Slashdot Mirror

Well, it's not as good as bribing the people who I'm begging for features, but I assume that it'll have the same result.

he kerning trouble turned out to be related to font hinting. When you get to small point sizes, the fonts sometimes contain hinting which basically adjusts the positions of the characters in small text. At the time we were able to fix the problem by changing the hinting settings.

Out of your four links two are score:0 and one is score:-1. This doesn't seem to speak for "the slashdot community", if such a thing exists.

Perhaps the people who express a dislike for Flash do so not because they simply personally dislike Flash? Because if so, it would make more sense to ask them their reasons why.

You can tell there is a HUGE trend that if a standard is not open source, it is NOT widely accepted by the /. community. Don't even try and play stupid here.

Hm.

So because I fail to back up your generalizations, which you didn't even initially bother to back up with some carefully selective out-of-context quotes, I don't read comments?

Interesting.

I do think there is a tendency for open source and open standards to be preferred and popular on slashdot. There's a good reason for this, since if standards are open (as SWF partially is) and open source implementations are available, people have the freedom to use these standards in the way that best suits them.

But making conclusions about other people's motivations seems highly unreasonable, as does trying to deduce some kind of slashdot hivemind opinion from the comments of a few, as does attacking people if they don't desire to back up your straw men concerning "open source zealots".

Anyhow, you seem to already be pretty convinced the reason people dislike Flash is "a HUGE trend that if a standard is not open source, it is NOT widely accepted by the /. community". If so, why did you phrase your original post in the form of a question?

That's the same as a 64 bit wide 78 MHz parallel interface - not that impressive.

That's the same as a 64 bit 78 MHz parallel interface - not that impressive.

I think you mean MAKE , a magzine published by O'Reilly...you heard about it first on /. actually looks like they tried the projects described; plenty of pictures too.

Or just jump over to the BBC now and get it:

http://www.bbc.co.uk/radio/audiohelp_install.shtml

Available for Linux, Mac, Solaris, and Windows. Enjoy ad-free RealPlayer today! ;-)

You tell this story without any attribution!

You impugn Apple (rightly or wrongly doesn't matter) for the subjective flaw of being hyperbolic. You then make statements without defining or defending them.

Here's a 'trusted' source, O'Reilly:
ZeroConf doesn't seem to be a Microsoft thing. Or a Sun thing; and that only later did Sun (and IBM) start supporting it.

O'Reilly says Sun has their own Jini thing and Microsoft UPnP; and UPnP. As for first implementations, Apple rolled it out into their OS in Jaguar, OS 10.2, and had already released their open source version in 2002. What other open source implementations are there?

In short, I think it's a good deal for Ask Jeeves. They're trying to compete with Google and Yahoo, and to do that they need to do something new. The user profiles Bloglines has would make a great tool for pricing Google AdWord-style text ads -- but the "oo" companies (G*gle and Yah*) don't have the same incentive to try something radically different. They're sticking with what works. Maybe by offering a richer profile to ad buyers, Ask Jeeves will be able to break into the search market more aggressively.

More in the full blog post.

In short, I think it's a good deal for Ask Jeeves. They're trying to compete with Google and Yahoo, and to do that they need to do something new. The user profiles Bloglines has would make a great tool for pricing Google AdWord-style text ads -- but the "oo" companies (G*gle and Yah*) don't have the same incentive to try something radically different. They're sticking with what works. Maybe by offering a richer profile to ad buyers, Ask Jeeves will be able to break into the search market more aggressively.

More in the full blog post.

Here are a few links that I found while googling around. They should be of some help.
Quite a few Wireless Network Links
Long Distance Wireless Network Project
Wireless Network Security Article
Forum discussion concerning long range wireless routers

Build your own Pringle Can network: Stuff about it here

I can't beleive ThinkGeek is selling dressed up Pringles cans for $45. Sickening.
Go buy a can of pringles and use that. Find info here: http://www.oreillynet.com/cs/weblog/view/wlg/448
(I'm also pretty sure I saw this on /. a while back too).

Unless the sites are spaced something like along a road, a mesh network would probably work and be much easier to setup as well as much more robust (I presume the network carries vital info on temperatures, greenhouse equipment status, etc).

See http://www.oreillynet.com/pub/a/wireless/2004/01/2 2/wirelessmesh.html for an overview

Why? Only he can say for sure, but possible reasons could be:

• distract the public from trying Linux or other Free or Open Source Software, or at least delay them.
• distract the public from real open document standards
• distract policy makers from the fact that WordML is still closed
• distract home users and businesses from OpenOffice.org
• distract everybody from FireFox, Mozilla and Opera.
• distract the public from ongoing Windows security failures
• distract investors from the fact that MS has halved research and development
• distract pundits from Longhorn's list of features getting shorter and release getting later
• distract home users from the Mac mini
• distract investors from the EU anti-trust case
• distract businesses and lawmakers from the VC-1 codec
• distract European businesses from the software patent threat
• ... etc.

O'Reilly has a useful article on Mac Mini information for Linux / Windows users.

What you really want is something like NoCatAuth (described nicely by this article. There are plenty of other similar solutions out there - look for 'linux wireless authentication gateway' or something similar on your favorite search engine.

The "Fast Infoset Project" for creating Binary XML as mentioned in the article is using ASN.1. See this blog entry by Rick Jelliffe for details.

Fast Infoset is to ASN.1 what XML is to SGML. At least if it becomes the standard anyway.

Yeah wtf ??
Last I heard, Moz was left titsup in a tar pit and the developers were concentrating their efforts on Firefox and Thunderbird. Did McNealy join mozilla.org or something?

Maybe you missed this?

Sure it's about conventional photovoltaics in California, but it seems economic to me.

There was no IPv5.

802.11h, and all the other letters do exist and are implemented. 802.11 does not simply refer to wireless link standards (.11, .11a, .11b, and .11g), but a whole set of wireless networking standards.

Look at this wikipedia entry about it.

Instead, use Win4Lin or VMware to run just the Windows app you need. Which is, topically, my tax program (:-)) --dave

WEP is only that insecure on very old hardware. Recent hardware made in the last two or three years is much more resistant to WEP cracking. I've simulated WEP cracking conditions on my own wireless network and even under abnormally heavy traffic conditions, it would take days to crack the key using commonly-available tools. I have a new network topology over here and I'm delaying the introduction of wireless until I can find a way to utilize Ipsec, but for most people who don't have valuable assets on their network WEP is fine especially if they change the key once in a while.

http://www.oreillynet.com/cs/user/view/cs_msg/2602 3

Some people consider file sharing progressive taxation, if not outright advertising.

I would wager that most of the big software vendors enjoying immense market share wouldn't be doing so were it not for "piracy", "warez" and file sharing, getting their stuff into the hands of those talented enough to use it, but poor enough to be unable to afford it.

Likewise there are musicians and artists who would have vanished from the scene, if it hadn't been for downloadable files to alert and encourage us to seek out and support their efforts.

I know for a fact that I would not be buying the work of Frank Cho, or Philippe Buchet had I not first found them as scans in the a.b hierarchy.

Likewise, Goldfrapp and Invader Zim.

I didn't hear Goldfrapp on the local FM or catch the original airing of Zim on Nick. But I have bought all of the Goldfrapp catalog (and sold some of it too), as well as buying all 3 DVD's of Zim, and the only reason I did was...."piracy" alerted me to their existence.

This whole copyright/intellectual property thing strikes me the same way as the "War on Drugs" has.

The little people get to watch the spectacle of a bunch of suits bandying about a bunch of numbers pulled from their collective anuses, patting themselves on their backs after criminalizing something that only threatened their control.

http://www.oreillynet.com/cs/user/view/cs_msg/4637 0
http://dodpki.c3pki.chamb.disa.mil/rootca.html

There's your DOD root CA info. As some other people have already posted, the DOD runs its own PKI and it's not automatically included in any browsers. More recently they're issuing contractors certs on a Verisign-rooted CA rather than the full DOD one. If you want to automatically install all the DOD certs use this: https://infosec.navy.mil/InstallRoot2_9.zip
Unfortunately that doesn't do anything for people not using IE on windows. You can export the certs from Windows in PKCS7 format and then decode the p7 file using openssl to break it up into individual certs you can import into mozilla/firefox/etc.

Gee I though Gumsticks were already mainstream... oh.. but of course http://www.oreillynet.com/pub/wlg/4552

these thingys aren't from Redmond...

dang it.. too late...

Just because you're not getting a lot of sunlight, the fact that there is ambient light coming through the clouds still does generate some power. It may be reduced, but it is still there. If you read the related article Hacking Your Way Off The Utility Grid he approaches it from a reducing his expenditures on power, and providing a cushion for any future price increases.

Additionally, depending on where you're at in Michigan, there are varying classes of wind power available. The inputs listed in the system in the article are pure DC inputs. That means anything that generates DC at the same voltage can be used for input, being a generator, solar, wind or even a generator attached to your gutters that takes the rain and does hydro power from it. The point is that if you approach it from an overall viewpoint of reducing your power consumption from a grid, you will be helping the system. If everyone reduced their needs from the grid by 1kWH/person/month it would count for a lot.

My approach i'm taking towards my home system i'm planning is to do a combined solar+wind system. Usually where I live (in Ann Arbor/Dexter area, Michigan) the wind is blowing or there is some sunlight. The average wind speeds combined with a wind generator may help reduce the power. If you're living near one of the great lakes, the amount of wind power you can generate is quite reasonable. I know today we're under a high wind advisory (again) so if I had my wind generators up and going now, it would help offset my other electricity costs.

Unfortunately, the 2004 USA Election has been a victory of FUD over Facts.

"Everyone is entitled to their own opinion, but not their own facts"- Sen. Daniel Patrick Moynihan.

The mainstream forth estate news organizations, on both sides, have utterly failed to hold either Democrats or Republicans accountable for claims that diverge widely from the known facts. In cases where journalists have made a consistent argument, the news organization has allowed that position to be "shouted down" by political camp followers repeating the same lies over and over again though the same outlet. In those same replies, there was very rarely comments by the news organization when known facts obviously contradicted the opinion. Many news organizations seem unwilling to publicly chastise either party for continuing to avoid addressing serious questions when the facts do not concur. The result has been an outright failure of the concept of journalistic ethics.

Some alternative sources, be they partisan or bipartisan organizations, individuals, websites, documentaries, forums or the blogosphere, have done a better job at holding both sides accountable. Sadly, even the most popular alternative source reaches a small fraction of the audience covered by the mainstream media. However, to even that small fraction, those same sources have utterly failed to present an overall palatable, concise and coherent position to the opposing or undecided viewers.

The resulting output from both mainstream and alternative sources has only polarized each sides opinion of each other, further dividing the nation.

Democracy is effective only when a large majority of voters are capable of making an informed choice. In my opinion, the majority of voters, despite who they voted for, were badly served by those organizations who claim they are responsible for keeping the public informed. It's not as if the same could not be said for past elections in any country, but this election cycle the "Whopper" mud slinging has been so much worse than any election since the introduction of television.

What does this mean for the tech industry?

In a lot of ways, both sides campaigns are mirrored by Microsoft's unabated campaign of Fear, Uncertainty and Doubt ( commonly referred to in the information technology sector by the acronym FUD ). Microsoft's advocates probably consider the use of the same strategy by both Democrats and Republicans a green light to continue to spread FUD, despite the evidence which contradicts the claims, including Microsoft's own internal research. Any forum attached to an article that even hints at Linux being used on the desktop results in a similar barrage of FUD that is familiar in form to that spouted by the political camp followers. Microsoft's advocates claim the same thing happens whenever Microsoft's record of security is mentioned.

Whether choosing a political or consumer platform, it is possible to make an informed choice when the mainstream political or technical media performs its role to certain ethical standards.

From the International Federation of Journalists:

DECLARATION OF PRINCIPLES ON THE CONDUCT OF JOURNALISTS

Adopted by the Second World Congress of the International Federation of Journalists at Bordeaux on 25-28 April 1954 and amended by

Dan lost the bet, as reported in http://www.oreillynet.com/pub/wlg/5346 among other places. Parrot wasn't necessarily supposed to replace the CPython interpreter (whose latest version is part of this release) but Python has had multiple language implementations for a long time. At best, Dan was hoping for a status similar to JPython.

But then... digital distribution started last year with Apple iTunes, Napster, Rhapsody, etc. All of these companies REQUIRED that the encoded file (AAC, WMA, etc) come from the master WAV file. Ack! Screwed! 9 months of ripping down the drain!

So... we finally realized what I was kicking myself for not realizing in the first place - and exactly what the story post mentions: hard drive storage is cheap. labor is expensive. rip the CD *once*, lossless, and NEVER have to rip it again. We wiped all our useless MP3 drives and started again: ripping all 78,000 CDs to FLAC format. Since it's a perfect digital copy of the master audio fles, and supports metadata tags, too, it's the perfect archiving format.

VERY easy to just script-up a bulk converter. http://perl.pattern.net/transcode is a great Perl solution. I posted my audio-converter scripts here, which include the use of SOX to make 30-second audio clips (since we needed that for work).

To all those here saying "MP3 is fine!" - you're being short sighted. In a few years there will be a newer better codec, and all your old MP3s will look as bad to your ears as your old 320x240 JPGs from 1995 look now. Go lossless. (FLAC, WAV, etc) - your future self will thank you.

I also think your post contains too much technical handwaving. Integrating their respective architectures and OSes would require an enormous amount of work, if it could even be done within time/money limits (say, three years and $5B).

You're not the first guy to propose such a merger. This guy at O'Reilley suggested it, and the responses to his article about why Apple-Sun would be stupid apply here. A quick Google search turns up other arguments that may also be valid, like this one.

Finally, the IBM non-sequitor at the end of your post doesn't even remotely apply to the Apple-Sun situation.

Btw, so save you guys some google image searching, here's the link to Mitchell Baker. http://www.oreillynet.com/pub/a/network/2003/07/11 /photos1.html?page=4

I couldn't find this link over the weekend, when I was writing the book review but some people did that already.

.

Nokia announced in June that Series 60 will feature SVG UI and viewer support.

Nokia rocks!!

...for a while - witness their use of Tomcat and MySQL in GoLive as far back as 2002.

5.4 Motive to Writing SoBig
......
We believe that Sobig was most likely written to support spam software. Any user or developer of spam mailing software, including Ruslan Ibragimov and Send-Safe, would be financially eager to leverage malware such as Sobig.

aah, phone unlocking.

Greatest thing ever, IMHO. I'm both a Cingular and ATT customer at the moment. (long story short)
I have 3 differnt phones (and rotate like girls rotate through shoes). All my phones are unlocked so it doesn't matter if I pop my cingular SIM into the ATT phone.

Going international? Not a problem with calls (prepaid sim as the parent said).

So, how to unlock?

Firstly, IS IT ILLEGAL? I don't think so. Technically, even if "free", you paid for the phone when you signed the contract. I'm locked in for the 12-24+ months with ATT/Cingular. The phone locking scheme is to prevent me from using my Cingular branded Motorola V400 with ATT- and ATT hopes I'll buy a V600 instead (but no, i'm paying 7 bucks tax for the "free" phone.
This article from oreillynet.com says its not too

I've only unlocked Nokia phones so far. So, if its nokia, download from cnet here.

insatall, find imei by punching in #*06#. Put that IMEI into the code generator. Turn off phone, take out sim card. Turn on phone again. Now, you need to punch in the unlock code generated from the program. DO NOT SCREW UP THE UNLOCK CODE! I WILL NOT BE RESPONSIBLE IF YOU PERMANENTLY LOCK YOUR PHONE. IF YOUR AFRAID YOU MIGHT SCREW IT UP, THEN DON'T EVEN TRY.

moving on. Once your phone is unlocked, it can be used with ANY carrier. That's right. ANY carrier. To prove my point, I have ATT on my Cingular branded V400 and a Cingular Sim on my ATT branded Nokia.

Happy unlocking!
Grump

However, the Sprint Treo has crippled bluetooth:

TreoCentral is reporting that the Sprint version of the Treo 650 doesn't allow you to use Bluetooth for dial-up networking through your computer. Apparently other carriers will, but not Sprint.

What I did find, however, was this:

"Michal Zalewski is a security researcher who has worked on topics ranging from hardware and OS design principles to networking. He has published research on many security topics and has worked for the past eight years in the InfoSec field for a number of reputable companies, including two major telecommunications firms."

So I doubt Mr Zalewski has ever had access to any of IE's code.

an interview with the creator of SPF that compares it with DomainKeys

http://www.oreillynet.com/pub/a/network/2002/02/04 /windows.html

This is a short into to infiband.

"InfiniBand breaks through the bandwidth and fanout limitations of the PCI bus by migrating from the traditional shared bus architecture into a switched fabric architecture."

"Each connection between nodes, switches, and routers is a point-to-point, serial connection. This basic difference brings about a number of benefits:

Because it is a serial connection, it only requires four as opposed to the wide parallel connection of the PCI bus.

The point-to-point nature of the connection provides the full capacity of the connection to the two endpoints because the link is dedicated to the two endpoints. This eliminates the contention for the bus as well as the resulting delays that emerge under heavy loading conditions in the shared bus architecture.

The InfiniBand channel is designed for connections between hosts and I/O devices within a Data Center. Due to the well defined, relatively short length of the connections, much higher bandwidth can be achieved than in cases where much longer lengths may be needed."

"The InfiniBand specification defines the raw bandwidth of the base 1x connection at 2.5Gb per second. It then specifies two additional bandwidths, referred to as 4x and 12x, as multipliers of the base link rate. At the time that I am writing this, there are already 1x and 4x adapters available in the market. So, the InfiniBand will be able to achieve must higher data transfer rates than is physically possible with the shared bus architecture without the fan-out limitations of the later."

as seen in this lovely screenshot...

http://www.oreillynet.com/network/2004/10/14/graph ics/gd_1_homepage.jpg

the google search majiger mabob appears to be running some sort of web server on some sort of port...

as a paranoid network security student, this makes me wonder what the security implications of having a nice little web page to search through all your files are... :|

The use of (+) for joins has been phased out of Oracle at around 8i, and then deprecated in 9i. Also while decode has not been offical deprecated it has been strongly recommended that you use CASE instead.
example of new join format

Did anyone else wonder, "whatever happened to IPv5?"?

Well, this seems to be the answer...

Cheers & God bless
Sam "SammyTheSnake" Penny

Okay Mr AC.. Whatever you say.."

I agree with your ideas, except for getting the "Dark Tipper" or whatever Kevin Rose calls himself now. He may know something, but his "super cool hacking tips" generally are nothing more than some simple social engineering or a windows "hacking" utility download. Don't even get me started on the screensavers since TechTV merged with G4 (ugh)... But I digress.

I truly hope this magazine makes it (no-pun intended) and if you are interested, be sure to check out the newsletter where they'll send you more information. With any luck this will turn out to be a usefull magazine in todays world where "PC Magazine" seems to dominate the bookstores.

Amazon, or any other one entity, must not own the semantic web:

Applying Distributed XML to The Open Source Paradigm Shift,
DataLibre (was: Resist A9),
& The Future of the Semantic Web is Here Today and is Evenly Distributed

Amazon, or any other one entity, must not own the semantic web:

Applying Distributed XML to The Open Source Paradigm Shift,
DataLibre (was: Resist A9),
& The Future of the Semantic Web is Here Today and is Evenly Distributed

The Future of the Semantic Web is Here Today and is Evenly Distributed, DataLibre (was: Resist A9) & DataLibre.

The Future of the Semantic Web is Here Today and is Evenly Distributed, DataLibre (was: Resist A9) & DataLibre.