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Am i the only person who thinks that case looks like a pile of crap? And as to some of the earlier questions about why PC cases aren't easy to access like G4s are, the answer is some are, some aren't. I build about 10 computers a month (not alot compared to some of you i'm sure, but a good amount nonetheless), and therefore i see a lot of cases. Many i've seen lately have only a thumb screw required to get inside, with panels that all slide off easily. Also, if you want the power of a desktop and the portability of a notebook, you get a rackmount case. You can have as much power as any desktop, with convenient handles and a protective shell. If you want to see a WAY cooler case hack (with about 1/10th the work), check out this guys.

=)

There is a good question whether this is a good case to challenge the DMCA with, or whether it will have to do as the only one of this kind we've got. An expensive legal proceeding may ultimately turn on mundane issues such as whether Dimity sold the program, or the company. Since he didn't do the sales, how could he be traffiking? So is this the one the EFF and ACLU should fund as the Great DMCA test? If not, Dimitry may be at the mercy of his employer's willingness to keep the funding going.

We should also recall that the legality in the other country is irrelevant in the eyes of the US courts. The US has been cheerfully prosecuting foreign nationals for violation of US laws for actions taking place elsewhere for a long time.

-dB

Huh? Do you even remotely keep a watch of the GNOME community? A couple months ago the GNOME 2.0 schedule was released and things are moving along pretty much as planned. A 2.0 API freeze just occured, activity on the lists and in CVS is dramatically rising. We've had recent releases of the new Control Center, a brand new AbiWord, second Beta of Evolution, new releases of development tools gIDE (screenshot) and DevHelp (screenshot), a new file selection dialog, etc...I could go on. I suggest you at least read the GNOME Summaries or check out Gnotices every now and then.

Why of why do people use MS BS? No insult to the fine folks above, especially freedos, but the alternatives are better used together rather than piece wise. Openssh on a PC with IE and Outlook is not secure in anyway. Don't throw your computer out the window, throw windows out of your computer!

Responding to a newly discovered security hole, Microsoft today released a patch to its Internet Information Server webserver less than twelve hours after the problem was discovered.

Brian Behlendorf of the Apache foundation and Theo deRaadt, OpenBSD project leader, expressed envy. "We wish we could get out patches that fast," commented Behlendorf.

"I'm actually amazed," said deRaadt. "Microsoft is usually so unresponsive. Of course, OpenBSD tries to prevent these kinds of problems in the first place."

You'll never see that reported on /.

Sorry, couldn't resist. Actually Apache, OpenBSD, and the guys who make them are great. (And hopefully have good senses of humor.)

Back in the day about 4-5 years ago, before Comedy Central picked up on it, they had the Robot Wars competition in one large 4 or 6-hour event on the Discovery Channel. No sportscasters, stupid interviews, etc. It was thouroghly better than what they do today...and I think a bit of the rules about weapons and such were more relaxed.

I think you'll find Robot Wars is still going, even after all the nonsense about who owned the name.

See also robotwars.com and SMIDSY

This guy named Neil McGuyver is trying to prove you can live without a SSN. One problem he ran into is that the state of Pennsylvania won't give him a license without him producing an SSN. The fact that he doesn't have one doesn't seem to make a difference. So, he doesn't have a license. He carries a tape recorder in his car to record the ecnounter between himself and police if he gets pulled over. Well he got pulled over and he recorded the incident with the permission of the police. It still didn't do him any good. The officer changed his story on the stand and they took the word of the officer over the recording .. gotta love it.

http://www.cjmciver.org/free.shtml

You see, because of the free market, people all over this country have switched to Linux. Nobody forced them to do so... they do so because Linux is better for what they want to use their computer(s) for. Unfortunately, for the average (i.e. dumb) user, Windows is still easier to use and more convenient than Linux. We are working to change this, but at the current time, the average person that uses Windows will tell you that, yes, it sucks (i.e. unstable, slow, etc), BUT these they are willing to live with these problems for the ease of use.

Yes, Microsoft is a giant. Yes, they try to make money. Yes, they try to gain market share. But THAT IS WHAT YOU ARE SUPPOSED TO DO in a free market! If businesses didn't try to make money, we would still be riding trains everywhere and building our own homemade computers.

Microsoft WILL fall by the way any company in a free market falls... by a better product taking away their market share! You can't expect this to happen overnight, as Microsoft has a HUGE userbase. And, in my opinion, they are still the best product for some people.

So, how can you, after seeing how the free market has allowed Linux to come in and cause serious damage to Microsoft's server market share, go crying to the government to interfere with capitalism at work and manually break up Microsoft?? The truth is that Microsoft is the BETTER product for many people to this day... and that probably pisses you off, and you don't want to accept it.

I hate Microsoft. I want to see them fall as much as you do. However, when they fall, I want them to KNOW that it was Linux that took them down... that it was a better product developed through the use of open source, that took down the giant! If the goverment goes in and breaks them up before we win, then they will just blame everything on the goverment instead of Linux. In 100 years, it will be the government that stopped Microsoft, not Linux.

We are making such good progress, why would you guys want the government to stop the war when we are on our way to victory?

I have never been FORCED to give Microsoft any money. In fact, the only person that has EVER forced me to give them money is the government via taxes (one of these days, I'm sure I will be robbed, but not yet). In fact, I don't think ANYBODY has been forced to give Microsoft their money... yet Microsoft takes in tons of it. This must mean that there are still tons of people that CHOOSE to give them money for one reason or another. We need to find these reasons and stop them ourselves.

The government is NOT the answer!

Some of you have the illusion that you (or anybody else) were forced to give your money to Microsoft. If you think so, post a reply and tell me how it happened, and we'll see if we can see how you were forced.

If you read the RenderMan Interface Spec. (V 3.2) the entry for trace() reads as follows:

" color trace( point P, point R )

trace returns the incident light reaching a point P from a given direction R. If a particular implementation does not support the Ray Tracing capability, and cannot compute the incident light arriving from an arbitrary direction, trace will return 0 (black). "

So, you can call trace() in prman, but it's not going to do you any good.

That said, it is possible to write a ray tracer in the shading language! This has been done, in fact, by an insane person named Katsuaki Hiramitsu. This shader, however, does not use the trace() call. The trick lies in actually defining the objects you're going to do ray tracing on in the shader along with your own version of trace(), which is, by necessity, intimately bound to the type of object you've defined.

So, saying the shading language can ray trace is like saying you can keep yourself alive for a while by eating selected portions of your own body. It's possible, but certainly pessimal.

Not to promote Mickeysoft or anything, but they have an awfully nice timekiller on the web called Terraserver. It holds a crapload of fairly-recent USGS satellite maps (1994/1996 or so) that you can zoom in on, and pick out your home town, your home street, even your house and the car in your driveway from orbit...Your entire neighborhood photographed at 1m resolution. For example, I work here...Zoom in, and you can see me waving to the satellite's camera. :)

Cheers,

egfrow

There are several projects in this direction. I will mention the ones with web-based interface. The one with (apparently) higher number of features is indeed PhPGroupware. Most of the modules are usable (e.g. Calendar, Address book, Trouble Ticket system, File Management, Chat, ToDo, etc.). Some of the modules are quite advanced but show some problems (e.g. Project Management, Inventory).With a little custom setup this looks the best choice at the moment. There is also Twig that is also quite mature but does not have as many modules as phpgroupware. Another project that claims to be Production/Stable is PhProjekt. The modules are much simpler than the ones in phpgroupware, it looks more like a viewer. But it has time cards, calendar, chat, e-mail and others. Another project is the Horde project, quite at the beginning. These are only the php - sql projects, you may find other approaches too.

Sorin M

I want to see this guy working on The Revolution. Is there a bio for him? Do they have a "current life status" [...]? Do they have him hooked up to record vital statistics?

His name is Nasubi. He seems like a likable if odd fellow.

True, I read stories I'm only vaguely interested in, if the posters are lively that day. But we still need the original content to spark the discussion. That's the shame of Suck going under.

However, I also agree that the user provided content is often more entertaining. But if everything turns into interlinking weblogs, doesn't everything end up under "meta"?

I hope that sites that are a mix of the two can bridge the gap.

I think there is a place for proffessional writers online. I think we'll see more collaborative journalism and even fiction down the road.

Almost ALL grownup webservers do this.
It's a rational requirement for auditing, not for privacy but for functionality and operations.

McNealy was right "You have zero privacy anyway,"... "Get over it.".

It isn't a pleasant thought, but it is reality.
Everyone from the phone company (or cable) to the author of a GeoCities site can get information about you activities to one degree or another.

It's kind of like going to the grocery store and not wanting ANYONE to know you picked up a copy of RedBook magazine. The retailer has to know, and there's no way to keep the person behind you in line from knowing. In that sense you have more privacy on the web than you do in the temporal world.

http://news.bbc.co.uk/low/english/business/newsid_ 1368000/1368648.stm

I have one example - website I found on IFITL... created by a BellSouth customer to show his install and provide some background on IFITL. Here, the handoff seems to occur RIGHT outside this guy's appartment.

Good Luck!!

Well so does Ruby on the server, and a whole lot more. I think that Flash is too proprietary to make it as yet another language paradigm.

On the client, Flash is superfluous fluff, yet another tab to click on at Bugtraq without any real gains.

mefus
--
um, er... eh -- *click*

Software, of the other hand, is a digital entity, so its function doesn't change with time. If it was broken on the 10,000th time around, it was broken all along. Whether anyone noticed it was broken is completely another issue.

On a somewhat related note, GEB is indeed Gödel, Escher, Bach.
Check it: HTML Character Entities

Art At Home

• In both cases, the patent office found "prior art" -- evidence that others had the idea first. In the case of the "one-click" concept, the prior art consisted of an earlier Japanese patent application and a 1996 book, "User Interface Design," by Alan Cooper.

• "We decided that the technology could be easily invented from this prior art," Natsumi said in a phone interview on Monday.

• Editorial Reviews: Amazon.com
  An excellent book for anyone who wants to understand why so much software is so poorly designed -- and an even better book for anyone who wants to DO something about the problem. Must reading (and doing!) for programmers of any level.

In all seriousness, how could the MD's who performed this be so arrogant as to think that they had the right to act unilaterally, irregardless of the "safety" of the "procedure."

It will most likely be proven that this procedure is safe, after the fact. In the meantime I assume the donor mitochondria were screened for rare, but inheritable mitochondrial diseases?

After all, we do have a complete mitochondrial genome too, right? And of course we have been looking at it long enough that we know what a healthy mitochondrial genome looks like -- we can read it forwards and backwards, eh?

At the very least these "doctors" should lose their licenses. At the most they should be charged with crimes against humanity and brought before an international tribunal. The human genome carries the most fundamental definition of "human". To experiment with that, even at the simple level of mitochondrial manipulation without previous debate -- or trials in non-human subjects -- is completely inexcusable.

These babies may be OK. What if they weren't? Don't these doctors accrue some penalty for performing experiments on humans?

This may be "science", but it's certainly not good science. It may be beneficial in the long run, but it is purported that so were some of the experiments performed by the Nazis. The end does not justify the means.

I am by no means a Luddite, I do believe there is promise in genetic manipulation, and I welcome careful research. Unfortunately, this was not careful research. This was show-boating with God's toys.

So any famous artist on the pro-napster side would be a good choice in your case. Notice the pro-napster list is about twice as long as the anti-napster list, though i suspect some bias there :-)

From the speech: Furthermore, it (Open Source Software) has inherent security risks and can force intellectual property into the public domain.
As opposed to Microsoft's approach to security documented here (Article from the Registry: "Microsoft tells U.S. Air Force to bug off).
With an attitude like this, he has no basis what so ever in talking about security risks!
-----------------

They say that "We want to become the Microsoft of handheld devices" but then what about this.

Doesn't claiming that you want to be the leader in a market, by 'becoming' one of your competitors in that same market imply that you have already lost?

http://http://www.theregister.co.uk/content/8/1843 4.html

Here's the scoop, beetsie.

It is called a merchant account.

These individuals could get their own merchant accounts from a PROVIDER and use open-source ecommerce software to automatically receive and process their own credit card payments. Paying only standard card commission fees. What if they don't own their own hardware, bandwidth, staff and capital pixies?If they didn't have their own server, they could use someone virtual server outfit with merchant services support built in, there are hundreds out there, including one from Yahoo Store.

My criticism isn't of the struggling content provider. I recognize their plights. You can bet that what Amazon current charges 15% for, someone else is going to offer for a lot less, and steal away whatever business Amazon does have by telling the various content players that they will process online donations for a fraction of the 15% that Amazon charges. Leaving Amazon yet again to search for a model that makes actual fiscal sense, before they run out of money.

My own business ran credit cards inhouse on a $900 PC running IC Verify with a dialup account ($19.95/a month). It could be run on a $400 PC today.

Amazon has made enough in commissions on Andrew Sullivan alone to pay for that PC and software and the dialup account. for a year. So the rest is gravy.

Ok, I got tired of staring at my 1040. It is incorrect that these rules were unconstitutional because:

1. They aren't laws, they're rules. I can't explain the distinction well because IANAL.

2. The Occupational Safety and Health Administration was created by an act of Congress in 1970 and was given the authority to create workplace safety rules. Congress gave the executive branch the power in the Occupational Safety and Health Act of 1970. See Section 6 where Congress authorizes the department to promulgate rules through publishing in the Federal Register (it took me a while to cut through the legalese). Congress often does things like this because if we had to legislate everything under the sun (like the maximum chlorine levels in drinking water, how much and what kinds of pesticide is allowed to be sprayed on food, how often to inspect slaughterhouses for disease, what drugs should be approved, etc.), nothing would get done. But it was Congress that gave the executive this authority, and Congress could take it away if it chose.

Besides, Congress did a smart thing and passed a law stating that Congress could repeal any regulation passed by the executive branch if both houses of Congress agree. So whether or not you agree with the rules, Clinton didn't tear through the Constitution to get them done. Even though this wasn't done in Congress, the law (OSHA 1970) requires that there be ample opportunity for public input, debate and review and there was in this case. A president couldn't use the OHSA legally to outlaw MP3's (Congress may have given the President authority in another area, but not here) but he can use it to implement safety rules. Executive orders are sweeping and Clinton abused them when Congress wouldn't let him have his way, but they really don't allow a President to do *whatever* he wants. There is a mechanism in the system to get regulations overturned in the legislative branch, and laws passed by Congress ALWAYS trump an executive order. I don't worry too much about the constitutional ramifications of the ergonomics rules.

The control system used is built by InnovationFIRST. It consists of three Basic Stamp 2X controllers where one is user programmable. These are remote controlled robots but sensor input can be taken from the robot and used to preform certain tasks (for instance, several robots could "autobalance" on this year's bridge).

For more information on FIRST, the following websites might be of interest.

• FIRST's web site
• Alstom & RIT & Edison Tech - Team 73 - my team
• Chief Delphi - Delphi & Pontiac High School - Team 47 - the web site for team 47 also provides message boards and photo galleries used by many FIRSTers
• FIRST Robotics.net - provides pictures of many robots
• InnovationFIRST - makers of the control system we use

Matt Leese
Team Leader
Team 73

"...linux is monolithic, and I agree that microkernels are nicer..."

"...From a theoretical (and aesthetical) standpoint linux looses..."

Thank you.

quotes

Interesting, and I'll have to check it out.

Lately I've been looking at CrystalSpace for a cross platform game environment.

Its a cross-platform GPL 3D Engine that rocks.

Warning: The whole structure is a major state of flux right now, as the codebase is in the process of moving into a much more modular and extensible state, and its probably 6-12 months to the 1.0 release (although the 0.18 release is very nice to play with).

The DirectX Redering library is undergoing a complete revision (from supporting DX6.0 to DX8.0, and cleaning up/speeding up the code).

It also includes a cross platform GUI/Widget set which was really neat to me since it means that an application can look the same no matter where it runs, since everything is within the app. Don't let the fact that its billed as a 3D engine fool you, its alot more then just that :)

(and it has a rather active/friendly/helpfull mailing list that you can join at SourceForge)

http://www.microsoft.com&item=q209355@http://32863 01978/Q2%3093%35%35%2e%61%73%70

Just my own tastes of course, YMMV:

Check out www.ninjatune.net. Lots of good flash microsites created for their artists. The Amon Tobin microsite is especially good. Coldcut (the guys who started Ninjatune) have also released a software package called VJamm, which is used to sequence video clips to make music. Apparently it can be used in realtime to great effect, although I've never tried it.

Also check out the flash site for Requiem For A Dream. Makes more sense if you've seen the movie, but a very impressive site either way.

Fuck dance. Lets art.

We get into business too. The Professor who led this project has set up a spin-off company from the University of Bath (with $9mn of seed funding). There's a story about it on uk.internet.com.

if [ -e bombdropping ];
then
mkdir /jail ; chroot /jail deran9ed
echo "it could happen to you too"
else
for i in `find /somewhere/over/the/rainbow -name deran9ed
do
wget -U spooks www.google.com/query?deran9ed
mv $i /jail
done
fi

German Federal Armed Forces banish Microsoft programs from fear of US secret services the Foreign Office and the German Federal Armed Forces safety gaps want to conclude. Instead of American software on the national computers in the future German programs will operate.

In computers, which are used in sensitive areas, no software from Microsoft is to be used anymore. After realizations of German security authorities the American espionage service NSA has encoded data all relevant source codes of the US firm and can read in such a way. In order to protect secrets, the Ministry of Defense sets Siemens and Telekom therefore on encoding techniques of the domestic companies.

The Foreign Office reset meanwhile its plan to introduce video conferences with its representations abroad. Undersecretary of state Gunter Pleuger experienced with a Telekom presentation in Berlin at the beginning of March that all satellite transmission ways for technical reasons run over the American city Denver in the Federal State Colorado.

Pleuger was too uncertain the detour via the USA. " then we can hold our conferences directly in Langley ", spoettelte a Pleuger coworker. In Langley (Virginia) the American secret service CIA resides.

but in my opinion to classify these volcanoes as "active" is to jump the gun. For one thing, we have never been there to label them "extinct".

There certainly may be the possibility of exploiting Mars' remaining internal heat for heating and energy needs, but first -- let's get there. :)

We have other resources we can use in the meantime until we determine whether or not areothermal energy (thank you Kim Stanley Robinson) is worth exploiting.

I saw this a while ago and thought the same thing - 'cept I was wrong.

"equivalent" PC100 memory with DDR is called PC1600. I believe PC133 is 2100, and MUCH more expensive.

I've been quoted $150 for an Asus A7V133 board and about the same (a little higher) for a 128MB PC2100 DIMM. On top of that, the CPUs with the 133FSBs are still around $250 and it's the slowest 133FSB Athlon CPU I have access to (Southern Ontario).

Tom's has a pretty good set of articles on the whole DDR situation. I've read around 5-10% overall speed increases with DDR memory.

The University of Connecticut, while known for it's basketball team throughout the country, is also 1 of 2 Carnegie-Mellon Research One Institutions in the northeastern United States that is a public university. Here's what our student conduct code has to say about academic dishonesty:

Part VI: Academic Integrity in Undergraduate Education and Research, Section A, Para 1 states:
"A fundamental tenet of all educational institutions is academic honesty; academic work depends upon respect for and acknowledgement of the research and ideas of others. Misrepresenting someone else"s work as one's own is a serious offense in any academic setting and it will not be condoned."
Para 2 states, quoted: "Academic misconduct includes, but is not limited to,"..."presenting, as one's own, the ideas or words of another for academic evaluation; doing unauthorized academic work for which another person will receive credit or be evaluated; and presenting the same or substantially the same papers or projects in two or more courses without the explicit permission of the instructors involved."

Research is based on taking pre-published information and using that background knowledge to explore and create new conclusions and ideas. In computer science, as in any other science, research is primarily involved in creating a new hypothesis, and the majority of the time spent in research is building the experiment to test the hypothesis. This isn't a lab course; experiments are created from scratch, since your experiments are original. About 75% of the time spent in research is in the lab trying to collect data. In computer science, data is collected by writing programs. However, it is logical that if someone has already created a protocol for an experiment and taken years to perfect the experiment, why should you, as someone trying to explore *new* ideas, be forced to recreate the wheel? Thus, you search in the literature, and you find that so-and-so had a similar setup and they used a set of components to build it. Because the best science is based on quantitative data, parameters are published, *for the express purpose of repeatability*.

The scientific method states that for a conclusion to gain acceptance based on experimental data, the experiment must be repeatable in the exact way it was published, and that if I would to go to the lab tommorrow and replicate an experiment using all the published parameters, I should get similar results.

In computer science, experiments are in the form of running analytical computer programs. Thus, in order to prevent reinventing the wheel, you can and SHOULD use pre-published code. However, YOU MUST GIVE CREDIT WHERE CREDIT IS DUE. Since almost everyone here on /. is a proponent of open-source, I think you can easily identify with crediting authors of code when you use them in your own projects. Published scientific data is NOT copyrighted, that is, you do NOT have to ask for permission to use the data. This is why, in EVERY formal paper, any information that was not the author's own ideas is cited. A typical research paper has around 30 citations or more; even background information needs to be citated. Otherwise, in addition to credit, how is accountibility and authenticity ensured? If I don't say where I learned that newly discovered fact X, and someone who doesn't know much about fact X reads my paper, they won't know if it's really true, of if I'm just pulling stuff out of my ass.

Here's the link (or http://www.space.com/businesstechnology/technology /space_gear_13.html) - the previous link didn't work for some reason...

The POWER3 processor is used in a number of RS/6000 and a E-server p-series system: The 44P 170 desktop system The 44P 270 deskside system Three types of SP node The E-server p-series p640 server These systems range from 1-2 processors (44P-170) to a 16 way system (nighthawk II). The p640 is probably the most interesting system, as it is rack mounted and support up to 4 processors. All in all quite a few powerful systems to choose from. The more options the merrier!

There are times when you'd rather not have your email forwarded. That's what copyright is all about and in most cases it should deter others from re-distributing private correspondence.

whatiscopyright

So who want to inform the australian government...

First things first, he experiment to which you refer is the g-2 experiment at Brookhaven ; it is an experiment to measure the anomolous magnetic moment of the muon (which is a fermion, not a boson).

The anomolous magnetic moment of the muon is a physical quantity predicted by the SM (a prediction which is itself a paramaterization of other measured quantities, and thus has some uncertanty). The g-2 experiment yielded a value which is 2.5 standard deviations away from the SM prediction.

This is a good thing for physicists (specifically the ones at Fermilab)! For one thing, no serious physicist has ever believed that the standard model is a complete description of nature. There are aspects of the universe for which the standard model cannot account (for example the obvious matter-antimatter asymmetry...).

The really exciting thing about the g-2 result and it's potential impact on the physics about to happen at Fermilab is that it is highly suggestive of new physics (i.e. supersymmetry... susy).

Think of the progress of scientific thought in the past 600 years. Newton's gravitation is a good theory; it makes predictions which mach quite well with observation (experiment). However, it is incorrect... along came Einstien's theory of gravitation, (General Relativity, which itself is a good theory, but not the correct one) which reproduces all of the predictions of Newtonian gravity, and and "does one better" by getting right what Newton got wrong (i.e. precession of the orbit of Mercury; the deflection of light by massive objects...).

So we have the standard model, which is by far the most successful physical model in human history. Yet we know it's wrong. But untill we find a better description of nature, it'll have to do.

The standard model is far from dead. It will evolve, in some sense, into a better description of nature.

Then I'd just have to update the blocked list with whatever it turned out they were hitting the most.

"As far as I am concerned, the code I have written for this software can be used freely for any purpose. Any derived versions of this software must be clearly marked as such, and if the derived work is incompatible with the protocol description in the RFC file, it must be called by a name other than 'ssh' or 'Secure Shell'."

This would pretty clearly seem to imply that as long as OpenSSH was creating a protocol-complaint product that they were welcome to use the name ssh. Otherwise it would have said something like "SSH is the trademark of SSHC, INC, and may not be used without our permission, period".

Unless I am missing something here, it would seem as if Ylonen pretty clearly authorized other compatible and derived products to use the name 'SSH'. And once that permission was granted, it can never - at least not if we want to 'do the right thing' - be taken back.

Claim your namespace.

The article mentions Sega dropped NVIDIA in favor of PowerVR for producing their console's graphics processor. What's interesting is PowerVR is now trying to move in on the PC graphics card industry itself with the Evil Kyro, which uses a tile-based rendering system; anyone know how similiar that is to what NVIDIA tried with quadratic surfaces?
--

Heheh, reminds me a lot of Cat Scan, a site dedicated to stuffing your kitty into a flatbed and hitting the scan button.

There are some pretty hilarious pictures from the original contest that started it all (near the bottom of the page).

With Evil Empire shares trading at about 50% less than their 52 week high is this the end of the world as we know it?

Check out these fruitcakes they're quoting:

"It's something the intelligence, law-enforcement and military communities are really struggling to deal with," Ben Venzke of the cyberintelligence company iDEFENSE told the paper. "

ok, head on over to www.idefense.com, browse a bit, find some speeches, dig out the tasty quotes:


"We already know that some 30 countries are working on offensive information warfare programs and the principal target for each is the United States. We know, too, that if a US business buys hardware or software from such countries as Russia, China and France, there is a very good chance that they will be infected by bugs or various kinds. We also know that every day hundreds of American companies are attacked through cyberspace and that billions of dollars are lost through theft and blackmail.
"

"
For example, no American intelligence agency effectively mines open source data and shares it across federal agencies and with the private sector. Yet open source data could be a huge national asset. Real reform might mean the creation of a Central Analytical Agency that could collate and analyze all open source data and distribute it via the web to its customer base in the private and public sectors. Only secret intelligence would be the responsibility of the existing intelligence community. Not only would this create a significant and profitable national asset, but it would eliminate wasteful duplication in the intelligence community."


Read the whole thing, it's beautiful.

They even get to speak before congress now and then.

Good thing they don't have a vested interest in the whole thing.

At least they got hacktivist right.

Now you certainly aren't going to be watching Windows Media under linux...

Actually, the Windows Media Format is properly known as ASF - Advanced/Active Streaming Format. Microsoft claims the codec is open and documented - which is true, in an MS like way...i.e, without a licensing agreement and NDA, the only publicly avaliable documents descrive ASF version 2. This would bea good thing if 100% of the content found on the Internet wasn't in ASF 1 format, which is is.

Luckily some smart folk have reverse engineered and documented the ASF 1 format and are using it to make the avifile project (which currently plays DivXs and ASF using thin layer of Wine to implement the Win32 avifile API) actually implement its codecs natively.

This is a good thing. So help them out.

And don't make a player. We have enough. Port more codecs and fix the existing players.

It seems that CmdrTaco knows very well the distinction between Vapor and Non-Vapor products, but he is simply biased depending on what camp he is defending in his posting comments. His damnation about placing the Linux 2.4 kernel on a vaporware list by saying he'd been running it for many months is equivalent to the beta-testers that are running the new Nintendo consoles. Thanks for the wonderful lesson Taco, but I'm still confused as to where you stand.