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Would your friend say that they're a generally "good" employer? Would she want to keep working there? There's always the risk that her name could be made public, despite her wishes, during any action.

If you want advice, somewhere like the Citizen's Advice Bureau or her Trades Union (taking along any relevant contract of employment) would be a good starting point. Depending on what a workplace CCTV camera is actually doing and (most importantly) what the company has said that it is doing with the data the company may or may not be abiding by the data protection act or not. Even if they aren't now, a simple declaration may be all it takes to abide by the law (with the camera staying, which may not be what your friend wants). The ICO would be a useful organisation to contact but (from experience) not until you've definitely got a case.

If you want someone who's likely to campaign on your behalf, try "Liberty" (http://www.liberty-human-rights.org.uk/). People have certainly made interesting use of the 1998 act (see http://www.fnord.demon.co.uk/mt/fifth/cctv.html).. .

Another possibility, although a bit of a long shot, would be the Human Rights Act (http://www.opsi.gov.uk/ACTS/acts1998/19980042.htm ). It's pretty vague in places, and while it's unlikely that said cameras interfere with e.g. "... the right to respect for his private and family life ..." it might be worth reading.

The usual caveats apply - I'm not a lawyer, but have been involved with the deployment in a camera system at a former employer in the past, and was involved with the discussions as to legal requirements (then under the 1984 act) re data retention policy and security, and later of the effects of the 1998 act (on non-camera data).

I did this 'cause Linux gives me a woody. It doesn't generate revenue. Please don't call or write us with bug reports. They cost us money, and I get sorta ragged on for wasting my time on UNIX ports anyway.

is there anybody who has spent some time on X11 with a decent window manager who thinks that the Windows window manager is more useable?

More usable? No. Roughly equally usable? Yup. It takes some 3rd party software to get there, but if you're going to object to that then realize that pretty much any XWM you choose falls into "3rd party software" as well as most of the widgets and other software that you probably use on *nix.

And yes, I am a Unix C++ developer. But except for one position (my first, quite some time ago) all of my development work has been done on Windows workstations.

almost fake virtual desktops

Why are you "almost" faking virtual desktops? Why don't you get a program that does them for real? I have no experience w/ OS X, but for Windows I can recommend VirtuaWin and Deskwin. And they're both OSS too! I find VirtuaWin better -- more options, less incidences of lost apps, and less issues with apps that aren't responding well to desktop switching.

Want a decent shell? Cygwin gives it to you, in any flavor you could want. There's also MKS (we use it here), but I really recommend Cygwin if you can work around its wonkiness with the Windows drive structure (if we could freaking disable that we could ditch MKS... sigh). Want perl/python/etc? Nearly any you want are also available on Windows, both via Cygwin and in natively compiled versions.

Want other window manager nice-ities? Nearly anything you want for X is also available in Windows, for free, via 3rd party programs. All it takes is some Google searches.

We had great game development libraries for stuff like that 10 years ago, e.g. Allegro. While I appreciate the Perl support here, I don't think anyone would put more than a couple of hours' worth of effort into a game that doesn't support pretty 3D stuff on modern graphics cards. If you want to do such things, SDL_Perl isn't a viable option (look at the effort involved).

So, sit down on your bums and write a Perl API for DirectX with good WINE support, folks. ;-)

So, sit down on your bums and write a Perl API for DirectX with good WINE support, folks. ;-)

Actually, the comment prompted me to look for one. All I found was this. I must admit, the idea seems a bit silly.

See here

But you don't think it's dangerous that a site that has a de-facto monopoly on searches is doing this?

Look at it this way. BMW felt that Google was putting them too low on the search list. So they make a page to 'fix' this. Then Google de lists them.

If Google was one of many equally popular search engines, I'd say that they were within their rights to do this. But they aren't. People use 'Google' as a verb, i.e. just f**king Google it. Most of the world uses them as their only search engine. So if I have a site, and I'm way down on the list, I'll try to fix it. Now I could use a different search engine of course, and even lobby other people to do the same. But my customers will still be using Google.

Actually, I do some work on a site with an open source FAT32 formatter. It's pretty popular, I get a 2-3 emails a day with people that have downloaded it, and all of them are satisfied. Now this site is way down on the list with any reasonable search terms, unless you know the name of the company. I actually emailed them, and got a reply IIRC about buying advertising. My solution was to email people who are high up on the pagerank and get them to link to me. And link to it from here, tight bastard that I am ;-)

So suddenly you have a de facto monopoly, and thus pagerank is valuable enough that they can charge for it, and punish people for trying to exploit it. That doesn't sit too well with me. Whatever you think of the people that run Google, in the end it is a business and one that has carved out a rather novel monopoly. And history shows that businesses have a tendency to exploit that in a way that is in their interests, even when their interests diverge from most people's.

The interesting thing is that in America at least, the law says that there are things like tying agreements that are legal unless you are a monopoly (or abusive monopoly, I forget the wording). So Microsoft could insist that you used Internet Explorer with Windows and not break the law, right up to the lawsuit that declared them to be a monopoly at which point it became illegal. But for Google, I don't think there is any legal restraint on them. They could of course claim that they are a not a monopoly, on the grounds that mind share is not market share, and people are still free to use yahoo or altavista. And asking for money to improve pagerank, or delisting people that try to exploit it would probably still be legal even if their competitors managed to get a Microsoft style judgement against them.

You have to remember Adam Smith's quote:

"People of the same trade seldom meet together," he wrote, without concocting "a conspiracy against the public."

I.e. that businesses have zero qualms about creating and abusing monopoly power. It's not about Bill Gates being a bad person, or the Google guys being good ones. It's something that businesses do, if they want to succeed and keep the shareholders happy. And in the Google case, it's a new sort of monopoly, one that won't be restrained by the laws that affected Microsoft, not that those proved particularly effective in any case.

Your arguments sound awfully familiar to those already refuted. In short: Stars aren't usually visible because of the fact that capturing those would need longer exposure, meaning the foreground would be overexposed (hint: Try taking a photograph anywhere with odd lighting conditions, then compare that to what you actually *see* - human eyes have pretty damn amazing dynamic range compared to cameras!) The odd shadows are mostly due to the fact that the surface isn't quite as flat as it seems, and the objects may be in a bit different angle than they immediately seem. Honestly, read the above site (and Clavius too).

Microsoft produced a product that a whole bunch of people thought was worth spending money on instead of its competitors, and thus made its founders rich.

What competitors?

"Would this process affect the coloration of the teeth?"

No, but tooth size many change. 8^)

> qwe qwewwq (...)

I belive that what you're looking for is:
http://www.babbage.demon.co.uk/morseabc.html

I was originally just going to put some random morse coded text, but the lameness filter got in the way :(

Hi, I found this game yesterday night and since I can't stop playing:
http://www.hurtwood.demon.co.uk/Fun/copter.swf
Enjoy :-)
chris

A few more examples

doesnt that means we had to go there in the first place? dur

I don't think it means anything. As far as I can tell, the patents cover one algorithm for the generation of short filenames from long ones.

You can format a volume by writing a bootsector, clearing out the FATS and writing an empty root directory. No filename creation is necessary, and so you don't infringe on any patents I'm aware of.

See this tool for an example

http://www.ridgecrop.demon.co.uk/fat32format.htm

You could, I suspect, write a FAT file system which supports long filenames and doesn't use any of the techiques mentioned in the patent I think. In fact it would be interesting if someone who knows about patent law could confirm this.

First some background - each filename on a FAT partition has a short filename. It may also have a long filename. Most of the time, the short filename is essentially invisible to the user. Windows, Linux and Mac will only ever display the long one. Dos and bootstrap code relies on the short filename, but that's a very special case. Short filenames must be unique though, since chkdsk will 'fix' the disk in bad ways otherwise.

Essentially, I'm thinking about using a different algorithm to generate short names, something like appending the file's position in the directory in Base 32, e.g. 0-9A-V. Since FAT directories can have at most 65536 files and usually have far fewer, this is pretty compact. There's a corner case where someone tries to create a file which collides with this scheme, but I think that it's solvable, especially if you can live with the limitation that you can only open files by their long filename.

I'll write a web page with the solution, so it can't be patented by anyone.

You can format big drives to FAT32 in Windows with this tool

http://www.ridgecrop.demon.co.uk/fat32format.htm

Nice job!

This is what FUD is. What you describe is not.

Great , now we can have newer 'as useless as a ' sayings

As useless as a usb Turd http://www.emanator.demon.co.uk/bigclive/usbshit.h tm

But the language, or more likely the way the language is most commonly used, isn't optimal for some things. Games happen to be one of those things.

You can't generalise. There is no reason why Java can't be used for games, and work well. Garbage collection should not be a problem for well-written applications (indeed, Java can be used for real-time work). There is the Quake clone, Jake, and there are commercial games, and even game platform emulators:

http://www.millstone.demon.co.uk/download/javaboy/

The film 'Threads' features some of the public information films and broadcasts that would have been broadcast prior to nuclear war. They are made all the more chilling because of the odd music played at the start and end of the broadcasts (Threads used the actual films - not a speculative mock up).

In the early 1980s, the government also issued Protect and Survive: the leaflets and some of the public information broadcasts are here: http://www.cybertrn.demon.co.uk/atomic/

I'm sorry, but I have to call you out on this.

I don't know what kind of "flack jacket" you're talking about that's comprised of "rticulated ceramic/steel plates with a touch of Kevlar fabric to hold it together" but it's nothing that I've ever seen. And a flak jacket from the Korean war, that was rated to stop a .50 BMG? That's ridiculous. There isn't any type of personal body armor that will stop a 50-cal, even today (unless you consider an armored vehicle a form of personal body armor).

I'll refer you over to the Body Armor page at Globalsecurity.org. "The [pre-Interceptor] "flak jacket," constructed of ballistic nylon, provided protection primarily from munitions fragments and was ineffective against most pistol and rifle threats. These vests also were very cumbersome and bulky and were restricted primarily to military use." This adequately describes the vests used up through Vietnam and which were even issued during the onset of the current war in Iraq. On the Interceptor system, which is current issue, "The outer tactical vest consists of a Kevlar weave that's very fine and will stop 9mm pistol rounds. Webbing on the front and back of the vest permits attaching such equipment as grenades, walkie-talkies and pistols. The Small Arms Protective Insert (SAPI) is made of a boron carbide ceramic with a spectra shield backing that's an extremely hard material. It stops, shatters and catches any fragments up to a 7.62 mm round with a muzzle velocity of 2,750 feet per second."

The old, Vietnam-era vest would not stop a 7.62mm rifle round. Whether it would stop a 9mm handgun round I'm not sure, but there are plenty of reports of guys being killed by being shot through the flak vest. It was never intended to stop aimed rifle fire. And it certainly wasn't made from hinged solid plate! Here's a page with a photo. It was made primarily of nylon.

That the new armor system -- with plates -- can reliably stop rifle rounds is a big deal. It was not true before; I do not believe there was a personal armoring system available to the average troops in any war before this one, that would stop bullets. The WWII, Korea, and Vietnam "flak jackets" were exactly that -- to stop flak, that is, fragments produced by things exploding.

You are also mistaken about the 5.56mm round. It does too have a steel penetrator. Nonwithstanding my personal experience (fire one through several layers of 1/4" mild steel plate separated by a few inches and you can see the copper jacket and lead surround strip off, and the steel core continue), there are an abundance of references on the net. The current issue is called the M885 Ball round, it is a 62 grain bullet with a full copper jacket and lead surrounding a cylindrical steel core. It's commonly referred to as "Green tip" because the tips of the bullets are painted green to differentiate them from the older, solid-lead M193 round, which has no coloring on the tips.

You can get quite an argument going with people familiar with terminal ballistics by asking about whether the wound profile of the new M855 bullets (they're quite a bit messier than the old solid lead ones) are due to the bullets 'tumbling,' or breaking apart on impact, but it's quite well known that they have a steel penetrator, and that this was introduced principally to defeat new types of body armor. The Russians have a comparable cartridge, for similar reasons. (Best reference: http://matrix.dumpshock.com/raygun/basics/pmrb.htm l)

Also read:
http://www.geocities.com/odjobman/r1r42.htm
http://www.globalsecurity.org/military/lib

Here are two that I am familiar with:

Microwriter

I remember seeing advertisements in the back of Byte magazine in the late 80s for a device called the Microwriter. It was a one-handed keyboard with only five keys and you 'played' chords in order to enter the desired character.

It's no longer manufactured, but here are some pictures and an image of the chords for the characters a to z.

A successor to the Microwriter exists and is called the CYKEY. The web site claims compatibility with some PDAs.

DataHand

The DataHand consisted of two banks of multi-switches (for want of a better word) one for each hand. The multi-switches were essentially little cups in which you rested your fingers. Each multi-switch could be activated in five directions: down, north, south, east, west. Down was a 'normal' key press, and the compass directions involved pressing a switch to the side of your finger tip. Basically your fingers remained still and you merely moved you finger tips. I believe you could also get pedals to act as shift keys.

Have a look here to learn more about it.

I friend of mine actually had one of these, he was a translator and had to do massive amounts of typing. He claimed it was 'somewhat' more efficient but rather difficult to get used to. I think he gave it up in the end.

Here are two that I am familiar with:

Microwriter

I remember seeing advertisements in the back of Byte magazine in the late 80s for a device called the Microwriter. It was a one-handed keyboard with only five keys and you 'played' chords in order to enter the desired character.

It's no longer manufactured, but here are some pictures and an image of the chords for the characters a to z.

A successor to the Microwriter exists and is called the CYKEY. The web site claims compatibility with some PDAs.

DataHand

The DataHand consisted of two banks of multi-switches (for want of a better word) one for each hand. The multi-switches were essentially little cups in which you rested your fingers. Each multi-switch could be activated in five directions: down, north, south, east, west. Down was a 'normal' key press, and the compass directions involved pressing a switch to the side of your finger tip. Basically your fingers remained still and you merely moved you finger tips. I believe you could also get pedals to act as shift keys.

Have a look here to learn more about it.

I friend of mine actually had one of these, he was a translator and had to do massive amounts of typing. He claimed it was 'somewhat' more efficient but rather difficult to get used to. I think he gave it up in the end.

The "new" ordering of the books is:

1. The Magicians Nephew
2. The Lion the Witch and the Wardrobe
3. The Horse and His Boy
4. Prince Caspian
5. The Voyage of the Dawn Treader
6. The Silver Chair
7. The Last Battle

That ordering works because the "Magicians Nephew" is the one where Narnia is created, and "The Last Battle" is the book in which it is destroyed/ascended. The original ordering has "The Lion .." coming first, and the "Magician Nephew" being a followup after the initial success.

Personally I read them in the published order, and the small paperback set I have has them numbered in the "old" order - not a big deal to be honest.

Read a this page for more details on suggested reading order.

... it was called TRABANT the cardboard little Mercedes!

Technical reason.

Developers just not targetting it is not it. It isn't like multimedia libraries don't exist for many platforms including Linux.

It's FUD spreading people like you who give OSS projects bad press. Go stand in the corner and think of what you did.

Tom

> Armorgeddon (now Tanarus)*

Armorgeddon! God! I used to play that on the Amiga back in 1991 - it was one of the first realtime games where you could have more than one player in the same universe.

Here's some reviews from back in the day:

http://games.eldritchs.com/armged.html
http://www.angusm.demon.co.uk/AGDB/DBA1/ArmG.html

And screenshots - this was considered good graphics at the time!

http://www.rottentomatoes.com/g/pc_games/armour_ge ddon/gallery.php?page=3

And finally, a shot of the box cover:

http://www.mobygames.com/game/atari-st/armour-gedd on/cover-art/gameCoverId,19250/

Psygnosis (makers of Armor-geddon) was quite the game maker, in their heyday.

The Tripods by John Christopher, adapted for TV by the BBC. Great series.

I am going to patent a story line of people doing stuff!!!
Or better yet.

I am going to patent: A plotline about a politician(s) doing political things in United States of America.

After that I'll demand that all new papers be burned and that .

----
Dear Mr Bush.
I am sending you this cease and desist. Please stop doing political stuff in Washington DC because its my IP.
P.S. I also have patents on the rest of the US and two on Crawford, Texas.

I know who runs USPTO. Those little dippy birds.
http://www.backstreet.demon.co.uk/oddstuff/drinkin gbirds/drinkingbirds.htm

But does it really have to be this way? Perhaps slashdot is better at filtering signal from noise than IRC in some respects, but not all. Any napsters or del.icio.us's coming out of this collective? I haven't seen signs of collective intelligence emerging for innovative solutions in this space, but granted, I am a newbie. Also granted, this forum isn't really geared for that level of collaboration.

Or isn't it? Here's a brain[emmission]; judge for yourself whether its aroma is appealing or repugnant:

Imagine an environment that is instantly responsive to your predilections based on the context you provide. Context is determinined heuristically based on your interactive participation, like adaptive steering through a meaning/value space.

The problem we're trying to solve, as always, essentially boils down to separating signal from noise. We want to do that more effectively. The situation is complicated by the fact that one person's signal may be another person's noise. The designation of signal or noise isn't universally objective. In fact it is inherently subjective. Complicating the picture further still is the fact that one person's present goals may be different from another's, even if their tastes are similar (I may agree that a post is funny, but I'm really more interested in finding something informative right now, so I'm not in the market for funny at the moment).

So, what if we enable *every user* to tag a given post as "signally" or "noisy" on a variety of spectra. If I find a given post funny, and I want find more funny posts, then the system should interactively display more posts based on querying "users who find the given post funny" joined with "other posts this group finds funny." Similarly, if I find this post funny, but not informative, and I'm looking for informative, the total posts are filtered, parsed and displayed for my viewing pleasure accordingly.

For each new post that I rank for signal/noise correlation (based on any spectra of my choosing), the total collection is reparsed for each user individually, and so each post viewed is another chance for a new bifurcation in the meaning/value space.

There are two simultaneous but distinct activities going on here: the first is differentiation of the value/meaning space based on individual signal/noise assessments; the second is integration of the space into clusters based on heuristic participation and querying.

There is an extremely important, but very tiny innovation involved in this system: the fact that all of my rankings are motivated by what I want to see more/less of, I'm not tasked with the chore of trying to decide what other users would like to see. There is no need for centralized control. The system is set up to let decentralized control flourish.

Basically, each user becomes a Maxwellian Demon (http://www.maxwellian.demon.co.uk/name.html), reversing the forces of entropy, and making the space more useful with increased participation rather than less useful. Not only that, but the system basically creates parallel mini-universes; rather than one single box in which everyone sees everyone, you've got a potentially unlimited number of boxes based on the evaluations by each user assigning and seeking meaning/value for their own selfish benefit.

One of the beautiful consequences of this kind of interaction is that the space become richer with prolonged usage instead of becoming more noisy (harnessing negative entropy). I don't even think that it would be necessary or useful to classify given users as "noisy" or "signally." That inf

That's why I'm still booting CP/M on my Commodore 128!

http://www.animus-web.demon.co.uk/maidens/ :)

(lots of short skirts in that series by the way, and fancy helmets too! just check the fashion section of above website)

ID can be disproven if someday natural laws are discovered to create specified complexity. To date, there have been many efforts, and all have failed.

First off, that's the God-Of-The-Gaps argument.

Second of all, can ID really be called a scientific theory if its disproof depends on another theory (the theory of evolution) being developed?

For instance, if I jump into the air and, instead of coming back down, I just keep going up, that disproves the theory of gravity. The only way the theory of gravity could continue to hold is if you could explain my ascent in a way that does not violate the theory of gravity.

So, a scientific theory makes a prediction, and if the prediction does not hold, the theory is either flat out wrong or it needs more work. I don't think there is a scientific theory out there where you could say that its disproof requires the proof of some other theory X. How can ID be a theory if its disproof does not require a counter-proof, but an explanation? The answer is that ID is not a theory (because it doesn't explain anything), but an assertion that the theory of evolution can not explain the process of life on Earth.

The server asks you to hash a string.

You run a program locally (here's some) or incorporate it into your client in which you enter your password and it spits out the 5 digit hash. Tell the server what the hash was, it compares it to what it thinks you should have entered.

All very simple and works just fine over unencrypted links !

plan9 uses it for ftp access

Apache / Firefox also support something similar for HTTP Authentication - your password is md5'd with some salt instead of just being base64'd

that is all

There are all kinds of electric devices you can make that look like they are straight out of an old horror movie. Jacob's ladders are quite simple to build. You can find all the parts on ebay. If you are more ambitious, you might want to try a tesla coil.

The use of "GB" for "The United Kingdom of Great Britain and Northern Ireland" surprises some people. However, the United Kingdom and the Ukraine both wanted "UK" so rather than start World War III over the matter, the United Kingdom was assigned "GB" and the Ukraine was assigned "UA.

$ cat test.cpp
int main( void ) {
        int xyz[30];
 
        xyz[31] = 0;
}
$ g++ -v
Using built-in specs.
Target: x86_64-redhat-linux
Configured with: ../configure --prefix=/usr --mandir=/usr/share/man --infodir=/usr/share/info --enable-shared --enable-threads=posix --enable-checking=release --with-system-zlib --enable-__cxa_atexit --disable-libunwind-exceptions --enable-libgcj-multifile --enable-languages=c,c++,objc,java,f95,ada --enable-java-awt=gtk --with-java-home=/usr/lib/jvm/java-1.4.2-gcj-1.4.2 .0/jre --host=x86_64-redhat-linux
Thread model: posix
gcc version 4.0.1 20050727 (Red Hat 4.0.1-5)
$ g++ -fmudflap -lmudflap -o test test.cpp
$ ldd test
        libmudflap.so.0 => /usr/lib64/libmudflap.so.0 (0x00002aaaaaadc000)
        libstdc++.so.6 => /usr/lib64/libstdc++.so.6 (0x0000003d87d00000)
        libm.so.6 => /lib64/libm.so.6 (0x0000003d85900000)
        libgcc_s.so.1 => /lib64/libgcc_s.so.1 (0x0000003d87b00000)
        libc.so.6 => /lib64/libc.so.6 (0x0000003d85600000)
        libdl.so.2 => /lib64/libdl.so.2 (0x0000003d85b00000)
/lib64/ld-linux-x86-64.so.2 (0x0000003d85400000)
$ ./test
*******
mudflap violation 1 (check/write): time=1128968399.682800 ptr=0x7ffffff384f0 size=128
pc=0x2aaaaaae4add location=`test.c:4 (main)'
/usr/lib64/libmudflap.so.0(__mf_check+0x18) [0x2aaaaaae4add]
./test(main+0xbd) [0x400a65]
/lib64/libc.so.6(__libc_start_main+0xef) [0x3d8561c3cf]
Nearby object 1: checked region begins 0B into and ends 8B after
mudflap object 0x602ae0: name=`test.c:2 (main) int xyz [30]'
bounds=[0x7ffffff384f0,0x7ffffff38567] size=120 area=stack check=0r/3w liveness=3
alloc time=1128968399.682787 pc=0x2aaaaaae541e
number of nearby objects: 1

I have a board around here somewhere. The cores were laid up on a PCB in blocks. the whole effect was a bit like a board full of giant cordorouy SMPs with a tangle of fine copper wire around the edges. Something like this.

I can purchase a new PC, install CP/M and not have to pay the Microsoft tax or deal with "modern" OSes whose sole purpose is to use up CPU cycles so you have to upgrade you hardware every couple of years.

Deep Space 9 and Farscape, but also The Prisoner and Sapphire and Steel.

Also, I suppose it was unavoidable to have a list focuse on English-language productions, but I would NEVER leave out Raumpatrouille, a superb German series from the sixties.

I would also remember Star Maidens, although I might not put it among the best 50... :)

Err, I don't know...maybe the missing ozone layer has something to do with it?

No. Completely wrong. The missing ozone allows UV radiation through, not more heat. Ozone itself is a greenhouse gas and a pollutant.

Note that while ozone is considered a greenhouse gas only in the troposphere, the primary source of tropospheric ozone is stratospheric ozone... which is what the hole is in.

Bottom line is that stratospheric ozone relies on continual production to sustain itself. Certain chemicals (CFCs, for instance) both interfere with production and destroy some existing ozone in the stratosphere. This creates the hole.

Eventually, (surviving) ozone in the stratosphere sinks down into the troposphere, where it becomes a greenhouse gas, and contributes to globabl warming. This process is the biggest contributor to tropospheric ozone.

So, in reality, the ozone destruction is limiting global warming to an extent, though since some CFCs themselves are powerful greenhouse gases, it is not a net reduction.

Look at postfix + mysql
http://www.sweeney.demon.co.uk/pfix_imap_virtual.h tml

Mostly, U will need a cluster for everything.
If you are seeking for a all around opensource, start with this link, later, to use LVS, the tool for makeking load balancing clusters go here:
http://www.linuxvirtualserver.org/

And if you really are looking for a opensource cheap software costs (not very cheap tco) also you can build your OWN san with ata over ethernet:
http://sourceforge.net/projects/aoetools/

And for webmail a usefull but also ligth interface:
http://www.squirrelmail.org/

With all the licence cost savings, you can Invest a lot of time, and have a fair amount of flexibility.

Sendmail inc, has high availability solutions:
www.sendmail.com

Also, you can spend a lot of money and buy a very bit IBM machine with lots, and lots of lotus notes licenses, with that kind of money spent, you can put IBM at your knees if a lawer makes a good contract..

Also, to complete the solution you can setup nagios and mrtg for monitoring.
http://www.nagios.org/
http://people.ee.ethz.ch/~oetiker/webtools/mrtg/

I think, to setup the hole thing, U will need, like about 50 good servers, (maybe u can try IBM openpower with virtualization, it IS a risc CPU), and like.. humm.. a month of technical tests...

The mysql backend will give you centralized administration, LVS will provide scalability and good servers will give you uptime...

And if EVEN you like, you can make a Linux Routers using sangoma hardware:
http://wwww.sangoma.com/

Everything can be done with Linux by now... The cuestion is how much responsability do you want to have regarding the stability, and overall functionality of the solution.

IBM, HP, RedHat, SuSe, and ANY Linux Consulting firm would be interested in having you as a success history.

Good Luck, and May the Source be With You

Heard of The Quantum Clip, then? http://www.belt.demon.co.uk/product/quantum/quantu m.html

Yours for just £500.

Where are the stars in the background? (this link is for those who can't tell I'm joking)

I do think it's amazing how quickly it's moving though; the visible weather patterns shown don't really change much...

Why don't you go to http://www.econym.demon.co.uk/ and explain to this guy that the sea-shells he makes with a single object and a well-chosen formula are impossible?

And go to this page: http://www.f-lohmueller.de/pov_tut/pov__eng.htm and tell the guy writing these tutorials that show complex rendered scenes in just a dozen lines of code are impossible?

And your next stop should be here: http://www.povray.org/ and then compare the images you saw in the POVray hall of fame to this scene from Myst classic: http://www4.ncsu.edu/~dwbruhn/Terragen/Myst.jpg and tell me that they would all take the same amount of time?

And then go to hell so the rest of us can have a decent conversation for a change.

Why don't you go to http://www.econym.demon.co.uk/ and explain to this guy that the sea-shells he makes with a single object and a well-chosen formula are impossible? And go to this page: http://www.f-lohmueller.de/pov_tut/pov__eng.htm and tell the guy writing these tutorials that show complex rendered scenes in just a dozen lines of code are impossible? And your next stop should be here: http://www.povray.org/ and then compare the images you saw in the POVray hall of fame to this scene from Myst classic: http://www4.ncsu.edu/~dwbruhn/Terragen/Myst.jpg and tell me that they would all take the same amount of time? The scene from Myst runs to 45 boxes, 37 cylinders, 6 triangular prisms, the tree objects (which look like a cone with a bark texture, about 10 cylinders for the branches, a .png texture with transparency and a leaf fractal rendered in green scattered around it, joined together as a merged object and copy 'n' pasted about 16 times), two height fields (one for the ground and another for the mountain...height fields can just be monochrome bitmaps with a random scattering of noise in them, which, when fed to the ray-tracer, get interpretted as white-high-Y-coordinate, black-low-Y-coordinate, grey in-between), and a sky texture (in POVray, that's the Bozo texture with about 0.7 turbulance and a color-map of four colors, two whites and two blues.)

But hey! You got it, that's impossible!!! Isn't this the same damn crowd that screams Linux is too hard to use (which makes my 8-year-old daughter superior in computer skills to you)? http://liw.iki.fi/liw/texts/linux-anecdotes.html Go tell THAT guy that it's impossible for a 21-year-old who starts out with no computer to write an entire operating system that sees global use.

Go tell a literary scholar that it was impossible for Robert Louis Stephenson to write "The Strange Case of Dr. Jekyl and Mr. Hyde" in three days: http://www.the-wow-experience.com/resources/NEW_Pu blic_Domain_Products.htm

Go to this page and tell this guy: http://www.quandaryland.com/jsp/dispArticle.jsp?in dex=723 that he's full of hooey when he says:
"Slideshow Adventures are cheaper and easier to make than the 3D equivalent. Hobbyists can do them for fun. Small independent developers can produce reasonable (even excellent) games on a shoe string. They're a way to start for those hoping to make the big-time. For the Adventure genre to thrive it needs a supply of Adventures. If Adventures are limited to productions costing tens of millions of dollars there won't be very many of them."

And then go to hell so the rest of us can have a decent conversation for a change.

There was a program that tried to use the language of Esperanto

Esperanto is a dreadful auxlang (auxiliary language). Look here: Learn Not to Speak Esperanto. The nice thing about it is that it's probably the only auxlang with a substantial community. They even have Radio: http://radioarkivo.org/. Interlingua is immediately comprehensible by a native speaker of one or more of: Spanish, French, Portuguese, Romanian, Italian, Catalan and some other I forgot.

I always thought glosa would be ideal for what you proposed http://www.glosa.org/

Here's what they claim: Glosa is the most advanced one of the type that linguists call isolating. That means, that in Glosa there are no inflections. Words remain always in their original form, no matter what function they actually have in the sentence. A conventional grammar is missing.Although Glosa is a full language. Grammatical functions are taken over by some operator words and the word order (syntax). This disposition brings Glosa relationship with many languages around the world: east-Asiatic languages like Chinese, Creolean languages from Africa, pidgin languages and with reservation the most important natural language - English.
(In my personal opinion this way is not only interesting, but also the best for an auxlang.)

A Glosa word represents an idea, but no part of speech. The same word can function as a verb, noun, adjective or preposition within reason. The Glosa words are taken from Latin and Greek. So they are known to many people by foreign words or by the Roman languages. A limitated vocabulary (Glosa 1000 or Centra Glosa), easy to learn for beginners, should satisfy for all day situations. For higher demands (science, art, poetry) an extension (Glosa 6000 or Mega Glosa) is available.

I've always thought you could at least achieve an aproximate translation by going Language1 -> Glosa -> Language2. At least vocabulary and some aproximation of grammatical tense would be achieved. Modality and aspects would be missed, but I imagine could be perfected by matching context to huge word lists in Language1 and Language2. In fact, verbal aspects are just enhancements - I wouldn't say they're essential. Apparently, the dominant languages (which is not the same as saying "90% of languages") - both from East and West seem to have the notion of past/present/future.

IMHO, Glosa is very well thought out. At one time I proposed that the Debian project used Glosa. Right now, I've got some Maxima docs (open source CAS) to translate to Portuguese and I keep thinking: if we at least used an auxlang like Interlingua, we would shorten the efforts for the translation temas of all latin languages, but people don't know Interlingua (but, in fact, they do, they just don't know they do.)

Here's a little Glosa traslation (from a website linked from glosa.org) - Walt Whitman
;
O kapitana! Mi kapitana!
O CAPTAIN! my Captain!
Na fobo viagia nu-pa es ge-fini.
our fearful trip is done; (fobo-fear ge=particle indicating now, IIRC)
U navi pa dura dia panto turba.
The ship has weather'd every rack,
U premi; na pa cerka, pa gene gania.
the prize we sought is won; (pa=past, cerka=seek, gania=win, pa gania=win in the past, won)
Un asilu-lo nu es proxi.
The port is near
Mi audi plu kampani.
the bells I hear (pretty obvious: "audi", "kampani" is obvious for any Italian/Portuguese/etc speaker)
Panto homi voci lauda.
the people all exulting
(panto=pan, as in "pan-american" homi=men, voci=voice, lauda=praise ("laudamunus"))

Another sample of Glosa:
u feli A cat, the cat
plu feli; poli feli Cats; many cats
tri feli Three cats
u feli tri The third cat
u-ci feli; u-la feli

Tardis 2000 is a Windows service that implements the NTP protocol, both as a client and (optionally) as a server.

I love this thing, I've been running it for years.