I've just set up an old, donated PC box at a church I work for (as a volunteer) to be a firewall - they have recieved a sizable donation to be used as a computer lab by the community kids who attend the Homework Help Club and other such services (at which I also tutor).
This is a fairly decent machine (pentium 233, 32M RAM) - more than enough functionality to be a firewall (IPChains/IPTables, BIND, SQUID, DHCPD). My question now is, are there any programs that can utilize the remaining time effectively?
I would love to have the following features, if at all possible:
- access to GNU compilers (free) over the network. Editor tasks run on (windows) clients and just compiliation and execution takes place on firewall box. Possible? Or should I look into CGYWIN?
- access to Linux proper. X servers for windows (for free, and open source) anybody? Telnet's the *easy* part.
- easy re-imaging of all client systems. Should I look at samba for this or does anybody have better sugguestions?
Is it possible to do n-way (n>2) networking with firewire? I was intending to use USB because each unit has two USB ports - so each unit can be daisychained to two others (granted, I suppose they'd have to be set up as routers).
OTOH, this is all roughly moot, because as the article points out the kits come with ethernet connectors - we could always just use those for their intended purpose. ^_^
Ok, who thinks they just found their next computer? I know I've been waiting for this to happen for a long while so I could finally justify the cost of one or more PS2s (mmm, USB networking) - it's not a toy, it's my development station! Err... yeah! ^^;;
Given the capabilities of such things as MOSIX, Beowulf clusters, etc, etc... why would *anyone* ever want to get rid of a computer? Especially the government, who really doesn't have to worry about the comparatively miniscule power that a headless computer draws (ok, it -might- matter in CA, but that's a different matter).
Let's see... I still have a 486DX2, two Pentium II systems... all on 10BaseT and running their various operating systems very happily. Oh, and I *did* have another 486 which is now in various places, different parts doing different things (hey, a free computer-grade power supply. No complaints here.)
Instead of destroying all those machines... just toss them into a distributed computing center, leave 'em powered, and use them for backup servers or something. Or even... have the military port MojoNation for internal use.::grin::
This effort is by no means localized to the United States of America (or the Corporate Republic formerly known as... but that's a different story). [And even if it were, stereotyping, xenophobia, and the like are widely frowned upon.] Citation: Japan produces an incredible percentage of the hardware, software, and tools, and conducts a huge amount of the research in AI and AL fields. The USA is not alone.
The 'strong AI' hypothesis has yet to be proven wrong - all AIs have had one real problem: they've only been run for a very short amount of time. Take a human, "run" it for a year, and tell me what you get. A pretty useless machine. Ten years, that's better. Thirty is even better. Show me an AI that's been up for thirty years, can you?
::sighs:: RMS, GNU/Linux, and the like are radical in that they have or are relatively new ways of viewing and dealing with information. Yes, they're somewhat leftist in nature. No, they are not communistic, as far as I understand. More a breed of anarchism than anything else, though personally I take issue with assigning a piece of software (GNU/Linux) a political standing (we don't yet have AI, after all:)
Man coming closer to god(s)? I'm an athiest an am so perhaps somewhat unqualified to debate this point, but... why must there be a god? Why is it a rediculous notion to propose that if life started up once (divine or naturally) that we can't do it again? So we'll screw up, maybe. SO DID GOD. Sorry, but he did.
Scientists should work on "practical things, which will help man get closer to god" - I should think all of biology, from ecosystems to molecular interactions, an effort to get us closer to god - by understanding ourselves, we become more like the Erdos's SF. The HGP seems to be but the latest and greatest example.
Science in general is the attempt to understand our world. I would say that that matches your goals.
--Begin Semisarcasm--
Or do you wish science to stop its ongoing research and attempt to make these force-fields for you so that you don't have to worry about god disappearing? Like it or not, god can only be found in the increasingly small gaps of science.
Oh, and as to people having cellphones being inconsiderate morons, well... it is not reasonable to force your demands on everybody around you, is it? Some people need communication - cellphones provide. Granted, vibrating is less intrusive, but that's really an issue beyond your control. Though I bet you'd make me take off my Tux hat if I came into your church. Funny that you can, but scientists can't force your priests to take off their robes if they enter a lab.
--End Semisarcasm--
Moderators: Yeah, it's a rant. And not even a very well thought out one. I apologize. Moderate me as you will.
The whole point of science is to expand its scope indefinitely
If only that were possible. But, there's this neat little bit of "metalogic" (using logic to prove something about logic) called Godel's Incompleteness Theorem. See the proof of it (and of the Church-Turing Halting Hypothesis, which is used in the proof) here, or any number of other places:
"http://ds.dial.pipex.com/town/gateway/a/aapo62/go del/"
(There are no spaces in this URL, but for some reason preview insists on putting one in.)
I'm not sure about their definition of a computer, but it is certainly good enough to give the idea of what they are talking about, and errors there do not damage the proof at all.
The long and short of it is that no system of axiomatic logic with a finite set of axioms can ever be used to prove everything. Any set that could would be internally inconsistant (e.g. able to violate the Halting Theorum). Science is such a system, as is mathematics.
Philosophers: go wild.
Anybody want to take a stab at disproving this? ^_^ That would be much more "pleasing," but of course that really doesn't matter to the universe at all.
Wait wait... Knowing M$, wouldn't they release their NDA, and just about everything else that's important, under the NDA? Or does their NDA say something like "can not reproduce protected works nor this document?" Is that possible? And if the NDA is up for free reproduction, wouldn't that seem to be going against M$'s proprietary nature? Because then somebody could do a GPL-ish thing and modify the licence to apply to them and not M$, turn around, and::gasp:: use something from Microsoft for free that MS wasn't offering for free.
Just a technical question: If I can't read one of the files, how does DeCSS work at all? All DeCSS does [as I understand] is take one stream of data [CSS encrypted] and output the decrypted MPEG stream.
It strikes me that any I/O errors would be produced from either bad media or a bad drive or a bad driver, yes?
They say:
Mojo Nation is a peer-to-peer network, enabling any computer on its network to talk to any other without having to go through a centralized server.
Then they say:
At that time, the debtor pays up by transferring a digital coin from his account on the Mojo Nation token server to the creditor account.
Correct me if I'm just not getting something, but doesn't the need for a "token server" require that the system not be decentralized? I.E. If 'the man' or whoever can shut down [by whatever methods] the MojoNation "token server," won't the whole system collapse very soon? I would suspect that each client ("broker") would be unable to continue functioning, yes?
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I've just set up an old, donated PC box at a church I work for (as a volunteer) to be a firewall - they have recieved a sizable donation to be used as a computer lab by the community kids who attend the Homework Help Club and other such services (at which I also tutor).
This is a fairly decent machine (pentium 233, 32M RAM) - more than enough functionality to be a firewall (IPChains/IPTables, BIND, SQUID, DHCPD). My question now is, are there any programs that can utilize the remaining time effectively?
I would love to have the following features, if at all possible:
- access to GNU compilers (free) over the network. Editor tasks run on (windows) clients and just compiliation and execution takes place on firewall box. Possible? Or should I look into CGYWIN?
- access to Linux proper. X servers for windows (for free, and open source) anybody? Telnet's the *easy* part.
- easy re-imaging of all client systems. Should I look at samba for this or does anybody have better sugguestions?
Any other help appreciated! Thank you in advance!
--_Knots
Is it possible to do n-way (n>2) networking with firewire? I was intending to use USB because each unit has two USB ports - so each unit can be daisychained to two others (granted, I suppose they'd have to be set up as routers).
OTOH, this is all roughly moot, because as the article points out the kits come with ethernet connectors - we could always just use those for their intended purpose. ^_^
--Knots
Ok, who thinks they just found their next computer? I know I've been waiting for this to happen for a long while so I could finally justify the cost of one or more PS2s (mmm, USB networking) - it's not a toy, it's my development station! Err... yeah! ^^;;
Ain't Linux great?
--Knots
FYI, the patch *makes* it a compile option under "Processor Type and Features." It's a Y/N called "Preemptible Kernel."
--_Knots
Given the capabilities of such things as MOSIX, Beowulf clusters, etc, etc... why would *anyone* ever want to get rid of a computer? Especially the government, who really doesn't have to worry about the comparatively miniscule power that a headless computer draws (ok, it -might- matter in CA, but that's a different matter). Let's see... I still have a 486DX2, two Pentium II systems... all on 10BaseT and running their various operating systems very happily. Oh, and I *did* have another 486 which is now in various places, different parts doing different things (hey, a free computer-grade power supply. No complaints here.) Instead of destroying all those machines... just toss them into a distributed computing center, leave 'em powered, and use them for backup servers or something. Or even... have the military port MojoNation for internal use. ::grin::
Ohkay... I'll bite.
:)
This effort is by no means localized to the United States of America (or the Corporate Republic formerly known as... but that's a different story). [And even if it were, stereotyping, xenophobia, and the like are widely frowned upon.] Citation: Japan produces an incredible percentage of the hardware, software, and tools, and conducts a huge amount of the research in AI and AL fields. The USA is not alone.
The 'strong AI' hypothesis has yet to be proven wrong - all AIs have had one real problem: they've only been run for a very short amount of time. Take a human, "run" it for a year, and tell me what you get. A pretty useless machine. Ten years, that's better. Thirty is even better. Show me an AI that's been up for thirty years, can you?
::sighs:: RMS, GNU/Linux, and the like are radical in that they have or are relatively new ways of viewing and dealing with information. Yes, they're somewhat leftist in nature. No, they are not communistic, as far as I understand. More a breed of anarchism than anything else, though personally I take issue with assigning a piece of software (GNU/Linux) a political standing (we don't yet have AI, after all
Man coming closer to god(s)? I'm an athiest an am so perhaps somewhat unqualified to debate this point, but... why must there be a god? Why is it a rediculous notion to propose that if life started up once (divine or naturally) that we can't do it again? So we'll screw up, maybe. SO DID GOD. Sorry, but he did.
Scientists should work on "practical things, which will help man get closer to god" - I should think all of biology, from ecosystems to molecular interactions, an effort to get us closer to god - by understanding ourselves, we become more like the Erdos's SF. The HGP seems to be but the latest and greatest example.
Science in general is the attempt to understand our world. I would say that that matches your goals.
--Begin Semisarcasm--
Or do you wish science to stop its ongoing research and attempt to make these force-fields for you so that you don't have to worry about god disappearing? Like it or not, god can only be found in the increasingly small gaps of science.
Oh, and as to people having cellphones being inconsiderate morons, well... it is not reasonable to force your demands on everybody around you, is it? Some people need communication - cellphones provide. Granted, vibrating is less intrusive, but that's really an issue beyond your control. Though I bet you'd make me take off my Tux hat if I came into your church. Funny that you can, but scientists can't force your priests to take off their robes if they enter a lab.
--End Semisarcasm--
Moderators: Yeah, it's a rant. And not even a very well thought out one. I apologize. Moderate me as you will.
--Knots
The whole point of science is to expand its scope indefinitely
o del/"
If only that were possible. But, there's this neat little bit of "metalogic" (using logic to prove something about logic) called Godel's Incompleteness Theorem. See the proof of it (and of the Church-Turing Halting Hypothesis, which is used in the proof) here, or any number of other places:
"http://ds.dial.pipex.com/town/gateway/a/aapo62/g
(There are no spaces in this URL, but for some reason preview insists on putting one in.)
I'm not sure about their definition of a computer, but it is certainly good enough to give the idea of what they are talking about, and errors there do not damage the proof at all.
The long and short of it is that no system of axiomatic logic with a finite set of axioms can ever be used to prove everything. Any set that could would be internally inconsistant (e.g. able to violate the Halting Theorum). Science is such a system, as is mathematics.
Philosophers: go wild.
Anybody want to take a stab at disproving this? ^_^ That would be much more "pleasing," but of course that really doesn't matter to the universe at all.
--Knots
Wait wait... Knowing M$, wouldn't they release their NDA, and just about everything else that's important, under the NDA? ::gasp:: use something from Microsoft for free that MS wasn't offering for free.
Or does their NDA say something like "can not reproduce protected works nor this document?" Is that possible?
And if the NDA is up for free reproduction, wouldn't that seem to be going against M$'s proprietary nature? Because then somebody could do a GPL-ish thing and modify the licence to apply to them and not M$, turn around, and
Knots
Ok, Ok, so I need to get a life.
So DVD drives "naturally" exist in a semi-broken state and need to be told with a key to become fully functional?
Does anybody know where I could find replacement firmware? ^^
TheKnottedOne
Just a technical question: If I can't read one of the files, how does DeCSS work at all? All DeCSS does [as I understand] is take one stream of data [CSS encrypted] and output the decrypted MPEG stream.
It strikes me that any I/O errors would be produced from either bad media or a bad drive or a bad driver, yes?
Don't flame me, I'm trying to learn.
TheKnottedOne
Aren't they contradicting themselves?
They say:
Mojo Nation is a peer-to-peer network, enabling any computer on its network to talk to any other without having to go through a centralized server.
Then they say:
At that time, the debtor pays up by transferring a digital coin from his account on the Mojo Nation token server to the creditor account.
Correct me if I'm just not getting something, but doesn't the need for a "token server" require that the system not be decentralized? I.E. If 'the man' or whoever can shut down [by whatever methods] the MojoNation "token server," won't the whole system collapse very soon? I would suspect that each client ("broker") would be unable to continue functioning, yes?
--Knots