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If you don't want to register, but also don't want a capped download: Demon FTP.

try tardis or if you only want a NTP client its sister product K9

And while every other aspect of the gregorian calendar can be described in just a few lines of code

Might be true, there are other quite tricky bits in the calendar as well. Although not quite part of the original gregorian calendar, try calculating the ISO week number.

Example: http://www.merlyn.demon.co.uk/weekcalc.htm

Eh, I have some issues with Star Trek's new-ageism and incoherent dualism. Bless you and your rant, Justin B Rye...

Still, that Patrick Stewart sure can deliver a line, can't he.

--grendel drago

Eh, I have some issues with Star Trek's new-ageism and incoherent dualism. Bless you and your rant, Justin B Rye...

Still, that Patrick Stewart sure can deliver a line, can't he.

--grendel drago

Could'nt agree more, but i hope they have'nt used all the names. I found a list of roman gods here. Just need to find a list over wich names has allready been used. The reason they didn't reserve the names is probably that they did'nt expect to find more planets in our solar system.

morse translation:

- oooo o ooo oo --o = thesig

Many people have mentioned SDL. You should also check out Allegro. It's a multiplatform game programming library.

http://www.talula.demon.co.uk/allegro

Neat -- I hadn't heard of this.

Here's a link (top hit from Google):

http://www.mandrake.demon.co.uk/Apple/charlie.html

"What do you need to make MacCharlie work? Nothing more than a Macintosh personal computer. It doesn't matter whether your Macintosh has 128 KB or 512 KB of memory; either will work equally well."

Umm . . Sealand isn't that big you know . . here's a picture of it.

Have you even Seen the thing? A bunch of rednecks with guns could take over that country.

http://www.hurtwood.demon.co.uk/Fun/copter.swf

Enjoy :)

Take you original 10$ keyboard, might be even wired one. Pull out ANY KEYS and leave only the key combination you desire, there are practically countless combinations(!!!).

Now all you need is a software like Girder or any macro related application and fire your personal shooter away.

Here are some examples.

140$ saved!

7 years ago they were getting ready to rebuild the Baby Manchester Mark I computer, a vintage late-1940s early PC.

They wrote a simulator, several actually (here's one that's still online)
, for a 32-word x 32-bit-per-word computer. Each word had 5 address bits and 3 instruction bits, the rest was user-defined. Optionally, you could treat a word as 32 bits of user-defined data. The best program won a prize, everone else got a written certificate of thanks.

The winning entry? A noodle-timer. Congrats again to Yasuaki Watanabe of Japan.

Programming in the small is a lot more challenging that it looks, especially if you have a problem that naturally fits in 33 words and all you have is 32.

I'm sure it's been a while since Hywel Williams' excellent site was last slashdotted, so Underground History - Disused Stations on London's Underground META NAME="KEYWORDS" CONTENT="london underground, ghost stations, history"

As part of my religious ritual, I would now like to chant, "I know I'll get modded down for this, but...." :)

> This is Slashdot. It's defending Christianity that gets you attacked by the moderators-on-crack.

Um, no--I have never defended Christianity in my life, nor am I likely to ever do so (except in the most broad of terms), but I have gotten negative mods nearly every time I've mentioned religion in any way.

> It definately demonstrates the innate desire for humans to search after something to obsess after/find truth in. One man might take that piece of evidence to suggest that all of these things we obsess over are clearly wrong, but another man might take it to mean that this desire to seek after a set of ideals or truths suggests that such a truth exists

And yet a third man (i.e. me) might suggest that it simply demonstrates that people feel a strong need to find explanations for things, without attaching a value judgement, good or bad, to that fact. The human brain is remarkably good at finding patterns, even where no patterns exist. This pattern-finding ability has generally stood us in good stead over the years, but has also lead many, many people to believe in the significance of apparent patterns that spring from randomness.

> It takes wisdom, not intelligence, to consider all the possible reasons for things being the way they are.

Now that I fully agree with. And yet, I have almost never run into a religious person who has actually considered all the possible reasons for things being the way they are. In fact, in one sense, it's impossible: there are an infinite number of possible reasons for things being the way they are. For example, consider the Invisible Pink Unicorn hypothesis. Is it true? I can't say. But I see no reason to think it's any more or less likely than any of the other many theories humanity has come up with.

Most religious people I've encountered (although, to be fair, I do have to say, not all of them) seem to think it boils down to two possibilities: the religion they were brought up with or out-and-out atheism. When you try to throw in all the other religions that exist, and the infinite number more that don't, but could, they get very uncomfortable and try to brush you off. At best, they say their religion "feels right" to them. (They often use far more emphatic terms, but that's what it boils down to.) Well, gee, why, possibly, might the religion you were brought up with feel right? Hmmm? Could it possibly be merely because it was what you were brought up with? Oh no, it must be the One True Religion! They can just feel it in their bones! Bah, pfui!

To bring this back vaguely on-topic, one of the best things I find in science fiction (and even, frequently, in science fantasy), is that it can open your eyes to the mere fact of new possibilities. If the strange alien race has a strange alien religion, it can suddenly make you realize that there's more than one (or even four) possible religions. Of course, that doesn't just apply to religion--it applies to all sorts of things, like politics, economics, biology, sexuality, art, etc., etc. Sure, a lot (probably even most) science fiction is mere brain candy, but the genre is still, at its core, about exploring boundaries and new ideas, and I think that's a good thing, despite Sturgeon's law.

I'm waiting for a mouse and microwriter/cykey

very fast touch typing very quick !

http://www.old-computers.com/museum/computer.asp?s t=1&c=558

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

second? The original order (as published) was
1. Lion the Witch and the Wardrobe
2. Prince Caspian
3. The Voyage of the Dawn Treader
4. The Silver Chair
5. A Horse and His Boy
6. The Magician's Nephew
7. The Last Battle
When I was younger (and lacking new things to read) I read all 7 books 7 times in a month (yeah - I read fast and was about 10 or 11 - not much to do at the time). I tried both the publishing order and a Chronological order - I found the original publishing order to be the best. Of course - Mr. Lewis did express a "mild preference" for the newer ordering - but I will be reading them to my children (if they want me to) in the original order in which they were published.
check out this page for more info on published/chronological/order in which the books were written.
http://www.aslan.demon.co.uk/narnia.htm

Never mind, someone else said it a lot better.

--grendel drago

C. S. Lewis leaned towards starting with The Magician's Nephew, though he was less inclined towards violence (as you seem to be) if someone were to choose another order. On a side note, Clive Staples Lewis died on 1963-11-22, the same day the American president John Fitzgerald Kennedy was shot. Perhaps JFK had recently read The Magician's Nephew without having read the five preceding books?

I heartily concur with your comments about the Superman/Batman dichotomy. Superman is a tool; he's a gullible fool ready to swallow whichever ideology gets to him first. (For a rather well-done example, read Superman: Red Son, where Superman lands 12 hours later/earlier, crashes into the verdant farmlands of the central Ukraine; he grows up to defend truth, justice and the expansion of the Warsaw Pact. Bonus points for having Batman be a Russian terrorist fighting Superman's police state in a furry hat that somehow still has bat-ears.)

See, my idea is that heroes need to be nerfed. Star Trek ran into this problem, and had to pretend that lots of overpowered tech simply ceased to exist. Likewise, Superman has to be nerfed by making him exceedingly stupid, gullible, etc. Which is why Batman---who requires little to no nerfing, being a simple meat-and-water human like the rest of us---is so much more interesting. Well, when done right.

--grendel drago

"dot dash dot, dot, dot dash dash dot, dot, dot dash, dash" from a month ago?

slashDOT thinks morse code is ascii art and won't post it, so I had to spell dot and dash out...so on slashDOT morse code is slower...

"If the books that comprise the bible are not universally reliable as the word of God, which the book itself claims to be, how can one know which parts are reliable and which are not? Do we just get to pick and choose? Buffet a-la Bible?"

Yes, Exactly! And that is what they do.

http://www.abarnett.demon.co.uk/atheism/picknmix.h tml

Where, you ask? Let's ask Justin B. Rye...

Love triangles? I'll skip that one, because I'd be okay without it.

Drug addiction? There are no drugs - Guinan isn't licensed. But is Picard's Earl Grey decaffeinated? Why don't they use harmless customised wonderdrugs? Clearly, everyone is on Super Soma to make them such nice, well-adjusted humanoids.

Racism? Did you see "Up the Long Ladder"? There is no racism... so where are all the Hispanics, Arabs, and co? Star Trek is a paragon of tokenism. Clearly, the White Masters back home are running things. Racist enough for you?

Violence? All races and cultures are equal. Everybody has only been Americanised (rather than, say, Iranianised) because they genuinely wanted to be. We're seeing a Pax Starfleetica. All other cultures have been squashed under the thumb of the aforementioned White Masters, far better than any of the 1500s' colonists could have dreamed.

Holosuite addiction? See frickin' Super Soma.

The whole thing is horribly creepy if you think about it enough. Read the link.

--grendel drago

A certain minority of Americans are inventing new illnesses in order to avoid work.

The economic miracle that was started off by Ronald Reagan in the 80s, and continued through the George Bush Sr and Clinton administrations is one the wonders of the modern world. The solid economic base of Amreica, coupled with the explosion of the American designed world-wide-web and Internet have created opportunities for all regardless of education, race, sex or class. Anyone in America who wants a job will be able to take their pick from a selection of attractive and highly paid positions due to the strength of the American economy.

So why is it then that the middle classes have taken to faking diseases and why are otherwise respectable physicians joining in this collective fraud ?

Dyslexia, M.E., Attention Deficit Disorder, Repetitive Strain Injury, Anorexia. You have probably heard of these diseases before. At least one of your co-workers has probably taken time off work for one of these 'illnesses' in the last month. And yet, up until now no evidence has been produced to support the existence of any these afflictions as actual medical conditions. Let's analyse these 'sicknesses' one by one.

• Dyslexia. This is the 'diagnosis' given to a middle class child who cannot read owing to low intelligence. It is an attempt to medicalize a problem which in reality is a social one: All men are not created equal. When God gave out the brains, some of us were fortunate enough to be given a shiny new BMW 7-Series sedan, some of us got '97 5.0 Mustang, and some of us (the unfortunate few) got nothing more than an old skateboard.
  
  Dyslexia does not exist. Stupid children who cannot read do exist.
• M.E. (also known as the 'yuppie flu'). Again the middle classes cannot stomach the fact that they are not superhuman beings. Consequently when one of them needs to take a day off work, due to being what normal people would call "tired" they medicalize the problem (by giving it a long medical-sounding name) and hey-presto you can get all the time off work you want. Not bad for simply being tired. I wonder what our forefathers who built America by the sweat of their brows would say to a modern yuppie suffering from M.E. ?
  
  M.E. does not exist. People who need to go to bed a bit earlier do exist.
• Attention Deficit Disorder (ADD). This one is quite sinister. For thousands of years, children were allowed to be carefree spirits, wandering wherever the mood took them. Investigating a world which is new and fresh to them, getting distracted when something more interesting came along. This was cal

A clean slate can sometimes be a good thing for progress. But it might make a lot less money in the short run. (thinks linux 2.4 -> 2.6 and kernel drivers).

My first thought was: "AFLAC!" Then I looked it up.

(Mea culpa for feeding the trolls.)

Here are his works catergorized as "Christian" in a faq I found:

• The Problem of Pain - 1940
• The Screwtape Letters - 1942
• Mere Christianity - (Probably his most famous)
• The Abolition of Man - 1943
• Miracles - 1947
• Reflections on the Psalms - 1958
• The Four Loves - 1960
• Letters to Malcolm: Chiefly on Prayer - 1964
• Devotional letters to an imaginary friend
• Christian Reunion
• Christian Reflections
• Fern Seed and Elephants
• First and Second Things
• God in the Dock
• Of This and Other Worlds
• Present Concerns
• Screwtape Proposes a Toast
• Timeless at Heart

P.S. "Apologetic" does not mean making an apology for. In this context it means making a formal justification or defense.

A rather low resolution image is
Here
Probably a better example is Aloha Airlines flight 243, which looked a whole shitload worse.
Check out the picture on page 2
Only one fatality, which is kind of amazing if you look at the pictures (flight attendant blown out).

Star Trek needs to die because it displaces better, more deserving shows. If not for Enterprise, Firefly might still have a home. If not for DS9, Babylon 5 wouldn't have had the struggle it did.

It's the same reason it was so much worse to make a cheesy action flick from "The League of Extraordinary Gentlemen" than it would have been to make a cheesy action flick from whole cloth.

If they could make and keep their bad or even marginally good work without it displacing better work, it wouldn't matter so much. But so long as they've got hot and cold running Roddenberry (well, Berman now), I'll drink a beer for the art I'll never see, and piss the results on Star Trek's long-overdue grave.

--grendel drago

I know a guy who sometimes quotes it out of the blue, which for some unknown reason causes everyone in earshot to fall down laughing. I guess we're easily amused :)

Anyway, after posting that (naturally :) I went looking, and seems the earliest documentable attribution is to a Jim Harkins' Usenet sig in 1993, but the article I found thought it might have been "from Emo Phillips appearing on a show such as Friday Night Live, the late-night comedy show which was the UK version of the US Saturday Night Live, back in the latter half of the 1980s."
http://www.horrible.demon.co.uk/die_peacefully_in_ my_sleep.htm

Maybe taglines should be blackboxed too ;)

[now let's see if /.'s stupid URL mangling bug is fixed.. they look normal in preview, die on posting]

Hello again!

Care to have a crack at the unicorns and dragons?

I'll bite

All biblical dragon references take place in the book of Revelation, where it is clearly poetic / symbolic. All other instances mention serpents or leviathan (crocodile).

Chuck Bigelow's history of Times Roman is a great document, and I should have included it along with Linotype's. Bigelow & Holmes did a number of important computer fonts, such as Lucida.

If you have access to a Unix box somewhere on the net, set up an http proxy server on it and make an ssh tunnel from your machine to it with forwarding of port 3128 or 8080 or whatever the proxy runs on. Then do all your web browsing through that ssh tunnel. This is usually faster over a modem link because you don't have the latency of doing DNS lookups and opening new TCP connections locally.

If the proxy server at the other end is something like RabbIT that can compress images and web pages, so much the better. If you run WWWOFFLE locally to do agressive caching of pages (and allow offline browsing), better still. For added blazing speed use dillo as your web browser (though I must admit I mostly use Firefox nowadays).

Finally note that you don't need loband.org for Slashdot - just enable 'light mode' in your preferences.

Home Theatre Projector lamps are, as you may know insanely expensive. Furthermore, in DLP projectors the light goes throug a RGB color wheel to produce the colors. Would it not be possible to use an array of RGB LED's in the projector set at the frequency of the color wheel? This way you remove the expensive (and very hot) bulb and you remove the moving part - the color wheel.

I saw on this website http://www.emanator.demon.co.uk/bigclive/makendo.h tm that you can also "overdrive" leds - that is increase their brightness if they are on for a very shortened period of time. Thus, you could possibly triple the output of the LED's without causing them damage.

Anyone out there consider this? Does this sound like a worthwhile DLP projector hack?

...who became a three legged cat, and helped me write some stuff

Hmm... must update pages this millennium.

Like this one, for example?

What makes the GNER system so fun is that you don't need to pay to get onto the train network - so you could have a great big LAN party going at 125mph between London and Edinburgh!

rd

Wouldn't it piss off SCO no end if someone produced a scorun app?

They already did, and as I remember SCO were mighty pissed off.

Methane doesn't brake down our ozone layer. It actually creates ozone by reacting with oxygen (O2). The only problem is that it creates it too low in the atmosphere.

It's also a greenhouse gas which brakes down into large quantities of CO2 which is another greenhouse gas so I know it's all that safe either.

and of course you mean John Christopher.

"The Tripods": John Christopher

Well, perhaps not. :)

Why would you waste jms on Star Trek? Trek is hobbled by years upon years of crufty retcon and ideas that sounded good at the time, but pile up to make an insane backlog of crap. Not to mention a pretty poorly done founding ideology.

jms can, and should, do better on his own. There's no reason for him to shackle himself to a sinking ship, not when he's proved that he can do the lion's share of making a kickass SF universe from scratch. It'd be a step down for him.

--grendel drago

Why would you waste jms on Star Trek? Trek is hobbled by years upon years of crufty retcon and ideas that sounded good at the time, but pile up to make an insane backlog of crap. Not to mention a pretty poorly done founding ideology.

jms can, and should, do better on his own. There's no reason for him to shackle himself to a sinking ship, not when he's proved that he can do the lion's share of making a kickass SF universe from scratch. It'd be a step down for him.

--grendel drago

• I am not in favour of patenting of software as in the US.
• Europe needs a uniform legal approach to stop the drift towards extending patentability to areas, which would not have been traditionally allowed, and to stop patentability of pure business methods, algorithms or mathematical methods.
• Software products as such, must not be patented.
• Opensource software must be allowed to flourish and the Commission must ensure that this Directive must not have adverse effects on opensource software and small software developers.
• Patents and the threat of litigation must not be used as an anti- competitive weapon to squeeze out small companies.

SPDIF is a horrible protocol that is sensitive to cables and almost anything else. Though it's nominally a digital signal, it's multiplexed with the system clock (which is as analog as it gets).

The clock is no more analog than the data, IT'S THE SAME SIGNAL. There is nothing encoded in the amplitude of any part of an SPDIF signal. SPDIF uses BPM/Manchester coding, which is a well-established, non-horrible protocol. You do have an ethernet cord plugged into the back of your computer right now?
Guess what that uses?

Analog signals are a whole different ballgame. If you don't think cables can make a difference, pick up an electromagnetics book.

And if you actually READ your electromagnetics book, you'd see that any cable that is even close to 75 ohms is good enough for SPDIF. SPDIF is not something where you need a 40dB return loss or a 0.1 dB insertion loss. It's digital. They could have run it over CAT5 if they wanted to.


There is no reason to buy monster cable for SPDIF lines. Any decent piece of coax will work. Your cable company doesn't pay $30 for six feet of coax and neither should you.

Also, you certainly can run a DAC off it's own clock, unlike your claim in another post. Allowing it to underrun or overrun would be silly. All you're really doing is resampling a digital signal at a different rate.

attempted electronic transfer of UKP13.9m

Sorry if this is in any way pedantic - just FYI since I used to work in a capital markets trading environment...

The abbreviation in most currency markets is not UKP, it's GBP, for Great Britain Pounds.

To quote from a handy refernce page:
ISO 4217 (Codes for the Representation of Currencies and Funds) defines three-letter abbreviations for world currencies. The general principle used to construct these abbreviations is to take the two-letter abbreviations defined in ISO 3166 (Codes for the Representation of Names of Countries) and append the first letter of the currency name (e.g., USD for the United States Dollar).

A non-official site's list is at: http://www.jhall.demon.co.uk/currency/by_country.h tml

The official 4217 list of currency codes is at http://www.iso.ch/iso/en/prods-services/popstds/cu rrencycodeslist.html

The official ISO 3166 Country codes list is at:
http://www.iso.ch/iso/en/prods-services/iso3166ma/ 02iso-3166-code-lists/list-en1.html

After browsing apple-history.com, I see you are right - the built-in drives don't have buttons. Ah, these are the drives I was thinking of - it is the second one down. I was confusing the drives on the IIgs with the mac. Sorry.

there's a cold front approaching hell

Actually, if you read Dante's Inferno the lowest level of Hell is pretty damn cold. Check out Cocytus.

Pehshaw! Shows what the hell you know, we are after the root of all evil, and everyone *knows* that SPECTOR is behind all.

Not to mention that Apple has absolutely tarnished the chance of decent, out of the box, _free_ font anti-aliasing on Linux/any alternative OS.

Bullshit.

They hold the patent for TrueType font hinting, which is absolutely needed for good looking fonts.

Well, gee, I don't think that's such a wrong thing, given that they invented TrueType.

Sadly, you will get Apple apolgists that think Apple is more than a company that 'plunders' OSS so they can shortcut some of their other commercial competitors.

TrueType is not the invention of some oppressed open source developers. It is not a "given" -- if you want a patent-free type system you're going to have to invent it yourself, the same way that Ogg Vorbis/Flac/Speex/Theora developers are building patent-free compression.