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Lets hope they don't run a-foul of these guys ...

Er, no. Duck Tape is NOT an "inferior copy" of gaffers tape.

They have different adhesives and are designed for different purposes.

Duck Tape would stink in a studio where you need the tape to hold fabric, props, cables, etc. in place but CANNOT leave residue behind. Duck Tape also comes in handy in race applications (hence the moniker 200mph tape)

Gaffers tape would stink in an environment where you need the application to be waterproof, which is Duck Tape's forte. Also, being designed for studios, stages, etc. Gaffers tape is available in more colors ( http://www34.pair.com/harrison/thetapeworks.com/pr ogaff.htm - note I am not affiliated with them in any way; a google query turned them up). Folks who use Duck Tape for those purposes either don't know any better or grabbed Duck Tape in a pinch because the right stuff isn't readily available - or they're downright cheap and bought a dollar-store clone of Duck Tape)

Similar look, different adhesives, different purposes.

That's about all the article says.

The key ingredient to a ducted fan is efficient expansion. Any old array of twisted parts can propell air. I read another article and fabricated such a thing from Dixie cups. After your rotor comes the stator, a very important component missing from ordinary fans, which removes the angular component of the flow velocity. You want to move the air down your axis not around it. Getting the air moving along the axis and expanding it out to larger volumes without wasting your effort is hard to do. Adding any stator will help. Doing it quietly and efficiently is one of those rocket science things.

Wikipedia, of course, has a quick article,

The vast majority of sites, I'm afraid, require a host header - that's how shared hosting works.

That's how it was done before HTTP/1.1, and some providers continue to do it that way. My hosting is from pair.com, and is the cheapest service they offer (I think). I can access my web page by IP address, and I'm sure not paying for a whole server!

are you just a complete moron? "they" only distribute the source and pre-compiled as tar files. the distributions distribute in the format that they use:

                ftp://openoffice.mirrors.pair.com/stable/2.0.2/

My web host, pair Networks, is listed on Netcraft as being fairly reliable, #14 out of all hosting providers as of the time I post this.

I highly recommend pair Netorks. I've been using them for years and never had a problem. In fact they've been good to me. They definitely cost more than a "value" host, but have some key benefits. Uptime is excellent, bandwidth is never a problem, shared servers aren't overloaded and in fact locked down once they're full. They use open source sofware including Apache, MySQL, and FreeBSD. More importantly, they donate a portion of their business' profits back into the OSS foundations/companies whose products they use. They have a private news server where you can talk about their services, and their owner/CEO Kevin Martin (privately owned) reads it regularly and posts there, even responding to customers' posts even though he encourages people to use formal customer service channels for most concerns. They even have their own DNS registrar, pairNIC.

I have no stake in this company. I am just an extremely satisfied customer that recommends them to all my friends because of the superior level of service I receive from them.

Microsoft has never been particularly innovative. I suspect you don't perceive innovation _now_ because you are aware of the prior art. Microsoft was not more innovative back in the day. You were probably just not as aware of the copious prior art when Windows 95 appeared. For example, the Windows 95 "look" was a poor copy if the NeXTstep 1988 look... The Win 16 API was a sad copy of the Mac Toolbox. Slashdot will tell you that the only notable innovation from Microsoft was "Bob."

http://www.guidebookgallery.org/screenshots/win95
http://www120.pair.com/mccarthy/nextstep/intro.htm ld/

Tom's uses these: pair Networks. He uses about 20 dedicated servers, including database servers. I think "CPU" in the singular sense is a bit inaccurate.

Everything I've read suggests that, while hydrogen is indeed quite flammable when mixed with oxygen, it's tendency to disperse almost immediately coupled with it's tendency to rise quickly makes it much less volatile than gasoline in a similar situation.

The Addison Bain (pdf warning) study on the Hindenberg explosion is very interesting in its factual treatment of hydrogen. Pure hydrogen is too rich to burn, and even a large leak mixes it with air too slowly, so you'd need a very large intrusion to introduce the needed O2, and a very timely spark to hit it before it dispersed.

All that together suggests to me that hydrogen is a lot more desirable to have in a crash than gasoline.

And they have lost some important things: see here for some features. Another thing that I find annoying, stuff are slow, even on a G5 dual cpu machine. I run OPENSTEP on a Pentium 233 mhz machine, with 64mb memory, and it's rock solid, and damn fast. Everything, see here for some nice apps.

No Catherine Britt! (pic at http://www2.pair.com/wacky/kasey/8big.jpg) Australia's hottest young female country singer, and she's not on there. I think I will go kill myself now.

When I try to think of prior examples of people implementing the Creative patent as I understand it, the absolute first thing that comes to mind is... that little file browser thingy from NeXT. Which was later assimilated into OS X when NeXT was bought by... Apple. Can you tell the difference between this and the cascading menus in the iPod? Because I can't.

And of course I'm still trying to figure out whether NeXT themselves ripped off the browser from that class browser widget you see so often in Smalltalk, or if it went the other way around.

Oh, but of course, the NeXT example covers a browser for files and the Smalltalk example covers a browser for objects, and in the mad calculus of patent law this is totally different from a browser for music files...

Agreed, I don't read that post to say that described the stack as "sub par".

I did notice something interesting. If you look through the sponsorships he received, a significant amount ($14,000) was pledged was by Pair Networks. They are one of the larger hosting providers in the U.S. and hundreds FreeBSD servers at their data center in Pittsburgh. It is unlikely that they would grant 14 stacks of high society at something they did not research and find to be of direct benefit. I am not an employee of Pair, but I have been a customer for seven years.

By the way, Pair's Mirrors are quite handy.

Agreed, I don't read that post to say that described the stack as "sub par".

I did notice something interesting. If you look through the sponsorships he received, a significant amount ($14,000) was pledged was by Pair Networks. They are one of the larger hosting providers in the U.S. and hundreds FreeBSD servers at their data center in Pittsburgh. It is unlikely that they would grant 14 stacks of high society at something they did not research and find to be of direct benefit. I am not an employee of Pair, but I have been a customer for seven years.

By the way, Pair's Mirrors are quite handy.

Many hosting providers use FreeBSD and swear by it. I don't expect Pair networks, for example to change from FreeBSD anytime soon.

RSS can be quite useful for IT and other administrative notifications. My ISP, Pair, for example, uses RSS maintenance feeds to notify customers about about outages, maintenance, or other known problems.

RSS is serving as a vehicle for other communication mediums as well, like mailing lists and newsgroups. Gmane, another service that I use quite frequently, provides RSS feeds for their technical newsgroups.

And finally, RSS is already used by most major news agencies, such as Yahoo, the BBC, New Scientist, New York Times, and so on.

RSS can be quite useful for IT and other administrative notifications. My ISP, Pair, for example, uses RSS maintenance feeds to notify customers about about outages, maintenance, or other known problems.

RSS is serving as a vehicle for other communication mediums as well, like mailing lists and newsgroups. Gmane, another service that I use quite frequently, provides RSS feeds for their technical newsgroups.

And finally, RSS is already used by most major news agencies, such as Yahoo, the BBC, New Scientist, New York Times, and so on.

http://www.ev1.pair.com/colorTV/myTK41_1.html

> Apple, Tiger, Windows, whats next?

Air

Direct link:

http://www38.pair.com/adamjh/blogfiles/Larry_Page- Graduation_Speech.mp3

MP3 direct dowload here

what is it about fm radio that doesn't appeal to you?

Engineering is all about compromises. The more things a device does, the less well it does any one of them, generally. (I can come up with half a dozen ways the iPod would be worse off if it had an FM radio.)

Since you can already pack enough music to listen to for *days*, and radio quality (in any sense of the word) isn't very consistent, it makes perfect sense to me that designers of MP3 players chose to omit this feature.

Read Free software UI (which isn't only relevant to free software). (I'll wait.) Now, I can quite easily come up with a list of 10 more features to add to an MP3 player. I could make an argument for each of them that's as good as FM radio. But adding all of them would clearly make the MP3 player a lousy device.

I suggest you read Donald Norman's "The Design of Everyday Things". From the end of chapter 1 (a homework assignment he gives):

"You have been employed by a manufacturing company to design their new product. The company is considering combining the following into one item:
- AM-FM radio
- Cassette player
- CD player
- Telephone
- Telephone answering machine
- Clock
- Alarm clock (the alarm can turn on a tone, radio, cassette, or CD)
- Desk or bed lamp)
The company is trying to decide whether to include a small (two-inch screen) TV set and a switched electric outlet that can turn on a coffee maker or toaster."

(Here's is where you say "aah, I am enlightened".)

Just trying to set the record straight.

Oh, don't worry, I'm not blaming you or calling you out or anything like that. Hell that column at the least opened a few eyes, and that's a good thing. It's just that the ST term is one of the triggers that set off some variant of a bitter "programmers need to learn more paradigms/languages" rant in me...

And the voices in my head won't go away until I vent it somehow...

Too many preferences means you can't find any of them.

Preferences really substantively damage QA and testing.

Preferences make integration and good UI difficult.

Preferences keep people from fixing real bugs.

Preferences can confuse many users.

I'm not plugging for referrals, I just like them. They have good service for cheap. Period.

I switched to them a few years ago. In that time, I've only had to contact them 2 or 3 times and always got a fast response.

Check them out.

Good luck.

I setup my mom's web site for a little ballet school years ago on pair.com. Rates have never increased and over time they've bumped up my disk space allotment. My mom also pays for the site 1 year at a time, which shaves 8% off the price. That includes hosting a domain, 5 email boxes, 200 MB disk space and 3G/month transfer. You only serve up static web pages, and access the site via FTP only. But for a web site with 6 pages and 10 pictures it works great. I think I had to talk to their tech support once, they were pretty good, but that was years ago. I've also used them for a couple other small places, and never had any problems. As far as I can tell, it just works.

"To me is seems that this project will only work if it is managed as a coherent whole, like BSD or Squeak, and that means being open source with a strong leader. And now that I've gotten completely off-topic of your question I'll end my post :)"

A Coherent Interface has been available for quite some time. Unfortunately Good Enough won instead of it's nearest Competitor.

"Microsoft, Apple, and other vendors need to figure out how to create software platforms that allow good integration between applications that weren't developed by a single team."

Hrm. I'd think OS X's Services Menu fulfills that.

"Services are things that one app can do for another, and they are available to every app, through the Services menu. So, for instance, I can select a phone number in an e-mail that someone has sent to me, and click "Dial Phone" (under "SBook"), rather than have to locate the SBook app, launch it, paste the phone number into the dialing window, and click "dial." Another thing I can do is position my cursor in a document where I want a screen cap to appear, and then click one menu item, and my screen capture software (Grab) will launch, take a capture of the screen, window, or selection, and place it in my document. I never have to leave my word processor, and this was all set up for me when I installed OS X -- no brain activity on my part was required. Services are a great time-saver, every Mac OS X (Coca) app has them." -
Modified from Intro to NeXSTEP

I used to frequent Tom's years ago when they where only linked at sysdoc.pair.com and you got unique and relatively dependable reviews. But I really have to compare their information more and more these days to filter the noise. Tomsnetworking.com is about the only interesting spin-off to me. Just not worth my time for hardware reviews. Either they've spread themselves to thin or gotten addicted to the money. Ho-hum.

I wonder what hardware they're using to run Tom's site?

Tom uses several of these. He has multiple dedicated boxes with this company (the same one I use, but I am on shared hosting). This host uses FreeBSD, so maybe his site died along with BSD? :-)

Trust me, it's not all that great :)

Well said! It shows the general quality of the article when they don't even bother to publish the results of the TESTING, let alone do a proper test, train, re-test, auto-learn, test again with each of the products! Instead it's just a "this one is easy to install, this one's got a pretty UI" waste of time.

The fact that they then quote ridiculously low percentages for spam recognition (when they should be aiming in the 95-99.9% bracket) and don't mention ANY of the problems of spam filtering such as false-positives ONCE, what each system does with mail marked as spam, or how each system plugs into a virus scanner (as essential as the spam-filtering itself; yes, I know they have a summary table at the end but it's only of the Y/N type with no detail) just puts the nail in the coffin. That article really is of very little use.

For people that have more of a clue and would like to implement something cheap but effective, this article gives a full step-by-step on how to create a Debian-based Postfix + Amavis-new + SpamAssassin + Razor + Pyzor + ClamAV + DCC mail relay (ideal for protecting an Exchange server, for instance):
http://www200.pair.com/mecham/spam/spamfilter20041 003.html

and some well known guys have published through these guys

On the one hand, that makes sense, but on the other hand it seems really unfair for Rackspace to lose their business over this. They're just as much the victim here as their clients are.

Rackspace has a history of ignoring us little people (e.g. spam complaints) while going overboard when the FBI even thinks about shutting down one of their sites. I have had a couple run-ins with their sysadmins because I had a known, verified source of fradulant spam and web sites on their network, but they refused to acknowledge me. Then when the FBI comes along, they gladly yank hard drives and everything, tripping over their own feet to please the feds.

Disclaimer: I do not work for this company, but I have to recommend them for enterprise-class web hosting: pair Networks. They are a FreeBSD based web host with excellent prices, support, uptime, etc. I have yet to be let down by them. Even their shared servers perform well because they do not overload them like Rackspace and others do.

Nah, you're thinking of something else. There have been numerous aborted attempts at creating a next generation Mac OS under a variety of strange code names like Pink, Taligent and Copland.

Rhapsody was the name of the OS [strategy] developed under the leadership of Gil Amelio, it was heavily based on OpenStep (moreso than OS X), hence it's cross platform capabilities. Apple also had a version of the Rhapsody frameworks that ran in NT, which they inherited from NeXT. At that stage, the name for Cocoa was YellowBox, and the Classic environment was called BlueBox IIRC. There was no equivalent to the Carbon frameworks in those early days, which was the subject of much debate.

Steve Jobs became Interim CEO after Amelio's departure in 1997 and killed the cross platform versions of Rhapsody along with the Mac 'clone' industry. About a year later Apple announced the name change from Rhapsody to Mac OS X. They released Mac OS X Server in 1999, followed a year later by the almost unrecognisable OS X Public Beta.

Check out these screenshots, which (in order from top to bottom) show the gradual progression from NeXTstep's multi-column Browser to Mac OS X 10.3's Finder*.

NeXTstep
Rhapsody
Mac OS X server 1.x
Panther

*yes, I skipped the aqua Finder.

I don't know about the "pot smoking hippies" part, but I tend to agree that this is not a major contribution to science or technology. I'm not so sure that Canadians should be proud that $600,000 of what was probably taxpayer's money were spent on this project.

Having said that, someone down below posted taht "Solar powered transportation is not practical." Well, these guys did it. I think the fact that they have ridden it hundreds of km around the city shows it can be done. They are not engineering prodigies, but they have shown that you can do it AND in the end you can do it fairly cheaply.

PSSST Electric cars can be practical. Some think there is a conspiracy to kill electric powered vehicles like the GM EV-1 (I would have sent you a link to GM's official information on the car, but I can't find it!).

Actually, it's mostly to keep hits down so I don't get slashdotted myself.

The average business user can't justify clicking on a link for wetsexygirl.com, even if it really IS a mirror for slashdot (which they're not supposed to visit during work, anyway).

If I posted with a "legitimate" site name then anyone in the universe could click and I'd be looking at a many-gig bill.

Eventually there will be some wet, sexy girls there, but since my current hosting provide (Pair networks) doesn't allow pr0n, it'll have to be whenever I change hosts (at least another year).

Also, it's just nice to be able to mess with y'all. Same thing here for Total Cost of 0wnership, but it's a temporary mirror, so that stuff is already gone.

puqloDwI' ja'pu'vawq Dayep
pe'vIl chop Ho'Du'Daj; pe'vIl Suq pachDu'Daj
Ha'DIbaH puv juchyub yIyep
bInDepSuHach vaQeHmuS ghombe' DanIDjaj

'etlhDaj veSpatlh HujtaH ghopDaj--
jagh HoSlaw' law' veqlargh Hos puS! nIteb nej nI'
vaj Sor tamtam, ghaH retlhDaq Qam
nI'be' leSlI' ghah (Sor retlhDaq) 'ej ghaH QublI'

(Courtesy of Keith Lim...)

It should come as no surprise that there is a similarity in behaviour ... the Feds have been using Scientology since the 60's ...

In fact, there are many who believe that the current church is a front group for the IRS. Yes, it sounds too strange to be true, but have a read of this...

It would explain why the Church is always shooting itself in the foot. Actually, it explains a lot of really stupid things that Scientologists do ... they're being run by the Feds!!! Its not really Scientology!!!!!

Sorry for the messed up first reply - something in my profile was wonky and it was giving firefox a headache ;)

What happened with 2004.1? Well, a lot of things did. We changed project managers, build tools, and procedure. Why? Well, Daniel was beginning to take a diminished role in the project so I had to step up and take over (a lot to learn there), we had no previous release building tool (which is why Daniel and I created Catalyst), and there was no formal procedure in place. So basically, .0 and .1 were both "starting from scratch" since we (releng) had no previous knowledge to build on.

As for your LiveCD problems - a lot of that was in the kernels (which should be fixed).

Try out http://gentoo.mirrors.pair.com/ - they are always fast and up-to-date ;)

There are two meteorites that are thought to have come from Venus, see here.

But I think it depends on what you are using your domain for; wildcard spam is minor/rare compared to targetted spam:

My main address (unmunged, in this message's header) gets about 500 spams per day. Before I removed the catch-all I was getting almost twice that. Granted I am not everyone, but a few other people are in the same boat as I am. My web host has its own private news server (i.e. not connected to Usenet), and quite a few people who post there talk about getting thousands of spams sent to nonexistant addresses on their domains every day. Turning off the catch-all is a no-brainer in that case.

Go to something like directnic.com, get your domain for $15/yr and get mail forwarding included (including wildcard)!

I am leery of most of those "quasi-registrars". I have a full fledged registrar, and I get those features, SPF, IPv6, et al. and it is all included in my free account, for the same $15 (or less) per year per domain.

That isn't true. See here for just one example.

There seems to be some trouble at Verio or ISC with the main NetBSD site. I've had no trouble getting to it through Pair.com's mirror www3.us.netbsd.org.

Some of ID's development was contracted out to The Omni Group, who did their stuff on NeXTSTEP. You haven't lived until you've played Doom and Doom II on a 33MHz MC68040 :-)

pair have been using it all along. They've got well over 100,000 domains running. They're but one company.

Oh yeah - Apple's another...

Wow, a recycler, how novel!

... well, it would have been, if it NeXTstep hadn't had it since before 1989 (NeXTstep is also where Window 95 got its taskbar). See for example this page for more details.

... which just serves to show even more how un-innovative Microsoft is. Of course, there's nothing wrong with building on other people's ideas, but there's something pretty sick about then pretending to be creative, and something pretty sad about a market where users are so unaware of alternatives that they buy this lie.

1. The Menus should be much more customizable; treated like folders that you can click and drag into (I hate to say this, but "Like Windows").

2. Better Video control properties; take advantage of XFree's extended features and have options like TV switching and such.

3. Better preferences; the control panels are quite lacking.

4. Other aesthetic enhancements that will make gnome pretty enough to compete with other window environments (like win XP's or OSX's). Smooth scrolling, the zoom-on-hover icons in OSX are sweet, and _drop shadows on windows_ would be real nice.

5. Some kind of Linux-version-of-Active-Desktop would be real nice, so I could have an IRC session running as part of my wallpaper,anchor the weather channel radar map to the background, etcetera.

There was the pump and LA lights but by far the coolest and best feeling ones were Nike Air. Amuasingly enough some of the patents on AIR expired in 1997. So there could be competetiors using it now as well. AIR was really cool becasue of the science that went into the "AIR" (molecular weight of gases) and the nature of the container (semi permeable to real air.. which made it inflate itsef..sorta)..