I loved the dark characters, especially Darrow's Avon. Darrow's Avon was the main reason to watch. Nobody can sneer better than Paul Darrow. Alas, he has completely disowned this version.
Please. The dude was a standard Pentagon bureaucrat whose notion of fixing a problem was to fire off a stern memo. He doesn't deserve uberwarrior status.
I had completely forgotten about that "feature" (which was common to all Unixes at one time) but you're correct. I guess they had a lot of cheap 6-bit terminals at Bell Labs in 1969.
In the late 70s, I was working in a university computer lab supporting Unix. Every couple of days, I'd have to explain to somebody why their input was all caps.
Strange that Sun took so long to disable this feature. Even their workstations were as far away from 6-bit teleprinters as you can get.
Guess you never used VMS apparently... Well, no, I haven't. But you made me curious, so I went and looked it up. VMS, like many OSs from that period, assumed that the user might not have access to lower case, and ignored case in things like the command line and file names. But that's also true of DOS/Windows command line and file systems.
It's true that the docs gave commands in all caps, but that's just a doc convention — one still followed by Windows documentation. Open a command line window and type "help".
And of course none of this prevents somebody with a mixed-case keyboard sending mixed-case email.
-- Only the State obtains its revenue by coercion. - Murray Rothbard Libertarians have a remarkable ability to make generalizations based on cherry-picked data. Hello? Business cartels? Organized crime?
Actually, by 1978 6-bit terminals were pretty rare, at least in the computer labs I frequented. There were no longer any significant 6-bit networks, so the only reason to have a six-bit terminal was if your terminal was a electromechanical teleprinter, because mechanisms that could print the entire 7-bit ASCII character set were more expensive than those that couldn't. And by 1978, electronic terminals were beginning to replace teleprinters. This was the period in which Bill Joy used an ADM3a to write vi — the fact that vi/vim still uses h, j, k, & l for cursor motion reflects the fact that the ADM3a had arrows on those keys (its cursor motion sequences were the corresponding Control characters)
But it doesn't surprise me that ARPA was still using 6-bit teleprinters. I can't give a logical reason, there's just something very military about it. Major Czahor probably didn't even enter the message himself; he would have dictated it to a Signals Clerk. Quaint term, that.
ON 2 MAY 78 DIGITAL EQUIPMENT CORPORATION (DEC) SENT OUT AN ARPANET MESSAGE ADVERTISING THEIR NEW COMPUTER SYSTEMS. THIS WAS A FLAGRANT VIOLATION OF THE USE OF ARPANET AS THE NETWORK IS TO BE USED FOR OFFICIAL U.S. GOVERNMENT BUSINESS ONLY. APPROPRIATE ACTION IS BEING TAKEN TO PRECLUDE ITS OCCURRENCE AGAIN.
IN ENFORCEMENT OF THIS POLICY DCA IS DEPENDENT ON THE ARPANET SPONSORS, AND HOST AND TIP LIAISONS. IT IS IMPERATIVE YOU INFORM YOUR USERS AND CONTRACTORS WHO ARE PROVIDED ARPANET ACCESS THE MEANING OF THIS POLICY.
THANK YOU FOR YOUR COOPERATION.
MAJOR RAYMOND CZAHOR
CHIEF, ARPANET MANAGEMENT BRANCH, DCA Did Major Czahor have a 6-bit terminal, or was he just indulging in the traditional military fondness for capital letters? But what's really funny is that he doesn't care about the spamming as such, he just wants to remind everybody that the network was for "U.S. Government Business Only". Which is laughable, since unofficial use of ARPANET was rampant, especially in 1978. That's how Zork got developed, with its authors writing it in pieces and using feedback from the ARPANET community to improve the game. There was also an excellent database of limericks; a friend with ARPANET access was good enough to print it out for me, but I've long since lost it. Anybody seen it online? For that matter, is there a PDP-10 emulator somewhere running the original Zork? Not the Fortran port (which never had the complete game) the original MDL version.
If your data really needs to be secure and accessed remotely, get yourself a laptop and a data card from one of the cell carriers. At least that way, you can keep physical control over your machine and avoid the risks of using a hotspot. Data plans go for about $65/month, and don't work everywhere. If all you're worried about is protecting yourself on an open hotspot, a VPN subscription does the trick, and only costs $15/month. It also allows you to bypass obnoxious firewalls.
One-time passwords are a good idea. (My employer uses them for VNC logins.) Problem is, what web email providers implement them? None that I know of. You could set up your own server, but I'm not sure the software to support this even exists.
Oh well, hopefully some OSS geek will read this and say, "hey, that'd be fun to implement!"
BTW, I hope that S/KEY calculator is password protected, in case you lose your PDA.
Nowadays, we also have good but cheap hardware. I'm the docs lead for this Opteron-based system, which is pretty affordable and will soon be available with Barcelona quad-core CPUs.
As for our future growth, obviously we are destined to overtake IBM, put HP and Dell out of business, and reverse global warming. Come on, what else did you expect me to say?
GNU Classpath has been at it for nine years. That's a long time to get to 1.0. And even 1.0 doesn't target the complete Java 6 library (no javax packages). I'm afraid that the disappearance of Classpath rates a big "who cares?"
Sun thought that Java was going to be the Next Big Thing, and so kept the language under their tight control to prevent it being forked by competitors or used in manners that they didn't approve of. That's the official story, and it's true as far as it goes. But it's not the whole truth.
The big problem has been Sun's corporate mindset. Until recently, key decision makers at Sun, both on the business side and the R&D site, seriously believed that they were smarter than everybody else, and had no need to listen to anybody else's ideas. That's why Sun stuck with SPARC processors so very long after it became obvious that commodity processors were the future — SPARC architecture is superior to x86, end of discussion. It's also why Sun's first attempt to move to commodity systems (by spending $2 billion for Cobalt Networks) was a total disaster: the Cobalt people couldn't get any respect from the rest of Sun, and quickly moved on. I can think of many other examples.
I was a contractor at Sun/JavaSoft in '98, and saw this attitude all over the place. In some cases, I couldn't get access to the FrameMaker source for key specifications because the spec owners feared "forked" copies of the specs!
The really sad thing is that many of these people were every bit as smart as they themselves thought they were. But their raw intelligence was often wasted, because you need a certain willingness to collaborate to create a real product.
I recently came back to Sun as a regular employee. I like to think this intellectual arrogance is no longer a major problem here. Part of this is the example set by current upper management, which seems to understand the problems I describe. But the big reason: most of the my-way-or-the-highway geniuses have been hired away by Google.
And what, exactly, does this have to do with the current thread? Pay more attention to where and what you post, and stop whining about conspiracies.
Re:Let me put it in terms you can understand.
on
eBay Sues Craigslist
·
· Score: 2, Insightful
Technically you're correct. But I find it hard to believe that eBay really cares about dilution of their interest in a small, marginally profitable company. What they do care about is that company's failing to make the most of its potential revenue streams. I suspect this suit is really about getting leverage to make them start charging for some of the services they now give away.
think this is the long delayed consequences of selling that stake to eBay in the first place Actually, Craig Newmark never sold eBay anything. What he did was give an employee, Phillip Knowlton, a stake in the company. Knowlton then sold the stake to eBay. I think Newmark would he the first to agree that Craigslist's charge-what-we-need business model is incompatible with the way a publicly held company like eBay does business.
OK, very informative post (though I think you mean to say Craigslist has issued extra stock). What I find interesting is that this is a purely technical issue. Craigslist doesn't make enough money for eBay to care about what their percentage is.
What eBay does care about is the fact that Craigslist refuses to make the most of its income potential. Instead, they charge just enough fees to cover their expenses. This sort of offends my own sense of fairness, because you have people with very deep pockets using Craigslist to move very expensive items (real estate, cars, antiques) and getting a free ride. Meanwhile, newspapers are going out of business because Craigslist has stolen all their classified advertisers.
I'm no profit uber alles Gordon Gecko, but I find this just a little wonky.
"Suspiciously well-moderated"? Oooh, everybody's conspiring against the guy. Not wait, it's just a few nutballs. Or maybe it's one nutball posting under six or seven IDs...
Whatever it is, you need to find a story and stick to it.
What article? The story links two, and neither has the quote you provide.
Twitter, you get flamed because you're a BS artist. Grow up a little, stop playing stupid games with quotations and fake IDs, and we'll consider treating you with a little respect.
Well, I assume PC at least taught her how to use this quaint legal language:
COMES NOW Kathleen Seidel and moves this court, pursuant to Rule 45(3)(A) of the Federal Rules of Civil Procedure, to quash the subpoena issued by Clifford Shoemaker, Esq., on behalf of plaintiffs in the above-captioned case...
Well, maybe I'm imagining things. Or maybe your are. Or maybe we both are: when you have this much randomness, it's very easy to see a pattern where there is none.
Frankly, it should. Allowing the sort of trick that you (claim) you do and that I tried means eliminating the requirement that mods not post in the discussion. Huh? I don't follow that. I'm reminding moderators that there are rules for moderation that should not be ignored. What does that have to do with the no-posting rule?
Anyway, I don't view it as a trick. I really do believe that the current moderator pool sucks. There were some changes a few years ago that I think really hurt the mod system.
"Traditional anti-war bias"? Hello? Ever hear of "Hearst's War"?
What you call "anti-war bias" is just the fact that modern news organizations are able to graphically depict what a cruel, evil, insane thing war is. (And I stole that phrase from a career soldier, so don't turn your "bias" on me!) In the pre-Vietnam era, people could pretend to themselves that war was a clean, heroic thing, that mostly killed a lot of Evil Invaders and a few Noble Martyrs. Now people get a daily reminder that our War Against Terror is chewing up the lives of thousands of people. That would create a certain hesitation even if everybody, including the news media, were out to show that the WoT was actually accomplishing its goals. Which, BTW, it's not.
What? Cheerleaders for the war? Then how come the blogosphere is full of people who can prove that they're part of the Liberal Media Conspiracy That Lies About The War Because They Hate Bush(tm)?
Slashdot Mirror
You also need to verify that you're not a character in "Total Recall", "The Matrix" or some other nothing-is-real movie.
Please. The dude was a standard Pentagon bureaucrat whose notion of fixing a problem was to fire off a stern memo. He doesn't deserve uberwarrior status.
I had completely forgotten about that "feature" (which was common to all Unixes at one time) but you're correct. I guess they had a lot of cheap 6-bit terminals at Bell Labs in 1969.
In the late 70s, I was working in a university computer lab supporting Unix. Every couple of days, I'd have to explain to somebody why their input was all caps.
Strange that Sun took so long to disable this feature. Even their workstations were as far away from 6-bit teleprinters as you can get.
It's true that the docs gave commands in all caps, but that's just a doc convention — one still followed by Windows documentation. Open a command line window and type "help".
And of course none of this prevents somebody with a mixed-case keyboard sending mixed-case email. --
Only the State obtains its revenue by coercion. - Murray Rothbard Libertarians have a remarkable ability to make generalizations based on cherry-picked data. Hello? Business cartels? Organized crime?
A certain percentage of your message has to be mixed case. I think it's about 50%.
Actually, by 1978 6-bit terminals were pretty rare, at least in the computer labs I frequented. There were no longer any significant 6-bit networks, so the only reason to have a six-bit terminal was if your terminal was a electromechanical teleprinter, because mechanisms that could print the entire 7-bit ASCII character set were more expensive than those that couldn't. And by 1978, electronic terminals were beginning to replace teleprinters. This was the period in which Bill Joy used an ADM3a to write vi — the fact that vi/vim still uses h, j, k, & l for cursor motion reflects the fact that the ADM3a had arrows on those keys (its cursor motion sequences were the corresponding Control characters)
But it doesn't surprise me that ARPA was still using 6-bit teleprinters. I can't give a logical reason, there's just something very military about it. Major Czahor probably didn't even enter the message himself; he would have dictated it to a Signals Clerk. Quaint term, that.
IN ENFORCEMENT OF THIS POLICY DCA IS DEPENDENT ON THE ARPANET SPONSORS, AND HOST AND TIP LIAISONS. IT IS IMPERATIVE YOU INFORM YOUR USERS AND CONTRACTORS WHO ARE PROVIDED ARPANET ACCESS THE MEANING OF THIS POLICY.
THANK YOU FOR YOUR COOPERATION.
MAJOR RAYMOND CZAHOR
CHIEF, ARPANET MANAGEMENT BRANCH, DCA Did Major Czahor have a 6-bit terminal, or was he just indulging in the traditional military fondness for capital letters? But what's really funny is that he doesn't care about the spamming as such, he just wants to remind everybody that the network was for "U.S. Government Business Only". Which is laughable, since unofficial use of ARPANET was rampant, especially in 1978. That's how Zork got developed, with its authors writing it in pieces and using feedback from the ARPANET community to improve the game. There was also an excellent database of limericks; a friend with ARPANET access was good enough to print it out for me, but I've long since lost it. Anybody seen it online? For that matter, is there a PDP-10 emulator somewhere running the original Zork? Not the Fortran port (which never had the complete game) the original MDL version.
Bah. Only 1 TB of porn? Get yourself a real computer!
Were you a professional kidnapper in a former life? Nobody else could do that much cutting and pasting without going crazy!
One-time passwords are a good idea. (My employer uses them for VNC logins.) Problem is, what web email providers implement them? None that I know of. You could set up your own server, but I'm not sure the software to support this even exists.
Oh well, hopefully some OSS geek will read this and say, "hey, that'd be fun to implement!"
BTW, I hope that S/KEY calculator is password protected, in case you lose your PDA.
Nowadays, we also have good but cheap hardware. I'm the docs lead for this Opteron-based system, which is pretty affordable and will soon be available with Barcelona quad-core CPUs.
As for our future growth, obviously we are destined to overtake IBM, put HP and Dell out of business, and reverse global warming. Come on, what else did you expect me to say?
GNU Classpath has been at it for nine years. That's a long time to get to 1.0. And even 1.0 doesn't target the complete Java 6 library (no javax packages). I'm afraid that the disappearance of Classpath rates a big "who cares?"
The big problem has been Sun's corporate mindset. Until recently, key decision makers at Sun, both on the business side and the R&D site, seriously believed that they were smarter than everybody else, and had no need to listen to anybody else's ideas. That's why Sun stuck with SPARC processors so very long after it became obvious that commodity processors were the future — SPARC architecture is superior to x86, end of discussion. It's also why Sun's first attempt to move to commodity systems (by spending $2 billion for Cobalt Networks) was a total disaster: the Cobalt people couldn't get any respect from the rest of Sun, and quickly moved on. I can think of many other examples.
I was a contractor at Sun/JavaSoft in '98, and saw this attitude all over the place. In some cases, I couldn't get access to the FrameMaker source for key specifications because the spec owners feared "forked" copies of the specs!
The really sad thing is that many of these people were every bit as smart as they themselves thought they were. But their raw intelligence was often wasted, because you need a certain willingness to collaborate to create a real product.
I recently came back to Sun as a regular employee. I like to think this intellectual arrogance is no longer a major problem here. Part of this is the example set by current upper management, which seems to understand the problems I describe. But the big reason: most of the my-way-or-the-highway geniuses have been hired away by Google.
And what, exactly, does this have to do with the current thread? Pay more attention to where and what you post, and stop whining about conspiracies.
Technically you're correct. But I find it hard to believe that eBay really cares about dilution of their interest in a small, marginally profitable company. What they do care about is that company's failing to make the most of its potential revenue streams. I suspect this suit is really about getting leverage to make them start charging for some of the services they now give away.
OK, very informative post (though I think you mean to say Craigslist has issued extra stock). What I find interesting is that this is a purely technical issue. Craigslist doesn't make enough money for eBay to care about what their percentage is.
What eBay does care about is the fact that Craigslist refuses to make the most of its income potential. Instead, they charge just enough fees to cover their expenses. This sort of offends my own sense of fairness, because you have people with very deep pockets using Craigslist to move very expensive items (real estate, cars, antiques) and getting a free ride. Meanwhile, newspapers are going out of business because Craigslist has stolen all their classified advertisers.
I'm no profit uber alles Gordon Gecko, but I find this just a little wonky.
"Suspiciously well-moderated"? Oooh, everybody's conspiring against the guy. Not wait, it's just a few nutballs. Or maybe it's one nutball posting under six or seven IDs...
Whatever it is, you need to find a story and stick to it.
What article? The story links two, and neither has the quote you provide.
Twitter, you get flamed because you're a BS artist. Grow up a little, stop playing stupid games with quotations and fake IDs, and we'll consider treating you with a little respect.
Anyway, I don't view it as a trick. I really do believe that the current moderator pool sucks. There were some changes a few years ago that I think really hurt the mod system.
"Traditional anti-war bias"? Hello? Ever hear of "Hearst's War"?
What you call "anti-war bias" is just the fact that modern news organizations are able to graphically depict what a cruel, evil, insane thing war is. (And I stole that phrase from a career soldier, so don't turn your "bias" on me!) In the pre-Vietnam era, people could pretend to themselves that war was a clean, heroic thing, that mostly killed a lot of Evil Invaders and a few Noble Martyrs. Now people get a daily reminder that our War Against Terror is chewing up the lives of thousands of people. That would create a certain hesitation even if everybody, including the news media, were out to show that the WoT was actually accomplishing its goals. Which, BTW, it's not.
What? Cheerleaders for the war? Then how come the blogosphere is full of people who can prove that they're part of the Liberal Media Conspiracy That Lies About The War Because They Hate Bush(tm)?