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I suggest you start by looking here LinuxDevices.com's SBC reference, it is a terrific resource.

Im not sure the PC itself is your problem, simply getting a proper LCD driver and VidCard is your real issue.

As Ive seen/thought many times before, even recently mentioned here @ /., is the trouble you have driving a standard LCD. Dead laptops with very cool and useful LCD displays probably litter the parts pile of every slashdot user(!) - geeks are really unable to give up that LCD. Outside of buying a terribly expensive driver card from someone like Earth LCD. Also you may want to have a look at this reference.

This is an excellent question, an excellent topic and a very worthwhile idea. Basically, how do we hobble together some cheap, general purpose computers... not too much power - not much more than a network connection... these could be terminals in the home, "tablet-pcs", a DIY "ConnectedTouchpad/IOpener/Audrey", portable MP3 players... all cry out for *EXACTLY* the hardware this question is asking for.

A modular "embedded" PC. Just like our desktops... expandable, extensible and versatile. Why dont we have a solution like this for PDAs? Without straying OT too far, it would be *EXCELLENT* to see a DIY laptop for a lot of reasons.

Incidentally, APL was invented by Kenneth Iverson, who never taught at Pomona. Perhaps you're thinking of somebody involved in APL's descendent, J. But neither language was the pet project of one prof.

I hope you have a great sense of humor, or else have just neglected your physics education, because currently I have little faith in your powers of logic.

OTOH, I suppose you're a neccessary part of the scientific eco-system. We always need people criticizing the accepted standards, pushing us to put up (give some physical proof) or shut up. I would prefer, though, if you would adhere to the same standards of intellectual honesty that your typical scientist does. For instance, if you could come up w/ some alternate theories w/ solid predictions, that could be verified or disproven, I might listen. Otherwise, you're little more than a crackpot claiming that stuff doesn't work because it doesn't make sense, to your math-illiterate brain. Well, tough. The Universe is not mandated to 'make sense' to the Joe Public, especially if he refuses to try. The power of populism only goes so far, you know.

At least the original post linked to someone who is willing to make predictions that can be proven or disproven. That man is a scientist, IMHO, whether I agree w/ him or not. Your link is to a crackpot, OTOH.

SpaceTime physics defines a static world. Since our world is constantly changing SpaceTime physics is prolly wrong. http://home1.gte.net/res02khr/crackpots/notorious. htm I don't know if I hold with everything at the above link but it is certainly something to think about.

Step 1, invent time machine

Except time travel is impossible, no matter what some notorious "scientific" crackpots would have you think. Time is simply the reciprocal of change; motion in a four-dimensional spacetime is impossible.

Still, for those desperate to achieve the Golden-eye pen twiddle and still get decent typing speeds, you can reach speeds of up to 60 wpm with the dvorak one-handed layouts (the keyboards are probably a little bigger than this though).

not_cub

Oh, unenlightened one, if only you had read the informative web page of the person you are responding to, you would REALIZE that most of the major figures in 20th century physics are crackpots! Here is a portion of the list of liars taken from the aforementioned page:

• Stephen Hawking
• Kip Thorne
• John A. Wheeler
• Richard Feynman
• Michio Kaku
• John Gribbin
• Carl Sagan

The problem with you, and all the people in the list above, is that you are all weirdos who believe in "time travel!" That is, one-directional time travel into the future. Clearly this is impossible!

Ha! Fools! Ahahaha! HAHAHAHAHA! Fools, all of them FOOLS!

--

Oh, unenlightened one, if only you had read the informative web page of the person you are responding to, you would REALIZE that most of the major figures in 20th century physics are crackpots! Here is a portion of the list of liars taken from the aforementioned page:

• Stephen Hawking
• Kip Thorne
• John A. Wheeler
• Richard Feynman
• Michio Kaku
• John Gribbin
• Carl Sagan

The problem with you, and all the people in the list above, is that you are all weirdos who believe in "time travel!" That is, one-directional time travel into the future. Clearly this is impossible!

Ha! Fools! Ahahaha! HAHAHAHAHA! Fools, all of them FOOLS!

--

informed content? do you mean like super-string theory or oort cloud objects?
before you guys get too carried away, try reading this:
Notorious Spacetime Crackpots.


Bored with your projects?
Try Einsteinium

This is a very weak interpretation of the EPR experiment: there is no reason to believe that "physics is fundamentally nonlocal" in the sense that you're talking about - especially when it comes to the interpretation that it will produce "instant" anything.

The hardest part of quantum entanglement to understand is the fact that Nature is both fundamentally local and nonlocal at the same time. Yes. You heard me. That's exactly what I meant.

Locality in my mind has to do with an extrinsic (to particles) space, i.e., extrinsic positions. Locality implies that, in order for an object to move from point a to point b, it must move through each and every position that comprises the distance between points a and b.

This would always be true if one assumes there is a space. I have excellent reason to believe there isn't. If one assumes that the position of a particle is intimated related to the particle, like the position variable of a sprite is part of the sprite structure, then it becomes theoretically is possible to change it in one fell swoop without going the incremental route. IMO, this is what Bell's inequality is telling us.

Interactions are local

Certainly interactions are local but we must be define what we mean by that. To me, it only means that particles with equal positions may (or may not) interact. Size and distance are extremely problematical beasts because, once one makes size or space necessary, one is immediately faced with an insurmountable infinite regress problem. I abhor infinite regress.

a particle at point B ten light years away from a particle at point A can only interact with an on-mass-shell particle intermediating the two. That is, for an electron which emits a photon which is reabsorbed by a particle ten light years away, the photon is on-shell - or VERY nearly on-shell: q^2 = 0. They can't exchange an off-mass-shell particle, because it would need to live too long. What does this mean? It means that space essentially determines the momentum scale of an interaction - i.e., interactions are fundamentally *local*.

Well, you see, to me, the two electrons never interacted. That would be action at a distance and we all know that's nonsense. The emitted photons, OTOH, travel at c and interact locally with the electrons to produce the proper changes in momentum.

Asking "where is an electron?" is nonsense. The concept of "where" doesn't exist quite as firmly for an electron as we think it does for us.

This is a nonsensical interpretation. Just because one cannot measure the exact position of an electron does not reflect on the nature of positional properties but on the nature of measurement.

You said it yourself. All that exists are particles and their interactions.

...and their properties. I doubt that you truly believe it though, because if you seriously work out the consequences of that statement, you'll find that it destroys many of your sacred cows.

Particles don't provide the structure of spacetime - their interactions do. You can't have instantaneous changes in position because that would suddenly cause all the interactions that those particles were undergoing to become nonlocal.

I disagree. It is true that a change in position is not instantaneous; it must be at least a minimum interval, the time it takes a particle traveling at c to cover Planck distance (as you see, I subscribe to a discrete universe). However, if position is truly an intrinsic property of particles (which it must be if only particles exist), it should be possible to devise an interaction such that this position is changed by a factor greater than Planck length.

However, good luck actually predicting the dynamics of creating a wormhole.

A wormhole is pure unmitigated crackpottery. Physicists should be ashamed to be talking about this crap. A wormhole is impossible because it requires the physical existence of spacetime. And, as we should all have figured out by now, spacetime cannot exist because nothing can move in it. It is motionless from the infinite past to the infinite future.

Nasty Little Truth About Spacetime Physics

OK. So even the 'simple' 4-velocity dx/dt now looks like dx/dt = (c, dx/dt, dy/dt, dz/dt). Nothing's unitless - everything has dimensions of distance/time. Thus, we have already disproven the statement in the above link. So, we can stop here.

You sir, are a babbling moron. c is measured in meters per second and does not represent speed in time but speed in a spatial dimension. Speed in a time diemsnion is silly because it would have to be given in second per second. Any high school kidd can grasp this. Just because one can mathematically convert the time axis from seconds to meters with the use of ct does not mean that one can move in time. Get a clue.

Any physicist who does not understand that a time dimension forbids motion should have his degree taken away from him and his alma mater picketed for fraud.

Nasty Little Truth About Spacetime Physics

Actually, I believe that's exactly what I said. Information is NOT being transmitted faster than light.

I agree but thought you meant that quantum entanglement is impossible because it would violate the c speed limit. My position is that it would not because there is no motion involved.

Not true at all. Special relativity (and even more so, general relativity) suggest that spacetime is very real in that the relative positions of two events in spacetime alone can determine whether or not one can possibly affect the other. Gravity itself is a manifestation of the curvature of spacetime. So spacetime is as real as gravity.

I disagree. Spacetime can be shown to be non-existent for a very simple reason: nothing can move in spacetime by definition. If we existed in a spacetime, we would not know it because nothing could move in it.

In fact, as weird as quantum entanglement and the EPR paradoxes are, they do not allow for us to transmit any information faster than light. It appears to be a non-local phenomenon at first glance, but no matter how hard you try, you just can't figure out a way to transmit information faster than light. To do so would prove basic quantum mechanics to be incompatible with relativity, and they've already shown to be compatible.

Nonlocality precludes the existence of space of spacetime. There is no magic in this thing. The spacetime of relativity is not real. It is an abstract math construct. Relativity is a macroscopic theory, a mere math trick or tool created for the prediction of the motion of bodies. It does not reveal any physical mechanism. As such it does not contradict nonlocality. It is only when one assumes the existence of spacetime as a physical entity that one runs into crackpot theory.

Nasty Little Truth About Spacetime Physics

But for two particles to become entangled, they must be created or interact at the same point. They can then be moved great distances apart and they remain entangled. So no information can really be transmitted from A to B by means of making measurements on the particles. To do so would violate causality (i.e. you'd be transmitting information faster than light.

Actually this is not correct. Nothing is being tranmitted. This is the hardest part of quantum entanglement to understand. As I said, what the whole thing means is that there is no space. The universe, as its name implies is ONE. Distance or space is an illusion that emerges from the intrinsic properties properties of particles.

As Gottfried Leibniz once put it, "space is nothing but the nature of the order of things". Nature is nonlocal at its fundamental level. I envision that instant secure communication is just the least of the things we will accomplish with future technologies. We might even achive instant transportation and I don't mean "beaming" people around as in Star-Trek. I mean instant changes of position over great distances.

Nasty Little Truth About Spacetime Physics

If two particles are entangled, they will instantly change state even if they are billions of miles apart. There is absolutely no way to intercept this form of communication because no signal is broadcast from source to receiver. What quantum nonlocality is really telling us is that space is an illusion. There exist only particles, their properties and their interactions. Everything else is either abstract or voodoo.

Nasty Little Truth About Spacetime Physics

Well, the public is certainly not limited to Joe Sixpack. We live in a world where people can get any information they want on any subject, often at the click of a mouse. People are getting informed about the things that interest them, at prodigious rate. This is one of the promises of the internet. There are a lot of people out there, non-scientists, college dropouts who are pretty knowledgeable in a particlar subject even though they never received a degree in it.

The way I look at it, public access is like open source. It's like E.R's many-eyes paradigm. It keeps the crackpottery out and scientists on their toes. Science needs a fresh perspective, otherwise it becomes a form of self-referential intellectual incest and malformed concepts are the progeny. This is what happened to relativity and gravity research. It's been close to a hundred years and we still haven't the slightest clue as tothe the causal and physical processes that give rise to gravity. It's sad.

Nasty Little Truth About Spacetime Physics

One of the bigger problems with the exclusivity of scientific journals is that the lay public has no real way of precisely determining how its money is being spent on scientific research. After all, most scientific papers are reports on publicly funded projects. By and large, the scientific community does not feel like it is accountable to the lay public and looks down condescendingly at them. I think it is a mistake to underestimate the collective lay-intellect. It is also not a good idea to insult the source of one's bread and butter.

Nasty Little Truth About Spacetime Physics

There is a physics-is-math cult composed of nerd physicists and mathematicians who think they are free to create physics simply by manipulating spacetime equations using what-if scenarios. This is an absurd way of doing physics because these people don't have the slightest clue as to the actual physical processes and mechanisms that give rise to the phenomenon we call spacetime curvature. Math does not create physics. Physics is about particles, their properties and their interactions. Everything else is either abstract or voodoo. So things like wormholes, black holes and time warps are pure crackpottery, glorified mathematical toys (I think of them as math hacks) invented by grown-up nerds for the sole purpose of impressing their peers and amaze a mystified lay public.

Nasty Little Truth About Spacetime Physics

My mistake. Someone told me he was knighted. He might as well be since he's so brilliant that he figured out that the impossible (time travel) is possible. It's a major accomplishment, don't you think? I'll add a correction to my page.

Nasty Little Truth

Most weird hypotheses of the comos, such as wormholes and black holes, owe their weirdness not to the strangeness of nature but to the belief among celebrated physicists like Sir Stephen Hawking and Dr. Kip Thorne that spacetime exists physically and that bodies are moving along a time dimension. Problem is, nothing can move in spacetime.

This nasty little truth is known by many physicists and is being kept under wrap by the physics community. If it came out in the open, it would make some of the most celebrated physicists in the world look like crackpots at best and frauds at worst.

Nasty Little Truth

Notorious Time Travel Crackpots

Nah, if we get a sense of humor, noone on slashdot will get the point that we had a parade with the monolith at 9pm on New Year's to mess with people's minds and then put it up somewhere else for the same reason.

Just like we did when we had Santarchy, where me and some of my friends (big pic with fire) rampaged thru Seattle dressed as Santas. Some more pics were at Santa John's website.

It's a joke, people!

Verizon sucks. Three days after I started using their dialup I already had 14 spammed messages. And I NEVER gave, wrote down, spoke out loud, my account name a single time. I get at least 50 junk mails a week and i still have never given, used this email account to anyone since day one. I ,mainly use my old shell account from my previous ISP or Yahoo. I emailed Verizon asking how this was possible. I was given a canned response with a link to the Verizon SPAM FAQ.

Basically the solution is to never give out your email address (which I never have) and filter the crap that gets through on your own end! Verizon is ALMOST as bad as Hotmail..

I wrote an NES game that pits a GNOME mascot against a KDE mascot. Play it then tell me what you think.
<O
( \
XGNOME vs. KDE: the game!

I'm a ROM developer. Before you insult, look at my NES work: GNOME vs. KDE is a GPL'd game; Who's Cuter? is what you get when you cross Precious Moments with a Rorschach inkblot.
<O
( \
XGNOME vs. KDE: the game!

I'm a ROM developer. Before you insult, look at my NES work: GNOME vs. KDE is a GPL'd game; Who's Cuter? is what you get when you cross Precious Moments with a Rorschach inkblot.
<O
( \
XGNOME vs. KDE: the game!

I live in the Erie, PA area and was one of the first customers to get DSL. Had a few problems installing it since it was so new to the area but other than that it is all good. From what I can tell GTE lets you run servers. I've ran one from my computer for a few months and haven't had any problems yet, though I do currently only subsribe to "residential" service. (what the difference bettween residential and business is, I really don't know).

Here are some animated Sokoban solutions. Sokoban is a puzzle game where you have to push blocks around a maze.

Yep...my life's goal is to write the kernel for Pimpbot 5000...I can just envision header files like smackaho.h, turnout.h, collectfrombitches.h, polishthecaddy.h, etc.

But seriously, I want to write software that, one day, will all meld into one big piece of code that will do anything...I'll put it in a file called whoisyourdaddy.h or whoisyourdaddy.java and import it into every subsequent piece of code I write. Sort of an API-as-omnipotent-deity pattern...

What is programming but overcoming boredom with brute force?

stuff accesses just as easy to the web surfer, no matter where it's located.

Not 100% accurate. The user might only see com instead of co.uk (or even better to), but ping times to faraway sites are bound to be lower because, for example, light moves only 299.8 km per millisecond. Latency produces slow loading sites, which turn off users who browse linearly and don't use Open Link in New Window aggressively.

My favorite physical bookstore has a presence online, along with plenty of other independent bookstores:

• Powell's City of Books in Portland, OR.
• WoodsWorth in Cambridge, MA
• Book Stacks, in Cleveland, OH, with the domain books.com
• The Tattered Cover in Denver, CO.
• Open Group Books is in Phoenix, AZ, and will ship worldwide.

All of these are smaller, independent bookstores that aren't huge conglomerates (or Internet behemoths,) and are very good alternatives to the conventional. This list has a good selection of online bookstores, including the ones listed above.

Or, there's always the old fasioned way. Walk to your local used bookstore. I guarantee that there is one in your town, and you might just find something worth reading.

No, tetris will not run because Blue Planet Software and The Tetris Company haven't ported it yet (ergo no Tetris®), but there are lots of free falling tetromino games (read: Tetris clones) floating around. I even made one, in TI-83 B*S*C (it's not really BASIC; TI calls the 89's language Keystroke) nonetheless. And then I made a C version. Have fun!

Insane aka SameGame, now that was fun. Pick it up (as Insane on 83/86 and SameGame on 89) at ticalc.org

I think it is possible, to come up with decent methodologies, but at least where I work, they seem to codify the existing mistakes, and make them repeatable rather than actually think about how to improve the process. Frustration with this led me to attempt to come up with a general strategy of development based on ancient Chinese military strategies. Check it out at The Art of Web Application Development. I'm curious as to what people here think of my approach (tongue-in-cheek as it is.) It's a pretty straightforward translation of basic principles on management and strategy, that I think work better than trying to document every detail of how things get done.

Whatever happend to calling before breaking ground. I know with GTE they preach that you should call them before cutting. Whoever thought that they would not heed their own advice from the propaganda machine.

netwiz opined:

I dunno. I saw Rexx on OS/2, it's native platform (next to mainframe), and it beat the hell out of DOS batch files.

I once tried to maintain a database-backed website whose glue was in Rexx. Yes, it blew the doors off DOS batch files. Quite a complete little language with some nice features. Unfortunately, I had the same allergic reaction to it that I always have when I try to read FORTRAN. Its design was very much rooted in the IBM mainframe culture, and it gave me the heebie-jeebies. I'm not being fascitious; something about its worldview bothered me in a very visceral way.

I'd be interested to hear what people who've worked in mainframe culture think about Rexx. I'm very much a *nix person, and just don't understand that point of view. How did it feel to use something like that on the desktop? What's your reaction to today's unix (or windows) dominated environment (and people like me)?

REBOL at least seems to have lost those awful capital letters, despite its retro 70s-language name. They need a retro-chiq logo to go with the name, instead of copying wired