If you went to see Remedy you'd notice that the tree has marks from surviving many a fire of the hundreds of years. Redwoods have very thick bark and don't tend to burn during forest fires. That is if the fire goes through mature forest.
When a clearcut happens the ecology is disrupted and many bushes grow up. This creates a thick underbrush which burns hoter and faster than fires in mature forests. This problem of over growth in clearcuts is why they use spray herbicides to keep down the brush. Instead of sustainable logging where you only take some trees but leave the ecosystem intact, clearcutting strips everything down. When it grows back you then have a forest that will never on it's own return to the stable old growth ecology. Not even in 2000 years!
First off there have been a few other articles about this. First on Kuro5hin and a video (real video i'm sorry).
Regarding the boxes. They are all donated either to ACCRC in Oakland or FreeGeek in Portland. We spent the last several weeks going through all the old lower end boxes they had and trying to make workable boxes out of them. Because we were getting together 235 computers we lowered our standards from what ACCRC or FreeGeek normally will send out. The boxes range from 100 mhz to 333mhz P I's and II's. Our goal at accrc was to get 64 megs of ram but freegeek doesn't have quite the resources that accrc gets from the bay area so they used 8meg edo simm's which means the box only gets 32megs total. All of the boxes have NIC cards, 1 gig or better hard drives, and a video card. There were sound cards in a bunch of them but we didn't have the time to go through and configure them. The same goes for modems, we actually tried to add modems but if kudzu didn't find it we just left it in there unconfigured and moved on to the next box.
The final setup we used was based on a netinstall / net boot system that the freegeek folks have put together called lessdisks. After a little pain recompiling the kernels to make sure we had support for all the random ethernet cards we got the install process really streamlined. We'd make sure the box had a hard drive, ram, video, and ethernet. Then we'd pop in the netinstall disk. It boot up using grub and our kernel would just nfs mount from a local server. Everything else was pulled over the network. We had scripts for formatting the hard drives which just set everything up with boot, swap, and one big main partition. On the server we had a clone of a server which was used as the base for each install. After everything was copied over we ran a bunch of scripts which tried to detect all the hardware. We then had like 4 questions which we need to answer on each box to detect the sound card, video for x, and mouse. This process made doing a couple hundred installs MUCH easier. Because we were finishing up the software configuration at the same time as we were rolling out boxes we have another option in the lessdisks install to do an rsync update. This let us fiddle with the spanish configuration and setup until two days before we packed everything up on palettes.
We used ICE for the window manager, Rox as a desktop, and KOffice for the basic apps. KDE, Gnome, StarOffice, and Mozilla were all way to bloated for this class of machine.
If you're in the Bay Area or Portland and are interested we will be working on sending more shipments of computers to south america in a few months. Please send me an email, evan at indymedia.org if you want to be notified when we start.
Yeah we have tried to include UPS's but the problem is that by the time they get donated they are often bad. We don't want to send down a UPS which will break and then we leave people with a toxic waste problem they can't deal with cleanly. Unfortunately we were able only to send a few UPS's in the container.
FreeGreek is actually helping out on this project a lot! They put together a bunch of the computers and helped us with the install. Despite the salon article we actually used Debian for the install not Mandrake. It was the FreeGeek folks who put together the netinstall.
I think it's really importiant to have both open media and open source. I'm one of the webmasters behind www.indymedia.org and we're working on building a new paradigm for news. One that is open and democratic, build on open publishing models and open source software.
That said the problems of a new open news media are very real. How do you organize all this content. What's worth promoting and what isn't? We've talked about building a slashdot type moderation system that molds and shapes how articles get listed. Kinda like a cross between kuro5hin's article moderation and slashdot's comment system.
One thing we've realized is that some people involved in the Independent Media Centers are trained journalists and some are less professional. You can really can tell the difference. Journalists will call up people for quotes, attempt to check their facts, writes in the second or third person, etc...
One of the things that has worked best at the IMC has been our comment system. We have an open publishing model, and when people post incorrect information it is quickly countered by somebody reading the site.
I think this kind of structured colloborative news is what makes a news site exist well within the internet as a medium. Much like the early TV broadcasts were just radio announcers on camra, most early news sites are just print or tv news jammed in to the new medium. Slashdot, kuro5hin, indymedia, and many others are starting to move forward in exploring how this new medium can really be used.
It's interesting that this push is coming not from journalists but geeks and the open source movement. It represents a potential major shift in power in who gets a say and control over this new medium. Take indymedia for an example, some of our tech collective members have worked on major commercial news sites, but because of the structure of those organizations we were only able to really use the medium in this seperate confrontational project. That the people who used to be minnions in the old world are taking power and shifting the terms of the public debate should scare the existing power structure as much as any molotov cocktail.
I think the whole ski mask argument really scares me. If I want to walk in public and exercise my rights not to have my identity shared I should have that right. In fact I've tried to exercise that right more than once. When I show up to a protest to express my free speech rights my identity is a very contested issue. From London to Seattle and DC the cops use security cameras and photographers to try and record and identify who's protesting. Knowing this and not wanting to have a longer FBI file than I already had, I wore a face mask at a some of the protest in DC. In short I was demanding that I had the right to peaceably assemble anonymously. After leaving a permitted march where we walked on the sidewalk I was tracked down and harassed by the cops. When I asked them why they were demanding to know my name, address, place of work, friends names, etc... they said that 'detectives' had told them to track down and find out who I was. They didn't arrest me for trying to conceal my identity, but I was singled out because I attempted to remain anonymous. Some people are arrested for hiding their identify in a public space, 30 anarchists were arrested while sitting in a public park on May 1st in NYC at a gathering they actually had a permit for.
We need privacy and the ability to be anonymous in both the online and offline worlds. I'm fine with them demanding that I not take a gun in to the bank while wearing a mask, but I think we need to demand the right to privacy and anonymity. Corporations like Seagram doing give a fuck about your rights, they care about profit. If we are going to have secure rights, then we can't rely on CEO's and their vapid promises.
The WTO represents a serious change in the way nations and global corporations interact. It is the concentration of power in an unelected international court to inforce the rights of capital. It is a world court to which national and state laws can be overturned with out appeal. Please read up on what the WTO means to all of us. The growing power of the WTO is going to be one of the defining features of global economics and politics in the 21st century.
Consider, in the future you may not be able to pass a law which protects the environment, enforces minimum wages, or any number of other 'anti-free trade' laws.
I think he's wrong is using the term Cybercommunism because it isn't communist. Communism is based on a more equitable distribution of wealth and power run by a centralized power who knows what's best for the masses. The Open Source movement is much more Anarcho-Syndicalist because it is a decentralized movement that rewards both giving to the community and individual effort and work. Both Communism and Capitalism are very hierarchical systems where those people on the top decided what's best for most other people. Libertarianism get's it partially right because they attack that hierarchy but they don't replace it with an egalitarian community oriented society. Like Libertarianism pure Anarchism is very similar with roots in the left rather than the right. Anarcho-Syndicalism is a combination of egalitarian community oriented values of communism and the decentralized anti-hierarchical ideas of Libertarianism.
My point is that in the Open Source community people are working as a collective contributing individual effort for a common goal without being told by a higher authority what to do and exactly how to do it. It's easier to look at the Open Source community as it compares to simple dichotomies of cold war politics but isn't accurate. It's better market speak to say cybercommunism than cyber-neo-anarcho-syndicalist.:)
FYI: Anarcho-Syndicalism was a major movement in northern Spain during the 1930's, and fought with other leftist such as the Communists, Socialists, and Social Democrats against the Fascists lead by Franco. The Fascists won and they were pretty much all killed or driven in to exile.
MySQL is a solid web tuned relational database. PostgresSQL is an academic database that implements many features MySQL doesn't but it takes a serious performance hit with all of those features.
Not to be heretical or anything but I was doing some benchmarking on MySQL's LIKE versus == matching on int's. It was actually faster using LIKE. I don't know why but I suspect it's because LIKE uses some sort of binary tree to find the int and the == tries to walk through them. This is not the case when you're using like to match a string or substring, in that case == seemed to work better.
I've been working with some people on building an open source calendar sharing protocol. We haven't gone very far, but it looks like it will be xml based, using a lot of the ideas from the iCal standards. I've written an vCal writer in perl, and a partial reader which helped me get a feel for the standard. The real pain I found was parsing repeating events.
We are trying to build a global network where everybody will run a calendar on their website and the data can be shared and used by people anybody who wants to use it. Once we get that up maybe we could build an open source, open content net syndication system for more that just calendar data.
They are a totally unaccountable corporation that has no problem gutting old growth forests for short term profit. I'm glad they are using linux, but come on folks. Is all the open source movement about getting accepted by corporate America? Do you know who these people are? They are the ones who have willingly embraced the M$ monopoly. They are about conformity, and profit, not innovation, creatively, individuality, and freedom. Every time I read about corporations adopting open source applications the more I am convinced that he open source movement is being co-opted.
For a real look at what Home Depot does in it's soulless presuit of profit, check out Home Depot Sucks.com. Also check out their section on hacking the their PA system for fun and agit-prop.
I've found that the number of lines I write can really depend on what I'm doing. Writing perl data munging scripts and web bots can take only a few lines. When you write code that does interface stuff the lines shoot up. It's a really rough estimate. I said 15 to 20, but thinking about it's probally more. Who actually keeps track of this kind of stuff?
From the rules section... How do I get to North Carolina?
Red Hat is footing the bill for all travel for the 6 winners. If you're from Richmond, VA or Istanbul, Turkey - we're flying you in to Raleigh, NC on May 21 or 22 (or before if you're able to attend the Linux Expo '99).
I suspect that you're being in Belgium isn't much of a problem. They got to burn the VC money somehow.;)
The referrer is really easy to spoof. I even worked on a little bot that walked the NY Times site which checks both cookies and referrer's. It's not that hard with the some perl and LWP at your side. As for the image, I know I'm not the only one to ran out and got O'Reilly's "Web Graphics Programming With Perl & GNU Software." I think on the whole that trying to compare the image is a waste of time.
According to the rules it's the image is a link so that actually narrows down the search space a lot. You can run a regex for all images with links, then request the page that is on the other end of the link. If it's got a form then it's a possibility.
Regardless it's pretty much a trivial problem to walk the site looking for the image. A more intersting problem might be seeing who could write the shortest perl script to do it. I bet it could be done in less than 5 lines.
I really like the concepts that are being played with by adding moderators to the slashdot discussion groups. I think this might be one of the more innovative features to be added to discussion groups in a long time.
That said, I don't like the new auto-moderation features. For the last few days I've been thrilled with the quality of the comments. I ignore all comments less than 2 and only get the interesting stuff. With this discussion that ability to filter out the crap seems to have been lost. I'd rather have moderators say they like stuff than have people be auto-rated. Many times somebody has something useful to say one time and not another. This is not always true, some people just write more intelligent comments than others, and sometimes I might want to read the intelligent comments. I don't want to make this too complex but perhaps what slashdot needs it a way to rate the posters, and also the posts. That way I can either look for the posts that got the high rating which would probably be a link saying the article was a hoax, links for more information, etc... or I could read posts by people who generally have something useful to say.
Actually Robert Morris graduated from Harvard and was one of the founders of ViaWeb an online store company that was snapped up by Yahoo for $50 Million. He went from net hacker to net millionaire. Interestingly enough he was head of Security for ViaWeb so I assume he's now running the security at Yahoo. For his 'crime' of writing and releasing the worm he got 400 hours of community service.
My main gripe with slashdot's performance is the rendering speed. Massive tables just are dog slow. Not that I'm all that much better. It does go to show that performance isn't just about cpu cycles. You can make a linux very slow, and you can make NT scream (shudder), it's just easier to get good performance when you're working on something that isn't based on VMS. O'Reilly has a decient book on web performance tuning if you're intersting.
"In Germany, first they came for the communists, and I didn't protest because I wasn't a communist. Then they came for the Jews, and I didn't protest because I wasn't a Jew. Then they came for the trade unionists, and I didn't protest because I wasn't a trade unionists. Then they came for the catholics and I didn't protest because I wasn't a catholic. Then they came from me -- and by that time there was nobody left to protest."
I can't find the name of the guy who said this but it's a very famous quote.
Slashdot Mirror
When a clearcut happens the ecology is disrupted and many bushes grow up. This creates a thick underbrush which burns hoter and faster than fires in mature forests. This problem of over growth in clearcuts is why they use spray herbicides to keep down the brush. Instead of sustainable logging where you only take some trees but leave the ecosystem intact, clearcutting strips everything down. When it grows back you then have a forest that will never on it's own return to the stable old growth ecology. Not even in 2000 years!
It's a toshiba 100mhz satelite notebook with a lucent orinoco card.
Regarding the boxes. They are all donated either to ACCRC in Oakland or FreeGeek in Portland. We spent the last several weeks going through all the old lower end boxes they had and trying to make workable boxes out of them. Because we were getting together 235 computers we lowered our standards from what ACCRC or FreeGeek normally will send out. The boxes range from 100 mhz to 333mhz P I's and II's. Our goal at accrc was to get 64 megs of ram but freegeek doesn't have quite the resources that accrc gets from the bay area so they used 8meg edo simm's which means the box only gets 32megs total. All of the boxes have NIC cards, 1 gig or better hard drives, and a video card. There were sound cards in a bunch of them but we didn't have the time to go through and configure them. The same goes for modems, we actually tried to add modems but if kudzu didn't find it we just left it in there unconfigured and moved on to the next box.
The final setup we used was based on a netinstall / net boot system that the freegeek folks have put together called lessdisks. After a little pain recompiling the kernels to make sure we had support for all the random ethernet cards we got the install process really streamlined. We'd make sure the box had a hard drive, ram, video, and ethernet. Then we'd pop in the netinstall disk. It boot up using grub and our kernel would just nfs mount from a local server. Everything else was pulled over the network. We had scripts for formatting the hard drives which just set everything up with boot, swap, and one big main partition. On the server we had a clone of a server which was used as the base for each install. After everything was copied over we ran a bunch of scripts which tried to detect all the hardware. We then had like 4 questions which we need to answer on each box to detect the sound card, video for x, and mouse. This process made doing a couple hundred installs MUCH easier. Because we were finishing up the software configuration at the same time as we were rolling out boxes we have another option in the lessdisks install to do an rsync update. This let us fiddle with the spanish configuration and setup until two days before we packed everything up on palettes.
We used ICE for the window manager, Rox as a desktop, and KOffice for the basic apps. KDE, Gnome, StarOffice, and Mozilla were all way to bloated for this class of machine.
If you're in the Bay Area or Portland and are interested we will be working on sending more shipments of computers to south america in a few months. Please send me an email, evan at indymedia.org if you want to be notified when we start.
Yeah we have tried to include UPS's but the problem is that by the time they get donated they are often bad. We don't want to send down a UPS which will break and then we leave people with a toxic waste problem they can't deal with cleanly. Unfortunately we were able only to send a few UPS's in the container.
FreeGreek is actually helping out on this project a lot! They put together a bunch of the computers and helped us with the install. Despite the salon article we actually used Debian for the install not Mandrake. It was the FreeGeek folks who put together the netinstall.
I think it's really importiant to have both open media and open source. I'm one of the webmasters behind www.indymedia.org and we're working on building a new paradigm for news. One that is open and democratic, build on open publishing models and open source software.
That said the problems of a new open news media are very real. How do you organize all this content. What's worth promoting and what isn't? We've talked about building a slashdot type moderation system that molds and shapes how articles get listed. Kinda like a cross between kuro5hin's article moderation and slashdot's comment system.
One thing we've realized is that some people involved in the Independent Media Centers are trained journalists and some are less professional. You can really can tell the difference. Journalists will call up people for quotes, attempt to check their facts, writes in the second or third person, etc...
One of the things that has worked best at the IMC has been our comment system. We have an open publishing model, and when people post incorrect information it is quickly countered by somebody reading the site.
I think this kind of structured colloborative news is what makes a news site exist well within the internet as a medium. Much like the early TV broadcasts were just radio announcers on camra, most early news sites are just print or tv news jammed in to the new medium. Slashdot, kuro5hin, indymedia, and many others are starting to move forward in exploring how this new medium can really be used.
It's interesting that this push is coming not from journalists but geeks and the open source movement. It represents a potential major shift in power in who gets a say and control over this new medium. Take indymedia for an example, some of our tech collective members have worked on major commercial news sites, but because of the structure of those organizations we were only able to really use the medium in this seperate confrontational project. That the people who used to be minnions in the old world are taking power and shifting the terms of the public debate should scare the existing power structure as much as any molotov cocktail.
I think the whole ski mask argument really scares me. If I want to walk in public and exercise my rights not to have my identity shared I should have that right. In fact I've tried to exercise that right more than once. When I show up to a protest to express my free speech rights my identity is a very contested issue. From London to Seattle and DC the cops use security cameras and photographers to try and record and identify who's protesting. Knowing this and not wanting to have a longer FBI file than I already had, I wore a face mask at a some of the protest in DC. In short I was demanding that I had the right to peaceably assemble anonymously. After leaving a permitted march where we walked on the sidewalk I was tracked down and harassed by the cops. When I asked them why they were demanding to know my name, address, place of work, friends names, etc... they said that 'detectives' had told them to track down and find out who I was. They didn't arrest me for trying to conceal my identity, but I was singled out because I attempted to remain anonymous. Some people are arrested for hiding their identify in a public space, 30 anarchists were arrested while sitting in a public park on May 1st in NYC at a gathering they actually had a permit for.
We need privacy and the ability to be anonymous in both the online and offline worlds. I'm fine with them demanding that I not take a gun in to the bank while wearing a mask, but I think we need to demand the right to privacy and anonymity. Corporations like Seagram doing give a fuck about your rights, they care about profit. If we are going to have secure rights, then we can't rely on CEO's and their vapid promises.
The WTO represents a serious change in the way nations and global corporations interact. It is the concentration of power in an unelected international court to inforce the rights of capital. It is a world court to which national and state laws can be overturned with out appeal. Please read up on what the WTO means to all of us. The growing power of the WTO is going to be one of the defining features of global economics and politics in the 21st century.
Consider, in the future you may not be able to pass a law which protects the environment, enforces minimum wages, or any number of other 'anti-free trade' laws.
There are lots of sites about what people are doing to counter the WTO, such as N30.org. You should also read up on the background of the new global capitalist order.
I know it's kinda extreem but she's the only O.S. women I know of. Still I think all of the perl porters are male.
I agree, perhaps if you choose those you could then get the option to directly metamoderate what other moderaters have said about that post.
I think he's wrong is using the term Cybercommunism because it isn't communist. Communism is based on a more equitable distribution of wealth and power run by a centralized power who knows what's best for the masses. The Open Source movement is much more Anarcho-Syndicalist because it is a decentralized movement that rewards both giving to the community and individual effort and work. Both Communism and Capitalism are very hierarchical systems where those people on the top decided what's best for most other people. Libertarianism get's it partially right because they attack that hierarchy but they don't replace it with an egalitarian community oriented society. Like Libertarianism pure Anarchism is very similar with roots in the left rather than the right. Anarcho-Syndicalism is a combination of egalitarian community oriented values of communism and the decentralized anti-hierarchical ideas of Libertarianism.
:)
My point is that in the Open Source community people are working as a collective contributing individual effort for a common goal without being told by a higher authority what to do and exactly how to do it. It's easier to look at the Open Source community as it compares to simple dichotomies of cold war politics but isn't accurate. It's better market speak to say cybercommunism than cyber-neo-anarcho-syndicalist.
FYI: Anarcho-Syndicalism was a major movement in northern Spain during the 1930's, and fought with other leftist such as the Communists, Socialists, and Social Democrats against the Fascists lead by Franco. The Fascists won and they were pretty much all killed or driven in to exile.
MySQL is a solid web tuned relational database. PostgresSQL is an academic database that implements many features MySQL doesn't but it takes a serious performance hit with all of those features.
Not to be heretical or anything but I was doing some benchmarking on MySQL's LIKE versus == matching on int's. It was actually faster using LIKE. I don't know why but I suspect it's because LIKE uses some sort of binary tree to find the int and the == tries to walk through them. This is not the case when you're using like to match a string or substring, in that case == seemed to work better.
-Evan
7. There are a few unexpected entries -- passport.com (????), ivillage.com ? Lends to questioning how broad of a sample
the study used.
I think you need to get out of the office a little more often. ivillage.com is a pretty major women's community site / portal.
I've been working with some people on building an open source calendar sharing protocol. We haven't gone very far, but it looks like it will be xml based, using a lot of the ideas from the iCal standards. I've written an vCal writer in perl, and a partial reader which helped me get a feel for the standard. The real pain I found was parsing repeating events.
Email me if you're interested in our mailinglist.
We are trying to build a global network where everybody will run a calendar on their website and the data can be shared and used by people anybody who wants to use it. Once we get that up maybe we could build an open source, open content net syndication system for more that just calendar data.
They are a totally unaccountable corporation that has no problem gutting old growth forests for short term profit. I'm glad they are using linux, but come on folks. Is all the open source movement about getting accepted by corporate America? Do you know who these people are? They are the ones who have willingly embraced the M$ monopoly. They are about conformity, and profit, not innovation, creatively, individuality, and freedom. Every time I read about corporations adopting open source applications the more I am convinced that he open source movement is being co-opted.
For a real look at what Home Depot does in it's soulless presuit of profit, check out Home Depot Sucks.com. Also check out their section on hacking the their PA system for fun and agit-prop.
I've found that the number of lines I write can really depend on what I'm doing. Writing perl data munging scripts and web bots can take only a few lines. When you write code that does interface stuff the lines shoot up. It's a really rough estimate. I said 15 to 20, but thinking about it's probally more. Who actually keeps track of this kind of stuff?
From the rules section...
;)
How do I get to North Carolina?
Red Hat is footing the bill for all travel for the 6 winners. If you're from Richmond, VA or Istanbul, Turkey - we're flying you in to Raleigh, NC on May 21 or 22 (or before if you're able to attend the Linux Expo '99).
I suspect that you're being in Belgium isn't much of a problem. They got to burn the VC money somehow.
The referrer is really easy to spoof. I even worked on a little bot that walked the NY Times site which checks both cookies and referrer's. It's not that hard with the some perl and LWP at your side. As for the image, I know I'm not the only one to ran out and got O'Reilly's "Web Graphics Programming With Perl & GNU Software." I think on the whole that trying to compare the image is a waste of time.
According to the rules it's the image is a link so that actually narrows down the search space a lot. You can run a regex for all images with links, then request the page that is on the other end of the link. If it's got a form then it's a possibility.
Regardless it's pretty much a trivial problem to walk the site looking for the image. A more intersting problem might be seeing who could write the shortest perl script to do it. I bet it could be done in less than 5 lines.
I really like the concepts that are being played with by adding moderators to the slashdot discussion groups. I think this might be one of the more innovative features to be added to discussion groups in a long time.
That said, I don't like the new auto-moderation features. For the last few days I've been thrilled with the quality of the comments. I ignore all comments less than 2 and only get the interesting stuff. With this discussion that ability to filter out the crap seems to have been lost. I'd rather have moderators say they like stuff than have people be auto-rated. Many times somebody has something useful to say one time and not another. This is not always true, some people just write more intelligent comments than others, and sometimes I might want to read the intelligent comments. I don't want to make this too complex but perhaps what slashdot needs it a way to rate the posters, and also the posts. That way I can either look for the posts that got the high rating which would probably be a link saying the article was a hoax, links for more information, etc... or I could read posts by people who generally have something useful to say.
Actually Robert Morris graduated from Harvard and was one of the founders of ViaWeb an online store company that was snapped up by Yahoo for $50 Million. He went from net hacker to net millionaire. Interestingly enough he was head of Security for ViaWeb so I assume he's now running the security at Yahoo. For his 'crime' of writing and releasing the worm he got 400 hours of community service.
My main gripe with slashdot's performance is the rendering speed. Massive tables just are dog slow. Not that I'm all that much better. It does go to show that performance isn't just about cpu cycles. You can make a linux very slow, and you can make NT scream (shudder), it's just easier to get good performance when you're working on something that isn't based on VMS. O'Reilly has a decient book on web performance tuning if you're intersting.
"In Germany, first they came for the communists, and I didn't protest because I wasn't a communist.
Then they came for the Jews, and I didn't protest because I wasn't a Jew.
Then they came for the trade unionists, and I didn't protest because I wasn't a trade unionists.
Then they came for the catholics and I didn't protest because I wasn't a catholic.
Then they came from me -- and by that time there was nobody left to protest."
I can't find the name of the guy who said this but it's a very famous quote.
Copyrighting a post on slashdot? Doesn't that seem to go against the ideas behind open source & copyleft?