The EU is not trying to destroy the internet, it is trying to do quite the opposite; it has recognised that countries like China, Brazil and Iran are making strong moves to setting up their own independant root servers, irrespective of the US.
They are trying to act as brokers between this position, which is not in the interest of the EU, and the maverick US position, which flatly disclaims any notion of international coordination on these issues. Repeat after me: the EU is not trying to split the internet, they are trying to maintain the current cohesion.
They are a broker between two arguments, and should be applauded as such, rather than vilified and slandered as 'splitters' or malcontents.
'The EU does not intend to scrap Icann. It would continue in its current technical role.
Instead Europe is suggesting a way of allowing countries to express their position on internet issues, though the details on how this would happen are vague.
"We have no intention to regulate the internet," said Commissioner Reding, reassuring the US that the EU was not proposing setting up a new global body.
Rather she talked of a "model of cooperation", of an international forum to discuss the internet.'
Cassini-Huygens is a joint mission between NASA and the European Space Agency - http://www.esa.int/. Cassini (the main vehicle) is NASA's responsibility, and the robot probe called Huygens is ESA's.
Good to see some international cooperation in a venture like this. After the stunning shots of Titan and Saturn returned by Cassini's sensors, we can only hope that the remote probe fares better than Beagle 2:)
ESA article with more information
I'm amazed that people confuse the two. Can there really be zealots with their vocal organs sufficiently inserted into their nether regions who believe that Windows and the GUI used by Windows are one and the same?
I'd invite you to look at Xbox as an example, and the operating system which that runs. There is no requirement for Windows to include a friendly GUI, animated characters, BSODs or any of these other 'hilarious'/. stalwarts.
'At the conference, Microsoft also unveiled a study on the effectiveness of online advertising. The company is using the study as the basis for an argument that companies spending about 1 percent of their advertising budget online should consider increasing that to 4 percent or 5 percent because people are spending more time online.
Ballmer said Microsoft spends about 12 percent of its media budget on online advertising, and that he orders his staff to "saturate" that market first and foremost.
"I want to make sure (a user) can't get through... an online experience without hitting a Microsoft ad," he said.'
Which is somewhat different from that implied by the submitter; rather than Microsoft wanting to dominate search space, and slapping their ads on everything, it's actually a suggestion that online advertising can be effective, and that companies should spend more of their marketing budget online.
Given the dearth of funding models for many websites, I'm amazed that people are willing to twist an attempt to get more money into advertising online as something more evil.
I very much doubt that Microsoft needed a helping hand to get the kernel working - NT 4.0 had a PPC port years ago. One of the benefits of a Microkernel architecture.
In any event, people aren't using Windows for its killer kernel - they're using it for its killer applications (Word, Outlook) and massive legacy software backlist. The fact that the kernel works on PPC hardware is irrelevant; software compiled for x86 will not run under PPC without emulation.
Unfortunately, this is not the case. It doesn't matter how complete the kernel is; you won't be able to run Windows applications compiled for x86 on PPC hardware.
You'd do just as well to ask 'where is MDI support in Office XP?'. I suspect that from Microsoft's POV, the two are equivalent. Single Document Interfaces in Office are massively more popular with everyday users than MDI - they prevent documents getting 'lost', users don't have to remember what instance of the application holds the child window with the document they want to edit.. etc.
I suspect that Microsoft keep Internet Explorer SDI for reasons of consistency between their application suites.
Linksys paid SCO for a license. As the Linux kernel is in violation of SCO's copyright, and is such not permissible as any form of viable evidence in a court of law, Linksys is safe.
Upon further questioning, a Linksys representative was quoted as saying 'Apples. How d'you like them?'
You'd want to be closest when the astronauts were coming back. It's (relatively) easy to launch them with lots of fuel and supplies to get there, but it's simply not possible to launch similar amounts from the surface of Mars. Ideally, the astronauts would be coming back around August 27th, not launching on their way there with a long journey back.
It doesn't matter. The $50 and $100 bills are the same size and material as a $1 bill. Bleach a $1 bill until you have nothing left visible but the raw material, then print a $50 or $100 over it.
I don't normally do this, but as the site seems to be almost dead within the first three posts, I've duplicated the article content in this post.
-- article -- May 23, 2003 LPD for fun and MP3 playing Background
Most true Unix geeks will recognize just how nice LPD is as a distributed queueing mechanism for managing all jobs sent to the printer. It has a beautiful simplicity to it, and some mean power to go along with it. It's a difficult beast to tame, but once you understand it, everything will start coming out exactly like you want it.
But, what most people don't realize is that LPD can be used for other things too. In fact, it can be viewed as a general queueing mechanism with a few added bells and whistles for printers. So let's examine a more interesting use of LPD, an engine for distributed spooling of MP3s. Motivation
The main thing that got me started on this quest was seeing these two pictures (one, two) from the c2k3 openBSD hackathon I saw that obviously someone else had figured out how to do it. I sure as heck could also. Initial Assessment
The first stop on my quest was examine the all-knowing seer of the Internet, google. That returned a wonderful page in Swedish about how to do this very task. Unfortunately, my swedish sucks, but thankfully the scripts were written in bash, and the other big thing was just a printcap file. Creating a Printcap Entry
The first thing that you need to do is to create an entry in your printcap file for your shiny new mp3 printer. On most systems this file is/etc/printcap on my redhat 7.3 system (no sound card on the openBSD firewall) it is/etc/printcap.local. You'll want to paste the following snipped of code in there:
Now we'll walk through the entry line by line. I'll ignore the \ at the end of almost every line, that just tells lpd to keep reading because there is more to come. The last line doesn't need the \ obviously.
* 1: mp3: - the name of your mp3 printer. In this case, just mp3
* 2::lp=/dev/null: - we're not hooking this up to a physical device in the normal sense
* 3::if=/usr/local/bin/audiofilter: - this is the input filter. I'll show how to create it later.
* 4::af=/var/log/audio-acct: - this is the accounting file. You could do some fun stuff with this to monitor who uses the queue the most and what not.
* 5::lf=/var/log/audio-errs: - this is the file that errors will be logged to. Well, some errors; not all errors will end up here.
* 6::sh - tells it to supress any header information that would normally be sent. This is important or you may get junk before every file which causes audiofilter to fail.
An Audio Input Filter
The key to the whole system is that all of the processing is done by input filter. On some platforms this may cause it say that the printing has stalled while a song is playing, but that's not a big deal. There is no output from the input filter, and thus nothing is done after this. You'll want to put the following piece of code on your system as/usr/local/bin/audiofilter:
#!/bin/bash # # This script was originally made by Teddy Hogeborn. # Small alterations was made by: # Peter Lundqvist # Patrick Wagstrom # # This is a "printer filter" for playing audio files
for arg in "$@"; do
case "$arg" in
-d*) dir="${arg#-d}";;
-e*) basefile="${arg#-e}";;
-f*.*) ext="${arg##*.}";;
esac done
You seem to connect themes with simple bitmap changes, and the like. I agree that simply offering this functionality is less than important.
However, with 'true' theming, the internal function of the GUI (and OS) is loosely tied with the graphical layout and function of the GUI. What does this means? It means that a single system, properly configured, can handle many different interface styles. You could simultaneously offer transition interfaces to users from different GUI camps - Windows, MacOS, NeXT, etc.
This is an immensely important feature for this reason. While many see theming as eyecandy, properly implemented it can serve a very useful purpose; fit the GUI to the user, not the user to the GUI. It should also allow new interface styles to be prototyped - what better way to develop usability than to look at what people with the skillset to change the interface think works best?
Underclocking is typically necessary if a part needs more voltage than is allowed for with the default configuration. This is why when you overclock, the converse is generally required; you can get better overclocks by increasing voltage.
Obviously, Intel are not going to encourage people to increase the voltage of their processors in order to run them at the default speeds, as this can run the risk of thermal damage to the chip with insufficient cooling, or overly high voltages. It may however still represent an option for system administrators who are keen to retain the performance of the chip.
We had something like this running during the mid 1990s. The speeds were incredible; it used the three decade old mothballed British launch vehicle rocket motors, which were abandoned after our nuclear deterrent moved onto submarine launched ballistics.
The record would have been held by the land on which the rain never stops, but for the fact there were some irritating leaves on the line during summer and autumn months. Winter was ruled out by that pesky light dusting of snow, and after unfortunate incidents with hypersonic sparrows in spring, the whole project was abandoned in favour of the 'wobbly train' approach to high speed cornering.
If you read the article, the US has 'no plans' for a manned mission to Mars. The Russians are planning to do this off their own back.
It makes sense. Combining two different nations in a space program might look good for the media, but from an efficiency and productivity point of view, it's very poor. You end up with compromises at every stage of the process, with the result that noone is truly satisfied with the outcome.
Bear in mind Russia has a huge advantage over the US in both long term space missions (Cosmonauts in Mir hold the endurance record for space 'flight'), and it also has far superior heavy lift capabilities. The Energia launch vehicle is capable of orbiting a payload of 100 tons - far more than than the 30 tons capable of being lifted by the shuttle. While there have been plans for US heavy lift systems (cf. the 'Shuttle-C' cargo container, or the Ares booster) which could increase payload weight to 121 tons, the Russians designed a system (Volcano) derived from Energia which could loft over 200 tons of cargo!
NASA is at serious risk of falling further and further behind, and becoming largely irrelevant in space exploration. Mars Express (from the ESA) is a clear example of how quality research can be performed at a fraction of the cost of a typical NASA mission. Pathfinder cost 'just' $200M - compare this to the British built 'Beagle' rover, which is more capable, and cost just £10M (~ $16M) to develop! Mars Express, the overall project of which Beagle is part, cost just 203M. Compare this to the $800M cost of the latest US mission to Mars.
If NASA is to succeed in the long term, and to shine at research, it has to learn hard lessons from several sources. Satellites can be optimally placed with cheap boosters, not expensive manned shuttle missions. Productivity needs to get back, at the very least, to Pathfinder mission standards. Using proven engineering, and modularity of design, you can massively reduce failures, and costs.
For more information on Mars Express, check here and the official ESA project page here.
The fundamental problem (as highlighted by the author) is the disparity in desires between 'techies' (I'm guessing people will prefer this over shrieking geeks), and users. To make it clear in this post, techies are people who use computers because they enjoy it; surfing the web, reading email and news, IRC, maybe some development, or just general messing around. Users use the computer because they have to; they work 9 till 5 in an office, bashing out documents. For them, a computer isn't a toy to
You are both correct and incorrect. While it's obviously not possible to simply go through changing instructions, operators and operands without consideration as to the effect on the program, it is possible to leverage functionally identical instructions to represent a bit.
If you read the article, a trivial example would be subtracting -5, rather than adding +5. The presence of a subtraction operation, rather than an addition operation can signify a binary digit.
Unfortunately, due to the consistent output from compilers, this is not steganography - you can both tell that the executable has been altered, and read the message! His plans for the future (parameter organisation, etc.) may be more relevant, but at the moment this is a proof of concept implementation, not a usable system.
Anyone interested in other forms of steganography could do worse than to read Andrew Tanenbaum's page on the subject.
They're engineers and scientists, not webdesigners. Their stated aim is 'to bring together a small team of highly motivated researchers to make a breakthrough in a strategically important technology area in just 4 months.' Personally, I find it somewhat refreshing that a team decides to focus on what they are good at, and spend less time on the website. I believe we may need to modify the primary lemma
Imperial Department of Computing lectures will never be the same again, now we know what this thing is and where to buy it:) Since we've had two lecture theatres refurbished, with obligatory automation (windows, fans, a/c, lighting all controlled from a single panel by the controlling computer), the lecturers just haven't been able to resist pulling this puppy out and playing with it.
The good news, for prospective purchasers, is that the range on this thing is pretty decent. Not sure what the bluetooth spec quotes for range, but it works perfectly in the 50 - 60ft length of the theatres. The bad news is that this means lecturers feel far more confident about walking around and asking questions of the insomniacs catching up on some much needed shuteye at the back.
Has anyone had any experience with two of these devices in the same bluetooth hotspot? Not that I've got anything planned, at all...
A webcam would offer shocking quality; you'd get to see the shuttle on the pad, and then the next frame update would be a cloud. Plus imagine the risk to the mission caused by the Shuttle crew continually being asked to be a little more erotic with their clipboards. I knew NASA was strapped for cash, but cheesey zero-gee pornos?
Slashdot Mirror
They are trying to act as brokers between this position, which is not in the interest of the EU, and the maverick US position, which flatly disclaims any notion of international coordination on these issues. Repeat after me: the EU is not trying to split the internet, they are trying to maintain the current cohesion.
They are a broker between two arguments, and should be applauded as such, rather than vilified and slandered as 'splitters' or malcontents.
'The EU does not intend to scrap Icann. It would continue in its current technical role.
Instead Europe is suggesting a way of allowing countries to express their position on internet issues, though the details on how this would happen are vague.
"We have no intention to regulate the internet," said Commissioner Reding, reassuring the US that the EU was not proposing setting up a new global body.
Rather she talked of a "model of cooperation", of an international forum to discuss the internet.'
[Taken from http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/technology/4327928.stm
Yeah, imagine what would happen if the BBC posted a story which was so obviously an April Fool's gag!
Good to see some international cooperation in a venture like this. After the stunning shots of Titan and Saturn returned by Cassini's sensors, we can only hope that the remote probe fares better than Beagle 2 :)
ESA article with more information
I'd invite you to look at Xbox as an example, and the operating system which that runs. There is no requirement for Windows to include a friendly GUI, animated characters, BSODs or any of these other 'hilarious' /. stalwarts.
Ballmer said Microsoft spends about 12 percent of its media budget on online advertising, and that he orders his staff to "saturate" that market first and foremost.
"I want to make sure (a user) can't get through ... an online experience without hitting a Microsoft ad," he said.'
Which is somewhat different from that implied by the submitter; rather than Microsoft wanting to dominate search space, and slapping their ads on everything, it's actually a suggestion that online advertising can be effective, and that companies should spend more of their marketing budget online.
Given the dearth of funding models for many websites, I'm amazed that people are willing to twist an attempt to get more money into advertising online as something more evil.
I very much doubt that Microsoft needed a helping hand to get the kernel working - NT 4.0 had a PPC port years ago. One of the benefits of a Microkernel architecture. In any event, people aren't using Windows for its killer kernel - they're using it for its killer applications (Word, Outlook) and massive legacy software backlist. The fact that the kernel works on PPC hardware is irrelevant; software compiled for x86 will not run under PPC without emulation.
Unfortunately, this is not the case. It doesn't matter how complete the kernel is; you won't be able to run Windows applications compiled for x86 on PPC hardware.
You'd do just as well to ask 'where is MDI support in Office XP?'. I suspect that from Microsoft's POV, the two are equivalent. Single Document Interfaces in Office are massively more popular with everyday users than MDI - they prevent documents getting 'lost', users don't have to remember what instance of the application holds the child window with the document they want to edit.. etc.
I suspect that Microsoft keep Internet Explorer SDI for reasons of consistency between their application suites.
Linksys paid SCO for a license. As the Linux kernel is in violation of SCO's copyright, and is such not permissible as any form of viable evidence in a court of law, Linksys is safe.
Upon further questioning, a Linksys representative was quoted as saying 'Apples. How d'you like them?'
You'd want to be closest when the astronauts were coming back. It's (relatively) easy to launch them with lots of fuel and supplies to get there, but it's simply not possible to launch similar amounts from the surface of Mars. Ideally, the astronauts would be coming back around August 27th, not launching on their way there with a long journey back.
It doesn't matter. The $50 and $100 bills are the same size and material as a $1 bill. Bleach a $1 bill until you have nothing left visible but the raw material, then print a $50 or $100 over it.
Bingo - instant profit.
I don't normally do this, but as the site seems to be almost dead within the first three posts, I've duplicated the article content in this post.
/etc/printcap on my redhat 7.3 system (no sound card on the openBSD firewall) it is /etc/printcap.local. You'll want to paste the following snipped of code in there:
:lp=/dev/null:\ :sd=/var/spool/lpd/audio:\ :if=/usr/local/bin/audiofilter:\ :af=/var/log/audio-acct:\ :lf=/var/log/audio-errs:\ :sh
:lp=/dev/null: - we're not hooking this up to a physical device in the normal sense :if=/usr/local/bin/audiofilter: - this is the input filter. I'll show how to create it later. :af=/var/log/audio-acct: - this is the accounting file. You could do some fun stuff with this to monitor who uses the queue the most and what not. :lf=/var/log/audio-errs: - this is the file that errors will be logged to. Well, some errors; not all errors will end up here. :sh - tells it to supress any header information that would normally be sent. This is important or you may get junk before every file which causes audiofilter to fail.
/usr/local/bin/audiofilter:
;; ;; ;;
-- article --
May 23, 2003
LPD for fun and MP3 playing
Background
Most true Unix geeks will recognize just how nice LPD is as a distributed queueing mechanism for managing all jobs sent to the printer. It has a beautiful simplicity to it, and some mean power to go along with it. It's a difficult beast to tame, but once you understand it, everything will start coming out exactly like you want it.
But, what most people don't realize is that LPD can be used for other things too. In fact, it can be viewed as a general queueing mechanism with a few added bells and whistles for printers. So let's examine a more interesting use of LPD, an engine for distributed spooling of MP3s.
Motivation
The main thing that got me started on this quest was seeing these two pictures (one, two) from the c2k3 openBSD hackathon I saw that obviously someone else had figured out how to do it. I sure as heck could also.
Initial Assessment
The first stop on my quest was examine the all-knowing seer of the Internet, google. That returned a wonderful page in Swedish about how to do this very task. Unfortunately, my swedish sucks, but thankfully the scripts were written in bash, and the other big thing was just a printcap file.
Creating a Printcap Entry
The first thing that you need to do is to create an entry in your printcap file for your shiny new mp3 printer. On most systems this file is
mp3:\
Now we'll walk through the entry line by line. I'll ignore the \ at the end of almost every line, that just tells lpd to keep reading because there is more to come. The last line doesn't need the \ obviously.
* 1: mp3: - the name of your mp3 printer. In this case, just mp3
* 2:
* 3:
* 4:
* 5:
* 6:
An Audio Input Filter
The key to the whole system is that all of the processing is done by input filter. On some platforms this may cause it say that the printing has stalled while a song is playing, but that's not a big deal. There is no output from the input filter, and thus nothing is done after this. You'll want to put the following piece of code on your system as
#!/bin/bash
#
# This script was originally made by Teddy Hogeborn.
# Small alterations was made by:
# Peter Lundqvist
# Patrick Wagstrom
#
# This is a "printer filter" for playing audio files
for arg in "$@"; do
case "$arg" in
-d*) dir="${arg#-d}"
-e*) basefile="${arg#-e}"
-f*.*) ext="${arg##*.}"
esac
done
mp3player="mpg123 -q -o oss";
modplayer="mikmod --quiet --playmode 0 --noloops --
You seem to connect themes with simple bitmap changes, and the like. I agree that simply offering this functionality is less than important.
However, with 'true' theming, the internal function of the GUI (and OS) is loosely tied with the graphical layout and function of the GUI. What does this means? It means that a single system, properly configured, can handle many different interface styles. You could simultaneously offer transition interfaces to users from different GUI camps - Windows, MacOS, NeXT, etc.
This is an immensely important feature for this reason. While many see theming as eyecandy, properly implemented it can serve a very useful purpose; fit the GUI to the user, not the user to the GUI. It should also allow new interface styles to be prototyped - what better way to develop usability than to look at what people with the skillset to change the interface think works best?
Underclocking is typically necessary if a part needs more voltage than is allowed for with the default configuration. This is why when you overclock, the converse is generally required; you can get better overclocks by increasing voltage.
Obviously, Intel are not going to encourage people to increase the voltage of their processors in order to run them at the default speeds, as this can run the risk of thermal damage to the chip with insufficient cooling, or overly high voltages. It may however still represent an option for system administrators who are keen to retain the performance of the chip.
We had something like this running during the mid 1990s. The speeds were incredible; it used the three decade old mothballed British launch vehicle rocket motors, which were abandoned after our nuclear deterrent moved onto submarine launched ballistics.
The record would have been held by the land on which the rain never stops, but for the fact there were some irritating leaves on the line during summer and autumn months. Winter was ruled out by that pesky light dusting of snow, and after unfortunate incidents with hypersonic sparrows in spring, the whole project was abandoned in favour of the 'wobbly train' approach to high speed cornering.
It makes sense. Combining two different nations in a space program might look good for the media, but from an efficiency and productivity point of view, it's very poor. You end up with compromises at every stage of the process, with the result that noone is truly satisfied with the outcome.
Bear in mind Russia has a huge advantage over the US in both long term space missions (Cosmonauts in Mir hold the endurance record for space 'flight'), and it also has far superior heavy lift capabilities. The Energia launch vehicle is capable of orbiting a payload of 100 tons - far more than than the 30 tons capable of being lifted by the shuttle. While there have been plans for US heavy lift systems (cf. the 'Shuttle-C' cargo container, or the Ares booster) which could increase payload weight to 121 tons, the Russians designed a system (Volcano) derived from Energia which could loft over 200 tons of cargo!
NASA is at serious risk of falling further and further behind, and becoming largely irrelevant in space exploration. Mars Express (from the ESA) is a clear example of how quality research can be performed at a fraction of the cost of a typical NASA mission. Pathfinder cost 'just' $200M - compare this to the British built 'Beagle' rover, which is more capable, and cost just £10M (~ $16M) to develop! Mars Express, the overall project of which Beagle is part, cost just 203M. Compare this to the $800M cost of the latest US mission to Mars.
If NASA is to succeed in the long term, and to shine at research, it has to learn hard lessons from several sources. Satellites can be optimally placed with cheap boosters, not expensive manned shuttle missions. Productivity needs to get back, at the very least, to Pathfinder mission standards. Using proven engineering, and modularity of design, you can massively reduce failures, and costs.
For more information on Mars Express, check here and the official ESA project page here.
I'm talkin bout flyin' cars man! Where we're going, we don't need roads!
strip unzip fcsk sleep
.. if only you could get a girl to parse sh.
The fundamental problem (as highlighted by the author) is the disparity in desires between 'techies' (I'm guessing people will prefer this over shrieking geeks), and users. To make it clear in this post, techies are people who use computers because they enjoy it; surfing the web, reading email and news, IRC, maybe some development, or just general messing around. Users use the computer because they have to; they work 9 till 5 in an office, bashing out documents. For them, a computer isn't a toy to
You are both correct and incorrect. While it's obviously not possible to simply go through changing instructions, operators and operands without consideration as to the effect on the program, it is possible to leverage functionally identical instructions to represent a bit.
If you read the article, a trivial example would be subtracting -5, rather than adding +5. The presence of a subtraction operation, rather than an addition operation can signify a binary digit.
Unfortunately, due to the consistent output from compilers, this is not steganography - you can both tell that the executable has been altered, and read the message! His plans for the future (parameter organisation, etc.) may be more relevant, but at the moment this is a proof of concept implementation, not a usable system.
Anyone interested in other forms of steganography could do worse than to read Andrew Tanenbaum's page on the subject.
to the more apt
The good news, for prospective purchasers, is that the range on this thing is pretty decent. Not sure what the bluetooth spec quotes for range, but it works perfectly in the 50 - 60ft length of the theatres. The bad news is that this means lecturers feel far more confident about walking around and asking questions of the insomniacs catching up on some much needed shuteye at the back.
Has anyone had any experience with two of these devices in the same bluetooth hotspot? Not that I've got anything planned, at all...
Or did you mean the United States' potential development of new nuclear arms in violation of a Congressional ban?
Funny old world!
Actually, where's my wallet...