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Comment I went to Dartmouth at that time (Score 1) 146

I was there starting in 1969. Went to the Kiewit computing center there all the time. There was a BASIC program called DATE which was kind of a whacky psychoanalysis program in which you typed questions and it answered them humorously. It was called DATE because you would bring your date there (though women were few and far between at Dartmouth then) to impress them. I took some math classes from Tom Kurtz. Super nice guy. Saw Kemeny around a lot too. Those were good days.

Comment Bradbury book signing (Score 4, Interesting) 315

RIP Ray Bradbury. In 1999 I waited for about 4 hours in a line that wound around the downtown Denver Barnes and Noble to meet him and have him autograph a book. At the beginning of the event the book store manager announced that he would only stay for 2 hours to autograph books. The 2 hours came and went and the line was still very long. He then announced that he would stay until every last person had his or her book signed. He stayed until long after the usual store closing and signed every book. One of America's greatest authors and a true gentleman.

Comment Re:First keylogger? (Score 1) 89

On the Dartmouth Time Sharing System GE-200 series computer, I wrote a program that emulated the login using BASIC. I left it running on teletypes for users to login to. When the user hit Enter a control character was printed which turned off the teletype (I forget what control character that was) and the data was saved in a file. This was in 1969. I collected a bunch of user names and passwords just for fun. I think it was a fairly early password stealing program. Hopefully statue of limitations has run out by now.
Operating Systems

The Future of Portable Linux Distros 107

i_want_you_to_throw_ sends in a Tech Radar piece about the various portable Linux distributions, focusing on operating systems like Android, Chrome OS, and Ubuntu Netbook Remix. The article compares the distributions designed for similar purposes and discusses where they will likely go in the future. "As UNR is built on Ubuntu, it's highly likely that we'll see almost as many UNR respins as we have for the parent distribution. We've already seen one example in Jolicloud, and we'd put money on many community distributions, such as Linux Mint or Crunchbang offering a UNR overhaul alongside their standard desktop installations. It's also likely that Canonical will be able to forge stronger relationships with companies like Dell, which is already shipping a specific version of UNR on its Mini 9 platform. As Windows XP is phased out and the cost of bundling Windows 7 rises, manufacturers will be looking for a cheap and easily maintainable netbook OS, and UNR fits the bill admirably."

Comment Re:she? (Score 1) 94

It's funny that people who get upset about using he as a generic pronoun probably don't care a bit when a group of people of both sexes (or even all females) is referred to as "you guys."

Comment Re:The people running the site ARE NOT IT Admins (Score 1) 780

This was a great site; I'm surprised more Slashdotters aren't familiar with it. I've downloaded plenty of flight sim expansion stuff from it -- in the best tradition of open source the site consisted free downloads contributed by the fs community. It's very upsetting that all that work is gone, and I blame whoever did it, not the site owners. Otherwise it is like blaming the architects of the WTS for not making the towers plane-proof.

Comment Re:strategy (Score 1) 346

I migrated from SVN (actually SVK) to git; I used git-svn initially to keep my centralized svn repository up to date, but eventually I did too many merges of too many local branches and now I can't dcommit back to svn. But... I like git so much that I chucked svn and now use GitHub as my central repository.

Comment Re:I hope this is better than SuSE 11. (Score 1) 173

I don't know if anyone else mentioned it, but apparently it is a problem with ReiserFS and the Beagle search program. I turned off Beagle and it stopped freezing. Other option is to change to a different FS like ext3. I would check and see if you have ReiserFS (this is especially likely if you upgraded from earlier Suse, as Reiser was default).

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