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Okay, I admit I'm still using CBB instead of gnucash since it's unclear whether one is morally superiour to the other.... ;-)

I suppose I should just bite the bullet and write a cbb to gnucash account converter... would anyone else find this useful? (The reason qif export/import isn't useful for this is that the two programs have completely different ideas of what a "category" is. Ah, semantics.)

Trouble indeed, trouble on triton. Hehe, well, at least the book was good.

I'm surprised that Dartmouth turned down a chance to evaluate Carnivore, given that the school's engineering and CS depts seem ready to leap into any ill-advised adventure given promises of funding and PR hits.

For example, take the recently founded ISTS. No one has yet been able to explain to me why this is housed at Dartmouth. A bit of investigation reveals some government/Dartmouth administration cronyism. The functional result is that Dartmouth faculty will soon (if they aren't already) be using these new government funds to fund existing projects seemingly unrelated to the purposes of ISTS.

Interesting, mais non?

If anyone has any info or thoughts on this, I'd appreciate it, either here or by email (grossdog@dartmouth.edu) for a story I'm working on. I can keep names/sources confidential if necessary.

--Andrew Grossman

I'm surprised that Dartmouth turned down a chance to evaluate Carnivore, given that the school's engineering and CS depts seem ready to leap into any ill-advised adventure given promises of funding and PR hits.

For example, take the recently founded ISTS. No one has yet been able to explain to me why this is housed at Dartmouth. A bit of investigation reveals some government/Dartmouth administration cronyism. The functional result is that Dartmouth faculty will soon (if they aren't already) be using these new government funds to fund existing projects seemingly unrelated to the purposes of ISTS.

Interesting, mais non?

If anyone has any info or thoughts on this, I'd appreciate it, either here or by email (grossdog@dartmouth.edu) for a story I'm working on. I can keep names/sources confidential if necessary.

--Andrew Grossman

Hey, go back and brush up on your History of Linux. Linus specifically argued the whys and hows of microkernels with Tannenbaum, (here) and he's repeated in various interviews (like this one with Yamagata) his reasons for not going with a microkernel.

I'm personally not convinced that voice-rec is the way to go for mobile computing. If I'm on the bus or anywhere else where someone can hear me, I don't want them to know what I'm saying to my computer. OTOH, if you're actually the one driving the car, it does make sense.

More importantly, though, is this vision that most mobile machines will stream all their data to nearby big iron which will crunch the numbers and stream back finished product. Let's pretend for a bit that the bandwidth issues can be worked out. Who's going to actually be running the machines that provide all these spare cycles? Are we going to have companies which simply maintain large computers for performing standard tasks like voice recognition and Web searching on behalf of mobile users? I personally wouldn't want to be in charge of maintaining a machine which is set up to accept and execute arbitrary tasks from passing users. (Yes, you can use sandboxing and other such strategies, but every security protocol is vulnerable.)

I did mobile-code research for a few years, and the resource question was always coming up. There were some papers written by a grad student with a background in economics, and some modeling was done, but it was never quite proven that this could work. (One can't really model all the various kinds of automated maliciousness that could occur.)

Finally, I'll add the standard gripe that I think ASPs are a step in the wrong direction. I don't want to be continually dependent on a manufacturer for access to an application. Let someone arbitrarily deny me word-processing services because they don't like what I write? Be forced to use a new version of software which adds features I hate and removes the ones I love? No thank you. If I want to take my laptop to Mars and do my word-processing there, I want to do so without interplanetary network lag.

Of course, if played right, this could be a big win for Linux and other free-software projects. I believe that once users get bitten by the ASP model, they will want to get away from it. Obviously, the big companies won't let them. If, however, they can just switch to a purely-local free-software office suite, we might see a large jump in the use of free systems.

The network is not the computer, the computer is not the network, and as far as this user is concerned, there are times when I'd like the network to fuck off and leave me alone with a completely functional machine.

Posted by 11223:

Sure - just have a look at Douglas Irving Repetto's media art. The result of his programming is a visual piece of art - some of which generates music as well!

I spent two years working for these guys building the Scheme component of their agent system, so I had a chance to learn something about the general theory of the field. Every agent system I've seen has a notion of a sandbox that agents are limited to. In the case of our particular system, agents were also to be signed by their "master", who might then be responsible for any damage caused. Agent data transmitted across the network could be encrypted; agents themselves had to be packaged and signed when in transit between machines, unless they came from a "trusted" machine. Inter-agent communication was not direct; it went through the agent server daemon on each host machine, so that untrusted agents wouldn't need to have the ability to open sockets or files. We were slowly putting together a system for resource allocation, such that each agent would only be allowed to use a certain percentage of each system resource --- that can help prevent a DDoSing agent. (There were interesting attempts to work out a micropayment-like system for purchasing resource access; I don't think it ever got finalized.)

In short, if Sandia has remotely competent people, these agents are going to have strict limitations on their capabilities. Are they completely immune to attack? No. As Bruce Schneier has taught us, this only reduces risk. Still, if you add a requirement for agents to monitor each other, a human would have to be damn good to compromise a sufficient agent population. (Of course, this means that we may be headed for a future of eternal agent war. Might be cool. Want to prove open source? Make Tux2.0 the agent that can kick the crap out of any other agent.)

Interface:While some users prefer the limited functionality of the Cat, the variety of commands available with Dogs is more suitable for the "hacker".

Applications:Most cats will retrieve all sorts of dead animals for you; Dogs can be used as NT Admins for your home network.

Internet:Though Fetch (for MacOS) and Lycos figure prominently on the Internet scene, neither of those compare to the fame of Persian Kitty (that's not an endorsement).

As for myself, I'm tired of living with animals.

I would like to remind everyone that LinuxPPC, like RedHat, Debian, et. al. is downloadable via the web for free. Check out linuxppc.org and for help, most HOWTO's are accurate. Also there is a LinuxPPC listserv. Also for help try the FAQ OMatic for more info. LinuxPPC 1999 had an installer program that ran after you downloaded it For those of you people who own old PCI Mac's I highly recommend trying it. The TCP performance blows the doors off of OpenTransport 1.3 (MacOS 8.1) on my StarMax. It also lets me use slave IDE devices for bulking up on storage, which MacOS 8.1 does not :). The only sad part is LinuxPPC, like Linux x86 does not support HFS Extended yet, so if you want to save data you have to convert drives back to HFS (unless they updated this for Linux 2000).

That "suscpected criminal" was cleared of all wrong doing.
Was he cleared of all wrongdoing or did the case fall apart because of the deaths key witnesses (including Vince Foster) and the reticence of people who had originally planned to testify then mysteriously changed their minds or their testimony? Look through the stories on this site for more information.

I'm not sure that "Object Oriented" is the correct term to apply to the Hurd's microkernel architecture. I may be wrong.

As for why Linux is not like Hurd, read The Torvalds / Tanenbaum debates or do a random search on "Linus," "Tanenbaum", and "Microkernel". Linus details all of the reasons why Linux is monolithic versus being broken up into micro modules. Very historic, in Linux terms.

In response to your question about LinuxPPC Lite, read this.
...

• Installing Debian PPC: Pretty detailed installation instructions that I think will be the official Debian docs. I'm not sure why it isn't linked to the main powerpc port page (or maybe I couldn't find it).

• Debian instructions from the LinuxPPC faq-o-matic (I think these are kinda old)

• Cryptic Installation instructions for a blue G3 from a more seasoned Debian user

• Installing Debian over LinuxPPC: (I can't seem to get the link to work but as I recall it was a good one; hopefully it works by the time anyone bothers to read this post)

• Debian PowerPC Joys & Woes: a useful post from the debian-powerpc list

• base2_2.tgz: The huge file you need to install Debian. (hey this is like 12M so don't just click away unless you're really ready to do this). Also it's not the newest version but it is rumored to be stable and nice. You might be better off downloading it from a mirror.

• Debian for m68k exists also. Eventually I may try to put it on my old mac plus with the busted monitor, hey why not....

That's all I can find at the moment. But I can swear I remember seeing some unfinished installation docs while poking around a mirror of their ftp site. But I can't find it now. Enjoy,

Ben

Just go check the thread about Linux being obsolete, and Linus' first reply to Andy Tanenbaum, when he criticized Linux. Of course, he apologized later, and I guess he learned a lot with that, but, please! "What Would Linux Do?"

More like "what would someone with some sense do?"

Some of the more interesting pieces, like LSF, are only licensed by Sun, thus will not be included in this `deal.' (For a free improvement over LSF, check out GNU Queue. If it doesn't do something you want, you can support the community and extend it.) If you read the announcement carefully, you'll see that the only new codes to which it applies are the parallel file system (the Sun CTO thinks distributed file systems are dead, anyways), the Prism debugger, and the parallel run-time environment.

Of those, the only with no available substitute is the debugger. The ROMIO library is a good place to start for the MPI file I/O stuff (a good database would be a better place, imho). I already mentioned queue management software. The Ptools Consortium and the Globus Project have links to other HPC cluster tools.

Many of the pieces for debugging are available (combine ddd and gnuplot), but some notable ones are missing. The ability to control multiple GDBs easily from one processes and the visualization of parallel execution are needed, and quite difficult to implement. There seems to be interest in making GDB easier to use from other processes, which is a good start towards solving the larger problem of general, distributed debugging. And both the mpich and LAM MPI implementation have some profiling information, but few tools to dig through it.

To be fair, Sun has contributed (and supported contributions) to the original packages. Why they are releasing the rest under their Exploit the Community license is beyond me.

Jason, ejr@cs.berkeley.edu

I like the pure democracy idea of everyone being able to vote on articles.

The only danger is that of positive feedback. An opinion which is valuable (i.e. arguably true, insigntful, etc) isn't necessarily popular. It would be a bad thing if opinions which were not well received (i.e. Foobar has these flaws which need fixing) were moderated into invisibility just because everybody voted them down. For this reason, I'm quite happy with the ideas on moderation.

But then, I don't have the time to read all 200 comments on some of thre threads. I try to guess which ones are interesting by looking at the subjects, but you miss many cases where the reply is more interesting than the question, that way. Maybe I should experiment with my preference level.

choates1-bp-140.dartmouth.edu
or 129.170.46.140


The server at geodesic.res.cmu.edu
downloaded at 600 kbps; if my crappy computer doesn't work, try that one.

...didn't really want to use my computer today anyway...

Wavelets are hardly new - the idea has been around for at least 3 years. I don't recall where I first heard about them (Scientific American?) but AT&T had a large interest a couple of years ago. In fact, a quick search for "wavelet" on altavista turned up wavelet.org, which is sponsored by Lucent Technologies. Other pages turned up included papers written about wavelets, and wavelet related source code. As I write this, I am downloading a package called wavelet.0.3.tar.gz - it is essentially a wavelet construction kit (grayscale only). The file is dated 1/29/97. It's about 700k, and there is no copyright notice / license on the page I'm downloading it from, nor in the source code.

So what we have is an old image format which hasn't caught on yet. I find it hard to believe that a community like the one here at Slashdot has never heard of this before, much less played with the freely available source code.