RTFA, he states that he knows he can use FPGA's etc. but doesn't want to. He WANTS the nostalgia value of wiring everything from bare basics and, short of wiring millions of transistors together, has done it. It was a personal project that was never supposed to have any value except that he can say "I made that".
Personally, I'd love to have the money to start on something like this myself. It's something to show the grandchildren... this is how we used to do it and this is one that **I** made.
It never hurts to forget where we've come from. You might as well ask why we're bothering to keep BBC Micros, ZX Spectrum's, Commodore's, PDP's in museums. This wasn't a "practical" project, it was a personal one.
Also, I think it's a good thing to propogate the knowledge that is needed to build something manually from bare components rather than rely on a manufacturer of FPGA's, etc. to still be making the same components in another 50 years, the software to program them still be around etc.
I've often pondered on what would happen if we had, say, some sort of nuclear war that put all the current methods of manufacture out of action. At the moment, everything is built on having a certain amount of technology available to build upon to fabricate the "latest" technology.
When those layers are removed, you will have to go back to basics. This is why I was also against the scrapping of coastguard listening stations that would listen out for ordinary AM-radio morse code SOS signals. It's the lowest common demoninator that can be easily fabricated from the lowest-level components.
We shouldn't forget where we've come from in case we ever had a need to get back from there!
Finally, sense has prevailed and someone has wrote down all their pet peeves and, guess what, they are pretty much what every gamer has been saying since the dawn of time.
The author must be a mind-reader because I've always had the same concerns in mind. Now, let's just hope that someone "up there" with a brain listens to him and Half-Life 3 breaks none of these sacred rules.
Actually... it was only their business-to-business arm that was ever called Consignia (and I think they kept that name for quite a while) but, point agreed.
You don't get a much better name than THE ROYAL MAIL. It's just about as good an endorsement as you could get. Why, then, change it to some wishy-washy, made up word which, I assume, is supposed to be a concatenation of Consignment and Insignia?
Mars/Snickers, Cellnet/BTCellnet/O2, Opal Fruits/Starburst, etc. all did the same for little reason. T-Mobile was somebody else as well, most phone companies have changed their name at least once (with the possible exception of Virgin Mobile).
Imagine the reprinting costs alone, not to mention customer confusion, disappearing brand loyalty and reputation, and not actually GAINING anything out of it (a company could be called Shit Computers for all I care... if they do what I want at the right price, I don't care what their name is).
The thing that gets me more annoyed, though, is when the company name is not obviously linked to their business AND they don't state their business on any slogan, advert etc.
M25 J26/27-ish, there is a MASSIVE warehouse with "Sericol... More than ink, solutions..." on it. I don't know what the bloody hell they do from that. They could be squid processors for all I know.
Well, the fact that he says that the LinuxWorld staff have been calling for O'Gara to go for a while suggests that they already know his objections and, I assume, he has told them this in person by now.
I think he's just trying to protect his professional reputation by stating, openly and publically, that he is challenging LinuxWorld on this issue. That's quite brave, but if they do "call his bluff" and let him go, his reputation will be intact... he stated an ultimatum in public, they refused. Much better than giving the ultimatum in private, being pushed out and then loads of rubbish being wrote about why he'd left.
I'm an ICT technician working in Primary Schools within London and Microsoft are not the whole problem here. RM (Research Machines) still hold a virtual monopoly over all-things school, at least in the primary schools arena, and they will supply and support only MS.
Then you have individual boroughs who will ONLY supply/support RM stuff, so you're fighting a losing battle.
The borough I work in has no non-MS schools to my knowledge, there are no borough tech's supporting non-MS stuff (in fact, support for any non-RM stuff is almost nonexistent hence my employment). Borough support has been effectively removed for any school which dares go non-RM (I kid you not).
Schools with even just plain Windows 2000/XP setups are abandoned and have to employ people like me to do silly things like add printers, block websites, fix paper jams, etc. as well as keeping the network going in all weathers.
Convincing a school in such a borough to go non-RM (and therefore possibly non-MS) means possibly removing any sort of borough support, having to coexist machines (the borough I work for can do finances, classlists etc. **only** via a piece of arcane Windows/DOS software), replacing every piece of software and all their paid-for expensive site licenses with an equivalent via Linux, or getting Wine to work with programs that cause no end of trouble even in Windows-only environments.
Training of staff/students is a minor matter, despite some posts on here, because most primary school teachers are nowhere near proficient on computers (I've met 2 or 3 across 6 different schools, and that's using a definition of "can install printer on standalone Windows PC by self given instruction manual and driver disks"). Some staff I know have cheat-sheets for almost every action from saving to printing to logging in.
Change the OS, change the cheat-sheet, the teachers still fumbles along without too many problems. You can actually watch them and see just how quickly they relearn how to work when you go from standalone to networked, PC to laptop, 95/98 to XP/2000. This happens almost every year for a decently-funded school.
The problem is 90% political, 10% technical. Convincing a school to go against the grain is hard. Cost savings are easily countered by hiring of technicians to replace lost support, previous expenditure on software and licenses. School's have little to no interest in moving to a "unheard-of", non-popular, finnicky, incompatible, new operating system with no "groundbreaking" features for themselves.
Existing software is pretty much Windows-only, even with Wine, and hardware is very below-par (some schools still have PC's with 233MHz or less). But most hardware is Linux-supported, even down to things like SmartBoards, microscopes, printers etc.
Teachers know nothing about software compatibility and will expect to be able to pick up Rainbow Fish/Barnaby Bear/Tweenies etc. and just plug it in the network for it to work. This will not happen with Linux. It barely happens with Windows.
No major educational software distributor that I am aware of supports Linux in any way, shape or form.
Saying that, I have slipped a Linux machine or two into schools but as kiosk-style machines for things like the Intel QX3 microscopes, exotic printers without XP drivers, etc. but these are expected to run pretty much unattended and unserviced for years and, when they stop working, it's no great loss to throw them away.
In short, get rid of RM, make boroughs and those higher-up in educational terms learn what an ass RM are making of them, encourage most educational software creators to support Linux, let ICT Co-ordinators/Heads/Governors know that this "Linux" thing exists and THEN try for a push.
Sequence of Events May 2 - Challenge begins with very basic static HTML web site to focus hackers on hacking IIS code May 16 - ASP.NET web site put up to give more potential hacking angles June 8 - Contest ends June 9 - Winner (or lack of winner) announced at TechEd in Orlando.
Why would mercury have a greater risk of leakage than water? Obviously, your computer would be wrecked if either leaked but I assume that the reason nobody has used mercury so far is that it does need extra protection. They'd hardly be allowed to sell it if it were THAT hazardous, so it must be sealed securely. Besides, my thermometer has mercury in it (yes, real mercury, not red liquid) and that doesn't need four inches of insulation to stop a leak.
I suppose the logic is that having a spare sitting around doing nothing means it's not subject to the same wear and tear as the others in the RAID and therefore more likely to be a reliable replacement once one of the drives does fail?
The author of the article and some of the comments seem to be surprised that life-vital systems, such as a manned spacecraft, are running on "old" hardware because it's trusted.
I doubt NASA, medical manufacturers and life-saving-equipment (such as airbags, seatbelts etc.) manufacturers are worried about anything other than making sure things work first time, every time, guaranteed and on-time. Severe code analysis is performed on ANY software of this sort, down to mathematical proofs that the program is correct, and you don't want your hardware to do anything you can't predict 100%.
Why is it surprising that custom-built, antique (and therefore every flaw is already public... wanna find out about FDIV bugs, that the interrupt timing is slightly off, or that an instruction that is supposed to take exactly one tick sometimes take more when you're half-way to Mars? I didn't think so.), reliable, low-powered hardware is the norm in any life-critical system?
As anyone who manages code knows, the simpler the better, the more predictable, the easier to debug and test. The Z80 was out and in commercial use for years before all it's bugs were found and documented and that's not the sort of thing you want when the machine has to make a few vital decisions (even if, in some instances, it DOES takes a few microseconds to calculate, verify, and implement them).
Many systems like this even have two or more processors providing the same answers. Any difference between their answers and a warning is signalled indicating a possible hardware failure so that manual control can be assumed.
Secondly, the hardware is considered embedded... you don't need 10 GHz, you don't need masses of cache (if fact it'd probably throw your mathematical correctness right off), and it only needs to be as powerful as is absolutely necessary. My digital watch don't need a GHz, nor does my airbag computer in my car or the engine timing circuits, nor do the life-support machines at the local hospital.
Why would you spend more than you need to, introduce more factors (such as heat, power, airflow, RFI interference etc.) that need to be analysed thoroughly just to put unused hardware into a life-vital system?
The article more than states the obvious and doesn't even bother to point out that most PC's actually waste a vast amount of their time doing unnecessary things. If you can put a shuttle in space with only a few MHz, why do I need at least 1GHz to even be able to LOAD some operating systems within a few minutes?
Being a bit of a Linux newbie as it comes to anything past a router, firewall or Samba, I can see that there are a few problems with CUPS but nothing show-stopping.
So long as you know about www.linuxprinting.org, you're set. The procedure via gui consists of: Connect with a web browser, add a new printer, give it a name, select a port (which admittedly can have some confusing options as many "ports" are available for a single, physical port), select a printer.
For bog-standard printers like HP Laserjet, you just select anything that looks HP-like until you can get to select your printer. For others (for example, my Samsung ML-4500 or inkjets etc.), download a PPD, install it in the right place beforehand and options will arise for that printer.
No, it's not 100% clear or simple but then not much in Linux ever is, but I have to say that CUPS is one of the easiest parts of my Linux setup. X, KDE and ALSA have given me ten times more problems. And once CUPS is up, so much uses it and detects it that you really have very few problems, KDE, Samba, etc.
Compared to the APSFilter (with all it's Ghostscript support) that I used to use for printer-servers prior to discovering CUPS it's a dream. I'd have to say that CUPS needs one or two minor tweaks to it's GUI, not much worse than that and even one or two lines of explanatory text or a web-link to Linux Printing's HOWTO would let it be used by even the simplest of Linux users.
Whoa... certainly a deliberate flame but here we go:
"I'm sure the amount of hours spent gaming in a week by the parent and his enthuisiastic "me too!" fellows below could be counted on one hand, combined."
Erm... if you averaged it out... six-plus hours a day, every day, for the past... oh... fifteen years? Yes, I'm actually quite sad. No, I don't sit and play one hand of Solitaire and have done with it.
"Having 3d graphics does not automatically make a game bad".
Nobody said that. Counterstrike is 3D and I specifically mention that. It's not 3D=bad, 2D=good, it's shiny graphics=not important, gameplay=vital. Some 3D games have gameplay (GTA VC springs to mind), some don't. Some 2D games have gameplay, lots don't.
"Since then I've owned and more importantly, played nearly every platform ever released, and believe me games are still good."
Whoopee for you. Me too, pretty much, but I disagree. Games, as a genre, are getting more and more rubbish. Picking one individual game from each year, of course they improve over time, but there's much more rubbish to wade through, less innovation and more reliance on benchmarks, eye-candy and PR.
"There have been some damned fine releases in the past few years, and if you can't find something fun to play since then, you just aren't a gamer. That's your fault, not the games."
Why am I not a gamer? Because I hunt and hunt for a innovative or enticing or replayable game to actually play and can't find one? Surely that's more a gamer than most people because I'm actually LOOKING, spending time, spending money, researching and LOOKING for a decent game to amuse me because I've played pretty much everything else? Surely that IS a gamer?
Get off your impulse-reaction high-horse and read the post again. I don't care if the game uses bump-mapping or 2D monochrome pixel dithering to display itself, it has to have gameplay. That means a game I will be playing in 10, 15 years time like the ones that I still AM playing from 10, 15, 20 years ago.
Not gonna happen with most current PC games, except possibly something like Half-life 2 if they mod it properly. It's "Black & White" syndrome you have here, friend. It's cool for about a month after release, then a year later nobody would pick it up and play it again if you paid them.
People do seem to have missed the point, probably because it's not FreeCiv 2008 Super-charged Turbo Hyper Championship Platinum Edition.
Games do not suddenly become non-games because they are old. In fact, I would argue that there hasn't been a decent PC game put out in years. Games are not just eye-candy, expensive system requirements and physics-driven. Games are fun.
"Chess? Cor, that game's just ancient. You should be playing Super-hyper Chess 2005, it's got cool 3D pieces, seven hundred different pieces, two-hundred new rules, every piece has 'hit-points' now and there's fifty types of board."
"No thanks. Checkmate."
People who think that "games" can only ever mean whatever is on display at your local videogame store are severely out of touch. Games are fun. These people like FreeCiv because it is, to them, fun to play, engaging, interesting, challenging.
There are not many games that have been released in the past few years that I would call engaging or interesting once the sheen wears off or the next game is released. I've seen people with cupboards full of games that they've bought, completed and never played again. That's not the sign of an engaging game.
There are 20-year-old games that I played then and still play now and still get as much enjoyment out of. My brother and I, both in our late twenties, the primary game market, love to play Age of Empires 2 and OpenTTD precisely because they are engaging games that have lasting appeal. In fact, we still even have the occassional game of Chaos, via the magic of a Spectrum emulator, because we enjoy it.
My brother recently invested in Half-life 2, which I must say looks fantastic. I played about half an hour of it while I was round there and already the sheen had worn off. Yes, I would still play on today if I could because the story was engaging, it's quite good to have a little experimentation with the engine etc. but once I've completed that game, there'll be next to no incentive to go back and play it.
Counterstrike, however, is a different story. Counterstrike I could still see myself enjoying playing when I'm 90.
Projects like FreeCiv and OpenTTD and the UFO remakes are existing precisely for this reason. They are/were great games, they are not just eye-candy and hype that lasts for about a week, they are based on good principles with well-balanced gameplay.
The fact that I can still play TTD on my modern Windows machines, my Linux machine, even a Mac, if i had one, increase the utility of the games. The fact that OpenTTD allows me to plug-in new, clearer graphics, even change the code and interface to suit myself like I couldn't do in TTD, that's the reason these sorts of projects exist.
Eye-candy is extraneous, gameplay is vital, being able to play an old favourite without compatibility issues, with customisations, bugfixes, with features that the game "should have had" in the first place, that's what it is all about.
Now go back to telling all your mates what your latest waste of $100 was at your latest game store.
The programs on the list are not the programs that are stopping admins updating to SP2.
The programs on the list are WORRYING the admins who are running custom software, legacy compatibility programs, specialised software.
I work for some schools in a London borough who have to make all financial arrangements over a program called SIMS which, last time I looked, was actually some sort of DOS-based program. It's had upgrades since but it still relies on communicating with the borough's financial systems which do not run on Windows but communicate over some sort of terminal interface. There were known incompatiblities with SP2 and this software because of the way it uses the network to communicate.
You upgrade and break that, the school can't pay their staff, buy products, organise mid-day catering or pay any suppliers. Because there is a policy of keeping all machines at the same patch level to prevent incompatibilities, the curriculum network (i.e. where the kids play) also cannot be upgraded until the incompatibilities are solved.
Therefore, 30-odd computers are forced to stay at SP1 because of the most important app in the school, which EVERY school in the borough runs (17 of them, I believe). That's getting into nearly a thousand computers all told that are hung up by an incompatibility with one program that's been running fine for YEARS.
You think MS know or care about a package that a London school uses on one machine in each school? No, so it's not on their incompatibility list. The point is that SP2 causes problems, especially with programs that use networking, that can only be found by testing. If the test fails, you have to wait for a fix from the vendor or make one yourself. In the meantime, you have to hold off on SP2.
It'd be much more accurate to think of it in terms of legal and illegal. Legal reverse-engineering of a popular, useful tool (BK) is "Good". Illegal copyright infringement of a piece of licensed software (PearPC) is "Bad".
"Then this 'Tridge' guy comes along, and is *so* opposed to BK that he is determined to fight against it using tactics that are legal, but not especially moral, ethical, or friendly."
Yes. And why can't he? What's immoral or unethical about trying to interoperate with a program which performs a task very well, is popular and has restrictions attached to its usage that someone sees as making the program inaccessible to themselves, completely within the bounds of the law?
"Then, while a temporary cease-fire is arranged so that the matter can be discussed and resolved maturely, he violates this truce."
The "ceasefire" was temporary while the situation was being resolved. (BTW: Where was the "war" and/or who was threatening it? It was more an investigation into the situation). Obviously, there *wasn't* any sort of resolution and people have squarely placed the blame on Tridge.
How? He (I assume) agreed not to reverse engineer the program as part of his work. You can't stop him, or guilt him into stopping, from performing a perfectly legitimate activity in his own personal time.
"So now that so much happiness and productivity has been ruined, are the license zealots happy? I hope so."
Lost happiness is questionable, lost productivity is probably undeniable. However, how much more productive could someone be with an OS or otherwise free version of this same tool, with all of the custom additions they require?
Linus himself has always said that he'd love to be able to use some OS equivalent of BitKeeper but that one did not exist. Tridge was obviously taking steps towards creating something along those lines, or at the very least building a helpful tool to improve BK's usage.
The problem is not licensing choice, or zealotry. The problem stems from people's perception that somehow emulating a good tool is blasphemous, immoral, illegal and generally bad. Of course, having an OS equivalent of BK will not be in BK's own interest because they would probably see some dip in sales, hence the clash of personalities that we've seen in this case.
However, people always knew that this point was going to turn up and that there would be controversy. Somehow, McVoy is being depicted as some sort of spurned hero and, in a way, that may be correct. He's got a good tool that is well-crafted, no doubt, but at all points it was obvious that the more popular it got, the more people would emulate its functionality.
McVoy isn't a hero. He's a good programmers. Tridge isn't some sort of villain. He's legally emulating functionality that he can't enjoy under his own terms any other way.
Right, I run tech support for (currently) six suburban schools in my area, being the sole person responsible for upgrading, maintaining etc. I am in high demand.
Yes, we have just got one school left which is running 98 in any significant amount. For large installations and computers which "need" to be up 24/7, you do need a nice shiny new OS. Most of the schools have a mixture of XP and 98, one has 95/98, one has 2000 throughout.
I can see the argument for those having to be upgraded, but there is a significant cost involved in doing so that means a complete upheaval of the entire computer base.
However, at home my most powerful machines run 98SE. It's cheap, easily available, VERY easily repairable. If maintained properly, there are no security problems, you just have to not rely on the OS seperating out user privileges like in XP.
I've actually seen people deliberately run commands (e.g. testing their unverified downloads out) on their computer just because they believe the OS will seperate the danger out enough because it's under a non-privileged user.
Most home users don't want the hassle and thus most home machines are probably running under a single, full-access account anyway. Also, an experienced user, with some simple freeware and an adequate firewall, is just as well protected as a modern OS user.
The older OS are not as stable, no, unless they are well-maintained (not installing crap just to see what it looks like). If the older OS's do go belly-up, though, they are VERY easy to recover (even down to the filesystem level, FAT is much simpler to recover from than NTFS).
I bought this machine 2-3 years ago, installed 98SE that I had bought an auction and it replaced my 6 year old machine that has been running 98 all that time.
Point 1) I've never had to reformat. This "do it every six months" is NOT a solution, not practical, nonsensical, inconvenient and totally unnecessary. I've worked on home machines that have been collecting spyware, viruses etc. for years and brought them back from the dead without having to reformat.
Point 2) My computer HAS NOT slowed down just because it's had more software installed. I carefully control exactly what software I use and how it's set up. On machines that have been allowed to do that, I've seen ten-fold increases in speed just by running AdAware, Spybot and getting rid of 90% of the crap using Startup Control Panel.
OS's do not get slower the more you install, they get slower the LESS you manage WHAT you install. They can ALWAYS be brought back to speed.
Point 3) Stability is not that great a problem compared to modern OS's. Yes, XP is less likely to crash Word on me and need a reboot but similarly if 98 goes COMPLETELY belly up, I can bring it back by copying an day-old registry file over the current ones.
I don't get stuck in constant blue-screen reboot loops (seen at least 6 of these in schools recently that, because the computers can be booted over the network and restore to their original configuration, I end up just reinstalling). If 98 ever did do that to me, it's much easier to fix. Additionally, 98's are used as home machines where 24/7 stability is not essential and most people use them for an hour or so at a time.
Point 4) I refuse to fund an organisation that is demanding money from me if I wish to upgrade to a "stable" system. Stability problems didn't suddenly get discovered in the year 2000, they were ALWAYS in there. The fact that every few years MS redesigns it's systems, charges EXTORTIONATE amounts for the next version, drops support for older versions and then discovers that they are just as buggy as the older versions makes my blood boil.
In my early years, Microsoft made more than enough money from myself. DOS was worth it. Windows 3.0/3.1 were worth it. Office up to and including 2000 was ALMOST worth it. After that, it just got silly. Now I buy my OS and Office packages from eBay. Money is VERY important to home use
Please, someone explain to me how, less than 15 years ago, a *full-priced*, years-in-development, state-of-the-art game cost in the region of 10UKP ($20). That same game would take many WEEKS, if not MONTHS, of game-time to complete if you dedicated yourself to it, many of them much more than that.
[[[Me, my dad, and my older brother once spent night-after-night trying to complete Nonterraqueous and only managed it through sheer brute-force cooperative mapping of the game and many weeks of intense play... Typically, the next week someone else sent in the first ever map of Nonterraqueous to a computer magazine and had it published.]]]
That older game would be programmed by (sometimes) a single-person or at most a small team. That game would interface direct with the hardware (no OS) and take full advantage of the entire machine's capabilities. It would be programmed in the lowest-level language available and be massively MANUALLY optimised to make full use of the available speed and resources, both of which were available in only miniscule amounts.
That same game would be ported, without the aid of cross-platform tools, to numerous platforms (with similar optimisations) and sell for the same price on all platforms. That game would be fun, virtually bug-free, engaging and keep the average gamer with a large software library occupied for years and years.
So why do modern games now cost RIDICULOUS amounts (way above equivalent inflation and way out of pocket-money territory even for modern youth) when they can be completed in a few DAYS of playtime, be in development for the same amount of time as the older games and sometimes never even appear at all.
Admittedly, any game today usually have a larger team behind it and more of a PR push but that must be cancelled out by the comparatively ENORMOUS gaming market of today, the low cost of duplication, the ability to take advantage of massive libraries of pre-crafted code, audio, artwork, the proliferation of available programmers, computer artists etc.
Modern games are also now written in much higher-level languages than older titles, which are easily portable across many platforms, using a massive framework of standardised operating systems and hardware interfaces with well-established controlling libraries (DirectX) etc.
The modern games are buggy, boring, bloated and absent of decent gameplay. Processor power and resource availability has soared far beyond anything the older gamers could ever dream of, yet the games are sluggish and ugly even on the "recommended" hardware.
I haven't played a game in years that engaged me, 90% of them having a single, oft-repeated premise that has been done to death and they provide nothing new but eye-candy that gets in the way of the game.
I've actually got to the ideal point now... I have a massive library of older games and I do not buy modern games much anymore, maybe only once or twice a year, and even then usually from the budget range.
My computer is DELIBERATELY several years behind state-of-the-art so that the only games I can be tempted to run are ones which have been on the market for a long while, allowed me to weed out the chaff and buy the one, single, ground-breaking game of the era.
My last (impulsive and un-researched) game purchase was UT2003 and I installed it, completed several of the ladders and got bored and uninstalled it. Yet Counterstrike is on my hard disk (in fact, I have about 10Gb of installed Half-life games BUT NOT HL2 or CS:Source) and I'm currently engaged in a few games of OpenTTD. The best pieces of software I own are a Spectrum emulator and DOSBox.
I have often wandered into my local game store and walked out again after not being taken by any of the games, even after test-playing many of them.
Why do companies even THINK that people will pay for the rubbish they churn out, except possibly by mistake? Black & White was, for me, the last game purchase I made near it's release date... it was
"Speaking at Queen Mary, University of London, on Monday night, Open Source Developer Labs chief executive Stuart Cohen said the lawsuits were "the best thing that ever happened to Linux"."
Damn... that's my old university ('cept it had a slightly longer name back then). Why do they send me letters asking if I want to go to some boring old lecture on chaos theory but not the ones that I'm actually interested in and would have attended if I'd known about them?
Grammer? Surely you mean grammar? And also, only put question marks on sentences that are questions. If you're gonna be picky about other people, take the time to get it right yourself.
Slashdot Mirror
Points missed: pretty much all of them.
RTFA, he states that he knows he can use FPGA's etc. but doesn't want to. He WANTS the nostalgia value of wiring everything from bare basics and, short of wiring millions of transistors together, has done it. It was a personal project that was never supposed to have any value except that he can say "I made that".
Personally, I'd love to have the money to start on something like this myself. It's something to show the grandchildren... this is how we used to do it and this is one that **I** made.
It never hurts to forget where we've come from. You might as well ask why we're bothering to keep BBC Micros, ZX Spectrum's, Commodore's, PDP's in museums. This wasn't a "practical" project, it was a personal one.
Also, I think it's a good thing to propogate the knowledge that is needed to build something manually from bare components rather than rely on a manufacturer of FPGA's, etc. to still be making the same components in another 50 years, the software to program them still be around etc.
I've often pondered on what would happen if we had, say, some sort of nuclear war that put all the current methods of manufacture out of action. At the moment, everything is built on having a certain amount of technology available to build upon to fabricate the "latest" technology.
When those layers are removed, you will have to go back to basics. This is why I was also against the scrapping of coastguard listening stations that would listen out for ordinary AM-radio morse code SOS signals. It's the lowest common demoninator that can be easily fabricated from the lowest-level components.
We shouldn't forget where we've come from in case we ever had a need to get back from there!
Finally, sense has prevailed and someone has wrote down all their pet peeves and, guess what, they are pretty much what every gamer has been saying since the dawn of time.
The author must be a mind-reader because I've always had the same concerns in mind. Now, let's just hope that someone "up there" with a brain listens to him and Half-Life 3 breaks none of these sacred rules.
Anyone else noticed that the Hack IIS6 website from the previous slashdot article has gone down?
Actually... it was only their business-to-business arm that was ever called Consignia (and I think they kept that name for quite a while) but, point agreed.
You don't get a much better name than THE ROYAL MAIL. It's just about as good an endorsement as you could get. Why, then, change it to some wishy-washy, made up word which, I assume, is supposed to be a concatenation of Consignment and Insignia?
Mars/Snickers, Cellnet/BTCellnet/O2, Opal Fruits/Starburst, etc. all did the same for little reason. T-Mobile was somebody else as well, most phone companies have changed their name at least once (with the possible exception of Virgin Mobile).
Imagine the reprinting costs alone, not to mention customer confusion, disappearing brand loyalty and reputation, and not actually GAINING anything out of it (a company could be called Shit Computers for all I care... if they do what I want at the right price, I don't care what their name is).
The thing that gets me more annoyed, though, is when the company name is not obviously linked to their business AND they don't state their business on any slogan, advert etc.
M25 J26/27-ish, there is a MASSIVE warehouse with "Sericol... More than ink, solutions..." on it. I don't know what the bloody hell they do from that. They could be squid processors for all I know.
This is me replying... :-)
lee (AT) ledow (DOT) org (DOT) uk
BTW: LB of Havering.
Well, the fact that he says that the LinuxWorld staff have been calling for O'Gara to go for a while suggests that they already know his objections and, I assume, he has told them this in person by now.
I think he's just trying to protect his professional reputation by stating, openly and publically, that he is challenging LinuxWorld on this issue. That's quite brave, but if they do "call his bluff" and let him go, his reputation will be intact... he stated an ultimatum in public, they refused. Much better than giving the ultimatum in private, being pushed out and then loads of rubbish being wrote about why he'd left.
I'm an ICT technician working in Primary Schools within London and Microsoft are not the whole problem here. RM (Research Machines) still hold a virtual monopoly over all-things school, at least in the primary schools arena, and they will supply and support only MS.
Then you have individual boroughs who will ONLY supply/support RM stuff, so you're fighting a losing battle.
The borough I work in has no non-MS schools to my knowledge, there are no borough tech's supporting non-MS stuff (in fact, support for any non-RM stuff is almost nonexistent hence my employment). Borough support has been effectively removed for any school which dares go non-RM (I kid you not).
Schools with even just plain Windows 2000/XP setups are abandoned and have to employ people like me to do silly things like add printers, block websites, fix paper jams, etc. as well as keeping the network going in all weathers.
Convincing a school in such a borough to go non-RM (and therefore possibly non-MS) means possibly removing any sort of borough support, having to coexist machines (the borough I work for can do finances, classlists etc. **only** via a piece of arcane Windows/DOS software), replacing every piece of software and all their paid-for expensive site licenses with an equivalent via Linux, or getting Wine to work with programs that cause no end of trouble even in Windows-only environments.
Training of staff/students is a minor matter, despite some posts on here, because most primary school teachers are nowhere near proficient on computers (I've met 2 or 3 across 6 different schools, and that's using a definition of "can install printer on standalone Windows PC by self given instruction manual and driver disks"). Some staff I know have cheat-sheets for almost every action from saving to printing to logging in.
Change the OS, change the cheat-sheet, the teachers still fumbles along without too many problems. You can actually watch them and see just how quickly they relearn how to work when you go from standalone to networked, PC to laptop, 95/98 to XP/2000. This happens almost every year for a decently-funded school.
The problem is 90% political, 10% technical. Convincing a school to go against the grain is hard. Cost savings are easily countered by hiring of technicians to replace lost support, previous expenditure on software and licenses. School's have little to no interest in moving to a "unheard-of", non-popular, finnicky, incompatible, new operating system with no "groundbreaking" features for themselves.
Existing software is pretty much Windows-only, even with Wine, and hardware is very below-par (some schools still have PC's with 233MHz or less). But most hardware is Linux-supported, even down to things like SmartBoards, microscopes, printers etc.
Teachers know nothing about software compatibility and will expect to be able to pick up Rainbow Fish/Barnaby Bear/Tweenies etc. and just plug it in the network for it to work. This will not happen with Linux. It barely happens with Windows.
No major educational software distributor that I am aware of supports Linux in any way, shape or form.
Saying that, I have slipped a Linux machine or two into schools but as kiosk-style machines for things like the Intel QX3 microscopes, exotic printers without XP drivers, etc. but these are expected to run pretty much unattended and unserviced for years and, when they stop working, it's no great loss to throw them away.
In short, get rid of RM, make boroughs and those higher-up in educational terms learn what an ass RM are making of them, encourage most educational software creators to support Linux, let ICT Co-ordinators/Heads/Governors know that this "Linux" thing exists and THEN try for a push.
Don't be a plonker, Rodney already does all that for him with his computer qualifications and his GCE's.
"Got ya, ya martian git."
http://hackiis6.com/events.htm
Sequence of Events
May 2 - Challenge begins with very basic static HTML web site to focus hackers on hacking IIS code
May 16 - ASP.NET web site put up to give more potential hacking angles
June 8 - Contest ends
June 9 - Winner (or lack of winner) announced at TechEd in Orlando.
Why would mercury have a greater risk of leakage than water? Obviously, your computer would be wrecked if either leaked but I assume that the reason nobody has used mercury so far is that it does need extra protection. They'd hardly be allowed to sell it if it were THAT hazardous, so it must be sealed securely. Besides, my thermometer has mercury in it (yes, real mercury, not red liquid) and that doesn't need four inches of insulation to stop a leak.
I should imagine that they are probably thinking more along the lines of mercury... liquid at room temperature.
I suppose it'd be relevant to say that this Windows installation has a substantial dollar value attached to it.
I suppose the logic is that having a spare sitting around doing nothing means it's not subject to the same wear and tear as the others in the RAID and therefore more likely to be a reliable replacement once one of the drives does fail?
The author of the article and some of the comments seem to be surprised that life-vital systems, such as a manned spacecraft, are running on "old" hardware because it's trusted.
I doubt NASA, medical manufacturers and life-saving-equipment (such as airbags, seatbelts etc.) manufacturers are worried about anything other than making sure things work first time, every time, guaranteed and on-time. Severe code analysis is performed on ANY software of this sort, down to mathematical proofs that the program is correct, and you don't want your hardware to do anything you can't predict 100%.
Why is it surprising that custom-built, antique (and therefore every flaw is already public... wanna find out about FDIV bugs, that the interrupt timing is slightly off, or that an instruction that is supposed to take exactly one tick sometimes take more when you're half-way to Mars? I didn't think so.), reliable, low-powered hardware is the norm in any life-critical system?
As anyone who manages code knows, the simpler the better, the more predictable, the easier to debug and test. The Z80 was out and in commercial use for years before all it's bugs were found and documented and that's not the sort of thing you want when the machine has to make a few vital decisions (even if, in some instances, it DOES takes a few microseconds to calculate, verify, and implement them).
Many systems like this even have two or more processors providing the same answers. Any difference between their answers and a warning is signalled indicating a possible hardware failure so that manual control can be assumed.
Secondly, the hardware is considered embedded... you don't need 10 GHz, you don't need masses of cache (if fact it'd probably throw your mathematical correctness right off), and it only needs to be as powerful as is absolutely necessary. My digital watch don't need a GHz, nor does my airbag computer in my car or the engine timing circuits, nor do the life-support machines at the local hospital.
Why would you spend more than you need to, introduce more factors (such as heat, power, airflow, RFI interference etc.) that need to be analysed thoroughly just to put unused hardware into a life-vital system?
The article more than states the obvious and doesn't even bother to point out that most PC's actually waste a vast amount of their time doing unnecessary things. If you can put a shuttle in space with only a few MHz, why do I need at least 1GHz to even be able to LOAD some operating systems within a few minutes?
Being a bit of a Linux newbie as it comes to anything past a router, firewall or Samba, I can see that there are a few problems with CUPS but nothing show-stopping.
So long as you know about www.linuxprinting.org, you're set. The procedure via gui consists of: Connect with a web browser, add a new printer, give it a name, select a port (which admittedly can have some confusing options as many "ports" are available for a single, physical port), select a printer.
For bog-standard printers like HP Laserjet, you just select anything that looks HP-like until you can get to select your printer. For others (for example, my Samsung ML-4500 or inkjets etc.), download a PPD, install it in the right place beforehand and options will arise for that printer.
No, it's not 100% clear or simple but then not much in Linux ever is, but I have to say that CUPS is one of the easiest parts of my Linux setup. X, KDE and ALSA have given me ten times more problems. And once CUPS is up, so much uses it and detects it that you really have very few problems, KDE, Samba, etc.
Compared to the APSFilter (with all it's Ghostscript support) that I used to use for printer-servers prior to discovering CUPS it's a dream. I'd have to say that CUPS needs one or two minor tweaks to it's GUI, not much worse than that and even one or two lines of explanatory text or a web-link to Linux Printing's HOWTO would let it be used by even the simplest of Linux users.
Whoa... certainly a deliberate flame but here we go:
"I'm sure the amount of hours spent gaming in a week by the parent and his enthuisiastic "me too!" fellows below could be counted on one hand, combined."
Erm... if you averaged it out... six-plus hours a day, every day, for the past... oh... fifteen years? Yes, I'm actually quite sad. No, I don't sit and play one hand of Solitaire and have done with it.
"Having 3d graphics does not automatically make a game bad".
Nobody said that. Counterstrike is 3D and I specifically mention that. It's not 3D=bad, 2D=good, it's shiny graphics=not important, gameplay=vital. Some 3D games have gameplay (GTA VC springs to mind), some don't. Some 2D games have gameplay, lots don't.
"Since then I've owned and more importantly, played nearly every platform ever released, and believe me games are still good."
Whoopee for you. Me too, pretty much, but I disagree. Games, as a genre, are getting more and more rubbish. Picking one individual game from each year, of course they improve over time, but there's much more rubbish to wade through, less innovation and more reliance on benchmarks, eye-candy and PR.
"There have been some damned fine releases in the past few years, and if you can't find something fun to play since then, you just aren't a gamer. That's your fault, not the games."
Why am I not a gamer? Because I hunt and hunt for a innovative or enticing or replayable game to actually play and can't find one? Surely that's more a gamer than most people because I'm actually LOOKING, spending time, spending money, researching and LOOKING for a decent game to amuse me because I've played pretty much everything else? Surely that IS a gamer?
Get off your impulse-reaction high-horse and read the post again. I don't care if the game uses bump-mapping or 2D monochrome pixel dithering to display itself, it has to have gameplay. That means a game I will be playing in 10, 15 years time like the ones that I still AM playing from 10, 15, 20 years ago.
Not gonna happen with most current PC games, except possibly something like Half-life 2 if they mod it properly. It's "Black & White" syndrome you have here, friend. It's cool for about a month after release, then a year later nobody would pick it up and play it again if you paid them.
People do seem to have missed the point, probably because it's not FreeCiv 2008 Super-charged Turbo Hyper Championship Platinum Edition.
Games do not suddenly become non-games because they are old. In fact, I would argue that there hasn't been a decent PC game put out in years. Games are not just eye-candy, expensive system requirements and physics-driven. Games are fun.
"Chess? Cor, that game's just ancient. You should be playing Super-hyper Chess 2005, it's got cool 3D pieces, seven hundred different pieces, two-hundred new rules, every piece has 'hit-points' now and there's fifty types of board."
"No thanks. Checkmate."
People who think that "games" can only ever mean whatever is on display at your local videogame store are severely out of touch. Games are fun. These people like FreeCiv because it is, to them, fun to play, engaging, interesting, challenging.
There are not many games that have been released in the past few years that I would call engaging or interesting once the sheen wears off or the next game is released. I've seen people with cupboards full of games that they've bought, completed and never played again. That's not the sign of an engaging game.
There are 20-year-old games that I played then and still play now and still get as much enjoyment out of. My brother and I, both in our late twenties, the primary game market, love to play Age of Empires 2 and OpenTTD precisely because they are engaging games that have lasting appeal. In fact, we still even have the occassional game of Chaos, via the magic of a Spectrum emulator, because we enjoy it.
My brother recently invested in Half-life 2, which I must say looks fantastic. I played about half an hour of it while I was round there and already the sheen had worn off. Yes, I would still play on today if I could because the story was engaging, it's quite good to have a little experimentation with the engine etc. but once I've completed that game, there'll be next to no incentive to go back and play it.
Counterstrike, however, is a different story. Counterstrike I could still see myself enjoying playing when I'm 90.
Projects like FreeCiv and OpenTTD and the UFO remakes are existing precisely for this reason. They are/were great games, they are not just eye-candy and hype that lasts for about a week, they are based on good principles with well-balanced gameplay.
The fact that I can still play TTD on my modern Windows machines, my Linux machine, even a Mac, if i had one, increase the utility of the games. The fact that OpenTTD allows me to plug-in new, clearer graphics, even change the code and interface to suit myself like I couldn't do in TTD, that's the reason these sorts of projects exist.
Eye-candy is extraneous, gameplay is vital, being able to play an old favourite without compatibility issues, with customisations, bugfixes, with features that the game "should have had" in the first place, that's what it is all about.
Now go back to telling all your mates what your latest waste of $100 was at your latest game store.
The programs on the list are not the programs that are stopping admins updating to SP2.
The programs on the list are WORRYING the admins who are running custom software, legacy compatibility programs, specialised software.
I work for some schools in a London borough who have to make all financial arrangements over a program called SIMS which, last time I looked, was actually some sort of DOS-based program. It's had upgrades since but it still relies on communicating with the borough's financial systems which do not run on Windows but communicate over some sort of terminal interface. There were known incompatiblities with SP2 and this software because of the way it uses the network to communicate.
You upgrade and break that, the school can't pay their staff, buy products, organise mid-day catering or pay any suppliers. Because there is a policy of keeping all machines at the same patch level to prevent incompatibilities, the curriculum network (i.e. where the kids play) also cannot be upgraded until the incompatibilities are solved.
Therefore, 30-odd computers are forced to stay at SP1 because of the most important app in the school, which EVERY school in the borough runs (17 of them, I believe). That's getting into nearly a thousand computers all told that are hung up by an incompatibility with one program that's been running fine for YEARS.
You think MS know or care about a package that a London school uses on one machine in each school? No, so it's not on their incompatibility list. The point is that SP2 causes problems, especially with programs that use networking, that can only be found by testing. If the test fails, you have to wait for a fix from the vendor or make one yourself. In the meantime, you have to hold off on SP2.
It'd be much more accurate to think of it in terms of legal and illegal. Legal reverse-engineering of a popular, useful tool (BK) is "Good". Illegal copyright infringement of a piece of licensed software (PearPC) is "Bad".
Can you see the difference now?
"Then this 'Tridge' guy comes along, and is *so* opposed to BK that he is determined to fight against it using tactics that are legal, but not especially moral, ethical, or friendly."
Yes. And why can't he? What's immoral or unethical about trying to interoperate with a program which performs a task very well, is popular and has restrictions attached to its usage that someone sees as making the program inaccessible to themselves, completely within the bounds of the law?
"Then, while a temporary cease-fire is arranged so that the matter can be discussed and resolved maturely, he violates this truce."
The "ceasefire" was temporary while the situation was being resolved. (BTW: Where was the "war" and/or who was threatening it? It was more an investigation into the situation). Obviously, there *wasn't* any sort of resolution and people have squarely placed the blame on Tridge.
How? He (I assume) agreed not to reverse engineer the program as part of his work. You can't stop him, or guilt him into stopping, from performing a perfectly legitimate activity in his own personal time.
"So now that so much happiness and productivity has been ruined, are the license zealots happy? I hope so."
Lost happiness is questionable, lost productivity is probably undeniable. However, how much more productive could someone be with an OS or otherwise free version of this same tool, with all of the custom additions they require?
Linus himself has always said that he'd love to be able to use some OS equivalent of BitKeeper but that one did not exist. Tridge was obviously taking steps towards creating something along those lines, or at the very least building a helpful tool to improve BK's usage.
The problem is not licensing choice, or zealotry. The problem stems from people's perception that somehow emulating a good tool is blasphemous, immoral, illegal and generally bad. Of course, having an OS equivalent of BK will not be in BK's own interest because they would probably see some dip in sales, hence the clash of personalities that we've seen in this case.
However, people always knew that this point was going to turn up and that there would be controversy. Somehow, McVoy is being depicted as some sort of spurned hero and, in a way, that may be correct. He's got a good tool that is well-crafted, no doubt, but at all points it was obvious that the more popular it got, the more people would emulate its functionality.
McVoy isn't a hero. He's a good programmers. Tridge isn't some sort of villain. He's legally emulating functionality that he can't enjoy under his own terms any other way.
Always have a backup civilisation/planet/atmosphere in case the first goes down.
Make sure you have enough redundancy in your population to ensure DNA data integrity
Right, I run tech support for (currently) six suburban schools in my area, being the sole person responsible for upgrading, maintaining etc. I am in high demand.
Yes, we have just got one school left which is running 98 in any significant amount. For large installations and computers which "need" to be up 24/7, you do need a nice shiny new OS. Most of the schools have a mixture of XP and 98, one has 95/98, one has 2000 throughout.
I can see the argument for those having to be upgraded, but there is a significant cost involved in doing so that means a complete upheaval of the entire computer base.
However, at home my most powerful machines run 98SE. It's cheap, easily available, VERY easily repairable. If maintained properly, there are no security problems, you just have to not rely on the OS seperating out user privileges like in XP.
I've actually seen people deliberately run commands (e.g. testing their unverified downloads out) on their computer just because they believe the OS will seperate the danger out enough because it's under a non-privileged user.
Most home users don't want the hassle and thus most home machines are probably running under a single, full-access account anyway. Also, an experienced user, with some simple freeware and an adequate firewall, is just as well protected as a modern OS user.
The older OS are not as stable, no, unless they are well-maintained (not installing crap just to see what it looks like). If the older OS's do go belly-up, though, they are VERY easy to recover (even down to the filesystem level, FAT is much simpler to recover from than NTFS).
I bought this machine 2-3 years ago, installed 98SE that I had bought an auction and it replaced my 6 year old machine that has been running 98 all that time.
Point 1) I've never had to reformat. This "do it every six months" is NOT a solution, not practical, nonsensical, inconvenient and totally unnecessary. I've worked on home machines that have been collecting spyware, viruses etc. for years and brought them back from the dead without having to reformat.
Point 2) My computer HAS NOT slowed down just because it's had more software installed. I carefully control exactly what software I use and how it's set up. On machines that have been allowed to do that, I've seen ten-fold increases in speed just by running AdAware, Spybot and getting rid of 90% of the crap using Startup Control Panel.
OS's do not get slower the more you install, they get slower the LESS you manage WHAT you install. They can ALWAYS be brought back to speed.
Point 3) Stability is not that great a problem compared to modern OS's. Yes, XP is less likely to crash Word on me and need a reboot but similarly if 98 goes COMPLETELY belly up, I can bring it back by copying an day-old registry file over the current ones.
I don't get stuck in constant blue-screen reboot loops (seen at least 6 of these in schools recently that, because the computers can be booted over the network and restore to their original configuration, I end up just reinstalling). If 98 ever did do that to me, it's much easier to fix. Additionally, 98's are used as home machines where 24/7 stability is not essential and most people use them for an hour or so at a time.
Point 4) I refuse to fund an organisation that is demanding money from me if I wish to upgrade to a "stable" system. Stability problems didn't suddenly get discovered in the year 2000, they were ALWAYS in there. The fact that every few years MS redesigns it's systems, charges EXTORTIONATE amounts for the next version, drops support for older versions and then discovers that they are just as buggy as the older versions makes my blood boil.
In my early years, Microsoft made more than enough money from myself. DOS was worth it. Windows 3.0/3.1 were worth it. Office up to and including 2000 was ALMOST worth it. After that, it just got silly. Now I buy my OS and Office packages from eBay. Money is VERY important to home use
Please, someone explain to me how, less than 15 years ago, a *full-priced*, years-in-development, state-of-the-art game cost in the region of 10UKP ($20). That same game would take many WEEKS, if not MONTHS, of game-time to complete if you dedicated yourself to it, many of them much more than that.
[[[Me, my dad, and my older brother once spent night-after-night trying to complete Nonterraqueous and only managed it through sheer brute-force cooperative mapping of the game and many weeks of intense play... Typically, the next week someone else sent in the first ever map of Nonterraqueous to a computer magazine and had it published.]]]
That older game would be programmed by (sometimes) a single-person or at most a small team. That game would interface direct with the hardware (no OS) and take full advantage of the entire machine's capabilities. It would be programmed in the lowest-level language available and be massively MANUALLY optimised to make full use of the available speed and resources, both of which were available in only miniscule amounts.
That same game would be ported, without the aid of cross-platform tools, to numerous platforms (with similar optimisations) and sell for the same price on all platforms. That game would be fun, virtually bug-free, engaging and keep the average gamer with a large software library occupied for years and years.
So why do modern games now cost RIDICULOUS amounts (way above equivalent inflation and way out of pocket-money territory even for modern youth) when they can be completed in a few DAYS of playtime, be in development for the same amount of time as the older games and sometimes never even appear at all.
Admittedly, any game today usually have a larger team behind it and more of a PR push but that must be cancelled out by the comparatively ENORMOUS gaming market of today, the low cost of duplication, the ability to take advantage of massive libraries of pre-crafted code, audio, artwork, the proliferation of available programmers, computer artists etc.
Modern games are also now written in much higher-level languages than older titles, which are easily portable across many platforms, using a massive framework of standardised operating systems and hardware interfaces with well-established controlling libraries (DirectX) etc.
The modern games are buggy, boring, bloated and absent of decent gameplay. Processor power and resource availability has soared far beyond anything the older gamers could ever dream of, yet the games are sluggish and ugly even on the "recommended" hardware.
I haven't played a game in years that engaged me, 90% of them having a single, oft-repeated premise that has been done to death and they provide nothing new but eye-candy that gets in the way of the game.
I've actually got to the ideal point now... I have a massive library of older games and I do not buy modern games much anymore, maybe only once or twice a year, and even then usually from the budget range.
My computer is DELIBERATELY several years behind state-of-the-art so that the only games I can be tempted to run are ones which have been on the market for a long while, allowed me to weed out the chaff and buy the one, single, ground-breaking game of the era.
My last (impulsive and un-researched) game purchase was UT2003 and I installed it, completed several of the ladders and got bored and uninstalled it. Yet Counterstrike is on my hard disk (in fact, I have about 10Gb of installed Half-life games BUT NOT HL2 or CS:Source) and I'm currently engaged in a few games of OpenTTD. The best pieces of software I own are a Spectrum emulator and DOSBox.
I have often wandered into my local game store and walked out again after not being taken by any of the games, even after test-playing many of them.
Why do companies even THINK that people will pay for the rubbish they churn out, except possibly by mistake? Black & White was, for me, the last game purchase I made near it's release date... it was
"Speaking at Queen Mary, University of London, on Monday night, Open Source Developer Labs chief executive Stuart Cohen said the lawsuits were "the best thing that ever happened to Linux"."
Damn... that's my old university ('cept it had a slightly longer name back then). Why do they send me letters asking if I want to go to some boring old lecture on chaos theory but not the ones that I'm actually interested in and would have attended if I'd known about them?
Grammer? Surely you mean grammar? And also, only put question marks on sentences that are questions. If you're gonna be picky about other people, take the time to get it right yourself.