It annoys me how long blacklists will keep you on, even after they haven't gotten any reports of spam from your IP range. Why is this so?
A fair number of blacklists (at least a few years ago) had a we-won't-ever-remove-you - unless-you-send-us-lots-of-proof - that-your-IP-range-is-no-longer-used-for-spam policy. IP ranges ought to expire from blacklists when there haven't been many complaints for a while.
In fact, blacklists ought to e-mail admin@mailserver when your IP range is blocked, and e-mail you monthly to remind you you're on a blacklist. Why? Most mail systems are polite and tell you if they're rejecting your messages because of a blacklist, but some will silently reject your messages and you might not realize your mail isn't being delivered for a long time, hence you might not realize you've been blacklisted somewhere. An alternative is that you can poll the blacklists periodically for your IP ranges to see if you've been blocked, but this seems like it places a burden on you and is somewhat irresponsible for the blacklists to do (I know, most of them say "we're a private org, we do what we want, if an ISP is using us for a blacklist then that's the ISP's prerogative, and we don't care," but if you know your blacklist is being used by others, especially by major ISP's, I still think it's somewhat irresponsible to not notify admins that you're blacklisting their IP ranges.)
Clever trick: most mail systems are configured so that USERNAME+anything will always be delivered to USERNAME (e.g., bob+ebay, bob+paypal, bob+cray-cyber, etc). This way, you don't have to deliver *@domain to your inbox nor set up forwarding aliases.
What I don't understand is that so-called "customer service" isn't designed to provide service to customers!
I *paid* for your product. This means that I theoretically have also paid for adequate documentation and human guidance when needed.
I don't understand why many products lack adequate documentation. For example, there's IR spectral analysis software called GRAMS that I've worked with, and the documentation doesn't completely describe the behavior of many parts of the built-in programming language which is provided for customers to use to automate tasks. Many hardware products I've bought don't come with any sort of "Troubleshooting" manual.
I think the best approach is something like this: (1) Documentation should have at least the following: - "Quick setup" guide, in print and on-line, with diagrams and good explanations, and references such as "If your system does not match this type, please see page 5 in the FULL SETUP GUIDE" and "If this indicator does not appear, refer to section 10 in the BASIC TROUBLESHOOTING GUIDE" - "Full setup" guide, in print and on-line - "Basic troubleshooting" guide, in print and on-line - "Advanced troubleshooting" guide, on-line and in print when sensible - Comprehensive on-line cross-referenced index of product's features and all documentation topics - Detailed on-line reference of behavior of each of product's features, one-by-one, explaining all valid inputs, all possible outputs, and all error codes and all their possible origins - Chapter-by-chapter on-line manual giving overviews of all sections of product - Chapter-by-chapter on-line manual giving overviews of common tasks, with multiple varied examples of each type of task (2) Phone numbers, e-mail addresses, snail-mail addresses, websites (knowledgebase, bug database, customer forums, support forums, FAQ, driver and firmware downloads, HOWTO repository), catalog and order numbers for any advanced manuals, and other necessary contact information, distributed as follows: - All of these references listed in the setup guides and other printed manuals - Tips such as "When calling support about setup procedures, please describe your progress through each part of setup, not just the part which is troublesome." - More detailed information about the tech-support options in appropriate places in the troubleshooting guides, task overview manuals, product overview manual, and detailed behavior/functionality reference. For example: "If these troubleshooting steps did not work, tell tech support that troubleshooting items 2-30 through 2-36 were tried and did not remedy the problem;" "When calling about this command, please inform tech support that Section 16-25 of the function manual did not answer your question." (3) Phone menus for incoming calls that allow calls to be categorized so they can go to the right department and be pre-escalated if it can be established that there is something unusual going on. For example: - "Please enter your product code... For this product, the JAMBOREE 2000, troubleshooting steps can be found in section 7 of the manual. If you do not have access to the manual, press 1. If you cannot determine which category your problem falls into, press 2. If you have identified your problem but cannot determine which troubleshooting steps are appropriate, press 3. If you have tried the troubleshooting steps but have questions about the results, press 4. If all troubleshooting in the manual has failed, press 5."
It's amazing how many vendors don't provide organized and detailed references. It also stumps me why so many tech support calls have gone like this: "Hi, I'm calling about a problem I'm having with a certain feature in XYZ Software." "Okay. Is the software installed? Have you gotten it to open at least once?" "Yes. The software installed and will open, but I'm having a problem with feature ABC." "Let me transfer your call."... "Hi, I'm calling about feature ABC in XYZ Software." "Oh. Thi
Wow. You know, there are feeds for expiring domains (do they come from the registrars or from crawling services? not sure), so there ought to be feeds for the opposite somewhere:)
I wonder if we can round up a few people to do this. The only pitfall I can see is that I have a static IP, so they could just filter static IPs out (and net-savvy people who care about squatters are more likely to have static IPs than the Joe Schmoes that feed these squatters the hits they make money from).
Everybody is jumping on the DRM bandwagon to some extent. If they don't, the big media companies will shun them, and they'll lose a lot of potential market.
The part that worries me most about DRM is that I don't see any point at which it can stop (the slippery-slope problem). For example---what if we could imprint an experience upon your nervous system via EM fields? That closes the "analog hole"---the content goes straight from the media to the brain. (You can argue that the reverse process could be used to hijack the data stream: in short, a highly-advanced brain scanner (which of course would be illegal to own under some futuristic DMCA).) Another idea: we don't want people to have the potential to infringe on intellectual property, so we design movies to have a hypnotic effect that causes mild amnesia; you can't remember all the parts of the plot, but you remember loving the film. So, you pay to see it again and again...
I'm not trying to troll. I'm just scared, in a I-just-read-1984 kind-of way.
My examples above aren't too far-fetched. We can already beam picturesbeam an image straight into someone's retina, and there was a recent slashdot article about audio transmission through bone. Highly selective amnesia through hypnosis is possible, so there's a real possibility that, in the future, you will love a movie but not quite remember how it goes, so you will have to see it again (and again.. and again... and again...)
Gotcha... I can't say whether they were truly guilty of anything, either. Sometimes in the free software world, we find developers caving to corporations' demands thanks to those corporations' well-funded legal departments (thankfully, the EFF can sometimes help fight back when it's cases of just plain bullying), which is very unfortunate. They could have maybe trademarked GAIM from the start (I *think* that's okay under some open source licenses, as long as it's done properly)... I just think it's unfortunate that they gave in to AOL's wishes when they might not have had to.
My understanding of trademark law is that whoever registers a trademark gets to own it, even if someone else was using the name first, with the exception of the original user being very well-known and taking action against the trademark-filer as soon as possible (if they don't fight the party which was granted the trademark immediately, I believe this effectively forfeits their right to do so); after someone trademarks something, they are required to notify anyone else in their market with an identical or nearly-identical name that the name infringes on the trademark. I'm not sure to what extent the trademark owner has to legally pursue other parties with an infringing name. (For example, if Xerox took offense to a photocopier named SIRex ('simply, instantaneous, reproduxion'), is Xerox obligated to file suit, send a C&D letter, or just notify me that they have a trademark for a similar product and that I should tread carefully? If my product advertisements say "SIRex is not affiliated and Xerox, and SIRex machines are not produced by Xerox," would Xerox be okay enough with that?) a useful FAQ from the USPTO and FAQ about filing trademarks
"GAIM" was an acronym. "gaim" was not; it was designed to be an arbitrary* sequence of lowercase letters that, if they were uppercase, would have been the project's former name. If you want to argue that because "gaim" resembles "GAIM" and "GAIM" is an acronym that is infringing that "gaim" is also infringing, I only need to define "gaim" as an acronym that isn't infringing. For example, "globally available interactive messager" or something (see, then I don't even say "instant messenger!"), and you could even change how it's written (like "g.a.i.m." or "ga-im" or something) so it bears even less resemblance to AIM. Even if you can trademark "AIM" under the premise that it's an acronym, and you can say that "aim" is infringing if it's "obviously" referring to the same thing or a similar thing, your trademark wouldn't apply to any "AIM" or "aim" that was deliberately spelled out to be a *different* acronym, unless you could prove that it causes significant consumer confusion, and I don't think "AOL Instant Messenger" and "globally-available--interactive-messager" are very close anymore.
* - not quite the right word, but you know what I mean.
I sure hope that the default package install will have symlinks so that things don't break. I know they said there will be a compatibility layer for the plug-in API, but I don't want to have to go around and make a bunch of symlinks every time I install pidgin so that things expecting it to be called "gaim" don't break.
While we're on the topic of the "aim" name, I had a libfaim-based bot called 'aimbot' years ago, and I took it off sourceforge when I got an e-mail saying "cease and desist: AOL says to remove the 3 letters 'aim' from your project name." I keep wanting to fix it up to run again (the protocol changed, so I have to use a newer libfaim, but libfaim's API is very different now, so it would have to be heavily reworked) and re-release it, but I'm not sure what to do about the name. I could maybe just advertise it as "Automated Interactive Machine roBOT" perhaps? I was considering renaming it anyway, because I got a lot of e-mails asking how to set up my "Quake Aim Bot." Evidently, there was some quake bot circulating at the time in a file called aimbot.zip.
Maybe I'll call it "samebot," signifying that it's the same bot that was called "aimbot";)
I used to check out http://freshmeat.net/ almost daily, but that was when I was only a few years into Linux and still on an endless search for software that did different things, and at the time it seemed simpler to just wait and see what came up on fm every day (you could easily tell how active things were that way, too). Speaking of fm---does anyone have a copy of that old butchered-meat logo fm used to have, waaaay back, before the beginning of the fm II theme?
Lately I've been choosing a new section on http://scitoys.com/ to read every few days. Every few weeks, I'll usually find a different information-type site to read through gradually, or pick a topic to research on wikipedia.
I think id Games used to compile on SGIs. I know MS did some development on Xenix/i286 and Xenix/i386 (somewhere, there's an MS quote about how MS-DOS/Win is not suitable for serious development..hah). In fact, the i286 had a memory management unit, but the only OS (that I know of) which took full advantage of it was Xenix. Minix/i286 may have supported it to some extent, as well. Some emulator pages....mac&ppc, simos (for SGI/IRIX5), DEC 10 and Big Iron, various DEC emulation, Apple Lisa, Z80 sim&development, yaze Z80, Apricot and Amstrad, bochs x86,... and there's always emulators that run under DOS that you could run under Bochs or QEMU.
OH, man. Thanks for reminding me. I need to set up my POWER2 replacement box. (My original POWER2 had its 700W power supply start reporting error codes, and then start dying randomly, and then no longer boot.) Unfortunately, I haven't been able to find my AIX media in about two years:-/ maybe my next search will go better...
I have a bunch of different machines running different OS's, but I'd never have the resources to have a compile farm. Also, the OS licenses for many of my boxes are "procesor/hardware" licensese, meaning the basic OS that 'comes with' an SGI machine, a Sun machine, an HP machine, etc. Usually, you can't use these for commercial development without upgrading to a 'real' license.
Somewhere there's an R3000 emulator which you can actually get permission to run a free (as in beer) copy of SGI IRIX5 on. (You can get last year's version of IRIX, without a full development system, from SGI for free-as-in-beer if you have a physical box, as well.) You can also get a free (as in beer) version of OpenVMS if you have the physical hardware, thanks to the VMS Hobbyist project. I want to see more vendors offering things like this. Also, SIMH has a ton of old platforms emulated (like, 1960s and 1970s old). There are a number of free disk images you can download and play with, as well. Good luck finding compilers that old, though... [ you used to be able to find lots of precompiled gcc2.7 packages on the web, but most of those pages are only found via the Wayback machine now, if at all!:( ]
This is fairly impressive (20M of RAM? can you actually/do/ anything?), but I have a 386 (that I still use!) which runs Slackware. 20MHz, no 387 coprocessor, 200M hard drive, and 3 megs of RAM. Yes, three. For a while I used it as a network server, with Samba, Apache, and multiple users logging in to bash v.1. I had a lightweight MUD on there, but decided to go with a (heavier) CircleMUD; I just had to turn off Apache so the machine wasn't swapping to disk so much. Afterward, it became a small hardware test server and pvm client... no real problems running gcc 2.7, although a kernel compile took about a day. I played with X11, but it was sort of slow and I didn't really know what I was doing with it enough to speed it up. I could open a couple xterms. Of course, I realize now that I should have used rxvt, and I could have set twm to use the screen's actual resolution instead of some huge virtual desktop space. (Scrolling around the virtual desktop wasn't that bad, though.) I eventually added a 400M disk so I could install some more stuff, and adding 4M more of RAM made the machine nice and speedy, since it cut down on some swapping; at that point, I could feasibly run autoconf scripts in only a few minutes. (they used to compile so many test scripts and run so many instances of bash that under 3M they would take 10-30 minutes to run, depending on their length). Oh, it was a libc5 installation, for reference. Running gcc with -pipe made it compile a good bit quicker on some source code (10 seconds for a few thousand lines?). I never bothered to try glibc, because it wasn't very stable then, and in order to link anything against it, you had to put some 80+ meg libc.so file in/usr/lib.
I had a P60 with 16M of RAM that ran W95 well, and I could run fvwm2 with virtual desktops on it just fine. Compiles were nice and quick. I played with various kernel configs quite a few times. One of the things that I liked was UMSDOS with loadlin, letting me randomly throw slack or RH onto a W95 box without having to do re-partitioning crap.
Of course, now with the monstrosity that is GNOME, you really need at least a 200MHz box for a modern linux GUI. KDE is snappier, though. Part of the slowness is all the calls and lookups to i18n just to display a string, although that really can't be helped if you want non-English support (some programs let you compile them without i18n, though:).
The 386 is now a spare test box and runs a few servers, including NFS.
For comparison, the 386 machine ran Windows 3.1 OK with mIRC and Netscape 3.0, but trying to run IE (was it version 4 then or something?) brought the machine to a halt. It took no less than 30 minutes for IE to start up and 5-10 minutes to load a lightweight HTML page with no graphics.. and clicking the scrollbar meant you should go brew some coffee while you waited.
I saw some page somewhere that told you what you could disable in XP to make it run quicker, and that came in handy a little while back. My mom had a Duron 900MHz with 128M of RAM that ran WinME all right, although AOL7 crept along sometimes; when the motherboard died, we moved the hard drive into a Celeron 533 and installed XP (couldn't find any ME install media, and the duron didn't even come with OEM discs)... it was unusable with 64M of RAM, but I came up with another 64M stick and it could run either AOL *or* a few apps at once. I think we used Mozilla on there, and then Firefox 1.0... 1.5 was too slow, and 2.0 swapped to disk to the point of unusability.
What gives with new versions of software having more layers of complexity with no real added benefit, and more and more features that can't be turned off? In well-designed software, there should always be a way to bring it down to a minimal/lightweight config; this isn't just for older machines, but for when you really don't need to devote all of your RAM to features you will never use.
[I've also seen wikipedia delete (hide from non-admins) all revisions of "non-notable entries." I'm not sure I would consider that a wise idea, but maybe the current system just isn't capable of different degrees of page deletion, and all of it is handled the same.] Anyway, back on topic: What if part of the allegations are true?
There's some other interesting bits at worldgolf.com, both about this current story (wikipedia claiming part of rush limbaugh's entry got switched? huh?) and about other interesting things about Zoeller *grin*. It's funny to hear about Zoeller getting offended about an Internet posting when, while in the Deep South, he told Tiger Woods not to order fried chicken and collard greens.
I noticed that one of the linked articles mentioned a policy initiated on Sep. 28 that goes something like this: (1) RIAA decides to file a complaint against you (2) Ohio yanks your Internet access without warning (3) You have to prove your innocence (4) If you can't, you have to prove that you have deleted the offending content from your computer.
The University of Delaware currently runs an identical racket, but what UD does is pretty classic: in order for you to get your computed "checked" after deleting content, you have to hand it over to a UD service that charges a good bit of money to give you a stamp of approval---but only after making sure you've deleted ALL music and movies. I don't know if Ohio charges students money after the RIAA sends a complaint that isn't actually a legal charge (just a cease&desist, I think), but UD sure does.
Any lawyers out there want to tell me the likelihood of students filing a class-action suit against UD? I've seen too many friends having to fork over cash, sometimes when they haven't done anything wrong. (They couldn't manage to prove their innocence, so they had to pay to let UD scan their computers for all music and movies. Oh, and, if you own the CD, you still have to make your MP3s disappear, as UD considers ripping your own CDs to be incompatible with their "Code of the Web." I'm still trying to wrap my head around *that* one.)
Awesome!:) Send me an email when it's back up.. I probably have some things to contribute very soon!!! =) Plus, I'd love to look at the code in the wiki, and the coding styles and commenting.
Yeah, but often it's a question of: (1) Do I want minimal noise and some semblance of organization? OR (2) Do I want components whose leads haven't been cut off in very specific ways and wires that aren't quirky lengths?
After all, these things are called temporary breadboards for a reason, aren't they?
Sometimes the best option is to figure out what parts of the circuit are going to stay on the breadboards for a long time, or what components can just be thrown out and inexpensively replaced if the leads end up too short to be useful when aligned differently, etc.
One of the *best* sites out there that I've found for understanding the real mechanisms behind all kinds of electrical phenomena, in addition to telling you how to play with them, is Bill Beaty's Amateur Science pages. He also maintains archives of fringe theories and stuff, too, if you're curious about those sorts of things.
I think I agree with you---the objective is there should be rational, intelligent people making good decisions around us, so---
Good GOD, where is the problem? We don't want this to turn out like Gattaca, so, how about this: If Mary and Tom's baby Sarah has DNA that would make her likely to be a drug addict, then Mary and Tom can emphasize the problems associated with drugs during Sarah's upbringing. If Joe and Janet's baby Chris has DNA that would make him likely to be a bully, then Joe and Janet can raise Chris with the guise that violence is a danger area.
Man is not dictated entirely by DNA. Society has a 'DNA' of its own that is evolving right alongside our bodies.
Technology is supposed to HELP us, not HURT us. This is NOT the minority report. This is about society being able to better itself.
Think about it. Mitochondria have their own independent blueprint. Homo sapiens sapiens have their own blueprint. Now, cultures have a social blueprint.
I know this is going off-topic somewhat, but I don't understand why anyone wants to lock someone up just because they might *become* dangerous. Causality exists for a reason.
But, as one poster above mentioned, microbes in your body produce small amounts of ethanol.
The typical sober human BAC is 0.01%. There's still alcohol in there. It's a byproduct from the organisms living in your gut that are necessary for you to extract the proper nutrients from your food. In effect, your body naturally has a slight BAC, and this may vary depending on your diet, body chemistry, build, hydration, etc. It's possible to have a BAC of 0.02-0.03% while sober (although uncommon).
"Zero tolerance" rules usually have a cut-off of 0.02%, to account for this, but some unlucky people with weird body chemistry (0.025%, for example) might get screwed over. If the government is going to penalize for BAC levels in minors, they should offer free BAC tests at any time (via blood withdrawal) so that an individual can have documented proof that their natural levels may vary above the "zero tolerance" cut-off: a documented history which shows the individual's nominal variance of sobriety.
[ Of course, "zero tolerance" laws of any sort are often bad, because they typically are prosecuted as the-slightest-bit-of-indirect-evidence-is-as-good- as-proof (which could violate "innocent until proven guilty"---don't have an alibi? you're fucked!---even though US law was created such that you didn't need to prove an alibi!) and maximum-punishment-regardless-of-severity-of-crime (I believe this qualifies as unusual punishment!). Sometimes, overly-severe laws will be drafted with the idea that the first few citizens prosecuted should be draconianly exemplified as a deterrent, but then future cases might not be as strongly enforced... in other words, if you get caught first, you could be treated unfairly (right to a fair trial?) and be overpunished to scare others (all equal under the law?). But, I digress. ]
We shouldn't be spending money on breathalyzers. We should be spending money on some sort of reaction time tester, which would catch people who are too tired to safely drive as well as any drug that causes impairment.
Impairment in making decisions is another matter, as well as potential hallucinations... those should be caught, too, somehow.
Consider this: there were all sorts of irrational numbers, but we eventually came up with useful ways to classify them, and now we can use those properties to draw conclusions we other might not; before zero was used as a true number, working on problems with zeroes in them was probably awkward; before imaginary numbers were explored, we only knew that negative square roots aren't realistic but sometimes clean themselves up; or perhaps; different ordinals of infinity that have different properties. Perhaps there are multiple types of not-a-number that actually have some interesting propertie? But, then again.. eh??
Slashdot Mirror
It annoys me how long blacklists will keep you on, even after they haven't gotten any reports of spam from your IP range. Why is this so?
A fair number of blacklists (at least a few years ago) had a we-won't-ever-remove-you - unless-you-send-us-lots-of-proof - that-your-IP-range-is-no-longer-used-for-spam policy. IP ranges ought to expire from blacklists when there haven't been many complaints for a while.
In fact, blacklists ought to e-mail admin@mailserver when your IP range is blocked, and e-mail you monthly to remind you you're on a blacklist. Why? Most mail systems are polite and tell you if they're rejecting your messages because of a blacklist, but some will silently reject your messages and you might not realize your mail isn't being delivered for a long time, hence you might not realize you've been blacklisted somewhere.
An alternative is that you can poll the blacklists periodically for your IP ranges to see if you've been blocked, but this seems like it places a burden on you and is somewhat irresponsible for the blacklists to do (I know, most of them say "we're a private org, we do what we want, if an ISP is using us for a blacklist then that's the ISP's prerogative, and we don't care," but if you know your blacklist is being used by others, especially by major ISP's, I still think it's somewhat irresponsible to not notify admins that you're blacklisting their IP ranges.)
Clever trick: most mail systems are configured so that USERNAME+anything will always be delivered to USERNAME (e.g., bob+ebay, bob+paypal, bob+cray-cyber, etc). This way, you don't have to deliver *@domain to your inbox nor set up forwarding aliases.
What I don't understand is that so-called "customer service" isn't designed to provide service to customers!
...
I *paid* for your product. This means that I theoretically have also paid for adequate documentation and human guidance when needed.
I don't understand why many products lack adequate documentation. For example, there's IR spectral analysis software called GRAMS that I've worked with, and the documentation doesn't completely describe the behavior of many parts of the built-in programming language which is provided for customers to use to automate tasks. Many hardware products I've bought don't come with any sort of "Troubleshooting" manual.
I think the best approach is something like this:
(1) Documentation should have at least the following:
- "Quick setup" guide, in print and on-line, with diagrams and good explanations, and references such as "If your system does not match this type, please see page 5 in the FULL SETUP GUIDE" and "If this indicator does not appear, refer to section 10 in the BASIC TROUBLESHOOTING GUIDE"
- "Full setup" guide, in print and on-line
- "Basic troubleshooting" guide, in print and on-line
- "Advanced troubleshooting" guide, on-line and in print when sensible
- Comprehensive on-line cross-referenced index of product's features and all documentation topics
- Detailed on-line reference of behavior of each of product's features, one-by-one, explaining all valid inputs, all possible outputs, and all error codes and all their possible origins
- Chapter-by-chapter on-line manual giving overviews of all sections of product
- Chapter-by-chapter on-line manual giving overviews of common tasks, with multiple varied examples of each type of task
(2) Phone numbers, e-mail addresses, snail-mail addresses, websites (knowledgebase, bug database, customer forums, support forums, FAQ, driver and firmware downloads, HOWTO repository), catalog and order numbers for any advanced manuals, and other necessary contact information, distributed as follows:
- All of these references listed in the setup guides and other printed manuals
- Tips such as "When calling support about setup procedures, please describe your progress through each part of setup, not just the part which is troublesome."
- More detailed information about the tech-support options in appropriate places in the troubleshooting guides, task overview manuals, product overview manual, and detailed behavior/functionality reference. For example: "If these troubleshooting steps did not work, tell tech support that troubleshooting items 2-30 through 2-36 were tried and did not remedy the problem;" "When calling about this command, please inform tech support that Section 16-25 of the function manual did not answer your question."
(3) Phone menus for incoming calls that allow calls to be categorized so they can go to the right department and be pre-escalated if it can be established that there is something unusual going on. For example:
- "Please enter your product code... For this product, the JAMBOREE 2000, troubleshooting steps can be found in section 7 of the manual. If you do not have access to the manual, press 1. If you cannot determine which category your problem falls into, press 2. If you have identified your problem but cannot determine which troubleshooting steps are appropriate, press 3. If you have tried the troubleshooting steps but have questions about the results, press 4. If all troubleshooting in the manual has failed, press 5."
It's amazing how many vendors don't provide organized and detailed references. It also stumps me why so many tech support calls have gone like this:
"Hi, I'm calling about a problem I'm having with a certain feature in XYZ Software."
"Okay. Is the software installed? Have you gotten it to open at least once?"
"Yes. The software installed and will open, but I'm having a problem with feature ABC."
"Let me transfer your call."
"Hi, I'm calling about feature ABC in XYZ Software."
"Oh. Thi
Wow. You know, there are feeds for expiring domains (do they come from the registrars or from crawling services? not sure), so there ought to be feeds for the opposite somewhere :)
I wonder if we can round up a few people to do this. The only pitfall I can see is that I have a static IP, so they could just filter static IPs out (and net-savvy people who care about squatters are more likely to have static IPs than the Joe Schmoes that feed these squatters the hits they make money from).
Everybody is jumping on the DRM bandwagon to some extent. If they don't, the big media companies will shun them, and they'll lose a lot of potential market.
The part that worries me most about DRM is that I don't see any point at which it can stop (the slippery-slope problem). For example---what if we could imprint an experience upon your nervous system via EM fields? That closes the "analog hole"---the content goes straight from the media to the brain. (You can argue that the reverse process could be used to hijack the data stream: in short, a highly-advanced brain scanner (which of course would be illegal to own under some futuristic DMCA).) Another idea: we don't want people to have the potential to infringe on intellectual property, so we design movies to have a hypnotic effect that causes mild amnesia; you can't remember all the parts of the plot, but you remember loving the film. So, you pay to see it again and again...
I'm not trying to troll. I'm just scared, in a I-just-read-1984 kind-of way.
My examples above aren't too far-fetched. We can already beam picturesbeam an image straight into someone's retina, and there was a recent slashdot article about audio transmission through bone. Highly selective amnesia through hypnosis is possible, so there's a real possibility that, in the future, you will love a movie but not quite remember how it goes, so you will have to see it again (and again.. and again... and again...)
(add-to-class 'knowns :singular 'problem :singular 'situation
(there-exists
(such-that
(belongs-to-class problem 'problems)
(delay-eval
'(or
(belongs-to-class problem 'linguistic)
(belongs-to-class problem 'social)))
(has-item-with-properties 'parentheses
(there-exists
(such-that
(belongs-to-class situation 'negative)
(has-property 'pronunciation)
(has-property 'communication)))))))
[In other words...]
There's a social/linguistic problem of pronouncing and communicating the parentheses, though.
Gotcha... I can't say whether they were truly guilty of anything, either. Sometimes in the free software world, we find developers caving to corporations' demands thanks to those corporations' well-funded legal departments (thankfully, the EFF can sometimes help fight back when it's cases of just plain bullying), which is very unfortunate. They could have maybe trademarked GAIM from the start (I *think* that's okay under some open source licenses, as long as it's done properly)... I just think it's unfortunate that they gave in to AOL's wishes when they might not have had to.
My understanding of trademark law is that whoever registers a trademark gets to own it, even if someone else was using the name first, with the exception of the original user being very well-known and taking action against the trademark-filer as soon as possible (if they don't fight the party which was granted the trademark immediately, I believe this effectively forfeits their right to do so); after someone trademarks something, they are required to notify anyone else in their market with an identical or nearly-identical name that the name infringes on the trademark. I'm not sure to what extent the trademark owner has to legally pursue other parties with an infringing name. (For example, if Xerox took offense to a photocopier named SIRex ('simply, instantaneous, reproduxion'), is Xerox obligated to file suit, send a C&D letter, or just notify me that they have a trademark for a similar product and that I should tread carefully? If my product advertisements say "SIRex is not affiliated and Xerox, and SIRex machines are not produced by Xerox," would Xerox be okay enough with that?) a useful FAQ from the USPTO and FAQ about filing trademarks
"GAIM" was an acronym. "gaim" was not; it was designed to be an arbitrary* sequence of lowercase letters that, if they were uppercase, would have been the project's former name. If you want to argue that because "gaim" resembles "GAIM" and "GAIM" is an acronym that is infringing that "gaim" is also infringing, I only need to define "gaim" as an acronym that isn't infringing. For example, "globally available interactive messager" or something (see, then I don't even say "instant messenger!"), and you could even change how it's written (like "g.a.i.m." or "ga-im" or something) so it bears even less resemblance to AIM. Even if you can trademark "AIM" under the premise that it's an acronym, and you can say that "aim" is infringing if it's "obviously" referring to the same thing or a similar thing, your trademark wouldn't apply to any "AIM" or "aim" that was deliberately spelled out to be a *different* acronym, unless you could prove that it causes significant consumer confusion, and I don't think "AOL Instant Messenger" and "globally-available--interactive-messager" are very close anymore.
;)
* - not quite the right word, but you know what I mean.
I sure hope that the default package install will have symlinks so that things don't break. I know they said there will be a compatibility layer for the plug-in API, but I don't want to have to go around and make a bunch of symlinks every time I install pidgin so that things expecting it to be called "gaim" don't break.
While we're on the topic of the "aim" name, I had a libfaim-based bot called 'aimbot' years ago, and I took it off sourceforge when I got an e-mail saying "cease and desist: AOL says to remove the 3 letters 'aim' from your project name." I keep wanting to fix it up to run again (the protocol changed, so I have to use a newer libfaim, but libfaim's API is very different now, so it would have to be heavily reworked) and re-release it, but I'm not sure what to do about the name. I could maybe just advertise it as "Automated Interactive Machine roBOT" perhaps? I was considering renaming it anyway, because I got a lot of e-mails asking how to set up my "Quake Aim Bot." Evidently, there was some quake bot circulating at the time in a file called aimbot.zip.
Maybe I'll call it "samebot," signifying that it's the same bot that was called "aimbot"
I used to check out http://freshmeat.net/ almost daily, but that was when I was only a few years into Linux and still on an endless search for software that did different things, and at the time it seemed simpler to just wait and see what came up on fm every day (you could easily tell how active things were that way, too). Speaking of fm---does anyone have a copy of that old butchered-meat logo fm used to have, waaaay back, before the beginning of the fm II theme?
About weekly, I'll check out http://amasci.com/ (amateur science and electricity stuff), http://en.wikipedia.org/ (duh), http://www.cray-cyber.org/ (free supercomputer access), http://www.hpcalc.org/ (HP48/49/etc calculator stuff), etc., to check for new stuff. I'll check my http://facebook.com/ and http://myspace.com/orangesquid (shuddup) messages about weekly. From time to time I might browse http://www.amazing1.com/ (catalog which has Tesla coils and stuff, though they're not actually the best place for parts/kits/devices) or search for scientific equipment or old unix systems on http://www.ebay.com/ (see the Used SGI Buying Guide FAQ, etc).
I also check up on some of my friends via http://os.livejournal.com/friends every few days.
Lately I've been choosing a new section on http://scitoys.com/ to read every few days. Every few weeks, I'll usually find a different information-type site to read through gradually, or pick a topic to research on wikipedia.
Ooh, just found Emulab - looks promising!! Offers access to lots of PCs running various OSs.
Also, forgot to mention access to Cray Unicos (and other supercomputers!) and pdp unix preservation society (not just PDP images).
I think id Games used to compile on SGIs. I know MS did some development on Xenix/i286 and Xenix/i386 (somewhere, there's an MS quote about how MS-DOS/Win is not suitable for serious development..hah). In fact, the i286 had a memory management unit, but the only OS (that I know of) which took full advantage of it was Xenix. Minix/i286 may have supported it to some extent, as well. ... and there's always emulators that run under DOS that you could run under Bochs or QEMU.
Some emulator pages....mac&ppc, simos (for SGI/IRIX5), DEC 10 and Big Iron, various DEC emulation, Apple Lisa, Z80 sim&development, yaze Z80, Apricot and Amstrad, bochs x86,
Other possibly helpful links:
emulators on freshmeat
OS kernels on freshmeat
OS's on freshmeat
bunches of old OS disk images
CP/M and MP/M
CP/M disks
Lisa Xenix
LisaOS
tandy xenix
elks and uclinux
freevms
freedos
Apple I (not II) development
reactos - winnt clone
MAME stuff and pinball Mame
info about tandy disk images
solaris minix
minix info and version 3
various free (as in beer and/or speech) OS list
The OS list at tunes.org
OH, man. Thanks for reminding me. I need to set up my POWER2 replacement box. (My original POWER2 had its 700W power supply start reporting error codes, and then start dying randomly, and then no longer boot.) Unfortunately, I haven't been able to find my AIX media in about two years :-/ maybe my next search will go better...
:( ]
I have a bunch of different machines running different OS's, but I'd never have the resources to have a compile farm. Also, the OS licenses for many of my boxes are "procesor/hardware" licensese, meaning the basic OS that 'comes with' an SGI machine, a Sun machine, an HP machine, etc. Usually, you can't use these for commercial development without upgrading to a 'real' license.
Somewhere there's an R3000 emulator which you can actually get permission to run a free (as in beer) copy of SGI IRIX5 on. (You can get last year's version of IRIX, without a full development system, from SGI for free-as-in-beer if you have a physical box, as well.) You can also get a free (as in beer) version of OpenVMS if you have the physical hardware, thanks to the VMS Hobbyist project. I want to see more vendors offering things like this. Also, SIMH has a ton of old platforms emulated (like, 1960s and 1970s old). There are a number of free disk images you can download and play with, as well. Good luck finding compilers that old, though... [ you used to be able to find lots of precompiled gcc2.7 packages on the web, but most of those pages are only found via the Wayback machine now, if at all!
A usenet/a, post that I just found suggests that "/etc" could be considered to 'stand' for something like: administrative tools, etc. (read the posts for what I mean) -- but that's meaningless now, since the proper place for those things has become /sbin and /var/adm. I guess that leaves /etc just having miscellaneous system files, so it really is an "et caetera."
I can find hardly any references to "edit these carefully," but I know I've heard it plenty of times. Huh.
I've heard "EDIT THESE CAREFULLY!" tons of places, but I haven't seen it posted in any comments yet here..
How about, someone hop over to PUPS/TUHS and look at some of the original bell labs source / docs?
This is fairly impressive (20M of RAM? can you actually /do/ anything?), but I have a 386 (that I still use!) which runs Slackware. 20MHz, no 387 coprocessor, 200M hard drive, and 3 megs of RAM. Yes, three. For a while I used it as a network server, with Samba, Apache, and multiple users logging in to bash v.1. I had a lightweight MUD on there, but decided to go with a (heavier) CircleMUD; I just had to turn off Apache so the machine wasn't swapping to disk so much. Afterward, it became a small hardware test server and pvm client... no real problems running gcc 2.7, although a kernel compile took about a day. I played with X11, but it was sort of slow and I didn't really know what I was doing with it enough to speed it up. I could open a couple xterms. Of course, I realize now that I should have used rxvt, and I could have set twm to use the screen's actual resolution instead of some huge virtual desktop space. (Scrolling around the virtual desktop wasn't that bad, though.) I eventually added a 400M disk so I could install some more stuff, and adding 4M more of RAM made the machine nice and speedy, since it cut down on some swapping; at that point, I could feasibly run autoconf scripts in only a few minutes. (they used to compile so many test scripts and run so many instances of bash that under 3M they would take 10-30 minutes to run, depending on their length). Oh, it was a libc5 installation, for reference. Running gcc with -pipe made it compile a good bit quicker on some source code (10 seconds for a few thousand lines?). I never bothered to try glibc, because it wasn't very stable then, and in order to link anything against it, you had to put some 80+ meg libc.so file in /usr/lib.
:).
I had a P60 with 16M of RAM that ran W95 well, and I could run fvwm2 with virtual desktops on it just fine. Compiles were nice and quick. I played with various kernel configs quite a few times. One of the things that I liked was UMSDOS with loadlin, letting me randomly throw slack or RH onto a W95 box without having to do re-partitioning crap.
Of course, now with the monstrosity that is GNOME, you really need at least a 200MHz box for a modern linux GUI. KDE is snappier, though. Part of the slowness is all the calls and lookups to i18n just to display a string, although that really can't be helped if you want non-English support (some programs let you compile them without i18n, though
The 386 is now a spare test box and runs a few servers, including NFS.
For comparison, the 386 machine ran Windows 3.1 OK with mIRC and Netscape 3.0, but trying to run IE (was it version 4 then or something?) brought the machine to a halt. It took no less than 30 minutes for IE to start up and 5-10 minutes to load a lightweight HTML page with no graphics.. and clicking the scrollbar meant you should go brew some coffee while you waited.
I saw some page somewhere that told you what you could disable in XP to make it run quicker, and that came in handy a little while back. My mom had a Duron 900MHz with 128M of RAM that ran WinME all right, although AOL7 crept along sometimes; when the motherboard died, we moved the hard drive into a Celeron 533 and installed XP (couldn't find any ME install media, and the duron didn't even come with OEM discs)... it was unusable with 64M of RAM, but I came up with another 64M stick and it could run either AOL *or* a few apps at once. I think we used Mozilla on there, and then Firefox 1.0... 1.5 was too slow, and 2.0 swapped to disk to the point of unusability.
What gives with new versions of software having more layers of complexity with no real added benefit, and more and more features that can't be turned off? In well-designed software, there should always be a way to bring it down to a minimal/lightweight config; this isn't just for older machines, but for when you really don't need to devote all of your RAM to features you will never use.
[I've also seen wikipedia delete (hide from non-admins) all revisions of "non-notable entries." I'm not sure I would consider that a wise idea, but maybe the current system just isn't capable of different degrees of page deletion, and all of it is handled the same.]
..."
Anyway, back on topic:
What if part of the allegations are true?
"Today's most voluble drinker may be U.S. Open and Masters champion Fuzzy Zoeller, who says surgery will be necessary on his chronic bad back 'only if the bars run out of vodka
There's some other interesting bits at worldgolf.com, both about this current story (wikipedia claiming part of rush limbaugh's entry got switched? huh?) and about other interesting things about Zoeller *grin*. It's funny to hear about Zoeller getting offended about an Internet posting when, while in the Deep South, he told Tiger Woods not to order fried chicken and collard greens.
I noticed that one of the linked articles mentioned a policy initiated on Sep. 28 that goes something like this:
(1) RIAA decides to file a complaint against you
(2) Ohio yanks your Internet access without warning
(3) You have to prove your innocence
(4) If you can't, you have to prove that you have deleted the offending content from your computer.
The University of Delaware currently runs an identical racket, but what UD does is pretty classic: in order for you to get your computed "checked" after deleting content, you have to hand it over to a UD service that charges a good bit of money to give you a stamp of approval---but only after making sure you've deleted ALL music and movies. I don't know if Ohio charges students money after the RIAA sends a complaint that isn't actually a legal charge (just a cease&desist, I think), but UD sure does.
Any lawyers out there want to tell me the likelihood of students filing a class-action suit against UD? I've seen too many friends having to fork over cash, sometimes when they haven't done anything wrong. (They couldn't manage to prove their innocence, so they had to pay to let UD scan their computers for all music and movies. Oh, and, if you own the CD, you still have to make your MP3s disappear, as UD considers ripping your own CDs to be incompatible with their "Code of the Web." I'm still trying to wrap my head around *that* one.)
Maybe the power supply was wired wrong, even /with/ a polarized cord?
[See http://amasci.com/amateur/whygnd.html%5D
Awesome! :) Send me an email when it's back up.. I probably have some things to contribute very soon!!! =) Plus, I'd love to look at the code in the wiki, and the coding styles and commenting.
MirrorDot managed to grab a few pages before the site went down, so you can at least peek at a few things:
Intro Page
Known Algorithms
Guidelines for submitting algorithms
Yeah, but often it's a question of:
(1) Do I want minimal noise and some semblance of organization? OR
(2) Do I want components whose leads haven't been cut off in very specific ways and wires that aren't quirky lengths?
After all, these things are called temporary breadboards for a reason, aren't they?
Sometimes the best option is to figure out what parts of the circuit are going to stay on the breadboards for a long time, or what components can just be thrown out and inexpensively replaced if the leads end up too short to be useful when aligned differently, etc.
One of the *best* sites out there that I've found for understanding the real mechanisms behind all kinds of electrical phenomena, in addition to telling you how to play with them, is Bill Beaty's Amateur Science pages. He also maintains archives of fringe theories and stuff, too, if you're curious about those sorts of things.
I think I agree with you---the objective is there should be rational, intelligent people making good decisions around us, so---
Good GOD, where is the problem?
We don't want this to turn out like Gattaca, so, how about this:
If Mary and Tom's baby Sarah has DNA that would make her likely to be a drug addict, then Mary and Tom can emphasize the problems associated with drugs during Sarah's upbringing. If Joe and Janet's baby Chris has DNA that would make him likely to be a bully, then Joe and Janet can raise Chris with the guise that violence is a danger area.
Man is not dictated entirely by DNA. Society has a 'DNA' of its own that is evolving right alongside our bodies.
Technology is supposed to HELP us, not HURT us. This is NOT the minority report. This is about society being able to better itself.
Think about it. Mitochondria have their own independent blueprint. Homo sapiens sapiens have their own blueprint. Now, cultures have a social blueprint.
I know this is going off-topic somewhat, but I don't understand why anyone wants to lock someone up just because they might *become* dangerous. Causality exists for a reason.
But, as one poster above mentioned, microbes in your body produce small amounts of ethanol.
- as-proof (which could violate "innocent until proven guilty"---don't have an alibi? you're fucked!---even though US law was created such that you didn't need to prove an alibi!) and maximum-punishment-regardless-of-severity-of-crime (I believe this qualifies as unusual punishment!). Sometimes, overly-severe laws will be drafted with the idea that the first few citizens prosecuted should be draconianly exemplified as a deterrent, but then future cases might not be as strongly enforced... in other words, if you get caught first, you could be treated unfairly (right to a fair trial?) and be overpunished to scare others (all equal under the law?). But, I digress. ]
The typical sober human BAC is 0.01%. There's still alcohol in there. It's a byproduct from the organisms living in your gut that are necessary for you to extract the proper nutrients from your food. In effect, your body naturally has a slight BAC, and this may vary depending on your diet, body chemistry, build, hydration, etc. It's possible to have a BAC of 0.02-0.03% while sober (although uncommon).
"Zero tolerance" rules usually have a cut-off of 0.02%, to account for this, but some unlucky people with weird body chemistry (0.025%, for example) might get screwed over. If the government is going to penalize for BAC levels in minors, they should offer free BAC tests at any time (via blood withdrawal) so that an individual can have documented proof that their natural levels may vary above the "zero tolerance" cut-off: a documented history which shows the individual's nominal variance of sobriety.
[ Of course, "zero tolerance" laws of any sort are often bad, because they typically are prosecuted as the-slightest-bit-of-indirect-evidence-is-as-good
We shouldn't be spending money on breathalyzers. We should be spending money on some sort of reaction time tester, which would catch people who are too tired to safely drive as well as any drug that causes impairment.
Impairment in making decisions is another matter, as well as potential hallucinations... those should be caught, too, somehow.
Consider this: there were all sorts of irrational numbers, but we eventually came up with useful ways to classify them, and now we can use those properties to draw conclusions we other might not; before zero was used as a true number, working on problems with zeroes in them was probably awkward; before imaginary numbers were explored, we only knew that negative square roots aren't realistic but sometimes clean themselves up; or perhaps; different ordinals of infinity that have different properties. Perhaps there are multiple types of not-a-number that actually have some interesting propertie? But, then again.. eh??