Everything on the 2600.com flyer seems fairly calm, collected, non-inflammatory but pursuasive. Great argument for giving out the flyers.
but...
Infringing on the Disney Company's visual trademarks and copyrights is not a good way to stay financially secure.
The 2600 flyer has a very legible, very distinct, very simple graphic of Mickey Mouse's face, pasted onto the War Bonds Uncle Sam's body.
In the 80s, during the Iran Hostage crisis, some very crude people expressed their frustrations with very similar images of Mickey Mouse flipping his middle finger at the Ayatollah. "Fuck you, Iran!" read the caption.
Due to *that* infringement then, the Disney Corporation began adding the (C) and/or TM to every instance of their artwork. They *vigorously* protect their corporate image by prosecuting just about every case they find. I mean, every case.
One example: many day-cares paint giant characters on the walls to liven the room for the children. Disney forced these cash-strapped centers to cease-and-desist on a regular basis, even though having a 5' smiling Donald Duck arguably would be a great advertisement for their products. Hanna-Barbara made a few headlines by offering to cover the amateur recreations with lavishly professional pictures of Yogi Bear and Booboo, all free of charge.
This is similar to my thoughts on the mirror-site issue. If you are going to show that a law stinks, and get support for your cause on a *level-headed*, reasoned approach, then doing *more* things that are in known or potential violation of the existing statutes is very risky. Not only to your own assets, but to the very cause you're trying to support.
Once IP6 is available, the lan will be but a collection of little parts that are connected to one or more processor units. I can imagine a desktop that has a bunch of tiny gold-plated studs in a decorative pattern, any three of which provide low-voltage power and/or ip6 hot-docking networking to the device(s) that rest upon them.
I'd head to the meeting room with the wireless mini-monitor to read up on the BeOS Matrix II DVD MPAA controversy on SlashDot, rather than fall asleep.
("the lan will be but a collection of little parts" => "well-chosen, brilliant, but total leaflet topic")
San Antonio, TX, uses inflatable emergency dams under several downtown buildings, in case of a flood problem along their narrow river-front.
Some ice-breaking ships use inflatable bladders to nudge themselves up onto the ice, if I recall correctly.
My last Dell computer (boo hiss blah blah) came in packaging materials that were bags of air, instead of foam, peanuts, or folded cardboard. Not a dynamic use, but still a continuing trend.
Airbags in cars use inflation for dynamic cushioning, of course.
I'm glad I don't have moderator points today; I'd more than likely get grouchy and use them the wrong way. I'd moderate every "Aren't we supposed to be boycotting blah blah?" article down. Of course, disagreement isn't what moderation is for, so here I post.
YOU can boycott the MPAA if you like, because they like to sue Norweigians who put slashes in their Os or put k00l hacks in their websites.
YOU can tell Spielberg that you don't want Schindler's List or Star Wars, Chapter One: Phantom Menace or anything else he sells, on DVD(tm), LaserDisc(tm), VHS Collector's Edition(tm), Special Remastered Widescreen Edition(tm), "Jar Jar in My Pants" Underoos Special Edition(tm), or whatever else he markets for a buck.
YOU can firewall off DoubleClick if you like, because they write down your zipcode and tell a few online vendors that you also buy "Jar Jar in my Pants" Underoos.
YOU can decide not to support Michael Dell, because he's "in bed" with Intel, and everyone knows that Dell should use AMD because they're both coincidentally in Austin, TX.
YOU can fire off a flame at JonKatz when he writes about how so many kids are being cruelly taunted for wearing Jar Jar Binks Underoos, too.
YOU can tell Amazon.com to take a trip up the biggest river without your paddle, because they spitefully try to litigate the number of clicks it took you to find and buy a copy of the "Jar Jar in my Pants" Edition on one of their competitors' sites.
YOU can email billg@microsoft.com with your personal opinion of Windoze, Winhose, Winlose, Whinos (What leet name do you choose today?). You can giggle and gloat when you spend a few hours setting up a non-Microsoft solution that plays your legally obtained copy of "Jar Jar" DVD on your non-Dell computer, free of interruption from banner ads.
YOU can do whatever you want, it's your dollars, it's your time, it's your pants. I agree that there's a lot of stupidity in corporate life, and a lot of people out there trying a little too hard to stake their claim in the first years of a massive new market of online consumers.
Me, I just want to read SlashDot, hear about the various issues that are facing the geek community, and come to my own conclusions about what I should or should not do. When you assume that I'll follow like a lamb to every one of the causes posted here, you do me a disservice. Perhaps individuality isn't the hallmark of geekdom, after all.
Thanks for letting me ramble on, on a news/discussion service that DOES post a variety of topics and lets ANYONE speak their mind.
-----------------------------------
p.s. Anagrams for "Jar Jar in my Pants" Underoos Special Edition, for those who like such things, may enjoy aspirins in maladjusted incorporate, after reading my journals despite draconian 'penis majority'.
#!/local/bin/perl5 # # usage: domain.sort.pl < listofdomainnames > sortedlistofdomainnames # # Sorts by each domain, so all *.com's are sorted together, and # all *.abc.com's are sorted together near the top of all *.coms, etc. # Doesn't sort dotted IP4 addresses well, but doesn't mangle them either.
sub reversehost { my @terms = split(/\./, shift); @terms = reverse @terms; join('.', @terms); }
It's been a while since I dealt with this study, but here are a few different reasons for VRD, or Virtual Reality Dissonance, the problems with people not being able to handle various 3D visuals:
Latency The screen can be 75fps, but if it takes more than about 50ms (1/20s) to register an intended move from peripherals to environment, user can get woozy. (Since we're talking about a write-device, instead of a read-device like a head-tracker, it may have different effects but I bet it still would cause suffering.)
Small Angle of View A small monitor does not cover a lot of the wide area of the user's view. The THX movie theatre standard has constraints that a certain number of degrees of arc from left to right be covered by screen; this is for a sense of immersion. Sit closer to a smaller screen, pending the next item...
Mismatched Field Distortion 3D algorithms assume a certain "viewing frustrum," where a given angle of view is assumed. From the angle of view and the size of the monitor, that means the viewer's eyes should be at a specific distance from the monitor. The rendered perspective should match that perspective, or subtle bearing cues the brain has learned are not acting properly. Regardless of the focus, the brain will work to refocus to correct the perspective. Try sitting closer or further away.
Uneven frame rate One dropped frame at 72fps can tear your brain out of your skull, if it's pretty accustomed to watching the continuous motion of smooth acceleration. Turn off your Apache server or whatever else is chewing unpredictable CPU.
Cochlear Sympathy Some people just can't sit in a car if they aren't anticipating the road bumps and curves with their eyes. Same goes for simulations, only more so. If you like roller-coasters, you don't have a strong cochlear sympathy; your brain can decide whether to trust gut or ear or eye on command.
Some people just don't get ill even on the wrong setup. Who knows why?
OK. You've coded in C. You've hacked in LISP. Fortran and BASIC hold no terrors for you. You write Emacs modes for fun. You eat assemblers for breakfast. You're fluent in half a dozen languages nobody but a handful of übergeeks have ever heard of. You grok TECO. Possibly you even know COBOL.
Maybe you're ready for the ultimate challenge...INTERCAL.
INTERCAL. The language designed to be Turing-complete but as fundamentally unlike any existing language as possible. Expressions that look like line noise. Control constracts that will make you gasp, make you laugh, and possibly make you hurl. Data structures? We don't need no steenking data structures!
INTERCAL. Designed very early one May morning in 1972 by by two hackers who are still trying to live it down. Initially implemented on an IBM 360 running batch SPITBOL. Described by a manual that circulated for years after the short life of the first implementation, reducing strong men to tears (of laughter). Revived in 1990 by the C-INTERCAL compiler, and now the center of an international community of technomasochists.
This is an excerpt of a program that does ROT-13, written in INTERCAL. Being a non-INTERCAL developer, I chose what seemed to be a representative sample of the code.
(10) PLEASE DON'T GIVE UP (1) DO.2 <- '?.1$#64'~'#0$#65535' DO.2 <- '&"'.1~.2'~'"?'?.2~.2'$#32768"~"#0$#65535"'"$".2~. 2"'~#1 DO.3 <- '?#91$.1'~'#0$#65535' DO.3 <- '&"'#91~.3'~'"?'?.3~.3'$#32768"~"#0$#65535"'"$".3~ .3"'~#1 DO (11) NEXT DO (2) NEXT DO (12) NEXT (11) DO (13) NEXT PLEASE FORGET #1 DO (12) NEXT (13) DO (14) NEXT PLEASE FORGET #2 DO (12) NEXT (14) DO STASH.1 DO.1 <-.3 DO (1000) NEXT DO.1 <-.3 DO.2 <- #1
And so on.
Yeah, I can see how writing Space Invaders or Quake bots or a MUD would be MUCH better in this language.
The major three schools, NAU (Flagstaff), ASU (Tempe/Phoenix), and UA (Tucson) all use government funds to provide the college services to the citizens. As such, isn't this plan of *requiring* pornography filters on dorm-room TCP/IP akin to many of the public library debates being held around the country, including around the West Michigan area, home to SlashDot?
The US Constitution First Amendment says the government cannot be a censor, the Constitution itself says Fed trumps State in areas that overlap, and States are trying to override/ignore the US First Amendment with "exceptions" like this. Is this a fair summary?
As such, what other 'unconstitutional' cases are useful precedent? "Single-sex" state-sponsored schools have been forced to close or become coed, with mixed results.
The 'grass-roots' approach of painting the elephant pink is good, as well. Someone mentioned calling this legislation the "Gay College Privacy Act," since it forbids hetero-gender visitation to dorm-rooms. I think the poster was kidding, and so did the people giving it +5 Funny moderation, but it's not a lousy approach. I'm certain it's one that's been done before for other causes, anyone with examples?
Arizona is an Initiative, Recall and Referendum state. It adds a *lot* of confusion, but it also adds some good checks-and-balances... Ex-Gov. Ed Mecham revoked the controversially-created State Paid Holiday for Martin Luther King, Jr. on his first day; this was one of the things that caused his recall election (vote of no-confidence and ouster of an official) to succeed. Referendum is a vote of no-confidence on a passed Initiative. Is calling a Referendum on non-Initiative Legislature also possible in Arizona, I'm rusty?
I owned a Toyota MR2 a few years back, which is a mid-engine car. That is to say, the engine is not in front of the front axle, it's in front of the back axle, behind the driver.
I drove a long highway trip, visiting relatives in a small town, just when it was due for oil. I didn't have the option of going to a Toyota dealership to get the service done. I went to a professional looking establishment a relative recommended. I drove up, and girl waived me into the garage stall. She must have been the mechanic's girlfriend, just killing time and helping him on a slow Wednesday. She made a hand gesture for me to "open the front hood."
I smiled, and shook my head no. When she came to the window, I explained, the oil's behind me. Her boyfriend assured her that I wasn't pulling her leg... the engine compartment really wasn't up in the front of the car. She couldn't get over that... a car with the engine in the back!
Sure, if you *know* the architecture of MSDOS and Windows starts with a kernel that reads AutoExec.bat, while the architecture of Unix starts with a kernel that reads/etc/inittab, you should be able to find your way around.
The last time I used Unix, there was no X login shell. Why would I look into something that was named/etc (as in, miscellaneous afterthoughts) for the core, key, central file that controlled all run levels? It's all a matter of context.
There's a difference between being stupid, and being ignorant. One can be cured.
A good book to get you started thinking about such things is Programming for the Java Virtual Machine by Josh Engel. It builds a bytecode assembler language he calls Oolong, and then implements both Prolog and Scheme from there. He also throws in a regexp compiler as an exercise.
Wins in reusing the JVM for your embedded language of choice:
Most machines already have a JVM installed and configured, thanks to Netscape vs IE wars
Compliant JVMs can be upgraded and all the users of that JVM gain the performance benefits immediately
HAL-9000, the character, killed a human astronaut when two mission objectives were at odds.
I heard a rumor a long while back that there was an accident during filming of either 2001 or 2010. It was in the big red memory chamber of HAL. I can't find any web reference to it now. The actors and crew people had to be hoisted by cables into positions in that chamber, and the rumor goes, that a cable broke and someone fell. Serious or fatal injury.
There seem to be a couple mediocrely-maintained (to coin a word) sites that purport to be depositories for XFree monitor timing tables. They're trying to take up the slack that XFree has dropped.
My first day with RedHat 6.1 was spent wrangling with one "Plug & Play" Sony CPD-200SF (Multiscan 200sf). I lacked X experience, but thankfully I had the *manual* for this monitor and knew how to use Unix and vi. I could adjust the probed entry to support more than 31.5KHz-only, set the faulty init runlevel 5, and fine-tune it from there. The depository sites didn't have my monitor, and the closest equivalent couldn't be centered or scaled enough by my onscreen controls.
I gather that's a very common experience in the Linux community, but it seems to fall on deaf ears. XFree doesn't seem to care, and the few who DO collect the info have uneven and errant data (pieced together from email submissions manually, no doubt).
Why isn't there a nice CDDS-style automatic feature? It could get called by the setup script, if the CDROM doesn't have the sensed monitor. My RedHat came up in text mode, sure, but it had eth0 and ppp0 just about ready to connect.
If RedHat asked for the PPP phone number, dialed me in, and accessed the "Xfree Monitor Database Service" instead of the nearly unusable "configure X dialog" in 6.1, my Linux Out Of Box experience would have been a LOT more gratifying.
The new bandwidth features for broadcasters (line-of-sight and cable) sound good, until you think about it.
They say that the new bandwidth slots can be used:
individually to send full HDTV resolution channel stuff with captioning or commentary, or...
divided four ways to send four separate, distinct channels that are approximately equivalent to today's NTSC quality
Hm, I want to sell advertising. I can either
show four channels to four groups of eyeballs in different demographics: Lifetime, WorldWarIIFootageAllDay, WCW, Simpsons, or...
I can preempt all four of those streams and hope that a larger total audience watches a premium quality version of Terminator III.
Oh yeah, and remember the scheduling hassle of trying to go hybrid and switching modes now and then. All four normal channels have to stop their typical streams to merge for the 90min premium showing.
HDTV will be limited to HD-DVD, HD-VCR, HD-WebTV applications for a while, I'm thinking. And oh, yeah, not until enough early-adopters (read, geeks with cash not allocated to Playstations or SIMMs for their MP3 players) go out and force their less-nerdy friends to buy them too.
Interest paid on a loan is free money. It's a part of the chain of how the economy grows:
Joe and Mary pool their private money in the Bank, the Bank loans money to Peter. Peter pays loan with interest, Bank pays smaller interest to Joe and Mary. Bank keeps some, and Peter works harder, raising Gross Product.
It's not a zero-sum cycle.
The more interest the Bank can charge on a loan, the faster they get rich. They can afford to pay all the other incidental costs of the mistakes: bad loan risks, stolen merchandise on stolen cards, etc.
One late payment, and that "Low APR For A Limited Time" card of yours balloons to a ridiculous loan-shark rate of 19, 20, even 25% APR.
The large corporations don't pay the costs. If they did, they wouldn't be large corporations.
Reading through the questions submitted and asked of Woz, it seemed kinda leading... browbeating him into admitting "we" are right, and "we" are misunderstood, and "we" hold the key to the future, blah blah.
So, what do you think of Apples? Aren't they going the wrong route because they used to come with pinout charts and now they don't? Well, having control of the hardware's a strength to both hardware and sof...
Hush! So, what do you think of Microsoft? Aren't they SUCH bullies for MAKING people buy more PCs than Apples? Well, early on, Apple did make some big mistak...
Stop! No, no, no. So, what do you think of BeOS? Aren't they SO wrong for being closed-source? Yeah, I guess you're right. Open Source is popular.
Plain integers have the natural size suggested by the machine architecture; the other sizes are provided to meet special needs.
So, from that logic, when you build a 64bit architecture machine and OS, then C/C++'s int type should be 8 bytes, or even more pedantically, 64 bits. (Can't assume even 8bit bytes:) ).
Invalid assumptions:
sizeof(int) <= sizeof(long int) Short and Long are just keywords; they do not necessarily mean that the compiler will allocate less storage for one or the other.
sizeof(int) == sizeof(void*) Pointers should use the natural size of the address bus, not the natural size of the data bus.
sizeof(int) == sizeof(time_t) Structures and typedefs can change their internal representation; always use sizeof() with the appropriate type.
Or am I out of date (so to speak) with current C++ ANSI standards?
Edmond's work attempting to prove Kepler's works in inverse-square force relationships between planets helped get Newton's ball rolling, so to speak. Edmond Halley was friend, financier and publisher to Sir Isaac Newton, and helped him with the milestone mathematics text, the Philosophiae Naturalis Principia Mathematica.
As astronomer, he discovered/charted numerous stars and nebulae.
Edmond Halley is considered to be the first to calculate the age of the planet Earth by measuring the levels of land salt that had been eroded into the oceans.
Oh, and that little bit about discovering a historically recurring stellar phenomena that had a period of 76 years. He worked out that the comet would return in 1758... too bad he didn't live to see the return of the comet that would be named for him.
I went to check on something there, and was faced with a 1960s style television test signal image, saying that VW.com is off the air until the night passed.
As an aside, I want to make a personal thank you to the Volkswagen Corporation... all through this year I'd been dreading the inevitable marketing hype about "The most anticipated event, the new Millennium Bug," or "the VW2K." Never saw a license plate Y2KBUG or anything. Kudos to avoiding schlock advertising!
Trying to paraphrase the doc, to see if I understand it right before I explain it to some friends interested in getting into HAM... do I have this right?
------
The FCC revisits rules every two years, and this year, they recognized the advances in communications by simplifying the license structure. Most of it is to ease their own bookkeeping headaches, though.
There were six classes of HAM license, each level of license including all entrance requirements and privileges of simpler level licenses. * Technician (first test) (50MHz+) * Technician Plus (5+ wpm morse) (additional privileges) * Novice (second test) (3-30MHz) * General (13+ wpm morse, third test) (additional privileges) * Advanced (fourth test) (275KHz) * Amateur Extra (20+ wpm morse, fifth test) (175KHz)
Now, there will be three classes of HAM license, * Technician (first test) * General (second test, 5+ wpm morse) * Amateur Extra (third test)
Novice and Advanced holders are grandfathered, keeping their privileges, not upgraded to additional nor downgraded to lesser privileges. Technician Plus holders renew as Technician. Technicians who pass the 5wpm morse exam will be able to use the additional privileges, but it won't be a separate license class.
------
Questions: very briefly, what are the 'additional privileges' that are not new bands of frequencies? Where does someone get to use a fixed station vs a handheld station, for example?
I guess I'm too used to business docs that require an 'Executive Summary' or separate sections for history, what ideas were proposed but rejected, and what was adopted.
I wouldn't call it "rewriting history," but you're both right.
The domain name 'microsoft.com' has been around for a LONG time, and was probably headed by a Xenix machine living in Building 11 on campus in Redmond.
If you wanted to email someone at Microsoft, you added @microsoft.com to their internal email name. The internal culture was that your internal email name WAS your name, and you'd pronounce them as best you could; many people knew each other by email and not by face, even on the 52 acre campus. "Oh, YOU'RE edh! I'm toddla!" But that was pretty much the extent of Microsoft's "presence" on the Internet. It wasn't until Win31 shipped that they made their BBS of Windows Driver Library available by FTP, if I recall.
Once they started making products that were Internet related, they shifted to using the WinNT servers that were replacing each departments' Xenix that year. It's a part of the corporate culture of "eat your own dogfood."
Tell that to my mother and the thousands of other secretaries who took dictation through the ages.
They listened to the author, wrote what they said in a phonetic shorthand in real-time, then went back to their desks and re-translated their shorthand to typed output.
The only reason they used that system was because they couldn't type as fast as the person talked, but they could write (shorthand) as fast as the person talked...
Slashdot Mirror
Everything on the 2600.com flyer seems fairly calm, collected, non-inflammatory but pursuasive. Great argument for giving out the flyers.
but...Infringing on the Disney Company's visual trademarks and copyrights is not a good way to stay financially secure.
The 2600 flyer has a very legible, very distinct, very simple graphic of Mickey Mouse's face, pasted onto the War Bonds Uncle Sam's body.
In the 80s, during the Iran Hostage crisis, some very crude people expressed their frustrations with very similar images of Mickey Mouse flipping his middle finger at the Ayatollah. "Fuck you, Iran!" read the caption.
Due to *that* infringement then, the Disney Corporation began adding the (C) and/or TM to every instance of their artwork. They *vigorously* protect their corporate image by prosecuting just about every case they find. I mean, every case.
This is similar to my thoughts on the mirror-site issue. If you are going to show that a law stinks, and get support for your cause on a *level-headed*, reasoned approach, then doing *more* things that are in known or potential violation of the existing statutes is very risky. Not only to your own assets, but to the very cause you're trying to support.
I'd like a desktop like this:
ls --ip6linksOnce IP6 is available, the lan will be but a collection of little parts that are connected to one or more processor units. I can imagine a desktop that has a bunch of tiny gold-plated studs in a decorative pattern, any three of which provide low-voltage power and/or ip6 hot-docking networking to the device(s) that rest upon them.
I'd head to the meeting room with the wireless mini-monitor to read up on the BeOS Matrix II DVD MPAA controversy on SlashDot, rather than fall asleep.
("the lan will be but a collection of little parts" => "well-chosen, brilliant, but total leaflet topic")
San Antonio, TX, uses inflatable emergency dams under several downtown buildings, in case of a flood problem along their narrow river-front.
Some ice-breaking ships use inflatable bladders to nudge themselves up onto the ice, if I recall correctly.
My last Dell computer (boo hiss blah blah) came in packaging materials that were bags of air, instead of foam, peanuts, or folded cardboard. Not a dynamic use, but still a continuing trend.
Airbags in cars use inflation for dynamic cushioning, of course.
Imagine the court cases that follow "infractions."
Today's courts are supposed to determine facts, by sheer dint of evidence presented by two people who both want opposite facts to be considered true.
"He stole my fact!" responses:I'm glad I don't have moderator points today; I'd more than likely get grouchy and use them the wrong way. I'd moderate every " Aren't we supposed to be boycotting blah blah? " article down. Of course, disagreement isn't what moderation is for, so here I post.
YOU can boycott the MPAA if you like, because they like to sue Norweigians who put slashes in their Os or put k00l hacks in their websites.
YOU can tell Spielberg that you don't want Schindler's List or Star Wars, Chapter One: Phantom Menace or anything else he sells, on DVD(tm), LaserDisc(tm), VHS Collector's Edition(tm), Special Remastered Widescreen Edition(tm), "Jar Jar in My Pants" Underoos Special Edition(tm), or whatever else he markets for a buck.
YOU can firewall off DoubleClick if you like, because they write down your zipcode and tell a few online vendors that you also buy "Jar Jar in my Pants" Underoos.
YOU can decide not to support Michael Dell, because he's "in bed" with Intel, and everyone knows that Dell should use AMD because they're both coincidentally in Austin, TX.
YOU can fire off a flame at JonKatz when he writes about how so many kids are being cruelly taunted for wearing Jar Jar Binks Underoos, too.
YOU can tell Amazon.com to take a trip up the biggest river without your paddle, because they spitefully try to litigate the number of clicks it took you to find and buy a copy of the "Jar Jar in my Pants" Edition on one of their competitors' sites.
YOU can email billg@microsoft.com with your personal opinion of Windoze, Winhose, Winlose, Whinos (What leet name do you choose today?). You can giggle and gloat when you spend a few hours setting up a non-Microsoft solution that plays your legally obtained copy of "Jar Jar" DVD on your non-Dell computer, free of interruption from banner ads.
YOU can do whatever you want, it's your dollars, it's your time, it's your pants. I agree that there's a lot of stupidity in corporate life, and a lot of people out there trying a little too hard to stake their claim in the first years of a massive new market of online consumers.
Me, I just want to read SlashDot, hear about the various issues that are facing the geek community, and come to my own conclusions about what I should or should not do. When you assume that I'll follow like a lamb to every one of the causes posted here, you do me a disservice. Perhaps individuality isn't the hallmark of geekdom, after all.
Thanks for letting me ramble on, on a news/discussion service that DOES post a variety of topics and lets ANYONE speak their mind.
-----------------------------------
p.s. Anagrams for "Jar Jar in my Pants" Underoos Special Edition, for those who like such things, may enjoy aspirins in maladjusted incorporate, after reading my journals despite draconian 'penis majority'.
#!/local/bin/perl5
#
# usage: domain.sort.pl < listofdomainnames > sortedlistofdomainnames
#
# Sorts by each domain, so all *.com's are sorted together, and
# all *.abc.com's are sorted together near the top of all *.coms, etc.
# Doesn't sort dotted IP4 addresses well, but doesn't mangle them either.
sub reversehost
{
my @terms = split(/\./, shift);
@terms = reverse @terms;
join('.', @terms);
}
sub main
{
my @lines = <>;
foreach my $line (@lines)
{ chomp $line; $line = reversehost($line); }
@lines = sort { $a cmp $b } @lines;
foreach my $line (@lines)
{ print reversehost($line) . "\n"; }
}
main();
1;
It's been a while since I dealt with this study, but here are a few different reasons for VRD, or Virtual Reality Dissonance, the problems with people not being able to handle various 3D visuals:
The screen can be 75fps, but if it takes more than about 50ms (1/20s) to register an intended move from peripherals to environment, user can get woozy. (Since we're talking about a write-device, instead of a read-device like a head-tracker, it may have different effects but I bet it still would cause suffering.)
A small monitor does not cover a lot of the wide area of the user's view. The THX movie theatre standard has constraints that a certain number of degrees of arc from left to right be covered by screen; this is for a sense of immersion. Sit closer to a smaller screen, pending the next item...
3D algorithms assume a certain "viewing frustrum," where a given angle of view is assumed. From the angle of view and the size of the monitor, that means the viewer's eyes should be at a specific distance from the monitor. The rendered perspective should match that perspective, or subtle bearing cues the brain has learned are not acting properly. Regardless of the focus, the brain will work to refocus to correct the perspective. Try sitting closer or further away.
One dropped frame at 72fps can tear your brain out of your skull, if it's pretty accustomed to watching the continuous motion of smooth acceleration. Turn off your Apache server or whatever else is chewing unpredictable CPU.
Some people just can't sit in a car if they aren't anticipating the road bumps and curves with their eyes. Same goes for simulations, only more so. If you like roller-coasters, you don't have a strong cochlear sympathy; your brain can decide whether to trust gut or ear or eye on command.
Some people just don't get ill even on the wrong setup. Who knows why?
From one of the INTERCAL enthusiasts' webpages:
So, you think you've seen it all, eh?
OK. You've coded in C. You've hacked in LISP. Fortran and BASIC hold no terrors for you. You write Emacs modes for fun. You eat assemblers for breakfast. You're fluent in half a dozen languages nobody but a handful of übergeeks have ever heard of. You grok TECO. Possibly you even know COBOL.
Maybe you're ready for the ultimate challenge...INTERCAL.
INTERCAL. The language designed to be Turing-complete but as fundamentally unlike any existing language as possible. Expressions that look like line noise. Control constracts that will make you gasp, make you laugh, and possibly make you hurl. Data structures? We don't need no steenking data structures!
INTERCAL. Designed very early one May morning in 1972 by by two hackers who are still trying to live it down. Initially implemented on an IBM 360 running batch SPITBOL. Described by a manual that circulated for years after the short life of the first implementation, reducing strong men to tears (of laughter). Revived in 1990 by the C-INTERCAL compiler, and now the center of an international community of technomasochists.
This is an excerpt of a program that does ROT-13, written in INTERCAL. Being a non-INTERCAL developer, I chose what seemed to be a representative sample of the code.
(1) DO
DO
DO
DO
DO (11) NEXT
DO (2) NEXT
DO (12) NEXT
(11) DO (13) NEXT
PLEASE FORGET #1
DO (12) NEXT
(13) DO (14) NEXT
PLEASE FORGET #2
DO (12) NEXT
(14) DO STASH
DO
DO (1000) NEXT
DO
DO
And so on.
Yeah, I can see how writing Space Invaders or Quake bots or a MUD would be MUCH better in this language.
As the joke goes...
The major three schools, NAU (Flagstaff), ASU (Tempe/Phoenix), and UA (Tucson) all use government funds to provide the college services to the citizens. As such, isn't this plan of *requiring* pornography filters on dorm-room TCP/IP akin to many of the public library debates being held around the country, including around the West Michigan area, home to SlashDot?
The US Constitution First Amendment says the government cannot be a censor, the Constitution itself says Fed trumps State in areas that overlap, and States are trying to override/ignore the US First Amendment with "exceptions" like this. Is this a fair summary?
As such, what other 'unconstitutional' cases are useful precedent? "Single-sex" state-sponsored schools have been forced to close or become coed, with mixed results.
The 'grass-roots' approach of painting the elephant pink is good, as well. Someone mentioned calling this legislation the "Gay College Privacy Act," since it forbids hetero-gender visitation to dorm-rooms. I think the poster was kidding, and so did the people giving it +5 Funny moderation, but it's not a lousy approach. I'm certain it's one that's been done before for other causes, anyone with examples?
Arizona is an Initiative, Recall and Referendum state. It adds a *lot* of confusion, but it also adds some good checks-and-balances... Ex-Gov. Ed Mecham revoked the controversially-created State Paid Holiday for Martin Luther King, Jr. on his first day; this was one of the things that caused his recall election (vote of no-confidence and ouster of an official) to succeed. Referendum is a vote of no-confidence on a passed Initiative. Is calling a Referendum on non-Initiative Legislature also possible in Arizona, I'm rusty?
Here's another little story.
I owned a Toyota MR2 a few years back, which is a mid-engine car. That is to say, the engine is not in front of the front axle, it's in front of the back axle, behind the driver.
I drove a long highway trip, visiting relatives in a small town, just when it was due for oil. I didn't have the option of going to a Toyota dealership to get the service done. I went to a professional looking establishment a relative recommended. I drove up, and girl waived me into the garage stall. She must have been the mechanic's girlfriend, just killing time and helping him on a slow Wednesday. She made a hand gesture for me to "open the front hood."
I smiled, and shook my head no. When she came to the window, I explained, the oil's behind me. Her boyfriend assured her that I wasn't pulling her leg... the engine compartment really wasn't up in the front of the car. She couldn't get over that... a car with the engine in the back!
Sure, if you *know* the architecture of MSDOS and Windows starts with a kernel that reads AutoExec.bat, while the architecture of Unix starts with a kernel that reads /etc/inittab, you should be able to find your way around.
The last time I used Unix, there was no X login shell. Why would I look into something that was named /etc (as in, miscellaneous afterthoughts) for the core, key, central file that controlled all run levels? It's all a matter of context.
There's a difference between being stupid, and being ignorant. One can be cured.
I was fairly impressed with the diverse set of other languages that are built on the Java Virtual Machine.
http://grunge.cs.tu-berlin.de/ ~tolk/vmlanguages.html lists Basic, Logo, Eiffel, Ada95, Forth, Tcl and many "new" languages, all implemented using JVM bytecodes.A good book to get you started thinking about such things is Programming for the Java Virtual Machine by Josh Engel. It builds a bytecode assembler language he calls Oolong, and then implements both Prolog and Scheme from there. He also throws in a regexp compiler as an exercise.
Wins in reusing the JVM for your embedded language of choice:HAL-9000, the character, killed a human astronaut when two mission objectives were at odds.
I heard a rumor a long while back that there was an accident during filming of either 2001 or 2010. It was in the big red memory chamber of HAL. I can't find any web reference to it now. The actors and crew people had to be hoisted by cables into positions in that chamber, and the rumor goes, that a cable broke and someone fell. Serious or fatal injury.
Anyone with facts to credit or discredit this?
Can you imagine trying to get XFree86 monitor timing configuration right, with one of these?
There seem to be a couple mediocrely-maintained (to coin a word) sites that purport to be depositories for XFree monitor timing tables. They're trying to take up the slack that XFree has dropped.
My first day with RedHat 6.1 was spent wrangling with one "Plug & Play" Sony CPD-200SF (Multiscan 200sf). I lacked X experience, but thankfully I had the *manual* for this monitor and knew how to use Unix and vi. I could adjust the probed entry to support more than 31.5KHz-only, set the faulty init runlevel 5, and fine-tune it from there. The depository sites didn't have my monitor, and the closest equivalent couldn't be centered or scaled enough by my onscreen controls.
I gather that's a very common experience in the Linux community, but it seems to fall on deaf ears. XFree doesn't seem to care, and the few who DO collect the info have uneven and errant data (pieced together from email submissions manually, no doubt).
Why isn't there a nice CDDS-style automatic feature? It could get called by the setup script, if the CDROM doesn't have the sensed monitor. My RedHat came up in text mode, sure, but it had eth0 and ppp0 just about ready to connect.
If RedHat asked for the PPP phone number, dialed me in, and accessed the "Xfree Monitor Database Service" instead of the nearly unusable "configure X dialog" in 6.1, my Linux Out Of Box experience would have been a LOT more gratifying.
The new bandwidth features for broadcasters (line-of-sight and cable) sound good, until you think about it.
They say that the new bandwidth slots can be used:
Hm, I want to sell advertising. I can either
Oh yeah, and remember the scheduling hassle of trying to go hybrid and switching modes now and then. All four normal channels have to stop their typical streams to merge for the 90min premium showing.
HDTV will be limited to HD-DVD, HD-VCR, HD-WebTV applications for a while, I'm thinking. And oh, yeah, not until enough early-adopters (read, geeks with cash not allocated to Playstations or SIMMs for their MP3 players) go out and force their less-nerdy friends to buy them too.
Interest paid on a loan is free money. It's a part of the chain of how the economy grows:
The more interest the Bank can charge on a loan, the faster they get rich. They can afford to pay all the other incidental costs of the mistakes: bad loan risks, stolen merchandise on stolen cards, etc.
One late payment, and that "Low APR For A Limited Time" card of yours balloons to a ridiculous loan-shark rate of 19, 20, even 25% APR.
The large corporations don't pay the costs. If they did, they wouldn't be large corporations.
Reading through the questions submitted and asked of Woz, it seemed kinda leading... browbeating him into admitting "we" are right, and "we" are misunderstood, and "we" hold the key to the future, blah blah.
So, what do you think of Apples? Aren't they going the wrong route because they used to come with pinout charts and now they don't?
Well, having control of the hardware's a strength to both hardware and sof...
Hush! So, what do you think of Microsoft? Aren't they SUCH bullies for MAKING people buy more PCs than Apples?
Well, early on, Apple did make some big mistak...
Stop! No, no, no. So, what do you think of BeOS? Aren't they SO wrong for being closed-source?
Yeah, I guess you're right. Open Source is popular.
See, I told you.
From the C++ Annotated Reference Manual (the ANSI Base Document defining the language), pp 22-23,
Plain integers have the natural size suggested by the machine architecture; the other sizes are provided to meet special needs.
So, from that logic, when you build a 64bit architecture machine and OS, then C/C++'s int type should be 8 bytes, or even more pedantically, 64 bits. (Can't assume even 8bit bytes :) ).
Invalid assumptions:Short and Long are just keywords; they do not necessarily mean that the compiler will allocate less storage for one or the other.
Pointers should use the natural size of the address bus, not the natural size of the data bus.
Structures and typedefs can change their internal representation; always use sizeof() with the appropriate type.
Or am I out of date (so to speak) with current C++ ANSI standards?
Edmond's work attempting to prove Kepler's works in inverse-square force relationships between planets helped get Newton's ball rolling, so to speak. Edmond Halley was friend, financier and publisher to Sir Isaac Newton, and helped him with the milestone mathematics text, the Philosophiae Naturalis Principia Mathematica.
:) ]
As astronomer, he discovered/charted numerous stars and nebulae.
Edmond Halley is considered to be the first to calculate the age of the planet Earth by measuring the levels of land salt that had been eroded into the oceans.
Oh, and that little bit about discovering a historically recurring stellar phenomena that had a period of 76 years. He worked out that the comet would return in 1758... too bad he didn't live to see the return of the comet that would be named for him.
[Of course, maybe I'm biased...
I went to check on something there, and was faced with a 1960s style television test signal image, saying that VW.com is off the air until the night passed.
As an aside, I want to make a personal thank you to the Volkswagen Corporation... all through this year I'd been dreading the inevitable marketing hype about "The most anticipated event, the new Millennium Bug," or "the VW2K." Never saw a license plate Y2KBUG or anything. Kudos to avoiding schlock advertising!Trying to paraphrase the doc, to see if I understand it right before I explain it to some friends interested in getting into HAM... do I have this right?
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The FCC revisits rules every two years, and this year, they recognized the advances in communications by simplifying the license structure. Most of it is to ease their own bookkeeping headaches, though.
There were six classes of HAM license, each level of license including all entrance requirements and privileges of simpler level licenses.
* Technician (first test) (50MHz+)
* Technician Plus (5+ wpm morse) (additional privileges)
* Novice (second test) (3-30MHz)
* General (13+ wpm morse, third test) (additional privileges)
* Advanced (fourth test) (275KHz)
* Amateur Extra (20+ wpm morse, fifth test) (175KHz)
Now, there will be three classes of HAM license,
* Technician (first test)
* General (second test, 5+ wpm morse)
* Amateur Extra (third test)
Novice and Advanced holders are grandfathered, keeping their privileges, not upgraded to additional nor downgraded to lesser privileges. Technician Plus holders renew as Technician. Technicians who pass the 5wpm morse exam will be able to use the additional privileges, but it won't be a separate license class.
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Questions: very briefly, what are the 'additional privileges' that are not new bands of frequencies? Where does someone get to use a fixed station vs a handheld station, for example?
I guess I'm too used to business docs that require an 'Executive Summary' or separate sections for history, what ideas were proposed but rejected, and what was adopted.
I wouldn't call it "rewriting history," but you're both right.
The domain name 'microsoft.com' has been around for a LONG time, and was probably headed by a Xenix machine living in Building 11 on campus in Redmond.
If you wanted to email someone at Microsoft, you added @microsoft.com to their internal email name. The internal culture was that your internal email name WAS your name, and you'd pronounce them as best you could; many people knew each other by email and not by face, even on the 52 acre campus. "Oh, YOU'RE edh! I'm toddla!" But that was pretty much the extent of Microsoft's "presence" on the Internet. It wasn't until Win31 shipped that they made their BBS of Windows Driver Library available by FTP, if I recall.
Once they started making products that were Internet related, they shifted to using the WinNT servers that were replacing each departments' Xenix that year. It's a part of the corporate culture of "eat your own dogfood."
Tell that to my mother and the thousands of other secretaries who took dictation through the ages.
They listened to the author, wrote what they said in a phonetic shorthand in real-time, then went back to their desks and re-translated their shorthand to typed output.
The only reason they used that system was because they couldn't type as fast as the person talked, but they could write (shorthand) as fast as the person talked...