If you want something new, go to 'backports' or to 'unstable' and, uh, lose stability...
Stable with backports of things that I really want latest releases of, like gnome and firefox etc, is my setup of choice.
"Unstable" just means "we haven't tested and tuned it for years to the point where we stake our reputation on it being stable." It doesn't necessarily mean you're "losing stability", it means you're losing their assurance that it's stable.
I've been using stable with backports of XFree86 and gnome on my laptop for 2 years without a *single* crash. I p
Slightly off-topic, but hey. The site is slashdotted with a "too many connections error"
<rant>
This is why just about no-one should use php's mysql_pconnect function. It sounds great, "Oh cool it will keep the connection open so apache doesn't have to reconnect to the server." The connection overhead when mysql is running on the same machine is minimal, and you don't run into this problem where apache spawns 50 child processes, each of with its own persistent connection, and eventually you get the "too many connections error".
</rant>
Why are some linux releases still hanging onto the 2.4.26 kernel
I am not sure what is going on, but a samba 3.0 server I maintain has been quite slow at processing domain logons with 2.6.x. Switching back to the debian provided 2.4.18 kernel speeded them up quite a bit.
Admittedly it might be because I compiled the 2.6.x one myself, but things like this make me uneasy about using newer kernels that haven't been so rigorously tested.
Just say 20 years from now I am on my quantum fandangle computer that does sub-atomic calculations, what happens when background radiation hits the processor and flips a few 1s and 0s?
Quantum error correction. is a sub-field of quantum computing concerned with just that, how to effectively perform a quantum computation in the presence of background radiation and other stuff which sub-atomic thingies tend to be quite sensitive to.
The likelyhood of flipping a few zeros and ones ( and other errors which can afflict quantum bits) is very high, and in reality is more a continuously decay than an instant flip.
It has been shown, however, that this continuous decay is equivalent to flip errors and phase errors (the other sort of quantum error) occuring with some probability. That probability is 1 in 10 for most of the current experiments, compared to your box in front of you which is more like 1 in 10 billion.
Fault-tolerant quantum computing is a theory field of research concerned with how good quantum computers have to be before quantum error correction can work. The best results at the moment suggest a probability of error of 1 in 1000 is good enough. The experimenters have a fair ways to go yet.
Turing's 1936 paper "On Computable numbers, with an application to the entsheidungsproblem"
was the seminal work on artificial intelligence and computation. Cellular automata are more an outgrowth of this work. They aren't even that different from Turing machines - they maintain a state and have rules for changing that state depending on their neighbours.
And Wolfram certainly hasn't discovered much that's impressed anyone else working in the physics / computer science world.
Re:Definately a bad choice on the part of the devs
on
A New Look For Firefox
·
· Score: 1
It doesn't look like that in Windows or Linux. Go here for Windows screenshots.
No no, that was for a timed button press. Sure the patent numbers are identical, and they may in fact be the same patent, but people are far more likely to become hysterical if it's referred to as a double-click patent.
Whatever you do, DON'T buy the OpenGL Superbible. It is a terrible book, consisting of uninteresting examples accompanied by banal attempts at a light-hearted introduction to the library that provide no insight whatsoever.
I'd buy the Reference Manual reviewed here, and use the tutorials at nehe.gamedev.net for an entry point.
They are talking one-time pads. The quantum key distribution protocol simply allows you to keep generating an endless one time pad, and lets you know whether someone else has eavesdropped on it.
If key exchange is done over the wire, you perform that step for each of them. If a key is exchanged via another channel (say by floppy disk) then there is no need for the quantum crypto anyway.
You should read about the actual quantum key distribution protocol. The two parties do share an initial private key, but unlike any classical cryptographic protocol the encryption scheme is not
Exhaustible, as in the case of a one time pad or
Subject to extra assumptions for security, such as RSA which assumes the difficulty of factoring large numbers.
So, there are two advantages the scheme has over conventional cryptography.
QC gets you nothing but an increase in complexity
This is akin to saying that quantum mechanics is an increase in complexity over classical physics, and is thus completely wrong.
Let's say there's an open source program X. I extend X and create X++. If X is GPL, then the only way I can distribute X++ is if it is also GPL -- I'm forced to give away my additions, whether I want to or not.
X++ is a collaboration between you and the original author, it's not exclusively your work. If you are going to collaborate with another author you need to agree on licensing issues, otherwise you cannot work together.
If the author has licensed his/her work under the GPL, then you may only extend it by entering into a licence agreement with that author. If you don't agree with the person's licensing philosophy, then don't work with them. Or equivalently, don't use their work in your project.
All freedoms involve compromise, otherwise it's just anarchy.
Freedom is, among other things, the absence of artificial constraints.
If you read the GPL or anything related by the FSF you'd see that they are very specific about what they mean by freedom.
"More precisely, it refers to four kinds of freedom, for the users of the software:
The freedom to run the program, for any purpose (freedom 0).
The freedom to study how the program works, and adapt it to your needs (freedom 1). Access to the source code is a precondition for this.
The freedom to redistribute copies so you can help your neighbor (freedom 2).
The freedom to improve the program, and release your improvements to the public, so that the whole community benefits (freedom 3). Access to the source code is a precondition for this."
The goal of the GPL is to promote free software in their sense - not yours. People doing whatever they want with GPL code us not promoting freedom in their sense.
It depends what you'd prefer, freedom for individuals, or freedom for everybody.
The article though is a bit hand-wavy over why the information is preserved in this new theory...
The abstract from the NPB article is
It has been found that the states of the 2-charge extremal D1-D5 system are given by smooth geometries that have no singularity and no horizon individually, but a `horizon' does arise after `coarse-graining'. To see how this concept extends to the 3-charge extremal system, we construct a perturbation on the D1-D5 geometry that carries one unit of momentum charge P. The perturbation is found to be regular everywhere and normalizable, so we conclude that at least this state of the 3-charge system behaves like the 2-charge states. The solution is constructed by matching (to several orders) solutions in the inner and outer regions of the geometry. We conjecture the general form of `hair' expected for the 3-charge system, and the nature of the interior of black holes in general.
If your institution is a subscriber you can get the full text from here
Slashdot Mirror
I'd replace the dead HD for about $15.
It's a laptop, dufus.
If you want something new, go to 'backports' or to 'unstable' and, uh, lose stability...
Stable with backports of things that I really want latest releases of, like gnome and firefox etc, is my setup of choice.
"Unstable" just means "we haven't tested and tuned it for years to the point where we stake our reputation on it being stable." It doesn't necessarily mean you're "losing stability", it means you're losing their assurance that it's stable.
I've been using stable with backports of XFree86 and gnome on my laptop for 2 years without a *single* crash.
I p
I have been using stable with
Hell yes. fixedsys for everybody.
True. But typical ISPs don't.
It isn't nice to blame PHP for the sysadmin's lack of foresight.
I wan't blaming PHP, I was blaming web scripter's undiscerning use of persistent connections.
Slightly off-topic, but hey. The site is slashdotted with a "too many connections error"
<rant>
This is why just about no-one should use php's mysql_pconnect function. It sounds great, "Oh cool it will keep the connection open so apache doesn't have to reconnect to the server." The connection overhead when mysql is running on the same machine is minimal, and you don't run into this problem where apache spawns 50 child processes, each of with its own persistent connection, and eventually you get the "too many connections error".
</rant>
Why are some linux releases still hanging onto the 2.4.26 kernel
I am not sure what is going on, but a samba 3.0 server I maintain has been quite slow at processing domain logons with 2.6.x. Switching back to the debian provided 2.4.18 kernel speeded them up quite a bit.
Admittedly it might be because I compiled the 2.6.x one myself, but things like this make me uneasy about using newer kernels that haven't been so rigorously tested.
"Some of us" meaning yourself, Ben, and Umesh I am guessing ;)
Yep, it probably is quite a few orders of magnitude off.
:P
I definately hope that my hard drive controller has some error correction built into it though
Just say 20 years from now I am on my quantum fandangle computer that does sub-atomic calculations, what happens when background radiation hits the processor and flips a few 1s and 0s?
Quantum error correction. is a sub-field of quantum computing concerned with just that, how to effectively perform a quantum computation in the presence of background radiation and other stuff which sub-atomic thingies tend to be quite sensitive to.
The likelyhood of flipping a few zeros and ones ( and other errors which can afflict quantum bits) is very high, and in reality is more a continuously decay than an instant flip.
It has been shown, however, that this continuous decay is equivalent to flip errors and phase errors (the other sort of quantum error) occuring with some probability. That probability is 1 in 10 for most of the current experiments, compared to your box in front of you which is more like 1 in 10 billion.
Fault-tolerant quantum computing is a theory field of research concerned with how good quantum computers have to be before quantum error correction can work. The best results at the moment suggest a probability of error of 1 in 1000 is good enough. The experimenters have a fair ways to go yet.
Turing's 1936 paper "On Computable numbers, with an application to the entsheidungsproblem"
was the seminal work on artificial intelligence and computation. Cellular automata are more an outgrowth of this work. They aren't even that different from Turing machines - they maintain a state and have rules for changing that state depending on their neighbours.
And Wolfram certainly hasn't discovered much that's impressed anyone else working in the physics / computer science world.
It doesn't look like that in Windows or Linux. Go here for Windows screenshots.
Windows Media player is fine for this
Bloody windows users. I'll be using xine and xmms on my OpenZaurus PDA thankyou very much.
No no, that was for a timed button press. Sure the patent numbers are identical, and they may in fact be the same patent, but people are far more likely to become hysterical if it's referred to as a double-click patent.
Insurance and regular backups.
I wouldn't mind one of them regardless of muscular disability.
Is a course being offered at caltech since last summer on using gpus for numerical work. Course page is here.
Whatever you do, DON'T buy the OpenGL Superbible. It is a terrible book, consisting of uninteresting examples accompanied by banal attempts at a light-hearted introduction to the library that provide no insight whatsoever.
I'd buy the Reference Manual reviewed here, and use the tutorials at nehe.gamedev.net for an entry point.
Do you get a patent on flora by finding it growing in a field?
They are talking one-time pads. The quantum key distribution protocol simply allows you to keep generating an endless one time pad, and lets you know whether someone else has eavesdropped on it.
You should read about the actual quantum key distribution protocol. The two parties do share an initial private key, but unlike any classical cryptographic protocol the encryption scheme is not
So, there are two advantages the scheme has over conventional cryptography.
QC gets you nothing but an increase in complexity
This is akin to saying that quantum mechanics is an increase in complexity over classical physics, and is thus completely wrong.
Let's say there's an open source program X. I extend X and create X++. If X is GPL, then the only way I can distribute X++ is if it is also GPL -- I'm forced to give away my additions, whether I want to or not.
X++ is a collaboration between you and the original author, it's not exclusively your work. If you are going to collaborate with another author you need to agree on licensing issues, otherwise you cannot work together.
If the author has licensed his/her work under the GPL, then you may only extend it by entering into a licence agreement with that author. If you don't agree with the person's licensing philosophy, then don't work with them. Or equivalently, don't use their work in your project.
All freedoms involve compromise, otherwise it's just anarchy.
If you read the GPL or anything related by the FSF you'd see that they are very specific about what they mean by freedom.
"More precisely, it refers to four kinds of freedom, for the users of the software:
- The freedom to run the program, for any purpose (freedom 0).
- The freedom to study how the program works, and adapt it to your needs (freedom 1). Access to the source code is a precondition for this.
- The freedom to redistribute copies so you can help your neighbor (freedom 2).
- The freedom to improve the program, and release your improvements to the public, so that the whole community benefits (freedom 3). Access to the source code is a precondition for this."
The goal of the GPL is to promote free software in their sense - not yours. People doing whatever they want with GPL code us not promoting freedom in their sense.It depends what you'd prefer, freedom for individuals, or freedom for everybody.
The abstract from the NPB article is
It has been found that the states of the 2-charge extremal D1-D5 system are given by smooth geometries that have no singularity and no horizon individually, but a `horizon' does arise after `coarse-graining'. To see how this concept extends to the 3-charge extremal system, we construct a perturbation on the D1-D5 geometry that carries one unit of momentum charge P. The perturbation is found to be regular everywhere and normalizable, so we conclude that at least this state of the 3-charge system behaves like the 2-charge states. The solution is constructed by matching (to several orders) solutions in the inner and outer regions of the geometry. We conjecture the general form of `hair' expected for the 3-charge system, and the nature of the interior of black holes in general.
If your institution is a subscriber you can get the full text from here
http://www.nuclearelephant.com/images/screenshot.j pg
That's freedesktop? Cool - how stable/fast is it?
And why on earth is that promising?
He/she didn't say why it was promising. He/she said, it was promising *and* also supported some neat things like drop shadows and translucency.