I have to agree with you on Spider Robinson...I have every one of the Callahan books, including the one that came out just this summer, Callahan's Con. Some people have criticized some of his stories for "not being science fiction" (especially "The Time Traveller," the second story in Callahan's Crosstime Saloon...go read it for yourself if you want to see how apropos the title is), but they don't need the glitzy gadgets or high-stakes action, because they're about people, and character. I don't know if there'll be another book in the series, but if there is, I'll be waiting anxiously for it.
Over on Electric Minds, we have a topic called Socrates' Bar & Grill, in which the price of a drink is a quote. For some time, I've been acting as "virtual bartender" at Socrates', and I've kept myself inspired to the task by thinking of Mike Callahan and Jake Stonebender. In some respects, Electric Minds as a whole is kind of like a virtual "Callahan's Place" (or "Mary's Place," or just "The Place"), and, just like Jake opening up Mary's Place after Callahan's got nuked, and then migrating to Key West to launch The Place after Mary's Place closed down, I've been part of the efforts (so far, successful) to keep EMinds alive after its older incarnations fell by the wayside.
Could there ever be a real, physical bar like Callahan's? I don't know...but if I had my druthers, I'd be going there right now.
"Joy or sorrow, it's better if you share, So I'll take me down to Callahan's, and do my drinking there."
The Shenzhou's design is based on that of the Soyuz, with the same three-module construction, but it's slightly larger. They don't share any parts in common. (The Soyuz, in turn, bears a strong resemblance to General Electric's proposed Apollo spacecraft.) Meanwhile, the Long March CZ-2F booster is said to be descended from the DF-4, the first Chinese ICBM.
See this link. This link is also relevant; it has various facts and figures on the Shenzhou.
There's an old saying that applies to situations like this:
"Always listen to experts. They'll tell you what can't be done, and why. Then do it."
-- Robert Heinlein, from "The Notebooks of Lazaras Long," in Time Enough For Love
I recall in particular the end bosses in the shareware episode of Doom had me literally sceaming in front of the computer. Seeing those doors slide up, and revealing *two* imposing Barons of Hell standing there... It was one of the most frightening things I have ever experienced from a computer, beating even the goatse.cx guy. The fight that followed was one of the most intense I've ever had from an FPS.
Those guys always got me jumpin', but the dude that really meant brown-trousers time for me was the Cyberdemon (or "steam-demon" if you read the novelization), used as the boss in Episode 2. That mofo was damn near impossible to beat without a BFG 9000 and a lot of quick dodging. (At least the hell-princes would go down after about five rocket hits each...ol' Cyberdude required a few dozen rocket hits to meet his maker, but only required one of its rockets to take you down.) And the ominous "thump...thump...thump..." of its walk...the novel's line was "It sounded like the World Trade Center was taking a stroll just outside," and that was about right.
May I point out the excellent essay by Christopher Weuve comparing Robert Heinlein's original Starship Troopers to Paul Verhoeven's "interpretation" (I use the term loosely, I admit) of the book? Weuve shows that, not only does Paul Verhoeven's Starship Troopers fail as an interpretation of Heinlein's book, it fails even considered as a movie in its own right.
For the book itself, though, he offers a great deal of praise, spending a lot of time debunking various "myths" that have sprung up around the book since it was published. If you're judging Starship Troopers (the book) by your impressions of Paul Verhoeven's Starship Troopers (the movie), you're doing yourself a great disservice.
Now you're making me glad I split California nearly four years ago. Things are a bit saner in Colorado. OK, they just elected a brewpub owner as mayor of Denver, and our Governor bears a certain resemblance to Sheriff Woody from Toy Story, and one of our Congressmen foams at the mouth whenever he talks about illegal immigration, but it's pretty sane compared to what's goin' down on the coast...
...that, rather than give away the cheesecake shots, she'd offer 'em only to people who donate large amounts of money to her campaign. You know, an incentive to maximize contributions.
(Of course, I'd hope she watermarks 'em so she knows who leaked the pictures when they get spammed across the Internet...)
My thought exactly. My wife surfed across this article and told me about it, and my first remark was, "That's probably posted on Fark under [OBVIOUS]."
However, I'm sure Consumer Reports did a good job of researching it before announcing this conclusion to the world...that's just what they do.
That Knoppix CD makes a great tool, and a great demo besides. At the beginning of this month, my hard drive crapped out, wrecking my Linux partition; using Knoppix, I was able to boot up, run fsck, and salvage what I could (FTPing it to our home server, from there to my wife's WinXP notebook, and burning it to CD) before reinstalling the whole system. I didn't use Knoppix to reinstall--I downloaded a Debian Woody install CD and went from there to unstable--but the Knoppix disc came in handy a few times during the process as things broke and I needed to repair them. (I like that it groks ReiserFS, as that's what I'm using on one of my partitions now.) I even tried booting my wife's notebook (a Toshiba 1955-S801, kind of the "precursor" series to the P25s) from the Knoppix CD, and it was able to bring up X and KDE very nicely from the get-go, without touching her WinXP installation on the hard drive. Damn, that disc is a nice piece of work. Just remember to boot it up with the "lang=us" option:-).
Hmm...that's not how I read it. It looks like the Brits are drafting the legislation that will kill the Morse requirement for HF access, once the WRC has changed the international treaty to allow them to do so. Which means they'll likely be the first nation to drop the requirement, but they just can't do it yet, until the changes are approved (a couple weeks from now at most, if I read the other article correctly). That qrz.com posting also said that, in Australia, they might not be able to drop the requirement until early 2005. As for the FCC, who knows when they'll feel inclined to take up the matter? And naturally, there will be lengthy comment periods and reviews before they take action...
Morse code requirements are definitely one of the major "hot button" issues for hams everywhere. On one side, we have organizations like No-Code International that work to eliminate the requirements (Bruce Perens, of Debian and other Linux fame, is heavily involved with them), and, on the other side, organizations like FISTS are working to preserve the knowledge and use of CW.
For any computer geeks that have no idea what I just said, think of it as being the ham equivalent of Unix vs. Windows, or vi vs. Emacs, or Windows vs. Macintosh.
I was dubious when I read this, but a few minutes' searching confirmed the story.
Of course, "Adoption of the Article 25.5 modification would not mean the immediate disappearance of the Morse requirement to operate on the amateur bands below 30 MHz. Each administration, including the FCC if it chooses to do so, would decide whether to drop the requirement from its domestic regulations." (quote from the arrl.org article) Theoretically, the FCC could decide to keep the existing 5 wpm Morse requirement...and they do have more important things to do than fiddle with the amateur licensing requirements, so it could take a while. But it would be good news, if it comes to pass.
Jabber can do more than that. If a company had its own Jabber server which was used by its employees, it could still interact with both Jabber and non-Jabber IM systems outside the company, but all communications would be forced through the corporate Jabber server, providing a convenient access point for keeping logs. (You'd have to firewall off port 5222, of course, keeping anyone inside the company from connecting to an external Jabber server, as well as the ports for all the other IM systems.)
Jabber has optional support for end-to-end encryption as well, depending on the client.
Re:The Java.net creator is on to something
on
Sun Opens Java.net
·
· Score: 1
Yeah, I'm not sure what's going on there either. Seems to me, most investors would be looking at VA by now like Toad looking at Storm and saying, "Don't you people ever die?" (Yes, I watched X-Men again when it was on cable tonight...)
They're still losing money, but not as fast as they used to. And their stock price has taken an uptick recently, on that leaked M$ memo where Ballmer described Linux as their greatest challenge. Their business right now is basically SourceForge, so SF.net is probably fairly secure for the moment, as a technology demo if nothing else. All in all, they're surviving, which is more than I can say for a bunch of companies. (To find all ths out, I glanced over the Yahoo! Finance news.)
Part of me wants to keep from looking a gift horse in the mouth, I suppose. But it's a situation that bears at least keeping an eye on. For that matter, so is the situation with Sun...Java.net will be at least as vulnerable to financial troubles at Sun as SF is to troubles at VA.
Re:The Java.net creator is on to something
on
Sun Opens Java.net
·
· Score: 1
Well, all I can say is, if Venice weren't already well established on SourceForge, I'd probably put it on Java.net. And it's comforting to know I now have a backup option if VA suddenly goes belly-up and SF disappears. (Not that I think that's gonna happen or anything, but sometimes you never know which way the frog's gonna jump.)
Q: Can Hollywood learn from Intuit?
A: That's not the right question.
Q: Well, what is the right question, then?
A: The right question is, "Will Hollywood learn from Intuit?"
Q: Oh, OK, then. Will Hollywood learn from Intuit?
A: That would be...no.
You're probably thinking of Kool-Aid Man, released in 1983 by Mattel Electronics for Intellivision and Atari 2600. There were some others, like a Chuck Wagon dog food game for Atari (that is apparently now a hugely prized collector's item).
You mean Jordan? I actually knew someone a lot like that in college...she wasn't a girlfriend, but she was a good friend.
BTW, the same actress that played Jordan, Michelle Meyrink, also played Gilbert's girlfriend Judy in Revenge of the Nerds. She had a pretty good geek-girl groove going there for awhile...
Usually, the standard PalmOS ROMs include the basic Palm applications (AddressBook, Notepad, Calendar, ToDo, a few others), so I'd guess they'll be in this as well. And I see they're including a "high-score conduit," which has to be one of the more novel uses for HotSync I've heard.
The developer page also doesn't say how much RAM will be in these things, or if they'll include a hard drive ala iPod. My guess is it'll be strictly RAM of one sort or another, if their claim of "less than 6 ounces" is true, so there can't be a lot of space. (It'll never replace an iPod as an MP3 player, in other words.)
The hardware array is impressive for a package that small...ATI accelerated graphics, Yamaha audio, built-in rumble pack, dual lithium batteries (sounds like it's gonna need 'em), integrated Bluetooth wireless. But another thing I can't see on there...what's the form factor going to look like? Probably not rectangular, like the Palm...maybe it'll be about the size and shape of an XBox controller (the original big ones).
Also, how will software be distributed for these things? The logical choice would be on SD cards, since PalmOS already supports them...but how comfortable would people be with "game cartridges" the size of postage stamps? (Yeah, I know, they have games on SD cards for ordinary Palms already, but that's a different market.)
There's a lot of questions to answer still about the TapWave, and the answers will probably be critical to measuring the success of the product.
Bowersox was the only American who had any active role in the descent (it was astronaut Donald Pettit's job to follow the checklists), and he denied touching the button...
Hey, I'll back him up on this one...Bowersoxes never press the wrong buttons!:-)
That's what I'm using now...faster than dial-up, you don't have to screw with the phone or cable company, and it works under Linux. Unfortunately, only people in Denver and San Diego can use it at the moment...
Slashdot Mirror
Over on Electric Minds, we have a topic called Socrates' Bar & Grill, in which the price of a drink is a quote. For some time, I've been acting as "virtual bartender" at Socrates', and I've kept myself inspired to the task by thinking of Mike Callahan and Jake Stonebender. In some respects, Electric Minds as a whole is kind of like a virtual "Callahan's Place" (or "Mary's Place," or just "The Place"), and, just like Jake opening up Mary's Place after Callahan's got nuked, and then migrating to Key West to launch The Place after Mary's Place closed down, I've been part of the efforts (so far, successful) to keep EMinds alive after its older incarnations fell by the wayside.
Could there ever be a real, physical bar like Callahan's? I don't know...but if I had my druthers, I'd be going there right now.
"Joy or sorrow, it's better if you share,
So I'll take me down to Callahan's, and do my drinking there."
See this link. This link is also relevant; it has various facts and figures on the Shenzhou.
"Always listen to experts. They'll tell you what can't be done, and why. Then do it."
-- Robert Heinlein, from "The Notebooks of Lazaras Long," in Time Enough For Love
Those guys always got me jumpin', but the dude that really meant brown-trousers time for me was the Cyberdemon (or "steam-demon" if you read the novelization), used as the boss in Episode 2. That mofo was damn near impossible to beat without a BFG 9000 and a lot of quick dodging. (At least the hell-princes would go down after about five rocket hits each...ol' Cyberdude required a few dozen rocket hits to meet his maker, but only required one of its rockets to take you down.) And the ominous "thump...thump...thump..." of its walk...the novel's line was "It sounded like the World Trade Center was taking a stroll just outside," and that was about right.
For the book itself, though, he offers a great deal of praise, spending a lot of time debunking various "myths" that have sprung up around the book since it was published. If you're judging Starship Troopers (the book) by your impressions of Paul Verhoeven's Starship Troopers (the movie), you're doing yourself a great disservice.
Now you're making me glad I split California nearly four years ago. Things are a bit saner in Colorado. OK, they just elected a brewpub owner as mayor of Denver, and our Governor bears a certain resemblance to Sheriff Woody from Toy Story, and one of our Congressmen foams at the mouth whenever he talks about illegal immigration, but it's pretty sane compared to what's goin' down on the coast...
(Of course, I'd hope she watermarks 'em so she knows who leaked the pictures when they get spammed across the Internet...)
As opposed to Arnold Schwarzenegger's extremely-factual campaign, for instance?</sarcasm>
Bear in mind, she still has two months to codify her positions before the election...
"Hey, SCO! You know what happens to a toad that gets struck by lightning? The same thing that happens to everything else."
However, I'm sure Consumer Reports did a good job of researching it before announcing this conclusion to the world...that's just what they do.
Oh, I love this game! I got the high score, man, fifty thousand! Try and beat that!
That Knoppix CD makes a great tool, and a great demo besides. At the beginning of this month, my hard drive crapped out, wrecking my Linux partition; using Knoppix, I was able to boot up, run fsck, and salvage what I could (FTPing it to our home server, from there to my wife's WinXP notebook, and burning it to CD) before reinstalling the whole system. I didn't use Knoppix to reinstall--I downloaded a Debian Woody install CD and went from there to unstable--but the Knoppix disc came in handy a few times during the process as things broke and I needed to repair them. (I like that it groks ReiserFS, as that's what I'm using on one of my partitions now.) I even tried booting my wife's notebook (a Toshiba 1955-S801, kind of the "precursor" series to the P25s) from the Knoppix CD, and it was able to bring up X and KDE very nicely from the get-go, without touching her WinXP installation on the hard drive. Damn, that disc is a nice piece of work. Just remember to boot it up with the "lang=us" option :-).
Morse code requirements are definitely one of the major "hot button" issues for hams everywhere. On one side, we have organizations like No-Code International that work to eliminate the requirements (Bruce Perens, of Debian and other Linux fame, is heavily involved with them), and, on the other side, organizations like FISTS are working to preserve the knowledge and use of CW.
For any computer geeks that have no idea what I just said, think of it as being the ham equivalent of Unix vs. Windows, or vi vs. Emacs, or Windows vs. Macintosh.
Of course, "Adoption of the Article 25.5 modification would not mean the immediate disappearance of the Morse requirement to operate on the amateur bands below 30 MHz. Each administration, including the FCC if it chooses to do so, would decide whether to drop the requirement from its domestic regulations." (quote from the arrl.org article) Theoretically, the FCC could decide to keep the existing 5 wpm Morse requirement...and they do have more important things to do than fiddle with the amateur licensing requirements, so it could take a while. But it would be good news, if it comes to pass.
Jabber has optional support for end-to-end encryption as well, depending on the client.
They're still losing money, but not as fast as they used to. And their stock price has taken an uptick recently, on that leaked M$ memo where Ballmer described Linux as their greatest challenge. Their business right now is basically SourceForge, so SF.net is probably fairly secure for the moment, as a technology demo if nothing else. All in all, they're surviving, which is more than I can say for a bunch of companies. (To find all ths out, I glanced over the Yahoo! Finance news.)
Part of me wants to keep from looking a gift horse in the mouth, I suppose. But it's a situation that bears at least keeping an eye on. For that matter, so is the situation with Sun...Java.net will be at least as vulnerable to financial troubles at Sun as SF is to troubles at VA.
Well, all I can say is, if Venice weren't already well established on SourceForge, I'd probably put it on Java.net. And it's comforting to know I now have a backup option if VA suddenly goes belly-up and SF disappears. (Not that I think that's gonna happen or anything, but sometimes you never know which way the frog's gonna jump.)
Q: Can Hollywood learn from Intuit?
A: That's not the right question.
Q: Well, what is the right question, then?
A: The right question is, "Will Hollywood learn from Intuit?"
Q: Oh, OK, then. Will Hollywood learn from Intuit?
A: That would be...no.
You're probably thinking of Kool-Aid Man , released in 1983 by Mattel Electronics for Intellivision and Atari 2600. There were some others, like a Chuck Wagon dog food game for Atari (that is apparently now a hugely prized collector's item).
BTW, the same actress that played Jordan, Michelle Meyrink, also played Gilbert's girlfriend Judy in Revenge of the Nerds. She had a pretty good geek-girl groove going there for awhile...
"Melancholy Elephants."
How do you fire your weapons with boxing gloves on your hands?
(no doubt this E-mail will be...DELETED!)
The developer page also doesn't say how much RAM will be in these things, or if they'll include a hard drive ala iPod. My guess is it'll be strictly RAM of one sort or another, if their claim of "less than 6 ounces" is true, so there can't be a lot of space. (It'll never replace an iPod as an MP3 player, in other words.)
The hardware array is impressive for a package that small...ATI accelerated graphics, Yamaha audio, built-in rumble pack, dual lithium batteries (sounds like it's gonna need 'em), integrated Bluetooth wireless. But another thing I can't see on there...what's the form factor going to look like? Probably not rectangular, like the Palm...maybe it'll be about the size and shape of an XBox controller (the original big ones).
Also, how will software be distributed for these things? The logical choice would be on SD cards, since PalmOS already supports them...but how comfortable would people be with "game cartridges" the size of postage stamps? (Yeah, I know, they have games on SD cards for ordinary Palms already, but that's a different market.)
There's a lot of questions to answer still about the TapWave, and the answers will probably be critical to measuring the success of the product.
Hey, I'll back him up on this one...Bowersoxes never press the wrong buttons! :-)
176 Kbps Ricochet spread-spectrum wireless (lower bound)
430 Kbps Ricochet spread-spectrum wireless (upper bound)
That's what I'm using now...faster than dial-up, you don't have to screw with the phone or cable company, and it works under Linux. Unfortunately, only people in Denver and San Diego can use it at the moment...