times. Reading the Wired
online article about people trying to get the books banned from schools because they promote witchcraft, I was struck by 1) the unlimited gall of fundamentalists in the U.S. and 2) that this would be a great way to boost kids' self confidence for those who need it. I mean this is the ultimate nerd movie, and seems to have a message for non-nerds that nerd is cool. Best at this I've seen since Animal House and Buckaroo Banzai. This could be a good force for stopping the shootings in American schools. In these stories, as mentioned in other messages, there are lots of good morals stories but also it shows a kid who regularly gets picked on becoming a hero for use of his head and inner talents. Educators should get as many kids to see it as possible!
Though still part of the metropolis, this made it possible to keep most street lights out of the eyes of the 8 people or so who appeared. Very good conditions, with clouds moving around the lower sky but straight up and most of the sky you could see with your eyes wide open staring high up to the South-southwest or high up to the East was available. It was so clear I thought I could see Jupiter's moons (but no binox so unlikely). Seat of my pants timing seemed to match the predictions, with the peak at 3:30 showing something like a meteor every few seconds. I viewed from 3:00 to 4:00 a.m., and it seemed there was at least a meteor every ten seconds. Some very bright ones, once or twice I saw three at a time, and once or twice very bright red ones. One or two bolide explosions at the end. Some meteor trails were very short, fast ones, there were also long dim ones and the best were big smokers.. the trail looked like a ships wake or an aircraft contrail, smoky and it would fade out to a long, dim glimmer. If you've ever seen a big white double contail in the day time, it looked very similar, sometimes with two parallel trails it seemed, and much fatter. Easy to imagine it as a big smoking trail.
Easy to imagine bouncing radio messages off such big ones, they did resemble recent meteor movies which tells me those animators did their homework. The most impressive of all was the huge red meteor trail maybe 30 degrees long (there were a number of this length that were not red) I saw some time after 3:30, in the Northern sky about 20 degrees over Cassiopeia. I used this guide to eyeball distances in the sky. Thought the red might be sunrise reflected off the trails, but then realized after seeing a greenish smoking trail soon thereafter that differences in meteor composition was a more likely cause.
Answer: No.
Reasons: (and proposal at the end)
1. It is too expensive for almost all pages anyway.
2. Variable pricing needed to make business sense i.e. to reimburse authors and copyright holders. Maybe a penny per page is an acceptable way to initially calculate a subscription to a newspaper or magazine, but there is no reason to require integer rates, nor is does it make sense to assume national currency. Currency fluctuations are another ball of wax.
3. Bizarre to hear "per page" when we are getting into the broadband (per play) and wireless (opportunity cost) era.. obsolete scheme.
4. The Net does not belong to America, or to mega-corporations, or to marketing weenies. Almost any price that makes sense to its promoters is an unacceptable high fee and restraint on trade to other countries' citizens.
5. Makes it impossible to practically run a new search engine, indexing/mapping service, or Sherlock session without requiring the accretion of yet more information and business schemes. You can't scan pages automatically without downloading them. So forget intelligent use of Perl's LWP, or unix's wget, or CGI, or mirroring software. Google.com may be the only ones to survive if they sign lots of contracts allowing them to search sites, and nobody will be able to create a competitor.
6. Redefining the terms client and server based on relative upstream-downstream position ignores realities of computing and networking, and is a transparent attempt by business people to put one over on consumers. PC software can be client, server or both, and the idea of "downstream" only has meaning within the context of a passively received service. Packets flow both ways, and any host can be the root server of its own private network or VPN. If we are talking about "per page" in particular your IP address has nothing to do with whether you are buying or selling.
7. The easiest way to get money from consumers for online services is to embed it in a utility bill they are already paying every month. The idea of giving local ISPs, phone, or cable companies political power (defining upstream-downstream and client-server based on their position on the end of the 24x7 network) on top of the money they will make as a percentage of such a monthly commercial services fee is unacceptable, irresponsible, and also impossible to support as that ISP would have to provide reasonable alternatives to all content on the Net. The result of ISP-controlled topology is uncompetitive pricing for stagnant content offerings.
8. "Penny-per-page" is bigotry of port 80 and seems to imply that only a web browser software package could participate. What we need is a way to pay for generic data, whether it is a web page, an encrypted key, or code controlling a live operation, and not implicitly bind that payment scheme to how the data gets into your hands.
Conclusion:
This is a good way to destroy the Internet. So long global mind. Bye-bye third-world education. Goodbye Free Software, Free Services, Privacy, and Hello Microsoft Passport.
A good example of a service that is a runaway success is NTT DoCoMo's i-Mode. A no-brainer, unimpressive service, it's just a menu of sites.
But as it happens, they are also the phone company and when you buy your i-Mode phone, you agree to
i-Mode fees. All they have to do is provide links to content within a framework that you already understand is commercial.
The reason this exists is that NTT worked very, very hard as the nation's phone monopoly to kill the Internet for a very long time (I know, I started an ISP in '94 - one of the first few in Japan), and these moneys were spent on opening up the wireless market in an unsophisticated marketplace.
What happened is, everyone jumped on the bandwagon, i-Mode is huge, and the company is the only success story in Japanese business today. The person who started the service admits it was totally luck, but now they have leveraged themselves into the one e-commerce portal in Japan. Nobody else is doing much (except kiosks now in convenience stores, which I was involved in building). At the moment one very interesting service is selling games for Java phones, which lets you download a selection of arcade games into your applet folder in your phone for 300 yen (under $3) per month.
The rest of the world can be more sophisticated. ISPs, cable, credit card, and other companies have a good location - not with regard to the packet stream, but with regard to the stream of bills they send you. These companies could provide a unified, undifferentiated line item that is your net wallet. There is no reason for the entire network to be balkanized, or for arbitrary metrics such data size, session length, or time of day in a given time zone, or exchange rate in a given bank to hold sway.
Of course if individuals can hold their own electronic money certificates then wallet software on the pc is useful. But consumer pcs are generally a dangerous place to put money; they crash and so on.
The one service that is absolutely necessary is a central payments server which will provide a single point of billing for the consumer while signing electronic invoices for commercial content with every content provider. Possibly "1 cent per page" might be one of the payment schemes this server could support, but it would be unnatural for this "automated wallet proxy" to decide how much content is worth. Whether the product is a newspaper, a song, a long distance call, or a day at the library, the company selling the product should be able to set its own fees (or choose to be free) on an otherwise free network.
It seems very likely (I do not have inside information to support this idea though) that DoCoMo's work to enter the N. American market will be to set up a similarly billed i-Mode service. There is not a lot of time left if you want to design your own future.
The second significant peak will begin around 12 noon EST and last until 2 pm EST on the 18th of November. The best viewing for this peak will be over Australia and the Far East. The level of activity for this event could be anywhere from 7000 to 15000 meteors per hour!
Anybody who can corroborate..
Afterwards though I asked the person who built it about the possibility of session hijacking and he said "security is the next thing we have to work on". So maybe you can sit in on the session now. Sticking the memory stick up the Aibo's butt was pretty hilarious though. The rest was pretty dry discussion of overall software idea and market, not a lot of meat for engineering types since I guess they don't want it to be hacked..
There are two new models that look like cute little pandas which most diehards don't like but young people seem to find cute enough to watnt to purchase.
Also Omron just came out with a robotic cat which I saw in a store (RanKing RanQueen, Shibuya Station 2F) two days ago. It looks like a hell kitty, in that it is a BIG cat (not a kitten) and while made up to look realistic it really isn't. Kind of like a cat nightmare. But it did have a number of interesting cat-like reactions to me even though it was stuck inside a plexiglass box. No info yet on future networking possibilities with it, but seems like it would be pretty easy to slide your own packages under the fur without anyone noticing!
Some extremely large, well known hosting companies have trouble providing "reasonable" (trustworthy, timely, competent) support to corporate website virtual hosting clients, and I have repeatedly seen all hell break loose in the case of deadlines to push staging to live server from many time zones away.. for some reason I still don't understand, we were never allowed to touch the live server so we never even knew its directoy contents. Sheer hell. In this situation you seldom know if it's going to work on the live server (which is *not* the same as staging no matter what was promised) until D-Day.
I was even offered root access once to fix this provider's host but I had to refuse due to responsibility for all the other clients with virtual websites. The problems generally do not come from things that would crash a kernel, but from the economics of getting individuals to apply appropriate knowledge in the right place at the right time, within the context of a number of companies working together with their own agendas.
Using this virtual server patch, I can see a *lot* of time, effort, danger, stress, complaints, etc. all swept away into history!
Run a virtual servers on your local dev box and the remote staging and live machines, then use rsync from local to staging. Ssh into staging and rsync again, or have the admin staff do so. But the live machine can be isolated network-wise, so it is more likely that the user could be allowed onto the live server themselves.
Of course, 1) it isn't a real compartment with your own filesystem and everything, so for example installing Perl modules, tweaking boot scripts, or tweaking security ain't happening. 2) it isn't strong compartmentalization. And 3) you have to be running a linux kernel in the first place. And 4) the above problems tend to involve Suns, not linux boxes.
Seems this kind of idea is killer though. It would be really interesting if we could run something like this or (maybe better yet) user-mode-linux efficiently as a process inside a SunOS environment. Sounds like IBM had the right idea running a bunch of complete OS images on their heavy iron.
Forgot to mention in my list, Leiji Matsumoto's
comic books and films in the Galaxy Express 999
(Ginga Tetsudo 999) are going to last a long time.
Also Gainax' Evangelion series, though that is just film as far as I know.
Rudy Rucker, particularly Transreal!, freeware
Douglas Adams - The "Trilogy" and the online site
Robert Heinlein, especially The Number of the Beast and Stranger in a Strange Land
A. E. Van Vogt - The Weapon Shops of Isher series, the World of Null-A, and other novels.
E.E. "Doc" Smith - The Lensman series.
Ursula K. LeGuin - A Wizard of Earthsea, the Earthsea trilogy. Lasted this long and going strong online!
Edgar Rice Burroughs - Mars series
William Burroughs - Naked Lunch and others
William Gibson - The Gernsbach Continuum, Burning Chrome
J. G. Ballard - Crash
Bruce Sterling - Islands in the Net
Neal Stephenson - Snow Crash, Cryptonomicon, The Diamond Age
Nancy Kress - Beggars and Choosers trilogy
Philip K. Dick - The Zap Gun, Martian Time Slip, lots of others
Michael Crichton - Travels, Andromeda Strain, Timeline, Rising Sun
Stanislaw Lem - The Cyberiad
Greg Bear - Blood Music, many others
David Brin - Uplift Trilogy, Earth
Carl Sagan - Contact, many others
Arthur C. Clarke - 2001, many others
Frank Herbert - Dune series
Samuel R. Delaney - Night and the Loves of Joe Dicostanzo, Stars in My Pocket Like Grains of Sand, Dhalgren
Vernor Vinge - Realtime series
Isaac Asimov - The Foundation series, The Robot series
Larry Niven - Ringworld series
Jerry Pournelle (with Larry Niven) - The Mote in God's Eye
C. S. Lewis - The Narnia series, Perelandra series
Ray Bradbury - Fahrenheit 451
Kurt Vonnegut - Cat's Cradle
Some others which may not make it into history but might be good to keep..
Charles de Lint - Moonheart and others
A. A. Attanasio - Radix tetrad
Jack L. Chalker - Well of Souls series
James P. Hogan - The Genesis Machine
John Varley - Titan
Peter F. Hamilton - The Reality Dysfunction
Stephen Baxter - Timelike Infinity
Alexander Besher - RIM
www.tor.com has a number of these artists.
there are some other great ones from early 80s for which I can't remember author/title.. help?
1 - another cool one, author/title unknown. a message from aliens that resembles an animated sequence of hypnotically merging venn diagrams drives every genius who sees it crazy with its seductive, inescapable logic. A lesser man who gets around the intelligence test gains access to a interstellar library beam. A key scene is inside a spaceship built from this ("Omnivox?") technology, in which the beam de-evolves the crew into liquid which can stand heavy accelleration, then re-evolves them back. One bad guy suffers a mishap in which he ends up a starfish! Predates the public Internet and tells you what may happen when we light it up one day with atomic lasers.
2 - a more recent, fun novel which features an American Indian whose sand paintings prove to be alien warps in time and information space. (Not Jack Haldeman's High Steel)
3 - another novel which features "neurolinguistic programming", which according to this fsf novel is a special language used by the sumerians that is rediscovered and gives its speakers over others.
4 - Hollywood (or maybe California) Dreamtime, by unknown author. Involving description of virtual reality technology and funhouses of the future. A fsf mystery.
anybody has an idea, please email me!
It is already being used in autonomous robots for its superiority over sonar at Helpmate with funding from NIST, for use in hospital robots.
Yes, Linux is working on it, mostly, but does anyone know if there is any reason the new IBM 48GH hard drive (5400rpm, 48gigs) wouldn't work in it? Plenty of space for it, and it works in say the Inspiron 8000.
I viewed similar work at Tokyo University's Production Lab (Seisanken). A grad student had
built an system (which could only be used at
night due to vibration) which hooked an atomic
force microscope (or what you call the one with a
needle that senses atomic height) to an SGI box.
You could see a visual representation of the atoms
but it was slow to render. The more interesting
part was a tube-like haptic i/o device in which
one would slide his/her index finger to not only feel the atoms but even pick them up and move them, or flick them across the surface. This was a couple years ago.
Sorry meant solar eclipse. The story being that
physicists have found that neutrinos oscillate between three "flavors" during their trip from the Sun to us, and that a different ratio of these flavors is found when they are detected after passing through the Earth. For neutrinos, ordinary matter is as thin as air is to us, but I'd imagine a black hole would put a kink in their travel plans! Some physicist help!
as night the day, that a small number could last a long time if they found matter to absorb before evaporating?
Perhaps we have some near the Earth's core, or maybe there is a much smaller but more accesible number
in the Lagrangian Points. IANA astrophysicist but it would seem quite likely that the moon's core would have such black holes. If so, might black holes in the lunar core be detected through perturbation of neutrino density during lunar eclipses?
On another note might microscopic black holes be able to change the ratio of neutrino flavors seen when solar neutrinos are viewed after passing through the Earth? Fascinating subject!
Can't wait to store my data in those extra dimensions.. hard disk will never get full! (not)
Even though I had left off downloading it for a while I luckily found it again.
Seems to me that if you sign a disclaimer saying you wouldn't dream of suing them for bugs it should be okay no?
Coming from someone who'se seen production with a custom mac premiere/raid system I can tell you crashes and such are not unknown in the commercial world.. anyway.
Should be a nifty tool and a mother lode of knowledge for anyone who wants to learn about video programming!
Ought to work.. anybody tried using it?
Maybe we'll get light tablets with smooth video, wireless, device connectivity, and GPL software in the hands of the public.
We (might) get unix drivers for all those little hardware doodads that will plug into the palm.. If SD devices can roll out much larger memory capacities I bet this will give Sony's memory stick vision a run for the money. It's basically 200 companies (in SD, pushing SDIO) against the Sonies. Hmm this could all be a war of whose batteries last longer. If so Sony's way ahead.
It was found that the force of the impact on pendulums made of different materials does not depend on the material but is only proportional to the mass of the sample. Pendulums of different mass demonstrated equal deflection at constant voltage. This was proved by a large number of measurements using spherical samples of different mass and diameter.
This seems to suggest either 1) antigravity etc or 2) paramagnetism. It would seem to rule out contamination with iron as someone else suggested. It would also be nice to know from some of the physicists around here whether or not there is a lot of experience with magnetic fields of this strength at this temperature.
Considering how deadly this kind of research must be to your career, you have to admire this scientist. It would seem obvious that if we began to understand it we would be able to control it in some way, that it would seem like a logical course of scientific inquiry.
The Keck Interferometer is now in operation, but it will be nulling in June 2002.
Sorry that's http://mobile.yamaha.co.jp/ which links to http://myc.thetamusic.com/framesets/myc.html. It's a Java sheetmusic composer for 16 voice midi; most of the phones now have sophisticated midi engines and instrument libraries in them now.
This is not the first time that sound has appeared. You see, horror movie directors have hit upon it time and again.. trying to reproduce the sound that signals a fight or flight response like when you hear something (a bear, a murderer, a grue, whatever) sneaking up behind you.
Maybe ten years ago or so we used to play with making the sound from one horror movie, which sounds like "Ch-ch-ch-ch-ch Ah-ah-ah-ah-ah", as if you just said the Ch and the Ah into a circuit which generates reverberating echoes.
It also sounds a lot like the sound of the daleks in Doctor Who which scared the shit out of me.. guess I'm susceptible to that kind of sound.
But listening to the audio, it seems that they are going way overboard on their application of the sound. I think it is going to give some people heart attacks and make genuinely frantic, not simply provide directional cues but actually get people into a nervous, crowd stampede state of mind, as if one was running through a nightmare.
Also, you usually run *away* from such sounds, not towards them. It is going to be a lot more effective if they can just add a small crackling component to ordinary rings and buzzes if necessary and forgoe a full sonic rendition of your worst childhood nightmare.
Finally, user selection of ring tones, to the point of symphonic midi rendition of popular songs, is already big business in Japan. You can even compose your own with a system my friend made called theta, at mobile.yamaha.com. Only unimaginative people will find themselves picking up their phone at the wrong time, most people have something interesting and people around them laugh and appreciate neat, beautiful music instead of irritating rings. That "whose phone is it" thing may be true but it is also a canard, based on low tech in the U.S. and Europe in this regard.
I think people are going to have to be very careful implementing this because it can be dangerous, in the same way that Japan Rail now has to tell people over and over again to not use their phones on the train because they interfere with pacemakers. You might get more hypertension and people with nervous conditions if such nerve- wracking sounds become prevalent. Once you open Pandora's box.. it could be like being submerged in an Indiana Jones style nightmare of endless slithering insectoid things.
I use and recommend Mysql quite a lot in my work and I think all users have a big stake in it improving specifically with regard to transactions , advanced DB administration, and operation under heavy load. At least the first two seem to be addressed by Nusphere, which I will try out as soon as they provide the source code.
Since Mr. Mickos has made several public announcements about the case, in effect appealing to mysql's users and accusing Nusphere of criminal intent, I'd say he owes it to us to explain what exactly that $300K was for and what Nusphere got out of it. Mysql has neglected that little fact. It sounds almost like they took the money and expected that any guarantees would evaporate the next time the last digit of the version number changes. I doubt Nusphere is ignoring the GPL in a way that is hurting anybody yet.. besides themselves (heard about code review?) It sounds more to me that they are reluctant to give Mysql AB anything else until the responsibilities of both parties are made perfectly clear by a court.
Unfortunately they must be in serious trouble having paid so much money to Mysql for what Mysql seems to think is nothing at all. I thought their site was over the top at first too but now hearing Mickos' responses I'm not sure that Nusphere is so much in the wrong. So what's the real story Mr. Mickos? Mysql has done great work, but TANSTAAFL. You can't selectively disclose facts to maybe the biggest online group of Mysql users and think you will gain good will.
I'd sure like to feel better about Mysql and Nusphere both before I use their software again, as it is I'm waiting for that PostgreSql alpha we've heard about to make it into production servers.
Obviously you should use Perl and search via keyword, subject, or regex. That way you can even learn about regexes by using them. If you want to search on another computer, you can figure a way to do that with Perl.
You are going to have a Perl interpreter on your machine if you are using the CD. They could bundle a Perl distribution probably too. And obviously it is a pretty good bet that the purchaser also will have a Perl CGI capable web server running on his or her machine, one of the gazillions that run Perl. So you know, you could use CGI to search on your own computer. Not so tough to find such a server on the net even if someone installs it, they'd probably sell more to companies that want to set up such a CGI server in-house too.
And you can probably make a crossplatform binary with perlcc. Better yet, just include a perl DBM or flat file with all this index and a specification for it, then make building specific plugins to the search engine "extra-credit" problems!