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http://www.textfiles.com/humor/woolly_m.amm

NASA had a robot in development JUST FOR THIS SORT OF THING. In the early 1990s/late 1980s they were working on an autonomous robot that responds to voice commands that would fly around in space near a space station to retrieve tools or astronauts and such. It would be released and lock on to the tool or whatever and fly to it and fly back to the station. I have a picture of it in a kids book about robots, but I can't find one online.

Here's a fact sheet on the project:

http://cd.textfiles.com/spaceandast/TEXT/STATION/STF_EVA.TXT

EVA RETRIEVER FACT SHEET

Johnson Space Center (JSC)

March 25, 1988

          The EVA Retriever concept is an autonomous free flying robot
for retrieving equipment or a spacewalking astronaut drifting in
separated flight near the Space Station. The device combines the
proven manned maneuvering unit (MMU) with a robot latched in
where an astronaut normally would be. The MMU was flown eight
times from the Space Shuttle's cargo bay in test flights and for
satellite repair spacewalks.

          Responding to voice commands from the Space Station crew,
the EVA Retriever would activate and check itself out, search for
and lock onto the "target," thrust toward, rendezvous with and
grapple the target -- automatically avoiding any obstacles en
route such as Space Station structures. After grappling the
target, the EVA Retriever would search for the Space Station and
finding it, return home.

Did it sing "Bicycle Built for Two", slowing down and getting deeper as it ran out of power?

I thought the tune's name was either "Daisy Daisy" or "Daisy Bell". In any case, it was used in 2001 because it was actually the first tune ever sung by a computer (the IBM 7094), in 1961. Here's an mp3 file link of that historic recording: http://audio.textfiles.com/sounds/daisy.mp3

Here's 10 Years of Atari/Atari Games VaxMail, this is history!!!!

http://www.textfiles.com/games/ATARIMAIL/

Description from the site:
Jed Margolis got his hands on something precious: a decade of internal mail from the now-defunct Atari Games corporation, makers of some of the more beloved arcade games in history and one of the more amazing stories in computer history. Buried among these large collections of e-mails from the Atari Corp. VAX are discussions of programming, trivia, jokes, and some real insights into the day-to-day concerns of this company.

The only podcast I need is CowboyNeal.
thesync.org seems to have gone away, so if you have a masochistic bent and want to hear Hemos, CowboyNeal, CmdrTaco, et al talking about 6-year-old news, go here.

http://ascii.textfiles.com/archives/000574.html

Ah, they don't need to be be hacked to have Goatse on their Myspace, just to link directly to images & annoy the site owner.

DieBold!

BlackBoard, DieBold, DMCA, RIAA... check your facts kids!

http://web.textfiles.com/phreak/wp101.txt

I think that to talk about Apple's role in gaming, it might be useful to abstract some of the concepts that stemmed from Apple's popularity and ubiquity.

It wasn't just "video games" that made Apple great - it was the creation of "Home computer games", i.e. games that couldn't be played on the standalone devices or early consoles of the time.

For example:

Educational games emerged as a subgenre as part of the deals Apple did to make computers available to school.

RPGs were available before, but they flourished on the Apple II with Wizardry, Ultima, Bard's Tale, Might & Magic.

I think that it could be arguable that Real-Time Strategy games owe a debt of gratitutde to Rescue Raiders.

Graphical adventures can trace their roots to Sierra's early efforts such as Wizard & the Princess.

There were a whole group of poly-bagged games that pre-dated the boxed software that isn't as widely documented. I sometimes wish I could play Artillery on the Apple II again if I only spent some time trying to get the emulators and Dos 3.3 disks working.

Piracy on Apple II was rampant, but I think that was largely because that piracy was one of the areas where learning about how hardware & software interact created a generation of computer engineers. A 7th grader learning about how filesystems work and how software controls a disk drive? Common place when the kid was motivated to copy a game. I don't want to make a moral claim that it's right, but you can't deny how many engineers of my generation have a similar story.

Info on disk protection was widely available - getting Hardcore Computist magazine every month was a real treat, learning new things about how hardware & software worked. You didn't get a crack to download - you had to dig into the disk editors yourself and learn why machine code edits made the game playable. Great fun from the old days.

The disc was specifically labeled. It didn't even say "Not suitable for PCs", which might confuse Mac users who think their machines are made of Steve Job's semen imbued with life by God above. It specifically said "Don't put this in your fucking Mac" and it had a picture because Mac users can't understand things that don't have pictures.

He says it himself, listen to the beginning of this interview http://audio.textfiles.com/shows/haxorradio/haxor_radio_show_04.mp3. Relying on Wikipedia like you obviously do is silly.

http://audio.textfiles.com/shows/storiesandstuff/

I was involved with an internet radio show a while back that did an excellent interview with him that covered a lot of interesting technical topics. http://audio.textfiles.com/shows/haxorradio/haxor_radio_show_04.mp3

Slight offtopic but there's a guy that just made a graphic novel about the history of phreaking. I'm not sure if Joybubbles is in it but looks neat. http://www.edpiskor.com/wizzy.html

http://textfiles.com/

Hell, I've sent the ol' Ascii Finger in the mid 80's many times.

http://www.widemann.net

I haven't heard most of Widemann's work, but Magma's Live/HhaïMagma's Live/Hhaï, where he appears, is for sure a must hear of prog rock.

Mike Ratledge from Soft Machine, I think I read somewhere that he wrote software for music creation years after he left the band, but I couldn't confirm. (maybe this is related?)

http://www.lastgasp.com/d/21573/

Uncle Festor's Silent Death looks fun:

http://www.unclefesterbooks.com/book_sd.html

Any book on pyrotechnics manufacture likely has multiple uses as well.

rec.pyrotechnics FAQ:

http://www.faqs.org/faqs/pyrotechnics-faq/

All kinds of fun:

http://www.textfiles.com/anarchy/

Yeah! And koalas are little bitches!

.

Read and laugh.

At least in the old days, we used to call it "social engineering" and hacking meant any kind of programming outside the obvious. That included getting machines to fork over security credentials, but that meaning was a subset of the broader term, which meant both a cheesy quick fix ("what a hack!") and a dancelike circumnavigation of inherent limitations to produce a semi-elegant but sturdy fix ("kernel hackers drink coffee black").

I second the call for the return of Geeks in Space. I have very fond memories of that show. There's no reason why there should only ever be one funny free software-related podcast at a time.

I know the Geek Compound is no more, and everybody's scattered across the US, but we have useable VoIP now. Can you imagine that happy day when geeks across the world will be able to unite in fellowship and say as one "I've been listening to Geeks in Space since before it started to suck"?

http://audio.textfiles.com/shows/geeksinspace/

You're not alone. We all wish you were dead. Here's some help: 101 Ways to Kill Yorself.

Some Apple II Crack Screens from days gone by:

http://artscene.textfiles.com/intros/APPLEII/

• Go inside
• Don't download anything involving porn or building incindiaries
• Buy a cup of coffee, tea, chocolate milk, etc.

3. The Legal Use of Images and Thumbnails

see #2 -- Cease & Desist before lawsuit.

Forget that. You should never ever hotlink someone else's image because they'll be able to replace it with the goatse.cx image.

Am I missing something here? Did you mean The Cherry Hill Gang, or The Cherry Hill Gang (see entry dated March 9, 1985), or some other group entirely? I fail to see what either of these groups has to do with music.

Never mind - from a bit of online searching of some old archives, it would appear that Hubble's limit of focus is about 10000km -> infinity without adjustment. The range of adjustment needed to make in-focus observations of the ground is pretty small however (12mm or so), so it's quite possible that it could be done.

But why you would do that when there are no doubt perfectly good spysats out there with better resolution, I don't know.

You may be reffering to http://www.textfiles.com/anarchy/SCAMS/stoppow.txt .

There are some formatting and spelling issues in it, as it looks like it came out of the tail end of an OCR program. I can't vouch for the accuracy or usefulness of the information, whether past, present, or future.

There's one point about these arguments I don't understand...

Why are the child porn types writing software that magically puts child porn on random people's computers? I'm really not clear about what they're accomplishing there, other than potentially hurting their business by bringing child pornography into the spotlight.

Umm, maybe to distribute it without getting caught? Not everything is about money, you know. Back in the day, the first of the 10 commanments of phreaking was:

              BOX THOU NOT OVER THINE HOME
              TELEPHONE WIRES, FOR THOSE WHO
              DOEST MUST SURELY BRING THE
              WRATH OF THE CHIEF SPECIAL
              AGENT DOWN UPON THY HEADS.

"Box[ing]" refers to using a device called a colored "box" (eg. redbox, bluebox, etc) to trick the phone system into (usually) giving you free phone service, which is clearly an illegal activity. As with any illegal activity using public communication lines, it is not wise to use a connection that can be traced back to the perp. In the case of child porn distribution, the trojans can be used as an untraceable way to store and distribute the illegal content. Your grandma's computer could be a hub for kiddie porn without her even knowing it!

I can see porn sites writing malware that provides porn popups (advertisements for their sites), but those (to me) aren't "images" as much as "software". I'm sure they aren't downloading a free gig of porn to the victim's computer - they wouldn't be making money that way!

Again, it's not always about money.

The way some of these stories and comments are written, it sounds like someone examining the computer found dozens of pictures of kiddie porn on there, and the explanation is "the virus did it!"...but I don't see the motive in writing a virus to do that...a popup or two, yes, but not dozens of images.

Most people who aren't computer literate will not realize that 30GB of their shiny new 500GB hard drive is missing. That's plenty of space to set up a clandestine IRC fserv for pedophiles. The default configuration in Windows XP doesn't even have an indicator to display network activity, so the unsuspecting users wouldn't have a clue what was going on behind the pretty wallpaper.

http://www.textfiles.com/art/barney.txt ...Subliminal Barney has spoken. (anyone remember this classic?)

My first BBS experience was with my Commodore 64 and some old 300 baud modem. You actually had to dial it pulse, and switch a switch manually to make it connect. Or you just dialed it with a touch tone phone, then flipped it to conenct.

Upgraded to a Aprotek Minimodem C (1200 baud) and found the online world of BBS'ing. Got into some of the more nefarious sides of it (i dont know what the author did in warez, but I was a courier), not paying for LD calls and whatnot.

I upgraded to a PC, and the fun got more fun, found a multiline BBS (Metropolis BBS, metrobbs.com now) running MajorBBS. It was originally run by Gary Martin, one of the TW2002 authors. Got quite involved with that community, they had get togethers at King Arthurs in Lawrence, KS. When I first logged on they had Lawrence and KC numbers, all 2400 baud except the 9600 baud "download line". Then they moved it to Overland Park (6619900 came to mind ... http://bbslist.textfiles.com/913/ yup). Also knew the guy who ran The File Shop (Walt) and even ended up working for him at one point as a tech (not on the BBS .. his BBS became one of the biggest local dial-up ISPs and became Birch).

You could even dial up to Metropolis after a while and get a SLIP connection (lordy mighty!) through the Major software .. then I ended up with a dialup account from The File Shop (ISP).

Then the WWW exploded on the scene, and I started BBSing less and less .. and now sadly even my Metrobbs account is gone..

The days! Thanks!

Finally, a review worthy of the top of my weblog!

I like Jason Scott's rant about Wikipedia over at ASCII. It is related to this next Wikipedia War in the following way:

"It's that there's a small set of content generators, a massive amount of wonks and twiddlers, and then a heaping amount of procedural whackjobs. And the mass of twiddlers and procedural whackjobs means that the content generators stop being so and have to become content defenders. Woe be that your take on things is off from the majority."

A related issue is that with some topics, you will *always* have debates. Certain wiki topics will always cause people to be at "war" with each other. I doubt this will kill off wiki technology, but eventually there probably will be some social conventions to handle disputes. Or, perhaps a more rigid technology will take the place of wikis. Who knows.

Sorry to ramble. My point is just that we need to be careful that we don't throw out the baby with the bathwater. In plain language, a wiki war doesn't mean that wikis are bad.

I'm curious because I'd like to have a similar lifestyle - if you're for real. I don't mean any insult, it's just that; well, you know better than I considering you've been on the 'Net MUCH longer than me, you can be whomever you want online.

I'm very good about keeping my companies under holding companies rather than under myself. This is a good question, though, and it is one that a lot of slashdotters are asking me often.

There are 3-4 Adam Dada's in the U.S. that I am aware of. There are some searches that will bring up a little "proof" that I am real:

A Google search of "Adam Dada" (with quotes) brings up an old article in Electrical Contractor Magazine that talks about my IT consulting business. It also brings up an ancient BBS text file list that has my old BBS phone number for my old BBS (The Melting Point) which grew from a single node to 5 nodes to 12 nodes before I sold it just before the Internet boom (I foresaw it and knew I'd never compete). Going to page 2 of that search pulls up an advertisement for my (failed) retail chain of stores that fell apart due to a bad accountant not filing taxes properly. I lost about US$300,000 on that business last year.

There are those who want to "mimic" my lifestyle, but they don't see how it is done. I'll be talking about how I do what I do in my Be The Boss blog (click my about URL) in the next week or two. There are a few secrets:

1. Love information over fast financial gain.
2. Take huge risks to get into a market before the average layman has heard of it
3. Find a GREAT team that will support your business responsibilities so you can enter new markets.
4. Live life without great expense (by used cars, don't buy a huge house, focus on real savings rather than gambles)

Life isn't easy, but I always feel that you need to re-invent yourself every 2-3 years. The reason why I have so many stories and knowledge on so many topics is that I've taken huge risks (with rewards and losses) to keep reinventing myself. Many of my businesses I've started are still around today (like www.deeplabs.com which I founded 13 years ago and is very successful in a niche market). Many of my businesses I've started are gone in name because I either sold them or gave them to a previous employee, so the names have changed by the people that know me will thank me in person but understand my desire to keep my name off of things as I don't believe in ego or pride -- I believe the best we can do is just keep finding what the market wants, provide it, and move on to a new market.

Public schools should not use in school punishments for actions one takes outside of school. However, American school boards don't care much for the constitution. Administration views anyone who fights censorship and helps kids learn freely as more threatening then any violent offender. Your fried is lucky he wasn't expelled for running a proxy like I was. People concerned with these issues should get involved with peacefire.

I was expelled from an Illinois public school for an online speech related issue as well. I set up a web (cgi) based proxy at home, and then informed students at school that it could be used to get around the school filter's censorship of the web. You can read about what happened here: http://www.textfiles.com/uploads/incident.txt

Congratulations on a valuable experience (notice I didn't say lesson).

Here's the lesson: When you think you might be in trouble, don't admit to anything. Don't confim that you were "in the media center", that fire is hot, or that you know where the power cord plugs in to the laptop.

And NEVER sign anything, and NEVER write anything and NEVER admit anything.

This applies at school, at work and everywhere else. If you're in legal or semi-legal trouble, get a lawyer.

If someone is trying to bone you, make them prove it. Chances are good that they can't.

You're extremely lucky that this lesson was in the relative safety of school and not some actual legal trouble. All they can do is kick you out for a while.

I was expelled from an Illinois public school for an online speech related issue as well. I set up a web (cgi) based proxy at home, and then informed students at school that it could be used to get around the school filter's censorship of the web. You can read about what happened here:
http://www.textfiles.com/uploads/incident.txt

The public school system is used to maintain social control, not educate. No one will stand up for the free speech rights of young people, and these rights are necessary for an informed and free society. The only solution is abandon compulsory education. Kids would be better off without being forced to go. Access to public Libraries would allow them to read; (at my school "unauthorized reading material" was banned). Libraries or homes would also give us free uncensored access to the Internet. Many leaders in unions, business, and non-profits are more then willing to hold workshops and lectures for high school aged kids. Their real world experience could replace incompetent teachers. There is nothing wrong with using public resources to teach young people, but forcing kids to spend their days being coerced into memorizing minutia, and detaining or expelling anyone with the capability for independent thought, that just further perpetuates the sort of passive obedience that makes American workers and consumers so easily manipulated.

Yah. Like you need to go to a museum to see it when you can just go here!

My favorite shell in the late 80's was JADU (Just Another Disk/Directory Utility) which had similar keyboard driven command interface. Not quite as varied as vi, but I loved it. "d" for delete, "m" for move, "c" for copy. You could use the mouse, but things are so much faster with your fingers on the keyboard.

Nowadays I love vi, and often am reminded of JADU from way back.
J

There are plenty of shows (so-called "podcasts") out there that do not force people to subscribe, and that have clear direct links to MP3's and even sometimes OGG vorbis files.

A site like HackerMedia is a great place to start, they even catalogue video shows.

Most of the shows on RantRadio and RantTV also operate in the same manner, such as GAMERadio and LagRadio.

And lets not forget about TextFiles.com, Jason Scott's mirror of a little bit of everything, offering direct links to the files.

The term "Podcast" has to go...

And here she is.. my beautiful Angela..
Among the first women you could fax to a friend.

Angela ASCII

Whenever you borrow a book from a libary (if you do that kind of thing) then you can bet that that information goes somewhere, so just hope its nothing contentious. And even I have heard of people being visited by homeland security for borrowing books (and no not terrorism hand books).

Just to help those along who think they can tweak goverments nose about books. Here is the Anarchist Cookbook online.
http://www.textfiles.com/anarchy/
Again for those who want to see how good the DHS is at finding out what you look at on the internet.

I state Impeach Bush as a SIG. He has violated parts of his "Oath of Office" he has trampled on our civil liberties and been willing to sell out to the Arabs (Big Oil). He has done far worse than Clinton or even Nixon who both came close to being Impeached.

Support our Troops - Make a plan to bring them home soon not in 10 years.

• Dewdney, A. K.; Computer Recreations - In the game called Core War hostile programs engage in a battle of bits; Scientific American; Mar 1984.
• Dewdney, A. K.; Computer Recreations - A Core War bestiary of viruses, worms and other threats to computer memories; Scientific American; Mar 1985.

but instead of being a main-page link(wank)er, link to the permalink for the entry -- without that link, your "topical" link will be useless (in fact, it already is, since I had to scroll around to find the anecdote in question!).

I think that this might be the first time that anyone, anywhere has called Robocop a "classic."

Jason Scott, of the BBS Documentary fame, recently detailed on his weblog an appropriate tale.

To get a feeling for old skool phreaking, you can read some parts of the Anarchist's Cookbook. Most of it is out of date, but it gives you an idea. A similar thing that you could do is to stop traces (it's actually in a PDF version of the Anarchist's Cookbook that I found some time, but this is the same thing), but I don't think it still works.

I would never do phreaking. I have no will to do it, and I respect the laws of my country (America). I'm sure that over 90% of the phreaking stuff in the A.Cookbook doesn't work anymore anyways, but it's still an interesting read, especially if you work for a phone company.

You could do it before, and I personally did it before. Crontab + small bash script = automated downloads of Hacker Mind ready for me to listen to at my convenience. Could even script it onto an mp3 player, had one existed yet.

"Podcasting" is not a new concept, its just a bad term (nothing to do with ipods, nothing to do with broadcasting) for something the rest of us have done for years. Sure, a little bit of standards involved is nice, but as long as you had a url for the stream and a timeslot, you didn't really need anything else.