This is a good way for Linux to earn respect with the big corporations. Having IBM behind a product still means something, if you still care about reliability and service. I don't like Caldera very much, but due to their current position, they're still preferable to Microsoft, and they have competition to keep them in check.
I tried out Visual Age for Linux, and although it looked somewhat like WP7 for UNIX, (i.e. halfway nice interface) it's still a very clean and impressive port. (slow on a P90 with 32MB RAM, but I'm sure it runs much better on any hardware from the past two years) I wish IBM the best of luck, as long as they support Linux.
Heh. They're both free, and they don't "own" anything. People can use whatever browser they like, be it lynx, amaya, or mozilla M7... (I'm not paying for a browser though, so I haven't tried Opera... I wouldn't mind a fast SVGALIB web browser, though.:)
The actual dangers are that people don't necessarily know that much about it--they think that Internet Explorer is the Internet, and that the Internet is slow and crashes a lot--or that they have a choice, and they don't realize why some web pages don't work or look right under Netscape (maybe they were created with a Microsoft product) or Internet Explorer... (maybe they were written with Netscape extensions...)
Both parties are guilty of pushing incompatible extensions, protocols, services... (Frames, ActiveX, DHTML, etc.) If we didn't have two competing browsers, maybe we could just stick to the open standards. At least Mozilla is trying to do a better job of being standards-compliant.
But seriously, this could drag on much longer. I hope they just settle, split the company into OSes and Apps, document all the Windows calls, support other OSes, port their apps, or something. That's what should have been done before, anyhow.
However, I read that if it goes up to the Supreme Court, this could last another four years. Windows 2000 already integrates much more than Internet Explorer, so I wonder what will happen if Microsoft loses... will they have to tear the browser out of the OS, and redesign it? Can they use an HTML help system? Where do the components end...
That's what I like about Linux: clear division and versioning of libraries and applications...
Yeah, that's true, and that's an advantage. But if you're into buying tapes, I'd get a 120 min. tape, make the mix once, and enjoy far more of my favorite music at no extra cost every morning.
My point is, once you've made your tapes, you're done. No extra time to spend, and you just saved a lot of money...
Of course, if I could just have *all* my.mp3's on one portable device, I'd ditch tapes and CD's in a heartbeat.....
I don't have a CD-R drive. Even if I didn't have a tape recorder, I can tell you right now it's cheaper, and it's especially cheaper than buying a Rio, which is what I'm talking about...
Less work:
Well, making a mix tape might take more time, but once you're done with it, you have it forever. Swapping out music on a Rio doesn't sound as easy. I guess there are trade-offs in both cases, but getting music onto a tape is far easier for the average person than getting mp3's would be. (or, if you have.mp3's, schedule a playlist, hit record on the tape, and record what you want...:)
Skip-proof is just a bonus tapes intrinsically have. So does the Rio, but remember that low-tech is sometimes better. Tapes are far simpler, and I'd love to see another easy solution to skipping that *doesn't* involve a small amount of static ram.
...and if I already had discs burned, I'd love a CD-based.mp3 player, that would be *far* better.:)
Well, considering what you pay for a Rio, if you can put a HD in a laptop, you'd think they could put a tiny one in a Rio and have a decent enough design to absorb your average shocks...
Of course you realize that tape players and CD players have moving parts too, this is just a design issue. We could still store mp3's on tape too, if we wanted to, we'd just lose the random access capabilities... And ZIP and JAZ disks are pretty robust, I guess we'd just want something to absorb shocks, and some RAM for read-ahead.
I don't see how they can offer copy protection features. How do they know how an mp3 was copied? Maybe they mean they don't want people copying mp3's from the Rio. But who cares?
Also, 64MB is pitiful. Give me a little HD any day, like those ones IBM had...:) Even a ZIP-disk would be better.
No, they're neat little devices, but I'm not convinced that the Rio is a good value. Why not make mix tapes? It's cheaper, less work, more music, and skip-proof. Silly people.
Interesting, this time ESR is assuming that open source is an inevitable, desirable business model from a business perspective.
...and maybe he's right.
There's nothing wrong with good, thought-provoking essays. If we had one of those for every flamer, I'm sure open source would be much more popular.
My question is, what happens when software companies build their product on open standards, and then pervert them by adding proprietary extensions on top of that? That's Microsoft's new Embrace-and-extend plot for Windows 2000. Sure, they support TCP/IP, IMAP, LDAP, and some weird new power management spec. (I wonder how much Microsoft shaped some of those later protocols...) as well as USB... I guess that's better than I2O... but on top of all that they're still supporting extensions to support their old protocols, and eventually this might go the way of Java/J++, changing an open protocol to a Windows protocol.
It seems sneaky, underhanded, and unfair. But they've got the monopoly for now...
I approve more of Red Hat's current policies. SuSE strikes me more as a young Red Hat, before they learned that bundling proprietary software for profit wasn't what they wanted to be doing.
Of course, you get much more software with SuSE, which is why when I got my Red Hat CD, I got an archive of software to go with it.
Give me the Commodore, X, and the Amiga any day. The Apple II was very overpriced at the time, as are most of Apple's products. NeXT was a very bad (read: incompatible, shoddy standard tools) UNIX.
...and any of your examples are better than the iMac. If you sell a computer that's integrated with the monitor, isn't upgradeable, (we haven't gone far since the Apple II) doesn't have a floppy drive (that was at least standard with the Apple II...:) and costs more than an equivalent real computer, then putting in a network card instead doesn't make it "the first viable step towards a network computer". I think the vt100 did that better than the iMac ever will, and for graphics, X Servers did even better. I don't think desktop machines with network cards are anything new, and if Apple does it, that doesn't suddenly make it a 'network computer' any more than all the other ones were.
Jobs does try to make sure that ideas and people are exploited, and he is ruthless. If Apple were on top, he would be basically a hipper version of Bill Gates. There have been many stories here of Jobs's ruthless exploitation, of Woz in particular. He may have popularized some ideas that caught on, and we might have him to thank for that, but past that, please don't give Jobs any more credit than you absolutely have to... Proprietary software is bad, but proprietary hardware is worse. If you can't release your source code, at least get it to run on more than one platform...
Nope. The app is under GPL. If you modify the source, then that is GPL'ed too. If you don't want it to be, then you should have read the license before you started tinkering with the source code.
The BSD licenses don't have to worry about this. Anyone can fork the tree and change the license. With a GPL'ed product, anyone can fork the tree, but it'll stay GPL'ed, which means that reincorporating changes like this doesn't run up against any licensing restrictions.
Basically, if MacOS X was built on top of Linux and used lots of GPL'ed code, then most if not all of it would be released under the GPL, and people would be furiously developing it, and incorporating the (good) changes into Linux as well. It isn't, though, it's proprietary, and whatever Apple does release is done out of the goodness of their little corprorate heart. BSD got forked again, and they're happy about it.
So pick the license you like best. I like the GPL best because I want to see what people are doing with my code. I don't want any license that takes *that* right away from me.
You do realize that this is purely opinion, don't you? I like X better for its flexibility. A good program is like a good tool--using Windows or the Mac for GUI development is like giving an artist a choice between crayons or colored pencils. X lets you use anything--charcoal, oil paints, whatever--if you can figure it out...
I can't stand MacOS or NeXT's idea of either Style or cApItAlIzAtIOn... Maybe Steve Jobs wants to be 31337. As for Style, what does Style (with a capital S) mean? There's no universal concept of Style. There's your concept, and there's Steve Jobs' concept, and they don't mesh with *my* concept. So offer some facts instead of opinions.
For my part, I've seen GUIs and Apps under X that resemble Windows, MacOS, NeXT, etc, etc. So where's your Style now?
I've used both, and they both sucked. I have a copy of Windows 1.03, which is basically a DOS Shell with a few programs... it looks sort of like GEOS for the C64 (which was far better, and smaller). Windows 1.03 was in EGA (at best), as opposed to the earlier versions which I guess were monocrome or CGA. The only thing that hasn't changed from then until Windows 3.1 was the Windows Write File Format. Scary, huh? Of course Windows 3.x was the first to have OLE, but the rest of the format is compatible. The binaries are incompatible in both directions, but Windows 1.03 had most of the utilities there, albeit with less functionality: calc, paint, the control panel, the DOS Executive (vestigal File Manager, I guess), etc, etc. It also ran on DOS 3.2 or so (had to use SETVER to use it on a later DOS) and you couldn't really get a command prompt without exiting. (I haven't tried it on a really old computer) It runs great under DOSEmu, though.;)
The Macintosh was very expensive (and originally black-and-white), and it had a more developed GUI, but it wasn't intuitive for me. Throwing out a disk and deleting a file are not the same thing... I think either the disk should be destroyed, or the files should be printed and deleted or something. The metaphor does not hold. Ejecting a disk shouldn't leave a "phantom disk" on the desktop. A dead mac shouldn't be unhappy, it should give some real information. A negative number is not an error message. A crashed mac ("[bomb] A system error has occured [Reboot button]") should either reboot or give more options, especially when it might have crashed enough that clicking on the button *does nothing*! To its credit, Windows now has some of these bugs. Unfortunately, so do current Macintoshes. (and better ones: being endlessly prompted to insert two different CD's is really fun for the novice) Most importantly, *where's the commandline*?!?!?!?!
There's nothing wrong with the Macintosh or the IBM PC, per se, but I can't stand Windows (especially > 3.1) or MacOS. They both have horrible, annoying flaws and quirks. MacOS has no command line, and DOS isn't flexible enough. My solution is the same on both systems: format, and install Linux.
And yes, Larry, Steve and Billy are all very egotistical, very rich, and share a striking resemblance to Larry, Moe and Curly.
Right, that's completely understandable. I like RedHat, and they haven't been distributing un-free stuff lately (or I might just not be buying it, I got my RedHat 6.0 CD from CheapBytes...:) AFAIK.
No hard feelings, (I didn't have an extra $20,000 a year, so I figured I could save the money and go to State) I actually know some very nice people who are trapped at Duke...:)
That's a good article, but I think memory is more involved than that is. First, for 'learning to ride a bicycle', that isn't even where the rest of memory is stored, procedural memory is in the cerebellum, I think, and it stores a lot of precise stuff, like my touch-typing. It's also the reason that we find it hard to remember a song in the middle, because we have to "sing" it from the beginning--it's a procedure.
Second, if I pick up a book I've read a long time ago, it will be familiar. (or if I just see a passage) That recognition is memory, and I've read a lot of books. If I pick up one I haven't finished, I can seek through it and find my place. I don't think 122MB of data could account for even that much information, much less the music I remember (although that might be in my cerebellum, apparently they count it as memeory).
Other than that, their methodology seems pretty sound, I'd just like to know how they got their estimates into bits.
I have read it, I know it wasn't Gibson after they got done with it, and I'm glad that "The Matrix" didn't try to steal the plot from Neuromancer (although I wouldn't mind a hot chick with some embedded razor blades...:).
However, I think the short story didn't make reference to the actual storage capacity of the (admittedly digital) device embedded in Johnny's brain. But I don't mind the movie, for two reasons:
1) Johnny Mnemonic wasn't a really great Gibson short story, in my opinion. I liked fragments of a hologram rose, or whatever it was called, a lot better, but you could never make a movie out of that.
2) Keanu makes a good Johnny. He's good in action movies, and he'll never miss that chunk of brain anyhow.;)
Hmm, funny you should mention Borland Turbo C. Although usually I just use an editor and the command line, my favorite IDE so far is RHIDE, which is built on Turbo Vision, so of course it looks just like Borland's old IDEs for DOS.
Also, you can have multiple windows, compile your code, debug, have lots of hilighting (in the console), jump to the lines that have compilation errors, etc. And it's all integrated, you have your watches, and your breakpoints, and all that fun stuff.
I guess I just liked Turbo Vision, it was always pretty intuitive for me, which I can't say about emacs. Too many bucky-bits spoil the broth, I guess.
Okay. I accuse the BSD community of fragmentation. Of course, Linux, UNIX in general, Windows and the like are all fragmented too... but let's look at this:
Windows: separate incompatible versions, as in a program written for one of these may not run on another of these without also writing it for that version: 1-1.xx (dead) 2-2.xx (dead) 3.0 (dead) 3.1, 3.11 (mostly dead...) 4.0-4.1 ('95, '98) (not dead yet) NT 3-3.51 (whatever service packs) NT 4.0 (I don't know how compatible the service packs are) Windows 2000 (not released yet, who knows how compatible) Windows CE (& 2.0?) (Hopefully will die)
...there's probably more, a lot of this is legacy. Of course, Windows has more application incompatibilities than anything else...
Linux: (this is vaguer, since this is just the kernel + whatever you add to it...) 1.0 or less -- dead 1.2-1.3 -- mostly dead, old libraries, old filesystem, old binary format, but mostly source compatible. 2.0-2.1 -- alive, ELF, ext2, source compatible UNIX. 2.2-2.3 -- new, still compatible except maybe GLIBC.
Different distributions -- mostly compatible, four major packaging formats can all be converted, should all be source compatible (standard UNIX compatibility here) with many of the best cool UNIXy features implemented (/proc, VFS, MITSHM, DGA, etc.)
UNIX: SYSV + BSD: many different UNIXes use one or both of these as a base, technically all of them today are either BSD or both, since BSD started the networking code, I think.:) FreeBSD, OpenBSD, NetBSD, MacOSX, HP/UX, IRIX, ULTRIX, DGUX, OSF/1, Tru64, AIX, SunOS, Solaris, SCO, XENIX etc. are all other UNIX variants that I believe derive from one or the other or both... Of course there are many more. These are mostly source-compatible, except for some hardware issues, like sound interfaces are often different, kernel features change, older programs have different options, SYSV and BSD have some different utilities and extensions...
Linux supports POSIX, and a lot of SYSV and some BSD extensions, but this doesn't always help. (the nice thing about standards is that there are so many to choose from!)
With both Linux and the free BSD variants, of course you can always read or change the source if you want to, which may lead to fragmentation, but it's often better than not being able to change it when there's a problem, especially with an old version or a defunct vendor...
Because of the BSD license, many people steal the BSD networking code, or TCP/IP stack, or something to use in their commercial OS... it's better to have that than having bad commercial products, of course...
All in all it's a mess, but Linux has great source compatibility with UNIX and itself, and okay binary compatibility, with support libraries with the older stuff. It also supports a *lot* of new stuff (I like my gamepad and my TV card and my Paralell Port ZIP Drive and my cheap PC hardware...) and different platforms.
The *BSD's, while I haven't used them, seem to also have good hardware support and lots of platforms supported, and this is much better than most of the commercial offerings which stick to one or two platforms and/or hardware configurations. Past that, I only know what I've heard from *BSD people, that once you know how to use it, generally that it makes a good server, has a central source for the tools, and I've seen the nifty kernel configuration thingy... YMMV.
Past that, if anyone has useful additions or corrections, please post them too.:)
Right, but the idea was that since the skull contains the brain, the bumps on the skull would indicate more gray matter on the inside, and depressions would indicate less gray matter. It was considered an indication of cranial capacity.
To me, it seems like measuring how much leftover meatloaf you have by seeing how big your tupperware container is, but maybe it's more like wrapping it in aluminum foil, what do I know. Anyhow, it sounded like a good idea 100 years ago, but now we can actually get inside and look at the brain.
It used to be that their (official) distro had MetroX and BRU Backup Server and a couple of other things that weren't open, or only had one license, etc, etc. Of course, XFree86 ran better on my hardware, but MetroX was the first to support some evil Diamond cards and whatnot.
*Please* don't try to correct me unless you know what you're talking about. (Silly Hitch-hiker fans.:)
Yep, they tried this already... (well, without removing the brain)
It's called phrenology, and the idea was that by measuring the size that different parts of the brain took up, you could measure a person's intellect and moral character. None of this has been proven very well, of course, but it did lead to some important scientific concepts.
If I remember correctly, Einstein's brain actually weighed less than your average brain, but I guess he had one of those special 'physics-understanding brains', whereas I have one of those 'computer-science-understanding / physics-hating brains' that I would assume are somewhat more common here...:)
I haven't seen a 'MEEPT' post in a long time. I hope someone moderates them up as long as they are AC posts.
Here's where we need more options on slashdot: *I*want to personally view all posts that are (a) rated at 1 or above, and (b) all (original) MEEPT posts. (the replies aren't always that MEEPT-ingful, if you know what I mean.)
In the meantime, I suggest that there be a MEEPT distribution of Linux--instead of Yellow Dog Linux on PPC, maybe we can have Big Bird Linux for the Presario or something... *chuckle*
What the hell is an 'operating system publisher', because these guys claim to be the third largest, behind Microsoft and Apple...
This looks interesting, but remember, I can buy Redhat 6.0 (and many other complete linux distributions) for a few bucks from CheapBytes. Why? Because they don't have anything proprietary in them, apparently unlike this distro. I know that Partition Magic has some funky licensing on it, and I bet their Apache/RSA Secure Webserver isn't much better...
Nope, RedHat learned the error of their ways and went completely Open Source, but I doubt these guys ever will.
Other than that, the RAM sounds like enough to run Redhat 6.0, VMWare and Windows '98 comfortably... The HD is a bit small for me, but I'd just install my old 6GB HD, I think that 15GB would be more than enough for me...
Slashdot Mirror
This is a good way for Linux to earn respect with the big corporations. Having IBM behind a product still means something, if you still care about reliability and service. I don't like Caldera very much, but due to their current position, they're still preferable to Microsoft, and they have competition to keep them in check.
I tried out Visual Age for Linux, and although it looked somewhat like WP7 for UNIX, (i.e. halfway nice interface) it's still a very clean and impressive port. (slow on a P90 with 32MB RAM, but I'm sure it runs much better on any hardware from the past two years) I wish IBM the best of luck, as long as they support Linux.
Heh. They're both free, and they don't "own" anything. People can use whatever browser they like, be it lynx, amaya, or mozilla M7... (I'm not paying for a browser though, so I haven't tried Opera... I wouldn't mind a fast SVGALIB web browser, though. :)
The actual dangers are that people don't necessarily know that much about it--they think that Internet Explorer is the Internet, and that the Internet is slow and crashes a lot--or that they have a choice, and they don't realize why some web pages don't work or look right under Netscape (maybe they were created with a Microsoft product) or Internet Explorer... (maybe they were written with Netscape extensions...)
Both parties are guilty of pushing incompatible extensions, protocols, services... (Frames, ActiveX, DHTML, etc.) If we didn't have two competing browsers, maybe we could just stick to the open standards. At least Mozilla is trying to do a better job of being standards-compliant.
What's that, 'DOJ' trial? :)
But seriously, this could drag on much longer. I hope they just settle, split the company into OSes and Apps, document all the Windows calls, support other OSes, port their apps, or something. That's what should have been done before, anyhow.
However, I read that if it goes up to the Supreme Court, this could last another four years. Windows 2000 already integrates much more than Internet Explorer, so I wonder what will happen if Microsoft loses... will they have to tear the browser out of the OS, and redesign it? Can they use an HTML help system? Where do the components end...
That's what I like about Linux: clear division and versioning of libraries and applications...
Um... probably a shell script. :)
.mp3's on one portable device, I'd ditch tapes and CD's in a heartbeat.....
Yeah, that's true, and that's an advantage. But if you're into buying tapes, I'd get a 120 min. tape, make the mix once, and enjoy far more of my favorite music at no extra cost every morning.
My point is, once you've made your tapes, you're done. No extra time to spend, and you just saved a lot of money...
Of course, if I could just have *all* my
mix tapes:
.mp3's, schedule a playlist, hit record on the tape, and record what you want... :)
.mp3 player, that would be *far* better. :)
Cheaper:
I don't have a CD-R drive. Even if I didn't have a tape recorder, I can tell you right now it's cheaper, and it's especially cheaper than buying a Rio, which is what I'm talking about...
Less work:
Well, making a mix tape might take more time, but once you're done with it, you have it forever. Swapping out music on a Rio doesn't sound as easy. I guess there are trade-offs in both cases, but getting music onto a tape is far easier for the average person than getting mp3's would be. (or, if you have
Skip-proof is just a bonus tapes intrinsically have. So does the Rio, but remember that low-tech is sometimes better. Tapes are far simpler, and I'd love to see another easy solution to skipping that *doesn't* involve a small amount of static ram.
...and if I already had discs burned, I'd love a CD-based
Well, considering what you pay for a Rio, if you can put a HD in a laptop, you'd think they could put a tiny one in a Rio and have a decent enough design to absorb your average shocks...
Of course you realize that tape players and CD players have moving parts too, this is just a design issue. We could still store mp3's on tape too, if we wanted to, we'd just lose the random access capabilities... And ZIP and JAZ disks are pretty robust, I guess we'd just want something to absorb shocks, and some RAM for read-ahead.
I don't see how they can offer copy protection features. How do they know how an mp3 was copied? Maybe they mean they don't want people copying mp3's from the Rio. But who cares?
:) Even a ZIP-disk would be better.
Also, 64MB is pitiful. Give me a little HD any day, like those ones IBM had...
No, they're neat little devices, but I'm not convinced that the Rio is a good value. Why not make mix tapes? It's cheaper, less work, more music, and skip-proof. Silly people.
Interesting, this time ESR is assuming that open source is an inevitable, desirable business model from a business perspective.
...and maybe he's right.
There's nothing wrong with good, thought-provoking essays. If we had one of those for every flamer, I'm sure open source would be much more popular.
My question is, what happens when software companies build their product on open standards, and then pervert them by adding proprietary extensions on top of that? That's Microsoft's new Embrace-and-extend plot for Windows 2000. Sure, they support TCP/IP, IMAP, LDAP, and some weird new power management spec. (I wonder how much Microsoft shaped some of those later protocols...) as well as USB... I guess that's better than I2O... but on top of all that they're still supporting extensions to support their old protocols, and eventually this might go the way of Java/J++, changing an open protocol to a Windows protocol.
It seems sneaky, underhanded, and unfair. But they've got the monopoly for now...
I approve more of Red Hat's current policies. SuSE strikes me more as a young Red Hat, before they learned that bundling proprietary software for profit wasn't what they wanted to be doing.
Of course, you get much more software with SuSE, which is why when I got my Red Hat CD, I got an archive of software to go with it.
Remember, people, it isn't about the money...
Give me the Commodore, X, and the Amiga any day. The Apple II was very overpriced at the time, as are most of Apple's products. NeXT was a very bad (read: incompatible, shoddy standard tools) UNIX.
:) and costs more than an equivalent real computer, then putting in a network card instead doesn't make it "the first viable step towards a network computer". I think the vt100 did that better than the iMac ever will, and for graphics, X Servers did even better. I don't think desktop machines with network cards are anything new, and if Apple does it, that doesn't suddenly make it a 'network computer' any more than all the other ones were.
...and any of your examples are better than the iMac. If you sell a computer that's integrated with the monitor, isn't upgradeable, (we haven't gone far since the Apple II) doesn't have a floppy drive (that was at least standard with the Apple II...
Jobs does try to make sure that ideas and people are exploited, and he is ruthless. If Apple were on top, he would be basically a hipper version of Bill Gates. There have been many stories here of Jobs's ruthless exploitation, of Woz in particular. He may have popularized some ideas that caught on, and we might have him to thank for that, but past that, please don't give Jobs any more credit than you absolutely have to... Proprietary software is bad, but proprietary hardware is worse. If you can't release your source code, at least get it to run on more than one platform...
Nope. The app is under GPL. If you modify the source, then that is GPL'ed too. If you don't want it to be, then you should have read the license before you started tinkering with the source code.
The BSD licenses don't have to worry about this. Anyone can fork the tree and change the license. With a GPL'ed product, anyone can fork the tree, but it'll stay GPL'ed, which means that reincorporating changes like this doesn't run up against any licensing restrictions.
Basically, if MacOS X was built on top of Linux and used lots of GPL'ed code, then most if not all of it would be released under the GPL, and people would be furiously developing it, and incorporating the (good) changes into Linux as well. It isn't, though, it's proprietary, and whatever Apple does release is done out of the goodness of their little corprorate heart. BSD got forked again, and they're happy about it.
So pick the license you like best. I like the GPL best because I want to see what people are doing with my code. I don't want any license that takes *that* right away from me.
You do realize that this is purely opinion, don't you? I like X better for its flexibility. A good program is like a good tool--using Windows or the Mac for GUI development is like giving an artist a choice between crayons or colored pencils. X lets you use anything--charcoal, oil paints, whatever--if you can figure it out...
I can't stand MacOS or NeXT's idea of either Style or cApItAlIzAtIOn... Maybe Steve Jobs wants to be 31337. As for Style, what does Style (with a capital S) mean? There's no universal concept of Style. There's your concept, and there's Steve Jobs' concept, and they don't mesh with *my* concept. So offer some facts instead of opinions.
For my part, I've seen GUIs and Apps under X that resemble Windows, MacOS, NeXT, etc, etc. So where's your Style now?
I've used both, and they both sucked. I have a copy of Windows 1.03, which is basically a DOS Shell with a few programs... it looks sort of like GEOS for the C64 (which was far better, and smaller). Windows 1.03 was in EGA (at best), as opposed to the earlier versions which I guess were monocrome or CGA. The only thing that hasn't changed from then until Windows 3.1 was the Windows Write File Format. Scary, huh? Of course Windows 3.x was the first to have OLE, but the rest of the format is compatible. The binaries are incompatible in both directions, but Windows 1.03 had most of the utilities there, albeit with less functionality: calc, paint, the control panel, the DOS Executive (vestigal File Manager, I guess), etc, etc. It also ran on DOS 3.2 or so (had to use SETVER to use it on a later DOS) and you couldn't really get a command prompt without exiting. (I haven't tried it on a really old computer) It runs great under DOSEmu, though. ;)
The Macintosh was very expensive (and originally black-and-white), and it had a more developed GUI, but it wasn't intuitive for me. Throwing out a disk and deleting a file are not the same thing... I think either the disk should be destroyed, or the files should be printed and deleted or something. The metaphor does not hold. Ejecting a disk shouldn't leave a "phantom disk" on the desktop. A dead mac shouldn't be unhappy, it should give some real information. A negative number is not an error message. A crashed mac ("[bomb] A system error has occured [Reboot button]") should either reboot or give more options, especially when it might have crashed enough that clicking on the button *does nothing*! To its credit, Windows now has some of these bugs. Unfortunately, so do current Macintoshes. (and better ones: being endlessly prompted to insert two different CD's is really fun for the novice) Most importantly, *where's the commandline*?!?!?!?!
There's nothing wrong with the Macintosh or the IBM PC, per se, but I can't stand Windows (especially > 3.1) or MacOS. They both have horrible, annoying flaws and quirks. MacOS has no command line, and DOS isn't flexible enough. My solution is the same on both systems: format, and install Linux.
And yes, Larry, Steve and Billy are all very egotistical, very rich, and share a striking resemblance to Larry, Moe and Curly.
Right, that's completely understandable. I like RedHat, and they haven't been distributing un-free stuff lately (or I might just not be buying it, I got my RedHat 6.0 CD from CheapBytes... :) AFAIK.
:)
No hard feelings, (I didn't have an extra $20,000 a year, so I figured I could save the money and go to State) I actually know some very nice people who are trapped at Duke...
That's a good article, but I think memory is more involved than that is. First, for 'learning to ride a bicycle', that isn't even where the rest of memory is stored, procedural memory is in the cerebellum, I think, and it stores a lot of precise stuff, like my touch-typing. It's also the reason that we find it hard to remember a song in the middle, because we have to "sing" it from the beginning--it's a procedure.
Second, if I pick up a book I've read a long time ago, it will be familiar. (or if I just see a passage) That recognition is memory, and I've read a lot of books. If I pick up one I haven't finished, I can seek through it and find my place. I don't think 122MB of data could account for even that much information, much less the music I remember (although that might be in my cerebellum, apparently they count it as memeory).
Other than that, their methodology seems pretty sound, I'd just like to know how they got their estimates into bits.
I have read it, I know it wasn't Gibson after they got done with it, and I'm glad that "The Matrix" didn't try to steal the plot from Neuromancer (although I wouldn't mind a hot chick with some embedded razor blades... :).
;)
However, I think the short story didn't make reference to the actual storage capacity of the (admittedly digital) device embedded in Johnny's brain. But I don't mind the movie, for two reasons:
1) Johnny Mnemonic wasn't a really great Gibson short story, in my opinion. I liked fragments of a hologram rose, or whatever it was called, a lot better, but you could never make a movie out of that.
2) Keanu makes a good Johnny. He's good in action movies, and he'll never miss that chunk of brain anyhow.
I don't know, I'll have to watch Johnny Mnemonic again... The story was good, if you understand about the Military Psychic Smack Dolphin...
Hmm, funny you should mention Borland Turbo C. Although usually I just use an editor and the command line, my favorite IDE so far is RHIDE, which is built on Turbo Vision, so of course it looks just like Borland's old IDEs for DOS.
Also, you can have multiple windows, compile your code, debug, have lots of hilighting (in the console), jump to the lines that have compilation errors, etc. And it's all integrated, you have your watches, and your breakpoints, and all that fun stuff.
I guess I just liked Turbo Vision, it was always pretty intuitive for me, which I can't say about emacs. Too many bucky-bits spoil the broth, I guess.
Okay. I accuse the BSD community of fragmentation. Of course, Linux, UNIX in general, Windows and the like are all fragmented too... but let's look at this:
:)
:)
Windows: separate incompatible versions,
as in a program written for one of these
may not run on another of these without
also writing it for that version:
1-1.xx (dead)
2-2.xx (dead)
3.0 (dead)
3.1, 3.11 (mostly dead...)
4.0-4.1 ('95, '98) (not dead yet)
NT 3-3.51 (whatever service packs)
NT 4.0 (I don't know how compatible the service packs are)
Windows 2000 (not released yet, who knows how compatible)
Windows CE (& 2.0?) (Hopefully will die)
...there's probably more, a lot of this is legacy.
Of course, Windows has more application incompatibilities than anything else...
Linux: (this is vaguer, since this is just the kernel + whatever you add to it...)
1.0 or less -- dead
1.2-1.3 -- mostly dead, old libraries, old filesystem, old binary format, but mostly source compatible.
2.0-2.1 -- alive, ELF, ext2, source compatible UNIX.
2.2-2.3 -- new, still compatible except maybe GLIBC.
Different distributions -- mostly compatible, four major packaging formats can all be converted, should all be source compatible (standard UNIX compatibility here) with many of the best cool UNIXy features implemented (/proc, VFS, MITSHM, DGA, etc.)
UNIX:
SYSV + BSD:
many different UNIXes use one or both of these as a base, technically all of them today are either BSD or both, since BSD started the networking code, I think.
FreeBSD, OpenBSD, NetBSD, MacOSX, HP/UX, IRIX, ULTRIX, DGUX, OSF/1, Tru64, AIX, SunOS, Solaris, SCO, XENIX etc. are all other UNIX variants that I believe derive from one or the other or both... Of course there are many more. These are mostly source-compatible, except for some hardware issues, like sound interfaces are often different, kernel features change, older programs have different options, SYSV and BSD have some different utilities and extensions...
Linux supports POSIX, and a lot of SYSV and some BSD extensions, but this doesn't always help. (the nice thing about standards is that there are so many to choose from!)
With both Linux and the free BSD variants, of course you can always read or change the source if you want to, which may lead to fragmentation, but it's often better than not being able to change it when there's a problem, especially with an old version or a defunct vendor...
Because of the BSD license, many people steal the BSD networking code, or TCP/IP stack, or something to use in their commercial OS... it's better to have that than having bad commercial products, of course...
All in all it's a mess, but Linux has great source compatibility with UNIX and itself, and okay binary compatibility, with support libraries with the older stuff. It also supports a *lot* of new stuff (I like my gamepad and my TV card and my Paralell Port ZIP Drive and my cheap PC hardware...) and different platforms.
The *BSD's, while I haven't used them, seem to also have good hardware support and lots of platforms supported, and this is much better than most of the commercial offerings which stick to one or two platforms and/or hardware configurations. Past that, I only know what I've heard from *BSD people, that once you know how to use it, generally that it makes a good server, has a central source for the tools, and I've seen the nifty kernel configuration thingy... YMMV.
Past that, if anyone has useful additions or corrections, please post them too.
Right, but the idea was that since the skull contains the brain, the bumps on the skull would indicate more gray matter on the inside, and depressions would indicate less gray matter. It was considered an indication of cranial capacity.
To me, it seems like measuring how much leftover meatloaf you have by seeing how big your tupperware container is, but maybe it's more like wrapping it in aluminum foil, what do I know. Anyhow, it sounded like a good idea 100 years ago, but now we can actually get inside and look at the brain.
It used to be that their (official) distro had MetroX and BRU Backup Server and a couple of other things that weren't open, or only had one license, etc, etc. Of course, XFree86 ran better on my hardware, but MetroX was the first to support some evil Diamond cards and whatnot.
:)
*Please* don't try to correct me unless you know what you're talking about. (Silly Hitch-hiker fans.
Yep, they tried this already... (well, without removing the brain)
:)
It's called phrenology, and the idea was that by measuring the size that different parts of the brain took up, you could measure a person's intellect and moral character. None of this has been proven very well, of course, but it did lead to some important scientific concepts.
If I remember correctly, Einstein's brain actually weighed less than your average brain, but I guess he had one of those special 'physics-understanding brains', whereas I have one of those 'computer-science-understanding / physics-hating brains' that I would assume are somewhat more common here...
I haven't seen a 'MEEPT' post in a long time. I hope someone moderates them up as long as they are AC posts.
Here's where we need more options on slashdot: *I*want to personally view all posts that are (a) rated at 1 or above, and (b) all (original) MEEPT posts. (the replies aren't always that MEEPT-ingful, if you know what I mean.)
In the meantime, I suggest that there be a MEEPT distribution of Linux--instead of Yellow Dog Linux on PPC, maybe we can have Big Bird Linux for the Presario or something... *chuckle*
What the hell is an 'operating system publisher', because these guys claim to be the third largest, behind Microsoft and Apple...
This looks interesting, but remember, I can buy Redhat 6.0 (and many other complete linux distributions) for a few bucks from CheapBytes. Why? Because they don't have anything proprietary in them, apparently unlike this distro. I know that Partition Magic has some funky licensing on it, and I bet their Apache/RSA Secure Webserver isn't much better...
Nope, RedHat learned the error of their ways and went completely Open Source, but I doubt these guys ever will.
Well, anyhow, I'd love to get one of those, but:
;)
(a) Don't have an extra $2,500 lying around.
(b) Waiting for good DVD support for Linux.
Other than that, the RAM sounds like enough to run Redhat 6.0, VMWare and Windows '98 comfortably... The HD is a bit small for me, but I'd just install my old 6GB HD, I think that 15GB would be more than enough for me...
So who wants to give me one?