Slashdot Mirror

Coming from a person who has both an interest in network security (me) and graffiti (again, me), I have to point out that graffiti and network intrusion don't really overlap and here is why:

When a person writes on a wall (or a "reach"), the owner of the shop might show up and go, "oh crap" and they might very well pay someone a few bucks to cover it up or perhaps do it themselves. The artists' intention is clear -- to throw up some paint and that's it. The paint isn't going to seep into the wall and ruin everything inside, however. It isn't going to pick up the cash register and run off. It isn't going to take every customer's credit information.

When someone breaks into a system -- regardless of their motivations -- the breakee does not know what the intruder has in mind. Maybe it is benign, maybe it isn't, but there is no room to "let it slide." It must be treated as a malicious attack and thus computers must be shut down, customers/students lose services, huge costs in time and effort can and will be expended to purge the system of the problem which often involves what might very well be overkill -- like reinstalling a system or a number of systems because you Don't Know and you can't afford to leave loose ends.

Graffiti and network intrusion would be analagous if and only if graffiti caused the same sort of response. It doesn't.

And in case you're curious as to why I'd be into graf, check out these sites.

If you look at the page source, you'll see this tag:
embed src="atlminke10x.mov" width="80" height="20" type="video/quicktime" controller="true" autoplay="false"
I used wget to fetch http://oceanexplorer.noaa.gov/explorations/sound01 /background/seasounds/media/atlminke10x.mov and it played just fine in mplayer. I used the PCM writer plugin and Notlame to make an mp3 of it (please mirror!!!!!!)

That could actually happen if the website you linked said anything about you other than 'the website is shut down while being overhauled'. How hard is it to put a single mp3?

Here's some MP3's: http://fz.os.us.eu.org/songs.htm

Sorry, Fraser's been a little busy, most of the new site is ready but he probably hasn't had time to touch it... It was only supposed to display that message while he was uploading the new files, but I don't think he ever finished =)

Its wrong and it hurts musicians and people in the industry.

Hell, man, I would *LOVE* it if my band started getting traded on P2P software. We're an underexposed, underbooked multi-genre band from Delaware, and we just want an audience beyond our friends and friends' friends...
(fz.os.us.eu.org if you're curious)

Sounds like the eu.org domain, which is a free-to-register one used by European people. Go geeks!

In my case it's significantly cheaper to pay $30/month for unmetered cable internet access,

For me it's 35$/month for unlimited 115,2 kbit connection :-/. But it's real 115,2 kbit - my MRTGs.

Other option is (where I use Internet now, during academic year) 15$/month for 128kbit link, with in reality is 2mbit link shared with 80 other persons :-((.

Both of them have hardly outside-poland connectivity. Yep, I live in Poland, in Internet third world.

Good quality 512kbit link starts at 250$/month. Not whole Europe is ahead US in broadband access.

Agreed, using numbers to order startsup scripts is clumsy and awkward at best, which is why NetBSD's startup scripts use a cleaner method: rc manpage

At the Haifa(Israel) Linux Club, we meet in a classroom of the local technological institute, which we get for free (including a windows PC+Internet with projector, and ability to connect laptop). The faculty agrees to help, as several club members are TAs or employees of the faculty.

Boson has very pretty looking screenshots but has no AI yet, so you could try to write some for them. If you do, try to make it modular so people can easily write their own AI and get them to compete.

Freecraft are advertising for some much needed artists to help them, but look good otherwise.

--
If you laid all the MicroSoft users in the world end to end around the equator, 2/3 of them would drown.

On the other hand, I'm a sysadmin. When I want to edit /etc/passwd on a remote box, I run vi.

He probably put a lot of work into it, it is a pity for him that his entire scheme can be defeated with a relatively simple modification to Mozilla.

you can read more about bsp trees and other graphics tricks on this wonderful online book written my Michael Abrash, an id software programmer: http://gpbb.dk.eu.org:81/
make sure you check the forewords by john carmack

you can read more about bsp trees and other graphics tricks on this wonderful online book written my Michael Abrash, an id software programmer: http://gpbb.dk.eu.org:81/
make sure you check the forewords by john carmack

The concerns are (a) difficulty to extract meta-data from SF (already mentioned), (b) the uncertainty of whether or not the free (beer) SF service will be around for the forseeable future, even for non-commercial, free projects, and (c) the uncertainly as to whether or not VA will be around to offer the service, in any form, for the forseeable future.

a) SourceForge XML Exports

b & c) The goal of CoopX is to define a standard format based on XML to exchange information on projects hosted by facilities such as SourceForge, Serveur Libre, tuxfamily or Savannah. With this format a project maintainer could migrate his project from one hosting platform to the other or mirror it.

http://www.freax.eu.org/img/linuxbox_tux_inside.pn g

I met the Jenny's when they gave a presentation on amateur radio astronomy at LBW2000.

Also check out my posting "The Astronomy Centre" about our project to build our own 42" reflector - we're just starting on building the machine to grind the mirror

Alan (Wylie)

If you're not into the whole "electronica" scene, there's still plenty of good electronic music out there. I concentrate here on music with vocals, as that's mostly what I listen to.

Synthpop is basically synthesizer pop. For mainstream examples, think New Order and a host of other 80s pop. Less mainstream synthpop ranges from "darker" music with goth-influenced lyrics to the happy sort of stuff you're used to from the 80s.

Industrial is heavy, distorted electronic music. It may have real instruments (most often guitars), but there will generally be much electronic treatment of both the instruments and often the vocals ("treatment" usually consists of various sorts of distortion).

EBM stands for "Electronic Body Music" (dumb genre name, I know), and is sometimes called "industrial dance". It's essentially a mixture of Synthpop and Industrial. There's incessant arguments over what is and isn't EBM, but pretty much anything from industrial with a vague beat to synthpop with a bit of a harsher edge can fall into the category, depending on who you ask. But the classification isn't really that important anyway.

Some good bands (almost all of these are European, as there's very little of a "scene" in North America) include:

[I'm concentrating on EBM here, as straight industrial tends to be less electronically-oriented]

VNV Nation - Their earlier albums are industrial-leaning EBM, while their newer stuff is very bombastic uplifting synthpop. One of the best out there. Some good songs: Standing, Further, Darkangel, Epicentre, Joy, Kingdom.

Apoptygma Berzerk - Their earlier albums are goth/industrial/ebm hybrids, while their newest one is barely synthpopish trance (a common trend; I guess industrial/ebm is getting less popular these days). Some good songs: Non-Stop Violence, Starsign, Deep Red, Eclipse, Unicorn.

Kraftwerk - Okay, so they're not really synthpop, EBM, or industrial, but they heavily influenced those genres, especially with their industrial (in the original literal sense of the term) instrumentation. And if you're interested in electronic music at all, you at least have to give them a listen. Some good songs: Radioactivity, Pocket Calculator, Boing Boom Tschak, The Robots, The Model.

Beborn Beton - Synthpop, with a darker yet optimistic tone. Some good songs: Deeper Than the Usual Feeling, Hemoglobin, Winter, Another World, Phoenix.

Einstürzende Neubauten - One of the original industrial bands, with the home-made industrial implements to prove it. Their earlier stuff is rather legendary, though a bit inaccesible and very noisy. Their more recent stuff alternates between melodic ballads and noisy clanging pieces, though the instrumentation is still all things from sheet metal to large mechanically-operated flutes. Some good songs include: Was Ist Ist, Zebulon, Sabrina, Salamandrina, Newton's Gravitätlichkeit.

Front 242 - The original EBM band. It's sparse industrial with a beat. Some good songs: Headhunter, Quite Unusual, Body to Body, Im Rhythmus Bleiben, Circling Overland, Welcome to Paradise.

Deine Lakaien - Very melodic synthpop, with the occasional noisy EBM song thrown in. Some good songs: Kiss the Future, Mindmachine, Down Down Down, Return.

Funker Vogt - Aggressive industrial-oriented EBM, with distorted vocals on every single song. The choruses are very catchy and easy to dance to though. Good songs: Killing Fields, Gunman, Nuclear Winter, Funker Vogt, Black Hole, Subspace. :Wumpscut: - Industrial/EBM with a very bleak worldview. Good songs: Totmacher, Deliverance, Embryodead, Sag Es Jetzt, Concrete Rage.

L'âme Immortelle - Industrial/EBM that alternates between distorted male vocals and beautifully clean female vocals. Very good. Some good songs: Tears in the Rain, Epitaph, Gefallen, Judgement, Forgive Me.

Assemblage 23 - Probably the best American EBM/synthpop band. Somewhat similar in style to VNV Nation, but a bit darker. Some good songs: House on Fire, Disappoint, Bi-Polar, Naked, Purgatory, Awake.

Blank - Italian EBM with heavily layered industrial-influenced but catchy music. And even better, you can download 192kbps full mp3s of both their albums from their official site (add a few legal mp3s to your collection!). I'm not going to bother listing good songs, because you can just go get them all and decide for yourself.

Cat Rapes Dog - Amusing (but possibly offensive) lyrics in an EBM/industrial format. You'll probably need to find some lyrics sheets to understand them all, but they're worth it. Some good songs: Don't Wanna Work, Things I Hate, Trojan Whores, The World Is Good and Nothing Bad Ever Happens, Dead Boys Don't Say No, Capitalist Punishment, Eating People is Fun.

Wolfsheim - Very, very good darkwave/synthpop. Some good songs: Heroin She Said, ...Scars Remain..., Lovesong, Künstliche Welten, Once in a Lifetime, Youth and Greed, The Sparrows and the Nightingales.

There's of course lots more, but that's about all I have the inclination to type up at the moment, so that should serve as a good start if you're unfamiliar with the genre.

[19:35] DE/Epic: Will UT2003 make it to Linux? If so, server, client or both?

[19:35] Server for sure on Linux

[19:36] MarkRein[Epic]: any word on a client

[19:36] Irix--> Don't know yet about a client but it will probably happen eventually

[19:37] Irix--> We'd definitely like to see it and I know Dan Vogel is talking with some friends of his who would like to do it.

Anyway, you do have a good point and you've neatly summarized one requirement of a "real" database. I would just caution not to base all comparisons between two DBMSs on ACID support -- especially if one of them is MySQL. After all, there are a lot of specific things that distinguish a serious DBMS from a toy.

Not that MySQL has a lot of them. The only one that comes to mind is the SQL interpreter. A lot more is missing, and a lot of it is stuff most programmers will miss a lot more than transactional integrity.

The biggest omission, to my mind, is support for relational queries.

"BZZZT!" I hear you saying. "What do you mean MySQL doesn't support relational queries? You can do a join with select/where! And..."

Well, you can specify a join in MySQL. (Just as you can if your "database" is a simple collection of text files.) But joins aren't very useful if you can't do nontrivial things with them. And you can't, because MySQL takes a terrible performance hit if your query involves more than one index. That's why Slashdot now numbers posts sequentially. Discouraging the first-posters was merely a side effect.

"The goal of CoopX is to define a standard format based on XML to exchange information on projects hosted by facilities such as SourceForge, Serveur Libre, tuxfamily or Savannah. With this format a project maintainer could migrate his project from one hosting platform to the other or mirror it."

geez, I could do it in cmos easier than that, too. Too busy posting anti M$ stuff to get your own boxen correct? - it's one of the only problems I have with my various hosts for websites running linux - no bothering with the CORRECT time and date. My FTP client always bitches about the file I'm sending being older that the destination...no, it's you WRONG time. Get a clue, sysops!

Thanks for the comments Dave. A free, open source (GPL'd) version of Scramdisk is in final Alpha testing and a Beta version will be released soon. This version will support just Blowfish and 3DES to begin with, but will certainly support WAV steganography out of the box.

Keep an eye on www.scramdisk.eu.org for details.

Suddenly my .sig seems in fashion again!

I'm sure you'll find strlcat() is better.

Maybe you'll get lucky and see the NOSS satellites, there are 3 flying in formation. I've only seen them twice.

SuperID

I too share your questions, but for completely different reasons. I wonder why Ximian is doing this, when work may have already begun on the Linux .NET port. Consider the investment that MS made in Corel. I had thought MS made an announcement several months back about Corel and .NET.

There may be a lot to .NET, but given that it's a nascent collection of tools, and that it has no foothold in the consumer market

As a MS developer, I've been working with .NET for six months now. Even in beta 2, it blows the doors off of the current development environment. Developers call the shots. Not admins, not hardware folks, not network people. Developers will flock to this like Linux guys to beer, and that's what will drive its adoption.

KLF knew it...
They exploited the system
Read "The Manual"

Thats exactly what they are doing, infact here in the UK they even made a TV series of them doing it called "Popstars" which finishes tonight, the really sad thing is that it looks like they are going to be number 1 in the charts this week, oh the irony, and to think it wasnt that any years ago that the KLF released their guide to how to make a number 1 hit, which can be found here I guess you really can't stop people from being sheep.

I've been on QuakeNet IRC for a few years now and I can certainly say it's a proper community. Others have mentioned IRC however, so I'd like to concentrate on something tied to that community which is Barrysworld. Barrysworld is a UK based gaming service provider which has been the heart of UK online gaming for a few years now. They started off being run by a few people in their part-time and recently got proper funding and became a company.

Whilst I'd like to go on and on about them, it's late so I won't. However, I would like to draw your attention to recent happenings at Barrysworld. Basically, their second round of funding is due, and the backers have decided to pull out. Unless someone steps in before a week on Monday (Feb 5th), Barrysworld will close forever. Read the announcement and official press release.

This came as a huge shock to all of us who are part of that community. I think there was a future for Barrysworld as a company and it's a real shame that investors are too scared with all the recent .com failings to make that happen. People have worked very hard indeed to run Barrysworld and they've got to where they are by respecting their community and vice versa. When the news hit IRC noone could believe it. People are truely upset. Take a look at some of the comments on their forums.

The Register has a good article, and the BBC has one too.

It means more than the loss of a few game servers, a nice gaming dialup, and a website... Barrysworld also host the main UK servers for QuakeNet which is going to cause big problems when they go down (although I've been told there are plans to relocate those). Barryworld was the centre of the UK Quake3 scene without a doubt. No one else is in a position to take that on. The excellent leagues they ran will be no more. The community is broken. We're upset. If you've got a few million quid to spare, you know where to send it.

• I find a huge difference in speed between pixmap themes and other themes (though IMO the pixmap themes make better eye candy).
• GTK+ apparently reverses X's previously-reversed notion of "client" and "server". That is to say, if you run an X program on a remote system, in the conventional sense your desktop might be the client and the remote system the server, but X interprets the remote program as the client and your display as the server. So the client makes requests and your X server handles them on your system, with a reduction in the amount of graphics that must be pushed through the pipe. As far as I can tell, GTK+ does not behave like X in this regard. If I start a GTK+ app on a remote system, the app pops up with the theme that I have set on that remote system, not the local theme. IMO this is a design error, because
  • it is counterintuitive: I would expect to have local control over the theme, and
  • it is inefficient: performance is horrible when you try to push all that graphics down the pipe.
  IMO, the #1 priority for GTK+ (and for GNOME) should be to remodel their system on the way X behaves.

Speaking of science, how do astronomers feel about having to put up with continued flares now that Iridium has been "rescued"?

'Perl development kit' - use a text editor, I do. Zap for RISC OS has a nice 'Perl syntax colouring' mode, and EditPlus does the same for Windows. Oh, if you bothered to check Perl.com, you'll now that Perl is available for Win32, Macintosh, 'UNIX' and RISC OS. Perl is a very handy language to know, and it's quick and simple. I know the 2nd edition of 'The Camel' has came in very useful for me, but it's also good to check on other resources.
Richy C.
--

At the end of the day, most mature text editors have the same core functionality, but some make it easier to use than others. I chose NEdit because emacs is too complicated for my liking (and for anyone else who thinks you should be able to pick up an editor in half an hour), and if I wanted to change its behaviour on any small point I had to delve into the voluminous documentation. I'd previously used Zap, and Nedit is certainly the closest to this editor that I'd found. Its interface shows off all its features without the user needing any documentation, and there's a large `cookbook' type library of macros and syntax hilighting available which you can just plug in.

I'm not doubting the capability of emacs or vi, but I came to Linux from RISC OS, an OS where user interface design was very important, and so I don't believe you should have to spend any time at all learning how to use an editor. So when X isn't an option I use joe or pico-- I think you'd be surprised how many other `serious' programmers just can't be arsed to mess around with customising their editors when there's real code to hack.

You are wrong. Simply.

The choice is pretty obvious - either our civilization would develop means to move substantial number of people out of Earth - or our race will perish. There is no other possible solution.

Being careful not to destroy environment is a good attitude but it is not a solution to the problem - it just gives us more time to develop technology necessary to seriously explore space.

Saying that our race is evil because it multiplies and uses natural resources is plainly stupid - unless you are an alien. We don't know of any other intelligent race that we could compare to.

URANOS

Leknor

Does this mean massive international man-hunts for the infamous "Carlos the Hacker"?

Best encrypt with ScramDisk (Windows 95/98 version here) locally, and with GnuPG for transmission, all your CueCat code and use anonymous remailers for version releases to Freenet, or be prepared to live out your life in a shadowy realm of underground coders dwelling in the hidden spaces between the giants of the United Corporations of the World.

-- <description>
--
-- This widget is the base of the tree for displayable objects.
-- (A displayable object is one which takes up some amount
-- of screen real estate). It provides a common base and interface
-- which actual widgets must adhere to.
...
-- </description>

-- <c_version>1.2.6</c_version>

...

-- <doc_ignore>
function Convert (W : in Gtk_Widget) return System.Address;
function Convert (W : System.Address) return Gtk_Widget;
package Widget_List is new Glib.Glist.Generic_List (Gtk_Widget);
package Widget_SList is new Glib.GSlist.Generic_SList (Gtk_Widget);
-- </doc_ignore>

Now that I got that off my chest, here are a few more amusing, yet not annoying, 404 pages:

• UserFriendly
• Another one that alludes to Poe, and a page that uses it.

--

There's a ten-or-so year old book which was reprinted recently called "The Manual: How To Have A Number One The Easy Way". It describes how to have a UK number one with a few weeks of effort and very little of your own money.

It seems that if more people took this sort of approach that the "majors" would have a serious problem.

Hey, it worked for The KLF...

140.000km round-trip would be for geosynchronous satelittes (4 * 36000). But these are low orbitting satelites, who are at an altitude more like 780km. That would make your round-trip 3000km, which is quite manageable (10ms).

> GTK+ has both C and C++ to play with, libglade, bindings to lots of other languages.

This actually matters in some circles. I have seen an ad for a commercial product built using the Ada bindings for GTK+. The product sells for $4995US/pop. (No, I didn't leave out a decimal point.) Someone is taking GTK very seriously.

I know there aren't likely very many Ada fans here, but the GtkAda crew deserves kudos on general principle. In addition to "just" providing the bindings, they have produced PostScript documentation for GtkAda to the tune of 328 pages, and have extended their bindings beyond "pure" GTK+ to include the excellent GtkExtra widgets for plotting, spreadsheet-style cells, and dumping plots and text generated by your programs to PostScript files. All under the GPL, with an LGPL-like exclusion for link-only usage.

I know of at least 3 more non-trivial projects underway using GtkAda, though I might reasonably be accused of pushing vaporware if I said much more about them at this time.

--

I have both Ada and C experience. Ada thrashes C for non-trivial programs. Maybe the problem is that most open source software starts out as trivial programs that scratch a programmers itch.

C++ and Ada95 are roughly equivalent. To my mind C++ suffers from its class-centric view of everything. Look at the hassles C++ has with singletons while Ada neatly solves this with the package structure.

adapower is a good place to start for those interested.

This is essentially similar to the Grateful Dead's position. It's a specific waiver by the copyright holder that makes copying OK, not their demise.

The Name KLF was indeed often decoded to Kopyright Liberation Front, but Bill & Jimmy delighted in changing it every time they were asked. So, does their use of the name Ketamine Acid Freaks in some way justify the violation of ancient copyright? Or Kings of Low Frequency?

Now I've got pretty much the whole KLF back catalogue. Anything I could get on vinyl for less than 50 pounds I have on vinyl. secondhand. But then I really love the hunt itself. A lot of other stuff I got by other means, but with the blessing of Bill & Jimmy, as it happens. Incidentally, copyright persists for 75 years after the creator's death.

That aside, sometimes the purpose of an advertisement isn't to be seen, but just to be known about. I for one would greatly respect anyone who'd pay money to help keep Mir in space. Anyone. Microsoft, McDonald's, anyone (okay, maybe not Phillip-Morris, but anyone short of that). All of those wannabe-geeks who think it'd be a "tragedy" if those silly Iridium satellites came down need to get their priorities straight. Satellites, no matter how much money was blown on them, are a dime a dozen, but space stations are something different altogther. If I were to make a list of reasons why the human race isn't a complete waste of time, keeping Mir manned and in orbit for over 14 years now would probably be near the top of the list. Look! There! *points up*. People!

It's a pity we haven't gone further ..we SO need to go back to the moon, if just to check Tycho for magnetic anomalies :) ...but at the very least there's Mir.

*whine*I wanna be a cosmonaut! *whine* *whine*
--
"HORSE."

Iridium was far too expensive to maintain and use

This will mean no more stupid Iridium flares to get in the way of astronomical observations.

Face it, they were an eyesore, and I'm not sad to see them gone.

We should also consider resorting -- at choice moments, and only under great provocation -- to some of their other, less savory, tactics. I don't mean merely the kind of tactics that got Randal Schwartz, an innocent man, convicted of an imaginary felony. I mean what used to be euphemistically called "wet work". There are Open Source developers who have disappeared, and those who have died under extremely suspicious circumstances. Two can play at that game.

--

Here is a time-lapse image, here is another, and here is a web site with several more images.

Typically, a flare lasts about ten seconds or so.

--

For those wanting instant gratification, here's a bunch of pictures of Iridium flares:

Iridium Flare Photos - Part 1
Iridium Flare Photos - Part 2

I wouldn't be surprised to start hearing UFO sitings based on the number of pictures which occur during partial daylight and the orb (flattened-circle) shape of the flares. Of course, such cover could give good camouflage for real UFOs.

For those wanting instant gratification, here's a bunch of pictures of Iridium flares:

Iridium Flare Photos - Part 1
Iridium Flare Photos - Part 2

I wouldn't be surprised to start hearing UFO sitings based on the number of pictures which occur during partial daylight and the orb (flattened-circle) shape of the flares. Of course, such cover could give good camouflage for real UFOs.

Note this web site says "In addition, a de-orbit plan will have to be submitted to eliminate the satellite constellation."