Slashdot Mirror

That's not what happens in Canada though. We pay the levy and the recording industry, who fought so hard to have it invoked, now wants to make copying illegal. Plus our government is paying the industry money specifically so that it can be lobbied against. I don't know whether the recording industry will win but I think it's more likely to happen with a Conservative government in power.

I blogged about this a while ago - http://demodulated.blogspot.com/2006/04/i-get-play ed-celine-gets-paid.html

You can't do anything with the fonts in the document, other than use them for viewing that document

Sure you can. Granted, it doesn't happen "automagically", but any coder worth their salt can fully automate the process with about half-an-hour of one-time work.

I could see it happening quite easily - send a photo of your kids in the bath to their grandma, AOL system tags it, police come knocking at your door and take your computer and all your archives away. .....

Why imagine? People already have been condenmed for taking pictures of their kids at bathtime.

Bathtime has become a taboo activity, best undergone alone, one child at a time, and if a supervisor must be present, only the child's mother is allowed. Possibly an aunt, but that's pushing it. No fathers allowed. Eyes only. IR goggles preferred.

God Bless The News Of The World.

Perhaps you should look at this from another angle. All these students posting detailed information about themselves on Facebook, including favorite books, movies, etc. are actually doing the leg work for the government. The way things are now and the way they're progressing, they won't have to tap your phones, read your mail and send agents to track you and take photographs. They can simply log on to Facebook and MySpace to find out everything they need to know. There's enough information to build a comprehensive profile of who you are (including political beliefs) as well as the people you associate with.

If you have a true concern about the direction of our government and the erosion of our rights, you should support educating people about the dangers of providing detailed personal information on social networking sites.

If you want to get a little more conspiratorial, please read http://www.commongroundcommonsense.org/forums/lofi version/index.php/t34949.html and http://jacobmorse.blogspot.com/2005/12/what-would- orwell-do.html. It appears that parties involved in funding Facebook have ties to the same elements you claim are behind the erosion of our rights.

You need to look at this issue in a deeper manner. These social networks could very well be trojan horses. Politicians will create the impression that they're against these sites knowing full well that there will be a backlash to protect them. This is exactly what they want. The anti-establishment has always been funded and supported by the establishment for its own gains.

Simply factor in the monthly payments for you average 2 car family. You will see that the total cost for the 2 cars is around the same price as a mortgage.

There is nothing wrong with having your personal space. The problem is many Americans have a libertarian attitude towards society. See the latest studies showing Americans have 1/3 fewer friends than 2 decades ago. Many wrongly feel that they are isolated from society because the have a car and a TV. That "Freedom" comes at a heavy cost. Just compare the energy and resource usage between a city dweller and a suburbanite. From experience I can tell you that my lifestyle in London was very substainable compared to Atlanta. We are creating a country of consuming friendless debtors.

Try living in a big city like New York or a European city. When you come back to the gridlock of suburban rush hour you will find your self feeling detatched.

An interesting blog by a homeless man in Abbotsford. There was an report about this guy and the plight of the homeless in general on April 5 on CBC, but the report doesn't seem to be available online.

An interesting blog by a homeless man in Abbotsford. There was an report about this guy and the plight of the homeless in general on April 5 on CBC, but the report doesn't seem to be available online.

I haven't RTFA, but I've been a fan of the Homeless Guy blog for a while now (he mentions being included in the Wired article). His site is at http://thehomelessguy.blogspot.com/, he's living in Nashville, TN right now. He has many enlightening comments on who makes up the homeless population, how politics and "aid" affect them, and the impact of stereotypes. A good read.

-mix

I got my start remastering DSL, often winding up with 75 MB or so once I put Firefox, etc. in there.
I then switched to Knoppix 3.4, using the 2.4 kernel to support older hardware as mentioned.
Here is my Getting Started Guide, also have a technical blog here.
There are some screenshots available there.
One post that I need to draw your attention to is the one about "testcd" for Knoppix remasters. I did run into problems with some versions of DSL using isolinux, in that they would not boot on many of my older computers, due perhaps to the "testcd" problem. It is extremely important that any knoppix remaster pass that test, or there will be complaints concerning no-booting on boxes that used to run the distro flawlessly in an earlier syslinux version.
For that reason, DSL often offers syslinux versions alongside isolinux versions.
I don't feel that I have to, since I pass "testcd" 100%, and mine boots on all my older boxes, in addition to the newer P4 ones.
One clue that I did take from DSL is to include lots of custom-made applications, found nowhere else. That makes a remaster different, and not just a re-arrangement of stock applications.
I do have a bright yellow boot: command line against a black background, making it easy to enter long cheatcodes when trying out a new build. So many knoppix builds have a pale gray boot: command line with black background, very hard to see what you are doing!

Also, see the main screenshots page link in my signature, below.

I got my start remastering DSL, often winding up with 75 MB or so once I put Firefox, etc. in there.
I then switched to Knoppix 3.4, using the 2.4 kernel to support older hardware as mentioned.
Here is my Getting Started Guide, also have a technical blog here.
There are some screenshots available there.
One post that I need to draw your attention to is the one about "testcd" for Knoppix remasters. I did run into problems with some versions of DSL using isolinux, in that they would not boot on many of my older computers, due perhaps to the "testcd" problem. It is extremely important that any knoppix remaster pass that test, or there will be complaints concerning no-booting on boxes that used to run the distro flawlessly in an earlier syslinux version.
For that reason, DSL often offers syslinux versions alongside isolinux versions.
I don't feel that I have to, since I pass "testcd" 100%, and mine boots on all my older boxes, in addition to the newer P4 ones.
One clue that I did take from DSL is to include lots of custom-made applications, found nowhere else. That makes a remaster different, and not just a re-arrangement of stock applications.
I do have a bright yellow boot: command line against a black background, making it easy to enter long cheatcodes when trying out a new build. So many knoppix builds have a pale gray boot: command line with black background, very hard to see what you are doing!

Also, see the main screenshots page link in my signature, below.

And here's the relevant Google blog post: http://googleblog.blogspot.com/2006/06/adobe-and-g oogle-team-up-for-toolbar.html Related, from ITWire: http://www.itwire.com.au/content/view/4721/53/ (troll my hole.)

Actually if you go to Archive.Org the entire collection of the Edison National Historic Site is available for guilt-free 100% free download. When the Cartoon Geeks Podcast was looking for theme music, I went there and found the song that we're now using, Sensation Jazz by the Jazz All Stars. It was recorded in 1919 for Edison, and features the xylophonist who later would go on to play on Disney's first sound cartoon, Steamboat Willie, and the later Disney classic The Skeleton Dance.

Also, when I had clearance problems for a song I wanted to use for a video I put up on You Tube, I replaced it with another piece from the Edison collection, a version of "Ride of the Valkyries" done by the Edison Symphony Orchestra. Again, found on Archive.Org.

It is ironic these recordings are now in the public domain, because Hollywood was founded on an intellectual property dispute. The dispute was between Thomas Edison and the Motion Picture Patents Trust and people like Carl Laemmle and Cecil B. DeMille who didn't want to pay the toll Edison wanted to extract on his invention. Edison probably would have loved the current IP climate, and would probably be a big supporter of the MPAA and RIAA.

Archive.Org is an amazing place.

Does this spell the end for the true relational storage paradigm that Microsoft has been promising since Windows 95?

Aspects of WinFS are being rolled into other products, WinFS is going away, and that grand relational-filesystem is going back into ivory-tower incubation. Great. So how much money and cross-team integrated innovation randomization did we invest in WinFS?

Is this why Mark Zbikowski left Microsoft (for those that wonder why I keep bringing up MarkZ: he had been with the company for over 25 years. Only Bill and Steve have been at Microsoft longer. His departure: mmm, kind of big. The silence about it, internal and external, is weird, to me.)?

Let the BDS posts begin:
http://drsanity.blogspot.com/2005/11/lets-discuss- bush-derangement-syndrome.html
http://www.littlegreenfootballs.com/weblog/?entry= 9173
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bush_Derangement_Synd rome
http://www.townhall.com/opinion/columns/charleskra uthammer/2003/12/05/160406.html

You guys really need to grow up and start thinking.

waiting for the flamebait mod from a lib...
-john

and you don't have the decency/intelligence/grace to admit that this is a legal program.

dammit...I'm sick of all the people on slashdot suffering from Bush Derangement Syndrome.
http://drsanity.blogspot.com/2005/11/lets-discuss- bush-derangement-syndrome.html

-john

It's not really related, but I found this interview with Carver Mead very interesting. Related in that it's also about progress (or non-progress) of scientific theory.

The IEEE , Department for Professional Employees, AFL-CIO and researhers such as Norm Matloff speak up against the H-1B abuse.

Lots of folks speak up against it.

The hired gun lobbyist Harris Miller loses to Jim Webb. Miller ran an unaplogetic pro H-1B and pro-outsourcing campaign. Seems the voters in Virginia don't like Harris Miller's record.

Heck, even Milton Friedman calls it a subsidy.

I have one simple rule when dealing with people - be nice. Be nice for as long as you possibly can. Then lose your shit in the most public, noisy and abusive way that you can. Two spectacular incidents that happened recently are on my blog at http://anonymouslemming.blogspot.com/2006/05/ghost -of-customer-service-past.html

I don't want to have to flip out just to get someone to do their job, and it creates more stress than I need. If everyone just did their job right, the world would be a much happier, less stressed place. It's the age old story of a few people ruining it for everyone :(

There is a guy that is trying to get Quake up and running on the Nintendo DS. I've been following this homebrew project for a while and not to long ago he started asking for help. You could read more about it at this website.

http://dsquake.blogspot.com/

That was then, this is now:

http://ajourneyofdesire.blogspot.com/2006/06/att-d elivers.html

I've looked up the word "fascist" several times and I've never been satisfied with a definition.

I don't agree. We basically only need to reward the robots appropriately (just like the zombies in "day of the dead") for artificial evolution to create the intelligence for us. "Wants" and "needs" are just words we use to label certain cognitive mechanisms, out of similarity with how we perceive our own thinking. If having "wants" and "needs" leads to better fitness (higher rewards) for the robot, evolution will come up with those things.

I just wrote a post describing the general idea behind this approach to artificial intelligence - check it out!

I blogged about why I won't purchase any "Plays for sure" music. The DRM is practically guaranteed to make your music collection disappear.

Any system that restricts copying the music you paid for will eventually lock out the paying customer. I refuse to spend real money on a disappearing product.

Fuck the banks. It doesn't take a computer for a bank to put a major fucking security hole in your account or your identity. Someone posted a link to this a while back:

http://wamublamesgrandma.blogspot.com/

Check out this check the bank cashed:

http://wamublamesgrandma.blogspot.com/2006/03/chec k-1.html

The biggest security liability in bank applications are their god-damned lobbyists.

Fuck the banks. It doesn't take a computer for a bank to put a major fucking security hole in your account or your identity. Someone posted a link to this a while back:

http://wamublamesgrandma.blogspot.com/

Check out this check the bank cashed:

http://wamublamesgrandma.blogspot.com/2006/03/chec k-1.html

The biggest security liability in bank applications are their god-damned lobbyists.

Hottest in 400 years, yes. In several millenia? No f&)#ing way. Past temperatures are not a mystery. See the graph in this post:

http://s405.blogspot.com/2006/03/globaloney.html

Information will free you. Stop listening to experts who make money on your fear and LOOK INTO IT FOR YOURSELF.

Martin Taylors Blog!

My friend proposes that we call it by a different name: the AAAARRRRRGH-I-A-A.

Issue 8 of the ZeroC (creators of the Ice RPC protocol) linked to an active discussion in the rpc blogosphere on the legacy of CORBA, the fate of SOAP, and the age old problems of RPC:

* exhibit A: 11:40 Oct 3, 05: Mark Baker claims CORBA was a technical failure ( http://www.markbaker.ca/2002/09/Blog/2005/10/03#20 05-10-ws-corba )
* exhibit B: 15:38 Oct 3, 05: Steve Vinoski of Iona (leading CORBA vendor) begs to differ ( http://www.iona.com/blogs/vinoski/archives/000214. html ); a long discussion including Michi Henning from ZeroC ensues in the comments, including:

Even if I do define WSDL that is "loose" and makes lots of things optional, that typically doesn't help me. Loose coupling isn't of interest just for its own sake, but is of interest because people are looking for a way to solve the versioning problem: how can I evolve a distributed application over time without breaking everything that is deployed already, and without having to recompile and redeploy the universe? If I define WSDL that is "loose" to start with, so I get the loose coupling I so much need, by implication, I know in advance how the application will evolve: I put the "loose" bits in the WSDL definitions where I expect future variation in the data. But real life doesn't work that way. None of us is prescient and, as a rule, what makes the versioning problem so hard is that we *don't* know how an application will evolve in the future. In other words, people who say that I can solve the problem by writing "loose" WSDL are kidding themselves: the real world is not cooperative enough for this to work.

* Michi Henning

It's odd that CORBA should end up being sidelined by most of its original supporters, in favour of a supposedly simpler and cheaper system that ends up being frantically complicated (well over 100 related specifications, and counting) and far more expensive. But that's business for you!

* Tom Welsh

* exhibit C: 23:05 Oct 13, 05: Ted Neward discovers and enters the discussion ( http://blogs.tedneward.com/CommentView,guid,070274 e8-ccfd-4ebd-87b5-494564c39b77.aspx )

And here is another prediction: once people get over their current fixation with loose coupling, they will finally realize that, to get loose coupling, I don't need loose type systems that throw away compile-time type safety, and I don't need support at the protocol level at horrendous cost in performance. All I need is intelligent system design, a middleware that offers a workable implementation of multiple interfaces (check out Ice facets), and domain-specific standardization. With that, I get type safety, flexibility, and performance.

* Michi Henning

* exhibit D: 17:32 Oct 22, 05: Ken Horn comments on the issue ( http://kendes.blogspot.com/2005/10/loose-coupling- corba-vs-ws.html )

Links

* PEPt - An Architecture for Adaptable Remoting Systems ( http://haroldcarr.net/pept/ )
* YAML ( http://www.yaml.org/ )
* A Conversation with Roger Sessions and Terry Coatta ( http://www.acmqueue.com/m

"...now would be a good time to switch over to a "real" database. "Real" is one of those words that Doug ought to add to his list of words. It means "expensive". Many managers seem to have this idea that it is invariably true that you get what you pay for, and that therefore nothing that is available for free can possibly be any good."

http://googleplanet.blogspot.com/2005/12/how-googl e-decided-to-stay-with-mysql.html

"The moral of the story is that sometimes, and in particular with free software, you get more than what you pay for."

If that is true why have DSL providers been lowering rates in order to attract customers? The fact is that nearly every consumer of broadband has at least one additional option.

2. Direct HD partition support so we can boot off the same 'system' and have the same applications and data

It's coming in a future release.

Lots of more info at the official Parallels blog.

2. Direct HD partition support so we can boot off the same 'system' and have the same applications and data

It's coming in a future release.

Lots of more info at the official Parallels blog.

What mirror-universe are you referring to exactly? Last I checked Ray Bradbury was alive and kicking.

--
http://unk1911.blogspot.com/

Apple's roadmap: an OSX kernel built around the TPM built into all new Intel Macs... allowing Apple to enforce hardware DRM, and force you to run or not run certain pieces of code and execute their own code in secret, outside the view of debuggers or scrutiny. I hope *you* trusted *them*. Basically, Treacherous Computing is the dominant thing on Apple's roadmap... just as it is on Microsoft's.

"The problem with OSS, as has been stated, is that it does not prepare students for what the vast majority of them are going to see in the real world."

I think I've heard this view more times than I can count. The "real world" - as you call it includes school. It is not a different place. But more importantly, there is a very strange idea implied in this particular use of the word "prepare". Is preparation a matter of mere training? Is it that you want students who have memorized step-by-step sequences to accomplish a task to work for your organization? Is it a drone that one seeks to hire from the "fake" world of education? A successful user of technology is one who can adapt and see conceptually what is actually happening with regard to the software they use. Such a user will have success no matter what software is thrown into their lap.

I've written more about this here.

"No, I'm not going to compromise student education for the sake of my ideals."

If your ideals compromise the education of students, then you don't have the right ideals. It appears that your ideal is teach-what-is-popular. Not only is that a very lethargic and vapid ideal, but is also wrapped up in an erroneous belief that it takes a knowledge of what-is-popular in order to be "prepared" educationally - that if you don't do what is popular, you are somehow making harmful sacrifices. This is, IMO, a superficial way of approaching education. This approach turns education into mere training. Such an approach merely perpetuates the status quo - whether it be in technology or any other subject area.

http://sikhissues.blogspot.com/2006/01/al-qaeda-of -india-rss-vhp-bjp-orthodox.html
I think America should NOT outsource to India till a comprehensive social security plan is implemented in India. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Unemployment_insuranc e
Otherwise America is contributing to "race to the bottom" in India where 85% of people do not even have bank accounts. http://in.rediff.com/money/2005/dec/01guest3.htm

You're wrong. The "smash things into each other" catgories are remote controlled, but other contests are fully autonomous (hexapod walking for example) or semi-autonomous (humanoid and aibo soccer). For some video, see my sons' blog report on Robogames

Uncle Sam :-D

Despite the other replies, Italy is one of the few that has Italian players...
http://football.guardian.co.uk/theknowledge/story/ 0,,1785937,00.html
Playing with foreign players can cause some distrust when they do not perform at away games...
http://worldcup.reuters.com/spain/news/usnL2772974 4.html
An interesting blogg about the last World Cup's national mix...
http://usasoccer.blogspot.com/2006/05/world-cup-20 02-roster-breakdowns.html
A Time article about the French team for the 2002 World Cup noted that they only had one French player...
http://www.time.com/time/worldcup2002/020128/index .html

I could go on but I think you should get my point by now.

I posted energy consumption data for PCs and Macs: http://lancej.blogspot.com/

The difference: many leave our PCs on 24 hours a day... leading to significant costs.

This is reminds me of the story about when Amazon went into auctions, taking on ebay. That didn't work out. Why? The customer behaviour is just different - you go to Amazon, you see book, you click. There's suggestions for other books etc, and you might or might not get those as well along the way. You deal with a company with a known reputation. Auctions is about bargain hunting, and assessing the reputation of whoever you are buying from. The consumer behaviour is just different.

Now, how is this grocery store any different? Can they give me a list of statistically improbable items in my shopping list (fertiliser, detergent, ammonium nitrate, charcoal, starch, paraffin oil... :) ;) just joking), or suggest grocery items? Or provide consumer reviews of products? Can that work? It might, but it sounds hard. There doesn't seem to be a compelling case.

The link I provided is very entertaining by the way. If interested, you want to start here. And read the whole blog, it's full of interesting tidbits (I'm not done with it yet). Greg's cool! He's one of us. (But wait there's more: here's a similar one for Google too! Doug's a marketing guy, and you can read Ron Garret's posts for the technical stuff.)

This is reminds me of the story about when Amazon went into auctions, taking on ebay. That didn't work out. Why? The customer behaviour is just different - you go to Amazon, you see book, you click. There's suggestions for other books etc, and you might or might not get those as well along the way. You deal with a company with a known reputation. Auctions is about bargain hunting, and assessing the reputation of whoever you are buying from. The consumer behaviour is just different.

Now, how is this grocery store any different? Can they give me a list of statistically improbable items in my shopping list (fertiliser, detergent, ammonium nitrate, charcoal, starch, paraffin oil... :) ;) just joking), or suggest grocery items? Or provide consumer reviews of products? Can that work? It might, but it sounds hard. There doesn't seem to be a compelling case.

The link I provided is very entertaining by the way. If interested, you want to start here. And read the whole blog, it's full of interesting tidbits (I'm not done with it yet). Greg's cool! He's one of us. (But wait there's more: here's a similar one for Google too! Doug's a marketing guy, and you can read Ron Garret's posts for the technical stuff.)

This is reminds me of the story about when Amazon went into auctions, taking on ebay. That didn't work out. Why? The customer behaviour is just different - you go to Amazon, you see book, you click. There's suggestions for other books etc, and you might or might not get those as well along the way. You deal with a company with a known reputation. Auctions is about bargain hunting, and assessing the reputation of whoever you are buying from. The consumer behaviour is just different.

Now, how is this grocery store any different? Can they give me a list of statistically improbable items in my shopping list (fertiliser, detergent, ammonium nitrate, charcoal, starch, paraffin oil... :) ;) just joking), or suggest grocery items? Or provide consumer reviews of products? Can that work? It might, but it sounds hard. There doesn't seem to be a compelling case.

The link I provided is very entertaining by the way. If interested, you want to start here. And read the whole blog, it's full of interesting tidbits (I'm not done with it yet). Greg's cool! He's one of us. (But wait there's more: here's a similar one for Google too! Doug's a marketing guy, and you can read Ron Garret's posts for the technical stuff.)

I think this is big and could lead to more trials. I definitely this was a positive result from California's prop 71. Let's hope it gets the bill stuck in Congress passed. I just posted a summary of this and other relevant stem cell science news dating back to December '04 on my blog, http://bensstemcellnews.blogspot.com/ You'll see a lot of advancements are being made. And check out a TV spot I was in for prop 71 called "Twins." If anyone wants to link to me or me to link to them, let me know!

You want to know the latest trends for Java-based web development? Fewer and fewer people are going to be doing Java-based web development in the future.

Fuck trends. They're wrong. Every day the industry continues to stay with its current ridiculous technologies when vastly superior ones were invented decades ago infuriates me further. If it doesn't infuriate you, you're not paying close enough attention.

My advice: read Lambda the Ultimate and Steve Yegge's blog. Endeavor to learn what the lambda calculus and referential transparency are. If you are sincerely interested in bettering yourself as a programmer and don't go find out who Alonzo Church was then so help me God I will kick you in the balls. Learn about SML and type inference. Learn about Haskell and monads. Learn about process calculi and Erlang. Learn about Lisp and code generation and domain-specific languages. Learn about Scheme and lexical closures and continuations. Learn about Smalltalk and what OO was really supposed to be. Learn about type theory and formalism and the Curry-Howard correspondence. Learn about Forth and Joy and how you can have a powerful, expressive language without even so much as a grammar. Learn about Intercal and Befunge and just how badly your choice of programming language can torture you. Learn about UML and Ruby on Rails and Seaside and agile programming and Java generics and Python generators. Learn about aspect-oriented programming, context-oriented programming and concept programming. Learn about multi-paradigm languages like OCaml or Oz. Learn about weird Lisp dialects with syntax like Rebol or Dylan.

Realize that library design is language design. Realize that asynchronous programming with callbacks and explicit state in a world where lightweight coroutines were around in the days of fucking Simula in the 60s for Christ's sake is cruel and unusual torture. (Sorry, pet programming construct.) Realize that the programming language research community, while considering systems programming a solved problem and generally not interested in talking about human factors, is doing some genuinely promising work. Did you know that there are conc

GNOME is not reattributing Google scholarships to women! The GNOME foundation received money from Google for participating in Google Summer of Code, this is a bonus which is not related to money given by Google to the students. Now the GNOME foundation decides to use its own money to create new "scholarships" for women, similar to Google SOC. See http://mces.blogspot.com/2006/06/gnome-summer-of-g als.html.

Chase what you love, first and foremost. That said, you should surf Sourceforge and sign into one of the projects there. It will help "the cause" of forwarding FOSS.

If you want extra money, you'll find enough few contract programming jobs (if you're competent) at places like Hire A Programmer or Xperts 4 Hire. There are others but you know how to google, right programmer?

For example, my side projects include:
  - FOSS Sudoku
  - Postgres Build machine agent
  - General BSD OS fiddling
  - Local C++ work
  - various "skunkwork" projects at my local job (.NET)

The rest is non-tech. I must stress that having a non-tech side makes your life whole.

I wouldn't be so quick at judging the Google guys. From their blog: "We'll follow through on the other commitment - one percent of profit - by taking one percent of each year's profits and donating and investing that too. Our first step in meeting these commitments includes a $90 million cash donation to the Google Foundation and a commitment of up to $175 million over three years across our other Google.org efforts." http://googleblog.blogspot.com/2005/10/about-googl eorg.html

you can run a web server of the new N series nokias already.

Dean
http://deancollinsblog.blogspot.com/2006/05/javaon e.html