I remember seeing these exact game systems being sold out of a courtyard kiosk just before this past Christmas at the Northridge mall here in LA. This extremely bored-looking guy with a beard was sitting on the kiosk stool playing the demo system to drum up interest. I asked him how much and he said $50.
I tried the other demo system on the side of the cart. Yes, the controller & system were 1 unit with this CHEAP looking PCB board with contacts sticking out of the back. It looked like what it probably was, a ROM chip, only instead of a plastic housing like a real console cartridge, the chip was loosely wrapped with a folded piece of notebook paper. Riiiiggght.
The system when booted up displayed list of "games" you could play on it, and it was not a short list, about 20-30 games listed on each page, and you could scroll down thru a couple pages of games, so the thing was loaded. Near the top was listed a "Teletubbies" game, which I chose so my daughter could watch me play it. The game was the NES version of Mario Brothers (not SuperMario, the original one) but with the sprites edited so instead of Luigi and Mario, you get Dipsy and Tinky-Winky! Eh-Oh...
I remember very clearly what happened next. I was so proud of my little discovery, I turned to my wife and said "It's like it's got an emulator inside and just using a bunch of NES ROMs!" And the guy manning the booth set his controller down, got off his stool, and walked off into the crowd without looking back. At first I thought maybe he took a restroom break, but we hung out at that booth for about an hour, me trying the various games, while my wife watched my daughted play on the nearby kids toys. The guy never came back and no came to replace him. After that we went to the Apple Store to play Nemo, and GameSpot, and even after that the cashier never returned. He just abandoned the cart and probably drove all the way to the state line!
If you're that bored and that good at coding, consider become a developer for Debian or one of the BSD projects. I mention these projects in particular because they have very specific membership procedures for accepting new developers and excellent tools to help you document and package your code into new packages. NetBSD is particular really could use some more developers, and the people on the netbsd lists are low-key and friendly. There are also many open source projects for Windows, DOS, MacOS X, and web platforms, so don't feel that this is a UNIX-or-nothing answer. The FreeDOS project is a good example.
You might learn more and make more tangible progress working on pre-existing, concrete problems with an open source program. Trying to find your own worthwhile problems/projects to work on out of just your own head can really just be a form of procrastination.
I wonder if Microsoft employs people to come in here and moderate or if it's just brainwashing?
I share your suspicions, partly because Microsoft set its own precendent. During the last anti-trust trial in the US, Microsoft was found to be planting false "grass-roots" letters to the editor and other fake testimonials from so-called "concerned citizens".
Keep in mind A LOT of people own Microsoft stock and stock options. Anytime someone stands to make or lose 5-6 figures on the future direction of a company, expect some of them (even if only 0.5%) to stoop to some pretty unethical behavior so they can make their money. Even Bill Gates himself has most of his wealth tied up in Microsoft stock. Tech stocks are heavily influenced by hype and public perception. And the "Slashdot Effect" doesn't just refer to overwhelming underpowered web servers. They astroturf here because the money they stand to gain makes them believe they can win a few converts or at least do some damage control. Based on Microsoft's past behavior, would it really surprise you to learn they'd retained the services of a PR firm to post pro-Microsoft propoganda on Slashdot, CNET, and other websites where readers go as much to read the comments from other readers as the articles?
Or to put it another way: _EVERY_ time an anti-Microsoft story is posted on Slashdot, dozens of organized, rhetorical, and accurately proof-read pro-Microsoft posts appear and get modded up by _somebody_. Do we really believe that Slashdot readers, in their haste to post and flame, can actually _spell_. (I have an English degree, that's my excuse.)
Most contractors, plumbers, maintenance men, and property managers I've met used Nextel phones. When you can buy Nextel accessories from Maintenance Warehouse, that speaks to their popularity in that field (whether they deserve it or not). The commercial Nextel phones are not as obviously flimsy as the "caliber" of phones on display in a Cingular store. Supposedly you can download and run Java applets on your phone, but the one I've been issued doesn't have that feature on the plan. Maybe someone can elaborate.
But when the plumbers drop their phone into the toilet, full bathtub, or pit of water coming up from the ground, it still kills the Nextel phone, even after trying to dry them out. But mine's taken a lot of abuse, and the screen, the keys, the antanae, the battery, they all stil work as well as when I recieved it. And that's better than most Nokias I've used.
* Requires you to install an 68882 FPU chip on the LC520's motherboard. Last time I bought one, they were $17(!).
** Requires an 68882 FPU, or else uses FPU emulation, which may be buggy and/or slow (maybe no "may be" about it)
*** The status of Linux on the LC520 is here: http://maclinuxstatus.sourceforge.net/statu s/listm achine.php?id=56
The specs for the LC520 are here: http://docs.info.apple.com/article.html?art num=112 213
ALSO, you'll need a supported LC PDS ethernet card for networking, since the LC520 has no built-in ethernet or Nubus slots. OpenBSD doesn't support the PDS slot cards at all. NetBSD and Linux probably do.
Here's a list of supported cards for NetBSD from _1997_:
http://www.macbsd.com/macbsd/macbsd-docs/etherne t. html
And lastly, you'll want a 3 button ADB mouse, or else I'd advise using the LC for any purpose other than running an X display server. The damn things only use 40W of power according to Apple, about as much as a modern powerbook, which actually sounds about right.
I won't dispute whether EFI is good or bad, since I know next to nothing about it. But you mentioned something interesting:
"EFI understands the FAT32 filesystem and can perform operations on files living there including editing. EFI can access any FAT32 on any device EFI has a built-in driver for, and any device that the user can obtain an EFI driver for."
There was an interesting story on/. a few days ago about how Microsoft was going to start _charging_ manufacturers of devices that infringed on their patents on LFN and what amounts to the FAT32 file system. Any OEM that sold hardware which used, implemented, or supported FAT32 was going to have to pony up a fee per item to Microsoft. The implication was that this would be for memory cards, like Compact Flash, SDIO, and USB flash keys, as if ONLY memory cards were going to be subject to this new licensing.
Hm.
If the new PC200x standard requires EFI, and EFI requires a FAT32 boot volume for loading drivers, will OEMs be required to license FAT32 "technology" in order to ship systems with EFI? Will this bring a return to the days when every OEM has to pony up $X to Microsoft, whether the PC will ever run Windows or not? Do they hope that EFI will end up being the new "Microsoft tax"?
Interesting. All the same, EFI sounds just like SRM (from the Alpha) warmed over. PPC and Alpha workstations from the 90s that ran NT needed a FAT file system as a system partition, and the OS was on the other, the "boot", partition.
All of "our" arguments about the superiority of security, etc. fall on deaf ears if folk can't use it. The home user is the guy who uses his CD drive as a cupholder people. Does anyone think Linux is ready to deal with that level of incompetence? But that is the market Sun is going after? Does anyone else see the problem there?
You keep talking trash about Wal-Mart shoppers and you're going to get yourself shot with a deer rifle.;-)
But don't ask me. I'm just here to watch the astroturfing...
Ask the people who already own a G3 that _won't_ run MacOS X at all or the most current versions, and for better reason than that Apple doesn't feel like maintaining OS compatability for these "old" machines. Of course you could alway just buy a newer Mac, but it may seem like a waste of perfectly good hardware just to run the latest/greatest x.y.z release, not to mention the cost.
If your Mac can run NetBSD, then when the time comes that it won't run MacOS X versions, you could switch over to NetBSD, especially if your Mac OS X apps will actually run on NetBSD. Then you can continue to use your existing machine and get new drivers and up-to-date software, even after Apple "Steves" your Mac (EOL's it).
My wife switched over to mozilla for everything except her sites that require IE. Sometimes she complains when a site fails to work in Mozilla, but it's more out of disappointment because she seems to prefer Mozilla (runs it first). But my wife also uses Lynx and prefers that to IE. YSOMV.
Someone I know uses an RSA key to access a VPN into work. It nearly cripples the PC with its CPU load. Even though this is a late 90s machine, still the overhead of the RSA VPN is, in my opinion, too high for the benefits, especially over dialup.
The RSA key is also difficult to use to legitimately log in. It's easy to mistime your login where the number rolls around and end up having to try again. In theory, RSA VPN sounds neat, put it looks like a huge pain in exchange for extra security.
Using clients that insist on encrypted protocols over a regular, unencrypted connection might perform better, especially if you're stuck with dialup. With engineering applications, I'd think you'd want needless CPU usage kept to a minimum to allow your application to perform well.
I can't comment on TeX because I don't really use it. The easiest tool I've found to do what you describe is HTMLDOC, if it supports the features you need. www.easysw.com writes it. You have to compile it yourself from the GPL source, or you can buy a copy for $100 from the company with support.
It takes HTML source files and turns them into a "book" with a table of contents and next/previous links. Just like DocBook or InfoTeX but without having to learn how to use them. You do have to learn some psuedotags placed in HTML comments to mark sections and pages though, but it's very easy. Last I checked it supports HTML single file, HTML directory of files, PostScript, and PDF as output formats.
The program has a mac-like GUI using FLTK, but you can use it from the command line too. The mailing list also has a pretty reasonable crowd, including the author.
Keep one locked away in your dorm/apartment. Call it the "spare". Take the spare out only to test it and update the software. Otherwise, leave it at home under lock and key.
Work on the other one, the "field" model. Backup the field model to media every day or whenever you wrap up your work. Then store the media AWAY from the field model, eventually storing it back with the "spare" model under lock and key.
This may sound a little extreme, but this is what I learned from what I saw at school.
Students steal. Turn your back for a second and your laptop could be gone. Or your CDs. Or disks. Or your bag. Whatever isn't nailed down, if you aren't paying attention to it, there's a chance, however small, some jerk may steal it. Or you may forget where you left it. (And in the time it takes you to retrace your steps, your gear may get claimed...) This is only one reason why never to keep your media with the field machine. If your disks or backups are in your bag with your laptop, and suddenly your bag goes missing... now you've lost everything.
I knew a guy who spent 4 years on his Statistics thesis, storing everything on floppy disk. He made multiple backups, rotating thru a set of floppies, which he kept all in one single floppy disk box. Yeah. Guess what happened. Nobody really knows, but he never found the box of disks, and he basically dropped out of school after that.
Beside protecting yourself from theft, in college time is crucial. There's lots of time to waste, but always a deadline to meet or something you should be doing. If something happens to your machine where you have to play the UPS "exchange" game to get a problem fixed, you could miss a deadline at school.
Some might say "this is what computer labs are for". I disagree. Labs get full at the worst possible times. When you get busy, so does everyone else at that time in the quarter, and many of them head to the computer lab. And also people go to the lab to relax, using the computers for fun or romance. So at best, I would look at the school's lab like a big Kinko's. Just use it occasionally for things they have that you personally can't afford, like Photoshop or a DVD-R burner. Kinko's has this stuff too, so I would find the closest one and take a Saturday to go bother the manager with a thousand questions. FE, you can keep a cheap printer around for drafts and email your final draft over the campus broadband to Kinko's. Then drive over and pick it up. If your school's labs get full quickly, this might be quicker than waiting in line to enter the lab, then waiting for your job to print on some poorly maintained, overloaded LaserJet 4.
Even if you're poor, you can use this two machine system to your cost advantage. Buy an affordable "field" machine (or have someone buy it for you...), then pay as little as possible for a spare that's just adequate for the job. Say Dad buys you a Dell Latitude, and you pick up an old Toshiba Tecra or an IBM Thinkpad off Ebay for $50 as your spare. When your circumstances improve to where you can afford an upgrade, demote the Latitude to "spare", and unload the old spare onto Goodwill or the Salvation Army. Repeat as necessary.
In any case, usable computers are ludicrously cheap now. What type of computer you really need, if any, depends on your major. Whatever that is, just keep access to two of them, and two different computer labs, say the generic school one, your department's lab, and a Kinko's or a friend's house. In college, the two biggest IT problems are data loss and not having the tools you need at hand.
Just don't be one of those dorks who uses their nifty PDA to meet people. When strangers ask about my handheld computer, I say "Oh, this junky thing is just an old organizer a coworker gave to me for free. I still think he got the better deal. I think these crusty stains on the top are dried-on cereal, or maybe I just hope they are." Most people last less than 30 seconds before they lose all interest.
Is it Washington Mutual? I remember when I applied for a home loan, my truck loan, my accounts, each time I could see OS/2 on the bank officer's PC. If you're ever in Cheney, WA, go to the WAMU on 1st street. You can see their S/390 churning away behind the teller's counter. On the subject, Cheney's city hall has an IBM mainframe in the center of the room behind the cashier's counter. The Spokesman-Review has an army of AS/400 models in their server room (along with many IBM NT boxes). The Associated Press used to sell turnkey systems for newspapers using OS/2 as the OS, but now all their stuff is W2K. Hooray.
I don't want to go on and on about the various video games I play, but I failed you all. Here it is.
Ultima IV - the moral system of becoming an avatar made this game something different than the usual combat-treasure-advancement-shop CRPGs. Get a real copy (I think you can still buy one from Origin) and see for yourself. If you think about it, most RPGs are incredible unethical, rewarding you for murdering "sub-human" beings on the basis of their race, stealing every valuable object not nailed down, and concentrating on personal advancement and amassing more and better stuff. Ultima IV is one of the few RPGs were you really do feel like the good guy(s), and it lets you know when you stray off the path.
Wasteland - I was always a fan of post-nuclear war fiction and imagery. The Mad Max movies, Gamma World, the Morrow Project, A Canticle for Leibowitz... if you like that kind of stuff, wasteland is great. It takes Bard's Tale and breathes a little more life and drama into the game.
Alone in the Dark - my wife loved this game. We used to play it together, working together to try and solve the puzzles. We actually beat the game and made it to the end. That's a game that can really scare the crap out of you.
DOOM - the first game that gave me motion sickness. I've never been a fan of 1st person shooters since.
Starflight - I liked the scale of this game, the illusion that you were really exploring space on the gigantic scale of the universe. Of course, if you have any programming knowledge, it's easy to see how a game world like starflight fits on 1 or 2 floppies. But when you're 9, the game's vague graphics helped your imagination fill in the blanks.
The Oddesey II - This is a Macintosh RPG from the 90s, but really, really well done. The game starts off very slowly, but once you beat the first island the story picks up. It's got a great open-ended story line that you explore by talking to townspeople. The game's theme is very Orwellian and the story has a lot to say about the moral/immoral use of magic (or power, if you want to abstract it). The spells and weapons are well done too, and the game has great sound and background music. If you liked Ultima IV, The Oddesey is almost as good. Find an old color Macintosh (pre-power mac) and give it a try. The game does emulate OK on PowerMacs, from what I remember.
The Adventure Construction Set - I just like playing Rivers of Light. Does anyone know if the ACS is still active. I remember joining the fan club, run by Ken St. Andre, the guy who wrote Tunnels and Troll, as well as Stormbringer for Chaosium.
I second that. I used too play a _lot_ of RPGs, but I absolutely _hated_ AD&D for precisely that reason. You spend all your time looking up ridiculous, arbitrary tables to learn the modifiers or result of a dice roll. I never really cared for RPGs that were nothing more than improvisational theatre, like Ars Magica or all the Vampire games, but AD&D was a the complete opposite end of the scale. You got the feeling that the purpose of all those die roll tables was to pad the rule books so they merited $30.
Chaosium had a better rules system, IMHO. You could summarize all the rules on 1 side of a sheet of paper and play the game from your character sheets and memory. This made gameplay really, really fast, especially if the players had the rules down too. The rules were also modular, so you could "complicate" or "simplify" combat, skills, magic, etc at will depending on how you liked your BRPS. Villains and Vigilantes was also good in the same way. The rules had a pattern you could memorize, keeping the table lookups to a minimum.
If someone out there is considering making an "open-source" RPG, keep that in mind. Give the game rules a pattern the players can keep in the heads, then the gameplay is faster and more spontaneous. You should only have to look up rules when there's a quandry.
I mean, it's not like there hasn't been mac clones before. And if y'all remember it didn't work out all that well, for Apple OR the clone makers, IIRC.
It didn't work out because the Mac OEMs failed to differentiate their Macs
away from desktop PCs. Nobody was selling "server-grade", rackmount
Macs, embedded systems with MacOS and its GUI, set top boxes with MacOS,
network appliance Mac clones, laptop or PDA Mac clones, network-enabled scanners
or copiers that ran MacOS, etc, etc. Sure, PowerComputing clones were
faster for less; that's why everybody wanted them. And UMAX clones
were Macs that happened to use standard PC parts. But beyond that the
mac clones were ordinary desktop PCs/Macs that were just consistently cheaper
than Apple's stuff.
Part of the blame lies with the MacOS of the time (System 7.5.5). It
was a real technological dead-end. It crashed. A LOT. Especially
if you didn't understand how extensions worked or had corrupt files. It
was slow, since most of the OS was emulating a 680x0 series Mac. It
was piggy. Where System 7 squeezed in under 4-5 MB of RAM and 40 MB
of disk for everything, by System 7.5.5 you _needed_ 32+ MB of RAM, about
150 MB of disk, and virtually memory -- and for not much visible gain over
System 7. It just (barely) ran on the new PowerMacs. At the time,
multimedia was the current IT fad, and RAM and disk were still very expensive,
which didn't help. System 7.5.5 didn't multitask any better than Windows
95, and its APIs were difficult to port to. So there was no GNU, BSD,
or much of any freeware community of hobbyiest programmers for the Mac. The
OS was excrutiating to write programs for. You had to lock and
unlock handles based on which OS calls "moved memory". But no one had
a comprehensive list of which calls did or did not move memory. Depending
on the OS revision, the MacOS ROM of the mac in question, and any patches,
the best people could do was say "This call may move memory." Bleh.
There was no memory protection either, so small errors could take out
the OS in spectacular ways. The OS was not stable the way Linux, BSD,
or even NT actually is. Development tools for the Mac at the time were
all proprietary, expensive, and IMHO kinda buggy (but given the platform
they were trying to target, how could you blame them...) The only free
development tools were MacApp, MPW, AppleScript, BBEditLite, and a couple
implementations of FORTH for the Mac (MOPS springs to mind...)
So given all this unneeded baggage saddled on MacOS 7.5.5, how were you supposed
to make Mac clones that differentiate themselves from Apple's offerings so
your didn't steal each other sales? You couldn't! Or you couldv'e
tried, but no one did, and to their credit. Nowadays, MacOS X is much,
much better. It's still fairly piggy, but with Darwin, you might be
able to trim it down. Apple is in a better position now to unleash
the clones (and this time... it's personal) and have it actually work
out. The trick is to have Mac clones that can cut into PC, UNIX, embedded,
or VAR/solutions markets, and not steal from Apple desktop sales. Now
there are more markets for consumer devices that have a GUI built-in (like the iPod or Airport). You
could customize MacOS X to do anything a regular UNIX could do, except fit
in a tiny amount of ROM/RAM. And with the semi-openess of Darwin, there's
less to NDA. I don't see Mac clones ever coming back, but if they ever
do, they might fare better, now that the MacOS is actually in decent shape.
Child-rearing advice, I've found, comes in 3 kinds: universals, particulars, and then all the other crap.
Universals you can learn from any reliable, scientific book on kids (ask your HMO. They may have free books for new parents). It's a matter of due diligence to be up on this stuff, so set aside a little time each day to read up on babies. I wouldn't waste my time on pop-culture child rearing books or anything more than 5-10 years old. Our scientific understanding of ourselves is a work in progress, so you want to be in possession of up-to-date information.
2, particulars of a given kid. If there's one sure universal to kids, it's that their all different. Pay close attention to your child's health and behavior, compare notes with your spouse, and follow up on anything "wierd" that doesn't seem to be explained in the books. It may be personality, or it could be a health issue. My daughter cried for weeks continuously right from birth. It turned out she had a sinus infection from leftover placental mucus. The nurses tried to clear it with saline, but that wasn't enough. I shot a jet of 2-to-1 saline and hydrogen peroxide into her nostril with a medicine syringe, and after a month the infection never came back. She also has fairly clear breathing for a toddler... Often people ascribe symptoms to a child's personality, when it may actually be a health issue. The nurses said "Oh, she's just a fussy baby." Well, they may be right, but my daughter became much more easy-going once sinuses and ears were no longer jammed with crud. So pay close attention to the details, and compare them to what the books have to say, and if you can't find anything about it in the book, let it set off a red-flag in your mind. It may be nothing, or it may be just personality, but it may be the symptom of something more serious.
Most child-rearing books have a "theory" to impart. I'll save you some time: their all complete, well-intentioned shit. Here's a theory: kids, like other baby animals, rehearse adulthood by playing. They also automatically develop language from their environment. If you want to teach your kids something:
- Make a game out of it or find a way to "play" the activity.
- Communicate as much and as early as possible with your kids, and insist they communcate in turn with you.
These two are really the same thing. FE, I taught my daughter when she was only 6 months old how to request juice (by saying "APU!" in a funny voice. then giving her juice), how to refuse things (by saying "NO!" and shaking my head in a silly way) and not to put things in her mouth (by saying "YUCKY!!!" and making a ridiculous grimace). After that, the crying went down a lot. If she was thirsty, instead of crying she'd saying "Apu!". If she was about to eat something off the floor, I'd say "Yucky!" instead of screaming and hollering at her, and because "Yucky" is such a fun game, she'd laugh and put the object down. Once she was full and didn't want more food, she knew to say "No" or shake her head instead of bawling and screaming like she was just born. Eventually, we had another, more serious game called "Use words". When she would get upset, the rule in the house was "Use words. If you don't say what you want with words, you won't get it." Of course you make reasonable exceptions, But it helps a lot when they're bawling their brains out if you have a set of pre-established codes, like "Use Words", "Apu", "Food", "Owie", "Sleepy", etc. for whatever concepts you need to convey, especially when they get upset. As long as the codes are viewed as a fun game and not some sort form of reprimand, they'll react more positively and start "talking" with you early on (it's not really talking, but it's enough to communicate, like teaching a chimp sign language). For physical skills, like using a spoon or cup, just make a game out of it at first, and you'll be shocked how fast they'll pick it up, and you'll have more fun with your kids in the process.
Consider using PostScript as a teaching language for kids.
I know, I know. Calm down, breath in and out, and put the flame-throwers
away. Yes, PostScript is obscure. Yes, it's not a prepositional
language (i.e. modifier before object, as in English), like Pascal or Basic.
It's not even remotely "English-like". Yes, it's not a functional
language, like C or nearly everything else. Yes, it's not object-oriented.
Yes, it's not a fasionable language or one that will prepare kids for
"the real world". There isn't even a bleeping "For Dummies" book for
PostScript. Et cetera, and so on and so forth. Blah blah blah.
But PostScript does have a lot going for it, due in part to its wierdness:
It's freely available and portable. Download Ghostscript and
a viewer, and you're done. You can even use Adobe Distiller, if you
already have it. (It's simple: type out an ASCII EPS in any editor,
save the file as.eps or.ps, and drag-and-drop the text file onto Distiller.
The interpretation will scroll by in the Distiller window and you'll
get a PDF if your code is correct.)
You can download COMPLETE documentation that is well-written and loaded
with code examples from Adobe and a few other places on the web. The
Adobe books are named by color: the Red book, the Blue book, the Green book.
Google for "Thinking in PostScript".
Postscript creates output kids can understand: pictures. You
can do numeric results if you want, but basically the can program the computer
to generate really cool pictures extremely easily.
They can print the results. Send the completed EPS or PS to
the printer, and your kids get a hard copy of the results. It difficult
to convey how satisfying this really is until you've done it. Even on
a crappy printer, PostScript output looks really, really good compared to
the image on a monitor. You can put the output on your fridge.
It's extensible. Add fonts, TIFF files, EPS files, or JPEG photos
to a directory the interpreter can find, and kids can "call" them, like subroutines
in a library. You could supply them with, say, JPEGs of their favorite
cartoon character or rock star (What's the difference? Eh, Barney?) and
they could write a program to make a montage, or a kalediescope, or an escher-like
pattern from the photo(s).
It's interactive, if you get ghostscript. I think edit-save-compile-run-debug-repeat
style IDEs are a little bit much for beginners. You want to remove all
upfront obstacles to their playing with the language. With an interactive
language, you can type code from the prompt and see what happens right away.
That's what was so easy about BASIC on PCs from the 80s. The
computers were so crude back then, most didn't have the free memory to support
a modern IDE with seperate editor, interpreter, compiler, and debugger. It
all had to fit in ROM.
PostScript is standardized. There are well-thought out, detailed
specs for the language that have very reliable, nearly bug-free implementations.
One non-obvious advantage of this is that code examples in PostScript
from almost any book will work on your setup. Compare that to BASIC
or (shudder) AppleScript, where it depends entirely on the version you have
how much work will be required to rewrite the code sample into working code.
It's a real world language. Most printers, copiers, pre-press
equipment and software, and all PDFs use PostScript for their inner logic.
You can read the newspaper or a magazine together and look for fonts,
rules, ligatures, transformations, and em-dashes.
Printing and publishing are great "nerdy" hobbies for kids. I used to help
my parents collate the books they wrote, photocopy hand-drawn illustrations
on to the dot-matrix print-out from our Apple IIe, and trouble-shoot Apple
Writer II and the printer. It turned out those skills (as prerequisites)
ne
He doesn't need Linux at his age. Kids can barely concentrate on one thing at time, unless they themselves want to. IOW, he's not going to multitask (not yet).
Consider FreeDOS. It may or may not work on your old laptop. But if it does, all you need is to - Add a menuing system - Set up a nice autoexec.bat to handle all the sound, mouse, and screen setting, and to drop the PC into the menu - Collect some abandonware or free DOS games or educational software
I used to have an old Thinkpad. With DOS, it ran great. With Linux, it also ran great... until you loaded the X window system.
I second the ideas here to either upgrade the hard disk with a newer laptop IDE drive, or to use CompactFlash.
I have her leave the key under the... wait a minute! I'm not going to tell all of you! Not that most of you would do much of anything beyond fix her computer and take an hour to tell her what the letters on your t-shirt mean.
We now return you to the actual topic.
I do know that the vendors who sell production systems DO put backdoors into their software. You'll never hear it from them, but they are there. Places to look: - hidden commands or parameters that are undocumented. Any vendor supplied shell commands or script interpreter is a likely place. - A "license server" supplied by the vendor to limit the number of seats on your LAN. Often they have training codes for classes or test codes for field service, probably also a special key to disable the license server. - Any vendor process listening on the network. - Commands that take datafiles or config files as inputs or parameters often have either hidden parameters or special files that they honor. A good example are PostScript interpreters. Almost all of them have some fun stuff squirreled away in the dictionary, and some of it explains alot. You can read the PostScript VM's dictionary like a book if you can find the interactive mode (like ghostscript's default prompt of gs>) or by reading the startup files for PostScript code (though some entries are hardcoded in a binary or lib) or by writing an EPS file to dump the whole dictionary to text file for you to leaf through later.
For Intel and SPARC, you can download a decompiler that will turn an executable or lib into a disassembled text file. A little assembly and a lot of patience, and you can find all kinds of fun fact. The 'strings' command in UNIX also works, but it only returns what look like "strings" even if the string is AAAAA or some other junk. You can learn a lot of hidden config options from a binary with strings, which comes in handy if you take on a new job and your new co-workers have "lost" the system manual(s).
Slashdot Mirror
I remember seeing these exact game systems being sold out of a courtyard kiosk just before this past Christmas at the Northridge mall here in LA. This extremely bored-looking guy with a beard was sitting on the kiosk stool playing the demo system to drum up interest. I asked him how much and he said $50.
I tried the other demo system on the side of the cart. Yes, the controller & system were 1 unit with this CHEAP looking PCB board with contacts sticking out of the back. It looked like what it probably was, a ROM chip, only instead of a plastic housing like a real console cartridge, the chip was loosely wrapped with a folded piece of notebook paper. Riiiiggght.
The system when booted up displayed list of "games" you could play on it, and it was not a short list, about 20-30 games listed on each page, and you could scroll down thru a couple pages of games, so the thing was loaded. Near the top was listed a "Teletubbies" game, which I chose so my daughter could watch me play it. The game was the NES version of Mario Brothers (not SuperMario, the original one) but with the sprites edited so instead of Luigi and Mario, you get Dipsy and Tinky-Winky! Eh-Oh...
I remember very clearly what happened next. I was so proud of my little discovery, I turned to my wife and said "It's like it's got an emulator inside and just using a bunch of NES ROMs!" And the guy manning the booth set his controller down, got off his stool, and walked off into the crowd without looking back. At first I thought maybe he took a restroom break, but we hung out at that booth for about an hour, me trying the various games, while my wife watched my daughted play on the nearby kids toys. The guy never came back and no came to replace him. After that we went to the Apple Store to play Nemo, and GameSpot, and even after that the cashier never returned. He just abandoned the cart and probably drove all the way to the state line!
If you're that bored and that good at coding, consider become a developer for Debian or one of the BSD projects. I mention these projects in particular because they have very specific membership procedures for accepting new developers and excellent tools to help you document and package your code into new packages. NetBSD is particular really could use some more developers, and the people on the netbsd lists are low-key and friendly. There are also many open source projects for Windows, DOS, MacOS X, and web platforms, so don't feel that this is a UNIX-or-nothing answer. The FreeDOS project is a good example.
You might learn more and make more tangible progress working on pre-existing, concrete problems with an open source program. Trying to find your own worthwhile problems/projects to work on out of just your own head can really just be a form of procrastination.
I share your suspicions, partly because Microsoft set its own precendent. During the last anti-trust trial in the US, Microsoft was found to be planting false "grass-roots" letters to the editor and other fake testimonials from so-called "concerned citizens".
Keep in mind A LOT of people own Microsoft stock and stock options. Anytime someone stands to make or lose 5-6 figures on the future direction of a company, expect some of them (even if only 0.5%) to stoop to some pretty unethical behavior so they can make their money. Even Bill Gates himself has most of his wealth tied up in Microsoft stock. Tech stocks are heavily influenced by hype and public perception. And the "Slashdot Effect" doesn't just refer to overwhelming underpowered web servers. They astroturf here because the money they stand to gain makes them believe they can win a few converts or at least do some damage control. Based on Microsoft's past behavior, would it really surprise you to learn they'd retained the services of a PR firm to post pro-Microsoft propoganda on Slashdot, CNET, and other websites where readers go as much to read the comments from other readers as the articles?
Or to put it another way: _EVERY_ time an anti-Microsoft story is posted on Slashdot, dozens of organized, rhetorical, and accurately proof-read pro-Microsoft posts appear and get modded up by _somebody_. Do we really believe that Slashdot readers, in their haste to post and flame, can actually _spell_. (I have an English degree, that's my excuse.)
Most contractors, plumbers, maintenance men, and property managers I've met used Nextel phones. When you can buy Nextel accessories from Maintenance Warehouse, that speaks to their popularity in that field (whether they deserve it or not). The commercial Nextel phones are not as obviously flimsy as the "caliber" of phones on display in a Cingular store. Supposedly you can download and run Java applets on your phone, but the one I've been issued doesn't have that feature on the plan. Maybe someone can elaborate.
But when the plumbers drop their phone into the toilet, full bathtub, or pit of water coming up from the ground, it still kills the Nextel phone, even after trying to dry them out. But mine's taken a lot of abuse, and the screen, the keys, the antanae, the battery, they all stil work as well as when I recieved it. And that's better than most Nokias I've used.
On an LC520, you can run the following:
u s/listm achine.php?id=56
t num=112 213
e t. html
- A/UX *
- NetBSD (all hardware supported) **
- Linux ***
- OpenBSD *
* Requires you to install an 68882 FPU chip on the LC520's motherboard. Last time I bought one, they were $17(!).
** Requires an 68882 FPU, or else uses FPU emulation, which may be buggy and/or slow (maybe no "may be" about it)
*** The status of Linux on the LC520 is here:
http://maclinuxstatus.sourceforge.net/stat
The specs for the LC520 are here:
http://docs.info.apple.com/article.html?ar
ALSO, you'll need a supported LC PDS ethernet card for networking, since the LC520 has no built-in ethernet or Nubus slots. OpenBSD doesn't support the PDS slot cards at all. NetBSD and Linux probably do.
Here's a list of supported cards for NetBSD from _1997_:
http://www.macbsd.com/macbsd/macbsd-docs/ethern
And lastly, you'll want a 3 button ADB mouse, or else I'd advise using the LC for any purpose other than running an X display server. The damn things only use 40W of power according to Apple, about as much as a modern powerbook, which actually sounds about right.
I won't dispute whether EFI is good or bad, since I know next to nothing about it. But you mentioned something interesting:
/. a few days ago about how Microsoft was going to start _charging_ manufacturers of devices that infringed on their patents on LFN and what amounts to the FAT32 file system. Any OEM that sold hardware which used, implemented, or supported FAT32 was going to have to pony up a fee per item to Microsoft. The implication was that this would be for memory cards, like Compact Flash, SDIO, and USB flash keys, as if ONLY memory cards were going to be subject to this new licensing.
"EFI understands the FAT32 filesystem and can perform operations on files living there including editing. EFI can access any FAT32 on any device EFI has a built-in driver for, and any device that the user can obtain an EFI driver for."
There was an interesting story on
Hm.
If the new PC200x standard requires EFI, and EFI requires a FAT32 boot volume for loading drivers, will OEMs be required to license FAT32 "technology" in order to ship systems with EFI? Will this bring a return to the days when every OEM has to pony up $X to Microsoft, whether the PC will ever run Windows or not? Do they hope that EFI will end up being the new "Microsoft tax"?
Interesting. All the same, EFI sounds just like SRM (from the Alpha) warmed over. PPC and Alpha workstations from the 90s that ran NT needed a FAT file system as a system partition, and the OS was on the other, the "boot", partition.
You keep talking trash about Wal-Mart shoppers and you're going to get yourself shot with a deer rifle. ;-)
But don't ask me. I'm just here to watch the astroturfing...
Ask the people who already own a G3 that _won't_ run MacOS X at all or the most current versions, and for better reason than that Apple doesn't feel like maintaining OS compatability for these "old" machines. Of course you could alway just buy a newer Mac, but it may seem like a waste of perfectly good hardware just to run the latest/greatest x.y.z release, not to mention the cost.
If your Mac can run NetBSD, then when the time comes that it won't run MacOS X versions, you could switch over to NetBSD, especially if your Mac OS X apps will actually run on NetBSD. Then you can continue to use your existing machine and get new drivers and up-to-date software, even after Apple "Steves" your Mac (EOL's it).
My wife switched over to mozilla for everything except her sites that require IE. Sometimes she complains when a site fails to work in Mozilla, but it's more out of disappointment because she seems to prefer Mozilla (runs it first). But my wife also uses Lynx and prefers that to IE. YSOMV.
Someone I know uses an RSA key to access a VPN into work. It nearly cripples the PC with its CPU load. Even though this is a late 90s machine, still the overhead of the RSA VPN is, in my opinion, too high for the benefits, especially over dialup.
The RSA key is also difficult to use to legitimately log in. It's easy to mistime your login where the number rolls around and end up having to try again. In theory, RSA VPN sounds neat, put it looks like a huge pain in exchange for extra security.
Using clients that insist on encrypted protocols over a regular, unencrypted connection might perform better, especially if you're stuck with dialup. With engineering applications, I'd think you'd want needless CPU usage kept to a minimum to allow your application to perform well.
YMMV, especially on newer machines.
I can't comment on TeX because I don't really use it. The easiest tool I've found to do what you describe is HTMLDOC, if it supports the features you need. www.easysw.com writes it. You have to compile it yourself from the GPL source, or you can buy a copy for $100 from the company with support.
It takes HTML source files and turns them into a "book" with a table of contents and next/previous links. Just like DocBook or InfoTeX but without having to learn how to use them. You do have to learn some psuedotags placed in HTML comments to mark sections and pages though, but it's very easy. Last I checked it supports HTML single file, HTML directory of files, PostScript, and PDF as output formats.
The program has a mac-like GUI using FLTK, but you can use it from the command line too. The mailing list also has a pretty reasonable crowd, including the author.
Why bother? Info-zip and WiZ are just as good, as well as being free software. It's also ported to more platforms (more than most other programs).
Whatever you decide on, buy two.
Keep one locked away in your dorm/apartment. Call it the "spare". Take the spare out only to test it and update the software. Otherwise, leave it at home under lock and key.
Work on the other one, the "field" model. Backup the field model to media every day or whenever you wrap up your work. Then store the media AWAY from the field model, eventually storing it back with the "spare" model under lock and key.
This may sound a little extreme, but this is what I learned from what I saw at school.
Students steal. Turn your back for a second and your laptop could be gone. Or your CDs. Or disks. Or your bag. Whatever isn't nailed down, if you aren't paying attention to it, there's a chance, however small, some jerk may steal it. Or you may forget where you left it. (And in the time it takes you to retrace your steps, your gear may get claimed...) This is only one reason why never to keep your media with the field machine. If your disks or backups are in your bag with your laptop, and suddenly your bag goes missing... now you've lost everything.
I knew a guy who spent 4 years on his Statistics thesis, storing everything on floppy disk. He made multiple backups, rotating thru a set of floppies, which he kept all in one single floppy disk box. Yeah. Guess what happened. Nobody really knows, but he never found the box of disks, and he basically dropped out of school after that.
Beside protecting yourself from theft, in college time is crucial. There's lots of time to waste, but always a deadline to meet or something you should be doing. If something happens to your machine where you have to play the UPS "exchange" game to get a problem fixed, you could miss a deadline at school.
Some might say "this is what computer labs are for". I disagree. Labs get full at the worst possible times. When you get busy, so does everyone else at that time in the quarter, and many of them head to the computer lab. And also people go to the lab to relax, using the computers for fun or romance. So at best, I would look at the school's lab like a big Kinko's. Just use it occasionally for things they have that you personally can't afford, like Photoshop or a DVD-R burner. Kinko's has this stuff too, so I would find the closest one and take a Saturday to go bother the manager with a thousand questions. FE, you can keep a cheap printer around for drafts and email your final draft over the campus broadband to Kinko's. Then drive over and pick it up. If your school's labs get full quickly, this might be quicker than waiting in line to enter the lab, then waiting for your job to print on some poorly maintained, overloaded LaserJet 4.
Even if you're poor, you can use this two machine system to your cost advantage. Buy an affordable "field" machine (or have someone buy it for you...), then pay as little as possible for a spare that's just adequate for the job. Say Dad buys you a Dell Latitude, and you pick up an old Toshiba Tecra or an IBM Thinkpad off Ebay for $50 as your spare. When your circumstances improve to where you can afford an upgrade, demote the Latitude to "spare", and unload the old spare onto Goodwill or the Salvation Army. Repeat as necessary.
In any case, usable computers are ludicrously cheap now. What type of computer you really need, if any, depends on your major. Whatever that is, just keep access to two of them, and two different computer labs, say the generic school one, your department's lab, and a Kinko's or a friend's house. In college, the two biggest IT problems are data loss and not having the tools you need at hand.
Just don't be one of those dorks who uses their nifty PDA to meet people. When strangers ask about my handheld computer, I say "Oh, this junky thing is just an old organizer a coworker gave to me for free. I still think he got the better deal. I think these crusty stains on the top are dried-on cereal, or maybe I just hope they are." Most people last less than 30 seconds before they lose all interest.
Is it Washington Mutual? I remember when I applied for a home loan, my truck loan, my accounts, each time I could see OS/2 on the bank officer's PC. If you're ever in Cheney, WA, go to the WAMU on 1st street. You can see their S/390 churning away behind the teller's counter. On the subject, Cheney's city hall has an IBM mainframe in the center of the room behind the cashier's counter. The Spokesman-Review has an army of AS/400 models in their server room (along with many IBM NT boxes). The Associated Press used to sell turnkey systems for newspapers using OS/2 as the OS, but now all their stuff is W2K. Hooray.
I don't want to go on and on about the various video games I play, but I failed you all. Here it is.
Ultima IV - the moral system of becoming an avatar made this game something different than the usual combat-treasure-advancement-shop CRPGs. Get a real copy (I think you can still buy one from Origin) and see for yourself. If you think about it, most RPGs are incredible unethical, rewarding you for murdering "sub-human" beings on the basis of their race, stealing every valuable object not nailed down, and concentrating on personal advancement and amassing more and better stuff. Ultima IV is one of the few RPGs were you really do feel like the good guy(s), and it lets you know when you stray off the path.
Wasteland - I was always a fan of post-nuclear war fiction and imagery. The Mad Max movies, Gamma World, the Morrow Project, A Canticle for Leibowitz... if you like that kind of stuff, wasteland is great. It takes Bard's Tale and breathes a little more life and drama into the game.
Alone in the Dark - my wife loved this game. We used to play it together, working together to try and solve the puzzles. We actually beat the game and made it to the end. That's a game that can really scare the crap out of you.
DOOM - the first game that gave me motion sickness. I've never been a fan of 1st person shooters since.
Starflight - I liked the scale of this game, the illusion that you were really exploring space on the gigantic scale of the universe. Of course, if you have any programming knowledge, it's easy to see how a game world like starflight fits on 1 or 2 floppies. But when you're 9, the game's vague graphics helped your imagination fill in the blanks.
The Oddesey II - This is a Macintosh RPG from the 90s, but really, really well done. The game starts off very slowly, but once you beat the first island the story picks up. It's got a great open-ended story line that you explore by talking to townspeople. The game's theme is very Orwellian and the story has a lot to say about the moral/immoral use of magic (or power, if you want to abstract it). The spells and weapons are well done too, and the game has great sound and background music. If you liked Ultima IV, The Oddesey is almost as good. Find an old color Macintosh (pre-power mac) and give it a try. The game does emulate OK on PowerMacs, from what I remember.
The Adventure Construction Set - I just like playing Rivers of Light. Does anyone know if the ACS is still active. I remember joining the fan club, run by Ken St. Andre, the guy who wrote Tunnels and Troll, as well as Stormbringer for Chaosium.
RE: rules being too complex.
I second that. I used too play a _lot_ of RPGs, but I absolutely _hated_ AD&D for precisely that reason. You spend all your time looking up ridiculous, arbitrary tables to learn the modifiers or result of a dice roll. I never really cared for RPGs that were nothing more than improvisational theatre, like Ars Magica or all the Vampire games, but AD&D was a the complete opposite end of the scale. You got the feeling that the purpose of all those die roll tables was to pad the rule books so they merited $30.
Chaosium had a better rules system, IMHO. You could summarize all the rules on 1 side of a sheet of paper and play the game from your character sheets and memory. This made gameplay really, really fast, especially if the players had the rules down too. The rules were also modular, so you could "complicate" or "simplify" combat, skills, magic, etc at will depending on how you liked your BRPS. Villains and Vigilantes was also good in the same way. The rules had a pattern you could memorize, keeping the table lookups to a minimum.
If someone out there is considering making an "open-source" RPG, keep that in mind. Give the game rules a pattern the players can keep in the heads, then the gameplay is faster and more spontaneous. You should only have to look up rules when there's a quandry.
It didn't work out because the Mac OEMs failed to differentiate their Macs away from desktop PCs. Nobody was selling "server-grade", rackmount Macs, embedded systems with MacOS and its GUI, set top boxes with MacOS, network appliance Mac clones, laptop or PDA Mac clones, network-enabled scanners or copiers that ran MacOS, etc, etc. Sure, PowerComputing clones were faster for less; that's why everybody wanted them. And UMAX clones were Macs that happened to use standard PC parts. But beyond that the mac clones were ordinary desktop PCs/Macs that were just consistently cheaper than Apple's stuff.
Part of the blame lies with the MacOS of the time (System 7.5.5). It was a real technological dead-end. It crashed. A LOT. Especially if you didn't understand how extensions worked or had corrupt files. It was slow, since most of the OS was emulating a 680x0 series Mac. It was piggy. Where System 7 squeezed in under 4-5 MB of RAM and 40 MB of disk for everything, by System 7.5.5 you _needed_ 32+ MB of RAM, about 150 MB of disk, and virtually memory -- and for not much visible gain over System 7. It just (barely) ran on the new PowerMacs. At the time, multimedia was the current IT fad, and RAM and disk were still very expensive, which didn't help. System 7.5.5 didn't multitask any better than Windows 95, and its APIs were difficult to port to. So there was no GNU, BSD, or much of any freeware community of hobbyiest programmers for the Mac. The OS was excrutiating to write programs for. You had to lock and unlock handles based on which OS calls "moved memory". But no one had a comprehensive list of which calls did or did not move memory. Depending on the OS revision, the MacOS ROM of the mac in question, and any patches, the best people could do was say "This call may move memory." Bleh. There was no memory protection either, so small errors could take out the OS in spectacular ways. The OS was not stable the way Linux, BSD, or even NT actually is. Development tools for the Mac at the time were all proprietary, expensive, and IMHO kinda buggy (but given the platform they were trying to target, how could you blame them...) The only free development tools were MacApp, MPW, AppleScript, BBEditLite, and a couple implementations of FORTH for the Mac (MOPS springs to mind...)
So given all this unneeded baggage saddled on MacOS 7.5.5, how were you supposed to make Mac clones that differentiate themselves from Apple's offerings so your didn't steal each other sales? You couldn't! Or you couldv'e tried, but no one did, and to their credit. Nowadays, MacOS X is much, much better. It's still fairly piggy, but with Darwin, you might be able to trim it down. Apple is in a better position now to unleash the clones (and this time... it's personal) and have it actually work out. The trick is to have Mac clones that can cut into PC, UNIX, embedded, or VAR/solutions markets, and not steal from Apple desktop sales. Now there are more markets for consumer devices that have a GUI built-in (like the iPod or Airport). You could customize MacOS X to do anything a regular UNIX could do, except fit in a tiny amount of ROM/RAM. And with the semi-openess of Darwin, there's less to NDA. I don't see Mac clones ever coming back, but if they ever do, they might fare better, now that the MacOS is actually in decent shape.
Tape Ape
Data Janitor
Administrative Systems Specialist
Mouse Jockey
Toner Boy
and of course the needlessly sexist term...
Computer Guy
Child-rearing advice, I've found, comes in 3 kinds: universals, particulars, and then all the other crap.
Universals you can learn from any reliable, scientific book on kids (ask your HMO. They may have free books for new parents). It's a matter of due diligence to be up on this stuff, so set aside a little time each day to read up on babies. I wouldn't waste my time on pop-culture child rearing books or anything more than 5-10 years old. Our scientific understanding of ourselves is a work in progress, so you want to be in possession of up-to-date information.
2, particulars of a given kid. If there's one sure universal to kids, it's that their all different. Pay close attention to your child's health and behavior, compare notes with your spouse, and follow up on anything "wierd" that doesn't seem to be explained in the books. It may be personality, or it could be a health issue. My daughter cried for weeks continuously right from birth. It turned out she had a sinus infection from leftover placental mucus. The nurses tried to clear it with saline, but that wasn't enough. I shot a jet of 2-to-1 saline and hydrogen peroxide into her nostril with a medicine syringe, and after a month the infection never came back. She also has fairly clear breathing for a toddler... Often people ascribe symptoms to a child's personality, when it may actually be a health issue. The nurses said "Oh, she's just a fussy baby." Well, they may be right, but my daughter became much more easy-going once sinuses and ears were no longer jammed with crud. So pay close attention to the details, and compare them to what the books have to say, and if you can't find anything about it in the book, let it set off a red-flag in your mind. It may be nothing, or it may be just personality, but it may be the symptom of something more serious.
Most child-rearing books have a "theory" to impart. I'll save you some time: their all complete, well-intentioned shit. Here's a theory: kids, like other baby animals, rehearse adulthood by playing. They also automatically develop language from their environment. If you want to teach your kids something:
- Make a game out of it or find a way to "play" the activity.
- Communicate as much and as early as possible with your kids, and insist they communcate in turn with you.
These two are really the same thing. FE, I taught my daughter when she was only 6 months old how to request juice (by saying "APU!" in a funny voice. then giving her juice), how to refuse things (by saying "NO!" and shaking my head in a silly way) and not to put things in her mouth (by saying "YUCKY!!!" and making a ridiculous grimace). After that, the crying went down a lot. If she was thirsty, instead of crying she'd saying "Apu!". If she was about to eat something off the floor, I'd say "Yucky!" instead of screaming and hollering at her, and because "Yucky" is such a fun game, she'd laugh and put the object down. Once she was full and didn't want more food, she knew to say "No" or shake her head instead of bawling and screaming like she was just born. Eventually, we had another, more serious game called "Use words". When she would get upset, the rule in the house was "Use words. If you don't say what you want with words, you won't get it." Of course you make reasonable exceptions, But it helps a lot when they're bawling their brains out if you have a set of pre-established codes, like "Use Words", "Apu", "Food", "Owie", "Sleepy", etc. for whatever concepts you need to convey, especially when they get upset. As long as the codes are viewed as a fun game and not some sort form of reprimand, they'll react more positively and start "talking" with you early on (it's not really talking, but it's enough to communicate, like teaching a chimp sign language). For physical skills, like using a spoon or cup, just make a game out of it at first, and you'll be shocked how fast they'll pick it up, and you'll have more fun with your kids in the process.
I know, I know. Calm down, breath in and out, and put the flame-throwers away. Yes, PostScript is obscure. Yes, it's not a prepositional language (i.e. modifier before object, as in English), like Pascal or Basic. It's not even remotely "English-like". Yes, it's not a functional language, like C or nearly everything else. Yes, it's not object-oriented. Yes, it's not a fasionable language or one that will prepare kids for "the real world". There isn't even a bleeping "For Dummies" book for PostScript. Et cetera, and so on and so forth. Blah blah blah.
But PostScript does have a lot going for it, due in part to its wierdness:
Printing and publishing are great "nerdy" hobbies for kids. I used to help my parents collate the books they wrote, photocopy hand-drawn illustrations on to the dot-matrix print-out from our Apple IIe, and trouble-shoot Apple Writer II and the printer. It turned out those skills (as prerequisites) ne
Except, of course, the foreman.
He doesn't need Linux at his age. Kids can barely concentrate on one thing at time, unless they themselves want to. IOW, he's not going to multitask (not yet).
Consider FreeDOS. It may or may not work on your old laptop. But if it does, all you need is to
- Add a menuing system
- Set up a nice autoexec.bat to handle all the sound, mouse, and screen setting, and to drop the PC into the menu
- Collect some abandonware or free DOS games or educational software
I used to have an old Thinkpad. With DOS, it ran great. With Linux, it also ran great... until you loaded the X window system.
I second the ideas here to either upgrade the hard disk with a newer laptop IDE drive, or to use CompactFlash.
bitter almonds.
That explains their CEO.
And the cow.
I admit it. I'm a backdoor man.
I have her leave the key under the... wait a minute! I'm not going to tell all of you! Not that most of you would do much of anything beyond fix her computer and take an hour to tell her what the letters on your t-shirt mean.
We now return you to the actual topic.
I do know that the vendors who sell production systems DO put backdoors into their software. You'll never hear it from them, but they are there. Places to look:
- hidden commands or parameters that are undocumented. Any vendor supplied shell commands or script interpreter is a likely place.
- A "license server" supplied by the vendor to limit the number of seats on your LAN. Often they have training codes for classes or test codes for field service, probably also a special key to disable the license server.
- Any vendor process listening on the network.
- Commands that take datafiles or config files as inputs or parameters often have either hidden parameters or special files that they honor. A good example are PostScript interpreters. Almost all of them have some fun stuff squirreled away in the dictionary, and some of it explains alot. You can read the PostScript VM's dictionary like a book if you can find the interactive mode (like ghostscript's default prompt of gs>) or by reading the startup files for PostScript code (though some entries are hardcoded in a binary or lib) or by writing an EPS file to dump the whole dictionary to text file for you to leaf through later.
For Intel and SPARC, you can download a decompiler that will turn an executable or lib into a disassembled text file. A little assembly and a lot of patience, and you can find all kinds of fun fact. The 'strings' command in UNIX also works, but it only returns what look like "strings" even if the string is AAAAA or some other junk. You can learn a lot of hidden config options from a binary with strings, which comes in handy if you take on a new job and your new co-workers have "lost" the system manual(s).