The mirror at snowy.arsc.alaska.edu is still running, though bandwidth use was throttled because we were overwhelming the UA statewide commodity network connection.
If you have a big network pipe (OC3 or better) and would like a backdoor way to download the data more quickly (or would like me to push the collection to you), drop me a note. It would be good to get the whole collection out for mirroring, and although many people have retrieved files there have not been too many who were able to download the whole 170GB collection yet.
For the geeks: Yes, I'm tuning the Apache server a bit during the/.'ing. Sorry for people who get dropped connections while I do this. I decided to upgrade to the Apache 2.1.8 beta for large file support & a few other features. The server is from ASA Servers, and has three 1.7TB SATA RAID arrays on Western Digital 250GB drives, with dual 2.8Ghz Xeon processors and 12GB of RAM. It's running SuSE 9.1. I put the FTP copy (vsftpd) on one array, and the http + rsync copy on another array. This is a pretty hefty server, but I've been changing tuning (xinetd, vsftpd, httpd and some kernel stuff) in response to traffic to try to keep it handling things. It's lots of fun, and reminds me of my close days with iBiblio, which was a frequent slashdot target.
I forgot to mention in the posting: there are several neat fly-over navigation programs that can use these images. One with a tie to the U. Alaska is EarthSLOT. The mirror links include an "earthslot" subdirectory, where ready-made flyover files are available. Unfortunately, EarthSLOT is Windows-centric:(
Here is a link to the speaker page:
http://www.the-fifth-hope.org/hoop/5hope_speakers. khtml. Scroll or search
to get Kevin's speech (two parts; audio only or audio
plus video). I got to speak with him a little at the
conference, as well as some family members (including
his grandmother, who was featured in Freedom Downtime).
Kevin was very personable, and has clearly given a lot of thought
to his current phase in life as a security expert.
As you might expect from his background, Kevin has
a keen mind for remembering details, and observing
human interaction. That's part of what I like about
his books, as well as from his presentation at The Fifth
Hope.
Here's something Michael Hart wrote about this today. He's the founder of Project Gutenberg, and inventor of eBooks.
-- Greg
Yet another consortium of multi-billion dollar institutions has thrown its hat into the eBook/eLibrary ring today, just 9 months before the 35th Anniversary of Project Gutenberg's placement on the Internet of the first eLibrary element, on July 4th, 1971.
Last December 14th Google used a multi-million dollar blitz of television, radio and print media to announce the Google Print revolution: "Today is the day the world changes," but so far it has been difficult to get even a handful of books from their project, some 10 months later.
I am wondering of the news media will give the same kind of coverage to a second such announcement, which will also put up an alliance of an Internet search engine giant with some multi-billion dollar libraries. I will be watching all the news programs tonight in eager anticipation, as I was doing last December, but I fear that "once burned/twice cautious" might take some of the wind out of their sails/sales.
However, this effort has one huge advantage: "The Internet Archive," run by my friend Brewster Kahle. Brewster is one person who has a proven ability to put an enormous resource on the Internet for the whole wide world to use.
This different is such that I am willing to bet that Yahoo! gets off to a better start in the next 10 months than did a rather completely false start by Google.
Of course, the real test will be to see how long it takes a project such as this to reach a million eBooks, since there are already well over 100,000 eBooks already available free for the taking on various Internet sites, perhaps 50,000 of them from the various Project Gutenberg sites.
Here's a hope that a few years from now anyone can have the advantage of a million book home library, and in even a few years more to ten million books sitting on one inch of your own bookshelf next to your computer.
I'm just chiming in with the folks who want to love Reiser (v3) but have had poor experiences. On my big SATA system, I started with three 1.7TB ReiserFS v3 filesystems (3Ware with 8 drives each on RAID5). These get hammered pretty hard for research, for database, and for public anonymous FTP servers.
Eventually, I changed them to ext3 instead. The reason is that when a problem occurred requiring fsck (such as a power outage or kernel panic) it was always the ReiserFS volume that required recovery, and fsck.reiser would take many hours. The ext3 filesystems (once changed over: same hardware, same usage) just didn't have such problems, and when unmounted uncleanly would take just a few seconds to fsck.ext3.
A 1.7TB filesystem (currently kernel 2.6.11 on a dual Xeon box with 12GB of RAM) is still relatively big, so I wanted to share my experience.
I'm ready to try Reiser v4 any time, though. In my benchmarks, it was much faster for dealing with small files, for big directories, and other things that are common on big research systems. But ext3 seems a bit more stable, and as others have mentioned is far faster & easier at recovery from problems.
The EFF & ACLU have been helping to bring together amicus briefs from the many organizations that have perfectly legal and legitimate uses for p2p software, including BitTorrent.
Want some good stuff? Visit Project Gutenberg's CD page where you can download ISOs with thousands of free (public domain) eBooks, including via BitTorrent. Plus, each search for a Project Gutenberg eBook at the search page includes a MagnetLink, suitable for p2p clients.
The point is that this is all entirely legal, legitimate content -- including many of the great literary works people are already reading in schools around the world!
If you want to know more about how the trial went, please check out apcmag.com's coverage. It's entertaining, descriptive and insightful. It covers each day of the Kazaa et al. trial.
For some reason, links to the other 15 or so articles are missing from this URL (I'm certain they were there earlier). Just search for "kazaagate" on the site, and you'll see all the articles.
Sorry for making new thread, but I searched through the postings so far and didn't even see a reference to "Rain Man."
I want to recommend Elizabeth Moon's The Speed of Dark. It's sci fi (good/. tie-in), but actually draws on the author's own experience as the parent of an autistic child. Apart from the sci fi plot, which is decent, there are many insights into the thought processes of people with autism. It seems quite consistent with the Guardian article, and is based on current research that the author read about.
The sci fi classic, which is OT for this thread but will be of interest for folks thinking of how to "cure" mental "disabilities," is Daniel Keyes' Flowers for Algernon. It's the diary of a man who starts with a very low IQ, but then is given a medical treatment to "cure" him. A control subject, a mouse named Algernon, is given a similar treatment. The diary follows his vastly increasing intelligence, but then complications set in. A movie called "Charly" was based on the book. Sci fi buffs, and other folks interested in these topics: these titles are highly recommended!
PG content goes out on p2p and bt networks in a few different ways. For p2p, we use Magnetlinks for our catalog search results, which allows download via p2p but falls back to http/ftp if not found on p2p. For bt, we run a few trackers for our CD images. I'm planning on running bt trackers for even more content in the future (we can do it for the whole collection, but for smaller files it might not make as much sense). http://gutenberg.org/cdproject for info and links to the trackers.
I was an early user of 1.0, and have followed developments of Xen since. It's very nicely done, open source, and builds on existing kernels and distributions (it's not really a standalone application, but integrates with the Linux kernel and adds some userland tools).
Xen lets you configure one physical system with multiple virtual systems. Hardware access (disk, net, video) is transparent via software.
This is kind of the conceptual opposite tools like Condor and Globus: rather than bundling lots of physical systems together as one (aka, grid computing), it is meant to take one system and subdivide. This makes for easier development (including testing for grid services, Web services, different distros, etc.), and of course is good for virtualization (like in Web hosting services).
Please email me (via copyright AT pglaf.org) with details. We do occasionally make mistakes, and when we do we strive to correct them.
Greg Newby, Project Gutenberg's CEO
PS: Neither Project Gutenberg nor Project Gutenberg of Australia has been sued, ever. Neither over the claim this/. article is about, nor any prior such claim.
A good question is whether shared items are copyrighted, and if they are whether they're licensed for redistribution (as is often the case for individual artists & writers), and if they are copyrighted and not licensed does the RIAA/MPAA legally represent the copyright holder (if not, it's MYOB under Title 17 U.S.C.).
Project Gutenberg contributed an amici brief with Prelinger & the Internet Archive. We welcome the opportunity to show how the use of p2p for legitimate copyright-free works has grown since we wrote the brief (and it was large then, already).
With the help of Magnetlinks (an open standard), all of the Gutenberg content is now available for direct download to enabled p2p programs via the Gutenberg search page. This is very cool, and helps our free eBooks to get around. If you use p2p software, consider sharing Project Gutenberg content in your "shared items" location.
On a somewhat different note, to anticipate a frequent/. contribution: it is still quite unclear whether individual readers (or listeners) violate copyright when they view/read an item for personal non-commercial use in many situations. For example, if you own a print copy of Orwell's 1984 and are in the US (where it's still copyrighted), is it legal for you to view the online copy of 1984 from Project Gutenberg of Australia? Or, if you are in Holland, can you view James Joyce's Ulysses from Project Gutenberg even though it still has copyright protection in life+70 countries? What if you already own a copy of the book? The core issue, yet to be decided for any media I can think of, is what happens when you purchase an "item" - did you purchase a right to use the item in various forms, or some piece of plastic or dead tree? The MPAA/RIAA & like-minded companies want all the benefits, so that if you lose your dead tree you need to buy another one (because you don't have the rights to the intellectual creation, just the crud it was printed on), but if you want to put a CD on your MP3 player you can't (because you own the piece of plastic, not a license to the music). The intersection between fair use, licensing and Title 17 (particularly the DMCA extensions) has not been addressed fully, and overlaps with issues like the applicability of EULAs. There's lots of work yet to be done.
I also return very nearly every piece of junk mail with a note to remove me from their mailing list. This is a lot of work, and it takes consistency and stamps (for example, telling companies that I actually *do* business with to stop sending me their fricking catalog). Eventually, it works pretty well. I never get telemarketing calls (just stupid surveys sometimes, or charities), and get very little junk mail.
Whenever anyone calls - even for market research, political or charitable purposes - tell them to add you to their "do not call" list. (This is important - just saying "go away" is meaningless.) Basically, if you work hard you can take some control over your mailbox and your telephone.
Finally, as others have said, be cautious about disclosing your information. Do you need to write a check? If not, try a credit or debit card - nobody ever wants your telephone # etc. for those. Avoid any sort of free offer (online or on paper) where you provide your personal information...likely you'll pay for it in sales calls or other harassments. Just be smart, but start (in the US) with the basics: the FCC's list, the DMA's list, and your credit report.
PS: nothing that I've found works at all for spam. About all you can do is try to get spamblockers working, or use disposable email addresses, or pursue other strategies. Blah!
Yes, Vinge is great! Two required novels (read them in order) are Deepness in the Sky, and A Fire upon the Deep. He is also one of the original cyberpunks, with "True Names." All three are SciFi 101, good for anyone looking for the best of the best.
And I'm not just saying this because he makes liberal use of references to "newbys" in the first book (that was way back when I first heard the term "network newby." Read my username if you don't know what I'm talking about. Yes, that's my name.)
When I look at the speaker schedule, the difference between a HOPE conference and other security-themed conferences is obvious. The scope of sessions and the range of speakers reinforces the notion that hacking is still open to everyone with a will to get involved, and not just about the technology. Am I biased? I guess so, since I'm one of the conference organizers.
PS, to the person looking for past session archives: it's all online for free download, or you can buy the CD. Just visit http://www.h2k2.net or http://www.2600.com and go to the store.
Re:Mod parent up - there is no "grid computing"
on
GGF and Grid Security
·
· Score: 1
Yours is a great question! Here's an article that basically says there is no simple definition.
The simplest I can make it is that Web services, as compared to "standard" Web pages, adds interoperability. This means that programs can actually operate with each other over the Internet. There are some other ways this can happen (distributed computing; cluster/parallel software like MPI), but Web services probably offers a more general-purpose framework. The trade-off is that WS are complex, and even deciding what the necessary components are can be tough!
One of the key desirable features for WS (but not a definition/requirement) is the ability to maintain state across connections. This is actually built into GS, which is an advantage I didn't mention (though notification frameworks might imply statefulness, I suppose).
I'm not trying to be an advocate, particularly, just pointing out what "real" problems are addressed by GS.
Re:Mod parent up - there is no "grid computing"
on
GGF and Grid Security
·
· Score: 1
First, I'm a co-chair of a working group in the Global Grid Forum. Also, I'll be speaking about Grid (In-)security at this summer's 2600 conference. At the outset, you are right to be skeptical of the power of Grid computing, and the extent to which it's different from other existing models (clustering, time sharing, distributed).
"Grid" as a concept is mostly just a buzzword. Oracle10g is a good example.
But Grid as a standard (under development by the GGF, OASIS and others) is something a lot more specific. What that emerging standards-compliant Grid offers is:
End-to-end encryption, based on certificates and public key
Virtual organizations, in which there is a closed "community" of systems and their users who can participate in a particular Grid (somewhat VPN-like)
Event-driven framework, instead of client/server or push/pull models -- this is a major win for some applications
The Globus toolkit is one messed up pile of confused & confusing software (yes, I'm running 2.4 and 3.0 and develop for it). But it will change a lot for the better over this upcoming year, if it keeps to schedule, to build on Web services (Tomcat, etc.) rather than re-inventing WS+Grid. Adding the points 1-3 above to WS will work a whole lot better, I think/hope, than re-creating most of WS in the Grid services (GS) Globus toolkit.
Bottom line: The vision/plan of standards-compliant Grid computing does offer some real advantages and promise. It's not for every application, every user and every organization, any more than, say, cluster or distributed computing is. But today's Globus and other Grid standards are in pretty early stages, and only barely useful for real tasks (i.e., see how the Teragrid
fell victim to fairly mundane attack).
Not as many packages as SuSE once had
on
Suse 9.1 Reviews?
·
· Score: 1
I'm a fan of SuSE, and have run either SuSE or RedHat on my server systems for years. One thing I've noticed is that while SuSE used to have tons and tons of different software, now they have about the same number of packages/programs as other distros (full install; "rpm -q -a | wc").
Back in pre-8 days, it would take 6 or 7 CDs for a complete SuSE install. This was about 1200 separate items (not separate RPM packages, several of which are often used to make one complete software title. For example, "rpm -q -a | grep -i apache" will show 5 or 6 different RPMs for one title).
I really liked some of the obscure packages...lots of old text-based games, and my favorite was a complete set of LAPACK & BLAS mathematical libraries.
I'm not really bitching, but I do miss the huge labor of love that went into trying to include virtually every single item the SuSE developers could find to compile for Linux. These days, many of those items have dropped off the install list (only three CDs these days, which includes the vastly grown binaries & sources for desktop software). It must have been a business decision, given that some of those packages were pretty obscure and no longer maintained. You can still get some on rpmfind.net, and might be able to find the source, but I haven't seen a distro with so many packages since earlier days of SuSE. If there's still one out there that's comparable, someone send me a clue about it.
I'm running 9.1 on my new 3.06Ghz dual Xeon box with ~5TB of disk (yes, terabytes) from asacomputers.com. It's a sweet system! I also have 9.0 on a new dual Opteron system, and am finding the SuSE transition to 64-bit Opteron land to be pretty painless. It was a little unclear at first where I needed to get my license from for Yast2 upgrades (turns out it was from Novell, but then I went to suse.com to activate it - this is for the $795./year server license which was about the only easy path for an AMD64 distro on a production server needing ready access to patches etc.). Consider this a positive review for SuSE!
Ebooks: Neither E, Nor Books, by Cory Doctorow
Subtitle: Paper for the O'Reilly Emerging Technologies Conference, 2004 Link: http://www.gutenberg.net/1/1/0/7/11077 Thanks to Cory Doctorow for making this public domain eBook available!
There's a lot of time to get involved in planning this year's HOPE. Start thinking about possible speakers and topics.
Internet connectivity was worse than dialup.
The conference had a T1, which was sometimes saturated. I didn't think it was that bad, but your mileage may have varied depending on when and where you connected (and who was trying to flood/DDoS the wireless access point you were using)
they had all the tables "reserved" for specific 2600 groups
I think you weren't paying attention or didn't look around. There were *piles* of folding tables and chairs, it was self-service. If you expected someone to set up your table and bring you a menu, you are missing a big part of the hacker ethic.
There is, of course, an elitist mentality among many of the attendees, which makes conversations about technology a little difficult.
Well, one thing about hackers: they are *all* types of people. The people I interacted with were there to share & learn, but I'm sure some fit your view, too.
I sent a fax to the feds (there's a cross-agency public relations department I can't remember the name of right now). I mentioned I was a planner for H2K2, and we would LOVE them to show up and give a talk to hackers. I told them it might not be a very friendly audience, but it would be a great opportunity for the feds to present their points of view, and gather feedback.
The RIAA is a membership organization. Their member list is online (it looks like a lot, but in fact most entries are labels that are owned by fewer than a dozen major media publishers).
They might have a contractual basis for enforcing copyright violations by their member organizations (i.e., Sony and Warner). The have NO basis for enforcing copyright violations by other publishers.
For the RIAA jack-booted thugs to enforce for labels or artists they don't represent is the same as you or I enforcing, on behalf of someone else. There's just no basis. Under the copyright law (US Title 17 USC, it's the infringed party that needs to pursue action -- not ANY party, and generally not even law enforcement (at least for garden variety copyright infringement....the feds get called in for fraud, for when banks are involved, and other cases).
In the LA Times article, the only title specifically mentioned was some sort of Latino hits from the 70s and 80s. Chances are that material is not represented by the RIAA. At a community radio station I worked with, the music directors decided not to put any RIAA member music on the play list. Know what? It turned out 80% was not, already! The other 20% wasn't painful at all - it was just a matter of putting it on another shelf, rather than the playlist shelf.
In short, there is a LOT of music that is not represented by the RIAA (a far higher proportion than video that's not represented by the MPAA). They have no business getting involved in any kind of enforcement action for artists or labels they don't have a relationship with.
64-bit address space means that a PROCESS (loosely equal to a PROGRAM) can access > 4GB. In Linux, processes are limited by 32bit (i.e., 4GB - though in practice a process can usually not get quite that much).
So, the "big deal" about 64-bit is that (a) there will be *direct* access to the memory beyond 4GB, as the previous message mentioned; and that (b) individual processes will be able to access > 4GB.
(a) provides a performance boost, by removing the need for "mapping" between 32-bit and 64-bit address space at the low level. [I haven't looked into the extent to which this actually happens in the Linux kernel - I hope to read some elaboration.]
(b) removes an important barrier to the many programs that want > 4GB, but can't get it (even on a system with well over 4GB). RDBMS, various simulation models, very large rendering, etc. are all great candidates, and we'll be seeing more. Before someone argues that they *can* get > 4GB on 32-bit: yes, it's possible to have multiple processes working together in a program. But each process has a max of 4GB.
There are lots of interesting byproducts of going to 64-bit addressing, notably that pointers move from 4 bytes to 8. So, today's implementations try to trade off, by allowing either compile-time choice of how large the address space should be, or space-saving techniques so that MANY aspects get the full 64-bit limitations, but not all (for example, 6 bit pointers rather than 8 bit; and limiting the # of file descriptors to 32 bit, since nobody needs 18446744073709551616 open files right now).
Slashdot Mirror
Meanwhile, we finally have BitTorrent trackers available.
If you have a big network pipe (OC3 or better) and would like a backdoor way to download the data more quickly (or would like me to push the collection to you), drop me a note. It would be good to get the whole collection out for mirroring, and although many people have retrieved files there have not been too many who were able to download the whole 170GB collection yet.
For the geeks: Yes, I'm tuning the Apache server a bit during the /.'ing. Sorry for people who get dropped connections while I do this. I decided to upgrade to the Apache 2.1.8 beta for large file support & a few other features. The server is from ASA Servers, and has three 1.7TB SATA RAID arrays on Western Digital 250GB drives, with dual 2.8Ghz Xeon processors and 12GB of RAM. It's running SuSE 9.1. I put the FTP copy (vsftpd) on one array, and the http + rsync copy on another array. This is a pretty hefty server, but I've been changing tuning (xinetd, vsftpd, httpd and some kernel stuff) in response to traffic to try to keep it handling things. It's lots of fun, and reminds me of my close days with iBiblio, which was a frequent slashdot target.
I forgot to mention in the posting: there are several neat :(
fly-over navigation programs that can use these images. One
with a tie to the U. Alaska is EarthSLOT.
The mirror links include an "earthslot" subdirectory, where
ready-made flyover files are available. Unfortunately,
EarthSLOT is Windows-centric
Kevin was very personable, and has clearly given a lot of thought to his current phase in life as a security expert. As you might expect from his background, Kevin has a keen mind for remembering details, and observing human interaction. That's part of what I like about his books, as well as from his presentation at The Fifth Hope.
Here's something Michael Hart wrote about this today. He's
the founder of Project Gutenberg, and inventor of eBooks.
-- Greg
Yet another consortium of multi-billion dollar institutions
has thrown its hat into the eBook/eLibrary ring today, just
9 months before the 35th Anniversary of Project Gutenberg's
placement on the Internet of the first eLibrary element, on
July 4th, 1971.
Last December 14th Google used a multi-million dollar blitz
of television, radio and print media to announce the Google
Print revolution: "Today is the day the world changes," but
so far it has been difficult to get even a handful of books
from their project, some 10 months later.
I am wondering of the news media will give the same kind of
coverage to a second such announcement, which will also put
up an alliance of an Internet search engine giant with some
multi-billion dollar libraries. I will be watching all the
news programs tonight in eager anticipation, as I was doing
last December, but I fear that "once burned/twice cautious"
might take some of the wind out of their sails/sales.
However, this effort has one huge advantage: "The Internet
Archive," run by my friend Brewster Kahle. Brewster is one
person who has a proven ability to put an enormous resource
on the Internet for the whole wide world to use.
This different is such that I am willing to bet that Yahoo!
gets off to a better start in the next 10 months than did a
rather completely false start by Google.
Of course, the real test will be to see how long it takes a
project such as this to reach a million eBooks, since there
are already well over 100,000 eBooks already available free
for the taking on various Internet sites, perhaps 50,000 of
them from the various Project Gutenberg sites.
Here's a hope that a few years from now anyone can have the
advantage of a million book home library, and in even a few
years more to ten million books sitting on one inch of your
own bookshelf next to your computer.
Michael S. Hart
Founder
Project Gutenberg
I'm just chiming in with the folks who want to love Reiser (v3) but have had poor experiences. On my big SATA system, I started with three 1.7TB ReiserFS v3 filesystems (3Ware with 8 drives each on RAID5). These get hammered pretty hard for research, for database, and for public anonymous FTP servers.
Eventually, I changed them to ext3 instead. The reason is that when a problem occurred requiring fsck (such as a power outage or kernel panic) it was always the ReiserFS volume that required recovery, and fsck.reiser would take many hours. The ext3 filesystems (once changed over: same hardware, same usage) just didn't have such problems, and when unmounted uncleanly would take just a few seconds to fsck.ext3.
A 1.7TB filesystem (currently kernel 2.6.11 on a dual Xeon box with 12GB of RAM) is still relatively big, so I wanted to share my experience.
I'm ready to try Reiser v4 any time, though. In my benchmarks, it was much faster for dealing with small files, for big directories, and other things that are common on big research systems. But ext3 seems a bit more stable, and as others have mentioned is far faster & easier at recovery from problems.
Want some good stuff? Visit Project Gutenberg's CD page where you can download ISOs with thousands of free (public domain) eBooks, including via BitTorrent. Plus, each search for a Project Gutenberg eBook at the search page includes a MagnetLink, suitable for p2p clients.
The point is that this is all entirely legal, legitimate content -- including many of the great literary works people are already reading in schools around the world!
If you want to know more about how the trial went, please check out apcmag.com's coverage. It's entertaining, descriptive and insightful. It covers each day of the Kazaa et al. trial. For some reason, links to the other 15 or so articles are missing from this URL (I'm certain they were there earlier). Just search for "kazaagate" on the site, and you'll see all the articles.
I want to recommend Elizabeth Moon's The Speed of Dark. It's sci fi (good /. tie-in), but actually draws on the author's own experience as the parent of an autistic child. Apart from the sci fi plot, which is decent, there are many insights into the thought processes of people with autism. It seems quite consistent with the Guardian article, and is based on current research that the author read about.
The sci fi classic, which is OT for this thread but will be of interest for folks thinking of how to "cure" mental "disabilities," is Daniel Keyes' Flowers for Algernon. It's the diary of a man who starts with a very low IQ, but then is given a medical treatment to "cure" him. A control subject, a mouse named Algernon, is given a similar treatment. The diary follows his vastly increasing intelligence, but then complications set in. A movie called "Charly" was based on the book. Sci fi buffs, and other folks interested in these topics: these titles are highly recommended!
PG content goes out on p2p and bt networks in a few different ways. For p2p, we use Magnetlinks for our catalog search results, which allows download via p2p but falls back to http/ftp if not found on p2p. For bt, we run a few trackers for our CD images. I'm planning on running bt trackers for even more content in the future (we can do it for the whole collection, but for smaller files it might not make as much sense). http://gutenberg.org/cdproject for info and links to the trackers.
I was an early user of 1.0, and have followed developments of Xen since. It's very nicely done, open source, and builds on existing kernels and distributions (it's not really a standalone application, but integrates with the Linux kernel and adds some userland tools).
Xen lets you configure one physical system with multiple virtual systems. Hardware access (disk, net, video) is transparent via software.
This is kind of the conceptual opposite tools like Condor and Globus: rather than bundling lots of physical systems together as one (aka, grid computing), it is meant to take one system and subdivide. This makes for easier development (including testing for grid services, Web services, different distros, etc.), and of course is good for virtualization (like in Web hosting services).
Congrats, team!
- Greg Newby, Project Gutenberg's CEO
PS: Neither Project Gutenberg nor Project Gutenberg of Australia has been sued, ever. Neither over the claim thisProject Gutenberg contributed an amici brief with Prelinger & the Internet Archive. We welcome the opportunity to show how the use of p2p for legitimate copyright-free works has grown since we wrote the brief (and it was large then, already).
With the help of Magnetlinks (an open standard), all of the Gutenberg content is now available for direct download to enabled p2p programs via the Gutenberg search page. This is very cool, and helps our free eBooks to get around. If you use p2p software, consider sharing Project Gutenberg content in your "shared items" location.
On a somewhat different note, to anticipate a frequent /. contribution: it is still quite unclear whether individual readers (or listeners) violate copyright when they view/read an item for personal non-commercial use in many situations. For example, if you own a print copy of Orwell's 1984 and are in the US (where it's still copyrighted), is it legal for you to view the online copy of 1984 from Project Gutenberg of Australia? Or, if you are in Holland, can you view James Joyce's Ulysses from Project Gutenberg even though it still has copyright protection in life+70 countries? What if you already own a copy of the book? The core issue, yet to be decided for any media I can think of, is what happens when you purchase an "item" - did you purchase a right to use the item in various forms, or some piece of plastic or dead tree? The MPAA/RIAA & like-minded companies want all the benefits, so that if you lose your dead tree you need to buy another one (because you don't have the rights to the intellectual creation, just the crud it was printed on), but if you want to put a CD on your MP3 player you can't (because you own the piece of plastic, not a license to the music). The intersection between fair use, licensing and Title 17 (particularly the DMCA extensions) has not been addressed fully, and overlaps with issues like the applicability of EULAs. There's lots of work yet to be done.
I also return very nearly every piece of junk mail with a note to remove me from their mailing list. This is a lot of work, and it takes consistency and stamps (for example, telling companies that I actually *do* business with to stop sending me their fricking catalog). Eventually, it works pretty well. I never get telemarketing calls (just stupid surveys sometimes, or charities), and get very little junk mail.
Whenever anyone calls - even for market research, political or charitable purposes - tell them to add you to their "do not call" list. (This is important - just saying "go away" is meaningless.) Basically, if you work hard you can take some control over your mailbox and your telephone.
Finally, as others have said, be cautious about disclosing your information. Do you need to write a check? If not, try a credit or debit card - nobody ever wants your telephone # etc. for those. Avoid any sort of free offer (online or on paper) where you provide your personal information...likely you'll pay for it in sales calls or other harassments. Just be smart, but start (in the US) with the basics: the FCC's list, the DMA's list, and your credit report. PS: nothing that I've found works at all for spam. About all you can do is try to get spamblockers working, or use disposable email addresses, or pursue other strategies. Blah!
And I'm not just saying this because he makes liberal use of references to "newbys" in the first book (that was way back when I first heard the term "network newby." Read my username if you don't know what I'm talking about. Yes, that's my name.)
When I look at the speaker schedule, the difference between a HOPE conference and other security-themed conferences is obvious. The scope of sessions and the range of speakers reinforces the notion that hacking is still open to everyone with a will to get involved, and not just about the technology. Am I biased? I guess so, since I'm one of the conference organizers.
PS, to the person looking for past session archives: it's all online for free download, or you can buy the CD. Just visit http://www.h2k2.net or http://www.2600.com and go to the store.
Yours is a great question! Here's an article that basically says there is no simple definition.
The simplest I can make it is that Web services, as compared to "standard" Web pages, adds interoperability. This means that programs can actually operate with each other over the Internet. There are some other ways this can happen (distributed computing; cluster/parallel software like MPI), but Web services probably offers a more general-purpose framework. The trade-off is that WS are complex, and even deciding what the necessary components are can be tough!
One of the key desirable features for WS (but not a definition/requirement) is the ability to maintain state across connections. This is actually built into GS, which is an advantage I didn't mention (though notification frameworks might imply statefulness, I suppose).
I'm not trying to be an advocate, particularly, just pointing out what "real" problems are addressed by GS.
"Grid" as a concept is mostly just a buzzword. Oracle10g is a good example.
But Grid as a standard (under development by the GGF, OASIS and others) is something a lot more specific. What that emerging standards-compliant Grid offers is:
The Globus toolkit is one messed up pile of confused & confusing software (yes, I'm running 2.4 and 3.0 and develop for it). But it will change a lot for the better over this upcoming year, if it keeps to schedule, to build on Web services (Tomcat, etc.) rather than re-inventing WS+Grid. Adding the points 1-3 above to WS will work a whole lot better, I think/hope, than re-creating most of WS in the Grid services (GS) Globus toolkit.
Bottom line: The vision/plan of standards-compliant Grid computing does offer some real advantages and promise. It's not for every application, every user and every organization, any more than, say, cluster or distributed computing is. But today's Globus and other Grid standards are in pretty early stages, and only barely useful for real tasks (i.e., see how the Teragrid fell victim to fairly mundane attack).
I'm a fan of SuSE, and have run either SuSE or RedHat on my server systems for years. One thing I've noticed is that while SuSE used to have tons and tons of different software, now they have about the same number of packages/programs as other distros (full install; "rpm -q -a | wc").
Back in pre-8 days, it would take 6 or 7 CDs for a complete SuSE install. This was about 1200 separate items (not separate RPM packages, several of which are often used to make one complete software title. For example, "rpm -q -a | grep -i apache" will show 5 or 6 different RPMs for one title).
I really liked some of the obscure packages...lots of old text-based games, and my favorite was a complete set of LAPACK & BLAS mathematical libraries.
I'm not really bitching, but I do miss the huge labor of love that went into trying to include virtually every single item the SuSE developers could find to compile for Linux. These days, many of those items have dropped off the install list (only three CDs these days, which includes the vastly grown binaries & sources for desktop software). It must have been a business decision, given that some of those packages were pretty obscure and no longer maintained. You can still get some on rpmfind.net, and might be able to find the source, but I haven't seen a distro with so many packages since earlier days of SuSE. If there's still one out there that's comparable, someone send me a clue about it.
I'm running 9.1 on my new 3.06Ghz dual Xeon box with ~5TB of disk (yes, terabytes) from asacomputers.com. It's a sweet system! I also have 9.0 on a new dual Opteron system, and am finding the SuSE transition to 64-bit Opteron land to be pretty painless. It was a little unclear at first where I needed to get my license from for Yast2 upgrades (turns out it was from Novell, but then I went to suse.com to activate it - this is for the $795./year server license which was about the only easy path for an AMD64 distro on a production server needing ready access to patches etc.). Consider this a positive review for SuSE!
Ebooks: Neither E, Nor Books, by Cory Doctorow
Subtitle: Paper for the O'Reilly Emerging Technologies Conference, 2004
Link: http://www.gutenberg.net/1/1/0/7/11077
Thanks to Cory Doctorow for making this public domain eBook available!
Instructions for getting a complete mirror: mirroring HOWTO (rsync; ftp; http).
Internet connectivity was worse than dialup.
The conference had a T1, which was sometimes saturated. I didn't think it was that bad, but your mileage may have varied depending on when and where you connected (and who was trying to flood/DDoS the wireless access point you were using)
they had all the tables "reserved" for specific 2600 groups
I think you weren't paying attention or didn't look around. There were *piles* of folding tables and chairs, it was self-service. If you expected someone to set up your table and bring you a menu, you are missing a big part of the hacker ethic.
There is, of course, an elitist mentality among many of the attendees, which makes conversations about technology a little difficult.
Well, one thing about hackers: they are *all* types of people. The people I interacted with were there to share & learn, but I'm sure some fit your view, too.
I sent a fax to the feds (there's a cross-agency public relations department I can't remember the name of right now). I mentioned I was a planner for H2K2, and we would LOVE them to show up and give a talk to hackers. I told them it might not be a very friendly audience, but it would be a great opportunity for the feds to present their points of view, and gather feedback.
I'm still waiting for a response....
The RIAA is a membership organization. Their member list is online (it looks like a lot, but in fact most entries are labels that are owned by fewer than a dozen major media publishers).
They might have a contractual basis for enforcing copyright violations by their member organizations (i.e., Sony and Warner). The have NO basis for enforcing copyright violations by other publishers.
For the RIAA jack-booted thugs to enforce for labels or artists they don't represent is the same as you or I enforcing, on behalf of someone else. There's just no basis. Under the copyright law (US Title 17 USC, it's the infringed party that needs to pursue action -- not ANY party, and generally not even law enforcement (at least for garden variety copyright infringement....the feds get called in for fraud, for when banks are involved, and other cases).
In the LA Times article, the only title specifically mentioned was some sort of Latino hits from the 70s and 80s. Chances are that material is not represented by the RIAA. At a community radio station I worked with, the music directors decided not to put any RIAA member music on the play list. Know what? It turned out 80% was not, already! The other 20% wasn't painful at all - it was just a matter of putting it on another shelf, rather than the playlist shelf.
In short, there is a LOT of music that is not represented by the RIAA (a far higher proportion than video that's not represented by the MPAA). They have no business getting involved in any kind of enforcement action for artists or labels they don't have a relationship with.
64-bit address space means that a PROCESS (loosely equal to a PROGRAM) can access > 4GB. In Linux, processes are limited by 32bit (i.e., 4GB - though in practice a process can usually not get quite that much).
So, the "big deal" about 64-bit is that (a) there will be *direct* access to the memory beyond 4GB, as the previous message mentioned; and that (b) individual processes will be able to access > 4GB.
(a) provides a performance boost, by removing the need for "mapping" between 32-bit and 64-bit address space at the low level. [I haven't looked into the extent to which this actually happens in the Linux kernel - I hope to read some elaboration.]
(b) removes an important barrier to the many programs that want > 4GB, but can't get it (even on a system with well over 4GB). RDBMS, various simulation models, very large rendering, etc. are all great candidates, and we'll be seeing more. Before someone argues that they *can* get > 4GB on 32-bit: yes, it's possible to have multiple processes working together in a program. But each process has a max of 4GB.
There are lots of interesting byproducts of going to 64-bit addressing, notably that pointers move from 4 bytes to 8. So, today's implementations try to trade off, by allowing either compile-time choice of how large the address space should be, or space-saving techniques so that MANY aspects get the full 64-bit limitations, but not all (for example, 6 bit pointers rather than 8 bit; and limiting the # of file descriptors to 32 bit, since nobody needs 18446744073709551616 open files right now).
Nuff said... Greg