Slashdot Mirror

Which "point of view" would that be? The only point of view available to you is that of the guy walking around with your memories... who, by definition, is you.

Assuming the Perfect Quantum Replication thing is even possible, of course. Although, come to think of it, we should probably pass legislation now to censor the Internet using PQR, on the assumption we'll someday have the technology to enforce such a law.

The funny thing is this PCWorld article that touts PS2 security over XBox and GameCube. The ironic part is when Sony announces their "partnership" with companies such as "America Online" and "RealNetworks." RealNetworks... now THAT's a company I trust with my personal information!

Kazaa, as previously discussed, comes bundled with a piece of adware called "Projector", from Brilliant Digital Entertainment. Projector not only accepts ads from some specified server, it sets up a peer to peer network and passes them to other Projector clients. It can also distribute updates to itself in a peer to peer fashion. That's its normal operation. So as delivered, it's basically a worm, one that installs a backdoor in user's systems and sets up a whole network to exploit that backdoor for commercial purposes.

The idea is that it allows Brilliant Digital, which is a tiny company in L.A. that used to produce hip-hop videos, to distribute vast numbers of ads without having a giant server farm. The Projector steals resources from the client machines to push ads around. It's peer-to-peer spam.

This opens up a huge backdoor into millions of systems. All that's necessary to exploit it is to figure out how to insert new content into the peer to peer system. Worse, because this is a push-type system, an attack can spread very fast. It doesn't require any user intervention. It's an ideal environment for distributing an attack, because it has everything an attacker wants. Built-in!

And now, somebody's used it.

As I said previously, if you have any responsibility for computers that do anything important, get Brilliant's software off them now!

Take a ferrite (that little plastic doohicky that protects monitor cables from RF interference...you didn't throw it away, did you?) from an old monitor cable, and put it on the ethernet cable - if you can't find one, they are available at electronics shops for a nominal price. That might do the trick...

Using this I just type in the address bar:

g mcdonalds big mac rat found inside

... or whatever, and the search results with Google appear immediately? Can any linux browsers do this or do I need to use a tcsh script with lynx?

"In fact, of the thousands of readers who said that they had e-mailed questions to manufacturers about their malfunctioning computers, only 25 percent reported that the answer they got back actually solved their problem."

So, it seems to me that the music industry is already getting compensated for the sales of CD-R's. And since that's the case, they have nothing to complain about.

I'm in the market as well and I found this article pretty helpful. To summarize, unless all you do is hack audio/video, it's a waste of money to get a P4-M w/ DDR memory, despite the faster bus, etc. Photoshop and AutoCAD tests were actually faster on the PIII-M.

I was leaning toward the Toshiba Satellite 5005-S504 until I read this. Running linux is a must, so now I'm considering a Dell Inspiron 8100.

Both of the above have UXGA (1600x1200) displays. I originally tought I wanted a Powerbook G4, but am not convinced that I can be productive on a 1152x768 display. My development environment looks like this: Left 1/3 of the screen is an Eterm running screen. Right 2/3 is XEmacs. A higher resolution means more code visible at a time and/or a more readable font.

PCWorld has a Top 15 list broken down into Power and Value categories. They also cover the pros and cons of each.

Pictures to give an impression of size near the bottom of this page:
http://www.watch.impress.co.jp/pc/docs/2002/0311/s ony3.htm

More interesting descriptions...
http://www.zdnet.co.jp/mobile/0203/11/n_vaiou.html

Babel Fish can help you with the Japanese text:
http://babelfish.altavista.com/

~v

here's a quick article giving a few examples from sony and apple about price increases:
Sony Pushes PC Prices Higher

But yes, you're right. In my experience, most users are comfortable with the Windows GUI. They have no particular interest in Microsoft®Windows(TM), computing, or software in general. To them, Linux is a crappy old refurb box that sits under their desktop. They just want to do their work, listen to some tunes, and not have their applications tank.

Users don't really comment much on their Linux box, except to ask how to resize their desktopresolution or use a theme. They don't remember the last time it was rebooted. But they can certainly remember the last time they rebooted Microsoft®Windows(TM).

</offtopic>

Who would buy gaming hardware from stuck up pricks

The over a million gamers who don't give a damn about what they support with their money.. ?

This was my final year project thesis. Just remember the golden rule unstructured 2 structured == convert 2 XML I wrote a [very bad] program in C++/Perl/tcsh IPC=pipes to add XML tags to English, and then index them into a search engine which would use the lingual data stored in the XML tags to help the search.

NIST does a MASSIVE competition on this annually. I don't want to be an XML-buzzword whore <Arnold Schwarzenegger accent> (XML commando eats Green berets, C++, Java, Perl, COBOL for breakfast)</Arnold Schwarzenegger accent> but you can't beat XML for easily converting anything that you can make sense out of into computer readable format. Real h3cKoRs use SGML, but us underlings have to stick with things we can understand like XML. As for expandability, if we want to encode something else into the document, then just tag-it-and-go

It took me 200 hours to fish out all these links (before the Google days), I don't want anyone to have to waste as much time as I did feeding the search engines exotic foods. It's a year old so pardon me for the odd broken link, armed with these you could probably turn jello into XML ;-)

My favourite bookmarx
PROJect[21 links]
Beginners' Guide[13 links]
Berkeley Linguistics Dept. Course Summaries, general stuffzzzzzzzzzzzzzzCryptic IR Vocabulary defined
Explanations of weird words like hypernym zzzzzzzzzzzzzzHow do we produce and understand speech
How Inverted Files are Created - Univeristy of Berkeley zzzzzzzzzzzzzzNLP Univ. of Indiana, very good basics e.g. word sense d
Simple langauge - useful.... zzzzzzzzzzzzzzWhat is Natural Language Processing, links
What is POS tagging........ zzzzzzzzzzzzzzWord Sense Disambiguation defined
Word Sense Disambiguation in detail, scroll down far zzzzzzzzzzzzzzWord Sense Disambiguator - LOLITA (tested at MUC-7 and SENSEVAL competition as best)
XML for the absolute beginner

HTML, XML stuff + parsers[19 links]
Apache plug-in that uhhh does stuff with XML zzzzzzzzzzzzzzConvert COM to XML
convert XML, HTML to Unix pipeable formats zzzzzzzzzzzzzzconverters to and from HTML
expat XML parser zzzzzzzzzzzzzzHTML Tidy - converts HTML 2 XML + source code!!
Parse DB (RDBMS, whatever) to XML zzzzzzzzzzzzzzPerl-XML Module List
PHP Manual XML parser functions - what the hell are they talking about, PHP Virtual M... zzzzzzzzzzzzzzPublic SGML-XML Software
Pyxie - XML Processor for Python, Perl, etc. zzzzzzzzzzzzzzSGML+XML tools.org
The XML Resource Centre - massive number of links zzzzzzzzzzzzzzW4F wrapper - wrapper converts XML to HTML
XFlat - convert flat file into XML zzzzzzzzzzzzzzXML Parsers and other XML stuff
XML.com - Parsers, etc. zzzzzzzzzzzzzzXML-Data Catalog System - uhhhh looks close
XTAL's general converter - convert anything 2 XML

other Background[8 links]
Is Linux ready for the Enterprise, scalable... zzzzzzzzzzzzzzLinux reliability
Linux Versus Windows NT, Mark(sysinternals bloke) zzzzzzzzzzzzzzPC reliability (pcworld)
SPEC - Standard Performance Evaluation Corp. zzzzzzzzzzzzzzSystems benchmarks
TPC - Transaction Processing Performance Council zzzzzzzzzzzzzzUnix Beats Back NT In EDA Workstation Arena
Proper TREC(-8) QA systems[2 links]

pg. 387 LIMSI-CNRS pretty deep parsing[2 links]
More links....
NLP, IR links - lots to corpii, etc.

pg. 575 U. of Ottawa and NRL (shit system, got 0%)[1 links]
LAKE Lab
pg. 607! University of Sheffield (crap system, but OPEN SOURCE!)[2 links]
GATE - FREE IE app w`source code
LaSIE - ER, coreference, template (cv)

pg. 617 Univ of Surrey (inconclusive matches)[2 links]
System Quirk - Or is this their search system..... Hmmmmmm
Univ of Surrey - pointers (hopefully this is their WILDER search system...)

SMU - Pg. 65[1 links]
Natural Language Processing Laboratory at SMU

Textract[2 links]
Cymfony - Technology
Textract - State of the Art Information Extraction

Xerox uhhhhh maybe[1 links]
Xerox Palo Alto Research Center
(OVERVIEW) 1999 TREC-8 Q&A Track Home Page
NLP bloke, Univ Sussex


Tcl-Tk[4 links] Tcl tutorial
Tcl-Tk Contributed Programs Index
Tcl-Tk Resources, sources
TclXML - manipulating XML using Tcl-Tk
Artificial Natural Language - Is this what I'm trying to parse into...
Comparison of Indexers - Prise vs. Inquery vs. MG, etc.
Eagles - Language Engineering Standards
Language Technology Group - lots of modules!
LDC - Linguistic Data Consortium, lots of corpora
Lexical Resources
Links 2 resources, indexers.....
Lots of IR stuff, University of uhhh
Managing Gigabytes Indexer
Managing Gigabytes Manuals and stuff
Htdig search system
NLP & IR (NLPIR, NIST) Group
OVERVIEW OF MUC-7-MET-2
Perl XML Indexing - XML search engine type thing
Phrasys Language Processing Software Components (money)
QA HCI bullshit
SIGIR - TREC-type thing, resources
SMART indexer system documentation
Text REtrieval Conference (TREC) Home Page
The Natural Language Software Registry
Thunderstone IE and IR products
WordNet - FREE DOWNLOADABLE lexical English database

Page created with URL+, nice utility for working with internet shortcuts

Ok, so the current rate for over-the-air broadcasters is $0.0022 per listening hour . Or assuming 4 and a half minutes per song,

$0.0022 / ( 60 / 4.5) = $0.000165

or .0165 cents per person per song. And they want webcasters to pay .14 cents per song. What the hell are they thinking?

The people on the panel must have invested money at the height of the dot-com boom and figured it was payback time....

...with a big freaking security hole in it! Thanks, Microsoft!

Here's a link for those who still want to try it ;)

http://ftp.pcworld.com/pub/system/other/beospe.exe

they also seem to have some primitive screenshots of this here.
I mean really, what civilised person would have their desktop like this rather than this.

NEC sells a laptop called the Versa DayLite (aka the LaVie MX in Japan) with a special "reflective LCD" screen that makes it usable outdoors. It also allows it (along with a second internal battery behind the screen) to run up to 8 hours.

On the downside, the screen isn't very good indoors - NEC says it's "suitable for occasional indoor use". The users reviews I've read agree with this. PCWorld also has a review.

According to this article, in 2000 Microsoft adopted a policy that "hardware manufacturers who license Windows directly from Microsoft [may] no longer ship a full backup CD of the OS." Unless Microsoft has changed its policy, HP may be contractually prohibited from shipping actual XP backup media with its systems.

edigital has a long history of using hype and grossly misleading tactics to, IMO, defraud investors. So far they've lost tens of millions of dollars, and recently had to resort to taking a loan at a 49% interest rate just to stay in business. Even the CEO has referred to the investors as a "cult".

As for their history with their products, their much-hyped Treo barely sold any units in stores, and is now being sold by liquidators on ebay. A lot of customers were a bit pissed that their players didn't come with any storage media!

This wasn't intended as flamebait, but E.digital has a long history of using hype and misleading tactics to pursue little more than an incursion of investment money from gullible public investors. I didn't lose any money to them, but a lot of people did, and will continue to.

In fact, they recently registered 20 million more shares so they can stay in business a while longer. They really don't deserve this kind of attention from Slashdot.

For those considering investing in them, I'd say stay away. For those considering a product purchase, I'd recommend the same.

The mantra of the 90's seemed to be "buy marketshare now, make money later". Because of the global economy, we're in the make-money phase. Broadband use is still low, so perhaps the market hasn't had time to benefit from economies of scale yet.

2. The FCC ordered them to demonstrate iteroperability. They chose their victim.. I mean, partner, to be some dot-com that is now bankrupt and defunct (nice loop-hole spotting, AOL!). I'm trying to find links on this to back this up, and I'll post them here when I find them (just couldn't let this go unanswered).

You're absolutely right. Let's start funding and supporting the biggest supporter of the RIAA and the leading pioneer in the music copy-protection scheme. After all, it's only $199.00, right?

Have you not seen my rants aboutSony blatently and knowingly being in direct violation of the GPL. You can be certain that they are not going to give you a single line of that source code.

After those stories were posted, and my comments made their way around the world, I received HUNDREDS of emails from people who worked with and for Sony, both as employees and contracted partners. They are doing this in a lot of places, not just with the PDA stuff I support and have consistantly called them on.

Here's an excerpt from one of those emails, sufficiently anonymized to protect the innocent:

For what it's worth I don't think that's the only GPL violation Sony is making. I work on [very high profile Sony gaming product] development tools here at [insert very well-known tool development company here] and I have several patches from Sony to [very well known GNU toolchain item here] for the [high-profile gaming product] but not their original sources to patch against. Plus some sources they compile/link into [same GNU toolchain item here] which they claim are proprietary and not provided.

I don't trust them as far as I can throw their Aibo, 43" flatscreen HDTV, and 200 of their PDAs, and I also would not pay them a single dime to help fund their further violating of a license I believe in strongly, and also to line the coffers of the RIAA (note how "proudly" the RIAA touts Sony on that page) and support more of their audio copy protection schemes.

Where do you think this $199.00 really goes?

It is still possible to download KaZaA, a quick search found a copy here

Yesterday: ZeoSync Expects Data Compression Science To Improve Wireless

01/14/2002 Summary: A Florida-based scientific research company expects its technology, which compresses digital signals for transmission and storage, to enable wireless operators to deliver third-generation capabilities without deploying 3G infrastructure.

Experts question compression 'breakthrough' 1/10/02

Experts Question Compression Breakthrough Friday 11, 2002

Zariski surfaces:

Zariski surfaces by Piotr Blass ASIN: 8301019719 Zariski Surfaces and Differential Equations in Characteristic P-O Zar Piotr Blass, Jeffrey Lang 2nd Rev edition, Marcel Dekker; ISBN: 0824776372

ULAM Previous

Students

Blass, Piotr; 1977 Thesis: Zariski Surfaces.

Previously cited Archive.orgzeosync

Big Number Mathematics

The Real Life Problem

It takes days to download a large (say one movie) file today.

To increase communication speeds throughput over the Internet.

For doing the above a very high compression ratio in the tune of 1000:1 needs to be achieved.

The Possible Approach

In order to do solve the same we have approached the problem using: BIG NUMBER MATHEMATICS.

How Big is this Number ?

The number is in the range of 28,000,000,000

The base of this number system is 232

But the big numbers can not be handled by the computers that exist today

How can Computers handle Big Numbers?

Only if these Big Numbers are converted into numbers which lie within the scope of computation by computers that are present today.

The Challenge

To represent these big numbers by smaller integers.

Encode Big Number into a Small Integer.

And finally Decode the Small Integer and re-create back the Big Number without any loss.

Assumptions in the Big Number Space Domain

No Negative Numbers
No Floating Numbers
Minimize Divisions

For more info, see this article at pcworld.com.

I can't say I much like realmedia formats -- while the compression is decent, the resulting quality is not necessarily the best for the bang. Combine that with RealNetworks's history of installing spyware with realplayer, and I've never been a big fan.

Nevertheless, I'm still rooting for RealNetworks, inasmuch as they're still giving Microsoft a run for their money. It's not that I especially hate Microsoft, although I do; it's that the last thing this industry is yet another concentration of formats in the control of one corporation. Windows Media is no more or less proprietary than realmedia, but when there are two competing crappy proprietary formats, at least they're more likely to keep each other honest that way.

And thankfully, this is just another sign that RealNetworks has what it takes to continue leading in this sector. Back in April, RealNetworks negotiated a deal with AOL to bundle their software with AOL's, putting them at #1. I'm certainly not a fan of AOL, for what it's worth, but that's probably the second easiest/best way to get one's software on the desktop of millions of ordinary users, next to bundling it with Windows itself.

Now if only TiVo would stay solvent long enough for all this to make some sort of difference....

(Note that they have a pop-up ad, if you're one of those people *really* bothered by them.)

Here are a couple of good mirrors for BeOS 5.01 I noticed:

http://ftp.pcworld.com/pub/system/other/beospe.exe

ftp://ftp.kando.hu/.3/beos/beos/BeOS5-PersonalEdit ion.exe

Besides, it's not like Microsoft are the only folks who take forever to release patches.

Product break down for affordable tape backups by PC World here. I just had a hard drive fail. Ontrack couldn't retrieve any data. I'd go with tape.

And PC World made another mention of the Archos here .

Archos media ban? No. Anti-Archos bias on Slashdot? Well, are there any 'Archos' posts modded up to 2 or higher (yet)?

Archos media ban? No. Anti-Archos bias on Slashdot? Well, are there any 'Archos' posts modded up to 2 or higher (yet)?

The feds already used a third-party keylogger that could be delivered via email. It is called DIRT.

I suspect the feature that makes this new keylogger more useful is that it is incorporated in their "DragonWare" suite of software, just like carnivore's lesser known post-processing programs Packeteer and CoolMiner.

More info about the personal human assistant concept available here.

You know, those companies bombed so hard, it's hard to find any trace of them anymore. Thanks for the update.

maybe redundant, but I didn't see it yet while scanning over the comments. This article says "As a backup, both systems let you use a password to get in." If you can use a password to get in..... what's the point of the fingerprint in the first place? Is it really more convenient to try to hold your finger in the same place every time than it is to type in your password? The article also has some info on how "error-free" (or not) these systems are... seems to me it still needs a little work.

I'm glad somebody finally said it - this stuff is almost a year old already. This article [PCWorld] explains the technology, including built-in support for 'multiple users'.

An article about the Uniform Computer Information Transactions Act

I think the Gnome people have got the right idea. But, I'm not sure they're there yet. It is important to focus on the HCI. Apple did just that. The result a superior user experience which has generated fanatical support from its users (OTOH Apple has made many many mistakes which is why Apple Macintosh is a niche market). By focusing on the user interface, the Gnome people counter the biggest single critisism of Linux: usability. In a rather different market, the embedded market (where Linux has already made a significant impact), Microsoft, I see have released thier 2nd beta preview of Windows XP Embedded code named Talisker. See the article in PC World. (Talisker as you may or may not know, is a town on the Isle of Skye, Scotland, famous for its rather distinctive whisky.)

Got it! The /. article is: here. It's a post about a link to a discussion about ClearType and Apple at pcworld (of all places)!!

I think maybe he means http://www.pcworld.com/news/article/0,aid,60124,00 .asp.

After a few minutes of searching I think I finally figured out exactly where PCWorld has "reported" that Linux will have USB 2.0 drivers in first half of 2002. It is located in this story .

Here is the information they give:

"But don't count USB 2.0 out. Microsoft has announced that it will offer downloadable USB 2.0 drivers for Windows 2000 and for the upcoming Windows XP operating system. Linux support for USB 2.0 should come in the first half of 2002.

Silicon behemoth Intel currently provides space for a USB 2.0 controller chip on its Pentium 4 motherboards, and Gateway has announced that it will put the chips in some PCs beginning this fall. Intel and Acer Labs plan to put USB 2.0 into at least some chip sets by mid-2002; Via Technologies, on the other hand, will add IEEE 1394 support to its chip sets before turning to USB 2.0. AMD says it will support USB 2.0, but not how or when."

Sounds like speculation to me on the Linux drivers. Do any Linux USB devs have any actual info about this?

Mind you I'm unable to quote whatever article that Hemos is referring to as there is no link to the story and I've searched the PCWorld website and found nothing about Linux and USB 2.0, but just going off of the quote it says that Linux won't have support until the first half of 2002 while this story quotes that Microsoft already has beta drivers and final WinXP drivers will be available by either the end of this year or the first part of next.

Sure there was no linked article, but at least read the freaking POST before you go trumpeting Linux beating M$.

My question is how much of an advantage does software not specifically compiled for 64bit gain?

None. In fact, they get slower. Check out this article (link pilfered from poster above).

MS's (correct) mantra about it being all about the apps is gonna bite 'em in the ass on this one. Until SQL server, IIS, and the rest of the back office stuff is also native 64 bit (along with all thier dev tools) it ain't gonna be anything but an expensive, slow box.

Now Microsoft word will take even more time to roll out Clippy.

Slow Office
But because 64-bit Windows has to emulate the 32-bit version to run 32-bit apps, the apps' performance will be slower on a 64-bit machine than on a Pentium III PC of comparable clock speed (Itanium launched at 733 and 800 MHz). And according to analyst Chris LeTocq of Guernsey Research, most engineers will not want to slow down their workstations with 32-bit apps.

From the PCWorld article.

Now that's innovation!