Slashdot Mirror

GNOME FTP Sites This site is mirrored at:

• United States and Canada

  ftp://ftp.cse.buffalo.edu/pub/Gnome
  ftp://ftp.rpmfind.net/linux/gnome.org/
  ftp://ftp.sourceforge.net/pub/mirrors/gnome/
  ftp://ftp.twoguys.org/GNOME
  ftp://ftp.yggdrasil.com/mirrors/site/ftp.gnome.org / ub/GNOME/
  ftp://ftp3.sourceforge.net/pub/mirrors/gnome
  ftp://archive.progeny.com/GNOME/

• Australia

  ftp://planetmirror.com/pub/gnome

• Europe

  ftp://ftp.easynet.nl/mirror/GNOME/
  ftp://ftp.unina.it/pub/linux/GNOME
  ftp://fr.rpmfind.net/linux/gnome.org
  ftp://fr2.rpmfind.net/pub/GNOME/
  ftp://ftp.acc.umu.se/pub/GNOME/
  ftp://ftp.belnet.be/mirror/ftp.gnome.org/pub/GNOME
  ftp://ftp.codefactory.se/pub/GNOME/
  ftp://ftp.dataplus.se/pub/GNOME/
  ftp://ftp.dit.upm.es/pub/GNOME/
  ftp://ftp.no.gnome.org/pub/GNOME/
  ftp://ftp.sunet.se/pub/X11/GNOME/
  ftp://ftp.tr.gnome.org/pub/GNOME

• South America

  ftp://linux.cem.itesm.mx/pub/mirrors/gnome.org

Last updated Wed Jun 26 03:18:01 2002 from our mirror database (webmaster@gnome.org).

Karma whore alert! Please mod down, and mod this anonymous post up!

archive.progeny.com (US or Canada)
ftp.twoguys.org (US or Canada)
ftp3.sourceforge.net (US or Canada)
ftp.rpmfind.net (US or Canada)
ftp.sourceforge.net (US or Canada)
ftp.cse.buffalo.edu (US or Canada)
ftp.yggdrasil.com (US or Canada)
planetmirror.com (Australia)
ftp.sunet.se (Europe)
ftp.dataplus.se (Europe)
ftp.easynet.nl (Europe)
ftp.unina.it (Europe)
ftp.belnet.be (Europe)
ftp.codefactory.se (Europe)
ftp.tr.gnome.org (Europe)
fr.rpmfind.net (Europe)
ftp.acc.umu.se (Europe)
ftp.no.gnome.org (Europe)
ftp.dit.upm.es (Europe)
fr2.rpmfind.net (Europe)
linux.cem.itesm.mx (South America)

archive.progeny.com (US or Canada)
ftp.twoguys.org (US or Canada)
ftp3.sourceforge.net (US or Canada)
ftp.rpmfind.net (US or Canada)
ftp.sourceforge.net (US or Canada)
ftp.cse.buffalo.edu (US or Canada)
ftp.yggdrasil.com (US or Canada)
planetmirror.com (Australia)
ftp.sunet.se (Europe)
ftp.dataplus.se (Europe)
ftp.easynet.nl (Europe)
ftp.unina.it (Europe)
ftp.belnet.be (Europe)
ftp.codefactory.se (Europe)
ftp.tr.gnome.org (Europe)
fr.rpmfind.net (Europe)
ftp.acc.umu.se (Europe)
ftp.no.gnome.org (Europe)
ftp.dit.upm.es (Europe)
fr2.rpmfind.net (Europe)
linux.cem.itesm.mx (South America)

So, just as daylight savings time supposedly reminds us to change our smoke detector batteries (because otherwise that annoying 'low battery' beeping always start at 4am), tiny earthquakes remind us about our earthquake kits and preparation. Includes...

• 3+ days of food, water, clothing, tools (ability to turn off the gas if needed) flashlights etc etc.
• especially if you're female: comfortable clothing in your car, with a good change of shoes (vs hiking in high heels)
• knowing where your important papers and backup disks are (some sites advise having copies in a bag you can grab on the way out), and having copies in a safe / safety deposit box.
• cell phone always charged and gas tank always at least 1/2 full

And unless you live in Scottsdale, AZ, don't feel smug about the safety of your own location- St. Louis has had an 8.0, and New York State has seen 6.0's.

Rats are actually willing to starve themselves to receive direct-to-brain pleasure (just search for 'starvation'), so it seems likely to me that they would subject themselves to danger (including, as the article says, brightly lit environments) and potentially even death for the reward of the neural stimulation.

The 1040 in question was the 1040 EZ, which you can see here: http://www.cedar.buffalo.edu/NABR/1040EZx2.gif. This form has 17 fields to fill out (not counting name and address and a couple other gimmies). An EULA tries to cover the gamut of legal possibilities. This little analysis is ignorant. An EULA is always going to be somewhat complex. The key to a usable EULA (which the issuer doesn't want, btw) is using layman's terms.

Actually, it's just a lot easier to state the algorithm as ((summation of digits) + n) mod 10 = 0, where n is the check digit.

You can see it here.

I think the person you were replying to was trying to give an equation in the form of n= and got a bit twisted.

You still have to give him credit for attention to detail in a weird stalker-like way!

Basically, the bits have values: 74210. Every digit uses five bits and exactly two bits are on, and the number zero is encoded as an eleven.

he's right. check out for yourself or use javascript for your needs. Thanks for playing!

You get the best of both worlds in the Buffalo Region.
You are within short driving distance of fine Canadian establishments (Canadian Ballet, anyone? ;-).
Good skiing country nearby.
BioInformatics center just established.

The main FTP site seems to be down, but at ftp://ftp.gnome.org/pub/GNOME/MIRRORS.html you can find a list of mirrors.

A few of them are:

ftp://ftp.cse.buffalo.edu/pub/Gnome
ftp://ftp.rpmfind.net/linux/gnome.org/
ftp://ftp.sourceforge.net/pub/mirrors/gnome/
ftp://ftp.twoguys.org/GNOME

OK, here's another mirror (thanks to the iller.org mirror!)

• The math archives WWW Server at the University of Tennessee
• Are You Ready? quizzes to help you assess your ability and progress

Here are some of the more promising results of a search from google.com (String used was :unix ref card pdf)

Unix Cheat Sheet
Unix Cheat Sheet
From Rice University : Very basic
Another Too large and outdated
Selection of Unix, Vi, and Emacs refferences Courtesy Univ. of Alberta.ca

You should be able to find what you need easy enough. I should also highly reccommend to everyone the linuxsecurity.com Linux Security guidesheet. Damn good reading to hardening your system. Here

Toodles

This is quite a salient point. In my very humble opinion, it seems to me that Government, Religion etc are in the business of controlling information and forming the way you think.

If you need any proof of this, remember that the government is now saying that they will not provide proof of Osama Bin Laden's involvement to other countries because the proof is "classified" (aka, a "Secret"). I would bet that they are using some form of encryption to keep prying eyes out. I don't believe there is any backdoor to their system so that we can check out this "proof" for ourselves. Does anyone know of one? I'm also quite sure that they don't have anybody checking the information to make sure that it doesn't contain plans to assasinate the president and overthrow the government. The FBI databases could be used to coordinate a coup.

Don't they report to us? Aren't we entitled to see this proof for ourselves before the government uses our money to finance a Crusade? Before you get your undies in a twist, face it. This is a Crusade. It happens to be that this Crusade is directed at a very select subset of the Muslim population, but it is a Crusade none-the-less.

Back to my point: Some religions tell you that there are things you can't read or listen to because they are sinful. What they really mean is that what you might actually hear or read something that will make you think for yourself and quite possibly deviate from what they've taught you.

I find it amusing that some people are horrified at some of the Taliban's (Yahoo Links and News) doctrines and don't even blink when they tell their kids that they can't listen to Ozzy Osbourne because it's a sin. In case you have no idea what I'm talking about, the Taliban's particular interpretation of Islam and the Holy Qur'an prohibits women to teach, read, attend school or hold down a job.

* Note: the date I saw this in the news was 10/3/00, but I can't find a link that documents the specific scheme used, though I made a note of how it worked. this page references that the zip + 4 + delivery point code could be used, but proposes a different way of doing and doesn't discuss the system I read about. Send me an email if you find a link that documents the system I outlined.

Dude, if you just want to view quicktime files, save the twenty bucks and use real free software.

Install plugger and Xanim.

Now shockwave is an entirely different matter...

Well you don't have to belive the ice ages on this planet have happened recently and climate changes can be dramtic enough without undue influence from man . Besides that althou the planet is a couple of billion years old the exsistance of man on this planet is not. Man made pollutants have rendered areas unihabatible . These factors contribute to atmosphic pollutants which help the global warming isssue. The planet may exsist another couple of billion years. How ever it may not be able to support life. Humans should try to contribute to a continued exsistance and not a quick destruction.

Case in point: Check out this spam I received the other day:

http://www.acsu.buffalo.edu/~jrross/email/spam.htm l

I had to save it, I've never seen any spam so blatant in my entire life.

Fisher, is it is *STILL BETA* is only available on a few mirrors, those of which are:
Indiana, USA:
http://csociety-ftp.ecn.purdue.edu/pub/redhat/beta /fisher
ftp://csociety-ftp.ecn.purdue.edu/pub/redhat/beta/ fisher

Minnesota, USA:
ftp://ftp.mn-linux.org/linux/redhat/beta/fisher

Buffalo, New York, USA:
ftp://ftp.cse.buffalo.edu/mirror/Linux/redhat/beta /fisher

Pennsylvania, USA:
http://carroll.cac.psu.edu/pub/linux/distributions /redhat/redhat/beta/fisher
ftp://carroll.cac.psu.edu/pub/linux/distributions/ redhat/redhat/beta/fisher
rsync://carroll.cac.psu.edu/redhat-beta/fisher

Anyone going to use Fisher should of course, goto Bugzilla.redhat.com and give plenty of bug reports and other issues while using this beta version of RedHat.

Ok. I know it was only part of a joke in the original post, but as a previous developer of SnB, I've gotta pass along the link to the actual lab and software:

http://www.hwi.buffalo.edu/SnB/

From your description I would think the method would be even more valuable if it had a better way than testing randomly generated models to find an optimal set. Hinton has proposed methods to dependently train his experts, which to me seems a very desirable property. Using randomly generated models is actually a strength of SD, the "proof which this margin is too small to contain." <grin>

One notable exception is in the research of Stochastic Discrimination (sd). This technique was originally developed through mathematics rather than experimentation as is the case with NNs. In other words, rather than the "let's see what happens if" development of NNs, sd's approach is "the equations say this should happen". Because of this, it is very rigorously defined and the hows and whys are clearly understood.

Sd also "combines" weak models but in a way that, to the best of my knowledge, no one else has done before. The basics are:

1. Incredibly weak models are generated to solve the given problem.
2. Hundreds of thousands of these models are combined.
3. These weak models must be uniform with respect to each other and to the problem space.

But before we "combine" them, we have to see that this weak model is uniform with respect to the other weak models. This is a term defined in the sd theory. Basically, what it means is that the weak models need to be evenly selected throughout the set of all possible weak models. In other words, there is no oversampling or bias. (Actually, this isn't quite right but goes in the right direction. Read one of the papers if you're interested.) The concept of uniformity is probably the most interesting part of sd and it is the primary concept that all the other "combination" techniques miss. In this article, for example, how do we know that there isn't a connection to being furry and being small? If there is a statistical dependency, then the vote won't be fair and results will be weaker.

Anyway, that's a real crash course in sd basics. So how does this algorithm perform? On the standard benchmarks (Irvine, for example) it handily outperforms anything out there. Right out of the box and without tuning. For more information see the web site or send me email.

University at Buffalo also requires incoming students to have "access to a computer, beyond those provided in the university's public computing sites." http://www.buffalo.edu/iconnect/ com p_reqs.shtml I don't really agree with this policy either.

Con: I suspect that because students will have there own computers, the University will not have to give as much support to public computing labs. Public computing labs will never be eliminated, but the equipment and infrastructure may be allowed to "slide". Also, people have noticed that students in the Computer Science program don't use the CS labs as much these days, now that everyone has their own high-speed-internet-enabled, mp3-playing, IM/ICQ machines at home. This reduction in use of the computer labs also reduces CS students' camraderie and feelings of unity (what little there was to begin with).

Pro: However, having a standardized minimum level of computer access does have its advantages. It allows instructors and administration to move to more efficient ways of registering for classes, communicating, submitting assignments, etc., since they know that all students have the ability to do so (because they know all students have computers).

Details: There are some minimum requirements for computers, based upon the ability to run applications. I don't know of any instances where students are required to be able to run Wintel-only programs. Also, students don't have to buy a computer. They can lease one through the University. There is also a Students Needing Assistance Program (SNAP) which loans computers to students for free, funded by Dell and IBM.

Ben

University at Buffalo also requires incoming students to have "access to a computer, beyond those provided in the university's public computing sites." http://www.buffalo.edu/iconnect/ com p_reqs.shtml I don't really agree with this policy either.

Con: I suspect that because students will have there own computers, the University will not have to give as much support to public computing labs. Public computing labs will never be eliminated, but the equipment and infrastructure may be allowed to "slide". Also, people have noticed that students in the Computer Science program don't use the CS labs as much these days, now that everyone has their own high-speed-internet-enabled, mp3-playing, IM/ICQ machines at home. This reduction in use of the computer labs also reduces CS students' camraderie and feelings of unity (what little there was to begin with).

Pro: However, having a standardized minimum level of computer access does have its advantages. It allows instructors and administration to move to more efficient ways of registering for classes, communicating, submitting assignments, etc., since they know that all students have the ability to do so (because they know all students have computers).

Details: There are some minimum requirements for computers, based upon the ability to run applications. I don't know of any instances where students are required to be able to run Wintel-only programs. Also, students don't have to buy a computer. They can lease one through the University. There is also a Students Needing Assistance Program (SNAP) which loans computers to students for free, funded by Dell and IBM.

Ben

Can't people even handle a compliment around here? I was trying to say that weathering overwhelming odds, with only luck to go on, until they found strong allies was admirable in the rebels.

Regardless of the participation of the French, the fact remains that America revolted agains the most powerful empire in the world, and won.

Nonsense. You cannot view the Revolutionary war without considering the French, Spanish and Dutch. Without them, the Americans could never have won. Your comment makes it seem like we can leave them out of the equation altogether, which is ridiculous.

The Americans won against the most powerful empire in the world because they had the help of three of the other most powerful nations in the world. Had it not been for those nations' personal enmity against Britain, the Americans would have been left high and dry.

I always hate it when foreigners equate John Wayne with their worst perceptions of American nationalistic fervor.

Fair enough. I'll be certain to form my future memory of the man from his role in . , complete with droopy fu manchu moustache. =)

The software industry has a lot of similarities - in some sense we're the Hollywood or rock star business of the 90s/00s, with a certain amount more solid real-world business but a lot of flash and entertainment and popular new waves followed by newer waves or retro version of older waves. And some folks get to be Mozillionares while other folks are just banging away in their garages, hopefully having fun in the process.
VCs put up a lot of risk money in return for large chunks of the startups they support, though the balance of power is different and even an unsuccessful startup usually pays its people a decent day-job wage before it tanks, unlike an unsuccessful record album.

I've recently been reading some biographies and histories of the late-60s San Francisco-area psychedelic bands - Jefferson Airplane/**, Grateful Dead, Janis Joplin. One mistake that happened with several bands is that after early successful records, their labels told them they could have unlimited studio time to work on their next project, and the bands took them up on it. This may be ok for speed metal bands or edgy punk types who want to get done quickly so they can go back to loud crowded clubs consuming aggressive drugs, but it's a bad idea for acidheads ("We were trying to get a perfect recording of the sound of thick air, so the percussionists could alternate it with the sound of thin air that we got last week, which would be a really cool effect, sort of a John Cage thing .") Analogies to followon software projects by highly creative people are left as an exercise for the reader :-)

...it's fair to say that any alien race that would put so much resources into the laughable venture of "space exploration" would most likely be a race of Communists

What about these guys?

Yes, companies really do this, and it gains the big ones that implement intelligently millions of dollars per year.

How about a few analogies to explain the "supposed" benefits:

It's like using a network file server instead of using floppies to move files between computers.

It's like using NIS to sync all your users instead of adding every user manually.

There are many benefits to using an ERP system, with most people finding the most benefits in a manufaturing company. It would be swell if there were only two fields to fill in to run ERP software (employees and sodas), but there are usually hundreds.

I used to implement ERP software(SYMIX,Glovia (CHESS),Baan), and then programmed for Baan...The software is big and does so many things. "Enterprise Resource Planning" _is_ descriptive. For your entire enterprise(business) - whether one site or a hundred sites of hundreds of employees, machines, departments - you can manage/decide/plan how each of those resources (including money) should be allocated and assigned to achieve your business objectives.

Go here and read: What is ERP

Wrong story thread. MS is Ferengi, not Wookee. Bill "Grand Nagus" Gates is ruled by the most the Rules of Acquisition, not US Law.

Rule 42: What's mine is mine, and what's yours is mine too.

I'm running an event at UBCon this weekend...

Have fun storming the castle!


Your Working Boy,

the HGP uses 4 BAC libraries with some P1s and pacs thrown in, for a total of 6
caltech libraries b,c and d
pieter DeJongs libraries RPCI-11 and RPCI-1
and the dupont p1 library(I forget the link, it's handled by a private company now)

Each library was constructed from a different persons tissue

jor-el

Here's a link to one of their projects on handwritten address recognition.

http://pennsun.essc.psu.edu/satan/sata n_doc/

http://urth.acsu.buffalo.edu/security/

He's not my favored Democratic candidate, so I don't know why I'm doing this; maybe just to combat the analysis of the teeny-brained.

* Internet quote: "In an interview shown on CNN on Tuesday, Gore was asked about his vision and his experience and he mentioned that while he served in Congress, 'I took the initiative in creating the Internet.'" [AP story] Obviously the word used is not "invented" though it is commonly reported that way; and "created" is probably too strong, especially since as we all know the history of the internet goes back to the 1960s ARPANET. But he did have a hand in legislation during that period when nobody else was paying attention.

* Love Canal: "'I called for a congressional investigation and a hearing. I looked around the country for other sites like that. I found a little place in upstate New York called Love Canal. Had the first hearing on that issue,' Gore said. That was the one that started it all. ... We made a huge difference and it was all because one high school student got involved.'"

Now, one can quibble over the phrase "started it all" -- did he mean that was the start of cleaning up Love Canal, or the start of Congressional attention to the toxic waste problem? The latter is NOT in question:

"In August of 1978, Gore did chair hearings on the matter by the House Commerce Subcommittee on Oversight and Investigations - two months after the Love Canal homes were evacuated and President Carter declared the neighborhood a disaster area."
[CapitalWatch, last December]

This local Love Canal chronology makes clear that while the emergency was dealt with thanks to the local representative and the EPA, Gore was indeed the first subcommittee chairman (3/21/79) to begin looking into the matter.

* Now, finally, the Earned Income Credit issue: I can't find the original quote, but the discussion/question was about EXPANDING the Earned Income Tax Credit, a bill which he most certainly did sponsor while in Congress.

So, are these gaffes, or are they just journalists and opponents looking for any opportunity to try to turn a remark of his into a gaffe? There certainly was truth in everything he said. Go ahead, sputter, say "it was an exaggeration", but what he said was factual. Self-serving; but factual.

And show me one other politician who has said nothing that is self-serving.
----

Plugger seems to work well in Linux. Instead of being a monolithic multimedia player plugin, it uses xanim and mtv to play video, timidity for MIDI, xmp for mods and so on. It's worth a try.

Xanim, maybe? Check out the Xanim home page.

Calvino's IOAWNAT is one of his books where he is most influenced by OuLiPo, a French literature movement dedicated to writing works that conform to playful (often mathematical) constraints. Calvino is one of the more approachable examples of Oulipan literature, and certainly bears a lot of exploration in his own right, but if you want to go deeper there's lots of room. Try Harry Matthews, the only English-language member of the core group; his oulipo compendium will give you lots of further leads.

Another recommendation (which you're probably aware of as a slashdotter): Samuel R. Delany's Neveryon series

> uh,
> 1.if none of them talk they'd both be dead.
> (Game theory)

I'm afraid you're wrong. You shouldn't go correcting people when you don't know what you're talking about. The Prisoner's Dilemma doesn't work that way. Why would the Chinese even need to interrogate them if, when neither of them fessed up and testified against the other brother, the government would kill
them both? If that was the case, they'd just kill them both and be done with it.

Here's how it might have worked in this case:

Bro A silent; || Bro A rats
Bro B silent -- Both 20 years in prison || A acquitted, B dies
Bro B rats -- B acquitted, A dies || Both life in prison

The entire point of game theory is that the maximized mutual benefit occurs when both parties cooperate, however, when one party is greedy, the other one will suffer. Here's a tutorial on game theory.

Here's some miscellaneous URLS's:
http://linas.org/linux/NMS.html
http://netman.cit.buffalo.edu/Archives.html
http://gxsnmp.scram.de/
http://www.cforc.com/cwk/net-manage.cgi
http://wwwsnmp.cs.utwente.nl/software/utwente.html
http://netman.cit.buffalo.edu/Papers.html

Here's some miscellaneous URLS's:
http://linas.org/linux/NMS.html
http://netman.cit.buffalo.edu/Archives.html
http://gxsnmp.scram.de/
http://www.cforc.com/cwk/net-manage.cgi
http://wwwsnmp.cs.utwente.nl/software/utwente.html
http://netman.cit.buffalo.edu/Papers.html

I see video file playback software as an important application for a modern desktop system because there is more and more video content offered on the net, from low bitrate news clips to huge MPEG-2 movie trailers.

Unfortunately, there is no playback software for two of the three important formats ASF (specs),
QuickTime (site), only Real is available (with some flaws in the player, correct me if I'm wrong).

Remember that Star Wars trailer using the Sorenson codec and how nobody could see it without a Windows box or a Mac? I'd like to know if there are any efforts underway to create a replacement format (very hard) or convince the creators (one of them Microsoft, but hey, they're trying to establish a standard with ASF, so they at least have to pretend they're cooperating) to offer a player which can be integrated into X / KDE. The xanim author does his best, but the enterprises won't give him specs on their newest codecs.

BTW, anyone here know about an MPEG-2 player (for unencrypted movie trailers)?

I emailed Apple and Sorenson about working with Mark Podlipec (Xanim's creator) and below is the email I got back.

If we all email them maybe they will get a clue.
For reference, Xanim's home page (and mirrors)
http://xanim.va.pubnix.com/home.html
http://smurfland.cit.buffalo.edu/xanim/home.html
http://xanim.resnet.gatech.edu/home.html


Hello,

You're receiving this note because you asked for QuickTime for Linux, QuickTime for UNIX, or QuickTime for Amiga.

QuickTime is available for Mac OS http://www.apple.com/macos, Windows 95, Windows 98, and Windows NT 4. The next platform to be supported will be Mac OS X http://www.apple.com/macosx (including Mac OS X Server), which is Mach/BSD-based.

If you're interested in QuickTime for platforms other than Mac or Windows, contact your platform vendor and let them know that you would like them to license QuickTime from Apple.

If you're interested in QuickTime as it relates to servers, be sure to check out the standards-based Darwin streaming server project http://publicsource.apple.com (which works with any standards-based streaming media client).

Thank you,

--
Charles Wiltgen
QuickTime Technology Manager
Worldwide Developer Relations Apple Computer, Inc. "Don't compromise. Use QuickTime."
http://www.apple.com/quicktime
http://www.QuickTimeFAQ.org

QuickTime 4: The first standards-based architecture for networked media.
Recognized as the industry standard for Macintosh and Windows since 1991.

I'm a junior at the CS program at SUNY Albany (thank G-d the CS dept is all *nix). I was horrified when I heard from a friend that a well known neiboring college (RPI) CS dept switched to MS VC++/NT/95/98. I do not have any confirmation of this, but I use to think that RPI was a mostly *nix school (or now maybe only the EE dept.)

Another good school pumping out MS drones :(

At least the SUNY systems colleges' CS depts use *nix (or at least Albany and Buffalo).

Agreed.

In Elizabethan english,

Ah, here's the problem. Go back further to middle or old English.

there was both a familiar and a formal version of the second person singular pronoun. The familar version was "thou" or "thee" Thou as the subject of a sentence: "thou hast a chicken on thy head", and thee as the object: "I despise thee." Neither of these words were every written with a thorn.

Wrong. Check out this university explanation of the thorn and see it used in 'the' and 'thou'. Or go read Beowulf in the original Old English. Besices the thorn English once used the eth (The unvoiced 'th' sound line in 'thought'), the asc or ash (the joined ae ligature still occasionally seen [today!] in words like encyclopaedia.), and the yogh (resembling a descended 3 with a flat top). People have such static concepts of the English alphabet and think if never changed. Heck, J and V and W are all fairly NEW additiona to the alphabet. Since ae is still used today, how many letters does the English alphabet really have again?

If you've ever read anything Noam Chomsky has had to say about the "media-industrial" complex, you'll have no trouble believing that MS may have indeed inspired just this type of article.

Remember, MS is in it for the kill and will use any resource they have at their disposal to kill Linux. That includes NBC.

I wrote a curses viewer which supports multiple playback speeds, pausing, and compression (that 930k movie file gzips into a nice little 37k bundle) Go grab it from http://www.acsu.buffalo.edu/~askalski/swplay.html and enjoy :-)