http://www.opendx.org/, a now open source product from IBM. Does wonderful 3-D stuff. Source code available, and binaries available for AIX, FreeBSD (might compile on OS-X), HPUX, Irix, Linux, Linux PPC, Solaris, and Microsoft OS.
Using this software won't be point, click, drag, like using Visio, but I'm sure you could easily compose the modules that would parse data, and create what you need. Look at the samples and highlights on the web page before you decide.
The minimum wage from different areas of India varies, but is usually stated around 2,000 Rs. per month. In reality, most folks are paid about half that. At 49:1 exchange, that comes to $489 U.S., or in the range of other numbers given here.
Museum admission (for Indians) was 5 Rs. when I was there (50 Rs. for us westerners), and meals at restaurants wound up being 8-25 Rs. per person. So roughly 1 Rs. equals $1 U.S. in what it'll buy.
That comparison breaks down quickly, though. Petrol was 25 Rs./liter when I was there (January, 2000), and electronics and internet access seemed to be a straight ($1 * exchange rate) conversion. The commercially produced cassette tapes of Hindi songs sold for about 60 Rs, for a price comparison.
While 10 Rs. is cheap by American terms, it's pricey by Indian terms. I think the U.S. would settle on $3/track, which would kill the service, intead of $1/track, which would generate revenue and business.
Step 1, consumers must throw out all existing digital appliances. Includes microwaves with digital clocks, watches, thermostats, TVs, stereos, and cars (yes, the whole car).
Step 2, businesses must throw out all existing digital infrastructure, such as cable, phone, DSL, radio, satellite. And all the digital appliances listed in step 1.
Step 3, businesses must build a new digital infrastructure, such as cable, phone, DSL, radio, and satellite, that has copy protection built in.
Step 4, the government decides what the full CBDTPA rules are, and authorizes U.S. Customs and the FBI to search out and sieze non-CBDTPA compliant devices.
Step 5, businesses manufacture and sell CBDTPA compliant devices. After spending a few years adding features, working out compatibility issues, and scaling production.
Step 6, consumers may now buy CBDTPA compliant devices.
The bill is really asking for quadrillions of dollars to be spent, JUST IN THE U.S., to create a subscription-only media distribution system.
An alternative? The taxes collected upon blank media should be used toward copyright enforcement.
No one, upon no one, is putting forth the real costs of doing this.
If the TV companies are whining about how consumers won't buy digital TVs now, think about how much the consumers will be whining when they have to stop using all the appliances they already own, and buy new appliances to replace them.
Think of a chatroom hooked to a web page. If you're on the web page, then some Java(tm) applet automatically sends you to the right channel on the right IRC server, then you can chat with a support person about that, or with other people using that same web application. The user doesn't have to load a seperate client in a seperate window, and then know what command syntax to send. Makes it more usable.
Think more of merging IM with email. You open your email, and the From line indicates if the sender is online, or away. Click their name, and instant chat. Lotus has done it with Sametime, and it makes sense in some situations.
Sametime makes use of Java, Javascript, HTML and LDAP, which means it integrates with far more than just IBM/Lotus products. It also links with wireless devices using Sametime Everyplace, and it's part of IBM's e-learning Mindspan suite.
The beta toolkit is available at http://www.lotus.com/beta, which includes the COM toolkit (that's new), the links toolkit, and the Community Server tookit, which is analogous to what Oracle did, if I read Jabber's press release correctly.
Get some drains mounted under it. When the sprinklers on the floor above go off (they will), or the roof leaks, it'll go under the floor, and drain away. Don't put it in a basement, and if you are in an area prone to earthquakes, hurricanes, or tornadoes, put the server room lower in the building. If the area is prone to flooding, move it up a floor or two. If in doubt, mount a moisture alarm in a low spot in the room. (They sell them wherever they sell sump pumps.)
Under the floor is really where racks are meant to have their cables run. Some flooring units have inserts that act as vents, and that works nicely. Your under-floor is ventilated, kept dry, and your smoke sensors have a higher chance of sniffing the smoke if the air moves through that closed area. There are actually some commercial smoke alarms that continually pump and sniff air, rather than the passive ones we have in our homes that rely upon convection and diffusion for the smoke to reach a sensor. Put some sort of dust-handling equipment on your air-conditioning. The folks that sell you the AC will be able to help. See if they can tie the ventilation into the smoke alarm so that if there is an alarm, fresh oxygen stops getting pumped to that room. (They do this on some modern highrises.) The folks that sell you the AC should also be able to help you with sizing the air conditioning to your requirements.
Call in your local pest control expert to mouse-proof the building, then make sure there's serious screening over all entries into the building. Mice get bored, and for fun, they pick their teeth with the fiber core of the cable running to your most mission-critical server. However, they have to chew through several cables before they find the right one.
Consider one of those big panic buttons that shut the room down in a hurry. Just make sure under a cover so that someone doesn't accidentally punch it. At the very least, place the circuit breaker panel in the room, and clearly exposed (meaning don't stack crap in front of it), so that someone can get to it and flip things on and off.
Also place several of the correct class fire extinguishers there. Place a wall-mounted first-aid kit (some cases have sharp burrs that cut fingers well) near the door. Doesn't have to be fancy. Could just be something on a shelf. Also have a paper-towel dispenser (or just a roll of Bounty) for when someone forgets, takes their drink in, and then knocks it over.
Finally, plan for expansion. Make the room a bit bigger than you think, but leave one wall that can be bumped out to claim the room next to it sometime in the future. (However, I think server sizes have stopped growing, so the need for more physical space is lessening.)
Create subdomains based upon server function. w.foo.com for web, f.foo.com for file services, d.foo.com for DNS, etc. Expand to two-digit subdomains, *.dx.foo.com or *.w9.foo.com if you need more.
Skip the themes for individual server names. You can use themes for DNS subdomains, but you don't need to actually name the "gemini" server group *.gemini.foo.com, but you can call the *.g.foo.com server group the gemini group.
You don't need to throw any reference to the operating system in the DNS name. If you replace a server with one from a different OS (like you migrate your database from HPUX to AS/400 or Linux), then you have to run around to several places and change the DNS name that other boxes point to. It also allows you to cluster mixed operating systems (good for reliability), and to transition from one OS to the other.
Finally, name your servers numerically as you add them to each sub-function group. Old servers that are slow and coming off lease soon will have lower numbers than higher ones. Just start with A0000001 for the first one in each domain, and go. If there are too many servers starting with A, then be slightly redundant and have the first letter of the server name match the single-letter subdomain. The first DNS server would be d00000001.d.foo.com.
Quite seriously. HBO needs something animated to balance all that real-life action stuff,:-), and Futurama isn't a bad choice. Could give the show a little more edge, and supply many more comedy possibilities (and likely a little cartoon nudity), plus HBO won't get hysterical at episodes like "Kwanzabot" and prevent their airing.
David Cohen, you out there? Shop that show around.
Riparian systems at first (that's rivers in plain English), then on to Cartography (map making) when the Legislature decided yooniversitees were for communists and that farmers' taxes shouldn't be used, and that all sorts of programs needed to be cut because edukashun and nawlej are evil, and gives people ideas.
From there, Cartography was being taken over by GIS (Geographic Information Systems), which is CAD and databases hooked together. http://www.esri.com is the big name in GIS, for the curious.
Throw in all the various jobs I worked to pay for college like river guide, carpenter, housepainter, bus driver, writer.... Took me till age 27 to finish college because I never received any aid, and I never liked the school loans program. (Sorry, but a loan is not aid.) So I traded off longer school and the ability to have lodgning and food for no debt.
From GIS it's a short leap to learning how to manage the computers, to my current job of computer consultant and programmer.
Your birth is your starting point, and fate has some destination in mind for you. Don't take the direct route. Some people do, and they stay in the same job for 50 years and retire happy.
Well, the version of Notes 5 under Linux I first saw was an RPM that -- the source told me -- was created in IBM by some frustrated users, and contained Note R5 plus a limited part of Wine. (Install the one RPM, and you were gold.)
I think what's keeping Lotus from going after a Linux version of the client is:
lack of market share
limited OLE functionality
non-unified GUI
The Lotus Domino server is fully supported on Linux, and you can buy SuSE bundled with the Domino, and SuSE is going to distribute IBM's linux offerings for IBM, so there's potential.
Slightly off topic, but the other thread on Slashdot right now about LindowsOS shows Lotus Notes running on a Linux box. Mirrored screen capture:
I have a B.A. in Geography, so, yeah, I tend to go for the geographic over the legal definitions.
Offtopic now, but about ten years ago, the media did one of their famed polls about how little adults know, and one of the results was how few people could name 3 countries in North America.
(I always love those polls where they ask adults something, then schools are forced to teach kids what the adults didn't know.)
Back to encryption, I should have added that once the Feds (or whomever has resources) has your Notes ID file, or your GPG/PGP private key file, then brute force attack becomes much easier. Lotus Notes uses PKI, with the ID file holding the private key, and the directory of Notes users holding the public key.
Having said that, I don't know if it was 56-bit DES, or what, but I do remember the password hash was stored in the ID file, and not the actual password (I think it was the MD5 checksum, but I don't think there was a salt used). I did do a diff on an international vs. a north american version, and only 5 files differed. 2 files each were only in one distribution, and a single DLL had differently named functions in it.
If you're worried about something that could be used against you later, why keep it?
True, I don't like the idea of someone going back through years of email and reading private things. But maybe messages shouldn't be saved by default. And how often do we really go back through our old email for something? Not trolling here, but the majority of email I get isn't worthy of digital immortality.
At one of the client sites I consulted, they deleted all Inbox mail after 30 days, and had a 3-year maximum retention on everything else in the mail file. (To keep it past 30 days, you basically had to move it to another folder.) Sent mail was also deleted after 90 days, but you could override that, up to the 3 year max. (Contrast that with another site where SEC made them keep _everything_ for years and years.)
I gotta say, I love it. I've even tweaked my email client to ask me if I want to save a copy, for everything I send.
True, it is encrypted. And true that the CIA uses Lotus Notes, so it obviously can pass the paranoia test. (Notes is one of the few systems where even mail administrators can't read your email.)
Where Lotus Notes breaks down in this situation is the certifier IDs. In LN, an administrator uses a "god" (or certifier) ID to create other IDs. That "god" ID can also go back and alter the IDs that it created (like to extend expirations, do name changes for marriage/divorce), which means that forgotten passwords can be unlocked.
So, using Lotus Notes will keep anyone who's not your boss, and anyone who's not the government, from reading your email.
There are other encryption keys that the end-user can create in Notes (the ID file can store several encryption keys in it, in different formats, so it's somewhat like a key manager), and they can use these for encryption, but these other keys are used to encrypt fields only, which means you'd have to write something that would take all the fields in your emails, and create new documents in your archive, and encrypt the fields along the way. (Simple, really, and it'd probably take me an afternoon to do.) The on-disk encryption is for the ID only (the one issued from the certifier), which means Bosses and Governments still can get it.
Oh, but Notes is reasonably stable running under WINE.
Brings me to one other bit. In the 4.x family of Notes, there were 3 encryption versions. 64-bit (U.S./Canada only, but strangely titled "North American" as if everything north of Panama isn't in North America), 40-bit (International), and this strange French version (unknown encryption, but the French Government didn't want any encryption, really, so it was even lower encryption).
The U.S. and International versions both used the same 64-bit encryption. However, the U.S. held 24-bits of the 64-bit international key in escrow. That, to me, means that the U.S. could crack 40-bit encryption back in the mid 1990's. In the newest release, the encryption level is higher (128?), and there's only one level for all distributions (I'll exclude France as I really don't know), but that's partly because of eased export laws on encryption, and partly because I think the Feds realize they can get around encryption.
If you have your own certifiers, and can digitally shred these as the Feds are knocking down your door with a search warrant in hand, then maybe it'd work.
English: How are you?
Spanish: Cómo es usted?
Portugese: Como são você?
And that's just a start. The pronounciation is different, and worst of all, some Portugese speakers are offended if you speak only Spanish to them. Point of pride, I guess, like Quebec French speakers.
SuSE in Brazilan: http://www.suse.de/br/
SuSE in Spanish: http://www.suse.de/es/
Haven't tried either, but kudos to the company in recognizing that Portugese and Spanish aren't the same language.
It's not "pouring tons of money"
on
Patented Seeds
·
· Score: 3, Insightful
The key to a patent is that you are the first to patent it -- not the first to discover it. Large companies like Monsanto have been trying to patent native, unaltered, unresearched varieties of local seeds in an attempt to create a revenue stream.
In India, big American companies are claiming patents on local varieties of basmati rice so that local farmers will have to pay money for seeds they grew themselves, from strains that have existed for millenia.
Patents aren't about new discoveries. They are about money. The first to "invent" something completely new deserves a patent. However, being the first to patent something that nature created does not deserve a patent.
I remember a test where they did double-blind testing involving the color of the exterior of the speaker. They had 4 identical units, and kept sliding different cases over top. The audiophiles insisted that the blue speakers had better highs, the red ones had better bass, etc.
I'm sure there's some old LP vs. CD wars in magazines back when the Sony CLP-1 or whatever it was came out (my dad still has it). But I doubt anything's been done in the last 10 years.
Skip the poor audio quality, and instead go buy a used CD of the albums you want.
Why bother doing this? Because the studios have gone back to the original studio master tapes and re-mastered it onto CD. Even CDs of ancient recordings are wonderfully clear -- and clearly better than vinyl.
Figure 2 hours for each album you burn, vs. $7 for a used CD, and you'll see what's cheaper. Your time is money.
If used CDs aren't available, well, consider spluring and buying new. But skip MP3's. Do a CD per album. Skip the bother of trying to seperate the individual tracks out. Just play the album and record both sides onto one disk.
Been out of the graphics end of things for almost 3 years. Never got into it enough that I had to wear the black kimono and throw a radar hood on the monitor -- but got close. (The kimono is worn so that you don't see your reflection in the monitor.)
I'm not sure if Apple is still selling a high-end monitor, or if they're letting someone else do it. I get the feeling apple is trying to build and sell Lexus computers. Having said that, I don't think LCDs are ready for high-end graphics, especially video. They might be giving up on glowing phosphor, and leaving that business to other people.
If the computer is going to be doing classwork and idle fiddling, then a smaller monitor (17") and a slower computer is acceptable (and a fully-loaded iMac might work). If your friend is intending to go into commercial work, then a small loan to finance the system is a must. $1,000 won't buy anything. Figure $4,000-6,000 (Dual 20" monitors, SCSI disks, etc.)
Go for a small loan and not racking up credit card purchases. Bad bank loans are 1/2 to 1/3 the interest rate of credit cards. Most credit card companies are just legalized loan sharks.
One easy way to save money is to not buy an Apple monitor. I don't know about the newest Apple monitors (the LCDs or the Mitsubishi CRTs), but the old ones were Sony's that were marked up about 40%. (They all had Trinitron tubes.) Dual 17" monitors is more monitor space, and more useable, than a single 20" monitor. And about the same price.
And I have to throw in a joke from an BBS I used to frequent that was run purely on Amiga, "Apple users would pay $1,000 for a toaster if it had an Apple logo on it."
Well, pessimistic, yeah, but I meant that the engineer is not allowed to use creativity. Take the 1983 Oldsmobile Cutlass Sierra as an example. You have to loosen the distributor bolt with the car on the ground, then place it overhead on a hoist, then remove the distributor from beneath the car when you want to replace the cap and rotor. Sometimes you can change the oil filter without removing the right front wheel, and sometimes not (it depends upon how flexible you are).
The car contains a lot of economic compromises. It reeks of management decisions, and of engineers not being allowed to do the right thing. As does most modern software.
As for what I do, mostly coding. My first management was "do whatever is cool, or holds promise." My next management was, "do whatever holds promise." My current management is, "don't do it." So I'm probably venting here, and not liking being reined in.
I fully understand the difference between creativity and practicality. However, I think it's the engineers who have allowed authors to dream, because fiction is as old as communication, but Science Fiction writers didn't think of these flights of fancy until engineers showed what imagination could do.
I bought mine from -- someone (it has a Q logo on it) before they had the Windows 2000 drivers on it. They weren't really keen to let me try alpha drivers, and then were slow making the final version public. USB Linux support then was iffy, but better now. Haven't tried it with Linux.
End result: I have an expensive keychain sitting totally unused in a drawer.
The OS must recognize it, from the get-go, without loading drivers from floppy. The price must be reasonable (this one was overpriced, and the price has gone up since I bought it). These things should have masqueraded as something else to the OS, like a USB floppy or CD or hard drive, or something like that.
But, I'll stick (stubbornly) by my original comments. The author thinks of what technology can do, and the engineer thinks of what to do with technology. A bit circular, and I'm feeling chatty....
The author throws the rules out the window, and does some What-If-ing.
The engineer, trained and bound by rules, but reporting to the demands of the Manager (who has read too much SciFi, and thus believes nothing is impossible), tries to find what technology can perform the task.
More simply, the author goes from task backward to technology, and the engineer goes from technology forward to task. In your post, they have the techology, and want to know what else to do with it. They are not trying to make SciFi come true. (am I nitpicking, here?)
I do think we need more dreamer-engineers, but the cirriculum and managers tend to conspire and weed them out.
The micro-sized cell phones today are an evolution. The first wave came from the idea of merging a phone with a radio, which would allow you to not have to run wires everywhere.
After that, the radio phones were made more portable. Then they were made small enough to carry around in cars. Then small enough to lug around occasionally (check out Danny Glover's cell phone in the first 'Lethal Weapon' movie). Then as small as normal radios. Then smaller.
Science Fiction gets to ignore all the problems and history of actually getting to the point in history where someone can use the gadget -- and Science Fiction has the option of ignoring reality -- which is something Engineers would love to be able to do (it'd make life sooo much easier). Sci-Fi ignores all the hard-won science and discovery that must occur before a magic device is even possible. Scientific discovery is evolutionary -- it builds heavily upon the work of all those previous, and can not exist without everything that came before it.
What we must seperate is the influence SciFi has upon an individual's decision to enter a field. The young engineer (proto-engineer?) finds that SciFi appeals to them, and that engineering sounds cool, and decides to pursue engineering. In that respect, SciFi influences the career choice of the engineer.
However, no engineer goes through college for the express purpose of making real an invention they read in a book when they were 14 years old.
The author, who needs a plot device, gets to ignore enough reality to make the device just plausible enough (to most people) to continue the story forward. To the engineers and researchers familiar with the subject matter, they can list for you reason after reason why it's impossible, or why it won't work.
Slashdot Mirror
http://www.opendx.org/, a now open source product from IBM. Does wonderful 3-D stuff. Source code available, and binaries available for AIX, FreeBSD (might compile on OS-X), HPUX, Irix, Linux, Linux PPC, Solaris, and Microsoft OS.
Be sure to check out the highlights: http://www.opendx.org/highlights.php
Using this software won't be point, click, drag, like using Visio, but I'm sure you could easily compose the modules that would parse data, and create what you need. Look at the samples and highlights on the web page before you decide.
The minimum wage from different areas of India varies, but is usually stated around 2,000 Rs. per month. In reality, most folks are paid about half that. At 49:1 exchange, that comes to $489 U.S., or in the range of other numbers given here.
Museum admission (for Indians) was 5 Rs. when I was there (50 Rs. for us westerners), and meals at restaurants wound up being 8-25 Rs. per person. So roughly 1 Rs. equals $1 U.S. in what it'll buy.
That comparison breaks down quickly, though. Petrol was 25 Rs./liter when I was there (January, 2000), and electronics and internet access seemed to be a straight ($1 * exchange rate) conversion. The commercially produced cassette tapes of Hindi songs sold for about 60 Rs, for a price comparison.
While 10 Rs. is cheap by American terms, it's pricey by Indian terms. I think the U.S. would settle on $3/track, which would kill the service, intead of $1/track, which would generate revenue and business.
What the CBDTPA really asks is this:
Step 1, consumers must throw out all existing digital appliances. Includes microwaves with digital clocks, watches, thermostats, TVs, stereos, and cars (yes, the whole car).
Step 2, businesses must throw out all existing digital infrastructure, such as cable, phone, DSL, radio, satellite. And all the digital appliances listed in step 1.
Step 3, businesses must build a new digital infrastructure, such as cable, phone, DSL, radio, and satellite, that has copy protection built in.
Step 4, the government decides what the full CBDTPA rules are, and authorizes U.S. Customs and the FBI to search out and sieze non-CBDTPA compliant devices.
Step 5, businesses manufacture and sell CBDTPA compliant devices. After spending a few years adding features, working out compatibility issues, and scaling production.
Step 6, consumers may now buy CBDTPA compliant devices.
The bill is really asking for quadrillions of dollars to be spent, JUST IN THE U.S., to create a subscription-only media distribution system.
An alternative? The taxes collected upon blank media should be used toward copyright enforcement.
No one, upon no one, is putting forth the real costs of doing this.
If the TV companies are whining about how consumers won't buy digital TVs now, think about how much the consumers will be whining when they have to stop using all the appliances they already own, and buy new appliances to replace them.
Think of a chatroom hooked to a web page. If you're on the web page, then some Java(tm) applet automatically sends you to the right channel on the right IRC server, then you can chat with a support person about that, or with other people using that same web application. The user doesn't have to load a seperate client in a seperate window, and then know what command syntax to send. Makes it more usable.
Think more of merging IM with email. You open your email, and the From line indicates if the sender is online, or away. Click their name, and instant chat. Lotus has done it with Sametime, and it makes sense in some situations.
Sametime makes use of Java, Javascript, HTML and LDAP, which means it integrates with far more than just IBM/Lotus products. It also links with wireless devices using Sametime Everyplace, and it's part of IBM's e-learning Mindspan suite.
The beta toolkit is available at http://www.lotus.com/beta, which includes the COM toolkit (that's new), the links toolkit, and the Community Server tookit, which is analogous to what Oracle did, if I read Jabber's press release correctly.
Get some drains mounted under it. When the sprinklers on the floor above go off (they will), or the roof leaks, it'll go under the floor, and drain away. Don't put it in a basement, and if you are in an area prone to earthquakes, hurricanes, or tornadoes, put the server room lower in the building. If the area is prone to flooding, move it up a floor or two. If in doubt, mount a moisture alarm in a low spot in the room. (They sell them wherever they sell sump pumps.)
Under the floor is really where racks are meant to have their cables run. Some flooring units have inserts that act as vents, and that works nicely. Your under-floor is ventilated, kept dry, and your smoke sensors have a higher chance of sniffing the smoke if the air moves through that closed area. There are actually some commercial smoke alarms that continually pump and sniff air, rather than the passive ones we have in our homes that rely upon convection and diffusion for the smoke to reach a sensor. Put some sort of dust-handling equipment on your air-conditioning. The folks that sell you the AC will be able to help. See if they can tie the ventilation into the smoke alarm so that if there is an alarm, fresh oxygen stops getting pumped to that room. (They do this on some modern highrises.) The folks that sell you the AC should also be able to help you with sizing the air conditioning to your requirements.
Call in your local pest control expert to mouse-proof the building, then make sure there's serious screening over all entries into the building. Mice get bored, and for fun, they pick their teeth with the fiber core of the cable running to your most mission-critical server. However, they have to chew through several cables before they find the right one.
Consider one of those big panic buttons that shut the room down in a hurry. Just make sure under a cover so that someone doesn't accidentally punch it. At the very least, place the circuit breaker panel in the room, and clearly exposed (meaning don't stack crap in front of it), so that someone can get to it and flip things on and off.
Also place several of the correct class fire extinguishers there. Place a wall-mounted first-aid kit (some cases have sharp burrs that cut fingers well) near the door. Doesn't have to be fancy. Could just be something on a shelf. Also have a paper-towel dispenser (or just a roll of Bounty) for when someone forgets, takes their drink in, and then knocks it over.
Finally, plan for expansion. Make the room a bit bigger than you think, but leave one wall that can be bumped out to claim the room next to it sometime in the future. (However, I think server sizes have stopped growing, so the need for more physical space is lessening.)
Create subdomains based upon server function. w.foo.com for web, f.foo.com for file services, d.foo.com for DNS, etc. Expand to two-digit subdomains, *.dx.foo.com or *.w9.foo.com if you need more.
Skip the themes for individual server names. You can use themes for DNS subdomains, but you don't need to actually name the "gemini" server group *.gemini.foo.com, but you can call the *.g.foo.com server group the gemini group.
You don't need to throw any reference to the operating system in the DNS name. If you replace a server with one from a different OS (like you migrate your database from HPUX to AS/400 or Linux), then you have to run around to several places and change the DNS name that other boxes point to. It also allows you to cluster mixed operating systems (good for reliability), and to transition from one OS to the other.
Finally, name your servers numerically as you add them to each sub-function group. Old servers that are slow and coming off lease soon will have lower numbers than higher ones. Just start with A0000001 for the first one in each domain, and go. If there are too many servers starting with A, then be slightly redundant and have the first letter of the server name match the single-letter subdomain. The first DNS server would be d00000001.d.foo.com.
Quite seriously. HBO needs something animated to balance all that real-life action stuff, :-), and Futurama isn't a bad choice. Could give the show a little more edge, and supply many more comedy possibilities (and likely a little cartoon nudity), plus HBO won't get hysterical at episodes like "Kwanzabot" and prevent their airing.
David Cohen, you out there? Shop that show around.
Riparian systems at first (that's rivers in plain English), then on to Cartography (map making) when the Legislature decided yooniversitees were for communists and that farmers' taxes shouldn't be used, and that all sorts of programs needed to be cut because edukashun and nawlej are evil, and gives people ideas.
From there, Cartography was being taken over by GIS (Geographic Information Systems), which is CAD and databases hooked together. http://www.esri.com is the big name in GIS, for the curious.
Throw in all the various jobs I worked to pay for college like river guide, carpenter, housepainter, bus driver, writer.... Took me till age 27 to finish college because I never received any aid, and I never liked the school loans program. (Sorry, but a loan is not aid.) So I traded off longer school and the ability to have lodgning and food for no debt.
From GIS it's a short leap to learning how to manage the computers, to my current job of computer consultant and programmer.
Your birth is your starting point, and fate has some destination in mind for you. Don't take the direct route. Some people do, and they stay in the same job for 50 years and retire happy.
It's the journey, not the destination.
Well, the version of Notes 5 under Linux I first saw was an RPM that -- the source told me -- was created in IBM by some frustrated users, and contained Note R5 plus a limited part of Wine. (Install the one RPM, and you were gold.)
I think what's keeping Lotus from going after a Linux version of the client is:
lack of market sharelimited OLE functionality
non-unified GUI
The Lotus Domino server is fully supported on Linux, and you can buy SuSE bundled with the Domino, and SuSE is going to distribute IBM's linux offerings for IBM, so there's potential.
Slightly off topic, but the other thread on Slashdot right now about LindowsOS shows Lotus Notes running on a Linux box. Mirrored screen capture:
http://members.rogers.com/kawaichan/1.gifI have a B.A. in Geography, so, yeah, I tend to go for the geographic over the legal definitions.
Offtopic now, but about ten years ago, the media did one of their famed polls about how little adults know, and one of the results was how few people could name 3 countries in North America.
(I always love those polls where they ask adults something, then schools are forced to teach kids what the adults didn't know.)
Back to encryption, I should have added that once the Feds (or whomever has resources) has your Notes ID file, or your GPG/PGP private key file, then brute force attack becomes much easier. Lotus Notes uses PKI, with the ID file holding the private key, and the directory of Notes users holding the public key.
Having said that, I don't know if it was 56-bit DES, or what, but I do remember the password hash was stored in the ID file, and not the actual password (I think it was the MD5 checksum, but I don't think there was a salt used). I did do a diff on an international vs. a north american version, and only 5 files differed. 2 files each were only in one distribution, and a single DLL had differently named functions in it.
If you're worried about something that could be used against you later, why keep it?
True, I don't like the idea of someone going back through years of email and reading private things. But maybe messages shouldn't be saved by default. And how often do we really go back through our old email for something? Not trolling here, but the majority of email I get isn't worthy of digital immortality.
At one of the client sites I consulted, they deleted all Inbox mail after 30 days, and had a 3-year maximum retention on everything else in the mail file. (To keep it past 30 days, you basically had to move it to another folder.) Sent mail was also deleted after 90 days, but you could override that, up to the 3 year max. (Contrast that with another site where SEC made them keep _everything_ for years and years.)
I gotta say, I love it. I've even tweaked my email client to ask me if I want to save a copy, for everything I send.
True, it is encrypted. And true that the CIA uses Lotus Notes, so it obviously can pass the paranoia test. (Notes is one of the few systems where even mail administrators can't read your email.)
Where Lotus Notes breaks down in this situation is the certifier IDs. In LN, an administrator uses a "god" (or certifier) ID to create other IDs. That "god" ID can also go back and alter the IDs that it created (like to extend expirations, do name changes for marriage/divorce), which means that forgotten passwords can be unlocked.
So, using Lotus Notes will keep anyone who's not your boss, and anyone who's not the government, from reading your email.
There are other encryption keys that the end-user can create in Notes (the ID file can store several encryption keys in it, in different formats, so it's somewhat like a key manager), and they can use these for encryption, but these other keys are used to encrypt fields only, which means you'd have to write something that would take all the fields in your emails, and create new documents in your archive, and encrypt the fields along the way. (Simple, really, and it'd probably take me an afternoon to do.) The on-disk encryption is for the ID only (the one issued from the certifier), which means Bosses and Governments still can get it.
Oh, but Notes is reasonably stable running under WINE.
Brings me to one other bit. In the 4.x family of Notes, there were 3 encryption versions. 64-bit (U.S./Canada only, but strangely titled "North American" as if everything north of Panama isn't in North America), 40-bit (International), and this strange French version (unknown encryption, but the French Government didn't want any encryption, really, so it was even lower encryption).
The U.S. and International versions both used the same 64-bit encryption. However, the U.S. held 24-bits of the 64-bit international key in escrow. That, to me, means that the U.S. could crack 40-bit encryption back in the mid 1990's. In the newest release, the encryption level is higher (128?), and there's only one level for all distributions (I'll exclude France as I really don't know), but that's partly because of eased export laws on encryption, and partly because I think the Feds realize they can get around encryption.
If you have your own certifiers, and can digitally shred these as the Feds are knocking down your door with a search warrant in hand, then maybe it'd work.
English: How are you?
Spanish: Cómo es usted?
Portugese: Como são você?
And that's just a start. The pronounciation is different, and worst of all, some Portugese speakers are offended if you speak only Spanish to them. Point of pride, I guess, like Quebec French speakers.
SuSE in Brazilan: http://www.suse.de/br/
SuSE in Spanish: http://www.suse.de/es/
Haven't tried either, but kudos to the company in recognizing that Portugese and Spanish aren't the same language.
The key to a patent is that you are the first to patent it -- not the first to discover it. Large companies like Monsanto have been trying to patent native, unaltered, unresearched varieties of local seeds in an attempt to create a revenue stream.
In India, big American companies are claiming patents on local varieties of basmati rice so that local farmers will have to pay money for seeds they grew themselves, from strains that have existed for millenia.
Patents aren't about new discoveries. They are about money. The first to "invent" something completely new deserves a patent. However, being the first to patent something that nature created does not deserve a patent.
I remember a test where they did double-blind testing involving the color of the exterior of the speaker. They had 4 identical units, and kept sliding different cases over top. The audiophiles insisted that the blue speakers had better highs, the red ones had better bass, etc.
I'm sure there's some old LP vs. CD wars in magazines back when the Sony CLP-1 or whatever it was came out (my dad still has it). But I doubt anything's been done in the last 10 years.
Yeah, gigantic PITA to fast forward, but still much easier and faster for the person recording.
However, someone who has a lot of older records probably wasn't song-hopping because of the sheer bother of changing records.
Nuisance to you and me, but probably not if you're used to records.
Skip the poor audio quality, and instead go buy a used CD of the albums you want.
Why bother doing this? Because the studios have gone back to the original studio master tapes and re-mastered it onto CD. Even CDs of ancient recordings are wonderfully clear -- and clearly better than vinyl.
Figure 2 hours for each album you burn, vs. $7 for a used CD, and you'll see what's cheaper. Your time is money.
If used CDs aren't available, well, consider spluring and buying new. But skip MP3's. Do a CD per album. Skip the bother of trying to seperate the individual tracks out. Just play the album and record both sides onto one disk.
Been out of the graphics end of things for almost 3 years. Never got into it enough that I had to wear the black kimono and throw a radar hood on the monitor -- but got close. (The kimono is worn so that you don't see your reflection in the monitor.)
I'm not sure if Apple is still selling a high-end monitor, or if they're letting someone else do it. I get the feeling apple is trying to build and sell Lexus computers. Having said that, I don't think LCDs are ready for high-end graphics, especially video. They might be giving up on glowing phosphor, and leaving that business to other people.
If the computer is going to be doing classwork and idle fiddling, then a smaller monitor (17") and a slower computer is acceptable (and a fully-loaded iMac might work). If your friend is intending to go into commercial work, then a small loan to finance the system is a must. $1,000 won't buy anything. Figure $4,000-6,000 (Dual 20" monitors, SCSI disks, etc.)
Go for a small loan and not racking up credit card purchases. Bad bank loans are 1/2 to 1/3 the interest rate of credit cards. Most credit card companies are just legalized loan sharks.
One easy way to save money is to not buy an Apple monitor. I don't know about the newest Apple monitors (the LCDs or the Mitsubishi CRTs), but the old ones were Sony's that were marked up about 40%. (They all had Trinitron tubes.) Dual 17" monitors is more monitor space, and more useable, than a single 20" monitor. And about the same price.
And I have to throw in a joke from an BBS I used to frequent that was run purely on Amiga, "Apple users would pay $1,000 for a toaster if it had an Apple logo on it."
Well, pessimistic, yeah, but I meant that the engineer is not allowed to use creativity. Take the 1983 Oldsmobile Cutlass Sierra as an example. You have to loosen the distributor bolt with the car on the ground, then place it overhead on a hoist, then remove the distributor from beneath the car when you want to replace the cap and rotor. Sometimes you can change the oil filter without removing the right front wheel, and sometimes not (it depends upon how flexible you are).
The car contains a lot of economic compromises. It reeks of management decisions, and of engineers not being allowed to do the right thing. As does most modern software.
As for what I do, mostly coding. My first management was "do whatever is cool, or holds promise." My next management was, "do whatever holds promise." My current management is, "don't do it." So I'm probably venting here, and not liking being reined in.
I fully understand the difference between creativity and practicality. However, I think it's the engineers who have allowed authors to dream, because fiction is as old as communication, but Science Fiction writers didn't think of these flights of fancy until engineers showed what imagination could do.
I bought mine from -- someone (it has a Q logo on it) before they had the Windows 2000 drivers on it. They weren't really keen to let me try alpha drivers, and then were slow making the final version public. USB Linux support then was iffy, but better now. Haven't tried it with Linux.
End result: I have an expensive keychain sitting totally unused in a drawer.
The OS must recognize it, from the get-go, without loading drivers from floppy. The price must be reasonable (this one was overpriced, and the price has gone up since I bought it). These things should have masqueraded as something else to the OS, like a USB floppy or CD or hard drive, or something like that.
But, I'll stick (stubbornly) by my original comments. The author thinks of what technology can do, and the engineer thinks of what to do with technology. A bit circular, and I'm feeling chatty....
The author throws the rules out the window, and does some What-If-ing.
The engineer, trained and bound by rules, but reporting to the demands of the Manager (who has read too much SciFi, and thus believes nothing is impossible), tries to find what technology can perform the task.
More simply, the author goes from task backward to technology, and the engineer goes from technology forward to task. In your post, they have the techology, and want to know what else to do with it. They are not trying to make SciFi come true. (am I nitpicking, here?)
I do think we need more dreamer-engineers, but the cirriculum and managers tend to conspire and weed them out.
And no, I'm not out trolling today.
The micro-sized cell phones today are an evolution. The first wave came from the idea of merging a phone with a radio, which would allow you to not have to run wires everywhere.
After that, the radio phones were made more portable. Then they were made small enough to carry around in cars. Then small enough to lug around occasionally (check out Danny Glover's cell phone in the first 'Lethal Weapon' movie). Then as small as normal radios. Then smaller.
Science Fiction gets to ignore all the problems and history of actually getting to the point in history where someone can use the gadget -- and Science Fiction has the option of ignoring reality -- which is something Engineers would love to be able to do (it'd make life sooo much easier). Sci-Fi ignores all the hard-won science and discovery that must occur before a magic device is even possible. Scientific discovery is evolutionary -- it builds heavily upon the work of all those previous, and can not exist without everything that came before it.
What we must seperate is the influence SciFi has upon an individual's decision to enter a field. The young engineer (proto-engineer?) finds that SciFi appeals to them, and that engineering sounds cool, and decides to pursue engineering. In that respect, SciFi influences the career choice of the engineer.
However, no engineer goes through college for the express purpose of making real an invention they read in a book when they were 14 years old.
The author, who needs a plot device, gets to ignore enough reality to make the device just plausible enough (to most people) to continue the story forward. To the engineers and researchers familiar with the subject matter, they can list for you reason after reason why it's impossible, or why it won't work.