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Domain: iu.edu
Stories and comments across the archive that link to iu.edu.
Comments · 571
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PDA versus Microfiche?
Find out if the Peace Corps sends other people either to where she is doing her stint, or if someone will pass through. Send the PDA with them, and have her meet them at the airport. This won't solve the theft in situ problem, but she probably has quite a few personal possessions in that category already, so it is not like an unaddressed problem. At least if you get a PDA to her, shipping her bytes consists of just sending a flash media card in a letter.
She might not live near an Internet cafe, so printing out the material might not be feasible, or might be prohibitively expensive, depending on how much she wants to print out.
I think PDA-based solutions might even beat out microfiche at this time, which surprised me. It was difficult to find out how much Computer Output on Microform (COM) costs; closest page to prices I could find seemed to imply that there is a $175 USD setup fee per run. This page seems to imply a $0.02/page cost. Maybe the Canadian government agency price of $0.12 CAD per image says I'm completely wrong, and if you can ship someone a TIFF file of the entire microfiche, they can turn around the microfiche to you for really dirt cheap. Or they might be talking about a TIFF image per page, and not per microfiche. I would be astonished if it was not priced per page, and really was $0.12 CAD per microfiche. If it was that cheap, then I would reconsider a PDA based solution if cheap microfiche readers can be found.
Oh, alright. Google is not all knowing. Curiosity got the better of me, so I broke down and called Microfacs and spoke with a nice guy named Rick. Minimum pricing is $0.05 USD per page, and they think 2,000 pages is a very small order. For that, the deal goes like this. You ship them single page TIFF images. You get about a week turnaround, and it is in the form of 16mm microfilm. If you want microfiche, that costs extra. I didn't ask, because $0.05 per page sounded like about the limit for the low budgets we are talking about; I'm guessing that $0.10 per page for microfiche. More expensive than a copy shop, but a heck of a lot cheaper to ship around I would imagine.
Recondtioned readers don't go below $130 USD, although some student projects seem to be aware of the advantages of shipping bulk human readable data around on microform (they are aming for a $20 USD reader, for example). There are handheld microfiche readers that use sunlight, but they cost about the same as a new low-end PDA, so you would still have in situ theft concerns. Used readers have $50 USD opening bids on eBay in the here and now. This is all for microfiche readers; search around for 16mm format microfilm readers that are sunlight or battery capable (if she isn't around reliable electricity), though I'm not sure about the prudence of using for long periods of time any readers that you have to peer through optics.
It currently seems tough to beat the TCO combination of an eBay'd Palm, solar panel, and SD media if you are talking about shipping all of Project Gutenberg to her. Microform readers cost more than a cheap PDA, even used and reconditioned, and the reproduction costs can really swing the cost picture into the PDAs favor (even assuming a couple get stolen) when you start dealing with 10,000 pages (roughly the number of proofed Project Gutenberg pages) and up. If she is around re
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Re:What problem
Before the my-format-is-better-than-your-format debate kicks into high gear, it should be said that the LSB intends to use the RPM format as a stop-gap measure
Of course, you know who is on record about how stop-gap measures "...have a way of staying around. Forever." -
Mailing list thread
Since the article is pretty much a copy/paste job from the lkml, why not link directly to the thread in question?
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MIME & Quoted PrintableAt least that's the only time I've heard Linus suggest to go out shoot anyone
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Re:How the hell
Now: patch for 2.6.10. Latest 2.4 release candidate fixes it.
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IPv6 on Internet2
Contrary to what many people know...there are MANY networks that are IPv6 enabled. Just not many IPv6 apps.
ALL of abiline (Internet2) is v6 enabled, just not all the way to clients.
Here is an up to date map of deployment of Ipv6 on I2.
http://www.abilene.iu.edu/images/v6.pdf
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Re:The Biggest IPv6 Network?
Abilene IPv6 Map seems a reasonable size already.
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Recording Realaudio, WMF, OGG & MP3 Radio stre
From a blog entry I wrote a few weeks ago:
I wanted to record a couple of radio shows so that I can listen to them later on my linux machine. Basically I would like to listen to a mix of realplayer, Windows Media, Ogg and MP3 streams and save them as mp3 or ogg files so I can listen to them later on my computer or iriver ogg/mp3 player.
First I tried mplayer's dumpstream command
1) mplayer -dumpfile cores -dumpstream http://wm.warnermusic.com/France/the_corrs/summer_ sunshine/video/Summer_Sunshine_video_458.wmv
(thi s will give you a file called "cores" in your home-directory)
2) mplayer -vo null -vc null -ao pcm -aofile audio.wav cores
(this will convert the videofile to a wav audiofile)
3) lame audio.wav cores.mp3
(this will convert the file from wav to mp3)
However this process core dumped on realplayer recorder over 10 minutes. Also it doesn't know about ram files so you have to download them first (wget filename) and then open them to file the real link to the rm file. So I went on to look for some other tools.
Most of the tools seem to be wrappers around vsound and/or sox and lame/oggenc. Another tool I looked at is streamripper, which works for mp3 or ogg streams.
First I grabbed realcap which is a shell script front end to those tools. Downloaded, compiled and installed vsound.
Trick one - you have to ensure that realplayer is using OSS drivers
http://www.osl.iu.edu/~tveldhui/radio/
After that seemed to work I tried directly with vsound. vsound acts as a kind of virtual audio loopback cable
vsound --timing -f myfile.wav realplay http://www.radio.org/ra/show.ram
oggenc myfile.wav
I also checked out the trplayer - which is a command line wrapper to realplayer. http://www.linux-speakup.org/trplayer.html
Got the error:
Failed to load rmacore.so.6.0:
Well I figured out that they must be looking for the real player in
Also I tried out streamripper
http://streamripper.sourceforge.net/, which seemed to work fine ripping various streams. It didn't seem to be able to read the
Finally I had a look at mp3record - a bash shell wrapper for lame and sox
Basically it does this:
(sox -r $strFreqRate -t ossdsp -w -s
| lame -s 44.1 -x -b $strBitRate -m s - $strFileName) &
Things to get working...
1) streaming directly to ogg with no intermediary wav step.
2) see if I can get this running from a cron job... -
Re:New Terms
Alan Cox is definitely not one of them.
Linux Torvalds, however, distributes the Linux kernel under that license.
See This post (and thread) on the linux-kernel list. -
Re:I've never quite understood...
What SuperKenall said is correct. However, some languages have more differences than others.
All the
Functionally, VB.NET, C#, J#, and Managed C++ all have exactly the same capibilities. They are all sequential, procedural, imperative, object-oriented languages that support single inheritance, interfaces, events, exceptions, type generics(they will in v2.0), reflection and share a common runtime library and work in a sandboxed VM. The ONLY differences between them are in syntax. So, it doesn't really matter which of these languages are used unless someone in the group doesn't know the syntax for a language in a source file they need to work on. The interfaces between them will be equivalent regardless of language.
Compare this to a functional language such as Common LISP or Scheme, or a declaritive rule-baed language like Prolog or Mercury. Mercury can compile to
Haskell has to jump through hoops to get the needed multiple inheritance to work.
OTOH, there are some interesting projects like F#, an OCaml like functional language. It has some serious issues to be compatible with
It's like Microsoft offers you several languages, but they are all the same. The illusion of choices without really having any. They should just be like Java and admit that there might as well be one language-- seriously, Java could have all the multi-language support of
As for what languages should be used when, where and by whom: I don't know. I'm still trying to figure that out. I know that some are good and bad for certain things, but I also know that personal preference is important, too.
</rant> -
Re:Linguistic origins
1. Ken Thompson created and named it after he felt that the MULTICS project was too complex. Ritchie came later and did the C compiler.
2. Have a link? Here's mine: http://www.uwsg.iu.edu/usail/concepts/unixhx.html -
A Con-Man
I'll let Merkey speak for himself, and let other judge who and what he is...
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My own Homestar Runner tribute
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My own Homestar Runner tribute
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My own Homestar Runner tribute
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My own Homestar Runner tribute
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My own Homestar Runner tribute
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Shapiro's take on this
Shapiro is the guy working on a research Operating System project (The EROS system).
EROS was originally implemented in C++, but then
it was reimplemented in C. -
Re:Ways you are wrong
solaris has some cool ass fault tolerance (hotswap CPUS). Linux can't do that
Hot swap CPU support for 2.4.1 -
Re:#3 might be an option
Awhile back, Via released the specs to the CLE266 chipset, which is an on motherboard graphics chipset most commonly used on their mini-itx boards. They have also bought S3. A few months ago S3 released the DeltaChrome S4 and S8 in Europe and Asia, no North American release yet. They have claimed they are going to release open source linux drivers for the card at some point in the near future. The price point for the performance they are offering would be just about right with open drivers. Also they are releasing a version of the card called OmniChrome which has a tv tuner powered by the Techwell TW9905 which already has linux support. Here is a Techbits.ca review of the OmniChrome. If they do pony up the open drivers, an S3 graphics card will definitely be the next graphics card I buy. We'll see if it happens. I'm gonna go read the lkml thread the kernel trap article refers to now. Should be interesting stuff.
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This one would qualify -- an ICBM and BIOS ... :)
An email to treasure
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Re:Overrated
Give me a break. You guys are blind Apple fanboys. The Hauppauge WinTV USB does TV and Radio timeshifting. It has been out for years now!
Hell, even Linux has had Radio timeshifting solutions for some time now. You can use any of the popular PCI TV Tuner cards, which almost always have radio tuning in addition to TV tuning. Then you can use this howto to setup radio timeshifting:
http://osl.iu.edu/~tveldhui/radio/
Yes its harder to setup this kind of thing on Linux, but I am trying to drive home the point that even Linux has had such a thing! You can setup scheduled recording, listen to recordings on the fly, pause live recordings, etc...
The Windows solutions are far easier to install than the Linux solutions, and in addition to PCI products, Windows also has support for plug-n-play USB timeshifters. Both Windows and Linux solutions have been available for at least half a decade!
In conclusion: overrated, overpriced Mac hardware. For the same price you can get a Hauppuage product that can also timeshift television.
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I invented something simmilar
for use in the ImmersaDesk system. I called it "Head Woggle Navigation" and the user's head attitude synced up display navigations with wand input (3d mouse) never caught on though. But I do see things like this from time to time.
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The USSG at Indiana University
The Unix Systems Support Group at Indiana University for spending thousands upon thousands of dollars a year to get software into the hands of people around the world.
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Misguided
I love the misguided comments in this story. In particular, I like the "most users don't care what is in their kernel, so we shouldn't care that we're taking away freedoms from all (including those who do care)".
Some comments from the guy who actually did this (http://www.uwsg.iu.edu/hypermail/linux/kernel/04
0 8.3/0270.html):"Without this hook, PWC will work, but with limitations, just as it always has."
"Actually, I've got a little surprise for you. The NDA I signed with Philips has already expired a year ago. Yet, I didn't just throw the decompressor code on the Internet."So, just to summarise, a) removing the hook doesn't stop the driver working, b) there isn't really anything stopping him publishing the code as free software. Basically, he just wants to take his ball home because he thinks he should be allowed to put hooks for proprietary modules into the kernel.
Is it the first time he's threatened to do this? No (http://www.uwsg.iu.edu/hypermail/linux/kernel/01
0 5.3/0365.html):"Anyway, I am not going to debate this any further at this point. Johannes, please remove my webcam driver from the USB source tree" (May 25, 2001)
Linux doesn't need proprietary drivers, it doesn't need to compromise freedom, and it certainly doesn't need people to try to press the issue by holding code hostage. And, aside from all the facts that this guy is acting an arse, there are also questions over whether or not the hook is legal (Linus' point of view of derivative works of the Linux kernel is quite clear - they must be GPL'd), and the decision to remove the hook was partially a technical one anyway (only one driver is using it).
Yet, we are still going to get people holding this up as an example of the GPL preventing Linux from "going enterprise" or whatever. Guys; shove it - for Linux to be "accepted by business" doesn't mean that developers should bend over for whatever perversion proprietary companies want. Jeesh.
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Misguided
I love the misguided comments in this story. In particular, I like the "most users don't care what is in their kernel, so we shouldn't care that we're taking away freedoms from all (including those who do care)".
Some comments from the guy who actually did this (http://www.uwsg.iu.edu/hypermail/linux/kernel/04
0 8.3/0270.html):"Without this hook, PWC will work, but with limitations, just as it always has."
"Actually, I've got a little surprise for you. The NDA I signed with Philips has already expired a year ago. Yet, I didn't just throw the decompressor code on the Internet."So, just to summarise, a) removing the hook doesn't stop the driver working, b) there isn't really anything stopping him publishing the code as free software. Basically, he just wants to take his ball home because he thinks he should be allowed to put hooks for proprietary modules into the kernel.
Is it the first time he's threatened to do this? No (http://www.uwsg.iu.edu/hypermail/linux/kernel/01
0 5.3/0365.html):"Anyway, I am not going to debate this any further at this point. Johannes, please remove my webcam driver from the USB source tree" (May 25, 2001)
Linux doesn't need proprietary drivers, it doesn't need to compromise freedom, and it certainly doesn't need people to try to press the issue by holding code hostage. And, aside from all the facts that this guy is acting an arse, there are also questions over whether or not the hook is legal (Linus' point of view of derivative works of the Linux kernel is quite clear - they must be GPL'd), and the decision to remove the hook was partially a technical one anyway (only one driver is using it).
Yet, we are still going to get people holding this up as an example of the GPL preventing Linux from "going enterprise" or whatever. Guys; shove it - for Linux to be "accepted by business" doesn't mean that developers should bend over for whatever perversion proprietary companies want. Jeesh.
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2.6.8 has NFS3 problems
people who use NFS should wait for 2.6.8.1: 2.6.8 oopses with nfs
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Re:Slackware and Vanilla?This has been discussed to death. See this.
Oh, and if you want to fork Linux and maintain your own tree in order to have binary compatibility, feel free to do so.
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Re:Nothing is stopping you from doing this.
The devfs code _is_ broken. To quote Al Viro -
- it was determined that the same thing could be done in userspace
- devfs had been shoved into the tree in hope that its quality will catch up
- devfs was found to have fixable and unfixable bugs
- the former had stayed around for many months with maintainer claiming that everything works fine
- the latter had stayed, period.
- the devfs maintainer/author disappeared and stoped maintaining the code. -
Re:there's fans then there's fansI just don't get it. With fedora, I'm getting the same deal I was getting with the distro when it had redhat slapped on the label.
Not really. They want you to know that Fedora is not stable and is not to be used if you're using it for something important since you might be willing to pay for RHEL.
Consider FC2 being released without Firewire support. Or for a more recent example, a serious security hole that no patch has been released for yet. You can't use a distro for business purposes if known security holes go unpatched for multiple weeks.
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he is an undercover linux-terrorist
Searching "Laurent Chavet" on google, I found some of his posts to the Linux-Kernel mailing list.
http://www.uwsg.iu.edu/hypermail/linux/kernel/0104
His e-mail address is @av.com, that is altavista, so it must be him. -
Re:Killed by tether
I wouldn't worry about being killed by a carbon fiber making meteoric reentry. It wouldn't be like the disaster in the Mars trilogy, or even like shadow square wire... by the time it hits it'll be more like laser toner, the stuff is strong in tension but it burns quite nicely: Nanotube Explosions
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Google didn't exist when user-mode linux started
Jeff Dike started user-mode linux in February 1998
message from jeff
Unified Modelling Language may have existed in early 1998; I first saw it in April 1999. But Unified Modelling Language was a lot smaller back then.
And Google did not exist in February 1998!
These days, when I need to name something, I stick the name in google and check for conflicts. -
Welcome to SlashdotWelcome to Slashdot, where anti-social people who like calling people idiots get moderated up.
And, oh, I haven't seen one Slashdot know-it-all post a link to the correct patch (not the one which merely stops the example code posted) for the problem.
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Another kernel violation..
From a recent post to a mailing list click
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Re:How about...
You mean, like this post? That was four years ago.
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Re:full changelog text
ATI and nVidia don't care about Linux users at all. Linux users don't make up enough of a marketshare for them to care. The binary drivers are provided merely as a dangling carrot to appease people.
The only way that nVidia and/or ATI would open up their drivers is if:
1. Linux was documented to be installed on at least 25% of all machines, with that number increasing, or,
2. Somebody paid them a ton of money.
The rumor that I heard is that the driver for the Promise TX2 SATA-150 cards/chips was opened because some people bought tons of Promise cards, to leverage Promise to release the driver GPL'd (as seen on the Linux-Kernel Archive.
Until the Open Source community can do this, I just don't see open source drivers available for video cards, or even other hardware.
-- Joe -
Re:tracking
Linus' original email linked further down makes clear the intention to track where the code came from start to finish.
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[RFD] Explicitly documenting patch submission
This is the e-mail itself, as posted to LKML by Linus - on Sunday, not Saturday.
Posted anonymously to avoid karma whoring. -
Link to Linus' Mailing List Post
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Re:short answer no
Yes, I am listening to triple J right now:
No need for realplay:
Goto Linux Radio Timeshift HOWTO and read up, but ignore all that about vsound.
mplayer -cache 512 -osdlevel 0 -nojoystick -nofs -slave mms://media4.abc.net.au/triplej
Plays the station
Then dump the file:
mplayer -dumpstream -dumpfile triplej.mms -cache 512 -osdlevel 0 -nojoystick -nofs -slave mms://media4.abc.net.au/triplej
Now with memcoder you can get clever an covert the ASF file you are saving to mp3 if you need. -
Re:Uh huh!
--Here you go:
Kernel Traffic
Linux Weekly News
Linux Kernel Mailing List Digest (from google, not tested by me)
--Try and find a site that details the inner workings of the NT kernel, on a weekly or any regular basis -- really -- I dare ya. If you can *find* the date on the NT kernel file, compare it with the downloadable kernels that you can find here:
Kernel.Org -
Where do the free competitors stand now?
Larry used to like to joust with the would-be bitkeeper challengers. I'd like to know what he thinks of them today. My guess is that he still thinks arch is limited by its "diff&patch" foundation, but I wonder what he thinks about darcs", which has some novel algorithms for distributed revision control (I admit I don't understand them all, not being a physicist).
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NForce2 + APIC working?
Has this been solved yet or must I keep running 2.6.3 with nforce2-apic and nforce2-disconnect-quick patches?
Apparently, the tradeoff is that your CPU runs hotter with the patches. -
BTTV question
Does anybody know if the bttv video card issue, the one that would freeze the machine when capturing from a bttv card under heavy system load, is resolved?
I'm not lazy asking about this here, it's just that I looked everywhere in the changelogs and I can't see anything about it, yet the problem is known. Perhaps the problem went away as another was fixed? Anybody has any experience on this? -
Re:could be handy..Actually, all you have to do is tweak the parameters of the TCP/IP stack. As I recall, Linux as a specific parameter for this. I want to say, it's the transmit window size. They document it as something you only change on a long haul line, which a satallite feed should count as one.
Specifically, you want to allow a lot more packets to be outstanding then a normal TCP connection will allow. This is a bad idea on a low latency connection. It has something to do with windows, and buffering. Also, if you use advanced IP tools to ensure that ACK's get sent before anything else, you'll be much happier.
This thread on the LKML seems to have useful information on it: LKML Thread
Kirby
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Re:Slow day
you mean this post?
"(Only wimps use tape backup: _real_ men just upload their important stuff on ftp, and let the rest of the world mirror it -
GPL violations on linux-kernel this month
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GPL violations on linux-kernel this month
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Re:I don't see what the big deal is
You'd have to read the list for exact details of what's irritating the people specifically, but here's a link.
Basically, Linux and friends (in frusteration at trying to troubleshoot non-open-source drivers, where they can't tell what's going on or fix anything) introduced a "tainting" system. Basically, they refuse to handle bug reports or fix anything on a system that has any "tainted" modules loaded.
This tends to increase direct customer dissatisfaction with closed-source drivers.
