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See also the companion volume Thinking Forth, on http://thinking-forth.sourceforge.net/

the United States of American, is technically a Corporation aswell, so a United States of America Citizen, is also a citizen of a corporation.

However, an "American Citizen" is not.

http://www.jusbelli.com/usofa_is_corp.html

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lVsMUpPgdT0

http://home.iae.nl/users/lightnet/creator/federalgovernment.htm

yadda yadda...

The U.S. Government has a history of testing on U.S. Citizens. In fact by LAW they can it is part of United States Code - Title 50 - War And National Defense - Chapter 32 - Chemical And Biological Warefare Program.

Secret Military Experimentation on Americans Was "Legal"

BIOLOGICAL AND CHEMICAL TESTING ON HUMAN BEINGS

HISTORY OF SECRET EXPERIMENTATION ON UNITED STATES CITIZENS

If you look there is even more showing this kind of secret testing has been going on for a looong time.
See More

These "insects" are also just another way for the government to ssecretly spy on you, warentless wiretaps wasn't enough. With these things they could "fly" them into your house and see and hear what your are doing/saying while -not- on the phone. Think the government wouldn't do that? What about all the "secret" wiretaps of U.S. Citizens by the NSA - which by the way ins illigal in itself.

Betamax?!! Do you remember Elcaset?

They have an uncanny ability to back the wrong horse and keep on ticking. Betamax, El Cassette, 8mm, Mini Disc, Memory Stick, ... ... next up: BlueRay.

Spiderweb Software (a mom and pop operation) seems to be doing alright for itself for many years now... using an extremely archaic game engine with shockingly limited production values. Of course they are never going to get a mainstream market (at least until Geneforge: The Movie comes out!), but that's not the point.

"To add to that, games are getting more complex in the way of graphics engines, physics engines, and AI as well."

Not a very complex game, nor a highly original concept, but the wonderful and addictive Breakquest took an open source physics engine (not to mention SDL based graphics) and applied it a "breakout" style game, with a style of its own, and beautiful results.

These two examples somewhat contradict some of the assumptions above. It seems to me creativity and visions are the two main things needed... and a competent developer still may be able to find a niche big enough to support himself, at least... it's a matter of scale.

The Tandy TRS-80 model II never really took off either.

Check this link for a nostalgic look at what might have been news at the time on slashBBS:

http://home.iae.nl/users/pb0aia/cm/modelii.html

For an extremely short period of time, luggable computers were popular, especially the Osborne

It's no surprise that the biggest capitalist ever, who switched his party bribery^Wdonation preferences to support the fascist (corporate government) presidential candidate in 2000 and 2004, thinks musicians who are motivated by something other than money are communists. FOSSers unite! You have nothing to lose but your proprietary toolchains!

I oughta know, I had some of those books when I was like, 2 or 3? First time I saw one of those Hello Kitty products, I assumed it was Bruna's work.

The SR71 uses one of the more complex methods of maintaining high mach travel, but it isn't the only one. The B70 Valkyrie experimental strategic bomber solved the problem using wings that folded down vertically to encompass the shockwave beneath the fusalage and literally ride it. It's supremely ironic that this aircraft can outrun today's B1-b Lancer by a full two times the speed of sound using 1950s technology.

Some history on this forgotten, stunning piece of aviation engineering.

One ham radio distro I discovered is AFU Knoppix. The site is in German and hints that it includes several ham radio packages. It'll take me another week to download it via my dial-up and see what it's about.

Another ham radio distro is the Debian DX-pedition Disk found at http://home.iae.nl/users/reinc/dxpedition_disk.htm l. The live CD uses Morphix and a USB memory stick to store newer versions of the logging program and logged QSOs.

These are two live CDs catering to ham radio. Among the traditional distributions, I would guess that Debian is among the most ham radio friendly, although Fedora Core could become a contender (I use Debian exclusively, so I may be a bit biased).

We just need to get the word out, methinks.

The Model II was an almost properly designed Z-80 with an almost proper bus that allowed a 68K CPU board to be plugged into it.

If you plugged the 68K board in, it became the II/16.

You think the fact that it hasn't been /.ed yet is impressive now? Wait until you check this out...

>nslookup 212.61.68.76 = kw68076.iae.nl

http://uptime.netcraft.com/up/graph/?host=kw68076. iae.nl

kw68076.iae.nl was running Microsoft-IIS on Windows Server 2003 when last queried at 25-May-2004 09:01:02 GMT - refresh now
Windows Server 2003
Microsoft-IIS/6.0
25-May-2004
212.61.68.76
VIA NET.WORKS Nederland

Wow. Just, wow. I'm as surprised as anyone, but I have to give credit where credit is due.

Also, if you look on the forum, one poster (I'm guessing the admin of this box) points to: http://212.61.68.34/rebels/hl2/ (another mirror I suppose.)
Which points to kw68034.iae.nl
If you look there, it has stats on that box in a language I do not know, but there's this line: Operating System : Windows XP; en-US; rv:1.5
And given that these appear to be identical, wow. I'm really not trying to promote linux or bash Microsoft here, either. I'm very impressed/intrigued a Windows server is able to hold itself up so well, as I'm sure most /.ers are.

BTW, here's a link to a guy who has a 80186 TRS-80 Tandy 2000 computer:

http://home.iae.nl/users/pb0aia/cm/garage.html

Hmm... upon checking Thinking Forth by Leo Brodie, I see that the name is capitalised throughout, but in the foreword to Starting Forth, Chuck Moore, inventor of the language, refers to the origins of the name in capitals, but otherwise uses mixed case - as does Brodie for the rest of that book. So I suppose the point is moot :-)

OTOH, I seem to recall another book (possibly Forth on the BBC Microcomputer by Richard de Grandis-Harrison) being quite insistent on mixed-case spelling of the name, but I can't put my hands on it right now.

My first computer (well, my school's) not only had all capitals, you had to look at them on Teletypes - unless you could read ASCII off punched paper tape. I think that must make us both old-school :-)

Some countries officially spell the name of that country next to Kuwait differently.

For example, the UNITED STATES CORPORATION (distinct from the united states of America) spells it "New Texas."

Did you know there are several governments in here ?

Other than United States Inc. and the government of the State of California, where Slashdot's parent VA Software is headquartered?

And what makes you think other national governments don't recognize Common Criteria certifications?

Not to be overly critical, but I want to know where these mysterious 1986 CDROM drives are? Enough that it did NOT have a scsi port, but most computers in 1992 didn't have a cdrom drive, no less in 1986. To my best recollection, they did not exist in mass in 1986, and it was several years later before it was a reasonable option for any computer, closer to 1990, and until Windows 95 came out before virtually ALL computers had them. After all, Windows 3.11 was only 7 or 8 floppies to install, DOS 6.x was 3.

After doing some googling, I find one site saying the first scsi cdrom was in 1987, a Philips CM110, after its big brother, the CM100 which used a proprietary interface. The CD110 converted the scsi signal to the proprietary as well.

You young whipper snappers forget how it was before CDROMs, back when it took forever to fill up a 20mb drive ;)

For the entire history of the modern music industry, producing and distributing music has worked this way. Nearly early every format upgrade has offered benefits that a fair majority of the listening audience has found worth paying for. It happened with LP's vs 78's, HiFi Stereo vs. Mono, Cassette vs 8-track, CD vs. Vinyl, etc.

Even where audio quality is not a central benefit, form-factor, features, and convenience weigh heavily in the adoption of a new format. I doubt anyone would argue that the adoption of cassettes vs. open-reel was prompted by the audio quality of cassettes. Likewise, MiniDisc enjoys a qualified success despite the fact that it is noticably lower quality than CD. And of course, there's MP3/AAC/OGG that continue to reinforce the idea that convenience can trump quality as an incentive to adoption.

The point is, the music industry periodically re-releases titles on formats that either sound better or offer benefits that previous formats do not, in an attempt to generate profits. (Admittedly, it doesn't always work. Anyone remember ELCassette?) Show me an industry that doesn't do something similar - cars, computers, even soap for goodness sakes - all of them attempt to do some kind of upgrade/value-add to get people to buy the new one. Welcome to capitalism. Or would you try and tell me that you still listen to music on LP's and post to Slashdot with a VIC-20?

Fact is, most people don't own systems to take advantage of multichannel and fidelity of the new formats. Hell, most people probably couldn't even hear the difference, let alone care.

No. This is the same argument that went around when CD's first made the scene. For a time (before I heard CD for the first time), I was even a proponent of this notion, and believed that there was no point in replacing my LP's with CD's. It seems a bit silly now, looking back on it.

He must be able to define the war, I mean isn't that all that the skulls and bones society care about?

I don't know why more people don't chroot apache or patch to use chroot(2). It can be a pain at times, but it can't be worse then having to reformat and reinstall the entire os because your are not sure what was tampered with. I know chroot is not perfect and you can break out of it, but as long as you are carefull about what goes in it, you are relatively safe. It would at least keep rootkits away from gcc, which seems to be required for most of these rootkits.

Which shell do you use ? bash (both on Unix and Windows) is pretty decent.

Shells make you guess if you have enough characters for the completion, and force you to hit the tab key to trigger it.

Remember that 10-15 keystrokes are worth a click. I often double-tab right at the beginning to see the list of files. I hate clicking to select, especially since I run usually in maximal resolution (1600x1200) and mouse control is harder.

Browsers bring up a most likely choice (which could be based on a variety of factors - alphabetic order, frequency of use, explicit preference, etc. as you like)

You need to separate file display and file selection. First issue a ls command: "ls -lS" sorted by decreasing size, "ls -ltr" sorted by inverse time, "find . -cmin -10", ...

A bash expert can do "Ctrl-r" in bash allow to search a string in a previous command in the history, then cut with "Ctrl-k", then "Esc->" and paste with "Ctrl-y" at the end of the line, all this with an amazing speed.

BTW, it is almost unthinkable to use bash without using the Ctrl-r feature, which is a search in your previous history.

Also a classic is to use "find . -cmin -10", for finding the files that were changed less than 10 minutes ago ; handy when you extracted an archive in the wrong directory, and everything is messed: "find . -cmin -10 | xargs rm -rf".

The filters such as "*.c", "*.h" are useful, also.

In some rare cases, I need to select manually many files, in a non-obvious way: then it's easy: "ls > /tmp/s && emacs /tmp/s", and the right amount of "Ctrl-k" does the job, faster than clicks. Then I can directly do a "tar czvpf //mybackupmachine/backup/another.tar.gz $(cat /tmp/s)", instead of clicking a billion of aggravating times on menus, buttons, confirmations, etc...

The key of shells is first that you can combine commands, second that you have full history (with the mandatory Ctrl-r) that you can cut and paste in your new commands.

No one is perfect; no one remembers everything; and many people who might love to use CLI features are put off by this moronic insistance that they spend time learning how to use them down to their depths before they can do thing one

I think that's not the point. Maybe 99% of the users will never have the (costly) time to learn CLI ; the same way I don't have the time to learn properly MS Word, and use it in a crappy way. But saying that, even for the remaining 1%, CLI are inefficient is plain wrong.

As for the comment below re: keyboard shortcuts, testing reveals that they are for the most part slower than using the mouse. People don't consciously realize it, but unless the command is incredibly common and ingrained as only a few are, they pause and try to remember it.

When keyboard shortcuts are a matter of life or death, not only you learn them, but you learn to learn them so that to remember them efficiently. A example of GUI with many shortcuts (it was 100% keyboard shortcuts before newer version) is Blender. I spent a few hours learning the modeler and the keys, and never used it after, but I'm amazed when I come back to it, 2 years later, that I still remember most the keys. Of course, for a big system like Emacs, it's harder, that's why there is Meta-x with long names, apropos with "Ctrl-h a", and a 4+ page dense "reference card", all with the keyshort cuts, not to mention search in the index of the big emacs help ("Ctrl-h i", "Ctrl-s emacs:", "enter", "i", )

Are there user reviews of any of these packages?

I'm still using a Mac and Deck or ProTools for multitracking / hard disk recording and would love a stabler, though just-as-able alternative ...

BeOS looked real good for awhile - especially Pebbles - but things have way slacked off. Any additional, personal usage info would be great.

Steve

.. relevant fact that the anti-WHO propaganda you linked to was compiled by a pro-tobacco organization funded by the tobacco industry.

OK, another example, vaccinations. The WHO are rather keen on assaulting everyones immune system with these foreign proteins.
Sure there are plenty of raving nutters who oppose the WHO. However that is no validation of WHO's actions. There are some very odd people opposing Micros~1, does that make free OS's wrong & Windows a stable, useful OS? Probably not.

I've used Blender since about version 1.5 or so. And yes, previous posters have stated that "No, the interface isn't intuitive". Right. It isn't. Blender has a rather formidable UI Learning curve. But compared to Alias/Maya, Lightwave, even 3d Studio, there really -aren't- any good 3d modeling programs that are of this caliber, -and- user friendly/intuitive.

But, for the price, even for the C-Key price, its the most powerful 3d package I've ever seen. Sure, its not Maya, or what have you. But neither is that price tag. Plus it'll run on Most any current day OS. (Irix, Solaris, FreeBSD, Linux (x86|Alpha|PPC), Beos, and Windows are listed. Unlike 3dsMax or what have you. I'm -glad- that theres a really formidable 3d package available for FreeBSD|Linux. More applications like this are what I think these OS'es need. Gimp, StarOffice, Blender... Shows the OS is good for getting more than "That geek programming stuff" done. Art can be made.

Yes, the UI is not the best. But like all UI's it -does- take time to get used to. (check Excellent Whale's home page for a list of the keystrokes. Blender uses nearly every available key. Plus the basics (move, rotate) are available as mouse click/drag swoops on the screen. There are a few kinks.. But every system has kinks.

Not counting the fact that its distributions are -tiny- (1.0M tgz for my FreeBSD, 1.1M zip for Windows). Ever check the size of Maya/Lightwave/3dsMax? Not counting that it runs sweet, and has never even once crashed on Win98.

I recommend it. Its not an easy learning curve. But perhaps this is not a bad thing.

-Ryan

I have written a client that can read CDDB info as well as CDIndex info. Also, it can generate data files containing the info you need to put a CD in the CDIndex. e-mail me via the link at the page I mention below for the secret key :-)

Point to my 'Audio utilities for the blind' to find the latest executable.

It's called PlayCD (duh!).

I'm sorry, I didn't update the source yet (I just had enough time to compile and upload...)

Have you *ever* tried to install solaris-x86 ?

"ease of use" my ass!

wayout

me

PS I welcome any tips on that subject