The first Ultima, written on a 48Kb Apple II in about 1978, was 3-D
Well, sort of - the dungeons are 3D wireframe in Ultima I (which came out in 1980, a year before Wizardry I), but the world map (where you spend most of your time) is in 2D overhead view, just like later games in the series.
I'm not sure if Aklabeth, Lord British's first game (and prequel to Ultima) had any 2D elements or whether it was a pure 3D dungeon crawl.
Personally, even back in the early 80s I was never a huge fan of those 3D first-person dungeons, espescially since there was no automap and you had to sit there plotting out each level with graph paper. Remember "mapping gems"?
Bard's Tale was even worse, but I played through and mapped that whole game on graph paper, so I mustn't have minded too much. Likewise for Dungeon Master (1 and 2). One of the things I liked most about Ultima Underworld was that it had a cool automap with notations etc. Ultima Underworld was a cool game engine for it's time (and a good game to boot).
It really saddens me to see how the space program has gotten shoved in the background over the past decade or two. Sure, it's a horrendously expensive endeavor in the short term, but I can't think of ANY better long-term investment, with returns in technology, economic wealth (I'd wager there's gold - and things even more valuable - in them there asteroids), and essential resources (stick a big array of solar panels in orbit, and you've got insane amounts of free energy, forever). And with overpopulation and global industrialization progressing at their current rate, humanity better start thinking NOW about where it's going to go as a species once things start to get truly shaky, even if that's a century or two down the road. Getting lots of people off the planet, one way or another, looks like the best long-term option from my perspective.
In the short term, too, I think the space program has many benefits. It gives people something to dream about, and a way to express the pioneer spirit now that all of available land masses on earth have been more or less spoken for.
When I was growing up, in the late 70s-early 80s, the space program was one of the first things to get me REALLY fired up about learning. Following the progress of the Voyager missions, the Mars probes, and the first Space Shuttle flights was utterly mind-blowing. I suspect that these interests had plenty to do with my getting interested in computers, which has proved rewarding in all sorts of ways. But then, a few years later, between the arms race of the cold war and the explosion of the Challenger, the U.S. cooled off on the space race, and hasn't regained the same momentum since.
There are plenty of arguments that money for the space program can be better spent. Not just on increased military spending and tax cuts for the rich, but for things like food and education. How can a nation spend billions building space probes when so many of its own people are going hungry, homeless, and without medical care? That's a sticky question.
But in the long term, I think that if anything holds the keys for humanity's long-term success as a species, it's probably the space program.
Note to President Bush: if you succeed in getting me that $1600 tax cut you've talked about, you can send my share to NASA. They've got much cooler things to spend the money on than I do.
The Top Ten Most Wanted List is a hoot, filled with dire language describing people who "force clicks on banners" (i.e. click a banner to download a file) as having "Stole $2000". I'm picturing some guy pointing a gun at a user's head, screaming "CLICK IT!", then afterwards going to rob a convenience store.
Some of the other comments are great also: "distributor of banner click software....heavy duty dude...beware!" Now I'm envisioning some cold-blooded ruffian fingering his glock as he puts the finishing touches on a Perl script.
so what if Scott Adams "sold out"? What was he rebelling against in the first place? Ice cream? You're not making any sense, moron. I think it's great that Dilbert is featured on Ben & Jerry's ice cream, it's more of an honor than anything. More than you can say about your pathetic life, Hemos, you phoney rebel.
I read Hemos' comment as implying that it was Ben & Jerry (ice cream co. with a hippy left-wing image) who were selling out by pimping Dilbert -- after all, Scott Adams has come out and said plainly enough that he's in it for the money, and will license his properties to pretty much anybody (I lost most of what little respect I had for Adams when I heard about his licensing Dilbert for use in IBM employee handbooks).
But personally, at this stage in the game, I have a hard time getting myself worked up over cartoon characters being used to sell shoddy merchandise. After Warner Bros. stores opened every half mile from coast to coast, I just stopped caring.
Great idea! And someone should sell a Doom breakfast cereal that I could eat while I watch the Doom breakfast serial.
Don't be glib. It's clear that CmdrTaco is waxing nostalgic for the days before ethernet became common, when we'd all squeeze in a little deathmatch over the RS232 connection before work.
Oh.. so you think managers have the best perspective on how to use peoples skills. heh.. right.
Actually, in my 6-7 years of being a paid coder & admin, I've found that the supervisors and CIOs I've had to work with have been, by and large, pretty reasonable, intelligent folks. There have been some who had PHB tendencies or had a different work style, but in the great majority of cases they've been smart people who knew a lot about computers.
Upper management and interdepartment politics, on the other hand, have often been the bane of my existence. But there *are* plenty of shops that have competent IT departments. That doesn't mean that I've never had to work with incompentent people, or people with maddeningly strange personalities, but by and large I've been pretty successful in being able to use my skills effectively and learn new things at every job I've had.
One thing that could well be successful (at *any* job, from a co-op/internship to a real-world position) is to take the initiative to find things around the company that you think look interesting and you might want to learn more about. This might be new piece of technology (hardware or software) you think the company could get use out of, a programming or networking project, or whatever. Write up your idea as a formal proposal, detailing what you want to do, how you plan to go about doing it, and how you think it would benefit the company, and present it to your supervisor. Don't pick something that would radically change the way the company does business ("convert all production servers to Lunix"), but do try to pick something that's actually useful, and not just a "toy" project.
Even if you don't get the green light to do your proposal as originally envisioned, chances are very good that your boss will be impressed by your initiative and organization, which will increase the chance of getting to work on something more interesting in the future.
I'm sure there are shady outfits out there who happily will use co-op/intern programs as just a source of cheap labor, but I suspect there are far more cases where the people assigned to supervise aren't themselves managers, and don't always have the best perspective of how to use your skills most effectively.
Browser Error Sorry.You must have cookies enabled to enjoy this site.
Odd. I'm using Netscape proxied through Junkbuster, with all cookies but a select few sites blocked, and the law.com page loaded just fine for me. I just checked the netscape cookies file to double-check, and there's nothing from that domain.
I don't know what it's like in the States, but in Australia the only commercial Unix that is alive and kicking is Solaris. HPUX and SCO are on their death beds. Digital Unix, AIX and Unixware are nearly unheard of.
Here in the states, I work in a shop that is about 50/50 split between HPUX and Linux, with a smattering of FreeBSD and Solaris (well, and file/print sharing is mostly NT, but I hardly ever have to get anywhere near it). It used to be that HPUX ran all the workhorse applications, but recently we've been moving some pretty large web/database applications to Intel/Linux. The HP9000s aren't going away anytime soon because, from a hardware perspective, they're more mature, reliable servers in a lot of ways. But as an OS, I think everyone has been a lot happier with Linux (even the BSD guy who still complains that he can't do a 'ps -ef' in Linux).
Overall, I agree with you that Solaris is the biggest commercial Unix by a large amount. Though there ARE plenty of people out there using that Sun hardware to run Sparc Linux...
As for Unixware, I'm not sure I see the point of Linux compatibility, but I do have a certain respect for Unixware as an OS. I admined a few Unixware boxes back when it was still a Novell property, and it was a good, by-the-book SYS5 implementation with a decent packaging system added on. This was back around '95, when most bosses would just sort of give you an amused look if you suggested running any sort of production server on Linux.
If you are making what I would classify as "parasitic" music ie. DJ stuff, some techno, some hip-hop you can pick up some software for a few hundred bucks and maybe one decent mic and you are set
As opposed to, say, "parasitic" music like Elvis Presley, or most early rock & roll, or Robert Johnson's producers, all of which ripped off earlier blues styles and musicians wholesale without credit or compensation?
I've been a bedroom-studio musician for a little under a decade, and it's been really wonderful seeing how the expanse of technology has allowed me to do things that would have been difficult or impossible to do 20 years ago without an expensive studio.
As others have mentioned in this thread, Tascam's introduction of the Portastudio in the late 70s was the REAL revolution, and that was my first really important purchase. I recorded my first full tape around 1993, using a combination of acoustic instruments, Casio CZ-1000 keyboard, Tascam 4-track, and an Atari ST as a primitive sequencer/sampler. The Atari ST, at 8mhz and 4MB of RAM, could loop beats and samples at all of 8-bit 22khz I think, but it made a GREAT MIDI sequencer - it ran Cubase, and was far more stable and reliable than anything I've used on a PC.
Computers themselves have been a big part of the tech boom for musicians, but it's also driven down the price of electronics in general. For a few hundred dollars, you can pick up a used Akai or Roland sampler with power that would have cost tens of thousands of dollars a couple of decades ago. And while I'm not sold on the ability of just a PC and software to be an all-in-one production station, it's made a BIG difference. With a fast machine and a good recording card (i.e. not a consumer-level one), it's no big deal having 24 tracks or more of high-quality digital audio. And that software DOES come in handy for editing and post-production tasks, and the advent of the CD burner means that you can cut a perfect-quality copy of your work instantly -- tape hiss is a thing of the past.
Overall, I've probably spent about $3-$5K on my studio over the past decade, not counting the computer upgrades every couple of years that I would have done anyway. From this setup, I've put out at least half a dozen self-produced tapes and CDs (ranging from electronic music to psychedelic punk) that haven't made me a living, but have gotten me a couple of club gigs and radio play on both sides of the Atlantic. I think that's pretty cool. (but don't just believe me,listen for yourself!)
I'm really glad I got into home recording before the PC explosion hit, though, because it made me go out and learn a lot of fundamental information about sound engineering that I might not have gone out and learned otherwise. It's a GOOD thing that I don't have to fool with bouncing tracks or setting up MIDI tape sync or wrestling with quite as many patch cables as I used to, but I'm glad that I know how, since it gives me a wider perspective of recording technology. Learning how to really use a 4-track will prepare you for aspects of a full-blown studio that no amount of Cakewalking ever will. And there are countless cool effects possible with a mixer and tape recorder that are well-nigh impossible to reproduce purely in the digital domain.
So by all means, computers are great - get out there and make some music with them - but don't forget that low-tech is an important part of the picture as well.
I've already seen napster spam in the form of automated/msg sent by one of the java/web-based napster clients. Whenever someone using this service grabbed a file from my machine, I would get sent a/msg like "Hey, song such-and-such has been downloaded by a user of Java-Napster-Thingy. Check it out at url.com!" Very annoying.
Of course, it's easy enough to just ignore your chat log, but this is a muddying up of another potentially useful means of communication.
What the hell is he thinking? Why should I want to subsidize record companies?
Yeah, I think Cringley sort of missed the boat on this one. There's *already* a "recording tax" on audio blanks which are specially coded to work on standalone audio CD writers (Phillips is one of the main manufacturers of these boxes). These audio blanks sell for between $3-$5 per disc at the same store where I can get a spool of 100 name brand CDR blanks for about $40.
But whats the advantage of having a shell account? I think I'm just looking at it from the perspective of; if you already run a *nix box, you've got a shell there. I can see someone wanting one if they run a Windows box, but whats the advantage of having a shell account?
Because you're not always *at* your Unix box. I can't count the number of times I've been at a friend's house, who only had a Windows PC, and needed to do a tracroute/nslookup/etc. (granted, Windows is a lot better about including these tools than they used to be, but I still prefer the full-blown Unix versions).
Because if you're troubleshooting, it can be invaluable having a machine that's part of another network. At my current job, there are very often questions along the lines of "Does such and such only work this way on our network, or does it do the same thing from the outside?" Similarly, the network at my job is firewalled pretty restrictively -- I can't even ping or traceroute outside machines from any of the systems outside the firewall. Similarly, if I decide I want to spend my lunch hour hanging out on IRC, I like being able to do so without using company cycles.
Because if you're also maintaining some sort of web/ftp space on the same account, it's *much* easier being able to manage files from a full-blown shell then by doing it all through an ftp client (renaming files, changing permissions, quick edits of text files, etc.)
Because I still prefer having a full-blown mail client like mutt or pine that I can use anywhere. Espescially since a lot of ISPs don't support IMAP, I've had to sometimes resort to things like telnetting into port 110 of a POP server and reading my new mail by hand (user username / pass password / list / retr 1 / quit).
Then I found a program called 'editres' with several siblings. 'editres' is a standard part of X. By using it and clicking on a running X program, you can edit all those goofy settings
I've played with editres a little, but found it fairly daunting when used with any really large apps. Most of the X resource hacking I've done has been done by hand -- most well-behaved X apps will document their resources in the man page. I learned a LOT reading the xterm and olwm/olvwm (my window manager of choice) man pages and looking at some sample code.
I've been working on a kiosk for one of the departments at my school.
As such, I've been using Redhat/Netscape/Afterstep. I too found the
pages on x.themes.org useful.
Hmm, for a dedicated Netscape kiosk, I wonder if you could run it entirely without a window manager...
What version of Netscape were you using? Navigator 4.73 on Linux silently fails on startup if any one of those options is set.
Works fine here on Navigator 4.76, Linux / Intel / libc 2.1.3. There are probably enough bug fixes and small refinements in 4.76 to make it worth the upgrade.
1. The "google" button assumes you have www.google.com set as your home page. You're smart; you get the idea.
2. The (expletive) lameness filter made me submit the above post three times because I tried to have a row of **** setting off the code fragment from the rest of the post. Lame.
Note: this is certainly outside the scope of the linked WC3 article, but is entirely relevant to the headline of "How to Fix Browsers".
I came across some useful bits on x.themes.org a few weeks ago about how to modify your xdefaults file so that Netscape supresses all the useless toolbar buttons ("Shop", "Spend", "Buy Stuff From Netscape"). Just add the following (my trimmed-down version) to your.Xdefaults and restart Netscape:
(unfortunately, the source file doesn't have the creator's name in it, so I don't know who to thank for whoever discovered/compiled this info... but it's nice indeed having a browser that just has buttons for Back, Forward, Reload, Google, and Stop)
For those, like me, who choose not to do business with amazon in any form, it appears that one can add 's1.amazon.com' to one's Junkbuster blockfile, and it'll replace the whole 'tip jar' banner with a broken link and an ALT tag reading "amazon honor system". Much less obstrusive, and it still lets you browse amazon.com normally, as far as I can tell.
I have mixed feelings about micropayment systems, but one thing you CAN do to encourage and reward people's efforts is to take a minute to send fan mail to sites/artists/musicians that you really like. Personally, a few meaningful comments about my work give me a lot more encouragement than the few bucks a month a micropayment system might result in.
I'm surprised that no one else in this thread has mentioned the fact that encrypted transmissions have been hidden in newspapers at least since world war 2 -- the Japanese used some pretty clever crypto disguised as newspaper advertisements to inform their agents in the U.S. as to when the bombing of Pearl Harbor was due to go down.
I'm not surprised that the USA Today article failed to mention this interesting historical footnote.
And really, in some ways, its more secure to encode small amounts of data in a newspaper personal or want ad. Downloading a file with a hidden message will almost certainly leave an IP footprint -- buying a newspaper from a streetcorner vending machine is pretty much untraceable.
But it's not surprising to see this kind of scare-tactic propaganda used to make people mistrust encryption. (Oh yeah, and don't forget to be wary of foreigners, and their weird religions also.)
So how many slashdot users use them and care that they are being sold as stats?
I bought one book from amazon about 3 years ago, but after seeing the directions they were going in, have sworn off them ever since. This is for various reasons, including:
The diversifaction of their services from just books to a million kinds of other crap.
Rampant reselling of customer data
They are killing off small, independently-owned specialty bookshops.
Patent issues
Aggressive marketing that means I can't surf the web for ten minutes without seeing an amazon logo. ("Spamazon")
A general uneasy feeling that they are one of the worst offenders in the trend to transform the web into a garish, dumbed-down AOLian pit where things have value only as commodities.
Do I still use amazon? Sure, they're a great source of book reviews, which I frequently consult before heading down to the local used book store or independently owned bookshop. As always, I browse with Junkbuster so my machine remains amazon-cookie-free.
For what it's worth (and I know this is common knowledge, but I'm mentioning in it hopes of limiting the number of redundant posts in this thread...): the reason that csh/ksh ship with commercial Unices and bash ships with Linux is because csh/ksh were originally written as non-free software. The need for a free, full-featured shell led to the development of bash, as well as free workalikes of the other shells (pdksh and tcsh) for those who needed to maintain close compatibility with existing ksh/csh scripts. (although scripting in csh is a bad idea from both a security and code maintainance point of view...)
Personally, I've stuck with bash ever since I first used it, because it combines the best features of ksh (job control, history, aliasing/substitution) along with invaluable interactive features like tab completion and emacs-style editing keystrokes. If I need to write scripts, I'll either make it Bourne-shell compatible (so it will run anywhere) or else write it in Perl (where I'm much more comfortable with the syntax).
But even though I haven't really used Mr. Korn's shell for about five years, I'm most appreciative of the advances he's made that have benefited programmers and admins everywhere. Good work!
the first time we entered his classroom we were met loud Bob Dylan-songs.
The bitterly ironic thing about this is that Bob Dylan is a vocal proponent of further extending the term of copyright. It deeply saddened me to learn this -- I'd always sort of lumped Bob into the category of cool folk singers like Woody Guthrie (who released all of his songs into the public domain).
Slashdot Mirror
The first Ultima, written on a 48Kb Apple II in about 1978, was 3-D
Well, sort of - the dungeons are 3D wireframe in Ultima I (which came out in 1980, a year before Wizardry I), but the world map (where you spend most of your time) is in 2D overhead view, just like later games in the series.
I'm not sure if Aklabeth, Lord British's first game (and prequel to Ultima) had any 2D elements or whether it was a pure 3D dungeon crawl.
Personally, even back in the early 80s I was never a huge fan of those 3D first-person dungeons, espescially since there was no automap and you had to sit there plotting out each level with graph paper. Remember "mapping gems"?
Bard's Tale was even worse, but I played through and mapped that whole game on graph paper, so I mustn't have minded too much. Likewise for Dungeon Master (1 and 2). One of the things I liked most about Ultima Underworld was that it had a cool automap with notations etc. Ultima Underworld was a cool game engine for it's time (and a good game to boot).
Or "Mob's new torture device of choice found to be low-cost version of new military 'non-lethal technology"
Yikes, it's the Tucker Cell-Phone!
(Do a web search on 'tucker telephone' if you don't get the reference).
It really saddens me to see how the space program has gotten shoved in the background over the past decade or two. Sure, it's a horrendously expensive endeavor in the short term, but I can't think of ANY better long-term investment, with returns in technology, economic wealth (I'd wager there's gold - and things even more valuable - in them there asteroids), and essential resources (stick a big array of solar panels in orbit, and you've got insane amounts of free energy, forever). And with overpopulation and global industrialization progressing at their current rate, humanity better start thinking NOW about where it's going to go as a species once things start to get truly shaky, even if that's a century or two down the road. Getting lots of people off the planet, one way or another, looks like the best long-term option from my perspective.
In the short term, too, I think the space program has many benefits. It gives people something to dream about, and a way to express the pioneer spirit now that all of available land masses on earth have been more or less spoken for. When I was growing up, in the late 70s-early 80s, the space program was one of the first things to get me REALLY fired up about learning. Following the progress of the Voyager missions, the Mars probes, and the first Space Shuttle flights was utterly mind-blowing. I suspect that these interests had plenty to do with my getting interested in computers, which has proved rewarding in all sorts of ways. But then, a few years later, between the arms race of the cold war and the explosion of the Challenger, the U.S. cooled off on the space race, and hasn't regained the same momentum since.
There are plenty of arguments that money for the space program can be better spent. Not just on increased military spending and tax cuts for the rich, but for things like food and education. How can a nation spend billions building space probes when so many of its own people are going hungry, homeless, and without medical care? That's a sticky question.
But in the long term, I think that if anything holds the keys for humanity's long-term success as a species, it's probably the space program.
Note to President Bush: if you succeed in getting me that $1600 tax cut you've talked about, you can send my share to NASA. They've got much cooler things to spend the money on than I do.
All your mp3 are belong to us.
The Top Ten Most Wanted List is a hoot, filled with dire language describing people who "force clicks on banners" (i.e. click a banner to download a file) as having "Stole $2000". I'm picturing some guy pointing a gun at a user's head, screaming "CLICK IT!", then afterwards going to rob a convenience store.
Some of the other comments are great also: "distributor of banner click software....heavy duty dude...beware!" Now I'm envisioning some cold-blooded ruffian fingering his glock as he puts the finishing touches on a Perl script.
All your forced clicks are belong to us.
so what if Scott Adams "sold out"? What was he rebelling against in the first place? Ice cream? You're not making any sense, moron. I think it's great that Dilbert is featured on Ben & Jerry's ice cream, it's more of an honor than anything. More than you can say about your pathetic life, Hemos, you phoney rebel.
I read Hemos' comment as implying that it was Ben & Jerry (ice cream co. with a hippy left-wing image) who were selling out by pimping Dilbert -- after all, Scott Adams has come out and said plainly enough that he's in it for the money, and will license his properties to pretty much anybody (I lost most of what little respect I had for Adams when I heard about his licensing Dilbert for use in IBM employee handbooks).
But personally, at this stage in the game, I have a hard time getting myself worked up over cartoon characters being used to sell shoddy merchandise. After Warner Bros. stores opened every half mile from coast to coast, I just stopped caring.
All your shameless plugs are belong to us.
Great idea! And someone should sell a Doom breakfast cereal that I could eat while I watch the Doom breakfast serial.
Don't be glib. It's clear that CmdrTaco is waxing nostalgic for the days before ethernet became common, when we'd all squeeze in a little deathmatch over the RS232 connection before work.
All your MP3 are belong to us.
Just for fun, I ran the "ALL YOUR BASE ARE BELONG TO US" through Babblefish (sic)
I translated the phrase to different languages and back to English, and got the following:
All your beats are belong to us.
Oh.. so you think managers have the best perspective on how to use peoples skills. heh.. right.
Actually, in my 6-7 years of being a paid coder & admin, I've found that the supervisors and CIOs I've had to work with have been, by and large, pretty reasonable, intelligent folks. There have been some who had PHB tendencies or had a different work style, but in the great majority of cases they've been smart people who knew a lot about computers.
Upper management and interdepartment politics, on the other hand, have often been the bane of my existence. But there *are* plenty of shops that have competent IT departments. That doesn't mean that I've never had to work with incompentent people, or people with maddeningly strange personalities, but by and large I've been pretty successful in being able to use my skills effectively and learn new things at every job I've had.
All your base are belong to us.
One thing that could well be successful (at *any* job, from a co-op/internship to a real-world position) is to take the initiative to find things around the company that you think look interesting and you might want to learn more about. This might be new piece of technology (hardware or software) you think the company could get use out of, a programming or networking project, or whatever. Write up your idea as a formal proposal, detailing what you want to do, how you plan to go about doing it, and how you think it would benefit the company, and present it to your supervisor. Don't pick something that would radically change the way the company does business ("convert all production servers to Lunix"), but do try to pick something that's actually useful, and not just a "toy" project.
Even if you don't get the green light to do your proposal as originally envisioned, chances are very good that your boss will be impressed by your initiative and organization, which will increase the chance of getting to work on something more interesting in the future.
I'm sure there are shady outfits out there who happily will use co-op/intern programs as just a source of cheap labor, but I suspect there are far more cases where the people assigned to supervise aren't themselves managers, and don't always have the best perspective of how to use your skills most effectively.
Browser Error Sorry.You must have cookies enabled to enjoy this site.
Odd. I'm using Netscape proxied through Junkbuster, with all cookies but a select few sites blocked, and the law.com page loaded just fine for me. I just checked the netscape cookies file to double-check, and there's nothing from that domain.
I don't know what it's like in the States, but in Australia the only commercial Unix that is alive and kicking is Solaris. HPUX and SCO are on their death beds. Digital Unix, AIX and Unixware are nearly unheard of.
Here in the states, I work in a shop that is about 50/50 split between HPUX and Linux, with a smattering of FreeBSD and Solaris (well, and file/print sharing is mostly NT, but I hardly ever have to get anywhere near it). It used to be that HPUX ran all the workhorse applications, but recently we've been moving some pretty large web/database applications to Intel/Linux. The HP9000s aren't going away anytime soon because, from a hardware perspective, they're more mature, reliable servers in a lot of ways. But as an OS, I think everyone has been a lot happier with Linux (even the BSD guy who still complains that he can't do a 'ps -ef' in Linux).
Overall, I agree with you that Solaris is the biggest commercial Unix by a large amount. Though there ARE plenty of people out there using that Sun hardware to run Sparc Linux...
As for Unixware, I'm not sure I see the point of Linux compatibility, but I do have a certain respect for Unixware as an OS. I admined a few Unixware boxes back when it was still a Novell property, and it was a good, by-the-book SYS5 implementation with a decent packaging system added on. This was back around '95, when most bosses would just sort of give you an amused look if you suggested running any sort of production server on Linux.
If you are making what I would classify as "parasitic" music ie. DJ stuff, some techno, some hip-hop you can pick up some software for a few hundred bucks and maybe one decent mic and you are set
As opposed to, say, "parasitic" music like Elvis Presley, or most early rock & roll, or Robert Johnson's producers, all of which ripped off earlier blues styles and musicians wholesale without credit or compensation?
(Now go download some symbiotic music to listen to).
I've been a bedroom-studio musician for a little under a decade, and it's been really wonderful seeing how the expanse of technology has allowed me to do things that would have been difficult or impossible to do 20 years ago without an expensive studio.
As others have mentioned in this thread, Tascam's introduction of the Portastudio in the late 70s was the REAL revolution, and that was my first really important purchase. I recorded my first full tape around 1993, using a combination of acoustic instruments, Casio CZ-1000 keyboard, Tascam 4-track, and an Atari ST as a primitive sequencer/sampler. The Atari ST, at 8mhz and 4MB of RAM, could loop beats and samples at all of 8-bit 22khz I think, but it made a GREAT MIDI sequencer - it ran Cubase, and was far more stable and reliable than anything I've used on a PC.
Computers themselves have been a big part of the tech boom for musicians, but it's also driven down the price of electronics in general. For a few hundred dollars, you can pick up a used Akai or Roland sampler with power that would have cost tens of thousands of dollars a couple of decades ago. And while I'm not sold on the ability of just a PC and software to be an all-in-one production station, it's made a BIG difference. With a fast machine and a good recording card (i.e. not a consumer-level one), it's no big deal having 24 tracks or more of high-quality digital audio. And that software DOES come in handy for editing and post-production tasks, and the advent of the CD burner means that you can cut a perfect-quality copy of your work instantly -- tape hiss is a thing of the past.
Overall, I've probably spent about $3-$5K on my studio over the past decade, not counting the computer upgrades every couple of years that I would have done anyway. From this setup, I've put out at least half a dozen self-produced tapes and CDs (ranging from electronic music to psychedelic punk) that haven't made me a living, but have gotten me a couple of club gigs and radio play on both sides of the Atlantic. I think that's pretty cool. (but don't just believe me,listen for yourself!)
I'm really glad I got into home recording before the PC explosion hit, though, because it made me go out and learn a lot of fundamental information about sound engineering that I might not have gone out and learned otherwise. It's a GOOD thing that I don't have to fool with bouncing tracks or setting up MIDI tape sync or wrestling with quite as many patch cables as I used to, but I'm glad that I know how, since it gives me a wider perspective of recording technology. Learning how to really use a 4-track will prepare you for aspects of a full-blown studio that no amount of Cakewalking ever will. And there are countless cool effects possible with a mixer and tape recorder that are well-nigh impossible to reproduce purely in the digital domain.
So by all means, computers are great - get out there and make some music with them - but don't forget that low-tech is an important part of the picture as well.
I've already seen napster spam in the form of automated /msg sent by one of the java/web-based napster clients. Whenever someone using this service grabbed a file from my machine, I would get sent a /msg like "Hey, song such-and-such has been downloaded by a user of Java-Napster-Thingy. Check it out at url.com!" Very annoying.
Of course, it's easy enough to just ignore your chat log, but this is a muddying up of another potentially useful means of communication.
What the hell is he thinking? Why should I want to subsidize record companies?
Yeah, I think Cringley sort of missed the boat on this one. There's *already* a "recording tax" on audio blanks which are specially coded to work on standalone audio CD writers (Phillips is one of the main manufacturers of these boxes). These audio blanks sell for between $3-$5 per disc at the same store where I can get a spool of 100 name brand CDR blanks for about $40.
But whats the advantage of having a shell account? I think I'm just looking at it from the perspective of; if you already run a *nix box, you've got a shell there. I can see someone wanting one if they run a Windows box, but whats the advantage of having a shell account?
Because you're not always *at* your Unix box. I can't count the number of times I've been at a friend's house, who only had a Windows PC, and needed to do a tracroute/nslookup/etc. (granted, Windows is a lot better about including these tools than they used to be, but I still prefer the full-blown Unix versions).
Because if you're troubleshooting, it can be invaluable having a machine that's part of another network. At my current job, there are very often questions along the lines of "Does such and such only work this way on our network, or does it do the same thing from the outside?" Similarly, the network at my job is firewalled pretty restrictively -- I can't even ping or traceroute outside machines from any of the systems outside the firewall. Similarly, if I decide I want to spend my lunch hour hanging out on IRC, I like being able to do so without using company cycles.
Because if you're also maintaining some sort of web/ftp space on the same account, it's *much* easier being able to manage files from a full-blown shell then by doing it all through an ftp client (renaming files, changing permissions, quick edits of text files, etc.)
Because I still prefer having a full-blown mail client like mutt or pine that I can use anywhere. Espescially since a lot of ISPs don't support IMAP, I've had to sometimes resort to things like telnetting into port 110 of a POP server and reading my new mail by hand (user username / pass password / list / retr 1 / quit).
Then I found a program called 'editres' with several siblings. 'editres' is a standard part of X. By using it and clicking on a running X program, you can edit all those goofy settings
I've played with editres a little, but found it fairly daunting when used with any really large apps. Most of the X resource hacking I've done has been done by hand -- most well-behaved X apps will document their resources in the man page. I learned a LOT reading the xterm and olwm/olvwm (my window manager of choice) man pages and looking at some sample code.
I've been working on a kiosk for one of the departments at my school. As such, I've been using Redhat/Netscape/Afterstep. I too found the pages on x.themes.org useful.
Hmm, for a dedicated Netscape kiosk, I wonder if you could run it entirely without a window manager...
What version of Netscape were you using? Navigator 4.73 on Linux silently fails on startup if any one of those options is set.
Works fine here on Navigator 4.76, Linux / Intel / libc 2.1.3. There are probably enough bug fixes and small refinements in 4.76 to make it worth the upgrade.
1. The "google" button assumes you have www.google.com set as your home page. You're smart; you get the idea.
2. The (expletive) lameness filter made me submit the above post three times because I tried to have a row of **** setting off the code fragment from the rest of the post. Lame.
Note: this is certainly outside the scope of the linked WC3 article, but is entirely relevant to the headline of "How to Fix Browsers".
.Xdefaults and restart Netscape:
I came across some useful bits on x.themes.org a few weeks ago about how to modify your xdefaults file so that Netscape supresses all the useless toolbar buttons ("Shop", "Spend", "Buy Stuff From Netscape"). Just add the following (my trimmed-down version) to your
*toolBar*myshopping.isEnabled: False
*toolBar*destinations.isEnabled: False
*toolBar*print.isEnabled: False
*toolBar*search.isEnabled: False
*toolBar*viewSecurity.isEnabled: False
*toolBar*home.labelString: Google
*home.tipString: Search here
*urlLocationLabel.labelString:
*bookmarkQuickfile.labelString:
(unfortunately, the source file doesn't have the creator's name in it, so I don't know who to thank for whoever discovered/compiled this info... but it's nice indeed having a browser that just has buttons for Back, Forward, Reload, Google, and Stop)
For those, like me, who choose not to do business with amazon in any form, it appears that one can add 's1.amazon.com' to one's Junkbuster blockfile, and it'll replace the whole 'tip jar' banner with a broken link and an ALT tag reading "amazon honor system". Much less obstrusive, and it still lets you browse amazon.com normally, as far as I can tell.
I have mixed feelings about micropayment systems, but one thing you CAN do to encourage and reward people's efforts is to take a minute to send fan mail to sites/artists/musicians that you really like. Personally, a few meaningful comments about my work give me a lot more encouragement than the few bucks a month a micropayment system might result in.
I'm surprised that no one else in this thread has mentioned the fact that encrypted transmissions have been hidden in newspapers at least since world war 2 -- the Japanese used some pretty clever crypto disguised as newspaper advertisements to inform their agents in the U.S. as to when the bombing of Pearl Harbor was due to go down.
I'm not surprised that the USA Today article failed to mention this interesting historical footnote.
And really, in some ways, its more secure to encode small amounts of data in a newspaper personal or want ad. Downloading a file with a hidden message will almost certainly leave an IP footprint -- buying a newspaper from a streetcorner vending machine is pretty much untraceable.
But it's not surprising to see this kind of scare-tactic propaganda used to make people mistrust encryption. (Oh yeah, and don't forget to be wary of foreigners, and their weird religions also.)
So how many slashdot users use them and care that they are being sold as stats?
I bought one book from amazon about 3 years ago, but after seeing the directions they were going in, have sworn off them ever since. This is for various reasons, including:
Do I still use amazon? Sure, they're a great source of book reviews, which I frequently consult before heading down to the local used book store or independently owned bookshop. As always, I browse with Junkbuster so my machine remains amazon-cookie-free.
For what it's worth (and I know this is common knowledge, but I'm mentioning in it hopes of limiting the number of redundant posts in this thread...): the reason that csh/ksh ship with commercial Unices and bash ships with Linux is because csh/ksh were originally written as non-free software. The need for a free, full-featured shell led to the development of bash, as well as free workalikes of the other shells (pdksh and tcsh) for those who needed to maintain close compatibility with existing ksh/csh scripts. (although scripting in csh is a bad idea from both a security and code maintainance point of view...)
Personally, I've stuck with bash ever since I first used it, because it combines the best features of ksh (job control, history, aliasing/substitution) along with invaluable interactive features like tab completion and emacs-style editing keystrokes. If I need to write scripts, I'll either make it Bourne-shell compatible (so it will run anywhere) or else write it in Perl (where I'm much more comfortable with the syntax).
But even though I haven't really used Mr. Korn's shell for about five years, I'm most appreciative of the advances he's made that have benefited programmers and admins everywhere. Good work!
the first time we entered his classroom we were met loud Bob Dylan-songs.
The bitterly ironic thing about this is that Bob Dylan is a vocal proponent of further extending the term of copyright. It deeply saddened me to learn this -- I'd always sort of lumped Bob into the category of cool folk singers like Woody Guthrie (who released all of his songs into the public domain).
Don't give these people your money. Go listen to some free music instead.