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Another thing shall be stressed - the working of a peripherial signal transduction nervous systems is peanuts compared to the complex brain functions, like image recognition and interpretation.
An article in Nature on how the brain interpretes what the eyes see shows how complex it all is.

The Register agrees with you as well in this article posted today. Seems plausible given that a lot of their dev tools have been developed on Linux (SN systems, MATHEngine and Rebel Software who are supplying the IDE, physics engine and sound tools respectively all use Linux)

The commercialisation of Muppets is sad.
Jim Henson was a genius - The Dark Crystal is one of my favourite movies & probably the best fantasy movie ever.

By these metrics, Tk wins hands down. You can develop GUI applications 5-10x faster with Tk than with any other toolkit around (especially those based on C, C++, or Java). Check out http://www.scripti cs.com/people/john.ousterhout/scripting.html for data to back up this claim. Tk also contains canvas and text widgets that allow you to do surprisingly powerful things by associating scripts with graphical elements. I understand that GTK tries to emulate Tk's canvas widget, but without an interpreted scripting language you can't get the same powerful dynamic behaviors.

Tk also has other advantages such as portability between Windows, Unix, and Macintosh, but the big deal is that you can create powerful GUIs amazingly quickly.

As a Canadian who keeps up on current events, I know that this tax was scheduled to go into effect last January (that is, Jan 1, 1999 not Jan 1, 2000). It was held back because of the public and (mostly) corporate outcry over it. Last I heard, it was being held off indefinitely. You can read about Bill C-32 here (it is an amendement to the Copyright Act). The bill did pass, and is legislation, but has not been implemented (as such that a consumer would notice any price differences).

This tax would extend to cover all recordable media (audio cassette tapes, CDs, video tapes, etc - not pre-recorded media), and is designed to help reduce copyright infringement of copyrighted materials.

There are more of us, we have less obstructions in the way we communicate (why work for the military when everything you do is watched and your every movement under suspicion, and who you are allowed to converse with strictly limited), and our stucture (or lack of) allows ideas to propagate faster.

We have outpaced the poor fools in the NSA and others and will overtake them soon, if we have not already done so. Things like 'milspec' slow down their processes enormously and they are losing their edge. And yeah, they are shit scared. Witness all the legislation attempting to censor the net and more.

PGP and other public key systems are very secure. The factorisation problem has not been solved. Shortcuts may have been found, but increased key lengths will easily keep up with this.

-- Reverend Vryl

There are several technical solutions available to stop yahoo (or any other site), in their tracks. these guys run an anonymizing proxy, as do these people. Of course, you also have several CGI proxies out there too, but I don't have the URL's offhand. lucent also ran a proxy, but it has since been discontinued. Freedom now has the functionality - currently free, but will eventually be fee based.

In short, the moral of the story is - if you want anonymity... you need to make a meager attempt at getting it. But not much more - there's plenty of us out there willing to thumb people like yahoo and their court odors (or should that be orders?)

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you can get almost the same thing for $79.00 from Ma cmillan Software

If you get to the end of your rope and can't find a free solution 4Front has been very responsive to these things. If you email them and their driver provides what you need, you can buy their driver.

I bought it for Montego support and their tech support is awesome. I got an email back within 10 minutes when I asked about the fast play speed (It's a beta driver) and I was given a temporary workaround. I also get new versions until 2002.

• Email - once transmited, becomes a load of 0s and 1s
• Database - data on a hard disk requires a dbms to interpret
• Graphics - a jpeg file means nothing to me - dunno 'bout you!

File - held as binary on a computer, requires aMethod and system for displaying [this] previously obscured information

So basically, any information displayed on any wimp system would be breaching this copyright.

However, aren't IBM a little late here? I could understand Xerox doing this, but IBM? Humph!

Interestingly, it states that the patent is only concerned with a windowing environment so presumably, if we switch ack to a good old CLI, we'll be fine?

IBM? IMBeciles?

Mong.

* Paul Madley ...Student, Artist, Techie - Geek *

Immigration - Le départ des immigrés du tiers monde

Etablir dans tous les domaines la préférence nationale et européenne. (Logement, emploi, aide sociale).

Expulsion immédiate de tous les immigrés en situation irrégulière, contrôle très sévère de la filière des réfugiés politiques.

Réduction de la durée du permis de séjour à 1 an et départ des immigrés extra-européens à l'expiration du délai.

Suppression de toute acquisition de la nationalité française et réforme du code de la nationalité selon le "droit du sang".

Poursuite pénales sévères contre les organisateurs et utilisateurs de filières de travailleurs clandestins.

Front National

Don't get me wrong -- I love Linux. But Red Hat's setup really really sucks. Besides that, and I understand why, but the hardware support sucks, too. I bought a whole computer so I could run X (my previous one was a Dell with an onboard video controller). I finally got all my hardware working in Linux a couple days ago, after using this computer for about 2 months. I had very bad experiences with RH5.2, but 6.0 has been great. I think Red Hat has finally matured. Today, I wen't to my friend's house, and in about two hours, got his whole system working (he'd already installed the OS, but not configured it).
My fairly computer-illiterate mom, who is a lawyer, will be using Linux when she finaly buys a new computer this summer, replacing her Altima 1 286 notebook with character-based monochrome screen and parallel-port, single-speed CD-ROM. This because of Corel's porting of WordPerfect. I have been using Enlightenment for a while now, and I think that since DR 0.15, it is very usable. KDE is probably even more usable, but it's ugly. However, it has better applets bundled (not to say that there's anything preventing you from running Qt apps in Gnome). I used KDE for a while until DR 0.15 came out, because 14 was a bitch to use. Now, though, I think it's pretty good. a couple things still bug me, like a few flaws in the Gnome panel, and the way Midnight Commander sucks, but it's very usable, on the whole. I am not hacker, and my computer is not a server. I am a nerd, though, and Linux is my toy, but that doesn't mean I can't get work done in it. I run WordPerfect, print, use the Gimp, play MP3s, and do everything else in it except run Terragen, Alpha Centauri, and Quake 3 (I know there's a Linux port, but I don't want to download 22MB again).

Sorry, correction, it does. I was the original poster, and last time I checked, it hadn't.

Ok, feel free to check my math. I calculated that if the universe were 14839 _million_ light years across, anything at that distance would be moving away from the other side at the speed of light. Of course, we don't have anything strong enough to see this, but could the universe be bigger than we think because things are moving away from us too fast and we can't see them?

According to the story things are moving away at 160,000 MPH for every 3.3 million light years. 160,000 miles is roughly 240 million meters.

240,000,000/3600s = 66,666m/s for every 3.3 million light years. 299,792,458m/s (speed of light in a vaccuum)/66,666m/s = ~14839 million light years across and the two objects are moving away from each other at the speed of light.

All values are approximate except the speed of light (speed of light found at http://physics. nist.gov/cuu/Constants/index.html?/table2.html).

• FreeBSD license
• The BSD license
• The GNU GPL

Yes. See point 3 of the LGPL.

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According to an article released at 3:42p ET on CNN, they haven't been bought yet and haven't released any official info - so don't jump on the ship quite yet :-)

I'm sure the aquisition of this encoding technology will be a good thing for Real. I can't wait to listen to NPR on the net and hear the same quality I get on my radio.

There is a lengthy and unflattering discussion of the Xanadu story in this Wired article. Ted Nelson's response to this articel can be found here. Here's a quick summary:

Ted Nelson is credited as the inventor of hypertext. For the last thirty years or so, he has been working on a project called Xanadu, an effort to create a hypertext 'docuverse' where information may be included (or 'transcluded') into any document while preserving the author information for all pieces and preserving the author's ability to collect royalties for every single piece of his work that is downloaded, no matter how small a fragment. It sounds like a good idea, IMHO, until you get to the royalties part.

There are many lessons in software development that can be gleaned from the story of Xanadu. A lesson for COSS is that this type of system is ridiculously complicated, perhaps prohibitively so. And it is probably not even something that anyone wants. Another, more tangential, lesson for OSS in general is that lunatic leaders can be divisive and irritating enough to totally screw projects that are otherwise good ideas. But I digress.

Even if Xanadu software shipped tomorrow (there is actually a program called zigzag), why would anyone want it when html has so much more infrastructure? Similarly, I think that COSS will not be able to attract people away from pure OSS. COSS may be appropriate for companies like Apple that are trying to recruit more eyeballs, but I think that most of us will stick to truly free software. I think that OSS is doing fine, and it is certainly meeting my needs as a programmer and an end user. I'm sure that a lot of you out there feel the same way. And with every office package and video driver that is released, the number of people whose needs are met by pure OSS solutions increases. I don't think that current open source hackers will get involved with COSS, and thus it will suffer from the same problems that proprietary software has. It will not benefit from many bug-fixing eyeballs, and people who get involved with COSS are likely to be just looking for a quick buck, the sort of people who will find a way to subvert the COSS system for their own purposes. These people will try to confine the exchange of information in such a way that they make money. Again, like the Xanadu project.

Information longs to be free. It will not permit restrictions. This is not a moral judgement, it is just an observation.

A humourless letter from one of a few members in a conspiracy of humour sites hoping to spring an April's Fool Joke tomorrow in the USA has ordered The Register not to tell the joke first.

If you feel like it, mail the url, and where ya came from to malda@slashdot.org

Someone probably have just forgot an http:// in a URL within their comment. Try going here: http://'http://blevins. simplenet.com/take-my-job-please.html' If it works, find the comment poster. Go ahead. Hire a private detective if you need to. Then face them down. Place your right thumb on your nose with you palm facing left. Make embarassing sounds with your mouth while wiggling your fingers.

I'm not arguing that it *should* be called GNU/Linux. Hell, I don't care what it's called (just don't call me late...never mind). But a new GNU-free distribution is just stupid. At a time when the Free/Open/Whatever community needs to work together more, a move towards fragmentation serves nobody's interests. Not Tom's, not the FSF's, and especially not the end user.

Let the FSF holler all they want. If distributors agree, they'll call it GNU/Linux. If they don't (and most of them don't seem to agree with the FSF), they'll call it whatever the heck they want.

By the way, to get the FSF's viewpoint, read Linux and the GNU Project on the GNU website.

Ask Swashdot and Qwick Winks!

Well, I'm sure some Linux users want or need Windows apps.
But I don't. Generalisations like yours are always wrong.
It's impossible to say what all Linux users want, because we don't all want the same thing.
Having said that, no-one will be forced to use these hypothetical apps developed by this hypothetical horde of Windows programmers, so, sure, let them go ahead and code. It's no big deal.
Someone else made the point that whether there is a whole lot to be learned from the Windows world about GUI design is questionable, and that is true. Perhaps what we need for Linux is a whole re-examination of the human/computer interface, rather than copying old designs.
Here's a good article on this:
The Anti-Mac Interface

On many of the modern Unix variants, /etc/passwd is only a textual representation of a database file which holds the real user information. The getpw*(3) routines use this database file to access passwd data. This makes things way faster than they used to be, for example, on SunOS4, where ls(1) was written so stupidly that it scanned the (sequential) passwd file for every single uid lookup it needed to make. Type "ls -l /home" on a SunOS system with like a thousand registered users, sit back and relax.

Speaking of today: FreeBSD, for example, uses a Berkeley DB database to store passwd information. In fact, it uses two databases, one with and one without passwords, for "security". This speeds up lookups quite a lot, but beware: The DB files are still generated from text files, so adding users with huge user databases is a lengthy process.

The question is whether you actually want to create that many Unix user accounts. For mail servers, you can often get away better with creating mail accounts only. This requires some hackery with your friendly MTA (postfix or qmail), but it is quite doable and also has positive security side-effects.

Look into Cyrus imapd if you need a message store implementation which is able to handle mailboxes for users who don't have a unix login. Beware, Cyrus comes with a ugly^H^H^H^Hpretty tcl-based administration interface which you can replace by a bunch of home-grown perl scripts to automate administration. Cyrus makes it fairly easy to integrate your own authentication mechanisms through a seperate process, although the performance of such a mechanism would have to be determined.

In a nutshell: Unix in itself is not prepared to handle very large user populations. If you need to serve a lot of users with shell accounts, look into NIS+ or Kerberos and distribute the load onto a bunch of machines served by central (and well-hardened) user-database-servers. If you need to support only mail, you might be well off with one fast machine and a special purpose mailer configuration.

You'd think the straight media would be blaring this out, since it's a BIG story that the secret codes that banks and such rely upon are essentially worthless. Wouldn't you? But no ... instead we get (on ABCNews) stories like "Which airline did consumers like best," and "Are you a Type A Driver?"

Well folks, maybe it's time for cyberdemocracy in action. Here's a list of emails where you can tell the government and the media about this story. I would ask that you please, please, pretty please be courteous and informative and to the point when you email these sites. Maybe this time we can get the message to people that our e-commerce infrastructure is lacking because of government boneheadedness.

The President
The Vice-President
The ABC News comments page
The CNN Feedback Page
The CBS News Feedback Page
The MSNBC Feedback Page.

As my favorite rock star once put it, "Don't just criticize the media...become the media."