The schools tend to teach history in terms wars, royalty, and loyalty to country.
I won't pretend that understanding the dynamics of conflict isn't important.
But the history of technology is an extremely important part of history that's usually given short shrift.

-- hendrik

Is there any substantial support for the slashdot beta?

-- hendrik

There's a war on science in this country. It's a disaster. And it'll continue at least until the next election, which may be years away. I'm ashamed of what's happening to my country.

-- hendrik, a Canadian.

My wife, a doctor, tells me the tests cannot detect 30-year-old cocaine use, but can detect recent cocaine use. So the implication is that the patient was using recently and was lying.

Air-gapped? You must not have heard about wifi yet.

-- hendrik

The bandwidth of a truck full of magnetic tapes goes to zero as everything is erased.

-- hendrik

Actually, there are a few systems that have to be rotated throughh 720 degrees to achieve their original state. Perhaps the SMBC anomaly really shows that USB plugs are spin one-half particles.

Presumably the wikipedia is under revision control.
Does this give you the whole thing so that you can forever after sync with the master?
Or just the most recent versions of the articles?
Should there be a bittorrent for syncing huge revision control data bases?

Which is exactly why the economist John Kenneth Galbraith wrote the book The Anatomy Of Power

-- hendrik

How they maintain security with C and C++ applets?

-- hendrik

When I buy a new hard drive, I test it with badblocks, which nowadays seems to take about a week. Something like 20% of the hard drives fail during testing immediately after purchase. Of course they go straight back to the store when this happens.

There's a difference between the number of people posting and the number watching?

-- hendrik

Well, it might be useful to review and assess the competition.

-- hendrik

Having lots of background processes lying around isn't the problem. It's one of the effective ways of structuring an operating system. The problem is in how they are implemented.

Processes that wait for something should not use the CPU time until the event happens. Unfortunately, it's extremely easy to write code that runs around in a loop waiting for the event. This is called busy waiting.

It requires careful design effort to do this properly, and an OS kernel that provides the necessary tools.

The OS must be able to managing events and waking a waiting process up only when the event happens. And it must be able to manage waiting on any of multiple events (a feature that is easily left out of event management). And to be effective agaoins power wastage, the OS should at put the CPU into a low-power mode when it is just waiting (this will require CPU support as well).

I would be surprised if all those mysterious processes were carefully written to avoid busy waiting, especially when it's really easy just to loop.

-- hendrik

I started it when I was writing lots of text on an Alphasmart stand-alone keyboard, almost the best tool for first-draft writing. But really bad for editing. So I'd upload raw text to a file, for further processing on a real conputer. I wrote a program to do preliminary cleanup, making it more like HTML. Emacs after that.

Yes, that was over a decade ago. The program is written in Modula 3.

I discovered that the notation I was using on the alphasmart was more convenient than raw HTML, so I continued to use the ad-hoc notation even after I migrated to a laptop, and slowly changed it and the program according to taste. The program now generates .fodt files, which I do not edit.

My notation has no log-term syntactic nesting constraints (as HTML does with its and tags) so it is a natural for use in a revision management system. (Merges preserving tree structure are notoriously hard to do correctly; i.e., yielding valid tree structure after).

I'm considering changing to markdown. A project I'm involved i has chosen Asciidoc instead.

I consider ease of use with a revision management system (I use monotone) to be crucial.

The main feature I've found to make this easy is for the markup to use separators instead of brackets whenever possible. Thus use a mark to separate paragraphs rather than two to enclose them. Maybe there are a few things that can't be anaged this way, but for the most part the big things can be.

-- hendrik