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For a minute I got excited when I saw the name Mehdi. I thought good old Mehdi Ali returned to work some of his magic at microsoft. One can old dream...

I remember those too! Turns out they were needed for backward compatibility with software expecting slower processing. So, it would be more accurate to say your computer back then had more of an underclock feature.

Of course, marketing made a hash of that.

We had another localized chain in these parts that did the same thing, called Dolgin's.

https://dfarq.homeip.net/remem...

CP/M was wildly popular. Take a look at the DOS Technical Reference Manual and you will see that the DOS system calls are basically identical to the CP/M ones. The only real difference is that DOS uses INT 5 instead of CP/M's CALL 5 to invoke system services. This article describes the striking similarities and why they might exist.

Irving Gould and Mehdi Ali can both rot in h*ll as far as I am concerned.

Irving Gould is dead (2004), and while Mehdi Ali is busy whitewashing his reputation, perhaps you can let go of the hate a little?

For a while I the server for my web app ran on a Palm Pre smart phone. because has significantly better performance then running it on my wireless router.

I still run a web server on my phone from time to time to test the new version of the web app that I'm developing on my phone.

CPU 2.5 GHz quad-core Krait 400
3 GB RAM
32 GB SD

I have gentoo prefix installed, which lets me install gentoo software under the stock Android distribution. I also haave XServer XSDL, an Android app that is an X Server, but I haven't used this very much so far.

I use it for web browsing, watching videos and development of Android and Free Pascal software. I have a Bluetooth keyboard to help with that.

I also have a MiniMac connected to the big screen TV at home that is my web server and hosts MythTV. It's also used for web browsing and flash games, mostly by my daughter.

CPU 2.5 GHz quad-core Krait 400
3 GB RAM
32 GB SD

I have gentoo prefix installed, which lets me install gentoo software under the stock Android distribution. I also haave XServer XSDL, an Android app that is an X Server, but I haven't used this very much so far.

I use it for web browsing, watching videos and development of Android and Free Pascal software. I have a Bluetooth keyboard to help with that.

I also have a MiniMac connected to the big screen TV at home that is my web server and hosts MythTV. It's also used for web browsing and flash games, mostly by my daughter.

I use the browser on my Android Wear watch regularly to show transit arrival predictions from my website, TransSee. I added a setting to push the header information to be bottom to get it to be easier to read.

PCs that came with Vista or XPSP3 installed are quite serviceable.

The extended support period for Windows XP Service Pack 3 expired five months ago. It has vulnerabilities that Microsoft will never fix.

Apple is pissed off that everyone copied them. And everyone did. This is not in dispute. THIS REALLY HAPPENED.

Oooh, let me try!

First of all, where are you going to find girls that are interested in geeks?

This. And more often than not, the feeling really is mutual:

"[...] for a group of healthy college-age males, there was remarkably little discussion of a topic which commonly obsesses groups of that composition. Females. Though some led somewhat active social lives, the key figures in TMRC-PDP hacking had locked themselves into what would be called 'bachelor mode.' It was easy to fall into -- for one thing -- as opposed to the hopelessly random problems in a human relationship -- which made hacking particularly attractive. But an even weightier factor was the hackers' impression that computing was much more important than getting involved in a romantic relationship. It was a question of priorities. Hacking had replaced sex in their lives."
...
"[Hacking] was a mission. You would hack, and you would live by the Hacker Ethic, and you knew that that horribly inefficient and wasteful things like women burned too many cycles, occupied too much memory space. 'Women, even today, are considered grossly unpredictable,' one PDP-6 hacker noted, almost two decades later. 'How can a hacker tolerate such an imperfect being?'

- Steven Levy, Chapter 4, Hackers - Heroes of the computer revolution.

I run a website called TransSee that uses the NextBus API to generate bus (and streetcar) predictions. It supports LA, San Fransisco, Boston and Toronto and a bunch of other places.

The web (and mysql) server runs on my Asus WL-500g Premium wifi router connected to a harddrive via USB (which is why it maybe Slashdotted by the time you read this.) It uses DD-WRT

I also have a Wordpress blog and MediaWiki hosted there.

The server is slower then I like. I was thinking of replacing it with the Palm Pre I'm using to make this post.

I run a website called TransSee that uses the NextBus API to generate bus (and streetcar) predictions.

The web (and mysql) server runs on my Asus WL-500g Premium wifi router connected to a harddrive via USB (which is why it maybe Slashdotted by the time you read this.)

I also have a Wordpress blog and MediaWiki hosted there.

The server is slower then I like. I was thinking of replacing it with the Palm Pre I'm using to make this post.

With a government-owned operation the stakeholders (voters) have an incentive to fix the problem. In large companies the shareholders just sell leaving the company to wither.

If a government where as incompetent as the HP board, they would have be voted out by now.

It relates back to my blog post, Why Should owners control companies?

The location of all Los Angles buses by GPS is already publicly available, as well as several other transit systems. New York is piloting the same system for the B63 5th Avenue bus.

GPS doesn't work underground, but I'm pretty sure the MTA already knows exactly where all its trains are. It's just a matter of making the data public rather then trying to interpolate it using cell phone signals.

I wrote Final Fantasy XI Timer for Palm entirely on my Palm Tungsten W using the PP compiler. There where several other compiler for Palm as well.

I'm also hoping to write application on my Palm Pre. I already released an update to Terminal by compiling it with gcc right on my Palm Pre.

What I meant to write is "Governments have".

I don't think adding "to" is correct. The list follows on "ensure that it" and "ensure that it to prevent corruption" doesn't make sense. I guess I should have said "prevents corruption".

Then, again I'm terrible at grammar. I have a whole blog full of errors like this.

There was a watch that was a full PalmOS device. You can still find them on eBay and they are probably still the most versatile watch computer ever sold. It was Fossil brand, too.

With technology improvements it should be possible in a year or two to have a full Palm Pixi equivalent in a watch.

I have a website that tell you when your bus or streetcar is going to arrive and I often think it would be very useful if there was some way to have that information on my watch.

Something similar to webOS dashboard controls that get exported to your watch would be one approach.

The real question: "I'm a friendly blogger. Why isn't anyone paying me?"

I generally use bc for straightforward numerical calculations and R for more complicated things. Another nice cli program is frink, which understands and tracks a huge set of units. It's free as in beer but not open source.

Don't and soon web sites will look like

Site with CSS3, PNG with alpha etc.

Now have a look at that site in Firefox 3.5, Chrome, Safari etc.

(the kind of inconvenience they will hack around, possibly making you even more vulnerable)

Exactly. I worked around it and if I hadn't been able to I probably would have quit. The vpn client for windows enforced the company policy, but the vpn client for linux let me set up split tunelling the way I wanted. So I set up a linux router/firewall and never looked back.

I blogged about it last year: http://hellewell.homeip.net/phillip/blogs/index.php?entry=entry080509-170319

If you have Firefox 3.1:

http://tinyvid.tv/

Real time Chroma-Key replacement: https://developer.mozilla.org/samples/video/chroma-key/index.xhtml

(Let's see you do THAT in Flash!)

Please be gentle with my server, but here's my own Chroma-Key experiments for Firefox 3.1b3:

http://iambatman.homeip.net/html5/index.xhtml

Click "Play", then mess with the "Chroma Key", "Invert", and "Mute" buttons to your heart's delight.

(The video is a random green screen video pulled off of Youtube.)

Note that this should work in Safari 4 with the OGG plugin. Unfortunately, the OGG plugin is out of date for Windows. It would be easy to configure MP4 as a fallback for Safari, but I haven't gotten that far yet. :P

It's already kind of lame when someone spells it M$ or Micro$oft in a comment but...

Yeah. I'm one of the ones that had to learn to not be childish with that use on /.

Do you go back as far to CP/M? The history of CP/M, CP/M-86, QDOS and the *original* PC-DOS? If you had - and I suspect you don't - you might cut some people some slack for that usage.

There exists a pre-PC-DOS link to a statement that Bill Gates put out regarding piracy of BASIC and denigrating everyone for how much money he was losing, how much he and his guys had invested in time and dollars and so forth. It was a little whiney, but he was pretty much spot on regarding the whole piracy thing. http://www.digibarn.com/collections/newsletters/homebrew/V2_01/gatesletter.html

And in those days - just like today - we all paid close attention to Intel. The 8086 was out there, we were all waiting for CP/M-86 stability to get a better computing environment. And CP/M-86 was taking time because it was work and because it was going to be (and eventually was) a quality product.

Seattle Computer Products, a hardware mfgr, created the Quick and Dirty Operating System (QDOS) and despite revisionist history, to ostensibly debug their hardware in anticipation of CP/M-86.

The follow-on history is very nicely summarized right here: http://74.125.45.132/search?q=cache:tIEkLM0yDDkJ:maben.homeip.net/static/S100/software/microsoft/DOS/The%2520origins%2520of%2520MS-DOS.ppt+qdos+S-100+quick+and+dirty+operating+system&hl=en&ct=clnk&cd=5&gl=us - that's the html/cached version, if you want the PPT file, it's here: http://maben.homeip.net/static/S100/software/microsoft/DOS/The%20origins%20of%20MS-DOS.ppt

Part of the backstory on his money loss was that the Osborne had come out, but then the KayPro did too, was doing better, and was getting a lot of attention for the superior (to MS) S-BASIC. So, sales of MS BASIC were not what the company expected. In fact, here's the backstory on Microsoft's creation and the importance of MS-BASIC. I putting the cached link and the orig - I couldn't get the orig server to respond as I write this: http://74.125.45.132/search?q=cache:kKA51ycXpCAJ:www.thocp.net/companies/microsoft/microsoft_company.htm+history+of+altair+basic&hl=en&ct=clnk&cd=1&gl=us and http://www.thocp.net/companies/microsoft/microsoft_company.htm

But add up the history: BASIC w/ license disputes, QDOS w/ license disputes, OS/2 w/ license disputes, Windows w/ license disputes.

Microsoft was once a darling company to many of us. They freed us from the clutches of IBM mini-computers and mainframes at work. It was a pain in the ass, but we could do desktop programming in BASIC rather than getting time to do our FORTRAN calculations on an IBM.

IBM was under attack by the US Justice Dept. in the early 80s - we couldn't have been happier. Then, Microsoft - as a company - was becoming the new IBM, with all of its evil.

I - and many others - were quite accustomed to calling them Micro$oft and M$ by the mid-to-late 80s for their stunts.

I lived through that history. I watched a company that I supported putting the screws to people in the industry.

I was pissed the first time a pretty good post of mine was labeled troll and attacked with

10 dollars_1981 -> dollars
23.83

10 dollars_1972 -> dollars
51.81

Note that Frogger came out in 1981 and Pong in 1972, at least according to Wikipedia. For a perspective of what things cost in 1972, check out this link. Interesting to ponder.

Check out that awesome calculator that makes short work of this problem, and many others: Frink

Throw a lump of antimatter into a lake and answer the most important question related to antimatter:

Does it sink or does it float?

Seriously, although most physicists would say that antimatter is attracted to matter via gravity, nobody has ever been able to do the experiment to find out if antimatter falls up or down.

There is at least a small chance that a lump of antimatter would rocket upward, annihilating against the atmosphere as it went. If the atmosphere annihilating against the lump broke it up into little bits, it would create a cone shaped explosion over your head. One would expect the little bits to break up faster, as they have more surface area per volume. As the force of the 'explosion' disintegrated the antimatter lump, the tiny particles would annihilate more rapidly. Unless of course, the explosion drove away any atmosphere from the immediate vicinity. Maybe that force would be enough to make a shield around the antimatter lump allowing it to survive until it got to outer space relatively unscathed. Who the hell knows?

But if it were attracted to matter via gravity, then it would sizzle, but also likely break up very soon. The little pieces would have more surface area than the big lump, and so would annihilate, ( and break up ) faster. The force of neighboring annihilations may contribute to speeding the breakup of the bits. It might be that the end result is a sort of conflagration that increases rapidly in rate.

Again, who knows?

Here's a fact calculated using Frink

15 gallons gasoline / ( c^2 ) -> micrograms

gives 23.365651177125987076 . So 23 grams of antimatter could fill up your SUV. Pretty cool eh? That's 455 kilos of TNT equivalent, or 928 McDonalds Big Macs.

A 60 megaton blast from an H-Bomb is equivalent to 111 billion McDonalds big Macs or 2.79 kg of antimatter annihilated.

Caveat read-or: I am not a physicist. When you annihilate antimatter to make energy, you do so with the equivalent amount of matter. So to annihilate 1 kg of antimatter, you need 1 kg of matter. So possibly, the amounts of antimatter above should be halved, since really, to annihilate 2 kgs of mass you need 1 kg of matter and 1 kg of antimatter. But, whatever, you get the idea.

jggimi's OpenBSD is quite good as well, you can choose between Gnome KFD Xfce or FluxBox; and they come up usually one week after the official release rather than waiting for months. http://jggimi.homeip.net/livecd/downloads.html

look for easy_e17.sh on the web.
single script to build and install e17 for you. HTH.

And no, compiling from svn doesn't count, especially given the number of components / dependencies

Dependencies are minimal, it's designed to run anywhere. The components can be downloaded and built with a simple shell script

I may have had time to dork with that when I was in college, but not now...

You're on slashdot, you have free time :P

For the lazy:

http://futureboy.homeip.net/frinkdocs/#JavaWebStart

(it's pretty cool even if you aren't lazy...)

Have you ever tried the updated version of mplayerplug-in?

Gecko-mediaplayer (browser plugin) and gnome-mplayer (clean GTK GUI for mplayer that gecko-mediaplayer uses over dbus) really try and give the best browser plugin support for firefox on linux.

You can find out more about them here: http://dekorte.homeip.net/download/

Frink:

http://futureboy.homeip.net/frinkdocs/

agrees with your calculation of 21 million tons(metric).

(to input metric tons into frink, use tonne or metricton)

all I want is a window, plays video, seek bar that goes to the location that I tell it, and I want my controls part of the same window as the video

You might look into trying GNOME Mplayer, a simplified UI for Mplayer. The controls sit in the window (press 'c' to show/hide them). A click in the progress bar seeks pretty close to your click (it doesn't get to the exact point...I think it goes to the nearest keyframe or something).

And for Gantt charts, there's a program which lets you express each task in python code (including whatever calculations, remote data, or whatever that it needs to get data from)

http://faces.homeip.net/

mplayer may have legal problems... that said you my want to try "gnome-mplayer" it can be found at getdeb. It is a gnomish wrapper for mplayer (just the basics). Also, you may want to try gecko-mediaplayer. It is a plugin for firefox that controls gnome-mplayer via dbus to playback embedded videos at most websites.

Find out more at http://dekorte.homeip.net/download

Yeah these are my apps...

There's a better one here.

(hint: Word per line mod 4, to hex)

It's not really what you asked for, but I wrote this for a graphics class in college:
http://aaron.homeip.net/~aaron/lab4.tar.bz2

Run it with ./oglRenderer 500 500 vornoi.wrl

Seismic Data from North Korean underground Nuke test registers on USGS sensors as 4.2 mag quake http://bitterplace.homeip.net:8080/modules.php?nam e=News&file=article&sid=607&mode=&order=0&thold=0

One of my favorites is Versailles. Yes, that Versailles.

Did you realize that the world's most famous palace, it's grounds, and the community in front of it are laid out like an enormous happy-face stick figure? Take a look at that aerial photo, then go back and look at the Google view -- it's obvious once you look for it. And this all goes back to, what, 1500s and earlier?

It almost makes you think that the French first sent people up in hot-air balloons just so that they'd get a chance to see the joke that architects & urban planners had set up centuries earlier...

:-)

web front-end to search the 2gb log file http://czern.homeip.net/aolsearch/

Check out IRM, a free application that does everything you asked for and more.

From the website: "IRM, the Information Resource Manager, is a powerful web-based asset tracking and trouble ticket system built for IT departments and HelpDesks. It keeps detailed information about each computer, as well as providing a trouble ticket system, an FAQ system, and a Knowledgebase. All elements are interwoven into a seamless web application."

This can be used to track machines, port switches, software on the machine and tickets. You can create custom fields and make them pull down or allow people to enter their own txt. It's good stuff, and 100% free.

Demo: http://budgester.homeip.net/~irm/irm/
User: Tech
Pass: tech

At least, before this leak -- as beautiful as it is, this might finally be the tipping point in getting Joe Average AOLer to understand the gravity of the drastic erosions of privacy the Western world has experienced since 9/11, and stop trusting the unencrypted text submission these logs prove we often so completely and utterly, soul-baringly do. And no one acts anywhere near the same when they have even the slightest feeling they're being watched (and, more importantly, judged). In a world where Diaries are implicitly public, who have you ever trusted more than your search bar?

Especially as, judging by these search logs, Joe Blow has a lot more to hide than even my cynical ass ever imagined. Might make some people realize the terr'rists aren't the only ones who'll be caught, charged, sentenced and executed for having something to hide.

And this leak has finally given credence to the long-cynically-mocked, longer-held Sci-Fi ideal that, in teh big, unknowable futar, all Art will be on, be of, Technology. And this horrific breach of privacy is also the greatest set of Artistic and statistical data to have ever been released to the public. I would say, since it's raw data and not just a single interpretation, it's more important than the Kinsey Report. Which is tragic, because it can never be allowed to happen again, if we want any semblance of a feeling of privacy and freedom in our civilization. It's becoming unexpectedly apparent that this will be the form of major (mainstream, big-A-)Art of the future.

Don't believe me? Read 'The Search Engine Confessions of AOL User 23187425' and tell me it expresses any smaller torrent of hte raw, beautiful essense of what it is to be human than any Keats or Basho;. And that's only one piece among the very many a quick search can reveal. Many more at SomethingAwful's special edition of the Weekend Web, one of the primary progenitors, whether it was intended to be or not, of this kind of art.

user quokkapox we've got your details right here

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In case anybody is wondering, I only know about that because I'm currently doing audio interface research, and I had read one of his papers so I had looked up what other work he's currently working on. I have no affiliation with him or UNC, but I thought some Slashdotter's may find that project interesting.

Absolutely agree with this one - I've used previous Operas but am now on Firefox - I generally have it set up to have just one bar at the top which contains everything I generally use. Particularly like the iFox theme for a compact interface, e.g. http://andycunningham.homeip.net/firefox.png

Not only those, but I just had it futz up my numbers. I loaded my Moon Shot Cost Calculator spreadsheet into Google SpreadSheet to see what would happen. Interestingly, it only displays the rows and columns I used. It also improperly sized column "C" so that "Wild Ass Guess" became "Wild Ass". :-P

The real problem, however, was that it automatically used integers for the computations. As a result, the mass ratio shows up as "0" rather than ".996". All calculations that follow from that one (pretty much everything) are thus zeroed out. With a more complex spreadsheet, you might never notice.

Frustratingly, there was no scientific or floating-point number option. I had to chose percent rounded to 2 decimal places to get the calculation to be correct. Not good. :-(

As you mentioned, dollars also show up as just numbers rather than dollars. This also changes the look of the spreadsheet.

In fact, Frink gives me 249,962,446.15730024456 Volkswagen Bug years but, I suppose, it's close enough for government work...

For that matter, print ads also over-emphasize Macs, even to the point of absurdity...