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Where is the problem ? Just use this.

http://www.his.com/~pshapiro/acorn.on.moon.html

Here in Portland, OR there was a story in the newspaper about a guy who commutes to work in a canoe. I kid you not.
OP should have used Seattle to Chicago instead of Atlanta to Denver. No rivers be crossin' the Continental Divide.

Two words: Panama Canal

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/True_Names
http://www.his.com/~z/vinge.html

or maybe Little Brother
http://craphound.com/littlebrother/download/

I'm unsure as to what the modern library will be like, or even if it will have a physical public location - though I hope they maintain that part. My ideal library would have a number of advanced technologies incorporated - from Tagging and print on demand books to Virtual Reality education and highend computer modelling/simulation software.

I am interested.

Which CDK library were you using: Vexus' at http://www.vexus.ca/products/CDK/ or Thomas E. Dickey's at http://dickey.his.com/cdk/cdk.html?

The results are presented at the IEDM conference, and it seems that there's no published article on this yet. From this page I get:

Ultra-Thin Phase-Change Bridge Memory Device Using GeSb
Y.C. Chen, C.T. Rettner***, S. Raoux***, G.W. Burr***, S.H. Chen, R.M. Shelby***, M. Salinga***, W.P. Risk***, T.D. Happ*, G.M. McClelland***, M. Breitwisch^, A. Schrott^, J.B. Philipp*, M.H. Lee, R. Cheek^, T. Nirschl**, M. Lamorey^^, C. F. Chen, E. Joseph^, S. Zaidi*, B. Yee^, H. L. Lung, R. Bergmann*, and C. Lam^, Macronix International Co. Ltd., *Qimonda, **Infineon Technologies, ***IBM Almaden Research Center, ^IBM Watson Research Center, ^^IBM Essex Junction, San Jose, CA

An ultra-thin phase-change bridge (PCB) memory cell, implemented with doped GeSb, is shown with 100microAmp RESET current. The device concept provides for simplified scaling to small cross-sectional area (60nm squared) through ultra-thin (3nm) films; the doped GeSb phase-change material offers the potential for both fast crystallization and good data retention.

Emission laws could actually be to BLAME for global warming. Believe it or not, the EPA itself says catalytic converts cause it. They reduce smog and other harmful pollutants, but cause nitrous oxide, the main contributor nowadays to this alleged global warming. Read for yourself (article a NY Times archive):

http://www.his.com/~sepp/Archive/controv/controver sies/catalytic.html

Actually, the GPL'ed output of bison it was considered a feature for some time. Enough time for byacc to gain ground. The exception was inserted because of the existence of byacc ment that the ability to use bison was no longer a incentive to release code as GPL.

The appropriate popularity comparison would be between byacc and bison.

done already. it's called "vile" (vi like emacs). here: http://dickey.his.com/vile/vile.html

Well, I guess there is VILE, the vi "finger-feel" emulator for Emacs...

The leakage path relevant to tunneling is through the gate oxide, from the gate to the channel below it. In this case, the width of the barrier is the gate oxide thickness, not the gate length. So the ways to decrease tunneling include having a thicker gate oxide, but of course it'll still be slower (less capacitive coupling of the gate to the charge in the channel). A representative paper reviewing gate tunneling and its effects on logic gate performance is this one (in pdf).

Also, the height of the barrier is determined by the material properties, not the gate voltage. With that said, I still don't understand how the authors can do what the press release says they say they do. How does RTA affect the material properies enough to affect tunneling significantly? MOS gate oxides are one of the most studied materials known to man, with uncounted man-millenia devoted to eliminating any defects therein. What did they miss?

A final thought--if this was such a fundamental breakthrough one would think it would be presented at the International Electron Devices Meeting itself, rather than at the small conference associated with it held later in the week. But maybe not.

Or you could use Vile, which is a scaled-down version of Emacs that has the same keys as vi but loads as quickly as vi. Oh, wait...

Noble Piece Prize != Nobel Peace Prize

Spammer Jeremy D. Jaynes: Represented by David A. Oblon. E-mail addresses: dao@albo-oblon.com, aolaw@his.com, and web form. Source.

Spammer Jessica DeGroot: Represented by Thomas V. Mulrine. Unable to locate e-mail address, but web form. Source.

Spammer Richard Rutkowski: Represented by Leo R. Andrews, Jr. E-mail address: leoa@erols.com. Source.

[Attention, Messrs. Olbon, Mulrine, and Andrews: if you discover this posting and decide to try to track down this 'anonymous coward' with revenge in your hearts, please note that your own actions put your e-mail addresses into the public record and onto the Internet, so kindly don't try to blame me for it. Mr. Olbon, you included your e-mail address in numerous Washington Business Journal articles you authored, and included your second e-mail address when you registered your firm's website. Mr. Mulrine, you signed up for the appropriate service with Martindale. And Mr. Andrews, you included your e-mail address in a legal pleading.]

$164.00

I am sure that the $61 Billion isn't sitting in his back pocket as that would weigh about 600 tons, but he's not hurting for that money.

That would really be vile.

I used the free version 2.1.3 for years but Alpha has been my main text editor on the Mac since 1993 or so. Now that is the closest a real mac app has ever gotten to emacs.

See http://www.his.com/~jlewczyk/adavie/mark8b.html and other sites.

I was in high school at the time and subscribed to this magazine. It was many many times more complex than the typical hobbyist project them. I remember thinking I'd have to drop out of school for six months just to find time to build it!

The screenshots look awful like the good old Turbo Pascal (circa 1990 or so) text-mode GUI library.

It uses ncurses, which originated in 1982.

AC is wrong.

The term microcomputer was coined to refer to a computer based on a "cpu on a chip". For example, when Data General implemented a Nova 3 on a chip (the MicroNova), the machine was called a microcomputer instead of a minicomputer.

The term "personal" was used to refer to non-shared systems well before the IBM PC. Here's a famous example from 1974.

It used to be in the 1980s one could make money raising and selling llamas because everyone wanted to buy them to make money selling them to those who wanted to buy them to make money doing the same etc. While legal, since llamas are beautiful animals in and of themselves, this approach to llama economics still smells to me a bit like a pyramid scheme. See for example: http://members.aol.com/LostCrk431/straightscoop.ht ml

Consider academia. Professors make money producing PhDs wanted by people so they can produce PhDs wanted by people who want to make money doing the same etc. Considering how an average professor might produce tens of PhDs, where will this lead?

See any parallels to llama production?

The Academic PhD market which was hot in the 1950s has over the succeeding decades been collapsing from the weight of overproduced PhDs relative to academic positions. (Yes there are other uses for a PhD but the main use historically was always to teach...)

For details on "Contemporary Problems in Science Jobs" see: http://his.com/~graeme/cpsj.html

Having said that, obviously some PhDs, like some llamas, are a valuable addition in this diverse world.

When I was learning UNIX programming and C++ (on Solaris), we were taught how to code (nothing quite like Stevens' APUE, RIP Richard) but nothing about how to edit, not even a tipsheet/survival guide thing. I hated vi so much, I felt like an idiot because I don't know how to quit it. I programmed most of my stuff on a mac and ftp'ed stuff over. I used Alpha on the Mac, glad it's still around at least in some form. Still the best editor I've used, though NEdit (my current fave) comes close. Me has to start looking at new editors, I kind of like the idea of the folding editors, but they all seem to be too heavy with resources. For those with recommendations of emacs, see last statement about too much resources.

You begin to make sweeping statements that students need to have more of a will to use the opportunities that they already have. Please, tell us about those opportunities that they have in, say, poorer parts of India, Brazil, or even the United States. Why do you feel those opportunites are enough? Don't you think that choice is good? Don't you think that having more educational options available to people is a good thing? Do you think that everyone has access to the same materials that you do? That the libraries throughout the world or even your country have a wealth of materials such as the ones you have access to? You know, there's a lot of places in the world where quality education isn't ubiquitous.

You also make the mistake of thinking that education can only be gained by sitting through a lengthy class and not from watching a 70 minute video. Who says that one VCD, or many, have to teach you French or calculus? And why do you think they can't? Sure, interaction is important, but haven't you ever sat down with a book and learned something from it? There's plenty of people who've taught themselves things from reading a book on how to do it. I learned how to draw and paint from reading a book. I also learned to program Perl from a book. There's no reason that a video makes it any different, it's just a different medium.

Thankfully, there are people such as ADUni that continue to make quality educational programs accessible in spite of your defeatist attitude. Not only do they provide the videos but they also provide the materials so that people can learn by practicing.

quote:

i dunno, it just seems like a waste to me.

Get every bit of GNU software off your systems. Then see what your "linux" system is worth. Sure, you can get by without gcc, gimp, gnome, ncurses, emacs, bash. But you can start by getting glibc off your systems. And after you delete it, reboot.

Ncurses doesn't use a GNU license. It uses an MIT style license.

First of all you should decide on exactly what you want to do. Do you want to design and build your own computer, or are you happy to build a computer that other people have already designed? I started building other people's designs (the first computer I built was a Z-80 kit computer) and managed to teach myself enough to tackle designing and building a simple 8-bit computer. 8-bit computers are reasonably simple to design and build and there's quite a lot of resources on the net available.

I would suggest that you look at sites like 6502.org, www.coprolite.com, Mark-8, POD 6502 or Grant Searle's collection of sites build your own UK101, build your own ZX-80 and build your own Jupiter Ace...

These are all quite good sites, and you can study their designs to learn how they work.

Hope this helps!

Sure. Just about any UNIX desktop environment is as flexible as LiteStep. Roll your own...don't feel like you just need to use KDE or GNOME or something like that. I've got a rather nice desktop with sawfish, the sawfish pager, all status information being shown via gkrellm, and programs launched via the keyboard using xbindkeys. No GNOME or KDE flavoring necessary.

AfterStep is probably the closest in functionality to LiteStep, but I personally prefer Enlightenment if you're looking for flash, Sawfish if you're looking for functionality, and Black Box if you're looking for speed.

Steps in roll-your-own:

Choose a base desktop environment (keep in mind that you can just mix and match bits of them...I used to use the GNOME panel without the rest of GNOME, and a roommate uses GNOME apps with the KDE environment):
None
GNOME
KDE
ROX
foXdesktop
Perltop
Equinox
XFce
Once you've chosen a desktop environment (or the lack of one), and possibly removed the parts of it that you don't like (with GNOME, I wholeheartedly suggest trying it without Nautilus, possibly without anything but the panel), then you get to choose a dock. Your current desktop may or may not include a dock/panel/wharf.

If it doesn't, icedock provides an environment-independent wharf for the afterstep-style wharf system -- swallowing apps.
gkrellm (seems to be currently down) makes for a nice status-monitor style dock.
Or you can make your own impromptu dock...I've built them before by starting xload and xlock with proper geometry arguments to stack them on top of each other, and having sawfish make the windows sticky and slap 'em at the edge of the screen.
Now a window manager. There are so many of these that I'm not going to list them all. I'll mention a few notables:
sawfish is a fairly fast, *extremely* flexible (everything's written in lisp, much like emacs) window manager that uses gtk. Currently GNOME's default. I love this thing, but it doesn't come with a pager, so you either need to use a base desktop environment with a pager or use spager.
enlightenment is, at least until the next major release, still a window manager and not a desktop environment. Lots of emphasis on eye candy.
ion, a novel window manager that's designed to be managed entirely with the keyboard and never overlap windows.
blackbox is what I'd suggest if you needed a fast environment that still looked nice.

Most WMs support launching programs with given key combinations. I'd advise against this. The excellent XBindKeys is window-manager independent, quite capable, allows you to kill off your window manager and still use keys to start programs, etc. Plus, there's a nice benefit to using a different program than your window manager to launch programs. If you never launch external programs with your WM, you can renice -10 `pidof sawfish` or whatever your window manager is. Making your window manager (and X) meaner with respect to CPU scheduling makes for a much more snappy environment when edge flipping or the like. Sure, it might take a sec for the mozilla windows in the background to finish redrawing when I flip to a new desktop, but in the meantime I can do my work without waiting around for them.

The reason you don't want to make your WM meaner if you use it to launch programs is that then all the programs will also be equally mean.

Decide on the Big Four applications of any X desktop. Text editor, web browser, file manager, and terminal emulator.

Text editor:
I can't possibly cover this holy war here. My personal preference is xemacs, which is a bit of a learning curve for new users from Windows, but well worth it in power in the long run. You may want something that meshes more with the rest of your chosen desktop environment.

Web browser:
Just because KDE uses Konqueror and GNOME uses galeon by default is no reason to stick with those. Of course, you also can use either Konq without KDE or galeon without GNOME. You're rolling your own environment!
mozilla is now (after years of work) a good web browser. Big, still slow and still RAM-hungry, but usably so.
dillo Lightweight, very fast, pretty stable, very screen-space efficient...I can't say enough good things about dillo. If you use dillo as your primary browser, be aware of the fact that it has fewer features than the large browsers, that it doesn't currently (without a patch) support SSL, that it uses a UNIXish config-file preferences interface, and that it doesn't lay out nested tables or wrap text around images the same way Mozilla does. I keep Mozilla around as a backup browser, but dillo is so freakishly fast that it's hard to want to use anything else.
There are a few other browsers, but Konqueror, Mozilla, and dillo are (IMHO) the big GUI players on Linux. Amaya is a specialty browser, Opera (thanks to its MDI interface) doesn't seem to have caught on much in the Linux world, and Navigator 4.x is definitely on its way out the door.

File manager:
You may choose to simply use a command-line shell and the standard file utilities (cp, rm, ls) to do your file management -- I do, and I've tried hard to give other things a chance. But if you prefer to use a specalized GUI tool:
Konqueror can be used, even if you aren't using KDE (you do, of course, need the KDE libraries installed). Faster than gecko (the engine in mozilla and galeon) and almost as standards compliant, Konqueror has a lot of fans.
GMC is no longer being developed, but it's a reasonable lightweight interface.
Nautilus, the current official GNOME file manager is big, slow, RAM-hungry, and pretty. Not sure how well Nautilus works outside of GNOME (given that Konqueror can work outside of KDE, I would expect this capability of Nautilus).
ROX filer is a very fast little gtk file manager.
There are a lot of file managers out there, so I won't list them all, especially as I'm happy with just bash and the POSIX tools.

Terminal emulator:
GNOME and KDE both come with terminal emulators -- gnome-terminal and Konsole. I'm not very impressed with either -- they're both very slow and aren't available apart from their associated desktop environment. Konsole supports tabbed terminals, which some people may like. Both of them are fairly easy to configure, and are suitable for newbies to work with.
Multi Gnome Terminal extends gnome-terminal significantly with Konsole-style tabs and a set of other features. If you like gnome-terminal, you should probably consider using this instead.
Eterm is a RAM-heavy terminal emulator that was designed to look nice. For all the tinting and blending it can do, reasonably fast.
Aterm seems to be basically a less featureful, less memory-hungry Eterm-like terminal.
xterm is the reasonably fast not-so-pretty fairly RAM-hungry terminal that's used all over the world.
rxvt is easily my favorite terminal emulator. rxvt uses less RAM than anything else out there, and is incredibly fast. You can compile in only the features you want to use (which can, of course, also be disabled at runtime). Background images are supported, but emphasis is not much on eye candy. Very configurable. The biggest drawback is that configuration is through traditional UNIX methods, which may scare away some -- X resources, command line options, compile-time options.

Whatever you do, choose a set of software that you like, and remember -- your desktop environment is based on Linux, which means it should composed of exactly the parts that you like most. Have fun!

The romans depended on their technology...

Gibbon lists the following reasons for the fall of the Roman Empire:

• the long period of peace and the uniform government of the Romans gradually extinguished the industry and creativeness of the people, as well as the military discipline and valour of the soldiers
• the indulgence in luxury, which originally remained confined to the nobles and residents of the Imperial Court, was later extended to the troops, totally corrupting their morals
• the enrolment of mercenary barbarians in the armies, which served to excuse the Roman themselves from military responsibilities, at the same time encouraged the barbarians within the Empire to grow in power and influence
• the multiplication of oppressive taxes was countered and evaded by the rich, who shifted the burden to the poor, who in turn also dodged them and fled to the woods and mountains to become Rome's rebels and robbers
• Christianity, which sapped the faith of the people in the official (pagan) religion, thereby undermining the state which that religion supported and blessed
• the barbarian invasions.

Barbarians exploiting Roman technology to Rome's detriment would not appear to be as significant as these other factors.

Indians developed anti-gravity propulsions eons ago! Info here Of course they didn't find spaceship yet.. but lets keep our fingers crossed:)

Oh, and by the way if you haven't know.. I am a real Martian! A proof!

Simply go here, and check to see if your favorite pyramid-scheme spammer is on there. Most of them are.

Now, go and sign up one of them for random free crap (AOL CD's, etc.). If one lives near you, taking out frustrations on them next halloween will be even more effective.

Of course, I'm not advocating you do anything illegal. But, when they give away their addresses, they must be seeking feedback about their social skills.

go grab a copy of turbo vision for unix. it's on freshmeat. it's a port of the old borland turbo vision text gui toolkit for dos.

it's in c++, not c, but it wouldn't be too difficult to make a c binding. or just use c++.

whatever you do, don't use curses. it sucks rocks. unless, of course, your app only needs text entry widgets and buttons.

if you must use curses, at least use cdk (curses development kit) which makes the life of the curses programmer much easier. the maintainer was very responsive to the issues i encountered when using it.
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Pulled this from here

Bookmarks using hostnames will not work just yet.

There's a brief account of what seems to have caused the outage on the opening page -- from the viewpointof Digital Nation and Verio.

If port 80 was shut off, it was not at our request. Here is the Drudge-munged URL:

http://jya.com/crypto.htmhttp:// jya.com/crypto.htm

Yes, a back to back embedded link under the visible, correct URL. Those who figured out the mistake typed in the correct URL rather than madly pounding the clicker.

The favicon.ico attack did not seem supported by the error logs -- the great bulk of those accrued before the outage. And we never saw them as a bother, but, listen, we have little idea of what goes on in the embedded-code Internet, or the embedded-code world.

We have indeed received much advice, consolation and ridicule over this teapot, and appreciate all of it, the ridicule mostso for its apt match of our rogue state.

Let's try this again.. :/
Pat Gomes' site

More than that, there are labels that manage to put out multiple albums every year, pay the artists higher royalties, and still make a buck. Touch & Go's royalty rate is around 50%; I believe that of DeSoto and Dischord sits at around 40%. The entire feast-famine business model of the major labels is essentially flawed; a band on an independent label--or making professional-quality music themselves, a la the Poster Children--and touring frequently (but without putting out a video or sinking hundreds of thousands of dollars into studio time) can make a living where most bands playing the majors' game can't. It's that simple. Steve Albini broke down the numbers in an essay for The Baffler, and for all his personality issues, I'm inclined to trust his numbers.
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