That the modern PC became so successful was because of the open hardware concept taken from the Apple ][ (slots / expansion cards, machines available from 3rd) plus a bunch of very useful apps like Visicalc (the original spreadsheet), wordstar etc. For me the IBM PC was just a better Apple ][, while Apple tried to take our freedom away with those darned closed Macintosh systems.
I am still a passionate Mac hater because of this.
Hah. The original Wolfenstein was a fantastic game for the Apple ][ by a company named Muse who also did that Robot Wars game.
Wolfenstein was a 2d maze game, but very cool because these folks managed to use the Apple ]{ sound system (write a memory address and the speaker goes click, do it often and you get a sound:) to play sound bits, like "Achtung!". Still gives me the chills.
There also was a nice successor, Wolfenstein II.
Hah, I must have them both, with two//c's deep down in my dungeon..er cellar.:)
of course there are always those driver problems..
What are you complaining?
The driver list IMHO is rather impressive. Strong in the departments where FreeBSD is extensivley used (network, scsi..), weaker in the consumer realms (soundcards, gamepads, DVD).
I would go so far to say that any popular hardware will attract a driver writer sooner or later, or a porting effort from other free operating systems.
The "Pulp Fiction" of relationship guides is probably TDGTR. Quite funny. But don't take it too serious. In particular this one is rather er.. technical. It's about love after all, don't forget!
To those who have not found their special one yet:
It's out there. Go for it. You will know when you met her or him. Then don't let the opportunity pass. Don't listen too much to others, it will be different for you. And, yes, all that trouble is worth it.:)
Since the first Nvidia beta driver for Linux, nothing happened, nobody seems to develop anymore to enhance this driver, no word from NVidia...
It is true that the driver was not picked up yet by the community. nvidia released some specs, but obviously nobody could make use of it.
End of September, there was a brief discussion on the glx developers list with someone from nvidia about it. Problems were acknoledged and it was promised to try to improve the situation by providing us with their RM.
Alas nothing happened, at least on the glx project. Maybe they released it to the XFree86 team, I have not checked lately (no time right now).
When the Clinton administration recently announced plans to relax restrictions on exports of data-scrambling software, a key issue that escaped notice was that the new policies affect only shrink-wrapped software, not the original source code -- the lines of instructions that programmers actually write.
When it comes to source code, the undersecretary of commerce for export administration, William Reinsch, said last week that "nothing has changed."
That was new to me. Remarkable. Shows what the US government thinks.
Re:One Time Pads and cypher technology
on
The Code Book
·
· Score: 1
You've missed the point. The main problem with the OTP is not storing the pad, or even generating it (diode noise or some other physical random event will do); it's the fact that you have to get a copy of the pad to both the sender and the receiver.
I don't think so. Handing out an OTP of that kind (imagine something like a palm pilot) is as easy/complicated as handing out a metal key.
You also can't reuse a pad between two people you want to talk to
I was talking about an obscene amount of information stored in the OTP (comparable to the information of all books written). This could avoid the need for reuse.
Note that featured links to the announcement site of the nobel prize commitee does not only announce but also offers some nice explanations of the work done!
Also interesting is that today we can click to the homepages of the prize winners. Again look at the announcement page. Gerardus 't Hooft having the most interesting home page one of them.
Re:One Time Pads and cypher technology
on
The Code Book
·
· Score: 1
Unfortunately, they are highly impractical simply because you may only use them once and you must use the right pad.
We can assume that in the not too distant future technology is able to fit enormous amounts of data in a small space. Read this article by Richard Feynman, where he states
I have estimated how many letters there are in the Encyclopaedia, and I have assumed that each of my 24 million books is as big as an Encyclopaedia volume, and have calculated, then, how many bits of information there are (10^15). For each bit I allow 100 atoms. And it turns out that all of the information that man has carefully accumulated in all the books in the world can be written in this form in a cube of material one two-hundredth of an inch wide--- which is the barest piece of dust that can be made out by the human eye. So there is plenty of room at the bottom! Don't tell me about microfilm!
Even if our technology does not come so far soon, it is obvious that we can expect small portable datastores with capacity good enough for creating usable One Time Pads.
Who says there are no other architectures than the flat Si wafer using electrons? Expect larger chips, real use of the 3rd dimension, photonic devices etc.
About inventiveness: I have a mathematics book that features the same quote "Everything important in the field has been invented (..now it gets dull..)" issued by an engineer from ancient rome, some guy from medivial times and then a french mathematician 200 years ago.
I can't think of any day to day computer graphics application where quantum effects matter anyway: classical electromagnetism gives you everything you need to compute light transmission/reflection/diffraction effects for any rendering you wan
Planck's law for the distribution of a body's radiation seems to me the only thing that is relevant for computer graphics and is related to quantum mechanics (using the sloppy definition of a QM formula as a formula where the Planck constant h shows up). In fact it started QM in 1900.
A computer graphics simulation simply needs some in advance stored information like the texture of a gold surface and does not need to calculate that properties from the atomic level.
I see nothing new. Reminds me very much of the time when some "revolutionary" early LucasArts games were released for the Apple ][ (Ballblazer, Rescue from Fractalus). What is new about it?
Indeed I have some amazing games and simulators running on my 64k RAM, 1MHz Apple ][. If I ever visit a computer hardware museum I hope they don't show just the machine, but show it running some of it's greatest software as well. Today's generation might underestimate what has been done on this stuff. Compare to the Playstation, a hardware used to its limits.
It is a sad fact that today's machines aren't used as effictively as that old iron. Can't say that my K6-300/192MB is a factor 300 improved.:-) That seems to come naturally when moving to a higher abstraction level.
a project to release small, documented, interchangable browser components freely (as in free speech) would be of much greater value.
You seem to think that it is possible to have a nice set of components. But is this possible?
I can imagine cutting it down into display engine, different clients (ftp, news, ssl) and maybe the language stuff (java, javascript, different HTML versions). Nonetheless I have the feeling that even the smallest possible browser component (HTML, nothing else) would turn out to be quite a big module.
It has not been called close to a large monster for nothing.
As an outgrowth of his work on the mathematical properties of "zero curvature" surfaces, Huffman developed his own techniques for folding paper into unusual sculptured shapes.
You could you tell a bit about this one? I can only imagine flat surfaces here, but that wouldn't be worth mentioning, or?
recently on freshmeat i have read that someone has improved the lame encoder so that it takes advantages of MMX/3DNow extentions found in newer CPUs: the name is GOGO but i have not tried it yet.
gogo, 'Gogo no coder' (which means 'afternoon coder'), is a very fast MP3 encoder based on lame-3.23 which is optimized for MMX, K6-2 3DNow! and Intel PentiumIII SSE. The latter is available when FreeBSD supports SSE. (Linux supports it.)
*** DON'T OVERCLOCK YOUR K6-2 *** Gogo heavily uses the 3DNow! unit that almost is asleep usual, and the CPU becomes very hot even in normal clock. So overclock may cause serious internal errors or crazy results. Also, this may be same on PentiumIII.
You can download it from here. Other related interesting stuff like icecast , vic and vat has been ported to FreeBSD. Feel free to try.
OpenBSD is indeed based on NetBSD and not FreeBSD.
Regarding the word "split" - it is a bit more dramatic than it is. Yes, there are different people at the helm and there is a different source tree, but there is still exchange of ideas and fixes.
IMHO OpenBSD is a fairly typical result of a natural evolution process. OpenBSD gives priority to security, NetBSD wants to be very portable and FreeBSD has tried to make best use of the x86 platform. Specialization leads to new species.
However all three (like those birds from Galapagos) are able to exchange genes.. er patches.
And ESR a "vulgar Marxist?"
The new article is right that ESR's essay had a few shortcomings, one of them the downplay of the FSF. On the other hand, like you mention, its sloppiness with facts (if the BSD stuff is that messed, how messed are the Linux facts?) is a bit annoying. I hope the author reviews it.
Not on a 1.44MB floppy.. I don't believe that will happen.
I am not sure however if it won't be possible to chop Mozilla to small size. If it is flexible written enough to be plugged to other GUIs I have hope for this direction.
Slashdot Mirror
That the modern PC became so successful was because of the open hardware concept taken from the Apple ][ (slots / expansion cards, machines available from 3rd) plus a bunch of very useful apps like Visicalc (the original spreadsheet), wordstar etc. For me the IBM PC was just a better Apple ][, while Apple tried to take our freedom away with those darned closed Macintosh systems.
I am still a passionate Mac hater because of this.
Wolfenstein was a 2d maze game, but very cool because these folks managed to use the Apple ]{ sound system (write a memory address and the speaker goes click, do it often and you get a sound :) to play sound bits, like "Achtung!". Still gives me the chills.
There also was a nice successor, Wolfenstein II.
Hah, I must have them both, with two //c's deep down in my dungeon..er cellar. :)
What are you complaining?
The driver list IMHO is rather impressive. Strong in the departments where FreeBSD is extensivley used (network, scsi..), weaker in the consumer realms (soundcards, gamepads, DVD).
I would go so far to say that any popular hardware will attract a driver writer sooner or later, or a porting effort from other free operating systems.
Like calling and getting a SIGHUP? :)
The only consistent signal I have found, is that if I am in their home, and they don't protest at that, then they like me.
SIGBUS? SIGSEGV? :)
To those who have not found their special one yet:
It's out there. Go for it. You will know when you met her or him. Then don't let the opportunity pass. Don't listen too much to others, it will be different for you. And, yes, all that trouble is worth it. :)
What are your favourite movies?
Do you listen to other techno than Kraftwerk?
When is you new virus scan software out?
It is true that the driver was not picked up yet by the community. nvidia released some specs, but obviously nobody could make use of it.
End of September, there was a brief discussion on the glx developers list with someone from nvidia about it. Problems were acknoledged and it was promised to try to improve the situation by providing us with their RM.
Alas nothing happened, at least on the glx project. Maybe they released it to the XFree86 team, I have not checked lately (no time right now).
Check these
http://www.talla.de (Talla 2 XLC one of the best DJs)
http://www.djtaucher.de (Taucher [=Diver] also very strong)
When it comes to source code, the undersecretary of commerce for export administration, William Reinsch, said last week that "nothing has changed."
That was new to me. Remarkable. Shows what the US government thinks.
I don't think so. Handing out an OTP of that kind (imagine something like a palm pilot) is as easy/complicated as handing out a metal key.
You also can't reuse a pad between two people you want to talk to
I was talking about an obscene amount of information stored in the OTP (comparable to the information of all books written). This could avoid the need for reuse.
Also interesting is that today we can click to the homepages of the prize winners. Again look at the announcement page. Gerardus 't Hooft having the most interesting home page one of them.
We can assume that in the not too distant future technology is able to fit enormous amounts of data in a small space.
Read this article by Richard Feynman, where he states
I have estimated how many letters there are in the Encyclopaedia, and I have assumed that each of my 24 million books is as big as an Encyclopaedia volume, and have calculated, then, how many bits of information there are (10^15). For each bit I allow 100 atoms. And it turns out that all of the information that man has carefully accumulated in all the books in the world can be written in this form in a cube of material one two-hundredth of an inch wide--- which is the barest piece of dust that can be made out by the human eye. So there is plenty of room at the bottom! Don't tell me about microfilm!
Even if our technology does not come so far soon, it is obvious that we can expect small portable datastores with capacity good enough for creating usable One Time Pads.
Thanks a lot. That gave me a surf tour from nano to crypto to cryo.
Who says there are no other architectures than the flat Si wafer using electrons?
Expect larger chips, real use of the 3rd dimension, photonic devices etc.
About inventiveness:
I have a mathematics book that features the same quote "Everything important in the field has been invented (..now it gets dull..)" issued by an engineer from ancient rome, some guy from medivial times and then a french mathematician 200 years ago.
Seems to be a recurrent theme. ;-)
I can't think of any day to day computer graphics application where quantum effects matter anyway: classical electromagnetism gives you everything you need to compute light transmission/reflection/diffraction effects for any rendering you wan
Planck's law for the distribution of a body's radiation seems to me the only thing that is relevant for computer graphics and is related to quantum mechanics (using the sloppy definition of a QM formula as a formula where the Planck constant h shows up). In fact it started QM in 1900.
A computer graphics simulation simply needs some in advance stored information like the texture of a gold surface and does not need to calculate that properties from the atomic level.
Indeed I have some amazing games and simulators running on my 64k RAM, 1MHz Apple ][. If I ever visit a computer hardware museum I hope they don't show just the machine, but show it running some of it's greatest software as well. Today's generation might underestimate what has been done on this stuff. Compare to the Playstation, a hardware used to its limits.
It is a sad fact that today's machines aren't used as effictively as that old iron. Can't say that my K6-300/192MB is a factor 300 improved. :-) That seems to come naturally when moving to a higher abstraction level.
You seem to think that it is possible to have a nice set of components. But is this possible?
I can imagine cutting it down into display engine, different clients (ftp, news, ssl) and maybe the language stuff (java, javascript, different HTML versions). Nonetheless I have the feeling that even the smallest possible browser component (HTML, nothing else) would turn out to be quite a big module.
It has not been called close to a large monster for nothing.
You could you tell a bit about this one? I can only imagine flat surfaces here, but that wouldn't be worth mentioning, or?
The gogo encoder is in the FreeBSD ports collection. A fine Japanese contribution by the way. This is from the Description
gogo, 'Gogo no coder' (which means 'afternoon coder'), is a very fast MP3 encoder based on lame-3.23 which is optimized for MMX, K6-2 3DNow! and Intel PentiumIII SSE. The latter is available when FreeBSD supports SSE. (Linux supports it.)
*** DON'T OVERCLOCK YOUR K6-2 ***
Gogo heavily uses the 3DNow! unit that almost is asleep usual, and the CPU becomes very hot even in normal clock. So overclock may cause serious internal errors or crazy results. Also, this may be same on PentiumIII.
You can download it from here. Other related interesting stuff like icecast , vic and vat has been ported to FreeBSD.
Feel free to try.
OpenBSD is indeed based on NetBSD and not FreeBSD.
Regarding the word "split" - it is a bit more dramatic than it is. Yes, there are different people at the helm and there is a different source tree, but there is still exchange of ideas and fixes.
IMHO OpenBSD is a fairly typical result of a natural evolution process. OpenBSD gives priority to security, NetBSD wants to be very portable and FreeBSD has tried to make best use of the x86 platform. Specialization leads to new species.
However all three (like those birds from Galapagos) are able to exchange genes .. er patches.
And ESR a "vulgar Marxist?"
The new article is right that ESR's essay had a few shortcomings, one of them the downplay of the FSF. On the other hand, like you mention, its sloppiness with facts (if the BSD stuff is that messed, how messed are the Linux facts?) is a bit annoying. I hope the author reviews it.
Not on a 1.44MB floppy.. I don't believe that will happen.
I am not sure however if it won't be possible to chop Mozilla to small size. If it is flexible written enough to be plugged to other GUIs I have hope for this direction.
Are they fighting for the Apple customers?
Both of you err.
It is a joke. He made fun of the first name mentioned ("Johann") instead of the commonly used "John" because he seems to think it is wrong.
In fact both names are appropriate as this link might show.
Follow this link to the Small FreeBSD home page for more information
BTW, FreeBSD 4.0-CURRENT users should have a look at their /usr/src/release/picobsd directory.
MSCSs (Microsoft certified scientists)