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Riiiiight, because no one ever counterfeits hard currency, never used it to buy off politicians, never laundered, never dumped, never hoarded, never used it to bribe people, never used it to pay soldiers to murder people, etc.

Just in case you don't get it: A _digital_ NOR a _physical_ currency is NOT immune to the many (government & private) abuses. That is, there are MANY issues with money ... namely its design and mis-implementation.

* http://mises.org/books/whathasgovernmentdone.pdf
* http://www.lewrockwell.com/paul/paul124.html
* http://www.gmlets.u-net.com/explore/problems.html
* http://www.amazon.com/Problem-Money-Its-Not-About/dp/0984502009

When are you going to stop being delusional that some magical pseudo-authority figure is the answer to everyone's perceived problems?

--
"Necessity is the Mother of Invention, byt Curiosity is the Father." -- Michaelangel007

This one? http://www.dunnington.u-net.com/public/startrek/

As a preteen in the late 70s I played a game that I remember as SPACWR on a friend's DEC PDP-11. My friend and I played for hours and thought it was great fun. It was really an ASCII Star Trek game originally written by Mike Mayfield in 1971 in BASIC and then translated into DEC BASIC by David Ahl who gave it the confusing name so similar to the game discussed here.

Here's another link for the curious.
http://www.dunnington.u-net.com/public/startrek/

I think the computer was a PDP-8/some letter, but I don't remember which letter

http://www.dunnington.u-net.com/public/startrek/

Specifically

http://www.dunnington.u-net.com/public/startrek/spacwr.ba

I think the computer was a PDP-8/some letter, but I don't remember which letter

http://www.dunnington.u-net.com/public/startrek/

Specifically

http://www.dunnington.u-net.com/public/startrek/spacwr.ba

I believe the British Chevaline upgrade to Polaris, to make sure we could take out Moscow, did have decoys: http://www.skomer.u-net.com/projects/chevaline.htm

Some relevant links:
"Is Public CCTV Effective?"

This is relevant because "This report offers key findings from the 20 top studies/articles in the field and offers practical recommendations on how to optimize the use of public CCTV systems."

Key Findings Summary
        * The expectation that CCTV systems should be deployed to reduce crime rather than solve crime has created huge problems.
        * While the studies show serious doubt on CCTV's ability to reduce crime generally, a strong consensus exists in CCTV's ability to reduce premeditative/property crime
        * CCTV is consistently treated as a singular, stable technology, obscuring radical technological changes that have occurred in the last 10 years
        * Differences in per camera costs are largely ignored, preventing policy makers from finding ways to reduce costs
        * Routine comparison of police vs cameras is counterproductive

Practical Recommendations Summary
        * Stop claiming that CCTV can generally reduce crime
        * Optimize future public CCTV projects around crime solving rather than crime reduction
        * Optimize future public CCTV projects around material and premeditative crimes
        * Target technologies that support crime solving and material/premeditative crimes
        * Focus on minimizing cost per camera

and "CCTV in Glasgow"
Main Findings
- In the 12 months after installation of the cameras there were 3,156 fewer crimes and offences than the average for the 24 months preceding installation.
- Once the crime and offence figures were adjusted to take account of the general downward trend in crimes and offences, reductions were noted in certain categories but there was no evidence to suggest that the cameras had reduced crime overall in the city centre.
- The cameras appeared to have little effect on clear up rates for crimes and offences.
- 33% of people questioned in the city centre were aware of the cameras 3 months after installation and 41% 15 months after installation.
- Installation of the CCTV cameras did not reduce the proportion of those who said they would sometimes avoid a certain part of the city but there was a slight reduction in those who said they were anxious about becoming a victim of crime in the city centre.
- 72% of all those interviewed believed CCTV cameras would prevent crime and disorder; 81% thought they would be effective in catching perpetrators; and 79% thought they would make people feel less likely that they would become victims of crime.
- 67% of those interviewed 'did not mind' being observed by street cameras.

Personally, I think the cost is the only way we can argue back our privacy. Say you are not willing to pay for costly, ineffective measures.

Solve 2 problems with one stone. Get rid of bankers, give everyone an excuse to actually implement IPv6

http://www.gmlets.u-net.com/explore/home.html
 

I believe you mean something like LETS.

I never managed to own any of the common machines, until I got a PC. I think it has had a serious impact on my personality...

1. Philips G7000 (Magnavox)
This was actually a game console, but it had a (horrible) membrane keyboard, and there was a programming cartridge! Some variant of Intel 8048 assembler was my first attempt at programming. It didn't go so well, I was nine.
http://www.sothius.com/hypertxt/welcome.html?g7000 .html

2. ZX81
My first "real" computer. 1KB of memory. I had no tape recorder, so if I wanted to run a program, I had to type it in first... Programming Sinclair computers was odd, since you every command was printed on a button, and pressing that one button entered the whole command.
http://www.honneamise.u-net.com/zx81/

3. TI 99/4A
Okay, if you're American, this is not a very odd home computer. But here in Europe it was rare. Everyone had a Commodore 64 or a Sinclair Spectrum. Except me. I got beat up a lot by the other nerds for that. Well, they can blow themselves, my computer was 16 bit! (It was the first 16b personal computer.) Coming from the ZX81, I was blown away by its awesome color graphics (16 colors!) and huge memory (16KB). With the Extended Basic cartridge, sprites and sound could be programmed using high-level Basic commands, which rocked.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/TI-99/4A

4. Commodore plus/4
Again I manage to find the odd duck. The +4 was big brother to the Commodore 16, and descendant of the C64. "Plus/4" referred to four built-in office applications. They of course sucked frozen goats through a straw. What was really cool though was that it had a built-in machine code monitor with a mini-assembler/disassembler. I actually learned some 6510 assembler this time around. And I knew I had entered the Space Age when I saw the +4's 128 colors(!!). It also had a better Basic than the C64, you could program graphics using what we called "Logo" commands, or "turtle graphics," basically vector drawing commands.
http://www.myoldcomputers.com/museum/comp/plus4.ht m

5. Ericsson PC
My first PC was an Ericsson 286 with a 9-pin printer in matching color. Since then I have owned and built countless PCs.

6. DECpc AXP/150
I still have the Jensen with some old Red Hat version on it. This was the first Alpha PC, and it was 64 bit even back then. Pretty cool stuff.
http://john.ccac.rwth-aachen.de:8000/alf/axp150/

7. Tandem Integrity s/2
This is the undisputed king of the computers I have owned. It cost around $250,000 when it was new in '91. Yes, that's two hundred and fifty thousand dollars. It consisted of a system cabinet and a disk cabinet (you could add up to four) with 6 1GB SCSI-2 disks. Every piece of hardware in it was doubled (except the CPU board which was tripled, one running checksums on the other two), including the fans and built-in battery backup. It was completely modular and every module could be changed while the machine was running (including CPU modules). It had a console with "smooth scrolling." It ran Tandem's Nonstop UX. It ran for four years without reboot before I got it from an insurance company. What can I tell you? It's cooler than any computer you've had. ;-)
http://www.speed-pac.com/i_shook/comp.jpg

Oh yeah, do I remember the days... This little baby back in 1981 was so super-pimp that it had a cassette recorder as a hard drive. I almost lost my life once or twice when I bumped the card table that my brother was using the ZX81 on to program a chess game. All of the data would just disappear. Poof! And then my brother would chase me around the house, red with rage.

Those were the days..

Does nobody remember the PowerBook 1400? The sheer popularity of that notebook should have sparked the iMac, iBook, etc. much, much sooner. One of the many personalized things you could get to fit in the back was in fact a solar charger! Check out the picture of the Powercover.

Apparently, the correct spelling of his name isn't as well known.

Ithica hours

Saltspring Dollars

LETS

An overview of alternative currencies

Hey, in Sleeper Woody Allen was able to fire up that VW bug that had been stored for like 200 years... and if a V-Dub can start after that, surely these rovers can manage one little winter!

- Leo

You wish is my command. Here's the source code plus there's a PALM version at the bottom of the list. In case you want to type it in yourself, SmallBASIC accepts traditional BASIC syntax. Someone event did a SmallBASIC port of Super Star Trek for you!

I'm not an accountant or tax lawyer, but I don't think a government can tax trade not being done in its native currency

(i.e. the U.S. can't charge tax at time of sale if I were to go to Toronto and buy a bottle of soda; on larger purchases, like a computer, they might be able to at the border/Customs, but I'm not sure).

Gender has more than one proper English usage.

Gender and sex are generally considered to be two separate (related) topics.

For those not in a reading mood, your sex generally considered to be what your chromosomes and organs say (assuming they agree, which they don't always), while your gender refers to learned social roles.

And I agree, clean rooms are no fun. Ever trying typing on a plastic-coated miniature keyboard with two pairs of gloves?

That sounds awkward but you ever tried typing 2000+ lines of hex code on a ZX81?

Regardless of all of that, I came to love my proper, if somewhat temperamental, little computer and after many a marathon session of learning Sinclair Basic and even some Z80 machine code I grew up to become, even if I say so myself, a very proficient IT Manager/Database Developer.

Retro Power Pack (4 REALLY retro games) $4.95
www.retropack.com

Spheres Of Chaos (awesome particles!!) $8.00
www.chaotics.u-net.com

Pontifex II (words defy me ;) $19.95
www.chroniclogic.com

I hate copy and paste! :)

The real problem is
that there is always to few money.

Here is how we can solve it.

Knud

For all those with huge subwoofers and Win32, there's the Test Tone Generator (shareware):

I tried it and looked at my Wharfedales' 6" cones move very visibly back and forth at 10 Hz with an amplitude of a couple of centimeters. Didn't hear or feel anything though, so I'd suggest a Big Ass (TM) subwoofer for the full experience.

I'm guessing that "public access" radio might be closer with its lower bandwidth and production cost requirements. I could easily forsee some kind of Wi-Fi peer-to-peer device blowing the radio market wide open. The software might resemble the streamer p2p protocol, but optimized with multicasting and some way to elect repeater nodes. Assuming a real world bandwidth of 1Mb/s, that gives us 16 64Kb/s channels. Not exactly an abundance of channels, but it's a start.

Over time, the growth in capacity is awesome.

Last month I was going overseas for a vacation so I decided to buy a new CompactFlash card for my digital camera. For about $100 my camera now has 365,000,000 times more memory than my first personal computer had. That's insane.

I love living in these times.

When money become electronic a different
type of economy becomes possible.
Like a system where the users issue the
money them self see
Lets

by a dis-interested populous

EU issues are rarely discussed on TV except on the minority news shows [i.e. the ones worth watching].

The EU parliament is seen as a bit of a gravy train for those serving. You never see your MEP in the news and I bet 90% if the people in the UK have no idea who their MEP is.

Big business is right in there, don't you worry. You'll do well to remember that the lovely people that bring us such tunes as All You Need is Love and Give Peace a Chance also help bring us such delights as the WE 177 tactical nuclear weapon and millions of the worlds landmines as well as a plethora of deadly devices.

*they need help from linux coders to help make this happen on open source os.

WordStar Rocks! Yes, that's right. Present tense. There's even emulation inside MS Word. Now, if someone would get around to creating a WordStar mode for Emacs I could finally stop dual booting!

"Telecom could invert itself and become a bottom-up phenomenon," is a deliciously subversive idea. Like the local currency systems - LETS and whatever comes after major labor music distribution this promises to really shake things up in a good way (read: shaft the bad guys) and is also right around the corner.

Then I'll get a cell phone

Streamer was the one that was GPLed, it's source is right here.

There are at least two peer to peer Internet radio networks: Streamer
and PeerCast.

You could also serve hot streaming mp3s with this very cool perl script

Or you could just bliss out to some great trance music ... as long as they can afford to keep going.

Eponymous Mallard
"If it quacks like a duck, it's the Eponymous Mallard"

Of course. The RIAA doesn't want to become obsolete. With everyone gone, they will still keep making money. They make deals with radio stations. They play what they want you to hear, They play what is cheap for them. They own your songs.

Of course, there are ways around everything.
Streamer

Slashdot: Streamer

This will be the future of Internet radio.

Damyan, thats a great article. Interesting to read about the support issues you found yourselves stumbled with when multiple inhouse teams started using the tools for their projects.

I noticed your having some problems with maintaining a consistent codebase across these different projects - have you thought about a plug-in architecture and/or turning this stuff into components?

Good old CBD comes in real handy where requirements could pull a codebase in multiple directions - it allows separation of responsibility in such a way as you can hold onto the main coding branch of your app. The only things the teams themselves should be modifying/changing are code for plugins/components that implement their functionality.

Couple of references:

Catalysis Component Based Design - D'Souza & Wills
UML Components - Cheeseman & Daniels

Second one is my particular bible. No cruft, just a straightforward process. Ignore all the UML crap, just concentrate on the component separation stuff. Might help with that problem.

In 1986 while living in German economy, far out of reach of AFN (Armed Forces Network), and thus English TV, we had to rent alot of movies. Metropolis stood out as an artful and imaginative work. I love the rock soundtrack version, but will have to seek out the reconstructed version as well.

Sincerly,
The Reformed BAS

It's not closed source anymore...
streamer

It is GPLed you fool.

No source

It's so simple I feel like an idiot for not thinking of it myself. This game is beautiful and takes very little processor.

Judging by the fact that they have their game compiled for Linux as well (at about one-third the size as the Windows version, which both together make us less than 1 mega^H^H^H^H mebi^H^H^H^H million bytes) they'll probably go this direction with the Streamer app as well.

Just out of curiosity, has anyone checked to see if the http interface is open to the public or is just restricted to localhost? Maybe we can start controlling other people's streams (e.g. knocking off the idiot who's doing the corrupt stream name)

Sega has no consumer loyaltee because they discontinued every system they ever released in the past as soon as a competetor released a better system. We saw sega drop the master system when 8bit Nintendo came out. We saw them drop the Genesis, and 32x when the Super nintendo and XF chip(starfox) came out. We saw them really run away with their Saturn when Sony made the Playstation. Their last coup de gra was the dreamcast, which after just the announcement of the N64, Xbox, and PS2 was dropped. I don't support companies that drop support of their systems at a drop of a hat.

This is 100% bullshit, really. The Sega Master System came out *after* the NES and was highly successful in europe. In the US it proved less successful, due in no small part to Nintendo's strong-arm tactics (such as, no retailer got NES games if they sold games for other systems).

The Genesis was supported all the way up to the Saturn's launch (and the 32X, Sega's attempt to prolong the life of the Genesis, was launched long after Starfox and Nintendo's FX chip). But the Megadrive was such a flop in Japan that Sega of Japan released the Saturn - which proved highly successful across the Pacific.

In spite of its failure in the US, all the money Sega made in Japan with the Saturn funded development of the Dreamcast (launched long after the N64, btw) - which turned out to be the fastest selling console in history in the US at launch. And, Sega supported the Dreamcast until the cash to subsidize selling the consoles ran out. At which point Sega abandoned the hardware business to focus on software.

If you don't like Sega, that's fine. But let's cut out the revisionist history bullshit just this once...

one way might be to start a LETS, like the kind in victoria.

This is an extremely important discovery! With this now known, many believe that the construction of a GRAVITY DRIVE is now trivial. This will have tremendous implications, both moral and scientific.

• What about Stunts, Elite, and other 3D games?

Given that ZX81 (aka TS1000) emulators for the PC were around from day dot (or a ZX81 emulator running on an Atari ST emulator running on a PC...) how about 3D Monster Maze? It's not that much more primitive than Doom. Run! Run from the scary Tyrannosaur!

(Yes, I know, the article is probably about hardware that draws triangles real fast, but it's Slashdotted hard, so we may as well have some fun reminiscing. If nothing else, it'll confuse the young 'uns ;-) )

He says this picture is him a year ago at age 23. Jeebus, poor guy is obviously seriously ill.

Oh wait, I thought you meant this guy.

You'd think he'd have better things to do, like bug Jean-Luc.

Want to do some good with your spending power? Local Exchange Trading System ( LETS) supports your local community, not a"global" economy.

- Derwen

One thing I find interesting is that many of the guys who built this stuff are still around. I feel ancient showing the PFYs around here my ZX81, and they go "Oh, neat. So small. Is it new?" (Aaaargh!).
On occasion I imagine going back just 40 years, and trying to convince anyone who wasn't certifiable, that yes, GHz speeds, under the desk, running off the power of a fsking lightbulb, for less than 1k$ is pretty much the norm. It's probably less interesting for the 604 guys, who came the long way around (as it were), but talk about exciting. (goes all starry-eyed).

And such radical Communists as Texas Instruments:


__

I take it back. I said elsewhere you were possibly ignorant or naive; but clearly you are just a troll. No one could be so ignorant of their own history to not know of indentured servitude or slavery on their own soil. Slavery was not abolished in England until 1833 Link. You get a 30 year lead there- which, on the grand scale of history, isn't much. And there was a great deal of fuss about it... sure, no civil war, but only because the numbers were smaller and the economy less dependent on them.

White women in Britain couldn't vote until 1918 and for 10 years after that only women who owned property or were married to men of property were allowed to vote. Universal female suffrage happened here in 1920. Either we are two years worse or eight years better- take your pick.

And, of course, you have to know whose idea property based suffrage was. It's not like British settlers arrived from enlightened England, bumped into classist Native Americans, and said "gee, how silly it was of us to give suffrage to everyone back in the old country. Here, only those with property will vote." Like many of our other good and bad ideas, the Brits had it first, and had had it for a lot longer than we did. As late as 1884, if you worked on a farm, you couldn't vote in the UK. True general suffrage was not granted until 1928. Legally speaking, the US wins by 59 years here (though obviously blacks were practically barred for another 100 years.)

As far as the reasons for revolt... sure, taxes were a huge reason. But if the British Government had actually given the Colonies seats in Parliament instead of opening fire on protesters, maybe we might have stuck around. Maybe India might have done the same if you hadn't tortured and arrested people who wanted the right to make their own salt. And let's not get into South Africa.

Look, America has a pretty dreadful history. But it is clear that you are just trolling when you are so willfully ignorant of your own history. Go back in your hole.
~luge

You certainly have a point!
But how long does the actual data on a CD-ROM survive ("real CD-ROM" / CD-R / CD-RW)?


Btw, blatantly assuming you're talking about WordStar for DOS there are good utilities for conversion of WordStar to other, more common, formats here: http://www.petrie.u-net.com/wsdos/pages/downloads. htm.


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