Slashdot Mirror

Wouldn't have been better to post this when there was actually news to report? Simply because someone has an idea and backs it up with a webpage does not a headline make.

This is one of the weirder things about /. -- like the Ogg Vorbis open-source audio compression posts... They posted that a beta was scheduled, but submissions when the beta was actually released were declined.

I've seen this happen many times now, where a headline states that something cool is *going* to happen, but no posts when the thing *actually* happens.

Have you been visiting that slackware site again?

That's all hooey. Check out this APS What's New report, in particular:

But Science magazine (25 June 99) disclosed that the crystals used were not even grown in space, but in Australia. Space-grown crystals can be distinguished only by their cost.

Ok, time for a reality check:

1) VA has yet to turn a profit. Infact, they're still seriously in debt. This "partnership" creates a dependence on VA financial situation. If VA goes down the tubes (as nearly 80% of .com companies are expected to do within the next 1-2 years) after burning through their cash reserves, what happens to MySQL?

2) VA has absolutely no policy in place to protect the work of users who house their projects on SourceForge. Infact, Linux Weekly News (as independent a source as you can get nowadays..they arent owned.) ran an article nearly 5 months ago pointing this out. SourceForge's privacy policy amounted to a one-line "We'ere working on it" statement. 5 months later, it still hasn't changed. Right now, from a legal standpoint, nothing prevents VA's management from picking and choosing from the collective ideas of 37,000 people, and nearly 6,000 projects in development, putting full-time employees on the task of replicating the work of the volunteers, and consequently leaving them in the dust without a legal leg to stand on.

This includes MySQL.

You can read LWN's two articles on SourceForge's lack of a security policy here and here

Relevant links:

Press Release, "VA Linux Forms Strategic Alliance With MySQL; MySQL Becomes Completely Open Source And Hosts Project On SourceForge

VA Linux Shareholder To Sell 1.55M Shares

Jon Richards files SEC 114 to dump restricted shares

IDC Report on VA's 5% Marketshare

And for fun, a story on VA's stock performance..or lack thereof..

Those are the facts. Educate yourself, folks.

Bowie J. Poag

Quoting Google's About Page, google is applying for a patent on it's search technique:

Google has revolutionized searching on the web with its patent-pending PageRankTM technology. PageRank leverages the structural nature of the web, which is defined by the way in which any web page can link to any other web page, instantly, directly, and without an intermediary. In a sense, this link structure automatically democratizes the Internet. It eliminates hierarchy and enables information and ideas to flow unimpeded from site to site.

1. You can make screenshots of movies on DVD through many means.

2. DeCSS does not help the process. The means of taking screenshots do not require the use of DeCSS.

3. The current case against Eric Corley is not about copyright infringement, but is a test case for the MPAA's pet anit-circumvention law, the DMCA (aka 1201).

4. It is not illegal to traffic in a circumvention device that has non-circumvention uses.

5. DeCSS has non-circumvention uses, such as copying files and bashing region protection. (but that is a copyright violation you say? Unfortunately for you, that's for a court to decide.)

6. The MPAA has not established how a person gets or is denied authorization to access a movie.

7. Until they do, DeCSS may not be circumvention at all.

Care to address these points? You might have a hard time, because the MPAA sure can't.

(of course, we still aren't exactly sure what NSA Key is really used for)

The PGP signing is to make sure nobody can hijack the URL and send bogus images. There is no encryption. Try this: take the XML page, remove the signature (between SIG and /SIG) , run the rest of the page through PGP with the key that a previous poster pulled out of dssagent.exe, and they *should* match. Nothing really secret here.

• Edit the INI file to set the interval to something like 60 seconds
• Fire up a packet sniffer like Ethereal
• Launch the DSSAgent

According to the original story, existing Helios users will be able to upgrade the OS on their PDA to linux once it's available. They will be able to use their existing programs and data, so I'm guessing that means they may still be able to use their current Windows tools that interface with the Helio. It also said the GUI will be based on Wwindows or Microwindows. The current OS for it uses Jot for the handwriting recognition (Isn't that what WinCE uses?).

I don't know about you, but it didn't take me long to get used to Graffiti when I was playing around with my friend's Palm V. There was something on slashdot a long time ago about an alternate handwriting method for the Palm that was supposedly faster.

Use Ramwatch to find good prices on Mac Ram:

http://www.macresource.pa ir.com/mrp/ramwatch.shtml

Judging from the >90% accuracy mentioned on the AMDL product info page I have to assume they're using a monoclonal ab (does anyone really use polyclonal for anything other than deactivation anymore?). In that case, how the heck are they selling the entire kit (which includes ab, enzyme, substrate, etc.) for $100? I'm paying over $300 for monoclonal beta-catenin ab's from Trans-Labs! (Given, they're FITC-labeled, but...)

PS - right on about the constant GATTACA references.)

What about a Handspring Visor? I have one and love it, it's cheap (relitively speaking) and it has the Springboard port. Right now there are a number of companies working on wireless Springboard modules. For instance there is Xircom, who is in the process of building a wireless modem, bluetooth modem and an ethernet module. According to their site, they should be released later this summer. Innogear also has some cool products for the Springboard available and under development.

In the meantime if you want movie times and maps there are some apps for Palm OS that you can install. For movie times there is a little program called Showtimes that allows you to download movie times for you favorite theaters from Yahoo! and stores them in a database, on your Visor or Palm, that you can access very easily. It's an awesome program and it is free!! As far as maps go, there is software available from Mapblast.com, called PocketBlast, that allows you to import maps to your handheld device of choice.

I didn't need the OOP theory (having written a book myself that taught OOP to people without any prior programming experience). I didn't need the Perl introduction (having just forced myself to learn perl after avoiding it for being the blight of a PL that it is (albeit useful) in order to change slash). So what did it it offer?

• Using Perl packages as objects? Nope. Got that from the Ostrich.
• Subroutines as methods? Nope. Second thing I did (after twinking a calendar package to use slash's user table and cookies) was create a Slash::Sql wrapper around the "do/execute/fetchrow" nonsense of DBI.
• Persistence? Nope. Third thing I did was make a Slash::Object class, which could read itself from an Sql database, and had an AUTOLOAD corresponding to the columns in the table.
• Multimethods? Okay, this was slightly useful. I caught from skimming the book that there was a multimethod package on cpan. Went there, did a search, then did perl -MCPAN -e "install Class::Multimethod" and I was done.

Perl's syntax is often opaque (especially if you didn't already know all the Unix utilities, shell scripting langs and programming langs it is based on). It ispowerful, but this book didn't quite seem to get it all. Closures, non-class-based inheritance (a la Self), or even some more useful examples? (the fourth thing I did was make a Slash::Handler class to interface to Apache, automatically placing query args or form input into fields on itself - subclass and override "handle" to decide what to do) (fifth thing was a subclass of Slash::Handler to use Text::Metatext to generate the page).

A nice enough book, but I think I'm gonna have to write one myself before I see one I really like :-)

Okay, if you're reading this, I dug and found something.

Here we are :-).

But still, it would be nice if they could go in the main distribution (because KDE, Konqueror, etc. is cool and installing it should be at least as easy as running it).

how about this?

Sorry!

The iChoose Online Savings Alert(TM) is not available for use with Netscape browsers.

The iChoose Savings Alert(TM) is currently available for computers running Windows 95/98/NT and Microsoft Internet Explorer 4.0 or later. Our development team is working on a version for Netscape browsers.

IMHO, the real issue should be that even after all of our backlash, censorware still exsits. The problem is not with CyberPatrol (per say), but with a culture that beleves in "protecting kids" from the evils of the world. I urge everyone to read a great article wired had about this is issue 4.07, "The Rights of Kids in the Digital Age"

What we need is a shift in how media mougles, politicians, parents, teachers, everyone -- see's the internet and it's impact upon youth. If there is no market for censorware, then we won't have to debate it anymore.

That's just my $0.02

Just because it's more expensive and brand new doesn't make it better. These boards all support AGP, UDMA66 and PC133 SDRAM. The Apollo Pro 133 is arguably the best chipset for PIII motherboards (The good old BX chipset is still faster at 100 Mhz bus, but you have no upgrade path to 133Mhz bus. see here). The fact that Apollo Pro boards are so cheap is a happy coincidence. Also, for users on a budget, an Apollo Pro 133 board and a PIII-550E is an easy (and reliable) overclock to 733. Athlon overclocking is a little more challenging to say the least.

As for Pricewatch, are you really naive enough to believe the lowest prices there? The only reason they're so low is because they charge $20 or more for shipping.

Ok First off this mother board is ment to be mounted in a backplane chassis for industrial application such as motion control for CNC machines (but usually FANUC controlers are used) or robotics setups, as well as data aquisition. Look in the back of any Design News magazine and youll see all of thoes cards that are supposed to be shoved into the backplanes. As far as being used in servers, they were never ment for such use. They are basicly for industrial embedded systems running QNX perhaps to run a machine shop or plant. Another thing that simply isnt possible to do with these bords it to issert them into other computers as an upgrade or put multiple cards in one unit for sort of super computer because youll just fry the card and computer. The card is a mother board and can you take the pci bus of one mother board and lets say pulg it directly into anothers? That would easily spell disaster. If you want to see other good industrial and embedded computers and solid state disks go here to Advantech , they have a great line of sold state disks that range from 3.5" solid state IDE disks to a little 32MB solid disk that plugs right into the motherboards ide port and just sticks out about an inch from the connector. great for building embedded Linux, BeIA , or QNX devices. Hey anyone here ever think of a pocket sized linux server check out this Advantech device :) Holds 144MB flash cards for bootstrap has 10/100 ethernet, 32 MB ram and 4MB vga and ide in a 2.5 hdd form factor. Definaly some awesome linux potential as a micro server that can whoop ass!

This is rather surprising.

Digitization is a massive trend all over the world. Just have a look at the home page of Bibliotheca Univeralis Project (affiliated to the G7). Among other things, you can see that almost every big national library has set up some kind of digitization project, including the LoC.

The most impressive effort to date seems to be the Gallica server at the Bibliothèque Nationale de France : 15 million pages on line, most of them as images or PDF documents (I'm sure you all dreamed of reading a XVth century bible in Middle French, didn't you ?). All documents that are copyright-free are publicly available.

I didn't check the LoC project, but the name (American Memory) sounds rather self-explaining.

Digitization is not the future : it is the present. As usual, computer scientists have paved the way (on-line papers, etc.) have paved the way, but the rest of the world are catching on.

Although Mr Billington's comments about the importance of the physical support do make sense (if you techno-junkies don't understand this, just trust me: they do ;o), using this understandable fear as a rationale for rejecting digitization altogether is plain nonsense.

There needs not be any opposition between computers and good old paper codex. They simply are different tools for different purposes, not to mention the fact that transition from electronic to physical form is a common task even among technologically oriented people (ever heard about those little boxes they call "printers" ?)

Thomas
PS: My opinion: the real reason is, they don't want to spend money in it (alt: they don't have any money to spend in it). What do you think ?

In case you didn't notice on the site... Pinkerton offers free email accounts such as "user@waveamerica.com"

I got mine...invasionofprivacy@waveamerica.com"

Go get yours HERE!

Which is all well and good, but SGML (and hence HTML) doesn't use a Unicode character set. It uses 7-bit ASCII. When you send pages with those sorts of characters through something like the W3C's HTML validation program, they show up as errors.

There have been a few questions posted so far, and not a whole lot of answers, so here's my humble attempt.

(1) What is auditing?

"Auditing", in this context, is the process of keeping detailed records of system activity. This can be as simple as recording when people log in and logout, or as involved as keeping a record of every single command line run by every user.

(2) What is C2 level auditing?

The DoD defines a number of classificating that have to do with the security of a computer system. Each level has specific requirements that must be met (and, in fact, even if a system meets those requirements it still needs to be officially certified).

The C2 security level is (he said unauthoritatively) the minimum classification defined by the DoD (followed by B1, B2, B3, and A1). This defines a number of specific events (and information for each event) that must be audited.

You can find a list of auditing requirements for all the above security levels by reading
A Guide to Understand Audit in Trusted Systems, published by the National Computer Security Center.
--

Right here. Scroll down a bit for Pi, musical compositions based on pi (or down a little bit more for "Two Works"). No kidding. This is from an underground Seattle musician, so you'll be the only person in town with it :) I heard it a few years ago; tis good. Odd, yes, but good.

The Register has an article on the 1GHz Athlon and a quote from a FAQ : Question "How did AMD reach 1GHz so much earlier than your projected introduction date?" Answer "AMD's process and manufacturing abilities, coupled with the AMD Athlon(TM) processor's advanced seventh-generation architecture has enabled AMD to reach this significant industry milestone, and successfully enable a leading manufacturer to bring 1GHz AMD Athlon systems to the marketplace in March." Unfortunally the link The Register has doesn't work, and I can't find the FAQ anymore.

The Register has an article on the 1GHz Athlon and a quote from a FAQ :
Question
"How did AMD reach 1GHz so much earlier than your projected introduction date?"

Answer
"AMD's process and manufacturing abilities, coupled with the AMD Athlon(TM) processor's advanced seventh-generation architecture has enabled AMD to reach this significant industry milestone, and successfully enable a leading manufacturer to bring 1GHz AMD Athlon systems to the marketplace in March."

Unfortunally the link The Register has doesn't work, and I can't find the FAQ anymore.

According to Netcraf t, linuxdoc.org runs on a solaris box. "www.linuxdoc.org is running Apache/1.3.4 (Unix) PHP/3.0.6 mod_perl/1.17 on Solaris" Can somebody confirm or deny this? Huge

Check this one out:crazy background

True, Open Source is not equal to GPL, but it is a superset. If you are going to talk about Open Source on Slashdot, you won't be speaking the same language unless you are talking about the Open Source Definition. If Open Source ever means anything besides this, then I'm going to start only calling it Free Software.

Fox News reported the story, not CNN. The Fox News story quotes CNN spokeswoman Edna Johnson, "It wasn't a hacker. We were not hacked into. Have you ever participated in an online chat? Anyone can come in and register and participate on site. This person was registered and participating in the chat. He was a prankster. They give themselves a user name."

The title of this story, "CNN.com Chat With President Clinton Infiltrated by 'Prankster'," starts off reasonably enough, until you get to the last two paragraphs of the first section. Then the FoxNews - not CNN - editors-that-be (or somebody) start hyping the DDoS connection.

Q: What do I love most about shoddy journalism?
A: Unnamed "experts".

I generally don't read AC posts on Slashdot, but you calling FoxNews "the authorities" is the functional equivalent of me calling a F1rst p0ster a Slashdot editor. (Too bad you can't set comment thresholds when you watch TV!)

Like you, I hate it when case (2) occurs: if you (i.e., CNN) didn't think it through, you shouldn't get upset when it blows up in your face.

But let's not use the erroneously sourced arguments of the things-as-they-are crowd. That's how laws like UCITA get passed, and how Jack Valenti gets his way.

Theres something I'm interested in, but haven't had a chance to use for real (I've used the demo java applets). Quickwrite. Its very good for limited space input devices. I'd estimate the min space for it would be around 1"x1". (but that might be a bit difficult to use). Its not really good for long winded input. One handed, and can be used by left or right handed. Pretty fast too. It relies on the movement of a "pen" from the center, to a side/corner(s), and back to the center. eg center->left->center is 'T' (I think). and center->up&left->center is 'H' (I think). Basically, check out the site. If i ever get myself a PDA (personal digital assistant), I'll use that interface.

---

It may be a process of beating it into shape rather then careful artistic planning, but the end result seems to be the same.

Example - X Windows, an old system designed for the amazing purpose of running remote applications through a GUI! However, it is now bundled with every distro as a regular GUI for use on your own computer. So, X programmers have to connect to an X server, and jump through local loopback hoops to get a simple window open and working. (not a programmer, so correct me if I'm spouting hot air). The Berlin Consortium, faced with the daunting task of making a modern windowing system for Linux, have struggled along slowly, 'cause not that many people want to code for them when X works 'fine'.

Second, it fosters an almost Darwinian approach to software development. Many ideas are put forward, and the best selected.

The competitive struggles of Open Source projects differ slightly from the other Darwinian selection going on in the software industry today. In a commercial setting, the motivation for improving your product is making money by attracting new customers. As we all know, marketing can also accomplish this goal if your product is 'adequate'. But with OSS, the reason to improve your product is just for the sake of improving it! Beautiful! In the commercial setting, competitors trying to steal your marketshare drive development. In OSS, dissatisfied users and perfectionists drive development. SO - Why is it good that Gnome and KDE are doing exactly the same thing? Especially when KDE does it so much better?

You don't put forward any arguments for either of your points: BeOS "better designed" then Linux

It's hard for a sunday fanatic like me to realize that not too many people are going to agree with my opinions without proof. Okay, the way I see it, Linux is based on the UNIX philosophy. "Good programs don't die, they just migrate". Or something. Portable code is the objective, and the speed problems "will be taken care of by next year's machine". That's a Good Thing (tm), but it doesn't lend itself to really tight, slick projects! The BeOS has

• Universal data translators, so programs don't need to concern themselves with decoding PNGs or whatever...
• Massive multithreading, so that a second CPU gives you a 99% increase in processing power, and so that the system and programs, if they're well designed are *always* responsive until a crash /:)
• A GUI with a (fast) Alpha channel, an anti-aliased font display engine, full OpenGL support (pending hardware rendering from chipset makers), and the ability to change resolutions/refresh rates/color depths on the fly.
• Journaling file system with full MIME extension support, yes, I know, ReiserFS, XFS, blah... :)
• Device drivers that load without asking, take up only a few hundred K of space (even video drivers), and can play that funky music.
• And finaly, the oft-touted "Boots in 20 seconds", which is more of an indicator of the level of "togetherness" than a virtue in itself. Except that it takes about as much time to boot from a system running Windows as, say, Photoshop.

Better this time around? Hope you're still following up on this comment. I recognise your sig, so I'm sure you're very active here...

THE EXECUTABLES FOR ALL PLATFORMS WILL NOT BE AVAILABLE FOR DOWNLOAD UNTIL AFTER CHRISTMAS. This means that if you want to play on the mac or linux, don't pick up a copy of the pc version and expect to download the other executables.

We are doing this at the request of the distributors. The fear is that everyone will just grab a windows version, and the separate boxes will be ignored. A lot of companies are going to be watching the sales figures for the mac and linux versions of Q3 to see if the platforms are actually worth supporting. If everyone bought a windows version and the other boxes sold like crap in comparison, that would be plenty of evidence for most executives to can any cross platform development.

I know there are a lot of people that play in both windows and linux, and this may be a bit of an inconvenience in the short term, but this is an ideal time to cast a vote as a consumer.

Giga Vice President Rob Enderle said in late September that Dell had made mistakes on orders, missed delivery dates, failed to fulfill terms of agreements and showed "arrogant disregard" for some newer customers. "

The story from Nov. is here, and some Zdnet follow-up here.

With their support being so poor across the board, I don't know if I would purchase again from them. Good for Linux exposure, but I don't think it will be all that good for Dell.

I think Dave Winer has already pulled off something akin to your idea --I couldn't find that meta-log, but there is this weblog monitor on his site and of course there is the weblog portal and there is a portal of weblog portals (meta^3 anybody?).

Of course the problem with meta^2 and above is that you have to group the content by well... content --my Greek-Turkish weblog has nothing to do with Slashdot although it uses a port of the Slash code.

engineers never lie; we just approximate the truth.

If specific site or specific page blah.blah.com/ blah.htm is disallowed because it is a specific topic or content, then I feel this would be censorship. So it's more based on the detail, rather than the generic action.

However, there are some organizations, such as the American Board of Medical Specialties (ABMS) that allow you to buy their directory for a reasonable sum, but if you need the data in an electronic form, like we do, they charge you, quite literally an arm and a leg. The CD that we bought (actually, rent, as they want the CD back), cost at least 36 times that of the bound version of the data.

Even all the data with their own GUI on it is approximately $1500 (i am making an educated guess), and that data cannot be easily exported to a usable format (only 200 lines at a time, and with 600,000 records, it's rough). My question is this: "Which is cheaper, the development time for this GUI, or to put the data in comma separated value files?" Surely, it is the latter. I assume it boils down to the fact that whomever controls the data, holds the upper hand.

http://sciences.homepage.com/miller. html

Enjoy!

Which is here.

It basically includes "do the work for us for free, and we will take it for us, and it won't even be stealing because the work will be ours, not yours". It is nowhere near open source, it is nowhere near fair either, and I really wonder why the people at blackdown have accepted to sign such a thing.

And this is bad for real free software because of the "why bothering writing a free java sdk, blackdown's one is good enough" effect.

OG.

It seems every X11 window managers' design heavily incorporates the mouse as a necessary tool for window management. I even get this impression from reading snippets of POSIX specs. Here's a (very botched) paraphrase, or at least, the impression I got when learning about POSIX window manager recommendations:

"The window manager should not intercept any key bindings... they should all be passed to the application and the mouse should be used for windowing."

Anyway, I have, since I first booted linux and fired up X, always thought this was STUPID. The one thing that I see Windows having over Mac OS or linux window managers was the common, global key-mapping that comes from a tidbit of smart thinking at one point in the design (or stealing somebody elses' idea) and then the subsequent forcing of all the applications that run within your operating environment to adopt "similar" keybindings and look-and-feels.

I took key bindings for granted in Windows. Say, in the middle of anything else, I suddenly had the urge for some Slashdot in a maximized explorer window.

Ctrl-Esc R iexplore [enter] [F4] www.slashdot.org [enter] Alt-[SPACE] x Done. Or maybe size it a bit and move it some. Alt-[SPACE] S (arrow keys) [Enter]. And the cordless mouse is still stuck somewhere in the couch cushions with dead batteries.

Before I figured out that there were window managers that supported something other than focus-follows-mouse, I almost developed tennis elbow, slapping that rat around to keep my focus where i wanted it, and the windows raised where I wanted them. very frustrating.

I moved to BlackBox, because it was nice and speedy. But I still had no pop-up root menu on the keyboard. (I kept telling myself I'd learn C++ and contribute a patch)

later I moved to Windowmaker, and found out why people swear by that. Its neat, theme-able, and nicely configurable. But something about it still irked me. Maybe I preferred the simplicity of BB.

three days ago, i slapped Sawmill on my machine and I think I've found a new love. It's all configurable in the same way emacs and scwm are, very modular, and it looks all pretty, very theme-able too. Not too bad in terms of speed, either. It's not blackbox (I loved BB's responsiveness) but it works well, and you can BIND stuff. With a wussy GUI configuration editor, even! If you want. wow.

So now i have a nice pretty desktop, that plays nice with gnome (even though I don't use gnome much), yet is not quite as hungry as Enlightenment or KDE, and supports lispy customizations (I don't know it well enough to code yet, but i can see the ability of the program to expand). I've got alt-space mapped to the window controls, ctrl-esc mapped to a popup app list, and f12 mapped to the root menu. So now i can, once again, sit on the couch across the room with the cordless 'board and have nearly-full control over my work environment. All I have to do is figure out how to configure it to be able to size the windows with the keys. That and implement selection, copy, and paste using shift and arrow keys. :-P

Maybe the whole system is flawed and maybe Berlin will work more to my liking. Man, i wish i already knew how to code. Then i'd just go FIX all this stuff, instead of bitching about it, eh? ;) (Helping berlin or any other OSS project to completion would be hella cool too.)

Good luck, jacobian, in your search for the "right" configuration.

They're legal Unicode.

HTML 4.0 and later uses Unicode as its character set, Unicode being an 16-bit character set in which you can write most human languages. Unicode is a superset of the 8-bit ISO-Latin (which in turn is a superset of 7-bit ASCII), the character set of HTML 3.2 and previous versions. It also has some nice things like typographic characters that aren't in ISO-Latin (m-dashes, curved quotes, and so forth) and some math characters.

The upshot of all this is that if a browser doesn't support Unicode, it'll still work with documents that use it...as long as those documents don't stray outside the first 8 bits. If they do, the resulting character will show up as however the browser handles indeterminate characters. Your browser gets the credit and/or blame for this.

Uhhh, not only is the site not secured by SSL, the results are displayed on the site in clear text.

The following trace is from my IPLing Linux on Princeton's VM box yesterday. I don't have a root file system set up yet, so it bombs kind of early. But you can see what the first part of the boot sequence looks like: (I've added <br> tags to preserve the formatting)

ipl 191
Linux version 2.2.1 (root@cheapo.rvdheij.iae.nl) (gcc version egcs-2.91.66 19990 314 (egcs-1.1.2 release)) #58 Tue Nov 23 15:31:32 CET 1999
SAPL booting from VMLINUX MODULE dated 991129 152545
Command line: root=/dev/mem
ramdisk_cmsfile=0191:root.disk
register eckd0 at major=60 i_dev=0
Device 9 is console (5, 1)
register eckd1 at major=60 i_dev=0
register eckd2 at major=60 i_dev=0
register eckd3 at major=60 i_dev=0
register eckd4 at major=60 i_dev=0
register eckd5 at major=60 i_dev=0
vm_load_ramdisk()
Failed to load ROOT DISK (rc=1)
exit vm_load_ramdisk()
trap init with storage key=0
enter time init
exit time init
vid3270_putcs 1 chars at (0,0):

vid3270_putcs 1 chars at (0,0):

vid3270_putcs 79 chars at (0,1):
Console: mono vid3270 80x24
Calibrating delay loop... 1710.49 BogoMIPS
trap init with storage key=6
Memory: 9264k available (524k code, 356k data, 32k init)
Init Ramdisk: 0k [00000000,00000000]
kmem_create: Illgl flg 500 - signal_queue
POSIX conformance testing by UNIFIX
i370_kernel_thread
i370_sys_clone flags=0xf00
i370_copy_thread, usp=0xa1fe8
i370_copy_thread: finished swapper pid=1 regs=000fc764
i370_sys_clone(): after do_fork, res=1
i370_kernel_thread(): return from clone, pid=1
task switch swapper/0 -> swapper/1 PSW 0x3680000 0x80014716 cpu 0
current sp=0xa2420 next sp=0xfc828
i370_sys_clone(): after do_fork, res=0
i370_kernel_thread(): return from clone, pid=0
Linux NET4.0 for Linux 2.2
Based upon Swansea University Computer Society NET3.039
i370_kernel_thread
i370_sys_clone flags=0xf00
i370_copy_thread, usp=0xfc5e0
i370_copy_thread: finished swapper pid=2 regs=000f888c
i370_sys_clone(): after do_fork, res=2
i370_kernel_thread(): return from clone, pid=2
Starting kswapd v 1.5
i370_kernel_thread
i370_sys_clone flags=0xf00
i370_copy_thread, usp=0xfc5e0
i370_copy_thread: finished swapper pid=3 regs=009de88c
i370_sys_clone(): after do_fork, res=3
i370_kernel_thread(): return from clone, pid=3
vid3270_putcs 1 chars at (0,0):

vid3270_putcs 79 chars at (0,1):
Console: switching to mono vid3270 80x24
Keyboard hardware init
pty: 256 Unix98 ptys configured
RAM disk driver initialized: 16 RAM disks of 4096K size
VFS: Cannot open root device 00:00
Kernel panic: VFS: Unable to mount root fs on 00:00
HCPGIR450W CP entered; disabled wait PSW 000A0000 8000DEAD

The next question is, why would you ever want to run Linux on the bare metal?

You wouldn't.

At least, not if you had a real S/390.

But for those of us who don't, or who find it inconvenient to get to one, there's Hercules.

So if Linux/390 runs, even poorly, under Hercules (i.e., on the bare iron), I don't have to either work under x3270 on an actual mainframe, nor do I have to build a cross-compiling GCC to do development and porting on the Linux/390 platform.

Of course it'd be nice if IBM would start distributing evaluation, software-only versions of VM so I could load VM on Hercules and then Linux under VM. But now I'm just fantasizing.

Adam

eToys.com

Another big push to the Langland's Program is a connection between Elliptic Modular Forms and group theory. The Monster Group's character table consists of linear combinations of coefficients from the Jacobi expansion of the elliptic modular function - this property is called Moonshine.
Nobody has the faintest idea why.

A pointless coincidence - both links above point to a computer called 'shimura'.

Sure, we'll have no more Odd Days after today, but we've had so many of them over the course of our lives, I say, so what? I've had my fill. Now the first Even Day in over 1000 years! now that's cool! I bet no-one remembers the last time we had one of those. But I tell you, I feel sorry for our Great Grandchildren born 1 January 2100. They may never experience either an Even or an Odd Day. So sad.

OTOH, in the Coptic Calendar, they won't have another Even Day until 15 October 2283, but there will be another Odd Day on 11 September 2000.
If you are Ethiopic however, you need to wait only until 13 October 2007 for your next Even Day, the next Odd Day being the same as in the Coptic Calendar.
Alas, though if you follow the Islamic Calendar, the next Even Day will not be until 8 February 2562, though there should be a new Odd Day as soon as 1 August 2087.
Persians have it even worse. The next Even Day for them won't be until 22 April 2621, though 20 March 2000 will be another Odd Day for you.
The Bah'a'i will have their next Even Day 10 April 2225, but 21 March 2000 is also an Odd Day.
For those of us following along on the Hebrew Calendar, our next Odd Day will be 5 April 2011, but we will have to wait until 24 April 2240 for our next Even Day.
Ni Hao, because if you are Chinese and follow the cyclical system of 60 years, then Even and Odd days are quite common for any lifetime. Take for instance the next Odd Cycle Day, which will be Chinese New Year next year, 5 February 2000; the next Even Cycle Day will be 24 February 2001. But, if you consider the 60 year cycle has repeated 78 times since the Chinese calendar was established, then the next time the cycle count will be Even is 17 March 2105, and the next time it will be Odd is Chinese New Year 2044, on 30 January. Every other Chinese New Year is an Odd Day, actually.
[You're probably getting pretty sick of this at this point but I shall continue... :) ]
If you are Hindu, your Even and Odd days depend on whether you're using the Old or New Lunar or Solar Calendars. In the modern Lunar Calendar, 27 November 1999 will be an Even Day, but the next Odd Day will not be until 30 April 3054. However in the Old Lunar Calendar, the next Even Day will not be until 3 April 2899, but the next Odd Day will be 14 April 2010. For the Solar Calendar, the next Modern Even Day will be 17 May 2078, but the next Modern Odd Day will occur as soon as 14 April 2009. For the Old Solar Calendar, things are just as bleak as for the Old Lunar One: we will have to wait until 1 June 2899 for another Even Day, but the next Old Odd Day will be 16 April 2010.
Mes amis, je continue en français à célébrer la Révolution. Puis, dans le calendrier de la Révolution, je raconte que nous avons ensuite un Jour Pair le 2nd janvier 2000, mais dois attendre jusqu' à le 23e septembre 2102 à notre Jour Impair prochain. Mais si nous regardons le Calendrier Révolutionnaire Moderne, alors le 1er janvier 2000 sera le Jour Pair suivant, et le 22nd septembre 2102 sera Impair.
[Please consult Babelfish Liberally and for more information about the French Revolution, I suggest consulting the most respected historical source at the next NoVaDWVS meeting, 22 November 1999... <-- Plug.]
Anyway, where would a list of Calendar Dates be without our good friends, the Mayans. Yes, thanks to Reingold and Dershowitz who provided the resources for all this information, I can tell you that the next Long Count Odd Day by one calculation of the Mayan Epoch will be 23 September 2033, and the next Even Day won't be until 13 October 4772!! That's going to be a long wait, but take solice, because if you only regard the Haab and Tzolkin Calendars, then you get many Even and Odd days each year. For instance, then next Haab Even Day will be 27 April 2000, and the next Odd Day will be 3 December 1999. The next Tzolkin Even Day will be Tomorrow, because today is an Odd Day. :)
Of course, if you missed today's Odd Day, not only is Tomorrow another Odd Day but might I recommend getting Rustic and celebrating it on 2 December 1999, when it occurs its last time for 1000 years in the Old Julian Calendar, or wait until 15 February 2000 for the next Julan Even Day. Of course, if you're an Astronomer, then you're only concerned about the Julian Day Number. Fortunately, the next Julian Even Day Number will be 24 February 2023, but the next Odd Julian Day Number won't be until 31 October 3805!
But none of this is ISO Standard, so therefore, I suggest that the next ISO Even Day will be Tuesday 4 January 2000, and the next ISO Odd Day will be Monday 20 December 1999. Alas, the last one for the next 1000 years will none the less be 26 December 1999.
Of course, since most of us are programmers, let me suggest that ANSI C dictates the next Even Moment will be 10 January 2004 at 13:37:04 GMT in Hexidecimal and 4 May 2000 at 06:56:33 GMT will be our next Odd Moment. Finally, this one is for those suckers that still use the OS of a certain company that may be about to be split in half: The next OLE Even Day will be 6 July 2009 at midnight GMT and the next Odd Day will be 8 August 2001 at 2:40:00 GMT.

And now you know the rest of the story...

Be Seeing You,

Jeffrey.

Thank you! The WordNet dictionary seems to be exactly what I was hoping for. Because they've chosen to use such a flexible license, it's likely this dictionary will become very widespread in many applications in future and possibly even the dominant dictionary of the English language. How many words does the dictionary contain? I couldn't see any mention of the current word count on their website.

"We are gratified that the court has once again upheld GoTo's rights to our logo, and the right of consumers not to be confused in the Internet marketplace,"

And to answer the question of "Why?", I think it all goes back to Sunday's User Friendly.
And people are always asking my why stupid people shouldn't be allowed to breed....What was that song about how they should all have to wear a sign?

Its definitely not the banwidth. I have some corporate dedicated servers serving image/video/audio assets here at dn and they are always incredibly fast. I even get ~20ms from home (due to their uunet oc3 +1 t3). Check out their connectivity. I only ever ever go through their teleglobe, qwest and uunet connections as dictated by bgp routing tables, so I can't be absolutely sure though.

Slashdot seems fast enough for me. 100+ comment pages load in less than 5 seconds (remember they do extensive database queries). There are some days when the site seems to be down for 5-10 minutes. Actually, I've tracerouted on occasion and found that the box was up but the httpd wasn't responding for some reason.

As for server hosting centers though, I haven't found anyone better than dn when it comes to multiple connections to just about every major bandwidth provider in north america. MAE's and notoriously oversold sprint-naps and other public exchanges are completely avoided 98% of the time.

You can't go wrong when they're likely to be directly the same backbone used by you and your clients isp's.

I wonder if employees get extensive free services. Drool.
----------

I was going to post something Informative about how ALT tages might not be enough for a site to be accessible, but... well, I will first, but there's more to be said.

1.

ALT tags might not be enough. The accessibility guidelines used by Bobby, a web page accessibility and HTML compliance analyzer, includes a number of things like "don't use tables for layout purposes", "don't put two links next to each other", and "don't use color to convey information". They also request that any page using non-standard tags, effects, and any plugins have a "text only" version, and any charts or table images have text description links.

After my page was panned by Bobby, I had a chat with the admins there, arguing that the guidelines placed too many limits on web page designers, and that blind users should be using Lynx to view the Web (makes sense??).

But apparently, the problem is that blind people with computers get the same crappy software by default that non-bline people get, namely Wintel with either NS or MSIE browser, and using a screen reader on top of the graphical browser to read the page. These things also expect browsers to do things like underline links (and not underline non-links), so that it can tell the blind user that the text is a link.

The admins at Bobby argued something about not forcing blind people to use a certain piece of software, but I still dont think that position is the most utilitarian solution for anyone.

That having been said,

2.

I'm shocked, frankly, at the depths to which the allegedly upper-crust and in-all-ways-superior readership of Slashdot has fallen in the comments on this story. Of the 12 comments rated above 2 when I started writing this one, only about two or three were in any way objective or respective.

To illustrate this, my favorite(?) quote here today is "What are blind people doing on the net anyway?"

Great. Definitely not the words of an intelligent, respectable human being. And definitely not what I am supposed to expect from Slashdot readers.

I don't normally say this, because I know it's obvious fl*m*b**t, but I think most of today's posters, as well as those who up-moderated them, could stand a few hot pokers in the eyes.

You're also ignoring a number of successful IT professionals who are blind. I wonder if there are any blind, probably Lynx-using readers of Slashdot, and where they are now.

It's okay to vilify Bill Gates or Steve Case. But
blind people did not make concious decisions to be blind, and most don't even really know what "seeing" is. Bill and Steve know what not being a self-interested bastard means, and even how not to do it. Therein lies the difference.

Hemos wrote: wondering how long it will be before I can upgrade to a Palm/Handspring device that will run Linux, a POP3 client and support a wireless modem

Well I don't know about the first part but if you are interested in wireless POP and telnet there is a palm-cellphone that will make you drool. It is currently supported by Sprint Spectrum, and the other carriers are picking it up too. You've probably seen the ads but they just becams avaliable last week.

Telnet from a cell-phone; every security administrators nightmare (or dream).

Peter
And don't tell me there isn't one bit of difference between null and space, because that's exactly how much difference there is. :-)
-- Larry Wall