Could someone provide us with a more complete list of mirrors? Hey, even a clue as to where such a list exists would be fine. Seems lame of us to be hammering the hell out of one site, and, more importantly, I can't download because of the number of users already on.
And in recent versions, you can even check and cull your cookie jar (by pressing =, I think...). Pretty spiffy. And it's smarter about asking for confirmation that either NSC or MSIE: you can choose "yes, allow all cookies from this domain" and "no, forbid all cookies from this domain" instead of just yes/no each time, if you like.
There should be a better heirarchy in the domain space like: time.mag.com, people.mag.com, etc.
Unfortunately, as stuff like the hassle over pokey.org reveals, maniac lawyers don't currently respect name spaces.
They should, but there's no case law out there that clues them in about it.
As for fuzzy directory services, as advocated upthread: not going to work. They already exist in various forms, including categorized directories like Yahoo (aren't they now charging for favourable placement?) and that RealNames thing, whatever it is.
The problem is that there is more than one fuzzy directory. Trademarks seek to protect exclusivity (within bounds -- yes, a proper domain-name-space should define some of those bounds), and there's only one generally recognized exclusive forum for everyone's precious special words: "your own dawt cawn." It's the only one that everyone's pretty much forced to use (unless, of course, you luck into a snazzy numeric IP and promote that -- there's a trend or subculture waiting to happen, there).
I've always wondered why there isn't more webbed information about these things. They sucked and were cool at the same time...
They were originally built by Cemcorp, the Canadian Educational Microprocessor Corporation. Unisys bought either the Icon or the whole company at some later point.
They were, with few exceptions that I knew of, diskless workstations. They got everything off of a central file-server, called the Lexicon. This was the weak link: turn on 20 of them at once and prepare to wait 15 minutes for them to all get the OS loaded. A small square in the upper right corner of the screen flickered when the machine wasn't just hanging, but was, rather, actually talking to the Lexicon.
There was an actual danger of files being left open on the Lexicon if you turned off an Icon while it was in the middle of doing something. Pretty bad.
The original beasts were pretty much all metal construction, except, of course, for the plastic keys on the English/French keyboard, and the rubber bumper on the front.
They had some kind of primitive sound synthesizer built in. When starting up, they'd say "dhtick," and there were some educational games (Speak Face, anyone?) that would talk. Ours often greeted you when you logged in: "Hah-low!"
They did indeed run QNX, with optional GUI shells over the command line. The first, called Ambience, was a pointy-clicky menu system. A later creation, which arrived, I think, with the Icon II, was called ICONLook. It tried to look cooler than Ambience (not hard), but was at least three times as slow. There was also a GUI file-manager that you could start up from the command line, called House. The command line was a reasonable place to be. There were various commands with odd names that corresponded to what we'd expect on a Unix system (the best was probably the delete command: "frel," for "file release"). The languages were all Watcom. The OS was buggy.
There was a text editor, a simple word processor, and then something more complex called WPro that you used if you felt cool. The text editor took good advantage of the trackball, and had a cut-and-paste clipboard system that held more than one thing at a time. There was a flat DBMS called Watfile.
Some programs took advantage of the networked nature of the machines to let you chat with others or play games against each other. Well, actually, two did, that I know of. We didn't even have e-mail, which is pretty grim. Perhaps it was available and we just didn't have it.
While watching the machine crash, or waiting 10 minutes for a program to load, you have lots of time to think of abusive names for it. Useless ICAN'T is my favorite. "Oh, no, it's loading ICAN'T-Look!"
Some years after they appeared in my school board, a I saw a What's New item in Popular Science about them. I've never met anyone from outside of Ontario who's ever heard of the things, though.
I wish I had the manuals...or any other information about them.
Ease of use. Win95 and MacOS machines just don't need administration the way Linux does. You buy them, you turn them on, you use them, you turn them off. "Setting up my Internet," is probably the toughest thing a Win95 user ever really has to do, and that's a hand-holdy, pointy-clicky, press-F1-for-help experience at worst. At best, they just install some software given to them by their ISP. Installing software (or 90% of it, these days) involves double clicking and then chatting to InstallShield (and you really only have to grunt).
If people moved right from that to Linux in its current state, they'd be asking "stupid questions" and then you'd just be sneering at them and telling them to "go use your stupid Macintosh."
Billy's pocket
Or Steve's. The person you're attempting to condescend to mentioned that most people who find Windows "good enough" would probably be better served by MacOS. Given where MacOS X is headed, I think that's pretty accurate.
I've probably missed some points on both sides. Whoop-de-doo.
MS used to be good enough for me. DOS/Win3.1 was reasonably good at doing what it did, and versions of DOS after 4.00 (shudder) seemed to be getting better and better.
Maybe my expectations have risen, or maybe Win95 is actually worse than DOS/3.1, but that's how it feels to me. Now:
the programming of the small program
Unix is small program heaven compared to Windows. You've got about a million scripting languages to choose from, a C compiler sitting around begging to be used, and no monster-sized GUI API to fuss with.
One other point: you're doing with your computer what I do with mine when I'm running Windows. Except that I've got a P166 with 32 MB of RAM. Aside from playing games, what are you doing, besides running NT, that really needs all that hardware?
So, if they ever do market it, it'll have either a different name, or they'll disclaim any expansion of the initials (as they have done with WinCE and WinNT, I believe).
If it turns out to have a different name, I'm betting on the presence of words such as "Object" "Technology" and "Visual." Hardly a stretch, I admit.
Or, hell, why not both? "Microsoft's COOL Visual Object Technology is an innovative and powerful new..."
But would there be *anyway* possible that this sort of thing could happen on Linux
If your PGP key is readable by you, then any process run by you (or run by a process run by you, and so on) can read it. If you ran a properly-written trojan shell script (trivially, could be anything) then it could seek out and reveal your key.
Unless, of course, your key weren't on a mounted drive. But sooner or later it would have to be, if only for a while, wouldn't it?
[...] put the Child Online Protection Act [...] on hold [...]
Now we just need someone to hold its head under water.
And maybe produce a Child Pack o' Muscle-Headed Chumps Protection Act, just so that people growing up seeing this sort of nonsense being seriously attempted don't get permanently traumatized.
I remember hearing that story, too (though I can't vouch for the "original TCP/IP guru" part). FWIW, I think he was using either a NeXT or a Sun in the version I heard, and the sound played was a sample of the person's voice, saying "ping."
Read it in a magazine some time in the 1980s, I guess (how's that for rigorous references?). The incident I'm thinking of could have been a copycat of the one you're thinking of, mind you...
Sure, but maybe there's some secret weakness in her math that means you can crack the code quickly by using a larger matrix, somehow.
I'm just making that up -- the example was an attempt to imagine what, other than brute force, one might attempt to use to compromise an encrypted message (or, in this case, the algorithm).
he only thinks he knows what a motherboard is, and the dog really grabbed something else
the dog did indeed grab something, and he thought it'd play better if he said it was the motherboard
I'm leaning toward the second option, if I must accept that the dog was involved at all. He's certainly writing for what he considers to be a "general audience," and in computing journalism this usually means that someone with an imperfect grasp of a subject (the author) tries to "simplify" things so that the audience can understand. They've probably heard the word "motherboard" before.
Think of all of those one-liner recapitulations of the year 2000 problem: that's this technique in action, and it's why the mainstream press is utterly useless at explaining technical issues. The author barely understands them, having been given the assignment yesterday, and has a target audience that's clueless. Stir in an "expert" who can't simplify effectively, either, and you've got your article and your pull-quote ready to go.
The solution is specialization. You don't see coverage of opera on Freshmeat, do you?
Nielson predicts that classifieds are going to turn out well. Hmm. With a Web-forms interface, they'd end up being like commercial-sites-only search engines. Could work.
so what are we talking about "hog" here? [...] i'm asking cause i don't know.
You're asking because you haven't read the article...one of the few things that it does explain is that the cyphertext is about 5 times larger than one produced by RSA from the same cleartext.
As usual, commercial news just makes we want to find out what they're really talking about. Does anyone have a source for more detailed information about the algorithm and the people involved?
Hmm. I wonder if Distributed.Net can help to test this. A brute-force attack would prove nothing, though, so there'd have to be something cleverer going on...perhaps working transformations on very large matrices? Hell, I dunno how parallelizable that sort of job might be...
I'm impressed with the quality of responses to this question. Where are the legions of flamers who'd have posted stuff like "ITS a DEADICADED MaCHINE STUUPID! There shuld be LISENSES REQIRED to post to./!!!!"? And, more importantly, how do we keep said legions from returning?
From the article: "failsoftness." Now, I guess this means "(fail-soft)-ness," meaning that failures in one place aren't catastrophic globally. But it could also, if poetically, mean "(fails-oft)-ness," being the quality of failing often. Maybe that's a term that could use replacing...
Get a nice terminal, and hide the ugly computer in the basement. Instant end to the looks purty vs. goes fast debate.
As for the person who complained that the styling of purty machines ages badly and gave the example of an old car...well, there's someone who's obviously never heard of people who put hours and hours into polishing "classic cars."
RMS started the GNU/Hurd project, in response to Linux.
The GNU project was a going concern long before Linux was even started. HURD was in the works long before Linux started. Go read the Linus vs. Andy Tannenbaum discussion of Linux and Minix: one of Tannenbaum's arguments is that Linux needs a big, expensive 386, and that by the time everyone has machines that can handle that, we'll all be running HURD anyway. Also note that one of the shortcomings of Minix was that it couldn't run GNU tools like gcc and all the rest.
Slashdot Mirror
They don't have to be ignorant of search engines; they just have to find something that they think'll stick. If that's "obscure," that's fine.
They were talking in the article about contributory mumble-mumble, so it sounds like there's already a contestant in the ring, so to speak.
repeat
inc(i);
write(lst,#12,i);
until billisgay; {don't ask}
If so, that loop will only execute once. From the context in which the code appears, I think you're wrong -- the opposite sense is intended.
Could someone provide us with a more complete list of mirrors? Hey, even a clue as to where such a list exists would be fine. Seems lame of us to be hammering the hell out of one site, and, more importantly, I can't download because of the number of users already on.
And in recent versions, you can even check and cull your cookie jar (by pressing =, I think...). Pretty spiffy. And it's smarter about asking for confirmation that either NSC or MSIE: you can choose "yes, allow all cookies from this domain" and "no, forbid all cookies from this domain" instead of just yes/no each time, if you like.
Unfortunately, as stuff like the hassle over pokey.org reveals, maniac lawyers don't currently respect name spaces.
They should, but there's no case law out there that clues them in about it.
As for fuzzy directory services, as advocated upthread: not going to work. They already exist in various forms, including categorized directories like Yahoo (aren't they now charging for favourable placement?) and that RealNames thing, whatever it is.
The problem is that there is more than one fuzzy directory. Trademarks seek to protect exclusivity (within bounds -- yes, a proper domain-name-space should define some of those bounds), and there's only one generally recognized exclusive forum for everyone's precious special words: "your own dawt cawn." It's the only one that everyone's pretty much forced to use (unless, of course, you luck into a snazzy numeric IP and promote that -- there's a trend or subculture waiting to happen, there).
I've always wondered why there isn't more webbed information about these things. They sucked and were cool at the same time...
Some years after they appeared in my school board, a I saw a What's New item in Popular Science about them. I've never met anyone from outside of Ontario who's ever heard of the things, though.
I wish I had the manuals...or any other information about them.
Ease of use. Win95 and MacOS machines just don't need administration the way Linux does. You buy them, you turn them on, you use them, you turn them off. "Setting up my Internet," is probably the toughest thing a Win95 user ever really has to do, and that's a hand-holdy, pointy-clicky, press-F1-for-help experience at worst. At best, they just install some software given to them by their ISP. Installing software (or 90% of it, these days) involves double clicking and then chatting to InstallShield (and you really only have to grunt).
If people moved right from that to Linux in its current state, they'd be asking "stupid questions" and then you'd just be sneering at them and telling them to "go use your stupid Macintosh."
Or Steve's. The person you're attempting to condescend to mentioned that most people who find Windows "good enough" would probably be better served by MacOS. Given where MacOS X is headed, I think that's pretty accurate.
I've probably missed some points on both sides. Whoop-de-doo.
MS used to be good enough for me. DOS/Win3.1 was reasonably good at doing what it did, and versions of DOS after 4.00 (shudder) seemed to be getting better and better.
Maybe my expectations have risen, or maybe Win95 is actually worse than DOS/3.1, but that's how it feels to me. Now:
Unix is small program heaven compared to Windows. You've got about a million scripting languages to choose from, a C compiler sitting around begging to be used, and no monster-sized GUI API to fuss with.
One other point: you're doing with your computer what I do with mine when I'm running Windows. Except that I've got a P166 with 32 MB of RAM. Aside from playing games, what are you doing, besides running NT, that really needs all that hardware?
Check the archives dangling from here for illustrations.
So, if they ever do market it, it'll have either a different name, or they'll disclaim any expansion of the initials (as they have done with WinCE and WinNT, I believe).
If it turns out to have a different name, I'm betting on the presence of words such as "Object" "Technology" and "Visual." Hardly a stretch, I admit.
Or, hell, why not both? "Microsoft's COOL Visual Object Technology is an innovative and powerful new..."
Nothing will save you from a programmer who represents dates with two digits. That's true on any machine running any operating system.
The interesting problem here isn't technical, it's PR-based: how's Apple going to deal with stories about people using MacBozoPro who get burned?
If that snippet above makes it look like the patent applies here, this one doesn't:
No icons here.
If your PGP key is readable by you, then any process run by you (or run by a process run by you, and so on) can read it. If you ran a properly-written trojan shell script (trivially, could be anything) then it could seek out and reveal your key.
Unless, of course, your key weren't on a mounted drive. But sooner or later it would have to be, if only for a while, wouldn't it?
Now we just need someone to hold its head under water.
And maybe produce a Child Pack o' Muscle-Headed Chumps Protection Act, just so that people growing up seeing this sort of nonsense being seriously attempted don't get permanently traumatized.
I remember hearing that story, too (though I can't vouch for the "original TCP/IP guru" part). FWIW, I think he was using either a NeXT or a Sun in the version I heard, and the sound played was a sample of the person's voice, saying "ping."
Read it in a magazine some time in the 1980s, I guess (how's that for rigorous references?). The incident I'm thinking of could have been a copycat of the one you're thinking of, mind you...
Sure, but maybe there's some secret weakness in
her math that means you can crack the code quickly
by using a larger matrix, somehow.
I'm just making that up -- the example was an
attempt to imagine what, other than brute force,
one might attempt to use to compromise an
encrypted message (or, in this case, the algorithm).
- he only thinks he knows what a motherboard is, and the dog really grabbed something else
- the dog did indeed grab something, and he thought it'd play better if he said it was the motherboard
I'm leaning toward the second option, if I must accept that the dog was involved at all. He's certainly writing for what he considers to be a "general audience," and in computing journalism this usually means that someone with an imperfect grasp of a subject (the author) tries to "simplify" things so that the audience can understand. They've probably heard the word "motherboard" before.Think of all of those one-liner recapitulations of the year 2000 problem: that's this technique in action, and it's why the mainstream press is utterly useless at explaining technical issues. The author barely understands them, having been given the assignment yesterday, and has a target audience that's clueless. Stir in an "expert" who can't simplify effectively, either, and you've got your article and your pull-quote ready to go.
The solution is specialization. You don't see coverage of opera on Freshmeat, do you?
...when he stops babbling like this snippet: "Our GenX gadget guru Nicci
Noteboom persuades with promises..."
Gah.
Nielson predicts that classifieds are going to turn out well. Hmm. With a Web-forms interface, they'd end up being like commercial-sites-only search engines. Could work.
You're asking because you haven't read the article...one of the few things that it does explain is that the cyphertext is about 5 times larger than one produced by RSA from the same cleartext.
As usual, commercial news just makes we want to find out what they're really talking about. Does anyone have a source for more detailed information about the algorithm and the people involved?
Hmm. I wonder if Distributed.Net can help to test this. A brute-force attack would prove nothing, though, so there'd have to be something cleverer going on...perhaps working transformations on very large matrices? Hell, I dunno how parallelizable that sort of job might be...
I'm impressed with the quality of responses to this question. Where are the legions of flamers who'd have posted stuff like "ITS a DEADICADED MaCHINE STUUPID! There shuld be LISENSES REQIRED to post to ./!!!!"? And, more importantly, how do we keep said legions from returning?
Excuse me while I bask in civilization for a bit.
From the article:
"failsoftness." Now, I guess this means "(fail-soft)-ness," meaning that failures in one place aren't catastrophic globally. But it could also, if poetically, mean "(fails-oft)-ness," being the quality of failing often. Maybe that's a term that could use replacing...
Hmm. Puts those little locking diaries to shame, doesn't it? Some sweaty younger sibling tries to mess with your stuff and fst!
Get a nice terminal, and hide the ugly computer in the basement. Instant end to the looks purty vs. goes fast debate.
As for the person who complained that the styling of purty machines ages badly and gave the example of an old car...well, there's someone who's obviously never heard of people who put hours and hours into polishing "classic cars."
Here's just one of what I'm sure are many errors:
The GNU project was a going concern long before Linux was even started. HURD was in the works long before Linux started. Go read the Linus vs. Andy Tannenbaum discussion of Linux and Minix: one of Tannenbaum's arguments is that Linux needs a big, expensive 386, and that by the time everyone has machines that can handle that, we'll all be running HURD anyway. Also note that one of the shortcomings of Minix was that it couldn't run GNU tools like gcc and all the rest.