Slashdot Mirror

But what has OpenAvenue actually done?

So far, not very much, as far as I can tell. E.g. there have been a lot of patches applied (but not by OpenAvenue people) and there has not been even a development cvs release since 1.10.8, yet there are quite a lot of fixes in the tree since 1.10.8.

You can read info-cvs here.

I've recently learned about Genetic Algorithms (GA) in my quest to win $15,000 from The Code Book and Simon Singh's Cipher Challenge (eGroup here). One of the stages is a deft Playfair Cipher, which have historically proven difficult to solve by hand. Using a genetic algorithm, I was able to solve the cipher in just 28 generations.

What's amazing to me is that here I have just 500 lines of code that know nothing about ciphers, Playfairs and codebreaking, yet using a simple mutation and scoring function was able to break a relatively difficult cipher.

For those that don't know, a Playfair cipher puts the English alphabet into a 5x5 grid (minus 'j') and uses pairs of letters to select other letters from the grid. Instead of a 26-letter substitution cipher, codebreakers are now faced with a daunting 676 letter-pair challenge.

My code created 1,000 random keysquares and mutated them, randomly selecting squares and swapping them with one another, or swapping entire rows and columns. The new generation was scored, and those that scored high had a better chance of making it to the next generation than those that scored low (survival of the fittest, if you will). And in just 28 generations, what was once a mass of jumbled letters slowly transformed before my eyes into perfect English. Once the solution had been found I actually felt bad about killing the process, as if I had creatd life and killed it. It was truly amazing.
--

mp3stereo

Knight Rider MP3 (I know, corny name)

ELMP or here

Say for example Listbox or there's always Egroups. My own company's mailing list services aren't really ready for prime-time yet, but I do operate the announcements-only mail list for the Philadelphia Eagles, and that is about 11000 subscribers although it is one-way only.
--

I'm a fan of the Kodak DC290, which uses compact flash cards for image storage (which I can also swap into my handheld PC). I own a DC265, which is 1.5 years old, takes 1536 x 1024 images, and its output has been fine for print publications (except glossy stuff). The camera came with a 16MB card, which takes about 40 photos at max quality. I bought a 40 meg card and get about 100 photos, which gives me all the storage I need, with no need to carry around 140 floppy disks! (Plus, the average user doesn't need max quality, for web or screen output. I could easily take hundreds of photos at lower quality.)

Kodak owners should join the digita mailing list which is excellent for peer technical support. The DC220, 260, 265, and 290 cameras run the Digita operating system, which allows you to write custom configuration scripts (for example, quickly set your camera for certain lighting conditions you encounter frequently). The only major drawback with the Kodak (and most digitial cameras) is that it cannot go fully manual like the Mavica and has only the standard 3X zoom. But, I gladly trade that for Kodak's many other merits (and I'll buy a zoom lens if it ever becomes really important). Its auto settings and white balancing make it really easy for me to hand this camera to my mom or other helpless person and still get nice photos. The DC290 is currently selling in the $680 range at shopper.com. (dang, my DC265 originally cost $800!)

Check out this posting on creating Windows EXE's using SmallEiffel on Linux.

Perhaps you'd want to contact the maintainers of this project for a perspective on your own: Michael Haller wrote a Win32 MUA called Phoenix Mail with Delphi 3. The project has been moving by fits and starts, but has actually been moving. Currently the project is doomed because of internal squabbling and the project lead is looking for someone to take over the project. The MUA is actually pretty decent and with the right team behind it, it could be one of the better mail clients around. Go take a look at the Phoenix Mail Development Group . If you are interested in taking over the project go have a look at their mailing list , it's like a messy scene in a sci-fi movie where the rescuers find the colonists dead having killed each other with their bare hands.

I am a Senior Software Engineer who co-founded and devoted much volunteer analysis effort to an organization called Censorware Project (http://censorware.org). I do not write to you as a representative of this organization, though, and in fact my comment pertains to why that is the case. ...

But I don't do this work anymore. A large reason is that the legal risks simply became more than I could tolerate. Around the time the DMCA was first being debated, I was advised by one lawyer with Censorware Project that we were facing odds of being ``sued on trumped up charges by a censorware company''.

Anyway, to make an effective portable fuel you can't just carry Hydrogen around in a bottle without seriously compressing it.

This isn't meant to be flamebait, or a troll. I really can't work this out, and I'd like to here what people have to say.

Link off deamonnews site ( here if you don't believe me)

Linus dispargaged BSD in his keynote...guess he must be feeling the heat at little.

Now, I wasn't there, so I may be wrong about this, but, I heard about the way some guy got up during the question time after Linus' keynote and asked him something about how he felt having all these companies moving to Linux, when BSD is a technicically superior operating system.

Linus handled it quite well, saying there is a place for both operating systems, etc, etc..

(From linuxworld.com:

Another gentleman asked why Linux was doing so well compared to FreeBSD, a technically superior OS. Linus replied that luck and timing certainly had a hand in Linux's success relative to FreeBSD, but he added, "It's not just all about technology." He underscored the point that Linux has an active community behind it, not just a few people writing good software.

How do you get "dispargaged", or "feeling the heat" from that?

Now I use Linux, WinNT, and I've used NetBSD on a sun3, so don't call me an anti BSD bigot or something, but what the hell?

What's with the big chip on (it seems) most BSDers shoulders? Most Linux people know about BSD, but choose not to use it - perhaps from laziness, or whatever. Why do you get so annoyed about it? BSD has its places, and perhaps one day it will replace Linux, or Linux will replace it. Who cares?

And a comment like that, at Linuxworld.. well, if it had been on Slashdot, it would have been moderated out of existance as a Uber-Troll.

It's all free software, right? Please - enough of the stupid anti-Linux comments. Aim them at MS, or Solaris if you want more of a challenge/

Check out much older information on mind uploading (also called "Whole Brain Emulation") at Joe Strout's site The Mind Uploading HomePage.

Or treat yourself to the much more recent main site of all things mind uploading:

minduploading.org

You can even join a mailing list intended for the exchange of information relevant to research into mind uploading:

MURG (the Mind Uploading Research Group)

Serious participation in the discussions and sharing of information is very welcome!

See you there!

rak@minduploading.org

Moderators anyone?

Hmm, my first post went up before I read through all the comments; it's encouraging to see other 'big site' posters out there speak up with their own XML success stories.

But after reading all this, I'm getting this odd feeling again - like the one you're supposed to have with a severed finger that still itches even though it's been gone years - not that I would know about that; anyway, there's *something* missing in the picture and it makes it all wrong.

That something is of course a database that "naturally" represents, stores, and serves XML. With a usable XML database you wouldn't need SQL; you can express the same semantics, and a huge superset of them, in XML. You wouldn't
need an OODBMS; XML-Data bindings would do the OO part, the data store the dirty persistence work.

Current tools in this area are few and incomplete (see the XML-Server list at eGroups for links and discussions), I hope to see some major new Open Source efforts concentrating in that area in the future.

<quote>
But what tools are available to actually incorporate XML in a system that can do all things we poor webdesigners dream of?
</quote>

There are many tools available to build such a system.

To mention only Open Source projects, I could suggest using Apache JSERV with Apache Cocoon as a framework, Castor or Quick to bind XML data to Java objects and a OODBMS like ozone or a RDBMS like PostgreSQL.

These are my favorites ;)

They are very powerful and highly flexible, but the price to pay is that they are rather complex to use, that you need time to get on speed with them and that you loose focus on the core techniques behind them.

To try to get a good understanding of these core techniques, I have set up some simple examples showing how one can bind XML documents into java objects, store these objects in a OODBMS and use them in a XSLT sheet both in standand alone mode or as a servlet.

These examples are available on our web at http://downloads.dyomedea.com/java/ and a mailing list has been created to exchange and discuss such basic tips.

Hope this helps.

Eric van der Vlist

I don't think anybody's mentionioned Python yet. Without extensive knowledge of the other alternatives, all I can say is that with a little care PyApache works for me. It's much like usual CGI in use, with some tricks like a dictionary for each Apache child process.

There's a different implementation of the same idea (embedding the python interpreter) called httdapy, I think, that's a little deeper into Apache interface-wise; I seem to recall it would work with Zope, too. That project is a "web application server" done in Python, if you haven't heard of it yet.

See the rough start here

Trespass has been used successfully in at least a couple of cases, most recently America Online, Inc. v. IMS, No. 98-0011 (E.D.Va., October 29, 1998). It seems to me that there's nothing about trespass which would limit its scope to commercial email, but that the First Amendment defense is nonetheless a lot more problematic.

John Noble

"The servers can perform database updating/maintenance and may also run client software itself. The client software sends it's finished "work units" to it's designated server. The servers assign IP addresses to be indexed to each client. Say a client is indexing in Australia and hits a link located in New York. The client will tell it's server about the link (and any other non-local ones) which will send them to the server nearest each link. The New York server sends a work unit to an arbitrary client waiting for links to index. It indexes, so on, etc. The cycle continues."

TradeWars... haven't played that in years. Any Slashdot teams out there, or interested in forming one?
Could be good. Place to discuss this matter is prolly right here.
TW Mailing list
Yz

The original posting doesn't say if the server is running pop/imap, and thus if it is used as the final delivery point for those 10,000 users.

If it is, then the hashing of the mailbox path that lucky luck mentioned is worth investigating. Also worth investigating is alternative mailbox formats. If you're using mbox format, then I'm not surprised there's a problem if you have a large number of users (and/or reasonably large mailboxes).

There has been some discussion about these issues on the exim-users mailing list. I read it via egroups.

Well, I agree with the MS bashing. I view it as hypocritical. When I got a bit out of my mind, and asked why on SVLUG, along the attacks and such, I did get one (well, also Rick's first was good.. 2nd a bit brutal :^). I can't find the message, of course... :-) To sum it up in a far worse way than it was said, MS's web server never stops cranking out the FUD. The web page doesn't get tired, it just keeps going on and on. Because Microsoft is such a big entity, the Linux community (as of yet) can't just have a page do the same fashoin to counter MS's. So.. screaming and shouting and the rest of it are needed to counter. Until Microsoft stops, the Linux community can't... (of course, one can always say the Linux community started it.. but in return, MS started it by making poor software and doing various unethical business practices)

Now it's just a bunch of zealots trying to dominate the world and following some stupid dictator. I'd rather work with FreeBSD.

heh. well, I started thinking the same thing a while back. Which is basicly why I lost it a bit... BSD in general, seems calmer and more orionted towards coding and progress, while Linux/GPL seems bent on good code, but more importantly to get a real fat ego boost. The latter can over shadow the former.. I emphasized the seem because it may be judging the Linux community harshly. The BSD community doesn't generally scream and shout, while at least some of the Linux community does. That may be the wrong impression... Rick's good responce on that part...

But just remember... Rick's reply was not meant as an article, or some Slashdot post, or anything else. I was quite surprised ot see it on Slashdot... It was just a reply off the thread in SVLUG... nothing more. It wasn't an article, it wasn't meant to be anything I think that Rick expected so much responce from.

Personally, I think that BruceS picked a design movement because of the _leverage_ it produces in the physical world. Inspired Writer => Curious, interested, creative designers => different products => marketplace.

It's a bloody good plan if you ask me.

You can also gossip about Viridian on the unofficial and unmoderated Viridian-d

I just created http://www.egroups.com/group/dizz-net/ as a an email discussion list. You can subscribe by sending email to dizz-net-subscribe@egroups.com. There are a lot of interesting issues, many already mentioned here:

• quality is usually more important than quantity
• a distributed app has the potential to be much more "fresh" than other search services
• a network protocol needs to be designed carefully -- you don't want to be sending all the web haphazardly around the web every day. clients might be assigned to monitor nearby sites. there are some cool opportunities to use this system just to map the internet.
• searching is a different beast from crawling. parallel searching -- like FAST and others -- requires major resources which an open source project couldn't manage.
• full text vs topic searching: does a distributed system with clients fetch documents index every word or summarize? Topic searching is probably more appropriate for distributed searching, but full text is often more desirable.
• interesting security issues come up, like how to keep clients from poluting the database.
• etc...

-david.

I just created http://www.egroups.com/group/dizz-net/ as a an email discussion list. You can subscribe by sending email to dizz-net-subscribe@egroups.com. There are a lot of interesting issues, many already mentioned here:

• quality is usually more important than quantity
• a distributed app has the potential to be much more "fresh" than other search services
• a network protocol needs to be designed carefully -- you don't want to be sending all the web haphazardly around the web every day. clients might be assigned to monitor nearby sites. there are some cool opportunities to use this system just to map the internet.
• searching is a different beast from crawling. parallel searching -- like FAST and others -- requires major resources which an open source project couldn't manage.
• full text vs topic searching: does a distributed system with clients fetch documents index every word or summarize? Topic searching is probably more appropriate for distributed searching, but full text is often more desirable.
• interesting security issues come up, like how to keep clients from poluting the database.
• etc...

-david.

If you manage to make a name for yourself when you're relatively young, you can leverage the contacts you make and an extended social network in the years to come. The wider your circle of acquaintances and friends, the more likely it is that someone at random ten years later will be in a position to hire or to fund your next project.

thanks

Ed

Edward Vielmetti emv@umich.edu Vacuum project: http://egroups.com/list/vacuum

http://www.egroups.com/lis t/risks--uga.cc.uga.edu/133.html. Scroll down to the first article.