My older brothers Digital Group Z-80 based CP/M with 4K of RAM, audio tape recorder, eventually upgraded to 8K of RAM and Phi-Decks (automated streaming audio tape). Graphics card..., yeah, that's cute. We played with TRS-80 Model 1s, IMSAI 8080s, Apple ][+s,//es, IIgs-es, Heathkit... He built a Cosmic Elf back in the day. We boxed with an Atari 400 and later an 800 with 300 baud acoustically coupled Novation CAT modem. We did SOMETHING with every Mac ever released in its own day. Later on in the 80s I spent some real quality time maintaining an LMI Lambda and Silicon Graphics machines and a Pixar PII graphics engine. That machine was the most beautiful computer I'd ever laid eyes on. Steve Jobs' shiny new NeXT was fun. SunOS 2.anything was a unpolished turd. These days its commodity hardware and virtual machines that have no character what-so-ever. The days of AT&T T-Carrier are pretty much gone as well. I lived with T-1 and T-3 for almost 30 years. Actually laid hands on a T-2 circuit as well. Never got to touch the mil-spec higher bandwidth stuff. Now 10Gb links look small. We need to be writing this down for posterity, you know?
I'm in the process of standing up a new cloudy little provider and we don't count hours or minutes. Is that so wrong?
The assumption is that the Internet is open 24/7 so why should we be marking time when we know you want it 24/7? We would rather cultivate the developers and geeks as customers. We'll soon have one portal for instant gratification but we're also happy to hand-craft VMs in a private place for you too. And it's built around CloudStack4 so it should feel familiar to many.
Come talk to us while we're young and dumb, before we figure out that our prices are too cheap. 20Gb/s out to the net, BGP/4, IBM BladeCenters for hardware, and we also rent bare metal. Anything from 1vCPU/512MB up to 336 CPUs and 10.5TB of RAM in bare metal if you're willing to pay for it.
http://www.blinkinblox.com/
Disclaimer: Yup, its a commercial plug. I'm pretty much both the King and the garbage man.
Having been very close to WinAmp and the AmpDev team in general in its infancy (circa 1996-1999) it's good to see that someone else is taking an interest. When AOL/Time Warner bought it for $100 Million in 1999 we all knew the direction it was going: large, corporate, and stupid. Let's face it, AOL bought WinAmp for the community that came with it. It should be no surprise that they did nothing memorable with it. And I can't fault Justin for taking the money and running.
I remember well the Stupid Factor being turned up to 11 when AOL ditched FreeBSD for SunOS/Solaris when they moved the hardware off of its "home" network. They practically ended up doubling the hardware to accommodate a (much) less functional OS. I could see the downward spiral start months before that happened. So they bought it for $100 Million and they're selling it for $5-10 Million. Good job, guys. Way to build shareholder value. Go, Team!...Still, you beat Microsoft to the punch.
The TAP/WinAmp Memorial Hot Tub still lives and I use it every day. And I still use WinAmp every day, just not a CURRENT version. ( I still keep the pre-brain-damaged versions around despite some known security issues.)
That little pieces of it survive here and there is a nice reminder of what was, and what could have been, and what still might be. We'll see what Radionomy does with it. I, for one, will be happy to give them a chance to become relevant again.
Oh, Hesu..., you whiners haven't looked in my garage, ever!; Apple/// with 5Mb Profile Hard Disk anyone? If I recall correctly, that flavour of xenix is EFS and there are still some old unixes (and early 90s BSDs) that can bridge that gap. It's probably an MFM or RLL ISA controller but I'm sure you could cobble together the hardware to either extract data or image the drive. The people whining about "OMG! Don't Touch It! You might break it!" never lived through that vintage of hardware....
Oh, come on. Dozens of jobs, not hundreds, with little or no extra community impact. And all of this for the low, low price of tax abatements and taxpayers money to provide the infrastructure for a huge ol' company to continue making enormous amounts of money which they will keep to themselves.
Frankly, if I'm going to decide to use my super-powers for evil, I'll choose the kind of evil that might actually make me some money. I'll take a pass on Microsoft in Iowa, thanks.
It's an old old old old old joke but what the heck, I'm an old old old old old unix hack.
And I'm a shell user of many years as well. Unfortunately, I believed http://www.adminspotting.org/ long before it was ever posted. And no, I'm not going to give you a prettified link to click on to go find it. That's called hubris. If you'd ever bothered to read about the BOFH you'd know that. It's a skill our kind all cultivate, like a Jedi Knight pulling his light sabre into his hand using only his mind.
"...Choose rotting away at the end of it all, pishing your last on some miserable newsgroup, nothing more than an embarrassment to the selfish, fucked up lusers Gates spawned to replace the computer-literate."
We are a dying breed.
And as the dumb-assed thumb-tribes continue to neglect the technologies that will serve the next generation, they empower the very organizations who will lord it over them for a life-time. Is it any wonder that large companies like Time-Warner, ComCast, and AT&T can afford to be audacious pecker-heads if they so choose? If you don't understand it, you'll just have to pay the bill and pray that it keeps working. Or you could read MAKE Magazine and the Anarchists Cookbook and build your own light sabre....
And just for the record; MAKE Magazine is a pale and shallow comparison to the homebrew and amateur radio scenes of the late Seventies and early Eighties.
Now if you'll excuse me, I'm old. I have to go yell at those damned kids to get them off of my lawn.
Does anyone remember Sun's "The Network Is The Computer" thin client push? The thin clients ran like crap when the network ran like crap. The SunRay servers ran like crap pretty much all the time and they were EXPENSIVE!!! And thus rose the.sig, "The network is the network, the computer is the computer. Sorry for the confusion. --Sun MicroSystems"
There wasn't an upside there, either.
My take on purchased goods versus SaaS is; Trust you data only unto yourself. Learn to understand and care for your tools. Don't be a dumb-ass like the millions of other point-and-drool morons connected to the 'net. Be responsible for your own little corner of the datasphere. Be a good neighbor. Watch over those around you who need your guidance on the 'net. Fight spam and viruses; you're either part of the problem or part of the solution. Remember, their life-time warranty is referencing THEIR lifetime, not yours. Don't trust subscription services of any kind; one minute they're there, the next they're gone.
Or is the above just too hard for most people? Or does is cut into your precious EverCrack time? Or is is just EASIER to let someone else do it for you so you can complain about it later?
Bloody, apathetic planet. I've no sympathy for them at all. -- Prostetnic Vogon Geltz
I use to shower keyboards all the time, since the late 80s, when they'd been peed on or drooled on by special needs children. Give them an isopropyl alcohol rinse, let'em dry, and you're good to go. Also works with Apple ][ motherboards, joysticks, and the occasional 5-1/4" floppy that had jello shoved inside it (don't ask...). A few rules apply; no mechanical systems (there's a special cleaning solution for those), no power systems, no monitors (unless you LIKE grisly death), no headphones, no speakers, et cetera. Just solid state components and key switches only please. Q-tips, Vaseline, canned air, and isopropyl alcohol are all still tools of the trade. It's amazing what you can do with them even on modern hardware.
Um, yeah..., ya see..., we all came to that conclusion back in the late 80s, too. You know, back when that was working fine under something like MacOS 6. All that is old is new and stoopid again.
Bill Gates whines about losing out on technically competent workers when his OS actively seeks to enable the feeble-minded to feel like they understand computers when many of them still won't upgrade their (trial) anti-virus application when it expires. Furthermore, his company aggressively punishes any new company or technology that might stand in the way of their bottom line or displace their products..., "just keep them dumb and purchasing upgrades, we'll buy or kill anything new that gets in our way." (Go find AdminSpotting if you don't know what I mean.)
Now mix in an education system where football is more important than math, physics, or science, add an "I'm entitled to be constantly, persistently entertained" attitude in our 12-24 year old population, and I think we have a recipe for self-destruction. It's a good thing China is set to kick our collective ass over the next 20 years. We're going to need to shed some of that complacency somehow.
Now what was it that Prostetnic Vogon Jeltz said? Something about "bloody, apathetic planet..."
Anyway, I think the whole point is; "Waah waah waah, Bill. You helped break it. Now why don't you try fixing it. Start with our schools. And do something about the federal deficit while you're at it."
"Shape the internet"...Retarded is not a shape. And the cranial rectitis imposed by the dumb-asses in DC can only help to line the pockets of Big Businesses and their lobbyists. See also; The CAN-SPAM Act.
Anyone who says that the terrorists haven't won hasn't set foot inside an airport, any airport, recently. I was stopped for possessing hot chocolate in zero degree weather. No kidding. It seems that a styrofoam cup might be a good place for a middle-aged, whitebread male terrorist to hide some C4. Go figure.
We did this from 1996 through about 1999. Some time spent building one new company, some time spent on a little software project. The company is still a steaming pile of monkey shiz losing money hand over fist but the software product went on to impress AOL. Not that we can all birth the next killer app....
As one of the guys who helped foster WinAmp's growth, I feel the loss more than most. Gone are the nights fighting off the script kiddies, rebooting servers, watching Tom fsck around... The web site moved from a Lotus Notes box to Apple network server 500s and finally to FreeBSD as it grew. AOL threw it up on Sun hardware when they bought it in '99. What a great deal: $100M for the property then kill it 5 years later. AOL, release the source. Release your head from your *.
As I read the KernelTrap thread I remembered having the same discussion with either Vernon Shriver or Mark Callow at SGI something like 14 YEARS AGO!!! The comment then was something like, "Bryan, there are only 4 people in the world, all of them in North America, and 3 of them are in mental institutions, that truely understand the strong juju that is swapping." That said, I have to wonder how many people posting on the swap thread have actually read the man pages, let alone understand swap and/or remember using xenix. Not only do they lack rough consensus and running code, they lack a fundamental understanding of why an operating system needs swap (do NOT equate M$s' virtual memeory with any modern unixes' swap), or, for that matter, most of them lack a fundamental understanding of operating systems. Leave your memory management to the system level codesmiths. If you want faster swap, buy a SCSI ramdisk widget and some ram and STFU. Your only other option is to earn a clue and start spending your nights and weekends becoming a tool builder. Otherwise, the "I want a pony" feature requests, critiques, and generally retarded banter from people who think they know something have every right to continue to fall on deaf ears.
This thread is precisely why I don't contribute to those communities anymore.
I still have a Mac IIci, an Apple IIe, a couple of IIgs's, a Commodore64, a Vic20, a Timex Sinclair, an Atari 400, and a Digital Group Z80-based "micro" from 1976, all of which STILL BOOT!!! WOOT!!! (Ah, that whopping _8K_ of main memory in the Digital Group. Is it any wonder I learned TinyBASIC and TinyPascal first?) Not to mention a string of parts spanning 1981 to present. I wonder sometimes what ever happened to my friend's IMSAI 8080.... I suppose I should include the Atari 2600, the pong game (4 Games In 1!!), and all of the old Nintendo and Sega gear. Yeah, I'm old too.
Slashdot Mirror
My older brothers Digital Group Z-80 based CP/M with 4K of RAM, audio tape recorder, eventually upgraded to 8K of RAM and Phi-Decks (automated streaming audio tape). Graphics card..., yeah, that's cute. We played with TRS-80 Model 1s, IMSAI 8080s, Apple ][+s, //es, IIgs-es, Heathkit... He built a Cosmic Elf back in the day. We boxed with an Atari 400 and later an 800 with 300 baud acoustically coupled Novation CAT modem. We did SOMETHING with every Mac ever released in its own day. Later on in the 80s I spent some real quality time maintaining an LMI Lambda and Silicon Graphics machines and a Pixar PII graphics engine. That machine was the most beautiful computer I'd ever laid eyes on. Steve Jobs' shiny new NeXT was fun. SunOS 2.anything was a unpolished turd. These days its commodity hardware and virtual machines that have no character what-so-ever. The days of AT&T T-Carrier are pretty much gone as well. I lived with T-1 and T-3 for almost 30 years. Actually laid hands on a T-2 circuit as well. Never got to touch the mil-spec higher bandwidth stuff. Now 10Gb links look small. We need to be writing this down for posterity, you know?
I'm in the process of standing up a new cloudy little provider and we don't count hours or minutes. Is that so wrong?
The assumption is that the Internet is open 24/7 so why should we be marking time when we know you want it 24/7? We would rather cultivate the developers and geeks as customers. We'll soon have one portal for instant gratification but we're also happy to hand-craft VMs in a private place for you too. And it's built around CloudStack4 so it should feel familiar to many.
Come talk to us while we're young and dumb, before we figure out that our prices are too cheap. 20Gb/s out to the net, BGP/4, IBM BladeCenters for hardware, and we also rent bare metal. Anything from 1vCPU/512MB up to 336 CPUs and 10.5TB of RAM in bare metal if you're willing to pay for it.
http://www.blinkinblox.com/
Disclaimer: Yup, its a commercial plug. I'm pretty much both the King and the garbage man.
Having been very close to WinAmp and the AmpDev team in general in its infancy (circa 1996-1999) it's good to see that someone else is taking an interest. When AOL/Time Warner bought it for $100 Million in 1999 we all knew the direction it was going: large, corporate, and stupid. Let's face it, AOL bought WinAmp for the community that came with it. It should be no surprise that they did nothing memorable with it. And I can't fault Justin for taking the money and running.
I remember well the Stupid Factor being turned up to 11 when AOL ditched FreeBSD for SunOS/Solaris when they moved the hardware off of its "home" network. They practically ended up doubling the hardware to accommodate a (much) less functional OS. I could see the downward spiral start months before that happened. So they bought it for $100 Million and they're selling it for $5-10 Million. Good job, guys. Way to build shareholder value. Go, Team! ...Still, you beat Microsoft to the punch.
The TAP/WinAmp Memorial Hot Tub still lives and I use it every day. And I still use WinAmp every day, just not a CURRENT version. ( I still keep the pre-brain-damaged versions around despite some known security issues.)
That little pieces of it survive here and there is a nice reminder of what was, and what could have been, and what still might be. We'll see what Radionomy does with it. I, for one, will be happy to give them a chance to become relevant again.
Good luck, guys! Whip that llama's ass!
Oh, Hesu..., you whiners haven't looked in my garage, ever!; Apple /// with 5Mb Profile Hard Disk anyone? If I recall correctly, that flavour of xenix is EFS and there are still some old unixes (and early 90s BSDs) that can bridge that gap. It's probably an MFM or RLL ISA controller but I'm sure you could cobble together the hardware to either extract data or image the drive. The people whining about "OMG! Don't Touch It! You might break it!" never lived through that vintage of hardware....
Seriously!?! Non-standard pinouts. I've been using non-standard pinouts for, what?, 25 plus years!?!
Are you a consultant for the USB lobby, or are you just mildly retarded?
What?, are you expecting some pretty little GUI to configure your fibre channel switches or something?
Or were you just trolling for flames?...
Elegant. Right. -- Two words: Blueberry Muffin. Seriously, that's what I see when I watch this thing. Bluuuueberry Muffin, my favourite. My favourite!
Oh, come on. Dozens of jobs, not hundreds, with little or no extra community impact. And all of this for the low, low price of tax abatements and taxpayers money to provide the infrastructure for a huge ol' company to continue making enormous amounts of money which they will keep to themselves.
Frankly, if I'm going to decide to use my super-powers for evil, I'll choose the kind of evil that might actually make me some money. I'll take a pass on Microsoft in Iowa, thanks.
Senator Biden doesn't LOOK like a retard, but then he opens his mouth....
In other news, OOXML voted down..., Oh, wait....
...Or is it just me?
Does anyone see any similarities between Rambus and OOXML?
unzip|strip|touch|finger|mount|fsck|more|yes|grep|awk|awk|awk|sync|umount|sleep;
It's an old old old old old joke but what the heck, I'm an old old old old old unix hack.
And I'm a shell user of many years as well. Unfortunately, I believed http://www.adminspotting.org/ long before it was ever posted. And no, I'm not going to give you a prettified link to click on to go find it. That's called hubris. If you'd ever bothered to read about the BOFH you'd know that. It's a skill our kind all cultivate, like a Jedi Knight pulling his light sabre into his hand using only his mind.
"...Choose rotting away at the end of it all, pishing your last on some miserable newsgroup, nothing more than an embarrassment to the selfish, fucked up lusers Gates spawned to replace the computer-literate."
We are a dying breed.
And as the dumb-assed thumb-tribes continue to neglect the technologies that will serve the next generation, they empower the very organizations who will lord it over them for a life-time. Is it any wonder that large companies like Time-Warner, ComCast, and AT&T can afford to be audacious pecker-heads if they so choose? If you don't understand it, you'll just have to pay the bill and pray that it keeps working. Or you could read MAKE Magazine and the Anarchists Cookbook and build your own light sabre....
And just for the record; MAKE Magazine is a pale and shallow comparison to the homebrew and amateur radio scenes of the late Seventies and early Eighties.
Now if you'll excuse me, I'm old. I have to go yell at those damned kids to get them off of my lawn.
Does anyone remember Sun's "The Network Is The Computer" thin client push? The thin clients ran like crap when the network ran like crap. The SunRay servers ran like crap pretty much all the time and they were EXPENSIVE!!! And thus rose the .sig, "The network is the network, the computer is the computer. Sorry for the confusion. --Sun MicroSystems"
There wasn't an upside there, either.
My take on purchased goods versus SaaS is;
Trust you data only unto yourself. Learn to understand and care for your tools. Don't be a dumb-ass like the millions of other point-and-drool morons connected to the 'net. Be responsible for your own little corner of the datasphere. Be a good neighbor. Watch over those around you who need your guidance on the 'net. Fight spam and viruses; you're either part of the problem or part of the solution. Remember, their life-time warranty is referencing THEIR lifetime, not yours. Don't trust subscription services of any kind; one minute they're there, the next they're gone.
Or is the above just too hard for most people? Or does is cut into your precious EverCrack time? Or is is just EASIER to let someone else do it for you so you can complain about it later?
Bloody, apathetic planet. I've no sympathy for them at all. -- Prostetnic Vogon Geltz
I use to shower keyboards all the time, since the late 80s, when they'd been peed on or drooled on by special needs children. Give them an isopropyl alcohol rinse, let'em dry, and you're good to go. Also works with Apple ][ motherboards, joysticks, and the occasional 5-1/4" floppy that had jello shoved inside it (don't ask...). A few rules apply; no mechanical systems (there's a special cleaning solution for those), no power systems, no monitors (unless you LIKE grisly death), no headphones, no speakers, et cetera. Just solid state components and key switches only please. Q-tips, Vaseline, canned air, and isopropyl alcohol are all still tools of the trade. It's amazing what you can do with them even on modern hardware.
Um, yeah..., ya see..., we all came to that conclusion back in the late 80s, too. You know, back when that was working fine under something like MacOS 6. All that is old is new and stoopid again.
Bill Gates whines about losing out on technically competent workers when his OS actively seeks to enable the feeble-minded to feel like they understand computers when many of them still won't upgrade their (trial) anti-virus application when it expires. Furthermore, his company aggressively punishes any new company or technology that might stand in the way of their bottom line or displace their products..., "just keep them dumb and purchasing upgrades, we'll buy or kill anything new that gets in our way." (Go find AdminSpotting if you don't know what I mean.)
Now mix in an education system where football is more important than math, physics, or science, add an "I'm entitled to be constantly, persistently entertained" attitude in our 12-24 year old population, and I think we have a recipe for self-destruction. It's a good thing China is set to kick our collective ass over the next 20 years. We're going to need to shed some of that complacency somehow.
Now what was it that Prostetnic Vogon Jeltz said? Something about "bloody, apathetic planet..."
Anyway, I think the whole point is; "Waah waah waah, Bill. You helped break it. Now why don't you try fixing it. Start with our schools. And do something about the federal deficit while you're at it."
F%#$!@g whiner.
"Shape the internet" ...Retarded is not a shape. And the cranial rectitis imposed by the dumb-asses in DC can only help to line the pockets of Big Businesses and their lobbyists. See also; The CAN-SPAM Act.
Anyone who says that the terrorists haven't won hasn't set foot inside an airport, any airport, recently. I was stopped for possessing hot chocolate in zero degree weather. No kidding. It seems that a styrofoam cup might be a good place for a middle-aged, whitebread male terrorist to hide some C4. Go figure.
We did this from 1996 through about 1999. Some time spent building one new company, some time spent on a little software project. The company is still a steaming pile of monkey shiz losing money hand over fist but the software product went on to impress AOL. Not that we can all birth the next killer app....
As one of the guys who helped foster WinAmp's growth, I feel the loss more than most. Gone are the nights fighting off the script kiddies, rebooting servers, watching Tom fsck around... The web site moved from a Lotus Notes box to Apple network server 500s and finally to FreeBSD as it grew. AOL threw it up on Sun hardware when they bought it in '99. What a great deal: $100M for the property then kill it 5 years later. AOL, release the source. Release your head from your *.
As I read the KernelTrap thread I remembered having the same discussion with either Vernon Shriver or Mark Callow at SGI something like 14 YEARS AGO!!! The comment then was something like, "Bryan, there are only 4 people in the world, all of them in North America, and 3 of them are in mental institutions, that truely understand the strong juju that is swapping." That said, I have to wonder how many people posting on the swap thread have actually read the man pages, let alone understand swap and/or remember using xenix. Not only do they lack rough consensus and running code, they lack a fundamental understanding of why an operating system needs swap (do NOT equate M$s' virtual memeory with any modern unixes' swap), or, for that matter, most of them lack a fundamental understanding of operating systems. Leave your memory management to the system level codesmiths. If you want faster swap, buy a SCSI ramdisk widget and some ram and STFU. Your only other option is to earn a clue and start spending your nights and weekends becoming a tool builder. Otherwise, the "I want a pony" feature requests, critiques, and generally retarded banter from people who think they know something have every right to continue to fall on deaf ears.
This thread is precisely why I don't contribute to those communities anymore.
I still have a Mac IIci, an Apple IIe, a couple of IIgs's, a Commodore64, a Vic20, a Timex Sinclair, an Atari 400, and a Digital Group Z80-based "micro" from 1976, all of which STILL BOOT!!! WOOT!!! (Ah, that whopping _8K_ of main memory in the Digital Group. Is it any wonder I learned TinyBASIC and TinyPascal first?) Not to mention a string of parts spanning 1981 to present. I wonder sometimes what ever happened to my friend's IMSAI 8080.... I suppose I should include the Atari 2600, the pong game (4 Games In 1!!), and all of the old Nintendo and Sega gear. Yeah, I'm old too.