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Not exactly 20 years ago (16 actually), but the Z88 was a Z80 (definitly older than 16 years) based portably that ran for 20 hours on 4 AA batteries.

Ah! So, you think English is bad? The world is full of homophones, think of French, where words like a, as, a' are pronounced exactly the same, but with different orthography (which is itself almost as bad as English' own). Arabic has a host of dialects, and also Russian is -I heard- quite scary.

However, what is interesting is that Opera is a norwegian company. As a foreigner living in Norway, and speaking Norwegian, I am stunned at how Norwegians plainly refuse to speak proper Norwegian: everybody stick to their dialect, and get pretty upset if you as them prettyPrettyPleaseWithACherryOnTop to speak Norwegian "because you're learning". They'll rather switch to English, vanifying any actual effort to learn the language, and feel pissed at you because you "disrespected their identity". Yes, there are local politicians that are wondering why most immigrants do not learn the language.

Here in Trondheim, where I live, the Linguistics department of NTNU, Trondheim's university, has managed to get an automated speech-recognition-based information service for the local mass transport company, so that elderly people can ring from their mobile phones and ask for when the next bus passes by. Can't find the link, it's possibly experimental, but i think my source is quite reliable. I work at that university myself, though at another institute and faculty.

Therefore, if their program managed to swallow Trondheim's dialect, troendersk, it can digest just about anything. AFAIHH, they used neural networks to program the thingie.

Ah! So, you think English is bad? The world is full of homophones, think of French, where words like a, as, a' are pronounced exactly the same, but with different orthography (which is itself almost as bad as English' own). Arabic has a host of dialects, and also Russian is -I heard- quite scary.

However, what is interesting is that Opera is a norwegian company. As a foreigner living in Norway, and speaking Norwegian, I am stunned at how Norwegians plainly refuse to speak proper Norwegian: everybody stick to their dialect, and get pretty upset if you as them prettyPrettyPleaseWithACherryOnTop to speak Norwegian "because you're learning". They'll rather switch to English, vanifying any actual effort to learn the language, and feel pissed at you because you "disrespected their identity". Yes, there are local politicians that are wondering why most immigrants do not learn the language.

Here in Trondheim, where I live, the Linguistics department of NTNU, Trondheim's university, has managed to get an automated speech-recognition-based information service for the local mass transport company, so that elderly people can ring from their mobile phones and ask for when the next bus passes by. Can't find the link, it's possibly experimental, but i think my source is quite reliable. I work at that university myself, though at another institute and faculty.

Therefore, if their program managed to swallow Trondheim's dialect, troendersk, it can digest just about anything. AFAIHH, they used neural networks to program the thingie.

Anyone remember the Sinclair Microdrive?

Sir Clive Sinclair, inventor of the ZX81 and Spectrum line of computers did not believe disc drives had a future. He invented the microdrive. Cheap, fast and with low power demands.

The microdrive had small cartridges with a tape loop running inside. The Spectrum version held ~100 k or so of data. They were built into the Sinclair Ql, and was available as periphals for Spectrum (Timex in the US).

It was very soon forgotten except by us old Spectrum afficionados!

• If someone just decided to write a bunch of random letters in a nice shape and try to compile it, it wouldn't work.

You sir, are mistaken :)

Ok, the letters themselves may not be random, but it's still a nice piece of code!

No remake could ever beat Repton 3. Check out BeebGames for more games, including a large collection of Superior Software games (scroll down on the left-hand nav), as well as AcronSoft and a whole heap of smaller companies games that didn't take off. Oh, and don't forget the emulators. (:

*sigh*.. they don't make 'em like they used to.

maybe it doesn't work becuase your resume looks like this.

http://www.stud.ntnu.no/~shane/stasj/pics/humor/di v/bubba.jpg

Speaking from some experience (CS undergrad TA while in grad school)....

A few thoughts:

It's essential to teach some assembly at some point in a CS undergrad - A CS course should give full insight into the workings of a real CPU, and should give as wide a variety as possible.

At Edinburgh the first year CS course included assembly, C, and ... wait for it ... PostScript. PS sounds wacky but it's the only stack based language widely used on modern computers (APL and Forth have died out).

When I was a CS undergrad we had practical classes in no fewer than 17 languages, covering the range of imperative, declarative, functional and stack based, plus specialist toys like theorem provers and SQL.

The best starting point for a university level course is the good old procedural language - in my day it was Pascal, C++ and Modula-3, these days I'd use Java (and many CS departments do).

Also, when you do get to assembler, I don't think using a real assembler is the best teaching tool - assemblers are intended for developing real low level code, or as back end targets for compilers. For teaching at Edinburgh, we used an X11 based tool called xspim which simulated a MIPS R2000 (we actually ran it on Sun Sparc-II's, not that it matters), and it let you single step and examine registers without the complexity of adding a debugger, and had a window where you could see the registers, CPU pipeline etc. displayed.

For introducing programming concepts to a younger audience I think an interpreted language which will execute command lines, allowing them to experiment while avoiding the edit-compile-run cycle, is very important. Some are better than others; when I was a kid the 8 bit micros (Apple, Commodore, Atari, ...) had BASIC interpreters in ROM, and they were mostly OK, though the only one with a really good BASIC language (proper procedures, not GOSUB) was the Acorn BBC.

I don't like Pilot or Comal for teaching (failed experiments of the 1980's) but I think LOGO is a very commendable way to make concepts accessible to the young.

A perhaps unexpected place I was made to learn with an interpreted environment was as an undergrad at Cambridge University, where the first programming language taught is ML which for the CS people who haven't heard of is an implementation of lambda calculus with a sane syntax.

It's ok that the letter isn't finished. RealNetworks wouldn't have been able to recieve it anyway.

• Density 1.05 - 1.07 Mg/m^3
• Bulk Modulus 4.1 - 4.6 GPa
• Compressive Strength 55 - 60 MPa
• Elastic Limit 40 - 45 MPa
• Endurance Limit 24 - 27 MPa
• Fracture Toughness 2.3 - 2.6 MPa.m1/2
• Hardness 100 - 140 MPa
• Modulus of Rupture 50 - 55 MPa
• Poisson's Ratio 0.38 - 0.42
• Shear Modulus 0.85 - 0.95 GPa

Which is enough to calculate at what at point point a solid cube of ABS will fail under its own weight. (Depending on your definition of fail.. but lets use, in this example example, a failure is when the pressure due to the blocks weight excedes the compressive strength).

However, in order to calculate the failure for a lego construction, I need geometic information. Anybody want to weigh a lego brick and give me a detailed engineering diagram? I suggest we settle on the standard 4x8 brick. Note that the result will be affected by exactly how its constructed. Any bricklayers on slashdot care to make a suggestion on the best way to lay a 3 dimensional solid structure?

Non-linkable so the referrer tags don't show.

www.nakkidnerds.com/members/index.php
login: jobmark
pass: passfan

Yeah, that pass should last about, oh, ten goddamn seconds.

Not like there's a point. Girls up on there are all kinda icky. Not like raverporn (now eroticbpm) or burningangel. Now *there*'s some good geek porn.

Raverporn gives new meaning to use strict. Goddamn.

Calm down and have some nice goatse cookies

Maybe, but you could get Kermit on just about every platform under the sun.

Which was why it was great. Back in the early 80's it was the only thing I could get for all of my hardware. In some cases I had X & Y modem and in some cases, X, Y and Z. But the biggest reason why was that, almost twenty years ago, I used to it transfer software, data and my thesis to and from my trusty BBC Micro to York University's VAX mainframe via another BBC Micro that was connected to it. It was the only way I got data to and from the outside world.

When we query Google for that question, we immediately discover that this 2003 talk by Eco is a rehash of a talk he gave in 1995, and a very similar talk he gave in 1996, and again in 1998, and yet again in 2000 . Each of those talks contains the Napoleon/Kant/encyclopedia example. So Eco has been giving much the same talk for almost a decade now.

A search at Amazon.com reveals that Bertrand Russell compared Napoleon and Kant back in 1935, and mentioned that Kant never travelled more than 10 miles from his home town of Konigsberg, Germany. Eco has presumably read Russell, one of the great philosophers and essayists, and may have lifted the Kant/Napoleon example from Russell.

So we've learned something important about Eco himself, something he didn't tell us. He's less creative and original than he would like us to think. Before Internet searches, it would have taken considerable scholarly research to discover that. Now, anyone can do it in a few minutes.

In the UK, you'd have to at least consider the inclusion of the Sinclair ZX80/81 and the BBC computer from the early 80s. Both were affordable, came with BASIC built in and introduced people to the idea of having a computer in their homes - I was particularly fond of BBC basic which, like many others of my generation, gave me my first programming experience.

You can get it from http://www.stud.ntnu.no/~stigespe/lotr3_trlr_dl.mo v

I've been on MUDs since around 1997 and experimented with a few different Windows and *nix clients, and the only thing I use anymore is tintin++ on *nix or wintin95 on any wintendo boxes I may be using at the time. They're very low on the "bells and whistles", as the windows port is basically the terminal version with a simple interface added, and the *nix version is meant for use in terminal windows.
They're not low on features, as you can easily add triggers, variables, aliases, and such.

Here's a link for each client:
tintin++
Wintin95

Hope you find them to your liking.

Being that I've played a few MUD's over the years, I've found that nothing like a Linux/Unix shell account and (T)he k(I)cki(N) (T)ickin d(I)kumud clie(N)t (TinTin++)can beat the features and quickness for those wacky text base games. Although Zuggsoft's was a good client when I happened to use in on occasion (Back when Win 3.11 was still predominantly used on school computers), it just doesn't beat the speed of TinTin. On the other hand, I've heard that WinTin is a good Win32 client based on the TinTin code, though havn't used it myself, if it's anything like it's cousin, I'm sure it's a decent client (even if it is on a windoze platform). All in all, it depends on what kind of client you're looking for, something with lots of eye candy, use the windows ones, but for the pure speed and transparentness, use TinTin hands down.

All my friends seem to like it.

check it out.

...and I pasted this (story I wrote for English class five years ago) into it, and got the EXACT same resulat as you. Hundred on everything except creativity (99.973).

(Okay, what's up with using accented chars in Slashdot posts anyway?)

Sinclair ZX Spectrum +

Then Amstrad followed up further with:

Spectrum 128

Spectrum +2 and +2A

Spectrum +3

and like all good ideas the Speccy was cloned around the world.

Sinclair ZX Spectrum +

Then Amstrad followed up further with:

Spectrum 128

Spectrum +2 and +2A

Spectrum +3

and like all good ideas the Speccy was cloned around the world.

Sinclair ZX Spectrum +

Then Amstrad followed up further with:

Spectrum 128

Spectrum +2 and +2A

Spectrum +3

and like all good ideas the Speccy was cloned around the world.

Sinclair ZX Spectrum +

Then Amstrad followed up further with:

Spectrum 128

Spectrum +2 and +2A

Spectrum +3

and like all good ideas the Speccy was cloned around the world.

Project Loki was the design for a "Super Spectrum" that Sinclair came up with before Amstrad bought them out. Two ex-Sinclair engineers, John Mathieson and Martin Brennan, left and set up their own company called Flare, drawing on the Loki designs to produce a new multiprocessor games console. Atari brought the console to market as the Jaguar. More info here.

Forget the C5 or C6, and Segway.

Clive Sinclair did have a few sharp ideas and one of them was the the wafer chip project:

"What you have is a wafer of silicon a few inches in diameter and instead of chopping that up and putting all the bits that work into packages and then putting them all together again on a circuit board, you keep them on the wafer. The problem is that you've got to have some system to test for the good areas. Essentially we divide the memory up into blocks about the size of an ordinary chip and put a bit of extra logic on which uses a mathematical algorithm to connect up the good chips and not the bad. If one bit fails you can power-down and reconfigure it so it has an extended lifetime."

This was a genuinely good idea. Reduce the cost of chip manufacture and extend the life of computers by many years. Just replace the odd power supply every 3 or 4 years. The reconfigure of faulty chips could even be done on the fly.

Using this proposed method, Memory & Processor chips aren't just "Good" or "Dead", they can last many years in a very slow state of hardly noticable decay.

Heat is a problem I hear you say for processors? Well if you have 20 of them on one wafer you don't need them to all be P4s.

Intel will probably jump onto this idea when Moore's law starts to flatten out.

Cheap slabs of ram and CPU, that don't fail all at once - yeah!!

You mean like the Loki super Spectrum?

• System photos & screenshots
  
• Acorn Computers - A history
  
• Google Directory on Acorn
  
• The BBC Lives
  
• BBC info at the Cybervillage
  
• BBC Documentation project
  
• Beeb History @ Stairway To Hell
  

Well, it'd be slow if you decided to send a raytracer or some fractals or even the Mandelbrot set itself to the printer.

Yes, I've actually sent a fractal to an old LaserJet with PostScript, and waited ten minutes for the page to pop out.

For normal usage, of course, you'd never run into any sorts of problems. But if you decided to be crazy about it...

More on-topic, there's a refurbished HP color laser on PriceWatch's "not exactly new" section for $650. I've seen them for moderately cheaper than that at the local computer chop shop---used, of course.

Color laser is faster and better than inkjet, and you won't go crazy refilling or replacing ink. It's worth the extra cash.

--grendel drago

My experience - early 80s home computing in the UK
---
Back in '83 my father bought the family a BBC B [1], and not long after playing the bundled games thoroughly I found the User Guide, tried out the teletext examples to do double height text, the moving man vdu23 example, and didn't stop until I got to the end. It was a wonderful learning experience..

Switch the Beeb on...
*blur*beep*
BBC Computer 32k

Basic

> 10 PRINT "Ooh look a programming language"
> 20 PRINT "that is right there at power up"
> 30 PRINT "and easy enough for a preteen"
> 40 GOTO 10
> RUN

From that prompt BBC BASIC was right there available to you from power up. Want to draw a triangle - plot 85.. play a middle C note - SOUND 1,-15,53,5. Now is that or talking to DirectX via C/C++/VB/Delphi/etc easier for a child?

Along with the Beeb, plenty other 8 bit machines also provided a simple to use programming environment right there by default at power up. No extras to have to buy, no alternative OS's to install, and what plenty of people who've posted here seem to be completely forgetting - a learning curve suitable for a pre-teen.

Nowadays
---
I think the article is spot on. A child who sits down at an out of the box Windows PC can do nothing more than play Solitaire. Sure there is plenty that can be done if you know about it. This requires purchase of $50+ books, programming languages, or knowledge to wipe the system and install some Unix variant with an oss compiler, etc. These are out of reach for a child. Even if a knowing parent had sorted out one of these solutions, it is still have a steeper learning curve.

It's all about accessibility, and nowadays programming really is less accessible to young children. Anyone who can't see that either wasn't there in the 80s or lives in an alternative reality.

[1] Huge UK success. Never cracked US market. See here for some background history on it.
[2] For the BBC, Electron, etc there was Micro User, A&B Computing, Acorn User, Electron World, and others besides. The C64/128 had Crash, Zzap, etc, and for the Speccy there was Your Sinclair, and lots of others I've forgotten.

You just won't believe how vastly hugely mindbogglingly big it is. I mean you may think it's a long way down the road to the chemist, but that's just peanuts to space er... I mean wall er... no dam

Here's one mirror I know of: http://www.idi.ntnu.no/~lindkvis/xd2/screenshots/

Good to see that Sinclair Research has made another comeback with the Zeta. I wonder if they will port it to the QL or to tricycles?

I quote from the last page of his site, which was not at all difficult to miss if you rtfa -

Yes, but if you'd look at the pictures on the second-to-last page it appears the thermometer's sensor is on the peltier cooler itself. Even if that's a misinterpretation on my part it's clear there is no probe in the Guiness itself but outside the glass at best.

By the way, I haven't tried the Guinnes-in-a-can yet. I'm not a total snob, but other beers aren't as good in the can, so I assumed Guiness would have the same problem. How is it? And can you pour yourself a four-leaf clover in the head with the can? :-)

I quote from the last page of his site, which was not at all difficult to miss if you rtfa -

Yes, but if you'd look at the pictures on the second-to-last page it appears the thermometer's sensor is on the peltier cooler itself. Even if that's a misinterpretation on my part it's clear there is no probe in the Guiness itself but outside the glass at best.

By the way, I haven't tried the Guinnes-in-a-can yet. I'm not a total snob, but other beers aren't as good in the can, so I assumed Guiness would have the same problem. How is it? And can you pour yourself a four-leaf clover in the head with the can? :-)

Yeah I made the exact same mistake. What you and I missed is this. Hence the name "PeltierBeer Cooler." I'm trying to not be too condescending since I posted a message earlier making the exact same mistake. Physics behind these things are actually pretty cool and you can use them in reverse by making one side hotter than the other and it will produce electricity.

Hmmm...perhaps you didn't RTFA.

...there's a reason he doesn't post any real data regarding how much colder it kept the beer than without the cooler.

I quote from the last page of his site, which was not at all difficult to miss if you rtfa - " The temperature in the glass was roughly 22C before I poured in the beer. The beer is from the fridge and has a temperature of 8C." and then "The temperature stabilized around 7C."

These comments on the temperatures being interspersed with pictures of the thermostat showing it in action.

Granted, he doesn't talk about the performance before hand, but since the first picture shows a baseline of 19 C outside and the temperature stabilzied colder than fridge temperature, I'm assuming it was quite effective.

Here ya go.

I wonder if the Norwegian University of Science and Technology can handle this link posted on slashdot...

Let's find out. =)

Is that a postscript or perl program?

Here is a program that is both postscript and perl.

If you like this sort of thing, check out the PostScript Fractals page. You can print out very detailed images from tiny PostScript files.

Surprise, surprise, it was an ugly looking thing, I used to see them in a shop window in San Francisco.
So it's followed the C5, remember Sinclair's triumph?

Maple Worksheet

NTH (Norwegian Institute of Science and Technology) also held a similar game award for student projects.

NTH is better than KTN :)

NTH (Norwegian Institute of Science and Technology) also held a similar game award for student projects.

NTH is better than KTN :)