That's Slashdot's "reparenting high scored responses" feature at work. I'm guessing your threshold is 1, and you're seeing replys to an AC's post which has been hidden by your threshold.
On a related note, if your cable provider carries BBC News 24, give it a go. BBC journalism is first rate. Being a UK citizen, I'm kinda biased:-) Even so, give News 24 a look if you can. You won't be disappointed.
For what it's worth, I met "CGI" as a abbreviation for "Computer Graphic Images" (or something like that) years before I met it as an abbreviation for "C(omputer?) Gateway Interface". I think the first time I saw the term "CGI" was referring to the visual effects in Babylon 5.
I saw that movie years ago. It was great. I don't think it's been on TV since, and hardly anyone I know seems to have heard of it. Thanks for reassuring me that I wasn't imagining the whole thing:-)
I think it's fine if Linux comes to the masses, but I just hope they don't pervert it too much so that power users can still do some cool stuff.
Without wanting to make this into a "me too!" thread, I agree 100%. By all means make the OS able to use little words and pretty pictures so that "average" computer users feel at home, but make it "grow" with experience. This is one of the reasons I like AmigaOS in its later incarnations. You can do virtually everything from the GUI, and most native Amiga apps (i.e. not Unix ports) are graphical. However, power users can drop down into a shell and do things that way. The GUI and shell complement each other perfectly. That's the way it should be.
(since being an Amigan seems to be the best way to get yourself ignored/flamed/ridiculed on Slashdot at the moment, feel free to ignore everything I say:-)
How about working with the Languages faculty and offering a joint degree in Science Fiction with Klingon? Or joint honours with the Physics department - Science Fiction and Warp Field Theory?
I wonder how long it'll be before nerd and geek become synonymous with say "gun toting lunatic"...
Argh!
Okay Slashdotters, we need a new word which means (hacker|geek|nerd) and which the media haven't hijacked yet. I propose "snlork". Knowing my luck, it's probably a curse word in some language:-S
I really hate buzz-phrases like this. I got this mental image of a bunch of Canadians hanging upside down bat-style from their lampshades so they could watch TV differently.
Re:What about underweight hackers?!
on
Hacker's Diet
·
· Score: 2
I'm 5'6" and weigh about 100lb. I'm very lightly built. I think my bones have negative mass.
I'm healthy, hardly ever get ill, and when I went for a medical a few months ago the nurse said it wasn't a problem. I don't think I'm underweight. I think I'm supposed to weigh this little.
Actually, the original Amiga 1000 OS was not built into firmware, it was on the first disk (called "kickstart").
Ah yes, forgot about that. I was a Johnny-come-lately whose first Amiga was an A500:-)
All models after the 1000 had "kickstart" in ROM, though it was possible to modify the function jump table and replace a ROM routine with a patch in RAM.
Or even replace the entire ROM. I still have my A500. One of the last things I did with it was dump the ROM to a file so I can softkick it into my A1200 for those rare occasions when I want to play a really old game.
They were DD floppies, formatted to 837KB (though the OS said 880KB, you lost a few KB 'coz the usable sector capacity was 488 bytes). Later Amiga filesystems really did give you 880-odd KB per floppy.
If I remeber correctly the 68000 was 32bit internally but only had a 16bit bus. I guess thats why the Amiga, ST and MAC were marketed as 16bit computers.
Yes, they had a 16-bit data bus and 24-bit address bus.
Sinclair's QL was based around the MC68008, which had an 8-bit data bus and 20-bit (I think) address bus. It was still 32-bit internally. Sinclair initially wanted to sell it as a 32-bit machine, and got in trouble with the advertising standards people:-)
With the exception of the multi-user aspects and proper memory protection, it is pretty much up to par with modern OS requirements.
The lack of memory protection really bugs me. One crash and that's it, everything falls over, time to reboot. A real bummer when you're coding (especially if you make as many mistakes as I do:-) Not so bad for day-to-day use; my A1200 isn't on 24/7, but I can spend a happy evening's computing without something crashing it.
Other than that, I agree with you. The lack of swap doesn't bother me 'coz I've got enough silicon to multitask pretty well. My biggest gripe with my machine is the poor graphics. That problem would go away if I threw money at it, of course:-)
I like AmigaOS. I like it enough that it's my regular desktop OS at home, and I'm not really interested in anything else at the present time.
If you have ever used the Amiga OS you would know that it is extremely compact and well written. The original release fit on to two floppies.
Don't forget that a lot of it was built into firmware. That doesn't alter your argument, of course; a 256KB ROM and two floppies is still pretty compact:-)
Keep in mind that the Amiga Linux version has been around for some time now. There is both a good PPC version and maybe even a Motorolla version (not sure here).
You mean a MC680x0 version; remember that the PPC is made by Motorola too:-)
It's the "Boing" ball. One of the first ever Amiga demos had a 3D "Boing" ball bouncing around the screen, making a "boing" noise whenever it hit the border. In the post-Commodore era, the "Boing" ball got adopted as an unofficial Amiga logo. Somewhere along the line it became the official logo. Just as well; I think it's way cooler than the old rainbow tickmark logo that Commodore used.
if the kernel is only 100kb what the hell has mikeysoft put in thiers?
Easter eggs. If you hold down QCKRTISO whilst saying the Lord's Prayer backwards and tipping milk into your keyboard, it displays random pictures from Bill's family photo album. This is why stuff like GIF decoders have to be in kernel space under Windows NT; the "photo album" Easter egg requires them to work.
I think so. Repton (Mania?) was a game that was very popular on the BBC B, IIRC. It had a lizard type thing as the main character. Never played it personally, cos I had a Speccy:-)
Repton and Repton 2 were both ported to the Spectrum. I don't know what the ports were like.
We had a BBC Micro in my form room at secondary school for a couple of years. We used to play Repton during lunch hour. I didn't rate it all that highly; I was never really into Boulderdash-type games. We had the BBC port of Arkanoid as well. That was cool.
My secondard school days were my "golden age" for gaming. What with the BBC Micro at school, and my Spectrum at home, I got a lot of games played. I don't play nearly as many games these days. My time gets soaked up posting stupid messages to Web forums:-)
Is Unix really any harder than any other command line?
In my opinion, no. Quite the opposite.
Does anyone really think the Windows command line is any easier?
I think that people who have used both the Windows command line (i.e. MS-DOS) and a Unix shell will find the Unix shell easier to use, particularly if they use a featureful shell such as zsh. Shells like zsh can do a lot for you once you've learned how to use them. By contrast, MS-DOS is dumb and seems to go out of its way to be a hindrance.
The key is that ideally, in Windows you never need to use the command line.
Exactly. GUI advocates don't have anything against the Unix command line in particular, but command lines in general. Some GUI advocates single out Unix/Linux in particular because they see it, rightly or wrongly, as primarily a command line driven OS.
My opinion? Have a system with both a powerul GUI and a featureful shell interface, so you can use the right tool for the right job.
Slashdot Mirror
That's Slashdot's "reparenting high scored responses" feature at work. I'm guessing your threshold is 1, and you're seeing replys to an AC's post which has been hidden by your threshold.
On a related note, if your cable provider carries BBC News 24, give it a go. BBC journalism is first rate. Being a UK citizen, I'm kinda biased :-) Even so, give News 24 a look if you can. You won't be disappointed.
For what it's worth, I met "CGI" as a abbreviation for "Computer Graphic Images" (or something like that) years before I met it as an abbreviation for "C(omputer?) Gateway Interface". I think the first time I saw the term "CGI" was referring to the visual effects in Babylon 5.
I saw that movie years ago. It was great. I don't think it's been on TV since, and hardly anyone I know seems to have heard of it. Thanks for reassuring me that I wasn't imagining the whole thing :-)
Without wanting to make this into a "me too!" thread, I agree 100%. By all means make the OS able to use little words and pretty pictures so that "average" computer users feel at home, but make it "grow" with experience. This is one of the reasons I like AmigaOS in its later incarnations. You can do virtually everything from the GUI, and most native Amiga apps (i.e. not Unix ports) are graphical. However, power users can drop down into a shell and do things that way. The GUI and shell complement each other perfectly. That's the way it should be.
(since being an Amigan seems to be the best way to get yourself ignored/flamed/ridiculed on Slashdot at the moment, feel free to ignore everything I say :-)
How about working with the Languages faculty and offering a joint degree in Science Fiction with Klingon? Or joint honours with the Physics department - Science Fiction and Warp Field Theory?
Argh!
Okay Slashdotters, we need a new word which means (hacker|geek|nerd) and which the media haven't hijacked yet. I propose "snlork". Knowing my luck, it's probably a curse word in some language :-S
I've given up, after explaining the difference 'twixt "hacker" and "cracker" one time too many. Nowadays, I call myself a "nerd".
I really hate buzz-phrases like this. I got this mental image of a bunch of Canadians hanging upside down bat-style from their lampshades so they could watch TV differently.
I'm 5'6" and weigh about 100lb. I'm very lightly built. I think my bones have negative mass.
I'm healthy, hardly ever get ill, and when I went for a medical a few months ago the nurse said it wasn't a problem. I don't think I'm underweight. I think I'm supposed to weigh this little.
Ah yes, forgot about that. I was a Johnny-come-lately whose first Amiga was an A500 :-)
Or even replace the entire ROM. I still have my A500. One of the last things I did with it was dump the ROM to a file so I can softkick it into my A1200 for those rare occasions when I want to play a really old game.
They were DD floppies, formatted to 837KB (though the OS said 880KB, you lost a few KB 'coz the usable sector capacity was 488 bytes). Later Amiga filesystems really did give you 880-odd KB per floppy.
N/T
Yes, they had a 16-bit data bus and 24-bit address bus.
Sinclair's QL was based around the MC68008, which had an 8-bit data bus and 20-bit (I think) address bus. It was still 32-bit internally. Sinclair initially wanted to sell it as a 32-bit machine, and got in trouble with the advertising standards people :-)
The lack of memory protection really bugs me. One crash and that's it, everything falls over, time to reboot. A real bummer when you're coding (especially if you make as many mistakes as I do :-) Not so bad for day-to-day use; my A1200 isn't on 24/7, but I can spend a happy evening's computing without something crashing it.
Other than that, I agree with you. The lack of swap doesn't bother me 'coz I've got enough silicon to multitask pretty well. My biggest gripe with my machine is the poor graphics. That problem would go away if I threw money at it, of course :-)
I like AmigaOS. I like it enough that it's my regular desktop OS at home, and I'm not really interested in anything else at the present time.
Don't forget that a lot of it was built into firmware. That doesn't alter your argument, of course; a 256KB ROM and two floppies is still pretty compact :-)
You mean a MC680x0 version; remember that the PPC is made by Motorola too :-)
The Linux/m68k project has a web site. See it!
It's the "Boing" ball. One of the first ever Amiga demos had a 3D "Boing" ball bouncing around the screen, making a "boing" noise whenever it hit the border. In the post-Commodore era, the "Boing" ball got adopted as an unofficial Amiga logo. Somewhere along the line it became the official logo. Just as well; I think it's way cooler than the old rainbow tickmark logo that Commodore used.
Easter eggs. If you hold down QCKRTISO whilst saying the Lord's Prayer backwards and tipping milk into your keyboard, it displays random pictures from Bill's family photo album. This is why stuff like GIF decoders have to be in kernel space under Windows NT; the "photo album" Easter egg requires them to work.
Repton and Repton 2 were both ported to the Spectrum. I don't know what the ports were like.
We had a BBC Micro in my form room at secondary school for a couple of years. We used to play Repton during lunch hour. I didn't rate it all that highly; I was never really into Boulderdash-type games. We had the BBC port of Arkanoid as well. That was cool.
My secondard school days were my "golden age" for gaming. What with the BBC Micro at school, and my Spectrum at home, I got a lot of games played. I don't play nearly as many games these days. My time gets soaked up posting stupid messages to Web forums :-)
I've noticed this correlation too. I suspect many Slashdotters have. It's summed up rather well at the end of the Jargon File.
I'm an average coder with average people skills. I find this to be an acceptable tradeoff.
Very funny, but also rather catty. I think someone annoyed Tom once too much :-)
I wonder whether it was running Linux or FreeBSD? :-)
In my opinion, no. Quite the opposite.
I think that people who have used both the Windows command line (i.e. MS-DOS) and a Unix shell will find the Unix shell easier to use, particularly if they use a featureful shell such as zsh. Shells like zsh can do a lot for you once you've learned how to use them. By contrast, MS-DOS is dumb and seems to go out of its way to be a hindrance.
Exactly. GUI advocates don't have anything against the Unix command line in particular, but command lines in general. Some GUI advocates single out Unix/Linux in particular because they see it, rightly or wrongly, as primarily a command line driven OS.
My opinion? Have a system with both a powerul GUI and a featureful shell interface, so you can use the right tool for the right job.
.