it *was* a Z80 machine, so at heart it was a perfectly good machine to get your feet wet in programing, at least if that's all you could get your hands on.
For that matter, they're still making Z80s and I've been toying with the idea of hacking up a "modern/old" computer just for kicks.
KFG
I first ran across this idea about 20 years ago.
on
Hardcore Waste Recycling
·
· Score: 4, Interesting
I found it in one of Alex Wade's classic post and beam/energy efficient house books.
The idea was old even then, ancient in fact. The toilet works better with humus ( that's the topsoil type of humus, not the mashed up chickpea sort of humus, although I know there are people who claim there's no essential difference) than with sawdust. The humus both represses odors better and contains living bacteria to go right to work breaking down the fecal matter.
Of course doing anything like this and using it for compost in the garden is very dependant on proper composting technique. A *proper* compost pile gets quite hot naturally. You'll never see a compost pile properly maintained covered with snow, but you *will* see steam coming off of it in cold, wet weather.
If you're a bit squeamish about these things the obvious answer is to use your human waste compost to fertilize non fruit bearing trees and other ornamental plants.
One of the other uses of this sort of toilet is that it's the safest, cheapest and most effective self contained marine toilet I've ever seen. No valves to fail. No expensive fixtures. No song and dance just to use and no through hull fittings. It's the old "cedar bucket" taken to the logical and extreme development.
Nearly everything he ever wrote ( Like If I Had a Hammer) has been attributed to Pete in the public mind, while he himself remains largely unknown.
As a point of interest when Lee died he was cremated and his ashes were, indeed, scattered on his compost heap.
There is also a cowboy reincarnation joke I learned from Utah Phillips. I won't go over the whole thing, but the punchline involves another cowboy looking at a "meadow muffin" and saying, "Nope, you ain't changed a bit."
I think they just didn't consider it as fitting the catagory of console.
The Adam was an *extension* of the Colecovision that turned it into a peronal computer. I've known a number of Adam owners and not one ever considered it a games machine at all.
Now as a *personal computer*, boy was it a huge failure. Ate up all the Cabbage Patch Doll profits, and then some. They made them right down the road from me a piece and when the company went under they were giving them away like promotional pens.
Even for free they weren't really worth it, as far as I'm concerned, but believe it or not there are *still* people using these things. I know one of them. But they all seem to use it as dedicated WP machine more than anything else. The built in daisy wheel printer seems to be the main attraction.
Ironically it was the low quality of this printer that was one of the key factors in the Adam's failure.
Oh yeah, that and the built in *300* baud modem when 2400 was the norm.
The Adam was built to a price point using whatever *discontinued* stuff they could scrounge up from other manufacturers (the daisy wheel was a Smith-Corona) to slap it together. The public realized that and stayed away from it in the proverbial droves.
Today the International Brotherhood of Hired Elimination Agents of Terror, HEAT began lobbying for changes in the definition of murder.
A member who would only speak to us with his face turned all grey and fuzzy for some reason, and a voice that sounds like some cheap sci-fi movie robot talking through a tin can had this to say:
"Look, the current laws just don't make a viable business model for our endeavors. We're just legitimate businessmen. We're just trying to earn a living. We have families to feed, just like everyone else and we have a right to do so. Not only that but the law *requires* that we do everything we can to produce value for our "stockholders." It just isn't right for the law to arbitrarily prevent us from going about our normal, everyday business.
We have to eat too you know. We have a *right* to make a living."
Then he shot our sound technician while mumbling something about unpaid sports gambling debts.
If you would like to support this cause you can make donations by calling your local paving company and whispering " Seabiscuit in the fifth."
PG doesn't restrict itself to the written word and it's works include midi and mp3 files.
Perhaps I should have been more exact and explicit in my original statements. PG *tries* to provide whatever coding method that results in the lowest level human understandable output, preferably in a nonpropriatary format.
Obviously for Kanji or Vedic Sanskrit ( or recorded music) this is not plain ASCII ( by which I actually mean extended ASCII, not "teletype" ASCII).
Diores, Scribe of Euripides: Master, I've been copying your latest play for hours and my limbs are getting numb.
Euripides: Well of course they are you idiot. Get up and move around once in a while why don't you? Sheesh, slaves these days are such incredable doofuses they don't even know how to take care of themselves.
Diores: Oh bless you master! I never thought of that, who would have even thought that moving around for a bit now and then would be advisable?
Euripides: Well, I guess that's why I'm the genius and you're the slave, eh? It's no wonder we conquered your pansy assed people.
So this scene need not be repeated in *another* few thousand years let me spell it out for you people. It's common knowledge that if your work keeps you sitting for long hours you should get up and move around for at least a few minutes every hour. If it keeps you on your feet for long hours you should sit down and take a rest for at least a few minutes every hour.
Perhaps I could have written "Fire!" in the subject box. That would have been attention getting, although false. "My comment on the story" would have been factual, but pointless.
Sometimes "Subject" means "Write something here to provide the reader a reason for proceding".
My approach seems to have worked.
If, in future, you wish to skip my posts, go ahead. I won't be offended. To each his own.
"it cripples it for creating PDFs, TeX files for printing"
You've seemed to go completely doofey here.
Wanting to produce printable documents from an ASCII terminal was kinda the reason Knuth invented TeX. N'cest pas?
If I wanted to use TeX to print Walden the very first step to take would be . . . what?
Firing up vim. That's right.
Now here I'll quote from Adobe's pdf page:
Adobe® Portable Document Format (PDF) is the open de facto standard for electronic document distribution worldwide. Adobe PDF is a universal file format that preserves all the fonts, formatting, graphics, and color of any source document, *regardless of the application and platform used to create it.*
Yes, I added the emphasis myself.
I'll refrain from mentioning how weird it would be to produce a pdf document from ASCII text though, since ASCII already perfectly duplicates ASCII, and in a nonproriatary and smaller file size.
Instead I'll simply point out that to convert an ASCII file into pdf one would *first* format it into the finished product of your choice and then convert *that* to pdf.
Why one would want to distribute Walden as a pdf file I'll leave as an exercise for the student (mostly because I'd be interested to see the answer myself. It beats the hell out of me. Maybe you're a font Nazi and don't believe in letting the reader use a font that *they* find pleasant to read?).
Your SGML comment is doofey beyond comprehension. SGML was developed at IBM as an ASCII markup language. HTML and XML are both interpretations of the SGML standard. The *point* of SGML is to take the plain text and create a document. I do it all the frikkin' time. So do millions of others. In vim.
You can find the author's recollection of its development here:
http://www.sgmlsource.com/history/roots.htm
I also use ASCII to write in more than one language. It's true that I don't write Chinese ideograms in it, but how one would go about it is trivial and obvious, although one *would* need an interpreting display layer, such as SGML/HTML/XML, where the trivial and obvious work has already been done, although not to everyone's satisfaction, to make it conviently human readable.
Forgive me if this post seems a bit bluff, but I'm truely baffled by your post.
In fact ASCII text can even be human translated (although not really human read) if all you have is the *binary*.
The poster to whom you reply seems to have missed the essential point.
I would give you one caveat though. English may well be the language of the internet ( and I'll leave the arguement as to whether that's a good or bad thing to the students), but it isn't the language of *literature.*
It would certainly be a Good Thing to be able to store the Vedas and Sun-Tzu, in the original script, at the lowest possible human readable electronic form.
This, however, as you note, will apparently have to wait for some future time.
full grown, like Athena springing from the head of Zeus, this criticism is largely valid.
Patience, however, is a virtue. Libraries of public domain works *grow.* Every work added remains. Although it may take many years, even generations, as did the construction of the Giza plaza, over time The pyramid grows toward its apex, another pyramid joins it, a temple is added to the side, and so on.
That's part of the point of Project Gutenburg. Not just to provide an online library but to do so in an immutable manner that only grows over time.
Adding only *one page* to the project is valuable, and that addition remains and is added to by others.
Even brick and mortar libraries can take generations to build. A two hundred year plan only requires patience to complete.
That said, I'm going to take an even more contrarian point of view to the Wired article. The amazing thing I find about Project Gutenburg is how much is already in there. It's already at the point that I think few people could manage to read one half of the texts available in their lifetime, and finding a project to donate is complicated by the fact that the hardest part may not be performing the labor, but simply finding a project that interests you that *hasn't already been done.*
It's already a remarkable collection, and I've had to, on occasion, resort to it because my local library didn't have a lending copy of the work I wanted, but Project Gutenburg could give me free ownership of it.
it is part of the philosophy of Project Gutenburg to publish all of their works in the lowest level stardard format, thus insuring continued cross platform, program independant readability, ad infinitum.
That means *plain* ASCII. Plain ASCII means you could read it in edlin if you really had to.
This is a Good Thing.
This also means that if you wish to format any Project Gutenburg text, in HTML or TeX for publication, you start with a blank slate and can immediately start to work your own will upon the raw text.
at least *nominally* original. They don't hand a copy of the speach out to each member of Congress who then stands up and repeats it, one after the other.
Congresscritters employ their *own* speach writers to massage the speach to appear as their own.
can't fly. You even see them refered to as "flightless" birds in the text books.
The fact is that they don't fly * in air.*
Watch a penguin "in flight" and this idea is just as obvious as flying machines in air are from watching a hawk soar. I'm only surprised that it's taken this long for someone to actually go ahead and build one.
Nor is the concept unique to the water. There was an experimental plane some decades ago that was a zeppelin shaped like a flying wing. It was heavier than air, but only by a matter of pounds and flew by the lift produced by its wing shape, but was nonetheless dirigable.
I can find no reference to this plane on the web (surprise, not everything is recorded on the web, go figure) but New Yorker magazine once did a piece on it.
The basic principles of buoyancy and lift apply to any fluid medium. All the rest is just commentary and you can find "planes," "zeppelins," "blimps," and even "helicopters" in the natural underwater world as inspiration. Just as you can in air.
In fact, I've got a tradmark myself that's just about 8 years old and isn't registered. I've got another that's going on three *decades* old that I've never registered.
In point of fact, *most* trademarks, perfectly legitimate, are *never* registered and of those that are most are years, or even decades, old at the time of registration.
This is the norm.
Ok, it isn't the norm for big marketing outfits like GE or IBM who "brand" their own pee, but the PCI group isn't such a big marketing outfit.
Yes, it's true that the PCI group have registered the mark in order to make it easier to defend it on the national and internatioal level, but that isn't anything nefarious, that's the explicit *purpose* of mark registration. The fact that they've done it now is simply an indication that *now* is when their lawyers belive that such is relevant and worth the time, effort and money.
The reason most legitimate marks are never registered is because it is *never* relevant to defend them on a national scale, like, say, "Joe's Used Cars." However, there's nothing to say that Joe couldn't run his local used car lot for 40 years and then "make the big time" and go national, at which point he might then find it advantageous to register his 40 year old mark, for the first time.
not registration. This would be why they take the trouble to point out how long they've been using it.
In fact, one of the steps necessary to register a trademark is showing that you're already *using* it as such.
This prevents the trademark equivilent of cybersquatting. You can't simply go through the dictionary and register every word. It just doesn't work like that.
I think it needs a bit of expansion. I'd set it up as an industrial or military espionage situation where *both* sides are trying to access vital data the other team has, while protecting their own. Even more like capture the flag than your suggestion.
Each side would have three boxes with "hot" files on them. The goal of the game is to capture as many of your opponents hot files as you can while protecting your own. You get points for every file captured and, obviously, also loose points for every breach of your own security, even if some of those breaches don't result in the loss of a hot file. Points would also be given for every attacker "captured."
Thus each side would have two squads. There would be the security team protecting the files, as well as a "tiger team" trying to gain access to the opposing teams systems.
In fact, rather than calling it a "hacker's contest" I'd call it a Tiger Team contest.
If nothing else it makes geeks sound more "macho."
Slashdot Mirror
it *was* a Z80 machine, so at heart it was a perfectly good machine to get your feet wet in programing, at least if that's all you could get your hands on.
For that matter, they're still making Z80s and I've been toying with the idea of hacking up a "modern/old" computer just for kicks.
KFG
I found it in one of Alex Wade's classic post and beam/energy efficient house books.
The idea was old even then, ancient in fact. The toilet works better with humus ( that's the topsoil type of humus, not the mashed up chickpea sort of humus, although I know there are people who claim there's no essential difference) than with sawdust. The humus both represses odors better and contains living bacteria to go right to work breaking down the fecal matter.
Of course doing anything like this and using it for compost in the garden is very dependant on proper composting technique. A *proper* compost pile gets quite hot naturally. You'll never see a compost pile properly maintained covered with snow, but you *will* see steam coming off of it in cold, wet weather.
If you're a bit squeamish about these things the obvious answer is to use your human waste compost to fertilize non fruit bearing trees and other ornamental plants.
One of the other uses of this sort of toilet is that it's the safest, cheapest and most effective self contained marine toilet I've ever seen. No valves to fail. No expensive fixtures. No song and dance just to use and no through hull fittings. It's the old "cedar bucket" taken to the logical and extreme development.
KFG
Nearly everything he ever wrote ( Like If I Had a Hammer) has been attributed to Pete in the public mind, while he himself remains largely unknown.
As a point of interest when Lee died he was cremated and his ashes were, indeed, scattered on his compost heap.
There is also a cowboy reincarnation joke I learned from Utah Phillips. I won't go over the whole thing, but the punchline involves another cowboy looking at a "meadow muffin" and saying, "Nope, you ain't changed a bit."
KFG
I think they just didn't consider it as fitting the catagory of console.
The Adam was an *extension* of the Colecovision that turned it into a peronal computer. I've known a number of Adam owners and not one ever considered it a games machine at all.
Now as a *personal computer*, boy was it a huge failure. Ate up all the Cabbage Patch Doll profits, and then some. They made them right down the road from me a piece and when the company went under they were giving them away like promotional pens.
Even for free they weren't really worth it, as far as I'm concerned, but believe it or not there are *still* people using these things. I know one of them. But they all seem to use it as dedicated WP machine more than anything else. The built in daisy wheel printer seems to be the main attraction.
Ironically it was the low quality of this printer that was one of the key factors in the Adam's failure.
Oh yeah, that and the built in *300* baud modem when 2400 was the norm.
The Adam was built to a price point using whatever *discontinued* stuff they could scrounge up from other manufacturers (the daisy wheel was a Smith-Corona) to slap it together. The public realized that and stayed away from it in the proverbial droves.
KFG
Today the International Brotherhood of Hired Elimination Agents of Terror, HEAT began lobbying for changes in the definition of murder.
A member who would only speak to us with his face turned all grey and fuzzy for some reason, and a voice that sounds like some cheap sci-fi movie robot talking through a tin can had this to say:
"Look, the current laws just don't make a viable business model for our endeavors. We're just legitimate businessmen. We're just trying to earn a living. We have families to feed, just like everyone else and we have a right to do so. Not only that but the law *requires* that we do everything we can to produce value for our "stockholders." It just isn't right for the law to arbitrarily prevent us from going about our normal, everyday business.
We have to eat too you know. We have a *right* to make a living."
Then he shot our sound technician while mumbling something about unpaid sports gambling debts.
If you would like to support this cause you can make donations by calling your local paving company and whispering " Seabiscuit in the fifth."
They'll know what to do.
KFG
Between friends?
KFG
PG doesn't restrict itself to the written word and it's works include midi and mp3 files.
Perhaps I should have been more exact and explicit in my original statements. PG *tries* to provide whatever coding method that results in the lowest level human understandable output, preferably in a nonpropriatary format.
Obviously for Kanji or Vedic Sanskrit ( or recorded music) this is not plain ASCII ( by which I actually mean extended ASCII, not "teletype" ASCII).
KFG
Diores, Scribe of Euripides: Master, I've been copying your latest play for hours and my limbs are getting numb.
Euripides: Well of course they are you idiot. Get up and move around once in a while why don't you? Sheesh, slaves these days are such incredable doofuses they don't even know how to take care of themselves.
Diores: Oh bless you master! I never thought of that, who would have even thought that moving around for a bit now and then would be advisable?
Euripides: Well, I guess that's why I'm the genius and you're the slave, eh? It's no wonder we conquered your pansy assed people.
So this scene need not be repeated in *another* few thousand years let me spell it out for you people. It's common knowledge that if your work keeps you sitting for long hours you should get up and move around for at least a few minutes every hour. If it keeps you on your feet for long hours you should sit down and take a rest for at least a few minutes every hour.
Geez, ain't modern science grand?
KFG
Perhaps I could have written "Fire!" in the subject box. That would have been attention getting, although false. "My comment on the story" would have been factual, but pointless.
Sometimes "Subject" means "Write something here to provide the reader a reason for proceding".
My approach seems to have worked.
If, in future, you wish to skip my posts, go ahead. I won't be offended. To each his own.
KFG
"it cripples it for creating PDFs, TeX files for printing"
You've seemed to go completely doofey here.
Wanting to produce printable documents from an ASCII terminal was kinda the reason Knuth invented TeX. N'cest pas?
If I wanted to use TeX to print Walden the very first step to take would be . . . what?
Firing up vim. That's right.
Now here I'll quote from Adobe's pdf page:
Adobe® Portable Document Format (PDF) is the open de facto standard for electronic document distribution worldwide. Adobe PDF is a universal file format that preserves all the fonts, formatting, graphics, and color of any source document, *regardless of the application and platform used to create it.*
Yes, I added the emphasis myself.
I'll refrain from mentioning how weird it would be to produce a pdf document from ASCII text though, since ASCII already perfectly duplicates ASCII, and in a nonproriatary and smaller file size.
Instead I'll simply point out that to convert an ASCII file into pdf one would *first* format it into the finished product of your choice and then convert *that* to pdf.
Why one would want to distribute Walden as a pdf file I'll leave as an exercise for the student (mostly because I'd be interested to see the answer myself. It beats the hell out of me. Maybe you're a font Nazi and don't believe in letting the reader use a font that *they* find pleasant to read?).
Your SGML comment is doofey beyond comprehension. SGML was developed at IBM as an ASCII markup language. HTML and XML are both interpretations of the SGML standard. The *point* of SGML is to take the plain text and create a document. I do it all the frikkin' time. So do millions of others. In vim.
You can find the author's recollection of its development here:
http://www.sgmlsource.com/history/roots.htm
I also use ASCII to write in more than one language. It's true that I don't write Chinese ideograms in it, but how one would go about it is trivial and obvious, although one *would* need an interpreting display layer, such as SGML/HTML/XML, where the trivial and obvious work has already been done, although not to everyone's satisfaction, to make it conviently human readable.
Forgive me if this post seems a bit bluff, but I'm truely baffled by your post.
KFG
In fact ASCII text can even be human translated (although not really human read) if all you have is the *binary*.
The poster to whom you reply seems to have missed the essential point.
I would give you one caveat though. English may well be the language of the internet ( and I'll leave the arguement as to whether that's a good or bad thing to the students), but it isn't the language of *literature.*
It would certainly be a Good Thing to be able to store the Vedas and Sun-Tzu, in the original script, at the lowest possible human readable electronic form.
This, however, as you note, will apparently have to wait for some future time.
KFG
comments commenting on the duplication of comments?
Your post alone has served to convince me that we not only need a +1 troll rating, but might well need a +1 redundant as well.
KFG
full grown, like Athena springing from the head of Zeus, this criticism is largely valid.
Patience, however, is a virtue. Libraries of public domain works *grow.* Every work added remains. Although it may take many years, even generations, as did the construction of the Giza plaza, over time The pyramid grows toward its apex, another pyramid joins it, a temple is added to the side, and so on.
That's part of the point of Project Gutenburg. Not just to provide an online library but to do so in an immutable manner that only grows over time.
Adding only *one page* to the project is valuable, and that addition remains and is added to by others.
Even brick and mortar libraries can take generations to build. A two hundred year plan only requires patience to complete.
That said, I'm going to take an even more contrarian point of view to the Wired article. The amazing thing I find about Project Gutenburg is how much is already in there. It's already at the point that I think few people could manage to read one half of the texts available in their lifetime, and finding a project to donate is complicated by the fact that the hardest part may not be performing the labor, but simply finding a project that interests you that *hasn't already been done.*
It's already a remarkable collection, and I've had to, on occasion, resort to it because my local library didn't have a lending copy of the work I wanted, but Project Gutenburg could give me free ownership of it.
KFG
it is part of the philosophy of Project Gutenburg to publish all of their works in the lowest level stardard format, thus insuring continued cross platform, program independant readability, ad infinitum.
That means *plain* ASCII. Plain ASCII means you could read it in edlin if you really had to.
This is a Good Thing.
This also means that if you wish to format any Project Gutenburg text, in HTML or TeX for publication, you start with a blank slate and can immediately start to work your own will upon the raw text.
This is also a Good Thing.
KFG
living on SS and it's petty larceny. Maximum sentence of about a year. If she wants her money back she can sue you when you get out.
"Steal" a $.50 song from Metallica, go to jail for three years and pay a $250,000 dollar fine.
Yeah, that sounds about right.
KFG
at least *nominally* original. They don't hand a copy of the speach out to each member of Congress who then stands up and repeats it, one after the other.
Congresscritters employ their *own* speach writers to massage the speach to appear as their own.
KFG
just walks up to random people on the street and asks them questions.
KFG
His New Yorker essay on the plane is one of my favorite bits of magazine writing. Obviously he was working on the book at the time too.
KFG
he can have lunch at TGI Friday's in Kathmandu, while wearing his khakis he bought at the local Gap outlet.
Good thing he's in Nepal, not Tibet. In Lhasa they've only got a Wimpy's.
Ignorant savages.
KFG
before someone connected my penguin observation to Linux.
Let's just say that "Blue Screen of Death" takes on a whole new meaning 1000 feet below the surface of the sea.
Would *you* risk it?
KFG
can't fly. You even see them refered to as "flightless" birds in the text books.
The fact is that they don't fly * in air.*
Watch a penguin "in flight" and this idea is just as obvious as flying machines in air are from watching a hawk soar. I'm only surprised that it's taken this long for someone to actually go ahead and build one.
Nor is the concept unique to the water. There was an experimental plane some decades ago that was a zeppelin shaped like a flying wing. It was heavier than air, but only by a matter of pounds and flew by the lift produced by its wing shape, but was nonetheless dirigable.
I can find no reference to this plane on the web (surprise, not everything is recorded on the web, go figure) but New Yorker magazine once did a piece on it.
The basic principles of buoyancy and lift apply to any fluid medium. All the rest is just commentary and you can find "planes," "zeppelins," "blimps," and even "helicopters" in the natural underwater world as inspiration. Just as you can in air.
KFG
In fact, I've got a tradmark myself that's just about 8 years old and isn't registered. I've got another that's going on three *decades* old that I've never registered.
In point of fact, *most* trademarks, perfectly legitimate, are *never* registered and of those that are most are years, or even decades, old at the time of registration.
This is the norm.
Ok, it isn't the norm for big marketing outfits like GE or IBM who "brand" their own pee, but the PCI group isn't such a big marketing outfit.
Yes, it's true that the PCI group have registered the mark in order to make it easier to defend it on the national and internatioal level, but that isn't anything nefarious, that's the explicit *purpose* of mark registration. The fact that they've done it now is simply an indication that *now* is when their lawyers belive that such is relevant and worth the time, effort and money.
The reason most legitimate marks are never registered is because it is *never* relevant to defend them on a national scale, like, say, "Joe's Used Cars." However, there's nothing to say that Joe couldn't run his local used car lot for 40 years and then "make the big time" and go national, at which point he might then find it advantageous to register his 40 year old mark, for the first time.
KFG
not registration. This would be why they take the trouble to point out how long they've been using it.
In fact, one of the steps necessary to register a trademark is showing that you're already *using* it as such.
This prevents the trademark equivilent of cybersquatting. You can't simply go through the dictionary and register every word. It just doesn't work like that.
This is a Good Thing(tm).
KFG
Nah, it'll be a, ummmmm, "big" success when it starts attracting women with *large* metal bras that just *look* small.
I can't help but wonder though. Are the metal bras protection against the aliens beaming messages to their "assets"?
KFG
I think it needs a bit of expansion. I'd set it up as an industrial or military espionage situation where *both* sides are trying to access vital data the other team has, while protecting their own. Even more like capture the flag than your suggestion.
Each side would have three boxes with "hot" files on them. The goal of the game is to capture as many of your opponents hot files as you can while protecting your own. You get points for every file captured and, obviously, also loose points for every breach of your own security, even if some of those breaches don't result in the loss of a hot file. Points would also be given for every attacker "captured."
Thus each side would have two squads. There would be the security team protecting the files, as well as a "tiger team" trying to gain access to the opposing teams systems.
In fact, rather than calling it a "hacker's contest" I'd call it a Tiger Team contest.
If nothing else it makes geeks sound more "macho."
KFG