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Actually, the speed of light is very much used as the constant around which time is measured. It's too much discussion to handle in a slashdot comment, so check out this page on the subject: The Light Clock

Handmade presents are the best, and handmade presents with a geek theme are great for geeks.

Why not give your s.o./parents a portrait of yourself made out of your code, like using the Text-Image plug-in for the GIMP, or my own image to text. Get a nice hi-res image of yourself and your best perl script/r00t sploit, combine the two and print it out on some photo quality paper, mat and frame it.

use the case of an old monitor as the pot for a large plant.

make a custom keyboard which only has the letters of your s.o.'s name.

get out the dremel, epoxy, spare parts, creativity and go at it.

On the whole I think you are right but some of your details are a bit off.

On Babbage:

He was a polymath. He had fingers in half a dozen differnent pies. Like many true geniuses from history he was interested in many things and that meant that he had a tendancy to stop projects and go and work on whatever new thing he was interested in. That said, what he was proposing, while it may sound obvious to us, was pretty radical (and very costly) in his day. It's a bit like fusion research today, expensive, and hard to get right.

Collosus:

The guy you are thinking of is called Tommy Flowers. He originally worked for the post office (which in those days ran the phone system). He was the brains behind Collosus. The reason he had to keep quite was the same reason that everyone who worked at station X had to. What they worked on was top secret. This had nothing to do with lack of funding. Much of the developement of the modern computer was done in British universities (especially Manchester).

Transputer:

Inmos was a private company. It's failure had little to do with the govenment. It was taken over by another company who insisted that it use a standardised design tool. it wasn't until late in the developemnet phase that a fault in the tool (something to do with timing calculations) came to light. This set back the developement by many month (if not years) and killed the company. This is what is happening in Transmeta, great, innovative tech, let down by the company that created it.

It the sad fact that many revolutionary indeviduals (i.e. those who were different, shock horror) have been persecuted or died penniless. Turing was a particularly sad case, considering what he did for the war effort, same goes for other homosexuals from history, Oscar Wilde being the prime example. The world hasn't changed that much though, people who are *different* are still persecuted, it just tends to be less obvious.

P.s.

Collosus has actually been rebuilt, see here. Sadly Tommy Flowers died soon after it was built (at the age of 92 I think).

The inmos thing might be a bit off but that is the main gist of what happened. of course if anyone who worked at inmos around that time could correct me that would be good...

I've been, on and off, a member of the West London Meccano Society (featured somewhere in the link above) since I was ooh, too young to do anything serious with Meccano, as opposed to now being too busy... Introduced by my Dad, who's built more Meccano trucks and cranes than I care to remember, along with writing many modelplans for them and various texts on particular areas of model construction - a review of how to build different types of vehicle suspension system, for example. Sorry, no URL for his work but they're sold by MW Models under the Everything Automotive banner.

Anyway. I was fortunate enough to be at this year's SkegEx show in Skegness, England for a little while. Some absolutely stunning models were on show - if anyone wants to see more photos (though no plans I'm afraid) of some really, really good models, I can heartily recommend John Thorpe's page though there's a lot of photos so it's a little slow to load :-) Always difficult to call a favourite, but three stick out in my memory:

• Fully working walking dragline - picture one, picture two, picture three
• Top Buzz fairground ride - picture one and picture two which ran constantly throughout the show, without any problems _I_ noticed :-)
• Cutaway model of a Mini - only one picture :-(

Very, very impressive, all of them.

My last job was at a hobby store that sold Meccano sets all the way up to Number 10. In about '91-'92 in one of the frequest Meccano management changeovers they Ditched the #1-#10 series (with the 1x,2x etc) and just went to the #1-#6 sets and introduced all-plastic sets with larger sets.

The original #10 set could build a nice locomotive, cranes, and a working Eifel tower, as well as every model from the #1 to #9 sets. In fact, our store had a 15 foot tall Eiffel tower at the front of it, which seemed to eternally rain bolts, a 10 foot long ship, steam powered Ferris wheels.

But then they fell into the Lego Trap, and started making things too pre-defined. Also, they ditched all the brass gears and went too much into Brass Bushing / plastic parts (CURSE YOU MS22P !!)

But compare
The cheap plastic junk of today with

with the beauty of

The Block Setting Crane from the old #10 set

The Blocksetting crane instructions basically said "You need this many parts, here's a picture of the pully set, here's a picture from below of the rotating part, heres some more pictures from each side, right build it!"

Was a puzzle as well as a engineering challenge.

Toys always seem to be being dumbed down nowadays.

I still find it difficult to bend my mind around the idea that today's attacks occurred not in Chechnya or Israel, but in the heart of American civilization. The very heart. I know, however, that America will survive this attack at punish those responsible. While perhaps "Pearl Harbor" is an extreme comparison, because we don't seem to be at war with a defined nation, it certainly will provoke almost as strong a change in public opinion and policy as that surprise attack.

Here at Macalester College in St. Paul, far far away from today's incidents, The state of MN has responded by shutting down the Mall of America and some of the larger buildings in downtown Mpls. and St. Paul. All over the cities, people are congregating, grieving for those lost and for the massive, mindless hatred and violence of today.

I think for millions of us, the most striking thing about this incident is its totally surreal nature. It is reminiscent of the end of Fight Club, or some kind of cartoonish super-villiany. The incident in Oklahoma City seemed far more within the realm of reality than "The destrucion of the WTC and a chunk of the Pentagon?!? Oh, please!"

In my opinion the best photo I've seen is located here. I suspect it'll be on the cover of TIME or Newsweek.

As for those of you angry with Mr. Katz for being trite: FUCK YOU! Thousands of people are DEAD and you have the balls to be angry with a man who's lost someone and prayed about it?! Only on the anonymous Internet would a person dare to tell someone they were being trite mourning a friend lost violently. You cruel bastards...

Oh on one last note, remember the trailers for the Spiderman movie? Will the scene with a bad-guy helicopter caught by a web between the WTC towers be kept for final theatrical release??

I think the Gnome people have got the right idea. But, I'm not sure they're there yet. It is important to focus on the HCI. Apple did just that. The result a superior user experience which has generated fanatical support from its users (OTOH Apple has made many many mistakes which is why Apple Macintosh is a niche market). By focusing on the user interface, the Gnome people counter the biggest single critisism of Linux: usability. In a rather different market, the embedded market (where Linux has already made a significant impact), Microsoft, I see have released thier 2nd beta preview of Windows XP Embedded code named Talisker. See the article in PC World. (Talisker as you may or may not know, is a town on the Isle of Skye, Scotland, famous for its rather distinctive whisky.)

I think the Gnome people have got the right idea. But, I'm not sure they're there yet. It is important to focus on the HCI. Apple did just that. The result a superior user experience which has generated fanatical support from its users (OTOH Apple has made many many mistakes which is why Apple Macintosh is a niche market). By focusing on the user interface, the Gnome people counter the biggest single critisism of Linux: usability. In a rather different market, the embedded market (where Linux has already made a significant impact), Microsoft, I see have released thier 2nd beta preview of Windows XP Embedded code named Talisker. See the article in PC World. (Talisker as you may or may not know, is a town on the Isle of Skye, Scotland, famous for its rather distinctive whisky.)

From the memorial page It is fittingly ironic that not one single major computing company was willing to support this project

I, for one, would dearly know who was asked to support/contribute and what their excuses were for not doing so.

I haven't got any pictures together yet but I've just squeezed a Celeron@1.1GHz (OCed of course) into a Sun SparcStation LX box.

I used an excellent motherboard from shuttle (the 7"x7.5" FV24) which includes almost everything onboard (from audio to network via firewire. Everything), so the build was easy.

I got the idea from a similar project I saw over at this place but because the FV24 is so tiny I managed to get everything, including a 1U psu, in the standard LX box.

It looks very odd indeed with my massive monitor perched on top... Retro modding is the way forward :)

Oh yeah, that other audio compression format.

I'm curious at what you get if you ask Microsoft (second link)...

"Books on demand" sounds wonderful until you realize that this kind of technology is already offering publishers new ways to screw authors.

Andrew Malcom is an author (and all-round brave and persistent guy) who has been taking on dodgy academic publishing practices for years.

Read his article for the full story.

mac unices page

its a good adventure getting it working well but once it is...

Every now and then somebody with a midi capable phone asks 'Can I convert a .wav/mp3 to midi?' on comp/alt.music.midi. There is software to do it, but your mileage may vary. After somebody asked this on /. some time ago I started writing a package, WaveGoodbye, available here, but this is designed for polyphonic conversion which phones cannot handle (yet). This is now the most capable of the free wav->midi conversion programs, and can rival the commercial packages at piano music conversion. The version 1, Windows only, binary is freely available and version 2 is currently under development. I am considering releasing the source for this and taking it cross platform. Any Kylix developers out there interested? The alt.music.midi faq (linked from the above link, unless it has moved again) contains a list of poly- and mono-phonic conversion programs. Polyphonic conversion is very difficult and still a topic of research in many university media groups. Monophonic conversion is easier and these programs are generally more accurate.

Ours did, but we had to disable it when it became annoying...

Howdy doodily doo!

I'd rather have the colour of the Prism. That plus an Minstrel modem with OmniSky, and PalmVNC, I can connect to my linux box from anywhere, and have the nice rich full colour of my KDE desktop.

If someone gets going a transparent cube with lots of transparent chips blinking very fast in different colors... well, all I can say is they will get a lot of free coverage in the next major films.

It's already been done in Blakes 7 (spectacular BBC TV sci-fi series from the 80s).

Computer was called Orac, and had a spectacularly cheesy pseudo-computer-generated voice!

To quote:
Orac was described by its creator, Ensor, as being beyond a simple computer but rather being a brain, a genius.

Sounds just like b1ll Gates describing Win2K ;-)

Look here.

And yes, neurons in the CNS are a little different than ones in the PNS. But not enough to make a difference, especially once you've put electrodes into them, because they both use the sodium/potassium/etc. ions for electrical signalling.
--

And yes, neurons in the CNS are a little different than ones in the PNS. But not enough to make a difference, especially once you've put electrodes into them, because they both use the sodium/potassium/etc. ions for electrical signalling.
--

I recently moved to FreeServe since it's service is unmetered (and, at the time BTi wasn't). I've niticed that FreeServe take all the e-mail that's sent out by my mail server (no matter what host it was intended to be sent to) and route it through their mail server (well, actually it's PlanetOnline's server).

IMO, this is better than just blocking your mail server. I know this isn't exactly the problem we're discussing here, but it's the only similar experience I've had (as I've never had a problem sending mail from my server to another mail server), and I thought it was partially relevant.

...another comment from Michael Tandy.

• Solaris is better than Linux ... on top end Sun Enterprise servers in enterprise environments, running something suitably heavy such as large Oracle databases. If you are fortunate enough to have a SPARC on your desktop (pros: hardware is rock solid, unlike cheap Intel shit; cons: 24 bit colour is rare and expensive), Linux is much nicer because the utility suite is so much richer. It's amusing to see Sun finally latch on and start shipping GNU tools with Solaris 8 - a major boon for admins (unless they're the kind of zealots who must compile the latest version of everything immediately).
  
• Linux, as has already been noted, is perfect for rejuvenating older Sun models whose hardware is likely to last for years to come but are incapable of running later Solaris releases.
  
• Were it not for the disk failing, I would still be running RHL 5.2 on my SPARCclassic. It was a solid release, it did basic DNS and X11 fine, it was still supported for security fixes and it made a good workstation when my SO was using the PC (she's a KDE user - fortunately, it wasn't in 5.x). Red Hat 7 has now bloated up to the point where it is almost as useless as Solaris for the low end models.
  
• Support: who wants it? Only companies need the assurance of a human being on the end of the telephone, and they are extremely unlikely to be running RHL for SPARC. The rest of us just need regular RPM updates. Anyone running RHL/SPARC ought to be capable of standing on their own two feet.
  

Finger pointing? We love it! Remember: every support call you make reduces the vendor's profit on the support contract.

See under "Support" here.

Ade_
/

Hey, I found a online book here (Secret Signals) with loads of information, dechiffered messages and so on.

This page has pictures of what they claim are the one time pads taken from captured foreign agents. They were hidden in hollowed out bars of soap and talcum powder containers.

http://www.btinternet.com/~simon .mason/page30.html

-kms1

Some other stuff :-

Some other stuff :-

The free calls start at midnight Friday and end midnight Sunday, there are lines for ISDN (64k) and pots. The only thing about it is the way it disconnects you every 2 hours (q the autodialer script)

OK I know it is signing up with the enemy, but most of my browsing and large email dumps happen at the weekend. (I'm a contractor and work away from home during the week)

It actually works real well as I do failover from the 0800 number to the paying number so you never see the difference (Except in the phone bills) and I don't have to change anything for my wife and kids to use the internet during the week.

Mind you, it doesn't stop me getting £100 per month phone bills... )Must do a log dump of the weektime internet browsing!)

BTInternet are allowing free calls for subscription paying customers, but only on the weekends, so I'm still boycotting this Sunday

Goto BTInternet for more info....

Oh, for a kernel-loadable Psion Link Protocol fs...

/me has been known to use his S5 as an emergency terminal...