The first time I used it was in 1993 when NCSA Mosaic came out. There was a copy on the university Sun box, my office boasted a spare 286 running DOS - some packet drivers and Vista-eXceed for DOS and I was away!
Pah! I had write access to the system status page at my workplace on that fateful day in 1999, and posted "MASSIVE NUCLEAR EXPLOSION - MOON TORN OUT OF EARTH ORBIT - HURLED INTO OUTER SPACE". Nobody even got the reference:(
Details here - it will make your use of public transport (bus, tube etc) faster and cheaper - you just touch it to open the barriers. Oh, and leave the laptop, there are plenty of internet cafes.
I never spent 5p to play the actual Space Invaders in an arcade, as the idea of the money being gone at the end never appealed, so I got the Psion clone.
The sky is actually completely clear at the moment (23:04 GMT, about 10 mins into totality, and in the western suburbs of Oxford), and I have a brilliant view of the moon.
It would be even more be brilliant if I wasn't surrounded by seven sodium-discharge street lamps!
The "MP3 player made from duct tape" was presumably an early version of the Eiger MPMan.
I own a Compaq/Hango PJB-100 (first hard disk based MP3 player, i.e. the ur-iPod) which still works fine (now playing Prokofiev's second piano concerto). Ironically, it actually is held together with duct tape now.
Security versus the ability to work
on
Too Many Passwords
·
· Score: 4, Interesting
Where I work (a university) we used to have a fairly fierce password regime. Change it every four weeks, no re-using of old passwords, minimum eight characters including mixed case, numerals and punctuation - that kind of thing.
Later on, we learned better, and adopted a much more relaxed regime, in which we specifically didn't force expiry or insist on passwords like tH1s#0n£3&@ for most of the users (we were stricter with people who could order goods or edit the payroll!).
The main reason was that we evaluated (for a range of typical users) the potential financial cost and likelihood of being prevented from working by our password regime, against the potential financial cost and likelihood of suffering a security breach. And in almost all cases, our security policy turned out to be much more damaging than any plausible security breach.
But even so, the other day I got a shock, seeing how quickly the door closes.
A professor at the university where I work turned up with his original doctoral thesis from 1989 on disk. 3" disk, to be exact - the format that famously lost out to the ubiquitous 3.5" disk. He had written it on the Amstrad PCW 8256, a weird British CP/M machine from the mid 80s. No matter, I have several of these rotting in my loft!
But they don't boot. At this point you brace yourself for the long haul. The drive belts used to perish on those models, but look! There are loads of drive belts in the Maplin Electronics catalogue. You just need to order the right size.
No problem! You carefully dismantle the drive and dig out the belt. You broke it? No problem! Just makes it easier to measure. You can only measure the circumference, whereas Maplin only quotes the diameter? No problem! You are about to use Pi for the first and last time in your entire life! Order one that's slightly too big, and one that's slightly too small, just to feel safe.
When the belt arrives, you fit it. You carefully re-assemble the drive. You insert that CP/M boot disk that you carefully prepared in 1987, the one with the custom PROFILE.SUB that copies important utilities to RAMDISK. You power up and it boots! You feel young again.
Now your try your Locoscript boot disk - remember, Locoscript did not run under CP/M - it was an entire little operating system unto itself. It works, and when you swap disks (f7) you can read the Prof's work! It's yesterday once more! Shoo-bee-doo-lang-lang!
At this point I got lucky - I had the LOCOLINK package including the special Amstrad Bus PC parallel port link cable, so I was able to go Locosript PCW -> Locoscript PC -> Wordstar 3.3 -> Wordperfect 5.1 -> Winword. Those nice chaps at Ansible could have shortened that trip by a step or two.
In the absence of the proprietary LOCOLINK cable I could also have gone Locoscript 1 PCW -> Locoscript 2 PCW -> ASCII on PCW -> ASCII on PC via Kermit -> Winword. But I'd have lost all his bolds and underlines.
Now I got a fine bottle of Metaxa Greek Brandy out of this exchange, so I'm not exactly complaining. But I was shocked to realise that his files were younger than my eldest child, and she's got two years of school ahead of her.
In the absence of any credible international initiative to create a reliable permanent archive format, I'd say print it to acid-free paper, multiple copies in separate places, and hope for the best, like Cassiodorus.
have been providing facts and utilities for years now, in the face of threats and obfuscation.
Those with long memories will remember how they exposed the fact that NT Server and NT Workstation were the same binary product, but with different marketing and license terms, back in the mid-1990s.
is generated randomly in javascript by the registration page. Eight digits - the first must be nonzero, the last is seven minus (the sum of the others, mod 7). E.g 10000006.
I have dipped in and out of Enterprise here in the UK on Sky (the guys that funded the new Battlestar Galactica - yes I do know that it's basically Murdoch).
It occurs to me that there are two fatal flaws in "Enterprise":
(1) Being a prequel, it lacks any sense of tension for the overall story arc. A common problem. Lucas, I'm looking at you.
Slashdot Mirror
...whereby it dies on closing the lid on a toshiba NB550d, I shall sacrifice many fatted oxen on the appropriate altar.
The first time I used it was in 1993 when NCSA Mosaic came out. There was a copy on the university Sun box, my office boasted a spare 286 running DOS - some packet drivers and Vista-eXceed for DOS and I was away!
According to Thunderbirds are Go, the Martian rock-snakes will shoot back!.
Pah! I had write access to the system status page at my workplace on that fateful day in 1999, and posted "MASSIVE NUCLEAR EXPLOSION - MOON TORN OUT OF EARTH ORBIT - HURLED INTO OUTER SPACE". Nobody even got the reference :(
Details here - it will make your use of public transport (bus, tube etc) faster and cheaper - you just touch it to open the barriers. Oh, and leave the laptop, there are plenty of internet cafes.
DESQview!
Then we would never have appreciated the benefits of W-W-Windows 386 !
Impact on hard ground from ten miles up? Nope.
I never spent 5p to play the actual Space Invaders in an arcade, as the idea of the money being gone at the end never appealed, so I got the Psion clone.
Of course I shot through the blocks.
as you can see from this early 1980's sketch featuring Rowan "Mr Bean" Atkinson.
Can't they both lose?
The sky is actually completely clear at the moment (23:04 GMT, about 10 mins into totality, and in the western suburbs of Oxford), and I have a brilliant view of the moon.
It would be even more be brilliant if I wasn't surrounded by seven sodium-discharge street lamps!
The dots on money aren't random either.
The "MP3 player made from duct tape" was presumably an early version of the Eiger MPMan. I own a Compaq/Hango PJB-100 (first hard disk based MP3 player, i.e. the ur-iPod) which still works fine (now playing Prokofiev's second piano concerto). Ironically, it actually is held together with duct tape now.
Ouch!
Where I work (a university) we used to have a fairly fierce password regime. Change it every four weeks, no re-using of old passwords, minimum eight characters including mixed case, numerals and punctuation - that kind of thing.
Later on, we learned better, and adopted a much more relaxed regime, in which we specifically didn't force expiry or insist on passwords like tH1s#0n£3&@ for most of the users (we were stricter with people who could order goods or edit the payroll!).
The main reason was that we evaluated (for a range of typical users) the potential financial cost and likelihood of being prevented from working by our password regime, against the potential financial cost and likelihood of suffering a security breach. And in almost all cases, our security policy turned out to be much more damaging than any plausible security breach.
Mozilla does this as well. You can turn it off by setting browser.urlbar.clickSelectsAll to false in about:config.
Or, for that matter, for my data.
Why do any webmail services still use unencrypted http? I'd be quite glad to see nothing but https on any services that I log in to.
But even so, the other day I got a shock, seeing how quickly the door closes.
A professor at the university where I work turned up with his original doctoral thesis from 1989 on disk. 3" disk, to be exact - the format that famously lost out to the ubiquitous 3.5" disk. He had written it on the Amstrad PCW 8256, a weird British CP/M machine from the mid 80s. No matter, I have several of these rotting in my loft!
But they don't boot. At this point you brace yourself for the long haul. The drive belts used to perish on those models, but look! There are loads of drive belts in the Maplin Electronics catalogue. You just need to order the right size.
No problem! You carefully dismantle the drive and dig out the belt. You broke it? No problem! Just makes it easier to measure. You can only measure the circumference, whereas Maplin only quotes the diameter? No problem! You are about to use Pi for the first and last time in your entire life! Order one that's slightly too big, and one that's slightly too small, just to feel safe.
When the belt arrives, you fit it. You carefully re-assemble the drive. You insert that CP/M boot disk that you carefully prepared in 1987, the one with the custom PROFILE.SUB that copies important utilities to RAMDISK. You power up and it boots! You feel young again.
Now your try your Locoscript boot disk - remember, Locoscript did not run under CP/M - it was an entire little operating system unto itself. It works, and when you swap disks (f7) you can read the Prof's work! It's yesterday once more! Shoo-bee-doo-lang-lang!
At this point I got lucky - I had the LOCOLINK package including the special Amstrad Bus PC parallel port link cable, so I was able to go Locosript PCW -> Locoscript PC -> Wordstar 3.3 -> Wordperfect 5.1 -> Winword. Those nice chaps at Ansible could have shortened that trip by a step or two.
In the absence of the proprietary LOCOLINK cable I could also have gone Locoscript 1 PCW -> Locoscript 2 PCW -> ASCII on PCW -> ASCII on PC via Kermit -> Winword. But I'd have lost all his bolds and underlines.
Now I got a fine bottle of Metaxa Greek Brandy out of this exchange, so I'm not exactly complaining. But I was shocked to realise that his files were younger than my eldest child, and she's got two years of school ahead of her.
In the absence of any credible international initiative to create a reliable permanent archive format, I'd say print it to acid-free paper, multiple copies in separate places, and hope for the best, like Cassiodorus.
have been providing facts and utilities for years now, in the face of threats and obfuscation. Those with long memories will remember how they exposed the fact that NT Server and NT Workstation were the same binary product, but with different marketing and license terms, back in the mid-1990s.
is generated randomly in javascript by the registration page. Eight digits - the first must be nonzero, the last is seven minus (the sum of the others, mod 7). E.g 10000006.
I have dipped in and out of Enterprise here in the UK on Sky (the guys that funded the new Battlestar Galactica - yes I do know that it's basically Murdoch).
It occurs to me that there are two fatal flaws in "Enterprise":
(1) Being a prequel, it lacks any sense of tension for the overall story arc. A common problem. Lucas, I'm looking at you.
(2) Diane Warren theme tune.
Who knew?
What we need is a really decent GPLed calendaring and groupware backend/server, which supports Outlook as a frontend.
What we don't need is yet another spiffy skinnable GPLed frontend, that supports bloody buggering bastard Microsoft Exchange as a backend!
Just run that by me again?