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What about DOS Plus which (so I'm told) was some hybrid of DOS and CP-M/86? It was used on the Master 512 (think BBC Micro with 80186 board hanging off the second processor link) and other strange machines. One developer wrote PC software on the Master 512 under DOS Plus because 'if it runs there, it runs on anything!'. (I wonder if DR-DOS inherits any code from DOS Plus.)

Do you realise that the definitions of Fl Oz, Pints and Gallons are different in America and Britain?

A British Pint is .568 of a litre, whereas the American one is 0.473 (so the definition of a gallon is different).

Fluid Ounces (fl oz.), too - there's 20 in a UK pint, and 16 in an American pint.

I think the American version is actually the original one - us Brits changed our measurements some time after the Revolutionary War, while the US kept them the same.

... which is http://www.scoriton.demon.co.uk/.

For low-cost low-light webcam performance, it's still difficult to beat the Philips Toucam Pro (aka Toucam 840). The electronics haven't changed for a few years, but I haven't found anything better in low light. See Lundycam for a comparison of a Toucam and a low-end Network camera at dusk.

I don't have any problems with it registering without touching however, that one seems pretty unique.

Perhaps because you don't have Raynaud's.

Daniel

But why- at least- don't they shrink them down?

That'd be OK... as long as they made the 5p and 10p's bigger (or non-circular).

I'm not visually impaired myself, but just out of sheer laziness (not bothering to look at what I've got in my pocket), I find UK coins really easy to distinguish by touch alone.

Of course, if you've got a gazillion-and-one bits of shrapnel[1] in your pocket, that's still not much use!

The hexagonal(? I don't have one on me!) 50p and 20p's, and the £1 (thick, heavy) £2 (big, thick & heavy) coins stick out like a sore thumb. Anything circular and thin (1p, 2p) or stupidly small (5p) get left amongst the pocket fluff.

That's one thing that puts me off Euro coins. They're all round, albeit with notches in the edge (4 in the 50cent, lots on the 10cent IIRC). Still, I'd miss the old 20p and 50p's. But I do like the appearance of the 1 and 2 euro coins. Similar to the £2 coin, which is really pretty... when you've got one of those, it really feels like you're holding something that's got some value. They were the UK's first bi-metallic coins, and have one of my favourite phrases on their edge -- "Standing On The Shoulders of Giants" -- proud, but with humility.

There's site of UK coin images here.

[1] 'shrapnel' = slang for low-denomination loose change.

Look, any time someone complains that doing something is too hard, they're really just saying that they're incompetent. Whining about it isn't an answer. Babylon 5 did a self-consistent time travel plot without turning it into a big pile of confusion.

Random people on the internet have commented on ways to fix Trek; it is a tribute to the incompetence of the show's producers that they are unable to match the cleverness of some unpaid guy in his pajamas. (I can't speak for seasons 3 and 4 of ENT, as I haven't seen 'em. But hell, the average TNG ep was light years behind the average B5 ep.)

The reason I, like so many other people, rag on Trek is because it displaces everything else. As Justin Rye said, "I remember the days (up until about 1985) when the BBC used to produce SF, as opposed to kiddy fantasy spoofs or half-hearted technothrillers. This will never happen again while they can get hot and cold running Roddenberry." How much equally worthy SF (and let's be clear that Trek itself is rarely SF, with its vague and inexplicable pseudoscience) has been forced off television because Trek is known, Trek is safe.

I may have to watch newer Enterprise, but unless it's really fucking amazing, I'm standing by my original position.

Trek Must Die.

--grendel drago

The Tori'i were clueless in the first few episodes (after Teal'c joined them). But their hard work introduced them to the Toik'ra

How is one supposed to pronounce the names with apostrophes anyway? See Xenolinguistics lesson 10.

heh, on the subject of plants that move when you touch them, how about a mimosa pudica? It is a tree, but you can keep it in your cube when it's still a sapling... apparently when you touch the leaves, or give the plant's pot a good sharp tap, the leaves fold up and droop towards the ground. (according to the link, it's a protection against locusts.)

Sorry, but that is wrong. You are correct in that there is no "absolute position or absolute motion" as you put it, but who or what gets accelerated certainly does make a difference. Acceleration is how the twin paradox, for instance, is resolved (see here: http://www.weburbia.demon.co.uk/physics/twin_gr.ht ml The rest of the relativity FAQ is very good as well).

IAAA.

Yes, RISC OS browsers certainly aren't the best, but you can get to access most things, and Netsurf (http://netsurf.sourceforge.net/) development is ongoing. There's certainly nice email clients - Messenger Pro for example.

OpenOffice? No thanks. RISC OS users are used to tiny footprint apps with no bloat. Ovation was superceded about 6 years ago by Ovation Pro. Easywriter and Techwriter http://www.iconsupport.demon.co.uk/ are also very good word processors with the ability to save and read MS Word files.

Check out the best RISC OS news site: http://www.drobe.co.uk/

Why would you tie the hands of a genius like Straczynski with the weight of too damn much shitty, contradictory continuity?

Justin Rye's commentary is a good place to start on it. At the bottom of most pages where it says "Star Trek does x wrong", it says "Babylon 5 did x right, and here's how".

For example, when the crew can beam onto the Borg ship, they can blast a few things with phasers, but don't think to bring, say, a five hundred megaton nuke into the center of the ship and set it to detonate as soon as they clear out. Babylon 5? (Spoilers for the end of season three here.) When Sheridan goes to Z'Ha'Dum, he brings nukes with him. Not "quantum torpedoes" or some treknobabble crap that doesn't sound ooh-we're-hippies-nuclear-scary, he brings a fucking nuke. (Well, two, for good measure.)

It suffers from the same problem that Xander's muscles did in Buffy the Vampire Slayer. How strong is Xander---does he get beat up by one regular vamp, or can he hold his own against an invading army of Turok-Han---"they are to the vampire what the Neanderthal is to humans"? It depends on how convenient it is to the plot.

The problem, in both cases, is giving someone way, way too much power, and having to nerf tham with stupidity because otherwise they'd be unstoppable. Which, incidentally, is why Batman rocks, and why Superman is a fucking tool. (For a list of Trek-tech which has to be ignored in subsequent episodes because they're overpowered, see here.)

Look, if you want brilliant SF, give JMS or Joss Whedon a fat check and a full season to prove themselves. Trek has become synonymous with SF. (I at least hope that 'Star Wars' has more of an association with fantasy than SF.) That needs to change. Netcraft Confirms---Trek Is Dying.

--grendel drago

Why would you tie the hands of a genius like Straczynski with the weight of too damn much shitty, contradictory continuity?

Justin Rye's commentary is a good place to start on it. At the bottom of most pages where it says "Star Trek does x wrong", it says "Babylon 5 did x right, and here's how".

For example, when the crew can beam onto the Borg ship, they can blast a few things with phasers, but don't think to bring, say, a five hundred megaton nuke into the center of the ship and set it to detonate as soon as they clear out. Babylon 5? (Spoilers for the end of season three here.) When Sheridan goes to Z'Ha'Dum, he brings nukes with him. Not "quantum torpedoes" or some treknobabble crap that doesn't sound ooh-we're-hippies-nuclear-scary, he brings a fucking nuke. (Well, two, for good measure.)

It suffers from the same problem that Xander's muscles did in Buffy the Vampire Slayer. How strong is Xander---does he get beat up by one regular vamp, or can he hold his own against an invading army of Turok-Han---"they are to the vampire what the Neanderthal is to humans"? It depends on how convenient it is to the plot.

The problem, in both cases, is giving someone way, way too much power, and having to nerf tham with stupidity because otherwise they'd be unstoppable. Which, incidentally, is why Batman rocks, and why Superman is a fucking tool. (For a list of Trek-tech which has to be ignored in subsequent episodes because they're overpowered, see here.)

Look, if you want brilliant SF, give JMS or Joss Whedon a fat check and a full season to prove themselves. Trek has become synonymous with SF. (I at least hope that 'Star Wars' has more of an association with fantasy than SF.) That needs to change. Netcraft Confirms---Trek Is Dying.

--grendel drago

Some more info on sensitivy: http://www.weburbia.demon.co.uk/physics/see_a_phot on.html

Yes, I remember reading about it in comp.risks. Apparently it got confused when an even week followed an odd week when it thought that an even week should have followed. This reference have more info than one probably wanted to know about week numbering.

The Apple II only really lasted that long because of its domination of the education market. It was discontinued because Apple wanted schools to start upgrading to Macs. An Apple II card was sold for the LC series machines for a time, so schools could make the transition to Macs without having to replace their legacy Apple II software at the same time.

~Philly

Back when I was still using RISC OS (an experience I would gladly go back to if I'd the money for a new machine), all our apps were packaged in their own directory. It all worked tremendously well! This page explains it well enough. There's no sense in me rehashing the whole thing here. Really, go take a read of that.

Oh, and I don't think the RISC OS FontManager's antialiasing has yet been beaten when it comes to quality. Nope, it's still the best font rendering engine around.

This link seems to cover what you are asking. Google Answers has some ideas as well.

this is a boon to hobbyist developers everywhere. I used to be a big fan of AMOS on the amiga before BlitzBASIC hit big, so I understand the grounding.

I have recently found, however, a C library which makes game coding as easy as Blitz and AMOS. Perhaps simpler. Even better, it's cross platform. So for those looking at something a little different, check out Allegro.

i believe it's rickie lee jones.

In fact, it's probably worse here. Although our DD/MM/YY is relatively sane, if you see documents on the web you've often no way of telling if they're UK-style DD/MM/YY or US-style MM/DD/YY.

For a long while I used the first three letters of the month instead of its number where possible (and included the century), which makes things unambiguous, but it still doesn't sort properly.

So these days I use YYYY-MM-DD almost everywhere. It sorts properly, it's logical, it's unambiguous, it's neat, and it's an international standard (hint: the 'I' in 'ISO'...), so it should be acceptable everywhere they count years in the same way we do!

The only real issues with it are 1) it makes date intervals awkward, and 2) it's much longer than a simple D/Mmm for near dates. But you can't have everything*.

(* Coz if you did, it'd probably undergo gravitational collapse and end up as a black hole, and then you'd look a bit of a fool...)

I used to have SuSE 9.2 [...] Now it's Windows 98. Boots in under twenty seconds

Gee, a seven-year-old OS boots faster than one released this year. Alert Ted Koppel.

Hey, maybe you could put CP/M-86 on it and have it boot in under ONE SECOND! After all, a lot of shit could pass between your ears in that 23 seconds it takes to start Wordpad.

Actually, player pianos can sound really cool, and they are NOT obsolete antiques from the past.
The sound is completely real, even better than the most costly surround system that ever excisted.

That is, if you tune the piano and restore the inner workings correctly, of course, in addition to being a good pianolist.

The automatic mechanism operates via a complex maze of vacuum hoses, valves and pneumatics (small bellows) and the piano roll which contains holes read by a tracker bar which tell small pneumatics when to collapse, which in order, moves the keys of the regular piano, something which is further illustrated and explained here.
Nearly all player pianos can be played by hand as a regular piano by the way. One interesting detail is that on European pianos, the keys often don't move when the player plays automatically, while on most of the american ones, the keys move like we see in those western movies. Some pianos have electrical driven pumps, most others have foot pedals - mine has both! Pianos with food pedals are very easy to pump, if they are in tight working condition!

Here are a some examples of high quality mp3 recordings of two old pianos, one Stroud pianola residing in an art café, called Thomasgaarden in the old norwegian copper mining town Røros and my own Weber Pianola !

Lion Tamer Rag Artcraft roll played on the Weber piano
Frühlingsrauschen by the norwegian composer Christian Sinding. Aeolian roll played on the Stroud piano
American Patrol Aeolian roll played on the Stroud piano
Chicago March Artcraft roll played on the Weber piano
Can-can Some old noname roll played on the Stroud piano

And yes, I also recorded St. Lois Blues and Tiger Rag when I visited that café last summer.

One should notice that even if the Stroud pianola is somewhat untuned, its tone is quite better than mine, which sounds more like a perfectly tuned home piano ready for taking those boring piano lessons. But guess what - there no more boring piano lessons to take when you have an automatic piano!

And if I need more rolls, My friend Douglas Henderson, who is the mastermind behind Artcraft still supplies newly made rolls!

Artcraft is by the way a one man business where the rolls are made the hard way with this amazing punching equipment.

Here are some pictures of the inside of my piano - and yes, I should long ago made a home page with these pictures.

Did you by the way get distracted by the LGB train on top of my Weber piano?

Anyway - here are some more pictures from the inside of the piano too, here's the wind motor which pulls the roll and the

Clive Sinclair and Sinclair Research worked on
Wafer Scale Integration in 1983. http://www.electromagnetism.demon.co.uk/z005.htm

At first glance, this cell processor thing seems
about the same, i.e. use the whole wafer of circuits, instead of cutting it to individual processors.

It's near the large lake full of floating explosive barrels, with the helicopter dropping hundreds of bombs. After destroying the helicopter, you open the large gate into another section of water. Somewhere around the edge of that area, there are the two sewer grates. Climb through the open one (I had to jump on top of the boat to reach it), run through the pleasantly radioactive sludge, and there's an opening on the left with the vortigaunt. (He speaks the vmono_*.wav files, whose contents are listed here)

Here

No. Hubble could theoretically pick up items the size of over 125x125m from moon surface, everything else is too small. You'd better not even bother with terrestrial telescopes, unless you come up with some completely amazing advances in optics.

So... Let's hope Chinese go to the moon and paint the entire surface red, after which Americans go there and paint huge Coca-Cola logo on it with white paint. That ought to make the conspiracy theorists stumped for at least a few seconds =)

I'm pretty sure there are international treaties banning any country from claiming extraterrestrial land for their country.

Sure, you can build your luxury hotel, but you're never going to be able to keep out the riff-raff.

I liked the USB Turd.

The cloud lamp he has on that page seems very interesting. Will have to think about making one ;)

Interesting! This guy's project basically connects a dimmer switch each to red, green and blue LED strings. The colors sorta mix, sorta producing colored light, but as you can see in his pictures there are major fringing effects (multicolored bands of light). The howto on this page, suggested by another poster, gives a much cleaner result.

The link above uses a microcontroller and pulse-width modulation to vary each color's intensity, producing a much more even color effect.

Now, of course, I want to redo the apartment with them. Eternal lighting with no more power consumption than a couple of flashlights...yum...

Ok, I'm gonna do it. I'm gonna post a "what the hell is this place comming too" post. Jesus, here's some guy who has done a rather awesome thing. Can we please just admire it for what it is without all the name calling? Jesus the tagline is "news for NERDS" - basicly everyone here so can we just stop it with the cheapshots and one-liners? And please, no more smart areses talking about getting laid. With that attitude you never will.

For those who were seriously interested in this project can I refer you to the link a fellow poster posted: it s more interesting.

Reminds me a lot of this guy's projects. He made some damn cool things out of LEDs there, complete with howtos.

Instructions for RH9 - should work anywhere...

$ rpm -qa allegro*
$ unzip -d tod wintod.zip
$ cd tod
$ gcc -Wall -O3 -ffast-math *.c `allegro-config --libs` -o linuxtod
$ ./linuxtod

The only dependency is on the allegro game library...

Probably, though back in the early days, the first programmers were women. Ada Lovelace has been described as Founder of Scientific Computing Grace Hopper also comes to mind. Futhermore, back in the days of cracking Enigma codes, it was teams of women who programmed the bombes. Somewhere along the line, computer programming was co-opted into professional studies as 'engineering' and 'science' and unfortunately, women were actively discouraged from entering those professions. Only now is this changing ...

Andrew Rilstone, who's a hell of a lot smarter than me, wrote a number of essays about this, which are frickin' brilliant.

Cerebus the Aardvark: An Obituary
Cerebus the Aardvark: An Obituary (2)
Is Dave Sim Mad?
Is Dave Sim Mad? (Update)
Does Dave Sim Have Occasional Moments of Lucidity?

The first one, I think, says what you mean by bugs in your breakfast: The text piece in Cerebus # 226 made me feel physically unwell; made me feel as if I'd been kicked in the stomach; actually spoiled my whole afternoon. When the drunken John Lennon beat up a waitress, she is reported as having said 'What really hurts is finding out that your idol is a complete asshole.'

I haven't reached the part of the series when Sim goes mad yet. I suppose it'll be... enlightening. (I finished "Jaka's Story" recently, and am scouting for "Melmoth".)

--grendel drago

Andrew Rilstone, who's a hell of a lot smarter than me, wrote a number of essays about this, which are frickin' brilliant.

Cerebus the Aardvark: An Obituary
Cerebus the Aardvark: An Obituary (2)
Is Dave Sim Mad?
Is Dave Sim Mad? (Update)
Does Dave Sim Have Occasional Moments of Lucidity?

The first one, I think, says what you mean by bugs in your breakfast: The text piece in Cerebus # 226 made me feel physically unwell; made me feel as if I'd been kicked in the stomach; actually spoiled my whole afternoon. When the drunken John Lennon beat up a waitress, she is reported as having said 'What really hurts is finding out that your idol is a complete asshole.'

I haven't reached the part of the series when Sim goes mad yet. I suppose it'll be... enlightening. (I finished "Jaka's Story" recently, and am scouting for "Melmoth".)

--grendel drago

Andrew Rilstone, who's a hell of a lot smarter than me, wrote a number of essays about this, which are frickin' brilliant.

Cerebus the Aardvark: An Obituary
Cerebus the Aardvark: An Obituary (2)
Is Dave Sim Mad?
Is Dave Sim Mad? (Update)
Does Dave Sim Have Occasional Moments of Lucidity?

The first one, I think, says what you mean by bugs in your breakfast: The text piece in Cerebus # 226 made me feel physically unwell; made me feel as if I'd been kicked in the stomach; actually spoiled my whole afternoon. When the drunken John Lennon beat up a waitress, she is reported as having said 'What really hurts is finding out that your idol is a complete asshole.'

I haven't reached the part of the series when Sim goes mad yet. I suppose it'll be... enlightening. (I finished "Jaka's Story" recently, and am scouting for "Melmoth".)

--grendel drago

Andrew Rilstone, who's a hell of a lot smarter than me, wrote a number of essays about this, which are frickin' brilliant.

Cerebus the Aardvark: An Obituary
Cerebus the Aardvark: An Obituary (2)
Is Dave Sim Mad?
Is Dave Sim Mad? (Update)
Does Dave Sim Have Occasional Moments of Lucidity?

The first one, I think, says what you mean by bugs in your breakfast: The text piece in Cerebus # 226 made me feel physically unwell; made me feel as if I'd been kicked in the stomach; actually spoiled my whole afternoon. When the drunken John Lennon beat up a waitress, she is reported as having said 'What really hurts is finding out that your idol is a complete asshole.'

I haven't reached the part of the series when Sim goes mad yet. I suppose it'll be... enlightening. (I finished "Jaka's Story" recently, and am scouting for "Melmoth".)

--grendel drago

Andrew Rilstone, who's a hell of a lot smarter than me, wrote a number of essays about this, which are frickin' brilliant.

Cerebus the Aardvark: An Obituary
Cerebus the Aardvark: An Obituary (2)
Is Dave Sim Mad?
Is Dave Sim Mad? (Update)
Does Dave Sim Have Occasional Moments of Lucidity?

The first one, I think, says what you mean by bugs in your breakfast: The text piece in Cerebus # 226 made me feel physically unwell; made me feel as if I'd been kicked in the stomach; actually spoiled my whole afternoon. When the drunken John Lennon beat up a waitress, she is reported as having said 'What really hurts is finding out that your idol is a complete asshole.'

I haven't reached the part of the series when Sim goes mad yet. I suppose it'll be... enlightening. (I finished "Jaka's Story" recently, and am scouting for "Melmoth".)

--grendel drago

Andrew Rilstone, who's a hell of a lot smarter than me, wrote a number of essays about this, which are frickin' brilliant.

Cerebus the Aardvark: An Obituary
Cerebus the Aardvark: An Obituary (2)
Is Dave Sim Mad?
Is Dave Sim Mad? (Update)
Does Dave Sim Have Occasional Moments of Lucidity?

The first one, I think, says what you mean by bugs in your breakfast: The text piece in Cerebus # 226 made me feel physically unwell; made me feel as if I'd been kicked in the stomach; actually spoiled my whole afternoon. When the drunken John Lennon beat up a waitress, she is reported as having said 'What really hurts is finding out that your idol is a complete asshole.'

I haven't reached the part of the series when Sim goes mad yet. I suppose it'll be... enlightening. (I finished "Jaka's Story" recently, and am scouting for "Melmoth".)

--grendel drago

The Incredible Hulk had fun with his halloween decorations but that's a warmup for his christmas lights where he plays RoShamBo when not helping out Google Compute.

Shackleton didn't lose a single man (although they suffered quite a bit and had to eat their dogs). Progress? Perhaps Shackleton was just a brilliant commander and the other ones just sucked. (See Sir John Franklin)

There seems to be alot of classification of these women as "goth"... Simply wearing lots of fishnet and leather doesn't make you goth... May I point the unwashed masses to http://www.scathe.demon.co.uk/histgoth.htm for an in-depth history of what goth really is... And yes, I know a good majority of them don't classify themselves as goth. I'm talking about the people on /. saying the girls are goth.

Well they already did it with dinosaurs. Just find some amber with a mosquito in it!

Solars are far more exciting. I've only witnessed a very-nearly-but-obviously-not-total eclipse, and that's because my parents didn't want to shell out the money to fly to the Big Island back in 1991 (grr!)

Anyways, This site has links to images where they show the path of the eclipse on the world map. Kinda nice.

Of course, NASA's is far more comprehensive, but it doesn't show which individual cites are blessed by such eclipses.

Yes, but there is a subtle difference in the types of technology. The manned submarines that reached the deepest part of the ocean were thick skinned vessels with no manipulators or propulsion. Alvin was submersible with a large glass window, manipulators, and self-propelled, allowing the ability to examine specimens.You can see how the technology has evolved; lighting and propulsion migrate to the sides to maintain a hydrodynamic shape. The visual field expands to 180 degrees at each end.

• The White Mountains
• The City of Gold and Lead
• The Pool of Fire
• When The Tripods Came (A prequel added later to the original trilogy)

While these are good stories on their own, I'm not sure they'd make good Hollywood plots for movies. The teenage boys would need love interests. The technology could be easily shown with special effects of today, but its likely to be reworked as a special effects extravaganza (which the stories were not). I can also see the stories being called derivative of V and sense that movie makers would have to make changes to distinguish themselves from that story. All in all, it sounds like the Tripod stories are better off if they aren't soiled by Hollywood to me.

I don't have much experience with ZoneMinder, but I did set up a similar software package called motion which not only has the ability to define zones, but also has built in noise reduction technology, and several other nifty features, including only triggering after a certain minimum number of frames and massive change filtering (such as when your AGC keeps drastically changing the image).

I have motion set up to watch my front yard, and I am very pleased with it's lack of false detections *without* having to set up zones.