I got an IBM PCjr, 8088, when I was 5 or so, with a 128k addon card, and it had a Microsoft BASIC cartridge. I rememeber doing very simple things with that--like probably a good fraction of Slashdotters, my first exposure to computer language was BASIC.
But it STUCK. And I had a very heavy BASIC class in high school.
And NOW I'm taking C++, and some of the less-computer-literate people in the class who can program a lot better than I, barely are able to maintain their own Windows machines. I run Linux and BSD, and here I am, completely crippled as a programmer.
I can't remember how to do a class implementation for more than 20 minutes. Then it's gone and I see this grey-on-blue screen with line numbers and endless GOTO statements in my mind...
It hurts. It hurts a lot.
Edsger W. Dijkstra observed in "Selected Writings on Computing: A Personal Perspective" that "It is practically impossible to teach good programming style to students that have had prior exposure to BASIC: as potential programmers they are mentally mutilated beyond hope of regeneration."
I should show that to my CS prof and tell him I'm exempt.
Around term-paper time my senior year of high school, I remember a few people in our very small senior class (a whopping 14 of us) griping about how a floppy had eaten their important term paper. The smarter ones had a copy on their hard disks at home. One unlucky girl didn't, and I was called in to try to read the disk.
"I ran, um, Scandisk on it...five times," she said.
"And you're surprised you have corrupt data?" I almost said, but I kept silent.
I took the disk home, took it to my Linux machine, and it read the file okay. I noticed the disk was very old and the little metal thing stuck when it tried to slide back. I transfered the file to several different formats on five different disks and drove the 10 miles to the girl's house.
All right, I guess the girl may have had an excuse to think floppies were the medium of the day. She was using a 386 with a character-mode word processor (Maybe Wordperfect somethingancient). Apparently, it was a very simple case of PEBKAC* "Oh, Windows is broken on this computer, I hate it."
Turned out the file formats I'd saved it in (txt and rtf seemed pretty reasonable to me) -- neither would read quite properly on her word processor, so she spent the evening taking strange little characters out of each sentence of the ten-page document.
I offered to save the file in a more readable format, but the girl's mother stepped in. "Bethani, ** she's done more than enough for you. Why don't you let her go home, and you just get all the stuff cleaned out of your paper by yourself, okay?"
Relieved, I left.
I will, on occasion, run a half-block away from here (my res hall) to the Science Center to print something off, on a floppy, but I always have a backup on my drive. I do this less and less lately as I ftp things up to my favorite ftp server and simply retrieve it from one of the workstations. Floppies do have their uses, but those uses can really only be counted on to be hackish runs to the lab to print something, or boot media.
* (PEBKAC-Problem Exists Between Keyboard and Chair.)
** (Names changed to protect the innocent.)
Sonic the Hedgehog actually has a surprisingly strong fan following in the US. Archie Comics produces a Sonic the Hedgehog comicbook (which I liked a good deal but let my subscription run out) and some years ago DiC produced a Saturday morning cartoon (which was some of THE BEST animation and scripting I have EVER seen, even better than a lot of Disney flicks I've seen.)
In a different light, fans of Sonic comics wish he would be a more developed character with more insight, weaknesses, and strengths, but Sega apparently wants to keep him cool and vague, and kill off the other characters.
Fools. You cannot restrict art.
On a completely off topic strange twisted note, I do indeed wonder what this will do to the Sega reps who tell Archie comics what they can and cannot do with their hero.
I bet Nintendo's just as tough about character portrayal.
--
[cuteygrl342] a/s/l???????
[suprkewldude] hi how r u
[L0VLYLADEE] i brb
[xX_EVIL_Xx] DIE DIE DIE DIE DIE KABOOM BOMB NUKE DIE DIE DIE DIE DIE DIE
[cuteygrl342] evil u shood not do that
[xX_EVIL_Xx] #$#@%@# DIE DIE @#@#$@##
[L0VLYLADEE] im bak!!!!!!!!!!
[suprkewldude] do u like nsync?????
--
Yes, I will agree that the majority of these things are dominated by 13-year-olds trying to be "kewl". However, I've made some of my best friends online. I'm very active in an IRC channel on Undernet, a group of motley geeks brought together by a similar interest. I am one of the ops on this channel (we have about 30 ops, maybe 20 of which are on every day.) When channel ownership changed hands recently, some of us ops handled an election for a new owner, some of us worked closely together with Undernet officials, and others of us thought of ways to make our channel a better place.
The ops, and a few of the regulars, are a pretty close knit bunch of geeks...if a relationship sucks for one of us, the rest are supportive. We all congratulated our new channel owner heartily (one of our higher level ops was rewarded the level 500 by cservice.undernet.org) when we had our election, even those who had lost. We're all planning to get together at a Linux convention at some point. Some of us are even collaborating to make T-shirts.
All but one of these people, I have never seen face to face; the one exception is my boyfriend (yes, real life, distance relationships suck) and we both frequent the channel. I don't know what most of these people look like. But we're still a close group, and some of the best friends I have.
It's a great Linux channel; you'll get help on just about everything. Look in my user info to find out exactly what channel it is.
In fact, I think they're my social life.
That may or may not be a good thing.
All OS's. All different. Different GOOD.
on
Is UNIX An OS?
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· Score: 2
Well, while I disagree that all "Mac People" say UNIX is not an OS (though there are certainly those who think so, given that there's an article written by one) I do agree his view was a bit narrow.
The kernel, the shell, and services (and other basic tenets of the *nix OS) are certainly a lot more "bare" in the view of a Mac user. (I've used MacOS pretty extensively, as well as being an avid Linux user.) After all, the Mac OS as it is at the present has the Finder, extensions, icons, menus, control panels...a lot of the actual guts and such is really pretty hidden from the user.
With MacOS and Windows, so much comes "prepackaged" with the OS in itself, it's hard to draw the line anymore. Unixes (Unices?) make that a lot more clear, because once you have a kernel and a shell, you basically stick on it anything you want. Compilers, the X Windowing System, and whatever myriad of things you want to throw at it. Libraries, fun apps, utilities, whatever.
So it's not that MacOS types are a bunch of raving loonies who can't stand a CLI. And UNIX is most definitely an OS. They both control hardware and make it so humans can do things with it. They're just different.
To IBM's credit, myself and some geek friends were at a smallish local tech convention and some IBM guys were there talking about their new nomenclature and such in their server lines. For the really big stuff, the S-390's ( I think pSeries and zSeries but I could be wrong) they run stuff that handles HUGE, HUGE payloads... run AIX...(isn't there OS-390 too) but for their middle range stuff, we couldn't get the guys to shut up about Linux. One of our guys mentioned it and the talk was all about that the whole time. "Our customers like it because we don't have to package costly licenses. And it's very, very, very scalable and flexible, we can run it on everything. And it's a UNIX so we can integrate it with AIX... " on and on...
So just for that IBM's not a bit bad, and their NUMA-Q architecture looks REALLY neato. As for putting Alpha and Sparc out of business...Hey, you build a better mousetrap. Big Blue has always had great R&D and put out some of the best products out there. That doesn't mean Alpha and Sparc and such are going to plummet.
Network ports? Well, cosmetically, perhaps, might be necessary, but for the big geekfests with my friends, we'd run cable along the floorboards and sometimes duct-tape it down. When it's behind furniture and along the walls, you can't trip on it and you barely even notice it. Everything would connect to my boyfriend's 8-port hub.
My boyfriend and his little brother bought 50' of cat5 to run between their two rooms. How'd they do it? A false ceiling; they ran it up above the acoustic tile, completely invisible and not in the way.
wow. Never thought anyone else would think of this.;]
Seriously, myself and some good geek friends thought about this. After we were all done with college and gainfully employed, if we were all in the same area, we wanted to get together and have a geek house. Our Windows-using (yes, they exist) geek friends would be fed Internet access off Linux boxen, and we'd do gaming every night.
Now I'm not sure that's going to go over.
Plus, now all our windows-using friends DO is play games.
Of course, I do feel for my poor roommate. I'm a chick college student, majoring in CompSci, and she's a volleyball player. She has to put up with my bizarre hours, my compulsive belching, my noisy IBM keyboard, and my tendency to drink Diet Coke every morning...
I'd say NORMAL people have a harder time living with geeks than geeks do, though.
I'm on the East Coast now, but I was born in South Dakota. Out here, I've been told I have a "radio voice"; "perfect enunciation"; etc, etc.
Some of the best speakers come from the Midwest, because, although there's heavy Scandinavian and German background, there are a LOT of people out there with absolutely zero accent. Including myself.;]
People in the Midwest may tend to "drawl" their words, but there's no Southern accent, and I actually know a lot of Midwesterners who speak very quickly.
Ah well. We're talking about grain elevators and broadband, not deeply inherent lingual characteristics, so maybe I should just go back to South Dakota and get better connection speed than I have here...
This post may be funny, but it's actually true...in the town I used to live in, in eastern South Dakota, the grain elevator in town actually DID "explode" in a way.
This grain elevator is truly large; it has to be...oh....30 stories; that's quite a rise above the completely flat land. It consists of about 10 huge cement cylinders; I just recall them being really freaking big (I was a little kid last time I was at the elevator).
I'm not sure about the details, but there's something about the way grain is stored; it releases a gas. Apparently one of these huge cylinders got too much gas in it, and with an earth-shaking (I'm not kidding, people for three miles around heard it) yellow-orange blast, the top blew completely off of the cylinder!
So much for dietary fiber, kids.
I used to say the Midwest had no redeeming characteristics, but if they can get broadband off grain elevators, more power to them.
I'm not entirely sure how this works, and I might be entirely wrong, but something in it binds to whatever causes caffeine tolerance and flushes it out, so you can enjoy a buzz again on a smaller amount of coffee.
It works. I'm not kidding.
(takes a gulp of juice and then a gulp of coffee)
woo hooooooo...
I'm still using a 4MB Matrox Millenium with a 6MB Canopus 3DFx add-on accelerator. 8MB should be okay, since my combination actually runs games pretty well. Half Life is rather pretty with my old hardware, so yeah, me wonders.
As for PC's stuttering? When it comes to multitasking, I do believe they win hands down compared to my Macs. My iMac DV 400MHz runs "A Bug's Life" rather prettily, but playing movie files and such makes everything else slow down to a crawl. On the other hand, I've used smpeg to play movie files on my 400MHz Linux box (with the same amount of memory) while playing mp3's, using several Netscape windows, GIMP, a bunch of Eterms, gAIM, and licq with no noticeable slowdown. CPU usage, of course, goes up a bit, but the thing is, resources aren't hogged by any single process.
If stuff is running that slowly for you, there's a problem somewhere. I love Macs, but I can't wait til they get a REAL OS.
And don't even get me started on their TCP/IP stack, either.
I have an iMac DV 400mHz, blueberry, a gift from a very kind aunt. I've never had this problem--resolutions have never had a hitch. May I ask what model you own, and if you recall right off hand what other models have had this problem?
... To remain slightly on-topic, I want to play violent games on my Macs as well. I have never seen Half-Life for the Mac...:( It probably doesn't exist.
Oh well. Cheers. I have four Macintoshes, and they make me angry sometimes.
I adore both platforms. Right now I'm using a Powerbook 3400c (because I'm on vacation; normally i'd be using a k6-2/400 with RHL6.0) but I can tell you one thing, MacOS is not always the easiest platform to work with.
I'm not kidding. I was raised on Win95 (i'm sorry; we all had to start somewhere) but was basically helpless until I began to understand how Linux worked. I built a computer and made the switch, and I've been very happy with Linux. I found it extremely logical, fast, stable, and just dang cool to have all those penguins all over the place. Linux made perfect sense to me, and I've been using it for about a year now.
Some time ago, I asked my aunt for any old computers she might have, and she started giving me Macintoshes. First I got a PowerPC 8100/80, then a Performa 6115, then an iMac DV-400 (THANK YOU LYNN) and now this Powerbook 3400c. I adore Macintoshes, but Apple's assertion is entirely correct: Think different. You have to, to understand the MacOS.
A lot of rather UNIX-ish stuff goes on beneath the perty simple GUI. Initializing disks, for one. And installing devices wasn't easy for me--admittedly, at the time, nothing talked to OS9 very well. I'm still more comfortable with Linux, but I adore both platforms. Still, if I had to put a label on them, I'd label Linux as easier than MacOS.
Windows is another thing entirely. Everyone and his brother knows how to use Windows. But why did it give me a kern386.exe error one day and completely die, leaving me with only my Linux partition (HUZZAH!) What causes the BSODs? Where are the memory leaks that Microsoft appears to know not of? Windows is neither cute nor logical. It's merely ubiquitous.
AMD processors in your PCs, Macs for everything else. Yum.
We've got a rather large AOL/TW/Netscape....and now Transmeta?! alliance. And there are a bunch of other companies in on this, all of which I forget now. This is a massive alliance, probably one that makes Bill Gates seethe; after all, he's facing all sorts of endless legal crap from the eternal DOJ proceedings, isn't he, and his empire is being threatened.
Say Bill suddenly decides to concede. "Yes, I'll help fragment Microsoft. You want it when, Miss Reno? Certainly." He pays off Netscape and the other companies that have been wronged by Microsoft. Bill Gates is Mister Good Guy: does what the legal system tells him to.
Now he's got a clean slate. He strikes a deal with the AOL alliance. He keeps his friends close, and his enemies closer. All one big happy family, right?
He buys them all and rules the world. End of story.
Well, it might not happen, but how good an idea is it to align smaller, more useful companies with giants like AOL? Sure, there are some benefits, but they're all Another Big Company. It surprises me to hear Transmeta is allied with AOL.
On another note: Some posters wondered about how "dumbed-down" the software on these machines will be. Well, it might be Linux. It might not. But if it is, I'm thinking it will be mostly functional, but set up for the average idiot.
A similar scenario is probably installing Linux on my iMac through VirtualPC. (Don't laugh; it was all I had available.) The disk image installed itself with no questions asked, and when I booted I found the configuration was for the average newbie: init was set to 5, the X resolution/color depth sucked, and so on. Still functional, but some configurations had to be changed to get to what I'm used to.
Oh well. I'm sure I'm rambling, but I'm just a bit disgusted with big companies.
I agree, Taco...This was a stinker. Here's the spoiler:
A genius develops the Chimera virus, an insipid strain of influenza that kills within 27 hours. Some evil Russian guy poses as Tom Cruise by (guess what!) putting on a mask. He and his buddies take the virus and cure, crash the plane the professor's on, and start rambling about stock options.
Meanwhile, Tom Cruise, aka James Bond, engages in rock climbing without safety lines and makes Batman-like moves to save his stupid rear. He then finds some chick and sleeps with her instantly. Some surrealism about Spanish dancers follows. They have the obligatory high-speed extremely-expensive car chase, then she goes off to steal information from her former boyfriend on a 32MB Kodak (Does Kodak even make those!?) memory card.
In the meantime, the goodguys capture a big CEO guy by pretending to infect him with Chimera. While he hallucinates, Tom Cruise poses as the Professor by (guess what!) using a mask to milk information from the CEO.
Then the obligatory drop-down-into-the-top-secret-riddled- with-security-measures-area. Tom Cruise, of course, jumps down into the place hanging ludicrously by a zipline, and moves stealthily into the Hackers-esque moody lighting, all the while keeping his vintage 1979 shaggy haircut out of his eyes. He destroys two out of three vials of Chimera, then has some sort of flashback that makes him pause. Idiot. Of course, the badguys attack just then, but never fear, the chick injects herself selflessly to waste the virus.
Cruise runs off and engages in the Matrix-Terminator 2-James Bond fight scenes that I need not even go into detail about. He gets the vaccine (again, by WEARING A MASK!) saves the girl, and they go to a fair to celebrate. This is when we got up and left in disgust.
Who here rememebers Life and Death? It's an ancient DOS game that ran in four colors, 320x200 or something like that. One of the first games I ever played. You had to memorize a LOT of rather arcane medical facts, poke a patient's belly, operate, and basically screw up and kill the person. A few of my friends got good at it. I played it just to be weird and see the human agony.
The worst part was operating. Usually you had obtained a warez'd or copied version of the game, and had absolutely no documentation whatsoever. Lots of strange, inhuman tools sat before you. I remember giving a patient atropine because I thought it was anasthaesia. Oops. He didn't live long.
I also had a thing for this one game in whence this blue hedgehog in red sneakers ran around grabbing gold rings for no good reason...
Ha! Try an k6-2/400 system in a TigerDirect midtower case. Now that thing gets toasty. Add to that an iMac 400mHz DV (That thing is a freaking space heater in itself. I fear it's going to melt through the desk) and a 486 with no case. I have a nice warm room.;]
In the summer, I leave the iMac and the 486 off and put big fans around my 400mHz Linux box. Works great.
Since we're all on the offtopic pursuit of doing horrible things to languages with Babelfish, I thought I'd share a little fun I had with it.
My original English phrase was a generic declaration of wannabe Linux pride: I am a geek. I want to program things. Linux is the best. My computer is my friend. We are happy.
I've taken some German courses, so, a fairly straightforward German translation: Ich bin ein geek. Ich möchte Sachen programmieren. Linux ist das beste. Mein Computer ist mein Freund. Wir sind glücklich.
Now, to make it ugly. Let's play with it a little...German back to English. I am geek. I would like to program things. Linux is the best. My computer is my friend. We are lucky.
Odd how Babelfish can't handle the German adjective "glücklich". It was like, one of the first words I learned. Now, I don't speak Italian, but let's see what Babelfish does to it... Sono geek. Vorrei programmare le cose. Linux è il la cosa migliore. Il mio calcolatore è il mio amico. Siamo fortunati.
And back to English. Sono geek. I would want to program the things. Linux is the better thing. My calculating is my friend. We are fortunate.
Now Portuguese, which I also don't speak, but I want to see what Babelfish does to it. Geek de Sono. Eu quereria programar as coisas. Linux é a coisa melhor. Meu cálculo é meu amigo. Nós somos afortunados.
Back to English. Geek de Sono. I would want to program the things. Linux is the thing best. My calculation is friend. We are fortunate.
Ah well. This was completely offtopic, but if you're bored, it helps. Especially around here. Sure, moderate me down, but I had fun doing this.
I'm not into MUD, but after playing with Linux for a few hours, and when trying to find something I've misplaced in real life, I have this urge to "locate sneakers" or "whereis hairbrush".
Dang. On my SNES, I would get some nice callouses from extended playing. I didn't think Nintendo would start compensating, though. Crap! I'd better stop playing my guitar, then. I've got some nasty callouses and sometimes blisters from extended playing of bass. Or, perhaps I should sue Squier/Fender for selling me a Telecaster that would inflict such injuries!
Oh, boy, don't even get me started on the little drawing/writing callus I have on the side of the middle finger of my right hand. BIC and Crayola and Berol need to do something for that. I shouldn't have to bear such pain.
And the bottom of my feet! The skin at the bottom of my feet is calloused badly! I should sue the construction agency that poured the cement foundation of my basement. Crackheads. Where do they get off on allowing such injury to my feet?
Oh, and these freckles and slight sunburn I have on my arms and face. I'm officially demanding that the solar system compensate somehow for this emotional damage and indecent exposure of my melanin.
And antibodies! What do those stupid little things think they're doing, mucking about my bloodstream like that? Immunity, bah! I had to get SICK to be immune to chickenpox. I demand that measures be taken! I shall sue my own body!
... You get the point. I'm done being silly now.;]
Slashdot Mirror
oh how horrible. how very horrible. take it away.
I got an IBM PCjr, 8088, when I was 5 or so, with a 128k addon card, and it had a Microsoft BASIC cartridge. I rememeber doing very simple things with that--like probably a good fraction of Slashdotters, my first exposure to computer language was BASIC.
But it STUCK. And I had a very heavy BASIC class in high school.
And NOW I'm taking C++, and some of the less-computer-literate people in the class who can program a lot better than I, barely are able to maintain their own Windows machines. I run Linux and BSD, and here I am, completely crippled as a programmer.
I can't remember how to do a class implementation for more than 20 minutes. Then it's gone and I see this grey-on-blue screen with line numbers and endless GOTO statements in my mind...
It hurts. It hurts a lot.
Edsger W. Dijkstra observed in "Selected Writings on Computing: A Personal Perspective" that "It is practically impossible to teach good programming style to students that have had prior exposure to BASIC: as potential programmers they are mentally mutilated beyond hope of regeneration."
I should show that to my CS prof and tell him I'm exempt.
Around term-paper time my senior year of high school, I remember a few people in our very small senior class (a whopping 14 of us) griping about how a floppy had eaten their important term paper. The smarter ones had a copy on their hard disks at home. One unlucky girl didn't, and I was called in to try to read the disk.
"I ran, um, Scandisk on it...five times," she said.
"And you're surprised you have corrupt data?" I almost said, but I kept silent.
I took the disk home, took it to my Linux machine, and it read the file okay. I noticed the disk was very old and the little metal thing stuck when it tried to slide back. I transfered the file to several different formats on five different disks and drove the 10 miles to the girl's house.
All right, I guess the girl may have had an excuse to think floppies were the medium of the day. She was using a 386 with a character-mode word processor (Maybe Wordperfect somethingancient). Apparently, it was a very simple case of PEBKAC* "Oh, Windows is broken on this computer, I hate it."
Turned out the file formats I'd saved it in (txt and rtf seemed pretty reasonable to me) -- neither would read quite properly on her word processor, so she spent the evening taking strange little characters out of each sentence of the ten-page document.
I offered to save the file in a more readable format, but the girl's mother stepped in. "Bethani, ** she's done more than enough for you. Why don't you let her go home, and you just get all the stuff cleaned out of your paper by yourself, okay?"
Relieved, I left.
I will, on occasion, run a half-block away from here (my res hall) to the Science Center to print something off, on a floppy, but I always have a backup on my drive. I do this less and less lately as I ftp things up to my favorite ftp server and simply retrieve it from one of the workstations. Floppies do have their uses, but those uses can really only be counted on to be hackish runs to the lab to print something, or boot media.
* (PEBKAC-Problem Exists Between Keyboard and Chair.)
** (Names changed to protect the innocent.)
Sonic the Hedgehog actually has a surprisingly strong fan following in the US. Archie Comics produces a Sonic the Hedgehog comicbook (which I liked a good deal but let my subscription run out) and some years ago DiC produced a Saturday morning cartoon (which was some of THE BEST animation and scripting I have EVER seen, even better than a lot of Disney flicks I've seen.)
In a different light, fans of Sonic comics wish he would be a more developed character with more insight, weaknesses, and strengths, but Sega apparently wants to keep him cool and vague, and kill off the other characters.
Fools. You cannot restrict art.
On a completely off topic strange twisted note, I do indeed wonder what this will do to the Sega reps who tell Archie comics what they can and cannot do with their hero.
I bet Nintendo's just as tough about character portrayal.
Example of the usual chat room.
--
[cuteygrl342] a/s/l???????
[suprkewldude] hi how r u
[L0VLYLADEE] i brb
[xX_EVIL_Xx] DIE DIE DIE DIE DIE KABOOM BOMB NUKE DIE DIE DIE DIE DIE DIE
[cuteygrl342] evil u shood not do that
[xX_EVIL_Xx] #$#@%@# DIE DIE @#@#$@##
[L0VLYLADEE] im bak!!!!!!!!!!
[suprkewldude] do u like nsync?????
--
Yes, I will agree that the majority of these things are dominated by 13-year-olds trying to be "kewl". However, I've made some of my best friends online. I'm very active in an IRC channel on Undernet, a group of motley geeks brought together by a similar interest. I am one of the ops on this channel (we have about 30 ops, maybe 20 of which are on every day.) When channel ownership changed hands recently, some of us ops handled an election for a new owner, some of us worked closely together with Undernet officials, and others of us thought of ways to make our channel a better place.
The ops, and a few of the regulars, are a pretty close knit bunch of geeks...if a relationship sucks for one of us, the rest are supportive. We all congratulated our new channel owner heartily (one of our higher level ops was rewarded the level 500 by cservice.undernet.org) when we had our election, even those who had lost. We're all planning to get together at a Linux convention at some point. Some of us are even collaborating to make T-shirts.
All but one of these people, I have never seen face to face; the one exception is my boyfriend (yes, real life, distance relationships suck) and we both frequent the channel. I don't know what most of these people look like. But we're still a close group, and some of the best friends I have.
It's a great Linux channel; you'll get help on just about everything. Look in my user info to find out exactly what channel it is.
In fact, I think they're my social life.
That may or may not be a good thing.
Well, while I disagree that all "Mac People" say UNIX is not an OS (though there are certainly those who think so, given that there's an article written by one) I do agree his view was a bit narrow.
The kernel, the shell, and services (and other basic tenets of the *nix OS) are certainly a lot more "bare" in the view of a Mac user. (I've used MacOS pretty extensively, as well as being an avid Linux user.) After all, the Mac OS as it is at the present has the Finder, extensions, icons, menus, control panels...a lot of the actual guts and such is really pretty hidden from the user.
With MacOS and Windows, so much comes "prepackaged" with the OS in itself, it's hard to draw the line anymore. Unixes (Unices?) make that a lot more clear, because once you have a kernel and a shell, you basically stick on it anything you want. Compilers, the X Windowing System, and whatever myriad of things you want to throw at it. Libraries, fun apps, utilities, whatever.
So it's not that MacOS types are a bunch of raving loonies who can't stand a CLI. And UNIX is most definitely an OS. They both control hardware and make it so humans can do things with it. They're just different.
Different is Good.
To IBM's credit, myself and some geek friends were at a smallish local tech convention and some IBM guys were there talking about their new nomenclature and such in their server lines. For the really big stuff, the S-390's ( I think pSeries and zSeries but I could be wrong) they run stuff that handles HUGE, HUGE payloads ... run AIX ...(isn't there OS-390 too) but for their middle range stuff, we couldn't get the guys to shut up about Linux. One of our guys mentioned it and the talk was all about that the whole time. "Our customers like it because we don't have to package costly licenses. And it's very, very, very scalable and flexible, we can run it on everything. And it's a UNIX so we can integrate it with AIX ... " on and on...
So just for that IBM's not a bit bad, and their NUMA-Q architecture looks REALLY neato. As for putting Alpha and Sparc out of business...Hey, you build a better mousetrap. Big Blue has always had great R&D and put out some of the best products out there. That doesn't mean Alpha and Sparc and such are going to plummet.
I say kudos to Big Blue.
You could use the "Home" key to just go home. ;]
Hehe. I'm still using the original Voodoo 3dFx--6 meg--and a 4-meg original Matrox Millenium. Still works fine for Half-Life. ;]
Well, fixer-upping doesn't have to be so hard...
;]
Network ports? Well, cosmetically, perhaps, might be necessary, but for the big geekfests with my friends, we'd run cable along the floorboards and sometimes duct-tape it down. When it's behind furniture and along the walls, you can't trip on it and you barely even notice it. Everything would connect to my boyfriend's 8-port hub.
My boyfriend and his little brother bought 50' of cat5 to run between their two rooms. How'd they do it? A false ceiling; they ran it up above the acoustic tile, completely invisible and not in the way.
See? Geekizing a house isn't so bad.
wow. Never thought anyone else would think of this. ;]
Seriously, myself and some good geek friends thought about this. After we were all done with college and gainfully employed, if we were all in the same area, we wanted to get together and have a geek house. Our Windows-using (yes, they exist) geek friends would be fed Internet access off Linux boxen, and we'd do gaming every night.
Now I'm not sure that's going to go over.
Plus, now all our windows-using friends DO is play games.
Of course, I do feel for my poor roommate. I'm a chick college student, majoring in CompSci, and she's a volleyball player. She has to put up with my bizarre hours, my compulsive belching, my noisy IBM keyboard, and my tendency to drink Diet Coke every morning...
I'd say NORMAL people have a harder time living with geeks than geeks do, though.
Just my 2c.
I'm on the East Coast now, but I was born in South Dakota. Out here, I've been told I have a "radio voice"; "perfect enunciation"; etc, etc.
;]
Some of the best speakers come from the Midwest, because, although there's heavy Scandinavian and German background, there are a LOT of people out there with absolutely zero accent. Including myself.
People in the Midwest may tend to "drawl" their words, but there's no Southern accent, and I actually know a lot of Midwesterners who speak very quickly.
Ah well. We're talking about grain elevators and broadband, not deeply inherent lingual characteristics, so maybe I should just go back to South Dakota and get better connection speed than I have here...
This post may be funny, but it's actually true...in the town I used to live in, in eastern South Dakota, the grain elevator in town actually DID "explode" in a way.
This grain elevator is truly large; it has to be...oh....30 stories; that's quite a rise above the completely flat land. It consists of about 10 huge cement cylinders; I just recall them being really freaking big (I was a little kid last time I was at the elevator).
I'm not sure about the details, but there's something about the way grain is stored; it releases a gas. Apparently one of these huge cylinders got too much gas in it, and with an earth-shaking (I'm not kidding, people for three miles around heard it) yellow-orange blast, the top blew completely off of the cylinder!
So much for dietary fiber, kids.
I used to say the Midwest had no redeeming characteristics, but if they can get broadband off grain elevators, more power to them.
Try drinking grapefruit juice. ;]
I'm not entirely sure how this works, and I might be entirely wrong, but something in it binds to whatever causes caffeine tolerance and flushes it out, so you can enjoy a buzz again on a smaller amount of coffee.
It works. I'm not kidding.
(takes a gulp of juice and then a gulp of coffee)
woo hooooooo...
I'm still using a 4MB Matrox Millenium with a 6MB Canopus 3DFx add-on accelerator. 8MB should be okay, since my combination actually runs games pretty well. Half Life is rather pretty with my old hardware, so yeah, me wonders.
As for PC's stuttering? When it comes to multitasking, I do believe they win hands down compared to my Macs. My iMac DV 400MHz runs "A Bug's Life" rather prettily, but playing movie files and such makes everything else slow down to a crawl. On the other hand, I've used smpeg to play movie files on my 400MHz Linux box (with the same amount of memory) while playing mp3's, using several Netscape windows, GIMP, a bunch of Eterms, gAIM, and licq with no noticeable slowdown. CPU usage, of course, goes up a bit, but the thing is, resources aren't hogged by any single process.
If stuff is running that slowly for you, there's a problem somewhere. I love Macs, but I can't wait til they get a REAL OS.
And don't even get me started on their TCP/IP stack, either.
I have an iMac DV 400mHz, blueberry, a gift from a very kind aunt. I've never had this problem--resolutions have never had a hitch. May I ask what model you own, and if you recall right off hand what other models have had this problem?
...
To remain slightly on-topic, I want to play violent games on my Macs as well. I have never seen Half-Life for the Mac...:( It probably doesn't exist.
Oh well. Cheers. I have four Macintoshes, and they make me angry sometimes.
I adore both platforms. Right now I'm using a Powerbook 3400c (because I'm on vacation;
normally i'd be using a k6-2/400 with RHL6.0) but I can tell you one thing, MacOS is not
always the easiest platform to work with.
I'm not kidding. I was raised on Win95 (i'm sorry; we all had to start somewhere) but was
basically helpless until I began to understand how Linux worked. I built a computer and made
the switch, and I've been very happy with Linux. I found it extremely logical, fast, stable,
and just dang cool to have all those penguins all over the place. Linux made perfect sense to me,
and I've been using it for about a year now.
Some time ago, I asked my aunt for any old computers she might have, and she started giving me Macintoshes. First I got a PowerPC 8100/80, then a Performa 6115, then an iMac DV-400 (THANK YOU LYNN) and now this Powerbook 3400c. I adore Macintoshes, but Apple's
assertion is entirely correct: Think different. You have to, to understand the MacOS.
A lot of rather UNIX-ish stuff goes on beneath the perty simple GUI. Initializing disks,
for one. And installing devices wasn't easy for me--admittedly, at the time, nothing talked to
OS9 very well. I'm still more comfortable with Linux, but I adore both platforms. Still, if
I had to put a label on them, I'd label Linux as easier than MacOS.
Windows is another thing entirely. Everyone and his brother knows how to use Windows. But why did it give me a kern386.exe error one day and completely die, leaving me with only my Linux partition (HUZZAH!) What causes the BSODs? Where are the memory leaks that Microsoft appears to know not of? Windows is neither cute nor logical. It's merely ubiquitous.
AMD processors in your PCs, Macs for everything else. Yum.
We've got a rather large AOL/TW/Netscape....and now Transmeta?! alliance. And there are a bunch of other companies in on this, all of which I forget now. This is a massive alliance, probably one that makes Bill Gates seethe; after all, he's facing all sorts of endless legal crap from the eternal DOJ proceedings, isn't he, and his empire is being threatened.
Say Bill suddenly decides to concede. "Yes, I'll help fragment Microsoft. You want it when, Miss Reno? Certainly." He pays off Netscape and the other companies that have been wronged by Microsoft. Bill Gates is Mister Good Guy: does what the legal system tells him to.
Now he's got a clean slate. He strikes a deal with the AOL alliance. He keeps his friends close, and his enemies closer. All one big happy family, right?
He buys them all and rules the world. End of story.
Well, it might not happen, but how good an idea is it to align smaller, more useful companies with giants like AOL? Sure, there are some benefits, but they're all Another Big Company. It surprises me to hear Transmeta is allied with AOL.
On another note: Some posters wondered about how "dumbed-down" the software on these machines will be. Well, it might be Linux. It might not. But if it is, I'm thinking it will be mostly functional, but set up for the average idiot.
A similar scenario is probably installing Linux on my iMac through VirtualPC. (Don't laugh; it was all I had available.) The disk image installed itself with no questions asked, and when I booted I found the configuration was for the average newbie: init was set to 5, the X resolution/color depth sucked, and so on. Still functional, but some configurations had to be changed to get to what I'm used to.
Oh well. I'm sure I'm rambling, but I'm just a bit disgusted with big companies.
And it was actually $5.50. But don't hold your breath. The theatre sucks. ;]
I agree, Taco...This was a stinker. Here's the spoiler:
A genius develops the Chimera virus, an insipid strain of influenza that kills within 27 hours. Some evil Russian guy poses as Tom Cruise by (guess what!) putting on a mask. He and his buddies take the virus and cure, crash the plane the professor's on, and start rambling about stock options.
Meanwhile, Tom Cruise, aka James Bond, engages in rock climbing without safety lines and makes Batman-like moves to save his stupid rear. He then finds some chick and sleeps with her instantly. Some surrealism about Spanish dancers follows.
They have the obligatory high-speed extremely-expensive car chase, then she goes off to steal information from her former boyfriend on a 32MB Kodak (Does Kodak even make those!?) memory card.
In the meantime, the goodguys capture a big CEO guy by pretending to infect him with Chimera. While he hallucinates, Tom Cruise poses as the Professor by (guess what!) using a mask to milk information from the CEO.
Then the obligatory drop-down-into-the-top-secret-riddled- with-security-measures-area. Tom Cruise, of course, jumps down into the place hanging ludicrously by a zipline, and moves stealthily into the Hackers-esque moody lighting, all the while keeping his vintage 1979 shaggy haircut out of his eyes. He destroys two out of three vials of Chimera, then has some sort of flashback that makes him pause. Idiot. Of course, the badguys attack just then, but never fear, the chick injects herself selflessly to waste the virus.
Cruise runs off and engages in the Matrix-Terminator 2-James Bond fight scenes that I need not even go into detail about. He gets the vaccine (again, by WEARING A MASK!) saves the girl, and they go to a fair to celebrate. This is when we got up and left in disgust.
'Tis a stinker. Save your $5.
Who here rememebers Life and Death? It's an ancient DOS game that ran in four colors, 320x200 or something like that. One of the first games I ever played. You had to memorize a LOT of rather arcane medical facts, poke a patient's belly, operate, and basically screw up and kill the person. A few of my friends got good at it. I played it just to be weird and see the human agony.
The worst part was operating. Usually you had obtained a warez'd or copied version of the game, and had absolutely no documentation whatsoever. Lots of strange, inhuman tools sat before you. I remember giving a patient atropine because I thought it was anasthaesia. Oops. He didn't live long.
I also had a thing for this one game in whence this blue hedgehog in red sneakers ran around grabbing gold rings for no good reason...
Ha! Try an k6-2/400 system in a TigerDirect midtower case. Now that thing gets toasty. Add to that an iMac 400mHz DV (That thing is a freaking space heater in itself. I fear it's going to melt through the desk) and a 486 with no case. I have a nice warm room. ;]
In the summer, I leave the iMac and the 486 off and put big fans around my 400mHz Linux box. Works great.
Since we're all on the offtopic pursuit of doing horrible things to languages with Babelfish, I thought I'd share a little fun I had with it.
My original English phrase was a generic declaration of wannabe Linux pride:
I am a geek. I want to program things. Linux is the best. My computer is my friend. We are happy.
I've taken some German courses, so, a fairly straightforward German translation:
Ich bin ein geek. Ich möchte Sachen programmieren. Linux ist das beste. Mein Computer ist mein Freund. Wir sind glücklich.
Now, to make it ugly. Let's play with it a little...German back to English.
I am geek. I would like to program things. Linux is the best. My computer is my friend. We are lucky.
Odd how Babelfish can't handle the German adjective "glücklich". It was like, one of the first words I learned. Now, I don't speak Italian, but let's see what Babelfish does to it...
Sono geek. Vorrei programmare le cose. Linux è il la cosa migliore. Il mio calcolatore è il mio amico. Siamo fortunati.
And back to English.
Sono geek. I would want to program the things. Linux is the better thing. My calculating is my friend. We are fortunate.
Now Portuguese, which I also don't speak, but I want to see what Babelfish does to it.
Geek de Sono. Eu quereria programar as coisas. Linux é a coisa melhor. Meu cálculo é meu amigo. Nós somos afortunados.
Back to English.
Geek de Sono. I would want to program the things. Linux is the thing best. My calculation is friend. We are fortunate.
Ah well. This was completely offtopic, but if you're bored, it helps. Especially around here. Sure, moderate me down, but I had fun doing this.
I'm not into MUD, but after playing with Linux for a few hours, and when trying to find something I've misplaced in real life, I have this urge to "locate sneakers" or "whereis hairbrush".
Cat...lol. That was humorous, dude. I nearly sneezed Diet Coke all over my keyboard. ;]
Actually, that might cause some short circuits that'll make the spooks scratch their heads.
Dang. On my SNES, I would get some nice callouses from extended playing. I didn't think Nintendo would start compensating, though. Crap! I'd better stop playing my guitar, then. I've got some nasty callouses and sometimes blisters from extended playing of bass. Or, perhaps I should sue Squier/Fender for selling me a Telecaster that would inflict such injuries!
;]
Oh, boy, don't even get me started on the little drawing/writing callus I have on the side of the middle finger of my right hand. BIC and Crayola and Berol need to do something for that. I shouldn't have to bear such pain.
And the bottom of my feet! The skin at the bottom of my feet is calloused badly! I should sue the construction agency that poured the cement foundation of my basement. Crackheads. Where do they get off on allowing such injury to my feet?
Oh, and these freckles and slight sunburn I have on my arms and face. I'm officially demanding that the solar system compensate somehow for this emotional damage and indecent exposure of my melanin.
And antibodies! What do those stupid little things think they're doing, mucking about my bloodstream like that? Immunity, bah! I had to get SICK to be immune to chickenpox. I demand that measures be taken! I shall sue my own body!
...
You get the point. I'm done being silly now.