Remember most of the poeple who ran Fidonet are alive and ready to kick ass.
It would be pretty easy to start an Othernet using Internet technology, but dialling different ISPs. Lets face it, in desperation, it could probably be done in hours!
OTOH, only governments can authorise the use of cruise missiles against spammers.
You want XML? I would prefer "printcap" - at least its Unix:-)
This is an example of confusing style with substance, as well as losing the plot.
There is clearly a demand for a mega-fantastic configuration tool that works like "Swat" but hacks all the STANDARD config files in a Unix environment.
This does not mean we need to replace the standard formats with new NON-STANDARD standards.
The American Sergeon General has found out what research in the UK showed years ago...
Most people don't get violent as a result of watching violent videos.
Unfortunately, a few people are "utter nutters" - one viewing of "Gratuitous Death II" and they kill everyone in sight.
Perhaps they don't make much difference in the US, where massacree's are part of the national heritage. In the rest of the world, we try to avoid them with varying degrees of success.
UK has 1/4 the population of the US, and 1/400 the murder rate.
The patent office grants you a patent, but its validity is only determined when it is challenged in court.
Filing the patent with the patent office ONLY establishes the date at which you claim to have invented it, so that you can show you were first. It does not mean that the claims are meaningfull, let alone valid.
OTOH, I wrote a magazine article in the 80's (never published) in which I predicted that the "normal" way of selling music would be to go into your local music store, where you slot a coin into a machine like a jukebox to select the tracks you wanted, the music would then be downloaded over the phone line, and burned into a CD, separate micro payments being made to the artist, producer, and songwriter by the jukebox, so as to prevent the record companies from scamming the artists.
I am ready to appear as an expert witness saying that any or all of this technology is not patentable on the grounds that "it is obvious to anyone suitably skilled in the relevant technology", which fails a patent in the UK.
I probably have the text of the original article on OS/2 backup tapes (but can't read them at present).
If you want me to appear in a US court, you will have to pay my trip across the Atlantic, and swear an affidavit that the opposite side is not connected to the mafia.
1) You need MS Word (or a DTP package, or both) - so Win is the answer - 98 needs less RAM, and doesnt email your innermost thoughts to Seattle or the FBI)
2) You don't need WP or DTP - *BSD is the answer.
Why would anyone want Linux, unless they have big iron? And why doesnt NetBSD run on my ibm 7090 yet?
If you get more that N identical e-mails from someone, then your filter program should swing into action pretty fast - test that the sending address and return address exists.
If it does,
then maybe you have to let it through, but there is absolutely NO EXCUSE for delivering ANY of the mails if they have a fake source or return address.
This policy could make you the most popular ISP on the planet. Hell, it might even avoid someone putting a cruise missile/767 though your bedroom window.
1) Get Sony to make the damn things. They know how to make stuff that is attractive and works.
2) If the things are worth making, the potential market is 300,000,000. If they are not worth making, then DONT MAKE THEM!
3) If you want a glyph language, the Chinese already have an open source, fully debugged one. Don't try out a completely untested Alpha version on non-english speaking kids - it wont work.
4) You might as well use English anyway. All kids speak English, everywhere, cos "The Simpsons" is in English (and, I am told, so is Gangsta Rap, although I am not so sure:-).
5) Make it a condition of the design/manufacture that the architecture is open source, so everyone can make compatibles if they feel like it. That way it will have a future, and there will be some merits in investing time and effort in learning to use it.
6) Why reinvent the wheel? Why not use an existing model whis is already tested? Get Psion to sell you a job lot of their old models? Or what about that Russian thingie designed for kids.
7) Actually, the whole project is a bunch of @#%£,
because kids all over the world are already communicating with each other by e-mail. Even the most remote parts of the world DO have e-mail, and its far cheaper than phone calls. Of course in poorer parts of the world, the facility is shared. Its not a problem - most of the poorer parts of the world have cultures that can handle the idea of sharing something. Its the rich bits that have trouble with the concept of sharing.
8) If you want to 3000 kids from all parts of the world together in one group, why not get two secondary schools from East London to merge.
No way - I have to put "Unix Unleashed" on top of "OS/2 Unleashed" to reach the shelf where I keep "DNS and Bind" and that book on Sendmail". I need more books to reach the shelf above.
Its a fairly safe bet it won't be targeted at Europe. No one here would be able to afford the line rental, AND it costs us more to call the house next door than it costs you to call us from across the atlantic.
Here in the UK, we have fully working broadband, with 80% coverage, but no one can afford it! (175 subscribers at last count).
You obviously think that Africa is like America - It isn't.
In much of Africa, lots of people earning $10 a month DO buy computers. They then rent them out to others. Its a great way to boost your income. Think of it: Millions of people without a word processor, and you have the only one in the street! Yeah! "Word processing done here - $1 per page" (Spell checks an extra $2.50).
The great thing is, 60% of your customers want you to type the same chainletter "get rich quick" scheme you typed for the last one, so you don't even need a big HD;-}
Of course if you are on $10 per month, you have to borrow $30 from a loan shark, and can only afford a 486 with 640x480, but hell, you can still send spam with it! - Well you could, but the telephone hasn't worked since 1973, so no internet connection.
Interestingly enough, I am just off this minute to renovate a bunch of computers donated to a charity for Sierra Leone. I have FreeBSD 4.5 and NetBSD 1.5.2 install disks in my car!
And for those who believe the What they really need is food Line - No - there is plenty of food in most of Africa - the problem is that the economies don't work, so you can't find a way to buy it. This is generally because the legal systems don't work, which, itself, is nearly always the consequence of being colonised - which, after a few hundred years, gives you the idea that laws are something others do to you, and not something that helps you. This attitude, and this attitude alone, is responsible for 90% of poverty in Africa, and probably most poverty in other places too, and also most of the violence in the world.
You have come adrift somewhere. This is an international standards committee. It is populated by people with an interest in the standard, just like SCSI, and the committees that tell you how big a foot or metre is. The companies who sponsor them do so to get the standard to meet their requirements. If their requirements includes fleecing implementors who don't belong to the group, it means the "standard" it is not a standard.
Feet and inches are very useful, but no one has ever suggested you should pay for the right to use them!
I have no objection to people being asked to pay to use patents to implement codecs, but there is no way that anything have to pay to USE will become a standard. Its a law of nature. The incentive to develop alternatives will guarantee non-compliance by major players.
You can rest assured that, if this is implemented, MPEG-4 will go the way of MCA.
On my very own license benchmark, written in a mixture of bwBasic and perl 3.2, I made the following measurements
---------------- Min --- Max --- Mean
BSD Licence ---- 29 --- 30 --- 29.5
GPL ------------ 2 --- 169 -- 15
MS EULA -------- 1 --- 3 --- 2
all meaurements in BogoMegaLops
I have no idea what this means, but I am sure its a good idea.
Realistically, Only the BSD licence allows you to kill babies and make money with software. (Or was that make babies and kill money?) The others require hardware.
Well just FYI, I used to work for Xerox Corp, where the standard desktop was Win NT with Outloook (not the express version). The system was managed by Ross Perot's gang (I forget their name), under an outsourcing deal.
Anyway, cutting the crap, whenever I tried to reply to HTML formatted e-mail, NT would lock up tighter than a duck's ass.
I phoned the "help line", and they would send a trained MSCE to reboot my NT workstation, and explain that this was already reported as defect number 97569987232 (or whatever).
Pretty soon I learned not to reply to any HTML formatted e-mail. I guess the managers took a little longer;-) MS are not even compliant with their own (non)standards.
You have lost the plot here... Loads of large companies are creating web sites for customers that can only be read using MSIE, and I, using Opera, cannot read them.
A major perveyor of software intended to support standards, reguarly sends me mail-shots (I did ask to be informed, this is not spam) about their £2000 training sessions. Their e-mails can only be read using some client I don't use - probably Outlook Express! - They are losing business - never mind that the e-mails are unreadable due to defective HTML - they clearly can't support standards, so I don't think their software can help me.
Outlook Express does not run on my (Win98) workstation, cos it screwed the registry, and won't install again, unless I wipe the hard disk, which I am not prepared to do, as OE can go to hell as far as I care (I really dont need a virus today).
In short, this guy is doing WHAT MS AND MANY OTHERS do all the time, but for Linux.
Why do we care if some people can't read his e-mail We can read it, in the unlikely event we want to. He cant read e-mals from some people - who he says he doesnt want to read e-mail from - what is the big deal here?
In short, he tells people how to mangle their systems so they half work. If people need half working systems, they can follow his advice. Why does this upset people?
Next time, you might suggest that he watched "419 Squadron" - Nigerian Statute 419 prohibits fraud based scams. All Nigerians know that.
You might suggest that one of your in-laws is now head of 419 sqadron, and they have a few B52s spare after Afganistan! Either he pays you $6,000,000, AND stops spamming, or the sqadron pays a visit.
Pity it wont work on US lawyers.
Half of my spam is from US lawyers, and since I don't live in the US, its even less relevant than Nigerian fraud.
I read it, and immediately tried it out on Linux,
and it worked as advertised.
Then I tried it on NetBSD - no suck luck. Whats worse, is that the Samba distribution with NetBSD says "smbclient is nothing to do with us, we dont want to hear about it, it sucks, piss off, etc"
(OK I exaggerated a bit)
I was very disappointed. I sold the concept of Linux to several clients on the strength of Samba, but NetBSD is SO much better. I just wish smbclient would work on it (and on Sparcs, and FreeBSD).
Your HOWTO should mention that its LINUX only, and smbclient is Not Samba. (or else the NetBSD distro needs its README seriously rewritten.)
Slashdot Mirror
It would be pretty easy to start an Othernet using Internet technology, but dialling different ISPs. Lets face it, in desperation, it could probably be done in hours!
OTOH, only governments can authorise the use of cruise missiles against spammers.
I was planning to learn on one of these in London, but the course wwas so expensive, it was cheaper to go to Switerland!
The plan was to try to produce really heavy bass for reggae music by beating two ultrasonic frequencies together.
I never got it to work properly, for a lot of reasons, but mainly lack of money AFAICR.
This is an example of confusing style with substance, as well as losing the plot.
There is clearly a demand for a mega-fantastic configuration tool that works like "Swat" but hacks all the STANDARD config files in a Unix environment.
This does not mean we need to replace the standard formats with new NON-STANDARD standards.
We've upped our standards, so UP YOURS
Most people don't get violent as a result of watching violent videos.
Unfortunately, a few people are "utter nutters" - one viewing of "Gratuitous Death II" and they kill everyone in sight.
Perhaps they don't make much difference in the US, where massacree's are part of the national heritage. In the rest of the world, we try to avoid them with varying degrees of success.
UK has 1/4 the population of the US, and 1/400 the murder rate.
Well you lose this one. IBM had the patent on key clicks, but it expired in or around 1956.
The patent office grants you a patent, but its validity is only determined when it is challenged in court.
Filing the patent with the patent office ONLY establishes the date at which you claim to have invented it, so that you can show you were first. It does not mean that the claims are meaningfull, let alone valid.
OTOH, I wrote a magazine article in the 80's (never published) in which I predicted that the "normal" way of selling music would be to go into your local music store, where you slot a coin into a machine like a jukebox to select the tracks you wanted, the music would then be downloaded over the phone line, and burned into a CD, separate micro payments being made to the artist, producer, and songwriter by the jukebox, so as to prevent the record companies from scamming the artists.
I am ready to appear as an expert witness saying that any or all of this technology is not patentable on the grounds that "it is obvious to anyone suitably skilled in the relevant technology", which fails a patent in the UK.
I probably have the text of the original article on OS/2 backup tapes (but can't read them at present).
If you want me to appear in a US court, you will have to pay my trip across the Atlantic, and swear an affidavit that the opposite side is not connected to the mafia.
1) You need MS Word (or a DTP package, or both) - so Win is the answer - 98 needs less RAM, and doesnt email your innermost thoughts to Seattle or the FBI)
2) You don't need WP or DTP - *BSD is the answer.
Why would anyone want Linux, unless they have big iron? And why doesnt NetBSD run on my ibm 7090 yet?
If it does, then maybe you have to let it through, but there is absolutely NO EXCUSE for delivering ANY of the mails if they have a fake source or return address.
This policy could make you the most popular ISP on the planet. Hell, it might even avoid someone putting a cruise missile/767 though your bedroom window.
2) If the things are worth making, the potential market is 300,000,000. If they are not worth making, then DONT MAKE THEM!
3) If you want a glyph language, the Chinese already have an open source, fully debugged one. Don't try out a completely untested Alpha version on non-english speaking kids - it wont work.
4) You might as well use English anyway. All kids speak English, everywhere, cos "The Simpsons" is in English (and, I am told, so is Gangsta Rap, although I am not so sure :-).
5) Make it a condition of the design/manufacture that the architecture is open source, so everyone can make compatibles if they feel like it. That way it will have a future, and there will be some merits in investing time and effort in learning to use it.
6) Why reinvent the wheel? Why not use an existing model whis is already tested? Get Psion to sell you a job lot of their old models? Or what about that Russian thingie designed for kids.
7) Actually, the whole project is a bunch of @#%£, because kids all over the world are already communicating with each other by e-mail. Even the most remote parts of the world DO have e-mail, and its far cheaper than phone calls. Of course in poorer parts of the world, the facility is shared. Its not a problem - most of the poorer parts of the world have cultures that can handle the idea of sharing something. Its the rich bits that have trouble with the concept of sharing.
8) If you want to 3000 kids from all parts of the world together in one group, why not get two secondary schools from East London to merge.
maybe I could use "Perl for Shortasses".
Here in the UK, we have fully working broadband, with 80% coverage, but no one can afford it! (175 subscribers at last count).
In much of Africa, lots of people earning $10 a month DO buy computers. They then rent them out to others. Its a great way to boost your income. Think of it: Millions of people without a word processor, and you have the only one in the street! Yeah! "Word processing done here - $1 per page" (Spell checks an extra $2.50).
The great thing is, 60% of your customers want you to type the same chainletter "get rich quick" scheme you typed for the last one, so you don't even need a big HD ;-}
Of course if you are on $10 per month, you have to borrow $30 from a loan shark, and can only afford a 486 with 640x480, but hell, you can still send spam with it! - Well you could, but the telephone hasn't worked since 1973, so no internet connection.
Interestingly enough, I am just off this minute to renovate a bunch of computers donated to a charity for Sierra Leone. I have FreeBSD 4.5 and NetBSD 1.5.2 install disks in my car!
And for those who believe the What they really need is food Line - No - there is plenty of food in most of Africa - the problem is that the economies don't work, so you can't find a way to buy it. This is generally because the legal systems don't work, which, itself, is nearly always the consequence of being colonised - which, after a few hundred years, gives you the idea that laws are something others do to you, and not something that helps you. This attitude, and this attitude alone, is responsible for 90% of poverty in Africa, and probably most poverty in other places too, and also most of the violence in the world.
The divisions were originally
Old World Europe, Asia, etc - basically all those poeple who had writing before the time of Christ.
New World The Americas
Third World The rest.
This was a social distinction that made sense 100 years ago.
The one, two, three business is a Socialist propaganda device, that has been taken on board by the ignorant twits that run the media these days.
Ps: Maybe slashdot needs a [spellcheque] buttong as well as [preview] and [submit]!
Feet and inches are very useful, but no one has ever suggested you should pay for the right to use them!
I have no objection to people being asked to pay to use patents to implement codecs, but there is no way that anything have to pay to USE will become a standard. Its a law of nature. The incentive to develop alternatives will guarantee non-compliance by major players.
You can rest assured that, if this is implemented, MPEG-4 will go the way of MCA.
---------------- Min --- Max --- Mean
BSD Licence ---- 29 --- 30 --- 29.5
GPL ------------ 2 --- 169 -- 15
MS EULA -------- 1 --- 3 --- 2
all meaurements in BogoMegaLops
I have no idea what this means, but I am sure its a good idea.
Realistically, Only the BSD licence allows you to kill babies and make money with software. (Or was that make babies and kill money?) The others require hardware.
Anyway, cutting the crap, whenever I tried to reply to HTML formatted e-mail, NT would lock up tighter than a duck's ass.
I phoned the "help line", and they would send a trained MSCE to reboot my NT workstation, and explain that this was already reported as defect number 97569987232 (or whatever).
Pretty soon I learned not to reply to any HTML formatted e-mail. I guess the managers took a little longer ;-) MS are not even compliant with their own (non)standards.
A major perveyor of software intended to support standards, reguarly sends me mail-shots (I did ask to be informed, this is not spam) about their £2000 training sessions. Their e-mails can only be read using some client I don't use - probably Outlook Express! - They are losing business - never mind that the e-mails are unreadable due to defective HTML - they clearly can't support standards, so I don't think their software can help me.
Outlook Express does not run on my (Win98) workstation, cos it screwed the registry, and won't install again, unless I wipe the hard disk, which I am not prepared to do, as OE can go to hell as far as I care (I really dont need a virus today).
In short, this guy is doing WHAT MS AND MANY OTHERS do all the time, but for Linux.
Why do we care if some people can't read his e-mail We can read it, in the unlikely event we want to. He cant read e-mals from some people - who he says he doesnt want to read e-mail from - what is the big deal here?
In short, he tells people how to mangle their systems so they half work. If people need half working systems, they can follow his advice. Why does this upset people?
You might suggest that one of your in-laws is now head of 419 sqadron, and they have a few B52s spare after Afganistan! Either he pays you $6,000,000, AND stops spamming, or the sqadron pays a visit.
Pity it wont work on US lawyers.
Half of my spam is from US lawyers, and since I don't live in the US, its even less relevant than Nigerian fraud.
You are free to say what you like on your web site. You are not free to send me spam telling me about it.
You are not free to prevent me from listening to my stereo by playing yours so loud, I can't hear my own.
Its so obvious, I bet MS and IBM have both patented it!
odds = 2^(compression ratio claimed):1
YMMV
[I recommend 100% lossy compression for Perl programs]
Then I tried it on NetBSD - no suck luck. Whats worse, is that the Samba distribution with NetBSD says "smbclient is nothing to do with us, we dont want to hear about it, it sucks, piss off, etc" (OK I exaggerated a bit)
I was very disappointed. I sold the concept of Linux to several clients on the strength of Samba, but NetBSD is SO much better. I just wish smbclient would work on it (and on Sparcs, and FreeBSD).
Your HOWTO should mention that its LINUX only, and smbclient is Not Samba. (or else the NetBSD distro needs its README seriously rewritten.)