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Slashback: SmoothWall, Gopher, Be
from the catching-up dept.
But can you backtrack through a google cache? pointym5 writes "Checked out the ZeoSync web site lately? Remember all those PhDs on the scientific staff? Well, like I'm sure others did, I sent e-mail to a few of them expressing interest in more technical details. All that I contacted responded with absolute disclaimers of any relationship whatsoever with ZeoSync. This morning I note that most names are gone from the 'org chart' and the scientific team list. There are only five left, including Dr. Piotr Blass, 'developer of one of the world's first web sites.' Wow!"
How smooth is smooth? juct writes: "I appreciate it, that Slashdot gave the SmoothWall Team an opportunity to answer to the concerns in my review of their firewall. But it is full of errors and might leave a wrong feeling of security. So I invite everybody to my Tour on SmoothWall where you can judge for yourself."
Whispered words of wisdom, 'Let it be.' Sander van Dragt writes: "Many BeOS news lately. Not all so good for the BeOS community though. BeUnited, the organization which tried to license BeOS from Palm, has received today a final answer from Palm: '...we have made a firm decision NOT to license any part of this technology other than that which we incorporate into the Palm OS.' It is already known that the new 32-bit PalmOS will feature some elements of the Be technology, but that OS is built for PDAs, not for the desktop."
You can read that letter and the rest of the article on OS news.
And take this as you will -- An Anonymous Coward writes: "osnews.com is reporting that there is a new version of BeOS on the way... A German company called 'yellowTab' is said to be ready to ship a new version of BeOS (Just when everyone thought it was dead, and the final shovel full of dirt laid on top), get the full article here ... Hrm, I sure liked BeOS, I hope this one works out."
Dig, my brethren -- the Gopher Palace is almost complete! SuperguyA1 writes "Lwn is reporting that the gopher team has done it again with a 3.0 release marking Gopher's 10th anniversary. Happy birthday gopher. Thanks for helping me find all the muds I wasted so much time in college on:)"
"Bad connection, say again, you invented WHAT?" mi writes: "Yahoo! reports a potential problem, the Segway Scooter may have in Japan -- a Japanese robotics professor seems to have a patent on something very very similar since 1996. On the other hand, the USPTO knew about, when granting the patent to Segway's Dean Kamen, but still found Mr. Kamen's invention worthy of a patent in 1999. My favorite is the Kazuo Yamafuji's words: 'I would hand over my patent for one dollar if Mr. Kamen admitted that we were first.' Indeed, he just sat on the invention for 15 years."
Gopher's Alive! (Score:3, Funny)
Compression (Score:5, Funny)
The others didn't leave, they were simply compressed down to only 5 people using their revolutionary compression algorithm.
I want to see the ZeoSync letters! (Score:2, Interesting)
Segway Gopher (Score:1)
Heck with patents -- Open-source it all!!
BeOS as Embedded OS (Score:5, Interesting)
Gopher (Score:4, Interesting)
If asked, I would have said that WWW was going to be a flash in the pan, and that Gopher was the future.
Oh well...
Re:Gopher how without Slip or PPP (Score:4, Informative)
lynx would do www on text mode terminals too, but was harder to use in text mode than gopher was.
Even on SLIP, mosaic was slow because it would load the entire page, including all images, before you could see anything. On a slow dialup line (14.4) that could take a while.
of course then Netscape came out and the rest is history... the main feature of Netscape that made everyone use it was that partial pages were displayed while the images downloaded.
gopher (probably slightly off topic( (Score:1)
Segway: Chicken or Egg? (Score:4, Interesting)
Segway vs Yamafuji (Score:3, Interesting)
Since I think Kamen actually cited Yamafuji's invention in his patent application, that rather implies that he does acknowledge that Yamafuji was first. I don't get what Yamafuji is upset about.
Re:Segway vs Yamafuji (Score:4, Insightful)
He could of course sue Kamen and his company to the point where releasing the product isn't possible.
He just wants the nod, and he should get it. Kamen should at least give him two bucks to show that he appreciates Yamafuji's view of IP and patents.
Look at it from this side: he could be like Prodigy and try to shut everyone down that uses the hyperlink. eBay and the rest should take note from Yamafuji.
He seems to be someone who won't let progress be stopped because of a piece of paper sitting in the patent office.
Hell, why not have the two get together and work on another invention. Kamen on the surface seems to be a nice guy. Yamafuji seems to be even nicer.
Kamen: Get Yamafuji on your staff. Don't turn this into a Xerox-Apple-Microsoft battle.
Note:I'm sure if Kamen repackaged Yamafuji's invention and tried to market it as all his own - Yamafuji might not be so open about this deal
Announcement *on* Gopher (Score:2)
Anyway, check out gopher://gopher.quux.org:70/h0/3.0.0.html [quux.org] for the news properly gophered.
Now I want a good TurboGopher 3D client rereleased :)
Gopher (Score:4, Insightful)
Its really amazing how quickly gopher dried up as http took off. The gopher clients for windows are all written for Windows 3.1 or NT 3.1 and the major browser vendors seemed to have left the code in a state of neglect.
I was also amazed to find CGI like scripts for handling gopher+ (or something like that, my memory is hazy and in true /. fashion I'm too lazy to recheck facts) forms. If everyone wasn't so busy re-inventing the wheel gopher might have made a good base for all the low bandwidth wireless devices running around today instead of WAP. A few modifications and it might have worked. Problem is, 'gopher' just isn't as sexy on the resume as all those modern TLA's...
Re:Gopher (Score:4, Insightful)
Like a Web based message board where NNTP would do?
Re:Advantages of Slash over Usenet (Score:4, Insightful)
...which are completely broken and cause more problems than they solve.
"NNTP doesn't readily support banner advertisements that keep the server free."
i'll grant you this, but it wouldn't be too difficult to hack an article-ad-interruptor, where the first (or middle, or a random) bit of the article has a textual ad (with http link) inserted.
"NNTP servers often don't have very long retention of old discussion."
...which isn't a problem if you run your own.
"NNTP doesn't have server-side search."
yes, it has working client-side searching, rather than broken/incomplete server-side searching.
seriously, have you ever tried to find something you saw on slashdot, say, two months ago? what if it was a comment, not a story? it's virtually impossible. you can't even query for all the posts that user xyz has posted. i wanted to find an old (~1 year) post of mine - couldn't. if i search for "phexro" in "stories", i get some stories i submitted. if i search in "comments" i get nothing. if i search in "users", i get me, and the last 24 posts i made. if i search for some key words in my post, i get page after page after page of incorrect results. if i search for a specific phrase, i get the same thing.
i've been meaning to bitch about this... thanks for the chance to let me do it on-topic.
Gopher vs. WAP (Score:4, Insightful)
Come to think of it, I still don't get why the hell they don't just use gopher. The protocol is there, it's lightweight, and it's perfect for providing text-based menus to access text content.
Oh, wait. These are phone companies...
gopher, Be and oh my (Score:1)
Listen to the words of Gopherism and let it BeOS..
Let it BeOS Let it BeOs..
By the way the Founder was informed in early 1997 to port BeOS to PDAs..gee why did he take so long to listen to me?
SmoothWall (Score:4, Interesting)
Why Kamen deserved the Segway patent (Score:5, Informative)
- Kamen has been working on the Segway for a lot longer than 15
years. Most people don't realize how old Dean Kamen is; Yamafuji probably
was just a young tot when Kamen introduced his "cripple cart."
- The Segway employs a sophisticated transmission system that adjusts
gear ratios depending on how difficult the terrain is (uphill, flat, or
downhill) and the desired speed. This improves battery life and
performance. Kazou's project had no such feature.
- As was clearly stated in the patent, Kamen used a gyroscope while
Yamafiji used a clumsy set of concentric rings and Hall effect sensors.
It's like the difference between using GNOME 1.0 and KDE 2.0 - there's just
no comparison.
- Kamen's software was considerably more streamlined because it was
written as a true embedded system, in pure ASM. Yamafiji's model used C++
because, well, it was just a model and it would have been useless if it
were not hooked up to the portable computer he used to build it.
Kamen deserves every penny he can make frmo Segway, both here and in Japan. For once, the USPTO did the right thing - and the media owes it to DK to stop complaining.Mr. Uptime
it's about innovation (Score:4, Insightful)
And if you actually took an "Engineering Law Class" and you were taught that people deserve patent protection because they implement their controller software in "ASM" as opposed to C++, you should ask for your tuition back. But perhaps you just made that up.
Wow, IE fetches gopher links (Score:4, Informative)
I dont guess they ever made any money of gopher at UMinn, but perhaps we shouldn't have been so hard on them for trying. Bygones.
Don't forget (Score:5, Informative)
Who knows, maybe some of that stuff will become collectible.
Old Internet Irony (Score:5, Funny)
"Admittedly, Web servers and hypertext editors are scarce; but the potential here makes the World-Wide Web one of the most interesting new tools on the Internet."
Oh how the tables have turned.
Yet another smoothwall security hole (Score:5, Informative)
bash$ id
uid=99(nobody) gid=99(nobody) groups=99(nobody),14(smoothwa)
bash$ ls -l
-rwsr-x--- 1 root nobody 23888 Aug 6 12:36
bash$
bash$ ls -l
-rw-rw-r-- 1 root nobody 367 Jan 10 03:11
Though it's not surprising it's full of holes with code that the smoothwall people write:
...
if (setgid(0)) { fprintf(stderr, "Couldn't set GID to 0\n"); return 0; }
if (setuid(0)) { fprintf(stderr, "Couldn't set UID to 0\n"); return 0; }
...
snprintf(command, STRING_SIZE - 1, "/var/patches/%s/setup", argv[1]);
if (!(p = popen(command, "r")))
return -1;
etc. etc.
It's full of setgid(0);setuid(0);system(command);
absolutely unbelievable.
hrm. (Score:2)
"Segway" is a proper noun as of a few weeks ago. Don't worry timothy, i suck at grammar too.
Speaking of backtracking, allow me to segue (teehee) into this offtopic question: Does anyone have any good techniques for backtracking, through google or otherwise, your old slashdot posts? it seems you can search by everything else but you're own name.
SmoothWall: Not Quite Free Tech Support. (Score:3, Insightful)
So it's free, but only if you pay for it. Why don't they just use a pay model?
Speaking of BE.. Did anyone going to the auction? (Score:2, Interesting)
That being said, it's in Menlo Park, Ca. Don't buy your plane tickets tonight. Some of these auctions end up WAY overbid...
For not Be-ing, they deserve the Palm... (Score:5, Insightful)
http://www.openbeos.org/
http://blueos.free.fr/
And those surely won't stop their efforts !
That's yet another example of the dangers of closed source systems...
RIP BEOS.
Beos: Amiga, TNG (Score:1, Informative)
It's time for the BeOS crowd to learn from the Amiga, OS/2, OS9 (no, not MacOS9), and every other alternative PC OS. Give it up. It's dead and it will never come back. Don't make bets on closed source alternative PC OS's. It doesn't pay off.
Try the Internet Archive instead. (Score:1)
Will we finally have free Be? (Score:1)
Now that Be has gone chapter 11, can I finally get a free copy _FULL_ of Be?
I may have missed the boat here, but I'd really like to try this deceased OS.
ZeoSync's Claims (Score:2, Insightful)
Basically, if you can reduce 1 million bits to 10,000, then you can only represent 2^10000 different outcomes. But, they need to represent all 2^1000000 outcomes! There are only so many outcomes in there that can be compressed, and that means that the other outcomes take up more space.
In other words, their data is not random.
If a 12th grade high school student can figure this out, surely people with PHD's can see how this idea is flawed. I am surprised that such an absurd idea is even being taken seriously in the news.
Re:ZeoSync's Claims (Score:4, Interesting)
The "Layman Process" explaination of their technology is worth a read just for the amusement value. They claim that it is not a compression technology, but that it works by "sending more data across less bandwidth while saving time", and that it "stores massive amounts of data compared to standard binary compression". Well, that sounds like compression to me. You might think that maybe they're referring to a different encoding method, but no, they also say that the data is able to "move rapidly on a fixed set of binary carriers through existing digital transmission devices".
So: They take binary data, do something magical to it, and then it can go across a digital, binary network, faster than any standard binary compression. OK, so what kind of magic is this?
Moving on to the "Technical Process", they have some astonishingly blatant smokescreen to their impossible claims.
First of all, they talk about the "solution to the Pidgeonhole Principle". Well, that's not something you solve, it just is. That's like saying you've learned to fly by "solving" gravity.
And then they "define" the pidgeonhole principle: Well, that's not what the pigeonhole principle is. The pigeonhole principle is simply: If you have more pigeons than holes, then there must be more than one pidgeon in at least one hole. Conversely, if you have less pidgeons than holes, then there must be at least one hole with no pidgeon.
Getting this basic theory wrong proves that they are either hopelessly ignorant or total frauds.
Furthermore, the reason the pidgeonhole principle disproves ridiculous compression claims is there are exponentially more long bitstrings than short bitstrings. So if you claim to be able to represent every long bitstring (the pidgeons) as a short bitstring, (the holes) then there must be at least two long bitstreams represented by one short bitstream. (Two pidgeons in one hole). But that means you can't tell which long bitstream was represented by the short bitstream, and you don't have a real compression algorithm - at least not a lossless one.
And then, Zeosync's alleged "technical explanation" veers off into the most amazing bullsh*t I've read in a long time: Simultaneously identical yet different. Sure. Uh-huh. Giggle.
But wait! Reading further, I see that they use the word "lossy". The surrounding context simply doesn't make sense, but if you're talking about lossy compression, the pidgeonhole principle is irrelevant, because it's OK to not know exactly which long bitstream a shorter bitstream encodes - that's the whole point of lossy compression - you loose some detail. But then why discuss the pidgeonhole principle at all?
I hope someone sues these hucksters into a smoking crater. I hate it when people lie about fundamental mathematics.
Re:ZeoSync's Claims (Score:4, Interesting)
The org chart also mentions Wavelets, Fractals, and Sub-band compression... So much for the website that claims their technology isn't actually compression...
Maybe, just maybe, the scientists actually do have some sort of interesting compression technology, but the marketing / business people have spun and hyped it up, totally out of control and totally out of touch with reality. But I don't think so - marketing people alone wouldn't be able to come up with the pseudo-scientific drivel on that website.
Moving on, you see that Dr. Burko Fuhrt and Dr. Piotr Blass are from Florida Atlantic University. Sure enough, doing a search of the university website turns up a few computer science classes... but that's interesting... All of Fuhrt's classes for Fall 2001 were cancelled, and they don't seem to be teaching anything in Spring 2002... Blass is an Instructor, apparently not a tenured professor, while Furht is a professor. They don't seem to have home pages so it's hard to know much about them.
Dr. Steve Smale of Berkely, on the other hand, looks like the real thing - a serious mathemetician. Someone should contact him and find out if he knows he's on the Zeosync org chart, and if so, what he thinks of their web site... I'd hate to see a genuine researcher inadvertently associated with something phony.
The Zeosync website claims that John Post of the University of Arkansas is on the Zeosync team, but a search of that University's directory turns up no hits for that name, and he doesn't have a home page there.
Very strange indeed.
Copyright failure (Score:5, Insightful)
Think of this as another example of the failure of modern-day copyright law. The purpose of copyright law is to place fine examples of the arts into the public domain -- if instead of computer software, BeOS consisted of a series of patents, then 20 years from now we would all have complete, free, access to BeOS, because the patents would have:
(1) been disclosed when the monopoly was granted
(2) expired
However, in the case of copyrighted computer object code, in exchange for granting a government monopoly of 95 years, the public gets nothing. Zilch. Nada. Copyright law hasn't just "tilted" to the side of copyright holders, it has no other master. The public interest is completely removed from consideration. Modern copyright law is NOTHING more then corporate welfare. It no longer benefits the public, and like all laws that work directly against the public interest, no longer deserves respect. Want to get rid of ancient, outdated, overreaching copyright law? Disobey it. Sit in the front of the bus -- in the seat labeled "for corporations only."
Take this as a warning. No matter how "cool" a piece of software is, if it is proprietary software, it is absolutely worthless. It can disappear at any moment, and it contributes nothing to the progress of computer science. nothing. Sure, you can pretend that you're part of the future by playing with a "cool" proprietary OS, but you're just wasting your time and energy on someone else's game.
Score: -1: Troll
NYTimes: Time.ca Faux Pas (Score:3, Interesting)
Be Amiga (Score:1)
http://www.lineo.com/news_events/announcements/
Ironically they turned the amiga name into a PDA as well. Oh well...
zerosync (Score:2)
I always cringe when, in movies, they show someone at a computer. inenvitably, the computer beeps, whines, or makes some sort audible response at the slightest keystroke or button press. I sometimes explain to the geek friends that i'm watching with how f*cking annoying it would be if computers actually did this, i'm sure it's something everyone here as thought about at least once. (as an aside, a friend of mine once went so far as to create a new term for those operating systems; MOS, or Movie Operating system) anyway, their site is like a web based version of mos.
I Just put my mouse over the damn menu, and I know i did that because you're wasting my cpu with this crappy flash animations, I DON'T MY COMPUTER TO BEEP AS WELL!
*beep* *beep* *beep*
Gopher alive and kicking (Score:1)
Personally, I think it's much better than the web.
smoothwall--readable files (Score:3, Insightful)
The part I can't figure out is why anyone would bother with a Linux software firewall running on a PC if you can get good firewall appliances with web-based configuration for little more than $100.
ZeoSynch website is crap (Score:2)
that was the problem of BeOS from the beggining (Score:1)
...that it was a propriatary platform. Although it had posix support, it was a commercial offering, free only as in beer [which likely would not have lasted if it had achieved successfull market penetration and widespread use].
That's why I stayed away from it and stayed with the free OS'es we know and love. I know that I will never be at the mercy of some rights-holder deciding that the technology I have come to depend on using, and have invested so much time/money into developing for and setting up, can be yanked away at their pervue.
Segway - Why the Hype ? (Score:1)
Cost ? At $3K each, not hardly
Speed? Many other electrics are faster
Range? No (See "Speed")
Size? Similar to a folded scooter
Weight? Again, not enough difference to note
Ease of use ? Not for anyone that already can ride a bike
All Terrain? Maybe on this point Ginger wins, maybe.
Does this invention really deserve all they hype ?
We can do that.... (Score:1)
Sandy MacReedy: Gophers! You great git! Not golfers! The little brown furry rodents!
Carl Spackler: We can do that. We don't even have to have a reason.
Caddyshack [tripod.com]
BeOS: WHIP-*CRACK* WHIP-*CRACK* (Score:4, Insightful)
A: BECAUSE IT'S DEAD.
Does yellowTab really think anyone wants to pay some tens of dollars U.S. for an O/S that has far less application support than damn near everything else?
Or that they'd want it for free for use as anything other than a toy, like AtheOS?
Hmm. Maybe we could use it to power an Internet applia-- oh, wait, Be already went there. Buying into BeOS is like learning Latin: it's cool and all, but unless there is some killer app (which is doubtful), it's just cool, pretty perhaps, but not the optimal choice.
ZeoSync does not claim lossless compression? (Score:3, Interesting)
The most interesting thing I read is in their Technical Description, where they state that they "will have for all intents and purposes successfully encoded lossy universal compression". No where in their description can I find anything that explicitly states that their algorithm is lossless.
They also talk about mapping binary strings into higher dimensional spaces, but that these spaces cannot be