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Looks like there are also a few free eps2png programs out there.

This one seems to work ok so far...

http://soliton.science.uva.nl/~kager/download/down load.htm#figepspdf

Core memory was not "pretty well obsolete" in 1971. Semiconductor memory was only just starting to come into wide use by then. It was not until 1974 that it became cheaper than core (see http://www.science.uva.nl/faculteit/museum/CoreMem ory.html), and even later before it overtook it in volume.

What's wrong with just getting used to bigger media? We've been spoiled, I think, by the shrinkage of storage media, which has come about because advances in density have been much more rapid than our needs. As we start to run into the theoretical limit on the density of the data, we can still increase capacity by increasing the surface area of the disk. Granted, you can only do this up to a point if you still want it to fit in the same case, but let's think outside the box here (no pun intended). It's not like we've never had to deal with physically large media before.

Then you've missed the whole point of memory systems, that the associations *must work for you*. In the first memory software package you pointed us to, one of the touted features is the ability to change which phonemes associate with which letters.

Strong associations are created when you find a visual or auditory link between a number and the corresponding letter or phoneme, like '2' and 'N' (which contains two downstrokes), that makes sense to you.

There is a visual system in which '2' is represented by a duck (similar shapes), and a the numeral '8' associates with an hourglass.

Another number memory system uses visual words which rhyme with the number words (one->bun, two-shoe, three->tree, ...)

I'll check out the software packages, they look interesting.

So they have finally found the Random Number God

I still have 8" discs.

I no longer have any way to read them, though. (Nor can I read my 5 1/4 inch Commodore 1541 discs.)

8" floppy? Prove that such a beast even existed.

You could've tried Google yourself, but here it is for you anyway.

For one of my classes, we split up into teams and wrote our own Robocup client (for the software simulation). My team had the best out of the class, but it was fucking pathetic compared to the 1st place winner of the tournament. If you're interested in the software tournament, take a look at the University of Amsterdam's RoboCup page. Their publications are especially useful.

Ah, yes.
It seems that we need to review
The Story of Mel.

I'll post it here from several places,
So that the good people of /.
(and the other people of /.)
Don't wipe out a single server (yeah, right!)

http://www.cs.utah.edu/~elb/folklore/mel.html
http://www.wizzy.com/andyr/Mel.html
http://www.science.uva.nl/~mes/jargon/t/thestoryof mel.html
http://www.outpost9.com/reference/jargon/jargon_49 .html

and, of course, many other places.

I have no doubt this guy is an impressive lego builder. His portfolio speaks for itself. However from Eric's website:

I had been pondering on how to make a LEGO clock for some time, but my first obstacle was not actually knowing how pendulum clocks worked. Of course, in this day and age, that's what the Web is for, so I went out on the Internet and learned.

Furthermore, a fellow in the Netherlands already had some web documentation on a LEGO clock he had built. While I ended up using different pieces for my escapement gear and such, his pages were invaluable, and credit should be given.

Personally, I found the above link a lot more interesting since it goes into far more depth as how to build a working lego clock.

Leo's LEGO has the answer to this particular question .

There's a program called Praat that does this. However, you need a medical degree, or at least working knowledge of the muscles of the human vocal tract and what positions the must be in to produce certain sounds, in order to get any use out of it. After about 5 hours of playing with the parameters, I got it to say 'e'.

Now, if someone were to make a program that generated coordinates for the muscles that corresponded to going between different uterances, we'd be in business.

BAH! 5 1/4 is modern crap. 8" is the real thing.

as most motherboards assume that there is a floppy drive around somewhere, the floppies won't die.
most os's still support creating boot floppies, minimalistic tools as disk repairers and ghosters are still around.

i'd personally prefer to use these mini cd -s instead, cause they don't get corrupted as often as the floppies. but since writing onto a cd is pretty complex business, we will have to wait quite some time to accept it as a common operation.

althrough lately it would be more handy to create a booting memory stick which can hold up to 1gb data (if the data amount hasn't been even more lately), and basically could contain an entire OS by today's standards.

just to remember the old days

http://www.science.uva.nl/faculteit/museum/flop8.h tml

can you still remember these ? i can ... these were awesome floppies, they looked so cool and new instead of these old annoying tapes and taperecorders .... just plug and pray

How about one of these stuck in the end? http://www.science.uva.nl/~sprik/masterlaser/holoe xp/holo.html/ Help me obi-wan, you are my only hope. The new Palm 2 D-2.

Ever heard of mercury delay lines? They are exactly what you describe, only they are abondened long ago, it's a bit of a toxic waste maker... And expensive...

Ever heard of mercury delay lines? They are exactly what you describe, only they are abondened long ago, it's a bit of a toxic waste maker... And expensive...

Land of the free
home of the slave

http://home.student.uva.nl/marlies.meijer/biohazar d/bioflag.gif

Well, it looks like the "Viral Marketing" is spreading all over the web! 2 more sites have now been seen with a count down timer. At http://www.immersionunlimited.com/ we came to a startling discovery. We are trying to find out more, and you are welcome to join us. So far these are the only sites we found with similar effects. If you, or anyone else, finds something more please let us know by visiting our site. The sites are.... http://www.science.uva.nl/cms-forms/ai.php?formuli er=vakkenlijst&session=1&prog=122&fase = (notice the logo looks a little like Immersion Unlimited's site initials) http://thefridgeowl.com/

Please STFW. There are a ton of articles written on this subject already. Here, I'll help you find some.

In case you were looking for my personal opinion (doubtful!) here it is: Windows XP has major user interface, hardware support, stability, security and compatibility enhancements compared to Windows 2000. That's what I noticed when upgrading. Windows XP is also faster than 2000 on sufficiently powerful hardware (due to better compatibility). On "Windows 2000-era" hardware, Windows XP is slower than 2000.

5.25" is the best you can do? People much older and crankier than you and I used 8-inch floppies. And of course, a whole bevy of bizarrely creative things before that, ranging from boxes of painstakingly-organized punch cards to paper tape to mercury delay tubes (more like RAM, i suppose) to big reel-to-reel tapes.

Hell, some of them had to just *remember* the whole program, and dip-switch it in one binary word at a time, while manually toggling in the memory address for that particular word.

Makes you and me seem downright coddled.

It's not a left vs. right struggle, it's a class struggle.

About 600mm people have internet access, according to that Norwegian site. Let's round up at 1 mm people. That means that by having internet access and reading this website, you are in the top 20% of the world.

Aren't your part of the bourgeois you're rallying against?

Reminds me of that time when I was looking for a place to live in Berkeley. This guy had an xbox, new apple powerbooks, digital tv, ipods, tivo, etc. etc. And he was a socialist...I found that odd. Is there something I'm missing?

Here is the server for the simulation league. I helped code a team for one of my college classes; it was pathetic :). The University of Amsterdam Trilean team has won three years straight. You should check it out; their team kicks some serious ass. If you're interested in the simulation league, be sure to check out the publications by the Trilearn team. The Master's thesis especially is a must read for anyone attempting to write a client. Tons of information on everything from self-localization to optimal-pass-determination.

Here is the server for the simulation league. I helped code a team for one of my college classes; it was pathetic :). The University of Amsterdam Trilean team has won three years straight. You should check it out; their team kicks some serious ass. If you're interested in the simulation league, be sure to check out the publications by the Trilearn team. The Master's thesis especially is a must read for anyone attempting to write a client. Tons of information on everything from self-localization to optimal-pass-determination.

Here is the server for the simulation league. I helped code a team for one of my college classes; it was pathetic :). The University of Amsterdam Trilean team has won three years straight. You should check it out; their team kicks some serious ass. If you're interested in the simulation league, be sure to check out the publications by the Trilearn team. The Master's thesis especially is a must read for anyone attempting to write a client. Tons of information on everything from self-localization to optimal-pass-determination.

Interview who?

Not sloppy code, but hard to maintain. ASM does not allow for a lot of nice things that structured langauges allow for. You end up with a lot of lines that move from one seemingly random memory location to a different one, change bits seemingly randomly, and place the result in a different location. It is very hard to see what is going on for all the irrelavant things that happen.

What makes it harder is nobody in their right mind would write in assembly unless performance is critical and no better algorythm is known, so assembly programers activly prefer hard to understand code that is fast over easier to understand code. That bit manipulation code above may silently depend on a side effect of an operation several instructions ago.

Read the story of Mel. While no assembly programer intentionally writes code that hard to understand without documentation, they all look for tricks like Mel would use because they should never be called unless the C compiler can't optimise good enough. No matter how much they document things (and correctly documenting your code is hard) it is by nature hard to understand.

Modern processors often have weird things going on too that you need to remeber. Delay slots, multipul pipelins to fill, and so on. A good programer (or more likely compiler) tune to take advantage of all this, but by nature is creates code that isn't liner.

Now the VU units can't be programed in C (appearently?), so they don't nessicarly have to use all the tricks in assembly to make it go fast. However even still by nature assembly is hard to understand.

To me, I think the biggest difference is that in 1998 with the RTM Worm *NIX people started to think "hey, if this box is going to be connected a network , it needs to be secure." In other words, if it could possibly have a network stack, it needed to be secured.

Microsoft didn't start thinking about that, what 13 or 14 years later, when Code Red and the lot started to hit. It wasn't rocket science, it was just a matter of time. I think it was just the beginning...

You know what scares me the most? China has access to Microsoft source code [1, 2]. What if some Chinese government insider's son decides to take the knowledge of exploits learned and release something (no different than RTM did in 1988)? What if China wanted to wage "cyberwar" on Taiwan and a worm with a multiple nasty exploits (3+) got lose to the US and abroad?

Just do this when you think somone is trying to take your picture..

For a research project I've actually been doing a bit of reading about RDF and OWL yesterday. When you do, you occasionally come across these types of remarks.

> java + XML = demand for 4+ghz CPUs

Let's make one thing clear: RDF is not an instantiation of the XML syntax. You can use XML to transfer RDF statements, but for reasoning other, internal, representations are to be preferred.

As I'm working on a Prolog project that needs RDF I use the SWI-Prolog RDF library, which, according to
this recent paper (pdf)* speeds up processing 22 folds compared to using the RDF/XML serialization syntax. Please note that Mozilla uses Prolog+RDF as well.

(*) here's google's html version of the paper

"Anything that can go wrong, will" is actually Finagle's Law

"Anything that can go wrong, will" is actually Finagle's Law

I'm pretty sure that I've seen more than this, but you can find several tracks between Zappa, Lennon and Ono on the 1992 compilation album "Playground Psychotics".

> 1. As a hiring manager, unless you go to a school I've heard of, in an English-speaking country, I'm probably not going to think very highly of your degree.

Your loss, but no offence. How many schools have you heard of?
A major difference between universities in the US and in some European coutries, is that European universities have to meet some standards to call themselves "University". The US has the best universities in the world as well as the worst. Countries like Germany, France, the Netherlands and Belgium try hard to prevent self-proclaimed so-called universities from giving the official -- usually state sponsored -- universities a bad name. This knowledge may help unexperienced hiring managers to judge foreign degrees.

Of course, what ultimately matters is a person's skills - which are only indirectly related to the person's school. IMHO it's not too hard to get a degree on a "good" university with average skills while I've met several excellent techies with an MA degree from a "dubious" university.

If you're a techie already, go to a place where they don't teach "just" software engineering or computer science. Learn to do something useful with it. I'd go to one of the Edniburgh departments if I had a chance (sniff). Tubingen has a briliant group cognitive science / language. Amsterdam has rising star Johan van Benthem.

> 1. As a hiring manager, unless you go to a school I've heard of, in an English-speaking country, I'm probably not going to think very highly of your degree.

Your loss, but no offence. How many schools have you heard of?
A major difference between universities in the US and in some European coutries, is that European universities have to meet some standards to call themselves "University". The US has the best universities in the world as well as the worst. Countries like Germany, France, the Netherlands and Belgium try hard to prevent self-proclaimed so-called universities from giving the official -- usually state sponsored -- universities a bad name. This knowledge may help unexperienced hiring managers to judge foreign degrees.

Of course, what ultimately matters is a person's skills - which are only indirectly related to the person's school. IMHO it's not too hard to get a degree on a "good" university with average skills while I've met several excellent techies with an MA degree from a "dubious" university.

If you're a techie already, go to a place where they don't teach "just" software engineering or computer science. Learn to do something useful with it. I'd go to one of the Edniburgh departments if I had a chance (sniff). Tubingen has a briliant group cognitive science / language. Amsterdam has rising star Johan van Benthem.

I'm struck by how much the HowStuffWorks picture of MRAM memory (*) looks like the donut-on-a-wire ferrite core memory. All that's missing are the 150-ohm terminating resistors.

I like the idea of a HD-less instant-on PC. One of the great things about my Palm Pilot is that the kids can turn it on and off without any "shutdown" process... although all my kids have known how to shut down Windows properly since they could understand the "To turn off press Start" concept.

On the other hand, it's already hard enough to restart a locked-up PC when the so-called power switch doesn't have anything to do with the power. How will I fix a PC when pulling the plug doesn't even reboot the OS?

c.f. broken as designed. "Windows is insecure by design" can be interpreted the same general way.

Is that a hard drive in your pocket...
Or are you just happy to see me?

Uh, huh. All this talk of 2.5" disks is going to impress the girls even less than the normal 3.5" (*).

Personally, I have 8", and that's just when it's floppy.

(*) Although posting regularly to Slashdot won't impress them much either.

Here are some more that might be of interest:

Law

"No society can possibly be built on a denial of individual freedom." -- Mahatma Ghandi

"Probably all laws are useless; for good men do not want laws at all, and bad men are made no better by them." -- Demonax - (Roman philosopher c. 150 A.D.)

"More laws, less justice." -- Marcus Tullius Ciceroca (42 BC)

Democracy

"Fifty-one percent of a nation can establish a totalitarian regime, suppress minorities and still remain democratic." --Erik von Kuehnelt-Leddihn

"Democracy must be something more than two wolves and a sheep voting on what to have for dinner." -- James Bovard, (1994)

Politicans and Government

"The urge to save humanity is almost always a false front for the urge to rule." -- H. L. Mencken (1880-1956)

"The welfare of the people in particular has always been the alibi of tyrants, and it provides the further advantage of giving the servants of tyranny a good conscience." -- Albert Camus (1913-1960)

"The enormous gap between what US leaders do in the world and what Americans think their leaders are doing is one of the great propaganda accomplishments of the dominant political mythology. " -- Michael Parenti (and it's just as true for the UK)

"If you tell a lie big enough and keep repeating it, people will eventually come to believe it." "The lie can be maintained only for such time as the State can shield the people from the political, economic and/or military consequences of the lie. It thus becomes vitally important for the State to use all of its powers to repress dissent, for the truth is the mortal enemy of the lie, and thus by extension, the truth is the greatest enemy of the State." -- Joseph Goebbels, German Minister of Propaganda, 1933-1945

"The technological capacities the government is acquiring and the removal of basic legal checks move us in a direction that was never possible 20 years ago. Does this bring us a lot closer to 1984? Absolutely." -- Tim Edgar, legislative counsel for the ACLU

"Nothing is so permanent as a temporary government program." -- Milton Friedman

Outcomes

"The search of the young today is more specific than the ancient search for the Holy Grail. The search of the youth today is for ways and means to make the machine - and the vast bureaucracy of the corporation state and of government that runs that machine - the servant of man . That is the revolution that is coming. It could be a revolution in the nature of an explosive political regeneration. It depends on how wise the Establishment is. If, with its stockpile of arms, it resolves to suppress the dissenters, America will face, I fear, an awful ordeal." -- William O. Douglas, former U.S. Supreme Court Justice (again, just as true of the UK).

"When governments fear the people there is liberty. When the people fear the government there is tyranny." --Thomas Jefferson

Regarding ancient Athens: "In the end, more than freedom, they wanted security. They wanted a comfortable life, and they lost it all - security, comfort and freedom. When the Athenians finally wanted not to give to society but for society to give to them, when the freedom they wished for most was freedom from responsibility then Athens ceased to be free and was never free again." -- Edward Gibbon

I am grateful for Vincent Tijms' web site, from which I selected all the above quotations.

... available "for free distribution to anyone in the world," including residents of Cuba, Iran, Syria, North Korea and Libya, countries to which the United States controls exports. The open-source technology IBM released "can be used for encryption, scientific research and weapons research," the suit said.

So IBM is helping terrorists and rogue states now? I think we need an addition to Godwin's Law - "As a dispute goes on, the probability of one side claiming the other is helping terrorists approaches one"

dude, where were you during the September that never ended? Usenet used to be a great place for info on the internet.

I stand corrected about Ogg. Actually, I found how it got the name within Netrek from this hacker dictionary entry.

In the multi-player space combat game Netrek, to execute kamikaze attacks against enemy ships which are carrying armies or occupying strategic positions. Named during a game in which one of the players repeatedly used the tactic while playing Orion ship G, showing up in the player list as "Og".

A backronym, and not a really good explanation of Perl's reason for being. See here and here for a better background on Perl.

Here's a new word for you --- "ESRhole"

ESRhole - one who takes command of something, proclaiming himself God and is no longer subject to criticism. ...or something like that.

As for applicable fixes, wget yourself a mirror of v4.2 here

I know, it's still got a bit of ESR in there, but it's free from the latest bugs, and so therefore more easily cleaned... ..which I hope somebody will do:

Fork it! *kerrack* Fork it good!

With the slightly older version, all one needs to do is set up a new tribunal or something to clean it, repost it, and then add to it as a team. Split the power three or five ways-- hold monthly or bimonthly meetings to discuss submissions, and Make It So.

THAT would be a Good Thing.

Barak Michener

though ESR significantly enhanced the whole effort during the mid-80's and published as a book.

Actually, according to the Jargon file itself, it was GLS who did the editing for the first book: (see here).

To see if you experience this bug, click on this link, uncheck the "Always show this dialog..." checkbox, then click the link again. If the dialog pops up again, you're seeing it.

I agree. They should just define "1 kilogram" as the weight of a 1-kilogram bag of sugar. Sorta like the jargon file's definition of recursion.

All other languages, including but not limited to C, Objective C, FORTRAN, C++, Java, COBOL, C#, Pascal, BASIC, and all other languages, compiled or interpreted, now known or later developed, shall bow before the majesty of INTERCAL, the One True Programming Language.

Bow before me for my operating system and all the programs that run on top of it are written entirely in INTERCAL, the master of all programming languages.

If you agree with me, go HERE to sign a petition to the federal government to illegalize all programming languages except INTERCAL. If you disagree with me, hear now and hear well: Real Programmers (tm) use INTERCAL.

INTERCAL is a registered trademark of Compiler Language With No Pronounceable Acronym Company, Incorporated.

No, he means the Ninety-Ninety rule.

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