Slashdot Mirror

Safety may be the main reason but it was always risky to do work in space. Perhaps we understand the risk better now and have rethought our risk:reward ratio. Comments on other points:

The Hubble wasn't state of the art when it was launched. Nothing launched is state of the art; by the time it is designed and built with space-hardened parts, it is already out of date, not to mention the actual delay involved in launching and on-orbit activation.

Hubble was flawed when it was launched. Luckily there was a servicing mission or it would have been a practically useless telescope, though today we have deconvolution software which goes a long way toward correcting this and other optical flaws, whether or not you know how it is flawed or camera is moving, etc.

While adaptive optics can compensate for the atmosphere in some ways it cannot compensate in all ways; there are limitations and more limitations, even of multi-conjugate AO. Telescopes in orbit or on the Moon will always have some advantages.

This filemaker pro database is available on-line. No password.

You know, when I search for "California's problems" I just get the usual prolifera of all the ways God hates you.

Try Here for more info. It's got info on all the planets.

This fields has decades of history. A good starting point, should you like to explore it, is here.

Only in the vaguest sense of the word.

hobbes.nmsu.edu (aside from being the definitive OS/2 software archive) has a good-sized collection of free tracked (mod/s3m/xm/it/etc.) and MPEG-format music. You can ftp there to grab the files (see the /pub/multimedia dir), and you can also browse at:

http://hobbes.nmsu.edu/cgi-bin/h-browse?sh=1&dir=/ pub/multimedia/music

How ya like dat?

I'd love it... were it accurate.

Always, always research.

There's actually quite a bit of work being done to try and enable UAVs (Unmanned Aerial Vehicles) to fly in the National Airsapce System without danger to other aircraft and the ground. Very cool systems are being developed to integrate them into normal airspace traffic; systems which allow them to communicate with air traffic control, "see" other aircraft and respond to them (SAA or see and avoid systems), contingency equipment for communications failures etc. It's really some fascinating stuff. I work along side one of the groups comissioned by NASA to develop a "cradle to grave" roadmap which outlines the steps that would be necessary to certify UAVs, individually and as classes of aircraft, from inception to the junkyard. One of the reports that goes with that roadmap is the concept of operations. For more information, you may want to check out AUVSI or google for "Unmanned Systems".

http://www.google.com/search?q=pthreads shows, for starters :

• A Pthreads Tutorial, written by Andrae Muys
• O'Reilly "Pthreads Programming"
• Pthreads Overview
• Introduction to PThreads

There's a ton of sites out there dealing with interfacing a computer to different things, if you know a little about electronics already. If not, it could take a little work getting up to speed.

http://et.nmsu.edu/~etti/fall96/computer/printer/p rinter.html

That's a fairly complete guide for interfacing a parallel port. Serial ports are slightly more complex as they are, well, serial. But it can still be done fairly easily [by a hobbyist].

Motors can be tricky at times, as they sink a lot of current, which would usually fry your PC's port, if not the power supply itself. You can find other sites better explaining how to use those.

-1 Ignorant. I happen to have a degree in CS.

I may not have gotten the exact idea down, but yes a very good approximative traveling salesman algorithm is based on ant behavior.

Do some research here for some undergrads that used the idea learned from here(pdf)

(Which are link i got from a two minute perusal on google for "traveling salesman ants")

Please have an idea what you are talking about next time.

Here's the abstract from the latter source.

We describe an artificial ant colony capable of solving the traveling salesman problem (TSP). Ants of the artificial colony are able to generate successively shorter feasible tours by using information accumulated in the form of a pheromone trail deposited on the edges of the TSP graph. Computer simulations demonstrate that the artificial ant colony is capable of generating good solutions to both symmetric and asymmetric instances of the TSP. The method is an example, like simulated annealing, neural networks, and evolutionary computation, of the successful use of a natural metaphor to design an optimization algorithm.

Riiiight...the word "monolithic" doesn't imply a single executable, and never has. *wink* Gotcha...

By your definition the Mach kernel used in OS X is a monolithic kernel because:

"...in Mac OS X, Mach is linked with other kernel components into a single kernel address space."

That sounds an awful lot like your definition of a monolithic kernel, but Mach in OS X is referred to as a hybrid micro-kernel. That is, it's a hybrid between the concept of a monolithic kernel, in which everything runs in the kernel space, and a micro-kernel, in which modules are dynamically loaded into the kernel.

It's revisionist history to call the Linux kernel in its current incarnation a monolithic kernel, since monolithic did indeed originally imply that everything was statically linked into a single executable.

Uh huh, it looks almost just like a Super-Axe-Hacker

All the optical mice I've seen don't use lasers. If they did, they'd be required by law to have the standard laser warning sticker in plain view on them. I have yet to see a mouse with such a sticker.

They just use very bright LEDs. If you think about it, that's all that's really necessary. It just needs to illuminate the surface under the mouse with a color that the sensor is sensitive to.

The question `how large is too large?' depends on the details of the atmosphere in question. This website has some numbers for various atmospheres in our solar system. With a measured lapse rate of about 7.7 K/km, there probably isn't a lot of spontaneous convection due to purely thermal forcing going on on Venus.

Of course, turbulence can be forced in a wide variety of ways, so the absence of strong convection doesn't mean there isn't turbulence on Venus.

The work is going on for porting OS/2 to ReactOS (Freeware NT clone). For me this seems to be the most promising project. There're already a lot of developers for OS/2 subsystem as well as horde of them for the OS itself. Site is under construction but mailing list is >20 messages a day.

For all who wonder - there's still life in OS/2 though not too much of it. OS/2 links:

• OS/2 News and Rumours
• ecomstation site working link
• Hobbes forever

if you want to grab the files while you can, grab it from sourceforge here or here or here while they last. That should cover all the flavors.

if you want to grab the files while you can, grab it from sourceforge here or here or here while they last. That should cover all the flavors.

Here we go, while it lasts:

http://www.cs.nmsu.edu/~rocombs/sc/

Sorry, didn't think that people had associations for .zip files already... I needed to use something that doesn't have an association... so I linked it to funny.glep also.. this should make it work with 99% of computers... unless I guess if you actually have .glep associated to something. I tried putting the file on geocities, (which would give you a semi-annonymous way to do this) but geocities didn't accept the upload of a .exe file no matter what the extention was. Kinda nice, but I'm sure there's some webhost somewhere that you could put it up annonymously... not to mention, you could also just "hax0r" a site, and upload it illegally, which would really make you wonder... "Well, the file _IS_ from respectiblesource.com... it must be ok"

You want to see it for yourself? The problem is that IE get's a file that ends in say, .ZIP, asks the user to download or open from current location, and if it's "open from current location" it actually executes the code as an executable, even if it _IS_ a .ZIP. There's nothing special here, and it doesn't need you to have web administrator access, I did it here: http://www.cs.nmsu.edu/~dfoesch/funny.zip If you want to see the exploit first hand, select "open file from current location" and then if it asks you what application to use, just click "ok" (ok, you might have to select the first entry) and PRESTO! Notepad.EXE! Running remotely on your computer! This could easily be any arbitrary program, I just chose Notepad.

OS/2 Warp Connect only has TCP/IP support, but it is said TCP/IP support can be added to Warp 3 using FreeTCP, which is probably available on Hobbes.

Everything you need to develop for OS/2 is in the OS/2 developers toolkit. Like everything else in the OS/2 world, it isn't free. eComStation comes with a copy of the latest version of the toolkit, which has about 100 Mb of libraries, sample code and documentation. If you are porting a Unix-like app, then you can use the emx package, which you may download at no charge from the OS/2 file repository at http://hobbes.nmsu.edu/.

Maybe there are less of us than before, and maybe our numbers are dropping, but we're still all out there! Check out the comp.os.os2 heirachy to find a few of us, and a google search will unearth a few more hiding places ;)

Another place we'll surface is mailing lists for open source projects. With the EMX runtime (on hobbes among other places), we can easily port a lot of cool stuff quite easily. Theres a supprisingly large number of projects out there which will build on os2, just look for #ifdef __EMX__ in the code.

Apart from os/2 servers, you'll find that most machines running os/2 will dual boot into windows and linux or bsd. Very few of us use only os/2, but we use os/2 because it does most of what we want. Now if only IBM would open source the WPS...

There is an OS/2 port (called Warpzilla) on Hobbes. It is at the 0.95 level, just posted yesterday.

OS/2 is alive and doing well, thank-you for asking....

The grue is a sinister, lurking presence in the dark places of the earth. Its favorite diet is either adventurers or enchanters, but its insatiable appetite is tempered by its horrible fear of light. No grues have ever been seen by the light of day, and only a few have been observed in their underground lairs. Of those who have seen grues, few ever survived their fearsome jaws to tell the tale.

Grues have sharp claws and fangs, and an uncontrollable tendency to slaver and gurgle. They are certainly the most evil-tempered of all creatures; to say they are touchy is a dangerous understatement. "Sour as a grue" is a common expression, even among themselves.

The grue is a sinister, lurking presence in the dark places of the earth. Its favorite diet is either adventurers or enchanters, but its insatiable appetite is tempered by its horrible fear of light. No grues have ever been seen by the light of day, and only a few have been observed in their underground lairs. Of those who have seen grues, few ever survived their fearsome jaws to tell the tale.

Grues have sharp claws and fangs, and an uncontrollable tendency to slaver and gurgle. They are certainly the most evil-tempered of all creatures; to say they are touchy is a dangerous understatement. "Sour as a grue" is a common expression, even among themselves.

I like the fact that we're not special, it doesn't give us any pressure to get something accomplished here.

..but the reality is that he's selectivly enforcing his invalid trademark (check the trademark db if you don't believe me). And he's doing this enforcement against the product that's **gasp** putting him out of business. If he really wanted to protect the (tm), he would need to go after:

O SSH
TTSSH
NiftySSH
MacSSH
Java-SSH
TGssh
sshCE
An OpenVSM project called just SSH
SSH-OS2
...

and, well, you get the point. He's just going after OpenSSH because they're beating him in the market. And not only does he have no legal leg to stand on, but he's being a real slime by only going after the successfull one. Theo would be right to tell hime where to stick his lawyers.

For instance, I just put PMVNC, ported from the Open source code on my OS/2 machine, which I used to access a Linux box and a Win2k box 90 miles from here. I also used a SSH port to access the linux box. I have had a port of NcFTP for a long time on the machine.

There is also an OS/2 ISP mailing list where they discuss Sendmail usage, SPAM, and a lot of other things; I also participate in that list.

You can find most of this stuff for OS/2 at http://hobbes.nmsu.edu. Xfree86 and Samba links for OS/2 can also be found at their respective sites.

Please don't kill my schools server, but here is a mirror of the frog mpeg anyway. The levitating frog

Gawd that was funny.

If any of you liked that, then you might find this site humorous:

Multiple Regression with Ren & Stimpy

Cheers...

--

I (== fluffy grue, incase you couldn't guess) trolled here only briefly. I quickly got tired of it, after I discovered Kuro5hin. This is the first time I've been to Slashdot in several months, because someone on Everything2 asked me if what was being said about me is true.

I was quite open on Kuro5hin about having been the President Clinton spammer. My handiwork is visible at the top of the Hall of Fame page. Aside from that, I haven't caused any permanent damage, and my relatively-harmless prank DID lead to some necessary changes in the way that anonymous posts on here were dealt with. I resent that it was called a DDoS, because it never even slowed down Slashdot's server, and it wasn't from multiple IP addresses (it was only from a single IP address, hence it was not distributed).

I resent being called a 'conspiracy theorist.' Any conspiracy theories I ever spouted off about were meant to be purely tongue-in-cheek. I never believed or stated that K5 and /. were at war, I just stated that I disliked /. and felt I had no reason to ever go back. And, aside from hearing about and finding this thread concerning me, I haven't come back, and I haven't had any reason to come back, and I will not continue to have any reason to come back, so I, most likely, will not come back.

Yes, it sucks that I trolled and spammed here (for a WHOLE THREE DAYS, no less). In the long run, what harm did it do? Not a whole lot; it did more good than harm (as it gave Rob&co. a bit of a clue regarding the notion of 'throttling').

If I hadn't done the spambot, someone else would have. In fact, other people have, since then, and I know I wasn't the first to write any sort of auto-trolling thing. The only differences were a matter of scale (it was obvious that these problems needed to be POINTED OUT to the administration here) and the fact that I released my source.

FWIW, my original idea was to mirror the Linux kernel source in comments, using comment parenting as a directory hierarchy, but I got caught up in the moment and did all that fortune crap instead. :)

I think that my only regret was that my "State of the Spam address" got moderated down and therefore nuked. I should have saved a copy; I personally thought it was brilliant, as did RL friends of mine who were there at the time. (In case you missed it, I took the post-Monica Lewinsky speech and changed just enough words that it vaguely referred to the spambot instead of the sex scandal.)

Oh, though I've heard that someone else has started posting Clintonesque speeches as their troll shpiel. It was kinda flattering to hear that. :)

Anyway. Not to get too carried away in talking about my last few days on Slashdot... If you must discuss this with me, email me (use my academic account address, joshagam at cs dot nmsu dot edu, since I wouldn't want the good friend who hosts my personal account to have his relatively-small connection frotzed up because of someone who has a vendetta against me deciding to spam me at it). I'm trying my hardest to be civil and forthcoming. I'd hope that anyone who feels like continuing this discussion to feel the same.

Now if you don't mind, I'm leaving /. again.
---
"'Is not a quine' is not a quine" is a quine.

This is a Motif based BDF (Bi Directional Font?) format font editor. Hope that helps.

more here as well.

There has been a dearth of good technical analyses of the Crusoe
available on the web. There is this official White
paper (PDF), and I liked this
article by Jon Stokes at at Ars Technica, but apart from that I
have seen very little quality information. This essay is much needed.

Well, I don't know anything about Describe, but if you look at the OS/2 archive at http://hobbes.nmsu.edu/ and do a search for Describe it comes up with all sorts of things, including an export macro to convert Describe files into HTML. Just a thought.

Regarding these new discoveries, it will be important to make sure that the discovered objects are actually members of the Orion GMC, and not more distant objects. Spectroscopic measurements will help to do this. The fate of stars/brown dwarfs/giant planets is determined primarily by their mass:
If Mass > 75 jupiters then Hydrogen fusion: Star
If 13 > Mass > 75 jupiters then Deuterium fusion: brown dwarf.
If Mass less than 13 jupiters then no fusion: planet.
At least that's one way to define the terms. The very informative Sci. Am. article mentioned above can be found here If you want to Create your own brown dwarfs, and see what their spectra look like, try this site. -chris

7Hi5 7U35D4Y'5 134P D4Y BR0U9H7 50M3 5URPRi5iN9 (0MPU73R PR0B13M5 70 7H3 Hi9H-73(H N47i0N 0F J4P4N. 4((0RDiN9 70 7H3 R3U73R5 N3W5 493N(Y, 1200 47M5 10(473D iN P057 0FFi(35 3XP3Ri3N(3D 134P-D4Y-R31473D PR0B13M5. 1iK3Wi53, 7H3 J4P4N353 W347H3R 0FFi(3 H4D DiFFi(U17i35 Wi7H 10(41 73MP3R47UR3 4ND PR3(iPi747i0N M345UR3M3N75. 4((0RDiN9 70 R3P0R75, 43 5747i0N5 411 0V3R J4P4N H4V3 B33N 7R4N5Mi77iN9 iN(0RR3(7 iNF0RM47i0N 5iN(3 7Hi5 M0RNiN9. 45 34R1Y 45 M0ND4Y 50M3 24-H0UR F0R3(4575 W3R3 PRiN7iN9 Wi7H 3RR0R5: 7H3 '29' iNDi(47iN9 7H3 1457 D4Y 0F 7H3 F0R3(457 B3(4M3 '1'. iN N0R7H3RN J4P4N, 7H3 53i5Mi( 4(7iVi7Y M0Ni70R5 iN 20 R39i0N41 0FFi(35 F4i13D; H0W3V3R, UN1iK3 47 7H3 574R7 0F 7H3 Y34R, 7Hi5 7iM3 7H3R3 W3R3 N0 R3P0R75 0F M41FUN(7i0N5 iN J4P4N'5 NU(134R P0W3R P14N75.
---
"'Is not a quine' is not a quine" is a quine.

Depends which country you're talking about. The calendar was the creation of Pope Gregory XIII in 1582, dropping ten days in October. Catholic countries followed immediately, and Protestant countries by 1700. In Europe, it was only England who had a leap year in 1700. Use of the Gregorian calendar in England (and the colonies) was finally specified by an Act of Parliament in 1751. By then, because of the extra leap year, the correction required 11 days. I believe Russia may not have changed until this century.

My info is from here and here.

Nah, the world's already been auctioned off on eBay several times.
---
"'Is not a quine' is not a quine" is a quine.

Or maybe Emmett was just making a joke, based on the fact that sort of thing always happens on eBay.
---
"'Is not a quine' is not a quine" is a quine.

That was the point.
---
"'Is not a quine' is not a quine" is a quine.

The music industry lost negative 1.4 billion. That is, they gained 1.4 billion.
---
"'Is not a quine' is not a quine" is a quine.

Sort of. You pay them some money and tell them the IP address(es) of one or more DNS server which serves your domain. Some registrars (register.com, for example) and many ISPs provide a DNS service, usually at an extra but nominal fee, or if you're willing to learn how to set up domain records yourself, you can go to free DNS services such as Granite Canyon, whom I use to serve the nameserver records for trikuare.cx (mostly since I need the flexibility of maintaining the DNS myself, since I have a bunch of different systems I keep under this domain, some of which are dynamic, some of which aren't, and I've also got my mail exchanging handled by a friend of mine, who is separate than the friend who runs the webserver which my homepage is on, etc.etc.etc.)
---
"'Is not a quine' is not a quine" is a quine.

More people use AOL than any other ISP in the world.

More people are willing to accept everything they're told as though it's gospel, rather than think for themselves.
---
"'Is not a quine' is not a quine" is a quine.

Hey, wow, that's pretty damned cool... I'm going to have to start running it. (If you've ever seen my desktop you know I'm into odd color schemes which I find pleasing to the eye and have the nice side-effect of making it difficult for others to look over my shoulder without getting a headache :)
---
"'Is not a quine' is not a quine" is a quine.

Either this ramble was created by a very good rant generator, a passable troll, or a woefully-misinformed severaly-brain-damaged political activist who doesn't know the difference between free trade and anarchy.

I suppose you think copyrights and trademarks are wrong and unnecessary too, huh?
---
"'Is not a quine' is not a quine" is a quine.

I personally prefer .cx, myself; they're cheaper, have great service, VERY nice policies (particularly when it comes to namespace conflicts such as in the case of trademark disputes - they'll only remove/freeze a registration with a court order), and, recently, have taken to providing free service for free(speech) and open source software projects.
---
"'Is not a quine' is not a quine" is a quine.