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The coplanar... mmmhh... maybe an acceptable approximation.

I'd say that depends on the stability of those systems. It's not just about point solutions in the parameter space, for astronomers, it's more about stable regions, like the L4/L5 Lagrangian solution. You simply won't hit a point solution with real objects, be it the mass or coplanarity, it doesn't matter.

You reckon?

1. when you speak stability of the system, what reference of duration you think of? Because, look, I'm pretty sure the Solar System is mathematically unstable in the absolute sense, however the changes in the planet orbits are so minute on millennial scale that we can consider it "pretty stable" even if, hundreds of millions of years the changes would be notable (my point: unless catastrophically unstable to exist, a real astronomical star system does not impose/require stability in the absolute sense)

2. I don't know why I remember 3 points always define a plane, at least in 3D Euclidean geometry. Now, it's highly likely a system to have a central star that is more massive than the planets; thus, the planets will rotate more or less around the star (that means the mass center is much closer to the start); such a system will not have a null angular momentum (that's why the second Kepler law holds so well). By the conservation of angular momentum, it means that - at least for an 3 body isolated star system (e.g. not too close to a black hole to avoid precession/nutation), this plane is likely will be stable (or become stable by exchange of angular momentum) or the system is unstable on long term. (my point: I wouldn't be dismissing the coplaneity and the difference of masses as not significant)

But... don't get me wrong, I do agree with you if you say what the guys did is sort of intellectual masturbation with little applicability for real life astronomy (maybe we may differ on the reasons why we consider their indulgence as such).
Funny thing, they are not even the first to fool around with that

A320 crashes http://www.airdisaster.com/cgi-bin/view_details.cgi?date=03221998&reg=RP-C3222&airline=Philippine+Airlines

The aircraft overran runway 4 while landing. A malfunction of the onboard flight computers prevented power from being reduced to idle, which inhibited thrust reverse and spoilers from being used. The offending engine was shut down, and brakes applied, but the aircraft was unable to stop before the end of the runway

I couldn't read the article you referenced ("server not responding"), but the accident report states this was caused by pilot error, not malfunctioning computers. From Wikipedia: "A selection by the pilot of the wrong mode on the onboard flight computers prevented power from being reduced to idle, which inhibited thrust reverse and spoilers from being used. The offending engine was shut down, and brakes applied, but the aircraft was unable to stop before the end of the runway".

There's a surprising number of people who believe that the high level of automation on Airbus is intrinsically more dangerous, but the figures show that the Airbus A320 is the safest narrow-body jet you can fly on. It's true that automated stuff can go wrong, but this can be more than compensated for by the ways it makes flying (or driving) safer.

Here's an interesting quote: "Nordwall reports that the RTCA Committee 177 inquiry found 137 `incidents' (pilot reports, anecdotes) reported either to them, or to the FAA/NASA Aviation Safety Reporting System (ASRS) program, or to the International Air Transport Association (IATA). VOR reception (2) was affected in 111 incidents -- by far the most common occurrence. From the 33 reports direct to RTCA, 21 incidents related to laptop computers and only 2 to cellular phones. Navigation systems were affected in 26 of those incidents; fuel systems, warning lights and propulsion reported one incident each. Rough correlation of suspect with effect by turning the suspect device on and off was found in 14 cases, on-off-on in 6 cases, and no correlation in 13 cases."

Incidents > 0.

If I remember correctly, Thales generation 2 HUDS for A737's had a known issue with interference from mobile phones / laptops - they would blank or flicker.

That particular case was about ten years ago, so it would not have been put onto the internet, but there are plenty of other examples if you google for "airplane interference", for example this one. (scroll down to "some anecdotes")

Interesting, but I was hoping something with actual data as opposed to word-of-mouth stories?

That particular case was about ten years ago, so it would not have been put onto the internet, but there are plenty of other examples if you google for "airplane interference", for example this one. (scroll down to "some anecdotes")

Woops, my mistake. it was Mike Smithwick who coined the term? Though I don't know if Mike is on Slashdot, and I do know Leo was posting to comp.sys.amiga back when Mike coined the term only a few years after the release of its inspiration: Robotron.

I can't believe a tech magazine has gone OUT OF ITS WAY to make this article practically unreadable.

Nothing works - Single page view still shows me about 65% page-width of sidebar, there is no print view to speak of, only a "Print" option that I could use to make a PDF, except even that is too shittily formatted to read, and for some reason the text column decides it's a good idea to get even narrower at some point after the insanely difficult-to-decipher timeline image. Of which a convenient PDF download is linked to, which is THREE FRAKKIN MEGABYTES and still a total disaster to read.

Is this some sort of test about who RTFA and who doesn't?

Well, even TFA is one meandering, rambling muse better suited for a blog, which is a real pity, as the writer Alfred Nordmann has two reasonably well written essays up on his site. *sigh* Some people are just better at papers than articles with word-limits.

As far as mathematics research goes, there is a huge range in journal prices depending upon the publisher. Many for-profit publishers (Springer, Elsevier, etc.) charge very high prices for journals, or have comprehensive pricing packages which make it hard to figure out how much a particular journal costs. Many journals are published by non-profit professional societies or universities, and those tend to be much more reasonably priced.

There is an effort to only submit to journals which are reasonably priced- see, for example, the Banff Protocol where prominent researchers state their commitment to only contribute to, serve on editorial boards and referee for reasonable journals. Many of the most prestigious journals are still for-profit and there is of course pressure on untenured people to publish in the best journals they can, but there is a healthy set of more senior people who choose where to submit things incorporating journal expense as a consideration.

The China Airlines 747 was severely damaged and nearly had to be scrapped. Not due to supersonic flight loads, but due to damage from the high-G pullout required to recover from the out of control power dive towards the ocean.

Among other things the landing gear locks pulled out of their fuselage mounts and the gear extended partly during the dive pullout, damaging the gear and gear doors.

The pullout encountered 5.1 and 4.8 G peaks, which exceed the normal structural limits, and the aircraft's wings were permanently bent upwards 2-3 inches.

The horizontal tailfins also were partially shredded - see pictures and more incident data at:
    http://aviation-safety.net/database/record.php?id=19850219-0

Also NTSB report available at:
    http://www.rvs.uni-bielefeld.de/publications/Incidents/DOCS/ComAndRep/ChinaAir/AAR8603.html

"Stray signals causing loss of altitude control is some serious crapola."

Yes it is, that doesn't mean it doesn't happen.

The power required to overcome the distance to the
aircraft makes any 'death ray' problematic.

Far easier to get a SAM.

http://www.cs.wustl.edu/~jain/cse574-06/ftp/aircraft_wireless.pdf

http://www.aviationtoday.com/av/categories/commercial/12776.html

http://www.rvs.uni-bielefeld.de/publications/Incidents/DOCS/Research/Rvs/Article/EMI.html

Yes.
A) Consumer device PEDs are not design or rated for air travel.

B) You can't completly harden against all EMR

C) the shape of Aircraft can cause you signal to change.

http://www.aviationtoday.com/av/categories/commercial/12776.html

http://www.rvs.uni-bielefeld.de/publications/Incidents/DOCS/Research/Rvs/Article/EMI.html

http://sciencelinks.jp/j-east/article/200012/000020001200A0261018.php

http://www.cs.wustl.edu/~jain/cse574-06/ftp/aircraft_wireless.pdf

While they due do 'bench test' with equipment Avionic equipment against devices that are done as individual units, not as the whole Avionics package. Adding to this, the same devices manufactured in two different locations may bleed AMI differently due to manufacturing difference.
For example someone decides to use cheaper capacitors. This results in 'spurious' EMI.

repeates cases where :PEDsa cause in flight 'incidents'.
Most of them don't result in a crash do to redundancy. If a PED, or series of PEDs interferes with the redundant system as well, then the plane may very well change course.

http://www.aviationtoday.com/av/categories/commercial/12776.html

http://www.rvs.uni-bielefeld.de/publications/Incidents/DOCS/Research/Rvs/Article/EMI.html

There are many more. I just googled for PED Study.

Repeatable studies have shown interference to the Aircraft from PEDs.

Try reading books from the early 20th century, and ask yourself how much overlap there is with a recent textbook. You won't find that much.

In other words, we're not so much compressing the past as merely picking the bits we're interested in and ignoring the others.

Hes a pretty bit of prick for a religious figure (ruling class of priests vs poor serfs).

If we are going to accept what the Wikipedia says about Tibetan Buddhism, he's more of a guru (a teacher) than a priest.

The world is better off without anyone who enjoys seeing people die horrible diseased deaths because they believe it brings them closer to god imo.

And how is that related to the Dalai-Lama? Oh, you talk about the "Dali Lama" which must be a twisted version of the Dalai Lama. That would explain your statements. And Buddhism seems to have no gods, at least in the traditional sense you imply by brings them closer to god.

But let this not keep you from bringing up references that support your statements.

Why am I going on about this? Becuase it is intellecutally dishonest to pretend that you can brush away the complexity of the world by calling it context. It leads to pointless research projects where aggregations are made, imperfectly, from imperfect information when it could already be obviously judged from the outset that they would ultimately not scale to complexity at hand. It results in 'Xanadu' projects that will forever be stuck in a state of being 'so close' to being useful, but never actually becoming so.

Here is one way where you were going: AI resarchers are intellecutally dishonest and pretend that they can brush away the complexity of the world by calling it context. This leads to pointless research projects where aggregations are made, imperfectly, from imperfect information when it could already be obviously judged from the outset that they would ultimately not scale to complexity at hand. It results in 'Xanadu' projects that will forever be stuck in a state of being 'so close' to being useful, but never actually becoming so.

You really want to go there and dismiss completely all AI research? Not to mention that the notion of context appears naturally in the context [sic] of formal grammars hierarchy (I think Chomsky is reposnible for this, so go pick on him first).

http://www.spectrum.uni-bielefeld.de/Classes/Winte r97/IntroCompPhon/compphon/node66.html/

There's a good report on that crash here. The A300-600 was pre fly-by-wire, and the crash was the result of a pilot accidentally switching the autopilot into go-around mode on approach then trying to fight the autopilot (without turning it off!) and land the plane rather than doing the sensible thing that all pilots are trained to do when a landing is not going smoothly and go around for another try.

SpaceX's info page states triple redundant systems as a reason for increased reliability.

One problem - pretty much every other rocket out there has dual or triple redundant avionics too.

Also, SpaceX doesn't state whether they do things Boeing style (External interfaces and functionality of the flight avionics boxes are specified, and then each of the three units comes from a different manufacturing and design team, resulting in them not only having different software but different hardware), or Ariane style? For a description of what happens when you do triple redundancy Ariane style, see http://www.rvs.uni-bielefeld.de/publications/Repor ts/ariane.html . For those who don't want to read the link, here's the simple summary. The rocket had triple redundant flight systems. Shortly after launch, the primary system failed due to a software bug. Backups immediately failed too due to the exact same software bug. The rocket's range safety failsafes went off. Rocket go boom!

It is a small number, but it is non-zero.

Especially worrying are the cases where the glideslope indicators were being "misled" because of apparent electronic interference from the back.

This was also discussed at length on PPRuNe a while ago.

This link (and its many references) are convincing: http://www.rvs.uni-bielefeld.de/publications/Incid ents/DOCS/Research/Rvs/Article/EMI.html.

Myth: Upheld!

Just look at all the airplanes, powerplants, car computers, etc. It's not very usual at all to see one fail critically.

Airplanes, powerplants, car computers (not to mention that the article talks about the recent Prius woes).

I understand your point that you don't hear about these things happening every day, but to state that one can ensure bug-free code is not correct. Every single one of these things depend on external input, and testing all possible combinations of inputs is often impossible if not reasonable feasible.

The best part of this is, so the story goes, that it wound up as an actual extra credit problem on an actual high school test. And that the teacher who administered the test was fired for it. This was years ago, and the person who told this to me was a high school teacher, so take that with a grain of salt.

And if three isn't enough for you there is a more generalized form.

http://www.mathematik.uni-bielefeld.de/~sillke/PUZ ZLES/condoms-n-m

Googled up this link:
http://www.rvs.uni-bielefeld.de/publications/Repor ts/aeroperu-news.html

Seems pretty much like what I saw on TV.

Correction: It was not duct tape, but masking tape.

I know the software folks here on /. always want to make excuses about 'its hard' and 'its to complicated', but, it's actually not hard, and not to complicated. complex systems are designed and built every day in the aerospace field, systems that many lives depend on.

Which is precisely why there has never been a software glitch in a plane system. You know, like the TCAS system which saw ghost planes and told pilots to avoid them (noted in IEEE Spectrum), or any of the cases cited here or here. Nope, aerospace engineers never screw up.

We do deploy equipment into life critical situations, so, for our work, 'shit happens' and 'i forgot' just dont exist in the vocabulary.

Funny you should mention life critical because one well known software glitch was the THERAC-25 which killed 6 people due to 2 software bugs.

We use checklists to ensure that all testing covers all forseeable abnormal conditions, up to and including partial failure of various hardware.

Which means your software barfs in unforeseeable situations and in cases of full hardware failure. Thus, your software is not fail-safe at all. Welcome to the real world - shit happens whether you like it or not. The unforeseeable will eventuate and no matter how much redundancy you have it is still possible for all the systems to fail at once. Denying that that possibility exists is unprofessional and dangerous.

Well, in a way, you're absolutely right. The very first thing you have to realize before you even do a preliminary security screening/threat assement is that security is always a trade-off. That's the major point that most managers fail to understand.

Basically, there are three elements that you need to balance: security, usability and costs (there a re also lot of other relevant factors like existing infrastructre, resistance to change, scalability, etc. that make real security work, ie. more breaking out the pen test kit and print a report, so damn expensive).

There is no such thing as a 100% secure system. That's the common wisdom and that's true. But you can design a 98% secure system. The only problem is that this system will require a huge overhead and be so cumbersome that your employees will spend most of their time doing anything but actual work. That way they'll either avoid it and use something else (ie. something less secure and more usuable), if given the choice. Or they'll be largely unproductive, which in turn means you'll have to spend a lot of money to even keep things running. Which of course means you'll not be able to compete (that's one of the reasons a lot of secure systems are designed for government use only because they government doesn't really have to compete or be efficient).

Multics implemented usuable security exceptionally well. You could get the job done in a timely but relatively secure manner. For some more information about user centered security check out this paper or "Multics Security Evaluation: Vulnerability Analysis" by Karger & Schell (1974). The latter is available online too.

It's really a shame there's no "Open Multics". I wouldn't really run it in a secure production envionment but I'd sure like to have my own Multics machine.

AeroPeru 603 crashed due to what was first thought was software error but it turned out to be caused by maintenace people leaving masking tape over important exterior sensors.

http://www.rvs.uni-bielefeld.de/publications/Incid ents/DOCS/ComAndRep/AeroPeru/aeroperu-news.html

Remember boys and girls, its a wild world outside of your programming cubical.

To follow up on what you wrote above, the entire administration of the journal is nearly free. The only place money goes is the salary of one secretary for the journal's managing editor and mailing costs for those journals that actually still mail out hardcopies to reviewers. The journal editor rarely gets any money from the journal, and the referees never do as far as I can tell. In principle, the only legitimate reason for high subscription prices is small circulation.

Looking at actual subscription prices, journals published by research societies (like the American Mathematical Society, Documenta Mathematica), university consortia (Pacific Journal of Mathematics, Annals of Math), etc. (Mathematical Research Letters), are much cheaper than those published by commercial publishers like Elsevier and Springer (Inventiones Mathematicae). The journals seem to be run the same way, so traditional publishers must be skimming profits.

You can find data and the prices of math journal subscriptions at Rob Kirby at UC Berkeley and Ulf Rehmann at Bielefeld and John Baez at UC Riverside

Sorry, not meaning to have a go but the risk has nothing to do with the field strength and therefore your arguements about the inverse square law are entirely superfluous. If we were discussing the (alleged) cancer-giving properties of EM radiation given out by mobiles then your arguement would be correct but we are not - we are discussing the possibility of fire and/or explosion as a result of using a mobile phone on a gas station forecourt and that needs three things:

1. A source of fuel
2. A source of oxygen
3. A source of ignition

1 and 2 are obviously there but how does a mobile phone battery provide a naked spark? Just go get your phone, and look at the design of it - it is very difficult to imagine a situation where the battery contacts can short out in such a way as to produce a sufficiently large spark to cause a fuel/air mixture such as that likely at a gas station to ignite.

Thats interesting because in the UK, Shell Texaco (and maybe others) will quite happily allow the mobile phone networks to install base stations in their signs. See here, here and for an interesting scientific refutation of the issue, here (note - link to pdf doc). Sounds like a case of double standards to me.

Howstuffworks: I've noticed that I am not allowed to use my cell phone in airplanes or in hospitals. Why are these prohibitions in place?

ELECTROMAGNETIC INTERFERENCE

Electromagnetic Interference with Aircraft Systems: why worry?

Airplanes are becoming more automated already, and we can hope software will become more reliable in the future (really?), but as the article points out, in fully automated civil flight the individual aircraft will be only a piece of a larger systems puzzle:

But the practicality, and safety, of doing away with the pilot altogether could eventually become obvious to all as, in 20 or 30 years, the military begins to use pilotless vehicles to airlift soldiers, and UAVs start moving cargo routinely around the world. And small UAVs, some say, might one day buzz around cities in place of the Fedex delivery van.

To exploit the availability of such smaller aircraft, the entire air-transport system will have to be overhauled. The number of domestic air travellers in America, for example, is expected to triple within 20 years according to an aeronautics blueprint by America's National Aeronautics and Space Administration (NASA). But if this is to happen, many more of America's 5,000 regional airports will have to be used. Currently, only 64 airports carry 85% of the country's civil air traffic. Yet in the past decade, only one large hub airport and seven new runways have been opened. Given the constraints, few new big hub airports are likely to be built.

So the bigger picture will include a radically "overhauled" traffic control system One with more traffic, doing more kinds of different things than today (such as free flight for example). And the question (in my mind) is: how does a fully automated airplane fit into this picture?

The airplane's computers will have to interact in non-trivial ways with the traffic control computers and --in the free flight scenario-- with the computers on nearby aircraft. These in turn will interact with other ancillary computer systems providing things like weather, data link, etc.

Suppose there are only 2 aircraft (A and B) in the sky in a given area. Computer A needs to interact with Computer B, and vice versa, so there are two interactions going on here. Add a third aircraft and since they all need to interact with one another the number leaps to 6 paths (A to B and C, C to B and A, B to A and C). Add an air traffic control computer (and yes, there will still be need for those even with free flight) and now we have 9 paths and so on. As more elements are added to the system, the complexity grows geometrically. And with it, the probability of a software error somewhere in this system also grows geometrically. There would also be a higher potential for cascading errors propagating through the system.

I think that getting a handle on that kind of complexity is likely to be a big challenge; even the 20 to 30 year time horizon the article mentions might be too optimistic.

For the technically inclined, the page on Computer-Related Incidents with Commercial Aircraft makes interesting reading.

Sure, strncpy() exists, but is has truly weird semantics in my opinion, I never use it as a no-overrun string copying function. For those, I prefer snprintf() if available, or just use glib and go for its g_snprintf() call. All of these, of course, are C. Oh, and for the size argument of these calls, I always try to use sizeof on the destination buffer, if it is an ordinary C vector. If it's on the heap, there's usually a variable holding the size from the allocation call anyway, and then that is used of course. Just my two hundredths of a currency unit.

PCI Adapter

PCI Adapter

Linux Router Page

http://unpythonic.dhs.org/~jepler/tkdu/

tkinter (= python + tk)

gpl
2. treemap

http://www.cs.umd.edu/hcil/treemap

java

mentioned here

can't charge for redistribution
3. xdiskusage

http://xdiskusage.sourceforge.net/

gpl

*nix only

i tried treemap first, and it was REALLY slow, and consumed tons of memory. i'm testing it under windows, but will also use it for linux. matter of fact, rerunning it on another smaller directory (though still gigabytes large with thousands of files) caused the program to bail (java had exceeded it's stack size or something like that). granted, treemap can also display tree-map formatted "database" files, but i just need it for viewing filesystem usage.

tkdu has all the features i need (ascend/descend into directories, change displayed filesystem depth, etc), a simpler interface, executed in a few seconds (as compared to a few minutes for treeview), and used ~ 80% less memory (20 MB vs 90 MB).

for headless servers, i'm thinking about modifying tkdu to save the filesystem data as pickles, so that it can be displayed on a workstation. this way i could run tkdu nightly from a cron job, and analyze filesystem usage the next morning on my workstation.

of course, i don't know how any of them work with mac packages/bundles? the web page that mentions treeview says that it has problems under *nix-like systems because it doesn't understand symlinks. i have yet to test any of them under linux.

all of the above research was prompted by reading this article, so i don't know that much (yet!).

Has anyone noticed that the English translation of certain selected passages appear to have a decided slant toward Jehovah's Witnesses? I had always though the Latin word "dominus" was a regular noun meaning "lord" or "master", not a proper name.

Especially do not claim that safety-critical systems are hack-proof, since even people who wouldn't normally try to hack them will try.

It does not even need evildoers to defeat safety-critical systems of some complexity. Consider for instance the 1993 Warshaw accident of a Lufthansa A320 (see also this report). Amongst its causes was a safety system meant to prevent deployment of reverse thrust and spoilers unless the plane had its wheels down on the runway. Which makes sense in principle because trying to stop a plane in mid-air is not a good idey, but turned out to be, uh, not quite helpful when this accident happened.

Now one may argue that this particular problem, or any particular problem, could be fixed by improving the systems' design. However, complexity of the system, and of the problem to be solved, makes it unlikely that even the smartest engineers will get it right soon. Now add evil minds to your considerations.

In the case discussed here, an obvious weakness is the need for location-awareness. What if the plane "thinks" it is elsewehre? This issue is addressed in the article, but I do not really see how they are going to solve it. What if the plane "thinks" it is inside such a soft wall, or surrounded by no-fly zones? What if the plane is Air Force One and has an actual reason to enter a no-fly zone? What if the plane just "believes" it might have been Air Force One in a former life? Not to mention the fact that such a system does not prevent the root problem: planes can still be hijacked. Maybe the next hijacked plane hits airport buildings then, killing as many people as the WTC attack did?

For a hint at why it's so, Google +4.375 Primes 210 to get

Sieve of Eratosthenes
... list of smallest primes can be extended, eg including 5 and 7, and we need only to consider 48 numbers out of 210, achieving a speed-up factor of even 4.375. ...
wwwhomes.uni-bielefeld.de/achim/prime_sieve.html - 12k

And also examine report of 7 Consecutive Primes in Arithmetic sequence at 7 consec primes in AP(1995, NMBRTHRY list archive).

I would be interested in a reference to the actual number-theory statement proof of what the ratio in the asymptotic limit actually is.

-- Bill N1VUX
IANA-Mathematician, but I played one in college.
I had a .sig when USEnet was the signet.

Don't know if this will be useful to anyone, but there have been several other crashes involving this same plane. Here's a link to a report dealing with this. -cobweb

Well my predictions are that This, rubberhose and this will all be very usefull for those of use who don't want to conform in the next few years. Also brush up on PGP, GNUPG, and any other cyrpto schemes that you think might be cool. Privacy is key. Also key is throwing out the numbers on violence among say football players vs. Unreal players. (I'll have to look those numbers up.) They will try alot of thing but mostly due to the situation in Congress they won't do alot. Mostly if you are interested in security or anything that is not "normal" use crypto lots of it and watch them squirm.

The simple fact is we have tools that are as good or better than the tools any government or corp out there have. For example (I link to this all the time but it is because I think they deserve all the help they can get) take a look at rubberhose . Or if you really want your stuff to be private take a look at this. Either of those tools will help you protect your data. Ok for cruising the web there are a lot of anonymous redirectors out there and ways to encrypt your stuff. Now as to being able to live without someone tracking your stuff. It is possible to live without a credit card not easy and stuff tends to cost more (no shopping on the net) but it can be done. As for credit it is possible to get housing with bad/no credit (trust me I've done it) and you can do the same with a car but then again if you don't want someone to track you you would not be buying a car on credit anyway. As to background checks put some effort into it and figure out a way to make a living where it does not matter. The US military would like you and many of the people in their ranks to think that I am not able to get a job because of the kinds of issues that Jon is going on about. The fact of the matter is because of my skillset I have not had one employeer since I got out check my record and now it is so far in the past I doubt anyone would care. This is only a issue for the lazy and those who don't care. If you really care it is possible and not very hard to live a very private life.

This is a very bad assed encrypted filesystem. Also take a look at this. So you can have encryption today. Have fun.

W windowing system

Wt programming toolkit.

Have fun!

You might want to check out "Distributed Operating Systems: Concepts and Design" by Pradeep Sinha.

It talks about Amoeba, the V-System (I couldn't find a good web page), and Chorus.

It's a textbook so it also has a lot of theory about general distributed OS's.

I looked a bit around in my region and I can get articles either via the local university library for about 10 cent copy fee per xeroxed page or delivered via email as TIFF files from the JASON server for about $1.50 per article. This link will send a test article to your email address. You then need an uudecode utility to turn the attachment into a binary und the result (a selfexploding ARJ for DOS) can be unpacked with the unarj utility that is available for UNIX too.

I believe you should find similiar offers.

I looked a bit around in my region and I can get articles either via the local university library for about 10 cent copy fee per xeroxed page or delivered via email as TIFF files from the JASON server for about $1.50 per article. This link will send a test article to your email address. You then need an uudecode utility to turn the attachment into a binary und the result (a selfexploding ARJ for DOS) can be unpacked with the unarj utility that is available for UNIX too.

I believe you should find similiar offers.

There's a relatively old windowing system called W, which is more like GEM than X11. To call it minimal would be putting it mildly.
Check it out:
http://www.modeemi.cs.tut.fi/~puujalka/w1r2.html
http://www.techfak.uni-bielefeld.de/techfak/ags/ti /personen/itschere/w.html

The picoBSD distribution of FreeBSD manages to fit PPP, SSH, and W (with weyes, wclock, and a web browser called -don't laugh- wetscape) onto a single floppy.

If you're looking for the absolute maximum packed onto a single floppy, it's hard to beat tomsrtbt - Linux 2.0.36 and a whole heap of useful stuff, on a 1.7Mb floppy. It even has a floppy image (Memtest-86) included, so it's two diskettes in one! :-) No room for any windowing system though.

Does this floppy format really break certain floppy drives, and if so, how old do said drives need to be?