After struggling along with digital cameras without any optical zoom, and after the relatively timely demise of a Konica FC-1 whose trigger failed just after I compiled enough material to create the portfolio for my basic photography class, I've been blessed (heh) with a pair of prosumer-type psuedo-SLR cameras. (It's early, but if I am not consumed by laziness perhaps I could look up what they are actually called... nah.) These are the type with the video viewfinder, which produces a larger and more expensive camera than using a look-through type (or no viewfinder) but allows full use of the camera during the daytime without necessitating a SLR mechanism. I still want a Digital SLR (probably a Rebel) but I'm ecstatic to have what I've got, considering what little I paid.

To wit, I literally inherited one camera, a Konica/Minolta DiMAGE Z6 (yay for leet trademarks) and bought the other from eCost, a Fuji FinePix S700. At the same time I also picked up two free-after-rebate (we'll see) OCZ SD/USB2 cards; you pull off the back and plug them into a USB slot, although I actually haven't tried due to the abundance of laptops with SD readers in the house. I got a 1GB and a 2GB, and the latter is in the Fuji. The quick summary (specs are easy enough to find) is that the former camera has 12x optical zoom, optical image stabilization, 6MP images, looks super goofy, and only shoots QVGA/30fps DPOF video while the latter has 10x, 7MP images, looks super pro, and shoots VGA DPOF video at 30fps, but only does the "digital anti-shake" which is an interpolation function (read: lossy.) Both cameras have a lens just barely adequate for their sensor, which is pretty typical of this type of camera, but both will supposedly produce clear images up to about the middle of the zoom range. The Fuji is a refurb (of course) and came without a lens cap or AV cable, but I got ahold of someone who said they'd send them out to me (I'm still waiting.) The Fuji takes a standard lens cap, filters etc though (the other camera does not, which is another big drawback) so even if they don't make good I can pick something up cheap. The Fuji has twice as many pixels to both the external screen (at 60fps!) and the viewfinder, but no diopter adjustment. Neither camera really has enough pixels to make full use of manual focus, but the Fuji's external LCD is really gorgeous.

The Fuji is my more "pro" feeling camera but I think the other may actually be a better unit. I'll certainly be using the Fuji as my camcorder. I only have the Fuji because it was a rejected Christmas present. The idea was to have an inexpensive but high-quality camera for my lady to take on her impending dental vacation, but it was deemed to be too large. Being excessively large myself, I guess I just tend to forget this is a problem. I propose to replace it with a Nikon Coolpix L14 since they take AA batteries which I consider a must for travel (both of my "new" cameras take four AAs and will shoot 500 pictures on NiMH) but that camera is pretty stupid, so if one is willing to deal with the custom charger there's the Coolpix S6 or the Fujifilm Finepix J10 available right now as well. All three of these cameras shoot VGA-res video and take SDHC cards so as long as you can keep them fed with power they seem to be ideal small cameras for travel. Neither of my cameras will take an SDHC, oddly in the case of the Fuji (which uselessly will take XD or SD cards, as if anyone would ever want to use an XD card for anything. I guess it's handy to have an extra XD card reader though. Maybe.)

I also have sent my laptop in, gotten it back, and put windows xp back on it since I got fed up with Linux on it. This machine was intended for Windows, and honestly I seem to have virtually no problems with this machine and XPSP3. So long as I don't expect too much, anyway :) But there is a story here, and I don't feel like telling it just now.

It's magic, it's tragic, it's my Compaq nw9440 P/N EZ901AA#ABA! The optical drive has been replaced twice for self-ejecting, and one more time because they sent me the wrong drive once. One power supply went bad and "fully" drained the battery twice, which killed it permanently; they sent me the wrong power supply twice, and finally replaced my battery when they sent me the right one on the third go. On my latest support call (optical drive again) they've decided to replace my motherboard and again replace my optical drive - but they spuriously input the wrong email address for me on my last call and I found out that UPS had misdelivered the replacement optical drive the day after it happened when they called me to confirm "my" email canceling the shipment of my replacement optical drive, which was already lost! The really good part? This is a business-class notebook with a three year onsite warranty. The total sticker price with the dock was around three thousand dollars. This laptop has cost me dozens of hours (not counting the funky EDID, poorly implemented intel HDA audio, and garbage Conexant HSF modem which doesn't work properly even with the linuxant driver) and now I'm mad... how do I get even?

hypermicro is selling some very nice dual-processor 1U IBM servers for around two hundred bucks; both are xSeries eserver systems. I got the eserver 325 with dual Opteron 246s and 1GB for $189, and added two 512MB ECC DDR333 DIMMs for a total shipped cost around $230. The system now has a 120GB disk (included) and 2GB of DDR333 with Chipkill ECC. There is also an onboard Ultra320 SCSI controller even though this is an IDE model, it is unused. Rails are included for the second drive bay. The optical drive is a notebook CDROM but it is cabled using full size cables and an adapter board, so it should be trivial to switch. Finally, the system has two 100MHz 64-bit PCI-X slots; I actually had a dual-channel SCSI RAID controller lying around with a whopping 32MB of SDRAM on it, so I threw it in there. Quad USB, AMD chipset, Dual Linux-supported Broadcom GigE ports on the back along with a DB9 serial and a VGA port.

You can also get a Dual Xeon which is very similar; it's 2.8 GHz, has 2GB RAM, and has no VGA port. You need a C2T breakout cable (~$20-50 on ebay) or to add a PCI VGA card (supposedly) in order to get a console; C2T does include PS/2 keyboard and mouse connectors, however. This system is however $250 and is not advertised as including a hard disk. Because the types are not advertised I don't know if it's a SCSI model or not. The Xeon probably has slightly more raw processing power. The Opteron certainly has superior memory bandwidth (especially with four DIMMs.)

I am currently installing Ubuntu Hardy 8.04.1 Server for AMD64 on my system, and intend to provide report of how the install proceeded. I am using a Logitech Netplay USB keyboard and also have plugged in a Logitech Optical Wheel mouse. (I am amassing quite the collection of brand-name space heaters once again, what with my HP/Compaq "mobile workstation", ye olde IBM Thinkpad A21p, and Cisco Catalyst 3548XL. Nothing like the days when I had a stack of Apollos, some RT PCs and an Indigo, though... thank goodness.

Anyway, obviously I haven't completed an install yet, but so far there have been no snags whatsoever. None. I expect to have problems with lm-sensors, but who knows, it might be possible to get lucky. IBM offers some Linux-related downloads for this system, which not only was once the basis of a Linux-base cluster near the top of the Top500 running SuSe 8.

They originally started at $2,919, mind you that's one Opteron 240 and, IIRC, 512MB RAM and no disk (IDE cable is present, SCSI controller is present but no backplane.) Now yours for a much, much lower price.

The full fan speed would be fearsome, but I never expect to hear it except when cold-booting.

I'm using a modem and trying to check out some CVS projects. When svn fails I can just cd into the directory and type "svn up" and it picks right up where it left off. When I do this with cvs, it only updates successfully-downloaded files. Trying to issue the same checkout command from the same working directory as the first time results in EXTREME SLOWNESS as cvs tells me to move aside existing files. How do I resume a cvs checkout in a reasonable fashion? Do I really have to start all over? Because some projects are literally impossible for me to download in a single pass.

In this comment, nuzak wrote:

There are two kinds of real-time multiplayer video game. Some games require one machine and screen for each player; these are historically associated with personal computers controlled by a keyboard and mouse, connected in either a local-area network or through the Internet. Other games allow multiple players to share a screen. Incidentally, this can be done without splitting the screen, as seen in Midway's Gauntlet, Konami's Bomberman series and Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles (arcade), and Nintendo's Super Smash Bros. series. These traditionally run on arcade cabinets or on video game consoles with multiple gamepads. The historical reasons for this platform divide include the difficulty in connecting multiple gamepads and the difficulty in fitting four players' bodies around one 14- to 17-inch monitor.

But in the late 1990s, the line began to blur. At first, only consoles had hubs called "multitaps" to connect four gamepads to one machine, but starting with the popularization of USB in 1998, the PC has also had hubs that take multiple gamepads. In the early 2000s, more and more PCs have included composite and S-video outputs for a standard-definition television, and high-definintion televisions have included VGA-style video inputs, solving the screen problem. The rise of home theater PCs has led to demand for multiplayer games designed to fit an HTPC.

Yet even in 2008, this demand has not been met, and the stigma of one PC per player remains. A minority of PC titles, such as Serious Sam, Lego Star Wars, and Midway Arcade Treasures, allow two players on one screen, but not much more. Even cross-platform games whose console version works with more than one gamepad tend to need one PC per player. The landscape of HTPC gaming is so barren that some people have recommended loading up an HTPC with emulators to run unauthorized copies of console game ROMs.

Much innovation in software comes from microISVs, or small businesses that develop software and distribute it on the Internet. These are often home-based businesses and in some cases are run more as a hobby or moonlighting enterprise than as a profit-seeking day job. Some microISVs make their money by developing proprietary software, distributing a trial version at no charge, and selling copies of a version with more features. Others, especially developers of free software, just take donations and advertisements. But the console makers have consistently excluded microISVs from the market. For example, from Nintendo's developer qualifications for Wii and WiiWare: "In addition, an Authorized Developer will have a stable business organization with secure office facilities separate from a personal residence ( Home offices do not meet this requirement )".

Imagine that the head of a microISV has written a design document for a video game intended for two to six people in one room looking at one screen. His team has developed a playable prototype that runs on Windows. For which platform should he and the rest of his team develop and market the final version?

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This morning I tried to buy a pack of DVD+R DL discs from Newegg and not only is there no shopping cart button (I had to find the cart in my history) but the cart wouldn't work - it just kept telling me it hadn't loaded completely. I refuse to enable three different sites' worth of javascript to make a shopping cart work, so I ended up spending five bucks more for the same thing on Amazon.

I had gone to Newegg this morning only because Geeks.com (with whom I have had better results in general) has been raising prices and is no longer all that compelling. They keep selling refurb laptops for more than I can find an equivalent product new (and usually from an equally or more reputable manufacturer) for example. If I can't stand Newegg or Computer Geeks, where the heck do I shop?

I would very much prefer it if their website were usable on slow connections. I was going to suggest IKEA as an example of the web done right, but they have gone to putting a big fat flash movie on their front page, which requires a newer flash than I have on Ubuntu Gutsy.

HI!

In this comment, sethawoolley wrote:

Tip 1: Be sure to quote the parts of the comment you're replying to. Quote multiple levels to recap the discussion from the original article to Slashdot's summary through parent comments if you feel it necessary.

Tip 2: If a comment is far enough off topic, and you can't tie it back to the article somehow, put it in your journal. Then, under the original comment, reply "See my journal" without bonus so that it at least shows up in the other user's messages.pl.

so I log in to check my messages today and I have five mods, all overrated, all in a row, no other moderation. The comments are: Re:Italian Radio * Re:Cooler... * Re:Software RAID * Re:Coming to Mac OS 10.5 * Re:Amiga beat them all

It's too bad people like this feel a need to contaminate my existence. What a waste of CHON.

Recently, the OSI announced that they were planning to "crack down" on people who misuse the term "Open Source". I found this particularly intriguing because I am well aware (as are most other long-time geeks) that the term 'Open' was around long before the OSI was even a dream. Another element of that conversation that was quite interesting is that Bruce Perens claims to have invented the term 'Open Source'. Can this possibly be true?

Bruce didn't give a date anywhere in the discussion as to when he might have invented the term, but his document The Open Source Definition does provide some clues. For example, he states that "The Open Source Definition started life as a policy document of the Debian GNU/Linux Distribution." [...] "I was the leader of the Debian project, at that time, and I addressed these problems by proposing a Debian Social Contract and a Debian Free Software Guidelines in July, 1997." He also states in relation to ESR's involvement that "Raymond and I had met occassionally at the Hacker's Conference, a by-invitation-only gathering of creative and unconventional programmers. We had corresponded on various subjects via e-mail. He contacted me in February of 1997 with the idea for Open Source."

These statements would seem to put the origin of the term, therefore, between February and July of 1997 — But Eric Raymond's recollection is different. In The Origins of `Open Source' , a portion of his book Revenge of the Hackers he writes "Hence the term `open source', which the first participants in what would later become the Open Source campaign (and, eventually, the Open Source Initiative organization) invented at a meeting held in Mountain View the offices of VA Research on 3 February 1998." That's right, Perens' ostensible source for the idea of the term Open Source himself places the event in February of 1998, not 1997.

This isn't the end of the claimants to the origin of the term "Open Source", however - and to find the next one, I don't even have to talk about a different group of people. In chapter 11 ("Open Source") of the book Free as in Freedom: Richard Stallman's Crusade for Free Software Christine Peterson, then-president (now the vice president) of the Foresight Institute, also claims to have invented the term - or at least to have a better claim to it than ESR. "Looking back, Peterson says she came up with the open source term while discussing Netscape's decision with a friend in the public relations industry. She doesn't remember where she came upon the term or if she borrowed it from another field, but she does remember her friend disliking the term." The book also quotes her as saying that she was "hesitant about suggesting it", adding "I had no standing with the group, so started using it casually, not highlighting it as a new term." The last relevant slice of the chapter claims that "Raymond says he didn't publicly use the term "open source" as a substitute for free software until a day or two after the Mozilla launch party, when O'Reilly had scheduled a meeting to talk about free software."

All of the events mentioned here happened during or after January of 1998. So it seems that ESR has the more correct interpretation of events than Perens; but in turn, Peterson's claim is shown to be the stronger.

However, none of these people has a better claim to the term "Open Source" than, of all places, Caldera - which we now know as the SCO Group. But back then, Caldera was a leader of the Open Source movement, as you can see from this mailing list archive entry which includes a press release from Caldera announcing their "Open Source" distribution of DOS, to which they had recently acquired rights. The title? CALDERA. ANNOUNCES OPEN SOURCE CODE MODEL FOR DOS The date? September tenth, 1996. That's right, over a year before the most reputable claims of invention.

To be absolutely fair, only ESR and Perens actually claim to have invented the term. Peterson says that she doesn't remember where she got the idea, which while potentially disingenuous is at the least not an outright lie, and at best is entirely true - assuming that there is any truth to the story to begin with. Believing everything you read is probably (to say the least) a mistake.

Regardless, we are left only with a mystery. Where did the term originate? Who out of these three — Eric Raymond, Bruce Perens, and Christine Peterson — is telling the truth? It can only be one of them, as each of them makes contradictory claims of one nature or another.

I formerly posted a comment asking these questions of Bruce Perens, in response to the comment in which he claims to have done the inventing, but he either did not see that I made the comment (ostensibly, a slashdot message should have been sent to him notifying him of a reply) or did not feel that it was worthy of response, so I am asking this question of the larger Slashdot community. Does anyone have any better information than I've already tracked down?

While a few of the gems are missing from the crown (in the form of marked out passages) you can get the CIA's "crown jewels" documents, 701 pages of dirty tricks (although the most interesting is marked out completely, as usual) which were recently released - previously "EYES ONLY" documents. It only takes one command:

for i in `seq -w 1 701`; do wget http://www.foia.cia.gov/docs/DOC_0001451843/0001451843_0${i}.gif; done

I apologize for any misformatting courtesy slashdot. Suffice to say there are no spaces in the URL, but there are a dollar sign and a set of braces (it's a shell command, after all).

Surreal, adj. 1. Entering the Tribal casino where you work and hearing Mister Custer playing on the overhead.

Today, many web retailers (e.g. Computer Geeks) will only ship to your credit card's billing address. No one in their right mind would extend me any credit, so I typically use my debit card for making web purchases. Now granted, more and more retailers are taking paypal, but I have the problem that my bank (Washington Mutual) will not permit me to associate "temporary" addresses with my debit card - meaning that I can only have things shipped to my mailing address. This is not my real address (I don't want junk mail, so I don't use that one for anything) and this poses a problem.

Can anyone suggest a bank with offices on the left coast that is less lame than WaMu? All I want to do is to be able to spend my money, and they don't seem to be interested in providing me common banking services, in spite of ostensibly being a bank.

I got the following spam: (note: no clicky linky) "YourMom, I wanted to again invite you to try out a great new money maker for your website, AuctionAds.com AuctionAds is owned in part by TLA and the results have been outstanding. The great part about AA is that it can be run along with other ad systems like Adsense so there is no reason not to run it on your site and see how it performs.".

This is amusing to me because of the name, "YourMom", which I have occasionally used as my name on websites. Obviously someone who shouldn't be is spamming me.

I've saved the entire original message in case it's relevant.

Okay, now I know I'm going to come off as a "hey you kids get off of my lawn" old fart here, but what the hell has happened to customer service? Why is it that every time you get a phone monkey on the line they want to argue with you?

Let me just share my latest saga with you. Last names are omitted to protect the stupid.

I am attempting to evaluate a product called Crystal Reports XI Server, which is currently owned by a company called Business Objects (they will erroneously claim that they are the creators of Crystal Reports, but Crystal has belonged to more companies than just about any other software product out there. In fact, here in house we have versions 6 and 9 of Crystal, for Aristocrat OASIS and MASS-90, respectively. Neither one was from Business Objects.

So I visit their webpage and they have a download link for a server trial. I visit this page and download what appears to be the appropriate product; it turns out to actually be an ordinary Crystal Reports Designer product. So I called up a sales rep (Damon) and talked to him. He tells me I should download Crystal Reports Developer, which he claims includes the server product.

After I download it, I contact him again, and he says (in email) "My apologizes the eval Edition of Crystal Reports Developer does not come with the Server component. It will come with the Server component if you purchase the product." How useful! So I try to download again. This time I notice there's a Linux version, so I'm downloading that one too. But for some reason my Ubuntu system unexpectedly hangs to a black screen (first time) during the download. So I fire firefox and vmware back up, and use DownThemAll! to resume my Linux downloads, and use the Business Objects download manager to resume my Windows 2000 VM download.

I still don't have the Linux download (I guess DtA! is pretty slow after all) but the Windows download completes, so I try to extract it. I get some CRC errors and am eventually told that there were errors, please download a fresh copy.

At work, we have only a T1 which I have to share with some 20-odd other users. A cable modem would be faster. I have just spent some four hours downloading and do not look forward to doing it again. So I call up the sales department and tell them my story. Then they say they're going to call the sales rep. I ask if there is anyone more competent I can deal with, and the guy (Neil) actually cuts me off to tell me that Damon has worked there for two years and must therefore be competent.

Anyone who has worked anywhere for any length of time knows people who have worked there for much longer than two years and don't know dick about shit. So this is a specious argument at best. But more to the point, I'm calling the sales department and trying to get an eval (I requested a hardcopy, they do send them out according to the download page) and they're giving me a hard time! This is the department tasked with convincing people to cough up money. It is not the department that is there to give customers a hard time and scare them away so that they evaluate other products, which is what happens if there is any further headache in between me and my product evaluation.

The sheer incompetence of creating a download manager that doesn't do CRC checks during the resume of a download to avoid file corruption, of course, is just icing on this very nasty cake.

This is hardly the only company I've had this kind of experience with. Don't these people want our money any more?