maybe we could all finally leave 32 bit in the distant past, where it needs to be.
Why does it need to be in the distant past? Do you own a lot of Adobe stock or something? Do you make a lot of your money selling new binary Windows apps?
Why should we ditch our thousands of dollars worth of Win32 apps when they're very, very useful?
I think you can "turn off" the stupidest UI effects in Vista simply by not having horrendously expensive hardware for it to shove it's binaries into. i.e. if you don't have an obscenely expensive graphics card, the wizzy-woo 3d graphics won't blight your visual experience.
Just about any Science Fiction writer who's ever been published more than a few times has presented better 'visions' than Roddenberry, or anybody else who has produced for Television. You can do better than Roddenberry. As long as you don't overly focus on Television, which isn't just 90% crap per Sturgeon's Law, but probably closer to the Ivory Soap ratio of 99 and 44/100% crap. Or maybe it's time to whip out some server reliability figures. How many 'nines' of television are complete crap? Six nines, perhaps?
Read some Ballard, or Pohl, or dozens and dozens of other writers from the period. A good approach is to go into used bookstores and buy only science fiction paperbacks with the original cover price being under two bucks. There was a lot of brilliant speculative fiction being written in the 60's and early 70's. That whole scene got wiped out by the Star Wars abomination, which, frankly, destroyed Science Fiction for a long time afterwards.
Roddenberry sucked! If you're a SF fan, you'll realize how much he sucked. Star Trek was better than anything on TeeVee those seasons, but there wasn't a heck of a lot of competition. I gave you a clue: read The Glass Teat if you haven't already.
You mean the 1488 and the 1489? They are available anywhere, since there are probably billions of them in the install base, and it's the 'front end' chip that people are prone to burn out.
Many of the classic old chips are still available. Even vintage oldies like the 555 timer and the 741 op-amp, both of which are STILL available in shopping malls everywhere at the Radio Shack.
The classic old parts live on. A recent design of mine at work uses 2N3904 and 2N3906 transistors, albeit in the surface mount versions. That stuff is really, really cheap and the old way is the right way to do things sometimes. The design I am referring to started out with a fancy fourty cent PIC controller but when Management wouldn't spring for an expensive part like that I redesigned it using an LM358 op-amp and six transistors. The total BOM cost for the circuit is under twenty-five cents including the circuit board. My joke line for that project is that 'I was afraid the linear design would be too expensive, too, and I would be asked to redesign it using just white glue and popsicle sticks.'
I had a Radio Shack '10 in 1' kit when I was a kid. That was back when the 10 circuit kit was what existed, none of the fancy stuff in it. A few transistors, resistors, capacitors, a loopstick antenna.
But my first 'from scratch' circuit was the code practice oscillator out of the Boy Scout Electronics Merit Badge Pamphlet. I had this huge center tapped audio transformer from my dad's tube days, and used a big TO-3 transistor out of a Radio Shack 'transistor assortment' and the oscillator circuit with a few other parts to make an oscillator. Which I quickly turned into an electronic organ using bent pieces of sheet metal for keys and a range of resistors to make different tones.
That schematic is still depicted in the Merit Badge Pamphlet; these days not as one of the projects, but as this highlighted background illustration in the front of the book. I figure I must not have been the first person to mess with that circuit and it's kept as a memory in the new pamphlet for us grown ups, some of whom are probably teaching new kids electronics out of it today.
That, or you've got your head deep up somewhere. I mean, come on. Maybe you should read Ellison's 'The Glass Teat' and come back to us about how 'relevant and moving' a television series can be.
Ellison wrote the script for the best Trek show in the series, btw, so should have extra credibility for a trekkie like you.
It's, uh, just a television show.
And while Shatner's SNL bit was doubtless focus group tested to make sure those 'in the cult' would view it as sarcastic, no: the rest of the world didn't see him as being sarcastic.
Maybe they felt that the main site would detract from the film. I can see potential film goers accidentally blundering into the main site, witnessing the aroma of unwashed basement dwellers, and deciding not to have anything to do with 'Star Trek' as a result.
I don't see why they couldn't just kill the two birds with one stone,
Me, either. They should not only eliminate the site, they should also cancel the upcoming movie. But we know there's still some money to be made from the phrase 'Star Trek' so they won't. Plus the budget for the film is allocated, etc.
They openly say, "we don't want to develop this for star trek fans, it's got to targeted to the lowest common denominator
The star trek fans ARE the lowest common denominator. Maybe they decided to aim higher.
Just my impression from the fuming, flaming, and sputtering I see here, but I can't help but feel they had some basis for not wanting to pander to a narrow and rather fanatical fanbase.
So I don't see the problem with putting modern computer parts into gutted vintage gear.
Well, that's fine, I guess, if you don't mind that a lot of people will shake their head at your practices. Do you know what you'll look like to the vintage computer community? Think about what a retard you would feel like right now if you'd gutted an Altair 8800 to put a shitty 386DX motherboard in it fifteen years ago. What would you have now?
I guess from a collector's point of view, when you waste off old gear, it makes the gear that still exists more valuable. But from the point of view of a historical conservator, which is where the vintage computer community is headed, you're a pariah. A dumb pariah who can now run 'doze on that wreck. We're really impressed.
It's the kind of thing my grandpa would have found at the dump, brought home, and converted into something useful.
I think I caught 'the bug' from him. He once turned an old wind-up phonograph mechanism into a jig to make his spearfishing lure rotate out in the ice house on the lak.
That's right. Fashion may come and go, but the nixie-tube digital voltmeter on my bench just keeps on measuring.
IOW some of us sat and watch it come and go. The excellent gear sticks around, though. I fired up an old Superior Instruments CR Bridge (with 'eye-tube' indicator) last week that probably hadn't been powered in two decades. Yep, it still works, and now it will be useful. I keep saying that someday I will put my vacuum tube random noise generator online to share it as a source of randomness with the world, but haven't done that yet.
It breaks my heart to see people putting current ITC boards (obsolete before the glue hardens) into cool but gutted vintage gear, when the original gear still had a long useful life ahead. To be ironic, if I had a bunch of money, I would order the latest new Dell box, gut it, and install a MicroVAX in the enclosure. (preserving the enclosure and hardware from the orignal, so it could be put back together after a few milliseconds when the cleverness wore off)
No, with Linux you get a scattershot conglomeration of different userspaces, all created arbitrarily by anybody who gets the idea they can 'do it better.' Maybe that's the right approach.
Me, I have a strong preference for NetBSD, because I think a more unified userland that is more harmonized is the best approach. I have learned my/etc dotfiles and have a strong base for a robust system on whatever architecture I choose. You with Linux are stuck using whatever miscellaneous collection someone has thrown together for the architecture you have to run it on.
I guess in a way I am arguing in circles, since NetBSD is a 'one true OPEN' platform, whereas the various Linux-based OSes are all kludges targeted at some narrow segment of the extant hardware platforms. So maybe I'll have to agree.
To bring things around to my original point, MANY Linuxes is probably a good thing, since it encourages experimentation and a diverse userland. I just don't choose to participate in that kludge. Someone else can diddle around and experiment. I'm pretty happy with what I use.
But I'll point out that the NetBSD pkgsrc collection is now ported to a lot of other OSes now.
So you're willing to concede that your solution is more powerful government, to take more control over us.
That's okay, if you want to be honest. Maybe put something like that in your tagline. Or the 'crackhead' bit so everybody knows your point of view and how you approach things.
Your weird notion that more government oversight and control will enable the auto industry to do something they are 'scrambling' to do isn't based in anything but conjecture. You're as bad as the 'Market' worshippers who think that particular approach will magically solve everything.
And your scattershot comments about Microsoft and the RIAA are just typical Slashdot groupthink. At least we know your approach is to cue the usual choir to join in.
People like you keep bringing up 'the environment' like large governmental bodies magically care more about 'the environment' than regular people do.
Your parody response makes it clear you're happier spreading stereotypes of your 'dream' opponent than any thoughtful discussion. Have a nice life in your fantasy world, dood. It's nice that you've found something to be angry about, that gives meaning to your existence.
You really can't just say this and have us accept it without any justifying arguements.
High density cities are not the 'norm' and people living outside them is not an abberation. Long distance commutes are not idea, either. But the practice of packing everybody into high density dwellings has many negative consequences. We are not honeybees, who crowd into hives. Human culture can spread out. The Net should serve as a good example of that.
Really, there are other ideologies involved here. Really weird ones that don't have much merit. And it's far too complicated to discuss on a blog.
Read some Jefferson if you want some thoughtful exploration of the evils of large cities. And for goodness sakes, stop parroting ill-thought-out dogma.
With GPS, we could automaticly raise prices in traffic heavy areas and lower them in empty areas.
That would promote 'sprawl' which is characterized as a 'bad thing' by the people who like large powerful governments. They instead promote the idea that the population should be crowded into high-rise apartment buildings along light-rail corridors.
Slashdot Mirror
What does anything sound like when it's rendered into a ringtone?
maybe we could all finally leave 32 bit in the distant past, where it needs to be.
Why does it need to be in the distant past? Do you own a lot of Adobe stock or something? Do you make a lot of your money selling new binary Windows apps?
Why should we ditch our thousands of dollars worth of Win32 apps when they're very, very useful?
I think you can "turn off" the stupidest UI effects in Vista simply by not having horrendously expensive hardware for it to shove it's binaries into. i.e. if you don't have an obscenely expensive graphics card, the wizzy-woo 3d graphics won't blight your visual experience.
They took away progman.exe with XP, though.
Just about any Science Fiction writer who's ever been published more than a few times has presented better 'visions' than Roddenberry, or anybody else who has produced for Television. You can do better than Roddenberry. As long as you don't overly focus on Television, which isn't just 90% crap per Sturgeon's Law, but probably closer to the Ivory Soap ratio of 99 and 44/100% crap. Or maybe it's time to whip out some server reliability figures. How many 'nines' of television are complete crap? Six nines, perhaps?
Read some Ballard, or Pohl, or dozens and dozens of other writers from the period. A good approach is to go into used bookstores and buy only science fiction paperbacks with the original cover price being under two bucks. There was a lot of brilliant speculative fiction being written in the 60's and early 70's. That whole scene got wiped out by the Star Wars abomination, which, frankly, destroyed Science Fiction for a long time afterwards.
Roddenberry sucked! If you're a SF fan, you'll realize how much he sucked. Star Trek was better than anything on TeeVee those seasons, but there wasn't a heck of a lot of competition. I gave you a clue: read The Glass Teat if you haven't already.
Try today to find a non CMOS RS232 NAND chip...
You mean the 1488 and the 1489? They are available anywhere, since there are probably billions of them in the install base, and it's the 'front end' chip that people are prone to burn out.
Many of the classic old chips are still available. Even vintage oldies like the 555 timer and the 741 op-amp, both of which are STILL available in shopping malls everywhere at the Radio Shack.
The classic old parts live on. A recent design of mine at work uses 2N3904 and 2N3906 transistors, albeit in the surface mount versions. That stuff is really, really cheap and the old way is the right way to do things sometimes. The design I am referring to started out with a fancy fourty cent PIC controller but when Management wouldn't spring for an expensive part like that I redesigned it using an LM358 op-amp and six transistors. The total BOM cost for the circuit is under twenty-five cents including the circuit board. My joke line for that project is that 'I was afraid the linear design would be too expensive, too, and I would be asked to redesign it using just white glue and popsicle sticks.'
I had a Radio Shack '10 in 1' kit when I was a kid. That was back when the 10 circuit kit was what existed, none of the fancy stuff in it. A few transistors, resistors, capacitors, a loopstick antenna.
But my first 'from scratch' circuit was the code practice oscillator out of the Boy Scout Electronics Merit Badge Pamphlet. I had this huge center tapped audio transformer from my dad's tube days, and used a big TO-3 transistor out of a Radio Shack 'transistor assortment' and the oscillator circuit with a few other parts to make an oscillator. Which I quickly turned into an electronic organ using bent pieces of sheet metal for keys and a range of resistors to make different tones.
That schematic is still depicted in the Merit Badge Pamphlet; these days not as one of the projects, but as this highlighted background illustration in the front of the book. I figure I must not have been the first person to mess with that circuit and it's kept as a memory in the new pamphlet for us grown ups, some of whom are probably teaching new kids electronics out of it today.
You misspelled kulture. Also, you misspelled Bushitlermchimpyhaliburton.
Wow. You forgot your sarcasm tags.
That, or you've got your head deep up somewhere. I mean, come on. Maybe you should read Ellison's 'The Glass Teat' and come back to us about how 'relevant and moving' a television series can be.
Ellison wrote the script for the best Trek show in the series, btw, so should have extra credibility for a trekkie like you.
It's, uh, just a television show.
And while Shatner's SNL bit was doubtless focus group tested to make sure those 'in the cult' would view it as sarcastic, no: the rest of the world didn't see him as being sarcastic.
I've never seen anything but a href link to any other site on Slashdot. I've never seen one of those ugly 'link to the video on youtube' windows.
You mean archives.org doesn't have a 'robots=off' line in their ~/.wgetrc file? I thought everybody had that one figured out.
Maybe they felt that the main site would detract from the film. I can see potential film goers accidentally blundering into the main site, witnessing the aroma of unwashed basement dwellers, and deciding not to have anything to do with 'Star Trek' as a result.
I don't see why they couldn't just kill the two birds with one stone,
Me, either. They should not only eliminate the site, they should also cancel the upcoming movie. But we know there's still some money to be made from the phrase 'Star Trek' so they won't. Plus the budget for the film is allocated, etc.
They openly say, "we don't want to develop this for star trek fans, it's got to targeted to the lowest common denominator
The star trek fans ARE the lowest common denominator. Maybe they decided to aim higher.
Just my impression from the fuming, flaming, and sputtering I see here, but I can't help but feel they had some basis for not wanting to pander to a narrow and rather fanatical fanbase.
It. Was. Just. A. TV. Program.
As long as you max out the RAM and install NetBSD on the SE/30's, he wouldn't miss out on *that* much...
Probably the same for the Amiga 2000.
So I don't see the problem with putting modern computer parts into gutted vintage gear.
Well, that's fine, I guess, if you don't mind that a lot of people will shake their head at your practices. Do you know what you'll look like to the vintage computer community? Think about what a retard you would feel like right now if you'd gutted an Altair 8800 to put a shitty 386DX motherboard in it fifteen years ago. What would you have now?
I guess from a collector's point of view, when you waste off old gear, it makes the gear that still exists more valuable. But from the point of view of a historical conservator, which is where the vintage computer community is headed, you're a pariah. A dumb pariah who can now run 'doze on that wreck. We're really impressed.
It's the kind of thing my grandpa would have found at the dump, brought home, and converted into something useful.
I think I caught 'the bug' from him. He once turned an old wind-up phonograph mechanism into a jig to make his spearfishing lure rotate out in the ice house on the lak.
That's right. Fashion may come and go, but the nixie-tube digital voltmeter on my bench just keeps on measuring.
IOW some of us sat and watch it come and go. The excellent gear sticks around, though. I fired up an old Superior Instruments CR Bridge (with 'eye-tube' indicator) last week that probably hadn't been powered in two decades. Yep, it still works, and now it will be useful. I keep saying that someday I will put my vacuum tube random noise generator online to share it as a source of randomness with the world, but haven't done that yet.
It breaks my heart to see people putting current ITC boards (obsolete before the glue hardens) into cool but gutted vintage gear, when the original gear still had a long useful life ahead. To be ironic, if I had a bunch of money, I would order the latest new Dell box, gut it, and install a MicroVAX in the enclosure. (preserving the enclosure and hardware from the orignal, so it could be put back together after a few milliseconds when the cleverness wore off)
No, with Linux you get a scattershot conglomeration of different userspaces, all created arbitrarily by anybody who gets the idea they can 'do it better.' Maybe that's the right approach.
/etc dotfiles and have a strong base for a robust system on whatever architecture I choose. You with Linux are stuck using whatever miscellaneous collection someone has thrown together for the architecture you have to run it on.
Me, I have a strong preference for NetBSD, because I think a more unified userland that is more harmonized is the best approach. I have learned my
I guess in a way I am arguing in circles, since NetBSD is a 'one true OPEN' platform, whereas the various Linux-based OSes are all kludges targeted at some narrow segment of the extant hardware platforms. So maybe I'll have to agree.
To bring things around to my original point, MANY Linuxes is probably a good thing, since it encourages experimentation and a diverse userland. I just don't choose to participate in that kludge. Someone else can diddle around and experiment. I'm pretty happy with what I use.
But I'll point out that the NetBSD pkgsrc collection is now ported to a lot of other OSes now.
So you're willing to concede that your solution is more powerful government, to take more control over us.
That's okay, if you want to be honest. Maybe put something like that in your tagline. Or the 'crackhead' bit so everybody knows your point of view and how you approach things.
Your weird notion that more government oversight and control will enable the auto industry to do something they are 'scrambling' to do isn't based in anything but conjecture. You're as bad as the 'Market' worshippers who think that particular approach will magically solve everything.
And your scattershot comments about Microsoft and the RIAA are just typical Slashdot groupthink. At least we know your approach is to cue the usual choir to join in.
Uh, think a little harder next time.
The idea that more tax dollars going to feed Big Government is a naive notion at best. It breeds corruption and waste.
It's dangerous to concentrate so much power arbitrarily. But clearly you're in favor of a strong State to rule over us.
People like you keep bringing up 'the environment' like large governmental bodies magically care more about 'the environment' than regular people do.
Your parody response makes it clear you're happier spreading stereotypes of your 'dream' opponent than any thoughtful discussion. Have a nice life in your fantasy world, dood. It's nice that you've found something to be angry about, that gives meaning to your existence.
HAND.
Urban density is a good thing.
You really can't just say this and have us accept it without any justifying arguements.
High density cities are not the 'norm' and people living outside them is not an abberation. Long distance commutes are not idea, either. But the practice of packing everybody into high density dwellings has many negative consequences. We are not honeybees, who crowd into hives. Human culture can spread out. The Net should serve as a good example of that.
Really, there are other ideologies involved here. Really weird ones that don't have much merit. And it's far too complicated to discuss on a blog.
Read some Jefferson if you want some thoughtful exploration of the evils of large cities. And for goodness sakes, stop parroting ill-thought-out dogma.
Its a market and competition, you dont have any birthright to sit there and dictate things.
You've got a weird way of promoting government mandates.
With GPS, we could automaticly raise prices in traffic heavy areas and lower them in empty areas.
That would promote 'sprawl' which is characterized as a 'bad thing' by the people who like large powerful governments. They instead promote the idea that the population should be crowded into high-rise apartment buildings along light-rail corridors.
Really. That's what the 'progressives' promote.
I most certainly have. As I said above, I like robust and broad build environments.
./config files for single architectures?
I don't know what you were implying. Do you code your