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I know it's cool to hate on things you don't understand yet, but Gluten (or more likely a sub-component of it) is a real problem for some of us.

Yes, this is the response I always get. I don't hate anyone. I'm 100 percent certain you don't believe me.

I can pose a question. Do you think it helps people who are seriously allergic to gluten when bottled water manufacturers put notices on their water that it contains no gluten:

http://claraglutenfreewater.co...

Some celiac sufferer's responses to gluten free water.

http://www.celiac.com/gluten-f...

Particularly as selective and genetically modified plant breeding has increased the average Gluten content of wheat by 40 times or more. Far above what anyone was exposed to 30 or 40 years ago.

SIde note: vegans for years have eaten pure gluten as a meat substitute. Seitan, they call it

http://vegetarian.about.com/od...

It's pretty much 100 percent gluten. And different ypes of flour have different amounts of gluten in them. This is pretty much where I address your increased amoount of gluten statement.

http://www.nyx.net/~dgreenw/wh...

Specifically speaking Cake flour is 7-9 percent gluten. Pastry is 9-10 percent Gluten Bread flour is 12-15 percent, "High gluten" flour is 14 percent. The essential gluten that is added to flours like rye in breadmaking is 45 percent gluten. No one eats that essential gluten except vegans making seitan - you couldn't make bread with that if you tried - it is almost all protein, not starch.

The amounts of gluten are critical to the purpose of the bread. If you raise or lower them, the wheat flour doesn't function correctly.

So your 40 times number is a little suspect.

You grandfather's wheat was not the same as today's wheat.

Even if so, the flour/gluten ratio's have not changes for the intended purpose. You're not going to make good cakes with High Gluten flour, and cake flour to make regular bread isn't going to be very good either. If modern day flower contains 40 times more gluten, they will have to take most of it out to get it to act correctly.

I am Gluten sensitive at least, and possibly allergic. I eat so little of it now that allergy tests are useless, but if I eat more than a trace amount I have measurable digestive and mental difficulties lasting roughly 12 hours from ingestion.

Before removing wheat from my diet, I would regularly run to the bathroom 5-8 times a day to painfully squeeze out liquidy, gooey mucas instead of anything even remotely solid.

That really sucks. Sounds like what happened to me when I went vegetarian for a while. Took several months to get back to normal after figuring out I was not meant to be vegan.

So be glad that you're not Gluten-sensitive, or at least not noticeably so, and stop hating on what is most certainly not a fad.

I am fortunate, yet I can tell you I've been told to go die in a fire by people, from gluten freeers, and anti-vaxxers saying that my calling GF diets or avoiding vaccines is a fad. Time to revisit that hate thing and who's handing it out.

This is simply science and public awareness catching up to the consequences of plant breeding decisions made years ago for the sake of higher and higher yields, without considering the nutritional quality of the grains that would be harvested.

Oh - you simply must show me the links to the documnets that prove that science has reached a consensus to all you speak about.

Here's some stuff you might want to watch and read.

How a system works can't be told from the inside of the same system.

Oh, and how is that? I'd imagine it would be something along these lines: http://www.nyx.net/~gthompso/quine.htm

Now it is true that you can never prove axioms (nor prove a negative), and thus never prove a model to be true from within the same system. But I see no reason why the true rules of the system could not be accurately described. They just can't be proven.

The big eye-opener was the injection of fluid at Rocky Mountain Arsenal near denver causing medium size quakes in 1965. This is called induced seismicity . Its been seen around new dams (possibility in last years large Sichuan quake), geothermal drilling, irrigation fluid disposal, water table drops, etc.

Teh question really is political. Was the possibility of I.S. included in the pre-project environmental study? Did they ignore signs of it starting? Was it really caused by their activities.

More to the point, check out the swap entry of the chapter on file systems features.

More to the point, check out the swap entry of the chapter on file systems features.

More to the point, check out the swap entry of the chapter on file systems features.

char*f="char*f=%c%s%c;main(){printf(f,34,f,34,10);}%c";main(){printf(f,34,f,34,10);}

char*f="char*f=%c%s%c;main(){printf(f,34,f,34,10);}%c";main(){printf(f,34,f,34,10);}

Basically, you have to agree on a starting environment and what "self-reproducing" means. Computer viruses might be argued to be better quines than a program that simply prints itself and requires a human (or another program) to take the output and run it again.

Similarly, one might demand that a true self-reproducing machine be able to reproduce itself in the middle of the desert with only the sand as raw material and sunlight for energy. But most people would accept something in between that and the machine described in TA.

Self-reproducing lifeforms have similar issues. It is possible for a very simple "lifeform" with only 54 base pairs to be self-reproducing, but only if it parasitic. On the other hand, the simplest known lifeform that can reproduce independently is the Mycoplasma genitalium bacteria with 582970 base pairs. This probably isn't the simplest one that can theoretically exist - it is hard to imagine the right combination out of 4^582970 appearing at random in the pre-life organic soup - but whatever simpler thing existed before it is a mystery.

It is impossible to run a full simulation of the universe you are in, since it would automatically multiply the complexity of the universe infinitely (a simulation inside a simulation, etc).

Y'all are wimps. Here in Colorado we used to produce earthquakes by lubricating old faults with chemical WMD's including nerve gas because everyone knows the best thing to do with nerve gas is pump it into a hole just outside of an enormous city.

Some friends of mine had a gold mine that kept collapsing -- they got most of their gold from a slip area at a fault line, and that's what was moving. The snag was: why were the earthquakes happening once a month, on Saturday morning? People started asking questions, and it turned out it was the Army pumping WMD's into holes.

How ironic that Andrew Burt should do this.

Andrew Burt was responsible for the first real unfettered access I had to USENET, back in the days when my telnet access was through a CP/CMS machine, and so telnet into Nyx.net (back when it was still known as nyx.cs.du.edu) was all cluttered with ANSI codes and improper scrolling yet still readable. aburt's Nyx site was where I went to read the anime newsgroup rec.arts.anime that a friend had told me about, and where I was inducted into online writing circles where we wrote our tales and shared our stories freely on the Internet. Though defunct now, alt.pub.dragons-inn and alt.pub.havens-rest were really jumping back in the day.

And Burt was also a more direct champion of writing circles, in his work with Critters. According to the article, he believed that espousing some of the principles of the Open Source movement in writing would lead to more and better writers.

And now look what he's doing. What a shame that it should come to this.

Oops, I broke the link. Here it is: polyglot programs

Did you ever run into the problem where you knew how to do something in one programming language, but really needed to do it in another?

There are also programs that can be compiled or run by several different compilers/interpreters:

Strange Brew - after being exposed and nearly killed by toxic waste, Chris and Gus awaken with new talents. Gus is an origami master, able to fold napkins into the most delicate of forms, while Chris gains super-intelligence. They decide to employ Chris' new smarts to win every spelling bee in the world. While the 'bee groupies' eventually start to annoy Chris, they make it all the way to the championships. Unfortunately, the effects of the toxic waste wear off, and Chris forgets how to spell 'pants'. The masses turn on him, sickened that he'd cheat the spelling bee organization by way of toxic waste.

I wrote a pretty good article on how to do this for Circuit Cellar awhile back. You have to buy the article, but a summary and all of my source code are available online here:

http://www.nyx.net/~smanley/palmadc

The code isn't the greatest, but it will get you started. The article is also linked to, and isn't TOO out of date.

The AVR has a open-source compiler based off GCC, the schematics are there, the palm stuff is open source.. it doesn't get much easier than that. You need a very basic opamp buffer and away you go.

I haven't had time to update my site in a long while, but if you contact me, I can send you the information you need to get started with a PCB based around that project. It was all built with open source tools, and I don't mind sharing.

Perhaps if a few people email me I can justify another run of PCBs.

http://www.nyx.net/~bkraft/
Stay off Usenet, I do. Most of the above NNTP servers purge after awhile and are not indexed in a huge database like Usenet posts are now.
You can find in them enough topics to rant and rave about forever.
Personally, I think Google has destroyed Usenet.
Most ISP's these days don't even have a Usenet news server and insist you go use the Google news HTTP interface which sucks in my opinion.
Never post using a e-mail address that contains your real name, web address etc., or any info that can be used for search purposes.

Programs have been doing this for a long time; I find it unsurprising that robots can also do it.

It is good that this study tried to eliminate the bias of independent co-factors but the bias of testing methodology remains.

Perhaps part of the problem is that the tests used are outdated. Perhaps students are learning different skills that the tests aren't testing. First, they apparently only tested math and reading. So, the tests wouldn't show if the students had more total skills but less in that area. I remember many years ago when i was in school that although I did very well on standardized tests (usually 99th percentile) I still realized that the tests were very biased. I noticed, for example, that one of my lower scores was on vocabulary in spite of the fact that I probably had a larger vocabulary than the other students who scored better. The reason was that they only appeared to test on the subset of vocabulary that they teach in schools. I had a huge technical vocabulary in computers, electronics, engineering, and scientific areas that were way outside the limited curriculum taught in schools. School tests test against the curriculum taught in schools and the particular way they are taught. This is true in other areas, as well. They don't teach much philosophy in high school so having read the entire works of more modern philosophers Frederic Nietsche, Jean-Paul Sartre, Betrand Russell, and Douglas Hofstadter may not help you much on tests that focus on Plato and Socrates greatest hits. Tests also focused on your rote memorization of who said what (and then only if they were within the curriculum) rather than your ability to apply the concepts or your breadth of knowledge. K-12 education is heavily biased towards ancient, deprecated works that do not reflect the progress made in the last few hundred years. School tests are also biased towards European and American culture so knowledge of the history and cultures of China, Nigeria, India, Brazil, and Indonesia counts for little. Tests in math tested manual methods of solving problems while students may be learning to use a computer to solve the problems. Yes, students may be allowed to use a calculator now but where is the spreadsheet, symbolic math package, or C compiler. The concepts of math are still very important but when I was in school, the tests tested rote memorization of identities and the ability to use them to solve the exact type of problems given in homework assignments rather than your ability to apply them to new types of problems. And there were time penalties that counted against you if instead of memorizing many of the identities you re-derived them as needed (actually demonstrating greater math skill) while taking the test. And, of course, the tests in math and reading don't measure how much high school students have learned about sex :-)

Now, it would not suprise me at all if the use of computers in schools and at home as educational tools failed to user their educational potential effectively. If computers are used as baby-sitting tools by lazy teachers, they aren't going to be effective. If they are just used for rote memorization drills, for example, they are being used in ways that just exacerbate pre-existing flaws in the educational system. Classes in how to use computers are useful for surviving in the modern world but won't show up in studies that only cover math and reading; however, computers could be used effectively to assist in teaching many subjects. Many students are highly motivated by human interaction and thus interacting with a machine may be less motivating than interacting with a teacher or other students. In these cases, using the computer as a tool without taking away the human interaction is likely to improve motivation. The use of gimmicks to hold the attention of students who are used to tv and video games has some value but can also waste a lot of time on fluff. Home computers are frequently used to play non-educational games but there are games that are more educational. The game c-r

This has been done before, it's been around since at least the mid 1980's possibly earlier - it was caleld Core Wars. This evolved into another similar more advanced version called CRobots... Short programs are written to "attack" the other by overwriting the other's memory space. They must alternate between "defending" their own space and "attacking" the other guys's... First to blow stack loses!

Here's some links:

Corewars:

Home Page

Source Forge Page

CRobots:

CRobots Home Page

I'd hate to try to write a quine in an XML programming language!

It it good to see js is used for more than popping up annoying ads on my screen. Now also The Linux Documentation Project offers a JavaScript driven HOWTO Generator where you just fill in the blanks, click on a button and out comes LinuxDoc SGML-code, ready for publishing.

11. Well, since C isn't a scripting language I don't see how that's possible.

It's very possible. It's called a quine. They're fascinating, and it's possible for programs to output themselves in all sorts of different interesting ways.

One of the most often 'brushed under the rug' issues is that there has never been a sucessful breeder reactor.

On the contrary! See, e.g.,

http://home.uchicago.edu/~cmcfaul/quiz.html (search for "breeder")
http://www.nyx.net/~drwalker/990519.scavhunt.nyt.h tml (search for "plutonium")

They all cost massive amounts of money and then make less fuel than they use...

... oh. Touche'. Guess it depends on your definition of "success" ;-)

I used Linux software RAID and was very satisfied. Success depends of proper config, not all of which is immediately obvious. Some issues

• Use disks from different batches
• partition properly
• tailor RAID level to purpose (RAID0 for /tmp vs. RAID5 for main storage, RAID0+1 or 7 for database files etc.)
• read the docs
  • There is a Linux HOWTO that goes in details, read it.

Hydro power, like that long the Colorado river has its own set of problems. It interrupts fish migration most of all. It also changes the flow of rivers which causes more (or less) silt in given areas, and may (over time) significantly reduce the ability of the dam to produce power. Changes to river flows also cause problems in temperature.

There is also a bunch of research into the fact that the large resovoirs of hydro power plants actually cause earthquakes. We are displacing so much material and adding so much weight in a place it hasn't been before that we are (ever so slightly) altering the shape of the earth's crust.

I don't know of a perfect power source, but I don't think developed nations will be adding significant amounts of hydro power. There are too many issues.

You know, the HOWTO: Multi Disk System Tuning (part of the linux documentation project), has said so and for a great many years. And without advertising banners left right and center popup.

In brief: small random reads will not suit a RAID 0. Large contiguous reads and writes will, like you in image/video processing, large file searching and so on.

As the HOWTO shows there are times when using clever partitioning rather than RAID 0 is what improves performance.

It's a polyglot of only seven languages (COBOL, Pascal, Fortran, C, PostScript, sh, and 8086 assembly), but perhaps you were thinking of this?

I'm also not a huge fan of watercooling. If there is a leak, two things happen.
1) Your computer gets wet
2) The chernobyl effect. Assuming it's survived this long, the coolant's now gone, and the computer keeps getting hotter. Uh oh.


I did a lot of experimenting with watercooling for about two years, short answer is it isn't going to leak unless you do something stupid or are very unlucky. If you have a GFCI on the outlet, you don't actually have too much to worry about. Just use proper clamps, or even zip ties will work ok.

So basically, I'd say this one is not worth worrying about. There have been very few meltdowns for all of the water cooling kits sold, and it HAS come a long way. Resevoirs aren't really needed with some of the new and adapted pumps that are out there. Fish tank 120V submersibles are obsoleted for 12V pumps. Good purpose built radiators are out there. Add silicone tubes and good hose clamps, and you shouldn't see a leak. Think of all the high pressure systems in your average car - rarely do those fail if maintained in far worse conditions.

I used to laugh at people who had PDAs. Then my little black book along with YEARS of contact info fell in a mudpuddle. After transcribing soggy half-legible pages, let me introduce you to the biggest reason to have a PDA:

You can back the damn thing up. $300 is NOTHING compared to the value of the information in my PDA.

PDA's are only useful if you always have them with you, too. What PDA's need, like notebooks, is the transparent bluetooth connection TO the cell phone for data. Those cell phone screens hurt my eyes. In Canada, the prices for wireless data over CDPD or GPRS is priced way to high to be used for anything, so maybe it's not as big of a deal here.

One things PDAs have done is they have been a BOON for the homebrew embedded industry. With about $20 in extra parts I built a really nice datalogger and digital gauge set for my car - and I got the palm for $60 on Ebay. (shameless plug) They're even cheaper now. (8mb of storage, a nice LCD, and buttons!) .. millions of pdas have been sold worldwide, too. Happy happy!

Maybe the mass market appeal of PDA's will drop, but they will always be there. I miss my HP100LX "real" palmtop/PDA though. Used it until the keys broke. All the ones that followed were much too big and clunky.

You can do it in Perl as well. Not only is it a stereogram generator, but it's also a quine!

Build yourself a little analog digital converter board and interface it to a PC or handheld. I did something like this for an article I wrote for Circuit Cellar, PalmOS Data Acquisition. Interfacing with the existing OBD I/II bus is one way to go, but unless you have the factory-approved tools, the updates are usually very slow and usually crippled in some way.

If you go custom, you get the ability to do lots of other interesting things too.

Yes, but we're waiting for them to produce a quine--a scientist program that, when compiled and run, decides to invent a scientist, which, when compiled and run, will decide to invent a scientist, which...on second thought, maybe that's not so useful. Mostly because the successive invented scientists won't be able to get published--reviewers will cite prior art. :)

If you have more inputs then why not send it to the author? (Link submitted in the spirit of recent anniversary and comments on The Linux Documentation Project, please support them!)

If you have more inputs then why not send it to the author? (Link submitted in the spirit of recent anniversary and comments on The Linux Documentation Project, please support them!)

Now, a well rounded HOWTO should combine a number of angles, check the Template for some recommendations and suggestions. You could also check out the Experimental HOWTO Generator.

It is your feedback that helps The Linux Documentation Project.

Once I graduated from University, I had the time and money to go after what I've always lusted for, a fast car. The more I learned about cars and handling the less I liked the big muscle cars I looked at growing up, and yeah, I'm a hick too, complete with beer-drinkin', pickup drivin', tire-burnin', you name it.

I got into Solo I and II, hopefully Formula Ford soon. Import modification is all about using technology to keep engines making close to 200 hp -per liter- from blowing up under boost. Engines were a black box to me for awhile, so I got the manuals and studied them inside out. You can't afford to race unless you have more money than Gates, or you do a lot of your own repair work.

Over the years I've acquired quite a pile of tools, learned to weld, and my Xmas vacation project is to build up a D16 Honda engine to hold about 12-15psi of boost. Running my own injector controller board and timing retard circuitry. The look on a Corvette or Viper owner's face when he gets his ass waxed by a little Honda is priceless. There is a replacement for displacement - technology. You think there are holy wars with Vi and Emacs.. heh, /. hasn't seen anything yet.

If you can program a PC, you can do just about any mechanical repair. One of my goals is to build a fully functioning engine control system based on the QNX operating system.

All the experience that I gained from learning how to build electronic controls and the like paid off bigtime after the collapse of the IT industry - I make my living doing embedded programming and hardware design now. Once of the courses I did in University was to build your own computer - wire wrap - right down to the latches. Most people used it to do something with lego, but I ran straight for my car and got a pretty nifty tachometer setup.

Knowing how to rebuild car engines and cars in general can save you tens of thousands of dollars over the years, easily, too.

You can do that with just about any language. Such programs are called quines.

Just fill in the form, hit the button at the end and (insert a Ta-daaah if you wish) you get the ready marked up text in the window at the end. Just copy it and paste it into an editor and continue using the pattern you already see. You can also get some more patterns from the Big HOWTO Template(SGML) (HTML).

More authoring help is at Author Resources.

Good to see an example of JavaScript that is not just for making flashy web pages or filling in forms to be spammed with later...

Just fill in the form, hit the button at the end and (insert a Ta-daaah if you wish) you get the ready marked up text in the window at the end. Just copy it and paste it into an editor and continue using the pattern you already see. You can also get some more patterns from the Big HOWTO Template(SGML) (HTML).

More authoring help is at Author Resources.

Good to see an example of JavaScript that is not just for making flashy web pages or filling in forms to be spammed with later...

Even just a tips or suggestion to the author would be useful; TLDP is always looking for inputs to the projects and this is a recent project.

Of course it's a programming language. Not only was it designed as a programming language (thus the "script" in Postscript), but it easily passes the test of producing a quine, as can be witnessed here and here.

More specifically you will find a number of links to projects not discussed in the threads I have seen so far, at the Multi Disk HOTWO where you can see how for instance Yoke and RAID can give you a fast reliable networked sharable file system. Someof these are research projects while others have been used for a few years. For even more fun you can stack file systems, like RAID0 with RAID1 where some of the drives are Yoke-connected over the net. Put inhertied fs on top and you have enormous flexibility, speed and reliability. OK so it is more complex but I am sure you can handle that.

And here comes the part I would like to stress: when you come to a conclusion, please contact the relevant HOWTO authors and give them your input. Only by your inputs can the Linux Documenttion Project improve.

For those not so programming-savvy (i.e. me, 5 minutes ago), a quine is "a program that generates a copy of its own source text as its complete output."

Apparently Douglas Hofstadter (of GEB fame)coined the phrase after logician Willard van Orman Quine.

For more see: http://www.nyx.net/~gthompso/quine.htm

A quine is a program that, when run, exactly reproduces its source code. Nifty - although not particularly useful, it's still kinda neat.

Anyway, find quines in, uh, many languages at The Quine Page.

Anyway, I would also like to mention that the Multi Disk HOWTO (homepage) is relevant, includes layout examples and also a trouble shooting guide. A fault tree would of course be nice.

The HOWTO also mentions that there are actually 2 different RAID systems available, do make sure you get the right one and the corresponding tools. Additionally it refers to a number of hardware RAID HOWTOs, of which there are many.

And please, please send feedback. That HOWTO author actively asks for inputs, so why don't you?

Anyway, I would also like to mention that the Multi Disk HOWTO (homepage) is relevant, includes layout examples and also a trouble shooting guide. A fault tree would of course be nice.

The HOWTO also mentions that there are actually 2 different RAID systems available, do make sure you get the right one and the corresponding tools. Additionally it refers to a number of hardware RAID HOWTOs, of which there are many.

And please, please send feedback. That HOWTO author actively asks for inputs, so why don't you?

So check out the HOWTO and send out an email to the author of the HOWTO

So check out the HOWTO and send out an email to the author of the HOWTO

Cosplay is a Japanese fan term for Costume Play; it's equivalent to the Western fan term Masquerade. In Japan cosplay covers pretty much the spread that convention masquerades in the West cover, from SF to fantasy, from medieval to military uniforms. It's basically a time for fans to dress up in their favourite garb or as their favourite character and have a bit of fun. There is a condition though; most fans insist that you not only play the character in dress, you also play the character's nature. In other words, whilst you're in costume, you must be the character, in thoughts, words and action.

How about a program that compiles and runs in seven different languages?
http://www.nyx.net/~gthompso/poly/polyglot.txt

Or a program that prints its own source code?
http://www.nyx.net/~gthompso/quine.htm

Or just a whole collection of weird programming-related stuff?
http://www.catseye.mb.ca/

(OK, so I'm way too late to the party and nobody's going to read this, but hey :)