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Obligatory Blackadder quote:

Mary: Well, he pooh-poohed the captain here and said that he'd never find the spy.

Melchett: Is this true, Blackadder? Did Captain Darling pooh-pooh you?

Edmund: Well, perhaps a little.

Melchett: Well then, damn it all, how much more evidence do you need? The pooh-poohing alone is a court-martial offence!

Edmund: I can assure you, sir, that the pooh-poohing was purely circumstantial.

Melchett: Well, I hope so, Blackadder. You know, if there's one thing I've learned from being in the army, it's never ignore a pooh-pooh. I knew a major: got pooh-poohed; made the mistake of ignoring the pooh-pooh -- he pooh-poohed it. Fatal error, because it turned out all along that the soldier who pooh-poohed him had been pooh-poohing a lot of other officers, who pooh-poohed their pooh-poohs. In the end, we had to disband the regiment -- morale totally destroyed ... by pooh-pooh!

Source

There was one language missing on the list: C+-. This is /. curriculum, so go get some some info about it. A slightly different explanation of it also exists.

Where I lived, a return to the long-term global average temperature (about 5C warmer than now) would be great. It might turn North Africa into a greenbelt again, too, just like it used to be. That would really help with the famines there! I know change is rough on everyone, but the poor dirt farmers would be a lot better off with an extra growing season. I really think that global warming is just too good to be true.

How much CO2 did Mt. St. Helens vent last eruption? How does that compare to the CO2 from power generation? This link claims that human CO2 inputs are at least an order of magnitude smaller than the natural output of CO2, and that that tips the balance towards increasing CO2 levels.

I really don't believe that idea, but just in case there is something to it, I say: go burn something. I'm sick of shivering!

Figures, you're a Sony user....
Read this.

http://www.dynopower.freeserve.co.uk/homepages/new chair.htm

Towing a Smart *behind* an SUV (or at least, a mobile home) is very common.

You can't unfortunately tow one with its wheels on the ground because you'll knacker the Smart's gearbox, but you can buy some very neat custom trailers which carry the Smart and hook onto the back of your mobile home.

See for instance, http://www.sailsussex.freeserve.co.uk/

John
(Got a Smart Pure Cabriolet and loving it.)

Or possibly a "trek." I've also heard "snit."

This one is fun, a joxquiz.

Or perhaps we should just call ourselves "a slashdot of nerds."

At one stage they even had a software download service for the BBC micro:
http://teletext.mb21.co.uk/gallery/ceefax/telesoft ware/index.shtml
http://myweb.tiscali.co.uk/themicrouser/issues/05- 03/telesoftware.htm
http://www.pembers.freeserve.co.uk/Teletext/Teleso ftware.html
Who needs Tucows or Sourceforge when there's Ceefax?!

One thing that I haven't seen mentioned is that Ceefax at one time was used to distribute computer software, as a kind of poor-man's Internet/BBS (download only). The primary use was to freely distribute software associated with the educational programs on the BBC to schools around the country.

A Teletext adapter was available for the BBC micro computer (Acorn) that would allow software to be downloaded from the Ceefax service. The concept was called Telesoftware, although the inherent limitations of teletext meant that it never really caught on.

and most pages used ZX81-style graphics (huge "pixels" :-) which reduced the content possibilities even more. Oh, it was free too :-)

It always amazed me to see how much they could do with those glyph blocks. Maps of the UK, Europe, the world for weather, traffic and airport news, even Snoopy. Undoubtably,ASCII art at it's finest. And they could manage to compress entire news stories into 400 characters or less, while still maintaining the reading level.

Confusingly, Teletext (with a capital 'T') is a commercial teletext service which runs on the non-BBC channels - this is the one with all the adverts.

Teletext (with the 'T') was only really notable for Digitiser, anyway. :-)

you mean it had one of these in it.

I still use Ceefax a lot, especially as a news source and for sports scores.

anyone remember the computer game page on channel 4 teletext called digitiser? That was some weird stuff..

http://www.lynn3686.freeserve.co.uk/digitiser.html
http://www.mrbiffo.com/biffodigitiser.htm

'The Man' and his column and all that 'press reveal' only to uncover a weird swan or something with flashing red eyes.

I always wondered who was paying the wages of those crazy guys

lp0 on fire

Not a typewriter

?

Not to mention the catch-all that I see from a lot of programs when anything at all goes slightly differently that the way the developer expected:

Segmentation violation (core dumped)

(Technically, it's the shell that prints that, not the program.)

On the flip side, when I worked at HP supporting HP-UX, I once saw a particular kernel error message. It was four lines long, and said very clearly, "so-and-so error has occurred. You probably need to increase the such-and-such parameter. You can do this by..."

I tracked down the guy that committed that message and promised to buy him a case of beer if he was ever in town.

That's missing the point. If I have a C/C++ routine taking two pointer dummy arguments of the same type, then there is no way of guaranteeing that the pointers won't be aliased

Sure there is. C99 specifies __restrict__ and __restrict for just this case.

You simply do not know what you are talking about. The keyword "restrict" in C99 makes a recommendation or statement, if you will, to the compiler that it can safely perform an optimization because there isn't pointer aliasing in the function call. It does not *guarantee* that that is the case. It simply makes a recommendation, which could be wrong.

See http://www.cbau.freeserve.co.uk/Compiler/RestrictP ointers.html for more details.

Searching Google Images, I found this photo of the wreck:

http://www.gnometech.freeserve.co.uk/html/montgome ry.html

Not the greatest in quality (taken in 1990), but still, it's nice to see. The BBC article should have included a photo of it. Grrr!

The last image on this page http://www.tuesdaynightclub.co.uk/Tour_01/Medplus2 .html
shows what can be seen above water in context, including the proximity to the shipping channel.
A closer image can be found here http://www.gnometech.freeserve.co.uk/html/montgome ry.html
The top image says 'present' but lines etc. are still in place so I think it was taken some time ago http://www.ronangel.demon.co.uk/
A map showing the location http://www.submerged.co.uk/monty%205%20big.jpg
How the wreck lies http://www.submerged.co.uk/monty%204%20big.jpg

You have to boost another car and get the wires mixed up?
We shouldn't have to. There are ways to keep your battery charged when your car is off. Heres one way to do it. For those with disabilities (including incompetence), there is AAA roadside assistance.

Some guy like me comes along with a localized EMP generator?
Probably die. Pacemaker.

Even worse in my eyes is that the guy has invented a really useful mobile transporter i.e. the iBOT wheelchair and all the hype still goes to the Segway.

Starts with an "i" and contains "BOT" - it rocks.

Would Every Sperm Is Sacred from Monty Python's "The Meaning of Life" tie in to that thought?

Some of these look real enough. Not sure if it's on this site, but one account I read even used a couple of contacts to photograph the scammer waiting at an airport in Dubai, while the mark pretended to be stuck in customs with the cash.

Next thing you know people will be crying baby-killer if a man masterbates or uses a condom.

Game Boy Kite Aerial Photography

I cut down trees. I skip and jump.
I like to press wild flowers.
I put on women's clothing
And hang around in bars.

Descent by Interplay made people seasick.

Why would you ever be hired with that attitude? The fact is, all the IE moaning is a BIG MYTH.

While I agree with you that one has to make pages work with IE; allow me to say that you are talking out of your ass.

My sites always have the proper DOCTYPE, they have to in order to validate (I validate all pages prior to posting). Sometimes _having_ a doctype makes IE show new bugs.

Frankly, unless you're building some fancy site with the absolute latest CSS and Javascript features, IE will render your page *just fine*.

Your sites are obviously _very_ basic with minimal design. The moment you pass into medium complexity you start running into problems. I don't use any Javascript.

Yet, why exactly do you need to be using 32-bit images on your page? It's quite easy (and beneficial for download speeds) to get by with 8-bit images.

We need 32 bit images in order to have variable alpha. If you don't have variable alpha, then you can't have any image without including the background it's going to be over.

Including the background in your image completely negates the advantage of declaring colors in the CSS. Normally I could change the background of my site by changing one line, now I have to change all images as well.

There's other reasons why you might want a variable alpha, say to have transparent graphics or windows (the navigation on the left). Which are not heavy as the image is just 2 x 2 pixels and weighs in at a hundred bytes or so. In fact there are tons of creative uses that people haven't even thought of.

and tell me why they play such an integral part of your development process that you cannot find a way around them.

You're missing the point entirely. The idea is to allow the designer do her thing (so I can get a beautiful unique website) and then translate that to CSS, compromising wherever needed; not just half-assedly add some design to a text document.

However, when one tries to do anything remotely interesting, Explorer completely dies on you.

The best solution I found so far is using IE conditionals and serving IE a different and sometimes strange CSS file. In the end I usually figure it out reasonably, but it takes ridiculous amounts of effort and the site is never as good as it's Safari/ Mozilla /Opera counterpart.

If you want an example you can look at my current site (I linked it above too), I've only starting the IE fixing, you can see the ugly IE file with filters: and other weird junk so that PNGs show up with alpha: here. So far it's taking a serious effort and even when finished won't look as well anyway. Look at it under both IE and then Firefox.

Right, altogether now!

IANAGeoscientist so I can't rightly scoff these theories down, though the writing on the various sites ranges from reasonably scientific to wide eyed, and their arguments seem occasionally spurious or even dopey (like forgetting that there's more than one way to get a sedimentary rock). I just keep remembering how the people who preceeded Wegener with ideas of plate techtonics were total kooks, and Wegener was ridiculed by many until decades after his death and the mid-oceanic ridges were totally obvious.

The accretion of mass from space debris would need some definitive answers about how much is actually falling. One mainstream source suggested 40million kilos anually, which isn't much (though would add up over 200million years, to 8,000,000,000,000,000 kilos).

I'm not convinced, but it is interesting.

I find that a whole lot more believeable.
16oz equates to about 450grams. if it was 16 grams then it would be made like This at the heaviest!

I'm suprised that that typo hasn't been picked up, but i guess everyone here is either
1)american and knows only pounds ounces and miles
2)stunned at the "cool, star trek really can come true!!!!" factor.

*hopes that not too much karma has been burnt*

Israel, unlike its arab dictator neighbors, allows for freedom of speech, freedom of expression, of religion, etc...


Yep, just ask Mr. Vanunu, eh?

...or the Mossad-educated "interrogators" assigned to Abu Ghraib and the JIDC in Baghdad during the June '03 to January '04 time-frame?

...or shall we discuss the past of your present Prime Minister's "indirect responsibility", or the attack by Israeli warplanes and motor-torpedo boats on the USS LIBERTY (GTR-5) a ship of an erstwhile ally, which found out about Israeli nuclear secrets in international waters and was attacked?

...or shall we discuss what should be even more painful facts to Israeli citizens, such as the use of Sarin and other nerve gasses against Palestinian citizens in what even Israelis term as "the Occupied Territories"?

Israel is a military-theocratic quasi-democracy with a LIMITED freedom of speech, religion and assembly, currently engaged in the military occupation of land that they seized and continue to illegally hold, thanks to their theocratic mythology and the terms of their pseudo-democracy, and supported by Zionists and Zionist Christians in the US, for their own reasons. Because of the support from the US propping up their economy and VERY favorable terms under the World Bank and IMF, they enjoy an almost European-level pseudo-capitalist oligarchy and are still quite Socialist in their benefits policies. I find it ironic that Israeli citizens have better health-care laws and rates, supported by my tax money, than my parents do.

Additionally, Israel is a country that violates the terms of EVERY no-proliferation treaty on the books today. The ONLY place there was WMD in the Middle East in Feb-Apr '03 was Israel...should I detail where they are? Iraq was "liberated" and put under an Israeli-style occupation by the US for Israeli, not US strategic interests, just as the original Desert Storm was fought for the same reasons. All the US is experieincing in Iraq today is a less-controlled, wider-range intifadah in a different country than The Occupied Territories.

http://www.vanunu.freeserve.co.uk/

I found a game called Gomoku that's supposed to be the "infinite board" but it looks like a whole bunch of sites just stole some dude's java applet because they all have the same 21x21 limitation and the same description. Get them here: windows app or java applet

The infinite board is insanely hard... at least without having read up on strategies before starting. Equus (mentioned in grandparent post) is most fun when played with another human. I found another version of the game here: http://www.rootaction.net/~tsunami/f-game.html which has a Human-vs-PC mode, but the AI is like playing a 5 year old. :P Better than nothing though, eh? ;)

The other one I linked to has a network-play option so you can start up a game through the internet and even have a game/chat server going. pretty crazy.

Not all movies are dependent solely on CG for their baddies and their special effects. Physical models can still look goddamn remarkable.

Whenever I need to put my email address somewhere public (i.e. mailing lists and websites) I make up a new email address of the form mailinglistname@myaccountname.freeserve.co.uk or websitename@myaccountname.freeserve.co.uk e.g. the email address I gave slashdot is slashdot.org@myaccountname.freeserve.co.uk

The good part: when I start getting spam to a particular address I just setup a filter that sends all mail to that address to /dev/null It also lets you know where your email address was harvested from. So when I get spam turning up on slashdot.org@myaccountname.freeserve.co.uk I know it was slashdot who sold my email address to the evil spammers ;-)

If I want to receive mail from slashdot again I just change my email on slashdot to slashdot.org2@myaccountname.freeserve.co.uk

Interestingly most of the spam I get comes in to the email address ebay.co.uk@myaccountname.freeserve.co.uk

This has worked very well for me for several years.

For anyone who's interested, Matthew Smith has a website here (although it hasn't been updated in years).

by British scientists!

Have a look Here, here and who could ever forget...Sheeeeeep Cuuuuull!!!!.

There are dozens of Cricket strategy games, including plenty of PBEM ones. Also, "fantasy cricket leagues" are quite popular.

Indeed there are. Here is a good place to start looking.

As for fantasy cricket, here are some links:
- http://www.fantasycricket.telegraph.co.uk/
- http://www.fiso.co.uk/cricket.htm
- http://www.cricketweb.net/fantasycricket/
- http://www.fantasycricketclub.com/
- http://www.ggiddings.freeserve.co.uk/fcm.htm
- http://www.cricketinc.com/
- http://www.dreamcricket.com/dreamcricket/home.asp

And there are many more

Does anyone else find having entire Cybercafes blacklisted by anti-spam filters a bit worrying?

I do a lot of travelling, and about a year ago, I noticed that in a lot of Cybercafes, when I tried to e-mail a particlar person, I got an automated response from their mail-server to say it had rejected the e-mail because it was spam. I usually use my Freeserve account (via a web-mail interface). I wondered how my e-mail address could have become blacklisted, and tried my Hotmail account which I hardly use (I only got one could use MSN messanger). The Hotmail e-mail got through (I got no automated rejection, and even a reply). This at first led me to the conclusion that my Freeserve e-mail address had been blacklisted. Later, I found that sometimes, e-mails from my Freeserve account would get through, and at other-times, they would be rejected.

Eventually, I figured out that it was the IP address of the place I was sending it from that triggered the spam-filter. This has lead me to two conclusions.

• E-mails sent from Hotmail accounts are immune to spam-filters, but not from Freeserve accounts.
• Just about half of the Cybercafes or Internet-Kiosks I have been to have been abused by spammers.

Do all spam-rejecting filters give out an automated rejection-reply? If not, then I won't know that my e-mail has been rejected by an anti-spam filter, and I won't try to mail it again from my Hotmail account or another place with Internet access.

Depending on your definition of "recently", which could be construed different ways considering that the subject at hand is hundreds if not thousands of years old, I would also include the Ranque-Hilsch Vortex Tube as a recent advancement. This simple device produces hot and cold air streams from a stream of compressed air with no electricity and *NO MOVING PARTS* (except those required to compress the air in the first place).

What about Dizzy? You can't get much stranger than a wizard-fighting hard-boiled egg.

If the item has been used by the individual before returning to the UK, it is considered "personal effects". More details can be found here

It's something I'm interested in. Especially since the Dell Dimension XPS isn't available in the UK.

People Who Should Be Shot Twice In The Back Of The Head
He's not on the list. I think his crimes against humanity are about the same as everybody elses'.

3DO did this, and I loved the idea. It was called the 3DO Blaster, and marketed by Creative.

Basically it was a 3DO (which, for you youngins, was a game system) on a card. It was a brilliant idea, but mostly was made possible by 3DO's creative 'hardware licensing' model. Manufacturers paid 3DO a fee, and they could make any console they wanted that played 3DO games.

The two problems that probably killed the 3DO Blaster were the fact that you could only use the 3DO blaster with Panasonic's cd-rom drive, and it came out almost precisely at the start of 3DO's decline.

An other international success story. These intrepid persons have been quitely working through the ARM tree of Linux to get a working kernel and PDA based on Psions abandoned product lines of PDAs.

" PsiLinux is a project to port the unix-like operating system Linux to a group of palmtops produced by Psion, and related machines such as the Geofox One. At present, working linux systems can be installed on any of the Series 5, Series 5MX, Series 5MX-Pro, Revo (Revo+, Mako) machines (NOT the Series 3). Linux on the Series 7/netBook is rudimentarily working."

IF Psion is looking at jumpstarting anything Linux they have a very sound basis to work from. If anything the should open or binary source the S5MX 's power code and other nice things like audio recording.
They had a strong following for their proprietary language OPL but burned most of those shops with the demise of the palmtop product line.

There were fantastic pieces of OPL software that I'd love to run under linux but can't such as Plan5 the only project management software useful for a PDA.

You mean something like the Barcode Battler?

Did the US never get to enjoy the Reliant Robin?

That reminds me of Dacia (Renault's attempt to bring decent cars to 'emerging markets'), and the failed Africar project of may years ago.

they stole my haiku
my moment of sartori
sold fake viagra