The problem is that novice-usable UI scripting that is also useful to power users may not really exist yet.
One word: ScripIt.
Scripit is an Amiga program that runs under Workbench 1.3 (and maybe others, but that's what I have) and can do some pretty nifty stuff. By running the Recorder, you can do something, which is then saved as a Scripit script. Running the script reconstructs the action. Since it's an automated tool, the Recorder writes huge-ish files, but is simple enough for a beginner. All that's really missing is a couple of GUI tools (to run the Recorder and the finished script) and some docs. Neither of these is too hard, though.
OTOH, power users can write their own scripts from scratch, which can be much smaller/smarter. Scripit can also do neat stuff AmigaDOS scripts can't, like manipulating the GUI. And ADOS can do stuff Scripit can't. So true power users can blend the two.
If I had a Scripit-like toy for Windows 95, I could write a "Check Email" script and park it on the desktop, which would take care of deactivating the answering machine (so rnaapp and tapiexe can use the modem) [dos+scripit], connecting to my ISP [scripit], launching the email reader [dos], and downloading any new messages [scripit].
Am I the only one that just doesn't understand why ISP's would collectively do this?
Do I have to be the one to point out that cable_modem==proprietary==no_isp_choice? Would you sacrifice your bitrate for privacy? Will Web developers of the future allow you to make that sacrifice? The days of text-only are swiftly leaving, to be replaced by images, Flash, Shockwave, Java, and other page-bloating toys.
Not yet. Paranoia often has a real root (not necessarily logical, but real...)
OTOH, I don't see how they're going to advertise at me any more than they are now. I thought about clicking an ad once from Netscape Webmail, but I checked the source first. Guess what? I didn't think to check where the form was being sent, but wherever it was, my real name, address, age, etc. were also going there. That's a very effective deterrent to clicking that ad. It was so effective, in fact, that I've never clicked an ad since.
Where was I? Oh, yeah... if Mozilla doesn't have a special area for a banner ad, they're going to be stuck with advertising on a website I go to. In my case, they're going to find I am very interested in Slashdot, my online college course, and email. Targeting those interests will get them nowhere, first because of the Netscape incident, and second because what I have works. When it breaks, pick up a real-world magazine and find out what to look for as a fix/replacement. Besides, I don't download images; ads that have "Click Here!" as their ALT text are automatically ignored.
The "Anonymous ID" thing is what I'm really scared of. Just imagine, we could have the whole DoubleClick thing all over again! The fact that a silhouette is unique, by nature, allows the anonymity to break down. "Sir, we don't know who was driving, but the license plate was ``BYTE ME''."
Is anyone else with me when I say that I STILL USE command line pkzip?
Yeah, baby! To get acceptable speed, I run a pure DOS system off a 133 MHz Pentium downstairs. I've finally succeeded in making my HDD the bottleneck in zipping:)
pkzip25 -extract -dir %1 %2 %3 %4 %5 %6 %7 %8 %9
You could squish one more parameter out of that like this:
Since the Space Station was started as an American project, it used customary units. By the time it became international, enough lots-of-fractions-unit stuff was designed that it stuck that way.
Until I read this post, I thought that I was doing OSS for entirely selfish reasons... for example, writing a DOS/UNIX/Mac text converter simply to have a small, fast program.
It bears mention here that none of the websites linked to here at/. point to an area with my OSS stuff on it. That would be here, mirrored here.
Anyway, I now realize that "selfishness" isn't the correct term. I write OSS because:
I don't have the skills for a real programming job. I haven't even earned my Associate's degree in CS yet.
OSS is educational, and other people can learn from me (preferably how to comment and how to document;-) For instance, to make sure I really understand partitioning, bootblocks, and code relocation, I'm writing (in NASM) a program to load/run drive C's bootsector. It'd be nice if MS did this; I'm sick of not being able to boot with a floppy in A:. Once I'm finished, I can release it as OSS, and other people can learn about FAT12's boot record, HDD partition tables, etc. an easier way.
My code doesn't necessarily die with me.
I can modify OSS to suit. If I want a particular UI, I can write it. If I want stuff to read from stdin when not given an input, I can code it that way (unlike certain DOS commands).
It's a way of getting useful software on a dead platform. If you can take someone's C code, and port the system-specific parts, you can recompile under Storm C and get an Amiga program. (I can't do this, as the A1200/WB3.0 didn't run some A500/WB1.3 stuff, so we still use the 500. But someone could.)
Take #3. That is very unselfish, as the reason it's there is because it annoys me when I come across a project that was top-of-the-line in 1996, but only disassembles, say, Java 1.1 stuff. With no source, it's pretty much stuck there. But useful enough software may be perpetually improved.
Both philosphies sponsor doing good for the communities sake and require that no one be selfish. If this were to actually be possible then a government (Marx) or software development (RMS) could exist within anarchy,and all would be good.
My experience with communism has been that it works if members' survival isn't directly linked to shared stuff.
Let's start with communism. It is the dominant philosophy at summer camp staff. Everyone can freely give to the refrigerator; anyone can freely take from it. Everyone can freely add money to the coin bowl, and anyone who takes money from there can only use it to benefit the Porch (as the area is called). Some people do take more than they give... and vice versa. The Porch is small enough that the proportions are about equal. Money is not created by our actions at the Porch, so there's not enough attachment to it to create greed. The overall amount given is dictated by the amount of junk food we can eat, the amount the refrigerator can hold, how much of our paychecks we're willing to give, and how much we want to risk losing to raccoons.
The same, or similar, is true for the MIT labs of yore. Nobody was selling that code, so it was readily shared. Everyone agreed on the underlying rules. And the system worked.
But out in the global market, with OSS-for-profit, the conditions for communism fail. If code is a means of support, it isn't wise to share and share alike, because you'd be giving other people free support. Since there are no structures in place to ensure that support returns to the coder, someone else could benefit off the original coder, and said coder would see nothing from it.
Offtopic: I figured out what's wrong with HTML formatting today. After previewing, the tags are not showing up again in this here <textarea>...
...he won't allow licenses based on the GPL with modifications.
I've been wondering about that. How legal would it be to license something under your own license with the condition: Any circumstance not explicitly covered by this license shall be covered by the GNU GPL, version 3.1337. Any circumstance not covered by this license or the GNU GPL is outside the scope of this license. Does anyone know if that's allowed?
Would a guestbook count as collecting "personal information", as it asks for name, website, where you're from, etc.----or since it's hosted by Bravenet, do they take the heat? Even though all fields are optional (excepting name and comment, which can be easily lied to)?
How am I supposed to know if my site is directed towards people under 13? I'm sure there are plenty of adults out there that would be interested in it, though it is more child-like stuff.
I regret I can't give the site out here; the/. effect might kill it, since it's only a free site.
I didn't think that IBM's MCA program was a disaster.
Absolutely right. The disaster was that IBM wanted everybody to pay retroactive royalties on the ISA stuff they had used, which prompted the creation of EISA: a faster, 32-bit, backwards-compatible ISA bus. IBM is pretty lucky it never caught on. As it is, everyone just continued using ISA, since it was the lowest common denominator, and MCA choked and died. With MCA's death came the demise of Plug&Play. (No, really----you just put the card in, swapped the reference and options (drivers) disks a couple of times, and it ran!)
Re:The problem with Rambus compared to SDRAM...
on
Will Rambus Go Bust?
·
· Score: 1
1 mbit = 1024 bit and 1 gbit = 1024 mbit = 1048576 bits
Huh?? Unless computer math was rewritten since last I checked:
134217728 Bytes = 131072 KBytes = 128 MBytes =.125 GBytes (1/8 of a GByte)
Re:The problem with Rambus compared to SDRAM...
on
Will Rambus Go Bust?
·
· Score: 1
...is in chipset overhead. AFAIK, it takes more control circuitry to run DRDRAM, as well as a faster clock. Therefore, it's going to run hotter in the chipset. A big step for DDR SDRAM might be to drop the voltage (if it didn't do it already) even further. The original Pentiums, at 60 and 66 MHz, ran too hot bacause of their 5V design. With the Pentiums at 75 MHz and beyond, Intel dropped the voltage to 3.3V, and the trend has continued to the present day, though it's reaching the theortical minimum that must be there to switch the gates.
So if a pure 1.8V system comes out...CPU core and I/O lines, cache, chipset, RAM, everything...it would run a lot cooler. Until everyone trades that in for faster, of course. The only thing I can see holding back this design are bridge chips required to run the PCI slots at 3.3V. Perhaps it's time for a 1.8V/133MHz PCI bus and 128-bit AGP II?
To think I will miss the first post for actually thinking...
No specific release date is definitely odd. But it got me to wondering, why publish a release date in the first place? If I get a release date two months in advance, I just forget about it until I see "In stores now" or my friends tell me how cool it is. Knowing that, say, Mortal Kombat IX-3 will be out in mid-October doesn't really matter to me in September....
...if you're just trying to swipe code without abiding by the author's wishes, you probably won't have much luck selling to the Linux community.
Unless enough people in the Linux community don't----pick one-----know/realize/care about what's going on. Hard to fathom, since this is on/., but improbable != impossible.
As for the original question, I read it as "You are not supposed to link proprietary software to GPL'ed code, but the majority may do otherwise, as they are notoriously unbounded by----pick one----patents/copyrights/licenses (see also: DeCSS, MP3, GIF)"
A special note to flamers: I know I'm handing out the DeCSS source. Look at it as proof of my argument.
Ah, the death knell of the PS2 is sounding. I live in a corner of New York State, where the economy is permanently in a recession. I got a Nintendo when they got down to $100 and my brother saved money from his paper route to buy it. Super Mario Bros. was state-of-the-art, and my Final Fantasy addiction began there.
Then we got a SNES when they were down to $80 and the NES had broken. Super Street Fighter II, Mortal Kombat II, and Final Fantasy II/III(aka VI) filled another few hundred hours of time. The PSX was only $120 when we got it, so we could play FF7 and FFT (Tactics).
But by the time the PS2 gets down into my price range, two things will have happened. One, I'll be too old to be spending 70 hours running characters up to Level 99 to splatter Kefka like a plastic toy. Two, the hardware will be obsolete. "Sorry, Final Fantasy 37.3 requires 2 GB of free hard drive space to install. Since you have 786 MB free, FF 37.3 cannot be run."
Install? Sure, why not copy one DVD of a 2-disc game to the HD for "speed"? All this is beginning to remind me of "How much land does a man need?" by Leo Tolstoy. We constantly grab for more and more... but does it ever occur to us that DOS might have been all we really needed? I run DOS on my box downstairs, and I'm satisfied with its 133MHz Pentium speed. Windows 95 is just an Internet connection, albiet a low-bandwidth one (one floppy per 5 minutes).
Where on microsoft.com can I download a compiler for my MS os? What about an IDE
You can't. And you wouldn't want it, even if you could... a #define WIN32_LEAN_AND_MEAN in MSVC++ 6.0 can trim a "Hello World!" program to 150 KB (from 200 KB)... I can write it in assembler in 150 bytes. TextConv 0.1.0 compiles to 204 KB in MS or 70-something KB in Borland C++ 5.02. Also note that Borland can build for DOS (standard and overlay), Windows 3.x, and Win32 (95/98/possibly NT or 2000). MS builds only for Win32. So, although I got a 90 KB DOS executable from Borland, I cannot compare it to MS.
Back on the subject of MS downloads: where can I get Windows 95 B? I can't... they want to sell me a Win98 Upgrade for $80. <RANT>If I can't pay, I'm stuck on FAT16. About 100 MB of my drive is slack (assuming average slack of half a cluster). That would be only 2 MB under FAT32. I'm only in college, so I'm stuck with a lame filesystem. Great customer support...</RANT>
...they may come to believe...that the best test of truth is the power of the thought to get itself accepted in the market...
No! By that definition, Nazism is a good truth, because it got accepted by all of Germany very swiftly. Whereas "democracy" took thousands of years to reach prominence.
...that truth [Nazism] is the only ground upon which their [my] wishes safely can be carried out.
Indeed, but only if I am the leader. Since it is impossible for everyone to lead, that idea cannot be implemented. (Well, it can, but you'd end up with a society as stable as Windows.)
For those who haven't met memetics: a "meme" is analogous to a gene, and "memetics" is analogous to genetics. However, memes and memetics involves ideas and their propogation through minds, rather than species and their propogation through environments. Nazism happens to be a much more appealing meme than democracy, so will stick in many more minds unless fought. Critical thought will usually reveal the best meme. I am against Nazism primarily because it is an underlying cause of a world war.
About BSD/Solaris/Linux: I must accept your statements on faith, as I have never used them.
However, DOS isn't dead (for me, anyway), as DOS is my asm-coding and plaintext-editing environment of choice. And it is still floating around beneath Windows 95/98. Also, DOS/Windows3.x are all over around here, as people pick up an old {2|3|4}86 at a garage sale for their kids to play with. And it's what surfaces in the computer-repair class at JCC: who cares if an XT board goes up in flames because you connected P8 and P9 backwards? You still lose points, but it's cheaper than blowing up your neighbor's board.
Linux, AFAIK, can be pretty small, until it gets bundled with <sarcasm>Microsoft Office for Linux</sarcasm> or the millions of things that people like to put in distros. One I looked at required 600 megs of HDD space, and recommended 1.5 gigs! And they say Linux runs on the "old iron"----I'd like to see how Mozilla fares on an ancient Digital at 20 MHz.
The concept of beautiful code is analogous to the concept of good writing, and will rise to the top of visibility based on this virtue. Much like good books rise to the top of the NY Times bestseller list. But no system is moron-proof, so sometimes bad books or code will get to the top. Yet you will (probably) never see Melissa or the Anarchist's Cookbook at the top of that list/website.
If you can make something legitimate, someone else can make it underground. To stop virus writers, we must take down the Internet and put away our CD burners and floppy drives so that the virii can't spread. Then we can only install trusted software, like MS Office, from a CD-ROM.
You disagree? Then we must tolerate the evil to the extent that it can spread capability; action must be stopped. Everybody can kill someone with a car, but we only punish the one who does. Also, law must be based on effect rather than intent. I can see "educational purposes" construed as learning credit card numbers to get educated on using them. Don't worry----your $60,000 was spent for my "educational purposes."
IANAL, all opinions limited by knowledge, mere possession of power is not justification for its use, I do not advocate carrying out any plans discussed, etc....
DeCSS speaks volumes about excessive control of speech...if you "get it".
I'm not sure... I tend to take my code at face value. Unless it has comments speaking these volumes, DeCSS cannot say much about excessive control of speech. It can only say, "Here's how to dodge a lawful CSS license."
Speech in any form is irrelevant until there is a consequence. People must be held accountable for the consequences of their speech...
So it's perfectly acceptable to yell "FIRE", as long as the perpetrator is punished, right? Which is more acceptable, banning significant-risk actions, or catching the wily evildoer that yelled it, slipped out among the first few, and acted like a panicked theatergoer?
IANAL, all opinions limited by knowledge, mere possession of power is not justification for its use, etc....
Once it finishes rearranging the CPU, the deadly work is done by the following code:
loopy: mov ax,OFFSET dethmsg mov ah,09h int 21h movsb;copies a byte of the virus to the ROM BIOS shadow jmp loopy .data dethmsg: 'DIE $'
Warning: this is VIRUS CODE. Do not assemble and run at home!
Note: this is the MS-DOS-on-x86-specific portion, which will run under *DOS and Windows 3.1..98. Other portions target other platforms and architectures.
I think it would be great if every Microsoft Customer recieved a cheque for $100 or $500:-) Is that realistic?
I think it would be great too, but I don't think it's all that realisic. How are you going to tell I am a Microsoft Customer? Nothing on my system is registered, as the computer wasn't phone-connected at the time of its OOB. Trust Compaq to mess everything up like that.
(on Macs running Netscape of course)
I originally shuddered at this. Even if it is proprietary, it's hard to throw out a once-$2300 investment and start over. Then I got to thinking: it might be nice to have G4-optimized Mac software. The ads all use Photoshop for a reason.
AmigaOS handles USB!? Wow! I didn't know my good ol' Workbench 1.3 was that futuristic!
khttpd - this is just stupid. Are we asking to get hacked?
Then don't compile it. Then you'll have an HTTP-incapable server! (See also: MS Windows.)
P&P - Windows has had this for HOW many years? WinModems - ditto
Linux isn't Windows 9x. Does Solaris have it? BSD? DOS? Windows 3.1?
Basically, no matter what it comes down to, there's always a better choice. Want to run consumer software? Windows. Want scalability? Solaris. Want a good server? BSD. Notice Linux anywhere in there?
So to get all of these at once, I have to run 3 operating systems... simultaneously! What fun!
Slashdot Mirror
The problem is that novice-usable UI scripting that is also useful to power users may not really exist yet.
One word: ScripIt.
Scripit is an Amiga program that runs under Workbench 1.3 (and maybe others, but that's what I have) and can do some pretty nifty stuff. By running the Recorder, you can do something, which is then saved as a Scripit script. Running the script reconstructs the action. Since it's an automated tool, the Recorder writes huge-ish files, but is simple enough for a beginner. All that's really missing is a couple of GUI tools (to run the Recorder and the finished script) and some docs. Neither of these is too hard, though.
OTOH, power users can write their own scripts from scratch, which can be much smaller/smarter. Scripit can also do neat stuff AmigaDOS scripts can't, like manipulating the GUI. And ADOS can do stuff Scripit can't. So true power users can blend the two.
If I had a Scripit-like toy for Windows 95, I could write a "Check Email" script and park it on the desktop, which would take care of deactivating the answering machine (so rnaapp and tapiexe can use the modem) [dos+scripit], connecting to my ISP [scripit], launching the email reader [dos], and downloading any new messages [scripit].
-- LoonXTall
Am I the only one that just doesn't understand why ISP's would collectively do this?
Do I have to be the one to point out that cable_modem==proprietary==no_isp_choice? Would you sacrifice your bitrate for privacy? Will Web developers of the future allow you to make that sacrifice? The days of text-only are swiftly leaving, to be replaced by images, Flash, Shockwave, Java, and other page-bloating toys.
Nobody is spying on you. Really.
Not yet. Paranoia often has a real root (not necessarily logical, but real...)
OTOH, I don't see how they're going to advertise at me any more than they are now. I thought about clicking an ad once from Netscape Webmail, but I checked the source first. Guess what? I didn't think to check where the form was being sent, but wherever it was, my real name, address, age, etc. were also going there. That's a very effective deterrent to clicking that ad. It was so effective, in fact, that I've never clicked an ad since.
Where was I? Oh, yeah... if Mozilla doesn't have a special area for a banner ad, they're going to be stuck with advertising on a website I go to. In my case, they're going to find I am very interested in Slashdot, my online college course, and email. Targeting those interests will get them nowhere, first because of the Netscape incident, and second because what I have works. When it breaks, pick up a real-world magazine and find out what to look for as a fix/replacement. Besides, I don't download images; ads that have "Click Here!" as their ALT text are automatically ignored.
The "Anonymous ID" thing is what I'm really scared of. Just imagine, we could have the whole DoubleClick thing all over again! The fact that a silhouette is unique, by nature, allows the anonymity to break down. "Sir, we don't know who was driving, but the license plate was ``BYTE ME''."
Is anyone else with me when I say that I STILL USE command line pkzip?
Yeah, baby! To get acceptable speed, I run a pure DOS system off a 133 MHz Pentium downstairs. I've finally succeeded in making my HDD the bottleneck in zipping :)
pkzip25 -extract -dir %1 %2 %3 %4 %5 %6 %7 %8 %9
You could squish one more parameter out of that like this:
SHIFT
pkzip25 -extract -dir %0 %1 %2 %3 %4 %5 %6 %7 %8 %9
Since the Space Station was started as an American project, it used customary units. By the time it became international, enough lots-of-fractions-unit stuff was designed that it stuck that way.
Until I read this post, I thought that I was doing OSS for entirely selfish reasons... for example, writing a DOS/UNIX/Mac text converter simply to have a small, fast program.
It bears mention here that none of the websites linked to here at /. point to an area with my OSS stuff on it. That would be here, mirrored here.
Anyway, I now realize that "selfishness" isn't the correct term. I write OSS because:
Take #3. That is very unselfish, as the reason it's there is because it annoys me when I come across a project that was top-of-the-line in 1996, but only disassembles, say, Java 1.1 stuff. With no source, it's pretty much stuck there. But useful enough software may be perpetually improved.
Oops, that's right. I was speaking from a home PC point of view.
Both philosphies sponsor doing good for the communities sake and require that no one be selfish. If this were to actually be possible then a government (Marx) or software development (RMS) could exist within anarchy,and all would be good.
My experience with communism has been that it works if members' survival isn't directly linked to shared stuff.
Let's start with communism. It is the dominant philosophy at summer camp staff. Everyone can freely give to the refrigerator; anyone can freely take from it. Everyone can freely add money to the coin bowl, and anyone who takes money from there can only use it to benefit the Porch (as the area is called). Some people do take more than they give... and vice versa. The Porch is small enough that the proportions are about equal. Money is not created by our actions at the Porch, so there's not enough attachment to it to create greed. The overall amount given is dictated by the amount of junk food we can eat, the amount the refrigerator can hold, how much of our paychecks we're willing to give, and how much we want to risk losing to raccoons.
The same, or similar, is true for the MIT labs of yore. Nobody was selling that code, so it was readily shared. Everyone agreed on the underlying rules. And the system worked.
But out in the global market, with OSS-for-profit, the conditions for communism fail. If code is a means of support, it isn't wise to share and share alike, because you'd be giving other people free support. Since there are no structures in place to ensure that support returns to the coder, someone else could benefit off the original coder, and said coder would see nothing from it.
Offtopic: I figured out what's wrong with HTML formatting today. After previewing, the tags are not showing up again in this here <textarea>...
I've been wondering about that. How legal would it be to license something under your own license with the condition:
Any circumstance not explicitly covered by this license shall be covered by the GNU GPL, version 3.1337. Any circumstance not covered by this license or the GNU GPL is outside the scope of this license.
Does anyone know if that's allowed?
And very few people are dumb enough to try and execute image files as if they were programs...
No, people aren't that stupid... Windows is.
Would a guestbook count as collecting "personal information", as it asks for name, website, where you're from, etc.----or since it's hosted by Bravenet, do they take the heat? Even though all fields are optional (excepting name and comment, which can be easily lied to)?
How am I supposed to know if my site is directed towards people under 13? I'm sure there are plenty of adults out there that would be interested in it, though it is more child-like stuff.
I regret I can't give the site out here; the /. effect might kill it, since it's only a free site.
I didn't think that IBM's MCA program was a disaster.
Absolutely right. The disaster was that IBM wanted everybody to pay retroactive royalties on the ISA stuff they had used, which prompted the creation of EISA: a faster, 32-bit, backwards-compatible ISA bus. IBM is pretty lucky it never caught on. As it is, everyone just continued using ISA, since it was the lowest common denominator, and MCA choked and died. With MCA's death came the demise of Plug&Play. (No, really----you just put the card in, swapped the reference and options (drivers) disks a couple of times, and it ran!)
1 mbit = 1024 bit and 1 gbit = 1024 mbit = 1048576 bits
Huh?? Unless computer math was rewritten since last I checked:
.125 GBytes (1/8 of a GByte)
1 Gbit = 1024 Mbit = 1048576 Kbit = 1073741824 bits
That, in turn, is:
134217728 Bytes = 131072 KBytes = 128 MBytes =
...is in chipset overhead. AFAIK, it takes more control circuitry to run DRDRAM, as well as a faster clock. Therefore, it's going to run hotter in the chipset. A big step for DDR SDRAM might be to drop the voltage (if it didn't do it already) even further. The original Pentiums, at 60 and 66 MHz, ran too hot bacause of their 5V design. With the Pentiums at 75 MHz and beyond, Intel dropped the voltage to 3.3V, and the trend has continued to the present day, though it's reaching the theortical minimum that must be there to switch the gates.
So if a pure 1.8V system comes out...CPU core and I/O lines, cache, chipset, RAM, everything...it would run a lot cooler. Until everyone trades that in for faster, of course. The only thing I can see holding back this design are bridge chips required to run the PCI slots at 3.3V. Perhaps it's time for a 1.8V/133MHz PCI bus and 128-bit AGP II?
To think I will miss the first post for actually thinking...
No specific release date is definitely odd. But it got me to wondering, why publish a release date in the first place? If I get a release date two months in advance, I just forget about it until I see "In stores now" or my friends tell me how cool it is. Knowing that, say, Mortal Kombat IX-3 will be out in mid-October doesn't really matter to me in September....
Unless enough people in the Linux community don't----pick one-----know/realize/care about what's going on. Hard to fathom, since this is on /., but improbable != impossible.
As for the original question, I read it as "You are not supposed to link proprietary software to GPL'ed code, but the majority may do otherwise, as they are notoriously unbounded by----pick one----patents/copyrights/licenses (see also: DeCSS, MP3, GIF)"
A special note to flamers: I know I'm handing out the DeCSS source. Look at it as proof of my argument.
Ah, the death knell of the PS2 is sounding. I live in a corner of New York State, where the economy is permanently in a recession. I got a Nintendo when they got down to $100 and my brother saved money from his paper route to buy it. Super Mario Bros. was state-of-the-art, and my Final Fantasy addiction began there.
Then we got a SNES when they were down to $80 and the NES had broken. Super Street Fighter II, Mortal Kombat II, and Final Fantasy II/III(aka VI) filled another few hundred hours of time. The PSX was only $120 when we got it, so we could play FF7 and FFT (Tactics).
But by the time the PS2 gets down into my price range, two things will have happened. One, I'll be too old to be spending 70 hours running characters up to Level 99 to splatter Kefka like a plastic toy. Two, the hardware will be obsolete. "Sorry, Final Fantasy 37.3 requires 2 GB of free hard drive space to install. Since you have 786 MB free, FF 37.3 cannot be run."
Install? Sure, why not copy one DVD of a 2-disc game to the HD for "speed"? All this is beginning to remind me of "How much land does a man need?" by Leo Tolstoy. We constantly grab for more and more... but does it ever occur to us that DOS might have been all we really needed? I run DOS on my box downstairs, and I'm satisfied with its 133MHz Pentium speed. Windows 95 is just an Internet connection, albiet a low-bandwidth one (one floppy per 5 minutes).
Where on microsoft.com can I download a compiler for my MS os? What about an IDE
You can't. And you wouldn't want it, even if you could... a #define WIN32_LEAN_AND_MEAN in MSVC++ 6.0 can trim a "Hello World!" program to 150 KB (from 200 KB)... I can write it in assembler in 150 bytes. TextConv 0.1.0 compiles to 204 KB in MS or 70-something KB in Borland C++ 5.02. Also note that Borland can build for DOS (standard and overlay), Windows 3.x, and Win32 (95/98/possibly NT or 2000). MS builds only for Win32. So, although I got a 90 KB DOS executable from Borland, I cannot compare it to MS.
Back on the subject of MS downloads: where can I get Windows 95 B? I can't... they want to sell me a Win98 Upgrade for $80. <RANT>If I can't pay, I'm stuck on FAT16. About 100 MB of my drive is slack (assuming average slack of half a cluster). That would be only 2 MB under FAT32. I'm only in college, so I'm stuck with a lame filesystem. Great customer support...</RANT>
No! By that definition, Nazism is a good truth, because it got accepted by all of Germany very swiftly. Whereas "democracy" took thousands of years to reach prominence.
Indeed, but only if I am the leader. Since it is impossible for everyone to lead, that idea cannot be implemented. (Well, it can, but you'd end up with a society as stable as Windows.)
For those who haven't met memetics: a "meme" is analogous to a gene, and "memetics" is analogous to genetics. However, memes and memetics involves ideas and their propogation through minds, rather than species and their propogation through environments. Nazism happens to be a much more appealing meme than democracy, so will stick in many more minds unless fought. Critical thought will usually reveal the best meme. I am against Nazism primarily because it is an underlying cause of a world war.
About BSD/Solaris/Linux: I must accept your statements on faith, as I have never used them.
However, DOS isn't dead (for me, anyway), as DOS is my asm-coding and plaintext-editing environment of choice. And it is still floating around beneath Windows 95/98. Also, DOS/Windows3.x are all over around here, as people pick up an old {2|3|4}86 at a garage sale for their kids to play with. And it's what surfaces in the computer-repair class at JCC: who cares if an XT board goes up in flames because you connected P8 and P9 backwards? You still lose points, but it's cheaper than blowing up your neighbor's board.
Linux, AFAIK, can be pretty small, until it gets bundled with <sarcasm>Microsoft Office for Linux</sarcasm> or the millions of things that people like to put in distros. One I looked at required 600 megs of HDD space, and recommended 1.5 gigs! And they say Linux runs on the "old iron"----I'd like to see how Mozilla fares on an ancient Digital at 20 MHz.
The concept of beautiful code is analogous to the concept of good writing, and will rise to the top of visibility based on this virtue. Much like good books rise to the top of the NY Times bestseller list. But no system is moron-proof, so sometimes bad books or code will get to the top. Yet you will (probably) never see Melissa or the Anarchist's Cookbook at the top of that list/website.
If you can make something legitimate, someone else can make it underground. To stop virus writers, we must take down the Internet and put away our CD burners and floppy drives so that the virii can't spread. Then we can only install trusted software, like MS Office, from a CD-ROM.
You disagree? Then we must tolerate the evil to the extent that it can spread capability; action must be stopped. Everybody can kill someone with a car, but we only punish the one who does. Also, law must be based on effect rather than intent. I can see "educational purposes" construed as learning credit card numbers to get educated on using them. Don't worry----your $60,000 was spent for my "educational purposes."
IANAL, all opinions limited by knowledge, mere possession of power is not justification for its use, I do not advocate carrying out any plans discussed, etc....
DeCSS speaks volumes about excessive control of speech...if you "get it".
I'm not sure... I tend to take my code at face value. Unless it has comments speaking these volumes, DeCSS cannot say much about excessive control of speech. It can only say, "Here's how to dodge a lawful CSS license."
Speech in any form is irrelevant until there is a consequence. People must be held accountable for the consequences of their speech...
So it's perfectly acceptable to yell "FIRE", as long as the perpetrator is punished, right? Which is more acceptable, banning significant-risk actions, or catching the wily evildoer that yelled it, slipped out among the first few, and acted like a panicked theatergoer?
IANAL, all opinions limited by knowledge, mere possession of power is not justification for its use, etc....
Once it finishes rearranging the CPU, the deadly work is done by the following code:
loopy: ;copies a byte of the virus to the ROM BIOS shadow
mov ax,OFFSET dethmsg
mov ah,09h
int 21h
movsb
jmp loopy
.data
dethmsg: 'DIE $'
Warning: this is VIRUS CODE. Do not assemble and run at home!
Note: this is the MS-DOS-on-x86-specific portion, which will run under *DOS and Windows 3.1..98. Other portions target other platforms and architectures.
I think it would be great if every Microsoft Customer recieved a cheque for $100 or $500 :-)
Is that realistic?
I think it would be great too, but I don't think it's all that realisic. How are you going to tell I am a Microsoft Customer? Nothing on my system is registered, as the computer wasn't phone-connected at the time of its OOB. Trust Compaq to mess everything up like that.
(on Macs running Netscape of course)
I originally shuddered at this. Even if it is proprietary, it's hard to throw out a once-$2300 investment and start over. Then I got to thinking: it might be nice to have G4-optimized Mac software. The ads all use Photoshop for a reason.
USB support - who doesn't have it?
AmigaOS handles USB!? Wow! I didn't know my good ol' Workbench 1.3 was that futuristic!
khttpd - this is just stupid. Are we asking to get hacked?
Then don't compile it. Then you'll have an HTTP-incapable server! (See also: MS Windows.)
P&P - Windows has had this for HOW many years?
WinModems - ditto
Linux isn't Windows 9x. Does Solaris have it? BSD? DOS? Windows 3.1?
Basically, no matter what it comes down to, there's always a better choice. Want to run consumer software? Windows. Want scalability? Solaris. Want a good server? BSD. Notice Linux anywhere in there?
So to get all of these at once, I have to run 3 operating systems... simultaneously! What fun!