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are you suggesting we take the old 16-bit Apollo computers out of mothballs and re-use them?
 
Nah, why should we bring out the old 16-bit Apollo computers when we can just buy a bunch of commodity Dells and emulate them with this!

At first I was a little skeptical that moon mining would yield anything worthwhile, so I went looking and found this:

http://www.ibiblio.org/lunar/school/near_earth/min emoon.html

Now, some books that might help:

There's also the book "How to Think Like a Computer Scientist - Learning with Python" available for free at http://www.ibiblio.org/obp/thinkCSpy/

The book "Dive into Python", which i've seen referred to lower down on this page, is probably *not* a good resource for somebody with no programming experience in that it aims to serve as a very fast introduction to python for people who already know what flow control is. Having said that, once you've gotten a bit more comfortable, do double back and read it because it's a great book!

I recommend you start with python, for two reasons: there is a good book How to Think Like a Computer Scientist , and because the enforced whitespace will start getting you into good habits as far as code formating from the start.

Note that I said start. Python is a great language, I use it a lot for my real world stuff. It is not the be all, end all of programing. Programmers I trust strongly recommend Ruby. (I have not got around to learning it yet) You will need to learn both LISP (Scheme is great) and assembly (any assembly, doesn't matter which, x86 is about the worst choice you could choose to learn though) at some point if you want to become a good programmer. Do not get stuck in the rut of thinking that your first language is perfect for everything.

While you can learn perl, php, C, Java, C++, C#, basic, etc, I recommend you avoid them until you need them (though I have different reasons to not recommend each). Unfortunately all are fairly popular, so odds are you will be called upon to use one. They are however ugly, so you should avoid them until latter.

It has been said that it is impossible to become a good programmer if you start with basic. While this isn't strictly true, there is a lot of truth behind it.

Real programmers do not think about language. Real programmers know that all languages are Turing complete, and thus if you can do it in one language you can do it in another. (though sometimes the language will try to get in your way) Real programmers are concerned about data structures, algorithms, and other such things that have nothing to do with the syntax of the language. While you are learning the language keep in the back of your mind that the language itself isn't what is important.

I'm torn about the recommendation that you take a class. While classes can be good, there are a lot of teachers out there who know nothing about programing, but think they do. If you get a good teacher, take the class. However a bad teacher can teach bad habits. (Comments are good, but run from any teacher who makes you comment every line) Sadly as a beginner you will be unable to tell the difference between a good teacher, and a bad teacher.

Exactly. Every played John Conway's Game of Life? From only a few simple math rules, you get incredibly complex patterns emerging.

VMWare Player tools for fun (and profit???)

Blank VMWare disk image
FreeDOS boot/install CD and/or FreeDOS boot floppy image
Daemon Tools (virtual CD drive) and/or Virtual Floppy Drive

VMWare Player tools for fun (and profit???)

Blank VMWare disk image
FreeDOS boot/install CD and/or FreeDOS boot floppy image
Daemon Tools (virtual CD drive) and/or Virtual Floppy Drive

For years he's been under the obviously mistaken impression that XML was his invention. Ref http://www.ibiblio.org/pub/sun-info/standards/xml/ why/xmlapps.htm .

Suddenly today's Dr. Fun Cartoon makes sense now. :-P

You can get the flock releases from torrent.ibiblio.org via bittorrent streams.
Enjoy and enjoy faster legal, authoratative, reliable and persistant torrents.

Reads Slashdot?

You could. But you still have to be bitchy, since Blackdown IS Sun's JDK. Blackdown is just a port of sun's java to linux. ftp://mirrors.ibiblio.org/pub/mirrors/blackdown/JD K-1.4.2/i386/02/LICENSE

Well, since you mentioned him, here's a page with a fairly complete listing of his works.

http://www.randomhouse.com/delrey/authors/results. pperl?authorid=718

His real name is not Piers Anthony, and as a matter of fact, I dated his daughter in the late '60's.

This has nothing to do with the question of the day however. If you will take a look at Henriette's site:

http://www.ibiblio.org/herbmed/

You will notice that there are more than a few natural remedies, which are forbidden by the FDA because of finacial conflicts with the current drug and chemical lords.

One notable instance is Stevia Leaf, a natural sweetener which has apparently been banned in the United States, because it's use interferes with Monsanto's market share of nutra-sweet(r).

Personally, I would prefer to replace as many chemical drugs with natural ones as possible. I am speaking as someone who spent 76 weeks on interferon, and would prefer to drink tea now.

Michael

For the geeks: Yes, I'm tuning the Apache server a bit during the /.'ing. Sorry for people who get dropped connections while I do this. I decided to upgrade to the Apache 2.1.8 beta for large file support & a few other features. The server is from ASA Servers, and has three 1.7TB SATA RAID arrays on Western Digital 250GB drives, with dual 2.8Ghz Xeon processors and 12GB of RAM. It's running SuSE 9.1. I put the FTP copy (vsftpd) on one array, and the http + rsync copy on another array. This is a pretty hefty server, but I've been changing tuning (xinetd, vsftpd, httpd and some kernel stuff) in response to traffic to try to keep it handling things. It's lots of fun, and reminds me of my close days with iBiblio, which was a frequent slashdot target.

Well, if you want to substitute Rail Shooter for FPS, then you should check Rez out. The creators of Rez site the Russian abstract artist Wassily Kandinsky as a major stylistic influence.

It's also an awesome game.

I actually took the time to mail the company and ask them about it. When you request the source code from them they simply order it from DamnSmallLinux and remail it to you. To get the source code for DSL you have to send them $7. VPM said that they never needed the source code because their modifications are only script based which come as source code itself. They don't keep a static copy to make duplicates of because DSL releases new versions randomly and they don't want to order a new copy everytime DSL releases a new version just to have the source on-hand.

Take a look at http://distro.ibiblio.org/pub/linux/distributions/ damnsmall/GPL_Sources.txt

It's not VPM, it's DamnSmallLinux.org that is making the source code hard to get. The $10 VPM charges is $7 plus the cost of remailing the CDs which is $3 for postage and an envelope. So if you want to report anybody, report DSL. Or better yet send DSL an email and ask them why they are doing it.

From http://www.ibiblio.org/pioneers/cerf.html :

"As a graduate student at UCLA, Vint Cerf was involved in the early design of the ARPANET. He was present when the first IMP was delivered to UCLA. He is called the "father of the Internet." He earned this nickname as one of the co-authors of TCP/IP-the protocol that allowed ARPA to connect various independent networks together to form one large network of networks-the Internet."

Furthermore, the people involved in the design of the ARPANet were schools: UCLA, Stanford, the University of Utah, and UC Santa Barbara. And that's a group of ACADEMICS, not a bunch bureaucrats who bought votes with propaganda.

So, if someone must take control of the internet, it should be Vint Cerf, UCLA, Stanford, University of Utah, and UC Santa Barbara. _NOT_ the US government. Let's ask them: Who should control the DNS servers? Eh?

Mastodon Linux looks like it comes closest: Linux kernel, libc 4, and a BSD userland.

I looked pretty hard, and that was the only thing I could find as well. I thought at first that I might have to concede the (increasingly esoteric ;-)) point, but after looking into it more deeply, I think Mastodon actually supports my claim that you cannot run Linux without GNU. Why? Because the creator of Mastodon dislikes GNU software and has gone to rather remarkable extremes to make it possible to run a BSD userland on Linux -- yet there are GNU components (notably glibc) in the core system. As much as he wanted Linux without GNU, he couldn't do it. Which isn't to say it couldn't be done, just that it's more work than one talented and dedicated guy could do.

OTOH, my searches have also turned up the fact that my OS of choice, Debian, has some BSD utilities which are an "essential" package (If you try to remove the bsdutils package, apt requires you to type 'Yes, I am aware this is a very bad idea' to authorize the removal). That package only contains a half-dozen utilities, and they would be fairly easy to replace, so I'm not quite ready to say Debian is a BSD/GNU/Linux system :-)

The question of what is and what is not part of an OS has no clear and general answers. It depends heavily on context and viewpoint, so it's not surprising that reasonable people may disagree.

I guess most of my insistence that the GUI should not be part of the OS stems from my perpetual irritation every every time I look at a Windows-based server with all of the bloat required for a full graphical UI that hardly ever actually gets used...

Anyway, it's been interesting.

One of the oldest web comics, yet not on the list. http://www.ibiblio.org/Dave/
Sad.

"There are so many things wrong with this is is not even funny. First of all, almost all pentagon research is done by academics, so it's really silly to say that academics run things better than the pentagon."

http://www.ibiblio.org/pioneers/cerf.html

Vint Cerf, graduate student at UCLA co-authored TCP/IP, which is the foundation of the Internet. Yes, it built on the ARPAnet, but then again, all research builds on what others have done before. Although the graduate students didn't really know what the internet would become, but that's beside the point. Had this neen a skunk work, someone else would have created an open project that would have evolved into the internet.

"Second of all, the WWW was NOT, repeat NOT, regardless of what you may have red in Dan Browns Angels and Demons, created by an academic working in switzerland. This is categorically not true, and the fact that it is not true is so well documented that I should not have to ever correct anyone about this. The invention of HTML has very little to do with the creation of the internet. First of all, hypertext was around long before HTML, and hypertext files could already be transmitted over the (existing) internet. This is merely another standard for turing text into page layouts, which happens to be in widespread use. It is a small part of the internet at best."

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tim_berners-lee

Again, Tim Berners-Lee, built upon previous research, hypertext, which you are confusing with the WWW, but he did invent the WWW as we know it, created HTML and wrote the first web server and working graphical browser. And he worked at CERN. My point was not that he invented the Internet, which he didn't, but that he created something royalty free that became the WWW, as opposed to Skype which always will be controlled by Ebay.

• http://www.mutopiaproject.org/
• http://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/Commons:Sound (Check bottom)
• Internet Archive: Open Source Audio
• Free Classical Music Archive recordings performed by the MIT choir and other amateurs (quite high quality)
• The Choral Public Domain Library describes itself as 'A Free Sheet Music Archive'
• Mutopia: a collection of public domain sheet music
• Project Gutenberg music section
• MusicBrainz: a database of structured metadata about audio releases

• http://www.mutopiaproject.org/
• http://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/Commons:Sound (Check bottom)
• Internet Archive: Open Source Audio
• Free Classical Music Archive recordings performed by the MIT choir and other amateurs (quite high quality)
• The Choral Public Domain Library describes itself as 'A Free Sheet Music Archive'
• Mutopia: a collection of public domain sheet music
• Project Gutenberg music section
• MusicBrainz: a database of structured metadata about audio releases

THE PROBLEM WITH BLOGGING IS THE SELF DELUSION THAT YOU BELIEVE YOU MATTER OR THAT PEOPLE GIVE A FUCK WHAT YOU SAY.

Like many Slashdotters, I have a "blog" myself. I write it for an audience of one. If someone expresses an interest in something I've written, as they do from time to time, it's interesting and, to a limited extent, I'll engage in the odd argument, but for the most part, the blog exists for me to let off steam. As a location I can rant about politics, computers, cellphone companies, Slashdotters, open source and free software, and other stuff, without actually boring the pants off the people around me or offending them. Sometimes I'll ask a question in the hope it'll be answered, but for the most part, I honestly don't care. The only real interactive nature of it is that after a while, if and when people do look occasionally enough to think it worthwhile looking regularly, you end up with a little community of people who are interested in each other's stuff. Kind of like a group of people who hang out at a pub. That's really the only reason it ends up going online.

And I don't think most bloggers care either. Do you think the 14 year old who explains in great depth how Snuggles shat all over her mother's best rug today and how yesterday Mike (urgh!) broke up with her AGAIN really considers this more than a version of her diary with the potential for the odd bit of feedback?

As far as calling a blog a website and other stuff. Why? Amazon's "just a website" too, as is "Cingular.com" and "Yahoo". A blog is a relatively specific form of website, it's an online journal (and not a "home page" as at least one person argued. This (NSFW! NSFH either, come to think of it...) is a home page, and this is a blog.) It may be a stupid sounding name, but it's nonetheless describes a particular type of website rather than "all websites". Would I prefer a term like "journal"? Probably, that'd probably be more reasonable, and some people - and for the most part I myself do - use that term instead. But you're not suggesting "journal", you're suggesting "website", which I'll start calling blogs the day I drive to building in my vehicle every period of day, driving back to other building in my vehicle while stopping by another building to get products on the way back every some other period of day.

My advice: lose the snobbery. And if you feel posting your unsolicited feelings and news on the web should be beneath anyone, you might want to reconsider your policy of involving yourself in Slashdot discussions. You're missing the point, in a way far sillier than any teenager who writes about their cat is.

For every problem, Linux has the solution. Have you taken a look at the Mock Mainfame HOWTO? Sounds like what you are looking for.

Wow, I see none of that. Both on-screen and text printing are perfect for me. Normally I don't use Arial and TNR but I tried both just now and they are flawless. It sounds to me like your FreeType2 is either out of date or not configured properly, but that is just a guess.

There are issues with QT 3.x and fonts that aren't going to be fixed until QT 4 and KDE 4, but I've never seen the issues discussed on the mailing lists.

Check out the Font-HOWTO for lots of details on how to tweak and tune fonts. It might have something that could help you.

http://www.ibiblio.org/pub/Linux/docs/HOWTO/other- formats/html/Font-HOWTO-html.tar.gz

  -Charles

Wait, I thought that was Eric Raymond.

http://www.ibiblio.org/koine/greek/lessons/alphabe t.html

justa being the carma hore that I am.

For you all linux geeks on here, I found some.. sort of interesting screenshots playing with probably a GP2X developement kit..
http://www.ibiblio.org/paulc/gp2x/

clasic web cartoon with their take on the 40 year old slurpee.

As I see it, a good grammar checker needs:

1. A comprehensive lexicon, that lists all english words, and ALL their possible roles as "parts of speech", that is, verb, noun, etc.

2. A hunk of statistics for each word, sampled from error-free text, showing the probabilities of the parts of speech when surrounded by certain words.

3. Some good well rounded algorithms to resolve ambiguities. "Time flies like an arrow", is time an adj. or a noun? Is "flies" a noun (plural) or verb?

4. good rule checks to see if the sentence fits proper patterns. Best to encode all the exceptions.

And all the painful details about extracting the root words from tense, etc. may come to play.

One possible reason the free software community hasn't played around with this yet, is because the cost of developing a useable lexicon is HUGE --it's several man years, if not tens of man years to develop, debug, review, etc. such a lexicon. The guys at Webster's, etc, have a definite head start, but... even such may not be useful enough; hardly any dictionary provides the level of detail you need, in painful accuracy, describing the parts of speech in a useful way right now. The GNU Dictionary project (history described here gives you a taste of the scope of the project. From what I've heard, it was mostly done by Russians (when they were cheap), because OCR is just not there.

From the standpoint of a grammar checking lexicon, the GCIDE in xml/html format is peppered with errors, omissions, irregularities, and problems, lacks all kinds of useful info, but is the best shot I've seen yet at a free lexicon.

Seems like most of the grammar checking s/w these days is rule/pattern based, and can spot a lot of common probs, but...

To sum it up, my guess as to why the open software movement seems to ignore the grammar checking software, is because a key piece of technology, a good lexicon, is missing. When one exists, you'll see all sorts of folks making pot-shots at really good grammar checkers.

For those who haven't heard of him, Elliotte Rusty Harold is a big name in the Java world - he maintains a very popular blog/news site and has written a slew of excellent books.

He's also a committer on the open source Jaxen XPath engine; my static analysis utility PMD is among the many satisfied Jaxen customers.

Last regrets

What a waste. If you wanted to learn to think like a Computer Scientist, you just had to read this Python tutorial:

http://www.ibiblio.org/obp/thinkCSpy/

Of course people will (would) buy it. Believe it or not, for Microsoft this isn't a game, it's business. The cost of producing, distributing and stocking another version is far greater than the satisfaction of being able to say "But we've got cheap version if you want them", except maybe for people like Eric Raymond.

Now if you tell me people won't buy it because they will pirate the premium versions, you're right.

Well, after recruiting Linus (at least in the alternate reality of WIRED) and trying to get ESR as well, maybe that simply had to happen...

To the extent I ended up "leading" or became a culture hero in that process, it was because the community desperately needed someone to do it and pulled me into the role, shaping me to fit in the process.

Cultures need culture heroes -- and they'll create 'em if they don't pop up spontaneously. Note: the process can be damn rough on the candidate. And being the focus of so many peoples' dreams and aspirations is...well, it's terrifying at times. I used to have a lot of contempt for rock stars who couldn't handle the pressure and fucked up with drugs. Now I understand better. I've been through some awful, heartbreaking, soul-destroying shit on this job.

to one of the comments here

He did not say on his page that he was actually offered any sort of job.

Um. From the page:
I'd thank you for your offer of employment at Microsoft,

http://www.ibiblio.org/pub/Linux/docs/HOWTO/Hard-D isk-Upgrade

Hard Disk Upgrade Mini How-To

Yves Bellefeuille - yan@storm.ca

Konrad Hinsen - hinsen@cnrs-orleans.fr

v2.11, 13 April 2000
...

In case anyone's interested, a torrent for this latest Linux kernel is available at torrent.ibiblio.org.

In case anyone's interested, a torrent for this latest Linux kernel is available at torrent.ibiblio.org.

You *have to* check out "Embedded" Damn Small Linux. ~50MB download, extract to your USB key, and run a full blown Linux distro in QEMU (Linux and Windows QEMU included).

Centripetal-force-generated artificial gravity systems, like those envitioned by Arthur C. Clarke shown in the film 2001, have been studied by NASA and the Air Force for decades. Basically, it would require a structure of a few hundred meters radius rotating at a few rpm. The scale of such a habitat would be enormous, and the cost associated has not been shown to be warranted as of yet. However, the commercialization of space will probably bring about such an innovation out of necessity (for comfort).
Links here, here, and here.

Almost sounds like it's using an autorun to run something like QEmu (See Damn Small Linux embedded for an example, link here: http://distro.ibiblio.org/pub/linux/distributions/ damnsmall/current/dsl-embedded.zip
Main site

# Speed limits were posted, on average, between 5 and 16 mi/h (8 and 26 km/h) below the 85th percentile speed.

# Lowering speed limits by 5, 10, 15, or 20 mi/h (8, 16, 24, or 26 km/h) at the study sites had a minor effect on vehicle speeds. Posting lower speed limits does not decrease motorist's speeds.

# Raising speed limits by 5, 10, or 15 mi/h (8, 16, or 25 km/h) at the rural and urban sites had a minor effect on vehicle speeds. In other words, an increase in the posted speed limit did not create a corresponding increase in vehicle speeds.

# The average change in any of the percentile speeds at the experimental sites was less than 1.5 mi/h (2.4 m/h), regardless of whether the speed limit was raised or lowered.

# Where speed limits were lowered, an examination of speed distribution indicated the slowest drivers (1st percentile) increased their speed approximately 1 mi/h (1/6 km/h). There were no changes on the high-speed drivers (99th percentile)

# At sites where speed limits were raised, there was an increase of less than 1.5 mi/h (2.4 km/h) for drivers traveling at and below the 75th percentile speed. When the posted limits were raised by 10 and 15 mi/h (16 and 24 km/h), there was a small decrease in the 99th percentile speed.

# Raising speed limits in the region of the 85th percentile speed has an extremely beneficial effect on drivers complying with the posted speed limits.

# Lowering speed limits in the 33rd percentile speed (the average percentile that speed were posted in this study) provides a noncompliance rate of approximately 67 percent.

# After speed limits were altered at the experimental sites, less than one-half of the drivers complied with the new posed limits.

# Only minor changes in vehicles following as headways less than 2s were found at the experimental sites.

# Accidents at the 58 experimental sites where speed limits were lowered increased by 5.4 percent. The level of confidence of this estimate is 44 percent. The 95 percent confidence limits for this estimate ranges from a reduction in accidents of 11 percent to an increase of 26 percent.

# Accidents at the 41 experimental sites where speed limits were raised decreased by 6.7 percent. The level of confidence of this estimate in 59 percent. The 95 percent confidence limits for this estimate ranges from a reduction in accidents of 21 percent to an increase of 10 percent.

# Lowering speed limits more than 5 mi/h (8 km/h) below the 85th percentile speed of traffic did not reduce accidents.

I believe almost all the content on http://torrent.ibiblio.org/ is available for direct download from http://www.ibiblio.org/

I believe almost all the content on http://torrent.ibiblio.org/ is available for direct download from http://www.ibiblio.org/

Why don't we all show our love by donating to ibiblio: https://secure.ibiblio.org/gift/
I am sure they could do with some more quad-Opteron boxes ;)

... while homebrew distributions will fail to qualify.
http://distro.ibiblio.org/pub/linux/distributions/
..'nough said ...

Just in case Peachy's discouraged anyone from trying to submit their homebrew distrobution to Ibiblio.

From Ibiblio.org
---------------
Contributing to ibiblio.org
If you are interested in becoming an ibiblio.org contributor:

      1. Read the Collection Criteria to see if your interest will be served by working with us
      2. Check out the services we offer contributors to see if we have what you need.
      3. Hint: very few, if any, proprietary services will be provided, but many open source solutions are, can or will be offered on request.
      4. Drop a note to help@ibiblio.org telling us:

        * What your project will be
        * What services you might wish to use
        * How to contact you by phone (so we can work out any details and passwords)
        * Anything else you think might be helpful
---------------

One of the main things to be considered is keeping things up to date and making some sort of contribution to the public. It (should) be a given that the bigger distros will be properly maintained, as a good homebrew distro should, but a homebrew which is only a minor modification to an existing distro may not make the cut. If you've got a great modification, maybe you should see if it's more practical to distribute the modified packages instead of an entire distro.