was Hermann Oberth, from Sigishoara in Romania (birthplace of Vlad the Impaler). I visited Sigishoara last year and found that the town museum had a room devoted to Oberth. The first Romanian in space (in Soviet times) was awarded the "Hermann Oberth Gold Medal".
The Science Museum has recently suffered a bit from showy makeovers that actually reduce the display space for its collection. I'd welcome the chance to see the actual objects, including the larger transport-related stuff, which has mostly disappeared.
The best workaround I have found is to set up Mercury, point that at your Pegasus data, and temporarily add an extra Imap server to Thunderbird (which actually points at localhost running mercury).
Then when you've finished moving things around, get rid of Mercury and the associated server entry in Thunderbird.
The BBC do a reasonably good Google-based search (page down for the search field) which is still up and smiling at the moment.
I can confim the IP-based blocking behaviour noted by others below. It looks like Google is trying to protect itself by failing queries from certain locations. I can't get results from my home cable, but from work (in.ac.uk) it's OK.
...compared to the living hell of their telephone system. Easily the worst ever voice-call management site I have ever encountered.
On the rare occasions where I am forced to use an Odeon these days, I tend to book my tickets by physically visting the cinema, talking to the nice students behind the counter (who have access to a decent and feature-filled UI, and can thus answer questions like "How busy is the 4:30 showing of Spiderman 2?"), and departing with my tickets physically in my hand.
I will never again book an Odeon ticket over the net, because their system is broken. I will never again book Odeon tickets over their telephone system, because their system is broken.
It pains me to say this, because ODEON is a big name in the history of British cinema & Art Deco architecture.
Re:How did this virus spread so easily?
on
SCO Offline
·
· Score: 5, Funny
The users that I support would double-click on a landmine to see what it did.
Anyone reading slashdot is by definition in a vanishingly tiny minority. We, and only we, have a relatively good sense of how how to defend ourselves.
The rest of the population are a bit like my neighbour. He has a Windows 2000 laptop (that's what it came with) and recently got an ADSL connection. His ADSL link went live about 10:30 one morning; by 12:15 he had been blocked by his ISP for spreading Blaster.
That's when he knocked on my door. I printed out his task list (i.e. things that couldn't even be bothered to cloak themselves). Including Blaster, he had already been compromised five ways. A hacked copy of Dameware was in there, plus a ratio-based FTP server. I can't remember what the other two were.
The point is, he could have unknowingly been carrying gigabytes of warez or child porn on the same day he bought his shiny new ADSL modem.
So I'm inclined to take very seriously the "it wasn't me" defence. For almost everyone, it's true.
The Netbook! It is, and always was, TOO BLOODY BIG.
I wish they would continue developing the Psion Series 5 line, which has the best small keyboard ever made. I'm being very careful with my last surviving 5mx, but nothing lasts forever.
I was really impressed by Epoc32 at the time (mid 1990s?) but I'd buy an updated Series 5 running anything - Linux, Symbian Quartz, MS Pocket PC - whatever. Just so long as they kept the keyboard. And fixed the stylus retainer!
I don't think you're taking this seriously enough.
According to this article today's Guardian, pirates killed or injured 145 people at sea in the first three months of this year. There are calls for the Royal Navy to station warships in the affected areas, to protect trade routes.
So you see, piracy is an ongoing and deadly threat... oh wait... *reads thread again*... Somebody seems to have started using the word "piracy" to mean "copyright violation". What an odd thing to do.
I thought that MS responded to this longstanding problem by putting code in later service packs that disables machines running on leaked keys. (Or at least, getting your permission to do this in the EULA - dunno if they've actually done it yet.) So a naughty server manager would be faced with the choice of running an increasingly old and unpatched copy of Windows Server, or updating it and finding that it had been remotely broken by MS.
Aha, I have dim memories of horrid Foxpro for DOS locking oddities. But too long ago to remember if we ever found a fix.
Foxpro for windows was even more of a giggle. I remember an accounting system written in Foxpro for Windows that one day offered us the unforgettable message "Fatal Error 6 attempting to report Error 6".
It's retro-computing day for me today - just dug out a Victor Sirius 9000 (vintage 1982) to read and transfer some data disks. Works perfectly!
I guess your problem is that MS Network Client for DOS (Lan Manager 2.2 client?) works well over netbeui and badly over tcp/ip (memory and other problems). NT offers SMB over Netbeui, Samba doesn't as yet AFAIK (some info here).
Where I work, we have to support one elderly networked DOS app. It runs splendidly in a DOS window under NT or 2000, 640K DOS memory! The network redirections are all passed through to the underlying NT/2000 operating system which talks nicely to Samba.
The DRM mess has collided with another well-known mess - horribly bad software.
This Christmas, amongst other things, my daughter got an iPod and my son got one of the new, USB-driven, Sony NetMD minidisc players, and the Shakira album on "CD".
Well, 'tis the Night After Christmas, and all through the house, not a creature is stirring except.... me. Now, after a few false starts, the Shakira album is going to.WAV files thanks to a well-placed sticker rather than a sharpie. For the iPod, I installed the recommended MusicMatch Jukebox, which is simply the worst piece of commercial software I have ever seen. So I deleted that and have since installed and happily used ephpod.
Sadly, for the minidisc player I am stuck with another dire piece of software, Sony's OpenMG. Incredibly cluttered UI, bizarre colours, incomprehensible DRM-inspired nomenclature ("check in", "check out").
I'm not cruel enough to leave my son to try to figure out how to transfer his brand new (Sony-sourced) Shakira album to his brand-new (Sony-sourced) minidisc player. Hence I'm staying up late to do it all myself.
I'm a geek dad. I moved RAMTOP on my Sinclair as a kid. I remember the syntax to PIP. I have known the obscure pleasure of deeply nested emulation. My kids used to mock me by chanting "SCSI BIOS! SPOOLER! SCSI BIOS! SPOOLER!" at the tops of their voices. If I'm finding it tiresome and laborious, then quite a lot of unhappy customers out there are finding it impossible.
I fed it Hugh, Pugh and Barney Mcgrew - and it gave the right answer.
It can't be far from becoming self-aware.
george
...and look how well slate.msn.com is working now!
on
Windows XP Has Arrived
·
· Score: 1
To coincide with the launch, Slate has had a makeover and now runs on.Net. Unfortunately most of the content is now along these lines:
Server Error in '/' Application.
Server Too Busy
Description: An unhandled exception occurred during the execution of the current web request. Please review the stack trace for more information about the error and where it originated in the code.
Exception Details: System.Web.HttpException: Server Too Busy
Source Error:
An unhandled exception was generated during the execution of the current web request. Information regarding the origin and location of the exception can be identifed using the exception stack trace below.
Stack Trace:
[HttpException (0x80004005): Server Too Busy]
System.Web.HttpRuntime.RejectRequestInternal(HttpW orkerRequest wr) +138
Version Information:Microsoft.NET Framework Version:1.0.3215.11; ASP.NET Version:1.0.3215.11
Quick! buy another 1,000 CPU's for the server farm!
The first spreadsheet I ever used was written by Psion. It was called VU-CALC and it ran on the Sinclair Spectrum. (Z80 at 0.4 MHz with 48K RAM!) They also had a 3D modelling package with wireframe and (sort of) ray-traced mode called VU-3D. Later on they wrote an office suite for the Sinclair QL/ ICL OPD. And the Psion Organiser was the first real PDA. And then there was EPOC32. And best of all, the revolutionary idea of a PDA with a good keyboard.
And now they will instead be "providing digital networks for businesses." Sigh.
A few years back, I was one of the people involved in drawing up a plan for our university's choice of desktop OS and office software suite. For the office suite we looked at offerings from Microsoft (the incumbent), Corel and Lotus, and for the desktop OS... well, that quickly came down to an all-Microsoft choice. I should point out that our student labs run over 400 apps used in teaching, mostly win16 but a few win32 (and one or two DOS!)
We consulted our users about the office site and they quickly voted for Microsoft on the grounds that it would be a sheer bloody pain to shift. Corel was on the ropes and Lotus cost almost as much as Microsoft. So we signed Campus Agreement, and it made life a lot simpler, and Mr Gates a lot richer.
I was the local Linux zealot and I did try long and hard to convince myself that:
* We could offer a Linux desktop, with linux-native office apps and browser, and run all 400-odd teaching apps under Wine.
* We could offer a Linux desktop, with linux-native office apps and browser, and run all 400-odd teaching apps under VMware.
* We could offer a Linux desktop, with linux-native office apps and browser, and run all 400-odd teaching apps on a Citrix app server via the linux ICA client.
And the I thought - why?
Once the decision was made, we all thought - "Don't worry, we don't need to renegotiate for a few years, and the DOJ will have broken Microsoft up by then - or at very least imposed regulations to make Mr Gates tame, polite and meek in all his dealings". This did not turn out to be true, did it?
So I suppose it's time to look at putting together a strategy to make Windows 2000/Office 2000 our final Microsoft platform - there's no way we're touching Windows Xtra Pain, that's for sure. Since we last looked at the problem, Staroffice/Openoffice has become pretty viable, many of our teaching apps have been replaced by web-based teaching aids, many new apps have appeared that have linux ports.
Are any other universities thinking along these lines?
The same idea (multiple shots onto monochrome stock via colour filters, recombined at the projection phase) has been independently rediscovered several times, for still and moving images. See, for example, Thomascolor at the Dead Media Project.
My own interest is that a member of my family, Juliet Rhys Williams had her own system, called the Morgana process, which she managed to get Bell & Howell to pilot in the 1930s. Her mother, Elinor Glyn the racy novelist, had connections with Charlie Chaplin, Hearst etc and was able to provide contacts in Bell & Howell to get the project off the ground.
The prototype had a 3-color spinning filter and ran ordinary monochrome stock at triple speed. The projector had a similar filter. When this proved impractically fast for a production model, B&H designed a near-natural colour process involving a two-colour oscillating filter, targeted at amateur (wealthy) home-movie freaks. This went into production and my father remembers using one as a boy in the early 1940s.
Its achilles heel was that the colours could easily go to hell if the film was spliced. But if the 3-colours-on-monochrome Morgana process had become popular instead of colour stock, it would have solved the problem of fading colour movies. It would only be necessary to replace the filters as they faded.
Slashdot Mirror
was Hermann Oberth, from Sigishoara in Romania (birthplace of Vlad the Impaler). I visited Sigishoara last year and found that the town museum had a room devoted to Oberth. The first Romanian in space (in Soviet times) was awarded the "Hermann Oberth Gold Medal".
That's got to be the best-kept secret at the moment, surely?
The Science Museum has recently suffered a bit from showy makeovers that actually reduce the display space for its collection. I'd welcome the chance to see the actual objects, including the larger transport-related stuff, which has mostly disappeared.
The best workaround I have found is to set up Mercury, point that at your Pegasus data, and temporarily add an extra Imap server to Thunderbird (which actually points at localhost running mercury).
Then when you've finished moving things around, get rid of Mercury and the associated server entry in Thunderbird.
The BBC do a reasonably good Google-based search (page down for the search field) which is still up and smiling at the moment.
.ac.uk) it's OK.
I can confim the IP-based blocking behaviour noted by others below. It looks like Google is trying to protect itself by failing queries from certain locations. I can't get results from my home cable, but from work (in
...compared to the living hell of their telephone system. Easily the worst ever voice-call management site I have ever encountered.
On the rare occasions where I am forced to use an Odeon these days, I tend to book my tickets by physically visting the cinema, talking to the nice students behind the counter (who have access to a decent and feature-filled UI, and can thus answer questions like "How busy is the 4:30 showing of Spiderman 2?"), and departing with my tickets physically in my hand.
I will never again book an Odeon ticket over the net, because their system is broken. I will never again book Odeon tickets over their telephone system, because their system is broken.
It pains me to say this, because ODEON is a big name in the history of British cinema & Art Deco architecture.
The users that I support would double-click on a landmine to see what it did.
Anyone reading slashdot is by definition in a vanishingly tiny minority. We, and only we, have a relatively good sense of how how to defend ourselves.
The rest of the population are a bit like my neighbour. He has a Windows 2000 laptop (that's what it came with) and recently got an ADSL connection. His ADSL link went live about 10:30 one morning; by 12:15 he had been blocked by his ISP for spreading Blaster.
That's when he knocked on my door. I printed out his task list (i.e. things that couldn't even be bothered to cloak themselves). Including Blaster, he had already been compromised five ways. A hacked copy of Dameware was in there, plus a ratio-based FTP server. I can't remember what the other two were.
The point is, he could have unknowingly been carrying gigabytes of warez or child porn on the same day he bought his shiny new ADSL modem.
So I'm inclined to take very seriously the "it wasn't me" defence. For almost everyone, it's true.
Bill Nighy is the front runner. Tom Baker was just voicing his opinion. See the Times.
The Netbook! It is, and always was, TOO BLOODY BIG.
I wish they would continue developing the Psion Series 5 line, which has the best small keyboard ever made. I'm being very careful with my last surviving 5mx, but nothing lasts forever.
I was really impressed by Epoc32 at the time (mid 1990s?) but I'd buy an updated Series 5 running anything - Linux, Symbian Quartz, MS Pocket PC - whatever. Just so long as they kept the keyboard. And fixed the stylus retainer!
I don't think you're taking this seriously enough.
According to this article today's Guardian, pirates killed or injured 145 people at sea in the first three months of this year. There are calls for the Royal Navy to station warships in the affected areas, to protect trade routes.
So you see, piracy is an ongoing and deadly threat... oh wait... *reads thread again*... Somebody seems to have started using the word "piracy" to mean "copyright violation". What an odd thing to do.
I thought that MS responded to this longstanding problem by putting code in later service packs that disables machines running on leaked keys. (Or at least, getting your permission to do this in the EULA - dunno if they've actually done it yet.) So a naughty server manager would be faced with the choice of running an increasingly old and unpatched copy of Windows Server, or updating it and finding that it had been remotely broken by MS.
Let it be April 2nd, now!
Linux localhost 2.0.36 #1 Tue Oct 13 22:17:11 EDT 1998 i486 unknown
It's a 486/66 which serves an old inkjet.
Its uptime is equal to the interval between power cuts. The best I ever got was about 400 days.
Aha, I have dim memories of horrid Foxpro for DOS locking oddities. But too long ago to remember if we ever found a fix.
Foxpro for windows was even more of a giggle. I remember an accounting system written in Foxpro for Windows that one day offered us the unforgettable message "Fatal Error 6 attempting to report Error 6".
It's retro-computing day for me today - just dug out a Victor Sirius 9000 (vintage 1982) to read and transfer some data disks. Works perfectly!
I guess your problem is that MS Network Client for DOS (Lan Manager 2.2 client?) works well over netbeui and badly over tcp/ip (memory and other problems). NT offers SMB over Netbeui, Samba doesn't as yet AFAIK (some info here).
Where I work, we have to support one elderly networked DOS app. It runs splendidly in a DOS window under NT or 2000, 640K DOS memory! The network redirections are all passed through to the underlying NT/2000 operating system which talks nicely to Samba.
"It slithered inside the machines and spewed venomous strings of data that threw its victims into electronic shock."
The DRM mess has collided with another well-known mess - horribly bad software.
This Christmas, amongst other things, my daughter got an iPod and my son got one of the new, USB-driven, Sony NetMD minidisc players, and the Shakira album on "CD".
Well, 'tis the Night After Christmas, and all through the house, not a creature is stirring except.... me. Now, after a few false starts, the Shakira album is going to .WAV files thanks to a well-placed sticker rather than a sharpie. For the iPod, I installed the recommended MusicMatch Jukebox, which is simply the worst piece of commercial software I have ever seen. So I deleted that and have since installed and happily used ephpod.
Sadly, for the minidisc player I am stuck with another dire piece of software, Sony's OpenMG. Incredibly cluttered UI, bizarre colours, incomprehensible DRM-inspired nomenclature ("check in", "check out").
I'm not cruel enough to leave my son to try to figure out how to transfer his brand new (Sony-sourced) Shakira album to his brand-new (Sony-sourced) minidisc player. Hence I'm staying up late to do it all myself.
I'm a geek dad. I moved RAMTOP on my Sinclair as a kid. I remember the syntax to PIP. I have known the obscure pleasure of deeply nested emulation. My kids used to mock me by chanting "SCSI BIOS! SPOOLER! SCSI BIOS! SPOOLER!" at the tops of their voices. If I'm finding it tiresome and laborious, then quite a lot of unhappy customers out there are finding it impossible.
I am in awe.
I fed it Hugh, Pugh and Barney Mcgrew - and it gave the right answer.
It can't be far from becoming self-aware.
george
To coincide with the launch, Slate has had a makeover and now runs on .Net. Unfortunately most of the content is now along these lines:
W orkerRequest wr) +138
.NET Framework Version:1.0.3215.11; ASP.NET Version:1.0.3215.11
Server Error in '/' Application.
Server Too Busy
Description: An unhandled exception occurred during the execution of the current web request. Please review the stack trace for more information about the error and where it originated in the code.
Exception Details: System.Web.HttpException: Server Too Busy
Source Error:
An unhandled exception was generated during the execution of the current web request. Information regarding the origin and location of the exception can be identifed using the exception stack trace below.
Stack Trace:
[HttpException (0x80004005): Server Too Busy]
System.Web.HttpRuntime.RejectRequestInternal(Http
Version Information:Microsoft
Quick! buy another 1,000 CPU's for the server farm!
george
A man walks into a bar. Ouch!
The first spreadsheet I ever used was written by Psion. It was called VU-CALC and it ran on the Sinclair Spectrum. (Z80 at 0.4 MHz with 48K RAM!) They also had a 3D modelling package with wireframe and (sort of) ray-traced mode called VU-3D. Later on they wrote an office suite for the Sinclair QL/ ICL OPD. And the Psion Organiser was the first real PDA. And then there was EPOC32. And best of all, the revolutionary idea of a PDA with a good keyboard.
And now they will instead be "providing digital networks for businesses." Sigh.
A few years back, I was one of the people involved in drawing up a plan for our university's choice of desktop OS and office software suite. For the office suite we looked at offerings from Microsoft (the incumbent), Corel and Lotus, and for the desktop OS... well, that quickly came down to an all-Microsoft choice. I should point out that our student labs run over 400 apps used in teaching, mostly win16 but a few win32 (and one or two DOS!)
We consulted our users about the office site and they quickly voted for Microsoft on the grounds that it would be a sheer bloody pain to shift. Corel was on the ropes and Lotus cost almost as much as Microsoft. So we signed Campus Agreement, and it made life a lot simpler, and Mr Gates a lot richer.
I was the local Linux zealot and I did try long and hard to convince myself that:
* We could offer a Linux desktop, with linux-native office apps and browser, and run all 400-odd teaching apps under Wine.
* We could offer a Linux desktop, with linux-native office apps and browser, and run all 400-odd teaching apps under VMware.
* We could offer a Linux desktop, with linux-native office apps and browser, and run all 400-odd teaching apps on a Citrix app server via the linux ICA client.
And the I thought - why?
Once the decision was made, we all thought - "Don't worry, we don't need to renegotiate for a few years, and the DOJ will have broken Microsoft up by then - or at very least imposed regulations to make Mr Gates tame, polite and meek in all his dealings". This did not turn out to be true, did it?
So I suppose it's time to look at putting together a strategy to make Windows 2000/Office 2000 our final Microsoft platform - there's no way we're touching Windows Xtra Pain, that's for sure. Since we last looked at the problem, Staroffice/Openoffice has become pretty viable, many of our teaching apps have been replaced by web-based teaching aids, many new apps have appeared that have linux ports.
Are any other universities thinking along these lines?
george
1) Will young T'Pau have that funky accent she had when she was older? (Koork, dis fight is to the deet!)
2) I always thought that the TOS Enterprise was the "first" Enterprise (NCC 1701).
The same idea (multiple shots onto monochrome stock via colour filters, recombined at the projection phase) has been independently rediscovered several times, for still and moving images. See, for example, Thomascolor at the Dead Media Project.
My own interest is that a member of my family, Juliet Rhys Williams had her own system, called the Morgana process, which she managed to get Bell & Howell to pilot in the 1930s. Her mother, Elinor Glyn the racy novelist, had connections with Charlie Chaplin, Hearst etc and was able to provide contacts in Bell & Howell to get the project off the ground.
The prototype had a 3-color spinning filter and ran ordinary monochrome stock at triple speed. The projector had a similar filter. When this proved impractically fast for a production model, B&H designed a near-natural colour process involving a two-colour oscillating filter, targeted at amateur (wealthy) home-movie freaks. This went into production and my father remembers using one as a boy in the early 1940s.
Its achilles heel was that the colours could easily go to hell if the film was spliced. But if the 3-colours-on-monochrome Morgana process had become popular instead of colour stock, it would have solved the problem of fading colour movies. It would only be necessary to replace the filters as they faded.