In all these years of Linux usage I still have not been able to do clone a display while having different resolutions. Is this actually possible?

I want to present slides on a presentation monitor, which is connected to my Thinkpad (nvidia, binary driver) via VGA cable. At the same time, I want to see the slides on the notebook screen during the presentation. So the screen has to be cloned.

However, the native resolution of the notebook and second (big) monitor differs. For instance, the notebook is 1600x900, the external presentation monitor is 1920x1080. Is there a way to produce the signal in 1920x1080 on the second monitor, and at the same time clone the screen on the notebook screen in another resolution?

You actually got me interested in reading something from Delany, I have never heard of him. His wikipedia page lists Nebula/Hugo awards or nominations for his books, what book would be one of his masterpieces to start with?

Randomly I clicked on Babel-17 and its description about the language of somebody forming the way he perceives reality is already very promising.

For a US-centric Sci-Fi audience (as here on /. with a more ... libertarian crowd) you might be right, in continental Europe Lem is quite known. I also read that the English translations of his books are quite bad and no his literary work no justice. This might be an additional reason why his books are not as highly valued as they should be in the US.

Lems texts contain a heavy dose of philosophy (mostly epistemology), mathematical theory and statistics and also sometimes sociology and psychology and medicine, he was a polymath with a very interesting biography. Also, often he is often able to include a witty sense of humor into these sometimes dry topics that make it a delight to read for somebody familiar with the corresponding scientific background.

His works in both Polish (of course) and in German are top-notch, it would be quite hard to find a writer similar as to how he wrote, maybe the Strugatsky brothers, and a little bit of Gene Wolfe, Umberto Eco and Jorge Borges.

My favorite novels of him are actually non Sci-Fi books:

A Perfect Vacuum: Lem reviews non-existent books (that also cannot really exist physically the way they are described).
The Investigation: A detective is tasked with solving murders and uses statistical theory and philosophical metaphysics during his investigation.
The Cold: Another murder series to be solved, involves again statistics and chaos theory.

How can the parent post get insightful?

Even an advocate of cut-throat capitalism should see that his word choice ("nanny", "five year old children", "mentally handicapped") is purely trolling.

What is this, Glen Becks /. account?

First off, a rant. Either your Computer Science program/dept does not truly deserve the name or you did not fully attempt to master the curriculum as it is intended. I know it sounds harsh, I am mostly annoyed by the constant misconceptions about CS that pop up here on /. from time to time.

A masters degree in Computer Science builds upon the basics of theoretical CS (theory of computation, languages, grammar, logics, discrete math...), technical CS (microcontroller, assembly) and applied CS (functional, OO and logic programming) from a undergraduate CS degree and extends it with topics about Networks (Sockets, Protocols, OSI Layers, Routing), AI (both classical AI with logic, planning and formal systems as well as machine learning), Operating Systems (for instance reimplementing parts of and studying Tannebaums Minix, Filesystems), Databases (Tuple relational calculus, OO databases, inductive databases, knowledge discovery) and also, and this is what I think you definitely missed out on, Software Engineering. This would involve developement models (V-model, Waterfall, extreme programming), UML, testing, maybe software verification, refactoring and so on.

Note that there is not much hacking (in a positive or negative sense) involved here. Great hackers do not necessarily need to be computer scientists, and competent computer scientists definitely do not need to be or leave the university as any from of hackers (be it some low level C pointer wizards or some OS file system experts).

I think what you meant to say is that the university did not teach you how to code in an industrial/enterprise setting. And rightfully so, thats the job of a vocational/trade instituion, but not of an university.

However, let me give you some pointers that helped me to grasp a bit more beyond purely academic programming.

1. Patterns. As some others have pointed out, this pretty much a must to grok in any OO project. The Gamma book is good, if you are looking for some really good intermediate more applied Java book about this, Effective Java by Joshua Bloch (he developed, among other things, the Java Collections).

2. Revision control management. One word: git. Anything beyond toy problems should not be touched without revision control. Watch the video with Linus Torvalds (the creator) to get motivated: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4XpnKHJAok8
A pretty good git tutorial that I like can be found here: http://www-cs-students.stanford.edu/~blynn/gitmagic/ch01.html

3. Read competent peoples code of the language of your choice! github and gitorious are a real treasure. The more you do it, the more you will discover more efficient approaches of how to implement certain concepts. And you will also see a lot of bad code and learn how to spot it.

4. Testing. JUnit is pretty basic to grasp. Some people swear by TDD (test driven development, write the test case first and then the implementation of what to test), I find this a bit extreme, however unit testing is a must to know.

5. Program yourself! Pair programming can be very helpful if your mentor is knowledgable and able to teach, otherwise do it yourself. Do not hack for the hell of it (although it can be fun), but focus instead on clean and clear concepts that you want to implement and improve upon. And document your code (doxygen or javadoc are your friends).

After reading the Fedora 16 release notes and the info that Fedora 16 uses GPT (GUID Partition Table) instead of the old MBR style, i am rather confused.

It seems that on all non-UEFI systems (like my Thinkpad T510), a separate, small 1 MB "BIOS Boot Partition" needs to be created, which is not the same as a partition on /boot.

Is this extra "BIOS Boot Partition" partition really necessary on non-UEFI machines? Why cant we use /boot for that?

FRITZ!Box of course. The device allows me to connect a voip phone to it, lets me setup a VPN, and since it runs Linux I can ssh in it and run my own applications (dropbear etc.).

Almost all comments here on /. are about nobel prices or about the summary but not about Valians research in CS. What gives?! On the other hand, this is /. after all, silly me ...

To contribute something to the topic: So he invented PAC learning, I took a Machine Learning course a while back, we studied this concept in Tom Mitchell's "Machine Learning" book, but quite honestly, I cannot remember this that well.

Does anybody know some good online resources (class slides etc.) about PAC learning? I mean there are plenty of examples for this online, but if somebody also took a ML course or knows some course slides that are of great quality (or can write some lines with explanations), I would really appreciate this.

I absolutely agree. It is astonishing how much attention Yu Suzuki and his team put into all the details that make Shenmue such an experience. It would be nice to see it ported to modern consoles.

The Yakuza series is probably the best that we can get in the meantime http://www.sega.com/yakuza/index_us.php and Yu also posted that he has been working on Shenmue City for Mobage-Town of Yahoo! Japan. http://sunsoft.jp/shenmue-gai/index2.html

Hopefully we will see Shenmue III one day.

I agree with VMWare being a likely candidate, as they recently strengthened their partnership with SUSE Linux Enterprise Server for VMware(R) earlier this month:

http://www.marketwatch.com/story/vmware-and-novell-deliver-suse-linux-enterprise-server-for-vmwarer-2010-09-01?reflink=MW_news_stmp

I wonder what this means for the future of OpenSUSE, as VMware has a rather proprietary range of software products.

Only that what we are interested in here are not (solely) opinions but rather arguments and their refutation.

You can take a look at the links to packages.ubuntu.com and koji for yourself, and the launchpad situation described by Parent cannot be easily dismissed.

Although, somehow I think your reply should modded Funny if it is a clever pun on the "opinion" status in launchpad.

In the blog entry, Mark writes about "... a willingness to chase down the problems that stand between here and there." From my experience, problems are not chased down but rather the Ostrich algorithm http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ostrich_algorithm is applied.

While running karmic (9.10), I noticed a bug with the network-manager pertaining static IP addresses and wireless connectivity, which made it unable to connect to certain configured wireless access points. Lets take a look at the network-manager released with 9.10: http://packages.ubuntu.com/karmic/net/network-manager , it is (0.8~a~git.20091013t193206.679d548-0ubuntu1).

Now lets look at the updates for karmic at http://packages.ubuntu.com/karmic-updates/net/ , there is not a single one (!) for network-manager. For the whole six months until the next release of 10.04, not a single update for it has been provided! They just took the git snapshot and left it in 9.10.

Just compare it to Fedora 12 and their updates on http://koji.fedoraproject.org/koji/buildinfo?buildID=172857 , karmic (9.10) was released at October 29th, and one can see the fixes and updates through Oct, Nov, Dec, Jan for F12.

I do not care about the marketing strategies and public image of Linux distributions, but rather about exactly what Mark said, about " ... a willingness to chase down the problems that stand between here and there."

For me, Ubuntu did not deliver that.

Is there a way to integrate R programs with another high level language like Java, for example to bind a R object to a Java interface? I have basic familiarity with R, and I would like to use programs written in R directly with other programs written in a object-oriented language, as opposed to do file i/o for the bridge between them.

The general idea is to be able to take Java objects and pass them to R and do all the stats numbercrunching with smaller R programs, that are somehow integrated with a Java program. The results then get back as other objects that can be further processed in Java.

Are there any possibilities for that?