Slashdot Mirror

I don't need TiVo's 'intelligence' - I wrote XMLTV to grab listings in advance and semi-automatically pick what to watch. I still have to program the VCR for tomorrow's programmes, but that takes only five minutes. I'd much rather have some Perl code and an open file format (whether or not I wrote it myself) than rely on a subscription to some black-box consumer electronics. </plug>

(BTW - have a look at my TV preferences if you're curious - though this does include some shows I record for my younger brother. Honest...)

Simon was aksed by Jon to write the replacement for RFC1591 and did so. There has never been any debate on the techncial merits of any of this stuff, in the IETF or otherwise, nor can there be as long as some guys step up and say "we're in charge"

Right after Simon published son-of-1591 and set up the shared registry mailing list, Don Heath (ISOC) met Bob Shaw (ITU) and Albert Tramposch (WIPO) at an OECD workshop and strong-armed Jon into the IAHC debacle which was in turn shut off by the US Government and has risen, phoenix like, from the ashes as ICANN, albeit in a more maccinated and Byzantine guise.

There have been a core (pardon the pun) group, that Simon is one of, that have worked together since the beginning of all this and independant of the I* organizations as they show up, then fall off, the radar. Today this group uses ORSC as a nexus. The genesis of this can be seen on the NEWDOM mailing list archives.

We think we have a good blend of techies, lawyers, average users and a couple of bona fide net.gods (Brian Reid and Einar Stefferud); indeed if you look at the early ICANN stuff you'll see the US government tell ICANN to talk to ORSC; they didn't listen to our principles and they stopped calling. Oh well.

Wanna try an aternate root? Try ours, we think it's the best.

I'd give you urls to our websites but they suck, we really do need to work on them. Instead we've been working on building a pretty decent root server network, deploying tlds, registries and a new improved whois service (code is free, just ask) and working on alliances.

So if you want to see pretty alt root websites, look at everyones elses. They've spent a lot of time on them.

At ORSC we believe no one company or entity should be in control of the root. We see it as a producers cooperative run by people working in collegial manner. We don't believe in press releases, we do believe in quietly resolving collisions in new domain space both at the tld and sld level. Every day the alternative namespace has a few less collisions. By the end of the year there's a very good chance there will be one unified alternative namespace regardless of how many root server clusters there are.

I believe we are at a critical point in the politics of DNS on the net, and if there is some degree of unity among all the independant roots so you always get the domain you think you shold get when you type something into the location line of Netscape we would all be better served.

So poke around alt.root land. Look at whose a jerk and who seems cooperative and hitch your wagon to their root. There are good guys and bad huys on both sides of the DNS wars, find out who they are. But most importantly:

TAKE BACK THE INTERNET.

This is exactly the kind of information that should be encoded according to RFC 1437.

BASIC was not the first computer language. According to FOLDOC it was created in 1963, which puts it after FORTRANs I, II, III, and IV ('54, '58, ??, '62), LISPs 1 and 1.5 ('55?, '59), ALGOLs 58 and 60, and God knows how many other languages. COBOL itself dates from 1960, and should have stayed there.

There's already bwBASIC which is GPL'd. It's written in C and builds on all the free Unices.

X-Windows (The Xerox Windowing System)

How ironic. You attempt to lambaste another poster and show off your ignorance.

X-Windows was created in 1984 at MIT as part of Project Athena. Its name, X Window System, is because it was based upon an earlier windows systems, "W" for the "V" research project at Stanford. (References: here, here, here, and here.)

If you are going to attempt to be kewl RootAksess, might I suggest, you do some research first?

Start HERE

A problem X is in the set NP-hard if all problems in NP can be transformed into X in polynomial time. Thus, every problem in NP-hard is at least as hard as every problem in NP.

A problem is in NP-complete if it is in NP and NP-hard. Thus, NP-complete is a "representative" set of NP problems, such that solving one of these in polynomial time would also mean solving all other NP problems.

Here is the FOLDOC entry for NP-hard. It explains all this.
--
Patrick Doyle

A problem X is in the set NP-hard if all problems in NP can be transformed into X in polynomial time. Thus, every problem in NP-hard is at least as hard as every problem in NP.

A problem is in NP-complete if it is in NP and NP-hard. Thus, NP-complete is a "representative" set of NP problems, such that solving one of these in polynomial time would also mean solving all other NP problems.

Here is the FOLDOC entry for NP-hard. It explains all this.
--
Patrick Doyle

Unix is 'in'. Remember Apple's first attempt at Unix, A/UX? Even if you are a machead, probably not. Because Unix wasn't 'in'. Let's not kid ourselves, there's not much difference between OSX or Linux or BSD or Solaris. It's all marketing. Anyone can learn to use Unix, unless maybe someone says "This is really hard". Anyway, this article is on a website called 'Mac Addict'.

--

Thanks to a couple of people for pointing out to me that similar formal specifications exist for OO languages. For instance, looking at the type systems for the simple L1 and L2 languages described here, with their accompanying soundness proofs, gives me all kinds of warm fuzzies.

The start and end of daylight saving time is now standardized across the EU. According to http://www.rog.nmm.ac.uk/leaflets/summer/summer.ht ml , summer time starts at 01:00 on the last Sunday in March, and ends at 01:00 on the last Sunday in October. (That's 01:00 UT (01:00 GMT) in both cases, BTW.) This has been the case since 1998. I believe that this is decided at EU level: when France wanted to change timezone, the other EU countries (except Britain) refused to allow them to change.

I wrote code to handle this nonsense: uk_tz.pl. It's a few routines building on the Date::Manip Perl module - one day I should make it into a derived class, or something. Consider it GPL/Artistic dual-licensed.

At the moment we get our power from two sources - the UK National Grid and our onsite gas-fired power plant (also supplies hot water - "combined heat and power"). The power plant is already operating at maximum capacity during peak periods of demand, so we have to buy in power from the Grid. The problem is that the cables are nearing capacity, so if we want to increase the amount of power coming in from the Grid we will have to lay a new cable. This will cost at least three million pounds (five million US dollars).

Part of the proposed solution is to replace CRTs with flat panels. This will cost us a fair bit in capital terms, but:

• when you buy several thousand screens it's much cheaper than buying them individually from PC World
• running costs for flat panel screens are cheaper
• we don't have to put in a new power cable
• the overall savings will outweigh the capital cost of the upgrade over the lifetime of the flat screens

Etienne Pollard
Imperial College Union

Someone point me to a ReplayTV project.

there isn't one going per se (at least I haven't seen one yet), but all of the tools are there...on the hardware side, you'll need a tv tuner, and Big-Assed Harddrive (TM).
On the software side, grab vcr. VCR is a command line tool to record divx files..it eats processors though, so make sure you got a good one..if you would like something that is a little leaner on the processor, grab mp1e (sorry no web page), the files you write will be bigger, but the quality is good, and only take about 15% of my celery 400.
To see what is on TV, either grab xmltv, tvguide, or the cream of the crop Mister House

Mister House looks pretty sweet, since it already embeds links to record shows right in the listings for recording(you'll have to hack it a bit to get it to use vcr/mp1e, but it'll work), and there is already code there for remembering your favourite shows, sorting for movies, etc, etc etc...

Now if you want to get fancy, you'll grab a DVD anywhere from x10 (to lazy to throw in the link), a second sound card in your Linux box, and a second video card in your Linux box, and it will all get run from your machine sitting in your room so that you don't have a noisy machine sitting your Living Room.
And of course this also gets you access to your MP3s, and web browser while sitting on the couch...

So why haven't you built this yet Jose, you ask? I'm working on it OK, GET OFF MY BACK!! =P

At doc.ic.ac.uk, the second year students get a lab exercise to modify Minix (which is, of course, a microkernel design). Last year it was adding a new kernel task for debugging and a user process which sends messages to this task to step through programs and set breakpoints. The number of layers a system call goes through is rather scary. Still, it's no worse than on Linux or any other complex OS, just more explicit.

At doc.ic.ac.uk, the second year students get a lab exercise to modify Minix (which is, of course, a microkernel design). Last year it was adding a new kernel task for debugging and a user process which sends messages to this task to step through programs and set breakpoints. The number of layers a system call goes through is rather scary. Still, it's no worse than on Linux or any other complex OS, just more explicit.

Or a cut down version, anyway. They hacked out some unnecessary stuff to keep the files more manageable. For the desperately curios, details are on Dr. Steffen van Bakes's website at http://www.doc.ic.ac.uk/~svb

rc definition at FOLDOC.
I know which I'd rather put money on... :)

--

There are materials with an index of n = -1 in the visible: metals will have an index of -1 for a particular frequency (not a range, just one). For instance, silver has an index of -1 for a wavelength of 350 nm and that is precisely the case that is discussed at the end of the article in PRL. However, to get a perfect lens the author shows that you also need a magnetic constant mu of -1. This is not the case of silver but he shows that you can still get a perfect lens as long as you stay in the near field (i.e. very close to the lens). That's why the object is only a few nanometers away from the silver lens. For photolithograhy applications, this could actually be practical.

The GHz lens made of wires and loops would be a perfect lens because they could manage to get n = -1 as well as mu = -1. By the way, the negative index for the GHz wave is achieved by stacking wires in a certain structure that is the exact analog of photonic crystals. Those are also possible in the visible. Pendry studies those too...

There's a HOWTO on how to get Halflife to run here: (with nvidia cards...)
http://www.alainsplace.f2s.com/nvidia/Linux+Wine+H alf-Life+NVidia-MiniHOWTO

...like shortening the TLD of sunsite.doc.ic.ac.uk to something a little easier to remember?

Maybe you're trying to be funny, but a TLD refers to a Top Level Domain rather than a Three Letter Domain.

--

IMHO, ISTM that all TLDs should be TLAs ;-)

IMHO, ISTM that all TLDs should be TLAs ;-)

IMHO, ISTM that all TLDs should be TLAs ;-)

IMHO, ISTM that all TLDs should be TLAs ;-)

`swap space' is space that is used to swap processes out to. You can have (and use) swap space without having a virtual-memory system--you can swap tasks out of memory and back in, so you can run lots of tasks, for which the total, aggregate memory usage is greater than your amount of physical RAM, but you cannot run one processes that, itself, requires more RAM than you physically have.

See the entry for `virtual memory' in the FOLDOC.

There is mention of it every now and then on the V4L list.
You really need V4L2 to actually do it (V4L1 doesn't support two programs accessing the tv tuner at the same time)..but it should be ready from prime time rsn.
For the mpeg encoding, the best tool I've seen so far is mp1e (mirror here ...the real site seems to be down..)
For grabbing the listings, have a look at xmltv. There should be a new release coming out soon, with support for more countries...

ccdecoder (search freshmeat) also looks promising...it has the potential for grabbing listings right off your cable tv line..

..went up yesterday, before this story even broke. My copy is located at http://www.doc.ic.ac.uk/~dwm99/ Computing/DeCSS.html.

I am now more convinved than before that what I did was the right thing to do.

To the MPAA, and all who would follow in their footsteps: you may not censor me .

From The Free On-line Dictionary of Computing

hmmmm - looks like a source to me. did you try finding this? it took me 2 secs.

little FYI.

Definition of SIMD:
"(SIMD) (Or 'data parallel') The classification under Flynn's taxonomy for a parallel processor where many processing elements (functional units) perform the same operations on different data. There is often a central controller which broadcasts the instruction stream to all the processing elements."

As you can see, SIMD is architecture and DSP is the actual I/O. Superior DSP means more I/O. Bigger images - higher resolution. More bandwidth, the precise problem the NSA (as well as any group which monitors lots of data) would need to combat to meet the demands for Echelon. I will reiterate that this is the main problem the NSA faces is one of bandwidth management. The best board in the world won't be able to do anything without decent bandwidth.. there is a certain amount of entropy which must be transmitted between each component and compression cannot help beyond that point! Bandwidth is key to Echelon's success.

Definition of SIMD:
"(SIMD) (Or 'data parallel') The classification under Flynn's taxonomy for a parallel processor where many processing elements (functional units) perform the same operations on different data. There is often a central controller which broadcasts the instruction stream to all the processing elements."

As you can see, SIMD is architecture and DSP is the actual I/O. Superior DSP means more I/O. Bigger images - higher resolution. More bandwidth, the precise problem the NSA (as well as any group which monitors lots of data) would need to combat to meet the demands for Echelon. I will reiterate that this is the main problem the NSA faces is one of bandwidth management. The best board in the world won't be able to do anything without decent bandwidth.. there is a certain amount of entropy which must be transmitted between each component and compression cannot help beyond that point! Bandwidth is key to Echelon's success.

Igor Aleksander postulates consciousness in NNs is based on awareness of World and of Self. As I see it the mindpixel project would train a NN in world-awareness, but what about the self-awareness? (Or don't you agree with Aleksander at all?)
-><-
Grand Reverence Zan Zu, AB, DD, KSC

This site should answer all your questions: http://wombat.doc.ic.ac.uk/foldoc/

I'd be very surprised if it was a lens and not a mirror. I did my PhD in making mirrors for adaptive optics - I've met the group from Rochester. Almost all adaptive elements (currently) are reflective - although LCD elements (used in phase rather than amplitude mode) could potentially be used in transmission.

But I wonder if in theory they could use the measurements to smooth out all the imperfections, presumably using laser surgery, and permanently give you the super vision.

Yes, they absolutely could. A guy i shared an office with during my PhD was doing exactly these types of measurements (see here ). He measured my eye, and came out with a complete map of the aberrations - i.e. the deviation from the perfect shape. He discovered that my cornea deviates from ideal by less than 0.5 microns - which is pretty good (i'd need about 0.25 dioptre lens to correct this).

Edric.

I'd be very surprised if it was a lens and not a mirror. I did my PhD in making mirrors for adaptive optics - I've met the group from Rochester. Almost all adaptive elements (currently) are reflective - although LCD elements (used in phase rather than amplitude mode) could potentially be used in transmission.

But I wonder if in theory they could use the measurements to smooth out all the imperfections, presumably using laser surgery, and permanently give you the super vision.

Yes, they absolutely could. A guy i shared an office with during my PhD was doing exactly these types of measurements (see here ). He measured my eye, and came out with a complete map of the aberrations - i.e. the deviation from the perfect shape. He discovered that my cornea deviates from ideal by less than 0.5 microns - which is pretty good (i'd need about 0.25 dioptre lens to correct this).

Edric.

I really don't care for their choices at all. A lot of them are more like general approaches than algorthms, and I'm not at all sure they are the most influential. I think they are supposed to be "the cleverest of the common fancy methods"

Simple algorithms for common problems are much more widely used, and have far more impact and influence, but try telling *them* that!

I hope these links help. (Warning: many are technical) If anyone has personal favorites that are less dry than many of these, please post!.

10. 1987: Fast Multipole Method. A breakthrough in dealing with the complexity of n-body calculations, applied in problems ranging from celestial mechanics to protein folding. [Overview] [A math/visual approach]

9. 1977: Integer Relation Detection. A fast method for spotting simple equations satisfied by collections of seemingly unrelated numbers. [Nice article with links]

8. 1965: Fast Fourier Transform. Perhaps the most ubiquitous algorithm in use today, it breaks down waveforms (like sound) into periodic components. Everyone knows this one (or should) [Part II of my personal favorite FFT and wavelet tutorial]

7. 1962: Quicksort Algorithms for Sorting. For the efficient handling of large databases. [Definition][Basic Method][Mathworld][More technical explanation][A lecture with animations and simulations]

6. 1959: QR Algorithm for Computing Eigenvalues. Another crucial matrix operation made swift and practical. [Math] [Algorithm

5. 1957: The Fortran Optimizing Compiler. Turns high-level code into efficient computer-readable code. (pretty much self-explanatory) [History and lots of info]

4. 1951: The Decompositional Approach to Matrix Computations. A suite of techniques for numerical linear algebra. [matrix decomposition theorem] [Strategies]

3. 1950: Krylov Subspace Iteration Method. A technique for rapidly solving the linear equations that abound in scientific computation. [History] [various Krylov subspace iterative methods]

2. 1947: Simplex Method for Linear Programming. An elegant solution to a common problem in planning and decision-making. [English} [Explanation with Java simulator] [An interactive teaching tool

1. 1946: The Metropolis Algorithm for Monte Carlo. Through the use of random processes, this algorithm offers an efficient way to stumble toward answers to problems that are too complicated to solve exactly. [English] [Code and Math] [Math explained]

I really don't care for their choices at all. A lot of them are more like general approaches than algorthms, and I'm not at all sure they are the most influential. I think they are supposed to be "the cleverest of the common fancy methods"

Simple algorithms for common problems are much more widely used, and have far more impact and influence, but try telling *them* that!

I hope these links help. (Warning: many are technical) If anyone has personal favorites that are less dry than many of these, please post!.

10. 1987: Fast Multipole Method. A breakthrough in dealing with the complexity of n-body calculations, applied in problems ranging from celestial mechanics to protein folding. [Overview] [A math/visual approach]

9. 1977: Integer Relation Detection. A fast method for spotting simple equations satisfied by collections of seemingly unrelated numbers. [Nice article with links]

8. 1965: Fast Fourier Transform. Perhaps the most ubiquitous algorithm in use today, it breaks down waveforms (like sound) into periodic components. Everyone knows this one (or should) [Part II of my personal favorite FFT and wavelet tutorial]

7. 1962: Quicksort Algorithms for Sorting. For the efficient handling of large databases. [Definition][Basic Method][Mathworld][More technical explanation][A lecture with animations and simulations]

6. 1959: QR Algorithm for Computing Eigenvalues. Another crucial matrix operation made swift and practical. [Math] [Algorithm

5. 1957: The Fortran Optimizing Compiler. Turns high-level code into efficient computer-readable code. (pretty much self-explanatory) [History and lots of info]

4. 1951: The Decompositional Approach to Matrix Computations. A suite of techniques for numerical linear algebra. [matrix decomposition theorem] [Strategies]

3. 1950: Krylov Subspace Iteration Method. A technique for rapidly solving the linear equations that abound in scientific computation. [History] [various Krylov subspace iterative methods]

2. 1947: Simplex Method for Linear Programming. An elegant solution to a common problem in planning and decision-making. [English} [Explanation with Java simulator] [An interactive teaching tool

1. 1946: The Metropolis Algorithm for Monte Carlo. Through the use of random processes, this algorithm offers an efficient way to stumble toward answers to problems that are too complicated to solve exactly. [English] [Code and Math] [Math explained]

I would refer you to the cited papers, and to an old (ca March-April 1996) web article: Dynamic Control of Topological Asymmetry

In that earlier report you can clearly see the biasing of a molecule conformation by a simple metal binding event. This was detected by optical methods.

Since them, other systems have been described by the same group, redox systems (Cu for example), in which there is a very strong conformational change affecting the optical and the electronic properties of the system. And this was very reproducible and stable.

I am a former memeber of the group, when I was doing my PhD at NYU

3COM dropped support on UNET and TCP/IP around 1983, instead pushing their own, now-forgotten protocol suite for PC LANs. We finally switched to BSD's networking on the VAX when 4.3BSD came out, and even then, it had lousy interoperability with non-Berkeley TCPs. I had to fix the thing myself, for which I got a minor mention in the 4.3BSD release notes.

The big advantage Berkeley had is that they could give their work away. UNET sold for about $5000 per CPU, just for the protocol stack.

John Nagle

Declaration: I use mysql and am happy with what it does

Question: What is it about mysql that does not fit the RDBMS definition?

Looking it up on a couple sites (foldoc tech. glossary) and an unsuccessful search for Cobb's original designs.. There didn't seem to include anything that mysql didn't support. Maybe mysql doesn't support the full set of SQL92 specs, but nothing but revisionism makes that what RDBMS is.
It seems as if it were more of a value judgement... 'Apache 1.0 isn't a REAL webserver, it doesn't support HTTP/1.1'... Maybe, maybe not, you tell me, and I would like citings, not personal reflections..
I think we have a good grasp of what mysql does and does not do (for the most part). I am not trying to make it out to be [insert other db]'s equal.

Yes, the Avian Carriers one is one of my favourites too. And, of course, The Twelve Networking Truths is required reading for anyone dealing with networks of any kind... And if you raise your eyes just a little bit, you will find a link to the "HyperText Coffee Pot Control Protocol", next to my "user info" link.

The infinite monkey thing this year was not one of the best, IMHO, even if it was long - They can do better.

I spoke to an MSCE friend of mine, and he says it's a MS protocol. Also, according to these guys, it really is a Microsoft protocol.

• Australiasia
  
  • Japan
    
    
  • ftp://ftp.netlab.is.tsukuba.ac.jp/pub /XFree86
  • ftp://ftp.iij.ad.jp/pub/X/XFree86
  
  
• Korea
  
  • ftp://ftp.kreonet.re.kr/pub/Linux/xfree86
  
  
• Australia
  
  • ftp://mirror.aarnet.edu.au/pub/XFree86
    
  • ftp://x.physics.usyd.edu.au/pub/XFree86
  
  

US

• ftp://phyppro1.phy.bnl.gov/pub/XFree86
  
• ftp://ftp.rge.com/pub/X/XFree86
• ftp://ftp.varesearch.com/pub/mirrors/x free86
• ftp://ftp.infomagic.com/pub/mirrors/XFr ee86
• ftp://ftp.calderasystems.com/pub/m irrors/xfree86
• ftp://ftp.cs.umn.edu/pub/XFree86
• 
  ftp://ftp.kernel.org/pub/mirrors/xfree86
  
  

Europe

• Austria
  
  • ftp://gd.tuwien.ac.at/hci/X11/XFree86
    
    
  
  
• Finland
  • ftp://ftp.funet.fi/pub/X11/XFree86
• France
  • ftp://ftp.lip6.fr/pub/X11/XFree86
  
  
• Germany
  • ftp://ftp.gwdg.de/pub/xfree86/XFree86
    
  • ftp://ftp.cs.tu-berlin.de/pub/X/XFree86
• Italy
  • ftp://ftp.unina.it/pub/XFree86
• Norway
  • ftp://sunsite.uio.no/pub/XFree86
  
  
• United Kingdom
  • ftp://sunsite.doc.ic.ac.uk/packages/XFr ee86

One thing that must be borne in mind in this situation is the intrinsic optical disturbance introduced by the atmosphere. This usually restricts the angular resolution of anything looking through it to around a second of arc. So, getting 1m resolution on the ground from a height of 681km suggests better resolution than that - this will not be obtained very often in practice.

The effect of the atmosphere also means that increasing the size of your optics doesn't do any good - you need adaptive optics too if you want to increase resolution. However, doing adaptive optics on wide field of view systems is damn near impossible - it's only any use because in astronomy, your field of view is typically quite tiny.

Edric.

Once Linux gets to be more and more mainstream, can we expect to see a block on .iso files as the traffic just gets to be too huge?

Something like that happened here at Imperial College London when Debian 2.1 was released. So many people were downloading the ISO images from SunSITE that the whole of .ac.uk started to get congested. So the bandwidth was throttled in order to give other network users a chance. Unfortunately this had the side effect of throttling bandwidth for the college as a whole.

There's something Deeply Wrong if anyone (not just M$) can patent a language, what with `language being the tool of thought', and all.

With respect to Basic, according to Foldoc, it was ``designed by John G. Kemeny and Thomas E. Kurtz at Dartmouth College in 1963''. I assume that even the infamous US Patent Office would recognise that as Prior Art. Whether Basic is an Art form at all is a moot point...

Having said that, I learned to program in Basic, and my brain isn't as damaged as some people claim it should be. That could be because I learned a reasonably structured Basic (Acorn's BBC Basic V), complete with (gasp) local variables, (ooh) procedures, (aah) and other nice features. I managed to write some reasonable size programs with not a single GOTO. The type system was a bit basic (pun intended), though.

Disclaimer: I know nothing about VB, and long may it stay that way.

So there you go...

Stephen

Polynitrocubances are still at the molecule level of development at this time and it is not expected that multigram quantities will be available anytime in the immediate future.

HMX and RDX

Another resource:

Cub ane Applications

• ftp://mirrors.xmission.com /mozilla/mozilla/releases/m12/
  
• ftp://sunsite.utk.e du/pub/netscape-source/mozilla/releases/m12/
  
• ftp:// sunsite.doc.ic.ac.uk/Mirrors/ftp.mozilla.org/pub/m ozilla/releases/m12/
  
• ftp://sunsite.ua lberta.ca/pub/Mirror/mozilla/mozilla/releases/m12/