Slashdot Mirror
Slashback: Civilians, Rubyx, Restrictions
Do they have the original Coneheads novels? seattlenerd writes "Largely lost in the TV coverage and media hype surrounding Friday's opening of Paul Allen's Science Fiction Museum and Hall of Fame in Seattle is the fact that SFM celebrates books as much as TV/film SF, according to at least one review. Lots of first editions and several manuscripts are on display as the font of SF ideas. Also not covered much: There's no fantasy or horror. It's all science fiction, with no apologies. And ain't it cool that someone has acknowledged that there are actual writers behind some of the best science-fiction depictions? And that some of these writers are on SFM's advisory board?"
(Reader Comte offered a sneak peek at the museum last week.)
That's why it's called software. An anonymous reader writes "News.com.au is reporting an Australian company has released "The Worlds First" anti-virus software for mobile phones to fix the recent 'Caribe' virus and attempts to prevent future exploits."Simon Crean of Mobile security company Jamanda wrote to say that his company is also has "just delivered a comprehensive fix to the widely publicised mobile virus Cabir and made this fix available to the public via its website at www.jamanda.com. As a gesture of goodwill and to maintain market confidence, concerned mobile users can currently download and install this fix at no charge."
Speaking of quick fixes, baudilus writes "The good folks at Cerulean Studios have already released a patch for Trillian, addressing the block attempt by Yahoo!. In half a day they've outdone Yahoo!'s latest scheme. How's that for support?"
Click two ISOs together, go /home. awalrond writes "Rubyx is a source-based Linux distro which achieved far too much interest a couple of months back after a mention on Slashdot. The author had to pull the plug due to the massive bandwidth costs of users downloading all the sources. Well now it's back, fully converted to use the new White Water bandwidth-sharing download utility. A line has been drawn in the sand, and this e-gauntlet thrown back at Slashdot.
Rubyx can be downloaded, built and installed with a single command to the small rubyx script (written in the ruby language) The same script handles all subsequent package management, and can even create a bootable ISO image of the distro."
I want to see the floating candy instead. Mike Taht writes "Bruce Damer, curator of the Digibarn, got some stunning pictures and movies of the historic SpaceShipOne launch event on Monday. Check it out!"Also in civilian space news, Walkiry writes "The Russian Space Comittee has rejected Gregory Olsen, who was set to become the third space tourist, due to health reasons. This comes as a bit of a surprise, given that Olsen himself seemed quite condfident about his performance during the physical training and claimed that the hardest part was actually learning Russian. A real shame."
(The linked story is less clear about whether Olsen will eventually be able to make the trip; in it, a spokesman for Space Adventures denies that this rejection precludes Olsen's flight.)
His meaning is clear. Matheus Villela writes "Sergio Amadeu, Brazilian president of ITI, the third authority in Brazilian government being below only of Brazilian president and the minister of civil house and recently sued by Microsoft have released an official note to Brazilian and international press; here's a translation of what he said:' In atention to the demands of national and international press, which seens solidary with Brazilian Govern at this moment with no precedences in the history, when a controller of an important public institucion of this country personally suffers the action from those interested in mantain a hegeomonic model, i come, after hear my federal lawyers and solicitors, say that the judicial provocation moved against my person is, by itself, so insultant and improper, that does not deserve reply.By reading this far, you irrevocably agree to all the text that follows. emtboy9 writes "If you happen to live in the Raleigh-Durham area, Nextel is now officially offering wireless Broadband via its cell towers. With all the discussion about BPL as of late, its refreshing to finally see someone in my local area doing wireless which is a much better mechanism for broadband access.
For other hand, i would like to register that the act of contract software preserving the values freedom and opening is, for the Brazilian Government, a question of indissolvable form to the democratic principle.
And because a long and painful way was covered to arrive at the current period of stage of development of the democracy in this Country, we will not stop in our fight. If democracy is a value replect of ideology, is not never an insignificant value. If democracy is a dream, is a dream of which this Country never will wake up again.
The future is free.'"
Nextel's coverage area looks to be about the same as the trial area they had been running, but if this takes off, it shouldn't be too much longer until they are offering this coast to coast, especially with coming pressure from Cingular Wireless."
However, be choosy about wireless internet service, which can come with some hidden snags: HEXAN writes "With all the recent hubub over wireless access at broadband speeds, I decided to check out Verizon's plan. Although the price is a bit steep, it seemed ok until I got to the "Terms and Conditions."
Here's a sampling of what you cannot do with Verizon's "unlimited" Internet Access: "...cannot be used for" "uploading, downloading or streaming of movies, music or games" [Ugg], "Web camera posts or broadcasts" [No camgirls], "telemetry applications" [No GPS], "substitute or backup for private lines" [No VOIP]. If I cannot use the service to play games, video conference, make calls, download movies or MP3's, what exactly am I paying for? More importantly, how badly will they impinge on my privacy to enforce this agreement? P.s. You cannot reach that special agreement until you go beyond the "front door". The gotcha clauses are not mentioned in the standard, consumer friendly, litigation-approved agreement."
yahoo shouldnt be _that_ worried since it seems that nobody appears to use the yahoo messenger in the first place (anymore).
The Sci-Fi "Hall of Fame" part of the museum is comprised completely of authors. Later, it will be expanded to include those involved with film and television. This is because Paul Allen took over the existing Sci-Fi Hall of Fame, which has been around for a while. It had no actual building, it just awarded plaques to inductees each year. It started out as a SciFi/Fantasy Hall of Fame, but fortunatley for the SciFi museum, all the inductees had at least some sci-fi in their bodies of work. They were able to make it into sci-fi only without kicking anyone out.
Don't forget that Friday is Hawaiian shirt day.
GAIM's mailing list on sourceforge has postings saying that they have received info on a Yahoo fix from the Trillian people. They expect to do a release of GAIM tonight. I'd expect that other projects will also get this info and will be doing releases shortly.
I, for one, welcome our new Antichrist overlord.
In case people are curious, the Gaim developers seem to be collaborating with the Trillian folks like they did last time Yahoo broke. (Here's the bug about the breakage.)
Apparently there will be a release out tonight with the fix included.
An explanation of WhiteWater from it's creator:
"A Massive increase in internet efficiency is possible with persistent
bandwidth sharing. BitTorrent started the ball rolling; now White Water takes
the next step with proxy/server and mirroring facilities."
Persistent bandwidth sharing is the key. Consider:
- When you download a file with ftp or http, you connect to and download the
WHOLE file from the publishing server.
- When you download a file with bitTorrent, you get CHUNKS of the file from
loads of other people who are downloading the file AT THE SAME TIME AS YOU.
If you are the only downloader, you'll get the WHOLE file from the publishing - When you download with White Water, you get CHUNKS of the file from any WW
proxy which has ever downloaded the file and still has it in it's cache.
White Waters' proxy mode provides this _persistent_ or _ongoing_ file sharing.
Even if you are the only person currently downloading the file, you will
receive chunks from every WW proxy which still has the file (or chunks of it)
in its cache. If there are a hundred proxies with the file, and your local
bandwith is wide enough, you could receive the file 99 times faster than
would be possible from the original publishing server alone, which might be
on a simple home broadband connection.
"Imagine that 10 of your hard working employees download the latest Harry
Potter movie trailer. Thats 10 identical huge files saturating your internet
connection. If instead the trailer was published using WW, you could run a WW
proxy on your gateway server and only 1 copy would be downloaded, even if a
hundred employees decided to fetch it. Better yet, they would all be sharing
the data amongst themselves, massively reducing the load on your gateway
server."
This is only possible with the proxy/server mode WW provides.
"Now imagine that your ISP provided a WW proxy. Thousands of downloads are
reduced to one, freeing up Gigabytes of the ISPs upstream bandwidth!"
As you can see, the implications are quite profound.
"Best of all, JK could publish the trailer on her home broadband connection,
and even a mention on Slashdot couldn't kill it!"
Sounds interesting. If the custom bootable iso creator works as well as it's supposed to it'd be a godsend to those of us who have to put together kiosks vel sim. fairly often.
One complaint though: I wish the author would quit calling it an "operating system" as if it wasn't yet another source-based [Linux | GNU/Linux] distribution. Sure, call it a meta-distribution like Gentoo, but don't get carried away. I'm glad he did so in the writeup; I hope he'll change the webpage too.
One question though: why isn't there a Sourceforge or Rubyforge page for the script? Also, there seems to be a namespace conflict with an in-development Ruby-based Enhydra clone.
Google confirms: Ruby is the world's most beloved programm
If I cannot use the service to play games, video conference, make calls, download movies or MP3's, what exactly am I paying for?
Spam. Lots and lots of Spam, and not the semi-gelatinous mystery meat in a can, either.
Free, huh?
This is the same country where a NYT reporter was threatened with deportation after he said (backed by sources) that President Lula da Silva was an alcoholic? link
Toronto-area transit rider? Rate your ride.
A good friend of mine is the product manager for Yahoo Messenger (or one of them). I remember asking him over dinner one time why Yahoo was blocking Trillian, as well as why Yahoo didn't let you create your own IMVironments.
The answer to both were the same: that Yahoo views Messenger and more specifically, the IMVironemnts contained within Messenger as basically a revenue generator and a advertising vehicle to draw traffic to their other properties, not just a text messaging service.
Since Trillian and other alternative clients don't you view the IMVironment ads, they don't want you to use them...
There's 10 types of people in this world, those who understand binary and those who don't.
This seems absolutely socialist behavior compared to what is being promoted by these licensing agreements. At least the immigrants knew they were being fucked and had the ability to discern exactly how fucked they were before they signed the papers. Now agreements are not even generally made available prior to the contract signing, i.e. purchase, and are often made available in hard copy only after the additional agreement is reached. I admire companies like verizon suppling their agreements before a contract, i.e. sale, is reached. However, one has to wonder when the courts are going to decide that the general populous is just too stupid to comprehend these agreements. which are written for corporate lawyers, and therefore have to be ruled null and void.
"She's a scientist and a lesbian. She's not going to let it slide." Orphan Black
Here's a sampling of what you cannot do with Verizon's "unlimited" Internet Access: "...cannot be used for" "uploading, downloading or streaming of movies, music or games"...
Unfortunately, uploading means "sending data from your system", and downloading means "receiving data to your system".
If this TOC is going to be enforced, you can plug in the adapter, but you couldn't technically use the service at all (everything else relies on these two capabilities).
Why exactly would you pay them any money?
eskwayrd = m^2c^4
Okay, how small is Ruby in comparision with Perl and Python...
Ruby is quite a bit smaller (in MBs) than Perl. The whole sourcecode to Ruby is less than 1MB - (well, now that they've added several packages and extensions in 1.8.1 it's closer to 2MB, but that includes GUI toolkit bindings, web server modules, etc. - lots of useful stuff.)
Last I checked Perl's sourcecode was in the >5MB range, but that was a while ago.
I included the ruby executable and a few libraries on a CD recently (it was used for installing packages from the CD) and it took up less than 3MB total including the ruby scripts written for installation and C extention that I wrote (a shared library).
So, Ruby's footprint is relatively small compared to Perl's. I don't know about Python's footprint, though.
Brazil is a free and democratic society, of that there should be no doubt. There are cultural difference (substantial!) between Brazil and America. In fact, from my own experience, it is sort of a cross between America and Europe, with a unique South American flavor.
The Portuguese, while a major ethnic group, is not the dominant one. I lived in the Italian part of Sao Paulo and some old timers could still speak Italian, but almost none of the kids (under 18 crowd) could speak languages of the Old World other than Portuguese and English, with English being a rather mottled version that was only studied in School like Americans (if you are into it) study French, German, or Spanish. English is not a daily language. Many teachers in Brazil learn British English, but with American cultural twists (which makes some very interesting conversations in English).
What I'm trying to say is that Brazil is not the backward country that you seem to be thinking it is. Freedom is relative, and there are many things you can do in Brazil that if done in America will get you arrested and thrown in jail. I also find the attitude to discuss religion in a public forum to be refreshing compared to almost official atheism in the U.S.A. (the ACLU's attitude about this not withstanding).
That Brazil has more respect for its elected officials than the NYT has for American politicians is totally understandable. If a reporter had done something similar during the JFK administration they probabaly would have been treated in a very similar fashion in the USA. It was just habit for that journalist to forget he was in a different country with a different culture, and not reporting from Texas.
but I came up with:
Fuck you Microsoft!
You are being MICROattacked, from various angles, in a SOFT manner.
In regards to the demands of the national and international press, that empathizes with the Brazilian Government in this moment without precendent in our history, in which the director of an important public institution of this country is personally attacked by those interested in maintaining a homeogenic model, I will, after discussing the matter with my lawyers and federal prosecutors, attest that the judicial action taken against me is, by itself, so insulting and without merit that it does not deserve a response.
On the other hand, I would like to maintain that the move to software that protects the values of openess and freedom is, to the Brazilian Government, something intimately connected to the democratic principle. And because we have come through a long and difficult road to reach our current level of democracy in this country, we will not surrender in our battle.
If democracy is an ideal, it is never insignificant. If democracy is a dream, it is a dream this country will never wake up from.
The future is free.
I have an even greater respect for the original translator now. Although I'm fluent in both languages, it's quite difficult to make direct translations (I guess I just never have to).
Warning: Opinions known to be heavily biased.
Depends on if you mean the interpreter and standard libraries or the source code you produce.
For the source code, you can often get quite small while still being readable. Ruby's designer, Matz, takes things like aesthetics, intuitiveness and liveable design more seriously than most language designers. Whether it succeeds or not is a personal judgement call. It leads to some useful things being excluded from the standard base because they are deemed "not the Ruby Way", but also to a tool base that is (in the estimation of fans) very clean, useful and fun to use.
You can read about the ideas behind Ruby here in a presentation by Matz called "How Ruby Sucks". Also an extended Python/Ruby comparison here.
Basically if you want to see what Perl would look like if it was created by a crazy Japanese guy with a peculiar philosophy of programming instead of a crazy American guy with a peculiar philosophy of programming, take a look at Ruby.
Google confirms: Ruby is the world's most beloved programm
IIRC, quite a big fraction of Perl's bulk is due to its extensive facilities for handling unicode (UTF-8). The lack of simple, automatic, thoroughly integrated unicode support is actually one of the reasons I've never wanted to do much with Ruby, even though it seems like compared to Perl it's a nicer language qua language.
Find free books.
He was speaking about the push to make religion politicaly incorect. In some if not most public forums (not just internet) religious speak and attitue is mostly ousted as undesireable by someone. For some reason we have to apease the minority of the comunity and stop saying the pledge or talking about money or somethign because it has a reference to god. In some areas, some people are almost embarassed to admit they goto church. This is the "official atheism" he is refering to.
Even in this enviroment (./) if you admit to being of a religious nature you will have someone trying to call you stupid or a mindless sheep that has to follow some book that was made up by stoner thinking of a way to control the masses. God forbid you actually state your religion, then you will have a bunch more people telling you your wrong for beliveing in a certain god, worship cows, or somethign of the sort. Religion has basically become taboo in america unless your in an enviroment were it is expected to talk about religion. It is verry hard to find people willing to have a conversation about religion outside one of these enviroments and it is even harder to just meet new people and talk about how being faithfull to your worship has helped you thru tough times.