Slashdot Mirror

DMoz is used here as well as here. If you don't believe they're taken from DMoz, try searching for for "Slashdot" or browsing through the categories a bit.

As for Mozilla/Gecko, haven't you heard of the Komodo project? No doubt it will debut in an embedded form in AOL 7.0 and not to mention Netscape 6.5 and that AOL/Gateway device it's already running in.

Umm...

You guys to realize that the term "Slash" also refers to homosexual erotic fan fiction...

From the article above:

"Slash" is fan fiction that focuses on a romantic and/or sexual relationship between two characters of the same sex.

The majority of slash is male/male stories written by women with other women as the intended audience.

Well, it's what I read when I saw "Censored Slash Sites".. There's a HUGE slash community out there online. There's been a fair bit of slash site censoring going on in that area as well...

So lets all stand up together and defend those censored slash sites!!!! Hail the power of slashdot!

As a sidenote, my wife once noticed a post with an aggrivated poster making the comment: "I thought of a really great name for a slash site, but 'slashdot' is already taken by some stupid geek site!" :)

...and isn't explaining B.C.E. as "before the Christian era" defeating the object? The reason I use BCE (before the common era) and CE (common era) instead of BC and AD is to remove the references to religious myth.
--
mrBlond

Wow, it's been years since I've seen a reference to "Night of the Lepus"

For those interested here's linkage to get you hooked!

(gosh - I can't wait for the DVD!)


http://us.imdb.com/Title?Night+of+the+Lepus+(197 2)


http://members.aol.com/shockcin/lepus.html

Remember you can file just about any suit you want. It's not getting it laughed out of court that's the hard part.

...and for a prime example of such stupidity see

UNITED STATES ex rel. Gerald MAYO v. SATAN AND HIS STAFF

on the Wacky Court Cases site. Its an old item, but worth a chuckle if you've never seen it before.

--

http://members.aol.com/spoons1000/break/

It's just a jump to the left...

Well, we (the POMS) were involved as well (assuming you mean black arrow) although from the few pictures available it all looked distinctly like Gerry Anderson was in charge.

Then this would probably have given you an aneurism.

(It's amazing etch-a-sketch art, not Mr. Goatsex)

-B

Converting MBR System Disks for 64-bit Windows Whistler

Partition Manager Help

LILO

LILO mini-HOWTO

Multi-Booting with LILO

Multiple Boot Advice for x86

The Ultimate Windows Whistler News

Usability comparison: Windows Whistler vs. Gnome 1.2, KDE 2.0, Mandrake Update

Bob is a good guy and an excellent engineer, but he stacked the deck for this one. As I mentioned before, reducing current launch costs by an order of magnitude is forseeable within the very near future. Designs that could, for large launches, reduce it by two orders of magnitude are clearly within the reach of current technology. If launch costs aren't down by a factor of 100 by 2050, it'll be because we've been sleeping on the job.

See the sci.space.settlement FAQ for a detailed analysis of this and some other concerns, although they're oriented towards a slightly different problem. At any rate, Bob also shoots down SPS by requiring massive orbital colonies to support the power generators, a demand that is, to say the least, arguable.

"they do this so they can keep saying '4 million subscribers cant be wrong'"

4 million? Try > 29 million. It's funny that you mention that half of their subscribers are imaginary. They are now giving away 1000 hours for 45 days. I'm not kidding.

Well, we could remove them with high-power lasers. This has already been proposed, and is quite feasible:

In-depth article on ORION space debris removal project
Photonics Spectra discussion of ORION project
ORION summary
ORION details
Military Discussion of LISK-BROOM
High power laser ablation conference

Plans to blow up asteroids always sound cool, but it's best to assume the worst. So stop drooling over those cool nukes, and prepare for what could be the most important task once you are the last male of female on this rock.

But seriously: water-warfare sounds like a 'relatively' good idea (if you forget that warfare sucks etc etc) as it minimises 'colateral damage' (i.e. innocent people getting hurt).

You mean like the sinking of the Lusitania? In which 1,195 lives were lost? There are plenty of people-carrying vessels out there that are in danger at wartime.

Well, this guy had lost his job, wife, dog, pants, whatever, and low and behold awakes to someone breaking into his truck. He promptly opens the door and fires off a few rounds. The repo man made it about half a mile before giving it up in a ditch. The next morning this man went to see what all to commotion down the road was about. When he approached the investigating officer and said, "Sir, I shot that man last night because I thought he was stealing my truck," the officer responded with, "Ok, sir. Thanks. You have a good day."

As a side note, justifiable use of force is covered under Pa. Consolidated Statues Title 18, Sections 505-507. Deadly force is (almost) never authorized for the protection of property, however, if the bad guy(tm) enters your house and you reasonably believe he is going to hurt someone inside, you can feel free to shoot him. ie You are not required to retreat in your own dwelling in PA.

Section 507 - Use of Force in Protection of Property in PA

If you think I'm joking take a peek at the following.

geek

new

UMich

And my favorite, check out his Darpa funding: Quinn

I have noticed in the recent past that there has been a lot of marketing whoring with regards to Ultra DMA and its various speeds.

I am most disappointed with IDE in general from a performance standpoint. I go through hardware all the time because of the nature of my job, and two things stick out as the sore thumb in bad system performance. The first is the availability of huge quantities of memory, the second being the hard drive.

As far as controllers go in the this area of performance, I tend not to care for anything that is not Intel or Promise, not that I have a fetish for Intel goods. I've yet to try any striping/parity striping controllers yet either. My observation of IDE thus far, regardless of bus 'speed' is somewhat negative. High CPU usage, bad multi-thrashability (e.g., hitting the disk with nasty requests in multiple ways all at once). I feel the hard disk holding me up, especially in Windows. I have found the following registry keys for Windows 2000 to enable DMA66+ operations, FYI:

From this site...

To activate the ATA/66 (UDMA/66) setting, you need to run Regedit (or Regedt32) and go to:

HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\System\CurrentControlSet\Contro l\Class\{4D36E96A-E325-11CE-BFC1-08002BE10318}\000 0

If using Regedt32 uncheck "Read Only Mode" in the Options menu. Note that the "0000" key above might show as "0001", "0002" or "0003" on your machine, depending on your particular hardware settings. Select the key appropriate to your case. Right-click to create a new DWORD [REG_DWORD] Value, call it "EnableUDMA66" (no quotes), and type 1 in the Decimal box to enable ATA/66 (UDMA/66) support. To disable it, change the Decimal value to 0, or delete the "EnableUDMA66" Value altogether. Reboot when done.

A MUST: To properly enable the UDMA/66 setting, you need to have your ATA/66 (or ATA/100) capable drive(s) hooked up to a different IDE channel than the one your older (E)IDE (even if UDMA/33 capable) drive(s) are connected to!

Another site has directions for NT 4.0 Sp5+ here.

Another useful site is here, BMDRIVERS.

Here and there you will see reports about reduced CPU usage. This is laughable. One place indicates that mass transfers were taking 90% CPU and with the new and improved drivers, a "mere 56%". Meanwhile all my SCSI drives never elevate the CPU at all.

Another alternative to using all these tweaks and hacks is to just download the Intel drivers (if you have an Intel chipset which you should for PCs, save the glorious Athlon).

I have noticed various anomalies with these drivers.

Sorry for giving so much attention to Windows, these operating systems tend to need the most attention. As far as unix goes, the hdparm suggestions I have seen so far seem correct, thanks for the input.

The SCSI paradigm is greatly suffering from the same pomp with festering numbers. My experience has been that Ultra 160 drives perform no better than Ultra 80. Open Magazine did a whole battery of benchmarks to illustrate its uselessness (unable to locate link).

I personally look for fast rotational speed, good platter density and fewer platters and a fast media rate, and lastly seek times.

IDE and its Ultra friends are great for huge drives to dump crap onto, and even mirror. Keep the OS and the swap file on a SCSI drive, and you can use your CPU for something else.

The client isn't TiK. The client is based on gtk, and is available here. It also supports oscar.

I support AOL for making an attempt to support the GNU/Linux platform, but what you linked to is not really a Linux client; it's a Linux86 client. From the page: "Currently, AIM Linux runs on the intel platform," meaning that it's prohibitively slow to emulate this client on a PowerPC, Sparc, Alpha, or Itanium system. A program that truly supports the Linux platform must be recompileable to any architecture and thus must be source code or bytecode. (Speaking of bytecode, here's a Java-based AIM client called AIM Express that will run in any browser with a Java 1.1 compatible runtime environment.)

The other problem with the released client is that it requires X11, which (apart from eating a fair chunk of system RAM) is much less friendly to the visually impaired than the console. A console client (which would look a bit like BitchX) would interface more easily with popular screen reading software.

The waste from nuclear reactors and reprocessing is in no way comparable to what is present in nature.

You might want to have a look at the Oklo Fossil Nuclear Reactor, the product of a natural nuclear reactor in Gabon. It's thought that, about 2000 million years ago, a water moderated chain reaction started in uranium rich soil and ran for about 1 million years. (How do they know, well there's all these fission products lying about the place.)

It is very chemically toxic ...

Agreed, but it is less chemically toxic than many other natural toxins. Botulism toxin is, I believe, top of the league table here. (And people inject this stuff into their foreheads!)

...but it will still be worrisome to deal with for something like 100,000 years.

This 100,000 years number seems to pop up with wild abandon. IIRC, this figure appears to be the half-life of one of the daughter products of the decay chain. But with a longer half-life comes less activity. How close is this to background radiation? And does it make more difference to radiation exposure than, for example, living at 700m above sea-level does?

None of the above is an argument for not treating nuclear waste carefully. But requiring massively different standards of risk control when the nuclear word is used doesn't help anyone. And it may be actively harmful: Opposition to nuclear power has led to more coal being used for base-line power production, leading to massive amounts of chemical and radioactive pollutants being spewed into the atmosphere. Not something I feel particularly comfortable about.

Or you could roll your own with this recipe. Some days I just love the net.

For something really cool, sometimes you have to look at older technology, like the plasma speakers described here.

The idea is that the shape/size of a flame can be influenced by a high voltage signal, and the resulting changes in the flame are broadcast as a high fidelity sound. Here's a quote from the above site

"It is really simple. It is a modulated RF power amp with a controlled ionic discharge. By modulating the oscillator with the audio signal the flame size changed and so the air pressure changed also . You hear the sound directly through the air without modulating a diaphragm. So there are no moving parts, no distortion and none of the problems other tweeters have."

And, as an added bonus, you get to play with nifty Tesla coil technology.

These are true Geek Speakers.

--

Only on Slashdot can a freedom to innovate/IP discussion wind up talking about cloning chocolate-chip cookies. Or maybe I'm wrong?

-JPJ

Two engineers from Bell Aerospace systems submitted a plan to NASA in 1962 for a one-way manned moon mission in order to beat the russians. The astronaut would have no means of immediate return and would be sustained on the moon by a series of supply rockets until the technology for a return mission is developed.

This wasn't a joke. These engineers were serious.

The 1962 book "The Pilgrim Project" by Hank Searle and the 1968 movie "Countdown" were based on this plan.

It seems to me that such a plan would not only have been a way to beat the russians but also a very effective budget ratchet - you can't cut the budget with a man stranded on the moon...

-

I thought spending on space projects was going down!

Our culture is supposedly dominated in areas like science by people who say that they believe in evolution. The next obvious step would be space (although the previous atomic age doesn't seem to have got very far in that direction). Without a program like this, Dr Malthus wins, albeit later than he figured, and everyone else loses (most of us die without any help from a rapacious industry, militant eco-nuts, Chernobyl or the Inquisition). Yet funding for space-oriented development is slowly, steadily drying up.

Why?

So maybe this would be a good reason to get M$ back in court

It seems that Bill or his lawyers read history. If time were in a position to honour anything, we would be considering a time-honoured practice here.

The exact same method was used to acquire enormous power by the Medievel Church. They worked very hard to become confessors to important people, then used or sold the information confessed for even further political entrenchment. Of course, if someone became too much of an obstacle, they could always be bumped off their perch.

So... Microsoft are taken to court, and then one day a judge finds an email in his inbox with copies of emails to and from his son's Hotmail account - concerning specific indiscretions - attached; or copies of an email conversation between him and a particular woman; or whatever. I'm sure you get the idea.

Suddenly, having Microsoft lose a case seems an exceptionally bad idea to the judge. Meanwhile, the other judges are seeing rising pressure from friends and relatives (many of whom, it seems, also have Hotmail/Passport accounts), which combined with another astroturf movement might be enough to throw the case.

... whoever was riding "shotgun" became extremely bored while the fellow "driving" became frustrated that the guy riding shotgun would come up with ideas in the middle of the driver's typing.

If it doesn't feel good, you're not doing it right.

The person not at the keyboard should be coming up with ideas, constantly (certainly often enough to stave off boredom). If he or she can't communicate them, he or she says, "Let me drive." Pairs change "drivers" frequently, and should.

I see paired programming as fairly wasteful of my time.

See http://members.aol.com/humansandt/papers/pairprogr ammingcostbene/pairprogrammingcostbene.htm for a study with evidence to the contrary. (Pairs took slightly more than half as long to "complete" a problem, but did so with so many fewer bugs as to more than make up for it.)

Then again, I'm prone to minimal laziness in my work.

"The three principle virtues of a programmer are Laziness, Impatience, and Hubris. See the Camel Book for why."

Yeah, A. Whitney Brown is outrageously funny. I especially like this quip from his site.

The net needs better transcripts of these shows. Of course there would be a lot of stuff to choose from, but I would enjoy digging thru volumes of text for some of my favorite writers.

These days Comedy Central and Public Access are the only channels that have anything really going for them. Good writing, few restraints.

Yeah, A. Whitney Brown is outrageously funny. I especially like this quip from his site.

The net needs better transcripts of these shows. Of course there would be a lot of stuff to choose from, but I would enjoy digging thru volumes of text for some of my favorite writers.

These days Comedy Central and Public Access are the only channels that have anything really going for them. Good writing, few restraints.

Yes, I am quite aware that the German word for window is das Fenster (remember to capitalize nouns in German), but fenestration is the layout of windows and doors of a building, and from Merriam Webster:
One entry found for defenestration.

Main Entry: defenestration
Pronunciation: (")dE-"fe-n&-'strA-sh&n
Function: noun
Etymology: de- + Latin fenestra window
Date: 1620
: a throwing of a person or thing out of a window
- defenestrate /(")dE-'fe-n&-"strAt/ transitive verb

also see The Defenestration of Prague

defenestration = deforestation? GAH!

-----

I thought AIM ran on Mac OS, on those non-x86 architecture boxen?

• Classic Mac OS has no memory protection.
• Mac OS X needs more computer (G4) than many Macintosh computer owners can afford.
• There's no Classic Mac binary compatibility engine for LinuxPPC or NetBSD, the most popular fully Free systems on Mac hardware, and Apple would most likely sue anyone who tried to implement one.
• Sparc, MIPS, and Alpha still have no official Oscar AIM client.
• Some people can live with Quick Buddy, which is available to anybody with support for Java applets. However, others desire features TOC does not provide, such as high availability (TOC outages are disturbingly common).

• It's a much smaller download than Win32, and uses Oscar (thus probably implements the MD5 stuff).
• AOL makes it available via FTP, so you can just retrieve the part that is necessary for your MD5sum. (using FTP RETR) Very quick for small parts.
• You can save whatever you downloaded so that you don't have to redo the download later.
• the .prc file (or some part of it) is probably what the checksum comes out of. Since it's uncompressed, there is less work to do.

How about we just do an old fashioned slashdotting of aol.com? Sure, they probably have a farm of servers, and can handle this load. Sure they'll probably get paid for every hit by their ads. but it'll be great for getting our frustrations out! Come on everyone, click here!!!!

Actually, linux is a supported platform. You can get it from http://www.aol.com/aim/linux.html. It doesn't have all the features of the windows client, but it works.

YMMV though: rumor is that it was broken by the recent changes.

Ok, so GAIM is another aol contender... any news on Tik? ...I'm an ICQ person myself, just beginning to dabble in the world of AIM. I've used AOL's official java client tiktoc for soooo long that Tik is a wonderful alternative. How are these two players effected?

Bull, no ad campaign, no matter how great it is can make me buy a crap product more than once

I'm not talking about an individual person. I have changed the radio station because of an irritating ad. However, nobody can deny that crappy products can be sold through sheer volume of advertising and name recognition even when there are better alternatives. Here's a perfect example of a company that owns almost 70% of their market earned almost entirely through their advertising.

Intrigued by this (which I had never heard of), I found a link to more information.

--
Evan

--

http://www.charlesworth.com/isr/issues/isr231/1379 _18/

Those of you familiar with German can also have a look at a short overview of Adam Ries' "Rechnen auff der Linihen" from 1518, which describes how to calculate the multiplication on the Abacus and is considered as the first mathematical book for the common people: Rechnen auff der Linihen

After "Rechnen auff der Linihen", he wrote "Rechnen auff der Linihen und der Federn" which also is considered as the introduction of the Arabic numbers to Central Europe.

(see Adam Ries - German)

The Arabic numbers had been introduced to Europe in 1202 by Leonardo Fibonacci (who also found the famous "fibonacci numbers", now a standard algorithm for describing recursion).

And last but not least, also an article in English: Adam Ries.

Sebastian

I've used GAIM a little -- it's a lot better than this piece of junk they're trying to get Linux users to use.

They should embrace GAIM -- and possibly even work together with the developers to make their own software better. Easier for them, better for the users.

They should embrace Jabber -- they own ICQ and AIM, why not put out a melding of ICQ and AIM based on Jabber? I mean, it is open source. Again, easier for them, better for the users.

But the above will never happen. We are talking about AOL. Instant messaging has been around as "MSG" since the IRC days, or even the "write" or "talk" commands on *nix. AOL is simply losing the best selling point of its service -- "instant messaging." This makes them angry.

Two words:

Neverwinter Nights

Dungeon Master, Wizardry, and like games, started a tradition of dungeon crawl RPGs that are currenly best explemfified by Diablo II on one end of the spectrum, and Baldur's Gate II on the other. But it looks like Bioware's Neverwinter Nights is about to take the crown.

Another method of hiding it with a hated, but long lasting material, is to built it with taped re-runs of "Highway To Heaven". That show never goes away, and nobody likes it!

That's what exsites me about the future of the Space Age and Goddard and what he meant to it, and all that. SO: do I get my lap dance now???

In the UK (or nearby) there was a period when the seas were crowded with pirate radio stations. One of these, Radio 390, was based on the seafort now known as Sealand.

This period ended in 1967 (dear God, is it that long ago?) with the Marine Offences Act, which made it illegal to supply/advertise on the pirates.

One of this later batch 'Not So Jolly Roger' involved the topical subject of pirate radio, with J.D. going undercover as a replacement disc jockey on a pirate radio station. The location footage was shot at the Red Sands off shore platform, home to Radio 309. Much of the incidental music was made up of fictitious performers having their 60's style discs spun on Radio Jolly Roger's turntables, with two notable exceptions, an instrumental 'The Scorpion' credited to Ted Astley and Patsy Ann Noble's 'He Who Rides The Tiger' neither of which was made available officially.

Okay, I didn't realize it'd require a port. However, I take offense to your "hostile to free software" comment. Windows has an extensive freeward community

I assume "freeward" is a misspelling for "freeware." In that case, I know about all royalty-free binaries, but most of them are not free software. There's a difference.

OSS software does not need to run on an OSSOS.

But copylefted free software can never be written in Visual Basic, as that would require providing the source code of the MS Visual Basic runtime and releasing it under a compatible license. Tough luck getting Microsoft to comply there. (Or is the VB runtime covered by the operating system exception to the common licenses?)

And there isn't that large of a library of GPL'd Windows software to infect Windows programs with GPL either.

AOL is going to bat for one of their subscribers here.

1. AOL didn't roll over and give away the identity of "grantst99" when issued a subpoena asking for this information for use in a civil lawsuit. They notified the user who then anonymously appeared in court asking for dismissal of the suit. (which was granted)

2. Now that the suit has been taken up again in another state, AOL has filed an Amicus brief that might just have another positive impact for their user.

3. That they're going to this trouble means that they want their customers protected. While they say (in the brief) that users would leave for the competition if their anonymity were compromised, that's really not true for the vast majority of thier customer base. Most AOL users aren't the type to post anything of interest at all on the Internet. (anyone remember USENET in the mid to late 90s, and how bad AOL users were ragged on for "me too" posts?)

Read thier paper - it's incredibly interesting. I think it shows that they really do have an interest in Free Speech. And that while we should always be skeptical, we shouldn't always be cynical.

The two questions which IMHO would need to be answered to favor a dynamo over a solar panel would be

a) which creates more of a drag burden, the dynamo on the wheel, or the weight and aerodynamic drag of the solar panel? and

b)if the base drag in item a) favors the dynamo, does this advantage continue even with the supporting electronics required to deliver the kind of presumably non-spiky power to the electronic devices in terms of voltage?

Have you heard about the painter Vincent Van Gogh,
Who loved color and who let it show.
Now in the museum what have we here?
The baddest painter since God's Jan Vermeer.
He loved he loved he loved life so bad,
His paintings had twice the color other paintings had.
So bad so bad that the world had to know,
The man loved color and he let it show.

Well in the Amsterdam museum I was feeling bad,
And trying to find a way not to be that sad.
I felt the feeling in the room sincere,
Vincent Van Gogh well he seemed so near.
And he loved he loved he loved life like he did,
HIs paintings had things that painters keep hid.
He loved life so bad that the world had to know,
He loved color and he let it show.

OK, so what can we say about this Vincent Van Gogh?
Ellie.
He loved color and he let it show,
Ok, Michael, now in the museum, what have we here?
The baddest painter since Jan Vermeer.
He loved he loved he loved life with that heart,
His paintings took off where the other paintings just start.
He loved life so bad that the world had to know,
He loved color and he let it show.

Alright.
Have you heard about the painter Vincent Van Gogh?
Who loved color and who let it show.
Now in the museum what have we here?
The baddest painter since God's Jan Vermeer.
He loved he loved he loved life with a passion,
His paintings said things that men generally don't do in that fashion.
He loved life so bad that the world had to know,
The man loved life folks and he let it show.
Vincent Van Gogh, who we talkin' about?
Vincent Van Gogh.