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.
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.
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
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.
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
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.
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
Mike
--
Mike
--
"Wi nøt trei a høliday in Sweden this yër?"
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,
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
--
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.
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.
The Wired article was called Mother Earth Mother Board . Highly recommended for those who haven't read it yet.
Cartoon Network moves there stuff to the archives quickly, it seems. Try here instead.
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.
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.
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?