Uggh, why am I thinking of animated paper clips when I read this.
"Good morning, it looks like you want to wake up, do you want me to make coffee, yes, no help?"
"Good morning, you hit the snooze bar, do you want to sleep for 10 more minutes, yes, no, help?"
I agree that there's a fortune to be made in a web search engine that works well, but I think Katz is missing the boat on this Clotho deal.
Rather than have an agent to query my refrigerator about it's inventory, I'll just stick with a dumb refrigerator and open the door.
Rather than have an agent spoof my intelligent drug and chemical sniffing toilet, I'll just stick with an old fashioned mechanical one.
Rather than having another GUI layer on my PC's, I'll do nicely with a telnet window.
I think a great example of embedding complex software in everyday appliances is your car. Someone from 1930 could drive one of today's cars, all the software that controls the fuel injectors, oxygen mix and ABS brakes is invisible to the user.
... could be hazardous to your health in zero G. The jizz leaves your penis at 120MPH and will richochet around the ship at high speeds, possibly putting someone's eye out.
Hmm, sounds like a nice throwaway for my X-rated science fiction short story.
Assuming an average male mass of 75 kg, and an average ejaculatory volume of 5 cc for arguments sake, translating into 5 gm assuming the density is about equal to water, sent forth at 50 m/s, we have a semen drive capable of 3 mm/s delta-v per orgasm.
Hmm, pretty slow, better work on getting Ron Jeremy in orbit.
Does anyone know if ZIP guns still have the click of death problem? You know, you fire them a few times, and then they destroy the magazine, making it unusuable.
Also, what fires faster, a SCSI ZIP gun or an EPP ZIP Gun?
I'm still irked by some Car Wars games I played in high school, 17 years ago.
One of my friends had built up a nearly invulnerable character (quadruple ace at least) and proceeded to always win with his dual laser pickup truck, while everyone else suffered with recoilless rifles (it was his house, so if he said it was fair for a quad ace with $200,000 to go against newbies on $40,000, it was). I was too stupid at the time to figure out how to beat him, and just kept hoping for 12 lucky throws in a row.
Today, though, quad flamethrowers, smoke screens and mine droppers. Lasers are pretty useless when they can't fire through smoke.
Ah well, as soon as I perfect my time machine, first thing I do is pass this info to my younger self before one of those games, noo, first thing I do is pass some condoms to my younger self as a college freshman, then the flamethrower trick second, noo, there was my friend who I was attracted to but didn't want to jeopardize my friendship with, though I haven't heard from her in years, so third thing I do with a working time machine...
I still play Car Wars solo occasionally, the last time was 6 months ago on an overnight.
1) go the the prom with a date 2) go to the prom stag 3) play Traveller 4) play AD&D 5) play loderunner 6) surf the web 7) chat on irc 8) turnips, turnips, turnips
I'm pretty sure my choice was 3, since it was 1984.
She's three, and right now her favorite computer activities are painting with Gimp or Paint (she prefers adding strokes to Teletubby images), searching the web for cat pictures, or posing for my parallel port camera.
The other day I captivated her by playing a wav of her crying at 2 months, she couldn't get enough of it.
Once she can read, I think I'll teach her to rebuild the kernel.
Because the people at NASA are big fans of Jules Verne's "From the Earth to the Moon".
The real reason:
When you launch a rocket into a normal (non retrograde) equitorial orbit, you add the velocity of the launching site, at the equator this translates to v = (2*pi*r)/(24*60*60) m/s, or about 450 m/s velocity that you get for free.
The two parts of the continental US that are closest to the Equator are Florida and Texas, and it was a coin toss as to which got the launch facilities (though the lack of great populations to the east of Florida certainly helped). Texas got the Space Center as a consolation prize.
Jules Verne's also described having to choose between Texas and Florida.
A lot of Vandenburg launches are destined for polar orbits, which is why Vanderburg isn't at much of a geographic disadvantage (and the Air Force security, too).
This is also why the French/ESA launches from Guiana, just about right on the equator.
Do you know of an ftp server where I can get GNU/Lego? Lego model quality has been going down hill for a while (the techniccal term is Town Juniorization), and it's too expensive, so if we can just convince some toy manufacturers to come out with high quality open source lego-compatible bricks, I'd be really jazzed. Mega-blocks are almost there, but not quite, and those Ramboesque Best blocks make me cringe.
Until then, I'll have to stick with my propietary Lego ( I just counted 12 models in my office, geez).
I'll believe it when I see it, it's hard to find an ethos more primal and unbeatable than one based on greed.
KSR's Antarctica had a philosopher talking about an idealogical battle between science and capitalism, about the only new idea in the whole book (the rest being a find and replace of the Mars trilogy). He said scientists presently ruled the economy, setting it up to make enough to do science and find life enjoyable, though I don't believe it.
Y2K in Rochester, NY (was Re:Y2K is a bug...)
on
9/9/99: News? Nein!
·
· Score: 1
My biggest Y2K preparations in Rochester will be to get another big propane tank, fill a few carboys with water and get enough home brewing supplies to make two batches. That way, if the grid goes down, I can still brew on my enforced vacation.
That's aside from the usual Rochester New York winter preps, food, candles, cross country skiis, snow shovels...
So remember, if the grid goes down, stop by the middle of January for some fresh homebrew.
No, why would nerds be interested in professional sports teams? If Columbine taught us anything (someone had to mention Columbine), it's that there's a natural antipathy between jocks and nerds.
Now, at yankee.com we can read about removing nuclear reactor vessels and decomissioning nuclear power plants, whoa, way cool!
More seriously, correct the url typo, quick, before we/. a nuke page.
They run "Linux 2.0" but I couldn't find the exact distribution.
Basically they sell Linux boxes with Apache and Perl on them. Nothing that a typical/. user couldn't make, but the convenience factor is nice, and presumably they're simple enough to administer that even an MCSE could do it. .
From there, you can read scads of reviews from Linuxworld and ZDNet, product specs, etc.
They seem to have a good product for someone (ISPs?) needing to add cheap, reliable, high performing web servers without needing too much inhouse expertise. And the cube is a funky cobalt blue box.
Why is this good for Linux? I suppose when you can go to a professional looking web site with your PHB and get some nifty servers preloaded with Linux shipped to you for far less than NT, you might start seeing more Linux boxes show up. It makes them more of a web page toaster than a complex, arcane, unsupported hack.
I know I'm in the minority, but I think it's too childish for adults. I did like it when I was a teenager though.
I think this may be the crux of the matter in comparing ANH and TPM. Your critical judgement changes as you get older, and the same stuff that knocks your socks off as a teen becomes infantile, predictable and obvious as an adult.
Of course, the only way to test this hypothesis is to get a few samples of children (preferably under 2), let them grow up in a non-Star Wars contaminated environment, and then expose one set to TPM and the control set to ANH, and see which one they prefer.
Now if I could just get a grant for this, or maybe we could grab a few Amish teens.
Lucas may have one of the greatest imaginations of all time when it comes to creating new worlds and whatnot
you mispelled regurgitating.
Read some Joseph Campbell to get a background on the classical myths that Lucas borrowed from for Star Wars.
Go to babelfish and translate father from english to German.
Read the Dune trilogy, or at least the first book, to see where Tattione (sp) came from.
The force? Read Heinlein's Stranger in a Strange Land and see if you don't agree that Michael Valentine could kick Vader's ass, and then melt Leia into a multi-orgasmic sex kitten. A trusty blaster is no match against an ancient religion when it disappears into the aether.
A powerful empire with a world encircling city as its capital, trying to crush a rebellion? Start with Asimov's Foundation Trilogy.
Floating/flying cities? I think there is a Star Trek episode about that, and I'd like to see the Empire try to take on one of Blish's Cities in Flight.
To his credit, Lucas did make a very entertaining space opera. The grittiness in the Star Wars opus contrasted nicely with the antiseptic cleanliness of previous filmed science fiction (cf. 2001), and you can see that influence in modern science fiction (SnowCrash, Virtual Light, etc).
I wish they would have gone into a little more detail about what it includes.
I'm assuming it's just a diskless client, and needs a big server to connect to. But then they mention running apps off the internet, so does it have a tiny OS in ROM, with a minimal browser?
Still, $10 a month is far cheaper than any PC you can get. If this takes off, maybe there will be lots of cheap, older Suns flooding the marketplace, Suns too old to support a these Javaclients. I know I could use a Sparc10 in my basement to keep my 486's company.
George
My linux laptop is a Thinkpad 500
on
On Linux Laptops
·
· Score: 1
With a 486/50 and a 240 meg HD.
I split it into a WFW 3.11 partition and a Caldera 1.3 partition.
It works fine as a slow, low end machine, and as a telnet terminal.
Getting networking working on the Linux side (with an IBM home and away 10baset card, with 14.4 modem) was a pain, I had to figure out the chips involved, but the PCMCIA howto was very helpful, plus there are a few web pages about Thinkpads and Linux.
I may move my mail from the Windows partition to my FreeBSD server, and then just telnet into it to read it, but it nice to be able to go anywhere and just check my mail.
I liked the "cheap knock-off product" line...If you download and burn a CD of RedHat Linux, isn't it still RedHat?
It's a RedHat distribution, and if it's for your own personal use, you can call it RedHat, or even Linux 2k if you want.
If you're going to burn disks and sell them.
What kind of QA are you doing on the burned disks?
What kind of support are you providing, your home phone number, your home page with 700 megs of files?
Are you including a RedHat bumpersticker?
Just like the letter says, people bought Joe-Bob's RedHat, and found they couldn't get any support from RedHat, which makes sense, since RedHat didn't sell them anything.
Bob's letter sounds reasonable to me, and they do have to be aggressive about protecting their trademark, or they will lose it.
Proud owner of one official copy of RedHat 5.1, and 4 copies of the RedHat disctribution.
Slashdot Mirror
Uggh, why am I thinking of animated paper clips when I read this.
"Good morning, it looks like you want to wake up, do you want me to make coffee, yes, no help?"
"Good morning, you hit the snooze bar, do you want to sleep for 10 more minutes, yes, no, help?"
I agree that there's a fortune to be made in a web search engine that works well, but I think Katz is missing the boat on this Clotho deal.
Rather than have an agent to query my refrigerator about it's inventory, I'll just stick with a dumb refrigerator and open the door.
Rather than have an agent spoof my intelligent drug and chemical sniffing toilet, I'll just stick with an old fashioned mechanical one.
Rather than having another GUI layer on my PC's, I'll do nicely with a telnet window.
I think a great example of embedding complex software in everyday appliances is your car. Someone from 1930 could drive one of today's cars, all the software that controls the fuel injectors, oxygen mix and ABS brakes is invisible to the user.
George
... could be hazardous to your health in zero G. The jizz leaves your penis at 120MPH and will richochet around the ship at high speeds, possibly putting someone's eye out.
Hmm, sounds like a nice throwaway for my X-rated science fiction short story.
Assuming an average male mass of 75 kg, and an average ejaculatory volume of 5 cc for arguments sake, translating into 5 gm assuming the density is about equal to water, sent forth at 50 m/s, we have a semen drive capable of 3 mm/s delta-v per orgasm.
Hmm, pretty slow, better work on getting Ron Jeremy in orbit.
George
Does anyone know if ZIP guns still have the click of death problem? You know, you fire them a few times, and then they destroy the magazine, making it unusuable.
Also, what fires faster, a SCSI ZIP gun or an EPP ZIP Gun?
Thanks,
George
I'm still irked by some Car Wars games I played in high school, 17 years ago.
One of my friends had built up a nearly invulnerable character (quadruple ace at least) and proceeded to always win with his dual laser pickup truck, while everyone else suffered with recoilless rifles (it was his house, so if he said it was fair for a quad ace with $200,000 to go against newbies on $40,000, it was). I was too stupid at the time to figure out how to beat him, and just kept hoping for 12 lucky throws in a row.
Today, though, quad flamethrowers, smoke screens and mine droppers. Lasers are pretty useless when they can't fire through smoke.
Ah well, as soon as I perfect my time machine, first thing I do is pass this info to my younger self before one of those games, noo, first thing I do is pass some condoms to my younger self as a college freshman, then the flamethrower trick second, noo, there was my friend who I was attracted to but didn't want to jeopardize my friendship with, though I haven't heard from her in years, so third thing I do with a working time machine...
I still play Car Wars solo occasionally, the last time was 6 months ago on an overnight.
George
On the night of your senior prom, did you:
1) go the the prom with a date
2) go to the prom stag
3) play Traveller
4) play AD&D
5) play loderunner
6) surf the web
7) chat on irc
8) turnips, turnips, turnips
I'm pretty sure my choice was 3, since it was 1984.
George
She's three, and right now her favorite computer activities are painting with Gimp or Paint (she prefers adding strokes to Teletubby images), searching the web for cat pictures, or posing for my parallel port camera.
The other day I captivated her by playing a wav of her crying at 2 months, she couldn't get enough of it.
Once she can read, I think I'll teach her to rebuild the kernel.
George
Someone needs to tell all those lonely woman looking for men to go to a Linux con, instead of the Valley.
Or, if you prefer, the Slashdot link.
George
Why is the Space Center in Florida again?
Because the people at NASA are big fans of Jules Verne's "From the Earth to the Moon".
The real reason:
When you launch a rocket into a normal (non retrograde) equitorial orbit, you add the velocity of the launching site, at the equator this translates to v = (2*pi*r)/(24*60*60) m/s, or about 450 m/s velocity that you get for free.
The two parts of the continental US that are closest to the Equator are Florida and Texas, and it was a coin toss as to which got the launch facilities (though the lack of great populations to the east of Florida certainly helped). Texas got the Space Center as a consolation prize.
Jules Verne's also described having to choose between Texas and Florida.
A lot of Vandenburg launches are destined for polar orbits, which is why Vanderburg isn't at much of a geographic disadvantage (and the Air Force security, too).
This is also why the French/ESA launches from Guiana, just about right on the equator.
George
The correct use is "GNU/Legos", get it right
Do you know of an ftp server where I can get GNU/Lego? Lego model quality has been going down hill for a while (the techniccal term is Town Juniorization), and it's too expensive, so if we can just convince some toy manufacturers to come out with high quality open source lego-compatible bricks, I'd be really jazzed. Mega-blocks are almost there, but not quite, and those Ramboesque Best blocks make me cringe.
Until then, I'll have to stick with my propietary Lego ( I just counted 12 models in my office, geez).
George
I'll believe it when I see it, it's hard to find an ethos more primal and unbeatable than one based on greed.
KSR's Antarctica had a philosopher talking about an idealogical battle between science and capitalism, about the only new idea in the whole book (the rest being a find and replace of the Mars trilogy). He said scientists presently ruled the economy, setting it up to make enough to do science and find life enjoyable, though I don't believe it.
George
Other Nasa programs are addressing it though, like the X-33.
George
The GNU Project, based in Boston, Massachusetts, was launched in 1984 to develop a free Unix-like operating system, called GNU/Linux.
Oh well, they got it half right.
George
I thought gravity was still a theory, and was due to be banned in Kansas public schools.
George
They mentioned a fan in the article.
George
My biggest Y2K preparations in Rochester will be to get another big propane tank, fill a few carboys with water and get enough home brewing supplies to make two batches. That way, if the grid goes down, I can still brew on my enforced vacation.
That's aside from the usual Rochester New York winter preps, food, candles, cross country skiis, snow shovels...
So remember, if the grid goes down, stop by the middle of January for some fresh homebrew.
George
No, why would nerds be interested in professional sports teams? If Columbine taught us anything (someone had to mention Columbine), it's that there's a natural antipathy between jocks and nerds.
/. a nuke page.
Now, at yankee.com we can read about removing nuclear reactor vessels and decomissioning nuclear power plants, whoa, way cool!
More seriously, correct the url typo, quick, before we
George
They run "Linux 2.0" but I couldn't find the exact distribution.
/. user couldn't make, but the convenience factor is nice, and presumably they're simple enough to administer that even an MCSE could do it. .
Basically they sell Linux boxes with Apache and Perl on them. Nothing that a typical
You can start at Cobaltnet for their home page, or, being provincial, go to their North American mirror.
They were also mentioned in WiReD 7.05.
From there, you can read scads of reviews from Linuxworld and ZDNet, product specs, etc.
They seem to have a good product for someone (ISPs?) needing to add cheap, reliable, high performing web servers without needing too much inhouse expertise. And the cube is a funky cobalt blue box.
Why is this good for Linux? I suppose when you can go to a professional looking web site with your PHB and get some nifty servers preloaded with Linux shipped to you for far less than NT, you might start seeing more Linux boxes show up. It makes them more of a web page toaster than a complex, arcane, unsupported hack.
George
I know I'm in the minority, but I think it's too childish for adults. I did like it when I was a teenager though.
I think this may be the crux of the matter in comparing ANH and TPM. Your critical judgement changes as you get older, and the same stuff that knocks your socks off as a teen becomes infantile, predictable and obvious as an adult.
Of course, the only way to test this hypothesis is to get a few samples of children (preferably under 2), let them grow up in a non-Star Wars contaminated environment, and then expose one set to TPM and the control set to ANH, and see which one they prefer.
Now if I could just get a grant for this, or maybe we could grab a few Amish teens.
George
Lucas may have one of the greatest imaginations of all time when it comes to creating new worlds and whatnot
you mispelled regurgitating.
Read some Joseph Campbell to get a background on the classical myths that Lucas borrowed from for Star Wars.
Go to babelfish and translate father from english to German.
Read the Dune trilogy, or at least the first book, to see where Tattione (sp) came from.
The force? Read Heinlein's Stranger in a Strange Land and see if you don't agree that Michael Valentine could kick Vader's ass, and then melt Leia into a multi-orgasmic sex kitten. A trusty blaster is no match against an ancient religion when it disappears into the aether.
A powerful empire with a world encircling city as its capital, trying to crush a rebellion? Start with Asimov's Foundation Trilogy.
Floating/flying cities? I think there is a Star Trek episode about that, and I'd like to see the Empire try to take on one of Blish's Cities in Flight.
To his credit, Lucas did make a very entertaining space opera. The grittiness in the Star Wars opus contrasted nicely with the antiseptic cleanliness of previous filmed science fiction (cf. 2001), and you can see that influence in modern science fiction (SnowCrash, Virtual Light, etc).
George
I wish they would have gone into a little more detail about what it includes.
I'm assuming it's just a diskless client, and needs a big server to connect to. But then they mention running apps off the internet, so does it have a tiny OS in ROM, with a minimal browser?
Still, $10 a month is far cheaper than any PC you can get. If this takes off, maybe there will be lots of cheap, older Suns flooding the marketplace, Suns too old to support a these Javaclients. I know I could use a Sparc10 in my basement to keep my 486's company.
George
With a 486/50 and a 240 meg HD.
I split it into a WFW 3.11 partition and a Caldera 1.3 partition.
It works fine as a slow, low end machine, and as a telnet terminal.
Getting networking working on the Linux side (with an IBM home and away 10baset card, with 14.4 modem) was a pain, I had to figure out the chips involved, but the PCMCIA howto was very helpful, plus there are a few web pages about Thinkpads and Linux.
I may move my mail from the Windows partition to my FreeBSD server, and then just telnet into it to read it, but it nice to be able to go anywhere and just check my mail.
Hooray for the old 486's.
George
Even better, rank the top 50 or 100 posters in terms of karma (which was suggested deep in an earlier thread).
George
On the other end, it also means we end up with lusers as fellow programmers. A Visual Basic developper once asked me what a DLL was. Eek!
Did you switch to BOFH mode and tell him it was a temp file that should be deleted?
George
They're not updating right, it's always "Flat Screens from Apple"
George
I liked the "cheap knock-off product" line...If you download and burn a CD of RedHat Linux, isn't it still RedHat?
It's a RedHat distribution, and if it's for your own personal use, you can call it RedHat, or even Linux 2k if you want.
If you're going to burn disks and sell them.
What kind of QA are you doing on the burned disks?
What kind of support are you providing, your home phone number, your home page with 700 megs of files?
Are you including a RedHat bumpersticker?
Just like the letter says, people bought Joe-Bob's RedHat, and found they couldn't get any support from RedHat, which makes sense, since RedHat didn't sell them anything.
Bob's letter sounds reasonable to me, and they do have to be aggressive about protecting their trademark, or they will lose it.
Proud owner of one official copy of RedHat 5.1, and 4 copies of the RedHat disctribution.
George