My friend registered a domain name a couple of years ago in his name, but used my address. I wanted to change all the information to my name but could not
So the domain belongs to your `friend', doesn't it? Ergo, only your `friend' should be allowed to change its details...
Or am I missing something dead subtle here? Like if I order a book (or a pizza) using my own money, but get it delivered to my office, the book (or pizza) mysteriously becomes the property of my employer, just because of the address?
It still runs on fossil fuel! And you need to be connected to a gas network, or have a propane tank (and get the gas delivered). What we need is a more self-sufficient system based on a methane converting fuel cell.
Let me just remind you that methane is an even more "efficient" greenhouse gas than carbon dioxide (by that, I mean that methane in the atmosphere traps more heat i.e. has a more pronounced greenhouse effect, that CO2).
So, it would, to my mind, be a very good idea to use fuel cells in conjunction with septic tanks...
This is how I see it. You have a house out in the sticks. You have a septic tanks because you're not connected to mains sewerage. Your shit goes in the septic tank, rots, makes methane. The methane gets taken up into a storage tanks and pressure-regulator, then goes into the fuel cell to generate electricity.
This could even become a kind of a self-regulating system, in that the more people you have living in the house, the more shit they produce, the more methane gets produced, the more electricity gets produced which gets used up because more people usually results in increased electricity usage (image all those house guests playing Sim City and reading slashdot on their laptops...).
KR.
I've been thinking about this, too... One idea is the CD-Rom drive from a portable, if that'll stand up to reasonable, everyday driving. (i.e. on the roads... I don't suppose that you're intending to listen to the music while doing the Paris-Dakar rally, are you?)
But the best way I can think of to avoid vibrations and G-shocks damaging moving parts (like drive spindles, heads) is to simply get rid of them. Go for 100% solid-state, disk-on-chip, PCM-CIA, whatever they're called now... You know, the things just made for hostile environments and embedded systems...
Can you imagine a LART with a couple of gigabytes of solid-state silicon discs?
So personal flying is going to be the next big thing? I don't think so...
But to those people who worry that it will take off in a big way, rest assured; it's not going to become the preferred method of transport for the masses in the next twenty years.
You have to bear in mind that this is going to be very very expensive, if it ever gets off the ground. So that reduces the risk of having the air as crowded as the LA freeways. Next, the national aviation authorities are going to be as strict as possible with giving out licences to fly these things. Just think about compulsory genetic testing to check for a "possible tendency to [alcoholism,drug abuse,short attention spans,*] resulting in refusal of licence, and random drug and alcohol tests upon landing, with instant revocation of your licence if positive...
Then if telecommuting picks up even more, there'll be fewer and fewer people needing individual transport like that just to get to and from the office... Trnasport will tend to be more and more family oriented (I believe), especially for holidays.
So if it ever catches on, it's going to stay a professional tool (like police, but also maybe farmers and photographers) and a rich playboy's plaything.
But if you want to play at James Bond right now, you can!
Check out the AutoGyro.
What, like the Apple ][ box? Lovely shade of creamy beige, like Marantz hi-fi used to be... The keyboard and motherboard in one box, with 5.1/4" disk drives placed on top... a bit like a Commodore PET... Or is my memory playing tricks on me...
Or maybe behing the look of the Apple///, or the Lisa, or early Macintoshes... lovely shades of creamy beige, parallel grooves... and very square.
As for workstations, which ones? The only one's I'm (slightly) familiar with are the IBM RS/6000 in a 19" rack... (little room for innovative design on a front-panel), various disguises of the Sun [Ultra]Sparc (from a pizza-box at first, but starting to look more and more like a "midi-tower PC", lovely shade of pale beige...) and the Silicon, oops, I mean the SGI Octane. Wow! At last, lovely shade of, er, is it indigo?
Supercomputers? Erm, lets see, is that an Origin 2000 over there in the corner? Oh no, It's a Convex SPP. Should have recognized from the fact that it looks like a scale model of the Tour Montparnasse in Paris (not Tx)... Did frogdesign do that? Looks nothing like an Apple Lisa...
Why does the article waffle on about MHz? We're not going still going to be using versions of the same crappy Pentium technology simply cranked to higher and higher clock speeds in ten years' time, are we? You can't compare a 400MHz Celeron with a 400MHz IP27 today; there's no point in talking about clock speeds (unless you're just trying to impress illiterates)...
The power supply will apparently be a "long, stick like lithium battery, bent into a doughnut"... Not if I can help it! I'll have a fuel cell that converts [m]ethanol to electricity... I'll grow fast-growing willows, pulp them (wind-powered), ferment, use a solar-powered still to get the pure alcohol.... That is, if I can't just pedal up a huge flywheel...
First, how many./ers does it take to float an ice cube in a glass of water? This has been mentioned by so many, I don't see why it didn't occur to everybody... Go read John Gribbin's book.
Secondly, I suppose the people who claim that man only had a significant effect on atmospheric carbon dioxide levels after 1820 would put that down to increasing use of fossil fuels. When you burn wood, you release the carbon stored in the structure. New trees reabsorb the released carbon dioxide to create new wood. But when you have a few million years' worth of binding up carbon into plant cells that are permanently buried, and suddenly man starts digging that up and releasing the carbon dioxide back into the air at an enormously faster rate, then the carbon dioxide levels rise quickly.
Now, seriously, go and read Gribbin's books (In Search of Schrödinger's Cat is a good read, too).
Now, I have to use Win NT 4 at work, and I was having a lot of problem with Adobe Illustrator crashing (you now, things like "illegal memory access" or "this program tried to execute an illegal instruction and has been shut down").
The WinNT admin referred to a rumour along the lines of "the boys at Micro$oft keep some of the API info secret, so that apps from other software vendors are less stable than those made by Micr$oft".
In other word, Micro$oft makes an OS, and keeps back the API information you need to write a stable application. This makes Micro4oft's own applications look better than the competitors'.
It becomes a vicious circle that any proprietary OS maker can pull off once the user base gets up to critical mass. Get the users dependent on the OS because you practically give away the apps with the OS, then screw the competitors by making it hard for competitors' apps to run reliably.
So, along comes a bunch of guys who say:
Hell, we can write an OS from the ground up, using no propritary code, that will be 100% compatible with WinDoze. That way, users can still choose to run the Micro$oft apps they've become dependent on, without shelling out for the OS,
and our FreeWin (or whatever) will be more stable than the original!
Of course Micro$oft doesn't want that... (Well, I suppose that if Micro4oft is split into two entirely separate companies,one for OS and the other for apps, the apps company won't care, as it will still make sales... but the OS company will be up shit creek without a paddle...)
However, what's to stop the apps from asking the OS to identify itself (equivalent of doing a uname -a), or looking specific bits of the code to see if it is running under the M$ Real Thing rather than a Free Better More Solid OS?
OK, so Bill got his knuckles rapped when WinDoze (was it 3.1?) gave spurious error messages when it was run over Dr DOS instead of MS-DOS. But the way the US Patents Circus is going, what's to stop Billy boy from patenting some [simple,bizarre,useless] algorithm that is systematically called by every M$ app? If the OpenWindowz Boyz are prevented from using that algorithm, every M$ app will complain and/or refuse to cooperate (so what's changed, you might ask)
Hello, my name is señor Tilverd. I have registered my family name as trademark in Spain, so it is protected.
Now, I find someone has made a website called www.dilbert.com ! I am outraged !
Everybody knows that the Spanish speaking people pronounce the v as a b (and vice-versa) and the t as a d when followed by an i and that an unvoiced d at the end of a word is pronounced as a weak t...
Ergo, the word dilbert is phonetically identical to the pronunciation of my family name and my registered trademark.
So, I am giving a yankee judge a pig pak of tollars to award me the domain dilbert.com, as is it rightfully mine!!!
How much do you think I could auction the domain Castlemain.xxxx for?
Re:Virus = 1st real a-life? Dashed off thoughts...
on
Building The Ubervirus
·
· Score: 1
What you are suggesting here is akin to a description of a good parasite.
A bad parasite is usually one living in a host other than its usual host, and doing too much damage. The point of a parasite is exactly to not do very much damage.
A badly adapted parasite, for example a worm that lives happily in a pig without damaging the pig, can do a lot of damage if a human eats undercooked pork.
Thus, the parasite kills its host. The well adapted parasite does not kill the host, lives long and prospers and reproduces more (which is its goal, if it can be said to have one).
It follows that if the goal of the computer virus is to propagate itself as widely as possible, it should not do immediate crippling damage to its host system.
There's absolutely nothing new even in the vocabulary used to discuss computer viruses...
This page uses Javascript (uggh) to determine whether the user (ironically) has Javascript enabled
It's not ironic at all!
Imagine you only speak English (albeit an approximate Americanized English), and you're on holiday somewhere where the natives speak some other language. You're hungry, or thirsty, or need directions, whatever... What are you going to do? Stop somebody, and ask "excuse me, do you speak English?"
You address the person in a language you understand, hoping to get a response.
If you get a positive response, you initiate a dialogue.
If you get a negative response, you fall back to plan B (usually give up, or speak louder and more slowly... it's common knowledge that all foreigners speak English to some degree, but most of them are hard of hearing).
Using JavaScript to determine if the browser can understand JavaScript is an analogous case.
For this to work, you have to figure out the micropayment problem. There's an overhead levied by whoever (banks, credit card companies) processes the payments.
Retail stores (in Europe, at least) often have a minimum sale for Visa card or cheque sales, sometimes as high as US$10 or even US$15 equivalent.
I believe that if a store has a high number of small transactions, the cost per transaction is lower than for a small number of medium-cost transactions.
To get this volume, maybe a gang of groups and musicians could gather together and set up a Dom Kultury, sharing studio space, web servers, and a webmaster and e-payment team... sharing the fixed costs of the cooperative.
But I think groups should use MP3 distribution as a kostenlos distribution of music to promote the things that will always be physical: live gigs.
Here's DrakFont!... Now you can import TrueType fonts and use them on your Linux machine. Finally, I have fonts.
Well, I've been using Mandrake for over a year, and I'm currently at release 7.0, and I can assure you that it's not really all that hard to install TrueType fonts by hand, without needing to use the DrakFont utility.
The proof is that a couple of nights ago, I installed all the TrueType fonts from a Bitstream 500 Font CD in a little over five minutes, from the command line.
Admittedly, if I want to be able to use these fonts in FrameMaker 5.5.6 (Beta) for Linux, I'll need to install the PostScript equivalents (on the same CD), but I don't think that's going to be a problem;-).
Oh, and Applix can't use these TrueType fonts yet...
But they show up fine in xlsfonts, xfd, the FontChooser dialogs, er, most everywhere.
I've used only two digital cameras: an Epson, and the Mavica.
The Mavica wins, hands down, for two reasons. First, because it gives better pictures, especially in low light (and has a flash). Second, most important, I can whip out the floppy, slip it into my linux box, and there's the JPEG format image. No messing with cables and Win95 software.
But for those who want to be able to cram several 6MByte images onto a single diskette/CD/Flashcard, what's the point? The optical quality of the lens is not what you could call "professional photo quality", the CCD can only give a limited number of pixels, and if the end result is for display on a 75 dpi screen, why try to grab images at ridiculous resolutions?
I'm quite happy to use a Mavica for web-page jobs.
If I want real quality, I'll either go for a good SLR body and a professional digital back, or use traditional film and ask the lab to digitize onto a CD-Rom for me.
It's just a question of using the right tool for the job.
Well, if you only want to think about how a worm (or any kind of shell script) can grab e-mail addresses out of a user's address book, try these for size: strings ~/.netscape/pab | grep "@" | more ldapsearch -h -b "c=/" "sn=*a*" cn | more OK, the first only works for users who use Netscape for e-mail, and the second only if an ldap server is used to provide or store e-mail addresses... but I'm sure you can get the information from other sources, too... A while ago, I wrote a little bash script that called on the fortune program to send off messages twenty at a time to a friend who clogged my mailbox with silly `virus warnings'. A combination of: 1. a bit of text that sounds convincing, like "Message from IT Security Services @ M$ Antivirus advises you to run the attached Diagnostics script" 2. a version of the fortune mailer, written so as to make the code nearly unreadable... (say, twice as many comment lines as code) 3. the address ripper should suffice to bring down the mailserver. The difficulty would be in obfuscating the code sufficiently. Anybody who looked inside the Love Bug vbs should have spotted immediately what was going on...
So it eats paper and phone connexions... if your address book contains a lot of fax numbers, you'll make a lot of calls, all of which will be billed by your telephone company. So, who's going to be happy? This worm could generate millions of dollars in revenue for the telcos!
First up, you need a stock of (lets say 32) reasonably powerful PCs that already earn revenue, or whose cost is already covered by some funding. They would typically be dual-boot WinDoze/Linux boxes, 400MHz, 128Mb, 6Gb for Win, 12Gb for Linux.
Examples I can think of or have seen are:
those in the basement of a University library where students type end-of-semester papers
those used for general office/secretarial work in a company
those in an internet cafe.
You get the idea.
These PCs would be in use from, say, 9h00 to 21h00 running WinDoze. Even the a careless or ill-intentioned user would prbably be incapable of damaging the Linux partitions from within Billy Boy's "Os". Then, at 21h00, the night-shift takes over. The machines are rebooted into Linux and become nodes in a Beowulf cluster.
There's a job-queueing server behind the firewall; users connect via ftp and leave their jobs in the incoming directory at any time. During the night, the job-queueing server submits these jobs to Beowulf. Users collect the results of the job that are found in the outgoing directory of the job-queueing server.
I'm sure there are many, many establishments with PCs sitting around idle for most of the time. I work in a company where around desktop PCs are used 8h00 - 20h00 Monday to Friday. That leaves 12 hours per night, plus all 48 hours at the weekend, i.e. 108 hours per week available.
The point is, these scenarios take PCs that are already paid for and use time that is usually lost. The only extra cost is the time it takes to set up the Beowulf cluster and implement the job-queueing server. There might not be any need to have an operator there during Beowulf operations, just during the boot phase.
Boff! The Coka-Cola[tm] boys should shut up right now!. Here's what Webster's dico says: coke [ME; akin to Sw kälk pith, Gk gelgis bulb of garlic] (1669) : the residue of coal left after destructuve distillation.... coke [by shortening & alt.] (ca. 1903) : COCAINE. Coke trademark -- used for a cola drink. IMNSHO, if you only use the word coke with a small letter at the beginning, and in an unambiguous context, the Coca-Cola[tm] boys haven't a leg to stand on (although they can probably buy some fairly strong legal legs). I don't remember how Tademarks work in other countries, but IIRR in France (where I live) you register a trademark to cover a "domain" of activity (i.e. food and drink, in the Coca-Cola[tm] instance) and its use in two (?) contiguous domains is protected (?). But your use of the work "coke" is clearly not an attempt to usurp the notoriety of the brand or the trademark... so where's the problem?
And in fact, what happens is that a scientific theory is never
proven once and for all!
Say sombody comes up with a theory that conveniently explains some observed
phenomenon, like Newton and gravity. What happens is that people,
i.e. other scientists, test the theory. If they manage to demonstrate
that it is false, then we forget about it. If it cannot be shown to be false, it
becomes generally accepted as being true. But it has not been proven to be true!
You may think I'm splitting hairs, but I maintain that absence of disproof is
not identical to proof. In may be pragmatically convenient to say that "absence
of disproof is equivalent to proof".
What very often happens, of course, is that a nobody demonstrates the theory in
question to be false therefore the thory becomes accepted as being true. Interest
in testing the theory wanes until research in a connex domain shows that the theory
only holds for cases that it was possible to test. As a new technology is developed,
new tests become available that demonstrate that the theory was bogus.
Going a bit overboard on the old Scrödinger's cat thing, you could say that
"until it became possible to disprove the theory, the theory was true; the theory
is stateless until proven to be false; but the observation of the falshood destroys
the experiment; therefore all theories must be either accepted as acts of faith, or
be deemed false, since we must assume on past experience that they will someday be
shown to be false in any case".
Slashdot Mirror
No. The pronunciation is:
ig-dre-sil
where the `e' in the middle syllable should be a `schwa' that I can't type right now...
It's the tree of life, a giant ash (æsc) that joins the home of men to the home of the gods.
KR.
er, is my brain out of gear this morning?
So the domain belongs to your `friend', doesn't it? Ergo, only your `friend' should be allowed to change its details...
Or am I missing something dead subtle here? Like if I order a book (or a pizza) using my own money, but get it delivered to my office, the book (or pizza) mysteriously becomes the property of my employer, just because of the address?
It still runs on fossil fuel! And you need to be connected to a gas network, or have a propane tank (and get the gas delivered). What we need is a more self-sufficient system based on a methane converting fuel cell.
Let me just remind you that methane is an even more "efficient" greenhouse gas than carbon dioxide (by that, I mean that methane in the atmosphere traps more heat i.e. has a more pronounced greenhouse effect, that CO2).
So, it would, to my mind, be a very good idea to use fuel cells in conjunction with septic tanks...
This is how I see it. You have a house out in the sticks. You have a septic tanks because you're not connected to mains sewerage. Your shit goes in the septic tank, rots, makes methane. The methane gets taken up into a storage tanks and pressure-regulator, then goes into the fuel cell to generate electricity.
This could even become a kind of a self-regulating system, in that the more people you have living in the house, the more shit they produce, the more methane gets produced, the more electricity gets produced which gets used up because more people usually results in increased electricity usage (image all those house guests playing Sim City and reading slashdot on their laptops...).
KR.
I've been thinking about this, too... One idea is the CD-Rom drive from a portable, if that'll stand up to reasonable, everyday driving. (i.e. on the roads... I don't suppose that you're intending to listen to the music while doing the Paris-Dakar rally, are you?)
But the best way I can think of to avoid vibrations and G-shocks damaging moving parts (like drive spindles, heads) is to simply get rid of them. Go for 100% solid-state, disk-on-chip, PCM-CIA, whatever they're called now... You know, the things just made for hostile environments and embedded systems...
Can you imagine a LART with a couple of gigabytes of solid-state silicon discs?
So personal flying is going to be the next big thing? I don't think so...
But to those people who worry that it will take off in a big way, rest assured; it's not going to become the preferred method of transport for the masses in the next twenty years.
You have to bear in mind that this is going to be very very expensive, if it ever gets off the ground. So that reduces the risk of having the air as crowded as the LA freeways. Next, the national aviation authorities are going to be as strict as possible with giving out licences to fly these things. Just think about compulsory genetic testing to check for a "possible tendency to [alcoholism,drug abuse,short attention spans,*] resulting in refusal of licence, and random drug and alcohol tests upon landing, with instant revocation of your licence if positive...
Then if telecommuting picks up even more, there'll be fewer and fewer people needing individual transport like that just to get to and from the office... Trnasport will tend to be more and more family oriented (I believe), especially for holidays.
So if it ever catches on, it's going to stay a professional tool (like police, but also maybe farmers and photographers) and a rich playboy's plaything.
But if you want to play at James Bond right now, you can!
Check out the AutoGyro.
Here are a couple of things to get you started
What, like the Apple ][ box? Lovely shade of creamy beige, like Marantz hi-fi used to be... The keyboard and motherboard in one box, with 5.1/4" disk drives placed on top... a bit like a Commodore PET... Or is my memory playing tricks on me...
Or maybe behing the look of the Apple ///, or the Lisa, or early Macintoshes... lovely shades of creamy beige, parallel grooves... and very square.
As for workstations, which ones? The only one's I'm (slightly) familiar with are the IBM RS/6000 in a 19" rack... (little room for innovative design on a front-panel), various disguises of the Sun [Ultra]Sparc (from a pizza-box at first, but starting to look more and more like a "midi-tower PC", lovely shade of pale beige...) and the Silicon, oops, I mean the SGI Octane. Wow! At last, lovely shade of, er, is it indigo?
Supercomputers? Erm, lets see, is that an Origin 2000 over there in the corner? Oh no, It's a Convex SPP. Should have recognized from the fact that it looks like a scale model of the Tour Montparnasse in Paris (not Tx)... Did frogdesign do that? Looks nothing like an Apple Lisa...
Why does the article waffle on about MHz? We're not going still going to be using versions of the same crappy Pentium technology simply cranked to higher and higher clock speeds in ten years' time, are we? You can't compare a 400MHz Celeron with a 400MHz IP27 today; there's no point in talking about clock speeds (unless you're just trying to impress illiterates)...
The power supply will apparently be a "long, stick like lithium battery, bent into a doughnut"... Not if I can help it! I'll have a fuel cell that converts [m]ethanol to electricity... I'll grow fast-growing willows, pulp them (wind-powered), ferment, use a solar-powered still to get the pure alcohol.... That is, if I can't just pedal up a huge flywheel...
just my 0.2Euros.
First, how many ./ers does it take to float an ice cube in a glass of water? This has been mentioned by so many, I don't see why it didn't occur to everybody... Go read John Gribbin's book.
Secondly, I suppose the people who claim that man only had a significant effect on atmospheric carbon dioxide levels after 1820 would put that down to increasing use of fossil fuels. When you burn wood, you release the carbon stored in the structure. New trees reabsorb the released carbon dioxide to create new wood. But when you have a few million years' worth of binding up carbon into plant cells that are permanently buried, and suddenly man starts digging that up and releasing the carbon dioxide back into the air at an enormously faster rate, then the carbon dioxide levels rise quickly.
Now, seriously, go and read Gribbin's books (In Search of Schrödinger's Cat is a good read, too).
Oh, and learn to spell "arctic".
Now, I have to use Win NT 4 at work, and I was having a lot of problem with Adobe Illustrator crashing (you now, things like "illegal memory access" or "this program tried to execute an illegal instruction and has been shut down").
The WinNT admin referred to a rumour along the lines of "the boys at Micro$oft keep some of the API info secret, so that apps from other software vendors are less stable than those made by Micr$oft".
In other word, Micro$oft makes an OS, and keeps back the API information you need to write a stable application. This makes Micro4oft's own applications look better than the competitors'.
It becomes a vicious circle that any proprietary OS maker can pull off once the user base gets up to critical mass. Get the users dependent on the OS because you practically give away the apps with the OS, then screw the competitors by making it hard for competitors' apps to run reliably.
So, along comes a bunch of guys who say:
Of course Micro$oft doesn't want that... (Well, I suppose that if Micro4oft is split into two entirely separate companies,one for OS and the other for apps, the apps company won't care, as it will still make sales... but the OS company will be up shit creek without a paddle...)
However, what's to stop the apps from asking the OS to identify itself (equivalent of doing a uname -a), or looking specific bits of the code to see if it is running under the M$ Real Thing rather than a Free Better More Solid OS?
OK, so Bill got his knuckles rapped when WinDoze (was it 3.1?) gave spurious error messages when it was run over Dr DOS instead of MS-DOS. But the way the US Patents Circus is going, what's to stop Billy boy from patenting some [simple,bizarre,useless] algorithm that is systematically called by every M$ app? If the OpenWindowz Boyz are prevented from using that algorithm, every M$ app will complain and/or refuse to cooperate (so what's changed, you might ask)
Go on, America, pull the plug for a week...
Even if the Internet stops (and I don't believe it will), after a few days the rest of the world will get it up and running again.
And it'll be a lot faster than before.
Hello, my name is señor Tilverd. I have registered my family name as trademark in Spain, so it is protected.
Now, I find someone has made a website called www.dilbert.com ! I am outraged !
Everybody knows that the Spanish speaking people pronounce the v as a b (and vice-versa) and the t as a d when followed by an i and that an unvoiced d at the end of a word is pronounced as a weak t...
Ergo, the word dilbert is phonetically identical to the pronunciation of my family name and my registered trademark.
So, I am giving a yankee judge a pig pak of tollars to award me the domain dilbert.com, as is it rightfully mine!!!
Was it Niklaus Wirth who said
or someone else?How much do you think I could auction the domain Castlemain.xxxx for?
What you are suggesting here is akin to a description of a good parasite.
A bad parasite is usually one living in a host other than its usual host, and doing too much damage. The point of a parasite is exactly to not do very much damage.
A badly adapted parasite, for example a worm that lives happily in a pig without damaging the pig, can do a lot of damage if a human eats undercooked pork.
Thus, the parasite kills its host. The well adapted parasite does not kill the host, lives long and prospers and reproduces more (which is its goal, if it can be said to have one).
It follows that if the goal of the computer virus is to propagate itself as widely as possible, it should not do immediate crippling damage to its host system.
There's absolutely nothing new even in the vocabulary used to discuss computer viruses...
It's not ironic at all!
Imagine you only speak English (albeit an approximate Americanized English), and you're on holiday somewhere where the natives speak some other language. You're hungry, or thirsty, or need directions, whatever... What are you going to do? Stop somebody, and ask "excuse me, do you speak English?"
You address the person in a language you understand, hoping to get a response.
If you get a positive response, you initiate a dialogue.
If you get a negative response, you fall back to plan B (usually give up, or speak louder and more slowly... it's common knowledge that all foreigners speak English to some degree, but most of them are hard of hearing).
Using JavaScript to determine if the browser can understand JavaScript is an analogous case.
For this to work, you have to figure out the micropayment problem. There's an overhead levied by whoever (banks, credit card companies) processes the payments.
Retail stores (in Europe, at least) often have a minimum sale for Visa card or cheque sales, sometimes as high as US$10 or even US$15 equivalent.
I believe that if a store has a high number of small transactions, the cost per transaction is lower than for a small number of medium-cost transactions.
To get this volume, maybe a gang of groups and musicians could gather together and set up a Dom Kultury, sharing studio space, web servers, and a webmaster and e-payment team... sharing the fixed costs of the cooperative.
But I think groups should use MP3 distribution as a kostenlos distribution of music to promote the things that will always be physical: live gigs.
So if you use the Lunn and Sansone method in California, you'll run fould of NOx emissions legislation...
Duke of URL says in his review of Mandrake 7.1:
Well, I've been using Mandrake for over a year, and I'm currently at release 7.0, and I can assure you that it's not really all that hard to install TrueType fonts by hand, without needing to use the DrakFont utility.
The proof is that a couple of nights ago, I installed all the TrueType fonts from a Bitstream 500 Font CD in a little over five minutes, from the command line.
Admittedly, if I want to be able to use these fonts in FrameMaker 5.5.6 (Beta) for Linux, I'll need to install the PostScript equivalents (on the same CD), but I don't think that's going to be a problem ;-).
Oh, and Applix can't use these TrueType fonts yet...
But they show up fine in xlsfonts, xfd, the FontChooser dialogs, er, most everywhere.
I've used only two digital cameras: an Epson, and the Mavica.
The Mavica wins, hands down, for two reasons. First, because it gives better pictures, especially in low light (and has a flash). Second, most important, I can whip out the floppy, slip it into my linux box, and there's the JPEG format image. No messing with cables and Win95 software.
But for those who want to be able to cram several 6MByte images onto a single diskette/CD/Flashcard, what's the point? The optical quality of the lens is not what you could call "professional photo quality", the CCD can only give a limited number of pixels, and if the end result is for display on a 75 dpi screen, why try to grab images at ridiculous resolutions?
I'm quite happy to use a Mavica for web-page jobs.
If I want real quality, I'll either go for a good SLR body and a professional digital back, or use traditional film and ask the lab to digitize onto a CD-Rom for me.
It's just a question of using the right tool for the job.
Oops, that should have read strings ~/.netscape/pab.na2 | grep "@" | more
Well, if you only want to think about how a worm (or any kind of shell script) can grab e-mail addresses out of a user's address book, try these for size: strings ~/.netscape/pab | grep "@" | more ldapsearch -h -b "c=/" "sn=*a*" cn | more OK, the first only works for users who use Netscape for e-mail, and the second only if an ldap server is used to provide or store e-mail addresses... but I'm sure you can get the information from other sources, too... A while ago, I wrote a little bash script that called on the fortune program to send off messages twenty at a time to a friend who clogged my mailbox with silly `virus warnings'. A combination of: 1. a bit of text that sounds convincing, like "Message from IT Security Services @ M$ Antivirus advises you to run the attached Diagnostics script" 2. a version of the fortune mailer, written so as to make the code nearly unreadable... (say, twice as many comment lines as code) 3. the address ripper should suffice to bring down the mailserver. The difficulty would be in obfuscating the code sufficiently. Anybody who looked inside the Love Bug vbs should have spotted immediately what was going on...
So it eats paper and phone connexions... if your address book contains a lot of fax numbers, you'll make a lot of calls, all of which will be billed by your telephone company. So, who's going to be happy? This worm could generate millions of dollars in revenue for the telcos!
First up, you need a stock of (lets say 32) reasonably powerful PCs that already earn revenue, or whose cost is already covered by some funding. They would typically be dual-boot WinDoze/Linux boxes, 400MHz, 128Mb, 6Gb for Win, 12Gb for Linux.
Examples I can think of or have seen are:
those in the basement of a University library where students type end-of-semester papers
those used for general office/secretarial work in a company
those in an internet cafe.
You get the idea.
These PCs would be in use from, say, 9h00 to 21h00 running WinDoze. Even the a careless or ill-intentioned user would prbably be incapable of damaging the Linux partitions from within Billy Boy's "Os". Then, at 21h00, the night-shift takes over. The machines are rebooted into Linux and become nodes in a Beowulf cluster.
There's a job-queueing server behind the firewall; users connect via ftp and leave their jobs in the incoming directory at any time. During the night, the job-queueing server submits these jobs to Beowulf. Users collect the results of the job that are found in the outgoing directory of the job-queueing server.
I'm sure there are many, many establishments with PCs sitting around idle for most of the time. I work in a company where around desktop PCs are used 8h00 - 20h00 Monday to Friday. That leaves 12 hours per night, plus all 48 hours at the weekend, i.e. 108 hours per week available.
The point is, these scenarios take PCs that are already paid for and use time that is usually lost. The only extra cost is the time it takes to set up the Beowulf cluster and implement the job-queueing server. There might not be any need to have an operator there during Beowulf operations, just during the boot phase.
Boff! The Coka-Cola[tm] boys should shut up right now!. Here's what Webster's dico says: coke [ME; akin to Sw kälk pith, Gk gelgis bulb of garlic] (1669) : the residue of coal left after destructuve distillation.... coke [by shortening & alt.] (ca. 1903) : COCAINE. Coke trademark -- used for a cola drink. IMNSHO, if you only use the word coke with a small letter at the beginning, and in an unambiguous context, the Coca-Cola[tm] boys haven't a leg to stand on (although they can probably buy some fairly strong legal legs). I don't remember how Tademarks work in other countries, but IIRR in France (where I live) you register a trademark to cover a "domain" of activity (i.e. food and drink, in the Coca-Cola[tm] instance) and its use in two (?) contiguous domains is protected (?). But your use of the work "coke" is clearly not an attempt to usurp the notoriety of the brand or the trademark... so where's the problem?
And in fact, what happens is that a scientific theory is never proven once and for all!
Say sombody comes up with a theory that conveniently explains some observed phenomenon, like Newton and gravity. What happens is that people, i.e. other scientists, test the theory. If they manage to demonstrate that it is false, then we forget about it. If it cannot be shown to be false, it becomes generally accepted as being true. But it has not been proven to be true!
You may think I'm splitting hairs, but I maintain that absence of disproof is not identical to proof. In may be pragmatically convenient to say that "absence of disproof is equivalent to proof".
What very often happens, of course, is that a nobody demonstrates the theory in question to be false therefore the thory becomes accepted as being true. Interest in testing the theory wanes until research in a connex domain shows that the theory only holds for cases that it was possible to test. As a new technology is developed, new tests become available that demonstrate that the theory was bogus.
Going a bit overboard on the old Scrödinger's cat thing, you could say that