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Well, I haven't used it yet, but I plan to. I just looked at the Kiwi file system. Looks nice.

Sure. Just about any UNIX desktop environment is as flexible as LiteStep. Roll your own...don't feel like you just need to use KDE or GNOME or something like that. I've got a rather nice desktop with sawfish, the sawfish pager, all status information being shown via gkrellm, and programs launched via the keyboard using xbindkeys. No GNOME or KDE flavoring necessary.

AfterStep is probably the closest in functionality to LiteStep, but I personally prefer Enlightenment if you're looking for flash, Sawfish if you're looking for functionality, and Black Box if you're looking for speed.

Steps in roll-your-own:

Choose a base desktop environment (keep in mind that you can just mix and match bits of them...I used to use the GNOME panel without the rest of GNOME, and a roommate uses GNOME apps with the KDE environment):
None
GNOME
KDE
ROX
foXdesktop
Perltop
Equinox
XFce
Once you've chosen a desktop environment (or the lack of one), and possibly removed the parts of it that you don't like (with GNOME, I wholeheartedly suggest trying it without Nautilus, possibly without anything but the panel), then you get to choose a dock. Your current desktop may or may not include a dock/panel/wharf.

If it doesn't, icedock provides an environment-independent wharf for the afterstep-style wharf system -- swallowing apps.
gkrellm (seems to be currently down) makes for a nice status-monitor style dock.
Or you can make your own impromptu dock...I've built them before by starting xload and xlock with proper geometry arguments to stack them on top of each other, and having sawfish make the windows sticky and slap 'em at the edge of the screen.
Now a window manager. There are so many of these that I'm not going to list them all. I'll mention a few notables:
sawfish is a fairly fast, *extremely* flexible (everything's written in lisp, much like emacs) window manager that uses gtk. Currently GNOME's default. I love this thing, but it doesn't come with a pager, so you either need to use a base desktop environment with a pager or use spager.
enlightenment is, at least until the next major release, still a window manager and not a desktop environment. Lots of emphasis on eye candy.
ion, a novel window manager that's designed to be managed entirely with the keyboard and never overlap windows.
blackbox is what I'd suggest if you needed a fast environment that still looked nice.

Most WMs support launching programs with given key combinations. I'd advise against this. The excellent XBindKeys is window-manager independent, quite capable, allows you to kill off your window manager and still use keys to start programs, etc. Plus, there's a nice benefit to using a different program than your window manager to launch programs. If you never launch external programs with your WM, you can renice -10 `pidof sawfish` or whatever your window manager is. Making your window manager (and X) meaner with respect to CPU scheduling makes for a much more snappy environment when edge flipping or the like. Sure, it might take a sec for the mozilla windows in the background to finish redrawing when I flip to a new desktop, but in the meantime I can do my work without waiting around for them.

The reason you don't want to make your WM meaner if you use it to launch programs is that then all the programs will also be equally mean.

Decide on the Big Four applications of any X desktop. Text editor, web browser, file manager, and terminal emulator.

Text editor:
I can't possibly cover this holy war here. My personal preference is xemacs, which is a bit of a learning curve for new users from Windows, but well worth it in power in the long run. You may want something that meshes more with the rest of your chosen desktop environment.

Web browser:
Just because KDE uses Konqueror and GNOME uses galeon by default is no reason to stick with those. Of course, you also can use either Konq without KDE or galeon without GNOME. You're rolling your own environment!
mozilla is now (after years of work) a good web browser. Big, still slow and still RAM-hungry, but usably so.
dillo Lightweight, very fast, pretty stable, very screen-space efficient...I can't say enough good things about dillo. If you use dillo as your primary browser, be aware of the fact that it has fewer features than the large browsers, that it doesn't currently (without a patch) support SSL, that it uses a UNIXish config-file preferences interface, and that it doesn't lay out nested tables or wrap text around images the same way Mozilla does. I keep Mozilla around as a backup browser, but dillo is so freakishly fast that it's hard to want to use anything else.
There are a few other browsers, but Konqueror, Mozilla, and dillo are (IMHO) the big GUI players on Linux. Amaya is a specialty browser, Opera (thanks to its MDI interface) doesn't seem to have caught on much in the Linux world, and Navigator 4.x is definitely on its way out the door.

File manager:
You may choose to simply use a command-line shell and the standard file utilities (cp, rm, ls) to do your file management -- I do, and I've tried hard to give other things a chance. But if you prefer to use a specalized GUI tool:
Konqueror can be used, even if you aren't using KDE (you do, of course, need the KDE libraries installed). Faster than gecko (the engine in mozilla and galeon) and almost as standards compliant, Konqueror has a lot of fans.
GMC is no longer being developed, but it's a reasonable lightweight interface.
Nautilus, the current official GNOME file manager is big, slow, RAM-hungry, and pretty. Not sure how well Nautilus works outside of GNOME (given that Konqueror can work outside of KDE, I would expect this capability of Nautilus).
ROX filer is a very fast little gtk file manager.
There are a lot of file managers out there, so I won't list them all, especially as I'm happy with just bash and the POSIX tools.

Terminal emulator:
GNOME and KDE both come with terminal emulators -- gnome-terminal and Konsole. I'm not very impressed with either -- they're both very slow and aren't available apart from their associated desktop environment. Konsole supports tabbed terminals, which some people may like. Both of them are fairly easy to configure, and are suitable for newbies to work with.
Multi Gnome Terminal extends gnome-terminal significantly with Konsole-style tabs and a set of other features. If you like gnome-terminal, you should probably consider using this instead.
Eterm is a RAM-heavy terminal emulator that was designed to look nice. For all the tinting and blending it can do, reasonably fast.
Aterm seems to be basically a less featureful, less memory-hungry Eterm-like terminal.
xterm is the reasonably fast not-so-pretty fairly RAM-hungry terminal that's used all over the world.
rxvt is easily my favorite terminal emulator. rxvt uses less RAM than anything else out there, and is incredibly fast. You can compile in only the features you want to use (which can, of course, also be disabled at runtime). Background images are supported, but emphasis is not much on eye candy. Very configurable. The biggest drawback is that configuration is through traditional UNIX methods, which may scare away some -- X resources, command line options, compile-time options.

Whatever you do, choose a set of software that you like, and remember -- your desktop environment is based on Linux, which means it should composed of exactly the parts that you like most. Have fun!

My CPU hours will remain dedicated to searching for a cure for diseases. If you would like to help check out the Folding@Home project that uses distributed computing to model protein folding to find possible cures.

Call me when they come up with robotic domo-kuns that I can get to chase my kitty around.

We need Larry Lessig to write this email! He's the one law professor who is most up-to-date with the damage that the DMCA, RIAA, CARP and others are doing daily and can articulate it in a way that most non-/. folks will understand. He has taken on Jack Valenti (head of the MPAA) directly in debates and run circles around their theories and ideas.

-info

What is fair use though? How far does fair use extend and where do it limits end? That seems to one part of the problem, because there is no rule of thumb of what constitutes fair use. In seems to be in the same boat as justice, in that it's definitely a good thing to have but its a loose principle so there is no concrete definition to determine what is just and what isn't.

Looking on the Internet there are plenty of documents (example 1, example 2) that define fair use in academia, but are they such definitions in regards to personal use?

Where are the sound mixing programs? Nothing compares to CoolEdit.

As one of its authors, I'm quite biased, but I think Audacity is in some ways even better than Cool Edit. Audacity is very user friendly, cross platform (Windows, Linux, Mac), and supports unlimited tracks. At least check it out. :-)

Other sound programs are very powerful but less user friendly. snd is the perfect example of this.

Also, a powerful Digital Audio Workstation program called Ardour has been in the works for a while, and it is in the same ballpark as ProTools.

According to this it's neither, it's an introsort which has O(n log n) worst case performance. Another interresting comparison between C and C++ sorts is given here

Just something to think about.

Gee, Pascal's Wager again.

1. How do you know which God to worship? What if you lived your whole life as a Christian and when you die you suddenly find yourself before the throne of Odin in the Halls of Asgard? Boy is he going to be pissed!

2. Any God with His salt is going to know that you only believed not out of genuine feeling, but only to cover your bets.

3. If you believe in God and you are wrong, it's not "no big deal". You still have lost something. You spent all that time going to church, praying, reading your Bible, etc, when you could have been out doing something productive.

I have yet to encounter any "trivial math"; as far as I've seen, it's all serious if you look at it hard enough. For example, arithmetic may seem trivial, but in the hands of Whitehead & Russell it turns out to be serious. All they were trying to do was put simple arithmetic on a sound logical footing, yet they (with Godel, etc.) wound up challenging notions like "proof" and "truth"--fairly serious consequences for such a trivial topic.

-- MarkusQ

Ha!

NO, NO, NO, NO, NO!!! (Did I mention NO!)

From the rec.arts.henson+muppets FAQ: "Disney does not, nor has it ever, owned the Muppets. ... [However] in the fall of 1989, the Walt Disney Company entered into negotiations to acquire The Jim Henson Company (then Jim Henson Productions) and the Muppets. Jim Henson died during the negotiations, and the deal eventually fell through. However, the JHC and Disney have sometimes worked together, such as for the MuppetVision 3-D at Disney/MGM studios in Orlando."

Short answer: They've collaborated extensively, but Disney does NOT own the Muppets!

Actually, it is the voltage.

Since we're talking STATIC electricity, there is, by definition, NO current flow.

The problem with static charge buildup and FETs is called punchthrough. Electric field strength is measured in Volts per Meter (V/m) The gate thickness of a typical CMOS FET is on the order of nanometers (1x10^-9 m).

Our 15 kV static voltage produces in the gate region of the FET a field of (15kV)/(40x10^-9 m) = 375x10^9 V/m.

According to this link the dielectric strength of (Pyrex) glass 14x10^6 V/m. Applying a field stronger than this will cause ionization of the material: electrons will be literally knocked off their atoms! This ionization allows a current to flow through the (normally) insulative material, called dielectric breakdown. In a CMOS FET, gate insulator ionization leaves residual conduction paths, ruining the transistor (punchthrough).

CMOS FETS have very thin gate insulators to increase performance, but the side-effect is that they can tolerate only very small static gate voltages without damage.

Likewise, I first heard about it in a slashdot story.

Although Alien Life is by far the most fascinating subject, I think there are better ways of enhancing your CPU's nobility. Folding@home and Genome@home are not as user-friendly as Seti@home, but the derived information will be much more applicable, both to mankind and the researchers who publish the article. By the way, I'm not a standford student/employee.. :)

Although Alien Life is by far the most fascinating subject, I think there are better ways of enhancing your CPU's nobility. Folding@home and Genome@home are not as user-friendly as Seti@home, but the derived information will be much more applicable, both to mankind and the researchers who publish the article. By the way, I'm not a standford student/employee.. :)

> what next?

Well, assuming we run out of data to process and methods to process it (yeah, right), or you get bored, or decide it's pointless, there are plenty of other projects to go to.

Folding@Home and Genome@Home are two related projects with open results and which will probably have client source available sometime.

Check a list of distributed projects. There's plenty of choice.

> what next?

Well, assuming we run out of data to process and methods to process it (yeah, right), or you get bored, or decide it's pointless, there are plenty of other projects to go to.

Folding@Home and Genome@Home are two related projects with open results and which will probably have client source available sometime.

Check a list of distributed projects. There's plenty of choice.

I recently discovered another game written for the same class that is a even more blatant rip-off. It is here. Strangely, this second game was developed without any knowledge of mine. Both seem to be inspired by Star Wars and specifically by the asteroid field scene in ESB.

So could we get sued?

I want to donate a copy of this to some of Stanford's management staff. They've made some bad decisions lately. Splitting off the hospital as a for-profit operation, then merging it back a year later, for example.

Its a recession. During boom times like the mid 90's companies were too busy dealing with sales and expanding like crazy to deal with demand. Now that most of the competition has died down, no one expects them to post record profits etc it gives people the chance to think about where to go next.

The web is all very well but HTTP et al. have some serious limitations and were never designed for most of the current technology. For example a dial up connection has the same bandwidth of a dedicated line in the 1970's so ASDL/Cable modems etc were never considered.

The reason for all the demand now is the scientific community and all the Grid projects around the world, just because there's a recession doesn't stop them and their data requirements make Google look like a small fry (20TB of data for Google vs 600TB for BaBar at SLAC).

The other issue is business - they've all got on the band wagon of internet sales as an extra sales channel so they can grow this, but its not going to be the sudden revenue increase it was initially. Web Services offer the opportunity for companies to increase productivity and efficency which is why the tech companies are investing in it now so when the economy changes and the corporate clients come back they have something new to go on about.

With this system, email can be encrypted using an easily obtainable public key (no need to exchange keys beforehand) - the string "your@email.address". You can encrypt email to people that have not yet set up a key, just by knowing their email address. To decrypt, they grab their key from a server. You can request your key from Stanford's key servers. These would one day be replaced by a publicly-trusted resource.

An elliptic curve variant of the Diffie-Hellman encryption model is used. A third party is necessary for the system and the distributed storage solutions being proposed could make good use of this technology.

Read a technical description here or download here.

With this system, email can be encrypted using an easily obtainable public key (no need to exchange keys beforehand) - the string "your@email.address". You can encrypt email to people that have not yet set up a key, just by knowing their email address. To decrypt, they grab their key from a server. You can request your key from Stanford's key servers. These would one day be replaced by a publicly-trusted resource.

An elliptic curve variant of the Diffie-Hellman encryption model is used. A third party is necessary for the system and the distributed storage solutions being proposed could make good use of this technology.

Read a technical description here or download here.

With this system, email can be encrypted using an easily obtainable public key (no need to exchange keys beforehand) - the string "your@email.address". You can encrypt email to people that have not yet set up a key, just by knowing their email address. To decrypt, they grab their key from a server. You can request your key from Stanford's key servers. These would one day be replaced by a publicly-trusted resource.

An elliptic curve variant of the Diffie-Hellman encryption model is used. A third party is necessary for the system and the distributed storage solutions being proposed could make good use of this technology.

Read a technical description here or download here.

With this system, email can be encrypted using an easily obtainable public key (no need to exchange keys beforehand) - the string "your@email.address". You can encrypt email to people that have not yet set up a key, just by knowing their email address. To decrypt, they grab their key from a server. You can request your key from Stanford's key servers. These would one day be replaced by a publicly-trusted resource.

An elliptic curve variant of the Diffie-Hellman encryption model is used. A third party is necessary for the system and the distributed storage solutions being proposed could make good use of this technology.

Read a technical description here or download here.

Here in the US, we have Alabama to New York. We don't ditch the problems of the poor and undesirable south.

The US does not donate. They are sold. You are wrong.

Any western country would be terrorized by the Arabs.

The US government is an order of magnitude less corrupt than any other on the planet. An order of magnitude. Its far from perfect, but this is a crock. Sponsoring terrorism?

we are a gentle giant taking a lot more punches that we EVER had to

And when was the last time you were invaded on actual US territory? By Britain, well over a century ago. You, your parents, your grandparents, and their parents don't know the fucking meaning of war, LOL.

Most people who come to live, come to stay, forever, and try to get their families here as well.

I stayed in America for a month, honestly considering moving there, and the experience turned me off completely. You're like a bunch of fucking monkeys throwing shit at each other, the most uncivilised Western country I've been to.

I'm not going to bother following this thread any more, because it's clear by my needing to provide links for basic statistics that you are completely uneducated on the topics you're trying to discuss.

I will, however, without your permission, forward your posts, as one of the best examples of why the world laughs at America. Thank you for this entertainment factor. Enjoy your week.

Doug Engelbart invented the mouse at SRI, and developed a graphical user interface to NLS, which was his early hypertext system (and no, he didn't get the idea from Ted Nelson). Ivan Sutherland's work on Sketchpad at MIT was extremely influential.

And Smalltalk wasn't the only GUI that PARC developed. There was the Alto, Interlisp-D, Mesa/Cedar, XDE (Xerox Development Environment) , Star/Viewpoint, and others.

oops that is

http://bowser.stanford.edu/workfromhome/workfromho me.html

still nothing on second page -- does anyone else have it?

Whew. I guess I can delay moving to Canada by a few months, at least. But now's not the time to become complacent.

Now is the time to start writing your Senators and Representatives and tell them it's time to codify precisely what the copyright bargain means as copyright is applied to today's media. Make sure the new copyright laws define fair use as well as protect consumers' rights to format-shifting. Alert them to the problem of the stagnant public domain due to the constant extension by Congressional act of copyright terms.

I, for one, intend to draw heavily on some of Lawrence Lessig's ideas. Let's move the written word and recordings to the exponential renewal system -- where if you want to hold it 100 years, you can , but the renewal fee grows exponentially every 5 years. Software distributed without source code should be subject to holding source code in escrow and subject to a short term -- say, 10 years -- at which point the source code, along with the software it produces, should become public domain.

The best defense against more CBDTPA-style legislation is a good offense.

For example, consider time space A, and time-space B. In time-space A, by some magical twist everybody was instilled by a commandment from God (and all believed in said God) that said, Thou shalt not time travel. These people will never time travel, never leave, and therefore this time space will continue to be populated by people. In time-space B, on the other hand, no such constraint by the man above is imposed and henceforth, the people may start time travelling. People will have an opportunity to check out, and may do so, meaning that this time-space is in danger of being devoid of humans at some point.

Hmm, that turned out a little fuzzier than I thought. Here's another angle that demonstrates the point that I'm trying to get at is. Consider our own time-space. Those that have developed a propensity to leave via time-travel will more likely do so. Those that do not will most likely stay. Those that stay will continue to reproduce while as those that leave, well, have taken their DNA with them. Eventually, those that have an extremely strong disposition to stay will be the majority, in fact it may develop into becoming a human instinct, and the time-machine would probably end up being destroyed or abolished by that population. So consider, in the abstract sense, time travel to be the equivalent of death in the sense that both satsify one basic feature "the termination of one's existence." Just as we are biologically wired to be adverse to any form of death, isn't it likely that we'll become adverse to time travel.

- philipkd
How to invest in the stock market

Actually, to really understand what everyone means by "time travel" you have to understand time itself. "time" as humans know it, is simply a uniform and repeated measurement of change.

The change, of course, is the increase of "entropy" or "chaos" in the universe. Time travel requires that you somehow hold the traveling object still (0 degress kelvin) while somehow reversing every interaction in the universe (or maybe a local area) and then starting the mix up again.

It has been shown that there are "impressions" made by small subatomic particles as they travel forward in "Time" (ie they progress toward chaos) that travel backwards in time (towards order).

Of course, this may just be an artifact of using symbolic math as a model.

Then again, there is no real world, there is no spoon. There are only individual human experiences.

integrated SSL and WebDAV support

WebDAV seems great when you try to work with larger groups. While I do OK with FTP and similar stuff, I think it would be a nice feature to be able to mount a remote WebDAV directory, and it seems like this is available in the form of Kiwi Filesystem

Does anybody have any experience with this software? Has it been included in any distros?

While you've provided some interesting practical examples, please explain to me exactly where my misunderstanding about faraday cages, and waveguides lies.

As far as I can tell, in order for a waveguide to be functional, it has to have a diameter that is a multiple of the wavelenth (I say again a processor pin won't cut it as a waveguide for 2.4GHz), and faraday cages are generally effective at blocking wavelengths down to about 10x their aperature size (none of the shields on those 802.11b cards looked like they had gaps >.2 inches).

Could you please try a real explanation and not just anectdotes? If there's somthing I'm missing I really do want to understand it and I'm not just being argumentative.

Under Title 17 (Copyrights), Chapter 1 (Subject Matter and Scope), Section 107 (Limitations on exclusive rights: Fair use), they describe the criteria for determining fair use. Two of them are "the amount and substantiality of the portion used in relation to the copyrighted work as a whole" and "the effect of the use upon the potential market for or value of the copyrighted work."

Under the substantial portion criterion, you could argue that there's a big difference between in how much is copied when you compare the two cases. 3 pages out of a 120 page magazine is only 2.5% of the material. 2 songs out of a 12 track CD is 16%.

Under the potential market criterion, we could point to CD singles. Music companies sell individual tracks from albums, so there's an existing market for the entire entity that you've duplicated.

Still, I'm not a lawyer, and it's impossible to understand how the law really gets applied without looking into all the case law and judicial opinions that've arisen afterward. But I lack the time and interest to make this into an entire research project.

How do you get a job like the guy on the right?

During the employment interview.
- "Hi, we'd like you to be the most annoying feature in the whole Windows world. The guy that everyone would like to shoot, stomp on, mutilate and do other nasty stuff to.
So, what do you say? Are you ready to join the high tech industry? Minimum wage of cause!"
- "Umm, sure. Why not?"

Or perhaps they just get an MCSA to do it? I hear that they are cheap and plentiful.
Atleast thats my boss reason for not using Unix.

Euro-Football: Hattrick
Do something that counts. Team 249.

mirror

Kingdom_intro.mov

I posted a copy here

Kingdom_intro.mov

no ads at all. although on my windows box, I got this really useful error message:

anotherboguserror.jpg

after I wrote my new host table and disabled my DNS caching and putting in a static IP. The machine only has one NIC.

take that back, preview reveals the need to ad ssads.osdn.com for some of those slashdot ads.

Moz still needs to fix up SSL speeds. IE probably cheats and misses doing stuff Moz wastes time playing with (i.e. using web standards).

Dan Boneh gave a talk about speeding up SSL transactions a couple months ago at Berkeley, and he mentioned that IE (and only IE) will terminate its connection if it is given an RSA public key whose base is greater than 2^32. Microsoft may be using an optimization other browser developers chose not to employ.

For those just tuning in, an RSA public key consists of a large composite integer N, and a number e coprime to \phi(N), called the base. You encrypt by raising your message to the power e, and decrypt by finding d, the inverse of e mod \phi(N), and raising your ciphertext to the power d. A very effective way to speed up transactions is to find small d (potentially making e very large), so the server doesn't work so hard exponentiating. This places more work on the client side, but IE refuses to play ball.

There are 3 internet-related moments I will always remember:

1. 1988: my first LAN download (10Mbps ether) instead of a 2400 modem.
2. 1994: Green Card Lottery
3. 1995: I typed in Yahoo's URL but it 301'ed to a new address.

I remember the feeling of epiphany each time -- "this is what the future will look like". The first one I was thrilled. The second one I was enraged. The third one I was mournful.

I work in cryptography.

In cryptographic publications, when you write that the security of a cryptosystem C relies on a certain difficulty D it means that if you have a algorithm that breaks C then you can use it to solve C. If you translate this in the current case, it means that: if RSA relies on factoring than any algorithm that breaks RSA could be used to factor composite numbers. I insist: this reduction has never been proved. I know that a lot of people misunderstand this type of resonning but it is very common in cryptography and in complexity theory.
Again, if you don't believe me, feel free to open the Handbook of Applied Cryptography, or any other serious book on cryptography.

As I said before, it is interesting to see that the Rabin cryptosystem, which is based on "squaring modulo a composite" has been proved to rely on the difficulty of factoring and indeed, an algorithm which breaks Rabin can be used to factor large composites.

I use google often, however I don't rely on keyword search on a scientific method to find the truth :)

Recall that an NP-Complete problem A is called that way because there exists a polynomial time reduction between ALL NP problems and A. In fact if you simply find such a reduction between the factoring problem and any single known NP-Complete problem, you will become a famous man, because such a proof has never been found.

I agree that I went a little fast when I said that factoring was not NP, by abuse of langage. What I meant is that there is no proof that an efficient polynomial time algorithm does not exist, and moreover, finding such an polynonial algorithm would not yield P=NP.

As a side note, some recent work by D. Boneh at Stanford suggests that RSA MAY NOT BE EQUIVALENT TO FACTORING.

Worth a read...

Also available for OS X.

(same URL)

Folding at Home

I run the Folding @ Home client on Linux, and it runs quite well!

I prefer to use my spare cycles for Medical research.

http://folding.stanford.edu

10s of thousands pcs are bruteforcing 1line for months, whats the point of that unless a hacker/cracker/whatever can run his password lists through distributed.net or on a multibilliondollar computer? i know pcs will one day do that in a sec. folding@HOME seems way more usefull IMO

Don't forget another practical distributed project. Stanford's protein folding project: folding@home

actually the full abstract

PDF and ASCII

-Jon

actually the full abstract

PDF and ASCII

-Jon

actually the full abstract

PDF and ASCII

-Jon

That's a previous version (Aug 2001).

This is the March 2002 version

You can get several versions of this from this page, including a pdf version or a plain text version.