Agreed - I have done both Linux and FreeBSD kernal compiles with success - although I cheat and write the Linux compiles to a boot disk so I can test them before committing my changes.
I like the fact the FreeBSD will keep a rescue kernal which is easy to boot if all goes wrong, but LINT is not the best type of documentation in the world. OTOH it is pretty easy to compile out all the crud like redundant ethernet and scsi and whatever that is installed by default, and you can be guaranteed to edit the kernal config file remotely via a text terminal without the useless interrogation of the Linux system.
MenuConfig on Linux is okay, fine for brutalising a kernal first time around before fine-tuning it. FreeBSD would benefit from a tool like this, but done better.
Idea: AN 80x25 array of 2 by 3 bobbles connected to the serial port of the computer like a wyse terminal. Each bobble can rise or fall depending on a signal (e.g., when 'A' gets sent to the terminal, it forms the braille 'A' shape in the bobbles.) That way, you can have a braille view on a text terminal... Maybe the device could be pressure sensitive as well - press down on a braille character is like mouse clicking on that character in a terminal.
This seems very old, and FreeBSD 4.0 has been released, and we know about the future, and since this interview FreeBSD and BSDi have merged and.. and...
Why replace QNX with NetBSD? QNX is cool. Of course, I don't know what i-Opener has done to QNX, but I don't imagine much - it will be the standard QNX Photon + Voyager + Mail + Some other stuff + terminal(? - a QNX Web Pad I have played with had a text terminal to play with). Replace this with what? A text-mode NetBSD? Strange idea.
Useful for your average Linux admin, but it doesn't go into a lot of depth. FreeBSD hasn't got the best kernal docs and system, and LINT isn't the most descriptive and helpfil file ever.
Still, the default kernal is good enough for most people!
That post did not exist when I wrote my post - there was only 1 post when I started, and I thought mine was relevant, and it included more information than the aforementioned post anyway. And my post has generated more conversation so it must be worth something:-)
Because an X-Box costs $300 and a PC with monitor and ISP connections costs $800 plus monthly ISP charge.
Yeah right. How about (for 2001):
Because an X-Box costs £300 plus extortionate MSN only monthly fee plus online-gaming monthly fee and you need to find a decent TV and stereo to plug it into anyway to have a good game and TVs are crap anyway, whilst a low-end PC with good graphics card costs $400, can do a lot more, has 30Gb of disk space, a keyboard and a mouse and can output to either a monitor ($200) or the aforementioned TV, and comes with the cheapest ISP subscription you can find around, and has a lot more uses apart from playing games.
I find that (e.g., zdnet.co.uk cacks out, but zdnet.com is fine, but both use doubleclick) - I found out why! In the html for the cacky pages, they use the tag to embed a whole html web pages (containing the advert only) inside the current page - to bypass this you have to hit ESC after the page is loaded, but before the computer has given up on the advert and gives a 404. This probably only works on windows though, because it is so slow to respond and I don't run a webserver under it in general! What you really want is an option in browsers to ignore layer tags completely - that would get rid of 50% of adverts immediately!
Gah, I hate Windows, but I have to work with it. Luckily, Caldera OpenLinux installed without a hitch on my home laptop machine, with PCMCIA CD-ROM! No boot floppies required at all, and quite pretty.
This is funny. I have killed of doubleclcik etc in Windows by aliasing ads.doubleclick.net etc to 127.0.0.1 in a hosts file. I have just submitted a comment and windows in its dumbness tried to get a doubleclick advert (inside the evil layer tag no less) and failed, and brought up the IE failed to load page message (even though the rest of the page had loaded fine - Netscape doesn't suffer from this).
one could stick a 18GB 3.5" scsi drive into the back of the unit
"Hmmm, looks at my TiVo 2(beta) with SCSI RAID farm with 200Gb of storage connected to the back (don't put the RAID on top of the TV, btw - it fell through the case and I had to get a new TV). This can store up to 300 hours at low quality, and I can add another 6 of these 200Gb RAIDs for up to 1500 hours of televisual fun."
"Of course, I can't hear the TV with all of these fans blowing around, and it is quite hot in here all the time, so I got in an industrial air conditioning unit - I need the volume at 11 to hear anything! My neighbours moved away recently, but luckily the slashed car tires have stopped."
CSS doesn't prevent professional piracy, but it is (was) a barrier to copying and distribution by a casual home user.
The average home user who currently would have to pay more for the media to put the pirated film on then the film would cost to buy! Okay, so in 5 years time black DVD-R's will cost a quarter of their current cost, but for your average person who might pirate a film, paying $20 for the film on DVD or $10 for the media and then finding someone with both the film and the DVD-RAM/R/RW drive to give them a copy... not worth a lot of peoples time.
Now, when DVD-R's cost $2 each to buy, and DVD-R drives are $80... there will be a problem then, and that time will come. A time will come when people have 8Mbit links into their home, a DVD will take 4000-8000 seconds to download (1 - 3 hours roughly) and then it can be recorded. This is 10 years away at most, and it will happen and the MPAA and movie studios can do nothing about it - unless everyone in the country is sent to prison!
Okay, so for the meantime people must fight for their rights, but whoever selected a 40-bit key anyway - in 5 years time an average home computer will be able to crack that before you can say "I like Kylie Minogue"...:-)
Well the new Amiga OS was going to be based around QNX Neutrino and Photon, but that deal fell down and Gateway bumbled around making silly noises all the time. A lot of Amigans really like QNX and its architecture and graphical system, as well as its amazing network transparency etc.
Anyway, the new Amiga will not be an outdated platform - I expect it will run on standard x86 hardware (or a selected subset of it - why support old graphics card, for example) and it will also run on the POP boards. It will run on current PPC Amigas (as does Linux, NetBSD, QNX (one day) etc) to provide people with an upgrade path. TAOS Elate has a lot of interesting and good technology in it - it is a step in front of Linux (true cross platform binaries etc) and it leaves Windows at the bottom of the elevator.
Trust us, we like our Amigas, but we know they are old and crufty, and have more add-ons than, erm, something very modular with lots of add-ons, but they do our work well and efficiently, and we can play Quake and lots more games are being ported (several based on the Quake II engine), but the processor power is holding us now. We want Quad 600MHz G4s in our machines!:-)
The classic Amiga OS has lots of great ideas and concepts - datatypes, screens, hardware graphics and audio accelleration, etc. Modern hardware has caught up and overtaken a lot of these features now, and screens is hard to justify when you could have a 1600x1200 desktop instead (but see here for a more useful application of Amiga OS and screens).
My Mobile phone does 800/900/1900 at the moment, all GSM as that is the standard everywhere in the world but the technological backwater that is the US (but they are catching up using 1900). I don't think that there are many analogue mobile phones left in Europe now, everything is digital.
Of course, this all goes wrong with with the standard GPRS system that will be introduced this year. That is a lot faster than GSM (120kbps vs. 9.6kbps) and allows mobile video applications and web access and all the other gubbins that will be cool to have when it is affordable, and phones have larger screens, like the Ericcson phone shown off at the Symbian stand at CeBIT.
Of course, I might be wrong with a few things here, but at least Europe can keep to a single standard for communications, unlike the USA. Digital Television is better in Europe, mobile technology is better, we have more freedom, no guns, etc. Okay, so taxes are higher, and the cost of living is higher, but America seems to be tending towards a view of life describes in the L. Ron. Hubbard Mission Earth series!:-)
Authors must have been a bit worried that their name could have been used on a document that had been modified with hundreds of swear words 'livening' up the text.:-)
Although I rather like the idea of documentation saying "Click on the f-ing icon in the top left corner and then set the damned slider to whatever you f-ing like". "To f-ing shutdown the f-ing computer, f-ing click on the f-ing arse-named Start button". Would make man pages a lot more interesting as well.
If these airships are so good, why don't you get funding and do it yourself? I would estimate that you would need several thousand to get global coverage, so you had better hope that they cost less than a million each. Also imagine customer support: "Why can't I get a signal", "Sorry, a we had a burst - someone launched a rocket at it, and it didn't crash into the sea". Worse would be for the guy that didn't let go of the rope when launching the damn thing. And where are you going to find material light enough to keep the damned contraption in the stratosphere?
Hmmm, coverage better provided by ground based solutions? I would return that crack if I was you!
This system will provide 100% Earth coverage. I doubt if you can get 10% coverage using normal ground based solutions, at most 30%. For most people this is okay, but there are a lot of people out there who need this kind of thing. It just depends on how competant the company is, and whether they want to do another Iridium...
Luckily the satellite was insured, and the group that was launching it planned for 10 successes out of 12 anyway - bet they are miffed that the first one went down though!
A 1 billion pound system, 12 satellites providing around 115kbps links to mobile systems anywhere on the globe at any time!
Good, the best way to advance is to take the best from all of the competitors, or to even encompass them all... and being more modern you can leave out the older parts that are not relevant anymore.
I read that there is an API for reading CD audio and playing it (how many more CD Players do we need:-) ?). Does OpenAL include support for mp3, MSAudio, Liquid Audio, Barry's Mega Audio, etc, or include hooks for these to be implemented, perhaps by third party software such as XMMS? Or am I getting a bit to specific...
Dolby AC3 support would be nice as well... I suppose I should take a gander at the API!
The Amiga won't ever pop back as a consumer machine, not for a while at least, although the next Amiga OS already has ports of Quake ]|[ and Unreal Tournament (according to UK Amiga magazine AmigaActive anyway). Hopefully there will be a good system around soon, and there is a lot of interesting technology involved.
Then there are lots of next-gen AmigaOS replacements occurring, some of them are actually making headway now, such as AROS. Other interesting ideas include trying to get the Linux Mac emulator (than runs on Linuxed Macs) to run on PPC enabled Amigas... That would be fun. Amigas have a wealth of OS's available to them, OpenBSD is the latest, others include Linux, NetBSD, QNX (well, it must run on the hardware, but it won't be released for a while I am sure), AmigaOS (never!) and probably a lot more.
Interestingly, the next-gen Amiga OS was going to be called Aqua - until Apple released their new UI. The Amiga has had a pretty rough year, even by the Amigas standards! Hoefully Tao will improve the fortunes, and maybe they should take a gander at OpenAL as their sound system. Sony also have relationships with Tao...
This is a good move by Loki and Creative, although Creatives involvement might put off other audio companies from wanting to use it - I bet the API is particularly suited towards Creative chipsets.
Anyway, Open Audio Library will signal the beginning of a true cross platform 3D audio system. Hopefully it provides more functionality than Microsofts proprietary single platfrom DirectAudio(?) system, otherwise it will be hard to get companies to switch over.
John Carmack should love this, him being a fan of cross-platform APIs and OpenGL etc.
Apples audio libraries probably aren't available for Linux, only Macs and Windows at the moment, and I don't know much about the Mac Sprockets or whatever they are called libraries, but I thought I should mention them so that it didn't look like I only thought that DirectAudio was the only competitor.
Now to wait the three years for the Amigas Audio system, AHI, to support this:-)
Slashdot Mirror
(sound of me sticking my tongue out and blowing a raspberry, then wiping the monitor with a tissue)
Okay, Kernel.
Linux Kernel in a Nutshell - O'Reilly.
Maybe there isn't much difference though, at least to the average person, except that Q-Bert is more fun (unless you are a cryptographer).
I like the fact the FreeBSD will keep a rescue kernal which is easy to boot if all goes wrong, but LINT is not the best type of documentation in the world. OTOH it is pretty easy to compile out all the crud like redundant ethernet and scsi and whatever that is installed by default, and you can be guaranteed to edit the kernal config file remotely via a text terminal without the useless interrogation of the Linux system.
MenuConfig on Linux is okay, fine for brutalising a kernal first time around before fine-tuning it. FreeBSD would benefit from a tool like this, but done better.
Idea: AN 80x25 array of 2 by 3 bobbles connected to the serial port of the computer like a wyse terminal. Each bobble can rise or fall depending on a signal (e.g., when 'A' gets sent to the terminal, it forms the braille 'A' shape in the bobbles.) That way, you can have a braille view on a text terminal... Maybe the device could be pressure sensitive as well - press down on a braille character is like mouse clicking on that character in a terminal.
This seems very old, and FreeBSD 4.0 has been released, and we know about the future, and since this interview FreeBSD and BSDi have merged and .. and ...
Why replace QNX with NetBSD? QNX is cool. Of course, I don't know what i-Opener has done to QNX, but I don't imagine much - it will be the standard QNX Photon + Voyager + Mail + Some other stuff + terminal(? - a QNX Web Pad I have played with had a text terminal to play with). Replace this with what? A text-mode NetBSD? Strange idea.
Still, the default kernal is good enough for most people!
That post did not exist when I wrote my post - there was only 1 post when I started, and I thought mine was relevant, and it included more information than the aforementioned post anyway. And my post has generated more conversation so it must be worth something :-)
Yeah right. How about (for 2001):
Because an X-Box costs £300 plus extortionate MSN only monthly fee plus online-gaming monthly fee and you need to find a decent TV and stereo to plug it into anyway to have a good game and TVs are crap anyway, whilst a low-end PC with good graphics card costs $400, can do a lot more, has 30Gb of disk space, a keyboard and a mouse and can output to either a monitor ($200) or the aforementioned TV, and comes with the cheapest ISP subscription you can find around, and has a lot more uses apart from playing games.
I find that (e.g., zdnet.co.uk cacks out, but zdnet.com is fine, but both use doubleclick) - I found out why! In the html for the cacky pages, they use the tag to embed a whole html web pages (containing the advert only) inside the current page - to bypass this you have to hit ESC after the page is loaded, but before the computer has given up on the advert and gives a 404. This probably only works on windows though, because it is so slow to respond and I don't run a webserver under it in general! What you really want is an option in browsers to ignore layer tags completely - that would get rid of 50% of adverts immediately!
Gah, I hate Windows, but I have to work with it. Luckily, Caldera OpenLinux installed without a hitch on my home laptop machine, with PCMCIA CD-ROM! No boot floppies required at all, and quite pretty.
Here is my hosts file:
127.0.0.1 localhost
127.0.0.1 www.doubleclick.net
127.0.0.1 ad.doubleclick.com
127.0.0.1 ad.doubleclick.net
127.0.0.1 ad.uk.doubleclick.net
127.0.0.1 ad.uk.doubleclick.com
127.0.0.1 ad.preferences.com
127.0.0.1 ad.washingtonpost.com
127.0.0.1 adbot.theonion.com
127.0.0.1 adpick.switchboard.com
127.0.0.1 ads.doubleclick.com
127.0.0.1 ads.doubleclick.net
127.0.0.1 ads.i33.com
127.0.0.1 ads.infospace.com
127.0.0.1 ads.msn.com
127.0.0.1 ads.switchboard.com
127.0.0.1 ads.washingtonpost.com
127.0.0.1 *.doubleclick.net
127.0.0.1 *.doubleclick.com
Helps sometimes, but not all the time, and I have to hit ESC when loading The Register... :-(
"Hmmm, looks at my TiVo 2(beta) with SCSI RAID farm with 200Gb of storage connected to the back (don't put the RAID on top of the TV, btw - it fell through the case and I had to get a new TV). This can store up to 300 hours at low quality, and I can add another 6 of these 200Gb RAIDs for up to 1500 hours of televisual fun."
"Of course, I can't hear the TV with all of these fans blowing around, and it is quite hot in here all the time, so I got in an industrial air conditioning unit - I need the volume at 11 to hear anything! My neighbours moved away recently, but luckily the slashed car tires have stopped."
QT should release a book "Programming QT for Windows" and include QT free of charge with the book, and make money from book sales :-)
The average home user who currently would have to pay more for the media to put the pirated film on then the film would cost to buy! Okay, so in 5 years time black DVD-R's will cost a quarter of their current cost, but for your average person who might pirate a film, paying $20 for the film on DVD or $10 for the media and then finding someone with both the film and the DVD-RAM/R/RW drive to give them a copy... not worth a lot of peoples time.
Now, when DVD-R's cost $2 each to buy, and DVD-R drives are $80... there will be a problem then, and that time will come. A time will come when people have 8Mbit links into their home, a DVD will take 4000-8000 seconds to download (1 - 3 hours roughly) and then it can be recorded. This is 10 years away at most, and it will happen and the MPAA and movie studios can do nothing about it - unless everyone in the country is sent to prison!
Okay, so for the meantime people must fight for their rights, but whoever selected a 40-bit key anyway - in 5 years time an average home computer will be able to crack that before you can say "I like Kylie Minogue"... :-)
Anyway, the new Amiga will not be an outdated platform - I expect it will run on standard x86 hardware (or a selected subset of it - why support old graphics card, for example) and it will also run on the POP boards. It will run on current PPC Amigas (as does Linux, NetBSD, QNX (one day) etc) to provide people with an upgrade path. TAOS Elate has a lot of interesting and good technology in it - it is a step in front of Linux (true cross platform binaries etc) and it leaves Windows at the bottom of the elevator.
Trust us, we like our Amigas, but we know they are old and crufty, and have more add-ons than, erm, something very modular with lots of add-ons, but they do our work well and efficiently, and we can play Quake and lots more games are being ported (several based on the Quake II engine), but the processor power is holding us now. We want Quad 600MHz G4s in our machines! :-)
The classic Amiga OS has lots of great ideas and concepts - datatypes, screens, hardware graphics and audio accelleration, etc. Modern hardware has caught up and overtaken a lot of these features now, and screens is hard to justify when you could have a 1600x1200 desktop instead (but see here for a more useful application of Amiga OS and screens).
Of course, this all goes wrong with with the standard GPRS system that will be introduced this year. That is a lot faster than GSM (120kbps vs. 9.6kbps) and allows mobile video applications and web access and all the other gubbins that will be cool to have when it is affordable, and phones have larger screens, like the Ericcson phone shown off at the Symbian stand at CeBIT.
Of course, I might be wrong with a few things here, but at least Europe can keep to a single standard for communications, unlike the USA. Digital Television is better in Europe, mobile technology is better, we have more freedom, no guns, etc. Okay, so taxes are higher, and the cost of living is higher, but America seems to be tending towards a view of life describes in the L. Ron. Hubbard Mission Earth series! :-)
Although I rather like the idea of documentation saying "Click on the f-ing icon in the top left corner and then set the damned slider to whatever you f-ing like". "To f-ing shutdown the f-ing computer, f-ing click on the f-ing arse-named Start button". Would make man pages a lot more interesting as well.
Neither do the Satellites :-)
If these airships are so good, why don't you get funding and do it yourself? I would estimate that you would need several thousand to get global coverage, so you had better hope that they cost less than a million each. Also imagine customer support: "Why can't I get a signal", "Sorry, a we had a burst - someone launched a rocket at it, and it didn't crash into the sea". Worse would be for the guy that didn't let go of the rope when launching the damn thing. And where are you going to find material light enough to keep the damned contraption in the stratosphere?
This system will provide 100% Earth coverage. I doubt if you can get 10% coverage using normal ground based solutions, at most 30%. For most people this is okay, but there are a lot of people out there who need this kind of thing. It just depends on how competant the company is, and whether they want to do another Iridium...
A 1 billion pound system, 12 satellites providing around 115kbps links to mobile systems anywhere on the globe at any time!
I read that there is an API for reading CD audio and playing it (how many more CD Players do we need :-) ?). Does OpenAL include support for mp3, MSAudio, Liquid Audio, Barry's Mega Audio, etc, or include hooks for these to be implemented, perhaps by third party software such as XMMS? Or am I getting a bit to specific...
Dolby AC3 support would be nice as well... I suppose I should take a gander at the API!
Then there are lots of next-gen AmigaOS replacements occurring, some of them are actually making headway now, such as AROS. Other interesting ideas include trying to get the Linux Mac emulator (than runs on Linuxed Macs) to run on PPC enabled Amigas... That would be fun. Amigas have a wealth of OS's available to them, OpenBSD is the latest, others include Linux, NetBSD, QNX (well, it must run on the hardware, but it won't be released for a while I am sure), AmigaOS (never!) and probably a lot more.
Interestingly, the next-gen Amiga OS was going to be called Aqua - until Apple released their new UI. The Amiga has had a pretty rough year, even by the Amigas standards! Hoefully Tao will improve the fortunes, and maybe they should take a gander at OpenAL as their sound system. Sony also have relationships with Tao...
Anyway, Open Audio Library will signal the beginning of a true cross platform 3D audio system. Hopefully it provides more functionality than Microsofts proprietary single platfrom DirectAudio(?) system, otherwise it will be hard to get companies to switch over.
John Carmack should love this, him being a fan of cross-platform APIs and OpenGL etc.
Apples audio libraries probably aren't available for Linux, only Macs and Windows at the moment, and I don't know much about the Mac Sprockets or whatever they are called libraries, but I thought I should mention them so that it didn't look like I only thought that DirectAudio was the only competitor.
Now to wait the three years for the Amigas Audio system, AHI, to support this :-)