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Shutting down these forums in shameful; the cost of running the server aspect of a community-moderated forum site of this size is practically Nil, likely doable for less than $100 a year, otherwise they'd have been turned off long ago....
I can see from some samplings of the the Linux forum that this thing is actually still used, And it looks like a pretty decent Forum system -- likely better than PhpBB bloatware.

Clearly Oath are just being corporate b***trds, otherwise they'd find people in the community to take over the site.

All that early stuff is gone and has been for some years. The "Compuserve Forums" that are today are a pale webby shadow of their ASCII glory.

You can look in on the forums as they are here. I don't think you need to be logged in to read.

I kept paying the $9.95/month to use it for dialup Internet when on the road, and so still have the numeric e-mail address (now approximately an AOL ID with e-mail).

You missed number #1 - bad bosses. People don't leave jobs, they leave bosses. That's been known fact in HR & hiring circles forever.
http://webcenters.netscape.com...

I could not think about this without wondering what Compuserve are up to ... so I looked at their site http://webcenters.netscape.compuserve.com/menu/about.jsp and cracked up when I saw the Netscape logo at the bottom... These people still think that they are important :-)

Another edit, BSP a Quake level editor from the mid ninties (The BSP Homepage: http://ourworld.compuserve.com/homepages/bernier/). The application is no longer in development and has been given to me by the author to do with what I wish. The original code along with my modified GPL'd version is located here: http://icefox.net/programs/?program=Archive/BSP

While true, there are ways of looking within the earth from outer space. Satellites can sense the variations in gravity/mass that are within planet surfaces, as with this: http://svs.gsfc.nasa.gov/vis/a000000/a001000/a0010 89/index.html

Radar mapping can also go a bit into the earth, too:
http://www.eomonline.com/Common/Archives/1996sep/9 6sep_holcomb.html
http://ourworld.compuserve.com/homepages/mjff/silk _rd.htm

Though I've never heard of anything that goes down as deep as what this article claims, and I have my doubts about it.

You should read up on German language schools in Pennsylvania.. the US has always been a polyglot nation with linguistic and cultural minorities that migrated or were assimilated (Louisiana purchase, Hawaii, the absorption of large parts of Mexico (CA, NM, etc) into the US, Puerto Rico, etc.). You can read more here.

In Europe visible minorities have faced social exclusion, unemployment and rampant racism. You'd be hard pressed to see a minority on French television.. people with Muslim names are far less likely to get a job interview or have equal access to housing. In Germany, until very recently even third generation Turkish minorities were not granted citizenship and often deported for petty crimes to a country they or their parents had never been to.. Imagine being told that you, your children, your grand children and your great grand children will never be considered French or German or whatever and you will forever be discriminated against even though you were born and raised in that country, went to the same schools and participated in the same culture. Would you decide that it's your own fault for not being "French" enough or would you decide you'd had enough and go back to your ancestral culture which grants you unconditional acceptance and identity?

The next time you find yourself saying something like 'they are violent' or 'they are angry' think of how you rationalise your own behavior ("I was tired" or "I work with idiots", etc.).. it's never "I'm angry because I'm Polish".. give other people the same benefit of the doubt. I strongly recommend you read this book - "Us and Them: Understanding Your Tribal Mind" by David Berreby.

I doubt smoking in a building could be considered "acts dangerous to human life". Although the smoking nazi camp would like your to believe it.

OMG! That's so funny. I completely forgot that you people have virtually banned the use of tobacco. No, the smoke-ins of the sixties were a somewhat different matter.

In order to belive it was all about oil...

It's not about oil. It's about the lust for power.

I see no reason to believe the government, if they did lie in the past, wouldn't have learned thier lesson by now. emphasis mine

IF?! Please! There simply is no incentive to learn anything other than doing a better job of covering their tracks. Hence, all the new secrecy. Nobody's being punished, except for the bit players. The voters provided a brief interlude after Nixon, but then threw it all away with Reagan, leading us to the present spate of lies and deceit.

And they gain support when we only look at the limited history of after WW2 compared to the history of the area 100 years before.

They gain more support as it becomes more obvious that Israel is an aparthied state.

There is absolutely no moral basis for our actions in the Middle East. And there wasn't any in Vietnam.. Like all wars, these are colonial wars, replacing one empire with another. And if it wasn't for all the cameras, we'd be wiping them out like the Mongols would. You can bet on that. It's high seas piracy in the desert.

A common mistake, though a little disappointing to see it in a headline written by the Taco Man.

Here's what a lot of people don't get: it's possible to compress data without discarding any of it. You just transform to a scheme that doesn't use 8 bits for every byte. Byte values that are extremely common (like the letter "e" in a word processor file) use fewer bits, while less common values have more. That, in an oversimplified nutshell, is lossless compression.

To understand lossy compression, you have to understand that the human brain is really good at putting in data that should be there but actually isn't. For example, everybody has a defect in their eyes that creates a blind spot in their field of vision. Usually it doesn't matter, because your eyes are always moving. But if you stare at a fixed point, your brain adds in the missing details you should be seeing. And sometimes it gets it wrong.

Lossy formats like JPEG, MPEG, and MP3 all discard some of the data they convert. They use mathematical formulas to select data that can theoretically be spared because the human brain will just interpolate it back. In practice, the perceived quality of the image or sound depends on the acuity of the audience and the amount of data discarded. Exactly how much data gets discarded is determined by a parameter which is usually an adjustable software parameter. It's instructive to fiddle with the parameter when you save a JPEG or rip a CD.

Start here.

Before the Internet became interesting to the general public (i.e., before it had pictures), the USA had several "online services", including AOL, Compuserve, now also owned by AOL, and Prodigy. These used proprietary, graphical client software to enable users to reach central servers via dial-up; the users paid $x per month for a certain number of available minutes of usage. In some ways, they provided the same sort of things that the Internet does now, like chat rooms, narrow-topic bulletin boards (the first "online communities,") and opportunities to shop. Since these were proprietary services, they had fairly restrictive terms of service, and were more sanitized than the unrestricted Internet (look at the AOL Safety and Security Center, particularly the "parental controls," for an idea of how they promote this idea. Being a single service, they could also make deals with particular content providers for exclusive goodies.

Eventually, these services started to allow users access to the Internet, first to Usenet, then to the WWW as that became popular. Typically, all Internet access went through the company's servers, since the communication protocol between client and service was usually not TCP-IP.

When Windows 95 shipped, one of the things that had people worried (and AOL suing Microsoft) was that it would include MSN built in, which the competing services contended would give MSN an unfair advantage when users would actually have to make the effort to install their software. This was resolved when Microsoft agreed to include the AOL and Prodigy software in the Win95 install image.

To my mind, the beginning of the end for the online services, and the end of the beginning for the mass-consumption Internet, was the day (in 1996?) that AT&T announced WorldNet, their dialup Internet service available virtually nationwide at $19.95 a month. Before that, standalone ISPs were largely small businesses, like Software Tool & Die; AT&T's announcement was what pushed it out of the early adopter stage. Once the masses became comfortable on the Internet, content providers had a direct pipe to them and didn't need to work with the online services anymore.

Incidentally, does anyone else think it's ironic that AOL is freeing up most of the AOL content, but CompuServe (which always had a technical bent to it) is still behind the locked doors?

Capacitors leak charge across the dielectric. To increase the charge capacity of a capacitor, you increase the surface area of the charged plates, move the plates closer together, or most likely, both. Moving the plates closer together means a thinner dielectric, which, obviously, will have a lower resistance than a thicker dielectric of the same type, and thus a higher leakage current. Large capacity capacitors don't typically maintain their charge for very long.

You can read more about capacitors in many places on the web. Try clicking on that link and searching for the word 'leak'.

AI. Artificial intelligence. This was once commonplace in the KNOWN GALAXY, but has been on the decline in more recent times. The reason (as with ROBOTS), is that in the real world AI progress has so far been disappointing, which is why Web browsers turn up a million sites but not the one you're looking for.

CompuServe also led the interactive services industry overseas, entering the international arena in Japan in 1986 with Fujitsu and Nisso Iwai, developing a Japanese-language version of CompuServe called NIFTYSERVE. In 1989, the company expanded into Europe where it grew to be a leading Internet service provider.

A Key Brand

Since February 1998, CompuServe has been a wholly owned subsidiary of America Online, Inc. As part of the AOL Web Properties group, CompuServe plays an important role by providing Internet connectivity for value-minded consumers seeking both a dependable connection to the Internet and all the features and power of an online service. "

The original CompuServe was in competition with hundres of local Bulletin Board Systems. I was a user/member of several of them between 1979 until I connected to the Internet via dialup in the mid 90's. Some were social and some were professional BBSs.

All of them predate this "Intellectual Property".

When will the patent office award a patent for breathing? The way the USTPO agents work, or don't work, it won't be long now.

In other words, toast falling off the breakfast table lands butter-side down because the universe is made that way.

that "HD Radio" will be as well received as another major advancement of years gone by.


AM Stereo

with poor electronics sure can be noisy and hence random, maybe it is good competition to comic noise...
http://ourworld.compuserve.com/homepages/geoffreyp ark/

Or NETCommOCX. It works quite well from within HTA scripts.

Was that browser/editor Mosaic?
If I remember right, that browser was standard in Compuserve. But, they had a customized version with no editor. Anyone remember the details of that, please enlighten us. All that ran on Windows 3.1, and Mosaic can still be downloaded for Win 3.1 or 95-98. Does not do a good job rendering modern web pages, however, and crashes sometimes.
We are just not used to that nowadays.

Well given that people ask these dumb questions It's no wonder we all get the shits with everyone else.

wheras THIS is closer to it ;-)

they already did the buttered toast falls butter side down myth, and it was busted

Just curious, as I've never seen the show; how was it busted? I've seen numerous articles which appear plausable and well researched, showing that toast, when falling from table height, has enough time to rotate to butter-side-down, but not enough to rotate back to butter-side-up.

The section that reads "These devices, a kind of switched-mode converter, generally perform the conversion by the following steps" is misleading. While it says "AC", if you click through the link, it actually says "The inverter stage converts DC ... to AC by switching it on and off ('chopping') at a frequency of tens or hundreds of kilohertz (kHz)". In other words, it's nothing like the orignal AC (60Hz), and the kHz chopping is necessary even if you start off with AC. So it's not redundant at all.

Eg. the typical Switchmode PSU has four stages:

1. 60Hz AC
2. half-wave rectified AC with a big capacitor (almost DC)
3. kHz chopped AC
4. final DC output

I took some of my proceeds and decided to invest in the hand that fed me, so to speak. I bought 200 shares each of Palm (PALM) and Handspring (HAND). Shortly after I bought, Palm decided to do a reverse 20:1 split to bolster their share price and buy Handspring. My 200 Palm shares became just 10, and after they bought Handspring that left me with 15 Palm shares and a fractional share in cash, which I was paid about $10 for.

Palm then split to PalmOne (PLSO) and PalmSource (PSRC) and my 23 PALM shares turned into 8 PLMO shares. Again, I received some fractional share payout. Today I hold exactly 8 shares of Palm, Inc (again PALM) that I won't sell because I don't want to take the $15 or $20 eTrade comission hit.

I'm only satisfied in the fact that I knew going into this that it was a risky investment and only played with money that I didn't mind losing. If there's a moral to this story, maybe it's that Palm may yet stage a comeback, but this is not a good company to invest in.

AOL ruled supreme

No, that would be CompuServe. If you wanted to reach company information, message boards, CompuServe was the way to go. They had local MODEM numbers in every major city.

And they are still around, though on the WWW.

There have been a number of other projects to drill deep into the Earth's crust, though none has succeeded in reaching the mantle, as this Japanese team is trying to do. Some of the more well-known ones:

Another poster already provided the wikipedia page for Project Mohole. That was a US team back in 1961 that managed to drill to 183 m below the sea floor, in 3500 m of water off the Mexican coast. From a ship, floating on the ocean surface -- I just find that incredible.

As far as land-based projects go, there have been 2 big ones that I know of. The Kola Superdeep Borehole was a Russian project, started in 1970, that drilled at a site on the Kola Peninsula near Finland. Their deepest hole reached 12.262 km in depth, which is the current record. This page has a section (scroll down a few screens) with some very interesting findings from the project. Apparently, geologic theory doesn't quite correspond with what we find when we actually go down there to see for ourselves.

There's also the KTB (long German acronym) Borehole, started in 1978 in Bavaria. They reached a depth of 9.101 km. Information on this one is hard to find, at least in English, though there is a great Oilfield Review article (big pdf) available.

This Japanese project is going to drill through the sea floor in the Pacific, in a spot where the crust is thin, which will hopefully allow them to reach the mantle in only 7 km, under 2.5 km of water. For comparison: the previous record seafloor drill was only 2.1 km. So they've definitely got their work cut out for them.

Back in 1998 I served my first homepages from a 486 laptop running Windows 3.1 with Trumpet Winsock, and the WSPlug httpd.

... of this (German language) story. :-)

You must work at NASA?

http://ourworld.compuserve.com/homepages/cuius/sip hon/siphon.html

Not that I'm saying you're wrong, but are you sure you didn't mean km, and not miles?

An analog synth? If only it had been that easy! The definitive account of the making of the original Doctor Who theme tune can be found here. A fascinating read.

Does it include the pseudo-Pink Floyd music of the Baker years?

The 1980 remix of the Dr. Who theme is probably what you're referring to. It's really great, my fav...though not in any way affiliated with Pink Floyd. There are however some live Pink Floyd covers of this theme(David Gilmour rocks), alas it's very difficult to find =(.

If you're really interested in this topic, you might enjoy reading 'A History of the Doctor Who Theme'

Depends on the type of scale.

A balance scale measures one mass against another and ignores gravity in its calculations. (So long as it has gravity to keep the weights on it.)

A spring scale measures weight and can vary according to gravity force.

This link explains it pretty well. Basically weight is ambiguous due to misusage.

A simple project that I remember fondly from my electronics class at high school was a fun little LED flasher project using a LM3909 LED flasher IC, a LED, a capacitor and a AA battery.

An example circuit is on this page.

Mount it in a matchbox, and you have your first electronics project! I think I still have that thing 20 years later. :)

A simple project that I remember fondly from my electronics class at high school was a fun little LED flasher project using a LM3909 LED flasher IC, a LED, a capacitor and a AA battery.

An example circuit is on this page.

Mount it in a matchbox, and you have your first electronics project! I think I still have that thing 20 years later. :)

Actually, you are not alone in novel halloween idea. Someone from GameSpy think it's cool to be suicide bomber. Also, you can buy Bin Laden masks. Even Walmart could not resist for 'Satan' Hussein masks at one time.

Does it look anything like this?

Rename it Dalek and you'll get lots of help!

And where is Compu$erve, nowadays????

They were bought out by AOL, upgraded to be fully Gooey compliant, then integrated into the AOL user-base. Now they exist only as a website with some news info. It's painful to look at, really.

The same fate befell Prodigy, GoNetworks, and anyone else who DARED compete with AOL. :-(

There are many peoples and religions in the Middle East besides Arabs and Islam, respectively. Most of them are not accused of being involved in terrorism.

Let us not forget the home-grown nutcases and whack-jobs of the ilk of McVeigh

home-grown, Baghdad-trained (his co-conspirator Terry Nichols, actually, courtesy of the Religion of Peace)

Koresh

Koresh was a nut, but he never killed anybody. Bill Clinton's Attorney-General Janet Reno, or somebody under her authority, was responsible for that horrible inferno massacre that killed 75 people, including 21 children. Sounds like Beslan, but who's the terrorist? Not Koresh.

and Kaczynski

Kaczynski was just a militant version of Al Gore and other ecofreak Democrats. Take the quiz. Can you tell the difference?

Millions of Muslims support terrorism, and you named three white guys to try to balance that. One didn't kill anybody, and, AFAIK, didn't intend to kill anybody. One committed terrorism with the help of Muslim training. So you got one lone American terrorist not associated with Islam.

On the contrary, they're there because the chinese market is the last frontier, and it's the big one. To not be a player in China is to say you're comfortable in your niche until they come and take it away from you.

Sure, there will always be fly-by-night doctoral schools. Heck there are in the USA, where do you suppose John Gray (mars and venus) got his Masters and PhD? But that doesn't mean you can't screen them out and out of 1000 candidates find some who really know their stuff (same as in the west, I might add!)

I've never even heard of half of these "prominent science fiction writers." Guess I've been living under a rock!

Yup. You might want to grab a copy of the Encylopedia of Science Fiction and catch up with the rest of us. My guess is that you're a hard SF / space opera fan, and you haven't heard of the authors listed because they write new wave / cyberpunk SF rather than the stuff you're into.

Cory Doctorow is a new author who has had success giving away his books under the creative commons licence. You might know him better as a blogger.

Pat Murphy has been around for a while. She mostly writes science-fantasy stuff... kind of like a midway between LeGuin and Cherryh, if you've heard of them.

Kim Stanley Robinson writes hugely popular airport newsstand bestsellers. Y'know, those big thumping books with gold leaf on the front. You've probably read his Mars books.

Norman Spinrad is one of my all time favourite writers. He is often compared to Norman Mailer (also a favourite), a comparison I find apt. You'd probably hate him, as he presents a strong criticism of psychology space opera fans in his novel The Iron Dream.

Bruce Sterling is probably best known to Slashdotters as the author of The Hacker Crackdown (full text here) and my sig. He's also a blogger for Wired and the Pope Emperor of the Virdian movement.

Ken Wharton is a relatively new writer, but a long time physicist. He's probably the most convention hard SF type writer of the lot.

I've never even heard of half of these "prominent science fiction writers." Guess I've been living under a rock!

Yup. You might want to grab a copy of the Encylopedia of Science Fiction and catch up with the rest of us. My guess is that you're a hard SF / space opera fan, and you haven't heard of the authors listed because they write new wave / cyberpunk SF rather than the stuff you're into.

Cory Doctorow is a new author who has had success giving away his books under the creative commons licence. You might know him better as a blogger.

Pat Murphy has been around for a while. She mostly writes science-fantasy stuff... kind of like a midway between LeGuin and Cherryh, if you've heard of them.

Kim Stanley Robinson writes hugely popular airport newsstand bestsellers. Y'know, those big thumping books with gold leaf on the front. You've probably read his Mars books.

Norman Spinrad is one of my all time favourite writers. He is often compared to Norman Mailer (also a favourite), a comparison I find apt. You'd probably hate him, as he presents a strong criticism of psychology space opera fans in his novel The Iron Dream.

Bruce Sterling is probably best known to Slashdotters as the author of The Hacker Crackdown (full text here) and my sig. He's also a blogger for Wired and the Pope Emperor of the Virdian movement.

Ken Wharton is a relatively new writer, but a long time physicist. He's probably the most convention hard SF type writer of the lot.

Why don't you talk to the survivors of the Halifax Explosion, the largest man made explosion short of atom bomb? I'm sure they thought it was "neat" too, digging relatives out of flattened houses and putting remains in matchboxes. Idiot...

The 'standard' mistranslation , made by translating from English to Russian and then back to English. starts with "The spirit is willing, but the flesh is weak" after the two translations comes out as "The whisky is strong, but the meat is rotten" This story has been circulating as some sort of urban legend for over 40 years. For more details see The whisky was invisible (pdf).

Group photo of the 1st HAMS to do Moon Bounce - The dish used came off British Telecom's "Post Office" tower in London. If you wish to see it yourself then come along to FRARS's HAMFEST on Sunday 8th August 2004. More moonbounce photos here.

FRARS still has some of the leading experts in communications - including M0EYT / Paul J. Marsh who is currently just out in the middle of a field working 10Ghz.... Paul's probably on IRC as well right now so I will see what I can do to highlight this discussion to him in a minute.

...at this site and I can see Dr. Who's problem. Without the Daleks, what new peril's will Dr. Who face if he's matched against a villian that could chase him up a ladder or through a narrow passage? If I ran the estate of Terry Nation I'd come to terms with the BBC before the BBC realizes "TV's most evil villians" are a cross between a shuttlecock and a salt shaker.

<a href="http://ourworld.compuserve.com/homepages/gra eme_birchall/HTM_COOK.HTM">free db2 cookbook</a>

By the way, a 2-litre water rocket already has an impressive range (up to 300 feet if aimed well) which makes it an interesting weapon for junkyard wars.

• FM sound quality with wide AM reach with digital reception quality
• Digital tuning support station text
• Supports multiple channels with digital audio/text/other services
• Can use existing transmitters

Useful links:

• Digital Radio Modiale organisation's homepage
• Open Source DRM software
• DRMRX - Commercial DRM software
• FRARS (where both myself and MOEYT are members)
• BBC: Research Department (Doing work on testing DRM)
• BBC Research Department papers (includes DRM papers
• MOEYT/Paul Marsh's homepage (lots of info on satcom and DRM info soon...)
• Introduction to the GNU software radio project with various links

• FM sound quality with wide AM reach with digital reception quality
• Digital tuning support station text
• Supports multiple channels with digital audio/text/other services
• Can use existing transmitters

Useful links:

• Digital Radio Modiale organisation's homepage
• Open Source DRM software
• DRMRX - Commercial DRM software
• FRARS (where both myself and MOEYT are members)
• BBC: Research Department (Doing work on testing DRM)
• BBC Research Department papers (includes DRM papers
• MOEYT/Paul Marsh's homepage (lots of info on satcom and DRM info soon...)
• Introduction to the GNU software radio project with various links

The frars talk I attended was given by M0EYT and covered the future of long range digital broadcasts using Digital Radio Modiale. The BBC research labs and many others are involved with DRM research. Just about to load up M0EYT's talk (which unfortunately isn't publically available - sorry!).

The frars talk I attended was given by M0EYT and covered the future of long range digital broadcasts using Digital Radio Modiale. The BBC research labs and many others are involved with DRM research. Just about to load up M0EYT's talk (which unfortunately isn't publically available - sorry!).