Re:I told my son exactly this.
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Immortal Code
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· Score: 1
My first program was BASIC code at school.. on one of those old computers - never figured out the make - that boot off tapes, had tiny monochrome green-on-black 8" screens, and we had to type those silly line numbers...
You can hang the punched card on the wall in lieue of the printed code, I suppose?
I'm afraid the only thing I know about PL/I was that it was used to write Multics.. dang, we are missing out. Wish there is a course on historical programming languages I can take.
For interesting machines, at least.. together with forgotten code there are forgotten platforms out there:) (and some are still being sold, even - just try getting a Quicktime player on your Linux/alpha box... )
You remind me of the Hercules emulator though - emulates the IBM System/370 through to zSeries mainframes. Apparently runs OS/370 pretty decently on recent hardware (preferably dual-processor, at least 1GHz), and during the beta testing for Redhat 7.3 a RH engineer actually invited people to try installing Redhat/S390 on it!
That, apparently, was slow:p You can read Moshe Bar's account of it at Byte.com
Elegant code
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Immortal Code
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· Score: 3, Insightful
Wonder how much well-designed assembler and punch-card code there is out there. While due to being platform-specific most would not be immediately usable, it would be nice to be able to read snippets to explore specific computer platforms for curiousity's sake.
Master of Orion 3 is available for Windows 98/ME/2000/XP PCs.
Funny, that the official press release forgot about the Mac port that they develop themselves.
And that Amazon UK does not stock.. sigh:( Funny, Amazon US would happily ship me Region 1 DVDs (watch out for MPAA!) but would not send me a video game. C'est la vie...
They tried that. It was called the 3DO, and it failed miserably. There were even plans in the works for a 3DO add-in card for PCs
Ehm, small correction: that add-in card was actually made available, at least in the East Asian market. I recall visiting a computer mall in Jakarta in August 1995 - around the time Win95 came out - and seeing a Creative 3DO PCI card for sale.
Around 1994 3DO was the hottest thing around too... then again the tech market was slightly different there, virtually everyone I know there have never used an Amiga, Atari or Commodore system before...
The contest benchmark might be what you are looking for. It tests system responsiveness by running kernel compiles under different kinds of load.
Still based on kernel compiles, granted, but at least it tries to measure responsiveness. Been used heavily to benchmark recent kernels - check Kernel Trap for results.
The Linux scheduling latency page of Andrew Morton might be useful as well. Alas, kernel patches tend to work on x86 first before PPC..
That might be why they trial it on the trans-Atlantic service, instead of, say, Europe-Asia - in a transatlantic service, most of the time the plane will be over international waters.
Has anyone flown Lufthansa recently and can comment on their quality of service? Last time I heard they did not even have personal TV screens in economy class - which is why I stuck to Air France, edging out Emirates since the latter is very paranoid - no electronic devices *throughout* flight!
.. how about your poor stomach, being slowly but steadily digested by its own hydrochloric acid and peptides?
DISCLAIMER: I have not read the article. It's Slashdotted already, dammit! Knowing that hilarious (and worrying) Navy incident of a warship stalling because NT4 crashed, I wonder why...
.. Towards our primary school graduation we were told to learn how to type since our affiliated middle school requires typed reports for science experiments.
Naturally, the nearby typing school only has old mechanical typewriters. And you are scored at the end of the course by the number of clean characters per minute, so it was experimenting until I found a comfortable position.
Simply put, it was with my wrist straight, i.e. not resting on the typewriter. My hands were hovering about 1-cm above the typewriter to let my fingers build speed before hitting the keys.
Bad for the fingers, but my wrists have felt worse after an extended period in front of a normal keyboard.
It was quite fun smashing the carriage return lever too:p
The 12" PowerBook. Yes portability is good, but does it sell in enough numbers to keep it alive. Will people want a G4 bad enough to pay the extra for the 12" PB vs the iBook? Subnotes/small notes are notoriously hard to sell, but I guess it does plug a hole in the Apple notebook strategy.
You are joking? I just ordered mine. Had an iBook last year but could not stand the lack of AltiVec - video encoding is *slow*
Plus the ice-plastic cover is nice, yes, but nothing like a cool metal sheen. Subnotebook is a new trendsetter and Apple lacked an entry until now.
Good thing my order for that Dell notebook has not been fully processed yet:p
Well, buying an X-Box for playing games is fair enough - it is what it is designed for.
I don't really play the kind of games made for consoles, but I do still keep Windows XP myself since the strategy games I play are still a bit flaky played under WineX...
Did not want to get flamed by thousands of sci-fi fans out there:p
I personally run Folding@Home myself but I know some people who actually refused to run it because 'the result would be used by greedy pharmaceutical companies' (?!) - and stick to SETI@Home.
Which reminds me - S@H *is* actually worthwhile for me. Sold close to 500 units for about 40 bucks, heh.
I would classify distributed computing projects in three categories, based on certainty: - 100% certainty of finding a result: projects like Folding@Home
- low certainty of finding a result: projects like Mersenne Prime Search, Distributed.net encryption cracking etc. ; yes, there definitely are solutions - no, chances are you won't find any yourself
- nil-to-some-unknown-low-percentage certainty: projects like SETI@Home. lots of reasons: not enough antenna time, looking at wrong place (frequency-wise and orientation-wise), failure to anticipate mode of signal, etc.
And in any case, SETI@Home was very useful as a floating-point CPU benchmarker:p
I do see the humour, but I would just like to point out that it might be the passphrase to the key, but the key is most probably generated using a pseudo random number generator (PRNG) algorithm.
Like the one used by PGP and GnuPG: on Linux it would take input from/dev/random, and ask you to randomly type on the keyboard, click the mouse on windows etc. to increase randomness.
There's no real teeth to international laws. if a country wants to do something, all that they need to do is have enough military might to outclass their neighbors and enough political savvy to not have the rest of the world unify around them.
Except that such selfish attitude tend to eventually backfire; witness the rise of Hitler in part due to the harsh Versailles settlement that France in particular insisted on imposing; the rise of Taleban due partly to the United States abandoning Afghanistan after its goal of effecting a Soviet withdrawal is achieved; etc.
Making genocide & similar acts of crulety "war crimes" makes sense--but calling conquered territory "illegal" is horribly silly.
The problem of Palestine is now not just the illegal occupation of the territories; it is also the denial of a people's right to self-determination, a basic human right. I am being impartial on this topic; I likewise acknowledge Kurdish and Chechen aspirations for nationhood as legitimate, likewise with Aceh, even though I am Indonesian.
Point taken. Not nuclear contamination though - for nuclear testing in some barren desert, yes - USA, Russia and China have all done it, as well as France (in Mururoa). And I do recall a biological weapon experiment in Scotland by the UK military that left the island sterile and off-limit, even now - but not attacking one's own population centres with nuclear weapons.
I have lived in an oil exporting country (Indonesia) and it still came as a shock how cheap American gasoline is. Considering you guys actually have to import quite a bit of it.
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My first program was BASIC code at school.. on one of those old computers - never figured out the make - that boot off tapes, had tiny monochrome green-on-black 8" screens, and we had to type those silly line numbers...
You can hang the punched card on the wall in lieue of the printed code, I suppose?
I'm afraid the only thing I know about PL/I was that it was used to write Multics.. dang, we are missing out. Wish there is a course on historical programming languages I can take.
Whoa. Wish I had the chance to try it; I thought DOSSHELL in MS-DOS 4 was pretty neat :p
A bit hard to have decent UI on an XT anyway considering most of them shipped with 4-colour monitors?
For interesting machines, at least.. together with forgotten code there are forgotten platforms out there :) (and some are still being sold, even - just try getting a Quicktime player on your Linux/alpha box... )
:p You can read Moshe Bar's account of it at Byte.com
You remind me of the Hercules emulator though - emulates the IBM System/370 through to zSeries mainframes. Apparently runs OS/370 pretty decently on recent hardware (preferably dual-processor, at least 1GHz), and during the beta testing for Redhat 7.3 a RH engineer actually invited people to try installing Redhat/S390 on it!
That, apparently, was slow
Wonder how much well-designed assembler and punch-card code there is out there. While due to being platform-specific most would not be immediately usable, it would be nice to be able to read snippets to explore specific computer platforms for curiousity's sake.
Funny, that the official press release forgot about the Mac port that they develop themselves.
And that Amazon UK does not stock.. sigh :( Funny, Amazon US would happily ship me Region 1 DVDs (watch out for MPAA!) but would not send me a video game. C'est la vie...
Or across the top of the screen, like OSX and optionally KDE - even better :)
Ehm, small correction: that add-in card was actually made available, at least in the East Asian market. I recall visiting a computer mall in Jakarta in August 1995 - around the time Win95 came out - and seeing a Creative 3DO PCI card for sale.
Around 1994 3DO was the hottest thing around too... then again the tech market was slightly different there, virtually everyone I know there have never used an Amiga, Atari or Commodore system before...
Interesting, yes.. they already employ quite a few ex-Eazel and ex-Mozilla programmers, after all.
The contest benchmark might be what you are looking for. It tests system responsiveness by running kernel compiles under different kinds of load.
Still based on kernel compiles, granted, but at least it tries to measure responsiveness. Been used heavily to benchmark recent kernels - check Kernel Trap for results.
The Linux scheduling latency page of Andrew Morton might be useful as well. Alas, kernel patches tend to work on x86 first before PPC..
It appears it's only triggered by certain keywords (e.g. britney, christina, etc.) - oh well. search for that, sort by size, and ta-daa...
That might be why they trial it on the trans-Atlantic service, instead of, say, Europe-Asia - in a transatlantic service, most of the time the plane will be over international waters.
Has anyone flown Lufthansa recently and can comment on their quality of service? Last time I heard they did not even have personal TV screens in economy class - which is why I stuck to Air France, edging out Emirates since the latter is very paranoid - no electronic devices *throughout* flight!
Thanks :)
I tried FreeBSD 4.7 for a while - still have it installed actually - and could not get around the problem of user-mountable removable media.
I suppose I could suid the relevant binaries (mount.iso9660 AFAIR), but is there a cleaner solution?
Thanks...
.. how about your poor stomach, being slowly but steadily digested by its own hydrochloric acid and peptides?
DISCLAIMER: I have not read the article. It's Slashdotted already, dammit! Knowing that hilarious (and worrying) Navy incident of a warship stalling because NT4 crashed, I wonder why...
.. Towards our primary school graduation we were told to learn how to type since our affiliated middle school requires typed reports for science experiments.
:p
Naturally, the nearby typing school only has old mechanical typewriters. And you are scored at the end of the course by the number of clean characters per minute, so it was experimenting until I found a comfortable position.
Simply put, it was with my wrist straight, i.e. not resting on the typewriter. My hands were hovering about 1-cm above the typewriter to let my fingers build speed before hitting the keys.
Bad for the fingers, but my wrists have felt worse after an extended period in front of a normal keyboard.
It was quite fun smashing the carriage return lever too
Hey, whoever moderated the parent post as +1 Informative, I hope it was done in a light mood and you were not serious about it :P
:-p
That, or I underestimated the grave state of public school education
That's easy. just tie a cat feet-to-feet and a buttered toast, buttered side up, on your head, and jump.
The cat has to land on its feet, the toast has to land on the buttered side, so you can't fall!
Then again when using IE I tend to start several independent processes, just in case one fall over and kill all the other windows :p
You are joking? I just ordered mine. Had an iBook last year but could not stand the lack of AltiVec - video encoding is *slow*
Plus the ice-plastic cover is nice, yes, but nothing like a cool metal sheen. Subnotebook is a new trendsetter and Apple lacked an entry until now.
Good thing my order for that Dell notebook has not been fully processed yet
Well, buying an X-Box for playing games is fair enough - it is what it is designed for.
I don't really play the kind of games made for consoles, but I do still keep Windows XP myself since the strategy games I play are still a bit flaky played under WineX...
Did not want to get flamed by thousands of sci-fi fans out there :p
:p
I personally run Folding@Home myself but I know some people who actually refused to run it because 'the result would be used by greedy pharmaceutical companies' (?!) - and stick to SETI@Home.
Which reminds me - S@H *is* actually worthwhile for me. Sold close to 500 units for about 40 bucks, heh.
I would classify distributed computing projects in three categories, based on certainty:
- 100% certainty of finding a result: projects like Folding@Home
- low certainty of finding a result: projects like Mersenne Prime Search, Distributed.net encryption cracking etc. ; yes, there definitely are solutions - no, chances are you won't find any yourself
- nil-to-some-unknown-low-percentage certainty: projects like SETI@Home. lots of reasons: not enough antenna time, looking at wrong place (frequency-wise and orientation-wise), failure to anticipate mode of signal, etc.
And in any case, SETI@Home was very useful as a floating-point CPU benchmarker
I do see the humour, but I would just like to point out that it might be the passphrase to the key, but the key is most probably generated using a pseudo random number generator (PRNG) algorithm.
/dev/random, and ask you to randomly type on the keyboard, click the mouse on windows etc. to increase randomness.
Like the one used by PGP and GnuPG: on Linux it would take input from
1. Provided Microsoft uses a proper public key infrastructure, brute-forcing this thing could potentially take forever
2. This so that you can feel good subverting an X-Box by making it run Linux
3. By that time the hardware would be definitely obsolete, or X-Box 2 would be out with programs signed with a different key
4. And in any case, buying the X-Box already helps Microsoft. The more units sold, the more games developed.
5. There are tons of other worthwhile distributed computing projects to do out there - Folding@Home, SETI@Home, Mersenne Prime Search etc.
Grow up folks! Running Linux on a hacked X-Box is cool, yes, but this might be going too far...
Except that such selfish attitude tend to eventually backfire; witness the rise of Hitler in part due to the harsh Versailles settlement that France in particular insisted on imposing; the rise of Taleban due partly to the United States abandoning Afghanistan after its goal of effecting a Soviet withdrawal is achieved; etc.
The problem of Palestine is now not just the illegal occupation of the territories; it is also the denial of a people's right to self-determination, a basic human right. I am being impartial on this topic; I likewise acknowledge Kurdish and Chechen aspirations for nationhood as legitimate, likewise with Aceh, even though I am Indonesian.
Point taken. Not nuclear contamination though - for nuclear testing in some barren desert, yes - USA, Russia and China have all done it, as well as France (in Mururoa). And I do recall a biological weapon experiment in Scotland by the UK military that left the island sterile and off-limit, even now - but not attacking one's own population centres with nuclear weapons.
I have lived in an oil exporting country (Indonesia) and it still came as a shock how cheap American gasoline is. Considering you guys actually have to import quite a bit of it.