Slashdot Mirror

Here is site at UCSD which goes into detail about the "Experimental Verification of a Negative Index of Refraction". Also, here is UCSD's press release the Rueters article is probably based on.

I'm not so sure about this claim, and find it interesting that there is no corroborating evidence elsewhere on the net (I tried, believe me). If this isn't "Cold Fusion II", then Sheldon Schultz has some explaining to do. Why is this not published in the Scientific American?

I suspect we will read about it in the paper tomorrow, and there will be an Entertainment Tonight feature on it later in the week. What ever happened to responsible journalism and scientific inquiry?

Hype alone will not change the laws of Physics. Although it is true that light will bend according to the refractive index, it is the angle itseld that determines the index of Refraction, if I recall correctly. Therefore, light will bend one way when going from air into glass, and another when going from air into a vacuum. So which way does light go here? If it goes from a vacuum into the medium in the same way it would go from air into a vacuum (or glass into air, i.e., from a higher to a lower medium), then, okay, you have something there. But why doesn't the article bother explaining the phenomena?

It reminds me of that article wherein they claimed that they found something that travels faster than the speed of light. I am still somewhat dubious on that, since it is only infomation that has passed out of that medium faster than a light beam would have traversed the medium, but not the initial pulse: that was absorbed, I believe.

Of course, I am just one guy. I could be wrong here. But not about the dearth of explanation...

• Sheldon Schultz Quick Bio
• Research Group Page
• UsCD Press Release
• Nature Summary
• Space Daily summary - Excellent!

Check out the Vinny the Vampire comic strip

• Sheldon Schultz Quick Bio
• Research Group Page
• UsCD Press Release
• Nature Summary
• Space Daily summary - Excellent!

Check out the Vinny the Vampire comic strip

• Sheldon Schultz Quick Bio
• Research Group Page
• UsCD Press Release
• Nature Summary
• Space Daily summary - Excellent!

Check out the Vinny the Vampire comic strip

Hear, as in listen, attend, or pay heed.

http://work.ucsd.edu:5141/cgi-bin/http_webster?isi ndex=hear&method=exact

There were some pretty heated discussions here a while ago, until we wrote down all the possible outcomes. It was a relief to find a mathematician agreed:

http://math.ucsd.edu/~crypto/Monty/montybg.html

Altamira has a Photoshop plugin, Genuine Fractals, that does this. I haven't tested it out yet, but I remember favorable reviews for it. It only requires a "G1" Mac with 32 megs, so the process of generating the fractals can't be too hard (of course, Photoshop users are accustomed to waiting for ages for something to happen).

For a (seemingly exhaustive) survey of the state-of-the-art (as of 1999) in fractal image encoding, check out this page, which Google seems to like a lot.
--
How many classes do you have to take

For your bedtime reading, y'all.

--Seen

I feel this way mainly because most of us lack the physical attractiveness to breed, and so this generation may be the last. I want to see what we do with our short time on the planet.

So if you really want to correct some English, why don't you teach the script kiddies to properly spell the word pornography, and leave my well meaning but linguistically quirky bretheren alone. So there! ...ya pansy.
--

--

It has posts from '81 to '82

Zeshan

[...] what do you think the odds of Google acquiring such data are?

Gah. I'm not the type to flame somebody for their grammar, but good god... What kind of sentence is this? What you thinking were?

This is a question for...PSYCHOLINGUIST MAN!

To be completely serious, this is a perfectly grammatical sentence. Indeed, I think it would make my Good Buddy Robert Kluender beam with joy. Now, is this kind of thing a piece of cake to parse? No way: it has what we experts call an unbounded wh-dependency. Indeed, our willingness to torture^H^H^H^H^H^H^Htest undergraduates with stuff like this is why we make the big bucks.

Now, to prove to you that this sentence is legit, consider the following:

1. The odds of Google acquiring such data are small.
2. I think the odds of Google acquiring such data are small.
3. Do you think the odds of Google acquiring such data are small or large?
4. What do you think the odds of Google acquiring such data are?

Does this help any? Now, the real interesting question is why people would tend to say (4) above as What do you think the odds are of Google acquiring such data? But I have office hours in five minutes, so that question will have to wait for another day. ;-)

To make this just remotely related to the topic of search engines and Usenet, I'll point out that long distance dependencies like this one are the kind of thing that can make it infuriatingly difficult to use easy cues like "lack of proximity" to decide that two search terms are truly unrelated to each other. Unfortunately, solving this one requires you to parse natural language as it is used on Usenet, which is truly a frightening thought.

That's a pretty good idea. There is a programming environment kind of like this on the Mac platform that is used mainly for audio programming, called Max. You plop down some boxes, set some values, add user-interfaces, and wire it all up with patch cords (pipes). There are Win32 (Pd) and Linux (Pd or jMax).

Perhaps these can be extended to unix commands.

That's a pretty good idea. There is a programming environment kind of like this on the Mac platform that is used mainly for audio programming, called Max. You plop down some boxes, set some values, add user-interfaces, and wire it all up with patch cords (pipes). There are Win32 (Pd) and Linux (Pd or jMax).

Perhaps these can be extended to unix commands.

Hi Bolus,

I'm also a physician facing the same issues and questions that you do. Overall, the big reason to make use of new technologies is to be more efficient, and allow you to spend more of your time seeing your patients. Obviously, you don't want something that's going to take time away from your patients (i.e. paperwork, paperwork, paperwork, etc). Why have doctors been resistant to adopting electronic charting software? They say, "It takes more time and effort than handwriting a typical SOAP note!" Allow me to give some opinions and suggestions:

• Online Charts for patient access - I'm on a project right now to revamp our old (but still used primarily) clinical MUMPS databases into an Oracle-based SQL datamart. By doing so, we'll be able to provide a web-based frontend for our patients, to allow them to check their meds, labs, etc. It'll be great. :) Oracle however has been quite expensive for us, but we need that kind of scalable performance for our 350+ bed hospital. Depending on the size of your medicine clinic, and how much/little you're willing to spend, you may want to contemplate the free (beer!) packages that are available for Linux and use things like MySQL, PHP, etc. Go check out LinuxMedNews for a starting point for links to free open source solutions.
• Chat groups and instant messanging - this is interesting, but I'm not sure how many patients would actually make use of these features to make it worthwhile to you. They *might*, but I'm just not sure. It'll be hard to replace face-time with the actual doctor with IM'ing or IRC, and I'm not sure how much it would help for cost/time resources. For quick messages like IM, why not just send a quick email to the doc or leave a message with the receptionist?
• Bulletin Boards for questions - this is a nice idea, however, you don't want to spend time creating the same information that's already been done at places like WebMD. A bulletin board that's customized to your practice, however, would be good to supplement the info at WebMD. This way, patients can spend less time having basic things explained to them during the clinic visit. Again, there are several good open source packages for the Linux platform for this.
• Electronic Medical Record (EMR) - No real suggestions here, but just find one that you and your partners will like using. There's really two opposite sides of a spectrum here, each with their own advantages/disadvantages - (1) systems that let doctors click off signs/symptoms listed on the screen, and (2) systems that let doctors write free-form notes into the computer, similar to handwriting a SOAP note in a pen-paper chart. (1) is nice because you can chart very quickly, and because everything is already parsed (diagnosis, signs, etc.) it is much easier to analyze the practice data to provide feedback on your performace. However, sometimes certain signs/symptoms/diagnoses are not listed amongst the choices! Obviously, a totally free-form note, which us docs are all used to right now, let's us convey the information they way we are used to and want to (we just tell it like it is), but you can't process they information with without additional work. What I envision in the future is a handheld that allows voice recognition input, like dictating into a recorder, but with good enough AI to *accurately* parse the information into various categories, i.e. procedural CPT codes, ICD-9 codes, etc. Wouldn't that be awesome? Today I spend way too much time hand-writing my freaking notes, time that could be spent talking to the patient.
• Security - This issue has already been mentioned many times in this discussion, so I don't have to go too much into it. You should go check out the papers for PCASSO, a medical systems security project at UC San Diego - they used multiple security measures which was very good at preventing exterior attacks. SHTTP, SSL, firewalling, etc. etc. However, they did note that the system did very little to prevent attacks from within the systems itself (staff, patients, etc.). Reminds me of a clinic version of the Maginot Line (i.e. bypassing a frontal assault). As for the new HIPAA regulations, they are a big pain in the ass for everybody (are they overkill? not sure, maybe) but will be an important component to patient confidentiality, because they will address these internal threat issues. Obviously, there will be huge liability for breach of medical information. I would not give security less priority than "cool" features like instant messanging.

Hope that helps... :)

Hanzim, the Chinese character tutor, is also very good for learning the Japanese Kanji characters and multi-character combinations, which are based on traditional Chinese characters. Hanzim doesn't help with learning the Katakana or Hiragana, which are alphabetic not ideographic, but the alphabetic characters are simple to learn. There is also no Japanese pronunciation provided although it'd be easy to add to Hanzim's database.

Adrian Robert of UCSD has created Hanzim, a truly excellent tutor for people learning to read written Chinese. Hanzim is GPLd and has a nice GUI in Tcl/Tk 8.1.

I think the Hanzim project is an outstanding achievement. I wouldn't be surprised if the author starts getting a lot of press recognition for his work, and also one of the Free Software Awards for educational software. Afterall, he has created, with some help, a dictionary with over 6000 individual Chinese characters and over 18000 Chinese character combinations, each with English translations as well as a cross-referenced Chinese radical lookup facility.

The software is downloadable from Robert's Hanzim directory (http://zakros.ucsd.edu/~arobert/hanzim.html).

As a footnote, there is, of course, plenty of good commercial Chinese language tutorial software but Hanzim, uniquely, is under the GPL.

-- William

The program is on my homepage here.

The above is a great idea...except for one thing. Private, "charter," for-profit schools are certainly not going to help educate the disenfranchised, especially not online. Contrary to popular belief (and you can see a little evidence for it in the C-Net article where they mention the number of people with whom the child is interacting online), online education is often more capital-intensive, and expensive than classroom education.

Online education is definitely more labour-intensive for the teachers and the institutions, and has much higher maintenance costs than many people suspect. That's why, in a recent Chronicle of Higher Education Live Colloquy, Dr. David Noble suggested that most online education is really only for the rich, at least at this point.

For more information, see Hara & Kling on student frustration with technology
http://www.slis.indiana.edu/CSI/wp00-01.html
and LaRose, Gregg, & Eastin on "low-tech high-tech"
http://www.ascusc.org/jcmc/vol4/issue2/larose.html ;
Mason on online education at http://www-iet.open.ac.uk/pp/r.d.mason/GlobalEdu.h tml ;
Morgan on online learning economics at http://multimedia.marshall.edu/onlinecosts/distanc elearning.pdf (you will need a PDF reader for this one!);
and Noble's famous and justifiably critical "Digital Diploma Mills" series -- One--The Automation of Higher Education, Two--The Coming Battle Over Online Instruction, Three--The Bloom Is Off The Rose, and Four--Rehearsal For the Revolution.

In any case, charter schools are just a bad idea whose time has come. They take money and authority away from the state, whose job it is to provide education and some sort of societal standard...which is why Canadian universities don't have entrance exams. Canadian schools are strictly enforced by a centralized, federal government, so school in one place is much like school in any other. Don't you wish you could say the same thing about US schools?

The above is a great idea...except for one thing. Private, "charter," for-profit schools are certainly not going to help educate the disenfranchised, especially not online. Contrary to popular belief (and you can see a little evidence for it in the C-Net article where they mention the number of people with whom the child is interacting online), online education is often more capital-intensive, and expensive than classroom education.

Online education is definitely more labour-intensive for the teachers and the institutions, and has much higher maintenance costs than many people suspect. That's why, in a recent Chronicle of Higher Education Live Colloquy, Dr. David Noble suggested that most online education is really only for the rich, at least at this point.

For more information, see Hara & Kling on student frustration with technology
http://www.slis.indiana.edu/CSI/wp00-01.html
and LaRose, Gregg, & Eastin on "low-tech high-tech"
http://www.ascusc.org/jcmc/vol4/issue2/larose.html ;
Mason on online education at http://www-iet.open.ac.uk/pp/r.d.mason/GlobalEdu.h tml ;
Morgan on online learning economics at http://multimedia.marshall.edu/onlinecosts/distanc elearning.pdf (you will need a PDF reader for this one!);
and Noble's famous and justifiably critical "Digital Diploma Mills" series -- One--The Automation of Higher Education, Two--The Coming Battle Over Online Instruction, Three--The Bloom Is Off The Rose, and Four--Rehearsal For the Revolution.

In any case, charter schools are just a bad idea whose time has come. They take money and authority away from the state, whose job it is to provide education and some sort of societal standard...which is why Canadian universities don't have entrance exams. Canadian schools are strictly enforced by a centralized, federal government, so school in one place is much like school in any other. Don't you wish you could say the same thing about US schools?

The above is a great idea...except for one thing. Private, "charter," for-profit schools are certainly not going to help educate the disenfranchised, especially not online. Contrary to popular belief (and you can see a little evidence for it in the C-Net article where they mention the number of people with whom the child is interacting online), online education is often more capital-intensive, and expensive than classroom education.

Online education is definitely more labour-intensive for the teachers and the institutions, and has much higher maintenance costs than many people suspect. That's why, in a recent Chronicle of Higher Education Live Colloquy, Dr. David Noble suggested that most online education is really only for the rich, at least at this point.

For more information, see Hara & Kling on student frustration with technology
http://www.slis.indiana.edu/CSI/wp00-01.html
and LaRose, Gregg, & Eastin on "low-tech high-tech"
http://www.ascusc.org/jcmc/vol4/issue2/larose.html ;
Mason on online education at http://www-iet.open.ac.uk/pp/r.d.mason/GlobalEdu.h tml ;
Morgan on online learning economics at http://multimedia.marshall.edu/onlinecosts/distanc elearning.pdf (you will need a PDF reader for this one!);
and Noble's famous and justifiably critical "Digital Diploma Mills" series -- One--The Automation of Higher Education, Two--The Coming Battle Over Online Instruction, Three--The Bloom Is Off The Rose, and Four--Rehearsal For the Revolution.

In any case, charter schools are just a bad idea whose time has come. They take money and authority away from the state, whose job it is to provide education and some sort of societal standard...which is why Canadian universities don't have entrance exams. Canadian schools are strictly enforced by a centralized, federal government, so school in one place is much like school in any other. Don't you wish you could say the same thing about US schools?

The above is a great idea...except for one thing. Private, "charter," for-profit schools are certainly not going to help educate the disenfranchised, especially not online. Contrary to popular belief (and you can see a little evidence for it in the C-Net article where they mention the number of people with whom the child is interacting online), online education is often more capital-intensive, and expensive than classroom education.

Online education is definitely more labour-intensive for the teachers and the institutions, and has much higher maintenance costs than many people suspect. That's why, in a recent Chronicle of Higher Education Live Colloquy, Dr. David Noble suggested that most online education is really only for the rich, at least at this point.

For more information, see Hara & Kling on student frustration with technology
http://www.slis.indiana.edu/CSI/wp00-01.html
and LaRose, Gregg, & Eastin on "low-tech high-tech"
http://www.ascusc.org/jcmc/vol4/issue2/larose.html ;
Mason on online education at http://www-iet.open.ac.uk/pp/r.d.mason/GlobalEdu.h tml ;
Morgan on online learning economics at http://multimedia.marshall.edu/onlinecosts/distanc elearning.pdf (you will need a PDF reader for this one!);
and Noble's famous and justifiably critical "Digital Diploma Mills" series -- One--The Automation of Higher Education, Two--The Coming Battle Over Online Instruction, Three--The Bloom Is Off The Rose, and Four--Rehearsal For the Revolution.

In any case, charter schools are just a bad idea whose time has come. They take money and authority away from the state, whose job it is to provide education and some sort of societal standard...which is why Canadian universities don't have entrance exams. Canadian schools are strictly enforced by a centralized, federal government, so school in one place is much like school in any other. Don't you wish you could say the same thing about US schools?

Okay, here are the links you'll need when picking out a free software laptop:

Linux:
http://www.cs.utexas.edu/users/kharker/linux-lapto p/
http://www.linux.org/hardware/laptop.html

FreeBSD:
http://www.cse.ucsc.edu/~dkulp/fbsd/laptop.html
http://www.jp.freebsd.org/PAO/LAPTOP_SURVEY/index. html

OpenBSD:
http://www.openbsd.org/i386-laptop.html
http://www.monkey.org/openbsd-mobile

NetBSD:
http://www.reedmedia.net/misc/netbsd/laptops-and-n etbsd.html
http://newsletter.toshiba-tro.de/netbsd/

X window system LCD configs:
http://www.sanpei.org/Laptop-X/note-list.html
http://www.sanpei.org/Laptop-X/Laptop-X/

Notebook survey for graphics/PCMCIA
http://hci.ucsd.edu/dsf/notebooks.html

If anyone has any other links for other free software OSes, please post them :)
--posted anonymously to avoid karma whoring.

IIRC, Vanavar (sp?) Bush talked about having a global, hypertextual web of information in the late 1940s (48?49?), which is discussed somewhere in Brook's Mythical Man Month I think (or maybe it was Levy's Hackers, I've been reading both in the past few days and they are starting to blend together). Even if he didn't patent anything, his writings are a part of public record. When is BT claiming their patent is from again? ;-)

OK, I actually found some substantive evidence:

• An academic paper segement talking about hypertext, which contains a reference to:
• As We May Think by Vanavar Bush, Atlantic Monthly, 1945. Credited in the academic piece as being the first mention in print of hypertextual documents (and you sort of have to have a hyperlink to have a hypertext).

--

I mean, can a human being tell it apart from another game of Life?
The Turing Test Page

So far, scientists at UCSD have developed ways to use this idea to focus microwaves in an MRI machine. Although those waves are in the 1 meter range, this method allows them to be more accurately focused on smaller areas. X-rays have also been observed with this method. However, visible light has not yet, and probably won't for a while.

The reason that this method is so valuable is because it removes distortion and allows precision optics to bypass a physical limit that has been hampering us for years. We'll see how quickly chip makers and others can capitalize on this technology to make better circuits.

Potatoes are esculent farinaceous tubers.

Why? Because it is formatted, in HTML, to be a giant ASCII-art version of the OpenDVD logo, expressing my belief that DVDs should be open and viewable by anyone, anywhere, free from restrictions, on any OS.

--
-Esme

Remember the roots of our fight for free speech.

Remember the roots of our fight for free speech.

Remember the roots of our fight for free speech.

No, but here's an ancestor of rec.arts.movie.erotica: review of 'Goodbye Emmanuelle', the 4th of a series of classic softcore movies starring Sylvia Kristel.
net.movies
---

this is taken from the first posting for net.suicide the smiley is mine actually, but it is pretty funny, isn't it?

WARNING: There is another system

It's time to go public with my discovery about a serious flaw in security the standard UUCP software in V7, 2BSD, and 4BSD.

I have successfully constructed a shell command file which will execute ANY desired command(s) on ANY system running vanilla UUCP. What's more, the command is executed as (not root, darn) the "uucp" login, thus allowing access to the L.sys and USERFILEs, which in turn yields more system names to "attack". The actual commands executed are also untraceable, but if you look through the LOGFILE, you can at least tell that somebody is doing something (but not what they do).

I do not know if this is the same bug found by Berkeley People (anyone out there that knows what they did please confer with me), but I will be glad to share my knowledge with any properly identified system administrator.

I will send computer mail only to "root" of any system that requests the information. My uucp address is:

...!ucbvax!teklabs!tekmdp!randals
or ...!decvax!teklabs!tekmdp!randals

(many other systems also know about us... check your local maps)

Randal L. Schwartz
Tektronix Microcomputer Development Products
Beaverton, Oregon

Hello, Randal! How good of you to be here!

God! This stuff is too much!

Sombody: put together a best-of!

t_t_b
--
I think not; therefore I ain't®

Aucb.759
fa.editor-p
utcsrgv!utzoo!decvax!ucbvax!C70:editor-people
Tue Mar 23 11:50:48 1982
Moratorium on statements about EMACS
>From Goldberg@RUTGERS Tue Mar 23 10:46:25 1982
It seems that any statement of the form "EMACS does X", where "X" can
be interpreted by someone as undesirable, will be followed up by at
least one message, and usually several, saying how EMACS can be reconfigured
to avoid the problem. Taking note of this trend, I suggest that correspondents
on this mailing list adopt at least one, and maybe both, of the following
suggestions:

1. THOU SHALT NOT make any negative comments about the operation or
user interface of EMACS. Like the Lord, EMACS appears in many
forms. The true form defies description in human terms.

2. HONOR THY SENDER: If someone took the time to analyze and describe
a user interface issue, give this person the benefit of the doubt.
Do not berate this person on the technicality that a completely
extensible language has no inherent fixed properties. Rather,
consider the impact of the comment on the space of properties
that one may want to choose as the "default" for a given system.

Bob

From: decvax!watmath!bstempleton at Berkeley
Subject: standard net address

... It seems to me that userid@site.forwarder is much more sensible than userid.site@forwarder. (this is a simple change that had better not take more than 1 minute to implement in any already written code - or else the code was badly done)

at sign is found rarely in userids, and almost never on the arpanet, if at all. Dot is found commonly. It seems to make sense to say, you want to join our net, here is a format for your site name, instead of "here is a format for your userid names"

Aside from all that userid@location is much more readable than userid.location if you ask me...

Gotta love the quote, though: "TCP and IP, the DoD Standard Networking Protocols for the Eighties." How modern yet quaint!

sulli

IB M invents new math

After revolutionizing the data processing industry with the 360, IBM is now revolutionizing mathematics. It seems that sometimes the IBM personal computer will tell you that .1 divided by ten is .001, instead of .01. This apparently happens sporadically, and is the result of a fault in the output routine, not the calculation. Stay tuned for more developments as they happen.

Did anyone else catch this post concerning the new digital audio standard that was just agreed upon by Sony and Philips... Funny how no one (well, at least I don't) remember an encoded "card" which is read by a scanner to play music...
---------------------------------------- --------------

http://communication.ucsd.edu/A-News/NET.news.grou ps/82.04.04_uwvax.305_net.news. group.html

There is a proposal for net.sport.basketball, and this argument against its creation...

net.news.group
utcsrgv!utzoo!decvax!harpo!uwvax!jon
Sun Apr 4 14:38:25 1982
basketball
Why start a basketball group now? The basketball season is already over. Pro basketball is boring, and will remain so until they remove the shot clock and allow zone defense. [guess it was boring for at least the next 20 years!]

Click here and read the last article.

Here, Bill Joy and Bob Fabry discuss the progress of BSD tcp/ip, and it's quite interesting. From what i understand, bill developed it while everyone else squabbled over clunky, slow tcp/ip implementations. Bill also made sure it was scalable for faster lines (10mbit for example). Other implementations only seem to get 100kbit/sec..

On 11/780's, these numbers typically scale up by 1.4 so that we can project the throughput with the improvements described above to be about 11.2 Megabaud, user-user.

And.. the end-note which proves it's historical significance..

We will be working with Rob Gurwitz at BBN in the coming weeks, combining our version of TCP/IP with his current version. We look forward to making a high-performance version of the protocol available to the VAX/UNIX community at an early date. Regards, Bill Joy and Bob Fabry

This is a killer archive. Someone needs to collect all old archives of old 'net' material and categorize it. For example, Kern & richie (c inventors) have old stuff on their web pages, like Source code to a C compiler from 1971! (1971!!!!!!!)

CLearly there is a demand, and a need for all academia et al to pull old data off their tapes, before it's too late.

Jillian.

Complete map of the Usenet in a single post.

Dated June 1, 1981. Imagine the time when the Usenet was small enough to sum up in a single ASCII post. It even fits onto one screen. I'm not savvy enough to break it down and analyze it, but someone out there might be able to make a few insightful comments.

Speaking of age, Good God - what is the average age of the typical /. member? With everyone dating themselves by saying "I was only X years old when these were written" or "I was but a zygote back then," I'm beginning to feel ancient. I like to think that those who post span all age groups, but perhaps it's more skewed toward Generation Y (or whatever - people younger than my generation) than I thought. (For the record, I turned 8 in 1981, old enough to remember but larval enough to be totally unaware of computers until a few years later.)

pacman: $(OFILES)

[snip]
You can find the rest of Pacman listed here:
http://comm unication.ucsd.edu/A-News/NET.sources/NET.sources- index.html
Including:
Subject: pacman/makefile
Subject: pacman/pacdefs.h
Subject: pacman/monster.c
Subject: pacman/movie.c
Subject: pacman/pacman.c
Subject: pacman/util.c

pacman: $(OFILES)

[snip]
You can find the rest of Pacman listed here:
http://comm unication.ucsd.edu/A-News/NET.sources/NET.sources- index.html
Including:
Subject: pacman/makefile
Subject: pacman/pacdefs.h
Subject: pacman/monster.c
Subject: pacman/movie.c
Subject: pacman/pacman.c
Subject: pacman/util.c

Hmm, so far the longest thread I can find is it NET.movies.

The topic? The rumor that Spock dies in the new Star Trek movie!

Long live geekdom

tcp-ip@brl
Postel@isif
Geoff@SRI-CSL

Amcnc.1058 net.bugs.4bsd utcsrgv!utzoo!decvax!duke!mcnc!swd Wed Feb 10 13:57:15 1982 fp bug?
On our 11/70, this program

double cos();
main() {
printf("%20.20f\n", cos(0.0));
}

prints out
1.00000000000000000000
On our VAX 11/780, it prints
1.00000000000000010000

We are not amused.

Has anyone else encountered this problem and/or fixed it?
We have compared the cos routine on the 11 and the 780 and they are identical.

From this gem in the net.unix-wizards group:

Wed Mar 3 15:38:05 1982
UNIX security breach

The rootshell: (post contains quote from LA Times)
Computer experts are scurrying to counter what may be the most serious threat to computer security to crop up since the machines were invented.
A group of students at the University of California at Berkely figured out an extremely simple and undetectable way to crack a large number of computer systems and remove, change or destroy the information they contain.
...
[Note: notice the word "crack". At least they got it right back then!]


The script kiddie: (poster asking for the sploit)
... What's the straight scoop? What is this magic method? I would appreciate it if you would respond via "mail" instead of broadcasting it.

82.01.08_watmath.1400_net.jokes

Awatmath.1400
net.jokes
utzoo!decvax!watmath!bstempleton
Fri Jan 8 01:31:59 1982
How many USENET people does it take to change a light bulb?

Well, it all depends. If the person decides to change it quietly,
only one. If he mentions it on the net however...

One to have a bulb that needs changing.
One to start up a group called net.lightbulbs.
Another to suggest it should be called net.bulb so subgroups can exist.
Another to post to net.lb and two more to yell at him/her.
Another to post to net.bulb
Mark to claim net.bulb is official.
Another to start up net.bulb.ge to discuss whether General Electric bulbs are the best type.
Another to say that as news administrator of N machines, he should decide the name of the newsgroup.
Two more to suggest that the whole issue of what kind of light bulbs to use be discussed at USENIX.
Ten more to claim that many who won't be at USENIX still use bulbs and that the net is the right place to discuss it.
One person to make a typo and post to net.bulbs.
Somebody in the midwest to claim that since they use exclusively LEDs that their funders would not tolerate system resources being used to discuss light bulbs, and that they will not take or forward net.bulb.
Three members of the ACLU to claim this is censorship and evil.
Two more to defend it as control of resources. One to ask in net.unix-wizards if anybody has a DH driver that can control
an rs-232 lightbulb controller.
Another to insist that no DH on a 780 has lightbulbs attached.
Somebody from the ARPANET to insist that DCA will not fund discussion of lightbulbs that are not DOD approved.
Matt and Mark again to suggest a usenet policy on bulbs.

As you might have guessed, the correct answer is infinite, cause it will never end...

-Brad Templeton

The Usenet Oldnews Archive: Compilation Copyright© 1981, 1996
Bruce Jones, Henry Spencer, David Wiseman.