...back in the 80's. Hour 25 is now online-only, but it was a 2-hour Friday-night program on KPFK-FM in Los Angeles, hosted by Mike Hodel and Mel Gilden, at the time, and Harlan was a frequent guest. No doubt, Eric Foss has the entire broadcast archived on tape somewhere.
From what I recall, Ellison said something like, "I attended a party in New York, along with some other writers, including L. Ron Hubbard, and Hubbard was saying something about 'Y'know what I should do? Invent a new religion. That's where all the real money is.' And, next thing you know, he came out with his next book, 'Dianetics'."
Agreed, keeping old boxes as production-not-pollution is environment-friendly. The lower power consumption of those older boxes is environment-friendly too, though.
Pull open an older box with a Socket-5 Pentium (say, 75 MHz) in it and look at the thermal components -- heatsinks, fans, etc. There's very little there: in a unit on-hand here, there's just one fan for PS and one for chassis, the CPU only has a heatsink, and it's the only mobo component (other than voltage regulators) that has one.
Compare that with what's in even a PII box: more fans including the one on the CPU, more and heavier heatsinking, and at least one chipset component is heatsunk. If it's got an AGP card, there's probably a heatsink there too.
Even without an AC ammeter, you can visually estimate which machine is going to put a smaller hit on your electricity bill, and thus your environment, when it's put into 24/7 service for something like a firewall or a HA controller, just by what it takes to get rid of the heat it throws off.
The IBM PC was pivotal because it was a relatively cheap microcomputer sold by IBM. The clout of that name was enormous, plus the PC actually ran 16-bit code in an address space ten times larger than the 8080's 64K address space and wasn't hampered by the S-100 bus's 8080-derived timing contraints, and that was what killed off the S-100 machines.
The Boca Raton engineering team who developed that machine are the ones who standardized the monitor, the first few generations of screen graphics (CGA, EGA, VGA -- Hercules was a popular early mono entry there, and the only non-IBM standard-by-public-acclaim), the keyboard, the serial and parallel ports, and actually changed the market dominance for floppy-disk-drive controllers from Western Digital chips to Intel chips just by using them. The AT-IDE hard drives we use today are a result of pushing the original PC-AT's Western Digital hard-drive-controller design (one board controlling two MFM drives -- in case you wondered about the master/slave/single jumpering on your HD) down into the HD, duplicating it per-drive, to get the S/N up.
CP/M had none of these standardized peripherals because the computers it was developed on and for didn't have them. CP/M had two named serial ports and one named printer port, and one of those serial ports, CON:, was the system console. What you hooked up to that port was a matter of what was available and what you could afford; early CP/M users used KSR33 Teletypes. My console was a Wyse-50, but I came late to the party.
MS-DOS used as standards only what was already on the IBM PC. Thank IBM.
CP/M was the icebreaker there. It ran on any 8080, 8085 or Z80 based microcomputer that had floppy disk drives (which IBM pioneered; look up "Shugart" history). It was arcane -- to adapt it to a new computer, somebody had to write a new BIOS -- but the BIOS was a set of system calls and you just had to understand how your floppy controller chip worked and what your disk geometry was. The BIOS was in 8080 assembly (CP/M came with an assembler), and small enough to fit in the outer one or two tracks of a 128k 8" SSSD floppy.
When IBM came out with the IBM PC, it was hurting from prior and present antitrust restraints, so IBM wanted an outside source to provide the operating system. Digital Research almost got that default-OS slot for CP/M-86, but MS priced for volume, using a codebase stolen from DRI (MSDOS was based on somebody's cribbing of CP/M-2.2, right down to the easter-egg).
There were already a LOT of CP/M-capable computers on the market by then; S-100 (old IEEE-696) boards were rapidly achieving commodity status, enough so that you could integrate together a computer much as you do a beige-box PC today... so that particular horse was already well away from the barn. MS gets no points here.
In fact, if you're being grateful for commodity PCs, you should be thanking Compaq and Phoenix Technologies Limited, who, using Chinese-wall clean-room methodology, replicated the IBM PC BIOS, making PC clones possible. And then you can thank the members of the ISA consortium, who, when IBM released the Microchanneled PS/1 to try to drive the industry back under their proprietary wing, banded together to promote their own open standards such as VESA (IIRC), extensions to the PC-AT design which advanced the PC platform with more powerful commodity boards as the technology improved, making Microchannel irrelevant.
MS didn't start pushing their own standards until they had a decent lock on the OS/apps market, enough so that people would listen to them at WINHEC and the like. They didn't initiate the setting of industry standards, they only commandeered the process for their own aims. They're opportunists in search of a monopoly and always have been, and, thanks to the power of money to buy lawyers in court and in public roles, they got one.
If Dartmouth BASIC had been GPL'd, there probably never would have been a Microsoft, because the code wouldn't have stayed stolen.
In which case somebody would have done more or less what they did, that is, write a BASIC that'd run on an Altair, because the Altair-8800 come out before there was a Micro-Soft. Maybe Gordon Eubanks would have written CBASIC earlier. Or maybe Mountain View FORTH would've replaced it.
Instead of MSDOS and Microsoft, we'd have CP/M and Digital Research (Gary Kildall contracted for Intel, not for MS, before starting DRI), and they would have been pricier and more hardnosed (MS knew how to look friendlier back then). Would that have stopped Stallman and BSD? Not a chance... so there would have been a Unix-style OS when Intel CPUs, and hard drive densities, and DRAM densities, matured enough to support them, and sooner or later there would be a free-as-in-country Unix-style OS for commodity PCs, just-because-there's-a-Richard-and-his-ilk.
Maybe GEM would've matured enough to provide the just-enough-windowing-environment category that the 386s needed, or maybe Desqview would've gone graphic, because neither PARC nor Apple depended on the impact of MS for their existence, so the WIMP interface was inevitable.
From a 50-year retrospective, it all would have looked substantially the same if Microsoft never happened, except we'd probably all be bitching about Gary Kildall instead.
Now, Intel, on the other hand... No matter what their business ethics might be, those guys were pivotal. TI was the other first-microprocessor contender, and they didn't get it right for quite a while. Making Intel go bankrupt, say, by making them buy back all those pattern-sensitive 1101 DRAM chips, would have seriously delayed the computer technology we're so fond of.
Okay, I'm killing my mods. Anybody know how to fix a mouse-slip in moderation once you've hit 'moderate'? The parent post should NOT have been modded off-topic by my mouse.
...that goes WAAAAAAY back, and hasn't changed much.
Remember when the 80286 came out? Remember the B-step '286, that Intel didn't want to admit had a bug in its flag storage until the B-steps were sold and the C-steps were coming out of the fabs? Imagine having your customers returning hardware for that -- how many trays of CPUs can you eat before you're Chapter-11? That's just one example.
There was an Intel seminar in SoCal where the Intel rep stood up there at the podium, pointing his pointer at the screen where the next transparency had just been put into the overhead projector and was being shown, and said, "Next, let's talk about Intel service"... and the whole hall full of engineers and programmers cracked up, it was that funny.
Lately, Intel has been doing TheRightThing[tm] more often, but not dependably. This is just another instance of where it's "funny so you don't waste your energy crying". With notable exceptions, Intel cares about Intel, full-stop.
The annoyance factor and the outrage will be big pushes for the OpenDNS idea, especially once the cc people wise up and get on board to stop the extortion.
Maybe ICANN won't notice as everybody migrates away from their little empire of root servers until everybody's already used to the idea; that will eliminate the 'single point of political failure'.
Verisign is busy proving all over again that FLOSS has been demonstrating: when it comes to the Internet, the only people you can trust are everybody.
Anybody who's big enough to fight back, like Miyazaki, they can license and dub. Who knows, the result might even be good, like Kiki's Delivery Service.
Anybody else over there, they can simply rip off, just like Kimba The White Lion became The Lion King, and Nadia: Secret Of Blue Water became Atlantis. The possibilities are endless: Neon Genesis Evangelionking, Darkwing Crisis, Ah! My Fairy-godmother... maybe even Goofy One-Half!
To actually be helpful, the AV program should step through the Received: lines, comparing them with a site-configured list of trusted servers. The "abuse@ISP" of the first step beyond the trusted-server chain gets the nastygram. In this regard, virus-mail handling is no different from any other UBE/UCE.
Example: One of my email accounts, on earthlink.net, gets some mail via an alias set in IEEE's computer.org domain, so the mail servers at computer.org go in my configuration's trusted-server list. I get other mail directly via earthlink's servers; those also go in my trusted-server list. As I step down through the Received: lines in a given email, each one has a from phrase and a by phrase, and maybe a for phrase which can be ignored. The first from phrase where the hostname doesn't match anything in my trusted-server list is where I stop: in most cases, that machine is the source of the email. Any Received: lines beyond that one are usually bogus ones put in by the originator (and sometimes ISPs like cox.net will be fooled by them and reject a spam-complaint as "not ours" because of them).
There are exceptions: AOL, for instance, will pass a given email through several postal servers on its way out of their domain, so you have to keep stepping until you hit what looks like a client account (with 'ipt' in the hostname). In most cases, though, the first host beyond the chain-of-trust is the guilty party, and then it's simple enough to compose an abuse@ISP address from that.
In all of the above, the only hostname that matters is the one obtained by reverse-lookup, or your own lookup of the source's IP. A spam source will dependably lie about itself, in some case even offering the receiver's own domain name in the HELO greeting, and current viruses do the same.
Until the AV programs are smartened enough to do the above anti-spam chain-sequencing, they're worse than useless.
This came out in the "anti-trust" trial, remember?
Windows is supposed to run slower with each new version, so you will have to buy current hardware to run it, at new-technology prices, so that the cost of the Windows OS, as a proportion of the total price of the delivered computer, will stay below a level they figured is likely to trigger a consumer revolt.
That's what I did, having gone round and round those pages looking in vain for a "delete this account AGAIN" checkbox or button (I got a confirmed delete back when I stopped moderating maillists there a few years back, but hey, Halloween wasn't so long ago, it must've risen from the grave or something).
They can now send all the spam they like to the new address: uce@ftc.gov
Sorry, but this Advanced-class ham has to disagree with you, based on personal experience and observation.
I have never experienced, nor have I ever encountered anyone who has experienced a health related problems for working in a high RF field.
Back in the late 70's - early 80's when I was getting into ham radio, QST was warning that the deaths due to leukemia in the Amateur community were four times the national average.
You live in an ocean of electromagnetic energy.
I'm very aware of it, thank you: I'm an RF sensitive. I found out that delightful fact about myself back in '78 at a Novice class held in a large cafeteria. They hung a 10-meter dipole at one end of the hall and loaded up an FT-101 into it to find a sample QSO. I got a sudden fierce headache and had to retreat to the other end of the room.
I could handle five watts of HF without nervous-system discomfort; I already knew that from my CB days. When I got my ticket, I stayed QRPp for that reason.
Whatever the physical basis is for the effect, it's frequency-related. A handheld CB at 27 MHz didn't bother me much at all, but even a watt is too much up at 2 meters. After a 10-minute QSO using a TH-21AT and a rubber duckie near the head, my eyes have that "all day in the beach sun" feeling and my thinking is shot for a while.
I coped by getting good at matching my antennas. If all the RF goes up the feedline and none of it comes back, I'm fine. Even at 1.9 GHz PCS, a magmount gets the signal out of the car and makes normal hands-free telephone use possible. If I can't get the RF away from my head, I just won't key the rig.
When I got into computers, I found that I could tell if the machine was on by sticking my hand down in there and seeing if it tingled. (Considering the prevalence of power indicators, this wasn't a very useful talent.) That was on 8080-driven S-100 bus machines; I don't even try that trick with current machines, but I know that touchpad cursor controls are mildly annoying to the fingertip, and I put up with a soft "ringing in the ears" kind of constant squeal in my head, clear across the house, if my computers and their CRT monitors are on.
The effect is probably more electrostatic than electromagnetic. I say this because I attended my child in an MRI session and had no ill effects. If it was magnetic I should have been clobbered then.
The effect might have to do with neurochemistry in some way. I say this because, if I let my nutrition slip, particularly calcium and magnesium, I am more susceptible.
These are my informal personal observations based on experiences. I think that I'm probably just a little more sensitive than normal folks. It's enough to tell me that there's something there, and saying that it can't be there because it doesn't fit your worldview won't change the facts.
It seems to me that the first order of business should be to compare it against Caldera's Linux tree to see if it lights up at 100%. How do you know it was the UNIX tree that was shredded? "Oops... that wasn't a shred-tree we intend to use in court."
My guess is that the virus-writer, realizing from the online news that his/her precious 20 IP numbers were being decoded and chased down, went around to all of those machines that were still online and switched in that porn-site target, to avoid disclosing further strategy.
With a lot of luck, maybe forensics on the first few machines taken offline will yield the real download address, and we can see what that clown was really up to.
Slashdot Mirror
Although, considering that 'original sin' is the probably-longest-running protection racket, religious content pushing it should be under *.mob.
You're new here, aren't you.
Well, according to Kimball Atwood IV of Skeptical Inquirer (here [csicop.org]),
Ahem. Why are you dragging religion into this?
...back in the 80's. Hour 25 is now online-only, but it was a 2-hour Friday-night program on KPFK-FM in Los Angeles, hosted by Mike Hodel and Mel Gilden, at the time, and Harlan was a frequent guest. No doubt, Eric Foss has the entire broadcast archived on tape somewhere.
From what I recall, Ellison said something like, "I attended a party in New York, along with some other writers, including L. Ron Hubbard, and Hubbard was saying something about 'Y'know what I should do? Invent a new religion. That's where all the real money is.' And, next thing you know, he came out with his next book, 'Dianetics'."
Everybody knows you don't buy beer: you rent it.
Agreed, keeping old boxes as production-not-pollution is environment-friendly. The lower power consumption of those older boxes is environment-friendly too, though.
Pull open an older box with a Socket-5 Pentium (say, 75 MHz) in it and look at the thermal components -- heatsinks, fans, etc. There's very little there: in a unit on-hand here, there's just one fan for PS and one for chassis, the CPU only has a heatsink, and it's the only mobo component (other than voltage regulators) that has one.
Compare that with what's in even a PII box: more fans including the one on the CPU, more and heavier heatsinking, and at least one chipset component is heatsunk. If it's got an AGP card, there's probably a heatsink there too.
Even without an AC ammeter, you can visually estimate which machine is going to put a smaller hit on your electricity bill, and thus your environment, when it's put into 24/7 service for something like a firewall or a HA controller, just by what it takes to get rid of the heat it throws off.
The IBM PC was pivotal because it was a relatively cheap microcomputer sold by IBM. The clout of that name was enormous, plus the PC actually ran 16-bit code in an address space ten times larger than the 8080's 64K address space and wasn't hampered by the S-100 bus's 8080-derived timing contraints, and that was what killed off the S-100 machines.
The Boca Raton engineering team who developed that machine are the ones who standardized the monitor, the first few generations of screen graphics (CGA, EGA, VGA -- Hercules was a popular early mono entry there, and the only non-IBM standard-by-public-acclaim), the keyboard, the serial and parallel ports, and actually changed the market dominance for floppy-disk-drive controllers from Western Digital chips to Intel chips just by using them. The AT-IDE hard drives we use today are a result of pushing the original PC-AT's Western Digital hard-drive-controller design (one board controlling two MFM drives -- in case you wondered about the master/slave/single jumpering on your HD) down into the HD, duplicating it per-drive, to get the S/N up.
CP/M had none of these standardized peripherals because the computers it was developed on and for didn't have them. CP/M had two named serial ports and one named printer port, and one of those serial ports, CON:, was the system console. What you hooked up to that port was a matter of what was available and what you could afford; early CP/M users used KSR33 Teletypes. My console was a Wyse-50, but I came late to the party.
MS-DOS used as standards only what was already on the IBM PC. Thank IBM.
Read the book "Just For Fun". (The title's pun says worlds about LT's attitude IMO)
"Before MS, HARDWARE WAS PROPRIETARY."
/apps market, enough so that people would listen to them at WINHEC and the like. They didn't initiate the setting of industry standards, they only commandeered the process for their own aims. They're opportunists in search of a monopoly and always have been, and, thanks to the power of money to buy lawyers in court and in public roles, they got one.
CP/M was the icebreaker there. It ran on any 8080, 8085 or Z80 based microcomputer that had floppy disk drives (which IBM pioneered; look up "Shugart" history). It was arcane -- to adapt it to a new computer, somebody had to write a new BIOS -- but the BIOS was a set of system calls and you just had to understand how your floppy controller chip worked and what your disk geometry was. The BIOS was in 8080 assembly (CP/M came with an assembler), and small enough to fit in the outer one or two tracks of a 128k 8" SSSD floppy.
When IBM came out with the IBM PC, it was hurting from prior and present antitrust restraints, so IBM wanted an outside source to provide the operating system. Digital Research almost got that default-OS slot for CP/M-86, but MS priced for volume, using a codebase stolen from DRI (MSDOS was based on somebody's cribbing of CP/M-2.2, right down to the easter-egg).
There were already a LOT of CP/M-capable computers on the market by then; S-100 (old IEEE-696) boards were rapidly achieving commodity status, enough so that you could integrate together a computer much as you do a beige-box PC today... so that particular horse was already well away from the barn. MS gets no points here.
In fact, if you're being grateful for commodity PCs, you should be thanking Compaq and Phoenix Technologies Limited, who, using Chinese-wall clean-room methodology, replicated the IBM PC BIOS, making PC clones possible. And then you can thank the members of the ISA consortium, who, when IBM released the Microchanneled PS/1 to try to drive the industry back under their proprietary wing, banded together to promote their own open standards such as VESA (IIRC), extensions to the PC-AT design which advanced the PC platform with more powerful commodity boards as the technology improved, making Microchannel irrelevant.
MS didn't start pushing their own standards until they had a decent lock on the OS
If Dartmouth BASIC had been GPL'd, there probably never would have been a Microsoft, because the code wouldn't have stayed stolen.
In which case somebody would have done more or less what they did, that is, write a BASIC that'd run on an Altair, because the Altair-8800 come out before there was a Micro-Soft. Maybe Gordon Eubanks would have written CBASIC earlier. Or maybe Mountain View FORTH would've replaced it.
Instead of MSDOS and Microsoft, we'd have CP/M and Digital Research (Gary Kildall contracted for Intel, not for MS, before starting DRI), and they would have been pricier and more hardnosed (MS knew how to look friendlier back then). Would that have stopped Stallman and BSD? Not a chance... so there would have been a Unix-style OS when Intel CPUs, and hard drive densities, and DRAM densities, matured enough to support them, and sooner or later there would be a free-as-in-country Unix-style OS for commodity PCs, just-because-there's-a-Richard-and-his-ilk.
Maybe GEM would've matured enough to provide the just-enough-windowing-environment category that the 386s needed, or maybe Desqview would've gone graphic, because neither PARC nor Apple depended on the impact of MS for their existence, so the WIMP interface was inevitable.
From a 50-year retrospective, it all would have looked substantially the same if Microsoft never happened, except we'd probably all be bitching about Gary Kildall instead.
Now, Intel, on the other hand... No matter what their business ethics might be, those guys were pivotal. TI was the other first-microprocessor contender, and they didn't get it right for quite a while. Making Intel go bankrupt, say, by making them buy back all those pattern-sensitive 1101 DRAM chips, would have seriously delayed the computer technology we're so fond of.
That's my take on it, anyway.
Okay, I'm killing my mods. Anybody know how to fix a mouse-slip in moderation once you've hit 'moderate'? The parent post should NOT have been modded off-topic by my mouse.
...that goes WAAAAAAY back, and hasn't changed much.
Remember when the 80286 came out? Remember the B-step '286, that Intel didn't want to admit had a bug in its flag storage until the B-steps were sold and the C-steps were coming out of the fabs? Imagine having your customers returning hardware for that -- how many trays of CPUs can you eat before you're Chapter-11? That's just one example.
There was an Intel seminar in SoCal where the Intel rep stood up there at the podium, pointing his pointer at the screen where the next transparency had just been put into the overhead projector and was being shown, and said, "Next, let's talk about Intel service"... and the whole hall full of engineers and programmers cracked up, it was that funny.
Lately, Intel has been doing TheRightThing[tm] more often, but not dependably. This is just another instance of where it's "funny so you don't waste your energy crying". With notable exceptions, Intel cares about Intel, full-stop.
The annoyance factor and the outrage will be big pushes for the OpenDNS idea, especially once the cc people wise up and get on board to stop the extortion.
Maybe ICANN won't notice as everybody migrates away from their little empire of root servers until everybody's already used to the idea; that will eliminate the 'single point of political failure'.
Verisign is busy proving all over again that FLOSS has been demonstrating: when it comes to the Internet, the only people you can trust are everybody.
Anybody who's big enough to fight back, like Miyazaki, they can license and dub. Who knows, the result might even be good, like Kiki's Delivery Service.
Anybody else over there, they can simply rip off, just like Kimba The White Lion became The Lion King, and Nadia: Secret Of Blue Water became Atlantis.
The possibilities are endless: Neon Genesis Evangelionking, Darkwing Crisis, Ah! My Fairy-godmother... maybe even Goofy One-Half!
To actually be helpful, the AV program should step through the Received: lines, comparing them with a site-configured list of trusted servers. The "abuse@ISP" of the first step beyond the trusted-server chain gets the nastygram. In this regard, virus-mail handling is no different from any other UBE/UCE.
Example: One of my email accounts, on earthlink.net, gets some mail via an alias set in IEEE's computer.org domain, so the mail servers at computer.org go in my configuration's trusted-server list. I get other mail directly via earthlink's servers; those also go in my trusted-server list.
As I step down through the Received: lines in a given email, each one has a from phrase and a by phrase, and maybe a for phrase which can be ignored. The first from phrase where the hostname doesn't match anything in my trusted-server list is where I stop: in most cases, that machine is the source of the email. Any Received: lines beyond that one are usually bogus ones put in by the originator (and sometimes ISPs like cox.net will be fooled by them and reject a spam-complaint as "not ours" because of them).
There are exceptions: AOL, for instance, will pass a given email through several postal servers on its way out of their domain, so you have to keep stepping until you hit what looks like a client account (with 'ipt' in the hostname). In most cases, though, the first host beyond the chain-of-trust is the guilty party, and then it's simple enough to compose an abuse@ISP address from that.
In all of the above, the only hostname that matters is the one obtained by reverse-lookup, or your own lookup of the source's IP. A spam source will dependably lie about itself, in some case even offering the receiver's own domain name in the HELO greeting, and current viruses do the same.
Until the AV programs are smartened enough to do the above anti-spam chain-sequencing, they're worse than useless.
This came out in the "anti-trust" trial, remember?
Windows is supposed to run slower with each new version, so you will have to buy current hardware to run it, at new-technology prices, so that the cost of the Windows OS, as a proportion of the total price of the delivered computer, will stay below a level they figured is likely to trigger a consumer revolt.
There's nothing accidental about it.
Or wouldn't you touch that with a ten-foot poll?
That's what I did, having gone round and round those pages looking in vain for a "delete this account AGAIN" checkbox or button (I got a confirmed delete back when I stopped moderating maillists there a few years back, but hey, Halloween wasn't so long ago, it must've risen from the grave or something).
They can now send all the spam they like to the new address: uce@ftc.gov
If corrupted voting machines and their owners give us kings, we have the guillotine.
Thank you, Daniel Bernstein. You had the guts to stand up for your principles, doing us all a great service in the process.
There. Now go ahead: Mod -1: politically incorrect.
Sorry, but this Advanced-class ham has to disagree with you, based on personal experience and observation.
I have never experienced, nor have I ever encountered anyone who has experienced a health related problems for working in a high RF field.
Back in the late 70's - early 80's when I was getting into ham radio, QST was warning that the deaths due to leukemia in the Amateur community were four times the national average.
You live in an ocean of electromagnetic energy.
I'm very aware of it, thank you: I'm an RF sensitive. I found out that delightful fact about myself back in '78 at a Novice class held in a large cafeteria. They hung a 10-meter dipole at one end of the hall and loaded up an FT-101 into it to find a sample QSO. I got a sudden fierce headache and had to retreat to the other end of the room.
I could handle five watts of HF without nervous-system discomfort; I already knew that from my CB days. When I got my ticket, I stayed QRPp for that reason.
Whatever the physical basis is for the effect, it's frequency-related. A handheld CB at 27 MHz didn't bother me much at all, but even a watt is too much up at 2 meters. After a 10-minute QSO using a TH-21AT and a rubber duckie near the head, my eyes have that "all day in the beach sun" feeling and my thinking is shot for a while.
I coped by getting good at matching my antennas. If all the RF goes up the feedline and none of it comes back, I'm fine. Even at 1.9 GHz PCS, a magmount gets the signal out of the car and makes normal hands-free telephone use possible. If I can't get the RF away from my head, I just won't key the rig.
When I got into computers, I found that I could tell if the machine was on by sticking my hand down in there and seeing if it tingled. (Considering the prevalence of power indicators, this wasn't a very useful talent.) That was on 8080-driven S-100 bus machines; I don't even try
that trick with current machines, but I know that touchpad cursor controls are mildly annoying to the fingertip, and I put up with a soft "ringing in the ears" kind of constant squeal in my head, clear across the house, if my computers and their CRT monitors are on.
The effect is probably more electrostatic than electromagnetic. I say this because I attended my child in an MRI session and had no ill effects. If it was magnetic I should have been clobbered then.
The effect might have to do with neurochemistry in some way. I say this because, if I let my nutrition slip, particularly calcium and magnesium, I am more susceptible.
These are my informal personal observations based on experiences. I think that I'm probably just a little more sensitive than normal folks. It's enough to tell me that there's something there, and saying that it can't be there because it doesn't fit your worldview won't change the facts.
It seems to me that the first order of business should be to compare it against Caldera's Linux tree to see if it lights up at 100%. How do you know it was the UNIX tree that was shredded? "Oops... that wasn't a shred-tree we intend to use in court."
My guess is that the virus-writer, realizing from the online news that his/her precious 20 IP numbers were being decoded and chased down, went around to all of those machines that were still online and switched in that porn-site target, to avoid disclosing further strategy.
With a lot of luck, maybe forensics on the first few machines taken offline will yield the real download address, and we can see what that clown was really up to.
Is there a chance that this barratry plus pump-and-dump qualifies under RICO?
No, of course not. I'm sure that, by the time CmdrTaco chose that icon for the topic, he'd figured out that SCO is a mickey-mouse operation.