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There is a principle, buried deep at the core of the Internet standards process, that reads:

"Be liberal in what you accept, and conservative in what you send"

This, too, is one of the basic qualities of free software. By following this simple principle, robustness and interopability are maximized. This is one of the things that make free software so wonderful. It tends to be made modular, and people just add plugins for whatever new functionality they need.

Java? sure.

Tcl? sure.

Shockwave? sure.

Flash? sure.

ActiveX? sure.

Any other language? write a simple little plugin yourself :-P

GNU/Linux can be both an alternative, as well as a superior implementation.

-- Agthorr

> Another thing to note is that if you take a screenshot in OS 9 while playing a DVD you get a big magenta rectangle where the DVD screenshot is supposed to be. Is there a technical reason for this or are the MPAA really that paranoid?

It has less to do with MPAA paranoia than the bandwidth of video being sent down the bus.
From the rec.video.dvd FAQ...

[4.4] Why can't I take a screenshot of DVD video? Why do I get a pink or
black square?

Most DVD PCs, even those with software decoders, use video overlay hardware
to insert the video directly into the VGA signal. This an efficient way to
handle the very high bandwidth of full-motion video. Some decoder cards,
such as the Creative Labs Encore Dxr series and the Sigma Designs Hollywood
series, use a pass-through cable that overlays the video into the analog
VGA signal after it comes out of the video display card. Video overlay uses
a technique called colorkey to selectively replace a specified pixel color
(often magenta or near-black) with video content. Anywhere a colorkey pixel
appears in the computer graphics video, it's replaced by video from the DVD
decoder. This process occurs "downstream" from the computer's video memory,
so if you try to take a screenshot (which grabs pixels from video RAM), all
you get is a solid square of the colorkey color.

Some decoders write to normal video memory. In this case, utilities such as
Creative Softworx, HyperSnap, and SD Capture can grab still pictures. Some
player applications can also take screenshots.

When they send you email about identd, send email to their ISP complaining about unauthorized use of port 25.

(You may want to read RFC 821 if you don't get the joke.)

A search on Google and Darwin's search page turned up nothing useful. But then I came across this Objective C FAQ.

It says that Objective C++ is a co-mingling of Objective C and C++ syntax that is accepted by Apple's compiler.

actually, DVD stands for nothing.

The difference between junk snail mail and junk email is that the snail mail costs the sender money, and UCE costs the recipient.

That means that the junk snail mailers constantly tend their lists, and make some attempt to send stuff only to people that might actually be interested. If you don't want to get junk snail mail, there is a place that you can write to to opt out, and your junk mail *really* will drop off in volume, although it may take a few months. See this site for more information.

Spammers, on the other hand, have no incentive to tend their lists, because it doesn't cost any more to mail to a million addresses than it does to mail to a few thousand. And you can't opt out, because that just verifies to the spammer that your address is 'live'.

If you don't like email postage, how about a 'voluntary' postage? It would work like this: If you want to send me an email, you have to enclose a 1-cent payment in e-cash -- unless you are on my 'free' list, in which case you don't have to pay anything. That way, I could sign up for newsletters, and put them on my 'free' list.

If you aren't on my free list, you have to pay a penny to make the initial contact, but then if I decide you are somebody I want on my 'free' list, you wouldn't have to pay again.

He was an online panelist in a discussion of the hyped up sell off of com.au to MelbourneIT that was held by the Four Corners (current affairs) program on Auntie ABC (the national broadcaster in Australia).

Check out the forum comments.

And for a glimpse at his sense of humour, try RFC 1924. He really had me going!

Just a terminology clarification: you folks are talking about RAD (rapid application development) tools -- the sort of thing where you drag GUI widgets around to make your interface.

Visual Programming means that the programming language itself is graphical (e.g. Prograph). See the com.lang.visual FAQ.

In spite of its name, Visual Basic is not a Visual Programming language. It is a RAD tool.

Given that you a) have one IP address and b) are dealing with a globe-spanning congolmerate with a history of monopoly, I'd say your odds of getting PTRs are about zero.

But for those with more flexible providers and a larger block of IP addresses, there's a nice trick that covers this:

RFC 2317 (aka BCP 20)

This allows the delegation of DNS PTR management even when the block doesn't start or end on octet boundaries.

or you want to scan the string backwards

UTF-8 can indeed be scanned backwards. You could also locate the start of the current character given a random pointer into a byte buffer. RTFM. UTF-8 can also directly encode 2 billion characters. UTF-8 is the right general solution to data interchange, and this is why it's catching on.

Here are some more informative RFCs regarding TLDs and related servers: RFC2795, RFC3092, RFC2551, RFC2100.

Here are some more informative RFCs regarding TLDs and related servers: RFC2795, RFC3092, RFC2551, RFC2100.

Here are some more informative RFCs regarding TLDs and related servers: RFC2795, RFC3092, RFC2551, RFC2100.

Actually, you just need their software to install the DSL service initially. Once it's setup, you can use any PPPoE client. I actually use a Linux box with a PPPoE daemon as my Internet gateway; it keeps the connection up and running 24/7. It was pretty simple to setup, too (at least under Debian). If you can setup Linux to use a traditional dial-up, you can set it up to use PPPoE.

In case you don't like to take my word for it, gesture recognition has existed in at least one free GPL'd C++ library for quite a few years (long before Gtk came to life, and AFAIK also before Qt, at least before it became popular). The library is called Amulet and has several other interesting features, such as a constraint solver for geometry layout. Another interesting aspect of Amulet is that it does not use class-based inheritance, but uses a prototype-based approach (in the form of a C++ library) instead.

But the history goes even further back. Basically, Amulet is just a reimplementation in C++ of an even older Common Lisp library called Garnet. Sadly Garnet seems to be relatively unmaintained these days, but it provides many of the same features in a much better suited language (yes, Common Lisp is better suited for this kind of programming, although I must admit that modern C++ is a surprisingly flexible language, given it's static nature).

Sun Microsystems' James Gosling created a displayed PostScript as the basis for NeWS around 1985. This implementation was never particularly Adobe/Apple-PostScript compatible and was only licensed from Adobe shortly before Sun abandoned it. However it was the first use of PostScript for a windowing system.

NeXT then licensed & underwrote development of PostScript into Display PostScript (no direct relation to displayed PostScript.) This was the basis for NeXT's NextStep interface and lives on today in GNUstep.

Apple has recently independantly implemented the PostScript-derived PDF from public specifications for it's Quartz rendering layer in it's recently released MacOS X.

Thus you've a single well known, well documented language that's been used for three independant windowing systems over the course of 15 years, two of them independant of the language's licensors. Add that to it's direct application to printing and it's a pretty powerful argument for further consideration as an X-Window alternative/successor.

NFS, HTTP, FTP, scp, rcp, ext2, reiserfs, XFS, JFS, BeFS, UFS, rfc1149, Network Neighbourhood, SmbFS, TCP/IP, UDP, paper, any form of analog or digital storage medium, any form of hardware or software, telephones, cellphones, speakers, sterios, radios, radio stations, television, human voice, music itself, humans themselves?

And the list goes on....

--
Garett

Got it: the other SETI FAQ.
--
"I'm not downloaded, I'm just loaded and down"

The Motif FAQ has an entry about this.

i'm thinking of an OS where there is no compiler, something more like forth going on. something where, if you wanted, you could click right down to the basics.

They were CISC, and RISC outran them.

They were caught in the AI Winter downdraft.

LispOS was harder to port than Un*x.

Mass parenthephobia.

They were The Right Thing (see section 2.1) and were killed off by the New Jerseyites.

Choose any or all of the above.

E-mail transmission cannot be guaranteed to be secure or error-free as information could be intercepted, corrupted, lost, destroyed, arrive late or incomplete, or contain viruses. The sender therefore does not accept liability for any errors or omissions in the contents of this message which arise as a result of e-mail transmission.

* If you include a signature keep it short. Rule of thumb is no longer than 4 lines. Remember that many people pay for connectivity by the minute, and the longer your message is, the more they pay.

--

About 15 years ago Apple made their own version of "real UNIX" called A/UX. It featured X as well as a Mac application layer. (Gee, sounds a lot like Mac OS X...). This had *nothing* to do with AIX and it only ran on a few 680x0-based Macs.

Fast forward to the PowerPC era. Apple made a series of nifty (for their time) Apple Network Servers running IBM's AIX (UNIX) OS.

The NSA's Linux version is from SAIC, I believe. And I'm not sure where a separate agency like NASA falls in the law.

LOL! I had completely forgotten about that. That's a riot.

Question is, of course, is if the basics of propoganda, as detailed above, are in fact relevant when talking about Microsoft.

Or do we automatically turn a blind eye to the abuse if it bears some resemblance to those tried and true historical examples?

The trap here is that if we turn a blind eye, then we permit the abuse we abhore happen again. But of course, we can over-react.

The best reaction is to determine the truth, and recognize that some people could use those techniques one way or another, especially if their intent is to destroy.

Check out the Vinny the Vampire comic strip

Unfortunately, we have to stop this discussion now. We've been Godwinned!

RW

I declare this thread over.

Anyone got a few thousand M1A1 tanks lying around?

Someone didn't read the USENET Primer before they started! :-P

(See "Be Careful What You Say About Others")

2821 is here,
2822 is here.

-- fencepost

2821 is here,
2822 is here.

-- fencepost

Since the FTP site listed had benn slashdotted, you can take a look at here and here for the RFCs.

Since the FTP site listed had benn slashdotted, you can take a look at here and here for the RFCs.

Exactly, only a few comments and the IETF is already slashdotted! So, in the best whoring fashion:

• RFC 2821
• RFC 2822

Exactly, only a few comments and the IETF is already slashdotted! So, in the best whoring fashion:

• RFC 2821
• RFC 2822

putting four direct links to that ftp on the front page is just horrible.

please view these rfcs at www.faqs.org.

complex

Let us disregard the issue of money and the issue of a specific answer's acceptability and analyze the question

In my opinion any person, given enough time to come up to speed on the subject, and given that that time, plus the time it takes to come up with and implement their solution all multiplied by the factor of time it takes to maintain themselves (eating, resting etc.) during that time, and given that they live that long, can come up with a winning solution to Mike's challenge due to a flaw, not in wording of the challenge, but in Mike's reasoning behind the challenge.

To put a lot of discussion to rest (in my mind) just read the relevent portion of the FAQ in which the challenge is found. i.e. the section entitled "9.2 The counting argument"

Here you'll find, clearly stated, the flaw in trying to find any one algorithm which will always compress data of a fixed length to less than that length. Also you'll see the decent challege by Steve Tate which paraphrased says:

"give me your best algorithm and the size of data it works on, and I'll give you one counter example of data in that size which will not compress with your algorithm."

"I'll give you data in any size you request, you give me data and a program which in total are smaller than the original size and for which the program applied to this data produce my original data."

Reading it in its full context, which aparently a lot of slashdotters didn't, it immediately gives itself up as a challenge which does not hinge on on the mathematical theorem it is presented with. i.e.

Given, there is no one algorithm which can compress all data, nor a subset of data selected by being a fixed length.
Therefore, if you give me an algorithm which claims to compress all data or all data of such a subset, I can give you at least one counter example.
It does not follow that I can give you one counter example to all compression algorithms for a given length (of your choice).

The implication of the first challenge is that the poser is confident in both the mathematical theory and either his analytical abilities when studying the given algorithm, or in his ability to test and check against the given algorithm in a sufficient period of time.

Conversely, the implication in the second challenge is that Mike in fact is the possessor of a set of super-data, of which any sub-set cannot be compressed by any algorithm.

Since we live in a time when any data sufficiently limited in size yet sufficiently large enough to offer decent gains when compressed (the challenger may pick that size) can be analyzed fully and with great speed, I think Mike has made a bit of a fool of himself.

I am not saying that Mike can't supply <<the uncompressable data from hell>&gt, but he will have to go to some lengths to get it. It will likely be selected to be large enough so Mike cannot generate it himself without an algorithm. It cannot be generated with a small input set or that set could be discovered and when coupled with the generator would defeat the challenge. It may be generated from a large set, but the result must show no patterns that can be bitstuffed (see networking) against or more simply generated and indexed for, nor may the source set contain any of the same properties. It may be possible that Mike is collecting this data from a source, i.e. digitizing random radio signals; we may all be interested in any source data which cannot by any reversable algorithm be represented/stored more succinctly particularly without any regard for retaining its meaning while compressed.

In summary, if Mike doesn't want to be giving away money, then he doesn't understand his own challenge's failure to be based on any mathematical certainty (unless I'm wrong and he has some super-data). However Patrick's solution was clearly not compression, though it was the start of a decent form of compression. Had concatenated his file-set and headed it with information as to each file's length in order, he just might have saved space enough for the decompression, particularly if he picked a suffiently large recuring patern that could be generated rather than having to be stored verbatim.

However, I might just be able to claim, that if the universe is deterministic, if the input conditions for the creation of the universe could be represented in less data than a generated block of data which can be represented in that universe, and if I were given enough resources in which to recreate the universe, I should be able to offer the input conditions of the universe and an index into it's ongoing generation which could point-to a generated block of data which exactly matches one provided. I just might be able to give you the process, its inputs, and your data before you've finished generating the data for my participation in the challenge, if in my generated universe I could significantly warp time without affecting the results.

-Daniel

That last part's an odd joke

i guess you just don't get it. some things are highly unlikely, and some things are quite literally impossible. read section 9 of the faq; maybe that'll clarify it for you.

Another idea also related to primes is to encode each number as an index into a table of primes and an offset relative to the indexed prime; this idea doesn't work either because the number of bits required to encode the index, the offset and the separation between index and offset is on average not smaller than the number of bits of the original bit stream.

However, in this case (using prime numbers and offsets), he would need to choose a file which (when seen as a nunber) is quite close to the nearest prime number, closer than the size of a decompressor which can do things like calculate the nth prime number and such. Seems unlikely to me, but I'm not inclined to do the math today...

Ron Obvious

The patent office issued a patent (US 5,533,051) on a lossless compression algorithm that reduces the size of ANY file fed to it by at least one bit.
It also explicitly claims to work on a 2 bit file.
Obviously impossible to us, but it still got issued a patent.
Details are in comp.compression FAQ.
As of just now, there are 7 issued patents which reference the bogus patent mentioned above. Scary.

You can have your web page send the ETag header. Generate a new ETag when the page changes. I mostly use it to change web page contents every x minutes, without messing with date stamps and worrying about screwed up clocks on browsers' computers. The RFC in question is available at http://www.faqs.org/ - it is the very lengthy HTTP1.1 protocol spec. From what I understand (not that the actual mechanism matters), the browser sends a request for a page along with the ETag (if page was previously cached) and the server will determine whether to send a 304 or the updated page with a new ETag. ETags are essentially disconnected from file date stamps and page content, which makes them great for use in dynamic pages.

Since so many people believe that clock speed==real speed why not make a processor with a divide by 2 (or more) in the clock input? I can see it now:

Using it's patented "Divide-by-2" architecture, AMD announced the new 2.4 Gigahertz Athalon today. When asked for comment, an INTEL spokesman responded, "Oh, yeah? The new Pentium will use our patented divide-by-1k process, and have a clock speed of almost 1 terahertz, so there!"

Of course, there's always a danger that people might start using something like specmarks and then AMD and INTEL would have to compete with processors that have real performance.

I don't know how well MSIE uses it though.

The HTTP spec has lots of ways for your browser (or any cache for that matter) to be able to hold on to content.

Two examples are the
Expires:
and
Cache-Control: max-age
headers. I'm not talking about meta tags, but actual headers in the request.

See section 14.9 of RFC2616 for more info.

Sorry to interupt you there, but I can't really draw the line between: "Resolving hostnames", BIND security problems and network integrity. I hope you realise that a nameserver and the root nameservers don't have anything to do with the lower levels (like IP and ARP). Well, of course they do for a bit, without them, a nameserver will usually not run, but they are on a higher level (TCP to be precise).
Attacking a nameserver only moves the problem away. Other nameservers have caching abilities and there are around 20 main nameservers on the internet to serve us with the toplevel domains.
You might want to read some RFC's on http://www.faqs.org.

Ugh, that's scary.

The C Shell has to be one of the worst things ever created for scripting. It was designed specifically for interactive use, and does not work well as a scripting langauge.

If you're going to write shell scripts, you should generally use the Bourne Shell. It's standardized, found on every unix machine in the world, and was designed to be a reasonable scripting language, as well as an interactive language.

Also, read csh Programming Considered Harmful for a well written and comprehensive analysis of the numerous problmes with C Shell scripting.

Now, as to scripting in general, the above statement is complete and totally untrue. You should use the best tool to get the job done, regardless of whether that's a sh script, a perl script, a python, ruby, scheme, lisp, etc, script. Or, if a script isn't appropriate, you should use a compiled language, such as C, C++, Java, assembly, etc.

The choices available are as many as the problems they're used to solve. Find the right tool for the matter at hand, and stop trying to force square pegs into round holes.

So in the future please refrain from getting snooty on people and referring to them as MCSEs without cause.

So in the future please refrain from getting snooty on people and referring to them as MCSEs without cause.

Troll elsewhere.....

RFC 1591, written by Mr. John Postel, outlined these guidelines for the allocation of second-level domains under the original 7 top-level domains. The following are cut directly from that RFC...

• COM - This domain is intended for commercial entities, that is, companies. This domain has grown very large and there is concern about the administrative load and system performance if the current growth pattern is continued. Consideration is being taken to subdivide the COM domain and only allow future commercial registrations in the subdomains
• EDU - This domain was originally intended for all educational institutions. Many Universities, colleges, schools, educational service organizations, and educational consortia have registered here. More recently a decision has been taken to limit further registrations to 4 year colleges and universities. Schools and 2-year colleges will be registered in the country domains
• NET - This domain is intended to hold only the computers of network providers, that is the NIC and NOC computers, the administrative computers, and the network node computers. The customers of the network provider would have domain names of their own (not in the NET TLD).
• ORG - This domain is intended as the miscellaneous TLD for organizations that didn't fit anywhere else. Some non-government organizations may fit here
• INT - This domain is for organizations established by international treaties, or international databases
• GOV - This domain was originally intended for any kind of government office or agency. More recently a decision was taken to register only agencies of the US Federal government in this domain. State and local agencies are registered in the country domains
• MIL - This domain is used by the US military

Any more questions?

2) "If I don't charge for it, it's not a violation."

False. Whether you charge can affect the damages awarded in court, but that's essentially the only difference. It's still a violation if you give it away -- and there can still be heavy damages if you hurt the commercial value of the property.

2) "If I don't charge for it, it's not a violation."

False. Whether you charge can affect the damages awarded in court, but that's essentially the only difference. It's still a violation if you give it away -- and there can still be heavy damages if you hurt the commercial value of the property.