• They either have the ability to travel vast distances, or the ability to travel from point-to-point in order to reach our planet from their current location.
• Either of the above would suggest they have a better understanding of many areas of science, including: mathematics, biology, physics, medicine as well as technology and self sustaining environments.
• Creatures with that level of understanding should understand that species from separate, highly-evolved biological systems can not directly interact without extraordinary biological risks to both species.
• If ants migrating across continents on ships seems like a problem – imagine the potential risks posed by a ship from another planet landing here.
• The consequences could be catastrophic for both parties, from even a microscopic level interaction
• The most probable form of contact would be a remote signal, or a sterilized robotic vehicle.
• Based on our research thus far there appears to be more uninhabited planets than habited ones.   That arrangement should make finding natural resources an easy task for beings with advanced travel and research capabilities.
• If an alien civilization was not able to interact with us on a physical level, and they had the ability to find resources on other uninhabited planets – the only purpose they would have for contacting us would be to share knowledge.
• Beings with an advanced understanding in so many areas should also recognize knowledge for what it is – power.
• It is doubtful they would remotely share knowledge with a less advanced society.  In a more primitive society, such as our own, corruption and abuse of power is to be expected.  To share knowledge not yielded from experience would only encourage a greater abuse of power.

Our sales and web teams worked hard to compile notes and requirements gathered over the years to develop a purchase section that is easy and intuitive, yet robust enough to accommodate diversified buying requirements.  We are proud to show the results of that work in our newly completed purchase section: http://www.aspose.com/purchase

As with all new things we would love to know what you think.  Love it, hate it or see things about it that you would like to have improved?  Drop us a note in our online purchase forum and you will find a willing ear glad to hear your voice.

Since their inception in 2002, Aspose’s core focus has centered on file management.  Their new line of products for SQL Reporting Services is a continuation of that effort, providing database experts with a powerful new set of tools to accommodate the growing needs of their audience. 

The Aspose.Total for Reporting Services suite is now available for purchase, with prices starting at $1499.  An evaluation version of the suite can be downloaded from the following URL: http://www.aspose.com/Community/Files/50/aspose.total.for.reporting.services/default.aspx  … For more information, please visit Aspose at: http://www.aspose.com

Product and service names mentioned herein are the trademarks of their respective owners.

Aspose currently offers six powerful, file-management components for the Java platform.  Through those components Java developers are able to: create, open, edit, convert and save some of the most popular formats in business, including: Word documents, Excel Spreadsheets, PowerPoint presentations, PDF documents and metafiles.  Aspose is committed in its efforts to offer world renowned support for both platforms and to provide developers with the best cross-platform solutions available.

About Aspose Pty. Ltd.

Aspose is a programming component vendor founded in 2002, in Sydney, Australia.  Their core focus has been on offering a powerful set of file management components. With their file management components developers can create applications which can open, edit, create and save some of the most popular file formats in business including: Word Documents, Excel Spreadsheets, PowerPoint Presentations, PDF Documents, Flash Presentations and Project Files. They offer an excellent line of products for data visualization including Aspose.Chart and Aspose.Grid. And they also provide excellent components for spell checking, recurrence patterns, network protocols, barcode management and ad-hoc query generation.  For more information please visit www.aspose.com

Product and service names mentioned herein are the trademarks of their respective owners.

I know this is a bit off topic; however, I thought it may be of interest to the programming community. A while back I discovered there is a pattern to prime numbers. I was very excited to find the pattern, but despite my best efforts I received little to no interest from the math community (this may very well have been because I was looking in the wrong place, but I really feel like I gave it a good effort). Therefore, in order to share the knowledge I thought that I would post it here in hopes that people could help spread the word.

Current mathematics states that there is not a prime pattern; that primes appear along the number line at random. I believe that conclusion was derived because people are looking at primes in a base 10 number system.



However, in a base 6 number system you will find that the primes form two straight lines (except for 2 and 3… they are special primes, similar to 1). So from a mathematics standpoint the following two equations make up those lines: (1 + 6x) and (-1 + 6x)



You will notice in the above screen shot that there are “skips” within the two lines (for example 25, 35, 49, 55, etc)… I was able to determine that the “skips” are factors of the primes… but not just any factors of the primes; it’s the factors of the primes times the other primes.

   

Therefore, if one is to calculate a prime – they have to know the number of “skips” that occur within the lines prior to the prime.  I then found that the space between the factors of the primes is a pattern as well. For example with factors of 5 the skips occur every 7th and then 3rd place (starting at 5)… the factors of 7 occur every 9th and 5th place (starting at 7) and so on…

In the end, the following is a true picture of the pattern (from a positive / negative side)…

I have created two different projects using the information I learned about the pattern. In the first project one can pass a number to a function and the function will then return the correct prime. It does so by determining the number of skips and then plugging the information into a math formula. However, it is quite slow when compared to a sieve (especially on very large numbers).

The second project is an improved version of the Sieve of Eratosthenes. It works in a much different fashion since the prime pattern is known. Based on my test so far it is between 100% and 150% faster than the basic sieve. If anyone would like copies of the projects, please feel free to email me for details.

If you know anyone that is interested in this sort of thing, please pass it along. I would love to get this information into the hands of the public.

 

For more details on the new program, please visit the Aspose MVP program overview.

I hope things are going well.  From time to time we at Aspose like to check with our customers and potential customers about upcoming product ideas.  Recently we have published two such ideas we would like to get your thoughts on: Aspose.PSD and Aspose.MSI.  Both of the products are currently not in production and we are looking for your thoughts and ideas on if they should.  Therefore, if you feel these products would be of interest I welcome you to share your thoughts and ideas in the following forums threads:

• Aspose.PSD: http://www.aspose.com/Community/forums/thread/52751.aspx
• Aspose.MSI: http://www.aspose.com/Community/forums/thread/52753.aspx

We feel customer feedback is vital; therefore, I would like to thank you in advance for any thoughts and ideas you are able to share.

I knew there had to be something to those catchy little RSS icons, so I began to do some digging.  After just a bit of searching I had found there are all kinds of “RSS Feed Readers” available to make use to RSS URLs.  I found web applications, desktop applications and tons of both.  I was really quite overwhelmed at all of the options.  I decided the best thing I could do is come up with everything I was looking for in an RSS reader and begin my search.  My needs were simple (so I thought):

• I was looking for something in a desktop model
• I wanted a familiar looking interface (something kind of Outlook’ish)
• I wanted to be able to categorize my feeds
• I wanted to be able to view all of my unread feeds in one consolidated screen
• Actually seeing a consolidated screen of my different categories would be better
• I wanted to be able to take feeds I really like and move them to a special folder
• I wanted to be able to forward posts I really liked via email
• I wanted a nice little notification (again similar to Outlook) to appeared when new stuff was ready
• I wanted a good layout so that I didn’t have to scroll all over the place to read a post
• And I’ll be honest… I was hoping to find something free

I really hate hunting for software, because inevitably I always end up having to install a dozen applications and then hope and pray that when I remove them their uninstall application will work properly (knowing in the back of my mind I would be left with a load of unneeded directories, files and registry entries).  After about five or six different tries I was finally able to find one that did everything I wanted and much, much more.  What was really nice about the application was that it was extremely easy to use but offered more advanced features (which were there without being in the way).

I’ve been using this new, magical “RSS Feed Reader” for around three days now and have been totally delighted.  The name of the application is RSS Bandit.  It is a freeware application hosted on Sourceforge and is written in .NET (which for some odd reason made it even more appealing to me).  Since I have found this wonderful new tool, I decided the best thing I could do is try to share it with others.  If you do not have a good RSS Feed Reader and like to stay informed, I think RSS Bandit does a top notch job.  I know, starting something new like that always seems like a hassle… but it was really painless.

RSS Bandit comes preloaded with a bunch of different RSS feeds installed.  I deleted all of the presets except for two: the daily Dilbert cartoon and Slashdot news.  From a .NET technology standpoint I found two sites loaded with great list of .NET centric Blogs:

The MSDN Asp.NET site (tons of great Blog links and Blog collection links):
http://msdn.microsoft.com/asp.net/community/blogs/default.aspx

And the DotNetSlackers Combined Feed Tool (Which allows you to create one feed from many different sites):
http://www.dotnetslackers.com/CombineFeeds.aspx

Both sites are packed full with a lot of great feeds.  If you get a chance to try it out, I hope you enjoy it as much as I have… and if you do and get a chance – pass it along to others.  I’ve got a feeling there are a whole lot of people out there (similar to myself) who have simply not taken the time to find out how this new technology can work for them. 

I want to personally thank you for you patience with any problems you may encounter and we look forward to continuing to provide you with highest quality products and service available.