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So Greenland used to be green. Then it froze. Now it's turning green again. It's almost like it's a natural cycle.

My father came to the UK some years ago (15 maybe) and they still used that strange system where 12 shillings was a quarter and 8 quarters was a pound (I am just babbling what I remember... those are not accurate numbers)...

We switched to the Pound and Penny in 1971. That was 35 years ago. I think you would remember the difference between 15 and 35!

At the time, it was the same old OLD MISERABLE people that complained, because they didn't like change, even if it was for the better. We had a fucking 3p coin before that! And a 1/4 of a pence coin. And the coins were the size of dinner plates.

As for pre-decimalisation monetary denominations:

Originally the pound consisted of 20 shillings each of 12 pence, the abbreviation for which, d, came from the denier of Charlemagne, which in turn came from the Roman denarius.

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

That place looks like a prison I think I'll hold out for something better

My name too. I've actually still got the certificate, dated 14 February 1998.

One day we hope to send space explorers to Mars and beyond. You could be that future explorer, but only if you stay in school and study hard, especially in the areas of math, science, and computer technology.

I did do what they suggested - but given the fate of the Mars Polar Lander, I'd want to think carefully before signing up for a future mission.

Regarding game programming, I should also mention Allegro, and allegro.cc.

I recently graduated from school with a CS degree, and several of my classes were very theoretical in nature. I remember first time I saw them, I thought console emulators were really cool. I have no idea how someone would begin writing one.

clc
  lda #2
  adc #2

I use CP/M. I am not aware of any published security holes for it.

That's a great idea. Using a 3D engine to generate fake pictures of Man landing on the moon should be much easier than the last time when they actually filmed the whole thing on earth. Plus, when the uncooperative truth tellers stick evidence of the fake in the video, they can just regenerate it!

If you think about it, this seems to imply that the Greenland had just been warmer than it currently is, and that it was starting to freeze up again when Eric discovered it. The ice has stopped migrating to the sea, but hadn't yet expanded to cover the shore again. (I could be wrong, perhaps there is currently a strip around the edge of Greenland that's suitable for raising rye or some such. It wouldn't need to be anything a modern farmer would find attractive.)

You could have it for quite a time, just an example.

But dou you honestly think that anyone would market that? Instead, overtime to buy multiple whatevers is proposed to be the best.

CC.

I am surprised no one has mentioned deskwin
[www.yipton.demon.co.uk] yet?

http://www.shelleys.demon.co.uk/fdec02em.htm

Here is an old article from 2002 with pictures. You would think in 4 years he would have already proven this... http://www.shelleys.demon.co.uk/fdec02em.htm

Columbia was so eager to have its new system accepted as the standard that it didn't even patent the technology. It was willing to let other record companies use it without paying a royalty. But refusing to admit that they'd been beaten by a competitor, the RCA Victor engineers immediately went to work on their own "new and improved" system. RCA, in fact, would be the last of the major labels to finally release its own 33 1/3 rpm albums, possibly not doing so until 1951.

"RCA decided that they were going to come out with a new system, because they thought that they were powerful enough to get away with it," said George Avakian, another of the team involved in the 33 1/3 rpm LP, in an interview with Michael Hobson of Classic Records in 1998. "In 1962, when I was at RCA, someone finally told me where 45 rpm came from. They apparently took 78 and subtracted 33 which left them with 45, which they went with out of spite."

And the "Battle of the Speeds" was on.

yo.

Another approach to try and prevent this might be to get the browser not to send conditional GET requests *at all* and to just reload silently from cache.

Some of those knicknacks may have been mildly amusing, but nothing in that article compared to the wonder and majesty that is the USB turd.

I think they missed this USB device.

The early bombes were built by The British Tabulating Machine Company. The later, improved version (with a printer) was built by NCR in Dayton. The initial British Tabulating Machine version just slowed and stopped after a hit, and someone had to crank the thing backwards to the hit point, record the settings, and restart, since many hits were false alarms. The improved version would stop, reverse to the hit point, print the stop info, and restart.

Visit Bletchley Park if you're in London. It's a short train trip, it's near the railroad station, and there's a tour. But go on a weekend, or you're liable to get someone who's an expert on British manor house architecture and will focus on that.

To be serious for a moment, the 6502 series (which included the 6507 and 65C02) was an excellent processor architecture that was incredibly easy to learn on. Its small instruction set, focus on 8 bit instructions, and logical segmenting made it popular both in real usage (Commodore 64, Atari 2600, Nintendo Entertainment System, Atari 8-bit computers, Apple II, BBC Micro, etc.) AND in teaching.

Just about anyone can learn to program it by reading the documentation. It's so simple, it can even replace BASIC as a first language. (Although, you might have a bit of diffculty doing "Hello World" unless you understand the hardware you're programming for.)

I find Mapki and Mike William's Tutorials more than sufficient. A quick glance at the API group's mailing list also helps.

Only now are games rated in terms of hours gameplay. And what's considered a good game offers 30 hours. I challenge any youngster to finish, for example, Head Over Heals in that time.

In my opinion, intelligent gamers just can't be arsed to play this modern rubbish, based on the same stuff as the year before, only with slightly smoother graphics. This is why the Wii will probably be successful. Not because it's Nintendo, but because it offers some actual gameplay developments over the previous 20 years.

The eyes have it....

Well, I was all eyes for the article I partly read yesterday or early this am.

Well, even IF the eyes transmit like a network, the eye study is not apples and apples. More like oranges and mangoes.

How many libraries of eye sockets worth of information is that?

I mean, look at the size of the Guinea pig's eye. Of COURSE it transmits less energy. I mean more data to the brain. It's not as if it enlarges to accommodate more data. Hell, the human eye is probably 10 times LARGER without expanding. But, I suppose if the eyes DID expand when more data rate was demanded, such information overloads would lead to a whole new meaning of eye-socket-to-yah....

http://www.pimms-pages.co.uk/

And, Guinea Pigs aren't pigs of any sort. It's a terrible name to give something that a real pig could kill just by rolling over it.

http://www.oink.demon.co.uk/pets/guinea.htm

What *I* wanna know is how the eyes of bats comaare to the Guinea Pig and the Chupacabra. And to hell with human eyes. I'm talking about the MOVIE "Chupacabra".

It's simply lack of circulation due to incomplete motion. Just get one of those hand gripper thingies and squeeze it about 20 times every half hour. Solved.

Wow, that is an ignorant comment. That is as clueless as my Doctor when I went to him with
RSI complaints in late 1993. In fact, you've advised the exact solution my Doctor advised. Completely and utterly the wrong advice for a problem that you have incorrectly diagnosed.

Fortunately for me I found a physiotherapist that understood the problem, fixed me, told me how to keep myself fit and move on. I still live with the RSI injuries to this day and still have to do the remedial exercises.

If you want to know more: http://www.objmedia.demon.co.uk/rsi.html

Next time, be more careful before your spout off on something you clearly know nothing about.

What is stopping you then from becoming one?... All the other folks out there, they're no smarter than you or else they'd be on TV so they're just a bunch of cooky conspiracy theorists so never mind listening to them, okay?

I actually was very intrigued when I first learned that people thought the landing was faked. I did a lot of research looking at both sides and I finally decided there was more convincing evidence on the side saying the landings were real. There definitely is still a lot of strange occurrences such as how many of the main people involved mysteriously died but I still think the landings were real.

Here are a couple links that I liked (and could still find since it has been a while since I researched) which debunked many of the "conspiracy theorists" claims:

http://www.braeunig.us/space/hoax.htm and http://www.redzero.demon.co.uk/moonhoax/ and http://www.thekeyboard.org.uk/Did%20we%20land%20on %20the%20Moon.htm

This is an interesting neutral site: http://www.xenophilia.com/zb0003.htm

Here is one of the "conspiracy theorists" sites I found interesting:

http://www.ufos-aliens.co.uk/cosmicapollo.html

I've pretty much sworn off all European languages now in favor of Japanese which at least makes some sense (what do you mean chair is feminine?!)

No matter what they say about Japanese being a "hard" language, in my experience, there are only two hard parts of it: 1) if you want to read it, you've basically got to learn to read all over again, and 2) a much larger basic vocabulary because of the various politeness/formatlity levels. I mean, seriously, it's really no harder to pronounce than Spanish (if you'll take a moment to learn that hyu and ryu are single sounds), and it's only got like (IIRC) 2 1/2 irregular verbs. (two fully irregular, one with a single irregular form, and eight or so honorifics with a consistently different conjugation) And "language lab" material is easily acquired in the Anime section of Best Buy.

In contrast is Esperanto, which has delusions of being an "international" language, while carrying a bunch of pointless Eastern European baggage.

"What the heck is the BSA?"

BSA? They used to make motorcycles. Didn't they?

http://www.baxtercycle.com/
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/BSA_Rocket_3/Triumph_ Trident
http://www.bsa-regal.co.uk/GROUP/bsa.html
http://www.ianchadwick.com/motorcycles/w650/histor y.html
http://www.bsaoc.demon.co.uk/
http://www.best-motorcycle-gear.com/bsa-motorcycle -history.html
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Birmingham_Small_Arms _Company
http://www.google.com/search?q=bsa+motorcycle+hist ory&btnG=Search&hl=en&lr=

Well, google results show I was right but incomplete, they did a lot more than that.

all the best,

drew
(da idea man)

I find it interesting how this "group intelligence" parallels a similar if not identical idea in how Helen Keller (see http://www.percepp.demon.co.uk/hkeller.htm for some more in-depth attributions) and her leraning of language allowed her to think. It all starts with simple building blocks of basic words, and it grows almost as if its a continuous recurssion, with each itteration becoming a more complex and "intelegent" set of grammar.

Hmm. I may be missing something, but I think you're confusing Choose Your Own Adventure type multiple choice games with the more simulationist, finer-grained parser-based text adventures; the grand-parent post quoted the very first of the latter - the venerable (if primitive) Adventure/Colossal Cave from 1975 (or one of its various, er, mods.)

Popular companies were Infocom, Magnetic Scrolls and Level 9, among others; these days, the form is kept alive by enthusiasts and frequently taken into directions more experimental and/or literary than throw the axe at the dwarf then pick up the gold.

Baf's Guide to the IF-Archive is a good place to start searching; as is the IF Review Conspiracy. Poke around and you'll notice most good games require either a "Z-Code" or "TADS" interpreter (VM); refer to the Inform homepage for a list of UNIX Z-Code interpreters or just go with Zoom right away (link has pretty picture). As for TADS games, here're the Linux TADS 2/3 Playkit and, alternatively, a QT-based TADS 2/3 interpreter.

TADS and Inform, incidentally, are the two most widely used Interactive Fiction programming languages. And although that's not their intended purpose, both have also been used for multiple choice games on occasion.

If you're interested, Brass Lantern has a collection of articles for beginners. If you're not, oh well ;)

"If someone could figure out how to do one handed typing"...

How about the BAT keyboard, CyKey or other chorded keyboards?

http://www.mcintyre.demon.co.uk/local/electbrae.ht m -- nuff said

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

You're missing the point. The point is that cartoon child porn is icky. Just like gay sex. Anything that offends my sensibilities, anything at all, must banned and its participants jailed, regardless of whether they're doing any harm or even affecting me at all. The mere thought that something out there is icky fills me with pure rage; rage that causes me to go out and vote for any canditate who'll stop the ickiness.

On an unrelated note, Eastern Orthodox Easter today, so happy Easter! Here's a picture of a cute bunny to offset any negative feelings I might have caused with the above paragraph.

You've obviously never heard of Rainbow Foil or the Clever Little Clock ;)

lack of multiple desktops

I'm so tired of people saying this. Have you even bothered looking? If you have an ATI or Nvidia card then you have multiple desktop capability built into your video drivers. They're a damn sight faster than any software based virtual desktops.

There's also software solutions, in case you're stuck with an archaic video card or a crappy Intel video card. My preferred one is VirtuaWin, but I've also used DeskWin. They're both OSS under the GPL.

Yes, MS has a PowerToy that does it as well (but it sucks). And even if you have ATI/Nvidia cards you may want to take a look at VirtuaWin -- it's extremely configurable and has a bunch of plugins available.

Is this just marketdroidal Hype, or does it more than this? http://www.gedanken.demon.co.uk/wwwoffle/

For the record, this is what FUD means.

There was a well-known analysis by Richard Grimes posted to Slashdot recently that explained how Microsoft has silently scaled back the amount of .NET managed code used in each build of Vista, even though they had previously made public claims that Longhorn would be very .NET-based, and that they were "betting the company" on it.

Got it.
Think I found the article here. It's a little dissapointing that Microsoft has been slow on the .NET promises, but as a developer I understand the need to scale back features in order to release a more solid product. However, as a company with virtually unlimited resources you'd think they would make a better effort.

When you switch desktops, you see all the windows minimising and all the ones for the next desktop un-minimising

Then you're using some really crappy virtual desktop software (the PowerToy is known to be... well... toy; I've never tried the ones in the drivers, simply because they are feature poor).

I highly recommend either VirtuaWin or DeskWin. I've used both and prefer the former, although I haven't used the latest version of the latter.

Are they perfect? Nope. I've had apps get "lost" and become unrecoverable -- usually when they go off and become unresponsive to Windows messaging while on another desktop (the biggest offender on my work desktop is Outlook). But that's pretty rare with VirtuaWin (the main reason I prefer it).

especially when "taskbar grouping" is turned on, the interface is completely unsuitable for someone who has a large number of apps running.

So disable it. It's easily done. And, frankly, you're simply wrong. I prefer a virtual desktop method myself, but I have coworkers who regularly have 20+ programs open and have no issues with switching between apps efficiently. It's all a matter of what you're used to. I suspect they would find virtual desktops to be a pain; frankly the one thing that perpetually annoys me about any virtual desktop software is the redraw time on them compared to simply switching between apps on the same desktop. And yes, I've used virtual desktops dating all the way back to tvtwm.

Looks good. Heres my version of Defender:

http://www.ogham.demon.co.uk/zips/def104.tgz

It still has a few quirks I don't like but generally I
reckon is a reasonably faithful version.

Actually someone from SGI ported POV Ray to MPI about 4 years ago:

http://www.verrall.demon.co.uk/mpipov/

There is also a PVM version as well.

http://www-mddsp.enel.ucalgary.ca/People/adilger/p ovray/pvmpov.html

For one of my graduate classes I am MPI enabling the latest povray source based on Leon Verrall, Andreas Dilger, & Brad Klines previous work mentioned above.

If they use apostrophes, ignore them - they're not serious. Some aliens will try to tell you that "'" stands for an obscure vowel (F'lar, T'pau, Sp'thra), or a silent consonant (Dra'Azon, Ka'a Orto'o), but in reality it's purely decorative. It's not clear why they choose to use apostrophes rather than, say, umlauts (à la Mötley Crüe) - or peculiar alien squiggles, come to that. Maybe they just want to keep things convenient for ASCII.

Cykey http://www.bellaire.demon.co.uk/newcykey.htm

I have one here, it's a bit of a pain with IR connection, but once you have the receiver set up it works fine.

The chording style they use here took me literally an hour to learn ~22 letters of the alphabet on, which matched the claim on the manual :-)

I still have their Excellent 1990 PDA, the AgendA http://www.bellaire.demon.co.uk/cykey.htm

Cykey http://www.bellaire.demon.co.uk/newcykey.htm

I have one here, it's a bit of a pain with IR connection, but once you have the receiver set up it works fine.

The chording style they use here took me literally an hour to learn ~22 letters of the alphabet on, which matched the claim on the manual :-)

I still have their Excellent 1990 PDA, the AgendA http://www.bellaire.demon.co.uk/cykey.htm

However, if you track through the links to various articles about Microsoft and the Longhorn 'reboot', you find that .NET was pulled from this OS role due to the lateness of .NET 2.0 and the fact that machines that would run .NET services at a reasonable speed are 6 years (now 3 years) down the road.


Interesting supposed "fact", when you consider in this article, he does some benchmarks and basically comes to the conclusion that managed code is perhaps 2% slower than unmanaged code.

So Richard Grimes bust the myth of you claiming he said something as a fact. Take that! :-)

if they offered the kit in brick and mortar stores, you could be sure that someone would probably pick one up by accident for their kid. can you imagine the frustration xmas morning when they discover it wont play any games?

Of course the Linux accessory for the kid's existing PS2 ran games. Xbomb anyone?

I see much talk of how innovative and groundbreaking this game is. Well, I beg to differ. I remember a game very much along these lines on the Atari ST. It was called Eco, was written by a team called Denton Designs and released by the EA of their day, Ocean Software. Here's a write-up on it. I@m sure you'll see the parallels.

Now, remember, this was nineteen years ago. When those 16-bit machines came out, game design suddenly became hugely interesting and innovative, and to my mind we've been stagnating ever since.

Ok, here's the list. I guess maybe the stormtrooper at the bottom would count, I haven't played any Dooms in a while, I just thought I remembered them all being aliens and zombies... oh well. http://www.easton.demon.co.uk/doom/monster.htm

i've been reading project gutenburg texts via weasel (formerly gutenpalm) for a couple of years now. Both are free, and more to the point gutenberg texts are, well, text of the non-drm'd ascii variety.

the thing that's really held me back is i've never seen a book i wanted to buy available for online purchase, let alone in a plain-ascii form unencumbered by a need for a particular reader or bizzare and frustrating licensing requirements. i'm well aware of the reasons publishers don't want to release their precious ip into the wild this way, but there you have it - the only form i'd be interested in buying an ebook, they can't sell it in. impasse.

infinite temperature occurs in some special situations because of the way temperature is defined.

google infinite temperature or look here or here

That's not the worst of it. I think this web page says it so best. Esperanto is hardly a "universal" language that anyone can learn. The Japanese and Chinese have enough problem with R vs L, and the Japanese with our barbaric European vowels like schwa and ihh and uhh, and Esperanto is much worse. It is an ugly hack of a language, a bad marriage of Polish and Italian, with phonemes that are difficult for half the world to pronounce, and with way too many irregularites and inconsistencies. Not to mention that it uses circumflex accent marks for no good reason, such that the page I linked has to use a superscript "v" to render them.

Esperanto sucks.