Momentum is only mass*speed for massive particles. The full expression is E^2=m^2*c^4 + p^2*c^2, where for a photon E=hbar*frequency, m is mass, p is momentum, and c is the speed of light. (Man, where is MathML when you need it?) If you solve for p, and make some assumptions about the energy of a massive particle, you get p=m*v. But for a photon, m=0, and thus p=E/c=hbar*frequency/c. Thus the momentum transferred to the craft is just proportional the energy of the photon, or the frequency of the photon.
Since the photons are reflected, the total impulse is delta-p=2*p, so you get twice the momentum of the photon. (A previous poster incorrectly assumed the photons were absorbed. This would burn up the sails, and impart less impulse to the craft)
To answer another question I saw, why aren't ion engines better: Ion engines require a power source on board the craft, and produce little thrust (~10^-4 Newtons). Solar sails can produce large thrusts (~10 Newtons). The article mentions that they acheive several times g accelerations. The ion engine also requires fuel (though not very much).
There is also the "plasma bottle" engine being developed (at JPL, I think). It uses a confined plasma to create a huge pancake shaped magnetic field, which interacts with the solar wind and gets a push from it. This also requires a largeish power source on board to sustain the plasma. It is also a "solar sail" though it uses the solar wind (energetic particles from the sun), not the sun's photons.
Solar Sails realy are a Good Idea. Not only can they use the sun, which is an always-shining abundant power source, but they can also use ground-based power sources. It's a hell of a lot cheaper to build a ground-based power source and a laser than it is to put that same power source in orbit. (At $10,000 a pound to launch stuff) Also by turning your sail WRT the sun you can get thrusts in different directions. This will allow you to use the solar sail to come back from Mars, for instance, just by turning the sail in the right direction. Orbital mechanics is a little counter-intuitive -- pushing "outward" doesn't necessarily get you farther away since both you and the planet are going in a circle, around the sun. You really want to push in the direction of motion around the sun that you're traveling (or against it) to increase/decrease the size of your orbit, and thus move you closer or further from the sun. Pushing directly away from (or towards) the sun will just get you in an elliptic orbit.
Not only does our government feel this pervasive need to do parenting for everyone, but they do so by making minors second class citizens. Minors are not afforded the protections of the constitution. It is completely legal to search & sieze their property (hey, they're kids, they can't own property anyway), censor their speech, and do other nasty things that they could never get away with for any other citizen.
It's about time we recognized people of age less than 18 as people too. They should be afforded the same basic human rights as everyone else. Those rights that cannot be reasonably given to minors should be the responsibility of their parents, not the damn government. Not everyone has the same beliefs about parenting. Not every parent wants to lock their kid in a box to prevent them from harm. And parents should be allowed to let their kids grow, in any manner the parents see fit.
What's even worse is that these damaging, unconstitutional attempts at censorship, vaulted into law in the name of save the children, have become a political tool. Congressmen know they're unconstitutional, but they get to look good by saving the children. We have devised a system of government where one branch gets its bread and butter by suckering extremist groups into voting for them, passing laws to appease them, and smoothing it all over with "save the children". Meanwhile another branch strikes down these laws one by one, but can't react quick enough.
Enough of this. Every one of you go watch South Park the movie and think about it really hard. It's not just a funny movie, you know.
I have a simple question that I've never really seen answered:
What is the battery lifetime of a Transmeta laptop?
Everyone says they will have longer battery life, but no one says how much longer. How important is that 3 watt processor after you factor in the disk, chipset, and screen backlight?
There are lots of ways to play with plasmas to create engines. NASA did lots of research into this in the 60's, and then someone decided it wasn't a good idea to launch a nuclear reactor, and research basically stopped. The technology has been around for a long time though (arcjets, ion engines, electrostatic engines of various designs...)
The fact of the matter is you could build a craft the size of the shuttle that could make it to Mars and back on one tank of gas, but it would require a nuclear reactor on board. You can also collect interplanetary dust (99% hydrogen) and use it as fuel. Greenpeace, our political system, and the public in general don't like nuclear reactors. I've fantasized many times about buying an island in the pacific for the purpose of building a launch complex, and being out of the reach of governments that feel it's their duty to make sure they know where every ounce of radioactive material on the planet is, and exactly what the owner is doing with it.
Nuclear "fear" is responsible for so much...export controls on computers, testban treaties, greenpeace...but there's so much you could do with it if you could get around all the (MASSIVE) regulation.
All research on nuclear technology basically stopped in this country in the 60's. France, for instance, has far more advanced (and safe) nuclear power plants than the US because they kept working on them. At some point in this country it became taboo to have anything to do with nuclear technology.
It's sad how ignorance and fear are the driving force behind policy on this issue. *sigh*
That GPL is enforced using copyright. The GPL forces people who use the software to follow the rules of GPL, like a) forcing availability of source code, and b) not being able to use GPL code in a closed product.
Correct me if I'm wrong, but the GPL has never been tested in court. Neither have any of the other free software licenses. (If I'm wrong, someone please provide a link or the court case) There are hundreds of copyright lawsuits in court right now regarding proprietary works.
I really don't think copyrights are the point. Free software would still exist without copyright. I think the original poster is correct, If there was no copyright, then there would be little need for the GPL. Or rather perhaps we should just say "Open Licenses". The GPL is viral, which is sort of an underhanded way of keeping things free in a proprietary world, and this viral component doesn't really have anything to do with copyright.
Without copyright source code availability could not be guaranteed, but how many proprietary products out there have borrowed code from free ones? How would you ever know? Who really cares? Any features distributed in a binary-only version of an otherwise free program would just be re-implemented in open source. And with an open version available, who would sign away all their rights for a marginally improved version?
But do you really think that Microsoft won't tell OEM's to dump linux or their prices will increase? It seems from Bill's attitude during the trial and even now that Microsoft(s) will continue to behave this way, counting on the fact that Big Brother can't effectively police Microsoft without having someone watch over the shoulder of every M$ employee. Will the government scrutinize every decision made by the 60k employee M$? Will the government scrutinize every line of code for artificially inserted incompatibilities? (Microsoft inserted just enough code between Windows 3.1 and 3.11 to break OS/2) Will the government be able to? Will the government have the power to fire people who consistenly go against the ruling? IBM and Dell will be able to have their way because they're big and they will make a stink and get Big Brother on Microsoft's back if they don't get their way. But what about the smaller vendors?
I don't think governmental action will be the answer to what ails the software industry. I think free software is.
I swore off all M$ products almost 10 years ago now, but everyone I know that uses Windows has to reinstall it on a regular basis. The thing seems to have a half-life of about 6 months. The registry gets corrupted, the filesystem gets fragmented, various and sundry other things happen which cause it to crash more than when you first installed everything. The point of this is if don't own the media, you can't reinstall! M$ would effectively be charging a licensing fee once every 6 months. Recovery CD my ass, It's my perogative to repartition the drive at will.
As other people have no doubt said, this really drives home the fallacy of buying software. Free software really is the way to go. Not only do you get rights, you get the ability to fix bugs, adapt it to your purposes, and otherwise do with it as you please.
I recently received a mail from someone about my personal OSS project (FilterProxy), asking me if it was OK for them to use it in their company. People just aren't used to this concept. They expect to be ripped off. They expect to pay exorbitant fees and have to go threough a lawyer to get all their software.
Well more power to us. I just hope that other industries besides software are able to follow someday.
FilterProxy can do most of the things you require, including removing layer-style ads, and stripping "web bugs" which are those 1x1 gifs that pages use to track pageviews and track you across many sites. (see link on the FilterProxy page)
Because I strip the ad rather than just block the gif, most pages get a significant facelift. Wired looks great (for one). So does slashdot...;) For sites that break up the article into many "pages", they almost always have a "printable version". If you can figure out the parameters encoded into the URL, it should be relatively straightforward to map the request for the original page-broken article to the "printable version", and add this to a proxy.
In general, I think it's not realistic to write a "HOWTO" on this since it's a complicated process to block user-tracking stuff, and it can change often (as advertisers find ways to defeat the blockers...and blockers find ways to defeat the advertisers...again). Rather the best way to deal with it is in software (usually a proxy, but it could be built into the web browser). There are many banner-blocking/stripping proxies out there, besides mine. You really should try one. They make the web MUCH more pleasant.;)
As long as it reduces the number of free parameters from our current "working" theories, it is an improvement. Personally, I don't think we will ever derive that our universe is unique or likely in any way. There is the whole anthropomorphic view (the universe is as it is because we're here -- all other combinations didn't result in sentient beings to view it -- or maybe they did, who knows?). Uniqueness seems somehow akin to the heliocentric view of old, but not very realistic.
The evidince for string theory comes largely from theoretical arguments. String theory originated with trying to find a theory which described the strong force (which binds quarks, protons, neutrons into atoms), but ultimately failed. Our current theory for the strong force is QCD (Quantum Chromodynamics -- analagous to Quantum Electrodynamics which describes electromagnetism). But out of the flames of a string theory for the strong force, many people noticed that some of the predictions made by string theory were just too amazing to be coincidences. Part of the continuing development of string theory is an attempt to understand this complex theory, and part is driven by the sheer beauty of it, and part is driven by the fact that no one has a better idea. Very recently there has been a flurry of work trying to get rid of "extra dimensions". String theory likes 26 dimensions, superstring theory likes 10, and M-theory wants 11 dimensions (all greater than 4=space+time that we see). So in the last couple of years there has been renewed interest in getting rid of these extra dimensions in various ways. One promising proposal ends up modifying gravity at short distances (< 1mm), which, unbelievably, has never really been tested. So right now there are several experiments trying to measure gravity at very small distances. Predictions have also come out of these schemes to get rid of extra dimensions relating to signatures that would be detectable in collider experiments.
As to the argument about Occam's Razor, frankly you're right. If String/M-theory can't explain what we want it to, or if there is a simpler theory that explains the same things, then string theory will fall to this other theory. But at the present time there is no other theory that holds half the promise of string theory. General Relativity can't explain Quantum Mechanics, and Quantum Field Theory, which is so good for electromagnetism, the weak force, and the strong force, can almost certainly not explain gravity. (and has some unsatisfactory properties for other reasons - like 30-odd "arbitrary" parameters. We'd like to know why these 30-odd parameters have the values they do)
String theory is promising because it has a very large space of possible configurations. In other words, there are billions of ways you can tune all the parameters in string theory to end up with different "universes". Many of the he generic properties of these universes have already been verified to correspond to our own. In some sense "solving" string theory will someday be a game of trying out all the possible permutations of configurations, and finding one that works. But for now we also need to concentrate on understanding the fundamentals of it.
It is important to note that General Relativity, and Quantum Field Theory must be derivable out of string theory for it to be a viable theory. (This is generically how physics works) People have been deriving QFT's and GR out of various string theories for a long time, so it can be done. It's just a matter of finding the right string theory, from which we can derive the electroweak QFT, GR, and the masses of all the particles that we see.
How long will this go on? Credit card fraud is HUGE! And CC companies have no interest in fixing it. Government covers litigation for them, consumers and vendors absorb the cost of fraud.
You, yes you sitting smug there behind your keyboard, go start a company RIGHT NOW that will encrypt transactions so that fraud is nigh impossible. Make it so I can beam money to people with my palmpilot, and while you're at it, establish a public key infrastructure that can verify my identity as well. PGP is well and good, but no one is selling it to companies! Some corporation must invest the resources to sell a better system. Companies aren't going to just pick up something like PGP and start encrypting transactions because no one is selling it to them and because they don't know about it, because no one is selling it to them.
Methinks consumers and vendors would come running in droves for a fraud proof electronic money.
I diagree strongly. Thus far, Compaq/DEC has been very forthcoming with porting their software to linux. They have ported their C, C++, Fortran compilers; math libraries; debuggers; spike optimizing tool and other stuff too. Comments in these things seem to indicate that they're under license agreement for pieces of the code from other companies, and cannot easily open soure their whole compiler, for instance. Comments also seem to indicate that they'd like to, if they could.
It looks like all the former Digital employees are behind this. Compaq doesn't seem to have a fucking clue about linux (try to find linux info for one of their PC's you'd buy at CompUSA), and the information is trickling from the old DEC employees. They have done well so far. That said, I hope Compaq makes the "right" decisions about how to handle this Tru64 thing. Linux could use the introduction of some Tru64 features. Honestly, I see their Tru64 sales declining steadily in the future, and Alpha/Linux installations increasing. It's already possible (has been for years) to run almost any Tru64 binary under Alpha/Linux. Incorporating Tru64 features to Linux and moving their UNIX division over to Linux would be a very strategic move for them.
I know you have been involved with Alpha/Linux for some time, I remember running into you on mailing lists two years ago, and you were still the expert then.
What do you see as the future for the alpha? Will Compaq let it die a slow and unfortunate death? Will it continue in its current niche of "High Performace Technical Computing", and be out of the reach (pricewise) of mere mortals? Or will Compaq ever market them to a wider audience, and hopefully bring the price down?
Many people I know wants an alpha. No one I know thinks they can afford one.
Alphas run Linux little-endian. They have an instruction that will allow them to treat a memory segment as either little or big-endian. But under linux they are little-endian all the time.
There is an emulator, em86, that will let you run Intel linux binaries on the alpha, and it works quite well.
It's not every day I get to refute almost every point in someone's post. Must be a good day.;)
Microsoft never ported MS Office to Alpha.
Who cares? One of the major reasons to use alpha is to divorce yourself from the Microsoft/Intel stranglehold. Note that Applixware Office IS available on the alpha.
On Linux, there is a severe paucity of "commercial" applications for Alpha, and some of the critical applications for "desktop" use are not available. Notably, Netscape is not readily available. (I know that the Digital UNIX version can be hacked into submission, but it is not an easy rpm -i netscape.rpm away...)
Oh, yes it is as easy as 'rpm -i netscape.rpm'. Check out Compaq's software list and you will see, right there before your very eyes, an rpm of netscape 4.7. It includes the Tru64 libraries necessary to run the Tru64 version. On the same page you will find mozilla.
Hardware compatibility lists are similarly "brittle." I've tried running the Diamond Rio package, rio on my Alpha box; it gets quite confused, probably due to some 32-bit-ism in the "driver." More critical is the paucity of graphics cards supported by XFree86 on Alpha. It is probably similar for other 64 bit platforms; you're restricted to whatever there are "open" drivers for, and there are some cards (Cirrus comes to mind) that have architectures that are distinctly unfriendly to 64 bit operations.
I also have a Diamond Rio, on my alpha, with USB (just to refute everyone that says Linux doesn't support USB), and I'm quite happy with it. I had to change ONE LINE that was getting 64/32 bits confused. I submitted the patch to the maintainers, and it's now in the main rio tools. You've gotta dig a little deeper sometimes. If you want nice prepackaged, "bug-free" software, go back to Microsoft. I couldn't have done that with a "commercial" app. Long live open source. Yes, 95% of linux users use Intel. Yes, the existance of alpha on linux doen't make everyone write 64-bit clean code. This is the only source of frailty I have found of on the alpha.
IA-64 will have the same 64-bit problems that the alpha is having now. sizeof(long int) != sizeof(int) is just about the only problem. I will say that I can compile 99% of the software I find for linux on the net without modification. Often I compile it with Compaq's ccc to get a faster binary (I was tickled to find lame encoding my mp3's at 4x realtime at 160kbps with ccc, where before it was roughly 0.5 realtime with bladeenc and gcc).
As you say, people that "just want it to work" will not buy an alpha. It is marked as a massive horsepower machine. Companies buy them to run big databases, and academia buys them to model weather patterns and nuclear blasts. They also pay through the nose for Compaq to maintain them. They have no need of running Office. For mere mortals who want to play with some horsepower you can buy an older one, and be very happy with it. But don't expect your grandmother to be able to use it. If you want everything preinstalled and done for you, buy an iMac or a Windoze machine. That said, I do wish Compaq would market the alpha to the masses. I think it would do well. It runs linux like a charm.
I ordered a 164LX (533MHz board, 2MB cache) two years ago from these guys (DCG Inc.) at around $1200 with chip and cache. I built the rest of the system (including case and PS--BTW, they don't need 630W, mine is 300W, but you should get a well ventilated case and lots of fans) from standard PC components, and have been infinitely happy with it. Right now you can probably get a 164UX or 164LX board for pretty cheap (these use the 21164 chip, which goes 433-633MHz -- the current generation is the 21264). These things use the PCI bus and IDE drives, and there's lots of documentation out there for them (try alphalinux.org for starters). I'd like to see people start overclocking these puppies.
I HIGHLY recommend doing this if you're a little hardware savvy (like to tinker), and are fed up with Intel's crap (like me). But then again there's always the Athalon. But then again the alpha still beats the Athalon at floating point.
The DCG people have been very good to me as well. When I first got the thing, I accidentally nuked the Flash BIOS, because I'm an idiot. They were very agreeable, and sent me a new motherboard. All I paid for was shipping! Try and get that out of some no-name Taiwanese fly-by-night PC outfit!
I don't have a source off the top of my head, but from what I've read, the infection rate increases with age. At twentysomething, ~25% have it, as you said. But at ~50 years, ~%50% have it. I'm speaking of simplex A, the oral kind. Dunno about simplex B rates. I could be wrong, I'm not an expert on the subject...
Everyone here has been saying that "free speech" software has only to do with freedom, not money. This is not true. Yes, the GPL supposedly permits you to sell software, but it doesn't really. Everything you sell can be redistributed by the purchaser. In other words, it's entirely possible and likely that you sell one copy of your software and then the buyer puts it on an FTP server and you never sell another copy. If your software is distributed under a "free speech" license, it must by common sense also be "free beer". So all of his arguments against "free beer" software are equally valid against "free speech" software.
Since a customer can always grab the source and run with it, a vendor of free software can only maintain its market share if it completes bugfixes requested by users in a timely manner, incorporates changes they make, and in general, does what is in the best interest of the customer. Having the source open prevents the vendor from "sticking it" to a customer, and also prevents the customer from being "locked in" to proprietary standards. It seems to me that open source forces capitalism to do what it was intended...that is, whatever the customer wants/needs.
Your point on the success of the virus is exactly correct. The same happens with biological viruses. Consider ebola, which has affected only a very small number of people worldwide. It's so destructive that everyone knows about it, and everyone tries to prevent its spread. Consider herpes, which is present in ~50% of the population, by some estimates, or the common cold, which everyone will get several times in their lifetime. The penetration (number of infections) is inversely related to its destructiveness.
There is an alternate path though, and that is when the virus is non-destructive (dormant) for a long period, and then flares up to become extremely destructive. AIDS, for instance. Many computer viruses have followed this path as well, with a built-in "time-bomb" date.
Personally, I think the most interesting virus would be totally non-destructive, and would not bother the infectee by consuming resources. (i.e. your example of monitoring CPU and network) Some people have predicted that the first true AI will be an entity that grows out of the network. I think this is exactly the way to do it. Someone suggested a small daemon that communicates with itself. I have seen code that changes its name every second, to prevent killing, and obscure it in 'ps' output. Monitoring load and network bandwidth is pretty easy, even for a program that isn't running as root. I wonder if someone will eventually write this...
Yes, but with the guy running it being "just a guy" without oodles of money, he would have to spend a lot of time in court, and a lot of money on a lawyer, just to get his site allowed. Who has time for that besides corporate execs with no sense of humor? Where the hell is our legal system going? I have to get out of this country before they come for me...
What does this mean for banner-ad filtering software. How log will it be before some corporate exec at a web ad agency gets bored?
Slashdot Mirror
Since the photons are reflected, the total impulse is delta-p=2*p, so you get twice the momentum of the photon. (A previous poster incorrectly assumed the photons were absorbed. This would burn up the sails, and impart less impulse to the craft)
To answer another question I saw, why aren't ion engines better: Ion engines require a power source on board the craft, and produce little thrust (~10^-4 Newtons). Solar sails can produce large thrusts (~10 Newtons). The article mentions that they acheive several times g accelerations. The ion engine also requires fuel (though not very much).
There is also the "plasma bottle" engine being developed (at JPL, I think). It uses a confined plasma to create a huge pancake shaped magnetic field, which interacts with the solar wind and gets a push from it. This also requires a largeish power source on board to sustain the plasma. It is also a "solar sail" though it uses the solar wind (energetic particles from the sun), not the sun's photons.
Solar Sails realy are a Good Idea. Not only can they use the sun, which is an always-shining abundant power source, but they can also use ground-based power sources. It's a hell of a lot cheaper to build a ground-based power source and a laser than it is to put that same power source in orbit. (At $10,000 a pound to launch stuff) Also by turning your sail WRT the sun you can get thrusts in different directions. This will allow you to use the solar sail to come back from Mars, for instance, just by turning the sail in the right direction. Orbital mechanics is a little counter-intuitive -- pushing "outward" doesn't necessarily get you farther away since both you and the planet are going in a circle, around the sun. You really want to push in the direction of motion around the sun that you're traveling (or against it) to increase/decrease the size of your orbit, and thus move you closer or further from the sun. Pushing directly away from (or towards) the sun will just get you in an elliptic orbit.
--Bob
--Bob
It's about time we recognized people of age less than 18 as people too. They should be afforded the same basic human rights as everyone else. Those rights that cannot be reasonably given to minors should be the responsibility of their parents, not the damn government. Not everyone has the same beliefs about parenting. Not every parent wants to lock their kid in a box to prevent them from harm. And parents should be allowed to let their kids grow, in any manner the parents see fit.
What's even worse is that these damaging, unconstitutional attempts at censorship, vaulted into law in the name of save the children, have become a political tool. Congressmen know they're unconstitutional, but they get to look good by saving the children. We have devised a system of government where one branch gets its bread and butter by suckering extremist groups into voting for them, passing laws to appease them, and smoothing it all over with "save the children". Meanwhile another branch strikes down these laws one by one, but can't react quick enough.
Enough of this. Every one of you go watch South Park the movie and think about it really hard. It's not just a funny movie, you know.
--Bob
But you're right, I skimmed it and missed that. DOH!
--Bob
What is the battery lifetime of a Transmeta laptop?
Everyone says they will have longer battery life, but no one says how much longer. How important is that 3 watt processor after you factor in the disk, chipset, and screen backlight?
--Bob
--Bob
There are lots of ways to play with plasmas to create engines. NASA did lots of research into this in the 60's, and then someone decided it wasn't a good idea to launch a nuclear reactor, and research basically stopped. The technology has been around for a long time though (arcjets, ion engines, electrostatic engines of various designs...)
The fact of the matter is you could build a craft the size of the shuttle that could make it to Mars and back on one tank of gas, but it would require a nuclear reactor on board. You can also collect interplanetary dust (99% hydrogen) and use it as fuel. Greenpeace, our political system, and the public in general don't like nuclear reactors. I've fantasized many times about buying an island in the pacific for the purpose of building a launch complex, and being out of the reach of governments that feel it's their duty to make sure they know where every ounce of radioactive material on the planet is, and exactly what the owner is doing with it.
Nuclear "fear" is responsible for so much...export controls on computers, testban treaties, greenpeace...but there's so much you could do with it if you could get around all the (MASSIVE) regulation.
All research on nuclear technology basically stopped in this country in the 60's. France, for instance, has far more advanced (and safe) nuclear power plants than the US because they kept working on them. At some point in this country it became taboo to have anything to do with nuclear technology.
It's sad how ignorance and fear are the driving force behind policy on this issue. *sigh*
--Bob
Correct me if I'm wrong, but the GPL has never been tested in court. Neither have any of the other free software licenses. (If I'm wrong, someone please provide a link or the court case) There are hundreds of copyright lawsuits in court right now regarding proprietary works.
I really don't think copyrights are the point. Free software would still exist without copyright. I think the original poster is correct, If there was no copyright, then there would be little need for the GPL. Or rather perhaps we should just say "Open Licenses". The GPL is viral, which is sort of an underhanded way of keeping things free in a proprietary world, and this viral component doesn't really have anything to do with copyright.
Without copyright source code availability could not be guaranteed, but how many proprietary products out there have borrowed code from free ones? How would you ever know? Who really cares? Any features distributed in a binary-only version of an otherwise free program would just be re-implemented in open source. And with an open version available, who would sign away all their rights for a marginally improved version?
--Bob
I don't think governmental action will be the answer to what ails the software industry. I think free software is.
--Bob
As other people have no doubt said, this really drives home the fallacy of buying software. Free software really is the way to go. Not only do you get rights, you get the ability to fix bugs, adapt it to your purposes, and otherwise do with it as you please.
I recently received a mail from someone about my personal OSS project (FilterProxy), asking me if it was OK for them to use it in their company. People just aren't used to this concept. They expect to be ripped off. They expect to pay exorbitant fees and have to go threough a lawyer to get all their software.
Well more power to us. I just hope that other industries besides software are able to follow someday.
--Bob
FilterProxy can do most of the things you require, including removing layer-style ads, and stripping "web bugs" which are those 1x1 gifs that pages use to track pageviews and track you across many sites. (see link on the FilterProxy page)
Because I strip the ad rather than just block the gif, most pages get a significant facelift. Wired looks great (for one). So does slashdot... ;) For sites that break up the article into many "pages", they almost always have a "printable version". If you can figure out the parameters encoded into the URL, it should be relatively straightforward to map the request for the original page-broken article to the "printable version", and add this to a proxy.
In general, I think it's not realistic to write a "HOWTO" on this since it's a complicated process to block user-tracking stuff, and it can change often (as advertisers find ways to defeat the blockers...and blockers find ways to defeat the advertisers...again). Rather the best way to deal with it is in software (usually a proxy, but it could be built into the web browser). There are many banner-blocking/stripping proxies out there, besides mine. You really should try one. They make the web MUCH more pleasant. ;)
--Bob
-- Bob
As to the argument about Occam's Razor, frankly you're right. If String/M-theory can't explain what we want it to, or if there is a simpler theory that explains the same things, then string theory will fall to this other theory. But at the present time there is no other theory that holds half the promise of string theory. General Relativity can't explain Quantum Mechanics, and Quantum Field Theory, which is so good for electromagnetism, the weak force, and the strong force, can almost certainly not explain gravity. (and has some unsatisfactory properties for other reasons - like 30-odd "arbitrary" parameters. We'd like to know why these 30-odd parameters have the values they do)
String theory is promising because it has a very large space of possible configurations. In other words, there are billions of ways you can tune all the parameters in string theory to end up with different "universes". Many of the he generic properties of these universes have already been verified to correspond to our own. In some sense "solving" string theory will someday be a game of trying out all the possible permutations of configurations, and finding one that works. But for now we also need to concentrate on understanding the fundamentals of it.
It is important to note that General Relativity, and Quantum Field Theory must be derivable out of string theory for it to be a viable theory. (This is generically how physics works) People have been deriving QFT's and GR out of various string theories for a long time, so it can be done. It's just a matter of finding the right string theory, from which we can derive the electroweak QFT, GR, and the masses of all the particles that we see.
--Bob
You, yes you sitting smug there behind your keyboard, go start a company RIGHT NOW that will encrypt transactions so that fraud is nigh impossible. Make it so I can beam money to people with my palmpilot, and while you're at it, establish a public key infrastructure that can verify my identity as well. PGP is well and good, but no one is selling it to companies! Some corporation must invest the resources to sell a better system. Companies aren't going to just pick up something like PGP and start encrypting transactions because no one is selling it to them and because they don't know about it, because no one is selling it to them.
Methinks consumers and vendors would come running in droves for a fraud proof electronic money.
--Bob
It looks like all the former Digital employees are behind this. Compaq doesn't seem to have a fucking clue about linux (try to find linux info for one of their PC's you'd buy at CompUSA), and the information is trickling from the old DEC employees. They have done well so far. That said, I hope Compaq makes the "right" decisions about how to handle this Tru64 thing. Linux could use the introduction of some Tru64 features. Honestly, I see their Tru64 sales declining steadily in the future, and Alpha/Linux installations increasing. It's already possible (has been for years) to run almost any Tru64 binary under Alpha/Linux. Incorporating Tru64 features to Linux and moving their UNIX division over to Linux would be a very strategic move for them.
--Bob
What do you see as the future for the alpha? Will Compaq let it die a slow and unfortunate death? Will it continue in its current niche of "High Performace Technical Computing", and be out of the reach (pricewise) of mere mortals? Or will Compaq ever market them to a wider audience, and hopefully bring the price down?
Many people I know wants an alpha. No one I know thinks they can afford one.
--Bob
--Bob
Who cares? One of the major reasons to use alpha is to divorce yourself from the Microsoft/Intel stranglehold. Note that Applixware Office IS available on the alpha.
Oh, yes it is as easy as 'rpm -i netscape.rpm'. Check out Compaq's software list and you will see, right there before your very eyes, an rpm of netscape 4.7. It includes the Tru64 libraries necessary to run the Tru64 version. On the same page you will find mozilla.
I also have a Diamond Rio, on my alpha, with USB (just to refute everyone that says Linux doesn't support USB), and I'm quite happy with it. I had to change ONE LINE that was getting 64/32 bits confused. I submitted the patch to the maintainers, and it's now in the main rio tools. You've gotta dig a little deeper sometimes. If you want nice prepackaged, "bug-free" software, go back to Microsoft. I couldn't have done that with a "commercial" app. Long live open source. Yes, 95% of linux users use Intel. Yes, the existance of alpha on linux doen't make everyone write 64-bit clean code. This is the only source of frailty I have found of on the alpha.
IA-64 will have the same 64-bit problems that the alpha is having now. sizeof(long int) != sizeof(int) is just about the only problem. I will say that I can compile 99% of the software I find for linux on the net without modification. Often I compile it with Compaq's ccc to get a faster binary (I was tickled to find lame encoding my mp3's at 4x realtime at 160kbps with ccc, where before it was roughly 0.5 realtime with bladeenc and gcc).
As you say, people that "just want it to work" will not buy an alpha. It is marked as a massive horsepower machine. Companies buy them to run big databases, and academia buys them to model weather patterns and nuclear blasts. They also pay through the nose for Compaq to maintain them. They have no need of running Office. For mere mortals who want to play with some horsepower you can buy an older one, and be very happy with it. But don't expect your grandmother to be able to use it. If you want everything preinstalled and done for you, buy an iMac or a Windoze machine. That said, I do wish Compaq would market the alpha to the masses. I think it would do well. It runs linux like a charm.
--Bob
I HIGHLY recommend doing this if you're a little hardware savvy (like to tinker), and are fed up with Intel's crap (like me). But then again there's always the Athalon. But then again the alpha still beats the Athalon at floating point.
The DCG people have been very good to me as well. When I first got the thing, I accidentally nuked the Flash BIOS, because I'm an idiot. They were very agreeable, and sent me a new motherboard. All I paid for was shipping! Try and get that out of some no-name Taiwanese fly-by-night PC outfit!
--Bob
--Bob
Now why the hell won't Metallica answer our questions?!?! Bastards. I think I'm gonna go burn my metallica CD now.
--Bob
Since a customer can always grab the source and run with it, a vendor of free software can only maintain its market share if it completes bugfixes requested by users in a timely manner, incorporates changes they make, and in general, does what is in the best interest of the customer. Having the source open prevents the vendor from "sticking it" to a customer, and also prevents the customer from being "locked in" to proprietary standards. It seems to me that open source forces capitalism to do what it was intended...that is, whatever the customer wants/needs.
--Bob
There is an alternate path though, and that is when the virus is non-destructive (dormant) for a long period, and then flares up to become extremely destructive. AIDS, for instance. Many computer viruses have followed this path as well, with a built-in "time-bomb" date.
Personally, I think the most interesting virus would be totally non-destructive, and would not bother the infectee by consuming resources. (i.e. your example of monitoring CPU and network) Some people have predicted that the first true AI will be an entity that grows out of the network. I think this is exactly the way to do it. Someone suggested a small daemon that communicates with itself. I have seen code that changes its name every second, to prevent killing, and obscure it in 'ps' output. Monitoring load and network bandwidth is pretty easy, even for a program that isn't running as root. I wonder if someone will eventually write this...
--Bob
--Bob
What does this mean for banner-ad filtering software. How log will it be before some corporate exec at a web ad agency gets bored?
--Bob