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Thanks. Now I can consider writing a filesystem-based backend to my PHP-based object data storage thingy.

Not to be nitpicking, but I was wondering whether the "filenameX/..owner" syntax already has been decided upon. I just happen to think it's not all that beautiful (really just a matter of taste) to have all these metadata files together with other dotfiles in every directory. Although the common solutions for HFS/ AppleTalk on UNIX systems don't really seem to suggest anything better. The OSX approach is dubious because it's actualy two approaches in one (reserving the "rsrc" filename and the "..namedsource" filename for just about the same purpose). One advantage is that at most you're faced with these two special files inside a normal directory(?), and not e.g. 20 different ones ("..user", "..group", "..access", etc.).

In an ideal world, you should be able to open a file or directory with a mode ("data", "metadata", and maybe even "directory"), and have the accompanying command line utils for this. But this of course doesn't fit in well with the current UNIX/ ANSI C approach of things. Of course, treating normal files as directories is a nice alternative, but the problem lies within the metadata for directories, which will still be visible as any other normal (hidden) file.

Hey, I realize that you have probably already given this stuff some thought, but anyway ;-)

* Wil Wright invents the "software toy" or "sandbox" type of game with SimCity


The invention of the "software toy" is *very* important - but there were earlier examples:

1982 Rock'y Boots

1960's Logo

1960's Eliza and Parry

I'm sure there are earlie examples of interactive, exploratory, non-games.

The interesting thing, of course, is that so few bugs have been found. Imagine if M$ had this policy!

If it's really for an academic project (say a master's thesis), you might want to direct your inquiry to Craig Silverstein. Since he's grad student it's likely he would be more interested in your project than the Google corporate types.

Who knows, mebbe you can parlay the project into an internship into a real live job.

Poking around this guy's site: http://www.stanford.edu/~lindholm/chinf_tal.html (WARNINGNot lunch safe; don't look at this and eat.)

I'm all for individuality. But posting scat shots on your Stanford web page is nuts.

Besides being just gross (a not presented in any sort of artistic manner; it's just "here's some scat"), it's hardly a way to get on the good side of future employers. But I read elsewhere that he flits about the globe: Ireland, Scotland, Japan, all during his stay at college. So perhaps working for a living like the rest of us is not a concern.

apologies for pegging onto your highly rated comment, but I wanted to let people know that Gutenberg was not the first guy with movable type -- it was the Chinese/Koreans (depends on what you consider moveable enough)

For a bit of history, see this page which says the the Chinese started with ceramic type, and the Koreans took metal type into a new level...

Korean metal print block

this guy talks about how Gutenberg might have been the first to mass produce MT - that could be a first (I don't know, either).

The world needs no more than one computer, it's just very spread out.

the cartoon art museum
slac(stanford linear accelerator)
lawrence livermore labs
also a webhost here in town ( laughing sqhid) maintains the squidlist for non-conventional and geeky events.

I own a Radio Baton. Dr. Schloss still refers to the instrument by it's original name, Radio Drum. Just to clarify, it was invented by Max Mathews, the person responsible for laying the foundations of computer/digital music.

12" is hard to read at a res bigger than 1024x768 as well.

This all depends on your font size, no? I just got a laptop that offers 1400x1050 on a 14.1" screen, and it's beautiful. Yes, I had to increase the default font sizes, and yes, ads on web sites are smaller, but the text is easier to read than on the lower resolution screens. Given this experience, I now want to see the Dells that have even higher resolution (1600? 1900?).

- Amit

The cable set-top box I have (AT&T digital cable) is really awful.

• It misses keypresses -- the receiver light blinks, so the hardware received the keypress, but the software just ignores it.
• It's really slow -- you can see the text being drawn on the screen
• It's buggy -- the wrong show sometimes gets described, which is really amusing/annoying when I'm watching Discovery Channel and the program guide shows the description of an adult movie.
• It's ugly -- but maybe I've been spoiled by the less harsh colors and more readable text used by TiVo.

Although I'm not generally a big fan of Microsoft software, in this case I'd put my bets on Microsoft's software being better.

Amit

while planetccrma might take you an hour or two to install and configure, its AWSOME... i love it. once its up and running its so much slicker than windows or macos for keeping your audio environment up to date.

bascially planetccrma is a multimedia distro on top of redhat (7.3, 8.0 or 9.0). it gives you a new kernel with alsa and the low latency + preemptive patches built in. plus it uses Apt-Rpm so installing and updating all those constantly developing linux audio apps is dead simple.

nando, the guy who puts it all together is really friendly and usually answers any install questions or program requests within a day.

I'm a total convert and this is actually letting move away from windows for my main audio performace OS.

Putting the "is MP3 trading really hurting anyone" argument aside, as a DePaul student I'm very concerned over my privacy rights. DePaul is fully working with the RIAA and not even put up a legal defense to maintain the privacy of its students.

This is simply unacceptable. Will all our traffic be sniffed by various copyright holders in the future? I don't like carry around thousand page books so I just scan them. If the publishers of america jumped on the RIAA bandwagon would I be a criminal and my ISP/University would fold instantly when asked for information? I'm afraid the answer is yes. Then I have to goto court and try to defend myself in front of a world of technophobes and vs. some lawyers that know all the tricks.

To me it looks like ALL format shifting has come under question, regardless of the legality of the use. Imagine if I gave someone a copy of one of my scanned books for academic use so we can work together on a project. Again, the "format-shift police" and the lack of privacy means that I'll probably be forced to defend my fair use rights at lawyerpoint.

When will it end? Will sigs in emails be checked to see if anyone owns them too?

A wholesale destruction of privacy rights and the destruction of fair use is not good for anyone, even the dreaded RIAA. Let's not forget the flaps their artists are always going through regarding illegal sampling, stealing obvious musical progressions, etc.

This whole MP3 thing is eroding our civil liberties faster than we'll be able to get them back. This will all lead to the day of the DRM enabled browser that won't let you copy and paste or link to copyright articles. This will put a massive chill on speech.

Laugh at the above all you like, but the web works mostly because of fair use and privacy. We've successfully fought off the "hyperlinking without permission is illegal" crowd and the "you must tell me who is anon39595 is" crowd. The RIAA is only helping those people. We are living in a time where copyright holders are more or less simply calling ISPs, giving an IP address and a time and getting back info like name, address, phone number, etc.

I really hope the RIAA doesn't have their stuff together and someone can build a defense on barratry. As I see no other way out of this problem. The file traders won't quit and neither will the RIAA.

The scene where the have the fire drill and the boss and his assitant carry the only wheechair bound employee halfway down the fire stairs then the drill is called off so they just leave here there half way down the stairs while they head off to the pub just had me in stitches. I mean i know it's sort of evil but honestly it was such a funny scene. the germans would use the term 'schadenfreude'.

See also Come Friendly Bombs and fall on Slough - it isn't fit for humans now.".

I will probably buy this book though, as i love a laugh.

Yes they are in the same party, but Dean isn't cozy with Hollywood. In the last quarter he raised more than any Democratic candidate, $7.6 million, from over 80,000 different people, with an average dollar amount in the 80s. This average amount is smaller than that of anyone else, and because he gets his money from the people due to his large grassroots support, he won't be beholden to special interests.

In fact, he has been guest blogging this week on Lawrence Lessig's blog, and Lessig is generally critical of current copyright law, so I consider him very promising (he hasn't yet explicity stated his opinions of the DMCA and copyright/technology law but he seems to have favorable positions; he's very pragmatic and chooses his policies based on the evidence).

Currently we have special interest groups funding government.
This is one of the reasons I might be voting for Howard Dean. At least he listens to what the people have to say http://cyberlaw.stanford.edu/lessig/blog/ http://dean2004.blogspot.com

I think the whole internet politics idea is genius.
Its just a matter of getting the old out and putting the new in. Dean seems to be new blood, advocating a new political process.
I'm going to watch his blogs carefully this week. Maybe I'll make a comment on it about this and see if he responds.

Check out some university CS websites for the basics of a new language. You should usually be able to find some free lecture notes written for a course dealing with your language of interest. As they are written for students, they're "dumbed down" enough to make learning the language simple, but at the same time often contain conceptual backgrounds as well. In a series of Java notes, like these at Stanford, for example, you will find all sorts of information not only about Java itself, but also object-oriented programming in general. Another advantage is that it's easier to find information about less-commonly-used languages. For example, the University of Illinois produces a wonderful resource book for x86 assembly (NASM).

Once you understand the basics behind the language, then go ahead and buy a book for the kinds of applications you need.

Bro, here's the schedule.

Can't help mentioning that I submitted a story Saturday (in time to see the cars on display) but it didn't get accepted by the editors. IT did have a link to the schedule too...

Solar Car Race - Chicago to California

We all know that solar power is cool. Even cooler is when you use it to go 80mph on a freeway, with the power consumption of a hairdryer! The American Solar Challenge unites teams from many Universities in the goal of racing their custom-built solar-cars from Chicago to California.
That's 2300 miles along Route 66! They start Sunday morning in Chicago, but you can check out the official schedule to see when the cars will be passing through your state. If you're in Chicago now, the cars are on public display (while last-minute tuning continues) at the Museum of Science and Industry.

Google has a number of related items. For photos and blogs, try these: ASC daily photos, ASC dialy diaries, a Stanford blog.

For the first time this year, 2-person cars will be entering the race. Unfortunately, only two of these passed the scrutineering tests: The Stanford Team is racing a 2-person back-to-back configuration. Here's a list of races held in the U.S.A. in the 90's. A similar race in Australia is less student-oriented.

[ I submitted the following as a story on Saturday. Plenty of links and info, but it got passed up. ]

Solar Car Race - Chicago to California

We all know that solar power is cool. Even cooler is when you use it to go 80mph on a freeway, with the power consumption of a hairdryer! The American Solar Challenge unites teams from many Universities in the goal of racing their custom-built solar-cars from Chicago to California.
That's 2300 miles along Route 66! They start Sunday morning in Chicago, but you can check out the official schedule to see when the cars will be passing through your state. If you're in Chicago now, the cars are on public display (while last-minute tuning continues) at the Museum of Science and Industry.

Google has a number of related items. For photos and blogs, try these: ASC daily photos, ASC dialy diaries, a Stanford blog.

For the first time this year, 2-person cars will be entering the race. Unfortunately, only two of these passed the scrutineering tests: The Stanford Team is racing a 2-person back-to-back configuration. Here's a list of races held in the U.S.A. in the 90's. A similar race in Australia is less student-oriented.

public beta of steam? oh, it's a game! When I first read the title I thought they were using a euphemism for "vaporware"...

That is a great pun indeed. However I would like to point out that anyone who is thinking about unbreakable copy protection, digital content delivery system sending binary digits (bits) which are impossible to copy,* or other perpetum mobile for that matter, might consider getting a clue and educating oneself. Crypto-Gram and some books could be a good start.

Of course I am not talking to anyone from the Slashdot community, as I am sure everyone of us is perfectly aware of everything I am talking about. I am saying it in case someone from this steampowered dotcom is listening.

__________
*) also acceptable would be: a lossless compression of random data, a one-time-pad cryptography without key distribution problem or with reused keys or keys shorter than cleartext, immortality drug, perpetual motion machine, prove of the existence of omnipotent superbeing, strong artificial intelligence on Turing machine, homeopathy, magic, multilevel marketing that works, et cetera ad infinitum, ad nonsensum... I think you get the point already.

Actually, there are intelligent, compelling arguments for using open-sourced software over commercial even if you proceed from the assumpton that it's always slower, unstable and somehow more expensive.

Here's one of many places you could go to find some.

I'm not going to bother pointing out why I think your experience with Linux vs. Windows is atypical. I will, however, challenge you to defend the subject line of your post.

At some point you have to actually get the tapes into the computers. Even if the tape drives themselves had relatively infinite bandwidth, it would still take at least 10 seconds to get it off the truck and loaded into the reader. Maybe you could save time by using some sort of SUPER GIANT SPOOL like 2 meters in diameter and height.

Imagine that, cassettes the size of shipping containers. Of course, if we're going to talk about things like that, we really need to talk about tape read speed too. Lets say the tape thickness is 8 microns. In that case, each layer can hold (4-(8*10^-6)*i)*pi where i is the layer number, So the total number of layers is Sum(2*(2-(8*10^-6)*i)*pi) (2*pi*r where r is 2m - 8um*i) for i from 0 to 2/8*10^-6. that gives us about 4*10^11 meters of tape. Even if we spun the tape at the speed of light it would still take 20 minutes to read one tape. At the speed of light, it would take about 1309 seconds to load the data into the computer. Since 1309/100 is 13.9, assuming you did your math right the cost would be $278 million per year. Of course, we can't actualy spin the tapes at the speed of light.

http://www.nature.com/nsu/030324/030324-7.html

also here:

http://www.slac.stanford.edu/slac/media-info/20030 207/

It was discussed on /. too I believe.

• Unix v/s ITS (from the paper)
• C v/s Lisp (from the paper)
• Linux v/s Hurd
• Opteron v/s IA64

My own experience on this very field is this: let everyone write TeX, LaTeX and PostScript using her favourite text editor (vi or Emacs) and use Concurrent Versions System (CVS) to seamlessly combine it all together. On the CVS server have makefiles and use GNU make(1) to generate PostScript (using tex(1) and dvips(1)--remember to use scalable PostScript Type 1 fonts for better results with resolutions over 600dpi) and PDF (using pdftex(1)). That way you have a completely free-software solution, and, as a nice side effect, you have the output with much higher quality than you could ever expect from Microsoft Office (or Open Office for that matter) thanks to Don Knuth. Remember that Microsoft Office, unlike TeX, is not a type setting system, but merely an office grade "word processor." The difference is huge, but frequently overlooked. In short, Word is good for clueless secretaries sending faxes, while TeX is good for professional typesetters and typographers working in the real publishing industry preparing the most important and the most beautiful books for print. You have to always make sure which solution fits your needs better. I hope this will help you. Good luck.

Difficult question, because the "ij"-sound is unique to the Dutch language. My first name is "Thijs" and I have the same problems trying to explain that sound. The ij sounds somewhat like the english "eye". The a on the end of Dijkstra should be pronounced short like the U in "cut". I've also found this page which has MP3's of the different sounds in the Dutch language. Good luck pronouncing Dijkstra's and my name :)

I'd just like to point folks to this in hopes that we can collectively steer this topic where it ought to be with our elected officials. Alternately, we could take Lessig up on his bet.

I'd just like to point folks to this in hopes that we can collectively steer this topic where it ought to be with our elected officials. Alternately, we could take Lessig up on his bet.

Email is a wonderful thing for people whose role in life is to be on top of things. But not for me; my role is to be on the bottom of things.

Maybe since this bozo started using it to title presentations?

It gets over 74000 hits on google.

Don't ya' just love the flexibility of English?

WRT the DIY version, you can set Linux up to merge inputs from multiple keyboards (actually, that's its default behaviour and dissuading it from doing that is one of the big traumas involved in making multiple independent X instances work), so you could plug two potentially mangled keyboards in and lay one to each side, and potentially also have another unmangled keyboard before you as well.

The mouse was originally used together with a one-handed chording keyboard.

This is a misconception that plagues the EFF and those who fight to better copyright law, that they really just want to legalize theft. This mischarictarization is apparent in a polite post in Lawrence Lessig's blog, in which the poster refers to the EFF as the "music should be free" movement.

I think that one of the biggest obstacles to mainstream acceptance is this misconception; no politician can possibly back this viewpoint, while the EFF's true position is really quite right and tenable.

Just my two cents.

10. Robots aren't as dextrous or adaptable as humans yet.
9. Robots aren't smart enough (yet) to be autonomous when telepresence latency increases.
8. We can't upload our minds into robotic shells yet. (GITS!)
7. The human condition is biological, and so we want to know the experience as such.
6. Robots don't get taxpayers excited.
5. Robots aren't "heroic" enough to inspire kids to grow up to be scientists, etc.
4. Robots just take more jobs away from real flesh-and-blood humans! (Armitage!)
3. We can convert the dead humans into valuable H20.
2. To ensure genetically diverse humans live on (via traditional sex in space) when Earth bites the dust.
1. Ego. ME. ME. ME. ME! ME!!!

--

If that means a little less porn, that's a price I'm prepared to pay.

rdiff-backup also takes snapshots, which are kept as reverse diffs. Very nice. A short word of warning though - running it on a p200 is slow. It probably has the same issues with samba as you describe.

First, Movieflix lets you watch the old movies for free. It is just the soft-core pr0n you have to pay for. Second, I'm willing to grant you that there might be some great movies from that period. That isn't the point. The point is that such a small number of people have an interest in those movies that there wouldn't be any competition. (Phillistines!) Third, there are a lot of films from that period that would basically have no audience, even if there are some gems. Yet having these films in the public domain would be a great boon to film scholars. Fourth, we aren't just talking about films, but all manner of works. And what makes tracking the copyright holders down hard is that people die, and so you have to figure out who inherited the copyright. Fifth, Lessig estimates that this would put over 90% of material from 1923--532 in the public domain. But I guess you shouldn't argue with an anonymous coward; people might not be able to tell the difference.

A relevant quote from Lawrence Lessig's blog:
âoeWhat you donâ(TM)t understand, Lessig, is that your bullshit âopenâ(TM) or âfreeâ(TM) types will never â" NEVER â" be able to compete with corporate organization. Squabbles-about-egos-pretending-to-be-about-the-me rits can never be quashed. There is no one to say âenough, letâ(TM)s move on.â(TM) So every great idea that your type creates, weâ(TM)ll just wait, watch, and then take. Always.â paraphrased from a conversation with someone from within one of the (how many are there?) largest proprietary code companies.

------------

It is possible that those charged with enforcing Berne would take a different view. They might see this tax as a simple way around the "formality" requirement. But as John Mark Ockerbloom nicely points out, Berne only imposes its requirements for the minimum term. If there is a formality problem with structuring this as a tax, then the proposal could be structured to apply only beyond Berne's minimum term.

Quantum entanglement would be a possible way to have relativity hold true, yet allow superluminal information transport. Essentially, the states of two similar particles become, for a lack of a more definate word: "entangled" and changes made to one of the particles occurs instantaneously with the second.

Agreed. As a greenie geek I spent a lot of time just getting up to speed. To save you some Googling (which is a great way to learn about OS/FS), let me post some links for you. These were articles that I've found particularly helpful.

• GNUWin II Articles Directory - A good collection of famous FS/OS articles.
• Philosophy section of the GNU Project - This is the extreme left wing of free software. I personally prefer a more moderate approach, but the ideas are engaging.
• Interview with Andreas Pour of the KDE Project - This interview did much to convert me to open source philosophies.
• Legal Concepts section of CreativeCommons.org - Masterminded by Lawrence Lessig, the legal champion of the public commons. One of the greatest minds working for the cause of FS/OS. He also has a couple of books that you might consider reading. I've read the first one and found it quite interesting.

Some of these weren't around when I was getting into things. Creative Commons came a bit later. Most of my earliest reading was from GNU. You've already found Slashdot, which is one of the best resources for learning about FS/OS, especially as it relates to current developments.

One word of caution: FS/OS is a religion. People can be very zealous about their views on it. Be careful as you formulate your own opinions, which will likely change over time. When in doubt, choose a more moderate approach. (If you're interested, my personal views can be found here.)

I hope this is helpful. Well, off to more reading myself...

Neat idea, but I think Stephenson actually had a Turing Machine in mind when he wrote that part of the primer's strory. The six (7?) castles contain models of computer logic of increasing complexity -- it's basically an intro to Computer Science class turned into a fantasy adventure game.

Now, if the Inca had Turing machines, that would really be something. Writing entire computer programs using only binary coded knots would be an achievement on the scale of building the Pyramids with stone-age tools.

Or do something actually worthwhile with your spare cycles, like Folding@Home.

I went to check some regular IDE drives just for comparison, and they were rated at 500,000 hours (57 years). Now, as I understand it, this is supposed to be the average time that you can expect the drive to last before failures. I rarely have an IDE drive last more than 4 years, and my record is 10 years, so what is the deal?

Let's say I have a drive that has a 99% chance of failing after 10 years, and a 1% chance of failing after 4710 years. The MTBF is 57 years.

In fact, with the proper distribution (think 2^n) you could have an infinite MTBF, but still have a 99% chance of failure within 10 years. See for example the St. Petersburg paradox.

"Beware of bugs in the above code; I have only proved it correct, not tried it."
http://www-cs-faculty.stanford.edu/~knuth/faq.html

HAHAHAHAHHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHHAHAHAHHA!

Is anyone surprised that business doesn't like GPL. I work for a living, I'm not impressed with GPL either. I release everything as BSD and Public Domain. It makes more sense from a business standpoint. Anyone could get contracted to work for a business or government, use my stuff in their project and they are done. Where I step in is, if a lot of contractors are using my stuff I get to write books on it and they sell like hotcakes. (most people will buy the extremely specialized books for their field, even if the books aren't very good). Also I can get a job easier as a contractor to work on my own "free" software.

The weird restrictions of GPL has always made it a hard sell when I've been contracted at various companies. We usually go "well this is GPL, so we can't statically link it here." or "This is LGPL, we can do this, but then have to do this".

RMS hippies are still paying off their student loans while wasting their time on GPL when they could contribute something wonderful to the community and turn around and actually sell it to business.

Release your applications as true PUBLIC DOMAIN today! Let everyone benefit from mixing your applications with other applications freely. Remember that PUBLIC DOMAIN means you have removed the copyright and can make no legal demands on it's use or distribution.

If you want to insure that you get credit for what you have done then use BSD license. Of course if it's public domain and some company just grabs it and claims they wrote it, that would be false advertising. The damages would be a lot smaller than copyright/license infringement, but most companies will be willing to mention your name someplace if your public domain code contributed a significant amount.

Stanford has something called SULinux. It is a modified version of Red Hat with APT, libsafe, different default firewall rules, and some programs preconfigured for Stanford's setup (kerberos, afs, etc.). http://sulinux.stanford.edu/

Same here at Stanford, only it's called SU Linux. It's a modified version of Red Hat, supposedly "hardened", but I think the main difference is that it comes with built-in support for AFS and Kerberos, 2 things we use a lot here. I'm not sure how many people actually use it - I'm using Debian (which has packages enabling AFS and Kerberos, though it was a bit tricky to get working at first), and I know some other people using other normal distros (I've seen Gentoo, Red Hat, and Mandrake floating around), so I suspect it's mostly used for installation in some computer labs around campus that run Linux.

``Beware of bugs in the above code; I have only proved it correct, not tried it.''

Donald E. Knuth

Felipe Hoffa

I'm surprised by two things by this: One is that he even managed to swallow, I haven't really tried, but my experience is that it boils extremely fast, and I would think it would be very hard to do that.

The other surprising thing is that he wasn't more seriously injured, or indeed that he lived to tell about it...

BTW Nobel Prize winner Douglas Osheroff told me he actually lets that stuff go far down his throat.