Yes, I'll fess up, I'm the one who gave him the suggestion... but I'll qualify that by saying that I'm flatly refusing to run any AOL software on my computer, and encouraged Tim to do the same. And remember, you don't even give AOL a credit card number when you sign up for an AIM account -- only an AOL account.
Sorry buddy, that already happened. That's why you don't ever put your real email in the Slashdot box. Or if you want people to know it, obfruscate it in a humanly-obvious but garbage-to-spambot way. See mine; it's purposely weird, but you should be able to figure out my real email from it anyway. And of course "nebby101@hotmail.com" is in their databases.
Okay... right, battery-powered cars rely on an infrastructure. But how do you propose to build this intrastructure? What's the incentive? Right now there is almost none. Something drastic needs to change to build this and other necessary infrastructures. "Solar power needs much more research as well, in order to increase efficiency." What better way to encourage research than making the product vitally important to a lot of people (and their pocketbooks)?
I'd like to see a president (err, Congress... the president can't do much without them) do anything significant about energy. Right now the government seems to care about as much as the people (which is to be expected).
Hydro is good. Which is more important to you, a few (hundred thousand, million, whatever) little fishies, or how we are going to get our energy in the future? But there's more problems to hydropower than just the fishies -- see the Grand Canyon, for example -- but in the end it's a balance that we need to weigh out.
And battery-powered cars are more efficient as far as energy usage overall anyway, because cars give off most of the energy in the gas as heat, using only a little for actual work (I saw a 25% figure somewhere once), whereas power companies can, and have price incentives to, utilize a lot more of the energy in the fuel, which is much more efficient.
Wholeheartedly agree. A gradual increase in fossil fuel costs will fuel growth of cheap, alternative energy. Case in point: the recent NEC battery article. Imagine if the potential market for batteries with a high current capacity, high charge density, and fast charge times could double in the next year. With all the funding for R&D in alternative tech, we'll see the same "faster, cheaper, better" revolution occur in alternatvie energy as occurred (and is still occuring today) in computing technology. And on that note, a laptop battery that could do that would be very nice to have, too... except that it's not essential to the laptop that the battery last super-long; you could always carry around a spare or two; but powerful batteries are an absolutely essential source of power for electric cars, and there's a lot more money in that business, especially if gas prices climb higher. (and I ought to smack anyone who has bought an gas-guzzling SUV for their daily drive to work)..
The only reasonable way to do that is taxation -- where it matters. If us US citizens saw our gas prices even approach what some Europeans pay for gas... it'd hurt in the pocket for a little while, but in the end we'd probably wind up paying less by buying more efficient automobiles and appliances, and later automobiles and appliances that use alternative, renewable sources of energy.
Just imagine what would happen if all the fossil fuel supplies ran out today. Panic? Well with current rate of concern among people of "developed" nations, that might not happen today, but when it does, we will be no more prepared than we are right now. I'm not a pessimist, in fact quite the opposite; this should serve as a wake-up call. We can do something about it. Get out of your dream worlds, people. We were born into bondage, slaves of OPEC and the oil companies...:)
2 floppy disks -- free from AOL a while back (not entirely necessary anyway)
<100 MB download from http.<country>.debian.org -- free in the US, poor folks in Europe.
<1 hr install time -- depends. For me, free.
Look on luser's face when [s]he sees the server's been running longer than [s]he's been alive - Priceless (you did get the secret uptime.o package, didn't you?)
Remember, BogoMIPS are how many millions of times a processor can do absolutely nothing in a second. So the only thing that 87.04 tells me is that your processor isn't as good as mine for wasting time. nuf said.
Before you spout too much about kernel configuration, I'd suggest grabbing ESR's CML2 configuration system. This has all you want and more, the only possible problem being its reliance on Python (last I checked). It's very well thought-out and deserves acceptence into the kernel sometime soon.
I have used Reiser in the past, but some big fs corruption due in part to a badly-applied Reiser patch (I think...) forced me to reinstall, and I haven't gotten Reiser back in yet. Unfortunately my partition table is full at the moment (everything primary -- dang x86 partition table), so I can't even resize something to make room for a temporary backup partition. Anybody know how to make a primary partition become a logical partition, especially if resize is a possibility?
I suggest that anyone with some spare brain cycles port Folderol to Linux (source code is at Sourceforge). Strip out the screen saver graphics elements and it shouldn't be too hard (algorithms are usually pretty cross-platform).
As far as operability on a completely mucked system, I have on occasion relied on the (nice) fact that a.deb is really just an 'ar' archive.
Say I wanted to forcefully reinstall a package, not caring about the database and such, just get me my program back:
# mkdir/tmp/package-extract
# cd/tmp/package-extract
# ar x/path/to/archive/like/var/cache/apt/archives/file. deb
# cd/
# tar zxvf/tmp/package-extract/data.tar.gz
control.tar.gz in the same archive contains all the scripts and such, so you can even run those manually if you need to. And the package database is (for better or for worse) ASCII anyways, so even if you only can get 'ed' working, you can mess around with it anyway.
I used Red Hat and rpm for about 6 months. Then I discovered Debian, and liked it a lot better, largely because of its package management. rpm can conceivably do a lot of the things Debian packages can do, but Debian has it here, now. As for the multiple versions of packages advantage claimed by RPM users, I should note that Debian packages (most often libraries) can have a version appended to the end of the name, and many do. libc5 and libc6 are quite plainly two distinct packages as far as the package management system is concerned, even though they provide much the same functionality. This applies similarly with other packages whose maintainer(s) have judged that having two or more versions of that specific package on a system is useful.
As for the file dependencies, I can see how that is a good idea (you execute, link to, copy, move, etc. files, not packages), but as the article mentions, it expands the dependency tree quite a bit, and I have personally had no trouble with Debian's package-oriented package management (if you depend on one file in a package, you likely depend on, or could somehow benefit from, the rest of those files, and they would get installed anyway when you installed the package). Need the GNOME headers? apt-get install libgnome-dev. Not brain surgery, and beats Windows's install-remove system by a landslide. Mac uninstallers can leave things behind also, but being able to just throw away the app's folder, preferences, and in some cases control panel and extension, is a very nice idea IMHO, but it doesn't scale well. I'd like to see what OS X does. (pssst, anybody got the CD? Can you post an ISO?)
DVB is COFDM (coded orthagonal frequency division multiplexing). Search Google for more information than you could possibly want on this format. But I'll give some here for the sake of information (no, not karma:) :
As you might know, some broadcasters have raised issues with the 8-VSB standard presently in use in the US, claiming that it does not preform suffieiently well under multipath conditions such as the inner city that residents would instead opt for cable or satellite services (it would typically be either that or getting up and readjusting the antenna every time you changed a channel). They also claim that mobile reception (i.e., walking down a sidewalk watching TV or receiving data on, e.g., the next Palm, or tuning in while on the road) is significantly more reliable with COFDM-based systems such as DVB than the 8-VSB system is (although NxtWave claimed that they could solve this problem; however nothing has come yet, and COFDM by design can naturally cope with these situations well anyway; those better informed than I can fill in here). Independant and hopefully objective tests are currently in progress in and around the Washington, D.C. metropoliton area to substantiate these claims.
This is yet another device that uses the DVB standard (which, BTW, is the standard in all but about 4 (?) other countries currently in transition to digital television; or in some cases a slightly modified standard is used). Another, also mentioned elsewhere in these comments, is the Nokia Mediascreen, a arm-held (a bit too big for hand-held) 12" TFT-display DVB reciever plus GSM phone access plus SMS plus Internet (and running Linux). I have used^H^H^H^Hplayed around with a prototype, and even if nothing else, it's cool enough to justify changing the standard just so the Europeans can't keep it for themselves:) .
At the present, Nokia DVB products run Linux. Europeans and others privalaged with DVB television systems please show your support with your wallets (i.e., grab your Mediascreen as soon as it comes out), and US citizens... well we'll just have to wait and see how Congress reacts to the data gathered during the D.C. testing.
FWIW, if I could ever understand what exactly he means, throw whatever it is in a Vorbis comment field (like Genre? How different?) and be done with it. Don't try to invent new formats or modify MP3.
Perl can be cryptic (and so can C), but in a lot of cases it's much easier to understand. You can do high-level stuff easily. But I won't get into the language war here.
apt-get install task-samba
Took me about a half an hour to get it running, but 95% of that time was spent downloading it and then reading the documentation. A lot of distros give you decent defaults for Samba, or graphical config utilities to keep you out of the text files.
Can't comment on sendmail, but qmail was a PITA to set up (though worth the effort). The only reason it was such a pain, though, is because the defaults are set to work out of the box with what it was really designed for (big Internet mail servers). Again, a good dig into the documentation (or, lacking that, source code) gets you what you need 95% of the time.
Yes, I agree -- it's hard to find an OS that doesn't suck. But in the words of Michael Elkins, mutt author, "All mail clients suck. This one just sucks less.". The same can be applied to operating systems.
Okay, so we got this new P4 thing that weighs tons, draws more power than it takes to wake up Godzilla, and could replace your home furnace, but then we got this G4 thing that doesn't even need a fan and yet still seems to be twice as efficient for the megahurts. Now guess which one I want...
Only two itsy complaints: (1) why didn't Apple put more expansion bays in the PMac G4?, and (2) Why is it still 500 MHz? How do you go about overclocking the dang thing?
Anyone ever tried to get a G4 mobo in an ATX case? I'd take a drill and hacksaw to mine (even though it's a really nice case) if I could get a G4 to fit in, just for those extra bays. Anyway, wouldn't a beige ATX tower with a Mac inside look cool? How about funny?
Way cool. Just one question: how difficult would it be to match a fingerprint of a song from some other input than the original song? i.e., could you get it (or some similar algorithm and search combination) to recognize you whistling the theme to some song? I would imagine that you would really only have to turn down the hit accuracy limit, and probably correct for some temporal distortion (the typical listener will not be able to hum a song at exactly the same tempo after it is done), but this obviously depends on the structure of the psychoacoustic model.
Just throwing ideas around...
On a similar note, how badly _can_ you manipulate the sound before the fingerprint gets whacked?
Another useless suggestion: could this fingerprint be somehow rendered into a useful visualization for a song? Presently there's the spectrum analyzer and the scope, but if the fingerprint incorporates other elements (I'm not that experienced in audio, so I don't really know what's left...), could you display those? That would be cool -- and, if done correctly, informative.
Slashdot Mirror
Hyperlinking in progress! LiViD!
Yes, I'll fess up, I'm the one who gave him the suggestion... but I'll qualify that by saying that I'm flatly refusing to run any AOL software on my computer, and encouraged Tim to do the same. And remember, you don't even give AOL a credit card number when you sign up for an AIM account -- only an AOL account.
Sorry buddy, that already happened. That's why you don't ever put your real email in the Slashdot box. Or if you want people to know it, obfruscate it in a humanly-obvious but garbage-to-spambot way. See mine; it's purposely weird, but you should be able to figure out my real email from it anyway. And of course "nebby101@hotmail.com" is in their databases.
> BATTERIES ARE NOT ENERGY SOURCES
Okay... right, battery-powered cars rely on an infrastructure. But how do you propose to build this intrastructure? What's the incentive? Right now there is almost none. Something drastic needs to change to build this and other necessary infrastructures. "Solar power needs much more research as well, in order to increase efficiency." What better way to encourage research than making the product vitally important to a lot of people (and their pocketbooks)?
I'd like to see a president (err, Congress... the president can't do much without them) do anything significant about energy. Right now the government seems to care about as much as the people (which is to be expected).
Hydro is good. Which is more important to you, a few (hundred thousand, million, whatever) little fishies, or how we are going to get our energy in the future? But there's more problems to hydropower than just the fishies -- see the Grand Canyon, for example -- but in the end it's a balance that we need to weigh out.
And battery-powered cars are more efficient as far as energy usage overall anyway, because cars give off most of the energy in the gas as heat, using only a little for actual work (I saw a 25% figure somewhere once), whereas power companies can, and have price incentives to, utilize a lot more of the energy in the fuel, which is much more efficient.
Right, a sudden increase (with a few years' warning to allow people to change their acts) would cause much more of an impact (duh! brainfart).
Wholeheartedly agree. A gradual increase in fossil fuel costs will fuel growth of cheap, alternative energy. Case in point: the recent NEC battery article. Imagine if the potential market for batteries with a high current capacity, high charge density, and fast charge times could double in the next year. With all the funding for R&D in alternative tech, we'll see the same "faster, cheaper, better" revolution occur in alternatvie energy as occurred (and is still occuring today) in computing technology. And on that note, a laptop battery that could do that would be very nice to have, too... except that it's not essential to the laptop that the battery last super-long; you could always carry around a spare or two; but powerful batteries are an absolutely essential source of power for electric cars, and there's a lot more money in that business, especially if gas prices climb higher. (and I ought to smack anyone who has bought an gas-guzzling SUV for their daily drive to work)..
:)
The only reasonable way to do that is taxation -- where it matters. If us US citizens saw our gas prices even approach what some Europeans pay for gas... it'd hurt in the pocket for a little while, but in the end we'd probably wind up paying less by buying more efficient automobiles and appliances, and later automobiles and appliances that use alternative, renewable sources of energy.
Just imagine what would happen if all the fossil fuel supplies ran out today. Panic? Well with current rate of concern among people of "developed" nations, that might not happen today, but when it does, we will be no more prepared than we are right now. I'm not a pessimist, in fact quite the opposite; this should serve as a wake-up call. We can do something about it. Get out of your dream worlds, people. We were born into bondage, slaves of OPEC and the oil companies...
Dang, waaay too much $. Try again:
2 floppy disks -- free from AOL a while back (not entirely necessary anyway)
<100 MB download from http.<country>.debian.org -- free in the US, poor folks in Europe.
<1 hr install time -- depends. For me, free.
Look on luser's face when [s]he sees the server's been running longer than [s]he's been alive - Priceless (you did get the secret uptime.o package, didn't you?)
Remember, BogoMIPS are how many millions of times a processor can do absolutely nothing in a second. So the only thing that 87.04 tells me is that your processor isn't as good as mine for wasting time. nuf said.
Before you spout too much about kernel configuration, I'd suggest grabbing ESR's CML2 configuration system. This has all you want and more, the only possible problem being its reliance on Python (last I checked). It's very well thought-out and deserves acceptence into the kernel sometime soon.
I have used Reiser in the past, but some big fs corruption due in part to a badly-applied Reiser patch (I think...) forced me to reinstall, and I haven't gotten Reiser back in yet. Unfortunately my partition table is full at the moment (everything primary -- dang x86 partition table), so I can't even resize something to make room for a temporary backup partition. Anybody know how to make a primary partition become a logical partition, especially if resize is a possibility?
I suggest that anyone with some spare brain cycles port Folderol to Linux (source code is at Sourceforge). Strip out the screen saver graphics elements and it shouldn't be too hard (algorithms are usually pretty cross-platform).
As far as operability on a completely mucked system, I have on occasion relied on the (nice) fact that a .deb is really just an 'ar' archive.
/tmp/package-extract /tmp/package-extract /path/to/archive/like/var/cache/apt/archives/file. deb / /tmp/package-extract/data.tar.gz
Say I wanted to forcefully reinstall a package, not caring about the database and such, just get me my program back:
# mkdir
# cd
# ar x
# cd
# tar zxvf
control.tar.gz in the same archive contains all the scripts and such, so you can even run those manually if you need to. And the package database is (for better or for worse) ASCII anyways, so even if you only can get 'ed' working, you can mess around with it anyway.
I used Red Hat and rpm for about 6 months. Then I discovered Debian, and liked it a lot better, largely because of its package management. rpm can conceivably do a lot of the things Debian packages can do, but Debian has it here, now. As for the multiple versions of packages advantage claimed by RPM users, I should note that Debian packages (most often libraries) can have a version appended to the end of the name, and many do. libc5 and libc6 are quite plainly two distinct packages as far as the package management system is concerned, even though they provide much the same functionality. This applies similarly with other packages whose maintainer(s) have judged that having two or more versions of that specific package on a system is useful.
As for the file dependencies, I can see how that is a good idea (you execute, link to, copy, move, etc. files, not packages), but as the article mentions, it expands the dependency tree quite a bit, and I have personally had no trouble with Debian's package-oriented package management (if you depend on one file in a package, you likely depend on, or could somehow benefit from, the rest of those files, and they would get installed anyway when you installed the package). Need the GNOME headers? apt-get install libgnome-dev. Not brain surgery, and beats Windows's install-remove system by a landslide. Mac uninstallers can leave things behind also, but being able to just throw away the app's folder, preferences, and in some cases control panel and extension, is a very nice idea IMHO, but it doesn't scale well. I'd like to see what OS X does. (pssst, anybody got the CD? Can you post an ISO?)
"Helping people make their lives better, everyday". Right...
oops, ignore last line...
DVB is COFDM (coded orthagonal frequency division multiplexing). Search Google for more information than you could possibly want on this format. But I'll give some here for the sake of information (no, not karma :) :
:) .
As you might know, some broadcasters have raised issues with the 8-VSB standard presently in use in the US, claiming that it does not preform suffieiently well under multipath conditions such as the inner city that residents would instead opt for cable or satellite services (it would typically be either that or getting up and readjusting the antenna every time you changed a channel). They also claim that mobile reception (i.e., walking down a sidewalk watching TV or receiving data on, e.g., the next Palm, or tuning in while on the road) is significantly more reliable with COFDM-based systems such as DVB than the 8-VSB system is (although NxtWave claimed that they could solve this problem; however nothing has come yet, and COFDM by design can naturally cope with these situations well anyway; those better informed than I can fill in here). Independant and hopefully objective tests are currently in progress in and around the Washington, D.C. metropoliton area to substantiate these claims.
This is yet another device that uses the DVB standard (which, BTW, is the standard in all but about 4 (?) other countries currently in transition to digital television; or in some cases a slightly modified standard is used). Another, also mentioned elsewhere in these comments, is the Nokia Mediascreen, a arm-held (a bit too big for hand-held) 12" TFT-display DVB reciever plus GSM phone access plus SMS plus Internet (and running Linux). I have used^H^H^H^Hplayed around with a prototype, and even if nothing else, it's cool enough to justify changing the standard just so the Europeans can't keep it for themselves
At the present, Nokia DVB products run Linux. Europeans and others privalaged with DVB television systems please show your support with your wallets (i.e., grab your Mediascreen as soon as it comes out), and US citizens... well we'll just have to wait and see how Congress reacts to the data gathered during the D.C. testing.
In case you're wondering,
FWIW, if I could ever understand what exactly he means, throw whatever it is in a Vorbis comment field (like Genre? How different?) and be done with it. Don't try to invent new formats or modify MP3.
n's only factors are p and q. p and q are prime. In that case, phi(n) = (p-1)(q-1). That's all you really need to know for RSA.
Thank you for elaborating; that was exactly my point.
i.e., you don't have to use bad hardware.
And if you use Debian, it'll look exactly the same on the outside for a good number of supported platforms.
Oops (HTML globbed my include):
#include <unistd.h>
void main (void) { while (1) fork(); }
Okay?
I've crashed a Linux system with:
#include
void main (void) { while (1) fork(); }
Big deal; you don't even need a C compiler to crash Win2k.
But what other hardware does Linux run on? And then what other hardware does Win2k run on? Need I say more?
ssh:
apt-get install ssh
Works a lot better when you have Debian.
Perl can be cryptic (and so can C), but in a lot of cases it's much easier to understand. You can do high-level stuff easily. But I won't get into the language war here.
apt-get install task-samba
Took me about a half an hour to get it running, but 95% of that time was spent downloading it and then reading the documentation. A lot of distros give you decent defaults for Samba, or graphical config utilities to keep you out of the text files.
Can't comment on sendmail, but qmail was a PITA to set up (though worth the effort). The only reason it was such a pain, though, is because the defaults are set to work out of the box with what it was really designed for (big Internet mail servers). Again, a good dig into the documentation (or, lacking that, source code) gets you what you need 95% of the time.
Yes, I agree -- it's hard to find an OS that doesn't suck. But in the words of Michael Elkins, mutt author, "All mail clients suck. This one just sucks less.". The same can be applied to operating systems.
If you look at the link, you will see that it is easy to get Google's cached site version from the URL. Just do like:
http://www.google.com/search?q=cache:URL
Or just type:
cache:URL
into Google's "search" box.
This all assumes that Google has visited the site already so it's in the cache.
How about put Linux on? I thought Linux could do SMP for the G4 now. Am I wrong?
Okay, so we got this new P4 thing that weighs tons, draws more power than it takes to wake up Godzilla, and could replace your home furnace, but then we got this G4 thing that doesn't even need a fan and yet still seems to be twice as efficient for the megahurts. Now guess which one I want...
Only two itsy complaints: (1) why didn't Apple put more expansion bays in the PMac G4?, and (2) Why is it still 500 MHz? How do you go about overclocking the dang thing?
Anyone ever tried to get a G4 mobo in an ATX case? I'd take a drill and hacksaw to mine (even though it's a really nice case) if I could get a G4 to fit in, just for those extra bays. Anyway, wouldn't a beige ATX tower with a Mac inside look cool? How about funny?
Way cool. Just one question: how difficult would it be to match a fingerprint of a song from some other input than the original song? i.e., could you get it (or some similar algorithm and search combination) to recognize you whistling the theme to some song? I would imagine that you would really only have to turn down the hit accuracy limit, and probably correct for some temporal distortion (the typical listener will not be able to hum a song at exactly the same tempo after it is done), but this obviously depends on the structure of the psychoacoustic model.
Just throwing ideas around...
On a similar note, how badly _can_ you manipulate the sound before the fingerprint gets whacked?
Another useless suggestion: could this fingerprint be somehow rendered into a useful visualization for a song? Presently there's the spectrum analyzer and the scope, but if the fingerprint incorporates other elements (I'm not that experienced in audio, so I don't really know what's left...), could you display those? That would be cool -- and, if done correctly, informative.