Why limit it to non-fiction!? Take a look at http://www.baen.com/library/
where you can download some great fiction for free. Make no mistake, Jim Baen and the authors want to make money off this little project, by spreading the word and getting the mid-list author's names out there, and they are bound to do better than the music industry, since they are embracing the web instead of denying its existence.
Well, last time I checked (about 30 seconds ago)
http://www.britannica.com/
still allowed full text searching of their encyclopaedia; it has figures and everything. Now, they still sell CDs and stuff, but compared to the $1000 I spent for the print version in 1980, the info is almost free (though not copylefted). Then there is http://www.encyclopedia.com/
which is also costless.
But the real question is, whatever happened to the Interpaedia? Remember, the web-based, user-written, free encyclopaedia? Sound familiar?
It's what RMS is proposing, and it's what failed before. What is different this time? The only links I could find to the Interpaedia were a gopher link and an old broken link to an archived discussion.
I can't even begin to describe how much the [this] story irritates me - yes, there's truth to it. But it's more then [than] just simple Hemos bugs -
it's any sort of spelling or grammatical error.
Take out the scare portion of the article, and just use the bottom line -- a broken metaphor is
worth two in the bushes. Now where *is* that darned bottom line, anyway?
I always knew Sun was interested in "education" but this strikes me as going a bit too far.
Of all the languages, they pick a closed source language. Next we'll see APCompSci.com, and C#
certification as requirements.
If they aren't going to be language agnostic and just accept pseudo-code (or straight C), I'd rather see a standard free language. For an AP exam, one of the functional languages would probably be a much better choice, because programming in those requires that you know how to think.
PPA printers are like Winmodems; they offload
processing to the host CPU, so are cheaper
to manufacture, and cost (a tiny bit; $$) less to buy. HP has repeatedly, consistently,
and officially refused to release the info required to write PPA drivers, because
the advanced color correction done by the driver
contains valuable HP intellectual property that they don't want to release.
I can see their point. If they did release the information, and a competitor started using the same color correction algorithm, HP would have no way to know that that competitor had stolen the code and violated HP's copyright (since the competitor wouldn't open the source either). The assurances of large companies that they do not violate licenses like the GPL apparently are not enough for HP.
If only there were a way to enforce their copyright without resorting to expensive reverse-engineering and legal battles, that would clear the way for HP (and many other companies) to release Open Source products. Are there any technical solutions? How can you know if somebody
is using your code in violation of the GPL?
Meanwhile, fortunately for PPA owners, a rather good reverse-engineering effort has resulted in a working Linux driver that has been included in several distributions:
200,000 on Joust! Wimp! I once scored 5,000,000 and only stopped 'cause they closed the store.
Joust was cool. Williams' games were all cool.
I could infinite-play Robotron, too.
If it was done with public money, it belongs in public, not in private. If it was done with private money, then it's up to the people that paid for it.
i'm wondering if anybody asked about the free
and open source reimplementation of carnivore, or like, why does carnivore have to be a locked down hardware box that only the fbi has access to? maybe they just want to sell hardware?? uhuh.
security through obscurity is my guess. in which case somebody will steal a box, or obtain illegal access, break the undoubtedly flimsy security (why else would they need to hide it?) and obtain the ability to bypass carnivore, or poison it, and not tell anybody, except perhaps the terrorists that are funding them.
if they want to do this i'd rather see an open competition like the AES selection process.
... if [you] really want to engage in what is considered in the U.S. to be defamatory...
You can hide all you want, but you cannot escape responsibility for your actions. You have the right to free speech, but you cannot walk all over the rights of others.
Of course, the best strategy is to always speak the truth.
Hacking the Legal System
on
Anonymity
·
· Score: 5
Yea, the 9th amendment gives you the right, but what most people fail to realize is that rights do not exist in vacuo. Rights are irreducibly tied to responsibilities -- you cannot have rights without responsibilities. It works the other way around, too -- you cannot have responsibilities without rights. You want one without the other? Tough! It doesn't work that way. You want to slander me and hide? Fine, but I have the right to look for you, within the bounds of the legal system, and you are responsible for what you say, whether you do it in the clear or not.
Naturally, some people are better at hacking the legal system than others.
This does NOT mean that you don't have the right to post anonymously -- you do -- and a clever person would leverage this to get such cases thrown out of court (any system can be hacked, even the legal system). But you cannot relinquish the responsibilities that go with anonymity!
at the size of recent kernels (90 meg)
it'll collapse under its own
weight if something isn't done.
I don't really need all the
S390 code for my 100 MHz laptop,
now, do I?
Monolithic OS, OK, but the monolithic tarball
is getting a bit large...
What's the point of King going glueless, cutting
out the middle man (big bad publishing cos.) and
then charging us exactly what a hardcover book costs in the retail outlet!?
If this was *micro*pay, and not exactly the same as buying at amazon.com and getting a hardcover,
except more awkward (pay 7 times instead of once),
it might have had a chance.
Here's a soft (virtual) keyboard that uses GTK:
http://www.gnu.org/software/gtkeyboard/gtkeyboard. html
It can do QWERTY and some international layouts, and even the OPTI layout (similar to FITALY but faster). You can run X, Emacs, etc. with just the mouse. It has word completion too (similar to what Stephen Hawking uses, but GPLed), which speeds up text entry.
All this work to fix cookies. Cookies are basically a flaw in the HTTP protocol, a hack to get around HTTP's statelessness, that allow arbitrary sites to communicate arbitrary data by writing files in client space. Isn't there a technical solution to this problem? Get rid of cookies, fix the HTTP protocol to include authenticated connections (not basic or digest authentication, but a session hash that identifies the client to the server across connections). You could base it on a GUID style token and hash it per-site so advertisers couldn't use it. Then advertisers can fall back on more traditional methods, like surveys.
They are only agreeing to self-regulation to avoid legislation or somebody fixing the flaw.
Requiring a standard set of apps to be there is nice, but one thing that would greatly improve the clue level of people out there is to specifically point out the hardware platform/architecture. Many many times, a vendor will release a package for "Linux" when what they usually mean is "Linux/x86". I think any standards document related to building Linux apps should point out that not only might the C compiler be different (or the shell, or whatever), but pointers might be 64 bits, or other odd things like, oh, say, the machine language.
They want to standardize software versions across platforms. Don't be fooled into thinking that just because you conform to the spec, your x86 RPM is going to be useful to people running Linux on Alphas, PPCs, s/390s, etc. ad nauseum.
Many people use them to send email. It's cheaper (connect time is very expensive here), it's asynchronous, and it's more polite, if you happen to be on a crowded train or similar. This despite the fact that typing in Japanese on a cell phone keyboard is a huge pain. Characters are typed using a phonetic alphabet that has over 50 glyphs organized by initial consonant -- all the "k" syllables are on one key, which you press up to 5 times to get the one you want -- and since most Japanese kanji characters need two or three phonetics, plus a menu-based selection in case of homophones (of which there are huge numbers) it can take more than ten keystrokes to enter a single kanji (and many Japanese "words" are combinations of two kanji). All of this done with the thumb of the hand holding the phone.
But people still do it. Abbreviations are very popular in Japan, and you can forego the kanji and just leave it as phonetics if it's clear enough from context.
One nice thing about this is that you don't have to hold the little microwave transmitter next to your head. Similarly for the new cell phones that have video cameras in them -- you hold them in front of you (but you don't type text in that case, obviously).
Meanwhile the cell phone manufacturers are packing more functionality into the phones. My wife's cell phone has a tamagotchi living in it. Plus all the functions of an address book and memo organizer. All on a 3cm screen. But small is beautiful in Japan, and you can pack a lot of info into a small space (16x16 pixels per kanji) even if it takes a long time to type it.
Slashdot Mirror
and http://www.zdwebopedia.com/, and hell, http://directory.google.com/Top/
I like their copyright:
Copyright © 1997 by TheReference.
All rights reserved. No part of this site may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic, or mechanical, including photocopying, recording, or by any information storage and retrieval system, without permission in writing from the Publisher.
Why limit it to non-fiction!? Take a look at http://www.baen.com/library/ where you can download some great fiction for free. Make no mistake, Jim Baen and the authors want to make money off this little project, by spreading the word and getting the mid-list author's names out there, and they are bound to do better than the music industry, since they are embracing the web instead of denying its existence.
But the real question is, whatever happened to the Interpaedia? Remember, the web-based, user-written, free encyclopaedia? Sound familiar? It's what RMS is proposing, and it's what failed before. What is different this time? The only links I could find to the Interpaedia were a gopher link and an old broken link to an archived discussion.
Great, a black market in computer hardware!
The world is getting more SciFi all the time.
Smuggling cigarettes is boring anyway.
"Hey, you! Is that an IDE interface in your pocket!?"
"It's for personal use, man, don't hassle me!"
"Tell me, do you use LINUX?" "That's none of
your business, man."
"Ho ho, what's THIS? A bag of blank CDR disks!
You're coming with me, son." "No, wait, those
belong to my brother, man, I never even saw them
before."
I can't even begin to describe how much the [this] story irritates me - yes, there's truth to it. But it's more then [than] just simple Hemos bugs - it's any sort of spelling or grammatical error. Take out the scare portion of the article, and just use the bottom line -- a broken metaphor is worth two in the bushes. Now where *is* that darned bottom line, anyway?
Of all the languages, they pick a closed source language. Next we'll see APCompSci.com, and C# certification as requirements.
If they aren't going to be language agnostic and just accept pseudo-code (or straight C), I'd rather see a standard free language. For an AP exam, one of the functional languages would probably be a much better choice, because programming in those requires that you know how to think.
I can see their point. If they did release the information, and a competitor started using the same color correction algorithm, HP would have no way to know that that competitor had stolen the code and violated HP's copyright (since the competitor wouldn't open the source either). The assurances of large companies that they do not violate licenses like the GPL apparently are not enough for HP.
If only there were a way to enforce their copyright without resorting to expensive reverse-engineering and legal battles, that would clear the way for HP (and many other companies) to release Open Source products. Are there any technical solutions? How can you know if somebody is using your code in violation of the GPL?
Meanwhile, fortunately for PPA owners, a rather good reverse-engineering effort has resulted in a working Linux driver that has been included in several distributions:
http://sourceforge.net/projects/pnm2ppa/
Keep up the good work!
200,000 on Joust! Wimp! I once scored 5,000,000 and only stopped 'cause they closed the store.
Joust was cool. Williams' games were all cool.
I could infinite-play Robotron, too.
The little stickers they put on the outside said "Insel Intide". (Must have been contracted out to the Slashdot Editorial Staff.)
http://slashdot.org/article.pl?sid=00/11/15/161236 &mode=thread
If it was done with public money, it belongs in public, not in private. If it was done with private money, then it's up to the people that paid for it.
I never could tell them apart anyway.
that'll slow those terrorist bombers down
beep beep beep -- this HTTP link is being monitored by the FBI -- beep beep beep
i wuzn't gonna say anything about my neighbor makin' hootch in his basement, anyway..
beep beep beep -- don't even THINK about using encryption -- beep beep beep
I'm startin' to get used to it already, fnord.
i'm wondering if anybody asked about the free and open source reimplementation of carnivore, or like, why does carnivore have to be a locked down hardware box that only the fbi has access to? maybe they just want to sell hardware?? uhuh.
security through obscurity is my guess. in which case somebody will steal a box, or obtain illegal access, break the undoubtedly flimsy security (why else would they need to hide it?) and obtain the ability to bypass carnivore, or poison it, and not tell anybody, except perhaps the terrorists that are funding them.
if they want to do this i'd rather see an open competition like the AES selection process.
You can hide all you want, but you cannot escape responsibility for your actions. You have the right to free speech, but you cannot walk all over the rights of others.
Of course, the best strategy is to always speak the truth.
Naturally, some people are better at hacking the legal system than others.
This does NOT mean that you don't have the right to post anonymously -- you do -- and a clever person would leverage this to get such cases thrown out of court (any system can be hacked, even the legal system). But you cannot relinquish the responsibilities that go with anonymity!
Americans should remember that they don't live in a democracy.
On the other hand, maybe the electorate could include "Cyberspace" as a state. No wait, Cyberspace doesn't pay taxes...
This was posted here, at the beginning of Sept., and they've still only had 4 events.
Monolithic OS, OK, but the monolithic tarball is getting a bit large...
If this was *micro*pay, and not exactly the same as buying at amazon.com and getting a hardcover, except more awkward (pay 7 times instead of once), it might have had a chance.
Here's a soft (virtual) keyboard that uses GTK:. html
http://www.gnu.org/software/gtkeyboard/gtkeyboard
It can do QWERTY and some international layouts, and even the OPTI layout (similar to FITALY but faster). You can run X, Emacs, etc. with just the mouse. It has word completion too (similar to what Stephen Hawking uses, but GPLed), which speeds up text entry.
They are only agreeing to self-regulation to avoid legislation or somebody fixing the flaw.
They want to standardize software versions across platforms. Don't be fooled into thinking that just because you conform to the spec, your x86 RPM is going to be useful to people running Linux on Alphas, PPCs, s/390s, etc. ad nauseum.
Everybody.
Many people use them to send email. It's cheaper (connect time is very expensive here), it's asynchronous, and it's more polite, if you happen to be on a crowded train or similar. This despite the fact that typing in Japanese on a cell phone keyboard is a huge pain. Characters are typed using a phonetic alphabet that has over 50 glyphs organized by initial consonant -- all the "k" syllables are on one key, which you press up to 5 times to get the one you want -- and since most Japanese kanji characters need two or three phonetics, plus a menu-based selection in case of homophones (of which there are huge numbers) it can take more than ten keystrokes to enter a single kanji (and many Japanese "words" are combinations of two kanji). All of this done with the thumb of the hand holding the phone.
But people still do it. Abbreviations are very popular in Japan, and you can forego the kanji and just leave it as phonetics if it's clear enough from context.
One nice thing about this is that you don't have to hold the little microwave transmitter next to your head. Similarly for the new cell phones that have video cameras in them -- you hold them in front of you (but you don't type text in that case, obviously).
Meanwhile the cell phone manufacturers are packing more functionality into the phones. My wife's cell phone has a tamagotchi living in it. Plus all the functions of an address book and memo organizer. All on a 3cm screen. But small is beautiful in Japan, and you can pack a lot of info into a small space (16x16 pixels per kanji) even if it takes a long time to type it.