Microsoft gives ridiculously deep discounts to educational institutions.... If you can't afford $5 for Windows XP, how can you afford $8 from Linux for Cheapbytes, or the bandwidth for downloading the ISOs, the CD burner and blank CDs to burn them?
Once you leave school, you cannot use the software any more. And you cannot buy the upgrade, which means that you will have to pay full retail price once you are no longer a student. And by that time, you are already ``locked in'' to the proprietary office suite/development software/operating system/etc.
And then there's always the ``freedom'' aspect of Free Software over closed, proprietary software. Far too few students concern themselves with that aspect though.
How many bands that have gotten silly, filthy rich produced a good album afterwards?
That's the funny thing about our capitalistic system. The possibility of becoming a monopoly is a powerful incentive for innovation and production in the first place. However, once a monopoly actually occurs, then the system begins to fail (specifically, that which follows leaves much to be wanted).
I submit that the dream of becoming a multi-millionaire superstar (in the area of music), or the dream of producing the de-facto desktop operating system (in the case of Microsoft) gives motivation to struggle in the market and to produce. Take away the mere possibility of ``striking it big,'' and you affect the number of people that are going to try.
At the start of each new school year, Microsoft hits our campus hard. They hang big banners, set up booths in the student center, and get the managers to make the on-campus computer store employees wear Microsoft t-shirts.
The BYU Unix Users Group gives its own response. This year, we're going to have a booth in the student center too. We're inviting students to bring their machines, and a group of volunteers will install Linux on their machines on the spot, for free.
We're making up flyers that read, ``Thrusday and Friday only! Get a FREE COPY of OpenOffice Suite version 1.0 (must have student ID or employee ID). Save HUNDREDS of dollars on your computer software this year!''
We're not just going to be pushing Linux, but Free Software in general. For those who are queasy about jumping full-force into Linux, we will offer to install Mozilla and OpenOffice on their Windows partitions, so they have some familiar ground to refer to when they boot into Linux.
The biggest debate in the group at the moment is which distributions to recommend to the newbies who bring their computers to the booth. I argue that since we're installing it for them, those who live on-campus and are on the university's network should use Debian because of the ease of maintenance. Others claim that Mandrake/RedHat/SuSE are more user friendly in general, and so they should be advocated instead.
In any case, we're doing what we can to let starving students know that they don't have to shell out hundreds of dollars to feed an addiction to proprietary software, when perfectly usable and functional Open Source alternatives exist for them. KDE+Mozilla+OpenOffice+Evolution is a powerful combination that makes Linux very much a viable desktop operating system.
Plus, anyone who switches over has the best support team around: the campus Unix Users Group! A perusal of our mailing list shows that we don't sleep at night until your problem is solved.:-)
My old college roommate went to Ghana, Africa last summer to film a documentary on the Burulli Ulcer epidemic. He was there for about 6 weeks, and we made plans to communicate over the Internet. He occasionally went into an Internet cafe in Accra to get to a web site I had set up with a PHP chat server. I hacked the code to send a notification to my cell phone when he happened to get to it, and I would run to a lab to jump in on the conversation. I also set up a web cam so he could see me while we chatted.
He described both the bandwidth and the latency as horrific. When the chat session refreshed on my screen (about a second), it could take several minutes to refresh on his. Not only that, but they have constant rolling blackouts in Accra, and so he would occasionally suddenly disappear from the chat room when the power went off in the cafe.
However, from the problems my friend saw in Ghana during his visit, I would say that the telecommunications infrastructure is the least of their worries.
My Gentoo 1.2 Experience
on
Gentoo Linux 1.2
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· Score: 5, Informative
I finally deleted my Windows partition. I figured that, as long as I'm messing with my partitions, I may as well ditch Mandrake 8.2 for a ``real'' distribution in the process.
I set apart all of Saturday to scrounge through my system to find and backup all my data files, and then to download and install Gentoo 1.2. So far, I have been mildly impressed. I have run into the following problems though:
I live on-campus, and my school blocks port 80 and makes everyone go through The Great Proxy Server. This does not jive well with emerge. The installation instructions, which I printed out before starting, say something about setting the HTTP_PROXY variable in the/etc/make.conf file, which I tried setting, to no avail. I then set the environment variables. That didn't work either. I looked for Lynx, or something to browse the Web with, and nothing was available (please no smart comments about telnet, thank you very much).
My school maps my network account to the hardware address of my network card, so I couldn't just plug in my laptop to get net access to get more documentation. I was about to run out to a computer lab, when I realized that the Gentoo 1.2 installation environment included iptables (I have 2 network cards in my system)! After a little bit of NAT magic, I had my laptop on-line, and I checked the FAQ, which mentioned, ``Oh, and if setting the PROXY environment variables in make.conf doesn't work, set it in wget's configuration files.'' So it uses wget. Nice to know. Setting the proxy there worked, and I was on my way!
I set the USE variable in make.conf, and then started emerge'ing. I was a little worried about how the compile settings really would be (i.e., would X, qt, and KDE be compiled with the necessary flags to enable anti-aliased fonts? It turns out that they were.) Compiling KDE took the better half of the afternoon, since it had to compile X and qt first. It worked like a charm!
So far, the only problem has been trying to emerge openoffice. The first time I tried, it complained about gcc 2.95.3 (it wanted 3.0.4). After ebuild'ing gcc 3.0.4, it started up. A couple of hours later, it bombed on something about not finding javac. There's a line in openoffice-1.0.0-r1.ebuild that reads ``COMMONDEPEND='... >=virtual/jdk-1.3.1''', but it prompted me for my java directory, and I wasn't sure what to type in there. And javac isn't on my system now, although that dependency should have prompted emerge to install it.
Well, these kinds of problems can be easily resolved by hand, but it goes to show that it can be difficult to get everything right the first time around in something like Gentoo. mozilla compiled without a hitch, and as soon as I fired it up this morning, I found this story, and thought I'd post my experience for all to enjoy. Oh... and my mozilla compiled with anti-aliased fonts, by default!
I tried (weakly) to get DXR3 to work with Xine, and it so far has not worked. It works in MPlayer for me though. DVD playback is flawless (no dropped frames, not A/V sync issues), except all the video is off-center a little to the right. I have sent messages to both the MPlayer and the DXR3 mailing lists, and no one has responded, so I assume that this is a problem that no one know how to fix.
I can play DivX-formatted video through the card with MPlayer, but the video must be first decoded into full frames and then re-encoded on the fly to send in MPEG-1 format to the DXR3 card. This makes things a little jumpy on my PIII 750. But worst of all is that the aspect ratio is often wrong; the video on the TV will be stretched vertically. Again, I've sent a message about this to both the MPlayer and the DXR3 lists, and again no one has been able to give me a solution to this problem.
It's really a shame, because DXR3 and MPlayer seem to be the perfect combination to create a good Linux DVD/DivX player for a television. These technical issues still need to be addressed, and there doesn't seem to be anyone around who is either capable or willing to get it working.
I am developing a financial application for use over Bluetooth from a PDA to a cash register, and I can say from first-hand experience that the problem of security over a wireless domain is not trivial. Your solution to channel everything through SSH is not economically feasible when you consider the processor and memory requirements necessary for *every single* vendor system out there to do this. The problem gets worse when you start talking about cell phones and wristwatches transmitting credit card numbers to vendor systems.
Bluetooth and 802.11b both have link-level encryption built in, but they both need some work before I would trust them with my financial information. For example, brute forcing the Bluetooth's E0 cipher can be reduced from a complexity of 2^128 to 2^100, and generating a database of keys and sample encrypted data can reduce the problem to a complexity of 2 if a match is found while listening to the communications!
You will have to clarify what you mean by "the account number is sent to the central server." Is it encrypted before it's sent? Against what key? How does your solution deal with non-repudiation (the device is authenticated, but not the user)?
One idea I came up with while working on this project was to incorporate the one-time use credit card numbers with client-to-vendor system. Before you leave home, your financial institution transmits a set of randomly generated one-time numbers to your PDA, wristwatch, cell phone, whatever, and the client sends a different number from the set each time he wishes to pay for something. That way, it doesn't matter if the number is compromised after the transaction is completed.
Based on the comments I've seen on this thread, the problem of sticky wages becomes apparent. The only reason that unemployment ever gets to where it is today is because people are more than happy to accept pay raises when the economy is doing well, but they are unwilling to accept pay cuts when the economy is doing poorly. This double standard in our expectations results in wages staying the same while they should be decreasing to keep pace with the normal swings in the market economy. Because people insist on their pay clashing with the economy, the market is unable to employ everyone who wants to work.
If are any Slashdotters who have known the pains of unemployment in the last year, you should be the first and foremost in advocating pay cuts like this when the economy is suffering! If not for the problem of sticky wages, you would never have been unemployed.
I am on a research team that is developing a Bluetooth financial transaction system. One of the members of our team wrote an XML parser using STL components. When it came time to compile the XML parser using the embedded tools for a PDA, we found that Microsoft had not implemented the STL in the libraries they provide in Windows CE. We had to switch all our string processing to use Windows components like CString (which, admittedly, has more features that the STL's string). The moral of the story? Using STL may affect your portability, especially in the embedded systems arena.
Time is Self-referential
on
Time Travel
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· Score: 2
This guy's web site gives a convincing argument as to why time travel will never be a reality: because time doesn't exist! Time is not a fundamental property of our universe; change is, and time is only a concept we invent to measure change.
Quote: "Motion in time is self-referential."
Quote: "Moving in spacetime is impossible because an evolution parameter (time) cannot be its own evolution parameter."
I moved into a new apartment near the end of 2000. Broadband was not (affordably) available in my neighborhood, and so I opted for a dial-in through a company named MStar. Boy was that a mistake.
I was running Linux on my primary machine, but they sent me Windows-only sign-up software on a CD-ROM. So I fired up my old system from when I was a freshman, which still had Windows '95 on it, and signed up. Their software loaded onto my system, took the liberty of placing a custom "quick-launch" bar onto my desktop, and then proceeded to log me in and activate my account.
The browser on the quick-launch bar was IE, but I prefered Netscape. However, when I tried to launch Netscape, the window would blip open for a split second and then close. Confused, I closed the quick-launch program (which disconnected me from the network) and tried again; this time it worked. MStar's trojan sofware was literally blocking me from running Netscape.
Their software, which connecting, would ask for a username and password, which is just a front for a "real" username and password that were secretly passed to the server when initiating the PPP connection. I used some software to capture my real username and password, and then I set up a standard dial-up account. When I would try to access the net on my Linux box, the Windows box would be able to auto-dial the connection. That worked nicely for a while.
Until a month later when banner ads from MStar started appearing at the bottom of every page that I loaded. Their servers were modifying every web page that I retrieved by placing an image and a link to MStar-related sites! There was a "disable banner for 5 minutes" link in the banner, which simply called a Perl script with a parameter of 5.
Oh, and did I mention that MStar performs ISP-side web censorship? They blocked Adobe's web site once. I had to set up a proxy server on another network to get around that little issue.
With the help of a filtering proxy and a call to that script with a parameter of "9999999" in my browser's home page setting, I was finally able to get clean access to the net. A few months later, I moved and had broadband access. But I will never consider going with MStar again.
The next time I search for an ISP, I will only subscribe to a service that interferes the least with my connection to the Internet.
... when it comes to buying a used laptop. Your GHz machine will be of little use to you if there are dead pixels, sticky keys, bad batteries, malfunctioning drives and/or ports, etc.
A few months ago, I picked up a used laptop from E-bay. It was from a reseller who purchased refurbished units from Dell which were on a corporate lease. There were tons of them selling at once, and I got a decent PIII for under $600. I was only moderately satisfied, as there were problems that couldn't be fixed (one of the PC-Card slots doesn't work and the left Ctrl key works only half the time, but the battery is still good). Some advice that I can offer from this experience includes:
Don't trust the warrantee. No matter how good it sounds on paper, they will probably do more damage to your laptop and return it to you in worse shape than it originally was in if you do send it in.
Don't be afraid to swap out parts yourself. Especially the keyboard. If you need to replace a broken part on your laptop, consider getting a "dead" model for less than $100 and using that for the parts.
Figure in the cost of a new battery when you browse for a new laptop. More often than not, the battery that comes with the laptop will be useless.
Ask specific questions about the laptop before buying it, like "Are there any dead pixels?", "Does the keyboard work perfectly?", "Do all the ports work?", "How long does the battery last?" The more questions the seller can't give definite answers on, the lower your offer should be for the laptop.
Make sure the vendor is reputable. If they have a fly-by-night Yahoo E-commerce deal going on, beware. If the company web site has a picture of a big building with the company name on it, it's probably safer than "some guy" selling his laptop.
I use Lynx to view Slashdot, and I resent not having the opportunity to view the larger, more intrusive ads. Posting ads in GIF or JPG format does for Lynx users what posting Word docs does for Linux users. In light of browser heterogeneity, I would appreciate it if the editors of Slashdot would kindly include ASCII art ads for those of us who opt to use text-only browsers.
The Chinese nation will sort themselves out over a long time, and probably peacefully, too - that's the Chinese way, to take the long, nonconfrontational view.
From what the West sees of China, this is not true. If it were not for fear of foreign intervention, China would immediately annex Taiwan and Hong Kong, rounding them under the Communist regime of the mainland, putting to death all who stand in their way. The Chinese government seems to have no problem being confrontational when it comes to political dissenters (a classic case of political stabalization theory gone amuck).
I remember when the Chinese ambassador paid a visit to my university last semester. He said that China was only concerned about creating "One Nation, One Government" with Taiwan. I swore I could hear Hitler's rhetoric ringing in those words.
Tyranny anywhere is a threat to democracy anywhere. When China truly becomes "the people's," then the economic boom you speak of will have an environment in which it can flourish. As long as people do not trust their government, they cannot trust its laws and policies. And fear motivates much less effectively than love does. Until the people can internalize, agree with, and embrace the structure in which they transact business, things will continue to crawl at a snail's pace.
In the meantime, we cannot allow the issues of human rights to "sort themselves out over a long time."
From a Huntsville Times (Alabama) interview with Bill Gates:
QUESTION: "I read in a newspaper that in l981 you said '640K of memory should be enough for anybody.' What did you mean when you said this?"
ANSWER: "I've said some stupid things and some wrong things, but not that. No one involved in computers would ever say that a certain amount of memory is enough for all time."
Like it or not, privacy is not a fundamental provision of the Consititution. If you place your messages in the public domain (which is what you do whenever you send an E-mail over the Internet), don't be surprised when it is screened, read, etc., by either the government or anyone who happens to own the router that your message passes through.
If you wish to have privacy, then you must send your communications over a private, secure channel, which the Internet is not. For example, the U.S. Postal Service is an entity that sends information securely; you can rest assured that your letters will never pass through the hands of a third party. But if you transmit information by posting a postcard on a bulletic board, it is free to be read by anyone who passes by, including government law enforcement officials.
You can attempt to make your messages sent through the public Internet "private" by encrypting the messages (which is perfectly legal and will continue to remain legal as long as our government is a free government). But that does not GUARANTEE privacy.
There is a general mistrust of government in general in this forum, which is sad. While I agree that the size and scope of government should be kept to a minimum, we should be able to trust the elected officials in a republican system, since we choose who our representatives will be. And we should certainly trust the executive branch (the ones actually screening the public E-mails) to do what they need to enforce the laws our elected representatives pass. If they aren't, then the people should vote accordingly for representatives that will fix the problem.
And despite what most people think, law enforcement officials are WAY to busy to concern themselves with the details of your private life. They are only concerned for the information that will help them protect the public from criminals.
I worked in the BYU Configurable Computer Lab (the lab that developed JHDL) for about a year and a half. I built the JHDLOutput and the Design Rule Checker (DRC) components of the system.
One semester, the EE department decided to use JHDL as the HDL for the logic design class (then it was EE320), and I was the teaching assistant that "specialized" in the actual tool (JHDL). Basically, JHDL was used as an introductory HDL for the students. The results were interesting.
In short, most of the class succeeded in building an LC2 processor entirely in JHDL, interfacing it with memory, and programming it (netlist, run through Xilinx backend tools, transfer bitstream) onto a Spartan chip. Most of the issues arose in the students struggling with object-oriented programming (creating a "Wire object" and a "2:1 Multiplexor object") and in the subtle details of how to interface circuit components with one another. A lot of students would get sections of their circuits ripped out by the Xilinx tools for failing to simply attach one component to another. The schematic viewer, waveform viewer, and other debugging tools proved effective in helping with the actual design.
Automated and dynamic simulation is easily performed in the simulator GUI and in testbenches. There is a Finite State Machine generator. There is parameratizable Floating Point arithmetic unit (its size depends on the number of wires you pass to it when you instantiate it; there are many more modules like this). Parameters can be assigned to the circuits in JHDL to, for example, instruct the Xilinx tools how to assign pins to top-level wires. Multiclock functionality exists. My DRC subsystem can dynamically instantiate circuits and run user-specified (and user-defined) checks on those circuits through a GUI. JHDL is fairly sophisticated, and it is an impressive tool given that it is mostly a student-developed application.
Before I left the lab (I had a very heavy classload), we were kicking around the idea of making JHDL Open Source. There are many legal issues we had to deal with... I'm not sure how it's looking now.
I was going to moderate this, but I refrained and chose to reply instead...
Homogeneity driven by a monopolistic environment leads to creativity and innovation limited to those in power (Microsoft comes to mind). When services are opened for provision by a large number of competitors, creativity and innovation is provided by whoever is best at it.
Despite what you have implied in your message, The Law of Comparative Advantage and the Law of Supply and Demand are still valid and applicable economic principles in the area of telecommunications. This is why the AT&T antitrust case was made pretty much a non-issue with the advent of Sprint, and why the Microsoft antitrust case will be nullified by Open Source and Free Software.
Don't be so quick to sing praises to a socialistic system, pointing out the low prices you seem to get in certain areas. When prices are not set right, market inefficiencies result, and someone loses out; usually the economy as a whole. And the people are denied the freedom to choose who they want to provide a service (it is pretty much decided for them). Only through competing broadband providers can the price be set right and the market become stronger.
If broadband in a free capitalistic economic market sucks, it's because the majority of the consumers want it to suck!
To anyone trying in the business of selling, the whole concept of trying to sell free software is as much an enigma as trying to conceptualize the "weight" of the color blue.
The color blue has a wavelength of approximately 460nm. This gives us a value of 2pi/460nm, or 1.366e7 inverse meters, in k-space. The momentum of the electromagnetic waves is Planck's constant
(6.626e-34Js) over 2pi multiplied by k, which turns out to be 1.422e-26mkg/s. The waves are travelling around the speed of light (3e8m/s), so the mass is the momentum divided by the velocity, or 4.739e-35kg.
Weight is actually mass times gravity. So, the weight would be 9.8m/seconds^2 times 4.739e-35kg, or 4.644e-34newtons.
I mean, this is great for Dimitry, but it seemed like a perfect case to test the DMCA against the First Amendment.
I couldn't disagree with you more. Dmitry was the absolute wrong test case. He is not within the jurisdiction of the DMCA, since he did not develop the software on American soil and he did not distribute the software in America. While his employer did distribute the software in America, Dmitry cannot be held responsible for the actions of his employer.
This "test" kept Dmitry locked up on a foreign land away from his family for a crime he did not commit.
The test case needs to be an American citizen, preferably a prominent university professor or researcher, who would publish an encryption circumvention technology, and who would be willing to go to jail in protest of the injustice of the law. This would not show contempt for the law; rather, it would show the highest respect for law.
Mandrake 8.1 seems to have all of this functionality.
Users can use the machine without logging in. (perhaps under some restrictive user account...)
GNOME Display Manager->Automatic login->"Login a user automatically on first bootup"
Users never have to manually configure hardware - the kernel detects the hardware and compiles and loads the requisite modules automatically
Mandrake's kernel comes with every stable module compiled and ready to go. If a process looks to the/dev directory for something that isn't linked to a driver, the module automagically links right in and takes over. This is transparent to the user. In addition, HardDrak detects and configures hardware on bootup.
There is one standard GUI interface across all distrubutions; even though GNOME and KDE are remarkably similar in function, the different appearance of windows will confuse the average user.
Perhaps, but only for a second. Besides, if someone is going to load Linux on their system, I don't think they won't have any problems taking 15 minutes to orient themselves to the slightly different look-and-feel of the GUI. My wife's been a Mac person her whole life, and I had her happily using WindowMaker in no time flat.
The user can install or upgrade any system with a single click of the mouse
No OS in the world can meet this requirement (at least no OS worth seriously considering; people should have some involvement in what is and is not loaded onto their computers). But, for what it's worth, Mandrake can be upgraded by booting off the CD-ROM and choosing "upgrade" when prompted. I've even created a software RAID and installed the OS on that RAID with Mandrake's installer, simply by using the GUI fdisk-like program they provide. How simple can you get?
For those who are interested in LDS history and theology, this event is recorded in the Book of Mormon as having occurred to the inhabitants of the ancient Americas:
Slashdot Mirror
Microsoft gives ridiculously deep discounts to educational institutions. ... If you can't afford $5 for Windows XP, how can you afford $8 from Linux for Cheapbytes, or the bandwidth for downloading the ISOs, the CD burner and blank CDs to burn them?
Once you leave school, you cannot use the software any more. And you cannot buy the upgrade, which means that you will have to pay full retail price once you are no longer a student. And by that time, you are already ``locked in'' to the proprietary office suite/development software/operating system/etc.
And then there's always the ``freedom'' aspect of Free Software over closed, proprietary software. Far too few students concern themselves with that aspect though.
How many bands that have gotten silly, filthy rich produced a good album afterwards?
That's the funny thing about our capitalistic system. The possibility of becoming a monopoly is a powerful incentive for innovation and production in the first place. However, once a monopoly actually occurs, then the system begins to fail (specifically, that which follows leaves much to be wanted).
I submit that the dream of becoming a multi-millionaire superstar (in the area of music), or the dream of producing the de-facto desktop operating system (in the case of Microsoft) gives motivation to struggle in the market and to produce. Take away the mere possibility of ``striking it big,'' and you affect the number of people that are going to try.At the start of each new school year, Microsoft hits our campus hard. They hang big banners, set up booths in the student center, and get the managers to make the on-campus computer store employees wear Microsoft t-shirts.
The BYU Unix Users Group gives its own response. This year, we're going to have a booth in the student center too. We're inviting students to bring their machines, and a group of volunteers will install Linux on their machines on the spot, for free.
We're making up flyers that read, ``Thrusday and Friday only! Get a FREE COPY of OpenOffice Suite version 1.0 (must have student ID or employee ID). Save HUNDREDS of dollars on your computer software this year!''
We're not just going to be pushing Linux, but Free Software in general. For those who are queasy about jumping full-force into Linux, we will offer to install Mozilla and OpenOffice on their Windows partitions, so they have some familiar ground to refer to when they boot into Linux.
The biggest debate in the group at the moment is which distributions to recommend to the newbies who bring their computers to the booth. I argue that since we're installing it for them, those who live on-campus and are on the university's network should use Debian because of the ease of maintenance. Others claim that Mandrake/RedHat/SuSE are more user friendly in general, and so they should be advocated instead.
In any case, we're doing what we can to let starving students know that they don't have to shell out hundreds of dollars to feed an addiction to proprietary software, when perfectly usable and functional Open Source alternatives exist for them. KDE+Mozilla+OpenOffice+Evolution is a powerful combination that makes Linux very much a viable desktop operating system.
Plus, anyone who switches over has the best support team around: the campus Unix Users Group! A perusal of our mailing list shows that we don't sleep at night until your problem is solved. :-)
My old college roommate went to Ghana, Africa last summer to film a documentary on the Burulli Ulcer epidemic. He was there for about 6 weeks, and we made plans to communicate over the Internet. He occasionally went into an Internet cafe in Accra to get to a web site I had set up with a PHP chat server. I hacked the code to send a notification to my cell phone when he happened to get to it, and I would run to a lab to jump in on the conversation. I also set up a web cam so he could see me while we chatted.
He described both the bandwidth and the latency as horrific. When the chat session refreshed on my screen (about a second), it could take several minutes to refresh on his. Not only that, but they have constant rolling blackouts in Accra, and so he would occasionally suddenly disappear from the chat room when the power went off in the cafe.
However, from the problems my friend saw in Ghana during his visit, I would say that the telecommunications infrastructure is the least of their worries.
I finally deleted my Windows partition. I figured that, as long as I'm messing with my partitions, I may as well ditch Mandrake 8.2 for a ``real'' distribution in the process.
I set apart all of Saturday to scrounge through my system to find and backup all my data files, and then to download and install Gentoo 1.2. So far, I have been mildly impressed. I have run into the following problems though:
I live on-campus, and my school blocks port 80 and makes everyone go through The Great Proxy Server. This does not jive well with emerge. The installation instructions, which I printed out before starting, say something about setting the HTTP_PROXY variable in the /etc/make.conf file, which I tried setting, to no avail. I then set the environment variables. That didn't work either. I looked for Lynx, or something to browse the Web with, and nothing was available (please no smart comments about telnet, thank you very much).
My school maps my network account to the hardware address of my network card, so I couldn't just plug in my laptop to get net access to get more documentation. I was about to run out to a computer lab, when I realized that the Gentoo 1.2 installation environment included iptables (I have 2 network cards in my system)! After a little bit of NAT magic, I had my laptop on-line, and I checked the FAQ, which mentioned, ``Oh, and if setting the PROXY environment variables in make.conf doesn't work, set it in wget's configuration files.'' So it uses wget. Nice to know. Setting the proxy there worked, and I was on my way!
I set the USE variable in make.conf, and then started emerge'ing. I was a little worried about how the compile settings really would be (i.e., would X, qt, and KDE be compiled with the necessary flags to enable anti-aliased fonts? It turns out that they were.) Compiling KDE took the better half of the afternoon, since it had to compile X and qt first. It worked like a charm!
So far, the only problem has been trying to emerge openoffice. The first time I tried, it complained about gcc 2.95.3 (it wanted 3.0.4). After ebuild'ing gcc 3.0.4, it started up. A couple of hours later, it bombed on something about not finding javac. There's a line in openoffice-1.0.0-r1.ebuild that reads ``COMMONDEPEND='... >=virtual/jdk-1.3.1''', but it prompted me for my java directory, and I wasn't sure what to type in there. And javac isn't on my system now, although that dependency should have prompted emerge to install it.
Well, these kinds of problems can be easily resolved by hand, but it goes to show that it can be difficult to get everything right the first time around in something like Gentoo. mozilla compiled without a hitch, and as soon as I fired it up this morning, I found this story, and thought I'd post my experience for all to enjoy. Oh... and my mozilla compiled with anti-aliased fonts, by default!
Slashdot is written in Perl, not C.
That's an entirely different problem that needs addressing...
I'm really sick of deleting hundreds of submissions from people who didn't read Slashdot on May 13
Taco, sounds like you have a problem here. One solution is to post a duplicate story. Allow me to suggest an alternative.
void processSubmission( char* submissionString, char* toExclude[], int toExcludeLength ) {
int x;
for( x = 0; x < toExcludeLength; x++ ) {
if( strstr( submissionString, toExclude[x] ) ) {
return;
}
}
askTaco( submissionString );
}
Of course, if you need a little more power, there's always regex.
I tried (weakly) to get DXR3 to work with Xine, and it so far has not worked. It works in MPlayer for me though. DVD playback is flawless (no dropped frames, not A/V sync issues), except all the video is off-center a little to the right. I have sent messages to both the MPlayer and the DXR3 mailing lists, and no one has responded, so I assume that this is a problem that no one know how to fix.
I can play DivX-formatted video through the card with MPlayer, but the video must be first decoded into full frames and then re-encoded on the fly to send in MPEG-1 format to the DXR3 card. This makes things a little jumpy on my PIII 750. But worst of all is that the aspect ratio is often wrong; the video on the TV will be stretched vertically. Again, I've sent a message about this to both the MPlayer and the DXR3 lists, and again no one has been able to give me a solution to this problem.
It's really a shame, because DXR3 and MPlayer seem to be the perfect combination to create a good Linux DVD/DivX player for a television. These technical issues still need to be addressed, and there doesn't seem to be anyone around who is either capable or willing to get it working.
I am developing a financial application for use over Bluetooth from a PDA to a cash register, and I can say from first-hand experience that the problem of security over a wireless domain is not trivial. Your solution to channel everything through SSH is not economically feasible when you consider the processor and memory requirements necessary for *every single* vendor system out there to do this. The problem gets worse when you start talking about cell phones and wristwatches transmitting credit card numbers to vendor systems.
Bluetooth and 802.11b both have link-level encryption built in, but they both need some work before I would trust them with my financial information. For example, brute forcing the Bluetooth's E0 cipher can be reduced from a complexity of 2^128 to 2^100, and generating a database of keys and sample encrypted data can reduce the problem to a complexity of 2 if a match is found while listening to the communications!
You will have to clarify what you mean by "the account number is sent to the central server." Is it encrypted before it's sent? Against what key? How does your solution deal with non-repudiation (the device is authenticated, but not the user)?
One idea I came up with while working on this project was to incorporate the one-time use credit card numbers with client-to-vendor system. Before you leave home, your financial institution transmits a set of randomly generated one-time numbers to your PDA, wristwatch, cell phone, whatever, and the client sends a different number from the set each time he wishes to pay for something. That way, it doesn't matter if the number is compromised after the transaction is completed.
Based on the comments I've seen on this thread, the problem of sticky wages becomes apparent. The only reason that unemployment ever gets to where it is today is because people are more than happy to accept pay raises when the economy is doing well, but they are unwilling to accept pay cuts when the economy is doing poorly. This double standard in our expectations results in wages staying the same while they should be decreasing to keep pace with the normal swings in the market economy. Because people insist on their pay clashing with the economy, the market is unable to employ everyone who wants to work.
If are any Slashdotters who have known the pains of unemployment in the last year, you should be the first and foremost in advocating pay cuts like this when the economy is suffering! If not for the problem of sticky wages, you would never have been unemployed.
I am on a research team that is developing a Bluetooth financial transaction system. One of the members of our team wrote an XML parser using STL components. When it came time to compile the XML parser using the embedded tools for a PDA, we found that Microsoft had not implemented the STL in the libraries they provide in Windows CE. We had to switch all our string processing to use Windows components like CString (which, admittedly, has more features that the STL's string). The moral of the story? Using STL may affect your portability, especially in the embedded systems arena.
This guy's web site gives a convincing argument as to why time travel will never be a reality: because time doesn't exist! Time is not a fundamental property of our universe; change is, and time is only a concept we invent to measure change.
Quote: "Motion in time is self-referential."
Quote: "Moving in spacetime is impossible because an evolution parameter (time) cannot be its own evolution parameter."
Something to consider...
This is getting old.
I moved into a new apartment near the end of 2000. Broadband was not (affordably) available in my neighborhood, and so I opted for a dial-in through a company named MStar. Boy was that a mistake.
I was running Linux on my primary machine, but they sent me Windows-only sign-up software on a CD-ROM. So I fired up my old system from when I was a freshman, which still had Windows '95 on it, and signed up. Their software loaded onto my system, took the liberty of placing a custom "quick-launch" bar onto my desktop, and then proceeded to log me in and activate my account.
The browser on the quick-launch bar was IE, but I prefered Netscape. However, when I tried to launch Netscape, the window would blip open for a split second and then close. Confused, I closed the quick-launch program (which disconnected me from the network) and tried again; this time it worked. MStar's trojan sofware was literally blocking me from running Netscape.
Their software, which connecting, would ask for a username and password, which is just a front for a "real" username and password that were secretly passed to the server when initiating the PPP connection. I used some software to capture my real username and password, and then I set up a standard dial-up account. When I would try to access the net on my Linux box, the Windows box would be able to auto-dial the connection. That worked nicely for a while.
Until a month later when banner ads from MStar started appearing at the bottom of every page that I loaded. Their servers were modifying every web page that I retrieved by placing an image and a link to MStar-related sites! There was a "disable banner for 5 minutes" link in the banner, which simply called a Perl script with a parameter of 5.
Oh, and did I mention that MStar performs ISP-side web censorship? They blocked Adobe's web site once. I had to set up a proxy server on another network to get around that little issue.
With the help of a filtering proxy and a call to that script with a parameter of "9999999" in my browser's home page setting, I was finally able to get clean access to the net. A few months later, I moved and had broadband access. But I will never consider going with MStar again.
The next time I search for an ISP, I will only subscribe to a service that interferes the least with my connection to the Internet.
... when it comes to buying a used laptop. Your GHz machine will be of little use to you if there are dead pixels, sticky keys, bad batteries, malfunctioning drives and/or ports, etc.
A few months ago, I picked up a used laptop from E-bay. It was from a reseller who purchased refurbished units from Dell which were on a corporate lease. There were tons of them selling at once, and I got a decent PIII for under $600. I was only moderately satisfied, as there were problems that couldn't be fixed (one of the PC-Card slots doesn't work and the left Ctrl key works only half the time, but the battery is still good). Some advice that I can offer from this experience includes:
I use Lynx to view Slashdot, and I resent not
having the opportunity to view the larger, more
intrusive ads. Posting ads in GIF or JPG format
does for Lynx users what posting Word docs does
for Linux users. In light of browser
heterogeneity, I would appreciate it if the
editors of Slashdot would kindly include ASCII
art ads for those of us who opt to use text-only
browsers.
The Chinese nation will sort themselves out over a long time, and probably peacefully, too - that's the Chinese way, to take the long, nonconfrontational view.
From what the West sees of China, this is not true. If it were not for fear of foreign intervention, China would immediately annex Taiwan and Hong Kong, rounding them under the Communist regime of the mainland, putting to death all who stand in their way. The Chinese government seems to have no problem being confrontational when it comes to political dissenters (a classic case of political stabalization theory gone amuck).
I remember when the Chinese ambassador paid a visit to my university last semester. He said that China was only concerned about creating "One Nation, One Government" with Taiwan. I swore I could hear Hitler's rhetoric ringing in those words.
Tyranny anywhere is a threat to democracy anywhere. When China truly becomes "the people's," then the economic boom you speak of will have an environment in which it can flourish. As long as people do not trust their government, they cannot trust its laws and policies. And fear motivates much less effectively than love does. Until the people can internalize, agree with, and embrace the structure in which they transact business, things will continue to crawl at a snail's pace.
In the meantime, we cannot allow the issues of human rights to "sort themselves out over a long time."
From a Huntsville Times (Alabama) interview with Bill Gates:
QUESTION: "I read in a newspaper that in l981 you said '640K of memory should be enough for anybody.' What did you mean when you said this?"
ANSWER: "I've said some stupid things and some wrong things, but not that. No one involved in computers would ever say that a certain amount of memory is enough for all time."
Like it or not, privacy is not a fundamental provision of the Consititution. If you place your messages in the public domain (which is what you do whenever you send an E-mail over the Internet), don't be surprised when it is screened, read, etc., by either the government or anyone who happens to own the router that your message passes through.
If you wish to have privacy, then you must send your communications over a private, secure channel, which the Internet is not. For example, the U.S. Postal Service is an entity that sends information securely; you can rest assured that your letters will never pass through the hands of a third party. But if you transmit information by posting a postcard on a bulletic board, it is free to be read by anyone who passes by, including government law enforcement officials.
You can attempt to make your messages sent through the public Internet "private" by encrypting the messages (which is perfectly legal and will continue to remain legal as long as our government is a free government). But that does not GUARANTEE privacy.
There is a general mistrust of government in general in this forum, which is sad. While I agree that the size and scope of government should be kept to a minimum, we should be able to trust the elected officials in a republican system, since we choose who our representatives will be. And we should certainly trust the executive branch (the ones actually screening the public E-mails) to do what they need to enforce the laws our elected representatives pass. If they aren't, then the people should vote accordingly for representatives that will fix the problem.
And despite what most people think, law enforcement officials are WAY to busy to concern themselves with the details of your private life. They are only concerned for the information that will help them protect the public from criminals.
I worked in the BYU Configurable Computer Lab (the lab that developed JHDL) for about a year and a half. I built the JHDLOutput and the Design Rule Checker (DRC) components of the system.
One semester, the EE department decided to use JHDL as the HDL for the logic design class (then it was EE320), and I was the teaching assistant that "specialized" in the actual tool (JHDL). Basically, JHDL was used as an introductory HDL for the students. The results were interesting.
In short, most of the class succeeded in building an LC2 processor entirely in JHDL, interfacing it with memory, and programming it (netlist, run through Xilinx backend tools, transfer bitstream) onto a Spartan chip. Most of the issues arose in the students struggling with object-oriented programming (creating a "Wire object" and a "2:1 Multiplexor object") and in the subtle details of how to interface circuit components with one another. A lot of students would get sections of their circuits ripped out by the Xilinx tools for failing to simply attach one component to another. The schematic viewer, waveform viewer, and other debugging tools proved effective in helping with the actual design.
Automated and dynamic simulation is easily performed in the simulator GUI and in testbenches. There is a Finite State Machine generator. There is parameratizable Floating Point arithmetic unit (its size depends on the number of wires you pass to it when you instantiate it; there are many more modules like this). Parameters can be assigned to the circuits in JHDL to, for example, instruct the Xilinx tools how to assign pins to top-level wires. Multiclock functionality exists. My DRC subsystem can dynamically instantiate circuits and run user-specified (and user-defined) checks on those circuits through a GUI. JHDL is fairly sophisticated, and it is an impressive tool given that it is mostly a student-developed application.
Before I left the lab (I had a very heavy classload), we were kicking around the idea of making JHDL Open Source. There are many legal issues we had to deal with... I'm not sure how it's looking now.
I was going to moderate this, but I refrained and chose to reply instead...
Homogeneity driven by a monopolistic environment leads to creativity and innovation limited to those in power (Microsoft comes to mind). When services are opened for provision by a large number of competitors, creativity and innovation is provided by whoever is best at it.
Despite what you have implied in your message, The Law of Comparative Advantage and the Law of Supply and Demand are still valid and applicable economic principles in the area of telecommunications. This is why the AT&T antitrust case was made pretty much a non-issue with the advent of Sprint, and why the Microsoft antitrust case will be nullified by Open Source and Free Software.
Don't be so quick to sing praises to a socialistic system, pointing out the low prices you seem to get in certain areas. When prices are not set right, market inefficiencies result, and someone loses out; usually the economy as a whole. And the people are denied the freedom to choose who they want to provide a service (it is pretty much decided for them). Only through competing broadband providers can the price be set right and the market become stronger.
If broadband in a free capitalistic economic market sucks, it's because the majority of the consumers want it to suck!
To anyone trying in the business of selling, the whole concept of trying to sell free software is as much an enigma as trying to conceptualize the "weight" of the color blue.
The color blue has a wavelength of approximately 460nm. This gives us a value of 2pi/460nm, or 1.366e7 inverse meters, in k-space. The momentum of the electromagnetic waves is Planck's constant
(6.626e-34Js) over 2pi multiplied by k, which turns out to be 1.422e-26mkg/s. The waves are travelling around the speed of light (3e8m/s), so the mass is the momentum divided by the velocity, or 4.739e-35kg.
Weight is actually mass times gravity. So, the weight would be 9.8m/seconds^2 times 4.739e-35kg, or 4.644e-34newtons.
I mean, this is great for Dimitry, but it seemed like a perfect case to test the DMCA against the First Amendment.
I couldn't disagree with you more. Dmitry was the absolute wrong test case. He is not within the jurisdiction of the DMCA, since he did not develop the software on American soil and he did not distribute the software in America. While his employer did distribute the software in America, Dmitry cannot be held responsible for the actions of his employer.
This "test" kept Dmitry locked up on a foreign land away from his family for a crime he did not commit.
The test case needs to be an American citizen, preferably a prominent university professor or researcher, who would publish an encryption circumvention technology, and who would be willing to go to jail in protest of the injustice of the law. This would not show contempt for the law; rather, it would show the highest respect for law.
Mandrake 8.1 seems to have all of this functionality.
/dev directory for something that isn't linked to a driver, the module automagically links right in and takes over. This is transparent to the user. In addition, HardDrak detects and configures hardware on bootup.
Users can use the machine without logging in. (perhaps under some restrictive user account...)
GNOME Display Manager->Automatic login->"Login a user automatically on first bootup"
Users never have to manually configure hardware - the kernel detects the hardware and compiles and loads the requisite modules automatically
Mandrake's kernel comes with every stable module compiled and ready to go. If a process looks to the
There is one standard GUI interface across all distrubutions; even though GNOME and KDE are remarkably similar in function, the different appearance of windows will confuse the average user.
Perhaps, but only for a second. Besides, if someone is going to load Linux on their system, I don't think they won't have any problems taking 15 minutes to orient themselves to the slightly different look-and-feel of the GUI. My wife's been a Mac person her whole life, and I had her happily using WindowMaker in no time flat.
The user can install or upgrade any system with a single click of the mouse
No OS in the world can meet this requirement (at least no OS worth seriously considering; people should have some involvement in what is and is not loaded onto their computers). But, for what it's worth, Mandrake can be upgraded by booting off the CD-ROM and choosing "upgrade" when prompted. I've even created a software RAID and installed the OS on that RAID with Mandrake's installer, simply by using the GUI fdisk-like program they provide. How simple can you get?
For those who are interested in LDS history and theology, this event is recorded in the Book of Mormon as having occurred to the inhabitants of the ancient Americas:
Read about it in III Nephi chapter 9