Dave:
You should remember me. I'm the guy that shook hands with you that day, two years ago, during the Tropic Hunt in Hollywood. You also signed the napkin I found near the garbage can. I know that it was a clue, but I don't understand why you didn't mention it when you read off the official answers to the Hunt. Clearly the contents were a reference to your many columns on boogers. I still have that napkin and will return it to as soon as you send me your home address.
Anyway, my question is:
How has your life changed since you won a Pullet Surprise? Is the fame and money and gorgeous babes throwing themselves at your feet worth it?
Kwan
PS How much do I need to pay you to get my name in one of your next columns?
Lord, you're twisting this disaster -- a disaster for all of humanity -- into some nationalistic bullshit. The beautiful thing about Columbia was not that it was an American venture, but that it contained the hopes and dreams of many nations. Exploration is not the sole province of any one country. America's space program, its dedication to exploration, is a noble, courageous effort uniting all peoples. NASA scientists, as a whole, work to further science, not to win some political race. Sure there is recognition in being first, but the glory is not that, but that this country, the USA, contributed to mankind's greater glory. Remember, "One giant step for mankind"?
Yup. We can't take old equipment to the range (they won't allow non-paper targets) but we can drive about an hour up north to Central Florida and open up a few ports with the Remington 700 in.223 or 22-250. I also have a couple Winchester Model 70s in.270 that are quite effective at remotely securing the drive.
I've always felt uncomfortable about the reports of Linux' demise on the desktop. At this moment I'm typing this on a RedHat 8.0 machine, using Mozilla. Three days ago I wrote a bunch of holiday letters in OpenOffice and read my mail in Evolution (though I normally use pine). Though I have no problems using a shell for any task, I was surprised to see that I rarely needed an Xterm.
The counter-argument is that I'm aware of the console utilities and don't represent the typical desktop user. OK, but I have my senior citizen parents, non-technical wife, and lots of kids using Linux without a second thought. For the most part, all of their computing needs for school and work are fulfilled by the RedHat system. The other thing that cannot be ignored is the price of this machine: ECS K7S5A MB + Athlon 1800XP, 40G HD, DVDROM, case, 256M memory all came to less than $400. This cost wouldn't be possible with a $190 Microsoft XP Home license.
DVDs play fine after a visit to freshrpms.net. MP3's work wonderfully and they sure seem to sound better than under Windows (largely because there are no pauses under Linux when the system does other stuff). OpenOffice's speed was an issue on my AMD K62/500. It's not noticeable on this 1.53g Athlon. The typical computer user spends the majority of their time on the web, checking email, and word processing. Secondary uses are usually games, and music (burning and listening). Hmm.. Except for the games, this system does all that perfectly well.
I've tutored K-12 and college-level students for several years and have been in a lot of classrooms. One thing I've noticed, especially in education challenged South Florida, is that the school system is trying to use computers to make up for the lack of real teachers. The second problem is that most educational software isn't.
For example, many of the reading comprehension titles are no better than the workbooks from before -- read a few paragraphs, answer a few questions. In fact, they're often worse because the workbooks allowed the student to respond with a sentence describing the paragraph rather than clicking a multiple choice option.
I do think that computers are useful in post-lecture studies since it allows students to work at their own pace until they understand a topic. THis is especially useful for mathematics.
In the works of Tolkien, a predominant concept is the concept of cultural reality. Hubbard suggests that we have to choose between the neostructuralist paradigm of consensus and cultural neosemiotic theory. It could be said that the main theme of LOTR is not semanticism, as dialectic narrative suggests, but postsemanticism. If precultural Marxism holds, we have to choose between dialectic narrative and the dialectic paradigm of reality.
However, in _The Two Towers_, Spelling deconstructs the neostructuralist paradigm of consensus; in ROTK, although, he examines prepatriarchialist theory. Brinn implies that we have to choose between the neostructuralist paradigm of consensus and capitalist posttextual theory.
If one examines precultural construction, one is faced with a choice: either reject prepatriarchialist theory or conclude that feudalism is capable of intentionality. But the characteristic theme of Brinn's analysis of the postcapitalist paradigm of reality is the bridge between society and morphic identity. If dialectic discourse holds, we have to choose between the neostructuralist paradigm of consensus and Lyotardist narrative.
Either way, to paraphrase Breathed, I found it a quasi-religious allegory with fascist undertones, with Aragorn clearly some Messianic redeemer.
Re:Over the Hill? ... An Opinion
on
Taken?
·
· Score: 2
Hummm....Mmmhhhhh... The problem I have with Speilberg films is that they always seem to leave me unsatisfied. They're these hollow constructs, full of sound and fury, gestures without motion, completely unable to hide the incredible blandness of the scripts . He stopped taking chances, stopped trying to enrage or challenge his audience, instead choosing to be safe and politically correct. Family oriented is one thing, to emasculate a story such as "SPR" is unforgivable. And I certainly don't think that a few curse words or eviscerations counts as challenging an audience. His world seems to have sharp good and bad delineations and as a result his characters are so one sided it would give Moebius a thrill. They never endure in my mind or my heart, I feel no empathy or sympathy for their plight. Whether this is a consequence or poor acting or poor directing, I'm not certain. But I know he's directed some fine actors and actresses.
This is a very interesting theory. Laurie Winn Carlson once wrote about the symbiotic relationship that humans and cattle have shared over the history of mankind. Cattle have also been useful in the prevention of smallpox (remember cowpox anyone?). Little wonder that cataclysmic events in recent history began almost exactly after the rash outbreaks of mad cow disease in Europe.
Interesting... A few people have proposed that all life on Earth is really just a vehicle for a complex molecule (DNA) to reproduce itself. At some point, whether it's at the virus level or at a molecular level, things somehow become living. I'm not sure what the criteria for life is since it seems to vary between different groups of scientists, but it is interesting in that "got nothing better to do on a Monday morning but post on Slashdot" sort of way.
Many years ago, Richard Feynman and Carl Sagan were spending some time in North Carolina to attend a scientific conference. North Carolina is well known for its scenery, and as they were driving back through one of the many forests, Feynman proposed that they buy a tent and spend the night in the forest instead of at a stuffy hotel room. They found a local Outdoor World shop and bought a tent. Then they found a beautiful spot along Mile Marker 42 to pitch their tent. They had a supper of beans and Vienna Sausages then hopped in their tent to sleep.
That night Feynman nudged Sagan.
"Look up," he said. "What do you see?"
"Billions and billions of stars," said Sagan.
"Yes, yes," said Feynman. "What can you deduce from these stars?"
"There are billions and billions of stars. If only a fraction of a percent can support life, then surely we are not alone in the Universe."
This is just another attempt to hoodwink the public. I'd publish my point-by-point rebuttal but no one would understand the scientific terms that I'd need to use.
The government can already read our minds. Last year we saw that scientists have been able to have machines controlled by nothing other than thought by scanning brain waves. It's obvious that this is merely the tip of the iceberg. Moving machines with thought is only the part that the government allows these scientists to reveal to the public. Just as civilians aren't privy to top-secret military aircraft designs until years after they become completely outdated, so is the thought-reading apparatus hidden while it still is useful.
You think I'm mad? Even private corporations are not allowed to release technology without government approval. Remember the Hoverboards in Back to the Future? They're real. But they still have military applications so cannot be released to the public. We know that it can work because the Japanese have maglev trains that work on identical priciples.
You still think I'm mad? Turn your Television to a 'staticky' station. Watch the chaotic series of dots and blips. Do this for about six hours until your brain becomes attuned to the frequency. Soon you'll be able to decipher the 8,192 bit encoded datastream that the government is using to communicate with the L'kelialia from Pluto. You'll hear their voices. You'll see their devilish grins peering back at you.
People ask, why would the government want to fake the moon landing? It's easy. Staking a claim. In 2053 the Global Congress will debate the issue of ownership of mineral rights on Luna. The government is only making sure that it has the most prior claim. The actual technology for a moon shot won't be available for another 16 years (I think, this is 2002, right?) but time travel has been well understood since Einstein. It's very complicated and scientific (I'd have to use terms like Schwartzchild radius and eigenvalues to really explain it) but suffice it to say that it's true. I read it on Slashdot earlier this year.
Anyway, I hope my detailed, logical, and coherent analysis and convinces you that this upcoming paper is total fabrication.
One thing I've learned is that, while blind and hungry, it's not a good idea to wander around the dungeon feeling for food on a level where you've killed a cockatrice.
Playing Nethack always reminds me of the room in Infocom's Enchanter where one must retrieve a scroll from a maze of caverns. Every step is important. Y'know how food rots away if left too long? I was once starving and did a hk to move instead of the diagonal. In that one step the food disappeared. I starved to death.
This article mentioned something on the order of 20 *refurbished* PCs to 5 schools (100 used PCs + 5 new servers). Given that PC prices are so relatively low (I've recently put together an Athlon XP1800+ based PC for under $400) It's amazing that a billion dollar corporation is so insanely profit driven that they can't even do something out of *good will*. It must become a profit opportunity. I don't know what level of PCs these are, but the local computer show often has Pentium 233MMX machines, AMD K62/500s and similar for under $100 for the complete machine (memory, disk, cdr).
This is precisely the reason I don't use M$ products. I started using Linux for purely practical reasons, but now it's almost equally philosophical.
Off the top of my head, in the last 3 years: The Matrix, Toy Story 1 + 2, Lord of the Rings, Spider-man, American Beauty, Being John Malkovich (tell me that would have come out of a studio 5 years ago.. ha!), Fight Club, Traffic, Crouching Tiger Hidden Dragon, Requiem For A Dream, Shrek...
But then there's XXX, Episode2, Jackass, Ecks vs. Sever, etc.. They're all guilty of thinking that high-priced special effects can make up for the lack of acting ability or a good story. I really enjoyed the movies in your list, but they span almost 4 years. The ones I mentioned were all released within this year, and are only the ones I've seen firsthand, forget the ones that were immediately panned by reviewers.
One thing to keep in mind is that many "dumb" printers require the host computer to do a lot of the processing. This keeps the printer cost down but requires a fairly fast machine. Is the times the author mentioned from the moment he hits the "print" button or from the moment the computer receives the data? How are the printers attached? If via USB the bottleneck may even be the connection.
I'm browsing right now...
on
Newton Won't Die
·
· Score: 5, Funny
om my Mew7on. 1 love this cool hamb writing pecognition. 1 think Cndr Taco yses one to post 5lashdot stories.
This is pretty good news for me. I started a tutorial for blender a while back. The interface at first looks daunting, but after using it for a few hours you realize that everything makes a lot of sense. It's probably as opposite as you can get to something like Bryce in terms of the interface. Not pretty, but powerful. Though there are many rt apps for Linux, none of the friendliest ones are open.
One of the big no-no's were the daisy chained power strips. These could be deadly since most walls sockets cannot handle the load. The power strips themselves may work, but the wiring in the walls could fail.
Amiga had the edge on colours and sound chips, but the ST was a workhorse in a lot of recording studios because it had built in MIDI ports with the 5-DIN jacks which you could plug in with your regular keyboard cables needing no adaptor.
The built-in MIDI was nice, except that the implementation was non-standard. IIRC, they rigged the passthrough to save costs. This worked fine for completely standard MIDI equipment, but failed with others.
I also had several STs. The first one I'd upgraded by piggy backing 256Mbit (??) *chips* onto the ones on the board. The second one used the EZRAMII upgrade board to get a whopping 2.5M. One really cool tool was a device called the Spectre GCR. Along with the rock steady display of the SM124 monitor, it allowed an ST to emulate a Mac Plus. I wonder what ever became of the legendary Dave Small??
Do you remember GFA Basic? I wrote hundreds of little applications in that interpreter, including several math graphing applications. Back then, a high resolution plot (i.e., 640x400) would take *hours* to complete. That I can do the same plots in under 1 second on my Duron 1.3G is pretty amazing:)...
I still have software for the ST, including the Megamax C compilers, some version of Pascal and Fortran, GFA Basic, and Dungeon Master...
Certainly it's easy to create scripts that can do nasty things. I guess the main difference between some other OS vulnerabilities is that to infect a machine, I may need only send an email. For some other OSes, I would need to send a package, have them su to root, run./configure and make install. In any case, I'm not convinced that any OS is inherently more secure than any other. For example, at the last company I worked for, the access to a database system was done through a.profile that automatically launched the db client. On exit from the client it would automatically log the user out. Apparently they believed that this would disable access to the shell for the user. Unfortunately, it was a simple matter to print an ASCII report and overwrite the.profile, thus allowing the next login to enjoy the benefits of the shell.
To spy without permission requires less pleasant approaches: * You can write a program that grovels through Kernel structures and watches the output buffer for the terminal in question, displaying characters as they are output. This, obviously, is not something that should be attempted by anyone who does not have experience working with the Unix kernel. Furthermore, whatever method you come up with will probably be quite non-portable.
Some thoughts on seeing what someone else sees:
If you can manage to get read permissions on Linux under/dev/vcs* you can also read the virtual consoles directly. This *might* require root access, but not always:).
screen can be setup with similar functionality to kibitz.
With insecure X permissions, you can use xwd to dump images from a remote xserver. With a short script you can also grab remote keypresses and events for logging.
Slashdot Mirror
Dave:
You should remember me. I'm the guy that shook hands with you that day, two years ago, during the Tropic Hunt in Hollywood. You also signed the napkin I found near the garbage can. I know that it was a clue, but I don't understand why you didn't mention it when you read off the official answers to the Hunt. Clearly the contents were a reference to your many columns on boogers. I still have that napkin and will return it to as soon as you send me your home address.
Anyway, my question is:
How has your life changed since you won a Pullet Surprise? Is the fame and money and gorgeous babes throwing themselves at your feet worth it?
Kwan
PS How much do I need to pay you to get my name in one of your next columns?
Lord, you're twisting this disaster -- a disaster for all of humanity -- into some nationalistic bullshit. The beautiful thing about Columbia was not that it was an American venture, but that it contained the hopes and dreams of many nations. Exploration is not the sole province of any one country. America's space program, its dedication to exploration, is a noble, courageous effort uniting all peoples. NASA scientists, as a whole, work to further science, not to win some political race. Sure there is recognition in being first, but the glory is not that, but that this country, the USA, contributed to mankind's greater glory. Remember, "One giant step for mankind"?
Yup. We can't take old equipment to the range (they won't allow non-paper targets) but we can drive about an hour up north to Central Florida and open up a few ports with the Remington 700 in .223 or 22-250. I also have a couple Winchester Model 70s in .270 that are quite effective at remotely securing the drive.
I've always felt uncomfortable about the reports of Linux' demise on the desktop. At this moment I'm typing this on a RedHat 8.0 machine, using Mozilla. Three days ago I wrote a bunch of holiday letters in OpenOffice and read my mail in Evolution (though I normally use pine). Though I have no problems using a shell for any task, I was surprised to see that I rarely needed an Xterm.
The counter-argument is that I'm aware of the console utilities and don't represent the typical desktop user. OK, but I have my senior citizen parents, non-technical wife, and lots of kids using Linux without a second thought. For the most part, all of their computing needs for school and work are fulfilled by the RedHat system. The other thing that cannot be ignored is the price of this machine: ECS K7S5A MB + Athlon 1800XP, 40G HD, DVDROM, case, 256M memory all came to less than $400. This cost wouldn't be possible with a $190 Microsoft XP Home license.
DVDs play fine after a visit to freshrpms.net. MP3's work wonderfully and they sure seem to sound better than under Windows (largely because there are no pauses under Linux when the system does other stuff). OpenOffice's speed was an issue on my AMD K62/500. It's not noticeable on this 1.53g Athlon. The typical computer user spends the majority of their time on the web, checking email, and word processing. Secondary uses are usually games, and music (burning and listening). Hmm.. Except for the games, this system does all that perfectly well.
I've tutored K-12 and college-level students for several years and have been in a lot of classrooms. One thing I've noticed, especially in education challenged South Florida, is that the school system is trying to use computers to make up for the lack of real teachers. The second problem is that most educational software isn't.
For example, many of the reading comprehension titles are no better than the workbooks from before -- read a few paragraphs, answer a few questions. In fact, they're often worse because the workbooks allowed the student to respond with a sentence describing the paragraph rather than clicking a multiple choice option.
I do think that computers are useful in post-lecture studies since it allows students to work at their own pace until they understand a topic. THis is especially useful for mathematics.
In the works of Tolkien, a predominant concept is the concept of cultural reality. Hubbard suggests that we have to choose between the neostructuralist paradigm of consensus and cultural neosemiotic theory.
It could be said that the main theme of LOTR is not semanticism, as dialectic narrative suggests, but postsemanticism. If precultural Marxism holds, we have to choose between dialectic narrative and the
dialectic paradigm of reality.
However, in _The Two Towers_, Spelling deconstructs the neostructuralist paradigm of consensus; in ROTK, although, he examines prepatriarchialist theory. Brinn implies that we have to choose between the neostructuralist paradigm of consensus and capitalist posttextual theory.
If one examines precultural construction, one is faced with a choice: either reject prepatriarchialist theory or conclude that feudalism is capable of intentionality. But the characteristic theme of Brinn's analysis of the postcapitalist paradigm of reality is the bridge between society and morphic identity. If dialectic discourse holds, we have to choose between the neostructuralist paradigm of consensus and Lyotardist narrative.
Either way, to paraphrase Breathed, I found it a quasi-religious allegory with fascist undertones, with Aragorn clearly some Messianic redeemer.
Hummm....Mmmhhhhh...
The problem I have with Speilberg films is that they always seem to leave me unsatisfied. They're these hollow constructs, full of sound and fury, gestures without motion, completely unable to hide the incredible blandness of the scripts . He stopped taking chances, stopped trying to enrage or challenge his audience, instead choosing to be safe and politically correct. Family oriented is one thing, to emasculate a story such as "SPR" is unforgivable. And I certainly don't think that a few curse words or eviscerations counts as challenging an audience. His world seems to have sharp good and bad delineations and as a result his characters are so one sided it would give Moebius a thrill. They never endure in my mind or my heart, I feel no empathy or sympathy for their plight. Whether this is a consequence or poor acting or poor directing, I'm not certain. But I know he's directed some fine actors and actresses.
This is a very interesting theory. Laurie Winn Carlson once wrote about the symbiotic relationship that humans and cattle have shared over the history of mankind. Cattle have also been useful in the prevention of smallpox (remember cowpox anyone?). Little wonder that cataclysmic events in recent history began almost exactly after the rash outbreaks of mad cow disease in Europe.
Interesting...
A few people have proposed that all life on Earth is really just a vehicle for a complex molecule (DNA) to reproduce itself. At some point, whether it's at the virus level or at a molecular level, things somehow become living. I'm not sure what the criteria for life is since it seems to vary between different groups of scientists, but it is interesting in that "got nothing better to do on a Monday morning but post on Slashdot" sort of way.
Many years ago, Richard Feynman and Carl Sagan were spending some time in North Carolina to attend a scientific conference. North Carolina is well known for its scenery, and as they were driving back through one of the many forests, Feynman proposed that they buy a tent and spend the night in the forest instead of at a stuffy hotel room. They found a local Outdoor World shop and bought a tent. Then they found a beautiful spot along Mile Marker 42 to pitch their tent. They had a supper of beans and Vienna Sausages then hopped in their tent to sleep.
That night Feynman nudged Sagan.
"Look up," he said. "What do you see?"
"Billions and billions of stars," said Sagan.
"Yes, yes," said Feynman. "What can you deduce from these stars?"
"There are billions and billions of stars. If only a fraction of a percent can support life, then surely we are not alone in the Universe."
"No, you idiot! Someone has stolen our tent!"
You don't see it? Remember the Good Kirk and Bad Kirk? Of course Linus needs Bill. You need a good and a bad!
This is just another attempt to hoodwink the public. I'd publish my point-by-point rebuttal but no one would understand the scientific terms that I'd need to use.
The government can already read our minds. Last year we saw that scientists have been able to have machines controlled by nothing other than thought by scanning brain waves. It's obvious that this is merely the tip of the iceberg. Moving machines with thought is only the part that the government allows these scientists to reveal to the public. Just as civilians aren't privy to top-secret military aircraft designs until years after they become completely outdated, so is the thought-reading apparatus hidden while it still is useful.
You think I'm mad? Even private corporations are not allowed to release technology without government approval. Remember the Hoverboards in Back to the Future? They're real. But they still have military applications so cannot be released to the public. We know that it can work because the Japanese have maglev trains that work on identical priciples.
You still think I'm mad? Turn your Television to a 'staticky' station. Watch the chaotic series of dots and blips. Do this for about six hours until your brain becomes attuned to the frequency. Soon you'll be able to decipher the 8,192 bit encoded datastream that the government is using to communicate with the L'kelialia from Pluto. You'll hear their voices. You'll see their devilish grins peering back at you.
People ask, why would the government want to fake the moon landing? It's easy. Staking a claim. In 2053 the Global Congress will debate the issue of ownership of mineral rights on Luna. The government is only making sure that it has the most prior claim. The actual technology for a moon shot won't be available for another 16 years (I think, this is 2002, right?) but time travel has been well understood since Einstein. It's very complicated and scientific (I'd have to use terms like Schwartzchild radius and eigenvalues to really explain it) but suffice it to say that it's true. I read it on Slashdot earlier this year.
Anyway, I hope my detailed, logical, and coherent analysis and convinces you that this upcoming paper is total fabrication.
One thing I've learned is that, while blind and hungry, it's not a good idea to wander around the dungeon feeling for food on a level where you've killed a cockatrice.
Playing Nethack always reminds me of the room in Infocom's Enchanter where one must retrieve a scroll from a maze of caverns. Every step is important. Y'know how food rots away if left too long? I was once starving and did a hk to move instead of the diagonal. In that one step the food disappeared. I starved to death.
This article mentioned something on the order of 20 *refurbished* PCs to 5 schools (100 used PCs + 5 new servers). Given that PC prices are so relatively low (I've recently put together an Athlon XP1800+ based PC for under $400) It's amazing that a billion dollar corporation is so insanely profit driven that they can't even do something out of *good will*. It must become a profit opportunity. I don't know what level of PCs these are, but the local computer show often has Pentium 233MMX machines, AMD K62/500s and similar for under $100 for the complete machine (memory, disk, cdr).
This is precisely the reason I don't use M$ products. I started using Linux for purely practical reasons, but now it's almost equally philosophical.
But then there's XXX, Episode2, Jackass, Ecks vs. Sever, etc.. They're all guilty of thinking that high-priced special effects can make up for the lack of acting ability or a good story. I really enjoyed the movies in your list, but they span almost 4 years. The ones I mentioned were all released within this year, and are only the ones I've seen firsthand, forget the ones that were immediately panned by reviewers.
One thing to keep in mind is that many "dumb" printers require the host computer to do a lot of the processing. This keeps the printer cost down but requires a fairly fast machine. Is the times the author mentioned from the moment he hits the "print" button or from the moment the computer receives the data? How are the printers attached? If via USB the bottleneck may even be the connection.
om my Mew7on. 1 love this cool hamb writing pecognition. 1 think Cndr Taco yses one to post 5lashdot stories.
This is pretty good news for me. I started a tutorial for blender a while back. The interface at first looks daunting, but after using it for a few hours you realize that everything makes a lot of sense. It's probably as opposite as you can get to something like Bryce in terms of the interface. Not pretty, but powerful. Though there are many rt apps for Linux, none of the friendliest ones are open.
One of the big no-no's were the daisy chained power strips. These could be deadly since most walls sockets cannot handle the load. The power strips themselves may work, but the wiring in the walls could fail.
Let's try this again...
// example of object unions
.5
#include "colors.inc"
#include "textures.inc"
#include "metals.inc"
camera {
location < 0, 8, -8 >
look_at < 0, 1, 2 >
}
plane { <0, 1, 0>, -1
pigment {
checker color Red, color Blue
}
}
light_source { <2, 4, -3> color White}
#declare lego=union {
box {
<6, 0, 0>,
<0, 2, 4>
}
#declare cyl1=cylinder {
<1, 0, 1>,
<1, 2.5, 1>
}
object { cyl1 }
object { cyl1 translate < 2, 0, 0> }
object { cyl1 translate < 4, 0, 0> }
object { cyl1 translate < 0, 0, 2> }
object { cyl1 translate < 2, 0, 2> }
object { cyl1 translate < 4, 0, 2> }
texture { Glossy
pigment { Red }
}
}
object { lego }
object { lego
translate < -6, 0, 5 >
rotate 20*y
}
Creating legos out of mathematical surfaces... (Use POVRay to render this :D).
// example of object unions
,
.5
#include "colors.inc"
#include "textures.inc"
#include "metals.inc"
camera {
location
look_at
}
plane { , -1
pigment {
checker color Red, color Blue
}
}
light_source { color White}
#declare lego=union {
box {
}
#declare cyl1=cylinder {
,
}
object { cyl1 }
object { cyl1 translate }
object { cyl1 translate }
object { cyl1 translate }
object { cyl1 translate }
object { cyl1 translate }
texture { Glossy
pigment { Red }
}
}
object { lego }
object { lego
translate
rotate 20*y
}
I remember that! You also sparked a memory of using the MIDI ports as a cheap LAN for moving files between machines. Man, that was fun...
The built-in MIDI was nice, except that the implementation was non-standard. IIRC, they rigged the passthrough to save costs. This worked fine for completely standard MIDI equipment, but failed with others.
I also had several STs. The first one I'd upgraded by piggy backing 256Mbit (??) *chips* onto the ones on the board. The second one used the EZRAMII upgrade board to get a whopping 2.5M.
One really cool tool was a device called the Spectre GCR. Along with the rock steady display of the SM124 monitor, it allowed an ST to emulate a Mac Plus. I wonder what ever became of the legendary Dave Small??
Do you remember GFA Basic? I wrote hundreds of little applications in that interpreter, including several math graphing applications. Back then, a high resolution plot (i.e., 640x400) would take *hours* to complete. That I can do the same plots in under 1 second on my Duron 1.3G is pretty amazing
I still have software for the ST, including the Megamax C compilers, some version of Pascal and Fortran, GFA Basic, and Dungeon Master...
Certainly it's easy to create scripts that can do nasty things. I guess the main difference between some other OS vulnerabilities is that to infect a machine, I may need only send an email. For some other OSes, I would need to send a package, have them su to root, run ./configure and make install. In any case, I'm not convinced that any OS is inherently more secure than any other. .profile that automatically launched the db client. On exit from the client it would automatically log the user out. Apparently they believed that this would disable access to the shell for the user. Unfortunately, it was a simple matter to print an ASCII report and overwrite the .profile, thus allowing the next login to enjoy the benefits of the shell.
For example, at the last company I worked for, the access to a database system was done through a
To spy without permission requires less pleasant approaches:
/dev/vcs* you can also read the virtual consoles directly. This *might* require root access, but not always :).
* You can write a program that grovels through Kernel structures and watches the output buffer for the terminal in question, displaying characters as they are output. This, obviously, is not something that should be attempted by anyone who does not
have experience working with the Unix kernel. Furthermore, whatever method you come up with will probably be quite non-portable.
Some thoughts on seeing what someone else sees:
If you can manage to get read permissions on Linux under
screen can be setup with similar functionality to kibitz.
With insecure X permissions, you can use xwd to dump images from a remote xserver. With a short script you can also grab remote keypresses and events for logging.