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Use The Heater, and a Few Other (Odd) Ideas by MBCook · 2001-12-15 12:43 · Score: 4, Insightful · on Home Server Rooms?

Why not run ducts behind all the computers and have those ducts be the intake from outside for the heater? That way, the air comes in cold, get's warmed up (so your heater doesn't have to do as much) and cools the computers/room (serving it's purpose), then it's business as usual.

Another suggestion is that when I lived in Salt Lake City our house had water heating. What if you ran pipes behind the computers with fins on the pipes (like a heatsink) then that water could go into the hot water heater. Once again, saving you some money.

Where is the room located physically? Don't forget that an underground external room (as opposed to a room in the middle of the house) will be cooler.

Being true geeks, you're probably not opposed to spending some moolah on this. What about doing something like this guy did? If you buried a few large tanks deep the ground deep so it's below the frost line, you'd get cold water for free. Then just hook all you're PCs into water cooling. Have them all draw from the same spot, and then all empty back in. That way you get free cooling and it'd be quiet. If you look back at my earlier suggestion involving the water heater, you'd be all set.

Re:Influence of solar activity by Anonymous Coward · 2001-12-07 06:08 · Score: 0 · on Global Warming Mostly Confirmed - On Mars

The report you cite seems to be highly questionable pseudoscience, IMHO. The author, a Phd in (he doesn't say which field) and member of the "Schroeter Institute for Research in Cycles of Solar Activity, Nova Scotia, Canada" (not a reputable institute -- it doesn't even have a website).

I've quoted some problematic statements:

"Those scientists who spread anxiety in the eighties.." [ad hominem],
"Precise forecasts that prove correct are a sharp criterion for efficient science. The protagonists of global warming remain empty-handed in this respect in spite of great material and personal expense." [false and unscientific]
"All these predictions have turned out to be untenable. It is accepted that global temperature has risen by 0.5 C in the last hundred years. Yet during the last fifty years the temperature has remained approximately at the same level, even though 70% of the anthropgenic carbon dioxide contribution was injected into the atmosphere during this time. From 1940 to 1970 the temperature fell, and according to satellitite data available since 1979, which are in good accord with balloon data [27], the trend in the lower troposphere has remained at -0.06 C per decade." [misrepresentation of the data, see here]

And it's conclusion is almost gibberish:
"If we bear in mind that the correct forecasts based on the semiquantitative model of solar-terrestrial relations presented here are thinkable only if the sun's varying activity is a dominant factor in climate change, it seems difficult to resist the insight that once again an artificially constructed homocentric position is beginning to rock. A general survey of the given results indicates that climate variations are governed by the sun, not mankind." [artificially constructed homocentric position? solar-terrestrial relations?]

Plus, the graph you cite has been deprecated; the authors of the 1991 study state in a new, revised 1999 report (see below) that solar variation cannot account for the warming trend observed during the 1990s. Solar variation accounts for 50% of the warming, at best, and there is clear evidence of an anthropogenic component.

From the relevant section of one Global Warming FAQ:

Is the recent warming caused by changes in solar activity?
There is no doubt that solar variability plays an important role in global climate change. Interest in the relationship between solar activity and the current global warming was sparked by a paper from the Danish Meteorological Institute, published in 1991. This found that there was a close correlation between a particular parameter of solar activity and surface temperatures, and it is discussed on this page from Stanford. More recently, however, the DMI has published an update of their work, in which they reveal that the increase in temperatures since 1990 no longer correlates with solar activity. They call it 'The fingerprint of the anthropogenic greenhouse effect'. Dr Keller of the Los Alamos National Laboratory has also researched this phenomenon, and he describes the relationship in this lecture he gave in 1998.
The detailed causes of the recent warming trend have been investigated by the UK Meteorological Office using climate models, and are presented here. They found that about half of the warming is caused by solar variability but that, in the second half of the century, these effects have been countered by sulphate emissions from volcanoes (which act to cool the earth). The overall effect of all these natural causes (sun and volcanoes combined) has been quite small. Similarly, two recent studies of ocean temperatures have found that the observed increase is best explained by the effect of greenhouse gases.

The current science seems to support the hypothesis that man-made emmissions of greenhouse gases pose a threat to the stability of the climate.

The question is "What can we do about it?" Clearly, dramatic reduction in fossil fuel usage is in order. The move to renewable solar, wind, hydro, and nuclear power, must be accelerated. Cleaner forms of transportation, such as hybrid-electric and fully-electric cars, must be promoted. Energy efficienct homes and appliances can be implemented. The list goes on.

Let's act now, while there is still time to affect the future.

Re:Influence of solar activity by Anonymous Coward · 2001-12-07 06:08 · Score: 0 · on Global Warming Mostly Confirmed - On Mars

The report you cite seems to be highly questionable pseudoscience, IMHO. The author, a Phd in (he doesn't say which field) and member of the "Schroeter Institute for Research in Cycles of Solar Activity, Nova Scotia, Canada" (not a reputable institute -- it doesn't even have a website).

I've quoted some problematic statements:

"Those scientists who spread anxiety in the eighties.." [ad hominem],
"Precise forecasts that prove correct are a sharp criterion for efficient science. The protagonists of global warming remain empty-handed in this respect in spite of great material and personal expense." [false and unscientific]
"All these predictions have turned out to be untenable. It is accepted that global temperature has risen by 0.5 C in the last hundred years. Yet during the last fifty years the temperature has remained approximately at the same level, even though 70% of the anthropgenic carbon dioxide contribution was injected into the atmosphere during this time. From 1940 to 1970 the temperature fell, and according to satellitite data available since 1979, which are in good accord with balloon data [27], the trend in the lower troposphere has remained at -0.06 C per decade." [misrepresentation of the data, see here]

And it's conclusion is almost gibberish:
"If we bear in mind that the correct forecasts based on the semiquantitative model of solar-terrestrial relations presented here are thinkable only if the sun's varying activity is a dominant factor in climate change, it seems difficult to resist the insight that once again an artificially constructed homocentric position is beginning to rock. A general survey of the given results indicates that climate variations are governed by the sun, not mankind." [artificially constructed homocentric position? solar-terrestrial relations?]

Plus, the graph you cite has been deprecated; the authors of the 1991 study state in a new, revised 1999 report (see below) that solar variation cannot account for the warming trend observed during the 1990s. Solar variation accounts for 50% of the warming, at best, and there is clear evidence of an anthropogenic component.

From the relevant section of one Global Warming FAQ:

Is the recent warming caused by changes in solar activity?
There is no doubt that solar variability plays an important role in global climate change. Interest in the relationship between solar activity and the current global warming was sparked by a paper from the Danish Meteorological Institute, published in 1991. This found that there was a close correlation between a particular parameter of solar activity and surface temperatures, and it is discussed on this page from Stanford. More recently, however, the DMI has published an update of their work, in which they reveal that the increase in temperatures since 1990 no longer correlates with solar activity. They call it 'The fingerprint of the anthropogenic greenhouse effect'. Dr Keller of the Los Alamos National Laboratory has also researched this phenomenon, and he describes the relationship in this lecture he gave in 1998.
The detailed causes of the recent warming trend have been investigated by the UK Meteorological Office using climate models, and are presented here. They found that about half of the warming is caused by solar variability but that, in the second half of the century, these effects have been countered by sulphate emissions from volcanoes (which act to cool the earth). The overall effect of all these natural causes (sun and volcanoes combined) has been quite small. Similarly, two recent studies of ocean temperatures have found that the observed increase is best explained by the effect of greenhouse gases.

The current science seems to support the hypothesis that man-made emmissions of greenhouse gases pose a threat to the stability of the climate.

The question is "What can we do about it?" Clearly, dramatic reduction in fossil fuel usage is in order. The move to renewable solar, wind, hydro, and nuclear power, must be accelerated. Cleaner forms of transportation, such as hybrid-electric and fully-electric cars, must be promoted. Energy efficienct homes and appliances can be implemented. The list goes on.

Let's act now, while there is still time to affect the future.

Re:Interesting, but there's an error... by Fjord · 2001-11-19 13:58 · Score: 3, Informative · on C# From a Java Developer's Perspective

This isn't right. C can do truely multidimensional arrays. If you say char[30][20] x it does one allocation of 600 contiguous bytes. When you use the array like x[10][10] it computes the full offset as in Pascal and BASIC, and then does a single pointer add. Here is an ok page that talks about C multidimensioned arrays.

But Java and C# don't actually let you have jagged multidimentional arrays like this. They have like you said in your first post, an array of pointers, which is valid in C. One wonders what the writer of the article thinks argv is (typed char*argv[])

ENDLESS issues... by Daniel+Rutter · 2001-11-14 04:18 · Score: 4, Interesting · on Would You Pay A Penny Per Page?

I suspect I'm not the only person who thought of this while reading that article (yes, I did read all of it, thanks for asking :-).

This idea's the R-pentomino of the micropayments world; it's possibly the simplest looking micropayments idea ever, on the face of it, but as soon as you let the thing run it explodes into a giant mess.

A few more questions for Marshall Brain to answer on v1.1 of this page:

Q: What if you live somewhere where a penny is enough to buy dinner?

Q: Are payments from people outside the USA to be made according to the exchange rate when the page was loaded, or the exchange rate when the user's Internet bill comes due at the end of the month?

Q: What about countries that refuse to ratify the international IP Trade Treaty that'll be needed to make this work? Here's a hint: China ain't gonna.

Q: If some countries refuse to pay, what's to stop ISPs in countries that do ratify the treaty from starting offshore data-haven proxies?

Q: What if you're someone who runs a proxy? What if your ISP does? What international organisation is going to force people to pay for pages that were never delivered from the server at the other end of the pipe, because they came from one of the numerous caches in between? Do the proxy owners get the money?

Q: And the flipside of that one - what if some webmaster somewhere insists that there are 250,000 pageloads in his server log from your IP, but you disagree?

Q: What about people who don't want users to have to pay to read their work? Will there be special HTML headers to specify free pages? What's to stop people making proxies that put those headers on everything that passes through, then?

I leave the next three billion giant show-stopping problems with this idea as an exercise for the reader. That seems fair enough to me, as Marshall Brain pretty much handwaved the whole implementation issue.

Plus, he's got some analogy problems. To quote the first page of the article:

"When you go to the book store, you never see free books. It is also very rare to find books containing advertising. Instead, people pay directly for the information that books contain because the information is valuable to them."

On the other hand, when you go to the library, you can read all of the books you like for free. And take 'em home, too. Who said anything about the Web being a book store?

And you know what? There are books containing advertising. They're called "magazines". I'm told that there are things called "newspapers", too. The cover prices of these publications generally make only a small contribution towards their bottom line; they run on ads.

I think you'll find that, commercially speaking, the ad-supported paper publications have proved to be a somewhat more vibrant market segment than the ad-free flavour of publishing.

Not that I think advertising is necessarily a good way to make the Web profitable. I just object to this strange assumption that loading a Web page is obviously an act for which you should pay. Even if the page turns out to be useless. Nobody makes me buy a book just because I picked it off the shelf and read the blurb on the back.

Oh, yeah. Books aren't priced by the page, either. Well, not unless you're one of those interior-decoration types who buys books of a certain colour by the yard.

Marshall Brain does great when he talks about refrigerators and rocket motors. But his site's called "How Stuff Works", not "Stuff I Think Might Perhaps Be Cool But Haven't Any Idea At All How It Might Work", and so I see no reason to cut the guy any slack on a sloppy job like this :-).

you by Anonymous Coward · 2001-11-07 11:34 · Score: 0 · on Text-to-Speech on a Low-Power Chip

are a moron

DN-Boy by PhilHibbs · 2001-11-06 04:20 · Score: 2 · on Laptop Data Recovery?

I've got one of these little beauties in my machine. A bay with a removable cartridge that holds the 2.5" drive, and a PCMCIA card and cable that connects to the same cartridge. The only snag is that the cartridge is powered from a PS2 keyboard wedge when external, and my Vaio C1 doesn't have a keyboard port!

Re:An oldie but goodie... by istartedi · 2001-10-31 07:17 · Score: 3, Interesting · on Slashdot Ghost Stories?

That reminds me of this.

Offtopic. by Anonymous Coward · 2001-10-23 22:16 · Score: 0 · on Can BeOs Live On As Open Source?

233 Pentium pro....

I didn't know that existed, I thought the fastest was a 200MHz. Sure you don't mean a Pentium MMX, those came as 233MHz.
A quick google search gave me this : 150MHz, 180MHz and 200MHz....no 233MHz, don't tell me you dared to overclock that baby! :-)

Network Notepad by ted_nugent · 2001-10-20 21:52 · Score: 1 · on Is There an Open Standard for Network Maps?

If you are in a Windows environment, this freeware interactive network mapping tool looks very promising.

Re:Bah, stegnography by Anonymous Coward · 2001-10-15 10:06 · Score: 0 · on First Steganographic Image Found In The Wild

Why don't they use hardly audible noises in an audio file that could be decoded into a message?

You mean like the Freemasons do?

sunset provisions?? by denshi · 2001-10-12 06:46 · Score: 5, Informative · on Senate Trashes Civil Liberties; House to Vote Today

Britian passed their own Anti-Terrorist legislation back in the 70's when there was a bombing a week (minimum) somewhere in Europe, and the IRA was really out of hand. They included time-limits (or 'sunset' clauses) as well. Of course, these have been extended more often than US copyrights. Check it out! Celebrating 29 years of "temporary" measures!!

We can expect precisely the same behavior over here in the States. Power needs to control. The government will never willingly return power to the populace -- such an act is simply not in its nature. It is only returned by massive, sustained acts of civil disobedience, for instance, in the legal viewpoint, the 60's were a reaction to the laws passed during the World Wars. It took an entire generation to restore some liberties lost during the previous decades of crisis. With this bill, we have just plotted a course for our children to follow.

Other posters rebutted you, but I should reiterate: civil liberties are in fact endowed, natural rights -- read the Declaration of Independence. Moreover, freedom and security are not polar opposities. It is largely because of our freedoms that America has developed into a vibrant, productive society capable of providing for everyone and thus removing the desperate incentives that drive terrorism. There are many places in the world far less free, with far less safety.

Oh, and I'm not worried about anthrax -- the infection rate is too low to be effective in the face of our fully mobilized medical resources. But there are other, simpler bateriums that can be spread in other fashions. My advice to you -- drink filtered water.

How IP ratings work by dingbat_hp · 2001-10-01 01:17 · Score: 5, Informative · on Psion Releases A Rugged, Water-Tight PDA

I'd be interested to see what an IP Rate of 100 (or zero, whichever is better, also assuming a 100 point scale) could handle.

IP ratings don't work quite like that. Rather than a 0..100 scale, they're actually a string concatenation of three 0+ scales. High numbers are better. First number is dust rating (0..6), second fluids (0..8), third mechanical impact (0..9). IP67 means "no ingress of dust", "short-term water immersion to 1m" and no description of mechanical impact strength.

There's a few on-line resources around with the full list.

Re:W's morally inconsistent position by Fishstick · 2001-08-25 06:04 · Score: 1 · on Stem Cell Problems Slow Research

>explaining the inconsistency in his moral position - money.

Now is that any way to characterize the leader of the free world, I ask you!?

Re:That's nothing... by Anonymous Coward · 2001-08-10 00:39 · Score: 0 · on Human Clock (Complete with Hands!)

Borrow this if you want to.

SAM MORTON RIDES AGAIN! by Medievalist · 2001-07-31 06:25 · Score: 3 · on New Clues About First Americans

I didn't see any mention of which graves were robbed to get all these skulls, but I have a suspicion....

In the early 1800s Samuel George Morton built a huge and famous collection of skulls. These skulls were garnered by his correspondents (Morton being an eminent naturalist of the day) from all over the world, but according to this site were mostly native american.
One of the previous posters was decrying the way some tribes object to the pillaging of their graveyards - in Morton's day, similar objections were made to the way the Indians resisted having their heads chopped off. Benighted savages, how dare they resist the progress of science!
A retired friend of mine was once the curator of the Morton skull collection (aka "the American Golgotha"). Originally housed at the Academy of Natural Sciences, it has since been moved to the University of Pennsylvania, where it still comprises over a thousand skulls despite an unknown amount of pilfering.
Everybody's got a theory of where the Amerinds came from; but Morton went a bit beyond that. He used his skulls to prove that middle-aged caucasian males (which, oddly enough, was a group containing Samuel Morton) were the pinnacle of evolution - the smartest, most bestest people of all!
The debunking of Morton's conclusions was completed by Stephen Gould, in his essay "The Mismeasure of Man". I highly recommend Gould's early works, incidentally, although his recent stuff is tedious.
Morton's infamously flawed racial ladder of intelligence, based on his measurements of humans skulls, were a part of the justification for Nazism and many other racist movements. Even today there are those who insist that measuring skulls can give meaningful insights to guide current events. I think the measurements, and especially the conclusions drawn from them, say more about the researchers than they do about the objects measured.
If you are really into the interpretation of dimensions of crania, you must visit the phrenology website.
--Charlie

Re:Pager forwarding by shyster · 2001-07-09 06:32 · Score: 2 · on Motorola Sues Over Pager Spam

Can anyone tell me what system resources are? I have a vauge idea that it has something to do with free RAM but the documentation for MS Resource Monitor never specifies exactly what it is...

Actually, it has nothing to do with free RAM. It's a combination of the GDI and User heaps, and System Resources is just the lower of the 2 (the Resource Monitor will show values of all 3, the Performance tab of the System Control Applet shows the lowest value of GDI and User as System Resources % free).

So, what's GDI and User resources, you ask? Here's a brief rundown.

The GDI (graphical device interface) heap is basically a space in memory to be used for graphic elements (cursors, bitmaps, icons, etc). The User heap is for window placement, keybd and mouse interactions, etc. Check references for more info, especially the Technet article here (it's about Win 3.x, but applies equally, except for the space limitations).

The GDI and User heaps are left overs for backward compatibility with Win 3.x, which is why the NT line doesn't have to deal with this crap. Win9x, however, did increase the sizes of the heaps to 32-bits, as opposed to 16-bit, and also increased the number of heaps. So, Win9x has 1 16-bit (64K) User heap and 1 64K GDI heap, and 2 32-bit (2MB) User heaps and 1 32-bit GDI heap. Win 3.0 had 2 16-bit heaps, Win 3.1 had 4 16-bit heaps, 3 User and 1 GDI).

And, of course, they also upped the limits on a few other things as well.

Just FYI, more RAM does not increase system resources. Only another OS (including NT/2000) will be able to do away with those limitations (or open-source code).

References: PCForrest, Adobe TechDoc, and there's a Technet article explaining it all as well, but I'll be damned if I can find it. You can try if you like.

Re: Correction by kelddath · 2001-06-19 17:06 · Score: 1 · on Experiment Shows Neutrinos Have Mass

It can't. It already is a white dwarf. Sirius itself isn't massive enough. The closest candidates for a supernova is probably Rasalgethi (Alpha Herculis) at about 380 light years distant.

For more info, see The Supernovae, Supernova Remnants and Young-Earth Creationism FAQ which covers this in some detail.

Disclaimer: I'm the author of said article

Supernova Info (Was Re:Great research) by kelddath · 2001-06-14 18:09 · Score: 1 · on Star In A Jar

For lots of info on Supernovae, see my Supernovae and Supernova Remnants FAQ here

Zeppelin Rules!!! by rogermicone · 2001-06-06 15:07 · Score: 1 · on Napster Going Legit

Otto

What we now need.. by scorcherer · 2001-05-28 05:13 · Score: 1 · on Microsoft Isn't Slowing Down

is the Perl-equipped Tux.

--

Re:FBI & Chechnya by 00001300 · 2001-04-24 06:28 · Score: 1 · on FBI Does A Cracker-Jack Job

Ektanoor,

I apologize for making you upset. I genuinely appreciate your comments.

Most of my info about the Chechans fighting for independence from Russia comes from www.qoqaz.net. This is hardly an un-biased source, but it provides me with the rebel perspective on the war. So I do not claim any firsthand experience with those people.

I do not make excuses for any crimes such as you describe. If a Chechan is found guilty of rape, I will demand just retribution. And I believe the Chechans who are represented by the qoqaz.net website would do the same, and actually carry it out. The justice that is presented on the website is what allows me to advertise the url.

In modern warfare, civilians are the biggest losers. For example, almost ten years after Desert Storm, the civilians in Iraq continue to suffer. The children are paying and will continue to pay for Saddams actions. Even the children of the US soldiers are not safe from the (controversial?) effects of depleted uranium.

Ektanoor, the Russians have a history of censorship and mis-information. If you can back up your claims of atrocities being commited and going unpunished by Chechan rebels, please cite your evidence and let the facts speak for themselves.

My evidence is available on www.qoqaz.net for public evaluation.

Peace.

Photo of Symbolics keyboard by Animats · 2001-04-06 13:18 · Score: 2 · on Hollywood and Hackers

Here's a photo of a Symbolics/MIT Space Cadet keyboard. Note the shift keys: Symbol, Shift, Hyper, Super, Meta, and Control.. They could all be used on a single character if you had enough fingers. Or you could use the Mode Lock button to lock in a combination of shift keys. Check it out.

EMACS fully supported this keyboard.

Another bad idea from the history of computing.

Re:Err, does that mean... by Guy+Harris · 2001-03-26 09:06 · Score: 4 · on FreeBSD an officially supported GNOME platform

For instance, Windows VMWare under Wine?

No, that's not good enough - Wine runs native on FreeBSD.

You want to run Linux VMware on the FreeBSD running on VirtualPC, and then run NT on VMware.

Then you can run Hercules on NT (yes, it runs on Linux as well, so you could run Linux on VMware instead)...

...and boot the S/390 version of Linux on that.

No, wait, you do want to run Linux on VMware. Then you'd run the NT version of Hercules under Wine....

Re:Sweeeet. by King_of_Plow · 2001-03-25 07:57 · Score: 1 · on Michael Abrash's Black Book For Download

You can find the Midpoint algorithm, a fast variant of Bresenham's algorithm here.
--
"Chiswick! Fresh horses!"

Neutrinos are detected all the time. by kelddath · 2001-03-21 18:36 · Score: 1 · on Polar Detector Spots Neutrinos

Neutrinos are detected all the time in various huge baths of water and cleraning fluid located in various places around the world (deep underground). Apart from the Sun, we've also detected Neutrinos from Supernova 1987A. See this link for some brief details (disclaimer: I'm the author). Best Regards, Dave

Re:You people are all dim by Aztech · 2001-03-11 17:37 · Score: 1 · on Why Offshore Napster Won't Work

Yeah... it was outside out the territorial waters, however the platform actually belong to the British Ministry Of Defence, so it was property of the British Government... and they could argue that it still is, since they have never formally relinquished sovereignty.

Just because somebody came along and said "I declare this independent" is not enough, try doing that in the middle of WestMinster, you wont be acknowledged by many people.

Of course, this is all arbitrary anyway, they could just pressure the ISP to stop providing the land microwave/satellite/radio/fibre link.

If they really wanted to go to town, they could prevent HeavenCo from trading anywhere in the western world if they proved they're an accessory to organised crime, copyright infringement etc. Let's admit it, there's no other reason why HeavenCo exists, the free speech argument seems pretty fickle, since you would be protected in the US or any half decent country anyway.

I think the owners of HeavenCo live in the US, the government could also pressure them for running illicit businesses.

At the moment, nobody appears to be bothered to Sealand, however I'm sure many governments are looking into how do deal with this 'problem' behind the scenes, at a recent G8 summit last year there was an item on the agenda on how to tackle international 'data heavens'.

I'm sure the NSA guys at Menwith Hill in Yorkshire (England) are very interested in HeavenCo's com links, what's the point of having a data heaven if all the information is being also feed straight into an intelligence agency? Fair enough they're using an encrypted link, however I wouldn't like to pit a puny 256K link against the powers that be, whatever strength of crypto being used.

The agencies would actually be pleased about this because they know the data going over the line has a good chance of being illicit, however say the same data was travelling over a standard US-UK backbone, it would basically be undetectable on the public net because of the sheer amount of traffic.

Infact just by using the HeavenCo service you're slapping a massive "look at me" label on your back... and as the crypto article pointed out yesterday, criminals just want to blend into the crowd, having your data pass through to an offshore server really makes you stand out from the either.

I wonder how HeavenCo processes its money? If money is basically being laundered into your account from some dodgy business outfit, that also raises some eyebrows.

Well, good luck to them, but I really don't fancy their chances, stuff like this has been around for years, however none of them have managed to escape the grasp of government control. And with SeaLand just being a stones throw off the English coast, I really don't like their chances.

Re:Sorry... by p3d0 · 2001-03-05 03:26 · Score: 1 · on Linux On Windows - The Thin End Of The Wedge?

Oh man, the shockwave movie is a riot.
--
Patrick Doyle

All links gone? I don't think so! by PhilHibbs · 2001-02-22 22:33 · Score: 2 · on USA Gov. Brief in MPAA vs. 2600 case Online

Mine hasn't, anyway.

Someone mentor me by buggy_throwback · 2001-02-21 22:56 · Score: 1 · on Making Software Suck Less, Pt. II

Will someone mentor me on using OpenGL which I only started recently, I am on a Maths degree, I live in the uk and Im willing to do it by e-mail.

Mail me

Re:This suspiciously sounds like an urban legend by SoulForSale · 2001-02-05 23:29 · Score: 1 · on Canadians Hang Bug Off Golden Gate

I also thought this to be an actual HUT student prank from the 50's, but a web search gave no references, and neither does Ossi Törrönen mention it in his definitive book on HUT pranks (in Finnish) .

In fact, Abbie Hoffman himself takes credit for a suspiciously similar prank (search for "bench" on the page) .

Word-of-mouth can't be trusted. The classic pranks of which I had heard from fellow HUT students differ slightly from their actual documented counterparts. While reading Törrönen's book, I found out that the classic "weld a tram to its rails" done by the Chalmers (Sweden) students was not, in fact, done while the tram was taking passengers at a tram stop, but at night at the depot. And the Paavo Nurmi prank mentioned above, a great media scandal of its time (Paavo Nurmi was a source of animosity between Finland and Sweden) was actually executed by a hired diver, not the HUT Diving Club.

So these things seem to get embellishments over time, just like good jokes that change form over the years.

I'm really sorry to conclude (though hoping for evidence to the contrary) that the park bench prank was not done by HUT students. Too bad, that was my all-time favorite, and fit well with my idea of Finland in the 50's. The police school students and the HUT students had a friendly one-upmanship going on, and the HUT pranksters habitually asked for police permission for their stunts (usually getting it).

Re:Or you could use... by davidgentle · 2001-02-05 14:23 · Score: 1 · on Cross The Atlantic Ocean In 3 Days - By Ship

and here's a better explanation of what an ekranoplan is.

Disch is an extraordinary intellectual... by Caffeinated · 2001-02-01 23:28 · Score: 1 · on The Dreams Our Stuff Is Made Of

although I actually prefer his "horror" novels (the supernatural Minnesota books) over his science fiction novels. His sci-fi always seemed a little drab to me, but when his books are ground in a contemporary setting, everything seems much more live and extraordinary.

This is a link to a very comprehensive Disch site, and here is one to Amnesia, an Infocom-style text adventure that he wrote back in the mid-'80s (and cites in Dreams).

- - - - -

Football scarves by Chuck+Flynn · 2001-01-05 15:00 · Score: 3 · on Piezoelectric Generators

A football scarf is a long (5-9ft) knitted scarf displaying the names of footballers (soccer-club players). They look like this. They're popular among football (soccer) fans in cold European climates: they let you root for the home club without having to take off your warm coat.

Re:How does the community work on these machines? by jochen · 2001-01-04 05:05 · Score: 1 · on Million Dollar Reviews: Sun E10K/4500/450 Servers

http://www.linas.org/linux/i370.html has some details about the beginning of the S/390 port. The port can even be run on the Hercules 370/390 simulator, although it might run a bit slow ;-).

Also, the S/390 code is only really useful with binary-only drivers for lcs (3172, old OSA) and qdio (GB OSA). Until these drivers are available in full source, i wouldn't call the port complete ;-)

--jochen

Re:another trend by tesserae · 2000-12-17 06:11 · Score: 2 · on Jupiter Moon Ganymede May Have An Ocean

Go tell that to Chandra Wickramasinghe and Fred Hoyle. Or to the Welsh scientists who've reported discovery of an unknown bacterium they suspect came from a comet.

Not that these folks are necessarily right, but the topic has a long and detailed history with exobiologists, many of whom do consider it possible, if not likely.

Just because your imagination doesn't stretch that far, doesn't mean it's not possible. Maybe college will open your eyes a little, huh? (When you get there.)

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ICANN fuck up the worlds DNS system. by Moderation+abuser · 2000-11-27 20:13 · Score: 2 · on Will .coop Be Regulated Better Than .com Et Al?

Yup. ICANN.

Fighting spammers using spamido techniques. by Colin+Smith · 2000-11-23 16:21 · Score: 1 · on Spambot Poisoner

Sugarplum is an interesting idea but a better one is to use the spammers techniques against them. Turn their strengths into weaknesses.

A spammer looks for email addresses, and sugarplum goes some way to taking advantage of that fact by giving them crap addresses. Unfortunately it's fairly simple to check the validity of the domains and accounts.

A better solution is to give spammers valid email addresses which are aliased to a spamtrap account; This is a system account who's sole job is to receive spam. You then know that anyone who sends mail to this account is a spammer.

You now have information about who the spammers are and can use this information to block spam from real accounts.

This is all described on the Spamido web page along with some procmail recipes which can be used to implement it.

ICANN are all idiots. by Colin+Smith · 2000-11-16 20:23 · Score: 1 · on ICANN Selects New Top Level Domains

Have a look at
http://www.yelm.freeserve.co.uk/dns/ to see what I mean.

I mean FFS, .aero just for the travel industry? How trivially moronic. These TLD are little more than ego masturbation. They are not going to do anything to sort out the utter fucking chaos which has ensued in .com, .net and .org.

Not likely a great idea by Sara+Chan · 2000-11-15 02:51 · Score: 2 · on WHO Bid To Regulate Health Sites

In the early 1980s, I lived in a small town in Canada (Waterloo). There was a referendum then about whether or not to have fluoride in the drinking water. The "pro" side was strongly backed by the WHO.

The "con" side was led by a fellow student. The student just kept repeating the same thing: "look at the evidence, then make up your own mind." I didn't take his advice. Instead, I assumed that if the WHO was advocating fluoridation so strongly, then it must be good. The majority of people seem to have thought the same: the "pro" side won the referendum.

In the last few years the official story on fluoridation has changed. Fluoridation might be far more dangerous than was supposed at the time of the referendum. Children's toothpaste is now with very low--or no--fluoride, for that reason. The safety level for adults is not really known. In fact, at the time of the referendum, little was actually known about fluoride safety levels. Yet the WHO claimed that its proposed level of fluoridation was certainly safe for everyone.

There is a good "con" site at http://www.npwa.freeserve.co.uk/. This site is an important part of the campaign that has kept Britain 90% fluoridation-free.

I don't really know for sure, but I suspect that if the same situation existed today, the WHO would prevent a "con" website from going up under .health.

The WHO can make mistakes, there is lots of internal politics, and there is a great deal of conservatism in what is called "medical science". The WHO will face up to none of that on their own.

Another good example is with acupuncture. It is only in the last few years that proper experiments have been done, showing that stimulation of acupuncture points affects related areas of the brain. For example, stimulating the acupuncture point associated with hearing affects the part of the brain associated with hearing. And stimulating nearby skin has no effect. (There is an excellent summary article in The Economist here and another good summary from Britannica here ). Again, although the WHO might accept such sites now, they would likely not have done so ten or more years ago.

If the WHO really wants to encourage health, how about a special seal/label/badge that could be put on websites: "This cite certified by the World Health Organisation"? Such a seal would have many advantages, and avoid the main disadvantages, of a regulated .health TLD.

Compressed French, Cars, and Time by fm6 · 2000-10-25 01:09 · Score: 2 · on Air-Powered Cars

What is it with the French and compressed air? There's the Parisian Pneumatic Mail. There's the Pneumatic Caisson. They used to have Trains driven by compressed air. The SCUBA regulator, which keeps a diver's lungs from imploding, was invented in France. They used to use compressed air as a motive power in factories....

To those concerned about people driving around with big tanks of compressed gas: people already do. A lot of vehicles (mostly small trucks and buses, but also some cars) are power by compressed natural gas -- which is, of course, pretty dangerous even when its not compressed.

(Someone once showed me a way to take out a whole city using this technology. I hope there was a flaw in his scheme.)

I have to mention Stirling's Draka Stories. Despite its appallingly revisionist social philosophy ("Slaveholders are people too!"), this is worth reading for its speculation as to how the industrial revolution might have occurred slightly earlier than in our timeline. One of the factors is the development of pneumatic power. Stirling envisions cities with compressed air mains, much like our gas and electric mains.

__________

Armageddon and Fiction by fm6 · 2000-10-16 06:20 · Score: 4 · on 20 Ways The World Could End

Since we're all SF fans here (I hope!), an obvious game to play is to list all the good stuff that falls into the various categories. I'll start. I've mostly stayed away from mass-market crap (I'm sure the rest of you can fill in the blanks) and stuff that really more fantasy than SF (The Stand).

6 Reversal of Earth's magnetic field

Poul Anderson wrote a story on this theme. The name escapes me.

8 Global epidemics

The novel Earth Abides and the BBC TV series Survivors (no cash prizes).

9 Global warming

Everything recent by Bruce Sterling, but especially Heavy Weather

10 Ecosystem collapse

A real popular category: Brunner's The Sheep Look Up, Wylie's The End of the Dream, and Streiber & Kunetka's Nature's End (not reflective of Streiber's recent UFO obsessions). There are many others, of course -- most of them pretty bad.

I'm fond of Spinrad's Riding the Torch, although this is more about the kind of humanity that ecodisaster might produce, not about the disaster itself.

11 Biotech disaster

The Death of Grass falls into this category, even though the technology Christopher warns about (traditional agriculture! it seems that most of our food crops are related to ordinary grass, and thus subject to the same diseases) is pretty primitive.

13 Nanotechnology disaster

A secondary theme in Stephenson's The Crystal Age.

15 Global war

I'm tempted to say that this theme died with the Cold War. But at least one writer (Eric Harry) seems to be making a living off the idea that It Could Still Happen. And of course, all the talentless technothriller authors manage to find minor countries (Argentina will rise again!) capable of setting off the Holocaust.

If there was ever a movie for Slashdotters, it's Doctor Strangelove. ("You can't condemn a system because of one little error!") The interesting thing about this movie is that it started out as an adaptation of a serious technothriller, Red Alert. But Kubrick found that he couldn't write about Armageddon without making jokes!

The movie Fail-Safe is worth mentioning, mainly because it's about a nuclear near-war triggered by technological failure. A good movie, but unfortunately based on a very bad book that happened to be a conspicuous rip-off of Red Alert. So Kubrick's lawyers kept it from getting a proper release.

16 Robots take over

David Brin has done some good stuff on this theme (an author I used to enjoy, before I realized that everything he writes is a sort of novelized flame war). Gregory Benford's Galatic Center series has some good points, but is hampered by an absence of focus -- and Benford's regretable tendency to read like a creative writing assignment.

It's interesting that the doyen of Robot SF never developed this theme. But maybe not suprising -- Asimov never really developed any serious understanding of computing, cypernetics, or robotics. His robot stories are really a combination of old-fashioned handwaving (can "don't kill people" really be made into a mathematical principle?) and social comentary (notice the stories where robots are addressed as "boy"!).

18 Alien invasion

Certainly more crap in this category than any other. V and Independence Day tell us that aliens will invade us to steal resources like minerals and water -- things they can obtain from solar and planetary rings and halos with much less trouble. Fortunately, Mars is uninhabited -- imagine the lawsuits if it weren't!

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Re:Pocket Quicken and others by beagle · 2000-10-15 20:08 · Score: 1 · on What Are Your Ten Best Palm Apps?

These are in no particular order, and many are repeats from earlier in the discussion. I went through much of Palmgear when I first got my Visor Deluxe and thought the enclosed list of companies made some pretty cool products.

Save your money !Was:What? by Bender_ · 2000-10-05 19:14 · Score: 2 · on Timex Sinclair ZX81 Back On the Market

Save your money, build one from off the shelf components:

http://www.home-micros.fre ese rve.co.uk/zx80/zx80.html

Details for building a ZX80/ZX81 from scratch by Steve+Smithies · 2000-10-05 10:43 · Score: 5 · on Timex Sinclair ZX81 Back On the Market

Heres a link to a page with details for building your own ZX80/ZX81 from scratch:
http://www.home-micros.freeserve.co.uk/zx80/zx80.h tml

Antikythera Device by Speare · 2000-10-05 09:49 · Score: 3 · on Slashback: Invitation, MIR, History

A designer in the UK makes reproductions of orreries and other devices, as well as this working replica of the Antikythera Device.

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

An orrery is a model of the solar system, and his prices range from affordable to... dare I say it... astronomical. Beautiful pieces.

A photo of the original lumps of sea-bed rock, with the bronze Antikythera device embedded, available through a link or two.

Re:My only prob with BattleBots by kyz · 2000-09-19 22:03 · Score: 1 · on Linux Powered Robots

They show Robot Wars in the US on some PBS stations. I've caught a couple of the shows and it's fun. The announcer is somewhat annoying as his excitement level is higher than the action usually warrants. But there is a soccer (football for some of you) competition using robots rather than RC that is really pretty amazing to watch.

Yep, the commentator picked the wrong week to quit sniffin' glue, but quite a few of the battles are genuinely edge-of-the-seat stuff, particularly ones with the devastatingly well engineered robots from series 3, like Razer, Hypnodisc or chaos2.

I can remember being goggle-eyed with wonder when the original Cassius flipped itself several feet into the air and back onto its wheels. Up until then, most of the effective robots were wedges with wheels, and if you were flipped over, you had lost. All hail Rex Garrod, gentlemanly master robot builder!

Re:Not yet... by Anonymous Coward · 2000-08-30 00:26 · Score: 3 · on More Threats From The MPAA

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