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Denmark, basic facts:

Terrain: low and flat to gently rolling plains
Highest point: Yding Skovhøj, 173 m (568 ft)

One of the goals of Perl 6 is to make non-trivial projects possible. That's good. The way it's being done is bad. Perl was once a lightweight, extremely flexible language. Now it's become a huge ugly monster. People wanted OO, so a nasty hack was bolted on top to allow some semblance of it. Now this nasty hack is being expanded. Sure, the code's different, but the basic form is the same. Kludge upon kludge upon kludge; I'd much rather have a nice, clean, pure language (and not one with loads of irritating whitespace thank you very much).

The same goes for the syntax. All the switching between $, @ and % is really irritating (ask a newbie how to get at the length of the keys array of a hash inside a hash, for example), and the changes proposed for 6 are just making this worse -- it seems that Larry, in his infinite wisdom, wants to prefix every data type with a different hard-to-type character. Perl was only designed for the three data types, and adding more is a mess.

Perl 6 is a complete rewrite, but it keeps all the mess which has accumulated over the previous versions. This is not good. Sure, my const int $var = 27; may look neat (in the same way that, say, Pascal does), but $var isn't entirely constant, or entirely an integer, it's just a hack which makes it sort of behave like one. The whole thing is an exercise in pseudo-computer science masturbation with little real purpose except to please the managers who dislike the one thing that makes Perl special.

On a similar note is regexes. I'm an avid fan of regular expressions simply because a nondeterministic finite automata is far more flexible than linear code. However, Larry must have been smoking that cheap $2 crack when he wrote this. Does he want Perl 6 to be flex or something?

I won't be going on to use 6. It's a nice idea, but it's completely unnecessary. It won't make large projects any easier to manage (the language is still, at heart, an almighty hack -- an impressive one, but still a hack). It won't make OO any cleaner. It won't make development any faster. To put it bluntly, Perl scripts will still look less beautiful than our friend Mr Goatse. I'd prefer to use a language which has always been pure synthesis of science and engineering, not some half-baked imposter.

Perl 6 will be nice, but I'm guessing it will be the end of Perl. It can't do what it wants to do whilst still being based upon a nasty mess. There are now other options, which provide all of Perl's power and none of the mess. Sorry, but *BSD^H^H^H^H Perl is dying. Larry is buggering it up the ass without lubricants, just like Shoeboy is doing to Larry's daughter.

Nothing about that article is remotely illegal, as he is simply describing how one would make a box using Cisco software.

I can publish a page on how to crack software, convert an AR-15 to an M-16, make meth, pick locks, launch dead babies out of catapults, and even have sex with dolphins, and none of that would be illegal, because I have the right to say pretty much anything I damn well please.
(Not that publishing some of those things is a good idea...unless you like feds showing up at your door.)

Talking about an illegal act isn't illegal (yet)...DOING it is.
There is absolutely no reason to pull this article...it's not as if the author is hosting IOS files.

:wq

One of the goals of Perl 6 is to make non-trivial projects possible. That's good. The way it's being done is bad. Perl was once a lightweight, extremely flexible language. Now it's become a huge ugly monster. People wanted OO, so a nasty hack was bolted on top to allow some semblance of it. Now this nasty hack is being expanded. Sure, the code's different, but the basic form is the same. Kludge upon kludge upon kludge; I'd much rather have a nice, clean, pure language (and not one with loads of irritating whitespace thank you very much).

The same goes for the syntax. All the switching between $, @ and % is really irritating (ask a newbie how to get at the length of the keys array of a hash inside a hash, for example), and the changes proposed for 6 are just making this worse -- it seems that Larry, in his infinite wisdom, wants to prefix every data type with a different hard-to-type character. Perl was only designed for the three data types, and adding more is a mess.

Perl 6 is a complete rewrite, but it keeps all the mess which has accumulated over the previous versions. This is not good. Sure, my const int $var = 27; may look neat (in the same way that, say, Pascal does), but $var isn't entirely constant, or entirely an integer, it's just a hack which makes it sort of behave like one. The whole thing is an exercise in pseudo-computer science masturbation with little real purpose except to please the managers who dislike the one thing that makes Perl special.

On a similar note is regexes. I'm an avid fan of regular expressions simply because a nondeterministic finite automata is far more flexible than linear code. However, Larry must have been smoking that cheap $2 crack when he wrote this. Does he want Perl 6 to be flex or something?

I won't be going on to use 6. It's a nice idea, but it's completely unnecessary. It won't make large projects any easier to manage (the language is still, at heart, an almighty hack -- an impressive one, but still a hack). It won't make OO any cleaner. It won't make development any faster. To put it bluntly, Perl scripts will still look less beautiful than our friend Mr Goatse. I'd prefer to use a language which has always been pure synthesis of science and engineering, not some half-baked imposter.

Perl 6 will be nice, but I'm guessing it will be the end of Perl. It can't do what it wants to do whilst still being based upon a nasty mess. There are now other options, which provide all of Perl's power and none of the mess. Sorry, but *BSD^H^H^H^H Perl is dying. Larry is buggering it up the ass without lubricants, just like Shoeboy is doing to Larry's daughter.

Valhalla was an awesome online environment. It beat the hell out of the BBSes of the time, and it kept getting better as more and more areas were added. I got all the rush of EQ from it 10 years before EQ ever happened, and I still get that same rush daily. Valhalla ceased to be in October 1997, but was reincarnated shortly thereafter (under new management) as Asgard's Honor. The admins and lib versions for Asgard have changed a bit from that link up there, but all the gameplay descriptions are still accurate, and a lot of the old Val players migrated to Asgard. I played on Val and now on Asgard as Silence.

Our web page is at ahonor.betterbox.net. We're currently in the process of updating it with all sorts of additional information. If you're looking for an online experience that isn't driven by profit but by having fun; where you can kill monsters, gain spells, chat with old friends and make new ones; and where you can talk directly with the people building the world, by all means stop in! Log in as 'guest', or create a character; either way, we'd love to have you check us out. I'm usually on every day, and I love to help out newbies.

-- Silence

Stop drooling you pervered furry fanboy.

It sounds to me that either Roxen or Caudium might meet your needs.

Both are multithreaded web servers, which are very good at producing dynamic content.
They have a very nice macro language built in (RXML) and support scripts written in the language Pike (which both servers are written in as well). Both also support embedded perl scripts, as well as java servlets, and fastcgi scripts. It also has very good database support, and support for dynamic image generation.

I haven't used Caudium myself - it is a fork of the Roxen 1.3 codebase, and I had already started using the new 2.x features before the fork happened. It is GPLed, and is available here

Roxen is available in two forms, a free GPLed version (available here) and a commercial version which includes content management features (Demo available here).

The new versions of Roxen are bundled with a MySQL install which the server uses for storing configuration data, caching generated images and pike/rxml pcode, and for storing internally managed user databases. It also works well with PostgreSQL as an external database.

Php support in roxen is a little tricky. Recent versions of PHP can be compiled into a module that can be merged into pike, allowing both Roxen and Caudium to execute PHP scripts inside of the multithreaded main process. This is still buggy under Roxen, but I understand that it works well under Caudium. Personally, I compiled php as a fastcgi, and used Roxen's fastcgi module.

Do you guys create your database schemas by pain-stackingly copying every element in every XML schema you have to handle to database tables and write huge amount of parsing/deparsing code both ways?"

I've been onto their particular game for about half a year now, as evidenced in a warning I wrote here.

In general, you should never give anyone's email address out. Ie, treat it like a phone number; it's not yours to give out, it's the owner's.

I treat the 'send this to a friend' thing in the same way. If you read the privacy statements of a lot of web sites, you'll see that it refers to your privacy, but doesn't mention anything about the privacy of your friends' email addresses that you happen to type into those 'send this to a friend' boxes.

I admit, I find the scoring systems on some games (such as Attack From Mars) a little absurdly inflated. In fact, you can see where AFM's software begins to break after a certain number of points because they didn't allow for the game's multi-billion scores - it truncates the highest significant digit in the high score list. Bleh!

Ever rolled a machine over? On some games such as Space Invaders, this is incredibly easy to do! Score enough points, and it rolls over from 9,999,990 (IIRC) to 0,000,000. On a machine that has an auto replay that kicks in at a certain score, you can collect this twice (or more) in a game.

It may not get you into the high score list, but rolling over a machine is one of the coolest awards in pinball (aside from, of course, being Grand Champion).

Also, whenever playing pinball, be sure to watch out for easter eggs! Some of these are just amusing, but others will help you score extra points or enter special game modes. I particularly like the hidden video poker mode on Star Trek: The Next Generation, mainly because it makes all the other people in the arcade stare and say "I didn't know it could do that..."

May pinball live on forever!

I admit, I find the scoring systems on some games (such as Attack From Mars) a little absurdly inflated. In fact, you can see where AFM's software begins to break after a certain number of points because they didn't allow for the game's multi-billion scores - it truncates the highest significant digit in the high score list. Bleh!

Ever rolled a machine over? On some games such as Space Invaders, this is incredibly easy to do! Score enough points, and it rolls over from 9,999,990 (IIRC) to 0,000,000. On a machine that has an auto replay that kicks in at a certain score, you can collect this twice (or more) in a game.

It may not get you into the high score list, but rolling over a machine is one of the coolest awards in pinball (aside from, of course, being Grand Champion).

Also, whenever playing pinball, be sure to watch out for easter eggs! Some of these are just amusing, but others will help you score extra points or enter special game modes. I particularly like the hidden video poker mode on Star Trek: The Next Generation, mainly because it makes all the other people in the arcade stare and say "I didn't know it could do that..."

May pinball live on forever!

I admit, I find the scoring systems on some games (such as Attack From Mars) a little absurdly inflated. In fact, you can see where AFM's software begins to break after a certain number of points because they didn't allow for the game's multi-billion scores - it truncates the highest significant digit in the high score list. Bleh!

Ever rolled a machine over? On some games such as Space Invaders, this is incredibly easy to do! Score enough points, and it rolls over from 9,999,990 (IIRC) to 0,000,000. On a machine that has an auto replay that kicks in at a certain score, you can collect this twice (or more) in a game.

It may not get you into the high score list, but rolling over a machine is one of the coolest awards in pinball (aside from, of course, being Grand Champion).

Also, whenever playing pinball, be sure to watch out for easter eggs! Some of these are just amusing, but others will help you score extra points or enter special game modes. I particularly like the hidden video poker mode on Star Trek: The Next Generation, mainly because it makes all the other people in the arcade stare and say "I didn't know it could do that..."

May pinball live on forever!

Stern is an interesting company by the way. Stern stopped producing pinball machines in the early eighties, whereupon the company sat dormant for almost two decades. Only recently did they resume pinball production once again. A pinball phoenix if you will.

Here is a great links for anyone interested in pinball:

The Internet Pinball Database.

Loomis

Ask and ye shall receive...
Usenet Cookbook

A long time ago before Usenet was only useful for p0rn and warez there was the Usenet Cookbook. It was distributed in the newsgroup rec.food.recipes. The moderator put together a set of troff macros and templates and people posted recipes to the group. The moderator would edit the postings and release a couple of recipes a week (to save bandwidth).

Copies are still floating around the net this seems like a good place to start. I printed the whole thing out several years ago and it took a couple of packages of paper.

• PuTTY is an SSH1+SSH2 implementation. PSCP, an scp-style program for Windows, is also available.

  PuTTY is available under the MIT licence (BSD-like).

  "PuTTY is a free implementation of Telnet and SSH for Win32 platforms, written and maintained primarily by Simon Tatham, who lives in Great Britain."

• TTSSH (SSH1) is an SSH1-only implementation, by Robert O'Callahan.

  "TTSSH is a free SSH client for Windows. It is implemented as an extension DLL for Teraterm Pro. Teraterm Pro is a superb free terminal emulator/telnet client for Windows, and its source is available. TTSSH adds SSH capabilities to Teraterm Pro without sacrificing any of Teraterm's existing functionality. TTSSH is also free to download and use and its source is available too, with an open source license. Furthermore, TTSSH has been developed entirely in Australia [...]."

• Cygwin (POSIX software on top of Windows)

  OpenSSH (SSH1 and SSH2 protocol) with Cygwin can run on Windows using the portable version of OpenSSH.

• MSSH

  MSSH from the Metropolitan State College of Denver supports Windows 95 and Windows 98, supporting SSH1 protocol.

• OpenSSH for Windows

  Another OpenSSH running on top of Windows..

• Secure iXplorer

  Secure iXplorer is graphical front end to PuTTY's pscp.exe.

• WinSCP

  WinSCP is a scp(1) program for Windows, with PuTTY integrated into it.

• NiftyTelnet 1.1 SSH is an SSH1-only implementation which comes with a scp-style program. Written by Jonas Wallden.

  "NiftyTelnet 1.1 SSH r3 is an enhanced version of Chris Newman's NiftyTelnet 1.1 application which adds support for encrypted terminal sessions using the SSH (Secure Shell) protocol. Please read the included Readme file before distributing this version."

• MacSSH is an SSH2-only implementation.

  "MacSSH is a modified version of BetterTelnet with SSH2 support. [...] The only SSH2 client for MacOS that I could find is a commercial product thats costs more than $100, and it crashes my Mac when closing a session... Since it's best to do things by oneself, here's MacSSH."

One of the goals of Perl 6 is to make non-trivial projects possible. That's good. The way it's being done is bad. Perl was once a lightweight, extremely flexible language. Now it's become a huge ugly monster. People wanted OO, so a nasty hack was bolted on top to allow some semblance of it. Now this nasty hack is being expanded. Sure, the code's different, but the basic form is the same. Kludge upon kludge upon kludge; I'd much rather have a nice, clean, pure language (and not one with loads of irritating whitespace thankyou very much).

The same goes for the syntax. All the switching between $, @ and % is really irritating (ask a newbie how to get at the length of the keys array of a hash inside a hash, for example), and the changes proposed for 6 are just making this worse -- it seems that Larry, in his infinite wisdom, wants to prefix every data type with a different hard-to-type character. Perl was only designed for the three data types, and adding more is a mess.

Perl 6 is a complete rewrite, but it keeps all the mess which has accumulated over the previous versions. This is not good. Sure, my const int $var = 27; may look neat (in the same way that, say, Pascal does), but $var isn't entirely constant, or entirely an integer, it's just a hack which makes it sort of behave like one. The whole thing is an exercise in pseudo-computer science masturbation with little real purpose except to please the managers who dislike the one thing that makes Perl special.

On a similar note is regexes. I'm an avid fan of regular expressions simply because a nondeterministic finite automata is far more flexible than linear code. However, Larry must have been smoking that cheap $2 crack when he wrote this. Does he want Perl 6 to be flex or something?

I won't be going on to use 6. It's a nice idea, but it's completely unnecessary. It won't make large projects any easier to manage (the language is still, at heart, an almighty hack -- an impressive one, but still a hack). It won't make OO any cleaner. It won't make development any faster. To put it bluntly, Perl scripts will still look less beautiful than our friend Mr Goatse. I'd prefer to use a language which has always been pure synthesis of science and engineering, not some half-baked imposter.

Perl 6 will be nice, but I'm guessing it will be the end of Perl. It can't do what it wants to do whilst still being based upon a nasty mess. There are now other options, which provide all of Perl's power and none of the mess. Sorry, but *BSD^H^H^H^HPerl is dying. Larry is buggering it up the ass without lubricants, just like Shoeboy is doing to Larry's daughter.

• So You Want To Write Your Own MMORPG

One of the goals of Perl 6 is to make non-trivial projects possible. That's good. The way it's being done is bad. Perl was once a lightweight, extremely flexible language. Now it's become a huge ugly monster. People wanted OO, so a nasty hack was bolted on top to allow some semblance of it. Now this nasty hack is being expanded. Sure, the code's different, but the basic form is the same. Kludge upon kludge upon kludge; I'd much rather have a nice, clean, pure language (and not one with loads of irritating whitespace thankyou very much).

The same goes for the syntax. All the switching between $, @ and % is really irritating (ask a newbie how to get at the length of the keys array of a hash inside a hash, for example), and the changes proposed for 6 are just making this worse -- it seems that Larry, in his infinite wisdom, wants to prefix every data type with a different hard-to-type character. Perl was only designed for the three data types, and adding more is a mess.

Perl 6 is a complete rewrite, but it keeps all the mess which has accumulated over the previous versions. This is not good. Sure, my const int $var = 27; may look neat (in the same way that, say, Pascal does), but $var isn't entirely constant, or entirely an integer, it's just a hack which makes it sort of behave like one. The whole thing is an exercise in pseudo-computer science masturbation with little real purpose except to please the managers who dislike the one thing that makes Perl special.

On a similar note is regexes. I'm an avid fan of regular expressions simply because a nondeterministic finite automata is far more flexible than linear code. However, Larry must have been smoking that cheap $2 crack when he wrote this. Does he want Perl 6 to be flex or something?

I won't be going on to use 6. It's a nice idea, but it's completely unnecessary. It won't make large projects any easier to manage (the language is still, at heart, an almighty hack -- an impressive one, but still a hack). It won't make OO any cleaner. It won't make development any faster. To put it bluntly, Perl scripts will still look less beautiful than our friend Mr Goatse. I'd prefer to use a language which has always been pure synthesis of science and engineering, not some half-baked imposter.

Perl 6 will be nice, but I'm guessing it will be the end of Perl. It can't do what it wants to do whilst still being based upon a nasty mess. There are now other options, which provide all of Perl's power and none of the mess. Sorry, but *BSD^H^H^H^HPerl is dying. Larry is buggering it up the ass without lubricants, just like Shoeboy is doing to Larry's daughter.

Me think someone is trying to set us up a google bomb.

One of the goals of Perl 6 is to make non-trivial projects possible. That's good. The way it's being done is bad. Perl was once a lightweight, extremely flexible language. Now it's become a huge ugly monster. People wanted OO, so a nasty hack was bolted on top to allow some semblance of it. Now this nasty hack is being expanded. Sure, the code's different, but the basic form is the same. Kludge upon kludge upon kludge; I'd much rather have a nice, clean, pure language (and not one with loads of irritating whitespace thankyou very much).

The same goes for the syntax. All the switching between $, @ and % is really irritating (ask a newbie how to get at the length of the keys array of a hash inside a hash, for example), and the changes proposed for 6 are just making this worse -- it seems that Larry, in his infinite wisdom, wants to prefix every data type with a different hard-to-type character. Perl was only designed for the three data types, and adding more is a mess.

Perl 6 is a complete rewrite, but it keeps all the mess which has accumulated over the previous versions. This is not good. Sure, my const int $var = 27; may look neat (in the same way that, say, Pascal does), but $var isn't entirely constant, or entirely an integer, it's just a hack which makes it sort of behave like one. The whole thing is an exercise in pseudo-computer science masturbation with little real purpose except to please the managers who dislike the one thing that makes Perl special.

On a similar note is regexes. I'm an avid fan of regular expressions simply because a nondeterministic finite automata is far more flexible than linear code. However, Larry must have been smoking that cheap $2 crack when he wrote this. Does he want Perl 6 to be flex or something?

I won't be going on to use 6. It's a nice idea, but it's completely unnecessary. It won't make large projects any easier to manage (the language is still, at heart, an almighty hack -- an impressive one, but still a hack). It won't make OO any cleaner. It won't make development any faster. To put it bluntly, Perl scripts will still look less beautiful than our friend Mr Goatse. I'd prefer to use a language which has always been pure synthesis of science and engineering, not some half-baked imposter.

Perl 6 will be nice, but I'm guessing it will be the end of Perl. It can't do what it wants to do whilst still being based upon a nasty mess. There are now other options, which provide all of Perl's power and none of the mess. Sorry, but *BSD, erm, Perl is dying. Larry is buggering it up the ass without lubricants, just like Shoeboy is doing to Larry's daughter.

Why Pascal is Not My Favorite Programming Language

Brian W. Kernighan, April 2, 1981
AT&T Bell Laboratories, Murray Hill, New Jersey 07974
....

One of the goals of Perl 6 is to make non-trivial projects possible. That's good. The way it's being done is bad. Perl was once a lightweight, extremely flexible language. Now it's become a huge ugly monster. People wanted OO, so a nasty hack was bolted on top to allow some semblance of it. Now this nasty hack is being expanded. Sure, the code's different, but the basic form is the same. Kludge upon kludge upon kludge; I'd much rather have a nice, clean, pure language (and not one with loads of irritating whitespace thankyou very much).

The same goes for the syntax. All the switching between $, @ and % is really irritating (ask a newbie how to get at the length of the keys array of a hash inside a hash, for example), and the changes proposed for 6 are just making this worse -- it seems that Larry, in his infinite wisdom, wants to prefix every data type with a different hard-to-type character. Perl was only designed for the three data types, and adding more is a mess.

Perl 6 is a complete rewrite, but it keeps all the mess which has accumulated over the previous versions. This is not good. Sure, my const int $var = 27; may look neat (in the same way that, say, Pascal does), but $var isn't entirely constant, or entirely an integer, it's just a hack which makes it sort of behave like one. The whole thing is an exercise in pseudo-computer science masturbation with little real purpose except to please the managers who dislike the one thing that makes Perl special.

On a similar note is regexes. I'm an avid fan of regular expressions simply because a nondeterministic finite automata is far more flexible than linear code. However, Larry must have been smoking that cheap $2 crack when he wrote this. Does he want Perl 6 to be flex or something?

I won't be going on to use 6. It's a nice idea, but it's completely unnecessary. It won't make large projects any easier to manage (the language is still, at heart, an almighty hack -- an impressive one, but still a hack). It won't make OO any cleaner. It won't make development any faster. To put it bluntly, Perl scripts will still look less beautiful than our friend Mr Goatse. I'd prefer to use a language which has always been pure synthesis of science and engineering, not some half-baked imposter.

Perl 6 will be nice, but I'm guessing it will be the end of Perl. It can't do what it wants to do whilst still being based upon a nasty mess. There are now other options, which provide all of Perl's power and none of the mess. Sorry, but *BSD, erm, Perl is dying. Larry is buggering it up the ass without lubricants, just like Shoeboy is doing to Larry's daughter.

Brian Kernighan's well known 'Why Pascal Is Not My Favorite Programming Language'.

I like to write my ER diagrams in something executable, like python scripts, which will create my schema automagically.

If you gotta have pictures, you might want to check out Dia, whose file format is XML. It has ER diagram components for you to connect. When you are done drawing, write a quick program to translate the XML description into SQL.

Ren & Stimpy can be seen via cable TV or satellite. It airs on Nickelodeon (aka SNICK on Saturday nights) Saturday evening at 9 PM (Pacific/Eastern). It also airs Sunday mornings at 11 AM (Pacific/Eastern), though it appears that this time slot will continue with reruns. MTV is also airing the second season, apparently, but no hard information has reached this author. MTV showings are inferior to the showing on Nick, since they stick the MTV logo on the lower right corner and have more commercials. (By the way, SNICK has also started adding their own logos to each cartoon.) MTV also compresses the audio badly and doesn't start the show on time. Incidentally, MTV Networks, Inc., owns Nick. Apparently MTV is owned in large part by Viacom. On the marathon of January 1993, MTV didn't have the logo but edited the music of "Svën Höek" and most show's order of cartoons.

MTV has random airings of the show (see your local television book for times if any), and Nick had "Nick-Mania" weekend with 8 of the best Ren And Stimpys during the afternoon. Nick Mania for the weekend of May 8 and 9 had "SNICK Mania" so that R&S will be played two times, once for each SNICK. No more mass airings have been planned, but R&S were participants in the Slime Time Sweepstakes.

Standard computer crime search warrants, which date back to the early 80s, use a sweeping language that targets computers, most anything attached to a computer, most anything used to operate a computer - most anything that remotely resembles a computer - plus most any and all written documents surrounding it. Computer crime investigators have strongly urged agents to seize the works.

Elsewhere it talks about the actual process of seizure. They do take photographs of the configuration before disturbing anything. However this is for their benefit, not yours. You are assumed to know how to reassemble your own kit.

(Aside: I recall a case in Guernsey where a new sports car was bought in to the island. The Customs disassembled it in a search for contraband and didn't find anything. Then they told the owner that he could take it away. Not only did he have to pay to have it put back together, but the warranty was now void. Neither of these two things was considered "damage" worthy of compensation).

On passwords, I'm not sure about the US. I suspect your Fifth Amendment protects you. In the UK the Regulation of Investigative Practices Act authorises the police to demand your passwords and encryption keys on pain of two years imprisonment for failure to comply, and if you tell anyone other than your lawyer about it then you can be put in prison for five years.

The Hacker Crackdown is probably the best book on computer cracking I've read, even though it was written over 10 years ago. It looks at the subject from the POV of the crackers, the cops and the civil libertarians. If you are interested in the subject then read it.

Paul.

Standard computer crime search warrants, which date back to the early 80s, use a sweeping language that targets computers, most anything attached to a computer, most anything used to operate a computer - most anything that remotely resembles a computer - plus most any and all written documents surrounding it. Computer crime investigators have strongly urged agents to seize the works.

Elsewhere it talks about the actual process of seizure. They do take photographs of the configuration before disturbing anything. However this is for their benefit, not yours. You are assumed to know how to reassemble your own kit.

(Aside: I recall a case in Guernsey where a new sports car was bought in to the island. The Customs disassembled it in a search for contraband and didn't find anything. Then they told the owner that he could take it away. Not only did he have to pay to have it put back together, but the warranty was now void. Neither of these two things was considered "damage" worthy of compensation).

On passwords, I'm not sure about the US. I suspect your Fifth Amendment protects you. In the UK the Regulation of Investigative Practices Act authorises the police to demand your passwords and encryption keys on pain of two years imprisonment for failure to comply, and if you tell anyone other than your lawyer about it then you can be put in prison for five years.

The Hacker Crackdown is probably the best book on computer cracking I've read, even though it was written over 10 years ago. It looks at the subject from the POV of the crackers, the cops and the civil libertarians. If you are interested in the subject then read it.

Paul.

About 10 years ago there was a debugger called Code Scope (I think that was the name). Anyway, if you compiled up Duff's Device with MSC and stepped through it in the debugger, it didn't execute correctly. However, if you just set a breakpoint at the end, it would run fine.

I was asked to evaluate the debugger for general deployment and after I tried this, I had to pass.

As far as most anoying bug -- about any MSC version before 6.0 and try

func(i > 0 ? Class1() : Class2());

Basically the lifetime of temporary objects was pretty messed up -- especially when combined with the ternary operator.

"Here is a Sun Dog, making sundogs."

There is a GNU SSH2-server! It is called lsh and is most probably not vulnerable!

One of the goals of Perl 6 is to make non-trivial projects possible. That's good. The way it's being done is bad. Perl was once a lightweight, extremely flexible language. Now it's become a huge ugly monster. People wanted OO, so a nasty hack was bolted on top to allow some semblance of it. Now this nasty hack is being expanded. Sure, the code's different, but the basic form is the same. Kludge upon kludge upon kludge; I'd much rather have a nice, clean, pure language (and not one with loads of irritating whitespace thankyou very much).

The same goes for the syntax. All the switching between $, @ and % is really irritating (ask a newbie how to get at the length of the keys array of a hash inside a hash, for example), and the changes proposed for 6 are just making this worse -- it seems that Larry, in his infinite wisdom, wants to prefix every data type with a different hard-to-type character. Perl was only designed for the three data types, and adding more is a mess.

Perl 6 is a complete rewrite, but it keeps all the mess which has accumulated over the previous versions. This is not good. Sure, my const int $var = 27; may look neat (in the same way that, say, Pascal does), but $var isn't entirely constant, or entirely an integer, it's just a hack which makes it sort of behave like one. The whole thing is an exercise in pseudo-computer science masturbation with little real purpose except to please the managers who dislike the one thing that makes Perl special.

On a similar note is regexes. I'm an avid fan of regular expressions simply because a nondeterministic finite automata is far more flexible than linear code. However, Larry must have been smoking that cheap $2 crack when he wrote this. Does he want Perl 6 to be flex or something?

I won't be going on to use 6. It's a nice idea, but it's completely unnecessary. It won't make large projects any easier to manage (the language is still, at heart, an almighty hack -- an impressive one, but still a hack). It won't make OO any cleaner. It won't make development any faster. To put it bluntly, Perl scripts will still look less beautiful than our friend Mr Goatse. I'd prefer to use a language which has always been pure synthesis of science and engineering, not some half-baked imposter.

Perl 6 will be nice, but I'm guessing it will be the end of Perl. It can't do what it wants to do whilst still being based upon a nasty mess. There are now other options, which provide all of Perl's power and none of the mess. Sorry, but *BSD, erm, Perl is dying.

One of the goals of Perl 6 is to make non-trivial projects possible. That's good. The way it's being done is bad. Perl was once a lightweight, extremely flexible language. Now it's become a huge ugly monster. People wanted OO, so a nasty hack was bolted on top to allow some semblance of it. Now this nasty hack is being expanded. Sure, the code's different, but the basic form is the same. Kludge upon kludge upon kludge; I'd much rather have a nice, clean, pure language (and not one with loads of irritating whitespace thankyou very much).

The same goes for the syntax. All the switching between $, @ and % is really irritating (ask a newbie how to get at the length of the keys array of a hash inside a hash, for example), and the changes proposed for 6 are just making this worse -- it seems that Larry, in his infinite wisdom, wants to prefix every data type with a different hard-to-type character. Perl was only designed for the three data types, and adding more is a mess.

Perl 6 is a complete rewrite, but it keeps all the mess which has accumulated over the previous versions. This is not good. Sure, my const int $var = 27; may look neat (in the same way that, say, Pascal does), but $var isn't entirely constant, or entirely an integer, it's just a hack which makes it sort of behave like one. The whole thing is an exercise in pseudo-computer science masturbation with little real purpose except to please the managers who dislike the one thing that makes Perl special.

On a similar note is regexes. I'm an avid fan of regular expressions simply because a nondeterministic finite automata is far more flexible than linear code. However, Larry must have been smoking that cheap $2 crack when he wrote this. Does he want Perl 6 to be flex or something?

I won't be going on to use 6. It's a nice idea, but it's completely unnecessary. It won't make large projects any easier to manage (the language is still, at heart, an almighty hack -- an impressive one, but still a hack). It won't make OO any cleaner. It won't make development any faster. To put it bluntly, Perl scripts will still look less beautiful than our friend Mr Goatse. I'd prefer to use a language which has always been pure synthesis of science and engineering, not some half-baked imposter.

Perl 6 will be nice, but I'm guessing it will be the end of Perl. It can't do what it wants to do whilst still being based upon a nasty mess. There are now other options, which provide all of Perl's power and none of the mess. Sorry, but *BSD, erm, Perl is dying. Larry is buggering it up the ass without lubricants, just like Shoeboy is doing to Larry's daughter.

It think, the industry is becoming more and more aware of the dangers of proprietary file formats.
Beeing an mechanical engineer myself, I have the problem every single day when designing in CAD. Ever tried to convert a model from Pro/Engineer to CATIA? Or EMS to IDEAS? Or...
Sure, after only some decades, they came up with exchange formats like the teethless IGES which everybody can interpret it's own way. IGES in Pro/E flavor (i.e. created by Pro/E in the way they thought is right) cannot be read by CATIA and IGES in CATIA flavor cannot be read by Pro/E. (Forget the ridiculus AutoDesk products, nobody want to design in them anyway, so no reason for data exchange...)
In recent years, the industry has become aware of the huge amount of time and money they spend on dealing with proprietary file formats and they have pushed for better standardized formats like STEP and VDA-FS. In fact, they have not only pushed, but done the job themselves...
One problem though: IGES, STEP and VDA-FS are still not public domain, they are owned by certain groups and will cost money as soon as it is feasible. So, the latest trend is XML - and this time, it's gonna be right!

BTW: One very exiting project is using XML for exchanging dynamic models between simulation programs, like this approach at my own university in Linköping, Sweden.

The only competition is the Mac version, 'Nifty Telnet-SSH'.

AFAICT, NiftyTelnet only does SSH1. Which sucks, because MacSSH (fc2 anyway; I just found out fc3 was out!) hasn't been real reliable on my Quadra 840AV. And it only does SSH2.

I'll second that. The single most useful tool I had in college (besides laptop). I still have mine and the knife on it is still extremely sharp. The can opener on it came in very useful in college, and the screwdriver is exactly the right size for the screws you'll find on PCs. It's also made out of steel, so the phillips screwdriver head didn't get stripped after lots of use.

Also, someone else already mentioned that lock picking tools might be illegal in her state. If you check the MIT Guide to Lock Picking, you'll see they mention that these are definitely illegal in MA, ME, NH and NY, so be careful. Also you might want to give her a piece of advice: fake IDs are illegal and have extremely stiff penalties. In addition, fake IDs aren't very useful in college, as even the most introverted, asocial geek can easily find some older colleague to buy the requisite vodka.

According to this paper (pdf) entitled "Scaling of Electronics" from 2001, the following conclusions are drawn:
* Moore's law will hold for 20 more years.
* There is a potential performance increase of 10000x with current CMOS-technology
* The minimum gate: needs 12(!) electrons to switch.

We'll see. I wouldn't hold my breath waiting for CMOS to hit the roof though.

Would this "humouse" be an anthropomorphistic creature, like those featured here? Some people get off on furry humanoids...

It is a proud and defiant ignorance allowed because the audience doesn't know better- they don't know of the SF books beyond the "Sword of Han Solo" serials on the NYTimes lists. The same reviewers would never review a modern comedy as "the tradition of Mark Twain and Charlie Chaplin" or a mystery as "part of the long history from Poe to Doyle." i.e. if it is another genre they'll have at least a basic knowledge of it: for example, that westerns went from simple ("Indians bad") to complex, and that other countries (Japan, Italy) are part of cowboy movie history. They'll know that Elvis isn't modern rock and Martha Graham isn't cutting edge dance. But with SF they'll use 40 year old movies as their example (in turn based on 60 year old stories/ideas, as SF movies tend to be far behind the literature) without embarrassment.

So what- let them be ignorant, some could say. But when reviewers don't know about or ignore modern SF, it hurts more than some thin-skinned fandom:

• It lets the modern non-SF author get away with slumming or borrowing. Authors need (and the good ones want) to be held to a higher standard.
  
• It prevents the SF authors from getting credit as the people who originated or built up a concept.
  
• It keeps the reader from finding out about the history and authors who've done a concept. The reader doesn't get a "if you like Z, you might also like X and Y, who started it..."
  
• It lets the reviewers get away with sloppy work.

So I'll be happy to see (what I assume are at least good sellers) books like Dozois' Best SF Stories of the Year and more showing up. Reviewers will have to first account for the writers like Ian McDonald, the rapidly approaching (and hope he pulls it off) Singularity Charlie Stross, and just intensely good Greg Egan, before they blow off SF as spaceship-westerns.

We play Real Time Battle at work sometimes.

Its pretty much exactly the same thing, except it used stdin/stdout so you can write your robot in your favorite language - C++, Java, perl, bash, whatever. I think development on RTB is pretty much dead, though. But its still fun.

I believe they have a competing product.

Didn't Wil Wheaton work there?

W

No, the point is that you said that no OS has shipped without a browser since 1998. I pointed out that there are OSes which ship without a browser today! And that, more to the point, most OSes still make it optional.

Note that the fact that a browser is optional with, e.g. Red Hat does not prevent Red Hat from shipping documentation in HTML format.

[S]hould Microsoft *have* to...

That's the question. MS has been found guilty in a court of law. Now we're discussing possible penalties for their transgressions. They've claimed that this particular penalty is impossible for them to implement. That's clearly not true. (Gee, MS lying in public? There's a shock!) Whether it's a reasonable penalty is a completely separate question.

And no one is demanding that Windows systems be prevented from having a browser. Once again, you've turned this around. The demand is that the browser be optional. Saying that this would make Windows be "unable to parse the single most significant new file format of the last few years" is just silly. Is Red Hat Linux "unable to [blah-blah]"? Sure doesn't look like it to me! Yet their browsers are optional.

Regarding command-line administration -- what does that have to do with remote adminisration? There are plenty of approaches (including the use of HTML/Jscript and a LOCAL browser) which don't involve the command line. Anyway, "TMTOWTDI" is not a justification for any random approach. No matter how you cut it, the bogosort sucks!

Some early examples from the Apple II:

*Eamon: A text adventuring system in which you were given the tools to create your own adventures.

*Lode Runner: Early platformer that came with a map-editing tool.

* Bill Budge's Pinball Construction Set

* Night Mission Pinball: Had pages and pages of values that you could tweak to customize game play.

Old Crays also make cool sofas, which adds a lot of value to their multi-million dollar price tags. =)

We have two of them (a Cray-1 and a X/MP) here at LiU

Here's a thorough one.

If I type in my last name in google, the first result on page one is my page on Elfwood. I like that.

On teoma, I used to get lesbian porn as a first resulst, now I get a listing of cheap Rio hotels, with a link to elfwood somewhere down there...Guess wich search engine is the Big Big Winner in my little subjective test.

As far as I can tell, teoma breaks down my name into separate words it uses in its search, while google first gives results for the whole word and THEN list resulst for broken down versions of my name, the lesbian porn and hotels are still listed by google, but ranked much lower, as they should be.

I know this doesn't answer your question, but you might try Dia. It has a GIMP-style (frameless, is it?) drawing editor. I have found I prefer it to Visio for things like UML (which I think they have done a fabulous job with -- better than ArgoUML IMO). I haven't used it for things other than UML, so I won't talk about those.

Regards,
Stephen

I think you missed creative loop unrolling.

This might be a time to look at the GNU replacement for SSH, lsh. It is completely 100% protocol compatible but a separate implementation so the configuration looks somewhat different. OpenSSH has a history of being somewhat a hack for a very old and broken version of the commercial SSH. lsh has a cleaner design.

This is an in-joke among C and C++ hackers, but it's too dangerous not to debunk.

Schildt's Annotated C Standard may a cheap way to get your hands on the text of the Standard, but for goodness' sake don't pay any attention to his annotations. This author is infamously incompetent and grossly negligent in checking his facts, and his books are full of severe misinformation and stupid mistakes.