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We're doing research like this at the Ecommerce Research Group at the Australian National University. We're focusing on software piracy, trying to work out why people do it if they don't then sell their cracked software (and could be using their coding skills in the workforce).

Our biggest problem has been getting crackers to participate. Most are so skeptical and wary that they are reluctant to take the survey (which we designed specifically so respondents don't have to admit to doing anything illegal).

Our second biggest problem has been getting the people who have elected to participate to take it seriously. It seems many respondents just treat it as a joke.

It's an interesting problem.

We're doing research like this at the Ecommerce Research Group at the Australian National University. We're focusing on software piracy, trying to work out why people do it if they don't then sell their cracked software (and could be using their coding skills in the workforce).

Our biggest problem has been getting crackers to participate. Most are so skeptical and wary that they are reluctant to take the survey (which we designed specifically so respondents don't have to admit to doing anything illegal).

Our second biggest problem has been getting the people who have elected to participate to take it seriously. It seems many respondents just treat it as a joke.

It's an interesting problem.

Techies ought to focus on how to take money from the wealthy and decrease the world's dependency on corporations, or even private companies (that later become corporations), by building cooperatives and collectives.

this link should explain enough.

It's a bit ancient language now, but still gets used in some regional areas... like around me :P

Using a method of buffering output at both ends and transferring only changes across sounds a lot like the Rsync algorithm. It seems like using a buffer at both ends and rsyncing everything over ssh would be a natural way to approach this, are there any open source projects that have tried it?

1. What else has he down?

If you're actually interested then you can read his resume.

The guy who invented this technique is called Dayton Taylor, and I seem to remember that it was written up on Slashdot some time before the Wachowsi brothers movie first appeared on our radar. That's how old Slashdot is. Doesn't it seem a long time ago now!

IIRC the inventor had originally envisaged its main application as being for televised sports games, to give a new twist to "action replay" of crucial moments. And it may have appeared in some TV commercials before appearing in any film. I doubt he realized back then that it would one day become a mainstream movie special effect. Or a Japanese comedy stage act.

The TiVo Client Device is of necessity a closed system. As a service provider, we must prevent theft of service, so TiVo pays a great deal of attention to security of the device and resistance to hacking. Additionally, we sell the TCD at a price that provides a net margin to retailers, but no profit to us. Our profits come from providing service to each device over time, rather than from up-front costs.

I think it is interesting that TiVo says they pay a lot of attention to the security of the device. That is true now, but with the first TiVo devices, getting a BASH prompt on the device turned out to be relatively easy. On boot a menu was available on the serial port with a hardcoded password. Using that password you could make all kinds of changes to the way the machine started up.

He also metions talks about people getting around using the service. For years, the TiVo hacking community has known how to partially emulate the service by creating slice files and manually loading them onto the device. Recently hackers have figured out how to get an unmodified TiVo to use a service emulator. What's interesting about these development efforts is that they are not putting TiVo out of business.

In the article, he makes no mention of the goodwill that TiVo has fostered with their users, even their hackers. Soon after TiVo was created, Richard Bullwinkle, their former "Chief Evangelist" started talking to people on bulletin boards. He was always very helpful and forthcoming, with only minor exceptions. He wouldn't talk about bypassing the TiVo service and he wouldn't talk about extracting video from the device. If you didn't talk about those things, he was perfectly happy to help out. Although TiVo was in business to make money through their service, they didn't screw over people who didn't want to subscribe. That's such a treat from a for-profit company. Imagine Microsoft, who also sells their set-top device at a loss, treating customers who don't want to use theirs for gaming without hostility.

When Andrew Tridgell, (the same guy who created Samba and rsync) figured out how to create TiVo slice files so he could use the machine in Australia, it was probably this goodwill which made him choose to not release the info to the general public. Instead, it remained a closely guarded secret.

Today, years later, the people who have followed in Tridge's footsteps, have refused to destroy TiVo's revenue stream. They have been very careful to try to make sure that only people who can't get TiVo service in their area are allowed to get around it.

I think the goodwill that TiVo has is partly because of their general attitude towards their customers (and towards the hacker community) and partly the fact they used open-source software, and followed the license requirements. And, it is this, not their security measures, which have ensured that they've maintained a revenue stream -- despite using the "razor and razor blades" pricing model.

I just wish Mr. Barton hadn't used a loaded term "service theft" to describe people who are using their TiVos without subscribing to the service. That term would be appropriate if people were downloading TiVo data without having a subscription, but not people who are simply choosing not to subscribe and are finding alternatives.

Like rsync or xdelta, you mean?

xdelta's even BSD-licensed, so there's nothing to stop them integrating it today. But again, Microsoft's arrogance and NIH-attitude stops them from recognising that outsiders might just have solved problems years before they even recognised the problem.

--

If you think that the GPL [were it intelligible, rather than the rambling, incoherent, mumbo-jumbo mess that it is] is not [or would not be, were it intelligible] every bit the blueprint for slavery that its progenitor was, you are a fool.

God forbid that men might construct a society whose citizens were free to choose to own both tangible and intangible private property [or neither, or one and not the other, or whatever the hell else they might desire]...

I did a study in September last year ("Buying bestsellers online: A case study in Search and Searchability") that examined how well the four major search engines at that time (Google, AllTheWeb, MSN and AltaVista -- Froogle didn't exist) could find pages from which you could buy bestselling books. It's hard to argue that a general purpose search engine shouldn't return at least one transactional page in their top results (to fulfill transactional search). However it wouldn't be so good for a general purpose search engine to return only transactional pages.

I found that Google and MSN search performed the best (i.e. they returned a transactional page early on -- although MSN search was a bit fishy, as if they had a deal with Walmart) and that Amazon had the best coverage of all the bookstores.

The paper is available here.

But if you're just interested in looking at pretty graphs the presentation I gave based on the paper is probably of more interest (pdf) OR (powerpoint).

I did a study in September last year ("Buying bestsellers online: A case study in Search and Searchability") that examined how well the four major search engines at that time (Google, AllTheWeb, MSN and AltaVista -- Froogle didn't exist) could find pages from which you could buy bestselling books. It's hard to argue that a general purpose search engine shouldn't return at least one transactional page in their top results (to fulfill transactional search). However it wouldn't be so good for a general purpose search engine to return only transactional pages.

I found that Google and MSN search performed the best (i.e. they returned a transactional page early on -- although MSN search was a bit fishy, as if they had a deal with Walmart) and that Amazon had the best coverage of all the bookstores.

The paper is available here.

But if you're just interested in looking at pretty graphs the presentation I gave based on the paper is probably of more interest (pdf) OR (powerpoint).

I did a study in September last year ("Buying bestsellers online: A case study in Search and Searchability") that examined how well the four major search engines at that time (Google, AllTheWeb, MSN and AltaVista -- Froogle didn't exist) could find pages from which you could buy bestselling books. It's hard to argue that a general purpose search engine shouldn't return at least one transactional page in their top results (to fulfill transactional search). However it wouldn't be so good for a general purpose search engine to return only transactional pages.

I found that Google and MSN search performed the best (i.e. they returned a transactional page early on -- although MSN search was a bit fishy, as if they had a deal with Walmart) and that Amazon had the best coverage of all the bookstores.

The paper is available here.

But if you're just interested in looking at pretty graphs the presentation I gave based on the paper is probably of more interest (pdf) OR (powerpoint).

I did a study in September last year ("Buying bestsellers online: A case study in Search and Searchability") that examined how well the four major search engines at that time (Google, AllTheWeb, MSN and AltaVista -- Froogle didn't exist) could find pages from which you could buy bestselling books. It's hard to argue that a general purpose search engine shouldn't return at least one transactional page in their top results (to fulfill transactional search). However it wouldn't be so good for a general purpose search engine to return only transactional pages.

I found that Google and MSN search performed the best (i.e. they returned a transactional page early on -- although MSN search was a bit fishy, as if they had a deal with Walmart) and that Amazon had the best coverage of all the bookstores.

The paper is available here.

But if you're just interested in looking at pretty graphs the presentation I gave based on the paper is probably of more interest (pdf) OR (powerpoint).

• There's a special version of TeX called Omega which does 16-bit Unicode. It can even do Sanskrit. Some critics say it doesn't cut the cake, however.
• There's also Unicode support for LaTeX.

The very BEST treatise on the subject is here.

One of the worlds largest Voice of IP rollouts is almost complete at the Australian National University (ANU), with over 1500 handsets already installed. For more info see here.

The Quality of Service (QoS) issues (lag, jitter, etc) were overcome using tagged VLANs and prioritising voice over video and other general data traffic. The Gigabit eithernet backbone is in a meshed star topology, supposedly providing five 9's (99.999%) reliability. Multiple gateways connect the internal telephone system to the outside analogue world.

Looks like Africa has some competition.

Boy, that MSNBC article was bad. They even mispelled the researcher's name. It is "Akiko Mizutani" not "Aikiko Mizutani".

Here is some better coverage of the story. discovery, NationalPost, and Ananova.

And here is a nice page from the Insect Vision, Navigation and "Cognition" Laboratory at ANU, but it doesn't cover the dragonfly work.

Logos: The altered studio logo at the opening of the film may be highly significant. The Matrix-coded WB letters could simply be the Wachowski brothers thumbing their nose at the Warner Bros. But by altering the logo - from the Greek term "logos," for word - the film's opening does two things. First, it corrupts the Gospel of John, which begins with "In the beginning was the Word...". Second, it asserts that metaphysical meaning can be gleaned by mining deep into words, or code.

BushLAN is a low cost 'last mile' solution specifically targeted at Internet distribution for rural areas. It uses lower frequencies (VHF) than 802.11. As a consequence the signal propagates further (3-100km). If you have television reception it should work.

I'm not directly affifialted with BushLAN, but I do work in a simliar field within the same country, so I am not completely disinterested.

"But modern Windows operating systems are competent and will do the job perfectly well for most people."

"I never said, 'Everybody uses UNIX because....'"

"Windows uses the BSD networking stack. It's true that you don't get the same level of administrative tools but you can always get better ones."

"Windows? BeOS? Amiga?"

"It's only been in the last 5 years or so that Linux has been getting any kind of real support from hardware manufacturers. And not even a lot of that."

"At least there's a chance that Objective-C and the OpenStep frameworks will see some acceptance now."

"'Each task has its own separate tool or tools.' 'Modularity.' 'KISS.' 'If it's not absolutely necessary, keep it in user space.' 'Offer the user as much information and flexibility as possible.' 'Everything is possible with a command line.' UNIX has much more of a linguistic mindset than Windows."

"Why would your location have anything to do with it? If you don't enjoy the freedom of technical details, the willingness to help each other learn, and the hobbyist programming environment, so be it. A lot of people enjoy it, however."

So go with Sun or Linux for networking gear. IMNSHO Solaris and IPFilter makes the best firewall anyway. Linux has good support in other areas such as 802.1Q spanning tree bridging and other neat tidbits. If the technology is open there is no where to hide.

hell, even over broadband it'd be annoying to have to sync my home directory with the .mac server... I've got at least 1GB of things in my Documents folder, almost 10GB in music, and god knows how much in the movies dir.

One word: rsync.

-Waldo Jaquith

The Three Laws of Robotics are:

1. A robot may not injure a human being, or, through inaction, allow a human being to come to harm.

2. A robot must obey the orders given it by human beings except where such orders would conflict with the First Law.

3. A robot must protect its own existence as long as such protection does not conflict with the First or Second Law.

If you want to tease an Aussie about being patriotic, or being ignorant, ask him/her to recite the words to the second verse of our National Anthem. It's probable they won't be able to do the first verse either. (OMG - I found a lyric site with five gawd-awful verses)

Most of us like Waltzing Matilda about the sheep stealing tramp better than stuff that includes lyrics like "our land is girt by sea". Girt???

Either that or the "laws" of nature are not laws, but merely guidelines, or emergent phenomenon.

Saying something is a 'law of nature' is to say that it is a regualrity that has been repeatedly well observed, with no relaible counter instances. And that is all. That's what the words mean. The philosopher Hume demolished the idea of having certain knowledge about natural laws, two centuries ago. The original poster was quite correct.

Better said: why not provide also rsync access to packages?

After all, it is possibile that foo-x.y.z-N+1.arch.rpm is mostly the same as foo-x.y.z-N.arch.rpm (same for .deb packages).

Or it could be as well that this is far from being true.

Assuming (for the sake of the argument) it is true, unfortunately, rsync is NOT the right tool, since diffs are done on the fly and this would put huge workloads on the server side.

But a tool specially crafted for this that makes a local copy of the package to update, retrieves via http all the needed patchsets (precomputed static files on the server-side), applies them in the proper order and does a bit of MD5summing to check if the result is right would be something nice to have.

Probably there is something out there that already implements most of the needed functionalities (unfortunately I don't know where), since the idea is so simple.

Your posts about Linux are pretty far off-base:

1) When is the last time you called MS support and got USEFUL information? The "support is only free if your time is worthless" argument is completely moot. You want support? Get a support contract with RedHat.

2) Things you install yourself (not from the distro) almost never work out of the box. No kidding, well not ALL non-MS Windows apps ALWAYS work right out of the box either. See where I'm going here? If you want a guarantee it will work, stick with the apps certified with the distro.

3) Inconsistent interface (emacs vs. vi)? Come on, compare apples to oranges why don't you. I could just as easily say MS-Word and Corel WordPerfect have inconsistent interfaces. They're not from the same authors and toolkits, they're bound to have differences. Besides, there's not interface guidelines for either emacs or vi. Pick a suite of applications and compare within, like the KDE suite or the GNOME suite.

4) No hardware support for scientific hardware:

CCD Camera
Digital Frame Grabbers
Confocal Microscopy- got me there, guess they must stock these at your local BestBuy because mine sure doesn't
High Res Image Analysis

Fact is, you probably didn't know about all this before you posted but now you do. I'm not saying everything works hunky-dory under Linux but don't post untruths. If you don't like Linux, fine, then don't use it, nobody's forcing you in the way MS forces it's products on the masses.

Alan Sondheim is the author of a lengthy meditation on the poetry and philosophy of cyberspace, The Internet Text, amongst (many) other things. He has used shell scripts and other techniques to generate texts. He writes about sex, death, the body, desire, trauma, capital, terror, etc.; technology and its implications remain an important theme throughout.

Just so we're clear, SAMBA is not a protocol. The protocol you are thinking of is SMB (Server Message Block). Samba allows unix users to use SMB. Here's some info.

I've have one on my desktop already.
The ANU Wedge
Of course it's a pretty big desk

That's a far too simplistic analysis.

Myth 1) Population rules all, which is why China (#1 population) and India (#2 population) should have the most powerful economies in the world.

Reality) China's GDP ranks 7th, behind that of the US, Japan, Germany, UK, France, and Italy. India's is 12th.

Myth 2) The United States, because of all of those damned immigrants and teenage mothers, is increasing its population at a staggering rate.

Reality) The predicted population ranking in 2015 will still be in order of size: China, India, the United States. The annual population growth rates of these nations between 1995 and 2000 are .90%, 1.69%, and 1.05% respectively. Accurate predictions for, say 2040, are hamstrung by the repeated failures of earlier population forecasts, as this paper delineates.

Larger population does not equal strongest economy. Japan has the 9th largest population and 2nd largest economy. Enormous Russia has the 6th largest population and 15th largest economy.

Population densities, education, economic infrastructure, and a variety of other factors are far more imporant than simple comparisons of size.

Newsflash yourself, guy. The full quote, which I'm guessing you haven't heard, is from Stewart Brand, stated in print for the first time as follows:

Information wants to be free. Information also wants to be expensive. Information wants to be free because it has become so cheap to distribute, copy, and recombine---too cheap to meter. It wants to be expensive because it can be immeasurably valuable to the recipient. That tension will not go away. It leads to endless wrenching debate about price, copyright, 'intellectual property', the moral rightness of casual distribution, because each round of new devices makes the tension worse, not better.

The quote was never meant to be used as a bludgeon to claim that all information should be free; it was part of an illustration of exactly the kind of tension going on here.

You're essentially claiming she should have been more careful in some fashion that would have prevented the email fro being leaked in the first place. Careful in what? Her use of email for delivery only to the intended recipients? Her choice of friends?

I'd like anyone with that attitude to look back over all the emails they've written since they've been online and to consider ones they've written that they only wanted a selected group of individuals to see. Don't think of claiming you've never written an email like that. Can you honestly tell me that if that email showed up suddenly on a web discussion board, you wouldn't be incensed? (And can you honestly tell me that if people responded to you with "information wants to be free!" you wouldn't want to break their kneecaps?)

Having said that, I agree Ms. Garrett should have been more careful in her responses to this trust violation. She displayed a snitty disdain for all internet discourse that, as a fan of her writing, I find considerably disappointing.

There is a solution to this - it is called rsync

The fires destroyed four telescopes, the equipment workshop, eight houses
which had been occupied by staff and an administration
building.

The fires destroyed four telescopes, the equipment workshop, eight houses
which had been occupied by staff and an administration
building.

The mirror takes about a year to make. Most telescopes are three years from money to installation. My friend's company may get a telescope back on Stromlo as early as July, simply and solely because it was already coming, and the mirror is already made.

Anyway. The point I'm looking to make here is - it doesn't take much to ruin a telescope's mirror.

Photographs of the damage to the landscape, the buildings, and the telescopes were made available today, at http://www.mso.anu.edu.au/colless/StromloFire/. I find it interesting that the trees are all still standing - less only their leaves!

DragonSister

If you want the official site, the university has set one up here

It is possible that they won't rebuild many telescopes. While it is very sad that so much classic equipment was lost, and a huge blow for the local amateur community, Canberra's light haze has been getting in the way of astronomy at Stromlo for years. Most of Stromlo's research is done up at Siding Springs observatory, way north near Coonabarabran.

Sounds like trying to get data from caches around the world might not be necessary. ANU media release

Two office buildings and the visitors centre were spared - importantly, preserving most of the computer data generated on site in recent years.

We have also saved our computer database and many of us will be back at work tomorrow.

The observatory is certainly a tragic loss, at least the data is safe though.

As terrible and horrific as it's been, I really can't stand that people are labelling it the "worst ever". Not being from the eastern side of Australia probably has something to do with the way I feel about this (yes, people west of Qld, NSW and Vic feel like they're in a different, neglected country), but it seems that people are forgetting that *the* worst fires *ever* were Ash Wednesday in SA and Vic on February 16, 1983:

2545 Buildings destroyed
75 People died
>390,000 Hectares burnt

source: http://sres.anu.edu.au/associated/fire/IUFRO/CONFL AG/ASHWED83/AW83.HTM

Don't get me wrong, the current predicament is terrible and serious, but please don't forget history or act like NSW is the only state that matters.

These are also some pages descibing that day:

http://www.abc.net.au/dimensions/dimensions_in_tim e/Transcripts/s678221.htm
http://home.vicnet.net.au/~gscfa/ash.htm
http://www.nre.vic.gov.au/4A25676D0022F2EE/BCView/ FAAF080E6756F7904A25679300155B2B?OpenDocument
http://www.historysmiths.com.au/CentFedPlayKit/eve nts/nature/1983_ash%20wednesday%20bushfires.htm

Google will help you find more.

Not the site exactly you're looking for (I've seen that one too), but another site with relativity ray tracings: [LINK]

Just curious if this robot is programmed to follow the rules layed out by Asimov. Or if anyone even thinks that they apply to this type of robot. It is after all programed to perform Martial Arts.

While a bit off-topic, I feel this is the perfect time to visit the idea of paradoxes and time travel. It may be argued that this can be explained by them eventually going back to 1985 and getting married, having kids, etc. This is a valid argument, but what about a more exotic situation?

Example: What if Marty from the future killed Marty from 1985? How could that happen?

Simpler example: Imagine a billiard ball that has a trajectory that takes it into a time portal that goes back in time by a small portion of a second. However, before the ball makes it to the portal, it comes out (naturally, it went back) and knocks the original ball off it's trajectory so that it never hits the portal. This situation actually has a fairly logical conclusion (believe it or not). Suppose instead that the ball was headed towards the portal, but in such a way as to miss it. However, when the ball goes through the portal (hold on a sec...) it goes back and hits itself onto a trajectory that forces it into the portal (there it is!).

I know this example is confusing, so I provided these links to better explainations. The second link has a nice diagram demonstrating this. Credit must be given to Kip Thorne for coming up with this solution to the famous "Grandfather" paradox.

Anyone else have any thoughts on the idea of time travel and paradoxes? I am of the opinion that these paradoxes prevent time travel from occuring. Another popular belief if that time travel is possible, but only in the forward direction. Yet another belief is that when you travel through time, you actually enter a different "universe" from our own. This theory is directly tied in to the "multiverse" theory. Any other insight?

These guys seem to have a Ultrasparc simulator http://cap.anu.edu.au/cap/projects/sulima/

Andrew Tridgell's notes on hacking the TiVo, including his various hacks for the device. Also, TiVo hacking FAQ may be of interest.

-Pat

Except the cycles aren't being "wasted" - they're just not happening.

Well, now, that depends on what I meant by "wasted", doesn't it. IMO, they're wasted if they're doing nothing ;).

If they're really worried about the electricity cost of running those extra cycles, let them tell you that so you can fully realize that your boss is telling you not to do something you're interested in so the company can save under $50/year. And though they might not be swayed by the worthy cause, they should be swayed by inexpensive ways to keep their employees happy, since happy employees are more likely to be productive and more than make up for that cost with increased productivity and improved retention.

Also for folks using Windows IE (the majority) ATT&T offers up their free eternally-beta AT&T Privacy Bird which gives folks visual and auditory feedback (both controlled/turned off in Prefs) on site's P3P settings. Quite informative actually, I discovered just how awful Yahoo's policies are when I used their headline aggregator (just who are they selling my newsreading habits to?) [rhetorical question]

The P3P folks have put together a great website at P3P Public Overview which is chock-full of useful information. On the other hand here is an interesting critique and here another, suprisingly both by lawyers. Security guru Richard Smith also has an important (though hopefully now fixed?) page on supercookies and how MS IE 6's touted protections can be got around.

Mozilla of course supports P3P and it's useful to understand just how MS IE 6 suppports and applies P3P and cookies.

To find out how to throw off the chains of oppression and live without explotation read this Freedom HOWTO.

Yacas -- A symbolic computation engine similar to Mathematica or Maple. It has a Lisp core, with plenty of syntactic sugar. Released under the GPL.

Octave -- A damn fine piece of work for numerical computation. IMO, it beats MatLab any day. Released under the GPL.

Maxima -- a descendant of Macsyma, which all True Math Geeks remember. It's a symbolic computation engine with a Lisp core, like Yacas. Released under the GPL.

JACAL -- another symbolic computation engine with a Lisp core. Released under the GPL.

GAP -- a system for doing abstract algebra and combinatorics. This is really only of interest to a limited subset of mathematicians. However, it is incredibly good at doing what it does. GAP is under its own license, which I'm fairly certain would classify as free to RMS.

There are many others, but these are the most mature that I've dealt with. If you're looking for a pretty front-end, Maxima has one, there's one for Octave called G-Octave (uses Gnome), and there's one for GAP called XGAP. None of them match the purtiness of Mathematica or Maple, though. There is TeXmacs, a rather impressive TeX-ish WYSIWYG. With some effort, you can make it serve as an input/output mechanism for any CAS. However, I recommend against using it for its intended purpose as, although its rendering is very impressive, it is a big step backwards for structured documents.