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There is some pretty funny stuff out there, if you browse long enough to stumble across it. I came across this site the other day and thought there were some pretty funny panel comics there.

Check it out while it lasts...

Interestingly...if you go to go to mac's store right now, they put up the G4 specs under the G5 area! This is the exact opposite of a couple days ago. If it's not there anymore, here's proof: http://us.share.geocities.com/richardsonke/G5.bmp. It's on geocities, cause i'm at work and i don't have access to my normal ftp server. Can someone mirror it? Thanks. And NO, this has NOT been photoshopped.

I have yet to see any scientifically valid, double-blind test in which users could distinguish between a CD and an MP3 at 320kbps.

In fact, a few years ago, C't did this at 256kbps, and found that 256kbps MP3 and CDs are pretty much a wash.

However, there is a reason to do this: longevity and patent issues. I don't trust the holders of the MP3 patents not to pull a Unisys just before the patents expire, and a lossless source recording means it's easier for people to compress to the format-du-jour. 256kbps MP3 maybe be indistinguishable from uncompressed, but I doubt the same is true for 256kbps MP3 recompressed using a different algorithm.

feh. It converted with pdftotext, but the pdf is better. PDF Here

he looked great in a dress!

Few people are aware that Pokemon was originally based on legends of the 150 Aztec gods of war and death. Now you know. (Courtesy of Discordian Intelligence Agency)

Few people are aware that Pokemon was originally based on legends of the 150 Aztec gods of war and death. Now you know. (Courtesy of Discordian Intelligence Agency)

I admire Bill gates. He Donates Millions to charity and computers to schools like ours. He invented computers and programs to make Our lives Easier.

Many think that Bill Gates invented computers, but he actually invented the computer language called Binary Code.

I agree on both counts. Rakesh Sharma was India's first cosmonaut (much like Kalpana Chawla being the first Indian-born astronaut), and yes, while not to take points out of the Chinese, I have a lot of respect for Chinese scientists, it does seem to me that China is ripping Soviet technology off.

Incidentally, it's ironical that you were talking about clean, cheap electric power, that is exactly what Rakesh Sharma apparently researched on, while aboard the Soyuz capsule.

That said, I believe all this talk of The Next Great Space Race is all (western?) media speculation; really, I'd be hardpressed to see anyone at Sriharikota (that's India's launch base) itching to compete with the Chinese (or the Chinese competing with us Indians); my impression so far has been that ISRO is all Zen-like in its aspirations. There's an interesting piece on this in Raj Chengappa's Weapons of Peace for anyone interested in Indian science.

An Australian computer chip designer will this weekend risk the wrath of Microsoft

Naah, who would risk going after those Ford Falcon driving weapon-carrying reckless Aussies, hey ?

An Australian computer chip designer will this weekend risk the wrath of Microsoft

Naah, who would risk going after those Ford Falcon driving weapon-carrying reckless Aussies, hey ?

An Australian computer chip designer will this weekend risk the wrath of Microsoft

Naah, who would risk going after those Ford Falcon driving weapon-carrying reckless Aussies, hey ?

Unless I'm alone here, being able to run X11 apps and native OS X apps at the same time is one of the best features of my OS X boxen.

Good sci-fi is so great, like any of the Culture series. I wish there were more good sci-fi movies too, but it seems that Hollywood is much more interested in "Science Fear", as opposed to sci-fi. Even our beloved Matrix is more about how tech is bad for people, than about freeing the storyline to explore other areas that aren't possible with today's tech.

It seems a lot easier to avoid "sci-fear" in text form though ... lucky for me, the public library is two blocks away!

See Incompetent People Really Have No Clue, Studies Find / They're blind to own failings, others' skills and another article here.

The original paper by David Dunning (Cornell University) and Justin Kreuger (University of Illinois), Unskilled and Unaware of It: How Difficulties in Recognizing One's Own Incompetence Lead to Inflated Self-Assessments, won an Ig Nobel Prize in 2000 (in Psychology).

Their report is a great and entertaining reading. The name says it all - basically they found that people generally tend to overestimate their skills (in certain areas) if they are actually bad and also suggested several mechanisms for that.

background reading on the subject can be found here, and here, and pretty much everywhere else google knows about.

if this kind of "boycott" did any good, slashdot would be using PNGs by now, wouldn't they? *cough* in this case, it's only a good idea if the linux community can come up with absolute, solid, will-hold-up-in-court proof that SCO is talking out of their collective asses about this.

and even then, who cares? SCO's unix products blow chunks anyway. SCO is irrelevant. they're being petty. why descend to their level?

Here's a few:

• SpamHaus Registry Of Known Spam Operators
• Stop-Spam Spammer Contact Information
• Frankie Spammers in Maryland

Would you like some nice hot buttered, scrummy toast?

Talkie Toaster is my deity.

"I Toast, therefor I am."

More Red Dwarf Please.

Has anyone formed a lobbying group specifically to advance the position of us little people?

No.

Well, unless you mean this.

You get to drink from... the fire hose!!!

(For those of you out of the loop, please watch this movie)

Well, OK, spam isn't a "sausage" but if sterile canning systems had been around in abundance equal to that of instestines when people were first thinking up sausage, do you think anyone would quite recognize the difference? Go with sausage, just for a minute.

Despite being of a basically liberal bent, I have at times so despaired of spam that even *new laws* sounded attractive. Various anti-spam measures (I like the *potential*-payment plan of pennyblack, mentioned on Slashdot at least once before), including of late vastly improved spam-filtering methods, I think are a better solution. (Yes, Declan McCullagh has made this argument better than I am ready to right now ;))

Even though it sounds nice to say that we should "ban spam," unless all email is routed through a big Spam Whittler, any such ban is no better than just enforcing property rights laws re: trespass etc. In Italy, CDs are all stamped with a little pink stamp of government approval / taxation (at least 10 years ago there were ... still true?); I don't want little pink stamps of inspection / taxation on all my emails.

A visit today to a franchise location of the U.S. Postal "Service" (remember, "dot-com, not dot-gov" since [hold the guffaws in the rear] they're not a government agency, according to so high an authority as ... the U.S. Postal Service) reminded me of what sort of people, if not which people per se, will increasingly hold power to approve email as any such laws click into bureaucratic place.

timothy

Actually their spacecraft are far more advanced than the Apollo era craft were, simply because there is newer tech today. Have you seen their space control center yet?

It's awesome! There is a ton of information about their space program here.

Also, you might want to note that the U.S. is currently incapable of landing on the moon. All the equipment used to do it in the 60's and 70's is too old and most of it can only be found in museums now. The rest is rusting in NASA hangars. If we want to go back, we would be better off developing updated versions of the Apollo craft. So in a way, China has a bit of an edge right now if there was a sudden race to put a base on the moon.

Actually their spacecraft are far more advanced than the Apollo era craft were, simply because there is newer tech today. Have you seen their space control center yet?

It's awesome! There is a ton of information about their space program here.

Also, you might want to note that the U.S. is currently incapable of landing on the moon. All the equipment used to do it in the 60's and 70's is too old and most of it can only be found in museums now. The rest is rusting in NASA hangars. If we want to go back, we would be better off developing updated versions of the Apollo craft. So in a way, China has a bit of an edge right now if there was a sudden race to put a base on the moon.

I will be going on a 2 week trip to Europe next month, living out of a backpack. We have 2x128 MB CF cards for the camera, but those wouldn't hold all of the photos we plan on taking during the trip.

My solution? I happen to have a Jornada 720 PDA and a 2 GB PCMCIA drive for the machine. The plan is when a 128 MB card if filled up, to move the contents onto the 2 GB drive. The PCMCIA harddrives are the same as in the iPod. You can get them in sizes ranging from 2 GB (a measly $70) all the way up to 30 GB (around $450). The PDA itself can be had for $300-450, depending on some factors. However, this was a good solution because I already had the hardware- it doesn't seem like a good idea for someone starting from scratch.

But then again, spending $350 on the J720 and then $70 on the 2 GB PCMCIA drive makes a lot more sense than buying $650 (!!) worth of SD/CF cards as someone else recommended as being a reasonable solution. At a decent quality, this 2 GB PCMCIA drive holds at least 10k images. I plan on recharging while at hostels and the occasional hotel. I am considering getting a solar panel as well, but I've not yet decided.

Would be great for journaling on the trip as well- I know I'd like to document all of my adventures and thoughts if I were taking a trip around the whole world!

This is *much* cheaper than the same space in a IBM CF MicroDrive, CF or SD cards.

---

The other option that may make sense is buying a camera that uses media like mini-CD-R discs. My uncle has a fancy Sony digital camera that burns the photos he takes on to the 3" CD-R disks. It was an expensive camera, but it takes awesome photos and wouldn't require a computer or a slew of expensive media like SD or CF cards.

I just looked it up, and you can get them cheaper than before. I remember my uncle paying $1000 for his fancy-pants CD-R burning Mavica, but it looks like you can get a camera which does that now for quite a bit cheaper.

The $500 MVC-CD350 and the $700 MVC-CD500 look like decent models. Definately seems to make more sense to pick up one of these rather than buying $700 worth in SD/CF media!

Not much since control systems have been balancing pool cue's since the early days of rocketry.

Amazingly enough, it is possible to mod a Power Glove to work with a PC. Check This Out, as well as this page. That should get you started. I know there's a driver for it somewhere, it was featured in a /. story sometime in the last 1.5 years...

all they have to show for it is a standard Street Fighter engine with a predictable character roster"?

The idea that a capcom-level fighting engine could be running on SNK hardware is pretty amazing. No offence to Mark of the Wolves fans out there, but the Neo Geo has never been known for a high physics framerate. The new iteration of Street Fighter vs. Capcom is running on a 12 mhz 68000, with a Z-80 coprocessor! That's equivalent to the old CPS 1 board that "powered" the original Street Fighter 2 through Turbo. This was hot stuff when it was released in 1990. But eeking out an experience comparable to Capcom Vs. SNK 2 (on a 128 bit SH-4 with PowerVR)? If your graphics coprocessor used to be used on the Sega Master System, you have to do a lot of work to keep up. It's a testament to the programmers that people can consider it a standard Street Fighter engine.

Furthermore, convincing Capcom to re-do their artwork must have been a Herculean task. After being burned by rediculous art resources in Street Fighter 3, Capcom has seemed afraid to commit to any major overhaul of their character's designs. The gorgeous Capcom vs. SNK 2 suffered from 16-color flat cell artwork from Darkstalkers and 10-year-old versions of Street Fighter characters (has Dhalism ever been updated?), while SNK's characters looked characteristically beautiful. Convincing this art-risk averse company to redo everything must have been a monumental task, dwarfed only by the task of actually re-doing their ten-year-old characters.

And, of course, playbalancing fighters is incredibly difficult. Unlike computergames which can be patched after launch if an exploit is discovered, and home games where competition in your house remains friendly, Arcade games have to be uncheatable out of the door. If you don't playtest them mercilessly, horrible imbalances can emerge. Why do Blizzard games take 4 years to make? Balance. Why do AAA fighters take 4 years to make? Balance.

In short, a 3 year development cycle for a competition-level arcade game is not surprising. If what they come out with is solid and plays well, they will have succeeded.

Bah, my initial starting figures for the surface of the earth are off by 1000. :(

Earth surface = 5.1*10^14 m2
Volume extruded from surface, 1km high, ignoring spherical distortion = 5.1*10^17 m3.
# atoms in that space = 1.48*10^46
one IP address for every 43 million atoms, which is a bit of a different story from my first post. But maybe my assumptions were too conservative?

This raises another question, which is what is the rough lower bound for the size (in terms of # of atoms) for a working nano-device? I evaded this question a bit in my earlier analysis, but remembering the Times Ten size comparisons showing viruses, particularly rhinoviruses as the smallest living things, I went to look at how many atoms make up such a thing. A google search led to a Caltech thesis saying that "The smallest important viruses, the picornaviruses (responsible for polio, the common cold, and hoof-and-mouth disease) are composed of protein coats of about 0.5 million atoms and a nucleic acid genome of about the same size." (Some smallest virus in theory calculations suggest lower sizes, I dunno how good the underlying assumptions are.) So 1 million atoms is a reasonable size for a nanodevice, right? Well, partially-- viruses can't do much without a host cell infrastructure to tap into. But on the flip side, for a working nanodevice sufficient to have its own IP address, we wouldn't necessarily need the self-replication infrastructure of a virus. So I'm not sure this line of thinking leads anywhere.

Stepping back, my volumetric analysis was probably too conservative (1km high all over the earth's surface?) Tallest buildings size today is ~400 meters to the top occupied floor, so in that respect my analysis isn't too off. But what's the average density likely to be anytime in the near future? My guess is there's a 1/x power law distribution of some kind (hmm, perhaps so?) More googling leads to a paper saying that average building height in Los Angeles is really more like 12 meters (with cities like Phoenix at 5 meters). So maybe we can chop off two orders of magnitude from our 1km height estimate. So 430K atoms per IP #?

Then there are two other factors that lead to further overestimates of usable volumetric space; that urbanization itself isn't spread evenly over the surface of the earth, and that within this, say, 10meter high volume, there's a limit to the nanodevice density that humans (and the atmosphere) will accomodate. That alone cuts the max number of atoms worldwide dedicated to nanodevices down by several orders of magnitude further. Enough so that I'm still pretty comfortable that nanotech won't exhaust IPv6.

OK, I've spent way too long satisfying my curiousity. Hope someone out there found it interesting. :)

--LP

currency converter - findsounds.com

how stuff works - infoplease

about.com - librarian's index

rebecca's reference - tom mayo's links
-words:

acronym/abbr -lookup -finder -bm

trans -babelfish -worldlingo -google bm

bartleby

phrontistery

pseudodictionary

jargon file
--music

epitonic - pitchfork

sonomu - electraum

gnod - audioquarium --books:

amazon - abebooks - bookfinder

gutenberg & onlinebooks

loc.gov - lambiek comiclopedia - rebecca's books

Here you will find the pdf of the Linux Kernel Internals, authored by Tigran Aivazian (tigran@veritas.com). Now, he has been submitting patches to the kernel for a long time.

He submitted patches for (among others)

Microcode updates

iBCS patches

kgdb patches

Linux Implementation of SCO UnixWare BFS

and I'm sure a lot more, across a wide range of kernel versions (2.2/2.3/2.4 ...)

Why does this matter? Well his email used to be tigran@ocston.org. odd domain name, try reversing it.search and look at the first two results, then look here for more info about the first entry.

Before that his email was tigran@sco.org, but he
got a little paranoid
about it.

Searching google brings up patches supplied by him throughout the whole development cycle of 2.3/2.4 and more. He is directly connected to the author of the LKP on SCO Unix, draw your own conclusions here.

Admittedtly this is slightly offtopic, but it's close enough to somthing I've always wondered that I thought I'd post it here.

Hydrogen and Helium are two elements with unusual properties: they're so light that the earth's gravitational field cannot hold them in their elemental form (or molecular form for Hydrogen, H2). Most of the Helium that we use has been harvested from oil wells and is the product of radioactive decay. When we run out of oil, we'll have to turn to nuclear power if we want more helium.

Hydrogen is a little different, of course. Since it's so reactive and abundant people usually don't worry about losing it. But considering that water vapor in the upper atmosphere, whatever it's source can be broken apart into HO and H, and some H might escape into space.... how would this impact the Hydrogen cycle?

If we're continually getting water delivered to earth via mini-comets (this is still debated) and continually evaporating off Hydrogen, what would this say about oxygen levels on earth, especially when the earth was first forming and possibly further from chemical equilibrium. Does this mandate an oxidizing environment if water is abundant in the earth's atmosphere, thus weighing in against the possibility that early earth had a reducing atmosphere?

I had a professor criticize this scenario back when I was in school, but he couldn't offer any evidence why it was wrong.

Yup, thats it:

Heres a screenshot and a download

UCL recently commisioned a study of this; it's fairly old actually. More info here

I can send you a video of me video taping my DAOC bot in progress.

They've actually patched Asheron's Call, and DAOC from some exploits I've done.

Since you won't believe I wrote my DAOC code, and its on a CD in my storage pile, I won't go to the effort of showing it. I am writing a MMORPG now, and some of the code is GPLed, so you can check it. If you have a job you can find me, then I'll show you code. Otherwise I think I've spent enough time on a worthless forum troll.

Here's the tool to build 3d fighting animations I wrote in a month:
XYZimation

KyuFu
This is for people who want to see how my games coming along.
This is also for people who don't think I can code.
I have another 2000-4000 hours of work... Next month's demo hopefully will have some combat in it.
Controls:
wasd moves
r-low punch
h-high punch
y-low kick
g-high kick
f-crouch
b-strafe/block
t-jump
v-crashes the game
Spacebar-Makes a random particle effect in the room

Try holding attacks in, some combos, standing G and H are good.
Try attacks in a jump.
Try attacks in a crouch.

No attacks do anything but animation yet.
I need to adjust some move speeds here and there, but they're not so bad now.
Later the moves will be mapped to joystick

Comes with Red Hat Linux 6.1 cd, and I found a simple use for it, although I am not a professionally trained programmer:

My Linux Files, Page Two

I would have loved to have had something like that to play with when I was a teenager. At the time, all we had was Ham Radio, and PC's didn't exist. Only transistors I could get my hands on were the 2N107 (GE) and the CK722 (Raytheon).

Penis Bird post brought to you by the Goatsemon Music Group!
*p_e_n_i_s_b_i_r_d_p_e_n_i_s_b_i_r_d_*
p______...___________________________p
e____(_..__`'-.,--,__________________e
n_____'-._'-.__`\a\\_________________n
i_________'.___.'_(|_________________i
s____________7____||_________________s
b___________/___.'_|_________________b
i__________/_.-'__,J_________________i
r_________/_________\________________r
d________||___/______;_______________d
*________||__|_______|_______________*
p________`\__\_______|__/__''\_______p
e__________'._\______/.-`____{}|_____e
n___________/\_`;_.-'_________/______n
i___________\_;(((____.--'\_/________i
s_________.(((_____.-;\______________s
b____.--'`_____,;`'.'-;\_____________b
i_taco's____.'____'._.'\\____________i
r_dick_--'_________|__\_|____________r
d__________________\_\,_/____________d
*p_e_n_i_s_b_i_r_d_p_e_n_i_s_b_i_r_d_*

note: if above site is slashdotted, try this one.

Important Stuff: Please try to keep posts on topic. Try to reply to other people's comments instead of starting new threads. Read other people's messages before posting your own to avoid simply duplicating what has already been said. Use a clear subject that describes what your message is about. Offtopic, Inflammatory, Inappropriate, Illegal, or Offensive comments might be moderated. (You can read everything, even moderated posts, by adjusting your threshold on the User Preferences Page)

Geocities let ME have more bandwidth :(

As lore would have it, the original USL suit against BSD and Berkely University broke up on the rocks for a similar reason.

As lore would have it, the proper spelling of Berkeley is B-E-R-K-E-L-E-Y, and the proper usage is "University of California, Berkeley," being that Berkeley is the University of California; the other UC schools (UCLA, UCSC, et al) are merely extensions of UC Berkeley, which was founded in 1868.

So no, it's not spelled "Berkly," Berkely," Berkley," or any combination of the three, and it most certainly has no connection to the Berklee College of Music.

I'm amazed that any self-respecting geek can misspell "Berkeley", given the advances made there. Where the hell do you think Berkelium and Californium were discovered? If it weren't for Berkeley, which runs LANL and LBNL, the DOD would be up shit creek, and GWB wouldn't have any of those "nuke-u-ler" weapons he likes to talk so much about. For the love of god, the guy who won a Nobel prize for inventing the frickin LASER is a professor there.

Without Berkeley, there'd be no BSD; it's the Berkeley Software Distribution. It's in the name of the operating system. If you can't even properly spell the name of the operating system to which you're referring, why even bother to make any comment at all?

I'd like to see a timeline.

I found a November 2002 article talking about SCO, high end computing work that they had done with Compaq in the clustering arena and a brief touch on LKP.

I found a February 2001 article just about Linux and SCO integration and LKP.

I found a 2002 SCO Newsletter touting LKP.

I also found Simon Baldwin's resume who has a long history at SCO and who was the "Lead Kernel Engineer and Architect for the Linux Kernel Personality (LKP)" from February of 2000 to "present".

So the LKP stuff was going on quite some time ago. Before or after IBM allegedly put the offending into Linux? Inquiring minds want to know.

I have a flight computer that runs on Windows 98. Pentium class 533MHz processor. 1G HD and 128Meg flash drive.
You can find it here.
And if there is an issue I can really say my computer 'crashed'.
RDH8

A couple useful docs on that page, thanks for the link.

Side note - I've had my TiBook for about a month, now. When I launched Ethereal for the first time at work, there was a moment of awe among my coworkers.

Plus, all the graphics guys I know went crazy. "Wow! A real computer geek - who has a Mac? That's fantastic!" Apparently, their experience with Mac users has been an "you're either a designer or Nick Burns" kind of thing.

Customer Support for Gnome? It has lots of help files, and configuration areas. True, fvwm has no customer support, and in my mind, is for tinkerers like myself. Right now, I am running evilwm (I call it that when I try and grab the tiny border to resize MozillaFirebird, etc. Can be done, but the "evil" part of the name seems appropriate. I love FVWM2, however, and have one of my favorite .fvwm2rc files here:
Version 3
It works on a Mandrake 8 pc, and has my dial and hangup scripts from:
Linux Files Page

• Bright (download) is the best non-dithering quantiser in the whole world, and reasonably fast, too; based on dlquant
• pngrewrite sorts the palette
• pngcrush removes junk chunks, fixes Photoshop's gamma bug and tries many filters to find a smaller filesize
• OptiPNG is similar to pngcrush, but executes much faster
• pngout uses an alternative deflate, yields sometimes even smaller filesizes
• tweakpng manipulates chunks comfortably with a GUI
• pngquant quantises PNG24 with alpha transparency to PNG8 with transparent palettes, the result is alas mostly ugly

sleightplus demonstrates how to overcome IE's rendering bugs without polluting your markup or styles; no silly style inlining required, either. Use PNG images or backgrounds all the way they were intended.

Predecessors with only support for foreground images: Youngpup sleight, WebFX PNG behavior, mongus pngInfo, Bob Osola. PNGHack, a server side solution, is doomed to fail because of dysfunctional browser sniffing.

If that was useful for you, and you are a C hacker, I have a plea. Take the dlquant sourcecode (see above) and massage it so it works with PNG instead of the archaic PPM. I want a functional Bright clone for Linux that takes a true colour PNG and outputs a paletted PNG. Can you do that?

The ability to properly illuminate latin texts is probably dying out as well.

Dying out?! Nonsense its going through a revival! Geeks all over the globe in groups such as the Society for Creative Anachronism are keeping it alive. Take a look at some common work for a better idea (remember that being good at illumination doesn't make you a good webmaster though.)

Yes, I know, I'm a geek.

Hai desu!

Please don't /. me :)

-uso.

goatsemon music group, music inspired by goatse:
http://www.geocities.com/goatsemon/

in the list of roadside americana, along with carhenge

and also, unfortunately, soon to have some it's planets ripped off and mounted in dorm rooms ;-(

Yes, and you can use 'em up on this just as quickly.

Penis Birds?

Goatsemon Music Group

You're a gross optimist. If we're not lucky, we'll get the current situation and we don't even need to be even moderately unlucky to get it.

If we're moderately unlucky we'll get a expansion of globalist dieases like autism.

If we're really unlucky (we're talking 50 years here -- a "geologic age" these days) we'll get to terminate life.