I have a KT133 (Asus A7V) and Athalon 800. The nvidia drivers, in 3d, crash (GeForce2 - Asus V7700). I've informed Nvidia. I got the runaround. I hate talking to "support" goons.
Avoid nvidia at all costs. Go with anyone more open. The speed is just not worth the hassle.
Try FilterProxy...it does exactly what you describe, in perl.
Re:You'd need *full* card specs to fix a driver.
on
Nvidia's NV20
·
· Score: 2
It can be done, but not nearly as easily as you seem to think, by several orders of magnitude.
I never claimed it was easy!;) It's kinda like being stuck in the middle of the ocean in a rowboat. With closed drivers, you have no paddles, and the rowboat is covered with a sealed, opaque top so you don't even know when you're near land. Open drivers is like having the top open, and a large soupspoon. Rowing yourself to shore with oars would be hard enough, and harder with a spoon. But at least it's possible.
Other benefits come for other OSes (NetBSD, FreeBSd, etc.) for which nVidia will never write drivers. Also companies don't in general last forever. What happens if nVidia goes belly up? All the people who bought their cards and are using their drivers are up shit creek without a paddle (to extend a metaphor too far). Having the code allows you to generate an extremely specific bug report, which can then be passed on to someone more knowledgable. It's very hard for core developers to fix bugs like "It crashes when I click on the menu in starcraft", which could be a hardware problem...
--Bob
Re:Open source drivers
on
Nvidia's NV20
·
· Score: 3
Unfortunately, you are incorrect. Compare NVidia's drivers to 3dfx's Voodoo 5 drivers. It seems as if 3dfx was simply expecting a few hundred developers to show up as soon as they made the drivers open source. As it turns out, only a couple of people outside 3dfx have made contributions, and one of them was paid to do it. It's sad, but it's true.
My argument is simply that there's nothing more frustrating than having a bug that you can't fix. I'm the type that at least gives a hack at it if I find a bug. Open source is not about open source developers fixing bugs for you. It's about coherent, concise bug reports that come from an examination of the code. It's also about (as you mention) fixing simple things that I could find and fix like memory leaks. Clearly I could not write or reverse engineer a driver in any reasonable period of time. Clearly nVidia are the best people to write the driver. Open source is most useful in the last 10% of the development process, fixing bugs and refining the code. If a company expects a magic cavalry of developers to appear to write their driver for them, they are sadly mistaken. But they can expect people to do a little hacking to get an existing driver to work with their hardware combination.
Open Source is not the panacea of magic software creation that some people (3dfx, apparently) think it is. But when I buy a product with closed source drivers and those drivers suck, I'm fucked. If those drivers are open, at least there is hope. I find that in general, if I depend on other people to fix my problems, they will never be fixed. I hack "open source" to fix my problems. nVidia can't own every possible combination of motherboard/processor/OS, and therefore can't fix every possible problem. Open source is simply the only way to go, and I won't ever again bother with companies that aren't open with their drivers.
--Bob
Egad, who modded my original post down as "Troll"? Do your worst, metamoderators.
Let us remember that nVidia does not have open source drivers. I have an nVidia card and their drivers manage to hang the linux kernel. Egad, there's nothing worse than to have a known bug, and not be able to fix it, or be able to do anything about it at all! Of course, nVidia said "they'd look into it". It's been several months...haven't heard anything, and no new driver versions.
I know they have carefully thought out arguments as to why their non-open source, crappy drivers are better than open source ones. But folks, it just ain't worth it. I don't care how fast their cards are, I'll never make the mistake of buying nVidia again. Stick with the more open 3dfx, or Matrox. With them, if it crashes, you can track the bug down and fix it! Or someone else can. The number of open source hackers that might fix a bug are much, much larger than the number of employees at nVivia working on drivers.
Sullivan said it is the first time Microsoft has asked the Beach to account for its software. In the past year, Microsoft has targeted Virginia in its software inquiries. Last year, the company sued two retailers in Northern Virginia and two more in West Virginia for software piracy.
Just an observation. Virginia passed the UCTIA back in Febuary. Looks like they're eating their own dogfood now.
I have been using SFNB for almost 2 years now and they've been wonderful. And I absolutely hate banks. But SFNB has been very good to me. (6% interest is great too!) They now offer 4% interest on checking accounts with balances over $1000. Only drawback is snail-mailing deposits. They also offer refunds on ATM fees.
Guess we'd all better start including disclaimers in our standard email.sig saying "Unless I cryptosigned this document it
does not constitute a binding digital signature" or something to that effect too.
Ack, not cryptosignatures! Without a legal definition of what constitutes an electronic signature, this law is worthless at best, and extremely dangerous at worst. My GPG signature is 2 things: identity verification, and verification that the message hasn't been modified since I sent it. I DO NOT want it to constitute a legally binding order. If it always constitutes a legally binding order, how do we do identity verification and checking that a message hasn't been modified without the "signature" carrying more weight than it should?
What's particularly dangerous is that the "--Bob" at the end of this message could be a signature. ANY SSL enabled website could have a button (that does anything in the world) that could be a signature. Anything sent electronically could be a signature!
No. A signature should be something cryptographically verifiable, and protected from fraud. It should also be something that I have to sit down and create, with full realization that this is legally binding. How about a message containing only my name and the date, that is PGP/GPG signed. Whatever the case, this law is crap without some definitions.
The idea of competition seems to necessarily imply duplication of effort. If two agencies are in competition, it's highly doubtful that they'd share research results or technology. This is hardly what I'd call a wise use of my tax dollars.
How about this: as public agencies, both NASA's would be required to disclose their research and findings, and turn them over to the public. NASA currently has an aggressive technology transfer program. Also, the author suggests competition in the form of prizes, where the government puts up a purse for acheiving X, and several private sector companies compete for it. The overall spending would be several times the purse, but it wouldn't be tax dollars. Not only that, but the private sector would reap the benefits of any techological developments. Either of the NASA's could then outsource projects to the private sector that developed said technology. In most cases competition is economically more efficent than a monopoly. (that is, it does more for the same dollars)
Just a few facts about NASA: The shuttle is 70's technology that has to be dismantled stem to stern every time it lands, and rebuilt. Every tile has to be reglued on the bottom, every engine removed and overhauled. It takes 6 months. Not exactly efficent or "reusable" in any reasonable definition of the word. The competition for the shuttle (DC-X, etc) can't find the funding to continue development...
Actually, the people in the Wisconsin group at CERN working on this have developed a rather cool system using a bit of perl and the web and a few batch jobs. It's called BEHOLD! and it presents the researchers with candidate higgs events from data that was collected the previous day. So they know daily how many higgs events they have, and what the lower limit on the higgs mass is. Pretty cool! I'd personally be surprised to see a higgs discovery after LEP is shut down. There's a heck of a lot of work going into the higgs analysis there.
This "announcement" is from an internal status report. (slides in pdf format, and a better article) There are 3 events they claim as "signal" for the higgs boson. 3! The statistical significance of this "find" is 2.6 sigma. In physics, one requires 5 sigma to announce a discovery. THIS IS NOT A DISCOVERY. Conspiracy theorists in the audience might say that this is an attempt to run LEP just a little bit longer before ripping it out for the LHC.
The fact of the matter that it is very easy to get statistical fluctuations of this magnatude in high-energy physics. (insert obligatory comment about the accuracy of political "polls" here) And in the higgs search at CERN they have frequently seen extra events just at the end of their range. (The mass of 114.9 GeV is barely within the range of the accelerator to see at its current energy)
If the higgs exists, it will be found by the LHC. It's enticing to think it's barely beyond LEP's reach, and if the LHC finds it there, the LEP people will bemoan not being able to extend LEP's run just a little bit longer...
Disclaimer: IAP (I Am a Physicist), and have worked on the higgs analysis at CERN (but do not currently). How come more physics people don't post to slashdot? I know you guys read it.;)
From what I've read a large part of the reason many credit-card accepting sites won't take customers outside the U.S. is the enormous rate of
fraud they experience when dealing with non-US customers. Fraud per se wouldn't be so bad if some of these countries had law enforcement
and judicial systems that were, to put it bluntly, honest and effective.
The US spends billions every year prosecuting credit card fraud. Are you surprised that other countries are unwilling or unable to dump this kind of money into doing the credit card companies' work? Because the US takes care of fraud for credit card companies, they have no incentive to fix their inherently flawed system.
Credit cards are a bad deal. Period. I won't consider the world to have truly evolved electronic money until the current credit card system isn't involved, or it is massively restructured (and involves cryptographic security). Another requirement isn't that you don't have to "pay" for money. PayPal doesn't qualify because of it's fees (business accounts).
I saw the page unmodified, but reloaded and lost it and the damn thing isn't in my cache. Can anyone hold onto (and post) a link to the actual html with the link intact?
When you say there is "no simpler theory" do you mean that it is possible to rigorously prove that? For instance, can
you prove that any theory of particle physics that matches experimental results must be supersymmetric, or must
have at least 11 spatial dimensions, or whatever?
Within a certain framework, yes. One of the most perplexing things about the Standard Model is that it doesn't contain gravity. There are many straightforward ways to extend it, all of them wrong (WRT gravity). Richard Feynman explored this in detail in "The Feynman Lectures on Gravity" (look for this in a library). But to really understand these lectures requires quite a bit of background knowledge. This is, for instance, why we think the "graviton" is spin-2. Extending the Standard Model in a straightforward way requires the graviton to be spin 2. Of course, it doesn't work. But within the framework of existing theories, you can rigorously prove that it has to be spin-2. There are a finite number of "actions" which can be written down in this framework. (action being the equation from which equations of motion are derived, by minimizing/maximizing the action) Each of these can be explored in turn, and rigorously proven to be wrong.
The next question is: "is our framework wrong?" The Standard Model is a set of "Gauge Theories", that is Quantum Field Theories which posess a certain gauge symmetry (represented by a Lie group). Now there's a mouthful to scare off the lay person.;) String Theory/M-Theory is attempting to explore this, by starting from the simple assumption that particles, rather than being point entities, contain a continuous degree of freedom. (that is, parameterized by x,y,z,t and one extra, continuous, internal degree of freedom...hence "string") This theory has turned out to be significantly more complex than one might imagine at first, and we're not done trying to figure out the theory.
For instance, you can straightforwardly prove that string theory can only exist in 26 dimensions. If you add supersymmetry it requires 10 dimensions. If you go to M-theory (which still isn't well defined) it requires 11 dimensions. Each of these is rigorously provable.
Supersymmetry solves a nasty problem in field theories of renormalization in certain calculations. It turns out that by adding a fermion (1/2 integer spin) for every boson (integer spin) and vice-versa, that you exactly cancel many divergences. This is clearly desirable. A theory with divergences should be treated with skepticism. But where are these extra particles? Supersymmetry was discovered in the context of string theory and carried over into field theories because of this nice property. You can have a string theory without it, but it clearly does not correspond to our universe.
I often wonder if there is a better framework. The Standard Model/Gauge Fields framework was very confusing (because of certain apparent problems like renormalization...which turned out to be a calculational problem, rather than theoretical) when it was first introduced, but it has turned out to be extremely useful in calculation.
Gad, I'm rambling again...that's what I get for answering posts in my field.;)
ah, books. I'm most familiar with graduate texts, so I'll give those. I don't read lay books because they frustrate me. (I need the math dammit!) These are the "canonical" texts in the field, those most respected in the physics community. There are others, I cannot speak for their quality, but I have used all in the following list, and can recommend them. I can handle the math: good luck, these are not easy reading, and often require a close examination of relevant equations. Note that this is the course regimen for a graduate degree in physics. If you make it through all these books, you should consider applying to a local university and getting a masters in Physics. This isn't light reading. Usual starting point for this material is an undergraduate degree in physics (though math or some engineering may suffice).
Field Theory/Standard Model:
An Introduction to Quantum Field Theory, Peskin and Schroeder.
Quarks and Leptons, An Introductory Course in Modern Particle Physics, Halzen & Martin.
Quantum Mechanics (note Quantum Field Theory = relativistic Quantum Mechanics + other stuff)
Principles of Quantum Mechanics, Shankar.
Modern Quantum Mechanics, Sakauri.
String Theory (M-Theory)
String Theory, Polchinski
Introduction to Superstring Theory, Kiritsis (hep-th/9709062)
TASI Lectures on D-Branes, Polchinski (hep-th/9611050)
Superstring Theory, Green, Schwarz, Witten.
D-Brane Primer, Johnson (hep-th/0007170 -- personal choice)
Other:
Classical Electrodynamics, J.D. Jackson. (note that electrodynamics is a U(1) Gauge Field Theory)
Classical Mechanics, Goldstein.
Gravitation, Misner, Thorne, Wheeler.
hep-th/####### and similar references can be obtained electronically at www.arxiv.org.
At one time I invested a lot of time and thought into an object-based operating system, and encountered many of the same problems that Bonobo (or any component-based architecture) will/has encountered. In particular: How do you do versioning? Miguel speaks fondly of objects embedding themselves in each other, but this is a disaster if one component doesn't do what it's supposed to. As evidince, look at M$ Word, Excel, etc. You can embed them in each other, but you have to have the right versions or everything goes to hell. And if one object misbehaves it can destroy the entire document. Not only that, but in order to look at a simple document (with an embedded spreadsheet), you have to load a massive amount of software to render it. Is this necessarily desirable? This will be a much larger for open-source than closed, since the versioning is finer, incremental updates are widely available, and people will try to use software of subtly different version numbers.
Is the interface definition used to determine "compatability" of an object for a particular purpose? Can interfaces evolve? Can an object add functionality, but still be used by other, older objects for the older purposes? Must an evolving object conform to several interfaces (adding bloat), or can there be v2.0 of an interface, after the designer realizes there's a Better Way to do it?
These are hard problems, and ones I was not able to answer to my satisfaction. Evidinced by their software, it seems that M$ has not either. Do you really want to embed an editable spreadsheet in a document, and deal with the bloat and crashes that will occur? Or is there a Better Way?
Of course, I could probably answer all these questions by digging into the Bonobo and CORBA documentation, but stimulating discussion is good too.
Except that a diff algorithm would scale as n! (n factorial). For the 10th post, you'd have to diff it against 9 others. For the 11th post you'd have to diff it against 10 others. This is by no means a computationally trivial task.
I once considered this to catch cheaters in a CS course I TA'd. But even with only 20 students, 20! diffs is a hell of a lot.
An IP-based frequency rejection would be better. (Quell requests/posts from the same IP if they occur too often). Then they'd be forced to use a slow DDOS, and what's the point of a DOS if it takes weeks?
Titan AE could have been a good movie. But from what I could tell, half way through the thing they fired the writers and rewrote the last half of the story. The amusing tongue-in-cheek attitude ("Who would guess, a smart guard?") that the first half had was totally lost in the second half. The second half the characters started taking themselves way too seriously, and everything became very predictable. They got wrapped up in their own CGI and tried to pass it off as a story. (20 minute flight through hydrogen clouds) See, the problem is they managed to violate every known physical law in the course of the movie. (WHEN will hollywood start hiring science advisors?!?!) This is OK, if the movie maintains some kind of suspension of disbelief, or doesn't take itself seriously. Titan AE did neither. The bad guys were shallow unexplained glowing blobs. (why did they want to destroy the earth?) And creating a planet? Come on. Watch me pull a planet's worth of mass out of my ass. At least in Star Trek II they used an existing planet and transformed it.
At any rate, it was a big disappointment. From now on I'll stick to Japanese animation for my sci-fi, because american movie houses just have no clue. (that is, until another 2001 comes along)
--Bob (hey, at least they named the planet after me!)
Fox is a business and this was a business decision, plain and simple.
Fox is a formula. Dash of famous actor. Smidgen of fancy 3d effects. Dollup of song by famous band. Stir. Presto, more money for Fox's pockets.
Once upon a time movies were still considered art. Now they're a formula to line someone's pocketbook. Good riddance to this studio. Perhaps they should start hiring people to write plots that don't suck and characters that aren't shallow. The problem is not their animators. It's trying to turn a story into a formula. A good story would still be good in animation, 3d rendering, live action, or stop motion.
These days there is maybe one movie a year I don't find terrible. Their formulas have gone to such an extreme. The movie exec's don't even realize that "good story" isn't in their formula, and they have no clue how to put it into their formula. It's not a formula thing.
Doesn't look like anyone's mentioned the plus ('+') method yet. Take your email (like mcelrath at draal.physics.wisc.edu) and insert +[identifier] after your username. i.e. mcelrath+slashdotcomment@draal.physics.wisc.edu. If you have a non-piece-of-crap mailer, the +[identifier] will be pereserved, and you'll know exactly where they harvested your e-mail address (or who sold your e-mail). This way you can use a logical identifier (like slashdotcomment), rather than a number, as I saw someone else suggest. Then you can always procmail it to/dev/null if need be. And if the spammer has a piece-of-crap mailer, it'll bomb and you won't get any spam anyway.
This is especially useful when you have to fill out a form that might send you something useful, so you want to use a real e-mail rather than one you know you'll never get useful e-mail from (in which case I usually use something like nunjo.bidness@no.way.never.com or root@127.0.0.1).
Unfortunately, all the spam I get is through an e-mail I haven't used in over a year. I have yet to receive any spam through a + address. But when I do it's gonna be ugly.;)
Ack! You're right! It should be E=h*frequency. After some time doing quantum mechanics problems I began to cross all my h's! And now I'm even crossing my h's in ASCII!! ARG!;)
Why do I use it? hbar is more convenient than carrying around that 2*pi in many circumstances. E=hbar*omega, where omega is the angular frequency. (note there's a 2*pi in hbar, and one in omega too that cancel out) hbar is also unambiguous. The alphabet gets used and re-used (and greek alphabet) in any science, and the meaning of variables becomes obscured. But there's only one hbar!
Now, I would have thought that with the absurd legal machinations of the MPAA, and other shitty tactics like region encoding, the slashdot camp would staunchly denounce the DVD format. Why is it then that everyone here goes ape shit over DVD? Do they like region encoding?
Personally, I have no intention of buying a DVD player or movie until I can play it on any player in the world, including under Linux. The whole world moving away from VHS is giving a default win to the RIAA. It doesn't matter how the DeCSS case goes. They will still sell DVD's for different prices in different parts of the world, and you'll still have no rights with respect to DVD's you buy.
With the "Plasma bottle", how big and how efficient is this magnetic sail? I thought the whole point of a physical sail is that you didn't have to drag along a power supply. Needing to sustain plasma seems to defeat the purpose.
Well...all of it. There isn't anything that "absorbs" the solar wind (except obvious things like planets). The solar wind ends at the heliopause where is where the interstellar medium takes over. The heliopause doesn't happen until well past Pluto, the Voyager and Pioneer probes will pass through it soon, and scientists are eager to see if they send back any interesting data about it.
Hitting even a large sail with a ground based laser from thousands or millions of miles away seems like a hell of a shot. Would the atmosphere throw off the aim? Can it be compensated for like the new telescopes do?
I haven't run this calculation, but yes, atmospheric distortion would be a problem, as would diffraction (at millions of miles, diffraction effects from the opening end of the laser can be large!) Compensating for atmospheric distortion may be possible. Extremely precise aiming devices would be required. It would also be a given that a large portion of your laser would miss the craft entirely. But even if 1% of the laser's power hits the craft, I'd guess that it's still cheaper than launching an equivalent power source.
Slashdot Mirror
Avoid nvidia at all costs. Go with anyone more open. The speed is just not worth the hassle.
--Bob
Try FilterProxy...it does exactly what you describe, in perl.
I never claimed it was easy! ;) It's kinda like being stuck in the middle of the ocean in a rowboat. With closed drivers, you have no paddles, and the rowboat is covered with a sealed, opaque top so you don't even know when you're near land. Open drivers is like having the top open, and a large soupspoon. Rowing yourself to shore with oars would be hard enough, and harder with a spoon. But at least it's possible.
Other benefits come for other OSes (NetBSD, FreeBSd, etc.) for which nVidia will never write drivers. Also companies don't in general last forever. What happens if nVidia goes belly up? All the people who bought their cards and are using their drivers are up shit creek without a paddle (to extend a metaphor too far). Having the code allows you to generate an extremely specific bug report, which can then be passed on to someone more knowledgable. It's very hard for core developers to fix bugs like "It crashes when I click on the menu in starcraft", which could be a hardware problem...
--Bob
My argument is simply that there's nothing more frustrating than having a bug that you can't fix. I'm the type that at least gives a hack at it if I find a bug. Open source is not about open source developers fixing bugs for you. It's about coherent, concise bug reports that come from an examination of the code. It's also about (as you mention) fixing simple things that I could find and fix like memory leaks. Clearly I could not write or reverse engineer a driver in any reasonable period of time. Clearly nVidia are the best people to write the driver. Open source is most useful in the last 10% of the development process, fixing bugs and refining the code. If a company expects a magic cavalry of developers to appear to write their driver for them, they are sadly mistaken. But they can expect people to do a little hacking to get an existing driver to work with their hardware combination.
Open Source is not the panacea of magic software creation that some people (3dfx, apparently) think it is. But when I buy a product with closed source drivers and those drivers suck, I'm fucked. If those drivers are open, at least there is hope. I find that in general, if I depend on other people to fix my problems, they will never be fixed. I hack "open source" to fix my problems. nVidia can't own every possible combination of motherboard/processor/OS, and therefore can't fix every possible problem. Open source is simply the only way to go, and I won't ever again bother with companies that aren't open with their drivers.
--Bob
Egad, who modded my original post down as "Troll"? Do your worst, metamoderators.
I know they have carefully thought out arguments as to why their non-open source, crappy drivers are better than open source ones. But folks, it just ain't worth it. I don't care how fast their cards are, I'll never make the mistake of buying nVidia again. Stick with the more open 3dfx, or Matrox. With them, if it crashes, you can track the bug down and fix it! Or someone else can. The number of open source hackers that might fix a bug are much, much larger than the number of employees at nVivia working on drivers.
--Bob
Just an observation. Virginia passed the UCTIA back in Febuary. Looks like they're eating their own dogfood now.
--Bob
--Bob
Ack, not cryptosignatures! Without a legal definition of what constitutes an electronic signature, this law is worthless at best, and extremely dangerous at worst. My GPG signature is 2 things: identity verification, and verification that the message hasn't been modified since I sent it. I DO NOT want it to constitute a legally binding order. If it always constitutes a legally binding order, how do we do identity verification and checking that a message hasn't been modified without the "signature" carrying more weight than it should?
What's particularly dangerous is that the "--Bob" at the end of this message could be a signature. ANY SSL enabled website could have a button (that does anything in the world) that could be a signature. Anything sent electronically could be a signature!
No. A signature should be something cryptographically verifiable, and protected from fraud. It should also be something that I have to sit down and create, with full realization that this is legally binding. How about a message containing only my name and the date, that is PGP/GPG signed. Whatever the case, this law is crap without some definitions.
--Bob
How about this: as public agencies, both NASA's would be required to disclose their research and findings, and turn them over to the public. NASA currently has an aggressive technology transfer program. Also, the author suggests competition in the form of prizes, where the government puts up a purse for acheiving X, and several private sector companies compete for it. The overall spending would be several times the purse, but it wouldn't be tax dollars. Not only that, but the private sector would reap the benefits of any techological developments. Either of the NASA's could then outsource projects to the private sector that developed said technology. In most cases competition is economically more efficent than a monopoly. (that is, it does more for the same dollars)
Just a few facts about NASA: The shuttle is 70's technology that has to be dismantled stem to stern every time it lands, and rebuilt. Every tile has to be reglued on the bottom, every engine removed and overhauled. It takes 6 months. Not exactly efficent or "reusable" in any reasonable definition of the word. The competition for the shuttle (DC-X, etc) can't find the funding to continue development...
--Bob
They do run their full analysis, and even compute new mass limits for the higgs on-line. It's not a quick cut-based skim or anything. ;)
--Bob
The fact of the matter that it is very easy to get statistical fluctuations of this magnatude in high-energy physics. (insert obligatory comment about the accuracy of political "polls" here) And in the higgs search at CERN they have frequently seen extra events just at the end of their range. (The mass of 114.9 GeV is barely within the range of the accelerator to see at its current energy)
If the higgs exists, it will be found by the LHC. It's enticing to think it's barely beyond LEP's reach, and if the LHC finds it there, the LEP people will bemoan not being able to extend LEP's run just a little bit longer...
Disclaimer: IAP (I Am a Physicist), and have worked on the higgs analysis at CERN (but do not currently). How come more physics people don't post to slashdot? I know you guys read it. ;)
--Bob
The US spends billions every year prosecuting credit card fraud. Are you surprised that other countries are unwilling or unable to dump this kind of money into doing the credit card companies' work? Because the US takes care of fraud for credit card companies, they have no incentive to fix their inherently flawed system.
Credit cards are a bad deal. Period. I won't consider the world to have truly evolved electronic money until the current credit card system isn't involved, or it is massively restructured (and involves cryptographic security). Another requirement isn't that you don't have to "pay" for money. PayPal doesn't qualify because of it's fees (business accounts).
--Bob
FilterProxy can successfully remove web bugs.
This message has been brought to you by Blatent Plug-O-Matic(tm)
--Bob
--Bob
Within a certain framework, yes. One of the most perplexing things about the Standard Model is that it doesn't contain gravity. There are many straightforward ways to extend it, all of them wrong (WRT gravity). Richard Feynman explored this in detail in "The Feynman Lectures on Gravity" (look for this in a library). But to really understand these lectures requires quite a bit of background knowledge. This is, for instance, why we think the "graviton" is spin-2. Extending the Standard Model in a straightforward way requires the graviton to be spin 2. Of course, it doesn't work. But within the framework of existing theories, you can rigorously prove that it has to be spin-2. There are a finite number of "actions" which can be written down in this framework. (action being the equation from which equations of motion are derived, by minimizing/maximizing the action) Each of these can be explored in turn, and rigorously proven to be wrong.
The next question is: "is our framework wrong?" The Standard Model is a set of "Gauge Theories", that is Quantum Field Theories which posess a certain gauge symmetry (represented by a Lie group). Now there's a mouthful to scare off the lay person. ;) String Theory/M-Theory is attempting to explore this, by starting from the simple assumption that particles, rather than being point entities, contain a continuous degree of freedom. (that is, parameterized by x,y,z,t and one extra, continuous, internal degree of freedom...hence "string") This theory has turned out to be significantly more complex than one might imagine at first, and we're not done trying to figure out the theory.
For instance, you can straightforwardly prove that string theory can only exist in 26 dimensions. If you add supersymmetry it requires 10 dimensions. If you go to M-theory (which still isn't well defined) it requires 11 dimensions. Each of these is rigorously provable.
Supersymmetry solves a nasty problem in field theories of renormalization in certain calculations. It turns out that by adding a fermion (1/2 integer spin) for every boson (integer spin) and vice-versa, that you exactly cancel many divergences. This is clearly desirable. A theory with divergences should be treated with skepticism. But where are these extra particles? Supersymmetry was discovered in the context of string theory and carried over into field theories because of this nice property. You can have a string theory without it, but it clearly does not correspond to our universe.
I often wonder if there is a better framework. The Standard Model/Gauge Fields framework was very confusing (because of certain apparent problems like renormalization...which turned out to be a calculational problem, rather than theoretical) when it was first introduced, but it has turned out to be extremely useful in calculation.
Gad, I'm rambling again...that's what I get for answering posts in my field. ;)
ah, books. I'm most familiar with graduate texts, so I'll give those. I don't read lay books because they frustrate me. (I need the math dammit!) These are the "canonical" texts in the field, those most respected in the physics community. There are others, I cannot speak for their quality, but I have used all in the following list, and can recommend them. I can handle the math: good luck, these are not easy reading, and often require a close examination of relevant equations. Note that this is the course regimen for a graduate degree in physics. If you make it through all these books, you should consider applying to a local university and getting a masters in Physics. This isn't light reading. Usual starting point for this material is an undergraduate degree in physics (though math or some engineering may suffice).
hep-th/####### and similar references can be obtained electronically at www.arxiv.org.
Hope this is useful, --Bob
Is the interface definition used to determine "compatability" of an object for a particular purpose? Can interfaces evolve? Can an object add functionality, but still be used by other, older objects for the older purposes? Must an evolving object conform to several interfaces (adding bloat), or can there be v2.0 of an interface, after the designer realizes there's a Better Way to do it?
These are hard problems, and ones I was not able to answer to my satisfaction. Evidinced by their software, it seems that M$ has not either. Do you really want to embed an editable spreadsheet in a document, and deal with the bloat and crashes that will occur? Or is there a Better Way?
Of course, I could probably answer all these questions by digging into the Bonobo and CORBA documentation, but stimulating discussion is good too.
--Bob
I once considered this to catch cheaters in a CS course I TA'd. But even with only 20 students, 20! diffs is a hell of a lot.
An IP-based frequency rejection would be better. (Quell requests/posts from the same IP if they occur too often). Then they'd be forced to use a slow DDOS, and what's the point of a DOS if it takes weeks?
--Bob
At any rate, it was a big disappointment. From now on I'll stick to Japanese animation for my sci-fi, because american movie houses just have no clue. (that is, until another 2001 comes along)
--Bob (hey, at least they named the planet after me!)
Fox is a formula. Dash of famous actor. Smidgen of fancy 3d effects. Dollup of song by famous band. Stir. Presto, more money for Fox's pockets.
Once upon a time movies were still considered art. Now they're a formula to line someone's pocketbook. Good riddance to this studio. Perhaps they should start hiring people to write plots that don't suck and characters that aren't shallow. The problem is not their animators. It's trying to turn a story into a formula. A good story would still be good in animation, 3d rendering, live action, or stop motion.
These days there is maybe one movie a year I don't find terrible. Their formulas have gone to such an extreme. The movie exec's don't even realize that "good story" isn't in their formula, and they have no clue how to put it into their formula. It's not a formula thing.
--Bob
This is especially useful when you have to fill out a form that might send you something useful, so you want to use a real e-mail rather than one you know you'll never get useful e-mail from (in which case I usually use something like nunjo.bidness@no.way.never.com or root@127.0.0.1).
Unfortunately, all the spam I get is through an e-mail I haven't used in over a year. I have yet to receive any spam through a + address. But when I do it's gonna be ugly. ;)
--Bob
--Bob
Why do I use it? hbar is more convenient than carrying around that 2*pi in many circumstances. E=hbar*omega, where omega is the angular frequency. (note there's a 2*pi in hbar, and one in omega too that cancel out) hbar is also unambiguous. The alphabet gets used and re-used (and greek alphabet) in any science, and the meaning of variables becomes obscured. But there's only one hbar!
--Bob
Personally, I have no intention of buying a DVD player or movie until I can play it on any player in the world, including under Linux. The whole world moving away from VHS is giving a default win to the RIAA. It doesn't matter how the DeCSS case goes. They will still sell DVD's for different prices in different parts of the world, and you'll still have no rights with respect to DVD's you buy.
What gives?
--Bob
I'm not an expert on this. It's called Mini-Magnetospheric Plasma Propulsion (M2P2) and they claim solar panels and about 3kW are enough to sustain it.
Well...all of it. There isn't anything that "absorbs" the solar wind (except obvious things like planets). The solar wind ends at the heliopause where is where the interstellar medium takes over. The heliopause doesn't happen until well past Pluto, the Voyager and Pioneer probes will pass through it soon, and scientists are eager to see if they send back any interesting data about it.
I haven't run this calculation, but yes, atmospheric distortion would be a problem, as would diffraction (at millions of miles, diffraction effects from the opening end of the laser can be large!) Compensating for atmospheric distortion may be possible. Extremely precise aiming devices would be required. It would also be a given that a large portion of your laser would miss the craft entirely. But even if 1% of the laser's power hits the craft, I'd guess that it's still cheaper than launching an equivalent power source.
--Bob