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Or check out The P versus NP Problem at Clay for a really good description (unfortunately too long to quote here). And lastly, you might want to check out Tutorial: Does P = NP? at VB Helper for a little more info.

Ok, but what is it good for? The Compendium of NP Optimization Problems is a great place to look for real world examples of NP problems. Including everything from flower shop scheduling to multiprocessor scheduling.

Hopefully that helps. I was very clueless when it came to P vs. NP stuff that always seems to be mentioned on Slashdot. So I took the time to look it up. Now I'm clueless but I have links to share. :)

As the developer and maintainer of a little GTK+-based application (plug, plug),

I was a user of your Gentoo file manager and can highly recommend it (since I am an old Amiga user :-), but I stopped caring to download it all the time. Is there any hope of getting it into Linux distributions?

Also high on my list of applications that ought to be in distributions, but are not, is the visual system monitor qps.

Do distributors have a "suggestion form" that one can fill out to request an application included in new versions?

Shameless plug: Or you can use a ports tree that allows you to have several versions of libraries installed simultaneously. ;-)

• Heimdal Kerberos 5
• KTH Kerberos 4

• Heimdal Kerberos 5
• KTH Kerberos 4

This nice shot in compination with the bottom of this page.

There is a link here of history of the atomic bomb. Oh, and it includes directions on how one is built as well.

On August 2nd 1939, just before the beginning of World War II, Albert Einstein wrote to then President Franklin D. Roosevelt. Einstein and several other scientists told Roosevelt of efforts in Nazi Germany to purify U-235 with which might in turn be used to build an atomic bomb. It was shortly thereafter that the United States Government began the serious undertaking known only then as the Manhattan Project. Simply put, the Manhattan Project was committed to expedient research and production that would produce a viable atomic bomb.

This and this link describe the Japanese atomic bomb program. Germany sent a submarine to Japan carrying uranium oxide, a needed element in building an a-bomb, but it surrendered after Hitler's defeat and was confiscated by the U.S. This uranium could have been used in the atom bombs dropped on Hiroshima and Nagasaki.

Another good link is here.

There was reason to fear that Germany might win the race to produce the bomb. Fission had been discovered in Germany, and German scientists were at least as able as anyone else to assess its significance. Moreover, it seemed ominous that Germany had stopped the sale of uranium ore from the rich mines in Czechoslovakia. Up until mid-1941, concern over a German bomb had been stronger in Britain than in the United States. About that time, however, the sense of urgency began to pervade U.S. nuclear scientists.

That photo is from the ceremony where Bill was awarded an honorary Doctorate by KTH, the Royal Institute of Technology in Stockholm.

Why they decided to do that, I do not know.

Use Kerberos for authentication. There are PAM modules out there, and it is also supported in Windows 2000 (sort of).

You also need to distribute a passwd file. We store ours in AFS and distribute it using scripts run by cron. Since doesn't contain any password, users do not really need to touch it, but we generate the global passwd file from data in a database anyway. You might want to put stuff like e-mail forwarding information in that database as well, propagate it to the mail server using some simple scripts, and let your users access the database somehow. (Perhaps through a Kerberos authenticating gateway.)

KISS

AFS is a really cool distributed filesystem and is used widely at many universities, I would like to see it used more in enterprise enviroments.

A good free AFS implementation is Arla. Another one is, as a previous poster pointed out, OpenAFS

AFS is good. The volume management is great, and you get real access control lists with groups. How about moving a users home directory to a different server, while the user is logged in? It's completly transparent. Or how about letting people create their own groups? That is useful. And there's proper authentication.

Random advice:

• Use Heimdal Kerberos 5 KDCs (plural for redundancy). Do not use the kaserver that comes with AFS.
• Put Heimdal and KTH-KRB (kerb 4) on all clients.
• Use OpenAFS servers.
• Use OpenAFS clients for Solaris, and Arla AFS clients for Linux 2.2.x. For Linux 2.4.x, OpenAFS clients might work better. I don't know, and probably it depends.

AFS is good. The volume management is great, and you get real access control lists with groups. How about moving a users home directory to a different server, while the user is logged in? It's completly transparent. Or how about letting people create their own groups? That is useful. And there's proper authentication.

Random advice:

• Use Heimdal Kerberos 5 KDCs (plural for redundancy). Do not use the kaserver that comes with AFS.
• Put Heimdal and KTH-KRB (kerb 4) on all clients.
• Use OpenAFS servers.
• Use OpenAFS clients for Solaris, and Arla AFS clients for Linux 2.2.x. For Linux 2.4.x, OpenAFS clients might work better. I don't know, and probably it depends.

AFS is good. The volume management is great, and you get real access control lists with groups. How about moving a users home directory to a different server, while the user is logged in? It's completly transparent. Or how about letting people create their own groups? That is useful. And there's proper authentication.

Random advice:

• Use Heimdal Kerberos 5 KDCs (plural for redundancy). Do not use the kaserver that comes with AFS.
• Put Heimdal and KTH-KRB (kerb 4) on all clients.
• Use OpenAFS servers.
• Use OpenAFS clients for Solaris, and Arla AFS clients for Linux 2.2.x. For Linux 2.4.x, OpenAFS clients might work better. I don't know, and probably it depends.

we have never converted one element into another before (at least not this way).

"Nuclear transmutation was first demonstrated by Rutherford in 1919 , who transmuted 14N to 17O using energetic alpha-particles." source

You can see the pictures of it here:
http://www.pdc.kth.se/projects/vr-cube/photo-galle ry.html

once the plant is decomissioned, as I recall it gets buried in concrete and/or glass for some long time>

the East Coast's continental shelf could support a gigantic wind farm with minimal environmental impact.

From what I've read, some wind farms are already price-competitive with coal, etc.

It works pretty well, but still all programs that should show up in the Gnome or KDE menus etc. are still installed along with those packages. It is also often a lot of work to get programs to not install in /usr.

• "Long fingernail and long toenail fetish"
• "mime nude photos"
• "16 year old boys whith arm pit hair"
• "easy and fast directions to make crack cocaine in the microwave"
• "but she was my student why did i have impure thoughs"
• "nude cartoons inspector gadget"
• "secrets on how to suntan through your computer"

If your home computer is online 24/7 (which is presumably is if you're on broadband) t's cooler to use SAMBA, AFS (or here), Coda, InterMezzo, NFS, or the unfinished Lustre. If you're not big on effort, set up an http or ftp (or gopher!) server. That way, you have an automatically up-to-date menu of your mp3s, where you can access all your music any time you can connect to the 'Net.
This box is just itching to be a Coda server.

I believe that applies in this case.

But should you not wish to get linux installed on a machine, look at these links (obtained by the google search on "Reading an HFS disk on Windows") :

HFS Utilities Homepage

Port of hfsutils to DOS

Good luck and have fun.

We use (commercial) AFS extensively at Boston University. We've historically had some trouble with getting updated client software for new operating system versions in a timely matter, so OpenAFS is pretty exciting to us. We have been using arla as our Linux client, but unfortunately have some serious reliability issues, so we've been testing OpenAFS and will probably ship that in the upcoming BU Linux 2.0.

thk writes "Sistina, the main developer of the Global File System, has changed its language from C to SPL (Shakespeare Programming Language). SPL is basically a language to make the source code for programs written with it, resemble a Shakespeare play. Interestingly, the change came just after beta testing, leaving some users a bit miffed. The GFS is an important component of some GPL clustering projects, such as Compaq's SSIC project. The Sistina press release is here."

I'm sorry that a lot of people seem to misunderstand my attempts at "so called" humor. Of course I think the two SPL creators (who are friends of mine) have done real work.

Maybe not useful work (as in creating peace, ending world hunger etc etc) for our society at large, but interesting, funny and cool work.

The language grew out of a lab assignment in a syntax analysis course at our school. If viewed as a lab assignment, SPL is probably a little more work than the course coordinator demands :-). That's all I meant.

/Erik

I'm sorry that a lot of people seem to misunderstand my attempts at "so called" humor. Of course I think the two SPL creators (who are friends of mine) have done real work.

Maybe not useful work (as in creating peace, ending world hunger etc etc) for our society at large, but interesting, funny and cool work.

The language grew out of a lab assignment in a syntax analysis course at our school. If viewed as a lab assignment, SPL is probably a little more work than the course coordinator demands :-). That's all I meant.

/Erik

Yes. Of course I was only trying (and failing) to be funny. I'm also a CompSci-student here in Stockholm and the SPL creators are friends of mine at The Royal Institute of Technology.

Mr. Torvalds and Linux is another pretty good example of what university students can create when they probably should use their time to "real school work".

As I said. Only trying to be amusing. Next time I'll just submit a URL.

/Erik Tjernlund

We didn't expect the slashdot effect (well, not so soon anyway ;-), and our WikiWiki certainly didn't, so the web server died. So, we set up some temporary, but not complete mirrors. The source, documentation and examples are here, but it lacks the lively and lovely Wiki discussion.

http://spl.pu240.com

http://cgi.student.nada.kth.se/~d98-jas/shakespear e/

Slightly OT:

There is also arla, a free AFS client/server that existed before OpenAFS came about. The client works quite well in Linux. I used it on my PC alot last year. But, yes, IBM already has their very own AFS client for linux (and server too, I assume).

If you like ports, check out mpkg. It is another ports tree for multiple platforms. It's a bit different from the rest of them, so it's worth a look.

It is worth noting that Lloyd's thought experiments in these areas were preceded by similar speculations over 4 years ago in Anders Sandberg's paper The Physics of Information Processing Superobjects: Daily Life Among the Jupiter Brains. Lloyd has extended them a bit by bringing Black Holes into the picture.

Now, what we will be able to engineer in this century, using diamondoid molecular nanotechnology, is solar system sized nested layer Dyson shell supercomputers. This is a unique architecture that I have named a Matrioshka Brain. It will allow us to most efficiently use the entire power output of the sun and compute somewhere in the range of 10^42 to 10^52 ops per second.

Interestingly enough, Michael Franks has a paper "Reversibility in optimally scalable computer architectures" which postulates a solar system sized reversible architecture that would out-compute any non-reversible architecture. This too would be using atomic-scale engineering. Unfortunately it requires the power output of an A or B class star (~50,000 suns) and requires an amount of silicon equal to the mass of Saturn (our solar system doesn't even come close to having that unless we mine the sun for it). After we have developed machines of these architectures, our development comes to a slow halt unless our ability to do sub-atomic engineering can be developed. I'll be quite happy with what we can get out of atomic-scale engineering -- it supplies enough computronium for roughly a trillion-trillion human minds for those who choose to upload.

http://sunsite.kth.se/sun/sunflash/www/march.1995/ sunflash/75.04.sparc-xterm.html

Good luck.

Now, having UNIX clients authenticate to that server is really straight-forward. Just install Heimdal and kth-krb and set it up. The passwd file is distributed using a cron job. It works fine, don't worry.

The Windows clients, at least W2k clients, should be able to authenticate to the KDC, and I think you can solve the rest of the centralized account management through AD.

See, all you clients will use KRB5 or at least KRB4 authentication so you should have a potentially secure system. If you need more PAM modules then you can use the ones from MIT kerberos as well, or Naomaru's.

Now, having UNIX clients authenticate to that server is really straight-forward. Just install Heimdal and kth-krb and set it up. The passwd file is distributed using a cron job. It works fine, don't worry.

The Windows clients, at least W2k clients, should be able to authenticate to the KDC, and I think you can solve the rest of the centralized account management through AD.

See, all you clients will use KRB5 or at least KRB4 authentication so you should have a potentially secure system. If you need more PAM modules then you can use the ones from MIT kerberos as well, or Naomaru's.

Apparently, Michael slept through his history classes because research on the Atom bomb (as it was called then) started before 1940.

On August 2nd 1939, just before the beginning of World War II, Albert Einstein wrote to then President Franklin D. Roosevelt. Einstein and several other scientists told Roosevelt of efforts in Nazi Germany to purify U-235 with which might in turn be used to build an atomic bomb. It was shortly thereafter that the United States Government began the serious undertaking known only then as the Manhattan Project. Simply put, the Manhattan Project was committed to expedient research and production that would produce a viable atomic bomb.

I know what RSS is! It is short for "resident set size" and if you use for example top to show it, you can get an idea of how much memory a program is using.

Seriously, it is kind of a problem that there are only a little more than 17 thousand three-letter acronyms. I am starting to see lots of duplicates, even just within the small (but acronym-filled) field of computing.

(Incidentally, and far more off-topic, the best graphical top like program that I know is qps which I urge people to try out. For some reason it does not seem to appear in distributions!?)
--

Um, actually, a C6 system probably has, um, er, thinking... Six projectors. At least the similar system here in Sweden (the world's first six-walled Cube) does. ;^) And the muscle is needed (or at least intended) to run the applications, some of which are very heavy indeed. It's not enough to just drive the display system, you know.

Why nobody speaks about ICQ ?

• It was the pioneer of IM
• It has a very big user base. More than 100 million registered users.
• It has many features. File transfer. Chat. Conference. Url transfer. Voice messages. A good user search interface.
• Many OpenSource clients. Licq, KXicq, gnomeicu (see The Linux ICQ Page)
• The Protocol has not been published, but it is well understood (see The ICQ Protocol Site)
• As far as I know, has never blocked OpenSource clients.

Why so much talk about AIM, MSM and YM ?

Then CORBA came along, it was to be the answer to all the worlds problems. I admit I'm ignorant of CORBA, but it seems to me that is hasn't lived up to the hype.

Now we have XML. Again, XML seems great for what it is designed for, a standardized markup language (without some of the more silly features in SGML), but does XMLRPC make sense? Do we really need another standard? What does XMLRPC give us, other than buzzwords for managers to throw about?

I can hear my boss now, "Do your next project in XMLRPC, and mail me .doc files weekly to let me know the status."

Someone please enlighten me.

1. People read the articles before posting.
2. Slashdot editors turned 30 seconds of their time toward making sure people can read the articles.

Huh? What?!? The ICQ API has been available for quite a while on Windows, I am sure of this because a friend of mine who writes encryption based ICQ plugins told me about using it almost a year ago.

As for the protocol being XML based. It isn't if not we'd already know about it because all the ICQ clones would be using an XML based protocol instead of the ICQ protocol (yes, it's available on the web).

Snack: http://www.speech.kth.se/snack/

Here's a blurb:
"""
The Snack Sound Toolkit is designed to be used with a scripting language such as Tcl/Tk or Python. With Snack you can create create powerful multi-platform audio applications. Snack adds commands for basic sound handling, e.g. sound card and disk I/O. Snack also has primitives for sound visualization, e.g. waveforms and spectrograms. It was developed mainly to handle digital recordings of speech, but is just as useful for general audio. Snack has also successfully been applied to other one-dimensional signals.
The combination of Snack and a scripting language makes it possible to create sound tools and applications with a minimum of effort. This is due to the rapid development nature of scripting languages. As a bonus you get an application that is cross-platform from start. It is also easy to integrate Snack based applications with existing sound analysis software.
"""

..but the reality is that he's selectivly enforcing his invalid trademark (check the trademark db if you don't believe me). And he's doing this enforcement against the product that's **gasp** putting him out of business. If he really wanted to protect the (tm), he would need to go after:

O SSH
TTSSH
NiftySSH
MacSSH
Java-SSH
TGssh
sshCE
An OpenVSM project called just SSH
SSH-OS2
...

and, well, you get the point. He's just going after OpenSSH because they're beating him in the market. And not only does he have no legal leg to stand on, but he's being a real slime by only going after the successfull one. Theo would be right to tell hime where to stick his lawyers.

There is already a version of SSH that is called ossh it's availible from ftp://ftp.pdc.kth.se/pub/krypto/ossh/.

The out cource one could wounder about other SSH versions as ttssh, java-ssh, NiftyTelnet SSH.

--

Okay.... I know a solid Dyson sphere has been proven in theory to be unstable, but we don't know if this 17x-Jupiter massive object is actually solid yet, do we? So who's to say that someone didn't actually try to build one?

No such thing as a "Dyson" ring (and a ring is unstable even in literary daydreams), and a Dyson sphere is not a solid structure, but rather a myriad of habitats and other artifically constructed objects in orbit around a sun so as to capture most of the radiated energy.

If they were a blackbody, they would be invisible, but we're looking for them (do a search for "Dyson").

Obviously they would encounter the issue of radiating waste heat[...]

Actually, that's not a huge issue. Especially when you consider that you can choose the distance (and thus energy per square unit of surface), and deal with radiating that amount out the back for each section of the sphere you build.

--
Evan

This has happened before with other mods. Some of my favorite mods/conversions, such as the Aliens Doom TC (Which did some amazing things with the doom engine) or Aliens Quake were both cease-and-desisted by fox. While they can often still be found floating around the net, the quake mod was never finished, despite the potential it had. These were made back in '97 or earlier, but fox had plans for their own games: Alien VS Predator and Alien Resurection which are both fairly recent arrivals on the scene. Would these sales have actually been hurt by the fan created patches? Possibly, although I would have gotten Aliens vs Predator had I not downloaded the demo and realized how much it sucked. So while it was in their rights to shut the projects down, they'd probably have done better (and had a product sooner) hiring those dedicated fans instead of disgruntling them.

Here's a link to a pretty cool applet that shows exactly how CA works in real time.

This applet will even let you choose the size of the matrix you want to play with, set your own start pattern, and count generations as it goes. (It also shows the famous r-pentonimo we've all come to know and love)

If you have one of these then you need a 3Dwm. Dont you agree?

It's nice that IBM has released OpenAFS two or so months after they said that it would be released, but a Free (libre) clone
called ARLA has existed for sometime, and in my experience hasn't caused me any problems on several platforms, and is GPL'd .
Also, arla supports many platforms, including (Free|Net|Open)BSD, and non x86 Linuxen, which Transarc (the IBM owned
company which actually develops AFS) hasn't bothered porting AFS to.

Arun

2000-10-15

XGGI 1.6.2 has been released. Summary of changes:

• Now uses XFree 3.3.6 as it's base.
• Don't try to open a new VT by default when running on a console-based target. This used to cause problems when running XGGI without any root privileges.
• Italian, Polish and Norwegian keymaps added.
• Save and restore all screens in a multihead configuration upon VT switching.

Yeah, it's not the most current, but i wouldn't say stagnating...
--