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I'm sorry you're so stubborn, ignorant, and nationalistic to believe that a mere 1% of the ash generated from burning coal couldn't possibly escape into the atmosphere in the Fatherland. Unless you've got alien-level technology, your German scrubbers are bound by the same physics as those in the US - ~99% efficient is the maximum you can get.

http://www.epa.gov/radiation/t... - 99% efficient

http://www.britannica.com/EBch... - 90% - 99% efficient

http://www.gdnash.com/rocktron... = 99% efficient

Table 3 in this document directly compares particulate matter emission regulations in the US and Germany - as you can see, the average PM emissions for German plants is 50 mg/Nm^3 as opposed to 18.3 mg/Nm^3 for all new large plants in the US as mentioned in this document.

The system we used here was actually smart enough to not flag common idioms like this, and also still flag cases where only the variable names and formatting had been changed. Also, our assignments were usually complex enough that there would be enough variation, anyways. Most things about our automated hand-in system sucked, but the plagiarism detector wasn't one of them. If you're curious: https://www.ipd.uni-karlsruhe.de/jplag/

jplag is software that does what you describe (not sure about the technology behind it, though). It compares all student submissions and detects similarities. The site seems to be down currently, but this page gives an overview of what it does.

...here, gives (under metamaterials) a good example of what negative refraction is here

...here, gives (under metamaterials) a good example of what negative refraction is here

What level of class was this? Based on what I've heard from my colleagues, freshman programming courses at our university have had the most (detected) dishonest activities, with 12 % of students being caught cheating at most (Basics of Programming ten years ago, using Scheme). On third-year or later courses, 3 % (as in the concurrent programming course I TAed) is considered quite a lot, and to find those I had to look for equivalent structures and small editing mishaps (the Chinese student submitting code with Danish comments ended up exposing five of his compatriots who edited the same code found on the web when I used an in-house JPlag derivative to check for students copying each other's code).

2.1 What is ssh?

To quote the README file:

Ssh (Secure Shell) is a program to log into another computer over a network, to execute commands in a remote machine, and to move files from one machine to another. It provides strong authentication and secure communications over unsecure channels. It is intended as a replacement for rlogin, rsh, and rcp.

Additionally, ssh provides secure X connections and secure forwarding of arbitrary TCP connections.

2.3 What kinds of attacks does ssh protect against?

Ssh protects against:

• IP spoofing, where a remote host sends out packets which pretend to come from another, trusted host. Ssh even protects against a spoofer on the local network, who can pretend he is your router to the outside.
• IP source routing, where a host can pretend that an IP packet comes from another, trusted host.
• DNS spoofing, where an attacker forges name server records
• Interception of cleartext passwords and other data by intermediate hosts.
• Manipulation of data by people in control of intermediate hosts
• Attacks based on listening to X authentication data and spoofed connection to the X11 server.

In other words, ssh never trusts the net; somebody hostile who has taken over the network can only force ssh to disconnect, but cannot decrypted or play back the traffic, or hijack the connection.

The above only holds if you actually use encryption. Ssh does have an option to use encryption of type "none" this is only for debugging purposes, and should not be used.

2.4 What kind of attacks does ssh not protect against?

Ssh will not help you with anything that compromises your host's security in some other way. Once an attacker has gained root access to a machine, he can then subvert ssh, too.

If somebody malevolent has access to your home directory, then security is nonexistent. This is very much the case if your home directory is exported via NFS.

2.5 How does it work?

For more extensive information, please refer to the README and RFC files in the ssh directory. The proposed RFC is also available as an Internet Draft from ftp://ftp.ietf.org/internet-drafts/draft-ietf-tls- ssh-00.txt .

All communications are encrypted using IDEA or one of several other ciphers (three-key triple-DES, DES, RC4-128, TSS, Blowfish). Encryption keys are exchanged using RSA, and data used in the key exchange is destroyed every hour (keys are not saved anywhere). Every host has an RSA key which is used to authenticate the host when RSA host authentication is used. Encryption is used to protect against IP-spoofing; public key authentication is used to protect against DNS and routing spoofing.

RSA keys are also used to authenticate hosts.

Start wetting:

http://www.bootdisk.info/articles.php?action=cat&i d=7
http://www.gentoo.org/doc/en/liveusb.xml
http://frontier05.blogspot.com/2006/01/installing- ubuntu-to-external-usb.html
http://www.oreillynet.com/digitalmedia/blog/2004/1 0/utility_to_make_usb_flash_driv.html
http://rz-obrian.rz.uni-karlsruhe.de/knoppix-usb/


And, you can even buy a pre-loaded, live-USB stick:

http://damnsmalllinux.org/usb.html

These are all bootable OSs on removable drives... or did you mean bootable *Microsoft* OSs on removable drives? ... then, you're probably SOL.

I haven't read it yet, but this project to make wikipedia more machine-readable might help. (On the other hand, if you're talking about repuation systems, complex article ranking systems, etc., then I'm skeptical. Investing too much structure in automated, numeralized evaluation tends to undercut the fluid nature of real human social interaction and detailed language-based evaluation.)

The Wikimania paper about semantic links is here.

The machine has to support booting from an external drive in BIOS, which should be most new computers, I think. There are versions of Knoppix that run off a thumbdrive.

Something like this?

I use CardExport2 from http://www.softick.com/. It cost roughly $15, and allows me to use my Palm Zire 71 as a portable USB drive, recognized as a generic, so no special drivers are required on Linux, Solaris9, *BSD, MacOS, or WinME>later. Oh yeah, there's more. I also downloaded the RealOne player for PalmOS, and with a /AUDIO directory (FAT16) on my removeable SD card I can upload music and playlists without any of the DRM crap that bugs a lot of folks. Palm has their own upload system which won't let you download the music again, but with CardExport2 I can. I was able to find 512MB SD(I) cards on pricewatch for about $24 at one point, so I bought a pile of 'em. Now, my Palm is more of a necessity for me than ever. It's even possible to boot my laptop with knoppix fom my Palm using CardExport2 and this info: http://rz-obrian.rz.uni-karlsruhe.de/knoppix-usb/ There you have it. -Dustin Thanks Matthias!

2) Adding transparency to X11 is not a big deal to a company like nVidia - one OSS hacker did it in a weekend. Business people get all worked up over the smallest things and think they're going to dominate a market because of some little improvement.

3) OSS (or rather Free Software since we're talking GPL) is hardly a "club for a couple kids" unless you count IBM and Oracle as little kids. How is anyone supposed to "look in and see things that would be useful to them" unless they have access to source code? That's exactly what the GPL is designed to promote.

4) Agreed, use whatever license you like for your own code.

The crux of this is your points 2 & 3. Allowing someone to make a proprietary version (to maintain an advantage) prevents people from looking inside to see how that new version works. Funny that a company doesn't want to give people the same opportunity they had themselves. If you want a proprietary product, follow your #4 and don't use GPLed code and deal with the added costs.

Companies have to realize what business they are in. If they make hardware they shouldn't be so concerned about their software copyrights.

First of all, Java!=JVM. Please make this distinction. I won't discuss the pros and cons of Java as a language here, just the JVM. You can use gcj to GNU-compile Java and you'll get very close to the performance of GNU-compiled C++ which is what one would expect. Note that I said GNU-compiled because there still commercial compilers which produce better code, in terms of execution speed. [Of course, I hope GCC will overtake them, but that's an unrelated issue :)]

Mod me troll flamebait, whatever - but the JVM is slow, not only on start up.

The empirical argument
IMHO, todays average real world JVM app *is* slower than the average real world compiled app. And, no, I do not talk about the startup time only. GUI code is slow. Network/File I/O is slow. Show me a JVM app (app, not test case!) with a native compiled equivalent which is slower. You won't find any.

MAYBE there is the *theoretical possibility* of JIT being faster than compiled/hand optimized assembly code. But this is purely theoretical. I have yet to see real world apps and not some made-up testcases with matching peephole optimizations for a particular architecture where this is the case. There are still uneccessary virtual method calls, wasted stack space etc. in JIT code.

The theoretical argument, mixed with personal opinion :)
Doing JIT with JVM code involves steps very similar to decompilation [JVM->IntermediateCode->Target] because in JVM code, no information about higher-level structure is preserved. This reconstruction is computationally very expensive (google: decompilation problems) so only approximative algorithms are used, leading to non-optimal code. There are reasons why e.g. the ANDF format preserves much more information than JVM code.

A possible solution
I think LLVM is a nice project that could bring all the VM hype of Java to C/C++/CommonLisp/Perl/Python/BiglooScheme etc. And Java!
Sure LLVM still lacks many things, the VM code isn't much more descriptive than JVM code etc. But it is independent, and it is growing. An LLVM applet plugin for Mozilla would be nice :)

This is also a partly political thing. Why do FLOSS Java developers accept the fact that Java and JVM are so tightly coupled? Maybe this helps Sun's goals (to spread the platform Java) but technically, it is clearly an inferiour solution.

I think what we're really looking for is simple meta programming (introspection and transparency). F.e. have a look at the Java-project Compost, which is supported by Prof. Goos (famous compiler engineer).

I don't know, wether C# has introspection (I think so). Unfortunately there is no easy way to introduce metaprogramming to C++ with its preprocessor and the hardcoded virtual method tables.

The KDE default themes are a bit bland

KDE Mods

With version 2.0, UML is going to make an enormous step towards visual application design. Several ambiguities are resolved. Class diagrams and OCL are now built on precise foundations (set theory and predicate logics) [1] -- instead of having most of the semantics described in plain English; the fundations of other diagram types were also formalized.

The advantages of more precise models are that they can better form the basis for code generation [2] or even direct interpretation [3,4]. In contrast to earlier approaches to code generation, a common standard now allows interchange between different tools (at least to some extent).

Here, one of the main advantages is probably not "point and click", but a higher level of abstraction: current programming languages simply do not support high level diagram elements--such as bidirectional associations--as first class members. Things that can be expressed by simple means in class diagrams and OCL expressions become multi-line code in a regular programming languages[5]. Of course, building on UML directly also may resolve maintenance problems such as inconsistencies between diagrams and the actual code.

1. http://www.amazon.de/exec/obidos/ASIN/3897228424
2. http://www.omg.org/mda/
3. http://www.riehle.org/computer-science/research/20 01/oopsla-2001.html
4. http://www-ai.cs.uni-dortmund.de/auto?self=$dq74rv vv
5. http://i11www.ilkd.uni-karlsruhe.de/~baar/oclworks hopUml03/papers/10_combined_model_processing.pdf

What it said. You're not feigning ignorance are you? Boot KNOPPIX from an USB Memory Stick.

You can package the SUN JDKs yourself very easily with j2se-package. Works very well for me. It has not been updated yet for 1.5, however.

There is a knoppix remastering called DamnSmallLinux - Designed to run on small CDs, but can be modified to boot from a USB key!
The distro runs FluxBox as the WM, it has a browser, email client, word processor, file mananger, instant messenger, picture viewer, image editing, spreadsheet and a lot more :) Oh, yeah, and it's 50 MB! :) How's that for light and portable?

1. They're expensive - 32MB = 40 (~$60) (not sure where you get $40 for 256MB the cheapest I can find is around $150).

Expensive? $55CDN for 128MB. While it's admittedly a boxing week sale, and costs about $80 CDN (About $50USD) regularly, I'd say that's indicative of where the prices are headed.

2. 99% of Computers have USB ports at the *back*, meaning that you have to crawl around the floor to get the thing in. Floppy drives are (almost) universally at the front.

USB ports are slowly moving to the front. If they are in the back, the system probably doesn't support booting from USB anyway. And just because most speaker jacks are in the back of computers, the rate of headphones and speakers being plugged in hasn't been greatly affected, has it?

3. You need drivers. If you have to boot into DOS they stop working... For a similar reason they're not bootable, so you can't carry around a 'boot pen' to rescue systems the way you can a floppy.

Last I checked, USB drives were bootable, and there are some linux distros that can boot off of them. Why would anyone want to boot into DOS anyway? It's not that great for fixing problems, thanks to the Windows Registry and NTFS.

4. They're not durable - electronics is too easy to break. If you get a floppy wet it'll usually keep working. If you get a pen drive wet then that's $40 (or $150) down the drain.

I concede this point to you...Although, I'm curious as to how you'd be getting your Pen Drives and Floppies out into the rain in the first place. Furthermore, have you ever seen a floppy drive spontaneously destroy all the data on a disk before? Floppies are far from durable as well.

Have a look at this. You can boot Knoppix (or a stripped down version) from a USB memory stick. Cheers.

My two favorites are the high-level representation form available in ANDF (over a decade old), and the typed functional approach of modern meta-complier frameworks like the Mohave system at Caltech.

In any case, I do also hope that Sun and related parties get experts on this precise topic involved so that the huge amount of research available in the field will not go to waste.

Architectural Neutral Distribution Format has been around for years and solves many of the same problems (and more).

I guess it is one more time around the (reinvention) wheel for sun.

But I prefer morphix BMS

You mean like Damn Small Linux ? That's a debian derivatives, but only 50MiB.

http://rz-obrian.rz.uni-karlsruhe.de/knoppix-usb/ will guide you into fitting it on your usb key.

Good luck!

I would agree with you!

Actually rather than fully poligonal icons and windows, I'd like to see texturing and lightning effects going realtime on current X' windows. I mean.., actual lightning effects, not pre-rendeered stuff. And of course, nice 3D transformation effects on the oppening and closing of windows.

Maybe this could be achieved with a couple more people working on the transluxent project, and making it go beyond the extremely outdated alpha effects. For Heavens..it had been cool to show off a desktop running WindowMaker and half a dozen Eterms open, but we need to leave taht behind.

Maybe an extension to X to use OpenGL, and a quick hack on KDE to animate -and post render - windows as they open/close go in/out of focus is feasible without that much manpower. A K3D could then raise. (Not to be mistaken with the existing K3B cd recorder, or K2D drawing tool)

A little googling revealed this site that tells how to Boot KNOPPIX from an USB Memory Stick.

I think the whole point is not about changing the boolean logic, but merely changing the representation of numbers, such as considering a number as octal and thinking of the values 0..7 as different voltages. Building an adder of course requires new logic circuits, but no one will take away boolean logic from you.

Besides, there exist many non-binary logic ideas with AND/OR etc. operations (such as the ternary Lukasiewicz logic), even continuous logic (see, for instance, the lecture slides here -- German unfortunately), but they are /not/ Boolean as they can not satisfy the Boolean axioms.

So, for you writing software, nothing changes really... but internally, numbers would be represented differently. (Of course, when switching a whole CPU to n-valued calculation, you still need a way to do simple Boolean calculations since that is needed for conditionals.)

I can think of two:

knoppix-usb
and runt.

Knoppix-usb is based on (you guessed it!) and runt is based on slackware.

Don't know if this will help, but..

http://rz-obrian.rz.uni-karlsruhe.de/knoppix-usb/

My guess is that sun lacks a mascot who stands for liberty, love and the pursuit of happiness all the while standing up for the little guy.

A mascot should enjoy being a super hero, fragging, and sports and should appeal to the geek, the freak, the n00b and those corporate types.

And no! Duke is not cool. Duke thinks that he is cool. But he only reaches cute. And cute is for sissies.

% file Hydra.dmg
Hydra.dmg: lif file

Disk images under OS X can be formatted with different file-system (UFS, HFS+, HFS and FAT), so I suspect that the disk image represents some kind of virtual disk device. The file-system on this device is then handled by the relevant drivers.

This means you could probably avoid inventing the round thing again and use the same format for disk images under Linux. Simply the disk images could be formated using different file-system formats (ext, reiserfs, whatever).

I'm not too clear on the exact capabilities of XRender, but presumably if it was possible to do shadows with it in its current state, someone would have done it. Real shadows are definately possible in XFree86, and it has it's been done, but I think it'll be a while before such things are working reliably and integrated into XFree86.

Opensource implementations will probably need to play catch-up to maintain interoperability. You can help too!

On this page there is centralised effort in reverse-engineering and documenting the protocol: http://www.stud.uni-karlsruhe.de/~uck4/ICQ/. Get your packet sniffer running!

This SourceForge project is a library that implements the protocol, however, its development has stalled: http://libicq2000.sourceforge.net. It could really use implementation of new features, like support for per-message encoding TLV (Type-Length-Value).

Opensource implementations will probably need to play catch-up to maintain interoperability. You can help too!

On this page there is centralised effort in reverse-engineering and documenting the protocol: http://www.stud.uni-karlsruhe.de/~uck4/ICQ/. Get your packet sniffer running!

This SourceForge project is a library that implements the protocol, however, its development has stalled: http://libicq2000.sourceforge.net. It could really use implementation of new features, like support for per-message encoding TLV (Type-Length-Value).

Oh, and actually that old CompSci course web page is still up, amazing :-) Down at the bottom of the page, you'll find a link to the GJ API Documentation (from back then). The GJ people had the Stack, Vector, Hashtable, and Dictionary classes rewritten with generics.

Oh, and actually that old CompSci course web page is still up, amazing :-) Down at the bottom of the page, you'll find a link to the GJ API Documentation (from back then). The GJ people had the Stack, Vector, Hashtable, and Dictionary classes rewritten with generics.

Just like Enlightnment E17? Or like Transluxent? Or just as DirectFB (yeah, I know it's not OpenGL, but who cares?:).

So who is "innovative" now?

Check out this screenshot for windows casting shadows. Apparently the server doesn't currently do this, but it's a nice effect.

I'd just like to review the 'jokes' so far... call it Flamebait, if you want to, but it just annoys me and I have to say it...

1. RFC 3514
   This one was nice. Obvious, but nice... as usual, the RFC people are doing a good job. Too bad Slashdot ruined it with the first April Fools dupe...
2. Gentoo on RPM
   Well, good idea of the Gentoo people, but waaay too obvious... imho a good AF joke is one you believe to be true for at least a couple of minutes until you've looked at it very closely. But OK, this was only number 2, so it was still nice... now AF story bloat yet.
3. Whitespace programming language
   Hm. As has been pointed out, it's not new... and even more obvious than the previous one (and pretty much boring too). I think then CPAN people know how to really make a good AF joke...
4. Microsoft + Security
   Hey... better at least. Nicely combining a true story with a joke story... though the joke was not very believable either. Also, it's number four already, and we're only half-way through the day...
5. The Register's story
   OK. By itself, not all that bad... but not too overwhelming either. And, on Slashdot, we're now at Number 5 and counting.
6. The dupe.
   OK, increasingly stupid... but then again, maybe the best joke today on Slashdot :)
7. Enlightenment 1.0
   Aawwww, come on. Enough. It hurts. And again, blunt joke. Latency between reading and noting the joke: .01 ms. Including the dupe, we're at seven now... and the day is still not over. I think I'll stop reloading the web site until I'm sure April 1 is over in all time zones...

For some quality 4-1 jokes, see here (German), the above-mentioned cpan.org, or even the Freshmeat one which isn't so bad. This ain't so bad either. Kuro5hin points to this interesting link.

Can you /. editors pleease try to come up with a single good hoax and dump the rest? That would be nice.

Somehow I don't find stories too good if there's a green box saying "Note: this is an April Fools joke" at the top... but I guess that just proves how many slashdotters actually follow the links and read the stories ;-))

But Editors, pleease remember: do not drown us in hundreds of April Fools jokes... last year it was getting kinda annoying. And we already have three stories up now... please make it fewer jokes, but make 'em good.

That being said, I liked what my University's computer center did... we have a wi-fi net running on campus, on today they announced Germany-wide wireless access via the new Satellite network... very detailed prank, they put up the homepage, created the corresponding mail addresses (sukath-admin@...), and wrote a whole bunch of pages on that site I linked to... funny FAQs etc. Good job!

Somehow I don't find stories too good if there's a green box saying "Note: this is an April Fools joke" at the top... but I guess that just proves how many slashdotters actually follow the links and read the stories ;-))

But Editors, pleease remember: do not drown us in hundreds of April Fools jokes... last year it was getting kinda annoying. And we already have three stories up now... please make it fewer jokes, but make 'em good.

That being said, I liked what my University's computer center did... we have a wi-fi net running on campus, on today they announced Germany-wide wireless access via the new Satellite network... very detailed prank, they put up the homepage, created the corresponding mail addresses (sukath-admin@...), and wrote a whole bunch of pages on that site I linked to... funny FAQs etc. Good job!

Somehow I don't find stories too good if there's a green box saying "Note: this is an April Fools joke" at the top... but I guess that just proves how many slashdotters actually follow the links and read the stories ;-))

But Editors, pleease remember: do not drown us in hundreds of April Fools jokes... last year it was getting kinda annoying. And we already have three stories up now... please make it fewer jokes, but make 'em good.

That being said, I liked what my University's computer center did... we have a wi-fi net running on campus, on today they announced Germany-wide wireless access via the new Satellite network... very detailed prank, they put up the homepage, created the corresponding mail addresses (sukath-admin@...), and wrote a whole bunch of pages on that site I linked to... funny FAQs etc. Good job!

Somehow I don't find stories too good if there's a green box saying "Note: this is an April Fools joke" at the top... but I guess that just proves how many slashdotters actually follow the links and read the stories ;-))

But Editors, pleease remember: do not drown us in hundreds of April Fools jokes... last year it was getting kinda annoying. And we already have three stories up now... please make it fewer jokes, but make 'em good.

That being said, I liked what my University's computer center did... we have a wi-fi net running on campus, on today they announced Germany-wide wireless access via the new Satellite network... very detailed prank, they put up the homepage, created the corresponding mail addresses (sukath-admin@...), and wrote a whole bunch of pages on that site I linked to... funny FAQs etc. Good job!

Now there's a language that needs a .net binding. But even so there are others that need integration with .net first. Primary among these (of course) must be INTERCAL especially the revised version with the "COME FROM" statement.

They did. I realize this was a joke, but, coincidentally, I had been looking for it online just last week, and the linked site contains a full scanned-in copy of what might very well be the first edition.

Correct, however, the current version is described here. And add to this the necessarity to have different versions of the same protocol, you really have a huge mess.

Did I ever mention that SlashCode sucks?

Correct, however, the current version is described here. And add to this the necessarity to have different versions of the same protocol, you really have a huge mess.