Slashdot Mirror
Tuesday Quickies
r3drun sent us pictures of
the first production empeg
(the Linux based car MP3 player).
Tom Porter
hooked us up with
interesting essay by Neal Stephenson
that is pretty interesting. Worth a read.
emad sent us a link to a
Vote for your favorite RFC page.
Cracked me up: You vote by number.
wall sent us what
appears to be the new SGI Logo.
Next, I've been waiting for an excuse to link Space Ghost for awhile, and
Visoblast sent one that I think
us amusing as hell:
Naked Pictures of Keith Richards
do not affect wildlife.
I'm probably only posting it because I listened to Some Girls and Beggers Banquet today.
In other music news,
RedOregon sent us amusing parody lyrics,
Welcome to Berkeley California (you
can guess the tune)
And finally,
GiMP wrote in to say that someone
created the Slashdot dance.
Hemos has never looked lovelier.
Not correct! The answers are:
1. 553573861 (*without* the first zero)
2. SHANGHAI
3. SNOW CRASH (with a space? Not sure...)
4. PRITCHARD (the characters' *middle* name)
5. Social Security number (I guess anything's OK)
...I still can't get in though! Anyone got the decoder card?
Hold on just a second, while I pick up my brain...Stephenson writes a pretty good stick, eh?
I won't get into why the Stephensen piece was posted in the middle of a slew of Quickies, but I will point that that it's too bad that a lot of potentially interesting discussion about it is mixed with stuff about the RFC poll and the SGI logo.
One point that I haven't yet seen made: IMHO, this piece is potentially as important as 'Cathedral and Bazaar', for not for us . This piece is something that you can show your non-Linux using friends, something to clue them in as to what the hell we're doing, and why it's so important to them, even if they don't recognize it.
john.
GeneHack {--(bioinfo*linux*opinion)
I like the SGI logo... it seems to fit with their using of lesser CPU's (Intel instead of MIPS RISC) and inferior operating systems (NT instead of Irix).
I'm not laughing :).. Well.. Yes, I am.. But not very hard :)
Why would it be a joke?
No, it is called marketing.
If you wish to complain go to the marketroids.
but http started the web rolling....also I thought 'Cerf.V' was in on TCP?
peterrenshaw ~ Another Scrappy Startup
RFC 1149 is truely the best choice amoung all the rfc's out there. My Fav Choice Too.
I wish John Katz wrote as well as him... Chris
Chris
So Buddha walks into a pizza parlor and says: "Hey, make me one with everything."
Combine them and you have a fully caffeinated tech/poet, a rarity in this modern world.
"L'IT c'est moi!"
My site http://www.enteract.com/~campers/ is dancing, could I PLEACE have it on SLASHDAOT =(
Someone with some musical skill needs to mp3 that song...
I say 1097. 'nuff said :)
--ac
He looks at the issue of pluralism from a different angle in Diamond Age. He is a visionary writer and a very good one, although I must warn you that his endings tend to be disappointing. If he could just learn how to end a book, he'd be the best writer of the 20th century IMNSHO.
Dancing Slashdot?
/. immortality:
Tips for
1. Use Photoshop or GIMP to make (or more often edit) a graphic. Spend all of 2 minutes to run a canned filter on it and save as an animated GIF.
2. Post to web page. Make sure to put a counter at the bottom. They're very accurate.
3. Post a message to rob on a slow day and wait for the hits to arrive.
- Darchmare
- Axis Mutatis, http://www.axismutatis.net
- Jeff
Rowan's "essay" on the GNU Community gets
full billing while Neal Stephenson's fascinating monologue is relegated to one of many
quickies? Wake up, slashdot editors.
1) I loved the old SGI logo. I was even seriously considering getting it tatooed on my lower back ... now I can do it legally Plus when I see the old logo my brain links to to "steal me please"... The new one: I work for CGI but i claim I am SGI. 2) Perhaps a naked keith richards would be a better logo for SGI ... I expect that neither logo would effect animal life either.
--- ask me about nihilism, I will have nothing to tell you.
64 bits beats 32 bits any day...
;-).
Only problem is, when you split development costs 15 million ways, it's pretty cheap to maintain an OS, but when you only split it among 1000 or 100000 people, it's much more expensive. Same thing for the chips.
Personally I don't care so much about the chip as the OS; SGI has always ruled because of raw, seething, furious I/O and memory bandwidth. If they support Linux on their machines (preferably all of them) we all win -- an alternative to poopy NT and kick-ass I/O at (relatively) low prices.
SGI no longer enjoys their position as "The" graphics workstation and hence can't gouge for them as much, so they can't reasonably support low-end development. If someone buys an Origin or an Onyx, suddenly there's a lot of money to spend on development again.
So Linux on the low end (as soon as there is support for hardware-accelerated X) and Irix on the high end is about all SGI can be expected to offer, given the razor-thin margins for lower-end machines. I mean, do you see Dell doing any OS development? IBM (on the low end)? HP (low end)?
Linux is about all the Unix workstation makers can afford these days
Remember that what's inside of you doesn't matter because nobody can see it.
I'm thinking about that... it could be a hit
Hmm, after voting for my favorite RFC, now i need a site where I can vote for my favorite cDc text...
10 PRINT CHR$(205.5+RND(1)); : GOTO 10
Printed it out once before reading it and didn't realize it was a joke.
i have a /. icewm theme if you care.
can't stand blackbox, though.
this isn't Silicon Graphics' new logo.. i'm sorry, this is some other dumb company's (silican graphics) new logo.. doh!
Right on. An excellent appeal to the power user communities in the Mac and Windows worlds. (esp. the Mac one)
--
Business. Numbers. Money. People. Computer World.
...besides Netscape for linux doesn't include a midi player
Though plugger with timidity can play embedded MIDI files all too well.
Today, something fairly normal happened at work.
One of our printer servers failed, and a bunch of people wasted a bunch of time trying to get their documents printed.
We run a fairly standard corporate structure - Win 98 boxes linked to NT machines that act as print servers.
Stephenson was right in that with Linux, a bunch of hackers and amateurs have built a tank that would make Guderian drool, and that the majority of users dont want an impregnable, low-maintainence, fast, efficient tank - they want a slow, ugly unreliable stationwagon.
However, if you are in business, you need something that can get in to position fast and put shells onto the enemy position as quickly and reliably as possible. The manufacturer is secondary.
Given this, if you are in business, you want the best, most easily maintained tank you can find.
Users at work get what they are given - I am given a Win 98 box, whether I want one or not.
Linux boxes running Samba are better print and file servers for Windows NT than Windows NT boxes are.
In this case, if the business buys Linux servers running Samba, the 'tank' is invisible - the user keeps their comfortable Windows 9x environment - and they gradually realise the fact that their printers used to fail, but dont any more, and that file transfer is faster.
I think that is weak point that Linux can take over the enterprise from.
Mike
--
Mike
--
"Wi nøt trei a høliday in Sweden this yër?"
The Berkeley tune is in it - I would have expected much better from /. readers - that FAQ rocks! No I won't link it - you STFW you lazy sod.
I, too, didn't find the essay. But lo and behold, a fellow slashdot reader has the answer. I'm sure cmdrtaco will have fixed it by now.
BUT! the site is kinda cool, too. But, um, where's the decoder card from? I'm guessing the book flappy cover thingie.
So who's got a password?
here's the answers...
1. 055357861
2. snowcrash
3. shanghai
4. waterhouse
5. your ssn.
-=nft=-
"We must be the change we wish to see in the world." -Gandhi
Make it use SSH instead.
>Shurely 1149 is the best.
Once storks fly the speed of light ( fixes the bandwith, and delay problems )
'fraid removing the last slash from the url doesn't work - the essay has definitely gone off the radar. Now you get "We are sorry, but this page is not currently available." ... :-)
Anyone know when it'll reappear? I was halfway through reading it, hit Reload and it was gone
The first half is excellent!
Sorry, he's got bigger fish to fry. He's a respected (and very good) science fiction novelist; what he is saying about Linux in his essay, he is saying not because he is *advocating* Linux - he is saying it because it is the Truth.
Once you've spoken the Truth beautifully, there's little more to say.
Yes, I realize it was very long and your knee was jerking, but if you had read the article, you'd see why he left it out. This was not a survey of operating systems. Don't fault the author because his choice of subject matter doesn't include your pet project. He also glosses over all sorts of free software issues and makes minor errors of fact and does other things that are sure to raise somebody's dander (including mine, at times), but that's all beside the point.
And if you think AmigaOS's age is a selling point, you missed the whole huge section on cruft. Linus and the Be guys are both saying that in a few years it'll be time to throw out the old and start over. Microsoft is sort of agreeing with NT, and even Apple is taking baby steps with OS X. AmigaOS is just as obsolete as MS-DOS and MacOS are, and can be taken out behind the barn with the rest of them.
It also doesn't help that Stephenson has probably never used a Miggy. He says right up top that this will be an idiosyncratic essay. He wasn't trying to be comprehensive and well researched, he was simply getting his ideas down on "paper".
I liked the old one way better!
And who is this lunatic talking about "lesser CPUs" and "inferior operating systems"? Feel free to buy an Origin 2000 with 128 R10K's, and support the development of Irix. What's that? You can't afford to? You can only buy an NT box like everyone else?
Hmm, what a coincidence -- SGI's going where the buyers are. Granted, they seem to be rather slow with the hardware-accelerated X support, but we'll have to wait and see... it is rather pointless to start flaming them this early on.
Remember that what's inside of you doesn't matter because nobody can see it.
In fact, this evening, I went to the main library of the University of Texas (doh!) to look for Snow Crash I was so impressed. The online catalog showed it as checked in, but I could not find it on the shelf!
could it be a Redmond conspiracy?
Notice that the stylized g in the new sgi logo is really a lateral view of a person with an open mouth and popping eyes.
No doubt they put the magic number 666 in there somewhere as well.
Pity, I very much like their current logo.
Then why was "sillicon" misspelled twice in the registration info?
or not.
Too bad approximately 56,399,949,929,191,214,218 people have said it already. In Southerner's talk, though, that theyre thang's UGGGG-LEEEEE!
Better buy yours now before they start actually MAKING their systems with that logo on them...
Glückwünsche, haben Sie Slashdot ermordet, indem Sie zum korporativen Druck beugten und Subskriptionen einlei
(Minor tangent: this is old news, and I for one sent in a submission early on. No go. Does anyone know if anonymous submissions are quietly deleted? In that case I can save myself the effort of trying to contribute. Come to think of it, my contributions never show up as anonymous.)
For those few who don't know: Neal Stephenson is the very guy who revitalised the Cyberpunk genre into the more "roccoco" Neo-Cyberpunk.
If you want a more active and dedicated discussion on this I guess cyberpunk newsgroup is the place to go. Tune your killfilters and you will find it a nice place.
You could also read some of his excellent stories available on the web, notably Hacking the Spew and The Great Simoleon Caper. Sorry, looks like I cannot get a direct link to work, too much session coded into the URLs.
However, I can off a link to a good packground page on Neal Stephenson which should be a good start.
Enjoy,
---Anonymous Tech
Are they trying to make it appealing to the simple-minded Wintel crowd?? It's got the feel of Teva... I guess they're worried that a 3D illusion may cause their new target customers' heads to hurt. Pity.
R.I.P. SGI
-- What you do today will cost you a day of your life.
I reckon we all get on and implement this one, hot coffee in the morning...you could also chuck in some eggs the night before and have some eggs..now how do I get the toast to work? ahh bugger it, just plug the toaster in the wall and drop it in as well....
:)
Network Working Group L. Masinter Request for Comments: 2324 1 April 1998 Category: Informational Hyper Text Coffee Pot Control Protocol (HTCPCP/1.0)
dont you just love april fools everywhere
peterrenshaw ~ Another Scrappy Startup
I already have a minimal htcpcp server written in Perl... Doesn't actually make the coffee, but it processes requests, and is a valid server... It's single threaded, which is probably a good thing.
My favourite bit of that RFC is the bit about security. Read it if you don't know what I mean...
Matt. Want XML + Apache + Stylesheets? Get AxKit.
Unforunately, they don't...
Wonderful essay. Wow, that man can write! Firstr .html (Try to find a paper copy of it before you download it, the online version is ~260Kb and none of the great pictures...), and now this one.
"Snow Crash", then "Mother earth, motherboard"
in 'Wired', december'96, http://www.wired.com/wired/archive/4.12/ffglass_p
Looks like I have to find out what other essays/books Mr. Stephenson has written....
While I like the goals set forth for HTCPCP, the functionailty would be better implemented through simple GET and POST methods and conveying the other directives through XML in the body of the passed file object.
This would allow for greater flexibility in client and server implementations, and would foster interoperability with proposed protocols for teapots, soda machines, beer kegs and drinking fountains.
I've always been partial to 1036 myself, but see the big winner so far is 822... oh, sigh.
for real man. i was getting pretty damn tired of seeing farm animals dance. but i could rock to the /. dance for days.
ERROR: Keyboard not attached. Press F-1 to continue.
It's got to be the HTTP/1.0 protocol. While the internet would certainly have grown, it would in no way shape or form be what it is today without rfc 1945, http://www.ics.uci.edu/pub/ietf/http/rfc1945
RFC 1945. Informational "Hypertext Transfer Protocol -- HTTP/1.0", T. Berners-Lee, R. Fielding, and H. Frystyk, May 1996. Also available in plain text, HTML, and PostScript (gzip'd) formats.
peterrenshaw ~ Another Scrappy Startup
slashdot effect....got the article just in time before page started to dribble in at 30bs
peterrenshaw ~ Another Scrappy Startup
I concur, 'tis a brilliant ramble.
i actually like it, man.
frankly the whole retro-underwood look is probably gonna catch on with other manufacturers...
three can keep a secret, if two are dead - benjamin franklin
what's an ex-Unix-lover to do?
I saw somewhere that older NeXT cubes were going for $700 or less... that's kind of cool. I think it was in Performance Computing (nee Unix Review or something like that) where they had a big article on running older Unix systems for cheap.
I think I'd rather just have the monitor from one of the Maximum Impact systems and an adapter card to use all 1600x1200 pixels... mmmm, decadence.
Well, that, and stereo-in-a-window on Linux.
Remember that what's inside of you doesn't matter because nobody can see it.
Yeppers.
... it rocks also.
Neal has also written 'Cobweb' under the Stephen Bury pseudonym.
And lo
...and while I'm ranting about my favourite SF authors
==> Howard V. Hendrix ==
wrote two absol-fragging-lutely amazing novels, 'Standing Wave' and 'Light Paths'.
Thoroughly recommended for people who like books with concepts wild enough to make your brain hurt.
Right up there with 'Godel, Escher, Bach' and the Illuminatus Trilogy.
Kinda sucks. I mean, it's OK but the old one was a lot cooler. Besides the old one had a "Computer Graphics" look to it that made since considering their customer base. First Borland becomes Inprise, now this! Oh well...C'est la vie I guess.
WTH is the management in Mtn. View thinking?!?!
--Troy
"My life's work has been to prompt others... and be forgotten." --Cyrano de Bergerac
And don't even bother wasting bandwidth telling that 'Interface' wasn't written by N.S....
Tha Big D.
I too can only say "an amazing read". Brilliant, captivating. Why didn't he supply his email address, I'd like to thank him.
The original TCP standard... don't leave home without it. Besides, Postel authored it.
Remember that what's inside of you doesn't matter because nobody can see it.
The new logo is awfull. I always thought that SGI's "cube" logo was one of the coolest logos out there. Sad to see a company that was once on top taken over by marketing nitwits.
Every wrong attempt discarded is a step forward - T. Edison
1925 has its merits. and applies to more than networks alone
OK. I admit it. I'm a Neal Stephenson zealot. I've read Snow Crash. I've read Snow Crash *aloud*. To other people. Without their consent. Zodiac, Diamond age, ingested.
But seeing that essay linked through Slashdot is really a kicker. Finding out Neal Stephenson is as oddly fixated on Linux as I am is like walking into my regular corner bar and finding out that, previously unbeknownst to anyone, Metallica is playing there that night because they know the owner from years ago and by the way James Hetfield might need to crash at my place tonight if its OK with me.
I love it.
And you know you're reading this, too, Neal. No self-respecting Linux pseudogeek does not read Slashdot at least on occasion. And no writer is enough lacking in vanity to not read his critics.
You, sir, are the tits. Good luck with the new book.
Many thanks,
Chris
You must read the Stephenson essay.
-tank builder
Shurely 1149 is the best.
Viva la Batmobile!
Ugh. The new SGI logo is Horrible. There is no distinguishing it between a Computer Graphics company and perhaps a clothing chain. Stick with the old one!!
-- Give him Head? Be a Beacon? :P)
(If you can't figure out how to E-Mail me, Don't.
Personally, I prefer RFC 1882, the Twelve Days of Technology before Christmas. On a related note, April 1 is almost here... I wonder what RFC it will bring us this year.
Mike
--
Mike
--
"Wi nøt trei a høliday in Sweden this yër?"
64 bits beats 32 bits any day...
;-).
Only problem is, when you split development costs 15 million ways, it's pretty cheap to maintain an OS, but when you only split it among 1000 or 100000 people, it's much more expensive. Same thing for the chips.
Personally I don't care so much about the chip as the OS; SGI has always ruled because of raw, seething, furious I/O and memory bandwidth. If they support Linux on their machines (preferably all of them) we all win -- an alternative to poopy NT and kick-ass I/O at (relatively) low prices.
SGI no longer enjoys their position as "The" graphics workstation and hence can't gouge for them as much, so they can't reasonably support low-end development. If someone buys an Origin or an Onyx, suddenly there's a lot of money to spend on development again.
So Linux on the low end (as soon as there is support for hardware-accelerated X) and Irix on the high end is about all SGI can be expected to offer, given the razor-thin margins for lower-end machines. I mean, do you see Dell doing any OS development? IBM (on the low end)? HP (low end)?
Linux is about all the Unix workstation makers can afford these days
Oh, ps. I have a couple of PPC boxes and will probably buy an old Sparc or Alpha one of these days. Maybe even a real old MIPS R3000, that's the only kind of assembler I can stomach. (well, x86, but that's a necessary and rare evil)
Remember that what's inside of you doesn't matter because nobody can see it.
I agree completely. Is Neal Stephenson the guy who had that great article in Wired on running cable all over the world? I really like his writing.
More Stephenson please, and less on how many hackers can dance on the head of a *PL.
I especially liked the comment about how unix is the Gilgamesh epic of hackerdom, that any decent hacker could recreate unix on the spot. Very moving.
I just noticed that they misspelled "Silicon" as "Silic a n" for their "pseudo-mark" entry. Let's just hope they proofread their software better than their trademark applications :-)
I hope this doesn't get the Well swamped by the slashdot effect, but ...
Stephenson has also posted an article about 'Cryptonomicon' on the Well. It's aimed at readers of the Cypherpunks mailing list, and covers the technical and historical basis for the book.
http://www.well.com/user/neal/cypherFAQ.html
More of a novella, really, but...
1 point to CmdrTaco for mentioning it.
-1 point to CmdrTaco for burying it in a bunch
of Quickies.
Both ``The Cathedral and the Bazaar'' and
``In the Beginning was the Command Line'' were
written by programmers who were, in part,
describing their introduction to Linux. The
difference is one was written by an egotistical
prick, and the other by a writer(you decide which
is which).
There are many jewels for a fortune(6) file in
Stephenson's piece.
It could almost be entitled ``The
Re-Education of a Mac Bigot''.
;^)
The author expends a great deal of prose(well
written!) wrestling with the fact that until a
computer Operating System or software application
does what you (the user) mean, you will have to
learn to do what it means.
The Windows and Mac Operating Systems are just
sick, sad, sorry interludes in the evolution of
interaction between humans and computers.
---------------------------------
"The Internet interprets censorship as damage,
If for nothing else, read it to learn how to gracefully express your ideas.
Neal is a Writer. His essay (and almost all of his published works) is an example of how you should strive to express yourself. Look at how he transitions from one point to the next, without any jarring skips, or requiring huge leaps of comprehension. His analogies are well-thought out, and explained in sufficient (but not excruciating) detail where they might be unclear. The wording isn't dense or filled with jargon or buzzwords, and yet conveys clear meaning and the sense of understanding.
All in all, an excellent work. I realize that everyone can't reach this level, and for alot of the short posts here, it's not necessary to put that amount of effort into it.
But, and this is really important, if you want to make yourself understood, put the same effort into your writing as you do your code.
I will always value a good techinical writer above a good coder - I can find good coders all over the place, but someone who can both understand code (usually someone else's) and can clearly and logically document it in a manner that others find usefull, is a gift.
I strive to reach Neal's level of writing. While I'm not there yet, hopefully I'm better than I used to be.
-Erik
Oh, and for all of those /.-ers still in H.S.: Pay Attention In English Class. For those in college: Take a good Expository Writing class. Both are as valuable to your future as any C.S. class; in fact, I would value them as MORE important than any single C.S. class.
There are always four sides to every story: your side, their side, the truth, and what really happened.
remove the last slash from the url. http://www.cryptonomicon.com/beginning_print.html not http://www.cryptonomicon.com/beginning_print.html/
I'd go further than calling him visionary: he defines cutting edge, honing it and remains the benchmark against which others are measured.
On the tech side alone he is important in my field, you simply have no credibility if you ask "Neal who?". You need to know your Gibson, your Sterling and your Stephenson just as much as your second order differentials.
Has anyone thought about the incredible chase scene in Snow Crash, flying and battling across the Metaverse while heading for the final showdown? I can visualise it in my mind but it sure would need a powerful graphics engine.
---Anonymous Tech
I must say... that is the single most depressing thing I've seen all week. They've traded their cool 3D Cube for some near-Courier text. Sigh Marketroids.... grumble, grumble, grumble
The following sentence is true.
The previous sentence is false.
Pining for the days when The Glorious MEEPT!!! graced SlapDash with his wisdom.
Aargh!!! The essay goes on about BeOS, and
how it's different and original...
Can you say AmigaOS ??? - around since 1986
and VERY SIMILAR to BeOS. The BeOS is like a bug-fixed, modernised, AmigaOS 3.1...
In fact, the essay doesn't mention the Amiga...
Shame... One of the most innovative computers EVER...
Yes, also read _Snow Crash_, which is funnier, but IMHO less well developed. The only other novel of his that I know about is called _Zodiac_ and is about a guy who cruises around in a rubber boat and makes existance miserable for companies that dump toxins into the watershed. A *very* entertaining read.
Not only does he rock as a sci-fi writer, I thought the essay was the most balanced and informative piece I have read on Linux and computers in a long time. This gets hidden away as a quickie, while Katz and ESR gets hyped whenever they open their mouths?
Being bitter is drinking poison and hoping someone else will die
That'd be
Where would we be today had these not been invented?TELNET SUBLIMINAL-MESSAGE Option
A Standard for the Transmission of IP Datagrams on Avian Carriers
--
he writes a popularized spoof of william gibson,
not "cicles around", i'm afraid.
Isn't his vision just amazing? Especially in the context of _Diamond Age_ (which I read a few weeks ago) it seems he is drawing the blueprint for a new kind of society.
He *truly* understands, at a deep level, what hacking is about, and can explain it. And he convincingly argues how Windows' dominance goes far beyond mere market share.
Actually, though, Stephenson doesn't really come out in favor of getting everyone to use the Linux command line - and replacing one GUI (MSWin) with another (Linux) is just moving from the frying pan to the fire, so to speak. Kindly note how he draws parallels between "GUI culture" and nihilistic, ball-busting PC "anti-culture", and says that anti-culture (for the masses) isn't necessarily a bad thing.
However, he does make it blindingly clear why *real* hackers may *use* GUI's but will never tolerate them.
Hmmm..guess I should have a higher caffine level before posting. I wasn't attempting to say that the essay argued that Joe SixPack should go buy a copy of Red Hat (or even Debian), but I think that a reading of it could help to foster understanding between the Morlocks and the Eloi, to use Stephenson's terminology.
It might help some of the Eloi decide to check out what the Morlock life style has to offer, but I don't think (and I wasn't trying to say) that that was the point.
john.
GeneHack {--(bioinfo*linux*opinion)
If that SGI logo is SGI's vision of effective marketing, we'd better get used to depending on Microsoft for what little pittance of an economy they already give us.
Posted by gmesser57:
Follow the link to the counter rant, from there the link to the Stephenson essay works.
Or....
http://www.cryptonomicon.com/beginning.html
Anyone up for making a Slashdot theme for blackbox?
Exactly what I was thinking. This guy writes to where he offends no one, but gets his point across crystal clear. It took me near 1-2 hours to finish it (with major skimming.. hopefully I will have time to go back and re-read it all.. but 2:30am is definately not the time).
Used R4400 Indigo2 High Impacts are going for ~$2k nowadays. I'm thinking seriously of getting one and returning to the SGI world. Bit of an antidote for the boring PC. :-)
Linux is cool, but there's nothing quite like SGI. I feel very sad they're going to NT; I feel it's an enormous loss -- and I was responsible for the purchase of several new SGI systems a couple of years back.
Oh, and I agree with the folks who say the new logo looks lousy.
D
----
What ending? I read the last page of the last chapter of Snow Crash and was surprised not to find another chapter when I turned the page. Same thing for Diamond Age. NS has some great ideas, but his characters lack depth and his plots lack conclusions.
I would still recommend both Snow Crash and Diamond Age because NS has some brilliant ideas. I'll agree that Snow Crash was the better of the two.
-Eric
I have to agree. Not only is this the best history of modern computing that I have ever read, I have laughed outloud at least 10 times since I started, and I'm only a third done.
I think the title says it all. This guy writes beautifully. I don't know whether he would want the job, but he certainly seems capable.
I was just happy to learn that he wrote the whole thing in BeOS, from his BeBox no less...
I think this essay may be a milestone of sorts. It's so well written it would fascinate people who've never even touched a computer. I'd say more about it but I'm going to reread it and let the ideas percolate for a few days. My head is still ringing.
:-)
One more thing--Stephenson says he uses FVWM and is looking at E. Someone should turn him on to Window Maker.
Groucho
All I have to say is "Wow."
And also: Please re-submit this as its own feature. It deserves to be widely read.
I was truly blown away by this essay -- a huge, rollicking trip through culture, cosmology, computers and the history of the OS. All written in simply amazing prose.
I have never read one of his novels, but I can say that this essay has inspired me to go out and buy _The_Diamond_Age_ and _Snow_Crash_ (and probably _Cryptonomicon_ as soon as its out).
I have recommended it to they small minority of Linux hold-outs I know among my more intelligent friends. This essay shows them with style what they are missing.
You can just go to:
http://www.cryptonomicon.com/main.html
To bypass all that password foolishness. Gee wiz, is Neil Stephanson an anal retentive twit or what?
Huh? Cruft is about the heaping on of features of dubious value, not age. Amiga OS development has been, , somewhat slow since Commodore submarined. Hardly an environment conducive to growing cruft.
But how much stuff will Gateway have to bolt on to bring it up speed? State-of-the-art in OS has changed mightily over the past 15 years, and they're not going to be able to sell the old system without a little updating. The early MS-DOS versions didn't have much in the way of cruft, either, they were little more than kernel, init, and shell, but I wouldn't want to use it.
If you want new features, at some point you'll have to throw out your old OS and move on. Period, end of story.
Only thing missing is the music!
How about the Free Software song?
Or should that be reserved for the RMS Dance?
Read all the way to the bottom.
I agree, the proposed new SGI logo isn't very good. Especially in comparison to the bold slanted "Silicon Graphics" with the metal piping cube.
the server linked to afraid of the /. effect or something? I found only a 404... *sniff* that means less procrastinating for me...
Stephenson's essay (nee novella :-) ) is long but well worth taking the time to read. I wish I wrote half as well as him.
Schwab
Editor, A1-AAA AmeriCaptions
It's just a BAD logo in graphic design terms. Just 3 letters, no symmetry, identity, etc. That's why you don't like it.
/\
If they need to get rid of the `graphics' in the name to appeal more to general computing, that's easy:
|\/|
\|/
Cray
Those of us working on the batmobile found some good tidbits there as well...
I encourage everyone with a sense of humor to go vote for RFC 2324. If you don't know why, go read it. :) By far, the most useful I've seen, and AFAIK, no one has even implemented it yet.
Beautiful, lyrical, absorbing, and full of fascinating arguments and arguments on - well, everything from the DoJ/MS case to the image of the Batmobile and the geodesic dome to represent certain products and communities. (Which cracked me up. How apt!) I've probably put everyone off, now, but honestly, even the "Essays shouldn't be on slashdot" people will find this relevant. One caveat: I do think it deserves reading thoroughly, rather than skimming. Expect to spend some time reading it. And going "Yes!" out loud and double-taking at various stages, with luck. In common with several other people, I feel this merited more than a "quite interesting" comment buried amid SGI's new logo and the Slashdot dance.
If you never read Snow Crash, go get it. The ending was a bit lame, but he writes circles around William Gibson. His other cyber-book, The Diamond Age, was not as great. Also of note is Zodiac, which is best described as an eco-thriller .
Ok, it's 6am here. I've gotten up early to meet a deadline, and I find this pile-o-quickies, nearly pass up the entire lot, but something makes me click on the essay link...and I can't stop reading. That bastard. I think I'll have to punish him by buying his books. I've had so many people tell me "you've gotta read snowcrash". Now I understand why. It's going to take a lot of effort to put it aside for later.
The "cue the foo posts in 3, 2, 1..." posts will commence with no subsequent foo posts in 3, 2, 1...
Although its rather long it has some very good messages. One part he talks about how MS Word 6.0 has a ballpoint pen instead of a fountain pen for the splash screen. I noticed this before, but never put much thought into it. Neal then says this might not have been by accident. Microsoft tried to please the average person (middle class computer purchaser) who would use a ballpoint pen. It also goes to prove Microsoft is not (well, may not be) as dumb as we sometimes mistake them to be. I think the free GUI projects should take a look at this article and think harder about their "target" audience (possibly all software writers) and how to get from point A (X Window System) to point B (a GUI that can grab the target audience).
Oops. My bad. It's only mispelled once. ("SILICAN" {sic})
It was merely the DoD standardizing of TCP.
But Postel wrote it up anyways.
Remember that what's inside of you doesn't matter because nobody can see it.
--
Why do I get the feeling that our Fearless Taco didn't actually *read* the Stephenson essay? I would think that anyone who gave it the time would realize it's importance -- it certainly doesn't belong in the Quickies. It needs it's own /. post, where fruitful discussions can frolic unfettered in the comments. It needs to be posted in a prominent location at the top of the main page where it will persist and permeate the /. consciousness for days, weeks, months to come... Seriously, this essay is incredible, impressive, and *important*. I think the basic, most important thing I got from reading it was _understanding_ of concepts that I already thought I was familiar with. I loved the analogies and the discussions about popular culture. The clear, concise, accurate insights contained within helped crystallize some of my years-old random feelings and thoughts about the computer industry, about operating systems, about how my way of experiencing things appears to differ from most people. I feel like I can share it with anyone with even minimal computer literacy, and not only will they be able to understand the computer-related content, they might gain clear understanding and insight into esoteric aspects of our society and culture. The really *brilliant* aspect is the fact that it's about as objective as an essay discussing MS, Apple, Linux and Be can get. And because of this, much can be learned from it. I think this essay could be a vital piece of literature for anyone wanting understanding of operating systems, interface paradigms, basic computer industry history, and how computing fits into contemporary culture. Ok, so some of the above paragraph seems to ramble and babble a bit. What can I say, it really hit me. Perhaps I'm still a bit dioriented from the impact, and all I can do is gush about how incredible it was.... Anyways, my point is, it's really worth the read. Stephenson struck me as a really good writer -- this is my first time I've read him -- and if I didn't have to work on my senior design, I'd spend the next 2 weeks absorbing his books. I guess they'll have to wait... Ok, enough from me already; sorry for the somewhat disorganized thoughts.
marijane
The Wired article was called Mother Earth Mother Board . Highly recommended for those who haven't read it yet.
"And if you think AmigaOS's age is a selling point, you missed the whole huge section on cruft."
:-)
Huh? Cruft is about the heaping on of features of dubious value, not age. Amiga OS development has been, , somewhat slow since Commodore submarined. Hardly an environment conducive to growing cruft.
NS even gave examples of old-but-not-crufty: the automobile interface. You could probably figure out how to drive a Model T Ford, once the steering wheel and accelerator and brake pedals had been pointed out.
Little Debian: America's #1 Snack Distro!
You are right and NS makes this point quite well. MS might not be too hot on high tech but they sure are one of the best when it comes to marketing.
Knowing your target audience is central to marketing, the way they neatly caters to top brass for buying it and middle layers to staying with it while saving money on satisfying those who actually have to work on it, is quite brilliant in its own twisted way.
It might be unethical what they do but I am glad their marketing is unbeaten; I can handle one company like MS but not more than one either!
http://zork.net/~schoen/rfc3000.txt
It's a crack man... Thoose guy's a GIMP rule!!!
He wrote Diamond Age? Wow, I've just read the first 1/2 of this essay (who are we kidding, this is an online book), and it's spectacular. I had planned on reading Diamond Age a few months ago, but passed. I'm definitely going back to it now!
damn YES!... /. :)
That was so good I PRINTED it...
A far petter use of paper than some of the books that have been recently reviewed at
Something to read on my next Nerdbird flight..
Number 1925 takes it.
- chad
I just want to contribute to the apparently prevalent opion that the new sgi logos sucks.
To me, the old one's actually is one of the better logos in the whole industry.
Maybe they should do a poll on this...
I was always kind of partial to RFC527, Arpawocky.
I would have had that if I didn't HATE music embedded into webpages, besides Netscape for linux doesn't include a midi player :(
:)
Maybe Ill add it later
Cartoon Network moves there stuff to the archives quickly, it seems. Try here instead.
Come on, I still think Intel CPU's are inferior to ultrasparc. alpha and ppc. (I own a Sparc machine and an Alpha machine). So no, I do not buy an NT box like everyone else. I like Linux on Alpha and Sparc. I simply prefer Unix to NT, and I think I am not alone in that. I do not own an sgi machine (yet), but I do have an old machine with MIPS RISC CPU, a Digital Decstation. (I collect computers..)
And I admit, I do have an x86 machine, but that one has an AMD CPU.
The correct URL for Neal Stephenson's essay is http://www.cryptonomicon.com/begi nning_print.html -- just take off the slash. I would have thought Slashdot readers to be a bit more enterprising.
I have to agree with Silmaril above.. it doesn't make sense that this long, literate and excellent essay by an insightful and respected writer gets relegated to a quickie, while Rowan van der Molen's whiny, unfocused rant gets a full article.
If Slashdot is going to have such a lax and sloppy editorial policy (further, and more egregious, examples of which abound) then it might be more interesting to pick articles using the same moderation system that's currently used for comments. If it didn't improve things, at least it would be radical.
forget the issue, (after SEP'1997). One of the most interesting thing I remember about the article I remember was digging holes for the cable going thru SE Asia. They laid the cable down something like 2 metres of rock for entire lengths of islands...why, 'cause everyone and their dog has a 'back-hoe' :)
peterrenshaw ~ Another Scrappy Startup
This is way late but still, I have to disagree with your view here.
William Gibson extrapolates pulp, noir, PK Dick, Bester and more to create his cyberpunk semi dystopian future. He maxes up on style but while not forgetting contents I'd say Bruce Sterling is more of the contents author.
Neal Stephenson is much more than a spoof of WG, he represents the neo-CP, the baroque that succeeded reneissance. Read his books and you will notice breakup of society along new lines into fragments in separate worlds is a recurring theme. His style is of course 'hot' but he has contents too, and it differs radically from WG.
Read the books. Then read them again. And don't forget to read Cheap Truth.
- the Tech
engineering != marketing
As opposed to those interesting essays that are pretty uninteresting <g> ?
Alex Bischoff
---
Alex Bischoff
HTML/CSS coder for hire
I went poking around the cryptonomicon site for more cool Stephenson, but was stopped at the gate by these questions and a decoder card:
http://www.cryptonomicon.com/questions.html
Have any of you intrepid soles navigated this?
-Garrett
http://www.cryptonomicon.com/main.html seemed to get me in the site
--
You're just jealous because the voices only talk to me.
I can just see it now. Forget selling watches by the side of the road, the big money is in high-end workstations.
"Pssst hey buddy, check it out. Its a Silican Graphics box, just like they used for Toy Story. And Ive got this Compak-Alfa workstation, just fell off of the truck. Look at all of these VD Research PC's with Lynux pre-installed, real cheap!"
Mike
--
Mike
--
"Wi nøt trei a høliday in Sweden this yër?"
I was fortunate to stumble across 'Snow Crash' in my local library a few years ago, and was amazed by that book, which (though not perfect) I then and still consider the best fiction I have read.
Now he has done it again with this essay. I have read a LOT of articles which cover linux / computer industry etc, (like all those which appear on /.) but this stands head, shoulders, knees and toes above all the rest. It's scope is so much more complete and fundamentally relevant to technology.
This is the one such essay I will be recommending to all my friends to read.
CmdrTaco/other editors: this link/essay must be posted as its own article - it more than deserves it.
Ok I feel really dumb right now but what is an RFC? I consider myself a geek and I'm ashamed to ask about something that seems so obvious.
--
I plan to have a full scale implementation by summer. :)
Looks like someone needs a new typewriter. That "g" is far too qute for a company like SGI. (Hint, move the bottom part towards the left if you don't want people to think it's a "q")
Then again, if you dressed it up in primary colors, the new logo would look right at home in an Iomega advertisement. And the scary part is that I think Iomega could probably afford SGI nowadays.
371HNASWSIH0000
I don't even know why it's password protected, it isn't even- hold on a sec, some guys in black suits just knocked on my door and want to talk to me...
Oh well, minor slip }:-)
I'll have to ask Mr. Stephenson one day how he manages to break the "quality vs. quantity" tradeoff. My god, can he write!
iSKUNK!
Where's the annoying tune? It needs an annoying tune.
Last week I set up the Hamster Dance as the secretaries' default IE page. Then I set the task scheduler to open IE next morning.
Unfortunatly, the secretaries spent the morning in a coffee clutch. The Hamster dance tune kept repeating over and over, causing the guy down the hall to puncture his ear drums with a letter opener.
I really have to think these things through.
I'm sure they meant well. So did the makers of Thalidomide.
Well, I hope that caught your eyes.
As you hopefully have seen, the readers in here are both literate, well read and reflected. Why not therefore add a BOOK item to your categories? After all, how many might not have missed the article about Neal Stephenson's latest book just because it was tucked away in the quickies section??
Neal Stephenson is an important authoir, he puts todays realities into perspectives, letting us see reality from a different angle. OK, so it might not be about fuses, bigger disks, more RAM etc but in the long term it is people like him that define the future.
So this might sound a little grand, eh? Then what about William Gibson? Few paid attention outside the intelligentia when he wrote Neuromancer, even fever realised what "Cheap Truth" heralded. Yet in my field of research he is as important as any article you might read in Science or Nature. Then came the media. That is, 15 YEARS too late. They sure didn't invent the gunpowder but they acted all like they were standing way too close when the cyberpunks lit the fuse.
I have tried to make this point before that being technically interested does not make for intellectually stunted minds. Amazing how few realise this.
So the question remains, my dear Taco: will you help those of us who do not conform to media's (and Hollywoods) image of us, and help us stay at the forefront - not only of the Tech but also of the trends that together with tech moves the world quietly forward?
Posted by OGL:
Sense of humor alert!
-W.W.