My first computer was a Commodore VIC-20. It rocked. I learned most of my programming skills on it, typing in programs line-by-line from English computer magazines.
Then I upgraded to a Commodore 64. Sweeeeeeeet! So fast! Incredible sound. Impressive graphics. My C64 stayed in action for longer than any of my other computers.
Then came my Amiga 500. Another quantum leap. Workbench blew me away, along with the graphics and sound capabilities. I was playing arcade games with 4096 colours and realistic sound in a time when the IBM & Microsoft world had beeps and monochrome monitors. Pre-emptive multi-tasking, protected memory, responsive GUI with command-line shell, and all in less than 1MB!
I still harbour quite an amount of bitterness for Microsoft because of the way the world gravitated towards IBM compatibles with Windows. The Amiga was clearly a superior computer in every way, but somehow that wasn't enough.
But back to the C64...
Nothing makes me feel more nostalgic that seeing screenshots of old C64 games. I 'lost' ( or found ) so many hours inside the C64 world. Crank on C64!
I prefer my desktop to be written in C. I know that Java is good for basically everything according to Sun, but a desktop???
Yeah I know. It's just a name.
A stoooopid name. Microsoft can get away with calling everything '.NET' because their market is the mindless masses. Most people have no idea what.NET is, and the more Microsoft put.NET in different sentences, the more people will warm to the idea and buy something with.NET in it.
But Sun is supposedly marketing to those who know better. So they have a serious problem, because this audience sees right through them.
Disney have little regard for such concepts as democracy and consumer rights. They throw so much money at one particular senator that he has come to be known as the 'Senator from Disney'. Surely this is contrary to our image of democracy. Until they retire their constant stream of 'donations' and make a public apology for further corrupting an already pretty fucking corrupt political system ( land of the free, my arse ), I urge everyone to do the same as I do: hire their DVDs, re-encode them in DivX;) format, burn them onto CD, and distribute them as much as possible amongst your friends, reminding them each time why you have unresolved issues with Disney, and that the alternative - giving them more money - is only going to make matters worse for all.
Well MY inside source tells me that Intel are ready to release the Pentium X, running at 50 Ghz and having a FSB of 25,000 Mhz.
It has their patented uber-cool ultra-wizzer-extra-special 128-bit extensions, and it also has an expansion port that you can slap an extra processor on in case AMD releases a 256-bit processor in the meantime.
This thing is going to scream, baby! It will plug into existing Slot-1 motherboards, and will be built on a 2 nanometer process.
Microsoft are believed to already have a version of Windows running on the beast, with their new 'WTF That's Friggin Incredible Mate' extensions that go hand in hand with Intels 'Fuck Me If This Isn't A Faster Chip Than AMD Has' architecture.
Wait a moment.......... yes, yes........ THEY'RE ON SALE NOW!
Slackware is very solid, there's no doubting it. It makes a good server system. I'd rather rely on it that RedHat because you don't have to learn all the changes they make to various packages - ie things behave as they should. It's simple and clean and just works. I used Slackware for 2 or so years before moving to Gentoo.
I've been using Gentoo ( unstable; ACCEPT_KEYWORDS=~x86 ) for about 18 months or so now. There are sometimes a few glitches, but that's what you get when you choose the unstable branch. I'm sure the stable branch is more... stable.
The things that set Gentoo apart from Slackware ( they're otherwise quite similar ) are:
1) Portage. It's just beautiful. You can do incremental upgrades till the cows come home, and it even handles major changes like upgrading glibc from 2.2.5 to 2.3.2 without any hickups. Amazing!
2) User forums. They *feel* like a nice, friendly, communal place where you go to hang, chat, and talk about Linux and stuff. In comparison, alt.os.linux.slackware feels like an Afghani desert - after the US military have finished with it. And of course it wouldn't be complete without the regular gang of vultures sitting atop their nests, waiting for the next non-boys-club member to turn up and ( God forbid ) ask a question. Yeah , yeah, I know. Tough love and all. Don't ask stupid questions. RTFM. That's all beside the point, which is that the they're just plain rude and childish, and I'd rather not go there - even if it is someone else who's getting flamed. It makes me feel bad to be a member of the Linux community when I see how they carry on.
I have the deepest respect for Pat. To hold together a Linux distro by himself for so long is nothing short of incredible. Well done Pat. If I need to put together a no-fuss server or even someone else's desktop that I don't wanna maintain, I'll most likely choose Slackware.
... I just finished setting up sendmail / mimedefang / spamassassin / clam-antivirus. And it's working beautifully, too. I'm sure the spammers will find a way around this though - probably initially by making more use of compromised computers. But at least someone's trying to do something about it.
The screenshots of OS4 are looking pretty damned sweet. And with a G4 under the bonnet, it would move along quite nicely. I wonder if OS4 is being ported to the G5?
So firstly, Prescott is 64-bit and Intel needs a 64-bit version of Windows to run on it 'cause hell will freeze over before they use AMD's 64-bit instruction set.
And then Intel start lecturing Asian countries about being obediant little consumers, and buying Windows, and not cutting off their nose to spite their face by investing in Linux.
What was the first bit again? Oh that's right... Intel needs Microsoft big-time or their Prescott will fail. Hmmmmmm.
That's what ALL the ISPs here do. Looks like Johnny Howard and Dickhead Alston have made quite a mark on the rest of the world. They both sit by and let Telstra continue to screw its customers to raise the share price, because they have big plans of selling off the other half of it.
The only strange thing is that, as far as I know, the IMF & World Bank have had nothing to do with it...
But I digress. Every ISP in Australia follows this download capping scheme, and blame their upstream supplier for it, which invariably is Telstra. Sure there are a few 'all you can eat' plans, but either the price is absurd, or the supplier has plans to go out of business real soon. Either way, not a good choice for consumers.
Try posting to the mysql mailing list. There are a few fuckers that scan the list every couple of hours. Each time I post, I get a flurry of spam coming in over the next few hours, which dies down to the usual 1-2 per hour until I post to the list again...
Man, my email box is FULL of this shit. I feel like charging Billy Gates for the next excess bandwidth costs. Seriously, I've received HUNDRES of these fucking things. The only consolation I can take is that it must be fucking SPAMMERS that are getting the virus, because I simply don't have this many friends:)
This has prompted me to uninstall exim, and install sendmail / mimedefang / spamassassin. Lets see the fuckers get through THAT!
We have a number of S3 cards at work. Man they blow chunks! They are the slowest of the slow, and were even in their days.
Their Linux support is woeful. I've tried to get XFree running on a few of them, and I think one out of eight actually work with the XFree driver - about 4 work with the vesa driver ( very, very, very slowly ) and the rest don't even run in vesa mode. For Christ's sake!
Also, as an owner of a Radeon 64MB DDR, I have been on the receiving end if their S3 Texture Compression patent. The DRI developers have begged S3 to allow them to include support for it in the Radeon driver - apparent the algorithm itself is simple and well-known in the industry. S3 have not responded at all to anyone.
I suppose there are some weirdos out there who use Windows and read Slashdot, but seriously, the majority of us should avoid S3 like the plague. They're not even concerned with 'extra features like OpenGL', so if bought, this card will most likely run just like the rest of the crap they've churned out so far: in vesa mode if you're lucky, otherwise get used to your console.
Israel is not democratic. Palestinians - the majority of the former population - are not allowed to vote.
Also, the form of government is irrelevant. The point is that weapons are OK for the US & allies, yet not OK for anyone else. The US have shown little respect for the non-proliferation treaty, in developing 'bunker-buster' bombs - which would have been illegal had anyone else developed them, but are supposedly OK for the US since they are a 'natural projection of an existing weapons system', and not a 'new' weapon. Nice loophole.
I assume most people will disagree with it, but... well done whoever posted it.
A question which comes to mind after reading this is:
Why is it illegal for North Korea or Iraq to supposedly have a nuclear / chemical weapons program, when US-Israel have the most enthusiastic nuclear & chemical weapons programs on Earth with full, offical government funding, and no-one bats an eyelid?
I know the answer that the right-wing will produce: that the US-Israel program is for defense only - to protect the innocents of the world, whereas the Iraqi / North Korean programs are clearly for TERRORISM and must be halted at all costs. There are some problems with their arguments, including:
1) Iraq didn't actually have any of the weapons they were accused of having
2) The people most likely to use their WOMD for terrorism are the US-Israeli people. Considering they have the largest stockpiles of WOMD on Earth, all other countries would be foolish to challenge them. Therefore the argument that the stockpiles are for defense seems to be quite a stretch of the truth, especially in light of recent history ( and not-so-recent history in Israel's case ).
Clearly no-one is going to fine you for doing that. You will only get in trouble if you have been caught using list-generating software for the purpose of spamming.
This must be the first useful thing which that stupid goat, Dick Alston, has ever done. It must have been drafted by someone else and simply rubber stamped by him.
For those with short memories, Alston is the one who banned internet gambling and porn, thereby sending any Australian companies involved in the above overseas. Of course Australians have no trouble engaging in internet gambling or downloading porn - just not from Australian servers now. Well done Alston!
I'm curious though, this bill bucks the liberal government's current trend of screwing the individual. Maybe they're just trying to distract us from ever-increasing public transport & medical costs.
All you have to do is replace fuel rods once in a while and you get emission-free, clean power
I'm not convinced. The half-life of radioactive waste that comes from nuclear power plants is measured in hundreds of thousands of years. What are you going to do with it? Put it in the ground along a fault line or in an active volcano like Bush is doing? Or how about put it somewhere where the US isn't likely do start a 'shock and awe' campagin. And then you have to consider problems like meteors and sabbotage and a long list of unknowns that carries on for hundres of thousands of years.
If we did something like shoot the radioactive waste into the sun, I would be satisfied that we are disposing of it safely. Any other way of disposal, such as the most common - paying 3rd world countries to deal with it - is simple not acceptable. As humans who live for 60 - 90 years, we don't have a right to make decisions that could make a part on the Earth uninhabitable for hundreds of thousands of years. Anyone who tells you differently is either not considering the consequences fully, or has a stake in the nuclear industry.
Keep in mind when you government tells you how 'safe' nuclear power is that they are using ammunition made from 'depleated' uranium which they claim is 100% safe, and yet there are plenty of claims to the contrary, coming from both the victims ( Iraqis, for example) and the aggressors ( US soliders ).
There are yet more problems with nuclear power. Think of the trouble the world is in over oil. Uranium will be no different. If you base the world's energy needs on a scarce resource, it will result in eternal military conquest. We must use a renewable energy source. There are plenty of them. The sun has given us all the energy we have needed for the past couple of million years, and will continue to do so for many more to come. The reason why governements don't put more research into renewable energy technology is that they think they can gain control of the scarce energy sources, and make absurd profits in the process.
Living in Australia, with one of the world's richest known sources of uraniam, I am petrified at the thought of what will happen when the oil runs out and the US comes looking for alternative sources. Renewable is the only answer.
With the dubious nature of the 'proof' offered so far for Iraq's WOMD, I am highly suspicious of 'proof' of any other country's WOMD 'stockpiles'.
The US only has itself to blame over Afghanistan. The CIA have been in there for 40 years, pushing their own political agenda, and growing MJ for conversion to hash and Opium for conversion to heroin so they can sell it on the black market and donate the funds to US-friendly military dictatorships. Note the target of the Taliban attack: the WTC building and the Pentagon. I think they were making a statement; they certainly weren't random targets. You reap what you sow.
As for North Korea, I still assert that there is far more proof of US and Israeli stockpiles of WOMD than North Korea could ever hope to have. Want to rid the world of Nuclear-toting bufoons? Disarm the US first. We don't have to destroy every WOMD they have - just 99% of them, so their stockpiles are more in-line with the rest of the world. Then you may resume bitching about North Korea.
Terrorists, lunatic nuclear-toting buffoons, vile dictators?
What terrorists? No link has been made between Iraq and any terrorists yet. Nuclear-toting bufoons? I thought Bush was an American, not an Iraqi.
hundreds of millions of people they give aid to every day around the world
Like who? Sure they give billions of dollars worth of WOMD to Israel. And they sometimes give away their surplus genetically modified food to countries who don't want it. The problem with US 'aid' is that it comes with a dick rammed up the arse - ie the World Bank and the International Monetary Fund. The US doesn't 'give' anything away when you consider the aims of these 2 organisations.
Slashdot Mirror
My first computer was a Commodore VIC-20. It rocked. I learned most of my programming skills on it, typing in programs line-by-line from English computer magazines.
Then I upgraded to a Commodore 64. Sweeeeeeeet!
So fast! Incredible sound. Impressive graphics. My C64 stayed in action for longer than any of my other computers.
Then came my Amiga 500. Another quantum leap. Workbench blew me away, along with the graphics and sound capabilities. I was playing arcade games with 4096 colours and realistic sound in a time when the IBM & Microsoft world had beeps and monochrome monitors. Pre-emptive multi-tasking, protected memory, responsive GUI with command-line shell, and all in less than 1MB!
I still harbour quite an amount of bitterness for Microsoft because of the way the world gravitated towards IBM compatibles with Windows. The Amiga was clearly a superior computer in every way, but somehow that wasn't enough.
But back to the C64...
Nothing makes me feel more nostalgic that seeing screenshots of old C64 games. I 'lost' ( or found ) so many hours inside the C64 world. Crank on C64!
I prefer my desktop to be written in C.
.NET is, and the more Microsoft put .NET in different sentences, the more people will warm to the idea and buy something with .NET in it.
I know that Java is good for basically everything according to Sun, but a desktop???
Yeah I know. It's just a name.
A stoooopid name. Microsoft can get away with calling everything '.NET' because their market is the mindless masses. Most people have no idea what
But Sun is supposedly marketing to those who know better. So they have a serious problem, because this audience sees right through them.
Java Desktop my arse.
Like I said, I prefer my C Desktop. Idiots.
Disney have little regard for such concepts as democracy and consumer rights.
They throw so much money at one particular senator that he has come to be known as the 'Senator from Disney'. Surely this is contrary to our image of democracy.
Until they retire their constant stream of 'donations' and make a public apology for further corrupting an already pretty fucking corrupt political system ( land of the free, my arse ), I urge everyone to do the same as I do: hire their DVDs, re-encode them in DivX;) format, burn them onto CD, and distribute them as much as possible amongst your friends, reminding them each time why you have unresolved issues with Disney, and that the alternative - giving them more money - is only going to make matters worse for all.
Well MY inside source tells me that Intel are ready to release the Pentium X, running at 50 Ghz and having a FSB of 25,000 Mhz.
.......... yes, yes ........ THEY'RE ON SALE NOW!
It has their patented uber-cool ultra-wizzer-extra-special 128-bit extensions, and it also has an expansion port that you can slap an extra processor on in case AMD releases a 256-bit processor in the meantime.
This thing is going to scream, baby! It will plug into existing Slot-1 motherboards, and will be built on a 2 nanometer process.
Microsoft are believed to already have a version of Windows running on the beast, with their new 'WTF That's Friggin Incredible Mate' extensions that go hand in hand with Intels 'Fuck Me If This Isn't A Faster Chip Than AMD Has' architecture.
Wait a moment
Slackware is very solid, there's no doubting it. It makes a good server system. I'd rather rely on it that RedHat because you don't have to learn all the changes they make to various packages - ie things behave as they should. It's simple and clean and just works. I used Slackware for 2 or so years before moving to Gentoo.
... stable.
I've been using Gentoo ( unstable; ACCEPT_KEYWORDS=~x86 ) for about 18 months or so now. There are sometimes a few glitches, but that's what you get when you choose the unstable branch. I'm sure the stable branch is more
The things that set Gentoo apart from Slackware ( they're otherwise quite similar ) are:
1) Portage. It's just beautiful. You can do incremental upgrades till the cows come home, and it even handles major changes like upgrading glibc from 2.2.5 to 2.3.2 without any hickups. Amazing!
2) User forums. They *feel* like a nice, friendly, communal place where you go to hang, chat, and talk about Linux and stuff. In comparison, alt.os.linux.slackware feels like an Afghani desert - after the US military have finished with it. And of course it wouldn't be complete without the regular gang of vultures sitting atop their nests, waiting for the next non-boys-club member to turn up and ( God forbid ) ask a question. Yeah , yeah, I know. Tough love and all. Don't ask stupid questions. RTFM. That's all beside the point, which is that the they're just plain rude and childish, and I'd rather not go there - even if it is someone else who's getting flamed. It makes me feel bad to be a member of the Linux community when I see how they carry on.
I have the deepest respect for Pat. To hold together a Linux distro by himself for so long is nothing short of incredible. Well done Pat. If I need to put together a no-fuss server or even someone else's desktop that I don't wanna maintain, I'll most likely choose Slackware.
I'm sure the spammers will find a way around this though - probably initially by making more use of compromised computers.
But at least someone's trying to do something about it.
Have a look around on the amigaworld.net website.
The screenshots of OS4 are looking pretty damned sweet. And with a G4 under the bonnet, it would move along quite nicely. I wonder if OS4 is being ported to the G5?
Very cool, and quite reasonable price.
How about the fact that it runs the Amiga OS 4 and is compatible with old Amiga software? That must count for something...
So firstly, Prescott is 64-bit and Intel needs a 64-bit version of Windows to run on it 'cause hell will freeze over before they use AMD's 64-bit instruction set.
... Intel needs Microsoft big-time or their Prescott will fail. Hmmmmmm.
And then Intel start lecturing Asian countries about being obediant little consumers, and buying Windows, and not cutting off their nose to spite their face by investing in Linux.
What was the first bit again? Oh that's right
That's what ALL the ISPs here do. Looks like Johnny Howard and Dickhead Alston have made quite a mark on the rest of the world. They both sit by and let Telstra continue to screw its customers to raise the share price, because they have big plans of selling off the other half of it.
The only strange thing is that, as far as I know, the IMF & World Bank have had nothing to do with it...
But I digress. Every ISP in Australia follows this download capping scheme, and blame their upstream supplier for it, which invariably is Telstra. Sure there are a few 'all you can eat' plans, but either the price is absurd, or the supplier has plans to go out of business real soon. Either way, not a good choice for consumers.
Try posting to the mysql mailing list.
There are a few fuckers that scan the list every couple of hours. Each time I post, I get a flurry of spam coming in over the next few hours, which dies down to the usual 1-2 per hour until I post to the list again...
Man, my email box is FULL of this shit. I feel like charging Billy Gates for the next excess bandwidth costs. Seriously, I've received HUNDRES of these fucking things. The only consolation I can take is that it must be fucking SPAMMERS that are getting the virus, because I simply don't have this many friends :)
This has prompted me to uninstall exim, and install sendmail / mimedefang / spamassassin. Lets see the fuckers get through THAT!
We have a number of S3 cards at work. Man they blow chunks! They are the slowest of the slow, and were even in their days.
Their Linux support is woeful. I've tried to get XFree running on a few of them, and I think one out of eight actually work with the XFree driver - about 4 work with the vesa driver ( very, very, very slowly ) and the rest don't even run in vesa mode. For Christ's sake!
Also, as an owner of a Radeon 64MB DDR, I have been on the receiving end if their S3 Texture Compression patent. The DRI developers have begged S3 to allow them to include support for it in the Radeon driver - apparent the algorithm itself is simple and well-known in the industry. S3 have not responded at all to anyone.
I suppose there are some weirdos out there who use Windows and read Slashdot, but seriously, the majority of us should avoid S3 like the plague. They're not even concerned with 'extra features like OpenGL', so if bought, this card will most likely run just like the rest of the crap they've churned out so far: in vesa mode if you're lucky, otherwise get used to your console.
Hmmm???
Works on mine.
Go to the MySQL web site. They either have a link that works, or have mirrored the article.
Yes that's exactly what the US does.
Hands guns to anyone who wants them - you can buy them from K-Mart.
And it also hands bigger weapons, even WOMD to Israel - a country which has been breaking UN resolutions since the UN was founded.
Israel is not democratic.
Palestinians - the majority of the former population - are not allowed to vote.
Also, the form of government is irrelevant. The point is that weapons are OK for the US & allies, yet not OK for anyone else. The US have shown little respect for the non-proliferation treaty, in developing 'bunker-buster' bombs - which would have been illegal had anyone else developed them, but are supposedly OK for the US since they are a 'natural projection of an existing weapons system', and not a 'new' weapon. Nice loophole.
Oh! They disappeared.
That's the lamest excuse I've heard yet!
AHA!
Well said.
I assume most people will disagree with it, but ... well done whoever posted it.
A question which comes to mind after reading this is:
Why is it illegal for North Korea or Iraq to supposedly have a nuclear / chemical weapons program, when US-Israel have the most enthusiastic nuclear & chemical weapons programs on Earth with full, offical government funding, and no-one bats an eyelid?
I know the answer that the right-wing will produce: that the US-Israel program is for defense only - to protect the innocents of the world, whereas the Iraqi / North Korean programs are clearly for TERRORISM and must be halted at all costs. There are some problems with their arguments, including:
1) Iraq didn't actually have any of the weapons they were accused of having
2) The people most likely to use their WOMD for terrorism are the US-Israeli people. Considering they have the largest stockpiles of WOMD on Earth, all other countries would be foolish to challenge them. Therefore the argument that the stockpiles are for defense seems to be quite a stretch of the truth, especially in light of recent history ( and not-so-recent history in Israel's case ).
Clearly no-one is going to fine you for doing that.
You will only get in trouble if you have been caught using list-generating software for the purpose of spamming.
This must be the first useful thing which that stupid goat, Dick Alston, has ever done. It must have been drafted by someone else and simply rubber stamped by him.
For those with short memories, Alston is the one who banned internet gambling and porn, thereby sending any Australian companies involved in the above overseas. Of course Australians have no trouble engaging in internet gambling or downloading porn - just not from Australian servers now. Well done Alston!
I'm curious though, this bill bucks the liberal government's current trend of screwing the individual. Maybe they're just trying to distract us from ever-increasing public transport & medical costs.
I'm not convinced. The half-life of radioactive waste that comes from nuclear power plants is measured in hundreds of thousands of years. What are you going to do with it? Put it in the ground along a fault line or in an active volcano like Bush is doing? Or how about put it somewhere where the US isn't likely do start a 'shock and awe' campagin. And then you have to consider problems like meteors and sabbotage and a long list of unknowns that carries on for hundres of thousands of years.
If we did something like shoot the radioactive waste into the sun, I would be satisfied that we are disposing of it safely. Any other way of disposal, such as the most common - paying 3rd world countries to deal with it - is simple not acceptable. As humans who live for 60 - 90 years, we don't have a right to make decisions that could make a part on the Earth uninhabitable for hundreds of thousands of years. Anyone who tells you differently is either not considering the consequences fully, or has a stake in the nuclear industry.
Keep in mind when you government tells you how 'safe' nuclear power is that they are using ammunition made from 'depleated' uranium which they claim is 100% safe, and yet there are plenty of claims to the contrary, coming from both the victims ( Iraqis, for example) and the aggressors ( US soliders ).
There are yet more problems with nuclear power. Think of the trouble the world is in over oil. Uranium will be no different. If you base the world's energy needs on a scarce resource, it will result in eternal military conquest. We must use a renewable energy source. There are plenty of them. The sun has given us all the energy we have needed for the past couple of million years, and will continue to do so for many more to come. The reason why governements don't put more research into renewable energy technology is that they think they can gain control of the scarce energy sources, and make absurd profits in the process.
Living in Australia, with one of the world's richest known sources of uraniam, I am petrified at the thought of what will happen when the oil runs out and the US comes looking for alternative sources. Renewable is the only answer.
With the dubious nature of the 'proof' offered so far for Iraq's WOMD, I am highly suspicious of 'proof' of any other country's WOMD 'stockpiles'.
The US only has itself to blame over Afghanistan. The CIA have been in there for 40 years, pushing their own political agenda, and growing MJ for conversion to hash and Opium for conversion to heroin so they can sell it on the black market and donate the funds to US-friendly military dictatorships. Note the target of the Taliban attack: the WTC building and the Pentagon. I think they were making a statement; they certainly weren't random targets. You reap what you sow.
As for North Korea, I still assert that there is far more proof of US and Israeli stockpiles of WOMD than North Korea could ever hope to have. Want to rid the world of Nuclear-toting bufoons? Disarm the US first. We don't have to destroy every WOMD they have - just 99% of them, so their stockpiles are more in-line with the rest of the world. Then you may resume bitching about North Korea.
What terrorists? No link has been made between Iraq and any terrorists yet. Nuclear-toting bufoons? I thought Bush was an American, not an Iraqi.
Like who? Sure they give billions of dollars worth of WOMD to Israel. And they sometimes give away their surplus genetically modified food to countries who don't want it. The problem with US 'aid' is that it comes with a dick rammed up the arse - ie the World Bank and the International Monetary Fund. The US doesn't 'give' anything away when you consider the aims of these 2 organisations.
So, sir, what exactly were you talking about?