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I, too, had the PC-2... Even though I had an Apple II, I liked the portability of the tandys. I started with a PC-4, and added a 1K memory upgrade and the casette port. This computer could keep 10 basic programs in memory at once (and they could call each other), and had a little memory counter at the top of the screen - it would display, in bytes, the amount of RAM left! It was great for trying to get that last bit of functionality into 1.5K.

I traded up to the PC-2. It offered graphics (I no longer had to use the yen sign to represent the protagonist dog in my adventure game!), a piezo speaker. I got the 4-color plotter/tape interface and plotted all sorts of neat geometric designs (as neat as you could get on adding machine tape). It's a clone of a sharp model... I just realized Sharp offered cool stuff that RS didn't, including a soft-key keyboard and apparently a video interface. Besides the video (which I thought was available only on the much-more-expensive HP basic calculator), the holy grail was the RS-232 interface: Thay way I could hook up a modem, a printer, or talk to big computers.

Little did I know that many years down the line I would eventually get a calculator that came with an RS232 serial port standard (HP48SX).

I, too, had the PC-2... Even though I had an Apple II, I liked the portability of the tandys. I started with a PC-4, and added a 1K memory upgrade and the casette port. This computer could keep 10 basic programs in memory at once (and they could call each other), and had a little memory counter at the top of the screen - it would display, in bytes, the amount of RAM left! It was great for trying to get that last bit of functionality into 1.5K.

I traded up to the PC-2. It offered graphics (I no longer had to use the yen sign to represent the protagonist dog in my adventure game!), a piezo speaker. I got the 4-color plotter/tape interface and plotted all sorts of neat geometric designs (as neat as you could get on adding machine tape). It's a clone of a sharp model... I just realized Sharp offered cool stuff that RS didn't, including a soft-key keyboard and apparently a video interface. Besides the video (which I thought was available only on the much-more-expensive HP basic calculator), the holy grail was the RS-232 interface: Thay way I could hook up a modem, a printer, or talk to big computers.

Little did I know that many years down the line I would eventually get a calculator that came with an RS232 serial port standard (HP48SX).

We used to do this with our Commmedore 64 floppy drives, or at least something close. You could control the and make it play a crude melody.

cvarc.org
how to build a full wave directional wire antenna (my favorite kind... I used to build a lot of them when I was 15-18 Very good for ham, cb, FM, and TV (built one for a friend to pick up the super bowl for his party))
softcom.net
Javascript calculator for the lengths of the wire

other than that, you just hook a couple antennas together and all is well. There aren't any links to the copper ring antenna or the double quad design that I'm aware of. I kinda made those from my head and bits of other designs and techniques(horizontal stacking free.fr is has pictures of double quads (stacked quads) for UHF, 2.4Ghz is only 6 inches in its longest direction.). If you want detailed instructions just email me and I'll forward you what I've sent to the other guy who asked. If there are more than 5 who care, I'll actually take pictures and put it on a web-page.

If you build quads and need a refelctor (the big metal piece behind them in the pictures) use a cd that is about 1" behind it. You can use that in conjunction with a satelite dish, and it's much better than the coffee can satelite feed that I've seen around :)

And if you are just crazy, you can build an antenna array like this with stacking : bigskyspaces.com

every time you double the number of antenna's you use, you get 3db more gain. 2=3db 4=6db 8=9db etc. also keep in mind that the antenna's in the wireless devices are about -9 db, so just about anything you do will make them better. I bet wrapping wire around it would improve it. It isn't even concievable that linksys even tried to make an antenna for the PCMCIA cards and the USB adapters. They are so terrible, that a spoon would probably have worked better. The WAP's on the other hand are good dipole antenna's. This makes the radiation pattern circle the antenna. If you aren't on the same level as the WAP, you'ld be better off pointing one antenna to the side. Of course I modified mine to be a quad, and my USB (only externally) so that I could get 75-85% signal strength through two floors (up to my bedroom).

It's definatly an addictive hobby.

Jean-Louis Naudin has successfully replicated on a small lab bench scale 3 types of interesting electric field based propulsion systems. The "Lifter", which IIRC is based on Thomas Townsend Brown's thrusters invented in the 1950s, has now been built by quite a large number of people and there's pictures of most of them. You can probably build one yourself if you have a high voltage power supply and are prepared to risk messing with potentially lethal voltages / currents. (no, I haven't tried it yet).

Note that JLN's site is an 'alternative science' site. There a quite a few /. readers who are closed-minded to say the least and will just scoff at it's contents. You know who you are. Leave the rest of us alone.

As for energy, that has been discussed many times before... take a look at this and this . Whether they will work in space is another matter ;-)

this is old news.
Check this one out.. this girl knows her stuff. She actually bothered to make it possible to connect any IDE device by buffering the 16-bit data path. CD-ROM on Apple ][ baby!

http://s.guillard.free.fr/

the full copy only really included Real Player, most of the other stuff (MP3 encoded for example) you could get of BeBits.

Or, you could wait a bit, and get OpenBeOS or BlueOS. The latter of which is based on Linux.

mlk

"Americans are broad-minded people. They'll accept the fact that a person can be an alcoholic, a dope fiend, a wife beater, and even a newspaperman, but if a man doesn't drive, there is something wrong with him."

-Art Buchwald

Read the whole essay

Why not? You can watch TV in text mode, you can play DVDs in text mode,
you can play Quake 1 in text mode. Quake II is the logical next step.

Or, as the author of ttyquake put it, "If you have to ask why, you're not a member of the intended audience."

And, for the record, the two main beos projects by lost souls are BlueOS and OpenBeOS.

Check out the lifter and JLN. Real live non-newtonian, reactionless drive
you can build out of an old monitor.

Think personal levitation. Yes, I have built one, and visited the company, and no it's not the ions. The future is very bright indeed, but only if people dig a little bit below the surface instead of posting crap from the likes of Time. I mean you people are supposed to be geeky right? When was the last time there was a science story on here that wasn't a press release? We are on the brink of the biggest revolution in all of human history. A revolution that will provide clean, limitless power to anyone who wants it. You can be sure
that the people who control power (literally) do NOT want to see this happen. This is the
main reason you wont see this in the media or in mainstream science. However, now it
appears that after years of supression and ridicule the tables are finally turning.

It's going to be an interesting ride.

People are writing 4k intros for linux, there are even some tools for doing just that. Also check this out, a Linux program just 45 bytes long, shorter then the ELF executable header :P.

Eye of the Beholder was a cheap ripoff of Dungeon Master.

interesting site about magnetism, FOund Here

• Spades

• Sosnoski

• Jeanpaul

maybe this won't use roman but arabic notation, like in this example...

This is the RC3, so it says on the page where I found it

two links!

I would say that if the machine-level hacker knows the CPU architecture and the application down to the specific instructions, it is very often that the hacker can beat the compiler. Take a look at this optimization of RC4 and tell me if you change your mind.

Try this for an example of how SVG could be used as a replacement.

http://nilo.stolte.free.fr/SVG.html#examples

Requires an SVG viewer.

I mourn for the impossibility of Ice Pirates. Alas, that marvelous dry universe of adventure is not ours.
--

Not quite related, but here's how to create a one-atmosphere plasmoid.

Its even complete with a horizontal seperator, little arrows for running apps, and a Mail Icon that shows how much unread mail you have.

A guy called Simon Morlat apparently hacked a VoIP solution for Linux together.

Some spoilage: LinPhone is a web-phone, (or Voice over IP software), running under Linux. It lets you phone to your friends using IP networks such as the internet...

It has the capacity to eventually work together with other VoIP software on other platforms (cause they're using a common protocol I guess).

http://members.theglobe.com/abracadab6/lotr2.mov

http://ere2.free.fr/lotr_trailer2.mov

http://scoobysnack5.tripod.com/mypersonalsite/lotr 2.mov

http://members.theglobe.com/rnst5964jgcf/lotr2.mov

In order to hook up CompactFlash to IDE, all you have to do is rearange the order of the wires in the IDE ribon cable. I assume that you could do it backwards too. You'll find instructions for IDE -> CF at http://wtarreau.free.fr/1u/v0-flash.html If you do it all backwards, you *might* be able to make it work.

--

• How wide their bandwidth is
• How many users they can handle
• How many simultaneous mySQL/PHP apps they can run

11 April 2001

In a recent event today, yet another site has been brought to it's knees by a /. DDoS attack. The current victim, a small site called: darkmazda.com, run by Christopher M. Park, who appears to be a vintage Nintendo game hobbyist. This site may still be available through Google's Cache.

Appearently, the /. DDoS attack is platform independent. It seems to attack sites without predjudice, but seems to be focused toward geeky content.

Other sites recelty attacked include: Spindletop LLC, a company, which was created to raise money for the Spindl3top non-profit, which plans on building high-end computers for charity; 1U Half Width Server Project, a site project that includes instructions on building a 1/2 width 1U rackmountable server.

Should Slashdot be held responsible for these attacks? Should they be made to pay for the bandwidth costs to these sites?


--
microsoft, it's what's for dinner

bq--3b7y4vyll6xi5x2rnrj7q.com

A complete mirror of the site, with all the images, is available at http://wtarreau.free.fr/1u/. Enjoy!

It is however, up at the moment, not sure if it will survive a slashdot attack but . . . here it is:

http://wtarreau.free.fr/1u/

"My opinion is that if their site can get /.ed so easily, I don't want to buy a server from them."

You might be on to something there, on the other hand they may have pre-determined their bandwidth by the fact that they are hosted on a free-provider.

Generally prodigy engineering students are flat broke.

Don't forget the POVLAB development effort, which is beginning to pick up the pace. POVLAB has been around for years as a modeller for POV-Ray, and is just now being rewritten in C++ and made cross-platform with wxWindows.

See the POVLAB development site for details and to find out if you would like to help.

I am new to programming, so no flames please. Can something like this be ported to Perl? (I am trying to learn it.)

Yes, this can be ported to perl. Anything in C can be written in perl (and vice versa).

C is weakly typed, so I'm not sure what you're getting at here... Strong typing is to save the programmer from himself. I personally do not enjoy programming in languages that remove C's power to make non-sensical casts.

So, I guess what I am really asking is: Is this kind of program only able to be written well in something like C++ or Java?

Absolutely not. This is just an algorithm for calculating Pi. C is nice because it's portable and fast. Check out a functional programming language like Haskell. Selecting a programming language for a particular task involves clearly stating your goals. If I wanted to confuse you, I'd write it in Malbolge or BrainF*ck. If I wanted to calcuate pi quickly (millions of digits), I might write it in C, but I'd also do my homework. If I wanted something from the command line, I'd use:

$perl -e 'for(0..9999){$i=$_*8;$p+=(16**-$_)*(4/($i+1)-2/($ i+4)-1/($i+5)-1/($i+6))}print$p'

It's really a matter of "what gets the job done."

(Besides that I have a feeling that using an object-oriented language (like Visual C++) would reduce the amount of code you would have to write (due to increased code re-use.))

Simple algorithms like this one are fairly atomic. You're foo class isn't going to help you here. You really aren't going to resuse this either. That's what M_PI is for =).

French site about case tuning: JackyPC.

• Dungeon Master Encyclopaedia (with pics from a fully 3d version of the game called DM Nexus, and a DM forum)
• Dungeon Master Web Lots of animated gifs from the game, including characters and monsters (as seen above).

>To put it another way: It's the page designer's fault for creating overly complex pages.
That's not so simple. Most of times, stupid HTML code is created by WYSIWYG editor, the worst of all being Word (go look at the source code of this example site, if you dare). For a truly better HTML, we need to force the include of a low-speed connection emulator in all HTML editor like Frontpage or Dreamweaver. It would be a very simple navigator, strictly conforming to the standard, and loading the page in memory at about 1.5 kilobyte per seconds. With sometimes random stalled waitings, and, once it's finished loading, it would also output a list of errors like those produced by the official validator. I think the world will be brighter with that.

For those of you able to read French, I wrote a year ago a Strict Code of Internet Ethic who ban unecessary use of images, cookies, applets, etc; and which insist on the necessity to conform to HTML standards. Yeah, except the title, it's in French, not in English.

You can not download StarOffice source. You can download the GPLed parts of the code (nearly everything, except for printer drivers), released under the name OpenOffice. In fact, those sources have allready been made RPMs out of by MandrakeSoft, some weeks ago!

As a mirror, we know that 7.2 is out since thursday and our local mirror was up and running before the week-end.

I have opened officially the directory yesterday.

The guys from Mandrake did it correctly and gave half a week to official mirrors to synchronize.

1. Linux is cool. IBM know it and works with it. BTW, IBM also worked in order to adapt their Intellistations to BeOS (see the result here).
   Conclusion, if it's good, IBM will work with it, however reluctant the "partner is". (In this case, Be wouldn't help IBM as they had too much to do with their own stuff, that's why IBM contacted distributors and bypassed Be Inc.)
2. They are known for their machines quality : I remember productive 80286 Xenix servers that still work perfectly along fabrication chains in factories.
3. They are also known for their developments: Compare the performances of the JDK1.2.2 that came with the Caldera OpenLinux2.4 and the one that was made by IBM.
4. IBM has patented loads of things. In fact, IIRC, they have an entry about this in the Guinness book of records. So, they are innovative (even if patents may be "stolen" - these are not my words - , all of these can't obviously have some irregular origin).
5. IBM doesn't focus on manufacturing products or computer. They are rather, IMHO, an R&D company. Which means that they are asked to develop solutions for a given problem ; hence the watch, hence the PC (The problem was : "Give me a quick and dirty computer to type some letters on"), hence Big crack, hence Kasparov defeat (Actually, this was a consequence of their researches in both AI and supercomputing), hence more advanced solutions...
6. IBM are known for projects which might not be paying before decades (e.g. 3D mollecular synthesis in some Swiss labs). So, who seriously think he will be here to collect the big bucks ?

From the page:

wmNetscapeKiller is a WindowMaker dockapp for killing Netscape when it freezes (so many times) !
Just one click on this dockapp : Netscape will be shut down and restart ! You can now (version 0.3) specify the program to kill and if you want to restart it or not.

I've wrotten an article critic about this.
No, this is not off-topic, this is just not in english.

The source code to be ported is in an archive format that isn't even available on the Macintosh... Gee thanks...

You can get Mac RAR tools here

I've found this site to be helpful. It's geared towards the PowerPC Linux distros, but should be applicable for almost anyone.

John

My own rant: Flash, images, Javascript, whatever are crap, but not intrinsically useless. Webmasters often use them needlessly, but it's good to have a browser capable of handling them if one day you need to. As IE5 can, most amateur webmaster will use flash, java and other crap if you need to browse their site, you'll get nothing of your surf if you stick to an imcompatible browser. Fortunately, we don't have to consult amateur site often, but it can happen. It's most a matter of web design than a matter of browser capacity (on a personnal side, I jokingly made up a Strict Code of Internet Ethics to which my home site will apply).
Oh, and html means HyperText anyway: text with hyperlinks and formatting. I don't have experienced gopher, but from what I've heard it lacks links and formatting.

Check out Free, they are operating on Linux, offer 50 Mb hosting with PHP+MySQL, you can connect to their news server from any other ISP with your username/password.

Sign up online, but they send you the login info in the snail mail (thank the spammers for having to do that ...).

I believe you can sign up completely online with Fnac.net, at least I did a while ago.

I waited long for someone to say this at last =)

Now that we all have the possibilities to create with our equipment, now that everyone can take part in a creation process, we could make realize the people who made the movie industry, the music industry that their scheme is starting to sound old.

Right now, I can tell you that 90% of all the music I listen to is produced by independant artists on the net, many of which came from the demoscene and tracking scene. (links)

The very fact that those scenes, and their audience exist proove the point that a society only following the big standards of life, of art is not our only future.

People organize in small groups of interests, in tribes, and even if the mass media still keep and probably will keep its power, it is now possible to consider other sources of music. This is true for music now. Let's just hope it will be true for movies in the future.

I'm always amazed by the warez-people. Many of them are conventionnal people who are warezing because they are desperate enough, and unable to get access, or search for other sources of art.