Re:Gopher?!?! Now there's ancient history...
on
A New TCP/IP Classic
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· Score: 1
When i was in college, TCP/IP was just starting to get big. we were moving from Novel and BITNET (we were even a major BITNET to TCP/IP gateway). At first, i played with ftp sites, found ARCHIE. Then gopher, followed very quickly by the WWW. I played with gopher a bit, but being exposed to it around the same time as the WWW, it's limitations were very obvious. Eventually, gopher servers went away and the gopher protocol became nothing more than a way to DOS Netscape (gopher has no concept of content-type, so you can feed a huge pipe of junk to netscape, i remember gopher://machinename:19/ URLs for a while). Someone even came out witha 3D gopher. It was pure eye candy, a way of viewing a 2D (at best) topology in #D and waste processor cycles. And it crashed a lot.
I assume he took gopher as a moderately complicated protocol, something with meat on it, with real world implementations, but small enough to cover as chapters in a book rather thana volume in itself. HTTP 1.1 is way too complicated for a teaching tome now. Probably should have looked at HTTP 1.0, somewhat useful as both a building bridge to 1.1, and even today most servers and clients can back rev to HTTP 1.0.
By full he means a full SLR, i don't think he meant anything about the functionality level of the camera. In this case, it's a full auto-everything (digital) SLR. I don't think "full" is relevant really, te only functionality you need is removable lenses. You could do this with a rangefinder in fact, though rangefinders would suck because of parallax and the inability to match the viewfinder magnification.
You don't need a fancty auto-whatever, in fact, you're probably better off with a cheap full manual (old Nikon manual F mount or Canon FD mount) camera. He didn't seem all that careful about cleaning (he may have left this as an assumptiom) or seals (he didn't have any, and he used a body cap as his connection to the camera, lots of leaks there, lots of dust for the sensor). He lost all electrical contacts, so the camera is essentially on full manual mode anyway.
I'm kind of torn on this. In one way, some guy wants to play with his camera, crack a lens in pieces just to play with it (I busted my 50mm Mk. II just from carelessly shoving it in a bag that then opened and dropped in in the West Village on a trip) and wanting to play with his powertools. On the other hand, as a guy who salivates over the 20D and the 5D, there are SO many better ways of getting extension tubes. Real tubes won't set you back much, keep electrical contacts, and are much safer for your camera than a dusty machined upon piece of cardboard. If you need more flexibility, get a bellows.
Aren't celebrated hacks supposed to be creative solutions to problems, and find an ingenious solution at a much cheaper (in cost or in effort) price? This is an unsafe solution that besides possily destroying a $1200 camera offers you much less functionality over a commercial solution that's not a lot of cash realative to the kit he's using, and probably competitive given risk to equipment and all the materials and labor cost. I'm severely puzzled by it, though mostly i just wish he'd give me the camera before he busts the sensor.;)
I was thinking the same thing. He saved about $100 for extension tubes, for a $1200 camera. He also lost all automatic function, lost a bit of control (the normal 2 pack of extension tubes allows you 3 lengths depending how you stack). Ok fine, this is just a hobby, he can do what he wants...
He also gets poorer optics by the fact that there is no way he can align the egdes to the tolerances of a real lens, even one as cheap as the 50mm mkII. I'd bet this would void all types of warranties. He looks like he has no back cover, just straight into the camera, meaning that any flash or residue from the surgery would end up inside his nice new camera. Fun to play with, but the savings not worth the risk to the electronics, especially since a commercial solution is safer and not that expensive. (and if the guy has a > $1000 digital SLR this isn't the cost optimization he should be looking at).
though a flame, probably not too far off. A lot of people thought the Apple/Intel cuddling was all about TPM, Apple's quest to be the center of home entertainment. I don't think Linus and Grove will be partying soon. Soon there will be media that will only work on TPM capable boxes. Linux will not be illegal, jsut less relavant.
Technically, it's not the sun stuff, it's Netscape, via AOL. Sun still distributes iPlanet 5.2, and it's pretty old and clunky. Sun's source cut hasn't been updated much sun took it over, and it currently only runs on RH 7.3 (with the evil 2.96 compiler).
RedHat bought the source from AOL, and actually made some changes. It runs on AS3.0, and multiple master is up to 4 nodes. We're switching from iPlanet to FS 1.0, we have it in Dev now.
Back when AIM meant Apple-IBM-Motorola and people thought PowerPC was poised to possibly become a commodity chip like x86, Sun actually had a port to PowerPC. Never went anywhere, because there were no non-Apple machines to install it on. Would be interesting to see things go full circle.
How am I supposed to know that the form target is https? Am I supposed to analyze the page source code before I click "buy" with my credit card number? Your browser might warn you, and give you a chance to opt-out, if a form submission leaves https mode, but the other way around you can only know, practically speaking, after it's too late.
If you use Mozilla/Firefox, the Target Alert extension will show you. Yes, this doesn't fix the general case, but you can fix yourself
I think the current state that blogs (and public wikis as well) are (massively generalizing) pretty much useless shows that sometimes friction is useful.
For a long time people bitched about the publishing companies, saying that they squashed creativity by focussing too much on monetary concerns. Desktop publishing made some things easier, now very easy to make your own zine and publish. But though the friction of self-publishing was radically reduced, it was still too high for most people. Desktop publishing software was expensive, you still had to have paper and pay for it, and need a place and manner of distribution.
Blogs (and wikis) made publishing nearly frictionless. go to some shared blogger site, carve out your space, use some subset of HTML, and you're someplace where everyone in the world can see you. With wikis, you have the wonder of a truly democratic world, where everyone's opinion is just as valid as anyone else's.
Seems to me now, the friction is somewhat valuable. We have a lot of crap out there. Having publishers need to guess salability of books meant a lot of crap never saw the light of day. The majority of people out there either just can't write or have nothing worth reading. You may not have liked all the publisher's choices but a lot of junk got filtered (as was good things that didn't meet their message of course).
It's interesting that a couple of the features they mentioned were spam plug-ins, and one had a feature that posts required a confirmation, both adding friction to the community aspect of the software. Even Wikipedia is looking to add some friction, to make it a little harder to post - coincidentally someone showed me a fight over Rachael Ray's Wikipedia entry this morning, adding sexual statements about her. They could use some friction.
Not saying that we need to go back to the old way. But in the Utopian days of the web, everyone was saying how we'd forever remove all friction and the world would be better for it. Now we see that friction is sometimes useful. It hasn't eliminated the large corporations, just shuffled some around, making new ones. Google understood that in the new frictionless world, people would need new guideposts, making google the new creator of friction (hard for people to trip on your website if its not in first 20 or so google hits). they're all billionaires for it.
I think there's a tendency for slashdotters to always say "code it yourself" since slashdot by nature attracts technical people. I think the vast majority of people who blog are people who see the isolation from HTML as the major selling point. They are technical enough to install, but probably not coders. The likelihood of them knowing enough on how to combat spam links and not open up any remote holes is probably lower than those who have a huge commitment to coding these on an ongoing basis. AJAX has severely upped the possible damage from CSS attacks. Having everyone write their own blog software only removes the software monoculture, removiong the amortization of cracker effort over several blogs, but making each individual blog much more insecure.
It's funny. The closer to open source you get the faster the revisions. Windows; 4 years between versions... OS X; one year between versions.. Most Linux stuff; 6-8 months between versions. OpenSource is part of this, but not all. Microsoft has years and years of backwards compatility they need to spend time on. Both Linux and MacOS X are based on newer code bases, so don't have as much as they need to support. Both Lunux and Apple aren't as strict about backwards compatibility either, both of them choosing to break compatiblity much more than Microsoft would. ZYou can probably still run some of your 1985 games on WinXP, try doing that with a mac game (this is priobably System 2.0 at this time). Linux didn't exist yet. Both models have their pluses and minuses. Microsoft is now carrying the weight of that, and having the most apps and drivers to test for.
This is written on a Win2000 machine. I like it much better than XP, but i can guarantee i won't be running it in 3 years. Not sure when the patches will be EOLed, but I can't see them supporting two major revs back on a 10 year old OS. I don't see redhat supporting V5 much these days, and even though I try to surf failry safely, i'll need to change from NT2K. To what, not sure at this point, Ubuntu does sound pretty good.
... to have dealt with Apple with their eyes open.
Apple screwed Motorola (and others) when they finally licensed clones, then pulled the licenses. Pissed off Motorola (StarMAX clone), enough that it was probably a factor leading to Motorola not sinking resources into desktop class PowerPC chips, but into embedded ones. Desktop class PowerPC innovations from Motorola withered, until Apple was forced to go to IBM for anything decent, dropping Motorola for Desktops, though still sourcing G3s for laptops. Then they dump PowerPC altogether, effectively ending the already tense AIM alliance. They have a long history.
There is no way the OS would be able to run 64-bit applications without being compiled for 64-bits. you're confusing 2 things.
Is the OS 64 bit aware? yes it is. Linux x86 PAE is 36 bit aware, even though it is a 32 bit OS. Solaris on SPARC was 32 bit compiled, even though it let you run 64 bit apps. It just needs to know how to manage larger page tables for the larger address space.
The conspiracy theory that made the most sense when I heard it was that Apple really sees the computer as a digital home center as the killer app, the new iPod with video kind of supports that theory. One thing that has Hollywood crazy is getting new revenue streams without a penny being lost on current streams. This means DRM, and Intel is firmly in the Trusted Computing camp, and moreso than either AMD or IBM.
I thought raytracing was pretty parallel, at least in the fact that each pixel was independent of other pixels. I remember mac 68040 render farms for this before. what isn't consistent is the amount of work per pixel. If the cards parallelism depends on a bunch of pixels doing the same thing at the same time, this won't work.
Technically, it still tries to identify itself as Netscape Navigator. Mozilla was the internal nickname at Netscape, short for Mosaic Killa. The original Mosaic team had split into two groups, Andreeson with Netscape and some other guys with Spyglass Mosaic. In the beginning, there was a rivalry for who's browser would dominate.
The company Spyglass is essentially dead, though the code lives in as the base of early IE. You can say that Microsoft killed Mosiac (well spyglass) by incorporating it into IE and giving it away for free. I seem to remember hearing that microsoft offered them a cut of sales of IE, then gave it away free, cutting Spyglass out of a revenue source. I wonder if any lawyer got creative, and since "IE is a fundamental part of the OS" tried to get a cut of Windows OS revenues.
Heh... I remember this in Assembler class. people would try their programs for the first time ever, if it crashed, the first thing they would finger would be the assembler program. Hmm, so this is the first time you've ever been in the environment with the least safety, and the first thing you do is to blame the tool.
It's also about differential pricing, setting a price in one marketand a different one in another. If anyone remembers Euro conversion, they may remember all the differential prices exposed, and a lot of consumers complaining about buying the same thing for one price in one country and for more expensive in another. Before the Euro it was hidden somewhat, after it became more obvious.
Yesterday I was ina camera store, two girls from Brazil were about to buy a camera. I had to laugh, because I remember buing my (now ex)-gf a camera. In the states, the Rebel 2000 was about $230 or so, but in Brazil, the EOS 300 was R$2000 (about $800 at then current exchange rates). The name difference serves as a form of "region coding". Just as I can't get warranty service on an EOS300 here (it's obviously a foreign model, it's not named that here) she wouldn't be able to get it on the Rebel 2000 there, though the price differential surely more than made up for any loss of warranty.
Why? Didn't Netscape mostly disappear? Admittedly, it was more due to Netscape sucking and having their business model conquered by MS free giveaways than not having a business model. Hubris and having the wrong business model helped. The original model was to sell servers, the client was almost a giveaway in the beginning. Then they became the darling of the tech industry and wall street, decided to battle Microsoft head on (the infamous "reduce windows to a set of poorly debugged device drivers" quote).
When you're not that bug free, and you have a heap of spaghetti code, it's probably best not to antagonize the biggest guy on the block. MS bought Spyglass and did a hell of a job adding features at a pace that broke netscape development even more. It ended up such a steaming pile that 4.5 marked the end of the line, and they threw everything out, and imploding.
netscape's implosion was complex, with MS's pressure helping to crush a bad situation.
Slashdot Mirror
When i was in college, TCP/IP was just starting to get big. we were moving from Novel and BITNET (we were even a major BITNET to TCP/IP gateway). At first, i played with ftp sites, found ARCHIE. Then gopher, followed very quickly by the WWW. I played with gopher a bit, but being exposed to it around the same time as the WWW, it's limitations were very obvious. Eventually, gopher servers went away and the gopher protocol became nothing more than a way to DOS Netscape (gopher has no concept of content-type, so you can feed a huge pipe of junk to netscape, i remember gopher://machinename:19/ URLs for a while). Someone even came out witha 3D gopher. It was pure eye candy, a way of viewing a 2D (at best) topology in #D and waste processor cycles. And it crashed a lot.
I assume he took gopher as a moderately complicated protocol, something with meat on it, with real world implementations, but small enough to cover as chapters in a book rather thana volume in itself. HTTP 1.1 is way too complicated for a teaching tome now. Probably should have looked at HTTP 1.0, somewhat useful as both a building bridge to 1.1, and even today most servers and clients can back rev to HTTP 1.0.
By full he means a full SLR, i don't think he meant anything about the functionality level of the camera. In this case, it's a full auto-everything (digital) SLR. I don't think "full" is relevant really, te only functionality you need is removable lenses. You could do this with a rangefinder in fact, though rangefinders would suck because of parallax and the inability to match the viewfinder magnification.
;)
You don't need a fancty auto-whatever, in fact, you're probably better off with a cheap full manual (old Nikon manual F mount or Canon FD mount) camera. He didn't seem all that careful about cleaning (he may have left this as an assumptiom) or seals (he didn't have any, and he used a body cap as his connection to the camera, lots of leaks there, lots of dust for the sensor). He lost all electrical contacts, so the camera is essentially on full manual mode anyway.
I'm kind of torn on this. In one way, some guy wants to play with his camera, crack a lens in pieces just to play with it (I busted my 50mm Mk. II just from carelessly shoving it in a bag that then opened and dropped in in the West Village on a trip) and wanting to play with his powertools. On the other hand, as a guy who salivates over the 20D and the 5D, there are SO many better ways of getting extension tubes. Real tubes won't set you back much, keep electrical contacts, and are much safer for your camera than a dusty machined upon piece of cardboard. If you need more flexibility, get a bellows.
Aren't celebrated hacks supposed to be creative solutions to problems, and find an ingenious solution at a much cheaper (in cost or in effort) price? This is an unsafe solution that besides possily destroying a $1200 camera offers you much less functionality over a commercial solution that's not a lot of cash realative to the kit he's using, and probably competitive given risk to equipment and all the materials and labor cost. I'm severely puzzled by it, though mostly i just wish he'd give me the camera before he busts the sensor.
I was thinking the same thing. He saved about $100 for extension tubes, for a $1200 camera. He also lost all automatic function, lost a bit of control (the normal 2 pack of extension tubes allows you 3 lengths depending how you stack). Ok fine, this is just a hobby, he can do what he wants...
He also gets poorer optics by the fact that there is no way he can align the egdes to the tolerances of a real lens, even one as cheap as the 50mm mkII. I'd bet this would void all types of warranties. He looks like he has no back cover, just straight into the camera, meaning that any flash or residue from the surgery would end up inside his nice new camera. Fun to play with, but the savings not worth the risk to the electronics, especially since a commercial solution is safer and not that expensive. (and if the guy has a > $1000 digital SLR this isn't the cost optimization he should be looking at).
though a flame, probably not too far off. A lot of people thought the Apple/Intel cuddling was all about TPM, Apple's quest to be the center of home entertainment. I don't think Linus and Grove will be partying soon. Soon there will be media that will only work on TPM capable boxes. Linux will not be illegal, jsut less relavant.
Technically, it's not the sun stuff, it's Netscape, via AOL. Sun still distributes iPlanet 5.2, and it's pretty old and clunky. Sun's source cut hasn't been updated much sun took it over, and it currently only runs on RH 7.3 (with the evil 2.96 compiler).
RedHat bought the source from AOL, and actually made some changes. It runs on AS3.0, and multiple master is up to 4 nodes. We're switching from iPlanet to FS 1.0, we have it in Dev now.
Back when AIM meant Apple-IBM-Motorola and people thought PowerPC was poised to possibly become a commodity chip like x86, Sun actually had a port to PowerPC. Never went anywhere, because there were no non-Apple machines to install it on. Would be interesting to see things go full circle.
How am I supposed to know that the form target is https? Am I supposed to analyze the page source code before I click "buy" with my credit card number? Your browser might warn you, and give you a chance to opt-out, if a form submission leaves https mode, but the other way around you can only know, practically speaking, after it's too late.
If you use Mozilla/Firefox, the Target Alert extension will show you. Yes, this doesn't fix the general case, but you can fix yourself
Feynman rules, he was one of the good ones...
I think the current state that blogs (and public wikis as well) are (massively generalizing) pretty much useless shows that sometimes friction is useful.
For a long time people bitched about the publishing companies, saying that they squashed creativity by focussing too much on monetary concerns. Desktop publishing made some things easier, now very easy to make your own zine and publish. But though the friction of self-publishing was radically reduced, it was still too high for most people. Desktop publishing software was expensive, you still had to have paper and pay for it, and need a place and manner of distribution.
Blogs (and wikis) made publishing nearly frictionless. go to some shared blogger site, carve out your space, use some subset of HTML, and you're someplace where everyone in the world can see you. With wikis, you have the wonder of a truly democratic world, where everyone's opinion is just as valid as anyone else's.
Seems to me now, the friction is somewhat valuable. We have a lot of crap out there. Having publishers need to guess salability of books meant a lot of crap never saw the light of day. The majority of people out there either just can't write or have nothing worth reading. You may not have liked all the publisher's choices but a lot of junk got filtered (as was good things that didn't meet their message of course).
It's interesting that a couple of the features they mentioned were spam plug-ins, and one had a feature that posts required a confirmation, both adding friction to the community aspect of the software. Even Wikipedia is looking to add some friction, to make it a little harder to post - coincidentally someone showed me a fight over Rachael Ray's Wikipedia entry this morning, adding sexual statements about her. They could use some friction.
Not saying that we need to go back to the old way. But in the Utopian days of the web, everyone was saying how we'd forever remove all friction and the world would be better for it. Now we see that friction is sometimes useful. It hasn't eliminated the large corporations, just shuffled some around, making new ones. Google understood that in the new frictionless world, people would need new guideposts, making google the new creator of friction (hard for people to trip on your website if its not in first 20 or so google hits). they're all billionaires for it.
I think there's a tendency for slashdotters to always say "code it yourself" since slashdot by nature attracts technical people. I think the vast majority of people who blog are people who see the isolation from HTML as the major selling point. They are technical enough to install, but probably not coders. The likelihood of them knowing enough on how to combat spam links and not open up any remote holes is probably lower than those who have a huge commitment to coding these on an ongoing basis. AJAX has severely upped the possible damage from CSS attacks. Having everyone write their own blog software only removes the software monoculture, removiong the amortization of cracker effort over several blogs, but making each individual blog much more insecure.
It's funny. The closer to open source you get the faster the revisions. Windows; 4 years between versions... OS X; one year between versions.. Most Linux stuff; 6-8 months between versions.
OpenSource is part of this, but not all. Microsoft has years and years of backwards compatility they need to spend time on. Both Linux and MacOS X are based on newer code bases, so don't have as much as they need to support. Both Lunux and Apple aren't as strict about backwards compatibility either, both of them choosing to break compatiblity much more than Microsoft would. ZYou can probably still run some of your 1985 games on WinXP, try doing that with a mac game (this is priobably System 2.0 at this time). Linux didn't exist yet. Both models have their pluses and minuses. Microsoft is now carrying the weight of that, and having the most apps and drivers to test for.
This is written on a Win2000 machine. I like it much better than XP, but i can guarantee i won't be running it in 3 years. Not sure when the patches will be EOLed, but I can't see them supporting two major revs back on a 10 year old OS. I don't see redhat supporting V5 much these days, and even though I try to surf failry safely, i'll need to change from NT2K. To what, not sure at this point, Ubuntu does sound pretty good.
Apple screwed Motorola (and others) when they finally licensed clones, then pulled the licenses. Pissed off Motorola (StarMAX clone), enough that it was probably a factor leading to Motorola not sinking resources into desktop class PowerPC chips, but into embedded ones. Desktop class PowerPC innovations from Motorola withered, until Apple was forced to go to IBM for anything decent, dropping Motorola for Desktops, though still sourcing G3s for laptops. Then they dump PowerPC altogether, effectively ending the already tense AIM alliance. They have a long history.
Or at least the stock market does....
There is no way the OS would be able to run 64-bit applications without being compiled for 64-bits.
you're confusing 2 things.
Is the OS 64 bit aware?
yes it is. Linux x86 PAE is 36 bit aware, even though it is a 32 bit OS. Solaris on SPARC was 32 bit compiled, even though it let you run 64 bit apps. It just needs to know how to manage larger page tables for the larger address space.
Is the OS compiled 64 bit?
No.
The conspiracy theory that made the most sense when I heard it was that Apple really sees the computer as a digital home center as the killer app, the new iPod with video kind of supports that theory. One thing that has Hollywood crazy is getting new revenue streams without a penny being lost on current streams. This means DRM, and Intel is firmly in the Trusted Computing camp, and moreso than either AMD or IBM.
or taligent... I hate made up names like that.
I thought raytracing was pretty parallel, at least in the fact that each pixel was independent of other pixels. I remember mac 68040 render farms for this before. what isn't consistent is the amount of work per pixel. If the cards parallelism depends on a bunch of pixels doing the same thing at the same time, this won't work.
Technically, it still tries to identify itself as Netscape Navigator. Mozilla was the internal nickname at Netscape, short for Mosaic Killa. The original Mosaic team had split into two groups, Andreeson with Netscape and some other guys with Spyglass Mosaic. In the beginning, there was a rivalry for who's browser would dominate.
The company Spyglass is essentially dead, though the code lives in as the base of early IE. You can say that Microsoft killed Mosiac (well spyglass) by incorporating it into IE and giving it away for free. I seem to remember hearing that microsoft offered them a cut of sales of IE, then gave it away free, cutting Spyglass out of a revenue source. I wonder if any lawyer got creative, and since "IE is a fundamental part of the OS" tried to get a cut of Windows OS revenues.
Heh... I remember this in Assembler class. people would try their programs for the first time ever, if it crashed, the first thing they would finger would be the assembler program.
Hmm, so this is the first time you've ever been in the environment with the least safety, and the first thing you do is to blame the tool.
forgive my inference, can anyone tell me the reference for this?
It's also about differential pricing, setting a price in one marketand a different one in another. If anyone remembers Euro conversion, they may remember all the differential prices exposed, and a lot of consumers complaining about buying the same thing for one price in one country and for more expensive in another. Before the Euro it was hidden somewhat, after it became more obvious.
Yesterday I was ina camera store, two girls from Brazil were about to buy a camera. I had to laugh, because I remember buing my (now ex)-gf a camera. In the states, the Rebel 2000 was about $230 or so, but in Brazil, the EOS 300 was R$2000 (about $800 at then current exchange rates). The name difference serves as a form of "region coding". Just as I can't get warranty service on an EOS300 here (it's obviously a foreign model, it's not named that here) she wouldn't be able to get it on the Rebel 2000 there, though the price differential surely more than made up for any loss of warranty.
Not sure where the comment about Horse Lovers fits in with the Cheating On Significant others part, but this is Slashdot...
Why? Didn't Netscape mostly disappear? Admittedly, it was more due to Netscape sucking and having their business model conquered by MS free giveaways than not having a business model.
Hubris and having the wrong business model helped. The original model was to sell servers, the client was almost a giveaway in the beginning. Then they became the darling of the tech industry and wall street, decided to battle Microsoft head on (the infamous "reduce windows to a set of poorly debugged device drivers" quote).
When you're not that bug free, and you have a heap of spaghetti code, it's probably best not to antagonize the biggest guy on the block. MS bought Spyglass and did a hell of a job adding features at a pace that broke netscape development even more. It ended up such a steaming pile that 4.5 marked the end of the line, and they threw everything out, and imploding.
netscape's implosion was complex, with MS's pressure helping to crush a bad situation.
University library != public library
Library on Public State University that receives state and federal money to be a public institution == ?