I had been wondering why I had that scar, thought I must have been got by aliens....
You're right about the cold war thing though, some mates and I built ourselves a 'fallout shelter' as our den in the back garden back then in 1970's Wales.
Kids now missed out on all that fun. There was a gov't leaflet from the post office in the UK called 'Protect and Survive' you were meant to paint your windows white, lean a few wet mattresses against a wall and hide behind them.
Some great parody too about the lack of food, you may need to eat money to survive, start with high value bills as they are less circulated by the poor therefore lower risk of disease.
Wonder if I can find 'Protect and Survive' on line..
I love this little beauty. My significant other has a Snotmail account and a person she knows works for a large telecoms company with a name made up from the ASCII characters: &TAT;)
Seams the LOVEBUG got him and I get a shout yesterday while she is checking her hotmail, hey Chris sent me an I love you message, Is he getting frisky or is it that virus thing.
Well sure 'nuf there's the.TXT.vbs attachment so I go for a download to have alook at it. Her Snotmail asks if I want to run the virus checker, I could not resist:
Virus Scan Results
Name of File: Status: LOVE-LETTER-FOR-YOU.TXT.vbs | No Virus Found
An M$ Certified friend said 'yeh, of course, the virus is really hard to detect that's why it was such a problem'
In the section on MP3s there are complaints made about losseyness (such a word ?). I'd just like to point out we already accepted lossey with the CD. A digital representation of an analogue signal is inherrently a poor (lossey) representation of reality. Ask any vinyl fiend.
We never complain too much about the quality of JPG graphics (also lossey)
IIRC there was a US proposition too put a GPS locator into mobile phones 'so the emergency services could get to you quicker'. Now with SA off and accurate GPS in your phone they can track you to the nearest meter (sorry, yard;-)
From what I read on the CNN site they are replacing CRTs which they had as well as normal analogue gauges with 'flat pannels' to quote:
The new cockpit replaces dozens of conventional gauges and cathode-ray tube displays with 11 flat-panel color screens that provide easier pilot recognition of key functions, NASA said.
I guess 'flat pannels' are TFT type diplays or similar.
Have a look at: Trojan added to TCP wrappers source on FTP and you will see this was done. It was less than a day before it was noticed by someone who downloaded and read through the source. This is of course an example of security related software so the odds on it being checked are > than luser toyz.
Surely the patent means that this (patented) technology is so far behind the curve they are sure all the other spoooks in the world already have it/have had it some time.
What they tell us and patent is old hat to them, scary stuff huh ?
You may of course have to buy a few more Mb RAM;-)
Seriously though as has been said here a few times allready, Linux swaps out unused program code so you get more disk buffers & hopefully better performance. If it is thrashing you are either doing lots with big memory footprint apps, or you have some funny data/code usage patterns. The good old answer of more memory may be the right one or get into some real kernel tuning.
If you want half decent quality it's worth getting a seperate power amp and real home/sterio speakers rather than the evil PC ones with built in amps. If you got the above you could add a little amp and still be under you USD500 budget with great sound.
The Dreamcast is already: "powered by Microsoft (tm) Windows (tm) CE(tm)" This is meant to allow "easy" porting of PC Games though quite how easy that makes it given the very differnt hardware I do not know.
Microsoft may have a loyalty related problem as Nintendo/Sony/Sega are all well know in the games machine market, Microsoft do not have the brand reputation there. These are not PHBs they are selling too so FUD Marketing may not get them so far. Nobody ever got fired for buying a games machine !
I think the main advantage PCs have for the sophisticcated gamer is the ease of upgrade, as soon as a new graphics card appears (and you scrape together the guilders/pounds/dollars) in it goes. The console is fixed when you buy it and when obsolete, unlucky. By X-Boxing a PC they add this problem to PC hardware.
I think they will fail, 'specialy up against the PSX-2, that looks awsome.
IIRC Swahili started as a universal (trading) language made up from various East African tribal languages, Arabic from traders coming to East Africa with an Indian influence and probably many others too. The word Swahili is from the Arabic word for the coast as the language sprung up first along the coast. It is now used as an intermediate by many peoples with different mother tongues far into Africa. In the short time I was in East Africa I found it incredibly easy to learn functional Swahili and I am a language dummy. Interesting then how this original 'universal' language has now moved down stream and is a one to translate too.
I suppose many other modern languages have grown from a mix of others (eg English, from Low German, Frisian, French, Celtic now including Indian (eg juggernaught), Polynisian (eg taboo, tatoo) and many other words)
Perhaps in the end we will just end up with another new language that started by the need of people to trade.
Perhaps they should base it on Swahili or even Esperanto, please no more new languages !
The efficiency may be 20-40% if you consider the calorific value of the fuel you are burning but as that fuel came from plants that converted solar energy, died, got crushed and baked, got drilled for, dragged across the ocean in a big ship and delivered in the end to your engine what is now the total efficiency of the conversion of solar energy to 'useful' energy ?
If it still remains high perhaps the best solar power is to grow sugar cane or beet, ferment, distill (use the waste heat from your engine for the stil) and burn the alcohol in an inf^Hternal combustion engine.
> 3. Ethical is, of course, in the eye of the beholder. Eugenics of the sort espoused by > Singer, in a fascistic darwinian sort of way, contribute to the future viability of the > species. However, see point two.
Eugenics of this sort could also work against the survival of the species. Sometimes a 'defect' may give a person a better chance of survival than a 'normal' person. An example is sickle cell aneamea which is eventualy fatal but provides some resistance to malaria which is more rapidly fatal, thus improving the viability of the population in a Malaria rich environment.
Any artificial selective control will reduce genetic diversity, this makes the species less adaptable, it is like pre-selecting an evolutionary branch before we know the next selective pressure we will come under.
> The cool thing about Unix is that it was designed as an infinitely flexible basic foundation on which to do anything. It was > developed originally to play Spacewar. From there, it was moved to text processing applications. Now we have Netscape, > StarOffice, Gnome and KDE - all four of which are indisputably late 20th century programs.
Damn 20th century programs, things were much better with my 19th century steam powered DTP package;-}
rde > If this is the case, dark matter has to exert a force other than gravity. And if that's the case, the Pioneers' acceleration rde> away from the sun should increase as it moves out of the dark matter's influence.
Actualy Pioneer is accelerating towards the sun, this is normal for a body that is in free fall, it just happens to have been thrown very hard away from the sun at the start >escape velocity but the suns gravity still slows it down. This accerlation is comonly called deceleration but thats just accelerating with a minus sign. The rate of (de)acceleration certainly does slow as it moves away from the suns influence. However without another force on it (engine, planet further out, other star etc) the thing will not accelerate away from the sun.
The rate of (de)acceleration is reducing but they have found that the pull towards the sun is larger than predicted and thus the acceleration towards the sun is higher.
rde> Of course, I could be talking bollocks. Afraid it looks like you were;-)
Can anyone say vectored thrust ? Seen a Harrier jet flying, hovering (+yawing), forwards, backwards etc ?
Is it not better to get the number of fans right down, the thing will probably spend 95% of it's time going 'forward' ie the way the camera faces.
Put a tube through the center and have two contra-rotating (kill most of the torque reaction) fans in this tube. this can be pretty efficient for normal forward flight. lead several ducts from this tube to positioning thrusters that can rotate the device and/or provide minimal thrust in other directions (maybe swivel nozles, maybe more but fixed).
You have the advantage over the Harrier that you can make the fan run reverse the Harrier is stuck with forwards only.
Keep all the heavy bits you can near the center to reduce angular momentum. Now you only have one motor and some light control gear.
Of course all these have the problem they only work in an atmosphere, spose you can stick on an ion drive for operation outside:-)
An exchange between Jim Collas, president of Amiga, and another individual on Usenet has heightened speculation that the company may use the Transmeta processor in its Amiga MCC platform.
This morning, Amiga released its specs for its hardware platforms (see Amiga releases technical brief with 'exciting Linux CPU').
Yesterday, posting in the comp.sys.amiga.misc newsgroup, D Cousins speculated that Amiga was set to incorporate the Transmeta processor into its platform.
He pointed out that the die size, plus its ability to run emulations including classic Amiga apps, could make it a candidate.
Collas replied to that post saying: "I can't verify that any of this is true but this is a brilliant speculation. You can expect similar types of hardware/software integration and optimization in the new Amiga... this influenced the Linux decision. Unfortunately, I can't talk about certain partners yet so people will continue to reach conclusions without all of the information." /quote
Only tangential to all this fun and games but please [do|don't] try this at home.
Open your trusty microwave oven and stick some duct tape over the air vents.
Now take a candle, a really smokey one is best, light it and put it in the microwave.
Shut door and nuke at full power.
Expected result:
Lots of buzzing noise and flickers of electrical activity show up in the candle flame, often starting in the wick. If you are lucky 'globs' of purple plasma will break loose from top of flame and exist as free floating fireballs in the microwave cavity for several seconds.
Microwave oven may burst into flames, so may duct tape, this will probably invalidate your waranty.
Candle will remarkably not melt during reasonable duration tests.
Conclusions:
Parafin wax has little interaction with microwaves and does not appear to heat up much.
Carbon in burning wick and smoke from candle provides a conductive antena absorbing microwave energy, rapidly heating the carbon. In some conditions this can produce a conductive plasma that will continue to absorb microwave energy and make small burn marks on the inside of the case if it touches down.
Duct tape can spontaneously combust when subjected to harsh microwave environments.
Disclamer:
Are you stupid ? This can fuck up your microwave, trip your circuit breakers or burn down your house, you do this at your own risk, bne ready to switch off the wall socket if it gets too scary ! fire extinguisher close by may also be a good idea. You do this at your own risk.
Further experiment:
If you can work out a way to pump microwaves into a magnetic containment field you may be able to produce a beautiful yet deadly microwave driven plasma sculpture floating in free air. Only view through several inches of lead glass, tight wire mesh or big fishtank.
I guess the way I'd go about getting total number of web pages would be:
1. Search a random set of IP addresses for web servers. Make this as big as you can. Just look at port 80 for now to make the task easier.
2. Find out how many pages are on each of the servers you find (OK _this_ is hard)
3. choose a subset of the machines you scanned and check them for web servers on unusual ports.
Work out the number of servers on odd ports for each running on 80 and add this to the servers found in (1).
Average (mean) the number of pages per server you attempted to establish in (2)
Now we know the % of IPs that run a server, we know the number of possible IP addresses there are so we can get a fair guess at the number of servers out there. We know average pages per server and robert's your father's brother...
Problems:
Big sites with many pages verses home servers on cable. Hit a few too many big sites, or too few and you are way out.
Just finding the number of pages on a server, how many to geocities have ? do they tell this stuff ?
Active pages, does slashdot have infinite pages if you keep adding users and generating unique views ?
Slashdot Mirror
Not exactly enlightening comentry here from me, but this looks better than I hoped for. Brief, to the point series of, Difficult Questions(tm;).
Beautiful
Well done to the comunity and all involved
I had been wondering why I had that scar, thought I must have been got by aliens....
You're right about the cold war thing though, some mates and I built ourselves a 'fallout shelter' as our den in the back garden back then in 1970's Wales.
Kids now missed out on all that fun. There was a gov't leaflet from the post office in the UK called 'Protect and Survive' you were meant to paint your windows white, lean a few wet mattresses against a wall and hide behind them.
Some great parody too about the lack of food, you may need to eat money to survive, start with high value bills as they are less circulated by the poor therefore lower risk of disease.
Wonder if I can find 'Protect and Survive' on line..
I just followed the 5K page link and it took ages to load, 30 secs for the last one I just clicked and I am on a reasonable cable.
5K pages slashdotted, scary
Seams the LOVEBUG got him and I get a shout yesterday while she is checking her hotmail, hey Chris sent me an I love you message, Is he getting frisky or is it that virus thing.
Well sure 'nuf there's the
Virus Scan Results
An M$ Certified friend said 'yeh, of course, the virus is really hard to detect that's why it was such a problem'
:LearnM$ Clue = Clue -1
goto LearnM$
In the section on MP3s there are complaints made about losseyness (such a word ?). I'd just like to point out we already accepted lossey with the CD. A digital representation of an analogue signal is inherrently a poor (lossey) representation of reality. Ask any vinyl fiend.
We never complain too much about the quality of JPG graphics (also lossey)
I could not help thinking the ribbon must have got a bit damp and the ink is diluted.
Hhhhmm...
;-)
IIRC there was a US proposition too put a GPS locator into mobile phones 'so the emergency services could get to you quicker'. Now with SA off and accurate GPS in your phone they can track you to the nearest meter (sorry, yard
I guess 'flat pannels' are TFT type diplays or similar.
Have a look at: Trojan added to TCP wrappers source on FTP and you will see this was done. It was less than a day before it was noticed by someone who downloaded and read through the source. This is of course an example of security related software so the odds on it being checked are > than luser toyz.
Surely the patent means that this (patented) technology is so far behind the curve they are sure all the other spoooks in the world already have it/have had it some time.
What they tell us and patent is old hat to them, scary stuff huh ?
R.
Why not try swapoff !
;-)
That will stop those anoying little critters...
You may of course have to buy a few more Mb RAM
Seriously though as has been said here a few times allready, Linux swaps out unused program code so you get more disk buffers & hopefully better performance. If it is thrashing you are either doing lots with big memory footprint apps, or you have some funny data/code usage patterns. The good old answer of more memory may be the right one or get into some real kernel tuning.
Cheers,
R.
Have a look at www.bose.com, some very small speakers and the sound is great for something so small, even got some bass !
Have a look at the Acoustimass®-3 Series III for example, about USD 300.
If you want half decent quality it's worth getting a seperate power amp and real home/sterio speakers rather than the evil PC ones with built in amps. If you got the above you could add a little amp and still be under you USD500 budget with great sound.
Cheers,
R.
The Dreamcast is already:
"powered by Microsoft (tm) Windows (tm) CE(tm)"
This is meant to allow "easy" porting of PC Games though quite how easy that makes it given the very differnt hardware I do not know.
Microsoft may have a loyalty related problem as Nintendo/Sony/Sega are all well know in the games machine market, Microsoft do not have the brand reputation there. These are not PHBs they are selling too so FUD Marketing may not get them so far. Nobody ever got fired for buying a games machine !
I think the main advantage PCs have for the sophisticcated gamer is the ease of upgrade, as soon as a new graphics card appears (and you scrape together the guilders/pounds/dollars) in it goes. The console is fixed when you buy it and when obsolete, unlucky. By X-Boxing a PC they add this problem to PC hardware.
I think they will fail, 'specialy up against the PSX-2, that looks awsome.
- possible bias: I am a dreamcast owner -
Jambo !
IIRC Swahili started as a universal (trading) language made up from various East African tribal languages, Arabic from traders coming to East Africa with an Indian influence and probably many others too. The word Swahili is from the Arabic word for the coast as the language sprung up first along the coast. It is now used as an intermediate by many peoples with different mother tongues far into Africa. In the short time I was in East Africa I found it incredibly easy to learn functional Swahili and I am a language dummy. Interesting then how this original 'universal' language has now moved down stream and is a one to translate too.
I suppose many other modern languages have grown from a mix of others (eg English, from Low German, Frisian, French, Celtic now including Indian (eg juggernaught), Polynisian (eg taboo, tatoo) and many other words)
Perhaps in the end we will just end up with another new language that started by the need of people to trade.
Perhaps they should base it on Swahili or even Esperanto, please no more new languages !
The efficiency may be 20-40% if you consider the calorific value of the fuel you are burning but as that fuel came from plants that converted solar energy, died, got crushed and baked, got drilled for, dragged across the ocean in a big ship and delivered in the end to your engine what is now the total efficiency of the conversion of solar energy to 'useful' energy ?
If it still remains high perhaps the best solar power is to grow sugar cane or beet, ferment, distill (use the waste heat from your engine for the stil) and burn the alcohol in an inf^Hternal combustion engine.
> 3. Ethical is, of course, in the eye of the beholder. Eugenics of the sort espoused by
> Singer, in a fascistic darwinian sort of way, contribute to the future viability of the
> species. However, see point two.
Eugenics of this sort could also work against the survival of the species. Sometimes a 'defect' may give a person a better chance of survival than a 'normal' person. An example is sickle cell aneamea which is eventualy fatal but provides some resistance to malaria which is more rapidly fatal, thus improving the viability of the population in a Malaria rich environment.
Any artificial selective control will reduce genetic diversity, this makes the species less adaptable, it is like pre-selecting an evolutionary branch before we know the next selective pressure we will come under.
> The cool thing about Unix is that it was designed as an infinitely flexible basic foundation on which to do anything. It was
;-}
> developed originally to play Spacewar. From there, it was moved to text processing applications. Now we have Netscape,
> StarOffice, Gnome and KDE - all four of which are indisputably late 20th century programs.
Damn 20th century programs, things were much better with my 19th century steam powered DTP package
rde > If this is the case, dark matter has to exert a force other than gravity. And if that's the case, the Pioneers' acceleration
;-)
rde> away from the sun should increase as it moves out of the dark matter's influence.
Actualy Pioneer is accelerating towards the sun, this is normal for a body that is in free fall, it just happens to have been thrown very hard away from the sun at the start >escape velocity but the suns gravity still slows it down. This accerlation is comonly called deceleration but thats just accelerating with a minus sign. The rate of (de)acceleration certainly does slow as it moves away from the suns influence. However without another force on it (engine, planet further out, other star etc) the thing will not accelerate away from the sun.
The rate of (de)acceleration is reducing but they have found that the pull towards the sun is larger than predicted and thus the acceleration towards the sun is higher.
rde> Of course, I could be talking bollocks.
Afraid it looks like you were
R.
Can anyone say vectored thrust ? Seen a Harrier jet flying, hovering (+yawing), forwards, backwards etc ?
:-)
Is it not better to get the number of fans right down, the thing will probably spend 95% of it's time going 'forward' ie the way the camera faces.
Put a tube through the center and have two contra-rotating (kill most of the torque reaction) fans in this tube. this can be pretty efficient for normal forward flight. lead several ducts from this tube to positioning thrusters that can rotate the device and/or provide minimal thrust in other directions (maybe swivel nozles, maybe more but fixed).
You have the advantage over the Harrier that you can make the fan run reverse the Harrier is stuck with forwards only.
Keep all the heavy bits you can near the center to reduce angular momentum. Now you only have one motor and some light control gear.
Of course all these have the problem they only work in an atmosphere, spose you can stick on an ion drive for operation outside
Y'all
From the rumour mill it is alleged that the CPU may be the new Transmeta chip:
I quote verbatim from www.theregister.co.uk
:quote
Posted 16/07/99 1:20pm by Mike Magee
Amiga Usenet exchange heightens Transmeta spexulation
An exchange between Jim Collas, president of Amiga, and another individual on Usenet has heightened speculation that the company may use the Transmeta processor in its Amiga MCC platform.
This morning, Amiga released its specs for its hardware platforms (see Amiga releases technical brief with 'exciting Linux CPU').
Yesterday, posting in the comp.sys.amiga.misc newsgroup, D Cousins speculated that Amiga was set to incorporate the Transmeta processor into its platform.
He pointed out that the die size, plus its ability to run emulations including classic Amiga apps, could make it a candidate.
Collas replied to that post saying: "I can't verify that any of this is true but this is a brilliant speculation. You can expect similar types of hardware/software integration and optimization in the new Amiga... this influenced the Linux decision. Unfortunately, I can't talk about certain partners yet so people will continue to reach conclusions without all of the information."
/quote
End Transmition
Y'all
Experiment:
Only tangential to all this fun and games but please [do|don't] try this at home.
Open your trusty microwave oven and stick some duct tape over the air vents.
Now take a candle, a really smokey one is best, light it and put it in the microwave.
Shut door and nuke at full power.
Expected result:
Lots of buzzing noise and flickers of electrical activity show up in the candle flame, often starting in the wick. If you are lucky 'globs' of purple plasma will break loose from top of flame and exist as free floating fireballs in the microwave cavity for several seconds.
Microwave oven may burst into flames, so may duct tape, this will probably invalidate your waranty.
Candle will remarkably not melt during reasonable duration tests.
Conclusions:
Parafin wax has little interaction with microwaves and does not appear to heat up much.
Carbon in burning wick and smoke from candle provides a conductive antena absorbing microwave energy, rapidly heating the carbon. In some conditions this can produce a conductive plasma that will continue to absorb microwave energy and make small burn marks on the inside of the case if it touches down.
Duct tape can spontaneously combust when subjected to harsh microwave environments.
Disclamer:
Are you stupid ? This can fuck up your microwave, trip your circuit breakers or burn down your house, you do this at your own risk, bne ready to switch off the wall socket if it gets too scary ! fire extinguisher close by may also be a good idea. You do this at your own risk.
Further experiment:
If you can work out a way to pump microwaves into a magnetic containment field you may be able to produce a beautiful yet deadly microwave driven plasma sculpture floating in free air. Only view through several inches of lead glass, tight wire mesh or big fishtank.
C Ya !
Robin.
I guess the way I'd go about getting total number of web pages would be:
1. Search a random set of IP addresses for web servers. Make this as big as you can. Just look at port 80 for now to make the task easier.
2. Find out how many pages are on each of the servers you find (OK _this_ is hard)
3. choose a subset of the machines you scanned and check them for web servers on unusual ports.
Work out the number of servers on odd ports for each running on 80 and add this to the servers found in (1).
Average (mean) the number of pages per server you attempted to establish in (2)
Now we know the % of IPs that run a server, we know the number of possible IP addresses there are so we can get a fair guess at the number of servers out there. We know average pages per server and robert's your father's brother...
Problems:
Big sites with many pages verses home servers on cable. Hit a few too many big sites, or too few and you are way out.
Just finding the number of pages on a server, how many to geocities have ? do they tell this stuff ?
Active pages, does slashdot have infinite pages if you keep adding users and generating unique views ?