OK, so I hit the space bar to fire a shell arching through the air in the general direction of my opponent, disintegrating in a ball of flame and lethal shrapnel splinters much to the annoyance of local mountain goats.
However, nothing happens.
Either the code is bust, some improvement in the instructions is required, or I tried to fire a dud.
It's not a big deal. All you need is a centre-tapped transformer if you want to get quick & dirty. Let one half of your LEDs light up on the positive half of the phase, the other half on the negative. Use of capacitors to double light output is left as an exercise to the diligent student.
I tend to use amber high-brightness (6.5 candela) LEDs because they'll run off 2xAAA with no electronics other than a weedy resistor. Inserted into one of those glasses-like head lights instead of bulbs, I can run them for months on the batteries that won't work in my pager.
US Presidents aren't voted for, they're auctioned to the highest bidder these days. They're advertised like breakfast cereal and lack a money-back guarantee like some software I could mention.
Shame the authors of the US constitution didn't write in a clause for removing an entrenched 2 party system, isn't it?
So Mir holds the record for continuous habitation. It's lasted longer that the projected life of the ISS, and it's now unoccupied. Who says the same won't happen to the ISS?
Look at the Apollo missions: We've not been back to the moon for over 25 years for crying out loud.
All the good aerospace gear - X15, Blackbird, Saturn V, DynaSoar - was invented when I was a youngster. All we have to show now is a broken X33, an international space station mostly made of Russian components (not that I have a problem with that) and a recycle-50%-after-every-launch space shuttle.
Roll on nanotechnology, 'cos do we ever need it to get off this dirtball.
I thought it looked like a good idea, so I had a go. I shared heaps of disk space over an ISDN link. I set up another one over a 28K modem line.
Both lost mojo hand over fist just for being there. I tried downloading twice over a 3-week period and lost over 1,000 mojo a day excluding that spent on the two downloads.
As a concept, it's great. As a practical implementation I fear it is badly implemented at best and heavily stacked at worst.
I've gone over to Freenet to see if it's any better.
WebSite Director has been doing sterling service in the web authoring domain for years now. In fact, the 13 December 1999 issue of PC Week had a playoff between different packages of this genre.
How some ***** can come along and patent the concept without thoroughly researching prior art like this is downright incredible. Can they be done for incompetence or fraud or something?
Vik:v)
Why the hell make it KDE specific?
on
KBasic
·
· Score: 1
Once again we see an application created from scratch with the built-in limitation that only KDE users are going to be able to use it.
Why not make it generic? Eh? Come on, why not?
It increases the user base, and the potential number of contributors.
This just illustrates that the Government attitude that brought you the $300 hammer is still working well. Hey, let's continue to spend lots and lots of money on using an inefficient operating system rather than bringing a free one up to scratch. At least if it goes wrong it's someone else's problem, right?
The day Microsoft make something that doesn't suck will be the day they start making vaccuum cleaners.
I joined the Artemis Society http://www.asi.org to do that, but it's taking a wee while to happen. It's got as far as booking a launch on a converted SS18 ICBM for a satellite (TB2001) that should prove I'm serious enough.
Once the world wakes up (and the TransOrbital lunar satellite should provide some impetus for that), I'm sure interplanetary travel will eventually be practical for the individual. I'm fairly confident that will happen within my lifetime.
Meanwhiles, back at the ranch, we'd like to build the ranch. "Geek Compound" as we call it, is envisaged to be built in a relatively isolated community centred around a high-speed data pipe and a self-contained pizza bakery in a warmish part of New Zealand. Other geeky features of this little village include a hydroponic greenhouse (trial system on my web page), use of renewable power sources and impressive perimeter monitoring systems. Good fences make good neighbours.
'Cos I'm married to this wonderful geek lady called Suz, it'll have to be done on a couples basis. Cats welcome, and dogs too as long as they aren't too stringy.
I use POVray from http://www.povray.org to do the actual rendering - and its quality is absolutely f'ing brilliant.
For Windows users, Moray is a nice designer that generates POV files. It's not free but there is a try-before-you-buy version. See POVray homepage.
Under Linux there wasn't one - so I'm helping build Giram. It's GPL, usable and does DXF files as well as POV. The new (0.1.7) release is coming RSN, so watch http://www.giram.org/ for details.
I'm one of the people whose company has been taken for a ride by government agencies snooping on our e-mail and giving it to rival companies that they approve of. The rival companies then show our e-mail to our prospective clients with their doctored numbers by the side of it.
Encryption is the only way to go. They're not after pornograhpers; pornographers are just a handle to lever the laws past the ignorant general public (half of whom are below average intelligence, don't forget). They're really after people who could expose their wrongdoings.
Unfortunately, they've now passed a law which says you have to hand the decryption keys over on request or spent 2 years in a UK jail - even if you've forgotten the password. So, the UK cops can now say "Give me the password for this ZIP file you encrypted in 1988. Can't remember? Tough. Go to jail for 2 years."
I fled the UK because of lunatic guilty-until-proven-innocent laws like this and I can't see myself going back now.
I've installed a few machines, and WindowMaker seems to be the most intuitive and flexible window manager around. It looks simple, which doesn't faze the beginners, but is flexible underneath and supports applets. It's also Gnome compatible for those who must.
This guy is big on there being a whole system out there which keep my data. Uh, no thanks. I'll keep my own data on my own storage medium, and I strongly suspect that in 15 years time this repository will be carried around on my own person. Not left around in a system I have no control over waiting to be cyberhacked.
Heck, my pants in 15 years time are going to have more processing power that I have on my desktop right now. The question is: Will they run Linux?
I say yes. Linux has this habit of evolving and - more importantly - being ported. As long as Linux develops SMP further and continues to be the most portable system out there, it'll carry on indefinitely.
100um is not far off the upper limit for cells in the human body, though it's true enough that you're not going to be doing a lot of cellular work with that arm. The average red blood cell is in the 7-9um range.
But bear in mind that this micro-arm is the first one ever. These things are likely to get smaller as experience is gained, and there's not a lot of point in doing research work on a device that you can't diagnose - keeping it visible is a good idea for research purposes.
Another thought: 6 months ago 500nm was the size of the best state-of-the-art gripper, and that couldn't work inside a human body anyway as it was made of silicon. That's just a pair of tweezers too, not the whole arm. What will we get in the next 6 months?
How soon until the smallest arm we can make can manipulate the largest regular molecules we can make? I say within 5 years.
Whatever they call it, it sounds like a damn fine idea. I must admit that don't use GNOME (much) or KDE (at all), but a package that takes the best from both worlds has to be A Good Thing (TM), and is the Open Source way.
You have the good press, you have the servers, you have the knowledge, and Ghu only knows there's a lot of Microshaft software out there that people don't want:)
http://www.strongnet.co.nz control the rights to the.cx (Christmas Island) domain. You might want to have a word with them. Tell 'em Suz & Vik sent ya.
Did it ocurr to you that the student may well view the situation as far more than a game? The abuse and erosion of rights by corporations manipulating the legal system is perhaps one that you yourself should pay more concern to. Leaping in and pulling pages willy-nilly in a knee-jerk reaction is arguably not the best way of protecting your network or your students.
Title of item: Your Business Card Sent to the Moon in 2001 Minimum bid: $500.00 Reserve price (if any): $0.00 Quantity: 1 Auction Ends on: Thursday, May 25, 2000 at 09:57:43 PDT
Questions answered:
Gregory Nemitz VP, TransOrbital, Inc. USA 619-528-0520 gnemitz@transorbital.net
TransOrbital Inc. initially spun off from the Artemis Project, as a company to prove that commercial flights to the moon were possible. It still has that aim, but has aquired a slightly wider scope.
Some of the images (which are to be much more detailed than Clementine's) will be used by the Artemis Project to determine if usable structures such as lava tubes exist.
Slashdot Mirror
OK, so I hit the space bar to fire a shell arching through the air in the general direction of my opponent, disintegrating in a ball of flame and lethal shrapnel splinters much to the annoyance of local mountain goats.
:v)
However, nothing happens.
Either the code is bust, some improvement in the instructions is required, or I tried to fire a dud.
Vik
Jah Love, Man.
Vik :v)
I tend to use amber high-brightness (6.5 candela) LEDs because they'll run off 2xAAA with no electronics other than a weedy resistor. Inserted into one of those glasses-like head lights instead of bulbs, I can run them for months on the batteries that won't work in my pager.
Vik :v)
US Presidents aren't voted for, they're auctioned to the highest bidder these days. They're advertised like breakfast cereal and lack a money-back guarantee like some software I could mention.
:v)
Shame the authors of the US constitution didn't write in a clause for removing an entrenched 2 party system, isn't it?
Vik
So Mir holds the record for continuous habitation. It's lasted longer that the projected life of the ISS, and it's now unoccupied. Who says the same won't happen to the ISS?
:v)
Look at the Apollo missions: We've not been back to the moon for over 25 years for crying out loud.
All the good aerospace gear - X15, Blackbird, Saturn V, DynaSoar - was invented when I was a youngster. All we have to show now is a broken X33, an international space station mostly made of Russian components (not that I have a problem with that) and a recycle-50%-after-every-launch space shuttle.
Roll on nanotechnology, 'cos do we ever need it to get off this dirtball.
Vik
I thought it looked like a good idea, so I had a go. I shared heaps of disk space over an ISDN link. I set up another one over a 28K modem line.
:v)
Both lost mojo hand over fist just for being there. I tried downloading twice over a 3-week period and lost over 1,000 mojo a day excluding that spent on the two downloads.
As a concept, it's great. As a practical implementation I fear it is badly implemented at best and heavily stacked at worst.
I've gone over to Freenet to see if it's any better.
Vik
WebSite Director has been doing sterling service in the web authoring domain for years now. In fact, the 13 December 1999 issue of PC Week had a playoff between different packages of this genre.
:v)
How some ***** can come along and patent the concept without thoroughly researching prior art like this is downright incredible. Can they be done for incompetence or fraud or something?
Vik
Once again we see an application created from scratch with the built-in limitation that only KDE users are going to be able to use it.
:v)
Why not make it generic? Eh? Come on, why not?
It increases the user base, and the potential number of contributors.
How hard can it be?
Vik
This just illustrates that the Government attitude that brought you the $300 hammer is still working well. Hey, let's continue to spend lots and lots of money on using an inefficient operating system rather than bringing a free one up to scratch. At least if it goes wrong it's someone else's problem, right?
:v)
The day Microsoft make something that doesn't suck will be the day they start making vaccuum cleaners.
Vik
But it'd be a real bugger to hook into the internet from there.
:v)
Vik
I joined the Artemis Society http://www.asi.org to do that, but it's taking a wee while to happen. It's got as far as booking a launch on a converted SS18 ICBM for a satellite (TB2001) that should prove I'm serious enough.
:v)
Once the world wakes up (and the TransOrbital lunar satellite should provide some impetus for that), I'm sure interplanetary travel will eventually be practical for the individual. I'm fairly confident that will happen within my lifetime.
Meanwhiles, back at the ranch, we'd like to build the ranch. "Geek Compound" as we call it, is envisaged to be built in a relatively isolated community centred around a high-speed data pipe and a self-contained pizza bakery in a warmish part of New Zealand. Other geeky features of this little village include a hydroponic greenhouse (trial system on my web page), use of renewable power sources and impressive perimeter monitoring systems. Good fences make good neighbours.
'Cos I'm married to this wonderful geek lady called Suz, it'll have to be done on a couples basis. Cats welcome, and dogs too as long as they aren't too stringy.
Vik
I use POVray from http://www.povray.org to do the actual rendering - and its quality is absolutely f'ing brilliant.
:v)
For Windows users, Moray is a nice designer that generates POV files. It's not free but there is a try-before-you-buy version. See POVray homepage.
Under Linux there wasn't one - so I'm helping build Giram. It's GPL, usable and does DXF files as well as POV. The new (0.1.7) release is coming RSN, so watch http://www.giram.org/ for details.
Vik
I'm one of the people whose company has been taken for a ride by government agencies snooping on our e-mail and giving it to rival companies that they approve of. The rival companies then show our e-mail to our prospective clients with their doctored numbers by the side of it.
:v)
Encryption is the only way to go. They're not after pornograhpers; pornographers are just a handle to lever the laws past the ignorant general public (half of whom are below average intelligence, don't forget). They're really after people who could expose their wrongdoings.
Unfortunately, they've now passed a law which says you have to hand the decryption keys over on request or spent 2 years in a UK jail - even if you've forgotten the password. So, the UK cops can now say "Give me the password for this ZIP file you encrypted in 1988. Can't remember? Tough. Go to jail for 2 years."
I fled the UK because of lunatic guilty-until-proven-innocent laws like this and I can't see myself going back now.
Vik
I've installed a few machines, and WindowMaker seems to be the most intuitive and flexible window manager around. It looks simple, which doesn't faze the beginners, but is flexible underneath and supports applets. It's also Gnome compatible for those who must.
:v)
Vik
This guy is big on there being a whole system out there which keep my data. Uh, no thanks. I'll keep my own data on my own storage medium, and I strongly suspect that in 15 years time this repository will be carried around on my own person. Not left around in a system I have no control over waiting to be cyberhacked.
:v)
Heck, my pants in 15 years time are going to have more processing power that I have on my desktop right now. The question is: Will they run Linux?
I say yes. Linux has this habit of evolving and - more importantly - being ported. As long as Linux develops SMP further and continues to be the most portable system out there, it'll carry on indefinitely.
Vik
100um is not far off the upper limit for cells in the human body, though it's true enough that you're not going to be doing a lot of cellular work with that arm. The average red blood cell is in the 7-9um range.
:v)
But bear in mind that this micro-arm is the first one ever. These things are likely to get smaller as experience is gained, and there's not a lot of point in doing research work on a device that you can't diagnose - keeping it visible is a good idea for research purposes.
Another thought: 6 months ago 500nm was the size of the best state-of-the-art gripper, and that couldn't work inside a human body anyway as it was made of silicon. That's just a pair of tweezers too, not the whole arm. What will we get in the next 6 months?
How soon until the smallest arm we can make can manipulate the largest regular molecules we can make? I say within 5 years.
Vik
Whatever they call it, it sounds like a damn fine idea. I must admit that don't use GNOME (much) or KDE (at all), but a package that takes the best from both worlds has to be A Good Thing (TM), and is the Open Source way.
:v)
Vik
It can always serve admirably as a bad example.
:v)
Vik
You have the good press, you have the servers, you have the knowledge, and Ghu only knows there's a lot of Microshaft software out there that people don't want :)
:v)
Vik
http://www.strongnet.co.nz control the rights to the .cx (Christmas Island) domain. You might want to have a word with them. Tell 'em Suz & Vik sent ya.
:v)
Vik
Did it ocurr to you that the student may well view the situation as far more than a game? The abuse and erosion of rights by corporations manipulating the legal system is perhaps one that you yourself should pay more concern to. Leaping in and pulling pages willy-nilly in a knee-jerk reaction is arguably not the best way of protecting your network or your students.
:v)
Vik
TransOrbital, Inc. (http://www.transorbital.net) offers service to put a business card on the Moon at auction on ebay. Details below.
Link to Auction:
Let the trading begin--your item is listed!
http://cgi.ebay.co m/aw-cgi/eBayISAPI.dll?ViewItem&item=333215424
Title of item: Your Business Card Sent to the Moon in 2001
Minimum bid: $500.00
Reserve price (if any): $0.00
Quantity: 1
Auction Ends on: Thursday, May 25, 2000 at 09:57:43 PDT
Questions answered:
Gregory Nemitz
VP, TransOrbital, Inc.
USA 619-528-0520
gnemitz@transorbital.net
I can't give out any secrets, but let's just say we do actually have a means of achieving the necessary resolution.
:)
:v)
Personally, I'm quite excited
Vik
[Designer/Artist for TransOrbital]
The Artemis Project (http://www.asi.org) is still going strong.
:v)
TransOrbital Inc. initially spun off from the Artemis Project, as a company to prove that commercial flights to the moon were possible. It still has that aim, but has aquired a slightly wider scope.
Some of the images (which are to be much more detailed than Clementine's) will be used by the Artemis Project to determine if usable structures such as lava tubes exist.
Vik
[Designer/Artist for TransOrbital]
Just goes to show: It's the 1% that's the kicker, right?
:v)
Vik