Our Principals
2) The difference between a winner and a loser is that the winner tried one more time. 3) K.I.S.M.I.F. 4) Y.C.D.B.S.O.Y.A. Our Web Page:![]() |
E-Mail Us!Our CreedExploring: Enthusiasm, Energy, & Excellence Venturing Crew 369Venturing Crew 369 was chartered on December 31, 1994 to the Reformation Luthern Church. Venturing Crew 369 specializes in UNIX for Programmers while emphasizing a deep theme of Engineering Computer Information & Science; Membership in Venturing Crew 369 is open to young men and women between the ages of 14 [and in high school] and not yet 20. Annual Membership fees are $25.00. |
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Congratulations Lord Neil!James D. CorderI want to congratulate Neil Coplin on becoming our first youth ever in 369 to achieve the title "Lord!" This is no small feet for Lord Neil. He had to achieve an 80% or better every month for the last twelve months. To maintain his position he must continue to receive scores higher than eighty. If he misses just one month the twelve month clock starts counting over!!! Moreover, he will loose his title for a minimum of twelve months. If Neil keeps his scores up until the February Court-of-Honor he will then have the right to wear black eplits as long as he is a Lord. Neil brings the total number of Lords in the Crew to 3. We also have two Sirs and one Dame. Again, congratulations Neil! Quote of the Month UnknownWell done is better than well said! It's a boy!S. PotterI'm excited to announce that John S. Potter was born at 4:38pm 09/15/00 and weighed 6lb 7oz, 18.5in long. |
Crew Finances
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Up-an-Coming Crew Expenses 12/01/01 Crew Charter $30.00 12/01/01 Crew Insurance $375.00 12/31/01 Registration $1,875.00 Monthly The Adventure $75.00 Up-an-Coming Member Expenses09/05/00 Registration $25.00 09/26/00 Book $25.00 06/05/01 Summer Camp $175.00 |
Aaron Croyle 19
Well I have successfully installed BeOS Personal Edition 5 on three computers now, but I don't know that I am able to say "I didn't know my computer could do that." Unfortunately I have been unable to configure sound or networking on any of them, due to the meager supply of drivers. I have found a work around for the networking problem. As you may recall from my previous article, BeOS Personal Edition installs to a file on your Fat32 partition which it uses as a pseudo-filesystem to run the OS from. In edition to this "filesystem" you can mount your entire assortment of drives. Thus, you can download BeOS files to your Fat32 drive, reboot to BeOS, and install them.
While this might seem like a pain, BeOS boots and is ready for action in 15 seconds flat (faster then Windows can shutdown); and I really wanted to see what Be had to offer. While sound and networking where not working, I did successfully install the drivers for my Wacom drawing tablet quicker and more easily then in Windows. It is also worth noting that I saw the pressure sensitivity of my pen for the first time in BeOS, something I am yet to see with Windows or Linux. I am fairly impressed with amount of software available for BeOS, including an assortment of games, emulators, and productivity software.
A word of advice to the people at BeOS, if there were more drivers for the Personal Edition (i.e. if I could use my Tulip network card and ESS audiodrive) I would consider buying the full edition. At this point I'm not willing to spend the money without knowing that the OS will work with my hardware.
Neil A. Coplin 19
The light of the sun glints in your eye as you gaze up at the solar system. A foreign object is hovering in the sky, with the sound of "Thus Spoke Zarathustra" booming in the background...
Well, it was something like that. Just a short week ago on September 13, the Public Beta for Mac OS X was released. Needless to say, being the Macintosh geek and UNIX wannabe that I am, I had to get it.
At first look, I was stunned. The graphics and interface are incredibly sharp and the animations are smooth, without interfering with the speed the OS seems to run at. The control dock at the bottom offers easy access to anything that a user could want, and keeps the desktop free from clutter.
The new OS is entirely backwards compatible with older Mac OSes, through one of its APIs (Application Interfaces), Classic. However, with the newer Mach Kernel built underneath the OS, Mac OS X can now support many non-GUI UNIX applications. It is yet to be determined if in the future, Apple will develop an GUI that can handle X Windows commands, allowing users to use programs originally intended for Solaris, Linux, etc. One of my attempts in the next few weeks will be to get a copy of Star Office working under Mac OS X. One of the newest and best features of the OS comes with its new UNIX kernel, protected memory. Even under the Classic API, where there used to be no protected memory, the user is protected from a whole system crash.
Now for a peek under the hood. Since OS X comes equipped with a terminal, you can now pull up that command prompt you've always wanted on a Mac. The file structure of UNIX seems to have been kept, but moved around slightly. Directories such as /etc, /var and /sbin are moved into a /private folder. While not a huge difference, a small change like this makes me wonder what else has been changed around as well. Some of the files in a standard UNIX login seem to be missing as well. .profile is completely gone! The kernel comes equipped with a few goodies for Mac users, but well known to UNIX users. Apache, Sendmail and ssh all seem to come built into the kernel (as they should), which gives new toys to Mac users. I will have more in next month's installment on Mac OS X. Since I've only used it for 3 days now, there is still much more to find out...
Heather Ward 19
The Olympics are supposed to be a gathering of international friendship and goodwill. Yet millions of dollars are lost at every Olympic Games due to illegal activity. This year's Sydney committee has benefitted from technological advances to increase security related to the games. For example, merchandise producers are taking advantage of DNA technology to protect their goods. The tags of authentic products are written with ink containing the DNA of an unnamed Australian athlete. Scanning and sequencing can then identify counterfeit products. Another problem Sydney is fighting is ensuring their exclusive broadcast contracts with about 20 companies internationally. In their $4 billion contract, NBC has exclusive rights to broadcast the games in America. Copyright Control Services has been working with the International Olympic Committee to scan the internet for broadcast activity, and they have already caught 30 violators, including Moscow's TV6. Broadcasting rights generate 20% of revenue for the games. All violators of the broadcast contracts have been stopped after email warnings.
http://www.cnn.com
http://www.sfgate.com
Nathan C. Lee 19
The Mighty Mac OS X can slice, dice, pick up your kids from school, writes your homework for you, ends communism, gives emancipation to the nations of Africa, and it just could be that one dash of style your wardrobe has been needing ever since your two-button jackets started looking a bit long in the tooth. It just looks so slick!
It's got a command prompt which runs in a terminal program inside the GUI. You can use that to access the command line portion of the OS, which is a derivative of NeXT, which is a derivative of BSD, or something like that. I'm almost positive that you can load any shell you like so long as you have the proper binary for it. You can telnet into the computer remotely, and if your Mac is on the internet, you can get inside from anywhere on the planet. There are some shortcomings, however. Apple, in its seemingly infinite confounded logic removed gcc and all other compilers from the public beta, but there IS a way to install it: you have to borrow it from Darwin.
Darwin, as you may or may not know is the basic command line-only, open source BSD system made by Apple, and distributed for free on their website (and it's downloadable!). They've gotten it to work on both PowerPC and Intel processors, so everyone who wants to can have a gander at it. If nothing else, it's a fresh and new non-linux that you can get for free and play with its open-sourceness. And if you are a voodoo priest and get OS X to run on an Intel machine, you'll probably get the Nobel Peace Prize or something. Of course, you're sooner to run into a confident Bengals fan than to achieve that noble task.
There are instructions on the web on how to borrow this piece of Darwin here: http://www.macaddict.com/content/news/2000/09/13/18723 As far as separating the GUI from the OS, I don't believe that's possible. There would be little point to doing so anyway, because that would take away all of the Mac OS applications and leave you with only Unix apps. If you're going to do that, you might as well just install Darwin, which is basically OS X without a GUI (that's really an oversimplification, but I'm sure you can understand.) If you did just want your Mac to be a server, you could simply attach a terminal via a serial port and log in from the local terminal, but that would really be more trouble than it's worth in this boy's opinion.
As far as configuring the system via .conf files and the like, I'm not sure if changes made to those would be mirrored in the GUI apps, though I assume that the GUI apps would modify the .conf files or a similar file, so manual changes would be possible, especially given the fact that it is meant to act as server software and remote manipulation would be a necessity.
This is all the stuff I know without even having the software yet. I shudder to think how much time I'll spend with it when it gets to me in the mail on Monday. From the looks of it, it's going to be a really fantastic product when it's done next year. It will certainly be the best and most advanced personal computer software (for the mass market), and should make Windows ME look like a 20 year old Siberian Husky with a weight problem: big, dumb, cumbersome, and staying way past its welcome. Peace in the Middle East. Bye.
Maxx Pinkerton NC/USA
I found your website from my church bulletin (Macedonia Baptist Church, Cary, NC). I think the "Read The Bible in One Year" is great. I know people who are paying for this by ordering through the mail. Keep up the good work!
Aaron Croyle 19
Attraction, for BeOS, is by far one of the most fascinating pieces of software I have seen. It is a seemingly simple physics simulator. You place particles with different attributes such as friction, mass, and attractive force into the view window, and watch how they react. The six sup plied particles are entertaining enough for hours, but you can even create your own custom particles with even odder properties. To show off the power of this application, and of BeOS itself, the simulation runs at realtime at least 15 frames per second with up to 1,000 of these particles. You can find Attraction at Bebits.com, so if you have BeOS check it out!
Ian C. 15
Cyber squatters are now squatting on the domain's that are still not approved yet with such speculative TLDs as .web, .firm, and .sex. They are doing this by trade marking the domains so that if the TLDs do ever get approved by ICANN the cyber squatters will have rights to the domains. The reason this works is that ICANN's domain name dispute arbitration process favors trademark holders over simple domain name registrants. So if you register a domain name with someone else's trademark in it, odds are you're going to get it taken from you. What's interesting about this new development is that the whole idea of giving priority to trademark holders over domain name registrants was intended to prevent cyber squatting, but cyber squatters are now using this same system to their advantage.