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Just in case you weren't aware of it, there's a fan-made mod for the SS2 that that will improve the 3d models from ridiculously dated to only slightly dated.

Organization:
novinit
Arnaud de La Fouchardiere
66 bis avenue Jean Moulin
Paris, 75014
FR
Phone: 06 07 61 23 36
Email: info@novinit.com

Registrar Name....: Register.com
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Domain Name: NOVINIT.COM

Created on..............: Fri, May 18, 2001
Expires on..............: Wed, May 18, 2005
Record last updated on..: Mon, Oct 06, 2003

If you're using All-In-One Gestures or whatever it's called, you can set your gesture as "Open Favorite Bookmark #1 or #2"

To make a bookmark a favorite, put AiO1 or AiO2 (#1 or #2) in the keyword field.

Can read about it here All-in-one Homepage

War on Terror? Please. Who, specifically, are we fighting again?

Other parts of the world have lived with terrorism for years without freaking out. The key bit there is "lived with". You begin by understanding that there's no "win"...

Overlooked the March flights. #2 did two flights in three days at the end of March. Flights 10 & 11 (& & 8 for #2).

Here's a URL for a good flight listing:

X-15 Flight List

It's in French, but numbers are numbers....

Note that the X-15 went higher than SS1 did yesterday only twice. Both Airframe #3, both in 1963, and just over a month apart. Evidence is, however, that it had the capability to do it within two weeks, if anyone had had a reason to do so.

I hope the standard will include some kind of wavelet compression, like Dirac or Apple's Pixlet

With these you get better image quality at the same bitrate. Combine that with more bits and you have an awesome picture.

Lets hope they keep up with the current maths technology. Fourier transforms are just so last century!

the newest version of all-in-one gestures works

Here's a few places to look for some unofficial repos:
http://perso.wanadoo.fr/j.pearson/linux.htm#Pack_S uSE_
http://scott.exti.net/links.html

ssh/sftp clients for Classic Mac OS:

MacSSH and MacSFTP.

JP

ssh/sftp clients for Classic Mac OS:

MacSSH and MacSFTP.

JP

Aha! Found an article on Infestation, complete with lots of screenshots. It's in French, though, and Google's translation makes the text virtually invisible unless you select it. Ooops!

1990. And no way is it the first FPS...

Ha Ha

More information on ISO-14443 is available here.

Cheap techology is great -- make digital cameras inexpensive, offer an SDK to grab their output, and folks will come up with wonderful ideas for how to abuse them. Devices like EyeToy are mostly just oddities now, but I'd like to see them used to popularize gestural interfaces.

Arkane Studios' RPG, Arx Fatalis is one of a handful of titles that offers gestural input, with its mouse-gesture-based spells. But this was more a novelty than a boon for usability -- it would have been easier to cast a spell by clicking icons. Perhaps a sequel will allow you to embellish your runes with serifs to achieve subtle variations on an incantation?

Avant Browser offers up a more useful gestural interface -- and I like it because it allows me to execute common tasks more easily. Rather than having to hit a smallish "new window" icon, I can rudely right-click anywhere on a window and sloppily drag my mouse upwards to open a new window.

EyeToy takes this a step further and does away with the mouse altogether; and though I had modest luck with the thing when I played against the noisy backdrop at Toys "R" Us, here's hoping that it's the first among many such interfaces. Perhaps five years down the road, a) gestures will be common, b) we'll laugh at what Minority Report got wrong, and c) we'll thank goofy gadgets like this one for paving the way.

After all, it was pretty silly to have a "Rat" for the Atari 800.
________________________________________________
The Inago Rage website is now up.
Critiques welcome and appreciated!

So I unblocked their relays a week ago to see the input IPs and LART each spam originating from worm-infected Wanaspew customer PCs. Surprisingly, the whole mess hasn't been coming from thousands of wormed Weendoze boxes, but merely from *four* (later six) different input IPs. A responsible ISP wouldn't have any problem in preventing a handful of customers from emitting spam.

Wanapoo did nothing. In spite of 44 (!) complaints to Spamadoo and some further communication with the French ISP association AFA France, the same customer IPs I've been LARTing up to 10 times since Sunday last week were still spamming on Friday.

So there are only two solutions left - either eat your spam or dig a deep hole, put Wanadoo's netblocks including their email relays in and let them rot there. Writing spam complaints to Wanadoo is futile.

Most utilities mentioned are really great, but mostly realtime stats
sometimes it's nice to see historic view on the machine as well.
sysstat does just that.
Now if only I can remember the thing that also use that statistics do
draw graphs (with gnuplot iirc.) Anyone ?

Why? For speed?

Conventional trains routinely hit 320 km/h FOR LONG STRETCHES AND DURATIONS (not just for 10km portion out of a 700 km journey), and have gone as fast as 515 km/h in tests.

The sheer complexity of the switches (*) guarantees that the resulting network will be much less flexible than an ordinary conventional high-speed rail whose switches are of the ultra-simple time-tested conventional design.

What does speed gives you? Since the energy expenditure squares each time the speed is doubled, you soon hit a wall where the energy efficiency drops well below an aircraft.

For example, a 1200 km trip (New-York_Chicago) Speed time saved* Energy How much more than
100 12 10000 at 100 km/h
200 6 6 40000 4 times
300 4 2 90000 9 times
400 3 1 160000 16 times
500 2.4 0.6 250000 25 times
600 2 0.4 360000 36 times
700 1.71 0.29 490000 49 times
* from previous time Fucking slashcode that won't let PRE pass. Fuck it (and cowboy neal too, at the same time).

So, each time you increase speed by 100 km/h, your energy use soars so much that for saving a paltry quarter-hour, you spend 13 times more energy than needed to go at 100 km/h!!!

This is the reason french TGVs only run at 300 km/h. They are designed for 400 km/h and routinely hit 450 km/h for demos but running them at 400 km/h would be too expensive for the tiny amount if time gained.

A high-speed maglev runs at the surface, where the air resistance is waaaaay much higher than for an aircraft at 35,000 feet. So the energy expenditure per seat IS GOING TO BE HIGHER than an airplane!

Even though the speed of sound is much higher on the ground than at 60,000 feet (where Concorde used to fly), 1000 km/h maglev trains will need very long viaducts and tunnels to avoid becoming high-speed stomach wrenching roller-coaster rides.

The only way a maglev could be useful is running within an evacuated tunnel in a long journey.

In theory, the trains could run at the orbital speed of the altitude they are; energy expenditure would then be zero (all you'd need is to accelerate the train to speed, and you'd recover most of that energy by decellerating it at destination). But the costs of digging tunnels that would be so perfectly aligned, immune to geological havoc (crossing from one tectonic plate to another isn't really a walk in the park) and to keep the thing perfectly evacuated would likely be prohibitive (and maintenance guys would need to work in spacesuits...). Such money should be spent instead for a space elevator.

And don't forget that one either.

The problem isn't raw materials for construction. We're literally swimming in 'em. The problem is going to be energy production. Oil and coal will be around for a little bit longer, but 50 years down the line when the rest of the 3rd world (and all of China) is turning on their lights at night, and you're talking about serious energy concerns. "Alternative" isn't an option, it's going to be a necessity.

The other problem is that NASA is dealing with space exploration in the completely wrong way. I wish they were bigger Sci-Fi geeks, because just about every single example of our future's spacecrafts are designed and built in space. It's stupid to be expending this much effort to go up and down when you could be having interstellar flights lasting months for the same amount of energy.

What the X-Prize is really all about is that we need to be able to get into space reliably and back again, it should be cheap, and it should be relatively safe. NASA has been spending a large part of its dough in past years to develop something that is fully capable of being produced by commercial interests today. But for real space travel, you need scientists on board for long periods to work "in-the-field" so to speak. If you need them to go to the surface of a planet, you just use shuttle craft.

What annoys me is that they (NASA) should be putting their cash in interstellar space vehicle design, in-space production, and power requirements for these ships. There's no reason we can't have people studying Mars while orbitting it -- if you need food for three months, you just tack on an extra cargo hold to your ship and have only the mass / energy considerations to think about.

Nowadays the primary concern is "I've only got so much payload because this thing has to break loose of the Earth's gravity intact." So they're flinging satellites to the far edges of our solar system, keeping their fingers crossed for the sometimes decade-long wait to find out if their fragile, expensive equipment functions correctly.

Why does NASA ignore what is so obvious to the rest of the imaginative world? Most sci-fi and anime fans already knows there are escape velocity/atmosphere vehicles, and interstellar vehicles (and know that the two don't mix very well with each other).

You're right about IBM's attitude towards legacy products. But the Selectric is not a good example. First, IBM spun off the printer and typewriter business back in 91. Second, the Selectric typewriter, though out of production, is still widely used ("I need it to fill out forms!"), and you get "support" for it from any office supply store.

Here are some potential "killer apps" for a 3D desktop:

Hydra is a three-dimensional extensible markup language (XML) instance viewer/editor that was developed to aid in standards development efforts. It uses OpenGL to display XML documents as a tree structure that can be manipulated in various ways by the user. Additional information is displayed in the tree using shapes, colors, and varying sizes and positions.

Croquet is a software architecture designed to enable collaboration between users across the Web in a shared 3D space. Croquet is not merely a 3D user interface for visualizing file systems or web sites, but a complete development and delivery platform for doing real collaborative work in a distributed 3D space.

kernel3d produces a 3D animation of Linux source code development. Shapes and different colored lines are used to represent files, function dependencies, variable dependencies, file size modifications, files being moved across directories, and new files (see screenshot).

Here are some potential "killer apps" for a 3D desktop:

Hydra is a three-dimensional extensible markup language (XML) instance viewer/editor that was developed to aid in standards development efforts. It uses OpenGL to display XML documents as a tree structure that can be manipulated in various ways by the user. Additional information is displayed in the tree using shapes, colors, and varying sizes and positions.

Croquet is a software architecture designed to enable collaboration between users across the Web in a shared 3D space. Croquet is not merely a 3D user interface for visualizing file systems or web sites, but a complete development and delivery platform for doing real collaborative work in a distributed 3D space.

kernel3d produces a 3D animation of Linux source code development. Shapes and different colored lines are used to represent files, function dependencies, variable dependencies, file size modifications, files being moved across directories, and new files (see screenshot).

Now if the DVDs have the scenes they talked about in one of the "making of" shows where Leia keeps slipping out of here bikini top in the 3rd (6th, or whatever the hell it was) movie, I might buy it!

"Mandrake" doesn't mean anything in French. The French name of that plant is mandragore (yes, it sounds even more mysterious :-)

Mandrake the Magician, however, is probably known by anyone aged 25 or over. His stories used to run in the "Journal de Mickey", which as you can guess is the prominent Disney publication here (70 years and counting !).

I can remember whole Mandrake stories. Hey, did you know that Hojo (the Asian cook) was really Inter-Intel's boss ? :-)

Yes, they took the name from the character. No, they do not compete in the same market. But yes, they might have thought a bit more before choosing that name.

Thomas Miconi

Actually, I'm thinking it IS a ripoff:

Leon Mandrake
Mandrake the Magician

Of course, the old Linux Mandrake logo is obviously a ripoff of Mandrake the Magician...

Mandrake the Penguin

There's no denying that the original inspiration for the name, the design of the Mandrake Linux mascot was derived from the old comics character. But Mandrakesoft has steered away from that lately, and I'd think that if they dropped any remaining references to magic in their marketing (including the star symbol), and argued the genericness of "mandrake" apart from those references, they should (by any reasonable standard) be allowed to continue using the "Mandrake" name.

Look at their current logo. (The topic icon.) Notice the little "magic" star and spark thingy. Notice a theme? Magic, maybe?

Take a look at their old logo. Compare with this image of Mandrake the Magician. Notice any similarities? Other than the penguin, it's basically the same thing - including the cape and wand! Although Mandrake the Magician doesn't have a big ugly star, and the cape is blue and not red.

It seems quite clear that Mandrake Linux intended to rip off Mandrake the Magician's look and name. It seems very clear to me that Mandrake Linux is in the wrong and will need to change their name. It's obvious they knew about Mandrake the Magician - they copied him for their original logo!

His name is Francis Lax.
You can hear his voice on a page dedicated to people who made voices for Harrison Ford on this page (in French)

SARS came from an unholy union between Tux and the BSD Daemon.

Picture here

Here's goes the link: http://perso.wanadoo.fr/cyberhome-help/insertcoin2 play.mpg

Quite nice indeed!

Way more KDE 3.2 screenshots

quite odd, they've developed it for everything from the vic-20 to the Nintendo, to the Co-co, wonder why they don't have it for the TIc? Oh, that's right.. It must be because the TI-99/4a has a 16 bit processor, and it's only for 8 bit systems.. (yes folks, the TI was the first 16 bit 'Home Computer' but due to bad coding, Bad marketing, (sorry Bill Cosby) and the fear of loss of money, it never went far with TI, but just check out the following, (including a 32 bit upgrade path) Myarc9640

• Instead of Mozilla, I prefer the leaner Firebird for browsing and Eudora for email. If you take the time to learn how to use the Filters feature, Eudora's pretty good at filtering spam. Especially if you crank up the size of the History of addresses you sent to and store your contacts in the address book. You can then filter messages whose sender "doesn't intersect" your address book or history into a spam folder.
• Instead of WS FTP, I prefer Filezilla, which is truly free (you have to pretend to be a student or a non-profit to use WS FTP for free) and does sftp as well.
• TTSSH is a much less clunky ssh client than PuTTY.

• If you use a Palm, PalmEudora Sync keeps your addressbooks synchronized (which will help with those Eudora spam filters).
• Mark's Adding Machine is much better than the Windows calculator for balancing checkbooks.

I've done this before on MacOS 9 with MacSSH and MI/X ppc, and the performance was *really* bad. Far worse than you would expect. I ran it on a 250 MHz G3 (in a 7500) over a local 100mbit lan. The same hardware running Debian was snappy. I don't know whether it was MacSSH that was the problem or MI/X.

For us, French-speaking people, we stick to Latin as it is still solidly anchored in our language :
it should then be viri.

virus vire virum viri viro viro, viri viri viros virorum viris viris...

It's called System Shock 2: Rebirth, and while there's a release that already works very well, he's still making upgrades.

(WARNING: link contains material that could be deemed inappropriate for minors - it would likely receive an 'R'/PG-18 rating [if it was a US film] for graphic violence, partial nudity, and "disturbing images")
System Shock 2: Rebirth

When I played through, they didn't have the new monkey or rumbler models (which both look great, imho) - and let me tell you, it added a lot =) While the original game had plenty of atmosphere to make me jumpy before, the new additions keep it fresh enough that I hope never to get complacent =)

-lw

System Shock 2 used the Thief engine, and although the engine is still solid, the graphics are starting to show some age. Hence, fans are updating the skins and models.

The original System Shock used the Ultima Underworld engine, with improvements and tweaks suited to the setting. Check out The System Shock Hack Project for technical details.

I've been trying to find ways to volunteer for all of these projects, but being a non-coder it's rather difficult. Ah, well.

System Shock remake

System Shock 2 remake [Some screenshots not work-safe]

And personally, the first two games I thought of when I saw the topic were the Genesis version of Shadowrun, and Skitchin'.

As a hormone infused teenage geek and connoisseur of all things science fiction at the time, I really enjoyed the show on several levels.

First, this show had some great looking leading ladies. There was Jane Badler as Diana, leader of the aliens. You wouldn't believe how bad I wanted her to come to my house and eat mice. I kept asking myself what I would/could do to get on Diana's good side so I could date her. Sure she was an alien intent on world domination so she could harvest humans for food, but maybe she could "reform" with my help. This is one lizard lady I wanted to meet. There were other aliens equally attractive. I didn't care that they were lizards down deep. Faye Grant wasn't too bad either.

Joking aside, the V mini-series movies was innovative and interesting. It's true that the series that followed lacked, but that was the case with most TV sci-fi series of that era as they just did not have the production values/capabilities that we have today.

But to diss the whole V story indicates that you do not have an appreciation for sci-fi in general and the efforts of that particular period. There is nothing wrong with that per se, but it invalidates your criticisms, which is very much in the minority Or you are showing both your arrogance and ignorance.

At that particular time, we didn't have the quantity nor the quality of science fiction shows and movies that we have today. They were few and far inbetween. Today we have a whole summer of sci-fi with advanced high quality special effects and good stories. Not to mention all this has gone over to TV where we see the same improvements in sci-fi TV shows.

So before you call V "shit" understand both the era and context that it appeared in.

I went looking, and the only one that would do decent vt100 emulation was the OS 9 app MacSSH.

We need it to access a VMS machine, and no other term emulators would work as flawlessly as MacSSH. I would LOVE to be proven wrong, if someone can point me to a term app that allows me to use the function keys and the keypad correctly!

It seems like 90% of my comments these days include the phrase 'Bloody Americans'.

It's not Frenglish. It's French. And it's not an insult, it's backing you up. I assumed you knew *something* about art given the comment you posted, but I guess not.

Art. By Magritte. He's a painter you know.

Read the white paper. It describes the compression and expansion clearly.

Advantages:

• Since the piston does not form part of the combustion chamber, there is much more freedom in designing the combustion chamber for efficiency -- lower surface/volume ratio (unlike a Wankel) and few crevices that trap unburned charge

• The compression ratio, and perhaps the displacement, could be varied by changing the port/valve timing
• Assymetrical compression/expansion ratios are easy -- a larger expansion ratio could provide better efficiency

• The external combustion chamber allows better handling of the heat issues -- e.g., the piston is not exposed to the primary flame front; cooling can be uniform around the chamber

Among the disadvantages of the toroidal engine are the huge swept area of chamber walls and sliding seals. If these seals are to be tight, they are going to have high friction (and thus high friction losses, due to the large F dot ds), as well as high wear. My conclusion is unchanged: this engine is not going to go anywhere before internal-combustion engines are largely replaced by fuel cells.

I'll keep them there for some hours, depending on the load induced to my puny 384 kb/s (<48 kB/s) bandwidth.
So far it seems though that the actual site is enduring pretty good too.

Linux does have sar/mpstat/iostat, though they aren't installed by default in most distributions. They're distributed in a package called sysstat. As for prstat, much of the same functionality is already present in Linux ps.

Ralf

blakespot

The usual hype. But I was surprised by the lack of one hugely important game:

Hunt the Wumpus.

Hunt the Wumpus was apparently an old Unix text-based RPG, which Texas Instruments brought to life on their under-rated but massively overbuilt TI-99/4A home computer in 1980 or so.

The TI-99/4A (and its rare older brother, the TI-99/4) had a 16 bit TMS9900 processor chip (in 1979 and 1981, boys and girls!), a kick-butt video chip (the TMS9918) which had 32 sprites and a video overlay feature. But Texas Instruments, a company which is/was making more chips than Frito-Lay, hobbled the machine by using the video chip's RAM as the console's main memory, bottlenecking the expanded memory down to 8 bits, and creating the single slowest BASIC interpreter ever designed by having it interpreted TWICE (from BASIC to GPL - "Graphics Programming Language" - then to machine language).

With this nasty kludge, they released a graphical version of Hunt The Wumpus. Horrible sound effects, and game play which made you feel like you were drunk and on LSD. Oh, and attempting to add graphics to an old text-only game is doomed to fail, don't even attempt it.

Accapareur, amiral de bateau-lavoir, amphitryon, anacoluthe, analphabète, analphabète diplômé, anthropophage, anthropopitèque, apache, apprenti-dictateur à la noix de coco, arlequin, astronaute d'eau douce, athlète complet, autocrate,...

Here is a complete list of "insults" (in french). He has quite a collection of them, each more entertaining than the other, and none are even remotely like f*ck, *ss, etc. All banal words from the dictionary, used creatively :)

Ahhh... I love Tintin. Being Belgian I grew up on these "comics" (a term that really doesn't do justice to the art, at least not the Begian/French kind of "comics"). Aside from owning the whole collection, I have several older copies with my dad's dedication in them (got them for birthday gifts, etc) which makes them even more valuable to me.

I am also a fairly big fan of Spielberg - with E.T. being the first major movie I have ever seen, and I still remember going to see it (in Belgium) when I was 11 like it was yesterday! I just hope he doesn't screw this up!

Check out the excellent MacSFTP or Transmit. With either you can make an SFTP connect and then open text files in BBEdit. Very easy, reliable, secure, and all works together seamlessly (as if they were one program).

I live in MacSFTP and BBEdit all day.

Done!!

Lotus Turbo Challenge 2 is there. I personally am partial to Pinball Dreams.