tzu's New Writeups

Petri net (thing)

2002-06-21T10:46:00Z

A Petri net is basically a both graphical and mathematical modeling tool for concurrent, distributed, parallel, nondeterministic and/or stochastic systems. It was developed by Carl Adam Petri in the early 1960's.

Generally, it consists of passive components (places) and active components (transitions) which are connected by directional weighted arcs. An arc can only connect a place with a transition or vice versa, but never two transitions or two places. The places can contain an amount tokens, defined by the capacity of the respective place. The state of the whole system is defined by the locations and amount of tokens in the places. System activity is modeled by the active components, the transitions which are able to fire, however only if they are enabled. A transition is enabled, if the places which have arcs leading to the transition are filled with the amount of tokens corresponding to the respective arcs weight. If a transition fires, an amount of…

Swarovski Crystal Worlds (place)

2001-12-30T13:07:23Z

Arranged by the Austrian multimedia artist André Heller, the Swarovski Crystal Worlds have attracted about 4 million visitors since its opening in autumn 1995 when it was created to celebrate the company's 100th anniversary. The whole site is buried beyond a huge grassy hill, featuring a giant grassy sphinx above the entrance. Inside, a dreamland of colorful adventures, with caleidoscopic colors, lights and refractions awaits you, as if you've entered a fairy-tale.

Some of the chambers of Wonder

Blue Entrance Hall

Most noticable element would be the 11m tall crystal wall filled with 12 tons of glimmering crystal stones. Apart from that just at the entrance you can take a peek at the worlds largest crystal stone, weighing 300,000 carat. Decorations and texts by Keith Haring, John Brekke, Nikki de St. Phalle's, Salvador Dali, and Andy Warhol.

The Crystal Dome

A mediation room constructed of 590 mirrors, the…

jar (thing)

2001-12-25T22:01:11Z

Remember ARJ? Yeah, warez d00ds first choice back in the good 'ol days before RAR grew strong.
The same company which created and still maintains ARJ, about the time when ARJ was falling from grace, created JAR which still seems to be a sort of ugly duckling.

JAR is a MS-DOS and WIN32 compatible, command line operated file archiver program. As of my knowledge, there is no GUI available for it. It's got almost all features ARJ has, which includes:

long (FAT32, NTFS) filename support
automated splitting (aka spanning) of the archive in aribitary lengths
ANSI-style comments

However, it wouldn't be another (newer) program, if it wouldn't have an edge above ARJ:

decent compression rates (similar to RAR or TAR/GZIP, small files are concatenated before compression, thus increasing compression rates)
multiple backups of the same files, using incremental compression
file

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Power leveling (idea)

2001-10-26T19:19:44Z

A term which originates from MUDs which describes unproportional fast level advancement of a player character, quicker than the game was designed for, or even expected by the designer. This is usually done by experienced players who want to raise a new character quickly.

In general, power leveling usually involves collecting appropriate items (usually the best items without level restrictions, so the newbie use them) and ample cash/gold for the new character. Naturally this character will have an edge over "normal" newbies, and be able to collect experience very quickly and thus level up much faster than usual. To speed up the advancement even more, often the newbie is supported by one or more high-level characters (sometimes by a whole party), which support him with spells, healings, transportation (portals), etc. Often big mobiles (aka mobs) are almost killed or disabled by the supporting party, then the newbie walks up and finishes them off to collect some big xp

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The Everything People Registry : Austria (place)

2001-09-13T02:53:57Z

The Everything People Registry : Austria

Counties of Austria:

Burgenland
Kärnten

baumbart

Contact the person who posted this writeup
Or any Content Editor
If you node from Austria
And would like your name added to this node.

Kuro5hin (place)

2001-09-03T23:00:20Z

kuro5hin.org is discussion website which is using some similar UI ideas as, for example Slashdot.org uses, maybe since it once upon a time was based on slash (the software which makes Slashdot run). However, Kuro5hin's admin and founder Rusty rewrote the whole backend software from scratch (also in Perl) and called it scoop.

The name Kuro5hin originates from a pun on Rusty's name (rusty == rust == corrosion == Kuro5hin), the "5" was inspired by the character "Da5id" from Neal Stephenson's Snow Crash.

Whats somewhat original about the site is the whole moderation system. If a registred user has submitted a story it is placed in the submission queue. Then any registred user may (and should!) evaluate it and vote if either:

the story should be posted on the front page (+1 FP)
the story should posted in the according section (+1)
the story should be ditched because it's crap and/or poorly written (-1)

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