Hold up a bit there! The real heyday of overclocking was the PC-AT, with the socketed crystal! No fancy-pants jumpers, DIP switches, BIOS settings, or anything! *Sigh*. Nothing compares to the good old days of overclocking, when choosing the right lubricant for your abacus could mean the difference between getting a good deal on a camel and accidentally mortgaging your soul.
I well remember cranking my Intel Abacusium IV to over 100 BOPS (bead operations per minute), my favourite FPA (first-person arithmetic) games ran lickety-split...
Ars Technica seems to be much better at providing computer-related news now, and their site is cleaner too. I'm considering switching permanantly to them.
Or you could just surf both regularly, most ISPs allow this.
Yes, if Mozilla was built on Xt underneath it would be more embeddable. At the moment as I understand it an app that can embed Mozilla has to be a GTK+ app. Sorry but we already handle the X Event quite nicely thanks.
On the contrary, Windows only seems a lot easier to use when it's what you started with. I didn't start with Windows and I find it nasty and repellant (I used VMS, Apollo Domain, Mac and various 8-bit microcomputers before I ever touched Windows). I think starting with systems built for reliability, power and openness first will innoculate the average Indian against thinking Windows is the "One, True Way".
I fired up my NeXT cube and logged into my Linux box over the network and ran top in a shell window. Everything ticked over to 2000 nicely and kept working. Actually I wasn't really surprised at all, but it was fun! We don't know yet if my girlfriends Windows PC will be ok next time it boots, but then I don't really care (have had to reinstall it twice from scratch in the 9 months we've had it so a little Y2K bug would be no big deal there, useless piece of junk) Whoops, end of rant...;^)
While I've been a loyal Audi fan/owner for over 15 years, I'm affraid that when my co-workers hear about Audi's "millennium madness" over Y2k, I'm toast. So much for my plans to buy an A8 and TT this year.
Then it seems to me you're buying cars for the wrong reasons. Why on earth would you change your opinion about what car to own because of the manufacturers website? I can well imagine Porsche not having a great website (I don't actually know) but if I had the right amount of money it wouldn't hold me back, let alone what my coworkers thought. Hell if I went by my coworkers opinions I'd have a Ford Truck and a Cadillac.
What's the point of Y2K verification if you aren't going to be around on Y2K?
Well I would guess they want to check that nothing they control failed when the time came and then go on-line with confidence. I don't think all this effort was spent to make sure everything in the world was working precisely at midnight, more that things are all back to normal as soon as possible afterwards.
Chris Morgan
They made me turn my Ultra10 workstation off as a precaution. Pah!
If you diss Java because of some stupid web applets programmed by some 13 year olds who know nothing about programming, it's just very sad because Java can do so much more. Unfortunately we see lots of "write once debug everywhere" statements by people who have little or no first hand experience with Java.
The first time I heard that "write once debug everywhere" comment was from the owner and founder of a web tool development company. They were very successful and eventually merged with another successful company who thought their product was great. It used Java extensively, and that was the comment from their founder, major shareholder and chief technologist.
So I can't really deny your statements about Java, but it's not just 13 year old kids who know nothing about programming who have had, and continue to have problems with Java's portability (admittedly it's more severe on the client).
Pretty much every diehard Quake fan has already purchased the win32 release and downloaded the linux client and server binaries. Why wait for a later linux retail box when the client and server are available for free download on the web?
Not really. I don't have Windows at all, yet I'm really quite a Quake fan. Why on earth would I buy the Windows version? It's literally no good to me. I have retail Quake 1, plus the two expansion packs (Window versions of course, as that's all that was available, and I had Windows back then to help me convert the files) plus the giant Quake II boxed set of QuakeII plus the two Quake II expansion packs for Linux (natch) and now I have ordered the Q3A Linux tin.
The fact that my PC is currently not quite up to the task of Q3A is just a minor bump on the road;^)
An air-cooled 1GHz Alpha 21264 has already been publically demonstrated (perhaps at Comdex, I forget). If you like the floating-point performance of the Athlon vs. PIII check out the Alpha benchmarks. On fp, Alphas crush* all-comers. At a price. (*)Ok, maybe not some IBMS;^)
YART - Yet Another RMS Triumph
on
RMS The Coder
·
· Score: 4
Another thing that RMS did that was really incredibly cool was he worked out how Ada could behave itself just like other computer languages rather than being really quite fierce and hostile. When he helped a bit in the initial design of GNAT (the GNU Ada compiler) RMS worked out that the Ada "library" that is required by the standard could in fact be a lightweight definition consisting of little more than the source code with attached timestamps, and some little supplementary text files, rather than the previous system. In this way GNAT was made a true first class language front-end for GCC without making GCC jump through any hoops or do anything really pointless.
Before GNAT, Ada "libraries" were these monstrous opaque creations that made compilation incredibly slow - the compiler would have to open each library and read the (huge, expanded) semantic information associated with each separate unit mentioned in the current compilation from disk, rather than just going and getting the source code. By the early 90s the old Ada library approach was total junk, as GNAT easily blew away all previous Ada technologies using a combination of a) one of the worlds fastest language parsers (I would guess, certainly the fastest Ada parser ever seen) b) bountiful cpu power and RAM, and c) RMS's new lightweight library design.
These days there is a small but happy free Ada software crowd building up around GNAT, and I believe the GNAT team has been able to contribute a fair amount of value back to the GCC core. RMS helped to make this all possible and vastly improved the lot of a number of underpaid overworked Ada programmers (defence, telecoms, transport infrastructure etc).
Webmasters can't/don't restrict access to their servers based on what browser is used (AFAIK), so, by the same token, Napster can't/oughtn't restrict access to their servers based on client.
Actually the TurboTax site wouldn't let me use it because I wasn't using Windows or a Mac. It was their loss, but there is definitely a risk of this type of thing increasing - one of the reasons I have started to familiarise myself with Mozilla.
In my day we had no physical reality at all. I had to imagine an entire world of sentient beings, invent methods of communication betweent them and then invent all the communications that they sent. Once they got going properly they still didn't want to be my friend.
I can't get into this thread that has some posts I really feel like responding to, because at the level of nesting and citation it's already at, I really want to be using Gnus in Emacs, not a web browser.
I hate to be negative, but I can't help the feeling that a news interface to topic threads wont happen because there are no banner ads in an NNTP newsgroup. I keep writing long replies and then at some point hitting Meta-Q (format paragraph in Emacs, quit in Netscape) and losing my work. If you override this using a resource file, netscape seems to crash more often. Yes I did submit that as a bug to Netscape. Yes I have read the Slashdot FAQ regarding NNTP, yes this is a little offtopic, sorry!
Theatres are nearly mandated to play the movie trailers (the previews that show before the movie) at a volume level about 25% louder than the actual movie, to (supposedly) draw attention in that first 12-15 minutes when latecomers are still finding seats.
This really sucks. When I saw Star Wars, the trailers before it were so loud they hurt my ears more than seeing the Black Crowes and Jimmy Page (a loud but not too loud rock gig). This was at Ziegfeld's in Manhattan which is supposedly technically very good. When I saw it the next time at a United Artists cinema it was just about perfect. Perhaps I should have complained.
By the way, I just started listening to the Star Wars soundtrack - half the magic, none of the dreck!
Yep... those were the days... back when I knew the entire AT command set, could tweak a modem down to a latency of 150ms.... when we created bits by banging rocks together... yessir.. those were the days....
You had rocks? Oh man! We had to just bang our heads together as we couldn't afford rocks.
If anyone wants an authentic old-timer experience they can come and watch q3demotest download here. I just estimated when it will finish and it's about 6 hours from now:-/
yeah, I agree, anything in which Sting dies is worth seeing!
On a more serious note, the navigator was awesome and Frank Herbert thought David Lynch did some very imaginative stuff (e.g. Italian Renaissance styling of the Emperor's court). It's all in his book ("Eye" I think).
i would like to see a rendering of some of the later stuff e.g. Emperor Leto II and also Teg moving at superhuman speeds. Dune just rules.
This is being posted from the build corresponding to the subject line. I had problems setting the proxy settings to get out of our WAN but I found the solution linked to the release notes in their bug listings posted very recently - the process works! I am going to use M11 as much possible from now on and may switch from Netscape if it only crashes, say, twice as much;^) Chris Morgan
Now you can have a Beowulf cluster of toaster ovens and blenders! You can compile the kernel while you blend and burn the indigineous life on our very own planet!" 3 cheers for Linus! Hip, hip, hooray! Hip, hip....guys? Hello?::chirp::
I'll have some of what he's having!
The cut-down (Celeron style) Transmeta product will be known as the ManFriday chip. You have to teach it to compute using pidgin assembler.
This is one of the things I love most about linux (as opposed to, say, windows). I find that about 90% of system freezes can be dealt with safely, and considering that system freezes are pretty rare to begin with, things tend to go smoothly more often than not.
Isn't this really available in all modern OSes except Microsoft and MacOS 9 or lower? In other words with my NeXT or my Solaris box or any of my Linux machines it's just a given that I can probably get in over the network via telnet and clean up. When my NT box locks up it takes me a couple of microseconds of unpleasant confusion before I realise "Oh yeah, it's that piece of junk" and _try_ and get task manager up - the last resort. Now where Linux does have an edge over some other Unices in my experience is the multiple virtual consoles - oftentimes an X problem just needs a quick trip into VGA mode and I'm all done. Sweet.
With all due respect, one might as well say that it is available, but only usable on the moon.
Hmmm... I wonder how much money would be needed to setup a server farm on the moon. Obviously lots, but consider the idea of a domain that is actually outside all jurisdictions! Of course the ping time is a bitch, I know, but it wouldn't even be as bad as the original UUCP store and forward-at-night-when-the-rates-are-low days. I suppose we might have to get some patches for time-to-live parameters in the comms stack...
The only compilers I heard of using ANDF never really got anywhere. It's wrong to draw conclusions from small samples, but at least Java runs right here and now... somewhat... where's any ANDF product for Linux? I'm curious.
I personally am unhappy with both browsers. They are slow, non standards complient, loaded with crap I do not need in a web browser, and crash all the time.
You can still get the standalone Navigator from their ftp servers. I quite like Navigator but I don't really like the extras that are added in to form Communicator (I mean, I have Emacs!) so I just stick with the original. I will be getting up to speed with Mozilla on Solaris and Linux soon and I'm hoping to switch over when it supports my fairly limited web needs.
Slashdot Mirror
I well remember cranking my Intel Abacusium IV to over 100 BOPS (bead operations per minute), my favourite FPA (first-person arithmetic) games ran lickety-split...
Chris Morgan
to them.
Or you could just surf both regularly, most ISPs allow this.
Yes, if Mozilla was built on Xt underneath it would be more embeddable. At the moment as I understand it an app that can embed Mozilla has to be a GTK+ app. Sorry but we already handle the X Event quite nicely thanks.
Chris Morgan
On the contrary, Windows only seems a lot easier to use when it's what you started with. I didn't start with Windows and I find it nasty and repellant (I used VMS, Apollo Domain, Mac and various 8-bit microcomputers before I ever touched Windows). I think starting with systems built for reliability, power and openness first will innoculate the average Indian against thinking Windows is the "One, True Way".
I fired up my NeXT cube and logged into my Linux box over the network and ran top in a shell window. Everything ticked over to 2000 nicely and kept working. Actually I wasn't really surprised at all, but it was fun! We don't know yet if my girlfriends Windows PC will be ok next time it boots, but then I don't really care (have had to reinstall it twice from scratch in the 9 months we've had it so a little Y2K bug would be no big deal there, useless piece of junk) Whoops, end of rant... ;^)
Chris Morgan
While I've been a loyal Audi fan/owner for over 15 years, I'm affraid that when my co-workers hear about Audi's "millennium madness" over Y2k, I'm toast. So much for my plans to buy an A8 and TT this year.
Then it seems to me you're buying cars for the wrong reasons. Why on earth would you change your opinion about what car to own because of the manufacturers website? I can well imagine Porsche not having a great website (I don't actually know) but if I had the right amount of money it wouldn't hold me back, let alone what my coworkers thought. Hell if I went by my coworkers opinions I'd have a Ford Truck and a Cadillac.
What's the point of Y2K verification if you aren't going to be around on Y2K?
Well I would guess they want to check that nothing they control failed when the time came and then go on-line with confidence. I don't think all this effort was spent to make sure everything in the world was working precisely at midnight, more that things are all back to normal as soon as possible afterwards.
Chris Morgan
They made me turn my Ultra10 workstation off as a precaution. Pah!
If you diss Java because of some stupid web applets programmed by some 13 year olds who know nothing about programming, it's just very sad because Java can do so much more. Unfortunately we see lots of "write once debug everywhere" statements by people who have little or no first hand experience with Java.
The first time I heard that "write once debug everywhere" comment was from the owner and founder of a web tool development company. They were very successful and eventually merged with another successful company who thought their product was great. It used Java extensively, and that was the comment from their founder, major shareholder and chief technologist.
So I can't really deny your statements about Java, but it's not just 13 year old kids who know nothing about programming who have had, and continue to have problems with Java's portability (admittedly it's more severe on the client).
Chris Morgan
New! Break the "Law" here!
Cheers,
Chris Morgan
Pretty much every diehard Quake fan has already purchased the win32 release and downloaded the linux client and
server binaries. Why wait for a later linux retail box when the client and server are available for free download on the web?
Not really. I don't have Windows at all, yet I'm really quite a Quake fan. Why on earth would I buy the Windows version? It's literally no good to me. I have retail Quake 1, plus the two expansion packs (Window versions of course, as that's all that was available, and I had Windows back then to help me convert the files) plus the giant Quake II boxed set of QuakeII plus the two Quake II expansion packs for Linux (natch) and now I have ordered the Q3A Linux tin.
The fact that my PC is currently not quite up to the task of Q3A is just a minor bump on the road
An air-cooled 1GHz Alpha 21264 has already been publically demonstrated (perhaps at Comdex, I forget). If you like the floating-point performance of the Athlon vs. PIII check out the Alpha benchmarks. On fp, Alphas crush* all-comers. At a price. (*)Ok, maybe not some IBMS ;^)
Another thing that RMS did that was really incredibly cool was he worked out how Ada could behave itself just like other computer languages rather than being really quite fierce and hostile. When he helped a bit in the initial design of GNAT (the GNU Ada compiler) RMS worked out that the Ada "library" that is required by the standard could in fact be a lightweight definition consisting of little more than the source code with attached timestamps, and some little supplementary text files, rather than the previous system. In this way GNAT was made a true first class language front-end for GCC without making GCC jump through any hoops or do anything really pointless.
Before GNAT, Ada "libraries" were these monstrous opaque creations that made compilation incredibly slow - the compiler would have to open each library and read the (huge, expanded) semantic information associated with each separate unit mentioned in the current compilation from disk, rather than just going and getting the source code. By the early 90s the old Ada library approach was total junk, as GNAT easily blew away all previous Ada technologies using a combination of a) one of the worlds fastest language parsers (I would guess, certainly the fastest Ada parser ever seen) b) bountiful cpu power and RAM, and c) RMS's new lightweight library design.
These days there is a small but happy free Ada software crowd building up around GNAT, and I believe the GNAT team has been able to contribute a fair amount of value back to the GCC core. RMS helped to make this all possible and vastly improved the lot of a number of underpaid overworked Ada programmers (defence, telecoms, transport infrastructure etc).
browser is used (AFAIK), so, by the same token, Napster can't/oughtn't restrict access to their servers based on client.
Actually the TurboTax site wouldn't let me use it because I wasn't using Windows or a Mac. It was their loss, but there is definitely a risk of this type of thing increasing - one of the reasons I have started to familiarise myself with Mozilla.
Chris Morgan
Pah! You were lucky...
In my day we had no physical reality at all. I had to imagine an entire world of sentient beings, invent methods of communication betweent them and then invent all the communications that they sent. Once they got going properly they still didn't want to be my friend.
I can't get into this thread that has some posts I really feel like responding to, because at the level of nesting and citation it's already at, I really want to be using Gnus in Emacs, not a web browser.
I hate to be negative, but I can't help the feeling that a news interface to topic threads wont happen because there are no banner ads in an NNTP newsgroup. I keep writing long replies and then at some point hitting Meta-Q (format paragraph in Emacs, quit in Netscape) and losing my work. If you override this using a resource file, netscape seems to crash more often. Yes I did submit that as a bug to Netscape. Yes I have read the Slashdot FAQ regarding NNTP, yes this is a little offtopic, sorry!
Chris Morgan
Theatres are nearly mandated to play the movie trailers (the previews that show before the movie) at a volume level about 25% louder than the actual movie, to (supposedly) draw attention in that first 12-15 minutes when latecomers are still finding seats.
This really sucks. When I saw Star Wars, the trailers before it were so loud they hurt my ears more than seeing the Black Crowes and Jimmy Page (a loud but not too loud rock gig). This was at Ziegfeld's in Manhattan which is supposedly technically very good. When I saw it the next time at a United Artists cinema it was just about perfect. Perhaps I should have complained.
By the way, I just started listening to the Star Wars soundtrack - half the magic, none of the dreck!
Chris Morgan
Yep... those were the days... back when I knew the entire AT command set, could tweak a modem down to a latency of 150ms.... when we
created bits by banging rocks together... yessir.. those were the days....
You had rocks? Oh man! We had to just bang our heads together as we couldn't afford rocks.
If anyone wants an authentic old-timer experience they can come and watch q3demotest download here. I just estimated when it will finish and it's about 6 hours from now
and I thought my V90 modem was pretty nifty...
I always thought that was a pretty good movie.
"I WILL kill you" - Sting
yeah, I agree, anything in which Sting dies is worth seeing!
On a more serious note, the navigator was awesome and Frank Herbert thought David Lynch did some very imaginative stuff (e.g. Italian Renaissance styling of the Emperor's court). It's all in his book ("Eye" I think).
i would like to see a rendering of some of the later stuff e.g. Emperor Leto II and also Teg moving at superhuman speeds. Dune just rules.
Chris Morgan
This is being posted from the build corresponding to the subject line. I had problems setting the proxy settings to get out of our WAN but I found the solution linked to the release notes in their bug listings posted very recently - the process works! I am going to use M11 as much possible from now on and may switch from Netscape if it only crashes, say, twice as much ;^) Chris Morgan
p.s. compiling the whole thing is a beast...
Now you can have a Beowulf cluster of toaster ovens and blenders! You can compile the kernel while you blend and burn the indigineous life on our very own planet!" 3 cheers for Linus! Hip, hip, hooray! Hip, hip....guys? Hello? ::chirp::
I'll have some of what he's having!
The cut-down (Celeron style) Transmeta product will be known as the ManFriday chip. You have to teach it to compute using pidgin assembler.
This is one of the things I love most about linux (as opposed to, say, windows). I find that about 90% of system freezes can be dealt with safely, and considering that system freezes are pretty rare to begin with, things tend to go smoothly more often than not.
Isn't this really available in all modern OSes except Microsoft and MacOS 9 or lower? In other words with my NeXT or my Solaris box or any of my Linux machines it's just a given that I can probably get in over the network via telnet and clean up. When my NT box locks up it takes me a couple of microseconds of unpleasant confusion before I realise "Oh yeah, it's that piece of junk" and _try_ and get task manager up - the last resort. Now where Linux does have an edge over some other Unices in my experience is the multiple virtual consoles - oftentimes an X problem just needs a quick trip into VGA mode and I'm all done. Sweet.
Chris
Hmmm ... I wonder how much money would be needed to setup a server farm on the moon. Obviously lots, but consider the idea of a domain that is actually outside all jurisdictions! Of course the ping time is a bitch, I know, but it wouldn't even be as bad as the original UUCP store and forward-at-night-when-the-rates-are-low days. I suppose we might have to get some patches for time-to-live parameters in the comms stack...
>An example of AST technology is Juice and ANDF
The only compilers I heard of using ANDF never really got anywhere. It's wrong to draw conclusions from small samples, but at least Java runs right here and now ... somewhat ... where's any ANDF product for Linux? I'm curious.
Chris Morgan
Disclaimer - blatant Amazon lingage alert!
Chris Morgan
You can still get the standalone Navigator from their ftp servers. I quite like Navigator but I don't really like the extras that are added in to form Communicator (I mean, I have Emacs!) so I just stick with the original. I will be getting up to speed with Mozilla on Solaris and Linux soon and I'm hoping to switch over when it supports my fairly limited web needs.
Chris Morgan