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• 1 Amstrad PC (with floppy drive)
• 1 PC running Window 98 with parallel port
• 1 copy of Locolink, which includes a parallel cable and transfer software

If you don't have an actual working Amstrad then your best bet is probably finding a hacked-up 3" drive that you can connect to a PC. You might be more likely to be able to purchase the whole computer.

If you're in the UK there are services that will transfer the files for you for 10GBP a disk. Here's a list of them. In the US, try here.

Good luck!

Right, because every other platform that lets you run your own applications has been subject to malware that has actually existed in the wild, right?

Oh, what? They haven't?

Sorry to say, but this story smells apocryphal, given that you explicitly mention she had a "high-end" Nokia, which would be running S60. No S60 "viruses" ever existed that sent MMS messages. If you can find one and identify it, I'd be interested in seeing it. The only S60 viruses that have ever been shown to exist in the wild propagated over bluetooth and did nothing but propagate.

The "Security" issue IS a red herring. The iPhone has been wide open to anyone who runs 3rd party software on it for nearly a year now, and yet there is NO iPhone malware. If the concern is over security, then implement a granular permissions system like S60, where you can decide what each app can do at install time, but keep in mind that no phone virus that causes monetary harm has ever been proven to exist, for any mobile platform.

The security handwaving is a bullshit reason for Apple to make damn sure they control exactly what you run on the phone. No VOIP, no SSH clients, nothing that will use too much data, nothing that might bite into a revenue stream Apple wants to create. They can couch it in terms of "it's for the security of the network!," yet somehow, every other network and every other device can run whatever apps you want on it and there's no problem.

I never spent 5p to play the actual Space Invaders in an arcade, as the idea of the money being gone at the end never appealed, so I got the Psion clone.

Of course I shot through the blocks.

I'd bet that (some inner) martial arts training would have helped to improve

Some (extra) food for thought: "Perception speed. When fighting, martial artists must constantly sense and respond to various stimuli. Mastering the ability to perceive the subtleties in an opponent's movements, is he attacking, retreating, punching or kicking? is the first phase of speed training. Simply seeing the opponent's movements is not enough. You must learn to hear, feel and smell the opponent's intentions. Perception speed is defined as the time it takes you to mentally register the opponent's intentions once you first sense his offensive or defensive stimulus. To increase your speed of perception, it is important to maintain an attitude of "emptiness," or what Bruce Lee called "no-mindedness." You must learn not to concentrate too much on details. Look at nothing, but sense everything. According to Lee, "A concentrated mind is not an attentive mind, but a mind that is in the state of awareness can concentrate. Awareness is never exclusive, it includes everything. A mind must be wide open to function freely in thought." (emphasis mine)
The Speed Training Of Bruce Lee - How To Be The First With The Most

CC.

the uk is a police state but they are just not as open about it as the usa!

http://www.noliberties.com/

http://www.thedossier.ukonline.co.uk/

the great thing about private companies doing the governments dirty work, is that there is no way to obtain the infomation, these secrets are just that. and this is new how? the Americans have been spying on the British the British on the Australians and the Australians on America for decades, each country is not allowed to spy on their own ppl but they can spy on another country and then share the information, and the biggest bonus is plausible deniability. http://www.thedossier.ukonline.co.uk/

Given that the Big Bang was heavily contested for the larger part of the 20th century and that most scientists initially thought it was a crackpot theory ... to have convinced the vast majority of the scientific community, I think it's safe to say that it's not a wild guess. Just because we don't know what happened before it. Believe me, there's shedloads of evidence for it. Wikipedia - http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Big_bang - look under observational evidence. Ergo, not wild guess. For the history of it - http://www.amazon.com/Big-Bang-Origin-Universe-P-S /dp/0007162219/ref=pd_bbs_1/103-0498900-8622244?ie =UTF8&s=books&qid=1175189801&sr=8-1 Evolution ... er ... there've been quite a few intermediate forms found. How the hell can you explain fossils of, say, homo erectus without evolution and geology being involved? Also see: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Evolution_of_cetacean s and http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Evolution_of_the_hors e because I'm presuming you wouldn't trust talkorigins as a source. Anyone who says that there are no intermediates either hasn't researched it too deeply or insists on finding additional intermediates between intermediates forever and ever, so that they can continue to deny that they exist. Mutations that add DNA complexity? Define complexity. Meanwhile, look up polyploidy, frameshifts and retroviruses. Because of your vague wording, I have no idea if these actually fit the bill for what you're looking for, but these are three things off the top of my head which show what I THINK you're denying exists. If you're too lazy to look them up: Polyploidy - copying chromosomes basically. Down's Syndrome is a form of it and it's a major cause for speciation in plants. Frameshifts - causes genetic disease. When an extra base is added or a base is removed from the DNA, which, by virtue of how DNA transcription works (codons of three bases, coding for one amino acid) completely alters all of the code past that point of the code. This is significant because it involves an additional base being added (additional complexity, ne?) and it's pretty undeniable that this happens. Retroviruses - viruses that can add DNA to the DNA of the host. Again, not really deniable, additional complexity. Given that Franklin lived and died before Darwin I'm not too surprised that he was a creationist. Seeing as there wasn't really an alternative at the time and the existence of God was, at the time, a given, see? Also, inventor does not necessarily mean scientist and vice versa. Although Franklin was undoubtedly both, it needs to be said. And of course there are Christians who create things. We're not talking about Christians and never were, we're talking about creationists. Unless you're telling me that every single Christian is a creationist. And a creationist does not necessarily reject the rest of science which does not conflict with the Bible, BUT, creationism as a whole is very unscientific, placing no value on science. There are some creationists who are still scientists, but the proportion (not amount, although that's also true) of creationists who are scientists is MUCH, MUCH smaller than the amount of non-creationists who are scientists. And what the hell are you talking about? No proof but verbal repetition? http://web.ukonline.co.uk/a.buckley/dino.htm - this page isn't the best for describing it, but there're certainly some things in there which I've checked up elsewhere and have found to be true. I'd say that it counts as evidence, rather than some mysterious verbal folklor

While you wait: Aqua4iTunes

This nambification has been going on for ages. When I was at school
everyone used to play British Bulldogs [on tarmac], but that was banned
(and this was decades ago) since it caused too many injuries
[about one broken nose or equivalent per day].
Bloody fun game though - a bit like rugby, but not nearly as
safe http://web.ukonline.co.uk/conker/games/sept.htm#bu lldog

I am quite shocked that (especially commenting on the upstream article) nobody mentioned The Dead Parrot. "WinFS is not dead, it is just morphing" (comment for upstream). Wov! http://web.ukonline.co.uk/thursday.handleigh/humou r/monty-python/dead-parrot.htm

Well, the smartphone is in many cases more than a PDA with a phone in it. There are indeed such devices - regular PDAs with phone capability built in. And many people like them. Problem is, they aen't the shape or size of a cellphone.

Queue huge ammounts of effort to make a PDA the size of a cellphone, with fair sucess I think. My Sony P910 is the size and shape of a large cellphone, and I can live with that. The screen is smaller than a Palm, but it's big enough for what I need it for.

If I needed smaller still, then I could give up the touchscreen and use a Symbian Series 60 device, which is the size of a regular cellphone. These devices are surprisingly capable - Steve Lichfield, for example, just moved the Nokia 6630 to the top of his Symbian PDA A-List - http://3lib.ukonline.co.uk/alistcurrent.htm

Exactly what 'western country' took over Japan at the beginning of the 20th century? Perhaps you're referring to the Meiji era, in which Japan made efforts to establish itself as a world power. In doing so, they made efforts to embrace more western ideals and customs, as well as moving forward technologically. Censorship is typically acknowledged to have its roots there (although some would rightly argue the motivation was to appear more 'civilized' to the more sexually conservative European countries).

One of the more common myths bandied about is that the US imposed sexual censorship laws on Japan after WWII. The constitution that McArthur mostly wrote had provisions such as the separation from church and state, a right to privacy, and bans on censorship. Article 21 protects secrecy of any means of communication: "No censorship shall be maintained, nor shall the secrecy of any means of communication be violated." Ironically, the US occupation forces routinely violated these censorship provisions, which makes a certain amount of sense, being that they were occupying forces in a formally hostile nation, I suppose.

It was the Japanese themselves that established precedence for allowing censorship of material deemed to be of a pornographic nature (Article 175 of the Penal Code) by a publisher printing a translated copy of Lady Chatterley's Lover in the case Koyama v. Japan.

I get a bit tired of this constant politically-correct anti-western civilization crap. At the very least, get your facts straight.

http://law.vanderbilt.edu/journal/35-03/Gilmer.pdf
http://web.ukonline.co.uk/rananim/lawrence/lcl.htm l

How often do you reboot? You must reboot windows machines every 49.7 days or they do crash, this is a known issue: http://web.ukonline.co.uk/eric.price/humour2/0379. htm .

as soon as i read this article i was thinking the same thing -- i was thinking how cool it'd be to at least recharge my batteries off the landline...

then i found this link... it says that when the fone is "on hook", you can only draw 5 microamps. when it's "off hook", you can draw current, but it'll degrade your signal.

that woulda been cool though.

And Microsoft invented the Binary Numbers.

It seems to me like innovative and experimental software is very commonplace in OSS. Unfortunately, a lot of it doesn't get noticed as it is never rolled into a "usable" product. Tempest, a radio broadcaster using CRT, is a good example.

Another obvious place where OSS seems to innovate is in low level networking programs. Ettercap is absolutely brilliant, for instance, and Ethereal is exceedingly useful as well. Perhaps these were created in part because they were necessary to write compatible higher level software to interoperate with other systems. Also, their internationally developed and non-profit nature might make their authors more likely to tread into "legally questionable" territory than a commercial venture would dare.

Despite the relative lack quality Linux-based music and audio software, there are definitely some innovative tools in this area as well, such as Csound, SuperCollider, and TaoSynth, which provide very interesting programmatic sound modeling possibilities. These programs wouldn't be generally useful to musicians, which is perhaps why they haven't been developed as closed-source commercial products, but for the somewhat rare musician-hackers out there, they're very interesting indeed.

There's plenty of innovation in open source. The only thing is, most of it is so niche that it's hard to hear of it.

Those aren't the correct lyrics. Here you go:

war
war never been so much fun
war never been so much fun
go to your brother, kill him with your gun
leave him lying in his uniform, dying in the sun
war

Regarding the question whether Symbian is involved: Here's some money for you to make... Load up your phone with all Symbian "viruses" that are out there and see if you can make the challenge!

>My Ericcson(sic, probably)

Yup - Ericsson. Eric's son (scandinavian company/name)

The company's history dates back to 1876 when the founder, Lars Magnus Ericsson, opened a repair shop for telegraph equipment.

http://web.ukonline.co.uk/freshwater/histlme.htm

just another barely on-topic post -- I don't feel much like doing any work tonight

would buy only German or Russian weaponry

Hmmm...you mean like the Torpedo's in the Kursk, which used a technology the Navy stopped using as the risk of explosion of the propulsion system was too great ?

As for the sub fire, there is no final cause released yet, although there is some evidence of a second fire being caused by an oxygen canister igniting.

Sounds an awful lot like "Web that Smut" from 1996!

From The January 1996 MacUser..
WEB THAT SMUT! - Andy Ihnatko
How to play..

The object of Web That Smut!:
To proceed from a perfectly innocent starting point on the web to... hang on - I've got the text of the litigation here somewhere. Aha!- "words and/or images of a prurient nature which violate reasonable standards of good taste in the town and/or county of it's source or destination of transmission."

Xerox Star was announced in 1981. Apple Lisa was announced in 1983. From "The Star user interface: an overview" (1982):

Every user's initial view of Star is the Desktop, which resembles the top of an office desk, together with surrounding furniture and equipment. It represents a working environment, where current projects and accessible resources reside.

Figure 5 from "Designing the Star User Interface" (Byte, 1982) looks like WYSIWYG publishing to me. From that article:

"What you see is what you get" (or WYSIWYG) refers to the situation in which the display screen portrays an accurate rendition of the printed page .... WYSIWYG is a simplifying technique for document-creation systems. All composition is done on the screen .... Figure 5: A Star document showing multicolumn text, graphics, and formulas. This is the way the document appears on the screen. It is also the way it will print (at higher resolution, of course).

Psion 3 was released in 1991. The Newton was released in 1993. I think the Psion 3 qualifies as a PDA since it included an application (AGENDA) that had a Calendar, diary, anniversaries, 100 todo lists, alarms and organiser.

The Xerox Star was announced in April 1981. The Apple Lisa was announced in January 1983. From "The Star user interface: an overview" (1982):

Every user's initial view of Star is the Desktop, which resembles the top of an office desk, together with surrounding furniture and equipment. It represents a working environment, where current projects and accessible resources reside. On the screen (Figure 3) are displayed pictures of familiar office objects, such as documents, folders, file drawers, in-baskets, and out-baskets. These objects are displayed as small pictures, or icons.

Psion 3 was a digital assistant (including Calendar, diary, anniversaries, 100 todo lists, alarms and organiser) and was released in 1991. The Newton was released in 1993.

The poster was listing technologies, not that apple had invented outright, but that apple had taken a base inspiration and created a market defining product.

The poster was disagreeing to a post that said:

Apple is not known for doing things 'radically new', but more for 'Taking a good concept/idea that no-one managed to implement in a useful way, and then doing it right'

Ten years ago a normal teenager didn't have to pay 50 dollars a month for his mobile phone.

And they still don't, unless someone is waving a gun in their face, or whatever (Yeah, I know I sound like Your Dad (TM)... I don't care :-P )

Either that, or what you say is true... 10 years ago, a mobile phone would have cost a lot more than $50 a month to run. In fact, it would have cost $50/month extra in gas just to haul the phone itself around with you.

BTW, your post confuses me; you imply that you are a teenager, and that as a teenager ten years ago, you didn't have a computer.

Dude, if you were a teenager 10 years ago, you're not a teenager now.

You're 23!

You are OLD. Stop deluding yourself. It's time to join the rest of us by getting fat, wearing trousers with unfeasibly high waistlines and driving at 5 MPH.

...and probably tasted like one too.

This whole "first animal evolution" thing reminds me soooo strongly of monks hawking pieces of the genuine cross of Christ.

Also, if the first animal hatched then why do bird fossils - even proper dinosaur fossils - appear so late in the piece? Complexity can't be the answer, since even shrimp and trilobites are as complex as birds in their own ways. And horseshoe crabs - muck-dwellers right at the bottom of the fossil ladder - are still with us today. The fossil sorting we do see seems to be based more on environment and density than on any systematic idea of age.

My first concern is the removal of virus. FRTFA is says zeewee has a pore size of 0.02 m. Virus have a size of roughly 10 to 50 nm so it sounds like that will not be a problem.

Next what about heavy metals, PCB's and dioxons. No mention about that...

Mmm... Dead systems...

Why not emulate another dead system on the emulated Amiga? ;-)

Please do a quick Google for antibiotic families and modes of action. You will find pages like this and this.

Penicillin and derivitaves are still prescribed, but virtually every bug in the world (+ dog) is resistent to them.

One evening of watching the Discovery channel does not a B.S. in Microbiology confer.

The "natural" antibiotics to which you refer are still being found by the dozens. The problems are not (primarily) with patents. You have to:

You have to find an organism that has some antibiotic activity. Not as easy as you might thing. Searches go on CONSTANTLY, and the major drug companies grab soil samples from everywhere they can to test for organisms in the soil that exhibit unknown antibiotic properties.

You've spent several years and have found a likely candidate. Now you have to test the snot out of it. How does it do what it does? Is it a cell wall synthesis inhibitor? Does it go after 23S ribosomes? How about side effects? After all, bleach is one of the best antibiotics in the world. It's used for disinfection in BSL3 and BSL 4 microbiology labs. However, it wouldn't do you much good if you were to drink it, either. Drug interactions? If it kills someone that is taking a common drug (or worse, an uncommon drug), you're still in trouble.

Now, you have to start the FDA certification process. Do you think the FDA reimburses you for the millions you've spent to this point if things go bad? Nope. Do you think they're even going to reimburse you for the millions you're going to spend in clinical trials? Not likely. Remember Martha Stewart and IMClone? The bottom fell out of ImClone because they'd sunk a good chunk of their cash into a drug that was not going to be approved (granted, IIRC it was a cancer drug and not an antibiotic, but the principle applies).

Yes, pharmaceutical companies are businesses. They are for-profit. But it is not so much corporate greed that causes some of the outrageous drug prices as it is them having to pay for the research costs involved with the 99 drugs that didn't make it to market with the money made from the one drug that did.

Please do some research before making statements like the ones you've made.

After my grandmother died, the only thing I wanted to inherit was her old standard-issue GPO rotary-dial telephone. My grandparent's house was built at the tail end of the 1960s, and the phone was installed new in that house. My grandmother died at the tail end of last year. Since I want to keep it original (it's a reminder of my grandparents every time I use it) I haven't even changed the little paper disc in the dial that has their phone number and the usual 'Emergency: Fire, Police, Ambulance: 999' bit at the top.

The phone is one of these and anyone who grew up in Britain in the 1970s and 1980s will remember them (and there's still quite a few around that have never been changed out for modern phones).

They are pretty much indestructable, having an electromechanical ringer and solidly-made mechanical parts (including the clockwork dial mechanism with generates the LD pulses). So as I didn't even have to change the wire that goes from the telephone to my modern RJ-45 jack - originally I had planned to just crimp on an RJ-45 plug to the cable - I managed to obtain an old GPO junction box from the same era. You just need to screw down the little connectors on the end of the telephone cable into one end, then crimp on some of those little fork-connectors to the free end of a piece of Cat5 with an RJ-45 at the other end, which you then screw down into the original junction box - then plug into the socket.

I'd also like an Ericofon, but I don't think without soldering resistors to the ringers of the phones to increase the impedance, the ringer current just won't make two phones with a real bell ring at the same time...and I don't want to modify the phones.

Huh? Automatic telephone exchanges were pioneered by Almon B Strowger, who filed a patent in 1889. By 1922, the UK standardized its exchanges to use this system, eliminating human operators without using transistors.

UK telephone history

In other news, Microsoft employees have been forced to start using windows and Microsoft office. http://web.ukonline.co.uk/metallix/suicide.jpgHere is a picture of the switch in action www.computerhelpforums.com

If you SG-1 folks need help from the Potter Fans, we've got your back.

Especially when "Windows" is written at the top of your typical Windows 9x BSOD.

You're wrong on only one point - It was Psion who gave the world the PDA in 1984. Sold as an 'Organiser', it didn't come with PDA functions, but within a year, software was available for managing contacts, calendars and to do lists.

I find Apple's take on 'non-conformist' quite interesting, as they have moved towards many industry standards over the last few years that a decade ago they would have shunned. Gone is their ADB, bus structure, and in comes PCI, AGP, USB.This brings it all down to what a Apple machine actually is nowadays; essentially, the only bits that make an Apple machine special are the CPU, OS and case. Apart from that, the guts of it are all industry standard and not worth writing home about, yet the machine itself is more than the sum of its parts - simply because Apple focus on what makes it different; it's G5, case pics and 'lickable' OS all the way with their ads, whereas PC stuff is hooked up on GHz, GB, MB and other mundane specs.

Another irony from the Open Source perspective is that somebody we all love to hate was a non-conformist - Bill Gates. His mantra from the mid-70's regarding selling software has shaped the computer industry as we know it today. Interesting stuff...

You don't think that Psion getting there nine years earlier counts, then? Even the Series 3 beat the Newton by a couple of years.

didnt that phrase appear in a rap song first?

For those who were wondering what that was about, its a monty python dead parrot reference.

I took a chart from Star Trek in Sound and Vision, a site which is now defunct, and put the modern unit values/warp values into my calculator, and used the various least squares regression functions. They told me that the Next Generation warp numbering system does not fit a linear, quadratic, cubic, quartic, logarithmic, exponential, trigonometric (duh) or power equation. Instead, they are based on the maximum speeds of certain ships.
Note that the word asymptote is not appropriate. I think you meant limit. An example of an equation with a limit of 10 is
f(x)=(-x)/(x-10)

The Psion 3 went to market in 1991. That's 13 years ago. I feel old.

but you know, stick a decent, time-test GUI toolkit on it and I might consider developing with it in the future, especially in light of the other improvements being made to it.

Well, how about wx4j, a java binding for the well respected wxwindows?

After having owned a Psion 5mx for many years, I'm still not impressed by the Zaurus clamshell models. Now, if Sharp could only come up with a decent keyboard. It's not like it's impossible, given that Psion had it already in 1997.

She can suck the life out of me any day!

They're not contacts. They're her real, honest-to-goodness eyes. She has "Iris whorls", an extremely rare "defect" (whatever.. it's beautiful) found in some french noble families. Back then, she was probably one of the most beautiful women on the planet. Not seen much in the USA because she was (a) VERY french and (b) VERY nude.

Bunch of animals, those Banzi creatures, and everyone like them... no, I take that back... most animals are sincere... humans have the corner on the liars market.

What about animals such as the Angler Fish or the like, which use tricks to capture prey?

In England, one of the main cinema advertising agencies (Carlton, who also have a TV station) have a star for a logo. In the ident for their cinema ads, the logo becomes a branding iron, which is shoved in your face. Makes me want to go to the movies even more!

Carlton also have some damn fine TV idents, which are simply eye droppingly cool. even better, they were rendered on Linux! W00t! See them here in glorious RealVideo, but please be gentle...

Defending against an extinction level event such as the Yucatan strike described by Alvarez et al would be prudent on a scale of megayears, but is difficult to organise on a scale of election years.

Extinction

deep impact

The Psion Series 3 had a fully multitasking OS running on an 8MHz x86 in 128Kb of RAM - in 1991.

If Psion could do it then, PalmOS was a step backwards in my book! :-)

J

And I have no idea why someone could get so uptight about recieving the wrong soda...

The wrong soda can kill some people

Seriously. The sweetener aspartame used in diet coke and pepsi is very bad for people with PKU.

...as a matter of fact, I believe this is it.

As long as they don't make the traditional mistakes about computers (see Computers in Movie's and Userfriendly's Movie OS).