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http://news.gmane.org/gmane.comp.multimedia.matros ka.devel

http://news.gmane.org/gmane.comp.multimedia.gstrea mer.devel

I've been using Gaim for, well, a long time now

I have as well. The grandparent was a bit trollish, but the problems he mentions are real. With my previous ISP (ADSL PPPOE garbage), my IP address would change 2, maybe 3 times per day on a good day. For some reason, the feeling among Gaim developers is that there is a need for a dialog box to appear every time each protocol reconnects. I think its fantastic that there is now an option to disable the "you have been disconnected" dialog, because that in addition to the reconnect dialog is really too much. That compounded with Metacity wanting to give keyboard focus to every single window that appears. The solution suggested, is to disable auto-reconnect. So then all your protocols just drop offline, and you have to manually reconnect them.

Having said that, Gaim is a fantastic program overall. The advantage Gaim has over the proprietary clients is that I have the ability to fix those problems myself, even if the Gaim developers don't see them as problems. It's just a shame that getting the Gaim clique to agree is like trying to get XFree86 to accept patches, and also that people like the grandparent will be told to go find a patch on the patch tracker if they complain. Just wait, I bet someone has already posted a link to one.

For some background about the tooltips problem mentioned in the grandparent post, please see the thread Freakin' annoying tooltips from February/March of this year (thats not the entire thread either, it was very fragmented over the many weeks). Its a fascinating look into the mind of a developer. How one can justify saying that "options confuse users", and therefor they should simply open up their prefs.xml in a text editor, locate the option to set a timeout for the tooltip, and set that to some obscenely large number so that the tooltips never appear.

Its a good thing nobody was confused by the appearance of an option like "disable buddy list tooltips".

I found this post in the mailing list about the closing of the working group interesting.

A lot of the blame seems to go to MS. Strange that the article here didn't attract more MS bashing comments. Maybe most slashdotters don't know what has been going on and didn't realize this was a good opportunity for anti-MS karma whoring? :-)

Anyway, I'm glad MS didn't manage to sneak patents into a standard. As a previous poster said: "Long live SPF".

• .."why should I trust Wikipedia, it's written by random people"?
• .."there's been a successful experiment of inserting false information..."
• "the neutral point of view doesn't work"
• "it's just an encyclopedia .."

Please read this:

Wikipedia has now hit another quantitative milestone (we reached 500,000 articles in the same year). It is now clear that volunteers can build a free, structured information resource which rivals all such proprietary resources. This is an accomplishment of immense importance, but it is not the end goal.

Article review

Wikipedia is not perfect yet. But from day one, we've been thinking about and tinkering with quality control mechanisms. The one which is currently in active use is the Featured Article Candidates nomination process as well as the Votes for deletion negative equivalent. There's also a peer review page which is in active use.

These are just trial balloons. They're not the end product, the peer review process which we need. There's a WikiProject Fact and Reference Check formed to explore a review system centered around individual factual statements in an article. I have also proposed such a system. There's also an article rating system that is currently in the CVS version of MediaWiki, our free wiki software.

We are all aware of the problem, and we all know that we have to fix this problem before Wikipedia can be a trusted authority. Doing this kind of systematic quality review will require the same level of dedication and effort as creating the encyclopedia in the first place. But we will do it, and not too far from now you will read "1000 reviewed articles", "10000 reviewed articles" announcements, and so on. And this review will be more in-depth than the review process of any traditional encyclopedia, because it will be done by thousands of volunteers from all political and religious persuasions.

There will always be an unstable edition of Wikipedia where you can go to read the latest information, with a big caveat lector sign on the front door. But we will also build a stable edition which we will distribute to the entire planet.

Neutrality

The Neutral Point of View is our guiding principle. However, that does not mean that it is the only way to write articles. Because Wikipedia's content is free, you can take it and start a fork that is written using a different methodology.

There's Wikinfo, which presents a "sympathetic point of view" on the main article, and critical views on separate pages. There's Disinfopedia and dKosopedia, which makes use of some of our content and develop it from a political/progressive perspective.

We will support dynamic cross-project transclusion of our content so that it will be easy to set up a project fork with a different policy. Wikipedia will always be the largest knowledge repository, but if you want the "truth" from a particular point of view, you will be able to consult a resource that is written by people who share that point of view. You can start such a fork right now if you want to - just download the database and get going.

It's more than an encyclopedia

The Wikimedia Foundation currently operates Wikip

Check out this rant about ATI's broken promises for 64-bit and Linux...

WTL indeed started life as VC++ sample code (some four or five years ago), but it is somewhat more than that now. It's a fairly widespread tool, particularly where developers are looking for something more lightweight than MFC (Microsoft Foundation Classes). MS has assigned a full-time developer to the project.

There is a WTL mailing list where one can obtain more information (also acessible through the Gmane mail-to-nntp gateway at gamne.comp.windows.wtl), and a WTL area on CodeProject, in addition to the SourceForge WTL page.

I'm a moderator of the Yahoo group, and a developer on the SourceForge project, so I may be a little biased, but I find it to be an extremely useful tool for Windows development.

They do. You can license them. Trouble is, once you have, you're bound by quite a number of restrictions One of the POI developers (Jakarta Word/Excel project) recently had to stop, as he'd changed employers to someone who'd licensed the specs: leaving email What would be nice is getting those docs without all the heavy licensing

There are several reasons why Vorbis is not used, appart from internal/political reasons it has at least these technical problems.

The current Vorbis encoders are very poor at fixed bitrate coding.

The current streaming system for use with Vorbis is just to use http. This isn't very satisfactory especially when you are serving large numbers and if you want to provide multicast services.

http://news.bbc.co.uk/sol/ukfs_sport/hi/av/player/ fs_wyw.stm?clippos=0&clipurl=http://news.bbc.co.uk /media_acl/sport_olympics/video/39952000/bb/399525 92_bb_16x9.ram&title=Opening%20ceremony%20finale&w intype=normal&rhs=http://news.bbc.co.uk/sol/ukfs_s port/hi/av/newsid_3560000/newsid_3563900/bb_rm_356 3982.stm&wyw=/sol/ukfs_sport/hi/av/newsid_3560000/ newsid_3561900/bb_rm_3561980.stm&cs=cs5&fsname=bb_ rm_fs&bw=bb
(might not work it links to a popup player and may be limited to UK)

Documentation of libvorbis, which is the library that needs to be used to create Vorbis streaming systems has been pretty much non existant until recently and it hasn't yet been put in the subversion tree. In fact this documentation was actually written at BBC R&D.

http://article.gmane.org/gmane.comp.multimedia.ogg .vorbis.devel/2891

As it stands at the moment completely additional independent infrastructure would be required to stream Vorbis.

I wonder what the BBC might have up their sleave next!

I believe that discussions were held between BBC R&D and Xiph before Emmett was removed. People at BBC R&D are more video engineer than hacker, they wanted documentation and were interested in contributing experience, they are not expert at reading code to discover the algorithm. However the Xiph codecs were pretty much undocumented and weren't likely to change soon even though some funding may have been available.

Note that even Vorbis which has been version 1 released for a couple of years now and which was started many years ago is not properly documented. LibVorbis has no official documentation and this is the library which you need to use if dealing with asynchronous sources such as network connections. As far as I know the Vorbis encoding algorithm is completely undocumented.

You might notice that the source of the docs when they do appear isn't offtopic for this thread. The BBC do have one or two hackers ;)

http://article.gmane.org/gmane.comp.multimedia.ogg .vorbis.devel/2891

There's a support list on Yahoo Groups, which is also available through Gmane; the group address there is gmane.comp.windows.wtl.

But SpamAssassin is just getting better and better. Version 3.0 is coming up, and 3.0-pre1 was recently released. I do not have a test system available for it, but those who have may want to take it for a spin.

Especially for large sites, this is extremely interesting. It adds relational database support for the Bayes database, so it should be a lot easier to set up on a large site.

I find the lack of individual training the main reason why SA works so well for me, but not very well at my old university.

So I did talk to some of these lenders. Apparently they buy leads from www.lendergateway.com . One guy that I talked to was irritated because it costs him $100 per lead they sell him and it's supposed to only be sold to him. He apologized quite a bit and was nice enough to give me the information on who sold him the names. The number he game me goes to voicemail which I'm going to try later. A couple other people told me what I can do with myself and one lady kept saying that she couldn't give me information on who provided her with my information.

The stupid thing is each time I talk to them I tell them I'm on a cell and that I need their name and number and I'll call them right back. They give it to me... So when they hang up I start calling again and again. I've been irritating the hell out of them...

Anyways, that's the fun storing of what happens when these forms are filled out.

Its neat to see Sun employees popping up on various mailing lists more often. Also, the Gnome HIG is an invaluable resource, contributed by Sun. I say give them the benifit of doubt for now.

Yes, I have.

Not only is this the Alpha release, but it is the Alpha 1 release. Yes, it's very buggy. There will be two Alpha releases from now on. Note the new milestone schedule.

One of the major scoring points for Linux in the e-gov scene in India in local language. Indic language support in GNOME/KDE/Mozilla/OpenOffice.org is improving rapidly - sometimes the Open Source developers are there even before M$. For an idea on the l10n scene in India - take a look at this newsletter.

However, one of the major bottlenecks of implementing Linux in rural areas is the power situation. People have tried a number of interesting stuff - solar power, manure power and whatnot - but these things can push up costs astronomically.

Moreover, there is a lack of trained professionals who can handle Linux systems - finding people to handle highly customised LTSP or kiosk based installations can be a real PITA. Support becomes a major headache - as people are not at all familar with troubleshooting through the command line. However, things are slowly improving - some states are introducing Linux courses in the school curriculum as apparent from this post.

Some idea about the Linux scene in India can be guaged from the interviews at this site.

I expected that Google would do something more like Gmane and start indexing existing mailing lists. The web search looks at existing pages, it doesn't let you make your own (unless that is coming?). But it looks like they want to make something better than Yahoo Groups, which should not be difficult.

I wonder if they will feed out the groups as NNTP, or as mailing lists which can be fed into Gmane. Then one will be able to read them with a convenient newsreader interface along with everything else.

Just some quick answers to your questions (link references posted below):

1) Does Daniel Robbins own all of the stock in Gentoo Technologies?
A: I believe so. However, that company will no longer hold the intellectual property/copyrights for Gentoo (as it currently does). Those are being transferred to the new, NFP entity, The Gentoo Foundation: From the Gentoo site:

"In the proposal, Gentoo Foundation, Inc. will hold the intellectual property of the project..."
From Daniel:
"Gentoo Technologies, Inc. will transfer the copyrights and trademarks to the Gentoo Foundation. In exchange, the Gentoo Foundation will grant Daniel Robbins & Gentoo Technologies, Inc. perpetual, non-exclusive, royalty-free use of the "Gentoo" trademark and "G" logo. This will allow me to continue to run the Gentoo Store if I want."

2) Why was Gentoo Technologies, Inc. initially set up as a for-profit?
A: The project was supported by donations, but was also supported by commercial offerings through the Gentoo Store and other ventures. From past postings I've read it was easier to structure the company that way (at least initially), even though there were drawbacks to the tax exemption possibilities, as you point out. It was just simpler given the many things they were doing (Gentoo Store, Gentoo Games, etc.).

For more information you can check the Gentoo Weekly Newsletter edition for April 19, 2004.
Please also see Daniel's transition plan.

From this post, it looks like Daniel built up quite a hefty debt working on Gentoo.

How 'bout some support? Visit the Gentoo homepage and click the donation button in the upper left corner.

The man's got to feed his family after all.

No details yet - but this
looks like it may well be part of the reason;
specifically, he cannnot (and should not) have to shoulder the financial risk necessary to shift gentoo to its full Not For Profit status.

Given that he has a young family to support, I for one can sympathise with his position.

There's going to be an official announcement once the dust settles slightly, but thisappears to be the live gentoo forum thread.

Go easy on it, the forums are pretty heavily loaded at the best of times, and the last thing the place needs is a full blown slashdotting!

Here's a snippit:

"OK. The purpose of this is to allow me to continue to support my family by doing things like pay for a house, pay for food, and potentially pay off some of the $20,000 in debt I accumulated during my tenure as Chief Architect of Gentoo, etc."

Given that the instruction sets are compatible, you don't need to do much investigation to figure out that they have looked at AMD's x86-64.

Apparently, there is still some confusion about whether the instructions sets are compatible or not, and people such as Linus has been critisizing Intel for trying to hide the fact that they are indeed compatible by giving the instruction set another name.

When it comes to licensing of technology, AMD and Intel has had cross-licensing agreements since the seventies, and there has been roumors for a long time that these has included x86-64.

what they need is a new section 'google mailing lists'

You mean like The Mail Archive or MARC?

Or if you like a newsgroup view of mailing lists there is always Gmane

GMANE.ORG offers this already. Alternatively, Google Groups does archive some mailing lists, including linux.kernel.

Interesting you should bring up HDTV; I'm in the middle of setting up a HD PVR based on a G3 PowerMac I just bought on eBay.

My digital cable box, the Motorola DCT-6200, puts out a MPEG2-TS stream over its 1394 port. Using the VirtualDVHS package that's part of Apple's Firewire SDK, it should be possible to record HD video; playback will probably require something a little beefier than the 300 MHz G3, but I have more powerful Windows boxen that can handle that.

If you're a Linux guy, check out Linux1394; it should be able to handle both DV and HDTV. AFAIK, there's no working Windows solution for my particular situation just yet (Windows doesn't recognize the Moto box as being anything particularly useful; promised firmware updates from Moto may change that). These guys have been in beta for quite a while now, but no release date has been announced.

HD-capable PVR solutions should become more common in the next few months -- as of April 1, per a recent FCC ruling, US digital cable providers who supply HD services must, at customer request, provide a box that makes the HD signal available through a computer-friendly interface (everyone's taken this to mean 1394, AFAIK).

No kidding. This thread discussing an update to the MPlayer -vs- KiSS situation would make for real interesting discussion, but they're rejecting those stories. This is blatent MS bashing. I'm all for a good MS bashing myself, but Hotmail goes down weekly this isn't news. This is something to bitch about on IRC.

Check out gmane. Only way to deal with high-volume mailing lists.

Check out gmane. Only way to deal with high-volume mailing lists.

I prefer mutt for my mail, but I've started to use gnus for my news.

There's a thread on the mailing list about this issue here

3.3v or universal would be good too, for people wanting a modem suitable for use with a Soekris ... This thread came up recently, suggestions included USB (some of which you might have space for in the case), PCI->MiniPCI adapters, and a suggestion of a Hayes 03367 (probably no 3.3v, unless the notch is placed wrongly, but sounds smaller than usual and hardware-based).

They were not impressed :) but that was primarily because the lack of cvsup-like tool and 3dparty support.

As the GPL is a copyright license it is enforced through copyright law and there wont be any case ever about a 'GPL violation'. Any such 'violation' is simply copyright infringement and any court case about it would be a civil or criminal copyright violation case, not a civil contract case.

But ok, I'll do some research for you.

License, not contract

Moglen.

Australian perspective

Wikipedia

Those are just a few starters from any number of articles you wish written by lawyers, legal experts, or laymen.

If you're interested in the concepts of open source licenses I'd also reccomend gmane OSS license mail list and debian-legal.

And, no, I'm not a lawyer. Altho I've been researching copyright law (US and various european versions) and the GPL and other OSS licenses for a decade by now out of interest. If you want a legal opinion I suggest you consult one of the many lawyers you'll find while researching these issues.

Mistaking the GPL for a contract is easy tho, and the reason for most misconceptions about it.

First, is it relatively safe? Does it do what the directions say it does and no more?

Yes, as far as I can tell (been running freenet sporadically for several years, constantly since last summer). The source is open, and due to the nature of the project there are a lot of slightly paranoid people looking at it. The bandwidth limiting code is actually kind of flaky, but if it's a big concern to you you can always run lower-level traffic shaping software.

Is especially vile content a big problem and will I feel guilty once I get into it?

Well, I've never felt guilty about running a node. There's certainly quite a bit of illegal distribution of copyrighted material going on over freenet, as well as a non-trivial amount of actual bad shit (read: child porn) (at least, I assume there is; I've seen links indicating that that's what they lead to, but never followed them). I feel, however, that there are better ways of dealing with such stuff than by making all secure, anonymous communication impossible. It's about as easy to avoid content you don't wish to see on the freenet as it is on the regular old web.

Second, Is it being run efficiently? I really don't know what it would take. One programmer plus a herd of volunteers sounds good, but please do let me know.

Um... it's kind of chaotic, but it gets results (in fits and starts, sometimes). The active developers are mostly nice, very smart people. You might be interested in perusing the freenet-devel archives.

more than 500MB of disk space to spare

Sorry to burst your bubble, but that will fill up in about a weekend. My local datastore is currently about 12GB, and I'll be putting in a spare 40GB drive soon just for freenet. Don't let this put you off, though; the network has plenty of storage space; what it really needs is more bandwidth. If you have a fast network connection, you should really try it out. It's an interesting project to follow, and could end up actually being very valuable to the world.

http://thread.gmane.org/gmane.comp.python.apple/21 91
http://thread.gmane.org/gmane.comp.python.apple/25 56
http://thread.gmane.org/gmane.comp.python.apple/31 77

Generally speaking the problem is that anything bleeding edge is better supported under Linux. Of course that's only natural, but it's (imho) reason enough to install Linux too.

http://thread.gmane.org/gmane.comp.python.apple/21 91
http://thread.gmane.org/gmane.comp.python.apple/25 56
http://thread.gmane.org/gmane.comp.python.apple/31 77

Generally speaking the problem is that anything bleeding edge is better supported under Linux. Of course that's only natural, but it's (imho) reason enough to install Linux too.

http://thread.gmane.org/gmane.comp.python.apple/21 91
http://thread.gmane.org/gmane.comp.python.apple/25 56
http://thread.gmane.org/gmane.comp.python.apple/31 77

Generally speaking the problem is that anything bleeding edge is better supported under Linux. Of course that's only natural, but it's (imho) reason enough to install Linux too.

LOL i thought it might raise a few eyebrows. The icon set i am using is called Aqua (surprisingly enough) you can get them here

Aqua Icons Although I cant be certain that is the full set. (you may need to do some hunting if it aint)

The rest of the stuff is just clever configuration. The KDE toolbar can be made transparent, and its easy to add and remove your favorite apps. Yes, that really is the KDE kicker! It doesnt animate quite as sexy as the OSX dock, but it looks good enough for me.

Other than that, Im running on a Athlon 1.4ghz dualie, with gentoo as the distro.

You can always look at themes.kde.org to get idea's download candy etc. Although Im still waiting for someone to do a Panther title bar.

A while ago, I made a SpamAssassin patch which resolves any URL found within an email and tests the resulting IP addresses against blacklists which are otherwise used to block unwanted email. A lot of Chinese bulletproof servers' IP addresses are listed on the Spamhaus Block List (SBL) and/or SPEWS as well as on certain *.blackholes.us lists.

Not that anybody doesn't trust the parent poster, but sig the updates to ClamAV can be verified here.

See: this message on the SPF mailing list

I have to admit that I haven't actually tried creating new ones, so I'll defer to someone who has. See: IETF ASRG RMX mailing list: Hadmut Danisch on creating new DNS RR types

Hadmut Danisch is the author of the RMX anti-spam proposal and his proposal is for a new DNS RR type of "RMX". I have little reason to doubt that he knows what he is talking about.

Our offsite backup MX is running just fine pumping messages to their destinations, but subscription may not work properly.

I don't have up-to-the-minute numbers, but several hours ago it was up about $2000 from the initial figure.

Here's the list archive. Signup probably won't work right now since the main mail server is on one of the machines that's down, but you can send mail to the list (wikitech-l at wikipedia.org) and it'll go through the backup MX just fine.

Honestly, it's hard to believe that it took PHD "rocket scientists" to come to the conclusion that email is probably better interfaced as a forum. We've all known that for years.

Indeed: see gmane.org. (Which itself has a strong cultural inheritance from Gnus, the Emacs newsreader that lets you read mail and other things as though they were newsgroups.)

In the story, the supposed faults of electronic mail - that it is easy to view one message but hard to set it in context, to see who is saying what to whom - could be fixed or at least greatly reduced by proper quoting and attribution. If Microsoft changed Outlook and Outlook Express to make it easy and encouraged for users to do concise, non-Jeopardy quoting followed by a reply, rather than typing a few words then followed by masses of irrelevant autoappended gunk, they'd do the net a big favour.

(See OE-QuoteFix - but I don't know of an equivalent for Outlook.)

gmane.org

mailing list <-> NNTP gateway
searchable archive
spam and virus filtering
web interface clone of gnus

I'm not sure if MS aren't talking about something different from what most of this discussion thinks they are. Rather than showing the thread of discussion of whole emails (which we're all used to in other clients) it might be they mean something more like this old discussion of what e-mail discussions should look like by Ka Ping-Yee..

In case you manage to /. that, the idea is that it shows the responses to pieces of your email - the kind where someone says "see my responses inline" and responds to each of your points piecemeal, then you do the same to their responses, and so on.

I've often thought it would be cool to write something to parse emails the KPY way, but the heuristics would have to be pretty damn clever to deal with supercite. Specifically what I wanted was something that combined KPY's ideas with text-autosummarization , and some 'author ranking' information to produce mailing list summaries from gmane which are like Kernel Traffic and Cousins, or the now-defunct Eclectic.

Oh well, I can always wait until MS put this in Outlook 2010 ;)

they'd have the sense not to override the default behaviour of the damn language, which would be to go to bignum if necessary. It would take effort to write a declaration to actually deliberately override the behaviour, and would be A Seriously Stupid Thing To Do. Doesn't mean that somebody, somewhere wouldn't do it, of course

"... and of course, CL transparently uses bignums when a numeric quantity exceeds the range of machine words, so we don't get overflow problems"

* (decode-universal-time (+ (* 86400 365 50) (get-universal-time)))
debugger invoked on condition of type TYPE-ERROR:
The value 2635786389 is not of type (SIGNED-BYTE 32).

This is because I didn't specify a timezone, so it asks unix for the default timezone and DST settings, and unix needs a time_t, which is 32 bits on this box.
Dan Barlow, SBCL and the Y2038 problem

The problem you describe is given more detail in this message. Ian Clarke then responded to the idea here.

The problem you describe is given more detail in this message. Ian Clarke then responded to the idea here.