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Since a good portion of Solaris code is licensed from AT&T, Sun couldn't Free it without AT&T's permission.

I thought that Sun paid SCO lots of money for the right to do whatever they want with the code they licensed. This Usenet article talks about this, although the author also thinks that Sun would be prohibited from freeing the code for some reason. I don't know the terms of Sun's agreement, but I'd guess that they have rights to do whatever they want with the code. Otherwise, what would be the point of paying all that money?

I have posted a method to get it working in Slack 4 quite a while ago. Here it is. It worked with the original version, and it works with the new one. Enjoy.

If you are traveling through a less dense subject, you travel slower (relatively)...the further away from the local source you go, the greater your acceleration in the opposite direction would appear to be from a distant reference.

Here's a kitchen reference: sound travels about 700 mph in air at sea level and 680mph about 10,000 feet up where the air is less dense.

From alt.sci.physics.acoustics Speed of sound in water is

" Fresh water at 20 degrees C is 1481 m/sec.
Seawater at 13 degrees C is 1500 m/sec.
"

Seawater is ....yes, that's right...MORE dense then fresh water.

Now there are some variables here such as heat from the sun creating a less dense "atmosphere" at the surface of the sun and into regions close by, but i think that matter ejected would have much greater effects on the satellite and therefor would be a more noticeable acceleration.

not that I'm an expert or anything though :)

• It's slink, honestly
• on a Unix machine, you can start it in user space (no root access required)
• you can get rid of quite a lot of annoying images - on many sites (e.g. DejaNews), it really speeds things up
• it has a per-domain/per-host cookie blocking mechanism

I could actually make a nice junkbuster feature request list. ;-)

Otherwise, aye to all the suggestions. I miss those features mentioned at the top of the thread each and every day!

"...We have not taken a position of refusing to make exceptions overall"

Yeah, the way Mindspring rolled out the port-25-blocking was pretty lame, and Tom, by virtue of his position, sounds like he had to choose his words carefully in that post, but it sounds to me like he's willing to listen. Tom's got plenty of clue.

On a technical level - while the following idea won't solve the case where you're relaying through a server for which you have authorization to relay but don't have administrative access... if you do own the server through which you're relaying, I'd imagine you could have it listen for SMTP traffic on a port other than port 25. Your outbound mail goes to your "other relay" via this other port. Or you can just relay outbound mail through smtp.mindspring.com, and fetch your incoming mail via POP. (Disclaimer: I haven't given any of these schemes because I haven't had the need to relay outside of Mindspring's network. Anyone who has put thought into this issue, please post your thoughts and/or solution... sounds like it's in demand!)

Read your AUP (Acceptable Use Policy).

This varies from company to company. Currently, I use COX/@Home as my cable modem provider, well for 3 more days anyways. Their AUP says that you cannot run a server on your home PC's. However, they don't enforce this unless your neighbors complain about bandwidth, so I do run HTTP/FTP/Telnet services from home. I'm pretty much the only person who uses them, but I do have a MP3 archive out there for my friends to use.

COX/@home does not have anything that physically stops you from running a server, but they have limited your upstream bandwith to 16Kb, via an "En hancement". So, with them, you really aren't getting what you're think you're getting. Don't get me wrong, Downstream is blazing fast, but any upstream trafic is pretty slow.

There are other companies that don't do this, so be sure to give them 20 questions about bandwith, static IP's and whatnot. If you can, get it in writing.

You also certainly want to know what their packet loss and the distance it is back to your city. I am pushed through Atlanta to get back to Omaha (200+ms) and can see upto 30% packet loss, which is very nasty for telnet.

But in anycase, its going to end up being cheaper and much better than any standard modem connection you can get (if you have a second line).

This is pretty funny.

--

I don't want to be a nay-sayer here, but as a member of the linux community we have a serious problem of DIRECTION. Here we have a large company sticking its neck out on the line based on the hope that in the future they will be able to provide service and support to their linux distribution. Service and support indicate corporate users. Not many end-users, or geeks, are willing to shell out money for a support contract, especially when you can go to Deja for free. But we have numerous technical debates and write-ups that linux is not keeping up in the high end server market. So why would I, a corporate user, use linux at work for a production server?

This argument is going to really plague RHAT and its investors as the true market for linux is explored. RedHat is lining itself up to have a great number of home and campus users using their product and supporting THEMSELVES online. I hope our friends don't get burnt on IPO stocks they have purchased.

Before the great speculation begins,
heres some info.

whois www.winlinux.net gives

[...]
Registrant
Dinamerico Schwingel (WINLINUX-DOM)
[...]

A search in dejanews for Schwingel AND Dinamerico gives this (Date: 1999/06/25):
In newsgroup installshield.is5.general :

[...]
I'm trying to build my software distributions which is very large. Some thousands files and 219MB total.

The Media Build Wizard goes ok, until it tries to create layout.bin. Then it stucks for about an hour and comes whith this message
[...]

There show up some linux-specific postings (some old) too, so no microsoft, no panic...







[...]

Well, as it so happens, I work at Deja, and we use Linux for almost all of our servers, and believe me, Linux handles the (often quite heavy) load just fine.

As it so happens, in our reception area, there is a 1997 award for "Technical Excellence" in the field of Web Design. Gee, can you guess who gave us that award? None other than our friend John C. Dvorak! It's signed by him and everything; it's a real hoot. I guess Linux was fine for "technical excellence" back then, but it has somehow become less so now.

Someone else said it best; all he's doing is selling banner ads, not writing real or meaningful content. Not that there's anything wrong with that; you just have to go into it with your eyes open.

1. man pages
2. info pages if neccessary
3. included documentation (/usr/doc etc.)
4. website for the program (found through Google)
5. links from the homepage
6. search on Google for other pages
7. usenet archives at Dejanews
8. ask on usenet. never gotten to this one.

If I'm trying to figure out how to do something, I go in a different order:

1. apropos
2. HOWTOs
3. websearch
4. usenet archives
5. ask on usenet. once again, haven't had to

I've been using Linux for around 4 months now, so a near-newbie as of yet. Once I started, though, I didn't go back (ever).

Anyone have any better suggestions?

Your last name is Nasal? Wow! I don't mean any offense here, but you could probably make the folks over in comp.lang.c (Deja link) laugh themselves silly pretty easily. Just write a program doing something unspecified (letting main() return void is a classic), and see what happens. Oh, the joy of stupid word plays.

BTW, I think few people saw this: http://www.deja.com/getdoc.xp?AN=4614616 79

I suggest taking them to comp.os.linux.powerpc

Lots of knowledge in there... if you got a question, search through the newsgroup with deja.com's engine or get right on that comp.os.linux.powerpc link ;o)

-nicole

I dont know about anyone else, but I would be very interested to see some benchmarking of the G4 machine (running, say Linux PPC) vs. an equivalently-priced, single-processor x86 system (Athlon 650?) running a Pentium-optimized Linux distro, e.g. Linux Mandrake.

Although a cursory Deja search shows me that nobody seems to know whether Linux PPC will run on ths machine yet, or whether there need to be major tweaking first. The 400 MHz system uses a Yosemite motherboard, but the 450 and 500 Mhz machines do not...so who knows.

The point here though, is that gauging the superiority (or inferiority) of the hardware by comparing Mac OS performance to Windows performance is a fairly ludicrous thing to do. Using two optimized Linux Distros seems far more fair, and can lead to a rational cost-benefit analysis for someone interested in buying the hardware.

Don't be too quick to dismiss ethics in any form. Sure, Jeremy Rifkin may be a gadfly, but consider the alternitive. You like your food pumped full of antibiotics and steroids so that steak can be bigger and your milk can be 10 cents cheaper and stay a day longer in the fridge?

Computer ethics are lacking and this is why this topic needs to be discussed. Unless, of course, you consider today's commercial software to be high quality and provide you a secure future. Ethics just are a way to make us more aware of issues. Its education and its good.

Seymour Cray's final product involved the fastest switching technology ever activated in a super computer, which was then coupled into a massively parallel computing system. The Cray-3/Super Scalable System had a revolutionary GaAs control processor with potentially tens of millions of computing memory elements. This system (an adaptation of the original GaAs Cray-3) was financed by the NSA. Seymour Cray accepted this funding in a last-ditch effort to save his company and when I visited the Colorado Springs office, I was actually given the impression by one of their executives that they had a working model and would consider commercial sale of the device. Cray Computer Corporation went bankrupt shortly thereafter in the first business failure of Cray's phenomenal career. About a year later, Cray was killed in a jeeping accident. Having cut my teeth on his machines at the CDC/Urbana PLATO project, I knew Cray was unhappy with the direction his technology had been taken by "the spook shops" from before the day he left CDC to found Cray Research on his farm in in Wisconsin.

Recent revelations of RSA's vulnerability come as no surprise. The NSA, despite the fact that it is run by unaccountable bureaucrats embedded in a dough ball of Federal funding, is probably far beyond a cabal of private hackers in their capabilities.

Lest hackers and civil libertarians get the idea that now is the time for civil disobedience in protest of regulations against unlimited key sizes, you should probably be aware that Federal officials are so embolden by their lack of accountability that some of them have slipped up and are explicitly threatening suspects with prisoner gang rape. Given the prevalence of HIV infection in the prison systems, and the efficiency with which the virus is transmitted during gang rape, such threats amount to murderous sexual sadism as punishment for civil disobedience. In one of the most outrageous examples, Assistant U.S. attorney Gordon Zubrod from Harrisburg, PA made the following statement in a broadcast statement to 3 suspects who fled to Canada (this statement was captured for the public record during a Canadian Broadcasting Corporation interview):

"You're going to be the boyfriend of a very bad man if you wait out your extradition."

If you think the use of murderous sexual sadism against protesters who engage in civil disobedience is unrealistic, or somehow so low risk as to be inconsequential, you should read Torture In The American Gulag before taking any personal risks.

The announcement at RSA.

The top of the most active thread on sci.crypt at DejaNews
--

I have been thinking about doing something like this for years.
But I never seems to have time.
But if someone started a open source project I would like to get
involved.

I can do the GA algorithms, so we need someone to do the network code
and someone to put together the web site.

By the way take a look at this.

On the 17. of July Roland Olsson posted to comp.ai a message saying he had made a program
using ADATE
The program searches after a SAT solver.
The satisfiability problem (SAT) is one of the fundamental problems
in theoretic computer science.
If we had a fast algorithm to solve this problem, we could solve a big
class of very interesting problems.
Example factoring of big integers and solving the travling salesman problem.

Your can find more problems with instances
here, if your are interested.

So if your computer got some spare time, give it a try.

I've refused to shop at Spamazon for quite some time due to their penchant for spamming. Cases in point go back at least as far as early 1998 and are widely documented on Dejanews.

A better write-up of their business practices can be found at the page of Peter Seebach, a long-time n.a.n-a.e (news.admin.net-abuse.email) regular.

Finally, there's Spamazon's practice of shilling for themselves on USENET - an "astroturf" campaign eerily reminiscient of Micros~1's "independently-written letters to the editor" stunt. (Available through Dejanews - Start here or search for Message-ID <3584e5cc.1368345@news.sirius.com>.

While I'm as disgusted at the "purchase circles" idea as anyone, I'm not at all surprised. Spamazon doesn't think in terms of customers; merely in terms of targets for additional marketing. Take your business elsewhere. (Many on n.a.n-a.e have recommended Powell's. I concur.)

Not a curve, but I have two relevant bookmarks, both found while looking for something else: Historical Cost-of-Storage Data, and a great article about trends and such by a storage engineer at SGI. cheers,
mike

In fact, the Xanadu Operating Company (XOC) was funded by AutoDesk (of AutoCad fame) for about five years under the pretext that the Xanadu system would make a dandy archive/retrieval system for AutoCad design files. That it also tickled the imagination of AutoDesk founder John Walker was a happy coincidence.

I was involved in a week's worth of discussion with the folks at XOC (and ESR) about turning USENET into a "coarse grain" hypertext system (after all, every article has a world-wide unique message-ID, required by the transport, and the software can use "references" like links), but there were a number of issues we didn't have clean answers for, and the discussion never resulted in software. Besides, now we have DejaNews as an archive of USENET, also Alta Vista can search it, too.

Anyway, when Carol Bartz became CEO of AutoDesk, she cut a lot of things (AutoDesk was in financial trouble at the time), and XOC was one of the casualties. Now, one could well ask why, with five years of funding, XOC never produced anything that the market saw...

I think the principal failing of Ted Nelson's dream was the almost relentless drive for perfection, with almost no "real world" testing of the incremental versions of the software - no one associated with the effort wanted to release anything less than complete and perfect.

Result: nothing was ever released (until now).

It'll be interesting to see if the code lives up to the decades of hype about it.

I have more luck at Deja then the LDP which appears to be quite obsolete information and i would point someone in search of help there far before i suggested the LDP. In theory it is good, but too difficulty to maintain.

I hope people contribute to it. I will... i think.

Um, no. This is Slashdot. There are some slashdot readers who are also in the linux community. A lot of these slashdot posters aren't even professionals, however.

Some poll data, FWIW:

1. 94% Male
2. 37% aged 18-23; 31% aged 24-30
3. Wrote
4. Have read /. for 3 months
5. 29% are students

This is NOT the Linux community, by far. Ever read the kernel mailing lists? Heh.

(For those curious individuals: I use a Dell Precision 410 with RH 6.0 for my desktop, every day.)

--
A host is a host from coast to coast...

-lev

Sadly, the SFPD seem to be on SRL's mailing lists these days, so they don't get away with much any more. For the last few years, the Fire Marshall has tended to show up before the show has even gotten underway.

If you like SRL, you might also like Seemen: here's an announcement for one of their recent shows: news:344de302.1085384@news.concentric.net.

Some like-minded links are over at Laughing Squid.

1. Wine will bring the existing Windows apps to Linux. This will help bridge the gap to the corporate desktop. Why wait for a Linux version of the last FooApp that BarCorp can't live without when you can do everything else in Linux and run the current version of FooApp under Linux? Oh, the new version doesn't work? Don't buy it.
   
2. Wine makes it easier to bring file format compatibility to Linux apps. Take a look at th is posting on Deja to see why.
   
3. Emulation is just plain cool. (Yes I know what WINE starts for...)
   
4. Some apps will never be ported. Wine will run them.
   
5. Why is everyone still using x86 architecture? Why not move to a superior processor? The same market pressure that kept WinTel around make Wine valuable.
   

Ah yes, the great VGA Plants game.

(In case you don't know, a munchkin is someone who works for a particular company and posts FUD etc. under an alias. This is a known Microsoft tactic, already practiced in the war against OS/2 years ago).

And if this Reuters report posted on Usenet is true, Microsoft actually confirms that it was a munchkin of theirs, but they "didn't authorise his smear attempt".

What's ironic that that guy at Microsoft decided to contact Richard Smith of all people, since he is well known for revealing secrets in Microsoft(!) software, such as the Registration Wizard and IDs stamped on Office documents. Bad luck for the Microsoft munchkin because... Richard Smith then discovered that the sender used the Yahoo mail system and had set up the account that day. Apparently, the sender was not aware that Yahoo includes IP addresses, which Smith used to trace the message back to Microsoft.

What does all this show?

1. Another example of a Microsoft employee who would do anything to help their cause. This has already been pointed out in commentaries on the MS vs DoJ trial: Bill Gates may not have said literally to destroy their competition but certainly his employees understood it as such in their zealotry.
2. AOL was very desperate in finding a way to detect non-approved clients. With an open protocol this can indeed be very difficult.
3. If you care about security for you or your users, don't use AIM, ICQ or MSN Messenger. Resist user demand and block 'em at your firewall. They gobble up loads of attention and productivity anyway.

Hopefully I'm reading too much into this, but the
announcement seems to make it sound like you're
only welcome to attack microsoft's controlled
target machine, not even your own machines. This
almost sounds like a ploy to make UCITA sound
more palatable, but having a single MS-blessed
target machine is no substitute from being able to
test on your own machines and publish the results!

More info about UCITA here.

Hopefully I'm reading too much into this, but the
announcement seems to make it sound like you're
only welcome to attack microsoft's controlled
target machine, not even your own machines. This
almost sounds like a ploy to make UCITA sound
more palatable, but having a single MS-blessed
target machine is no substitute from being able to test on your own machines and publish the results!

More info about UCITA here.

AC: Most deaths are caused by sky-diving accidents.

PB: No, most deaths are caused by heart failure.

AC: Um, and just what do you think it is that sky-diving accidents do?

Let me repeat: most cancer isn't caused by viruses (although some is). The top two causes are smoking and diet, although people will claim that just about anything is a cause, including stress, premarital sex, and snakes.

The top of the thread at Deja is at A primeval C compiler

I can do without Dejanews... (Er.. "deja", now). Especially with all that damned advertisement and stomache churning color schemes.

Use http://www.deja.com/=dnc/ instead of just deja.com if you don't like all that new fancy stuff.

Now, if Dejanews can get all their other problems fixed...

PowerQuest was to release the code 18 months after the commercial version was released.

This post is by the author of the ext2fs resizer and does not dispute the information that Rik van Riel posted. It was posted 15JUN98, so I guess we can look forward to seeing it in the next few months.

Alex Bischoff
---

A while ago I was searching on www.deja.com for an online computer games dealer, when I found this post. When I read the post and then looked at the name of the author I nearly fell off my chair with laughter. How stupid can one man be? Needless to say, I didn't order from this company.

If you really need raw devices (someone from Oracle said in this thread that they don't) then they are on their way. Stephen Tweedie is doing them (paid by Red Hat).

Your company, if large enough, will be able to afford such a setup. Any of your collegues use pirated or unregistered shareware and screensavers? Remember the Microsoft/SPA raids? After one of those, there might be a settlement to bring your company into compliance. They can make you an offer that can't be refused.

Amazing Palm Case Pics Posted!

It still doesn't explain much.

Barbara Cartland?
Geoff
Forget what you know - Share what you don't

My only software problem with FreeBSD is getting Applix to work. Applix is the only Linux commercial application I run that does not seem to have a FreeBSD version

Doesn't the emulator work? Try 'man linux' on the FreeBSD box. I haven't setup the emulator either so I can't tell you if Applix runs or not but I found this on Deja(news).com which seems to indicate that it does. This post seems to say RealPlayer G2 works under the emulator as well!

My only software problem with FreeBSD is getting Applix to work. Applix is the only Linux commercial application I run that does not seem to have a FreeBSD version

Doesn't the emulator work? Try 'man linux' on the FreeBSD box. I haven't setup the emulator either so I can't tell you if Applix runs or not but I found this on Deja(news).com which seems to indicate that it does. This post seems to say RealPlayer G2 works under the emulator as well!

NT comes in dead last in user survey. See: http://www.deja.com/rat e/list_items.xp?CID=11997&PCID=11846

Slashdot too :)

What about software? I didn't see a Code Warrior for xBSD

FreeBSD runs that too. They have a nice linux emulator which even runs Quake3. http://www.dons.net.au/~darius/quake/ has some Q1 and Q2 instructions which should be pretty close to Q3. The emulation doesn't support everything yet but there should be enough to run most apps.

The FreeBSD project also has quite an extensive ports collection which can grab the source, apply patches and do the compile. It is pretty much like downloading SRPMs from contrib.redhat.com. 99% of your OSS will run on Linux, FreeBSD, and a whole lot of other systems without major modification anyway.

Maybe this is a lesser know fact because it didn't
appear in the PC Week stories but the FreeBSD people
were there too.

Mike Smith's ZD labs test update

Webbench results including FreeBSD and Solaris 7

The bottom line is of course that given this configuration and test setup neither of the free operating systems have much to boast about.

One of the more insigtful comments is that we need to go back to Knuth's Fundamental Algorithms and see how he handles the memory hierarchy. In this case, tape drives. Tape drives in those days had reasonable bandwidth (for the time) and miserable latency. Sounds like hard drives now. So we need to reread the old algorithms and do a little translation:

Tape drives -> disk drives

Disk drives -> DRAM main memory

Core (RAM) memory -> 2nd level cache

Cache -> 1st level cache

This isn't simple, of course, because things have changed, amongst other things there is no detailled control over what is in which cache level, but the gist of it is that we need to drop the assumption that accessing random addresses in RAM is just as fast as accessing RAM in such a way that cacheing and readahead are possible. This is still a universal assumption in algorithms textbooks.

Similarly, we need to drop the idea that we can get to any part of the disk within a reasonable time. If we treat modern disks like a tape drive with really good mechanics for fast-forward and rewind, then we are closer to the reality, where you can transfer over a megabyte in the time it takes you to read a random bit from the other end of the disk, (about 10ms).

This implies our 'hard disks' should be RAM disks, and the current hard disks should be relegated to some sort of backup role.

The mainframe I used at Cambridge (Phoenix, a heavily hacked IBM 370 - this is only 10 years ago!) would move your files out to tape if you didn't access them for a few weeks. Next time you accessed them it took a few minutes for the tape robot to find your tape and put it back on the disks.

What bothers me is the several other articles which claim it's blindingly fast - on this machine it's quite the opposite.

Actually I think that most of the comments about speed are about the speed of HTML & CSS rendering (which is fast), not the speed of browser behaviour, which still is quite slow because of the lack of optimization.

And is there truly no way of setting up a proxy host? I've looked, and I can't find one.

I hear that this has been asked frequently on Mozilla newsgroups. So you'll propably find some answers by searching for it in Deja.com.

/Bergie

--

If the control program toggles DTR, the modem could hang up. If the control program toggles RTS, then you could get a buffer overflow from releasing flow control too early. The latter probably isn't so bad, but the former is probably the reason for the dropped connection. Adding a '&D0' to the modem init string would make the modem ignore DTR commanded hangups. Perhaps that would let you activate firecracker without being diconnected from your ISP.