Note that the 558 is not retriggerable. This led to bugs in joystick (or game paddle) reading in many Apple II programs. If you trigger the 558 to read input 0, then want to read input 1, do NOT just trigger it again. Make sure that input 1 has timed out first, before triggering it to be read. Otherwise you'll read an incorrect value. Or trigger once, then read all inputs you're interested in at the same time.

I, for one, welcome our old protozoan overlords.

In the 1970s, magnetic bubble memory was expected to be the next big thing in nonvolatile data storage, and there were commercial products from Hitachi, Intel, Rockwell, and TI. Commercial bubble memory devices were fabricated using garnet films, though there was research into the use of other materials.

Due to high cost, bubble memory was successful only in limited niches, so by the mid-1980s it was discontinued. Intel stopped development at the 4 Mbit level; I don't think the other vendors even pushed it that far. Late 1980s research results suggested the possibility of 64 Mbit devices. I suspect that the technology probably wouldn't have scaled much further anyhow.

More recently, IBM has been working on "racetrack memory", which works similarly to magnetic bubble memory.

Is ther e a way to send a PM on Slashdot? I've got the skills you need, and am available. You can email me at

The LEM wasn't capable of doing this in earth gravity. It was *extremely* specialized for use on the moon.

Why should only the criminal side of the malware equation get the benefits of open-source?

Some of my cells were travelling self-propelled at 5 km/h earlier today. In fact, all of the were.

Which is "better than an hour", 59 minutes or 61 minutes, and why is it better?

This is why we can't have nice things!

You have to do more than "make it available". Since it is being commercially distributed, and isn't accompanied with the complete corresponding machine-readable source code, they need to satisfy section 3b of the GPLv2:

Can anyone who has a Xoom confirm whether it came with such a written offer?

As others have pointed out, this only applies to any GPL'd components of the software, which includes the Linux kernel but little else.