As an Aussie, it is likely our government will be asked to provide support for the NMD system (basically, the US runs some frigging huge spy satellite ground stations on Aussie soil), and for the life of me I still haven't heard a single sensible argument for NMD come out of its proponents.
My guess is that it's really aimed at taking China's ICBM's out of the game if there's a confrontation over Taiwan, but even that doesn't make sense (smuggled-in weapons render the world's best NMD system useless).
So, can anyone point me to a well-thought-out justification for NMD that convinces me to do something other than encourage my government to tell the US government to go jump when they ask to use the Australian bases for this (not that my encouragement will make a lick of difference, but . . . )
It should be obvious that, when it comes to computers, that just about anything that can be done in hardware can be done in software and vice versa. Now, say you come up with some brilliant new algorithm, and to save any arguments about it being novel and nonobvious we'll make it an O(n^2) solution for the satisfiability problem:-)
You'd obviously like our brilliant "invention" protected as broadly as we can, even in places where software isn't patentable. Hardware, however, is patentable everywhere. So, what you do is implement your algorithm in a custom chip and patent the chip design. Once this is done, not only does *hardware* implementing the algorithm infringe the patent, but so does software.
As I understand it, this is how IDEA was patented in Europe, along with a bunch of compression algorithms.
Back when I used windows (long, long time ago, but I can still remember when the crashes made me frown . . . ), I remember that there were "theme engines" for the pathetic amount of customization Win95 let you do (basically backgrounds and sounds).
And what about Java's Swing toolkit, which lets your application look like a Windows program, a Mac program, and so on. I dunno exactly when it was released, but I'd guess that it was in development before the patent was filed.
Well, a friend of mine, whose day job is web programming, maintains the Fashion Model Index, and has consequently corresponded occasionally with a few of the models featured in it. Another guy I know works at a company that sells what is essentially accounting software for the fashion industry, and a lot of the non-programming staff are ex-models. The really annoying part of all this is my friend is living with his high school sweetheart and is disgustingly faithful . . .
So, while it's not the typical lot of a sysadmin or programmer, it is possible:)
Remember, most people don't know about country
coding for DVDs now, because most people don't travel overseas very often.
I wouldn't go so far as to say that *most* people buying DVD's in Australia understand CSS, but a fair proportion do, as ordering DVDs from the US well before video release here is quite popular. It's gotten to the point where even the chain stores were openly advertising some of their units as "multi-zone";)
New Zealand have gone even further, every DVD player shipped there *must* be multi-zone, IIRC, because the monopolies commission could smell the distinct odor of rat coming from the movie industry:)
Of course, the thing about the CBM drives that made them the most fun drives to play with was the onboard 6502 processor with its 2k of memory, allowing you to download and execute code in the drive, speeding it up, flashing error messages in morse code on the LED, or even playing music using the stepper motor.
Never heard the musical disk drives, but I once saw somebody who wrote some code to simulate a dimmer on the floppy drive lights. It'd just slowly get brighter, then fade again. Very nifty:)
You're right in that, from what I can see, Google deserves fulsome praise for attempting to save this important historical resource. However, the fact remains that because of its very importance, the preservation of the USENET archive shouldn't just be left to the fortunes of commerce. Librarians are the experts in the long-term storage and archiving of information, and an instrument like the Library of Congress is an appropriate body to do so - even so, *several* bodies in several nations should be archiving this stuff, not one.
This allows your application to define a custom tag for the render to catch and call you - thus allowing your code to use HTML for displaying interfaces with complex parts drawn by custom GTK components. There are no security problems as they cannot be put on the Internet.
For instance, consider a financial report with a movable, customizable graph inside it. Very difficult to do with standard HTML. Very easy to do when GtkHTML. As for security, the HTML is locally generated, and the embedded widget is from local code.
Theoretically, you *could* use GtkHTML's abilities to do an ActiveX-like job, but that would be bad practice and no code using GtkHTML does it AFAIK.
I think you might be somewhat underestimating the improvement in CPU performance - the 32-bit registers and floating point hardware make a massive difference on many tasks (have a look at a 32-bit multiplication routine written in assembly for a 8-bit processor one day, let alone floating-point operations).
Comparisons like this are very hard to make, of course, because any benchmark that runs on the older machine can run entirely in L1 or L2 cache on the newer one, representing an entirely unrealistic workload for the new machine.
"Dude, there is a bug in GtkHTML."
"That isn't a GtkHTML bug."
"Yeah dude, it is.
"Dude, no it isn't."
"Dude, it is."
"No, dude, it isn't." ...
Yep, had that conversation with the GtkHTML guys. A couple did turn out to be their fault, though;) Seriously, GtkHTML is a seriously cool piece of software, and the project I hack on, GnuCash, is make ever-heavier use of it. Want a GTK+ widget in the middle of your HTML page? Set up a custom tag for it and there you go. No mess, no fuss (well, not quite, but almost), and incredibly powerful . . .
You could try the project page, or check the linux-kernel mailing list archives.
Kernel Traffic, the linux kernel development newsletter, seemed to indicate that the idea has been welcomed, except for ESR's choice of Python as the development language, as many people are concerned that it means that you need a working python environment to build a kernel.
ESR's thoughts *are* worth considering. He still does real coding (for instance, he's currently working on replacing the Linux kernel configuration system with something considerably better, from all accounts), and he is a thoughtful and incisive writer - lets not discount the value that many of his writings have had.
Yes, he has a big ego which he's not afraid to let show (at least in his writing, he may be a wallflower in person for all I know), but so do a lot of other people who have done considerably less than he has.
Sure, don't treat the guy as some kind of god, but don't ignore him just because he's not the flavour of the month any more.
I think this is certainly worth a try - it's a good test of the "things aren't like the good old days" theory, if nothing else.
This would be a great idea to set up as a competition, actually, with a critic's choice and player's choice award at the end. I'm sure that you could get one of the game companies to sponsor it (particularly as it would get that company the chance to potentially snare a new developer or two).
Well, not quite, but as someone who was in one of the other of the 13 Melbourne university colleges at the time, I might be able to explain the situation a bit better.
At the time, many colleges were simply using dialup modems to connect to the university network, one computer at a time. Students in the rooms had no choice but to do the same. Administration of machines was performed, in many of the colleges, by essentially clueless PC-tweaker guys who had never used Unix in their lives and consequently had no idea what CS students wanted and knew was possible. So, around this time, students and a few of the more clued-in staff around the crescent started lobbying their respective administrations, most of whom knew nothing about IT, to start networking their colleges. After *much* butting heads up against heritage-listed stone walls, every college was connected to the wider university network through a very nice fibre-optic link.
At the same time, many of the colleges realised that their PC-tweaker "consultants" didn't have the skills required, and a different solution was required. Whitley went down the student-administered route. Other colleges did not, including my own. While I did consider pushing for it at the time, there are various issues, some of which are general arguments against student-administered IT systems and covered elsewhere, and others were largely political and specific to my particular college.
Anyway, Whitley do deserve plaudits for their system, and I'm glad it works for them. They have been somewhat lucky to have talented and dedicated students to fill the IT committee's role, and they'll have to be careful to make sure that continues.
I still hope that UC kicks their arses in the "chicks footy" (women's Aussie Rules football) tournament this year:)
It's not an entire university. It's a residential college. It's communal housing for about 120-odd students, and a great way to spend your eighteenth and nineteenth year.
I know a guy who was heavily involved in the Whitley IT committee, and he was a mature, responsible individual. Given that the right individuals were on the committee, and the right privacy policy was in place, and the right oversight from the head of college was performed, I'd have no problem with this.
I'm no compression expert but I regularly get 10:1 compression on text files using guess what? WinZip.
As the other poster has pointed out, your text files are almost certainly *not* straight English ASCII text (they're HTML, Word files, C code, Unicode-encoded, or something else again).
I'm sorry I wasn't more clear in my post to explain that I was referring to straight ASCII text, not anything else.
As to my colleague, he'd read virtually all the published literature in the area, and he's a pretty smart cookie (he's now on a PhD scholarship at Princeton working with people like Tarjan). I think the thing I learned most from his efforts were that text compression is in a period of diminishing returns for improved algorithms - they're not likely to get much better.
I'm not at all surprised that they can get 8:1 compression of plain text.
I am. One of my postgrad colleagues (back when I was a postgrad) did research into text compression. The best that he could get on the KJV Bible was a little over 1.8 bits per character (about 4.4:1 compression), and IIRC the best *anyone* has ever done with a general-purpose compression scheme is a bit over 1.7, and it turns out that the bible is generally a little more compressible than most other text;) Generally, you'll struggle to get better than 4:1 on most text, and that's using using compressors that are substantially slower than gzip or even bzip2.
While it is correct that studies with humans have indicated that English text has about one bit of entropy per byte, suggesting a natural limit of about 8:1 compression, humans have the use of a whole lot of semantic information (they understand the meaning of the text and can therefore predict words based on that) that no compression algorithm I'm aware of has used.
I'm taking this with a large grain of salt, thanks.
It should be obvious to everyone here, but a rocket that's big enough to launch a satellite is more than big enough to act as an ICBM. The US military doesn't like ICBM's, unless they belong to it.
Of course, there are privacy implications, so you'd want it to be opt-in - and you'd have to be extra paranoid about security.
Re:Do you own a late model car?
on
OS X on x86?
·
· Score: 2
Plan on buying one? Using open source software on it? Emailed the GM engineer about the bug you found in the ABS? Of course, as a purist you're using an open source coded cell phone right?
You're trolling, but you raise an interesting point. Yes, I would like to tell the engineer about the bug that I found in the ABS. Or the fact that the cupholders don't hold bottles of my favourite drink.
To give a more realistic example, my family owns a sport fishing boat, which we operate in rather rough conditions (southern Tasmania, a very windy, rough, and unforgiving place to be at times). Much of the gear that we fit to the boat fails, having been designed for relatively benign boating conditions like those in Florida, and when we repair it we often make modifications to better cope with the conditions. Don't you think the engineers at those companies would be interested?
Open source lets you do the same thing for software. That's what makes it so valuable.
While the Darwin core might well be, the windowing system and graphics toolkit certainly isn't and will never be. I'm not going back to a proprietary operating system if I can possibily avoid it, thanks.
I've gotten kinda used to the idea that I can email the actual person responsible for code if I find a bug. I like being able to check the source if I don't understand what a function does. I like the fact that I will never again be beholden to a software company's whims. It'd take something pretty damned compelling for me to give that up again.
Slashdot Mirror
My guess is that it's really aimed at taking China's ICBM's out of the game if there's a confrontation over Taiwan, but even that doesn't make sense (smuggled-in weapons render the world's best NMD system useless).
So, can anyone point me to a well-thought-out justification for NMD that convinces me to do something other than encourage my government to tell the US government to go jump when they ask to use the Australian bases for this (not that my encouragement will make a lick of difference, but . . . )
You'd obviously like our brilliant "invention" protected as broadly as we can, even in places where software isn't patentable. Hardware, however, is patentable everywhere. So, what you do is implement your algorithm in a custom chip and patent the chip design. Once this is done, not only does *hardware* implementing the algorithm infringe the patent, but so does software.
As I understand it, this is how IDEA was patented in Europe, along with a bunch of compression algorithms.
And what about Java's Swing toolkit, which lets your application look like a Windows program, a Mac program, and so on. I dunno exactly when it was released, but I'd guess that it was in development before the patent was filed.
So, while it's not the typical lot of a sysadmin or programmer, it is possible :)
I wouldn't go so far as to say that *most* people buying DVD's in Australia understand CSS, but a fair proportion do, as ordering DVDs from the US well before video release here is quite popular. It's gotten to the point where even the chain stores were openly advertising some of their units as "multi-zone" ;)
New Zealand have gone even further, every DVD player shipped there *must* be multi-zone, IIRC, because the monopolies commission could smell the distinct odor of rat coming from the movie industry :)
Never heard the musical disk drives, but I once saw somebody who wrote some code to simulate a dimmer on the floppy drive lights. It'd just slowly get brighter, then fade again. Very nifty :)
You're right in that, from what I can see, Google deserves fulsome praise for attempting to save this important historical resource. However, the fact remains that because of its very importance, the preservation of the USENET archive shouldn't just be left to the fortunes of commerce. Librarians are the experts in the long-term storage and archiving of information, and an instrument like the Library of Congress is an appropriate body to do so - even so, *several* bodies in several nations should be archiving this stuff, not one.
For instance, consider a financial report with a movable, customizable graph inside it. Very difficult to do with standard HTML. Very easy to do when GtkHTML. As for security, the HTML is locally generated, and the embedded widget is from local code.
Theoretically, you *could* use GtkHTML's abilities to do an ActiveX-like job, but that would be bad practice and no code using GtkHTML does it AFAIK.
Comparisons like this are very hard to make, of course, because any benchmark that runs on the older machine can run entirely in L1 or L2 cache on the newer one, representing an entirely unrealistic workload for the new machine.
Kernel Traffic, the linux kernel development newsletter, seemed to indicate that the idea has been welcomed, except for ESR's choice of Python as the development language, as many people are concerned that it means that you need a working python environment to build a kernel.
Yes, he has a big ego which he's not afraid to let show (at least in his writing, he may be a wallflower in person for all I know), but so do a lot of other people who have done considerably less than he has.
Sure, don't treat the guy as some kind of god, but don't ignore him just because he's not the flavour of the month any more.
This would be a great idea to set up as a competition, actually, with a critic's choice and player's choice award at the end. I'm sure that you could get one of the game companies to sponsor it (particularly as it would get that company the chance to potentially snare a new developer or two).
At the time, many colleges were simply using dialup modems to connect to the university network, one computer at a time. Students in the rooms had no choice but to do the same. Administration of machines was performed, in many of the colleges, by essentially clueless PC-tweaker guys who had never used Unix in their lives and consequently had no idea what CS students wanted and knew was possible. So, around this time, students and a few of the more clued-in staff around the crescent started lobbying their respective administrations, most of whom knew nothing about IT, to start networking their colleges. After *much* butting heads up against heritage-listed stone walls, every college was connected to the wider university network through a very nice fibre-optic link.
At the same time, many of the colleges realised that their PC-tweaker "consultants" didn't have the skills required, and a different solution was required. Whitley went down the student-administered route. Other colleges did not, including my own. While I did consider pushing for it at the time, there are various issues, some of which are general arguments against student-administered IT systems and covered elsewhere, and others were largely political and specific to my particular college.
Anyway, Whitley do deserve plaudits for their system, and I'm glad it works for them. They have been somewhat lucky to have talented and dedicated students to fill the IT committee's role, and they'll have to be careful to make sure that continues.
I still hope that UC kicks their arses in the "chicks footy" (women's Aussie Rules football) tournament this year :)
It's not an entire university. It's a residential college. It's communal housing for about 120-odd students, and a great way to spend your eighteenth and nineteenth year.
I know a guy who was heavily involved in the Whitley IT committee, and he was a mature, responsible individual. Given that the right individuals were on the committee, and the right privacy policy was in place, and the right oversight from the head of college was performed, I'd have no problem with this.
As to my colleague, he'd read virtually all the published literature in the area, and he's a pretty smart cookie (he's now on a PhD scholarship at Princeton working with people like Tarjan). I think the thing I learned most from his efforts were that text compression is in a period of diminishing returns for improved algorithms - they're not likely to get much better.
While it is correct that studies with humans have indicated that English text has about one bit of entropy per byte, suggesting a natural limit of about 8:1 compression, humans have the use of a whole lot of semantic information (they understand the meaning of the text and can therefore predict words based on that) that no compression algorithm I'm aware of has used.
I'm taking this with a large grain of salt, thanks.
Both the US and USSR deployed liquid-fuelled ICBM's.
It should be obvious to everyone here, but a rocket that's big enough to launch a satellite is more than big enough to act as an ICBM. The US military doesn't like ICBM's, unless they belong to it.
If they could just bump up the capacity to about 64MB ;)
Of course, there are privacy implications, so you'd want it to be opt-in - and you'd have to be extra paranoid about security.
You're trolling, but you raise an interesting point. Yes, I would like to tell the engineer about the bug that I found in the ABS. Or the fact that the cupholders don't hold bottles of my favourite drink.
To give a more realistic example, my family owns a sport fishing boat, which we operate in rather rough conditions (southern Tasmania, a very windy, rough, and unforgiving place to be at times). Much of the gear that we fit to the boat fails, having been designed for relatively benign boating conditions like those in Florida, and when we repair it we often make modifications to better cope with the conditions. Don't you think the engineers at those companies would be interested?
Open source lets you do the same thing for software. That's what makes it so valuable.
I've gotten kinda used to the idea that I can email the actual person responsible for code if I find a bug. I like being able to check the source if I don't understand what a function does. I like the fact that I will never again be beholden to a software company's whims. It'd take something pretty damned compelling for me to give that up again.
You're absolutely correct, it was Humpty Dumpty. Project Gutenberg to the rescue.