...and is seems to work ok. There's a problem with the compilation, you need to add -DEXPORT_SYMBOLS in the api/ subdir makefile for it to compile correctly.
Apart from that I never had any problem with it, but I admit that I never did much testing.
I looked at the 2.4.15 and 2.4.16 changelogs but I cannot understand if they fixed whatever problem happens with the disk cache. I often find myself with 2^32-1 Kb of RAM devoted to cache, which has some interesting results.... If you just ignore it goes away after a bit, so it's probably a counter somewhere which underflows.
But it's certainly fun, have you ever seen bubblemon turn pink? Or blood-red?:)
The ones you talk about are ok (The Silmarillion is very good) or semi-ok. The problem is with the "History of Middle Earth" series, where the amount of text actually by Tolkien goes down exponentially with the book number....
I just hope it does not end as it was with Tolkien, with lots of books published from temporary files/materials and in general so much stuff that it really looked like they were squeezing all the possible money from it....
While almost-completed stories are ok to publish, when the level reaches 10 lines of text and 10 pages of comment by someone else then it's sad.
I think that the problem is that "it depends on what you're doing". If you're re-applying for the 100th time the same metodology (= solving the same problem again, with different sugar) or if you're just gluing together pre-cooked solutions, then the process is much like an industrial project. You can make estimates, and only the normal delays will pop up.
On the opposite, if the developement is more like "research", i.e. doing something completely new, designing new solutions to known problems, extending known solution to new problems, then you're in the same boat as the scientists.
There's no way to give a correct estimate, since you don't know the exact procedure which will be followed. And no, "design - code - test" is a bit weak of a process description to be a basis for an estimation.....
Actually, I doubt that IBM is trying to be "cool". They definitely don't need it. What they want to obtain is 0-cost software, not in the sense that it costs you $0 to buy, but that it costs them (near) $0 to develop. IBM produces hardware, and hardware sells much better if software is running on it. Software changes daily and is pirated, hardware doesn't.... It's a much safer market.
For the "service" part: IBM sells solutions, which means people at your office solving problems. Again $0 (developement) costs makes this more effective and profitable.
It's not payola it's "kill the monopoly". Microsoft gets bashed for its dominant position and attitude. Intel gets bashed for its dominant position and attutide. The day Intel has 10% of marketshare and AMD starts putting out crappy CPUs you can bet that Slashdot will be covered with Intel info.
Another explanation could be that you tend to get quite a lot of (dis)information about the big players in the classic media, so the new (internet) media plays more on the less-known facts with a "balancing" effect.
This is the same mistake of thinking that since you ust rolled a 6 on a dice, then the probability of rolling another 6 "is less than 1/6". It doesn't work like this. If there's a 1/1000 chance of being hit by a meteorite per year, this does not mean that there'll be one hit every 1000 years..... only that *the average on a large number of hits* will be 1/1000 years. The next one could be tomorrow...
Actually, this means that software used in some specific circumstances will need to be certified.
For your parallel with buildings: even without a certification I can build a house (not that I'm able....) for myself or for a friend. It's building a public building or having insurance cover for my self-built house which may be a problem.
In general, anyway it's the OBJECT which needs the certification (if, after building my house, I pay experts to certify that it meets security standards, then I'm fine), and it's people allowed to make this certification which needs the certification (note that they take money but also responsibility).
Software will work the same way, with "certified" software costing money but also implying that the producer is accountable for damage done and "hobby" software where you're on your own.
I think that the main problem with SSSS(?)CA is the mandatory certification required for some kind of (absolutely non mission-critical) applications, which opens up the way for massive abuse from corporations (and government, but I don't believe this).
....and now I'm replacing all my desktop buttons/menus with gestures....
I use a very small program, called "wayv" (URL: at sourceforge). It's definitely not friendly, but it gets the job done.
The reason I moved to gestures to control desktop is simpler: they work ALWAYS, independently of the current state of the screen. Buttons are nice, but they always end up being covered by something, and short of Mac-like "hide all", they quickly become a pain. Win-like bars/menus or right-click menus either are too slow or are position-sensitive. A gesture isn't, and when you have one hand of the keyboard and one on the mouse they are very fast (choose simple ones!).
I use L-Shift+Right button to trigger the recognition code, and while I get mistakes at times, I find that my desktop is much cleaner and opening applictions faster....
A stupid idea just occurred to me... Is it possible to use the DMCA to restric the distribution of personal data?
The idea would be that when you buy/do something requiring you to disclose your personal data, instead of giving it in clear text, you provide it "encrypted" with a stupid algorithm and together with a decryption program using a proprietary algorithm. The program comes with a non-transferable license.
Now, the company can access your data as much as they want, but they can't transfer the cleartext (you own the copyright on it). They can distribute the cyphertext, but they cannot distribute the program, since it's copyrighted and they can't reverse-engineer and distribute the algorithm, since then result would be distributing a circumvention device.
Also, by encrypting the data with different keys when you give it to different companies, you can prevent them to exchange cyphertexts successfully.Then you start including some "marks" (like typos, or initials) in the data to track it and threaten to sue under the DMCA if they distribute it.
Would this work? (I'm not saying it's practical, mind you)
...so i'm guessing other than excessive heat (used to make steam), there is none. no radioactivity, no cancer, no threat to humanity as we know it when one of these 'melts down'.
I don't think they can melt down...
For the environmental effects: what I remember from my nuclear physics courses is that the simplest reaction to obtain is quite dirty (D+T=He+n maybe?), producing fast neutrons which will make the reactor's inner walls radioactive. It's not as bad as the waste currently produced by fission, but still poses some problem.
The real positive thing is that as time passes we can imagine that the technology will evole, just like it happened in other fields, permitting the construction of the reactors running the "clean" fusion.
Fantastic technology. The internet is full of asshole sites and this will provide a very nice way to detect a lot of them....
And if (as someone suggests) they use image load tracking to see if the popup was shown or not, then don't be surprised if the next version of your window manager has an option "automatically position off-screen windows with this title".
I'm vey happy 8.1 is out, since I'm a Mandrake user (running 8.1beta right now:), but I can't close my eyes to the fact that the distributions are getting bigger and bigger and, what's worse, the demand on hardware are much higher.
Even if Mandrake is very much desktop-oriented, this should not necessairly mean requiring a monster. I'm using a K6/2 350Mhz and the CPU power is fine. Not blazing fast, but ok. On the contrary, the 64Megs of RAM are way too little. I don't use GNOME/KDE (I prefer plain WindowMaker), but at the moment the situation is:
total used free shared buffers cached
Mem: 62240 60456 1784 1056 1124 15232
-/+ buffers/cache: 44100 18140
Swap: 66524 27508 39016
27M of swap is not the end of the world, except that I'm using old recycled disks, with a throughput of 3-5 Mb/sec. And with this disks, you can FEEL the system swapping.
What suprises me is that I'm running the same stuff I was using with the old releases, but nevertheless RAM usage is going up!!
Even if RAM is cheap, I don't see any reason to go the Microsoft way. Featurithis is not a need..... Please keep this in mind, all you software developers...better many small utils which do stuff than one big monster....
PS: I can't consider Mandrake a server distro, there's too much bleeding edge stuff. This is nice for the desktop, but stability is affected. I'd stick to Debian for a server.
I agree with you, but I think (fear?) that it doesn't come from some conspiration against crypto, but from the fact that often newspapers tend to "correct" reality a bit in order to make their articles sound more "strong". I've witnessed this happen a couple of times. After all, normal, flat life and feelings are a bit too "grey" to attract the public. A nice black/white strikes much more....
So why exactly was it necessary to support the Taliban?
Here's a novel answer for Slashdot: I don't know. And I wager, you don't either. I don't have all the intelligence reports from the time. I don't know all the factors that went into the decision. I know the overall goal was preventing Soviet expansionism.
Don't trust this blindly, but this is what the main TV news in France was reporting. Apparently most of the money was from a US oil company (I don't remember the name, Uneco, maybe?). They wanted to access the extremely rich oil deposits situated in a country north of Afghanistan (Tadjbekistan (sp?)), and they needed to run a pipeline to a sea port. Through the URSS it was not possible (and Iran neither), so they supported the creation of a central government in Afgh. just to have a single point of negotiation. They hoped that the government, controlling all territory would allow the construction of the pipeline. Unfortunately (for them) the Taliban backed down on the promise and no pipeline was built.
The feeling I got from that report is that it's a consequence of moral-less distribution of money to the strongest player just for the sake of making even more money.
I'd love to see a breakdown of total Internet bandwidth allocated to porn and piracy. I'd bet
it consumes >90% of the total bandwidth used. Movies, music, and babes...now, if only they
could figure out a way to download alcohol and drugs.
I did some statistic a few years ago on web traffic, using logs from a proxy server which a friendly admin provided. On top it's software downloads (LEGAL downloads), then porn/warez, then random stuff (hotmail, disney, etc.), with the ratios being something like 36%, 30%, rest.
Even if Napster is dead, I think that it ended up playing a very important role, i.e. showing the potential of the internet to the great public.
And with 'potential of the internet' I don't mean 'copyright infringment at large', but the indication that the distribution costs for digitally reproducible material is near-zero, which will definitely help in bringing back the market to a more sane state (well.....I hope:).
Also, it exposed a lot of people to copyright law, and how it can be abused (in particular by the recording industry), something which was not really known by many before the Napster debate started.
Even if now sharing will move on to different means/protocols/etc. I think that Napster will/should not be forgotten as it'was a landmark in the early "digital era".
Oh come, come! If Rummy and Dick can get the Pentagon to produce a missile defence, how
hard would it be to adapt the system to hitting fastballs? Who knows, this might even make
missile defence against an imaginary adversary worthwhile!:-P
Are you proposing an anti-missile system composed of a big big bat or what?:)
My friend's son has a lego sports car, out of the "Technic" series of kits. This thing is actually
quite impressive. Working shifting mechinism+gearbox (5 speeds plus reverse),
As some other poster noted, LEGO has the problem that with time it's moving toward the "few specialized pieces" approach instead of the "lots of unspecialized pieces". Technic is following the same trend: if you grab hold of the ORIGINAL technic boxes you'll see that they had very very few pieces, but they managed nevertheless to build objects of high complexity. I owned most of them as a kid (they still sit somewhere at my parent's), and in particular I remember the first "car" box, featuring 4-piston engine, gearbox (3 speeds, I think), steering wheel, adjustable seats, and all of this done with basically the classic lego pieces plus 20-30 parts (shafts, wheels,....).
What's more interesting is that with the same parts you could build anything else, since they were absolutely non-specialized, pushing creativity much more that the current sets.
I hereby give up my right to privacy. I don't want to be a 'private' citizen anymore. I want the
police to follow my face about the town. I want cameras on every corner, and clipper chips in
everything. [....]
You know what? I agree on the idea of total, utter complete elimination of privacy, based on the approach "I have nothing to hide". Of course, there's a small minor problem. If the society doesn't want me to hide my affairs, I'd very much like to check the affairs of other people. Take for example the military: they suck a lot of money! I want access to all facilities to see that they are not spending *my* money to play Quake. And politicians? Full access to all bank records! We don't want anyone hiding money, do we? Ah, Swiss banks should be outlawed.
And don't forget Monsanto/whoever else laboratories, they say they do nice stuff, but I want to check out: I want access to all laboratories and data, just to make sure they're not boing evil things.
I suppose that if I were to propose such an "exteme" approach no-one would agree....I wonder why......maybe at times it's actually *shudder* useful to hide something?
Slashdot Mirror
Apart from that I never had any problem with it, but I admit that I never did much testing.
I looked at the 2.4.15 and 2.4.16 changelogs but I cannot understand if they fixed whatever problem happens with the disk cache. I often find myself with 2^32-1 Kb of RAM devoted to cache, which has some interesting results.... If you just ignore it goes away after a bit, so it's probably a counter somewhere which underflows. :)
But it's certainly fun, have you ever seen bubblemon turn pink? Or blood-red?
The ones you talk about are ok (The Silmarillion is very good) or semi-ok. The problem is with the "History of Middle Earth" series, where the amount of text actually by Tolkien goes down exponentially with the book number....
I just hope it does not end as it was with Tolkien, with lots of books published from temporary files/materials and in general so much stuff that it really looked like they were squeezing all the possible money from it....
While almost-completed stories are ok to publish, when the level reaches 10 lines of text and 10 pages of comment by someone else then it's sad.
I would have very much liked to write an intelligent post, but it looks like the poor site was wiped out of existence.
:((((
Dammit, even a dumb "mirror of the text" post to get some karma would have been good.
I'm definitely not fast enough
I think that the problem is that "it depends on what you're doing". If you're re-applying for the 100th time the same metodology (= solving the same problem again, with different sugar) or if you're just gluing together pre-cooked solutions, then the process is much like an industrial project. You can make estimates, and only the normal delays will pop up.
On the opposite, if the developement is more like "research", i.e. doing something completely new, designing new solutions to known problems, extending known solution to new problems, then you're in the same boat as the scientists.
There's no way to give a correct estimate, since you don't know the exact procedure which will be followed. And no, "design - code - test" is a bit weak of a process description to be a basis for an estimation.....
Actually, I doubt that IBM is trying to be "cool". They definitely don't need it. What they want to obtain is 0-cost software, not in the sense that it costs you $0 to buy, but that it costs them (near) $0 to develop. IBM produces hardware, and hardware sells much better if software is running on it. Software changes daily and is pirated, hardware doesn't.... It's a much safer market.
For the "service" part: IBM sells solutions, which means people at your office solving problems. Again $0 (developement) costs makes this more effective and profitable.
It's not payola it's "kill the monopoly". Microsoft gets bashed for its dominant position and attitude. Intel gets bashed for its dominant position and attutide. The day Intel has 10% of marketshare and AMD starts putting out crappy CPUs you can bet that Slashdot will be covered with Intel info.
Another explanation could be that you tend to get quite a lot of (dis)information about the big players in the classic media, so the new (internet) media plays more on the less-known facts with a "balancing" effect.
This is the same mistake of thinking that since you ust rolled a 6 on a dice, then the probability of rolling another 6 "is less than 1/6". It doesn't work like this. If there's a 1/1000 chance of being hit by a meteorite per year, this does not mean that there'll be one hit every 1000 years..... only that *the average on a large number of hits* will be 1/1000 years. The next one could be tomorrow...
What happens if you type "terrorism" or "antrhax"?
A mail is automatically sent to the FBI?
Actually, this means that software used in some specific circumstances will need to be certified.
For your parallel with buildings: even without a certification I can build a house (not that I'm able....) for myself or for a friend. It's building a public building or having insurance cover for my self-built house which may be a problem.
In general, anyway it's the OBJECT which needs the certification (if, after building my house, I pay experts to certify that it meets security standards, then I'm fine), and it's people allowed to make this certification which needs the certification (note that they take money but also responsibility).
Software will work the same way, with "certified" software costing money but also implying that the producer is accountable for damage done and "hobby" software where you're on your own.
I think that the main problem with SSSS(?)CA is the mandatory certification required for some kind of (absolutely non mission-critical) applications, which opens up the way for massive abuse from corporations (and government, but I don't believe this).
....and now I'm replacing all my desktop buttons/menus with gestures....
I use a very small program, called "wayv" (URL: at sourceforge). It's definitely not friendly, but it gets the job done.
The reason I moved to gestures to control desktop is simpler: they work ALWAYS, independently of the current state of the screen. Buttons are nice, but they always end up being covered by something, and short of Mac-like "hide all", they quickly become a pain. Win-like bars/menus or right-click menus either are too slow or are position-sensitive. A gesture isn't, and when you have one hand of the keyboard and one on the mouse they are very fast (choose simple ones!).
I use L-Shift+Right button to trigger the recognition code, and while I get mistakes at times, I find that my desktop is much cleaner and opening applictions faster....
A stupid idea just occurred to me... Is it possible to use the DMCA to restric the distribution of personal data?
The idea would be that when you buy/do something requiring you to disclose your personal data, instead of giving it in clear text, you provide it "encrypted" with a stupid algorithm and together with a decryption program using a proprietary algorithm. The program comes with a non-transferable license.
Now, the company can access your data as much as they want, but they can't transfer the cleartext (you own the copyright on it). They can distribute the cyphertext, but they cannot distribute the program, since it's copyrighted and they can't reverse-engineer and distribute the algorithm, since then result would be distributing a circumvention device.
Also, by encrypting the data with different keys when you give it to different companies, you can prevent them to exchange cyphertexts successfully.Then you start including some "marks" (like typos, or initials) in the data to track it and threaten to sue under the DMCA if they distribute it.
Would this work? (I'm not saying it's practical, mind you)
...so i'm guessing other than excessive heat (used to make steam), there is none. no radioactivity, no cancer, no threat to humanity as we know it when one of these 'melts down'.
I don't think they can melt down...
For the environmental effects: what I remember from my nuclear physics courses is that the simplest reaction to obtain is quite dirty (D+T=He+n maybe?), producing fast neutrons which will make the reactor's inner walls radioactive. It's not as bad as the waste currently produced by fission, but still poses some problem.
The real positive thing is that as time passes we can imagine that the technology will evole, just like it happened in other fields, permitting the construction of the reactors running the "clean" fusion.
Fantastic technology. The internet is full of asshole sites and this will provide a very nice way to detect a lot of them....
And if (as someone suggests) they use image load tracking to see if the popup was shown or not, then don't be surprised if the next version of your window manager has an option "automatically position off-screen windows with this title".
Even if Mandrake is very much desktop-oriented, this should not necessairly mean requiring a monster. I'm using a K6/2 350Mhz and the CPU power is fine. Not blazing fast, but ok. On the contrary, the 64Megs of RAM are way too little. I don't use GNOME/KDE (I prefer plain WindowMaker), but at the moment the situation is:
total used free shared buffers cached
Mem: 62240 60456 1784 1056 1124 15232
-/+ buffers/cache: 44100 18140
Swap: 66524 27508 39016
27M of swap is not the end of the world, except that I'm using old recycled disks, with a throughput of 3-5 Mb/sec. And with this disks, you can FEEL the system swapping.
What suprises me is that I'm running the same stuff I was using with the old releases, but nevertheless RAM usage is going up!!
Even if RAM is cheap, I don't see any reason to go the Microsoft way. Featurithis is not a need.....
Please keep this in mind, all you software developers...better many small utils which do stuff than one big monster....
PS: I can't consider Mandrake a server distro, there's too much bleeding edge stuff. This is nice for the desktop, but stability is affected. I'd stick to Debian for a server.
I agree with you, but I think (fear?) that it doesn't come from some conspiration against crypto, but from the fact that often newspapers tend to "correct" reality a bit in order to make their articles sound more "strong". I've witnessed this happen a couple of times. After all, normal, flat life and feelings are a bit too "grey" to attract the public. A nice black/white strikes much more....
Here's a novel answer for Slashdot: I don't know. And I wager, you don't either. I don't have all the intelligence reports from the time. I don't know all the factors that went into the decision. I know the overall goal was preventing Soviet expansionism.
Don't trust this blindly, but this is what the main TV news in France was reporting. Apparently most of the money was from a US oil company (I don't remember the name, Uneco, maybe?). They wanted to access the extremely rich oil deposits situated in a country north of Afghanistan (Tadjbekistan (sp?)), and they needed to run a pipeline to a sea port. Through the URSS it was not possible (and Iran neither), so they supported the creation of a central government in Afgh. just to have a single point of negotiation. They hoped that the government, controlling all territory would allow the construction of the pipeline. Unfortunately (for them) the Taliban backed down on the promise and no pipeline was built.
The feeling I got from that report is that it's a consequence of moral-less distribution of money to the strongest player just for the sake of making even more money.
This technology may bring a new meaning to the slashdot effect.... :)
..."no, Dave, you will not buy this."
it consumes >90% of the total bandwidth used. Movies, music, and babes...now, if only they
could figure out a way to download alcohol and drugs.
I did some statistic a few years ago on web traffic, using logs from a proxy server which a friendly admin provided. On top it's software downloads (LEGAL downloads), then porn/warez, then random stuff (hotmail, disney, etc.), with the ratios being something like 36%, 30%, rest.
And with 'potential of the internet' I don't mean 'copyright infringment at large', but the indication that the distribution costs for digitally reproducible material is near-zero, which will definitely help in bringing back the market to a more sane state (well.....I hope :).
Also, it exposed a lot of people to copyright law, and how it can be abused (in particular by the recording industry), something which was not really known by many before the Napster debate started.
Even if now sharing will move on to different means/protocols/etc. I think that Napster will/should not be forgotten as it'was a landmark in the early "digital era".
Are you proposing an anti-missile system composed of a big big bat or what? :)
As some other poster noted, LEGO has the problem that with time it's moving toward the "few specialized pieces" approach instead of the "lots of unspecialized pieces". Technic is following the same trend: if you grab hold of the ORIGINAL technic boxes you'll see that they had very very few pieces, but they managed nevertheless to build objects of high complexity. I owned most of them as a kid (they still sit somewhere at my parent's), and in particular I remember the first "car" box, featuring 4-piston engine, gearbox (3 speeds, I think), steering wheel, adjustable seats, and all of this done with basically the classic lego pieces plus 20-30 parts (shafts, wheels,....).
What's more interesting is that with the same parts you could build anything else, since they were absolutely non-specialized, pushing creativity much more that the current sets.
See what I mean at this site.
[....]
You know what? I agree on the idea of total, utter complete elimination of privacy, based on the approach "I have nothing to hide". Of course, there's a small minor problem. If the society doesn't want me to hide my affairs, I'd very much like to check the affairs of other people. Take for example the military: they suck a lot of money! I want access to all facilities to see that they are not spending *my* money to play Quake. And politicians? Full access to all bank records! We don't want anyone hiding money, do we? Ah, Swiss banks should be outlawed.
And don't forget Monsanto/whoever else laboratories, they say they do nice stuff, but I want to check out: I want access to all laboratories and data, just to make sure they're not boing evil things.
I suppose that if I were to propose such an "exteme" approach no-one would agree....I wonder why......maybe at times it's actually *shudder* useful to hide something?