Im suprised noone has written a virus that uses unused sectors on the hard drive, and makes modifications to the MBR and partition table.
Like boot sector viruses? You know, back in the days when everybody booted from floppies, all viruses were of that kind. I have a few of those lying around somewhere... for the Commodore-Amiga.
Are the modern sci-fi books dystopic? Yes, and that is not a new trend. Is it because that is all the publishers will publish? I don't know. In 1972, The Sheep Look Up was published, and that is about as dystopic a story as I have ever read.
1972? Are you joking? Dystopy has been a big theme in SF since Hiroshima, at least.
Sturgeon's Law doesn't have an expiration date or a start date, I'm afraid.
(Parsed that as "... or a stardate" first. Ugh.)
Maybe we have too strict a definition of SF movie. I went to see Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind last night. Who thinks of that one as SF? If it had been a short story in an SF collection however, noone had would have denied it. Theodore Sturgeon could have written something like that in the 1950s. Or Robert Sheckley later on.
Now take any of the movies you mentioned and pretend they were stories on paper. They would have been laughed at as hopelessly outdated even fifty years ago...
Maybe because "Managed C++" and "ISO C++" are two entirely different languages? Sure, they may have some syntax in common, but they have almost nothing in terms of purpose, design philosiphy or capibilities in common.
Yeah, but this story was about the C++/CLI language which (unlike "Managed C++"!) is supposed to be compatible with C++ -- until you use one of the.NET-specific extensions, something which will happen pretty soon, I'm afraid.
The advantages of thin clients in this type of environment are many. It's almost impossible for a user to screw up what is effectively nothing but a terminal.
I didn't mind it a few years back, when public libraries used to have real terminals for browsing the catalogue. I.e. something like a VTxxx and a serial link to the server. No GUI of course, but, if done right, more user-friendly IMHO than a PC with a small screen and some ugly web interface to the catalogue. Plus, anything that can run a terminal program can be used, from real terminals through ancient discarded PCs to high-end machines.
Or, if you want diagrams with source code, use pic(1) and let troff render to Postscript. Or grap(1) - another bizarre troff preprocessor from the ancient past.
The Omniscient Debugger seems similar to what Trace32 does, only in hardware and for embedded systems. Collect all memory accesses and CPU register changes in a huge circular buffer, and when you hit a breakpoint, you can move back and forth in time at will.
This makes for some very interesting debugging techniques.
All good Unix installations I've used have had thin clients - either just enough disk to boot and NFS mount everything, or (more rarely) set up as X terminals.
Any Windows install where all software is installed separately on hundreds of desktops looks stoneage compared to that.
My main requirement on any such system is simple: revision control. If you cannot see the change history of the things in the system, or compare versions and so on, it's next to useless to me.
But a do... while(0); is often easier to follow than gotos. Not always, and there is a use for goto, and the example is artificial since no cleanup is involved... void example(void) {
do {
if(error) break;
do_something();
if(error) break;
do_sth_else();
} while(0); }
Visual Basic made it possible for untrained people to write software...
Actually, UNIX made it possible for untrained people to write software. More precisely, the shell plus all the things in/usr/bin.
Nota bene, I'm not talking about applications and stuff like that; creating things once and hand it to users. I'm talking about automating things you do often, or just once.
This is the great tradgedy of computing: that people sit at these gigahertz monsters and still do their boring, repetitive tasks manually, step by step.
Compare boot time on a WinXP box with non-essential services turned off to boot time on a Linux box with non-essential services turned off. WinXP boots a lot faster, at least in my experience.
Can't say I've used WinXP, but my aging 450MHz AMD PC boots Debian Woody in a few seconds. The annoying part is the BIOS (and, to tell the truth, Postfix).
And when the boot is done, you still have to log in, open the stuff you want opened today... the Linux bootup time is the least annoyance for me.
SIP and other protocols used/specified by the telecom industry tend to have layer upon layer. If 1 layer is good, then 10 layers must be ten times as good.
Huh? Last time I checked, the major alternatives were SIP and H.323. H.323, not SIP, is the overspecified, layered monster from the telecom industry. (Although I'm sure SIP sucks, too.)
I am a collector and reader of old sci-fi. The ~vast majority~ of golden and silver age sci-fi are short stories (usually reprinted from magazines) and short novels. There are, of course, series and serials, but the majority of the works are stand alone stories.
Me too. And it seems to me that many Slashdot readers have a pretty warped idea of what SF used to be about.
Take the book I found last weekend, for example. A collection of short stories (can't remember its name) edited by Heinlein -- and with a rather pompous foreword about SF being all about the future and technology, and "escape literature" (fantasy and anything else non-SF) being crap. We're going to Mars real soon, etc.
But when you read the stories -- all written in 1950 or 1951 -- most take place on earth. Many deal with an upcoming cold war, arms race, WW3 or WW4. Aliens are realt with mostly in a parodic fashion... very little space opera here!
And by the way, the last of the stories in that collection, Poor Superman by Fritz Leiber, is very relevant to the discussion we're having here. It's about a future where people have stopped trusting scientists, because they never reached Mars, never build the perfect AI... Government grants instead go to a group of charlatans who fake Mars missions by sending people up in orbit for six months, and who have a super computer which is just an impressive box with a guy inside...
The stuff I work on (texts, source code,...) checked out from my CVS repository. CVS lets me sync changes between the files on my USB memory and the various computers I use. Pretty nice side-effect of a version control tool.
I also reserve about 30MB for a FAT partition; file transfers between work and my connectionless old HP Vectra.
You could start by giving the executables less generic names. I wouldn't want random utilities named round, range and random lying around polluting my namespace unless I used them a lot.
Well, many true cacti will look good under little or no light -- iff you give them no water. In reality, what they do is go dormant and prepare to die, like any other plants. It's just that cacti take longer to die, and they look good meanwhile.
> you can't expect them all to support every
> operating system there is. That simply isn't
> possible.
Yes it is.
Just open up telnet and ssh, two protocols
*made* for interactive stuff like this,
unlike http{s,}.
It would confuse the unwashed masses, but it
would make for a much better and more
client-independent user interface than
the online banking stuff I've seen so far.
Slashdot Mirror
Like boot sector viruses? You know, back in the days when everybody booted from floppies, all viruses were of that kind. I have a few of those lying around somewhere ... for the Commodore-Amiga.
1972? Are you joking? Dystopy has been a big theme in SF since Hiroshima, at least.
(Parsed that as "... or a stardate" first. Ugh.)
Maybe we have too strict a definition of SF movie. I went to see Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind last night. Who thinks of that one as SF? If it had been a short story in an SF collection however, noone had would have denied it. Theodore Sturgeon could have written something like that in the 1950s. Or Robert Sheckley later on.
Now take any of the movies you mentioned and pretend they were stories on paper. They would have been laughed at as hopelessly outdated even fifty years ago ...
Yeah, but this story was about the C++/CLI language which (unlike "Managed C++"!) is supposed to be compatible with C++ -- until you use one of the .NET-specific extensions, something which will happen pretty soon, I'm afraid.
One person's positive view here.
I still don't like this at all. Pascal, here we come!
I didn't mind it a few years back, when public libraries used to have real terminals for browsing the catalogue. I.e. something like a VTxxx and a serial link to the server. No GUI of course, but, if done right, more user-friendly IMHO than a PC with a small screen and some ugly web interface to the catalogue. Plus, anything that can run a terminal program can be used, from real terminals through ancient discarded PCs to high-end machines.
Or, if you want diagrams with source code, use pic(1) and let troff render to Postscript. Or grap(1) - another bizarre troff preprocessor from the ancient past.
This makes for some very interesting debugging techniques.
All good Unix installations I've used have had thin clients - either just enough disk to boot and NFS mount everything, or (more rarely) set up as X terminals.
Any Windows install where all software is installed separately on hundreds of desktops looks stoneage compared to that.
My main requirement on any such system is simple: revision control. If you cannot see the change history of the things in the system, or compare versions and so on, it's next to useless to me.
But a do ... while(0); is often easier to follow than gotos. Not always, and there is a use for goto, and the example is artificial since no cleanup is involved...
void example(void) {
do {
if(error) break;
do_something();
if(error) break;
do_sth_else();
} while(0);
}
Actually, a friend of mine sometimes talks about the database course he took at Uni.
They did use MS Access in one assignmnent -- to demonstrate why it sucked.
Which files do you care about more - the ones in your home directory or the ones in /bin ?
... I care more about the files in /bin than those in his home directory.
My files. But when my luser colleague runs a piece of malware
Visual Basic made it possible for untrained people to write software ...
/usr/bin.
Actually, UNIX made it possible for untrained people to write software. More precisely, the shell plus all the things in
Nota bene, I'm not talking about applications and stuff like that; creating things once and hand it to users. I'm talking about automating things you do often, or just once.
This is the great tradgedy of computing: that people sit at these gigahertz monsters and still do their boring, repetitive tasks manually, step by step.
Compare boot time on a WinXP box with non-essential services turned off to boot time on a Linux box with non-essential services turned off. WinXP boots a lot faster, at least in my experience.
... the Linux bootup time is the least annoyance for me.
Can't say I've used WinXP, but my aging 450MHz AMD PC boots Debian Woody in a few seconds. The annoying part is the BIOS (and, to tell the truth, Postfix).
And when the boot is done, you still have to log in, open the stuff you want opened today
SIP and other protocols used/specified by the telecom industry tend to have layer upon layer. If 1 layer is good, then 10 layers must be ten times as good.
Huh? Last time I checked, the major alternatives were SIP and H.323. H.323, not SIP, is the overspecified, layered monster from the telecom industry. (Although I'm sure SIP sucks, too.)
I am a collector and reader of old sci-fi. The ~vast majority~ of golden and silver age sci-fi are short stories (usually reprinted from magazines) and short novels. There are, of course, series and serials, but the majority of the works are stand alone stories.
Me too. And it seems to me that many Slashdot readers have a pretty warped idea of what SF used to be about.
Take the book I found last weekend, for example. A collection of short stories (can't remember its name) edited by Heinlein -- and with a rather pompous foreword about SF being all about the future and technology, and "escape literature" (fantasy and anything else non-SF) being crap. We're going to Mars real soon, etc.
But when you read the stories -- all written in 1950 or 1951 -- most take place on earth. Many deal with an upcoming cold war, arms race, WW3 or WW4. Aliens are realt with mostly in a parodic fashion... very little space opera here!
And by the way, the last of the stories in that collection, Poor Superman by Fritz Leiber, is very relevant to the discussion we're having here. It's about a future where people have stopped trusting scientists, because they never reached Mars, never build the perfect AI... Government grants instead go to a group of charlatans who fake Mars missions by sending people up in orbit for six months, and who have a super computer which is just an impressive box with a guy inside...
The stuff I work on (texts, source code, ...) checked out from my CVS repository. CVS lets me sync changes between the files on my USB memory and the various computers I use. Pretty nice side-effect of a version control tool.
I also reserve about 30MB for a FAT partition; file transfers between work and my connectionless old HP Vectra.
You could start by giving the executables less generic names. I wouldn't want random utilities named round, range and random lying around polluting my namespace unless I used them a lot.
What about the roff family?
Troff is definitely an alternative for many uses, especially groff which has a whole bunch of extensions compared to classical troff.
Well, many true cacti will look good under little or no light -- iff you give them no water.
In reality, what they do is go dormant and prepare to die, like any other plants. It's just that cacti take longer to die, and they look good meanwhile.
Theodore Sturgeon, The Cosmic Rape and many of his shorter stories, for a non-political angle on Utopia.
> you can't expect them all to support every
> operating system there is. That simply isn't
> possible.
Yes it is.
Just open up telnet and ssh, two protocols
*made* for interactive stuff like this,
unlike http{s,}.
It would confuse the unwashed masses, but it
would make for a much better and more
client-independent user interface than
the online banking stuff I've seen so far.