funny, I use VI or another text editor... and with Phoenix I get a quick, straight-forward HTML page faster than the so-called "web-developers" here can with their overpriced development tools.
Nahh.. if you want a webpage... use a text editor.
I used to think that way too, especially after a truly dreadful experience with Adobe GoLive, which is probably the worst piece of dung (ahem, software) I've *ever* used, anywhere. (Not to mention it's $400, and Adobe doesn't even want to hear about how it can't even perform the examples shown in the documentation...)
Then I tried Namo WebEditor, and fell in love. It's great for power users, preserves hand edits to HTML, and most impressively, gives you an incredibly easy way to make all kinds of things completely automatic that are otherwise a fairly major PITA. In particular, the program is well worth its cost just for the smart objects feature that allows dynamic creation of graphic elements like buttons, anigation elements, headers, or pretty much anything else you can think of. This is something akin to magic if you've been doing it manually - there's nothing quite like rearranging the placement of pages in a site and telling it to "rebuild navigation". Instantly, the site is reorganized, the menus are fixed, all the correct graphic elements are created, wrapped in JavaScript, if necessary, and inserted in to the proper pages.
Generally, i've found that creating the graphical elements is 85% of the work, and Namo reduces that to a near triviality. It's not as intuitive as I'd like, and the docs could be better, but it's far, far, better than anything else I've seen, including DreamWeaver and FrontPage.
Still, I use Netscape 7.0's Composer for quick and dirty stuff that doesn't require any dynamic elements. And VIM for final hand-tweaking on output from anything, where required. With Namo, I'm not tweaking much...
Of course any power MSDos user used 4DOS but even that's not as nice as as the real thing.
No, *real* power users loaded the MKS or Thompson toolkits and had real, functioning Unix utilities and sort-of functioning shells on thier PCs... I still have a Win16 version of the MKS Toolkit out in the garage somewhere - I think it cost around $400, and was worth every penny. (But the way it handled remapping of slashes to backslashes produced some "interesting" problems, IIRC...)
Kinda like *real* power users replace the crap GNU utilities in Linux with the true Unix-style BSD utilities even today...:-)
Keep in mind that this is a *desktop* I'm talking about, not even a laptop. I'm just sick and tired of all the vacuum-cleaner fans and the hot cases (and the failing hard drives produced by said hot cases) that my friends suffer.
Laptop users hate the power usage even more.
This is a VERY valid observation. I was at one time program manager for software for Dell portables. It's a sad testimony that laptop battery life has gone *down* over the past few years despite great improvements in battery and power management technology.
I know one thing: I would *much* rather have a 300-500 MHz laptop with 8-12 hours of continuous use (and yes, that's actually do-able) than a 1+ GHz monster that barely makes 2 hours and will scorch your flesh (literally - see ExtremeTech's recent review of Motion Computing's Tablet PC...)
Seriously, if we applied modern low-power technology, we really could have laptops that run all day, and the healthcare folks really could have point-of-care computers that an entire shift with no chance of battery problems.
Sadly, there are two reasons this probably won't happen: 1) Intel and the OEMs have a huge vested interest in selling only "faster", newer gear - the fact that the market really wants longer battery life in portables means nothing. 2) Like it or not, for most people, Windows is the only OS that matters, and the the bloated obesity of W2K/XP *requires* hardware that fast. (I was stunned recently at the slowness of a 400 MHz Dell machine a friend loaned me. To put this in perspective, my primary laptop is a 233 MHz P2 with Win98SE and Office 97. Her 400 MHz machine was laden with Win2K Pro and Office2000. There is simply no comparison - it's is NOT an exaggeration to say that the older machine is *considerably* more reponsive to the user than the newer, fancier (and of course, much more expensive) one. Battery life for the two is about the same, indicating that applying the technology of the new machine to the performance profile of the old one should easily improve battery life by 2-3x.)
It's also sad that we will not see tablet computers with long battery life, because they too are saddled with the power-sucking fat of XP. (I'm also afraid I don't expect any real OS alternative on Tablet PC hardware for several years at least - this is not an area in which open source has a glowing record.)
Perhaps someone will begint o listen to what customers really want and we'll once again be able to buy a laptop capable of running througout a coast-to-coast flight.
I'm really surprised - there are posts here mentioning some truly obscure solutions, but no one's mentioned one of the most popular: Smoothwall is all-CD-based, and is certainly one of the most widely used CD-based firewall distros on the net. The link above is to Smoothwall's corporate, supported version, but a less featureful free version is available. It used to integrate well with the Dan's Guardian content filter, until Dan joined Smoothwall, so they no longer tell you how to mke the two work together, since that would compete with their commercial offering. Still, their pricing seems reasonable, and while not a state-of-the-art firewall, it's no worse than all the other stateful packet filters out there. (Ultimately, that's just not a very good way to provide security, which is why SPFs are no longer permitted by the military.)
If you don't have to have it run from CD, you should probably check out T-Rex (NOT a stateful packet filter, but the free version is lagging a bit), or, if you need a firewall combined with other functions (such as serving files, mail, web, etc.) then check out e-smith or ClarkConnect.
OK, Here I go again, tilting at/. windmills, but it needs to be said again: PATENTS ARE GOOD, and they **PROTECT** the ability of individual inventors to pursue real innovation. Good patents in no way inhibit the pace of innovation, but rather they are the strongest protection possible to allow the inventor to be able to bring his invention succesfully to market so you and I can buy it.
Here's what I had to say about it in a letter to LWN a while back:
And perhaps more importantly, here's what James Dyson has to say, which is essentially the same thing: (Dyson is the famous inventor of the phenominally successful and innovative Dyson vacuum cleaners that have vacuumed up the competition virtually everywhere but the US, where they are just now becoming available.) http://www.dyson.co.uk/invent/default.asp
I know too many of you have fallen for the FSF's party line of patent demonization, but eliminating Patents would only ensure that the likes of Microsoft would roll completely unopposed over any potential competition.
Re:Strictly speaking not a new principle
on
Fanwing Planes?
·
· Score: 3, Informative
Also, the cycloprop [brtrc.com] actually *is* a plane working on the same principal.
Actually, the CycloProp coscept only looks similar. Mechanically, it's very different, in that it's rotors are a true cycloidal drive (meaning their angle of attack is controllably varied in a cyclical fashion as the rotor makes a complete turn), while the FanWing uses static blades/vanes to produce a similar effect.
The cycloidal drive is much more mechanically complex, but has been used in marine applications for around a century, and is now favored as a marine drive for some types of tugboats and ferries, due to its ability to instantly provide thrust in any direction. One advantage this approach would have over a FanWing, is that a CycloProp-type aircraft could conceivably be a true VTOL (Vertical Take-Off and Landing) craft, while the FanWing would likely be an STOL (Short Take-off and Landing) craft at best.
He wants it to replace a scientific calculator watch that isn't made anymore and which is decidedly non-water-resistant.
You know, I hadn't realized it, but this could be the first watch in history that provides a calculator I'd find useful - one that uses RPN. (*All* us techno types only use RPN calculators, right? It's right up there with vi for validating real technical prowess, rather than just being a pretender and emacs weenie [ducks])
Seriously, though, so far as I know, there's never been an RPN calculator watch - even HP's famous HP-01 was algebraic as have been the myriad Casio and Sharp(?) calc watches. The utterly cool thing about this watch is that it is a *real* Palm, with a full 160x160 screen, so it's capable of runnning any real Palm program, including RPN or even MathPad (one of my personal favorites.)
Don't forget that it's only water resistant until you have the battery replaced. Manufacturers might guarantee their watches when new but as soon as the seal is broken....
Of course, Rolexes (and other brands of "superlative chronometers", to use their marketing catch-phrase) are entirely mechanical devices, and require no batteries of any kind, ever. I know, it's hard to imagine, but it's true - technology that doesn't asphyxiate in the absence of electron flow. You know, this sort of thing just might catch on...
Seriously, it's sad that everyone the world seems too easily staisfied with cheesy quartz watches (accurate though they may be) when there are still so many Swiss mechanical works of art out there, that are a true mech hacker's dream...
SVG has also some problems. It's XML, so it's text. This means that it can be quite a lot of data you have to send over the net.
Don't assume that text is necessarily a negative here - I'm working on a project right now where this is a key attribute arguing for SVG: Because it's text-based, SVG is a usable option for very simple, stupid embedded web devices. This allows temperature graphs or controls to be easily created by tiny 8-bit embedded microcontrollers, something that's not really computationally practical with Flash's computationally bloated binary format.
Not everything connected to the Internet is a PC. In fact we're rapidly approaching the point where most of the interesting things on the net won't be PCs. SVG can be very good for those, and it's status as a true web standard makes it a far better choice than Flash as a long-term investment.
TSSIA (That's "The subject says it all" for those of you that actually think casemods are cool...)
It's hard to imagine anything that's less worthy of appreciation as a hack than this tripe. It's a kludge, and a bad one at that: an off-the shelf clock radio, not even integrated into the power system, but with the original clock radio cord dangling out the back of the case, and a few holes hacked into a blank bezel. If this qualifies as a "mod", then I suppose I need to post all the computers and automotive trim I've sprayed with Krylon semi-flat black over the years...
If the clock was one of those WWV self-setting jobs and there was software to turn the box into a stratum 2 or 3 timeserver there might be some news here, but this is just a joke, and gets my vote for 1) the lamest Slashdot story in the entire history of the site, and 2) the strongest indication yet that Slashdot is completely irrelevant to those that actually *do* know how to do hardware hacks. (Yes I'm one of those "radicals" like James Dyson that thinks that innovative and superior function should determine form (but is not at all averse to attractive and innovative forms), not the other way around...)
I'm a "true-enough geek" (why am I begging to be labelled with what originated as the description of the carnival freak who bit the heads off live chickens??)... But I don't type well at all. I do a two finger hunt and peck, and I doubt I'll ever train myself to do better.
Well, duh... You can hardly expect the chicken to hunt and peck after you've bitten off its head!
FWIW, I was one of the preproduction testers for the Diamond/SonicBlue ProGear device linked to at Mira2Go, and I can tell you authoritatively that there are VERY GOOD reasons this machine did not succeed in the marketplace. It was a bold try, but the people involved did not understand Linux, networking, basic usability design, or especially, how to build a portable device rugged enough to be carried around without special padded luggage.
Sadly, it offered a very poor Linux environment designed for browsing only with just barely enough pen interaction (basically, one-button mouse emulation) that it could claim to be a tablet. Pens, tablets, and Linux (or any other Unix-like OS) do NOT mix right now, and I see no development efforts underway that are likely to change that...
Unless they develop some killer feature (yes yes, in ADDITION to Linux support, these [mira2go.com] notwithstanding) I've got absolutely no intention of purchasing one.
With Cygwin or U/Win (which I prefer because its non-GPL) loaded, who needs Linux? I've found the best of both worlds from a practical point of view is clearly a Windows machine with Unix utilities/extensions.
I reached this conclusion reluctantly (as someone who has seen sleazy MS business practices up close at a major Texas OEM, and as someone with a 17-year Unix bias), but there's really no open source alternative for much of what I need to do. For example: There's nothing even *remotely* like Visio (Kivio, Dia, and the like are light-years from Visio, which I really hated to see MS buy up) on any other platform, and it is an incredibly powerful tool for developing data-driven diagrams and such. There are other examples that aren't so stark, but still show a huge difference between the two worlds, Namo's Web Editor 5 or Macromedia's Dreamweaver vs. *any* open source html/website management package would be one good example, good MCAD software is another.
I am defintely NOT pro-Microsoft, but I've finally come to the conclusion that I only hurt myself by trying to use Solaris, Linux, or BSD as a desktop OS, even though there are things about each of those that I prefer. The simple fact is that MS has had a "real OS" (in the sense that Unix traditionally defined an "OS") since Windows 2000. XP is not an improvement on W2K, but it's really not a bad OS, and with a few of the right additions, either of the newer versions of Windows can be a very nice environment even for those of us that have a strong preference for the way Unix works. (That said, I still run W98 on my primary desktop because I'm too cheap to upgrade. Go figure.)
Bottom Line: This is NOT an either-or battle. It's possible to have your cake, and eat it too. I look forward to adding a Tablet PC to my arsenal of tools that enhance my effectiveness and productivity, although I'll likely wait a year or so to shake out the bugs...
I wish I could claim credit for originating it. Although I heard it before, I think it's been enshrined as Mozilla Bug # 127856: "Huge bookmark file horks my profile - uses all system resources"
A truly nasty bug, and one that continues to bite those that bounce back and forth between various Mozilla/Netscape derivatives foolishly thinking they can use the same profiles. Sounds reasonable enough, but it can't be done reliably today...
Hooking up SCSI devices twin-tailed to a pair of servers is not exactly rocket science, it's done every day. But if you just do that, all it's good for is backup servers connected to the same disk.
Keep in mind that although the electrical connections are OK (so long as only one thing is talking at a time on the SCSI bus), the filesystem is a different matter entirely: Without some sort of distributed lock manager, your data WILL get horked. Generally DLMs are part of larger packages like GFS, AFS/DFS, Coda, or Veritas ClusterFS. Tivoli's SANergy is probably the closest thing to a standalone product to do this, although there are others - I haven't looked a the market in nearly a year.
Filesystem consistency may be a serious enough problem to keep this approach from even being valuable for backup servers: If one server goes down unexpectedly, it leaves the disk in a corrupted state, which must first be fixed with fsck or the like. If you have ot wait for that anyway, then there's not a whole lot of advantage to all that extra cabling and the weirness that accompanies SCSI length.
Generally, the three best solutions today for this sort of thing are 1) Cheap, easy: to use external RAID boxes and just switch then over physically to a backup server, if required, 2) to use iSCSI or other Storage over IP (SoIP) (or NAS, if you don't need performance) to allow disks to be easily reconnected, or 3) buy a fully virtualized SAN-type solution (which ay be SCSI, Fibre Channel , or SoIP) that will allow you to re-connect everything in software - some of these can work with distributed lock managers.
If you really want to do this sort of thing, do it right: check out FalconStor or DataCore, or HPAQ's VaporStor, I mean, VersaStor...:-)
I'm looking at using a weblog for process documentation purposes, and have looked at the usual suspects: Movable Type, Grey Matter, etc.
But the one that really stands out so far as a great mix of power, simplicity, and a wonderfully non-intrusive license is Bloxsom. If you're looking for blog software, check it out.
It's straight Perl (very small, simple, and streamlined) but offers the most important power features of the others.
Even better, it fully leverages the underlying power of your OS, web server, or environment/tools - use and leverage whatever editors and text processing tools you like. All in all, a simple, powerful, and elegant solution in a world of bloated, complex, and overengineered alternatives.
Every day is 9-11. It's true. Abortion has reached such epidemic proportions that the *daily* death toll in American abortion clinics is roughly the same as the *total* bodycount from the Sept. 11th attacks. Check the figures yourself.
If that doesn't cry out for a legitimate protest, I don't know what does...
If you don't really care about sticking with the arcane tags and XML syntax of DocBook, you might want to consider anoter option that will get the job done easier and quicker: HTMLDOC.
This is a really clever program that allows you to take a regualr web page and produce very nice PDFs (or PostScript) from it. It supports a few new tags that let you do things like page breaks, headers/footers and such that always should have been in HTML (even if only as a hint for printing) but wasn't. It automatically builds tables of contents (fully clickable in the PDF), cover pages, and the like, too.
I've started using this tool more and more often over the last few months. It's just too handy for words. You can find it at Easy Software. (And yes, it's open source.)
Linux is fairly stable. (I've seen *lots* of Linux servers crash, and I've been working with them in perparation for production use since 0.99 patch level 56.) BSD is rock-solid stable. There's a huge difference, especially when you're designing serious production systems. In fact, BSD is the only open source OS that seriously rivals the stability of the commercial Unixes like Solaris in large-scale compute-intensive environments.
I've worked extensively with both Linux and BSD, and built large-scale production systems on both. One indication you might want to consider as pointing out BSD's superior stability is that at least two 1000+ node compute clusters for oil exploration are considering migrating from Linux to BSD mostly to ensure higher stability and availability. ("Mostly" because getting out from under the GPL is a factor in at least one of these moves.) When you're literally betting a billion dollars on getting the right answer before your competitors in a bidding war for drilling rights over a huge reserve, you really want to make sure you get the right answer in a timely fashion. Losing a node (for any reason) during the week or two it takes to crunch the numbers pretty much blows your chances.
Although both are good, BSD is considerably better w.r.t. stability - give it a try and you'll give up Linux for servers unless you just need quick small ones like the E-smith distro makes so easy.
In a serious production environment, BSD is far more reliable and stable than Linux. Last year I designed the architecture for a set of IP SAN servers. One of the biggest problems was that the virtualization software runs on Linux only (they have since added Solaris) - this left us with a wonderfully stable product running on a server environment that really wasn't as stable as it should be, given that it's the heart of the entire SAN system. It's gotten better, but I'd opt for Solaris now, and am encouraging them to port to BSD to achieve true rock-solid enterprise bulletproofness.
BSD is the next best thing to Tandem, and one heck of a lot cheaper. (Not to mention it's not terminally weird...)
Detaining people without trial and ignoring the courts is a time honored practice in the US. Lincoln did it during the Civil War to secessionist politicians from Maryland.
The only problem is, Lincoln was a REAL War Time President. The Civil War was legally declared by Congress as set forth by the Constitution.
Actually, the War Between the States (that conflict's official name as designated by the US Congress) was in no way legal or appropriate. In 1865, Lincoln, the first Republican president, used force to deny a "distinctly legal and constitutional secession", to use the wording of a recent Vox Day column.
In addition to recognizing the Southern states' rights under the Constitution to secede, Lincoln violated the Constitution in myriad other ways - anything was permissable so long as it preserved the Union, thhus establishing the precedent that the US government no longer relied or acknowledged the consent of the governed as necessary or proper.
Here is just a partial list of the ways Lincoln savaged the US Constitution:
He "unilaterally suspended the writ of habeas corpus and eventually ordered the federal army to arrest between 13,000 and 38,000 Northern civilians who were suspected of opposing his administration (this is the range of estimates that exists in published literature). These people were never given any due process at all.
On May 18, 1864 Lincoln issued an order to General John Dix that read as follows: "You will take possession by military force, of the printing establishments of the New York World and Journal of Commerce . . . and prohibit any further publication thereof . . . you are therefore commanded forthwith to arrest and imprison . . . the editors, proprietors and publishers of aforesaid newspapers." Dix complied, and hundreds of newspapers were censored (see Dean Sprague's Freedom Under Lincoln).
Lincoln won New York by 7,000 votes in 1864 "with the help of federal bayonets," according to David Donald in Lincoln Reconsidered; all telegraph communication was censored; the railroads were nationalized; new states were created unconstitutionally; and the Tenth Amendment was all but destroyed by the war.
Even Lincoln's own attorney general, Edward Bates, was of the opinion that Lincoln's orchestration of the secession of western Virginia from the rest of the state was unconstitutional. Article IV, Section 3 of the U.S. Constitution reads: "New States may be admitted by the Congress into this Union; but no new State shall be formed or erected within the Jurisdiction of any other State; nor any state be formed by the Junction of two or more States, or Parts of States, without the consent of the Legislatures of the States concerned as well as of the Congress" (emphasis added). West Virginia was unconstitutionally carved out of Virginia, and since it did not even exist as a state, its non-existent legislature could not have consented, as required by the Constitution. A puppet government was established in Alexandria, Virginia, run by Republican Party operatives, which guaranteed a few more electoral votes for Lincoln in the 1864 election.
Lincoln was a bad president, and a worse man. His actions ensured that the US could never again be free, and enshrined total central control as a fundamental principle of government in the incorporatoin clause of the 14th amendment. The game was over back then, but some yankees are just now figuring out what the rest of us have known for a nearly a century and a half: this goverment has no respect for freedom or rights of any kind.
A good modern automatic is as fast or faster than a manual, and one heck of a lot easier to drive in heavy traffic.
I may not ever buy another car with a manual transmission, and as a Ferrari owner (308gt4 with a 5-speed, of course) I consider myself a pretty serious car guy. I have nothing against manuals (other than they're a pain in a daily driver), but I don't see anything mystical about them either.
With today's tranny tech, there's really no reason to have to put up with the downsides of a manual slushbox anymore. Automatics (whether auto-shifted manuals, high-performance automatics, or CVT designs like Audi's new one that is finally able to take non-trivial torque) are faster, easier, and better in pretty much every respect. If they weren't superior, you wouldn't find people willing to pay a serious premium for them on new Ferraris, and wouldn't find them used on every competitive F1 car. The battle is over, and in the realm pf real performance, the manual tranny is history.
I'm personally convinced that if the weenies at the car magazines quit acting like manuals are required on serious sports cars, they'd die out in a few years. I expect they'll be pretty dead in another decade, anyway, and people will wonder why anyone would want to shift those "old cars" just the same way as we look at old Model Ts and think what a pain it must have been to have to continually adjust the spark with that lever on the steering column.
People lamented the passing of that anachronism, too, but not for long. It's time for the manual transmission to go.
Might I suggest that a solid, rational approach to Chrisitanity might well let you find both the Truth therein as well as acknowledgement that we must *think*, and are in fact, "to think God's thoughts after Him." (I will also submit this is far different than "testing" God, which is wrong.)
I'd suggest starting with John Calvin's Institutes of the Christian Religion, the clarity of which should more than make up for any wooly thinking your upbringing might have left you with...:-) If that's a bit too ambitious for you, try Jonathan Edwards, or any of several excellent current writers at sites like antithesis.com (Warning, requires IE - yuk), or Credenda-Agenda. You may not like these(or even agree with them), but you can't argue they're not thoughtful and well-reasoned. These sites drive some of my Baptist friends to absolute distraction...
If we didn't have a single fossil, evolutionary theories would still be the only reasonable way to explain DNA similarities between species, structural similarites, the results of selective breeding, etc.
Actually, DNA is quite an embarassment to the evolutionary argument, too. (Turtles are a particular problem, stubbornly refusing to let their DNA fit into the primitive places evolution claims it must go.) Similar problems beset other reptiles, flowering plants, etc. If DNA analysis has done anything to evolutionary theory, it has shattered the notions of an evolutionary heirarchy.
For more info, see this article, "The DNA Dilemma" describing just a few resons why DNA does *not* correlate with what evolution predicts and still maintains.
A short excerpt from that article, showing the serious problems DNA research was causing for evolutionary theory in the 12 months before the article was written, is included below - these are not exactly Creationists raising this ruckus, you'll notice:
7 August 1998 (Science page 774) "New Views of the Origins of Mammals--Paleontologists and molecular biologists take different approaches to questions of evolution and often come to different conclusions"
27 November 1998 (Science page 1653) "The Abominable Mystery". The caption under two alleged evolutionary trees says, "In this analysis, Gnetales are more closely related to other gymnosperms than to the angiosperms."
5 December 1998 (Science News page 358) "Turtle Genes Upset Reptilian Family Tree". The caption under the photo of a turtle says, "Turtles: An evolutionary enigma".
6 February 1999 (Science News page 88) "DNA's Evolutionary Dilemma--Genetic studies collide with the mystery of human evolution".
26 February 1999 (Science page 1310) "Evolutionary and Preservational Constraints on Origins of Biologic Groups: Divergence Times of Eutherian Mammals--Some molecular clock estimates of divergence times of taxonomic groups undergoing evolutionary radiation are much older than the groups' first observed fossil record".
6 March 1999 (Science News page 159) "Turtles and Crocs: Strange Relations".
21 May 1999 (Science page 1305) "Is It Time to Uproot the Tree of Life?--More genomes have only further blurred the branching pattern of life. Some blame shanghaied genes; others say the tree is wrong".
Bottom line: DNA does anything but validate evolutionary theory, and changing the cladograms to reflect the DNA evidence eliminates nearly all animals that might be considered even remotely "transitional". From the reading I've done, the DNA evidence does, in fact, make it look more like perhaps all living things were created individually. This a one more area where science is solidly against evolution.
I didn't catch this story when it was first posted, but this device is a serious research interest of mine. (Blame Dava Sobel and her excellent "Longitude" - that book has cost me a small fortune, and set me to learning about globes, clocks, sundials, armillary spheres, orreries, tellurians, chonometers, sextants, octants, latitude hooks, astrolabes, backstaffs, Nathaniel Bowditch, and who knows what all else...)
I got the fever so bad I even had Amazon hunt me down a $150 copy of Price's book (this was several years ago, long before they bought bibliofind and had theri current network of used book shops.)
Anyway, I can't post the book of course, because I fully respect and support copyright law, but I do have a fairly extensive list of links about the Antikythera mechanism that might be useful for those just beginning to be infected with curiosity about the gadget: (Sorry, there are so many of these I'm not jumping through/.'s inane posting system to make them all clickable. Whaddya want for free?)
P.S: I think Rob Rice's paper may be one of the most interesting overall, if only because it goes a long way toward suggesting that the knowledge to build such a device might correlate with the substantial evidence that the Rhodian navy had unmatched navigational and command and control capabilities, including the ability to navigate and coordinate the motions of fleets at night, giving them an impressive strategic advantage over all opponents.
Slashdot Mirror
funny, I use VI or another text editor... and with Phoenix I get a quick, straight-forward HTML page faster than the so-called "web-developers" here can with their overpriced development tools.
Nahh.. if you want a webpage... use a text editor.
I used to think that way too, especially after a truly dreadful experience with Adobe GoLive, which is probably the worst piece of dung (ahem, software) I've *ever* used, anywhere. (Not to mention it's $400, and Adobe doesn't even want to hear about how it can't even perform the examples shown in the documentation...)
Then I tried Namo WebEditor, and fell in love. It's great for power users, preserves hand edits to HTML, and most impressively, gives you an incredibly easy way to make all kinds of things completely automatic that are otherwise a fairly major PITA. In particular, the program is well worth its cost just for the smart objects feature that allows dynamic creation of graphic elements like buttons, anigation elements, headers, or pretty much anything else you can think of. This is something akin to magic if you've been doing it manually - there's nothing quite like rearranging the placement of pages in a site and telling it to "rebuild navigation". Instantly, the site is reorganized, the menus are fixed, all the correct graphic elements are created, wrapped in JavaScript, if necessary, and inserted in to the proper pages.
Generally, i've found that creating the graphical elements is 85% of the work, and Namo reduces that to a near triviality. It's not as intuitive as I'd like, and the docs could be better, but it's far, far, better than anything else I've seen, including DreamWeaver and FrontPage.
Still, I use Netscape 7.0's Composer for quick and dirty stuff that doesn't require any dynamic elements. And VIM for final hand-tweaking on output from anything, where required. With Namo, I'm not tweaking much...
Of course any power MSDos user used 4DOS but even that's not as nice as as the real thing.
:-)
No, *real* power users loaded the MKS or Thompson toolkits and had real, functioning Unix utilities and sort-of functioning shells on thier PCs... I still have a Win16 version of the MKS Toolkit out in the garage somewhere - I think it cost around $400, and was worth every penny. (But the way it handled remapping of slashes to backslashes produced some "interesting" problems, IIRC...)
Kinda like *real* power users replace the crap GNU utilities in Linux with the true Unix-style BSD utilities even today...
Keep in mind that this is a *desktop* I'm talking about, not even a laptop. I'm just sick and tired of all the vacuum-cleaner fans and the hot cases (and the failing hard drives produced by said hot cases) that my friends suffer.
Laptop users hate the power usage even more.
This is a VERY valid observation. I was at one time program manager for software for Dell portables. It's a sad testimony that laptop battery life has gone *down* over the past few years despite great improvements in battery and power management technology.
I know one thing: I would *much* rather have a 300-500 MHz laptop with 8-12 hours of continuous use (and yes, that's actually do-able) than a 1+ GHz monster that barely makes 2 hours and will scorch your flesh (literally - see ExtremeTech's recent review of Motion Computing's Tablet PC...)
Seriously, if we applied modern low-power technology, we really could have laptops that run all day, and the healthcare folks really could have point-of-care computers that an entire shift with no chance of battery problems.
Sadly, there are two reasons this probably won't happen: 1) Intel and the OEMs have a huge vested interest in selling only "faster", newer gear - the fact that the market really wants longer battery life in portables means nothing. 2) Like it or not, for most people, Windows is the only OS that matters, and the the bloated obesity of W2K/XP *requires* hardware that fast. (I was stunned recently at the slowness of a 400 MHz Dell machine a friend loaned me. To put this in perspective, my primary laptop is a 233 MHz P2 with Win98SE and Office 97. Her 400 MHz machine was laden with Win2K Pro and Office2000. There is simply no comparison - it's is NOT an exaggeration to say that the older machine is *considerably* more reponsive to the user than the newer, fancier (and of course, much more expensive) one. Battery life for the two is about the same, indicating that applying the technology of the new machine to the performance profile of the old one should easily improve battery life by 2-3x.)
It's also sad that we will not see tablet computers with long battery life, because they too are saddled with the power-sucking fat of XP. (I'm also afraid I don't expect any real OS alternative on Tablet PC hardware for several years at least - this is not an area in which open source has a glowing record.)
Perhaps someone will begint o listen to what customers really want and we'll once again be able to buy a laptop capable of running througout a coast-to-coast flight.
I'm really surprised - there are posts here mentioning some truly obscure solutions, but no one's mentioned one of the most popular: Smoothwall is all-CD-based, and is certainly one of the most widely used CD-based firewall distros on the net. The link above is to Smoothwall's corporate, supported version, but a less featureful free version is available. It used to integrate well with the Dan's Guardian content filter, until Dan joined Smoothwall, so they no longer tell you how to mke the two work together, since that would compete with their commercial offering. Still, their pricing seems reasonable, and while not a state-of-the-art firewall, it's no worse than all the other stateful packet filters out there. (Ultimately, that's just not a very good way to provide security, which is why SPFs are no longer permitted by the military.)
If you don't have to have it run from CD, you should probably check out T-Rex (NOT a stateful packet filter, but the free version is lagging a bit), or, if you need a firewall combined with other functions (such as serving files, mail, web, etc.) then check out e-smith or ClarkConnect.
OK, Here I go again, tilting at /. windmills, but it needs to be said again: PATENTS ARE GOOD, and they **PROTECT** the ability of individual inventors to pursue real innovation. Good patents in no way inhibit the pace of innovation, but rather they are the strongest protection possible to allow the inventor to be able to bring his invention succesfully to market so you and I can buy it.
Here's what I had to say about it in a letter to LWN a while back:
http://lwn.net/2000/0420/backpage.phtml#backpage
And perhaps more importantly, here's what James Dyson has to say, which is essentially the same thing: (Dyson is the famous inventor of the phenominally successful and innovative Dyson vacuum cleaners that have vacuumed up the competition virtually everywhere but the US, where they are just now becoming available.) http://www.dyson.co.uk/invent/default.asp
I know too many of you have fallen for the FSF's party line of patent demonization, but eliminating Patents would only ensure that the likes of Microsoft would roll completely unopposed over any potential competition.
Also, the cycloprop [brtrc.com] actually *is* a plane working on the same principal.
Actually, the CycloProp coscept only looks similar. Mechanically, it's very different, in that it's rotors are a true cycloidal drive (meaning their angle of attack is controllably varied in a cyclical fashion as the rotor makes a complete turn), while the FanWing uses static blades/vanes to produce a similar effect.
The cycloidal drive is much more mechanically complex, but has been used in marine applications for around a century, and is now favored as a marine drive for some types of tugboats and ferries, due to its ability to instantly provide thrust in any direction. One advantage this approach would have over a FanWing, is that a CycloProp-type aircraft could conceivably be a true VTOL (Vertical Take-Off and Landing) craft, while the FanWing would likely be an STOL (Short Take-off and Landing) craft at best.
He wants it to replace a scientific calculator watch that isn't made anymore and which is decidedly non-water-resistant.
You know, I hadn't realized it, but this could be the first watch in history that provides a calculator I'd find useful - one that uses RPN. (*All* us techno types only use RPN calculators, right? It's right up there with vi for validating real technical prowess, rather than just being a pretender and emacs weenie [ducks])
Seriously, though, so far as I know, there's never been an RPN calculator watch - even HP's famous HP-01 was algebraic as have been the myriad Casio and Sharp(?) calc watches. The utterly cool thing about this watch is that it is a *real* Palm, with a full 160x160 screen, so it's capable of runnning any real Palm program, including RPN or even MathPad (one of my personal favorites.)
Don't forget that it's only water resistant until you have the battery replaced. Manufacturers might guarantee their watches when new but as soon as the seal is broken ....
Of course, Rolexes (and other brands of "superlative chronometers", to use their marketing catch-phrase) are entirely mechanical devices, and require no batteries of any kind, ever. I know, it's hard to imagine, but it's true - technology that doesn't asphyxiate in the absence of electron flow. You know, this sort of thing just might catch on...
Seriously, it's sad that everyone the world seems too easily staisfied with cheesy quartz watches (accurate though they may be) when there are still so many Swiss mechanical works of art out there, that are a true mech hacker's dream...
SVG has also some problems. It's XML, so it's text. This means that it can be quite a lot of data you have to send over the net.
Don't assume that text is necessarily a negative here - I'm working on a project right now where this is a key attribute arguing for SVG: Because it's text-based, SVG is a usable option for very simple, stupid embedded web devices. This allows temperature graphs or controls to be easily created by tiny 8-bit embedded microcontrollers, something that's not really computationally practical with Flash's computationally bloated binary format.
Not everything connected to the Internet is a PC. In fact we're rapidly approaching the point where most of the interesting things on the net won't be PCs. SVG can be very good for those, and it's status as a true web standard makes it a far better choice than Flash as a long-term investment.
Here it is, in all it's original glory (This is book 1, section 1): http://www.maths.tcd.ie/pub/HistMath/People/Newton /Principia/Bk1Sect1/PrL1S1.pdf
And, oh, by the way, having a mastery of Latin will aid your understanding quite a bit...
TSSIA (That's "The subject says it all" for those of you that actually think casemods are cool...)
It's hard to imagine anything that's less worthy of appreciation as a hack than this tripe. It's a kludge, and a bad one at that: an off-the shelf clock radio, not even integrated into the power system, but with the original clock radio cord dangling out the back of the case, and a few holes hacked into a blank bezel. If this qualifies as a "mod", then I suppose I need to post all the computers and automotive trim I've sprayed with Krylon semi-flat black over the years...
If the clock was one of those WWV self-setting jobs and there was software to turn the box into a stratum 2 or 3 timeserver there might be some news here, but this is just a joke, and gets my vote for 1) the lamest Slashdot story in the entire history of the site, and 2) the strongest indication yet that Slashdot is completely irrelevant to those that actually *do* know how to do hardware hacks. (Yes I'm one of those "radicals" like James Dyson that thinks that innovative and superior function should determine form (but is not at all averse to attractive and innovative forms), not the other way around...)
I'm a "true-enough geek" (why am I begging to be labelled with what originated as the description of the carnival freak who bit the heads off live chickens??)... But I don't type well at all. I do a two finger hunt and peck, and I doubt I'll ever train myself to do better.
Well, duh... You can hardly expect the chicken to hunt and peck after you've bitten off its head!
FWIW, I was one of the preproduction testers for the Diamond/SonicBlue ProGear device linked to at Mira2Go, and I can tell you authoritatively that there are VERY GOOD reasons this machine did not succeed in the marketplace. It was a bold try, but the people involved did not understand Linux, networking, basic usability design, or especially, how to build a portable device rugged enough to be carried around without special padded luggage.
Sadly, it offered a very poor Linux environment designed for browsing only with just barely enough pen interaction (basically, one-button mouse emulation) that it could claim to be a tablet. Pens, tablets, and Linux (or any other Unix-like OS) do NOT mix right now, and I see no development efforts underway that are likely to change that...
Unless they develop some killer feature (yes yes, in ADDITION to Linux support, these [mira2go.com] notwithstanding) I've got absolutely no intention of purchasing one.
With Cygwin or U/Win (which I prefer because its non-GPL) loaded, who needs Linux? I've found the best of both worlds from a practical point of view is clearly a Windows machine with Unix utilities/extensions.
I reached this conclusion reluctantly (as someone who has seen sleazy MS business practices up close at a major Texas OEM, and as someone with a 17-year Unix bias), but there's really no open source alternative for much of what I need to do. For example: There's nothing even *remotely* like Visio (Kivio, Dia, and the like are light-years from Visio, which I really hated to see MS buy up) on any other platform, and it is an incredibly powerful tool for developing data-driven diagrams and such. There are other examples that aren't so stark, but still show a huge difference between the two worlds, Namo's Web Editor 5 or Macromedia's Dreamweaver vs. *any* open source html/website management package would be one good example, good MCAD software is another.
I am defintely NOT pro-Microsoft, but I've finally come to the conclusion that I only hurt myself by trying to use Solaris, Linux, or BSD as a desktop OS, even though there are things about each of those that I prefer. The simple fact is that MS has had a "real OS" (in the sense that Unix traditionally defined an "OS") since Windows 2000. XP is not an improvement on W2K, but it's really not a bad OS, and with a few of the right additions, either of the newer versions of Windows can be a very nice environment even for those of us that have a strong preference for the way Unix works. (That said, I still run W98 on my primary desktop because I'm too cheap to upgrade. Go figure.)
Bottom Line: This is NOT an either-or battle. It's possible to have your cake, and eat it too. I look forward to adding a Tablet PC to my arsenal of tools that enhance my effectiveness and productivity, although I'll likely wait a year or so to shake out the bugs...
I wish I could claim credit for originating it. Although I heard it before, I think it's been enshrined as Mozilla Bug # 127856: "Huge bookmark file horks my profile - uses all system resources"
A truly nasty bug, and one that continues to bite those that bounce back and forth between various Mozilla/Netscape derivatives foolishly thinking they can use the same profiles. Sounds reasonable enough, but it can't be done reliably today...
Hooking up SCSI devices twin-tailed to a pair of servers is not exactly rocket science, it's done every day. But if you just do that, all it's good for is backup servers connected to the same disk.
:-)
Keep in mind that although the electrical connections are OK (so long as only one thing is talking at a time on the SCSI bus), the filesystem is a different matter entirely: Without some sort of distributed lock manager, your data WILL get horked. Generally DLMs are part of larger packages like GFS, AFS/DFS, Coda, or Veritas ClusterFS. Tivoli's SANergy is probably the closest thing to a standalone product to do this, although there are others - I haven't looked a the market in nearly a year.
Filesystem consistency may be a serious enough problem to keep this approach from even being valuable for backup servers: If one server goes down unexpectedly, it leaves the disk in a corrupted state, which must first be fixed with fsck or the like. If you have ot wait for that anyway, then there's not a whole lot of advantage to all that extra cabling and the weirness that accompanies SCSI length.
Generally, the three best solutions today for this sort of thing are 1) Cheap, easy: to use external RAID boxes and just switch then over physically to a backup server, if required, 2) to use iSCSI or other Storage over IP (SoIP) (or NAS, if you don't need performance) to allow disks to be easily reconnected, or 3) buy a fully virtualized SAN-type solution (which ay be SCSI, Fibre Channel , or SoIP) that will allow you to re-connect everything in software - some of these can work with distributed lock managers.
If you really want to do this sort of thing, do it right: check out FalconStor or DataCore, or HPAQ's VaporStor, I mean, VersaStor...
I'm looking at using a weblog for process documentation purposes, and have looked at the usual suspects: Movable Type, Grey Matter, etc.
But the one that really stands out so far as a great mix of power, simplicity, and a wonderfully non-intrusive license is Bloxsom. If you're looking for blog software, check it out.
It's straight Perl (very small, simple, and streamlined) but offers the most important power features of the others.
Even better, it fully leverages the underlying power of your OS, web server, or environment/tools - use and leverage whatever editors and text processing tools you like. All in all, a simple, powerful, and elegant solution in a world of bloated, complex, and overengineered alternatives.
Every day is 9-11. It's true. Abortion has reached such epidemic proportions that the *daily* death toll in American abortion clinics is roughly the same as the *total* bodycount from the Sept. 11th attacks. Check the figures yourself.
If that doesn't cry out for a legitimate protest, I don't know what does...
If you don't really care about sticking with the arcane tags and XML syntax of DocBook, you might want to consider anoter option that will get the job done easier and quicker: HTMLDOC.
This is a really clever program that allows you to take a regualr web page and produce very nice PDFs (or PostScript) from it. It supports a few new tags that let you do things like page breaks, headers/footers and such that always should have been in HTML (even if only as a hint for printing) but wasn't. It automatically builds tables of contents (fully clickable in the PDF), cover pages, and the like, too.
I've started using this tool more and more often over the last few months. It's just too handy for words. You can find it at Easy Software. (And yes, it's open source.)
Linux is fairly stable. (I've seen *lots* of Linux servers crash, and I've been working with them in perparation for production use since 0.99 patch level 56.) BSD is rock-solid stable. There's a huge difference, especially when you're designing serious production systems. In fact, BSD is the only open source OS that seriously rivals the stability of the commercial Unixes like Solaris in large-scale compute-intensive environments.
I've worked extensively with both Linux and BSD, and built large-scale production systems on both. One indication you might want to consider as pointing out BSD's superior stability is that at least two 1000+ node compute clusters for oil exploration are considering migrating from Linux to BSD mostly to ensure higher stability and availability. ("Mostly" because getting out from under the GPL is a factor in at least one of these moves.) When you're literally betting a billion dollars on getting the right answer before your competitors in a bidding war for drilling rights over a huge reserve, you really want to make sure you get the right answer in a timely fashion. Losing a node (for any reason) during the week or two it takes to crunch the numbers pretty much blows your chances.
Although both are good, BSD is considerably better w.r.t. stability - give it a try and you'll give up Linux for servers unless you just need quick small ones like the E-smith distro makes so easy.
In a serious production environment, BSD is far more reliable and stable than Linux. Last year I designed the architecture for a set of IP SAN servers. One of the biggest problems was that the virtualization software runs on Linux only (they have since added Solaris) - this left us with a wonderfully stable product running on a server environment that really wasn't as stable as it should be, given that it's the heart of the entire SAN system. It's gotten better, but I'd opt for Solaris now, and am encouraging them to port to BSD to achieve true rock-solid enterprise bulletproofness.
BSD is the next best thing to Tandem, and one heck of a lot cheaper. (Not to mention it's not terminally weird...)
The only problem is, Lincoln was a REAL War Time President. The Civil War was legally declared by Congress as set forth by the Constitution.
Actually, the War Between the States (that conflict's official name as designated by the US Congress) was in no way legal or appropriate. In 1865, Lincoln, the first Republican president, used force to deny a "distinctly legal and constitutional secession", to use the wording of a recent Vox Day column.
In addition to recognizing the Southern states' rights under the Constitution to secede, Lincoln violated the Constitution in myriad other ways - anything was permissable so long as it preserved the Union, thhus establishing the precedent that the US government no longer relied or acknowledged the consent of the governed as necessary or proper.
Here is just a partial list of the ways Lincoln savaged the US Constitution:
- He "unilaterally suspended the writ of habeas corpus and eventually ordered the federal army to arrest between 13,000 and 38,000 Northern civilians who were suspected of opposing his administration (this is the range of estimates that exists in published literature). These people were never given any due process at all.
- On May 18, 1864 Lincoln issued an order to General John Dix that read as follows: "You will take possession by military force, of the printing establishments of the New York World and Journal of Commerce . . . and prohibit any further publication thereof . . . you are therefore commanded forthwith to arrest and imprison . . . the editors, proprietors and publishers of aforesaid newspapers." Dix complied, and hundreds of newspapers were censored (see Dean Sprague's Freedom Under Lincoln).
- Lincoln won New York by 7,000 votes in 1864 "with the help of federal bayonets," according to David Donald in Lincoln Reconsidered; all telegraph communication was censored; the railroads were nationalized; new states were created unconstitutionally; and the Tenth Amendment was all but destroyed by the war.
- Even Lincoln's own attorney general, Edward Bates, was of the opinion that Lincoln's orchestration of the secession of western Virginia from the rest of the state was unconstitutional. Article IV, Section 3 of the U.S. Constitution reads: "New States may be admitted by the Congress into this Union; but no new State shall be formed or erected within the Jurisdiction of any other State; nor any state be formed by the Junction of two or more States, or Parts of States, without the consent of the Legislatures of the States concerned as well as of the Congress" (emphasis added). West Virginia was unconstitutionally carved out of Virginia, and since it did not even exist as a state, its non-existent legislature could not have consented, as required by the Constitution. A puppet government was established in Alexandria, Virginia, run by Republican Party operatives, which guaranteed a few more electoral votes for Lincoln in the 1864 election.
(Above bullet items snagged from a recent Thomas Dilorenzo column.)Lincoln was a bad president, and a worse man. His actions ensured that the US could never again be free, and enshrined total central control as a fundamental principle of government in the incorporatoin clause of the 14th amendment. The game was over back then, but some yankees are just now figuring out what the rest of us have known for a nearly a century and a half: this goverment has no respect for freedom or rights of any kind.
A good modern automatic is as fast or faster than a manual, and one heck of a lot easier to drive in heavy traffic.
I may not ever buy another car with a manual transmission, and as a Ferrari owner (308gt4 with a 5-speed, of course) I consider myself a pretty serious car guy. I have nothing against manuals (other than they're a pain in a daily driver), but I don't see anything mystical about them either.
With today's tranny tech, there's really no reason to have to put up with the downsides of a manual slushbox anymore. Automatics (whether auto-shifted manuals, high-performance automatics, or CVT designs like Audi's new one that is finally able to take non-trivial torque) are faster, easier, and better in pretty much every respect. If they weren't superior, you wouldn't find people willing to pay a serious premium for them on new Ferraris, and wouldn't find them used on every competitive F1 car. The battle is over, and in the realm pf real performance, the manual tranny is history.
I'm personally convinced that if the weenies at the car magazines quit acting like manuals are required on serious sports cars, they'd die out in a few years. I expect they'll be pretty dead in another decade, anyway, and people will wonder why anyone would want to shift those "old cars" just the same way as we look at old Model Ts and think what a pain it must have been to have to continually adjust the spark with that lever on the steering column.
People lamented the passing of that anachronism, too, but not for long. It's time for the manual transmission to go.
Might I suggest that a solid, rational approach to Chrisitanity might well let you find both the Truth therein as well as acknowledgement that we must *think*, and are in fact, "to think God's thoughts after Him." (I will also submit this is far different than "testing" God, which is wrong.)
:-) If that's a bit too ambitious for you, try Jonathan Edwards, or any of several excellent current writers at sites like antithesis.com (Warning, requires IE - yuk), or Credenda-Agenda. You may not like these(or even agree with them), but you can't argue they're not thoughtful and well-reasoned. These sites drive some of my Baptist friends to absolute distraction...
I'd suggest starting with John Calvin's Institutes of the Christian Religion, the clarity of which should more than make up for any wooly thinking your upbringing might have left you with...
Actually, DNA is quite an embarassment to the evolutionary argument, too. (Turtles are a particular problem, stubbornly refusing to let their DNA fit into the primitive places evolution claims it must go.) Similar problems beset other reptiles, flowering plants, etc. If DNA analysis has done anything to evolutionary theory, it has shattered the notions of an evolutionary heirarchy.
For more info, see this article, "The DNA Dilemma" describing just a few resons why DNA does *not* correlate with what evolution predicts and still maintains.
A short excerpt from that article, showing the serious problems DNA research was causing for evolutionary theory in the 12 months before the article was written, is included below - these are not exactly Creationists raising this ruckus, you'll notice:
Bottom line: DNA does anything but validate evolutionary theory, and changing the cladograms to reflect the DNA evidence eliminates nearly all animals that might be considered even remotely "transitional". From the reading I've done, the DNA evidence does, in fact, make it look more like perhaps all living things were created individually. This a one more area where science is solidly against evolution.
I didn't catch this story when it was first posted, but this device is a serious research interest of mine. (Blame Dava Sobel and her excellent "Longitude" - that book has cost me a small fortune, and set me to learning about globes, clocks, sundials, armillary spheres, orreries, tellurians, chonometers, sextants, octants, latitude hooks, astrolabes, backstaffs, Nathaniel Bowditch, and who knows what all else...)
/.'s inane posting system to make them all clickable. Whaddya want for free?)
http://www.grand-illusions.com/antikyth.htm: //www.csd.uch.gr/~venturas/index2.htm. giant.net.au/users/rupert/kythera/kythe ra2.htmh era/kythe ra5.htmt p://www.ballarat.edu.au/student/cc6rmr/kythera/ kythera.htmr chimedes/Sphe re/SphereSources.html~ crorres/Archimedes/Sphe re/SphereIntro.htmli ce/usna_pap.htmlu blic.htmc e/Students /Jesse/CLOCK1A.htmld u/GreekScience/Studen ts/Jesse/differ.gifd u/GreekScience/Studen ts/Jesse/antik.gif1 031.htm
I got the fever so bad I even had Amazon hunt me down a $150 copy of Price's book (this was several years ago, long before they bought bibliofind and had theri current network of used book shops.)
Anyway, I can't post the book of course, because I fully respect and support copyright law, but I do have a fairly extensive list of links about the Antikythera mechanism that might be useful for those just beginning to be infected with curiosity about the gadget: (Sorry, there are so many of these I'm not jumping through
http://www.ams.org/new-in-math/cover/diff1.html
http://www.ams.org/new-in-math/cover/kyth1.html
http
http://www
http://www.giant.net.au/users/rupert/kyt
http://www.math.utsa.edu/ecz/ak.html
ht
http://www.mcs.drexel.edu/~crorres/A
http://www.mcs.drexel.edu/
http://ccat.sas.upenn.edu/rr
http://uranus.ee.auth.gr/TMTh/p
http://www.perseus.tufts.edu/GreekScien
http://hydra.perseus.tufts.e
http://hydra.perseus.tufts.e
http://www.uh.edu/engines/epi
Enjoy.
P.S:
I think Rob Rice's paper may be one of the most interesting overall, if only because it goes a long way toward suggesting that the knowledge to build such a device might correlate with the substantial evidence that the Rhodian navy had unmatched navigational and command and control capabilities, including the ability to navigate and coordinate the motions of fleets at night, giving them an impressive strategic advantage over all opponents.