That's gotta be one of my favorite vintage computers of all times! That was the first computer I programed in basic at highschool back about '78 with a wopping 32KB of ram!
It was a great deal of fun sitting down with the manual and a copy of creative computing typing in the programs and learning at the same time. My favorite games that came with it were Trek-80 and target (a shooting gallery type game).
I also learned to program in 8080 assember, and played with focal and anything else I could find included with it.
The one we had had a dual drive Helios II 8" floppy drive.
These things were the oddest drives I've seen. They had motorized eject and loading... you slide the disk most the way in and it would "suck it in", and you would push a button and it would whirr and eject the disk. A bad think to do with these was to was to grab the disk as it was still being ejected... would as often as not cause the drive to jamb.
The other odd thing about the drives is that both drives had their heads mounted to a single voice-coil positioner... the drives sounded like somebody bouncing on an old bed when they were busy seeking.
DOH!
Of course your right!! I should have remebered that one since I have 2001 on VHS. "Silent Running" was also a good one, but I would not say it was great.
Being an aging computer geek that watched the orginal many times over, this won't be a classic like it was.
The effects were wornderful, but it was way to predictable, even the ending(s). There was actually two endings to this movie... the real one, and the second one that burton tacked on the tail to thumb his nose as another poster pointed out.
This is a good movie, if a little predictable, and other than Shrek the only other watchable movie this summer I've seen (I have not watched AI yet).
Of other Sci-Fi movies of the periods that I think should be mentioned are the following.
Soylent Green (sp?)
The Omega Man
Both classics depicting dark futures and starring Charston Heston as the main character.
Well I believe Xbox will be a failure in the marketplace... Microsoft has deep pockets, but the maketplace is too cuthroat for even them I think.
I think Windows ME would have been a total failure except for the fact that most OEMs only offered a choice of WinME or Win2K and consumers were not ready for Win2K. Everybody I know who had upgraded from Win95 or Win98 and had upgraded to WinME has gone back and won't recommend WinME to anybody else.
I wonder if WinME was supposed to kill off the Win9X line intentionally, or just a crappy product introduced in a hurry to get some upgrade sales for Microsoft.
I think is going to have a tougher time with the suits now. What with the belt tigtening caused by the poor economy and the growing mindshare of Linux even the Corporate IS group where I work is finally blessing running Linux for non-buisness critical apps.
They are still sticking with Office97 as the official suite shame to say. They were sweating bullits when they heard that they were not going to get corporate pricing on Win98 and Office97 and be loose upgrade pricing from Office 97 to Office 2K & XP.
Hmmm, well I'm running RH 7.1 on one server here and my desktop and neither of them have crashed, not even the X server. Windows 98 SE often crashes or runs out of memory from running apps.
RH 6.2 (currently I have a server that's up over 200 days) is probably better than 7.1 is. But HR 7.1 is better than 95/98/ME and probably NT/2000 by a good margin.
It's also a fallacy that how "hard" linux is to install vs windows... neither is easy to install, they are just different. Consumers don't give a damn how hard the OS is to install since PCs come with the OS installed. They only care a bout a few things.
Does it run the application I want.
Linux need some help here, no MS office for linux!
Is it hard to do what I want.
Linux is getting better, but needing to be root to do some things is a pain. Windows NT/2000/XP all have the root issue also.
Can I get help from the PC mfg or joe down the street.
Linux is doing as well here as NT/2000/XP is on pre-installed systems. You can get phone support from HP, IBM and Dell for linux if it was installed when you got it. Also there are more joes that know how to use it.
It's a fallacy that linux needs to be easy to install to get accepted. It's all about the apps and the support you can call on!
DataFellows offers F-Secure 4.10 for linux in workstation and server flavors. We user F-Secure for Windows here and it works fine, we have the linux version also but have not tried it out on either of our linux servers to see how it works.
I've read your open letter and still am having trouble figuring out why you are suing Roxio. I've seen no reason given for this and all I've read in the open letter is "feel good fluff". I agree you offer a valuable service to application developers by providing titles & cover artwork and don't have an issue with you charging for the service.
The issue I see is that Roxio's contract with your company has expired and rather than renewing with you they've decided to switch to a competing service that also happens to be free. The way I see it is you are trying to legal measures to pressure developers from switching to competing services such as FreeDB, CDindex, or MusicBrainz.
I would greatly appreciate hearing what intellectual property Roxio is actually violating.
The problem with the peltier(sp?) devices were that they were not terribly effient. They would typically produce twice as much heat as they removed. This is a big problem inside a computer case where there is enough heat being generated already.
The devices are still used in portable electric coolers since they can exaust the hot air from the heat exchanger directly to outside air.
At todays ram prices not a bad idea unless you are storing gigs of data, of course backup power becomes an issue but disposing of the datat becomes easy.
Windriver also is going to be dropping the hornet archive (old PC demo scene archive), and destroyed the remaining hornet CDs that walnut creek still had. So if you have any of their CDs they are now officially collectors items.
Frankly as an old fan of the demo scene I find this is a sad time. Hornet closed it's doors in 1998 and stopped accepting new submissions, and many of the older sites have shut down.
It's a shame that we can't get kids into the demo scene and keep them away from the stupid script kiddie stuff.
Oh well I'm an old fart... oh and Slackware 3.0 was my first linux distro, debian & redhat are better. Who needs dozens of Linux distros, Linux is evolving and the ones with something unique to offer will survive.
"techniques of erasing files without a trace, keeping hidden backup files, and even smashing one's own hard drive in the event of a police search in school dorms."
I've long considered many techniques for protecting some on one's data from unauthorized search and seizure. The best method I've come up with borrows a bit from black boxes in military craft...
Build a server in a good fire proof safe or firebox, the type that is plastic or metal with gypsum between the layers.
On the hard drive place a thermite device to "burn" the hard drive that can be triggered remotely.
Never keep local copies of the sesitive data except on the server. Find a utility that will wipe all non-used areas of the HD of your local PC and use it regularly.
Keep any copies of the sensitive data offsite, preferrable in another state or county at least.
Make sure any offsite copies of the data is encrypted to make them difficult to recover.
For the really paranoid make sure the person holding the offsite backups are not a close relative or somebody that you regularly associate with.
Is taking things to this level extreame overkill and paranoid? Probably in most cases, but if you really want to make sure somebody can't get to your data this is probably the lengths you need. Even this is pobably not far enough in some circumstances.
- subsolar
Re:Interesting Lecture.
on
CPRM Lecture
·
· Score: 2
I just finnished watching it... most interesting thing mentioned is that the scheme only used 56 bit encryption! Since this is a "simple" cypher it should be possible to brute force working keys. The only thing making it hard is the fact that the encryption algorythm is going to be a trade secret.
I suspect that there will be a generic crack of this whole CPRM system in fairly short order since it does not appear to be a real improvement over what was done with DVD.
Ok what are the variables:
A player specific key.
Media specific key that is incrementable for R/W media like HD & Flash, fixed ID for DVD, DVDA, DVD-R and CDR.
A matrix or tree (added in the past couple months) "media key block" containing a list of valid keys.
Here's how it sounds like it works for playback:
The player retreives the media key uses it's key and some magic hash to determine were to start looking in the matrix/tree for it's key.
The player then uses that key to try to decrypt the track key, if it fails try next key in matrix/tree till you succeed.
The track key & media ID key is used to decrypt the content for playback via the magic "C2" encryption.
Result: You copy the data to different CPRM media, the media ID is different and so won't play back. You copy the data to non-CPRM media, still no good cause it's encrypted.
For recording it works a bit different:
The player retreives the media key uses it's key and some magic hash to determine were to start looking in the matrix/tree for it's key.
The player then uses that key to try to and generates a track key.
The media ID and track key is used to encrypt the content.
Result: same as the prior example.
Copying is doing the above two togeter, it just requires that the software honor the copy permission data, and to get licenced to use CPRM you must play by the rules or dire consequences will ensue.
The bright side I see is the tree scheme seems to depend on approx 500 root keys, and if you can figure out the algorthm for calculating the rest in the tree you have every key in that tree.
Result:
They have to pull keys for whole groups of manufacturers, pissing off consumers and manufactuers.
Game over, they give up, and go into a corner and suck their thumb.
They ingore it publicly, sue you and everyone you know into the stone age, and say it was not a significant hack.
Buy a law to make reverse engineering, debuggers, logic analyizers, and thinking illegal unless you are specifically licenced to do so and work for one of five companies.
I've considered an encrypted P2P using SSL and using Public Key to authenticate users to limit who can browse your files.
With the system I envisioned you would have a list of public keys of people that were allowed to browse your files to keep nasty spy bots out and would use encryption on the connection to make it very difficult to figure out what was being tranferred... no telling if it was the latest pop single or my kids latest picture. I would build such a system on top of ICQ or AIM to locate your buddies.
Up sides: It would be fairly untraceable, likely cause less attention because of the difficulty of mass infringment like Napster, and would have no central control athority.
Down sides: If you are trying to get a copy of the latest pop single there are less people you could aquire it from.
Frankly that's my "perfect" P2P... I only want to share stuff with certain people anyways and I don't want people mooching off of me. I also don't want somebody else to snoop at what is being transferred.
Well I would take small exception to this. Since they are not currently (judging from the question) MS-SQL... so it might be a bit pricey to go with an all microsoft solution.
I've experimented with MySQL 3.21 using the windows ODBC driver with Access 97 and had some issues gettting the two to play nice together so eventually gave up the idea using Access as a frontend for the application and went back to a strait PERL web based front end.
There are newer version of both MySQL and the ODBC driver now so it may work much better, but it just did not work well for me about a year ago.
When I was your age, we didn't have 32-bit processors with GUI interfaces and mice. We programmed in binary with toggle switches and LEDs, and we were thankful for them! 4KB was a lot of memory in those days, yessirree...;^D
It covers some of the earlier stuff, and alot of the more obsure systems like the Sphere, Cromeco, Nothstar, and Processor Technology. You can read the first chapter here
The first computer I programmed on was in highschool in 1977 on a Processor Technolgy SOL-20... a cool machine with a wopping 32KB of RAM and dual 8" floppy drives the likes of which I have seen noplace else... really weird motorized eject & insertion that quite often jammed. I learned BASIC, FOCAL and 8080 assembler on that box.
My first home system was an Ohio Scientific C1P that I bought in 1978 with money from a part-time job instead of a Car like the rest of my friends. Leaned 6502 assembler and FORTH on that box, and programmed several games and a "word processor". I also wrote an AI program that was like ELIZA, but on steroids and actually learned words and phrases and understood grammer.
For information on the SOL-20 and an emulator check here, and for information on the C1P check here or here.
Actually I have no doubt that somebody has patented it. Actually I've been playing around with a system that does something similar using the following.
Pallalax Basic STAMP
ISD 240sec voice storage IC
Motorola Caller-ID chip
Pair of relays
Misc analog componets.
Right now if a call is "out of area" it forwards them to a fake "automated phone menu system" that is designed to waste time and extract a little vengence. ];^D from telemarketers!
I plan on adding a DTMF decoder, and a circuit to generate ring voltage so that I can redirect the call to a normal answering machine or if a friend enters a code after the "phone menu" rings my regular phone.
A friend says I should market it, frankly I would much rather put the cicuit and software out on the net once I get past the bread board stage. Though I may very well market it, but my luck I *will* be violating somebody else's IP and go out of buisness. So far I have not looked to see if it's patented, there is less liability if you don't look!
1.people will give up producing art (of whatever form), since artists are often very proud of their work and have beliefs about how it should be made
I don't see how this will have any effect on that. How is getting broader distribution of their music going to effect how they create it? It just means that the record industry won't be able to stonewall competitors online just because they are not members of *The CLUB*.
2. companies will go bankrupt, and the result will be that there is no art/music at all, since a distribution strategy is crucially important in a business, and if that is undermined, if your marketing in one area, if your investment is wasted, you will do very badly.
Companies go bankrupt all the time, most for being stupid and/or not adapting to changing markets, the company that I work for is a case in point. The music industry has refused to adapt, and has been using it's government granted monopoly strangle hold to keep prices up, and most artists starving.
Online music distribution either free a-la napster et-al, or paid service of some sort is the future of music and they (the music industry) has been dragging it's feat waiting for *perfect* copy protection. Just charge a resonable price, allow previews, skip the copy protection and more than enough people will buy to keep you in buisness.
There is absolutely no way this will increase the amount of art/music available, there is every chance it will reduce the number of artists in existence (with only the big surviving) - music will become more bland, and, in the free market, there is no reason why we should allow this kind of left-wing free distribution of property
So you like the all the *manufactured* artists out there like the Backstreet Boys, Spice Girls, et-al? Go to MP3.com and you will find tons of artists as talented or more talented than those signed by the record labels.
The ones signed by the record labels are neither the best or the brightest in their field, they are just the lucky ones to get picked by the lottery.
Many good artists produce art just for the sake of it. Shakespere, Mozart, Bach, etc. produced their art before copyright was granted by any governmet, but it was still produced none the less. Their art was frenquently stolen by theatres in the next town, but still they produced.
Great artists are driven to produce even if there is no profit in it. The best that copyright can do is provide some income so that the artists are able to focus more on what they love. Though in the modern copyright buisness the artist usually get's screwed anyways
Actually if copyright ceased to exist, it would get rid of alot of the profit motive pushing *uncontrovercial* music. You don't hear protest music, experimental music, or totally wacky music because that's not profitable. The current situation encourages lack of diversity.
- the music industry does not overcharge - hardly anyone is unable to afford music, since music is a volume industry, which relies on high sales.
Funny, I can get CDs in lots of 5000 with jewel cases, fold-outs, etc for about $4000. So where does the $13 of $14-15 go when I buy a CD from best buy? I hope you don't seriously think any sigificant portion is going to the artist!
I support copyright, but it is a government granted monopoly. So, as they say, the government granteth, and the government can taketh away. The music industry has foreced it onthemselves, Hatch a year ago was making sounds that if an agreenment between online sources and record industry that of "licencing" may be required, and the record industry being greedy did not listen.
One slight modification I would make is for all e-mail package providers (MS, Netscape/AOL, Qualcom, etc) automatically configure their clients to trash that stuff automatcially. I do also think that "opt-in" e-mails should not be required to put that tag. You wanted a free service, you gotta pay.
I'm generally against the government getting involved in the internet. But this is one of the least damanging solutions I've seen and one I've thought of also.
Actually for several months there Hotmail was really good at filtering out bulk e-mail, though spammers disconvered how they were filtering it (if the hotmail address was not in the to: headers it went to the bulk folder).
One problem with the third distribution being Microsoft. I think that Microsoft signed the away the right to make a *nix distribution when the sold Xenix to SCO.
But when has previous agreements stopped Microsoft from doing anything?
It's not the broadcasters or the broadcasters that need to get their act together, but the content providers that are pushing this BS. So how in the heck did the above one get modded up as insightful?
I think that the big content providers and cable operators *WANT* broadcast TV to die. They can get much more money by selling us pay-per-view entertainment. The push to force all digital broadcast TV in 2006 and forcing copy protection & encryption in digital TV equiment are part of it.
The digital cable operators will be glad to *rent* converter boxes to people with old sets so that they can watch the improved digital TV. This will keep people from stealing service since the digital converter boxes will be much harder to crack. They can also institute a two tier pay per view system one that only lets you watch and a higher one that lets you record the program. It also lets the studios have "electronic delivery" of movies over the cable system but keeps anybody but you on your orginal TV set viewing them. If you get a new set, it probably won't play the "electonic" version of the movie because it was coded to a specific viewing appliance.
The only one that really suffers is the local independent station since buying content from the major providers will go up. The network affiliates ar screwed too since the major networks won't really need them so it will either be pay-up or shut-up. Oh the consumers will suffer to, but the government won't care since the big companies are greasing their wallets.
I will agree that frankly there is nothing useful on TV or cable except for the odd show on SciFI, Discovery Channel, TLC, and PBS. About the only local programming I watch is PBS, and frankly I would love to drop cable service except for two local channels plus the above mentioned Basic-Plus channels and my cable modem. I frankly don't want the kids watching the rest of the crap on TV.
Slashdot Mirror
It was a great deal of fun sitting down with the manual and a copy of creative computing typing in the programs and learning at the same time. My favorite games that came with it were Trek-80 and target (a shooting gallery type game).
For some links to PT stuff try out the following:h Sol20.htm c =344
http://www.geocities.com/~compcloset/ProcessorTec
http://www.corestack.com/machines/sol.html
http://www.old-computers.com/museum/computer.asp?
and for an SOL-20 emulator: http://thebattles.net/sol20/sol.html
I also learned to program in 8080 assember, and played with focal and anything else I could find included with it.
The one we had had a dual drive Helios II 8" floppy drive. ... you slide the disk most the way in and it would "suck it in", and you would push a button and it would whirr and eject the disk. A bad think to do with these was to was to grab the disk as it was still being ejected ... would as often as not cause the drive to jamb. ... the drives sounded like somebody bouncing on an old bed when they were busy seeking.
These things were the oddest drives I've seen. They had motorized eject and loading
The other odd thing about the drives is that both drives had their heads mounted to a single voice-coil positioner
Enough reminicing from an old fart computer geek!
- subsolar
Of course your right!! I should have remebered that one since I have 2001 on VHS. "Silent Running" was also a good one, but I would not say it was great.
- subsolar
The effects were wornderful, but it was way to predictable, even the ending(s). There was actually two endings to this movie ... the real one, and the second one that burton tacked on the tail to thumb his nose as another poster pointed out.
This is a good movie, if a little predictable, and other than Shrek the only other watchable movie this summer I've seen (I have not watched AI yet).
Of other Sci-Fi movies of the periods that I think should be mentioned are the following.
Soylent Green (sp?)
The Omega Man
Both classics depicting dark futures and starring Charston Heston as the main character.
- subsolar
I think Windows ME would have been a total failure except for the fact that most OEMs only offered a choice of WinME or Win2K and consumers were not ready for Win2K. Everybody I know who had upgraded from Win95 or Win98 and had upgraded to WinME has gone back and won't recommend WinME to anybody else.
I wonder if WinME was supposed to kill off the Win9X line intentionally, or just a crappy product introduced in a hurry to get some upgrade sales for Microsoft.
I think is going to have a tougher time with the suits now. What with the belt tigtening caused by the poor economy and the growing mindshare of Linux even the Corporate IS group where I work is finally blessing running Linux for non-buisness critical apps.
They are still sticking with Office97 as the official suite shame to say. They were sweating bullits when they heard that they were not going to get corporate pricing on Win98 and Office97 and be loose upgrade pricing from Office 97 to Office 2K & XP.
- subsolar
RH 6.2 (currently I have a server that's up over 200 days) is probably better than 7.1 is. But HR 7.1 is better than 95/98/ME and probably NT/2000 by a good margin.
It's also a fallacy that how "hard" linux is to install vs windows ... neither is easy to install, they are just different. Consumers don't give a damn how hard the OS is to install since PCs come with the OS installed. They only care a bout a few things.
Linux need some help here, no MS office for linux!
Linux is getting better, but needing to be root to do some things is a pain. Windows NT/2000/XP all have the root issue also.
Linux is doing as well here as NT/2000/XP is on pre-installed systems. You can get phone support from HP, IBM and Dell for linux if it was installed when you got it. Also there are more joes that know how to use it.
It's a fallacy that linux needs to be easy to install to get accepted. It's all about the apps and the support you can call on!
- subsolar
see: http://www.datafellows.com/products/anti-virus/wor kstations/
- subsolar
Dear Mr. Hyman ,
I've read your open letter and still am having trouble figuring out why you are suing Roxio. I've seen no reason given for this and all I've read in the open letter is "feel good fluff". I agree you offer a valuable service to application developers by providing titles & cover artwork and don't have an issue with you charging for the service.
The issue I see is that Roxio's contract with your company has expired and rather than renewing with you they've decided to switch to a competing service that also happens to be free. The way I see it is you are trying to legal measures to pressure developers from switching to competing services such as FreeDB, CDindex, or MusicBrainz.
I would greatly appreciate hearing what intellectual property Roxio is actually violating.
Regards,
-withheld-
If all you need to deal with are "zip" files then try EnZip http://website.lineone.net/~chris_m/ it's smaller, faster, better if that's all you need.
Power Archiver?? who wants a "skinnable" zip utility with more bells and whistles than Windows Media Player 7???
- subsolar
The devices are still used in portable electric coolers since they can exaust the hot air from the heat exchanger directly to outside air.
- subsolar
Frankly as an old fan of the demo scene I find this is a sad time. Hornet closed it's doors in 1998 and stopped accepting new submissions, and many of the older sites have shut down.
It's a shame that we can't get kids into the demo scene and keep them away from the stupid script kiddie stuff.
Oh well I'm an old fart... oh and Slackware 3.0 was my first linux distro, debian & redhat are better. Who needs dozens of Linux distros, Linux is evolving and the ones with something unique to offer will survive.
- subsolar
- Build a server in a good fire proof safe or firebox, the type that is plastic or metal with gypsum between the layers.
- On the hard drive place a thermite device to "burn" the hard drive that can be triggered remotely.
- Never keep local copies of the sesitive data except on the server. Find a utility that will wipe all non-used areas of the HD of your local PC and use it regularly.
- Keep any copies of the sensitive data offsite, preferrable in another state or county at least.
- Make sure any offsite copies of the data is encrypted to make them difficult to recover.
- For the really paranoid make sure the person holding the offsite backups are not a close relative or somebody that you regularly associate with.
Is taking things to this level extreame overkill and paranoid? Probably in most cases, but if you really want to make sure somebody can't get to your data this is probably the lengths you need. Even this is pobably not far enough in some circumstances.- subsolar
I suspect that there will be a generic crack of this whole CPRM system in fairly short order since it does not appear to be a real improvement over what was done with DVD.
Ok what are the variables:
- A player specific key.
- Media specific key that is incrementable for R/W media like HD & Flash, fixed ID for DVD, DVDA, DVD-R and CDR.
- A matrix or tree (added in the past couple months) "media key block" containing a list of valid keys.
Here's how it sounds like it works for playback:- The player retreives the media key uses it's key and some magic hash to determine were to start looking in the matrix/tree for it's key.
- The player then uses that key to try to decrypt the track key, if it fails try next key in matrix/tree till you succeed.
- The track key & media ID key is used to decrypt the content for playback via the magic "C2" encryption.
Result: You copy the data to different CPRM media, the media ID is different and so won't play back. You copy the data to non-CPRM media, still no good cause it's encrypted.For recording it works a bit different:
- The player retreives the media key uses it's key and some magic hash to determine were to start looking in the matrix/tree for it's key.
- The player then uses that key to try to and generates a track key.
- The media ID and track key is used to encrypt the content.
Result: same as the prior example.Copying is doing the above two togeter, it just requires that the software honor the copy permission data, and to get licenced to use CPRM you must play by the rules or dire consequences will ensue.
The bright side I see is the tree scheme seems to depend on approx 500 root keys, and if you can figure out the algorthm for calculating the rest in the tree you have every key in that tree.
Result:
- They have to pull keys for whole groups of manufacturers, pissing off consumers and manufactuers.
- Game over, they give up, and go into a corner and suck their thumb.
- They ingore it publicly, sue you and everyone you know into the stone age, and say it was not a significant hack.
- Buy a law to make reverse engineering, debuggers, logic analyizers, and thinking illegal unless you are specifically licenced to do so and work for one of five companies.
Hmmm probably the last two I think!Do I have it right or am I missing something?
- subsolar
With the system I envisioned you would have a list of public keys of people that were allowed to browse your files to keep nasty spy bots out and would use encryption on the connection to make it very difficult to figure out what was being tranferred ... no telling if it was the latest pop single or my kids latest picture. I would build such a system on top of ICQ or AIM to locate your buddies.
Up sides:
It would be fairly untraceable, likely cause less attention because of the difficulty of mass infringment like Napster, and would have no central control athority.
Down sides:
If you are trying to get a copy of the latest pop single there are less people you could aquire it from.
Frankly that's my "perfect" P2P ... I only want to share stuff with certain people anyways and I don't want people mooching off of me. I also don't want somebody else to snoop at what is being transferred.
- subsolar
I've experimented with MySQL 3.21 using the windows ODBC driver with Access 97 and had some issues gettting the two to play nice together so eventually gave up the idea using Access as a frontend for the application and went back to a strait PERL web based front end.
There are newer version of both MySQL and the ODBC driver now so it may work much better, but it just did not work well for me about a year ago.
- subsolar
- subsolar
- Stan Viet's History of the Personal Computer
It covers some of the earlier stuff, and alot of the more obsure systems like the Sphere, Cromeco, Nothstar, and Processor Technology. You can read the first chapter hereThe first computer I programmed on was in highschool in 1977 on a Processor Technolgy SOL-20 ... a cool machine with a wopping 32KB of RAM and dual 8" floppy drives the likes of which I have seen noplace else ... really weird motorized eject & insertion that quite often jammed. I learned BASIC, FOCAL and 8080 assembler on that box.
My first home system was an Ohio Scientific C1P that I bought in 1978 with money from a part-time job instead of a Car like the rest of my friends. Leaned 6502 assembler and FORTH on that box, and programmed several games and a "word processor". I also wrote an AI program that was like ELIZA, but on steroids and actually learned words and phrases and understood grammer.
For information on the SOL-20 and an emulator check here, and for information on the C1P check here or here.
GOD I FEEL OLD!!!
- subsolar
See:m l
http://www.exn.ca/Stories/1999/11/03/01.cfm
http://www.zdnet.co.uk/news/2000/38/ns-18053.html
http://www.youve-got-male.com/
http://slashdot.org/articles/99/09/23/0836256.sht
Is this funny, or is it informative?
- subsolar
Actually I have no doubt that somebody has patented it. Actually I've been playing around with a system that does something similar using the following.
Right now if a call is "out of area" it forwards them to a fake "automated phone menu system" that is designed to waste time and extract a little vengence. ];^D from telemarketers!
I plan on adding a DTMF decoder, and a circuit to generate ring voltage so that I can redirect the call to a normal answering machine or if a friend enters a code after the "phone menu" rings my regular phone.
A friend says I should market it, frankly I would much rather put the cicuit and software out on the net once I get past the bread board stage. Though I may very well market it, but my luck I *will* be violating somebody else's IP and go out of buisness. So far I have not looked to see if it's patented, there is less liability if you don't look!
- subsolar
Online music distribution either free a-la napster et-al, or paid service of some sort is the future of music and they (the music industry) has been dragging it's feat waiting for *perfect* copy protection. Just charge a resonable price, allow previews, skip the copy protection and more than enough people will buy to keep you in buisness.
So you like the all the *manufactured* artists out there like the Backstreet Boys, Spice Girls, et-al? Go to MP3.com and you will find tons of artists as talented or more talented than those signed by the record labels.The ones signed by the record labels are neither the best or the brightest in their field, they are just the lucky ones to get picked by the lottery.
Many good artists produce art just for the sake of it. Shakespere, Mozart, Bach, etc. produced their art before copyright was granted by any governmet, but it was still produced none the less. Their art was frenquently stolen by theatres in the next town, but still they produced.
Great artists are driven to produce even if there is no profit in it. The best that copyright can do is provide some income so that the artists are able to focus more on what they love. Though in the modern copyright buisness the artist usually get's screwed anyways
Actually if copyright ceased to exist, it would get rid of alot of the profit motive pushing *uncontrovercial* music. You don't hear protest music, experimental music, or totally wacky music because that's not profitable. The current situation encourages lack of diversity.
Funny, I can get CDs in lots of 5000 with jewel cases, fold-outs, etc for about $4000. So where does the $13 of $14-15 go when I buy a CD from best buy? I hope you don't seriously think any sigificant portion is going to the artist!I support copyright, but it is a government granted monopoly. So, as they say, the government granteth, and the government can taketh away. The music industry has foreced it onthemselves, Hatch a year ago was making sounds that if an agreenment between online sources and record industry that of "licencing" may be required, and the record industry being greedy did not listen.
- subsolar
For those afraid of goat sex: http://www.salon.com/comics/boll/2000/08/24/boll/i ndex.html
- subsolar
I'm generally against the government getting involved in the internet. But this is one of the least damanging solutions I've seen and one I've thought of also.
Actually for several months there Hotmail was really good at filtering out bulk e-mail, though spammers disconvered how they were filtering it (if the hotmail address was not in the to: headers it went to the bulk folder).
- Subsolar
But when has previous agreements stopped Microsoft from doing anything?
- subsolar
AAAAKKKKK!!
Help ME!!!
It even gave my computera siezure!!!
Truely it did!
- subsolar
I think that the big content providers and cable operators *WANT* broadcast TV to die. They can get much more money by selling us pay-per-view entertainment. The push to force all digital broadcast TV in 2006 and forcing copy protection & encryption in digital TV equiment are part of it.
The digital cable operators will be glad to *rent* converter boxes to people with old sets so that they can watch the improved digital TV. This will keep people from stealing service since the digital converter boxes will be much harder to crack. They can also institute a two tier pay per view system one that only lets you watch and a higher one that lets you record the program. It also lets the studios have "electronic delivery" of movies over the cable system but keeps anybody but you on your orginal TV set viewing them. If you get a new set, it probably won't play the "electonic" version of the movie because it was coded to a specific viewing appliance.
The only one that really suffers is the local independent station since buying content from the major providers will go up. The network affiliates ar screwed too since the major networks won't really need them so it will either be pay-up or shut-up. Oh the consumers will suffer to, but the government won't care since the big companies are greasing their wallets.
I will agree that frankly there is nothing useful on TV or cable except for the odd show on SciFI, Discovery Channel, TLC, and PBS. About the only local programming I watch is PBS, and frankly I would love to drop cable service except for two local channels plus the above mentioned Basic-Plus channels and my cable modem. I frankly don't want the kids watching the rest of the crap on TV.
- subsolar