However, doing the prelimiary match using the regexp would definately be resource-prohibitive. In the above example, you would have to read the text of each file in to do the regexp. Not to mention the cost of keeping the text around.
You do it by looking for the words in the regex, then you search for those (the words can be indexed -- the regex can't), then you apply the regex to the results to further narrow them down. This his how glimpse/webglimpse (www.webglimpse.net) works.
However, this all falls apart when the keywords are all very common, because nearly every page everywhere will contain them, and so the actual regular expression search will have to search thousands of pages. But for uncommon words, it works fairly well.
glimpse does do this, but it has problems with memory usage and being slow at times -- probably exactly because it does this.
Sorry, but I don't know of any full-Internet search engine that allows this. Your best bet is probably to write something that looks for the keywords in a regex, feeds them to google, then downloads every page that matches and then runs the regex on your own computer to further narrow down the results. Depending on how common your keywords are, it may work well, or it may try to download half the Internet.
Wheel support is application specific. Mozilla uses it natively, but other applications often require some ~/.Xdefault changes, or mapping the wheel events to other events.
For a good bit of background on all of these changes, check out -
http://www-sop.inria.fr/koala/colas/mouse-wheel-sc roll
I tried to make that a link, but/. didn't like it. How do I do that anyways?/. also seems to be introducing a space that I can't remove. You'll have to remove it manually.
I've got one of those Microsoft Optical mice (the cheap one.) Very nice mouse at a good price ($20-$30.)
The keys are the correct protocol (not just PS/2), and adding the appropriate Buttons and ZAxisMapping lines.
Do be aware that the PS/2 extensions often don't work through KVM switchs (in mine, it works only if the KVM is switched to each computer as it boots up. If I do that, it works fine. If not, it only sees my mice as standard three button mice. It's not too hard to understand why.)
Audio is definately AC. It's the alternating quality of it that makes it audio. If you hook up a battery to a speaker, it makes a click as you ocnnect and disconnect it -- but that's it. If you take AC current from the wall, run it through a transformer to reduce it's voltage and run it into a speaker, you hear the familiar 60hz hum.
Remeber, transformers don't work on DC current, yet they work nicely on audio signals.
I'm not sure how I can make it any more clear to you.
I suppose you can argue this, but what is an example of software that doesn't require frequent updates and maintenance?
Well, that would be any software that does it's job well now and doesn't have any security exposure. If it's not networked and is kept in a secure physical location, security isn't an issue.
If Wordperfect 5.1 under DOS does everything you need it to, then it's a perfect example of software that `doesn't require frequent updates and maintenance.'
It seems to me the only way out of this legal sinkhole would be to convince the Patent Office to...
Stop there. The USPTO doesn't get involved with the conflict once the Patent is granted. The courts have to do that. A Patent is a 'right to sue,' and only the suits themselves can resolve the Patent.
Perhaps I should have been more clear...
The idea of `indexing' is obvious to the layperson, and based on that, AltaVista's patents should not have been granted. Had they not been granted, there would be no problem.
I was not suggesting that the USPTO get involved now. I was suggesting that they need to start obeying their own rules -- which is basically the same thing you said, but you took it further, which is good. By `legal sinkhole', I meant the mess that patents in general have become, not specifically the AltaVista indexing patents.
I guess if we ever DO reform the patent process, we're still going to have a lot of bad existing patents to deal with...
This is great that the author of Archive is coming forward and calling shenanigans on Altavista...
but...
Is it enough?
I'm not a lawyer, and certainly not a patent lawyer, but as I understand it there's a process called `predatory patenting' where a company will find a patent that it wants (something that was patented by somebody else), and then patent every possible application of the original patent. All patents reference the original patent.
Basically that means that if you want to use any of these applications of the original patent, you have to have the permission of all patent owners involved.
(Normally this is done in an attempt to make the original patent holder allow the company in question to use his patent without royalties. Unfair, but apparantly legal.)
Well, in this case, there's no original patent (the Archie author didn't patent the idea of `indexing')... but if AltaVista patents every possible use of indexing (patent 1: indexing HTTP sites, patent 2: indexing intranets, patent 3: indexing internets... patent 644: indexing Pokemon collections, etc.) then we may still be screwed. Only the original idea (indexing ftp sites, and gopher sites if the Veronica author comes forwards) would be truly protected by the `prior art'.
It seems to me the only way out of this legal sinkhole would be to convince the Patent Office to actually apply the two most important tenants of patent law - 1: prior art invalidates a patent application and 2: the idea must not be obvious to the layperson. Tenant #2 is just as important as #1.
My wife wanted to play Atari 2600 games, because she thought they were better than Playstation games. So I got her an Atari 2600, and bought one of every game this guy had for $1/each or so.
She probably spent two hours playing games, then it got shoved in the closet:)
It was kind of nostalgic though, playing the old games. I need to get another Intellivsion...
As far as I know, PCMCIA is a form of ISA, with a different connector.
If true, that would explain the speed (or lack of speed.) But then what's this `32bit cardbus' stuff I hear about? I guess it really doesn't matter...
Another reason why a passthrough connector wouldn't work -- passthrough to what? You could do this if you used an external monitor, but to pass the signal back to the LCD would require some wiring that just isn't there.
Any PCMCIA 3D card would have to work like the Matrox M3D card - a 3D `co-processor' of sorts. It has no video in or out (in fact, the only plugs it had was the PCI slot plug) -- the cpu gives it 3D work to do, and it gives it's results back to the CPU or maybe directly to the video card via the PCI bus. Much slower than the `real' 3D cards out at the time (like the Voodoo^1) but still better than software 3D, assuming your games supported it (few did. The only game I remember getting working with it was the Hexen game that came with it.)
Of course, I don't think PCMCIA is fast enough to make this worthwhile -- and it wasn't even that worthwhile with PCI:)
Is PCMCIA even fast enough for a modern video card? I don't think so. You might be able to get ISA speeds out it, but I doubt you get anything anywhere close to modern PCI or AGP speeds, and you'll need at least a good sized fraction of that speed for any decent 3D card.
The only way to get a fast enough interface to the computer would be to put it in the docking station, which would be specific to the brand of laptop.
Many old laptops used to actually put ISA (and later PCI) slots in their docking stations. Of course, these docking stations tended to be massive, but that's the price you pay. Nowadays, that doesn't seem to be done anymore.
Still, your laptop as it is now has a lot better 3D than mine:)
It seems to me that if you're looking to lug your computer over to a LAN party, your best bet is a full sized computer (with your GeForce2 GTS Ultra or whatever) and a LCD screen if you can afford it (or a 17" monitor if not.) Yes, it's heavy, but at least it won't suck like a laptop will.
Or, as the other poster suggested, wait for the laptops with the GeForce cards in them. *drool*
Here's a (now) amusing passage from a pretty out-dated book -
From O'Reilly's book "Managing UUCP and Usenet" (1990), page 154 :
"Before you even beging to think about installing Netnews, make sure
that you have enough disk space. The volume of traffc on the net can
be quite substantial (over 4 MB per day.) Since articles are usually
left around for a week or two to allow users to read them, you need
from 28 to 56 megs of free disk space."
Current figures are more like 2GB/day, or they were last time I checked, at least a year ago.
This traffic is almost all binaries. I'm currently running a news server for a company that I'm working for -- it's a SS2, 64mb ram, about 6gb of disk. It has a fairly full feed - most of the big seven groups (comp.*, rec.*, talk.*, sci.* etc.) and a few selected alt.* groups. No binaries. It has no problems keeping up with the incoming traffic and a few readers, and it has enough disk to keep most articles for at least a few days. I could upgrade it, but why? It's doing it's job just fine, even now...
alt.* is a wasteland. Once you get away from it, Usenet is reasonably sane, even today. Which is a shame -- alt.* had such potential. at least until C&S got clever...
Note that back when Usenet was designed, back in 1979, I'm not even sure T-1's existed. Back then, news and mail was shuttled around on dialup modems ( at 1200 bps or so) using UUCP and even the largest universities tended to not have connections to other places faster than 9600 bps.
No new games require Glide anymore -- it's often an option, but you can also use OpenGL or D3D.
But many old games came out when 3dfx was the only real accelerated 3D game in town, and many of these games were either Glide or Software 3D.
One good example of such a game is Myth. Great game, even today, but the 3D is Glide only.
I have since replaced my Voodoo3 with a GeForce card -- but I had to put my old Voodoo2 back in so I could still play the Glide games. I lost a PCI slot, as well as a little picture quality (due to the passthrough cable.) I don't like it, but I don't want to lose the ability to play these games that I still do enjoy.
I suspect the answer to the problem is a good Glide wrapper rather than Glide drivers for other cards. Yes, there's a performance hit, but the games that *require* Glide were also made for slower boxes, and today's boxes should have no problem running them, even with a small to moderate performance hit.
Ultimately, the question isn't really `do we want Glide drivers?'... it's `do we still want to play older 3D games?' Lots of people say `no', but a few of us do say `yes'.
TeX (and the LaTeX frontend) runs on about as many platforms as linux.
Actually, TeX and LaTeX run on far more platforms than Linux...
many people think the learning curve is high, but this isn't necessarly so.
Trying to make the masses learn TeX or LaTeX is a big mistake -- they'll just go back to Word. The trick would be to write a WYSIWYG word processor that saves documents as TeX. There's already a few out there, but they're not ready to take on Word yet.
TeX is a good idea. XML is probably better, and far more likely to actually happen. Of course, there's a zillion different ways that a paper could be stored in XML, so XML alone isn't the magic bullet. But it's a good start.
Let's hope that at the very least this gets us a decent glide wrapper for use with NVDIA cards. It really bugs me to have to have a Voodoo2 card in my box just for old games that don't support the GeForce.
I used to be very pro-3dfx, but the GeForce2 GTS I've got kicked their ass (and I do have V5 5500 as well, in another box.)
I'm not so sure that I agree that this would be the `first' email.
As the article said, people had been sending messages to each other for some time before he added the ability to send it from machine to machine.
I'd personally argue that even sending a message to somebody else on the same machine (especially if they're not currently available/logged in) would count as an `email' as well. The fact that people often logged into the system remotely from various locations even makes it seem `more like the modern idea of email.'
Just for the record, the CueCat probably *is* covered by some patent or another. I don't have one in front of me so I can't easily check, but I'll bet it is. This shouldn't affect writing software to use it (such as drivers and such) so it shouldn't affect any software projects, but it probably *is* covered by patents. Hell, they may have patented the idea of making a bar code reader look like a cat.
Egress filtering doesn't limit bandwidth. It makes sure that packets leaving your `network' have the appropriate source IP address. If they don't, they don't pass the filters. This should have *no* effect on any legitimate traffic (unless somebody has a misconfigured dual-home setup.)
And to answer the question, YES, they could solve a large part of the DDoS problems that the Internet has been seeing for years. People have been saying this for years -- and they're right!
It won't solve *all* of the DDoS attacks, but the ones that it doesn't stop outright will suddely become much easier to track down. Alas, this will only be true if *everybody* egress filters, and this won't happen overnight...
There's a few reasons why it's not as popular as it should be -
1) people don't care. Egress filtering doesn't protect you from attack, it just helps keep your network from being used to attack others. It's a subtle difference, but important. We ran into the same problem when we tried to get people to fix their networks so they couldn't be used as smurf amplifiers.
2) when a network IS used to spoof packets, the packets are spoofed -- it's very difficult to find out where they came from in the first place, so you can't just email the originating network and tell them to do egress filtering. When you're under attack, you have no way of knowing who's network needs egress filtering.
3) it does use up router CPU. This sort of filtering, while cheap, is not free.
With some luck, the large backbones will be able to start doing egress filtering (or, for them it may be ingress filtering, depending on how it's configured) and do it, even if their customers won't. Time will tell.
If you're *really* serious about this, move as far away from a big city as possible. You want the sky to be *dark* at night. Nothing makes the sky look cooler at night than it being dark. You don't even need a telescope or binoculars for it to look cool!
Then buy the kid a telescope, prefereably a good one. Provide some instruction. Point the telescope at Saturn -- that's always a cool demonstration.
If you've got a computer and the kid knows how to use it, get a program like xephem (free!) that draws the night sky and helps them find neat stuff like the planets. Or buy one of the new telescopes with a built in computer that does this for them. I guess you could always look this stuff up in books, but kids may not go for that, at least not at first.
From then on, if the kid is interested, they'll take over. If they're not interested, I'm not sure if you can make them interested. (ask me in a few years -- my daughter will be born in April, and then I can try being a parent too!)
Slashdot Mirror
However, this all falls apart when the keywords are all very common, because nearly every page everywhere will contain them, and so the actual regular expression search will have to search thousands of pages. But for uncommon words, it works fairly well.
glimpse does do this, but it has problems with memory usage and being slow at times -- probably exactly because it does this.
Sorry, but I don't know of any full-Internet search engine that allows this. Your best bet is probably to write something that looks for the keywords in a regex, feeds them to google, then downloads every page that matches and then runs the regex on your own computer to further narrow down the results. Depending on how common your keywords are, it may work well, or it may try to download half the Internet.
Wheel support is application specific. Mozilla uses it natively, but other applications often require some ~/.Xdefault changes, or mapping the wheel events to other events.
For a good bit of background on all of these changes, check out -
I tried to make that a link, but /. didn't like it. How do I do that anyways? /. also seems to be introducing a space that I can't remove. You'll have to remove it manually.
This does it fine for me with Xfree86 4.0.1 --
Section "InputDevice"
Identifier "Mouse1"
Driver "mouse"
Option "Protocol" "IMPS/2"
Option "Device" "/dev/mouse"
Option "Resolution" "1200"
Option "Buttons" "5"
Option "ZAxisMapping" "4 5"
EndSection
I've got one of those Microsoft Optical mice (the cheap one.) Very nice mouse at a good price ($20-$30.)
The keys are the correct protocol (not just PS/2), and adding the appropriate Buttons and ZAxisMapping lines.
Do be aware that the PS/2 extensions often don't work through KVM switchs (in mine, it works only if the KVM is switched to each computer as it boots up. If I do that, it works fine. If not, it only sees my mice as standard three button mice. It's not too hard to understand why.)
Remeber, transformers don't work on DC current, yet they work nicely on audio signals.
I'm not sure how I can make it any more clear to you.
It can even do it programmatically -- no clicking required.
it's that simple.And ghostscript can do it too, but it can't handle the encrypted (yuk!) PDF files. As for tiff files, that's already been answered.
and much of that's probably duplicates ...
If Wordperfect 5.1 under DOS does everything you need it to, then it's a perfect example of software that `doesn't require frequent updates and maintenance.'
The idea of `indexing' is obvious to the layperson, and based on that, AltaVista's patents should not have been granted. Had they not been granted, there would be no problem.
I was not suggesting that the USPTO get involved now. I was suggesting that they need to start obeying their own rules -- which is basically the same thing you said, but you took it further, which is good. By `legal sinkhole', I meant the mess that patents in general have become, not specifically the AltaVista indexing patents.
I guess if we ever DO reform the patent process, we're still going to have a lot of bad existing patents to deal with ...
but ...
Is it enough?
I'm not a lawyer, and certainly not a patent lawyer, but as I understand it there's a process called `predatory patenting' where a company will find a patent that it wants (something that was patented by somebody else), and then patent every possible application of the original patent. All patents reference the original patent.
Basically that means that if you want to use any of these applications of the original patent, you have to have the permission of all patent owners involved.
(Normally this is done in an attempt to make the original patent holder allow the company in question to use his patent without royalties. Unfair, but apparantly legal.)
Well, in this case, there's no original patent (the Archie author didn't patent the idea of `indexing') ... but if AltaVista patents every possible use of indexing (patent 1: indexing HTTP sites, patent 2: indexing intranets, patent 3: indexing internets ... patent 644: indexing Pokemon collections, etc.) then we may still be screwed. Only the original idea (indexing ftp sites, and gopher sites if the Veronica author comes forwards) would be truly protected by the `prior art'.
It seems to me the only way out of this legal sinkhole would be to convince the Patent Office to actually apply the two most important tenants of patent law - 1: prior art invalidates a patent application and 2: the idea must not be obvious to the layperson. Tenant #2 is just as important as #1.
In any event, I hope I'm wrong :)
She probably spent two hours playing games, then it got shoved in the closet :)
It was kind of nostalgic though, playing the old games. I need to get another Intellivsion ...
Another reason why a passthrough connector wouldn't work -- passthrough to what? You could do this if you used an external monitor, but to pass the signal back to the LCD would require some wiring that just isn't there.
Any PCMCIA 3D card would have to work like the Matrox M3D card - a 3D `co-processor' of sorts. It has no video in or out (in fact, the only plugs it had was the PCI slot plug) -- the cpu gives it 3D work to do, and it gives it's results back to the CPU or maybe directly to the video card via the PCI bus. Much slower than the `real' 3D cards out at the time (like the Voodoo^1) but still better than software 3D, assuming your games supported it (few did. The only game I remember getting working with it was the Hexen game that came with it.)
Of course, I don't think PCMCIA is fast enough to make this worthwhile -- and it wasn't even that worthwhile with PCI :)
The only way to get a fast enough interface to the computer would be to put it in the docking station, which would be specific to the brand of laptop.
Many old laptops used to actually put ISA (and later PCI) slots in their docking stations. Of course, these docking stations tended to be massive, but that's the price you pay. Nowadays, that doesn't seem to be done anymore.
Still, your laptop as it is now has a lot better 3D than mine :)
It seems to me that if you're looking to lug your computer over to a LAN party, your best bet is a full sized computer (with your GeForce2 GTS Ultra or whatever) and a LCD screen if you can afford it (or a 17" monitor if not.) Yes, it's heavy, but at least it won't suck like a laptop will.
Or, as the other poster suggested, wait for the laptops with the GeForce cards in them. *drool*
This traffic is almost all binaries. I'm currently running a news server for a company that I'm working for -- it's a SS2, 64mb ram, about 6gb of disk. It has a fairly full feed - most of the big seven groups (comp.*, rec.*, talk.*, sci.* etc.) and a few selected alt.* groups. No binaries. It has no problems keeping up with the incoming traffic and a few readers, and it has enough disk to keep most articles for at least a few days. I could upgrade it, but why? It's doing it's job just fine, even now ...
alt.* is a wasteland. Once you get away from it, Usenet is reasonably sane, even today. Which is a shame -- alt.* had such potential. at least until C&S got clever ...
Note that back when Usenet was designed, back in 1979, I'm not even sure T-1's existed. Back then, news and mail was shuttled around on dialup modems ( at 1200 bps or so) using UUCP and even the largest universities tended to not have connections to other places faster than 9600 bps.
It's all very different now ...
But many old games came out when 3dfx was the only real accelerated 3D game in town, and many of these games were either Glide or Software 3D.
One good example of such a game is Myth. Great game, even today, but the 3D is Glide only.
I have since replaced my Voodoo3 with a GeForce card -- but I had to put my old Voodoo2 back in so I could still play the Glide games. I lost a PCI slot, as well as a little picture quality (due to the passthrough cable.) I don't like it, but I don't want to lose the ability to play these games that I still do enjoy.
I suspect the answer to the problem is a good Glide wrapper rather than Glide drivers for other cards. Yes, there's a performance hit, but the games that *require* Glide were also made for slower boxes, and today's boxes should have no problem running them, even with a small to moderate performance hit.
Ultimately, the question isn't really `do we want Glide drivers?' ... it's `do we still want to play older 3D games?' Lots of people say `no', but a few of us do say `yes'.
TeX is a good idea. XML is probably better, and far more likely to actually happen. Of course, there's a zillion different ways that a paper could be stored in XML, so XML alone isn't the magic bullet. But it's a good start.
I used to be very pro-3dfx, but the GeForce2 GTS I've got kicked their ass (and I do have V5 5500 as well, in another box.)
`I know this -- this is a UNIX system'
As the article said, people had been sending messages to each other for some time before he added the ability to send it from machine to machine.
I'd personally argue that even sending a message to somebody else on the same machine (especially if they're not currently available/logged in) would count as an `email' as well. The fact that people often logged into the system remotely from various locations even makes it seem `more like the modern idea of email.'
Still, an interesting story.
Don't forget the End of IRC.
Film at 11.
And you're right, DeCSS doesn't fit.
And to answer the question, YES, they could solve a large part of the DDoS problems that the Internet has been seeing for years. People have been saying this for years -- and they're right!
It won't solve *all* of the DDoS attacks, but the ones that it doesn't stop outright will suddely become much easier to track down. Alas, this will only be true if *everybody* egress filters, and this won't happen overnight ...
There's a few reasons why it's not as popular as it should be -
1) people don't care. Egress filtering doesn't protect you from attack, it just helps keep your network from being used to attack others. It's a subtle difference, but important. We ran into the same problem when we tried to get people to fix their networks so they couldn't be used as smurf amplifiers.
2) when a network IS used to spoof packets, the packets are spoofed -- it's very difficult to find out where they came from in the first place, so you can't just email the originating network and tell them to do egress filtering. When you're under attack, you have no way of knowing who's network needs egress filtering.
3) it does use up router CPU. This sort of filtering, while cheap, is not free.
With some luck, the large backbones will be able to start doing egress filtering (or, for them it may be ingress filtering, depending on how it's configured) and do it, even if their customers won't. Time will tell.
Then buy the kid a telescope, prefereably a good one. Provide some instruction. Point the telescope at Saturn -- that's always a cool demonstration.
If you've got a computer and the kid knows how to use it, get a program like xephem (free!) that draws the night sky and helps them find neat stuff like the planets. Or buy one of the new telescopes with a built in computer that does this for them. I guess you could always look this stuff up in books, but kids may not go for that, at least not at first.
From then on, if the kid is interested, they'll take over. If they're not interested, I'm not sure if you can make them interested. (ask me in a few years -- my daughter will be born in April, and then I can try being a parent too!)