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Comment Nobody mentions the TI-99/4A (Score 1) 523

by xioborg (#62891353) Attached to: Ask Slashdot: What Was Your First Computer?
TI 99-4A. I'm not seeing it mentioned enough. It was the first commercially available 16 bit computer, even if it was hardware-hobbled with an 8-bit memory bus, and even more hobbled with a byte-code interpreter.. I think it was called grom. The keyboard SUCKED.. and I had just enough electronics where-witherall to put together a hard-wired keyboard I got from the abundant electronics surplus available at the time. I manually removed all the copper traces on the keyboard, and litterally hard wired the matrix to my and/or circuitry. My biggest motivation for all that keyboard work was to have a REAL backspace key (which was not available on the TI-99/4A keyboard without special double key-presses). I remember also hacking mine to make the extra 32K memory available on the 16 bit bus, which was a VERY nice speed-up. Eventually as this computer was dying out on the marked, I got the hard-drive card with a whopping 4MG seagate hard drive.... :) That was living high on the hog at the time... :) At the time I found a local BBS that was wonderfully active, with lotz of good info and programs to download. I sort-of miss those days when everything was a new discovery.
Science

The Science of 12-Step Programs 330

Posted by timothy from the your-brain-on-steps dept.
Hugh Pickens DOT Com writes "Since the inception of Alcoholics Anonymous — the progenitor of 12-step programs — science has sometimes been at odds with the notion that laypeople can cure themselves because the numerous spiritual references that go with the 12-step program puts A.A. on "the fringe" in the minds of many scientists. But there is an interesting read at National Geographic where Jarret Liotta writes that new research shows that the success of the 12-step approach may ultimately be explained through medical science and psychology. According to Marvin Seppala, chief medical officer at Hazelden and sober 37 years, attending 12-step meetings does more than give an addict warm, fuzzy feelings. The unconscious neurological pull of addiction undermines healthy survival drives, causing individuals to make disastrous choices, he says. "People will regularly risk their lives—risk everything—to continue use of a substance." Addicts don't want to engage in these behaviors, but they can't control themselves. "The only way to truly treat it is with something more powerful," like the 12 steps, that can change patterns in the brain. Philip Flores, author of Addiction as an Attachment Disorder, says the human need for social interaction is a physiological one, linked to the well-being of the nervous system. When someone becomes addicted, Flores says, mechanisms for healthy attachment are "hijacked," resulting in dependence on addictive substances or behaviors. Some believe that addicts, even before their disease kicks in, struggle with knowing how to form emotional bonds that connect them to other people. Co-occurring disorders, such as depression and anxiety, make it even harder to build those essential emotional attachments. "We, as social mammals, cannot regulate our central nervous systems by ourselves," Flores says. "We need other people to do that.""
Space

Submission + - Virgin Galactic's suborbital spacecraft gets FAA blessing (networkworld.com)

Submitted by
coondoggie
coondoggie writes: "Space tourism company Virgin Galactic today said its spacecraft developer has been granted an experimental launch permit from the Federal Aviation Administration to begin rocket-powered testing of its spaceships. With the FAA Office of Commercial Space Transportation permit, Scaled Composites and its SpaceShipTwo craft will be able to test the aerodynamic performance of the spacecraft with the full weight of the rocket motor system on board. Integration of key rocket motor components, already underway will continue into the autumn."
Space

Submission + - Milky Way's black hole wasn't always such a wimp (nature.com)

Submitted by scibri
scibri writes: Sagittarius A*, the dormant supermassive black hole that lies at the centre of our galaxy, was much more active than today not that long ago. Astronomers using the the Fermi Gamma-ray Space Telescope have picked up some faint gamma-ray signals that suggest that Sagittarius A* was emitting a pair of powerful gamma-ray jets like other galactic black holes as recently as 20,000 years ago (Arxiv paper).

If our black hole was more active in the past, it could explain why Sagittarius A* seems to be growing about 1,000 times too slowly for it to have reached its current mass of about four million solar masses since the Galaxy formed about 13.2 billion years ago.
Crime

FBI Seizes Servers In Virginia 405

Posted by Soulskill from the sorry-about-your-luck dept.
Axolotl_Rose writes "The FBI has seized servers belonging to several clients of a hosting company in Reston, VA, disrupting service for many other clients. 'In an e-mail to one of its clients on Tuesday afternoon, DigitalOne’s chief executive, Sergej Ostroumow, said: “This problem is caused by the FBI, not our company. In the night FBI has taken 3 enclosures with equipment plugged into them, possibly including your server — we cannot check it.” Mr. Ostroumow said that the FBI was only interested in one of the company’s clients but had taken servers used by “tens of clients.” He wrote: “After FBI’s unprofessional ‘work’ we can not restart our own servers, that’s why our Web site is offline and support doesn’t work.” The company’s staff had been working to solve the problem for the previous 15 hours, he said.'"

Comment Speaking from experience... (Score 1) 637

by xioborg (#32934346) Attached to: Which service is the last you would let lapse in a cash crunch?
I went from making $76,000 a year to $10,000 a year. The last thing(s) I'm giving up is my phone (NO data!), and my car. Need to be able to keep connections (phone), and need to be able to get there with a reasonable response time (car). (public transit here isn't too good) If I HAD to choose ONE, I'd pick cellphone (no data!)

Comment Where's the login/passwd??? (Score 1) 43

by xioborg (#27142085) Attached to: A Taste of FreeBSD With VirtualBSD
OK, for the most part, I agree with this being a BFD,but, what the heck, I like wasting my time, so I downloaded the file, but I cannot find anywhere what the login name and password to use are. I just noticed that this post has been moded down. Maybe delete would be better.

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