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The old BYTE magazines from the 1970's and 1980's were wonderful reading. The Circuit Cellar guide to building your own home security system with a 20Amp klaxxon air raid siren in the basement. Reviews of the workstations (Next Cube), motherboards and graphics cards of the time. What goes into a single ASIC now, would go into a dozen little chips and a full-size daughter board. State of the art visual effect was a silhouette halo like in Xanadu.

Had the chance to program 8-bit home computers like the Apple ][, Atari, BBC, and Atari ST. There were so many magazines out there, all giving program listings and information on building things like light pens, mini device drivers and games written in assembler. These days, you would get sued just for using a function call the wrong way.

I'm not sure I believe that. The only way I can think of permitting things like su and passwd (among many others) is by running some sort of permissions escalation daemon ("owl-control" perhaps?) as root that essentially does the same thing. This moves the vulnerability from the binary to the permissions daemon.

There is almost no documentation on owl-control; the best I could find was a FreeBSD port and the (encoded) man page as plucked from CVS HEAD.

If this has been independently audited and continues to appear to be a Good Idea then perhaps it would be of interest to one of the larger distributions?

I like the phrase 'ancient graphics cards' - I had a Hercules Graphics Station Card, a full-size graphics card with the innards of a GPU splattered all over the circuit board. The VRAM chips were a problem - they stuck out so much that they would make contact with the adjacent cards.

I guess, if RAM chips were installed in sockets, they would have be slid in between the heatsink and the circuit board like a memory stick.

From this article, GPU memory clock speeds are coming close to 990 Megahertz, while regular CPU memory is running at 1333 Megahertz, but that GDDR3 memory is optimised for longer length block read and writes.

That trend has been happening for the past 40 years. If you looked at a 1990's graphics accelerator card (Hercules Graphics Station Card or a Voodoo 5000/6000, you would see that all the different components (RAMDAC, graphics processor, memory controllers) were all on different parts of the circuit board. Now, most of that logic is within a single chip Geforce 9800GTX

Memory chips keep changing as rapidly as the CPU's do. Assuming that a CPU manufacturer wanted to enter the memory chip market, by the time they had caught up with current state-of-the-art in memory technology, bus communication and got the product onto market, the memory chip manufacturers would already be designing, producing and marketing the next generation.

The sixth year of the new millenium would be 2007. http://www.staff.uni-marburg.de/~schittek/millenni .htm

Right, because everyone wants to spend days installing and weeks debugging an OS on their brand new Apple computer. Many of the THOUSANDS of apps for linux can be compiled on OS X either with fink, ports, or even a ./configure; make; make install.

If it weren't for Ben where would you be?

an older experiment

I wouldn't either -- those things are boring! ;-)

Unless you're reading what the scientists in Garry Larson's "Far Side" are saying. One
Two

I wouldn't either -- those things are boring! ;-)

Unless you're reading what the scientists in Garry Larson's "Far Side" are saying. One
Two

It took me forever to find this comic online, Dog decoder (see the one to the right).

Naturally, there is also the more subtle guide to interpreting the mood of an Irish Setter.

http://www.uni-marburg.de/religionswissenschaft/jo urnal/mjr/frenschkowski.html

as a protestant german theologan, among other things he notes that much of the opposition to scientology in germany is because it is american, not for other reason.

He's an academic studying religions. even tho he dislike scientology, the absence of info gives the resources he can find in germany a strange flavor. doesn't help the objective study.

http://www.uni-marburg.de/religionswissenschaft/jo urnal/mjr/frenschkowski.html

as published in the marpurg journal of religion.

He treats the issue from the viewpoint of an academic trying to research the church, as he finds it. as he notes; "Being a Protestant theologian, I regard it as highly undesirable that Scientology grows. I regard Hubbard's and Christian views on man, on the deity, on salvation as not reconcilable." Even so he tries to approach it with academic objectivity.

One note he makes is the german atttitude toward scientology is as often based on being anti-american, along with other things.

See for example this, or this.

"I'm not hot doggin ya!"

-dB

See for example this, or this.

"I'm not hot doggin ya!"

-dB

Whoooo, aren't you a tough one? Color me unimpressed. In case you haven't noticed, attacking whole nations and killing thousands on the suspicion that they might be harboring terrorists--remember, the U.S. has produced no actual evidence that Bin Laden is behind this--is a real good way to create more Al Qaida's then you ever dreamed of.

>Since the events on 9/11 we are very, very angry, and countries like Somalia and Afghanistan, that harbor terrorists, are going down. One after another, like dominos, until we have accomplished our task.

I don't know why you Americans persist in believing that what happened to Napolionic France and Germany (twice in the last century!) somehow can't happen to you. Those nations, too, were international bullies which threw their weight around, attacked and butchered their neighbors, and tried to force their worldview on large parts of the globe. They, too, had huge millitaries which were unmatched in strength and professionalism. And they, too, generated hatred and fear everywhere they went untill finally they were dragged down and destroyed by those whom they would rule. I know, I know--"America is invincible, no one can stop us, yadda yada yadda." Just remember that these people thought their nation was invincible, too. They were wrong. So are you.

This sounds like the kinds of problems that the concurrent functional programming people love. See Erlang or perhaps some concurrent variation of Haskell like Eden.

Regards,

Zooko

http://www.mathematik. uni-marburg.de/~kronjaeg/hv/hv/do/crt/
If you can't figure out how to mail me, don't.

There is a site collecting articles by Richard Hull explaining how to build a fusor at Jochen Kronjaegers High Voltage Page. Also Tom Ligon, who wrote the Analog article you mention, produced a supplement to that article which points out many of the safety issues with building these things.