You either spit text at the printer through a serial connection if it is a line printer or you spit PS at it through a network connection if it is a PS printer.
See, simple.
(Although I guess/usr/lib/lp/model/standard counts as a printer driver)
Oh, and put down that USB FF joystick -- that isn't funny.
Come on, you are a professor of *marketing* and some guy from *Wired* calls you up about a pop-culture issue (that if you think about it, is going to be on slashMac (or Macfilter) the day of online publication).
Wouldn't you be *really* tempted to troll a bit?
I'm surprized that *anyone* gives Wired reporters a straight answer...
Well, considering that they *expect* a GUI, I'm not terribly suprized.
And since the classic Mac OS days there have been ways to wrap a command line application inside a GUI object. Today it would be even easier, with an AppleScript that ran the command line ap and then sent formatted output to... I don't know... TextEdit? There are a lot of options.
But if you'd rather be pissed off and hold their hands, don't bother.
I work at a newspaper and I get lots of emails from people wanting articles from any time from yesterday to the late 1800s. Many times I have to tell them that we did not start electronic archiving until 1995, and that if they want earlier stories they have to go to the library and look through micofilm.
There is a lot of historical information that might not interest the slashdot crowd -- but is of interest to folks trying to get an idea of how their grandfathers lived or fill out dry geneology information with articles about the people (or the people they lived around).
Many times I felt really bad for these folks -- who can't always visit our local library -- but I haven't seen a cost effective way to digitize microfilm.
Sure, for technical issues, trivia, current events, advocacy issues, sports and 'pr0n' the Internet is great. But there are vasts amounts of low-level historical information that will probably never be on the Internet. Maybe there is no way to correct this, and maybe this stuff isn't really all that important. But the information is there, even if people can't find it on the Internet.
The important thing to remember is that just because something isn't on the Internet, doesn't mean it doesn't exist.
A while back I talked to a guy who runs a business computer network and he was griping that you can't hardly buy computers anymore with less than 40GB of hard drive space. Most of that space is wasted for office workers.
He was looking into using P2P to replace file servers. If you let multiple copies of documents live on many computers and you have redundancy. Add a P2P system to that and you make it easy to find those documents.
Obviously you have to look at versioning and permissions, but the idea is interesting.
The X-15/B-52 drop scenereo actually allows you to drop *anything* from around 40-50K feet at about 500 MPH (I can't remember the exact numbers, I'm normally too busy to look at those gauges at the time).
That is so much fun! Especially when you turn off the sim's realism for in-flight airframe damage. Gliders do huge loops at that speed. Not much lift for helos though. I see that someone has built a grand piano model, that's going to be my next drop...
Even with airframe damage turned on you can drop a helocopter and see how long you can go before the rotors fall off. Then watch with the third-person camera as you fall on Burbank, or whatever.
What they need is a cruise missle model, then you could play not-so-smart bomb...
I think you folks are pulling out some nice edge cases, but most businesses don't run render farms or weather simulations.
There is the electricity: Even five years from now a 4 GHz, 64 bit CPU will still take more electricity than a 500 MHz, 32 bit CPU. I would imagine that electricity is a big part of Google's continuing expenses, if they can keep that down...
And the upgrades: We run accounting, billing etc. for a 100 person business on an Ultra 1 (umm... 1996?). The machine seems a little slow so we will replace it with something, say, 3 years old. After we do that, we might *never* need anything faster. I know, we've said that before -- but we have really reached a point where 3 years ago was enough. For Intel business desktops we have reached and gone past "enough" a while back as well.
What the article is saying is that more and more business are getting to the point that they don't need to upgrade again. And if Intel stops seeing rapid upgrades then it becomes more difficult to keep up R&D.
I think the article overstates thing a bit, but the facts look pretty solid. If you say "the software is going to require more CPU" then I'll reply that software growth is artificial and managed to require hardware upgrades.
If the gamers want to keep upgrading, fine. But business buyers (such as myself) are starting to think about abandoning the upgrade cycle.
All of this, by the way, should be good for Linux. Businesses might start to be interested in an OS that doesn't push hardware into obsolesense every year.
There is a page at berkeley.edu that talks in more depth about the satellite (http://chips.ssl.berkeley.edu/index.html) but doesn't really cover command/control and software issues. Maybe an Ask Slashdot for the maintainer of the page is in order?
Probably 90% of all non-profit websites could be run off a single 500 MHz computer and most could be run from a sub 100 MHz CPU -- especially if you didn't go crazy with dynamic content.
A big bottleneck can be your connection to the Internet. The company I work for once was "slashdotted" (not by slashdot) for *days*. What happened was our Frame Relay connection ran at 100%, while our web server -- a 300 MHz machine (running Mac OS 8.1 at the time) had plenty of capacity left over.
In what format? Format? The images will just be burned into the *analog* signal. All TV is (well, aside a few complications) is a bunch of raster images, QuickTime it ain't.
Either way, stop whining to/., and by extension, me, about it.
Oh please, there are really only two kinds of slashdot readers, those that come here to whine and those who think the whining is funny. If the particular whining isn't funny to you -- fine. But it is silly to complain about whining here.
If you are going to mod me up, read the post again, all I post here is garbage.
Story ideas for Daryl Carpenter
on
Review: U-571
·
· Score: 1
I've got a few story ideas for Mr. Carpenter:
1) Review LOTRs movie with special attention to how historically inaccurate the movie is.
2) Cover a random Usenet flame thread. The thread should be at least six-months old and on a subject no one cares about. Please be very mad and personally injured, even though the thread doesn't concern yourself.
3) Review the personal web sites of small children, paying close attention to spelling errors and poor design.
4) Review historical texts on WWII. In particular complain that "The Rise and Fall of the Third Reich" uses the word "Nazi" too often and presents an unfair stereotype of Germans during WW II.
Someone needs to apologize for this being on Slashdot, by the way.
Oh good lord, it has come to this... any absurd comment I make about an application of some random idea... not only has been already thought of but has been put into practice and has its own web page.
I wonder if that means my idea for spray-foam hotdog buns is already in the works somewhere...
But yeah, back on topic, I agree that Afgan-bot is pretty horrid -- even as art. At least the tornado people seem to be focusing more on nature than human misery.
Anything that increases safety and stability while filming a tornado would also increase these characteristics in other chaotic situations, such as a war zone or the scene of a terrorist attack.
Hmm? So we can get more voyeuristic video of war and terrorist attacks? I shudder to think of Fox inventing some kind of disaster-bot that would nose around ground-zeros. But hey, ratings trump human dignity, right?
Even if these guys are inventing things that would protect people/cars against tornadoes... tornadoes aren't trying to kill you, as a buch of guys with rocket grenades and machine guns would be -- not that I think tornadoes aren't deadly, mind you. I just don't think that experience with tornadoes would translate well into war.
What a great slashdot parody article! I mean, the irony of complaining about the benchmarking of Windows NT in a configuration where is is still faster than a Linux distribution. Or is the author poking fun at the idea of a Linux person trashing NT because the performace scales up as you add memory?
I read somwhere (sorry, I've forgotten) that Moore's law would not work with mechanical devices like Babbage's engines.
Doesn't Moore's law partly depend on stuff getting smaller and smaller? Aside from nano wouldn't you have trouble making gear wheels small enough to pack enough of them into a reasonable space?
* Confessions of a Crap Artist (basis for the film "Barjo") * Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep? (basis for the film "Blade Runner") * Second Variety (basis for the film "Screamers) * We Can Remember It For You Wholesale (basis for the film "Total Recall")
There also seems to have been a French language animated thing based on UBIK
1) Unix -- Ken Thompson, Dennis Ritchie 2) C -- Thompson, Ritchie, Brian Kernighan 3) Perl -- Larry Wall 4) Sendmail -- Eric Allman 5) NNTP -- (? Two guys from NC) 6) diff/patch -- Larry Wall 7) Linux kernel -- Linus Torvalds 8) Mosaic httpd client -- NCSA 10) GNU utilities -- FSF/GNU
The above list is what I think of when I think 'hack' -- useful new tools or solutions to problems devloped by small groups or individuals. The web site vandals and other intrusion experts just doen't seem to be on the same level as the folks on *this* list.
As 'the computer guy' at one of those under 100 employees companies, I'd say that getting Linux in the door means getting the software vendors on board. I'm speaking here about accounting and sales packages, that's what we really care about, not what program we use for typing.
And for those big packages we pick the software we like first, then ask the vendor what platform to run it on. Right now that means Solaris, but if our vendors started saying Linux is the best platform for our product... so be it.
Why not develop our own stuff? We just don't have the time, or money for enough staff, and I imagine that most small businesses are in the same boat.
So -- convince the software vendors and they will sell Linux to the business community.
Many find the software package they want to use to run thier business, then buy the hardware (plus OS) that runs it. They know that you can't run billing, point of sales, accounting or inventory tracking with generic OS-anything. But there are a lot of business that are running Xenix, SCO, etc. because UNIX is te preferred platform of the vendors that they like and trust.
Find the software vendors that make the stuff that the business world likes and turn them on the Linux. Then it won't matter what new toy MS makes.
Slashdot Mirror
Printer drivers? Ah, um ... no, no, no.
/usr/lib/lp/model/standard counts as a printer driver)
You either spit text at the printer through a serial connection if it is a line printer or you spit PS at it through a network connection if it is a PS printer.
See, simple.
(Although I guess
Oh, and put down that USB FF joystick -- that isn't funny.
Come on, you are a professor of *marketing* and some guy from *Wired* calls you up about a pop-culture issue (that if you think about it, is going to be on slashMac (or Macfilter) the day of online publication).
Wouldn't you be *really* tempted to troll a bit?
I'm surprized that *anyone* gives Wired reporters a straight answer...
Well, considering that they *expect* a GUI, I'm not terribly suprized.
... I don't know ... TextEdit? There are a lot of options.
And since the classic Mac OS days there have been ways to wrap a command line application inside a GUI object. Today it would be even easier, with an AppleScript that ran the command line ap and then sent formatted output to
But if you'd rather be pissed off and hold their hands, don't bother.
I work at a newspaper and I get lots of emails from people wanting articles from any time from yesterday to the late 1800s. Many times I have to tell them that we did not start electronic archiving until 1995, and that if they want earlier stories they have to go to the library and look through micofilm.
There is a lot of historical information that might not interest the slashdot crowd -- but is of interest to folks trying to get an idea of how their grandfathers lived or fill out dry geneology information with articles about the people (or the people they lived around).
Many times I felt really bad for these folks -- who can't always visit our local library -- but I haven't seen a cost effective way to digitize microfilm.
Sure, for technical issues, trivia, current events, advocacy issues, sports and 'pr0n' the Internet is great. But there are vasts amounts of low-level historical information that will probably never be on the Internet. Maybe there is no way to correct this, and maybe this stuff isn't really all that important. But the information is there, even if people can't find it on the Internet.
The important thing to remember is that just because something isn't on the Internet, doesn't mean it doesn't exist.
A while back I talked to a guy who runs a business computer network and he was griping that you can't hardly buy computers anymore with less than 40GB of hard drive space. Most of that space is wasted for office workers.
He was looking into using P2P to replace file servers. If you let multiple copies of documents live on many computers and you have redundancy. Add a P2P system to that and you make it easy to find those documents.
Obviously you have to look at versioning and permissions, but the idea is interesting.
The X-15/B-52 drop scenereo actually allows you to drop *anything* from around 40-50K feet at about 500 MPH (I can't remember the exact numbers, I'm normally too busy to look at those gauges at the time).
That is so much fun! Especially when you turn off the sim's realism for in-flight airframe damage. Gliders do huge loops at that speed. Not much lift for helos though. I see that someone has built a grand piano model, that's going to be my next drop...
Even with airframe damage turned on you can drop a helocopter and see how long you can go before the rotors fall off. Then watch with the third-person camera as you fall on Burbank, or whatever.
What they need is a cruise missle model, then you could play not-so-smart bomb...
I think you folks are pulling out some nice edge cases, but most businesses don't run render farms or weather simulations.
... 1996?). The machine seems a little slow so we will replace it with something, say, 3 years old. After we do that, we might *never* need anything faster. I know, we've said that before -- but we have really reached a point where 3 years ago was enough. For Intel business desktops we have reached and gone past "enough" a while back as well.
There is the electricity:
Even five years from now a 4 GHz, 64 bit CPU will still take more electricity than a 500 MHz, 32 bit CPU. I would imagine that electricity is a big part of Google's continuing expenses, if they can keep that down...
And the upgrades:
We run accounting, billing etc. for a 100 person business on an Ultra 1 (umm
What the article is saying is that more and more business are getting to the point that they don't need to upgrade again. And if Intel stops seeing rapid upgrades then it becomes more difficult to keep up R&D.
I think the article overstates thing a bit, but the facts look pretty solid. If you say "the software is going to require more CPU" then I'll reply that software growth is artificial and managed to require hardware upgrades.
If the gamers want to keep upgrading, fine. But business buyers (such as myself) are starting to think about abandoning the upgrade cycle.
All of this, by the way, should be good for Linux. Businesses might start to be interested in an OS that doesn't push hardware into obsolesense every year.
Anyway...
There is a page at berkeley.edu that talks in more depth about the satellite (http://chips.ssl.berkeley.edu/index.html) but doesn't really cover command/control and software issues. Maybe an Ask Slashdot for the maintainer of the page is in order?
I'm not up on chemistry and electrical engineering to know if this stuff actually makes sense. Would the stuff presented in the stories actually work?
If so, it is nice to see funny, clever hard-scifi -- it might make a nice book or short story.
I wouldn't worry too much.
Probably 90% of all non-profit websites could be run off a single 500 MHz computer and most could be run from a sub 100 MHz CPU -- especially if you didn't go crazy with dynamic content.
A big bottleneck can be your connection to the Internet. The company I work for once was "slashdotted" (not by slashdot) for *days*. What happened was our Frame Relay connection ran at 100%, while our web server -- a 300 MHz machine (running Mac OS 8.1 at the time) had plenty of capacity left over.
In what format? Format? The images will just be burned into the *analog* signal. All TV is (well, aside a few complications) is a bunch of raster images, QuickTime it ain't.
If you are going to mod me up, read the post again, all I post here is garbage.
I've got a few story ideas for Mr. Carpenter:
1) Review LOTRs movie with special attention to how historically inaccurate the movie is.
2) Cover a random Usenet flame thread. The thread should be at least six-months old and on a subject no one cares about. Please be very mad and personally injured, even though the thread doesn't concern yourself.
3) Review the personal web sites of small children, paying close attention to spelling errors and poor design.
4) Review historical texts on WWII. In particular complain that "The Rise and Fall of the Third Reich" uses the word "Nazi" too often and presents an unfair stereotype of Germans during WW II.
Someone needs to apologize for this being on Slashdot, by the way.
Oh good lord, it has come to this ... any absurd comment I make about an application of some random idea ... not only has been already thought of but has been put into practice and has its own web page.
I wonder if that means my idea for spray-foam hotdog buns is already in the works somewhere...
But yeah, back on topic, I agree that Afgan-bot is pretty horrid -- even as art. At least the tornado people seem to be focusing more on nature than human misery.
Anything that increases safety and stability while filming a tornado would also increase these characteristics in other chaotic situations, such as a war zone or the scene of a terrorist attack.
... tornadoes aren't trying to kill you, as a buch of guys with rocket grenades and machine guns would be -- not that I think tornadoes aren't deadly, mind you. I just don't think that experience with tornadoes would translate well into war.
Hmm? So we can get more voyeuristic video of war and terrorist attacks? I shudder to think of Fox inventing some kind of disaster-bot that would nose around ground-zeros. But hey, ratings trump human dignity, right?
Even if these guys are inventing things that would protect people/cars against tornadoes
What a great slashdot parody article! I mean, the irony of complaining about the benchmarking of Windows NT in a configuration where is is still faster than a Linux distribution. Or is the author poking fun at the idea of a Linux person trashing NT because the performace scales up as you add memory?
I read somwhere (sorry, I've forgotten) that Moore's law would not work with mechanical devices like Babbage's engines.
Doesn't Moore's law partly depend on stuff getting smaller and smaller? Aside from nano wouldn't you have trouble making gear wheels small enough to pack enough of them into a reasonable space?
Films from PKD's stuff?
. htm
From http://www.kruse.demon.co.uk/philip.htm
* Confessions of a Crap Artist (basis for the film "Barjo")
* Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep? (basis for the film "Blade Runner")
* Second Variety (basis for the film "Screamers)
* We Can Remember It For You Wholesale (basis for the film "Total Recall")
There also seems to have been a French language animated thing based on UBIK
http://www.cdrom-depot.qc.ca/Rlelievre/chron106
Well, there already is a Virtual PC with Linux for the Mac so ...
Mac > Virtual PC > Linux > Wine > Windows Palm Emulator > Gameboy Emulator for Palm
That's six parts, if not six degrees of separation.
The point is that there are a lot of artists who are seriously out of touch with the kind of art that ordinary people want to have around them.
Isn't this a little old, by the way? I remember hearing about the survey months and months ago.
Maybe not in this order, but:
1) Unix -- Ken Thompson, Dennis Ritchie
2) C -- Thompson, Ritchie, Brian Kernighan
3) Perl -- Larry Wall
4) Sendmail -- Eric Allman
5) NNTP -- (? Two guys from NC)
6) diff/patch -- Larry Wall
7) Linux kernel -- Linus Torvalds
8) Mosaic httpd client -- NCSA
10) GNU utilities -- FSF/GNU
The above list is what I think of when I think 'hack' -- useful new tools or solutions to problems devloped by small groups or individuals. The web site vandals and other intrusion experts just doen't seem to be on the same level as the folks on *this* list.
But only if you have a few servers, there are really only two machine names in his books. But the ones he had sound good:
valis (for a SMP machine?)
albemuth (for an old machine? a gateway?)
If you had any more I would vote for obscure ScFi computer names, none of this hal, wintermute stuff. Any more obscure SciFi machine names out there?
I've always wanted to use the 'tower' names for gateways or firewalls.
DRouse
As 'the computer guy' at one of those under 100 employees companies, I'd say that getting Linux in the door means getting the software vendors on board. I'm speaking here about accounting and sales packages, that's what we really care about, not what program we use for typing.
... so be it.
And for those big packages we pick the software we like first, then ask the vendor what platform to run it on. Right now that means Solaris, but if our vendors started saying Linux is the best platform for our product
Why not develop our own stuff? We just don't have the time, or money for enough staff, and I imagine that most small businesses are in the same boat.
So -- convince the software vendors and they will sell Linux to the business community.
Many find the software package they want to use to run thier business, then buy the hardware (plus OS) that runs it. They know that you can't run billing, point of sales, accounting or inventory tracking with generic OS-anything. But there are a lot of business that are running Xenix, SCO, etc. because UNIX is te preferred platform of the vendors that they like and trust.
Find the software vendors that make the stuff that the business world likes and turn them on the Linux. Then it won't matter what new toy MS makes.