I wish I had a CDC Cyber 1700 emulater with the Cyber 1820 extensions just like I use to use in 1978 (remember the Beegees and "Staying Alive"?).
I'd also love a monochrome terminal with red phosphors like I had then. You don't see those now. Some of the CRTs actually drew on the screen and they looked awesome but they were limited and the raster CRTs have taken over everywhere.
We used to waste hours playing Lunar Lander (we wrote it of course, no graphics (I hadn't even heard the word then), just numbers and it was still fun).
We've come a long way since I started 24 years ago.
I want a picture of a sunrise over a Tahitian lagoon to wake me every morning. What an alarm clock that would be. Of course the Tahitians will have to look at pieces of glass forever afterwards as they collect images for later resale.
What the porn industry could do with these genuinely stereo, turn on/turn off images is beyond the imagination.
So the FBI want to monitor the internet. It's a big job and taxpayers are going to pay for it. Having J Edna Hoover in charge of something like that gives me the heebeejeebees but even so. As has been said before they cannot mandate to the routers because it is against the fourth amendment (not sure what that is but the person who said so sounded like they knew what they were talking about).
We are not terrorists. We don't have anything to be worried about. It may degrade the internet a little but probably not too noticeably.
What we do have to worry about is that the FBI will miss the real terrorists. How easy would it be to set up a new internet with no connection to the big internet. A few POPs in crucial places, several routers, readily available software and immediate dropout when intruders appear. A bit expensive but not excessively so. Replicate your net ten times and you can detect who compromised it if that ever happens. Inconvenient but not impossible.
Or if you want to use the internet proper. Take your message and translate it into, say, seven languages. Take the first word of the first language and then the second word of the second language. I don't like to add too many details because it is an effective way of defeating any encryption breaking tools.
The FBI is a strange organisation. Part cop, part spook and not quite either. I don't trust them as far as I can kick them but they are on our side.
So, they scare the terrorists by showing that they are looking at every packet (yeah right), but then they make their own job that much harder.
Ever see a little dog with a big bone? Jaws aren't quite big enough. Well this is a big dog with a brontosaurus bone. No danger just yet.
Have you ever worked with a Moslem? Have you ever had a conversation with one? Do you know any Moslem who would say that you were their friend? They are not all the same. The Renaissance that started the culture in which we live is due to the Arabs who kept the knowledge that we lost. The numbers that we use to count with come from the Arabs. The names of half the stars come from the Arabs.
Some Arab words in English: logarithm, algebra, sheriff and many more
This does make me feel old. I have been listening to news about the new great standard that will make games available for all platforms for longer than most slashdotters have been alive.
It's a great idea but somebody please make it work before I die.
I think that you have just solved a problem of mine. Some newer web pages refuse to load in either Opera 5.12 (my main browser) or Mozilla 0.93 which is my backup. But when I scratch out IE from the box I buried it in then they load perfectly.
Incidentally, Frontpage is nothing. No-one uses it for anything important. I am however worried that MicroSoft may put the same caveat on Windows and/or Office and then enforce it. Frontpage is possibly just testing the waters.
I see your point, but.. while Christianity remains a powerful movement in the first world it is no longer a majority. The majority are capitalists, wage earning capitalists, it is the only system that they (and I) know. There are no alternatives unless you want to go to a socialst republic (which is really turned upsidedown fascism) or the Amish which is Luddism.
So, we are all capitalists even though we are feeding on the bottom. The Arab countries are different, not better nor worse, just different.
This time the fight is between Capitalism and The Future of Islam. Capitalism wins by inherent vigor and seduction. It is just too easy to buy a greasy Kentucky when you are late/tired/birthday/hungry. It is cheapish and you know what you are going to get and kids get a job until they get a real job (erhmm did I just say that?).
So, the Americans value money over god (mostly) and the Moslems want to be left to follow god without the intrusion of capitalism (read take over of the media and thoroughly intrusive advertising). They want their kids to be like them.
America will win this one in the short term. However an eye needs to be kept on the future.
Incidentally, do you think that TimeWarner will be selling "Fuck tha Police" in New York tomorrow. Maybe some rapper could make a song called "Fuck tha Fire Brigade 2".
The music/media/film corporations are deriding the heritage that has been earned by America through two world wars and billions of dollars to set the world on its feet again.
I think that Mr Katz has made a mistake about President Bush's 'singsong monotone'.
I used to be a doorman and I have hit a lot of people and thrown them out. Mostly they yell and swear and threaten with anything they can think of. A few, a very few fortunately, use just the same tone as President Bush did and they are the ones who come back when you have finished your shift and, well in one case, beat up my friend so badly he had eight broken fingers, a broken jaw, two cracked ribs and a broken arm. He never worked on the door ever again. Another acquaintance got an iron bar across the back of his head. Someone even got shot (most unusual here in Australia) as he walked out of the club when his shift finished.
That singsong monotone is the most dangerous thing that I have heard for a long time and I am worried that all that suppressed anger might lead the US into something they can't win and can't leave.
Afganistan has been the key that broke three empires already (Moghul, British and Russian). We could have a lot bodybags coming back home if prudence isn't used.
Try telling the person in charge of the company for whom you are doing the site that a com.au site is going to cost four times the price of a com site when what he really wants is a com.au and wants to pay a com price.
I am Australian and I share a company with my wife. We use.com instead of.com.au because the au was just too hard to get. My wife owns the company but we wanted a different name because the company has changed in nature (from dtp to web animation). The registered name didn't suit.
Anyone can have a.com. It is bloody hard to get a.com.au. You have to show company papers and everything. To have a.au is a sign of respect in Australia and I think that it should stay that way. It is only because of Robert Elz that this exists. Now that he is gone we are going to see names like sexsexsex.com.au and godownonyourgoodtimebuddy.com.au. Terrific...not!
You don't live in Australia (mostly) but it is important to us to be proud and do things right. We make mistakes and our government (all parties fellers) does everything to make us seem like mental midgets. We still want to rise above our politicians and rise above our organistations who are a bunch of sycophants. Want to contribute as an equal partner to the world knowledge despite our IT organisations and despite our politicians.
We think that we belong in the larger world but the people that we would have respected forty years are the ones who make us a laughing stock. Australians stand proud by the acts of individuals and are ashamed by the people who represent those individuals.
Thank you Robert Elz. We respect what you have done and are grateful for your legacy.
I was in the industry at that time and apart from jcr's attitude I have to agree with them. IBM sold on reputation and if you wanted best performance you went elsewhere. IBM computers didn't fall over though. Not once in my experience has an IBM mainframe died for no apparent reason. It was worth something then. The world was different.
I was a Systems Programmer working with (but not for) CDC just before IBM released the PC. We had twin Cyber 1820s, the latest and greatest in minicomputers, about the size of a modern executive's desk and less than a million dollars each. We even had a hard disk. The platters had a blue plastic hood and were about the size of an LP and you had to manually lock them into place. The magnetic field around the hard disk was so strong that your watch would stop when they started spinning (all watches were analogue then). When you turned on the computer you had to key in a bootstrap to get the computer started, ours was very short, about 30 characters as I recall. The bootstrap was just a bit of machine code in hex. We used to program in machine code (we mostly programmed in Cyber 1700 assembler or Fortran 4 which was brand new, but sometimes machine code).
It was so easy to use and we actually got to use the computer. Generally programmers were not allowed near the computer (Finance programmers had to look through the glass) and operators were sacked/transferred if it became known that they had learned how to program.
Best of all we had monitors with red text, the main monitors had green text but all the other departments had to make do with amber text.
One day one of the CDC programmers came up with some advertising for the IBM PC that was going to be released the following year. It had 64K ram and a cassette deck and cost $3000 (about 3 months wage as a programmer). We all fell about laughing and agreed that it would never be a success. I don't recall if it mentioned a floppy drive or not as I had never heard of them at that time (I was using punch cards at university and tapes at work). The thing was that there were several other personal computers as good or better on the market at that time. I think one was the Trash 80 (memory can be a lying jade though). Apple had been around for a long time then but no-one even talked about it. It wasn't a real computer in our minds (even though it had colour monitors - not that anyone I knew had ever seen a colour monitor then).
If I had known that IBM didn't own the patents then I would not have laughed so much. A few years later Apple almost became the standard but they managed to enforce their patent and so killed itself and had to be reinvented as the Lisa/Macintosh.
The world would be very different now if Apple had not been able to enforce its patents and IBM had enforced its BIOS patent.
I haven't been able to see the site yet but the problem seems very simple to me. A small pile of magnesium powder and a bit of detergent and water and you should be able to ignite virtually any piece of solid magnesium (and possibly a lot of the surroundings). Don't try it at home though.
Remove Tim Berners-Lee, and Curl offers nothing. And he is out to make a buck from Curl.
With all due respect to Tim Berners-Lee (and we owe him heaps), thanks for Curl but no thanks.
Slashdot Mirror
While we are on wish emulaters.
I wish I had a CDC Cyber 1700 emulater with the Cyber 1820 extensions just like I use to use in 1978 (remember the Beegees and "Staying Alive"?).
I'd also love a monochrome terminal with red phosphors like I had then. You don't see those now. Some of the CRTs actually drew on the screen and they looked awesome but they were limited and the raster CRTs have taken over everywhere.
We used to waste hours playing Lunar Lander (we wrote it of course, no graphics (I hadn't even heard the word then), just numbers and it was still fun).
We've come a long way since I started 24 years ago.
I want a picture of a sunrise over a Tahitian lagoon to wake me every morning. What an alarm clock that would be. Of course the Tahitians will have to look at pieces of glass forever afterwards as they collect images for later resale.
What the porn industry could do with these genuinely stereo, turn on/turn off images is beyond the imagination.
The price could be a little out of my range. LOL.
The best time and place to do this would be over Australia on November the 18th!
Whatta show with meteorites coming down all over the place.
As long as the US media only show US news then the US public will never know what is being done in their name.
A lot is good and a lot is bad. It is all done in the dark because the US citizen never hears about it.
I couldn't agree more. If you don't like the law then vote it out. If the police don't follow the law then they are criminals.
So the FBI want to monitor the internet. It's a big job and taxpayers are going to pay for it. Having J Edna Hoover in charge of something like that gives me the heebeejeebees but even so. As has been said before they cannot mandate to the routers because it is against the fourth amendment (not sure what that is but the person who said so sounded like they knew what they were talking about).
We are not terrorists. We don't have anything to be worried about. It may degrade the internet a little but probably not too noticeably.
What we do have to worry about is that the FBI will miss the real terrorists. How easy would it be to set up a new internet with no connection to the big internet. A few POPs in crucial places, several routers, readily available software and immediate dropout when intruders appear. A bit expensive but not excessively so. Replicate your net ten times and you can detect who compromised it if that ever happens. Inconvenient but not impossible.
Or if you want to use the internet proper. Take your message and translate it into, say, seven languages. Take the first word of the first language and then the second word of the second language. I don't like to add too many details because it is an effective way of defeating any encryption breaking tools.
The FBI is a strange organisation. Part cop, part spook and not quite either. I don't trust them as far as I can kick them but they are on our side.
So, they scare the terrorists by showing that they are looking at every packet (yeah right), but then they make their own job that much harder.
Ever see a little dog with a big bone? Jaws aren't quite big enough. Well this is a big dog with a brontosaurus bone. No danger just yet.
But will it run the legacy drivers for my hand scanner and Iomega video capture card?
Have you ever worked with a Moslem? Have you ever had a conversation with one? Do you know any Moslem who would say that you were their friend? They are not all the same. The Renaissance that started the culture in which we live is due to the Arabs who kept the knowledge that we lost. The numbers that we use to count with come from the Arabs. The names of half the stars come from the Arabs.
Some Arab words in English: logarithm, algebra, sheriff and many more
The newspapers tell truth and lies together.
This does make me feel old. I have been listening to news about the new great standard that will make games available for all platforms for longer than most slashdotters have been alive.
It's a great idea but somebody please make it work before I die.
I think that you have just solved a problem of mine. Some newer web pages refuse to load in either Opera 5.12 (my main browser) or Mozilla 0.93 which is my backup. But when I scratch out IE from the box I buried it in then they load perfectly.
Incidentally, Frontpage is nothing. No-one uses it for anything important. I am however worried that MicroSoft may put the same caveat on Windows and/or Office and then enforce it. Frontpage is possibly just testing the waters.
I see your point, but.. while Christianity remains a powerful movement in the first world it is no longer a majority. The majority are capitalists, wage earning capitalists, it is the only system that they (and I) know. There are no alternatives unless you want to go to a socialst republic (which is really turned upsidedown fascism) or the Amish which is Luddism.
So, we are all capitalists even though we are feeding on the bottom. The Arab countries are different, not better nor worse, just different.
This time the fight is between Capitalism and The Future of Islam. Capitalism wins by inherent vigor and seduction. It is just too easy to buy a greasy Kentucky when you are late/tired/birthday/hungry. It is cheapish and you know what you are going to get and kids get a job until they get a real job (erhmm did I just say that?).
So, the Americans value money over god (mostly) and the Moslems want to be left to follow god without the intrusion of capitalism (read take over of the media and thoroughly intrusive advertising). They want their kids to be like them.
America will win this one in the short term. However an eye needs to be kept on the future.
Incidentally, do you think that TimeWarner will be selling "Fuck tha Police" in New York tomorrow. Maybe some rapper could make a song called "Fuck tha Fire Brigade 2".
The music/media/film corporations are deriding the heritage that has been earned by America through two world wars and billions of dollars to set the world on its feet again.
Precisely.
That is what I am most afraid of.
I think that Mr Katz has made a mistake about President Bush's 'singsong monotone'.
I used to be a doorman and I have hit a lot of people and thrown them out. Mostly they yell and swear and threaten with anything they can think of. A few, a very few fortunately, use just the same tone as President Bush did and they are the ones who come back when you have finished your shift and, well in one case, beat up my friend so badly he had eight broken fingers, a broken jaw, two cracked ribs and a broken arm. He never worked on the door ever again. Another acquaintance got an iron bar across the back of his head. Someone even got shot (most unusual here in Australia) as he walked out of the club when his shift finished.
That singsong monotone is the most dangerous thing that I have heard for a long time and I am worried that all that suppressed anger might lead the US into something they can't win and can't leave.
Afganistan has been the key that broke three empires already (Moghul, British and Russian). We could have a lot bodybags coming back home if prudence isn't used.
We offer our sincerest sympathy from Australia
Enthusiasm - I can make this baby fly!
Doubt - Something's not working here
Denial - Stating that legacy code should stay in place until the end of time.
:try_again
Anger - Showing signs of anger towards said legacy code.
Self-bargaining - Bargaining with one's self about what legacy code should stay and what should not.
Depression - Usually accompanied by guilt - When you realize you removed the wrong bit of code and checked it back in without reviewing the changes.
Acceptance - Re-writing most of the code since it's all buggered-up, anyhow.
Goto
I apologise for my my ignorance but just what is Unix 2?
Unix is Unix and Linux is pretty close but Unix 2 is something that I have heard mentioned various times recently but the actuality escapes me.
Try telling the person in charge of the company for whom you are doing the site that a com.au site is going to cost four times the price of a com site when what he really wants is a com.au and wants to pay a com price.
I'd like to speak in support of Mr Elz.
.com instead of .com.au because the au was just too hard to get. My wife owns the company but we wanted a different name because the company has changed in nature (from dtp to web animation). The registered name didn't suit.
.com. It is bloody hard to get a .com.au. You have to show company papers and everything. To have a .au is a sign of respect in Australia and I think that it should stay that way. It is only because of Robert Elz that this exists. Now that he is gone we are going to see names like sexsexsex.com.au and godownonyourgoodtimebuddy.com.au. Terrific...not!
I am Australian and I share a company with my wife. We use
Anyone can have a
You don't live in Australia (mostly) but it is important to us to be proud and do things right. We make mistakes and our government (all parties fellers) does everything to make us seem like mental midgets. We still want to rise above our politicians and rise above our organistations who are a bunch of sycophants. Want to contribute as an equal partner to the world knowledge despite our IT organisations and despite our politicians.
We think that we belong in the larger world but the people that we would have respected forty years are the ones who make us a laughing stock. Australians stand proud by the acts of individuals and are ashamed by the people who represent those individuals.
Thank you Robert Elz. We respect what you have done and are grateful for your legacy.
anarchists lunatics terrorists
I was in the industry at that time and apart from jcr's attitude I have to agree with them. IBM sold on reputation and if you wanted best performance you went elsewhere. IBM computers didn't fall over though. Not once in my experience has an IBM mainframe died for no apparent reason. It was worth something then. The world was different.
I was a Systems Programmer working with (but not for) CDC just before IBM released the PC. We had twin Cyber 1820s, the latest and greatest in minicomputers, about the size of a modern executive's desk and less than a million dollars each. We even had a hard disk. The platters had a blue plastic hood and were about the size of an LP and you had to manually lock them into place. The magnetic field around the hard disk was so strong that your watch would stop when they started spinning (all watches were analogue then). When you turned on the computer you had to key in a bootstrap to get the computer started, ours was very short, about 30 characters as I recall. The bootstrap was just a bit of machine code in hex. We used to program in machine code (we mostly programmed in Cyber 1700 assembler or Fortran 4 which was brand new, but sometimes machine code).
It was so easy to use and we actually got to use the computer. Generally programmers were not allowed near the computer (Finance programmers had to look through the glass) and operators were sacked/transferred if it became known that they had learned how to program.
Best of all we had monitors with red text, the main monitors had green text but all the other departments had to make do with amber text.
One day one of the CDC programmers came up with some advertising for the IBM PC that was going to be released the following year. It had 64K ram and a cassette deck and cost $3000 (about 3 months wage as a programmer). We all fell about laughing and agreed that it would never be a success. I don't recall if it mentioned a floppy drive or not as I had never heard of them at that time (I was using punch cards at university and tapes at work). The thing was that there were several other personal computers as good or better on the market at that time. I think one was the Trash 80 (memory can be a lying jade though). Apple had been around for a long time then but no-one even talked about it. It wasn't a real computer in our minds (even though it had colour monitors - not that anyone I knew had ever seen a colour monitor then).
If I had known that IBM didn't own the patents then I would not have laughed so much. A few years later Apple almost became the standard but they managed to enforce their patent and so killed itself and had to be reinvented as the Lisa/Macintosh.
The world would be very different now if Apple had not been able to enforce its patents and IBM had enforced its BIOS patent.
Solid mangnesium is VERY hard to ignite. So no it won't work.
I haven't been able to see the site yet but the problem seems very simple to me. A small pile of magnesium powder and a bit of detergent and water and you should be able to ignite virtually any piece of solid magnesium (and possibly a lot of the surroundings). Don't try it at home though.
Remove Tim Berners-Lee, and Curl offers nothing. And he is out to make a buck from Curl.
With all due respect to Tim Berners-Lee (and we owe him heaps), thanks for Curl but no thanks.