There are two solutions for email when you are in the middle of the ocean: HF/SSB and satellite.
On the satellite side, there is exactly one product on the market. I don't remember the name or mfgr, but you can find them in any boating gear catalog. This is a small, self-contained unit with a small keyboard and LCD display. They go for about a grand, plus you need to subscribe to service and pay per message. Not cheap, but I hear they work quite well.
The other, and much more common, option is HF/SSB/Marine Radio. Any ocean-going vessel will (or should) have a SSB radio, although you need a fairly decent radio and a good antenna for data use. If you have a General (or better) class amateur radio license, then your choice is simple: WinLink 2000 http://winlink.org/k4cjx/ is pretty much the defacto standard for amateur radio internet email. Yes, the software runs under 'doze, but it is free, and the service is also free, run by fellow ham operators.
If you do not have a General Class license and are operating on Marine SSB frequency bands, there are a number of commercial solutions that work just the same as WinLink. Unfortunately, they are not cheap, and none of them provide service any where near as good as the amateur WinLink setup.
In either case, (Marine/commercial or Amateur/Ham) you will need a radio modem to sit in-between your laptop and your radio. Which one you get will be determined by which service you use. If you go with a commercial provider, they will tell you what unit to use. If you use WinLink, there are many more options, all well documented on k4cjx's web site.
Also, if you are serious about this, I *highly* recomend that you take at least two laptops with you and that someone on board knows how to re-install both of them. Yes, your laptop will get fried, so make sure that you have an extended service policy on it! Why? I guarantee that someone will start the engine, start the anchor windless, or kick in the wind generator while the laptop is plugged in, sending a nasty spike through the electrical system and frying your laptop, or at the very least scrambling memory and corrupting the disk. Keying up 1KW on your HF radio can also do nasty things to your laptop as well.
BTW, I spent nine months as a live-aboard in the carribean, so I know all these issues only too well. If anyone wants more info, I'd be happy to provice all the gory details...
Bringing computers into third world countries may sound exciting and exotic (I revived a few dead computers for a K-12 school of 30 kids while sailing in the Bahamas) but it may surprise you to know that a computer is just as alien in America's inner cities as it is in much of the third world. This is not to mention the fact that in much of the third world electricity and telephones are still considered luxuty items, so getting a machine on the web can be a serious challenge!
The point is, you can make a huge difference just be working a few weekends, essentially in your own back yard. To see an example of what can be done, check out a site that we have been working on in Baltimore:
I started using the internet back in 1986 when you could print out the cannonical/etc/hosts file (the days before DNS, you know) on about 100 pages. Connectivity for the entire university of 10,000 students was a 9600bps modem, but this really wasn't a big deal because the few dozen people who knew how to do ftp all knew to be very judicious of bandwidth use and only downloaded large files after 3am.
The internet was a cool place back then. It was this incredibly cool system that would let you send mail anywhere in the world in a matter of minutes or to talk (talkd) to people in real-time. There were public message forums (usenet) that allowed people to converse, discuss, and exchange ideas. And yes, even then, you could download pr0n.
It was so cool because there was just nothing like it. It was cool because everyone using the system had a brain. And yes, it was cool because it was underground. Kinda like watching R.E.M. play to a club of 200 people.
And then, I guess maybe arround 1989, came the Portal System, the first real ISP, although they were called "Public Access Unix" systems at the time. And with it came the first flood of the clueless with their stupidity, bigotry, and spam. The Portal System died a few years later, but not before many other similar such systems spring up. The downhill slide had begun.
But it wasn't until 1993-4, with the introduction of Mosaic that things really started to change. Although http has been arround for a year or so, the text-based browsers really didn't seem all that different than Gopher. Mosaic's X/windows display and their addition of the img tag was what really kicked things off.
For a while, the web was cool, because it was very much a two-way system of interaction. Much like usenet news, but much more structured, and more permanent. But this didn't last long. In just a few years, big media and the advertisors discovered the internet.
And what have they done with it? Have they tried to push it in new directions? Have they tried to expand on the principles that made the internet so great to begin with? No, they have not. They have turned it into Television. As if 500 channels of crap were not enough, you now have five million.
So, what really has happened in the last 15 years? Sure, the network is faster and easier to use, but what has really been added since then? The only major new item I have seen in the past 15 years is that you can now buy stuff over the net in a fairly safe and reliable fashion. But that's hardly remarkable or revolutionary, and from a strictly practical matter, not very profitable for the seller either.
What do I see becoming obsolete? Not much. I expect things to become recycled more than anything. Slashdot, for example, is nothing more than a repackaged version of usenet news. Not that this is bad. On the contrary, the same things that made usenet news so great are the same things that make slashdot so great. Oh, and by the way, people were experimenting with moderation on usenet before the web ever existed.
But the major change? I expect TV to die and be replaced by the internet. By the time HDTV ever gets to the mainstreem market, every TV will come with a computer as powerful as today's desktops built right into it. And that will be the biggest step backward that has ever happened to the internet...
Since, well, it is pretty obvious that, like, someone asked Lars the questions and then, you know, just taped or transcribed his answers. That it would make sense, you know, to just send the audio, I mean, like in Real Audio or MP3 format, instead of lots of long, rambling text that just takes forever to read.
There is absolutely nothing different between the output of this system and what you get from using DeCSS or even just watching a DVD movie on your monitor
In fact, one of the DVD FAQs describes very clearly how to build a very high end home theater system using a PC with line doubling and anamorphic decoding to drive a high quality 1600x1024, 90 or 120 hz refresh, signal through a high end projector or large format plasma/CRT.
The real issue is the one the got mentioned only in passing in the article, and that is the fact that it is trivial (and cheap) to build a small-scale pay-per-view delivery system for an environment such as a hotel... or perhaps something just a bit larger like your local broadband cable modem net.
"Even if its searches use only a small amount of eBay's computer system capacity, Bidder's Edge has nonetheless deprived eBay of the ability to use that portion of its personal property for its own purposes. The law recognizes no such right to use another's personal property."
I really don't see how this is different than any other web-crawling search engine. By the judges argument, he is denying all use of ebay since every transaction takes of a small amount of resources.
From the technical side, Bidder's Edge may actually be reducing the load on the ebay servers by offloading some of the search load to their own servers. Without knowing how much they are caching and how many users they have it is hard to tell for sure.
Now the interesting bit: would the ruling prevent me from writing software to do the same thing and then selling it? Yeah, you'd need a big/fast network pipe to use it, but that's not really the point here...
I read this article in the paper last week and was very surprised that there was no mention of any of the emulators on the market, either commercial (Bleem) or non-commercial (MAME, et al.)
I was also pissed to learn that there was an exhibit last year in a local (baltimore) museum dedicated to the original video games of the 70s and 80s. Sigh...
Brad Templeton (of rec.humor.funny and clari.net fame) wrote a very good analysis and solution of the problem several years ago, and it is still far and away the best I've heard. Read on...
I just checked, and bablefish can be used to translate the Bank of America site. I wonder if they received the same letter...
-p.
IPV6 has been available for FreeBSD for years...
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· Score: 2
FreeBSD has had IPV6 support for several years now. It was an option with FreeBSD 3.x and ships by default with 4.0.
Substantial development of IPV6 and IPSEC were actively developed under FreeBSD versions as far back as 2.x
It's too bad the IPV6 deployment will remain stunted (we won't see ISPs rolling out support) until M$ decides to implement it in their operating systems...
It was a little 5 inch wide thermal printer with a composite NTSC input. Just hit the button and get a little 4x5 in. greyscale printout. I got the little toy along with a serially-controlled LD player from a real estate agency that had tried to do a video presentation system 15 years ago. Basically, they had a working realtor.com (with video walk-throughs) 15 years ago, but it just wasn't profitable at the time.
I raped the HeNe laser from the LD player shortly after I got it (never planned to watch any LDs) and sold the video printer at a hamfest a few years later.
So, like, how hard would it be to build one of these with a WinTV card ($50 new) an old 486 (free) and an old printer (free to $100 for a new color inkjet)? Of course you'd be running Linux on it...
... or the author(s) will face culture crimes like they are trying to do with web sites. frenchc or frenchperl anyone? Or maybe just translate comments to french. No wait, we can just strip the comments from the code to solve that problem.;-)
Seriously, though, I'm not sure how well this will really work in practice. Just because you have access to source code does not necessarily means that you would ever want to use it. Code written behind closed doors tends to stay that way for a reason (it is usually pretty embarassing.)
It is also interesting to note that in the US any code developed through a federal grant must be released into the public domain.
The Transmeta chip is an emulation chip, I believe
Correct.
and thus get's away from the ancient x86 architecture.
Partially correct. It escapes some of the external hardware architecture, but that's really not much of an issue for a non-IO-heavy system. The transmeta cpu actually executes x86 instructions. Although another instruction set could be developed, this would provide little improvement over emulation of x86. (at least according to initial tests as reported by Linus.)
Hey, you could probably get the entire company just by assuming their liabilities! Just think of the service you would receive as the sole user!
Now, keeping the satellites in proper orbit may be a little tricky while on the road. You'll probably need to port all the controll software to Linux, but you'll have plenty of time to do that since you are on vacation!
But just think of the coolness factor! Want to impress that cute chick on the beach? Just bring down one of the satellites as a show of your affection. That'll be a whole lot more impressive than a drink with a little paper umbrella...
If Microsoft is broken up, it would be the first time the Justice Department shattered a company in this way since the 1984 breakup of telephone monopoly AT&T. Launched in 1974, the landmark antitrust suit against "Ma Bell" resulted in the creation of regional phone companies, sometimes referred to as "Baby Bells," such as Bell Atlantic, US West and Ameritech.
I'm not sure the extent to which the DoJ was involved with this, but AT&T was not broken up because they were violating any laws. In fact, it was AT&T that initiated the breakup so that they could sell computers and the Unix operating system, something they were prohibited from doing by the limited monoply granted to them by the government.
Sheesh, in nearly 200 messages so far not a single person has mentioned the importance of profiling!
There is a classic CS quote that says that a program spends 90% of its time in 10% of its code. Make this code run twice as fast and you will nearly double the speed of your program. Optimise everything else and you won't see any difference at all.
The important thing is to write clean, readable, code. Do not be overly concerned about going to great lengths to improve speed during development. As soon as you have a working system, build a set of automated testing tools and generate some benchmarks. Determine where the bottlenecks are and try to fix them. If you don't know what is really slowing down the system, you will waste many hours optimising code that has no need to be optimized!
This is a trivial operation when using a language such as C with no threads and/or accesses to remote resources. (Although despite this fact, I still see people trying to write optimized spagetti code and never touch a profiler.) Things get a little more difficult when you start talking about database-driven web pages since there are so many more pieces to analyze.
In addition to analyzing the execution time of your script, you must also look at the execution time of database queries. Unfortunately, it is not always possible to profile individual queries, and some databases such as Oracle are highly tunable (i.e. you can tune the system to acount for perhaps poor database design.) When dealing with databases, you are often disk-bound as well, so applying the same profiling techniques to your hardware will often provide good results.
When your database and web server are on the same machine, just using ps or top will give you a good idea of where your cpu time is going. And don't forget to make sure that you aren't swapping. If you are swapping, optimise for memory use or buy more ram. If you've maxed out the RAM on your machine, consider splitting the application onto multiple machines. Sometimes it is cheaper to solve a problem by throwing more hardware at it, but this should only be considered as a last resort.
BTW, I'm assuming you've already done the obvious and are taking advantage of the best technologies such as mod_perl or Java servlets. Forking several copies of Perl just to generate one web page just isn't terribly smart...
Although there may be copyright issues involving a post, when an actor or politician says something in public there's always the possibility that he can be quoted. The same thing applies here. Thousands already read your post so what's the problem with a few more? If you didn't want your opinion to be heard why voice it in the first place?
Well, there are quite a number of issues here.
First off, there is a difference between quoting and publishing. When somoene is quoted, only a part of a larger text is re-printed. When text is re-printed in its entirely, the rules for quoting do not usually apply.
It should also be noted that things said in public are not in the public domain. For instance, a speech given in public can still be copyrighted. The same applies to sporing events and concerts. Just because a song is played in an open forum certainly does not mean that it can be re-produced or re-broadcast.
What concerns me most though is that no attempt was made to contact the authors and verify the stories, as this is one of the most important tennants of responsible journalism. Putting something in print that was submitted anonymously is just flat out irresponsible.
This story has the potential to be an excellent and very powerful book. It is too bad that is nothing more (in essesnce) than a collection of sound bites. Welcome to reporting in the 21st century...
Although I didn't select the messages in this about-to-be published collection, (Since I am legally under contract to another book publisher, I couldn't directly participate in the production of the book,
Ok, then, who did write the book and why is your name on the cover?
This is an extremely important question, one that I have long wondered about, and probably one of the most important brough up on Slashdot in some time. I've seen a lot of opinions both ways on this issue, both here, now, on Slashdot as well as in other places in the past, but never including relevant information from the GPL itself. What follows is my interpretation.
It is completely legal to modify a GPL program, and redistribute it under the GPL. This is the fundamental point of the GPL. It is, therefore, completely legal to modify the program in such a way that it can be compiled into a library. It is most clearly not legal to take this, a derived work, and re-release it under the LesserGPL.
What is at issue here is the status of a third program, written to take advantage of the library with e GPL license. I believe that this program is not bound by the GPL. Here are the relavant sections of the GPL that lead me to conclude this:
From section 0 of the GPL:
This License applies to any program or other work which contains a notice placed by the copyright holder saying it may be distributed under the terms of this General Public License. The "Program", below, refers to any such program or work, and a "work based on the Program" means either the Program or any derivative work under copyright law: that is to say, a work containing the Program or a portion of it, either verbatim or with modifications and/or translated into another language. (Hereinafter, translation is included without limitation in the term "modification".) Each licensee is addressed as "you".
Activities other than copying, distribution and modification are not covered by this License; they are outside its scope.
Certainly the critical issue here is the phrase, derivative work under copyright law and the legal interpretation of it. Just because our hypothetical third application is not fully functional or usable without the GPLed library, does not necessarily mean that it is a derived work.
This is further supported by Section 2 of the GPL:
These requirements apply to the modified work as a whole. If identifiable sections of that work are not derived from the Program, and can be reasonably considered independent and separate works in themselves, then this License, and its terms, do not apply to those sections when you distribute them as separate works. [... ]
Thus, it is not the intent of this section to claim rights or contest your rights to work written entirely by you; rather, the intent is to exercise the right to control the distribution of derivative or collective works based on the Program.
But, the critical phrase is the one I left out above:
But when you distribute the same sections as part of a whole which is a work based on the Program, the distribution of the whole must be on the terms of this License, whose permissions for other licensees extend to the entire whole, and thus to each and every part regardless of who wrote it.
Therefore, the critical distinction comes as a result of distribution. If the GPLed library is distributed with the third program, then third program is infected by the GPL. However, if the third program is distributed apart from the library (separate tarballs, for instance) I believe that the third program is not infected with the GPL and can be released under whatever license the author desires.
Several people have mentioned Section 10. I believe that section 10 can be used if the author of the third progam wishes to include the GPL code as part of his distribution. However, it is not a controlling issue of the author of the third program desires separate distributions.
Of course, someone could just ask RMS for his thoughts on the issue...
The human desire to make things go better, further, faster is nothing new. In fact, it probably goes back to the stone age. This is one of the most celebrated acts of society! Look at the Indy 500, the America's Cup, or any class of land or air speed records.
A direct correlation to overclocking certainly goes back at least as far as the inductrial revolution when the items that came off the assembly line left room for improvement. People have been hot-rodding and racing automobiles and motorcycles as long as they have existed. Hotrodding is as much a paer of popular culture as apple pie and, um, Chevrolet.
Maybe there was a time when overclocking was a black art, requiring the use of a soldering iron and magic crystals (yes, I overclocked my Apple ][ some 15-odd years ago) but now days it is as simple as going into the BIOS and tweaking a few parameters. Heck, they are practically documented in some of the owner's manuals now.
I just read on one of the I-Opener mailing list archives that I-Openers are now being shipped with the IDE header pins clipped off the motherboard. Can anyone confirm or deny that this is the current policy?
This would be the sensible thing for Netpliance to do to prevent the majority of hacks over the short term. It is a relative quick, simple, and effective procedure.
I put down a deposit at Circuit City on an IOpener as soon as I realized that this was going to be the only way to get one at the $99 price. I've seence been back several times to check on the status, as well as to other Circuit Cities in the Baltimore/metro area. It seems as if there have been no shipments of IOpeners to Curcuit City from Netpliance since news of the hack hit the net. My guess is that there is a team of pinsnippers down in Austin (or wherever the units are built/distributed) opening and altering all units before shipping them out. Either that, or Netpliance just isn't shipping any at all to Circuit City until the fad blows over and people loose interest.
Has anyone gotten an IOpener from Circuit City in the past few weeks? If you did, what was the staus of your pins?
-p.
Problem with Mozilla has nothing to do with skins
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Suck On Skins And UI
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· Score: 3
The interface problem with Mozilla/Netscape has nothing at all to do with skins!
The problem has everything to do with the difficulties of building a large, complicated, GUI for multiple windowing systems. The only way to get fully native look and feel for each operating system (those that support such a concept, that is) is to hand code the interface for each system.
This, in turn, leads to several subproblems. The most obvious is that you need the staff to code for each of these platform. This problem is fairly well solvable in a commercial shop where you get get all the GUI programmers in the same room with the developers. But with Mozilla, everyone is both a code functionality developer as well as a GUI developer. It is hard enough to find people qualified to work on Mozilla, but can you imagine if they needed to know multiple GUI programming systems as well?
The first reponse of the clueful person will be to ask why an abstraction layer to the native GUI is not possible. It is possible, and in fact there are several commercial packages that do this. Unfortunately, you are stuck with the whole lowest comon denominator problem. Every feature missing from each windowsystem must be removed from the abstraction library, and what you are left with just reallt isn't usable. From a technical perspective, there are enough differences in API paradigms pretty darn tricky to begin with.
So in the case of Mozilla you have absolutely no choice but to develop your own programming API from the ground up and implement it at the back end with your own widget set. And once you've done this, it becomes trivial to make it themeable. Even the people that hate themes and think they are just plain silly must admit that themes and themeable apps have a great popularity which must be catered to.
It is unfortunate that it is so easy to draw the conclusion that the interface is as fubared as it is on Win/Mac systems just to obtain themeability, but nothing could be further from the truth.
And mostly I'm surprised that after almost 200 comments nobody has actually mentioned this yet (or if they did, that it has not yet been moderated up to level 2, a threshold I never read below...)
I mean, you guys post articles, but do you actually ever read them, or search slashdot itself to see what has already been posted?
On jan 14, 2000, this article was posted about the Apex player. There have since been several followup articles posted about the legality of the Apex, and there are about a bazillion other web sites with info about it. Heck Circuit City now even advertises that this thing plays MP3s
Even earilier than that, back on Sep 9, 1999, slashdot posted this story on the Pine unit. Now, the Pine unit has not hit the market yet, but it any many similar units can be found in the MP3 hardware section on mp3.com
There are now probably about a half dozen other units similar to the Pine unit (their names and URLs have already been posted by people more eager than myself) but also like the Pine unit none of them have actually made it to the streets yet. Had the poster asked what was actually *available* or reviews of the available units, that would have been a different story entirely.
I mean, it's bad enough when people post stupidly obvious questions to usenet or to mailing lists (questions that can be answered with a simple web search or by looking in very obvious locations) but when these things start getting posted as slashdot feature stories... sheesh...
AC writes: When installing anything and run into problems, you check the lists for relevant info. NE2000 cards come up again and again on the mailing list as having problems. If you would have looked instead of asking, it would have taken you 5 minutes of *glancing* at the archives to realize this. You lost several days of work due to your inability to do this, not bad drivers. Yes, NE2000 cards suck in general. I'm aware of the lack of standards. I'm aware that there are a lot of sucko cards in particular. I'm using cards with the RealTek chipset which is known to be one of the best out there.
WRT to the mailing lists, I did an exhaustive search before I posted my first message. I always search before posting. There was nothing in the openbsd list archives indicating problems similar to mine. If there were, I missed them. I tend to think this is not the case, as most people learn pretty quickly that they have posted a FAQ to a mailing list.
If you saw a lot of messages recently, chances are they were actually written by me or on responce to me.;-)
How do you lose several days debugging and swapping hardware? You swap the hardware (10 minutes max) and move on.
The problem was that the cards were listed as supported, that they were recognized, and that for the most part they did work. Connections to most sites were *flawlwss.* The problem was that there was a bizarre interaction between the driver and the TCP stack that was only triggered under very unique (but always replicatable) conditions.
With 20/20 hindsight, yeah, I *could* have found the problem with a 10 minute hardware swap. But we *all* know how good our hindsight is...
Slashdot Mirror
On the satellite side, there is exactly one product on the market. I don't remember the name or mfgr, but you can find them in any boating gear catalog. This is a small, self-contained unit with a small keyboard and LCD display. They go for about a grand, plus you need to subscribe to service and pay per message. Not cheap, but I hear they work quite well.
The other, and much more common, option is HF/SSB/Marine Radio. Any ocean-going vessel will (or should) have a SSB radio, although you need a fairly decent radio and a good antenna for data use. If you have a General (or better) class amateur radio license, then your choice is simple: WinLink 2000 http://winlink.org/k4cjx/ is pretty much the defacto standard for amateur radio internet email. Yes, the software runs under 'doze, but it is free, and the service is also free, run by fellow ham operators.
If you do not have a General Class license and are operating on Marine SSB frequency bands, there are a number of commercial solutions that work just the same as WinLink. Unfortunately, they are not cheap, and none of them provide service any where near as good as the amateur WinLink setup.
In either case, (Marine/commercial or Amateur/Ham) you will need a radio modem to sit in-between your laptop and your radio. Which one you get will be determined by which service you use. If you go with a commercial provider, they will tell you what unit to use. If you use WinLink, there are many more options, all well documented on k4cjx's web site.
Also, if you are serious about this, I *highly* recomend that you take at least two laptops with you and that someone on board knows how to re-install both of them. Yes, your laptop will get fried, so make sure that you have an extended service policy on it! Why? I guarantee that someone will start the engine, start the anchor windless, or kick in the wind generator while the laptop is plugged in, sending a nasty spike through the electrical system and frying your laptop, or at the very least scrambling memory and corrupting the disk. Keying up 1KW on your HF radio can also do nasty things to your laptop as well.
BTW, I spent nine months as a live-aboard in the carribean, so I know all these issues only too well. If anyone wants more info, I'd be happy to provice all the gory details...
-p.
The point is, you can make a huge difference just be working a few weekends, essentially in your own back yard. To see an example of what can be done, check out a site that we have been working on in Baltimore:
http://agape.qis.net/
This site is hosted over the same 56KB modem line that the kids used to surf the web, so be prepared for a wait, ok?
-p.
The internet was a cool place back then. It was this incredibly cool system that would let you send mail anywhere in the world in a matter of minutes or to talk (talkd) to people in real-time. There were public message forums (usenet) that allowed people to converse, discuss, and exchange ideas. And yes, even then, you could download pr0n.
It was so cool because there was just nothing like it. It was cool because everyone using the system had a brain. And yes, it was cool because it was underground. Kinda like watching R.E.M. play to a club of 200 people.
And then, I guess maybe arround 1989, came the Portal System, the first real ISP, although they were called "Public Access Unix" systems at the time. And with it came the first flood of the clueless with their stupidity, bigotry, and spam. The Portal System died a few years later, but not before many other similar such systems spring up. The downhill slide had begun.
But it wasn't until 1993-4, with the introduction of Mosaic that things really started to change. Although http has been arround for a year or so, the text-based browsers really didn't seem all that different than Gopher. Mosaic's X/windows display and their addition of the img tag was what really kicked things off.
For a while, the web was cool, because it was very much a two-way system of interaction. Much like usenet news, but much more structured, and more permanent. But this didn't last long. In just a few years, big media and the advertisors discovered the internet.
And what have they done with it? Have they tried to push it in new directions? Have they tried to expand on the principles that made the internet so great to begin with? No, they have not. They have turned it into Television. As if 500 channels of crap were not enough, you now have five million.
So, what really has happened in the last 15 years? Sure, the network is faster and easier to use, but what has really been added since then? The only major new item I have seen in the past 15 years is that you can now buy stuff over the net in a fairly safe and reliable fashion. But that's hardly remarkable or revolutionary, and from a strictly practical matter, not very profitable for the seller either.
What do I see becoming obsolete? Not much. I expect things to become recycled more than anything. Slashdot, for example, is nothing more than a repackaged version of usenet news. Not that this is bad. On the contrary, the same things that made usenet news so great are the same things that make slashdot so great. Oh, and by the way, people were experimenting with moderation on usenet before the web ever existed.
But the major change? I expect TV to die and be replaced by the internet. By the time HDTV ever gets to the mainstreem market, every TV will come with a computer as powerful as today's desktops built right into it. And that will be the biggest step backward that has ever happened to the internet...
-p.
-p.
There is absolutely nothing different between the output of this system and what you get from using DeCSS or even just watching a DVD movie on your monitor
In fact, one of the DVD FAQs describes very clearly how to build a very high end home theater system using a PC with line doubling and anamorphic decoding to drive a high quality 1600x1024, 90 or 120 hz refresh, signal through a high end projector or large format plasma/CRT.
The real issue is the one the got mentioned only in passing in the article, and that is the fact that it is trivial (and cheap) to build a small-scale pay-per-view delivery system for an environment such as a hotel... or perhaps something just a bit larger like your local broadband cable modem net.
-p.
"Even if its searches use only a small amount of eBay's computer system capacity, Bidder's Edge has nonetheless deprived eBay of the ability to use that portion of its personal property for its own purposes. The law recognizes no such right to use another's personal property."
I really don't see how this is different than any other web-crawling search engine. By the judges argument, he is denying all use of ebay since every transaction takes of a small amount of resources.
From the technical side, Bidder's Edge may actually be reducing the load on the ebay servers by offloading some of the search load to their own servers. Without knowing how much they are caching and how many users they have it is hard to tell for sure.
Now the interesting bit: would the ruling prevent me from writing software to do the same thing and then selling it? Yeah, you'd need a big/fast network pipe to use it, but that's not really the point here...
-p.
I was also pissed to learn that there was an exhibit last year in a local (baltimore) museum dedicated to the original video games of the 70s and 80s. Sigh...
-p.
http://www.templetons.com/brad/domain.html
-p.
-p.
FreeBSD has had IPV6 support for several years now. It was an option with FreeBSD 3.x and ships by default with 4.0.
Substantial development of IPV6 and IPSEC were actively developed under FreeBSD versions as far back as 2.x
It's too bad the IPV6 deployment will remain stunted (we won't see ISPs rolling out support) until M$ decides to implement it in their operating systems...
-p.
I raped the HeNe laser from the LD player shortly after I got it (never planned to watch any LDs) and sold the video printer at a hamfest a few years later.
So, like, how hard would it be to build one of these with a WinTV card ($50 new) an old 486 (free) and an old printer (free to $100 for a new color inkjet)? Of course you'd be running Linux on it...
-p.
-p.
Seriously, though, I'm not sure how well this will really work in practice. Just because you have access to source code does not necessarily means that you would ever want to use it. Code written behind closed doors tends to stay that way for a reason (it is usually pretty embarassing.)
It is also interesting to note that in the US any code developed through a federal grant must be released into the public domain.
-p.
The Transmeta chip is an emulation chip, I believe
Correct.
and thus get's away from the ancient x86 architecture.
Partially correct. It escapes some of the external hardware architecture, but that's really not much of an issue for a non-IO-heavy system. The transmeta cpu actually executes x86 instructions. Although another instruction set could be developed, this would provide little improvement over emulation of x86. (at least according to initial tests as reported by Linus.)
-p.
Now, keeping the satellites in proper orbit may be a little tricky while on the road. You'll probably need to port all the controll software to Linux, but you'll have plenty of time to do that since you are on vacation!
But just think of the coolness factor! Want to impress that cute chick on the beach? Just bring down one of the satellites as a show of your affection. That'll be a whole lot more impressive than a drink with a little paper umbrella...
-p.
If Microsoft is broken up, it would be the first time the Justice Department shattered a company in this way since the 1984 breakup of telephone monopoly AT&T. Launched in 1974, the landmark antitrust suit against "Ma Bell" resulted in the creation of regional phone companies, sometimes referred to as "Baby Bells," such as Bell Atlantic, US West and Ameritech.
I'm not sure the extent to which the DoJ was involved with this, but AT&T was not broken up because they were violating any laws. In fact, it was AT&T that initiated the breakup so that they could sell computers and the Unix operating system, something they were prohibited from doing by the limited monoply granted to them by the government.
Why can't people ever get this right?
-p.
There is a classic CS quote that says that a program spends 90% of its time in 10% of its code. Make this code run twice as fast and you will nearly double the speed of your program. Optimise everything else and you won't see any difference at all.
The important thing is to write clean, readable, code. Do not be overly concerned about going to great lengths to improve speed during development. As soon as you have a working system, build a set of automated testing tools and generate some benchmarks. Determine where the bottlenecks are and try to fix them. If you don't know what is really slowing down the system, you will waste many hours optimising code that has no need to be optimized!
This is a trivial operation when using a language such as C with no threads and/or accesses to remote resources. (Although despite this fact, I still see people trying to write optimized spagetti code and never touch a profiler.) Things get a little more difficult when you start talking about database-driven web pages since there are so many more pieces to analyze.
In addition to analyzing the execution time of your script, you must also look at the execution time of database queries. Unfortunately, it is not always possible to profile individual queries, and some databases such as Oracle are highly tunable (i.e. you can tune the system to acount for perhaps poor database design.) When dealing with databases, you are often disk-bound as well, so applying the same profiling techniques to your hardware will often provide good results.
When your database and web server are on the same machine, just using ps or top will give you a good idea of where your cpu time is going. And don't forget to make sure that you aren't swapping. If you are swapping, optimise for memory use or buy more ram. If you've maxed out the RAM on your machine, consider splitting the application onto multiple machines. Sometimes it is cheaper to solve a problem by throwing more hardware at it, but this should only be considered as a last resort.
BTW, I'm assuming you've already done the obvious and are taking advantage of the best technologies such as mod_perl or Java servlets. Forking several copies of Perl just to generate one web page just isn't terribly smart...
-p.
Although there may be copyright issues involving a post, when an actor or politician says something in public there's always the possibility that he can be quoted. The same thing applies here. Thousands already read your post so what's the problem with a few more? If you didn't want your opinion to be heard why voice it in the first place?
Well, there are quite a number of issues here.
First off, there is a difference between quoting and publishing. When somoene is quoted, only a part of a larger text is re-printed. When text is re-printed in its entirely, the rules for quoting do not usually apply.
It should also be noted that things said in public are not in the public domain. For instance, a speech given in public can still be copyrighted. The same applies to sporing events and concerts. Just because a song is played in an open forum certainly does not mean that it can be re-produced or re-broadcast.
What concerns me most though is that no attempt was made to contact the authors and verify the stories, as this is one of the most important tennants of responsible journalism. Putting something in print that was submitted anonymously is just flat out irresponsible.
This story has the potential to be an excellent and very powerful book. It is too bad that is nothing more (in essesnce) than a collection of sound bites. Welcome to reporting in the 21st century...
Although I didn't select the messages in this about-to-be published collection, (Since I am legally under contract to another book publisher, I couldn't directly participate in the production of the book,
Ok, then, who did write the book and why is your name on the cover?
-p.
This is an extremely important question, one that I have long wondered about, and probably one of the most important brough up on Slashdot in some time. I've seen a lot of opinions both ways on this issue, both here, now, on Slashdot as well as in other places in the past, but never including relevant information from the GPL itself. What follows is my interpretation.
It is completely legal to modify a GPL program, and redistribute it under the GPL. This is the fundamental point of the GPL. It is, therefore, completely legal to modify the program in such a way that it can be compiled into a library. It is most clearly not legal to take this, a derived work, and re-release it under the LesserGPL.
What is at issue here is the status of a third program, written to take advantage of the library with e GPL license. I believe that this program is not bound by the GPL. Here are the relavant sections of the GPL that lead me to conclude this:
From section 0 of the GPL:
This License applies to any program or other work which contains a notice placed by the copyright holder saying it may be distributed under the terms of this General Public License. The "Program", below, refers to any such program or work, and a "work based on the Program" means either the Program or any derivative work under copyright law: that is to say, a work containing the Program or a portion of it, either verbatim or with modifications and/or translated into another language. (Hereinafter, translation is included without limitation in the term "modification".) Each licensee is addressed as "you".
Activities other than copying, distribution and modification are not covered by this License; they are outside its scope.
Certainly the critical issue here is the phrase, derivative work under copyright law and the legal interpretation of it. Just because our hypothetical third application is not fully functional or usable without the GPLed library, does not necessarily mean that it is a derived work.
This is further supported by Section 2 of the GPL:
These requirements apply to the modified work as a whole. If identifiable sections of that work are not derived from the Program, and can be reasonably considered independent and separate works in themselves, then this License, and its terms, do not apply to those sections when you distribute them as separate works. [ ... ]
Thus, it is not the intent of this section to claim rights or contest your rights to work written entirely by you; rather, the intent is to exercise the right to control the distribution of derivative or collective works based on the Program.
But, the critical phrase is the one I left out above:
But when you distribute the same sections as part of a whole which is a work based on the Program, the distribution of the whole must be on the terms of this License, whose permissions for other licensees extend to the entire whole, and thus to each and every part regardless of who wrote it.
Therefore, the critical distinction comes as a result of distribution. If the GPLed library is distributed with the third program, then third program is infected by the GPL. However, if the third program is distributed apart from the library (separate tarballs, for instance) I believe that the third program is not infected with the GPL and can be released under whatever license the author desires.
Several people have mentioned Section 10. I believe that section 10 can be used if the author of the third progam wishes to include the GPL code as part of his distribution. However, it is not a controlling issue of the author of the third program desires separate distributions.
Of course, someone could just ask RMS for his thoughts on the issue...
-p.
Counterculture? Ppfffffftttthhh!!!
The human desire to make things go better, further, faster is nothing new. In fact, it probably goes back to the stone age. This is one of the most celebrated acts of society! Look at the Indy 500, the America's Cup, or any class of land or air speed records.
A direct correlation to overclocking certainly goes back at least as far as the inductrial revolution when the items that came off the assembly line left room for improvement. People have been hot-rodding and racing automobiles and motorcycles as long as they have existed. Hotrodding is as much a paer of popular culture as apple pie and, um, Chevrolet.
Maybe there was a time when overclocking was a black art, requiring the use of a soldering iron and magic crystals (yes, I overclocked my Apple ][ some 15-odd years ago) but now days it is as simple as going into the BIOS and tweaking a few parameters. Heck, they are practically documented in some of the owner's manuals now.
-p. "Yeah, but these go to eleven."
I just read on one of the I-Opener mailing list archives that I-Openers are now being shipped with the IDE header pins clipped off the motherboard. Can anyone confirm or deny that this is the current policy?
This would be the sensible thing for Netpliance to do to prevent the majority of hacks over the short term. It is a relative quick, simple, and effective procedure.
I put down a deposit at Circuit City on an IOpener as soon as I realized that this was going to be the only way to get one at the $99 price. I've seence been back several times to check on the status, as well as to other Circuit Cities in the Baltimore/metro area. It seems as if there have been no shipments of IOpeners to Curcuit City from Netpliance since news of the hack hit the net. My guess is that there is a team of pinsnippers down in Austin (or wherever the units are built/distributed) opening and altering all units before shipping them out. Either that, or Netpliance just isn't shipping any at all to Circuit City until the fad blows over and people loose interest.
Has anyone gotten an IOpener from Circuit City in the past few weeks? If you did, what was the staus of your pins?
-p.
The interface problem with Mozilla/Netscape has nothing at all to do with skins!
The problem has everything to do with the difficulties of building a large, complicated, GUI for multiple windowing systems. The only way to get fully native look and feel for each operating system (those that support such a concept, that is) is to hand code the interface for each system.
This, in turn, leads to several subproblems. The most obvious is that you need the staff to code for each of these platform. This problem is fairly well solvable in a commercial shop where you get get all the GUI programmers in the same room with the developers. But with Mozilla, everyone is both a code functionality developer as well as a GUI developer. It is hard enough to find people qualified to work on Mozilla, but can you imagine if they needed to know multiple GUI programming systems as well?
The first reponse of the clueful person will be to ask why an abstraction layer to the native GUI is not possible. It is possible, and in fact there are several commercial packages that do this. Unfortunately, you are stuck with the whole lowest comon denominator problem. Every feature missing from each windowsystem must be removed from the abstraction library, and what you are left with just reallt isn't usable. From a technical perspective, there are enough differences in API paradigms pretty darn tricky to begin with.
So in the case of Mozilla you have absolutely no choice but to develop your own programming API from the ground up and implement it at the back end with your own widget set. And once you've done this, it becomes trivial to make it themeable. Even the people that hate themes and think they are just plain silly must admit that themes and themeable apps have a great popularity which must be catered to.
It is unfortunate that it is so easy to draw the conclusion that the interface is as fubared as it is on Win/Mac systems just to obtain themeability, but nothing could be further from the truth.
And mostly I'm surprised that after almost 200 comments nobody has actually mentioned this yet (or if they did, that it has not yet been moderated up to level 2, a threshold I never read below...)
-p.
On jan 14, 2000, this article was posted about the Apex player. There have since been several followup articles posted about the legality of the Apex, and there are about a bazillion other web sites with info about it. Heck Circuit City now even advertises that this thing plays MP3s
Even earilier than that, back on Sep 9, 1999, slashdot posted this story on the Pine unit. Now, the Pine unit has not hit the market yet, but it any many similar units can be found in the MP3 hardware section on mp3.com
There are now probably about a half dozen other units similar to the Pine unit (their names and URLs have already been posted by people more eager than myself) but also like the Pine unit none of them have actually made it to the streets yet. Had the poster asked what was actually *available* or reviews of the available units, that would have been a different story entirely.
I mean, it's bad enough when people post stupidly obvious questions to usenet or to mailing lists (questions that can be answered with a simple web search or by looking in very obvious locations) but when these things start getting posted as slashdot feature stories... sheesh...
-p.
WRT to the mailing lists, I did an exhaustive search before I posted my first message. I always search before posting. There was nothing in the openbsd list archives indicating problems similar to mine. If there were, I missed them. I tend to think this is not the case, as most people learn pretty quickly that they have posted a FAQ to a mailing list.
If you saw a lot of messages recently, chances are they were actually written by me or on responce to me. ;-)
How do you lose several days debugging and swapping hardware? You swap the hardware (10 minutes max) and move on.
The problem was that the cards were listed as supported, that they were recognized, and that for the most part they did work. Connections to most sites were *flawlwss.* The problem was that there was a bizarre interaction between the driver and the TCP stack that was only triggered under very unique (but always replicatable) conditions.
With 20/20 hindsight, yeah, I *could* have found the problem with a 10 minute hardware swap. But we *all* know how good our hindsight is...
-p.