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I once heard a phone engineer (BT) plug himself in...

At the time (1984-89) I worked on the JANET network as a Network Operator. We used to have to chase line faults on the 9600 analogue circuits used back then (isn't progress a great thing?). One particular afternoon I was on the phone to the local exchange helping said engineer trace an intermittent problem.

Suddenly in the middle of the conversation there was a strangled yell, followed by a loud metallic clatter as he fell off his aluminium step-ladder. A few seconds of silence passed, then a wavering voice came back on the line "..h..hello?..".

Turned out the poor bloke had been talking to me on a linesman's phone (attached to the exchange with croc-clips) whilst he looked for a dry joint - then decided to grasp a bare wire carrying ringer circuit. This page gives ringer as 75V AC @ 25hz. Ouch

Matt

It's called Falcon's Eye NetHack - and it looks pretty cool. Thanks for making me look for it ;-)

I noticed the site is getting slow so I decided to mirror the Technology Demo. It's 3.9MB and available here:
http://shakti.tky.hut.fi/slashdot/u1_tech.zip

Over at the Fans for Ultima website they have quite a bit of information about the various Ultima remakes & patches in the works.

This is yanked from that page... some info on other remakes:

Monday, September 3, 2001: Remake Mania

Hello people,
This is my first news update for FfU. Maigo and I decided to share the work, so that the site sees changes more often. This one is just a news update, the subsections will be updated soon. We're glad you've stayed tuned over the past months.

A lot has happened in the fan community, with several new and interesting projects announced. Most of them try to recapture the magic of the earlier games with newer technology, so this is both for nostalgic fans and for those who never played the older Ultimas because of their dated graphics. So here are the new projects, in "chronological" order:

Ultima IV: The Dawn of Virtue: The Dawn of Virtue: Using a self-written engine similar to Bioware's Infinity engine (which powered games like "Baldur's Gate" and "Planescape: Torment"), project leader Jaako Peltonen plans to redo "Ultima IV: Quest of the Avatar", released 1985. The website provides several concept renderings and drawings.

Ultima Underworld 1 and 2: Twister Software is currently working on a complete remake of the two Ultima Underworlds with a new 3D Engine. Surprising is the announcement of a multiplayer mode; up to 8 heroes will be able to explore the Abyss or shatter the Blackrock dome.

Ultima VII: The Black Gate and The Serpent Isle : Like Ultima V: Lazarus, this project is going to use the Dungeon Siege engine. Interesting are the "Expected Outcome Pictures", Dungeon Siege promotional shots showing what some Ultima locations could look like.

Ultima IX: Redemption: Another project using the Dungeon Siege engine. As a response to the plotwise disappointing Ultima IX: Ascension (Dialogue/Plot patch downloadable here), Ultima IX Redemption is not a remake, but a completely new attempt at finishing the trilogy of trilogies. Avatus, the project leader, promises a rich and compelling storyline with several endings, depending on your decisions.

A similar attempt is Ultima IX: Eriadain, which will make use of the upcoming Neverwinter Nights engine.

Ultima IV: Elijah: Elijah rocks. Plain and simple.

This means that teams are working on remakes for every Ultima except 2, 3, 8 and the Worlds of Ultima series. That's a lot. It's great to see that the community is that active. If even half of these projects get finished, we'll have a lot to play in the future.

All the announcements have inspired Evil_Freak Dragon to write a pretty hilarious story featuring all the major projects. "Lazarus' Redemption Prophecy: A Legend is Reborn with the Dawn of Elijah's Great Balls of Fire" features some insider humor, but it might still be a great read even if you aren't involved in any of the projects.
-Grandor Dragon

> I would imagine that a GUI would be especially
> useful for the developers

You want us to use the web frontend. We spend a lot of time in BugZilla. The more dogfood we eat, the better.

Well, I'd be interested to see Self Organising maps dropped into 3-D - and extra dimension always helps.

For those that don't know what I'm talking about, Self organsing maps are methods of representing large multidimensional datasets in 2 dimensional space using neural network pattern recognition to get the best "organisation" of point in 2 space. It's quite interestign stuff - check out www.cis.hut.fi for more detail.

Jedidiah
--

worldtrade_plane2.wmv - Too bad it's in Windows media format :(

If someone managed to get the videos mentioned in the story before they were slashdotted, I'd be happy to host'em on my box with 100Mbit/s connection.

Delorme will also be offering Middle Earth Atlas 1.0 for Windows which will enable you to navigate through middle earth easily and accurately. It has a GPS option for realtime tracking, but they haven't quite figured out how to make it work underground yet. I've been using the beta and have avoided a lot of mine shafts and molten rock pockets. No word on a Linux port.

You're probably confusing it by playing Angband on the machine at the same time.

I think Runix, the Linux for the Sony Playstation 2, was released recently. The X Box should be out before Christmas, and I'd think Linux will be ported to that soon as well.

There are also dozens of VGA-to-NTSC converters, some of them listed here.

Reader, you are much more likely to enjoy an unaltered transcription of Updike's Cosmic Gall . (Actually, I'm not sure it is unaltered, but it's at least as good as my memory, and it has the indentation. Depressingly, most versions I found on the web are wrongly formatted and have at least one obvious textual mistake.)

The apple was geared for both home and business; the vic-20 and C64 were toys from beginning to end. Popular toys, but they never had any aspirations at other markets.

Well, Commodore might not have had any aspirations at other markets, but readers of (say) Compute! magazine would know that many peripheral add-on companies did not have the same limitations in vision. :-) So I know you could get "accounting" software for at least the 64, which pretty much boggles the mind.

But I think my favorite item along these line was the really fast mobius strip casette loop as a replacement for RAM product (primarily for the Vic 20, as I recall). If this sounds completely nutty to many readers that's because it was. You really had to have been there.

The Vic was *not* a new design; it was a stripped down PET with color. The C64 was a vic with 64k.

Bzzt! The C64 was a lot more than a vic with 64K. For one thing, the C64 had something almost like real sound, and not just a way to buzz the speaker. :-) The color graphics were also much more capable; 98% of vic 20 graphics were generated via special characters from the keyboard.

For all six of you who really want to know more on the technical specs of these machines, you might try this page full of Commodore "Business" Machines trivia

The site at http://www.hut.fi/Misc/Electronics/circuits/vga2tv / also has info on VGA -> TV conversion.


- - - - -

You might be able to use a TV as the "monitor" -- see here for instructions. Requires TV with RGB SCART input. Gamers may already know what SCART is, but for the rest of you, it means "Syndicat des Constructeurs d'Appareils Radiorécepteurs et Téléviseurs." SCART is for connecting dissimilar A/V systems together. It's popular in Europe where they have those funny Pal systems :) Here is a little info. And here is some more.

- - - - -

Although the SOM are usually described as a form of neural computation, that category is somewhat misleading, although they are inspired by neural nets and have many things in common.

The method works with a restricted keyword vocabulary (a few thousand words if I remember correctly). The words are fed to the SOM as triplets, which makes the method somewhat context-sensitive. The method creates a two-dimensional map that is organized according to the "nearness" of documents. The map can then be used for different kinds of applications, such as classification.

Although the SOM learning is usually "unsupervised learning", where the different classes are not known beforehand, it's possible to define the classes afterwards.

I'm not sure what method AOL uses, but SOM is one possibility. If they use training data where the classes are known beforehand, they probably use some supervised learning method, such as conventional feedforward nets and backpropagation. They might be able use a similar triplet coding with that too.

You can find more information about WEBSOM from http://websom.hut.fi/websom/. They have several articles available there, and also some interactive search system.

GNU /gnoo/, _not_ /noo/ 1. [acronym: `GNU's Not Unix!', see recursive acronym]

So, what? ;-)

Falcon's Eye (working title) is a mouse-driven interface for NetHack that displays the game in high-res, isometric, light-source shaded graphics, yet retains all of the game features. The new interface eases many tasks; for example, there's an 'autopilot' for long movements, and tooltips to describe the many objects and creatures in the game.

Falcon's Eye (working title) is a mouse-driven interface for NetHack that displays the game in high-res, isometric, light-source shaded graphics, yet retains all of the game features. The new interface eases many tasks; for example, there's an 'autopilot' for long movements, and tooltips to describe the many objects and creatures in the game.

Falcon's Eye (working title) is a mouse-driven interface for NetHack that displays the game in high-res, isometric, light-source shaded graphics, yet retains all of the game features. The new interface eases many tasks; for example, there's an 'autopilot' for long movements, and tooltips to describe the many objects and creatures in the game.

Well, one could get a lot closer. Currently, the Finns are holding the world record, and are below one billionth of a Kelvin.

You'll have to reverse the arguments of kill for that to work:

- kill(SIGALRM, getppid());
+ kill(getppid(), SIGALRM);

Why don't sysadmins start blocking off invalid TCP/UDP packets that the router? AFFIK lots DoS attacks use packets with invalid TCP flags, have a look here. If they are dropped by the backbone provider end of problem..... mind you having said that most crackers will simply find another exploit.

I suppose some sort of stateful tracking would be handy as well, but that wouldn't stop DDos.

Its a game of chess

I also thought this to be an actual HUT student prank from the 50's, but a web search gave no references, and neither does Ossi Törrönen mention it in his definitive book on HUT pranks (in Finnish) .

In fact, Abbie Hoffman himself takes credit for a suspiciously similar prank (search for "bench" on the page) .

Word-of-mouth can't be trusted. The classic pranks of which I had heard from fellow HUT students differ slightly from their actual documented counterparts. While reading Törrönen's book, I found out that the classic "weld a tram to its rails" done by the Chalmers (Sweden) students was not, in fact, done while the tram was taking passengers at a tram stop, but at night at the depot. And the Paavo Nurmi prank mentioned above, a great media scandal of its time (Paavo Nurmi was a source of animosity between Finland and Sweden) was actually executed by a hired diver, not the HUT Diving Club.

So these things seem to get embellishments over time, just like good jokes that change form over the years.

I'm really sorry to conclude (though hoping for evidence to the contrary) that the park bench prank was not done by HUT students. Too bad, that was my all-time favorite, and fit well with my idea of Finland in the 50's. The police school students and the HUT students had a friendly one-upmanship going on, and the HUT pranksters habitually asked for police permission for their stunts (usually getting it).

I also thought this to be an actual HUT student prank from the 50's, but a web search gave no references, and neither does Ossi Törrönen mention it in his definitive book on HUT pranks (in Finnish) .

In fact, Abbie Hoffman himself takes credit for a suspiciously similar prank (search for "bench" on the page) .

Word-of-mouth can't be trusted. The classic pranks of which I had heard from fellow HUT students differ slightly from their actual documented counterparts. While reading Törrönen's book, I found out that the classic "weld a tram to its rails" done by the Chalmers (Sweden) students was not, in fact, done while the tram was taking passengers at a tram stop, but at night at the depot. And the Paavo Nurmi prank mentioned above, a great media scandal of its time (Paavo Nurmi was a source of animosity between Finland and Sweden) was actually executed by a hired diver, not the HUT Diving Club.

So these things seem to get embellishments over time, just like good jokes that change form over the years.

I'm really sorry to conclude (though hoping for evidence to the contrary) that the park bench prank was not done by HUT students. Too bad, that was my all-time favorite, and fit well with my idea of Finland in the 50's. The police school students and the HUT students had a friendly one-upmanship going on, and the HUT pranksters habitually asked for police permission for their stunts (usually getting it).

Galactic Bloodshed deserves at least a mention when you discuss turn-based space strategy.

It's loads of fun and addicting. Although, it necessitated you being near a DEC terminal at odd hours. I risked my job playing this game.

Ah, excellent! Now you Linux folks can play with Falcon's Eye, one of several spiffier-than-the-average-16x16-tiles interfaces being designed for that paragon of gaming, Nethack.
So guess what I've been playing recently... ;-)

-J

If there ever was an easily-renewable thing, it's microbes. It seems to me there was a mention relatively recently on Slashdot about "Gastrobots", as a small-scale example.

The idea of turning septic tanks into generators appeals to me. This sort of thing might also someday make an adjunct to methane-burning power plants in landfills.

Personally, I'd love to find a way to make the medium that the microbes grow in safe to drink - imagine, brew your own beer AND generate your own power at the same time! (This fuel cell runs on yeast...)

upon further investigation, I found this service for timestamping, as well as this one. Here is a page with more timestamping links...

It's really simple, I built a pedal set with a pair of linear potentiometers(X2, Y2), a few springs, and some sweat.. I later added a couple of big switches that corresponded to switches 3 & 4 of the joystick. This was a some years back, but now that there are more and more USB joysticks and such, the gameport should be freed up for use with simple stuff like this, you can get some pots and switches and make your own controller, I've used to gameport hooked up to a thermometer.

This is real simple stuff beginners can get started on.

Good start for technical info on joystick ports.

Kris.

However, Paulo Sergio Coelho has a web site for his DOS and Windows based VGA to TV (similar refresh as low res arcade monitors) drivers that work with a variety of video cards with claims of superior quality as compared to standard tv-out cards I think. I believe source code can be gotten if someone wanted to look at some sort of port or at least a good starting point. Other links of interest:

Tomi Engdahl has several must-visit links - VGA to TV information center, VGA to RGB + composite sync -converter, and connecting Matrox MGA to TV among others that are probably worth visiting, and the Fixed Frequency Video FAQ is probably on the list as well. I would also definitely visit the TV and Monitor CRT (Picture Tube) Information by Samuel Goldwasser. This is getting kind of wordy, for more links hit the "Tech & tips" link on my web site and then the "monitors" link, and/or the "finishing" link and then again the "monitors" link. OH! Also you might contact Brian of PC2Jamma and who is also the author of ArcadeOS to see if some sort of port would be possible.

Hope that was of some use :)

However, Paulo Sergio Coelho has a web site for his DOS and Windows based VGA to TV (similar refresh as low res arcade monitors) drivers that work with a variety of video cards with claims of superior quality as compared to standard tv-out cards I think. I believe source code can be gotten if someone wanted to look at some sort of port or at least a good starting point. Other links of interest:

Tomi Engdahl has several must-visit links - VGA to TV information center, VGA to RGB + composite sync -converter, and connecting Matrox MGA to TV among others that are probably worth visiting, and the Fixed Frequency Video FAQ is probably on the list as well. I would also definitely visit the TV and Monitor CRT (Picture Tube) Information by Samuel Goldwasser. This is getting kind of wordy, for more links hit the "Tech & tips" link on my web site and then the "monitors" link, and/or the "finishing" link and then again the "monitors" link. OH! Also you might contact Brian of PC2Jamma and who is also the author of ArcadeOS to see if some sort of port would be possible.

Hope that was of some use :)

However, Paulo Sergio Coelho has a web site for his DOS and Windows based VGA to TV (similar refresh as low res arcade monitors) drivers that work with a variety of video cards with claims of superior quality as compared to standard tv-out cards I think. I believe source code can be gotten if someone wanted to look at some sort of port or at least a good starting point. Other links of interest:

Tomi Engdahl has several must-visit links - VGA to TV information center, VGA to RGB + composite sync -converter, and connecting Matrox MGA to TV among others that are probably worth visiting, and the Fixed Frequency Video FAQ is probably on the list as well. I would also definitely visit the TV and Monitor CRT (Picture Tube) Information by Samuel Goldwasser. This is getting kind of wordy, for more links hit the "Tech & tips" link on my web site and then the "monitors" link, and/or the "finishing" link and then again the "monitors" link. OH! Also you might contact Brian of PC2Jamma and who is also the author of ArcadeOS to see if some sort of port would be possible.

Hope that was of some use :)

The fields, however, are orders of magnitude larger and much more coherrent than those found in an EMP pulse.

Know it.

Love it.

I don't know if it'd be efficient, but it would be potentially funny.

"And in the news today, the temperature is expected to top 110F tomorrow, and power demand will be at an all time high, so please eat lots of fiber to keep our power plants going!"

You can find out more here:
http://www.tml .hu t.fi/Opinnot/Tik-110.501/1995/zeroknowledge.html

I have no idea if any part of Zero Knowledge Inc.'s sytems use zero knowledge proofs or whether they just chose it for its cool name and vague relevancy.

In case the transfer speed is slow for you, you can try downloading the source from my box which is at the end of a 100mbit/s pipe. Here:

http://shakti.tky.hut.fi/slashdot/oo_605_src.tar.g z (80MB)

While I was out looking for a GSM source, I came across this page which has a table of some of the different options, better than I could have put it. They also have sound bites in each format, however, they are in the compressed format so you'll need a decoder for each format to listen.

You may want to check out Ogg Vorbis, which is an alternative patent-free opensource audio compression. I haven't heard any low bitrate samples and the implementation is rather new, so I really can't vouch for this.

Does this mean massive international man-hunts for the infamous "Carlos the Hacker"?

Best encrypt with ScramDisk (Windows 95/98 version here) locally, and with GnuPG for transmission, all your CueCat code and use anonymous remailers for version releases to Freenet, or be prepared to live out your life in a shadowy realm of underground coders dwelling in the hidden spaces between the giants of the United Corporations of the World.

The likelihood that CT is using a browser that doesn't understand Unicode is remote. MSNBC is using a character set called Windows code page 1252, which is like the standard Latin-1 character set, except that it uses reserved positions for characters like smart quotes.

Modern browsers accept “ and ” for smart quotes, but Frontpage hasn't caught up yet...

windows character set

An excellent overview of Bluetooth security, enumerating potential flaws that aren't discussed in the Markoff article, can be found here.

HardlyWorkin-UE- DM2-Install.exe

Got it from that horrible FTP site running Serv-U.

Here

Now everyone go show me that Slashdot effect! I don't believe in it until my very own box is down :)

checkout for example PayPal, and Just Web It.

PayPal is a way to send money over the internet, it is a nice little operation, and convenient.

Just Web It is a free ecommerce/estore site, just right for the entry band selling some albums and an occasional t-shirt, etc.

These may not be the best options, but they help someone who doesn't have coding expertise to set up a web page.

Now we get to the morons who do not see what their little misstep does on the broader scale. I am reminded of the apocryphal story of Atari Computer. Supposedly, they ultimately went under in part because the games for the Atari computer were so popular that everyone hacked them, and the developers ultimately went broke, throwing in the towel. (Anyone remember copy protection?)

of course the hackers were pissed that the company went broke, and didn't connect what they did to the fate of the company.

ultimately, the company got sold and resold many times (history here, and here), and now is a subsidiary of Hasbro.

Officially, there were other market forces at work. But I can not help wondering if these wise fools contributed to the downfall.

• Want to have a fancy job? Contact one of the small but powerful geek companies.
  
• Want to play it safe? Apply for anything at Nokia HQ.
  

It's a little problematic to say that Microsoft supports Unicode -- they have a rather characteristic "embrace and extend" attitude towards character sets. The "windows character set", the reason why early JonKatz articles had question marks instead of quotes, is an extension to ISO Latin 1 which features smart quotes, em- and en-dashes, guillemots, etc., in a reserved section of the set (130-160). This creates a whole host of interoperability problems, as most Microsoft tools think it's OK to save 8-bit strings as text.

In Microsoft's favor, however, Unicode support in IE is pretty good -- and I think Unicode is probably the best way to display many international characters on the web -- the standard &-entities (i.e. oslash for ø) aren't supported everywhere, but the Unicode entity (#xxxxx, where xxxxx is a decimal number) is gaining more support in HTML 4.0/compliant browsers. However, IE supports the non-standard extensions, and most support for non-Latin glyphs is through codepages...

In any case, the real solution is to use LaTeX for all typesetting. :-)

~wog

checking whether P = NP... no

checking whether P = NP... no

If you cant find one, or not interested in setting it up and taking additional desktop space, there are a number of decent C64 emulators available for the PC.
Frodo 64: http://www.burgoyne.com/pages/jaso no/frodo1.html
Others: http://www.hut.fi/Misc/cbm/emulators.html

Pacific Bell Wireless provides GSM in SF, and here's a map of their coverage. Digital data service at 9600 bps for $5/month + 0.15/minute. Connects to PCs or PDAs with a $50 cable. Even their low-end Nokia 5190 will work.

There are descriptions of cables available, and the Linux interface is at gnokii.