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I can't believe some of the stuff I'm reading from /.ers about how "trees aren't news for geeks". Come on!!! Trees are where books come from!!! Trees are exercises in fractal mathematics!!! Trees are how apes like us escaped extinction from feline and canine predators!!! Trees are just plain cool in several meanings of the word!!! And extinct trees are yet another arena to play Jurassic Park!!! Speaking of extinct trees (or those almost so), nothing can top the story of the American Chestnut ... from "chestnuts roasting on an open fire" fame. More details here. There is hope that one day these magnificent trees will be revived ...

I can't believe some of the stuff I'm reading from /.ers about how "trees aren't news for geeks". Come on!!! Trees are where books come from!!! Trees are exercises in fractal mathematics!!! Trees are how apes like us escaped extinction from feline and canine predators!!! Trees are just plain cool in several meanings of the word!!! And extinct trees are yet another arena to play Jurassic Park!!! Speaking of extinct trees (or those almost so), nothing can top the story of the American Chestnut ... from "chestnuts roasting on an open fire" fame. More details here. There is hope that one day these magnificent trees will be revived ...

Geos is a 16-bit, graphical operating system from Geoworks that is generally platform independent. The most common version runs on top of MS-DOS or compatible operating system such as PC DOS, DR-DOS, ROM-DOS, OS/2, or Win95/98, and provides a preemptive multitasking, multithreaded, object-oriented environment for almost any DOS-based computer. (Note though, that other versions of DOS such as FreeDOS, and Multiuser DOS or Concurrent DOS do not support Geos, though PTS-DOS apparently supports it.) For more modern versions of Geos, an 80286 based computer with at least 2 Megabytes of memory is strongly recommended. All versions provide built-in memory management, virtual (disk) memory, a single imaging model, outline font technology, automatic scrolling and scaling, complex graphics rendering, and a flexible, scaleable GUI. Version 3.x is the current version of Geos, with 3.0 currently found on the Nokia 9000/9000i/9110 Communicator, Brother GeoBook, NewDeal Office/SchoolSuite/WebSuite Release 3, and 3.1 for the GlobalPC from MyTurn.com (a company that manufactures inexpensive PC's), and the GreenPC from NewDeal. (For the rest of this document, I shall use "NewDeal" to refer to Office, SchoolSuite, and WebSuite.)

Geos is also defined by the platform that it is running on. Currently it runs on the Apple II, Commodore 64/128, IBM PC compatible, Hewlett Packard OmniGo 100 and 120, several Brother products, Canon StarWriter Pro 5000, Nokia 9000, 9000i, and 9110 Communicator, MyTurn.com's GlobalPC and three other DOS-based PDA's collectively referred to as the Zoomer. The OmniGo 700LX is not a native Geos platform, and for the rest of the FAQ all references to just "OmniGo" refer to the OmniGo 100 or 120. The operating system that runs on the Toshiba Genio and Dialo, Seiko-Epson Locatio, and Mitsubishi Moem-D, is a Japanese version of Geos-SC and not a RISC-based version of Geos as earlier reported. The IBM PC version, also referred to as the desktop version, started as GeoWorks Ensemble 1.0 in November 1990. A copy of of Geos 1.2 was also bundled with CD-ROM drives from NEC and Sony as part of a package that included a Geos-based CD player and several DOS-based programs. The current version is now NewDeal Office Release 3.2A. A detailed account of the evolution of desktop Geos is available in my History page. The desktop version contains more software than any other Geos package out of the box. All other versions are still called Geos.

The most recent calculations show that the annual cost to consumers and taxpayers of its 29 member countries' support for agriculture and horticulture amounts to US$361 billion. Such a large sum is difficult to grasp, but it is large enough to pay for a first class, round-the-world air ticket for each of the 56 million cows in the 29-member OECD?s dairy herd, and to give each cow a further US$1450 spending money for her stopovers in the US, Europe and Asia.

Thus while there may be laudable social objectives in keeping Scottish farmers around, there is a serious economic cost which makes you wonder why don't they just give the money directly to funding a Silicon Glen.

LL

Question to all: Has anyone run CBROM.EXE on a PhoenixNet-enabled BIOS dump?

I'm wondering if PhoenixNet is a module that can be unloaded from BIOS, and then the BIOS reflashed.

Given that it's marketing-related (i.e, Award expects to make money off it), it's quite plausible that they'd release BIOSes that "have it" (because the manufacturer/reseller either paid or got paid for it) and "don't have it" (for those evil OEM types). The logical way to do this would be to modularize it, in the same way that the .BMP that makes up the "boot logo" is a module that can be loaded or unloaded before reflashing.

For more information:

BIOS Customization Page

(And many more, but this gives you the general idea of what CBROM.EXE is for.)

...and most importantly, Pacman ultimately always loses.

Check out The First Church of Pac Man. The ultimate score has been achieved.

I wonder when the privatized prisons will get around to selling the labor of programmers who have been incarcerated for violation of /PL\d+-\d+/ and then having Salon "journalists" writing about how this is simply "rehab" for young men who needed guidance anyway? It would certainly appear to be a great boost to the economy to be able to compensate young programmers with rooms in the portions of the "facility" not populated by gang-rapists. That way you don't have to give them actual Federal Reserve Notes -- greedy neurotic little bastards that they are.

... but then there really isn't that much of a difference between Federal Reserve Notes and a pass, signed by the Warden, to a "rape-free" portion of the prison, now is there?

Well, it depends on the keyboard. Some keyboards make a noisy "clack" and others are very quiet.

A dozen years or so ago, long before Palm, the smallest and lightest laptop-ish thing you could get was a TRS-80 Model 100. It had 24 or 32 kilobytes of memory (24KB, not 24MB), a display that was 8 lines of 40 characters each, and a decent keyboard. That keyboard was noisy, but there was a well-known hack: you would pop the key caps off, put a little tiny rubber band around the post for the key, and put the key cap back on. (You could get the tiny rubber bands from any orthodontist.) With a spongy rubber bumper under every key, the keyboard became very quiet for note-taking.

(By the way, I heard that the Model 100 was very popular for news reporters. 24KB is enough to write up a news story, the built-in text editor was adequate, and they could use the optional acoustic coupler with the built-in 300 baud modem to send in the news story from any phone booth.)

I don't think any of the portable Palm keyboards I have seen make a really loud "clack" sound when you type. If you are a gentle typist, you shouldn't make too much noise.

steveha

Instead of just praising your favorite toy, let's talk about the basic issues here. Which are:

-- Does it really make sense to put Linux on handhelds? Is it better than handheld OSs (PalmOS, Epoc) and if so, why?

-- Does it make sense to develop a handheld hardware platform specifically to run Linux? And if you're going to give the religious argument (I won't pay a license fee to M$, even if it costs me money!) consider that economics is a bigger issue to most people. Your pet technology is irrelevent if nobody uses it.

-- Why are we so dependent on X-Windows? It would seem to make sense to develop a new terminal server for modern platforms. But everybody insists that it's too hard to port X apps to new technologies, such as W. Why?

-- For that matter, why does the X server model persist years after the demise of the dedicated platform it was designed for? Why is nobody looking at approaches that simply dispense with the terminal server, such as Qt Palmtop?

__

Federal Reserve money buys protection from punishment. You are punished if you don't pay taxes. This has become the Federal Reserve's primary monetary authority. The moral hazard of basing monetary authority on punishment has now been realized in the systemic and out-of-control gang rapes of prisoners in the US. All other unlawful acts by US governments are now overshadowed by the murderous, sexually sadistic character of governmental authority that has developed in US penal systems. Federal Reserve money is now protection racket money, or, if you prefer "punishment protection money". Calling it "fiat money", "debt money" or even "legal tender" obscures its true character.

She's Native American - and has quite the voice over resume. http://www.geocities.com/SunsetStrip/Vine/4993/ It looks as if she's been doing this stuff forever...

Uh oh....
http://www.valeriedelacruz.com/Brittney%20Cleary.h tm
http://www.geocities.com/SouthBeach/Tidepool/3223/ 4corners/music/promotion.html
http://www.metafilter.com/comments.mefi/7329

And the worst:
http://www.cyberteens.com/ne/mg/html/cleary.html

• "Q: How are things going in the studio?
• 
  

  A: Good.
  

  Q: Do you like your songs?
  

  A: Yeah, they are cool.
  

  Q: What is it like being in a recording studio and singing your own songs?
  

  A: It's cool. It's better than singing cover songs because they are my own.
  

  Q: What kind of cover songs did you used to sing?
  

  A: "Somewhere Over the Rainbow" and songs like that [on karaoke]."

/kill

My first big piece of Fortran (I'm tired of typing uppercase - get over it) was porting a huge piece of Algol 60, written by generations of physicists, into Fortran because the new "upgraded" ICL machine (an Estriel, when they were still called that) only supported Algol 68, not Algol 60.

Youth of today, they just ask why I didn't recompile it for Algol 68....

#karma_whore
If you care enough to read this far, you'll like this.

Our Regional and Massachusetts Library of Last Recourse
City of Boston Public Library Departments Reference Desks
have censored their very own curatorial reports from the public!
http://www.geocities.com/dsaklad/specialcollection sbpl.html

Don't forget "Doctorin' the Tardis" by The Timelords (an early manifestation of those whacky funsters The KLF) which, very unfortunately, went to Number 1 in the UK in 1988. It's a mixture of the Doctor Who theme and a song by fallen glam-rocker Gary Glitter.

Check out the KLF FAQ (link above) which includes lots of interesting trivia, like the fact that Jimmy Cauty of the KLF painted that Lord of the Rings poster from the seventies (for those of you old enough to remember it) and the reason why they burned a million pounds. Strange people.

This page showed how a :Cue:Cat can be useful, I'm sure this audio thing can be used to a simular end. I, personally, found it useful learning how to Over Clock The :Cue:Cat. Pushing hardware like this to it's outer limits is very important to the geek comunity so I suggest you check out the link, and go through all the pages.

--Josh

The patch came too late to stop my own 3 year old badly scratching my Toy Story DVD, though... TS2 is on VHS now :-/

Is one of Alex Chiu's doctors the one and only,
Dr. Nick Riviera

I'm building a PIC programmer that is controlled by the parallel port.
Sad part is that I'll probably only ever use it once to program the chip needed for the *BIG LOUD VOICE* Universal Infrared Reciever!

Whereas most phonetic alphabets consist of ideograms recycled as phonetic symbols, Hangul seems to be the only one to consist of symbols constructed purely for phonetic meaning.

If you like hangul, you'll probably also like J.R.R. Tolkien's tengwar. Regular changes to the shapes of the consonants denote stop/fric/nasal and voiced/less. The structure of the script is such that unused letters (after t series, p series, and k series) can be used to represent sounds unique to a given language. It's available in both vowel-pointed (like devanagari and biblical hebrew) and vowel-letter (like greek/latin/cyrillic) modes.

I'm not 100% sure about the legal status of a post-1923 script. Can a script be copyrighted or trademarked? Probably not. (Patents don't apply; it's been more than 20 years since the entire system was disclosed in RotK.)

Here's another thought: even if Sealand is a safe place to park your data (which I doubt), and its sovereignty stands up in international court (hasn't really been tested yet), does putting your data there really put it out of reach? Since you can't move your own body to Sealand, you can still be arrested and ordered to turn the data over. That still gives you the option of refusing, but you can get the same level of security by encrypting the data and refusing to divulge the key.

As long as we're discussing pseudocountries, does anybody know why The Kingdom of Patagonia tried to seize some uninhabited islands off the coast of France, back in 1998? I don't recall which specific islands, but I do recall they are part of the Channel Islands, which Elizabeth II rules, not as Queen of Great Britain, but as Duchess of Normandy. Didn't know that particular Duchy still existed, did you? Imagine what would happen if Liz went to Calais and started demanding Droit de Seigneur!

__

I'd just as soon try to memorize the Charge of the Light Brigade as that bizarre poem. It ain't exactly "Thirty days hath September."

But I think I could manage to make four paper strips and fold them around a pencil, or build this cardboard contraption, or even try tattooing this stuff on various body parts like the guy in Memento.

I might try this interactive calendar to find the Doomsday to start the algorithm process, but then I wouldn't need to remember the algorithm, would I? I would be most likely to consult my desk copy of Farmer's Almanac, then the only thing I would have to remember is where I put it.

Resisting the urge to shout "How are you, gentlemen?" every time I pass the "gentlemen's room" at work.

I'd just as soon try to memorize the Charge of the Light Brigade as that bizarre poem. It ain't exactly "Thirty days hath September."

But I think I could manage to make four paper strips and fold them around a pencil, or build this cardboard contraption, or even try tattooing this stuff on various body parts like the guy in Memento.

I might try this interactive calendar to find the Doomsday to start the algorithm process, but then I wouldn't need to remember the algorithm, would I? I would be most likely to consult my desk copy of Farmer's Almanac, then the only thing I would have to remember is where I put it.

Resisting the urge to shout "How are you, gentlemen?" every time I pass the "gentlemen's room" at work.

Douglas Adams spoke at MIT in Cambridge MA on 2 November 2000. Ironically, his topic was "Last Chance to See." He was funny and entertaining, though most of his talk consisted of stories from the book. After the Q&A, he sat and signed a large number of autographs.

Here are my pictures from that evening.

http://www.geocities.com/tmcgonegal/dna/

Tom.

Making my dream of a Jet-powered oldsmobile a reality........

Why bother with a jet when you can get a Rocket under the hood? :-)

True, but the modern pizza (i.e., since the 17th century) is not possible without the tomato of the New World as discussed here .
OpenSourcerers

That's something I've never liked about the GPL. Personally I prefer the No Problem Bugroff license.

I took a fish head out to see a movie

Mr. Gates, forgive me for the off-topic rant on your sig, but I'm sick and tired of people misattributing this masterpiece. The song "Fish Heads" was written and recorded by Barnes & Barnes, and was credited as such on MTV (back when they had interesting content). Dr. Demento merely popularized the song by putting it on his compilation albums, just as he did with Weird Al's early works.

Back to your regularly scheduled discussion. ;{)>

From the latin: "it happened after so it was caused by". A fairly common and fallacious argument, confusing cause and effect.

Methinks you should read about Carl Sagan's Baloney Detection Kit.

• http://www.geocities.com/Hollywood/6952/voynews.ht m

The ASCEM Golden Orgasm Award winners posted at http://www.geocities.com/ASCEMGO/-- I especially liked "Morning Dew", and you can skip right down to chapter 16 for the naughty stuff.

http://geocities.com/cc_ssd/ -- Heavy on the Pavel Chekov, but who wouldn't like "The Taming Of The Shrew"? And plenty of other hot slash.

Ooops, I'll try to bring this back to the topic of Voyager by citing Tommyhawk's slash page at http://www.leatherdog.com/~tommyhawk/startrek.htm which is all Chakotay/Paris.

--A Dirty Old K/S Lady

The ASCEM Golden Orgasm Award winners posted at http://www.geocities.com/ASCEMGO/-- I especially liked "Morning Dew", and you can skip right down to chapter 16 for the naughty stuff.

http://geocities.com/cc_ssd/ -- Heavy on the Pavel Chekov, but who wouldn't like "The Taming Of The Shrew"? And plenty of other hot slash.

Ooops, I'll try to bring this back to the topic of Voyager by citing Tommyhawk's slash page at http://www.leatherdog.com/~tommyhawk/startrek.htm which is all Chakotay/Paris.

--A Dirty Old K/S Lady

There is a good frame-by-frame-analysis of the new trailer at TheOneRing.net.

This page has links describing how to control TVs from various Psion models in the 3 and 5 families. I've tried this on my 5mx -- works great.

So, dig this: suppose the time-frame of compulsory education has been hiked up for the purpose of keeping children off the job market longer, so as to not devalue labor and thereby devalue the labor system.

Suppose the compulsory educational system, which is economically (and therefore ideologically) linked to every other industry, is regearing to keep the middle class from further expanding and gaining power.

Suppose that, with all the psychological research that's been done, someone actually thought ahead and said, "Okay, if we can institutionalize middle-class children within the first 2 decades of their life, we'll be able to not only increase the size of the prison-industrial-military complex, but also to grab more power for ourselves and our friends overall" Just the same way some retailer once said, "Let's hire some of these behavioral psychologists to figure out how to organize the store in the most influential possible way[s]."

The net effect of our compulsory school system is obvious: 23% illiteracy in America, 13% prevalence of social phobia, Major depression (18.9%), generalized anxiety (14.8%), and the 'Suicide Rate Among U.S. Teens Keeps Increasing'.

And I nearly left out the continuous rise in teenage violence...

You see, the problem is, as Adam Yauch is quoted in the last link, that "Being on either end of a violent situation, whether you seem to have come out with the upper hand or whether you don't seem to, it doesn't resolve anything. It escalates the problem. Hatred leads to more hatred. Violence leads to more violence." Violence is not by any means limited to its overt outbreaks; it is a sadist/masochistic cycle which perpetuates itself. Our "educational" system suffers the Disney syndrome: the violence of management over the tenderness of interaction.

"Nature once had a chance to run riot in South Florida, producing jungles and swamps; now nature must submit to control. " And nature (which, yes children, is very much alive in each and every one of us) is pissed.

________________________________________________ __

--

Their forwarding link at http://www.theoffice.net/guitool seems to be down but the original at Geocities is still up.

Please also read my essay on why it is important to write cross-platform code - with quotes from Judge Jackson on why Microsoft felt it was important enough to put a stop to cross-platform development that it broke the law.

My favorite cross-platform application framework is ZooLib, written by my friend Andy Green and his clients Learning in Motion. It allows you to write a single C++ sourcebase and deliver multithreaded native executables for Mac OS, BeOS, Windows and Linux/XWindows.

Mike

The Flood was recorded in the Sumerian epic of Gilgamesh as well as other myths. Now colleagues of Dr. Mair's are discovering evidence of an ancient civilization in western China that had its own unique writing.

Sure, there's even an HowTO about setting up such a beast: VCR-HOWTO

The VCR program is currently quite unstable, since it frequently freezes my 2.4.4 kernel, but even that doesn't stop me from having a bit of fun with scheduled realtime DivX video capturing ;-)

--
"Tell the world that we're going to be the grim reaper of innocent orphaned children." - /linux/init/main.c

There are hundreds, (thousands?) of 747's in service, and only four Shuttles.

With the entire world's launch industry's market at $2 billion per year and NASA's budget at $14 billion per year, whose fault is that?

If NASA would just fly their missions on commercial craft instead of making "we are the world" happy faces for us on TV, there would, long ago, have been a huge competitive launch services industry. See my comment on the Kelly Act below:

The 747 is a late generation aircraft, the Shuttle is a first generation reusable.

The Wright Brothers flew their first aircraft in 1903. Goddard flew his first liquid rocket in 1926. The growth curves of both industries progressed quite well to mass production within 2 decades, with airplanes being mass produced in WW I and sub-orbital rockets being mass produced in WW II. The Kelly Act of 1925 got the government out of the role of supplier and into the role of customer of transport services whereas there was no analogue to the Kelly Act in rocketry until a group of us sacrificed a few years of our lives and substantial personal assets in a grassroots battle against NASA's entrenched interests circa 1990 and even then NASA didn't follow the clear intent of the law (PL101-611) when it decided to launch the ACTS on the Shuttle, among other violations of that and other programs such as launch vouchers -- which it resisted.

The Shuttle is an N-th generation craft by a communist bureaucracy that owns the means of production -- however it is less efficient than was the Soviet space program because the Soviets didn't have a private sector to tax to bail them out of starvation, so they had to figure out that shooting corrupt bureaucrats -- or threatening them with the equivalent due to the imminent loss of a clear competition with high visibility (eg: war or race to the moon) -- is the only way to get them to stop being malfeasant.

The 747 is a child's toy compared to the complexity of the Shuttle.

And E=MC**2 is trivial compared to 18th century theories of the caloric.

The 747 also requires incredible amounts of maintenance, support, and facilities, but most of this is out of the public eye.

I didn't ignore that, since I did say: when a jumbo jet lands. But for an elite few, it is the beginning of a 1.2 million-step process but of course, that "1.2 million-step process" is far more economical and scientific since the people engineering and operating it have to turn a profit -- unlike NASA which can just have you thrown in jail and given anal AIDS injections if you don't give them more money to cover their "technical difficulties".

The 747 operates in a far simpler and more benign enviroment than does the Shuttle.

A valid point... but let's be rational:

the USD$900 you cite is for coach class...)

And just what is "coach class" on the Shuttle?

What's the matter, the Goldin got yer tongue?

Your ticket cost is held down by the revenues generated by the cargo in the belly of the 747 and by competition.

If NASA weren't so intent on suppressing competition it might be able to follow presidential policies and corresponding laws that mandate that it use the lions share of that $14 billion per year to buy commercial launch services to actually do things in space.

The Pad Rat's Page

There's a mirror of nearly all the pages extracted from the google cache and stitched together at http://www.geocities.com/hensonmirror/. Including a zip of all the files at http://www.geocities.com/hensonmirror/henson.zip

There's a mirror of nearly all the pages extracted from the google cache and stitched together at http://www.geocities.com/hensonmirror/. Including a zip of all the files at http://www.geocities.com/hensonmirror/henson.zip

An Edward Gorey renderer:

http://students.washington.edu/cread/gorey/goreyli nks.html

http://www.geocities.com/SoHo/Square/3441/object1. html

--Jim

Anyone who thinks their Java is safe should try running some class files through JAD. You'd be surprised how complete a decompilation is usually available.

When they finally learned that the injuries were done by a local school bully (there were witnesses)... THE SCHOOL ABANDONED ALL INTEREST IN THE STUDENT'S INJURIES!

For the same reason the Government has criminals meet out its most severe punishments against the least offensive individuals within the penal system -- basically, the Government is just a gang of chicken-shit sociopaths corrupted by too much money and power and too little real and I mean real accountability.

For example, everytime a kid gets beaten up by a bully in school, the principle should get beaten up equally. Everytime a prisoner gets gang-raped by HIV-infected sexually sadistic inmates, those inmates should be summarily executed and the Warden should be gang-raped by HIV-infected sexual sadists.

But really, folks, rather than pursue such extreme justice within a system that is so utterly vile and sick, a different system should be tried in which people are indoctrinated against elicitation of kin-altruistic instincts toward "society" with the same degree of vigor that they are now indoctrinated to believe "we are the world" even after they're dying of AIDS from being gang-raped in prison. Children should be educated by their parents and relatives -- not by people whose autority ultimately resides at the tip of a knife in prison pointed at the jugglar of a prisoner, weilded by the most viscious criminal the government can find to deliver on its threats against "noncompliant" taxpayers.

So, while in Washington, D.C., I shared with Rep. Rohrabacher, Truax's vision of a rapid-turn-around reusable system and how additional legislation we were proposing, such as giving tax incentives for capitalization of commercial space transport systems, would help guys like Truax get people to plop down their own cash to help him get started.

I was pretty exhausted both physically and financially from all the political activism, so I took a position as VP of Public Affairs with E'Prime Aerospace Corporation, initially to acquire the first Ka-band orbital slot from the FCC. It was for Norris Communications' geostationary "Norstar" satellite -- one of E'Prime's potential customers. This was all keeping an eye to attract capital for both E'Prime and Norris Communications. As part of that work, I ended up in Los Angeles. There, cable companies were interested in the high-frequency of Ka-band (and consequently smaller dishes for direct-broadcast media services). We had some potential investors interested. In the middle of the day of meetings with our potential investors, they disappeared. When we investigated, it turned out that McDonnell-Douglas had just (and I mean that day) held a press conference announcing they were going into a "public private partnership" to develop what would come to be known as the DC-X for "Delta Clipper-Experimental". In addition to satellite launching, one of the early applications touted for this vehicle was to be commercial transportation services shuttling cargo between ports on earth.

McDonnell-Douglas's headquarters were located in Long Beach, CA just a few miles from our meeting place. Long Beach, CA was Rep. Rohrabacher's district.

come off crisp and play up to the cynic
clean and schooled right down to the minute