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They do, occasionaly, let tourists play Quake in the CAVE.

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That renders as a light brown-yellow sort of colour. Perhaps your browser just doesn't like style-sheets. BTW, I think the wraparound in this comment box has stuck an unwanted space in that URL - you'll have to remove it.

I think there are still a lot issues that need to be worked out before we can really have complete wireless networking capabilities. Removing centralized control and going in for ad hoc networks give rise to several issues at the medium access and physical layers that are not observed in wired networks. There seems to be a significant drop in capacity of such networks when the user population increases. My (limited) knowledge of these problems stem from this (The Capacity of Wireless Networks) paper and work related to it.

To use it create a directory, say /usr/local/encap/, and when you run ./configure set the prefix to /usr/local/encap/packagename-1.2.3. After running make install go to /usr/local/encap/ and run epkg to install sym-links under /usr/local to your program.

Check it out, it is a very good system. It becomes very easy to uninstall a package and also see what packages are installed. I highly recommend it!

Not that I'm particularly fond of Smalltalk, but it is a simple language to learn, it's well-connected to its development environment (thus, very, very simple to prototype in), and Object-Oriented at its very core. Java, on the other hand, is much too complex and idiosyncratic for placement as a learning language ... ditto C/C++. I think a more straightforward language benefits the student of OOA&D.

Plus, some of the better CS departments (GATech, etc.) seem to agree. Check out Squeak.

As someone else mentioned, the glove has a re-center button. Personally, I think this sort of thing is just what gesture recognition was made for; and I know just what gesture I intend to assign to "re-center because I ran out of movement space".

See figure one.

-Billy

Yup, if you still have one of these you can wire it to you PC (no one's tried to hack this for the Linux ... yet).

Do it yourself version
Pay for the parts version

_f

Here's what you're looking for.
It includes such stuff as how to build a cross-compiler, a sample "Hello World OS" and some other cool OS-related stuff. Check it out.

-Greg

1996, you say? Interesting. The High Performance Computing Act of 1991 paid for increasing network backbone infrastructure over the next 5 years. Perhaps there's a connection? However, I seem to remember some guy getting a whole lot of shit for taking credit.

TCP/IP. HTTP. graphical web browsers. What do these things have in common? Answer: they were all created with government funding.

I must say CAVE quake is very cool, I worked with the cave @ ncsa and we tried to slip away when we could. Even more cool was playing someone across the hall in a deathmatch using the idesk and CAVE. Paul is truely a top notch programmer @ he also worked on a vrml generator thats pretty cool, check out more news about cave quake here

I must say CAVE quake is very cool, I worked with the cave @ ncsa and we tried to slip away when we could. Even more cool was playing someone across the hall in a deathmatch using the idesk and CAVE. Paul is truely a top notch programmer @ he also worked on a vrml generator thats pretty cool, check out more news about cave quake here

It's funny that the proposal comes from South Africa, because there were quite a few natural nuclear ractors nearby, such as in Oklo , in Gabon. (here is a more technical article, and a cross-section diagram, neatly labelled in Japanese). And, of course, you can expect it to be threatened by mining...

(Here is my google search for the stuff).

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If you understand and are comfortable with Simula there is the Smalltalk-72 emulation [1] created by Dan Ingalls you can file into Squeak.

Doug Engelbert pioneered the use of Graphic Human Tool Interface with bitmap displays starting in 1957 and going public with his oNLine System in the "MotherOfAllDemos" in 1968.

• [1] Smalltalk-72 ChangeSet for Squeak
  ftp://st.cs.uiuc.edu/pub/Smalltalk/Squeak/goodies/ Smalltalk-72/
• [2] WikiWiki:TheMotherOfAllDemos
  http://www.c2.com/cgi/wiki?TheMotherOfAllDemos
• [3] RealAudio copy of the MotherOfAllDemos
  http://sloan.stanford.edu/MouseSite/1968Demo.html
• [4] The Augmented Knowlege Workshop - Chronology - 1964
  http://www.bootstrap.org/augment-101931.htm#6C

Another list is on the VisualWorks Smalltalk Wiki, at http://wiki.cs.uiuc.edu/VisualWorks.

A list of Cincom Smalltalk (i.e. VisualWorks or ObjectStudio) success stories is at http://www.cincom.com/scripts/smalltalk.exe/smallt alkSuccess/index.asp?content=customerProfiles. Unsurprisingly perhaps, that site is running on VisualWorks...

Well, the experience reports section of the Smalltalk Solutions wiki would be a good place to look.
The EZBoard slides aren't up there yet (the second largest online community site, serving 4.5M hits/month out of a pure Smalltalk web server) but the OOCL/Gemstone in the Large presentation (sorry, it's encoded in Microsoft-specific technologies to help keep slashdotters out) talks about the technical details of using Smalltalk and an OODB to run one of the world's largest shipping operations. Elastolab is on a completely different scale, but more fun to play with, and of course the web site hosting the proceedings is running purely in Smalltalk. I've just singled out a few. There's also a Smalltalk article in this month's Communications of the ACM, for those who read offline.
Is that enough of a start?

Extreme Programming. The extreme programming (XP) methodology grew out of a Smalltalk project 3-4 years ago. The founder of extreme programming, Kent Beck, advocates Smalltalk as the most productive language for XP, as does Ron Jeffries, the author of the Extreme Programming Installed book.

Refactoring. The term "refactoring" has become popular in the last few years, due in large part to the work done on the Refactoring Browser for Smalltalk by John Brant and Don Roberts. (Martin Fowler's book on Refactoring includes a section on the Refactoring Browser.) The Refactoring Browser lets you perform automated behavior-preserving code refactorings, such as abstracting references to an instance variable, pushing a method up into its superclass, etc. (There have also been some refactoring tools written for Java, but the nature of the Java language will make it difficult to create a tool as powerful as the Refactoring Browser for Smalltalk.)

IDE's (Integrated Development Environments). Smalltalk has generally been considered a leader in this area, with its integrated code browsers, the ability to reliably look up all senders or implementors of a method, etc. (There is the occasional effort in other languages to catch up in this area, such as VisualAge Java with its integrated browsers, but VA/Java was also written in Smalltalk.) Also, to shamelessy toot my own horn for a minute, I've created an object-oriented "stacking" code browser for Squeak/Smalltalk called Whisker. I used Smalltalk to create this because the IDE supports this sort of experimentation well.

So, to claim that Smalltalk is somehow dead or obsolete is obviously false. True, it doesn't have the marketing hype (and market penetration) that Java does, but then, what else does? :-)

(Also, I still consider the language features of Smalltalk to be more technically "advanced" than those of Java. My personal hunch is that if you conducted a random poll of developers with *significant* experience with both languages (say, a minimum of 1 year full-time experience with each), probably 90-98% would agree with this. Of course, the same is probably true of Scheme vs. Java, or CLOS vs. Java, etc.)

Anyway, Smalltalk is obviously not the answer to all programming problems. (I wouldn't use it to write a device driver, for example.) But it is still one of the best (if not *the* best) options for many larger programming problems.

The future of the Internet is in what I call "rational programming" derived from a revival of Bertrand Russell's Relation Arithmetic. Rational programming is a classically applicable branch of relation arithmetic's sub theory of quantum software (as opposed to the hardware-oriented technology of quantum computing). By classically applicable I mean it is applies to conventional computing systems -- not just quantum information systems. Rational programming will subsume what Tim Berners Lee calls the semantic web. The basic problem Tim (and just about everyone back through Bertrand Russell) fails to perceive is that logic is irrational. John McCarthy's signature line says it all about this kind of approach: "He who refuses to do arithmetic is doomed to talk nonsense." More on this a bit later, but first some history, because he who fails to learn from history is doomed to repeat its nonsense:

When I invented the precursor to Postscript (an audacious claim that I can back up -- it started as a replacement for NAPLPS which I proposed while Manager of Interactive Architectures for Viewdata Corp of America back in November of 1981 -- the Xerox PARC guys found my approach of what they called a "tokenized Forth" communication protocol to be an intriguing way to encode text and graphics), I was interested in having a Forth virtual machine migrate into silicon (ala Novix) so it could evolve from mere graphics rendering into a distributed Smalltalk VM environment (ala Squeak) as videotex terminal/personal computer capacities increased. But I was _not_ interested in object-oriented programming as the long-term semantics of distributed programming environments. (I still have some of the hardcopy of the communiques with Xerox PARC and others from this period.)

Rather, relational semantics were what I saw as the ultimate direction for distributed programming. I had a bit of a go at Tony Hoare's "communicating sequential processes" paradigm and its Transputer realization because he was, at least, starting with the hard problem of parallelism rather than making like the drunk looking for his keys under the light post the way everyone else seemed to be doing (and still are, save for Mozart, since threads, etc. are always an afterthought). But, because there were other hard problems like abstraction, transactions and persistence that he ignored, I christened his approach "Occam's Chainsaw Massacre" in my communiques (in honor of his distributed programming language "Occam") and dropped it in favor of relational programming, which has inherent parallelism resulting from both dependency and indeterminacy. (BTW: Dr. Hoare seems to have finally come to his senses about this issue.)

Unfortunately, the only researcher doing hardcore work on relational programming (meaning, getting to the root of relational semantics in a way that Codd had failed to do) at the time was Bruce MacLennan, then, of The Naval Postgraduate School, and he just didn't have the glamour of Alan Kay at places like Xerox PARC to attract the attention of guys like Steve Jobs. Bruce had a bit of a blind-spot, too, when it came to transactions and persistence, which I attempted to remedy by bringing David P. Reed's work on distributed transactions for the ARPAnet to him, but although he wrote a white paper on a predicate calculus (close to a relational) implementation of Reed's thesis (MIT/LCS/TR-205), he didn't really "get it", IMHO. Reed and MacLennan abandoned their work for other pursuits (ironically, Reed was chief scientist at Lotus while Notes was being developed but did not contribute his ideas on distributed synchronization to that development despite the fact that we had a mutual acquaintance from my Plato days by the name of Ray Ozzie -- so, I share some of the blame for this failure) even as Steve Jobs botched the embryonic object oriented world by abandoning Smalltalk and giving us, instead, a lineage consisting of Object Pascal on the Lisa/Mac which begat Objective C on Jobs's NeXT which begat Java at Sun via Naughton and Gosling's experience with NeXT.

This brings us to the present -- a world in which Javascript-based technologies like Tibet promise to not only salvage the object oriented aspect of the Internet from the birth defects of Jobs's spawn, but actually provide an advance over Smalltalk in the same lineage as CLOS and Self. But it is also a world in which there is growing confusion over the proper role of "metadata" in the form of XML -- particularly when it comes to speech acts and distributed inference. I would call Tibet "the next major Internet advance" except for the fact that the basic idea for a Tibet-like system has been around and well understood since the early 1980's. When it is finally released, Tibet (or a system like it) will put the Internet back on track. I call that a "recovery", not an "advance".

We are now poised to move forward with type inference based on full blown inference engines, thereby dispensing with the nonterminating arguments over statically vs dynamically typed languages that allowed Steve Jobs's spawn to get its nose in the tent. If you want to declare a "type" in a declarative language, just make another declaration and let the inference engine figure out what it can do with that information prior to run time. See how easy that was? Well, there is more to it than that, but not that much: Assertions have implications and assertions made prior to run time have implications prior to run time. Live with it and don't repeat the mistakes of the past.

The confusion over semantic webs, and the reason Berners Lee et al will fail, is essentially the same as the confusion that has beleaguered all inferential systems such as logic programming and "artificial intelligence" over the years: logic is irrational and the real world demands rationality -- otherwise nothing makes sense. By "rationality" I mean that reasoning must literally incorporate "ratios" -- or, as John McCarthy would put it, doing arithmetic so things make sense. By making sense, I mean there is a sense in which one interprets the sea of assertions that clearly dominates for a particular purpose. With logic not only are you limited to 0 and 1 as effective quantities; you have no adequate theoretic basis from which to derive more accurate quantities with which to make sense by taking ratios and determining which inferences are dominant.

Fuzzy logic and expert systems incorporating probabilities have typically failed because they are not based in the first principles of probability and statistics. As Gauss, the premiere probability theorist put it, "Mathematics is the study of relations." He didn't say, "Mathematics is the study of multisets." There are good reasons that relational databases, and not set manipulation languages, have come to dominate business applications -- and Gauss was aware of these differences when he began to derive his laws of probability. Subsequent axiomatizations of mathematics based on set theory were similarly misguided and have led to the idea that "fuzzy sets" are the way to introduce rationality into programming. Rather than sets, relations are the foundation, not just of mathematics but of rationality in the same sense that Gauss realized when he derived his theory of probability from the study of relations.

Rationality allows for judgment which is recognized as inherently fallible -- but which allows one to procede without exponentiating all possible paths of inference. Judgment also allows various identities to limit sharing of information to that needed -- thereby creating speech acts and a basis for rational measures of credibility associated with those identities. Since credit-rating is a degeneration of credibility, it should come as no shock that the invention of negative numbers, originating as they did with the Arabic invention of double entry account keeping, has its analog in something that might be called "logical debt" with which negative probabilities are associated.

And now we have come to the "quantum" aspect of rational programming. It is precisely the "credibility debt" aspect of rational programming that corresponds, in mathematical detail, to the various equations of quantum mechanics and their negative probability amplitudes. (Von Neumann's quantum logic failed to properly incorporate logical debt which has led to much confusion.) Logical debt is important to distributed programming for the same reason debt is important to financial networks. Logical debt is a way of handling poor synchronization of information flow in the same way that financial debt is a way of handling poor synchronization of cash flow. As in any rational system, there are both limits to credit and limits to credibilty that influence one's judgments and actions, including speech acts.

The object oriented folks may, in a sense, have the last laugh here because when we divide up inference into identities that engage in speech acts, we are reintroducing the notion of objects that hide information via exchange of speech act messages that can be thought of as "setters" (assertions) and "getters" (queries). However, I believe it is only fair to recognize that the excellent intuitions of Johan Dahl and Kristen Nygaard did need the added insights and rigor of philosophers like J. L. Austin and T. Etter.

Well the Coca-Cola contract is retarded. Don't blame my University for being stupid. I doubt that things won't get that bad that they will start selling installation rights. No one would stand for say Microsoft coming in and signing a contract with the university that makes every computer on campus run Windows 2000 but based on how cheap they are giving it away at I guess anything is possible. And now there's a friggin Active Directory project on campus.

Well the Coca-Cola contract is retarded. Don't blame my University for being stupid. I doubt that things won't get that bad that they will start selling installation rights. No one would stand for say Microsoft coming in and signing a contract with the university that makes every computer on campus run Windows 2000 but based on how cheap they are giving it away at I guess anything is possible. And now there's a friggin Active Directory project on campus.

This article says most of what I wanted to say, and says it better. Let me add one thing though:

Microsoft is as irresponsible with their technological power as the chemical companies who have polluted the environment for decades, not knowing or caring what unexpected side effects might result.

Given the complexity of human trust relationships, and the fact that Microsoft never gets anything security-related right the first time, nobody should trust them to "change society's infrastructure." (Not to mention the fact that they have no business trying to re-architect human society when they don't even know how to architect an OS.)

A flawed system like .NET is to the Information Age what polluting industries were to the Industrial Age. No wonder Microsoft is lobbying Congress. We'll have to fight them the way the last generation had to fight the chemical companies.

But if you need something catchy? Microsoft .NET is the Next Chernobyl.

Centralizing data is a huge problem with HailStorm but also consider the innate problems of storing data on the service. You are going to put your data into HailStorm and Microsoft is going to get a firsthand peek at whatever you put in. They encrypt and protect your information but there is nothing to stop them from giving it away to the government or selling it!

To make matters worse they are inplementing HailStorm into everything they sell including Windows XP, Office XP, the X-Box, and Hotmail. People will be able to link their Windows XP login with the HailStorm service.

A group of concerned University of Illinois students has started an organization called !NET (Not Net) to spread awareness of the problems with handing all your personal information to a company like Microsoft to be stored in a centralized datacenter. If Microsoft gets their way they will have the keys to this huge collection of information. We respectfully submit that handing control of this kind of information to one company, organization, or government is a horrible idea.

We are gathering people and ideas and coding an open source, alternative method of doing HailStorm where the user encodes their data with PGP keys and allows other users or companies access to that data only by signing their data with those companies or individuals' public keys. We have considered a variety of delivary mechanisms including peer to peer networks such as FreeNet. Peer to peer distribution would give the advantage of not consolidating everyone's data in one place and would also ensure that the person who stored the information, the rightfull keyholder, will be the only one that chooses who else can view that information, not Microsoft. More information on our at present unrefined ideas is located at our website www.notnet.org.

Centralizing data is a huge problem with HailStorm but also consider the innate problems of storing data on the service. You are going to put your data into HailStorm and Microsoft is going to get a firsthand peek at whatever you put in. They encrypt and protect your information but there is nothing to stop them from giving it away to the government or selling it!

To make matters worse they are inplementing HailStorm into everything they sell including Windows XP, Office XP, the X-Box, and Hotmail. People will be able to link their Windows XP login with the HailStorm service.

A group of concerned University of Illinois students has started an organization called !NET (Not Net) to spread awareness of the problems with handing all your personal information to a company like Microsoft to be stored in a centralized datacenter. If Microsoft gets their way they will have the keys to this huge collection of information. We respectfully submit that handing control of this kind of information to one company, organization, or government is a horrible idea.

We are gathering people and ideas and coding an open source, alternative method of doing HailStorm where the user encodes their data with PGP keys and allows other users or companies access to that data only by signing their data with those companies or individuals' public keys. We have considered a variety of delivary mechanisms including peer to peer networks such as FreeNet. Peer to peer distribution would give the advantage of not consolidating everyone's data in one place and would also ensure that the person who stored the information, the rightfull keyholder, will be the only one that chooses who else can view that information, not Microsoft. More information on our at present unrefined ideas is located at our website www.notnet.org.

Ask, and you shall receive: CAVE Quake II. Of course, it helps if you have the CAVE to play in. I've gotta see if we can try this at work. ;-)

The first web browser was NCSA Mosiac. it's early beta versions started with an "internal" web page, much like Netscape. So that's probably the oldest, however since it wasn't really "on the web" I would have to vote for either the NCSA home page or the NCSA Mosiac for X/Windows page.

P.S. I did actually work at the UIUC/NCSA during the development of Mosiac, but for the life of me I cannot remember what was the first page I saw, I just know it was a NCSA page.
--
He had come like a thief in the night,

The first web browser was NCSA Mosiac. it's early beta versions started with an "internal" web page, much like Netscape. So that's probably the oldest, however since it wasn't really "on the web" I would have to vote for either the NCSA home page or the NCSA Mosiac for X/Windows page.

P.S. I did actually work at the UIUC/NCSA during the development of Mosiac, but for the life of me I cannot remember what was the first page I saw, I just know it was a NCSA page.
--
He had come like a thief in the night,

I smell the Automatic Complaint Letter Generator! If I didn't use it so much myself it might have fooled me.

What about people that have turned off Javascript, or better yet, use browsers that never heard of it? Where does this leave them?

• A.J. Hegeman, "Self-repairing polymers: repair mechanisms and micromechanical modeling," M.S. Thesis, Dept. of Mechanical Engineering, Univ. of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, Urbana, IL, June, 1997.
• D. Jung, "Performance and properties of embedded microspheres for self-repairing applications," M.S. Thesis, Dept. of Mechanical Engineering, Univ. of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, Urbana, IL, July, 1997.

As an introduction... In the U of I dorms, our usage policies are rather strict. We're permitted 500 mb per day (either direction) per MAC address. From there, we're limited to 4 MAC addresses per port, and there is one port per room. In some of the older networks in other dorms, you are limited to 500 mb per day per port. Additionally, access to Napster and Imesh has been blocked entirely (through traditional access, anyhow). There are talks of implementing a new system, which analyzes your traffic usage, and if you use more than a certain amount of bandwidth over a certain period of time (there's a 10 mbit switched line to each of the dorms, and ill usage would be something along the lines of 100 k/sec for more than 30 seconds or so), the system will throttle your connection. If you continue to use bandwidth, the system will continue to throttle your connection until the connection is made un-usable. The procedure reverses incrementally in a similar manner, so you get the idea. Many see this as an improvement, but I'm not so sure. Irregardless...

In any event, the administration contends that doing this isn't an invasion of privacy, and since we don't have a network usage fee, there's no reason we should complain, because using the resource for anything outside academic purposes is out of policy, and there is almost no way to justify high bandwidth usage (or high volume, their current, and much less accurate metric) save some very special exceptions, such as downloading Linux ... and now they contend that since RedHat and Debian are mirrored locally, that isn't even such a good excuse. Regardless, even if your usage of bandwidth IS legitimate, they shut your port down first, and re-instate it only after you've talked to the security officer, whose role is essentially "Hey, were you trading mp3s? I think you are. One more time, and you get to talk to the dean."

So after visiting University of Michigan and some other universities where essentially the official policy is "It's not our business, if they use more bandwidth, then we'll give them more to use," do you, as a researched expert in the field, think that this type of policy is reasonable? You can view the posted policy, which also mentions that gaming and other activities are prohibited, as it may impact educational usage of the network. I'm interested in hearing how this relates to what else you've seen, and how fair of a policy you think this is.

Well we can't sue anybody, but we can sure complain about it.
--------

We've been able to take people with no computer experience and get them online and earning their master's. It takes a lot of time and patience, so be prepared if you're students need to ramp up.

Even if you are teaching a bunch of Slashdot types, I still maintain that investing in staff for support is crucial to success. No one wants to work with indifferent or mean people, and that goes double for students who are footing the bill.

That all being said, we also go for low bandwidth (since we are a global program and many of our students have older machines and slower dialups). IRC-based chat rooms, nntp-based bulletin board system. We also stream Real Audio (at 6.5 kbps...sounds grrreat!). We find that having synchronous class times as well as asynchronous work really helps students feel like they're part of the ol' learning environment. We also tend to emphasize some oncampus time (two weeks in the beginning of the program to get to know us and their classmates, then a day per class enrolled in during the semester).

No, it really isn't. The Common Gateway Interface (CGI) is a standard for interfacing external applications with information servers, such as HTTP or Web servers. It has nothing to do with the urlencoding of the form data by the client. See here for a link that backs me up. This page comes top of a google search for "cgi".

If you want to see what CGI really means and what is CGI and what is not CGI, please refer to the CGI spec. CGI refers to an interface that requires a set of environment variables to be set, passes in POST and PUT information via stdin, and returns HTTP response results on stdout.

This allows almost any language to be used to write CGI programs (C, perl, tcl, bash, whatever you want). But it doesn't imply that every interface to the HTTP protocol is CGI.

It's only a political problem if you intend to force other people to do it. Otherwise go buy as much land as you want in Egypt and start planting. Keep following the winds westward...

Interesting, but I don't know where you got your information, and it seems likely to be wrong. A Google representative gave an excellent talk here at the U of I and explained as much as he could without giving away their "secrets". Actually, much of the information they make available already. The key component is the PageRank system, which assigns a rank to a page based on how often it's linked to. Obviously, this isn't at all trivial in a graph as complicated as the web (esp. considering the amount of dynamic content around these days).

In any case, the point is that I specifically asked the guy (he was actually one of their engineers, responsible for Google's SafeSearch, IIRC) if they did any click-through analysis to try and improve the relevance of their results. He responded with an emphatic "no". They believe it's just too much of a privacy concern.

-Jay Thomas
http://www.uiuc.edu/~jthomas2

Actually the Russians wanted to have ISS at the same inclination but for political reasons a "compromise" inclination was chosen that is sub-optimal for everyone involved. Even as late as the launch of the first Russian module they were pushing to switch the inclination. If they did that, the stations could at least serve as lifeboats to each other and some modules and/or equipment could be moved over. Remember, much of Mir dates to 1995 when the "American" modules were launched. (Read Dragonfly if you have a chance, it's a great book, I'm surprised someone hasn't submitted a review yet)

Of course, Mir would need a substancial capital infusion if it were to return to operational status. That was the whole point of MirCorp, not to use a dying station, but to re-fit it & open it for commercial operations. Hopefully their latest plans will go smoother.

-Jay Thomas

http://www.uiuc.edu/~jthomas2

There is a link here.

Sounds like they are building a free-floater that will co-orbit & can dock w/ ISS so it can use the same re-supply mechanisms as ISS but yet be completely independent so you don't have to fill out 7 kg of paperwork before you can dock w/ it.

It also seems as if Titov has approval to go on ISS in April. We'll see how it all works out though. Should be interesting.

-Jay Thomas

http://www.uiuc.edu/~jthomas2

Read this and lean something today

Not funny, juvinile, purile. I guess you've never spent any proper time around women...

Sega, of course. The only thing that really stuck in my head about it was being afraid of rupturing myself trying to do a fatality in Mortal Kombat. Now that i'm thinking about it, didn't the NES have a VR glove? Maybe with a needle, thread, some duct tape and a little creativity, you could get it on your foot.

Yes, it was called the "power glove". Apparently someone at Nintendo has a complex about powerlessness. Anyway, we revisit the peripherals page at nesfan.com to find this information:

The 'Power Glove', released by Mattel in 1989, was an attempt at incorporating virtual reality with the NES. The glove emitted the movement information (left, right, up, down, etc.) of the gamers hand and fingers to sensors that were placed on each corner of the tv screen. Although the 'Power Glove' would work with almost every game available, it didn't work well unless it was with a game that was designed for it (i.e., 'Super Glove Ball'). With a costly price tag of $79.99 (U.S.) being coupled with the peripheral's unreliable control, the 'Power Glove' was quickly forgotten.

It however was not forgotten at all. There is a device called the PGSI which is a preconstructed serial interface for the power glove. It also seems to support the Sega LCD shutter goggles for 3D, but I don't know much about that. As an aside, if anyone has a set of the Sega Master System shutter goggles, and is willing to part with them, I need a pair. I have the interface controller but not the goggles.

See also:

• Powerglove FAQ
• Aminet Amiga Hardware Drivers
• Another powerglove faq

• XML validator
• Merriam-Webster dictionary
• www.wdvl.com/Authoring/
• WebImage
• gifoptimizer.com
• WS_FTP
• Cute HTML
• CGi documentation

The dictionary and gifoptimizer.com are the ones I use the most.

--
Spelling by m-w.com.

Maybe someone at Adobe reads /.? I downloaded v1.1 of the Reader (the most recent non-beta version), and Alice, and got this. No mention of reading it out loud. Did Adobe make changes, or is this only something that shows up with the beta versions?

I recently finished a project for school where i had to use a large collection of the gutttenburg e-texts, and i'm wondering if adobe can acctully place these restrictions... the guttenberg project has one of the longest disclaimers i've ever read, it's often longer then the document they're publishing....

but more to the point, two things strike me as off, they're selling the work of a non-profit organization. What gives them a right to make a profit off this? And since we all know that it's a guttenburg etext, we can and will simply give public readings of the original guttenburg text instead of thiers....

Personally, adobe let some lawyer in on the project that hasn't the brains to write anything that could possibly stand up..

If adobe wants in on the etext "raquet" their goning to have to add some original content to the feild, merely making some-one pay for somthing they can get for free won't last long..

Icars

to get your own copy of the guttenburg e-texts go to the ftp site and you'll find the e-text directory tree

Those pacemakers use plutonium encased in tungsten inside stainless steel. Testing on those things was extensive. They will survive bullets at point-blank range and cremation.

Today, people are horrified by the concept of an implanted nuclear device, but the track record of these holdovers from the 1950s is pretty good.

http://www.ece.uiuc.edu/ece291/mp/mp4/ablit.html should give you a decent idea of what Alpha Blending can do, why you would want to use it, and how you might go about coding it (using MMX even! :)

How common are these organizations? How well have they faired the "Internet Revolution"?

A program that converts between the rpm, dpkg, stampede slp, and slackware tgz file formats with ease is the little-hyped Alien . Apt is swish - especially now when it understands a major file format like rpm - but it would be the cats ass if it had the package conversion capabilities of Alien. Apt should also imitate package management routines like Encap and GNU STOW, pm's that essentially isolate packages, installing programs in their own directories and ensuring cleaner and easier removal. With those killer features, Apt would indeed be the Linux standard, regardless of the distribution your using.

Escape from DLL Hell!: The ultimate Package Manager Howto

Wow, Slashdot actually works in NCSA Mosaic!

No it doesn't, at least not in the NCSA X Mosaic 2.7b5 that I have open at the moment. Of course, it's hardly Mosaic's fault since Slashdot specifies the stunningly readable black text on a black background in its <body> tag while Mosaic predates the table bgcolor that Slashdot uses to make things readable for newer browsers.

Heh, just in case anyone wants to experience the nostalgia...
ftp://ftp.ncsa.uiuc.edu/Mosaic/Unix/binaries/2.7b/