Latin. They didn't have Microsoft Word spellchecked US English in those days.
Not classical Latin but the religious latin that had adapted somewhat by this time (1500 years after the Romans).
Actually I thought the typeface was remarkably clean and sharp. Just depends on your culture and how you're expecting letters to look (check out contemporary printings of the Koran, or Talmud).
This is a very useful, very important use for the internet. You are looking at very high resolution images across the internet of a unique book.
OK so this may not be big news for folks whose idea of important books are the latest O'Reilly's a whole 30 minutes away in your nearest bookshop.But for historians, academics, subject specialists, this means potential desktop access to a whole library of significant works that could previously only be accessed by flying 3000 miles to see. Not all of these have been previously accessible via high resolution facsimile copies, and besides, the facsimile copies that do exist are often very expensive themselves and rare enough (they don't do Harry Potter style print runs of 12th century works...)
Sorry guys, you're not the centre of the world for everything.
Not sure where the centre of the world *is* for techno toys right now, but the combined population of Europe is pretty similar to the USA, with a lot of mobile telephonic innovation happening by Nokia and Ericsson. Somebody want to give me a figure for the Asian market for mobile technology?
I went to a lecture recently on iMode with a speaker from mOgilvy (Japan) and the speaker made an excellent point about access to the internet/ other info services via mobile telephone interface for Asian countries. Sure, the interface sucks, but if your mother tongue isn't written down using a Latin character set, well then a standard PC keyboard sucks big style. So a well designed mobile phone/ small screen touch and click interface can be an awful lot easier to use. Apparently the end of this year will see the mobile phone overtaking the PC as the prime entry point to the internet for people in Japan.
IMHO I reckon you're going to see an awful lot more products developed with the USA seen as a subsidiary rather than primary market.
Routing through the mideast is a little dicey given the political instability.
Watch out for connecting through the USA right now. Things are bit unstable out there at the moment. The favourite of the current president is trying to get in while the son of a previous president (the other power faction in the country) is trying to get in supported by big industrial money. It's all snarled up over some sort of dodgy procedure over counting votes and whose votes are elegible. I think there's also some sort of worry about the political neutrality of the legal people sorting out the mess. So it's all a bit politically shaky with concerns about corruption there, no actual leader of the country ready for the next term of election. But people assure me that in the long term we don't have to worry.;-)
Being one third owner of a tiny internet company (5 employees total), business has been good for the last year and we've paid ourselves. We're thinking of investing in a new kettle and maybe another monitor and a keyboard this month. The strength of our company position in the boom economy means we are tentatively expanding to buying two types of coffee and maybe, just maybe, three types of chocolate biscuits. Might print some business cards to diversify our holdings. Been following NASDAQ closely.;-)
Hey, I was fascinated to see the chess news pop up on slashdot. A bit biased because I grew up in Hastings (UK) - home of a large international chess competition of many years standing.
Also the town I went to school in, bought my first computer, learnt to rig pyrotechnics, canoe in heavy winter seas, dated my first girlfriend and snapped my arm in half while rock hopping
I don't find being into computers and loving chess excludes these other activities... or to quote my long standing chess opponent...
"There are those in life who play chess, and those who merely push wood"
They are broke, so they are selling things. ( I'd love to hear from a slashdot reader who could give some solid references to links on the economy there). I am more concerned about the Russians losing their knowledge base - what's happening to all the people with the knowhow to build and keep up space technology. Are they moving to other countries or are they losing their knowledge slowly by not being able to keep up with developments? Now that is truly sad.
The West should think about ways to help support that infrastructure - universities supporting their Russian counterparts, helping fund research, that sort of thing. Letting all this knowledge and technology (don't forget the military stuff) drop into an economic blackhole is worrying. A lot of people are concerned about terrorist/ 'rogue government' activities. Well, a continent full of of highly skilled, disaffected, very poor rocket scientists who are looking just to survive could be tempted by less than morally pure work. This isn't sad, this is dangerous. What are we doing to improve the situation?
UNITED STATES
--Total number of tests: 1,054
Pacific -- 106
Nevada Test Site -- 928
South Atlantic -- 3
Other nuclear sites -- 17
FORMER SOVIET UNION --Total number of tests: 715 (969 devices)
Semipalatinsk -- 456
Novaya Zemlya -- 130
Other nuclear sites -- 129
UNITED KINGDOM
--Total number of tests: 45
Nevada Test Site -- 24
Monte Bello Island -- 3
Woomera -- 2
Maralinga -- 7
Christmas Island -- 9.
CHINA
--Total number of tests: 43
FRANCE
--Total number of tests: 210.
--Tests were conducted at sites in Algeria, the Sahara
Desert, North Africa, and in the South Pacific.
... Perhaps some of the posters that exhibit anti-NASA sentiment are a new generation of nerds who just don't care...
anti- NASA doesn't necessarily mean anti-space programs. Certainly speaking from Europe I think a lot of people have a wider perception of space flight. Space flight isn't exclusive to NASA.
Big respect and all to NASA and the US programs but also a lot of praise to the Soviet/ Russian program, the European Space Agency, Japan, China, Canada, and everybody else who is up there or wants to be. And let's not forget the very professional 'amateurs' who are trying to be there (i.e. individuals and organisations who aren't nation states).
I'm only anti-NASA insofar as the idea of any one nation's military-industrial organisation having complete monopoly over access to the rest of the entire Universe is a bit worrying, eh?
But for the most part, yup, I'm biased, I'd like to see humanity out there in the stars.
Per capita GDP in Rwanda is $720. That means the scrap value of the copper in that wire is worth the effort to steal. How long do you think it will stay wired?
I notice that there are electricity substations, pylons, and other such structures all across the USA worth many times the per capita GDP of the average US citizen. Is there a problem with keeping the USA wired?
I know there are more issues involved but your oversimplification borders on the racist.
I guess it goes to show that space travel is still at a really experimental stage. I'm suprised that as we enter the fifth decade of launching people into space, a loose 10cm pin on a structure the size of a tower block can still delay a whole space flight.
How long will it be before we can send up flights on a regular basis (say once a week) without this sort of delay?
It seems amazing that after all this time the space launching system is still this fragile...
Make sure you get to the talk, he's fascinating
on
Rebuilding Colossus
·
· Score: 1
I went along to a similar talk that Tony Sale gave in London a couple of years ago.
He's fascinating. Don't miss it. Speak to one of the driving forces behind rebuilding Colossus. When they started the rebuild they had something like seven photos of the room. Tony has spoken to many of the remaining people alive who originally worked on colossus during the war, the people who were part of breaking the enigma codes.
I think the payment mechanism is imode's killer app. When a consumer buys something, it appears on their phone bill. That's it.
How good is that? all the problems with trust and ecommerce on the web (crackers/ giving teenagers across the planet my credit card/ strange foreign companies and banks processing my card...) all solved in one foul swoop for the consumer. They trust their telephone company to give them an honest phone bill. The telephone company takes the responsibility for making sure the third party companies are honest, takes the pressure off the poor wee consumer who worries about all of these issues on the net.
i Mode *is* a monopoly . It all goes through the NTT (national PTT ) network. If you really want to get hits on your site you need to get to be part of the DoCoMo content partner sites.
Once you're part of that group you're going to get listed on the DoCoMo portal interface on the imode phone and you'll see your traffic multiply by 50 - 60 times (according to a speaker from m.Ogilvy, Japan, at a recent talk I went to at BAFTA in London).
DoCoMo reckon that they will have 21 million users by the end of 2000, that's more than the number of people online in Japan via PC. Effectively the mobile phone becomes the primary point of internet access for more people than the desktop computer.
So even if the medium is crap, it will have superceded the computer in Japan... better take these people seriously...
Stop making pretty colors
cover the fact that you have no content and actually give me some meaningful information.
Hmmm.... the proliferation of themes/ skins/ cutsie little icons in the open source world suggests that that it's a bit hypocritical for some members of the slashdot community to have a rant about design in general... they obviously like a bit of pretty colour in their lives.
Functionality is the key but colour and layout can make information meaningful rather than just detract from it. Is it a suprise people want to achieve this in web based media?
The whole naming system is in a bit of a mess isn't it? But it would be a start to draw a line in the sand and say 'from now on (whenever that is) - we are going to strictly enforce correct usage of names' . The majority of the world uses national identifiers so I think the USA should come in line with the rest of the planet.
In the UK Nominet is strict about who can be called a.net.uk , you have to prove you are a registered charity before they'll let you be a.org.uk , etc. And for sure you have to be a dot something dot uk. Whereas I notice in some countries this isn't a requirement, in the Netherlands for excample, I used to work with the Technical University at Delft - http://www.tudelft.nl .
..And the American system where you choose a dot something without anybody checking if you really are a.net or a.org or a.com, (though at least.edu is looked after) but are assumed to be global... causes me a real nightmare when I find a cool tshirt on the web but when I go to order find I've got to double the price for postage and wait for six weeks before it arrives...
Seems like people should be paying attention to some sort of standard here (Educate me, tell me what it is...).
I've looked all over the family tree diagram and I can't see where it connects to Deep Purple. I am sure the bassist from this Unix band (some obscure psychedelic r n b outfit I guess) played with the drummer from Iron Butterfly once.
My bet is that it will be considered as pollution and thus forbidden, like the noise.
sorry Mirko, but my bet is that if the money is there, they will do it. There will be a lot of righteous noise and heartrending, but then somebody will come along and offer to donate x billion to a worthy cause (that is, a cause considered worthy by those people that could block the space advert, like the US government), and up it will go.
It's the free market economy for goodness sake, try to block it in the name of keeping space clean / scientific progress / human values and some corporate will claim that you're blocking their right under the first amendment to free speech or something like it. Maybe they 'll even sue and make the environmental groups pay for it...
Well the movies seem to be predominantly crap and from the USA...
Can we have favourite East European motorbikes next week?
cutting through the PRspeak, should I buy it?
on
SuSE 7.0
·
· Score: 1
Cutting through the PR speak, is this a significant development from version 6.4? or merely an incremental? I have been using linux for about a year so still getting used to the core functionality of it all. Will I notice a difference or is the upgrade only of value to all you gurus n wizards out there who are doing developmental work?
I am on a home telephone line so ftp'ing down anything over a few Mbs is out of the question (good old UK British Telecom pay per minute phone bills). Is it worth me going out and buying the new version on disc?
Can somebody succinctly list the major developments that this new version offers?
yeah, when I came to the USA for the first time, I found hiring a car with only two pedals well confusing. Couldn't work out how to turn the MS 'automatic gearshift' Wizard off so I could choose when to change gears rather than the car doing it for me...
Slashdot Mirror
Latin. They didn't have Microsoft Word spellchecked US English in those days.
Not classical Latin but the religious latin that had adapted somewhat by this time (1500 years after the Romans).
Actually I thought the typeface was remarkably clean and sharp. Just depends on your culture and how you're expecting letters to look (check out contemporary printings of the Koran, or Talmud).
Think laterally here folks!
This is a very useful, very important use for the internet. You are looking at very high resolution images across the internet of a unique book.
OK so this may not be big news for folks whose idea of important books are the latest O'Reilly's a whole 30 minutes away in your nearest bookshop.But for historians, academics, subject specialists, this means potential desktop access to a whole library of significant works that could previously only be accessed by flying 3000 miles to see. Not all of these have been previously accessible via high resolution facsimile copies, and besides, the facsimile copies that do exist are often very expensive themselves and rare enough (they don't do Harry Potter style print runs of 12th century works...)
This is very good news for historians.
Do Autogen have the rights over all samples in perpetuity or just for the next 5/ 10 / whatever years?
Sorry guys, you're not the centre of the world for everything.
Not sure where the centre of the world *is* for techno toys right now, but the combined population of Europe is pretty similar to the USA, with a lot of mobile telephonic innovation happening by Nokia and Ericsson. Somebody want to give me a figure for the Asian market for mobile technology?
I went to a lecture recently on iMode with a speaker from mOgilvy (Japan) and the speaker made an excellent point about access to the internet/ other info services via mobile telephone interface for Asian countries. Sure, the interface sucks, but if your mother tongue isn't written down using a Latin character set, well then a standard PC keyboard sucks big style. So a well designed mobile phone/ small screen touch and click interface can be an awful lot easier to use. Apparently the end of this year will see the mobile phone overtaking the PC as the prime entry point to the internet for people in Japan.
IMHO I reckon you're going to see an awful lot more products developed with the USA seen as a subsidiary rather than primary market.
Routing through the mideast is a little dicey given the political instability.
Watch out for connecting through the USA right now. Things are bit unstable out there at the moment. The favourite of the current president is trying to get in while the son of a previous president (the other power faction in the country) is trying to get in supported by big industrial money. It's all snarled up over some sort of dodgy procedure over counting votes and whose votes are elegible. I think there's also some sort of worry about the political neutrality of the legal people sorting out the mess. So it's all a bit politically shaky with concerns about corruption there, no actual leader of the country ready for the next term of election. But people assure me that in the long term we don't have to worry. ;-)
no problem for me.
Being one third owner of a tiny internet company (5 employees total), business has been good for the last year and we've paid ourselves. We're thinking of investing in a new kettle and maybe another monitor and a keyboard this month. The strength of our company position in the boom economy means we are tentatively expanding to buying two types of coffee and maybe, just maybe, three types of chocolate biscuits. Might print some business cards to diversify our holdings. Been following NASDAQ closely. ;-)
Can somebody advise me on their UK experiences?
I also agree with thorsen that this posting could do an 'only read if you live in the USA' .
..it's military.
What's the largest computer out there which isn't designed to supporting more efficient killing?
Hey, I was fascinated to see the chess news pop up on slashdot. A bit biased because I grew up in Hastings (UK) - home of a large international chess competition of many years standing.
Also the town I went to school in, bought my first computer, learnt to rig pyrotechnics, canoe in heavy winter seas, dated my first girlfriend and snapped my arm in half while rock hopping
I don't find being into computers and loving chess excludes these other activities... or to quote my long standing chess opponent...
"There are those in life who play chess, and those who merely push wood"
The Russians are being pragmatic
They are broke, so they are selling things. ( I'd love to hear from a slashdot reader who could give some solid references to links on the economy there). I am more concerned about the Russians losing their knowledge base - what's happening to all the people with the knowhow to build and keep up space technology. Are they moving to other countries or are they losing their knowledge slowly by not being able to keep up with developments? Now that is truly sad.
The West should think about ways to help support that infrastructure - universities supporting their Russian counterparts, helping fund research, that sort of thing. Letting all this knowledge and technology (don't forget the military stuff) drop into an economic blackhole is worrying. A lot of people are concerned about terrorist/ 'rogue government' activities. Well, a continent full of of highly skilled, disaffected, very poor rocket scientists who are looking just to survive could be tempted by less than morally pure work. This isn't sad, this is dangerous. What are we doing to improve the situation?
Weren't you the kid who dropped the coke can on the sidewalk the other day and said "hey, don't worry, it's only a tiny bit of trash..." ?
Nuclear test statistics (hey, what's a little bit of junk going to matter in the oceans.. ?)
UNITED STATES--Total number of tests: 1,054
Pacific -- 106
Nevada Test Site -- 928
South Atlantic -- 3
Other nuclear sites -- 17 FORMER SOVIET UNION --Total number of tests: 715 (969 devices)
Semipalatinsk -- 456
Novaya Zemlya -- 130
Other nuclear sites -- 129
UNITED KINGDOM
--Total number of tests: 45
Nevada Test Site -- 24
Monte Bello Island -- 3
Woomera -- 2
Maralinga -- 7
Christmas Island -- 9.
CHINA
--Total number of tests: 43
FRANCE
--Total number of tests: 210.
--Tests were conducted at sites in Algeria, the Sahara Desert, North Africa, and in the South Pacific.
INDIA
--Total number of tests: 6
anti- NASA doesn't necessarily mean anti-space programs. Certainly speaking from Europe I think a lot of people have a wider perception of space flight. Space flight isn't exclusive to NASA.
Big respect and all to NASA and the US programs but also a lot of praise to the Soviet/ Russian program, the European Space Agency, Japan, China, Canada, and everybody else who is up there or wants to be. And let's not forget the very professional 'amateurs' who are trying to be there (i.e. individuals and organisations who aren't nation states).
I'm only anti-NASA insofar as the idea of any one nation's military-industrial organisation having complete monopoly over access to the rest of the entire Universe is a bit worrying, eh?
But for the most part, yup, I'm biased, I'd like to see humanity out there in the stars.
Go ahead, wire Africa. I dare you.
Per capita GDP in Rwanda is $720. That means the scrap value of the copper in that wire is worth the effort to steal. How long do you think it will stay wired?
I notice that there are electricity substations, pylons, and other such structures all across the USA worth many times the per capita GDP of the average US citizen. Is there a problem with keeping the USA wired?
I know there are more issues involved but your oversimplification borders on the racist.
But can I drive my 1965 Singer Gazelle car remotely?
When I can expect that plugin?
I guess it goes to show that space travel is still at a really experimental stage. I'm suprised that as we enter the fifth decade of launching people into space, a loose 10cm pin on a structure the size of a tower block can still delay a whole space flight.
How long will it be before we can send up flights on a regular basis (say once a week) without this sort of delay?
It seems amazing that after all this time the space launching system is still this fragile...
I went along to a similar talk that Tony Sale gave in London a couple of years ago.
He's fascinating. Don't miss it. Speak to one of the driving forces behind rebuilding Colossus. When they started the rebuild they had something like seven photos of the room. Tony has spoken to many of the remaining people alive who originally worked on colossus during the war, the people who were part of breaking the enigma codes.
I think the payment mechanism is imode's killer app. When a consumer buys something, it appears on their phone bill. That's it.
How good is that? all the problems with trust and ecommerce on the web (crackers/ giving teenagers across the planet my credit card/ strange foreign companies and banks processing my card...) all solved in one foul swoop for the consumer. They trust their telephone company to give them an honest phone bill. The telephone company takes the responsibility for making sure the third party companies are honest, takes the pressure off the poor wee consumer who worries about all of these issues on the net.
Got to be a winner ...
Once you're part of that group you're going to get listed on the DoCoMo portal interface on the imode phone and you'll see your traffic multiply by 50 - 60 times (according to a speaker from m.Ogilvy, Japan, at a recent talk I went to at BAFTA in London).
DoCoMo reckon that they will have 21 million users by the end of 2000, that's more than the number of people online in Japan via PC. Effectively the mobile phone becomes the primary point of internet access for more people than the desktop computer.
So even if the medium is crap, it will have superceded the computer in Japan... better take these people seriously...
Stop making pretty colors cover the fact that you have no content and actually give me some meaningful information.
Hmmm.... the proliferation of themes/ skins/ cutsie little icons in the open source world suggests that that it's a bit hypocritical for some members of the slashdot community to have a rant about design in general... they obviously like a bit of pretty colour in their lives.
Functionality is the key but colour and layout can make information meaningful rather than just detract from it. Is it a suprise people want to achieve this in web based media?
The whole naming system is in a bit of a mess isn't it? But it would be a start to draw a line in the sand and say 'from now on (whenever that is) - we are going to strictly enforce correct usage of names' . The majority of the world uses national identifiers so I think the USA should come in line with the rest of the planet.
In the UK Nominet is strict about who can be called a .net.uk , you have to prove you are a registered charity before they'll let you be a .org.uk , etc. And for sure you have to be a dot something dot uk. Whereas I notice in some countries this isn't a requirement, in the Netherlands for excample, I used to work with the Technical University at Delft - http://www.tudelft.nl .
..And the American system where you choose a dot something without anybody checking if you really are a .net or a .org or a .com, (though at least .edu is looked after) but are assumed to be global... causes me a real nightmare when I find a cool tshirt on the web but when I go to order find I've got to double the price for postage and wait for six weeks before it arrives...
Seems like people should be paying attention to some sort of standard here (Educate me, tell me what it is...).
I've looked all over the family tree diagram and I can't see where it connects to Deep Purple. I am sure the bassist from this Unix band (some obscure psychedelic r n b outfit I guess) played with the drummer from Iron Butterfly once.
My bet is that it will be considered as pollution and thus forbidden, like the noise.
sorry Mirko, but my bet is that if the money is there, they will do it. There will be a lot of righteous noise and heartrending, but then somebody will come along and offer to donate x billion to a worthy cause (that is, a cause considered worthy by those people that could block the space advert, like the US government), and up it will go.
It's the free market economy for goodness sake, try to block it in the name of keeping space clean / scientific progress / human values and some corporate will claim that you're blocking their right under the first amendment to free speech or something like it. Maybe they 'll even sue and make the environmental groups pay for it...
I give it 20 years.
Well the movies seem to be predominantly crap and from the USA...
Can we have favourite East European motorbikes next week?
Cutting through the PR speak, is this a significant development from version 6.4? or merely an incremental? I have been using linux for about a year so still getting used to the core functionality of it all. Will I notice a difference or is the upgrade only of value to all you gurus n wizards out there who are doing developmental work?
I am on a home telephone line so ftp'ing down anything over a few Mbs is out of the question (good old UK British Telecom pay per minute phone bills). Is it worth me going out and buying the new version on disc?
Can somebody succinctly list the major developments that this new version offers?
cheers
yeah, when I came to the USA for the first time, I found hiring a car with only two pedals well confusing. Couldn't work out how to turn the MS 'automatic gearshift' Wizard off so I could choose when to change gears rather than the car doing it for me...
Think I'll stick to my bicycle next time... :-)