MindlessCode.net

I’m looking for a hosting company/person to host my Icewater ISOs. If anybody has any suggestions of which hosting companies don’t mind hosting ISOs, please let me know. So far, nobody has wanted me :(. I can’t pay too much, dedicated is not for me…

Does anybody else find this picture ironic? If not, please let me know the location of the nearest mental hospital: http://wildgardenseed.com/Taj/images/notagain.png

Oh dear…http://slashdot.org/article.pl?sid=04/06/16/1752249&mode=thread&tid=109&tid=126&tid=172&tid=185&tid=187&tid=190&tid=201

Will this be like their firewall? (For those who don’t have Win XP, their "firewall" allows everything by default…). Glad it’s been removed from my computer.

Pioneer 10 was launched 32 years ago. It left the solar system 21 years ago today as the first man-made object to leave our solar system. Unfortunately, it seems to have died. From WP:

A later attempt in December 2002 received a faint response, which was too weak to decode. Pioneer 10’s final signal (after two previous failures) was received on January 22, 2003. As of February 25, 2003, NASA came to the conclusion that the craft’s radioisotope power source was no longer functioning well enough for further contact with Earth. NASA’s (DSN) did not detect a signal during the last contact attempt February 7, 2003. The previous three contacts, including the January 22 signal, were very faint with no telemetry received. The last time a Pioneer 10 contact returned telemetry data was April 27, 2002. NASA has no additional contact attempts planned for Pioneer 10.

Shucks. But Voyager 1 is still transmitting data. It was launched in 1977. It should keep sending back data until the 2020’s thanks to its power generators (two Radioisotope Thermoelectric Generators). They provided 470 Watts of 30-volt DC power at launch. They were powered by Plutonium 238, which decays to half-life in 80 years. Currently Voyager 1 is producing 315 watts of electricity.

All of Voyager 2 has had almost all of its instruments was powered down, Voyager 1 was going to be powered down in 2000, but was left on so further information could be gathered.

Both probes are connected via 3.7-meter high-gain antenna at 16-bit/sec uplink and 160 bit/s downlink normally, with a 1.4 kbit/s for playback of high-rate plasma wave data.

Both are still returning mounds of information. Check out this page from the JPL: http://voyager.jpl.nasa.gov/

…for the most biased “review” you’ve ever seen: http://www.linuxshootout.com/shootout.php

The markups just don’t make sense:
Scanner: Lindows - Yes, Mandrake - No, Fedora - No
Sorry, that’s wrong! Mandrake supported my (very weird) scanner out of the box.

Plays MP3 Files: Lindows - Yes, Mandrake - Yes, Fedora - Yes
Fedora does not support playing MP3s out of the box. Oops.

Popup Blocker: Lindows - Yes, Mandrake - No, Fedora - No
Huh? Mandy and Fedora both distribute Firefox or Mozilla.

Not only that, but Lindows has every box ticked or the highest number of starts (all)…

bash$ whois linuxshootout.com
[...]
Registrant:
Lindows Inc. (IIDFMZVYOD)
   9333 Genesee Suite 300
   San Diego, CA 92121
   US
[...]

Hmm…

Finally finished the Froogle feed for Wild Garden Seed. osCommerce has such terrible table names. Just as I finished it, I saw: http://www.oscommerce.com/community/contributions,2000
Damn. Oh well, it was kinda fun. If anybody want’s the code, I’d be happy to share.

Will it happen again this year with over 20 states using electronic voting? A flaw has been found in the voting machines that will make the (broken) "event log" not correctly reproduce what happened during the election. Here’s a quote that will scare you:

State officials say there is no need for recounts, or an audit trail, with the touchscreen system because it was designed to prevent people from voting in the same race more than once — an overvote — and provide multiple alerts to voters to warn them when they are skipping a race — an undervote.

Read all about it here:
http://news.yahoo.com/news?tmpl=story&u=/ap/20040612/ap_on_el_pr/florida_voting_machines_1

Glad Oregon still uses DRE…

Yay EFF! The EFF is (wheh! That’s EFF three times in the first line :S) starting a "Patent-Busting Challenge" where they plan to try and revoke the top ten stupidist patents. They include:

* Online shopping carts (U.S. Patent No. 5,715,314.)
* The hyperlink (U.S. Patent No. 4,873,662.)
* Video streaming (U.S. Patent No. 5,132,992.)
* Internationalizing domain names (U.S. Patent No. 6,182,148.)
* Pop-up windows (U.S. Patent No. 6,389,458.) (damn, they should enforce that patent!)
* Paying with a credit card online (U.S. Patent No. 6,289,319.)
* Framed browsing; (U.S. Patent Nos. 5,933,841 & 6,442,574.)

The webpage is: http://www.eff.org/patent/
There’s also a contest about other patents: http://www.eff.org/patent/contest/

I submitted the patent on spam filtering. Maybe I should of also submitted the double-click patent, but I don’t want to overwhelm them!

Novell says:

With more than 30,000 restaurants around the globe and more than 1,200 in Germany alone, McDonald’s is the undisputed market leader in the fast food sector. For its activities, McDonald’s makes use of state-of-the-art technology and mature concepts that support business workflows in the best way possible.

So, they’re going to move to SuSE (^H^H^H^HSUSE) Linux. I don’t know if that’s a great idea or not. I just installed SUSE 9.1 via FTP on a standard box (300MHz, 128MB RAM, 12GB)…slow as a dog and it overwrote my BIOS. Opening up the software installation dialog took 10 minutes, and Open Office wasn’t installed by default. They distributed KMail as their email client. WAT?!?! KMail is one of the most broken, brain-dead parts of KDE (and yes I use it because Evolution has so many funky dependencies). Oh well…maybe I’ll try it again.

OK, the article on Slashdot may be a little extreme, and I haven’t RTFA (it’s really convoluted), but here’s a quote from /.

The Broadcast Treaty is a proposal from a WIPO Subcommittee that’s supposedly about stopping ’signal theft.’ But along the way, this proposal has turned into a huge, convoluted hairball that threatens to make the PC illegal, trash the public domain, break copyleft and put a Broadcast Flag on the Internet. The treaty negotiation process is unbelievably convoluted and hard-to-follow, and they’ve just wrapped up the latest round in Geneva.

The EFF has a (editized) transcript here: http://www.eff.org/deeplinks/archives/001599.php#001599
Get it while it’s legal!

If all that’s true, that’s scarrrrry. Guess it’s time to become an outlaw :P.

—-
EDIT :: Just RTFA. Here’s the part about "banning computers"

from Article 16, Alternative V:
2. In particular, effective legal remedies shall be provided against those who:
…
(iii) participate in the manufacture, importation, sale, or any other act that makes available a device or system capable of decrypting or helping to decrypt an encrypted program-carrying signal.

Yes, every computer is capable of decrypting a broadcast signal. Just sloppy writing. Scarry thing is, this isn’t writing…it’s legislation–sloppy legislation.

About breaking public domain:

The World Intellectual Property Organization (WIPO) has just released a draft of a treaty that would give broadcasters new power over material that they broadcast, even if that material in the public domain.

http://www.public-domain.org/?q=node/view/31
In this case, "broadcasters" would be anybody who would provide it to a large number of people. ISPs, magazines, etc.

Read this page!! http://www.public-domain.org/node/view/30