I can remember going to a university interview for a
place on a computing degree, circa 1975. A group of us were sitting around waiting for our turn, and
were told that if we wanted to play on a computer,
there was a PDP-8 running FOCAL[1] in the corner of the room. I was the only one that had ever used a computer before[2] or who showed any interest in playing with it, and by the time my turn came for the face-to-face with the lecturers, I had written
a trivial prime number printer.
Googling for "FOCAL" turned up
this interesting page on the taxonomy of computer languages
In November 2003, it was reported that Belkin had added code to the firmware in their routers that every 8 hours would grab a random HTTP connection and redirect it to advertising on their web site. I personally no longer trust them or their products.
New Scientist is currently running a competition in association with Firebox.com.
Is it just co-incidence that the Blast Match fire
starter (a particularly useless item of "survival" gear, at least here in the UK) which is number 8 in the NS gift guide hi-tech list, is available from Firebox? Ditto the Powerball.
Each DMD(TM) is a square mirror about 16 um (16 microns, or millionths of a meter) on a side, and can flip ten degrees one way (on) or the other (off). The switching is controlled electrostatically, and takes about 2 uS (two microseconds).
That mirror is flipping between an "on" and
an "off" position. For the virtual display, you
will need to sweep the mirror linearly across an angle, in two dimensions. Using two mirrors is non-trivial, since the beam reflected off the first mirror will strike the second mirror at a position away from the centre, making the geometry
calculations complicated.
The article mentions a single mirror. This implies
that the display is a vector, rather than a raster display.
Vector displays (e.g. the
Textronix 4010) required storage tubes, i.e. tubes with a very long persistance phospor.
I used to work for a company that produced a High
Resolution Display that used mirrors to steer a
red or blue laser beam onto a sheet of
photochromic film - the blue laser would permanently write
on the film - the red laser could be used for drawing small amounts of vector graphics - a cursor, or a few characters of text. Doing complex graphics in vector mode when the persistence of the human eye is less than 40ms will require the mirror to be scanned at very high frequencies
Shadowcrew has its very own entry in the
Snopes Urban legends page, after being the subject of
"Joe-Job" e-mails claiming that "your credit card has been charged $149.95 for
child pornography"
One can only wonder who was responsible. A rival group of fraudsters perhaps, or someone trying to bring them into further disrepute?
Moving processing out into special purpose processers, and then back into the main one again as
Moore's Law takes effect has been known about since the term
the wheel of reincarnation was coined back in 1968.
My favourite silly scientific name is "Puffinus Puffinus". This is not the Puffin,
but the unrelated Manx Shearwater. And the more often you type the word "Puffin", the sillier it looks.
Reported only yesterday, a ladybird being sold around the world for pest control may out-compete native ladybirds, and eat the eggs of butterflies and lacewings.
They also blemish soft fruits and their acrid defensive chemicals taint wines.
Shortly before it went tits-up in the aftermath of Y2K (lots of testing in 1999, not so much afterwards), and the bursting of the Dot.Com bubble,
one of my previous employers decided to release the
software testing application they had developed under the GPL. It's called OpenSTA and
it's available at SourceForge.
It's designed to stress test web pages, and analyse the load on web servers, database servers and operating systems.
There is also a new company - Cyrano that has
risen from the ashes of the old one, and provides many other testing tools, including regression testing.
_ALL_ Economics is based on "frankly don't have a clue on how to address it", except for the little bit that actually understands that the economy is a dynamic system with a _huge_ number of bodies and variables, and thus you must consider it using probablistic and statistical methods.
If copyright law is changed so that it extends some number of years after the death of the artists, rather than from the date of release of the recording, will we see the likes of 2 year old "Heavenly Hiraani Tiger Lily", "Fifi Trixibelle" and "Moon Unit" banging a drum on the backing track to prolong copyright as much as possible?
gawk
talk
nice
date
wine
grep
touch
unzip
strip
touch
gasp
finger
gasp
lyx
mount
fsck
more
yes
gasp
umount
more
yes
suck
make clean
make mrproper
sleep
and a long string of text to get around the lameness filters
Perhaps OSDN should send the defendant, accused in 2001 of reading users emails in order to find out what they were interested in purchasing from Amazon, a T-shirt from ThinkGeek?"
The soon-to-be-released Spamassassin 3.0 will have
the URIBL_SBL test. This will test the IP address
of domains referenced in the body of the spam against lists of known spammer hosts. This will reliably trap all of the 70% of spam that advertises
web sites hosted in China.
in this posting to news.admin.net-abuse.email, Steve makes a couple of corrections to the article:
> Linford also told the conference that some 70 percent of spam is sent > from China by American spam outfits who are hosting their servers with > Chinese ISPs.
That should say: "70% of spam advertises URLs hosted in China" (not "is sent from").
...
> Unless things change drastically, we predict that 80 percent of > email will be spam by December this year, and it's very likely to go > to 90 percent by this summer," Linford warned.
Slashdot Mirror
Googling for "FOCAL" turned up this interesting page on the taxonomy of computer languages
[1]h tml
0 6&language=FOCAL
http://www.faqs.org/faqs/dec-faq/pdp8/section-11.
http://hopl.murdoch.edu.au/showlanguage.prx?exp=4
[2] my school had use of a HP 9830 for half a term a year, and I was the one usually found in front of it after school.
In November 2003, it was reported that Belkin had added code to the firmware in their routers that every 8 hours would grab a random HTTP connection and redirect it to advertising on their web site. I personally no longer trust them or their products.
Is it just co-incidence that the Blast Match fire starter (a particularly useless item of "survival" gear, at least here in the UK) which is number 8 in the NS gift guide hi-tech list, is available from Firebox? Ditto the Powerball.
I used to work for a company that produced a High Resolution Display that used mirrors to steer a red or blue laser beam onto a sheet of photochromic film - the blue laser would permanently write on the film - the red laser could be used for drawing small amounts of vector graphics - a cursor, or a few characters of text. Doing complex graphics in vector mode when the persistence of the human eye is less than 40ms will require the mirror to be scanned at very high frequencies
One can only wonder who was responsible. A rival group of fraudsters perhaps, or someone trying to bring them into further disrepute?
Moving processing out into special purpose processers, and then back into the main one again as Moore's Law takes effect has been known about since the term the wheel of reincarnation was coined back in 1968.
My favourite silly scientific name is "Puffinus Puffinus". This is not the Puffin, but the unrelated Manx Shearwater. And the more often you type the word "Puffin", the sillier it looks.
Reported only yesterday, a ladybird being sold around the world for pest control may out-compete
s tm
native ladybirds, and eat the eggs of butterflies
and lacewings.
They also blemish soft fruits and their acrid defensive chemicals taint wines.
Harmonia axyridis - the Harlequin Ladybird
http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/england/essex/3715120.
Why wasn't Quatermass on the short list? It's astounding to think that early TV SF horror shows were broadcast live.
click here if you dare risk the madness.
It was the Silicon Graphics (SGI) Lavarand implementation, which was at lavarand.sgi.com.
It seems to live on at lavarnd.org
It's designed to stress test web pages, and analyse the load on web servers, database servers and operating systems.
There is also a new company - Cyrano that has risen from the ashes of the old one, and provides many other testing tools, including regression testing.
Hans Reiser has written a white paper containing his thoughts on the design of the next major version of ReiserFS.
If copyright law is changed so that it extends some number of years after the death of the artists, rather than from the date of release of the recording, will we see the likes of 2 year old "Heavenly Hiraani Tiger Lily", "Fifi Trixibelle" and "Moon Unit" banging a drum on the backing track to prolong copyright as much as possible?
talk
nice
date
wine
grep
touch
unzip
strip
touch
gasp
finger
gasp
lyx
mount
fsck
more
yes
gasp
umount
more
yes
suck
make clean
make mrproper
sleep
and a long string of text to get around the lameness filters
http://www.spamhaus.org/sbl/howtouse.html/ 25_uribl.cf
http://www.spamassassin.org/full/3.0.x/dist/rules
Their report is available at http://www.brandenburg.com/reports/200404-isc-trip -report.htm
[1] /usr/share/doc/RFC/rfc*.txt | wc -l
$ grep -lw Crocker
570