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How about Speak Freely for Unix?

I have played with it a bit, and it seemed to work, but I haven't actually used it for gaming yet.&nbsp It didn't seem as simple to configure and use as some of the windoze voice comm programs, though.

A one time pad? The encryption key is exactly as long as your message, so it's better than spammimic. But then, you also need a separate, secure transmission to your recipient for them to decode it.... You can't have it all.

I believe the link you need is HotBits: Genuine random numbers, generated by radioactive decay. If memory serves, it was featured on Slashdot some time ago.

I think this might have been mentioned on /. awhile ago, but there are tools and information at the Eat Watch site from John Walker, the creator of AutoCAD. Cool stuff, including Palm tools for weight tracking.

Read The Hacker's Diet by John Walker (of Autodesk fame).

yer, cause it's not like you cant just save as html.

Have you ever seen the HTML created by MS-Word? Hideous stuff, barely useable, with deprecated tags, incorrectly made entities and invalid ASCII. See http://www.fourmilab.ch/webtools/demoroniser/ You are better off to save as text, then go in with a text editor and add the markup.

Also, how long until they remove these export mechanisms "in order to serve us better" with more "innovation"? For example, they could make Front Page read Word format (if it doesn't already), then claim that this removes any need for export to text or HTML and that this represents better "integration" (their premier code-word for "lock-in").

--

Kind of true: you can't universally compress random data using a single program, but this doesn't mean you can't compress a single instance of random data.

This competition is kind of "balanced" because:

• The contestant can attempt and mount any number of different types of compression - all he has to do is find one instance that meets the requirements of the challenge.
• The challenge owner can choose a file of the specified length that is "strong" against compression: Test the data with tools such as Diehard and Ent - if the file doesn't seem "strong enough" then create a new one.

Given a sufficiently large file (a couple of Gb would probably do) then I think virtually any file could be compressed with a specially crafted compressor and decompressor. Given a 2Gb file, you only need to achieve .0001% compression to have 2147 bytes to write the decompressor.

If you get Home Planet, other useful things are NISTime (freeware time synch program from NIST) available here, and you can get two-line satellite tracking (TLE) info (also useful at the Earth and Moon Viewer site) from NORAD's satellite catalog here. It's all text files, and there are several that are designed for automated downloads for the real fanatics.

In general, everything is surprisingly simple, and it doesn't take much to, say, get the latest telemtry on Endeavor (STS-100) here, cut-and-paste it into a Home Planet satellite database (text file), and see exactly where the shuttle is.

If you get Home Planet, other useful things are NISTime (freeware time synch program from NIST) available here, and you can get two-line satellite tracking (TLE) info (also useful at the Earth and Moon Viewer site) from NORAD's satellite catalog here. It's all text files, and there are several that are designed for automated downloads for the real fanatics.

In general, everything is surprisingly simple, and it doesn't take much to, say, get the latest telemtry on Endeavor (STS-100) here, cut-and-paste it into a Home Planet satellite database (text file), and see exactly where the shuttle is.

If you get Home Planet, other useful things are NISTime (freeware time synch program from NIST) available here, and you can get two-line satellite tracking (TLE) info (also useful at the Earth and Moon Viewer site) from NORAD's satellite catalog here. It's all text files, and there are several that are designed for automated downloads for the real fanatics.

In general, everything is surprisingly simple, and it doesn't take much to, say, get the latest telemtry on Endeavor (STS-100) here, cut-and-paste it into a Home Planet satellite database (text file), and see exactly where the shuttle is.

If you get Home Planet, other useful things are NISTime (freeware time synch program from NIST) available here, and you can get two-line satellite tracking (TLE) info (also useful at the Earth and Moon Viewer site) from NORAD's satellite catalog here. It's all text files, and there are several that are designed for automated downloads for the real fanatics.

In general, everything is surprisingly simple, and it doesn't take much to, say, get the latest telemtry on Endeavor (STS-100) here, cut-and-paste it into a Home Planet satellite database (text file), and see exactly where the shuttle is.

Home Planet is a nice simulator, only for Windows I'm afraid but public domain! It's possible to enter the trajectory of various objects and observe them in animations. Home Planet

NASA's site seems either down, slow, or slashdotted. There's also the Solar System Live (http://www.fourmilab.ch/cgi-bin/uncgi/Solar/actio n?sys=-Sf). It appears to be/do the same thing (though I haven't seen the NASA site).

The Good Reverend
I'm different, just like everybody else.

I can't believe that you of all people would fall for this argument (or that you'd use Microsoft's Moronic HTML, but that's another matter :-). Sure, I believe the TuxBox will fail, for most of the same reasons that Indrema did, but quality control won't come into it. Official submission may increase the quality of the end product, but if it does so, it's not by much. Does the vast quantities of useless apps currently available for Windows (or for that matter, Linux) make the quality apps any worse? No? So why do you think it would do the same for TuxBox? Yes, the gaming market is very competetive, and obsoletes products and technology even quicker than the mainstream software market, so there is a certain amount to pressure to release before the product is fully ready, but I doubt that'll be sufficient to cause a significant drop in quality. The key to the long term success of any platform is an unrestricted third party development market. Sadly, it's just not economically feasible to do this in the console market now, so we're stuck with the current situation. Even MS backed away from their initial stance of not requiring approval for Xbox games.

most likely it's an artifact of frontpage. Frontpage makes it's authors look like morons by trying to get fancy with apostrophes. That's why there is the demoronizer

He completely evaded the point of question 9 - the ruination of defacto standards such as Kerberos and Java. He just ignored it altogether. His answer to this is nothing but blather - which is the best he could do because there is NO good answer for what Microsoft has done to standards.

(For a discussion of how they abuse one of the most widely used and useful standards ever, see: Moronic Microsoft HTML)

--

Actually, they _did_ have precise enough manufacturing capability to build Babbage's machines - this has already been proven by the building of Difference Engine No. 2 at the Science Museum in London. Scientific American had an article on it, discussing how they built the parts to the tolerances specified, and the resulting machine worked excellently. Portions of the machine were built after Babbage's death, proving that it could be done (more info on this and other interesting Babbage info can be found here).

It is my opinion (shared by a lot of researchers) that Babbage failed primarily for two reasons; a) He could never "settle down" and build any one of his calculating machines, he was constantly dreaming of improvements and never committing to one design, draining his resources to the point of where they abandoned him (.com failure?), and b) his machines simply weren't practical for the time period, for their huge cost. People at the time didn't have a pressing need for enormous amounts of calculating power, that couldn't be provided for by cheaper human labor (so called later "computers"). It wasn't until the late 1800's that the need for real mechanical/electrical computing power began to be felt (look into Hollerith and the 1890 census for one take - there are others, of course, notably Lord Kelvin's Tide Predicting machine of 1876, while being analog, does demonstrate the need for mechanical models of complex computing problems - in fact, this particular use was not overtaken in any large part by digital computers until the 1950's), in fact, this was the time during which many "inventors" came forth with their own takeoffs of Babbage's machine - it should be noted that these were all portions of "Difference" engines, some original, some of Babbage's design. None were of the scale and complexity of his Analytical engine, though I believe a portion of the mill was completed by one of his sons after his death. It actually worked rather well, computing the successive sums of PI (though with errors, some tracable to machine problems, most likely spring related, but the major problem being that the input for the initial value of PI was off in one digit - thus, perhaps one of the first examples of GIGO as it relates to computers).

Thus, we have two points of failure: One, a character "flaw" (something that affects many hackers even to this day), and the second a lack of practical need.

It's too bad - his machines could have radically shaped our world...


Worldcom - Generation Duh!

I remember working with the Exec 8 operating
in the 1970's, and occasionally seeing a
NON-SYMBIONT PRINT printout ejected by the
line printer. Apparently a non-symbiont print
file was a print file that had become orphaned
from a job run. I always wondered where they
got the word "symbiont" from. Years later, while
visiting the Smithsonian, I got a chance to
see the original Univac control panel close up,
with all of its rows of gleaming toggle switches.
Sure enough, there was a switch marked "SYMBIONT".

A great site for for more Univac memories is

http://www.fourmilab.ch/documents/univac/

In 1968 you could pick up a 1.3 MHz CPU with half a megabyte of RAM and 100 megabyte hard drive for a mere US$1.6 million. Oh, and you want a printer too...?

The FASTRAND II was the second member of the FASTRAND family, and by far the most common. The ill-fated FASTRAND I had only one rotating drum and half the storage capacity. A single massive drum rotating almost 15 times a second acts as a powerful gyroscope which tries to stay in a fixed location with respect to the distant stars. Unfortunately, the Earth rotates, and this leads to a conflict between the Earthly imperative of motion and the FASTRAND I's desire to stay put, which resulted in the devices tending to move around the computer room. In the FASTRAND II, the two drums rotated in opposite directions, which cancelled out the gyroscopic effect. The story of the Navy ship which set sail with a spinning FASTRAND only to have it stand on end at the first course change is, as far as I can determine, apocryphal.

In 1968 you could pick up a 1.3 MHz CPU with half a megabyte of RAM and 100 megabyte hard drive for a mere US$1.6 million. Oh, and you want a printer too...?

The FASTRAND II was the second member of the FASTRAND family, and by far the most common. The ill-fated FASTRAND I had only one rotating drum and half the storage capacity. A single massive drum rotating almost 15 times a second acts as a powerful gyroscope which tries to stay in a fixed location with respect to the distant stars. Unfortunately, the Earth rotates, and this leads to a conflict between the Earthly imperative of motion and the FASTRAND I's desire to stay put, which resulted in the devices tending to move around the computer room. In the FASTRAND II, the two drums rotated in opposite directions, which cancelled out the gyroscopic effect. The story of the Navy ship which set sail with a spinning FASTRAND only to have it stand on end at the first course change is, as far as I can determine, apocryphal.

For the truly paranoid, several companys have products that generate random numbers based on the decay of a radioisotope. It doesn't get much more random than that.

You can try one out on the Internet.

" HotBits [brought to you by John Walker] is an Internet resource that brings genuine random numbers, generated by a process fundamentally governed by the inherent uncertainty in the quantum mechanical laws of nature, directly to your computer in a variety of forms."

If you need a random number, go here:

www.fourmilab.ch/hotbits/

The guy has a geiger-muller tube pointed at a radioactive source. The time between detected events is random. Really random.
--
#include "stdio.h"

You'll be entering the 'market' a little late:
This guy is already doing that for free :)

--

Build one yourself.

--

Your CS professor was wrong:

radioactive decay random-number generator
atmospheric noise random-number generator

--Blair
"Nineteen billion bits can't be wrong!"

Proposers must submit an original and 4 copies of the full proposal and 8 electronic copies (i.e., 8 separate disks) of the full proposal (in Microsoft Word ?97 for IBM-compatible, PDF, Postscript, or ASCII format on one 3.5-inch floppy disk or one 100 MB Iomega Zip disk).

Also notice the Microsoft character for apostrophe (looks like a question mark on my screen).

Slashdot won't let me post that char literally (nice job), so I replaced it with a litaral question mark.

Instead of flaming away because you *think* you know what the problem is, perhaps you should educate yourself on what you are commenting on first.

http://www.fourmilab.ch/webtools/demoroniser/

However, the main disadvantage of any one time pad based system (despite it's great cryptographic strength) is that the key (or pad) requires itself some amount of physical security. In contrast a system like RSA is much different because it is not even remotely symmetrical (encryption vs. decryption) and you can send out your public key for all to see and to use but still only you (with your private key) can decrypt what has been encrypted with the public key.

Personally, I don't see this new development as anything special, we already have methods of using extremely high security encryption where it's needed (spying and whatnot) and for other applications that require more convenience and can have more cpu power put behind them the systems we have now are really more than adequate (assuming your using the right systems, not all the systems in use now are cryptographically secure in any resonable sense, but we know which ones those are).

WEB BUILDERS: Tired of hacks and versioning? Write valid markup ...

--

"Documents Reveal Rambus? Patent-Enforcement Plans"

Now if Slashcode could do something when moronic characters are present...

She wasn't all that impressed, it was just a brief note to compliment my page, and I get such notes all the time.

What mattered was that we began corresponding, and after a month or so I asked for her phone number, and we began talking on the phone occassionally. I really impressed her by calling her in Nova Scotia while I was visiting a friend in Rome.

She lived in Truro, Nova Scotia, I in Santa Cruz, California. I soon discovered the need for cheap long distance - before I got my rate lowered I received a $2500 bill for just one month, and even after getting AT&T one rate international my bills were running $1100 per month.

She didn't own her own computer so voice over IP wasn't an option, and I tried to make it one by sending her my old 486 and Speak Freely. While she was able to negotiate Speak Freely's complex UI the 486 wasn't up to the task of the signal processing.

I also made three visits to her (the first on January 18, 1998, in wintry Canada from sunny California, bringing a rose with me all the way on the plane), and she made two to me.

It was when I offerred to buy her a brand new Pentium-II machine to run Speak Freely on that she decided to finally come out to Santa Cruz and live with me.

She soon found work doing biotech and was able to stay for a year on a TN-1 visa, an option also available to americans and mexicans in each other's countries who hold bachelor's degrees and work in various professional fields (tip - computer programming qualifies).

We were married July 22, 2000 in Pippy Park, St. John's Newfoundland just outside the Fluvarium where we held our reception. It was a beautiful day - outdoor weddings are not common in Newfoundland because of the northern climate, and in fact we rented a big tent.

We moved back to the U.S. a few weeks ago and now live in Owl's Head Maine in a house we could have never hoped to have afforded in Santa Cruz.

Mike

(I wonder what it costs to look at the Windows source.)

Just your soul.

;)

Actually, that's still better than being a Windows software developer ;)

I see question marks in odd places in the /. posting. Either the syntax and grammar are worse than usual, or those are non-displayable characters. I guess it's time to build the demoronizer into the slashsubmissions scripts.

However, what is a phone primarily used for? Reading contents? No. Talking with others. For that, the PHS phones are so much better than i-mode. Yet, most people seem to tolerate the poor voice quality for the contents (and more often then not, IMHO, the name brand) of i-mode.

Like complaining to LookOut! users about their moronic HTML mail, I often ask i-mode users to find a public phone to talk with me.

But it does look as though contents are what most people find most important. At the train station or on the streets walking, I see hundreds of people every day focused on their little phone screens.

Oh, how silly. They have a Self Test which behaves differently when viewed on different monitors and systems.

Here is an article that may interest readers of the above post.

If you have an interest in space, please read it.

There is always a large gap between using formal communication skills in another language developed through academic courses, listening to the radio/TV, reading, etc. , and suddenly being thrown into the situation of having to use the informal, idiomatic everyday language.

I can only suggest to grab every chance to speak, stutter, and be corrected by native speakers; both you and they will need patience and persistence, but learning to communicate in the language idiomatically will be worth it.

You might also take a look at John Walker's language learning resources which has a lot of useful material, especially for anglophones learning French.

Speak Freely is a marvelous program, I have used it to save literally hundreds of dollars on long distance! It has been around for a long time, but hardly anyone new to unix these days seems to have heard of or use it.

It is a marvelously solid and robust package, supports 4 types of compression [even one which allows robust [4 duplicates of every packet] communication over a standard POTS 33.6 modem (albeit at less then ideal fidelity)], as well as GSM compression [at a mere 1.5KB/sec], which I find delivers notably better fidelity then your normal telephone link! [Maybe this is just a matter of the higher quality analog-to-digitial converters in modern sound cards plus better mics then normal phones]

It is available, under a BSD style license, for download at this site [full source]
Best of all [or pehaps not, depending on your degree of elitism] it is also available for windoze... which, although I hate to think of another example of the win32 world enjoying the fruits of hardcore unix ingenuity and altruism [they even slapped a bloody GUI on the thing for the win32 version...sigh...], nonetheless is cool because they interoperate.

This means that other less CSCI friends/aquantainences of mine can download it and talk to me for free. I doubt I could convince them that "well, you just need to install a copy of linux on your system to use this amazing product, come on, it's easy enough, I'll talk you through it!" heh [PS. not saying linux is hard to install at all, but it is for those people whose VCR's are still blinking 12:00]

An amazing program. Enjoy saving lots of money!

P.S. Did I mention that it also natively supports high-grade encryption for all conversations? ... comes with full integration of IDEA, DES, Blowfish cyphers, and can call pgp to exchange a key with someone else if they have pgp installed too.

P.S. I am in no way affiliated with the fine group that has developed speakfreely. I just think that the program rocks.


---
man sig

Like... screenplays and novels!

Patent 57. A plot device whereby invaders from space initiate an attack, but are destroyed due to a fatal susceptability.

examples:
War of the Worlds (H.G. Wells) (Earth germs)
Independence Day (computer germs)
Mars Attacks (country music)

...the latest versions [of Micros**t applications] added HTML/XML as a 'native' file format for saving documents.

Har har! It is to larff!!

Have you looked at the HTML that MS applications generate? Why do you think programs like HTML De-Moroniser exist?

These employees then get to pay their own taxes on the gain, usually at a full 37%, the same thing that M$ or Cisco would have paid -- sometimes more -- meaning that the government doesn't lose a cent.

Thank you, bleeding-liberal-sensationalist SF Gate and SlashDot, for informing us of this atrocity. That certainly proves that corporations run this country.

In the real world, the tax structure generally sucks for corporations, minus a few tax shelter structures (which are being closed this year, as reported in yesterday's NYTimes and elsewhere). For a techies' view of US taxes and trying to make a corporation fly, try John Walker's The AutoDesk File, which (in varying parts -- I believe Info letter 14? and the stuff on stock options) explains just how the US governments fucks corporations just as well as individual citizens.

and (in a different incarnation of sorts) was led by Roger Gregory:
http:www.udanax.org

and finally incorporated into AutoDESK in '88, at the urging of John Walker:
Statement for the Autodesk/Xanadu Press Conference

Unfortunately, AutoDESK (no longer under John's direct control) killed Xanadu in 92, of all times, not seeing any future in hypertext -- which is a shame, since IMHO Xanadu was and is much better than the mess which is the web.

Roger and Ted are certainly bemused by the BT thing... and would probably be more bemused if BT won :)

"Is there any voice encryption avaiable."

There most certainly is. The first cross-platform app that comes to mind is Speak Freely and the documentation at that URL says, among other things:

Speak Freely is a [sic] application for a variety of Unix workstations that allows you to talk (actually send voice, not typed characters) over a network. If your network connection isn't fast enough to support real-time voice data, various forms of compression may allow you, assuming your computer is fast enough, to converse nonetheless. To enable secure communications, encryption with DES, Blowfish, IDEA, and/or a key file is available. If PGP is installed on the user's machine, it can be invoked automatically to exchange IDEA session keys for a given conversation. Speak Freely for Unix is compatible with Speak Freely for Windows, and users of the two programs can intercommunicate.

That sounds to be exactly what you are looking for, and then some. If you are a Debian user, you can even "apt-get install speak-freely" and poof! :-)

I really like your articles, but since when did you start using Word (or WordPerfect) to write? I ask because all of your single quotes are escaping into strange Kanji codes.

Please run the demoronizer (or in /usr/ports/www/demoroniser) on your text before submitting. I know, the LA Times and others have the same problems, but I didn't expect to see this kind of non-standard character usage here on /..

Off topic, but needs to be said.

When I first looked at the FAQ, I thought they were being very apostrophe shy, omitting them from words like "companys", "securitys" etc. However, looking at the page again in Netscape instead of Lynx shows that they're just just using Microsoft moronic HTML. Sigh.

I suspect that with the availability of mp3 mixers, icecast, etc, a nice solution for the communications problem should be achievable. Timing, on the other hand, is another matter, but then that's what clocks are for :)

Bill - aka taniwha
--

a plug for one of my favourite sci-fi stories : We'll Return, After This Message. Written in 1989 by John Walker, founder of Autodesk and co-author of AutoCAD, it contains stuff (like search engines) which was way ahead of its time. the hero, art crane, tries to develop an algorithm to filter out ads.
He likened the problem to protective coloration. "If television is a medium that delivers entertainment at the price of advertising, then advertising and entertainment will co-evolve to become indistinguishable in time."

I have a demoronised mirror of the MPAA brief on my site.