Slashdot Mirror
Grosse Pointe Quickies
Nostradumbass told us about HandHeldCrime. This is cool for people that like to read on their Palm.
jleader shared a link to a revolutionary new airplane design
being built at the Van Nuys airport in Los Angeles.
As if you couldn't tell from his name, linuxsucks_dot_com thinks that Linux Sucks! Use it as a tool, not as flamebait.
SEWilco told us about a little cyber kid-leashing, and while you?re making sure the kids are where they need to be,
kawlyn told us about the x86 Still.
Beinoni shared a link to some interesting nonlinear emergent phenomena.
An Anonymous Coward sent in a link to an interesting Scientific American story about anti-aging.
dolanh sent in a cool question: What was your first computer? Okay, you caught me. My first real computer of note was an Apple //c. Still have the monitor.
Zeitgeist gave us a link to a tool for the paranoid, Mindguard.
why after I turned my monitor upside down the web page look just like any other Linux web page ....
I think this is similar to an earlier story on Slashdot - about studies at Los Alamos that used phase-change stuff from physics to model traffic flow.
h tml
...
Here is the Slashdot story link, but the original article link seems to be dead.
http://slashdot.org/articles/99/08/05/1656256.s
PS: And would someone add the site referred to in the quickies to the list of sites which disable the "back" button"
My first thought is that the Traffic Waves site has been posted to Slashdot before. After an initial search, I couldn't find it. Anyone else want to try?
My second thought is this: My first computer was an IBM PS/2. Wow did that thing kick ass - 386 SX @ 25 MHz, 2 MB RAM (I upgraded to 10 YEAH!), 130 Meg HD, and a 12" monitor that you'd swear was frying your brain.
One of the first things I learned how to do was start the example BASIC games that came with that thing - SNAKE being one of them. Ahh, snake. It ruled yesterday's computers, and it rules today's cell phones.
Another thing, that computer came with the most documentation I've seen for any personal system. It came with the ENTIRE IBM DOS manual! It had every utility's switch, option, and description right there! If only modern computers came with such things. But then again, not much you could do in the way of a manual for a GUI driven system.
Ah well, rant mode off..
You should never take life too seriously - You'll never get out of it alive.
A wristband company called Vertex RSI... that is just NOT RIGHT in the slightest.
That's like calling a cruise ship the Titanic; you can if you want, but it's something you just DON'T DO...
Friends don't let friends misuse the subjunctive.
Interesting site. I haven't thought about it to the depth he obviously has, but I do something similar when I'm driving (even short distances). Try to keep a constant pace and put on your brakes only if you MUST (and do it as late as possible). One effect he left out was the psychological one of seeing brake lights ahead of you. When people see brake lights, they put on their brakes (often causing the stop waves). So if you don't use your brakes unless you absolutely must, the people behind you are less likely to, leading to fewer traffic waves.
As soon as he mentioned his hypothetical friends helping him out, I thought of the state trooper idea that he mentions two paragraphs later. But I may have a twist on that: Don't get a "rolling barrier" of cops, just put one or two a few miles out from the slowdown/jam. Have them drive 5 miles below the speed limit. Everyone else will slow down to keep from passing the cop and the effect will be achieved. Experiments will be necessary to determine real distances and speeds for specific cases, of course.
Another idea is to have continuously updated speed limit signs. When there is a jam ahead, the previous 5 miles of signs can say "65 MPH" instead of "70 MPH".
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Linux MAPI Server!
http://www.openone.com/software/MailOne/
(Exchange Migration HOWTO coming soon)
This is pretty exciting stuff. Anyone with access to Medline should check out the ALT-711 research being done. Here are the abstracts from the latest two studies:
Hey, about that anti aging article... I recently e-mailed the about.com biology guide on this, and she responded with this extremely interesting response:
h tm
/Mattias
"Hello Mattias,
Death is a part of life. In fact one of the characteristics of living things is that all living things die. Sleep would not prevent death from occurring.
As scientists find out more and more about the body, they have discovered that our cells are genetically programmed to die. Cells have structures called telomeres that shorten as the cell ages.
Studies have been performed to see if researchers can prevent the telomeres from shortening and thus prolong the cell's life. See:
The Real Fountain of Youth http://biology.about.com/library/weekly/aa012298.
-- Regina"
The first computer I had at home was a Kaypro II
The first computer I owned was a 19MHz XT with 1MB of EMS that I used as a drive cache so I could run Windows 3.0 on it. Only took 2 minutes to start windows from a DOS prompt.
The quickies seem the best place for something like this. =)
SMARTY MAN GAEM DESIGNEAR "SURVIROR"
(be sure not to miss John Carmack's profile!)
Pablo Nevares, "the freshmaker".
Pablo Nevares, "the freshmaker".
Actually, just briefly reviewing the site, I would recommend that EVERY SINGLE linux developer spend some time there.
Many of the complaints listed are the same complaints I have, and the same complaints of anyone that I've exposed to linux. It would be nice if the list of "why linux sucks" was done in a more easily followed manner, but the raw language of it tends to help get the point across.
Oh, and my first computer was a Tandy TRS-80 with the analog tape system...I still have it, although I haven't had it out of it's box in nearly 2 years.
-Jer
it's showing as "http://slashdot.org/www.handheldcrime.com".
I use Macs for work, Linux for education, and Windows for cardplaying.
Most religions allow sorts of unnatural things, like antibiotics, contraceptives, etc.
But anyway, I'd just like to point out that in the rich countries where anti-aging treatments are most likely to occur, the birth rate is at, or below, replacement value and falling.
(Even if we could stop aging and all disease, your life expectency would still be in the ~250 range, because of accidents, etc.)
The cake is a pie
Unixux
Man did that thing ever rock! Two, count em, two floppy disk drives, a whopping 64k of ram, and a great big red power button on the keyboard. Sure it had sucky games, but then again it helped me learn assembly language programming (Z-80) in 6th grade. I didn't own an assembler (couldn't talk the parents into springing for one) so I hand-assembled everything with a hex calculator and entered it directly into memory with the debugger.... Ah, the good old days. I loved the thing--a throwback to when computers cost about as much as an automobile and weighed about the same too.
Btw., whatever happened to Scripsit, the greatest word processor of all time?
But I kind of like the linuxsucks site.
The guy has a sense of humor. I dropped in and had a good laugh at myself and many other Linux advocates.
We need to laugh more at ourselves. Kudos to the linuxsucks webmaster.
And if you search in it for "waves" about the forth one has a link to the same page the quickies article talks about. I knew I had seen it on slashdot before :-)
My father works for Prudential, and they naturally were all over Big Blue. I donno how close it was to being the first laptop, it had a blue tinted monochrome screen, and must have weighed 15 lbs. To expand it, one added 4inch/3inch/15 inch units to the back; I think this is how it got extra comm ports. You could keep adding units until the thing was aboutthe size of a surfboard (there was a printer module).
My first real computer was a PS/2 model 80, which was a 386 with I think 4 mb ram standard, but I had that sonuvabitch rocking with a Kingston 486 upgrade and a Kingston memory MCA board, fully populated with 16mb of ram. It was on this I ran WFW 3.11 and used Prodigy, so I was on the net relatively early, when I was 16 or so (5.5 yrs ago). True geekdom didn't come until I had worked for Pru a couple summer, and got interested in networking.
I still have a *^%#load of various MCA NICs in my basement, the Model 80 is still down there. I should really put Linux on it, or something, just for the memories. I have had Model 77, 56, 57, 60, etc all flow thru, but just that one original PS/2 remains.
matt
More information right here: here.
:(.
Now, if I could just get game ROMs for the emulators
Ant(Dude) @ Quality Foraged Links (AQFL.net) & The Ant Farm (antfarm.ma.cx / antfarm.home.dhs.org).
[BTW, Driver Psychology is a useful link for those who are interested in the other major component of traffic -- or simply have a friend they want to keep from killing themselves on the highway]
I used to take my friends to a cabin in Laconia, NH for Thanksgiving each year. One year, (early 80's) we brought several (Apple II) computers with us and attacked this problem, coding and discussing it as we conducted our usual festivities. The joke was that we'd win a Nobel Prize (The Peace Prize, we decided) and the undying gratitude of the Billions in the Next Millenium.
Alas, coding/modifying the digital automata took most of our time , and none of us had more than a couple of years driving experience. (Yikes, I can't believe it even ran in something like real time on a 64K machine with 191K floppies (this was before hard drives for personal computers) running on a 8/16 bit CPU at a true speed of 1/2 MHz) We never made our breakthrough -- and the hangovers on the last day of that trip made several of us repress the memory of the entire weekend.
Well, here we are, hard upon the next millenium, and I was wondering what software is out there that could implement a digital automata traffic simulator. We had notebooks full of elaborate scenarios - traffic light synchronization, types of accidents, ambulances, cars going in/out os various types of commercial parking lot entryways, etc. It was a low-res SimCity of traffic. -- much more fascinating than it sounds. (And hey, if a million late night hackers can't solve traffic, then we should go back to the single wheel and start over)
Can anyone suggest a program - perhaps Object Oriented - that would let me repeat and expand on my original experiments? I *still* drive differently because of what I learned (At last! Driver's Ed that means something!)
If you can go to bed, knowing you did a valuable thing today, you're very lucky. If you can't... it's not bedtime
So whaddya think... start a betting pool...
Is he:
An "anti GPL RMS is a dirty hippie commie BSD license is "more free"" type?
A Berkeley student/alum who is disgruntled that Linux gets so much mindshare?
A hipocrite, plain and simple?
john
Resistance is NOT futile!!!
Haiku:
I am not a drone.
Remove the collective if
Imagine all the people...
Read linuxsucks. the top reasons especially; specifically, the last comment on the page (as I write this, "Luke from [IP address]).
OK. The PhD in AI. I've done x86 assembler, bare metal stuff, and I've done and read quite a bit of AI... informal but I have some knowledge. I've done and am doing some AI-ish stuff. The two DO NOT mix. There's brains in AI work, there's brains in OS work; I don't think the two can co-exist. If you think they can, please tell me your brand, I could use a shot. In short, I laugh. VMS bigot anyway.
Next up, Chris 2/17. Damn. Anybody know a "chris" at microsloth? Perhaps a high-up in marketing? The editor's note helps confirm my suspicion that I wants a shot of his brand.
The screed above that, well, that's sorta suspiciosly like my (semi-illiterate) 14yr old nephew would write after an evening of stoking up on, say, Ziff Davis publications. Really, the shameless propaganda with no redeeming social value has got to stop. Will no one think of the children?
And I'd love to rant a bit more about that page, but that's it. How long has this been up? Granted I'll say these comments are probably worth reading, but 3? That's it? What kind of criticism is that? Any propaganda meister worth his salt ought to know that the key principle is REPITION... I'm sure you've got it in you somewhere.
... Ahh, that feels better. But really, ya'll, is bombing the form gonna do any good? Lookit this forum; we knows there's dipshits abounding who happen to be around, do we need to prove it yet again?
Cool hack.
I remember back in the old times when I got deleted from a large multi-line BBS. It was an Oracomm board, and if you were the one who originated a discussion thread you had the ability to also delete it completely. So one night for fun I spooled the whole thread into a text file, ran the textfile through the Jive filter, deleted the thread, and posted the new 'jive' version as if it were the original thread.
Boy were people pissed.
Okay, this is pretty funny.
First off, Let me start off by saying that I'm a Win2K user. I used to run NT 4.0, but replaced it with an errant install of Redhat 6.2 (see some of my previous postings for that). So, I more or less tried to use Redhat 6.2 for about a month.
Now, why am I back to Win"blows"?
Simple:
1) The applications I use are here today, not tomorrow, not next year. I got tired of trying out really beta software for Linux for the stuff I use, and the stuff that wasn't beta was very unpolished, very cluttered, very unfocused. Think GNUCash vs. Quicken or even Money and you'll see what I mean.
2) X is slow and crappy and unresponsive. I run a dual CPU system and it annoys the hell out of me. X likes to crash, taking my whole system with it, usually. It just sucks balls. I stated before that the client-server architecture inherent in X is NOT NEEDED for typical home/end users. BeOS does the GUI right. You want to beat the GUI experience that Win2K gives? Ditch X and come up with something new.
3) I've not *touched* my registry since installing Win2k. I had to "touch" all kinds of config files weekly under Linux, just to install stuff.
4) Who cares about freedom to do with the software? Can't you see that RMS wants you to be paid MINIMUM WAGE for your work? How dare you code for money! nono, that was a rant, sorry. Rather, most users don't give a rat's ass about GPL or whatever. They want to install a software package and then use it. They don't want to have to search freshmeat.net for some obscure graphics lib or a specific version or whatever. Win2K at least halfway has this right. how many updates have I done to Win2K? Two or Three, the security update patch, couple drivers. And they installed *smoothly* with a double click. Every week I was scouring for the latest glibc or whatever to get whatever to work. Too much of a hassle.
4. Linux just felt too beta to do anything that I would want to do. The feel is not right on the OS. I don't care how smooth the architecture is or how stable it is (to an extent). Think of it this way: My Ti Graphing Calculator I had for engineering never crashed on me, but you don't hear me extolling it's stability virtues. Win2K didn't crash on me until I installed EverCrack.
5. i won't go into the games rant, because games are not important to me.
Does Linux suck? Hell fuck no. I've got two linux machines in my living room routing mail, etc. They are *great* for that. But for everyday using, Win2K provides me with the best experience, freedom be damned. BeOS has a better "experience" than linux, and I'd really like to see it take off. Will I ever use Linux as my everday OS again? If they can fix X so it doesn't run so slow and get some real apps that don't require 3 hours of searching to find that obscure library (hey, freedom has its price), then maybe. Until then, I'm sticking with something I know and somewhat trust. Fuck, guys, it's just a goddamned OS. Go outside and see the real world every once and awhile.
If you were me, you'd be good lookin'. - six string samurai
Because Microsoft products use a different encoding to iso-8859-1, which is standard in the UNIX world - and, indeed the standard to which most moders specs are written. Windows encoding has several extra characters encoded in undefined areas, which contain not-so-smart quotes (the typeographers' quotes).
The shouldn't be a problem, because when translating to HTML, one should either use non-smart quotes (' and "), or one of the HTML entities (“, ‘, <q>) that deal with this problem. Instead, MS products use &# entities, specifying numbers which are meaningless on non-Windows encoded systems.
Of course, it isn't all Microsoft's fault. While Lynx and IE 4 & 5 both recognise and render the various quoting entities and markup correctly, stupid old Netscape, and worse yet, Mozilla don't, even in their latest incarnations. (Netscape 4.72 not doing so is bad enough, IMO, but mozilla has no excuse, since the extneded entities are part of the HTML 4 standard. So much for claims gecko is a standards-compliant rendering engine).
At any rate, the most correct thing to do would be to use dumb old typewriter style quoting in HTML. But Microsoft products don't do that, sadly.
Actually, their webhosting provider (hypermart.net) runs Linux/apache (guess they're not up to setting up their own server).
hypermart.net is running Apache/1.3.6 (Unix) secured_by_Raven/1.4.2-dev ApacheJServ/1.0 g2am/1.36 adutil/1.7 g2ad/1.63 on Linux
In high school, I learned how to program on the school district's RCA Spectra 70 mainframe that was connected to a 110 bps KSR-35 teletype in each high school via modem. The RCA Spectra 70 was a clone of the IBM 360, except for the reliability bits. It crashed all the time. It offered Dartmouth BASIC, COBOL, WATFOR FORTRAN and RPG.
My first electronic computer was a Radio Shack TRS-80 Model 1 (AKA Trash-80) with 4K of DRAM. I really wanted an Apple II but I couldn't afford one.
Mea navis aericumbens anguillis abundat
A Traffic Simulator Applet written by Cay Horstmann
...but I have nothign to say about that.
/. crew for not giving this the big, bold, badass headline that it deserves. this is probably one of the most important things that you will ever read on /., and it's somethign that every human over 16 in the US sould be forced to read.
Instead, I thought I'd comment on the nonlinear emergent whatevers - if you did not take the time to read that because it looked like some wierd math thing you couldnt understand, I urge you to read it. In fact, shame on the
I suffered through weeks of drivers education classes and learned nothing. if driver's education taught you NOTHING other than the contents of this link, america would be reshaped permanently, forever.
Go read the link. now. seriously. do it.
99% of traffic problems in this country can be SOLVED by following one simple rule - LEAVE SOME FUCKING ROOM BETWEEN YOU AND THE GUY IN FRONT OF YOU. enough room for some jackass to jump in between without you getting all hot an bothered about it. traffic sucks in this country for the simple fact that people ride each others' asses everywhere they drive. well, that and retards driving slow in the fastlane, but tailgating is a far more terrible problem.
go read this link. learn to drive like this. spread the word; spread this link. let's use the slashdoteffect for the powers of good just once, mmkay?
I ran across this idea over 30 years ago. Some guys at IBM were working on simulating traffic flow thru city streets and came to the conclusion that the best description of the available data had the same mathematical form as that of fluid flow in pipes. From that key observation, many interesting analogies followed directly: standing waves, shock waves, the congestion resulting from an abrupt narrowing (lane closure or step down to a smaller diameter pipe), etc.
Fascinating to contemplate how often a new discovery could be found by going back and looking at some of those outdated materials in the dusty old dead tree libraries!
A couple of years back there was a flurry of excitement about a couple of high-school kids who used some math software to come up with a "new" geometric construction for dividing a line into an arbitrary number of equal divisions. Their teacher had them present a paper at a math teaching conference, and they were even written up in the Wall St. Journal. Meanwhile, I found exactly the same bit of geometry in an old book on typography and book design, and a newer one (but older than their "discovery") on Fontographer. Seems this same construction had simply been a well-known tool in the printing and book layout field even though the math teachers had forgotten it.
All of this raises the question... In our rush to assume that anything not on line (and easily found by a search engine) is no longer relevant, how much real information are we in danger of losing? (And the problem itself isn't new -- remember the Venetian stained glass that nobody knows how to make any more?)
My first "computer" was an IBM 407 Calculating Punch, programmed by placing jumper wires on a board about twice the size of today's mobos. By the time I went to college, I found they had a Clary DE-60, also programmed with jumper wires and a General Precision LGP-30. Back in '65, this computer had 64K bytes - of rotating drum memory, no RAM, not even "core" memory. I/O was only through the Freiden Flexowriter, a huge typewriter (85 lbs.) with a paper tape punch. And it was programmed in hex machine language. I'll never forget debugging hex where the codes were 0-9,F,G,J,K,Q and W. (They represented the codes from the Flexowriter for 10-15.) Finally, the school got an advanced computer, a CDC-8090 with 4K 12 bit words of core memory. But it came with tape drives, a punched card reader and a FORTRAN compiler! So we really coded up a storm!!
My first operating system was tape based because there wasn't any room left in memory after that compiler loaded its run time libraries for the execution. (It took two of us three weeks to write.) And it was reloaded after every job! The OS was really just a job control system but it was designed to interpret only the first two characters of each word on the job control card so we had contest to come up with the weirdest sentences that would still specify the right job parameters.
After graduation, I got to work on an IBM 1401 and one of the custom machines (AN/FSQ-31) IBM built for the military just before they designed the 360. By the time I bought my own home computer (a Commodore 64), I'd already been programming for over 15 years. But that C-64 was capable of graphics and sprites that the mainframe at work couldn't touch. When the C-128 came out and offered CPM, I though it was a wonderful alternative to OS/360.
My favorite magazine was Dr. Dobb's Journal but that was back when it was titled "Dr. Dobb's Journal of Computer Calisthenics and Orthodontia; Running Light Without Overbyte". Things have changed a bit since. I'm playing with Beowolf clusters at home and designing distributed comm networks for world wide deployment now but thanks for the opportunity to stroll down Memory Lane!
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VP Unmarketing, Product Confusion and Linux Distributions
VP Unmarketing, Product Confusion and Linux Distributions
Megadodo Publications, Ursa Minor Beta
Death is the price we pay for the orgasm.
I'm trying to teach myself to set people on fire with my mind... Is it hot in here?
I don't know what the guy who built the x86 still used to solder the still shut, but if he used standard Drat Shack solder, the result of the still could kill you with lead poisoning. Use lead free solder, like plumbers use.
www.eFax.com are spammers
The first computer I ever worked on was a DEC PDP 11/70, in 1975. Then our school sprung for a state-of-the-art TRS-80. The first computer I owned myself was a 286 clone from American Semiconductor.
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What? WHAT?!! Oh.
> I admin VMS for a living and I detest ACLs - they just generate work and complication. Thankfully, here they are verboten unless there is No Other Way. And there is ALWAYS Another Way.
Yeah, I used to work in a shop where the secretaries wanted to use ACLs to share their files with specific other secretaries. Problems, problems.
They would request an ACL, we would set it up, they would forget they requested it, and then get pissed off when someone read something they weren't supposed to know.
Or they would come around when someone was out of town, wanting us to set up ACLs to let them see the absent party's files. And we had no guidelines whatsoever as to who was actually supposed to be able to see what.
Or two would disagre on how an ACL should be set up, and we'd have to go to the boss to see which secretary had more clout that week, so that one could have her way... until the next round.
Then there were the technically clueless secretaries who convinced some manager that they should be given system privileges so they could manage the ACLs, after which things got really screwed up, both technically and in terms of legitimacy of access.
All in all, the problem was more political than technical. We tried scripts to let them manage their own and leave us out of the loop, but that didn't work because they were so clueless about what they wanted and so forgetful about what they had actually granted.
And in addition to the politics, you could hardly get anything done for the phone ringing with someone demanding access to someone else's files.
I'm glad I'm out of that game.
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Sheesh, evil *and* a jerk. -- Jade
They mention that high sugar levels are bad. THC drops your sugar levels - would this mean that stoners stay younger?
't used to be LawnMOWER, really...
Oh yeah, and your moderation notwithstanding, I still do not consider myself a troll. Yeah, I've had a few troll moderations, along with every other type of moderation (except insightful, *sigh*). And my karma is always around zero. If I was trying to be a troll, I could easily do a lot better than that...
That said, I think it's time I changed my