I saw you at the show, Emmett. I only got to go Saturday, so I missed most of the good stuff. You kept my trip from Wichita from being a complete waste.
Next time you are in Kansas City, take the couple of hours to drive down to Hutchinson and see the Kansas Cosmosphere. It is one of the few items we Kansas Geeks can crow over: the most respected space artifact restoration center in the world, one of the largest collections of Russian space artifacts outside the Commonwealth, and all pulled into existance by the will of a few good men.
Also, you might want to explain the "Aquaman" reference. Post a link to an explaination on your web page or something.
And, at the risk of a -1: redundant, I'd like to also add my voice to the choir: not all of us live within driving distance of the Valley, or Research Triangle Park! Kansas is at most 2 days drive from anywhere in the Continental US, and most of the US (geographically speaking) is a day away. Gas (even at today's prices) and a hotel room is still much cheaper than air fare, and not everybody has a high paying job. Also, let us not forget that to "win", we must make Linux usable by the masses, and make the masses aware of that fact!
"It's worse than that he's dead Jim dead Jim dead Jim"
Most people not only associate "Pentium" with "fast processor", they associate "Pentium" with "any processor".
True story: I was in my local Drat Shack (which also has a section devoted to amateur radio gear and other "stuff" on consignment) and this kid (who, for the record, seemed to believe "soap" was a four letter word) comes in. He starts looking at this old Pentium 75 that is stuck into a block of plain old styrofoam (can you say ESD? I thought you could). "Ouuuuh, would this work in my computer? I have a pentium-486." As you can tell, it went downhill from there. Fast.
Intel has poured gigadollars into making this the case: people ask what kind of Pentium is in their Macs, or in my Indy, or whatnot. Intel's execs would sooner chew off their own testicles than change that name.
The TCP protocol is, by design, limited to a mere 780kb/s.
WHAT? I've moved over 10Mbytes/sec over TCP! The receive window in certain alleged operating systems *cough|windows|cough* may be too small for high speed over the 'Net, but any real OS can automatically adjust the TCP windows to be big enough to fill the pipe.
Apple (building on the work done at NeXT) has come up with a design for application resource packaging that has been tested and tweaked through several generations at this point. Can the Linux team overcome its own "NIH" issues and look at adopting this as an api for Linux apps? Ditto the *BSD teams. Certainly the GNUStep teams are looking into this, but I think the core teams need to be looking into it as well. I didn't mean to imply that Linux should come up with it's own solution and Apple should then be forced to use it. However, Apple is coming at this with a very focused perspective: make old Mac programs work alongside Unix-like programs. The Linux kernel team were discussing it in a more general manner: metadata good, how do we implement it? It's possible that Apple might make choices that are more optimal within the limited problem space Apple is trying to solve that are suboptimal in the larger problem space. In that case, I'd want the more globally optimal solutions.
Obviously, if Apple comes up with a globally (near-)optimal solution (and doesn't immediately lock it up with patents), then everybody else (Linux, *BSD, even Microsoft) should be man enough to join in.
The Mac system makes it impossible to make simple programs that copy files and also provided a fertile breeding ground for viruses. Please explain to me how metadata provided a breeding ground for viruses. I guess I don't see this.
As for the "metadirectory" approach - that was actually discussed. You might go look at the archives and read the discussion: many of your concerns were discussed there.
Definitely poorly advertised. I'm in ICT as well, and I heard about it via a passing ref on Yahoo, and said bad words because had I known about it, I could have budgeted time and had work pay for it. I went up today, and stuck around to hear Emmett speak (Rob et. al.: You should try to get Emmett on GIS). However, in talking to a few folks there I hope they will do better advertising next year. I'd love to see a Linux event those of us in the Midwest could get to.
OK, let me get this straight. I'm supposed to run a program from Mattel that will remove the programs from Mattel that were secretly placed on my system when I ran a program from Mattel.
ERROR -9876: Insufficent Caffine to complete Operation.
ERROR -6647: Gullibility Threshold too low for process.
You know, it's pretty bad when one of the/. crew's OWN SITE gets/.'d.
Also, it will be interesting to see if Hemo's wife has the same reaction to the inevitable "naked and petrified" posts as Emmet claimed his wife had: "All RIGHT! I'm going to be the next Natilie Portman!" (Source: Emmet's keynote speech at the Kansas City Linuxfest this afternoon.)
One of the things that I've seen being discussed in the Kernel development threads is adding metadata support to Linux. This would allow for "resource forks", "file types", "file icons" and all sorts of other stuff that actually would be useful. Many of the problems described in the article were also brought up in the kernel thread: how do we cp/mv/tar the whole file (metadata and all) but allow open() to just get the "data fork".
The interesting question is: should the day come that Linux implements metadata, could/would the Apple team merge the same Unix API into the BSD layer of OS-X?
I have NFI about Chemistry but as far as i know glucose is just a string of amino acids strung together
Sugars aren't "strings of amino acids strung together." Glucose and other sugars are strings of hydrogen, carbon and oxygen, whilst amino acids contain nitrogen. If you don't know about a subject, you should simply not speak on that subject.
If Di$ney's copyrights were to expire, we would not see Mickey poping up everywhere. Mickey is not covered by copyright, he is covered by trademark. And as long as Di$ney defends the trademark, and has it in use, they will continue to hold it. Copyright only covers the movies Mickey was in. So, should the copyrights fail, we could distribute "Steamboat Willy" to our hearts content, but we couldn't use Mickey's image in anything we created without infringing upon Di$ney's trademark.
This is all the more reason that the arguements that "we must extend copyright so that our characters won't show up in porn." don't wash.
Micro-payments are the 900 numbers of the 'net, and that's the problem.
First, for those readers who aren't in the US: a 900 number is a telephone number that you call and a charge is added to your phone bill above and beyond the normal cost of the call. One good(?) use of a 900 number would be for "pay for service" calls: you call the number and are charged $50/hr for tech support.
The problems with 900 numbers are as follows:
The most frequent real uses for these things are "Psychic Freinds Hotline" scams and dial-a-porn services. Funny, just like much of the 'net today...
The numbers usually have little to no verification that you really are allowed to authorize such a charge. Many calls to these sorts of numbers are made by children/teenagers who don't pay the bills. Mommy and Daddy do, and all hell breaks loose when the phone bill comes in...
Some 900 numbers masquerade as 800 numbers (800 numbers are usually free of charge): you dial 1-800-<some number here> thinking it will be free, and you get nailed.
Given this analysis, what risks would micropayments incur on the 'net? Would most sites using micropayments be porno or scams? Would some sites claim to be free, while draining your micropayment account? What about E-Mails containing HTML/Javascript that cause you to access a micropayment site? (What's this charge to "31337 roolz U"?) What happens when you find you've just sent $500 to "Pokemon freinds network"? (BART! Get your ass in here boy!)
Actually, the term is "fist": the way in which a Morse code sender composes his dots and dashes. An operator with a good "fist" is easier to copy than a some "ham-fisted" operator.
None of this applies to me, as I am a dirty stinkin' no-coder.
The one thing I like about GNOME... is the professional elegance of it's imagery
Until you run it with a larger than average setting for your X server's DPI setting: I run 1600x1200 on a 21" monitor, with my X server's DPI setting set to 120 dpi (via the --dpi setting in my startx file). The result is that the fonts get scaled up to a reasonable size (and look quite smooth without antialiasing). However, most Gnome apps seem to think that all fonts will the the same height (in pixels), thus all Gnome apps have most of the text cut off in the window layouts. Wish I could paste a picture into this to show you. Then again, with some of the trolls around here, maybe pasting pictures would be a bad thing....
The integration between the browser and the file viewer is cool (and very useful) tech
I'm sorry, but I shall have to disagree with you: a file manager is NOT a HTML browser! HTML only allows 1 action per click, file browsers require many actions (open/activate, show properties, rename, etc.)
The only reason MS replaced the file viewer with a browser was to have a reason to embed the browser into the "OS" (actually, the operating environment or OE, but MS has always blurred that line).
Now, integrating an FTP client into the file manager is a GOOD idea, since the operations of the two are very similar. But the differences between a browser and a file manager are too large to make them one and the same ("It's a desert topping! It's a floor wax!")
Now, merging an HTML browser with the help system is great!
If the Eazel developers are worth their salt, it will also use Bonobo to do realtime previews in that box
. Great, so that when some @$$h013 sends me a file with an embedded link to a cookie, or a web bug, and I save it to disk in order to dissect it, it will *still* be invoked!
Call me old fashioned, but I happen to think that for file management, the old GEM desktop on my TT030 was almost perfect (just needed a right button context menu...)
Notice to lamers: I didn't imply this individual was on crack, or gay, or lame, or a stinkin' 'Softie. I responded politely and cogently. Try it yourselves sometime....
One of the stories linked from the article is about tanning compounds:
Hadley and his research colleagues engineered a synthetic molecule that is a thousand times more powerful than M.S.H., and in 1984 Hadley thought it was ready for trials on humans. So he injected himself with it one afternoon. Three weeks later he looked in his bathroom mirror, and staring back at him was this other Hadley with, yes, beach-ready brown skin. Unfortunately, this other Hadley was also 10 pounds lighter and had a very un-beach-ready case of priapism -- the dread perpetual erection.
This is one thing most people get wrong: the limits are:
144-148MHz (2 meters) - 9600 baud
420-460MHz (70 centimeters) - 56kbaud
10 GHz band: pretty much unlimited
Now, why did I keep italicizing baud? Because baud ain't bits per second! It one of my pet peeves when I hear somebody talking about his 33.6kbaud modem, or 56kbaud modem. There ain't such a thing! You have either a 3 kBaud modem or an 8 kBaud modem. A baud is a symbol transition per second, not a bit per second. In the old 300 baud days each symbol was worth 1 bit, so 300baud == 300 bits/second. However, in a 33.6kbit/sescond modem, the baud rate is 3 kbaud, with each symbol worth 11 bits. A 56kbps modem uses 8 kBaud, with 8 bits/symbol (with 1 bit robbed for line signaling).
On 2 meters, I could modulate a signal with C4FM (FM signal, but with 4 levels rather than 2) and get 2 bits/symbol, or 19200bps. If I went to 256QAM, I could get 8 bits per symbol, and still be perfectly legal. Why don't hams do this? Because you cannot hook an external TNC (terminal node controller, the radio equivelent of a modem+network interface) to a standard narrowband FM tranceiver and have it make those kinds of signals - you need a special data radio. Also, 256QAM has far less signal to noise ratio than does BFSK. Hence, the amateur community doesn't avail themselves of the bandwidth they have.
One final point: signal bandwidth does not directly control data bandwidth: as Shannon proved, it's all about signal to noise ratio. The only thing signal bandwidth does is give you a better S/N ratio.
There's two types of spread spectrum: freq hopping and direct sequence.
Frequency hopping uses a standard narrow band carrier, but the frequency is changed every few milliseconds. This, coupled with forward error correction allows the system to be relatively hard to jam (you might jam a hop or two, but the FEC will pull out the missing bits from the other hops), and hard to receive (since you have to know the sequence so you can follow it.) You can visualize this like this: you and your buddy use your CB's, you start at channel 1 and every second click the knob one step. Some trucker on 19 might stomp on a word as you go by, but you'll get the gist. Also, if I don't know the sequence, I won't be able to follow you.
Direct sequence spread spectrum is a little more complicated to visualise: you take a very fast pseudorandom signal, and mix it with your signal. This makes the carrier very wide band. The receiver mixes the signal with the same pseudorandom sequence, thus "de-spreading" the signal. The best example I can give would be taking your message, repeating the letters 1024 times each, then XOR'ing that with your favorite MP3.
Longer wavelengths actually go around "things" better: An object has to be on the order of a wavelength long to cause a lot of problems to a signal. That's why AM radio (at.5-1MHz) will diffract around a building, and FM (at 88-108MHz) will undergo "picket fencing", or destructive interference. (This is the "fluttering" you will often hear on FM; it is also the effect of an aircraft flying overhead making your broadcast TV a little wavery).
Higher frequencies have less change in their penetration factor for different media than low frequencies. Long wave signals (like broadcast AM) go through air quite nicely, but get stopped pretty well by a metal building. Shorter wavelengths (like FM) start to become more attenuated by air, but are better able to penetrate buildings (relative to air) than long wave. Microwaves are strongly attenuated by air but have little trouble getting into things. X-Rays have almost as much trouble in air as flesh.
Adsorption spectra: At about 400 MHz, water starts to really adsorb signals. This falls off at higher frequencies, until you hit about 1.6 GHz, then it starts to pick back up. There is a strong adsorption at 2.6GHz (that's where your Microwave oven operates, and that's also WHY it operates there.), then it starts getting worse.
Also, as the freq goes up the signals start acting more like light than fields, and things start wanting to work more point-to-point. That's one of the reasons I doubt you'll ever see cell phones at 26GHz: the directionality of the signals would be too great to allow you to just whip out your phone: you'd have to point it at the cell tower.
Install image on HD & viruses
on
Copyrant
·
· Score: 3
Simple question: what happens the next time a Viral Beginners Script program decides to go after c:\windows\options and modify the files therein? How do you re-install your system when the install image has been comprimised?
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I saw you at the show, Emmett. I only got to go Saturday, so I missed most of the good stuff. You kept my trip from Wichita from being a complete waste.
Next time you are in Kansas City, take the couple of hours to drive down to Hutchinson and see the Kansas Cosmosphere. It is one of the few items we Kansas Geeks can crow over: the most respected space artifact restoration center in the world, one of the largest collections of Russian space artifacts outside the Commonwealth, and all pulled into existance by the will of a few good men.
Also, you might want to explain the "Aquaman" reference. Post a link to an explaination on your web page or something.
And, at the risk of a -1: redundant, I'd like to also add my voice to the choir: not all of us live within driving distance of the Valley, or Research Triangle Park! Kansas is at most 2 days drive from anywhere in the Continental US, and most of the US (geographically speaking) is a day away. Gas (even at today's prices) and a hotel room is still much cheaper than air fare, and not everybody has a high paying job. Also, let us not forget that to "win", we must make Linux usable by the masses, and make the masses aware of that fact!
Being in the test industry myself, I cannot help noticing that "agilent" is an anagram of "genital".
"Cementing the break"? That metaphor was well mixed. Shaken, or stirred?
Most people not only associate "Pentium" with "fast processor", they associate "Pentium" with "any processor".
True story: I was in my local Drat Shack (which also has a section devoted to amateur radio gear and other "stuff" on consignment) and this kid (who, for the record, seemed to believe "soap" was a four letter word) comes in. He starts looking at this old Pentium 75 that is stuck into a block of plain old styrofoam (can you say ESD? I thought you could). "Ouuuuh, would this work in my computer? I have a pentium-486." As you can tell, it went downhill from there. Fast.
Intel has poured gigadollars into making this the case: people ask what kind of Pentium is in their Macs, or in my Indy, or whatnot. Intel's execs would sooner chew off their own testicles than change that name.
WHAT? I've moved over 10Mbytes/sec over TCP! The receive window in certain alleged operating systems *cough|windows|cough* may be too small for high speed over the 'Net, but any real OS can automatically adjust the TCP windows to be big enough to fill the pipe.
Apple (building on the work done at NeXT) has come up with a design for application resource packaging that has been tested and tweaked through several generations at this point. Can the Linux team overcome its own "NIH" issues and look at adopting this as an api for Linux apps? Ditto the *BSD teams. Certainly the GNUStep teams are looking into this, but I think the core teams need to be looking into it as well.
I didn't mean to imply that Linux should come up with it's own solution and Apple should then be forced to use it. However, Apple is coming at this with a very focused perspective: make old Mac programs work alongside Unix-like programs. The Linux kernel team were discussing it in a more general manner: metadata good, how do we implement it? It's possible that Apple might make choices that are more optimal within the limited problem space Apple is trying to solve that are suboptimal in the larger problem space. In that case, I'd want the more globally optimal solutions.
Obviously, if Apple comes up with a globally (near-)optimal solution (and doesn't immediately lock it up with patents), then everybody else (Linux, *BSD, even Microsoft) should be man enough to join in.
The Mac system makes it impossible to make simple programs that copy files and also provided a fertile breeding ground for viruses.
Please explain to me how metadata provided a breeding ground for viruses. I guess I don't see this.
As for the "metadirectory" approach - that was actually discussed. You might go look at the archives and read the discussion: many of your concerns were discussed there.
Definitely poorly advertised. I'm in ICT as well, and I heard about it via a passing ref on Yahoo, and said bad words because had I known about it, I could have budgeted time and had work pay for it. I went up today, and stuck around to hear Emmett speak (Rob et. al.: You should try to get Emmett on GIS). However, in talking to a few folks there I hope they will do better advertising next year. I'd love to see a Linux event those of us in the Midwest could get to.
OK, let me get this straight. I'm supposed to run a program from Mattel that will remove the programs from Mattel that were secretly placed on my system when I ran a program from Mattel.
ERROR -9876: Insufficent Caffine to complete Operation.
ERROR -6647: Gullibility Threshold too low for process.
ERROR -1: BS threshold exceeded. Mattel dumped.
Also, it will be interesting to see if Hemo's wife has the same reaction to the inevitable "naked and petrified" posts as Emmet claimed his wife had: "All RIGHT! I'm going to be the next Natilie Portman!" (Source: Emmet's keynote speech at the Kansas City Linuxfest this afternoon.)
The interesting question is: should the day come that Linux implements metadata, could/would the Apple team merge the same Unix API into the BSD layer of OS-X?
Rob, no matter what many trolls say, we really don't want to hear you fsck on the air. Do that in private, and wash your hands afterword.
Sugars aren't "strings of amino acids strung together." Glucose and other sugars are strings of hydrogen, carbon and oxygen, whilst amino acids contain nitrogen. If you don't know about a subject, you should simply not speak on that subject.
And you get a very wearable, very useful computer.
I WANT. NOW!
Wrong. Sorry, thanks for playing.
If Di$ney's copyrights were to expire, we would not see Mickey poping up everywhere. Mickey is not covered by copyright, he is covered by trademark. And as long as Di$ney defends the trademark, and has it in use, they will continue to hold it. Copyright only covers the movies Mickey was in. So, should the copyrights fail, we could distribute "Steamboat Willy" to our hearts content, but we couldn't use Mickey's image in anything we created without infringing upon Di$ney's trademark.
This is all the more reason that the arguements that "we must extend copyright so that our characters won't show up in porn." don't wash.
Personally, I can't wait. Maybe we can get smart humans, instead of the dumb variety we have now. (want proof? Read at 0).
First, for those readers who aren't in the US: a 900 number is a telephone number that you call and a charge is added to your phone bill above and beyond the normal cost of the call. One good(?) use of a 900 number would be for "pay for service" calls: you call the number and are charged $50/hr for tech support.
The problems with 900 numbers are as follows:
Given this analysis, what risks would micropayments incur on the 'net? Would most sites using micropayments be porno or scams? Would some sites claim to be free, while draining your micropayment account? What about E-Mails containing HTML/Javascript that cause you to access a micropayment site? (What's this charge to "31337 roolz U"?) What happens when you find you've just sent $500 to "Pokemon freinds network"? ( BART! Get your ass in here boy!)
Submitted for your (dis-)approval....
Actually, the term is "fist": the way in which a Morse code sender composes his dots and dashes. An operator with a good "fist" is easier to copy than a some "ham-fisted" operator.
None of this applies to me, as I am a dirty stinkin' no-coder.
Until you run it with a larger than average setting for your X server's DPI setting: I run 1600x1200 on a 21" monitor, with my X server's DPI setting set to 120 dpi (via the --dpi setting in my startx file). The result is that the fonts get scaled up to a reasonable size (and look quite smooth without antialiasing). However, most Gnome apps seem to think that all fonts will the the same height (in pixels), thus all Gnome apps have most of the text cut off in the window layouts. Wish I could paste a picture into this to show you. Then again, with some of the trolls around here, maybe pasting pictures would be a bad thing....
I'm sorry, but I shall have to disagree with you: a file manager is NOT a HTML browser! HTML only allows 1 action per click, file browsers require many actions (open/activate, show properties, rename, etc.)
The only reason MS replaced the file viewer with a browser was to have a reason to embed the browser into the "OS" (actually, the operating environment or OE, but MS has always blurred that line).
Now, integrating an FTP client into the file manager is a GOOD idea, since the operations of the two are very similar. But the differences between a browser and a file manager are too large to make them one and the same ("It's a desert topping! It's a floor wax!")
Now, merging an HTML browser with the help system is great!
.
Great, so that when some @$$h013 sends me a file with an embedded link to a cookie, or a web bug, and I save it to disk in order to dissect it, it will *still* be invoked!
Call me old fashioned, but I happen to think that for file management, the old GEM desktop on my TT030 was almost perfect (just needed a right button context menu...)
Notice to lamers: I didn't imply this individual was on crack, or gay, or lame, or a stinkin' 'Softie. I responded politely and cogently. Try it yourselves sometime....
Lesse: a drug that
Makes you look better
makes you lose weight
Keeps you "up"
Sounds good, ship it!
Now, why did I keep italicizing baud? Because baud ain't bits per second! It one of my pet peeves when I hear somebody talking about his 33.6kbaud modem, or 56kbaud modem. There ain't such a thing! You have either a 3 kBaud modem or an 8 kBaud modem. A baud is a symbol transition per second, not a bit per second. In the old 300 baud days each symbol was worth 1 bit, so 300baud == 300 bits/second. However, in a 33.6kbit/sescond modem, the baud rate is 3 kbaud, with each symbol worth 11 bits. A 56kbps modem uses 8 kBaud, with 8 bits/symbol (with 1 bit robbed for line signaling).
On 2 meters, I could modulate a signal with C4FM (FM signal, but with 4 levels rather than 2) and get 2 bits/symbol, or 19200bps. If I went to 256QAM, I could get 8 bits per symbol, and still be perfectly legal. Why don't hams do this? Because you cannot hook an external TNC (terminal node controller, the radio equivelent of a modem+network interface) to a standard narrowband FM tranceiver and have it make those kinds of signals - you need a special data radio. Also, 256QAM has far less signal to noise ratio than does BFSK. Hence, the amateur community doesn't avail themselves of the bandwidth they have.
One final point: signal bandwidth does not directly control data bandwidth: as Shannon proved, it's all about signal to noise ratio. The only thing signal bandwidth does is give you a better S/N ratio.
Also, as the freq goes up the signals start acting more like light than fields, and things start wanting to work more point-to-point. That's one of the reasons I doubt you'll ever see cell phones at 26GHz: the directionality of the signals would be too great to allow you to just whip out your phone: you'd have to point it at the cell tower.
Simple question: what happens the next time a Viral Beginners Script program decides to go after c:\windows\options and modify the files therein? How do you re-install your system when the install image has been comprimised?