Perhaps if the French were not so quick to surrender, the members of my family here in America might not have had to go over there to give their lives. I assure you the US felt the war nearly as severely as did many European countries.
Clue for the clueless: As a general rule, it's bad form to criticize those willing to come to your aid from halfway around the world when your country has a history of being unwilling to defend even its own territory.
Dava Sobel, in her excellent book "Longitude" (subtitled: How a lone genius solved the greatest scientific problem of his time - mandatory reading for any geek interested in pre-20th century hacking), points out that French navigation charts and ephimerides (tables of astromonical movements) protested the establishment of Greenwich as the Prime Meridian by printing thier reference time as "Greenwich Mean Time retarded by 19 minutes and 42.3 seconds" (not the actual value, do you think I memorized it??).
So really, this isn't new, just the same dumb thing again, which seems to be a pattern over there. I'm sure this sort of thing embarasses our French colleagues, so let's try not to be too hard on them. It's not thier fault they have the stupidest and most spineless government on the planet. Hmm, on second thought, maybe it is...:-)
Re:Christians aspire to be like the MYTH of Yesu.
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This isn't the time or place for a flame war on this subject, but those reading this deserve to know that the provenance (documentation of authenticity) of ancient writings concerning Christ is exceptional. Jesus (the correct spelling in English, by the way) was no myth. Many of the New Testament books can be traced directly back to manuscripts dating from the third century, less than four generations from the actual events. Contemporary Roman writings further support those accounts. Contrast this with the oldest known copies of many of the Greek classics or other ancient texts, which are only about a thousand years old, and you begin to see the extraordinary reliability of the Bible and the New Testament in particular.
You may dislike what He taught, or choose to reject it, but as C.S. Lewis said, there are only three possiblilities: Jesus was either a bad man, a mad man, or He was indeed what He claimed to be: the God-man. It's actually fairly easy to eliminate the first two, especially since people don't willingly die horrible deaths for anything less then what the *know* to be the truth. (read Fox's Book of Martyrs for a real eye-opener.) And the truth is what it's all about, now isn't it?
If someone started taking my computing devices away from me one at a time, the PalmPilot would absolutely be the last one remaining. Seriously, I'd give up e-mail and the web (at least in their rich forms) before the PalmPilot. It's that useful.
Don't get me wrong, other computers are useful too, but in different ways - they serve very different purposes. The Palm(Pilot) is fundamentally different because it's form factor leads you to carry it with you pretty much everywhere, just because there's no downside to doing so. (My wife laughs at the boxy mark showing up on the front left pocket of all my jeans - it's kind of the 90's equivalent to the kickers' Skoal-can ring, I guess.) That fundamentally changes the way you'll start to use information. Graffiti isn't ideal, but it does a good job - I can Graffiti at a passable rate, esp. with the addition of extensions to customize the recog. engine.
But really, it's incredibly valuable to have a decent amount of information (and in compressed ASCII, a few MB is a lot) with you at all times. It's reminder functions are great, too, especially with some choice replacements for some of the 3Com default apps. (ToDo+, RPN, Hacks, etc.) Those who think it's a toy have not really *used* it enough (or well enough, which does require addl. S/W) to see its value.
Signed - Drooling while waiting for the Qualcomm PDQ from Sprint... (PDQ: PalmPilot and CDMA PCS phone in one!)
We won't be able to do this for a very long time, if ever. The very best imitations we can create are but pale shadows of the real thing even with the benefit of something to copy.
God is an AWESOME engineer!
We don't need no stinkin' wires...
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1GHz Alphas
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So it looks like the Alpha will be the first microwave CPU on the market. How long until we just toss the wires and propagate the signals down a waveguide?:-)
This is an interesting innovation - at those speeds, you can cook your food with the radiated RF energy, the dissipated heat, or both. Finally, a computer that's *really* an appliance!
I can see it now, the new CPSC/FCC/DOE microwave PC warning label:
WARNING - Do not remove this tag under penalty of law! (This isn't a matress or pillow, we mean it.)
DANGER! Microwave Microprocessor Unit! Do not ever, ever open the case of this computer!
RF Radiation Hazard inside. Opening this computer will let cancer-causing microwave frequency photons jump out and eat their way through your retinas on their way to your brain, where they may impair your judgement in selecting an operating system.
You've been warned.
Factory sealed for your protection.
This computer contains no user-servicable parts.
Like you could get it apart anyway, since Compaq uses these goofy screws...
Seriously, folks, I think we're seeing the beginnings of a renaissance in thought about the incredible capabilities of analog systems in particular applications. (This is not a slam at digital, but the trend over the past decade or so has been to do everything in digital, whether it makes sense or not.)
Analog processing is simply better for some things than digital, and it's been my firm belief that when technology allowed sufficient miniturization and flexibility in analog circuitry, we would see a resurgence of interest in analog techniques, especially in areas such as sensing and response.
My original background is in robotics and automation - one reason I left the field was the nagging feeling that we were being forced to work with a kludge - it was apparent even in the mid-80's that we needed something like neural systems to significantly advance the state of the art. A hybrid analog/digital system based on Rodney Brooks-style control layers would offer a reasonable promise of a robot that can successfully mimic a rudimentary "intelligence".
I'm going to go out on a limb and say that we may truly be witnessing the beginnings of a renaissance in analog computing and signal processing. Announcements like the one above, and the fact that people are finally succeeding in building microscopic low-power vacuum tubes (ideal for this sort of stuff), lead me to believe we may see analog applied more and more often in areas where it has real benefits over digital.
Sometimes you have to wonder how things ever get approved to be on their website. Let's look at a few of the more imflammatory claims, which is really quite a kettle o' fish:
RED HERRING: Daemons that control domain operations and perform monitoring functions run on an unreliable device (Ultra 5 workstation), hardly a desirable situation in the context of a data center.
So what? The E10000 will continue to truck on as before without it. This is a complete red herring. The SSP is a really just a console station, nothing more. If it dies, you reboot it, or in the worst case, replace it with another one from the closet, which with Sun's AutoClient technology, can take on the entire identity of the failed box in a couple of minutes. (AutoClient allows Wall St. traders to replace their workstations and be working again with NO IMPACT in 5 minutes. Let's see NT do that.)
FUD SHARK: When security is compromised on the System Service Processor, which runs on the Ultra 5 workstation controlling domain operations and performance monitoring, all running domains on the E 10000 can be brought down with a short command sequence.
No one in their right mind would put the SSP on a network that extends beyond the glass house!! It's a *console*, designed to be locked up securely, like all other mission-critical control consoles. MS still doesn't get the data center, do they?
DUH WHALE: System boards that are hosting non-pageable kernel data structures cannot be removed from a domain without interrupting service. The Solaris operating system has to undertake a special "quiesce," or suspend, operation while the critical pages are migrated to another board.
This is incredible. They're knocking the E10K because you can't walk up to it and pull a CPU card at random without telling the machine first that you plan to do this. These cards contain memory, too, folks, which is why it's pretty reasonable to let the system move things to a safe place before the card goes bye-bye. Pretty much only Tandems can accept this sort of things (because they've got at least two of everything all the time, and they cost like they have even more), and if you're after real fault tolerance, you won't be running NT on them, even though you could...
STING RAID: If you remove a system board from a running domain without enough swap space, Solaris will hang. The administrative tools do not warn you if you do not have enough swap space available.
This is pretty low. Yeah, it can happen - what else is an OS supposed to do when it has more processes than now remains as memory? Although a warning would be nice, E10K admins aren't stupid (we hope), and they understand that there are easy workarounds to this - the E10K makes it very easy to move enough resources into the OS domain in quesiton on a temporary basis. If you don't have enough hardware to do that, you misconfigured the machine in the first place. This is hardly a weakness.
On the whole, the incredible thing about this is that MS is throwing rocks at a really good system with availability features far in excess of that for any practical NT box. You've gotta admire their guts, though - some people will read this and think the E10K is a really expensive, dangerous computer. Funny how they neglect to mention that there's not an NT box on the planet that can provide the performance of an E10K, regardless of how much you spend. This may change eventually, but it's pretty cheeky now.
If you need real fault-tolerance, get a Tandem/Compaq - but after you've paid all that money, I bet the Compaq folks would be the first to advise against using NT on it if you really want fault tolerance.
I find it difficult to take an article seriously when it is so chock full of obvious errors. (e.g. "Varmus" is used 3 times vs. "Varnus" 8 times, etc.)
The thinking behind the article *may* be valid, but sloppiness like this kept me from reading far enough to know.
Is it just me, or has anyone else noticed that the quality of/. (both posts and responses) has been heading downhill pretty fast lately? It looks like the moderation model still needs a little bit of work, doesn't it?
You wouldn't want to use a tube amp in a mobile setting anyway, they don't like vibration too much.
Because of the fundamental physics differences in the way that tubes and transistors amplify, even a simple, cheap tube amp can often provide far better sound than a complex solid state amp. Tube amps are simple because their physics are simple - even a relatively complex tube amp has an order of magnitude fewer components than pretty much any solid state amp. Many of the components in a solid state amp are to correct for things that happen "in the bargain" with tubes.
Tubes are the perfect analog solution to a fundamentally analog problem - digital is NOT always better. Go read up about tube gear at the various web sites out there before making assumptions like that. Prediction: Analog will be big news in electronics sometime in the next few years. There are people working right now to shrink tubes to chip sizes, which would provide some very interesting analog signal processing capabilities to go along with the interesting DSP techniques we have gotten recently.
The guy that said, "Dude! Tubes ROCK!" had it right...
Telnet in?? No Ethernet!!
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Empeg Shipping
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You can't telnet in, there's no Ethernet!
This, in my mind, is the most glaring oversight in the Empeg. It would sure be nice just to be able to plug the car into the Ether (my hub's in the garage, anyhow;-)) and move music, etc. around that way.
I wrote them about that a while ago - apparently, they are worried that if they provide some reasonably easy way to slurp music off the thing, they'll run afoul of the RIAA gestapo...
Oh, and by the way, for all you conspiracy theorists, guess who would be supplying the He4? Yep, your friendly neighborhood global oil company, which finds helium far more than it would like while looking for natural gas. (There's a huge Helium molecule monument somewhere up around Amarillo, I think...)
The idea that cold fusion would put the oils out of business could well be as silly as cold fusion itself has been to date. (I'm willing to believe, once there's something to believe in - so far, there's not...)
I've found Caldera 2.2 to be exceptionally complete and stable. I've installed it now a couple of dozen times on four different kinds of machines, and have had only minor problems - its DHDPCD even works correctly out-of-the box with RoadRunner, although oddly, the OS complains it uses outdated calls. (Can't help on PPP - who uses that anymore, anyway?:-)) My 7-year-old daughter, who is not computer-savvy (real literacy first, "computer literacy" later), has installed 2.2 twice now on her own. She probably couldn't do that with Windows98, so we've cleared the ease-of-install hurdle.
StarOffice is a commercial product, so Caldera doesn't give away licenses to it. If you have a real copy of 2.2, the StarOffice key is on a label inside the cover of the Getting Started Guide. And you'll get another CD full of source with the real thing, too, so those are both invalid criticisms.
Caldera does make some assumptions that may be questionable, but they are not completely unreasonable. The biggest problems I see are:
1) You do need to select Custom Partitions/Expert or whatever it is if you already have Linux partitions on the disk. The Use Prepared Partitions option does not work well. There is also no option to do a full surface scan before the install, something I needed on one of my disks.
2) As you mention, if you boot off of the CD, rather than launch the install from windows, Lizard does not properly set up LILO, so on your next boot, it'll get as far as printing "LI" to the screen before hanging. This is not a problem if you use the included BootMagic thing, which I personally think is a pain, but I understand why it's there. This is a real problem if you're trying to build a pure Linux box, since you won't have a Windows partition to launch BootMagic from. If you do use LILO (created either by hand or with LISA), you don't get the graphical boot screens, which is either good or bad depending on your perspective. This whole issue needs some work - it's definitely the most botched area of this distro.
4) Lizard completes all it's hardware checking at install time, and provides no way to re-run/reconfigure at a later time. This makes it quite difficult to get everything working on a laptop that does not have a CD, since you have to install the image on another computer and then transplant the disk. If you do the install on a desktop computer, you'll be missing PCMCIA and other stuff you'll care about and have to add the missing packages by hand. This is admittedly a corner case for any install program, but it would be nice if it worked.
4) Really a KDE problem: Many of the KDE config screens, including the KDE wizard, are not usable from a 640x480 screen (buttons below the edge of the screen, etc.) This is just boneheaded design! While it's not necessary to force everyone into a "6x4" window for config, everything *should* work with no problems from a plain old VGA display. This makes KDE fairly useless on the Libretto unless you use a virtual desktop, which you should never *have* to use.
5) (Not really a Caldera problem.) I have not yet got sound working ever, under any Linux, so I guess it's no worse than all the other distros, but I had hoped for better this time around. I have come to believe that sound with Linux is impossible...:-) It is frustrating - I've spent probably 25 hours futzing with sound under Caldera 1.1, 1.2, 2.2, and RedHat 5.0 and 5.2 with three different hardware audio configs (Toshiba Libretto 50J, Dell Latitude CPi, FIC Sahara Databook). I'm still about 0 for 20, despite numerous helpful messages from slashdot users saying I must be a clueless newbie or a complete idiot, since eveything works fine for them. Oh, well - someday I'll be able to listen to MP3s on Linux - I think. If anyone has audio working under Caldera 2.2 with the above hardware, I'd love to hear about it.
Ever heard of composites? As someone who used to work with them in the aerospace industry, I can pretty much assure you it's very conceivable that someone could build a composite firearm. It might not be as durable as it's metallic counterparts (probably showing wear after only several dozen shots), but again, in the circumstance, that might not matter. Bullets don't have to be lead, either - nor casings brass for that matter. The most advanced true assault rifles (as opposed to those our government calls by that name) use caseless ammunition that has no brass at all! Completely plastic guns would be quite expensive, but not particularly diffucult to build, given a little knowledge (or research in the absence thereof.)
Generally, it's pretty much impossible to stop someone who's willing to die in the course of committing their act of terror.
Columbine had very little to do with the availabiltiy of firearms. These two murderers were determined to kill innocent people, and we are truly fortunate that their bomb-making skills, while impressive, fell significantly short of their intentions. There is no good deterrent to this sort of crime, and all the publicity is only going to spawn a horrendous number of copycats.
Actually, one reason my wife and I are willing to spend a painful amount of money on private school is exactly because the good ones ARE far more egalitarian than the public schools.
For instance, uniforms aren't to enforce conformity but to eliminate differences so the students can all relate to one another as equals. Making equality happen is a big deal in private schools, and completely ignored in public schools.
Part of this has to do with school size, too: It's just imposssible to avoid the formation of poisonous cliques in a large school. What do we really expect to happen socially when we put 3000 people in a high school?
To use sports as an example: Even those interested in sports or other activities haven't a chance unless they're pro material: the talent pool is just too big to allow players of average (or even above average!) skill on the teams, so we wind up with sports teams comprised of the same extreme physical specimens that dominate college and professional sports.
I would bet that there is a direct correlation between these sorts of incidents and school size. A smaller school creates a much better sense of belonging than the big impersonal windowless buildings in which we warehouse high-schoolers today. If we continue to force adolescents into huge, impersonal overcrowded schools, Littletons will sadly become more common.
(Check out "Recovering the Lost Tools of Learning" by Doug Wilson and "For the Children's Sake" by Susan Schaeffer Macaulay for real eye-opening books that show how we can build *good* schools for our children.)
Yes, as a matter of fact...
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Why Kids Kill
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"The bearing of arms is the essential medium through which the individual asserts both his social power and his participation in politics as a responsible moral being..." -- J.G.A. Pocock, describing the beliefs of the founders of the U.S.
The right of the citizens to keep and bear arms has justly been considered as the palladium of the liberties of a republic; since it offers a strong moral check against usurpation and arbitrary power of rulers; and will generally, even if these are successful in the first instance, enable the people to resist and triumph over them." -- Supreme Court Justice Joseph Story of the John Marshall Court
"A militia, when properly formed, are in fact the people themselves... and include all men capable of bearing arms." -- Senator Richard Henry Lee, 1788, on "militia" in the 2nd Amendment
Such are a well regulated militia, composed of the freeholders, citizen and husbandman, who take up arms to preserve their property, as individuals, and their rights as freemen. -- "M.T. Cicero", in a newspaper letter of 1788 touching the "militia" referred to in the Second Amendment to the Constitution.
That the said Constitution shall never be construed to authorize Congress to infringe the just liberty of the press or the rights of conscience; or to prevent the people of the United states who are peaceable citizens from keeping their own arms... -- Samuel Adams, in "Phila. Independent Gazetteer", August 20, 1789
In the absence of any evidence tending to show that possession or use of a 'shotgun having a barrel of less than eighteen inches in length' at this time has some reasonable relationship to the preservation or efficiency of a well regulated militia, we cannot say that the Second Amendment guarantees the right to keep and bear such an instrument. [...] The Militia comprised all males physically capable of acting in concert for the common defense. -- Majority Supreme Court opinion in "U.S. vs. Miller" (1939)
The conclusion is thus inescapable that the history, concept, and wording of the second amendment to the Constitution of the United States, as well as its interpretation by every major commentator and court in the first half-century after its ratification, indicates that what is protected is an individual right of a private citizen to own and carry firearms in a peaceful manner. -- Report of the Subcommittee On The Constitution of the Committee On The Judiciary, United States Senate, 97th Congress, second session (February, 1982), SuDoc# Y4.J 89/2: Ar 5/5
In recent years it has been suggested that the Second Amendment protects the "collective" right of states to maintain militias, while it does not protect the right of "the people" to keep and bear arms. If anyone entertained this notion in the period during which the Constitution and the Bill of Rights were debated and ratified, it remains one of the most closely guarded secrets of the eighteenth century, for no known writing surviving from the period between 1787 and 1791 states such a thesis. -- Stephen P. Halbrook, "That Every Man Be Armed", 1984
It's so simple..No, it's not...
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Why Kids Kill
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Guns are not difficult to make. Ammo, however, is quite another matter - ever tried making your own brass? This is why regulation of either is reason to be gravely concerned. Do you people really want to live in a police state? After all, that *is* what they call it when the police have all the guns...
Guns Control: They're CRIMINALS, darn it!
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Why Kids Kill
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Let's look seriously at this for a moment, since so many people seem to think that our constitutionally protected right to firearms caused this tragedy:
"Among the many misdeeds of the British rule in India, history will look upon the act of depriving a whole nation of arms, as the blackest." - Mahatma Gandhi
Katz asserts that the number of guns in the US has increased substantially in the recent past. This is patently false for several reasons: a) although guns are still being produced, they are also being destroyed in record numbers, b) even if the number of guns were increasing, it is increasing at nothing like the poulation rate, resulting in a net decrease in the availability of guns. This is the oldest trick in the book to lie with statistics: use raw numbers instead of the rate to make your argument. Our parents and grandparents generally had far greater "access to guns" than we do, and they had no problem such as the ones we face.
The most foolish mistake we could possibly make would be to permit the conquered Eastern peoples to have arms. History teaches that all conquerors who have allowed their subject races to carry arms have prepared their own downfall by doing so. - Adolph Hitler, April 11 1942
Second, passing laws outlawing guns will have ZERO affect on those with no regard for the law or their fellow humanity. (This, by the way is the REAL problem.) These guys did much of their damage with bombs as well, and they're illegal, too. THEY'RE CRIMINALS, DARN IT! By definition, laws will not and cannot effectively deter these people. In reality, it is FAR harder to obtain firearms today than it has ever been before in the history of the US, and knee-jerk reactions to tragedies like Littleton will only result in removing guns from the hands of those that respect the law, leading to "thought police" to make sure that no one thinks any politically incorrect thoughts. The assumption that gun owners are a threat to society is no more sensible than that those who posesses cryptography are a threat to society. Technology is neutral. People are not.
The real problem is that we live in a world in which people are told that they have no value, nothing matters, there is no objective truth, and when you die, that's it. If that's your worldview (and it's the one pumped into modern Americans in their public schools, culture, movies, TV, magazines, music, colleges, and everything else), then there's little reason *not* to act out on whatever fantasies of revenge one may harbor. At the risk of raising the dreaded word Christianity on/., I'd like to point out that the Judeo-Christian worldview, on the other hand, teaches that there is more to existence than that, and that we are all to be held accountable for what we do. This produces a very different kind of behaviour than what we saw this week in Littleton. Even the possiblity that Hell is real and the consequences of actions can be eternal serve to substantially moderate the actions of an individual.
No matter how one approaches the figures, one is forced to the rather startling conclusion that the use of firearms in crime was very much less when there were no controls of any sort and when anyone, convicted criminal or lunatic, could buy any type of firearm without restriction. Half a century of strict controls on pistols has ended, perversely, with a far greater use of this weapon in crime than ever before. - Colin Greenwood, in the study "Firearms Control", 1972
On this issue of firearms being valid as deterrents, I am aware of at least two members of my family in this century who have avoided assault or worse by having access to a firearm. And no, thankfully, neither of them ever had to shoot anyone - the simple presence of the weapon was sufficient to deter the crime. (This includes my cousin avoiding what could likely have been rape and death as a man who jumped into her car and started to grab her suddenly declared, "Sorry, wrong car, lady" when she drew a pistol from under the seat. She's a WWII widow, and has travelled extensively alone, but prepared, for years.)
Americans have the will to resist because you have weapons. If you don't have a gun, freedom of speech has no power. - Yoshimi Ishikawa, Japanese author, in the LA Times 15 Oct 1992
"The very atmosphere of firearms anywhere and everywhere restrains evil interference - they deserve a place of honor with all that's good" - George Washington
Further limits on gun "access" will only serve to further concentrate firearms in the hands of untrustworthy criminals and a possibly more untrustworthy government. Think about that seriously before you hand over your freedoms.
I am constantly amazed at how many people in this forum will fight valiantly to defend free speech, privacy, and even independence from commercial interests, but senselessly support using force (and laws *are* force) to remove one of the only truly valid protections we have against tyranny. The "tyranny of Microsoft" which is railed against so much in this forum, is nothing compared to the real thing.
Note: Quotes courtesy of ESR's excellent firearms rights quote page: http://www.netaxs.com/~esr/guns/quotes.html
Please read these before you determine that government should regulate the purchase and ownership of firearms - and remember that your actions and decisions have serious consequences now and in the future.
You wrote: --- King George has been dead a long, long, long time, dude. Americans no longer have British soldiers knocking on their doors. ---
Quite right, but now we have the BATF, FBI, DEA,IRS, etc. armed with fully automatic weapons and in many documented cases over the past several years, engaged in wanton killing of innocent people. (Ruby Ridge comes to mind - blowing a woman's head off while both her arms are engaged holding her baby and she makes no hostile motion is indefensible under any circumstances. This was government murder, pure and simple.) When the IRS starts to send in stormtroopers, something is wrong. The founders of this country fought a War for Independence (NOT a revolution) over far less opression than our current govenment imposes.
The intent of the Second amendment was expressly to allow citizens to protect themselves from government *in the event that it no longer honored the law itself*:
"No free man shall ever be debarred the use of arms. The strongest reason for the people to retain the right to keep and bear arms is, as a last resort, to protect themselves against tyranny in government" -- Thomas Jefferson, 1 Thomas Jefferson Papers, 334
Wow, this both brings back memories and shows my age. GEM was the official windowing environment for the Flexible Composites Center program at LTV Aircraft Products in the late 80's. (FCC was an automated plant to build parts for the B2 - it died when the B-2 (called ADP-101 as a black project) came in WAY over budget.
GEM was selected over Windows, which for those of you too young to know, wasn't even available as a separate product at that time - MS only created Windows so that they could sell PC versions of Excel, which was originally a Mac-only program. In those days (pre Windows 3.0), Windows came bundled with Word for Windows and Excel, which created the interesting problem of having a Windows install step on the existing one when you added another product at a later date...
GEM and it's application suite was much faster and more usable than the MS stuff. While GEM was no Mac, it worked reasonably well. I probably still have floppies somewhere with the network design for the never-built FCC in GemDraw. As I recall, we were trying to get other software vendors to write programs to run in GEM (proj. mgt., etc.) It ran fine on the 286's especially the "fast" 20 MHz ones, and was far faster on the short-lived 40 MHz 286s than on the first 386's, which I think were 16-20 MHz. EGA was the order of the day for graphics and we had an extravagant hundreds of machines with EGA cards! For those that are wondering, it's pretty weak compared to today's windowing systems/WMs - I doubt there's much code there that would be valuable except for embedded systems.
Shifting gears, as for GEOS, I think putting a (usable!) graphical user interface on a Commodore 64 has got to be one of the greatest hacks of all time. It wasn't real fast, but worked well - I wrote my senior papers in college and all my letters an resumes for my job search in GEOwrite. I had the cheesy mouse that pretended to be a joystick - this was seriously inferior to the later Commodore mouse that actually worked like a mouse in GEOS and some other later C64 software.
We need more hardware postings, the community gets a little stale talking aboput the same thing all the time, and there are non-software nerds out there, too...
Slashdot Mirror
Perhaps if the French were not so quick to surrender, the members of my family here in America might not have had to go over there to give their lives. I assure you the US felt the war nearly as severely as did many European countries.
Clue for the clueless: As a general rule, it's bad form to criticize those willing to come to your aid from halfway around the world when your country has a history of being unwilling to defend even its own territory.
Dava Sobel, in her excellent book "Longitude" (subtitled: How a lone genius solved the greatest scientific problem of his time - mandatory reading for any geek interested in pre-20th century hacking), points out that French navigation charts and ephimerides (tables of astromonical movements) protested the establishment of Greenwich as the Prime Meridian by printing thier reference time as "Greenwich Mean Time retarded by 19 minutes and 42.3 seconds" (not the actual value, do you think I memorized it??).
:-)
So really, this isn't new, just the same dumb thing again, which seems to be a pattern over there. I'm sure this sort of thing embarasses our French colleagues, so let's try not to be too hard on them. It's not thier fault they have the stupidest and most spineless government on the planet. Hmm, on second thought, maybe it is...
You may dislike what He taught, or choose to reject it, but as C.S. Lewis said, there are only three possiblilities: Jesus was either a bad man, a mad man, or He was indeed what He claimed to be: the God-man. It's actually fairly easy to eliminate the first two, especially since people don't willingly die horrible deaths for anything less then what the *know* to be the truth. (read Fox's Book of Martyrs for a real eye-opener.) And the truth is what it's all about, now isn't it?
My children refer to my PalmPilot as "Daddy's MagnaDoodle"!
I think Tyco (I think) and 3Com are missing a bet here...
If someone started taking my computing devices away from me one at a time, the PalmPilot would absolutely be the last one remaining. Seriously, I'd give up e-mail and the web (at least in their rich forms) before the PalmPilot. It's that useful.
Don't get me wrong, other computers are useful too, but in different ways - they serve very different purposes. The Palm(Pilot) is fundamentally different because it's form factor leads you to carry it with you pretty much everywhere, just because there's no downside to doing so. (My wife laughs at the boxy mark showing up on the front left pocket of all my jeans - it's kind of the 90's equivalent to the kickers' Skoal-can ring, I guess.) That fundamentally changes the way you'll start to use information. Graffiti isn't ideal, but it does a good job - I can Graffiti at a passable rate, esp. with the addition of extensions to customize the recog. engine.
But really, it's incredibly valuable to have a decent amount of information (and in compressed ASCII, a few MB is a lot) with you at all times. It's reminder functions are great, too, especially with some choice replacements for some of the 3Com default apps. (ToDo+, RPN, Hacks, etc.) Those who think it's a toy have not really *used* it enough (or well enough, which does require addl. S/W) to see its value.
Signed - Drooling while waiting for the Qualcomm PDQ from Sprint... (PDQ: PalmPilot and CDMA PCS phone in one!)
We won't be able to do this for a very long time, if ever. The very best imitations we can create are but pale shadows of the real thing even with the benefit of something to copy.
God is an AWESOME engineer!
This is an interesting innovation - at those speeds, you can cook your food with the radiated RF energy, the dissipated heat, or both. Finally, a computer that's *really* an appliance!
I can see it now, the new CPSC/FCC/DOE microwave PC warning label:
WARNING - Do not remove this tag under penalty of law!
(This isn't a matress or pillow, we mean it.)
DANGER! Microwave Microprocessor Unit! Do not ever, ever open the case of this computer!
RF Radiation Hazard inside. Opening this computer will let cancer-causing microwave
frequency photons jump out and eat their way through your retinas on their way
to your brain, where they may impair your judgement in selecting an operating system.
- You've been warned.
- Factory sealed for your protection.
- This computer contains no user-servicable parts.
- Like you could get it apart anyway, since Compaq uses these goofy screws...
- Do NOT warm strawberry Pop-Tarts in the Zip disk drive slot.
- Coffee cups on the CD-ROM drive "cup holder" may be heated, but drive
- Digital/Compaq is NOT responsible for funny little fractal patterns on your CD's.
- Discontinue use if rash, irritation, redness, or swelling develops.
- Do not use an apostrophe to indicate the plural form.
Thank you.must be closed when no coffee cup is present, or it's your retinas, baby.
Legal Department, Digital Equipment Division of Compaq Computer Corporation, Houston, Texas.
Analog processing is simply better for some things than digital, and it's been my firm belief that when technology allowed sufficient miniturization and flexibility in analog circuitry, we would see a resurgence of interest in analog techniques, especially in areas such as sensing and response.
My original background is in robotics and automation - one reason I left the field was the nagging feeling that we were being forced to work with a kludge - it was apparent even in the mid-80's that we needed something like neural systems to significantly advance the state of the art. A hybrid analog/digital system based on Rodney Brooks-style control layers would offer a reasonable promise of a robot that can successfully mimic a rudimentary "intelligence".
I'm going to go out on a limb and say that we may truly be witnessing the beginnings of a renaissance in analog computing and signal processing. Announcements like the one above, and the fact that people are finally succeeding in building microscopic low-power vacuum tubes (ideal for this sort of stuff), lead me to believe we may see analog applied more and more often in areas where it has real benefits over digital.
Another take on cathedrals:
Sometimes you have to wonder how things ever get approved to be on their website. Let's look at a few of the more imflammatory claims, which is really quite a kettle o' fish:
RED HERRING: Daemons that control domain operations and perform monitoring functions run on an unreliable device (Ultra 5 workstation), hardly a desirable situation in the context of a data center.
So what? The E10000 will continue to truck on as before without it. This is a complete red herring. The SSP is a really just a console station, nothing more. If it dies, you reboot it, or in the worst case, replace it with another one from the closet, which with Sun's AutoClient technology, can take on the entire identity of the failed box in a couple of minutes. (AutoClient allows Wall St. traders to replace their workstations and be working again with NO IMPACT in 5 minutes. Let's see NT do that.)
FUD SHARK: When security is compromised on the System Service Processor, which runs on the Ultra 5 workstation controlling domain operations and performance monitoring, all running domains on the E 10000 can be brought down with a short command sequence.
No one in their right mind would put the SSP on a network that extends beyond the glass house!! It's a *console*, designed to be locked up securely, like all other mission-critical control consoles. MS still doesn't get the data center, do they?
DUH WHALE: System boards that are hosting non-pageable kernel data structures cannot be removed from a domain without interrupting service. The Solaris operating system has to undertake a special "quiesce," or suspend, operation while the critical pages are migrated to another board.
This is incredible. They're knocking the E10K because you can't walk up to it and pull a CPU card at random without telling the machine first that you plan to do this. These cards contain memory, too, folks, which is why it's pretty reasonable to let the system move things to a safe place before the card goes bye-bye. Pretty much only Tandems can accept this sort of things (because they've got at least two of everything all the time, and they cost like they have even more), and if you're after real fault tolerance, you won't be running NT on them, even though you could...
STING RAID: If you remove a system board from a running domain without enough swap space, Solaris will hang. The administrative tools do not warn you if you do not have enough swap space available.
This is pretty low. Yeah, it can happen - what else is an OS supposed to do when it has more processes than now remains as memory? Although a warning would be nice, E10K admins aren't stupid (we hope), and they understand that there are easy workarounds to this - the E10K makes it very easy to move enough resources into the OS domain in quesiton on a temporary basis. If you don't have enough hardware to do that, you misconfigured the machine in the first place. This is hardly a weakness.
On the whole, the incredible thing about this is that MS is throwing rocks at a really good system with availability features far in excess of that for any practical NT box. You've gotta admire their guts, though - some people will read this and think the E10K is a really expensive, dangerous computer. Funny how they neglect to mention that there's not an NT box on the planet that can provide the performance of an E10K, regardless of how much you spend. This may change eventually, but it's pretty cheeky now.
If you need real fault-tolerance, get a Tandem/Compaq - but after you've paid all that money, I bet the Compaq folks would be the first to advise against using NT on it if you really want fault tolerance.
I find it difficult to take an article seriously when it is so chock full of obvious errors. (e.g. "Varmus" is used 3 times vs. "Varnus" 8 times, etc.)
/. (both posts and responses) has been heading downhill pretty fast lately? It looks like the moderation model still needs a little bit of work, doesn't it?
The thinking behind the article *may* be valid, but sloppiness like this kept me from reading far enough to know.
Is it just me, or has anyone else noticed that the quality of
Because of the fundamental physics differences in the way that tubes and transistors amplify, even a simple, cheap tube amp can often provide far better sound than a complex solid state amp. Tube amps are simple because their physics are simple - even a relatively complex tube amp has an order of magnitude fewer components than pretty much any solid state amp. Many of the components in a solid state amp are to correct for things that happen "in the bargain" with tubes.
Tubes are the perfect analog solution to a fundamentally analog problem - digital is NOT always better. Go read up about tube gear at the various web sites out there before making assumptions like that. Prediction: Analog will be big news in electronics sometime in the next few years. There are people working right now to shrink tubes to chip sizes, which would provide some very interesting analog signal processing capabilities to go along with the interesting DSP techniques we have gotten recently.
The guy that said, "Dude! Tubes ROCK!" had it right...
You can't telnet in, there's no Ethernet!
;-)) and move music, etc. around that way.
This, in my mind, is the most glaring oversight in the Empeg. It would sure be nice just to be able to plug the car into the Ether (my hub's in the garage, anyhow
I wrote them about that a while ago - apparently, they are worried that if they provide some reasonably easy way to slurp music off the thing, they'll run afoul of the RIAA gestapo...
It seems to me that we're talking more about bitleggers than bootleggers here, now aren't we?
Is there a second to the motion?
Oh, and by the way, for all you conspiracy theorists, guess who would be supplying the He4? Yep, your friendly neighborhood global oil company, which finds helium far more than it would like while looking for natural gas. (There's a huge Helium molecule monument somewhere up around Amarillo, I think...)
The idea that cold fusion would put the oils out of business could well be as silly as cold fusion itself has been to date. (I'm willing to believe, once there's something to believe in - so far, there's not...)
I've found Caldera 2.2 to be exceptionally complete and stable. I've installed it now a couple of dozen times on four different kinds of machines, and have had only minor problems - its DHDPCD even works correctly out-of-the box with RoadRunner, although oddly, the OS complains it uses outdated calls. (Can't help on PPP - who uses that anymore, anyway? :-)) My 7-year-old daughter, who is not computer-savvy (real literacy first, "computer literacy" later), has installed 2.2 twice now on her own. She probably couldn't do that with Windows98, so we've cleared the ease-of-install hurdle.
:-) It is frustrating - I've spent probably 25 hours futzing with sound under Caldera 1.1, 1.2, 2.2, and RedHat 5.0 and 5.2 with three different hardware audio configs (Toshiba Libretto 50J, Dell Latitude CPi, FIC Sahara Databook). I'm still about 0 for 20, despite numerous helpful messages from slashdot users saying I must be a clueless newbie or a complete idiot, since eveything works fine for them. Oh, well - someday I'll be able to listen to MP3s on Linux - I think. If anyone has audio working under Caldera 2.2 with the above hardware, I'd love to hear about it.
StarOffice is a commercial product, so Caldera doesn't give away licenses to it. If you have a real copy of 2.2, the StarOffice key is on a label inside the cover of the Getting Started Guide. And you'll get another CD full of source with the real thing, too, so those are both invalid criticisms.
Caldera does make some assumptions that may be questionable, but they are not completely unreasonable. The biggest problems I see are:
1) You do need to select Custom Partitions/Expert or whatever it is if you already have Linux partitions on the disk. The Use Prepared Partitions option does not work well. There is also no option to do a full surface scan before the install, something I needed on one of my disks.
2) As you mention, if you boot off of the CD, rather than launch the install from windows, Lizard does not properly set up LILO, so on your next boot, it'll get as far as printing "LI" to the screen before hanging. This is not a problem if you use the included BootMagic thing, which I personally think is a pain, but I understand why it's there. This is a real problem if you're trying to build a pure Linux box, since you won't have a Windows partition to launch BootMagic from. If you do use LILO (created either by hand or with LISA), you don't get the graphical boot screens, which is either good or bad depending on your perspective. This whole issue needs some work - it's definitely the most botched area of this distro.
4) Lizard completes all it's hardware checking at install time, and provides no way to re-run/reconfigure at a later time. This makes it quite difficult to get everything working on a laptop that does not have a CD, since you have to install the image on another computer and then transplant the disk. If you do the install on a desktop computer, you'll be missing PCMCIA and other stuff you'll care about and have to add the missing packages by hand. This is admittedly a corner case for any install program, but it would be nice if it worked.
4) Really a KDE problem: Many of the KDE config screens, including the KDE wizard, are not usable from a 640x480 screen (buttons below the edge of the screen, etc.) This is just boneheaded design! While it's not necessary to force everyone into a "6x4" window for config, everything *should* work with no problems from a plain old VGA display. This makes KDE fairly useless on the Libretto unless you use a virtual desktop, which you should never *have* to use.
5) (Not really a Caldera problem.) I have not yet got sound working ever, under any Linux, so I guess it's no worse than all the other distros, but I had hoped for better this time around. I have come to believe that sound with Linux is impossible...
I'm actually very glad he said this. It may be quite valuable to the DOJ...
When the OS controls those things (at least on an Intel box) it's called ACPI. So far as I know, no one's written an "acpid" for Linux yet.
We really need one, though...
Ever heard of composites? As someone who used to work with them in the aerospace industry, I can pretty much assure you it's very conceivable that someone could build a composite firearm. It might not be as durable as it's metallic counterparts (probably showing wear after only several dozen shots), but again, in the circumstance, that might not matter. Bullets don't have to be lead, either - nor casings brass for that matter. The most advanced true assault rifles (as opposed to those our government calls by that name) use caseless ammunition that has no brass at all! Completely plastic guns would be quite expensive, but not particularly diffucult to build, given a little knowledge (or research in the absence thereof.)
Generally, it's pretty much impossible to stop someone who's willing to die in the course of committing their act of terror.
Columbine had very little to do with the availabiltiy of firearms. These two murderers were determined to kill innocent people, and we are truly fortunate that their bomb-making skills, while impressive, fell significantly short of their intentions. There is no good deterrent to this sort of crime, and all the publicity is only going to spawn a horrendous number of copycats.
Actually, one reason my wife and I are willing to spend a painful amount of money on private school is exactly because the good ones ARE far more egalitarian than the public schools.
For instance, uniforms aren't to enforce conformity but to eliminate differences so the students can all relate to one another as equals. Making equality happen is a big deal in private schools, and completely ignored in public schools.
Part of this has to do with school size, too: It's just imposssible to avoid the formation of poisonous cliques in a large school. What do we really expect to happen socially when we put 3000 people in a high school?
To use sports as an example: Even those interested in sports or other activities haven't a chance unless they're pro material: the talent pool is just too big to allow players of average (or even above average!) skill on the teams, so we wind up with sports teams comprised of the same extreme physical specimens that dominate college and professional sports.
I would bet that there is a direct correlation between these sorts of incidents and school size. A smaller school creates a much better sense of belonging than the big impersonal windowless buildings in which we warehouse high-schoolers today. If we continue to force adolescents into huge, impersonal overcrowded schools, Littletons will sadly become more common.
(Check out "Recovering the Lost Tools of Learning" by Doug Wilson and "For the Children's Sake" by Susan Schaeffer Macaulay for real eye-opening books that show how we can build *good* schools for our children.)
"The bearing of arms is the essential medium through which the individual asserts both his social power and his participation in politics as a responsible moral being..."
... and include all men capable of bearing arms."
-- J.G.A. Pocock, describing the beliefs of the founders of the U.S.
The right of the citizens to keep and bear arms has justly been considered as the palladium of the liberties of a republic; since it offers a strong moral check against
usurpation and arbitrary power of rulers; and will generally, even if these are successful in the first instance, enable the people to resist and triumph over them."
-- Supreme Court Justice Joseph Story of the John Marshall Court
"A militia, when properly formed, are in fact the people themselves
-- Senator Richard Henry Lee, 1788, on "militia" in the 2nd Amendment
Such are a well regulated militia, composed of the freeholders, citizen and husbandman, who take up arms to preserve their property, as individuals, and their rights
as freemen.
-- "M.T. Cicero", in a newspaper letter of 1788 touching the "militia"
referred to in the Second Amendment to the Constitution.
That the said Constitution shall never be construed to authorize Congress to infringe the just liberty of the press or the rights of conscience; or to prevent the people
of the United states who are peaceable citizens from keeping their own arms...
-- Samuel Adams, in "Phila. Independent Gazetteer", August 20, 1789
In the absence of any evidence tending to show that possession or use of a 'shotgun having a barrel of less than eighteen inches in length' at this time has some
reasonable relationship to the preservation or efficiency of a well regulated militia, we cannot say that the Second Amendment guarantees the right to keep and bear
such an instrument. [...] The Militia comprised all males physically capable of acting in concert for the common defense.
-- Majority Supreme Court opinion in "U.S. vs. Miller" (1939)
The conclusion is thus inescapable that the history, concept, and wording of the second amendment to the Constitution of the United States, as well as its
interpretation by every major commentator and court in the first half-century after its ratification, indicates that what is protected is an individual right of a private
citizen to own and carry firearms in a peaceful manner.
-- Report of the Subcommittee On The Constitution of the Committee On
The Judiciary, United States Senate, 97th Congress, second session
(February, 1982), SuDoc# Y4.J 89/2: Ar 5/5
In recent years it has been suggested that the Second Amendment protects the "collective" right of states to maintain militias, while it does not protect the right of "the
people" to keep and bear arms. If anyone entertained this notion in the period during which the Constitution and the Bill of Rights were debated and ratified, it
remains one of the most closely guarded secrets of the eighteenth century, for no known writing surviving from the period between 1787 and 1791 states such a
thesis.
-- Stephen P. Halbrook, "That Every Man Be Armed", 1984
Guns are not difficult to make. Ammo, however, is quite another matter - ever tried making your own brass? This is why regulation of either is reason to be gravely concerned. Do you people really want to live in a police state? After all, that *is* what they call it when the police have all the guns...
The real problem is that we live in a world in which people are told that they have no value, nothing matters, there is no objective truth, and when you die, that's it. If that's your worldview (and it's the one pumped into modern Americans in their public schools, culture, movies, TV, magazines, music, colleges, and everything else), then there's little reason *not* to act out on whatever fantasies of revenge one may harbor. At the risk of raising the dreaded word Christianity on /., I'd like to point out that the Judeo-Christian worldview, on the other hand, teaches that there is more to existence than that, and that we are all to be held accountable for what we do. This produces a very different kind of behaviour than what we saw this week in Littleton. Even the possiblity that Hell is real and the consequences of actions can be eternal serve to substantially moderate the actions of an individual.
On this issue of firearms being valid as deterrents, I am aware of at least two members of my family in this century who have avoided assault or worse by having access to a firearm. And no, thankfully, neither of them ever had to shoot anyone - the simple presence of the weapon was sufficient to deter the crime. (This includes my cousin avoiding what could likely have been rape and death as a man who jumped into her car and started to grab her suddenly declared, "Sorry, wrong car, lady" when she drew a pistol from under the seat. She's a WWII widow, and has travelled extensively alone, but prepared, for years.) Further limits on gun "access" will only serve to further concentrate firearms in the hands of untrustworthy criminals and a possibly more untrustworthy government. Think about that seriously before you hand over your freedoms.I am constantly amazed at how many people in this forum will fight valiantly to defend free speech, privacy, and even independence from commercial interests, but senselessly support using force (and laws *are* force) to remove one of the only truly valid protections we have against tyranny. The "tyranny of Microsoft" which is railed against so much in this forum, is nothing compared to the real thing.
Please read these before you determine that government should regulate the purchase and ownership of firearms - and remember that your actions and decisions have serious consequences now and in the future.
You wrote:
---
King George has been dead a long, long, long time, dude. Americans no longer have British soldiers knocking on their doors.
---
Quite right, but now we have the BATF, FBI, DEA,IRS, etc. armed with fully automatic weapons and in many documented cases over the past several years, engaged in wanton killing of innocent people. (Ruby Ridge comes to mind - blowing a woman's head off while both her arms are engaged holding her baby and she makes no hostile motion is indefensible under any circumstances. This was government murder, pure and simple.) When the IRS starts to send in stormtroopers, something is wrong. The founders of this country fought a War for Independence (NOT a revolution) over far less opression than our current govenment imposes.
The intent of the Second amendment was expressly to allow citizens to protect themselves from government *in the event that it no longer honored the law itself*:
"No free man shall ever be debarred the use of arms. The strongest reason for the people to retain the right to keep and bear arms is, as a last resort, to protect themselves against tyranny in government"
-- Thomas Jefferson, 1 Thomas Jefferson Papers, 334
Wow, this both brings back memories and shows my age. GEM was the official windowing environment for the Flexible Composites Center program at LTV Aircraft Products in the late 80's. (FCC was an automated plant to build parts for the B2 - it died when the B-2 (called ADP-101 as a black project) came in WAY over budget.
/tmp/Earth\ Day*
GEM was selected over Windows, which for those of you too young to know, wasn't even available as a separate product at that time - MS only created Windows so that they could sell PC versions of Excel, which was originally a Mac-only program. In those days (pre Windows 3.0), Windows came bundled with Word for Windows and Excel, which created the interesting problem of having a Windows install step on the existing one when you added another product at a later date...
GEM and it's application suite was much faster and more usable than the MS stuff. While GEM was no Mac, it worked reasonably well. I probably still have floppies somewhere with the network design for the never-built FCC in GemDraw. As I recall, we were trying to get other software vendors to write programs to run in GEM (proj. mgt., etc.) It ran fine on the 286's especially the "fast" 20 MHz ones, and was far faster on the short-lived 40 MHz 286s than on the first 386's, which I think were 16-20 MHz. EGA was the order of the day for graphics and we had an extravagant hundreds of machines with EGA cards! For those that are wondering, it's pretty weak compared to today's windowing systems/WMs - I doubt there's much code there that would be valuable except for embedded systems.
Shifting gears, as for GEOS, I think putting a (usable!) graphical user interface on a Commodore 64 has got to be one of the greatest hacks of all time. It wasn't real fast, but worked well - I wrote my senior papers in college and all my letters an resumes for my job search in GEOwrite. I had the cheesy mouse that pretended to be a joystick - this was seriously inferior to the later Commodore mouse that actually worked like a mouse in GEOS and some other later C64 software.
kill -9 "Earth Day"
rm -rf
We need more hardware postings, the community gets a little stale talking aboput the same thing all the time, and there are non-software nerds out there, too...
Dub