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AOL's "AOL Everywhere" project has heavily relied on Perl, they've even set up a forum for developers. Check it out at The AOL Perl Forum.

There's a good page on AOL with a history of the Nobel Prizes all the way back to their origin. Check it out here.

"The only thing called "America" without a north/south/central modifier is the United States Of America."
May be when you say America like:
Capitan America
America On-Line

But America is a continent. Africa is a continent too.
If America uses north/south/central modifier is because the TV want's.

Because most of Yankies think that they are the most special people in the world. And they have forget that his grandfathers where from Africa, Europa and Asia. (Yes this things are continents)
But this news are about Africa not America.

On one hand, there's their open-source webserver.

On the other hand, they have disgusting, slimy tentacles (and I don't mean the good kind of tentacles, either), like Cthulhu, but more commercial.

(Offtopic, why the hell does Slashdot add a / after news: when you try to link to a newsgroup? Just plain news: should link to a group on whatever newsfeed you've got handy, and news:// can take you to a group on a different news server (I think), but news:/ doesn't work at all. Oh well. The joke is intact anyway, I guess.)

Get it Here,, plus if your are concerned about Windows only get a copy of VmWare trial license its good for 30days. Last you can get a Window 30days trial at CompUSA etc so you should be all set until Xmas.

Eschatology : es'ka-tol'o-je, n. [Gr. eschatos, Last, and logos, discourse; word.] Theol. The discourse of the last or final things; End time doctrines such as life, judgment, end of things, Christ's return, and the final destination of the soul; Declaration of future prophecy or biblical events; also Prophesy. --es-cha-to-log-i-cal, es'ka-to-loj'i-kal, a. --es-cha-to-log-i-cal-ly, adj.--es-cha-to-o-gist. n.

This isn't the first time that Apple did this. Back in the early days of Hypercard they shipped a "demo" version on all new macs. You could play stacks but not create them. That is, unless you were capable of typing the word "magic" at which point the demo would "magically" transform itself into the full thing.

Apple never took any legal action to my knowledge. This was well before the "look and feel" days so they were still innocent, sweet and too wealthy to care.

Search on google for: libel law "per se"

You'll find some examples listed there. One of the more entertaining, though, is this one, where a ostensibly eloquent lawyer-type writes "...it would be impossible for me to win that case in court [in San Francisco], because everybody is queer out there" halfway through his analysis of the law!

Another example that, in contrast to the previous one, even vaguely resembles professional writing can be found here, at a site that details a New York Supreme Court ruling in the case of Anthony Nacinovich v. Tullett & Tokoyo Forex, Inc, where it was ruled that calling someone gay is defamatory, even though it may be true.

I couldn't find the actual wording of the law, but the person who advised me of this (who is himself a lawyer) told me that the suit had merit. Ergo, the removal of the story.

- adam

I noticed that one post made mention of some ELF towers in Annapolis. Since I live in Annapolis, and had never heard of this, I got rather curious. After a quick Google search, I came up with a few interesting things:

• Although not as old as NAA, NSS is still in operation on VLF. In fact, it is the oldest continuously operating very low frequency station in the entire world! NSS is located on the small peninsula known as Greenbury Point on the northeastern shore of the Severn River, directly across from the United States Naval Academy at Annapolis, Maryland. Found on http://members.aol.com/k6dc/history.htm. Check this link out for some good info and pics!
• LF (Low Frequency) and VLF (Very Low Frequency) antennas there are no longer used by the Navy and were made available for some experiments by AMRAD ... The Antenna, approximately 400 ft long, is suspended between two towers approximately 300 ft high. Found at http://www.amrad.org/projects/lf/March1999NSS/. More good pics of antennae and info on this link.
• 28. "ELF Communications System Isn't Needed, Might Not Work, GAO Says," Aerospace Daily, March 22, 1979, 107 (cites GAO classified report, The Navy's Strategic Communications System, PSAD-79-48); Seafarer ELF Communications System Final Evaluation Impact Statement for Site Selection and Test Operation (Washington, DC: Dept. of the Navy, December 1977). Found on http://www.ndu.edu/inss/books/milgeo/milgeoch4n.ht ml
• The Coast Guard is establishing a temporary safety zone covering all waters within a 2,000 foot radius of each of three Very Low Frequency (VLF) towers located between Greenbury Point and Possum Point, near Annapolis, Maryland. Potts and Callahan, Inc. will be demolishing the three towers with explosives. This safety zone is intended to restrict maritime traffic in order to protect mariners from the hazards associated with the demolition. http://www.epa.gov/fedrgstr/EPA-IMPACT/1999/Novemb er/Day-29/i30882.htm This was in December, 1999.

So it looks like the Navy did, in fact, have a rather groundbreaking ELF setup back in the day. Unfortunately those antennae seem to be gone now, but hey, technology marches on. Now that I'm reading some of these articles I know exactly which antennae they're talking about, and I do remember noticing that there seemed to suddenly be fewer of them a couple years ago...

The good news is, the dishonest people who know how to do it are already doing it, but they?re a slender fraction of today?s installed cable modem base.

The bad news is, there?s nothing you can do about it. At least, not anytime soon.

Such is the case with some wireless home networking hubs, which use a form of over-the-counter routing known as ?network address translation,? or NAT.

Just as, to some, ?take one? always means ?take three,? and ?contribution appreciated? always means ?free,? so can the bandwidth of a legal cable modem subscription become wirelessly shared among neighbors. It can be shared omnidirectionally, as it turns out, for about 300 feet?the range of wireless hubs based on the 802.11b home networking specification.

?So all we could do was to Sit! Sit! Sit! And we did not like it. Not one little bit.? ?Dr. Seuss, The Cat In The Hat

This probably doesn?t come as a big surprise to CED?s readers. The NAT conundrum is reminiscent of the early days of pay television?when descrambler boxes presumed for use on additional TVs within a subscribing household mysteriously found their way into someone else?s house? someone who wasn?t paying for HBO or Showtime or a similar premium service.

What?s different between the two types of thievery, technologists say, is that descrambler boxes of yore, and particularly those sold for additional outlets, could be (and were, once the debauchery was discovered) provided at an additional, and undiscounted, rental fee.

But NAT, because it is invisible to the cable modem, can theoretically continue its stealth stride into cable networks, undetected. The only remedy?at least until CableLabs? ?CableHome? effort releases its antidote, known as Cable Address Translator, or CAT?is to trust in humanity?s application of right and wrong: ??Tis a sin, to steal a pin, as we, all of us, used to be informed in the nursery,? as the 1875 proverb goes. Or, in this case, ?tis a sin, to steal bandwidth, as we, all of us, learned in the workplace.

What?s the value of the stolen goods? Revenues associated with additional IP addresses, for one. Let?s say one in 10 of the 5 million U.S. cable modem subscribers are usurping IP addresses without paying the $4.95 per month fee that?s typically charged (beyond a pre-specified limit, which varies MSO to MSO.) Right off that bat, that?s just shy of $30 million lost, annually.

Under NAT?s hat Network address translation started out innocently enough. Back in 1993, the World Wide Web consisted of just a handful of graphically-oriented destinations?what we now call ?Web sites??and a group of data-minded, engineering members of the Internet Engineering Task Force got worried.

There was no question that the Internet, and its TCP/IP-based underpinnings, would get big, the engineers mused. And when it did, how on earth would the distribution of zillions of Internet Protocol (IP) addresses be managed, let alone scaled?

At its inception, NAT was viewed as a way to ward off a looming shortage of IP addresses.

The only answer, the engineers decided, was some form of hierarchical distribution, handled transparently at drop-off points. Something that could partition IP addresses for multiple, simultaneous use by devices ?lower? in the hierarchy. The drop-off point, though, was imagined more as a standard LAN than a home network.

NAT was also meant to simplify matters. Specifically, it was intended to simplify small business networks, so that the technologically-challenged small business owner could install and run IP address-sharing on a run-of-the-mill local area network, without having to go to night school to acquire a data communications doctorate.

Who knew?

At the time, eight or so years ago, no one had fully imagined that regular, everyday consumers would someday own multiple PCs, and would want a way to hook them together. Nor had anyone fully imagined that a cable or DSL modem could be hooked into a residential network, and its IP address resource shared. (The Internet, mostly a bulletin board at the time, topped out at 9600 baud back then.) And certainly, no one had fully imagined that the resources shared by a single, wirelessly-networked residence would also be shared among other devices, at other residences, within 300 feet.

What happened is the inverse of the old Ivory soap story: Upon going to lunch one day, somebody forgot to turn off the mixer. An ordinary accident. The result was soap that floated: A good, marketable, accidental discovery. NAT turns out to accidentally be a bad, unmarketable discovery. Its intentions were good; but one portion of its reality is clearly not so good.

Reality, right now, is walking into a computer store and buying a $100-ish wireless home networking hub, with built-in NAT. These days, NAT is a feature differentiator for home networking hub vendors. Suppliers describe the benefits of NAT in terms of modifying IP and transport headers to provide transparent routing to end hosts, which are trying to communicate from disparate address realms.

That means the NAT-based home networking hubs can create secret domains, behind and invisible to the cable or DSL modem. The IP address intended for the cable modem is partitioned into re-usable addresses, transparently, through software routing mechanisms. The result is a sort of private, sub-network running datagrams to and from invisible end devices (the PCs in neighboring homes).

How it works A home-networking hub is a fairly unglamorous, rectangular box with lights on the front that correspond to what?s connected. On the back there are eight or so receptacles for telephone wires, or thicker ?category-5? wires, for the items being linked?laptops, PCs, printers, the cable or DSL modem. Ditto for wireless hubs, except they use an antenna to send and receive datagrams from other antennas; those antennas are attached to the things to be connected.

Put simply, NAT works by securing an IP address via the cable modem and the IP-address server (the ?DHCP,? or Dynamic Host Control Protocol server). NAT software resident inside the wireless hub handles the parsing of the IP address, as well as back-and-forth conversations with all connected devices. Notably, not all home networking hubs include NAT; in general, less-expensive $50-ish hubs don?t have it.

Tactically, it works like this: Anyone with a networkable computer, an 802.11b antenna and receiver, and approval from the master PC connected to a wireless hub, can sit, invisibly, ?behind? the NAT, and share the throughput of the cable modem attached ?ahead of? the NAT.

?The Cat in the hat came back in with a box. A big, red wood box. It was shut with a hook. ?Now look at this trick,? said the cat. ?Take a look! ?? ?Dr. Seuss, The Cat In The Hat

For example: Neighbor Bob buys cable modem service and a wireless home network. Neighbors Carol, Ted and Alice don?t buy cable modem service, but they go out and buy antennas compatible with Neighbor Bob?s wireless network. Everybody agrees to share Neighbor Bob?s connection. So what if it?s not quite as zippy? It?s free. Neighbor Bob?s cable modem, and Neighbor Bob?s broadband service provider, never know its throughput is being shared. They, sadly, can?t see a thing past the NAT.

NAT also raises issues for forthcoming cable-delivered home-networking services. A crucial part of the success or failure of broadband home networks will be the set-up and ongoing care processes used to link PCs and consumer-electronics gear.

With NAT-based hubs, cable providers won?t be able to see into all connected devices?making remote troubleshooting difficult?because, again, the NAT is speaking for all connected devices. It?s the data communications equivalent of, ?You wanna talk to her, you go through me??except you don?t even know she?s there to talk.

Cable?s CAT in the Hat MSO technologists involved with home networking are already sorely aware of NAT?s blemishes. In addition to what?s already been noted, technologists grumble that NAT hubs vary in operation from one supplier to the next, making uniform maintenance a nightmare.

Gladly, there?s a remedy in the works. It?s coming from CableHome, the CableLabs project specifically focused on specifications for cable home networks.

Mercifully, MSO and CableLabs technologists involved in the project are hard at work on a cable-friendly form of IP-address distribution to connected devices. They?re unofficially calling it ?CAT,? for ?Cable Address Translator.? In future CableHome-based networks, CAT software could go one step further, essentially saying, ?Pardon, NAT, but what?s that behind you?? Or, CAT could replace NAT altogether, at least in equipment hand-picked by MSOs for home-network service packages.

At the very least, cable MSOs involved in CableHome want a counting mechanism, with parameters set by them, that specifies a maximum number of connected devices. Until then, all indicators point to DOCSIS 1.1, which includes methods to monitor bandwidth consumption (how much is used per customer) and speed (who?s bursting at what rates).

Unquestionably, the ability to ?see? connected devices makes troubleshooting and customer care somewhat easier. It will also put some enforceability into what, today, is an unintentional honor system, in terms of IP address and resultant bandwidth sharing.

Perhaps Theodore Geisel, Dr. Seuss? inventor, had the best advice, albeit not from The Cat in the Hat: ?You have brains in your head. You have feet in your shoes. You can steer yourself any direction you choose.?

E-mail: Ellis299@aol.com

I used to work at a company that wanted desperately to create an online community. But it's not a simple thing to do and they failed miserably. Why? Because the market just doesn't demand it. Online communities are necessarily small niches, and niches are things that big companies just can't seem to handle well. And trying to make a niche community into something bigger usually fails miserably and alienates the people who made the site popular in the first place.

This book is obviously intended to be read by managers who still think they can put up a simple web site and make millions of dollars catering to the needs of individuals on the Internet. (I know because I borrowed and skimmed it.) Well, the reality of the matter is that it's just not possible. Online communities just happen. If you try to intentionally build one, you are wasting your time.

Just my 2c.

~wally

I agree strongly with this. Whilst it is a shame that they feel they have to censor the net, what we should be pleased about is that they have actually allowed it at all. I was at Gitex (the major Gulf region IT show) in 1997 and met people from Saudi and Iran whose only link with the 'net was international dial-up accounts - many with AOL (which is worse? aol or censorware?).

In brief, I think that hoping for the Internet to create a more open world is hoping for too much. The good thing is that it is beginning to make parts of the world less closed.

But this one goes to eleven!

...or at least an appropriate exerpt.

Hovercraft are cool. Either give me a working R/C model hovercraft, or a good set of plans and components. Or, let me know what will make a good liftfan because I can't find one so far when I'm trying to build my own :-(

Merry Xmas!

BTW - the fan this guy is using looks like a PC case fan, though a bit bigger - I could be wrong, though.

I dunno about ICQ on a mobile phone, but AIM on a mobile phone works right now. Check it out:

http://www.aol.com/wireless/index.adp

Hmmmmmm.

The Panel

Furthermore, from 1998:

Ink-jet printing of light-emitting polymers

Ink-jet printing of light-emitting polymers onto a thin film has been demonstrated by a Princeton group (James Sturm, 609-258-5610), bringing about a new way to fabricate a light-emitting diode (LED) made of polymers. An LED is typically built by surrounding a semiconducting material with two electrodes. When an electron from one electrode and a hole from the other meet in the semiconductor, they can annihilate each other and release the energy as light. LEDs in which the semiconductor materials are polymers instead of inorganic materials such as gallium phosphide would be cheaper and easier to manufacture. To make polymer LEDs, the Princeton researchers replaced the ink cartridges of a conventional ink-jet printer with a polymer solution containing the semiconducting polymer polyvinylcarbazol (PVK) and a light-emitting dye dissolved in a chloroform solvent. The researchers printed this solution onto a thin polyester film coated with indium tin oxide (ITO), which served as one of the electrodes. Over the polymer layer they deposited a metal film, which served as the other electrode. With this technique, they produced LEDs emitting green light. In separate experiments, they used the ink-jet printer to make dot patterns of PVK mixed with either red, green, or blue dyes on the ITO-coated polyester film, although they have not yet used these patterned films to make LEDs. (T.R. Hebner et al., Applied Physics Letters, 2 February 1998.)

Update 358
11 Feb 98 http://www.ee.princeton.edu/~sturmlab/pdf/apl/ijpo .pdf

Copper was being used elsewhere in the war effort, so:

At one point during the Manhattan Project, they needed a lot of copper. They were going to build plants in Utah to manufacture uranium and needed an estimated 10,000 to 15,000 metric tons of copper. Unfortunately, due to other war requirements, this much copper was not available. Someone suggested that the Manhattan Project go to the United States Treasury and ask for silver. Which they did.

For the record we should note two things about our story. First, the Manhattan Project eventually used somewhere around 13,000 metric tons of silver. A current valuation would be about $6,000,000,000. Second, they gave it all back.

GameSX - Great site, I've been an active reader for about a year. Lots of information on video game systems.

Arcade Controls.com - Information on building your own arcade controls for emulation and other hobbies.

Sex Pistols Pinball - This guy redid a old pinball machine into a Sex Pistols pinball machine, neat.

The sBox - A Preslashdoted story. Read it here.

CmdrTaco even likes emulation - He made his own MAMEcabinet

Posts have suggested many alternatives. I believe that you will need to do all of them.
- Take some time away from CS
- broaden your horizons academically and otherwise.
- Then look at what you enjoy
- Do what you enjoy, money will come.
- Give yourself time to do all this and remember not to blindly copy others' decisions.

I have been through something similar recently and have stumbled through the above stages, albeit unplanned. The hardest part has been figuring out what I enjoy and that's where exploring all the options helped a lot. Now things are getting clearer and I think I know what I want to do.

You could also take some vocational/personality tests to help you figure out what you may enjoy. Your career office should be able to help you. They get paid to do this kind of stuff. Make sure you get a one to one consultation. Another resource (expensive!) is Johnson O'Connor Foundation. I didn't do this test myself but my wife and some other people I know found it quite useful.

Most of all give yourself time. I extended my Ph.D. by more than a year to just try out different things and resolve these issues before going on. I should have done that before the PhD. but better late than never! So be warned that blindly going to grad school is not going to solve your problems.

Hope that helps.

p.s. I am very glad that this topic was brought up on slashdot. I find some of the posts very helpful for my own situation too.

The hairspray-powered paintball gun I *built*. I decided to scale down the typical spud gun and sized the barrel for paintballs. Loading is a pain in the ass, so I wouldn't ever use it for an actual game of paintball (not that I play or anything) but it outshoots CO2 guns by a large margin.

I was planning on making a website for this thing (as well as its golfball-firing big brother) but never got around to it... Check out the image at:

pballgun.jpg

Here

and here
Hang gliders, bicycle gliders...etc..

Here

and here
Hang gliders, bicycle gliders...etc..

I was playing around with some C64 games with CCS this past weekend and, in the Halloween mood, recalled a spooky game I used to enjoy called Castles of Dr. Creep by Ed Hobbs. I just did a Google of the title and found a PC Beta version probably worth a look if you don't want to fool around with emulators. Looks cool and the came was a lot of fun on a C64, looks like Ed is still at it and has done a nice job.

Back in the '80s, I worked on a DOS port of an Apple II game called "Robot Odyssey" where there were "guard 'bots" that guarded certain items. In order to win, you had to program a robot with digital logic circuits to bypass the guards, or solve a puzzle.

The game was way cool, but too hard for the casual gamer. I understand the game was even used in electronics classes to teach digital logic.

Here [members.aol.com] is a site where you can see screenshots or download copies of the Apple II and DOS version.

I recall that the DOS version only worked on 8086/286 machines with color monitor and joystick.

It won't be long before you won't be able to use a digital certificate, register a domain, or host a web site without permission from Microsoft. It only takes one more line of code to shut out Apache (or Zeus or IPlanet) servers from IE users. If you don't think they'd do something like that, then point your brower to this link.

If you are counting on the competition to stop practices like these, you may want to head over their site.

let's start with cnn.com ... they are at least partly responsible for the average united states IQ and that is responsible for ... well ....

This came up while my sister was typing some middle school paper. Funniest thing since that Word 97 thesaurus "I'd like to see Bill Gates dead." trick.

-Shmibbon

On the first point, that the house has the power of the purse, it doesn't mean squat. All it means is that bills must originiate in the house. The normal rules of bills matter. So if the Senate drags its heels than it doesn't matter. The bill does not be come law. Don't you remember your School House Rock.

And on the second point, all items must have sales tax collected. If you buy mail-order dog food from California and you live in Kansas, you are still legally required to pay Kansas sales tax on the item. With mail-order it is the responsiblity of the purchaser and not the seller to pay the tax. This has been generally ignored and not enforced by the states because its not worth it and in the end it all pretty much evens out. With the Internet, the ban was extened to include e-transactions into mail order. Taxes were still required to be paid, although no one did it. Now the times is up, the states have simplified the system between themselves to ease the collection and they are going to do so. They are losing quite a bit of money on transactions and they want their cut back. Some states like, Tennessee need the money badly.

So yes, you are going to be taxed. You are going to be taxed soon, and there is nothing to either worry about or prevent it.

Have a nice day.

AOL Don`t even operate everywhere, the argentina subsidiary is pretty new, and last i heard, the swedish subsidiary http://www.sverige.aol.com was closed down by the swedish government... and the site hasn`t been updated for years

Yea, I tell her how to "play with it" and she sends the pix to my AOL account.

Are there this many idiots in the world?

Yes, as Homer put it, "Everyone is stupid except me."

You thought MS had sort of nazi-esque methods? Well, I will now, in this brief essay, reveal to you the hidden truth of Linux, an joint Finnish-German Nazi conspiration for revenge against the victors of WW2. Let's look at the evidence.

During the second World War, Finland was a close allied to the Third Reich, as is clearly illustrated by this photo of a finnish military aircraft. After the defeat of the Axis Powers, a revantionist urge abounds in both countries.

Linux was written by Finnish stuent Linus Thorvalds, a member of the small Swedish-speaking minority of Finland, well known for it's white supremacist tendencies. In this article Torvalds expresses his enthusiasm and admiration for the German-led KDE project. He also makes some unclear statements about the claims of Richard Stallman for calling the operating system GNU/Linux being invalid. Why is this? Obviously, the Nazi -and therefore Anti-Communist- Thorvalds here shows his support for his German allies against the Communist GNU and GNOME [gnome.org] projects.

But what does this hideous Nazi conspiracy want? We cannot, at this point, know. But what we do know, is that Nazies are up to no good. To stop them from achieving whichever horrible goals they hav in mind, I would strongly discourage any use of the Linux kernel or the KDE. Instead, I would recomend the use of a truly democratic operating system.

Thank You.

You thought MS had sort of nazi-esque methods? Well, I will now, in this brief essay, reveal to you the hidden truth of Linux, an joint Finnish-German Nazi conspiration for revenge against the victors of WW2. Let's look at the evidence.

During the second World War, Finland was a close allied to the Third Reich, as is clearly illustrated by this photo of a finnish military aircraft. After the defeat of the Axis Powers, a revantionist urge abounds in both countries.

Linux was written by Finnish stuent Linus Thorvalds, a member of the small Swedish-speaking minority of Finland, well known for it's white supremacist tendencies. In this article Torvalds expresses his enthusiasm and admiration for the German-led KDE project. He also makes some unclear statements about the claims of Richard Stallman for calling the operating system GNU/Linux being invalid. Why is this? Obviously, the Nazi -and therefore Anti-Communist- Thorvalds here shows his support for his German allies against the Communist GNU and GNOME [gnome.org] projects.

But what does this hideous Nazi conspiracy want? We cannot, at this point, know. But what we do know, is that Nazies are up to no good. To stop them from achieving whichever horrible goals they hav in mind, I would strongly discourage any use of the Linux kernel or the KDE. Instead, I would recomend the use of a truly democratic operating system.

Thank You.

Also, The official AOL client works
under WINE (You'll probably have the best luck using the 16-bit version of the AOL client).

You thought MS had sort of nazi-esque methods? Well, I will now, in this brief essay, reveal to you the hidden truth of Linux, an joint Finnish-German Nazi conspiration for revenge against the victors of WW2. Let's look at the evidence.

During the second World War, Finland was a close allied to the Third Reich, as is clearly illustrated by this photo of a finnish military aircraft. After the defeat of the Axis Powers, a revantionist urge abounds in both countries.

Linux was written by Finnish stuent Linus Thorvalds, a member of the small Swedish-speaking minority of Finland, well known for it's white supremacist tendencies. In this article Thorvalds expresses his enthusiasm and admiration for the German-led KDE project. He also makes some unclear statements about the claims of Richard Stallman for calling the operating system GNU/Linux being invalid. Why is this? Obviously, the Nazi -and therefore Anti-Communist- Thorvalds here shows his support for his German allies against the Communist GNU and GNOME projects.

But what does this hideous Nazi conspiracy want? We cannot, at this point, know. But what we do know, is that Nazies are up to no good. To stop them from achieving whichever horrible goals they hav in mind, I would strongly discourage any use of the Linux kernel or the KDE. Instead, I would recomend the use of a truly democratic operating system.

Thank You.

According to AOL itself, Quantum Computer Services (which later changed names to America Online) released its first online service, Q-link, for some unnamed Commodore computer. The first product with the AOL name was for Apple ][ and Macintosh. I don't know if I, as a Mac user, should be happy or embarrassed by this. (:

Revolutionary War 25324
World War I 116708
World War II 408306
Total 550338

A bunch of clone clients have been trying to get hooks in for years to no constructive end because AOL actively tried to BLOCK other clients from connecting. If I remember correctly Jabber and MSN had it working for a while until AOL forced them out by altering the protocol. Most lately I believe they've been doing it with executable checksums. We might have figured out the protocol, but theyre just going to change it up again as soon as foreign clients start connecting in large numbers.

Some old coverage of this can be found at ZD. Theyve got a whole site called "InstantMess" that talks about how AOL refuses to discuss an open format because they want to lock users into their app.

Recently Trillian (www.trillian.cc) has succesfully done it. I think they got around it by using whatever method the JAVA aol clients (AIM express, Quickbuddy).

Id love to see an open standard, but without AOL on board its useless. Its sad really - that the unwashed masses are dictating the standard for the rest of us.

But what really sucks is that Slashcode's inane . link exposer for people who are too stupid to look at the bottom of their browser's window to see the URL that they're clicking on has basically ruined this joke.

The U.S. military has converted to less-volatile fuels, from JP-4 to JP-8. But the airlines already used JET-A, which is essentially the same as JP-8. There's JP-5, which is less volatile and is used by the Navy for carrier aircraft, but it's considered too expensive for the USAF and the airlines. We probably won't see a change there.

• ...locked down in the most secure configuration.

Whaddabout pair programming? In my 'advanced' compilers class we were highly encouraged to use pair programming for our final project. I was really surprised at how effective it really was.

Here's a
link with more word turds on the subject. I'm sure there's better out there.

I say we just get rid of all the TLDs. They're useless. And get rid of that "www" while we're at it.

What's most interesting about this piece is that it's totally accidental. The author was never intending to make it a tribute - when he shot it, it was just footage of a place he liked. But now, because it's gone, it suddenly means a lot more.

For another example, next time you're in NYC, take a train to Pennsylvania Station. As you walk around that low-ceilinged, crowded, user-hostile concourse, look around for the B&W photos on some of the pillars. This used to be there, until they tore it down in 1963.

Hate to break the news, but apparently the pilot hinges on the introduction of some time-travelling aliens who are trying to change history for some unknown purpose.

And then a guy dressed like a pirate and a history geek from the early 80's have to get things back on track!

• ads (whatta bummer eh? =)

• auto-upgrade

Yeah, so it's a repeat, but it's still a great technique.

Having played with it, and with writing custom renders, I can say that the SDK is really great. It's found here.

For more great NPR eye candy and programming stuff have a look at this good intro to toon rendering, this NPR site or indeed this or this demo of cell shading.

For anyone else who, like me, likes GFX programming for fum but is tired of working on an OGL engine that just ends up like everyone else's, this is a pretty cool feature to try and implement.