Slashdot Mirror

One of my favorite things about xfig is the ability to embed LaTeX commands in the figure and have them rendered by LaTeX. This is nice because it gives font consistancy between the document text and the fonts in the figure. With the figtex2eps script, one can process their .fig files by latex and have a .eps file for direct inclusion into the document.

Guess not much has changed since I used to pirate 8-bit BBC micro games in the 80's with my friends from high school. Of course, as soon as we published a game ourselves, our attitudes changed ;-)

I guess that absence of homegrown coders is one thing that might be different nowadays -- even kids who were just a few years younger than me were used to computer games being studio affairs; the closest they'd get to writing a game would be designing a level on Doom.

Another thing that may have changed is the thrill of breaking copy protection. That was a big deal for us back then -- we'd compete to crack the encryption on the latest games... then take off the copy protection, put our own logos on, and put the encryption back in place so that lesser pirates couldn't steal our glory, heheh..... I never saw any of the really nasty "black ice" that was rumoured to exist (e.g. antipiracy code that'd deliberately wreck your drive by moving the disk head beyond its physical limit)... I heard Infocom games had a lot of this.

Back then we didn't have to resent the kids in US or Asia, cos no-one except Europeans knew what a BBC was.... in fact, looking back, US kids didn't even have Elite, so we were the privileged ones :)

If you're not a total performance junky but like me just want to get on with computing (audio/music/image editing/perl/html/asm etc) then buy a thin and light or ultraportable laptop like sony T or S series. Many laptops are very quiet and the "centrino" based systems even more so (yeah, Intel's done a good job on those CPUs)

here's more info on the T series
http://vaio.sony-europe.com/view/ShowProductCatego ry.action?site=ite_en_GB&category=VN+T+Series

I can barely hear it. Failing that you will just have to spend a small fortune on low noise fans etc all of which cost more, usually due to the enormous size of the things. TBH I can't the stand drone PC's make it sends me to sleep, so does the whirr of air cons. I can't stand working in offices. Hence, I work at home! Those places literally knock me out. My old tower system has low noise components (PSU/cpu fan/fanless video card) but it is still very audible to me.

failing that this computer is deadly silent...

http://www.nvg.ntnu.no/sinclair/computers/zx81/zx8 1.htm ;-)

http://www.burnttoys.co.uk/

I will, in the mean time, here's another mirror

Shameless self-promotion follows: If you want easier access to your bookmarks than at del.icio.us, you might want to try the del.icio.us illogical interface.

If you want to test it before logging in with your own username, you can try mine, "engmark".

I've studied archaology at http://www.ntnu.no/ One of the most valuable things I learned there, is that there are very few facts. Some sciences, like math or physics have a lot of them, but stuff like archaology or history have very few hard facts. The value of general truth in the world of around us, isn't 1 or 0, but is rather a sliding scale. For example, why would world war one start?

What user needs to receive .SCR files via email? Seriously

I do. Of course, not for stupid screensavers, but for this:
http://www.nvg.ntnu.no/sinclair/faq/fileform.html# SCR

I hate file extension hijacking. I know this is an ultra rare case, but M$ also hijacked .DOC for their stupid Word, and NFO for their even more stupid MSInfo.

Univieristy class hosting and all goodies!

Oh, and I said use, not abuse :)

Become a ninja today!

Don't be a communist, be a ninja!

Comparing TeX to PS or PDF doesn't really make sense. PostScript and PDF are output languages, while TeX is a typesetting program. It's like comparing the merits of Photoshop versus JPEG.

I don't think anyone really writes PS directly, unless they're l33t hackers. (There is that tiny snowflake program that prints a different snowflake every time. That's pretty darn nifty.

But little to do with typesetting. You'd want to compare TeX to Adobe InDesign or QuarkXPress, I suppose. Comparing it to MS Word is a frickin' joke.

--grendel drago

Uploaded the file to:
http://www.stud.ntnu.no/~stianbor/shared/TOQCv1_0. pdf

the university server should be able to take a slashdot or two.

Imagine stretching your fingers over the keyboard to do a Ctrl-C Ctrl-V [on a Dvorak]

I have been using my own dvorak i18n-ized layout for a few years, and typing feels indeed more natural. For the shortcuts, Ctrl-V is actually quite close, Ctrl-C and Ctrl-X a bit trickier, but they are all within the span of my hand.

Now to put some in my Peltier Beer cooler http://www.stud.ntnu.no/~arnesen/peltierbeer/

• First item and its Home page.
• Second item and its Home page.
• Third item and its Home page.
  (I remember reading about this one on Slashdot before.)
• Fourth item and its Home page.
  (Byte magazine had anarticle about using an Etch-A-Sketch as a plotter back around 1980 or so.)
• Fifth item and its Home page.

Mirror!.

It's been done already.

http://www.stud.ntnu.no/~shane/stasj/pics/humor/di v/343.html

This person had a good idea, and the same tech can keep just about any pc cool enough without a fan (maybe add some liquid cooling too).

The Torah are the five books of Moses. The Hebrew Bible (in Hebrew, Tanakh) consistes of the Torah, Neviim, and Ketuvim. Bible simply means a collection of books.

I think the OP was referring to the Bible as being synonymous with "The Book" as in the way Muslims, Christians and Jews are considered each other "People of the Book."

No doubt there's more to it than that, and I have no idea how the evangelicals fit into the equation, or what book these folks belong to, but there you go.

Remember to vote on November 2nd. (Yes, the student representative election is on the same date as the US general elections.)

To keep this on topic: The student democracy are using re-designed old propaganda posters from the US (I want YOU to vote), China and the Soviet Union to create interest in the election.
Today, I saw lots of Iwo Jima pictures being used.

So printed out a cover of "The New Soldier" and posted it below the Iwo Jima posters.

Get a 486 for $20. eg -
http://cgi.ebay.com/ws/eBayISAPI.dll?ViewItem&cate gory=51096&item=5133469694&rd=1

Install;
http://www.ipt.ntnu.no/~knutb/linux486/linux486.ht ml

Ah, Romania

I think this image sums it up nicely: link

I wish they'd listed more of the hardware they're having problems getting hold of or getting working. I found this about the Atlas, and I actually remember the Sinclair ZX-80. Sure enough, as the site says they're sometimes sold on e-bay. Someone want to tell the library to get their bid in?

There should be a two wheels Segway, but powered by a human

Isn't that called an electric bicycle?

If Valve is worth their salt, they'll have to move to limit the information sent to players, giving them only what they should be able to observe and nothing more. Sending only the character positions you can directly observe would be one method, which would destroy wallhacks, but leaves aimbots unscathed. I think the only good way to counter aimbots longterm is to offload rendering to a server, but that's borderline insane. Both of these suggestions mean an increase in lag, but that's what we get for using a system where failures to transmit mean waiting for random milliseconds.

Actually, there has been some work done in encrypted or zero-knowledge computation*.

This way, you can actually perform calculations on a packet of data without decrypting it, which is a pretty neat concept.

There have been several examples of allowing encrypted database lookup, but this is different. In an encrypted lookup, you hash the query first (for example, you want to search for a patent on 'salmon descalers'), and search through the hashes of the field in the db. If there is no record match, then the server never knows what you were searching for. However no real computation is performed. Encrypted computation allows you to solve any problem that can be represented as a BSS (Blum-Shub-Smale) automata (broad enough that many real problems can be represented using it).

[If you are an evil virus writer, please skip the next paragraph]

Also, there was another technique suggested a while ago that allowed event-driven decryption. This way, a virus for example could carry an encrypted payload and occassionally attempt to read a url for the key, or use the hash of the IP address and date as a key, or a stock price, etc. If it decrypts correctly and the checksums match, execute the payload.

*: 962KB PDF covering a possible way to do this

The belief of the 1960s progenitors of US affirmative action programs (most notably the late Sen. Moynihan) was that a period of #2 would permit #1 to succeed. I believe the last 40 years have proven him rather misguided. I don't know what the solution is - and I doubt there is one - but enforced discrimination isn't it.

You probably just implemented it wrong. Here in Norway it works just fine. At the last election for the student representatives at the university's board at NTNU, a male was quoted in because two girls were first and second.

That's a bit extreme since the quotes are 50/50 for only two seats, but today Norwegian society is much more egalitarian than what would have been decades ago. In politics, two out of four main parties are run by women (Kristin Halvorsen for Socialist Left, Erna Solberg for the Right), and even the populistic Progress Party plans to appoint a woman, Siv Jensen, when current Führer Carl I. Hagen steps down. Another smaller party with a female leader is the Centre Party. You can look at this recent poll to check that 50/50 is approximately respected, even though there is no law saying that 50% of the voters have to vote for a party led by a woman.

Note: I'm not a nationalist Norwegian. I'm born and grown up in Italy, where there is only one woman in the parliament for every 9 men.

The belief of the 1960s progenitors of US affirmative action programs (most notably the late Sen. Moynihan) was that a period of #2 would permit #1 to succeed. I believe the last 40 years have proven him rather misguided. I don't know what the solution is - and I doubt there is one - but enforced discrimination isn't it.

You probably just implemented it wrong. Here in Norway it works just fine. At the last election for the student representatives at the university's board at NTNU, a male was quoted in because two girls were first and second.

That's a bit extreme since the quotes are 50/50 for only two seats, but today Norwegian society is much more egalitarian than what would have been decades ago. In politics, two out of four main parties are run by women (Kristin Halvorsen for Socialist Left, Erna Solberg for the Right), and even the populistic Progress Party plans to appoint a woman, Siv Jensen, when current Führer Carl I. Hagen steps down. Another smaller party with a female leader is the Centre Party. You can look at this recent poll to check that 50/50 is approximately respected, even though there is no law saying that 50% of the voters have to vote for a party led by a woman.

Note: I'm not a nationalist Norwegian. I'm born and grown up in Italy, where there is only one woman in the parliament for every 9 men.

But it's still a cool idea.

http://www.stud.ntnu.no/~arnesen/peltierbeer/index .html

Great game. Lots of bugs, however. Sadly, the majority of them were within the very conversational dialogs that garnered so much praise. Whole portions of backstory and in-game dialog are hidden in any unpatched installation.

Thank god for the fan community around it (and incidentally that of Baldur's Gate) or we wouldn't have Platter's Fix packs nor the ability to play around with BioWare's Infinity Engine which powers it.

Fix Packs for Torment
http://www.accesswave.ca/~cthorpe/

Jon Olav Hauglid's Infinity Engine Editor
http://www.idi.ntnu.no/~joh/ni/about.html

Misc Torment stuff c/o Platter
SPOILER WARNING
http://platter.jink.org/

Right here

You mean kind of like this?

...but the University library at NTNU, Norway is running Mozilla. Have been for a while too. They are serving many thousands of students (25-30k), haven't heard any complaints yet. These are not meant for general browsing though, only to the internal library database and related links. I did manage to read slashdot there, even though the address bar is locked so you can't type :)

Kjella

Fire the market researchers! Why didn't they learn, right back from this - The Sinclair C5. It failed then, so why don't they learn that people don't want to ride around in something that makes them look like a fool?

Now, if they follow the examples set by manufacturers such as Toyota, where they make hybrid, dual fuel cars (gas/electric) that switch fuel type depending on the usage, we'll get to the point where we can effectively use less damaging energy sources. We're getting there, slowly, but this just isn't it.

Here's a picture of a big cock
Here's a picture of a nice pussy
Here's a picture of a duck
Here's a great view of the beach

--
Afrodot. News for Idiots. It doesn't matter. Really.

Commodore 64, Apple II, and the Atari

"It's easy to remember - use Gimp for bitmaps and Tard for vector graphics."

...and on their free time, people use Tile Molester for retrogame development. Graphics programs have to be aggggrrrrrressive. =)

I think speeding is a lot worse than sharing files. whats the fine for speeding in italy?

In Italy, as we say, Laws are applied for foes and interpreted for friends. This is one of the reasons I left that crappy country.

Basically, all political parties are nominally against this law and want to change it (but then, why they voted it is beyond me--except they're idiots, but no news then). What the government let know is that they won't enforce it seriously. Since Mr. Berlusconi does not (yet) have a major interest in p2p-swapped material, I expect their fancazzismo (~laziness) to be likely.
(Yes, this is Italy. The lawmakers make laws they don't really want, the government says they won't apply it, and the judges had better shut up as they're all a bunch of stalinists plotting against Berlusconi)

If you want to know what the fine is for speeding, it's basically nothing considering you rarely get caught. Nowadays things have got a little bit better with the point-subtraction mechanism (lose 20 points and you have to take the licence exam again), but it's still nowhere near civilisation, especially in other traffic subjects like stopping at zebra crossings or parking in double line. Should you pass by Milano, be sure to check out via Lambrate, a secondary road close to piazzale Loreto, with quadruple-line parking on both sides! (No, I don't have the slightest idea about how they get out)

Go to this link if you want to know something more about Italy... as an Italian I can guarantee it's all true!

Lazy, paranoid and helpfull.

wget -m http://www.blackboxvoting.org ; chmod -R a+rx *

At your service. As we speak. Univeristy-class hosting.

You might notice a slight glitch, but I'll have that corrected.

These are some of the first new NES games developed in years

Hardly some of the first...There have been tons of homebrew NES demos and full games developed within the past few years. Well-polished games like Chris Covell's Solar Wars and Kent Hansen's Bombsweeper are polished games that put Bob Rost's own self-proclaimed 'NES game of the century', Sack of Flour, to shame - if not on code complexity and dev team size, on well-polished game design and playability. Not to mention the promising Megaman: Vengeance homebrew game being (slowly) developed by the folks at Dragon Eye Studios. The rom hacking community has produced plenty of other high quality rom hacks that do amazing things with the NES.

Either way, I think it's a cool project. I first discovered the student class webpage a month or two ago, and I'm glad that the class ended successfully.

Here. Faster.

...my Ex-University's library has been using Linux/Mozilla since 2001 (yes, pre-1.0). They are dumb terminals only designed to search the library database and download/print articles though, no other OSS apps.

Oh and if any of you admins there read this: You didn't lock it down well enough, I still managed to read slashdot even though you disabled editing the address bar & most of the copy-paste functionality :)

Kjella

It's very rare today to hear of a major company throwing money at a research project since the '80s.

Of COURSE it's rare for an oil company to fund any research into alternative energy sources.

Neal Stephenson rocks. Seriously. If you haven't already, read Snow Crash. You'll be glad you did.

Now that the fawning and praise and adoration is out of the way... He did an interesting essay a while back called In the Beginning was the Command Line. It's a good read.

All human activity since the industrial revolution is less than one small to moderate eruption

Because, for example, the eruption of Mount St Helens put 1 Million tonnes of sulfur aerosols into the stratosphere - these are the things that have the most effect on the worldwide climate, the ash from volcanos is local effect only.

Now, a million tonnes sounds absolutely huge. But it is still only just over five times what, say, the State of Louisiana emits as sulfur dioxide every year.

So in other words - the US easily produces as much sulfur dioxide, and more, every year than the explosion of Mount St Helens.

Or put it this way - you get sulfur dioxide from burning fossil fuels. We mine, worldwide, billions of tonnes of coal every year (the US alone produces just under a billion). How much sulfur dioxide do you think all that lot produces? The answer is that a typical small coal-fired power station (100 MW) may produce from 20 000 up to 30 000 tons of sulphur dioxide a year. In other words, Mt St Helens is worth a measly 40 small coal-fired power stations. How many of them are there in the US alone?

There is some info about the game on this page.

6502 assembly source code

A bit more on crime induced poverty traps here: http://www.sv.ntnu.no/iso/Ragnar.Torvik/crime.pdf.

A quote from the conclusion:

"the social forces that produce the hump under some circumstances can lead to a poverty trap long before full industrialization is reached. Depending on the stage of development capital accumulation may have negative or positive externalities via criminal behavior. At a low stage of development capital accumulation by one producer generates increasing crime that reduces the profitability of all producers. At a higher stage of development, when labor has become more scarce, capital accumulation (and increased employment) of one producer reduces crime, enhancing the profitability of all producers. It is the changing sign of the externality at different stages of development that can generate a poverty trap."

why google does not index ftp? anonymous ftp, like the good old ftpsearch.ntnu.no/ was doing, reading each day the ls-lR or ls-lr.Z from the ftp? after web, images, news, catalogs, etc, they should index ftp

Now, where's my publication in SIGGRAPH 04?

-Bow for the Gimp!

I'm mirroring the DVD (1.4gig). It's not fully downloaded either, but will be in 25 minutes.

To the "supposedly 'world class'" part, allow me to quote a song from Office Space: Real gangsta ass niggas don't flex nuts, cuz real gangsta ass niggas know they got 'em.

Ps: Science is not about learning practical things.