This has a lot to do with who does own a database... If I go out, messure the rainfall over a period of a year at 10 different places, and then put that into a database, its mine. I don't think anyone but mother nature can contest that (unless I put it in an Access database, then MS might contend;)).
But if I go and put all the information I know about everyone I know into a database, who does the database belong to? Can I go and sell the information? The 1991 Privacy Act in New Zealand says that if I am a company, and I collect information about ppl, one of the things I must do is along ppl access to view/modify there record. (Within reason, ppl can't demand to modify their bank balance;)). I also must state what I plan to do with the information, including wether I plan to sell it. Ianal, but I don't think it prohibits me from selling it to anyone I want.
Theres a good reason for this, our electoral rolls (list of ppl who are enrolled to vote, names, addresses, etc) are availible for purchase, (incidentaly, in order to have my record unavailible, I have to have a "good" reason, eg I'm being stalked, and I have a restraining order, etc. I can't opt out of it just because I want to).
This means that my database of your personal habits I noticed is mine. And I can do with it what I want. (Note; there is an option for various personal defimation(sp) laws here if I say false things).
Now that thats settled, what DO I want to do with my database of your habits? Well, I believe in free speach, my programs are GPL, so I want to make it free.
I will license my database under a "free" license. This license is NOT designed to allow ppl to make money off of my database, so the same rights must be transmitted to the user of the database. So, the license must allow a user to "copy" the database one record at a time if they like.
Now, the big thing, cost. Simple, same as the GPL, a distribution fee. ie you can charge a reasonable fee for the distribution of the database in whole to the user.
Ahh, but what about accessing records, eg a web database, or phone, whatever. Thats fine, you can charge me whatever, that is outside the scope of the license, but what is in scope, is you MUST offer the entire database for a reasonable cost.
"What!" you cry, "This is no good for me". Fine, then don't use the license, if you want to make money out of something, why are you trying to use a "Free" license?
The point of the matter is, a "free" database license should not be orientated at making money. I don't earn a cent from the GPL programs I write. If i wanted to, I could, I'd just use a different license. But I don't, and I want my database of your personal habits to be free aswell.
The minute you try and work out how a company can still make money with this license, you defeat the purpose of it. As I said, you can offer access to the database for whatever price you want, but you must offer the entire database for a resonable price too. RedHat makes their money by basically selling pretty boxes and support.
Stop trying to work out how you can make money out of database, and start working out how you can make it available for all.
I'm thinking he had a y2k problem. heheh I wonder if he did an ascii rotation of characters (maybe rot13), I think I'll go try and translate this before tommorow:)
They *WANT* to report the world has ended. As soon as anything went wrong, the question was asked, "Is this the y2k bug?". The only *major* y2k-bug event I've heard of is the monitoring system in the nuke plant in japan, but last time I checked, "Its currently unknown wether this was caused by the y2k bug, and wether any further nuclear power plants will suffer similar problems in the future"...
One thing I did find funny was Mercury Power (a power provider here in NZ) had ads weeks before the date, "There WILL be a power outtage in New Zealand on Jan 1 2000, just like there is one almost every day. More often that not, its caused by this: ***insert picture of car slaming into power poll***. Drive safe these holidays."
Well, they were right, in Ottago, a drunk driver plowed into a power poll last night, and cause a 30 min outtage. Whats strange is the media were still saying its unknown if it was caused by the y2k bug AFTER it was established as being a drunk driver.
Anyways, onto the topic again, New Zealand had the first millenium baby. (infact, I believe the first 3 or so). the very first one, a healthy baby boy was born 1 minute past midnight in Auckland. However, the family (good on them), are insisting on a media blackout. No reporters have been told any other information.
Now the media WANT this millenium baby, but can you imagine what will happen to the poor kid. Then again, it could also be a good thing, if the parents run into financial trouble later on in life, they can just come forward as the parents:).
As I've said to all those I've talked to, as I predicted, the bug will mostly be lots of small problems. We've already heard about a few, and come monday more will come, and come Mar 1, err, Feb 29, there will be more. Though I suspect most of the Feb 29 ones will be about wrong day of week for things. (You'll get paid one day later;)). If we are very lucky, our banks will have problems, and you won't be charged for a days interest:)
I admit, at the last minute I grabbed a few empty big coke bottles and filled 'em with water, but it was all for naught. Maybe in the year 3000 when we are REALLY computer automated we'll have some big problems, till then, its time to ask
What am I gonna do with my.50calibre, the 10,000 rounds of ammo, and this damn bunker in my back yard?
Happy New Year, keep on coding, and don't forget. Y2k is over, we can now start prepending all dates with "20" and only storing 2 digits again!
If its money we need.....
on
DVD Recap
·
· Score: 2
....then we may just fail.
I cannot recall any time where the Open Source or Free Software community has come together to provide money. Yes, donations are made to various organisations related to this, but as far as I'm aware, nothing big.
This will be an interesting test. The article claims we need money to put together a good case. If we do manage to get together enough money, I really suspect that it will be due to only a few peoples/companies contribution (eg: A recently very rich person who may own some stock in some little linux company;) (No, I'm not saying he should donate money, nor am I asking, but I wouldn't be surprised if he did. It could certainly start the ball rolling.)
I guess it *COULD* happen. But geeks are lazy, if the EFF was to put up a page where you could enter your credit card #, and an ammount (and state everywhere on the page that ANY ammount (even $5) will do. Then maybe...
But personally, I probably won't unless I can see it will do good. So we need something to start the ball rolling. A slashdot article would help, but I suspect a large number of people will visit, but not many will donate.
But then again, maybe they will. As I said, geeks are lazy, but if all it requires is our credit card number, an ammount, and press the "submit" button, then maybe I will, and maybe others will donate.
One thing I would suggest for the page would, once (or if) things start rolling, put an indicator indicating the ammount pledged so far. (And maybe a $/hit ratio on the page). But I wouldn't put it on immediatly, it would be rather dissapointing to come to the page and see "$22.50 has been donated. 4000 people have visited this page"
mmm, *shrug*, thats my thoughts on the matter. You can probably ignore all that ramblings, but put up the page anyway. I wanna max out my credit card.:)
These statistics are about as good as slashdot polls. (ie if you really believe them, you need help). The big point being, its only those who actually submit there times that are counted, so, like magazine polls, that makes it heavily bias. Case-in-point, a certain magizine in the US (I'm not sure which one) awhile back that predicted John F Kennedy wouldn't win the election. But that was based on their magazine poll, and their magazine was target towards the (for lack of a better word) upper-class.
These are hardly what I would call "Hard numbers". They are even worse than a microsoft sponsered comparision.
Don't get me wrong, I love linux, and I highly believe that yes, windows IS miserable for uptime, and yes FreeBSD does kick ass with uptime. (Linux has more frequent kernel release, and we haven't yet figured a way to upgrade your kernel w/o rebooting).
I'm surprised that an article phrased in such a way that its sounds as if its suppose to be serious would be posted on slashdot.
Thats enough ranting, I'll probably get moderated down as a troll. But seriously, tune out anyone who quotes these numbers as reliable.
I just found out, the source code to Linux and a lot of Unix Operating Systems has been avalible to the HACKER world! Aswell as the source code to the Apache web server, which is used in a lot of places!
Half the internet is comprimised! All my online transactions, my credit cards! Hackers have them all! Thank goodness we still have Microsoft with their totaly secure web servers!
Quick, do as I've done, take all your money out of the banks (They may run Unix you know!), and give it all to Microsoft (Its almost Y2k, so you'd better hurry!). Microsoft will save you! But don't give it all away, use some of it to buy 100 gallons of water, a 50 calibre machine gun, and 10,000 rounds of ammo, cause baby, Y2k is comming!
Eeeermmm, sorry, this is Zaffles brain returning back in control now, I couldn't stop that outbreak before, self-control circuits blew at that comment. They have been repaired.
Whip me, spank me, moderate me down for offtopic-ness! - Its funny, laugh.
Ok, well, this seems to be mainly about recording transcripts with the agent as the 2nd person. Unless its a public forum, such as an IRC chat channel, or slashdot comments, its very difficult to log "private" conversations between two people unless you have the help of one of those persons, or you seek the help of the 3rd party hosting the means to hold this conversation. (eg an IRC server, or in the case of email, one of the users ISPs).
In respect to logging conversations made to a police officer. I agree with the judge. Its called expectation of privacy. People on the net should NOT expect their conversation not to be logged by the user they are talking to.
However, I agree that 3rd party recording (where the recording is done by the police when they aren't involved in the conversation) is in the grey area. Most services that I know of that over "private" conversation (Email, ICQ, IRC, etc) will disclaim that you may not have privacy. Although a lot of IRC servers state that the server does NOT record conversations.
Personally, I log everything I can when it comes to the net. And if I later choose to use those logs, so be it. If someone has a problem with that, they shouldn't have talked to me in the first place.
Washington must have some pretty funny laws. I can't understand how phoning your local police station, and saying "I did it, I killed so and so, and the body is buired here, my name is blah blah, and I live at blah", can be any different to me walking into the police station and saying the exact same thing, except that I save the cops the car trip out to pick me up. (In this case, I'd probably take the bus in, ethier that or find somewhere to park my car long term:))
... Since its still very possible for someone such as myself (Not that I would ever do such a thing), to get a pirated movie.
As someone pointed out, at the moment, its pretty damn difficult to actually COPY a DVD onto another DVD. Since the hardware requirements are very large. However, if I wanted to start distributing DVD movies, I'd just go buy a DVD player for my TV, and plug the video/audio out into my PC, and start capturing. Sure I loose quality, and also the neat things about DVDs, but if its just the movie I want, its fine.
People who buy pirated movies rarely do it for the high quality, the large number of pirated video cds are copied from demo disks with those nice symbols that float around the screen and words that scroll along the bottom. Ethier that or from someone sitting at the back with a tripod and video camera (or even worse, as one of the ID4 pirated copies was, someone at the back HOLDING a camera, and laughing alot)
By trying to keep the actual algorithm and keys secret, they can only try to achieve 2 things 1) Control of who can make DVD players, and what it costs to make them. 2) Pirating the actual entire DVDs (not just the movie on it) is difficult (but as case in point, not impossible).
If I recall correctly, this all started because an authorized DVD player maker accidentaly left the encryption keys unencrypted (I don't recall the specifics). If I were the DVD people, I'd be more concerned with suing this company than, as many people have stated, trying to close the barn doors after the horses have escaped.
Lets face it, no matter what they do, unless they someone get every country in the world to execute anyone found with pirated DVDs (mmm, world domination by MS is probably how that'll be achieved), its going to be impossible to stop DVDs, or any movie from being pirated. The most they can achieve is stopping mass-pirating by underground companies setup to pirate, and even then, as I outlined above, you can STILL get the actual movie, with no reverse engineering required.
Finding the distributors of anything pirated would be, in my guess akin to hunting down drug distributors. Except there is a $10,000 reward for information about big time piraters (atleast in New Zealand), but I don't recall any kind of reward for information about drug distributers (except maybe a lighter sentance for yourself:))
In the end, all the big companies can, and will end up doing, is trying to convince the public that pirated stuff is bad, and you should pay retail. And also trying to hunt down those big time piraters.
In regards to this restraining order, it will achieve nothing but hurt a few dozen people, and in the pirating world, unless that dirty dozen are big time distributors, it will achieve nothing.
In respect to the new design of shuttle that you talked about;
Landing pads and structs saving wieght over wheels? Thats a bit debatable. And I'd think the wieght GAINED by having to take the fuel to land verticaly would be greater than the wieght of wings for landing. It would take a tonne of fuel to "land" a craft vericaly using rockets on earth. It takes a load to get it up as it is.
You would probably double your fuel requirement, which I suspect would wiegh more than the wings of the space shuttle. (Remember, the space shuttles engines aren't the main lifting during take off.
And since Nasa is fighting for every penny it can get, and doing well, launching cheaper satilites and space vechiles, I can't see how it would be in NASAs best interest to intentionaly destroy a very expensive prototype, then deliberatly pay more money and time to develop another one.
The shuttle too can launch fly, and land with noone at the pilot seat, but we get more from having people up there, fixing any problems that go wrong, and doing experiments. I'd certainly like to see this new craft fix problems in the Hubble without a human hand up there.
and btw - the entire slashdot world says one collective "Doh!".
I hope you sent your solution to the guy before you posted it here:).
Now, as to why the rest of the world couldn't figure it out. Personally, I was wayyyy of track in my last assumption. (Its ethier a trick of words, or something that never happens in normal play), and I think most people didn't find it because its valid play and its also very agressive of both sides. In almost all the solutions I worked on, I very rarely considered taking pieces. (except for Knight takes Rook:), I wouldn't rule it out ofcourse, but the way I was working, the less pieces you have, the less you have to block the king with.
The cunning in this solution is finding the location that the king is block by his own troops, and his troops can't save him. In the final resting place, the king could only move 4 ways. 3 of which were blocked by the black queen, and the other blocked by the black Knight.
But as I predicted, it didn't involve castling, and it did involve primarily the black knight kicking butt to get over to the other side.
Its a shame the puzzle has moved from the "dark corridors" of chess out into the public eye. I imagine now it will be difficult to use such a thing to stump your friends, but never-the-less, It will be fun to try.
I would be keenly interested to hear exactly how "Spicy Bisquit" did indeed find the solution, and how a Ti82 helped him.
Nxe4 was brilliant too.:) I think the best tip you could give someone who was trying to solve this, would be "White must sacrifice her queen". It would ofcourse, make it 10 times easier:)
Once again, congrats to the winner, and we are all keenly awaiting your next post telling us exactly how you did it.
...where there are 2 articles: "Science: 50 Year Old Quantum Physics Problem Solved" and "A Christmas Chess Puzzle" next to each other and having tried this problem myself, leads me to daydream this:
Slashdot, 50 years from now...
Slashdot: 50 Year Old Chess Puzzle solved
Finaly 50 years after the chess puzzle was posted, an Anonymous Coward has posted a correct and working solution to the elusive chess puzzle.
This puzzle was first introduced 50 years ago at Christmas time, as something for the readers to chew on. CmdrTaco, Hermos, and thousands of other slashdot readers have not been to sleep since.
The article was upto its 10 millionth comment when Hermos finally archieved it on its dedicated 50terabyte drive.
Another thing to note is the knight cannot take the rook in under 3 moves. This only leaves 2 moves to play with.
Castling takes 4 moves minimum. That only leaves 1 move to move the rook into a position that the other knight can then take it, and put the king into mate (discover or otherwise).
This leads me to conclude that castling isn't an option.
At first (and 2nd, 3rd, 4th... nth) glance, it seems impossible. There just aren't enough moves. And anyone who has tried this has come to the conclusion, "I can do it in six".
Grand Masters have been stumped. So this means one of two things.
it ISN'T classical. And its the sort of move which never happens in chess.
and/or Theres a trick in the interpretation of the instructions.
One question I have, is a matter of wording. and ends in the fifth move with knight takes rook mate. Is it possible that the knight it white, and the mate is done by black?
Technically, it'd still be move 5. And in move a knight could attack a rook.
Only problem with this is, it takes a knight 4 moves to attack a rook (assuming the rook doesn't move, since I'd assume the other player would be moving ass to get into a mate possition).
From left to right, when sitting on Whites side of the table, is A-H. From the white side to the black side, is 1-8. So D1 is Whites Queen.
When stating a move, the result is sometimes stated by itself, when its obvious what happened. (eg: e4, theres only one piece that can make that move, the pawn at e2).
I don't know about the rest of the world, but for me, it *SEEMS* that the StarOffice browser is pretty good. I haven't done any advanced testing, but it doesn't *SEEM* to crash as ofter as nutscrape, and works a bit better than Mozzila and Opera. (I just tried the Opera beta out, and it seems to crash just a bit too often, but hey, its a beta).
Only thing is, StarOffice isn't free. (Well, it is free (as in beer) for personal evaluation use). Its also a pretty damn hefty download for just using it as a browser. 70megs download. ~150-170 installed. But, atleast you get an entire office suit for that price:).
If this thing doesn't crash that much, I might buy it.:)
5. They want to make a Linux distro. Neither good nor bad, really - thanks to GPL, they can't possibly take over the market, and another distro probably wouldn't hurt anything.
Unfortunatly, this may not be such a great thing... I don't remember who did it, but someone wrote an article/rant on what MS could do. I believe it went something like this.
MS Releases MS Linux. Its nothing special, and probably doesn't containing anything new.
MS then ports MS Office to linux. (obviously it won't be open source) Good news at this point, since it'll mean more Linux users.
MS then makes some changes, tweaks, or a binary kernel module, than means that MS Office will only run on MS Linux. This will boost MS Linux up with whatever is the current leader (Redhat, Corel, Debian, who knows). Since MS has the best of both worlds. You can run anything any other distro can, but you can also run MS Office.
MS then begins to port other applications over to MS Linux, making sure each one can ONLY run on MS Linux. They could also port the Windows libraries to linux (aka Wine) and thusly allow you to run any windows program on MS Linux.
Yes, this tatic is mean, but its very possible, and if I were a Billionare, and were looking to take over the linux market, its what I'd do.
"We are simply embracing the new technoligy of linux." "We are no longer competing against it, we are working with it", etc etc
As I said, I didn't originaly think of this, but I personaly believe its very possible, though you can make up your own mind.
Great episode, couple of comments and items
on
Live from a Sunspot
·
· Score: 1
When you all talk at once, it does get hard to understand you.
Also, Rob seems to speak louder at some times, as if he leans towards the microphone.:)
The music is nice.:)
My favourite spam: Microsofts Y2k email. I don't USE MS products! I don't care.:) The others is cheap US interstate call rates. I live in New Zealand, we don't even have states.:)
I agree with others in previous comments sections, having you read out some comments/emails and commenting on them would be nice, answer the question, or make fun of it *grin*.
Hmm, come to think of it, slashdot the US Postal system, offer to answer a FEW questions sent in via snail mail. That'd work, till the US Postal system gets slashdoted, and then refuses to deliver your mail, and you don't get your CDs you order:)
Ahh but, Slashdot originaly wasn't owned by Andover.net.
And anyway, other tlds are abused frequently. (I thought the country TLDs (eg.nu) was for host in that country. But we've all seen the rash of those tlds.:))
A quick rgrep through the linux source for "uptime" reveals:
val.uptime = jiffies / HZ;
Thusly, if your jiffies wrap, your uptime will too.
If your box does anything mission critical, maybe its time for a reboot? There are still the occasional problems in the kernel with jiffy rapping.
btw - My first thoughts when I saw this was; "hmm, I'm sure this has been answered before in other places", but I did a search and couldn't find any references to uptime wrapping. (admitidly I didn't search too hard).
Welp, on a Linux 2.2.6 box, with a NE2000 PCI network card, on a Pentium 133, I ran some tests.
I wrote a program that counts the number of bytes read in from stdin, and then writes them to stdout. It also records the start/end time of its run, and starts timing from the recieving of the 1st byte.
Then, I setup 2 netcat sessions, one listening on a port, and putting the output in/dev/null, and the other reading from/dev/zero, and piping it through my program, and then through to netcat, which sent it to the other netcat.
I did this on both connections to 127.0.0.1 and my network cards IP, and the results are almost identical.
I suspect that my CPU is probably limiting things though:)
Later I'll try it on a K6II/400 and see if the results are any different.
Btw - I realize that my test isn't exactly accurate, but the figures are probably in the right area. If you see an obvious mistake in my measuring, let me know.
Oh, if you want the program to laugh at my coding, email me:)
Lets not forget, when you do stuff via SMB, it needs to first be packaged up in smb packets, then sent through to the network device, which then puts a TCP/UDP header on it, and then an IP header on it. I'm not quite sure where it figures out that its destined for the local machine, but it will be ethier here or at the next level down (putting a ethernet header on it).
Why do ALL this stuff instead of just taking the shortcut? Because the loopback device (127.x.x.x) is suppose to simulate a network. loopback will be faster only in that it doesn't have to put it on the wire for xx milliseconds. I'm not saying there are any inbuilt delays, rather loopback wasn't designed with speed in mind.
For highspeed communication to processes on your local machine, you probably shouldn't use network sockets. I'm not sure, but Unix sockets may be faster, otherwise pipes.
Its a dog-eat-dog world out there, and one must take any and all advantages one can get. Therefore having a P.E., puts you one up on someone who doesn't.
To not get one when the opertunity arises would be foolish at best.
Slashdot Mirror
This has a lot to do with who does own a database... If I go out, messure the rainfall over a period of a year at 10 different places, and then put that into a database, its mine. I don't think anyone but mother nature can contest that (unless I put it in an Access database, then MS might contend ;)).
But if I go and put all the information I know about everyone I know into a database, who does the database belong to? Can I go and sell the information? The 1991 Privacy Act in New Zealand says that if I am a company, and I collect information about ppl, one of the things I must do is along ppl access to view/modify there record. (Within reason, ppl can't demand to modify their bank balance ;)). I also must state what I plan to do with the information, including wether I plan to sell it. Ianal, but I don't think it prohibits me from selling it to anyone I want.
Theres a good reason for this, our electoral rolls (list of ppl who are enrolled to vote, names, addresses, etc) are availible for purchase, (incidentaly, in order to have my record unavailible, I have to have a "good" reason, eg I'm being stalked, and I have a restraining order, etc. I can't opt out of it just because I want to).
This means that my database of your personal habits I noticed is mine. And I can do with it what I want. (Note; there is an option for various personal defimation(sp) laws here if I say false things).
Now that thats settled, what DO I want to do with my database of your habits? Well, I believe in free speach, my programs are GPL, so I want to make it free.
I will license my database under a "free" license. This license is NOT designed to allow ppl to make money off of my database, so the same rights must be transmitted to the user of the database. So, the license must allow a user to "copy" the database one record at a time if they like.
Now, the big thing, cost. Simple, same as the GPL, a distribution fee. ie you can charge a reasonable fee for the distribution of the database in whole to the user.
Ahh, but what about accessing records, eg a web database, or phone, whatever. Thats fine, you can charge me whatever, that is outside the scope of the license, but what is in scope, is you MUST offer the entire database for a reasonable cost.
"What!" you cry, "This is no good for me". Fine, then don't use the license, if you want to make money out of something, why are you trying to use a "Free" license?
The point of the matter is, a "free" database license should not be orientated at making money. I don't earn a cent from the GPL programs I write. If i wanted to, I could, I'd just use a different license. But I don't, and I want my database of your personal habits to be free aswell.
The minute you try and work out how a company can still make money with this license, you defeat the purpose of it. As I said, you can offer access to the database for whatever price you want, but you must offer the entire database for a resonable price too. RedHat makes their money by basically selling pretty boxes and support.
Stop trying to work out how you can make money out of database, and start working out how you can make it available for all.
They *WANT* to report the world has ended. As soon as anything went wrong, the question was asked, "Is this the y2k bug?". The only *major* y2k-bug event I've heard of is the monitoring system in the nuke plant in japan, but last time I checked, "Its currently unknown wether this was caused by the y2k bug, and wether any further nuclear power plants will suffer similar problems in the future"...
One thing I did find funny was Mercury Power (a power provider here in NZ) had ads weeks before the date, "There WILL be a power outtage in New Zealand on Jan 1 2000, just like there is one almost every day. More often that not, its caused by this: ***insert picture of car slaming into power poll***. Drive safe these holidays."
Well, they were right, in Ottago, a drunk driver plowed into a power poll last night, and cause a 30 min outtage. Whats strange is the media were still saying its unknown if it was caused by the y2k bug AFTER it was established as being a drunk driver.
Anyways, onto the topic again, New Zealand had the first millenium baby. (infact, I believe the first 3 or so). the very first one, a healthy baby boy was born 1 minute past midnight in Auckland. However, the family (good on them), are insisting on a media blackout. No reporters have been told any other information.
Now the media WANT this millenium baby, but can you imagine what will happen to the poor kid. Then again, it could also be a good thing, if the parents run into financial trouble later on in life, they can just come forward as the parents :).
As I've said to all those I've talked to, as I predicted, the bug will mostly be lots of small problems. We've already heard about a few, and come monday more will come, and come Mar 1, err, Feb 29, there will be more. Though I suspect most of the Feb 29 ones will be about wrong day of week for things. (You'll get paid one day later ;)). If we are very lucky, our banks will have problems, and you won't be charged for a days interest :)
I admit, at the last minute I grabbed a few empty big coke bottles and filled 'em with water, but it was all for naught. Maybe in the year 3000 when we are REALLY computer automated we'll have some big problems, till then, its time to ask
What am I gonna do with my .50calibre, the 10,000 rounds of ammo, and this damn bunker in my back yard?
Happy New Year, keep on coding, and don't forget. Y2k is over, we can now start prepending all dates with "20" and only storing 2 digits again!
I cannot recall any time where the Open Source or Free Software community has come together to provide money. Yes, donations are made to various organisations related to this, but as far as I'm aware, nothing big.
This will be an interesting test. The article claims we need money to put together a good case. If we do manage to get together enough money, I really suspect that it will be due to only a few peoples/companies contribution (eg: A recently very rich person who may own some stock in some little linux company ;) (No, I'm not saying he should donate money, nor am I asking, but I wouldn't be surprised if he did. It could certainly start the ball rolling.)
I guess it *COULD* happen. But geeks are lazy, if the EFF was to put up a page where you could enter your credit card #, and an ammount (and state everywhere on the page that ANY ammount (even $5) will do. Then maybe...
But personally, I probably won't unless I can see it will do good. So we need something to start the ball rolling. A slashdot article would help, but I suspect a large number of people will visit, but not many will donate.
But then again, maybe they will. As I said, geeks are lazy, but if all it requires is our credit card number, an ammount, and press the "submit" button, then maybe I will, and maybe others will donate.
One thing I would suggest for the page would, once (or if) things start rolling, put an indicator indicating the ammount pledged so far. (And maybe a $/hit ratio on the page). But I wouldn't put it on immediatly, it would be rather dissapointing to come to the page and see "$22.50 has been donated. 4000 people have visited this page"
mmm, *shrug*, thats my thoughts on the matter. You can probably ignore all that ramblings, but put up the page anyway. I wanna max out my credit card. :)
These are hardly what I would call "Hard numbers". They are even worse than a microsoft sponsered comparision.
Don't get me wrong, I love linux, and I highly believe that yes, windows IS miserable for uptime, and yes FreeBSD does kick ass with uptime. (Linux has more frequent kernel release, and we haven't yet figured a way to upgrade your kernel w/o rebooting).
I'm surprised that an article phrased in such a way that its sounds as if its suppose to be serious would be posted on slashdot.
Thats enough ranting, I'll probably get moderated down as a troll. But seriously, tune out anyone who quotes these numbers as reliable.
I just found out, the source code to Linux and a lot of Unix Operating Systems has been avalible to the HACKER world! Aswell as the source code to the Apache web server, which is used in a lot of places!
Half the internet is comprimised! All my online transactions, my credit cards! Hackers have them all! Thank goodness we still have Microsoft with their totaly secure web servers!
Quick, do as I've done, take all your money out of the banks (They may run Unix you know!), and give it all to Microsoft (Its almost Y2k, so you'd better hurry!). Microsoft will save you! But don't give it all away, use some of it to buy 100 gallons of water, a 50 calibre machine gun, and 10,000 rounds of ammo, cause baby, Y2k is comming!
Eeeermmm, sorry, this is Zaffles brain returning back in control now, I couldn't stop that outbreak before, self-control circuits blew at that comment. They have been repaired.
Whip me, spank me, moderate me down for offtopic-ness! - Its funny, laugh.
Ok, well, this seems to be mainly about recording transcripts with the agent as the 2nd person. Unless its a public forum, such as an IRC chat channel, or slashdot comments, its very difficult to log "private" conversations between two people unless you have the help of one of those persons, or you seek the help of the 3rd party hosting the means to hold this conversation. (eg an IRC server, or in the case of email, one of the users ISPs).
In respect to logging conversations made to a police officer. I agree with the judge. Its called expectation of privacy. People on the net should NOT expect their conversation not to be logged by the user they are talking to.
However, I agree that 3rd party recording (where the recording is done by the police when they aren't involved in the conversation) is in the grey area. Most services that I know of that over "private" conversation (Email, ICQ, IRC, etc) will disclaim that you may not have privacy. Although a lot of IRC servers state that the server does NOT record conversations.
Personally, I log everything I can when it comes to the net. And if I later choose to use those logs, so be it. If someone has a problem with that, they shouldn't have talked to me in the first place.
Washington must have some pretty funny laws. I can't understand how phoning your local police station, and saying "I did it, I killed so and so, and the body is buired here, my name is blah blah, and I live at blah", can be any different to me walking into the police station and saying the exact same thing, except that I save the cops the car trip out to pick me up. (In this case, I'd probably take the bus in, ethier that or find somewhere to park my car long term :))
... Since its still very possible for someone such as myself (Not that I would ever do such a thing), to get a pirated movie.
As someone pointed out, at the moment, its pretty damn difficult to actually COPY a DVD onto another DVD. Since the hardware requirements are very large. However, if I wanted to start distributing DVD movies, I'd just go buy a DVD player for my TV, and plug the video/audio out into my PC, and start capturing. Sure I loose quality, and also the neat things about DVDs, but if its just the movie I want, its fine.
People who buy pirated movies rarely do it for the high quality, the large number of pirated video cds are copied from demo disks with those nice symbols that float around the screen and words that scroll along the bottom. Ethier that or from someone sitting at the back with a tripod and video camera (or even worse, as one of the ID4 pirated copies was, someone at the back HOLDING a camera, and laughing alot)
By trying to keep the actual algorithm and keys secret, they can only try to achieve 2 things
1) Control of who can make DVD players, and what it costs to make them.
2) Pirating the actual entire DVDs (not just the movie on it) is difficult (but as case in point, not impossible).
If I recall correctly, this all started because an authorized DVD player maker accidentaly left the encryption keys unencrypted (I don't recall the specifics). If I were the DVD people, I'd be more concerned with suing this company than, as many people have stated, trying to close the barn doors after the horses have escaped.
Lets face it, no matter what they do, unless they someone get every country in the world to execute anyone found with pirated DVDs (mmm, world domination by MS is probably how that'll be achieved), its going to be impossible to stop DVDs, or any movie from being pirated. The most they can achieve is stopping mass-pirating by underground companies setup to pirate, and even then, as I outlined above, you can STILL get the actual movie, with no reverse engineering required.
Finding the distributors of anything pirated would be, in my guess akin to hunting down drug distributors. Except there is a $10,000 reward for information about big time piraters (atleast in New Zealand), but I don't recall any kind of reward for information about drug distributers (except maybe a lighter sentance for yourself :))
In the end, all the big companies can, and will end up doing, is trying to convince the public that pirated stuff is bad, and you should pay retail. And also trying to hunt down those big time piraters.
In regards to this restraining order, it will achieve nothing but hurt a few dozen people, and in the pirating world, unless that dirty dozen are big time distributors, it will achieve nothing.
In respect to the new design of shuttle that you talked about;
Landing pads and structs saving wieght over wheels? Thats a bit debatable. And I'd think the wieght GAINED by having to take the fuel to land verticaly would be greater than the wieght of wings for landing. It would take a tonne of fuel to "land" a craft vericaly using rockets on earth. It takes a load to get it up as it is.
You would probably double your fuel requirement, which I suspect would wiegh more than the wings of the space shuttle. (Remember, the space shuttles engines aren't the main lifting during take off.
And since Nasa is fighting for every penny it can get, and doing well, launching cheaper satilites and space vechiles, I can't see how it would be in NASAs best interest to intentionaly destroy a very expensive prototype, then deliberatly pay more money and time to develop another one.
The shuttle too can launch fly, and land with noone at the pilot seat, but we get more from having people up there, fixing any problems that go wrong, and doing experiments. I'd certainly like to see this new craft fix problems in the Hubble without a human hand up there.
Well done, its a winner.
and btw - the entire slashdot world says one collective "Doh!".
I hope you sent your solution to the guy before you posted it here :).
Now, as to why the rest of the world couldn't figure it out. Personally, I was wayyyy of track in my last assumption. (Its ethier a trick of words, or something that never happens in normal play), and I think most people didn't find it because its valid play and its also very agressive of both sides. In almost all the solutions I worked on, I very rarely considered taking pieces. (except for Knight takes Rook :), I wouldn't rule it out ofcourse, but the way I was working, the less pieces you have, the less you have to block the king with.
The cunning in this solution is finding the location that the king is block by his own troops, and his troops can't save him. In the final resting place, the king could only move 4 ways. 3 of which were blocked by the black queen, and the other blocked by the black Knight.
But as I predicted, it didn't involve castling, and it did involve primarily the black knight kicking butt to get over to the other side.
Its a shame the puzzle has moved from the "dark corridors" of chess out into the public eye. I imagine now it will be difficult to use such a thing to stump your friends, but never-the-less, It will be fun to try.
I would be keenly interested to hear exactly how "Spicy Bisquit" did indeed find the solution, and how a Ti82 helped him.
Nxe4 was brilliant too. :) I think the best tip you could give someone who was trying to solve this, would be "White must sacrifice her queen". It would ofcourse, make it 10 times easier :)
Once again, congrats to the winner, and we are all keenly awaiting your next post telling us exactly how you did it.
...where there are 2 articles: "Science: 50 Year Old Quantum Physics Problem Solved" and "A Christmas Chess Puzzle" next to each other and having tried this problem myself, leads me to daydream this:
Slashdot, 50 years from now...
Slashdot: 50 Year Old Chess Puzzle solved
Finaly 50 years after the chess puzzle was posted, an Anonymous Coward has posted a correct and working solution to the elusive chess puzzle.
This puzzle was first introduced 50 years ago at Christmas time, as something for the readers to chew on. CmdrTaco, Hermos, and thousands of other slashdot readers have not been to sleep since.
The article was upto its 10 millionth comment when Hermos finally archieved it on its dedicated 50terabyte drive.
Another thing to note is the knight cannot take the rook in under 3 moves. This only leaves 2 moves to play with.
Castling takes 4 moves minimum. That only leaves 1 move to move the rook into a position that the other knight can then take it, and put the king into mate (discover or otherwise).
This leads me to conclude that castling isn't an option.
At first (and 2nd, 3rd, 4th... nth) glance, it seems impossible. There just aren't enough moves. And anyone who has tried this has come to the conclusion, "I can do it in six".
Grand Masters have been stumped. So this means one of two things.
it ISN'T classical. And its the sort of move which never happens in chess.
and/or Theres a trick in the interpretation of the instructions.
One question I have, is a matter of wording. and ends in the fifth move with knight takes rook mate. Is it possible that the knight it white, and the mate is done by black?
Technically, it'd still be move 5. And in move a knight could attack a rook.
Only problem with this is, it takes a knight 4 moves to attack a rook (assuming the rook doesn't move, since I'd assume the other player would be moving ass to get into a mate possition).
From left to right, when sitting on Whites side of the table, is A-H. From the white side to the black side, is 1-8.
:)
So D1 is Whites Queen.
When stating a move, the result is sometimes stated by itself, when its obvious what happened.
(eg: e4, theres only one piece that can make that move, the pawn at e2).
For more info, check out your local chess faq
I don't know about the rest of the world, but for me, it *SEEMS* that the StarOffice browser is pretty good. I haven't done any advanced testing, but it doesn't *SEEM* to crash as ofter as nutscrape, and works a bit better than Mozzila and Opera. (I just tried the Opera beta out, and it seems to crash just a bit too often, but hey, its a beta).
:).
:)
Only thing is, StarOffice isn't free. (Well, it is free (as in beer) for personal evaluation use).
Its also a pretty damn hefty download for just using it as a browser. 70megs download. ~150-170 installed. But, atleast you get an entire office suit for that price
If this thing doesn't crash that much, I might buy it.
5. They want to make a Linux distro. Neither good nor bad, really - thanks to GPL, they can't possibly take over the market, and another distro probably wouldn't hurt anything.
Unfortunatly, this may not be such a great thing... I don't remember who did it, but someone wrote an article/rant on what MS could do. I believe it went something like this.
MS Releases MS Linux. Its nothing special, and probably doesn't containing anything new.
MS then ports MS Office to linux. (obviously it won't be open source) Good news at this point, since it'll mean more Linux users.
MS then makes some changes, tweaks, or a binary kernel module, than means that MS Office will only run on MS Linux. This will boost MS Linux up with whatever is the current leader (Redhat, Corel, Debian, who knows). Since MS has the best of both worlds. You can run anything any other distro can, but you can also run MS Office.
MS then begins to port other applications over to MS Linux, making sure each one can ONLY run on MS Linux. They could also port the Windows libraries to linux (aka Wine) and thusly allow you to run any windows program on MS Linux.
Yes, this tatic is mean, but its very possible, and if I were a Billionare, and were looking to take over the linux market, its what I'd do.
"We are simply embracing the new technoligy of linux." "We are no longer competing against it, we are working with it", etc etc
As I said, I didn't originaly think of this, but I personaly believe its very possible, though you can make up your own mind.
When you all talk at once, it does get hard to understand you.
:)
:)
:) :)
:)
Also, Rob seems to speak louder at some times, as if he leans towards the microphone.
The music is nice.
My favourite spam: Microsofts Y2k email. I don't USE MS products! I don't care.
The others is cheap US interstate call rates. I live in New Zealand, we don't even have states.
I agree with others in previous comments sections, having you read out some comments/emails and commenting on them would be nice, answer the question, or make fun of it *grin*.
Hmm, come to think of it, slashdot the US Postal system, offer to answer a FEW questions sent in via snail mail. That'd work, till the US Postal system gets slashdoted, and then refuses to deliver your mail, and you don't get your CDs you order
Its not an "official" tld.
:)
.. take a look at a nslookup on it.
Com:
Non-authoritative answer:
com nameserver = F.GTLD-SERVERS.NET
com nameserver = F.ROOT-SERVERS.NET
...etc... eg the root name servers.
Int:
Non-authoritative answer:
int nameserver = NS.ISI.EDU
int nameserver = NS0.JA.NET
int nameserver = NS1.CS.UCL.AC.UK
int nameserver = NS.UU.NET
See what I mean?
Ahh but, Slashdot originaly wasn't owned by Andover.net.
.nu) was for host in that country. But we've all seen the rash of those tlds.:))
And anyway, other tlds are abused frequently. (I thought the country TLDs (eg
A quick rgrep through the linux source for "uptime" reveals:
val.uptime = jiffies / HZ;
Thusly, if your jiffies wrap, your uptime will too.
If your box does anything mission critical, maybe its time for a reboot? There are still the occasional problems in the kernel with jiffy rapping.
btw - My first thoughts when I saw this was; "hmm, I'm sure this has been answered before in other places", but I did a search and couldn't find any references to uptime wrapping. (admitidly I didn't search too hard).
Nothing beats it.
:)
I wrote a program that counts the number of bytes read in from stdin, and then writes them to stdout. It also records the start/end time of its run, and starts timing from the recieving of the 1st byte.
Then, I setup 2 netcat sessions, one listening on a port, and putting the output in /dev/null, and the other reading from /dev/zero, and piping it through my program, and then through to netcat, which sent it to the other netcat.
I did this on both connections to 127.0.0.1 and my network cards IP, and the results are almost identical.
225583104.000000 bytes
6612615.740435 Bytes/sec
52900925.923483 bits/sec
I suspect that my CPU is probably limiting things though :)
Later I'll try it on a K6II/400 and see if the results are any different.
Btw - I realize that my test isn't exactly accurate, but the figures are probably in the right area. If you see an obvious mistake in my measuring, let me know.
Oh, if you want the program to laugh at my coding, email me :)
Why do ALL this stuff instead of just taking the shortcut? Because the loopback device (127.x.x.x) is suppose to simulate a network. loopback will be faster only in that it doesn't have to put it on the wire for xx milliseconds. I'm not saying there are any inbuilt delays, rather loopback wasn't designed with speed in mind.
For highspeed communication to processes on your local machine, you probably shouldn't use network sockets. I'm not sure, but Unix sockets may be faster, otherwise pipes.
Nick
http://us1.samba.org/samba/archives.html.
Its a dog-eat-dog world out there, and one must take any and all advantages one can get. Therefore having a P.E., puts you one up on someone who doesn't.
To not get one when the opertunity arises would be foolish at best.
whitehouse.gov running Debain?
nsa.gov running LinuxPPC?
Slashdot.org running IIS