Ever hear of the Lynx browser? Works great, and Java-free too!
actually, i used lynx quite a bit on my first internet account, a solaris shell that didn't even support ppp connections. (i later compiled slirp to get around that limitation, and learned quite a bit in the process)
i don't object to graphics at all... they can be very useful, and sometimes (as with sites like heavy.com) can significantly enhance the experience. but i don't like the trend of stuffing as much flash and such onto a page as possible, just because it can be done. text still works as the best disseminator of information in the most platform-neutral format, which is why my web page doesn't have anything on it more complicated than an occasional image and some avoidable frames.
I write to you as someone who's been on the Internet a fairly long time. I'm not the archetypal grungy Unix guy from the basement, but I remember cursing when my favorite gopher holes were replaced by web sites. I don't write my own device drivers or build my own hardware, but I try to learn from those who can.
That's the point of the Internet, you see. Learning.
I don't want your advertisements shoved in my face. I don't want banner ads or flash filled sites funded by this week's trendy diet cola. Hell, I don't even want graphics all that much. I want information.
The Internet has the potentiality to be the greatest repository of information in the history of the world. You're trying to turn it into the digital equivalent of the crinky paper fliers in my Sunday newspaper.
I don't want it. Very few people do.
I wake up in the morning and there's a Pepsi ad on the radio. Then there's one on the television when I watch the news. I figure I'll escape to the movies, there's one there as well. What the hell would I want to look at more ads for?
Speaking as a.org-owning netizen, you can take all of your "economic responsibility," fold it until it's all sharp corners, hold it in the palm of you manicured marketer's hand, and shove it straight up your ass.
You want streaming video ads and the like to every desktop in America? Build your own fucking network. That's not what this one is for.
Who ARE Apple's competitors? We always talk about "their competition" -- and there's plenty of O/S competition, hardware competition, et al, but no one offers what they do in one compete package -- so I guess there's no business competition:)
The only ones I can think of would be these guys. Even used to make their own custom hardware to go with their "digital media" operating system, if anyone else remembers that.
it was my first Unix too, on a Mac IIvx. i completely agree with you that the best way to learn Unix is by complete, terrible, helpless immersion until you learn to love it.
hear hear. i remember when i first got it to boot, i was incredibly excited. there i was, with a command line to a powerful os on my old mac iicx.
then i realized i had nothing to do with it. nothing. i didn't know how to use vi or ed, so i couldn't configure anything enough to use my network connection and get a different editor. it's amazing how fast you can figure out the syntax for "ifconfig" when you really have to.
* no computer is "useless"
...and every time i have to wipe a machine at work to send to the recycler's, i grit my teeth. this is stuff that could actually be useful to people, low end power macs and pentiums. but they're too slow to run mac os 9 or windows 98, so off to the knacker's. i've got a powermac 7100 sitting next to the g4 in my cubicle. i use it for running older software, including operating systems. works like a charm.
for all the claims about how linux runs on slower, older boxen, i have yet to see a distribution (except maybe slack) that really works well on a 486, let alone a 386 or a 68030.
woo hoo, now i can run an actual release version of netbsd without the obscure kernel race problem from a few weeks back.
you know, i was never really into the unix style operating systems until last year, and i'm really glad i started with netbsd rather than linux. there's nothing like a completely bare-bones install to make you figure out how all the parts actually fit together. when i installed linuxppc for the first time, i was amazed at how obfuscated the actual structure of the system was in comparison. i recommend net/openbsd to everyone i know who wants to "learn unix" (haven't tried free, can't comment on it) and every one has come back to thank me.
I work for a DoD contractor. We build datawarehouses. We play with BETA's.
hey, that's great! you wouldn't happen to know where i could get another copy of "nintendo power gamer secrets 3" on beta, would you? i've been trying so hard to beat dizzy's adventure...
you know, my more unixy friends have been extolling the wonders of xwindows to me for years, and i just started playing around with it recently. fun stuff.
anyhow, i'm using an old powermac 5200 as a combination tv/mp3 player/xterm for the bedroom. if you're interested, i wrote a brief document on how i set everything up. please be kind - it's a cable modem.
Domain names in the.com,.net, and.org domains can now be registered
with many different competing registrars. Go to http://www.internic.net
for detailed information.
Domain Name: ASSPORT.COM
Registrar: NETWORK SOLUTIONS, INC.
Whois Server: whois.networksolutions.com
Will they be supporting a Linux version? The article didnt mention specific platforms. Here's hoping!
I'm rather hoping for a Mac port, myself. I suppose the nice thing is that if they make it for OS X, then the people buying it would have to have a reasonably high end machine already -- would cut down on some of the "oh, I thought my video card was better than this" returns to Best Buy.
it appears that their site is still up. Why don't you check that out first...
i did, but all that's on there is the usual "we're boldly going out of business" fluff about being the ultimate internet portal and rediscovering focus and such. i was wondering what the original idea was - looks like it was some sort of hipper-than-thou gen x boutique online, but impressions can be deceiving.
yeah, yeah. so i'm ignorant. but i keep seeing all these references to "boo.com" and wondering just what in the bloody hell it was. anyone have a synopsis?
Many Linux desktops have ftp, telnet & http ports open, so do they count as severs too?
no, they count as targets for l33t haX0rs, especially since the people who just installed mandrake from that wal mart cd don't even know they're open or use them...
Big Media will homogenize opinion, marginalize you and other smaller competitors and make it impossible for anyone else to compete or grow in the emerging Net AOL/Disney/Sony information economy.
while i do admit there is a significant "mcnugget" quality to american culture now (and please - i'm qualifying this as american because i have little to no experience in other countries and don't want to be too much of an Ugly American), i don't think that's what's killing online magazines.
after all, what's killing them is a lack of funds, right? computers and bandwidth and even the clueless monkeys most of them call writers all cost cash. it's not a big illuminati plot or anything. they're just not producing something people are willing to pay for.
is it because, unlike Time magazine, paying to read Suck or Slate doesn't give you anything material? maybe. is it because people just don't like the hip gen x messenger bag style of most of these sites? maybe. is it because the market for ad banners has fallen through the floor and crushed the furnace? possibly. but i doubt it has a whole lot to do with aol/tw execs chuckling in dark rooms about their great plan to take out salon.
your corporate republic shite is usually a lot closer to the mark than this.
Um. Verizon's broadband engineering staff isn't unionized, unless it just happened.
well, i started working as verizon dsl tech support in may of 2000 and they were union then. still are, as far as i know. before that, i don't know. _tech support_ isn't union, but then again, they're not verizon employees anyhow so nobody seems to care.
oh, and to the person who replied to my last post: i probably should have put "union laziness" in quotes to alert your sarcasm meter. i apologize. though i've found a lot of verizon union employees contentious when dealing with non union contract folk like i was, i haven't found them terribly lazy as the parent post i replied to was implying. hence the title.
yeah, but fortunately, the tooth fairy showed up to do my install.
actually, at the NOC, the only tickets that can be closed without verification are the ones for verizon customers. if you've got AOL DSL going across verizon lines, guess what? they get it running, and fast.
now, that's not to say that the line installs are that efficient, but let's give a little credit where its due. and before anyone accuses, no, i don't work for whorizon. (check out vcw4ever.tripod.com). in fact, i was laid off by them and my job moved to another country. but hey, that's the new new new economy.
for my older machines -- 486s, 586s, moderate amounts of RAM -- that I have to track down pre-2000 distributions, or settle for crippled distributions such as SmallLinux (very cool, can do X-Windows in 4 megs of RAM, but also states very clearly "this is not a complete distribution"). I think our convincing arguements about how good Linux is with old machines are becoming less convincing as older distributions become more obscured or drop off the Web entirely.
running the newest official release on a 486. nary a hiccup. of course, it doesn't come with a gig and a half of useless preinstalled cruft, which really can't hurt.
Perhaps its "cool" to bash Microsoft these days but do you people actually USE some of Microsoft products?
i do. i'm posting this from the mac version of internet explorer, and i switched all my email info over to outlook express yesterday. i tried mozilla, i really did, but even the 0.8+ build didn't work right. it couldn't even find the goddamned pop server half the time!
open source is nice and all, but my mac just _works_.
the only problem i had with 1.5 was an issue with the architecture. i was running the m68k port of 1.4.3 on a mac quadra 700 with no trouble at all. unfortunately, the 1.5 build apparently has some sort of conflict between the video and scsi drivers on that particular model, so it won't even bootstrap completely. and, being a mac, there's no way to get around using the video driver, even though i run it headless. sigh.
what i ended up doing was moving my webserver to the i386 port instead, using a 486 a friend of mine donated. the built in ssh and postfix and such was definitely worth the trouble, but i thought i'd just post this as a cautionary tale for anyone else with a 700 out there.
Slashdot Mirror
Ever hear of the Lynx browser? Works great, and Java-free too!
actually, i used lynx quite a bit on my first internet account, a solaris shell that didn't even support ppp connections. (i later compiled slirp to get around that limitation, and learned quite a bit in the process)
i don't object to graphics at all... they can be very useful, and sometimes (as with sites like heavy.com) can significantly enhance the experience. but i don't like the trend of stuffing as much flash and such onto a page as possible, just because it can be done. text still works as the best disseminator of information in the most platform-neutral format, which is why my web page doesn't have anything on it more complicated than an occasional image and some avoidable frames.
--saint----
Attention corporate whores:
I write to you as someone who's been on the Internet a fairly long time. I'm not the archetypal grungy Unix guy from the basement, but I remember cursing when my favorite gopher holes were replaced by web sites. I don't write my own device drivers or build my own hardware, but I try to learn from those who can.
That's the point of the Internet, you see. Learning.
I don't want your advertisements shoved in my face. I don't want banner ads or flash filled sites funded by this week's trendy diet cola. Hell, I don't even want graphics all that much. I want information.
The Internet has the potentiality to be the greatest repository of information in the history of the world. You're trying to turn it into the digital equivalent of the crinky paper fliers in my Sunday newspaper.
I don't want it. Very few people do.
I wake up in the morning and there's a Pepsi ad on the radio. Then there's one on the television when I watch the news. I figure I'll escape to the movies, there's one there as well. What the hell would I want to look at more ads for?
Speaking as a .org-owning netizen, you can take all of your "economic responsibility," fold it until it's all sharp corners, hold it in the palm of you manicured marketer's hand, and shove it straight up your ass.
You want streaming video ads and the like to every desktop in America? Build your own fucking network. That's not what this one is for.
--saint----
Who ARE Apple's competitors? We always talk about "their competition" -- and there's plenty of O/S competition, hardware competition, et al, but no one offers what they do in one compete package -- so I guess there's no business competition :)
The only ones I can think of would be these guys. Even used to make their own custom hardware to go with their "digital media" operating system, if anyone else remembers that.
--saint----
There isn't a single useful thing that we in the CS community can come up with that some cocksucking marketer can't abuse.
i need that on a t shirt. maybe for the next meeting i have with the pr team.
--saint----
it was my first Unix too, on a Mac IIvx. i completely agree with you that the best way to learn Unix is by complete, terrible, helpless immersion until you learn to love it.
hear hear. i remember when i first got it to boot, i was incredibly excited. there i was, with a command line to a powerful os on my old mac iicx.
then i realized i had nothing to do with it. nothing. i didn't know how to use vi or ed, so i couldn't configure anything enough to use my network connection and get a different editor. it's amazing how fast you can figure out the syntax for "ifconfig" when you really have to.
* no computer is "useless"
for all the claims about how linux runs on slower, older boxen, i have yet to see a distribution (except maybe slack) that really works well on a 486, let alone a 386 or a 68030.
--saint----
woo hoo, now i can run an actual release version of netbsd without the obscure kernel race problem from a few weeks back.
you know, i was never really into the unix style operating systems until last year, and i'm really glad i started with netbsd rather than linux. there's nothing like a completely bare-bones install to make you figure out how all the parts actually fit together. when i installed linuxppc for the first time, i was amazed at how obfuscated the actual structure of the system was in comparison. i recommend net/openbsd to everyone i know who wants to "learn unix" (haven't tried free, can't comment on it) and every one has come back to thank me.
--saint----
I work for a DoD contractor. We build datawarehouses. We play with BETA's.
hey, that's great! you wouldn't happen to know where i could get another copy of "nintendo power gamer secrets 3" on beta, would you? i've been trying so hard to beat dizzy's adventure...
--saint----
you know, my more unixy friends have been extolling the wonders of xwindows to me for years, and i just started playing around with it recently. fun stuff.
anyhow, i'm using an old powermac 5200 as a combination tv/mp3 player/xterm for the bedroom. if you're interested, i wrote a brief document on how i set everything up. please be kind - it's a cable modem.
--saint----
lupus@blue#whois assport.com
.com, .net, and .org domains can now be registered
with many different competing registrars. Go to http://www.internic.net
for detailed information.
Whois Server Version 1.3
Domain names in the
Domain Name: ASSPORT.COM
Registrar: NETWORK SOLUTIONS, INC.
Whois Server: whois.networksolutions.com
why do i find this so funny?
--saint----
Will they be supporting a Linux version? The article didnt mention specific platforms. Here's hoping!
I'm rather hoping for a Mac port, myself. I suppose the nice thing is that if they make it for OS X, then the people buying it would have to have a reasonably high end machine already -- would cut down on some of the "oh, I thought my video card was better than this" returns to Best Buy.
--saint----
holly wars between ourselves is everything we don't need.
Flame them all with balls of holly,
fa la la la la, la la la la.
Prove the Windows users' folly,
fa la la la la, la la la la.
If you use GNOME or KDE,
--saintfa la la la la, la la la la,
You are sure more e-lite than me,
fa la la la la, la la la la.
----
it appears that their site is still up. Why don't you check that out first...
i did, but all that's on there is the usual "we're boldly going out of business" fluff about being the ultimate internet portal and rediscovering focus and such. i was wondering what the original idea was - looks like it was some sort of hipper-than-thou gen x boutique online, but impressions can be deceiving.
--saint----
yeah, yeah. so i'm ignorant. but i keep seeing all these references to "boo.com" and wondering just what in the bloody hell it was. anyone have a synopsis?
--saint----
NewDeal has minimal system requirements to operate. Those requirements are:
* 286 CPU or faster (386 recommended)
and it supports cga too. wow. good to see someone out there selling commercial software that'll still run on something as old as my server.
--saint----
First of all, in Linux, you 0wn the system if you want to.
and when you're done with that, you can 0wn every linux box on your cable modem node. thanks, red hat!
--saint----
They laughed at my CLI-less Mac and then at my GUI-less BSD box. KDE shut them up.
so did an amiga. :)
--saint----
my first question with new hardware purchases is always, "does it work with linux?"
i'm in a bit of a tougher situation... though the drones at the local compusa have gotten used to me asking if stuff works with netbsd or not.
"well, shit, it works with SCO. _nothing_ ought to do that. i'm sure it's fine."
--saint----
Many Linux desktops have ftp, telnet & http ports open, so do they count as severs too?
no, they count as targets for l33t haX0rs, especially since the people who just installed mandrake from that wal mart cd don't even know they're open or use them...
--saint----
Big Media will homogenize opinion, marginalize you and other smaller competitors and make it impossible for anyone else to compete or grow in the emerging Net AOL/Disney/Sony information economy.
while i do admit there is a significant "mcnugget" quality to american culture now (and please - i'm qualifying this as american because i have little to no experience in other countries and don't want to be too much of an Ugly American), i don't think that's what's killing online magazines.
after all, what's killing them is a lack of funds, right? computers and bandwidth and even the clueless monkeys most of them call writers all cost cash. it's not a big illuminati plot or anything. they're just not producing something people are willing to pay for.
is it because, unlike Time magazine, paying to read Suck or Slate doesn't give you anything material? maybe. is it because people just don't like the hip gen x messenger bag style of most of these sites? maybe. is it because the market for ad banners has fallen through the floor and crushed the furnace? possibly. but i doubt it has a whole lot to do with aol/tw execs chuckling in dark rooms about their great plan to take out salon.
your corporate republic shite is usually a lot closer to the mark than this.
--saint----
Um. Verizon's broadband engineering staff isn't unionized, unless it just happened.
well, i started working as verizon dsl tech support in may of 2000 and they were union then. still are, as far as i know. before that, i don't know. _tech support_ isn't union, but then again, they're not verizon employees anyhow so nobody seems to care.
oh, and to the person who replied to my last post: i probably should have put "union laziness" in quotes to alert your sarcasm meter. i apologize. though i've found a lot of verizon union employees contentious when dealing with non union contract folk like i was, i haven't found them terribly lazy as the parent post i replied to was implying. hence the title.
--saint----
This really happens, every day.
yeah, but fortunately, the tooth fairy showed up to do my install.
actually, at the NOC, the only tickets that can be closed without verification are the ones for verizon customers. if you've got AOL DSL going across verizon lines, guess what? they get it running, and fast.
now, that's not to say that the line installs are that efficient, but let's give a little credit where its due. and before anyone accuses, no, i don't work for whorizon. (check out vcw4ever.tripod.com). in fact, i was laid off by them and my job moved to another country. but hey, that's the new new new economy.
--saint----
I have to admit that I find this pretty funny.
yeah, it's sure nice to know that the only alternative i had to the godawful ILEC i used to work for is just as crooked and incompetent.
--saint----
for my older machines -- 486s, 586s, moderate amounts of RAM -- that I have to track down pre-2000 distributions, or settle for crippled distributions such as SmallLinux (very cool, can do X-Windows in 4 megs of RAM, but also states very clearly "this is not a complete distribution"). I think our convincing arguements about how good Linux is with old machines are becoming less convincing as older distributions become more obscured or drop off the Web entirely.
*cough*
running the newest official release on a 486. nary a hiccup. of course, it doesn't come with a gig and a half of useless preinstalled cruft, which really can't hurt.
--saint----
Perhaps its "cool" to bash Microsoft these days but do you people actually USE some of Microsoft products?
i do. i'm posting this from the mac version of internet explorer, and i switched all my email info over to outlook express yesterday. i tried mozilla, i really did, but even the 0.8+ build didn't work right. it couldn't even find the goddamned pop server half the time!
open source is nice and all, but my mac just _works_.
--saint----
the only problem i had with 1.5 was an issue with the architecture. i was running the m68k port of 1.4.3 on a mac quadra 700 with no trouble at all. unfortunately, the 1.5 build apparently has some sort of conflict between the video and scsi drivers on that particular model, so it won't even bootstrap completely. and, being a mac, there's no way to get around using the video driver, even though i run it headless. sigh.
what i ended up doing was moving my webserver to the i386 port instead, using a 486 a friend of mine donated. the built in ssh and postfix and such was definitely worth the trouble, but i thought i'd just post this as a cautionary tale for anyone else with a 700 out there.
--saint----