Lots of posts from the US about their old BBSes - we had some classics over here too.
I used to be a regular on Arcade - they're still going, on (0208) 654 2212 (although with a sadly depleted complement of lines).
Still call up from time to time when I'm at home (although the crappy terminal software I have to use has nothing on Hearsay).
What's Hugo Fiennes doing these days anyway?
On a related topic, anyone else miss the glory days of Fidonet? Ah, I remember it well - I was 2:255/75.5 for a while, then switched to 2:255/93.4. Had a real sense of community did Fidonet.
Oh well - back to impersonal anonymous old Slashdot.
I wonder if the auction includes Star Fighter for the 3D0, an amazingly good game developed by Fednet (Tim Parry and Andrew Hutchings). I wonder what they are doing now?
$15,000 is an awful lot of money, though - you have to hope it's some sort of public organisation putting in that bid, rather than a `lone nut' (to paraphrase the Warren Report).
I do agree with your comments about the over-exposure of NetBSD's rhetoric. However, the ARM example is unfair; arm26 and arm32 really are entirely different architectures, and have extremely different requirements for porting.
The arm32 port is now very mature, but arm26 has not been running for long. I happen to know the arm26 portmaster, and I assure you that if his task was a simple as copying most of arm32 with a few minor modifications, it would have been done and dusted a long while ago.
A port of NetBSD supporting arm26 AND arm32 would either fail to exploit either architecture to its fullest, or would contain swathes of redundant code and tedious checks.
I think Microsoft should look on the good side of all this.
Look at previous split-up companies in the US. AT&T ("Ma Bell" herself) was a lumbering hulk before it was split - since then it has (or rather its various children have) gone from strength to strength.
IBM almost underwent the same process in the early 1980s, and perhaps the split HAD taken place they would have avoided such spectacular failure in the early 1990s. Only in the last 5 years have they really turned things around again, ironically employing the same compartmentalisation techniques that a DOJ-enforced split would have imposed.
Now, Microsoft are a hugely successful company. But they're getting very big, and they are at just the stage where management and red tape begin to take their toll on good business sense and keen research and development. Indeed, according to inside reports they themselves are beginning to realise their own fallibility (especially after a couple of high-profile squibs in the last few years).
Perhaps therefore the DOJ split would do Microsoft a power of good, in a business sense. Whether or not this is good news for Slashdot readers remains to be seen.:-)
Very glad to hear of a Haskell binding for.NET - perhaps this is what functional programming luminary Simon Peyton-Jones has been doing for Microsoft Research recently? Excellent news.
The article's slanted in favour of Java, but that's Slashdot for you. To me,.NET seems fairly hyped, but it's be a shame to lose something of possible quality and utility in the sea of marketing hyperbole.
Don't really get along with Java myself, but that's mainly because I got used to C++ before it came along - if I was starting again, Java might be a better choice, for the cleaner syntax if nothing else!
This topic has come up several times on Slashdot recently - it's nice to see TWO readers in the same thread giving Acorn the credit they deserve for having had superb anti-aliasing for years.
I still can't believe X doesn't support font anti-aliasing... but there you go, no doubt the same people will jump down my throats saying "but you don't need it" as did the last time this came up on Slashdot.:-)
Agree with most of this, except the fan. Fans are EVIL and must be banished by better design. It's like power amplifiers - most designs require fans, but companies that put their minds to it can come up with very high powered amps that cool by convection, and actually run colder than an equivalent fan-cooled device.
This must be done with computers. It's particularly important if (like me) you use a computer in your recording studio - this is one area where Macs are particularly popular, so evidently Apple are listening to the market here.
(NB this is why I still use a silent Atari 1024STE for my sequencing...)
However, I haven't used a Cube yet, so for all I know it might melt within half an hour.:-)
Acorns could probably do 1024x768 in 1990, but that's missing the point. Anti-aliasing is beneficial even at high-resolutions, for small and large text alike.
Better still, let it be controllable - you can turn it off, I can leave it on. We're both happy.:-)
It's a side issue, but I wholeheartedly agree with you about the need for high refresh rates - one of the reasons I prefer to use 800x600 rather than anything higher, as with my fairly rubbish vid. card and monitor I can still get fast refreshes at this size but not at greater resolutions (yes, I'm skint).
I suspect you may be trolling here, but I'll play along anyway...
I don't doubt that X is well designed. Unix is well designed, and that's been around for years too. However, if something has been around essential unchanged for over ten years then it CANNOT be said that it represents the state of the art in its field. This is certainly true of X.
There's nothing particularly wrong with it, except that we can now do better!
As for your comments regarding anti-aliasing, I must strongly disagree here. Businesses, governments and science ALL benefit from anti-aliasing, simply because (in the most simple terms) it makes the writing on the computer screen easier to read! In fact these are three areas where operators would expect to read a lot of material from screen (eg. papers, reports, figures, etc etc.) and therefore where anti-aliasing would be of most benefit.
This isn't intended to be a facetious question, but have you ever actually used a system with proper sub-pixel anti-aliasing throughout? Come back to anything else and your eyes will complain...
As for the resolution issue, jaggies will ALWAYS occur no matter what the resolution, as at the end of the day you cannot perfectly approximate a curve by a series of rectangular dots on a CRT. Moreover, anti-aliasing makes small fonts MUCH easier to read, even at high resolutions, and prevents the "greeking" that so besets X's standard fonts (on my machine at least).
Also, remember that some of us are forced to used resolutions such as 800x640, for either personal or financial reasons.
(Note: just thought I'd say this early before some AC tries to be clever... anti-aliasing/= alpha transparancy. The latter *can* (but need not) be used to achieve the former - that's all.)
Surprised there haven't been any comments pointing out that X is woefully out of date. Nostalgia aside, it's really fairly embarassing that we'll still all be using X Window in 2001 - I would have thought a tech-savvy audience like Slashdot would have been the first to point this out.
So, is it really so exciting that Apple now support X? I suppose in one sense it's great to have all those legacy applications, but it would be nice to see the state of the art pushed forward somewhat - I would certainly have expected this of Apple, one of the more forward-thinking old-school computer companies.
Then again, I must admit there are no serious contenders to X currently visible on the radar. I've looked at WHY (fairly promising but early days) and Berlin (extremely interesting, but a little too bogged-down in providing support for glitzy rotations and the like too early on in the development), but I don't see X being replaced in the forseeable future, sadly.
Perhaps this is because X Window was developed by academic experts who were basically employed to do this, whereas it's putative replacements are being developed by enthusiastic amateurs (and this isn't intended as a knock to those developers, but merely a reflection of the truth - I am an enthusiastic amateur myself!).
Specifically, one thing X certainly needs is FAST and CONSISTENT (across the whole desktop) sub-pixel anti-alisasing. Acorn users have had this since 1990, so why has it taken so long for the rest of the world to catch up?
Slashdot Mirror
Lots of posts from the US about their old BBSes - we had some classics over here too.
I used to be a regular on Arcade - they're still going, on (0208) 654 2212 (although with a sadly depleted complement of lines).
Still call up from time to time when I'm at home (although the crappy terminal software I have to use has nothing on Hearsay).
What's Hugo Fiennes doing these days anyway?
On a related topic, anyone else miss the glory days of Fidonet? Ah, I remember it well - I was 2:255/75.5 for a while, then switched to 2:255/93.4. Had a real sense of community did Fidonet.
Oh well - back to impersonal anonymous old Slashdot.
"...the functionality of Netscape 6..."
:-)
Now there's a contradiction in terms if ever I heard one!
Why the fuck do you people always say that?
Why?
When will you geaks get it in to your heads that THE PLURAL OF LEGO IS LEGO!
Think about it.
I wonder if the auction includes Star Fighter for the 3D0, an amazingly good game developed by Fednet (Tim Parry and Andrew Hutchings). I wonder what they are doing now?
$15,000 is an awful lot of money, though - you have to hope it's some sort of public organisation putting in that bid, rather than a `lone nut' (to paraphrase the Warren Report).
Amen to that!
:-)
Seriously though, hasn't this dragged on for long enough? It's not even news any more, let alone stuff that matters.
I do agree with your comments about the over-exposure of NetBSD's rhetoric. However, the ARM example is unfair; arm26 and arm32 really are entirely different architectures, and have extremely different requirements for porting.
The arm32 port is now very mature, but arm26 has not been running for long. I happen to know the arm26 portmaster, and I assure you that if his task was a simple as copying most of arm32 with a few minor modifications, it would have been done and dusted a long while ago.
A port of NetBSD supporting arm26 AND arm32 would either fail to exploit either architecture to its fullest, or would contain swathes of redundant code and tedious checks.
I think Microsoft should look on the good side of all this.
:-)
Look at previous split-up companies in the US. AT&T ("Ma Bell" herself) was a lumbering hulk before it was split - since then it has (or rather its various children have) gone from strength to strength.
IBM almost underwent the same process in the early 1980s, and perhaps the split HAD taken place they would have avoided such spectacular failure in the early 1990s. Only in the last 5 years have they really turned things around again, ironically employing the same compartmentalisation techniques that a DOJ-enforced split would have imposed.
Now, Microsoft are a hugely successful company. But they're getting very big, and they are at just the stage where management and red tape begin to take their toll on good business sense and keen research and development. Indeed, according to inside reports they themselves are beginning to realise their own fallibility (especially after a couple of high-profile squibs in the last few years).
Perhaps therefore the DOJ split would do Microsoft a power of good, in a business sense. Whether or not this is good news for Slashdot readers remains to be seen.
It's "Bill Gosper" (note spelling)
Better still, the Risc OS filer.
As for KDE2 books, I welcome them. One thing you can say for Microsoft is that there's (plenty of|too much) documentation for their APIs...
Hey, what's with the personal vendetta?
Jon posts some of the most (+5, Insightful) articles I read on Slashdot.
Very glad to hear of a Haskell binding for .NET - perhaps this is what functional programming luminary Simon Peyton-Jones has been doing for Microsoft Research recently? Excellent news.
.NET seems fairly hyped, but it's be a shame to lose something of possible quality and utility in the sea of marketing hyperbole.
The article's slanted in favour of Java, but that's Slashdot for you. To me,
Don't really get along with Java myself, but that's mainly because I got used to C++ before it came along - if I was starting again, Java might be a better choice, for the cleaner syntax if nothing else!
I agree, Windows does it wrong, but you can achieve PROPER anti-aliasing without alpha transparency.
cf. RiscOS 3.7 or greater (if memory serves) for font blending against a variable coloured background - not an alpha channel in sight.
Yeah, I remember widespread confusion, and people suggested that you NEEDED "alpha transparancy" to do anti-aliasing - this is not true.
I complete agree with you - glad to see some sense on this topic at last!
(by the way I seem to remember some of the older ARM3s were at 25Mhz, could be wrong though... I had one put in my A3000 back in the day.)
This topic has come up several times on Slashdot recently - it's nice to see TWO readers in the same thread giving Acorn the credit they deserve for having had superb anti-aliasing for years.
:-)
I still can't believe X doesn't support font anti-aliasing... but there you go, no doubt the same people will jump down my throats saying "but you don't need it" as did the last time this came up on Slashdot.
cheers
The latter, my post was intended to be humorous but obviously went over your head.
Oh well.
Ahhh the ARM chip - a truly beautiful design.
Takes me right back to my mad ARM assembly days, that post does...
But X isn't a kernel, it's a windowing system.
I quote:
:-)
"People who take the time to make it out to a LUG are generally the types who are going to be interesting."
It's funny, the people I know who go to a "LUG" are amongst the least interesting people I know...
Agree with most of this, except the fan. Fans are EVIL and must be banished by better design. It's like power amplifiers - most designs require fans, but companies that put their minds to it can come up with very high powered amps that cool by convection, and actually run colder than an equivalent fan-cooled device.
:-)
This must be done with computers. It's particularly important if (like me) you use a computer in your recording studio - this is one area where Macs are particularly popular, so evidently Apple are listening to the market here.
(NB this is why I still use a silent Atari 1024STE for my sequencing...)
However, I haven't used a Cube yet, so for all I know it might melt within half an hour.
Acorns could probably do 1024x768 in 1990, but that's missing the point. Anti-aliasing is beneficial even at high-resolutions, for small and large text alike.
:-)
Better still, let it be controllable - you can turn it off, I can leave it on. We're both happy.
It's a side issue, but I wholeheartedly agree with you about the need for high refresh rates - one of the reasons I prefer to use 800x600 rather than anything higher, as with my fairly rubbish vid. card and monitor I can still get fast refreshes at this size but not at greater resolutions (yes, I'm skint).
I suspect you may be trolling here, but I'll play along anyway...
/= alpha transparancy. The latter *can* (but need not) be used to achieve the former - that's all.)
I don't doubt that X is well designed. Unix is well designed, and that's been around for years too. However, if something has been around essential unchanged for over ten years then it CANNOT be said that it represents the state of the art in its field. This is certainly true of X.
There's nothing particularly wrong with it, except that we can now do better!
As for your comments regarding anti-aliasing, I must strongly disagree here. Businesses, governments and science ALL benefit from anti-aliasing, simply because (in the most simple terms) it makes the writing on the computer screen easier to read! In fact these are three areas where operators would expect to read a lot of material from screen (eg. papers, reports, figures, etc etc.) and therefore where anti-aliasing would be of most benefit.
This isn't intended to be a facetious question, but have you ever actually used a system with proper sub-pixel anti-aliasing throughout? Come back to anything else and your eyes will complain...
As for the resolution issue, jaggies will ALWAYS occur no matter what the resolution, as at the end of the day you cannot perfectly approximate a curve by a series of rectangular dots on a CRT. Moreover, anti-aliasing makes small fonts MUCH easier to read, even at high resolutions, and prevents the "greeking" that so besets X's standard fonts (on my machine at least).
Also, remember that some of us are forced to used resolutions such as 800x640, for either personal or financial reasons.
(Note: just thought I'd say this early before some AC tries to be clever... anti-aliasing
Surprised there haven't been any comments pointing out that X is woefully out of date. Nostalgia aside, it's really fairly embarassing that we'll still all be using X Window in 2001 - I would have thought a tech-savvy audience like Slashdot would have been the first to point this out.
So, is it really so exciting that Apple now support X? I suppose in one sense it's great to have all those legacy applications, but it would be nice to see the state of the art pushed forward somewhat - I would certainly have expected this of Apple, one of the more forward-thinking old-school computer companies.
Then again, I must admit there are no serious contenders to X currently visible on the radar. I've looked at WHY (fairly promising but early days) and Berlin (extremely interesting, but a little too bogged-down in providing support for glitzy rotations and the like too early on in the development), but I don't see X being replaced in the forseeable future, sadly.
Perhaps this is because X Window was developed by academic experts who were basically employed to do this, whereas it's putative replacements are being developed by enthusiastic amateurs (and this isn't intended as a knock to those developers, but merely a reflection of the truth - I am an enthusiastic amateur myself!).
Specifically, one thing X certainly needs is FAST and CONSISTENT (across the whole desktop) sub-pixel anti-alisasing. Acorn users have had this since 1990, so why has it taken so long for the rest of the world to catch up?
Or, amusingly, at St.Hilda's College, Oxford (the last remaining all-female Oxford college) it's called TESSA - This Election Should Start Again.
:-)
True!