I don't remember a few of the particulars, but the short form of the story goes something like this: Late 19th or early 20th century, a mathematical crank gets a bill introduced into the Indiana state legislature setting pi to 3 with the idea that it's being offered "for the good of the Indiana educational system". Not too many people are really paying attention to the bill, which gets routed in some fairly random directions (IIRC a subcommittee on canal construction was involved for no particularly good reason) and the bill was ultimately either tabled or simply abandoned because nobody really cared.
Like I said, I'm a little hazy on the details (especially the exact date) but the bill never actually became law.
More to the point, not everything is Carbonized. AppleWorks is one of the few Classic apps that will run native on OS X; you still need 9 for some things (scanners, for example; Epson still has no X drivers).
-I understand the roller coaster thing. There's something cool about being able to make yourself barf without having to wait in line. -I understand the monorail, sorta. I'd have set it up a bit differently, but it works. "Garden light rail" (still like that one) fits more or less the same purpose.
But let's be honest: unless you're going to connect the shed to the garage the whole subway idea is completely useless. The monorail would be more fun for that purpose anyway.
Well, they're not workable *everywhere*; I grew up near Boston and I can pretty honestly say that there's no place a monorail could fit in without blowing huge holes through downtown (and anyone who knows anything at all about Boston knows that Bostonians are pretty sick of that sort of thing). Might work in Providence, though.
However, if you have the room for them and sufficient geological stability I think they're a pretty good idea. In a city like Phoenix where everything is fairly new and spread out, yes, it would work; elevated views of a city are often very beautiful as long as it's a nice city (try driving down Boston's Central Artery at night, after most of the traffic is gone).
I thought of doing something like this as a kid, but I had neither expertise nor money.
Maglev would be fun, but let's be honest about this: you'd be doing it for hack value only, because the ride wouldn't much be worth the trouble. The monorail is pretty cool, but I suspect it would get pretty old quickly (maybe build a station at the garage and the pool it would be worth it?
The point is that patching a trap is patching a trap whether it's protected or not. I realize it's isn't quite so dangerous on Unix; it's still skeevy software engineering if you don't have to do it. The mechanisms on MacOS Classic date back to 1981 and were originally designed for a 64K computer. It was a necessity at the time; the problem is that Apple didn't get anything remotely resembling a decent shared library format until ASLM (which sucked because it was tied to Apple's MPW tools, which few used); they later mostly junked it in favor of COM when OpenDoc shipped.
Patching traps was skanky programming but it was necessary. That doesn't make it a good idea now, when on-chip caches are larger than the entire memory bank on the original Mac, which is why Apple did away with it completely rather than try to add equivalent functionality to Rhapsody/Darwin.
All I can say is this: Subterfugue has its legitimate uses, most of which involve reverse-engineering and packet-sniffing (developing a Linux driver for an iPod comes to mind as one application). Any application developer who uses it in a program deserves to be hurt; "patching traps" and/or the equivalent is the API equivalent of a "come from" statement and anyone who feels that it's critical to serious application development is either perverse or lazy.
They do use it, but on an out-of-box OS X system I think you need to use ls to see it. The Finder suppresses the extension, but it is there.
I think Apple's system makes more sense to the end user, but it would seem that using both would be the ideal. After all, Apple recognized a long time ago that file extensions are how the rest of the world does it.
This is one of those nasty little types of hacks that was the main inspiration for Apple going to OS X. To those of you who don't know much about it, every version of MacOS Classic to be seen by the public has a mechanism for subverting system calls that has seen especially heavy use since System 7 (rumor has it that the majority of upgrades to the system have been done this way, at least up until OS 8.5 or so, because no one knows how to operate the Classic build scripts anymore). It's actually routine to short-circuit the Mac Toolbox when doing low-level programming.
If you want some real strange fireworks, get an old (68k) Mac running some version of System 7 and a copy of an extension called Screwy. AFAIK it was written as a prank and will break every UI call in the system without actually crashing anything (at least not immediately). Really sick.
It's almost the same. The main difference is that Sega Swirl allows cheating by allowing you to eliminate single blocks (at a steep point deduction, mind you). I already have a version of Same Game on my Palm IIIx, so I probably won't be trying out Sega's version anytime soon.
I don't know about the arcade game thing on Palm, though. Granted most Palm devices being sold these days seem to be rechargeable, but some of us are still keeping our eyes out for cheap AAAs. Ten minutes of Dreadling (or even Lode Runner) will wipe out your batteries.
Scott Mueller's Upgrading And Repairing PCS (13th edition) includes a couple of sidebars on this subject. For some reason in the midst of a discussion about BIOS flashes he felt compelled to explain how flash capability is pretty common in controller ROMs in cars and went on to describe how his Chevy Impala is running a firmware flash that originally belonged to a Camaro; he even points to a few websites that describe the procedure. (It's late, so I'm not going to go digging through my copy right now, but anyone who's interested could email me tomorrow morning if they don't feel like googling for the sites...)
The difference is that we never had much of an opportunity to get region-free players; it was only something that people in the know could get, and the supply wasn't big enough anyway.
In theory, I suppose you could create an "out of band" watermark by encoding the information as a supersonic or subsonic signal that wouldn't necessarily play through the speakers. I say in theory because as far as I know all sound formats out there are tuned to human hearing and aren't all that likely to be able to encode such streams.
Er... the patent is expired. RSA is as free as it gets. You're free to remain ticked off at the idea of the patent, mind you, I think most of us here are annoyed by it, but principles aside this particular case is no longer relevant.
I once pursued a woman who happened at the time to be an Allaire employee, long before the Macromedia buyout. Beautiful girl, a little short in the brains department, but I didn't figure that out until long after she crushed my heart by hitting on my boss right in front of me. But anyway. Ever since then I've always thought that there was something weirdly appropriate about the fact that someone like her -- bimbo-in-geek's-clothing -- would work for a company whose flagship product was called Cold Fusion. (I met some people a while later who had worked with her -- I got the sense that my impression of her was not far off from the impression she gave around the office.)
As for the matter of wehavethewayout.com... Two companies that had it coming. The dinosaur and the Borg... wonder how much fingerpointing is going on right now. (Come to think of it, Rick Belluzzo... never mind.)
Okay, so I don't pay that much attention to processor load. I'm mostly just looking at the features, ease of use, etc. and the fact that it's free. I think, however, that CPU load isn't that much of an issue on the desktop unless you're doing something else processor-intensive.
Actually, it's much the same proposition as SPARC linux. SPARC was a popular early platform for Linux but it's faded into obscurity; hell, if I was going to buy myself a used SPARCstation I'd probably put NetBSD on it, not Linux.
Solaris is a very powerful, very stable system. People buy SPARC hardware to run Solaris, whether it's a cheapskate Blade box or a high-end enterprise server; while SPARC Linux is nice to have around for hack value, the vast majority of real-world Linux use is on Intel/AMD.
And now I completely undermine my own point.
I grant you that the proposition is a little different with an iBook; they're very elegant little computers with lots of nice features (the newer ones, that is). PowerPC Linux does have much more of a real-world presence than SPARC does right now, so there is a better case for it. Granted I can't afford IBM's obscene prices for a PowerPC box, but old Macs are easy enough to come by, and one never knows when the opportunity to hack a TiVo might pop up. That's why there seems to be a fair amount of pent-up demand for ATX PowerPC motherboards.
But the fact is that Linux on an iBook is a bit pointless, at least from a Mac fan's point of view. Look at it this way: you've just bought a laptop that is configured to run one of the most bulletproof operating systems in the industry, one with over thirty years of history behind it branching in from at least three different directions. MacOS X is every bit as good a system as Linux or Windows NT 5+ (2000 and XP), has more software support than the former, and doesn't abuse its users like the latter.
Granted, it does come down to a matter of taste. But if you've gone through the trouble of buying a Mac as your #1 system and don't have any particularly strong reason for not running a Mac OS (bandwidth-intensive processing using the gigabit ethernet in a G4 box comes to mind), you will at the very least get an awful lot of strange looks from a Mac crowd that is just getting used to the advantages of Unix and Open Source (especially on a portable, where the OS invariably is designed to fit the hardware like a glove no matter the platform).
Yeah. Why exactly would you do that when you've already got OS X? I mean, I'm a Linux fan myself, but unless you're making a political statement (and one can argue that if you are, an iBook is not the platform to be making it on) OS X is as good a system for most purposes (if not better because you don't have to go through the trouble of downloading OpenOffice).
Apple tends to be like this; it's why the Mac has been so marginal (and I say this typing on an iMac). In the beginning they actually discouraged game development on the Macintosh because they wanted it to be taken "seriously"... probably scared away a good many users. I don't think it's a coincidence that this was back in the early Steve days; I think it still goes on today to some extent.
Maybe so, but my feeling on the matter is that if you need something that PostgreSQL doesn't have you're better off going to IBM or Oracle for it. And presumably down the road PostgreSQL will have all that eventually as well?
Slashdot Mirror
I don't remember a few of the particulars, but the short form of the story goes something like this: Late 19th or early 20th century, a mathematical crank gets a bill introduced into the Indiana state legislature setting pi to 3 with the idea that it's being offered "for the good of the Indiana educational system". Not too many people are really paying attention to the bill, which gets routed in some fairly random directions (IIRC a subcommittee on canal construction was involved for no particularly good reason) and the bill was ultimately either tabled or simply abandoned because nobody really cared.
Like I said, I'm a little hazy on the details (especially the exact date) but the bill never actually became law.
/Brian
From what I've heard about the way things are run around his office, that's debatable.
/brian
Yeah, that Arsenic bit reminds me of a really weird fetish story I wish I hadn't read once.
This is more interesting than the subject of the posting, though. I liked Si and Ca too...
/brian
More to the point, not everything is Carbonized. AppleWorks is one of the few Classic apps that will run native on OS X; you still need 9 for some things (scanners, for example; Epson still has no X drivers).
/brian
Okay:
-I understand the roller coaster thing. There's something cool about being able to make yourself barf without having to wait in line.
-I understand the monorail, sorta. I'd have set it up a bit differently, but it works. "Garden light rail" (still like that one) fits more or less the same purpose.
But let's be honest: unless you're going to connect the shed to the garage the whole subway idea is completely useless. The monorail would be more fun for that purpose anyway.
/Brian
Trolling pedantic AC useless mofo...
"Unices". Perfectly acceptable. I've been known to use the term "Linuces" as well, but I doubt that's common usage.
"Boxen" is considered silly, but used. I do believe, however, that "VAXen" is not considered incorrect, though it's not the only term.
/Brian
Well, they're not workable *everywhere*; I grew up near Boston and I can pretty honestly say that there's no place a monorail could fit in without blowing huge holes through downtown (and anyone who knows anything at all about Boston knows that Bostonians are pretty sick of that sort of thing). Might work in Providence, though.
However, if you have the room for them and sufficient geological stability I think they're a pretty good idea. In a city like Phoenix where everything is fairly new and spread out, yes, it would work; elevated views of a city are often very beautiful as long as it's a nice city (try driving down Boston's Central Artery at night, after most of the traffic is gone).
/Brian
I thought of doing something like this as a kid, but I had neither expertise nor money.
Maglev would be fun, but let's be honest about this: you'd be doing it for hack value only, because the ride wouldn't much be worth the trouble. The monorail is pretty cool, but I suspect it would get pretty old quickly (maybe build a station at the garage and the pool it would be worth it?
/Brian
YANAP (You Are Not A Poet), either.
But yeah... coolest dad on the block points works for me; now all I need are a wife, kids, and a gigantic back yard.
/Brian
The point is that patching a trap is patching a trap whether it's protected or not. I realize it's isn't quite so dangerous on Unix; it's still skeevy software engineering if you don't have to do it. The mechanisms on MacOS Classic date back to 1981 and were originally designed for a 64K computer. It was a necessity at the time; the problem is that Apple didn't get anything remotely resembling a decent shared library format until ASLM (which sucked because it was tied to Apple's MPW tools, which few used); they later mostly junked it in favor of COM when OpenDoc shipped.
Patching traps was skanky programming but it was necessary. That doesn't make it a good idea now, when on-chip caches are larger than the entire memory bank on the original Mac, which is why Apple did away with it completely rather than try to add equivalent functionality to Rhapsody/Darwin.
All I can say is this: Subterfugue has its legitimate uses, most of which involve reverse-engineering and packet-sniffing (developing a Linux driver for an iPod comes to mind as one application). Any application developer who uses it in a program deserves to be hurt; "patching traps" and/or the equivalent is the API equivalent of a "come from" statement and anyone who feels that it's critical to serious application development is either perverse or lazy.
/Brian
They do use it, but on an out-of-box OS X system I think you need to use ls to see it. The Finder suppresses the extension, but it is there.
I think Apple's system makes more sense to the end user, but it would seem that using both would be the ideal. After all, Apple recognized a long time ago that file extensions are how the rest of the world does it.
/Brian
... trap patching.
This is one of those nasty little types of hacks that was the main inspiration for Apple going to OS X. To those of you who don't know much about it, every version of MacOS Classic to be seen by the public has a mechanism for subverting system calls that has seen especially heavy use since System 7 (rumor has it that the majority of upgrades to the system have been done this way, at least up until OS 8.5 or so, because no one knows how to operate the Classic build scripts anymore). It's actually routine to short-circuit the Mac Toolbox when doing low-level programming.
If you want some real strange fireworks, get an old (68k) Mac running some version of System 7 and a copy of an extension called Screwy. AFAIK it was written as a prank and will break every UI call in the system without actually crashing anything (at least not immediately). Really sick.
/Brian
It's almost the same. The main difference is that Sega Swirl allows cheating by allowing you to eliminate single blocks (at a steep point deduction, mind you). I already have a version of Same Game on my Palm IIIx, so I probably won't be trying out Sega's version anytime soon.
I don't know about the arcade game thing on Palm, though. Granted most Palm devices being sold these days seem to be rechargeable, but some of us are still keeping our eyes out for cheap AAAs. Ten minutes of Dreadling (or even Lode Runner) will wipe out your batteries.
/Brian
Scott Mueller's Upgrading And Repairing PCS (13th edition) includes a couple of sidebars on this subject. For some reason in the midst of a discussion about BIOS flashes he felt compelled to explain how flash capability is pretty common in controller ROMs in cars and went on to describe how his Chevy Impala is running a firmware flash that originally belonged to a Camaro; he even points to a few websites that describe the procedure. (It's late, so I'm not going to go digging through my copy right now, but anyone who's interested could email me tomorrow morning if they don't feel like googling for the sites...)
/brian
The difference is that we never had much of an opportunity to get region-free players; it was only something that people in the know could get, and the supply wasn't big enough anyway.
/Brian
In theory, I suppose you could create an "out of band" watermark by encoding the information as a supersonic or subsonic signal that wouldn't necessarily play through the speakers. I say in theory because as far as I know all sound formats out there are tuned to human hearing and aren't all that likely to be able to encode such streams.
Just food for thought, really...
/brian
Er... the patent is expired. RSA is as free as it gets. You're free to remain ticked off at the idea of the patent, mind you, I think most of us here are annoyed by it, but principles aside this particular case is no longer relevant.
/Brian
I once pursued a woman who happened at the time to be an Allaire employee, long before the Macromedia buyout. Beautiful girl, a little short in the brains department, but I didn't figure that out until long after she crushed my heart by hitting on my boss right in front of me. But anyway. Ever since then I've always thought that there was something weirdly appropriate about the fact that someone like her -- bimbo-in-geek's-clothing -- would work for a company whose flagship product was called Cold Fusion. (I met some people a while later who had worked with her -- I got the sense that my impression of her was not far off from the impression she gave around the office.)
As for the matter of wehavethewayout.com... Two companies that had it coming. The dinosaur and the Borg... wonder how much fingerpointing is going on right now. (Come to think of it, Rick Belluzzo... never mind.)
/Brian
Okay, so I don't pay that much attention to processor load. I'm mostly just looking at the features, ease of use, etc. and the fact that it's free. I think, however, that CPU load isn't that much of an issue on the desktop unless you're doing something else processor-intensive.
/Brian
That bird wouldn't VOOM if you put 50000 volts through it.
Still, lovely plumage, the Norwegian Blue. Though I understand they tend to pine for the fjords.
/Brian
Troll.
Oh, and when you find a better jukebox program than iTunes let me know, 'kay?
/Brian
Actually, it's much the same proposition as SPARC linux. SPARC was a popular early platform for Linux but it's faded into obscurity; hell, if I was going to buy myself a used SPARCstation I'd probably put NetBSD on it, not Linux.
Solaris is a very powerful, very stable system. People buy SPARC hardware to run Solaris, whether it's a cheapskate Blade box or a high-end enterprise server; while SPARC Linux is nice to have around for hack value, the vast majority of real-world Linux use is on Intel/AMD.
And now I completely undermine my own point.
I grant you that the proposition is a little different with an iBook; they're very elegant little computers with lots of nice features (the newer ones, that is). PowerPC Linux does have much more of a real-world presence than SPARC does right now, so there is a better case for it. Granted I can't afford IBM's obscene prices for a PowerPC box, but old Macs are easy enough to come by, and one never knows when the opportunity to hack a TiVo might pop up. That's why there seems to be a fair amount of pent-up demand for ATX PowerPC motherboards.
But the fact is that Linux on an iBook is a bit pointless, at least from a Mac fan's point of view. Look at it this way: you've just bought a laptop that is configured to run one of the most bulletproof operating systems in the industry, one with over thirty years of history behind it branching in from at least three different directions. MacOS X is every bit as good a system as Linux or Windows NT 5+ (2000 and XP), has more software support than the former, and doesn't abuse its users like the latter.
Granted, it does come down to a matter of taste. But if you've gone through the trouble of buying a Mac as your #1 system and don't have any particularly strong reason for not running a Mac OS (bandwidth-intensive processing using the gigabit ethernet in a G4 box comes to mind), you will at the very least get an awful lot of strange looks from a Mac crowd that is just getting used to the advantages of Unix and Open Source (especially on a portable, where the OS invariably is designed to fit the hardware like a glove no matter the platform).
/Brian
Yeah. Why exactly would you do that when you've already got OS X? I mean, I'm a Linux fan myself, but unless you're making a political statement (and one can argue that if you are, an iBook is not the platform to be making it on) OS X is as good a system for most purposes (if not better because you don't have to go through the trouble of downloading OpenOffice).
/Brian
Apple tends to be like this; it's why the Mac has been so marginal (and I say this typing on an iMac). In the beginning they actually discouraged game development on the Macintosh because they wanted it to be taken "seriously"... probably scared away a good many users. I don't think it's a coincidence that this was back in the early Steve days; I think it still goes on today to some extent.
/Brian
Maybe so, but my feeling on the matter is that if you need something that PostgreSQL doesn't have you're better off going to IBM or Oracle for it. And presumably down the road PostgreSQL will have all that eventually as well?
/Brian