Slashdot Mirror

One of the things that comes to my mind ponder AI and the web is smarter search engines: use the power of classification systems (say something like self-organising maps like WEBSOM in order to get something like useable semantic nets. For example, I'd love to see a web engine that, when searching for "Serpent" or "Blowfish" would ask me "Are you looking for an animal or an encryption algorithm". Also, this would make it possible for a search system to produce hits that don't use the literal search term(s), but only synonoyms.

http://websom.hut.fi/websom

This could give you some ideas for a project.The idea of chronologically listing search results according to some rankings is a limiting factor, especially so when more and more useful information gets onto the web. Some kind of visualization or ordering technique could be designed which will give the user more control for searching. A better human computer interface (HCI) if you like, for a web search engine would be a useful project. The term "three dimensional" seem to crop up. Who knows, you could be the next Jerry Yang :)

The reasons I chose Nokia are the interface options and Linux interface (although I almost didn't because of Nokia not supporting Linux well).

There also is a Nokia Card Phone, a PC Card with a GSM phone, although I don't know what it supports.

Phil wrote a better compression program that was compatible with System Enhancements Associates (SEA) program called ARC. So they litigated. And so Phil went off and found a better algorithem for compression, and brought out PKZIP.Many people in the BBS community thought that SEA was a little heavyhanded (Perception, I don't know the reality), and moved to PKZIP. Others moved over for the speed and the better compression. The rest is history.

See also "arc wars"MIT Jargon File ver 299. This story seems to have been dropped from the current Jargon File for some reason.

ttyl
Farrell McGovern
Former Sysop, Data/SFnet (One of the first few hundred Fidonet BBSs!) and Solsbury Hill, founding member of PODSnet.

What you extracted was character #146, a reserved character in ISO 8859-1 (the default character set for HTML). In Microsoft's character set, #146 is the right apostrophe.

It's sad, but in some ways, Microsoft is actually LEADING technology. In this case it is the adoption of UNICODE international character set. I wish the Unix/BSD/Linux community would get their act together and get these things working.

Bzzt. Try again. This is the unicode entity for a right single quote: ’

Browsers on Linux display it just fine, but they DON'T display Microsoft's proprietary replacement. The "Unix camp" is quite up to date in this regard. The problem is, as stated before, ignorant webmasters - who don't know that Microsoft's proprietary extensions are a Bad Thing, and worse still, don't understand that the proper character to use for an apostrophe is.. an apostrophe, character #39.

Reference: The Windows Character Set

• Computing Review
• Epinions
• Deja.com (see Consumer Electronics>>Communications>>Cell Phones)

I've been sitting here behind a 700kbps line for two years now. I love it and I hate it. Half of the company I work in does this, but I'm one of the most home-staying ones. Recently they bought me a laptop to use on way to work, to see me more often, but it doesn't have wireless net yet, so here I sit in my pile^H^H^H^Hpit.

Expect your phase to get even worse messed up. Expect a new kind of freedom (no clothes at work!) and a new kind of slavery - at home.

Request a perfect line. "512kbps should be enough."

If you're outgoing, social, don't do it. Unless people like you so much they come over, giving you natural breaks.

It's a stretch of sanity, both physical and mental :), but worth it if you really want it.

Maybe I should come back when I've thought a bit better what to say. Nevertheless, I take my situation as an interesting experiment. It is not actually a well-established way of working, so... You'll be on your own, after all, finding out your own way of doing it, I guess.

>Yah...banning books because we don't agree with them is a really good idea - next we can all wear swastikas and put jews in internment camps.

Well... accoprding to Godwin's Law, you've just lost this entire argument, dude! :-)

It's a fine line between trolling and karma-whoring... and I think you just crossed it.
--
- Sean

My boss is canadian and he writes his dates year-month-day which struck me as a bit odd. Does anybody know if this is common?

Not only "common", but acutally an ISO standard (8601). See for instance Info on ISO 8601. And I would actually recommend it, for all the reasons mentioned.

I had a faint hope that the entire world would come to their senses and convert just to be Y2K compatible; but, alas, we are now swamped with those darned "00" dates. I have used the format myself since the mid 90'ies (sp?), but I am of course a self-righteous overachieving little nerd-meister.

Well, at least according to The New Hacker's Dictionary, this is a legitimate use of the word parse.

I've also taken an operating systems course in my university. The course used nachos, and I think it was very educational.

Anyways, you should get the Stallings book on OS'es, which includes a list of suggestions for OS course projects.

Stallings, William: Operating Systems, 3rd ed., Prentice-Hall International 1997

You might consider learning the bare minimum on the subject before posting. Look at this fine document to get a clue. Then you might start looking for documents about I18N.

Floogle wrote:

Running 1600x1200 on a 15" LCD screen would be unbearable. It's almost too small for my 21" CRT.

You are confusing screen resolution with screen object size. Having a screen that's 1024x768 and then moving to one that's 4096x3072 would be no problem if your new desktop had objects which were four times larger in each dimension, plus you'd have the advantage of sharper, higher resolution screen objects.

Most current desktops have too many things that are hardcoded to a set number of pixels, but fixing this is a simple matter of programming. As screen resolutions outpace physical desk size, I think people will make sure it's less of an issue.

----

if you haven't read the Fox article, I suggest you do. It's pathetic. This is my e-mail

Subject: Bad, Bad Fox

To whom it may concern (and somebody better read this)

One of your web pages http://www.foxnews.com/vtech/021400/hack.sml, contains extremely erroneous information. The quote "Several experts, however, said the disruption was almost certainly a hack. The experts said it would have been impossible for anyone to give a false answer for Clinton without deliberately bypassing chat room security measures. " is totally incorrect. I suggest you take a look at the explanation (http://www.boredom.org/cnn/), talk to those experts again (I'd avoid the AntiOnline crackpots) and quickly amend your story.

To contend that this attack has ANY relation to the recent denial of service attacks is ludicrous. I'd expect such sensationalism from NBC, but I hoped you guys were above it.

If this story is left as is I will discontinue my Fox.com or Fox News Channel patronage, as I cannot condone such shabby fact checking.

Wah

Actually I used my real name, but whatever. This story is HORRIBLE, it ties the CNN "hack" (a hack only in the sense (def #5) we would use) to the recent DDoS (with an interesting bit about the Bank's secret Don't Ask Don't Tell pact), and finally to some kid changing grades on report cards. The kid's explanation. "I did it to show them I could."

--

Actually, you can tell from the suerscript-one's that Jon doesn't use a Unix box either. He in fact typed the text on a Mac.

The oldest Mac-charset to ISO-charset converters will turn Macintosh curly-quotes into ISO-8859-1 superscript-one characters, because the ISO encoding doesn't contain curly-quote entities. (For more information, read these Guidelines to use 8-bit character codes.)

As for speculation about which product might be doint this to his writing: I have Microsoft Office 98 for Macintosh, and Word does not do this when I save curly-quotes either as text or as html. This is a guess, but a more likely culprit is the Fetch FTP application, which has a setting that controls whether Fetch does ISO-charset to Macintosh-charset conversion of data in text file transfers. The default setting of this option is "on", which would lead to the corruption in Jon's posted answers.

For more reading, see

• ISO-8859-1 and the Mac platform
• A tutorial on character code issues
• A list of Jukka Korpela's documents

Actually, you can tell from the suerscript-one's that Jon doesn't use a Unix box either. He in fact typed the text on a Mac.

The oldest Mac-charset to ISO-charset converters will turn Macintosh curly-quotes into ISO-8859-1 superscript-one characters, because the ISO encoding doesn't contain curly-quote entities. (For more information, read these Guidelines to use 8-bit character codes.)

As for speculation about which product might be doint this to his writing: I have Microsoft Office 98 for Macintosh, and Word does not do this when I save curly-quotes either as text or as html. This is a guess, but a more likely culprit is the Fetch FTP application, which has a setting that controls whether Fetch does ISO-charset to Macintosh-charset conversion of data in text file transfers. The default setting of this option is "on", which would lead to the corruption in Jon's posted answers.

For more reading, see

• ISO-8859-1 and the Mac platform
• A tutorial on character code issues
• A list of Jukka Korpela's documents

NSA: America's Fortress of Spies Part one of The Sun's NSA series, Baltimore Sun, 1995
"From a commercial communications satellite, NSA lifted all the faxes and phone calls between the European consortium Airbus, the Saudi national airline and the Saudi government. The agency found that Airbus agents were offering bribes to a Saudi official. It passed the information to U.S. officials pressing the bid of Boeing Co. and McDonnell Douglas Corp., which triumphed last year in the $6 billion competition."

and then I found this article which is far too long to quote here but includes some interesting points including:-

It's also fascinating to see that the UK didn't react when the NSA eaves dropped on the Airbus consortium (partly composed by a British industry) for the benefit of one of its American competitors . Even when her interests are concerned, the UK doesn't hesitate to serve her big brother or hypocritically close her eyes...

and then I noticed another rather strange thing in the same article, namely:-

Echelon members :

• USA: NSA National security Agency
• Great-Britain: GCHQ Government communications head quarters
• Canada: CSE Communications security establishment
• Australia: DSD Defense signals directorate
• New Zealand: GCSB Government Communications Security Bureau

How come the French are only hassling the UK and the US? It all seems a bit confused to me...

I also heard (but cannot track down any links at this point) that the methods used to extract the information about the airbus negotiations used the NSA backdoor keys into the Lotus Notes 'secure' email system. Maybe in the light of the recent story about commission policy and the fact that there is a directive currently being worked on concerning the legalities of encryption in the EU may well lead to some interesting policies in the future for NSA 'enhanced' exported software. (here is an essay detailing some of the issues being considered)

• Creative Micro Designs
  
• GO64!
  
• ftp.funet.fi
  
• CBM Web Server
  
• The Fridge
  
• JOS: Multitasking Accelerated-CPU OS
  
• or even my home page
  

No, no, no, **YOU** STILL DON'T GET **IT**.

As far as I can tell, the Crusoe processor engine itself is not special. If you are a "talented programmer programming to the bare metal", you might as well program in assembly on another pre-existing chip.

And then as a chip manufacturer, you'll face 20 years trying to ensure your vintage instruction set that those bare metal hackers employed.

You're missing the point.

Take database servers. Oracle, MySQL, Informix, Sybase, Uncle Joes Ultimate Data Thingy... Just about all of them allow access to their data through a standard SQL language.

But... But... but... Wouldn't it just be so insanely cool and fast if I could just direcly access the ISAM structures and indexes and modify disk sectors directly?!?! I fully expect every dedicated DBA and application designer to go to the bare iron to squeeze performance from their data warehouses!

Has that happened? No. Why? Because MOST, EVERY DAY APPLICATION DESIGNERS DON'T "PROGRAM TO THE BARE METAL". It's too complex, intensive, and fruitless a task. Why is Slashdot written in Perl and not assembly? Why isn't Linux 100% x86 assembly?

There is a BIG difference between just a cool hack and maintainable elegance.

Why do we have high level languages? Why do we have abstraction layers? Why?

The Code Morphing is an abstraction layer. Initially, that layer is the x86 instruction set, an arbitrary set of instructions that just happens to currently be widely used. Using Code Morphing, the Crusoe can leapfrog on that wide base of support, while throwing away the hardware architectural garbage traditionally needed to support it.

Back to SQL: Oracle supports SQL for access to data, but beneath, I'll bet you that a lot of the specific operations upon data that those SQL statements fire off has changed ENORMOUSLY over the years. What would have happened had they allowed programmers straight past the abstraction layer? They still would be trying to support that API today, and I bet they wouldn't be as free to rework their server software.

Furthermore, why do we have the DBI module and DBD modules in Perl? To provide a semi-universal abstraction layer across all databases. When one database's API changes for performance reasons, efficiency, whatever, you just change the morphing-- er DBD-- layer to accomodate it.

What is the point of Crusoe then?

Not to provide assembly hackers with a new opcode set to learn and tweak, which 90% of the application design world will never learn or exploit, and therefore will remain voodoo essentially.

The point is to provide an architecture which supports ABSTRACTION LAYERS of assembly opcodes. So Transmeta is free to vary the underlying hardware in any exotic or esoteric form they see fit, throwing backwards compatibility of their VLIW opcodes to the wind because the Code Morphing allows the SAME ABSTRACTION LAYER API to be exposed to the application designer.

Now, finally, note I keep saying 'application designer'. This is as opposed to 'dedicated hacker'.

Read the definition of a hack. The first two definitions are not my idea of elegance. Something that's quick and does the job but not well. Or, something that is incredibly good, but took a long time.

Now, read the definition of elegant. Something that combines simplicity, power, and grace. Something that is understandable, almost obvious in its expression. Something maintainable.

Tell me what's more maintainable: Assembly code for the Mx-650938 processor, or Java code. It's a close call, but I'll have to go with the Java code. It's harder to write a hack in Java, than it is to create an elegant design in assembly.

It's not about performance. We haven't even BEGUN to wring the performance from the chips we have-- and why? because it's not humanly possible for every applications designer to be a brilliant assembly hacker, which is why we have compilers!

So, finally, why spend your time learning the latest opcode set when you can just focus on a higher level language and leave the hand tweaking and performance tweaks to the man behind the curtain of the Code Morphing abstraction layer of OZ?!?!?!

No, no, no, **YOU** STILL DON'T GET **IT**.

As far as I can tell, the Crusoe processor engine itself is not special. If you are a "talented programmer programming to the bare metal", you might as well program in assembly on another pre-existing chip.

And then as a chip manufacturer, you'll face 20 years trying to ensure your vintage instruction set that those bare metal hackers employed.

You're missing the point.

Take database servers. Oracle, MySQL, Informix, Sybase, Uncle Joes Ultimate Data Thingy... Just about all of them allow access to their data through a standard SQL language.

But... But... but... Wouldn't it just be so insanely cool and fast if I could just direcly access the ISAM structures and indexes and modify disk sectors directly?!?! I fully expect every dedicated DBA and application designer to go to the bare iron to squeeze performance from their data warehouses!

Has that happened? No. Why? Because MOST, EVERY DAY APPLICATION DESIGNERS DON'T "PROGRAM TO THE BARE METAL". It's too complex, intensive, and fruitless a task. Why is Slashdot written in Perl and not assembly? Why isn't Linux 100% x86 assembly?

There is a BIG difference between just a cool hack and maintainable elegance.

Why do we have high level languages? Why do we have abstraction layers? Why?

The Code Morphing is an abstraction layer. Initially, that layer is the x86 instruction set, an arbitrary set of instructions that just happens to currently be widely used. Using Code Morphing, the Crusoe can leapfrog on that wide base of support, while throwing away the hardware architectural garbage traditionally needed to support it.

Back to SQL: Oracle supports SQL for access to data, but beneath, I'll bet you that a lot of the specific operations upon data that those SQL statements fire off has changed ENORMOUSLY over the years. What would have happened had they allowed programmers straight past the abstraction layer? They still would be trying to support that API today, and I bet they wouldn't be as free to rework their server software.

Furthermore, why do we have the DBI module and DBD modules in Perl? To provide a semi-universal abstraction layer across all databases. When one database's API changes for performance reasons, efficiency, whatever, you just change the morphing-- er DBD-- layer to accomodate it.

What is the point of Crusoe then?

Not to provide assembly hackers with a new opcode set to learn and tweak, which 90% of the application design world will never learn or exploit, and therefore will remain voodoo essentially.

The point is to provide an architecture which supports ABSTRACTION LAYERS of assembly opcodes. So Transmeta is free to vary the underlying hardware in any exotic or esoteric form they see fit, throwing backwards compatibility of their VLIW opcodes to the wind because the Code Morphing allows the SAME ABSTRACTION LAYER API to be exposed to the application designer.

Now, finally, note I keep saying 'application designer'. This is as opposed to 'dedicated hacker'.

Read the definition of a hack. The first two definitions are not my idea of elegance. Something that's quick and does the job but not well. Or, something that is incredibly good, but took a long time.

Now, read the definition of elegant. Something that combines simplicity, power, and grace. Something that is understandable, almost obvious in its expression. Something maintainable.

Tell me what's more maintainable: Assembly code for the Mx-650938 processor, or Java code. It's a close call, but I'll have to go with the Java code. It's harder to write a hack in Java, than it is to create an elegant design in assembly.

It's not about performance. We haven't even BEGUN to wring the performance from the chips we have-- and why? because it's not humanly possible for every applications designer to be a brilliant assembly hacker, which is why we have compilers!

So, finally, why spend your time learning the latest opcode set when you can just focus on a higher level language and leave the hand tweaking and performance tweaks to the man behind the curtain of the Code Morphing abstraction layer of OZ?!?!?!

One of the book's interesting devices is the fictional story of someone who creates a smallpox ?bomb? and the effect it has."

Your review seems to be infected with Microsoft proprietary characters.

?Yes I do!? "No - I don't."

Do you think so? Yes, I do!

This isn't something for us to get over. You're the one making illegal posts. Cut it the hell out. Please get a real operating system.

You're using MS-ASCII for Slashdot postings! Please stop that nonsense. Embrace, extend, and extinguish has no place on an open source advocacy forum, saver perhaps to attract flames.

``Anyone who slaps a `this page is best viewed with Browser X' label on a Web page appears to be yearning for the bad old days, before the Web, when you had very little chance of reading a document written on another computer, another word processor, or another network.''
--Tim Berners-Lee in Technology Review, July 1996

We shouldn't be surprised that once money makers got involved that the web became just another casualty in the war on our minds. Information is less important than image. Literacy is less important than economics. Critical reasoning is less important than feel-good emotive response. Welcome to our brave new world; we hope you like it, because you don't have any choice. Best to just lie back, close your eyes, and think of England--er--America.

Neil Postman's non-fiction book, Amusing Ourselves to the Death, is a disturbing report of this phenomenon that offers no real solution. Bruce Sterling's science fiction novel, Distraction, is not just a decent story; it's also filled with social commentary about a world in which media image is paramount. I heartily recommend both books. Huxley's Brave New World wasn't that great a read, but he was scarily on-target about a lot of this.

Here are two links to resources related to this disturbing trend. The first is to the Any Browser Campaign, a definite must-read for designers. The other is a far less ambitious work, my own short treatise on Diversity in Web Design. Both are replete with links to further resources.

There's also a subtle connection between the themes of bad keyboard strategies and bad webpage design. In both cases, we have people who think they're making things better for one portion of the populace at the cost of making things worse for another portion.

There seems to be a bit of confusion about exactly what this software offers over the standard SSH. Hopefully I can help clear it up a bit.

• Licensing

  SSH1 comes with a license which is rather ambiguous about commercial use. The most common interpretation is that it's OK to use it commercially so long as one isn't making a profit directly off it. (e.g. charging people for the software.) SSH2 is much clearer-- in order to use SSH2 in a business you must use the closed-source, $400-a-server version from DataFellows.

  Here is the vague portion of the SSH1 license:

  Companies are permitted to use this program as long as it is not used for revenue-generating purposes. For example, an Internet service provider is allowed to install this program on their systems and permit clients to use SSH to connect; however, actively distributing SSH to clients for the purpose of providing added value requires separate licensing.

• Compatibility

  SSH2 clients cannot talk to SSH1 servers. This was by design in an attempt to drive people to upgrade to the new protocol. SSH1 clients are able to talk to SSH2 servers.

• Patents

  The IDEA (default) algorithm is patented and requires a license to use commercially. The RSA algorithm is also patented, but that patent has either expired or is about to expire. If one can find a copy of "rsaref", formerly offered freely from RSA's FTP site, then one can use it instead of the internal RSA algorithm to work around this little hurdle.

One reason there is demand for another implementation of the SSH protocol is so that people in small businesses can continue to use SSH while still maintaining access to the source code and also staying $400/server closer to being profitable.

Given the incompatibility of the clients, upgrading from SSH1 to SSH2 requires a flag day upon which day every client and server must be simultaneously upgraded to SSH2. Trying to upgrade in stages results in those with SSH2 unable to connect to SSH1 servers. It is possible to install both versions of the client, but the user will have to be the one "failing over" to the other version. Irritating at best, costly and time-consuming at worst.

For more information about SSH implementations, check out the Open Directory Project's SSH Category.

Read This story written by Lars Wirzenius, speech given at 1998 Linux Expo.

There he states a well known fact (in Finland), that it was Ari Lemmke who gave Linux the name Linux.

Snippet from Liw's text:

The name Linux was not coined by Linus himself, strange though that may seem to people familiar with his self-esteem. It was coined by Ari Lemmke, the administrator at ftp.funet.fi who first made Linux available for FTP. Ari had to coin a name since Linus had failed to give a proper one, so Ari invented one and it stuck.

Nooo.. The MS Ergo keyboard is pure evil.. :-) It just shows you where your homebrew typing system is "wrong" and gives a hard time for anyone who doesn't do the 100% correct 10-finger system.. Old IBM clickety-keyboards are the best for rearranging, as the keycaps can be totally rearranged without it looking bad. Some keyboards I've seen have different angles on different rows of keys so when you dvorakize it, the keys slant up and down, and it looks and feels terrible. Oh, by the way, a person called Matti Airas has created a version of dvorak suited for Finnish people.. Even though most of the page is in Finnish, you can at least see what the kbd looks like.

Bandwidth isn't great, at 9600 or 14.4k depending on your carrier, but it's more than functional.

Once you're online, you can use ssh or vnc to work on a box. I've had only minor difficulty ssh'ing into a unix box and reading my mail with mutt. I still haven't really seen the usefulness of vnc in a 160x160 window, but it exists and it works.

Useful links:
Wireless Connections for Nokia 51x0/61x0
Top Gun ssh for PalmOS
VNC
And of course, ssh, because only morons use telnetd

Fittingly enough, I notice the press release was moronized. Uck.

Yes, this passage about just 11 neurons connected by a mere 30 links makes me wonder what this net actually does. "Speech Recognition" could of course also mean the ability to recognize that an audio signal contains speech :-)

Of course the task of net could also be to separate the noise signal from the speech, aka blind separation, a problem that has been solved before (for instance by independent component analysis)

If this is merely ICA with a time coded neural net, it is IMHO still pretty cool, and much more impressive than all those commercial systems that rely on dumb correlation and processing power.

Anyway, instead of just having me guessing, could someone please point to their paper :-)

Yes, Webmethods does look useful. I'd have more confidence in it if their web pages were not moronized.

It has been argued very persuasively that traditional top-down AI won't work (see e.g. Hofstadter's Gödel, Escher, Bach), and while bottom-up AI (be it artificial life, neural networks or evolutionary computation) has produced some interesting results (like the WEBSOM classification system), I'm still very skeptical about "Real Soon Now" predictions of AI.

Of course, I still hope someone proves me wrong (and that if they do that it's going to be "interesting times" but not in the Chinese curse sense).

At least the Helsinki University of Technology Computing Centre makes their opinion pretty clear.

You can study free of charge in any Finnish university even if you are a foreigner. You may have to pass the entrance exam, but you can begin your studies right away if you are already studying in (or have a degree from) a US college.

I did my postgraduate studies at Helsinki University of Technology, and I'm happy with it. You can study and do the exams in English. The catch is you are not allowed (by the Finnish law) to work while you study -- even on campus.

(My information is seven years old, so some details may have changed.)

Marko

Check out this page for some DIY mixer projects, if you want to go that route.

I think US have enough specialists to know :-)

I also think that what they want to achieve is not a ban on encription (impossible in the long run) but a delay for as long as possible.

Most Internet backbones go trough US. It is trivial and for a government just pennies to do statistical analysis on emails, usenet and web to determine e.g. trends (particularly the email is of biggest interes as is perceived by most users as private)

If you want to see such an engine in action see WEBSOM.

You! Reading this article! Do you use ssh and pgp? If not, why not? You're part of the problem!

If you're not using PGP (yet), drop by http://www.pgpi.com/ and have a look around. http://www.pgpi.com/cgi/download-wizard .cgi will let you easily determine exactly which version of is appropriate for your OS and location. PGP installation is pretty straightforward and there is ample online documentation and tutorials. Not only does PGP become more useful each time a new person starts using it, but the more people we have using PGP routinely the harder it will be to remove our freedom to do so. There's no reason not to use encryption, except for inertia. And I guarantee it's not as hard to install or use as you may be thinking.

Using a nice pgp-aware mailer like mutt is a nice step, too.

If you ARE using telnet or rlogin or ftp, then you have problems now and you don't even realize it. Did you realize that every time you telnet or rlogin or ftp to a remote host that you are transmitting your username and password in clear text? Sniffing passwords is a trivial task, mostly due to the widespread use of insecure protocols such as telnet. ssh is a drop-in, secure alternative for telnet, rlogin, rsh, and ftp. Not only is it secure, but it's easier to use and more featureful as well. On top of security it adds such features as compression, encrypted traffic, encrypted tunnels, and completely automatic and secure X11 forwarding. Plus with RSA Authentication you can eliminate passwords entirely. A cracker can't crack a password that doesn't exist.

Unix users can obtain ssh from ftp://ftp.cs.hut.fi/pub/ssh/ and have it up and running in a matter of minutes. I recommend the 1.2.27 version of ssh (as opposed to the v2 platform) due to licensing difficulties with the v2 platform. Non-unix users have even more options.

For Win32 there's SecureCRT (http://www.vandyke.com) which is an excellent, albeit commercial solution. There's also a very nice, free implementation of ssh which works with Tera Term. You can grab it from http://hp.vector.co.jp/author s/VA002416/teraterm.html

There's even an opensource ssh for win32 at http://www.chiark.greenend.o rg.uk/~sgtatham/putty.html although I must admit that I'm not sure I trust an ssh implementation done by a guy who refuses to implement RSA Authentication.

For Macintosh, I understand that there's a nice plug-in for NiftyTelnet at http://www.lysator.liu.se/~jon asw/freeware/niftyssh/ although I've not used it.

There's never been a better time to be more secure. Simply by installing a couple of easy-to-use applications you could be on your way to a more secure, more private computing experience. Your data is yours, and here are two ways to ensure that it stays that way.

Yeah, I ripped this shamelessly from my .plan -- so sue me, it's still useful information...

Use ssh. It will take care of your cookie handling and can encrypt your X traffic.

--

In this day and age, you should never be setting your DISPLAY variable or using -display options except in very unusual circumstances. For day-to-day use, ssh is perfect with X: automatic, transparent, secure session forwarding with no need to set DISPLAY, run xhost, copy magic cookies around, or any of that stuff.

If you always use ssh to secure your X sessions, you will be a happy (and safe) X11 user.

Get it from ftp://ftp.cs.hut.fi/pub/ssh/ssh-1.2.2 7.tar.gz. You'll be glad you did.

Here is a page that shows how to hook up a parallel port to control various devices and has example programming in the C language, with examples for both DOS and Linux. It also shows why and how to hook the diode up to the relay coil (very important.) It has a few good illustrations where those wires go from the back of the computer

My friend's Sony receiver (not sure the model number) has a "coax in" port that can talk S/PDIF, and Toslink (optical) outputs to connect to his minidisc. We are planning on connecting his AWE32 to his receiver via this input, email me if you want to know how it turns out. (remove the nospam and spamsux :)

Here are some links you may find useful:

• S/PDIF info
• Converting S/PDIF to Toslink
• Commercial S/PDIF -- Optical S/PDIF converter

MySql is another bad one and it doesn't even attempt to follow the SQL standards!

Use PostgreSQL instead.

As for mirroring multiple machines, the best way to do this is to use rsync along with SSH 1.2.27 and the blowfish encryption which uses less CPU time. Also make sure to turn on compression in rsync, -z I believe.
--
Michael Dillon - E-mail: michael@memra.com

Tomi

Yes, 110 V can easily fry many expensive components. But 110 V is *less* than the voltage on many residential telephone lines.

;-) Maybe you should disconnect your computer from the telephone system to protect it from those evil high voltages.

See the facts at http://www.hut.fi/Misc/Electronics/circuits/telein terface.html

"The telephone ... voltage at the subscribers end depends upon loop length and number of ringers attached to the line; it could be between 40 and 150 Volts ... can give a nasty shock."

Is this what they mean by FUD ?

These pages explain this MS problem:

• On the use of some MS Windows characters in HTML
• demoroniser - correct moronic and gratuitously incompatible Microsoft HTML

Do not be ashamed as an old kernel is quite in style these days. I have been experimenting with some of these older, smaller gems. They were the ones that ran on less hardware and still do it well. Since I have a few 386's, some with 4MB laying around, may I share the following:

Superant - sells cheapo CDs catering to small computers
Xdenu Versions
Linux On A Floppy
Etherboot home page

My favorite:
toms router boot home page