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Domain: qis.net
Stories and comments across the archive that link to qis.net.
Comments · 16
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Re:I'm pissed.I'll see that fscking roadrunner in court! Thanks for the idea.
Sorry, but that boat has already sailed.
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Re:Online versionExtremely interesting. But in section two: I love what I do, and I love nature, but I don't see the two being especially well interrelated. It's a bit like trying to rank libertarians against greens.
I feel that it's really asking me "do I believe in god?".
I seem to have scored okay, though, but I feel that many with still more developed traits will do worse. For example, a physicist might score worse than a cultist who saw design in the universe.
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Re:Some commentsIf it was hard to write, it should be hard to read.
(Theres like a thousand versions of that out there.)
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Real recipe engineeringThere's such a thing as engineered recipes, but these aren't it. Engineered recipes are for volume production in food plants.
Serious recipes have tolerances. What temperatures are needed, and how tightly do times and temperature have to be controlled? What's the effect of ambient humidity? Here's a oven for a commercial bakery.. 6 heat zones, digital temperature control, and a conveyor belt. The bakery with a unit like that has recipes that tell how to set it up for each product they make. There's no market for a few thousand slightly burnt rolls. Some jobs need a fancy oven like that. Others are less critical. Some jobs (especially pastries) need even finer control.
There are safety issues. See this microorganism lethality calculator. That's a key part of an industrial recipe.
Here are some engineered home recipes. These are intended for use in a programmable home bread-making machine. Note the comments:
- Measure all ingredients exactly -- close is not "good enough".
- Water temperature must be between 70 and 80 degrees Farenheit.
- Use flour specifically designed for bread machines; it rises better than all-purpose flour.
- Load ingredients in the pan in the order listed.
- Keep yeast away from liquids.
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Re:Could someone...
Could someone...enlighten us to some details of the 'vega launcher' and why its special ?
If you had ever owned a Vega, you would understand why they want to launch any remaining ones into space... -
Re:The cost of everything ... more about accountan
"Accountants know the cost of everything, and the value of nothing".
Read more on accountants
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Worst Cars of the Millenium - from Car Talk
A funnier list is the one the CarTalk guys compiled for the millenium. It is no longer on their site, but is mirrored here:
http://www.qis.net/~jimjr/misc160.htm
My favorite quote is about the Yugo: "At least it had heated rear windows -- so your hands would stay warm while you pushed." -
Re:Software Patentsmukund wrote:
I do not support
It's a statement of fact. The Welch LZW patent covers the display of LZW encripted files as well as the creation of them. Unisys currently does not enforce this, but it doesn't change the fact that they threatened to before, and they can start doing so at any point until the patent expires.
If Mozilla cannot license [LZW encoded GIF files] or defend its use, it should stop using them and perhaps drop support for GIF. People will either adopt this decision and stop using GIF, or reject it and stay with a popular browser which supports GIF.
The GIF file format is a defacto standard on the web. If a standard is subject to licensing fees, that closes out all the Free software projects and many small businesses are shut out of using that standard. There is nothing to prevent a patent holder from waiting until people a standard becomes popular before announcing and enforcing their patent on it.
We do not live in a communist society.
What does communism have to do with this, at all?
Purportedly communist governments have patents too.
Reasonable IP which is registered as patent is done so because the author of such IP wants his work protected against commercial gain.
A patent is, and always has been, a government granted monopoly. The government shouldn't grant a monopoly because the recipient feels he has a right to a monopoly, there is no right to a monopoly. They are granted because government thinks it is good to do so. In the USA, this is represented by the paragraph in the constitution
The Congress shall have the power...To promote the Progress of Science and useful Arts, by securing for limited Times to Authors and Inventors the exclusive Right to their respective Writings and Discoveries;
While I see how a case can be made that protecting an invention (eg. anti-skip mechanism for CD player) promotes the progress of the useful arts, I fail to see how protecting an idea (eg. buffered I/O) does so. Those ideas are the lifeblood of progress, "protecting" them cuts off progress, it doesn't promote them. -
Computer Clubhouse & Geeks in the Streets
There is a well written paper The Computer Clubhouse: Technological Fluency in the Inner City that I just found by doing a web search. It includes a list of principles to keep in mind when teaching kids.
You might want to also check out Geeks into the Streets - "Geeks Into The Streets (GITS) is an opportunity for people who love computers to bring them to people who might otherwise not have access to them." Their primary project is House Agape.
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consider giving your time, too.i realize the american way is to write a check and forget about it, but consider giving some of your time and elbow grease as well. i help run a computer lab for an inner city community (http://agape.qis.net/ if one of the kids hasn't pushed the power button on the server again
as you're looking around for places to put your money, consider whether you could put yourself and your expertise there as well. you'll find that it's a lot more fun, and you get to see first hand whether the project you're contributing to is doing any good.
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Re:Remember the home front too!
Seems like you did a great job! Keep up the good work! Do you teach HTML to these kids? It seems some of the pages are not really HTML. But then some of them are really good, like http://agape.qis.net/~mharri1/
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Remember the home front too!Bringing computers into third world countries may sound exciting and exotic (I revived a few dead computers for a K-12 school of 30 kids while sailing in the Bahamas) but it may surprise you to know that a computer is just as alien in America's inner cities as it is in much of the third world. This is not to mention the fact that in much of the third world electricity and telephones are still considered luxuty items, so getting a machine on the web can be a serious challenge!
The point is, you can make a huge difference just be working a few weekends, essentially in your own back yard. To see an example of what can be done, check out a site that we have been working on in Baltimore:
This site is hosted over the same 56KB modem line that the kids used to surf the web, so be prepared for a wait, ok?
-p.
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Re:So much more out there...
that was us:
we always welcome (tax deductible) donations of money or equipment (our average xterminal box is a 486 with 16-32 megs of ram), and, as any nonprofit will tell you, we're always more in need of people's time than their money, so if you know anyone near us who might want to help either with putting machines together or helping the kids, pass the word along.
we're also happy to offer advice & assistance to anyone who's interested in doing the same thing in his/her city. feel free to contact me at jeff.covey@pobox.com.
we're starting our first formal classes this week with an intro to unix class, to be followed by an html class, a course in basic c, maybe an emacs class; whatever various lug members want to teach. should be fun.
as to the
they should come out of the closest and admit that the heart of their products is being written by teenagers with green hair and noserings, and that that's ok.
linuxworldexpo was a bit odd, because it's not clear for whom it was meant. atlanta was for the community, san diego was for the corporations, thebazaar was for... well, who the hell knows who thebazaar was for, but linuxworldexpo new york seemed to be for the businesses who would tolerate the community so long as it was kept segregated in its own ghetto.
oh, btw: "eeeeemmmmmmmmmmmmmeeeeeettt!"
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The Agape HouseThe Agape House in Baltimore City, teaching inner city kids how to use computers. The computer lab is Linux based and was designed by the UMBC Linux Users Group. It was mentioned on Slashdot a few months ago.
Agape characterizes the community spirit and has provided a real-world example of how free(beer) software can be implemented with older hardware for an extremely low-cost.
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not everyone has a 400mhz machineicewm is needed because not only is it full of features, easy to use, and quite configurable, but because it is extremely fast and lightweight. i run a lab full of 386 and 486 xterminals, and icewm is the default wm, not because i wouldn't like to give the kids kde, but because we can't afford the memory and cpu overhead.
here's a screenshot of a typical desktop in our lab.
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"Rogue-like" News pageI notice several people have posted the old win.tue.nl URL for Rogue and its various descendants. Actually, the win.tue.nl site is *very* out-of-date (3 years?) and has been replaced by the Rogue-like News site, here:
http://www.skoardy.demon.co.uk/rlnews/
Check out the links page for various "Rogue-like" games, many of which have Linux ports and most of which are ASCII. Several are also Open Source and often under the GPL or a variant thereof.
Although there are plenty of games there, a lot of them are incomplete; it's really only worth looking at those with subsidiary sites (in light blue on the page).
My personal favourites are Crawl, Zangband, and, of course, Nethack. But there are a heap to choose from.
I wonder what the Queen would do with the Amulet of Yendor?