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From my latest trip to the Science Museum. They were part building the new Difference Engine but they had finished for the week so all that was there was a collection of lathes and mills, and a dust sheet covered pile of metalwork in the middle of the room.

The first one they built

http://www.chris-street.demon.co.uk/difference1.jpg

A part of the Analytical engine (which would have been Turing complete)

http://www.chris-street.demon.co.uk/analytical1.jpg

And one of Babbages original journals/notebooks. They have his brain pickled in a jar as well.

http://www.chris-street.demon.co.uk/babbage-book1.jpg

From my latest trip to the Science Museum. They were part building the new Difference Engine but they had finished for the week so all that was there was a collection of lathes and mills, and a dust sheet covered pile of metalwork in the middle of the room.

The first one they built

http://www.chris-street.demon.co.uk/difference1.jpg

A part of the Analytical engine (which would have been Turing complete)

http://www.chris-street.demon.co.uk/analytical1.jpg

And one of Babbages original journals/notebooks. They have his brain pickled in a jar as well.

http://www.chris-street.demon.co.uk/babbage-book1.jpg

From my latest trip to the Science Museum. They were part building the new Difference Engine but they had finished for the week so all that was there was a collection of lathes and mills, and a dust sheet covered pile of metalwork in the middle of the room.

The first one they built

http://www.chris-street.demon.co.uk/difference1.jpg

A part of the Analytical engine (which would have been Turing complete)

http://www.chris-street.demon.co.uk/analytical1.jpg

And one of Babbages original journals/notebooks. They have his brain pickled in a jar as well.

http://www.chris-street.demon.co.uk/babbage-book1.jpg

The CIRCLE algorithm in the original spectrum ROM is actually very clever and efficient.
It is the same as the ARC command mirrored about a central point, but new coordinates are generated relative to the last ones plotted, rather than relative to the central point. If that makes any sense.

Have a look at the ROM dissasembly here:
http://www.wearmouth.demon.co.uk/zx82.htm

We've established that the reality distortion field is in fact correct (TFA), and that it self-evidently (look at Apple's recent sales) is transmitted as a meme throughout technological society. We know that the human condition is regulated by culture - that the human brain is evolving to cope with the phenomenal rate-of-change-of-culture it is being exposed to. In doing so, it must also cope with (adapt to) this reality distortion field created by Apple.

Steve Jobs is screwing with your mind, people. And your children's nascent minds too. Be afraid (of non-shiny things). Be very afraid (of anything not cool).

Simon.

WRT Java, I know it is 'enterprise', but I have never even heard of a company that managed to get an enterprise Java system set up without half a dozen servers, or a mainframe running it. Enterprise Java has EJBs and the like, that doesn't make it good at all. I don't know whether its the memory usage model, or the 'lazy' programmer model that makes it suck, but it does even though it should work perfectly. (its a bit like Arnold Schwarzenegger - he's tall, strong, rich, powerful. He *should* be a babe magnet but .. somehow it doesn't pan out like that when implemented in the real world)(sorry for the mixed metaphor)

MS has gone C# in a big way over the last few years, they have concentrated on it to the exclusion of all else to drive it to market, yet the program manager for Visual Studio has said that they're done with that now and the next big push for them is unmanaged C++;
Vista for all its modernness has a tiny amount of managed code in it (and the bit that is managed - Aero - is the bit that requires 2Gig to run acceptably, its not a issue with fancy graphics, its an issue with managed-ness). Has Robert Grimes done a more up-to-date analysis of Vista's use of managed code - the last one he did showed Vista is made of only 3% managed code.

(note: to see what I mean, read the comments on here where they describe the new Office controls like the Ribbon being made available for MFC developers. Someone asks, "but will they be available for us C# devs?" and is told "we plan to make this available but we don't have a date we can announce" - ie not for some time).

This is why I think the MS-friend is right, .NET is not a tool for every job, but MS likes to hype stuff up way past a sensible level so everyone thinks you cannot program anymore unless you're using Windows Workflow Foundation to drive a Best-Practice Application Block through Windows Presentation Foundation gui all written in C#. Now they're moving on to something else, expect more hype but in a different direction.

He was on the side of the Germans during WWII. It even said so on their belt buckles.

For most all of my 'internet life'...starting back about '93-'94 or so, I pretty much always used pseudonyms, and rarely if ever gave out personal information.

I think most people back then did pretty much the same. It just seems common sense doesn't it? When did people start really acting stupid AND not only documenting it and publishing it for eternity? Do people not have the common sense to know that actions can follow you over time?

This started to change when people started putting personal servers on the 'net, and completely died when AOL (where you get to pick your own email name) joined Usenet in 1994. After that, your online name was pretty much anything you wanted it to be.

2038 is just the tip of the iceberg!!!

Significant dates

Four out of five. It's not the language, but how it's learnt. Suppose you learn that debugging due to stupid mistakes is a chore best avoided by not making stupid mistakes I'd call that a good thing. I could tell you, make you write an essay, even interview you, but unless you've got it ingrained in your programmer's psyche you're not doing it right. FWIW in my book http://www.eminent.demon.co.uk/ob/Programming.htm I use Javascript as a pig-to-debug (but easy to get started with) language in the early stages where either the reader learns early on to think before typing and read after typing or they give up and do something more suited to their temperament.

One thing I missed on the feature list: bluetooth.

Combine this with one-handed chording keyboard, maybe a camera or just a hole to look through (or allow one-eye option) and some wireless connectivity (say, your mobile phone as GPRS modem), and you have a lightweight wearable computer.

bonus for whoever comes up with a handy wearable cursor control device - kinda trackpoint on the keyboard would do, but they are quite obnoxious.

MS software all seems bass-ackwards to me, starting with the directory seperator ("\ is ass backwards, Bill)

Before DOS had directories "/" was for options.

It's also easy to draw conclusions of how cool Microsoft was early on, and how evil they are now.

Do you mean, "Using the C-language escape character as a path separator" cool"

The whole point of "absolute zero" is that there _are_ no negative temperatures.

If it were that simple....

And here is more...

So there is negative temperature. It is just not what you think it is.

Give it four or five years and there will be a lot of lawsuits because of Repetitive Strain Injury. Laptops are bad for ergonomics and RSI, as are "comfy" chairs etc.

These companies are just setting themselves up for a whole heap of trouble. I'm glad I don't work there.

RSI Info

http://www.guybrush.demon.co.uk/spectrum/docs/Keys.gif Enough said, really.

OK! For those who have NOT read Douglas Adams,

"I seem to be having tremendous difficulty with my lifestyle"

Started a interstellar war.

http://www.cgoakley.demon.co.uk/vlhurgs/index.html

"It is of course well known that careless talk costs lives, but the full scale of the problem is not always appreciated.

For instance, at the very moment that Arthur said, 'I seem to be having tremendous difficulty with my lifestyle,' a freak wormhole opened up in the fabric of the space-time continuum and carried his words far far back in time across almost infinite reaches of space to a distant galaxy where strange and warlike beings were poised on the brink of a frightful interstellar battle.

The two opposing leaders were meeting for the last time.

A dreadful silence fell across the conference table as the commander of the Vl'hurgs, resplendent in his black jewelled battle shorts, gazed levelly at the G'Gugvuntt leader squatting opposite him in a cloud of green sweet-smelling steam, and, with a million sleek and horribly beweaponed star cruisers poised to unleash electric death at his single word of command, challenged the vile creature to take back what it had said about his mother.

The creature stirred in his sickly broiling vapour, and at that very moment the words, 'I seem to be having tremendous difficulty with my lifestyle' drifted across the conference table.

Unfortunately, in the Vl'hurg tongue this was the most dreadful insult imaginable, and there was nothing for it but to wage terrible war for centuries."

Oh MOD PARENT +1 FUNNY... ah hahhahahahah!

From Babelfish

"É naturalmente bom sabido que a conversa descuidada custa vidas, mas a escala cheia do problema não é apreciada sempre. Por exemplo, no momento very que Arthur disse, ' eu pareço ter a dificuldade tremenda com meu lifestyle, ' um wormhole freak aberto acima na tela do continuum do espaço-tempo e carreguei suas palavras distante distante para trás a tempo através dos alcances quase infinitos do espaço a uma galáxia distante onde os seres estranhos e warlike poised no brink de uma batalha interstellar frightful. Os dois líderes opondo-se estavam encontrando-se com por a última vez. Um silêncio terrível caiu através da tabela de conferência como o comandante do Vl'hurgs, resplendent em seus shorts jewelled pretos da batalha, olhado levelly no líder de G'Gugvuntt que squatting oposto a ele em uma nuvem do vapor sweet-smelling verde, e, com o milhão lustroso e beweaponed horribly os cruzadores da estrela poised para desencadear a morte elétrica em sua única palavra do comando, desafiado a criatura vile fazer exame para trás o que tinha dito sobre sua mãe. A criatura agitou em seu vapor broiling sickly, e nesse muito momento as palavras, ' eu pareço ter a dificuldade tremenda com meu lifestyle ' drifted através da tabela de conferência. Infelizmente, na lingüeta de Vl'hurg este era o insulto o mais terrível imaginable, e não havia nada para ele mas para empreender a guerra terrível por séculos."

I showed this to a friend of mine who speaks Protuguese. After reading only a few sentences, he laughed out loud for a long time. It wasnt so much as the joke itself, but the translantion. Its so extrodinarly bad.

Look at the re-translation:

"Of course good it is known that the careless colloquy cost lives, but the full scale of the problem is not appreciated always.

For example, at the moment very that Arthur said, ' I seem to have the tremendous difficulty with mine lifestyle, ' one wormhole freak (HA!) opened above in the screen of continuum of the space-time and carreguei its words distant distant stops backwards the time (HA!) through reaches them almost infinite of the space to a distant galaxy where the strange beings and warlike poised in brink of a battl

Ill have a crack at this too .. another more obscure Queen song

Keep Passing the Open Windows

Yeah Baby, thats gotta be the one !!

http://www.pemcom.demon.co.uk/queen/works/windows.html

This idea is original (I haven't copied it from anywhere) but it has probably been independently thought of before.

A natural thing to ask about a 2D game such as go, chess, naughts-and-crosses/tic-tac-toe is how can it be extended to three dimensions?

For go, the immediate thought is to play on a 3D grid of cubes. However, I believe (I haven't actually tried) that this will work very poorly. The number of neighbours that each point has will have a huge effect on play. With two many neighbours (6 in the case of a cubic grid) it will be impossible to defend territory, or to capture stones until nearly the entire board fills up. The game would be boring.

To capture the essence of go in 3D, we need each point to have four neighbours. This can be achieved with maximal symmetry by using either truncated octahedra or rhombic dodecahedra as the board's cells.

UPDATE: After writing the above, I did a quick search and discovered diamond go which has clearly used the same basic idea. I haven't figured out yet whether it is equivalent to one of my two options.

You can use this

http://www.ridgecrop.demon.co.uk/fat32format.htm

FAT is old fashioned to be sure, but it you can do both read and write on pretty much any OS without installing a driver. And any OS that supports USB keys bigger than 2GB supports FAT32 and thus supports volumes upto 2TB.

http://www.firsttvdrama.com/enterprise/index.php3
Excellent reviews of Enterprise and WHY it sucked. Not really about the Star Trek universe. More about telling the stories in that universe. And isn't that what this is all about?

http://www.xibalba.demon.co.uk/jbr/trek/0.html
I hope that guy's bandwidth can take the hit. He has GREAT ideas about how to "fix" the Star Trek universe itself. Why DOES a phaser heat rocks AND vaporize enemies? How does a trasporter work? "Logically" within the framework provided.

The problem that Star Trek had ... well there were two problems.
#1. It was episodic and the "technology" was altered from episode to episode to suit the writer of that episode.

#2. Roddenberry was fixated on the current (at the time) social issues and how to portray them in his series. That's why you have the first inter-racial kiss and a Russian working with a Chinese on a "USS" ship. Where's the gay captain today? The Islamic first officer?

Star Trek sucks now because the stories suck. And the stories suck because they aren't challenging. And the stories aren't challenging because Hollywood doesn't want the RISK of challenging stories.

If they want to bring back Star Trek they need to completely change the WRITING. Get the best writers and give them 4 hours to fill. With the only limitations being that all the techno-babble needed to be vetted by a real Star Trek geek and they couldn't alter the established time lines.

Each month you'd get an entirely new, but still coherent, Star Trek. Some would suck. Some would not. And the ones that didn't suck could be expanded.

Let's hope mine doesn't need some analysis shortly. http://www.chris-street.demon.co.uk/article.php.ht m

Goddamn, will people stop saying this?!? I've formatted a 200GB hard drive as FAT with the Windows XP installer. There is no 32GB limit.

OK, here is the Real Deal:

• FAT itself can be up to 2 terabytes in size. FAT32: 2TB (theoretically 8 TB) FAT16: 4GB FAT12: 16MB.
• Large FAT partitions can be hugely wasteful of disk space, because FAT has a limited number of possible entries in the file allocation table itself, and therefore must use ever-larger cluster sizes (think extents) for file storage if you wish to have a large partition. Much disk space is lost to the many resulting partially-filled clusters. We used to call it 'slack'.
• The 32 GB limit (which MS admits is arbitrary) was imposed in the GUI partitioning tool in Windows 2000, and has persisted since. This only applies to partitions created with that formatter; W2000 and above will happily use much larger partitions.
• But the gotcha is that if your FAT filesystem is larger than about 124 gigabytes and it breaks, you will not be able to fix it. Scandisk is the repair tool for FAT filesystems, and it simply cannot process a partition larger than 124.5GB.
• If you want to create a >32GB FAT partition from within the Windows GUI, you can use fat32format.exe.

Other references: Limitations of the FAT32 File System, Raymond Chen, NTFS vs FAT.

There's a reason they haven't caught on, and it's the same reason that Dvorak keyboards haven't -- it's very hard to learn unless you're relatively young.

Utter bollocks. Skills like this can be picked up easily at any stage of life. I'm a member of a novelist's web group that has a large number of dvorak typists. Most of them learned it after the age of 40, and few reported any serious difficulties. I learned a device very much like the one the blogger is describing in just a few hours, substantially less time than it took me to learn dvorak.

Also: Dvorak is hard to remember if you ever stop using it and revert to QWERTY. It's been 15 years since I last used a chord keypad, but I bet I could pick one up and be using it profficiently within ten minutes.

It would also help if there was a standard for chorded data entry.

There is, although it isn't currently popular. Scroll down to the bottom to see the list of basic shapes.

You're doing it wrong.

>not like the passengers in his car, screaming and yelling

You have the word passengers before screaming and yelling! Passengers is the PUNCHLINE (punchword?), that goes at the END!

AND, you specify that his passengers are in a car. Why a car? Why not a bus? Why not a plane? Why give any specification at all? Better to let the reader's imagination fill in the most terrifying situation.

>I'd rather die peacefully in my sleep like my Grandfather,
>not screaming in terror like his passengers.

See?

Sheesh, kids these days. Don't know the classics.

Here is a chart of all the letters: http://www.bellaire.demon.co.uk/bellaire_cykey_cod es.html, it's not as weird as it looks and it really did only take me 30 mins to get a reasonable speed - the Z,Q etc took a bit longer. There's also a chart of all the codes that can be generated but without the keypresses: http://www.bellaire.demon.co.uk/bellaire_cykey_all codes.html. I hope that helps. I keep being tempted but the CyKey looks a bit flat - the AgendA was more tactile and if I were using it as my primary input device I'd be worried about battery life. The idea is sound but I'd really like a USB cable version with a bit more

Here is a chart of all the letters: http://www.bellaire.demon.co.uk/bellaire_cykey_cod es.html, it's not as weird as it looks and it really did only take me 30 mins to get a reasonable speed - the Z,Q etc took a bit longer. There's also a chart of all the codes that can be generated but without the keypresses: http://www.bellaire.demon.co.uk/bellaire_cykey_all codes.html. I hope that helps. I keep being tempted but the CyKey looks a bit flat - the AgendA was more tactile and if I were using it as my primary input device I'd be worried about battery life. The idea is sound but I'd really like a USB cable version with a bit more

I have a graphire xl (and a MX1000) and I used to use a Microwiter AgendA so I can recommend this. I wish they did a wired version too for desktop use. I like some of the Logitech mice as the slope fits very well with a rest position for my hands - they naturally seem to fall at about 45 degress, not perpendicular to the desk. For me a VM would be as much of a twist as a normal, but in the opposite direction, which is probably why I like the tablet so much.

If you asked me before I read this article, I'd have said that "Free Software" and "Open Source Software" are different things. I may have got the wrong end of the stick here, but I would have expected most people to agree with me.

"Free Software", with a capital 'F', I would take to mean something licensed under either the GPL or the LGPL (or something else with RMS' blessing). "Open Source", I would take to mean any software where the source code was available for no charge. Period. So, for example, FreeBSD would be Open Source, but not Free Software. So would software such as Allegro, which has a 'public domain' style license.

Yes - a Type One Plot. Another example is Greg Egan's Hundred Year Diaries.

Poland stayed independent country for 800 Years

• The Coronation of Boleslaw Chrobry (the Brave) As the first king of Poland, in 1024, established Poland's right as an independent kingdom.
• In 1138 the Testament of Boleslaw III shattered the precarious unity of Poland by dividing the realm among Boleslaw's sons.
• The [Teutonic] Order turned on the Poles and began to grab large chunks of Polish territory, finally invading Gdansk in 1308 and massacring its Polish inhabitants. At the same time, a steady influx of German colonists helped to consolidate the Order's wealth and power.
• A brief period of Czech rule from 1300-1305, under Vaclav II, reunited a main part of Poland [So there was even an external rule over the country].
• From 1609 Poland became involved in a series of wars and was invaded by Swedes, Turks and Muscovites in such numbers that the country was almost submerged by enemy forces; this period became known as the "Deluge".
• ...

And according to You Russia has some special influence on Poland? Interesting. It's just like saying that France had special influence on US because quite a few states had belong to France before US declared Independence AFAIK.

According to me this is not good for anyone that Poland together with the US, together with Russian governemt seek to escalate the tension in this region.

FAT32 supports up to 8TB volumes in 2k and xp under certain conditions

The current limit is 2TB because of a 32 bit "disk size in sectors" field in the bootsector.

If that were a 64bit sector count (or a 32 bit cluster count) you could have volumes of 2^28 clusters, each 32K which takes you to 8TB. With 64K clusters you could get to 16TB.

And by using the reserved 4 bits in the FAT entry to get 2^32 64K clusters you could have 256TB.

But at the moment, the version of FAT32 which most OSs supports is limited to 2TB, because the disk size in sectors is a 32 bit field.

Some Microsoft documentation mentions an 8TB limit, but the released version does not support it. Personally, I think at one point a "disk size in clusters" field was in the FSInfo sector, which explains the 8TB limit, but this was removed at some point.

Microsoft nerfed their format tool to ensure that people used ntfs instead.

Yes, but you can use this one instead

http://www.ridgecrop.demon.co.uk/fat32format.htm

No it doesn't.

Is it too much to ask that we research these things a little bit before posting?

The usefulness of a scripts is often directly proportional to the privileges granted. Javascript is hobbled for use in browsers yet it plays a key role in the majority of browser security problems and what do you do when a script manages to break out of it's sandbox? Chroot or BSD jails are one thing but the average user will gladly grant a script extended privileges just to shoot the monkey.

We've heard this argument that sandboxing is the cure to scripting ills for years now, it isn't working. I say it's time to stop behaving like an old woman and tackle the problem directly ;-)

The route these libraries/frameworks are taking is allowing you to build and thus include only the js you need for your particular use case. For instance, the best JS lib IMO is Ext http://extjs.com/ which has a dependency builder where you specify the framework you want to use (YUI, JQuery, or Prototype) and the capabilities you need (e.g just Core, DD, or choose from umpteen UI components).

At any rate the Dr Dobbs article was pretty poor, seriously outdated and lacking much in the way of details.
Dojo is nice, but I found it to be too slow and recently I think they realized they needed to re evaluate some design decision and set a clearer path on where they are taking dojo in the future. They have not released much in the last 6 months (a minor dot release to 4.1 I believe). It does have the great feature of graceful degradation cause it can take existing markup and convert to supa nice UI widgets, but this requires it to traverse the whole DOM and look for 'dojo' widgets. There are workarounds, e.g specifying the element ids for your widgets to be dojo-ized though. Still though, pages (really when using UI JS frameworks they are not pages anymore but applications) with a lot of dojo widgets can be very slow to render. In addition dojo has some rough edges such as poor docs, too many grids that make it feel like there is a lack of direction etc. I look forward to the next major release though, Dojo certainly has a ton of potential.

But the kick ass JS library right now is Ext http://extjs.com/. Its well documented, very polished, has just about any widget you need, a super nice data abstraction for the grid/editable grid/combo box, and simplifies DOM manipulation and XHR. All the while being written in very nice OO JS style (yes I said OO and JS, for those you are ignorant of JS capabilities take a look at http://www.litotes.demon.co.uk/js_info/private_sta tic.html and http://phrogz.net/JS/Classes/OOPinJS.html

I once wrote an XP/2k/Win9x/Dos driver for a PCI parallel port card I bought which came with a driver that couldn't work on my motherboard. Took about a week and it taught me a lot actually.

http://www.ridgecrop.demon.co.uk/ITEdriverTech.htm

Really...religion is more dangerous than any gun, or pistol, or any death ray gun that we'll ever create. Whip on over to http://www.abarnett.demon.co.uk/atheism/harm.html to see what religion does. Out of the millions of gamers, statistically how many are the cause of deaths, and now religion??? Yeah, the "Fundy's" win by a long shot! Excuse the tasteless pun.

My cache contains many years of browsing history (basically every page I ever visited).
Have a look at wwwoffle http://www.gedanken.demon.co.uk/wwwoffle/, it's a really cool caching proxy.

Can God make an heptagonal triangle? Well, to spare my time trying to explain why is it a fallacy I googled an article about it. Anyway, discussing this is as pointless as discussing how can the Saci Perere cross his legs if he has only one (Brazilian folklore), or what is the sound of one hand clapping.

Anyway, there is only one thing we can be certain: Chuck Norris can create a rock so heavy that even he can't lift it. And then he lifts it anyways, just to show you who Chuck Norris is.

not disputing that planes use more fuel but just wanted to point out that wings are actually quite efficient lift/drag ratios can be as high as 20/1 for modern planes. (for example a boeing 787 wing http://www.lissys.demon.co.uk/samp1/polarb.png) Also heat (and especially jet/turbine) engines are much less efficient than electrical motors. (off course a turbine is usually involved in production of electricity but things tend to get more efficient as they get larger)

Agreed. If the FCC allowed the company to transmit 1 Watt, which I doubt, then the power would immediately spread throughout the room and beyond. There is no way to keep the power focused unless both the sending and receiving antenna is close to the size of one wavelength, at least, an unacceptable size. And it would certainly not be acceptable to focus the power, because of concerns about health. (At 900 MHz, the wavelength is 33.4 centimeters, about 1 foot. If you don't live in the U.S., you may need to know that the FCC is the U.S. government agency that regulates electromagnetic transmissions.)

Question: If this is an April Fools joke, it is the most elaborate one I've seen. Is it a joke or is it fraud? I can't imagine Philips allowing the company name to be used to advertise an April Fools joke.

It's a tragedy when otherwise intelligent people play video games instead of learning about the world around them.

I think id Games used to compile on SGIs. I know MS did some development on Xenix/i286 and Xenix/i386 (somewhere, there's an MS quote about how MS-DOS/Win is not suitable for serious development..hah). In fact, the i286 had a memory management unit, but the only OS (that I know of) which took full advantage of it was Xenix. Minix/i286 may have supported it to some extent, as well.
Some emulator pages....mac&ppc, simos (for SGI/IRIX5), DEC 10 and Big Iron, various DEC emulation, Apple Lisa, Z80 sim&development, yaze Z80, Apricot and Amstrad, bochs x86, ... and there's always emulators that run under DOS that you could run under Bochs or QEMU.

Other possibly helpful links:
emulators on freshmeat
OS kernels on freshmeat
OS's on freshmeat
bunches of old OS disk images
CP/M and MP/M
CP/M disks
Lisa Xenix
LisaOS
tandy xenix
elks and uclinux
freevms
freedos
Apple I (not II) development
reactos - winnt clone
MAME stuff and pinball Mame
info about tandy disk images
solaris minix
minix info and version 3
various free (as in beer and/or speech) OS list
The OS list at tunes.org

I successfully repartitioned and formatted a FAT32 drive to a size greater than 32GB with QTParted. That's not even possible in Windows.

Fat32Format

There are upper atmospheric measurements and other indications that pretty much disproves the increasing SOLAR output theory.

Unfortunately, or intentionally, the person promoting this theory never bothered to seek out those data points.

Increasing solar activity (or cosmic rays) should increase the temperature of the upper atmosphere. That's NOT happening!! It's getting colder, which fits right in with the consensus that the current GW delta is mostly a function of the increasing GHG concentration.

Gah, I've had that sig literally for years (at least 6) and this is the first anyone's commented on it. (Conclusive proof that it sucks and needs to be changed.) Apparently I got it from this page, which is a super-nerdy treatise on Star Trek. I was about to claim they copied it from me, but considering it was written in 1993, I probably got it from them.

But why did you use a metric coin system? After all, even the English didn't abandon the 1£ = 20s = 240p system until they got the metric bug in 1971. And that's even ignoring older coinages throughout history including the 21s Guinea (or the £1.05 coin), 80p coins etc. After all, you are so good at using fractions in other measures (stock values, physical measures like 7/8"), why not also for money?

http://www.tclayton.demon.co.uk/coins.html#index

PHP is the same : It's easy to drive so naturally lots of people have a go. (Good Thing). Sadly many haven't got the foggiest idea about security, interface design, database design, maintainability or testing. Some will take this opportunity to learn a bit about these subjects but for most 'programming' is the same as 'getting code to work'.

If only someone would write a book. http://www.eminent.demon.co.uk/ob/Programming.htm

I'd just like to point out, that yes, it would be great to do real-time raytracing with such powerful processors. Last week I was up until 6 in the morning waiting for a 2+ hour render of a reasonably simple scene to finish. Yeah, these procs would be great... if someone could just write a parallelizable version of POV-ray for Linux. Before someone jumps in to point to the few ports out there, let me head you off:

A distributed version of POV-ray exists using the MPI library, but it's based on the pretty old 3.1 branch (POV-ray is on 3.6beta right now). This is important because even the newest POV-ray betas have pretty vanilla features compared to some of the other experimental branches (like Mega POV) that include things like motion blur to simulate moving objects, etc. I haven't even tried MPI Pov because I like playing around with the must-have toys like radiosity.

A version that looks really good for Windows (bleh..) and is based off the 3.6 branch is SMPov. I really, really, really wish someone would port this to Linux so that I could have a chance to play..

And, finally, there is a patch to POV-ray that will work on Linux using the PVM library -- and it will work with the 3.5 branch. Sounds good, until you read the Howto. Quoting directly: Radiosity is not working. The resulting image looks like a mosaic. The energy bias for each block is different because the radiosity equation is not globally resolved correctly.

I suppose someone's going to tell me I should just do it myself. *Sigh*. I'm actually learning Erlang right now to learn more about distributed processing. Maybe, someday..

*21st Century* FOSS?