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I guess they should add more interesting images and stories about scientists. Like the one about Newton blowing up his alchemy lab ^_^

Or how about Einstein's tongue?

Or Lenna? (Lenna is a 70's playmate whose picture is widely used by image processing scientists. The image is cut JUST at the RIGHT point, so nothing "interesting" is seen :P )

However, I think that the most critical part of science is HOW it's taught. Richard Feynman made an astonishing discovery on science being memorized and not taught (Excerpt from book: Surely you're joking Mr. Feynman).

I belonged to a scientific group in my school. (I'm talking about college). We had LOTS of funs making robots that actually walked (one was a crane-like biped robot), programming computer simulations (or making cool flashing lights with electronics), a talking program (you would train the program with your voice, and a few hours of manual labor later :P, you could make it speak any phrase you'd like)...

And of course, just talking about science, of any topic that interested us. We even talked about religion - in a scientific way (WEIRD math ideas), fractals (fractal geomety of nature), chaos theory (remember Jurassic Park?), etc.

We were like the "deat poet society" of science. The LINDA group was pretty succesful, and we published some papers in international physics journals.

Perhaps making groups like this in your school would attract youngsters. Science, without the grades. Just for learning and fun :)

There's Dar (as mentioned in the article) and also bacula for remote backups - go check them out if they're new to you.

My first compnuter, a casio PB-700 had 4Kb of ram, expandable to 16Kb (I went to 12Kb). with plastic modules the size of cigarette lighters for each 4kb.

It had BASIC, and I COULD NOT save programs on any media. It was battery operated (4 AA iirc), and I lost all memory when changing.

it had 160*32 pixels display, and I got good at writing games for it, and drawing out quadratic equations. I carried it in my jacket pocket.(That was 1984).

link: http://pocket.free.fr/html/casio/pb-700_e.html

My friend had a Z-80 with 24Kb... Man, he was hot. It plugged in to the tv... The games used the ascii extended tileset for display...

Anyways. My parents didn't want to buy me the Texas Instrument 99/4i (i think that's the right name), so I became a programmer. Now, I have too many computers, from the ones I own, work with, and manage.

What happened to the PB 700? I busted the lcd when I dropped it. I still remember what it looked like, the crystals liquit all smeared in there... boo hoo...

Right. And, if by "NUV" you mean the Nuppel video format, it can be made without a hardware encoder. The ATI All-in-Wonder 128 cards only seem to record reliably in a somewhat hacked Nuppel format. And last time I tried, I had a hell of a time getting either Xine or mplayer to play them.

just another mountable volume :))
(some buzz about it)

I personally like Stellarium. It may not be as comprehensive, but is available for Windows and OS X, as well as Linux. Not to mention it has pretty constellation art, looks very nice as a whole, and is quite easy to use. It is GPL'd too.

"Stellarium is a free GPL software which renders realistic skies in real time with openGL. It is available for Linux/Unix, Windows and MacOSX. With Stellarium, you really see what you can see with your eyes, binoculars or a small telescope."

I use SprintPCS, the Palmone treo600, and pssh. SprintPCS's network is CDMA so if you're not in the continental United States, and not in or near a metropolitian area, forget about it. For the rest of you I can tell you that it works splendidly, though latent. It'd be difficult to perform any complex task, though not impossible. On the treo the font-size will be tiny. One should consider the treo650 with it's high resolution screen as an alternative.

I should also mention PalmVNC. The bandwidth limitations of the sprintpcs network, and the resolution limitations of the treo600 render this application to little more than a novelty. Though again, in a pinch, it's a usefull app to keep around.

Perhaps you already have a phone that runs java midlets? If so you could try SSH & Telnet Floyd or MIDPSSH.

That'd be http://www.haikunews.org
googlefs shot. :)

Okay, it's cool. However, it may not be the best pick if you want to offload pictures from your camera / camera's card.

There's lots more options here :
http://fhoude34.free.fr/PortableHD_Main.htm

Most are going to be a good bit bigger, but have more functionality as well.

This doesn't surprise me at all. As an emulator author myself (jzIntv), I've worked closely with other emulator authors to reverse engineer and understand all the corners of my chosen system of interest.

I've worked with the authors of Bliss, IntvWin/IntvDos, Nostalgia, IntvPC, Kinty and the MESS Intellivision driver to work out emulation bugs and understand the various odd machine details. The authors of those emulators also have worked with each other--it's not like I'm some central focus here. It's a friendly community.

It'd surprise me more if the emu authors couldn't get past their egos to such an extent that they simply didn't talk to each other except to flame.

....If you make this character look like Jessica Rabbit, you will have one honey of a honeypot indeed.

A couple of ISPs here have gotten into this already: Free offers this with its own-brewed FreeBox based on a linux kernel (http://adsl.free.fr/tv/) and Wanadoo as well with its LIveBox (http://www.infos-du-net.com/en/news/3209-wanadoo- livebox.html). Both meet quite a nice interest but I don't have figures here. Nrodz./.

Actually, according to France Telecom, DSL was invented in BellCore Labs in 1987. :)

Telcos in France, Germany, Britain and Belgium have been quicker off the mark than the USA in developing and rolling out "triple-play" services over DSL though.

TV on phone lines has been reality for over a year in France. Check out the offering of Free.fr: http://adsl.free.fr/

For 29 euros/month (about 40 dollars) they offer:

• high speed Internet access: up to 15Mbps
  I'm two miles away from the central so I get around 5Mbps (that's based on actual mesurements), the closer you are the faster.
  
• 30+ TV channels
  As I understand it, while you watch TV Free reallocates 3Mbps for the MPEG2 video stream (though that should be checked as I never really noticed a difference).
  
• free phone calls all over France, calls to the US for 3 eurocents/minute
  They also offer services like Caller Id for free, services which you have to pay for with the legacy monopoly phone company.
  

And for a one time payment of 27 euros (about 35 dollars), you can convert their FreeBox (the modem that handles it all) into a wireless 54Mbps router.
http://adsl.free.fr/admin/wifi.html

TV on phone lines has been reality for over a year in France. Check out the offering of Free.fr: http://adsl.free.fr/

For 29 euros/month (about 40 dollars) they offer:

• high speed Internet access: up to 15Mbps
  I'm two miles away from the central so I get around 5Mbps (that's based on actual mesurements), the closer you are the faster.
  
• 30+ TV channels
  As I understand it, while you watch TV Free reallocates 3Mbps for the MPEG2 video stream (though that should be checked as I never really noticed a difference).
  
• free phone calls all over France, calls to the US for 3 eurocents/minute
  They also offer services like Caller Id for free, services which you have to pay for with the legacy monopoly phone company.
  

And for a one time payment of 27 euros (about 35 dollars), you can convert their FreeBox (the modem that handles it all) into a wireless 54Mbps router.
http://adsl.free.fr/admin/wifi.html

yeah, no shit.

apt-torrent update && apt-torrent upgrade && apt-torrent moo

Still trying to make it work on /.
slashdot fucked up :(

A better product is a subscription to WindBusiness !!
New technologic product, very important for you !
WindBusiness : because selling wind is our business...
Of course, it DOES support XML !

Great manager pictures here

Nice, elegant, right on time for xmas. Pic at http://lom42.free.fr/images/EthernetKiller.jpg

For my course in VHDL last year, I completed the courseworks using GHDL for simulation and GTKWave 2 to view the waveforms. The combination was fine for my purpose but I can imagine it failing with more complex projects. For synthesis I can choose from tools by Altera, Xilinx and Synplicity, although that wasn't necessary for the coursework.

I was actually thinking of simply switching to Verilog. One language doesn't really offer any advantages over the other anyway.

Ftp link.

Not too hard.


smeat!

I saw a few comments requesting SSH clients and Text Readers so I thought I point some out.

First some free stuff:

plucker - Ebook reader. Really only supports it's own format but is very robust. iSilo is a non-free ebook reader that supports other formats including txt, but with the plucker tools you can convert almost any document into plucker format.
pssh - There are other SSH clients for palmos, but this one doesn't crash my treo.
palmvnc - Very neat, but less than practical on my low-res, low-speed treo.
soundrec - Simple sound recording application, export to wav (usefull with Bhajis Loops) designed for the treo 600 but may work with other palm devices

Now some non-free stuff:

Pocket Tunes - Turn your palm device into an ipod only better with ogg and wma support. Worth the price.
Bhajis Loops - Turn your palm device into a music studio. Also worth the price

Not too mention the countless games, calculators, calendars, and other knick-knacks.

There are limitations in hardware obviously. There's only so much stuff you can fit in such a tiny device. But I must say that my treo 600 does way more than I ever expected when I bought it.

Try this one:

http://gauret.free.fr/adshare/adshare.php

The Transmeta processors have special features to support x86 emulation, but in the real world we can run QEMU on much faster real x86 and concentrate on implementing the emulation of other processors. Now the only thing missing is people working on new target architectures for QEMU...

Apple should invent an e-book reader.

They already had one, years ago. It was called the Newton.

Back when I was working for ANS - err, UUNet - umm, WorldCom - I would download text files, convert them to Newton Book files, upload them to my trusty Newton 2100, and read away. I read The Hacker Crackdown while taking lunchtime walks, as well as a few RFCs.

The Newton's form factor would still be great for an ebook reader. There's still a small but rabid base of people still writing software for the Newton, including mp3 players, 802.11 support, and even a web server! Surely someone can be persuaded to come up with a modern book reader / creator package for the Newton.

The only problem with this is the pride of Steve Jobs. One of his first actions upon returning to the Apple helm was the killing of the entire Newton program, ostensibly as it was the baby of John Sculley, the man who had Jobs removed from Apple. Apple still has the rights to the name and the hardware, and the Inkwell software that's included with OS X supposedly came from the Newton handwriting recognition software, so I can't see a reason why this wouldn't be possible.

Then again, I'm a hopeless dreamer about seeing the best PDA platform in existance making a return to the market :)

Well, there's QEmu, and Bochs, which can run Windows in Linux and so on. However, they are full CPU emulators, and are as such much much slower than VMWare. If all you're using VMWare for is like Outlook in Windows (and some organizations I know do exactly that), then these solutions might suffice, but for anything else VMWare wins hands-down.

You're looking for something more like QEmu, which while it's actually a CPU emulator they're working on adding virtualization capabilities a la VMware Workstation/VPC.

Give QEMU a try. It's much faster than Bochs.

Americans tend to be more fix cost centric vs. Total Cost or Value centric. They will look at dialup lines and see that they can have internet service for $10-$20 threw dialup vs. $30-$40 for Broadband

You're right. But Americans are no different from others.

In France, for instance, people are massively switching to DSL services not because they value Broadband more than their american counterparts, but because for several reasons the DSL market is terribly competitive : legacy operator France Telecom is forced by law to open its network to every broadband operators (and there are now more than a dozen of them, at least).

The competition is fierce and you can have 8 Mbps ADSL service for as low as 15 euros per month (http://www.neuftelecom.fr/). An other company (http://adsl.free.fr/) offers ADSL 2+ service (up to 15 Mbps download / 1 Mbps upload) for 30 Euros per month and that includes TV via DSL and Phone via DSL (unlimited local abd national calls). And you can even opt out from the legacy operator and you won't have to pay a fee to France Telecom to use their line (they own the last mile of copper) : the DSL company will have to pay a small fee to France Telecom to use the line, and most of the time they won't charge it back to you. So you have unlimited phone, high speed internet and Television via DSL, all for 30 euros per month, which is dirt cheap.

This have nothing to do with french infrastructure being more modern or anything : It's just the direct effect of fierce competition. I mean : even AOL offers 1 Mbps DSL service for 17 Euros per month (5 Mbps for 23 euros) !!!

It was the same a few years ago when 3 mobile companies battled over the emerging mobile market : prices went down and equipment rate sky rocketed.

That's in Paris and most French cities, through Free. New subscribers as of this month get ADSL2 at 15Mbps/1Mbps.

I think you missed my point: Code generators have improved so that the cost-of-change has gone down! At one time they were really only good for getting started by spitting out piles of repetitive, uninteresting code; afterwards you might tweak the generated code or have to change it for a bug fix, so you didn't want to regenerate. This is no longer entirely the case.

Check out some of the links here. Especially CodeWorker.

Mind you I am not entirely a fan of code generators myself, having been forced to use bad ones in the past. But they are good fits for certain kinds of problems, they really have improved recently and I was simply trying to answer the original question in the parent article in a meaningful way. I really do think they are going to be hot in the developer space soon. Unfortunately I expect a lot of PHBs are going to jump on the bandwagon and want us to use code generators in spaces where they aren't a good fit. For example, using a code generator in a case where a nice clean library is more suitable.

You can always play the clone for GNOME called gweled It's pretty decent

I argued in this article that Wikipedia is the only knowledge base that can be called an encyclopedia today because it is the only one that still have an underlying political project of its own. The political importance of the Wikipedia Project : the only true encyclopedia of our days. Then, it's not up to wikipedia to defend itself as an encyclopedia. It's to other so-called encyclopedias to be able to desmonstrate that they are something else than a big book where scholars were paid to write some stuff about what they studied before.

Actually, yes. "Lifters" work in the atmosphere with just electricity.
Unfortunately, nobody has built them big enough just yet to lift their own power source.

I think they got the files from the same place this guy got his. Or was it this guy?

I think they all got it from these guys or maybe these guys over here or maybe it was these guys.

Here is another interesting propulsion design. Anyone have any insight into this technology. Glow Discharge Plasma. Does this technology have promise? How about for space travel? Obviously a scramjet needs oxygen which makes space travel a little difficult.

We have free national house-to-house VoIP phone for about a year or so in France. And you don't have to use your computer: just plug your phone in the 'Freebox' given with your Free.fr subscription. You also get broadband internet (up to 15 mbits in some areas) and TV (not everywhere), all for 30 euros/month. For once that France isn't years behind technologically, I thought I'd mention it...

These are they. From IOCCC past, I love this entry

http://marc.herbert.free.fr/linux/win2linstall.htm l

For those of you who, like me, cannot afford vmware, might I suggest qemu?

wasn't even a computer, it was a calculator. I had one of these in high school and (stupidly) gave it away a few years later. Since then I've occasionally found myself online looking for one to replace it. It had application specific programming that allowed you to enter an algebraic formula like f=1/2*pi*r*c and it would prompt you for each variable, solving for the missing variable automatically. Only "macro" type programming (no branching) but its algebraic function was so powerful it didn't need anything more to solve some really complex problems.

I bought one of the rebranded Sharps from radio shack a few years later and it was nothing at all like the old machine. Such a simple device, but with functions I've never seen since.

You mean this Sam Cassel ?

If that isn't evidence of UFO's I don't know what is.

Google for Sam Cassel and u get the following website. This

QEMU is a similar open source project. It's supposed to run unmodified versions of Windows even. Does anybody know what QEMU's lastest performance numbers are?

I'm not sure how old the page is, through, since I think some dates on the page list it as 2002.

http://jackperr.free.fr/monica_bellucci.jpg

Well, given the German people's record for making rational, mature decisions, maybe the German government has a point.

Warning: the "rational" link might be hard for your poor stomach to take.

If you're running gentoo and you're not recompiling your kernel at boot you're just a poser!