Norway has switched the main stations (apart from local ones that have 4 years left) and it is the most idiotic bureaucratic move I have ever experienced. So they might have saved a little money operating the FM transmitters, but they just junked millions and millions of perfectly working radios. Funny thing is, people didn't rush out and buy swathes of new DAB units to replace the old ones - the radio listening has taken a nosedive and the local FM stations are having a right goldage.
How can they make their product worse and worse for each release? There used to be option for inverting/mirroring/flipping your image, but that is long gone. And the linux client implementation must be the worst thing I have seen in yonks - it is impossible to make it grok a camera that cheese is perfectly happy with.
>Microkernels work fine, they just take (up to) a 30% performance hit depending on the workload. Yes. On your grandmothers cpu. (She has some mighty hefty cpus though.)
Which is why I am keeping an extremely keen eye on the works of Mill Computing - there should be no difference between monoliths and microliths in their architecture. (And until Intel fixes their ghosts in the system then the performance is real close there too.)
"Back then" I could really feel the need for more processing power and all the things it would enable. Now, I'm not so sure I imagine as much "new" as I do "more" from developments. But I did have a puzzling experience around 2000 when I was reading a number of CS papers that had roots in the Linux/open movement, and I found it was in large proportions repeating research done in the 60s/70s/80s. Not being aware of what has gone before was not what I expected of the CS community. I'm sure that research was exciting, just as it was the first time around. Are we still doing this?
My internet connection has now crept up into the 250MBit/s range and I'm beginning to wonder if I wouldn't be willing to spend some of it on downloading ads: Mind you, I didn't say watching them.
So is there any way for a web server to know if I'm looking at an ad or if the space it is supposed to occupy is empty? I'm looking for a variation of an ad blocker that will tell the browser whether it should show a frame/image/whatnot after it has been downloaded or just leave the space for it as empty. Anyone?
1. I'd like to see a well usable SASOS+Micro-kernel combo. Think grand-son of AmigaOS. 2. I want a versioning filesystem. If you are about to press "reply" to say something about something practically-just-about-as-good-as then you are missing the point. Sorry. 3. I want linux distros to actually test the "upgrade" option. Good thing none of those devs have been in arms reach or I'd be behind bars for strangling them so hard my fingers would lock in place. 4. I want old PC standards to go up in flames and die in a horrible fire. Primary and secondary disk partitions - W.T.F.? Bootloaders: Nope, still not making sense and user-unfriendly written all over. 5. Sensible Linux audio. 6. Faster progress from the Mill Computing camp. Would mix well with 1. 7. I'd like to hear some more about the progress on memristors. 8. Why are there no ICs not based on silicon but instead using more exotic materials? Are there really no-one willing to pay the premium for the premium performance? 9. In short: Excitement is missing. Everything is streamlined and uniform and conformant. My local newsagent has a total of 5 different games and computing magazines. I am sure there used to be 20-30 back in the day when computing was exciting and heading in all directions at once.
So I finally went through a major hoopla to upgrade my system so I could run a more recent version of Skype (so mom could keep calling me and get her remote support). There was absolutely no reason to update (ok, a system update is never wrong) as the old version of Skype worked just _fine_ (well, after a lot of tweaking) and the only reason it stopped working was M$ throwing all the toys out of the pram and refusing to let the old version keep running.
The new Skype wont take my camera (Cheese likes it plenty fine) and the incoming sound is so scratchy and choppy that I have major trouble understanding peoples' speech. First up against the wall etc...
So long as no-one is in control of the whole desktop stack you can't get a coherent experience and direction. Apple controls the whole stack they use. OSS runs around like headless chickens in all directions - it sorely lacks a Linus who can jump up and shout "eff you" when someone gets too creative. Take something like the Datatypes from AmigaOS (assuming a more modern and updated take on what they can do): Who would institute this framework and enforce it upon all and sundry desktops around the globe? Where does it enter the software stack - at the X level or further up like KDE/Gnome or even further out (possibly like a server in X style)?
Commodore should really have been "too big to fall/fail". (Seriously, do you know how far up the list of tech companies they were?) Being treated like a private playground probably did not help one iota and aborted any rescue operations. I hope it was a wake-up call to other big corporations that Moore's Law will bury you if you don't respect it.
I have been waiting for this to happen, but I expected it later and then in some kind of rotational motor (not Wankel) where knock doesn't really exist and you can boost compression until self ignition.
IBM burglar killers? Bah. Give me the HP PA-RISC Workstation (50/99MHz) keyboard any day. Took a bit of getting used to, but suddenly all others felt wrong. (I've seen similar later, but they had hard plastic keys and not the soft rubber ones of the original.)
I totally agree on proper spelling and sentence construction, but that "Professor" or "Sir" thing wouldn't last for 5 minutes over here in Norway. Titles and formalism means jack all over here, and we have the flattest organisational structures around. You don't think twice about talking to the boss, and it isn't unheard of by the ground floor do-ers to sabotage decisions in larger organisations if they are considered bad.
And (IMNSHO) we can blame M$ and the PC for that; where is the diversity in computing today? Back in the day you had all kinds of hw options but now you have x86 and perhaps a bit of ARM (on something you don't put on your desktop). I rooted for the PS2 with its oddball hw, I rooted for the PS3 with its oddball hw, and then the PS4...does nothing for me. (But hey! I am keenly watching Mill Computing...)
I could see that. Myself, I have a correlation between a few (but not most) sugarfree soft-drinks and getting a headache. So I simply have stopped drinking those. One does wonder about the others though...
MF has some...interesting pricing for their products. How would you like to pay yearly fees for the run-time part that your compiled Cobol code needs to run? Depending on number of users and such ofc.
Seems I will keep waiting for a FS that can do versioning. I wonder if it is more of an API hindrance than a technical one (as a snapshot already has much of what you need for it).
The Church of the Flying Spaghetti Monster has held their first officially approved wedding in New Zealand.
Obvious and plainly seems to have different interpretations depending on your location. I'll make a rare exception: Way to go New Zealand and Pastafarians!
Can you still get those 501-in-1 electronic kits they used to have? With door bells, radios, and whatnot. Haven't seen ads for anything like that in ages - mail-order catalogs used to carry those, but I guess kids aren't trusted to be thinking for themselves today...
Why can't you get a properly mapped keyboard nowadays? Doing some funny remap of cap-lock is not the same as having the CTRL key in the right place and the lock key between it and "A".
Old computers did it right (Unixen, Amiga, probably more). This really irks me.
OTOH, how often are you shouting at people behind your keyboard? Even then you only need to press it once, so it is working like intended I'd say Oh wait, I'm talking with people on the internet, the lock key gets used a bit I guess...
A versioning filesystem (VMS still seems to be the only one around). Datatypes Next-Gen (Amiga style, but handling streaming etc). SASOS. Proper multiscreen (in the Amiga sense) support. Happily with dragging and overlapping. A smart shell that knows command options, behaviour and their documentation, like I believe AS/400 does. Devices like the Amiga has - "FTP:" is a filesystem, there are editors that export their current files through a filesystem device, and many many more. A framework for handling compressed data like XPK for the Amiga.
Even a 6502 can make a pre-emptive operating system (though you hit all kinds of limits that are unpleasant). The problem with instruction restart (or continuation depending on the cpu) _only_ relates to bus control and as such to memory management (which is typically what causes the bus error). The 68000 design is lacking the necessary parts for accessing an address and having the OS recover and handle it when it is pointing to void and nothing or just a part of the address map where nothing lives.
The 68010 added the necessary states and instruction to work together with an external MMU to do this. The other interesting solution was to run _2_ 68000 cpus in lockstep where the hw was designed to detect this and switch to the other cpu to run the offending instruction (there would obviously have to be some cleanup and mapping change before it could do so). Can't remember the name of the system that did it, but it was a Unix-like IIRC. Someone will now find a link to it in 5... 4... 3...
Sci-fi books like to play around with issues like this as sci-fi is often a mirror held up to let us see ourself, and it does indeed show plenty of potential trouble at the very least during a transition period.
This is the vampire stories. This is the life costs $$$ stories. Do you have enough $$$ to continue living? What happens to wealth when inheritance changes? What happens to power when people can hold on to it forever? Putin and Mugabe, emperors for a millennium - how does that sound? The rich gets richer and the poor gets poorer - sounds like a case of when, not if, the riots break out as you will have one constant target for the despair and anger.
Then there is the "problem" that women, from birth, only have so many eggs that can be fertilized. We have to have another discovery in biotech to be able to engineer eggs after menopause. Then there is the fact that fewer and fewer men today get to reproduce (women staying ~constant) and how this would change if women are not "in a hurry" and you mix that up with "rich getting richer". There is a potential army of disgruntled young (erm... well not so young anymore perhaps in this setting) men who is not getting any thanks to the New Order. These will be in no way what you might think of as losers today - you can envision a 90/10 society of non-breeders and breeders - and they might have ideas about what _their_ New New World Order should look like.
And we have civil wars all over the place. Much more probable with sudden changes, not so much when they happen slowly. And no, I don't have much faith in my fellow Man (I look in the mirror every day).
"use digital radio every day" Except they are counting _any_ radio not from FM, i.e. DAB, internet, satellite, cable.
The fucking politicos are pushing an antiquated solution on listeners and I know nobody who agrees with it - this is not going to free any frequencies, people will just set up their own local FM transmitter in-house or in the car so they can continue using what they already have.
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Norway has switched the main stations (apart from local ones that have 4 years left) and it is the most idiotic bureaucratic move I have ever experienced. So they might have saved a little money operating the FM transmitters, but they just junked millions and millions of perfectly working radios.
Funny thing is, people didn't rush out and buy swathes of new DAB units to replace the old ones - the radio listening has taken a nosedive and the local FM stations are having a right goldage.
How can they make their product worse and worse for each release? There used to be option for inverting/mirroring/flipping your image, but that is long gone. And the linux client implementation must be the worst thing I have seen in yonks - it is impossible to make it grok a camera that cheese is perfectly happy with.
>Microkernels work fine, they just take (up to) a 30% performance hit depending on the workload.
Yes. On your grandmothers cpu. (She has some mighty hefty cpus though.)
Which is why I am keeping an extremely keen eye on the works of Mill Computing - there should be no difference between monoliths and microliths in their architecture.
(And until Intel fixes their ghosts in the system then the performance is real close there too.)
"Back then" I could really feel the need for more processing power and all the things it would enable. Now, I'm not so sure I imagine as much "new" as I do "more" from developments.
But I did have a puzzling experience around 2000 when I was reading a number of CS papers that had roots in the Linux/open movement, and I found it was in large proportions repeating research done in the 60s/70s/80s. Not being aware of what has gone before was not what I expected of the CS community. I'm sure that research was exciting, just as it was the first time around. Are we still doing this?
My internet connection has now crept up into the 250MBit/s range and I'm beginning to wonder if I wouldn't be willing to spend some of it on downloading ads: Mind you, I didn't say watching them.
So is there any way for a web server to know if I'm looking at an ad or if the space it is supposed to occupy is empty?
I'm looking for a variation of an ad blocker that will tell the browser whether it should show a frame/image/whatnot after it has been downloaded or just leave the space for it as empty. Anyone?
1. I'd like to see a well usable SASOS+Micro-kernel combo. Think grand-son of AmigaOS.
2. I want a versioning filesystem. If you are about to press "reply" to say something about something practically-just-about-as-good-as then you are missing the point. Sorry.
3. I want linux distros to actually test the "upgrade" option. Good thing none of those devs have been in arms reach or I'd be behind bars for strangling them so hard my fingers would lock in place.
4. I want old PC standards to go up in flames and die in a horrible fire. Primary and secondary disk partitions - W.T.F.? Bootloaders: Nope, still not making sense and user-unfriendly written all over.
5. Sensible Linux audio.
6. Faster progress from the Mill Computing camp. Would mix well with 1.
7. I'd like to hear some more about the progress on memristors.
8. Why are there no ICs not based on silicon but instead using more exotic materials? Are there really no-one willing to pay the premium for the premium performance?
9. In short: Excitement is missing. Everything is streamlined and uniform and conformant. My local newsagent has a total of 5 different games and computing magazines. I am sure there used to be 20-30 back in the day when computing was exciting and heading in all directions at once.
So I finally went through a major hoopla to upgrade my system so I could run a more recent version of Skype (so mom could keep calling me and get her remote support).
There was absolutely no reason to update (ok, a system update is never wrong) as the old version of Skype worked just _fine_ (well, after a lot of tweaking) and the only reason it stopped working was M$ throwing all the toys out of the pram and refusing to let the old version keep running.
The new Skype wont take my camera (Cheese likes it plenty fine) and the incoming sound is so scratchy and choppy that I have major trouble understanding peoples' speech.
First up against the wall etc...
So long as no-one is in control of the whole desktop stack you can't get a coherent experience and direction. Apple controls the whole stack they use. OSS runs around like headless chickens in all directions - it sorely lacks a Linus who can jump up and shout "eff you" when someone gets too creative.
Take something like the Datatypes from AmigaOS (assuming a more modern and updated take on what they can do): Who would institute this framework and enforce it upon all and sundry desktops around the globe? Where does it enter the software stack - at the X level or further up like KDE/Gnome or even further out (possibly like a server in X style)?
Commodore should really have been "too big to fall/fail". (Seriously, do you know how far up the list of tech companies they were?) Being treated like a private playground probably did not help one iota and aborted any rescue operations.
I hope it was a wake-up call to other big corporations that Moore's Law will bury you if you don't respect it.
I have been waiting for this to happen, but I expected it later and then in some kind of rotational motor (not Wankel) where knock doesn't really exist and you can boost compression until self ignition.
IBM burglar killers? Bah.
Give me the HP PA-RISC Workstation (50/99MHz) keyboard any day. Took a bit of getting used to, but suddenly all others felt wrong. (I've seen similar later, but they had hard plastic keys and not the soft rubber ones of the original.)
(Anyone know some place that sells them?)
I totally agree on proper spelling and sentence construction, but that "Professor" or "Sir" thing wouldn't last for 5 minutes over here in Norway.
Titles and formalism means jack all over here, and we have the flattest organisational structures around. You don't think twice about talking to the boss, and it isn't unheard of by the ground floor do-ers to sabotage decisions in larger organisations if they are considered bad.
Answer: No.
And (IMNSHO) we can blame M$ and the PC for that; where is the diversity in computing today? Back in the day you had all kinds of hw options but now you have x86 and perhaps a bit of ARM (on something you don't put on your desktop). ...does nothing for me.
I rooted for the PS2 with its oddball hw, I rooted for the PS3 with its oddball hw, and then the PS4
(But hey! I am keenly watching Mill Computing...)
I could see that. Myself, I have a correlation between a few (but not most) sugarfree soft-drinks and getting a headache.
So I simply have stopped drinking those. One does wonder about the others though...
MF has some ...interesting pricing for their products.
How would you like to pay yearly fees for the run-time part that your compiled Cobol code needs to run? Depending on number of users and such ofc.
Seems I will keep waiting for a FS that can do versioning.
I wonder if it is more of an API hindrance than a technical one (as a snapshot already has much of what you need for it).
The Church of the Flying Spaghetti Monster has held their first officially approved wedding in New Zealand.
Obvious and plainly seems to have different interpretations depending on your location.
I'll make a rare exception: Way to go New Zealand and Pastafarians!
Can you still get those 501-in-1 electronic kits they used to have? With door bells, radios, and whatnot. Haven't seen ads for anything like that in ages - mail-order catalogs used to carry those, but I guess kids aren't trusted to be thinking for themselves today...
Why can't you get a properly mapped keyboard nowadays? Doing some funny remap of cap-lock is not the same as having the CTRL key in the right place and the lock key between it and "A".
Old computers did it right (Unixen, Amiga, probably more). This really irks me.
OTOH, how often are you shouting at people behind your keyboard? Even then you only need to press it once, so it is working like intended I'd say Oh wait, I'm talking with people on the internet, the lock key gets used a bit I guess...
A versioning filesystem (VMS still seems to be the only one around).
Datatypes Next-Gen (Amiga style, but handling streaming etc).
SASOS.
Proper multiscreen (in the Amiga sense) support. Happily with dragging and overlapping.
A smart shell that knows command options, behaviour and their documentation, like I believe AS/400 does.
Devices like the Amiga has - "FTP:" is a filesystem, there are editors that export their current files through a filesystem device, and many many more.
A framework for handling compressed data like XPK for the Amiga.
Take your incompetence and stuff it.
Even a 6502 can make a pre-emptive operating system (though you hit all kinds of limits that are unpleasant).
The problem with instruction restart (or continuation depending on the cpu) _only_ relates to bus control and as such to memory management (which is typically what causes the bus error).
The 68000 design is lacking the necessary parts for accessing an address and having the OS recover and handle it when it is pointing to void and nothing or just a part of the address map where nothing lives.
The 68010 added the necessary states and instruction to work together with an external MMU to do this.
The other interesting solution was to run _2_ 68000 cpus in lockstep where the hw was designed to detect this and switch to the other cpu to run the offending instruction (there would obviously have to be some cleanup and mapping change before it could do so). Can't remember the name of the system that did it, but it was a Unix-like IIRC. Someone will now find a link to it in 5... 4... 3...
Sci-fi books like to play around with issues like this as sci-fi is often a mirror held up to let us see ourself, and it does indeed show plenty of potential trouble at the very least during a transition period.
This is the vampire stories. This is the life costs $$$ stories.
Do you have enough $$$ to continue living? What happens to wealth when inheritance changes? What happens to power when people can hold on to it forever?
Putin and Mugabe, emperors for a millennium - how does that sound?
The rich gets richer and the poor gets poorer - sounds like a case of when, not if, the riots break out as you will have one constant target for the despair and anger.
Then there is the "problem" that women, from birth, only have so many eggs that can be fertilized. We have to have another discovery in biotech to be able to engineer eggs after menopause.
Then there is the fact that fewer and fewer men today get to reproduce (women staying ~constant) and how this would change if women are not "in a hurry" and you mix that up with "rich getting richer". There is a potential army of disgruntled young (erm... well not so young anymore perhaps in this setting) men who is not getting any thanks to the New Order. These will be in no way what you might think of as losers today - you can envision a 90/10 society of non-breeders and breeders - and they might have ideas about what _their_ New New World Order should look like.
And we have civil wars all over the place. Much more probable with sudden changes, not so much when they happen slowly. And no, I don't have much faith in my fellow Man (I look in the mirror every day).
Sundry keys, garage port opener, and a tiny red-led giveaway from FreeBSD - can be useful for finding keyholes in the dark.
"use digital radio every day"
Except they are counting _any_ radio not from FM, i.e. DAB, internet, satellite, cable.
The fucking politicos are pushing an antiquated solution on listeners and I know nobody who agrees with it - this is not going to free any frequencies, people will just set up their own local FM transmitter in-house or in the car so they can continue using what they already have.
What is up with that table?
If you search all results you see an IBM P780 beating all of those, and many others that should beat out that list.