Uh, these are to be consumer devices? What makes you think that consumers are concerned that their BIOS knows what an ethernet card is?
Both of the major "broadband" netowrking technologies (cable modem / xDSL) offered in the Austin area require the installation of an Ethernet card to connect to service. Granted, broadband isn't all that widespread now (maybe a couple of million subscribers, I think), but Fast Internet is something you can really sell to the average consumer. It's much much cooler than "fast hard drive" and at least as cool as "fast printer."
Now, what does this have to do with boot code and ethernet? Maybe not a whole lot; but point is that ethernet is probably going to become more standard as time goes on, and I'd certainly like to be able to use it as it's done on most large workstation boxes.
(On the other hand, there is considerable architectural support needed to get this level or interoperability up and running--most implementations seem to have some sort of imbedded Forth in them and a well-defined interface for storage and network controllers. It may well be "too late," at least for this generation of PC's. Let's face it--the new PC specifications from MS have a lot fo problems, but at least they're an attempt to ditch at least some of the 19-year-old baggage of the PC architecture)
> not cheesy El Torito CD's that work by emulating a piece of crap floppy disk
I'm curious, what makes you say that ?
That's how El Torito (sounds like something you find in the freeze asile, no?) works. Take a gander at this page with a lot of good links, including one to the official 1995 spec from IBM and Phoenix. From a not-the-spec document:
The El Torito Specification is the brainchild of two engineers -- Curtis Stevens, of Phoenix Technologies in Irvine, CA, and Stan Merkin, formerly of IBM, and currently of Dell Computers in Austin, TX. The name "El Torito" is from the El Torito Grill Mexican restaurant in Irvine where Stevens and Merkin collaborated on the spec over lunch. The practice of naming CD-ROM standards after the place of their inception has a distinguished precedent. The ad hoc assembly of CD-ROM researchers and developers known as the High Sierra Group named themselves and their standard, which later became ISO 9660, after the High Sierra Hotel and Casino in Lake Tahoe. The El Torito Group, such as it is, was an even more ad hoc collaboration.
While officially, the El Torito spec allows the emulated boot media to be 1.44, 2.88, or "hard disk" types, generally the support is sub-standard for anything other than 1.44 boot floppies. AFAIK, most Linux distributions still use 1.44 (or if they're feeling lucky, 2.88) boot images in the CD's because anything else just fails too often on too many computers.
but then... why hasn't someone written an open source bios?
I wouldn't go about holding your breath. . . The last project that I know about trying to do this didn't get too far. I would certainly agree that such an effort would be possible, however, I think that such a project would face many uphill battles before having anything like a usable product.
The tarball I grabbed from their page has file modification dates more than a year old. I think I might have been subscribed to a mailing-list of theirs at one point, even . . . I think that you need a few really talented people at the core to pull off the bootstrap of any ambitous project, and either openbios didn't have talended enough people or not enough talented people. (Though there seem to have been plenty of people to propose logos for the project).
WTF is this? You know how many people I know that setup @home service with an old Linux box to proxy off the cable connection to the rest of the house? I know about 4 people that this is seriously going to piss off. They don't spam and their systems are very secure, but it looks like they are going to be @Home's sacrificial lamb to the UDP.
If done properly, a Linux proxy server should essentially undetectable from its external interface.
My apologies if this was addressed in the earlier discussion in the previous story . . .
My opinion of usenet is general is bad because there are no (hint here) easy to access methods for people using what I would term "public access terminals" where you cannot easily change things and add programs and such. Telnet usually could work but would generally suck.
What about deja.com? That's pretty much public access. Of course, you will miss out on a few posts with X-NoArchive set, but that's not usually too critical. (Ok, so you wouldn't get much from the monistary, but that's your loss . ..).
--Matt
Un-fun endings--Stephenson's Bane
on
The Diamond Age
·
· Score: 4
I've read both Diamond Age and Snow Crash. Both books had great beginnings, but both books ended up meandering off into a very speculative (credulity-straining) endings.
Both books had a semi-mystic subplot. In Diamond Age it was the cult of the mass-human-hosted computer. In Snow Crash it was the idea that our minds have a sort of primative assembly language that can be used to reprogram them. In both stories, these ideas were blown up too far. We get fantastic imagry of the driven scientist in Diamond Age, falling down into insanity as he is drawn toward the drummer cult (a group of people who together comprise a giant biologicly hosted computer). But at the same time, the wonderful future detail of the book is dropped as Stephenson descends into the murky realm of the mind. I love how he can paint the future--but switching gears bogs down his books.
Compared with Snow Crash (8/10), I would give Diamond Age a 6/10. The first half of the book is so much fun to read. You just want to be a part of his future world (or at least, want to be shown more of it). But that just makes the second half more depressingly mediocre. And of course, you have a sudden, jolting ending as loose plot ends are quickly tied up and the whole thing shudders to a halt.
I have a feeling the Crypt. is much better--and it's on my reading list. Stephenson is good, but not 9/10 good. Not in Diamond Age, at least.
Texas has two such programs, TAMS @ UNT and the Academy @ Lamar-Beaumont.
I went through TAMS, another residential academy, this one at the University of North Texas. The chance to get out of an unpleasant (though certainly not hellish) highschool environment was a great gift. I learned a great deal more than I would have in my local high-school, and met some people I will never forget. There are great things that happened when we came together. I bet that these the things that we do will be magnified because of the accepting, deverse culture we lived in (well, more accepting and diverse than your typical highschool, anyway).
Not eveyone is so stupid as to beleive that by targeting video-games and goths we will prevent further tragedies.
I watched the first ten minutes of Meet the Press on Sunday morning while waiting for a ride. The US attorney-general Janet Reno was being interviewed about her take on the mess in Colorado. The transcript of this interview is availbile from MSNBC
Here is an illustrative quote from the interview:
MR. RUSSERT: The Internet-I know when you were in Littleton, everyone talked to you about the Internet, where there was evidence that-instructions how to make bombs were on the Internet and these young men used them. How do we control the Internet? How do we keep young people from getting access to that kind of information?
ATTY. GEN. RENO: Again, that comes back to how we raise our young people, how we teach them what's right and what's wrong. Ten years ago you could go to the library and get a book that told you how to make a bomb, but it wasn't as accessible. But you didn't take the book off the shelf. We have got to teach our kids that there are things that you don't do with the Internet and things that you use to broaden your education to learn from and to expand your horizons.
The answers of limit this, limit that, limit the other, change this, change that, change the other, don't go to the hard issue of how we raise our children the right way, how we listen to them, how we understand them. And in that sense, if we train our police officers to listen, train our teachers to listen, to communicate, to elicit from kids what their problems are and try to help them to solve those problems, we can make a difference
She also answered some questions about metal detectors in schools, parental responsiblity, etc. in a similar fashion.
So, when you are looking for a good quote to back up your argument, you might just be able to snag one from the top law-enforcement officer in the federal govronment. And that can be handy.
Slashdot Mirror
Both of the major "broadband" netowrking technologies (cable modem / xDSL) offered in the Austin area require the installation of an Ethernet card to connect to service. Granted, broadband isn't all that widespread now (maybe a couple of million subscribers, I think), but Fast Internet is something you can really sell to the average consumer. It's much much cooler than "fast hard drive" and at least as cool as "fast printer."
Now, what does this have to do with boot code and ethernet? Maybe not a whole lot; but point is that ethernet is probably going to become more standard as time goes on, and I'd certainly like to be able to use it as it's done on most large workstation boxes.
(On the other hand, there is considerable architectural support needed to get this level or interoperability up and running--most implementations seem to have some sort of imbedded Forth in them and a well-defined interface for storage and network controllers. It may well be "too late," at least for this generation of PC's. Let's face it--the new PC specifications from MS have a lot fo problems, but at least they're an attempt to ditch at least some of the 19-year-old baggage of the PC architecture)
While officially, the El Torito spec allows the emulated boot media to be 1.44, 2.88, or "hard disk" types, generally the support is sub-standard for anything other than 1.44 boot floppies. AFAIK, most Linux distributions still use 1.44 (or if they're feeling lucky, 2.88) boot images in the CD's because anything else just fails too often on too many computers.
I wouldn't go about holding your breath. . . The last project that I know about trying to do this didn't get too far. I would certainly agree that such an effort would be possible, however, I think that such a project would face many uphill battles before having anything like a usable product.
The tarball I grabbed from their page has file modification dates more than a year old. I think I might have been subscribed to a mailing-list of theirs at one point, even . . . I think that you need a few really talented people at the core to pull off the bootstrap of any ambitous project, and either openbios didn't have talended enough people or not enough talented people. (Though there seem to have been plenty of people to propose logos for the project).
If done properly, a Linux proxy server should essentially undetectable from its external interface.
My apologies if this was addressed in the earlier discussion in the previous story . . .
My opinion of usenet is general is bad because there are no (hint here) easy to access methods for people using what I would term "public access terminals" where you cannot easily change things and add programs and such. Telnet usually could work but would generally suck.
What about deja.com? That's pretty much public access. Of course, you will miss out on a few posts with X-NoArchive set, but that's not usually too critical. (Ok, so you wouldn't get much from the monistary, but that's your loss . . .).
--Matt
I've read both Diamond Age and Snow Crash. Both books had great beginnings, but both books ended up meandering off into a very speculative (credulity-straining) endings.
Both books had a semi-mystic subplot. In Diamond Age it was the cult of the mass-human-hosted computer. In Snow Crash it was the idea that our minds have a sort of primative assembly language that can be used to reprogram them. In both stories, these ideas were blown up too far. We get fantastic imagry of the driven scientist in Diamond Age, falling down into insanity as he is drawn toward the drummer cult (a group of people who together comprise a giant biologicly hosted computer). But at the same time, the wonderful future detail of the book is dropped as Stephenson descends into the murky realm of the mind. I love how he can paint the future--but switching gears bogs down his books.
Compared with Snow Crash (8/10), I would give Diamond Age a 6/10. The first half of the book is so much fun to read. You just want to be a part of his future world (or at least, want to be shown more of it). But that just makes the second half more depressingly mediocre. And of course, you have a sudden, jolting ending as loose plot ends are quickly tied up and the whole thing shudders to a halt.
I have a feeling the Crypt. is much better--and it's on my reading list. Stephenson is good, but not 9/10 good. Not in Diamond Age, at least.
I went through TAMS, another residential academy, this one at the University of North Texas. The chance to get out of an unpleasant (though certainly not hellish) highschool environment was a great gift. I learned a great deal more than I would have in my local high-school, and met some people I will never forget. There are great things that happened when we came together. I bet that these the things that we do will be magnified because of the accepting, deverse culture we lived in (well, more accepting and diverse than your typical highschool, anyway).
--
Not eveyone is so stupid as to beleive that by targeting video-games and goths we will prevent further tragedies.
I watched the first ten minutes of Meet the Press on Sunday morning while waiting for a ride. The US attorney-general Janet Reno was being interviewed about her take on the mess in Colorado. The transcript of this interview is availbile from MSNBC
Here is an illustrative quote from the interview:
She also answered some questions about metal detectors in schools, parental responsiblity, etc. in a similar fashion.
So, when you are looking for a good quote to back up your argument, you might just be able to snag one from the top law-enforcement officer in the federal govronment. And that can be handy.
--
SSSSSSSSSKKKKKKKKKKOOOOOOOOOLLLLLLLLLDDDDDD!!
Nevermind. You just had to be there.