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With 160GB HD's available for US$100 the space isn't much of an issue. Also Unison is pretty clever about how it updates the files (rsync) so bandwidth use is reasonable enough even for home use.

FWIW For a server I use the free e-smith Red Hat-based distribution which is trivially managed from a web browser. It has a custom Unison rpm available for really simple synchronization setup.

The second suggestion is my other solution; an external drive. A cheapie USB2/Firewire case can be picked up for US$40 and any IDE drive popped into it. Again instant reasonably high-speed storage. One can even compress the files to it for more savings, use PGPdisk, encrypted NTFS, etc.

However if you're wedded to using CR/Rs or CD/RWs check out the free Burn to the Brim. While not specifically a backup application (no compression) it does pack the files best for CDs, can sort on many criteria including mp3 tags, and can generate ISO images.

Finally if you really do want a full backup strategy then I suggest Dantz's Restrospect package. Under US$100, very easy to use, cross-platform, long track record and does all that you'd want of it. Good product at a good price with good support.

http://www.m-w.com says that the term goes back to 1877, but the first appearance in print of the word capitalism was in the novel The Newcomes, by William Makepeace Thackeray, 1854.

I thought the Communist Manifesto may have preceeded that, so I quickly scanned it, and there are several references to Capital, and Capitalists, but no "Capitalism"

This site backs that up, showing what appears to be entries from the OED (which is a paid site, so no linky) for it and a few more 'isms'

BTW, here is an interesting article on Capitalism. I doubt that it will change the minds of any true believers, but I'd encourage all to read it.

Wait a minute, who am I kidding? This is /.

You can find some plays and poems by Oscar Wilde here
Also, more funny quotes by Wilde here.

IP is definitely considered in these things. While you could probably obtain an illicit copy of most of the text corpora out there just to play around with it, if you ever intend to publish your research, you need to "buy" the corpus, which gives you the right to use it to build translation systems, parsers, question-answerers, or whatever else.

Typically, academic licences are a lot cheaper than commercial ones, although the base price can vary all over the place. The Canadian Hansards (parliamentary proceedings, in French and English---a major corpus used in statistical machine translation work, including Och's) will run you $5k; the ECI Multilingual Corpus 1 is about $35. Usually, corpora are made available through either the Linguistic Data Consortium in Philadelphia or the Evaluations and Language resources Distribution Agency in Paris, although some of the free corpora are distributed elsewhere, typically from the website of the research lab that developed it.

Two major costs go into the creation of corpora: content and markup. The former is often responsible for the majority of the cost, as LDC or ELDA negotiate with the copyright holder for a redistribution licence, although the markup costs can be significant for more a elabourately-annotated corpus, such as a treebank (which contains parse structure and more for all the sentences in it). However, assuming you can get enough free content, or negotiate for a free licence to the content, there's no theoretical reason there couldn't be an open corpus repository....

Initially, the snippets remind me of unedited "l=a=n=g=u=a=g=e" poetry from the late '80s, but I suspect they'll be verging towards formal and stylistic standards like R.Frost or ee cummings, since that's what people got in school (and usually remember). I don't have faith that this will wind up with anything like the avant-garde direction that the newness of the generation technique suggests is possible.

There's a good tradition of last century's poets experimenting with generation techniques. Bryan Gyson and William Burroughs played with cutups, and someone's even automated the process with TextBlender Pro (disclaimer: haven't tried this one). I had a gas with this idea, and once had a month off so sequestered myself with a typewriter (yeah I'm getting old) and source texts by Buckminster Fuller, Nietzche, Attar, and some histories of WW2, in order to generate some centos for fun and non-profit (never published, needless to say).

William Carlos Williams claimed that poetry is a word machine:

• To make two bold statements: There's nothing sentimental about a machine, and: A poem is a small (or large) machine made out of words. When I say there's nothing sentimental about a poem, I mean that there can be no part that is redundant.
• 
  
  Prose may carry a load of ill-defined matter like a ship. But poetry is a machine which drives it, pruned to a perfect economy. As in all machines, its movement is intrinsic, undulant, a physical more than a literary character. From: Williams's introduction to The Wedge, in Selected Essays of William Carlos Williams

sometimes the point is that there is no point.

activities which are ostensibly silly or nonsensical often have a protest value that can't be communicated via traditional means. whether the flash mob people have this in mind is anyone's guess, especially now that they've been (electronically) flash mobbed themselves, but i have to wonder.

i, for one, would hate to be working in one of the retail shops that got flash mobbed, though-- poor saps.

A couple of years ago there was a university project somewhere that implimented an ENIAC on a modern chip. I wonder if the museum has that. Maybe sitting besides the original to demonstrate the rapid pace of development or something.

That was at the University of Pennsylvania. The Moore School of Electrical Engineering. They've got the schematics of the chip up on the wall next to the little Eniac museum. Their project page is here. While it was obviously a challenging and interesting project, the schematics for the chip make it look pretty simple to eyes used to Pentiums, Athlons, etc.

They also had some of the programmers for the ENIAC on hand for a few celebrations of some 50th anniversary. I really regretted not meeting them.

So you know the history of this company? Hell even the article states that before the technology bubble shakeout, this company was around 400 employees strong.

So here's some of what your "slimy opportunits" were busy doing before you heard about them...

From Fortune:

In 1990, when commerce over the Internet was still illegal--the National Science Foundation lifted the ban the following year--Shear founded InterTrust with the extravagant aim of inventing core technologies that would enable "technology-mediated commerce," as he put it.

Or just go to this article directly.

Or perhaps see this reference...

1999

Now considering Intertrust filed their 1000 page vision of how DRM would work back in 1995, after several years of research, how does this make them weasels?

You incorrectly assume that they merely applied for a patent after there was prior art (which is common nowdays, albiet unreasonable), with the single goal being litigation.

They instead appear to have made a real attempt at business, perhaps a little before the market was ready. But in their foresight they did apply for patents.

What typical /. crap.

At the risk of starting (yet another) flamewar over where the modern computer was born...

If you find yourself in Iowa, trek on over to Ames. You can visit the Computer Science department that produced the Atanasoff Berry Computer. Even if you place more stock in other early computers, it's interesting to learn where Mauchly got some of his ideas.

While you're there, I recommend grabbing some pizza at the Great Plains Sauce & Dough Company. Only pizzaria in Iowa recommended by Let's Go!

They actually ripped off Dr. Garfield. The article should have mentioned that.

I've never used rsync so I can't compare and contrast, but I'm rather happy with unison, which is like rsync (I'm told) but different (somehow).

In my configuration; I run the server on my w2k desktop (with the big drive) and use the unison client from my laptop to sync files (bookmarks, the my documents folder, etc) across the two systems. Unison detects changes and propagates them, if there is a conflict it will prompt you or can even launch diff (for ascii files, you're kinda screwed if it's binary though(1). It can be tunneled over ssh or has a built in server that can bind to whatever port you specify.

Maybe someone who knows better can explain exactly what rsync is and how it differs from unison. Regardless, the original question dealt more with networking protocols than syncronization.

1 - I guess; I've never tried to diff a binary file though.

Although I realize that 1500 vs. 1501 words isn't very significant, many of our laws draw a clear line. You may not operate a vehicle if your blood alcohol is greater than or equal to .1 (now .8 in some areas). You may not purchase cigarettes if you're under 18; alcohol if you're under 21. These laws don't say "you can't purchase these goods if you're sort of young."

But Fair Use is definitely vague, and after a little research, I found out that congress did that intentionally in order to examine each case individually, since it varies so often. "Lawmakers wanted fair use to remain flexible, so that it would meet changing needs without new legislation every few years."

True, there's no way to argue that you have a right to distribute 15,000 digital copies of a song for which you don't own the copyright. But it's gone so far that CD-R's labeled for Music actually have a few cents of the price going to the recording industry. I can't see how that's fair, either.

Do you know what I really enjoy about the public domain and efforts such as Project Gutenberg? The texts that have been made available are the ones that are most important to read when debating topics such as this. The U.S. Constitution, and The Autobiography of Thomas Jefferson are two great places to start. Once you have digested the basic ideas, try reading The Psychology of Revolution

If you read all of this, you may find that you haven't the time to watch The Bachelor, American Idol, or Fear Factor. Personally, I think that's a good thing.

The public domain is a threat to media giants. Not only does it remind us of why our forefathers founded a new nation, it also competes directly with them for our eyes and minds.

The best place (that I know of) to search for free books is The Online Books Page at the University of Pennsylvania. Also check out their list of some books (available online) that have been banned somewhere at some time - "Little Red Riding Hood" is one of the curiosities...

The best place (that I know of) to search for free books is The Online Books Page at the University of Pennsylvania. Also check out their list of some books (available online) that have been banned somewhere at some time - "Little Red Riding Hood" is one of the curiosities...

Want to know what's new, etc? The Project Gutenberg website admittedly sucks, and their ASCII adherence admittedly verges on dogma, but there is a good substitute:

The Online Books Page
http://digital.library.upenn.edu/books/

It currently has 20,000 FREE titles listed, from hundreds (at least!) of sources, in all subjects, beautifully categorizes by title, author and subject--and topped off by an up-to-date what's new listing and a fine search engine. Much props to John Mark Ockerbloom and the University of Pennsylvania for supporting the site.

P.S. Won't one of you nice Slashdotters with time or interest in good works consider doing a complete redesign of the PG site, a full-text on-site search engine for the texts, a better categorization system and just a decent, half-respectable look? It don't get no respect lookin' as it does now. Among other things, the lack of internal organization means that individual texts get shafted in Google rankings.

An interesting related link to a UPenn compiled chronology leading to computers (that mentions the Incan Quipus).

currency converter - findsounds.com

how stuff works - infoplease

about.com - librarian's index

rebecca's reference - tom mayo's links
-words:

acronym/abbr -lookup -finder -bm

trans -babelfish -worldlingo -google bm

bartleby

phrontistery

pseudodictionary

jargon file
--music

epitonic - pitchfork

sonomu - electraum

gnod - audioquarium --books:

amazon - abebooks - bookfinder

gutenberg & onlinebooks

loc.gov - lambiek comiclopedia - rebecca's books

Of course the USA would never censor or ban anything.

But yet, if you walk into CompUSA and say "Will you sell me Windows XP(tm) for $299?", the clerk will say "Yes". The signage hanging on the shelves and walls reinforces the idea that selling will occur. More importantly, the reciept says "Sold".

Either the vendors of computer software are committing fraud on a gargantuan scale, or you are being sold software.

(Software publishers wish to change this- why they include those EULA that are legally nonbinding, and why they've pushed US states to create laws making EULAs effective. Virginia, so far, has agreed)

However, the reason normal EULAs are meaningless is because no contract terms were presented before money and product were exchanged. So, they have no similarity with the agreement between SCO and IBM. It was presumably conducted with lawyers, signatures, and even handshakes.

So what? Great writers of any stamp are. Perhaps youve heard of Sturgeon's Law:

"I repeat Sturgeon's Revelation, which was wrung out of me after twenty years of wearying defense of science fiction against attacks of people who used the worst examples of the field for ammunition, and whose conclusion was that ninety percent of sf is crud.

"The Revelation: Ninety percent of everything is crud.

"Corallary 1: The existence of immense quantities of trash in science fiction is admitted and if is regrettable; but it is no more unnatural than the existence of trash anywhere.

"Corallary 2: The best science fiction is as good as the best fiction in any field."

102(a) known or used by others must be enabling.

So if I describe what I have not invented yet it don't invalidate patent.

in re borsch

Get over it.

Well, looks like the market's cornered on the Dunes, Enders, Stephensons, Hyperions and Hitchhikers (must-reads, but also entries into *very* long series that will dominate your reading until you're done with them).

Anything early and non-biographical by Vonnegut is a good choice. He's written about 12 autobiographies at last count, and paying to get the same stories about his life over and over again gets a bit tedious. That said, Slaughterhouse Five and Cat's Cradle just can't be beat.

In our current socio-political situation, there's quite a few books that are more than a little relevant: 1984, Brave New World, Catch-22...

So the books above plus Ringworld give you /. 101 summer reading, and they're all really fast reads.

An idea: why not branch out a bit? it pays to have some knowledge of other cultures and non-tech related things. Get a little more well-rounded!

James Clavell's Asian Saga is amazing (they were derided as mass-market page turners back in the day -- maybe correct, but the man can tell a great story). They work better if you read them in chronological order by when the story is set (ie, start with Shogun, then Tai-Pan) instead of the order they were released in. They're hella page turners, and I'd have to say that 4 of the 6 in the series were amazing... passing on Whirlwind and Gaijin wouldn't hurt you much -- if you can even find Whirlwind -- it's been out of print a long time. Added bonus: you'll be able to speak a bit of pidgin Japanese by the end of the first two.

Considered brushing up on some Shakespeare? Most people loathe it because they're introduced in a rather hostile environment in school. Check out Macbeth or Othello. Awesome insight into human nature.

My fiancee introduced me to Paul Auster's books. Breathtaking writing.

Driving Mr. Albert (Michael Paternini) is a travelogue detailing a cross-country trip with Einstein's brain in his trunk. Amazing stuff that goes in the truth is stranger than fiction file.

My personal favorite book that I've read in a year or so, I gave to my fiancee as a gift -- Balzac and the little Chinese Seamstress. It's set during the chinese cultural revolution and is a modern-day fable. Simple, sweet, and a hell of a punch line at the end ;-) I actually forced myself to read it in small chunks instead of in one sitting because I enjoyed it so much and didn't want it to end.

If none of these float your boat, get your hands on a banned book list.

I'm not saying that everything on it is worth reading - but words put together in such a fashion that they can create public outcry deserve a look, at least while our first amendment is still in effect.

Interesting, I can't rule out that it was only the Baath party that released that information. But, see this link as well: Link. There are a great many more sources if you google.

Even if what you say is correct, and Glaspie said the US 'had no opinion', that is actually not different at all. It was the main point of my post. They didn't outright say "Go ahead and attack," obviously. But saying "We won't interfere" is in no way any better.

Keep in mind also that the US undoubtibly had knowledge that Iraq was amassing troops in the area, and to say such a thing as 'we have no opinion' then they knew that they would protect Kuwaits sovereignty, is essentially a set up.

Woodward's position is the same as that website's.

I am sure the Kurds, sunni, and christian Iraqi's have something to say about this? Leaving Iraq to the mullahs would be worse than never having invaded at all.

What? So, you are basically saying "democracy is only good if it serves the minority that we approve of? That's not democracy. That's not even self-determination. That is the same practice America is notorious for: installing subservient puppet regimes. One would think that if you really wanted to change the way the Arab world feels about you, you would change the way you treat the Arab world.

Yeah, good source

It is very reliable. It is part of a much longer conversation, edited down to the parts where the two of them, Hussein and Glaspie, talked about the Kuwaiti 'problem.'

Here is the full link: Click me!

This conversation most certainly did happen. Use google, and you can pull up 108,000 sources confirming it, the reporters' inquiries, the question dodging, etcetera.

That's what many publishers would like. It makes things like this impossible. You know, where they university purchases things share with their students and the public free of charge so that we can all appreciate and share our common culture? Some universites even used to take advantage of their royalty exemptions to broadcast that collection to the public - wow! Nah, pay per play is so much better, right? Anything else is like high-seas theft and murder.

Don't forget that kiddies, sharing is bad. Do what the good folks at McDisneySoft want and keep providing them content you never get paid for while paying for content you never asked for.

Radio that takes advantage of government and educational exemptions for public performance royalty payments sounds like a more realistic collective work. You know, the university buys music bassed on advice from music experts and student volunteers who then share that music? Wow, what a concept - music education. Oh yeah, I forgot, most college radio stations have gone to "realistic" formats to get their DJ's ready for the real world of comercial radio playlists. There's no chance of extending the free radio concept to online music services is there? The dean it telling everyone to pay per play. What an industry whore.

80,873 students x $2 fee/student = $161,746

That's enough to buy 8,138 CD a year. Compare this to the current holdings and you see a total industry rape about to happen. Buy the music, make it available and tell Universal, Sony, Time/Warner and all that to screw off.

There are no toy languages, only toy programmers ;)

[...] there are probably many schools in the US doing this [...]

There are also some schools out there that will let you propose a course, provided that:
- the subject is educational
- you find more than the minimum required number of students
- you find someone to teach the class

[...] I took an Information Warfare class [...]

Funny you mention that, so did I -- at the aforementioned school. Officially it was called "Computer Ethics", but we've learned a lot about breaking into computers as well. There was even this one guy there, whose name eludes me for security purposes, who looked to be in his 30s at the time and who claimed to have worked for the gov't and was getting his masters at the time, IIRC. At the end of the semester the class got divvied up into groups for a project/presentation, so I made sure I was in the same group as he was. I've learned of a few neat tricks that the gov't was able to do with their technology, though no specifics (for obvious, classified reasons), like being able to pick up EM radiation from a monitor cable and reconstruct the video -- from a few hundred feet away.

But getting back on-topic... if there's a will, there's a way. If students are interested in learning something the school doesn't offer, they should try rallying up support from both their peers as well as the professors to have courses offered.

Calling this particular piece, speculative as it may be, the sign of a new "low" for Scientific American - unless you personally have also published extensively in the field - may be premature.

-renard

The definition is not perfect; there are some amusing anomolous cases, e.g. where sub-group A breeds with B which breeds with C wich breeds with D, but A and D don't ever seem to interbreed, even given the chance.

Similar problems of classification come up in linguistics, e.g. the rhenish fan (an area of Germany/France/Belgium/Holland where the languages/dialects shade into one another). There's an inside joke that "a language is a dialect with an army" which contrasts popular notions of what a language is with the technical definition of a language as a set of mutually intelligeble dialects. By the technical standard, Swedish and Norwegian are one language... However, the technical definition breaks in the face of A nice survey of this language stuff is here

And for those all-nighter programming sessions, Khat instead of Jolt Cola.

The problem with these distributed files systems seems to be that they're either pretty old and lacking features like disconnected operation (AFS) or seem to be unstable or, even worse, unmaintained (Intermezzo, Coda).
For many simple purposes backups can be done quite nicely using rsync or something like bacular. For laptop/notebook support unison is definitely worth a look. It syncs directories like rsync does, but in both directions. Works nicely for me.

I usually use rsync for one way backups, and unison where I need 2 way synchronization.
Rsync is nice because you can update lots of files very quickly, as it only moves binary diff's between files. Also, if it is a costly network link, you have the option to specify max transfer rates, so you don't kill your pipe when it runs from your cron job.
Unison is nice because it is pretty smart about determining which files should be moved, and can correctly handle new and deleted files on either end of the link. Plus it supports doing all of it's comm via ssh, so it's secure.

rsync

unison

The downside to both of these being that neither of them are instantaneous. However, I've had much success running both of these as often as every 5 minutes. Just make sure that you launch them from a script that is smart enough to check for already running instances before it starts trying to move data.

Whoa, you definitely need Unison.

Unison will synchronize any two file trees in The Right Way (TM).

Get the gtk version for interactive conflict resolution.

ask Macromedia Dreamweaver MX to test a stored procedure with a hundred parameters, and it'll freeze for 30-90 seconds on all of the P4's I've tried it on, pegging the CPU at 100%.

Have you tried increasing the nice value? Wait a minute...were you playing around with real time schedule policies? No wonder your system locked up!

Seriously, get an OS with a real scheduler, and you won't need SMP. At least not because of stupid problems like this.

Okay idea; bad example. It is estimated by various* sources* that the annual death toll due to smoking in the United States is on the order of half a million per year.

The CDC estimates that of the six hundred thousand cancer deaths per year in the United States, one third are the direct result of cigarette smoking, costing $60 billion per year in direct health costs and loss of productivity.

How about a "war on smoking"? Tobacco use costs the United States almost as much each year as invading Iraq did--if we only count the costs of cancer care. You want to protect American lives? How about a Tomahawk or two for Philip Morris?

*PDF links.

Physics people are far ahead of other fields in this - because there is not money to be made in the field. Chemistry journals and searchable databases are in clutches of major publishers - which solicit the free work of their referees but charge top dollars.

It wasn't supposed to end up this way.

I think KeyKos used to claim that they had the longest running process. Of course, this isn't fair, because their processes can outlive power and equipment failures. Still, interesting and relevant.

Regarless about bandwidth, the link is gone.
Searching google turned up a page with a link to the book.

Jack

From JMS's homepage :

Various ways I can be reached include:

* E-mail: jms@cis.upenn.edu
* Telephone: 215.898.9509
* FAX: 215.898.0587
* Foot: 604 Levine, south side of Walnut between 33rd and 34th, Philadelphia, PA (Office Hours T/Th 10:30-11:00)
* Post: CIS Dept., 200 South 33rd St., Phila., PA 19104-6389

I absolutely can't stand lying weasels who promote something then go back on their word. Fortunately, we know who is responsible. Send those flames to Mark West and Jonathan Smith.

Give them a taste of their own medicine!

I absolutely can't stand lying weasels who promote something then go back on their word. Fortunately, we know who is responsible. Send those flames to Mark West and Jonathan Smith.

Give them a taste of their own medicine!

I wrote a little HOWTO if you want more info.

...is that critters have more than one gene, and they are often randomly mixed/expressed at mating. This means that selecting for one good feature may mean selecting against several other good features. Your only hope is to start with samples from lots of the animal, so expect Axel Heiburg Island to become a very busy place.

There is also some design input from the support machinery in and surrounding the nucleus, which means that your host animal is going to have an impact too. Your cloned critter won't be a pureblood in the strictest sense of the word. I'd be working hard to preserve whatever DNA I was able to recover, in the hope of having better techniques to apply later. But I guess the recovery they're doing is a lot better than nothing.

I have done this, even across windows machines. Of course, I'm not a typical windows user in that I tend to live in Cygwin when I use windows. Anyways, I have in my .bashrc
if [ -n "$LINUX" ]; then ...
fi
and
if [ -n "$WINDOWS" ]; then ...
fi

Plus a bunch of stuff that is common between machines. I also have some tests for "what domain am I on?" to set a couple of options. It works reasonably well. I have been toying with the idea of using replicated HOME dirs via Unison (as I mentioned in another thread) but have not bitten the bullet just yet. Part of the issue is whether or not I really want my entire home directory to be replicated, or just parts... I guess I haven't figured out my requirements yet so I haven't constructed a solution just yet.

An alternative to a true distributed filesystem is Unison , a user-space daemon that keeps filesystems automagically synced using rsync. I have not used it myself, but I saw reference to it nested somewhere in here and thought it looked interesting.

How do you know what the US needs to spend on defense? Do you work for the NSC or Pentagon? No? I thought not. Your ignorance is appalling and you best serve society by remaining quiet than by spouting your ill-informed rhetoric.

Not so ignorant. What freedoms are the military protecting right now if you believe everyone who has something negative to say should just be quiet? Some people just amaze me.

Huge militaries are relative to huge security needs. Norway, Canada and Belgium have relatively little threatening them and very little international interests. The US has huge interests and is the single most threatened nation in the world (in terms of power). Apples and Oranges.

My point wasn't to stop all military and defense actions. Just to budget it better. I hardly think the $396,100,000,000.00 spent on military (52% of the total budget) is really as nessesary as the government would like you to believe.

Nothing is ever perfect, but what you are proposing is just as short sighted as the parent post. I don't agree with everything the Bush administration is doing, but I at least realize they have access to all the information and I do not.

You have almost all of the information at your finger tips. And blindly following the administration because "they have access to all the information and I do not" is such a sad thing to hear in this day and age I don't really want to respond to it.

Think about this: for this war, Bush and Blair privately met with all the other leaders of major UN countries. They provided reasoning and proof for it, yet only Australia (whose Free-Trade agreement has since then been accelerated) decided to support the movement. Either the US actually doesn't have any proof whatsoever, or, ummm... well I guess that was actually it. Only after Bush declared war did some smaller countries hop aboard (all without actually dedicating troops or resources to the mission, hmmm...).

Here is the manual's information on conflicts and conflict resolution. If I'm reading it correctly, it prompts you to decide what to do. Although it doesn't seem to mention what I consider to be the idea solution -- merging the files so you don't loose anything from either machine.

Not just Karma whoring, I'm downloading now. (:-{)}

Thanks for the heads-up PD.

Cheers,

Bill