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... whatever. Big fat whatever.

Apple need only respond to the 'death' of their cult-item iProduct, with the release of another one:

The Apple PDA(*). ... thus hastening the death of PocketPC forever. (Amen.)

(*- When Apple make a PDA - again - its going to fucking rock... **-Why will PPC fail? Fuck, who cares? Its Windows, for crying out loud. Who wants Windows in a palmtop any more? What do you think PalmOS was?)

Does anyone know what the free software package is?

Betcha it's SME Server: http://www.e-smith.org

I run my own mail server on a comptuer in my house. You send e-mail from your client to my server. How is anyone going to make you pay if I don't buy-in to the system?

A better system is Domain Keys proposed by Yahoo. See /. article

Of course he can never win because if it's secret he can't list them and if he can list them it's not secret.

if it connects to the Phantom? Besides, if you want small-but-cool, you're better off with an MP3-playing wristwatch. Their english ain't so hot, but their products are.

Excellent! Now they just need to develop a chip that protects against id10t and PEBCAK problems.

And here is a screenshot of e1enor's partially minimized safari (minimizing to the right) inside another partially minimized safari (minimizing to the left). I suppose if you timed it right the distortions somewhat cancel.

But nice try to stir up fears by mentioning "uranium" How about pointing to a scientific study of DU toxicity (some have been done, by opponents of DU, even, and found what I have said above) instead of pointing to propaganda?

Although any increase in radiation to the human body can be calculated to be harmful from extrapolation from higher levels, there are no peer reviewed published reports of detectable increases of cancer or other negative health effects from radiation exposure to inhaled or ingested natural uranium at levels far exceeding those likely in the Gulf. This is mainly because the body is very effective at eliminating ingested and inhaled natural uranium and because the low radioactivity per unit mass of natural uranium and DU means that the mass of uranium needed for significant internal exposure is virtually impossible to obtain.
DEPLETED URANIUM A Review of the Scientific Literature As It Pertains to Gulf War Illnesses

As far as Live CDs go, Knoppix is still superior for the development tools, and setting up persistant storage that plays well with FAT32. But this last release is starting to close that gap. And it looks stunning.

I use Mandrake 9.2, but PCLOS is so much better... My wife likes to watch Starting Over, but she can't see any of the previews on the website because they are in Quicktime. Naturally, there's no QuickTime for Linux plugin available. With PCLOS, it just works.

I've managed to muck something up on my Mandrake desktop, because I have to wait an additional minute after the desktop is installed while it's doing something - I can't figure what, probably trying to get the soundcard to work - and reinstalling Mandrake hasn't taken care of it. CUPS doesn't want to talk to my laser printer, but it works just fine under lpr... It's a complete mess.

I'm not quite ready to dump Mandrake (PCLOS is still beta), but some of Texstar's RPMs will be installed on my machine Real Soon Now.

Let's be realistic here. When has it not?

Computers were originally people who determined calculated firing tables. The first computers were used to calculate this information and break encryption codes.

The Internet is based on equipment and protocols that DARPA paid for. Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency Check out the current and recent solicitations.

I'll grant you that business plays a large role too. It funds its fair share, but it seems as though it is more practical and immediate. The military seems to fund things that might not be very practical now, but can possible provide the edge in battle.

Those points are all very typical far-left thought.

It may be true that most of those who are willing to state these points are branded as being "far-left", but each of his points are based on factual evidence:

1) The US is a terrorist state.
it sponsors terrorism in the rest of the world to support its corporates objectives.

Iran-Contra

Guerilla opponents of American policy are terrorists

El Salvador

Guerilla supporters of American policy are freedom fighters.

Iran-ContraIran Contra

2) America loves freedom & democracy.
Only in America and only to the extent required by the shackles of it's constitution. elsewhere its OK so long as it doesnt get in the way of American policy.

Chile

Dictators can be bought cheaply to hold the peasants in line.

Iraq

I think most /. readers are fully aware of the evidence for point number three.

Those points are all very typical far-left thought.

It may be true that most of those who are willing to state these points are branded as being "far-left", but each of his points are based on factual evidence:

1) The US is a terrorist state.
it sponsors terrorism in the rest of the world to support its corporates objectives.

Iran-Contra

Guerilla opponents of American policy are terrorists

El Salvador

Guerilla supporters of American policy are freedom fighters.

Iran-ContraIran Contra

2) America loves freedom & democracy.
Only in America and only to the extent required by the shackles of it's constitution. elsewhere its OK so long as it doesnt get in the way of American policy.

Chile

Dictators can be bought cheaply to hold the peasants in line.

Iraq

I think most /. readers are fully aware of the evidence for point number three.

Umm, you mean like this one?

Or this one?

Or this one?

Just because MS has been dragging it's feet for years doesn't mean other people have.

HP
IBM
Compaq
Alienware
Gateway
Build your own

We have choices, after all.

I know lots of programmers who have programmed in constrained environments yet produce awful code for modern systems. They're lazy. They want to be lazy. They don't care about elegance or correctness, they just want to get things done.

As someone who cares, it makes me sad.

Especially when the lazy people are those who the software industry caters to. Consider Java - weak language, huge library.

As for reliability; djb's prize is still unclaimed, as proof that people can design and implement things carefully enough that they work well.

Of course often even those few people who want to do things well don't get the chance because of dumb requirements and deadlines.

Read Kernel Traffic, the periodical summary of conversations on the Linux Kernel Mailing List (LKML). In article #240, you will find your answer. If in doubt, email the authors directly.

ok... If anyone is actually having the same problem, here's how to fix it without having to wade through a flame war I inadvertently started. Use the PC to download the PC updater from apple, restore it, then put it back on the Mac. Restore it again and it should go. But bear in mind that this does happen... I honestly didn't know and everyone screaming at me that I should've was not that helpful when I was staring at my 250 white brick. Thanks to everyone that tried to help and didn't say I was too stupid to live and deserved to die and probably drink bleach or think I should be able to breathe underwater. iTunes for Windows disables a hack that many people had been using. Here is a hack to work around it. Stop the flaming please.

Here is a good summary of this scam from Snopes.com. The cashiers check is the aspect of this that makes it scary. He sends you the money first, which makes it seem like it's not a scam, and then when the bank shows that it actually deposited, it all seems good. Most people don't realize that a bank would deposit before they could confirm the source of funds.

...not mentioning the fact that Opteron beat the G5 to market by over 4 months...

*sigh* If we are going to get into a pissing match as to whose 64-bit CPU was introduced first, then it still goes to Apple/IBM/Moto. Anyone remember the PPC 620 which was released in 1995? Also, if AMD introduced their Opteron 4 months ago, why did they have to introduce their "desktop" CPU only a month ago (remember, Apple's claim was the first 64-bit "desktop")? And why can't I buy one at Dell? Geeze, get real. This article is merely for the benefit of their readers to make them feel good about being behind the curve with respect to innovation.

Re-encoding does NOT violate the ITMS terms of service. I just read through it from your link, and it is not trying to circumvent or reversen engineer their security system. I did notice something weird in their terms of service, though. On the main page, there is a section under Usage Rules that says "You shall be entitled to export, burn or copy Products solely for personal, noncommercial use." However, section 5 under the heading Policies and Rules has a link that goes to a page called Terms of Sale that tells stuff about taxes, prices, etc. It also has a section called Content Usage Rules that repeats much of the earlier description. This one, however, contains this line "You shall be entitled to burn and export Products solely for personal, non-commercial use." Do you think there's a reason they didn't just copy the text from one page to another? I'm not just asking to be a nitpicker, but because I think export and copy are the applicable terms when you talk about ripping to mp3. I believe this statement in their Terms of Use specifically allows any form of format conversion you want to do. When people complain about it being a lossy or bad quality format when extracted that way, I think I would have to say that you are given two options if you want to comply with copyright law. Go buy the CD so you can make your own high quality rips, or get the songs cheaper and tolerate a little lower quality. Why is it so hard to understand that choices involve weighing pros and cons? Life is not about getting everything you want with no sacrifice, and that should be applied to a lot more than just music. Think of the huge number of bankruptcies in this country due to credit card debt.

They can't go much(if any) lower than $.99 per song because there are so many hands that need a cut of it, as posted in this Slashdot story. The advantage of the $.99, of course, is that you can get one or two songs from an album that doesn't have anything else good on it. Congratulations, you have now achieved the same enjoyment from $1.98 as you would have from $12.99. Also, that new bargain price of $12.99 still doesn't look as good as the $9.99 for a whole album that iTunes has been offering since the beginning. I, for one, welcome our new Windows iTunes overlords! :)

A cluster of computer geeks unhooking their Commodore 64 web servers and hooking them together to form the combined computing power of...my microwave.

The spoofed messages always appeared to be coming from someone named "Pissed Off Phan," with a return address matching a staff writer for the Philadelphia Inquirer.

I sincerely wish I'd saved the text of some of them. The were uniformly well written, however, devoid of the usual spelling mistakes you come to expect in unsolicited e-mail. Of course, the author was motivated not by greed, but by vitriol: the only thing which separated his message from a bona-fide editorial was his pathological hatred of Larry Bowa. In fact, I came close to firing off an angry e-mail to the folks at philly.com before thinking to check the full headers.

That is what I use for my VR3. I have to setup a ppp connection over the serial port, but that is it. They use the berkeley db for a file format from Sleepycat. There are plenty of Open Source tools for manipulating that data. I typically tar and gzip all my personal data and rsync with my desktop. For a $100 it is a nice machine. In use it feels a fraction of a second slower than a Palm OS4 device, but the multitasking features beats the Palm platform hands down. If Agenda could have marketed the things, they would have had a good market share.

The new MX7 looks to be a better offering than the Royal device.

"An analysis of the patent conducted by a group of Stanford students as part of an overall look at software patents points out that in their search for prior art, Microsoft turned up Pei Wei, who, in May of 1993 demonstrated Viola, a browser that integrated an application in basically the same way that is claimed in the patent. And where did Pei Wei develop this patent? At the University of California. Why is that interesting? Because the University of California also owns patent number 5,838,906." See here.

And why IS this interesting? Let's see what US law says about this:

Title 35 United States Code , Sec. 103. c) - Conditions for patentability; non-obvious subject matter:

Subject matter developed by another person, which qualifies as prior art only under one or more of subsections (e), (f), and (g) of section 102 of this title, shall not preclude patentability under this section where the subject matter and the claimed invention were, at the time the invention was made, owned by the same person or subject to an obligation of assignment to the same person

In other words, US patent law recoginzes that an inventor's own work, and the work of her co-workers, should be obvious to her. The test of patentabbility is whether or not the work would be obvious to another. Pei Wei's prior art - however significant it may be - appears to have been owned by the same person or subject to an obligation of assignment to the same person under in accordance with the exemption of 35USC103 c) and is as a matter of law could NOT to be considered as prior art for the purposes of patentability.

Thus the idiot judge was only applying the law as it was written and intended.

They are trying to make the deadline for the Top 500 list of supercomputers here. The conference is in early November and they need to be able to run the LinPack benchmarks on the system in order to get a spot. They will hopefully make it into the Top 5.

I've looked for an RIAA-free venue as well, and have come up mostly empty, however I will pass along what I did find:

• AmpCast (a service much like what mp3.com used to offer) not entirely RIAA-free, but mostly indy.
• Moonshine Records (an RIAA-free electronica label)
  

Gnome Storage

Dianne Whitmire, Internet Fleet Manager with Carson Toyota in SoCal. I'm actually part of Toyota's Pioneer Preorder program. Toyota had a special marketing campaign for 18,000 "Prius Pioneers" who ordered their 2001 or 2002 Prius through the Internet the first time around. These 18,000 or so customers got a special letter offering them the first chance to purchase a 2004 with specific options, again over the internet. Even w/o self parking, I couldn't resist.

Dianne's got over 17% of the orders within the LA/Southern California region (a pretty large cut in this area considering the number of Toyota dealers). She's got people flying/driving in as far as 1800 miles (Texas and Washington) to buy from her. Carson is closest to the Long Beach port (they get the cars first), and this dealer does ALOT of Prius volume.

Good luck in your search. The cars won't be here in the States till at least 10/15/2003 as production started 8/27/2003. First cars will be dealer demos and pioneer preorder fulfillments. Dealers stock will probably arrive after all of the preorders have been fulfilled.

Come on over to the 2004-Prius Yahoo! Group to learn more. Some of the people in this group have really good dealer recommendations. Some dealers know nothing of the new car, some know alot and already have orders lined up.

Good luck!

Just got today, it supports virtually every IM protocol (Including the "big three") through plugins, and it's open source. On top of that, it is easily customizable, simple to set up, and looks better than the official clients. The fact that it connects to MSN, AIM, et al. makes a nice, smooth transition to Jabber, too. :D

I left California in 1995; after being born and raised there. I miss it at times, but not at the moment... Proposition 187 was supposed to "fix" all of this; it was passed right as I left the state, but it looks as though it didn't do much.

The law was struck down by a federal court as un-Constitutional.

-Scott

Why don't you try one of the Blue-Pac's Turbine FLASH generation products?

They are very cost effective and most important: they are very robust and are able to generate a great deal of already designed graphical charts. You just have to select your data-source (DB based, XML, flat text, etc.), quickly configure it and voilá!

It works with PHP, ASP, .NET, C++. You can download a free-trial version and follow one of their tutorials. You can even check out great sites that use their products.

So why C# instead Java? Well if you're not concerned with being locked into a single platform (which has the lions share of the market locked up) you get all of the advantages of Java with quite a few extras thrown in.

Lion's share of what market? Last time I checked, most people were using neither .Net nor Java on their web/application servers, its more likely to be PHP or Perl. Tell me again why I should base my choice of platform on what other people are using.

Applications which look like Native Win32 apps. Sorry, Java looks like ass.

Java's awt toolkit uses NATIVE components for rendering. Java's swing toolkit is 100% skinable so if it looks like shit, talk to the developer of the app.

Applications that just seem faster. Sorry, Java just makes my new box feel like an 8088.

So I guess you don't bother with device drivers either. All that hardware abstraction just makes apps "feel" slower. Jitted Java is no slower than C++ if it is written properly.

A great set of development tools and a huge body of excellent documentation.

Isn't it crazy how there are no sources of information on Java. I guess C# has it all over Java on this one. I guess the FREE development environments like, eclipse or netbeans or jcreator or Sun ONE Studio just don't provide anything useful to a developer, except may a choice in their ide. You can always buy a Java IDE from Borland or Oracle, or a thousand other companies.

The ability to pre-compile applications, negating speed disadvantages of the JIT compiler.

gcj

Like I said, .Net is Java with the added drawback of locking you into a single platform.

Yes, I can't help but agree with you on that. The link, however is to the text of a London Times article that is only available through a paid subscription. I have found the same article printed in several other newspapers, but have not yet found an subscription-free archive that dates this far back.

Although I have found some usefull information through resources like David Ickes and Art Bell, my opinion is that they do damage to serious inquiry into government and intelligence agency corruption with thier lack of fact checking and self serving sensationalism. They make it difficult for those who have a legitimate grievance by mixing legitimate evidence with outlandish stories of aliens and time travel. It's possible that this is done intentionally.

So the phone/pda combo that people are after is really more like the O2 XDA then?? As seen here

Every other client logs except AIM... DeadAIM, AIM+, MyIM

Problem solved.

What proof did SCO present for the origin of both fragments of source code?

What proof did SCO present to show the SCO code did not originally from old BSD,Linux or public domain publications?

Who put the SCO source into Linux? - Was put there by Old Novell/SCO/Caldera in the first place?

What proof did SCO provide to show that the person had access to SCO's Unix sources?

The latter question raises another issue. The similarity is just as likely to be due to both operating systems performing the same role. Form is often directed by the function it performs. Function and variable names are often dictated by the API and common terminology.

Both the current Linux and Unix kernel developers have attended the similar university courses and read the same publicly available documentation. The works of W. Richard Stevens are very influential as a reference toward modern Unix and Linux and have dictated the implentation of APIs and TCP/IP stacks in both.

Copyright WHAT Copyright

From Groklaw.

Now that copyright is back on the table in the SCO case, you might like to

read the law on copyright.

SCO held another telephone conference today, but you had to be on time. I tried to call in later, when I was free, to hear the recording, but although the operator told me it had been recorded, it wasn't being made available. She suggested I contact SCO and ask to hear it. Meanwhile, someone who did listen posted on Slashdot as "mec" and he or she heard this question and answer:

[question #3] Stephen Shankland, CNET --

"Q: Copyright office does not have an assignment on file [for the Unix copyrights from Novell]. 'Is it your understanding that the copyrights have not been registered yet?' A: 'Stephen is correct ... [if we need] we will change the assignment of copyright ...' [we can do that at any time]."

If this is true, that they failed to register, it puts another interesting twist on this story. (Novell put a twist of its own, by posting a press release on its site saying that while the Amendment that SCO sent them seemed to support their claim "that ownership of certain copyrights for UNIX did transfer to SCO in 1996", Novell doesn't seem to have the amendment in its own files, and patents for sure didn't transfer.)

It's true you can register a copyright any time, but you can't sue for infringement until you have registered and you can't get certain damages for infringement that occured prior to registration: "Before an infringement suit may be filed in court, registration is necessary for works of U. S. origin." Section 411 says it precisely like this:

" 411. Registration and infringement actions10 (a) Except for an action brought for a violation of the rights of the author under section 106A(a), and subject to the provisions of subsection (b), no action for infringement of the copyright in any United States work shall be instituted until registration of the copyright claim has been made in accordance with this title...."

You are limited as to remedies without registration, as Section 412 sets forth:

" 412. Registration as prerequisite to certain remedies for infringement11 In any action under this title, other than an action brought for a violation of the rights of the author under section 106A(a) or an action instituted under section 411(b), no award of statutory damages or of attorney'

What proof did SCO present for the origin of both fragments of source code?

What proof did SCO present to show the SCO code did not originally from old BSD,Linux or public domain publications?

Who put the SCO source into Linux? - Was put there by Old Novell/SCO/Caldera in the first place?

What proof did SCO provide to show that the person had access to SCO's Unix sources?

The latter question raises another issue. The similarity is just as likely to be due to both operating systems performing the same role. Form is often directed by the function it performs. Function and variable names are often dictated by the API and common terminology.

Both the current Linux and Unix kernel developers have attended the similar university courses and read the same publicly available documentation. The works of W. Richard Stevens are very influential as a reference toward modern Unix and Linux and have dictated the implentation of APIs and TCP/IP stacks in both.

Copyright WHAT Copyright

From Groklaw.

Now that copyright is back on the table in the SCO case, you might like to

read the law on copyright.

SCO held another telephone conference today, but you had to be on time. I tried to call in later, when I was free, to hear the recording, but although the operator told me it had been recorded, it wasn't being made available. She suggested I contact SCO and ask to hear it. Meanwhile, someone who did listen posted on Slashdot as "mec" and he or she heard this question and answer:

[question #3] Stephen Shankland, CNET --

"Q: Copyright office does not have an assignment on file [for the Unix copyrights from Novell]. 'Is it your understanding that the copyrights have not been registered yet?' A: 'Stephen is correct ... [if we need] we will change the assignment of copyright ...' [we can do that at any time]."

If this is true, that they failed to register, it puts another interesting twist on this story. (Novell put a twist of its own, by posting a press release on its site saying that while the Amendment that SCO sent them seemed to support their claim "that ownership of certain copyrights for UNIX did transfer to SCO in 1996", Novell doesn't seem to have the amendment in its own files, and patents for sure didn't transfer.)

It's true you can register a copyright any time, but you can't sue for infringement until you have registered and you can't get certain damages for infringement that occured prior to registration: "Before an infringement suit may be filed in court, registration is necessary for works of U. S. origin." Section 411 says it precisely like this:

" 411. Registration and infringement actions10 (a) Except for an action brought for a violation of the rights of the author under section 106A(a), and subject to the provisions of subsection (b), no action for infringement of the copyright in any United States work shall be instituted until registration of the copyright claim has been made in accordance with this title...."

You are limited as to remedies without registration, as Section 412 sets forth:

" 412. Registration as prerequisite to certain remedies for infringement11 In any action under this title, other than an action brought for a violation of the rights of the author under section 106A(a) or an action instituted under section 411(b), no award of statutory damages or of attorney'

In my city ,ottawa , we sort of have this . For $995CAD/month ( the city owned power companies broadband division will deliver 1m through fiber to almost any where in the city. The bandwith is 100% UU net and they provide a full commit for the 1 mb. I can then burst 10mb if no one else is using it . The only problem from my pov is that I can get 3.5m (admitedly not burst 10 service) for $90/mo over dsl .If the city could bring there prices down a bit (by not using 100% UUnet that stuff is pricy!) and going for a mix of bell nexxia , uunet , and posible a connection to onet I would probably connect . As it stands I can rent good office space , get two 3.5m connections for cheaper than my city . Now If any one elses city provides broadband I would love to know what bandwith providers they use and how much they charge .

You should go look at the places where they really race power tools:

National Belt Sander Racing Association International Belt Sander Drag Race Association Tyrol Basin Belt Sander Races North Liberty Belt Sander Races

And yes, it's what it sounds like. Ever used a belt sander and had the sander get away from you because you weren't holding it tightly enough? Well, get a bunch of people sitting around in a bar drunkenly arguing about whose belt sander can get away from them the fastest, and belt-sander racing is born.

You should go look at the places where they really race power tools:

National Belt Sander Racing Association International Belt Sander Drag Race Association Tyrol Basin Belt Sander Races North Liberty Belt Sander Races

And yes, it's what it sounds like. Ever used a belt sander and had the sander get away from you because you weren't holding it tightly enough? Well, get a bunch of people sitting around in a bar drunkenly arguing about whose belt sander can get away from them the fastest, and belt-sander racing is born.

NASA TV

For those with satellite dishes, NTV is available through AMC2 (formerly referred to as GE2), Transponder 9C at 85 degrees West longitude, vertical polarization, with a frequency of 3880 Mhz, and audio of 6.8 Mhz. This is a full transponder service and is operational 24 hours a day. Mission audio is also available during crew working hours -- 1:30 a.m. - 4:30 p.m. Central Time (06:30 - 21:30 GMT) daily -- on GE-2, Transponder 13, with a frequency of 3960 Mhz.

In the 1970's most of the NOAA weather satellite broadcasts were unencrypted SSTV-like VHF transmissions, but I honestly don't know how much this has changed. It may be the same - all the TV channels obviously get satellite weather pictures in near-real-time.

I have used a SUN computer some years ago that provided something like this - I can't remember the precise details but I think that it had a forth-like command line environment available at boot time which was stored in ROM / flash RAM

Wow,

That sounds like a great deal! Make it a million, though! Then, I can do book signings, appear on talk shows, write stories for magazines, and start my own tv reality show where I torment you by repeating every word you say, while you rant that I'm stealing your thoughts. Btw, right now I'm singing myself "Happy Birthday", and stealing some company's hard earned income.

Rodney King is
back in the news today....breaking the law again of course. Anyone else
think the LAPD should have beat him harder?

Anyway, if true, this is kind of like Wiles proof of Fermat's Last Theorem -- proving an old conjecture by proving a more general (and more modern) one (in Wiles case, it was proving part of Taniyama-Shimura).

Sun Microsystems made claims of an incredible language that just weren't true. They claimed the language would be revolutionary and that software written for it could work everywhere. Partially true but no one wants a slow computer either. The whole reason people buy new computers is for speed.

Java is not liked nor used by everyone. No one wants it on their computer. No one wants large apps written in java.

Don't be part of the herd mentality. Just because Sun or Microsoft tells you to use their software doesn't mean you have to use it.

Try these languages if you don't like java.
modula-3
squeak
netrexx
rexx
euphoria
python
xbasic.org
tcl/tk

Sun Microsystems made claims of an incredible language that just weren't true. They claimed the language would be revolutionary and that software written for it could work everywhere. Partially true but no one wants a slow computer either. The whole reason people buy new computers is for speed.

Java is not liked nor used by everyone. No one wants it on their computer. No one wants large apps written in java.

Don't be part of the herd mentality. Just because Sun or Microsoft tells you to use their software doesn't mean you have to use it.

Try these languages if you don't like java.
modula-3
squeak
netrexx
rexx
euphoria
python
xbasic.org
tcl/tk

Sun Microsystems made claims of an incredible language that just weren't true. They claimed the language would be revolutionary and that software written for it could work everywhere. Partially true but no one wants a slow computer either. The whole reason people buy new computers is for speed.

Java is not liked nor used by everyone. No one wants it on their computer. No one wants large apps written in java.

Don't be part of the herd mentality. Just because Sun or Microsoft tells you to use their software doesn't mean you have to use it.

Try these languages if you don't like java.
modula-3
squeak
netrexx
rexx
euphoria
python
xbasic.org
tcl/tk