I remember not long after I got an internet connection (through the U, august of 94), this big brouhaha happened about some people (Unisys? Lawyers acting for them? How quickly brain cells die when soaked with hard alcohol...) that were supposedly releasing a worm onto the Internet to "ferret out" patent-infringing GIFs...
The small problem with that was, it was impossible. Even if some secret header code existed in "licensed" gifs, which to my semi-sketchy knowledge about graphics file formats does not (unless maybe gifs from "licensed" authoring tools had some sort of characteristic fingerprint like "made by gimp" or whatever), imagine for a second the difficulty of finding, cataloging, and determining the ownership of every gif on the net.
Now take all of the previous difficulties of this type of InfringeWare, undiminished and in fact probably heightened, and add to them the fact that now instead of being concerned about the file format (a relatively fixed thing), you're trying to judge infringe/not-infringe based on the content itself. This would require one of two things to work (from what I can tell talking out my ass on slashdot @ 5am whilst drinking):
1 -- a complete DB of every song ever recorded in any digital format, possibly at different bitrates. This would be for a "dumb" approach using pattern matching/comparison (like a global regular expression for mp3 contents, which might actually be a nifty hack for a local program ("computer, play me someting hardcore, with lots of drums" and the machine looks for patterns in the files themselves to spit something out into the soundstream)).
2 -- an expert system powerful enough to comprehend and categorize musical information, that could tell a licensed recording of Mozart from a bootleg NIN concert, i.e. practically full-blown Artificial Intelligence.
Both of these things seem less than likely to occur anytime soon. (If they had the former they'd be whoring it out a la terraserver's approach to space imagery, if they had the latter I hope as a human being that we could find more meaningful things to do with true AI than searching for mp3z!:-) )
No, I think that this is just hot air intended to scare people into thinking the Big Bad Patent/Copyright-Holding Wolf is Just Around The Corner, so It's Time To Shape Up And Quit Trading Mp3s You Little Monsters... Another option is this is a vaporware company trying to feed of the greed and stupidity of the record labels...
According to CNN at about 1:30am central, FL is now chalked up as a Bush win, giving him 271 electoral college votes, making him the next Prez irregardless of what happens in Oregon or Wisconsin.
The difference in raw votes cast between Bush and Gore in Florida was about 50,000. Nader got about 93,000 votes. In other words, the speculation as to the Nader Effect can be put to rest, in that he effectively cost Gore the race, while still only garnering about 2.5% of the popular vote nation wide.
As a Democrat (being what we here in Texas call a yeller dawg democrat in that I'd happily vote for a yellow dog if it was on the Democratic ticket), I can only call this depressing. The second thing that comes to mind is "fuckin' nader". The third thing to occur to me is that out of ~84 million votes cast, Bush won by about 600,000, so he will not be a President with a strong popular mandate, a fact which I can only pray reins in the damage he will cause to America.
See this month's issue of the Linux Journal. There is a relatively lengthy article describing the installation of Linux on ~60 machines that covers many topics similar to this question. I don't have my copy handy or else I'd post the title and page number(s).
This isn't a Debian issue (I'm using 4.0.1 on my mongrel RH workstation), but I have noticed recently that the X server will SIG 11 at odd times. I haven't pinned down the common thread yet, but it seems to happen at the point of initial start up of some programs (e.g. the AnyJ java ide thingy from www.netcomputing.de, which gets to the splash screen and _blammo_, X server dies). When I first installed X 4.0, it would SIG 11 when I right clicked on a variable in DDD. So anyway, my point is be cautious, as for all the improvments in XFree 4.x (and don't get me wrong, it is nicer, especially in the font managment realm), it still has some odd stability issues.
Seems like a crummy answer, I know. But compare the feature set of the early UNIX (1970's) with the stuff UNIX gained from the academic community after AT&T started making it available to them, especially the fruit born (no pun intended;-) ) from the BSD open source implementation (IIRC didn't tcp/ip on unix first become available in BSD?).
Technically UNIX wasn't a product until the early 80's but it was still pretty solidly in the closed-source arena, AT&T being who they were.
Damn, I just installed the napster client yesterday because a friend was telling me about it... (previously I'd just rolled my own mp3s off my cds, but she said napster was a good resource for rare mixes that I'd have a snowball's chance of finding in the US or in print at all)
Just goes to show that when you wash your car it rains and that the best way to summon a public bus is to light up a cigarette...:-)
I'm not a weapons designer, but to my knowledge, all current thermonuclear packages require an initiator stage consisting of 1+ "ordinary" nuclear devices (U-235 or plutonium squeeze devices). So while the main stage may not kick out a lot of (long-term) radiation, you can bet your bottom dollar the initiator device(s) will. Further more, the earth around the device will become irradiated and amplify the fallout effect of the original device (and contaminate rain on its way to the water table). This is why the fallout from a military target like missle silos was always assumed to be much worse because the device would have to detonate at or near ground level as opposed to miles up for a "soft" civilian target like a city.
The United States looked into using nuclear devices for civil engineering in the 1950s and 1960s. For example, string a line of devices and you can make an instant shipping canal. The only problem is that the environmental side effects would be extreme. A rough rule of thumb I've heard quoted is that the amount of earth eliminated by the detonation in cubic meters was equal to the yield of the device assuming it was placed properly (100kT device = 100,000 m^3 earth gone). The devices used for this sort of thing were not in the thermonuclear yield range (megaton TNT equivalent or above). If the Chinese are thinking along the lines of the earlier plans, I'd guess their charges will be
As a side bit of trivial, you'd be amazed at the number of things we (US) thought of using "small" devices for during the 50's and 60's: civil engineering, fighter-deployed anti-aircraft missles (sure, 1 missle = a squadron of Russian bombers, but I'm sure the folks down wind of that will be _real_ happy...), anti-tank mines, and Jeep-mounted nuke rockets where the range of the missle was less that the lethal radius of the device (I think weapon system was refered to as the Patriot or the Bowie or something like that).
Friend of mine works at (large computer manufacturing company). They have a non-official irc channel, sort of an e-WaterCooler...
Anyway, internal MIS dept. found out about it and started sniffing the network, and logged EVERYTHING that was said in the channel over a three week period. Talk of stupid bosses, who was screwing who, drug taking at weekend parties, the works.
Upshot: 6 people fired, 3 more severely reprimanded.
So, yeah, if you want to chat at work without "the man" hearing everything, this is a pretty important development.:^)
He is actually a teacher where I go to school (UTexas @ Austin). Then again, we have lots of really famous profs in their fields working here, suprisingly so for a state U. (c.f. Steven Weinberg in physics)
Well, I'm certainly not a lawyer or an expert on Forth, but from your description it sounds sort of like perl or java's execution model. You might want to take a look at perl's Artistic Licence (sp? too early in the morning), which IIRC, essentially says "do as you wish as long as you aren't acting like an asshole".;^) (I'm being silly, it's actually a more serious document worthy of inspection that my juvenile 3am wit doesn't articulate well...)
Failing that, the LGPL for the compiler might work pretty well, or the BSDL as a previous poster mentioned (I've heard that mentioned many times WRT commercially palatable OSS dev tools).
The SETI aspect is cool, but I think there are a lot of problems this would be beneficial for if it is easily retaskable. This includes both the internet-based distributed calculation efforts such as distributed.net's projects and the Mersienne (sp?) Prime Search, and local machine programs. Many scientific/engineering problems benefit from parallelization (chemistry applications (ab initio quantum mech, visualization, etc) come to mind, as I'm a chemist;-) ), so this might be a great way to add some extra computational horsepower to your workstation without having to spend an order of magnitude more for a Beowulfish clustering solution.
Of course, a full-on clustering solution would no doubt perform better but this way every professor and grad student could have a "pocket battleship" solution on their desk. This might work best if the device could be made as transparent in use as possible (like the voodoo^2 cards were for 3d rendering)./dev/numbercruncher?:-)
Well, they probably wouldn't pick that as their new name.
On a somewhat more serious note (I just woke up, there is a limit to how serious I can be in a precoffee state;-) ), this could be a good thing for the freenix community if Caldera ends up incorporating goodies from SCO in a source-available form. I can also see how this is a good business move for Caldera. They've always been one of the most business-oriented linux distributers (server and desktop), and I can see that having access to SCO's infrastructure would help further that aim.
I'm by no means a DBA but I could have sworn one of the entries in the Changelog for PostgreSQL recently (don't recall if which of the 7.0.x series it was (I'm running 7.0.2 quite happily)) was that the 8kb limit had been raised (as in eliminated, not set to a higher amount). Of course, I could just be smoking crack...;-)
OK, so I'm a texan and my dad was born here too. He also has a degree in history, so he tends to accreate historical trivia the way I just seem to always end up with more cat-5 cable than I started the job with... I don't know if this is true, but from what I've heard of the people involved it certainly seems plausible.
Seems after the original Brown v. Topeka Board of Education case with it's "all due speed" bit, Witchita Falls was being, er, Veeeeeerrrrrrry Deliberate in proceeding. (Or, as my dad put it, "they'd done about fuck all" to follow the ruling.;) ). Witchita Falls also has a large US military presence (an army and air force base IIRC). Maybe had, I don't know if their bases survived the base closings of the 90s.
LBJ was widely renowned to be, well, not to put too fine a point on it, a real son of a bitch when he wanted his way about something. Which, aside from the vietnam fiasco, was probably a good thing for the country (thank God he was a good old Southern Liberal Yellow Dog Democrat (i.e. "we'd vote for a yeller dawg if it was on the democratic ticket")). LBJ really wanted schools to be integrated.
According to the story, it comes to be about midnight, and Mayor Dicksmack of WF, being the small-minded wastoid pit viper that he is, is long abed with his wife, look all good little conservative piggies. The phone rings, waking them both up.
Operator:Please hold for the President of the United States.
Mayor:?!?
LBJ: How you doin', Mr. Mayor?
Mayor: Ah, pretty good Mr. President.
LBJ: How is the economy doing there in Witchita?
Mayor: Uh, pretty good...
LBJ: Those military boys spending all their paychecks around town doesn't hurt, I imagine.
Mayor: No, no, of course not.
(At this point it should be pointed out that while the military bases were not the sole economic activity in the city, if they pulled out because LBJ had a chat with the Joint Chiefs of Staff, WF's economy would take a dive right into the shitter.)
LBJ: (yelled, and LBJ was a big man with big lungs) Schools! Integration! Tomorrow! *click*
And the next day, the WF school district integrated.:^)
Slashdot Mirror
I remember not long after I got an internet connection (through the U, august of 94), this big brouhaha happened about some people (Unisys? Lawyers acting for them? How quickly brain cells die when soaked with hard alcohol...) that were supposedly releasing a worm onto the Internet to "ferret out" patent-infringing GIFs...
The small problem with that was, it was impossible. Even if some secret header code existed in "licensed" gifs, which to my semi-sketchy knowledge about graphics file formats does not (unless maybe gifs from "licensed" authoring tools had some sort of characteristic fingerprint like "made by gimp" or whatever), imagine for a second the difficulty of finding, cataloging, and determining the ownership of every gif on the net.
Now take all of the previous difficulties of this type of InfringeWare, undiminished and in fact probably heightened, and add to them the fact that now instead of being concerned about the file format (a relatively fixed thing), you're trying to judge infringe/not-infringe based on the content itself. This would require one of two things to work (from what I can tell talking out my ass on slashdot @ 5am whilst drinking):
- 1 -- a complete DB of every song ever recorded in any digital format, possibly at different bitrates. This would be for a "dumb" approach using pattern matching/comparison (like a global regular expression for mp3 contents, which might actually be a nifty hack for a local program ("computer, play me someting hardcore, with lots of drums" and the machine looks for patterns in the files themselves to spit something out into the soundstream)).
- 2 -- an expert system powerful enough to comprehend and categorize musical information, that could tell a licensed recording of Mozart from a bootleg NIN concert, i.e. practically full-blown Artificial Intelligence.
Both of these things seem less than likely to occur anytime soon. (If they had the former they'd be whoring it out a la terraserver's approach to space imagery, if they had the latter I hope as a human being that we could find more meaningful things to do with true AI than searching for mp3z!No, I think that this is just hot air intended to scare people into thinking the Big Bad Patent/Copyright-Holding Wolf is Just Around The Corner, so It's Time To Shape Up And Quit Trading Mp3s You Little Monsters... Another option is this is a vaporware company trying to feed of the greed and stupidity of the record labels...
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I can just see that happening. So then I guess you could literally say you 'dig' music...
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Well, an hour later the difference in FL may have only been 6,000 between Bush and Gore. All the more reason to curse Nader in my book.
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According to CNN at about 1:30am central, FL is now chalked up as a Bush win, giving him 271 electoral college votes, making him the next Prez irregardless of what happens in Oregon or Wisconsin.
The difference in raw votes cast between Bush and Gore in Florida was about 50,000. Nader got about 93,000 votes. In other words, the speculation as to the Nader Effect can be put to rest, in that he effectively cost Gore the race, while still only garnering about 2.5% of the popular vote nation wide.
As a Democrat (being what we here in Texas call a yeller dawg democrat in that I'd happily vote for a yellow dog if it was on the Democratic ticket), I can only call this depressing. The second thing that comes to mind is "fuckin' nader". The third thing to occur to me is that out of ~84 million votes cast, Bush won by about 600,000, so he will not be a President with a strong popular mandate, a fact which I can only pray reins in the damage he will cause to America.
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She would have made a way-better president than the Shrub. I just hope that everybody realizes that there are Liberals in Texas too.
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Sorry, should have learned about those damn inequality signs in html-marked posts by now. That should have said "population <50000".
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Hank Hill is painfully close to the truth in pretty much any texas city with population
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See this month's issue of the Linux Journal. There is a relatively lengthy article describing the installation of Linux on ~60 machines that covers many topics similar to this question. I don't have my copy handy or else I'd post the title and page number(s).
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Nope, riva TNT with a celeron 450 (i.e. 300a->450, and no I don't think the oc'ing is the problem, as this setup worked flawlessly with 3.3.6... :-) )
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This isn't a Debian issue (I'm using 4.0.1 on my mongrel RH workstation), but I have noticed recently that the X server will SIG 11 at odd times. I haven't pinned down the common thread yet, but it seems to happen at the point of initial start up of some programs (e.g. the AnyJ java ide thingy from www.netcomputing.de, which gets to the splash screen and _blammo_, X server dies). When I first installed X 4.0, it would SIG 11 when I right clicked on a variable in DDD. So anyway, my point is be cautious, as for all the improvments in XFree 4.x (and don't get me wrong, it is nicer, especially in the font managment realm), it still has some odd stability issues.
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UNIX
Seems like a crummy answer, I know. But compare the feature set of the early UNIX (1970's) with the stuff UNIX gained from the academic community after AT&T started making it available to them, especially the fruit born (no pun intended ;-) ) from the BSD open source implementation (IIRC didn't tcp/ip on unix first become available in BSD?).
Technically UNIX wasn't a product until the early 80's but it was still pretty solidly in the closed-source arena, AT&T being who they were.
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Umm, what? I'm not jewish, and I don't think anything about that post connotated that I was.
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Damn, I just installed the napster client yesterday because a friend was telling me about it... (previously I'd just rolled my own mp3s off my cds, but she said napster was a good resource for rare mixes that I'd have a snowball's chance of finding in the US or in print at all)
Just goes to show that when you wash your car it rains and that the best way to summon a public bus is to light up a cigarette... :-)
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They use NT, to judge by the error message (characteristic of IIS) and all the .asp files on the google cache page's hyperlinks...
Yet another example that NT blows. (note that it isn't a bandwidth problem or else we wouldn't be able to get to the server at all)
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I'm not a weapons designer, but to my knowledge, all current thermonuclear packages require an initiator stage consisting of 1+ "ordinary" nuclear devices (U-235 or plutonium squeeze devices). So while the main stage may not kick out a lot of (long-term) radiation, you can bet your bottom dollar the initiator device(s) will. Further more, the earth around the device will become irradiated and amplify the fallout effect of the original device (and contaminate rain on its way to the water table). This is why the fallout from a military target like missle silos was always assumed to be much worse because the device would have to detonate at or near ground level as opposed to miles up for a "soft" civilian target like a city.
The United States looked into using nuclear devices for civil engineering in the 1950s and 1960s. For example, string a line of devices and you can make an instant shipping canal. The only problem is that the environmental side effects would be extreme. A rough rule of thumb I've heard quoted is that the amount of earth eliminated by the detonation in cubic meters was equal to the yield of the device assuming it was placed properly (100kT device = 100,000 m^3 earth gone). The devices used for this sort of thing were not in the thermonuclear yield range (megaton TNT equivalent or above). If the Chinese are thinking along the lines of the earlier plans, I'd guess their charges will be
As a side bit of trivial, you'd be amazed at the number of things we (US) thought of using "small" devices for during the 50's and 60's: civil engineering, fighter-deployed anti-aircraft missles (sure, 1 missle = a squadron of Russian bombers, but I'm sure the folks down wind of that will be _real_ happy...), anti-tank mines, and Jeep-mounted nuke rockets where the range of the missle was less that the lethal radius of the device (I think weapon system was refered to as the Patriot or the Bowie or something like that).
Random rambling at 3am...
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Friend of mine works at (large computer manufacturing company). They have a non-official irc channel, sort of an e-WaterCooler...
Anyway, internal MIS dept. found out about it and started sniffing the network, and logged EVERYTHING that was said in the channel over a three week period. Talk of stupid bosses, who was screwing who, drug taking at weekend parties, the works.
Upshot: 6 people fired, 3 more severely reprimanded.
So, yeah, if you want to chat at work without "the man" hearing everything, this is a pretty important development. :^)
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He is actually a teacher where I go to school (UTexas @ Austin). Then again, we have lots of really famous profs in their fields working here, suprisingly so for a state U. (c.f. Steven Weinberg in physics)
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Sorry I barfed the link tag. I should be here.
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See the stuff on the homepage. SDL stands for the Simple Direct media Layer, and is sortof like DirectX but on (Linux | *BSD | Amiga | MacOS | Win32 | am I missing any more?). There have been several demos coded for it. The iXalance stuff is my fav so far... (great music too)
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Well, I'm certainly not a lawyer or an expert on Forth, but from your description it sounds sort of like perl or java's execution model. You might want to take a look at perl's Artistic Licence (sp? too early in the morning), which IIRC, essentially says "do as you wish as long as you aren't acting like an asshole". ;^) (I'm being silly, it's actually a more serious document worthy of inspection that my juvenile 3am wit doesn't articulate well...)
Failing that, the LGPL for the compiler might work pretty well, or the BSDL as a previous poster mentioned (I've heard that mentioned many times WRT commercially palatable OSS dev tools).
Best of luck!
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The SETI aspect is cool, but I think there are a lot of problems this would be beneficial for if it is easily retaskable. This includes both the internet-based distributed calculation efforts such as distributed.net's projects and the Mersienne (sp?) Prime Search, and local machine programs. Many scientific/engineering problems benefit from parallelization (chemistry applications (ab initio quantum mech, visualization, etc) come to mind, as I'm a chemist ;-) ), so this might be a great way to add some extra computational horsepower to your workstation without having to spend an order of magnitude more for a Beowulfish clustering solution.
Of course, a full-on clustering solution would no doubt perform better but this way every professor and grad student could have a "pocket battleship" solution on their desk. This might work best if the device could be made as transparent in use as possible (like the voodoo^2 cards were for 3d rendering). /dev/numbercruncher? :-)
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Well, they probably wouldn't pick that as their new name.
On a somewhat more serious note (I just woke up, there is a limit to how serious I can be in a precoffee state ;-) ), this could be a good thing for the freenix community if Caldera ends up incorporating goodies from SCO in a source-available form. I can also see how this is a good business move for Caldera. They've always been one of the most business-oriented linux distributers (server and desktop), and I can see that having access to SCO's infrastructure would help further that aim.
--
I'm by no means a DBA but I could have sworn one of the entries in the Changelog for PostgreSQL recently (don't recall if which of the 7.0.x series it was (I'm running 7.0.2 quite happily)) was that the 8kb limit had been raised (as in eliminated, not set to a higher amount). Of course, I could just be smoking crack... ;-)
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I'll second that! That desk KICKS ASS, even if it does have a rather unfortunate name... ;^)
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OK, so I'm a texan and my dad was born here too. He also has a degree in history, so he tends to accreate historical trivia the way I just seem to always end up with more cat-5 cable than I started the job with... I don't know if this is true, but from what I've heard of the people involved it certainly seems plausible.
Seems after the original Brown v. Topeka Board of Education case with it's "all due speed" bit, Witchita Falls was being, er, Veeeeeerrrrrrry Deliberate in proceeding. (Or, as my dad put it, "they'd done about fuck all" to follow the ruling. ;) ). Witchita Falls also has a large US military presence (an army and air force base IIRC). Maybe had, I don't know if their bases survived the base closings of the 90s.
LBJ was widely renowned to be, well, not to put too fine a point on it, a real son of a bitch when he wanted his way about something. Which, aside from the vietnam fiasco, was probably a good thing for the country (thank God he was a good old Southern Liberal Yellow Dog Democrat (i.e. "we'd vote for a yeller dawg if it was on the democratic ticket")). LBJ really wanted schools to be integrated.
According to the story, it comes to be about midnight, and Mayor Dicksmack of WF, being the small-minded wastoid pit viper that he is, is long abed with his wife, look all good little conservative piggies. The phone rings, waking them both up.
Operator:Please hold for the President of the United States.
Mayor:?!?
LBJ: How you doin', Mr. Mayor?
Mayor: Ah, pretty good Mr. President.
LBJ: How is the economy doing there in Witchita?
Mayor: Uh, pretty good...
LBJ: Those military boys spending all their paychecks around town doesn't hurt, I imagine.
Mayor: No, no, of course not.
(At this point it should be pointed out that while the military bases were not the sole economic activity in the city, if they pulled out because LBJ had a chat with the Joint Chiefs of Staff, WF's economy would take a dive right into the shitter.)
LBJ: (yelled, and LBJ was a big man with big lungs) Schools! Integration! Tomorrow! *click*
And the next day, the WF school district integrated. :^)
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