I used to work for Byte Magazine. Many years ago. I even worked on BIX for a short while. I have all of 1978 in hardcover. I look at those magazines sometimes and what sets them appart from all of the magazines that cover the industry now is that they still engender excitement. Byte magazine went "commercial" in the early 90's when they changed the editorial staff due to declining sales. That staff changed the focus from computers to the business of computers. Magazines today are produced, edited and written by people interested in Business and not Computers for the most part. The ones that do actually focus on technology instead of profit have marginal sales (Dr. Dobb's is an excellent example of a mag. written by geeks for geeks.) Now that online sources of the same business data exist, why bother with the paper magazine? Also, I can read a hell of a lot more interesting stuff online than what usually fills the mags. I think I probably find only 1 article per week that is interesting in PC Week. YMMV, of course. The rest are pretty much drek. Even when they try to get technical they tend to botch it. So, don't weep too many tears. Online is probably a better way to publish anyway and kills fewer trees (assuming your electricity is coming from hydroelectric or solar power and not coal or oil!) --Pete
The problem isn't make and the install process. If you do it right, your make process handles all of the itty-bitty details right the first time and probably faster than you can switch to your browser and enter in the data to check your change. I've done it myself and enjoy writing in C for CGI's. I consider C++ a bad choice for small to moderate sized CGI's because small C++ programs tend to have huge executables, while as huge C++ programs are only slightly bigger (much of which is overhead for cool things like STL).
I think PERL is used mainly because it is easy to work with. Those who complained about spagetti code should know the time tested rule:
"There is not now nor will there ever be a language in which it is the least bit difficult to write crappy code in."
I've seen 40 page (laser printed, word wrap on, 8pt courier) functions written in C at major financial companies. I won't name names but the one in particular has a name synonomous with "Faithful" Investments...:-)
If Grandma can be hacking code in Perl and creating cgi's on the fly - more power to her. She certainly won't be doing the same in C++. I might give Perl a looksee now that I know how easy it is.
Some points on your points! Being an avid historian and deeply interested in Japanese history from my armchair let me make some clarifications.
1) the Ainu are an aboriginal race in Japan. There are still Ainu cultural centers for them in Japan. Race wise the most recent scholorship thinks of the Ainu and Japanese as basically the same race with different cultures. Ancient Japanese are divided up between Yayoi and Jomon. They are named after different ways of patterning pottery. Yayoi overcame Jomon. Around 200 A.D. the Yamato court started to do the big push off of Kyushu (one of the 4 main Islands of Japan) and spread into the Kanto plain (the area around Tokyo). There the Yamato and the Ainu met and struggled for land/water/game rights. Overtime the Yamato began to refer to the Ainu as Emishi and also called anyone who wasn't keen on a big central government Emishi (barbarian). By 805 the Yamato had pacified the Emishi and by 950-1000 AD the Ainu and Emishi were pretty much totally absorbed into Japanese culture. This is important because if it wasn't for the wars against the Emishi and the proof that the Yamato Court's conscription system basically sucked we would not have had the development of the military houses that by 1100AD had become the Samurai.
2) The Dutch can also be implicated in arms trade with the Japanese, but for less "holy" reasons (unless you venerate gold...) There are some fascinating tales of the struggles of the Christian Samurai.
3) Does anyone else find it funny that one of the lead characters is named after a court cap? Eboshi means court cap (one of those funny caps that look anything like a sailors cap to something the coneheads would wear.) It would be like refering to a character in one of our films as Mr. Baseball Cap! Well, perhaps Costner could get away with this one.
4) The Japanese have come a long way and are now avid Linux users. (See, back to tech news!)
I would like to suggest that people consider these obvious improvements:
1. a list of process types that determines "monster type." For example "init" would be a Revenent while "ls" would be a zombie. Anything not in the list would be a zombie. Of course there is the confusion in that any process can become a "zombie" which leads me to another suggestion:
2. perhaps the Doom "pantheon", if you will, is not the most appropriate. Procs can be divided up between Kernal, daemons, shell and other processes. Obviously Kernal processes ought to be God Like or perhaps even Boss Monsters! Daemons are self obvious. Shells, well, obviously should be something fairly big as they launch a lot of other procs. I consider XWindows just a big fancy shell. Hmmm, a modified Beholder (or whatever the hell they called that beast), Instead of flaming skulls it would spit out other procs. Lowly things like "ls", "cat" should be harmless, easy to kill things. One should be open to using different monsters and models. I am sure one could find much to work with delving into "Little Gods" or "Hitchhiker's Guide" or "Poke'mon".
3. Friendly Fire on the behalf of the processes should be on a toggle. If you want the processes to determine how to rebalance the system you can toggle it on. Hopefully the kernal won't be too unlucky!
4. You should be in direct control of your XDoom process (i.e. that is YOU) and your immediate parent should not be visible to you or your bullets. This will prevent you from killing your own shell & GUI with the tool.
5. The weapon should be commesurate with the level of kill. Kill -1 = Pistol. Kill -9 = BFG. I am not sure we will want to continue to use the Area of Effect of things like the rocket launcher and BFG and Shotgun varients. Normally a Kill is only worked on one process at a time. Perhaps this is also a toggle.
6. Instead of Doom lets get them to give us the code to Daikatana and have a version of that ready to ship at the same time as the game (hopefully sooner than later). I'd much rather cut off the head of a process than just shoot it at range. There is more honor in that.
Scarcity of food is not a problem, that is why starvation is such an embarrasment to our planet. (I tend to try and think of how extraterrestrials would view us). We have so MUCH food that we could easily feed the rest of the world instead of having such problems as widespread obesity (I myself an 20lbs. overweight.) If food were scarce then every farmer in America would be as rich as every computer programmer. But food is so abundent that farmers are a dying breed - there is no money in farming just the love of the land.
The major problem we face as a society is pollution. We consume so much that we use up clean resources and generate dirty residue. Just one look out my window and I can see all sorts of trash along the highway. I can't see but am aware of all the exhaust from all of the cars. In the parking lot are pools of oil and anti-freeze. The groundwater where I live in Woburn is so bad they made a movie about it ("A Civil Action") and I have to use a water filter.
Food is not a problem. Pollution, politics, and war are much worse in that order. Pollution affects us all. Politics prevent us from making good decisions and implementing solutions. War has the worst of pollution and politics and adds on top of it the small chance of becoming nuclear war. It worries me that Pakistan, a nuclear nation, is so unstable it has had a coup. Pakistan and India have engaged in unreasonable politics lately, have had several wars in the past and in a blatant show of "manhood" have polluted their own environment with nuclear weapons testing. Now that is insane.
As programmers what can we do? How about creating a global communication and information system? Wait, that's the web! How about designing software that helps solve economic problems, helps design more fuel efficient vehicles, helps people shop at home so they don't drive all over creation during the holidays? Hey, we are doing that!
I'm not worried about genetically engineered plants or marketing schemes for seeds. I don't think Nature is perfect (otherwise, why go through all the work of building a complex ecosystem just to later wipe it all out with a single 10 mile wide asteroid?) The makers of the Terminator seeds have to eat too and the market will determine which economic model give mutual benefit to the creator of the seeds and the grower of the food. Honestly, if the plants are that much better no farmer is ever going to buy the seeds. Nature provides it's own open source!
Dear Bruce, in "The Difference Engine" you postulate an America divided by North and South with the South having won it's independence. In what way do you see the South would have been helped by difference engines? Also, with the North's greater industrial capacity wouldn't the Union be more able to employ bigger and better difference engines much like it did with ironclads? I think it would be fascinating to have a book length treatment on how Difference Engines made a, er, difference!
In case you have not noticed, the US has been on the biggest, fastest and best economic growth spurt ever in the last 9 years since the fall of Communism and the USSR. In fact our military has been drastically cut back, major Naval projects cutback, we stopped making replacement missiles (note we are almost out of smart bombs), etc.
The extra cash in the Govt's hands has been directed at industry on an as needed basis in loans and what not.
We are certainly living in an age where the benefit of peace is loudly proclaimed by our strong economy. My main worry about China is not that they might take over the world with their totalitarian regime but that they might slow down the wonderful ride we are having with our totaliarian regime's economy!
Let's take the luddite viewpoint and decide to roll back technology. At what point do you stop? Do you go Amish and roll back history to 1850? Even the Amish rely on some technologies - they use modern hospitals in PA and buy their nails from modern steel mills. If we get rid of modern steel mills will we have to go back to the old coke plants?
Let's say that even the Amish using 1850 technology are much to advanced, their technology is just too corrupting. Look at all the weapons that existed in 1850: cannons with cannister rounds (think big shotgun), smoothbore muskets, sea mines. Think of the complications attributed to the use of foutain pens, advanced moveable type printing presses, and lucifers (matches).
Roll it back to 0 A.D. and the Roman Empire. A good storm could clog up your aqueduct and tens of thousands of people could be without easily accessable drinking water for days. How about all them new Iron weapons? The Gladius was used to kill a lot of people and that new Roman armor was pretty hard to defeat. Don't even get me started on their Pilum technology that renders our heavy shields useless...
OK, how about back to being cavemem where the only technology is obsidian stone and the discovery of fire? Well, we don't have agriculture so we HAVE to hunt, we have not shelter from the elements that we can count on such that when it snows instead of saying "Darn, I won't be able to go out drinking tonight" we say "Damn, hope I live through this one." Oh and when we are not being careful and cut off a thumb with the obsidian knife we can't expect a good chance of it getting reattached. We also have no law, no means of defending ourselves against predators (hey we didn't used to be at the top of the food chain, we had to earn that.)
Now take the non-luddite perspective. Sure a bunch of people lost phone service. A) they had phones with a single point of failure. B) in the end it was just an inconvinience. That alone proves we are getting serious payback on technology. If we didn't miss it we wouldn't use it.
I never "need" a cell phone. The one I have is a cheap model that I pay $11.00 a month for on the cheapest plan I could find. Phone calls on it are expensive ($0.59 per minute air time). However, when trying to meet up with people in Boston, with all the impracticalities of the Central Artery project and a busy work schedule, the cell phone has transformed my life.
Does any one need to be this connected? Yes! In fact I want to be more connected! I want my truck to have it's own web page and I want it to be the web server. I want to be able to go online and see mileage, fluid levels, service milestones, tire wear, engine performance, ownership history etc. I want my mechanic to be able to get all of this information immediately and be able to add information about quirks, repairs, warranty recalls and anything else that would make his job easier.
People make their own lives complicated. Frankly I have no sympathy for anyone who makes their life overly complex. If a technolgy has no added benefit don't use it. Be smart and responsible for yourself. And if the other guy is getting ahead of you because he is technologically superior don't begrudge him for your choice.
"And I'm the guy who knows it all. If you happen to be a friend of Oliver Stone, please give him my number."
Talk about a pact with the devil. Cringly spends all that time barfing on PoSV for it not getting the story right and bending the truth when in fact Oliver Stone, his supposed saviour, has done more to bend historical truth like a prism than anyone in recent memory. Just look at Platoon (depicts 1 unit causing all of the attrocities comitted by U.S. troops in Viet Nam), JFK practically makes Oswald a working class hero and implicates L. B. J. as architect of JFK's assination and finally Nixon (portrays this Republican Hero as a theif and liar and rasist - wait he got that one right!)
History is such a wonderful study and a terrible tool. The way people feel a need to rewrite history to justify their current posisision is terrible. I remember in High School learning about the Ionian Revolt against Persian Tyranny and what a wonderful and grand struggle it was. Later in life I found out that the Ionians wanted to replace Persian Tyranny with Ionian Tyranny...
If you want history - don't expect to get it from TNT.
I love the web - it is the great equalizer. Bad benchmarks like Mindcraft can be shot down in quick order. However there is one test that would have crushed NT in BOTH tests. It is simply this: Conduct the test over a 6 week period.
Having worked in an ALL NT house and now in an ALL UNIX house I can tell you that the NT/IIS server will crash NO LESS than 8 times in 6 weeks and require hours to fix/restart. That has been my experience at a company that had 80+ NT servers doing real life web application work.
I used to complain that LINUX/APACHE was no match for NT/IIS because the application platform from Microsoft is simply amazing. I've since seen something called PHP3 and that looks as good if not better than IIS. Does anyone have any experience with PHP3? Is it very powerful?
Uhmmmm, how does it know what device drivers to use? You know, silly little things like video drivers and crap like that. Neat idea for Zork implementations of VGA only games!
--Peter "I'm sorry, I don't mean to rain on your parade..."
What you should have done was spoken truthfully to the judge. "Is the car yours?" should be followed by "no, your honor." (they love that last bit). You alleged it was stolen, you got your insurance money. The car is no longer yours. It belongs to the insurance company or the state. Since you don't know whose it is but you do know it isn't yours it's not your responsibility. You led the judge to believe that it was your car and thus your responsibility.
It does make you hate our legal system though. This same judge is probably one of the guys that lets burglars and drunk drivers off on a regular basis. It is amazing what a wonderful concept our system is and how deeply flawed its execution. These flaws are what keep me from voting for the Death Penalty - I just can't trust the state to command that power.
Intel needs to sell chips and motherboards - lots and lots of them. Especially the pricy, "high-powered" pairs. Now then, along comes Linux and it runs just fine on a 486. "486?!?" shouts Andy Grove. Those are dirt cheap! Windows 9x are pigs on anything smaller than a Pentium 90 and to really appreciate the OS bloat you need a PII.
So, Yes! Linux is a threat because it is more efficient on the same hardware. Does this logic boggle the mind or what?
RWD wrote: Also, destroying the most powerful army that had ever been, largely without help for most of the time, required some exertion, or so I am told.
Actually, one can hardly say that they "Destroyed" the German army. 20 million casualties doesn't even make for a pyrhic victory. The Germans made a lot of really bad decisions, otherwise they should have subjugated a portion of the USSR and then dealt with their Western Front.
However, they did manage to survive and hold out while the Germans were playing havoc in their country and certainly there were many amazing acts of bravery. However, I wonder how much of the hard work was encouraged by the purges of Stalin who had upwards of 60 million of his own country men executed.
Yes, 60 million. It's a disgusting figure - and the price paid for Soviet Communism.
I believe that several groups competing to lead is a very good thing. It's what open software itself is about, isn't it? Best implementaion wins and all that.
Competition in all arenas is good. In this case you will have various organizations to compare against and as time rolls on and they face various tests and challenges only the well organized groups with a clear mission and realistic goals will survive.
cyberwar has already begun, it is old history
on
Pentagon Cyber Wars
·
· Score: 1
Just to clarify something, just as the US was the first country to utilize the atomic bomb for warfare the US is also one of the first to utilize hacking computer and phone systems for warfare. Iraq was the hackee in 1991. This has been published in the news so should be researchable.
Also, I worked for the DOD in '86-87 as a student and I am well aware that they seperate their networks. Computers are VERY CLEARLY labled as secure or insecure and are on seperate networks. If they have continued that policy and I can think of no reason for them not to then I would be VERY suspicious of anyone claiming there were gateways between the non-secure and secure networks. The DOD does not mind double duty when re-entering data. There are many ways to get info into a computer without using a network. Also work is divided up between that which needs a secure system and that which does not. The Walker spy ring did wonders for fixing holes in American security by revealing we had TOO MANY secrets and thus too many people needed secret clearence to do mundane jobs.
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I used to work for Byte Magazine. Many years ago. I even worked on BIX for a short while. I have all of 1978 in hardcover. I look at those magazines sometimes and what sets them appart from all of the magazines that cover the industry now is that they still engender excitement. Byte magazine went "commercial" in the early 90's when they changed the editorial staff due to declining sales. That staff changed the focus from computers to the business of computers. Magazines today are produced, edited and written by people interested in Business and not Computers for the most part. The ones that do actually focus on technology instead of profit have marginal sales (Dr. Dobb's is an excellent example of a mag. written by geeks for geeks.) Now that online sources of the same business data exist, why bother with the paper magazine? Also, I can read a hell of a lot more interesting stuff online than what usually fills the mags. I think I probably find only 1 article per week that is interesting in PC Week. YMMV, of course. The rest are pretty much drek. Even when they try to get technical they tend to botch it. So, don't weep too many tears. Online is probably a better way to publish anyway and kills fewer trees (assuming your electricity is coming from hydroelectric or solar power and not coal or oil!) --Pete
I think PERL is used mainly because it is easy to work with. Those who complained about spagetti code should know the time tested rule:
I've seen 40 page (laser printed, word wrap on, 8pt courier) functions written in C at major financial companies. I won't name names but the one in particular has a name synonomous with "Faithful" Investments...
If Grandma can be hacking code in Perl and creating cgi's on the fly - more power to her. She certainly won't be doing the same in C++. I might give Perl a looksee now that I know how easy it is.
--Pete
Some points on your points! Being an avid historian and deeply interested in Japanese history from my armchair let me make some clarifications.
1) the Ainu are an aboriginal race in Japan. There are still Ainu cultural centers for them in Japan. Race wise the most recent scholorship thinks of the Ainu and Japanese as basically the same race with different cultures. Ancient Japanese are divided up between Yayoi and Jomon. They are named after different ways of patterning pottery. Yayoi overcame Jomon. Around 200 A.D. the Yamato court started to do the big push off of Kyushu (one of the 4 main Islands of Japan) and spread into the Kanto plain (the area around Tokyo). There the Yamato and the Ainu met and struggled for land/water/game rights. Overtime the Yamato began to refer to the Ainu as Emishi and also called anyone who wasn't keen on a big central government Emishi (barbarian). By 805 the Yamato had pacified the Emishi and by 950-1000 AD the Ainu and Emishi were pretty much totally absorbed into Japanese culture. This is important because if it wasn't for the wars against the Emishi and the proof that the Yamato Court's conscription system basically sucked we would not have had the development of the military houses that by 1100AD had become the Samurai.
2) The Dutch can also be implicated in arms trade with the Japanese, but for less "holy" reasons (unless you venerate gold...) There are some fascinating tales of the struggles of the Christian Samurai.
3) Does anyone else find it funny that one of the lead characters is named after a court cap? Eboshi means court cap (one of those funny caps that look anything like a sailors cap to something the coneheads would wear.) It would be like refering to a character in one of our films as Mr. Baseball Cap! Well, perhaps Costner could get away with this one.
4) The Japanese have come a long way and are now avid Linux users. (See, back to tech news!)
I would like to suggest that people consider these obvious improvements:
1. a list of process types that determines "monster type." For example "init" would be a Revenent while "ls" would be a zombie. Anything not in the list would be a zombie. Of course there is the confusion in that any process can become a "zombie" which leads me to another suggestion:
2. perhaps the Doom "pantheon", if you will, is not the most appropriate. Procs can be divided up between Kernal, daemons, shell and other processes. Obviously Kernal processes ought to be God Like or perhaps even Boss Monsters! Daemons are self obvious. Shells, well, obviously should be something fairly big as they launch a lot of other procs. I consider XWindows just a big fancy shell. Hmmm, a modified Beholder (or whatever the hell they called that beast), Instead of flaming skulls it would spit out other procs. Lowly things like "ls", "cat" should be harmless, easy to kill things. One should be open to using different monsters and models. I am sure one could find much to work with delving into "Little Gods" or "Hitchhiker's Guide" or "Poke'mon".
3. Friendly Fire on the behalf of the processes should be on a toggle. If you want the processes to determine how to rebalance the system you can toggle it on. Hopefully the kernal won't be too unlucky!
4. You should be in direct control of your XDoom process (i.e. that is YOU) and your immediate parent should not be visible to you or your bullets. This will prevent you from killing your own shell & GUI with the tool.
5. The weapon should be commesurate with the level of kill. Kill -1 = Pistol. Kill -9 = BFG. I am not sure we will want to continue to use the Area of Effect of things like the rocket launcher and BFG and Shotgun varients. Normally a Kill is only worked on one process at a time. Perhaps this is also a toggle.
6. Instead of Doom lets get them to give us the code to Daikatana and have a version of that ready to ship at the same time as the game (hopefully sooner than later). I'd much rather cut off the head of a process than just shoot it at range. There is more honor in that.
Scarcity of food is not a problem, that is why starvation is such an embarrasment to our planet. (I tend to try and think of how extraterrestrials would view us). We have so MUCH food that we could easily feed the rest of the world instead of having such problems as widespread obesity (I myself an 20lbs. overweight.) If food were scarce then every farmer in America would be as rich as every computer programmer. But food is so abundent that farmers are a dying breed - there is no money in farming just the love of the land.
The major problem we face as a society is pollution. We consume so much that we use up clean resources and generate dirty residue. Just one look out my window and I can see all sorts of trash along the highway. I can't see but am aware of all the exhaust from all of the cars. In the parking lot are pools of oil and anti-freeze. The groundwater where I live in Woburn is so bad they made a movie about it ("A Civil Action") and I have to use a water filter.
Food is not a problem. Pollution, politics, and war are much worse in that order. Pollution affects us all. Politics prevent us from making good decisions and implementing solutions. War has the worst of pollution and politics and adds on top of it the small chance of becoming nuclear war. It worries me that Pakistan, a nuclear nation, is so unstable it has had a coup. Pakistan and India have engaged in unreasonable politics lately, have had several wars in the past and in a blatant show of "manhood" have polluted their own environment with nuclear weapons testing. Now that is insane.
As programmers what can we do? How about creating a global communication and information system? Wait, that's the web! How about designing software that helps solve economic problems, helps design more fuel efficient vehicles, helps people shop at home so they don't drive all over creation during the holidays? Hey, we are doing that!
I'm not worried about genetically engineered plants or marketing schemes for seeds. I don't think Nature is perfect (otherwise, why go through all the work of building a complex ecosystem just to later wipe it all out with a single 10 mile wide asteroid?) The makers of the Terminator seeds have to eat too and the market will determine which economic model give mutual benefit to the creator of the seeds and the grower of the food. Honestly, if the plants are that much better no farmer is ever going to buy the seeds. Nature provides it's own open source!
Dear Bruce,
in "The Difference Engine" you postulate an America divided by North and South with the South having won it's independence. In what way do you see the South would have been helped by difference engines? Also, with the North's greater industrial capacity wouldn't the Union be more able to employ bigger and better difference engines much like it did with ironclads? I think it would be fascinating to have a book length treatment on how Difference Engines made a, er, difference!
In case you have not noticed, the US has been on the biggest, fastest and best economic growth spurt ever in the last 9 years since the fall of Communism and the USSR. In fact our military has been drastically cut back, major Naval projects cutback, we stopped making replacement missiles (note we are almost out of smart bombs), etc.
The extra cash in the Govt's hands has been directed at industry on an as needed basis in loans and what not.
We are certainly living in an age where the benefit of peace is loudly proclaimed by our strong economy. My main worry about China is not that they might take over the world with their totalitarian regime but that they might slow down the wonderful ride we are having with our totaliarian regime's economy!
Let's take the luddite viewpoint and decide to roll back technology. At what point do you stop? Do you go Amish and roll back history to 1850? Even the Amish rely on some technologies - they use modern hospitals in PA and buy their nails from modern steel mills. If we get rid of modern steel mills will we have to go back to the old coke plants?
Let's say that even the Amish using 1850 technology are much to advanced, their technology is just too corrupting. Look at all the weapons that existed in 1850: cannons with cannister rounds (think big shotgun), smoothbore muskets, sea mines. Think of the complications attributed to the use of foutain pens, advanced moveable type printing presses, and lucifers (matches).
Roll it back to 0 A.D. and the Roman Empire. A good storm could clog up your aqueduct and tens of thousands of people could be without easily accessable drinking water for days. How about all them new Iron weapons? The Gladius was used to kill a lot of people and that new Roman armor was pretty hard to defeat. Don't even get me started on their Pilum technology that renders our heavy shields useless...
OK, how about back to being cavemem where the only technology is obsidian stone and the discovery of fire? Well, we don't have agriculture so we HAVE to hunt, we have not shelter from the elements that we can count on such that when it snows instead of saying "Darn, I won't be able to go out drinking tonight" we say "Damn, hope I live through this one." Oh and when we are not being careful and cut off a thumb with the obsidian knife we can't expect a good chance of it getting reattached. We also have no law, no means of defending ourselves against predators (hey we didn't used to be at the top of the food chain, we had to earn that.)
Now take the non-luddite perspective. Sure a bunch of people lost phone service. A) they had phones with a single point of failure. B) in the end it was just an inconvinience. That alone proves we are getting serious payback on technology. If we didn't miss it we wouldn't use it.
I never "need" a cell phone. The one I have is a cheap model that I pay $11.00 a month for on the cheapest plan I could find. Phone calls on it are expensive ($0.59 per minute air time). However, when trying to meet up with people in Boston, with all the impracticalities of the Central Artery project and a busy work schedule, the cell phone has transformed my life.
Does any one need to be this connected? Yes! In fact I want to be more connected! I want my truck to have it's own web page and I want it to be the web server. I want to be able to go online and see mileage, fluid levels, service milestones, tire wear, engine performance, ownership history etc. I want my mechanic to be able to get all of this information immediately and be able to add information about quirks, repairs, warranty recalls and anything else that would make his job easier.
People make their own lives complicated. Frankly I have no sympathy for anyone who makes their life overly complex. If a technolgy has no added benefit don't use it. Be smart and responsible for yourself. And if the other guy is getting ahead of you because he is technologically superior don't begrudge him for your choice.
"And I'm the guy who knows it all. If you happen to be a friend of Oliver Stone, please give him my number."
Talk about a pact with the devil. Cringly spends all that time barfing on PoSV for it not getting the story right and bending the truth when in fact Oliver Stone, his supposed saviour, has done more to bend historical truth like a prism than anyone in recent memory. Just look at Platoon (depicts 1 unit causing all of the attrocities comitted by U.S. troops in Viet Nam), JFK practically makes Oswald a working class hero and implicates L. B. J. as architect of JFK's assination and finally Nixon (portrays this Republican Hero as a theif and liar and rasist - wait he got that one right!)
History is such a wonderful study and a terrible tool. The way people feel a need to rewrite history to justify their current posisision is terrible. I remember in High School learning about the Ionian Revolt against Persian Tyranny and what a wonderful and grand struggle it was. Later in life I found out that the Ionians wanted to replace Persian Tyranny with Ionian Tyranny...
If you want history - don't expect to get it from TNT.
--Pete
I love the web - it is the great equalizer. Bad benchmarks like Mindcraft can be shot down in quick order. However there is one test that would have crushed NT in BOTH tests. It is simply this: Conduct the test over a 6 week period.
Having worked in an ALL NT house and now in an ALL UNIX house I can tell you that the NT/IIS server will crash NO LESS than 8 times in 6 weeks and require hours to fix/restart. That has been my experience at a company that had 80+ NT servers doing real life web application work.
I used to complain that LINUX/APACHE was no match for NT/IIS because the application platform from Microsoft is simply amazing. I've since seen something called PHP3 and that looks as good if not better than IIS. Does anyone have any experience with PHP3? Is it very powerful?
--Pete
Uhmmmm, how does it know what device drivers to use? You know, silly little things like video drivers and crap like that. Neat idea for Zork implementations of VGA only games!
--Peter
"I'm sorry, I don't mean to rain on your parade..."
What you should have done was spoken truthfully to the judge. "Is the car yours?" should be followed by "no, your honor." (they love that last bit). You alleged it was stolen, you got your insurance money. The car is no longer yours. It belongs to the insurance company or the state. Since you don't know whose it is but you do know it isn't yours it's not your responsibility. You led the judge to believe that it was your car and thus your responsibility.
It does make you hate our legal system though. This same judge is probably one of the guys that lets burglars and drunk drivers off on a regular basis. It is amazing what a wonderful concept our system is and how deeply flawed its execution. These flaws are what keep me from voting for the Death Penalty - I just can't trust the state to command that power.
Intel needs to sell chips and motherboards - lots and lots of them. Especially the pricy, "high-powered" pairs. Now then, along comes Linux and it runs just fine on a 486. "486?!?" shouts Andy Grove. Those are dirt cheap! Windows 9x are pigs on anything smaller than a Pentium 90 and to really appreciate the OS bloat you need a PII.
So, Yes! Linux is a threat because it is more efficient on the same hardware. Does this logic boggle the mind or what?
RWD wrote:
Also, destroying the most powerful army that had ever been, largely without help for most of the time, required some exertion, or so I am told.
Actually, one can hardly say that they "Destroyed" the German army. 20 million casualties doesn't even make for a pyrhic victory. The Germans made a lot of really bad decisions, otherwise they should have subjugated a portion of the USSR and then dealt with their Western Front.
However, they did manage to survive and hold out while the Germans were playing havoc in their country and certainly there were many amazing acts of bravery. However, I wonder how much of the hard work was encouraged by the purges of Stalin who had upwards of 60 million of his own country men executed.
Yes, 60 million. It's a disgusting figure - and the price paid for Soviet Communism.
I believe that several groups competing to lead is a very good thing. It's what open software itself is about, isn't it? Best implementaion wins and all that.
Competition in all arenas is good. In this case you will have various organizations to compare against and as time rolls on and they face various tests and challenges only the well organized groups with a clear mission and realistic goals will survive.
Just to clarify something, just as the US was the first country to utilize the atomic bomb for warfare the US is also one of the first to utilize hacking computer and phone systems for warfare. Iraq was the hackee in 1991. This has been published in the news so should be researchable.
Also, I worked for the DOD in '86-87 as a student and I am well aware that they seperate their networks. Computers are VERY CLEARLY labled as secure or insecure and are on seperate networks. If they have continued that policy and I can think of no reason for them not to then I would be VERY suspicious of anyone claiming there were gateways between the non-secure and secure networks. The DOD does not mind double duty when re-entering data. There are many ways to get info into a computer without using a network. Also work is divided up between that which needs a secure system and that which does not. The Walker spy ring did wonders for fixing holes in American security by revealing we had TOO MANY secrets and thus too many people needed secret clearence to do mundane jobs.
--Pete