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The reasons for glibc2.0 not being supported are ">here.
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Make use of your spare CPU time!

Richard Fateman has a program called "mockmma" that is a simple knock-off of Mathematica. I don't know how complete it is, but I doubt it is anywhere close to being a complete clone of Mathematica. It's written in Common Lisp and there's a pointer to it on the ALU's Lisp Tools page.

There are other resources:

• The Numerical Analysis & Associated Fields Resource Guide, especially sections "NA Software Libraries on the Net" and "NA Software Packages on the Net".
• Usenet newsgroups sci.math and sci.math.symbolic (but read the FAQ, first, and read the news groups for a few weeks before posting!)

I'm sure if you spend a little time with a search engine (Deja, Google), you will turn up more information. I found the above in less than five minutes, so I'm sure there's much more information out there if you look a little bit.

HOORAY MOZILLA! Just when they've missed another on-the-wire date and you start to lose hope, they pop back up again. You guys are big encouragers, especially by jumping into the forums here and educating us all.

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In th is usenet article, Jim Roskind goes into some of the plans for M14 and beyond. One point he brings up (and this is the where-you-can-help part) is that the main things which prevent a commercial-branded alpha/beta are the "beta-stopper" bugs; bugs which are first marked beta1 on submission, then reviewed and marked by authorization as PDT. These beta-stoppers, by virtue of their priority, draw human resources from across Netscape as well as just the seamonkey group.

So if you can, test the program. If you find a beta-stopper - some real bug like a crash or a performance problem - report it and mark it beta1. These draw special attention from the mozilla people, and if promoted to PDT status, will attract extra developers from Netscape.

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Someone else at MozillaZine had some insights about a (possibly semi-official) name for the full completed package: Netscape 2001 or some such. Yes it is the year thing, but as Henrik points out, it could be succesfully tied into the air of cooless surrounding 2001, A Space Odyssey. Maybe they'd even give it a classical soundtrack :-)

-- If you lived here, you'd be home by now.

Next thing you're going to suggest is hiding our IP addresses?

Good point! One could say the following could help protect a wireless lan:

Blocking MAC hardware addresses from unathorized sources,

but that won't work, because the game of intrigue is such a fun area:

Spoofing MAC addresses can be done on the victim's network, which blows that whole idea out of the water,

...and that is why unrestricted encryption is manditory in a modern network to prevent denial of service attacks by ensuring hosts are authentic and secure. If your government outlaws such, they open themselves to terrorists and shoot themselves in the foot.

Politics and spooks are a deadly combination

Next thing you're going to suggest is hiding our IP addresses?

Good point! One could say the following could help protect a wireless lan:

Blocking MAC hardware addresses from unathorized sources,

but that won't work, because the game of intrigue is such a fun area:

Spoofing MAC addresses can be done on the victim's network, which blows that whole idea out of the water,

...and that is why unrestricted encryption is manditory in a modern network to prevent denial of service attacks by ensuring hosts are authentic and secure. If your government outlaws such, they open themselves to terrorists and shoot themselves in the foot.

Politics and spooks are a deadly combination

In Glqwcl, ever tried using the numeric keypad in linux? / * - and enter were all bound to the same keycode (space). The non-gl version worked fine, so it was probably a simple change.

I had to work around this (since I use the keypad for fps games) by remapping the keyboard in svgalib's keymaps -- I mapped / to the regular / on the keyboard, * to the regular *, etc.... If you read rec.games.computer.quake.misc, I think there's an old post in there where I described how to do this (ah, here it is ), although it is probably fixed now in all the open source project versions of glqwcl.

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so what happens if you are listening to music with it in the room... it'll go crazy...

That would be a realistic simulation of my cats. Siamese in particular seem intolerant of music they don't like.

Real geeks play Go! Seriously, if you're into board games at all, you should give Go a chance. There's a burgeoning online community that includes a newsgroup (rec.games.go) and the Internet Go Server (IGS). Also, check out Samarkand for cool Go goodies.

It's a real computer, in an overgrown pocket calculator.

When I want a laptop, I'll grab my laptop. When I want my accessories I'll grap my laptop. When I want a PDA, I'll grab my palm.

If you want to buy a laptop in pieces, go for it. When not being able to show 30 second movies on a 2-inch screen 'causes me problems, I'll look at WinCE.

And I'd check you battery life sources again. The 6-8 hrs. I see in reviews are a far cry from the 20-30 my palm gets at home.

And of course, that's the real reason.

If a company's past actions don't affect your purchasing decisions, that's your dime. Personally, after a company treats me like shit, I do the same.(or does WinCE have a toll-free support number unlike every other Windows product, wait a sec, it's not even WinCE anymore, you are Windows Powered!)

if you want a great organizer go with the Palm Vx. If you want a great organizer with Multimedia and awesome color and don't quite need a laptop go with a Casio E-100/105.

from here

--

I'm betting on "Anyone But Rambus".

If Intel continues to tie their fortunes to Rambus, they're in for lots of serious pain.

Look at this poll from Deja news. Looks like I'm not the only one prefering Borland over anything else :)

I can't believe M$ would spy on Windows users.

Beleive it.

Post 2:
Um, hello? NT 3.1? The good old days, eh? This does show (probably) that this stuff *did* occur, but it doesn't bear any real relevance to today... MS was burned when the first round of hidden API calls were discovered, and it's possible they cleaned up their act.

Post 3:
First off, if we conceed that, just maybe, NT's networking protocols are part of the OS (or at least part of the platform), then these aren't hidden API's at all, but are rather simply exported functions that are called within a coherent product. If *not*, then I guess I'd need more information to understand why Jeremy Allison needs to call the kernel functions directly and why the Win32 API is insufficient for his needs.

Post 4:
Ah yes... more about that one call in NT 3.1... and an unspecified reference to an unnamed call in some version of NT (I don't doubt that this exists, but there's not much info here). The rest is just more about how, yes, we've got this "Win32 API", but I want to use the kernel's calls directly. I'm not going to tell you how or why, but I do...

I don't know... while these seem to indicate that, yes, there were a couple calls (perhaps more) that were undocumented in previous versions of NT, it gives us no reason to believe that this practice continues, or that it was even abused in more than two instances.

Oh, and, while it probably didn't exist then, just for kicks LsaLogonUser

Post 2:
Um, hello? NT 3.1? The good old days, eh? This does show (probably) that this stuff *did* occur, but it doesn't bear any real relevance to today... MS was burned when the first round of hidden API calls were discovered, and it's possible they cleaned up their act.

Post 3:
First off, if we conceed that, just maybe, NT's networking protocols are part of the OS (or at least part of the platform), then these aren't hidden API's at all, but are rather simply exported functions that are called within a coherent product. If *not*, then I guess I'd need more information to understand why Jeremy Allison needs to call the kernel functions directly and why the Win32 API is insufficient for his needs.

Post 4:
Ah yes... more about that one call in NT 3.1... and an unspecified reference to an unnamed call in some version of NT (I don't doubt that this exists, but there's not much info here). The rest is just more about how, yes, we've got this "Win32 API", but I want to use the kernel's calls directly. I'm not going to tell you how or why, but I do...

I don't know... while these seem to indicate that, yes, there were a couple calls (perhaps more) that were undocumented in previous versions of NT, it gives us no reason to believe that this practice continues, or that it was even abused in more than two instances.

Oh, and, while it probably didn't exist then, just for kicks LsaLogonUser

Post 2:
Um, hello? NT 3.1? The good old days, eh? This does show (probably) that this stuff *did* occur, but it doesn't bear any real relevance to today... MS was burned when the first round of hidden API calls were discovered, and it's possible they cleaned up their act.

Post 3:
First off, if we conceed that, just maybe, NT's networking protocols are part of the OS (or at least part of the platform), then these aren't hidden API's at all, but are rather simply exported functions that are called within a coherent product. If *not*, then I guess I'd need more information to understand why Jeremy Allison needs to call the kernel functions directly and why the Win32 API is insufficient for his needs.

Post 4:
Ah yes... more about that one call in NT 3.1... and an unspecified reference to an unnamed call in some version of NT (I don't doubt that this exists, but there's not much info here). The rest is just more about how, yes, we've got this "Win32 API", but I want to use the kernel's calls directly. I'm not going to tell you how or why, but I do...

I don't know... while these seem to indicate that, yes, there were a couple calls (perhaps more) that were undocumented in previous versions of NT, it gives us no reason to believe that this practice continues, or that it was even abused in more than two instances.

Oh, and, while it probably didn't exist then, just for kicks LsaLogonUser

Post 2:
Um, hello? NT 3.1? The good old days, eh? This does show (probably) that this stuff *did* occur, but it doesn't bear any real relevance to today... MS was burned when the first round of hidden API calls were discovered, and it's possible they cleaned up their act.

Post 3:
First off, if we conceed that, just maybe, NT's networking protocols are part of the OS (or at least part of the platform), then these aren't hidden API's at all, but are rather simply exported functions that are called within a coherent product. If *not*, then I guess I'd need more information to understand why Jeremy Allison needs to call the kernel functions directly and why the Win32 API is insufficient for his needs.

Post 4:
Ah yes... more about that one call in NT 3.1... and an unspecified reference to an unnamed call in some version of NT (I don't doubt that this exists, but there's not much info here). The rest is just more about how, yes, we've got this "Win32 API", but I want to use the kernel's calls directly. I'm not going to tell you how or why, but I do...

I don't know... while these seem to indicate that, yes, there were a couple calls (perhaps more) that were undocumented in previous versions of NT, it gives us no reason to believe that this practice continues, or that it was even abused in more than two instances.

Oh, and, while it probably didn't exist then, just for kicks LsaLogonUser

Do you believe Jeremy Allison (SAMBA developer)? Wham, Bam, thank you maam.

Do you believe Jeremy Allison (SAMBA developer)? Wham, Bam, thank you maam.

Do you believe Jeremy Allison (SAMBA developer)? Wham, Bam, thank you maam.

Do you believe Jeremy Allison (SAMBA developer)? Wham, Bam, thank you maam.

Humor is an effective weapon - possibly the best use thereof has been the alt.religion.scientology wars.

Here are a couple of representative USENET posts:
Post 1
Post 2

The effectiveness of humor against the $cieno meme complex has been demonstrated pretty effectively. Of course, it's hard not to laugh at someone who spends $300K to find out that the source of his personal problems involves volcanoes, H-Bombs, and an evil Galactic Overlord named Xenu, particularly when cult doctrine considers "joking and degrading" a high crime. (Solution obvious: Make everything a degrading joke about the cult - then stand back and watch cult members go apeshit, labelling everyone but themselves criminals, much to the amusement of anyone watching. Give a cult enough rope and it'll hang itself.)

And while we're on the subject of the Co$ and censorware, as a followup to my "Censorship is for suckers" thread -- is it any wonder that the very same Cult of $cientology ordered all its members to use it's own custom-branded version of Cybersitter on their home PCs?

For reference:
Co$ Censors Net Access for Members, and The Scientology Net Censor.

Now - if you're a God-fearing Christian, why on earth would you rely on a solution advocated by a satanic cult that believes that the whole Jesus story was merely an "R6 implant" - a false memory artificially-implanted into our collective unconsciousness by evil alien overlords? I'm sure glad my library is following the lead of the Cult of $cientology and using censorware!

This leads to another propagable meme: The only "major" "religious" organization to mandate its members' use of censorware is the Cult of $cientology. Why are we following the lead of a god-denying UFO cult? Do you want to trust your children's safety to a group of software companies, when at least one of them has already demonstrated a willingness to develop a custom version of their product to a nut cult that believes Jesus Himself was merely an fake memory implanted in us by aliens? Do the censorware merchants have no shame? How stupid do the censorware peddlers think we are?

Humor is an effective weapon - possibly the best use thereof has been the alt.religion.scientology wars.

Here are a couple of representative USENET posts:
Post 1
Post 2

The effectiveness of humor against the $cieno meme complex has been demonstrated pretty effectively. Of course, it's hard not to laugh at someone who spends $300K to find out that the source of his personal problems involves volcanoes, H-Bombs, and an evil Galactic Overlord named Xenu, particularly when cult doctrine considers "joking and degrading" a high crime. (Solution obvious: Make everything a degrading joke about the cult - then stand back and watch cult members go apeshit, labelling everyone but themselves criminals, much to the amusement of anyone watching. Give a cult enough rope and it'll hang itself.)

And while we're on the subject of the Co$ and censorware, as a followup to my "Censorship is for suckers" thread -- is it any wonder that the very same Cult of $cientology ordered all its members to use it's own custom-branded version of Cybersitter on their home PCs?

For reference:
Co$ Censors Net Access for Members, and The Scientology Net Censor.

Now - if you're a God-fearing Christian, why on earth would you rely on a solution advocated by a satanic cult that believes that the whole Jesus story was merely an "R6 implant" - a false memory artificially-implanted into our collective unconsciousness by evil alien overlords? I'm sure glad my library is following the lead of the Cult of $cientology and using censorware!

This leads to another propagable meme: The only "major" "religious" organization to mandate its members' use of censorware is the Cult of $cientology. Why are we following the lead of a god-denying UFO cult? Do you want to trust your children's safety to a group of software companies, when at least one of them has already demonstrated a willingness to develop a custom version of their product to a nut cult that believes Jesus Himself was merely an fake memory implanted in us by aliens? Do the censorware merchants have no shame? How stupid do the censorware peddlers think we are?

here
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Oops. The actual URL is he re.
Steven E. Ehrbar

See this link, this link and this link for details.

See this link, this link and this link for details.

See this link, this link and this link for details.

Incidently, I'll even grant to you the fact that the reason Smalltalk and Lisp are slower relative to C is not completely GC, but just the nature of the languages.

CMU Lisp

CMU floating point bench marks

The other thing is that I feel I'm getting a bad rap here. I'm not against GC in languages, but there are cases where you don't want the unpredictability of GC and manual memory management makes sense. Are you trying to say that GC is appropriate for all problems?

Of course these kind of engineering decisions need to be made on a case-by-case basis. By the way, commercial Lisp vendors do offer hard real-time GC systems.

Harlequin's memory management services (scroll to the bottom)

Exploitation is the key to USENET's success.

Agreed
The whole "Design Patterns" movement is taking on all of the characteristics of a cult.
comp.lang.lisp discussion of "Design Patterns"

I think it was irresponsible to wait as long with this advisory as CERT has done. The exploits have been known for years. When hotmail forced javascript down the throats of their customers, there was a huge uproar in news.admin.net-abuse.email, because spamfighters have learned the hard way that javascript can easily be abused. One of the threads started with 552549264 at deja.com.

hotmail just requires javascript, it still works without it. Download the source of the simple form I wrote and try it yourself. My form may not look as flashy as the opening screen at hotmail, but it downloads a lot faster.

The web doesn't need javascript, however marketroids love it, because it makes it easier to collect information.

ALL HAIL ACADEMIAS NEUTRONIUM!
GOD OF SCIENCE!
EMPORER OF ALL USENET!
SOFT LAND URANUS INTO MY HOT TUB!

THE OFFICIAL RECORD OF ACADEMIAS NEUTRONIUM
KIBO IS A PUTZ

MIT/Stanford Venture Laboratory is helpful. They'll be taping their events and broadcasting them soon also.

www.deja.com/~vlab
www.vlab.org

hehe, I should have told them to ban www.espn.com or something like that. our sysadmins are huge fsck-ups

Me letting them in on my joke

DCIT sysadmin's response my letting him know I knew the whole time
"Alright... so I didn't go to the site before adding it to the list. Big whoop.... I just did a DNS lookup.. added it to the list and boom, it was gone. See how cool my job is"

hehe, I should have told them to ban www.espn.com or something like that. our sysadmins are huge fsck-ups

Me letting them in on my joke

DCIT sysadmin's response my letting him know I knew the whole time
"Alright... so I didn't go to the site before adding it to the list. Big whoop.... I just did a DNS lookup.. added it to the list and boom, it was gone. See how cool my job is"

This is one of the FAQ on winmodems; if you do a search on Deja.com, you'll find the answer. Or, check out this site or this one.

"why hasn't some Linux developer written a driver for them?"

Kinda tough to write code for something you can't get specs to.

From the Winmodems are not Modems MiniFAQ: (third section on the page)
3. But someone must have adapted or reverse-engineered one by now!
Winmodem vendors will not release the source code. Without it, creating a software modem is a non-trivial programming task.

There's a link to Deja.com on the subject. Appears the manufaturers don't want to release specs for the community until there's a demand. There isn't really a demand because people know that Winmodems don't work with Linux.

Feel free to draw your own conclusions...

Here's my copy of DeCSS. Where's yours?

Clemson student:

"Guess what guys, there is a rival to dialpad. its called http://www.funphone.com/."

DCIT response:

"Now you've done it. I can't ignore such a blatant challenge to our ability to block access to a website whether we agree with it or not."

Clemson student:

"Guess what guys, there is a rival to dialpad. its called http://www.funphone.com/."

DCIT response:

"Now you've done it. I can't ignore such a blatant challenge to our ability to block access to a website whether we agree with it or not."

the math comes to this gentleman, assuming 8 hrs a day, biling at a rate of $250/hr. so oops, i underestimated! of course, he is not your run of the mill programmer.

my fiance had an offer two months ago for a position in SF for a 280k annual salary at a startup. and yes, it was for Perl. that comes to ~140/hour, but self employment (incorporating, etc) and salaried bases can have very differenct meanings to net income.

There's been some discussion during the past week on our local newsgroup, clem.hubcap, regarding dialpad.com and napster. The fulltext of the most informative of the posts is at deja.com at this URL.

...you Microsoft cheerleaders...

I use primarily FreeBSD (replacing Linux) at home and HP-UX at work. I have no love for Microsoft. Just being in the security industry I like to be realistic about security and not just imagine everything is perfectly secure. This means the kernel and any supporting applications.

Here is a security, kernel bug for Linux: Serious SECURITY hole in 2.2 kernels

I can't wait till the next time Micros~1 has egg on thier face.

Did you see or read any of the case of DOJ vs. Microsoft? Now that was entertainment!

Strangely enough, this was just debated in comp.lang.lisp this month (search Deja for a thread with "Transmeta" in the subject). The prevailing opinion seems to be that Lisp on general purpose computers is roughly 1/2 the speed of C or faster (depending on compiler, level of safety, declarations, etc.) but you end up spending orders of magnitude less time coding and debugging, and that special-purpose hardware will do less for Lisp than softer things (like having the GC and the virtual memory manager play well together). Do look the thread up---the arguments are presented in a much clearer fashion than my attempt at a summary.

Actually, I just bought a Postscript printer for $350 once shipping & handling was factored in. It's the Lexmark Optra E310, and it handles Postscript Level 2 natively. List price on Lexmark's website is $400, although a Price Watch search ought to turn up some cheaper prices. Do a DejaNews search for "Lexmark Optra E310" and you can read about other people's experiences with this printer. I bought mine from Electrified, where they list refurbished Optra E310's for $300 ($299, technically). Note that that does not include a parallel cable (though it does include a toner cartridge, otherwise I'd be a little steamed), which wound up costing me an extra $15. Add hefty shipping & handling fees (due, I suppose, to the weight of the package, although I'm sure I got overcharged there too), it still came out to about $350, which is cheaper than anywhere else I found.
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The real meaning of the GNU GPL:

Mobile Linux is not what a lot of people think it is.

See this post from the Main Man.

Perhaps some of you have heard of a famous open letter Gates wrote in 1976 condemning piracy. It's available here

Interesting notes about page coloring... I didn't know FreeBSD had this capability.

Linus has stated that he probably will never add page coloring to the Linux kernel. Apparently he doesn't believe it will benefit enough architectures to be worthwhile.

On an Alpha 21164 many binaries run faster on Tru64 Unix than on Linux. Static linking rules out differences in the compilers or libraries. Page coloring (a feature of Tru64) is almost certainly the reason.

At last I feel compelled to go try FreeBSD...

The article also comments on the declining role of Usenet. I quote:-

"But the threat of a ban failed to ignite an outcry from its customers, a symptom of the dwindling use of Usenet. Once a venerable platform for online discussions, the influence of Usenet newsgroups has progressively declined, according to analysts and those in the industry".

I love /. - but its news has a half-life measured in hours, practically Chat. Usenet has a half-life measured in days, diligently archived by Deja News.

I prefer that for considered discussion.

Cheers, Andy!

I was pretty shocked by next article that an OpenBSD-user showed me. (I'm a Linux user, thank you). You can read it here.

From: Theo de Raadt
comp.unix.bsd.openbsd.misc

...

> I'm just
> curious to know if anyone has broken into an open source system because it
> was open source.

Linux is the best example of this, there are many examples. As the
system being attacked, that is -- even if their source was not being
analyzed earlier. Funny thing is, (especially around two years ago)
it was a case of _us_ finding the holes, fixing them in OpenBSD,
telling the BUGTRAQ mailing list, and then crackers writing exploits
and using them on _other_ operating systems. (I guess that is
distributed and applied ;-)

Sometimes, as in the case of the recent RedHat lpd security report,
years elapse. Let's look closer at what happened:

http://www.pr ogressive-comp.com/Lists/?l=bugtraq&m=947550717304 74&w=2
http://www.pr ogressive-comp.com/Lists/?l=bugtraq&m=947310141065 60&w=2
http://www.pr ogressive-comp.com/Lists/?l=bugtraq&m=947552011315 70&w=2

And then read

http://www.pr ogressive-comp.com/Lists/?l=bugtraq&m=947699382089 89&w=2

And pay special attention to the original bug report. That's October
of '97.

http://www.nai.com/ nai_labs/asp_set/advisory/20_bsd_lpd_adv.asp

I had already seen this on Mozilla.org's Newsbot. The information was posted on netscape.public.mozilla.seamonkey. You can read it on deja here.