The other day there was much controversy over RMS' insistence that "Linux" be properly referred to as GNU/Linux. A few of the remarks suggested that RMS was free to release his own kernel, which he would be free to call whatever he pleases. I was aware of the Hurd Kernel, but NOT aware that it had reached 1.x status. According to this announcement they(the Hurd development team)'re through with 1.x, and working on 2.0!
This is great, IMHO. While Hurd probabaly cannot (now) challenge the Linux Kernel, it is at least a viable project for those who are too pure to desire the compromises (non-free driver code, non-free development tools) that Linus has accepted. For those who can no longer consider Linux totally FREE, the Hurd was, is, and shall always remain FREE software, even if that does mean compromising its functionality for things like, say, LoseModems (which require proprietary DSP code).
At the very least, it adds GNU/Hurd to the list of "OSS" operating systems, and provides another reason to call "Linux" GNU/Linux: to both relate it to and distinguish it from GNU/Hurd.
without which "Linux" would not exist, and BSD would be crippled.
What about my freedom to call something anything I like...?
I suppose you'd be free ("Freedom of Speech" and all) to call an Apple by the name "Orange", but that won't help others understand what you're talking about. Recall the confusion which resulted when the previous "presidential administration" unilaterally redefined the term "sex" to exclude fellatio.
The man's point is that the FSF's OS is much more properly named "GNU" or "GNU/Linux", that "Linux" really properly refers only to the Kernel, and that the FSF deserves at least as much recognition in the deal as does Mr. Torvalds. "Everybody" may know this, but newbies and the laiety (especially the PRESS) tend to gloss over this important matter.
That's OK. I'm thinking in terms of the backpack full of 2" books that I used to carry around in engineering school. This gyzmo would be the size of the looseleaf binder I also carried around, thinner than 1 book, weigh about as much as 2 books, and hold more data than a _busfull_ of backpacks!
I like that. I think it's a good direction to go, especially as it should be far cheaper to publish textbooks electronically than as the short-run dead-tree publications they are now.
A couple of comments above, somebody cited the poop on the different Plutonium isotopes. I hadn't the slightest fscking idea that there are over thirty! Half-lives cover the spectrum, from 0.6 nS to eighty million years. Of these, only the ones with spontaneous fission decay modes: 236(2.9Y), 238(88Y), 239(24e3Y), 240(6500Y), 241(14Y), 242(3.7e5Y), and 244(8e7Y) would be of interest to nuclear engineers. My understanding has always been that the main useful isotope was 239. All give off charged particles (alphas, electrons) but it's the neutrons from the spontaneous fission that can feed nuclear chain reactions, even though these are a miniscule fraction of the total radiation.
Plutonium _oxide_ (the active compound in reactor fuel rods) isn't too hard to handle, but the pure (metallic) Plutonium is more dangerous. The chief hazard is that it's easily burned, making smoke which spreads well through the atmosphere and returns to earth as dust. This dust is deadly. Breathing it loads your lungs with plutonium, the long-term radiation from which damages the tissues of your body. Damage to cellular DNA causes cancer. A (nuclear) munitions plant in Colorado had a fire in 1957, the (Plutonium) smoke from which was not fully contained. The neighboring town remains a cancer colony, though other contaminants, in addition to Plutonium, can be pointed at. The most dramatic story was of a little girl who was perfectly healthy until she fell down in the playground and scraped her knee. She must have picked up a plutonium dust particle or two, because six months later she lost the knee to cancer and by the end of a year she was dead.
The big story was of the filming of "The Conqueror" in 1954, about a hundred miles, and upwind, even, from a bomb test site in NV. As of 1980 John Wayne, Susan Hayward, director Cecil B DeMille, and half the crew who filmed it (kicking up plenty of dust in the process, no doubt, and breathing it as well) were dead - mostly of lung cancer, though no causal relation was proven in court.
Really, that doesn't sound too much like anything "harmless". But in comparison, there are other isotopes so intensely radioactive that only brief exposure to them amounts to a death sentence. There are elements which are much more aggressively absorbed by biochemistry, making their radioactive isotopes far more dangerous.
I don't want any of these things in my environment. Bury 'em, DEEP, so deep that nobody will ever get at them accidently!
But what about Mother Nature? It's pretty well known that the Earth's crust isn't a static thing. It moves, fluids (water, oil, etc) wash around inside it, and over the geologic span of time that this stuff (some of it, at least) lasts, who knows what will happen in Nevada's basement?
Build a large marker out of a common and valueless material, say granite, in sections too large to be practical to move. Build it in the shape of a periodic table of the elements. Ever seen the curved one, in which the rows go around and meet at what are usually the edges? It looks like an expanding spiral, and is quite distinctive.
Prominently indicate the elements which are contained in the dump. Go ahead and put the atomic numbers in the element squares and prominently indicate the atomic weights of the radioactive isotopes. It would be useful to include drawings of the atoms illustrating the proton & neutron counts, but these would of course be useless by the time we get up to the elements which are radioactive. The first few drawings would be understandable, and would serve as a useful clue as to what the thing was about. Radioactive isotope nuclei might be drawn with neutrons or alpha particles flying away from them. Any civilization capable of understanding nuclear power or even molecular chemistry would understand such a symbol, though it might take them a couple of hours to get the numbers. Space aliens from another planet oughta be able to understand the distinct arrangement of the elements of the periodic table. It's not a cultural symbol, like a skull & crossbones, and it's NOT subject to misinterpretation. You either get it, or you don't.
Yeah, it'd be a puzzle, but it wouldn't be that obscure, and it would take a hell of a lot less brains and effort to figure out its meaning than it would to dig down a couple of miles to find out firsthand what's down there.
For the sake of the clueless you could keep the information kiosk and the multilingual messages. Sanskrit and Egyptian heiroglyphics are still understood. Engrish & Times Roman probably will be also, even in 10,000 years. The nuclear hazard trefoil symbol is likely to be around for quite a while, too.
Then you just have to bury the waste deep enough down a hole blocked up well enough so that any ignorant primitives who may descend from us won't be able to get at it. 4 Km sounds like plenty, backfilled with concrete oughta thwart anybody without the sophistication necessary to understand a periodic table, or construct carbide-steel drills. How many wells or mines were dug that deep before the industrial revolution?
If a nuclear war happens, it's a pretty safe bet that the survivors (if any) will understand radioactive isotopes, and for a very long time.
I think it's as likely we'll find some _use_ for that crap, and will want to dig it up ourselves!
IMU he'll have a large "L" (Linux Luser) branded on his forehead the minute he reports to his masters, and probably be ridden out of Redmond on a rail....
I have a hard time with that, mostly because the original 8086/88 addressed 1 Meg of memory and not just 640K. The 640K limitation came from DoS and M$, hence Gates is credited with the remark.
Admittedly the 8086/88 could only address 64K/segment, and you only got 4 segment registers, limiting you to 256K before you had to start reloading segment registers. Intel's attitude at the time could possibly have been along the lines of "a 64K data element is as big as anybody'll ever need", but at the time 64K was an _entire_ CP/M system, program, data, BIOS, BDOS, everything. Nowhere in the 8086 architecture is there a 640K limitation.
Don't try to blame IBM, either. Their first PC could only handle 256K RAM. The XT upped this to the 640K which was all DoS ever used until EMS & XMS came around.
All his old short stories (and a couple of novellas in installments) (the stuff on the "Future History" chart) were originally published in pulp-fiction SF magazines like "Amazing Stories" and "Astounding Science Fiction" or some such. These are worth a mint now, if anybody's dad still has a box of them left in his attic.
Later, paperback publishers (Del Rey?) went through the stuff, and picked and chose to make anthologies, usually naming these after one of the short stories contained therin to maximize reader confusion and therby hope to sell him the same short story multiple times.
IIRC, "Let There Be Light" was included in (at _least_) anthologies named "The Past Through Tomorrow", "The man Who Sold The Moon", and "The Green Hills Of Earth", each of which contained a (sometimes not-so-)short story bearing the same name as found on the anthology cover. I've other anthologies named "Revolt in 2100" and "The Menace From Earth", both of which are also short stories.
And it's ABOUT TIME somebody around here came up with this cold-light technology, which time-line three has had since the sixties.
A keyboard plug. Handwriting recognition to/dev/kb when the keyboard isn't present a rather special xf86config file, but nothing the multihead guys shouldn't be able to come up with.
Mfgr (mfkr?) claims it's made of off-the-shelf parts, implying that it couldn't be _too_ different electronically from a dual-head / LCD monitor rig. Porting WinBloze to it woulda co$t them a _lot_ if they'd done anythng really strange....
Lessee... An 8.5 x 11" ("letter") sheet of paper works out to 13.9" diagonally. 15" diagonal is going to be right about the size of the looseleaf binder that that fits in. I'm usually carrying one of those around already, and the idea of getting 20G and two screens in that space is very interesting.
_Electronically_, I'd expect it to be a dual-head laptop with tilted orientation. I'd _want_ a keyboard plug, once in a while, but handwriting recognition a la Palm would do much to eliminate the need.
Remember when Stallman made quotes along the lines of "anything that doesn't come with its own compiler isn't a real operating system".
and this is loony how?
Of course you'll _need_ a compiler with your Operating System. One of my cheif beefs with the Empire is that they want another $500 or so for theirs (unless you buy it at the college bookstore). Note that RMS, Linux, GNU & Hurd will hardly get prissy with you if you want to replace gcc with something _else_, but you'll _need_ a compiler for most installations, except of course those where the compiler is on another machine and things are built remotely.
Of course you'll need a browser, too (for a desktop workstation, not, say, an nfs server). The point here is that with GNU/Linux, *BSD or such you can choose from a rich selection of browsers (or none when apporpriate), varying considerably in functionality, speed, memory footprint, licensing, cost,... while the monopolist quite aggressively forces Exploiter on you.
It's very easy to argue that a compiler is a far more fundamental and important part of an OS than an Internet browser. Real Operating Systems come with both. Real Operating Systems let you choose whether or not you want to install either, or both, or substitute something else of your own preference. Toy OSsen (and right now the Redmond "OS"'s cheif distinction is that it runs a lot of video games) "protect" the luser from the "confusion" of having to make these decisions of what to install or not.
I actually am pretty convinced that OEM's *pay* to put those ugly stickers on their machines.
Bzzzzzzzt!! Wrong.
Intel & M$ pay the OEMs, in the form of "advertizing allowances", to put those stickers on their machinery, as they pay the OEMs to play their jingle at the end of the TV commercials. The stickers are almost unquestionably part of the deal. In order to qualify for an "advertizing partnership" with the monopolist, and get $15 off each and every WinBloze license you buy/ship, you _must_:
1) Bundle WinBloze on each and every machine you ship, no matter how badly your customer whines for a naked PC or a Linux install. Selling just _one_ Linux PC blows your $15 rebate on _all_ 2 million other systems you'll ship this year, "co$ting" you $30e6, so it's out of the question.
2) Put the little "Designed for WinBloze" sticker on each and every machine also. I really wonder who they think they're trying to fool with that, because it certainly does not discourage a single Linux hack from trying to install Linux on a machine that's clearly intended to run WinBloze. We just peel off the offending sticker, and Linux doesn't care one way or the other.
3) Throw up a M$ logo at the end of each and every commercial you put on TV. That nets you a $10,000 partnership in the commercial. Mo' money!
4) Bend over and (publicly) kiss BillG's ass whenever he asks. That doesn't cost money, just pride...
5) Other things which don't co$t you anything, but which further the propaganda goals of the Empire, like putting a link on each and every page of your OEM e-commerce website that says "${OEM} computers come pre-loaded with only _genuine_ Micro$uck WinBloze" and points to the piracy webpage of the monopolist.
If the monopolist were shut down by the court and went away tomorrow...
OEMs would continue to support their installed users, just as they do now. OEMs would have no Empire to which to pay per-CPU licensing for the WinBloze images which they already have and are already shipping. I'm confident that they'd shed a single tear for the simplicity that was a monopoly OS market, then move on. The OEM channel wouldn't even hiccup, but probably _would_ shift to bundling competing non-orphaned OSen and portable apps as quickly as it could. Systems with Linux & OpenOffice or such pre-loaded on them by the OEM would be available day after tomorrow. Also available (from some OEM or other - I'm NOT claiming they'd all support multiple platforms or choose the same single one) would be:
BeOS - Which would see a sudden recovery
OS/2 - Would rise from its uneasy grave and probably dominate the consumer "OS" market in two years
Some really compatible WinAPI OS that's not even heard of now
XP lusers, indeed anyone with MPA, would throw out some CDs, but everything that works now (for an unspecified value of "works") would still work if a judge (or a nuke) took out the monopolist.
A MAJOR scramble would ensue to fill the vacuum left by the monopolist, and that might not be too pretty, but it _would_ be market driven, at least. First in the requirements to fill the gap would be ability to run the existing Imperial code, but that would fade as soon as the major apps got ported to POSIX. Hardware manufacturers would scramble to learn to write Kernel modules. Intel would lose its monopoly market.
Micro$oft dead would be a great thing for the rest of the software industry. A lot of MCS"E"s would have retraining to do.
Also, the computer doesn't want any beer, no matter how much you think it does. NEVER, EVER feed your computer beer, it doesn't need it and is prob[ab]ly too young for it anyways.
My old 5160 (PC/XT) is about there. Of course I've gutted the cabinet, and replaced all its insides with newer stuff. Does that count?
My kid brother bought an OEM XP license from Fry's for $100. (I sent him to confession. It was Holy Week, and he buys XP!) Installable, not an upgrade. They required him to buy "some hardware" in order to qualify it as computer sale, with which they can sell an OEM license. He bought a kit of cabinet fasteners, you know the ones with disk drive screws and those plastic standoffs that you need to mount a mobo. Let's see the Empire figure out which of those screws did or did not get built into his computer.....
I've seen that 30V figure mentioned twice now. Where did that come from? All the modern (TTL voltage) CMOS parts I've ever seen had a maximum bias voltage of 5.8 or 6V (OK, with the exception of Vpp on PROMS). No individual pin is spec'ed to tolerate voltage above the Vcc(+5)(+3 or less on RAMs and CPUs nowdays!) supply nor below ground. I once encountered a power supply that had the unusual "feature" (more likely a regulatory failure) of ramping its +5 output to about 8V on startup, for only maybe 15 or 20 mS before it fell back where it belonged, but this burned up two motherboard/disk sets before I figured out WTF was going on. _Very_ few things in a computer cabinet can withstand a 30V bias. Maybe a 30V ESD pulse? This is nothing, simply moving around in fairly dry air will result in >300V static potential, and you'll never feel it, either.
That said, I'll agree that the ESD hazard is overstated.
A few simple rules keep me out of trouble:
Keep a rather nervous frame of mind, which will make your hands sweat, or turn up the AC a bit. No, not so hot that you drip or anything. Sweat is an ionic solution (salt) and a natural antistatic coating for the human body.
Sit down. Sit at the table, keep your feet still, put your elbows on the table. Standing beside a bench shuffling your feet on the floor is a pretty good way to generate a static charge. Sticking your then-charged hand into a box, without first touching the box and discharging the static, is asking for it.
Hold the cabinet in one hand and the component you're dealing with in the other. If your task requires both hands, lean an elbow or forearm on the edge of the cabinet. Try to keep contact with a metal surface (one painted with EMI/RFI suppression paint will do) of the cabinet as much as possible. This eliminates static charge, much as a bracelet with a wire would, without cuffing you to the cabinet. "Grounding" the bench and/or cabinet is irrelevant. Equalizing the static electronic potential between your body and the gear you're working on is vital.
To pass (unbagged) equipment from one person to another, touch the person's hand first, to discharge any potential difference, then you can touch the gear they're holding. Be sure to explain this as a static precaution so they won't think you're gay.
Keep the gear bagged as much as possible. Keep disk drives in their shock packaging, this is usually antistatic as well. The spectacle of stacks of naked motherboards sitting on shelves at the local used hardware dealer makes me queasy. I don't buy that guy's motherboards.
I leave the power supply plugged into a grounded outlet while working on the machine.
IMU a modern ATX PS doesn't ever really fully power down the motherboard. Touching (with your hands) the 3/5/12 volts you'll find there isn't a hazard, but working with metal tools isn't such a good idea. You're of course safe with a (now old-fashioned) AT power supply that _fully_ shuts off.
That's a fundamental problem with monolithic kernels. Linux will continue to be rejected by the unwashed masses when adding new hardware means compiling a new kernel.
I have tons of drivers, configured as installable modules. These all seem to work well enough, and are loadable/unloadable on the fly (try _that_ with a M$ driver or TSR!). I've never had to recompile a Kernel. Sure it's fun and all, but you don't need to recompile your Kernel everything you change some piece of hardware if you leave the driver module _outside_ the Kernel and install it at bootup time. I set up the drivers I want (with modconf) & let it rip. If I were a hardware mfgr wanting to support Linux I would definately build installable Kernel modules to distribute. Source code for these is a different question. I fail to understand the hardware manufacturer's objections to the release of hardware interface specifications. There's a major difference between describing how a piece of machinery _acts_ and revealing the gritty details of what's going on inside of it, and the more complex the machine is the wider this gap becomes. It takes six to eighteen months to reverse engineer or clone a chip, and by then the manufacturer of the original has had plenty of time to release his next version, making both his old version and your clone worthless.
I would like to thank you for reading this qand ask 1 favor....... im stuck with a 56k modem and a bad connection at that and id like to download a Linux for my computer (selfbuilt....making sure i dont break the MS Law):) but with this crap connection i cant get it DLed Can you suggest a Linux flavor for a newbee thjat wants to wean himself off of MS OSs and where can i download it (i need a place that will allow DAP Resume or have it chapped into smaller bits to DL)
RedHat (arguably our most popular distro) no doubt has a means to download everything you'll need. Alas, they obscure it so you'll buy CDs instead, that's their decision. (Anybody who knows otherwise feel free to correct me.) I've taken to using Debian largely because of apt-get, their nicely automated download and update utility. Other distros no doubt have this stuff by now. SuSE has a thing called YAST & YOU for installing and updating respectively.
My experience is with Deb. Anybody else is free to chirp up with details from other distros.
I'm working under the assumption that you're in the US and looking to install on a new (bare) i386 machine.
You'll need a couple of boxes of floppy disks and a computer with an internet connection and a floppy drive with which to write them. Go to the Debian FTP site and download all the.bin files there (17 as of 19 Apr). Then (assuming you're downloading with a WinTel system) go here and get rawrite.exe and its instructions, rawrite.txt. If you're not downloading with a wintel machine you'll have to find some other way of getting the.bin files written directly to the floppies (no file system, formatting, or other BS: the images must be written straight to the floppies. If you have access to a Linux or UNIX system use dd. RTFM for dd to learn how it works.
With all those floppies in hand, read this, which should give you some clue as to what is going on. Use the floppy made from the rescue.bin file to boot your computer. It should ask you for the root.bin disk and one of more of the driver disks. Keep following the directions and you will soon be asked for the 11 base disks. Once these are all loaded, the system will reboot. You should now have a minimal (32MB), working Debian system. It will probaby start dselect for you. You will have to configure and start ppp before you are going to contact anybody. This (setup of ppp) is the second of several rites of passage that all Linux newbies go through (Installation is the first, and you're already through the hardest part of that). It _will_ be painful, but the first time you get it up and ping yer ISP and then the Deb ftp server, the rewarding feeling you will get will be worth it. If it is not, maybe you should get Mandrake or some other super user-friendly distro, Debian may not be for you. Once you have ppp operational you should set dselect's access method to use apt-get from ftp.us.debian.org, which IIRC is the default if you just go through the source setup and let it do its thing. Choose one of the standard installations (do NOT, at this point, get involved in manually picking and choosing from the over 3500 packages available, it'll take you days, and you'll drive yourself crazy), the smaller the better, and let the thing rip. My experience is that it will take about 36 hours to download a smallish installation, but that was on a connection that actually linked at 52Kb. If you're on a slower line (like my present one, which seems unable to do any better than about 26Kb), it will take proportionally longer. If you have problems, reconnect and restart, the download will pick up where it left off. If your phone line is _truly_ bad, to the point where it won't stay connected for any significant length of time, you'll have to find some other way. I recommend contacting your local LUG (Linux Users' Group) for help. They'll very probably have CDs which you can borrow.
When (NOT if) you get stuck, you may mail me describing your status, and I'll try to help. Please get as far as getting the seventeen floppies written and ready to boot your system with them first, though, if you can't get that far you'll need professional help.
In return for this (ongoing) help and consultation I've a favor to ask of you: LEARN TO FSCKING _SPELL_!!! LEARN TO CAPITALIZE THE NOMINATIVE SINGULAR PRONOUN "I"!!! LEARN THE PROPER USE OF THE APOSTROPHE AND THE DIFFERENCE BETWEEN "THEIR", "THEY'RE", AND "THERE", AND LEARN TO _PROPERLY_ SPELL THIS SENTENCE: "THEYRE GOING OVER THEYRE TO THEYRE CAR"!!! No, "theyre" is NOT in either the American OR British English dictionaries, because IT'S A MISSPELLING!! I don't care if you _are_ a product of American public schools' "outcome based education", and have been taught "invented spelling" since you were six, in the real world, poor spelling and grammar skills make you look like an idiot no matter how profound your ideas may be. I read through your entire post because you had something interesting to say, but your lowercase "i"s, poor spelling, and total lack of apostrophes nearly caused me to give up. I'm sure that many others did give up, or skipped your post entirely after only a few lines.
stuffed =~ "fscked" nobheads !~ a term anyone would use in America pilsiing !~ anything American canoe == well, take a guess carshead =~ a place one might park a car in US? diddly order =~ maybe an organization of wankers? wankers|tossers =~ nothing particularly bad in US smeghead =~ understandable but unused in US "crapped nosex breasts" =~ nonsense over here arsehole =~ asshole in US, just another spelling variation
And all we have over here are "jerkoffs" and "dickheads".
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The other day there was much controversy over RMS' insistence that "Linux" be properly referred to as GNU/Linux. A few of the remarks suggested that RMS was free to release his own kernel, which he would be free to call whatever he pleases. I was aware of the Hurd Kernel, but NOT aware that it had reached 1.x status. According to this announcement they(the Hurd development team)'re through with 1.x, and working on 2.0!
This is great, IMHO. While Hurd probabaly cannot (now) challenge the Linux Kernel, it is at least a viable project for those who are too pure to desire the compromises (non-free driver code, non-free development tools) that Linus has accepted. For those who can no longer consider Linux totally FREE, the Hurd was, is, and shall always remain FREE software, even if that does mean compromising its functionality for things like, say, LoseModems (which require proprietary DSP code).
At the very least, it adds GNU/Hurd to the list of "OSS" operating systems, and provides another reason to call "Linux" GNU/Linux: to both relate it to and distinguish it from GNU/Hurd.
See above.
without which "Linux" would not exist, and BSD would be crippled.
What about my freedom to call something anything I like...?
I suppose you'd be free ("Freedom of Speech" and all) to call an Apple by the name "Orange", but that won't help others understand what you're talking about. Recall the confusion which resulted when the previous "presidential administration" unilaterally redefined the term "sex" to exclude fellatio.
The man's point is that the FSF's OS is much more properly named "GNU" or "GNU/Linux", that "Linux" really properly refers only to the Kernel, and that the FSF deserves at least as much recognition in the deal as does Mr. Torvalds. "Everybody" may know this, but newbies and the laiety (especially the PRESS) tend to gloss over this important matter.
...you might acquire additional skills...
Like grammar:
"...they automatically assume that I wan't to be a programmer or an engineer."
That's OK.
I'm thinking in terms of the backpack full of 2" books that I used to carry around in engineering school. This gyzmo would be the size of the looseleaf binder I also carried around, thinner than 1 book, weigh about as much as 2 books, and hold more data than a _busfull_ of backpacks!
I like that. I think it's a good direction to go, especially as it should be far cheaper to publish textbooks electronically than as the short-run dead-tree publications they are now.
Uh, there's a LOT more to it than that!
A couple of comments above, somebody cited the poop on the different Plutonium isotopes. I hadn't the slightest fscking idea that there are over thirty! Half-lives cover the spectrum, from 0.6 nS to eighty million years. Of these, only the ones with spontaneous fission decay modes: 236(2.9Y), 238(88Y), 239(24e3Y), 240(6500Y), 241(14Y), 242(3.7e5Y), and 244(8e7Y) would be of interest to nuclear engineers. My understanding has always been that the main useful isotope was 239. All give off charged particles (alphas, electrons) but it's the neutrons from the spontaneous fission that can feed nuclear chain reactions, even though these are a miniscule fraction of the total radiation.
Plutonium _oxide_ (the active compound in reactor fuel rods) isn't too hard to handle, but the pure (metallic) Plutonium is more dangerous. The chief hazard is that it's easily burned, making smoke which spreads well through the atmosphere and returns to earth as dust. This dust is deadly. Breathing it loads your lungs with plutonium, the long-term radiation from which damages the tissues of your body. Damage to cellular DNA causes cancer. A (nuclear) munitions plant in Colorado had a fire in 1957, the (Plutonium) smoke from which was not fully contained. The neighboring town remains a cancer colony, though other contaminants, in addition to Plutonium, can be pointed at. The most dramatic story was of a little girl who was perfectly healthy until she fell down in the playground and scraped her knee. She must have picked up a plutonium dust particle or two, because six months later she lost the knee to cancer and by the end of a year she was dead.
The big story was of the filming of "The Conqueror" in 1954, about a hundred miles, and upwind, even, from a bomb test site in NV. As of 1980 John Wayne, Susan Hayward, director Cecil B DeMille, and half the crew who filmed it (kicking up plenty of dust in the process, no doubt, and breathing it as well) were dead - mostly of lung cancer, though no causal relation was proven in court.
Really, that doesn't sound too much like anything "harmless". But in comparison, there are other isotopes so intensely radioactive that only brief exposure to them amounts to a death sentence. There are elements which are much more aggressively absorbed by biochemistry, making their radioactive isotopes far more dangerous.
I don't want any of these things in my environment. Bury 'em, DEEP, so deep that nobody will ever get at them accidently!
But what about Mother Nature? It's pretty well known that the Earth's crust isn't a static thing. It moves, fluids (water, oil, etc) wash around inside it, and over the geologic span of time that this stuff (some of it, at least) lasts, who knows what will happen in Nevada's basement?
Build a large marker out of a common and valueless material, say granite, in sections too large to be practical to move. Build it in the shape of a periodic table of the elements. Ever seen the curved one, in which the rows go around and meet at what are usually the edges? It looks like an expanding spiral, and is quite distinctive.
Prominently indicate the elements which are contained in the dump. Go ahead and put the atomic numbers in the element squares and prominently indicate the atomic weights of the radioactive isotopes. It would be useful to include drawings of the atoms illustrating the proton & neutron counts, but these would of course be useless by the time we get up to the elements which are radioactive. The first few drawings would be understandable, and would serve as a useful clue as to what the thing was about. Radioactive isotope nuclei might be drawn with neutrons or alpha particles flying away from them. Any civilization capable of understanding nuclear power or even molecular chemistry would understand such a symbol, though it might take them a couple of hours to get the numbers. Space aliens from another planet oughta be able to understand the distinct arrangement of the elements of the periodic table. It's not a cultural symbol, like a skull & crossbones, and it's NOT subject to misinterpretation. You either get it, or you don't.
Yeah, it'd be a puzzle, but it wouldn't be that obscure, and it would take a hell of a lot less brains and effort to figure out its meaning than it would to dig down a couple of miles to find out firsthand what's down there.
For the sake of the clueless you could keep the information kiosk and the multilingual messages. Sanskrit and Egyptian heiroglyphics are still understood. Engrish & Times Roman probably will be also, even in 10,000 years. The nuclear hazard trefoil symbol is likely to be around for quite a while, too.
Then you just have to bury the waste deep enough down a hole blocked up well enough so that any ignorant primitives who may descend from us won't be able to get at it. 4 Km sounds like plenty, backfilled with concrete oughta thwart anybody without the sophistication necessary to understand a periodic table, or construct carbide-steel drills. How many wells or mines were dug that deep before the industrial
revolution?
If a nuclear war happens, it's a pretty safe bet that the survivors (if any) will understand radioactive isotopes, and for a very long time.
I think it's as likely we'll find some _use_ for that crap, and will want to dig it up ourselves!
The M$ rep was sweating bullets
IMU he'll have a large "L" (Linux Luser) branded on his forehead the minute he reports to his masters, and probably be ridden out of Redmond on a rail....
I have a hard time with that, mostly because the original 8086/88 addressed 1 Meg of memory and not just 640K. The 640K limitation came from DoS and M$, hence Gates is credited with the remark.
Admittedly the 8086/88 could only address 64K/segment, and you only got 4 segment registers, limiting you to 256K before you had to start reloading segment registers. Intel's attitude at the time could possibly have been along the lines of "a 64K data element is as big as anybody'll ever need", but at the time 64K was an _entire_ CP/M system, program, data, BIOS, BDOS, everything. Nowhere in the 8086 architecture is there a 640K limitation.
Don't try to blame IBM, either. Their first PC could only handle 256K RAM. The XT upped this to the 640K which was all DoS ever used until EMS & XMS came around.
Add "Methuselah's Children" to the above list.
All his old short stories (and a couple of novellas in installments) (the stuff on the "Future History" chart) were originally published in pulp-fiction SF magazines like "Amazing Stories" and "Astounding Science Fiction" or some such. These are worth a mint now, if anybody's dad still has a box of them left in his attic.
Later, paperback publishers (Del Rey?) went through the stuff, and picked and chose to make anthologies, usually naming these after one of the short stories contained therin to maximize reader confusion and therby hope to sell him the same short story multiple times.
IIRC, "Let There Be Light" was included in (at _least_) anthologies named "The Past Through Tomorrow", "The man Who Sold The Moon", and "The Green Hills Of Earth", each of which contained a (sometimes not-so-)short story bearing the same name as found on the anthology cover. I've other anthologies named "Revolt in 2100" and "The Menace From Earth", both of which are also short stories.
And it's ABOUT TIME somebody around here came up with this cold-light technology, which time-line three has had since the sixties.
It holds 20G. Try _that_ with a looseleaf binder?
So really it needs:
/dev/kb when the keyboard isn't present
A keyboard plug.
Handwriting recognition to
a rather special xf86config file, but nothing the multihead guys shouldn't be able to come up with.
Mfgr (mfkr?) claims it's made of off-the-shelf parts, implying that it couldn't be _too_ different electronically from a dual-head / LCD monitor rig. Porting WinBloze to it woulda co$t them a _lot_ if they'd done anythng really strange....
Lessee... An 8.5 x 11" ("letter") sheet of paper works out to 13.9" diagonally. 15" diagonal is going to be right about the size of the looseleaf binder that that fits in. I'm usually carrying one of those around already, and the idea of getting 20G and two screens in that space is very interesting.
_Electronically_, I'd expect it to be a dual-head laptop with tilted orientation. I'd _want_ a keyboard plug, once in a while, but handwriting recognition a la Palm would do much to eliminate the need.
Remember when Stallman made quotes along the lines of "anything that doesn't come with its own compiler isn't a real operating system".
and this is loony how?
Of course you'll _need_ a compiler with your Operating System. One of my cheif beefs with the Empire is that they want another $500 or so for theirs (unless you buy it at the college bookstore). Note that RMS, Linux, GNU & Hurd will hardly get prissy with you if you want to replace gcc with something _else_, but you'll _need_ a compiler for most installations, except of course those where the compiler is on another machine and things are built remotely.
Of course you'll need a browser, too (for a desktop workstation, not, say, an nfs server). The point here is that with
GNU/Linux, *BSD or such you can choose from a rich selection of browsers (or none when apporpriate), varying considerably in functionality, speed, memory footprint, licensing, cost,... while the monopolist quite aggressively forces Exploiter on you.
It's very easy to argue that a compiler is a far more fundamental and important part of an OS than an Internet browser. Real Operating Systems come with both. Real Operating Systems let you choose whether or not you want to install either, or both, or substitute something else of your own preference. Toy OSsen (and right now the Redmond "OS"'s cheif distinction is that it runs a lot of video games) "protect" the luser from the "confusion" of having to make these decisions of what to install or not.
I actually am pretty convinced that OEM's *pay* to put those ugly stickers on their machines.
Bzzzzzzzt!! Wrong.
Intel & M$ pay the OEMs, in the form of "advertizing allowances", to put those stickers on their machinery, as they pay the OEMs to play their jingle at the end of the TV commercials. The stickers are almost unquestionably part of the deal. In order to qualify for an "advertizing partnership" with the monopolist, and get $15 off each and every WinBloze license you buy/ship, you _must_:
1) Bundle WinBloze on each and every machine you ship, no matter how badly your customer whines for a naked PC or a Linux install. Selling just _one_ Linux PC blows your $15 rebate on _all_ 2 million other systems you'll ship this year, "co$ting" you $30e6, so it's out of the question.
2) Put the little "Designed for WinBloze" sticker on each and every machine also. I really wonder who they think they're trying to fool with that, because it certainly does not discourage a single Linux hack from trying to install Linux on a machine that's clearly intended to run WinBloze. We just peel off the offending sticker, and Linux doesn't care one way or the other.
3) Throw up a M$ logo at the end of each and every commercial you put on TV. That nets you a $10,000 partnership in the commercial. Mo' money!
4) Bend over and (publicly) kiss BillG's ass whenever he asks. That doesn't cost money, just pride...
5) Other things which don't co$t you anything, but which further the propaganda goals of the Empire, like putting a link on each and every page of your OEM e-commerce website that says "${OEM} computers come pre-loaded with only _genuine_ Micro$uck WinBloze" and points to the piracy webpage of the monopolist.
OEMs would continue to support their installed users, just as they do now. OEMs would have no Empire to which to pay per-CPU licensing for the WinBloze images which they already have and are already shipping. I'm confident that they'd shed a single tear for the simplicity that was a monopoly OS market, then move on. The OEM channel wouldn't even hiccup, but probably _would_ shift to bundling competing non-orphaned OSen and portable apps as quickly as it could. Systems with Linux & OpenOffice or such pre-loaded on them by the OEM would be available day after tomorrow. Also available (from some OEM or other - I'm NOT claiming they'd all support multiple platforms or choose the same single one) would be:
BeOS - Which would see a sudden recovery
OS/2 - Would rise from its uneasy grave and probably dominate the consumer "OS" market in two years
Some really compatible WinAPI OS that's not even heard of now
XP lusers, indeed anyone with MPA, would throw out some CDs, but everything that works now (for an unspecified value of "works") would still work if a judge (or a nuke) took out the monopolist.
A MAJOR scramble would ensue to fill the vacuum left by the monopolist, and that might not be too pretty, but it _would_ be market driven, at least. First in the requirements to fill the gap would be ability to run the existing Imperial code, but that would fade as soon as the major apps got ported to POSIX. Hardware manufacturers would scramble to learn to write Kernel modules. Intel would lose its monopoly market.
Micro$oft dead would be a great thing for the rest of the software industry. A lot of MCS"E"s would have retraining to do.
Also, the computer doesn't want any beer, no matter how much you think it does. NEVER, EVER feed your computer beer, it doesn't
need it and is prob[ab]ly too young for it anyways.
My old 5160 (PC/XT) is about there. Of course I've gutted the cabinet, and replaced all its insides with newer stuff. Does that count?
That's the $65,536 question.
My kid brother bought an OEM XP license from Fry's for $100. (I sent him to confession. It was Holy Week, and he buys XP!) Installable, not an upgrade. They required him to buy "some hardware" in order to qualify it as computer sale, with which they can sell an OEM license. He bought a kit of cabinet fasteners, you know the ones with disk drive screws and those plastic standoffs that you need to mount a mobo. Let's see the Empire figure out which of those screws did or did not get built into his computer.....
I've seen that 30V figure mentioned twice now. Where did that come from? All the modern (TTL voltage) CMOS parts I've ever seen had a maximum bias voltage of 5.8 or 6V (OK, with the exception of Vpp on PROMS). No individual pin is spec'ed to tolerate voltage above the Vcc(+5)(+3 or less on RAMs and CPUs nowdays!) supply nor below ground. I once encountered a power supply that had the unusual "feature" (more likely a regulatory failure) of ramping its +5 output to about 8V on startup, for only maybe 15 or 20 mS before it fell back where it belonged, but this burned up two motherboard/disk sets before I figured out WTF was going on. _Very_ few things in a computer cabinet can withstand a 30V bias. Maybe a 30V ESD pulse? This is nothing, simply moving around in fairly dry air will result in >300V static potential, and you'll never feel it, either.
That said, I'll agree that the ESD hazard is overstated.
A few simple rules keep me out of trouble:
Keep a rather nervous frame of mind, which will make your hands sweat, or turn up the AC a bit. No, not so hot that you drip or anything. Sweat is an ionic solution (salt) and a natural antistatic coating for the human body.
Sit down. Sit at the table, keep your feet still, put your elbows on the table. Standing beside a bench shuffling your feet on the floor is a pretty good way to generate a static charge. Sticking your then-charged hand into a box, without first touching the box and discharging the static, is asking for it.
Hold the cabinet in one hand and the component you're dealing with in the other. If your task requires both hands, lean an elbow or forearm on the edge of the cabinet. Try to keep contact with a metal surface (one painted with EMI/RFI suppression paint will do) of the cabinet as much as possible. This eliminates static charge, much as a bracelet with a wire would, without cuffing you to the cabinet. "Grounding" the bench and/or cabinet is irrelevant. Equalizing the static electronic potential between your body and the gear you're working on is vital.
To pass (unbagged) equipment from one person to another, touch the person's hand first, to discharge any potential difference, then you can touch the gear they're holding. Be sure to explain this as a static precaution so they won't think you're gay.
Keep the gear bagged as much as possible. Keep disk drives in their shock packaging, this is usually antistatic as well. The spectacle of stacks of naked motherboards sitting on shelves at the local used hardware dealer makes me queasy. I don't buy that guy's motherboards.
I leave the power supply plugged into a grounded outlet while working on the machine.
IMU a modern ATX PS doesn't ever really fully power down the motherboard. Touching (with your hands) the 3/5/12 volts you'll find there isn't a hazard, but working with metal tools isn't such a good idea. You're of course safe with a (now old-fashioned) AT power supply that _fully_ shuts off.
"_Nothing_ works after you let out the Magic Smoke(tm)."
oOps - forgot about the boycott.
I'll answer you next week.
anyway?
That's a fundamental problem with monolithic kernels. Linux will continue to be rejected by the unwashed masses when adding new hardware means compiling a new kernel.
I have tons of drivers, configured as installable modules. These all seem to work well enough, and are loadable/unloadable on the fly (try _that_ with a M$ driver or TSR!). I've never had to recompile a Kernel. Sure it's fun and all, but you don't need to recompile your Kernel everything you change some piece of hardware if you leave the driver module _outside_ the Kernel and install it at bootup time. I set up the drivers I want (with modconf) & let it rip. If I were a hardware mfgr wanting to support Linux I would definately build installable Kernel modules to distribute. Source code for these is a different question. I fail to understand the hardware manufacturer's objections to the release of hardware interface specifications. There's a major difference between describing how a piece of machinery _acts_ and revealing the gritty details of what's going on inside of it, and the more complex the machine is the wider this gap becomes. It takes six to eighteen months to reverse engineer or clone a chip, and by then the manufacturer of the original has had plenty of time to release his next version, making both his old version and your clone worthless.
I would like to thank you for reading this qand ask 1 favor....... im stuck with a 56k modem and a bad connection at that and id like to download a Linux for my computer (selfbuilt ....making sure i dont break the MS Law) :) but with this crap connection i cant get it DLed Can you suggest a Linux flavor for a newbee thjat wants to wean himself off of MS OSs and where can i download it (i need a place that will allow DAP Resume or have it chapped into smaller bits to DL)
.bin files there (17 as of 19 Apr). Then (assuming you're downloading with a WinTel system) go here and get rawrite.exe and its instructions, rawrite.txt. If you're not downloading with a wintel machine you'll have to find some other way of getting the .bin files written directly to the floppies (no file system, formatting, or other BS: the images must be written straight to the floppies. If you have access to a Linux or UNIX system use dd. RTFM for dd to learn how it works.
RedHat (arguably our most popular distro) no doubt has a means to download everything you'll need. Alas, they obscure it so you'll buy CDs instead, that's their decision. (Anybody who knows otherwise feel free to correct me.) I've taken to using Debian largely because of apt-get, their nicely automated download and update utility. Other distros no doubt have this stuff by now. SuSE has a thing called YAST & YOU for installing and updating respectively.
My experience is with Deb. Anybody else is free to chirp up with details from other distros.
I'm working under the assumption that you're in the US and looking to install on a new (bare) i386 machine.
You'll need a couple of boxes of floppy disks and a computer with an internet connection and a floppy drive with which to write them. Go to the Debian FTP site and download all the
With all those floppies in hand, read this, which should give you some clue as to what is going on. Use the floppy made from the rescue.bin file to boot your computer. It should ask you for the root.bin disk and one of more of the driver disks. Keep following the directions and you will soon be asked for the 11 base disks. Once these are all loaded, the system will reboot. You should now have a minimal (32MB), working Debian system. It will probaby start dselect for you. You will have to configure and start ppp before you are going to contact anybody. This (setup of ppp) is the second of several rites of passage that all Linux newbies go through (Installation is the first, and you're already through the hardest part of that). It _will_ be painful, but the first time you get it up and ping yer ISP and then the Deb ftp server, the rewarding feeling you will get will be worth it. If it is not, maybe you should get Mandrake or some other super user-friendly distro, Debian may not be for you. Once you have ppp operational you should set dselect's access method to use apt-get from ftp.us.debian.org, which IIRC is the default if you just go through the source setup and let it do its thing. Choose one of the standard installations (do NOT, at this point, get involved in manually picking and choosing from the over 3500 packages available, it'll take you days, and you'll drive yourself crazy), the smaller the better, and let the thing rip. My experience is that it will take about 36 hours to download a smallish installation, but that was on a connection that actually linked at 52Kb. If you're on a slower line (like my present one, which seems unable to do any better than about 26Kb), it will take proportionally longer. If you have problems, reconnect and restart, the download will pick up where it left off. If your phone line is _truly_ bad, to the point where it won't stay connected for any significant length of time, you'll have to find some other way. I recommend contacting your local LUG (Linux Users' Group) for help. They'll very probably have CDs which you can borrow.
When (NOT if) you get stuck, you may mail me describing your status, and I'll try to help. Please get as far as getting the seventeen floppies written and ready to boot your system with them first, though, if you can't get that far you'll need professional help.
In return for this (ongoing) help and consultation I've a favor to ask of you: LEARN TO FSCKING _SPELL_!!! LEARN TO CAPITALIZE THE NOMINATIVE SINGULAR PRONOUN "I"!!! LEARN THE PROPER USE OF THE APOSTROPHE AND THE DIFFERENCE BETWEEN "THEIR", "THEY'RE", AND "THERE", AND LEARN TO _PROPERLY_ SPELL THIS SENTENCE: "THEYRE GOING OVER THEYRE TO THEYRE CAR"!!! No, "theyre" is NOT in either the American OR British English dictionaries, because IT'S A MISSPELLING!! I don't care if you _are_ a product of American public schools' "outcome based education", and have been taught "invented spelling" since you were six, in the real world, poor spelling and grammar skills make you look like an idiot no matter how profound your ideas may be. I read through your entire post because you had something interesting to say, but your lowercase "i"s, poor spelling, and total lack of apostrophes nearly caused me to give up. I'm sure that many others did give up, or skipped your post entirely after only a few lines.
They have so many more curse words than we yanks:
stuffed =~ "fscked"
nobheads !~ a term anyone would use in America
pilsiing !~ anything American
canoe == well, take a guess
carshead =~ a place one might park a car in US?
diddly order =~ maybe an organization of wankers?
wankers|tossers =~ nothing particularly bad in US
smeghead =~ understandable but unused in US
"crapped nosex breasts" =~ nonsense over here
arsehole =~ asshole in US, just another spelling variation
And all we have over here are "jerkoffs" and "dickheads".
Mod that one up about +3(funny)