I'm going to dust off one of my favorite soap-boxes, and try to introduce a few people here to a fond place in my memory. It's called FidoNet
You could even meld Usenet and FidoNet together in some places. Sometime in '93 or so, Net209 here in Las Vegas set up a gateway to move email and Usenet between the Internet and FidoNet. I had a small selection of newsgroups (mainly comp.sys.apple2.*, rec.arts.startrek.*, and a few others) going into my BBS, first with Maximus-CBCS running under DR DOS 6.0 and then with some custom menu stuff I hacked together under Linux. (Getting cnews and ifgate (?) to communicate with each other in the way I wanted was a bit of a chore, but I eventually had it set up with nearly transparent Usenet access and Fido echoes under a bogus "fidonet" hierarchy (e.g., the STARTREK echo got mapped to something like fidonet.rec.arts.startrek). Fun stuff, and the $10/month it cost to be a node was cheaper than what local ISPs were charging and I could do things with it that I couldn't do with Internet access through college. (Having email addressed to sysop@sknkwrks.genesplicer.org or sysop@f263.n209.z1.fidonet.org (neither has been active in over five years, so don't click:-) ) appear on your very own computer without any manual intervention was kinda neat.:-) )
The intent of these Web sites is clear. Break the encryption. Steal the product. The posting of the hacking code is akin to mass producing and distributing keys to a department store. The keys have only one real purpose: to allow a thief to open a locked door to steal the goods he targets.
<sarcasm> The only purpose of guns is to kill people, too. </sarcasm>
It's the same flawed logic. Yes, something could be used in the commission of a crime. Just because I can drive my car up onto a sidewalk and mow down a bunch of innocent bystanders, though, does that mean cars should be outlawed? (BTW, a woman is on Nevada's death row for having done just that several years back in Reno.)
If I have the disk space to throw some movies and some music on a file server at home and would rather do that than have to shuffle through a bunch of CDs and DVDs, why shouldn't I be able to do that? How is crunching a DVD down to fit on a couple of CDs that can be viewed on a computer with just a CD-ROM drive any different than copying music off a CD onto tape so I can listen to it in my car?
It seems that what Mr. Valenti and his ilk are seeking is a form of prior restraint, which (IIRC, IANAL) goes completely against our nation's legal traditions.
Moderate this down to -1:Redundant if you must...though I suspect that only a DVD-CCA or MPAA flunky would do that.:-)
I've had the DeCSS source available through my website for a while, but didn't have a link to it on my site. I linked to it once or twice through articles here on/., but that was about it.
No more! Check out the (admittedly somewhat crude...it was a quick hack) "Screw the MPAA" banner at http://salfter.dyndns.org. If you just want to grab DeCSS (and other DVD-related software for Linux), click here to go straight to it.
I don't think that's entirely true.. I understand that recording a movie from a DVD was very difficult before DeCSS. If that were entirely true, the whole DeCSS problem wouldn't exist. It's easier with sound tho..
Copying DVDs to tape isn't difficult at all. All you need is something to get rid of Macrovision; this can either be (1) a device in the video line from the DVD player to the VCR to strip Macrovision out or (2) DVD playback equipment (such as a modified DVD player or some computer-based DVD solutions such as the Creative Labs Dxr2) that can be set to not add Macrovision to the video signal.
Copying DVDs to other digital media is another matter...I've tried DeCSS, but haven't gotten very far with it (maybe because my "DVD player" is a K6-200 with a Dxr2).
Monitor ROM source code is included. Schematics are included as well, but they're way too small to be of use in building an Apple I clone. I've seen the schematics in larger form somewhere, but don't remember where...I might have them on my computer someplace if anyone's interested.
Planes and concerts aren't private places; you are there with a lot of other people. Which means that your rights aren't absolute - others have rights too. The right for safety for instance.
Here's something for you to think about:
The Right of the People to be secure In their Persons, Houses, Papers, and Effects, against unreasonable Searches and Seizures, shall not be violated, and no Warrants shall issue, but upon probable Cause, supported by Oath or Affirmation, and particularly describing the Place to be searched, and the Persons or Things to be seized.
Amendment IV, Constitution of the United States
Since when has safety been a "right?" The last time I checked, the Constitution made no mention of it. Yes, the Constitution comes into play here as nearly every airport in the country is a government-owned facility and is therefore subject to the restrictions on its powers provided by the Constitution. In particular, the Fourth Amendment would be of some relevance here.
I remember accessing the Internet on my trusty BBC model B. If anyone here knows of a PC of comparable age, speak now or forever hold your peace.
I'm not familiar with that machine, but I was using an Apple IIe to dial into shell accounts for Internet access as far back as 1989. Started with a Zoom 300-bps internal that I borrowed from a friend, then got an Applied Engineering DataLink 2400 that Christmas for some real speed.:-)
Nowadays there's an actual TCP/IP stack for the IIGS. It'll do SL/IP and PPP over serial connections. I think some kind of TCP/IP-over-AppleTalk support was in the works...don't know if it was completed or not. Client support is kinda thin at this point, though there's a telnet client, a text-only web browser, and (someone's priorities must've been mixed up) an AIM client. I've used it to connect to my Linux box via PPP, more for sh*ts and grins than anything else. Firing up ProTERM and getting a shell prompt is more useful.
e-Commerce existed before the PC. People used to buy/sell off Bulletin Boards, or over the International Packet Switch-Stream system all the time.
The old online services used to do this stuff, too...I bought/sold/swapped more than a few things through GEnie.
FIDO did as much as the entire early e-mail system did, if not more.
Fun stuff...the local net even had an email/news gateway to the Internet. Some of us (well, me anyway) were even crazy enough to get Linux boxen communicating with Fidonet. I mapped Usenet groups back to their original names and mapped Fidonet echo names to something Usenettish, and all email addresses (whether Fidonet or Internet) were in Internet format...something like "joeblow@f263.n209.z1.fidonet.org," if I remember right, would map to joeblow @ 1:209/263 (which was my BBS up until late '94).
As for the issue at hand, I don't think anyone, even Microsoft, should be held responsible for such bugs. Cmon, all programs are going to have problems; just because one of the bugs happens to have more risky consequences doesn't mean that it is any worse than a bug that is relatively harmless. It shouldn't be concidered "negligence" - it should be expected by users of the program.
This is an overly-broad generalization. A bug that trashes your computer's hard drive is one thing, but a bug that kills is another thing altogether. (Yes, there have been software errors that have ended up causing severe injury--and even death. Computer-controlled medical devices come to mind as an example; http://people.delphi.com/salfter/cs301.ht ml is a paper I wrote a few years back regarding such problems.) Is a bug that kills really no worse than one that merely inconveniences people? I think not.
RealNetworks has for quite a while been offering their own software that enables you to download and store.rm files on your computer.
The utility of that feature is solely dependent on whether the content provider allowed for this capability at encoding time. There's a flag that can be set in RealEncoder to enable or disable the "record" feature. I think you can guess how most sites set this.:-(
I had been using Real stuff to time-shift some talk-radio programs with my computer...an old (v3) RealEncoder and RealServer G2 Basic running on Linux to do real-time encoding and subsequent streaming across my home LAN to Win9x boxen running RealPlayer G2. I recently replaced RealEncoder with ecasound and NotLAME, and RealPlayer with Winamp...yes, I'm using MP3 now instead, though this happened before this whole Streambox thing popped up. The only weak spot is streaming...Icecast doesn't let listeners seek to particular tracks or to parts of a track like RealServer does, and RealServer won't stream MP3s (I've tried). Maybe I should just get Samba running and share the MP3 directories on the Linux box...it's not like I'm serving MP3s to the world (over 56k dial-up? Yeah, right...).
On a more related note: a link to Streambox Ripper was posted further upstream, but Streambox VCR sounds like it'd be a more useful program. I've checked AltaVista and Google and have come up empty. Is Streambox VCR mirrored anywhere? Downloading high-bandwidth streaming-media files over a low-bandwidth connection for later listening/viewing would be nice.
Ford's ticker is simply "F"... you just don't GET more generic than a single letter.
That came about simply because Ford is a very old and very big company, and was able to grab one of the single-letter ticker symbols.
The only single-letter symbols not taken are I, M, Q, and V. Here's a rundown of who they all are. (It seems that some newer companies are also on the list, so maybe some of 'em have been "recycled" over the years.)
A: Agilent
B: Barnes Group, Inc.
C: Citigroup
D: Dominion Resources, Inc.
E: ENI SpA
F: Ford
G: Gillette
H: Harcourt General, Inc.
J: Jackpot Enterprises
K: Kellogg Co.
L: Liberty Financial Cos.
N: Inco Ltd.
O: Realty Income Corp.
P: Phillips Petroleum
R: Ryder
S: Sears
T: AT&T
U: US Airways
W: Westvaco Corp.
X: USX
Y: Alleghany Corp.
Z: Venator Group
OK, so maybe not all of 'em are huge mega-conglomerates, though there are more than a few of 'em in there.
And on nerd vs. geek, since I'm not a native English speaker, I'm not that good at those fine differences - sorry.
One way to look at it is that a nerd is someone who thinks he's cool or wants to be cool, but most definitely is not cool, while a geek is someone who really doesn't give a damn one way or the other.
The Geek Code website (no link because I don't remember where it is/was) had another "nerd vs. geek" definition. The Jargon File should also have some useful info regarding nerds and geeks.
I use mine every day. I don't know what I'd do without it. Actually, this morning, it fell out of my bag, and landed on the pavement. I nearly had a heart attack. Thats the second time I've dropped my PalmV, both times without any damage.
Lucky bastard.:-) I was riding my bike back from class one day, and something happened (hand slipped or something) such that I fell off. My PalmPilot Pro was in the front pocket on the side I landed on...c-r-a-c-k.:-(
I was still able to sync my notes out of it, though, and got a replacement for $100. As part of that process, 3Com "screwed up" somewhere and ended up sending me a Palm III as a replacement. I called them to verify what should've happened...they said I could keep it, or if I was really set on another PalmPilot Pro, I could send it back and they'd send out the "right" product. I think it's pretty obvious what choice I made. (Let's see...double the RAM and infrared...what would I do with those?:-) )
Better yet, use Junkbuster to accept cookies only from sites you choose. And you remove annoying banner ads too - whadda deal.
I tried it once...it had the annoying habit of announcing to the world that you were using Netscrape as your browser, regardless of what you were actually using (IE, Lynx, kfm, etc.) Several websites I frequent didn't work right through it, probably because of this.
Another ad-filtering proxy you might want to investigate is WebWasher. I've used it for a few months now, and it's worked pretty well. AFAIK, it's Win9x-only (maybe NT as well), but if you have only one Win9x box on your network, you can install WebWasher on it and make it available to your entire LAN. It also doesn't mangle the browser information, so websites know that I'm using IE and not Netscrape. It's free (in the "free beer" sense) if you're not using it for business purposes.
My second concern is that we will have people with good eyesight getting chips put in to get better eyesight. I don't want to see the age where we all are computerized people.
Resistance is futile. You will be assimilated.:-)
On a more serious note, while this would be good stuff for the handicapped, it has the potential to be abused. It'd kinda be like cosmetic surgery...you don't really need it, but some people aren't happy with what they're born with, or something along those lines.
what if your eye or arm shorts out for some reason
I believe this only applies to the version 3 ROMs (with the updated motherboard).
Hit control-apple-option-N any time there's a "sliding apple" system error screen up and it'll print out a complete list of names on the team and a sample of the team yelling "Apple II!" will play.
ROM 01s (like mine) have an Easter egg that's brought up the same way, though it's not quite as much fun: it displays the names of the people who worked on the IIGS.
Fun machines, though it's a bit of a bummer that one of the HDs on mine went bad. (I had transferred the contents of both drives to a Zip disk, though, and it'll boot off of that, so at least I didn't lose anything.) It started life back in '85 as a IIe with 128K and two 5.25" floppy drives; it now has 4.25 megs, two 40-meg HDs (one dead), Zip, CD-ROM, and runs at 12.5 MHz. These days, it mainly runs ProTERM 3.0 and acts as a dumb terminal hanging off a Linux box.
I can see the point, however it still seems to me that the entire point of government is to make these decisions.
Bzzt! The role of government is (or ought to be) to safeguard individual liberties. This entails on people infringing the rights of other people. Since "government" is, basically, just another group of people, these restrictions would also apply to the government.
In the UK we have responsibilities under the law (and are free to do what we please otherwise), while in the US they have rights (but can't do anything that isn't definined as one of their rights).
I can't speak for how things work on your side of the puddle (and won't even try, even though I lived there for two years in the mid-80s), but you are totally mistaken as to what our Bill of Rights does. It is not an enumeration of the people's rights, to the exclusion of other rights which the founding fathers may have neglected. It is, instead, a command to government that under no circumstances are certain rights to be infringed by the government. It says, among other things, that the government may pass no law restricting free speech/press/assembly (First Amendment), the right to keep and bear arms (Second Amendment), or the right to a speedy and public trial by jury in criminal matters (Sixth Amendment). There's even an amendment (the Tenth) which was intended to serve as a catch-all amendment to prohibit the central government from trying to claim any powers not granted it by the states or the people. (A case could be made that the Tenth Amendment has been a dead letter in recent years (possibly as far back as the Civil War), but that is beyond the scope of this discussion.)
52 years old... If they restore it to actual operational status I'll bet they don't run it for very long at a time. Spare tubes and such are gonna be a bear to find.
Tubes aren't as hard to come by as you might think. Lots of companies are still selling 'em. The biggest of 'em is Antique Electronic Supply in Arizona; a couple of others I can think of off the top of my head are CWest Tubes in Utah and Fair Radio Sales in Ohio. The audiophooles have driven the prices of some types (especially power triodes) through the roof, but many types still sell for just a few dollars each, including (IIRC) the 12A_7 types that boatanchor computers more than likely would've used by the gross. (If they're interested in economizing, they could retrofit the machine to use some of the goofball tube types developed for TV use, which are dirt-cheap...but since they're working with a one-of-a-kind machine, they probably don't want to hack it up too badly.)
In fact, I've heard from some people that it's actually harder to fix old transistor radios than it is to fix similar equipment built with tubes, since early transistors have become scarcer than hens' teeth. Early ICs can be equally hard to come by (some talk came up in comp.sys.apple2 a while back about the feasibility of reproducing the Apple I from schematics, and someone noted that some of the chips used in that machine's design are no longer available.
With all that said, the machine would more than likely be on static display most of the time. They might fire it up for special occasions or just to verify that it still works, but I doubt they'll have it participating in GIMPS 24/7.:-)
Since when is SuSE a stock cooperation (AG)? Have I missed their IPO? Last time I checked, SuSE has been a private limited company (GmbH) and it still says so on their homepage.
I had wondered for some time what those abbreviations mean, so I played with Babelfish a bit and got these results:
AG: Aktiengesellschaft, or corporation
GmbH: Gesellschaft mit beschränkter Haftung, or limited liability company
You learn something new every day. I lived in Germany for two years, and never figured those out while I was there.:-)
Well, it really wouldn't qualify as good software, but I did a short paper for a college class six years ago that illustrates what badly-coded, not-adequately-reviewed software can do when it's unleashed on an unsuspecting public. I dug up the original on the hard drive on my Apple IIGS, where it was in AppleWorks 3.0 format, and converted it to HTML:
It's mainly an account of incidents (some of them fatal) involving the Therac-25, a radiotherapy machine that was almost completely computer-controlled. Numerous race conditions in the code combined with a lack of hardware-based safety interlocks allowed the machine to be operated in unsafe configurations. Several people were killed or badly injured before the machines were recalled. The software problems would've stood a better chance of being caught in a more open review process. (A case might also be made regarding the replacement of hardware-based interlocks with software, and how this is awfully similar in basic concept to Winmodems and their problems, but that's beyond the scope of this thread. Besides, nobody had heard of Winmodems back in 1993.:-) )
Let's take a look at the current trends in the cheap hardware arena:
Integrated video
Integrated audio
Bottom of the line Winmodems
It's agreed that these are sub-optimal choices (especially the Winmodems), but...
Non-intel CPUs
Non-intel chipsets
...but what's wrong with these? I have several AMD- and Cyrix-based systems here (all homebrew, of course), and I've had fewer problems with them than I've had with many systems I've run across (some brand-name, some of the screwdriver-shop variety) that had that annoying "Intel Inside" sticker on 'em. They all run Linux pretty well, too.:-) (Can't say I've ever tried making a Beowulf out of 'em, though.:-) )
Besides, let's not forget that the fastest x86-compatible processor you can buy isn't from Intel anymore.
Slashdot Mirror
You could even meld Usenet and FidoNet together in some places. Sometime in '93 or so, Net209 here in Las Vegas set up a gateway to move email and Usenet between the Internet and FidoNet. I had a small selection of newsgroups (mainly comp.sys.apple2.*, rec.arts.startrek.*, and a few others) going into my BBS, first with Maximus-CBCS running under DR DOS 6.0 and then with some custom menu stuff I hacked together under Linux. (Getting cnews and ifgate (?) to communicate with each other in the way I wanted was a bit of a chore, but I eventually had it set up with nearly transparent Usenet access and Fido echoes under a bogus "fidonet" hierarchy (e.g., the STARTREK echo got mapped to something like fidonet.rec.arts.startrek). Fun stuff, and the $10/month it cost to be a node was cheaper than what local ISPs were charging and I could do things with it that I couldn't do with Internet access through college. (Having email addressed to sysop@sknkwrks.genesplicer.org or sysop@f263.n209.z1.fidonet.org (neither has been active in over five years, so don't click :-) ) appear on your very own computer without any manual intervention was kinda neat. :-) )
To paraphrase James T. Kirk, "'Sure you don't know what embarrassment is?"
Pot. Kettle. Black.
<sarcasm>
The only purpose of guns is to kill people, too.
</sarcasm>
It's the same flawed logic. Yes, something could be used in the commission of a crime. Just because I can drive my car up onto a sidewalk and mow down a bunch of innocent bystanders, though, does that mean cars should be outlawed? (BTW, a woman is on Nevada's death row for having done just that several years back in Reno.)
If I have the disk space to throw some movies and some music on a file server at home and would rather do that than have to shuffle through a bunch of CDs and DVDs, why shouldn't I be able to do that? How is crunching a DVD down to fit on a couple of CDs that can be viewed on a computer with just a CD-ROM drive any different than copying music off a CD onto tape so I can listen to it in my car?
It seems that what Mr. Valenti and his ilk are seeking is a form of prior restraint, which (IIRC, IANAL) goes completely against our nation's legal traditions.
I've had the DeCSS source available through my website for a while, but didn't have a link to it on my site. I linked to it once or twice through articles here on /., but that was about it.
No more! Check out the (admittedly somewhat crude...it was a quick hack) "Screw the MPAA" banner at http://salfter.dyndns.org. If you just want to grab DeCSS (and other DVD-related software for Linux), click here to go straight to it.
Copying DVDs to tape isn't difficult at all. All you need is something to get rid of Macrovision; this can either be (1) a device in the video line from the DVD player to the VCR to strip Macrovision out or (2) DVD playback equipment (such as a modified DVD player or some computer-based DVD solutions such as the Creative Labs Dxr2) that can be set to not add Macrovision to the video signal.
Copying DVDs to other digital media is another matter...I've tried DeCSS, but haven't gotten very far with it (maybe because my "DVD player" is a K6-200 with a Dxr2).
Consider the source (CNN)...maybe the AOL-Time Warner merger is already a done deal and they're just "faking it" right now. :-)
http://205.169.182.205/archaic_apple s/index.html
Monitor ROM source code is included. Schematics are included as well, but they're way too small to be of use in building an Apple I clone. I've seen the schematics in larger form somewhere, but don't remember where...I might have them on my computer someplace if anyone's interested.
Here's something for you to think about:
Since when has safety been a "right?" The last time I checked, the Constitution made no mention of it. Yes, the Constitution comes into play here as nearly every airport in the country is a government-owned facility and is therefore subject to the restrictions on its powers provided by the Constitution. In particular, the Fourth Amendment would be of some relevance here.
I'm not familiar with that machine, but I was using an Apple IIe to dial into shell accounts for Internet access as far back as 1989. Started with a Zoom 300-bps internal that I borrowed from a friend, then got an Applied Engineering DataLink 2400 that Christmas for some real speed. :-)
Nowadays there's an actual TCP/IP stack for the IIGS. It'll do SL/IP and PPP over serial connections. I think some kind of TCP/IP-over-AppleTalk support was in the works...don't know if it was completed or not. Client support is kinda thin at this point, though there's a telnet client, a text-only web browser, and (someone's priorities must've been mixed up) an AIM client. I've used it to connect to my Linux box via PPP, more for sh*ts and grins than anything else. Firing up ProTERM and getting a shell prompt is more useful.
The old online services used to do this stuff, too...I bought/sold/swapped more than a few things through GEnie.
Fun stuff...the local net even had an email/news gateway to the Internet. Some of us (well, me anyway) were even crazy enough to get Linux boxen communicating with Fidonet. I mapped Usenet groups back to their original names and mapped Fidonet echo names to something Usenettish, and all email addresses (whether Fidonet or Internet) were in Internet format...something like "joeblow@f263.n209.z1.fidonet.org," if I remember right, would map to joeblow @ 1:209/263 (which was my BBS up until late '94).
Nothing like a trip down memory lane...:-)
This is an overly-broad generalization. A bug that trashes your computer's hard drive is one thing, but a bug that kills is another thing altogether. (Yes, there have been software errors that have ended up causing severe injury--and even death. Computer-controlled medical devices come to mind as an example; http://people.delphi.com/salfter/cs301.ht ml is a paper I wrote a few years back regarding such problems.) Is a bug that kills really no worse than one that merely inconveniences people? I think not.
The utility of that feature is solely dependent on whether the content provider allowed for this capability at encoding time. There's a flag that can be set in RealEncoder to enable or disable the "record" feature. I think you can guess how most sites set this. :-(
I had been using Real stuff to time-shift some talk-radio programs with my computer...an old (v3) RealEncoder and RealServer G2 Basic running on Linux to do real-time encoding and subsequent streaming across my home LAN to Win9x boxen running RealPlayer G2. I recently replaced RealEncoder with ecasound and NotLAME, and RealPlayer with Winamp...yes, I'm using MP3 now instead, though this happened before this whole Streambox thing popped up. The only weak spot is streaming...Icecast doesn't let listeners seek to particular tracks or to parts of a track like RealServer does, and RealServer won't stream MP3s (I've tried). Maybe I should just get Samba running and share the MP3 directories on the Linux box...it's not like I'm serving MP3s to the world (over 56k dial-up? Yeah, right...).
On a more related note: a link to Streambox Ripper was posted further upstream, but Streambox VCR sounds like it'd be a more useful program. I've checked AltaVista and Google and have come up empty. Is Streambox VCR mirrored anywhere? Downloading high-bandwidth streaming-media files over a low-bandwidth connection for later listening/viewing would be nice.
That came about simply because Ford is a very old and very big company, and was able to grab one of the single-letter ticker symbols.
The only single-letter symbols not taken are I, M, Q, and V. Here's a rundown of who they all are. (It seems that some newer companies are also on the list, so maybe some of 'em have been "recycled" over the years.)
OK, so maybe not all of 'em are huge mega-conglomerates, though there are more than a few of 'em in there.
One way to look at it is that a nerd is someone who thinks he's cool or wants to be cool, but most definitely is not cool, while a geek is someone who really doesn't give a damn one way or the other.
The Geek Code website (no link because I don't remember where it is/was) had another "nerd vs. geek" definition. The Jargon File should also have some useful info regarding nerds and geeks.
Lucky bastard. :-) I was riding my bike back from class one day, and something happened (hand slipped or something) such that I fell off. My PalmPilot Pro was in the front pocket on the side I landed on...c-r-a-c-k. :-(
I was still able to sync my notes out of it, though, and got a replacement for $100. As part of that process, 3Com "screwed up" somewhere and ended up sending me a Palm III as a replacement. I called them to verify what should've happened...they said I could keep it, or if I was really set on another PalmPilot Pro, I could send it back and they'd send out the "right" product. I think it's pretty obvious what choice I made. (Let's see...double the RAM and infrared...what would I do with those? :-) )
I tried it once...it had the annoying habit of announcing to the world that you were using Netscrape as your browser, regardless of what you were actually using (IE, Lynx, kfm, etc.) Several websites I frequent didn't work right through it, probably because of this.
Another ad-filtering proxy you might want to investigate is WebWasher. I've used it for a few months now, and it's worked pretty well. AFAIK, it's Win9x-only (maybe NT as well), but if you have only one Win9x box on your network, you can install WebWasher on it and make it available to your entire LAN. It also doesn't mangle the browser information, so websites know that I'm using IE and not Netscrape. It's free (in the "free beer" sense) if you're not using it for business purposes.
Resistance is futile. You will be assimilated. :-)
On a more serious note, while this would be good stuff for the handicapped, it has the potential to be abused. It'd kinda be like cosmetic surgery...you don't really need it, but some people aren't happy with what they're born with, or something along those lines.
It'd give BSOD a whole new meaning. :-)
ROM 01s (like mine) have an Easter egg that's brought up the same way, though it's not quite as much fun: it displays the names of the people who worked on the IIGS.
Fun machines, though it's a bit of a bummer that one of the HDs on mine went bad. (I had transferred the contents of both drives to a Zip disk, though, and it'll boot off of that, so at least I didn't lose anything.) It started life back in '85 as a IIe with 128K and two 5.25" floppy drives; it now has 4.25 megs, two 40-meg HDs (one dead), Zip, CD-ROM, and runs at 12.5 MHz. These days, it mainly runs ProTERM 3.0 and acts as a dumb terminal hanging off a Linux box.
Bzzt! The role of government is (or ought to be) to safeguard individual liberties. This entails on people infringing the rights of other people. Since "government" is, basically, just another group of people, these restrictions would also apply to the government.
I can't speak for how things work on your side of the puddle (and won't even try, even though I lived there for two years in the mid-80s), but you are totally mistaken as to what our Bill of Rights does. It is not an enumeration of the people's rights, to the exclusion of other rights which the founding fathers may have neglected. It is, instead, a command to government that under no circumstances are certain rights to be infringed by the government. It says, among other things, that the government may pass no law restricting free speech/press/assembly (First Amendment), the right to keep and bear arms (Second Amendment), or the right to a speedy and public trial by jury in criminal matters (Sixth Amendment). There's even an amendment (the Tenth) which was intended to serve as a catch-all amendment to prohibit the central government from trying to claim any powers not granted it by the states or the people. (A case could be made that the Tenth Amendment has been a dead letter in recent years (possibly as far back as the Civil War), but that is beyond the scope of this discussion.)
Tubes aren't as hard to come by as you might think. Lots of companies are still selling 'em. The biggest of 'em is Antique Electronic Supply in Arizona; a couple of others I can think of off the top of my head are CWest Tubes in Utah and Fair Radio Sales in Ohio. The audiophooles have driven the prices of some types (especially power triodes) through the roof, but many types still sell for just a few dollars each, including (IIRC) the 12A_7 types that boatanchor computers more than likely would've used by the gross. (If they're interested in economizing, they could retrofit the machine to use some of the goofball tube types developed for TV use, which are dirt-cheap...but since they're working with a one-of-a-kind machine, they probably don't want to hack it up too badly.)
In fact, I've heard from some people that it's actually harder to fix old transistor radios than it is to fix similar equipment built with tubes, since early transistors have become scarcer than hens' teeth. Early ICs can be equally hard to come by (some talk came up in comp.sys.apple2 a while back about the feasibility of reproducing the Apple I from schematics, and someone noted that some of the chips used in that machine's design are no longer available.
With all that said, the machine would more than likely be on static display most of the time. They might fire it up for special occasions or just to verify that it still works, but I doubt they'll have it participating in GIMPS 24/7. :-)
I had wondered for some time what those abbreviations mean, so I played with Babelfish a bit and got these results:
You learn something new every day. I lived in Germany for two years, and never figured those out while I was there. :-)
They must not be using their codebreaking machines to run this site, as it seems the /. Effect has struck again. :-)
http://people.delphi.com/salfter/cs301.ht ml
It's mainly an account of incidents (some of them fatal) involving the Therac-25, a radiotherapy machine that was almost completely computer-controlled. Numerous race conditions in the code combined with a lack of hardware-based safety interlocks allowed the machine to be operated in unsafe configurations. Several people were killed or badly injured before the machines were recalled. The software problems would've stood a better chance of being caught in a more open review process. (A case might also be made regarding the replacement of hardware-based interlocks with software, and how this is awfully similar in basic concept to Winmodems and their problems, but that's beyond the scope of this thread. Besides, nobody had heard of Winmodems back in 1993. :-) )
http://people.delphi.com/salfter/LiVid. tar.gz
No link on the associated web page...yet (I'm at work and the master copy of my HTML is at home).
It's agreed that these are sub-optimal choices (especially the Winmodems), but...
Besides, let's not forget that the fastest x86-compatible processor you can buy isn't from Intel anymore.