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Now Doctor Mario!

I've cloned Dr. Mario for the PC, and it's available as part of the freepuzzlearena suite available here.

The people that find a Tivo "difficult to setup and maintain" are complete morons that must scrape their knuckles on the ground while they walk.

Ad hominem insults such as the one you just made are sometimes insulting to the disabled. Not all people who walk on their knuckles are complete morons. Some people are just born without legs.

if your legs hurt that bad, you might as well get rid of them. people do fine without them.

What if Palladium decides not to load today, and I can't access my own documents, even those *I* created?

Microsoft has made it clear that if you own the rights to a document (for example, if you created the document), you will always be given a choice whether or not to save it in a Palladium vault.

BTW, my brain insists your handle is "yerricide"

Several E2 members make that same mistake. Blame Rose-Hulman for taking the first six letters of the family name, plus the initials of the first two given names, from Damian E Yerrick.

Even if biomed engineers manage to create a way to regenerate natural limbs, would such a technique work for people born without legs?

Is this a SF story about a men who do not have two legs and two arms?

Could be.

Not all [shell providers have an absurdly small quota] though - not some university accounts.

I have a 100 MB shell account at my university, but it costs $30,000 a year to maintain, and I'll lose it within the next ten months :-(

They can use a 386 laptop to log into a remote machine and compile the software on a state of the art machine.

How much space does a Solaris/SPARC hosted DOS/x86 targeted or GBA/ARM targeted cross-compiler take on a shell account's quota, assuming that it isn't popular enough for the shell server admin to install for everybody? And then how long does it take to download the binary once it's compiled?

Also, when I was on 14.4kbps modem and wanted several articles (totally maybe 4mb) on a page to look at I'd login to the remote shell account, wget the pages quickly, zip them up really same (text compresses really well after all) and then download them from my service provider.

Since then, HTTP has added gzip as a content encoding, and /. uses it.

Believe me. The homeschoolers were _not_ the maladjusted ones in my college. The truly socially inept were the public schoolers. I just finished my four years, and I did just fine.

Want an interesting commentary? Check out the spelling and grammar of the posts done by a lot of the high-schoolers in this forum. Even if they are "socially adjusted", it won't do them much good if they can't express their thoughts in a cogent and correct manner.

Bottom line: Give your kids the best you can. Ten years ago the critical mass was there for me to join a homeschool group and interact with other school kids. This was the middle of Indiana farm country. You should be fine just about anywhere.

No legs

That was my first thought too. See also these.

...but Microsoft users are the ones drinking the Kool-Aid!

The latest Disney licensed character's need something to make them happy. Unscramble the letters to find out what they need! : HAPYP MAEL.

Taking "Disney licensed characters" to mean "Disney's Pinocchio" (yes, Pinocchio was around long before Disney; that's why I'm specifying a likeness), and "HAPYP MAEL" to descramble to "HAPPY LAME", you get this picture and this story. I have to wonder what kind of Tool thinks this stuff up.

Now you, and others, keep claiming this, but the fact remains that every single government which has described itself as communist has been murderous and totalitarian. Every single one. And every single one has said, as you say, that `what went before was not really communism. We are the true communism.'

So, while you may say `trust us, we'll be different this time, we mean it', you'll have to forgive us if we're not willing to take that chance.

You believe that because you've only read the history that tells you about the totalitarian ones. Read "Rogue State" by Philip Blum. When you've finished that, try "A People's History of the United States" by Howard Zinn, and "Heroes" by John Pilger.

The fact is that there have been many attempts at democratic socialist and communist states, e.g. Kerala state in India, Jacobo Arbenz in Guatemala, and they have been mostly been stamped down hard by murderous, totalitarian right-wing regimes, usually assisted by the United States gov't. I'm talking about murderous, totalitarian right-wing regimes like Indonesia, Peru, Chile and Colombia, with murderous totalitarian dictators like Batista in Cuba, Pinochet in Chile, Stroessner in Paraguay, Somoza in El Salvador, the Shah of Iran, etc. President Reagan once described Gen. Efrain Rios-Montt, the butcher of Guatemala, as "totally dedicated to democracy", and complained that he'd had a "bum rap" on human rights.

For that matter, the US is happy enough to support China, which is about as "Communist" today as it has ever been, to the point of extending them Most Favored Nation trading status, regardless of their brutal totalitarian practices. It's not the ideology that the US objects to you, you see, it's the money. So long as the money flows, so long as there's oil, or chromium, or bauxite, or new markets for Nike and Microsoft, or whatever else the US govt is after that week, "Communist" or "Capitalist", it makes no difference.

I was raised to believe the same right-wing propaganda as you were, pal. It never occurred to me that my teachers and parents could have got it so completely wrong. Go read the history for yourself, and decide for yourself whether ideology has any connection with totalitarianism.

Also, let's please be careful to never, ever refer to a crippled disk as a "CD", because (by the Red Book standard) it isn't.

To me, CD stands for one of two things. For Red Book conforming discs, it stands for "Compact Disc". For discs that deviate far enough from the Red Book standard that they become unplayable, CD stands for Completely Disabled. (Such discs are even more disabled than this little fellow.)

I'd always wondered how long it would be before the companies that produce software like Mathematica and Maple would port their software to PDAs. When I went to college at Rose-Hulman IT we were all issued notebooks which ran Maple and CAD software. We used Maple in all of our Calc classes and were able to use it on tests once we proved our ability to do that particular type of problem by hand first. The CAD software could have easily been on higher power workstations. If Maple had been on our PDAs it would have lowered the cost of going to the college by a few thousand dollars (high end notebooks were really expensive back in '95, and sometimes still are)

The main problem is that PDAs were nearly non-existant at that time, but today I can see PDAs like the iPaq doing a grand job of running some of this higher end math software.

Of course cheating would run pretty rampant with wireless transmitting of email and text, not to mention the ability to store files with crib sheets on them. I'm still not sure how our profs back in the day thought they were ensuring that we didn't cheat on our calc exams back then. I think it was more of a matter of honor than anything.

I have done this already, having built a USB controlled robotic webcam mount for senior project. It has an internal USB hub too, so it doesn't take up any extra USB ports. Just plug it in, plug the camera into the base, and you're ready to go.

It took several months of head-scratching to get this to work. I used Motorola's MC68HC908JB8 USB 1.1 microcontroller, and highly recommend it to anyone who wants to build a low-speed device. Even at low speed, you can transfer data over 64kbps, so it's pretty useful for a wide range of control applications. It has a good in-circuit serial programming interface, and the development tools from PEMicro are excellent and free.

The route I suggest, and the one I eventually took, is to program the device to enumerate as HID-compliant hardware. This makes things vastly simpler, since Windows has built-in drivers for HID devices, and with a little tweaking you can pipe as much data back and forth as you want. It took me a week of evening work, and a solid 24-hour coding spree before I got two-way communication working correctly, but after that everything was a breeze. If you want your device to be compatible with Windows 95, you need to keep it USB 1.0 compatible, which means just Endpoint 0 and Endpoint 1. You have to tunnel data to the device through control transfers, which after you figure it out, becomes mostly transparent to the rest of your program.

I like the 908JB8 because it's Motorola, has 8k of Flash, and costs a couple bucks. The surface-mount profile is big enough so that you can solder it without huge headaches. You can get these chips from Digikey.

Using the HID method also opens up some cool possibilities. Just by changing a few identification numbers, you can make the device into a mouse, keyboard, joystick, volume control, or other recognized HID devices. It would be pretty simple to take a MC68HC908JB8 and turn it into a custom joystick with 50 buttons, or flight yoke or some other crazy peripheral. The hardest part would the mechanics, unless your good at that sort of thing.

If you want a high-speed device, you are in for a few more headaches, but nothing impossible for you wizard coders out there (I accomplished what I needed to with zero training in assembly or C++). Definitely go with the Cypress chips, they are widely documented and have lots of great features. I've even seen that some of their hub controllers have microcontrollers that you can program as well.

Highly recommended book: USB Complete by Jan Axelson. This book will be infinitely useful to anyone who wants to program USB devices. Also check out the comp.arch.embedded newsgroup. Jan posts there are lot, as well as many others knowledgable in the field.

There isn't much documentation out there on the MC68HC908JB8, but for anyone who wants to see what I've worked on, shoot me an email at garrett.r.mace@rose-hulman.edu.

Have fun!

So if say eminem released his album online beforehand (or some singles) and put this type of watermark in it, with perhaps a message in it like : "Preorder the cd now and recieve $5 off, or a free hat". I feel that would be alot more productive than this crap.

It's possible to hide a watermark in an MP3. For instance, Aphex Twin hid a picture of his face in a song, and I've written a program to hide text.

stick with feeding cyc reasonably un-controversial things like definitions and humans have two arms and two legs

Not necessarily.

[GBA has platform games, and] So does a PC [link to Boycott Advance, a GBA emulator].

Yes, but you still have to buy the cartridge reader for $45 from a Visoly dealer such as Lik Sang. A GBA doesn't cost much more than that. And even then, VisualBoyAdvance is a bit more accurate than Boycott Advance (for GBA) and Marat's VGB (for GB/GBC).

[links to Super NES, Genesis, N64, and Game Boy emulators]

For one thing: Do NOT use iNES or NESticle. They have a bug in their VBlank handling that causes some games to skip their delay loops or perform other weird actions.

For another thing, cart readers for Super NES, Sega Genesis, and N64 were extremely hard to come by last time I checked.

[PlayStation emulator]

It's easy to read most PSX games (they're ISO 9660 file systems for Christ's sake), but many PSX games do not work well with a keyboard. If you're going to carry a USB PSX pad (Gravis GamePad Pro) with your laptop, why not just carry a GBA?

I always wondered if it would be possible to do the opposite of a spectrograph.. take an image and convert it to a sound... I guess it is!

It's actually quite easy. Do the inverse MDCT (modified discrete cosine transform, an equation similar to the discrete Fourier transform) on each column of pixels.

If you want to put textual messages in a spectrogram, you can use this app.

Christian Music will have crosses, doves, and christian fish encoded into the signal, which will probably improve the music.

You could very well be right. Simple geometric figures, such as a cross made of band-passed noise, can be used as percussion, and a line drawing of a dove can easily be hidden in a bird call (heh).

but that, when translated to mp3, will crash your computer.

Not possible unless a buggy MP3 encoder passes such a file to a buggy MP3 decoder. Well-written codecs don't crash.

But you left one out: Cheesy electronic music will have the printed source code for a CSS decoder.

What ripping quality would preserve the face?

Steps used in Cool Edit Pro with Fraunhofer plug-in:

1. Rip CD
2. Trim to face only (the face looks strange in a linear spectrograph such as the one in Cool Edit)
3. Convert to Mono
4. Save as Fraunhofer MP3 at 64 kbps
5. Open MP3 in Winamp
6. Turn on Nullsoft Tiny Visualizer and play the MP3. The face is preserved, but unfortunately, Winamp's spectral display is linear too.

Anybody have a good link to a spectrograph program that uses a logarithmic frequency axis?

I once wrote a program to hide printed text in a spectrogram. The first thing I encoded (after test messages such as Hello World) was efdtt from David Touretzky's Gallery of CSS Descramblers.

the program

efdtt on top of music from Tet*is Advance

I once wrote a program to hide printed text in a spectrogram. The first thing I encoded (after test messages such as Hello World) was efdtt from David Touretzky's Gallery of CSS Descramblers.

the program

efdtt on top of music from Tet*is Advance

there haven't been many advances in algebra

Right now, there's an active field of research in discrete algebra focusing on mathematical constructs called "cwatsets." Cwatsets are not a Welsh obscenity but rather a slight generalization of group theory that has applications in statistics.

calculus

Calculus, especially in the 3xx and 4xx levels where it is called "real analysis", is still an active field of research.

that would make it into most undergraduate classes.

I agree that 1xx-level and 2xx-level material don't change much from year to year, except perhaps in CS where the school changes the language for Introduction to Programming every other year to match market demands. Perhaps I just go to a good school, where many of the mathematical topics covered in most colleges' graduate programs are covered in the senior year.

The decapacitation and amputation clause may make sense

Will it be illegal to make a game whose main character is a legless boy? "You see, Your Honor, even though you don't see any legs getting cut off in the game, the fact that he doesn't have any legs most surely implies that there was an amputation somewhere. Ban it!" And watch the bought-and-paid-for judge conveniently ignore the fact that the boy is from a race of people born without lower appendages, as was explained in both the manual and the help file.

The children were sorely disappointed when the machine wouldn't acknowledge their parent-induced handicaps such as missing limbs and blindness.

When it comes to the Internet, blindness is a handicap (now that much of the web is moving to Flash and that Flash MX's accessibility features have not come into wide use), but not having legs isn't nearly as much of a handicap, especially when you can prop yourself up and use the computer that way.

The only correlary is that some people will pay more for convenience.

Legitimate music download services such as eMusic and the one that this article mentions provide more convenience than Gnutella, KaZaA, and WinMX in two big ways:

• The downloads work over HTTP and thus work better over connections that severely throttle non-RFC-defined services, such as the router on Rose-Hulman's T1s.
• Three nines availability. There is negligible risk of "Connection reset by peer" ... Resume ... "User offline".

The barn is supposedly where the Last IBM Mainframe ever used at Rose was housed, according to urban legend circa 1982.

--Mike--

Now imagine that, when the baby is born ('prototype clone'), (s)he starts getting all types of horrible diseases, limbs missing and what have you.

"Limbs missing" is not a "horrible disease." Having a child born without legs (but with fully-functional arms) can be a good thing for the parents because it means the little fellow can't run off as easily. Besides, it's cute.

Many children living near train tracks have been observed exhibiting a lack of lower apendages! The advance of mechanical transportation having rendered the function of legs as a primary locomotive means useless, the legs of some people are falling off in an incredible example of physical mutations!

So in other words, are you saying we'll soon be seeing Lame Boy Advance?

Me too, until I got a Cease and Desist order from the Tetris company!

As long as you don't call it TETRIS®, you should be fine. Games in and of themselves cannot be copyrighted, and falling tetrominoes aren't patented in the US or the EU. Call it something weird like BinaryBlocks Game or freepuzzlearena or something, and The Tetris Company will have no grounds for a trademark lawsuit. Sorry Henk...

I have heard of these things [over fifteen] years ago ... Why do you always try to sell the same old stuff as "news"?

Because only now have the prices come down (Moore's Law and all) to make the technology viable in the market.

In VA453 (The Entrepreneur) at Rose-Hulman, I learned that creation of a new machine or process is invention; turning it into a product and introducing it to the market is innovation. (Note how the dictionaries define "innovation" in terms of "introduction.")

My univerity (University of Texas at Austin) offers Microsoft software for dirt-cheap prices [utexas.edu]. For example, Windows XP can be had for $5, and Visual Studio 6 for $15 or $20. (As an aside, the University was once one of the largest purchasers of Apple computers; now the campus is dotted with labs brimming with Dell PCs, some donated by Microsoft.)

Yeah, well, there's no such thing as a free lunch. My University (Rose-Hulman) does the same thing, but it's not because Microsoft is being nice to us in any way. Actually, it's because our school screwed up the licensing agreement (we got in trouble for distributing our own custom copies of windows 98 and gaving them out with freshman laptops). Basically, Microsoft was all pissed off that we were printing our own copies of Windows, so they offered "student copies" (like the ones mentioned in the above post) for cheap prices. Essentially, the school must first pay a boatload of money to Microsoft, then the school is allowed to distribute the cheap copies to the students in bookstores and so forth. You've already really bought a fully-registered copy of windows with your tuition; now you're just paying for the octual CD.

How's this: each point of karma earned (or whored, where's the distinction) allows the poster to "kill" (with sound and explosion effects please) upto 50 (!!) humongous animated ad banners.

You could probably just hack my Hampsterdeath game to do that, by replacing the five hamster bitmaps with stereotypical ad banners.

Patent laws will be pending

I have the prior art.

Then just start throttling ports whose protocol isn't defined by an IETF RFC. This allows legit traffic on FTP, HTTP(S), Usenet, e-mail, ssh, etc., to continue unimpeded while maintaining a neutral stance on both content and services, and it gives your school a reputation of supporting open protocols. For instance, Rose-Hulman restricts the ports that OpenNap, Gnutella, FastTrack, and WinMX use to 2.4 Mbps (about 40% of total bandwidth), and it works well. The IT department also grants exceptions to users that can prove a legitimate educational need such as a comparison and contrast of p2p filesharing networks for a computer networking course.

Then just start throttling ports whose protocol isn't defined by an IETF RFC. This allows legit traffic on FTP, HTTP(S), Usenet, e-mail, ssh, etc., to continue unimpeded while maintaining a neutral stance on both content and services, and it gives your school a reputation of supporting open protocols. For instance, Rose-Hulman restricts the ports that OpenNap, Gnutella, FastTrack, and WinMX use to 2.4 Mbps (about 40% of total bandwidth), and it works well. The IT department also grants exceptions to users that can prove a legitimate educational need such as a comparison and contrast of p2p filesharing networks for a computer networking course.

I'd consider making my own Tetris game if only to avoid paying $60cdn for shitty Tetris Worlds.

No, you can't make your own Tetris® game because Blue Planet Software aka The Tetris Company owns a trademark on the name "Tetris". You can make a falling tetramino game, but you'll just have to call it something different such as Quadra or freepuzzlearena.

And what's so bad about Worlds? It has Tetris, The New Tetris, The Next Tetris, a clone of Quadra, and two new variations all in one cartridge. That is, other than the fact that speed levels 13 through 15 are practically unplayable.

[snip torture involving force-feeding ham to UCE senders] whilst being made to listen to Enya's Orinoco Flow over and over again.

Don't knock Enya. Remember when she collaborated with Eminem for a remix of "The Real Slim Shady"? (Hear it here for a limited time.)

Have you tried Tetanus On Drugs?

but [GPLing everything I write for homework] seems like a safe thing to do in case it comes up (who knows, someone may want the tetris game I wrote for OpenGL class).

If you're writing Tetris® games, you're either working for the Tetris Company or violating a trademark. "Tetris" is to tetramino game as "Xerox" is to photocopier. Would you say "I built a Xerox® machine for a senior project"?

Besides, who wants OpenGL tetraminoes when you can get Tetanus On Drugs, i.e. tetraminoes with a 2 1/2-D spinning, zooming, and distorting display, without the hefty video hardware requirements? Heck, TOD is playable even on a 486/25 with cheap onboard Tseng video.

I wonder how long it will take for someone to port xbill [xbill.org] (which would be more popular than Quake according to the xbill homepage) to the XBox

For one thing, xbill is a heavily mouse-oriented clickfest similar to Hampsterdeath, and the Xbox doesn't come with a mouse.

For another, Microsoft must approve every piece of software that runs on a home XBox so that the company can make up the money it spent marketing the console. (Console makers make a slight profit on the console itself but take a loss in initial marketing that they make up with software sales.)

because I wanted to play DiVX and games, both of which demand more than a K6-266

I accept that a 266 MHz K6 processor probably doesn't have enough oomph for real-time MPEG-4 decoding, but games should work. Heck, Tetris and Tunneler run even on an 8 MHz 286, and a Tetris clone that uses mode 7 is (barely) playable on a 25 MHz 486.

More recent first-person shooters, on the other hand...

But few few students have been through the full software engineering cycle of design, developement, maintenance & support.

Every junior CS major at Rose-Hulman Institute of Technology takes a two-quarter software engineering course in which she works on three projects in four terms, forcing students to write things down and practice maintainability.

I don't know why it's so hard for you to understand that it isn't a clock.

I know it's not a clock; it's an icon. But when you look at your analog watch and see the hands pointing to the 3:00 position, do you immediately think "O-L"?

It's the letter "L" inside the letter "O."

"L" inside "O". How do you do that in Hebrew? You show me how to fit inside &#1506 . I'll give you as much clock time as you want.

If people are seeing a clock, then that's their problem.

"If people can't fly, it's their problem." It's Microsoft's problem. If users don't immediately see O-L, then Microsoft has not effectively communicated O-L. Oh well...

Here's a picture of Latin capital letter L inside Latin capital letter O, and here's a clock.

Point is, if it looks like a clock, moves like a clock, and ticks like a clock, it's a clock. I know Microsoft's icon designer meant L in O, but that's not what was conveyed. Users expect icons to convey the function of an app, not the name, and the analogy from scheduling makes it more likely that the user will see a clock.

Does L inside O convey "Outlook"? Or is it more like "Look Out" for viruses?

I don't know why it's so hard for you to understand that it isn't a clock.

I know it's not a clock; it's an icon. But when you look at your analog watch and see the hands pointing to the 3:00 position, do you immediately think "O-L"?

It's the letter "L" inside the letter "O."

"L" inside "O". How do you do that in Hebrew? You show me how to fit inside &#1506 . I'll give you as much clock time as you want.

If people are seeing a clock, then that's their problem.

"If people can't fly, it's their problem." It's Microsoft's problem. If users don't immediately see O-L, then Microsoft has not effectively communicated O-L. Oh well...

Here's a picture of Latin capital letter L inside Latin capital letter O, and here's a clock.

Point is, if it looks like a clock, moves like a clock, and ticks like a clock, it's a clock. I know Microsoft's icon designer meant L in O, but that's not what was conveyed. Users expect icons to convey the function of an app, not the name, and the analogy from scheduling makes it more likely that the user will see a clock.

Does L inside O convey "Outlook"? Or is it more like "Look Out" for viruses?

I've been wating for years for a better Windows Entertainment Pack! I hope they've improved tetris!

Want an improved tetrisclone? Try Tetanus On Drugs. So improved it'll make your head spin.

If you want to compare my side of things lets look at compilers. MSVC is fairly solid and optimizes well.

MSVC does not generate code for any non-x86 targets. What happens when you want to make an app that runs on Itanium? Intel's response: Use GCC.

GCC is the next in line competitor [I feel].

Factoid: Nintendo developers use GCC to compile code for the ARM7TDMI processor in the Game Boy Advance system.

Cygwin for example is a rather complete [minus an IDE] distribution that is gaining popularity.

"Minus an IDE"? What about Emacs? Or by IDE, do you mean dialog box designer? Those exist also.

Most MS development tools for example have color highlighted syntax

So does Emacs, with any of the popular .emacs files (such as Claude Anderson's) or .emacs generators.

popups for API syntax

Don't many users hate pop-ups and use Proxomitron to turn them off on the web? When I want to look up API syntax in Emacs, I pop up my own Info window (thank you very much) with C-x 2 C-h i, which is explained on the menus and in the tutorial.

Let's break Miguel's legs!!!!!

Or just take them off.

... I'm guessing the cost of transporation was a bit much for a small private school. What school? Rose Hulman, with the Solar Phantom. They've done fairly well, in my opinion, for a school that's only got the population of a large high school.

During the episode
"The Tick Vs. Arthur's Bank Account" where the Tick gets rather excited about "Upgrading the Apparatus!", he and Arthur are sitting there while the Tick is yogourt or something.

The Tick decides that the time has come to come up with heroic battle cries both to cheer Arthur up, and to further his cause for justice. Tick looks at himself in the spoon, with his image all convoluted and happy, and shouts - "Spooooon!". Arthur does not complain, but instead thinks a little, and realises what he's say when danger rears it's ugly head - "Not in the Face! Not in the Face!". They practice their calls a few times, and a few scenes later, and they are trying them out in battle.

:^)

Ryan Fenton