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My favourite loopy law was the German tax on radio valves. The more valves your radio had, the more tax you had to pay. This inspired the electronics industry to attempt to package as many elements inside a glass envelope as possible, thus pioneering integrated circut design with the Loewe radio.

Actually you can use some javascript to get IE to render transparent PNGs "properly".
e.g. http://homepage.ntlworld.com/bobosola/

The scans won't be added to Project Gutenberg, but it's very likely that the scans will be used by Project Gutenberg's Distributed Proofreading project, which I'm involved in. We're already 'harvesting' images from quite a few sites, as well as all the images our volunteers scan. Now that there are several large and relatively well funded scanning operations getting off the ground, I imagine that over time an ever increasing proportion of the works that go through DP will be based from harvested images.

I maintain several lists that show the DP harvesting status of several image collections, including The Internet Archive's Canadian Libraries collection, Google Print, and Early Canadiana Online. As you can see, we will not be running short of material to work on for a very long time, even without any of these recently announced initiatives. That said, it's always great to see more material be made freely available, rather than locked up behind expensive subscription services like Jstor and EEBO.

The scans won't be added to Project Gutenberg, but it's very likely that the scans will be used by Project Gutenberg's Distributed Proofreading project, which I'm involved in. We're already 'harvesting' images from quite a few sites, as well as all the images our volunteers scan. Now that there are several large and relatively well funded scanning operations getting off the ground, I imagine that over time an ever increasing proportion of the works that go through DP will be based from harvested images.

I maintain several lists that show the DP harvesting status of several image collections, including The Internet Archive's Canadian Libraries collection, Google Print, and Early Canadiana Online. As you can see, we will not be running short of material to work on for a very long time, even without any of these recently announced initiatives. That said, it's always great to see more material be made freely available, rather than locked up behind expensive subscription services like Jstor and EEBO.

The scans won't be added to Project Gutenberg, but it's very likely that the scans will be used by Project Gutenberg's Distributed Proofreading project, which I'm involved in. We're already 'harvesting' images from quite a few sites, as well as all the images our volunteers scan. Now that there are several large and relatively well funded scanning operations getting off the ground, I imagine that over time an ever increasing proportion of the works that go through DP will be based from harvested images.

I maintain several lists that show the DP harvesting status of several image collections, including The Internet Archive's Canadian Libraries collection, Google Print, and Early Canadiana Online. As you can see, we will not be running short of material to work on for a very long time, even without any of these recently announced initiatives. That said, it's always great to see more material be made freely available, rather than locked up behind expensive subscription services like Jstor and EEBO.

Alien breed on the Amiga when the siren went off and you had to run !!

bring it back
http://homepage.ntlworld.com/xavnet/alienbreed/
http://www.mentalillusion.co.uk/alienbreed/screens hots.php

Umm *LOTS* of cameras have IR filters.

In fact there are several websites devoted to removing the IR filter from a webcam so it can be used as a "night vision" camera.

For example. Hell, here's a article about it.

Yes you can still see the IR from a remote control in cameras with the filter, but try it with the filter removed.

And if you'd RTFA or even just the blurb here you'd know that it finds cameras with IR but blinds them with visible light.

I'll be happy the day we can ditch the user agent string. But then again, I'll be happy the day we can use alpha transparency in a PNG on the web.

Not this again. PNG's with alpha transparancy have been supported in IE for years. You just have to do a little bit of extra work.

You're right. No true Christian believes in evolution, because by your definition of Christianity, he couldn't believe in evolution.
-russ

If you get a PS2, make sure you buy a hard drive and load up HD Loader. Out of the box it is not compatible with every game, but there are numerous patches you can apply that improve compatibility and add features. You can also use it with the slim PS2 over a USB hard drive.

If you get an Xbox, flash the BIOS with EvolutionX . Then upgrade the hard drive with a faster and bigger one.

This way you can download and play the hot imports, rare classics, and even (for the Xbox) emulations and movies.

I'd recommend the PS2 if you want more games, especially imports. Xbox only if you particularly like emulation and have a large collection of movies to stream off the desktop computer. A hard core gamer can blow throw the games worth playing on the xbox in a matter of months.

I mean, I'm all for buying the legit games you like. But renting is legal you know. Pay $5 for a week. What's difference if you spread it out and it takes a month? Most single player games can be beaten in less than 20 hours these days. But for some of the best games like imports it's simply prohibitive.

Radio waves in certain frequency bands wil bounce off the ionosphere, and this is used to establish communications over very long distances. Higher frequency radio waves zip right through the ionosphere, so normally communciations are limited to line of sight. But, if there are temperature inversions in the atmosphere, it is possible to get conditions that will cause the radio waves to follow along the "duct" created by the inversions. More info

I ran into this twice, when many years ago when I was flying S-2 Trackers on maritime patrol missions in Canada. The first time we had departed St. John's, Newfoundland, heading east over the Atlantic. I had left the VHF Com radio tuned to the airport control tower frequency, as there was no one else I needed to talk to after I left their control zone. It was quiet on the radio after we went below the radio horizon from St. Johns. We were over 200 miles east of St. John's when I dropped down to 100 ft above the water to inspect a boat. Suddenly I could hear St. Johns control tower on the radio. After I finished the work at that boat I tried talking to St. John's tower, and they answered me. If I climbed up, I couldn't hear them, but at 100 ft they were as clear as a bell.

One other night we were cruising south at 1500 ft, on our way to a naval exercise. The radar operator said that his radar was painting a fleet of ships about 150 nm ahead of us, which would normally be well below the horizon at our altitude. I took the range and bearing he gave me and plotted it to get a lat and long. Sure enough, once we got closer we found that the naval fleet we were going to play with was right where he had said it was.

But, radio ducting is apparently not been seen at frequencies over 1.2 GHz, and is rare at frequencies over 50 MHz. Source

While it doesn't come with source, it does let folks use the GeoManager under DOS.

I've been finding myself using GVFM more and more under DOS, too (a DOS GUI file manager in the style of Windows Explorer).

prolly get modded off topic, but for the web devs out there
IE png fix via javascript
I'd imagine google is using something similar for their IE support.

Cable modem setups *are* asymmetric:

"Upstream slots: Unlike an ethernet card, a cable modem is not allowed to transmit on demand. A single upstream channel frequency has to be shared by hundreds of cable modems that cannot hear each other's transmissions. If more than one cable modem transmitted at once, the UBR would not be able to understand either of them. So all cable modems must remain silent until they are allocated a time slot (measured with a precision of microseconds) by the UBR. The time-slot allocations are broadcast by the UBR on the downstream as MAP packets, so called because they map time slots to individual cable modems. So a typical sequence might be:"

You can read more at:
http://homepage.ntlworld.com/robin.d.h.walker/cmti ps/latency.html

Pngfix my man. IE supports true alpha-channel transparency for PNG's, you just have to mess around a bit to get them working.

Well, I still haven't understood why this game is so slow on old machines, just to give an example. Maybe it's very badly programmed, I don't know. It's great btw :)

• automated scan tools don't get bored.
• turning off ping and stealthing ports may break some applications, see here

Anyone who writes to their MEP on this issue, why not post a link here to how you got on?

My original letter only got a handful of replies. Let's see how a new letter gets on...

I was all pumped up for a meat-modding exerciose that told me how to convert my existing snake into a flying one with cool neons and shit. It's just a stupid science article.

1. Run over snake with Hummer
2. Put model-plane propeller on its flat body with super-glue
3. Put neon lights on it
4. Rev up motor
5. Watch it fly!
(Profit optional)

If they can make toilet seats fly, certainly one can make a flattened snake fly.

You write: Transputer != microprocessor

You really shouldn't comment on things you don't know anything about.

Here is some info on the transputer family, and links to data sheets on devices in each of the four main families. The T212, T414, and T805 became the most popular. And yes, they're all microprocessors, ie. a little integrated circuit CPU which you plug into a motherboard just like you do a Pentium, and with all the normal features of a normal microprocessor plus a few others of their own, like the 4 on-chip comms links. I've got a couple of T414's upstairs sitting on the shelf.

http://homepage.ntlworld.com/kryten_droid/inmos/im s_transputers.htm -- An intro to transputers

http://www.classiccmp.org/transputer/documentation /inmos/2186.pdf - 16-bit IMS T225 transputer (T200 famiily)

http://homepage.ntlworld.com/kryten_droid/inmos/im s_t414.htm - 32-bit IMS T414 transputer (T400 family)

http://www.classiccmp.org/transputer/t805.htm - 32-bit IMS T805 f/p transputer (T800 family)

http://www.classiccmp.org/transputer/documentation /inmos/4260.pdf 32-bit IMS T9000 virtual-channel transputer

These Inmos microprocessors were right down the middle of where Kutaragi wants to take the Cell, with lots of interdevice communications being handled directly by the hardware. Inmos even made graphics output chips which were often driven by multiple transputers in parallel, so graphics demos were really common on the transputer scene.

Interestingly, after being passed around between various European parties once Inmos ran out of money, the rights to the transputer were eventually sold off to some Japanese megacorp, iirc.

You write: Transputer != microprocessor

You really shouldn't comment on things you don't know anything about.

Here is some info on the transputer family, and links to data sheets on devices in each of the four main families. The T212, T414, and T805 became the most popular. And yes, they're all microprocessors, ie. a little integrated circuit CPU which you plug into a motherboard just like you do a Pentium, and with all the normal features of a normal microprocessor plus a few others of their own, like the 4 on-chip comms links. I've got a couple of T414's upstairs sitting on the shelf.

http://homepage.ntlworld.com/kryten_droid/inmos/im s_transputers.htm -- An intro to transputers

http://www.classiccmp.org/transputer/documentation /inmos/2186.pdf - 16-bit IMS T225 transputer (T200 famiily)

http://homepage.ntlworld.com/kryten_droid/inmos/im s_t414.htm - 32-bit IMS T414 transputer (T400 family)

http://www.classiccmp.org/transputer/t805.htm - 32-bit IMS T805 f/p transputer (T800 family)

http://www.classiccmp.org/transputer/documentation /inmos/4260.pdf 32-bit IMS T9000 virtual-channel transputer

These Inmos microprocessors were right down the middle of where Kutaragi wants to take the Cell, with lots of interdevice communications being handled directly by the hardware. Inmos even made graphics output chips which were often driven by multiple transputers in parallel, so graphics demos were really common on the transputer scene.

Interestingly, after being passed around between various European parties once Inmos ran out of money, the rights to the transputer were eventually sold off to some Japanese megacorp, iirc.

Um, IE has always had 8 bit translucency support. It's done through a directx filter. You can enable this with javascript so that IE treats PNG transparency correctly, and this has been known for years - IE 5.5 and up. One of the links in TFA documents this method. http://homepage.ntlworld.com/bobosola/pnghowto.htm

If you look at the source to, say, google maps, you will see that they use this very method to make the drop-shadows work properly with IE.

This bit of javascript will enable 8-bit alpha for PNGs used in IMG tags. Won't work for PNGs used as backgrounds of objects, but is at least moderately useful, considering that even if they release the fixed version of MSIE today, older versions will persist in large numbers for many years.

Here's a hack to enable 8-bit alpha in PNG images. It's a little flaky when used with an image map, but is essentially functional.

Case in point, shamelessly googled:

http://homepage.ntlworld.com/jim.mccumesty/jan_jun 2003/vanc_skytrain2.jpg

(They used to be able to operate the windshield-wiper handle too, but those have since been disconnected.)

>His mistake was underestimating in just how low esteem Democrats hold the US Constituition.

Are we talking about George 'I love the Constitution so much I lock people up for 3 years without charges and without access to an attorney' W. Bush? Here is what those wacko ultra-liberal Democrats (NOT!) at the Cato Insitute have to say about it http://www.cato.org/dailys/08-21-03.html/

Are are we talking about the George W. 'I love free speech so much I have the secret service arrest people that try to ruin my photo opportunities' Bush? http://homepage.ntlworld.com/jksonc/docs/bursey-ds c-d95.html/

Or are we talking about the guy that wanted to ammend the Consitution to prohibit one particular form of free speech, not so much because he actually cared (because deep down in side, he cares about nothing) but because he wanted to pander to the anti-liberty wing of the Republican party http://www.patridiots.com/000875.html/

Or are we talking about the George W. 'Pass the religious Bigotry and Homophobia act of 2005 and my signature will be on it tomorrow' http://www.cnn.com/2004/ALLPOLITICS/02/24/elec04.p rez.bush.marriage/ Bush?

Whatever else he is, W. is no fan of the Consitution as it is today, and certainly no fan of liberty. But hey, that's OK, he has a lot of friends on both sides of the aisle. Nobody in the last 100 years has proposed an Amendment to give people more freedom, we only seem to get amendments to take freedom away.

How dare you make such disparaging remarks about Cathy Diana, and Gwyneth

Check the NTL pages, they are already advertising the 1/2/3mbit service to customers. If you haven't been upgraded yet, perhaps you should give them a call..

Or, if you have a cable modem, you can upgrade your connection yourself here.

WTF is the timelapse movie doing there?

Its cool and all, but I thought a gallery of instructions would tax his server enough.

Sucker for punishment?

I can't wait for the Carrier Command remake to be released.

LK

Does anyone else remember a few years back when Quantum 3D was making voodoo banshee cards?

Even easier - a JavaScript solution - just add this one file at the beginning of your HTML page, and you're done.

http://homepage.ntlworld.com/bobosola/

I loved BBC BASIC. I think it was unique enough to warrant its own mention.

The UNIX History page thankfully included a reference to RISC iX though.

A tidal surge of 6 feet doesn't mean that the entire ocean rose 6 feet all around the island. This surge is essentially a large swell coming from one direction. It the case of Diego Garcia, it came from the east. Most of the development on DG is on the west side. The tidal surge was essentially deflected/absorbed by the east side of the U shaped land mass (see map) and likely resulted in little more than a slight rise in water height in the central lagoon, and little if any flooding on the west side.

Amstrad developed an email telephone a few years ago that allow you to download and play Spectrum games. Unfortunately you can only download games from their (extremely limited) catalogue and you have to play them on the built-in screen.

It's a pity these machines do not have a small solid state drive. It would be great to transfer a few tape images to a TV console and start to play them as they were meant to be played. There are thousands of freely distributable games for the Spectrum and new games are being written.

I wouldn't mess with the speed, as I'm sure the second somebody starts blasting 10mbit uploads down the cablenet, somebody on the UBR end will pick it up. I'd be happy with re-enabling the read-only 'public' SNMP on the local IP address of the cable modem... it was really nice pointing MRTG at 192.168.100.1 and reading the transferred-bytes numbers straight out of the modem interface, to say nothing of the signal strength and other genuinely useful info you can read with docsdiag.

(Quick primer for people unfamiliar with these: TADS is an authoring system and playing system for text adventure games. Z-Code is a platform independent bytecode for text adventure games. Z-Code games were originally produced by Infocom using proprietary tools. Inform is a modern authoring system that also outputs Z-Code.)

TADS has its advantages (a friend of mine who wrote the above mentioned "Magocracy" used it to great effect), but it also has serious disadvantages that must be weighed. Perhaps its most serious disadvantage is that it simply isn't as portable as Z-Code. TADS pretty much has a single interpreter and iffy specs. The only real specs for TADS games is the TADS interpreter itself. Z-Code is well documented at this point with many interpreters being available. TADS interpreters require relatively modern processor and memory while Z-Code was designed to run on home machines from the early 1980s.

All of this boils down to: my old Palm III happily plays very recent Z-Code games but has no hope of running any TADS game. Thanks to Frobnitz I've got 9 games sitting on my Palm right now. Z-Code is so stable that I'm happily running a 4 year old version of Frobnitz

While the interpreter support for graphics is but a pale shadow of TADS, graphics are really the point, are they? Yes, some games greatly benefit from them (I do like the "Earth and Sky" games), they're hardly a requirement for most games. Beyond that the Z-Code spec is quite flexible.

As for the development language, while Inform does have some strange quirks, it's a fine language that reasonably expresses intent. And while I'm a C++ and Perl coder at heart, I'm not so attached to a particular syntax that I'll pick a language based on it.

Ultimately it's telling that TADS games rarely come up in lists of "great interactive fiction you should play." It's dominated by Z-Code games. Apparently Z-Code isn't that limiting.

Don't get me wrong, TADS does have advantages. It shines in graphics integration. The author of Inform has said, "This author at least has long admired the elegance of Mike Roberts's Text Adventure Development System (TADS)," in his own book on Inform and goes on to mention some specific features he likes. Personally I disagree with enough of the library design that I'm tempted to replace it with the Platypus library. But since I'm personally interested in maximizing the number people who can play what I write and I don't have any truly serious problems with Inform or Z-Code, I'll be using that.

(For anyone sold on my little spiel, check out the excellent and free Inform Beginner's Guide and Designer's Manual , the free development software, and an interpreter. Of course, TADS is just as free, so check TADS out yourself.)

My robot, scratch build. Total cost about $100, if you bought everything new. I scavenged most of the bits from my "box-o-bits", though.

Yes, I love tubes. I love the wacko physics and great ideas people had in the past. Lessee here:
Miniaturized tubes (In german, but pretty pictures)
Mercury arc rectifer Evil-looking power tube! AH!!! An insane alien octopus!
A glass analog to digital converter? You betcha!!!
Tubes? Big? Don't think so!
I confess, I don't just like tubes, I like snap and tunnel diodes as well.

Yes, I love tubes. I love the wacko physics and great ideas people had in the past. Lessee here:
Miniaturized tubes (In german, but pretty pictures)
Mercury arc rectifer Evil-looking power tube! AH!!! An insane alien octopus!
A glass analog to digital converter? You betcha!!!
Tubes? Big? Don't think so!
I confess, I don't just like tubes, I like snap and tunnel diodes as well.

I second this. I have one and recently went through a few firmware changes. The stock firmware is actually not bad, and can has a decent amount of options.

Although Sveasoft stirrs up mixed emotions around here, you can get the image for free, and it's very good. You just can't see the forums unless you pay. I personally haven't needed the forums, but your results may vary.

http://homepage.ntlworld.com/mcmntl/satori/Firmwar e_Satori-4.0G.zip

If you are one of those people that don't agree with Sveasoft's forum policy there's Wifi-Box on sourceforge. I installed this one too and its very good also, although I prefer the Sveasoft image.

http://sourceforge.net/projects/wifi-box/

There are some others floating around, but I did not try them as they seemed too alpha. Cratering my WAP isn't currently a priority.

There are 3 different models of the WRT54G actually. If you count the WRT54GS there are 4. I suggest ebay as a source for the early 20 LED (V1.0) model. This model has more flash ram than later models, and of course looks cooler with its 20 LEDs.

http://www.sveasoft.com/modules/phpBB2/viewtopic.p hp?t=1176

Of course there are the other WAPs based on the Broadcom chip:

Linksys WAP54G
Linksys WRE54G
Belkin F5D7130
Belkin F5D7230-4
Motorola WR850G
Trendnet TEW-411BRP
Asus wl-300g
Asus wl-500g
Dell Truemobile 2300
Buffalo Airstation WBR-G54
Ravotek W54-RT
Ravotek W54-AP
Microsoft MN700
Apple Airport ExtremG

I don't have experience with these so I can't vouch for their performance.

Have fun!

-ft

About that png problem:

http://homepage.ntlworld.com/bobosola/pngtestfixed .htm

They've always been very very close to having it fixed. So close that it can be fixed more or less entirely with a small script tag at the bottom of your pages. It's simply laziness on their part.

Please tell us of the strange spaceships and spacesuits depicted in your cave drawings. Did the spacemen who met OOGG know secret of plane wave making?

Just for those who don't feel like reading through the article and associated forum: An apple fanboy created this photo with some ingenuity and photoshop and posted it as if it came from a third party. If you view the photo's blue channel only, you can see the following image Notice the words "fake fake fake" in the corner. Later on the forum Philbot (who was caught as the purpotrator of another hoax last year) admitted the deed. Oh those crazy apple geeks...

So what if I use something else like a gel pen? I do use those to sign check, you know.

Here are some pictures of Marvin's Costume, there's confirmation they're real in this interview.

Here are some pictures of Marvin's Costume, there's confirmation they're real in this interview.

Its already been done.

Without rails.

Full alpha.

Using this code:
<!--[if gte IE 5.5000]>
<script type="text/javascript" src="fixiepng.js">
<![endif]-->

Include this javascript file to your page.

This was possibly taken from http://homepage.ntlworld.com/bobosola/pnginfo.htm

With clothes and without.

(On topic, for once.)