Domain: planet.nl
Stories and comments across the archive that link to planet.nl.
Comments · 88
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Re:I've had X-10 home automation for over 35 years
...X-10 didn't exist until 1999 - that's 27 years for you....
Google is your friend. X10 has been around since the 1970's.
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From The History of X-10...In 1978, after several years of refining the technology, X10 products began to appear in Radio Shack stores. Shortly thereafter, X10 products appeared in Sears stores. A partnership with BSR was formed, known as X10 Ltd, and the BSR System X10 was born. The system at that time consisted of a 16 channel Command Console, A lamp module, and an Appliance module. Soon afterwards came the Wall Switch module and the first X10 Timer.
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Re:Psychiatric consultation!
http://home.planet.nl/~mourits/koelkast/ Is that you?
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Re:Technology finds a way
Where can I find a Wang word processor?
At the Wang Museum? Like the GP said, there will always be some place, museum or collector, that holds on to a copy. It's quite possible you could come across what your looking for at a garage sale as well when people are clearing out their old stuff.
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Re:Technology finds a way
Where can I find a Wang word processor?
You could ask the geek who runs the Small WANG Museum.
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Re:eight?Considering those SGI's 1024 CPU thingies are not SMP machines I'm guessing it's established who the idiot is... Well, I don't think that quite qualifies as 'idiot'. NUMA scalability is still relevant and interesting - and some such systems are indeed SMP (ie systems with a single node) - their Altix ICE seems to go up to 2 quad-core Xeons per node, which would be 8 (it seems to be very similar to one of the configs they used in TFA).
In any case, I didn't mention which "serious SGI" kit. Even their power series systems back in the '80s went upto 8 CPUS (4D380S), and they've had several different architectures since (though mostly ccNUMA). Their Challenge XL (hehe)series also went upto 8, and applications scaled very nicely too.
Of course, other manufacturers continued making even larger SMP systems - wikipedia mentions "ASCI Red had 4,510 [cpus]".
Perhaps the linearity of the scaling performance from 1-8 shown in TFA is interesting, but 8 is pretty where things start to get interesting (scalability-wise).
As a side-note, I read this in wikipedia's smp article :
"It should also be noted that dual socket Opteron designs are technically ccNUMA designs, though they can be programmed as SMP for a slight loss in performance."
So they could have run in SMP mode, I suppose, and wikipedia doesn't mention the Intel's design (so I suppose it's SMP, but Intel can do some weird stuff too). -
Beating a Wang 2200 to reversi.Yeah, that shows how old I was. I'm not sure of the model, but it was definitely the one with a self-containing beige box including the crt, the keyboard, and most certainly a tape deck (see here and here).
Pong ? yeah I played it when some neighbors bought the Atari version.
Some time after that, we bought a Apple ][e, and I never really quit gaming since. -
condoms
It shouldn't. It's not something that is made by primitive techniques from low-tech materials. Clay pots are just that, condoms aren't. Unless, of course, you consider polyurithane a low-tech material.
Ah but as with many other things made today condoms used to be made by "primitive" materials. At one tyme condoms were made from rubber, which spawned their nickname, "rubbers". And originally rubber, like plastics, were made from plants. Rubber is the sap of trees, and plastic was made from plant cellulose. Kodak, the photography business, did some research on making plastics from trees. After all film was made from plastic.
Falcon -
Re:ATTENTION CREATIONISTS!!!Sorry for the delay. I tried to install Kubuntu on a software RAID array and it completely nuked my MBR- I had to reinstall Windows from scratch. Fun fun fun.
... evolution is a particularly hard case. It's a very malleable theory in the broad, and entertains some diverse possibilities.
... it can be hard to find data that contradicts a theory -- or even find enough data to make people consider that the evidence might actually contradict the theory -- but new theories only have to adjust the story to fit that new data. ... Bits of evolution are modestly hard -- where it has hard data like genes, for instance. Bits of evolution are really soft -- fossils are soft data that aren't very amenable to experiment, and are more or less compatible with a lot of explanations.Based on these statements, and links you provided in another post, it's clear that you think evolution produces no predictions and is not falsifiable. I don't agree, because as far as I know there are many potential falsifications (click on parts 1,2,3,4,5 for long lists of potential falsifications) for evolution and lots of verified predictions. I especially like this quote from Origin of Species: "If it could be proved that any part of the structure of any one species had been formed for the exclusive good of another species, it would annihilate my theory, for such could not have been produced through natural selection."
What predictions can creationism offer, and how can we falsify it? As far as I can tell, the answers are "none" and "it's not falsifiable". Creationism is compatible with every conceivable discovery. For instance, it's strange that all life we find uses the same DNA bases (which is a specific requirement of common descent). But it's also compatible with creationism because, even though God could have created every species with different bases of DNA (or something even wilder) to provide obvious proof that common descent is false, He obviously chose not to, presumably because His Ways Are Mysterious. It's strange that the fossil record shows a general progression from simpler, less diverse organisms in the distant past to more diverse and complex organisms in the "recent" past (which is a specific prediction of evolution), but this is ALSO compatible with creationism because God (or Satan?) could be playing games with our heads.
I noticed your link to "Message Theory", but I'm surprised that you would consider this to be a valid example of a prediction. As far as I can tell from the book synopsis and this review, the author is basically saying "the prediction of intelligent design is that intelligent design is obviously correct and no other interpretation is possible." Isn't that tautological? It's like saying "evolution predicts that evolution is correct and no other interpretation is possible". Notice that none of the predictions or potential falsifications I have mentioned or linked to follow this pattern...
Incidentally, did you ever read the novel Contact (NOT the movie)? At the end of the book, Sagan's heroine discovers an obvious, indisputable message encoded in the digits of pi. This is what I would consider to be definitive proof of God's existence, and a true example of the discovery of a message from an intelligent designer.
I sense a problem in that many evolutionists complain that creationists don't have theories of their own, but just pick on the theories of others. That shouldn't be perceived as a problem -- it should be perceived as modern science in action.
...I completely agree with you
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Re:As easy as 1 ENTER 1 +
Further, their functionality surely must by now have been surpassed by PDAs.
Well, PDA's can emulate hp calculators but a nice calculator keyboard is hard to beat. -
Re:In Europe
The dutch privacy act give room for this. http://home.planet.nl/~privacy1/wbp_en_rev.htm You can demand you personal data to be destroyed except when it has a specific purpose (ie bank records, police records etc). If they fail to do so, or sell the data without written consent they can be fined.
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Re:guitune
Since the official download page is currently down, here is another place to download the recent source version 0.5.2
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Re:Why Slashdot?
Reminded me of this great commercial from a Dutch campaign that warns children of the dangers of webcams. Guy is camming with some hot girl on the internet and is then called for dinner. Guess who he was camming with
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Re:did anyone honestly fail to see this coming?
This business model in the US is just plain stupid. I have metered access during the day and un-metered at night this is exactly what paid for and my ISP & I don't have a problem with each other. Grant it I probably pay a bit more per month than the average USian Slashdoter (49 Euros) but it's fast and I don't get hassled.
Making this out to be an allegory of some culture clash between profligate Americans and prudent Europeans is childish not to mention factually baseless.
There is metered access in the USA and there is unmetered access in Europe (not to mention elsewhere). Today I am in the Netherlands using unlimited DSL at 19.95/month (there is also a 9.95/month plan from this ISP). And at home in Malaysia, unlimited DSL is about the same price. A quick read of dslreports.com or lowyat.net forums will confirm that the Malaysian service is in fact unlimited; many people seem to torrent 24 hours a day. From what I can see, metered broadband is rare and getting rarer worldwide.
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Old Tech
Our company has been experimenting with this idea since a year or two, to measure the traffic on smaller "B" roads, that unlike highways do not have traffic measuring equiment built into the asphalt. Here is a short article (In Dutch, use Babelfish), and the site with the traffic information (Type in the 6 digit number shown into the "log in" box). They obtain phone location data from one or more GSM providers. The data has been filtered so they only get generic location data; no phone numbers or other identifiers are provided.
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This is one of the laptops they used.
http://home.planet.nl/~advan010/images/flybook-3.
j pg
They did a bodge photoshop job on a red version of this REAL transmeta based laptop. -
Re:Random Thoughts:
Ok, only FYI (as many of these topics were covered in other replies) and certainly not for karma (as this topic is dead at this point), here is the definitive guide for playing Lucasarts/Sierra games on modern PC's:
First, Linux PC's:
Lucasarts games: http://www.scummvm.org/
AGI Sierra games (Lsl1, Sq1, Sq2, Kq1-3, etc): http://sarien.sourceforge.net/
SCI0 Sierra games (Sq3, Lsl2-3, Kq4): http://freesci.linuxgames.com/
SCI1 Sierra games (Sq4-5, Lsl5-6, Kq5, etc) and oddballs like willy beamish and all those old games like tunnels of armageddon: http://dosbox.sourceforge.net/
Windows Sierra games (Sq6, Lsl7, etc): http://www.transgaming.com/ (or apt-get install wine)
Any platform, Sierra games: This guy has done the unpossible, writing timing fix patches for the games so you don't have to kludge them with slowdown utils: http://geocities.com/belzorash/
Windows PC's:
LucasArts games: http://www.scummvm.org/
AGI Sierra games: http://www.agidev.com/nagi.html
SCI Sierra games: http://sourceforge.net/projects/vdmsound/
Windows games:
http://home.planet.nl/~harms646/larry7.html
http://www.softpedia.com/get/System/OS-Enhancement s/ResChange.shtml
Games that just don't work right:
http://dosbox.sourceforge.net/
And just for grins, because it's freaking awesome:
http://www.agdinteractive.com/
http://people.freenet.de/lucasfangames/maniac/game s_eng.htm
Good luck, let me know if you have any problems. -
What? Are you saying that these aren't useful?
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Re:1984?Off-topic, but what the heck...
Quick copy-paste from this page.
* Orwell's 1984 was obviously influenced and perhaps inspired by a book called We, a nearly forgotten totalitarian fantasy by Russian Writer Eugene Zamiatin. We was written in 1923. translated into English by Manhattan Psychiatrist Gregory Zilboorg and published in the U.S. in 1924. Orwell read it in a French translation in 1946 and wrote an enthusiastic review of it in London's weekly Tribune, of which be was then literary editor. Orwell's is the better book in every way, but his debt to We is quickly apparent. In the Russian's novel the characters live in glass houses where state agents can watch them; in 1984 they are spied on by "telescreen." Zamiatin's dictator, the Benefactor, is a counterpart of Orwell's Big Brother. In both, a love affair leads to the hero's undoing. In both, he rebels against the state, is trapped, punished and spiritually crushed. Zamiatin died in Paris in 1937.
The original russian text can be found on lib.ruDead tree translation available from (for example) amazon.
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Re:game
Here you go
http://home.planet.nl/~pulle071/firemac/games.htm ... Sound doesn't seem to work in classic on my set-up, but other than that.... -
ISP relaysThis is exactly why my provider Planet Internet doesn't allow for connecting your SMTP server directly to the internet. You set up your MX records correctly and they relay the mail for you. The gains are obvious:
- spam zombies simply won't work
- people with no clue but wanting to run a mailserver will have trouble setting it up, so their choice is either to ask someone knowledgeable enough or forget about the whole thing.
- the ISP won't get blacklisted
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my 2 cents3 little gems. no adware / no spyware
nice RTF editor, complete with a 'highlight' hotkey: Copywriter: http://home.planet.nl/~gaale131/cw_home.htm
Windows security hardening tool: StopListening: http://www.nonebar.com/sl.html
Global script and hotkey tool: Autohotkey: http://www.autohotkey.com/
Excellent PIM that fits on a USB drive: EssentialPIM: http://www.essentialpim.com/
(OK, that's 4:) -
Re:whats ac?
"AC" is Anonymous Coward. You must be new here. The post was sarcasm. Try reading it again, keeping this image, or perhaps this one in mind while thinking about what might be causing one's computer to run too slowly.
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Re:whats ac?
"AC" is Anonymous Coward. You must be new here. The post was sarcasm. Try reading it again, keeping this image, or perhaps this one in mind while thinking about what might be causing one's computer to run too slowly.
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Re:90 MPH???? Not so badIt's not Top Gear but Fifth Gear that showed that crash test. To view a clip of the Smart Car crash test go to http://home.planet.nl/~sjaro/5thGear_Smart_Crasht
e st70mph.wmvApologies on the file format.
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Use a simple parserConsider to use a parser that is easier and more powerful than yacc and lex. Have a look at IParse, a simple, small interpretting parser. The whole source is in a single 92 Kbyte file.
Forget about using a Virtual Machine. That is nice for speed, but it requires a lot of work. Beter make an interpretter that interprets the abstract program tree. I once started doing this for a JavaScript interpretter, but I never came to finish it.
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In the Blink of an Eye
I thought I remembered this book being reviewed on
/., but I can't find the link.
Here is a link to a review of it, and a sample.
Link
reviewed by Gert Korthof. 22 June 2003. version 1.2
In this book, Parker describes his solution for the famous Cambrian explosion. What is the Cambrian explosion and why is it a problem? The Cambrian explosion is the fact that 543 million of years ago there were 3 animal phyla and 538 million of years ago there were 38 animal phyla. So in 5 million years 35 phyla originated. Darwin already recognised this as a problem for his theory of gradual evolution. It seems too fast for gradual evolution. Religious critics routinely use it as an argument against evolution. But even some non-religious critics use it to refute gradual evolution. Critics often distort and exaggerate the problem, but hardly study it. There are several good popular science books describing the Cambrian Explosion, but Parker is the first who describes it and solves it. -
Biomorphic robot indeed!
BioMorphic robot indeed! DO NOT go in there!! -
Re:This will not get you laid!Oh, you mean something like this?
Yeah, I show this to all the biatches I bring to my crib. Turns them on like a house on fire. Respect!
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Re:Obligatory Family Guy Quote
Psych ward clerk: "What's your name, sir?"
Peter: "Umm.....Pee.....ter.............Griffin.....damn! "
That one's only funny when you explain the context. He tried to create a fake name and said "pea...tear...griffen", naming objects he saw in the room. -
Re:Fridge
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This has been done before (but not on a phone)
Reminds me of propeller clocks (also here, here, here...)
...or the similar mechanically scanned displays.
Spacewriter sells some very cool full-color displays. Their iBall 3D display is also sold at AudioVisualizers - check their site out for more animated demos.
There's also the Virtual Game System (Google cache) which was amazing; unfortunately the site is down so you'll have to settle for text and no pictures. -
Re:I`ll raise you...
http://home.planet.nl/~mourits/koelkast/
I`m new to this...
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Re:Big threat? Not really
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Quick tests on some Windows XP systems
I ran a few quick tests on a couple of different Windows XP systems using the proof of concept exploit code here.
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Windows XP Professional Service Pack 1
Mozilla Firebird 0.8 run as limited user: no apparent effect
Mozilla Firebird 0.8 run as administrator: no apparent effect
Internet Explorer 6 run as limited user causes an Internet Explorer Script Error:
Line 47, Char: 5, Error: Write to file failed, Code: 0
URL: ms-its:mhtml:file://C:\foo.mht!http://ip3e83566f.s peed.planet.nl/security/newone/modified//EXPLOIT.C HM::/exploit.htm
Internet Explorer 6 run as administrator: demo exploit runs as expected
A software restriction policy is in place on this machine, forbidding the execution of any executable files (including .chm) in any directories except for the ProgramFilesDir and System directories, but, as you can see, it did not stop the sample code from executing when IE was run with administrator privileges.
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Windows XP Professional Service Pack 2 RC 1
Internet Explorer 6 run as administrator: no apparent effect
Fixed in SP2?
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One thing that concerns me about using this particular sample code as a test, is that it seems to rely on having write permission to \Program Files, thus requiring administrator privileges (usually) and thus making limited user accounts appear to be invuelnerable -- but are they? Can a version of this exploit be written that runs even if the user does not have write privileges to the program files and system directories? (Thus giving access to all of the limited user's files.) In such a case, would software restriction policies prevent the execution of the exploit exe even if not stopping the script itself? -
Re:What browser to use?
I played with fire and tested the PoC found here
In IE, it copied itself over wmplayer.exe, SFP copied the original back, but that was enough for me. Firefox 0.8, OTOH, didn't budge and nothing happened to wmplayer.exe. Same thing with Netscape 7.1 and Opera 7.23.
At least in this case, IE seems to be the only one. -
Its not
There is a proof of concpet page here. Neither mozilla nor firefox are susceptible.
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Today?
They announced this TODAY? It has been discussed on Bugtraq for weeks - and due to a few comments I made in their discussion forum the Swedish IDG.se reported this last Friday. I've also linked to one of the PoC-exploits here on Slashdot for people check for themselves.
... what took them so long?
Jelmer's PoC is good: link
(That page is the info page, you won't get hit by clicking on the link directly) -
Re:The Netherlands???"Is it really this bad that you think we all walk around on wooden shoes and live in windmills?"
I wear wooden shoes, when I code in my tulip-decorated windmill-office. Don't you? And I took my finger out of the dyke last week, and look what happened...
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Re:Already too many OS...
I agree with you that most object models are crippled. But I was speaking of a "solid object model with a clearly defined semantics". Most common used object models lack clearly defined semantics in terms of mathematics. Please read my Object-Oriented Considered Harmful and my article on Art of Programming.
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Re:Already too many OS...
I agree with you that most object models are crippled. But I was speaking of a "solid object model with a clearly defined semantics". Most common used object models lack clearly defined semantics in terms of mathematics. Please read my Object-Oriented Considered Harmful and my article on Art of Programming.
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In true /. fashion ...The technology is still pretty new
...DAB is 10 years old already according to this history page.
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Re:Hey!
Oh my god. I know what tsa's toilet looks like.
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5 watts...Crazy
From the article, Beagle is only broadcasting a 5 watt signal. Quick calculation..5 watts power output with a free space path loss of ~200db means that the amount of power reaching the Lovell dish is roughly 1/5x10^-66 of a watt.. I'm blown away that they are able to pick that out of the backgound noise at all.
Links
Free Space path loss
Nifty WLAN link calculator
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Re:More Info On The Frivolity
Well, here's a fact that no one seems to know. That McDonald's drive through is at the top of a very steep hill(greater than 45 degrees).
I call bullshit. The steepest road in the world has a gradient of 37.5% (cite)/. A road with a gradient over 100% would be impossible for most vehicles to navigate.Everyone with any common sense would know that you don't open hot coffee between your knees when your car is headed down a steep hill.
RTFJ (judgement). The car was stationery. -
It's easy
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Re:Tommorows news today
This guy is in big trouble:
http://home.planet.nl/~mourits/koelkast/
He turned his SGI server into a fridge. All food products contained therein now constitute a derivate work of UNIX SysV. On eating those food products... -
Re:Attempting to telnet in?
try this (using IE ofcourse)
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Radical idea: Implementation versus specification
I totally agree with the poster. C++ (and most other programming languages) are implementation languages. Most programmers are not aware of the fact that the main reason why we use implementation languages lies in the fact that we have to produce highly optimized code to make computers perform. Specification languages are hardly used, because we lack the proper tools to transform (formal) specification into implementation code. The reason behind this is that much of the engineering in "software engineering" lies in choosing the right implementation, e.g. it is not (yet) possible to automatically convert high-level specifications into executable code. I think it is really sad that after more than twenty years of software engineering, we are still working like craftsman, and not like engineers. In this sense software engineering hardly can be called an engineering science. For some more ideas, read The Art of Programming.
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Nothing new
European NRENs are already doing this on an international scale. With credentials from participating local university students and employees can already log on to the WiFi hotspots of other participating universities and research institutions in both their own and other countries.
The authentication mechanism is based on IEEE 802.1x and uses a RADIUS backend to enable cross domain authentication. Currently this is in operation (machine translation) between the Netherlands, Portugal and England, and Croatia is next.
SURFnet is also working (machine translation) with local hotspot operators in the Netherlands to make sure Dutch students can roam their networks as well. Initially this will offered as a free service fro students. -
frenologist or phrenologist?
"Did you mean phrenologist?"
from dictionary.com
phrenology n. The study of the shape and protuberances of the skull, based on the now discredited belief that they reveal character and mental capacity.
Mind you there are so many frenologists on google, that it seems to have adopted the new spelling.
Btw I think that the cgi reconstruction looks more like Angelina Jolie than the limestone statue in the Berlin Museum.