Slashdot Mirror

Now FOX can sue Microsoft for using their Mr. Sparkle idea. I guess that's assuming they go to market with the name. They've done it in the past: Windows NT. The NT stood for N-10, which was the test suite they used to test in. I guess marketing re-designated it to mean new technology.

"I never had a girl before
With much of a figure
So excuse me if I start to play
With your digital display"

Lyrics for Digital Display (Extended Version) - Ready For The World

Personally I think that a Digital Miss World site is just going to be a 'one-handed computing' site.

I think it mostly because space robots are gaining popularity.

WTF? That's definitely the Lindows logo, but...

BTW, clickable link.

Sorry to have to inform you of this but
Persis Khambatta passed away in 1998.

Looks like you'll have to find yourself another future wife...

You necrophiliac! She's dead

Ah, you took a wrong turn. Here is the site you want.

Oops, you mis-capitalized that URL. I'm also a big fan of Approval Voting; it's simple and elegant.

Machiavelli stated, in The Discourses I believe, that the time it is most dangerous for the powers that be is not during repression but during relief from repression. It seemed that the decimation of the baby boomer generation had been a repressive era particularly for technologists -- primarily due to the sexual dynamics surrounding engineering professions in the era of sexual liberation and women's liberation. The end of female boomer fertility was a time when the primary source of a lot of that oppression, misled sexual power of young women combined with testosterone overload of youthful males, was being relieved and the thumbscrews were being loosened on the techs. What I didn't expect was what happened: a whipsaw pumping up the techs and then popping their bubble. Machiavelli didn't really have much to say about this weird circumstance. What is interesting is that it does make a kind of perverse sense to do that to the folks that might start getting some of their standing back after a lifetime of disenfranchisement -- keeps them discombobulated. Then there is the problem of what to do for an encore if you can't keep the thumbscrews tied down after the whipsaw. If it worked once then why not try it again? Hopefully you can keep whipsawing until the boomer tech males are near retirement and unable and/or unwilling to do anything about their lifetime of displacement and disenfranchisement from their culture, fertility, territories and wealth. The outsourcing craze and H-1b craze are a part of this but I think the global elites may have to really pump things up again if at all possible, and try to whipsaw everyone again to avert Machiavelli's Rule again. If that is the case then theForesight Exchange claim REBOOM is in for a quick rise soon.

A local school recently tried to teach the embryonic recapitulation theory ("it's not a little baby person, its just a [pick one of fish/crocodile/bunch'o'cells/dog/dinosaur] so far") to a child I know, and that's been known to be a fraud for about 140 years (tongue firmly in cheek? of we go, then) so far.

I'm fairly sure that this rocket doesn't have scales, though... (g/d/r).

I'm not sure what you are saying in this post

This site may help you. There is ample reading on the subject concerning my viewpoint. I'll go ahead and look at answersingenesis.org per your advice in another thread.

When you get it installed, which is a surgical process, everyone and everything sounds like daffy duck until your brain gets to know how it works.

So, does Daffy sound like a human then? :-)

Seriously, I had the somewhat related idea about 10 years ago of a Palm-Pilot-like device that shows a scrolling frequency chart of the sounds around you. A deaf person could learn to interpret such a chart and know what people are saying. Some hearing researchers taught themselves to read paper versions of such charts, so it is at least humanly possible to read them.

Here is an old e-sketch I did of such a thing

To make your jest serious: This is the trail that Richard Stallman proceeded down in about 1984. He wanted good software, and felt that the complications of copyright (and the business model that usually came along with copyright) made good software so much more difficult to produce.


Kinda ironic how much time and effort that should be going toward writing software is now consumed by the game of armchair copyright lawyer.

I want good software, and am sick and tired of having to pass on the right solution because it doesn't pass the purity test, or it is infected with a viral license, or it isn't free (or Free (or Phree)) enough, or it is "tainted", or it undermines our whole economic system, or ...

Enough with the licenses already. Personally I prefer the No problem Bugroff license. (mostly because it wastes less space in the source files than the GPL (or even MIT) licenses), but have adopted the following as a general rule:

The more fanatic someone is about software licensing, the more likely that their software isn't worth bothering with.

This applies equally to the BSA jackals and the GNU/Hippies. It turns out to be a pretty reliable guide.

Try playing around with this!

Maybe Brian Walker watched the show Salvage 1 when he was younger.

"Salvage 1 was a short-lived television series [in which] 'a guy built a spaceship out of junk and flew to the moon' ".

This picture? From the source page... not what you expected I bet.

This picture? From the source page... not what you expected I bet.

The show didn't last because Don Knotts never played a character in it, the way he did with most of Andy Griffith's other projects (No Time for Sargents, Andy of Mayberry*/The Andy Griffith Show, Matlock, Return to Mayberry*, etc.).

It was a nice show, however, even if most people don't remember it.

* sp?

P.S. Here is your link as a link.

Quantity does not equate to quality. Our magical, genetically altered and irradiated veggies have no equal. I'd rather have an ear of high quality, edible American corn than a hard brown turd some African farmer handed me and told me was 'corn'.

yu0 wh1te boy pretending to be nigger...you take it in d4 cornhole. yu0 have d4 cornholelust

When I go visit friends and family I often am asked to sort out all kinds of problems, that for you or I would be simple.

And there you have it boys and girls...

You searched the world over looking for the Microsoft Community and found out that you are part of it.

So I think that your idea that "the majority of the internet is a MS community site" is bullshit.

It's ok for you to think that, but you'd be wrong.

There is no one website devoted to the Microsoft community. Instead it is divided into thousands of websites, each with unique purpose, a unique niche.

It's sites like this.

Or this.

What is it you need help on? Antivirus?

My small personal statistic of 30-something countries in Europe, Asia and Africa so far was the opposite, admittedly mostly non-English speaking people (e.g. Japan, Sweden, Senegal, Croatia, Germany, Ukraine, France, Hungary, Belgium, etc.). But maybe in the recent years things have changed.

It's really sad though, that a fine product of Italian cousine gets McDonaldsized both in name and in preparation. Obviously, it happened before - one only has to remember what happened to pizza in the U S of A ... really sad. Starbucks (just as McDonalds) keeps decreasing the overall expected quality of food, and unfortunately it succeeds (unlike McDonalds) in maintaining the appearance of 'high quality' to many customers.

PS: Latte is certainly not a normal means of asking for milk, it simply means milk (in Italian, of course: it's an Italian word after all).

This will be very handy for warning us of impending doom from the sky.

1 - "Gnome with a DDD cup" is not exactly an attribute that comes to mind when I think of attractive women. "Hey, lookit the ta-tas on that female gnome!"

2 - "Expandable codpieces"? Give me a break. Women are beautiful. The female body is one of the most elegant things (at least in some incarnations) created by nature. Men, well, I dunno, naked guys not being my cup of tea, but "partially decorated christmas tree" comes to mind. "Goofy-lookin" is another adjective.

3 - I always thought that women were a bit less physical than guys? Correct me if I'm wrong, I know that my female friends often look after a guy they think is attractive (male companion: *snort* "he's probably gay") but at least I figured that girls were at least a bit less apt to wolf-whistle at nice-looking men (unless they're 40-ish and desperate.) I know it's a bit stereotypical of me to say so, but I can't remember the last time I heard "hey, nice trouser snake!". But then again, maybe that's just because it's me....

4 - Girls with guns and swords and jet fighters and kung fu moves are just sexy, period. Maybe it's that I find assertive (not bitchy or dominant) women attractive, but I've heard similar statements from lots of male friends. The idea of h0t Ch1x that can blow things up, do gymnastics, and ride speedbikes (Lara Croft, anyone?) is just appealing. I've yet to see a woman get weak-kneed over Conan or Dirty Harry.

5 - If you're really into esoteric codpieces, may I suggest renting some Blackadder DVDs. Black, his codpiece made of metal....

That said, I'm all for equal rights in games. If someone wants to customize their 35th level troll barbarian in any and every aspect, great. Frankly, it'd be sort of funny to see what the 13 year old pimply gamer set comes up with--although I can't see having a Rogue constantly tripping over the enormous 5 foot schlong dragging from his left trouser leg having an enormous advantage in combat.

There's RTSP rippers available for windows, and the RTSP spec is public, so it's possible to write one yourself.

As far as mms is converned(Windows Media streams) you can get mmsclient.

Both can be played directly with various versions of xine or mplayer.

Im a computer geek and she [link from my hompage rui.paytheprice.org] isnt.

For further reference.

Hot off the press is this news article: "Sources: Google Seeks Banks to Lead IPO". The search-engine business is going to consolidate. Microsoft and Yahoo will be two survivors. Google won't be because it lacks the revenue to invest in the R&D needed to build the best search engine. What Google has right now can be easily duplicated by either Microsoft and Yahoo. Google also has the issue of appearing to favor H-1B workers over American workers; in a period of 9% unemployment in Silicon Valley, Google just can't seem to find enough qualified Americans to fill its list of unfilled job positions that are advertised month after month. Google also practices age discrimination: "Google, in its intense effort to hire employees, is focusing on 'getting 25-year-old [employees]'.

If you buy into the Google IPO, you are shooting yourself in the foot as its stock will be worthless after 2 years. Moreover, you are enriching the pockets of people who turn their backs on the older, unemployed Americans. You ask yourself, "Is Google ethical?"

As well, you can be sure that VMWare is running to the IPO finish line. Microsoft has built a virtual machine monitor (VMM) that is as good as VMWare's best product.

... from the desk of reporter

1)hype console
2) Depend upon the utterance "You people buy every console there is."
3) Profit!

Yes folks! They have revealed the elusive and often obfuscated STEP 2!

Hallelujia! No longer do I have to steal underpants to build a business!

If anyone's ever seen the Crest of the Stars (Sekai no Monshou) anime, you know what I'm talking about. The Abh are a genetically engineered race of humans specifically built to live in space their entire lives.

To wit; resistance to radiation, normal physiology in low gravity, better performance at high Gs, a sixth space sense, etc. There's a great explanation here. The anime is actually based on a series of novels; consequently it has a level of narrative depth far higher than most TV series. To me, it feels like a book more than a TV series, and I loved it.

http://www.geocities.com/ussmunchkin5/TNG80.htm

I don't know about y'all, but I'm so sick of various days and weeks and months being devoted to all this random crap. In this case it is entirely ironic because everyone's going to be 'taking back their time' rather than doing what they really want to do. Some people actually like working. It's just a bunch of people deciding that they know what you should really be spending your time doing.

If anyone buys into Google's IPO, then that person is a fool. The shares will be worthless after about 2 years.

The other issue is an ethical one: should Americans buy into Google to reward its founders even though the shares will ultimately be worthless? NO! Why? An employee of Google wrote an article to Slashdot and suggested that Google favors H-1B workers over Americans. During a period 9% unemployment in Silicon Valley, Google claims that it cannot find enough American workers to fill job positions and resorts to H-1B workers.

... from the desk of the reporter

Absolutely not. It was to fill the acronym gap for Windows CeMeNT.

>You gotta look UP people!

Indeed.

Now, SUNW is conceding the market for high-end servers.

SUNW recently purchased Afara. It supplies processors for low-end servers. SUNW will still try to maintain a presence there. Unfortunately, with the SPARC64 going to 4 cores per die and 2 threads per core, the processor from Afara is starting to look less and less competitive. SUNW will exit the market for even low-end servers by 2007.

The announcement of Power5, with its SMT capabilities, is tantamount to announcing a starship for intergalatic space travel when all the spacecraft in the Federation can only travel within the solar system. Power5 and, to a lesser extent, SPARC64 basically killed the UltraSPARC line and the entire hardware business of the Sun Microsystems.

By the way, Professor Susan Eggers of the University of Washington must be tickled pink because she development most of the technology for simultaneous multithreading. IBM, with its Power5, proved that her ideas were all right. The Draper prize in engineering should be going her way.

... from the desk of the reporter

The originally proposed quick fix is to simply redesign the the Sun servers to accept the SPARC64-V. An even better proposal, now leaked by the press, is to simply discontinue the Sun-designed servers and to sell re-branded Fujitsu designed servers. The latter proposal is a much faster path to solving the server-performance problem at Sun but leads to lower profit margins. Clearly, the situation at Sun is dire, so you can be assured that one of these proposals will be adopted. (Please read "Sun posts deeper loss for quarter". Having lower profit margins is better than having no profit margins. Right now, the second proposal appears to be winning.

Sun Microsystems will most likely fire more than 50% of its processor development team. The single biggest cause of Sun losing marketshare so rapidly is the UltraSPARC III. It has horrible performance. Check "SPEC" and "TPC".

How does this deal help Fujitsu? It can now sell more servers and get more cash. Fujitsu has the upperhand and should force Sun to accept the second proposal: Sun exits the highend server market and sells rebranded Fujitsu-designed servers. To avoid being dependent on Sun, Fujitsu should move rapidly to jettisoning the Solaris OS in favor Linux. Fujitsu is rapidly being shaped into a company like IBM: high-performance servers and computing services are the mainstays of the business.

As a side note, Fujitsu rejects hiring foreign workers (the equivalent of H-1Bs). Their SPARC64-V and SPARC64-VI were designed and built almost exclusively by native talent. When Fujitsu hires workers, Fujitsu most values the quality of "willingness to work", not "best match of skills"; Fujitsu will take the time to train its employee. Fujitsu is a traditional Japanese company that emulates most of the values that once characterized traditional American companies. Sun, by contrast, encourages the employment of H-1Bs; the UltraSPARC III and the UltraSPARC IV were built substantially by former or current H-1B workers. Sun seeks only "best match of skills" and, along with Intel, claims that they absolutely need H-1B worker even during a period of 8% unemployment among native Americans in Silicon Valley.

... from the desk of the reporter

Target the G5 at the consumer market. Target the G5-W at the engineering/high-performance market.

Amazingly, thanks to Apple, the PowerPC architecture has the best chance of capturing a sizeable share of the workstation market, obliterating any remaining UltraSPARC workstations. Apple has a damned good chance if only Steve Jobs doesn't blow it.

... from the desk of the reporter

He wrote "Yet Another Modest Proposal" about making coinage out of nuclear waste...

Excerpt:

"The profession of tax collector would carry its own, well deserved penalty. So would certain other professions. An Arab oil sheik might still grow obscenely rich, but at least we could count on his spending it as fast as it come in, lest it go up in a fireball. A crooked politician would have to take bribes by credit card, making it easier to convict him. A bank robber would be conspicuous, staggering up to the teller's window in his heavy lead-shielding clothing. The successful pickpocket would also stand out in a crowd. A thick lead-lined glove would be a dead giveaway; but without it, he could be identified by his sickly, faintly glowing hands. Society might even have to revive an ancient practice, amputating the felon's hand as a therapeutic measure, before it kills him."

Greenpeace activists get to the reactor of Zorita Nuclear Power Plant in Spain:

Activistas de Greenpeace se encaraman en la cupula de zorita para exigir su cierre inmediato y definitivo

Oops. I guess that if I'm going to be a complete perv, I'd better do it right.

Of course, I wonder what the U.N. has to say about Real Sheep, too.

One way to encourage reindustrialization adequate to the task of lowered population and higher resource efficiency might be to allow people threatened by imported disease to sue the globalist companies importing the cheap labor.

My GI generation father lives with some life-threatening conditions, and does he have some stories to tell since he moved from Iowa to the border with Mexico!

I rarely see the man anymore, however, so the change is hardly gradual and is quite palpable.

Sitting in a waiting line with illegals ahead of him for medical service is finally getting to him. Never a racist act nor word from him during his entire life, and now at the end of his life, he's having to think about what he was fighting for when he, before the Japanese attacked Pearl Harbor, left the Quakers, where he could have easily evaded the draft, and volunteered to go fight the Germans. He is probably going to die quite a few years earlier for the want of a small amount of service from Medicare to which he is entitled. He will likely lose these years of life due to the degradation of Medicare by immigration promoted by globalist companies forcing wages for American workers down. He could actually get better care if he were an illegal rather than a WW II vet.

As Paul Craig Roberts reports - Friday, Oct. 3, 2003:

So you think your government looks out for you? Not nearly as much as it does for aliens.

On Sept. 24 Robert Pear reported in the New York Times that the Bush administration has quietly decided to stiff 6 million poor elderly and disabled Americans by denying them Medicare drug benefits. According to the Bush administration, these Americans are already covered under state Medicaid programs.

President Bush should read the newspapers. On Sept. 23 Robert Pear reported in the New York Times that "rising costs prompt states to reduce Medicaid further." It seems that the job loss recovery has forced virtually every state to take action to cut back on Medicaid.

Not to worry. All the 6 million poor and disabled Americans need to do is to acquire Mexican citizenship and recross the border as illegal aliens. Once Americans acquire the status of illegal aliens, their medical care is provided free without even a co-pay.

Can you imagine what things will happen when the boomers, whose economic and therefore reproductive viablity has already been decimated by government policy which is now compounded by immigration-induced age, if not race, discrimination, hit retirement and all that imported labor that was supposed to keep Social Security solvent is voting?

I'll admit I'm angry about this; however, the public health menace facing those on Medicare is a drop in the bucket compared to what is starting to become obvious to even the most dogmatic proponent of globalism:

Globalist companies are using immigration to drive down labor costs at the expense of profound risks to the public health from epidemics.

When SARS turned out not to be the threat so many feared, some thought this might have been due to quick rea

Despite the ranting and raving by Scott McNealy, Sun Microsystems is also bunding software into a single package. According to "Sun eyes application server market", Sun is bundling server application software into its Solaris OS. Sun is deliberately trying to destroy BEA Systems.

Remember. If we attack Microsoft for bundling stuff into its OS, then we should attack Sun for doing likewise.

... from the desk of the reporter

Yeah, they don't have a clue.

They are looking for intelligent life where it does not exist. An absolute proof is unavailable, but the odds for life at all is worse that one in 0^36,000.

As a cultured /.'er, the words ogg vorbis probably sends shivers down your spineless back.

Yes, there is ogg vorbis support thru a skinnable app boringly called "Ogg Player". The only downside is that you can't use them as ringtones.
It should also interest you to know that there is a SCUMM emulator port for SymbianOS called escummvm.

The P900 is signifigantly better than the P800. You might even want to say that the P800 was an expensive beta test. The improvements include, but are not limited to:
1- Higher screen resolution
2- Landscape mode
3- Downloadable firmware updates
4- A full length, real stylus
5- A faster processor
6- More internal memory, plus support for Memory Stick Duo Pro
7- Real buttons on the non-removable keypad
8- More glorified business style; it doesnt look like a child's cheesy toy like the P800
9- Has video camera software with sound-in support
10- Includes the latest rev of the UIQ interface
11- Camera now has mirror so you can take self-potraits

All in all, it was an upgrade to the P800, and they were originally going to name it the P810, but marketing thought that this would raise the ire of thousands of P800 who would demand the free upgrades.

Federal spending is not what makes the United States a great country. The American Experiment was not an experiment with strong central power; that had been done for years and was the very thing the American Revolutionaries were escaping. The United States constitution was constructed to balance the needs for some federal power (the Articles of Confederation gave it almost none!) while serverly restricting the excercise of those powers.

I could not disagree with you more with regard to a new amendment abolishing the 9th and 10th amendments that Congress holds in such disdain. Instead, I am for a return to Federal constitutionally correctness and the ouster of those Representatives and Senators that fail to live up to their oaths of office. What does "promoting national growth and standards" conflict with a small, constitutionally correct Federal government? I'm somewhat bothered by government "promoting growth" of any fashion; should not a liberated people be left to achieve what they can imagine? How did the United States ever survive the Nineteenth Century without the programs of the New Deal or the Great Society? Remember: the "General Welfare Clause" is in the preamble, not Article I.

For what it's worth, I'm for the repeal of the Seventeenth Amendment, as it silenced the voice of the States in Federal Government, giving power to the People that was originally intended for States to hold.

It is imperative that we expel all laboratory employees who were born or grew up in Taiwan. It is already a matter of national policy that persons born or raised in mainland China are denied employment at American weapons labs. This policy should be extended to include person born or raised in Taiwan. The facts at "Reality of Taiwan" further elaborate on the security risk posed by Taiwanese.

Note that a Taiwanese gave American neutron-bomb technology to Beijing. The Justice Department has classified Taiwan as security threat to the USA.

To reiterate what the "Wall Street Journal" reported, the majority of spies who steal American technology to give to Beijing were born or raised in Taiwan. We should treat people from Taiwan in the same way that we treat people from mainland China. They should be denied employment in any sensitive job in the American government. The alternative is to risk the security of the free world.

... from the desk of the reporter

It is imperative that we expel all laboratory employees who were born or grew up in Taiwan. It is already a matter of national policy that persons born or raised in mainland China are denied employment at American weapons labs. This policy should be extended to include person born or raised in Taiwan. The facts at "Reality of Taiwan" further elaborate on the security risk posed by Taiwanese.

Note that a Taiwanese gave American neutron-bomb technology to Beijing. The Justice Department has classified Taiwan as security threat to the USA.

To reiterate what the "Wall Street Journal" reported, the majority of spies who steal American technology to give to Beijing were born or raised in Taiwan. We should treat people from Taiwan in the same way that we treat people from mainland China. They should be denied employment in any sensitive job in the American government. The alternative is to risk the security of the free world.

... from the desk of the reporter

What about Visual Basic for MS-DOS. Does anyone still have a copy?

It's easy to find - just google for vbdos.zip [Direct Link]. In fact, you can find most older software this way - ie, Borland Pascal 7 (bp7.zip | Direct), Turbo C++ 3 (tc3.zip | Direct), QuickBASIC 7/PDS (qb7.zip | Direct), Turbo Prolog (tprolog.zip | Direct , etc.

Try poking around in the directories containing the files listed above (eg, http://thegeekery.org/downloads/ci/ - they tend to have cool stuff.

ps. - I had a book on VB for DOS - the book was terrible, but so was VBDOS, so I guess they went well together.

It is unlikely that Sun will do anything to optimize Solaris for x86 here in the USA. There may be some optimization work at Sun's R&D center in India, but basically in the USA, Sun is conceding to Linux. Linux is backed by IBM, and IBM and Linus are cooperating to make Linux a rock-solid product that meets 6-sigma reliability. Right now, Linus is concentrating on making Linux as stable as possible instead of adding more widgets and gadgets.

The penguin shall rule the world!

... from the desk of the reporter

Now *that* makes me think of one man. A man who made science and physics *very* interesting (and fun) to me.

No, its not Bill Nye, although he is cool.

Nope, not Don Herbert either, although I must say that our beloved Mr Wizard certainly entertained and educated me more than I can really express in words, it was just the other kids that he had on the show that annoyed the hell out of me.

(Then again, I really miss those afternoons after school. Mr Wizard at 4:00, Dangermouse at 4:30, and You Can't do that on Television at 5:00, now that made for a decent afternoon)

Nope, just one person pops into mind.

Julias Sumner Miller

Julius
Sumner
Miller (warning, scary music and horribly made page)

Granted, he looked like a mad scientist, but he made physics cool to me. And he made mistakes, and that was one of the things that made it so fun to watch! Not only did I learn why things work, but he also taught me to *wonder* why things work the way they do, instead of just accepting that they work.

I am so very happy that those shows still air daily here on PBS in the states.

Sure the editing was atrocious, and the film was grainy, and the music just .. well .. was wierd, but If they would put those old shows on DVD, I would spend that money in a heartbeat, not only for myself to watch and enjoy again, but for my kids.

Heck, the messes that they would make in the kitchen couldn't possibly be as bad as the ones I made right?

THAT was the kind of show that, in some bizzare "train wreck" way, I just could not stop watching. Hell, I still watch them if I happen to channel surf past them in the afternoon.

Although, if I let my kids watch Mr Wizard also, I am going to have to watch it before they do, just to make sure I edit out that one episode where he teaches you how to make the hot air balloon with a dry cleaning bag, a few straws for a frame, and a little pile of burning sterno as a heat source. Then it was up, up, and away!

I have a strange feeling that if my kids were to copy that little trick, they might be branded as junior terrorists at this point.