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The attraction of the BBS was that it was like your own local coffeehouse. The internet lacks that -- chat rooms are far less personal-feeling than even the most primitive BBS (your cable across the room trick almost qualifies! :) A good BBS had its own ambience, its own regulars, its own specialties of the house, not duplicated anywhere else.

But BBSing is not dead, and you can still experience it ... in fact I still use a messaging BBS every day (access via telnet://techware.dynip.com or http://techware.dynip.com/public/bbslogin.wct ) and am the "co-sysop-at-large" for a surviving dialup BBS (see http://eqcity.com/ )

BTW, I'm a 1955 model, and started doing the BBS thing in 1993, with a 286 running DOS6, and a 2400 baud modem -- which at the time was quite sufficient.

http://cyborgcentral.dynip.com/~pd/images/site/dar kforce.jpg

(I'm pulling these numbers off my ass, okay, but I've built a couple of solar powered boats so I know what I'm talking about... )

<a href="http://spiritplumber.dynip.com/boat">List of pics</a>. <a href="http://www.spiritplumber.com/boat">Same list of pics</a>.

I thought we never landed on Venus

Depends on your concept of "we". The Russians had an extensive Venus orbiter/lander program - absolutely thrilling stuff considering the difficulties Venus presents. These guys were pioneers, the first to land a probe on another planet. The moon as well.

I guess its time to look forward to either landing people on Mars, or pushing spacecraft further to Mercury.

Why adopt Dubya's limited vision? The really juicy planetary science targets are Jupiter's icy moons, and Saturn's Titan. As has been pointed out, all of these, along with Mercury, are underway.

Alas, it looks like Dubya's "mars or bust" program will drain the funding from many of the most exciting future space science missions, just as the "look mom, I'm (barely) in space" ISS did before, and the space shuttle (the Swiss army knife of spaceflight: does everything, but nothing well) before that. I'm so glad for those missions whose probes have been launched already - harder (though not unheard of) to axe those.

to try and land/splash on Jupiter

Been done.

Jupiter is just a (humungous) ball of gas, there is no land to land on, nor sea to splash in.

There are certainly going to be phase transitions to liquid and solid (aka "sea" and "land") somewhere in that humongous ball of gas. Operative question is how to design a probe to withstand the enormous pressure at the depth at which these phase transitions occur.

Best,

- nic

Looks like you got it, though I interpret that the grand prize requirement is arbitrary audiovisual input rather than ASCII art. Pretty steep.

Whalen has some invaluable musings and observations on the contest and his second entry. I remember the generalist strategy from the Alice CHAT simulation in the early nineties (linked in the grandparent post), and it doesn't look like that was really the problem - Wientraub's winning entry end-runs it with smooth non-sequiturs. In many ways that does point out the weakness in the contest, and even in the Turing test itself (weak versions anyway). Whalen's work with CHAT and TIPS has always been geared to actually delivering information (ie. being useful instead of merely clever), so I'm not surprised he didn't use that same strategy.

You can chat with Whalen's entries at the telnet site.

>Thus, they probably have another technique which cleans up the film grain by comparing it to subsequent and/or prior frames.

Yes, and you can try it yourself. Its VERY much worth the effort, even if it takes a lot longer to postprocess your video.

The more random the noise, the better. Its excellent for TV shows on VHS or from broadcast TV (or so I've found).

Oh, and if you like to make things disappear without noticing it (great for those HUGE ads in the corner of a TV show) try this, or this.

[Somebody with some experience please port these to Linux! You would be so well thanked! This would be really nice too! No, I can't do it myself, I'm really not that good.]

..that the Microsoft time server was 3 minutes slow ! This was about 2 weeks ago. I checked it against both another time server, and then the UK speaking clock (dial 123 in the UK) which is synchronised with Greenwich. As a result, I disabled the time synch (right click on the time in the system tray, Adjust Date Time, Internet tab, uncheck the box). I now use the time synchronisation feature that comes with the Dynip client.
Since the MS time synch is enabled by default, they really should make sure their server farm has the correct time :(

I BSD-ified my example code so if anyone wants to use it, feel free.

UPS does home consumer shipping as a sideline: they're more worried about pleasing their corporate customers.

I don't know about that.. I work for a _very_ large financial services company and I once Next-Day-Air shipped a Cisco 7507 router ($35,000 insurance, packed in Cisco's packing material)and it arrived nearly crushed. Took 3 months of bitchin and lots of phone calls/escalation to get UPS to fess up and pay for it.

First it was the 'sub-standard packaging' excuse... we have our own UPS personnel on site so my obvious question was 'Why did they accept the shipment?' and then it was 'We only insure up to $10,000' .... so why did they charge me for the requested $35,000 insurance on the package??

Eventually they honored the agreement that was made when they accepted and insured the shipment but it was a major pain in the ass.

No pics but near as we could guess is that it had been dropped while being loaded into an aircraft.

_Chainsaw

Help out Project Gutenberg! Distributed Proofreaders http://charlz.dynip.com/gutenberg)

This site uses a combination of PHP, mySQL and some Java Script to create a 'library'. People scanning books upload the scanned image files and the initial text file for the images that is produced by OCR software.

When a proofer elects to proofread a page for a particular project, the text and image file are displayed on a single webpage. This allows the text file to be easily reviewed and compared to the image file, thus assisting the proofreading of the text file. The edited text file is then submitted back into the library. The basic concept is that several proofreaders can be working on the same book, but different pages, at the same time. This significantly speeds up the proofreading process.

Once all pages for a particular book have been processed all the pages are concatenated into one text file which is downloaded by the Project Manager where it is properly formatted/final proofread and submitted to the PG archive.

The site has a limited amount of bandwidth and will probably become overwhelmed with the /. effect but if you are interested please check out my site at http://charlz.dynip.com/gutenberg

The site can always use some more proofreaders!

Thanks!

Charles

--Chris

You proofread OCR'd text for Project Gutenberg using the raw scanned image to fix anything. You can do as little or as much as you want.

There is a really easy way to help Project Gutenberg. They have setup a site where you can help proofread OCR'd books. They give you a textbox with the OCR's text and the raw image of the scanned page and all you do is correct all the mistakes. You can do as little or as much as you like. It is located here: http://charlz.dynip.com/gutenberg/

www.icepick.com
www.jeffshouse.dynip.com

You don't actually need a static IP, just use dynip or a number of other providers that offer DNS services for dial-up connections. Nearly as good as a static IP, but a lot cheaper.

I'm hoping to start a collection of The Worst of Slashdot. Send me links to the best Troll, offtopic, stupid, bizarre, and funny posts ever. I want Natalie Portman with hot grits using a Beowolf posts! I want BSD is evil/sucks posts. Send the links to xm@geekmafia.dynip.com I want them all. THis will be no mere lame webpage. Think Yahoo-style directories
TOP::Natalie_Portman::With_Hot_Grits
TOP::BSD::BSD_IS_EVIL

Send them /.ers! and remember........ "Jon Katz is a Windbag!"

"There are no shortcuts to any place worth going."

I use a Ricochet modem on my server at home in Alexandria, Fairfax County, VA. It's my only connection to the Internet. Sometimes I get nearly 28.8K out of it. Other times it's much slower. Overall, I'm happy with the service although I wish that its interactive performance was better. It's unusable for telnet. In spite of the sometimes slow connections, I'm running a couple of services over the radio link. Visit Madison to play with my NetBSD port of Alan Cox's Linux Portaloo and also Ben Reser's Echelon Armor thingie which I swiped from here. I'm running an OpenVerse server on madison.dynip.com:7000 and a dopewars server on the default dopewars port. Feel free to try any of them. I don't advertise, so I don't get lot of traffic. Don't be surprised if the connection is slow!

I've also used the modem on my NetBSD-running Sony PCG-505 laptop. I've used it to listen to WPFW in DC and WWOZ in New Orleans using RealAudio. In fact, Frank Ahrens of the Washington Post wrote about my experience in an article on the future of radio. It appeared on January 21, 1999. Depending on network congestion, it acutally sounds OK. In the article, I think I said the sound was "like a cheap transistor radio". Mr. Ahren's editor cut out the qualification that that was a weakness of the small Sony speakers I used rather than the streaming audio technology or the wireless modem.

A recent announcement from Metricom promised 128K service in 12 markets by summer 2000.

I use a Ricochet modem on my server at home in Alexandria, Fairfax County, VA. It's my only connection to the Internet. Sometimes I get nearly 28.8K out of it. Other times it's much slower. Overall, I'm happy with the service although I wish that its interactive performance was better. It's unusable for telnet. In spite of the sometimes slow connections, I'm running a couple of services over the radio link. Visit Madison to play with my NetBSD port of Alan Cox's Linux Portaloo and also Ben Reser's Echelon Armor thingie which I swiped from here. I'm running an OpenVerse server on madison.dynip.com:7000 and a dopewars server on the default dopewars port. Feel free to try any of them. I don't advertise, so I don't get lot of traffic. Don't be surprised if the connection is slow!

I've also used the modem on my NetBSD-running Sony PCG-505 laptop. I've used it to listen to WPFW in DC and WWOZ in New Orleans using RealAudio. In fact, Frank Ahrens of the Washington Post wrote about my experience in an article on the future of radio. It appeared on January 21, 1999. Depending on network congestion, it acutally sounds OK. In the article, I think I said the sound was "like a cheap transistor radio". Mr. Ahren's editor cut out the qualification that that was a weakness of the small Sony speakers I used rather than the streaming audio technology or the wireless modem.

A recent announcement from Metricom promised 128K service in 12 markets by summer 2000.

IIRC inetd is turned on by default on Redhat. The newbie thinks "Great, Internet, I need that".
Trouble is that /etc/hosts.allow and /etc/hosts.deny are empty and /etc/inetd.conf has turned on ftp and pop by default.

I mean, what's the use of all those security updates and fixes if the worst holes are provided as an installation default? And with services like dynIP the problem even gets much worse. In its current form Linux is pure dynamite in the hands of people that have no idea of how to smell the fuse.

The author's proposal of having server and workstation editions will at least work for the sensible portion of new users. The rest will have to learn by error, I am afraid.

I don't think that it would have helped them at all to release it as open source first. Nobody would have bought it then. Book sales would drop dramatically if every book was open sourced. I think the only reason that they did this is because they got such an earfull when people noticed that the book was closed-source. I really think that if all technical books were open-source, we really would have excellent technical book and you wouldnt have to go through buying a bad book again. Propane News

Check this out! http://geekmafia.dynip.com/pla/bumbox.ht ml
xm@GeekMafia.dynip.com [http://GeekMafia.dynip.com/]

Without people like L0pht, we would have no privacy, no security and no idea that we lacked both. (My US$ .02)

On a security note, check out my new Windows file system DoS attack. FAT filesystems are naughty.

Actually, a lot of people care. My roommate for one - he's assistant art director for a small ad agency in Cambridge, MA and he has told me a number of times that they've looked at the GIMP and the only reason they don't use it is b/c it has no CMYK support. [snip]

Are you trying to tell me that one can get good CMYK (aka subracttive color) on any PC monitor driven by any PC video card using any software? I would think one would need the likes of a carefully calibrated SGI box for that. Now there's a thought, GIMP on SGI!

nbarry@isolation.net - too lazy to log in.

So, use a cookie for login. Every time I go to SlashDot, I am automatically logged in.
--
Buz Cory of the New York Amateur Club AnyNix SIG
write to the BuzCo Systems helpdesk <helpdesk@buzco.dynip.com> for FREE help with:

• Installing/Configuring Linux
• Getting started with the Ada Programming Language.