Yes, a car. My favorite part is how the nutcase shoots a hole in the floor to be able to tie it securely to the catapult's sling.
Beware that this will Slashdot my server, be patient if the download is very slow.
Diskette Drive Classical Music - Assembly!
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MenuetOS Debuts
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· Score: 2
An operating system in assembler? Bah! Such high level languages are tools for the weak, macros be damned!
Heh. Interesting perspective. I suppose all the nasty compatibility issues imposed by assemblers are all but erased, are they?
Never mind the debugging you'll have to spend with machine language. Assembly has its own issues, of course - mistyped register numbers, wrong hardware addresses, then the usual programming errors you get in any other language. But with machine language, you have to count your zeros and ones very carefully... of course, you'll eschew the bourgeois luxury of hexadecimal, won't you?
:)
I love Assembly. Back in high school, I was ordered to write a program that made a computer play music. Everyone else wrote little Pascal and structured BASIC programs to play Chopsticks on the school's Macs 512s.
I wrote a TMS9900 Assembly program which played Flight of the Bumblebees in three-part harmony with the stepper motors of my TI-99/4A's three 5.25" full-height SSSD diskette drives. Percussion was achieved by toggling the head pad solenoids.
My Computer Studies teacher didn't like it because he couldn't understand it to critique it. But he gave me an A+ anyway, probably because the source code was about 30 pages long.
Now if you think AI design is easy, why don't you go program one?
Heh. I think for something with a high-tech golf cart motor spinning sharpened tool steel anvils, it would be very easy; here's a simple flowchart which could be implemented in the language of your choice:
Turn on rotating anvil motor.
Seek out anything which moves.
Chase anything which moves.
If anything still moves, goto #2.
Shut off rotating anvil motor.
Just make sure you don't accidentally turn it on when you've got it in the workshop. Or, worse still, when you're enjoying your new-found celebrity by showing it off in a booth at the local shopping mall. Granny probably couldn't out-run it, even with her walker. (Can't you just imagine the CNN coverage for that kind of shopping mall carnage?)
That's pretty impressive for one 12HP peak motor, let alone two with batteries and the rest of the robot. I was a skeptic when I read "12HP" in the article, but then I read the motor's current ratings: 300A at 48V. 14.4kW. Since 1hp=746W, and given that the motor isn't going to be more than about 75% efficient, that sounds about right. Urk.
Surfing a couple of links, I've discovered that the motors are Briggs and Stratton Eteks. Very nice; I didn't know B&S were building electric motors at all. Apparently, they're a new generation of high-tech electric motor for golf carts.
The only golf cart motor I've ever played with was a fairly inefficient series-wound universal motor. It ran off 24 volts (very comfortably off two series-wired car batteries) and it certainly wasn't something that you'd want to mount tool steel hammer to. It would be quite terrifying.
Note also that a loaded series motor would tend to be pretty self-regulating in speed - there will come a point where the reactance of the windings will limit the current (and therefore power) as the commutator frequency increases.
Modern motors are electronically controlled, and depending on control, can be more efficient at a far broader range of speeds.
If these Eteks are anything like what Briggs and Stratton claims (and I love Briggs and Stratton, they make terrific gas motors, so I'd be inclined to believe them), this bot must be insanely terrifying.
Does anyone have any links to photos of this thing doing its destruction?
Dude. 130 watts of power dissipation. My 17" monitor only draws 125 watts. What's the surface area of the packaged chip?
Forget the old 5V Pentiums (P60/66) being nicknamed "coffee warmers". They were known for all sorts of overheating problems, but they only drew 3.2 amps at 5V. P = I x E = 3.2 x 5 = 16 watts of power.
I could use one of these new chips for the heater in my backyard foundry.
There's soon gonna be a boom market for tungsten and ceramic heat sinks.
"Am I the only person who LIKES having a small internet terminal in the kitchen/family room?" Apparently, yes. I suspect that laptops with wireless cards are filling the role that web appliances were supposed to fill.
I'm a purist. I've got a DEC VT-100 terminal in my kitchen, and it's connected to my BSD box. The best part is that it has video and genlock input jacks - so it can double as a TV set.
The Amiga? Wow. So you could plug things in and it would work! The same applies to wall sockets. And for the same reason - they mandated how they'd work.
Yes. Maybe if IBM had designed such features into the original PC, we wouldn't *still* be fighting with IRQ conflicts 16 years later.
TI went one better with the TI-99/4 (in *1979*): device drivers were burned into an EEPROM on the device. You plug it in, it checks for conflicts and adjusts itself accordingly, and loads the device drivers as the machine starts up. Admittedly, that wouldn't work in a multi-OS environment, but doesn't a PCI bus configure resources the same way? To my knowledge, the first time that was attempted on the x86/PC/AT architecture was with IBM's ill-fated foray into MCA slots. 1987?
Yes, Plug and Play is an achievement given the disarray the platform (was? is?) in. But if the platform had been better designed, this would never have been an issue.
Here's an interesting analogy to the way I see things: Microsoft took IBM's RV for a drive without making sure the cupboards were latched. When the problem was noticed, Microsoft swept the debris under your bed and covered it with stickers which called it clean.
We're gonna be picking glass shards out of our feet for a *long* time.
I dunno, I kinda liked your sig better when it was "Unix users?". Old skool and all.
Heh. You know, actually, that's not what it was meant to say, at all. I changed it mostly because most people were misreading it - there's only so much you can do in a.sig.
"UNIX? They're probably not even circumcised. Savages."
It was getting me flamed. Lots of it was the predictable (and funny!) "I was robbed at birth, don't make fun" stuff. You know, balding 23-year-olds who watch anime and blame their social maladjustment on the absence of a piece of skin. (Sorry if I just described anyone, this wasn't meant to be offensive.)
But the majority of the flames were coming from people who were reading the.sig differently from the way I intended. One day, my e-mail box was full of people calling me names for implying that there was anything better than UNIX. Of course, UNIX and its derivatives (Linux) are without question the best general purpose operating system for servers and Big Iron.
The old sig was a play on "UNIX" sounding like "eunuchs". Eunuchs, of course, are castrated men.
Note the question mark after UNIX in the original.sig. The question, from the unseen (and unquoted) other speaker could have been any number of things... "Do they know UNIX?", "Can they write a shell script in UNIX?", "Does microsoft.com use UNIX webservers?"...
So, it was more a suggestion of a lack of civility among those who would approve of the [clearing throat with disdain] other operating system which claims to be ready for the big times. You know, the one which evolved from desktop to datacenter as a mish-mash of patched-on features, versus the alternatives which had their origins on robust time-sharing systems.
Unfortunately, while I thought I'd worded it in such a way that everyone would get it (and my test audience of 4 people *did* get it), I discovered the bug. You know, the kind that requires a quick patch. For the longest time, though, I thought the hate messages were from people who consider microsoft.os.windows.advocacy to be a well-informed bunch, or people who were unhappy that they couldn't accumulate smegma. The first message I got from someone literate enough to actually describe his contempt, I changed the.sig and explained what I'd been meaning.
When the Code Red bug came along, it seemed like a great opportunity to plug my website. Nothing quite so controversial there, I merely added the "IIS Users?" link to it, and there it is.
(Oh boy, am I gonna take a karma hit for what's coming...)
Finally, a more personal explanation, lest you find the latter half of my.sig to be offensive. I went to a drunken kegger party with a bunch of U of M engineering students in Ann Arbor MI. As the token Canadian, I was expected to bring a good Canadian beer - "You know, Lawrence, not the formulaic Molson and Labatt stuff!". I brought a 24 of a beer whose translated French name means "The Damned". It's a little strong, so it wasn't very popular with anyone but me. 18 of them later, and my ?third? ?fourth? bathroom break of the evening, it happened.
To paraphrase the line from There's Something About Mary, I managed to get the beans above the frank.
Nothing sobers you up faster than that. Legend has it that the scream could be heard as far away as State Street.
A stumble from the dorms to the hospital ensued, and though the doctor was able to extricate the tissue from the zipper on my Levis, it was totalled. As totalled as a Honda Civic at a monster truck show. As shredded as a garbage bag caught in a snowblower. Fortunately, the contents were unscathed, a circumcision was performed, and my only regret is that I didn't have that accident sooner.
So, as one of the few who has actually had sex both with and without a foreskin, I can assure you that all you miss out on is having a dick which looks like the business end of an anteater. Sex is actually better *after* than before, which basically erases all rational arguments against the procedure. I'm quite a proponent now (privacy and advocacy seldom go hand in hand). And each of the five years since, I've sent a Hannukah card to the good Doc who did it.
If you want more details on before and after sexual and daily living comparisons to sate any questions, e-mail me.
ohhh of course that excludes putting a desktop PC on almost every home users desk in the world right ? (if it wasn't for MS-Dos, their would be no PC-as-we-know-it)
Indeed. In fact, your quote of my original posting included the assertion that Microsoft has indeed has some practical uses.
And I will give Microsoft credit where it's due. Microsoft can be at least partially credited for standardizing the Intel x86 architecture, for one thing. IBM may have created it, but it was the clone makers selling it to run MS-DOS that standardized it. For sure, it was a dated kludge of an architecture even when it was introduced in 1981, but the fact that we don't have 18 different popular desktop platforms has terrifically simplified buying a computer. The adoption rate has been increased greatly as a result of Microsoft selling MS-DOS.
On the other hand, Microsoft did not invent Plug and Play. The Amiga had it in 1985, the Mac in 1984 and the TI-99/4 in 1979. They merely managed to make it work (sorta) on the Intel platform that IBM designed and they standardized.
Microsoft did not invent the Internet, did not invent TCP/IP, multitasking, multi-user operating systems, e-mail, etc. Hell, they didn't even invent MS-DOS.
So, what does Microsoft do well? Sell their products and implement standards. Not good standards, usually.
Like VHS winning over Beta, Microsoft usually pushes the technically inferior standard, of its own or someone else's creation. Just on sheer volume. And again, like VHS winning over Beta, a default operating system and platform sure makes it a lot easier to use your computer.
Anyone else here old enough to remember trying to mount DOS diskettes on an Amiga, or Amiga diskettes on a Mac, or Mac diskettes on a TI-99/4A? That's the only part of Microsoft which has been a blessing to the industry.
As with most other people who've got experience with more than one operating system (and, better still, several hardware and CPU platforms), I've seen enough variety of computers to know that Emperor Bill has no clothes.
VHS versus Beta? Beta's still very much alive, thank you. Consumers don't know quality, but TV stations sure do.
small minded ignorant linux smux, gotta love em:P LIARS too hey:P
I've yet to meet anyone with any degree of experience in multiple operating systems who still feels positively about Microsoft. If all you've ever driven is Hyundais, I guess it's pretty hard to understand how someone could like a Plymouth Superbird or a Porsche 959.
And, lemme tell you, Windows 2000 makes a nice daily driver. Disposable, just like a shiny new Hyundai Sonata.
Favorite linux user quote of the decade : "I can't get my modem working" hahahahahahahahahahahaha......
Interesting comments, especially in light of your.sig. Where are the mod points when I need them?
I have yet to claim impartiality. Ever.
However, I do consider myself to be a cut above (pun intended - ha ha) the kind of thoughtless Windows-bashing that I frequently see. Sure, it should be illegal to use Windows on any machine with a routable IP. ISPs should collectively ban it the way most of them have banned running servers of any sort.
But you'll not find me posting my anti-Windows diatribe in as ill-formed a manner as they stereotype.
MSNBC have proven themselves to be pretty damn impartial. Slashdot cannot claim that. At all.
Yeah. They're pretty impressive in that regard.
Similarly, the Canadian Broadcasting Corporation (CBC) is funded by the Canadian federal government. And, similarly, they've managed an impressive record of impartiality to our government's ineptitude.
However, I'm sure that a single telephone call from Jeen Poutine could slash the CBC's funding, and that must weigh on the back of the mind of the editors and reporters there. Certainly, when I freelanced for the CBC, it was strictly verboten for CBC employees to have lawn signs supporting election candidates at any level.
Uncle Bill must wield similar authority over MSNBC. While MSNBC certainly covers Microsoft flaws, it seems to be a little toned down compared to ABC or CBS for example. And CNN, with its AOL ownership, seems to be harder on Microsoft.
Maybe it's subliminal to the staff, but it's there. Compare the coverage very carefully next week when a new Microsoft vulnerability imperils the Internet.
Now, why doesn't it matter that Slashdot is *not* impartial? Because that's the format. That's what's expected. You trust the comments only slightly more than Usenet postings. After all, Slashdot actively solicits opinions from its readership, and those make up the bulk of the news coverage.
that talks about something we already knew, but haven't paid that much attention to: most tech journalists are a bunch of corporate whores.
Of course. Well, tech journalists are usually going to write for tech periodicals, which sell advertising to tech firms. Predictably, that makes them about as impartial as Car and Driver magazine.
So, the bigger point is this: which do I, as an informed and newsreading consumer, trust? Slashdot, which is an arm of VA Linux, or MSNBC?
Hmmm...
It even mentions Slashdot, although not very favorably
He does hit home on an irritating issue. Much of the moderation here appears to be done based on whether or not the moderator personally agrees with you, regardless of how intelligent or relevent your comments may be. This is a subtle evolution of the "luser who uses Windoze" quote from the NetSlaves author. It's rare that Microsoft does something right, of course, but when it does, it's nice to be able to discuss it rationally. Meta-Moderation should address that, but as long as human beings are involved, impartiality will be unattainable.
Hey my dick is bigger than yours because I shaved off all my pubic hairs:)
Heh. And your girlfriend is a pedophile.;)
even 60Hz isn't acceptable, so now we have tv-sets that digitally enhance the image and give 100Hz
True. You don't see features like that in NTSC sets, though - the 60Hz vertical rate of NTSC means that set mfrs concentrate on other things - like 53" projection sets where the scan lines are 1/4" apart. Ugh.
IMHO American TV suck, and it suck hard, to many comercials and verry bad picture quality, but mind you that was in 1992
Too many commercials, I agree. But that's not a technical issue. As for the picture quality, were you watching TV on NYC's cablesystem? [grin]
A good, clean NTSC signal is very nice. It's nothing compared to a VGA monitor, of course, but neither is PAL. I'm a videophile, I've worked as a broadcast technician, and NTSC's picture quality can be amazingly good.
and when is the us going to switch to hdtv ?
When Linux conquers the desktop, IIS users keep their webservers patched, and our home 'net connections are fiber optic with IPv6 addresses.
Maybe sooner. [sigh] It's the same chicken or egg issue which slows the IPv6 adoption.
Here in Canada, we're waiting for the US to take the lead. ER is now simulcast in HDTV, but until I point a big UHF Yagi at Buffalo NY and smuggle a receiver across the border, it does me no good.
Yeah, but let's face it, Quicktime is for the most part dead.
If Apple had been serious about it, there *would* have been at least precompiled Linux binaries for it; my only guess is that Microsoft's financial interest in Apple may have helped to prevent that from happening.
Of course, Windows Media Player's ASF support for Linux would be great, but I see no mention of it in the press release. Given that Microsoft went after Virtual Dub for its support of ASF files (read the news archive):
"If I remember correctly, my reverse engineering of the ASF file format structure took place after the DMCA was enacted but before the anti-reverse-engineering clause took effect, and between the filing and issuing dates for the Microsoft patent. I will have to look up the exact dates, but ASF functionality existed in VirtualDub long before the infamous V1.3c release that will seemingly roam the Internet for eternity. This is, unfortunately, the same ASF parser that ended up in the Linux avifile library in modified form -- so anyone using that library needs to be careful. Frankly, I'm amazed my parser ever worked at all, given how nasty it was."
[sigh]
Please join with me in wishing cancer on Mr. Gates.
OK, you have probably had both TV and color TV for a longer time in the US, but the price that you've to pay for that is a slightly lower quality picture with fewer lines and a color signal that is not always perfect.
Yes. Admittedly, PAL has more scanning lines.
But there's no magic to that. Nearly the same horizontal frequency, with a 50Hz vertical. The bandwidth of the video and RF circuits is nearly the same, so there's really no dramatic improvement in picture quality.
On the other hand, NTSC has 525 interlaced scanning lines, 60Hz vertical, a higher frame rate, and almost no perceivable flicker as a result.
From what I understand, Linux and Windows NT have had IPv6 support for quite some time now.
The problem appears to be more subtle than that. The routers are mostly compliant, I wouldn't worry about it.
The smooth transition is going to require that everyone on the 'Net start to switch over. Even half-wit Windows-95 AOL-point-and-drool users.
Surely, we can release patches to the operating systems. And users can upgrade to new applications programs which aren't crashing when they request a DNS lookup and get something longer than they expect.
But you know they won't.
As evidence, I submit to you the Code Red worm. You'd have to be living under a rock for the past two months to not know about it. Yet, I still get hit by infected machines. Follow the link on my.sig.
I haven't studied or attempted to deploy IPv6, but it will have to be backwards compatible with IPv4.
By contrast, RCA came up with an ingenious way of making a color signal ride on top of the existing North American black and white system. Old black and white TV sets were eventually replaced with color, but there was no great format change. You bought a color TV or a black and white set, and you weren't at the mercy of finding out whether or not there was still a black and white station in your area. People transitioned more gently and weren't put off by having their two-year-old oak-cabinet investment turned into a paperweight by moving out of a 405 line service area.
IPv6 will have to be deployed in the same way or adoption rates will wane.
I've been thinking about doing this to my Ranger - where did you pick up the LEDs, and are you using integrated 12V ones, or do you have a seperate regulator for them?
Yes, please tell us more about how you did your lamp conversion. I'd be very interested in upgrading my tail lamps and other markers with LED's.
The LEDs are 3,500MCD each, from Mode Electronics. I run a dozen of them.
Under the dashboard and connected to the brake pedal, I used a 7805 regulator to cut the voltage down to something predictable. The regulator also provides overload protection; that is, if the rest of the controller fails catastrophically, the main brake lights will still work.
In the truck's back end, there's a 555 timer IC with industrial temperature range capacitors and resistors doing the timing. The 555 sets about a 15% duty cycle, dumping 5V directly across each LED. The current through each diode is about 200mA. This is the limit of what they're designed to handle, and they get warm.:) A fairly large electrolytic capacitor takes up the slack in what the regulator can handle.
From the back end, the LEDs are every bit as bright as the main tail lights. And because of how I mounted them, they're essentially invisible until I touch the brake pedal.
You're being blinded by your/. drive anti-Microsoft thinking too much.
Windows is absolutely the best desktop operating system out there. KDE and Gnome are great, but Windows is still more mature.
There. I said it. I displayed reason. I even posted this from my Windows 2000 machine.
However, you only need to follow the link in my.sig to see why it should be illegal to use Windows on a routable IP. And that's coming from a moderate Libertarian.
The facts speak for themselves. Microsoft is a sick and dangerous company, like the Nazis were a sick and dangerous political entity. They're so convinced that what they're doing is the right thing for everyone that they fail to see their own shortcomings.
Hitler thought that killing all the Jews would solve the world's problems. Bill thinks that being the only operating system will solve the world's problems. Neither one is/was anything more than obsessively convinced of the strength of a flawed vision.
Hitler's birthday = April 20th. Gates = October 28th.
but when the 2.2GHz P4.1 comes out in November it will take a clear lead.
That's getting pretty close to the magic 2.4 GHz number.
Computers might upset the global microwave oven infrastructure we've already established. Chaos will ensue, as networks of Amana RadarRanges and Panasonic Genius are disrupted. People might have to make a choice between counting with rocks or defrosting TV dinners over a campfire.
Even worse, there might actually be grounds for newbies calling the CD-ROM tray a "coffee warmer".
This will also be a new problem for overclockers who are managing to get processors up to the lofty 2.4 GHz range. RF heating of their water cooling systems will have to be addressed.
Slashdot Mirror
Kegs and organs are neat, but amateurish. A friend sent me an e-mail with an attached MPEG of a bunch of British nuts throwing a CAR.
Yes, a car. My favorite part is how the nutcase shoots a hole in the floor to be able to tie it securely to the catapult's sling.
Beware that this will Slashdot my server, be patient if the download is very slow.
An operating system in assembler? Bah! Such high level languages are tools for the weak, macros be damned!
Heh. Interesting perspective. I suppose all the nasty compatibility issues imposed by assemblers are all but erased, are they?
Never mind the debugging you'll have to spend with machine language. Assembly has its own issues, of course - mistyped register numbers, wrong hardware addresses, then the usual programming errors you get in any other language. But with machine language, you have to count your zeros and ones very carefully... of course, you'll eschew the bourgeois luxury of hexadecimal, won't you?
:)
I love Assembly. Back in high school, I was ordered to write a program that made a computer play music. Everyone else wrote little Pascal and structured BASIC programs to play Chopsticks on the school's Macs 512s.
I wrote a TMS9900 Assembly program which played Flight of the Bumblebees in three-part harmony with the stepper motors of my TI-99/4A's three 5.25" full-height SSSD diskette drives. Percussion was achieved by toggling the head pad solenoids.
My Computer Studies teacher didn't like it because he couldn't understand it to critique it. But he gave me an A+ anyway, probably because the source code was about 30 pages long.
Ahhh... High school.
While I haven't programmed in Assembly in about ten years, you can check out my resume here, since I'm looking for work!
Just because it was an Old washing machine, does 1) make it his to destory 2) mean that it doesn't funcation correctly
I know the Slashdot article mentions the washing machine carnage, but I have yet to find any references to it on the bot's website.
I wanna see pictures! I wanna see pictures!
Now if you think AI design is easy, why don't you go program one?
Heh. I think for something with a high-tech golf cart motor spinning sharpened tool steel anvils, it would be very easy; here's a simple flowchart which could be implemented in the language of your choice:
Just make sure you don't accidentally turn it on when you've got it in the workshop. Or, worse still, when you're enjoying your new-found celebrity by showing it off in a booth at the local shopping mall. Granny probably couldn't out-run it, even with her walker. (Can't you just imagine the CNN coverage for that kind of shopping mall carnage?)
it weighs in a 315lbs
That's pretty impressive for one 12HP peak motor, let alone two with batteries and the rest of the robot. I was a skeptic when I read "12HP" in the article, but then I read the motor's current ratings: 300A at 48V. 14.4kW. Since 1hp=746W, and given that the motor isn't going to be more than about 75% efficient, that sounds about right. Urk.
Surfing a couple of links, I've discovered that the motors are Briggs and Stratton Eteks. Very nice; I didn't know B&S were building electric motors at all. Apparently, they're a new generation of high-tech electric motor for golf carts.
The only golf cart motor I've ever played with was a fairly inefficient series-wound universal motor. It ran off 24 volts (very comfortably off two series-wired car batteries) and it certainly wasn't something that you'd want to mount tool steel hammer to. It would be quite terrifying.
Note also that a loaded series motor would tend to be pretty self-regulating in speed - there will come a point where the reactance of the windings will limit the current (and therefore power) as the commutator frequency increases.
Modern motors are electronically controlled, and depending on control, can be more efficient at a far broader range of speeds.
If these Eteks are anything like what Briggs and Stratton claims (and I love Briggs and Stratton, they make terrific gas motors, so I'd be inclined to believe them), this bot must be insanely terrifying.
Does anyone have any links to photos of this thing doing its destruction?
if you dont have the cash for the kilowatts,
Dude. 130 watts of power dissipation. My 17" monitor only draws 125 watts. What's the surface area of the packaged chip?
Forget the old 5V Pentiums (P60/66) being nicknamed "coffee warmers". They were known for all sorts of overheating problems, but they only drew 3.2 amps at 5V. P = I x E = 3.2 x 5 = 16 watts of power.
I could use one of these new chips for the heater in my backyard foundry.
There's soon gonna be a boom market for tungsten and ceramic heat sinks.
Sheesh.
"Am I the only person who LIKES having a small internet terminal in the kitchen/family room?"
Apparently, yes. I suspect that laptops with wireless cards are filling the role that web appliances were supposed to fill.
I'm a purist. I've got a DEC VT-100 terminal in my kitchen, and it's connected to my BSD box. The best part is that it has video and genlock input jacks - so it can double as a TV set.
I love that thing.
The Amiga? Wow. So you could plug things in and it would work! The same applies to wall sockets. And for the same reason - they mandated how they'd work.
Yes. Maybe if IBM had designed such features into the original PC, we wouldn't *still* be fighting with IRQ conflicts 16 years later.
TI went one better with the TI-99/4 (in *1979*): device drivers were burned into an EEPROM on the device. You plug it in, it checks for conflicts and adjusts itself accordingly, and loads the device drivers as the machine starts up. Admittedly, that wouldn't work in a multi-OS environment, but doesn't a PCI bus configure resources the same way? To my knowledge, the first time that was attempted on the x86/PC/AT architecture was with IBM's ill-fated foray into MCA slots. 1987?
Yes, Plug and Play is an achievement given the disarray the platform (was? is?) in. But if the platform had been better designed, this would never have been an issue.
Here's an interesting analogy to the way I see things: Microsoft took IBM's RV for a drive without making sure the cupboards were latched. When the problem was noticed, Microsoft swept the debris under your bed and covered it with stickers which called it clean.
We're gonna be picking glass shards out of our feet for a *long* time.
I dunno, I kinda liked your sig better when it was "Unix users?". Old skool and all.
Heh. You know, actually, that's not what it was meant to say, at all. I changed it mostly because most people were misreading it - there's only so much you can do in a .sig.
"UNIX? They're probably not even circumcised. Savages."
It was getting me flamed. Lots of it was the predictable (and funny!) "I was robbed at birth, don't make fun" stuff. You know, balding 23-year-olds who watch anime and blame their social maladjustment on the absence of a piece of skin. (Sorry if I just described anyone, this wasn't meant to be offensive.)
But the majority of the flames were coming from people who were reading the .sig differently from the way I intended. One day, my e-mail box was full of people calling me names for implying that there was anything better than UNIX. Of course, UNIX and its derivatives (Linux) are without question the best general purpose operating system for servers and Big Iron.
The old sig was a play on "UNIX" sounding like "eunuchs". Eunuchs, of course, are castrated men.
Note the question mark after UNIX in the original .sig. The question, from the unseen (and unquoted) other speaker could have been any number of things... "Do they know UNIX?", "Can they write a shell script in UNIX?", "Does microsoft.com use UNIX webservers?"...
So, it was more a suggestion of a lack of civility among those who would approve of the [clearing throat with disdain] other operating system which claims to be ready for the big times. You know, the one which evolved from desktop to datacenter as a mish-mash of patched-on features, versus the alternatives which had their origins on robust time-sharing systems.
Unfortunately, while I thought I'd worded it in such a way that everyone would get it (and my test audience of 4 people *did* get it), I discovered the bug. You know, the kind that requires a quick patch. For the longest time, though, I thought the hate messages were from people who consider microsoft.os.windows.advocacy to be a well-informed bunch, or people who were unhappy that they couldn't accumulate smegma. The first message I got from someone literate enough to actually describe his contempt, I changed the .sig and explained what I'd been meaning.
When the Code Red bug came along, it seemed like a great opportunity to plug my website. Nothing quite so controversial there, I merely added the "IIS Users?" link to it, and there it is.
(Oh boy, am I gonna take a karma hit for what's coming...)
Finally, a more personal explanation, lest you find the latter half of my .sig to be offensive. I went to a drunken kegger party with a bunch of U of M engineering students in Ann Arbor MI. As the token Canadian, I was expected to bring a good Canadian beer - "You know, Lawrence, not the formulaic Molson and Labatt stuff!". I brought a 24 of a beer whose translated French name means "The Damned". It's a little strong, so it wasn't very popular with anyone but me. 18 of them later, and my ?third? ?fourth? bathroom break of the evening, it happened.
To paraphrase the line from There's Something About Mary, I managed to get the beans above the frank.
Nothing sobers you up faster than that. Legend has it that the scream could be heard as far away as State Street.
A stumble from the dorms to the hospital ensued, and though the doctor was able to extricate the tissue from the zipper on my Levis, it was totalled. As totalled as a Honda Civic at a monster truck show. As shredded as a garbage bag caught in a snowblower. Fortunately, the contents were unscathed, a circumcision was performed, and my only regret is that I didn't have that accident sooner.
So, as one of the few who has actually had sex both with and without a foreskin, I can assure you that all you miss out on is having a dick which looks like the business end of an anteater. Sex is actually better *after* than before, which basically erases all rational arguments against the procedure. I'm quite a proponent now (privacy and advocacy seldom go hand in hand). And each of the five years since, I've sent a Hannukah card to the good Doc who did it.
If you want more details on before and after sexual and daily living comparisons to sate any questions, e-mail me.
ohhh of course that excludes putting a desktop PC on almost every home users desk in the world right ? (if it wasn't for MS-Dos, their would be no PC-as-we-know-it)
Indeed. In fact, your quote of my original posting included the assertion that Microsoft has indeed has some practical uses.
And I will give Microsoft credit where it's due. Microsoft can be at least partially credited for standardizing the Intel x86 architecture, for one thing. IBM may have created it, but it was the clone makers selling it to run MS-DOS that standardized it. For sure, it was a dated kludge of an architecture even when it was introduced in 1981, but the fact that we don't have 18 different popular desktop platforms has terrifically simplified buying a computer. The adoption rate has been increased greatly as a result of Microsoft selling MS-DOS.
On the other hand, Microsoft did not invent Plug and Play. The Amiga had it in 1985, the Mac in 1984 and the TI-99/4 in 1979. They merely managed to make it work (sorta) on the Intel platform that IBM designed and they standardized.
Microsoft did not invent the Internet, did not invent TCP/IP, multitasking, multi-user operating systems, e-mail, etc. Hell, they didn't even invent MS-DOS.
So, what does Microsoft do well? Sell their products and implement standards. Not good standards, usually.
Like VHS winning over Beta, Microsoft usually pushes the technically inferior standard, of its own or someone else's creation. Just on sheer volume. And again, like VHS winning over Beta, a default operating system and platform sure makes it a lot easier to use your computer.
Anyone else here old enough to remember trying to mount DOS diskettes on an Amiga, or Amiga diskettes on a Mac, or Mac diskettes on a TI-99/4A? That's the only part of Microsoft which has been a blessing to the industry.
As with most other people who've got experience with more than one operating system (and, better still, several hardware and CPU platforms), I've seen enough variety of computers to know that Emperor Bill has no clothes.
VHS versus Beta? Beta's still very much alive, thank you. Consumers don't know quality, but TV stations sure do.
small minded ignorant linux smux, gotta love emI've yet to meet anyone with any degree of experience in multiple operating systems who still feels positively about Microsoft. If all you've ever driven is Hyundais, I guess it's pretty hard to understand how someone could like a Plymouth Superbird or a Porsche 959.
And, lemme tell you, Windows 2000 makes a nice daily driver. Disposable, just like a shiny new Hyundai Sonata.
Favorite linux user quote of the decade : "I can't get my modem working" hahahahahahahahahahahaha......True. It's so much better to have similarly incompetent people actually managing to get online, contract every dread e-mail virus known to man, and then continue to pollute *my* webserver (paid for with *my* money) through *their* idiocy, right?
Interesting comments, especially in light of your
Where are the mod points when I need them?
I have yet to claim impartiality. Ever.
However, I do consider myself to be a cut above (pun intended - ha ha) the kind of thoughtless Windows-bashing that I frequently see. Sure, it should be illegal to use Windows on any machine with a routable IP. ISPs should collectively ban it the way most of them have banned running servers of any sort.
But you'll not find me posting my anti-Windows diatribe in as ill-formed a manner as they stereotype.
MSNBC have proven themselves to be pretty damn impartial. Slashdot cannot claim that. At all.
Yeah. They're pretty impressive in that regard.
Similarly, the Canadian Broadcasting Corporation (CBC) is funded by the Canadian federal government. And, similarly, they've managed an impressive record of impartiality to our government's ineptitude.
However, I'm sure that a single telephone call from Jeen Poutine could slash the CBC's funding, and that must weigh on the back of the mind of the editors and reporters there. Certainly, when I freelanced for the CBC, it was strictly verboten for CBC employees to have lawn signs supporting election candidates at any level.
Uncle Bill must wield similar authority over MSNBC. While MSNBC certainly covers Microsoft flaws, it seems to be a little toned down compared to ABC or CBS for example. And CNN, with its AOL ownership, seems to be harder on Microsoft.
Maybe it's subliminal to the staff, but it's there. Compare the coverage very carefully next week when a new Microsoft vulnerability imperils the Internet.
Now, why doesn't it matter that Slashdot is *not* impartial? Because that's the format. That's what's expected. You trust the comments only slightly more than Usenet postings. After all, Slashdot actively solicits opinions from its readership, and those make up the bulk of the news coverage.
that talks about something we already knew, but haven't paid that much attention to: most tech journalists are a bunch of corporate whores.
Of course. Well, tech journalists are usually going to write for tech periodicals, which sell advertising to tech firms. Predictably, that makes them about as impartial as Car and Driver magazine.
So, the bigger point is this: which do I, as an informed and newsreading consumer, trust? Slashdot, which is an arm of VA Linux, or MSNBC?
Hmmm...
It even mentions Slashdot, although not very favorablyHe does hit home on an irritating issue. Much of the moderation here appears to be done based on whether or not the moderator personally agrees with you, regardless of how intelligent or relevent your comments may be. This is a subtle evolution of the "luser who uses Windoze" quote from the NetSlaves author. It's rare that Microsoft does something right, of course, but when it does, it's nice to be able to discuss it rationally. Meta-Moderation should address that, but as long as human beings are involved, impartiality will be unattainable.
Hey my dick is bigger than yours because I shaved off all my pubic hairs
Heh. And your girlfriend is a pedophile. ;)
even 60Hz isn't acceptable, so now we have tv-sets that digitally enhance the image and give 100HzTrue. You don't see features like that in NTSC sets, though - the 60Hz vertical rate of NTSC means that set mfrs concentrate on other things - like 53" projection sets where the scan lines are 1/4" apart. Ugh.
IMHO American TV suck, and it suck hard, to many comercials and verry bad picture quality, but mind you that was in 1992Too many commercials, I agree. But that's not a technical issue. As for the picture quality, were you watching TV on NYC's cablesystem? [grin]
A good, clean NTSC signal is very nice. It's nothing compared to a VGA monitor, of course, but neither is PAL. I'm a videophile, I've worked as a broadcast technician, and NTSC's picture quality can be amazingly good.
and when is the us going to switch to hdtv ?When Linux conquers the desktop, IIS users keep their webservers patched, and our home 'net connections are fiber optic with IPv6 addresses.
Maybe sooner. [sigh] It's the same chicken or egg issue which slows the IPv6 adoption.
Here in Canada, we're waiting for the US to take the lead. ER is now simulcast in HDTV, but until I point a big UHF Yagi at Buffalo NY and smuggle a receiver across the border, it does me no good.
FINALY QT in linux
Yeah, but let's face it, Quicktime is for the most part dead.
If Apple had been serious about it, there *would* have been at least precompiled Linux binaries for it; my only guess is that Microsoft's financial interest in Apple may have helped to prevent that from happening.
Of course, Windows Media Player's ASF support for Linux would be great, but I see no mention of it in the press release. Given that Microsoft went after Virtual Dub for its support of ASF files (read the news archive):
"If I remember correctly, my reverse engineering of the ASF file format structure took place after the DMCA was enacted but before the anti-reverse-engineering clause took effect, and between the filing and issuing dates for the Microsoft patent. I will have to look up the exact dates, but ASF functionality existed in VirtualDub long before the infamous V1.3c release that will seemingly roam the Internet for eternity. This is, unfortunately, the same ASF parser that ended up in the Linux avifile library in modified form -- so anyone using that library needs to be careful. Frankly, I'm amazed my parser ever worked at all, given how nasty it was."[sigh]
Please join with me in wishing cancer on Mr. Gates.
OK, you have probably had both TV and color TV for a longer time in the US, but the price that you've to pay for that is a slightly lower quality picture with fewer lines and a color signal that is not always perfect.
Yes. Admittedly, PAL has more scanning lines.
But there's no magic to that. Nearly the same horizontal frequency, with a 50Hz vertical. The bandwidth of the video and RF circuits is nearly the same, so there's really no dramatic improvement in picture quality.
On the other hand, NTSC has 525 interlaced scanning lines, 60Hz vertical, a higher frame rate, and almost no perceivable flicker as a result.
Anyone out there in a similarly distant job?
No, but I'm willing!
www.glowingplate.com/gnujobs_resume.html
From what I understand, Linux and Windows NT have had IPv6 support for quite some time now.
The problem appears to be more subtle than that. The routers are mostly compliant, I wouldn't worry about it.
The smooth transition is going to require that everyone on the 'Net start to switch over. Even half-wit Windows-95 AOL-point-and-drool users.
Surely, we can release patches to the operating systems. And users can upgrade to new applications programs which aren't crashing when they request a DNS lookup and get something longer than they expect.
But you know they won't.
As evidence, I submit to you the Code Red worm. You'd have to be living under a rock for the past two months to not know about it. Yet, I still get hit by infected machines. Follow the link on my .sig.
I haven't studied or attempted to deploy IPv6, but it will have to be backwards compatible with IPv4.
In the 1950s, Europe upgraded their TV system to color. The new PAL and SECAM color standards weren't compatible with their old 405/441-line black and white standards, leaving consumers with far too many confusing choices. Arguably, European TV never recovered.
By contrast, RCA came up with an ingenious way of making a color signal ride on top of the existing North American black and white system. Old black and white TV sets were eventually replaced with color, but there was no great format change. You bought a color TV or a black and white set, and you weren't at the mercy of finding out whether or not there was still a black and white station in your area. People transitioned more gently and weren't put off by having their two-year-old oak-cabinet investment turned into a paperweight by moving out of a 405 line service area.
IPv6 will have to be deployed in the same way or adoption rates will wane.
Godwin's Law!
Indeed.
Heheh.
I've been thinking about doing this to my Ranger - where did you pick up the LEDs, and are you using integrated 12V ones, or do you have a seperate regulator for them?
Yes, please tell us more about how you did your lamp conversion. I'd be very interested in upgrading my tail lamps and other markers with LED's.
The LEDs are 3,500MCD each, from Mode Electronics. I run a dozen of them.
Under the dashboard and connected to the brake pedal, I used a 7805 regulator to cut the voltage down to something predictable. The regulator also provides overload protection; that is, if the rest of the controller fails catastrophically, the main brake lights will still work.
In the truck's back end, there's a 555 timer IC with industrial temperature range capacitors and resistors doing the timing. The 555 sets about a 15% duty cycle, dumping 5V directly across each LED. The current through each diode is about 200mA. This is the limit of what they're designed to handle, and they get warm. :) A fairly large electrolytic capacitor takes up the slack in what the regulator can handle.
From the back end, the LEDs are every bit as bright as the main tail lights. And because of how I mounted them, they're essentially invisible until I touch the brake pedal.
It's really a slick setup.
You're being blinded by your
Windows is absolutely the best desktop operating system out there. KDE and Gnome are great, but Windows is still more mature.
There. I said it. I displayed reason. I even posted this from my Windows 2000 machine.
However, you only need to follow the link in my .sig to see why it should be illegal to use Windows on a routable IP. And that's coming from a moderate Libertarian.
The facts speak for themselves. Microsoft is a sick and dangerous company, like the Nazis were a sick and dangerous political entity. They're so convinced that what they're doing is the right thing for everyone that they fail to see their own shortcomings.
Hitler thought that killing all the Jews would solve the world's problems. Bill thinks that being the only operating system will solve the world's problems. Neither one is/was anything more than obsessively convinced of the strength of a flawed vision.
Hitler's birthday = April 20th. Gates = October 28th.
Yahoo's Astrology section has some interesting insights into their romantic potential. Buy the happy couple some flowers. And please lace them with cyanide.
Ya right, do you really think that _I_ have an Audi S4... I wish! I'll be up there in November, and if I had those wheels, I'd so be game.
I'll take you for a ride in the Ram. It gets about 7 MPG, so you'll get to pitch in for gas, but it's a *lot* of fun running over trees.
:)
Ready for the Gatineau Mountains in January?
You can order a Doctor of Divinity from ULC for $25: Courses and Degrees
Oh no. [grin]
Hey! That ULC website is really cool. Now, I've got a prefix for my name.
Anyone know of something like that for a Ph.D? Or, at least, a very easy mail-order or online course?
"Dr. Lawrence Wade" suits my officious nature far more than "Rev. Lawrence Wade".
but when the 2.2GHz P4.1 comes out in November it will take a clear lead.
That's getting pretty close to the magic 2.4 GHz number.
Computers might upset the global microwave oven infrastructure we've already established. Chaos will ensue, as networks of Amana RadarRanges and Panasonic Genius are disrupted. People might have to make a choice between counting with rocks or defrosting TV dinners over a campfire.
Even worse, there might actually be grounds for newbies calling the CD-ROM tray a "coffee warmer".
This will also be a new problem for overclockers who are managing to get processors up to the lofty 2.4 GHz range. RF heating of their water cooling systems will have to be addressed.
Welcome to a brave new world.