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You actually need to type in http:// in the "Open" field at the top of the screen. Every other browser maker got over this fixation in '95. Why can't the W3C?

Cos the job of Amaya is not to save 0.7 seconds of typing. It is to allow more people to use open, interoperable standards instead of proprietory HTML tags. If you emit the http:// from a URL, then it is no longer a valid URL.

You could argue that "everybody knows that www.w3c.org means http://www.w3c.org". That's true. Except that some programmer will assume that therefore "www.w3c.org" is a valid URL, and he will break interoperability between his program and another program which is expecting a real URL. If Amaya's job is to be strictly correct, then it must do this for URLs too.

My business website, painstakingly html-validated (ON THEIR VALIDATOR!!) doesnt even render right.[...] it doesnt support frames AT ALL

You HAVE to enter http://

The "scheme://" part of a URL is compulsory. See RFC 1738. Maybe it's good for a normal browser to allow you to omit "http://", but if the W3C's reference browser did this it could lead people to think that "www.w3c.org" is a valid URL.

What in the hell?!?!

Amaya is there to educate web designers and web-browser designers, so it has to be picky. That probably means that it's not a good web browser to use for browsing today's largely non-conforming www.

You're actually focusing on the wrong problem. Except if you focus on the right problem, it turns turns out to be even worse than you suggest.

It isn't simply a case of addresses for trivial devices versus "real" computers. A lot of computers -- real serious computers -- can get all the the access they need without using any address space at all. RFC 1597 sets asides IP numbers that cannot be used for "public" interaction. These addresses are valid only for intranet traffic.

The machine I'm using right now is a case in point. My employers do not want anybody not on our campus network accessing this computer. So I don't need an IP number that's valid in the Internet at large. Instead, I have a Class A address in Network 10. Addresses in 10.*.*.* can be reused endlessly, so long as they're not re-used on the same network.

I used to work for a major computing company that was extremely paranoid about off-campus access to their systems. But for some reason (probably institutional inertia) they assign IP numbers out of their permanent allocation. So that's thousands of IP numbers used unnecessarily. Plus they have a permanent shortage of IP numbers for internal use. Plus, every once in a while, a hacker finds his way through the firewall...

Perhaps I speak in ignorance, but it seems to me that nobody needs a public IP address, permanent or transient, unless they have a server or peer app. (Age of Empires anyone?) Thus 90% of all users -- especially the users of "real" computers -- are just wasting address space. And making themselves vulnerable to boot.

On the other hand, it makes perfect sense to assign an IP address to a gun. You never know who needs to kill who....

__________

He's right. Learning some things will definitely help the way you think about things. The incredibly strong typing of something like pascal will definitely kick your *ss if you've been doing nothing but C for a while, and I think that's actually a Good Thing. Learning Eiffel if you already know smalltalk is a very different experience.

Even something like Algol will probably change your views and get you closer to the hardware in many respects (not that you can get Algol to run on most machines anymore....;-)

What about Ada? Programming by Contract really will teach you something serious about how you actually interact with the rest of your application, and while you'll curse it ("I KNOW what I'm trying to do and it's correct, dammit!") you'll be happier for learning it. Older, but happier.

And as long as the languages keep coming, there'll pretty much never be a chance to really run out.

My list would include:

• C
• C++
• Pascal& lt;/a>
• Lisp (anything but eLisp)
• Python
• Perl
• Smalltalk
• ML
• prolog&l t;/a>
• Eiffel
• Ada
• a RISC Assembler
• Cobol (those who do not learn from history are doomed to repeat it)
• Java
• BASIC (the non-Visual kind).

attr(1) - manipulate Extended Attributes on filesystem objects

rfc2624 - NFS Version 4 Design Considerations

I HIGHLY recommend checking out the FAQ for the usenet group: comp.software.testing . It can be found at: http://www.faqs.org/faqs/soft war e-eng/testing-faq/ or at: http://www.cigital.com/c.s.t.faq.html

There's MUCH MORE to automated testing that just recording and playing back keyboard/mouse input.

Here are some of the issues that need to be dealt with:

1. Timing. (It's hard to click a button, if it ain't there, yet.) Different versions of the Application Under Test (AUT) may run at different speeds (better/worse performance) on the same system, or you may try to run the same automated test on different (faster/slower) platforms. In either case, there's a need to wait until *something* has happened, and only then feed in the next input.
2. Location. Minor modifications of the AUT may cause fields and buttons to be relocated. Hard-coded locations in your test scripts are a PAIN to maintain!
3. Verification. How do you know if it did what you wanted it to?
   • Screen capture? Again, minor screen layout changes force major maintenance headaches.
   • Date/Time and other varying output. If your Application puts up a date or time on the window, you're gonna need a way to mask that out between prior and current runs so it doesn't give you a false negative.
4. Error Handling. The whole idea is to deal with an application that might not run the same every time. That means needed to determine all possible outcomes, and to be able to deal with them, too. (It's all too easy to get into deadlocks where the application is expecting input, and the test program is waiting for some other screen to display before it sends any keystrokes to it.)

I could go on and on, but this hopefully gives a hint to the complexity and difficulty in automated testing. (And, yes, I've stumbled upon ALL of these myself at one time or another.)

AFAICS, the Photorius cookies are for building an encryption link. To do all the encryption processing neccessary for every SYN is itself vulnerable to a DoS attack. I would imagine that the SYN flooding protection simply chalked up in a fixed-size array that it recieved a SYN and what sequence number it sent out, and looked in that array when the ACK returns for validity. There's no need to use encryption for this.

At least they didn't try to extend the patent by tricking the patent office. For instance, "c = me mod n" is the formula for RSA. So they patented that formula back in 1983, then in 1985 they could have patented the formula "me = c mod n". Mathematically the same formula of course, but that's ok. The patent office will let you patent a formula or algorithm that has already been patented, as long as patent is worded differently enough that the monkey who rubber-stamps patents doesn't notice. The comp.compression FAQ has a section on patents, which has several patents for identical compression algorithms that the patent office rubber-stamp monkey didn't notice.

They could just make up a new patent every year. Like "Using RSA to exchange DES keys", then "Using RSA to exchange IDEA keys", "Using RSA to exchange keys over computers connected by telecommunication lines", "Using RSA to exchange keys over the internet", "Using RSA to exchange keys between web browsers". They could probably keep this up for as long as they wanted.

In case you hadn't noticed, Windows, by default, in no way supports the LPD protocol, no standard printer drivers that I've ever seen support that kind of functionality, and HP themselves usually distributes third party NT-based server software with their network printers to allow SMB clients to connect to that server which acts as sort of proxy to the network printer itself. All this product does is replace that server software with a box you can easily mount in a rack, give a couple of IP addresses to, and just go instead of having to mess around with complicated software installations and risk crashing that unstable NT box you've decided to use as the SMB (not LPD -- note the difference) print server.

If anything, HP deserves credit (yay HP!) for what they've done with this product, not derided. (And their marketing department looks to be pretty on the ball here, so don't give them crap either.) They're using Linux to provide functionality easily which would otherwise be very difficult if the customer relied strictly on Windows. Your Unix box can still print just fine with this product around because it CAN use the LPD protocol. Your cubicle-mate, however, can't because, if anything, his stupid Windows box probably thinks LPD is a psychoactive drug or something and so, with the HP Jet Direct 4000 Printing Appliance, he now gets the same functionality out of the network printer that you do, and the boss doesn't have to spend $3k on yet another server that has to be configured with a whole OS and all that goes along with that. Or, alternatively, he doesn't have to dance with Samba on a Unix server he may already have set up, taking away resources from the already heavy Oracle database running on it. Or, alternatively to that, he doesn't have to rely on the Jet Admin software being installed on an NT workstation that might possibly crash often or get misconfigured or be prone to any of an infinity of pilot errors. Sounds like a good deal to me.

No, this isn't ironic, CmdrTaco. Y'all just don't do your research and are quick to jump a reactionary gun at anything that doesn't just gush about Linux and is designed to support Windows exclusively. In this case, it's only Windows that needs this support because your Linux box can already do what Windows can't.

Geez.

jer

DISCLAIMER: Some info on this page assumes you are from the Omaha, NE area. I apologize.......

I just got into arcade collecting/building myself, so I'll try to lend a few pointers (though most of this info will be totally region-centric)

As for what kind of cabinet you want, I recommend sticking to Jamma based cabinets (most are, but the really old ones aren't). Basically, the Jamma harness provides a uniform interface to the monitor/buttons/etc, so swapping out PCB's are pretty easy. I like old Capcom games (Strider, SF 2, Final Fight), and you can find tons of them on Ebay or perhaps purchase them from a place like Central Distributing. For the really really old ones that used dedicated hardware, there are a few sites on the net that show you how to make a Jamma harness yourself, but you'd be better off buying the whole thing in a lot of cases (if you are interested in coverting a non-jamma to jamma, check out This link.

You will also want to check the condition of the monitor. It's pretty much a given that older games will have some burn in. You'll have to watch out for that. The good news is, if you have to settle for a monitor with burn in, Happ Controls has a good selection of monitors to choose from, if you need to replace it.

Personally, I like to pick up my cabinets from local outlets (like that place Central Distributing). Usually, they are more than happy to let you mess around with it and make sure all the controls work and the monitor looks sharp and the sound works, etc. In other words, you know what you are buying. :)

Once you find yourself a decent cabinet, you can start buying just the PCB's and swap them in an out (nice thing about the Jamma harness, it makes this painless, for the most part). Like I said earlier though, older games ( Pac-Man, Gyruss era) might require a bit more work.

While I realize you don't like emulation, there is a neat cabinet from Hanaho called the ArcadePC. It gives you more of the arcade "feel", while running the games from a PC under MAME or something. Sometimes, this may be your only choice :(

Here is a list of some of my favorite sites (all can be found by searching Google with the keyword 'jamma' or 'jamma pcb' or something like that

http://www.faqs.org/faqs/games/vide oarcade/faq/

http://nexus.nanospace.com/~spo onman/neogeo/faq.htm

http://www.ntrnet.net/~braze/ arcade/tech/repair.shtml

http:/ /directory.google.com/alpha/Top/Games/Coin-Op/Arca de_Games/Collectors/ (TONS of links)

http://members.xoom.com/organian/

If you need more info or anything, feel free to email me (remove the NOSPAM) and discuss!

As has been previously mentioned the company MainSoft has a product called MainWin which is simply an API wrapper library similar to WINe.

Thus it stands to reason that instead of trying to port the existing Internet Explorer and Windows Media Player code, they'll add functionaliy to their wrapper API's until MSIE and Media Player compile with no dependency problems.

Of course, references to C:\ drives and forward vs. backslashes will need to be fixed. From the looks of it this is no different from a *nix version of the Cygwin Project.
The Queue Principle

That last link should've been to here instead of that stupid advertising page. Chances of posting a mistake is directly proportional to how critical your post is of something.

Well, there was the CD32 console-type machine.


Later...

The main goal of this paper is to lay the groundwork for the development of a vector graphics format to be used as a basis for an on-line graphical communication protocol. We call such a format an "interactive graphical communication format," or IGCF. In this section we describe some operational requirements and usable characteristics for an IGCF.

Like anarcho capitalism is going to improve the situation.

Follow this link to get an opposing viewpoint of libertarianism.

non libertatrian faq

The stupid shitheads could have tried reading RFC 821 and used standard techniques of mail handling that have been around since fucking 1982.

Then there would be no Melissa, no Love Bug and none of this other crap based on pathetic software that can't even handle a Date field. The pitiful MSNBC article was worthless, and apparently this is some kind of buffer overrun error. Can't they even avoid that shit, or have it actually CRASH when it hits an error it can't handle? This is one occasion where a BSOD would be preferable to what this idiotic software allows.

Yeah, I know, standard boilerplate Microshaft sucks rant.

Fact: All posts to Usenet are by default copyrighted material and not in the public domain unless explicitly stated. Read this for more info. The Copyright FAQ states that many believe it is implied, though, that by posting to Usenet you agree to let your material be redistributed through that medium. Copyright FAQ is here.

Fact: Most posts to Usenet are made independent of Deja, so whether or not their browsing service is free or their terms of service or whatever conditions they make up is irrelevant when determining if they have violated your intellectual property rights.

Opinion: I don't think allowing your copyrighted material to be reproduced immediately grants others a license use it to promote their commercial interests. I think this whole debate on the legality of Deja's move to use words from your post is a question of fair use.

Opinion/Analogy: Copyrighted music is played on the radio. It is free to whoever tunes in. However, it is illegal for me to record that music off of the radio and then use it in a television commercial without permission/paying royalties to the original copyright owner. I may not be altering the original content of the copyrighted work (the song). I may put a BIG ORANGE TRIANGLE on the screen with my company's logo in it, but does that make it legal? Deja made a business decision to use the content of your copyrighted work to endorse products without your permission. I don't see how this issue is much different.

Final opinion: This forum needs more lawyers and less speculation (including that of my own).

It is possible to take damn near any existing electrical motor, add a few parts, and turn it into a generator that runs itself without any fuel. You just give it a spin and it runs forever. But guess what happens when someone tries to patent such a device? The patent office replies, "Oh. That, by definition, is a perpetual motion machine. We can't give patents on those. Sorry." They don't even bother testing the patent's claims, or try building one themselves, or even let the guy demonstrate it... they just refuse to patent it and move on

It is not the patent office's job to test if an invention works only if it is original. The exception is that they will not approve perpetual motion machines because they don't want thousands of crackpots saying ``look the patent office approved my design so it must work''.

Do not simply see the phrase "perpetual motion machine" in this post and scoff immediately. Science and physics doesn't even know what magnetism or gravity is,

And I suppose you do?

yet it claims to be able to state with absolute certainty that perpetual motions machines are impossible?? The sheer arrogance is staggering. "Yes, well, we realize we only understand about 0.01% of how the universe works, but we know you can't have perpetual motion. It's just preposterous." Give me a break.

Few scientists say that perpetual motion machine are absolutely impossible. What they do say is that there has never be a repeatable experiment that demonstrated it. The law of conservation of energy has been tested so many times (and found to always hold true) that machines that claim to violate it should be treated with a healthy dose of scepticism.

• "The world is round," Columbus said. "Preposterous," the "scientists" of the 15th century said. "You'll fall off the edge."
• "Diseases are caused by microscopic creatures that I call 'germs' which get inside us and do harm to our cells," said Louis Pasteur. "Preposterous," the "scientists" said.
• "The earth actually revolves around the sun, and not the other way around," said Galileo. "Preposterous," the Catholic Church's "scientists" said. "Shut up or we'll torture and kill you."
• "Travelling faster than 60 MPH would be fatal."

`The usual rejoinder to someone who says "They laughed at Columbus, they laughed at Galileo" is to say "But they also laughed at Bozo the Clown".' (From Carl Sagan, "Broca's Brain", Coronet 1980, p79).

How far would we have gotten if Columbus had just believed what the scientists told him without question instead of being brave and intelligent enough to go find out on his own?

I can't believe that there are still people who think that Columbus was right and scientists of his time were wrong.

It was well known at the time that the earth was round (and the size was pretty well known as well). Columbus, however, thought that the world was much smaller than the scientists of the time and that it would be possible to sail west to the Indies. He was wrong, it was only luck that America happened to be in the way.

I was going to deal with your arguments for the existance of free energy machines. But then I realised that you didn't present any.

The sci.sceptic FAQ section on perpetual motion machines is well worth reading (as is the whole thing actually). This is from section 8 (on free energy machines):

8.6: The oil companies are conspiring to suppress my invention

This is a conspiracy theory. See the entry on these in section 0. In most of the US the utility companies are *required by law* to buy your excess electricity if you produce your own. If you've got an energy machine, build it in your basement, phase match it to the line, and enjoy.

Is this site connected to the net? If so, I strongly suggest using an RFC1918 address range and use NAT or PAT to keep things happy. IPChains or TCP Wrappers would be nice. A good generic /etc/hosts.deny and /etc/hosts.allow file would be:

-------------- /etc/hosts.deny -----------------
ALL: ALL : spawn (echo "%d from %a (%n) on `/bin/date` - output from \
reverse finger is `/usr/sbin/safe_finger -l @%h`." | /bin/mail -s \
"Security Alert - `uname -n`/%d" USER@domain,USERID@another.domain ) &
------------------------------------------------

------------ /etc/hosts.allow ------------------
ALL : ( your_ip_address_range .domain.blah x.y.z.q )
------------------------------------------------

Change "USERID@domain, USERID@another.domain" to addresses of your security/admin people
Solaris users can use the same by removing the word "spawn".

Font licensing is a very contentious issue. While it is true that there is a wealth of freely available fonts, the chances are that the fonts are ``ripoffs'' in some sense, unless they come with a license indicating otherwise. The issue is made more confusing by intellectual property laws regarding typefaces. Basically, in the USA, font files are protected by copyright, but font renderings are not. In other words, it's illegal to redistribute fonts, but it's perfectly legal to ``reverse-engineer'' them by printing them out on graph paper and designing the curves to match the printout. Reverse engineered fonts are typically cheap and freely available, but of poor quality. These fonts, as well as pirated fonts are often distributed on very cheap CDs containing huge amounts of fonts. So it's not always easy to tell if a font is reverse engineered, or simply pirated. This situation creates an enormous headache for anyone hoping to package free fonts for Linux.

Perhaps one of the most offensive things about the nature of font piracy is that it artificially debases the value of the work that type designers do. Pirated fonts invariably are bundled en masse onto these one zillion font CDs, with no due credit given to the original designers. In contrast, what is commendable about several legitimate font foundries is that they credit their designers.

Make a real file sharing network.

Seriously, napster is... of marginal usability? I'll be frank. Napster's protocol is total crap. Its based around single unconnected servers. Now, not only is this not totally decentralized (==bad) but since the napservers arent connected, you dont have access to every file (Yes, there are multiple napservers. (Choose your server with napigator)).

What we really need is a protocol that uses/abuses MD5 (RFC or a less technical overview), so you _know_ your getting the same file. Its not too much to ask to send a couple more bytes just once to know your getting the right song. Way more favorable option than having to backup your file before resuming a download, listening to make sure its the exact same file, et al. Way better

In terms of other options, I'd have to recommend a couple of different things: first off, check out Gnutella which is far superior to napster. Open protocol, truly distributed network. Everything. Second off, I'm gonna throw in a plug for Pie in the Sky, what I'm doing for BitWrench, the company I'm working for. Pie in the Sky (PitS) is the mother of all mp3 programs. When it does come out (end of summer time frame), it will support searching across napster, gnutella, freenet and scour. It will also boast possibly the most intelligent Gnutella router seen, extended protocols for enhanced communication with other PitS servnets and more. Check it.

Alright, enough ranting. Matt

Motif is a clone of Windows. Windows was a clone of the Mac. According to this Windows timeline, Windows 1.0 was released on November 20, 1985 and even Windows 3.0 was released on May 22, 1990. According to the Motif FAQ, Motif 1.1.3 was released in August 1991. How then could Windows be a copy of Motif?

The "Unix Haters Handbook" claims that a "stated design goal" of Motic was to copy Windows. Look at the "Motif Self-Abuse Kit" section of "The X-Windows Disaster".

A stated design goal of Motif was to give the X Window System the window management capabilities of HP's circa-1988 window manager and the visual elegance of Microsoft Windows. We kid you not. Recipe for disaster: start with the Microsoft Windows metaphor, which was designed and hand coded in assembler. Build something on top of three or four layers of X to look like Windows. Call it "Motif."

Crap. A Blade Runner discussion on /. and I miss it. Oh well, I'm a latecomer, sue me.

The Blade Runner FAQ, initially authored previous to your '96 paper, poses the same argument, with many of the same supporting details. I recognized so much of it by reading your post that I wonder if you hadn't just used this FAQ as "inspiration" for your own paper.

Additionally, it's never been a secret that Ridley Scott and Harrison Ford themselves (as detailed in the FAQ) believed Deckard to be a Replicant. For true fans, there is no problem with believing either way, just as you state that you felt when watching the film yourself.

< tofuhead >

I can't help but mention that I did call myself "a guy". By the way, this "Nazi/Jew" contraction is disgusting. Finally, I refuse to manually process Fishbabble (TM) in order to turn it to something remotely human-readable. There's an RFC that deals in exatly these things.

From what I read in the Bladerunner faq Harrison Ford says:

"Blade Runner was not one of my favorite films. I tangled with Ridley. The biggest problem was that at the end, he wanted the audience to find out that Deckard was a replicant. I fought that because I felt the audience needed somebody to cheer for."

It sounds to me like all of the holywood types (basically everyone involved in the film but Ridley Scott) didn't want Deckard to be a replicant so that the movie woule be more palatable to Hollywood audiences (and profitable). Scott wanted him to be a replicant cause that is what makes it a truly good story. It's the old battle of art vs. commerce. unfortunately, in the original version, commerce won out, but art finally got its say in the director's cut!

This has already been covered in the Blade Runner FAQ, which basically already quoted Ridley Scott as saying Deckard was a replicant.

I personally think most of the so-called "evidence" that Deckard was a replicant consists of holes in the plot, of which there are very many in the film.

Of course, people actually downloading the whole human genome probable wouldn't worry about this, but couldn't they use a better compression format than .zip? I bet using bzip2 or rar would shave a couple of hundred MBs off of that 753MB file. Also, the differences in compression techniques would be interesting to see on a large group of files mainly consisting of G, A, C, and T. -- demiurge You find a file that appears important and obliterate it from memory!!! Score one for the downtrodden hacker!

• G -- 00
• A -- 01
• T -- 10
• C -- 11

This would only work for the .fa files, but .fa files can contain "N"s also. If you just want to browse the Genome, look through the pieces directory. .

Of course, people actually downloading the whole human genome probable wouldn't worry about this, but couldn't they use a better compression format than .zip? I bet using bzip2 or rar would shave a couple of hundred MBs off of that 753MB file. Also, the differences in compression techniques would be interesting to see on a large group of files mainly consisting of G, A, C, and T. -- demiurge You find a file that appears important and obliterate it from memory!!! Score one for the downtrodden hacker!

• G -- 00
• A -- 01
• T -- 10
• C -- 11

This would only work for the .fa files, but .fa files can contain "N"s also. If you just want to browse the Genome, look through the pieces directory. .

Of course, people actually downloading the whole human genome probable wouldn't worry about this, but couldn't they use a better compression format than .zip? I bet using bzip2 or rar would shave a couple of hundred MBs off of that 753MB file. Also, the differences in compression techniques would be interesting to see on a large group of files mainly consisting of G, A, C, and T. -- demiurge You find a file that appears important and obliterate it from memory!!! Score one for the downtrodden hacker!

• G -- 00
• A -- 01
• T -- 10
• C -- 11

This would only work for the .fa files, but .fa files can contain "N"s also. If you just want to browse the Genome, look through the pieces directory. .

I seem to remember there is a GCC module for MPW,
www.funet.fi/pub/mac/programming/ (read 00Index). this thing (programming FAQ for Mac) might answer some questions too. If you want a MacOS (non-MacOS X), it is always possible to get. - Try search on Google (or any other search engine), and you will find it quickly)

But especially on the field of data compression, there /are/ tons of people coming up with record-breaking, never-before-seen compression rates. Of course they can't say anything specific because they're trying to get a patent on it... And money. Some of the claims for lossless compression ('infinite compression schemes') even are proven to be false (counting argument) and get on the nerves of comp.compression regulars. The FAQ for that newsgroup sums up some of the cases (see items [9] and [10]).

Compression CANNOT guarantee anything better than 1:1 ratio - it is ENTIRELY dependent on the data.

- The US patent office no longer grants patents on perpetual motion machines,
but has recently granted a patent on a mathematically impossible process
(compression of truly random data): 5,533,051 "Method for Data Compression".
See item 9.5 of this FAQ for details.

As can be seen from the above list, some of the most popular compression
programs (compress, pkzip, zoo, lha, arj) are now covered by patents.
(This says nothing about the validity of these patents.)

Here are some references on data compression patents. Some of them are
taken from the list ftp://prep.ai.mit.edu/pub/lpf/patent-list.

....
9.2 The counting argument

[This section should probably be called "The counting theorem" because some
people think that "argument" implies that it is only an hypothesis, not a
proven mathematical fact. The "counting argument" is actually the proof of the
theorem.]

The WEB compressor (see details in section 9.3 below) was claimed to compress
without loss *all* files of greater than 64KB in size to about 1/16th their
original length. A very simple counting argument shows that this is impossible,
regardless of the compression method. It is even impossible to guarantee
lossless compression of all files by at least one bit. (Many other proofs have
been posted on comp.compression, please do not post yet another one.)

Theorem:
No program can compress without loss *all* files of size >= N bits, for
any given integer N >= 0.

Proof:
Assume that the program can compress without loss all files of size >= N
bits. Compress with this program all the 2^N files which have exactly N
bits. All compressed files have at most N-1 bits, so there are at most
(2^N)-1 different compressed files [2^(N-1) files of size N-1, 2^(N-2) of
size N-2, and so on, down to 1 file of size 0]. So at least two different
input files must compress to the same output file. Hence the compression
program cannot be lossless.

For data compression in memory to succeed, you MUST have an option to cache the "extra" memory to a swapfile incase the prediction logic fails and you run out of physical ram. If you do not, you will tank your system, bigtime.

Sorry, but I'm very leery of any "memory compression" - it requires OS support to function. Period. You aren't going to just plug in a miracle DIMM and make it work. I hope IBM is opening the spec (it looks like they are) and that OS development people quickly embrace this, or their hardware will take a nosedive in the market.

RFC 2795 obligatory IMPS (The Infinite Monkey Protocol Suite)

Apart from finding "Douglas Adams" in the "If you like Pratchett you might like these guys" section of the FAQ, I found no reference to Pratchett's opinion of being compared to Douglas Adams. I looked at the FAQ here and here.

From SpaceFAQ, controversial questions: HOW LONG CAN A HUMAN LIVE UNPROTECTED IN SPACE If you *don't* try to hold your breath, exposure to space for half a minute or so is unlikely to produce permanent injury. Holding your breath is likely to damage your lungs, something scuba divers have to watch out for when ascending, and you'll have eardrum trouble if your Eustachian tubes are badly plugged up, but theory predicts -- and animal experiments confirm -- that otherwise, exposure to vacuum causes no immediate injury. You do not explode. Your blood does not boil. You do not freeze. You do not instantly lose consciousness. Various minor problems (sunburn, possibly "the bends", certainly some [mild, reversible, painless] swelling of skin and underlying tissue) start after ten seconds or so. At some point you lose consciousness from lack of oxygen. Injuries accumulate. After perhaps one or two minutes, you're dying. The limits are not really known.

I've had some really great experiences in lines! Like the line for the first showing of the Phantom Menace, which was a better experience than the movie itself. Or the times I've camped out waiting for concert tickets to go on sale. Even when I recently had to go in to contest some parking tickets ("Hey! More of my car was parked out of the No Parking Zone than in it!") I ended up sitting in a waiting room with a lot of other really interesting people who I'd never have met otherwise, and really got a sense of my community that I didn't have before.

Lines aren't necessarily bad. I would say a future of NO lines would be a lot worse. Like we don't sit at home and play Quake enough as it is!

Also: I think it's a rather hackeyed line to say that anyone who casts a critical eye on where a given technology takes us is a "neo-Luddite". It's lazy, and it isn't even true. From here on in, I'm establishing Crash's Corollary : When someone participating in a tech discussion refers to the opposing side as Luddites (or any variation thereof) without examining the issues raised by them, the argument is ended in favor of the opposing side.

The JPEG algorithm is capable of encoding images that use any type of color space. Jpeg itself encodes each component in a color model separately, and it is completely independent of any color-space model, such as RGB, HSI, or CMY.

However, as you say CMYK isn't very useful for web graphics.

If you are concerned primarily with archiving your sound, there's a program I've seen being used by people trading bootlegged CD's called Shorten. It's a non-lossy compression that displays around a 2:1 ratio (there's also a lossy version but I don't know much about it, the ratio is less than MP3 though). There's a company called SoftSound that markets a commerical version for Windows/DOS but I believe there's other version.

I also came across the comp.speech FAQ which has a specific section regarding audio compression standards.

1. When a standard says MUST, then the implementation might
2. When a standard says SHOULD, then the implementation will not
3. When a standard RECCOMENDS, then the implementer will laugh scornfully
4. When there are two possible interpertations of a standard there will be 4 possible implementations, correct for readings 1 and 2, a mad attempt to fit both contraditory meanings and the the old reliable invention of something completely incompatible with both.

Your average programmer is a completely incompetent ego riden madman. A standard is an affront to his cherised belief that he is the best programmer on the planet. How dare someone restrict his options to make a complete mess. So they trample all over the standards, and each program that is broken but not broken enough to fail immediately and catastrophically adds to the standards pollution. Limiting the solution space in which it is possible to create an app that interoperates correctly with everything else.

A proper standard shouldn't be released unless it has a few things which most lack,

1. A rationale, Why are decisions made, egoboy is more likely to follow a standard if its reasoning is made clear and the thinking behind various decisions are explicit.
2. A big set of tests which the app must pass before it can conform to the standard. Not that that mattered much in the case of rfc822 btw most mail programs wouldn't know what to do with the complex commenting and line folding behaviour.
3. A section threatening intense physical suffering for anyone caught trying to subvert it. "By reading this document you hereby agree to a punishment no less than being nailed to a tree for creating any software which almost but not quite matches the standard herein"
4. And a sample implementation released.

C.

I have this mental image of little bits travelling to the outer reaches of India, saying "I think I can, I think I can, I think I can..."

There are probably places in India where they don't even have railroad tracks. I recommend they implement RFC-1149 technology there. [That's A Standard for the Transmission of IP Datagrams on Avian Carriers.]

The main problem with fractal compression is not patent problems.

It's that it doesn't work.

That is to say, it doesn;t work usefully.

To explain: in order to get efficent compression, you need to use something called an IFS (Iterated Function System). These can be used to represent an image, but only if the IFS used is sufficently "similar" to the target image. And there in lies the problem. IFS's are good for generating natural looking images, but generating an IFS from an image is an inverse process. And has not been solved.

State of the are is to use the graduate student theorm to produce an IFS for your image, but this is expensive:

Take a gradutate student, give him a graphics workstation, lock him in a room, and don't let him out until he's come up with an IFS for your image.

This take 100 hours, of input from a grad student, in order to come up with an IFS. Not exactly mass market tech.

There was discovered a way (by one of said gradstudents) to automatically come up with an IFS that is "quite similar" to the image, called Partitioned Integreadted Function Systems (PIFS). Unfortunatle, they're not proper IFS, and the 10 000:1 compression went out of the window, and dropped to 50:1 or so. At 50:1 compression, with patent issues, and a slow algorithm, it just wasn't worth it.

Aside: The technology is patented under US patent 4,941,193. I'd link on IBM, but it's down. Partitioned IFS are US patent 5,065,447. More data in comp.compression FAQ here.

you can stick data in HTML files using the <a href=data:[data]> to embed data in HTML files.

To bad it dosn't work, though :(

Setting up up a network connection to the island should be no problem as long as the volcano stays active. How? Adapt RFC 1149 - A Standard for the Transmission of IP Datagrams on Avian Carriers to use flying rocks instead!

Another thought is the fact that with linux clusters becoming more common it doesn't take as long to break the encryption. With a very powerfull cluster the encryption becomes a minor anoyance, to the average hacker its a bit harder.

(Warning: I'm not a cryptography wonk.)

It's all a matter of degree. The reason public key cryptography is an attractive prospect is because the difficulty involved in cracking the scheme grows exponentially as key sizes increase. At that rate of increase, you can't just add more/bigger computers into the mix and expect to get results. Of course, no one is actually sure of exactly how hard it is to perform the computations necessary to crack big-key public key algorithims, but they all seem to agree that it's pretty damn hard. Check the sci.crypt FAQ, part 6.

The reason that the government is concerned is because, for the first time, they're really worried that they can't crack these codes. Or, at least, not quickly enough to be able to do anything with them.

I wish it was true, but it isn't. See the Social Security Number FAQ. Private organizations are free to request your SSN and may decline to provide service if you refuse to give it to them. The legal restrictions (Privacy Act) on gathering SSNs only apply to government agencies.

This topic comes up in virtually all intelligent virus discussions. In summary, it is not a good idea to use viral properties, even for something useful. I refer you to item F7 in the comp.virus FAQ (circa 1995):

A very hotly debated topic that has flared-up dramatically several times in Virus-L/comp.virus. The answer to this is not simple and largely hinges on your definition or interpretation of the term computer virus.

By definition (see B1), viruses do not have to do something "bad" (although many people argue that the uninvited "resource wasting" that is almost inherent in viral activity is necessarily bad). From this point (and based on his somewhat esoteric definition of the term computer virus) Fred Cohen has argued that "good" or "useful" computer viruses are a serious possibility. In fact, Dr. Cohen offered a reward of $1000 for the first clearly "useful" virus--despite several potential claimants, however, he hasn't paid up.

Although there has never been a position that was widely agreed upon as a result of any of these discussions, many contributors to this forum believe that there are serious problems with the idea of implementing useful computing functionality through self-replicating programs. Vesselin Bontchev's paper originally delivered at the 1994 EICAR conference, titled "Are `Good' Computer Viruses Still a Bad Idea?", is available by anonymous FTP from ftp.informatik.uni-hamburg.de (IP = 134.100.4.42), as pub/virus/texts/viruses/goodvir.zip. *Anyone* wishing to raise this discussion in Virus-L/comp.virus again should read and carefully consider this paper before posting. It contains many strong arguments against the idea of "good computer viruses", and some prescriptions of how good viruses would have to be implemented and distributed to deserve the label "good". To date no strong arguments countering the points in this paper or otherwise arguing in favor of the concept of good viruses have been posted to the group.

The summary of points made in this paper are:

1. Lack of Control
   Even features such as defined lifetimes, central verification, etc. can't control self-replicating code perfectly. It is very easy for viruses to "get away". A great number of the viruses in the wild started out as merely research projects and were never intended to be released.
2. Recognition Difficulty
   Allowing one program which has viral properties through one's defenses makes it easy for other programs to exploit the same hole. It's hard to tell when a "good" virus is doing its work versus a "bad" virus.
3. Resource Wasting
   The process of infection will use up system resources-- what happens when the program hits a host that has few resources to spare?
4. Bug Containment
   What happens if you discover a bug in the viral code? How do you update all the installed copies?
5. Compatibility Problems
   The software could break certain systems while it works fine on others. This could make for difficult-to-track problems.
6. Effectiveness
   There are always increased risks with viral code, and they can't do anything that nonviral code couldn't do with lower risks.

Vesselin even goes so far as to describe some mechanisms to help mitigate the above problems, but the crux of the story is that it's still simpler and safer to rely on non-replicating code.

There are some examples of failed attempts at "good" viruses in Vesselin's brief. They include The "Anti-Virus" Virus, The "File Compressor" Virus, The "Disk Encryptor" Virus, and The "Maintenance" Virus. Some of these same ideas have been brought up in this very Slashdot discussion.

Amazing what history can teach. Damn, I'm starting to feel old...

"As a Usenet discussion grows longer, the probability of a comparison involving Nazis or Hitler approaches one." [ http://www.faqs.org/faqs/usenet/leg ends/godwin/ ]

Ah, crap! I think we are going to have to adapt this to slashdot, before it's too late!

Here are a few people's pages about Lisp Machines, for the curious (Some links are MIA; can anyone find a new valid address for them?):

• Symbolics machines: Peter Paine | Bob Kerns | [MIA] Rainer Joswig | dr. P.M.E. De Bra | Ralf Moeller | PT Withington
• LMI machines: [MIA] Joe Marshall
• There were other LISP Machines: Ti Explorers, Xerox Dandelions, etc... Check the FAQ for comp.lang.lisp, make a Google search, etc.