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Says somebody typing on a computer, that is direct product of competition between businesses for customer money.

Basic research is done by private sector absent government crowding out all sorts of credit, money, people and other resources, which governments always crowd out of the private sector into the public sector in search for a better bomb to kill you.

Invention of transistor was done privately and without it we still would be stuck with vacuum tubes, which were also invented privately.

The history of telegraph is a history of private inventors, same as the history of telephone. Radio.

History of television is fascinating in yet another aspect, since the inventor of Kinescope had to escape h his new Soviet government while doing it.

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You are saying: not ALL invention comes from private sector. Well, of-course the governments steals so much money, that they can throw nearly unlimited funds at a problem. That's a huge waste of resources. Just like the Langley Aerodrome compared to the Wright brothers airplane. Langley had 50,000 USD thrown at him at the beginning of 20th century. Wright brothers had their own bicycle shop and under 1000 bucks of money over they years. Results are in the studio.

Yes, we can have money stolen from us by government and piles of it can be thrown at problems, like money thrown at Iraq, Afghanistan, Vietnam, Korea, War on Drugs, War on Poverty, etc.etc. It doesn't matter to the government how the money is spent, the only solution to all problem is: steal more money and spend it.

Would the Internet be here without government? OF-COURSE! Of-course it would be, just like all other forms of communications that we invent. Would it be using a protocol similar to what we are using today? Most likely, it's not like the idea of packet switching is so far fetched from the ideas that were already implemented in telephone circuit switching exchanges, the difference being that the telephone circuit had to be on and with data the speed removes the need for completely synchronous data exchange.

Besides, as I said, the people who were crowded out by the government from the private sector into the public sector, most of those people were already working on similar or exactly the same projects. Stealing them for the purposes of running wars more efficiently by governments is not what I would call a 'moral' enterprise. AFAIC the public sector is definitely immoral, it's based on theft and coercion and murder.

The private sector absent the government is based on voluntary exchange and pursuit of profits, which is the most moral way that we have invented as a species to run an economy, specifically because it's based on voluntary exchange among willing participants.

I think current OpenOffice functionality is on par with Microsoft Office 97.

Someone should really do a hand in hand comparison (maybe Microsoft should pay someone to compare OO.o 3 with MS Office 97?)

Not trying to troll here, A good review of changes between Word 2000 and 2003 can be seen here. It may be a good starting point to see if OO 3.0 has all the "new features" of Office2003, or maybe Office 2000[pdfwarning]

However, I find it difficult that any of the parties (the Open Source community or Microsoft) could do an objective comparison between the two.

/etc (Extended Tool Chest) is the directory that holds the configuration files for the system. The sub-directory init.d is where the initialization and termination scripts and binaries are linked to. The Apache deamon is linked to from this subdirectory, as is Samba, SSH server and any other process that starts automagically.

I know that when I need to start, stop or restart a service, I will find it in /etc/init.d/

I have been using linux for about a year now, and Ubuntu for about 6 months. This makes sense to me, maybe it's because I took the time to familiarize myself with the basics of the new operating system I was diving into (e.g. The Linux Filesystem Hierarchy Standard[wikipedia] or the init.d man page).

It's amazing how far a little research can go. I've spent a lot of time with google, wikipedia and books, but I can say now that I'm getting there.

I know where comments like this come from, I was there a few months ago. I decided to take the plunge, but did so with some information to back me up and an attitude that I would find the answers. Before you complain that something is intuitive, take a look at the logic behind it, maybe it's your intuition that needs modification.

If word 2003 docs opened perfectly in word 2000, how would microsoft ever get you to upgrade?

Parent sed: "Don't get me wrong. In principle I do believe in freedom of speech and freedom to surf."

No you don't not with an attitude like that you believe some people should be allowed to see some images and words. Now that may be all well and good but don't LIE and proclaim your great love of freedom like some modern day Benjamin Franklin when in fact you value safety over freedom. Lack of freedom and the chilling of free speech ALSO tears peoples lives apart If you don't believe me just read a biography of the beat writers like William Burroughs who were persecuted for their sexually explicit writings in the 50s. Ditto for James Joyce in the 20s.

http://pers-www.wlv.ac.uk/~bu1895/EN3016_text.htm

Real life often offers hard choices with no clear cut guidelines to make those choices. In those cases I believe we are best served by erring on the side of freedom even at the risk that some people may be hurt on occasion. Are we really so cowardly that we have gone from being a nation willing to die for freedom to one willing to destroy freedom because of the mere hypothetical risk something bad may happen? And yes this article may be abut Germany but I suspect a majority of the responders are Americans so this action is relevant to us to as these sorts of actions set bad precedents.

Also keep in mind eliminating TOR is NOT going to end child pornography or terrorism. If TOR is gone these people will just switch to steganography, or coded phone calls, or secret drop spots. The bottom line is that if people want to do bad things they will most likely do them and the best we can do is clean up the mess afterwards. The alternative is quite literally 1984.

Just kidding :P

There's a reason it's called the Hindu-Arabic number system.....
http://scitsc.wlv.ac.uk/university/scit/modules/mm 2217/han.htm

This site says it was adapted into a short animated film in 1982, so you're probably right.

Firefox employs the same Gecko rendering engine, which supports the BLINK tag.

It was indeed in England, what was less well known until secret Home Office papers were released in 1999, was that shortly after that trial the police senior police officer responsible for bringing the case was found guilty of corruption and jailed as well.

I would like to hear more about this. Is there an English version of that article anywhere?

I hope Europe and America can do the same a few more years down the line to leap forward on the backs of Indian technology developed...

Err.. I think we did that already..

The number system we use today originated 4000 years ago... in India. http://www.scit.wlv.ac.uk/university/scit/modules/ mm2217/han.htm

And while we're at it, important developments in mathematics were made 1000 years ago in Baghdad, in what was then Babylon. http://www-gap.dcs.st-and.ac.uk/~history/HistTopic s/Arabic_mathematics.html. Mind you, all the looting of museums and important sites which has happened since Iraq was invaded may mean a lot evidence for that has been lost.

Expect that mpeg layer 3 audio uses a bit reservoir, even in constant bitrate encoding (the bits allocated to any one frame of 1152 samples changes).

The IMDCT used by layer 3 also means that the samples out depend on each frame and the previous frame, even if the bit reservoir feature is not in use.

The number system is not Arabic. It is Hindu and was transmitted to the west by the Arabs. Please see Hindu-Arabic Numerals

As some of you may remember, this was also remade into an episode of the (usually) fantastic Ray Bradbury Theater.

I'm really wondering how long it'll be before it gets released on DVD. [/hopeful]

Here!!

It seems it was not The Twilight Zone or The Outer Limits after all.. It was on Ray Bradbury Theater .

Here!!

It seems it was not The Twilight Zone or The Outer Limits after all.. It was on Ray Bradbury Theater .

I believe no discussion of deadly software disasters is complete without mentioning the London Ambulance Service Disaster of '92. Basically, bad project management and other gaffes lead to the Londom Ambulance Service using a computerised dispatch system which was not up to the job. It promptly crashed, and quite a few people died as a result.

The concept of 0 existed Sumeria but the Babylonians introduced a symbol for zero.

A lot of the Indian astronomy and number theory was inherited from the Greeks (via Alexander's invasion) which in turn came from the Babylonians. Many of the names are similar between both Greek and Indian mathematics.

As for where the character 0 meaning zero. This may have come from the Sumerians but others, as you point out, attribute the Indians with this.

Hi all,

Here is a mirror of the Free Software Song:

OGG

No space for the MP3!!

Jono

aah, it's FUD alright, to deny that. They just changed the terminology (VM+core classes == CLR, IL == bytecode, JIT == JIT, ...). The only difference being not to have to use one syntax (java C#, VB, ...) BUT it's not the platform they recreate, just a similar but different syntax: their VM uses statically typed languages their .NET implementation of "smalltalk", e.g., is NOT close to the real thing. BTW every OO language uses a VM to execute. Think hard before denying that one ;-)

Very true

All traffic coming in one side of a bridge will be sent out the other side.

This is only true for a simple bridge. I don't think any vendors currently provide simple bridges, since it is quite easy to incorporate the logic necessary to not forward every packet. From a bridge FAQ I found:

# Learning Bridges The simple bridges described above re-transmit every packet whether this is necessary or not. A learning bridge examines the source field of every packet it sees on each port and builds up a picture of which addresses are connected to which ports. This means that it will NOT re-transmit a packet if it knows that the destination address is connected to the same port as the bridge saw the packet on.

AFAIK, my cable modem (and all DOCSIS compliant cable modems) act in this manner.

But, all that applies to normal bridges. Your cable modem may actually be a router,

It is not a router, it does not use layer 3 (ip) addressing, it uses layer 2 (MAC) addressing. From the DOCSIS specification for external modems (section 2.1):
"The cable modem MUST be capable of filtering all broadcast traffic from the local LAN, with the exception of DHCP"
And from section 3.1.1.2.1:
"The cable modem MUST perform MAC bridging in accordance with ISO/IEC 10038 (ANSI/IEEE Std 802.1D)"

From the 802.1d specification section 7.1::
"The principal elements of bridge operation are:
a) Relay and filtering of frames (emphasis mine)

It would seem all DOCSIS 1.1 compliant cable modems are in fact learning bridges, and do not forward LAN traffic to the RF side of the modem. DSL "routers" often can act as a bridge or a router (or a combination 'brouter'), but I have never seen a cable modem that had those capabilites, all the equipment I encountered in @Home tech support was layer 2 bridging equipment. Of course, I certainly have not seen all possible equipment so YMMV.

It would be ironic, except for the fact that the blink tag was never in the HTML recommendation to begin with.

I find this bit interesting: "Only NN honours this tag. Users of other browsers can cause severe irritation to Netscape users by enclosing the whole page in <blink> .. </blink> tags."

Most are probably unaware that there is a semi-official division of the English speaking print publishing world into two camps, one based in London and the other in New York, a division which has a long and complex history that might be of interest to a few of /.'s self-styled copyright scholars, but which i won't attempt to go into here.

Felix Dennis is one of London's most interesting publishers having gained considerable notoriety through the Oz obsenity trial of 1971 long before starting MacUser.

Now according to a link from this article Dennis is giving up on an eight year US involvement that started as Blender, "one of the first interactive magazines delivered on CD-ROM" and morphed into Dennis Interactive.

As one of the original editors for Australian Macworld I've followed the comings and goings of Mac mags with some interest.

Despite the Mac having had much greater success in market penetration terms in Australia than the UK, our three early titles gradually merged into one.

The MacUser licence here was acquired by the publishers of the locally created MacNews which operated the merged mag as MacUser until that too was merger with the local Macworld, so now the company that started MacNews publishes only Australian Macworld and our newstands carry a few UK and US Mac titles.

I hope that Ian Betteridge's prediction that the three UK Mac titles can survive proves to be accurate.

IIRC, you cannot express irrational numbers using the Roman counting system. The Romans understood division & multiplication; but zero, place notation, and the decimal point were unknown in Europe, the Middle East, and Africa until Arabic astrologers adopted and formalized the older Hindu counting system sometime around 662 CE. The Hindus were using a base-10 place notation system as early as 3000 BCE. There's a particuarly interesting article about the history of counting systems here

Wolverhampton University (home of the classic WITCH 1948 historic computer) has had a similar microwave Internet connection since the early 1980's.

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Okay, the reason I put the word "allegedly" into my story quote is because I expected there to be some considerable disagreement about which was the "first" computer. Particularly since Germany, France, the UK and the USA all claim this honour (plus a few others I expect).

The problem is: what is a computer? Do you mean a calculator? So does an abacus count? Something that runs a program? So does a weaving loom count? Something electronic that runs a program? So does a washing machine count? Something digital? Something that has a modifyable program? Something that stores its program in the same way as its data?

As you can see, there are many definitions of "computer". Stop bickering!

And to add to that, early computers were often an international effort. Certianly Bletchley Park relied heavily on US involvement towards the end of the war.

That doesn't detract from the fact that Bletchley Park was a major contributor to both cryptography and modern computing.

Anyway, here's a few more British historical computing links for those who like nostaligia. If anyone would like to add some links to sites about other historical computers- of any nation- I'd be most interested.

Colossus I
The LEO - Lyons Electric Office (my dad worked on this)
The WITCH (my dad worked on this, too!)
The Baby

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