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NeXTstep has had recordability since 1988.

So where is it?

Examples of macro languages and applications which used NXJournaler:

• Puppeteer
• COWS was a fun project.
• Simon Says

You might also be interested in TickleServices, which was an early example of macro languages applied to a GUI. TickleServices worked via the Services menu in all NeXTSTEP applications (and now all MacOS X apps). I believe someone has more or less reinvented TickleServices in an Applescript guise now. Don't remember the name.

i think the likelier explanation is that you're full of s---

From the stuff above, it appears the most likely explanation is that you don't know how to Google.

NeXT was an early pioneer in a lot of stuff. My experience is that when the OS-9'ers say "Feature Foo was thrown out by the NeXT people who didn't get it", usually about 90% of the time NeXTSTEP had that feature as well, and the NeXTers are mad about it getting tossed out as well.

NeXT did "Fat Binaries" before Apple did, and they are still possible in OS X's .app bundles. NeXT's added Fat Binary support on Black Tuesday in 1993. Apple's Fat binaries were introduced with the Power Macintosh line in 1994. NeXT's fat binaries could be built to run 68K, x86, SPARC, and PA-RISC.

Of course, right now the search algorithm isn't designed for a fallback mechanism. The system can consider itself either a "MacOS" or a "MacOSClassic". Both are assumed to be generic PPC code and one doesn't fall back to the other.

As has been observed, wireless internet access is too cheap to meter for a business. Business should set it up themselves (or an outside company should charge a one-time fee for setting it up). The problem is that wireless providers get into the mix and want to turn a profit independent of the hosting business.

But I haven't seen a lot of people pointing out that esr is also taking it too easy on the Unix culture.

I started reading the draft of esr's "Art" a while back, and was immediately struck that he was repeating the "do one thing and do it well" slogan as if anyone ever really worked that way. Has he ever seen the man page for "tar"? How about "find"? The Unix Way is more like "do one thing sort-of-okay, and then trick it out with options and modifiers and run command files and embedded scripting languages until you can't tell when it's going to fry eggs or flush the toliet."

You might want to balance out esr's idealized view with the half-serious ranting of The Unix-Hater's Handbook (pdf).

I think the chapter on X is one of the better X-windows tutorials around (though unreasonable people may disagree).

For the love of GOD, or just plain your eyesite, do NOT visit: this site.

If you do visit this site, please post your experiences with the rest of slashdot so we can laugh at your stupidity.

Go on. I double. Naaa. Triple. Naaaaa. Pentiple dare you to visit the above site.

Thank you. HAND.

Enjoy.

Naked and loving it?

At least it's not Simson Garfinkel.

The story is fiction. The author, Simson Garfinkel is a grad student at MIT. Do a search in slashdot's archives and you'll see him mentioned in the past on all sorts of stories. He's also written a bunch of O'Reilly books.

The author is Simson Garfinkel? Yes, Simson Garfinkel, who "holds three degrees from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology and a masters of science degree from Columbia University," is a "doctorial candidate at MIT's Computer Science and Artificial Intelligence Laboratory," and "still writes for Wired on an occasional basis."

In the Operating Systems Comparison section, ESR fails to take note of the Lisp Machine. It's instructive to note that Lisp Machine hackers were the main contributors to the Unix-Haters Handbook and the Unix-Haters mailing list.

You mean Microsoft apologists like Jamie Zawinksi? Or Simson Garfinkel? Oh wait -- you haven't read the book, so never mind.

Typical slashdot jackass.

'jfb

just a typical Tim Berners Lee machina. i could run debian on it today, or net bsd i suppose. if i had the time. right now, its a wonderful paperweight. coming in at 100 lbs. (of magnesium, fire-resistant casing) its sure to keep your stacks of paper from floating off!

i got this machine from a former employee of apple in iowa (who i think was slightly queer, he reset the root password to penis) for 400 bucks 4 years ago. i have all the books and disks, cds and everything for it.

to answer the post, it was the cutting edge, onboard everything! so far ahead of its time, that everything we're using today to make this post was already there, just about, or born there. it created the matrix. a 12" by 12" square motherboard in a case with space for 4 of them, so you can buy another board and it will netboot and cluster off the first board. nearly impossible to crash. i first used one in 1995 and did music on it, back then it was just on par with the P133 we had next to it. in fact, the 133 ran openstep outrageously fast (for back then), but it is still useable, i have scattered links about the fun science project it could become (if i ever had time). if i can't find a buyer, i have been talking about creating a sculpture out of the parts i don't want (don't have time for this either). in other words, the keyboard is the only part i can use legacy without the rest, ADB --------->USB (which i don't have time to buy), its got the best ever clack!

ahhh, your first *nix box, nothin like it!

Are we supposed to take anything said by Simson Garfinkel seriously? Just look at this hilarious article he wrote 3 years ago. It predicted that Linux would be destroyed by viruses. Hasn't happened (even though Linux "anti-virus" software, his proposed solution, is a rarity)

Yah, yah, I know, "Look at the merits of the argument, not it's deliverer". I just thought it was funny to look back at the the old article in light of the Microsoft worms that rampaged over the last month.

"Would love to see an animation of a webserver being slashdotted."

Hot enough for you?

As others have already pointed out, you probably meant sodium. Magnesium will put on a pretty fantastic show, if you can get it to burn, but as this NeXT-torching geek discovered, that's not quite so simple.

The MS link is broken now, but the pdf is also available here.

Regarless about bandwidth, the link is gone.
Searching google turned up a page with a link to the book.

Jack

Simson Garfinkel eventually became a hermit and withdrew from public life after too many people mistook him for Art Garfunkel. He now lives in a cave in southern California.

Daniel Weise went on to work at Microsoft. He distinguished himself as the first non-Samoan to ever pick up Bob Barker after winning the Showcase Showdown on "The Price Is Right."

Steve Straussman (no website, sorry -- anyone?) left the Unix-Hater's list after it was revealed that he had fallen in love with a woman who loved Unix. He has come to terms with the past, and now teaches "How to Shell Script in Linux" classes at his local community college.

John Klossner went on to a successful career making cartoons for Lucas' Skywalker Sound company newsletter, until fired for printing one that suggested an unnatural intimacy between Luke Skywalker and Chewbacca.

Donald Norman won the coveted "Golden C< Prompt" award and retired from public life.

Dennis Ritchie became something of a celebrity on the web for his many and varied contributions of photos to Engrish.com.

Scott Burson became a monk and moved to Iceland.

Don Hopkins ran for office in Lousiana and lost. He is now a semi-successful insurance salesman, and plays harmonica regularly.

That was all I could find out about -- anyone got any more?

While this is in practice generally true, this is actually false. Some good reads on the subject: Simson Garfinkel's Database Nation, and The Transparent Society by David Brin.

From the former:
Many people today say that in order to enjoy the benefits of modern society, we must necessarily relinquish some degree of privacy. If we want the convenience of paying for a meal by credit card, or paying for a toll with an electronic tag mounted on our rear view mirror, then we must accept the routine collection of our purchases and driving habits in a large database over which we have no control. It's a simple bargain, albeit a Faustian one.

I think this tradeoff is both unnecessary and wrong. It reminds me of another crisis our society faced in the 1950s and 1960s -- the environmental crisis. Then, advocates of big business said that the poisoned rivers and lakes were the necessary costs of economic development, jobs, and an improved standard of living. Poison was progress: anybody who argued otherwise simply didn't understand the facts. Today we know better.

Most magnesium alloys don't burn that easily. See the burning of the cube for an example.

Most steel, iron, and aluminium used in cars is recycled already. With almost any metal it is far cheaper to recycle from an already refined form than to smelt new metal from raw ore.

No, not necessarily. :-)

You'd be lucky to set a magnesium computer case on fire.

Take a look at the punishment this NeXT cube took before it melted -- you'd probably have better luck with concrete.

Bless those Google guys (and gals).

Here is a list of photos I found on Google Images.

http://www.simson.net/photos/2000/sealand/

Start at the bottom and work your way up to get a chronology of what they were doing.

Looks like some British seafarers were invited to bring supplies or something and someone took photos of the process. It is a cruddy looking place. Even if the servers are IN the towers as their web site suggests, there just is not much room in there.

But then again, I spend most of MY time in a basement smaller than that...

In one of the pix, he's got the table leaning on a NeXT cube. Melt it down, and add it to the table.

I thought this was an interesting tidbit: 'But NeXT wasn't just a software company -- Jobs was also obsessed with building hardware. And this proved to be the company's downfall.' Ironic, because this has been Apple's salvation, or portentous, because history is doomed to repeat itself? You be the judge!"

I very much doubt history is doomed to repeat itself.
One difference between NeXT boxes and pretty much
all Macs these days is installed user base. Don't
get me wrong, NeXT boxes were pretty kickass (and
they made a lovely fire, they were
trying to carve out a new market for themselves
while simultaneously competing with both Apple and
Microsoft.

The hardware was also woefully proprietary.
Macs are moving away from that proprietary stance,
most of the hardware is interchangeable with x86
analogues (IDE, USB, VGA, AGP etc...) Now, that's
not to say that there's nothing wrong with Apple
hardware, (slow FSB, pc100 RAM, Motorolla making
your CPUs) but the positions aren't exactly the
same. Say what you want about El Steve, he does at
least learn from some of his mistakes...

Remember the guy who burnt the case? What I want is an computer with a burning case ;-)...

Would just putting an Athlon in without a heat-sink work? ;-)

BOOM!!!

Of course, NeXTWORLD Editor Simson Garfinkel's quasi-sick obsession proved that it's not easy to light one of these cases up, but he hadn't reckoned with the awesome power of an exploding processor.

Am I the only one that wishes Apple would dump Ive's "style" in favor of the classy NeXT machines?

I don't know. The NeXT cube gave the impression of being carved out of granite. Good for a server or a supercomputer, but as a workstation it was just kind of silly.

The magnesium case burned nicely, though.

I was surprised nobody mentioned the old NeXT cubes - solid magnesium alloy case!

I never heard of anyone shooting one, but they could be burnt!"

Simson Garfinkel, author of Database Nation among numerous other books, write an article for the Boston Globe nearly two years ago. His warning in that article was remarkable considering what happened with DeCCS. For those of you inclined to view RMS as an alarmist, read Garfinkel's article and consider the fact that he got it right.

Simson Garfinkel, author of Database Nation among numerous other books, write an article for the Boston Globe nearly two years ago. His warning in that article was remarkable considering what happened with DeCCS. For those of you inclined to view RMS as an alarmist, read Garfinkel's article and consider the fact that he got it right.

This is one of the most disappointing story blocks I've seen on Slashdot in a good long while. The self-absorption and lack of even basic rhetorical skill is pretty disheartening. Not to mention the shallow understanding of the issues. It makes the few comments that really get into the technical considerations stand out that much more.

The number of "write-mostly" humanoid bots on Slashdot these days is the most dismaying thing, though.

For those still not clear on who Simson Garfinkel is yet, here is your FREE CLUE!.
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