Considering that 2 megapixels gives you slightly more pixels than fit on a 1600x1200 computer screen, that's actually pretty darn good (depending on the quality of the pixel). You must still be thinking of the old cheapy 640x480 (1/3 megapixel) devices.
Granted you need more if you want photo-quality prints, but it's more than adequate for on-screen use. In a device this small, the real limitation is the size and quality of the lens (ie, crappy) rather than the resolution of the sensor. There's a reason that good cameras have big lenses, and it has little to do with the size of the sensor or film they're recording on.
Horrors! How am I going to protect myself from all those x86 Linux viruses, then?
(Did you miss the smiley in the original post? For the humor-impaired, replace "all those x86-based Linux viruses" with "the rare x86 Linux malware". And most of the Windows-targeted crap out there doesn't even make it through the packet filter on the router.)
So, to all 12 people out there interested in Yellow Dog Linux, tell us why.;)
Well, I don't have a G5, but I do run YDL. (If I had a G5 Mac, I'd have it set up to dual boot.) I've got a couple of older PowerMacs (in the 200MHz 603e range) that will never run MacOS X (in fact, were never upgraded beyond MacOS 8). Mostly I use them for testing software portability. (I've also got a Sparc Linux box, and x86 BSD and Solaris boxes). When I get newer PowerPC hardware I'll probably put one of the old boxes to use as a firewall to protect myself from all those x86-based Linux viruses around;-)
Oh, certainly, a lot of the backstory can be left out. The fact that the core of the galaxy is exploding ties together the Puppeteer migration, the need for the Q2 hyperdrive, and the coincidental fact that the Ringworld, whose scrith foundation screens out all radiation and 50% of neutrinos just happens to be inclined to screen the inhabitants from the galactic core, is just a minor detail.
It isn't essential, but it's like a turkey dinner without the dressing and cranberry sauce. Incomplete.
For that matter the Pak Protector thing can be omitted unless you're doing Ringworld Engineers too.
(The interesting point about that is not merely why did the Pak populate the model of Kzin with real Kzinti, but why didn't the Pak exterminate the Kzinti when they were first discovered? Look what Brennan did to the Martians. BTW, is it just me, or does the Face On Mars look like a Protector might?)
I have to admit I haven't watched "Star Trek: Enterprise" since a few episodes in first season. But I have to wonder -- how do they get away with introducing new alien species (other than the typical throwaway we only ever see them in one show species typical of Trek) that later in the chronology (TOS, TNG, DS9, V'ger) we've never heard of?
"Enterprise" should have fewer alien species than were in TOS -- and that's still plenty to work with. (What I'd really like to see is them come up with an explanation for the difference in Klingon physiology between TOS and all the other series, which the DS9 episode "More Tribbles, More Troubles" just glosses over with Worf muttering "we don't speak of it".)
And how faithful will they be to the books? Will they have the "invulnerable" General Products hull? Will they have the Slaver shotgun? Will they include the Puppeteer Fleet of Worlds?
This has so much potential to be great or awful.
That's the problem. Niven's Known Space has far too much backstory leading up to Ringworld. Yeah, they can gloss over the details, but that would likely leave fans unsatisfied and everyone else confused. And four hours isn't near enough time to even do Ringworld. (Timing for a screenplay is typically one minute per page, and a screenplay is far less densely written than a novel. Some of the difference you can make up by virtue of showing rather than describing, but not a lot.)
To do it right, they need to do enough of the earlier Known Space stories to fill in. Parts of The Adults (which became Protector), At the Core (which explains why the Puppeteers are leaving known space, as well as the origin of the Quantum 2 hyperdrive), and some other story (maybe Soft Weapon?) which gives a bit of background into the nature of Puppeteers and Kzin.
makes the setting the story and throws in some hackneyed and stereotypical characters with an inane plot to act as placeholders.
Most of Niven's early SF is like this. But then, so was Jules Verne's and, to a lesser extent, H G Wells'. As was Clarke's, and Asimov's. If you want character and plot, why the hell are you reading SF? Or are you one of those touch-feely "sci-fi" that prompted a lot of the crap known as "New Wave" back in the 70s which ruined the genre.
Science fiction is a literature of ideas, not characters. Now, good characters and good plot certainly make for a more entertaining story than otherwise, but without good ideas -- and Ringworld is one of the grandest inventions in the history of the genre -- you might just as well be reading space opera (which most sci-fi these days is) or any other genre, for that matter.
(And while a girl with a 'luck' gene, a 200-year old genius, an insane puppeteer and an 8 foot tall possibly lapsed Kdaptist ratcat may be "cookie cutter", I wouldn't exactly call them "stereotypical". Although one can make a fair argument for mapping them onto Dorothy, the Tin Woodman, the Scarecrow and the Lion -- but not necessarily in that order).
Actually, the Kzinti (yes, Niven's Kzinti) did in fact appear in a Star Trek episode.
It was the ancient (and thankfully, mostly forgotten) animated Star Trek series, Niven did an adaptation of his short story "The Soft Weapon" with Spock substituting for the Puppeteer.
Remember it isn't the act of obtaining an unauthorized copy of a copyrighted work that is copyright infringement, it is the act of making such copies available to other people in the first place
But the files placed in a shared folder aren't copies (at least, not provably unauthorized copies). The copying doesn't occur until the download starts. Then the violation is by whoever initiated the copying (download) process.
An analogy might be a bookstore that photocopies a book without authorization, rebinds it, and puts it on the shelf with a price tag on it.
Nope, because the sharer is neither charging a price nor has copied the file. The analogy would be with a bookstore that has a photocopy machine in it. The bookstore has done nothing wrong, even if it allows a patron to make wholesale copies of its wares. (Stupid, yes; legally wrong, no.)
Now, burning copies of music onto CD-Rs and handing them out on the street is clearly a copyright violation -- and is also against the "Personal Use" provision of Canadian copyright law.
Materials, parts and welds can be x-ray inspected for example. Larger pieces of metal can be tested sonically.
That inspection doesn't add quality, it just weeds out the crap. Now, if your production process gives you only one bad item for every 10 you produce, you won't have to inspect as many to get n good ones than if your process creates 5 bad items for every 10 produced.
Same as developing software: you can do all the code walk-throughs (inspection) and turn on all the compiler warnings (automated inspection), but the real proof is when it gets turned over to the testers and end users. Problem with most rockets is, once they've been tested (under operating conditions, firing the engines on the stand isn't a complete test) they can't be re-used.
To add quality to a vehicle, you have to flight test it and fix the problems the flight test turned up. And fix them in that vehicle, since the next one off the line may have different problems.
(Of course you inspect your materials and components during assembly, but that doesn't prevent the dropped washer in the circuit board, or the misplaced socket wrench behind the panel, or the rag left in the fuel line, or the airbrake gear installed upside-down (all actual space vehicle occurances)).
The key to lowering the cost of launches is mass production and that means emphasizing manufacturing design, rather than rocket design.
That might be one approach -- but the Lockheed Martin (then Martin Marietta) factory south of Denver, when it was built in the early 1960s, was capable of rolling out a Titan II every week (actually the peak was closer to 6/month). Back then, aside from their role in the Gemini program, they were also our ICBM of choice.
You're still left with the problem of guaranteeing that something (the rocket you just built) you haven't tested under operational conditions will work correctly the first time. Would you be willing to book a ticket for a trans-Pacific flight aboard a 747 that just rolled off of Boeing's assembly line? (No shakedown flight, no place for an emergency landing, just load and go.)
That's fine for low-value payloads where you don't mind if you lose one every once in a while, or for ammunition, but carrying people is going to require an order of magnitude better reliability, which is either very expensive (you can't really inspect-in quality) or we need to come up with vehicles that can be test-flown, reflown, and have reasonable emergency abort provisions.
(And you're right about the chicken and egg problem. My wife used to be a manufacturing engineer for Martin, involved in a lot of studies on how to streamline and automate the production process for various real and projected launch vehicles. Low volume demand nearly always meant it was cheaper to just stick with the old methods (a lot of hand labor) than invest in new equipment and processes.)
Hey, just because you're an adult doesn't mean you have to be a grown up;-) I think it was G. Harry Stine that was fond of saying something like "Once you reach fifty without growing up, you don't have to."
Well, if Modula were a good scripting language, you could go with Linux Apache Modula Postgres. But I'm having trouble coming up with any other language starting with M.
Probably just as well that there's no popular scripting language starting with C, and that CGI is out of favor, can you imagine CGI Linux Apache Postgres? Unfortunate.
In no natural language does the case of a character convey information that cannot be gained from context.
Glad you added that qualifier. But the whole point of programming languages is to minimize the amount of context (read, "redundancy") needed to make the meaning clear.
Now you can go back to putting a polish on your Polish sausage;-)
I've been paid (as in, it was part of my job at the time) to write code in: APL, Assembler, Basic, C, C++, Cobol, Fortran, Java, JavaScript, Pascal, Perl, PHP, PL/I, PostScript and SQL (plus variants of some of those), as well as job control languages like JCL and WFL, simple scripting in sh and csh, several proprietary application-specific scripting languages like MITS, SPSS, GML and GSL, and miscellanous markup languages (troff, formal, HTML, XML, rtf, etc). And a half-dozen different text editors (CANDE, Teco, FIX, vi, emacs...)
I've probably left a few out, and that's not even mentioning languages I learned incidental to a class assignment (GPSS, Simscript II and Simula for a course on discrete event digital simulation, SNOBOL for something on text processing, Lisp).
The point is not to brag, but to point out that any professional software developer should be both expected to know several languages and should expect to learn and use several more over the course of his career. (But if you're going to mention it on a resume, give some indication of skill level -- expert, experienced or just "I wrote a 'hello world' in it once"?)
A mechanic is expected to have a pretty complete toolkit, with both metric and imperial wrenches, slot and Phillips and Torx screwdrivers, etc. -- and in Canada, Robertson screwdrivers too. (OTOH, he probably doesn't need a left-handed blivet impeller unless he's just into collecting tools for their own sake.) Somebody designing a product to be built -- whether a machine or a software system -- needs to be aware of what tools and materials are available to build the product with, and to maintain it. (In this regard progamming languages are more like materials than tools, either way they should be chosen for their properties.)
Ah, you beat me to it. I was going to mention the Arabia. Yeah, terrific dive, even some of the rigging still in place. Quite a few other wrecks to dive at Tobermory too. For those that don't know the area, it's the tip of the Bruce Peninsula between Lake Huron and Georgian Bay. It's officially preserved as an underwater Provincial Park.
Even salt water can preserve things well if it's cold enough. I've dived on the Empress of Ireland (ie, "I've gone down on an Empress";-) in the Gulf of St. Lawrence (about 120-150 ft, and bloody cold), which still holds up pretty well (mostly steel, but wood decking, railings, etc).
Most of the plastic 'lumber' sold for decking and the like is from recycled plastic. One of the more popular uses of the stuff, since in general the recycled plastic isn't high grade enough to be used in food or beverage packaging.
Not only that, but it won't give you splinters and isn't treated with nasty wood-preserving chemicals. Great for backyard play structures for the kids.
I seem to recall that there was a namespace collision (read, "trademark problem") with some other pre-existing Open Office. Hence the tacked on ".org".
Yeah, I think it looks silly myself, and I don't know that anyone bothers pronouncing it.
Some people may need to run Windows because they rely on one of the vanishing breed of Windows-only products.
That's no reason for them not to avail themselves of being able to freely exchange Open Office documents with their more fortunate brethren on Linux. And the documents they generate will all nicely be already in OOo format for when they finally do get to migrate to Linux.
(And besides, Open Office is several hundred dollars cheaper than MS Office.)
Nonsense. IBM has always, when they've shipped Linux, shipped RedHat on some platforms (mostly x86-based, started to move to POWER) and SUSE on others (S/390 and zSeries, maybe some x86. SUSE used to have a PPC distro too).
I can imagine that one reason for this policy is that IBM learned with Microsoft the danger of handing an OS business to just one company.
Why did Bean know that? He was the LM pilot, not the CM pilot (or the Commander, who is supposed to know everything;-). I'm not saying he didn't, just strikes me as curious.
Telemetry wasn't of course the whole issue -- that lets Houston know what's going on but doesn't do anything for the flight itself (guidance, etc). The Apollo-Saturn did have a mode to allow guidance inputs via the hand controllers in the CM, and Pete Conrad was prepared to use it, I don't know that it came to that however.
Yeah, some of the systems restored during the ascent, but they still had to recalibrate everything to make sure they restored correctly once in LEO.
(BTW, I once asked Pete about this, and his and Bean's pinpoint landing near Surveyor 3, and some of the other things he'd done (he also "flew" (via computer) most of the DC-X flights). As far as the space program went, he was most proud of what he'd done to rescue/repair Skylab after its solar panels had been damaged during launch.) (Heh, and the thing he may have been least proud of was his acting role as an alternate-reality version of himself in the made for TV movie "Plymouth".)
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Considering that 2 megapixels gives you slightly more pixels than fit on a 1600x1200 computer screen, that's actually pretty darn good (depending on the quality of the pixel). You must still be thinking of the old cheapy 640x480 (1/3 megapixel) devices.
Granted you need more if you want photo-quality prints, but it's more than adequate for on-screen use. In a device this small, the real limitation is the size and quality of the lens (ie, crappy) rather than the resolution of the sensor. There's a reason that good cameras have big lenses, and it has little to do with the size of the sensor or film they're recording on.
Firewalls don't protect from viruses.
Horrors! How am I going to protect myself from all those x86 Linux viruses, then?
(Did you miss the smiley in the original post? For the humor-impaired, replace "all those x86-based Linux viruses" with "the rare x86 Linux malware". And most of the Windows-targeted crap out there doesn't even make it through the packet filter on the router.)
So, to all 12 people out there interested in Yellow Dog Linux, tell us why. ;)
;-)
Well, I don't have a G5, but I do run YDL. (If I had a G5 Mac, I'd have it set up to dual boot.) I've got a couple of older PowerMacs (in the 200MHz 603e range) that will never run MacOS X (in fact, were never upgraded beyond MacOS 8). Mostly I use them for testing software portability. (I've also got a Sparc Linux box, and x86 BSD and Solaris boxes). When I get newer PowerPC hardware I'll probably put one of the old boxes to use as a firewall to protect myself from all those x86-based Linux viruses around
Oh, certainly, a lot of the backstory can be left out. The fact that the core of the galaxy is exploding ties together the Puppeteer migration, the need for the Q2 hyperdrive, and the coincidental fact that the Ringworld, whose scrith foundation screens out all radiation and 50% of neutrinos just happens to be inclined to screen the inhabitants from the galactic core, is just a minor detail.
It isn't essential, but it's like a turkey dinner without the dressing and cranberry sauce. Incomplete.
For that matter the Pak Protector thing can be omitted unless you're doing Ringworld Engineers too.
(The interesting point about that is not merely why did the Pak populate the model of Kzin with real Kzinti, but why didn't the Pak exterminate the Kzinti when they were first discovered? Look what Brennan did to the Martians. BTW, is it just me, or does the Face On Mars look like a Protector might?)
I have to admit I haven't watched "Star Trek: Enterprise" since a few episodes in first season. But I have to wonder -- how do they get away with introducing new alien species (other than the typical throwaway we only ever see them in one show species typical of Trek) that later in the chronology (TOS, TNG, DS9, V'ger) we've never heard of?
"Enterprise" should have fewer alien species than were in TOS -- and that's still plenty to work with. (What I'd really like to see is them come up with an explanation for the difference in Klingon physiology between TOS and all the other series, which the DS9 episode "More Tribbles, More Troubles" just glosses over with Worf muttering "we don't speak of it".)
And how faithful will they be to the books? Will they have the "invulnerable" General Products hull? Will they have the Slaver shotgun? Will they include the Puppeteer Fleet of Worlds?
This has so much potential to be great or awful.
That's the problem. Niven's Known Space has far too much backstory leading up to Ringworld. Yeah, they can gloss over the details, but that would likely leave fans unsatisfied and everyone else confused. And four hours isn't near enough time to even do Ringworld. (Timing for a screenplay is typically one minute per page, and a screenplay is far less densely written than a novel. Some of the difference you can make up by virtue of showing rather than describing, but not a lot.)
To do it right, they need to do enough of the earlier Known Space stories to fill in. Parts of The Adults (which became Protector), At the Core (which explains why the Puppeteers are leaving known space, as well as the origin of the Quantum 2 hyperdrive), and some other story (maybe Soft Weapon?) which gives a bit of background into the nature of Puppeteers and Kzin.
I'm not holding my breath.
makes the setting the story and throws in some hackneyed and stereotypical characters with an inane plot to act as placeholders.
Most of Niven's early SF is like this. But then, so was Jules Verne's and, to a lesser extent, H G Wells'. As was Clarke's, and Asimov's. If you want character and plot, why the hell are you reading SF? Or are you one of those touch-feely "sci-fi" that prompted a lot of the crap known as "New Wave" back in the 70s which ruined the genre.
Science fiction is a literature of ideas, not characters. Now, good characters and good plot certainly make for a more entertaining story than otherwise, but without good ideas -- and Ringworld is one of the grandest inventions in the history of the genre -- you might just as well be reading space opera (which most sci-fi these days is) or any other genre, for that matter.
(And while a girl with a 'luck' gene, a 200-year old genius, an insane puppeteer and an 8 foot tall possibly lapsed Kdaptist ratcat may be "cookie cutter", I wouldn't exactly call them "stereotypical". Although one can make a fair argument for mapping them onto Dorothy, the Tin Woodman, the Scarecrow and the Lion -- but not necessarily in that order).
Actually, the Kzinti (yes, Niven's Kzinti) did in fact appear in a Star Trek episode.
It was the ancient (and thankfully, mostly forgotten) animated Star Trek series, Niven did an adaptation of his short story "The Soft Weapon" with Spock substituting for the Puppeteer.
Remember it isn't the act of obtaining an unauthorized copy of a copyrighted work that is copyright infringement, it is the act of making such copies available to other people in the first place
But the files placed in a shared folder aren't copies (at least, not provably unauthorized copies). The copying doesn't occur until the download starts. Then the violation is by whoever initiated the copying (download) process.
An analogy might be a bookstore that photocopies a book without authorization, rebinds it, and puts it on the shelf with a price tag on it.
Nope, because the sharer is neither charging a price nor has copied the file. The analogy would be with a bookstore that has a photocopy machine in it. The bookstore has done nothing wrong, even if it allows a patron to make wholesale copies of its wares. (Stupid, yes; legally wrong, no.)
Now, burning copies of music onto CD-Rs and handing them out on the street is clearly a copyright violation -- and is also against the "Personal Use" provision of Canadian copyright law.
That's okay, I just read it as "Interface Engineering".
You can inspect-in quality.
No, you can't.
Materials, parts and welds can be x-ray inspected for example. Larger pieces of metal can be tested sonically.
That inspection doesn't add quality, it just weeds out the crap. Now, if your production process gives you only one bad item for every 10 you produce, you won't have to inspect as many to get n good ones than if your process creates 5 bad items for every 10 produced.
Same as developing software: you can do all the code walk-throughs (inspection) and turn on all the compiler warnings (automated inspection), but the real proof is when it gets turned over to the testers and end users. Problem with most rockets is, once they've been tested (under operating conditions, firing the engines on the stand isn't a complete test) they can't be re-used.
To add quality to a vehicle, you have to flight test it and fix the problems the flight test turned up. And fix them in that vehicle, since the next one off the line may have different problems.
(Of course you inspect your materials and components during assembly, but that doesn't prevent the dropped washer in the circuit board, or the misplaced socket wrench behind the panel, or the rag left in the fuel line, or the airbrake gear installed upside-down (all actual space vehicle occurances)).
The key to lowering the cost of launches is mass production and that means emphasizing manufacturing design, rather than rocket design.
That might be one approach -- but the Lockheed Martin (then Martin Marietta) factory south of Denver, when it was built in the early 1960s, was capable of rolling out a Titan II every week (actually the peak was closer to 6/month). Back then, aside from their role in the Gemini program, they were also our ICBM of choice.
You're still left with the problem of guaranteeing that something (the rocket you just built) you haven't tested under operational conditions will work correctly the first time. Would you be willing to book a ticket for a trans-Pacific flight aboard a 747 that just rolled off of Boeing's assembly line? (No shakedown flight, no place for an emergency landing, just load and go.)
That's fine for low-value payloads where you don't mind if you lose one every once in a while, or for ammunition, but carrying people is going to require an order of magnitude better reliability, which is either very expensive (you can't really inspect-in quality) or we need to come up with vehicles that can be test-flown, reflown, and have reasonable emergency abort provisions.
(And you're right about the chicken and egg problem. My wife used to be a manufacturing engineer for Martin, involved in a lot of studies on how to streamline and automate the production process for various real and projected launch vehicles. Low volume demand nearly always meant it was cheaper to just stick with the old methods (a lot of hand labor) than invest in new equipment and processes.)
Malbolge? That sounds more like a disease... ;-)
Mercury is a planet, Miranda is a moon -- but I guess that's okay, Algol is a star.
Doesn't anyone have a COBOL-script?
Actually, it seems, yes. (Scary, isn't it?)
Wait a minute. Adults still visit Slashdot ?
;-) I think it was G. Harry Stine that was fond of saying something like "Once you reach fifty without growing up, you don't have to."
Hey, just because you're an adult doesn't mean you have to be a grown up
Well, if Modula were a good scripting language, you could go with Linux Apache Modula Postgres. But I'm having trouble coming up with any other language starting with M.
Probably just as well that there's no popular scripting language starting with C, and that CGI is out of favor, can you imagine CGI Linux Apache Postgres? Unfortunate.
In no natural language does the case of a character convey information that cannot be gained from context.
;-)
Glad you added that qualifier. But the whole point of programming languages is to minimize the amount of context (read, "redundancy") needed to make the meaning clear.
Now you can go back to putting a polish on your Polish sausage
I've been paid (as in, it was part of my job at the time) to write code in: APL, Assembler, Basic, C, C++, Cobol, Fortran, Java, JavaScript, Pascal, Perl, PHP, PL/I, PostScript and SQL (plus variants of some of those), as well as job control languages like JCL and WFL, simple scripting in sh and csh, several proprietary application-specific scripting languages like MITS, SPSS, GML and GSL, and miscellanous markup languages (troff, formal, HTML, XML, rtf, etc). And a half-dozen different text editors (CANDE, Teco, FIX, vi, emacs...)
I've probably left a few out, and that's not even mentioning languages I learned incidental to a class assignment (GPSS, Simscript II and Simula for a course on discrete event digital simulation, SNOBOL for something on text processing, Lisp).
The point is not to brag, but to point out that any professional software developer should be both expected to know several languages and should expect to learn and use several more over the course of his career. (But if you're going to mention it on a resume, give some indication of skill level -- expert, experienced or just "I wrote a 'hello world' in it once"?)
A mechanic is expected to have a pretty complete toolkit, with both metric and imperial wrenches, slot and Phillips and Torx screwdrivers, etc. -- and in Canada, Robertson screwdrivers too. (OTOH, he probably doesn't need a left-handed blivet impeller unless he's just into collecting tools for their own sake.) Somebody designing a product to be built -- whether a machine or a software system -- needs to be aware of what tools and materials are available to build the product with, and to maintain it. (In this regard progamming languages are more like materials than tools, either way they should be chosen for their properties.)
PL/1.
Ah, you beat me to it. I was going to mention the Arabia. Yeah, terrific dive, even some of the rigging still in place. Quite a few other wrecks to dive at Tobermory too. For those that don't know the area, it's the tip of the Bruce Peninsula between Lake Huron and Georgian Bay. It's officially preserved as an underwater Provincial Park.
;-) in the Gulf of St. Lawrence (about 120-150 ft, and bloody cold), which still holds up pretty well (mostly steel, but wood decking, railings, etc).
Even salt water can preserve things well if it's cold enough. I've dived on the Empress of Ireland (ie, "I've gone down on an Empress"
Most of the plastic 'lumber' sold for decking and the like is from recycled plastic. One of the more popular uses of the stuff, since in general the recycled plastic isn't high grade enough to be used in food or beverage packaging.
Not only that, but it won't give you splinters and isn't treated with nasty wood-preserving chemicals. Great for backyard play structures for the kids.
I seem to recall that there was a namespace collision (read, "trademark problem") with some other pre-existing Open Office. Hence the tacked on ".org".
Yeah, I think it looks silly myself, and I don't know that anyone bothers pronouncing it.
Some people may need to run Windows because they rely on one of the vanishing breed of Windows-only products.
That's no reason for them not to avail themselves of being able to freely exchange Open Office documents with their more fortunate brethren on Linux. And the documents they generate will all nicely be already in OOo format for when they finally do get to migrate to Linux.
(And besides, Open Office is several hundred dollars cheaper than MS Office.)
Step 5 - Profit!
historically IBM has always been a Red Hat shop
Nonsense. IBM has always, when they've shipped Linux, shipped RedHat on some platforms (mostly x86-based, started to move to POWER) and SUSE on others (S/390 and zSeries, maybe some x86. SUSE used to have a PPC distro too).
I can imagine that one reason for this policy is that IBM learned with Microsoft the danger of handing an OS business to just one company.
Why did Bean know that? He was the LM pilot, not the CM pilot (or the Commander, who is supposed to know everything ;-). I'm not saying he didn't, just strikes me as curious.
Telemetry wasn't of course the whole issue -- that lets Houston know what's going on but doesn't do anything for the flight itself (guidance, etc). The Apollo-Saturn did have a mode to allow guidance inputs via the hand controllers in the CM, and Pete Conrad was prepared to use it, I don't know that it came to that however.
Yeah, some of the systems restored during the ascent, but they still had to recalibrate everything to make sure they restored correctly once in LEO.
(BTW, I once asked Pete about this, and his and Bean's pinpoint landing near Surveyor 3, and some of the other things he'd done (he also "flew" (via computer) most of the DC-X flights). As far as the space program went, he was most proud of what he'd done to rescue/repair Skylab after its solar panels had been damaged during launch.) (Heh, and the thing he may have been least proud of was his acting role as an alternate-reality version of himself in the made for TV movie "Plymouth".)