Coz - Slashdot User

Submission + - The birth of vi

Submitted by

lanc

on Friday January 05, 2007 @06:00PM

lanc writes: "Bill Joy, co-founder of Sun, contributor to BSD Unix, the UltraSparc technology, NFS and even Java, tells the story in an article at TheRegister about how he wrote vi and what the motives were. In the interview he says:

"It was really hard to do because you've got to remember that I was trying to make it usable over a 300 baud modem. That's also the reason you have all these funny commands. It just barely worked to use a screen editor over a modem. It was just barely fast enough. A 1200 baud modem was an upgrade. 1200 baud now is pretty slow."

...and so my son begun The Holy Editor War."

Submission + - Nintendo Wii Remote + WowWee Robot = Hilarious!

Submitted by

robotsrule

on Friday January 05, 2007 @05:40PM

robotsrule writes: "The next version of Robosapien Dance Machine, the free open source program also known as Robodance, has support for the Nintendo Wii remote. A brand new video shows the upcoming release in action with a WowWee robot tickling Elmo. The video shows the creation of the script and how the Nintendo Wii remote smoothly interacts with the script. Also demonstrated is the use of voice commands to control a Roboreptile robot. Robodance requires a Windows PC and a supported infrared transmitter. It won the SourceForge Project Of The Month award for May 2005. The new version is expected to be released on February 1, 2007, or sooner."

Submission + - IBM Pimps PS3 as Cheap Cell Workstation

Submitted by Borland on Friday January 05, 2007 @05:20PM

Borland writes: IBM has a pretty nice how-to article on using the PS3 as a cheap Cell development workstation. This first article in the series goes over broad technical details & limitations, installation using Yellow Dog Linux, and ends with a brief mathematical "Hello World" program using the SPEs.

Submission + - 100 things we didn't know last year

Submitted by

gollum123

on Thursday December 28, 2006 @03:03PM

gollum123 writes: "The BBC news magazine is runnnig a compilation of the interesting and sometimes downright unexpected facts that we did not know last year, but now know ( http://www.bbc.co.uk/blogs/magazinemonitor/index.h tml#a007948 ). some examples — There are 200 million blogs which are no longer being updated, say technology analysts. Urban birds have developed a short, fast "rap style" of singing, different from their rural counterparts. The lion costume in the film Wizard of Oz was made from real lions. Online shoppers will only wait an average of four seconds for an internet page to load before giving up. just one cow gives off enough harmful methane gas in a single day to fill around 400 litre bottles. More than 90% of plane crashes have survivors. For every 10 successful attempts to climb Mount Everest there is one fatality. The word "time" is the most common noun in the English language, according to the latest Oxford dictionary. Hexakosioihexekontahexaphobiacs is the term for people who fear the number 666. The egg came first. Thinking about your muscles can make you stronger."

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