don't knock jobs too much. despite all his arguably quite evil things he has done to apple-- killed cloning and adb (without so much as a thought to backward-compatibility) and the floppy-- he has somehow managed to take apple out of a downward spiral and made them quite a lot of money.
Although maybe it's just a coincidence that at the same time apple started marketing to the people most likely to buy their machines, and stopped the cloners (who whether they were good or not, sapped apple's money, especially since how is apple supposed to compete with companies that apple is paying for the R&D budget of, leaving the other companies with little to spend money on besides advertising and tweaking?), apple started making a lot of money?
Maybe some day apple will manage to return to an OS strategy that isn't isolationist, but not while apple makes almost all of their money off of hardware and not until apple gets a lot more money than they have now. If they had gone on like they had before Steve they might be dead now. Sad but true.
i believe that the "intel benchmarks" referred to were specifically floating-point benchmarks. Just FP, nothing else. It was mostly a demonstration of altivec. Don't quote me on that though. Still, good FP scores are a good thing..
And you're right, benchmarks are mostly useless. The Real-world app tests, such as the macro'd Photoshop "bake-offs" are a much better indicator of speed..
i'm disappointed-- there would be rumors that an extended keyboard would be an option with the new gray G4s.
please note that i'm probably just nitpicking through sour grapes, as i have been sitting and waiting for the G4s to come all year, and yet will probably wind up continuing to use this here 7200/75. I don't have the money for a new computer.:P
perhaps this is just another way of "testing" slashdot? although he's testing the wrong server, dagnabbit. He's supposed to be flooding the _test_ server, to see how it stands up. Ha.
A note to Taco-san or other/. admin type people: maybe you should consider adding a special "flood" category to the Moderator list, along with Offtopic and Troll.. then set up the servers in such a way that anything with a "flood" rating would immediately be given a much much shorter amount of space to run before the cutoff for "Read the rest of this comment.." happens. That might help to cut down on scroll times when floods like this one happen, without hurting posts that just happen to be really long.
and God dammit, what the hell IS the name of that "put the lime in the coconut, drink a bowl up" song? that's a cool song but nobody seems to know where i can find it.:P
there is another way-- it's called Mac-on-Linux. http://www.ibrium.se/linux/mac_on_linux.html
It isn't so easy to install (requires kernel recompile type stuff), it takes over the screen instead of going in a window like in sheepshaver, and doesn't work on all machines. However it's totally open-source and free and it's here now, whereas Sheepshaver isn't quite yet released for linuxppc and seems to cost $50 anyway. So until sheepshaver/linux is released, i guess you can use this instead.
p.s. i believe the term is "hardware abstraction", not emulation, since you're using the exact same machine you're "emulating" and there's no translation between different chip instruction sets.. but it might be emulation if you run it on one of these IBM-based thingies.. i dunno.
sorry.. i hadn't read the infoworld article when i started typing this post, and there werne't any other posts yet. i'd just read a much less clear article at the "nando times" and had come away with the impression that the suspension of the injuction was permanent.. didn't realize it was just a temporary request for elaboration by the original judge. i feel dumb.:P well, my point remains the same, since why else would MS still even be in the case..:P
p.s. to the AC: you know what i meant by "working":P
in the it-is-neccicary-to-destroy-all-human-life-to-save- it tradition of the people claiming the USCITA is "good for open source", let's look at the benifits of MS possibly winning this case against Sun.
1. MS is using Sun's name and logo without permission. They did not pass the compatibility tests required to gain a liscense to the java name. 2. MS is claiming their products are compliant with "official java". This is in fact a lie, since it is not compatible. Therefore they're commiting fraud, or truth in advertising violations, or something. The appeals court sees nothing wrong with either of these things.
Therefore, if MS wins against Sun in claiming that these two things are legal, people will be able to use this precedent to: 1. Violate the MS liscense agreements that require hardware makers to do things in order to sell computers iwth windows, or claim they are compliant with MS windows, or use the MS widows logo. Since MS was not required to follow Sun's liscense agreements to distribute the Java code or logo, neither would anyone be bound by the restrictions MS places on products it sells. 2. Take redhat linux, put Wine on top of it, and say it is 100% compatible with Microsoft Windows. Even though Wine is not 100% compatible with Windows, they would not be required to disclose this information to people buying their products, since Microsoft was allowed to tell their customers that their java was 100% compatible with 'official' java. Hell, you could maybe even go so far as to claim that Wine IS 'official microsoft windows'; that's what MS did with their bastardised java VMs. all this could be done with the precedent from the microsoft-sun case. it's exactly the same thing; java is not under any different rules from windows simply because one API is more widely used and more expensive than the other.
Of course, this will not happen. what happened today was simply a desision that microsoft would not be bound by any injunctions stopping them from selling java until the actual court case has happened. And, of course, when the case happens, microsoft will lose, as they expect to. Winning is not the point; the point is to delay losing. This is microsoft's normal strategy, to delay losing until the other side dies or gives up. See also the case involving the stolen source code from Quicktime, or a billion other examples. And it works very well. And it may work here.
Note that microsoft never incorporated a working java into things-- they simply shipped new computers with the VM on the windows 98 cd broken, and then an extra CD containing the fixed VM, which you had to install seperately. This is at least how it was with all the brand new Gateway2000s i wound up setting up a network for this summer at a computer camp. The point of this of course is that MS knows that with practically every customer the Blinking 12:00 Effect will prevail and the customer won't be bothered to figure out how to install a working VM. Now that they're [for now] no longer required to ship a working VM, this CD will just cease to be shipped..
and the _ultimate_ geek toy:
on
Linux on a SIMM
·
· Score: 1
would be a TI calculator deeply integrated with one of these things.:)
both this thing and the TI-89 and TI-9X calculators are based off of the motorola 68k chips, right? it would probably be relatively easy to get them working together.
if not, there's already a terminal emulation program for the TIs that works through a null modem.. just figure out some way to plug it into the SIMM thing.
One interesting thing about this would be that you could actually program games in TI ASM in the SIMM, then transfer them to the calculator. Or add iridium to the mix somehow, and you've got a web server you can carry anywhere, along with a terminal to talk to the web server with.. -_-
hey.. i can dream, can't i? and would somehow working in the fact that the old macintoshes were 68ks be _too_ far-fetched?
After some time dogging presidential hopeful George W. Bush over whether he used cocaine, the press has turned its spotlight on democrat frontrunner Al Gore. Vice President Gore declined to answer questions from reporters about whether he uses the internet more than four hours a day.
in other news, it was recently revealed that Carl Sagan used the internet regularly, and in fact was secretly an avid user of an early, text-based prototype of the internet at some point in the 80s. His biographer revealed this, as well as the fact that before his death he posted several pro-internet comments on slashdot.org under the nick "Mr. X". The internet may have also inspired some of his scientific writings.
as of a couple weeks ago you could d/l it from aol's website.. it's just that the main page was missing. the.tar.gz file was still there, though, and linked to from freshmeat. i think all they did is take down the main page, not the download..
the person who invented the concepts of programming was a woman. her name was ada lovelace, and she was one of Charles' Babbage's students.
the first word-based programming language, "flowmatic", was also created by a woman whose name i can't remember. i think COBOL was largely based on it or something.
yeh.. i know exactly what you mean. i'm an internet pirate, and people confuse me with a "software pirate" all the time.
Some of you may not totally understand what being an internet pirate entails, but it's actually quite simple; i portscan up alongside their packet stream, slam a plank with exposed nails onto their IP adress so they can't get away, then board the computer and take any gold or women who may be on the hard drive. Then as i leave i set their CPU to overclock itself, so it bursts into flames destroying the victim and any knowledge of my crime. If someone never gets home, everyone just assumes a storm got them.
I try to stay away from any heavily armed script kiddies; i just go after the defenseless windows users without any DOS cannons, and i have yet to have any problems. The Cservice Navy may be looking for me, but they'll never find me. Although i now have a peg leg since i got my real leg bitten off in an attack by a viscious Ping of Death several years ago..
sounds amazing. and as someone who listens to ambient techno and thinks speaker feedback sounds nifty, i want some CPU noise to listen to in the car..:)
i'd try it myself but i'm on a mac and i doubt this is the kind of thing that would work on all versions of linux. maybe later i'll reboot into linuxppc, download it and see if it compiles.. but even so i doubt a 75 mhz machine will reach up into the FM band, although the CRT version might work.
<ramble> anyway, this might be a great source of random audio for the one-time-pad security thing mentioned in the other article today. put an FM radio in the audio-in jack and run SETI@home or something complex to ensure the sound coming out the CPU will be random and unreproducable. Or run RC5, just for the sheer irony value of cracking one type of encryption and generating another in the process. If OTP were actually something useful, that would be a great idea.. -_- <ramble>
Believe it or not, Mac OS X is designed from the ground up to be as hardware-independant as possible. It could have easily run on all platforms with nothing more than a recompile required to run a different program. There were also rumors of it at some point being able to boot from inside of any FS you installed it on, so long as it could read that FS. The Mach kernel makes even _more_ sense within this context, and there's really no reason to switch now that they're going to nail OSX to the PPC platform.
Oh.. also, Avie Tevanian, currently head of technology or something at Apple, happened to be one of the people on the original Berkeley team that created the first version of Mach. That may just be a coincidence though.
Btw, don't flame apple for PR stunts. If you don't want to develop for Darwin, don't, but there are certain mac-based developers of hardware and some software for whom having the low level code of Mac OS X available to them will be a complete Godsend. If these people are made happy by the Opening of the Source, then whatever posturing apple does is justified.
i don't really totally get what this article was trying to say. it seems like it could be condensed to "X 0WNZ j00!!" the only arguments i could find in it are "we ought to make an upgrade to X11" and "we shouldn't try to replace X". The idea that everyone should stick to X since 'it is standard' does make sense, but it's still kind of stupid to dismiss alternatives out-of-hand before those alternatives have actually been created. I mean, once Berlin has reached the stage of being usable then it makes sense to argue not to switch to it; but bashing a technology before it has a chance to prove itself is just kind of arrogant.
it's clear that Microsoft will do anything they can at this point to distract from the point of this: servers.
AOL isn't complianing about use of the protocol, it's use of the servers. Microsoft is trying to say, look, we're open and AOL isn't, by the fact they're publishing a 'open' protocol which is almost as versatile as UNIX 'Talk'. Meanwhile AOL has a completely open protocol (TOC) which they have published a completed open-source implementation of (TIK).
The point is, if microsoft wants total openness, and they're expecting AIM to open their servers, why not we make use of the servers Microsoft's put up for their messenger? i mean, they didn't invite us-- they just posted the protocol-- but i guess they're kinda _implying_ they want us to abuse their servers, the way they assumed that AOL wanted microsoft to abuse OSCAR when they posted TOC.
So, let's do whatever we can with/to the MSM servers. And i don't mean use them for messanging; that would be pointless. I mean just do whatever the hell we feel like. Route things through it. Send large files to friends. Or just heavily pingflood it at random or something, i dunno. If a pingflood is nothign more than "unauthorized use of a computer network", it's no less ethical than what MS is already doing to AOL, and i doubt they could really complain about it.
I have no clue how the MSN servers are set up, or even if they exist. Nor do i care; i use AIM, and i don't use it because i like it, i use it because i have friends on AOL. i have no use for another instant messenging protocol, particularly not one such as MSM which is devoid of any redeeming features. Hell, i have little use for _a_ instant messenging protocol. i have IRC. if i had my way, we'd all have accounts on dynip and just use DCC to talk to each other (it even has file transfers!). Or ICQ, it's pretty nice.
But there's probably some way you could send packets of any type with a MSMessenger-like wrapping that would allow you to use the MSMessenger server for other things. I'm just saying, let's look. There may even be ways to shell through it, or run SETI@home. Either way we should certainly _check_.
you again? mr. "anonymous coward"? look.. why can't you get an account? i've noticed you coming in and immediately saying this in every discussion, and then every time someone brings up Jabber you bash them. If that's your opinion that's ok, but it would be nice if you'd do this from an account. frequently posting the same thing as "anonymous coward" is really just kind of, well, lame..
if it turns out that the four "anonymous coward" posts i'm basing this on just happen to be from four different people with the exact same writing style, well, my apologies..
i clearly remembered somethign about the PPC architecture having 64-bit support, but couldn't find the details, so i did a search on Google.
apparently there is a 64-bit PPC. IBM uses it in some of their workstations. lookit. http://www.austin.ibm.com/resource/technology/ns tar.html "BM's NorthStar superscalar RISC microprocessor integrates high-bandwith and short pipe depth with low latency and zero cycle branch mispredict penalty into a fully scalable 64-bit PowerPC-compatible symmetric multiprocessor (SMP) implementation. Based on PowerPC architecture, the first in the Star Series of microprocessors, the NorthStar processor contains the fundamental design features used in the newly available RS/6000 and AS/400 server systems targeted at leading edge performance in commercial applications as characterized by such industry standard benchmarks as TPC-C, SAP, Lotus Notes and SpecWeb. "
i'd imagine that you ought to be able to easily cobble together something based on this chip. it might not be able to run MacOS, but linux is the point of this thread anyway.
- mcc-baka who needs sheepshaver? http://www.ibrium.se/linux/mac_on_linux.html
not everyone is paranoid enough to check the authority signature. yes, they should, but i'm not sure everyone will go to the bother, or that everyone knows how. For a lot of people, the words "digisign security certificate below" followed by the results of a cat/dev/random ought to be enough that they will just _assume_ it's valid without ever bothering to check. I think that was what the original point in the article was.
the one-piece design of the really old macintoshes meant that they could be reused really well once you took out all the hardware. For example, they reportedly worked very well as a home for fish. There used to be plans for a MacQuarium floating around the internet but i'm not sure where they went. I have also heard reports of people making bongs out of them (if ANYONE out there has pictures of a MacBong, send them to me..:). The best part about this is, you could still use the mac-- it would just be naked and caseless.
me and a couple friends got a couple of old broken 286s at a school "garage sale" for about a dollar each. We then threw away the cases and cannabalized the rest for various things. This one girl was planning on making earrings out of a chunk of motherboard, and i have an old expansion slot card that i'm going to hang from my rear-view mirror, the way people used to hang dice there, whenever i get around to it. The card has a parrallel port or something on it; i think it was meant to be a joystick attatchment, but the important thing is it looks neat.
Also, i've heard that old RAM DIMMs make good wind chimes.
The point is, even if it won't boot it isn't useless.
i have a macintosh, and a number of friends who are on AOL and refuse to get a real ISP.
the macintosh native AIM client has some rather serious stability issues related to accidental modem disconnects. if this happens while AIM is in the background, it tends to crash AIM, taking the remote access out with it and forcing me to restart.
here's my question: i've used TiK in LinuxPPC, and it seems to be pretty nice. so i've been trying to run it inside of the macintosh TCL interpreter, in hopes it will be more stable than normal AIM. Unfortunately it won't run-- i open tik.tcl in the wish8.0 application and it says "can't find file toc.tcl" or something. I'm not sure exactly what to do about this. I looked in the file and noticed it had several "exec" commands, which it says in the README do not work on the macintosh TCL version.
Has anyone used the macintosh TCL interpreter who could help me some with this? Or point me to a place where i could look up what to do? would it be difficult to modify Tik for the macintosh version of TCL?
"OSS for profit" is totally irrelivant in this particular case, since AIM is freeware anyway. AOL gets the gain from the fact that it lets users of their online service talk to people outside, thus letting the AOL users pretend that aol is an ISP.
You may have a point about corporate mindsets, but in this case profit certainly has nothing to do with it.
the program you speak of is already in progress of being built. it's called Jabber, and its approach to servers is very much like you describe; the servers communicate with each other in a decentralized manner, and they eventually expect for ISPs to host jabber servers the way they do mail servers now.
the interesting thing is that they are building the capability for the jabber servers to connect to the ICQ and AIM servers, or anything else for that matter, and then translate those messages into jabber's XML format and send them to the jabber user. so you connect to the jabber network, but are also on ICQ and AIM despite being connected to one server..
i spent quite awhile using the iMac keyboard this summer on someone else's computer, and it was sheer hell. It's too small, and it has quite a few keys missing, not because of simplicity but just because they don't have much room.
The problem with this is they left out "end" and "forward-delete" along with the keys that don't do anything. And for someone like me who has gotten horribly dependant on forward-del, it was difficult to try to remember not to use it because it wasn't there.
The thing that pissed me off was they left the "help" key on the keyboard, right next to the delete key like it is on a normal keyboard, the one place where it's easiest to hit it accidentally. Now, if there is one key on the entire keyboard that needs to die, it is the "help" key. (for you windows users, i think it's labeled "insert".) It serves no real purpose, since there's a "help" menu. The only thing it does is that you accidentally hit it when you're trying to press the delete key (it's very close). And then you have to wait for the program's online help to go and load so you can close it. If i knew how i would have remapped the help key to forward-del, but i couldn't figure out how. Anyway i'm glad to be back home on my macally extended with the 33 extra useless keys again. (in my book, the num pad is useless except for first-person game purposes, and my home computer has no 3d card, so..)
and yes, the light in the imac caps lock means you don't have to look at the other side of the keyboard. But it does mean that your left hand is always in the way of the light. so you have to move your left hand to see. Of course the reason it's there in the first place is, again, no room for an independant caps light.
alright, i think i've released some of my pent-up angst now by yelling about keyboards. thank you for listening.
Slashdot Mirror
don't knock jobs too much. despite all his arguably quite evil things he has done to apple-- killed cloning and adb (without so much as a thought to backward-compatibility) and the floppy-- he has somehow managed to take apple out of a downward spiral and made them quite a lot of money.
Although maybe it's just a coincidence that at the same time apple started marketing to the people most likely to buy their machines, and stopped the cloners (who whether they were good or not, sapped apple's money, especially since how is apple supposed to compete with companies that apple is paying for the R&D budget of, leaving the other companies with little to spend money on besides advertising and tweaking?), apple started making a lot of money?
Maybe some day apple will manage to return to an OS strategy that isn't isolationist, but not while apple makes almost all of their money off of hardware and not until apple gets a lot more money than they have now. If they had gone on like they had before Steve they might be dead now. Sad but true.
i believe that the "intel benchmarks" referred to were specifically floating-point benchmarks. Just FP, nothing else. It was mostly a demonstration of altivec. Don't quote me on that though. Still, good FP scores are a good thing..
And you're right, benchmarks are mostly useless. The Real-world app tests, such as the macro'd Photoshop "bake-offs" are a much better indicator of speed..
i'm disappointed-- there would be rumors that an extended keyboard would be an option with the new gray G4s.
:P
please note that i'm probably just nitpicking through sour grapes, as i have been sitting and waiting for the G4s to come all year, and yet will probably wind up continuing to use this here 7200/75. I don't have the money for a new computer.
perhaps this is just another way of "testing" slashdot? although he's testing the wrong server, dagnabbit. He's supposed to be flooding the _test_ server, to see how it stands up. Ha.
/. admin type people: maybe you should consider adding a special "flood" category to the Moderator list, along with Offtopic and Troll.. then set up the servers in such a way that anything with a "flood" rating would immediately be given a much much shorter amount of space to run before the cutoff for "Read the rest of this comment.." happens. That might help to cut down on scroll times when floods like this one happen, without hurting posts that just happen to be really long.
:P
A note to Taco-san or other
and God dammit, what the hell IS the name of that "put the lime in the coconut, drink a bowl up" song? that's a cool song but nobody seems to know where i can find it.
-mcc-baka
INTELLECTUAL PROPERTY IS THEFT
there is another way-- it's called Mac-on-Linux.
http://www.ibrium.se/linux/mac_on_linux.html
It isn't so easy to install (requires kernel recompile type stuff), it takes over the screen instead of going in a window like in sheepshaver, and doesn't work on all machines. However it's totally open-source and free and it's here now, whereas Sheepshaver isn't quite yet released for linuxppc and seems to cost $50 anyway. So until sheepshaver/linux is released, i guess you can use this instead.
p.s. i believe the term is "hardware abstraction", not emulation, since you're using the exact same machine you're "emulating" and there's no translation between different chip instruction sets.. but it might be emulation if you run it on one of these IBM-based thingies.. i dunno.
sorry.. i hadn't read the infoworld article when i started typing this post, and there werne't any other posts yet. i'd just read a much less clear article at the "nando times" and had come away with the impression that the suspension of the injuction was permanent.. didn't realize it was just a temporary request for elaboration by the original judge. i feel dumb. :P well, my point remains the same, since why else would MS still even be in the case.. :P
:P
p.s. to the AC: you know what i meant by "working"
in the it-is-neccicary-to-destroy-all-human-life-to-save- it tradition of the people claiming the USCITA is "good for open source", let's look at the benifits of MS possibly winning this case against Sun.
1. MS is using Sun's name and logo without permission. They did not pass the compatibility tests required to gain a liscense to the java name.
2. MS is claiming their products are compliant with "official java". This is in fact a lie, since it is not compatible. Therefore they're commiting fraud, or truth in advertising violations, or something.
The appeals court sees nothing wrong with either of these things.
Therefore, if MS wins against Sun in claiming that these two things are legal, people will be able to use this precedent to:
1. Violate the MS liscense agreements that require hardware makers to do things in order to sell computers iwth windows, or claim they are compliant with MS windows, or use the MS widows logo. Since MS was not required to follow Sun's liscense agreements to distribute the Java code or logo, neither would anyone be bound by the restrictions MS places on products it sells.
2. Take redhat linux, put Wine on top of it, and say it is 100% compatible with Microsoft Windows. Even though Wine is not 100% compatible with Windows, they would not be required to disclose this information to people buying their products, since Microsoft was allowed to tell their customers that their java was 100% compatible with 'official' java. Hell, you could maybe even go so far as to claim that Wine IS 'official microsoft windows'; that's what MS did with their bastardised java VMs.
all this could be done with the precedent from the microsoft-sun case. it's exactly the same thing; java is not under any different rules from windows simply because one API is more widely used and more expensive than the other.
Of course, this will not happen. what happened today was simply a desision that microsoft would not be bound by any injunctions stopping them from selling java until the actual court case has happened. And, of course, when the case happens, microsoft will lose, as they expect to. Winning is not the point; the point is to delay losing. This is microsoft's normal strategy, to delay losing until the other side dies or gives up. See also the case involving the stolen source code from Quicktime, or a billion other examples. And it works very well. And it may work here.
Note that microsoft never incorporated a working java into things-- they simply shipped new computers with the VM on the windows 98 cd broken, and then an extra CD containing the fixed VM, which you had to install seperately. This is at least how it was with all the brand new Gateway2000s i wound up setting up a network for this summer at a computer camp.
The point of this of course is that MS knows that with practically every customer the Blinking 12:00 Effect will prevail and the customer won't be bothered to figure out how to install a working VM. Now that they're [for now] no longer required to ship a working VM, this CD will just cease to be shipped..
would be a TI calculator deeply integrated with one of these things. :)
both this thing and the TI-89 and TI-9X calculators are based off of the motorola 68k chips, right? it would probably be relatively easy to get them working together.
if not, there's already a terminal emulation program for the TIs that works through a null modem.. just figure out some way to plug it into the SIMM thing.
One interesting thing about this would be that you could actually program games in TI ASM in the SIMM, then transfer them to the calculator. Or add iridium to the mix somehow, and you've got a web server you can carry anywhere, along with a terminal to talk to the web server with.. -_-
hey.. i can dream, can't i?
and would somehow working in the fact that the old macintoshes were 68ks be _too_ far-fetched?
After some time dogging presidential hopeful George W. Bush over whether he used cocaine, the press has turned its spotlight on democrat frontrunner Al Gore. Vice President Gore declined to answer questions from reporters about whether he uses the internet more than four hours a day.
in other news, it was recently revealed that Carl Sagan used the internet regularly, and in fact was secretly an avid user of an early, text-based prototype of the internet at some point in the 80s. His biographer revealed this, as well as the fact that before his death he posted several pro-internet comments on slashdot.org under the nick "Mr. X". The internet may have also inspired some of his scientific writings.
as of a couple weeks ago you could d/l it from aol's website.. it's just that the main page was missing. the .tar.gz file was still there, though, and linked to from freshmeat. i think all they did is take down the main page, not the download..
the person who invented the concepts of programming was a woman. her name was ada lovelace, and she was one of Charles' Babbage's students.
the first word-based programming language, "flowmatic", was also created by a woman whose name i can't remember. i think COBOL was largely based on it or something.
interesting trivia.
yeh.. i know exactly what you mean. i'm an internet pirate, and people confuse me with a "software pirate" all the time.
Some of you may not totally understand what being an internet pirate entails, but it's actually quite simple; i portscan up alongside their packet stream, slam a plank with exposed nails onto their IP adress so they can't get away, then board the computer and take any gold or women who may be on the hard drive. Then as i leave i set their CPU to overclock itself, so it bursts into flames destroying the victim and any knowledge of my crime. If someone never gets home, everyone just assumes a storm got them.
I try to stay away from any heavily armed script kiddies; i just go after the defenseless windows users without any DOS cannons, and i have yet to have any problems. The Cservice Navy may be looking for me, but they'll never find me. Although i now have a peg leg since i got my real leg bitten off in an attack by a viscious Ping of Death several years ago..
arr, me mateys!
i'd try it myself but i'm on a mac and i doubt this is the kind of thing that would work on all versions of linux. maybe later i'll reboot into linuxppc, download it and see if it compiles.. but even so i doubt a 75 mhz machine will reach up into the FM band, although the CRT version might work.
<ramble>
anyway, this might be a great source of random audio for the one-time-pad security thing mentioned in the other article today. put an FM radio in the audio-in jack and run SETI@home or something complex to ensure the sound coming out the CPU will be random and unreproducable. Or run RC5, just for the sheer irony value of cracking one type of encryption and generating another in the process. If OTP were actually something useful, that would be a great idea.. -_-
<ramble>
On monolithic kernels:
Believe it or not, Mac OS X is designed from the ground up to be as hardware-independant as possible. It could have easily run on all platforms with nothing more than a recompile required to run a different program. There were also rumors of it at some point being able to boot from inside of any FS you installed it on, so long as it could read that FS.
The Mach kernel makes even _more_ sense within this context, and there's really no reason to switch now that they're going to nail OSX to the PPC platform.
Oh.. also, Avie Tevanian, currently head of technology or something at Apple, happened to be one of the people on the original Berkeley team that created the first version of Mach. That may just be a coincidence though.
Btw, don't flame apple for PR stunts. If you don't want to develop for Darwin, don't, but there are certain mac-based developers of hardware and some software for whom having the low level code of Mac OS X available to them will be a complete Godsend. If these people are made happy by the Opening of the Source, then whatever posturing apple does is justified.
i don't really totally get what this article was trying to say. it seems like it could be condensed to "X 0WNZ j00!!" the only arguments i could find in it are "we ought to make an upgrade to X11" and "we shouldn't try to replace X". The idea that everyone should stick to X since 'it is standard' does make sense, but it's still kind of stupid to dismiss alternatives out-of-hand before those alternatives have actually been created. I mean, once Berlin has reached the stage of being usable then it makes sense to argue not to switch to it; but bashing a technology before it has a chance to prove itself is just kind of arrogant.
it's clear that Microsoft will do anything they can at this point to distract from the point of this: servers.
AOL isn't complianing about use of the protocol, it's use of the servers. Microsoft is trying to say, look, we're open and AOL isn't, by the fact they're publishing a 'open' protocol which is almost as versatile as UNIX 'Talk'.
Meanwhile AOL has a completely open protocol (TOC) which they have published a completed open-source implementation of (TIK).
The point is, if microsoft wants total openness, and they're expecting AIM to open their servers, why not we make use of the servers Microsoft's put up for their messenger? i mean, they didn't invite us-- they just posted the protocol-- but i guess they're kinda _implying_ they want us to abuse their servers, the way they assumed that AOL wanted microsoft to abuse OSCAR when they posted TOC.
So, let's do whatever we can with/to the MSM servers. And i don't mean use them for messanging; that would be pointless. I mean just do whatever the hell we feel like. Route things through it. Send large files to friends. Or just heavily pingflood it at random or something, i dunno. If a pingflood is nothign more than "unauthorized use of a computer network", it's no less ethical than what MS is already doing to AOL, and i doubt they could really complain about it.
I have no clue how the MSN servers are set up, or even if they exist. Nor do i care; i use AIM, and i don't use it because i like it, i use it because i have friends on AOL. i have no use for another instant messenging protocol, particularly not one such as MSM which is devoid of any redeeming features. Hell, i have little use for _a_ instant messenging protocol. i have IRC. if i had my way, we'd all have accounts on dynip and just use DCC to talk to each other (it even has file transfers!). Or ICQ, it's pretty nice.
But there's probably some way you could send packets of any type with a MSMessenger-like wrapping that would allow you to use the MSMessenger server for other things. I'm just saying, let's look. There may even be ways to shell through it, or run SETI@home. Either way we should certainly _check_.
Comments, anyone?
you again? mr. "anonymous coward"?
look.. why can't you get an account? i've noticed you coming in and immediately saying this in every discussion, and then every time someone brings up Jabber you bash them. If that's your opinion that's ok, but it would be nice if you'd do this from an account. frequently posting the same thing as "anonymous coward" is really just kind of, well, lame..
if it turns out that the four "anonymous coward" posts i'm basing this on just happen to be from four different people with the exact same writing style, well, my apologies..
i clearly remembered somethign about the PPC architecture having 64-bit support, but couldn't find the details, so i did a search on Google.
s tar.html
apparently there is a 64-bit PPC. IBM uses it in some of their workstations. lookit.
http://www.austin.ibm.com/resource/technology/n
"BM's NorthStar superscalar RISC microprocessor integrates high-bandwith and short pipe depth with low latency and zero cycle branch mispredict penalty into a fully scalable 64-bit PowerPC-compatible symmetric multiprocessor (SMP) implementation. Based on PowerPC architecture, the first in the Star Series of microprocessors, the NorthStar processor contains the fundamental design features used in the newly available RS/6000 and AS/400 server systems targeted at leading edge performance in commercial applications as characterized by such industry standard benchmarks as TPC-C, SAP, Lotus Notes and SpecWeb. "
i'd imagine that you ought to be able to easily cobble together something based on this chip. it might not be able to run MacOS, but linux is the point of this thread anyway.
- mcc-baka
who needs sheepshaver? http://www.ibrium.se/linux/mac_on_linux.html
not everyone is paranoid enough to check the authority signature. yes, they should, but i'm not sure everyone will go to the bother, or that everyone knows how. For a lot of people, the words "digisign security certificate below" followed by the results of a cat /dev/random ought to be enough that they will just _assume_ it's valid without ever bothering to check. I think that was what the original point in the article was.
the one-piece design of the really old macintoshes meant that they could be reused really well once you took out all the hardware. For example, they reportedly worked very well as a home for fish. There used to be plans for a MacQuarium floating around the internet but i'm not sure where they went. I have also heard reports of people making bongs out of them (if ANYONE out there has pictures of a MacBong, send them to me.. :). The best part about this is, you could still use the mac-- it would just be naked and caseless.
me and a couple friends got a couple of old broken 286s at a school "garage sale" for about a dollar each. We then threw away the cases and cannabalized the rest for various things. This one girl was planning on making earrings out of a chunk of motherboard, and i have an old expansion slot card that i'm going to hang from my rear-view mirror, the way people used to hang dice there, whenever i get around to it. The card has a parrallel port or something on it; i think it was meant to be a joystick attatchment, but the important thing is it looks neat.
Also, i've heard that old RAM DIMMs make good wind chimes.
The point is, even if it won't boot it isn't useless.
i have a macintosh, and a number of friends who are on AOL and refuse to get a real ISP.
the macintosh native AIM client has some rather serious stability issues related to accidental modem disconnects. if this happens while AIM is in the background, it tends to crash AIM, taking the remote access out with it and forcing me to restart.
here's my question: i've used TiK in LinuxPPC, and it seems to be pretty nice. so i've been trying to run it inside of the macintosh TCL interpreter, in hopes it will be more stable than normal AIM. Unfortunately it won't run-- i open tik.tcl in the wish8.0 application and it says "can't find file toc.tcl" or something.
I'm not sure exactly what to do about this. I looked in the file and noticed it had several "exec" commands, which it says in the README do not work on the macintosh TCL version.
Has anyone used the macintosh TCL interpreter who could help me some with this? Or point me to a place where i could look up what to do? would it be difficult to modify Tik for the macintosh version of TCL?
"OSS for profit" is totally irrelivant in this particular case, since AIM is freeware anyway. AOL gets the gain from the fact that it lets users of their online service talk to people outside, thus letting the AOL users pretend that aol is an ISP.
You may have a point about corporate mindsets, but in this case profit certainly has nothing to do with it.
the program you speak of is already in progress of being built. it's called Jabber, and its approach to servers is very much like you describe; the servers communicate with each other in a decentralized manner, and they eventually expect for ISPs to host jabber servers the way they do mail servers now.
the interesting thing is that they are building the capability for the jabber servers to connect to the ICQ and AIM servers, or anything else for that matter, and then translate those messages into jabber's XML format and send them to the jabber user. so you connect to the jabber network, but are also on ICQ and AIM despite being connected to one server..
Jabber is also, btw, open-source.
-mcc-baka
INTELLECTUAL PROPERTY IS THEFT
mail.earthlink.net has also been down for most of the day.
i spent quite awhile using the iMac keyboard this summer on someone else's computer, and it was sheer hell. It's too small, and it has quite a few keys missing, not because of simplicity but just because they don't have much room.
The problem with this is they left out "end" and "forward-delete" along with the keys that don't do anything. And for someone like me who has gotten horribly dependant on forward-del, it was difficult to try to remember not to use it because it wasn't there.
The thing that pissed me off was they left the "help" key on the keyboard, right next to the delete key like it is on a normal keyboard, the one place where it's easiest to hit it accidentally. Now, if there is one key on the entire keyboard that needs to die, it is the "help" key. (for you windows users, i think it's labeled "insert".) It serves no real purpose, since there's a "help" menu. The only thing it does is that you accidentally hit it when you're trying to press the delete key (it's very close). And then you have to wait for the program's online help to go and load so you can close it. If i knew how i would have remapped the help key to forward-del, but i couldn't figure out how. Anyway i'm glad to be back home on my macally extended with the 33 extra useless keys again. (in my book, the num pad is useless except for first-person game purposes, and my home computer has no 3d card, so..)
and yes, the light in the imac caps lock means you don't have to look at the other side of the keyboard. But it does mean that your left hand is always in the way of the light. so you have to move your left hand to see. Of course the reason it's there in the first place is, again, no room for an independant caps light.
alright, i think i've released some of my pent-up angst now by yelling about keyboards. thank you for listening.