Charles Moore who invented Forth, and as a side consequence can be said to have given us the first IDE (integrated development environment).
Well, and also for being the first person to utilize line noise as an effective programming language.:-)
Gibraltar Encylopedia of Progressive Rock
on
Discovering New Music?
·
· Score: 3, Interesting
If you're into progressive rock, and even if you're not, and especially if you think you're not, then I highly suggest you check out the New Gibraltar Encyclopedia of Progressive Rock. This is a simply awesome resource for finding new music to hunt down and listen to. In addition to the aforementioned encyclopedia, the GEPR has its' own webzine and you'll find links to many sites which review prog rock discs.
Although I have personally not listened to their Live365 stream (dial up line -- not enough bandwidth), ProgRock.com has an informative website and a very active discussion forum.
One streaming radio station that I listen to a lot, often for hours, is Delicious Agony. They play a good mix of both classics and new progressive music. Highly recommended. A great benefit of streaming radio is that you can see the playlist while listening and in progrock.com's case, there will also be links to where you can buy the music and to the artists' homepages. Happy hunting.
This reminds me of the old computer folklore story. I've heard two versions of it, one occurring at MIT, and one occurring at Georgia Tech. If anybody out there knows the true origin of this story I'd appreciate knowing.
The story associated with MIT goes that an unknown prankster programmed the mainframe to pick a random unused terminal in one of the computer labs, display a large eye on the screen, look left and right, wink and then disappear only to reappear on yet another unused terminal in the room. Apparently this caused quite a panic among the janitors at the time who thought the computer was watching them.
The story associated with Georgia Tech goes that late one night (or early one morning depending on how you look at it), a sleepy eyed operator was running the nightly backups. As he watched the status lines scroll by, a large (CBS logo style) eye appears on screen, winks and then disappears leaving only the status messages scrolling.
I think Alan Kay's Squeak implementation of Smalltalk pretty much fits those criteria. I've spent some time playing with it and have to admit to being awfully impressed. It still has quite a way to go, but when it gets there it should be pretty amazing.
You're thinking of the Alto developed IIRC in 1972 at Xerox's Palo Alto Research Center(PARC) by Alan Kay also of Smalltalk fame. Unfortunately, Xerox decided the Alto wasn't commercially viable. However, later they did manufacture the Star Office System, but with a $17,000 price tag it didn't sell very well. I believe this was in 1981 or thereabouts. Someone please correct me.
It was during a tour of Xerox PARC by Steve Jobs and some others from Apple where the Alto was demostrated that Jobs and company hit upon the ideea of building a computer featuring a GUI operating system. Since Xerox had determined the Alto to be commercially unviable, Jobs was able to convince some of the PARC gang to jump ship.
This led to the development of the Lisa at Apple, which was really revolutionary. I believe it was Smalltalk based and did not incorporate a Finder as it was not really needed in the Smalltalk environment. Another group at Apple was working on the Macintosh though which as everyone knows was launched via the famous 1984 commercial during that year's Superbowl.
I don't know if it was internal politics that led to the predominance of the Macintosh over the Lisa or not. I do know that later Apple basically landfilled their entire factory run of Lisas from which they drew some rather well deserved criticism at the time since these computers were in their own way as revolutionary as the Amiga, and Apple could have at least sold them at discount to shools and libraries.
Oh, and as a side note, Bill Gates got the idea for Windows after seeing a demonstration of the Macintosh at Apple. This was the basis of the famous "look and feel" lawsuit that Apple filed against Microsoft. Part of the agreement for Microsoft investing $150,000,000 into Apple in 1997 was that Apple would give up it's claim of patent infringement against Microsoft.
So... would this mean there's no real way to do a secure wipe of files on modern drives? Pardon me if I sound ignorant on this subject, because I am frankly...
"...the true low-level format includes all sorts of special blocks that store tracking information and bad sector tables. You wouldn't want your BIOS to screw with that."
You're, of course, correct. *sigh* I just guess I haven't progressed much in my understanding of disk drives from the old 8-bit days when your BIOS was exactly the thing that was supposed to handle all that low-level stuff.
...modern HDDs (since the moving-coil was introduces) cannot format themselves!
All the infromation used for alignment (servo information) is written with special heads in the factory and cannot be changed afterwards.
That's interesting. I didn't know this. Does this mean that format option in the BIOS is no longer a low-level format?
Personally, I thought the late '80s BBC adaptation of LW&W through The Silver Chair was much better than the animated series. I know that the muppet-like Aslan may seem a little hokey today, but as a kid I was awed.
One oddity though. The IMDB says this was done in 1988 and yet I seem to clearly recall seeing it much earlier on PBS. Is my mind going or does the IMDB have this wrong?
In college I cooked some hot dogs by putting metal forks in each end of the hot dog and running 120V through it. Hot dogs have just enough conductivity so that this works well.
Oddly enough, I remember in the late '60s my parents had a small appliance that did just that. It had six prongs on each side between which you would skewer your hot dogs. Then you plugged it in and the fun began. Sort of like watching a botched execution by electric chair. Come to think of it, the hot dogs smelled and tasted about the same too. Now that I reflect on it, I believe I have some unresolved traumas from the whole experience!
You're thinking of Lee De Forest who was the inventor of the audion tube, the tube equivalent of the transistor. De Forest is also one of the most fascinating men of the 20th century, one of the last great lone inventors whose invention spurred development of everything from the long distance phone network to the first digital computers.
If you ever get a chance I highly recommend reading Tom Lewis' book Empire of the Air which profiles the three men probably most resposible for the modern age of communication: Lee De Forest, Edwin Howard Armstrong and David Sarnoff. IIRC, Ken Burns also did a documentary based on the book for PBS. These are truly three of the most interesting, and in many ways, most tragic men whom have ever lived.
I think the hardware and software side of what you are suggesting are pretty trivial. In fact, I've seriously considered putting together such a device myself.
However, how would you get up to date program listings — or deal with last minute programming changes? Sure, you could screen scrape services such as TV Guide or GIST TV (superior to TV Guide anyway IMHO) but these are for profit entities and I doubt they would take kindly to 10's of thousands of geeks eating up bandwidth as their open source/GPL'd PVR's hit their web sites every hour or so.
If anyone out there knows how to get access to the TV programming listings without paying a service such as many newspapers do (often for inaccurate information) I would really love to hear how in e-mail.
I know this has been mentioned in other discussions on keyboards on Slashdot, but I think it bears repeating...
Would it kill these companies trying to sell keyboards (especially non-traditional ones) over the web to include some large enough pictures that you can actually see what the keyboard might be like to type on? There's no way I'm going to plop down $100 or more for a product I can only get a 250 or 300 pixel wide view of.
While this topic is well outside my usual area of (in)expertise, I think these guys products might be able to help you out... That is, if you were not absolutely tied into the TIFF format for your viewable files. As others have pointed out, TIFFs are a poor format for very large images.
Anyway, LizardTech's technology is used by plces like the USGS and Library of Congress to allow instant access to very large scanned maps and other documents. In particular, you might want to check out their software aimed directly at working with big photos.
I haven't seen anybody mention these guys (and they're GPL'd to boot!) so I thought I'd throw in my highly devalued 2 cents.
They seem to have a similar solution to this problem as Ensim does with their Webppliance virtual server suite. Basically making available to each virtual server their own copy of the standard filesystem underneath their/home directory via links and using chroot to keep everyone in their own little area. It seems to work pretty well.
Note: I use an Ensim Webppliance but other than that I really don't know what I am talking about.
Nice to know we have experts out there experienced in the black arts of paper weapons... You never know when you'll need to give someone a good papercut!:-)
Origami Shurikens
on
Origami Science
·
· Score: 3, Informative
Directions for making those cool paper shurikens can be found here.
At home I have a large LCD display, only i spend a lot of time looking at sites that insist on folding themselves up to a postage stamp size in one corner with 6pt fonts.
Actually, with CSS you can specify 6pt (or whatever size) fonts and it should be readable on almost everybody's browser window. The browser should scale the text size appropriately for the user's display. The problems like you're describing occur when specific pixel values are specified for font sizes in CSS.
PGP doesn't have to be hard and GPG can be dead easy... not that useing either from the command line is that difficult.
There is PGPTray and on the free software side there is WinPT (Windows Privacy Tray). This is a little system tray application that encrypts and decrypts from the clipboard and supports most of the common command line options.
There is also GPGOE, a GPG plug-in for Outlook Express.
I find it rather scary that this guy Valentine sounds just like my old Radio Shack district manager. I would have thought that a multi-billion dollar corporation would run their sales department with a little more elegance and subtlety.
Slashdot Mirror
Ahh! I used up my mod points yesterday... Please someone mod the parent up -- this is really funny! And for those who don't get the reference...
Long version: http://www.acme.com/jef/netgems/scratch_monkey.htm l t ch-monkey.html
Short version: http://www.tuxedo.org/~esr/jargon/html/entry/scra
Charles Moore who invented Forth, and as a side consequence can be said to have given us the first IDE (integrated development environment).
Well, and also for being the first person to utilize line noise as an effective programming language. :-)
If you're into progressive rock, and even if you're not, and especially if you think you're not, then I highly suggest you check out the New Gibraltar Encyclopedia of Progressive Rock. This is a simply awesome resource for finding new music to hunt down and listen to. In addition to the aforementioned encyclopedia, the GEPR has its' own webzine and you'll find links to many sites which review prog rock discs.
Although I have personally not listened to their Live365 stream (dial up line -- not enough bandwidth), ProgRock.com has an informative website and a very active discussion forum.
One streaming radio station that I listen to a lot, often for hours, is Delicious Agony. They play a good mix of both classics and new progressive music. Highly recommended. A great benefit of streaming radio is that you can see the playlist while listening and in progrock.com's case, there will also be links to where you can buy the music and to the artists' homepages. Happy hunting.
This reminds me of the old computer folklore story. I've heard two versions of it, one occurring at MIT, and one occurring at Georgia Tech. If anybody out there knows the true origin of this story I'd appreciate knowing.
The story associated with MIT goes that an unknown prankster programmed the mainframe to pick a random unused terminal in one of the computer labs, display a large eye on the screen, look left and right, wink and then disappear only to reappear on yet another unused terminal in the room. Apparently this caused quite a panic among the janitors at the time who thought the computer was watching them.
The story associated with Georgia Tech goes that late one night (or early one morning depending on how you look at it), a sleepy eyed operator was running the nightly backups. As he watched the status lines scroll by, a large (CBS logo style) eye appears on screen, winks and then disappears leaving only the status messages scrolling.
I think Alan Kay's Squeak implementation of Smalltalk pretty much fits those criteria. I've spent some time playing with it and have to admit to being awfully impressed. It still has quite a way to go, but when it gets there it should be pretty amazing.
You're thinking of the Alto developed IIRC in 1972 at Xerox's Palo Alto Research Center(PARC) by Alan Kay also of Smalltalk fame. Unfortunately, Xerox decided the Alto wasn't commercially viable. However, later they did manufacture the Star Office System, but with a $17,000 price tag it didn't sell very well. I believe this was in 1981 or thereabouts. Someone please correct me.
It was during a tour of Xerox PARC by Steve Jobs and some others from Apple where the Alto was demostrated that Jobs and company hit upon the ideea of building a computer featuring a GUI operating system. Since Xerox had determined the Alto to be commercially unviable, Jobs was able to convince some of the PARC gang to jump ship.
This led to the development of the Lisa at Apple, which was really revolutionary. I believe it was Smalltalk based and did not incorporate a Finder as it was not really needed in the Smalltalk environment. Another group at Apple was working on the Macintosh though which as everyone knows was launched via the famous 1984 commercial during that year's Superbowl.
I don't know if it was internal politics that led to the predominance of the Macintosh over the Lisa or not. I do know that later Apple basically landfilled their entire factory run of Lisas from which they drew some rather well deserved criticism at the time since these computers were in their own way as revolutionary as the Amiga, and Apple could have at least sold them at discount to shools and libraries.
Oh, and as a side note, Bill Gates got the idea for Windows after seeing a demonstration of the Macintosh at Apple. This was the basis of the famous "look and feel" lawsuit that Apple filed against Microsoft. Part of the agreement for Microsoft investing $150,000,000 into Apple in 1997 was that Apple would give up it's claim of patent infringement against Microsoft.
So... would this mean there's no real way to do a secure wipe of files on modern drives? Pardon me if I sound ignorant on this subject, because I am frankly...
You're, of course, correct. *sigh* I just guess I haven't progressed much in my understanding of disk drives from the old 8-bit days when your BIOS was exactly the thing that was supposed to handle all that low-level stuff.
That's interesting. I didn't know this. Does this mean that format option in the BIOS is no longer a low-level format?
This was my thinking. ImageMagick is well suited for the job. There is even a Win32 TWAIN API for Perl. Combined with the Perl API for Imagemagick you could even write that custom application that will automate the whole process.
It doubled the speed of ROMs on the old Tandy CoCo (Color Computer).
Personally, I thought the late '80s BBC adaptation of LW&W through The Silver Chair was much better than the animated series. I know that the muppet-like Aslan may seem a little hokey today, but as a kid I was awed.
One oddity though. The IMDB says this was done in 1988 and yet I seem to clearly recall seeing it much earlier on PBS. Is my mind going or does the IMDB have this wrong?
Ask and ye shall receive...
Usenet Cookbook
You're thinking of Lee De Forest who was the inventor of the audion tube, the tube equivalent of the transistor. De Forest is also one of the most fascinating men of the 20th century, one of the last great lone inventors whose invention spurred development of everything from the long distance phone network to the first digital computers.
If you ever get a chance I highly recommend reading Tom Lewis' book Empire of the Air which profiles the three men probably most resposible for the modern age of communication: Lee De Forest, Edwin Howard Armstrong and David Sarnoff. IIRC, Ken Burns also did a documentary based on the book for PBS. These are truly three of the most interesting, and in many ways, most tragic men whom have ever lived.
I think the hardware and software side of what you are suggesting are pretty trivial. In fact, I've seriously considered putting together such a device myself.
However, how would you get up to date program listings — or deal with last minute programming changes? Sure, you could screen scrape services such as TV Guide or GIST TV (superior to TV Guide anyway IMHO) but these are for profit entities and I doubt they would take kindly to 10's of thousands of geeks eating up bandwidth as their open source/GPL'd PVR's hit their web sites every hour or so.
If anyone out there knows how to get access to the TV programming listings without paying a service such as many newspapers do (often for inaccurate information) I would really love to hear how in e-mail.
I know this has been mentioned in other discussions on keyboards on Slashdot, but I think it bears repeating...
Would it kill these companies trying to sell keyboards (especially non-traditional ones) over the web to include some large enough pictures that you can actually see what the keyboard might be like to type on? There's no way I'm going to plop down $100 or more for a product I can only get a 250 or 300 pixel wide view of.
While this topic is well outside my usual area of (in)expertise, I think these guys products might be able to help you out... That is, if you were not absolutely tied into the TIFF format for your viewable files. As others have pointed out, TIFFs are a poor format for very large images.
Anyway, LizardTech's technology is used by plces like the USGS and Library of Congress to allow instant access to very large scanned maps and other documents. In particular, you might want to check out their software aimed directly at working with big photos.
I haven't seen anybody mention these guys (and they're GPL'd to boot!) so I thought I'd throw in my highly devalued 2 cents.
They seem to have a similar solution to this problem as Ensim does with their Webppliance virtual server suite. Basically making available to each virtual server their own copy of the standard filesystem underneath their /home directory via links and using chroot to keep everyone in their own little area. It seems to work pretty well.
Note: I use an Ensim Webppliance but other than that I really don't know what I am talking about.
Nice to know we have experts out there experienced in the black arts of paper weapons... You never know when you'll need to give someone a good papercut! :-)
Directions for making those cool paper shurikens can be found here.
Actually, with CSS you can specify 6pt (or whatever size) fonts and it should be readable on almost everybody's browser window. The browser should scale the text size appropriately for the user's display. The problems like you're describing occur when specific pixel values are specified for font sizes in CSS.
PGP doesn't have to be hard and GPG can be dead easy... not that useing either from the command line is that difficult.
There is PGPTray and on the free software side there is WinPT (Windows Privacy Tray). This is a little system tray application that encrypts and decrypts from the clipboard and supports most of the common command line options.
There is also GPGOE, a GPG plug-in for Outlook Express.
I find it rather scary that this guy Valentine sounds just like my old Radio Shack district manager. I would have thought that a multi-billion dollar corporation would run their sales department with a little more elegance and subtlety.
Perhaps this might be of some use?
...isn't meant to help contain the trolls, but rather to catch instances where a good comment has been unfairly modded down.
Otherwise, I agree with you.