There is a time window when the moon could not be seen from any part of the former Soviet Union. Moonbounce communication during that time window were actually pretty secure, unless there were Russian ships around that could intercept the signal. Since these ships would have had to be equipped with high gain antennas that cannot be disguised easily, these ships were known to the US, together with their location, thus making it possible to calculate a time window during which secure transmissions were possible.
"I'm a great fan of Linux and of Linus Torvalds, but I feel this is a huge mistake and I hope that either I'm convinced that my fears are unfounded or that this decision is reversed quickly."
I believe your fears are unfounded and I also believe that you have overlooked one important aspect: The GPL makes publishing any modifications mandatory, which means that every distribution with its own kernel version can use its competitors' patches, fixes and feature additions.
As a matter of fact, I think that the change of policy will be very much welcomed by the smaller distributions, because they have a wide variety of derivates from the central kernel and all of them are available and usable within the guidelines of the GPL. There is no reason a small distribution does not incorporate patches from RedHat or SuSE.
From an economical point of view a vanilla kernel is an unsupported piece of code that may break under certain circumstances, most of which are outside the kernel hackers' realm anyway. Leave the everyday stuff to distributions and the creative feature development to the kernel itself.
In the long run it will help both kernel development, since they will be bothered less by those who need a stable kernel for their "production machine" (which in most cases is their private toy machine anyway), because that is what a commercial distributor is for.
I can't think of any serious network setup that does use a vanilla kernel and has the machines handled by someone who is not intimately familiar with the kernel itself. No, in ALL the serious big iron setups a commercial distributor and system provider will act as the missing link between highly experimental kernel development and a user in need of a stable production environment.
"I consulted with a friend of mine before posting that... unfortunately for him, he was wrong. I also checked the IRS website and confirmed what you said. I trusted his advice because, well, he's a CPA at a major firm and gets paid incredible amounts of money to do what he does. I figured that he would know what he was talking about.
My mistake."
Your mistake is to be close to someone working at SCO.
"The card is necessary because it's awfully expensive to check relations of one pair of eyes against 260,000,000 pairs of eyes. You'd need a lifetime to do that."
You only need to check relations of one pair of eyes against the one pair of eyes on record.
"Um...Wasn't this bill passed unanimously? That would lead me to believe that it would be quite hard to vote for someone who didn't support this bill."
Dude, wake up. There are more than two political parties out there.
" Haven't seen an office yet where almost everyone doesn't run at least some sort of custom app.
- A zillion Excel spreadsheet macros to be converted to OOo Whatever their payroll system is. - Custom reporting in Access out of the Oracle/SQLServer backend needs to be rebuilt - The city engineers need some new CAD package to manage the sewer sytem. Oh, and all those existing files may need to be converted. - All of their current Word/Powerpoint files need to be bumped against OOo for compatibility. It's not quite as seamless at it appears. - All of their current development tools"
We should be glad that the transition is done at this point of time. At a later stage the city would have been locked into all kinds of proprietary technology so that a switch would not be feasible anymore.
And that is exactly what this migration is about: Vendor lock-in with a company that abhors open standards (and makes migrations like this on such a pain).
With Micorosoft's upcoming DRM-crap and all kinds of additional (and proprietary) security solutions there are many, many institutions that are looking at Munich right now, knowing that they, too, will have to consider switching to Linux lest they want to be completely dependent on the mercy of one single provider of software as the foundation of their entire infrastructure.
The migration will be horribly expensive and it will reveal a lot of shortcomings in the current state of Open Source software. However, with both IBM and SuSE on the team, there is a huge number of developers on board who will deal with each of these shortcomings as swiftly as they can and the results will be beneficial for both the Open Source community and every other institution that will want to escape a vendor lock-in for the next couple of decades.
I consider that money well spent and it buys added value that Microsoft cannot and does not want to provide. Their choice.
Did those who modded this informative actually visit the link?
"Summary of changes from v2.6.7-rc3 to v2.6.7"
I know very few people running rc3, so the only relevant changelog is the one from the previously released version, i.e. 2.6.6. A link to that one can be found directly on kernel.org and it's very much worth reading the extensive changelog, since there are numerous surprises that cannot be found in the changelog from rc3.
The extensive involvement of xfreedesktop.org contributors is worth noticing. Seems like they are very much involved in kernel development and I wonder where that leaves those with BSD or other non-Linux systems.
" Apple will never be a threat to Microsoft until they run on x86 hardware. End story, full stop."
Horse manure.
The next-generation X-Box will run on an IBM Power PC processor - just as the Apple computers are. Microsoft will port one specific version of its gaming operating system to the X-Box, effectively porting the entire OS to the Power PC architecture.
Give it one or two years and we will see further Windows versions being ported to the Power PC platform and thus in direct competition to Apple's hard- and software.
OTOH, one might just as well start thinking about getting OSX on a non-Apple piece of hardware. The next X-Box hacking competition will involve a price for the first one to have OSX up and running on a next-generation X-Box.
Brazil is probably the moste remarkable countries I have encountered during all my travels.
Apart from the many obvious attractions this country has to offer (the Amazon ecosystem, the unbelievable food, the friendliness of its citizens, the great beaches etc.), Brazil is on its way to become the most modern state in South America and setting the pace for the development of the continent in many respects.
The current government seems to have realized that sovereignity and independence are the two most important goals that cannot be achieved by relying on foreign companies in many areas of everyday life. Software is only one part of it, food, beverages, automobiles, clothing, oil and gas are others and Brazil is on its way to create and maintain economic independence in all these areas.
One of the most overlooked facts of the entire matter is the rather weak currency, which makes one copy of Windows XP extremely expensive. Just to give you an idea about the costs of life in Brazil: A dinner for four persons in a 5-Star restaurant in downtown Rio (www.porcao.com.br) with the most amazing variety and quality of food, incredibly attentive waiters, a posh setting and numerous drinks cost me about 90$. Having wined and dined people in similiar surroundings in New York and Chicago, the bill in these places ran well over 300 USD.
Even at reduced prices, Microsoft products are way too expensive for the regular Joe and a government operating on a tight budget. Economically it doesn't make any sense at all to transfer license fees to the USA, when comparable software can be had for free and can be supported from with the country's own resources.
" Travel with a girl. They'll never identify you as a geek then!"
True for me. My spouse wears black clothes all over, together with steelcapped Doc Martens boots. Of course, it helps to be 6'2 myself, wearing cropped hair and a black outfit.
Never had any problems, never feared having any. Should things get *really* tough, I can certainly outrun any stupid mugger.
Best pieces of advice:
- Don't argue with someone who carries a gun. - Look confident and don't shy from eye contact - Walk briskly - Don't dress like tourist - Separate your cash from your wallet - Avoid places that leave you no exit - Backup religiously and encrypt your data
"I would never even reveal I had a gun unless I was about to use it and then only in defense of my life. As for someone who asks me to give them my property, I just tell them to "fuck off." However, most robbers usually pull a weapon and then make their demands, so that leaves you back at square one, protecting your life."
So you start pulling your weapon while your opponent already has his one pointed at you.
"If Saddam Hussein didn't have WMDs, all he had to do was cooperate with the inspecters, verify he didn't have them, and there would have been no war. He'd still be alive,"
That's American stupidity at its best. Let's twist the facts, ignore the obvious and yell it so loud that there will be enough idiots to believe it without checking.
Saddam cooperated, the inspectors were pulled out one week prior to the attacks and Saddam is still alive. Would you mind explaining your "argument" on basis of these facts?
"One of the main reasons for switching to linux in the past was that it was possible to utilize older hardware that the commercial OS's would not support well."
That is still true today. A current Linux kernel supports all older hardware to such an extent that virtaully any computer you can get for free works fine. That should be good enough in terms of backward compatibility.
How about Windows? Is there any current version that works on a 486?
Greetings from Tokyo and all the members of TIARA (Tokyo International Amateur Radio Association). I know I promised you a series of articles on Japanese amateur radio, but there is something so exciting I just have to take a break and tell you about it.
It all started with the work that Ed Coan (AH7L/7J1AAE) did on antenna pattern plotting using his personal computer and the A-to-D converter in his FT-1000. The circular, and even backward antenna patterns of some of our local TIARA club members brought home the point that what a good station needs is a good antenna. Ed's antenna looks great and the results verify it. He works regular schedules into Colorado and Maine, just like sunspots don't mean anything. My mini-beam just could not compare.
Well, I got to thinking about what we Tokyo apartment dwellers could do and realized that space is THE problem. How do you fit a full-sized beam on a balcony? Loading coils are the answer and the problem at the same time -- the antenna radiation resistance drops as reactance is substituted for length. High current loops develop and the power is dissipated in the antenna instead of being radiated. If only the antenna didn't dissipate the power. Hmmm....let's see, P=E2/R; now if R were 0 then...
From my work, I have some contacts in research groups over at Tokyo University. Better yet, I knew a Japanese ham that is a graduate student there. The thought running through my head was to build a super-conducting antenna. This requires cryogenics, i.e. temperatures around minus 279 degrees Centigrade. I was able get the university folks interested in the project and we built a 10-meter dipole test silicon wafer. They put together a lot of serial coils by "re-work" on the wafer; they were able to connect them so we had a super-conducting yagi. I took my TS-930 transceiver down to the lab for the first tests, but before we could test it, actual measurements showed it was resonant on 3.126 MHz. It seems that the normal equations for inductance don't work with super-conducting materials -- you need a lot fewer turns to get the same results compared to room temperature. Many measurements and trials later, we had a ten-meter resonant wafer. This time we put a 40-element beam on each wafer and stacked 4 wafers in the same assembly. That made a 160-element array on 10-meters in less than a half-foot cube (15 cm3).
The first test didn't go too well. I connected my TS-930 to the super-conducting wafer antenna and tuned it for 10 meters. At room temperature, we couldn't hear anything. Using a heat pump, the lab technicians started lowering the antenna's temperature toward the super-conducting region. I was really impressed by how small the equipment is, and started thinking it might all fit in the shack. Just then, the TS-930 froze solid, which had a negative effect on its operating characteristics. This wouldn't be so easy after all; the coax connection would need some study!
We reworked the wafers to put inductive coupling on them, but I could find no way to efficiently couple to it from the conducting array. Fortunately the lab technicians came up with a new ceramic material that passed RF but not heat. Probably, something that Kyocera invented just for this use. I sent the TS-930 to the ham shop in Akihabara and asked them to touch it up for me. My friend Suzuki-San, JH1WWC (store manager at the ham shop), asked exactly how the paint had been peeled off around the coax connector -- lightning maybe? No, I assured him -- just low temperature exposure, without saying how low the temperatures were. The project had to stay secret and besides, Suzuki-San can repair anything!
Since it looked like it might be a while before the TS-930 would be repaired, I brought out my TS-940. I had already placed an order for a Yaesu FT-1000 anyway. After verifying that in the super-conducting range the antenna was resonant on 10-meters, we connected the TS-940. The ceramic material worked and the rig opera
I really wonder what's insightful about hat kind of comment. If American kids were as smart as you say then the level of high-tech products developped without "foreigners" would have risen to unprecedented levels, which it has not, except maybe in the field of defense technology, and even there it's the rainfall of freely available money without limits that makes things possible.
Unless, of course, smartness is measured independent of knowledge.
I think so, too. Linux is going to be hijacked by cheap commercial entities, because it's giving them something for free that they would have to pay for dearly otherwise. Linux on the desktop will essentially be marketed by cheap companies that do not want the hassle of a separate development department, Linspire being the perfect example.
Did Linspire give anything back to the Open Source community? No, they're just profiting from free giveaways and laughing their asses of at all these idiots who love to work for free.
Same with Google. It's the El Cheapos, mainly the spammers and porn industry that profits from bending Google search results the way they want it - for free.
Classical music is perfect for geeks. It offers a level of complexity that should be more appealing to intelligent people than Britney&Co. The intrinsic beauty of a carefully developped symphony by Beethoven or Shostakovich (or a fugue by Bach) can be compared to a beautiful and bugfree code project, shared with the world for enjoyment.
Classical music is free, you can see the source and it's brutal in its honesty, peer review being one of the most prevalent processes of weeding out the good from the bad.
Granted, it's not easy to expand one's attention span from 3 minutes to an hour or more, but just as Linux is a lot more rewarding in the long run than Windows, classical music offers a lot more than the shiny commercialized products of people who can't even read music or understand the basics of harmonic progressions beyond I-IV-V.
Slashdot Mirror
There is a time window when the moon could not be seen from any part of the former Soviet Union. Moonbounce communication during that time window were actually pretty secure, unless there were Russian ships around that could intercept the signal. Since these ships would have had to be equipped with high gain antennas that cannot be disguised easily, these ships were known to the US, together with their location, thus making it possible to calculate a time window during which secure transmissions were possible.
" Amateur Radio Enthusiasts do CW (morse) communications using moonbounce, not voice."
[ ] You know W5UN, or (if you are old enough) K1WHS
"I'm a great fan of Linux and of Linus Torvalds, but I feel this is a huge mistake and I hope that either I'm convinced that my fears are unfounded or that this decision is reversed quickly."
I believe your fears are unfounded and I also believe that you have overlooked one important aspect: The GPL makes publishing any modifications mandatory, which means that every distribution with its own kernel version can use its competitors' patches, fixes and feature additions.
As a matter of fact, I think that the change of policy will be very much welcomed by the smaller distributions, because they have a wide variety of derivates from the central kernel and all of them are available and usable within the guidelines of the GPL. There is no reason a small distribution does not incorporate patches from RedHat or SuSE.
From an economical point of view a vanilla kernel is an unsupported piece of code that may break under certain circumstances, most of which are outside the kernel hackers' realm anyway. Leave the everyday stuff to distributions and the creative feature development to the kernel itself.
In the long run it will help both kernel development, since they will be bothered less by those who need a stable kernel for their "production machine" (which in most cases is their private toy machine anyway), because that is what a commercial distributor is for.
I can't think of any serious network setup that does use a vanilla kernel and has the machines handled by someone who is not intimately familiar with the kernel itself. No, in ALL the serious big iron setups a commercial distributor and system provider will act as the missing link between highly experimental kernel development and a user in need of a stable production environment.
That is funny.
[Bearshare]
"...and our company is awaiting a patent on it." [...]
A patent that is entirely dependent on Microsoft Windows.
Wow.
"I consulted with a friend of mine before posting that... unfortunately for him, he was wrong. I also checked the IRS website and confirmed what you said. I trusted his advice because, well, he's a CPA at a major firm and gets paid incredible amounts of money to do what he does. I figured that he would know what he was talking about.
My mistake."
Your mistake is to be close to someone working at SCO.
"The card is necessary because it's awfully expensive to check relations of one pair of eyes against 260,000,000 pairs of eyes. You'd need a lifetime to do that."
You only need to check relations of one pair of eyes against the one pair of eyes on record.
"Um...Wasn't this bill passed unanimously? That would lead me to believe that it would be quite hard to vote for someone who didn't support this bill."
Dude, wake up. There are more than two political parties out there.
" Haven't seen an office yet where almost everyone doesn't run at least some sort of custom app.
- A zillion Excel spreadsheet macros to be converted to OOo
Whatever their payroll system is.
- Custom reporting in Access out of the Oracle/SQLServer backend needs to be rebuilt
- The city engineers need some new CAD package to manage the sewer sytem. Oh, and all those existing files may need to be converted.
- All of their current Word/Powerpoint files need to be bumped against OOo for compatibility. It's not quite as seamless at it appears.
- All of their current development tools"
We should be glad that the transition is done at this point of time. At a later stage the city would have been locked into all kinds of proprietary technology so that a switch would not be feasible anymore.
And that is exactly what this migration is about: Vendor lock-in with a company that abhors open standards (and makes migrations like this on such a pain).
With Micorosoft's upcoming DRM-crap and all kinds of additional (and proprietary) security solutions there are many, many institutions that are looking at Munich right now, knowing that they, too, will have to consider switching to Linux lest they want to be completely dependent on the mercy of one single provider of software as the foundation of their entire infrastructure.
The migration will be horribly expensive and it will reveal a lot of shortcomings in the current state of Open Source software. However, with both IBM and SuSE on the team, there is a huge number of developers on board who will deal with each of these shortcomings as swiftly as they can and the results will be beneficial for both the Open Source community and every other institution that will want to escape a vendor lock-in for the next couple of decades.
I consider that money well spent and it buys added value that Microsoft cannot and does not want to provide. Their choice.
Did those who modded this informative actually visit the link?
"Summary of changes from v2.6.7-rc3 to v2.6.7"
I know very few people running rc3, so the only relevant changelog is the one from the previously released version, i.e. 2.6.6. A link to that one can be found directly on kernel.org and it's very much worth reading the extensive changelog, since there are numerous surprises that cannot be found in the changelog from rc3.
The extensive involvement of xfreedesktop.org contributors is worth noticing. Seems like they are very much involved in kernel development and I wonder where that leaves those with BSD or other non-Linux systems.
"Soldiers aren't supposed to stop and think "Oh wait, I'm supposed to be protecting what he says"."
Oh yes, they are.
"Sorry, but if moderate Muslims are against terrorism, then why *aren't* they outraged."
Where would you read about their outrage?
" Apple will never be a threat to Microsoft until they run on x86 hardware. End story, full stop."
Horse manure.
The next-generation X-Box will run on an IBM Power PC processor - just as the Apple computers are. Microsoft will port one specific version of its gaming operating system to the X-Box, effectively porting the entire OS to the Power PC architecture.
Give it one or two years and we will see further Windows versions being ported to the Power PC platform and thus in direct competition to Apple's hard- and software.
OTOH, one might just as well start thinking about getting OSX on a non-Apple piece of hardware. The next X-Box hacking competition will involve a price for the first one to have OSX up and running on a next-generation X-Box.
Draft beer is called "Chopp" in Brazil...
Brazil is probably the moste remarkable countries I have encountered during all my travels.
Apart from the many obvious attractions this country has to offer (the Amazon ecosystem, the unbelievable food, the friendliness of its citizens, the great beaches etc.), Brazil is on its way to become the most modern state in South America and setting the pace for the development of the continent in many respects.
The current government seems to have realized that sovereignity and independence are the two most important goals that cannot be achieved by relying on foreign companies in many areas of everyday life. Software is only one part of it, food, beverages, automobiles, clothing, oil and gas are others and Brazil is on its way to create and maintain economic independence in all these areas.
One of the most overlooked facts of the entire matter is the rather weak currency, which makes one copy of Windows XP extremely expensive. Just to give you an idea about the costs of life in Brazil: A dinner for four persons in a 5-Star restaurant in downtown Rio (www.porcao.com.br) with the most amazing variety and quality of food, incredibly attentive waiters, a posh setting and numerous drinks cost me about 90$. Having wined and dined people in similiar surroundings in New York and Chicago, the bill in these places ran well over 300 USD.
Even at reduced prices, Microsoft products are way too expensive for the regular Joe and a government operating on a tight budget. Economically it doesn't make any sense at all to transfer license fees to the USA, when comparable software can be had for free and can be supported from with the country's own resources.
" Travel with a girl. They'll never identify you as a geek then!"
True for me. My spouse wears black clothes all over, together with steelcapped Doc Martens boots. Of course, it helps to be 6'2 myself, wearing cropped hair and a black outfit.
Never had any problems, never feared having any. Should things get *really* tough, I can certainly outrun any stupid mugger.
Best pieces of advice:
- Don't argue with someone who carries a gun.
- Look confident and don't shy from eye contact
- Walk briskly
- Don't dress like tourist
- Separate your cash from your wallet
- Avoid places that leave you no exit
- Backup religiously and encrypt your data
"I would never even reveal I had a gun unless I was about to use it and then only in defense of my life. As for someone who asks me to give them my property, I just tell them to "fuck off." However, most robbers usually pull a weapon and then make their demands, so that leaves you back at square one, protecting your life."
So you start pulling your weapon while your opponent already has his one pointed at you.
Right.
"If Saddam Hussein didn't have WMDs, all he had to do was cooperate with the inspecters, verify he didn't have them, and there would have been no war. He'd still be alive,"
That's American stupidity at its best. Let's twist the facts, ignore the obvious and yell it so loud that there will be enough idiots to believe it without checking.
Saddam cooperated, the inspectors were pulled out one week prior to the attacks and Saddam is still alive. Would you mind explaining your "argument" on basis of these facts?
That's really incredible. Copy two files into a standard directory correctly and people start praising it.
My system-wide corporate deployment tool can do this, too. It's called cp and tar.
"I mean, when is the last time you heard of a successful business person taking advice from a skid row bum?"
You'r right; I wouldn't take advice from Americans either.
"One of the main reasons for switching to linux in the past was that it was possible to utilize older hardware that the commercial OS's would not support well."
That is still true today. A current Linux kernel supports all older hardware to such an extent that virtaully any computer you can get for free works fine. That should be good enough in terms of backward compatibility.
How about Windows? Is there any current version that works on a 486?
This article is about antenna arrays:
/R; now if R were 0 then...
Greetings from Tokyo and all the members of TIARA (Tokyo International Amateur Radio Association). I know I promised you a series of articles on Japanese amateur radio, but there is something so exciting I just have to take a break and tell you about it.
It all started with the work that Ed Coan (AH7L/7J1AAE) did on antenna pattern plotting using his personal computer and the A-to-D converter in his FT-1000. The circular, and even backward antenna patterns of some of our local TIARA club members brought home the point that what a good station needs is a good antenna. Ed's antenna looks great and the results verify it. He works regular schedules into Colorado and Maine, just like sunspots don't mean anything. My mini-beam just could not compare.
Well, I got to thinking about what we Tokyo apartment dwellers could do and realized that space is THE problem. How do you fit a full-sized beam on a balcony? Loading coils are the answer and the problem at the same time -- the antenna radiation resistance drops as reactance is substituted for length. High current loops develop and the power is dissipated in the antenna instead of being radiated. If only the antenna didn't dissipate the power. Hmmm....let's see, P=E2
From my work, I have some contacts in research groups over at Tokyo University. Better yet, I knew a Japanese ham that is a graduate student there. The thought running through my head was to build a super-conducting antenna. This requires cryogenics, i.e. temperatures around minus 279 degrees Centigrade. I was able get the university folks interested in the project and we built a 10-meter dipole test silicon wafer. They put together a lot of serial coils by "re-work" on the wafer; they were able to connect them so we had a super-conducting yagi. I took my TS-930 transceiver down to the lab for the first tests, but before we could test it, actual measurements showed it was resonant on 3.126 MHz. It seems that the normal equations for inductance don't work with super-conducting materials -- you need a lot fewer turns to get the same results compared to room temperature. Many measurements and trials later, we had a ten-meter resonant wafer. This time we put a 40-element beam on each wafer and stacked 4 wafers in the same assembly. That made a 160-element array on 10-meters in less than a half-foot cube (15 cm3).
The first test didn't go too well. I connected my TS-930 to the super-conducting wafer antenna and tuned it for 10 meters. At room temperature, we couldn't hear anything. Using a heat pump, the lab technicians started lowering the antenna's temperature toward the super-conducting region. I was really impressed by how small the equipment is, and started thinking it might all fit in the shack. Just then, the TS-930 froze solid, which had a negative effect on its operating characteristics. This wouldn't be so easy after all; the coax connection would need some study!
We reworked the wafers to put inductive coupling on them, but I could find no way to efficiently couple to it from the conducting array. Fortunately the lab technicians came up with a new ceramic material that passed RF but not heat. Probably, something that Kyocera invented just for this use. I sent the TS-930 to the ham shop in Akihabara and asked them to touch it up for me. My friend Suzuki-San, JH1WWC (store manager at the ham shop), asked exactly how the paint had been peeled off around the coax connector -- lightning maybe? No, I assured him -- just low temperature exposure, without saying how low the temperatures were. The project had to stay secret and besides, Suzuki-San can repair anything!
Since it looked like it might be a while before the TS-930 would be repaired, I brought out my TS-940. I had already placed an order for a Yaesu FT-1000 anyway. After verifying that in the super-conducting range the antenna was resonant on 10-meters, we connected the TS-940. The ceramic material worked and the rig opera
I really wonder what's insightful about hat kind of comment. If American kids were as smart as you say then the level of high-tech products developped without "foreigners" would have risen to unprecedented levels, which it has not, except maybe in the field of defense technology, and even there it's the rainfall of freely available money without limits that makes things possible.
Unless, of course, smartness is measured independent of knowledge.
" The path of Linux is the path of Google."
I think so, too. Linux is going to be hijacked by cheap commercial entities, because it's giving them something for free that they would have to pay for dearly otherwise. Linux on the desktop will essentially be marketed by cheap companies that do not want the hassle of a separate development department, Linspire being the perfect example.
Did Linspire give anything back to the Open Source community? No, they're just profiting from free giveaways and laughing their asses of at all these idiots who love to work for free.
Same with Google. It's the El Cheapos, mainly the spammers and porn industry that profits from bending Google search results the way they want it - for free.
Classical music is perfect for geeks. It offers a level of complexity that should be more appealing to intelligent people than Britney&Co. The intrinsic beauty of a carefully developped symphony by Beethoven or Shostakovich (or a fugue by Bach) can be compared to a beautiful and bugfree code project, shared with the world for enjoyment.
Classical music is free, you can see the source and it's brutal in its honesty, peer review being one of the most prevalent processes of weeding out the good from the bad.
Granted, it's not easy to expand one's attention span from 3 minutes to an hour or more, but just as Linux is a lot more rewarding in the long run than Windows, classical music offers a lot more than the shiny commercialized products of people who can't even read music or understand the basics of harmonic progressions beyond I-IV-V.