Have been using it since about 1992 or so. Linux 0.93. The first thing I install on any new system is joe. I sure won't use it for serious editing (Sublime Text r00lz!) but I do use it every single day for editing files on servers on and off.
joe's keyboard layout (^Kx and that stuff) is based on WordStar, a word processor back in the 80's. I find the WS/joe idea of a modal selection where you explicity set the start end end of the block you want to work with very useful.
I wrote a spreadsheet in 1988 that ran on DOS that had the same key combinations as joe. I really need to see if that thing still compiles.
There are only two jobs in the world whew you lie down on your back and play with floppy cables in dark places. One is a prostitute, the other a network admin. Prostitutes at least usually leave happy clients, they get more respect and often better pay too!
3 weeks ago I visited my dad. He is 75. Still working. His boss is an old apprentice of him who lets him run his shop a few days a week while he works in his own electronics shop, builds circuits and sells and toys with 3D printers. This guy started his electronics shop a few years ago, at the tender young age of 60, because he like to play with new electronics gizmos that you build yourself (most of his stock are electronic building kits). I (age 45) felt like a kid in a candy store there.
His shop has a inventory system that runs on SCO Unix and dates from the 80s. Someone screwed up and started printing inventory reports for an entire year. My dad dug out the SCO manuals, went into the terminal and found the command line stuff to stop the printer.
Now they have a problem. Their terminal program runs on DOS and it uses a strange version of telnet that can print locally (on a dot matrix). They can't use it anymore cause they can't find floppy disks that can boot DOS anymore. This is problematic. The inventory program on SCO is still better than anything you can find nowadays and they like to use it. The menu is burned into the green-screen monitor.
I looked into using a Raspberry Pi as a terminal with cKermit to get rid of the old (one still running since the 80s') DOS boxes. Old 60 year old guy installed it himself.
This was 3 weeks ago, in 2015. That is what a digital native looks like.
I agree with you. It is still possible to get a lot of the 80's feel by playing with Arduinos and Raspberry Pi's. I will definietly look at the mbed thing. A few eeks ago I helped my dad to keep an old SCO Unix program running that he has been using for 20 years. He could not us the terminal anymore because he could not get floppy disks to boot DOS for his special terminal program. So we looked into using a RaspPi with ckermit.
Thermonuclear refers to the use of fusion to gain more energy. It can be used for two things:
a) To make a really humongous bomb. High-yield more than 5MT. b) To boost a pure fission bomb to get the same amount of energy in a smaller package.
Almost all modern nuclear weapons are of the b) sort. They are all thermonuclear but they are small. A pure fission device (Little boy, for instance) is physically large for the boom you get.
That said, most of the weapons do not use thermonuclear energy as a main source. The thermonuclear reaction produces copious neutron which boosts the fission part. The weapon is still primary a boosted fission device.
Type (a) high-yield weapons are scarce things. The US, for one, does not have any, the Russians not many and they have a specific bunker-busting role. They are also physically large devices and hard to steal.
(b) type weapons are much more common. This is the threat, but they are still thermonuclear.
Uhm, the US is a BIG country. The Iranians are probably capable of building maybe a 150-200kt device, if that. An EMP pulse would take out the power in mid-sized city for a few weeks at most. It would also cause major damage on the ground.
90% of the US population would not die from starvation. Maybe 0.1% would die from the blast itself.
Even if they had a 50's style high-yield multi-megaton thermonuclear device they could not make 90% of the US population starve.
Even the USSR at its high point would not have been able to kill 90% of the US population with massive missile strike.
Of course, after the Iranians made their point and killed 0.1% of US citizens they would face the music.
You really think that the Israelis are so stupid as to get the US to engage in a proxy war for them so that they can claim Arab land? Really?
I disagree with Israelis and think the US should make peace with Persian ASAP, but the Israelis are acting out of fear. They live in a rough neighbourhood.
I once had a small Notes web thing running for a bunch of people in Scandinavia. The thing crashed every time when someone from Iceland worked with it. Ruend out that the icelandic character is not in some middle european character set (this was before UTF-8) and wasted Notes every time. That was a total bastard of a problem to find.
> I figured I needed that for sure and bought a modem dongle but then found I never used it.
Same with my internal CD drive. I am no sooooo happy with an extra thin laptop because that drive is gone, and I use my exern one maybe 3 times per year. Mostly for CD's on magazines.
Few people use drives, SSD or not, that can sturate a USB bus NOW, but this could well change in the FUTURE which is why extra bandwidth gives some breathing room unless you want another standard in 5 years.
I wish every Google and Apple and Linux and Microsoft engineer will be forced to work with QNX for a week as a training session just to show them how things were supposed to be done. Same with BeOS.
I keep an old Thinkpad from 2000 around just to occasionally boot up BeOS on it and toy around a bit.
Slashdot Mirror
Have been using it since about 1992 or so. Linux 0.93. The first thing I install on any new system is joe. I sure won't use it for serious editing (Sublime Text r00lz!) but I do use it every single day for editing files on servers on and off.
joe's keyboard layout (^Kx and that stuff) is based on WordStar, a word processor back in the 80's.
I find the WS/joe idea of a modal selection where you explicity set the start end end of the block you want to work with very
useful.
I wrote a spreadsheet in 1988 that ran on DOS that had the same key combinations as joe. I really need to see if that thing still compiles.
> through human history the majority of men didn't reproduce.
Out of scientific interest, do you have any references for that ?
Start pirating his works. And publish them under your own name.
You had a great time in Siberia. Wow.
Hat off you you, sir.
There are only two jobs in the world whew you lie down on your back and play with floppy cables in dark places. One is a prostitute, the other a network admin. Prostitutes at least usually leave happy clients, they get more respect and often better pay too!
Out of a mathematical interest, do you have any data or a link here? If the article is in german, no problems, I speak the language.
3 weeks ago I visited my dad. He is 75. Still working. His boss is an old apprentice of him who lets him run his shop a few days a week while he works in his own electronics shop, builds circuits and sells and toys with 3D printers. This guy started his electronics shop a few years ago, at the tender young age of 60, because he like to play with new electronics gizmos that you build yourself (most of his stock are electronic building kits). I (age 45) felt like a kid in a candy store there.
His shop has a inventory system that runs on SCO Unix and dates from the 80s. Someone screwed up and started printing inventory reports for an entire year. My dad dug out the SCO manuals, went into the terminal and found the command line stuff to stop the printer.
Now they have a problem. Their terminal program runs on DOS and it uses a strange version of telnet that can print locally (on a dot matrix). They can't use it anymore cause they can't find floppy disks that can boot DOS anymore. This is problematic. The inventory program on SCO is still better than anything you can find nowadays and they like to use it. The menu is burned into the green-screen monitor.
I looked into using a Raspberry Pi as a terminal with cKermit to get rid of the old (one still running since the 80s') DOS boxes. Old 60 year old guy installed it himself.
This was 3 weeks ago, in 2015. That is what a digital native looks like.
I agree with you. It is still possible to get a lot of the 80's feel by playing with Arduinos and Raspberry Pi's. I will definietly look at the mbed thing.
A few eeks ago I helped my dad to keep an old SCO Unix program running that he has been using for 20 years. He could not us the terminal anymore because he could not get floppy disks to boot DOS for his special terminal program. So we looked into using a RaspPi with ckermit.
Any suggestions on that FPGA board?
Bender runs on 6502? THAT explains a lot!
Karlsruhe Institute of Technology. KIT?
There are 20 men for each girl at that place. Stay away :) That said, I know a woman who studied there.
Let's clarify something technical here.
Thermonuclear refers to the use of fusion to gain more energy. It can be used for two things:
a) To make a really humongous bomb. High-yield more than 5MT.
b) To boost a pure fission bomb to get the same amount of energy in a smaller package.
Almost all modern nuclear weapons are of the b) sort. They are all thermonuclear but they are small. A pure fission device (Little boy, for instance) is physically large for the boom you get.
That said, most of the weapons do not use thermonuclear energy as a main source. The thermonuclear reaction produces copious neutron which boosts the fission part. The weapon is still primary a boosted fission device.
Type (a) high-yield weapons are scarce things. The US, for one, does not have any, the Russians not many and they have a specific bunker-busting role. They are also physically large devices and hard to steal.
(b) type weapons are much more common. This is the threat, but they are still thermonuclear.
If the Iranians get one, I would be freaked because then the Saudis will buy a few from Pakistan.
When it comes to fanaticism the Persians are not even close to the Saudis. I would be freaked if they get a bomb.
Uhm, the US is a BIG country. The Iranians are probably capable of building maybe a 150-200kt device, if that. An EMP pulse would take out the power in mid-sized city for a few weeks at most. It would also cause major damage on the ground.
90% of the US population would not die from starvation. Maybe 0.1% would die from the blast itself.
Even if they had a 50's style high-yield multi-megaton thermonuclear device they could not make 90% of the US population starve.
Even the USSR at its high point would not have been able to kill 90% of the US population with massive missile strike.
Of course, after the Iranians made their point and killed 0.1% of US citizens they would face the music.
You really think that the Israelis are so stupid as to get the US to engage in a proxy war for them so that they can claim Arab land?
Really?
I disagree with Israelis and think the US should make peace with Persian ASAP, but the Israelis are acting out of fear. They live in a rough neighbourhood.
Suppose all guns came without safety catches. I now go and blame this technical oversight for the increase in people with blown-off heads.
You now claim that blaming the safety-catch-less badly designed guns for the casualties is asinine.
> It gets the job done quickly and easily,
So does a gun without a safety catch.
Uhuh
CSV is for p*ssies. Postgres can store BLOBs directly, right? All you need is a table with an integer id and a blob.
Hah. Slashdot breaks too! It is the Icelandic 'thorn' character http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/T...
I once had a small Notes web thing running for a bunch of people in Scandinavia. The thing crashed every time when someone from Iceland worked with it. Ruend out that the icelandic character is not in some middle european character set (this was before UTF-8) and wasted Notes every time. That was a total bastard of a problem to find.
All successful 'open' and 'free' and 'democratic' systems (not just software) are run by a small dedicated old boys club.
Firewire, at least, was because of a huge user-base of FireWire video cameras and devices.
There was one model of MacBook where they took FW out, and because of user complaints it was back in the next generation.
> I figured I needed that for sure and bought a modem dongle but then found I never used it.
Same with my internal CD drive. I am no sooooo happy with an extra thin laptop because that drive is gone, and I use my exern one maybe 3 times per year. Mostly for CD's on magazines.
Few people use drives, SSD or not, that can sturate a USB bus NOW, but this could well change in the FUTURE which is why extra bandwidth gives some breathing room unless you want another standard in 5 years.
My normal gigabyte motherboard has a few thunderbolt ports on it
QNX. Sigh.
I wish every Google and Apple and Linux and Microsoft engineer will be forced to work with QNX for a week as a training session just to show them how things were supposed to be done. Same with BeOS.
I keep an old Thinkpad from 2000 around just to occasionally boot up BeOS on it and toy around a bit.