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I really can't reply to this, and I can't even give any hints as to why not, and I'm not going to respond to any guesses.

Heeere's Councillor Tim Ward!

"Vice-Chair of Environment Scrutiny Committee, Strategic IT Scrutiny Committee"

less monitors (to a minimum of one, obviously), more virtual desktops.

The two are not exclusive, nor do they replace one another.

And, frankly, this says little about virtual desktops and considerably more about your coworkers work habits. It also says absolutely nothing about Windows vs Linux, since there are tons of virtual desktop managers for Windows -- including my preferred one DeskWin. It's even GPL.

Virtual desktops are great when you can hide apps that you don't need to look at often, or can segment your work completely into independant groups. But it breaks down quickly when you need to work on things between two different desktops -- the time spent switching back and forth is a huge waste.

Multiple monitors solve that issue entirely, since it's simple to see two completely different desktops at once. Cut 'n' paste does not do the trick with a lot of these kinds of things, while having two monitors does.

Your coworkers maximixing every window is probably what's screwing them the most. If you have to have 3 windows, only have 2 monitors, and want everything maximized then you're not much better off than one monitor. They're not segmenting the work well.

Does anyone else remember the great Atari/Amiga/DOS Dune adventure/strategy game by the French company Cryo from 1992? It was based partly on the book and partly on the Lynch film. I believe the same company tried again a year ago or so ago with "Frank Herbert's Dune", this time more based on the Sci-Fi channel mini-series. The reviews this time was more so-so.

The best thing about the original game was the atmosphere, helped along by the great soundtrack and the impressive architecture...

You can download the whole game here!
review

another..

another...

. Kasparov plays very emotional games

I'm not sure what an 'emotional' chess move looks like. I can say this, kasparov's ELO has been over 2800 for quite some time (the highest rating in history). Younger players like rajdbov et all do not play more 'technically' than kasparov. He is the single greatest chess tactician ever, period (and an unmitigated jerk, meh) tactical brilliance.

The really interesting thing is that a GM combined with a computer is MUCH stronger than a GM or computer by themselves. I think some rule alteration to put a human more on 'par' with a computer could help the man vs. machine idea.
If they allowed kasparov to touch the pieces and move them on another board (like the computer can do perfectly in its memory) before making a move on the 'real' board, it might make the match more interesting. Also, as others have pointed out, humans get tired, this is the single biggest reason kasparov as faired somewhat poorly in the past.

The reason machines are strong at chess at all is because a positional advantage can usually be translated into a material advantage within 7 moves or so (14 ply) as opposted to games like Go, so brute force tends to work. The trouble with computers is they will never blunder, never, so every move the human makes must be optimal.

Pictures and details here:
http://www.birtwhi.demon.co.uk/Gallery2003SQ222.ht m

POSIX provides only source-level compatibility. Writing POSIX-compliant code, together with some autoconf sorcery can make you as compatible as it goes these days, but sometimes source compatibility just isn't enough -- most commercial applications do not come in source format.

There was binary compatibility module called iBCS (an Intel initiative for cross-compatibility between Intel-based Unix OSs) which failed to take off because vendors kept adding extensions to their Unix which never made their way into iBCS. And of course, running something in a different platform than its original one may require tons of runtime support (check FreeBSD's Linux binary support).

Reading that article I can't help but be reminded of Victor Lewis-Smith's Gay Daleks.

There is still an active APL community and there are APL implementations for Linux, UNIX, MacOS, OS/390, Windows...
After APL, Ken Iverson created J, a dialect of APL that uses the ASCII character set.

Doom on a cellphone

Allegro Homepage

In case you are not a doubleplusgood duckspeaker, here is a helpful translation of Verisign's letter to ICANN.

Dear Paul:
Translation: Dear meddlesome twit:

This will respond to the ICANN Advisory concerning VeriSign's Deployment of DNS Wildcard Service dated 19 September 2003.
We're about to tell you where you can stick your "advisory".

In the footsteps of several other registries that have done the same, we recently deployed a wildcard in the .com and .net zones.
Verisign has no problem being just as sleazy and underhanded as any of our competitors.

This was done after many months of testing and analysis and in compliance with all applicable technical standards.
Marketing sees dollar signs, and legal says we can get away with it.

All indications are that users, important members of the internet community we all serve, are benefiting from the improved web navigation offered by Site Finder.
None of the lusers who installed "The Internet" on their computers has a clue that we've even done anything.

These results are consistent with the findings from the extensive research we performed.
They are, however, clicking the pretty buttons, just like we hoped they would.

We are, of course, very interested in any objective technical information ICANN may have received concerning the service and would welcome the opportunity to work with you to review such data. To that end, we have reached out to schedule meetings... of leading experts in the field.
Let's have a meeting. Then another. Then another. Then, we'll codify the new de facto "standard".

As to your call for us to suspend the service, I would respectfully suggest that it would be premature to decide on any course of action until we first have had an opportunity to collect and review the available data.
We're going to get our way, because we can, and there's nothing you can do about it. Weenie.

After completing an assessment of any operational impact of our wildcard implementation, we will take any appropriate steps necessary.
And if we don't get our way, we'll pay off anyone we need to.

I look forward to continuing to work with you on this issue.
Kiss our ass.

Best Regards,
See you in Hell,

Russell Lewis
Executive Vice President, General Manager
VeriSign Naming and Directory Services

After the long and tedious prosecution of a most unnaturall cruell, homebred war, occasioned by divisions and distempers amongst our selves, and those distempers arising from the uncertaintie of our Government, and the exercise of un-limited or Arbitrary power, by such as have been trusted with supreme and subordinate Authority, whereby multitudes of grevances and intolerable oppressions have been brought upon us. And finding after eight yeares experience and expectation all indeavours hitherto used, or remedies hitherto applyed, to have encreased rather than diminished our distractions, and that if not speedily prevented our falling againe into factions and divisions; will not only deprive us of the benefit of all those wonderful Victories God hath vouchsafed against such as fought our bondage, but expose us first to poverty and misery, and then to be destroyed by forraigne enemies.

And being earnestly desirous to make a right use of that opportunity God hath given us to make this Nation Free and Happy, to reconcile our differences, and beget a perfect amitie and friendship once more amongst us, that we may stand clear in our consciences before Almighty God, as unbyassed by any corrupt Interest or particular advantages, and manifest to all the world that our indeavours have not proceeded from malice to the persons of any, or enmity against opinions; but in reference to the peace and prosperity of the Common-wealth, and for prevention of like distractions, and removall of all grievances; We the free People of England, to whom God hath given hearts, means and opportunity to effect the same, do with submission to his wisdom, in his name, and desiring the equity thereof may be to his praise and glory; Agree to ascertain our Government, to abolish all arbitrary Power, and to set bounds and limits both to our Supreme, and all Subordinate Authority, and remove all known Grievances.

Not too far from

We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights, that among these are Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness. That to secure these rights, Governments are instituted among Men, deriving their just powers from the consent of the governed. That whenever any Form of Government becomes destructive of these ends, it is the Right of the People to alter or to abolish it, and to institute new Government, laying its foundation on such principles and organizing its powers in such form, as to them shall seem most likely to effect their Safety and Happiness.

And what kind of anarchist sets out a requirement in his manifesto that:

I.---That the Supreme Authority of England and the Territories therewith incorporate, shall be and reside henceforward in a Representative of the People consisting of four hundred persons, but no more; in the choice of whom (according to naturall right) all men of the age of one and twenty yeers and upwards (not being servants, or receiving alms, or having served in the late King in Arms or voluntary Contributions) shall have their voices; and be capable of being elected to that Supreme Trust those who served the King being disabled for ten years onely. All things concerning the distribution of the said four hundred Members proportionable to the respective parts of the Nation, the severall places for Election, the manner of giving and taking Voyces, with all Circumstances of like nature, tending to the compleating and equall proceedings at Elections, as also their Salary, is referred to be setled by this present Parliament, in such sort as the next Representative may be in a certain capacity to meet with safety at the time herein expressed: and such

Well its not quite the same, but somebody has ported the engine of FFE to DirectX. There is even a Linux version and source too for downloading.
The videos sadly (or luckily) don't seem to be available any more, but perhaps your nearest searchable P2P can be of more help.

-----------
Copying for Private Use

80. (1) Subject to subsection (2), the act of reproducing all or any substantial part of

(a) a musical work embodied in a sound recording,

(b) a performer's performance of a musical work embodied in a sound recording, or

(c) a sound recording in which a musical work, or a performer's performance of a musical work, is embodied

onto an audio recording medium for the private use of the person who makes the copy does not constitute an infringement of the copyright in the musical work, the performer's performance or the sound recording.

(2) Subsection (1) does not apply if the act described in that subsection is done for the purpose of doing any of the following in relation to any of the things referred to in paragraphs (1)(a) to (c):

(a) selling or renting out, or by way of trade exposing or offering for sale or rental;

(b) distributing, whether or not for the purpose of trade;

(c) communicating to the public by telecommunication; or

(d) performing, or causing to be performed, in public.

1997, c. 24, s. 50.
------------

Note the highlighted section. You cannot use P2P to share music in Canada. You may leech , but copying music for the purpose of offering it to the public is illegal.

Any note, your rights apply to all media, not just CDs. You can privately copy music for your Player Piano at last!

Interesting feedback. I did come across this paper whilst researching the subject - essentially it's a phone/meter linked together to forward results for analysis and feedback, but it's not a single, integrated unit. Research sponsored by Vodaphone (UK) with trials supposedly started in July 2003.

Yes, thank you for pointing out that my model is nonsense. There's a very nice explanation with diagram that I should have dug up before spouting.

It still looks like the nearest Earth/Sol point ought to be several million miles away, but then I've already proven that I don't know beans about orbital mechanics....

I wonder how FED would look.

On a different note, is there a free text mode SSL client for Windows that supports mouse events? I'd really like to use the scrollbar.

Step AWAY from the keyboard indeed...

(sorry, had to plug a friends' blog there. :-P)

I use a modem for web browsing. I've found that wwwoffle is a good proxy server, because it can operate in both online and offline modes - when offline, it serves the most recent version of each page, and if you try to view a non-cached page, it's marked to be downloaded next time you connect. If you want to speed up your browsing some more at the expense of having to hit 'reload' occasionally, you can configure wwwoffle to always use an available cached version even when online.

If you have a shell account on another machine, and that machine has access to a proxy server, then you can tunnel port 3128 or 8080 (common http proxy ports) through ssh. This makes browsing a lot quicker because there is only a single TCP/IP connection going over the modem link - you don't have to connect separately for each page downloaded. Unfortunately I found that while this gave very fast browsing for half an hour or so, eventually it would freeze up and the ssh connection would have to be killed and restarted. Perhaps this has been fixed with newer OpenSSH releases.

RabbIT is a proxy server you can run on the upstream host which compresses text and images (lossily).

The author of rsync mentioned something about an rsync-based web proxy where only differences in pages would be sent, but I don't know if this program was ever released.

Beer died last August. There's a nice appreciation of his life here. He was a very major figure in both Operations Research and Cybernectics.

--

Anthony Staines

And, somehow, the British economy managed to cope with a new government coming into office quite literally overnight. Like it always does.

A fact not unrelated to having a permanent civil service (Alasdair Campbell et al excluded), rather than replacing the entire staff with your own people when you take power.

Incidentally, the last constituency to declare a result was Winchester, Hampshire, at 6.18pm,

Even more remarkable - dispersed island-based constituencies such as Western Isles, Orkney and Shetland or Argyll, Bute and Strathclyde declared before this at 2:15am, 5:23am and 11:43am respectively, although they didn't have significant recounts to delay the declaration.

Now really.. if we can't sort things into categories, what are we going to do? Hell, even Magic is science.

I especially liked the anecdote about Linus hacking a crashed server to find out what went wrong. Just goes to show how damn proficient the leader of the Linux world is.

I have now added the National Zoo & Aquarium to my list of must-see Canberra places (wow, my list has doubled :). Maybe they'll have Fairy penguin nipping sessions there 'specially for all the visiting geeks. Beats getting mauled by a koala (those things are real killers!).

Some grip on reality is needed here. Especially for any article with a quote like, "It dawned on me that the key to survival and victory in today's battlefield is information," said Garcia That pearl of wisdom has been around in written form since Sun Tzu so what vaccuum has this person been working in? That aside look at the various conceptual flaws in the article.

"nature can provide ready-made solutions." is a comment made in many fields including computer science. The problem is that nature developed solutions for a carbon based lifeform. Imitations in silicon, steel, polymers cannot hope to achieve the same results. Flocks of birds do fly but they also eat and their cells reproduce and die. Steel and silicon simply dissipate energy (with nothing close to a Krebs cycle for renewal) and wear out (since repair or replacement of steel or silicon is hideously demanding of energy). So on a very fundamental level, solutions found in nature do not completely translate to the current materials of technology. You can get aspects of them, like the imitation of flapping flight, but not the whole package.

But lest you think, "Fine. We'll go with _some_ of the benefits." Think: what are they? The article says Flapping wings allow insects and birds to fly at low speeds, hover, make sharp turns and even fly backward. The latter cite trying to imitate a hummingbird's flight. A hummingbird's flight can already be imitated by helicopters and even the V-22 Osprey. But both the helicopter and the Osprey achieve the desired result (within bounds dictated by inertia and thrust-to-weight ratios) with a structure evolved for maximum efficiency given the materials i.e. the propeller. Even if you are utterly fanatic and feel that flapping is the way to go, consider further the imitation of a hummingbird. The birds virtually eat constantly. In fact, you could argue that the researchers haven't looked to nature very closely for their solutions. Even if you could translate the physical properties of a hummingbird to a machine, nature itself demonstrates that the energy requirements are huge for that type of flight. At least the researchers acknowledge this at the end of the article but the impression is more that it is an afterthought rather than an evident truth even before the research had started.

And is the flapping flight really the goal of ornithopters in this article? In this article it's a flock of small, lightweight robots hovering over Martian land rovers and guiding them to places of interest that seems to be the pitch. So what advantage do ornithopters have over other "eye in the sky" objects like helicopters, blimps, gliders, or high power satellite cameras? There don't seem to be any.

At this point one might even ask, how appropriate is a solution inspired by nature (on Earth) to the environment on Mars? Environments on Earth that are similar to Mars don't have an abundance of life because there isn't much to support the energy requirements of life. Therefore a solution based on "nature" is arguably inappropriate.

And finally, Mars exploration has top priority at the CSA. Sorry but Canada officially bowed out of its option to participate in the Mars exploration program via lack of federal funding. Maybe some Canadian companies will keep their hand in without the CSA but odds are NASA will buy American, and why not?

(As for the submitter's comments, let's put on our thinking caps people. What kind of ride would people in the hull of a flapping aircraft get? Replacement for the Osprey indeed!)

Fixed link for HuSi (HuSi being Hulver's Site).

HuSi: where it seems that most of the UKian K5 contingent has retreated after the recent crapflooding spree...

Uhm, I believe it was the CP/M guys saying something along the lines of "64KB should be enough".

Yeah, thanks. Have you never heard of Godwin's law?

So where do I pay my license fees?

I barely mastered 3D deathchase

Looking for an OS X z-machine interpreter? Maybe Zoom is what you want? I'm not sure since I don't have a Mac, but it seems like it's mroe mac-friendly and capable than Frotz compiled for OS X...

i'm not insinuating that the american way is wrong (although it obviously is - if my knowledge is correct, Mr. Webster chose to drop those silent "u"s more or less arbitrarily, for no other reason than to show Britain that the states weren't part of it)

See this map.

I have a fairly good knowledge of the Amiga scene, where - for obvious reasons - almost all the game releases of late 1990's were independent games. Some of them were actually quite good and I really miss them on the mainstream platforms. Amiga coders were doing some true magic with optimizing 3D engines to cope with high-screen true-color animations on ancient processors like the 68040. The quality of their work was superb. However, it was rarely followed by the quality of the scriptwriting and graphics design. Now here's my question: why is it easier to find a guy who will spend many sleepless and unpaid nights writing the game engine - than to find a guy who would put a similar effort in writing a good story or drawing an interesting texture? This resulted in weird "sort-of-games", that were actually nothing more than a blazing fast 3D engine and just a couple of rooms to show that it works. What's the point?

N-grams? N-grams? DON'T CLICK ON THE LINK!

It's a CoS trick to enslave us all!

Wow, these guys are just begging for a lawsuit from you-know-who.

The whole world is literally at your finger tips. Here are a few examples.

Everytime passwords get mentioned on slashdot, I say they suck with little to no moderation. Regarding the lack of standard protocols and software packages try:

Multos
EMV (Europay-Mastercard-Visa) Specifications
JavaCard
OpenCard
PC/SC Workgroup
Standards Committees and Standards Related to Smart Cards

I attended the 10th annual smartcard convention in 1999, yet have not seen a smartcard outside of the places I used to work programming them. Maybe its time... The cards then were 1 or 2 dollars and the readers were about 6 or 7, hardly an expensive periferal on your computer.

Let me reiterate. Passwords have nothing to do with authentication, they only say that someone knows your password. Even having a magstripe card at least says that you know a password and were able to obtain phyisical access to the card. The best is a biometric reader with a smartcard. I think bioreaders are about 50 dollars.

Sorry, I was too busy ranting and forgot to elaborate. Here's a page where I was tipped off http://www.drh-consultancy.demon.co.uk/pkcs12faq.h tml

I'll be the first to admit that I don't know much about Windows and I'm no export on cryptography so maybe I'm an idiot for not having found a solution sooner. The big hurdle for me was that if I navigated to a site that used one of my own certs, IE would *offer* to add it permanently, walk me through the process, then congratulate me on successfully adding it. But it was all lies. It wasn't added.

As the document above describes (see the 12 step usage section near the middle) the solution I found to work is to convert my openssl CA cert to "DER" format, make that a downloadable file for IE users, and have them *download and open it*. With the proper mime type, this will trigger IE to walk you through exactly the same process as above, but this time it works, suggesting IE really only likes certs in a particular format. No excuse for making up lies, though.

Also, the way I set it up may not work for IE5, but I've had enough for one week :p. MacIE - hopeless. No way to import certs as far as I know.

From a personal standpoint, I couldn't care less how IE handles these certs since I don't use it, but I needed to find a solution that our users could handle.

-h3

Apparently if you write your signature like this:

John Smith > O.K.

on the outside cover of a CD or record, the magic of quantum physics makes the sound better!

A review that includes this as well as the old "freezing the CD" psychological trick can be found here.

Nifty Site on Old English

Sealand is a sovereign nation with one mounted gun. The RIAA has more than enough money to afford a fast boat, a couple of torpedoes, and several guys nuts enough to attack Sealand. What laws would prevent the RIAA from launching a couple of torpedoes at Sealand's pilings and blowing any fiber connections between the machine room and the ocean floor to smithereens? If the entire "country" is destroyed by one corporate attack, there's nowhere to extradite to, nobody to complain to the U.N. about it, etc... What's the story there?

This is probably an underhanded idea, and a bad one at that, but suppose the RIAA talk people like Musicmatch into adding an extra little bit of code to their ripper for their trial version players. Whenever a CD was ripped using MusicMatch, a unique hash of the IP address (if static), general System ID and other identifing characteristics would be added somewhere within the file. Think about something like this. Let the RIAA download all the music they want for a few days or weeks, before some hacker notices. Then they have a list of who to prosecute for originally creating the file.

What you're describing is essentially chaffing and winnowing, first proposed by Ronald Rivest.

There's no Mac support for the higher-capacity Nomad products due to a tiff between Creative Labs and Apple people... and it all started going sour right around the date of release for the iPod. Anyway, if you are a OS X nerd that buys one of these things myself and a few others are trying to get either Gnomad2 or GnomeDAP up and running under Gnome 2.0 using libnjb (current cvs). Wish us luck...

That looks like a horribly fake photo. Not to mention it's not even close to what was being discussed. Try , although the URL had already been listed.

You should have played The Extraordinary Adventures
of Baron Munchausen, a much superiour game, with many fewer encumbrances.

It's basically a lying contest. It takes a bit of practice before you're any good, but once you're good... you're great. Fantastic game.

Off-topic? Oh, puh-LEEZE!

Some neat tricks to do with the code: superimpose images on top of video, or transition effects between videos,

A genlock superimposes text on top of video. There is a program for Win16 and Win32 already which can make the subtitles, and I was just commenting that I would have liked to see a way to do it using tools like this.

Pardon the slashbot-ism, but I have to say that IMHO, TMAOC again.

-uso.

Ive got a little summing for you, its called the royal finger.

oh Im sorry was the grammar no good? do you make such lame arse comments to all the news submissions on /. aswell? so fucking what if my grammar or smelling aint perfect, I got the message across didnt I? yet your only come back is my spelling and grammar.. my god how fucking lame are you? is your life that uninteresting that you have to pick up on these things? really I want to know.

One of the largest ISP's here in the U.K used to be Demon They're still in the top 5. Not only could they tell you if their service worked with Unix, they could tell you if it worked with OS/2, NeXT or even an Amiga. Hell, their public FTP used to contain directories for almost every slightly-popular operating system known the man, with freely available network applications for download (AmiTCP for the Amiga for example) When you signed up, they sent you a letter and a technical sheet (Four sides of A4) that listed all their DNS servers, mail, news, POPs etc.

That was the way to do it..

Interestingly, for the first time ever, a neural network program has had some success, with Neuro Go coming a creditable 6th.