Everytime the Air Force tries to get rid of the A-10 the Army says, "If you don't want those, we'll take them..." and the Air Force promptly shuts up and keeps the A10's.
I don't know about the Navy, but in the Army we had platoon command posts built in the 1970's that used wire wrap TTL circuits. The consoles would lock up and the solution was to pull out and slam in circuit boards until it started working again.
The machine could only run one program at a time, the programs were loaded from an ancient tape loader that would eat a tape unless you did everything just right. You selected the program to run by dailing in the ocal address of the program in in memory and depressing the execute button.
_Anything_ would be better than this, even NT.
Of course, UNIX would be best...
Re:The Author Doesn't Know What An OS is...
on
Is UNIX An OS?
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· Score: 1
No, X is part of any number of distributions and can run on top of any number of different OS'es.
But X is not part of the OS, it merely runs as an application program.
Just because Joe 6-pack can't tell the difference between a program and an OS is no reason for those of us who know better to allow this precisely defined term to be blurred.
We need a term to define a minimum set that is an OS without including all the extra garbage that is not really part of the operating system.
Otherwise we will have huge software monopolies trying to tell us that a web browser is an integral part of an OS. Even when it really isn't.
That is not what happens. Think of RT-Linux as replacing the schedualing system, so that the kernel itself is only ran in certain time slices. Therefore, the RT OS runs for a set amount, then the Linux OS runs for a set amount.
Each manages its own set of resources seperate from the other. It is like two OS'es running at the same time on a box. But the only resource that is managed for Linux is the time and some FIFO's. Linux still manages the rest of the systems resources.
Inventory of all your books and CD's. Maybe we can produce a database similar to the CD music databases for books and magazines.
Cheap Linux based Point of Sale terminal.
Print up yard sale tags for multiple family yard sales and total up the sales at the end of day by family.
Inventory tags for a small business.
For the institutional pharmacy, tag your drugs and tag the patient label and scan in both to ensure that the drug dispensed matches the drug prescribed on the patients' label.
Use bar coded ID tags at security stations such as convention entrances to see if the individual is allowed to enter the event.
Anyone else have any other suggestions? I have to go watch "That 70's Show" now or I would thing of some more.
Re:The Author Doesn't Know What An OS is...
on
Is UNIX An OS?
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· Score: 2
You have hit the nail on the head. You are exactly right about what an operating system is.
From the book "Operating System Concepts, 4th ed." by Silberschatz Galvin:
'The purpose of an operating system is to provide an environment in which a user can execute programs.'
So I would classify as an OS that minimum amount of code that is needed to execute a program. So, every thing that happens upto the point of running init is the UNIX OS, everything that gets started after this point, including init, are programs being ran by the OS, not the OS itself.
In fact, under UNIX the only program that is actually executed is init, every other program that is started on a UNIX system after this is started with a fork and execute.
The distinction is that programs are ran as processes under the control of the UNIX kernel, while the kernel itself manages the resources for the programs without running as a process itself.
Therefore, if something is running as a process, it is not part of the OS.
there is nothing you can do. What if they goto an URL like this: "www.acmecorp.com/~mystuff/1234.jpg" abd then walk away, leaving a porno picture for the next user to view.
Notice that there are no keywords for you to filter out.
You are going to be able to stop a horney teenage male from seeing porn on the internet for about a billionth of a second, and I don't care what tool you use to try and filter it out.
A better policy would be to have booths where the user can be seen, but not what they are viewing, and to reset the computer to some sort of default between users. And to only allow your customers who are doing laundry to use the kiosks.
According to you MS advocates can outright lie, because, hypothetically, if any of the open source leaders were to lie too then we would defend them.
This is not true for several reasons.
Open source leaders are too busy programming and leading the open source movement to actually even care that much about Microsoft. Do you really think that Linux or Alan even think about Microsoft that much?
But I bet you Billy G. was groups comprised of dozens of people that are devoted to monitoring Linux and producing weekly summaries and reports for Microsofts top executives. Linux is cutting into Microsofts server revenue, so it is getting a lot of attention from Redmond.
If our open source leaders ever did spout insane statistics like Mr. Moody then I would be the first to point out the inacurracies. These people are our leaders because they are smart, good with others, and don't lie. If they weren't they wouldn't have very many followers, now would they?
Since the basic primise of your argument is wrong, which you freely admit yourself, then the rest of your arguments are wrong as well.
Free speech doesn't mean that you are free to lie. And editors that allow their writers to continue lying, when the customer is compaining about those lies, don't remain editors for very long.
Funny, when I add up the numbers I get the following:
NT : 22 SQL Serv: 6 IIS : 12 IE : 6 Outlook : 5 ------------ total : 51
And this is only for Microsoft software. You add in all the third party bugs and the total number of NT bugs quadruples.
The 51 number seems a little higher than the 34 that the site claims for the total number of NT bugs, or does NT not come with Outlook, IE, IIS and SQL server?
And W2K adds in 10 brand new bugs. And Office adds a couple more yet.
The grand total is around 218 with all NT bugs (excluding 98 and 2000 entries.) The total number of all Redhat bugs is only 71.
I got this information from this page: http://www.securityfocus.com/frames/?content=/vdb/ middle.html%3Fvendor%3DMicrosoft%26title %3D%26version%3Dany
Maybe you need to look closer next time and not take someone elses word for things? Don't take my work for it, look for yourself.
Here is what I sent to http://www.abcnews.go.com/service/Help/abc_contacu s.html
Dear Sir,
I was suprised to read a news article on your site that was so clearly biased against Linux and so clearly biased in favor of Microsoft.
In the above article, Mr. Moody's conclusions are suspect and his methods are questionable.
Some of the mistakes that he makes are the following:
The totals for Linux includes many more software packages than does NT. For instance, the apache server is included in the Linux numbers, but the IIS web servers numbers are split apart from the NT numbers and Mr. Moody didn't trouble himself to add them into the list of NT vulnerabilities.
Since Linux distributions include several times the number of servers, clients and other software than an NT distribution, it hardly seems fair to directly compare the two OS'es in this manner. For a valid comparision Mr Moody should probably add in the mail, web browser, and other commonly installed server and client software vulnerablities for say the top three Windows packages in several different catagories to the number of vulnerabilites found in NT.
Since Linux is used as a desktop machine by 4% of the worlds computer users it has a lot of non-server software installed. It is possible to install only server software, turn off the services that you don't actually need and only have to update packages for security reasons 1-2 times a year. It is also possible to run Bastile software against a Redhat box and close numeous security holes before they are even a problem.
Because Bug Track is the primary method of tracking bugs in open source distributions nearly all the bugs will be reported here. Microsoft often hides its bugs in a security through obscurity method that rarely works.
It appears that if a single package has a vulnerablity in Linux then the Bug track list includes the vulnerablity for each affected distribution. Thus, a sendmail report will be counted once for each distribution that uses that version of sendmail. This will tend to artificially inflate the Linux numbers.
Mr. Moody also doesn't take into account how long it takes any given OS to fix each know vulnerablity. Linux will often post the fix with the bug report, or within a couple of hours, while NT products will often go many days or even weeks until a hot patch is released. An example of this is the current vbs vulnerablity that exists in the MS mail client. This is clearly a well known problem, but windows clients are hit again and again by the exact same mail worm.
A final point to make is the fact that even though NT is only used on a third of the web servers on the internet, nearly half the page defacements are against NT boxes.
I am not saying that any OS is more or less vulnerable than any other OS. All OS'es have vulnerabilities and need constant monitoring by well trained security personnel. But some OS'es are much more open and honest about their problems than others.
And I just found a site that has a bunch of old C64 games for download:
http://arnold.c64.org
I just played M.U.L.E. again for the first time in 10 years. I really missed that game. For those of you who don't remember, upto 4 players could play at the same time and it involved colonizing a new planet, bartering, setting up your property, and good health capitalist competition.
I am trying to find a good copy of Elite, a wire frame space trading game where you bought and sold cargo and carried it to other solar systems in order to make more money. You fought pirates and had to dock in rotating spacestations.
I also played a lot of infocom games and a bunch of other games.
I am using the vice emulator which is very good, and I am going to try the css emulator as well.
I also don't have to worry about being illegle, because I still have most of the original game disks for the games that I am playing. Fair use is a great thing.
Anyone know where I can find any of the old C64 manuals in html or pdf formats?
You may want to get a complete physical and talk to your doctor about your problems at work.
Clinical depresion is a very dangerous thing that can sneak up on a person. If it is depression, then your doctor can help you out a lot.
Translation to techno babble [with comments!]
on
Selfish Society
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· Score: 1
I have translated the authors comments into standard techno geek:
These young whipersnappers! They are so full of themselves. [Who is the author? The angry old man?]
These techno geeks are mostly male and have a chip on their shoulder. This is true because I quoted someone else here.
These young kids don't know what work is, why in my day I had to work 18 hour shifts, two a day! And we only got paid with dirt.
This new generation sold out for security. [Ignore all the GNU software that they are giving away for free.]
I don't like techno people because they know more about computers than I do and make fun of me for it. [*pointing* Look at the funny lady... *Ha Ha Ha!*
These techno people have no political issues. Oh yeah, they believe in freedom of speech.
Technoids think that all the institutions have failed them, but haven't come up with any new institutions. [what about slashdot? usenet? email? pgp? openssl?]
The techno culture doesn't use traditional institutions, they made up their own and this means that they have no understanding of history. [The Luddites are comming! The Luddites are comming!]
We are talking to ourselves while the old ignorant old men who actually run things are doing what they want. [Those old men will do what they want anyway.]
The unwashed masses are caught between the ignorant old men and the techies. [Those poor ignorant people, why won't anyone help them? ]
We don't contemplate our own navels enough. [Can't we just criticise each other? Isn't that almost the same thing?]
Traditional political agendas aren't flexible enough for the mass of individuals who make up the internet. [Duhhh!]
Technology and Corporations [those who create the technology in the first place?] are the leading political powers.
The techno savy don't understand that the techo ignorant won't take the time to learn. [Those poor people. Maybe we can just pass a law or something.]
Most computer users are so ignorant that they think gnomes carry the data from their hard drives to their TV thingies. And this is the fault of the techies for not being better teachers. [I appologise. *Sob*]
Individuals are vulnerable to organized groups. [Duhh!]
People who run around like Chicken Little are ignored or even made fun of. [Baiting fanatics is my favorite sport!]
I think that we can use technology to make individuals who don't agree on anything more policially powerful than organized groups. [I don't think that this is ever going to happen.]
Your definition of Client and Server are confused. These terms refer only to whom originates a connection and who accepts the connection. No more, no less.
Thus the process that opens a port and listens for a connection is the server for that service. The process that connects to the port is the client.
Thus the telnetd server listens for tcp connections. Telnet the client then connects to the port and is granted a connection.
The same box can be both the server and client for any particular port.
It is such a great idea to have a minimum set of libraries, kernel versions, and X versions as well as some development guidelines.
As long as the distributions meet these minimum standards, and the developers follow the guidelines then they will both meet somewhere in the middle and everyone will benefit with easier to install software.
Keep in mind that these documents are the first of their kind and that there will need to be some negotiation and some give and take between developers, distribution makers and these standards bodies. Things may even get a little messy and peoples feelings may get hurt, but that is just human nature.
If the manufacturers would double the number of pixels in the vertical direction, then going into 3D mode wouldn't make much difference.
I can see that in just a few years none of us are going to have a CRT in our houses. LCD is the future. I like the way that my laptop screen is totally flicker free in any lighting. Add in a 3D view mode and I wouldn't want to use my video tube monitor anymore.
Kind of a shame when an era ends though. Once TV's and computer monitors all switch to LCD that will be the end of the vacume tube. It always made me laught to see the labels on TV's in the mid eighties that claimed the TV was 100% solid state, with the business end of the largest vacume tubes ever built siting out in plain view.
Anyone can start their own web site at anytime and make it look as professional as any of the big news outlets.
The big boys are going to buy out all the little ones and find out that there is a new crop of little ones to buy out again.
And the funny thing is that NPR is the only unbiased news outlet in America today. It only looks liberal because the rest of the media today is owned by rich ultraconservatives who bias all their news reports to the right.
An example of this is when the regular new media covers a story where drugs were involved they might paint the person arrested as a "Alleged Major Drug Lord Arrested Today!" and go on and on how drug use is a major scourge of todays society, where NPR will report that Fred Rubble was arrested today and charged with drug possession.
Then NPR might actually question whether or not the drug laws in the United States make sense.
NPR might actually question that locking someone up for thirty years for doing what the Tobacco companies have been doing for the past 70 might be a little insane.
But I guess looking at both sides of an issue is something that only liberals do... I mean, after all, us conservatives _already_ _know_ what is right, we don't need unbiased coverage, it'll only confuse us with the issues.
No matter what the results of this case show we have already won. Sure, American developers won't be able to distribute this DVD software, but don't worry about that. In this world are places and countries that are far from the authority of the USA and the MPAA.
Further development of this product is occuring worldwide right now. The results will be accessable through the world wide web.
This is just like when pgp was deemed to be a dangerous munition in the USA and forbidden for export. But it was still fully accessable to everyone on the internet, wasn't it?
So, just take a deep breath and know in your heart of hearts that we have won already. What this one man who has already decided the guilt of the defendants in this case says about the matter is meaningless.
We, the people of the world, have already spoken on the matter and we find the defendant innocent.
Lets define our own open source console gaming machine. Let's not define a bleeding edge machine, instead, lets define a nice trailing edge machine that still has a couple of years of life left in it. This would let us get the most bang for our buck.
Lets say that it will have the following:
500Mhz pentium II CPU 128MB RAM 30GB Hard Drive Sound Blaster Live ATI AGP All-in-wonder 128 Pro card (Hardware MPEG II) NE2000 10/100 network card CD/RW drive DVD drive Digital Surround Speakers
Once we define the hardware we then make a Linux distribution that fully supports this machine. We have full drivers for all the hardware. Now we write software that fully supports all the hardware:
player/recorder: DVD, CD, MP3, MPEG (1, 2, 4), AVI, MOV Digital VCR (open source TIVO) with VCR control Digital 8 track audio TV Surround sound from all sources with digital effects. X with DRI/Open GL drivers that fully support the hardware.
A standard 3D gaming engine with modules to play the Doom, Quake, Quake II, and Quake III and our own games...
A standard tile gamming engine with modules to play Warcraft, Warcraft II, Starcraft and games of our own devising...
A review board can update the hardware list every couple of years and replace the most outdated hardware to bring the machine back up to date with the current trailing edge.
Seperate standards boards for each type of gaming engine can improve/upgrade the engines using open source methods.
Linux had a monolithic kernel back when it was version 1.1.13. But it has had a modular kernel since development version 1.3.x about 6 years ago.
In case you didn't know, loadable modules mean that I can update my sound drivers from the internet, reload my sound drivers and immeadiately begin using the new sound drivers _without_ rebooting my machine. Something that Windows _can't_ do...
My Impressions of the Linux CLI 1) Love the tab complete!! Me Too!
2) Nice roll back history. Between sessions even! That is nice.
3) Why can't the Delete key NOT act like a backspace? ACK! stty erase to define the backspace key to be some other key... Use with caution!
4) Still haven't figured out how to deal with spaces in a file name or directory. rm "This is a single filename with a lot of spaces in it."
5) Rather like the hi-light with left, paste with middle mouse button thing. Not 100% sure I prefer it to NT's clipboard. In time you will try to highlight right click, click center click even in NT. and it won't work there:(
6) I hate case sensitivity. I have yet to hear a single reasonable argument as to why this is a "feature". pizza != Pizza != PiZZa. Has a logic train like this ever done anything but cause errors? Here is a good reason. I hate trying to debug scripts where the same program is referred to as Wipeout, WIPEOUT, wipeout, WipeOut and wipeOut interchangeable. It makes it nearly impossible to find every reference to the command wipeout when I am replacing that script with something else.
7) Don't much care for launching GUI apps from the CLI. Locks out that CLI from being used for anything else. But it doesn't have too! UNIX has had job control for 25 years now. Instead of typing "xview stars.jpg" type "stars.jpg &" and you will run the GUI command in the background. Quite handy and far beyond the capability of Windows9x. To find out more about job control run the command "man bash" and look for a section titled JOB CONTROL.
Can you write down the problems that you are having, the equipment that you are using and the versions of the software you are running and send it to the developers?
This is called a bug report.
If you can do this just one time a year, then you have done a great thing and have helped out open source a great deal.
You do know that address have to be encoded and decoded right now don't you? Especially when you throw in memory exceptions for memory that is swapped out. Or did you sleep through that part of the Organization of Microprocessors class?;)
With this design the through put of the entire system would be an order of magnitude higher than the current "is it my turn to hog the bus design?" Each device would have a duplex bus speed of 250 Mega Bytes per second and any device would be able to talk to any other device, all simultaneously. In theory, 10 devices would be able to talk back and forth to each other at a throughput of 125 Giga Bytes per second. So, your video capture device could be writing directly to the hard drive, skipping the processor entirely. Think of it as having DMA to and from every device in the system, simultaneously.
True, there would be a slight increase in latency for memory, but even that could be smoothed over with improved cache designs and improved branch prediction.
With devices being able to communicate directly with one another the memory and processor speed becomes even less important than today. Don't get trapped into the Von Nueman mode of thinking where all data _must_ go through the central processor.
In this design the Central Processing Unit (CPU) becomes merely a Processing Unit (PU) and is no longer central anymore. Of course we still need to do some processing, but maybe we need a set of special purpose digital and signal processors instead of a general purpose processor. This design would allow data to stream through multiple processors, much like connecting UNIX commands together through pipes.
Slashdot Mirror
Everytime the Air Force tries to get rid of the A-10 the Army says, "If you don't want those, we'll take them..." and the Air Force promptly shuts up and keeps the A10's.
I don't know about the Navy, but in the Army we had platoon command posts built in the 1970's that used wire wrap TTL circuits. The consoles would lock up and the solution was to pull out and slam in circuit boards until it started working again.
The machine could only run one program at a time, the programs were loaded from an ancient tape loader that would eat a tape unless you did everything just right. You selected the program to run by dailing in the ocal address of the program in in memory and depressing the execute button.
_Anything_ would be better than this, even NT.
Of course, UNIX would be best...
No, X is part of any number of distributions and can run on top of any number of different OS'es.
But X is not part of the OS, it merely runs as an application program.
Just because Joe 6-pack can't tell the difference between a program and an OS is no reason for those of us who know better to allow this precisely defined term to be blurred.
We need a term to define a minimum set that is an OS without including all the extra garbage that is not really part of the operating system.
Otherwise we will have huge software monopolies trying to tell us that a web browser is an integral part of an OS. Even when it really isn't.
That is not what happens. Think of RT-Linux as replacing the schedualing system, so that the kernel itself is only ran in certain time slices. Therefore, the RT OS runs for a set amount, then the Linux OS runs for a set amount.
Each manages its own set of resources seperate from the other. It is like two OS'es running at the same time on a box. But the only resource that is managed for Linux is the time and some FIFO's. Linux still manages the rest of the systems resources.
Inventory of all your books and CD's. Maybe we can produce a database similar to the CD music databases for books and magazines.
Cheap Linux based Point of Sale terminal.
Print up yard sale tags for multiple family yard sales and total up the sales at the end of day by family.
Inventory tags for a small business.
For the institutional pharmacy, tag your drugs and tag the patient label and scan in both to ensure that the drug dispensed matches the drug prescribed on the patients' label.
Use bar coded ID tags at security stations such as convention entrances to see if the individual is allowed to enter the event.
Anyone else have any other suggestions? I have to go watch "That 70's Show" now or I would thing of some more.
You have hit the nail on the head. You are exactly right about what an operating system is.
From the book "Operating System Concepts, 4th ed." by Silberschatz Galvin:
'The purpose of an operating system is to provide an environment in which a user can execute programs.'
So I would classify as an OS that minimum amount of code that is needed to execute a program. So, every thing that happens upto the point of running init is the UNIX OS, everything that gets started after this point, including init, are programs being ran by the OS, not the OS itself.
In fact, under UNIX the only program that is actually executed is init, every other program that is started on a UNIX system after this is started with a fork and execute.
The distinction is that programs are ran as processes under the control of the UNIX kernel, while the kernel itself manages the resources for the programs without running as a process itself.
Therefore, if something is running as a process, it is not part of the OS.
there is nothing you can do. What if they goto an URL like this: "www.acmecorp.com/~mystuff/1234.jpg" abd then walk away, leaving a porno picture for the next user to view.
Notice that there are no keywords for you to filter out.
You are going to be able to stop a horney teenage male from seeing porn on the internet for about a billionth of a second, and I don't care what tool you use to try and filter it out.
A better policy would be to have booths where the user can be seen, but not what they are viewing, and to reset the computer to some sort of default between users. And to only allow your customers who are doing laundry to use the kiosks.
According to you MS advocates can outright lie, because, hypothetically, if any of the open source leaders were to lie too then we would defend them.
This is not true for several reasons.
Open source leaders are too busy programming and leading the open source movement to actually even care that much about Microsoft. Do you really think that Linux or Alan even think about Microsoft that much?
But I bet you Billy G. was groups comprised of dozens of people that are devoted to monitoring Linux and producing weekly summaries and reports for Microsofts top executives. Linux is cutting into Microsofts server revenue, so it is getting a lot of attention from Redmond.
If our open source leaders ever did spout insane statistics like Mr. Moody then I would be the first to point out the inacurracies. These people are our leaders because they are smart, good with others, and don't lie. If they weren't they wouldn't have very many followers, now would they?
Since the basic primise of your argument is wrong, which you freely admit yourself, then the rest of your arguments are wrong as well.
Free speech doesn't mean that you are free to lie. And editors that allow their writers to continue lying, when the customer is compaining about those lies, don't remain editors for very long.
Funny, when I add up the numbers I get the following:
/ middle.html%3Fvendor%3DMicrosoft%26title %3D%26version%3Dany
NT : 22
SQL Serv: 6
IIS : 12
IE : 6
Outlook : 5
------------
total : 51
And this is only for Microsoft software. You add in all the third party bugs and the total number of NT bugs quadruples.
The 51 number seems a little higher than the 34 that the site claims for the total number of NT bugs, or does NT not come with Outlook, IE, IIS and SQL server?
And W2K adds in 10 brand new bugs. And Office adds a couple more yet.
The grand total is around 218 with all NT bugs (excluding 98 and 2000 entries.) The total number of all Redhat bugs is only 71.
I got this information from this page: http://www.securityfocus.com/frames/?content=/vdb
Maybe you need to look closer next time and not take someone elses word for things? Don't take my work for it, look for yourself.
Here is what I sent to http://www.abcnews.go.com/service/Help/abc_contacu s.html
Dear Sir,
I was suprised to read a news article on your site that was so clearly biased against Linux and so clearly biased in favor of Microsoft.
In the above article, Mr. Moody's conclusions are suspect and his methods are questionable.
Some of the mistakes that he makes are the following:
The totals for Linux includes many more software packages than does NT. For instance, the apache server is included in the Linux numbers, but the IIS web servers numbers are split apart from the NT numbers and Mr. Moody didn't trouble himself to add them into the list of NT vulnerabilities.
Since Linux distributions include several times the number of servers, clients and other software than an NT distribution, it hardly seems fair to directly compare the two OS'es in this manner. For a valid comparision Mr Moody should probably add in the mail, web browser, and other commonly installed server and client software vulnerablities for say the top three Windows packages in several different catagories to the number of vulnerabilites found in NT.
Since Linux is used as a desktop machine by 4% of the worlds computer users it has a lot of non-server software installed. It is possible to install only server software, turn off the services that you don't actually need and only have to update packages for security reasons 1-2 times a year. It is also possible to run Bastile software against a Redhat box and close numeous security holes before they are even a problem.
Because Bug Track is the primary method of tracking bugs in open source distributions nearly all the bugs will be reported here. Microsoft often hides its bugs in a security through obscurity method that rarely works.
It appears that if a single package has a vulnerablity in Linux then the Bug track list includes the vulnerablity for each affected distribution. Thus, a sendmail report will be counted once for each distribution that uses that version of sendmail. This will tend to artificially inflate the Linux numbers.
Mr. Moody also doesn't take into account how long it takes any given OS to fix each know vulnerablity. Linux will often post the fix with the bug report, or within a couple of hours, while NT products will often go many days or even weeks until a hot patch is released. An example of this is the current vbs vulnerablity that exists in the MS mail client. This is clearly a well known problem, but windows clients are hit again and again by the exact same mail worm.
A final point to make is the fact that even though NT is only used on a third of the web servers on the internet, nearly half the page defacements are against NT boxes.
I am not saying that any OS is more or less vulnerable than any other OS. All OS'es have vulnerabilities and need constant monitoring by well trained security personnel. But some OS'es are much more open and honest about their problems than others.
Thank You!
And I just found a site that has a bunch of old C64 games for download:
http://arnold.c64.org
I just played M.U.L.E. again for the first time in 10 years. I really missed that game. For those of you who don't remember, upto 4 players could play at the same time and it involved colonizing a new planet, bartering, setting up your property, and good health capitalist competition.
I am trying to find a good copy of Elite, a wire frame space trading game where you bought and sold cargo and carried it to other solar systems in order to make more money. You fought pirates and had to dock in rotating spacestations.
I also played a lot of infocom games and a bunch of other games.
I am using the vice emulator which is very good, and I am going to try the css emulator as well.
I also don't have to worry about being illegle, because I still have most of the original game disks for the games that I am playing. Fair use is a great thing.
Anyone know where I can find any of the old C64 manuals in html or pdf formats?
You may want to get a complete physical and talk to your doctor about your problems at work.
Clinical depresion is a very dangerous thing that can sneak up on a person. If it is depression, then your doctor can help you out a lot.
I have translated the authors comments into standard techno geek:
These young whipersnappers! They are so full of themselves. [Who is the author? The angry old man?]
These techno geeks are mostly male and have a chip on their shoulder. This is true because I quoted someone else here.
These young kids don't know what work is, why in my day I had to work 18 hour shifts, two a day! And we only got paid with dirt.
This new generation sold out for security. [Ignore all the GNU software that they are giving away for free.]
I don't like techno people because they know more about computers than I do and make fun of me for it. [*pointing* Look at the funny lady... *Ha Ha Ha!*
These techno people have no political issues. Oh yeah, they believe in freedom of speech.
Technoids think that all the institutions have failed them, but haven't come up with any new institutions. [what about slashdot? usenet? email? pgp? openssl?]
The techno culture doesn't use traditional institutions, they made up their own and this means that they have no understanding of history. [The Luddites are comming! The Luddites are comming!]
We are talking to ourselves while the old ignorant old men who actually run things are doing what they want. [Those old men will do what they want anyway.]
The unwashed masses are caught between the ignorant old men and the techies. [Those poor ignorant people, why won't anyone help them? ]
We don't contemplate our own navels enough. [Can't we just criticise each other? Isn't that almost the same thing?]
Traditional political agendas aren't flexible enough for the mass of individuals who make up the internet. [Duhhh!]
Technology and Corporations [those who create the technology in the first place?] are the leading political powers.
The techno savy don't understand that the techo ignorant won't take the time to learn. [Those poor people. Maybe we can just pass a law or something.]
Most computer users are so ignorant that they think gnomes carry the data from their hard drives to their TV thingies. And this is the fault of the techies for not being better teachers. [I appologise. *Sob*]
Individuals are vulnerable to organized groups. [Duhh!]
People who run around like Chicken Little are ignored or even made fun of. [Baiting fanatics is my favorite sport!]
I think that we can use technology to make individuals who don't agree on anything more policially powerful than organized groups. [I don't think that this is ever going to happen.]
Life is politics. [Life is what you make of it.]
Your definition of Client and Server are confused. These terms refer only to whom originates a connection and who accepts the connection. No more, no less.
Thus the process that opens a port and listens for a connection is the server for that service. The process that connects to the port is the client.
Thus the telnetd server listens for tcp connections. Telnet the client then connects to the port and is granted a connection.
The same box can be both the server and client for any particular port.
It is such a great idea to have a minimum set of libraries, kernel versions, and X versions as well as some development guidelines.
As long as the distributions meet these minimum standards, and the developers follow the guidelines then they will both meet somewhere in the middle and everyone will benefit with easier to install software.
Keep in mind that these documents are the first of their kind and that there will need to be some negotiation and some give and take between developers, distribution makers and these standards bodies. Things may even get a little messy and peoples feelings may get hurt, but that is just human nature.
Good Luck Everyone!
If the manufacturers would double the number of pixels in the vertical direction, then going into 3D mode wouldn't make much difference.
I can see that in just a few years none of us are going to have a CRT in our houses. LCD is the future. I like the way that my laptop screen is totally flicker free in any lighting. Add in a 3D view mode and I wouldn't want to use my video tube monitor anymore.
Kind of a shame when an era ends though. Once TV's and computer monitors all switch to LCD that will be the end of the vacume tube. It always made me laught to see the labels on TV's in the mid eighties that claimed the TV was 100% solid state, with the business end of the largest vacume tubes ever built siting out in plain view.
Anyone can start their own web site at anytime and make it look as professional as any of the big news outlets.
The big boys are going to buy out all the little ones and find out that there is a new crop of little ones to buy out again.
And the funny thing is that NPR is the only unbiased news outlet in America today. It only looks liberal because the rest of the media today is owned by rich ultraconservatives who bias all their news reports to the right.
An example of this is when the regular new media covers a story where drugs were involved they might paint the person arrested as a "Alleged Major Drug Lord Arrested Today!" and go on and on how drug use is a major scourge of todays society, where NPR will report that Fred Rubble was arrested today and charged with drug possession.
Then NPR might actually question whether or not the drug laws in the United States make sense.
NPR might actually question that locking someone up for thirty years for doing what the Tobacco companies have been doing for the past 70 might be a little insane.
But I guess looking at both sides of an issue is something that only liberals do... I mean, after all, us conservatives _already_ _know_ what is right, we don't need unbiased coverage, it'll only confuse us with the issues.
No matter what the results of this case show we have already won. Sure, American developers won't be able to distribute this DVD software, but don't worry about that. In this world are places and countries that are far from the authority of the USA and the MPAA.
Further development of this product is occuring worldwide right now. The results will be accessable through the world wide web.
This is just like when pgp was deemed to be a dangerous munition in the USA and forbidden for export. But it was still fully accessable to everyone on the internet, wasn't it?
So, just take a deep breath and know in your heart of hearts that we have won already. What this one man who has already decided the guilt of the defendants in this case says about the matter is meaningless.
We, the people of the world, have already spoken on the matter and we find the defendant innocent.
Lets define our own open source console gaming machine. Let's not define a bleeding edge machine, instead, lets define a nice trailing edge machine that still has a couple of years of life left in it. This would let us get the most bang for our buck.
Lets say that it will have the following:
500Mhz pentium II CPU
128MB RAM
30GB Hard Drive
Sound Blaster Live
ATI AGP All-in-wonder 128 Pro card (Hardware MPEG II)
NE2000 10/100 network card
CD/RW drive
DVD drive
Digital Surround Speakers
Once we define the hardware we then make a Linux distribution that fully supports this machine. We have full drivers for all the hardware.
Now we write software that fully supports all the hardware:
player/recorder: DVD, CD, MP3, MPEG (1, 2, 4), AVI, MOV
Digital VCR (open source TIVO) with VCR control
Digital 8 track audio
TV
Surround sound from all sources with digital effects.
X with DRI/Open GL drivers that fully support the hardware.
A standard 3D gaming engine with modules to play the Doom, Quake, Quake II, and Quake III and our own games...
A standard tile gamming engine with modules to play Warcraft, Warcraft II, Starcraft and games of our own devising...
A review board can update the hardware list every couple of years and replace the most outdated hardware to bring the machine back up to date with the current trailing edge.
Seperate standards boards for each type of gaming engine can improve/upgrade the engines using open source methods.
What does everyone think?
Linux had a monolithic kernel back when it was version 1.1.13. But it has had a modular kernel since development version 1.3.x about 6 years ago.
In case you didn't know, loadable modules mean that I can update my sound drivers from the internet, reload my sound drivers and immeadiately begin using the new sound drivers _without_ rebooting my machine. Something that Windows _can't_ do...
Which is the more primitive again?
He he he.
My Impressions of the Linux CLI
:(
1) Love the tab complete!!
Me Too!
2) Nice roll back history. Between sessions even!
That is nice.
3) Why can't the Delete key NOT act like a backspace? ACK!
stty erase to define the backspace key to be some other key... Use with caution!
4) Still haven't figured out how to deal with spaces in a file name or directory.
rm "This is a single filename with a lot of spaces in it."
5) Rather like the hi-light with left, paste with middle mouse button thing. Not 100% sure I prefer it to NT's clipboard.
In time you will try to highlight right click, click center click even in NT. and it won't work there
6) I hate case sensitivity. I have yet to hear a single reasonable argument as to why this is a "feature". pizza != Pizza != PiZZa. Has a logic train like this ever done anything but cause errors?
Here is a good reason. I hate trying to debug scripts where the same program is referred to as Wipeout, WIPEOUT, wipeout, WipeOut and wipeOut interchangeable. It makes it nearly impossible to find every reference to the command wipeout when I am replacing that script with something else.
7) Don't much care for launching GUI apps from the CLI. Locks out that CLI from being used for anything else.
But it doesn't have too! UNIX has had job control for 25 years now. Instead of typing "xview stars.jpg" type "stars.jpg &" and you will run the GUI command in the background. Quite handy and far beyond the capability of Windows9x.
To find out more about job control run the command "man bash" and look for a section titled JOB CONTROL.
Have fun!
According to this article:
/ ut93_bench2.shtml
http://www.evil3d.net/articles/linux/ut93_bench
Seems that NVIDIA is faster at most resolutions/texture depths when running UT. Imagine that.
This kinda tells me that you are wrong...
Can you write down the problems that you are having, the equipment that you are using and the versions of the software you are running and send it to the developers?
This is called a bug report.
If you can do this just one time a year, then you have done a great thing and have helped out open source a great deal.
Earth,
1970's
Pong was king!
Wish I had time to still play games anymore. *sigh* I buy a game and it lasts me for a couple of years before I finish the whole thing.
You do know that address have to be encoded and decoded right now don't you? Especially when you throw in memory exceptions for memory that is swapped out. Or did you sleep through that part of the Organization of Microprocessors class? ;)
With this design the through put of the entire system would be an order of magnitude higher than the current "is it my turn to hog the bus design?" Each device would have a duplex bus speed of 250 Mega Bytes per second and any device would be able to talk to any other device, all simultaneously. In theory, 10 devices would be able to talk back and forth to each other at a throughput of 125 Giga Bytes per second. So, your video capture device could be writing directly to the hard drive, skipping the processor entirely. Think of it as having DMA to and from every device in the system, simultaneously.
True, there would be a slight increase in latency for memory, but even that could be smoothed over with improved cache designs and improved branch prediction.
With devices being able to communicate directly with one another the memory and processor speed becomes even less important than today. Don't get trapped into the Von Nueman mode of thinking where all data _must_ go through the central processor.
In this design the Central Processing Unit (CPU) becomes merely a Processing Unit (PU) and is no longer central anymore. Of course we still need to do some processing, but maybe we need a set of special purpose digital and signal processors instead of a general purpose processor. This design would allow data to stream through multiple processors, much like connecting UNIX commands together through pipes.
Break the mold!