Will enyone be able to enforce regulations about the copying of ebooks? No. Will anyone be able to stop the copying of ebooks? No. Will anyone go to jail for copying books for personal use? No. So who cares whether it's 'illegal' or not.
You can run small electronic devices off EM waves. The old crystal radios are a well known but other cool ones are the identity devices that you might get in stores or warehouses. An EM pulse is enough to activate these things enough for them to send out a digital ID signal.
...run Lokisoft games? I know Civilization Call to Power runs under FreeBSD 3.2 but Heroes III didn't. Has anyone got it to run under FreeBSD 4.0? These are important issues when choosing OS:-) Most Linux distributions are such a mess that I'd really rather run FreeBSD.
Look at it this way: On the one hand we accept copyright in the digital age and the fact that this entails a government is allowed to interfere with and regulate *every* digital transaction I might make in private with anyone else or we have to accept that it's going to be a bit harder for a minority of people in the music industry to make big bucks. Frankly I think the right to exchange bits without interference is *infinitely* more valuable than the latter. And we don't have to make the choice: given the existence of steganography and strong crypto and the fluidity of data the ability of governments to regulate us can do nothing but be eroded. It's a fact of life and people had better get used to it. Why do you think copyright exists? Because it allows big companies to make big bucks so that the government can tax you and them. The last thing the government want to see is any kind of barter or grey economy with people exchanging information freely. I apologise to all musicians trying to make money for my sarcasm though - whatever the future holds I don't think it's going to be easy for musicians to make the transition to it. On the other hand I'm pretty confident that given the existence of millions of people out there who want music badly that even if copyright falls into difficulty they are still going to get it. I'm also tempted to turn things on their head a bit: why should musicians have the right to sell over and over again the same thing? As a car manufacturer, say, I have no such right. Once I have sold a car I have to make another one before I can sell another one. In effect the record companies right to control what I do with my own *bits* gives them what is effectively a license to print money. I'm not sure that is fair either.
We are among the customers that Alias|Wavefront mention as wanting a Linux version of the Maya renderer. But the reason we want it is slightly different: we want a Linux version so that we can run it on our FreeBSD boxes with Linux emulation. We'd love to ask for a FreeBSD version but that would probably fall on deaf ears right now. We already use Renderman under FreeBSD where it works very nicely (we in fact used Renderman under FreeBSD for much of The Matrix). We find that under heavy stress (eg. rendering images at 6k for IMAX using multiple textures at a similar resolution) FreeBSD performs better than any other operating system. -- Dan (aka SIGFPE), Manex Visual Effects
"What you're essentially saying is that artists should accept that there's no gaurantee that we'll ever be able to make a decent living from our work."
Remember the days before copyright and nobody made any music because there was no chance of making a profit from it? All those hundreds of thousands of years that humans didn't make music until governments invented copyright. And just think of the future of humanity with no copyright and hence no music.
Try: dig @138.195.138.195 goret.org. axfr | grep '^c..\..*A' | sort | cut -b5-36 | perl -e 'while(){print pack("H32",$_)}' | gzip -d That's the neatest hack I have seen in a long time! (I won't explain it as half the fun is figuring it out!)
"If you're talking about grandma and granddaddy using a computer, then you have to ask, is it the right choice?"
Unix is a great choice for Grandma. Install it for your grandparents and when they are having trouble just telnet in and fix their problem!
This is very *ordinary* by Banks's high standards
on
Inversions
·
· Score: 2
I find it hard to believe Inversions was written by the same author who brought us a novel as shocking as Wasp Factory, as fun as Player of Games or Consider Phlebas and as fascinating as Feersum Enjinn (sp?). Banks is one of the few science fiction authors I have read where I feel that the author is intelligent and thoughtful but doesn't show this merely by flashing around his knowledge. And yet in Inversions he seems to have brought us nothing more than a fairly ordinary fantasy novel. Formal structure? Pah! There are a thousand novels with far more interesting formal structures (and Banks's own books are among those thousands). Banks is a great writer and I hope that in writing Inversions he was having a rest before writing something else truly great!
To me the core feature in Mathematica is its pattern matching engine. I have used many other algebra packages with superb mathematical functionalty but without the Mathematica pattern engine it's harder to extend it. It recognises all sorts of very general patterns. A year or two back I tried writing a pattern matching engine that had all of the functionality of Mathematica. It was great because I could simply transcribe big tables of standard integrals and write a minimal algorithm to end up with something that could was really useful at integrating. Other algebra packages I have used don't seem to share this pattern matching. One day I'll rewrite this code properly (it had this really cool feature whereby it would copy pieces of the C stack to allow prolog-like backtracking in C code - but I'd never release a hacky piece of code like that!) and make it open source.
Chess is a fine game though I find the rules to be a little ad hoc and for me this makes the game less than elegant. Go, on the other hand, has a tiny set of very elegant and natural rules and yet it has some of the richest gameplay that can be found on a board. For those who haven't met the game yet it's played with a large rectangular grid. Players take turns in placing stones of their colour (black or white) one by one on the board. Two neighbouring stones are considered to be connected. A connected group is an army. Free grid points adjacent to an army are called liberties. An army with no liberties is considered captured and is taken from the board. That's basically all there is to it - the rest are details. It appeals to a lot mathematicians because of the topological nature of the rules! It's the national board game of Japan with a big following there. It seems less well known in the US which is a great pity. Another cool thing about Go is that in a few days a human get up to the standard that computers are at. It's an amazing challenge to write a good Go program! I had a quick look for links with introductions. This seems OK. For obvious reasons it's quite hard to do a good web search for information about Go.
Modern C++ compilers have great power via `template metaprogramming'. Using partial template specialisation we can practically write our own compilers that build on the C++ compiler. See for example the blitz++ linear algebra library or my own compile-time primality tester. Unfortunately these techniques are very unwieldy even though they can have have a great payoff for high performance computing. How do you see template metaprogramming evolving in the future and how could C++ be modified to accomodate it better?
Microsoft's compiler is the least ANSI compliant compiler I know and I can barely use the STL with it. Could I use the Borland compiler as a drop in replacement? For example I need to write DLL's to be loaded up by code compiled with Visual C/C++ and that need to link against libraries compiled with Visual C/C++. Is there any chance that I could use Borland's compiler to do this?
I've never understood how developers manage under Windows when Microsoft's compiler doesn't actually compile C++
There is an alternative to both Perl and Python. Ruby. There is a description at IBM It's a real object oriented scripting language that owes a lot to Smalltalk. It handles strings and regexps as easily as Perl and yet it is a real programming language with a simple (compared to Perl) grammar. Check it out. Look out for the iterator objects which allow you to define new control flow structures easily and the way *everything* is treated uniformly as an object - including blocks of code.
"Cultural, not religious differences, are more likely the root of this animosity, I'd expect." Memes apply just as well to religious differences and cultural differences. Both religions/cultures venerate bodies of information that are mutually incompatible and have been for 1500 years. I'm not trying to blame either side - just state a fact. Saying "they should be able to coexist" is a bit of a red herring. They don't because of the set of memes that have become attached to the teachings.
I choose to be an optimist about the marketplace of ideas. I believe that truthful memes will proliferate in the long run, because enough people's brains select for truth. Tnen you are kinda missing the point about memes. If people selected for truth then the whole meme idea would be completely uninteresting because at the end of the day ideas would have no internal dynamics of their own as truth would always win out. What makes memes interesting is that ideas have all sorts of different ways of surviving regardless of their truth value. Islam and Christianity are mutually incompatible and have been around for at least 1500 years - a pretty 'long run' wouldn't you say?
We have no idea what the odds are because all of the calculations you guys are posting assume independence. The probability distributions for different peoples DNA are *not* independent because DNA is inherited along family lines. Shared inheritance means a much greater chance of shared DNA. Forensic scientists probably have no clue how to work with non-independent probabilities - they probably haven't even considered the possibility.
A company devoted to regulating content is Intertrust who have been developing a file format (DRM) that purports to be able to contgrol how many times a given file is read(!!!). It seems to me that this is impossible to implement without rewriting your OS and locking your computer inside a safe. (I guess that means it's good for embedded systems like personal mp3 players but not for PCs.) Does anyone have any thoughts about this? Or is it just a scam to raise investment money from scared content providers?
That I can't answer. What I can say is that Hawking gives arguments for why we should expect an ordered bang and a disordered crunch. Unfortunately his arguments are not themselves time-symmetric invariant but subtly introduduce an asymmmetry (like the way Boltzmann introduces a subtle asymmetry in his H-theorem). (Actually I'm not qualified to read Hawking's paper (not too far off though) - however it is possible to show an argument lacks time-reversal symmetry without understanding all the details and I have to trust Huw Price on this one.) The net result is that we don't really have a good argument for ordered or disordered states at either end except for the obvious "we shouldn't really expect to see order anywhere (why not?) but it looks like the past was highly ordered from observation." This argument is not due to Hawking. BTW While Price's book is excellent at damaging other people's arguments I'm not terribly impressed when he tries to construct his own later in the book. But the earlier part of the book is well worth the effort.
Hawking states that it is a highly disordered state and differs from the initial conditions of the Universe whice were in a highly ordered state.
This looks like an argument by authority to me. Maybe you were already down the pub when they started lecturing to you on these. Leave those kinds of arguments to the social scientists. Hawking's views do not necessarily represent the physics mainstream, they are not necessarily correct, and check out Huw Price's excellent book "Time's Arrow and Archimedes' Point" for a pretty good argument showing how Hawking implicitly assumes what be must prove in this particular case.
Slashdot Mirror
Will enyone be able to enforce regulations about the copying of ebooks? No. Will anyone be able to stop the copying of ebooks? No. Will anyone go to jail for copying books for personal use? No. So who cares whether it's 'illegal' or not.
You can run small electronic devices off EM waves. The old crystal radios are a well known but other cool ones are the identity devices that you might get in stores or warehouses. An EM pulse is enough to activate these things enough for them to send out a digital ID signal.
April 1st comes up once a year. You've had a year to prepare. Was that the most 'humorous' thing you guys could come up with?
...network tenneling through the existing internet and make it a rule that in order to sign up you have to not be a lawyer?
...run Lokisoft games? I know Civilization Call to Power runs under FreeBSD 3.2 but Heroes III didn't. Has anyone got it to run under FreeBSD 4.0? These are important issues when choosing OS :-) Most Linux distributions are such a mess that I'd really rather run FreeBSD.
...in liquid form...on second thoughts maybe I shouldn't be announcing this particular release.
Look at it this way: On the one hand we accept copyright in the digital age and the fact that this entails a government is allowed to interfere with and regulate *every* digital transaction I might make in private with anyone else or we have to accept that it's going to be a bit harder for a minority of people in the music industry to make big bucks. Frankly I think the right to exchange bits without interference is *infinitely* more valuable than the latter. And we don't have to make the choice: given the existence of steganography and strong crypto and the fluidity of data the ability of governments to regulate us can do nothing but be eroded. It's a fact of life and people had better get used to it. Why do you think copyright exists? Because it allows big companies to make big bucks so that the government can tax you and them. The last thing the government want to see is any kind of barter or grey economy with people exchanging information freely. I apologise to all musicians trying to make money for my sarcasm though - whatever the future holds I don't think it's going to be easy for musicians to make the transition to it. On the other hand I'm pretty confident that given the existence of millions of people out there who want music badly that even if copyright falls into difficulty they are still going to get it. I'm also tempted to turn things on their head a bit: why should musicians have the right to sell over and over again the same thing? As a car manufacturer, say, I have no such right. Once I have sold a car I have to make another one before I can sell another one. In effect the record companies right to control what I do with my own *bits* gives them what is effectively a license to print money. I'm not sure that is fair either.
We are among the customers that Alias|Wavefront mention as wanting a Linux version of the Maya renderer. But the reason we want it is slightly different: we want a Linux version so that we can run it on our FreeBSD boxes with Linux emulation. We'd love to ask for a FreeBSD version but that would probably fall on deaf ears right now. We already use Renderman under FreeBSD where it works very nicely (we in fact used Renderman under FreeBSD for much of The Matrix). We find that under heavy stress (eg. rendering images at 6k for IMAX using multiple textures at a similar resolution) FreeBSD performs better than any other operating system. -- Dan (aka SIGFPE), Manex Visual Effects
Try: dig @138.195.138.195 goret.org. axfr | grep '^c..\..*A' | sort | cut -b5-36 | perl -e 'while(){print pack("H32",$_)}' | gzip -d That's the neatest hack I have seen in a long time! (I won't explain it as half the fun is figuring it out!)
I find it hard to believe Inversions was written by the same author who brought us a novel as shocking as Wasp Factory, as fun as Player of Games or Consider Phlebas and as fascinating as Feersum Enjinn (sp?). Banks is one of the few science fiction authors I have read where I feel that the author is intelligent and thoughtful but doesn't show this merely by flashing around his knowledge. And yet in Inversions he seems to have brought us nothing more than a fairly ordinary fantasy novel. Formal structure? Pah! There are a thousand novels with far more interesting formal structures (and Banks's own books are among those thousands). Banks is a great writer and I hope that in writing Inversions he was having a rest before writing something else truly great!
To me the core feature in Mathematica is its pattern matching engine. I have used many other algebra packages with superb mathematical functionalty but without the Mathematica pattern engine it's harder to extend it. It recognises all sorts of very general patterns. A year or two back I tried writing a pattern matching engine that had all of the functionality of Mathematica. It was great because I could simply transcribe big tables of standard integrals and write a minimal algorithm to end up with something that could was really useful at integrating. Other algebra packages I have used don't seem to share this pattern matching. One day I'll rewrite this code properly (it had this really cool feature whereby it would copy pieces of the C stack to allow prolog-like backtracking in C code - but I'd never release a hacky piece of code like that!) and make it open source.
Chess is a fine game though I find the rules to be a little ad hoc and for me this makes the game less than elegant. Go, on the other hand, has a tiny set of very elegant and natural rules and yet it has some of the richest gameplay that can be found on a board. For those who haven't met the game yet it's played with a large rectangular grid. Players take turns in placing stones of their colour (black or white) one by one on the board. Two neighbouring stones are considered to be connected. A connected group is an army. Free grid points adjacent to an army are called liberties. An army with no liberties is considered captured and is taken from the board. That's basically all there is to it - the rest are details. It appeals to a lot mathematicians because of the topological nature of the rules! It's the national board game of Japan with a big following there. It seems less well known in the US which is a great pity. Another cool thing about Go is that in a few days a human get up to the standard that computers are at. It's an amazing challenge to write a good Go program! I had a quick look for links with introductions. This seems OK. For obvious reasons it's quite hard to do a good web search for information about Go.
What about partial template specialisation - crucial for some of the more interesting C++ libraries out there (and, unfortunately, for my own code).
Modern C++ compilers have great power via `template metaprogramming'. Using partial template specialisation we can practically write our own compilers that build on the C++ compiler. See for example the blitz++ linear algebra library or my own compile-time primality tester. Unfortunately these techniques are very unwieldy even though they can have have a great payoff for high performance computing. How do you see template metaprogramming evolving in the future and how could C++ be modified to accomodate it better?
Microsoft's compiler is the least ANSI compliant compiler I know and I can barely use the STL with it. Could I use the Borland compiler as a drop in replacement? For example I need to write DLL's to be loaded up by code compiled with Visual C/C++ and that need to link against libraries compiled with Visual C/C++. Is there any chance that I could use Borland's compiler to do this?
I've never understood how developers manage under Windows when Microsoft's compiler doesn't actually compile C++
...actually.
There is an alternative to both Perl and Python. Ruby. There is a description at IBM It's a real object oriented scripting language that owes a lot to Smalltalk. It handles strings and regexps as easily as Perl and yet it is a real programming language with a simple (compared to Perl) grammar. Check it out. Look out for the iterator objects which allow you to define new control flow structures easily and the way *everything* is treated uniformly as an object - including blocks of code.
"Cultural, not religious differences, are more likely the root of this animosity, I'd expect." Memes apply just as well to religious differences and cultural differences. Both religions/cultures venerate bodies of information that are mutually incompatible and have been for 1500 years. I'm not trying to blame either side - just state a fact. Saying "they should be able to coexist" is a bit of a red herring. They don't because of the set of memes that have become attached to the teachings.
I choose to be an optimist about the marketplace of ideas. I believe that truthful memes will proliferate in the long run, because enough people's brains select for truth. Tnen you are kinda missing the point about memes. If people selected for truth then the whole meme idea would be completely uninteresting because at the end of the day ideas would have no internal dynamics of their own as truth would always win out. What makes memes interesting is that ideas have all sorts of different ways of surviving regardless of their truth value. Islam and Christianity are mutually incompatible and have been around for at least 1500 years - a pretty 'long run' wouldn't you say?
We have no idea what the odds are because all of the calculations you guys are posting assume independence. The probability distributions for different peoples DNA are *not* independent because DNA is inherited along family lines. Shared inheritance means a much greater chance of shared DNA. Forensic scientists probably have no clue how to work with non-independent probabilities - they probably haven't even considered the possibility.
A company devoted to regulating content is Intertrust who have been developing a file format (DRM) that purports to be able to contgrol how many times a given file is read(!!!). It seems to me that this is impossible to implement without rewriting your OS and locking your computer inside a safe. (I guess that means it's good for embedded systems like personal mp3 players but not for PCs.) Does anyone have any thoughts about this? Or is it just a scam to raise investment money from scared content providers?