Freedos is more than small enough
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Lineo Frees CP/M
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· Score: 2
The storage space and memory requirements are low enough that I really can't imagine an x86 or x86-clone based machine that would be unable to run freedos, but would still run CP/M. Remember, DOS was also designed to deal with severe memory constraints. Finally, I'd point out that there already are DOS embedded systems - CP/M users would have to reinvent the wheel ad infinitum.
For one thing, I wonder if this "Magic Lantern" has been ported to Linux. I tend to think not - it probably needs some pretty OS-specific code to hide itself effectively, so for now my bet would be Windows only. If you think Linux is common enough they'll want to rewrite a Magic Lantern for it soon, just continue along the path of security through (relative) obscurity, and switch to BeOS.
Another option: I wonder what a port sniffer/firewall would see while the Magic happened? If anyone posting to slashdot thinks the Feds might want to shine a Lantern on them, could you try this experiment? We won't know whether you really have ML installed until you're disappeared, of course, but at that point your data might prove useful.
Darnit, I like tons of backstory, even when I don't know all of it. I like it when a TV shows rewards its regular audience with content that they can appreciate more than casual viewers, because they pay attention to the series. And I'd think the writers would like to encourage such a fan base as well, just for the joy of creating a world that isn't just sitcom eye-candy.
I mean, come on, it's not like they show anything. This isn't a pr0n flick, it's a little song-and-dance about two young people (arguably ditzes, but that's besides the point) in love. As such, it's just a sappy chick-flick "Isn't-that-sweet" moment, at least to my mind. And yes, I did watch the show.
This post is pointlessly offensive; please downmod it accordingly.
I just watched the musical Buffy episode - it was okay - and I have to say the salon reviewer's take on Buffy is just bizarre. She seems to be saying Buffy the Vampire Slayer is a masterpiece - it isn't. It's a show that once was semi-decent spoof-action and now is a soap opera with vampires. But even if you disagree with me there, surely you have to concede that the reviewer raving about what a great metaphor willow and what's-her-face's song and dance number was was a bit over the top.
I dunno, maybe it's me, but I think this lady spent far too long in a visual literacy class. Even a single lecture can scar one for life, believe me.
"Disinfectant Gel" Note: In the last 15 minutes or so of the buffy musical, Buffy sorta-kinda-almost strips. It's not much, but since I suspect the main demographic of the series is "Teenage girls and horney guys" I thought it was worth pointing out.
This post IS pointlessly offensive; please downmod it accordingly.
Literally. Reading "Atlas Shrugged" hurts. I did it once, on a dare, and I had a headache for a week. That woman is just so damn preachy - she stuck a 40-page lecture on the evils of helping people in the middle of the book! 40 pages! No interruption! After that, I gotta say, I read a steven king novel right away, and it was like taking a warm shower. Never again will I open a book by Rand - she was a sadist!
Dickens wrote novels that, more than anything else, explored the tragic and terrible human condition of the poor in 19th-century England. His novels, while they certainly use their characters to good effect, are used to send a message about society.
King also has strong characters - I could argue that they're even stronger than Dicken's in many ways - but those characters are used only to drive a plot, a plot that usually conveys no real social message. (With the exceptions of some of his earlier novellas.)
I confess, I have a hard time thinking King will be considered a classic author. But even if he is, he will not be in the same niche as Dickens.
That one was VERY large indeed - his robot stories, foundation, and a lot of his other works were all part of this universe, although you need to read a lot of his stuff to see it.
I'm sorry, man, but come on. They were saying back in the 50s that they'd have sentient AI in ten years. In the sixties, they were still saying it. Ditto the seventies, eighties, nineties, and now the oughties. Given that track record, is it that wise to bet on sentient AI within fifty years? And don't talk to me about the "vast strides" we've made in AI, because they don't exist. We've made kick-ass expert systems, true enough, but the state of the sort of true generalized AI that might lead a long time from now to sentience is still in its infancy.
One last point: How the hell do you code something when you don't even know how it works? And can anybody tell me in precise, painstaking detail how sentience works? Well enough to program it?
The thing that made Poe great was the way his stories and poems struck a chord with the reader, made them really empathize with desperately unhappy, disturbed people - and he could do that because he was himself very disturbed and unhappy. Read "The Tell-Tale Heart" and "The Raven" if for some strange reason you haven't already, and tell me you don't fell unsettled by them, that you don't identify with the narrators on a very deep level.
No go read a Stephen King novel, novella, or short story. Is he a talented writer? Are his stories and characters engaging and thought-provoking. Absolutely, on both counts - I really do like King. But the problem is that his works very often comment directly or indirectly on our modern society, mores, and values. "The Long Walk" was one of the best pieces of short fiction I've ever read - and I did empathize with the protagonist - but it plays to a large degree on twentieth-century values and ideas.
Poe, on the other hand, is timeless. "The Tell-Tale Heart" is a story about a descent into madness. Nothing more or less. Very little setting is given, and the story is short enough that you really don't get a feel for the society of the day - but that is what makes it so universal - all the extraneous stuff is cut out.
These comics are WAY too topical - they make sense at the time, but as soon as we forget the petty struggles to configure win2k ISA server, or the win32 Apache port, or any other similar issue these comics address, the humor will lose a lot of its value. That said, I think historians who specialize in the twentieth century might get a kick out of them.
Not because he was especially profound - although he certainly was at times - but because his humor is universal despite the sf setting. I've bugged a lot of people who positively loath science fiction into reading the Hitchiker's series, and do you know what? They love it, all of them. This was the best of British and sf humor all combined by the brilliant mind of Douglas Adams, and I really can't imagine a time when people will stop saying to each other "Hey, this guy Doug Adams wrote some really funny stuff. Read it!"
I would also argue that this degree of absurdist, uniquely british humor in science fiction was really a new innovation of Douglas Adams, although I do know I'm on thin ice there.
As is obligatory in any post about Adams, I would like to close by saying that Douglas Adams most definatly was a man who always knew where his towel was, and his literature reflects that.
I'm going to hold out for blimp gun platforms
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Hellhound Paintball ATV
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· Score: 3, Interesting
Imagine a remote-controlled blimp or dirigible with a regular paintball gun mounted on it, and a video camera. Quiet enough for recon, packs a punch, wouldn't unbalence the game TOO much, and could also allow a VERY high level of tactical/strategic oversight by team commanders.
I think we can all agree it's no contest - neither sharp nor casio calcs are near as programmable or hackable as TIs - even if you think that TI calc are edsels compared to HPs, everything else is pretty much a horse-drawn carriage compared to TI.
1.) Standardized testing and exams. For both of these in college, a lot of the time you will be required to use a standard graphics calculator. When that happens, having a high-end TI or HP calc is very nice.
2.)Speed. Maybe it's just me, but I find I can enter numbers a lot faster on my TI-83+ than I can on my Revo Plus, which has a keyboard, stylus, and a variety of graphics calculator apps which really blow the 83+ out of the water.
There are all sorts of hacks you can do to a TI graphic calc, including the installation of backlights, remote controls, overlocking, memory expansions, and homemade link cables. I don't think we need complain about the lack of hackable calcs, even though HP is gone.
...for the same reason that Microsoft Windows is here to stay, and Intel, and MS Word, and any other number of products that aren't really the best at what they do but all share one key feature: a huge user base familiar and comfortable with them. Is an Ion-type interface better than conventional overlapping windows? Honestly, I have to agree with several other posters who've said it all boils down to personal preference - some people's work habits are more compatible with overlapping windows, and others with ion.
The thing is, the mainstream computer users - you know, the ones who their ISP is Internet Explorer? - are used to overlapping windows, just as they're used to working in Windows, and MS Word, and Internet Explorer. Most people either don't care about the advantage they'd gain with a new paradigm for windows management, don't understand them, are completely unwilling to learn a new system, or all three bundled as even more neuroses and whatnot than I can think of. I've lost track of the times I've left the family dual-boot BeOS/Win98 system running BeOS, and heard my mother complaining that she just could not figure out how to use it. Nor is she willing to learn - despite what we all know about the BeOS GUI, Windows is better because my mom is familiar with at, at least according to her.
Might we see ion-type window managers become more popular in GPLed OSes like Linux, BlueOS, etc? Eh, maybe, although there's still the personal preference angle even among the computer literate who could understand and learn to use the new system. Likewise, I could see a real change in the MDI schemes for specific applications. But I think the average desktop home user is going to be using some sort of conventional overlapping windows environment for a long time to come.
Consider the number of times some idiot has tried to modify the seti@home client to falsify its work in order to improve his or her account statistics. That's not really a huge risk to human life when we're searching for aliens (Unless, of course, their first message to us is something along the lines of "We are the Borg. You will be assimilated. Resistance is futile. Your biological and technological distinctiveness will be added to our own.") However, if some script kiddie spoofs his work units, and so we miss a near-earth orbiting asteroid - especially one traveling so close it could concievably hit the Earth - well, that would be bad. I know the folks working on seti@home have implemented error-checking, but it just seems to me that the risk of depending on thousands of insecure home PCs to assess a threat that could destroy civilization might be too great. Whatever happened to "slow and steady wins the race"?
I know, there's always the possibility that an asteroid or comet is on a collision course RIGHT NOW, but just considering the time spans involved (65 million years since the last -ahem - dinosaur killer),I would thing that the more likely result of our search would be to find an asteroid that might hit us in 10 years. Or 20. Or 100, I dunno. The point is, I would feel much safer knowing that the asteroid data were being analyzed by secure, trusted machines that might take longer, that if it were being handeled by a very insecure internet distributed computing system.
Is that sinking feeling my karma falling through the floor?
...then you give up the chief advantage of power line internet access: the use of an existing infratstructure, with no modifications or enhancements needed.
...is painfully slow and noisy. Until proven otherwise, I'd imagine internet access through power lines would be the same. There's just too much noise from sudden power drains (such as applicances and factory machines) or surges. The power grid was built to carry power, not data, and it is singularly unsuited to the latter role.
Think about it. The idiots doing this - be they terrorists or regular homegrown wackos - would have a hard time knowing how effective their production process is. Wouldn't sending samples of the powder through USPS be a good way of testing effectiveness? It's not a large enough outbreak to cause the sort of massive response that might get them caught faster, but it WOULD make the news, so the perps could know what had worked and what didn't.
Based on that information, couldn't they then refine their process and launch a more massive attack? For example, consider "Sick Building" syndrome - basically, highly advanced circulation systems in office buildings and skyscrapers blowing germs all through the building. There was a Robin Cook novel (don't laugh) based on the idea of terrorists using building circulation systems to distribute anthrax powder - could this be done? I know, getting the powder fine enough to cause a really nasty case of inhalational anthrax is a bitch, but just making it fine enough to make a lot of people very sick ISN'T that hard. With a few thousand people in a building, people - delivery guys, contractors, janitors - walking in and out all day, how long would it be until someone realized there was a problem? And even though anthrax cannot be communicated directly from person to person, couldn't someone in the offivce building get the spores on their coat, and just track them all over the place?
Of course, there's a difference between making a few grams and a few kilos of anthrax powder, but it's not really a fundamental one - just one of scale. In fact, couldn't the relative crudeness of the anthrax powder simplify the production process? If it isn't fine enough to cause inhalational anthrax, then the terrorists (or whoever) might be willing to risk exposure to the powder, and just trust a course of high-powered antibiotics to keep them safe.
I am not an MD, or any sort of medical professional. In fact, I am simple a pimply-faced youth. But are any of these thoughts legitimate?
Slashdot Mirror
The storage space and memory requirements are low enough that I really can't imagine an x86 or x86-clone based machine that would be unable to run freedos, but would still run CP/M. Remember, DOS was also designed to deal with severe memory constraints. Finally, I'd point out that there already are DOS embedded systems - CP/M users would have to reinvent the wheel ad infinitum.
For one thing, I wonder if this "Magic Lantern" has been ported to Linux. I tend to think not - it probably needs some pretty OS-specific code to hide itself effectively, so for now my bet would be Windows only. If you think Linux is common enough they'll want to rewrite a Magic Lantern for it soon, just continue along the path of security through (relative) obscurity, and switch to BeOS.
Another option: I wonder what a port sniffer/firewall would see while the Magic happened? If anyone posting to slashdot thinks the Feds might want to shine a Lantern on them, could you try this experiment? We won't know whether you really have ML installed until you're disappeared, of course, but at that point your data might prove useful.
Darnit, I like tons of backstory, even when I don't know all of it. I like it when a TV shows rewards its regular audience with content that they can appreciate more than casual viewers, because they pay attention to the series. And I'd think the writers would like to encourage such a fan base as well, just for the joy of creating a world that isn't just sitcom eye-candy.
I mean, come on, it's not like they show anything. This isn't a pr0n flick, it's a little song-and-dance about two young people (arguably ditzes, but that's besides the point) in love. As such, it's just a sappy chick-flick "Isn't-that-sweet" moment, at least to my mind. And yes, I did watch the show.
This post is pointlessly offensive; please downmod it accordingly.
I just watched the musical Buffy episode - it was okay - and I have to say the salon reviewer's take on Buffy is just bizarre. She seems to be saying Buffy the Vampire Slayer is a masterpiece - it isn't. It's a show that once was semi-decent spoof-action and now is a soap opera with vampires. But even if you disagree with me there, surely you have to concede that the reviewer raving about what a great metaphor willow and what's-her-face's song and dance number was was a bit over the top.
I dunno, maybe it's me, but I think this lady spent far too long in a visual literacy class. Even a single lecture can scar one for life, believe me.
"Disinfectant Gel" Note: In the last 15 minutes or so of the buffy musical, Buffy sorta-kinda-almost strips. It's not much, but since I suspect the main demographic of the series is "Teenage girls and horney guys" I thought it was worth pointing out.
This post IS pointlessly offensive; please downmod it accordingly.
Literally. Reading "Atlas Shrugged" hurts. I did it once, on a dare, and I had a headache for a week. That woman is just so damn preachy - she stuck a 40-page lecture on the evils of helping people in the middle of the book! 40 pages! No interruption! After that, I gotta say, I read a steven king novel right away, and it was like taking a warm shower. Never again will I open a book by Rand - she was a sadist!
Dickens wrote novels that, more than anything else, explored the tragic and terrible human condition of the poor in 19th-century England. His novels, while they certainly use their characters to good effect, are used to send a message about society.
King also has strong characters - I could argue that they're even stronger than Dicken's in many ways - but those characters are used only to drive a plot, a plot that usually conveys no real social message. (With the exceptions of some of his earlier novellas.)
I confess, I have a hard time thinking King will be considered a classic author. But even if he is, he will not be in the same niche as Dickens.
That one was VERY large indeed - his robot stories, foundation, and a lot of his other works were all part of this universe, although you need to read a lot of his stuff to see it.
I'm sorry, man, but come on. They were saying back in the 50s that they'd have sentient AI in ten years. In the sixties, they were still saying it. Ditto the seventies, eighties, nineties, and now the oughties. Given that track record, is it that wise to bet on sentient AI within fifty years? And don't talk to me about the "vast strides" we've made in AI, because they don't exist. We've made kick-ass expert systems, true enough, but the state of the sort of true generalized AI that might lead a long time from now to sentience is still in its infancy.
One last point: How the hell do you code something when you don't even know how it works? And can anybody tell me in precise, painstaking detail how sentience works? Well enough to program it?
The thing that made Poe great was the way his stories and poems struck a chord with the reader, made them really empathize with desperately unhappy, disturbed people - and he could do that because he was himself very disturbed and unhappy. Read "The Tell-Tale Heart" and "The Raven" if for some strange reason you haven't already, and tell me you don't fell unsettled by them, that you don't identify with the narrators on a very deep level.
No go read a Stephen King novel, novella, or short story. Is he a talented writer? Are his stories and characters engaging and thought-provoking. Absolutely, on both counts - I really do like King. But the problem is that his works very often comment directly or indirectly on our modern society, mores, and values. "The Long Walk" was one of the best pieces of short fiction I've ever read - and I did empathize with the protagonist - but it plays to a large degree on twentieth-century values and ideas.
Poe, on the other hand, is timeless. "The Tell-Tale Heart" is a story about a descent into madness. Nothing more or less. Very little setting is given, and the story is short enough that you really don't get a feel for the society of the day - but that is what makes it so universal - all the extraneous stuff is cut out.
Does this make any sense, or am I full of it?
Sentimental clerk who's a DNA fan. Nothing wrong with that, mind you - I would have done the same thing - , but it has no deeper meaning.
These comics are WAY too topical - they make sense at the time, but as soon as we forget the petty struggles to configure win2k ISA server, or the win32 Apache port, or any other similar issue these comics address, the humor will lose a lot of its value. That said, I think historians who specialize in the twentieth century might get a kick out of them.
Not because he was especially profound - although he certainly was at times - but because his humor is universal despite the sf setting. I've bugged a lot of people who positively loath science fiction into reading the Hitchiker's series, and do you know what? They love it, all of them. This was the best of British and sf humor all combined by the brilliant mind of Douglas Adams, and I really can't imagine a time when people will stop saying to each other "Hey, this guy Doug Adams wrote some really funny stuff. Read it!"
I would also argue that this degree of absurdist, uniquely british humor in science fiction was really a new innovation of Douglas Adams, although I do know I'm on thin ice there.
As is obligatory in any post about Adams, I would like to close by saying that Douglas Adams most definatly was a man who always knew where his towel was, and his literature reflects that.
Imagine a remote-controlled blimp or dirigible with a regular paintball gun mounted on it, and a video camera. Quiet enough for recon, packs a punch, wouldn't unbalence the game TOO much, and could also allow a VERY high level of tactical/strategic oversight by team commanders.
I think we can all agree it's no contest - neither sharp nor casio calcs are near as programmable or hackable as TIs - even if you think that TI calc are edsels compared to HPs, everything else is pretty much a horse-drawn carriage compared to TI.
1.) Standardized testing and exams. For both of these in college, a lot of the time you will be required to use a standard graphics calculator. When that happens, having a high-end TI or HP calc is very nice.
2.)Speed. Maybe it's just me, but I find I can enter numbers a lot faster on my TI-83+ than I can on my Revo Plus, which has a keyboard, stylus, and a variety of graphics calculator apps which really blow the 83+ out of the water.
There are all sorts of hacks you can do to a TI graphic calc, including the installation of backlights, remote controls, overlocking, memory expansions, and homemade link cables. I don't think we need complain about the lack of hackable calcs, even though HP is gone.
Head over to www.ticalc.org, and I'm sure you'll find some - interesting - files.
...for the same reason that Microsoft Windows is here to stay, and Intel, and MS Word, and any other number of products that aren't really the best at what they do but all share one key feature: a huge user base familiar and comfortable with them. Is an Ion-type interface better than conventional overlapping windows? Honestly, I have to agree with several other posters who've said it all boils down to personal preference - some people's work habits are more compatible with overlapping windows, and others with ion.
The thing is, the mainstream computer users - you know, the ones who their ISP is Internet Explorer? - are used to overlapping windows, just as they're used to working in Windows, and MS Word, and Internet Explorer. Most people either don't care about the advantage they'd gain with a new paradigm for windows management, don't understand them, are completely unwilling to learn a new system, or all three bundled as even more neuroses and whatnot than I can think of. I've lost track of the times I've left the family dual-boot BeOS/Win98 system running BeOS, and heard my mother complaining that she just could not figure out how to use it. Nor is she willing to learn - despite what we all know about the BeOS GUI, Windows is better because my mom is familiar with at, at least according to her.
Might we see ion-type window managers become more popular in GPLed OSes like Linux, BlueOS, etc? Eh, maybe, although there's still the personal preference angle even among the computer literate who could understand and learn to use the new system. Likewise, I could see a real change in the MDI schemes for specific applications. But I think the average desktop home user is going to be using some sort of conventional overlapping windows environment for a long time to come.
Consider the number of times some idiot has tried to modify the seti@home client to falsify its work in order to improve his or her account statistics. That's not really a huge risk to human life when we're searching for aliens (Unless, of course, their first message to us is something along the lines of "We are the Borg. You will be assimilated. Resistance is futile. Your biological and technological distinctiveness will be added to our own.") However, if some script kiddie spoofs his work units, and so we miss a near-earth orbiting asteroid - especially one traveling so close it could concievably hit the Earth - well, that would be bad. I know the folks working on seti@home have implemented error-checking, but it just seems to me that the risk of depending on thousands of insecure home PCs to assess a threat that could destroy civilization might be too great. Whatever happened to "slow and steady wins the race"?
I know, there's always the possibility that an asteroid or comet is on a collision course RIGHT NOW, but just considering the time spans involved (65 million years since the last -ahem - dinosaur killer),I would thing that the more likely result of our search would be to find an asteroid that might hit us in 10 years. Or 20. Or 100, I dunno. The point is, I would feel much safer knowing that the asteroid data were being analyzed by secure, trusted machines that might take longer, that if it were being handeled by a very insecure internet distributed computing system.
Is that sinking feeling my karma falling through the floor?
...Compgeeks (http://www.compgeeks.com/details.asp?invtid=KG-JC 3S-WB) has one for $35, and you don't have to return it to get your pictures.
thanks
...then you give up the chief advantage of power line internet access: the use of an existing infratstructure, with no modifications or enhancements needed.
...is painfully slow and noisy. Until proven otherwise, I'd imagine internet access through power lines would be the same. There's just too much noise from sudden power drains (such as applicances and factory machines) or surges. The power grid was built to carry power, not data, and it is singularly unsuited to the latter role.
Think about it. The idiots doing this - be they terrorists or regular homegrown wackos - would have a hard time knowing how effective their production process is. Wouldn't sending samples of the powder through USPS be a good way of testing effectiveness? It's not a large enough outbreak to cause the sort of massive response that might get them caught faster, but it WOULD make the news, so the perps could know what had worked and what didn't.
Based on that information, couldn't they then refine their process and launch a more massive attack? For example, consider "Sick Building" syndrome - basically, highly advanced circulation systems in office buildings and skyscrapers blowing germs all through the building. There was a Robin Cook novel (don't laugh) based on the idea of terrorists using building circulation systems to distribute anthrax powder - could this be done? I know, getting the powder fine enough to cause a really nasty case of inhalational anthrax is a bitch, but just making it fine enough to make a lot of people very sick ISN'T that hard. With a few thousand people in a building, people - delivery guys, contractors, janitors - walking in and out all day, how long would it be until someone realized there was a problem? And even though anthrax cannot be communicated directly from person to person, couldn't someone in the offivce building get the spores on their coat, and just track them all over the place?
Of course, there's a difference between making a few grams and a few kilos of anthrax powder, but it's not really a fundamental one - just one of scale. In fact, couldn't the relative crudeness of the anthrax powder simplify the production process? If it isn't fine enough to cause inhalational anthrax, then the terrorists (or whoever) might be willing to risk exposure to the powder, and just trust a course of high-powered antibiotics to keep them safe.
I am not an MD, or any sort of medical professional. In fact, I am simple a pimply-faced youth. But are any of these thoughts legitimate?