Is that really a good thing? Think about it -- pretty soon you'd have mob rule.
I could have been clearer. I do want people to have more control over their government but I do not want to vote on every little thing.
In fact with easy voting it would be more important that you vote on more local issues.
But I also think that if you senator is saying yes to the DMCA and the latest quick poll in his area says that the citizens are overwhelming against it. What is the reasoning in their vote?
All of this rotates around my deeper issue which is that voting with my dollar is far more effective then voting with my X. And that has to change.
California is also doing a bang-up job of showing what can go wrong in a "direct" democracy...
IMO the problem with the proposition system is that is suffers from the same deeper issue. A system which was meant to make it possible for the ordinary citizen to affect their government has been co-oped by the rich minority to slip laws into the flow by using the same clever marketing that gets one to supersize their fries. The proposition system has brought good laws to California that politicians shy away from promoting.
I for one would love a voting system with almost immediate feedback. It should be trivial to have elections and polls any time. That way we could reduce the power of congress and the president and put government back into the hands of the people.
Instead of driving to the closest parking space. Consider combining different modes of transportation to get you to work. A bus with a bike comes to mind. If your work has shower facilities, bike the whole darn way. If your bus/rail system does not allow bikes, get a foldable one (google Birdy Black).
Walk whenever you can and change all of your 1-2 mile trips to biking or walking.
"a compressed file is, in theory, non-repetitive and is therefore less crack-able"
Sorry, a compressed file is very repetitive. The algos are well known. Compression is done prior to encryption because the resulting file is smaller then if it hadn't been compressed. The encrypting of files makes them much larger.
Re:The quarter is hard enough
on
Making Change
·
· Score: 1
I think this points to a flaw in the study. The study does not account for the fact that someone might give change as part of the payment, thereby reducing the amount of change they have overall.
For those scared to learn latex but want a superior document processing system LyX does work and work well. I have used it for many articles and papers for work and school. And as an added incentive there is a mif to lyx filter if you happen to be one of those now stuck by Adobe's decision.
The point which strikes a cord with me is that the ultimate model that corporations strive for is to remove any material ownership from the consumer so the consumer always has to pay over and over again for the 'experience'. This model effectively strips the consumer from creating or fostering their own culture. The internet like any other medium or tool can be used by the corporations to continue this erosion, ala ASP, UCITA, etc. or it can be used to combat this erosion, ala slashdot, usenet, wiki wiki web, rre, etc.
It is probably no coincidence that this ask slashdot comes on the same day as the Scott Reents interview. They are in the same vein both prompting you to think about your freedom outside in the big blue room and how the internet effects it.
There is no doubt in my mind that we as a people should actively work to ingrain our culture into the internet and constantly strive to make life as tangible as possible. The internet should serve as our glue to keep our culture together not be the solvent that rips it apart.
There are several choices for solaris. dtbuilder, which is very simple and featureless but free and already in CDE/solaris. Sun's forte development environment, which can be try-n-buyed for 30 days or bought for anywhere between 300 (edu price) and 3500 USD. Both Kdevelop and GLADE work under solaris. Teleuse is actually not sold by telesoft, but by a company called aonix.
Just choose one of those options and you will be fine. If I had a choice myself I would use either Kdevelop or forte. Kdevelop because it uses qt so it is entirely c++ (which seems to be a requirement for you) as well as the possibility of portability since qt runs on windows. Forte, because Sun makes it so it will have Sun support as well as having a significant performance advantage on sparc.
If you decide on motif as your windowing toolkit and use forte and you have oodles of money in your pocket. Consider adding XRT. Very many high quality widgets which can improve the look of just about any gui.
mgetty + voice has the low level capability you need as well as a perl interface. You will end up doing a lot of the work to do this yourself. But the pieces are there.
I suggest using XVscan. It costs $50, is supported by a company and is really simple to use.
I have used SANE with beta drivers and have had good luck, very few glitches. So it would not be a bad idea to consider scanners in the beta list. No experience with alpha though.
off topic: metacreations going opensource
on
Minolta 3D Camera
·
· Score: 1
It is interesting that Metacreations is in this deal with minolta. It seems like a perfectly good fit of a great graphics software company and a great camera company. But Metacreations has had it's own difficulties lately. Metacreations is a company with really neat products and what seems to me almost no good marketing skills. This has led to a sustained loss every quarter last year. They are often over shadowed by the big boys in Microsoft and Adobe. Well, it seems obvious to me that they should consider opening up their software at least in the graphics genre. If they had the gimp on their side...
Even nicer would be if an open source company bought them flat out and opened them up. This would be chump change for RedHat but also very possible for Corel.
I know you all have heard it a thousand times before. Open it up! In fact I will probably be moderated down because it is so off topic. But first read what I have to write. Why did Netscape open it up? Because they couldn't support a free browser like Microsoft could indefinitely. What compelling reason would one have to buy Metacreations software over Adobe's products? Features? Certainly not because of that, very few people buy software for the features. Cost? Well it is a concern but only to people not making money at doing graphic work. What else then is going to bouy metacreations? Their e-commerce? Maybe, but even then this product line has nothing to do with their graphic software. So spin it off!
Besided the suggestions for the ISDN router, which are good suggestions I think some mention should be made for the external terminal adapter option. The two best IMO are the 3com impact and the zyxel omni.net plus.
This option is really appealing if you are used to POTS modems because they behave just like them. They hook up to your serial port and they have dial out commands just like modems. They work seemlessly with ppp and do not require that one get involved in any isdn4linux stuff. It isn't that the isdn4linux stuff is bad it is a little hard to work with if you don't live in europe. And the isdn4linux debate on it's regular inclusion in the linux kernel is still not completely resolved.
The reason I like both the 3com and the zyxel product is because they both have the capability to do 230kbps or more across the serial port. This is important if you want to use all 128kbps of ISDN. USB would make the whole serial port discussion a null issue but it is not quite ready in linux. The 3com impact does 230kbps and the zyxel does 460kbps. Don't let the zyxel fool you 460kbps is better then 230kbps but only marginally. Instead, let the zyxel price lure you. The zyxel is generally cheaper then 3com but has just as high customer satisfaction (I own a zyxel myself and am very happy with it).
This brings up an important point. Most serial ports have the 16550A UART which does a smashing good job of 115kbps. This is more then enough for 56K modems. But for ISDN even at 115kbps one will find that the best throughput is really only 95kbps due to overhead on the UART. And if one can make a 128kbps connection the throughput is even worse. So if you go the route I describe I suggest picking up a serial port board with a 16750 or 16950 UART. These UARTs are supported in linux kernel 2.2.x or newer. A good manufacturer is pacific commware. Their turboexpress 920 board is isa pnp which will require isapnptools and a little elbow grease. I need to stress that the newer UARTs are not supported in the older 2.0.x kernels.
In the original coverage of the unveiling of the Queen's website there was many a mention of the choice being made to use linux instead of solaris which was pretty much the second choice and the standard there before linux. The info there was at best vague and showed no real compelling reason to pick linux over solaris or why solaris was even the second choice. A few recent surveys of solaris 7, linux and NT have given solaris 7 the edge on web service over both linux and NT. And solaris seems to be holding its own against linux and NT in the marketplace. Since the press rarely gets these things right some advice or opinion from a real person having experience in both linux and solaris as well as runnning a high load web server would go a long way.
Could you spend some words explaining why linux is more compelling to you in this instance over solaris 7? Please delve into some technical depth.
Simple, costs only a little and can boot more OS' then you can shake a stick at. Think Lilo on steriods. Using it currently, very easy to install and has never failed me.
I am glad you don't take yourself too seriously doing this new audio gig. It would be too much.
Anyhow, it is an interesting idea to an under served audience but the content leaves a lot to be desired. See the content of the audio show is much like slashdot itself. Which for the main site is merely a collection of stories with terse commentary on them. This is great for a website designed to quickly wisked you off to a new site with the real dirt. But on a uninterruptable sound feed it adds up to the audienced being trapped in a one sided conversation ready to hit ^C.
If you continue this type of programming I am sad to say it will not last long. I suggest either adding listener callin in some form. But at least be able to provide insight in a semi intelligant or grossly humorous fashion that isn't available on the website already. Otherwise I am going to flip back to regular radio.
I wasn't making a comment about Sequent employees, rather I was commenting on the all too often occurence after any techno merger. Everyone from the assimilated company jumps ship. Examples of good companies which followed this phenomena were digital->compaq and palmcomputing->3com. I am sure there are absolutely tons of competent Sequent employees now. Tomorrow...
As far as anyone bothering and especially in IBM's case, it is most likely because they can and because some middle level executive convince some upper level executive that it was a good idea at a cheap price and it fits with this strategic goal or that sentence in a mission statement. It doesn't have to make sense but it does have to work out to some monetary and market advantage and this one does (although I consider it negleable in big blue's case).
I expect someone else to do the same with SCO. We'll see.
This buy out has two interesting ramifications. Everyone reading the press release saw how the sequent boxes 'compliment' the IBM line. But they do directly compete for data center space as well. The sequent boxes may not be long for this world. IBM, historically has proven to go either way on these sorts of things and with sequent constantly lumped in the 'other' piece of the market share pie it may make no sense for IBM to keep the company around.
Also, project monterrey has three members, SCO, Sequent and IBM. Now it has two members. Is SCO in the merger kill zone too? Yes they are. What would project monterrey be if only IBM was the only member.
(flame bait)Not that monterrey will be able to compete with linux and solaris.
Seriously Sequent adds up to almost nothing when compared to any of the Unix big boys this is barely news worthy, only because sequent has shown up in all the project monterrey press releases next to big blue.
Good luck to all those sequent employees. I can hear the resumes being edited from my office.
The most interesting answer to your question is there are plenty of companies out there who's venture capital come from Intel. When Intel owns say 20% of your company and you need an enterprise level computer for your data center do you honestly think that Intel is going to let you buy a PowerPC/UltraSPARC/Alpha based system with their money. The answer is no.
Look at Intel invested startups like eToys. Just Intel boxes running linux, NT or Sequent's unix.
This is an interesting way for Intel to invest to preserve it's market dominance.
Interesting question. 2D is kinda dead for the most part. No one is putting out the 2D performance numbers anymore. With good reason, the ultimate in 2D has pretty much been reached.
There are plenty of cards out there that do fantastic 2D still.
My personal preference is matrox. Millenia II for PCI and a G200 for AGP. They have fantastic color ranges, supported under linux and windows and have really high 2D resolution (HDTV 1920x1200) at nice high refresh rates.
I have a suspicion that there is more then just one vendor with very good 2D performance though.
isdn4linux is focused on the add in isdn cards and the european ones at that. So the information there is not exactly accurate.
I currently have a ZyXEL omni.net plus using both channels under linux. But when I first got it I had a little trouble figuring it out.
Here is what I had to do. First you have to use the modem's built in capability to communicate by MPP, or multi-point PPP. Set the second channel call on the isdn TA real low so it will try to make the second channel bond with very little traffic.
In pppd land use PAP or CHAP to authenticate with your ISP. Then you should be off to the races.
Doing all this will require you to spend some quality time with your isdn TA's manual since you will have to figure out the initialization string to get it to work. And there is no standard for isdn TA's so my string may mean nothing to your isdn TA.
But just so you can get an idea of what I mean I will include it and break it down for you.
AT&E1S83.7=1&K44BP1&J3
The AT you should already be familiar with. &E1 tells the modem to operate at 56k (because my telco doesn't provide a d channel). S83.7=1 sets the isdn's "Speech Bearer service" this is handy for getting a lower rate on calls if your telco operatest this way. &K44 sets compression on, I personally don't get much out of this, YMMV. BP1 is very important, make sure you find the equivalent for your TA, it enables bandwidth allocation protocol which is what your TA is going to use with your ISP's equivalent to get two channels to bond. &J3 enables multilink PPP.
So to summarize, make sure you are using multilink PPP and that your TA is able to use the Bandwidth Allocation Protocol. Do not use v.120 to connect, use PPP. v.120 is a very loose standard and many ISP dial-in boxes will not support channel bonding in this protocol. Then finally use PAP/CHAP to authenticate in pppd scripts. Read the PPP Howto on how to do that.
This is no gauranteed fix for you but I wanted to let you know it is very possible to bond both channels of ISDN using linux to achieve 115kbps or more.
Slashdot Mirror
Is that really a good thing? Think about it -- pretty soon you'd have mob rule.
I could have been clearer. I do want people to have more control over their government but I do not want to vote on every little thing.
In fact with easy voting it would be more important that you vote on more local issues.
But I also think that if you senator is saying yes to the DMCA and the latest quick poll in his area says that the citizens are overwhelming against it. What is the reasoning in their vote?
All of this rotates around my deeper issue which is that voting with my dollar is far more effective then voting with my X. And that has to change.
California is also doing a bang-up job of showing what can go wrong in a "direct" democracy...
IMO the problem with the proposition system is that is suffers from the same deeper issue. A system which was meant to make it possible for the ordinary citizen to affect their government has been co-oped by the rich minority to slip laws into the flow by using the same clever marketing that gets one to supersize their fries. The proposition system has brought good laws to California that politicians shy away from promoting.
Speed in counting? Who needs it?
I for one would love a voting system with almost immediate feedback. It should be trivial to have elections and polls any time. That way we could reduce the power of congress and the president and put government back into the hands of the people.
Instead of driving to the closest parking space. Consider combining different modes of transportation to get you to work. A bus with a bike comes to mind. If your work has shower facilities, bike the whole darn way. If your bus/rail system does not allow bikes, get a foldable one (google Birdy Black).
Walk whenever you can and change all of your 1-2 mile trips to biking or walking.
thanks for the reply. I stand corrected!
"a compressed file is, in theory, non-repetitive and is therefore less crack-able"
Sorry, a compressed file is very repetitive. The algos are well known. Compression is done prior to encryption because the resulting file is smaller then if it hadn't been compressed. The encrypting of files makes them much larger.
I think this points to a flaw in the study. The study does not account for the fact that someone might give change as part of the payment, thereby reducing the amount of change they have overall.
For those scared to learn latex but want a superior document processing system LyX does work and work well. I have used it for many articles and papers for work and school. And as an added incentive there is a mif to lyx filter if you happen to be one of those now stuck by Adobe's decision.
lyx website.
mif 2 lyx translator.
Sure, but what is Senator Hatch doing about the mutant threat? - Dang wrong article.
I recently heard a great interview on Larry Mantel's Air Talk of Jeremy Rifkin. He has just written a new book, titled The Age of Access, which delves into this very topic.
The point which strikes a cord with me is that the ultimate model that corporations strive for is to remove any material ownership from the consumer so the consumer always has to pay over and over again for the 'experience'. This model effectively strips the consumer from creating or fostering their own culture. The internet like any other medium or tool can be used by the corporations to continue this erosion, ala ASP, UCITA, etc. or it can be used to combat this erosion, ala slashdot, usenet, wiki wiki web, rre, etc.
It is probably no coincidence that this ask slashdot comes on the same day as the Scott Reents interview. They are in the same vein both prompting you to think about your freedom outside in the big blue room and how the internet effects it.
There is no doubt in my mind that we as a people should actively work to ingrain our culture into the internet and constantly strive to make life as tangible as possible. The internet should serve as our glue to keep our culture together not be the solvent that rips it apart.
There are several choices for solaris. dtbuilder, which is very simple and featureless but free and already in CDE/solaris. Sun's forte development environment, which can be try-n-buyed for 30 days or bought for anywhere between 300 (edu price) and 3500 USD. Both Kdevelop and GLADE work under solaris. Teleuse is actually not sold by telesoft, but by a company called aonix.
Just choose one of those options and you will be fine. If I had a choice myself I would use either Kdevelop or forte. Kdevelop because it uses qt so it is entirely c++ (which seems to be a requirement for you) as well as the possibility of portability since qt runs on windows. Forte, because Sun makes it so it will have Sun support as well as having a significant performance advantage on sparc.
If you decide on motif as your windowing toolkit and use forte and you have oodles of money in your pocket. Consider adding XRT. Very many high quality widgets which can improve the look of just about any gui.
mgetty + voice has the low level capability you need as well as a perl interface. You will end up doing a lot of the work to do this yourself. But the pieces are there.
Find mgetty here.
Rumor no more .
I suggest using XVscan. It costs $50, is supported by a company and is really simple to use.
I have used SANE with beta drivers and have had good luck, very few glitches. So it would not be a bad idea to consider scanners in the beta list. No experience with alpha though.
It is interesting that Metacreations is in this deal with minolta. It seems like a perfectly good fit of a great graphics software company and a great camera company. But Metacreations has had it's own difficulties lately. Metacreations is a company with really neat products and what seems to me almost no good marketing skills. This has led to a sustained loss every quarter last year. They are often over shadowed by the big boys in Microsoft and Adobe. Well, it seems obvious to me that they should consider opening up their software at least in the graphics genre. If they had the gimp on their side...
Even nicer would be if an open source company bought them flat out and opened them up. This would be chump change for RedHat but also very possible for Corel.
I know you all have heard it a thousand times before. Open it up! In fact I will probably be moderated down because it is so off topic. But first read what I have to write. Why did Netscape open it up? Because they couldn't support a free browser like Microsoft could indefinitely. What compelling reason would one have to buy Metacreations software over Adobe's products? Features? Certainly not because of that, very few people buy software for the features. Cost? Well it is a concern but only to people not making money at doing graphic work. What else then is going to bouy metacreations? Their e-commerce? Maybe, but even then this product line has nothing to do with their graphic software. So spin it off!
Besided the suggestions for the ISDN router, which are good suggestions I think some mention should be made for the external terminal adapter option. The two best IMO are the 3com impact and the zyxel omni.net plus.
This option is really appealing if you are used to POTS modems because they behave just like them. They hook up to your serial port and they have dial out commands just like modems. They work seemlessly with ppp and do not require that one get involved in any isdn4linux stuff. It isn't that the isdn4linux stuff is bad it is a little hard to work with if you don't live in europe. And the isdn4linux debate on it's regular inclusion in the linux kernel is still not completely resolved.
The reason I like both the 3com and the zyxel product is because they both have the capability to do 230kbps or more across the serial port. This is important if you want to use all 128kbps of ISDN. USB would make the whole serial port discussion a null issue but it is not quite ready in linux. The 3com impact does 230kbps and the zyxel does 460kbps. Don't let the zyxel fool you 460kbps is better then 230kbps but only marginally. Instead, let the zyxel price lure you. The zyxel is generally cheaper then 3com but has just as high customer satisfaction (I own a zyxel myself and am very happy with it).
This brings up an important point. Most serial ports have the 16550A UART which does a smashing good job of 115kbps. This is more then enough for 56K modems. But for ISDN even at 115kbps one will find that the best throughput is really only 95kbps due to overhead on the UART. And if one can make a 128kbps connection the throughput is even worse. So if you go the route I describe I suggest picking up a serial port board with a 16750 or 16950 UART. These UARTs are supported in linux kernel 2.2.x or newer. A good manufacturer is pacific commware. Their turboexpress 920 board is isa pnp which will require isapnptools and a little elbow grease. I need to stress that the newer UARTs are not supported in the older 2.0.x kernels.
And now the URLs:
In the original coverage of the unveiling of the Queen's website there was many a mention of the choice being made to use linux instead of solaris which was pretty much the second choice and the standard there before linux. The info there was at best vague and showed no real compelling reason to pick linux over solaris or why solaris was even the second choice. A few recent surveys of solaris 7, linux and NT have given solaris 7 the edge on web service over both linux and NT. And solaris seems to be holding its own against linux and NT in the marketplace. Since the press rarely gets these things right some advice or opinion from a real person having experience in both linux and solaris as well as runnning a high load web server would go a long way.
Could you spend some words explaining why linux is more compelling to you in this instance over solaris 7? Please delve into some technical depth.
Simple, costs only a little and can boot more OS' then you can shake a stick at. Think Lilo on steriods. Using it currently, very easy to install and has never failed me.
There is a rumor going around that Solaris8 will be IPv6 ready. But if you want to play around with IPv6 on your solaris box, you are welcome to try.
Just so you don't think the commercial unices don't want to play with linux.
I am glad you don't take yourself too seriously doing this new audio gig. It would be too much.
Anyhow, it is an interesting idea to an under served audience but the content leaves a lot to be desired. See the content of the audio show is much like slashdot itself. Which for the main site is merely a collection of stories with terse commentary on them. This is great for a website designed to quickly wisked you off to a new site with the real dirt. But on a uninterruptable sound feed it adds up to the audienced being trapped in a one sided conversation ready to hit ^C.
If you continue this type of programming I am sad to say it will not last long. I suggest either adding listener callin in some form. But at least be able to provide insight in a semi intelligant or grossly humorous fashion that isn't available on the website already. Otherwise I am going to flip back to regular radio.
Maybe an in depth segment on Tulip Day =P
I wasn't making a comment about Sequent employees, rather I was commenting on the all too often occurence after any techno merger. Everyone from the assimilated company jumps ship. Examples of good companies which followed this phenomena were digital->compaq and palmcomputing->3com. I am sure there are absolutely tons of competent Sequent employees now. Tomorrow...
As far as anyone bothering and especially in IBM's case, it is most likely because they can and because some middle level executive convince some upper level executive that it was a good idea at a cheap price and it fits with this strategic goal or that sentence in a mission statement. It doesn't have to make sense but it does have to work out to some monetary and market advantage and this one does (although I consider it negleable in big blue's case).
I expect someone else to do the same with SCO. We'll see.
This buy out has two interesting ramifications. Everyone reading the press release saw how the sequent boxes 'compliment' the IBM line. But they do directly compete for data center space as well. The sequent boxes may not be long for this world. IBM, historically has proven to go either way on these sorts of things and with sequent constantly lumped in the 'other' piece of the market share pie it may make no sense for IBM to keep the company around.
Also, project monterrey has three members, SCO, Sequent and IBM. Now it has two members. Is SCO in the merger kill zone too? Yes they are. What would project monterrey be if only IBM was the only member.
(flame bait)Not that monterrey will be able to compete with linux and solaris.
Seriously Sequent adds up to almost nothing when compared to any of the Unix big boys this is barely news worthy, only because sequent has shown up in all the project monterrey press releases next to big blue.
Good luck to all those sequent employees. I can hear the resumes being edited from my office.
The most interesting answer to your question is there are plenty of companies out there who's venture capital come from Intel. When Intel owns say 20% of your company and you need an enterprise level computer for your data center do you honestly think that Intel is going to let you buy a PowerPC/UltraSPARC/Alpha based system with their money. The answer is no.
Look at Intel invested startups like eToys. Just Intel boxes running linux, NT or Sequent's unix.
This is an interesting way for Intel to invest to preserve it's market dominance.
Interesting question. 2D is kinda dead for the most part. No one is putting out the 2D performance numbers anymore. With good reason, the ultimate in 2D has pretty much been reached.
There are plenty of cards out there that do fantastic 2D still.
My personal preference is matrox. Millenia II for PCI and a G200 for AGP. They have fantastic color ranges, supported under linux and windows and have really high 2D resolution (HDTV 1920x1200) at nice high refresh rates.
I have a suspicion that there is more then just one vendor with very good 2D performance though.
isdn4linux is focused on the add in isdn cards and the european ones at that. So the information there is not exactly accurate.
I currently have a ZyXEL omni.net plus using both channels under linux. But when I first got it I had a little trouble figuring it out.
Here is what I had to do. First you have to use the modem's built in capability to communicate by MPP, or multi-point PPP. Set the second channel call on the isdn TA real low so it will try to make the second channel bond with very little traffic.
In pppd land use PAP or CHAP to authenticate with your ISP. Then you should be off to the races.
Doing all this will require you to spend some quality time with your isdn TA's manual since you will have to figure out the initialization string to get it to work. And there is no standard for isdn TA's so my string may mean nothing to your isdn TA.
But just so you can get an idea of what I mean I will include it and break it down for you.
AT&E1S83.7=1&K44BP1&J3
The AT you should already be familiar with. &E1 tells the modem to operate at 56k (because my telco doesn't provide a d channel). S83.7=1 sets the isdn's "Speech Bearer service" this is handy for getting a lower rate on calls if your telco operatest this way. &K44 sets compression on, I personally don't get much out of this, YMMV. BP1 is very important, make sure you find the equivalent for your TA, it enables bandwidth allocation protocol which is what your TA is going to use with your ISP's equivalent to get two channels to bond. &J3 enables multilink PPP.
So to summarize, make sure you are using multilink PPP and that your TA is able to use the Bandwidth Allocation Protocol. Do not use v.120 to connect, use PPP. v.120 is a very loose standard and many ISP dial-in boxes will not support channel bonding in this protocol. Then finally use PAP/CHAP to authenticate in pppd scripts. Read the PPP Howto on how to do that.
This is no gauranteed fix for you but I wanted to let you know it is very possible to bond both channels of ISDN using linux to achieve 115kbps or more.