If the text formatting is primitive, and all you want is ASCII text, there are a couple OCR packages available for Linux. They are rather primitive, and at best about twice as error-prone as an entry level commercial product, but they will handle clean text very well. Graphics, snap exception formatting, etc, are not handled by any of them, but they are scriptable.
Entry level commercial products (read: $200, Windows) will export to a.doc or similar wordprocessor file with the gross formatting intact. A few will actually 'guess' what needs to remain an image, and will include it in the finished product. They always skew the formatting some, graphics are not always detected properly, and I have yet to see one that is scriptable. They are also not free in any sense, and tie you to the Windows platform.
OT: Kind of, but.. Something I would like to see is a OCR search on demand application; In most document management systems you use only image files, and the information is only searchable by meta data.
Actually, I didn't know NT had that feature. OpenBSD swap is only overwritten on demand, meaning the contents are not changed until that section of swap is overwritten as some process swaps into it..
There hasn't been any real 'zero'ing feature, save perhaps the paranoid individuals I have seen that include dd if=/dev/zero of=/dev/[swap] bs=1024 count=[swapsize] in their shutdown scripts..
Let's encrypt everything to the point of all we get on our screen will be a bunch of useless characters
This is assuming that you could make *nix any more cryptic than it is without hitting mental critical mass. Try it, and you'll probably see the fatality rate in *nix admins soar from cranial explosion..
Swap partition, no. Swap file, yes.. Encrypted loopback, or an encrypted filesystem holding said swap file..
Now this is off the cuff; This prolly won't work, and even if it did, it's be as slow as Windows95 on a 386.. But it is food for thought.. Ramdisk in memory, containing the 'swap space' mounted via a encrypted loopback. Make the ramdisk size close to physical, and you now have encrypted DRAM..
Or switch platforms; The AS/400, the S/80 and a variety of other IBM midranges are capable of it, even if they don't come out of the box that way..
IIRC, OpenBSD swap space is only overwritten on demand. Once used, the space retains whatever information is in it until overwritten again.. A lot of useful junk, passwords, etc, is left in swap for an indeterminate amount of time. What happens when the box is stolen, say by a hostile foreign government or by the hostile local one, and they can't log in or mount your encrypted volumes? They sniff your swap space!!
All this really amounts to is standard distributed ARP/DHCP protocol. Standards are good;)
When a device comes up, it broadcasts "Hey, what IP's are you guys on? I'd like 198.111.21.42 with a hosts entry of 'Jim's Fridge', but I'm flexible! Oh, and by the way, I'm on Ethernet now, but I can use my SiR transciever too! Do I need two IPs?"
The rest of the devices come up, find an unused IP and assign the name "Jim's Fridge" to their hosts file. The SiR capable machines make a note to activate a connection for devices with that discovery information.
Simple stuff. Microsoft can't even screw that up!
Re:Cool! A tux logo at boot time?
on
Linux BIOS
·
· Score: 2
And on any x86 machine using framebuffer console.
One thing to note is that it will give you multiple penguins, one for each processor. I've seen several people freak out when I start the SMP and there are four.. (As if the freaking when POST keeps going past 128M, then 256M, then past 512M wasn't bad enough!)
One option may be an 'as agent' form. It's a pretty standard regurgitation of legalese that says 'I am acting on the behalf of [x], and performing [x] action in his/her stead.'. You are then not bound by the GPL after the fact of handing over the disc. It's pretty much the same as loaning them your equipment and letting them copy it themselves.
Otherwise, just snag and master a single set of source discs. It shouldn't take that long. If anyone actually contacts you for source, let them know you'll make them a copy for media fee but that d/ling the source off the net will be faster for them and less painful for you. Everone's ass will be covered this way, and you won't have to drag the people you give/sell the discs to through signing a form..
C'mon! Technology like this is what the Unlimited-Class land speed record was meant for! We've aready got guys doing it with rockets and jet motors stolen from fighter planes, so why not a VASIMR?!?!
Well, that little thing of cooling the magnets on Earth may stump them for a while.. Or perhaps they'll turn to the salvaged powerplants from the space vehicles this supplants..
Perhaps they already have a VSIMR! The Vehicular Sensing and Monitoring Robot sounds plausable enough, as do Volumetric Status Information, Management and Retrieval, and Vertical Space IMaging Radar.
They used commodity cassettes for some copies due to production underrun early on. Of course, this meant they had extra space on the cassette. What to do? Six and a half minutes of the Frogger game music, and someone saying 'Goodnight'.
What I'd like to know is who the hell was whacko enough to play back the entire Frogger program cassette in a audio tape deck.
After reading that, I only wonder how the janitorial staff makes it through Tuesday evening without shooting people. You have no idea how bad geeks are on the lavatories after a plate full of badly prepared Mexican. Half the time I'm not sure the geeks I work with actually digested before spraying bean dip over every visible surface..
If *'they' screw up, they certainly don't want to hear screaming about it, so they silence the press and whoever screwed up disappears after a 'hunting accident'. The CIA, NSA, OSS, etc, stay silent because they don't want to draw attention to their activities.
But in the 'free world', when someone screws up, not only do they get their name and face on the next Daily Mirror, but they get publically tried. You get to hear the gorey details of 'My life as a Spy' in 'Time', about 'Nuclear secrets stolen' in 'Newsweek', and 'Three blow-jobs to Treason' in the letters column of 'Shaved Brazilian Hooters'
We deem far too much classified. As of a couple of years ago, Project Urchin was still classified. Urchin was the baseball sized metallic neutron initiator used in the Hiroshima bomb. Normally, I'd applaud them for keeping nuclear secrets classified. Only prob here is that the Soviets widely published OUR diagrams (courtesy of the Rosenbergs, no doubt) in the early sixties!! Worse yet, any physics grad could spec out a superior replacement!!
The information is public knowledge, and yet still classified.
Makes me wonder just how paranoid they are when they say 'classified'. For all I know, they've deemed the Los Alamos cafeteria schedule classified because it might be used to help poison some foolhardy scientist in ten years. Or perhaps they've classified their work schedule, because they don't want the GAO to know they work twenty hour weeks and bill for forty..
Exactly my thoughts.. The model is on a maintained even footing thanks to the GPLs role in the software base. Even if you get [x] closed-source addition, the competition is already 99.999% there due to the common base, and they will open-source to kill you.. So the only real money is in the specific 'pay-to-play' options that large customers are willing to pay fees for regardless of future outcome.
The community gets better software, companies get exactly what they need, and everyone pays next to nothing.
It's not just the model that we hope for; it's the only sustainable model after 65% GPL market saturation, or so a trustworthy analyst has told me.
Predicting this stuff requires the kind of black voodoo magic normally found only in SCSI drivers, and I don't think economists, financial analysts or journalists have that sort of magic. Some of them will consolidate, sure, but we certainly can't tell now!
But specifics aside, my personal theory says none of them will be primarily in the distribution business in a few years time, having pared back operations to support and VAR. Several well-informed people happen to think they will just die off, seeing all of them as an intermediary step to a more idealistic system.
But what happens when and if they do consolidate? Do we get the 'one-size-fits-all' distribution that is good for nothing? Do we get competing, mutually 'incompatible' distributions from the few remaining players? Or does everybody still play reasonably nicely as they have in the past?
If yopu only require one or two restorable regressions, or resorations are frequent, a couple of relativly cheap IDE drives might fit the bill. Of course, at some point of backlog/downtime cost, you'd be better off sticking with tapes.
You can even off-site them easily; IDE pull racks and perhaps a small bootable image (a single floppy) will ensure they're more universally accessable than a tape..
Myself, I use a mix of IDE, tape and CD. IDE gets first gen, tape gets 2-4, and every third fifth gen backup is converted to CDRAID.
Nasty compromises? I know of companies still using Tandy portables for warehouse stock entry! They're paying around $400 a pop to get refurb units as well.
Why? Long battery life, nearly indestructable, decent input provisions, and you can plug a barcode scanner in. Going with a NCR barcode scanner syatem is prohibitivly expensive and you get shit battery life, and Palm doesn't give you a flexible enough interface nor the indestructability you need.
If they can make these things as indestructable as the Tandy, and offer better battery life for under a grand, I'm willing to bet POS and stocktracking will earn them a tidy sum before the geeks and marketroids even get into the game..
It's an issue of speed, and ease. It runs a little like the 'Why copy music?' argument.
A real forger has to take significant effort to produce a work that is not easily dismissed. Additionally, the real forger has a significant time investment.
A script kiddy has no significant effort or time investment to produce the same work.
Think about banks. If I wish to close my account, walking away with a $10K cashiers check, the process laboriously checks identification, the signature, and whither it makes sense. Shit, I have the odd problem with my bank calling me because a check I endorsed for deposit while riding in a moving vehicle doesn't seem to match. When the electronic bank provides the same service based on my new DigiSig 2.0, some script kiddy walks away with my savings account.
'A Star Wars Christmas' 'Mission to Mars' 'Daikatana: The Motion Picture' 'Howard the Duck' 'Caverns of the Living Dead'
In addition, it caused less mental scarring than:
Seeing your mother kissing Santa Claus. Trying to justify the existance of Visual Basic. A major text editor flame war. Two minutes in the same room with Tom Christianson. Your first GPF. Attempting to 'unlearn' Pascal.
Slashdot Mirror
Textbridge is, ehrm, messy. It also requires a huge amount of user intervention, and a rather large amount of training..
If the text formatting is primitive, and all you want is ASCII text, there are a couple OCR packages available for Linux. They are rather primitive, and at best about twice as error-prone as an entry level commercial product, but they will handle clean text very well. Graphics, snap exception formatting, etc, are not handled by any of them, but they are scriptable.
.doc or similar wordprocessor file with the gross formatting intact. A few will actually 'guess' what needs to remain an image, and will include it in the finished product. They always skew the formatting some, graphics are not always detected properly, and I have yet to see one that is scriptable. They are also not free in any sense, and tie you to the Windows platform.
Entry level commercial products (read: $200, Windows) will export to a
OT: Kind of, but..
Something I would like to see is a OCR search on demand application; In most document management systems you use only image files, and the information is only searchable by meta data.
Actually, I didn't know NT had that feature. OpenBSD swap is only overwritten on demand, meaning the contents are not changed until that section of swap is overwritten as some process swaps into it..
There hasn't been any real 'zero'ing feature, save perhaps the paranoid individuals I have seen that include dd if=/dev/zero of=/dev/[swap] bs=1024 count=[swapsize] in their shutdown scripts..
Let's encrypt everything to the point of all we get on our screen will be a bunch of useless characters
This is assuming that you could make *nix any more cryptic than it is without hitting mental critical mass. Try it, and you'll probably see the fatality rate in *nix admins soar from cranial explosion..
Shit, I may have just given Microsoft an idea..
Swap partition, no. Swap file, yes.. Encrypted loopback, or an encrypted filesystem holding said swap file..
Now this is off the cuff; This prolly won't work, and even if it did, it's be as slow as Windows95 on a 386.. But it is food for thought.. Ramdisk in memory, containing the 'swap space' mounted via a encrypted loopback. Make the ramdisk size close to physical, and you now have encrypted DRAM..
Or switch platforms; The AS/400, the S/80 and a variety of other IBM midranges are capable of it, even if they don't come out of the box that way..
IIRC, OpenBSD swap space is only overwritten on demand. Once used, the space retains whatever information is in it until overwritten again.. A lot of useful junk, passwords, etc, is left in swap for an indeterminate amount of time. What happens when the box is stolen, say by a hostile foreign government or by the hostile local one, and they can't log in or mount your encrypted volumes? They sniff your swap space!!
All this really amounts to is standard distributed ARP/DHCP protocol. Standards are good ;)
When a device comes up, it broadcasts "Hey, what IP's are you guys on? I'd like 198.111.21.42 with a hosts entry of 'Jim's Fridge', but I'm flexible! Oh, and by the way, I'm on Ethernet now, but I can use my SiR transciever too! Do I need two IPs?"
The rest of the devices come up, find an unused IP and assign the name "Jim's Fridge" to their hosts file. The SiR capable machines make a note to activate a connection for devices with that discovery information.
Simple stuff. Microsoft can't even screw that up!
And on any x86 machine using framebuffer console.
One thing to note is that it will give you multiple penguins, one for each processor. I've seen several people freak out when I start the SMP and there are four.. (As if the freaking when POST keeps going past 128M, then 256M, then past 512M wasn't bad enough!)
One option may be an 'as agent' form. It's a pretty standard regurgitation of legalese that says 'I am acting on the behalf of [x], and performing [x] action in his/her stead.'. You are then not bound by the GPL after the fact of handing over the disc. It's pretty much the same as loaning them your equipment and letting them copy it themselves.
Otherwise, just snag and master a single set of source discs. It shouldn't take that long. If anyone actually contacts you for source, let them know you'll make them a copy for media fee but that d/ling the source off the net will be faster for them and less painful for you. Everone's ass will be covered this way, and you won't have to drag the people you give/sell the discs to through signing a form..
No, but they will throw a couple dozen working prototypes on the scrap heap, and sell them in mint condition for a couple cents a pound..
Do you actually think these guys get their military grade semi-classified powerplants from McDonnell-Douglas or Boeing? They go 'dumpster diving'!!
C'mon! Technology like this is what the Unlimited-Class land speed record was meant for! We've aready got guys doing it with rockets and jet motors stolen from fighter planes, so why not a VASIMR?!?!
Well, that little thing of cooling the magnets on Earth may stump them for a while.. Or perhaps they'll turn to the salvaged powerplants from the space vehicles this supplants..
Perhaps they already have a VSIMR! The Vehicular Sensing and Monitoring Robot sounds plausable enough, as do Volumetric Status Information, Management and Retrieval, and Vertical Space IMaging Radar.
before some idiot straps one to four wheels and tries to break mach 2 on the salt flats?
And better yet: How long after leaving the line before same fool disintegrates the car and is strewn over fifty square miles of ground?
They used commodity cassettes for some copies due to production underrun early on. Of course, this meant they had extra space on the cassette. What to do? Six and a half minutes of the Frogger game music, and someone saying 'Goodnight'.
What I'd like to know is who the hell was whacko enough to play back the entire Frogger program cassette in a audio tape deck.
After reading that, I only wonder how the janitorial staff makes it through Tuesday evening without shooting people. You have no idea how bad geeks are on the lavatories after a plate full of badly prepared Mexican. Half the time I'm not sure the geeks I work with actually digested before spraying bean dip over every visible surface..
100% correct.
If *'they' screw up, they certainly don't want to hear screaming about it, so they silence the press and whoever screwed up disappears after a 'hunting accident'. The CIA, NSA, OSS, etc, stay silent because they don't want to draw attention to their activities.
But in the 'free world', when someone screws up, not only do they get their name and face on the next Daily Mirror, but they get publically tried. You get to hear the gorey details of 'My life as a Spy' in 'Time', about 'Nuclear secrets stolen' in 'Newsweek', and 'Three blow-jobs to Treason' in the letters column of 'Shaved Brazilian Hooters'
(Yes, it's a real magazine, but don't ask..)
We deem far too much classified. As of a couple of years ago, Project Urchin was still classified. Urchin was the baseball sized metallic neutron initiator used in the Hiroshima bomb. Normally, I'd applaud them for keeping nuclear secrets classified. Only prob here is that the Soviets widely published OUR diagrams (courtesy of the Rosenbergs, no doubt) in the early sixties!! Worse yet, any physics grad could spec out a superior replacement!!
The information is public knowledge, and yet still classified.
Makes me wonder just how paranoid they are when they say 'classified'. For all I know, they've deemed the Los Alamos cafeteria schedule classified because it might be used to help poison some foolhardy scientist in ten years. Or perhaps they've classified their work schedule, because they don't want the GAO to know they work twenty hour weeks and bill for forty..
Exactly my thoughts.. The model is on a maintained even footing thanks to the GPLs role in the software base. Even if you get [x] closed-source addition, the competition is already 99.999% there due to the common base, and they will open-source to kill you.. So the only real money is in the specific 'pay-to-play' options that large customers are willing to pay fees for regardless of future outcome.
The community gets better software, companies get exactly what they need, and everyone pays next to nothing.
It's not just the model that we hope for; it's the only sustainable model after 65% GPL market saturation, or so a trustworthy analyst has told me.
Predicting this stuff requires the kind of black voodoo magic normally found only in SCSI drivers, and I don't think economists, financial analysts or journalists have that sort of magic. Some of them will consolidate, sure, but we certainly can't tell now!
But specifics aside, my personal theory says none of them will be primarily in the distribution business in a few years time, having pared back operations to support and VAR. Several well-informed people happen to think they will just die off, seeing all of them as an intermediary step to a more idealistic system.
But what happens when and if they do consolidate? Do we get the 'one-size-fits-all' distribution that is good for nothing? Do we get competing, mutually 'incompatible' distributions from the few remaining players? Or does everybody still play reasonably nicely as they have in the past?
I've seen the Symbol devices, as well as a near clone made by Olivetti. The cost of integration is way too high.
I appreciate the pointer anyway, AC..
If yopu only require one or two restorable regressions, or resorations are frequent, a couple of relativly cheap IDE drives might fit the bill. Of course, at some point of backlog/downtime cost, you'd be better off sticking with tapes.
You can even off-site them easily; IDE pull racks and perhaps a small bootable image (a single floppy) will ensure they're more universally accessable than a tape..
Myself, I use a mix of IDE, tape and CD. IDE gets first gen, tape gets 2-4, and every third fifth gen backup is converted to CDRAID.
Nasty compromises? I know of companies still using Tandy portables for warehouse stock entry! They're paying around $400 a pop to get refurb units as well.
Why? Long battery life, nearly indestructable, decent input provisions, and you can plug a barcode scanner in. Going with a NCR barcode scanner syatem is prohibitivly expensive and you get shit battery life, and Palm doesn't give you a flexible enough interface nor the indestructability you need.
If they can make these things as indestructable as the Tandy, and offer better battery life for under a grand, I'm willing to bet POS and stocktracking will earn them a tidy sum before the geeks and marketroids even get into the game..
Ever see what a cigarette does to a LCD? I'd honestly prefer a dropped hammer to a dropped Lucky Strike..
It's an issue of speed, and ease. It runs a little like the 'Why copy music?' argument.
A real forger has to take significant effort to produce a work that is not easily dismissed. Additionally, the real forger has a significant time investment.
A script kiddy has no significant effort or time investment to produce the same work.
Think about banks. If I wish to close my account, walking away with a $10K cashiers check, the process laboriously checks identification, the signature, and whither it makes sense. Shit, I have the odd problem with my bank calling me because a check I endorsed for deposit while riding in a moving vehicle doesn't seem to match. When the electronic bank provides the same service based on my new DigiSig 2.0, some script kiddy walks away with my savings account.
It wasn't:
'A Star Wars Christmas'
'Mission to Mars'
'Daikatana: The Motion Picture'
'Howard the Duck'
'Caverns of the Living Dead'
In addition, it caused less mental scarring than:
Seeing your mother kissing Santa Claus.
Trying to justify the existance of Visual Basic.
A major text editor flame war.
Two minutes in the same room with Tom Christianson.
Your first GPF.
Attempting to 'unlearn' Pascal.