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Here is a screen showing one of the true horrors of doom.

You see, I am the guy who actually clicks through the ads to go to the advertised sites. If it weren't for me, then no traffic would be generated by the ads and hense no advertising revenue.

I also like to drive 45 MPH on the highway during rush hour while I yammer away on my cell phone.

I use public toilets and piss on the seat
I walk around in the summertime saying "how about this heat?"

If they want Hollywood ones, the list is long..
Gort (from "The Day the Earth Stood Still")
Johnny Five (from "Short Circuit")
Half the cast of "The Black Hole"
Any of the Star Wars ones...
Plus the evil one from "Saturn V",
Logan's Run,
Buck Rogers,
Battlestar Galactica
and so on...

The public will recognize those.. I doubt there are many (if any?) non-fictitious robots that the general public could name or recognize.

Theres also Blueyonder if don't like queuing.. Unfortunately the Linux version doesn't appear to be up yet,

Sadly lacking are the ships from Iain M. Banks' Culture universe. These not only have great names but are much more realistic than in most scifi. Even a small General Systems Vehicle (GSV) would be up there with a Super Star Destroyer sizewise (and has millions of inhabitants) and a Torturer Class Rapid Offensive Unit (ROU) would kick the shit out of any other scifi warship (couple of hundred metres long, over 90% engine, the rest weapons, controled by an AI, 0 crew).

It is actually fairly easy to estimate what what warships in space would be like, from a little physics and common sense. Most scifi fails miserably in this regard. The most obvious fact that has a bearing on space warships is that space is empty or nearly so. There is no where to hide and therefore it is very easy to guess what colour a warship would be, black. For the same reason it can also be guessed that the temperature of a warships hull will be 2.73 K (2.73 degrees above absolute zero), to match the temperature of the Cosmic Microwave Background (CMB). Any hotter and its thermal emission will give away its presense, any cooler and it will stand out as a shadow against the CMB.

Of course there is still many effects (such as passing in front of a star) that could give you away. A critical parameter which determines how battles would play out is at what distance, on average warships could detect each other. Since the speed of light is around 300,000 km/s, if ships can only be detected at less than a million kilometers battles are likely to very short, few second affairs, where the first ship to detect the other and fire a laser (or similar) wins. In this case the sophistication of sensors and camoflage technology will be the deciding factor.

However if the average detection distance is much greater than a million kilometers then the travel time of the fastest weapon will many seconds or even minutes. Even ships moving at only a few kilometers per second could move a considerable distance in such time. Using laser like weapons would have much of the quality of contempory battleships shelling each other. With significant light travel times you would need to accurately predict the motion of the target to stand any chance of hitting it and evasive action by the target would be possible (although they would not be able to see a laser pulse coming).

At short ranges lasers or the like would be the weapon of choice but if you are engaging ships at distances of a hundred million kilometres guided missiles, if they could move at a significant fraction of the speed of light, might be of use as well, since at such a distance the light travel time would be many minutes and you are unlikely to hit something at that range with a laser if it is doing any manouvring.

It should be noted that engagements at very small distances such as those portrayed in Star Wars, B5 etc. would be rather unlikely. Not only is it unlikely that ships would be undetectable down to distances of a few kilometres but if this was the case ship combat would be virtually impossible. Considering just the inner solar system and confining oneself to the within a million kilometres of the plane you are faced with a volume of the order of 10^22 cubic kilometres. Thousands of ships could wander around in such a volume for ever without meeting if they needed to pass within a few kilometres in order to see each other.

When you consider the whole galaxy it quickly becomes clear that conventional war loses all meaning. I think it is unlikely that ships would detectable at even lightdays if they were trying to be inconspicuous, given the huge amount of gas, ice, dust and rocks that is floating around and reflecting starlight. But even if you could seeing where a ship was days ago is not a great step forward in fighting it (a lightday is very roughly the size of the solar system). The volume of the galaxy

more recreational math

some lego

Film GIMP(now CinePaint) is NOTHING like Adobe Premiere. Adobe Premiere is a non-linear video editor, CinePaint is a high dynamic range picture editor, basically just the Gimp with 64-bit RGBA color capability. Cinelerra is a non-linear editor, but not quite on par with Premiere IMHO. Kino and kdenlive are promising projects I have yet to use to do that same thing.

Dave Chapelle gives it a try

Once again slashdot stumbles upon an already popular hobby. http://www.scnt01426.pwp.blueyonder.co.uk/Articles /WXSAT/wxsat.htm

Put it on your COCK!

LOL

i was unpopular, but not because of any status as a "nerd".

they were just jealous of my stylish good looks.

At '27,99 a month in the uk, its poor value for money. Most people I know have released that AOL is crap and they have switched a real isp.

> What color is the sky in your world? [...] Even if you did manage to assemble the right talent of artists, musicians, programmers, testers, managers, etc.

I live in a world where the color of the sky indicates that artists, musicians, and managers don't add a heck of a lot to the game-playing experience.

I mentioned continuous evolution as the reason for OSS gaming's ultimate supremacy, but I should have mentioned the increasing diversion of resources into irrelevant fluff as the reason for commercial gaming's... increasing fluff-orientation. It's kind of like the music industry: marketing has become more important than the content.

[Heh, and I use the graphic tiles when I play Angband. You can imagine what a hardliner would say about today's commercial games!]

How about making a 3D FPS-version of nethack?
Ofcourse, you wouldn't have the same overview as the real thing, but I know *I* would have loved to explore endless of dungeons in full 3D anyway. :)The nethack "world" is based on squares, and so are some of the older "2.5D" FPS's like f.eks. Wolf3D. I'm not a very experienced (or even slightly good) programmer, but I'm sure it wouldn't be too hard to make a simple raycasting engine for nethack. :)
Anyone up for it? ;)

There's one here

Ray Kurzweil was predicting this by 2005 I believe. ( I don't have the book handy ) His next milestone is about 2010 when this same power should be about $1000 bucks.

Hope he's right about the rest of it. I want to live in the Culture

There are many other neat things on this guy's website besides the Eschers, most notably these mathetical scultupes and Rodin's Thinker. From the Rodin's Thinker project: This took a lot of work, despite starting from computer-generated instructions based on photographs (actually the programming was nearly half of the project). Cool!

There are many other neat things on this guy's website besides the Eschers, most notably these mathetical scultupes and Rodin's Thinker. From the Rodin's Thinker project: This took a lot of work, despite starting from computer-generated instructions based on photographs (actually the programming was nearly half of the project). Cool!

For a lot of the suggested uses, a (software) RAM drive would be about as good this thing.

About the only thing that this drive provides that makes it better than a software drive is the fact that it's got it's own power supply. This means that the data on the hardware ramdrive will survive a system crash/power cycle. Unfortunately, their prices don't (seem to) include a separate battery backup, so you should budget an extra couple hundred dollars for a UPS dedicated to the drive. I'd actually pay for that, even if I already have a UPS for my computer because -- if you're paying the extra hundreds (or thousands) for this box, you'd better be paying for the persistant data feature. If that's the case, the last thing you want to happen is for your data to be lost the first time you had a blackout long enough to outlast the UPS.

My expectation is that this machine doesn't eat much power.. In other words, even a small power supply should supply it for a day or more if it's not also powering a computer.

Now for the reasons why this card isn't too useful for most data:

• Programs: Why store programs on this drive? At that price, I'll just use a startup script that populates a software RAM drive whenever I boot up. Unless you have a program that absolutely must be running as fast as possible after boot, that extra wait isn't going to hurt most people.
• Cache data: especially with transient cached data, a software RAM drive gives you most of what you need.
• Temp Data: (e.g. scratch files for compilers, etc). Same as Cache data.
• read-mostly Databases: Once the data is first accessed, you're better off to pay for a few gigabytes of regular RAM and assign it to your database cache. If your database doesn't have a decent data caching algorithm then you'd better find yourself a better database.
• read-write databases: This is one place where this works nicely -- between the fast access and data persistence across a reboot, it might be worthwhile -- but I'd reiterate the comment about putting the RAM drive on it's own UPS. Remember that if you have a hardware failure that requires a motherboard replacement, you won't be able to unplug the board's power cable until you've backed up the data. (heh, heh).

BTW:

• Hardware RAM drives aren't new. There have been implementations of those things floating around for years.
• Linux has a really good disk cache system. Among other things it makes it really difficult to test the I/O subsystem on a machine with 6GB of RAM (had to do that once). You end up needing a program to flush the disk cache after every run.
  And it's free (in both senses of the word)!

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Dear lin-ux@blueyonder.co.uk

Posting a mirror of the receiver on your ISP's webspace is moronic and asking for it. Therefore, lin-ux@blueyonder.co.uk I feel it is my duty to provide a link to abuse@blueyonder.co.uk for all the people who are in a far more evil mood than I am, and feel like trying to get your account closed. I hope you have a Cable Modem, as that would be funnier still.

lin-ux@blueyonder.co.uk , you are a silly fucktard.

Dear lin-ux@blueyonder.co.uk

Posting a mirror of the receiver on your ISP's webspace is moronic and asking for it. Therefore, lin-ux@blueyonder.co.uk I feel it is my duty to provide a link to abuse@blueyonder.co.uk for all the people who are in a far more evil mood than I am, and feel like trying to get your account closed. I hope you have a Cable Modem, as that would be funnier still.

lin-ux@blueyonder.co.uk , you are a silly fucktard.

Dear lin-ux@blueyonder.co.uk

Posting a mirror of the receiver on your ISP's webspace is moronic and asking for it. Therefore, lin-ux@blueyonder.co.uk I feel it is my duty to provide a link to abuse@blueyonder.co.uk for all the people who are in a far more evil mood than I am, and feel like trying to get your account closed. I hope you have a Cable Modem, as that would be funnier still.

lin-ux@blueyonder.co.uk , you are a silly fucktard.

Dear lin-ux@blueyonder.co.uk

Posting a mirror of the receiver on your ISP's webspace is moronic and asking for it. Therefore, lin-ux@blueyonder.co.uk I feel it is my duty to provide a link to abuse@blueyonder.co.uk for all the people who are in a far more evil mood than I am, and feel like trying to get your account closed. I hope you have a Cable Modem, as that would be funnier still.

lin-ux@blueyonder.co.uk , you are a silly fucktard.

Heres a screenshot!

Blueyonder are probably the biggest broadband supplier in the UK to homes. They use this method of MAC authentication.
They have a 'sef-care' page where you can register your own MAC address' yourself. Or you can phone up. Each person can have 10 MAC addresses.
Will

You wouldn't belive this either!

"Have you ever talked to a woman without needing to give you her credit card number?"

(i think this applies here :) )

-fren

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Here is the real link!

Mirror here

OK, it's here:

http://www.aedanmcg.pwp.blueyonder.co.uk/winswitch /win_switcher.html

Try not to slashdot it!

aedan

Heres a screenshot of the new tool in action

Who plays whom?

LISP: Yoda.
C: Construction worker. Wearing plaid. With "F*** you" on the front of his shirt.
C++: Two-headed construction worker. Exists in five dimensions. At certain plane intersections, looks like C, at others like Java, and sometimes resembles nothing so much as a confused little boy holding TNT.
Perl: A mobius strip.
PHP: A two dimensional drawing of a human interleaved in slices with a three-dimensional rendered version of Perl.
Eiffel and other purely-functional languages: a perfectly-symmetrical, beautiful woman. She's not too fast, up in the head, but she's got a GORGEOUS pair of legs.
C#: A small, annoying entity grafted onto the leg of Bill Gates, a giant who carries a sledgehammer labelled "Visual Studio". It's a very pretty sledgehammer.

Jouster

Heres a screenshot

Sorry that was I in such a rush this morning. Trust me, if you'ld had to wade through the zoo down by the WTC site (visiting police strutting about, tourists blocking the sidewalks, media types damn near hitting folks with eighty bazillion pound cameras) to, get this, coordinate a move, you'ld want to get in and out ASAP too.
Anyway, the direct Pongsat link is here, most of my other science teacher resources are here (check out SciPlus in particular; they're amazing). The homeschooling discussion is archived here, and the obligatory LEGO link is here.
Good luck,
Rustin

BT are to blaime in the UK. Luckily I can get my broadband through telewest. I just hope that the scottish power line trials are a success

It nice to see Tradwars on it. Haven't seen that and years.

I haven't seen this in years. In case you were wondering, that's a banner ad Slashdot is running featuring John Wayne Gacy.

Yes, the same John Wayne Gacy that was convicted of 33 serial murders. Whom did he rape and murder, you ask? Why, he raped and murdered small children.

That's right, HE RAPED AND MURDERED SMALL CHILDREN. And now he's being used to sell things on Slashdot.

God Bless America.

http://www.weebl.pwp.blueyonder.co.uk/b3ta/pie.htm l

Hey, if Weebl likes pie, you should, too!

Are you KIDDING? That's a Weebl and Bob quote!

mmmm piemenus!

when come back, bring pie!

[ seriously, follow this link, its not the dude with the weird ass ]

Look, you need to realise that different price points have little to do with "What's most expensive to provide" (beyond obviously covering costs).

It's much more to do with "how much do customers want it enough to pay for it." The stuff which makes broadband useful is obviously more desirable to technically competent customers such as ourselves than a 'faster version of dialup'.

So if I'm the owner of a cable company, I apply simple supply & demand and say "You want the good stuff? Sure you can have it, for a price"

Now I think there's a tier between the bog standard consumer and the business customer who has a net financial gain from their connection - call it the 'clueful consumer' offering. If I were running a cable company, I'd be offering it at a price a bit above the standard consumer offering, which would allow:

1. Servers not open to the public (ie all services have to be p/w protected and the URLs not generally advertised)
2. Faster speed (I'm thinking 1024kps download)
3. Mostly static IP - no SLA on it, but the DHCP hands out long leases (a month+)

By some odd coincidence, that's what my cable provider is offering. Although only the extra bandwidth is part of the premium service rn - I get everything else. The AUP explicitly allows me to run servers:

Telewest blueyonder hi-speed internet opens up new possibilities of use with its features such as 'always on', and while subscribers are able to benefit from these features, Telewest must also ensure that the Service is not abused to the disadvantage of the Service and subscriber group.

You must not use, nor allow anyone else to use the Services to provide Internet Protocol services to the Internet populace as a whole, including other blueyonder customers. Internet Protocol services includes, but is not limited to, HTTP, games, telnet and FTP services.

However, you may provide Internet Protocol services from your computer for personal use. An example would be the running of an authenticated FTP service to enable you to access files on your home computer remotely. The following conditions apply:-

• Any Internet Protocol services you use require authentication eg. You are not allowed to provide anonymous FTP servers; and
• You are not allowed more than ten concurrent connections to the Internet Protocol services you use.

Which is nice

Look, you need to realise that different price points have little to do with "What's most expensive to provide" (beyond obviously covering costs).

It's much more to do with "how much do customers want it enough to pay for it." The stuff which makes broadband useful is obviously more desirable to technically competent customers such as ourselves than a 'faster version of dialup'.

So if I'm the owner of a cable company, I apply simple supply & demand and say "You want the good stuff? Sure you can have it, for a price"

Now I think there's a tier between the bog standard consumer and the business customer who has a net financial gain from their connection - call it the 'clueful consumer' offering. If I were running a cable company, I'd be offering it at a price a bit above the standard consumer offering, which would allow:

1. Servers not open to the public (ie all services have to be p/w protected and the URLs not generally advertised)
2. Faster speed (I'm thinking 1024kps download)
3. Mostly static IP - no SLA on it, but the DHCP hands out long leases (a month+)

By some odd coincidence, that's what my cable provider is offering. Although only the extra bandwidth is part of the premium service rn - I get everything else. The AUP explicitly allows me to run servers:

Telewest blueyonder hi-speed internet opens up new possibilities of use with its features such as 'always on', and while subscribers are able to benefit from these features, Telewest must also ensure that the Service is not abused to the disadvantage of the Service and subscriber group.

You must not use, nor allow anyone else to use the Services to provide Internet Protocol services to the Internet populace as a whole, including other blueyonder customers. Internet Protocol services includes, but is not limited to, HTTP, games, telnet and FTP services.

However, you may provide Internet Protocol services from your computer for personal use. An example would be the running of an authenticated FTP service to enable you to access files on your home computer remotely. The following conditions apply:-

• Any Internet Protocol services you use require authentication eg. You are not allowed to provide anonymous FTP servers; and
• You are not allowed more than ten concurrent connections to the Internet Protocol services you use.

Which is nice

So far (and touch wood) my service has gone down only once for like a day and there are no limits or caps which is as serious as our buddies in other continents are suffering. The price is good, £29.99 per month or even less if you subscribe to another service like TV or telephone.

Still, I don't see the big deal in owning or leasing a cable modem. As long as it works and the service is good, then it shouldn't really matter. I think I lease mine from Telewest, but they simply don't tell you. Maybe the price is inculded in the monthly fee? well, ignorance is bliss :)

Well, i guess i should go back to work now..

I'm surprised that everyone on /. thinks G-force limits is a stupid law. Think about it the theme park (large multimillion dollar corporation) makes a ride without thinking about the safety of people riding it. How is this differrent from the CDBPTA where Hollywood, actors and record companies are dazzled by CDPBTA being great because it obliterates our rights and gives them billions of dollars? The rollercoaster corporations aren't considering our safety and just building massive things with g-forces that'll knock your brain into your ass. Obviously the kids and /.'ers younger than 25 won't understand this, the only way they'll understand is if when they walk away from the ride one of them drops dead. And then they'll just feel bad for a month before forgetting it.

Oh, and if you get a GP 32, a smart media card, and go to GP Developers to get the free launcher, you can get games for it for free....

Wolfenstein 3D (the original shareware) and Spear of Destiny (the original shareware) run really well, and they didn't cost me a dime. (Doom is coming along nicely too..)

For a while if you were looking for reasonable priced games in the U. S., the Dreamcast has been a good choice (I got Unreal Tournament new for just $9.00), too...

1. BT monopoly. There are tales of people 'phoning BT to get broadband and being signed up for unmetered dialup (56k) instead due to BT customer service idiocy. The BT/ BT OPenworld/ BT whatever split makes Railtrack's look sensible.
2. UK Cableco current funding. This does *not* indicate any future network upgrades will be forthcoming soon. I am with Telewest Blue Yonder - my service is excellent for what it is (>60 days same IP, between 100-250k down, 40-80k up) but does not come close to US definitions of broadband. I pay 25 UKP/ month for this. NTL are bringing in 1mps for 50 UKP/ month (!) in selected areas, but have many pockets of analogue only TV / dialup subs.
3. 3) The UK government's terrible record on encouraging broadband - hell, even dial up - access. Last year the Guardian reported reported that the UK has committed

   £30m to extend broadband technology outside metropolitan areas. Sweden is committing £1.19bn.

   This despite the UK 'e-zar' loudly boasting about how good things are.
4. Basically, the UK gets whipped at non-LANned betwork gaming evry time :(