this would be a good idea, but I thought I was being original.
It could be done cheaply, of course. First of all, for the actual tunnel under the Bering Strait, you could use a floating bridge - after all, tunnels were used on the British Channel only so they wouldn't block shipping, but there is very little shipping on the North Pole. (Seattle has two very beautiful floating bridges that were built at a remarkably low cost - though they are about 4 km each, since each segment supports itself and can be towed in, I don't think 60 km should be too bad.) Secondly, the vast majority of such a rail network is already built - there's a rail line going straight up the West Coast into Alaska, and rail already goes through Alaska. All these lines are very old and would need to be renovated, but it should be cheaper than building new lines.
Up in Alaska and Siberia, you'd need to cover the tracks somehow to prevent snow from clogging the lines - after all, trains might not be frequent enough to justify sweeping.
The train would clearly not be used for shipping, as massive barges already go between Seattle and San Francisco and Asian ports like Tokyo and Tianjin quite frequently. And though trains might be attractive for shipping between the West Coast and Europe, there's basically no trade going on now. Also, no one in particular wants to send things from the West Coast to Africa, and the little trade that does go on is in diamonds and oil, which are sent by pipelines and airplanes now anyways.
So what would it be useful for? Well, if there were a million passengers a year (random number), and the project was financed for 50 years (also arbitrary), a ticket on the $60,000,000,000 system would cost $1200. Using non-high-speed trains (since the tracks would be ridiculously expensive), the passage might take 9-10 days between the two closest cities on the line. Worse, boats would probably still be necessary to cross over to Japan, which would be a big part of the target market.
Perhaps the best use of the system would be to connect China and the U.S. There are a LOT of Chinese people who'd love to come to the U.S., and probably an untapped market of American tourists who'd love to visit China. The northern cities of China aren't all that far from Siberia, and the connection could be entirely by train. But the price is much too high (although reportedly Chinese people are paying $20,000 to be smuggled to the U.S. on a train car - which is then put on a barge and sent to Seattle or Vancouver - somehow I think the INS would get suspicious if an actual railroad line were built).
So in short, a train would do wonders for international cooperation, but it would be mostly useless. If you want to get to Asia fast, take a plane; to get there slowly, take a barge. Getting to Europe would probably take the better part of a month. Shipping is already dirt cheap between the continents. There's just no reason to do it.
Microsoft's source codes are the most coveted in the multibillion-dollar industry. With access to them, competitors could write programs and challenge Microsoft's products.
So competitors need to steal the source code to write programs for the O.S.? Antitrust, antitrust, antitrust.
What hardware is necessary on the server to keep X terminals running at a reasonable speed? I ask because I set up a network of 5 486s being served off a K6 400, and when all of them were in use the systems were VERY slow.
Please correct me if I'm wrong, but a long time ago I read some government manuals about C2 certification. It turns out that level of certification isn't so much based on the actual security of the product...rather, it is a measure of the types of security that it implements.
For example, have you ever wondered why Microsoft chose Ctrl-Alt-Delete to be the log-on, log-out and general system access combination? That's because NT's kernel traps that key combination, and only notifies the log in code that the user has pressed those keys. This prevents some random program from catching Ctrl-Alt-Delete, displaying its own log in box, and recording the password to send to crackers. It also prevents trojan horses from just displaying something that looks like a log in box and catching the user's password, since if the user isn't sure it's a real log-in box, she can just press Ctrl-Alt-Delete and get a real one.
I believe C2 also requires ACLs, which let you control access to a file at an atomic level (Linux can't really do this). And NT has a built-in advantage over Linux as a graphical operating system - since users don't normally have Telnet- or SSH-style access to the system, an attacker can't break in unless the administrator has been _really_ stupid.
I like Linux. I think that in an empirical way it is more secure than NT - when was the last time you heard of a system being compromised? I've heard of a few different break-ins, but they all boiled down to very difficult-to-exploit buffer overflows. In an inductive way, though, NT is more secure, because it implements all sorts of security policies which are simply impossible under Linux (evenif they don't always even work on NT).
It doesn't really matter, though - the only way to make a machine truly secure is to unplug the NIC.
Ten years ago, you would have been right. But as a sophomore in high school now, I can attest that there is way too MUCH money in computer science education. Cisco donates hundreds of thousands of dollars of equipment, as does Microsoft, quite routinely. There's an obscene amount of money from goodwill organizations that want to see an inner-city school with top-quality technology. While teachers and core classes are basically being ignored, there is a river of money flowing in to computer labs.
Around the middle of the last school year, a coupla geeks started the Computer Club. I walked in, figuring I might be able to teach them something about Linux. I was completely surprised to discover that there were five or six other guys who had been messing with Linux at home too! In a fairly large high school (2000+ students) there were a respectable number of real l33t h4x0rs, despite any particularly official teacher involvement.
Pretty soon, we taught the Tech Coordinator Linux, and after skipping a few days of school to read through a massive Red hat manual, we had the school Web page running on Apache (instead of a Mac) and a brand new RAID server with 256 MBs RAM, all running on Linux. Soon we had a FreeBSD server as well.
So what do you need to get Linux accepted in your school? ORGANIZE! Get all your Linux friends together, andd convince all your other friends to start learning. Found a club. Meet during lunch hour and after school. And get your teachers to dig Unices!
Good luck!
P.S.: If there are any Garfielders out there who wanna learn Linux, come to 312 at lunch and ask for Dan any time.
I was there, and it really wasn't all that interesting. Doug Engelbart and Alan Kay did a lot for the computing world in their youths, but haven't done anything special in the past decade or so. (Although Kay supposedly had a hand in creating Squeak - it's a great project, check it out.) Engelbart hasn't made a peep in the past 30 years or something. Most of the people in the audience were technophobes, and concentrated on the political issues surrounding "the Internet thing."
My favorite part of the discussion was when the moderator asked "So what will the effect of the Information Technology of the next fifty years be on the general population" - then he coughed and cleared his throat - "of Rwanda?"
Re:AOL == )(*^@#(*$&^!@(*&^#@$
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AOL Nation
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· Score: 1
Actually, 5k/s isn't bad. "56k" lines have an actual maximum speed of 53k, plus network analysts usually factor in about 10% TCP overhead. 48.7k/s over 8 bits per kilobyte means that the theoretical maximum speed of a 56k modem is around 6.1 KB/s. I'm not a huge fan of AOL, but you can't blame them for _everything_!
What can the government *do* to Microsoft? What can they do that would affect the company at all? What can they do that would even help the Open Source people? Is anyone familiar with the possible penalties Justice can inflict?
I live in Seattle, where for over a year now there has been a US$500 fine for any spammer who sent mail to an address in Washington state. The law seems to work: I haven't received ANY spam on any of my local e-mail accounts, and it's really nice to be able to give sites my address and use anon FTP with relative security. Unfortunately, (I'm not a legal wiz so I might be wrong on this) the law defines spam as any e-mail with a FALSE RETURN ADDRESS.
Obviously this leads to complications- what if I send mail with my friend's return address? What if I send out a million e-mails with my real address (and somehow claim they were not unsolicited)? I run a small Linux box that serves shell accounts to about 30 students. On the web site, I have a simple PHP3 script which allows visitors to click on any user and send an e-mail. Of course, a Web site can't determine the sender's address, so I ask senders to type it in. Since this mail is technically sent from my server, what happens if somebody clicks on a user's name, types in a false return address, and sends it? Even though the script can only send mail to users on that box, I might be exposing myself to liability. I haven't recieved any fines yet, and I doubt that I will, but I can only hope that mailers type in their real address. (P.S. No, we don't have open relays!)
I am a member of the Seattle FreeBSD Users' Group, aka Seafug, mailing list. Recently some spam got through our cleverly designed procmail filters (I don't know how, it was now supposed to). Even though the spammer never got our individual e-mail addies, the spam was sent to all of us. To complicate the story, the actual server box is in fact the infamous dub.net, colocated somewhere fancy in Tucson. So although the spammer had an address that was in Tucson, the messages reached a few dozen people in Seattle.
I think our spam laws are remarkably well designed, considering that th people who wrote them were civil servants annoyed that their SMTP servers were crashing, not expert hackers. But I think any legal solution to the problem is inevitably bound to have loopholes. That's why we need a technical solution to the problem - certificates would work, but a decent way for users to configure mail filtering from a client would be nice too.
I used to be really into MOOs, not because of the social-interaction stuff but because they're such a neat computing metaphor. Everything's stored inside a database, including the programs that manage the database! And everything's hierarchical, so scripts can make variables globally accessible. Very cool stuff. In my opinion, a MOO should just be a programming language with a database back-end, and everything else written in that language. That way, you can use the database for anything you want- a MOO, for instance, makes a really great scriptable web server (not quite as good as Zope, though). And you can use it to serve basically anything you want. Instead of making just a Java MOO, why not make an extendible application platform, with a database that can execute code, which happens to work particularly well for serving text-based virtual reality worlds?
This article's logic: 1) Steve Jobs is selling lots of Macs. 2) Steve Jobs is making lots of money. 3) Macs suck. 4) Therefore Steve Jobs is selling Macs only so he'll be bought out.
This is obviously faulty logic. Steve Jobs may be perfectly content to have 7% market share. If I were Apple, though I'd be making a big push towards thin clients; start selling stripped-down iMacs for $500 preconfigured to connect to a VNC server running on LinuxPPC on a supercharged G3 and you're halfway there already. Only serious geeks would buy this setup for home, but at work, these would sell like hotcakes.
I wouldn't mourn if Disney bought Apple. Apple could easily shift to a mainly content company; make iMacs the machines of choice for video buffs, with DVD players and embedded content and super-easy Web browsing, and many would buy them. If Apple can get back to doing truly groundbreaking multimedia work, I think they could be very successful.
What if Apple bought a smaller movie company? It has the cash. They'd have the same advantages as if Disney bought them. They could even buy Pixar; Apple has tons of creative talent, which is just what a too-technically-minded company like that needs. I think the SEC would call this a conflict of interest, tho.
~scriptkiddie
PS: There is a way to recapture the alpha-quality, slightly slipshoddy but still amazing feeling you got when you first saw a Mac. Check out the Squeak system, which, oddly enough, was partially written by Disney. It isn't just a programming language; it's almost a whole operating system.
FreeBSD 4.0 is now fully Pentium optimized, which is really pretty cool - every pogram on the system is EGCS'd and EGCS is the default compiler. Just thought you might want to know...
An appendage to my post above... Response details: Host OS recognized -------------------------------------------------- --- ------- ------- * FreeBSD, NetBSD, OpenBSD 1 1.9% * Linux 1.2.xx 1 1.9% * Linux 1.3.xx, 2.0.0 to 2.0.34 1 1.9% * Linux 2.0.35 to 2.0.9999:) 10 18.9% * Solaris 2.x 5 9.4% * Windows95/98/NT (queso 980922 "Cisco 11.2" error) 11 20.8% * Windows 95/98/NT 24 45.3% ----------- ----- ----- ++checksums 53 100.0% From the Internet Operating System Counter.
GO LINUX!!!
In the interest of disclosure, I should note that there were 32 unrecognized hosts, most of which gave valid responses. These are obviously the secret IranOS that controls missile-guidance systems, nuclear submarines and an army of cyborg robots marching toward the US.
Well it isn't really surprising that over 10% of Linux was made in the America - after all, the gnu utilities are far larger than the kernel, much of which was writen in the America anyway.
I can't think of any other systems without American code. But if you mean code from the USA, there are a few. There's QNX, made in Ottowa I think, but it costs big money and isn't Linux compatible. OpenBSD is a wonderful system also, and it has very good Linux emulation. But it's based on US-made NetBSD, so I bet more than 10% of the code is US. Much of FreeBSd was developed in Japan but I doubt it was 90%. Oh yes, RISCos is British, can you use that?
So what OS _do_ they use in Iran? I've no idea, but I bet it's Windows and I bet Micros~1 sells it there. Is there anyone who knows?
I personally would recommend that you export out of Canada or Austria or something - you don't even need to download from a US mirror. It can't be your fault if you get it from a country without these braindead restrictions. Any legal experts 'round here?
How often do companies violate embargoes? I'd imagine a few politically active ones, maybe Apple, would send stuff overseas and ignore (internationally illegal) restrictions. I doubt the FBI would go after you, but you never know...
Someone above pointed out that KDE themes are now just starting to materialize, and I thought a few more people should find out about it (at the risk of/.ing somebody's website...). Before, KDE had interim theme support that let you customize the WM, background, and chose between Motif and Windoze widgets, but now it has real, GTK-style theme support. This had been a bit of an embarrassment to KDE evangelists. It still ain't easy to compile, but for now you can look at screenshots that seem to indicate that the whole theme thing is beginning to crystalize. They also show KOffice, which is even worse to compile but (supposedly) really works. And on the subject of KDE mascots, I think we need to find a name for the dragon. It should also appear in various places throughout KDE itself, maybe leaning against the window that pops up the first time you run it. And I think it would be neat if the rendered gears appeared instead of the cartoony ones in KFM, but they do look suspiciously WinNT-like (ever notice those wierd purple-and-green gears hanging out in the documentation)?
A couple months ago I was hanging out in West LA and met a software designer who apparently worked for a hardware company (go figure). After arguing at length (in the middle of a crowded park) over the importance of microtubules in cells, the stranger began to expound his personal theories on me. He said that Shakespeare was not William and he actually knew who the real Shakespeare was, which sounded like an original idea (since then I've learned that others share his view), and then told me that no civilization would ever have developed without the influence of mind-altering drugs. Alcohol is certainly the necessary drug in America. Alcohol is prohibited under Islam, but he claaims that in Saudi Arabia hashish has the same role (he said drinking alcohol was a capital offense in S.A., which I later learned isn't true.) And Americans smoked pot long before Euros arrived. I'm not sure about China (it had opium, but it wasn't really cultivated until the British arrived), and I'm sure there are many other disproofs. Anyways, he said he'd publish his thoughts in a book one day - I have a feeling it will be quite a long book!
PS: I don't believe any of this. But it's an interesting idea. I personally am disinclined towards any mind-altering substance, including alcohol, nicotine and caffeine, but I suppose I can't really avoid those pesky endorphins (maybe by sitting at the computer all day?).
I'm not a console whiz, so could somebody pleez answer the following question in words of less than six letters?
Why the @!$% is Sega, an American company, putting so much focus into selling stuff in Japan? Nintendo and Sony are like that but they have an excuse. Sega, if they had any logic at all, would have released DC as early as possible in the US. I mean, if they had the product by 4Q '98, they could've whupped Sony and been able to fight on their own side of the pond. Am I crazy?
PS: I'm not being selfish, as an estadounidense, since I'm sure I won't even think about buying a DC until their used and cheap.
mustapha's post seemed intriguing, so I decided to check it out. I can't read Japanese, but takemura's thing seemed really cool. Problem was, every single page I could find was in Japanese. I went to NEC's US web site and searched for Mobile Gear, and nothing came up. After digging around for a while, I found something called the "Mobile Pro." Sure enough, when the picture came up, it was definitely the same thing takemura had (althouh it has a color display -- it must be a newer model). And right next to the picture was a "Powered by Windows CE" logo!
Apparently it is possible to put BSD on a Windows CE thing. This seems especially wierd since the "regular" version only runs on x86 processors. Would somebody please explain this to me (using words of less than five letters)?
P.S.: It seems like a lot of the action in the FreeBSD world is happening over in Japan. In fact, when a friend of mine wanted a FreeBSD book, I couldn't find one in English that had been written less than a few years ago. Meanwhile, 20 Japanese books have been released in the past six months, most with cute anime guys on the cover. So the question is, is there a good online course in Japanese?
Who's talking about sub-$1000 PC's? I think everyone should have a comfortable 28.8 modem and a nice programmable serial terminal with a shell account and Lynx. Total cost $40, max, at a used computer-parts store. Does everything a $3000 Pentium III does, unless you're one of those people who care about pictures.
My mom wants to buy one of the new neato mini laptops, for around two grand. I really think she'd prefer fifty green-screens, myself...
An admirable attempt, if poorly implemented
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Slate Takes on Linux
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First, guys, I concede that neither article was particularly accurate or informative. The tech guy tried very hard to sound like some sort of a guru, but what kind of "guy who knows Unix" says that "Xwindows" looks like Windows 95? And the English major can be granted some leeway,since she (supposedly) had no previous operating-systems experienced, but she did almost everything wrong. She should have bought from VA Research, as somebody above posted, or at least have tried a different distro (No offense against Red Hat, but it's the wrong way to get started in the Unix world). She could have served as a role model for other Linux wannabies, or at least have helpfully pointed out her mistakes. But I do not understand what anybody could _learn_ from scanning over her installation diary.
But what's really important is that MS attempted this exercise at all. Should they simply ignore Linux? That would seem to foment _disgust_ with the stupid MS drones who can't see the revolution on the horizon. Should they flatly deny that Linux has _any_ redeeming merits? No, that would annoy current Linux users, serve as evidence that they're trying to undermine competitors, and possibly provoke a few skeptics to actually _install_ Linux. Should they say Linux is a miraculous wonder handed to Linus the Messiah from the hands of God? No - then they'd be fired:) . Providing mixed reviews is best for everyone.
Some people seem suspicious of a major software empire that also controls its own publishing company and writes its own product reviews for it. Maybe they will be contented by learning that Salon is mostly owned by a little fruit farm we'll call Apple. Guess what OS they like best?
Slashdot Mirror
this would be a good idea, but I thought I was being original.
It could be done cheaply, of course. First of all, for the actual tunnel under the Bering Strait, you could use a floating bridge - after all, tunnels were used on the British Channel only so they wouldn't block shipping, but there is very little shipping on the North Pole. (Seattle has two very beautiful floating bridges that were built at a remarkably low cost - though they are about 4 km each, since each segment supports itself and can be towed in, I don't think 60 km should be too bad.) Secondly, the vast majority of such a rail network is already built - there's a rail line going straight up the West Coast into Alaska, and rail already goes through Alaska. All these lines are very old and would need to be renovated, but it should be cheaper than building new lines.
Up in Alaska and Siberia, you'd need to cover the tracks somehow to prevent snow from clogging the lines - after all, trains might not be frequent enough to justify sweeping.
The train would clearly not be used for shipping, as massive barges already go between Seattle and San Francisco and Asian ports like Tokyo and Tianjin quite frequently. And though trains might be attractive for shipping between the West Coast and Europe, there's basically no trade going on now. Also, no one in particular wants to send things from the West Coast to Africa, and the little trade that does go on is in diamonds and oil, which are sent by pipelines and airplanes now anyways.
So what would it be useful for? Well, if there were a million passengers a year (random number), and the project was financed for 50 years (also arbitrary), a ticket on the $60,000,000,000 system would cost $1200. Using non-high-speed trains (since the tracks would be ridiculously expensive), the passage might take 9-10 days between the two closest cities on the line. Worse, boats would probably still be necessary to cross over to Japan, which would be a big part of the target market.
Perhaps the best use of the system would be to connect China and the U.S. There are a LOT of Chinese people who'd love to come to the U.S., and probably an untapped market of American tourists who'd love to visit China. The northern cities of China aren't all that far from Siberia, and the connection could be entirely by train. But the price is much too high (although reportedly Chinese people are paying $20,000 to be smuggled to the U.S. on a train car - which is then put on a barge and sent to Seattle or Vancouver - somehow I think the INS would get suspicious if an actual railroad line were built).
So in short, a train would do wonders for international cooperation, but it would be mostly useless. If you want to get to Asia fast, take a plane; to get there slowly, take a barge. Getting to Europe would probably take the better part of a month. Shipping is already dirt cheap between the continents. There's just no reason to do it.
...when it comes out? That could be very useful to some.
What hardware is necessary on the server to keep X terminals running at a reasonable speed? I ask because I set up a network of 5 486s being served off a K6 400, and when all of them were in use the systems were VERY slow.
Please correct me if I'm wrong, but a long time ago I read some government manuals about C2 certification. It turns out that level of certification isn't so much based on the actual security of the product...rather, it is a measure of the types of security that it implements.
For example, have you ever wondered why Microsoft chose Ctrl-Alt-Delete to be the log-on, log-out and general system access combination? That's because NT's kernel traps that key combination, and only notifies the log in code that the user has pressed those keys. This prevents some random program from catching Ctrl-Alt-Delete, displaying its own log in box, and recording the password to send to crackers. It also prevents trojan horses from just displaying something that looks like a log in box and catching the user's password, since if the user isn't sure it's a real log-in box, she can just press Ctrl-Alt-Delete and get a real one.
I believe C2 also requires ACLs, which let you control access to a file at an atomic level (Linux can't really do this). And NT has a built-in advantage over Linux as a graphical operating system - since users don't normally have Telnet- or SSH-style access to the system, an attacker can't break in unless the administrator has been _really_ stupid.
I like Linux. I think that in an empirical way it is more secure than NT - when was the last time you heard of a system being compromised? I've heard of a few different break-ins, but they all boiled down to very difficult-to-exploit buffer overflows. In an inductive way, though, NT is more secure, because it implements all sorts of security policies which are simply impossible under Linux (evenif they don't always even work on NT).
It doesn't really matter, though - the only way to make a machine truly secure is to unplug the NIC.
Ten years ago, you would have been right. But as a sophomore in high school now, I can attest that there is way too MUCH money in computer science education. Cisco donates hundreds of thousands of dollars of equipment, as does Microsoft, quite routinely. There's an obscene amount of money from goodwill organizations that want to see an inner-city school with top-quality technology. While teachers and core classes are basically being ignored, there is a river of money flowing in to computer labs.
Around the middle of the last school year, a coupla geeks started the Computer Club. I walked in, figuring I might be able to teach them something about Linux. I was completely surprised to discover that there were five or six other guys who had been messing with Linux at home too! In a fairly large high school (2000+ students) there were a respectable number of real l33t h4x0rs, despite any particularly official teacher involvement.
Pretty soon, we taught the Tech Coordinator Linux, and after skipping a few days of school to read through a massive Red hat manual, we had the school Web page running on Apache (instead of a Mac) and a brand new RAID server with 256 MBs RAM, all running on Linux. Soon we had a FreeBSD server as well.
So what do you need to get Linux accepted in your school? ORGANIZE! Get all your Linux friends together, andd convince all your other friends to start learning. Found a club. Meet during lunch hour and after school. And get your teachers to dig Unices!
Good luck!
P.S.: If there are any Garfielders out there who wanna learn Linux, come to 312 at lunch and ask for Dan any time.
I was there, and it really wasn't all that interesting. Doug Engelbart and Alan Kay did a lot for the computing world in their youths, but haven't done anything special in the past decade or so. (Although Kay supposedly had a hand in creating Squeak - it's a great project, check it out.) Engelbart hasn't made a peep in the past 30 years or something. Most of the people in the audience were technophobes, and concentrated on the political issues surrounding "the Internet thing."
My favorite part of the discussion was when the moderator asked "So what will the effect of the Information Technology of the next fifty years be on the general population" - then he coughed and cleared his throat - "of Rwanda?"
Actually, 5k/s isn't bad. "56k" lines have an actual maximum speed of 53k, plus network analysts usually factor in about 10% TCP overhead. 48.7k/s over 8 bits per kilobyte means that the theoretical maximum speed of a 56k modem is around 6.1 KB/s. I'm not a huge fan of AOL, but you can't blame them for _everything_!
Can you tell what Diageo PLC makes by its name? Aircraft, maybe, or telecommunications or engineering? Actually their main business is ice cream.
What can the government *do* to Microsoft? What can they do that would affect the company at all? What can they do that would even help the Open Source people? Is anyone familiar with the possible penalties Justice can inflict?
I live in Seattle, where for over a year now there has been a US$500 fine for any spammer who sent mail to an address in Washington state. The law seems to work: I haven't received ANY spam on any of my local e-mail accounts, and it's really nice to be able to give sites my address and use anon FTP with relative security. Unfortunately, (I'm not a legal wiz so I might be wrong on this) the law defines spam as any e-mail with a FALSE RETURN ADDRESS.
Obviously this leads to complications- what if I send mail with my friend's return address? What if I send out a million e-mails with my real address (and somehow claim they were not unsolicited)? I run a small Linux box that serves shell accounts to about 30 students. On the web site, I have a simple PHP3 script which allows visitors to click on any user and send an e-mail. Of course, a Web site can't determine the sender's address, so I ask senders to type it in. Since this mail is technically sent from my server, what happens if somebody clicks on a user's name, types in a false return address, and sends it? Even though the script can only send mail to users on that box, I might be exposing myself to liability. I haven't recieved any fines yet, and I doubt that I will, but I can only hope that mailers type in their real address. (P.S. No, we don't have open relays!)
I am a member of the Seattle FreeBSD Users' Group, aka Seafug, mailing list. Recently some spam got through our cleverly designed procmail filters (I don't know how, it was now supposed to). Even though the spammer never got our individual e-mail addies, the spam was sent to all of us. To complicate the story, the actual server box is in fact the infamous dub.net, colocated somewhere fancy in Tucson. So although the spammer had an address that was in Tucson, the messages reached a few dozen people in Seattle.
I think our spam laws are remarkably well designed, considering that th people who wrote them were civil servants annoyed that their SMTP servers were crashing, not expert hackers. But I think any legal solution to the problem is inevitably bound to have loopholes. That's why we need a technical solution to the problem - certificates would work, but a decent way for users to configure mail filtering from a client would be nice too.
I used to be really into MOOs, not because of the social-interaction stuff but because they're such a neat computing metaphor. Everything's stored inside a database, including the programs that manage the database! And everything's hierarchical, so scripts can make variables globally accessible. Very cool stuff.
In my opinion, a MOO should just be a programming language with a database back-end, and everything else written in that language. That way, you can use the database for anything you want- a MOO, for instance, makes a really great scriptable web server (not quite as good as Zope, though). And you can use it to serve basically anything you want. Instead of making just a Java MOO, why not make an extendible application platform, with a database that can execute code, which happens to work particularly well for serving text-based virtual reality worlds?
This article's logic:
1) Steve Jobs is selling lots of Macs.
2) Steve Jobs is making lots of money.
3) Macs suck.
4) Therefore Steve Jobs is selling Macs only so he'll be bought out.
This is obviously faulty logic. Steve Jobs may be perfectly content to have 7% market share. If I were Apple, though I'd be making a big push towards thin clients; start selling stripped-down iMacs for $500 preconfigured to connect to a VNC server running on LinuxPPC on a supercharged G3 and you're halfway there already. Only serious geeks would buy this setup for home, but at work, these would sell like hotcakes.
I wouldn't mourn if Disney bought Apple. Apple could easily shift to a mainly content company; make iMacs the machines of choice for video buffs, with DVD players and embedded content and super-easy Web browsing, and many would buy them. If Apple can get back to doing truly groundbreaking multimedia work, I think they could be very successful.
What if Apple bought a smaller movie company? It has the cash. They'd have the same advantages as if Disney bought them. They could even buy Pixar; Apple has tons of creative talent, which is just what a too-technically-minded company like that needs. I think the SEC would call this a conflict of interest, tho.
~scriptkiddie
PS: There is a way to recapture the alpha-quality, slightly slipshoddy but still amazing feeling you got when you first saw a Mac. Check out the Squeak system, which, oddly enough, was partially written by Disney. It isn't just a programming language; it's almost a whole operating system.
FreeBSD 4.0 is now fully Pentium optimized, which is really pretty cool - every pogram on the system is EGCS'd and EGCS is the default compiler. Just thought you might want to know...
An appendage to my post above... Response details: Host OS recognized- --- ------- ------- :) 10 18.9%
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* FreeBSD, NetBSD, OpenBSD 1 1.9%
* Linux 1.2.xx 1 1.9%
* Linux 1.3.xx, 2.0.0 to 2.0.34 1 1.9%
* Linux 2.0.35 to 2.0.9999
* Solaris 2.x 5 9.4%
* Windows95/98/NT (queso 980922 "Cisco 11.2" error) 11 20.8%
* Windows 95/98/NT 24 45.3%
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++checksums 53 100.0% From the Internet Operating System Counter.
GO LINUX!!!
In the interest of disclosure, I should note that there were 32 unrecognized hosts, most of which gave valid responses. These are obviously the secret IranOS that controls missile-guidance systems, nuclear submarines and an army of cyborg robots marching toward the US.
Anyone want to smurf 'em?
Well it isn't really surprising that over 10% of Linux was made in the America - after all, the gnu utilities are far larger than the kernel, much of which was writen in the America anyway.
I can't think of any other systems without American code. But if you mean code from the USA, there are a few. There's QNX, made in Ottowa I think, but it costs big money and isn't Linux compatible. OpenBSD is a wonderful system also, and it has very good Linux emulation. But it's based on US-made NetBSD, so I bet more than 10% of the code is US. Much of FreeBSd was developed in Japan but I doubt it was 90%. Oh yes, RISCos is British, can you use that?
So what OS _do_ they use in Iran? I've no idea, but I bet it's Windows and I bet Micros~1 sells it there. Is there anyone who knows?
I personally would recommend that you export out of Canada or Austria or something - you don't even need to download from a US mirror. It can't be your fault if you get it from a country without these braindead restrictions. Any legal experts 'round here?
How often do companies violate embargoes? I'd imagine a few politically active ones, maybe Apple, would send stuff overseas and ignore (internationally illegal) restrictions. I doubt the FBI would go after you, but you never know...
Someone above pointed out that KDE themes are now just starting to materialize, and I thought a few more people should find out about it (at the risk of /.ing somebody's website...). Before, KDE had interim theme support that let you customize the WM, background, and chose between Motif and Windoze widgets, but now it has real, GTK-style theme support. This had been a bit of an embarrassment to KDE evangelists. It still ain't easy to compile, but for now you can look at screenshots that seem to indicate that the whole theme thing is beginning to crystalize. They also show KOffice, which is even worse to compile but (supposedly) really works. And on the subject of KDE mascots, I think we need to find a name for the dragon. It should also appear in various places throughout KDE itself, maybe leaning against the window that pops up the first time you run it. And I think it would be neat if the rendered gears appeared instead of the cartoony ones in KFM, but they do look suspiciously WinNT-like (ever notice those wierd purple-and-green gears hanging out in the documentation)?
A couple months ago I was hanging out in West LA and met a software designer who apparently worked for a hardware company (go figure). After arguing at length (in the middle of a crowded park) over the importance of microtubules in cells, the stranger began to expound his personal theories on me. He said that Shakespeare was not William and he actually knew who the real Shakespeare was, which sounded like an original idea (since then I've learned that others share his view), and then told me that no civilization would ever have developed without the influence of mind-altering drugs. Alcohol is certainly the necessary drug in America. Alcohol is prohibited under Islam, but he claaims that in Saudi Arabia hashish has the same role (he said drinking alcohol was a capital offense in S.A., which I later learned isn't true.) And Americans smoked pot long before Euros arrived. I'm not sure about China (it had opium, but it wasn't really cultivated until the British arrived), and I'm sure there are many other disproofs. Anyways, he said he'd publish his thoughts in a book one day - I have a feeling it will be quite a long book!
PS: I don't believe any of this. But it's an interesting idea. I personally am disinclined towards any mind-altering substance, including alcohol, nicotine and caffeine, but I suppose I can't really avoid those pesky endorphins (maybe by sitting at the computer all day?).
I'm not a console whiz, so could somebody pleez answer the following question in words of less than six letters?
Why the @!$% is Sega, an American company, putting so much focus into selling stuff in Japan? Nintendo and Sony are like that but they have an excuse. Sega, if they had any logic at all, would have released DC as early as possible in the US. I mean, if they had the product by 4Q '98, they could've whupped Sony and been able to fight on their own side of the pond. Am I crazy?
PS: I'm not being selfish, as an estadounidense, since I'm sure I won't even think about buying a DC until their used and cheap.
mustapha's post seemed intriguing, so I decided to check it out. I can't read Japanese, but takemura's thing seemed really cool. Problem was, every single page I could find was in Japanese. I went to NEC's US web site and searched for Mobile Gear, and nothing came up. After digging around for a while, I found something called the "Mobile Pro." Sure enough, when the picture came up, it was definitely the same thing takemura had (althouh it has a color display -- it must be a newer model). And right next to the picture was a "Powered by Windows CE" logo!
Apparently it is possible to put BSD on a Windows CE thing. This seems especially wierd since the "regular" version only runs on x86 processors. Would somebody please explain this to me (using words of less than five letters)?
P.S.: It seems like a lot of the action in the FreeBSD world is happening over in Japan. In fact, when a friend of mine wanted a FreeBSD book, I couldn't find one in English that had been written less than a few years ago. Meanwhile, 20 Japanese books have been released in the past six months, most with cute anime guys on the cover. So the question is, is there a good online course in Japanese?
Who's talking about sub-$1000 PC's? I think everyone should have a comfortable 28.8 modem and a nice programmable serial terminal with a shell account and Lynx. Total cost $40, max, at a used computer-parts store. Does everything a $3000 Pentium III does, unless you're one of those people who care about pictures.
My mom wants to buy one of the new neato mini laptops, for around two grand. I really think she'd prefer fifty green-screens, myself...
First, guys, I concede that neither article was particularly accurate or informative. The tech guy tried very hard to sound like some sort of a guru,
:) . Providing mixed reviews is best for everyone.
but what kind of "guy who knows Unix" says that "Xwindows" looks like Windows 95? And the English major can be granted some leeway,since she (supposedly) had no previous operating-systems experienced, but she did almost everything wrong. She should have bought from VA Research, as somebody above posted, or at least have tried a different distro (No offense against Red Hat, but it's the wrong way to get started in the Unix world). She could have served as a role model for other Linux wannabies, or at least have helpfully pointed out her mistakes. But I do not understand what anybody could _learn_ from scanning over her installation diary.
But what's really important is that MS attempted this exercise at all. Should they simply ignore Linux? That would seem to foment _disgust_ with the stupid MS drones who can't see the revolution on the horizon. Should they flatly deny that Linux has _any_ redeeming merits? No, that would annoy current Linux users, serve as evidence that they're trying to undermine competitors, and possibly provoke a few skeptics to actually _install_ Linux. Should they say Linux is a miraculous wonder handed to Linus the Messiah from the hands of God? No - then they'd be fired
Some people seem suspicious of a major software empire that also controls its own publishing company and writes its own product reviews for it. Maybe they will be contented by learning that Salon is mostly owned by a little fruit farm we'll call Apple. Guess what OS they like best?