Until you sign up for a mailinglist that automatically adds a "how to unsubscribe" section on the bottom of each message.:)
Not that it helps, even with a little note on the bottom of every message people still manage to post "How do I unsubscribe?" messages about once a week or so on even moderatly crowded mailinglists.
Down that path lies madness. On the other hand, the road to hell is paved with melting snowballs.
Fibre Channel doesn't always mean Optical - these drives use a 40-pin "copper" connection, which can be a cable or a backplane (for hot-plugging).
40 pins? Last time I worked with fibre the cables were 4 pins. They were heavenly to work with, especially after wiring up SCSI RAID racks (8 68 conductor cables all running under the floor, and 68 conductor cables are a true PITA to work with, they're heavy (especially when shielded and 50' long), don't bend easily, keep their shape even when you don't want them to (they always want to be rolled up) and it's easy to bend the pins on the connector. The Fibre Channel cables are like thin serial cables. A single person can carry enough cables for two or three enclosures without even breaking a sweat, and wire them up in 1/4 of the time.
Of course this isn't such a big deal in PC-land, but those tiny little cables do allow for better airflow in your case (especially compared to those 68 conductor ribbon walls, I usually split the cable into 4 or 5 secgments just so it doesn't create a huge heat sheild inside of my case (especially important for those hot running 10k RPM drives!)
Down that path lies madness. On the other hand, the road to hell is paved with melting snowballs.
Xine lets you display overlays (subtitles) but it doesn't do a very good job of it yet. Unfortunatly most Anime houses use the overlay feature in ways it was never ment to be used in valient efforts to get a third color on the screen, which confuses the heck out of many software DVD players.
Also, I've never been able to get xines.ifo support to work correctly, so on some DVDs you'll only get 1/2 or less of the subtitles.
Still, the feature is there, and possibly even useful in some circumstances.
Down that path lies madness. On the other hand, the road to hell is paved with melting snowballs.
Not to mention they are really picky. If you're talking about 049s (as I think you are) those little 2 stroke engines need a lot of TLC just to get started, and then you have to be really careful with them or you'll just kill them right out. You're right about the noise though, those suckers are just as loud and a lot shriller than you average car, especially considering most people don't put any sort of exaust system on them (they need all the power they can get).
The only think I can see this used for is as something you can plug into the side if your laptop if you are traveling through the congo or something and want to carry a compact power source.
Down that path lies madness. On the other hand, the road to hell is paved with melting snowballs.
You mean tik? That uses TOC, or maybe you mean the java client, IIRC that uses TOC as well.
By the way, has anybody successfully run the java client for more than a few hours? I always had bizzare things happening with the widgets (buttons disappearing, windows growing to 1000x10000 and then disappearing, windows placing themselves at -31231,-12314, random freezes, etc...) Not to mention it slowed down my R10k O2 with 128MB of memory (Still a lot back in the day).
Tik was pretty cool, it even had a Slashdot ticker, but wasn't very featureful (you couldn't send files, chat, and do many of the things that the regular AIM clients could do).
Down that path lies madness. On the other hand, the road to hell is paved with melting snowballs.
Oh and you can't set the away message. In fact, gee, it doesn't do almost everything OSCAR does. You must not use TOC very much. I've had it go out for days at a time when I had to use it in my previous job. Oh, and you messages would make it through the servers about 90% of the time. Unfortunatly this was a few years ago, so maybe they improved it.
I can guarentee that TOC is a lower priority at AOL than OSCAR though. Worse, there is no guarentee that AOL is going to keep TOC around, only by using OSCAR can the Unix folks keep fairly confident that they won't simply be shut off one day when AOL decides that TOC is just too expensive to keep running for the few people who actually use it. Heck, they've been hinting at this for some time now by slowly shutting off features in TOC. As it is now, they are basically down to Login, logoff, set status, and send message to X.
Down that path lies madness. On the other hand, the road to hell is paved with melting snowballs.
4. If you are the only person on their contact list that is fine, but if your friends have other friends (who use AOL), then it really isn't feasable to ask them to switch. Worse, many people use AIM because it is part of AOL, making them quite hesitant to switch (why give up a perfectly good IM client just becaues one of my friends switched to something I've never heard of?). Running two IM clients side by side is not exactly an elegant solution. Worse, most people will end up forgetting about the second client, particularly if they are AOL (and not just AIM) users. I offer that this is a very suboptimal solution, and in the end equivelent to option 1.
Now this certainly isn't true of everybody. Maybe you can get your entire group of friends to switch, but I belive that is going to be the exception rather than the rule. Jabber like Linux whereas AIM is like Windows. You can run it yourself and appreciate the technical superiority, but don't expect your frends and family to switch.
Option 5 is the same as option 1, give up IMing entirely.
Down that path lies madness. On the other hand, the road to hell is paved with melting snowballs.
Actually, there are many people who don't have Windows but still need to communicated with their friends and co-workers. Besides, reverse engineering something for the purposeses of interoperability is not illegal, and is in fact one of the major tenets of fair use. Not even the DMCA can take this away (unless AOL starts to encrypt their IM messages).
Anyway, you didn't answer my question: how are we stealing something that AOL is apparently giving away for free? Sure AOL doesn't have to give it away, but they are.
If I may venture a little ways offtopic here and offer an observation: I suspect you see issues like this in a very black and white manner. If someone isn't 100% obviously right, they must be doing something evil. If we're not following coperate policy to the letter, we are obviously no better than the common criminal. If something is against the law, then it is wrong, period. I'm not going to try to change your worldview here (it would be pointless for me to try) but I can only offer three nuggets of wisdom:
1. Laws are not always just or wise. History teaches us that laws are frequently put in place for entirely selfish or wrong reasons.
2. Fighting laws "in the system" is possibly the slowest and least effective means of changing a law. People don't wouldn't throw tea in harbors if it was easy (or possible) to change the law through the system. Even if a law is unjust, you are still asking the people who put it there (perhaps knowing that it was unjust) to take it away. If they didn't want it, chances are they wouldn't have put the law there in the first place, so you are asking the people who want the law in place to take it away. Can you see the conflict of interest?
3. I like enumerating things.:)
Down that path lies madness. On the other hand, the road to hell is paved with melting snowballs.
You just answered your own question: I know that TOC isn't as fully featured as OSCAR, but that's what IRC and ICQ are for anyway.
Isn't this like saying: Why don't use use TOC? TOC sucks so much that you will stop using AIM altogher and switch to another IM system, like ICQ, or you can forget about IMs altogether and just use IRC. By the way, you don't have to reverse engineer TOC, it is available as a documented standard. Basically every AIM client supports it, and nobody likes it because it sucks. AOL frequntly lets their TOC servers die for days on end and the protocol has been loosing features ever since it was documented.
Down that path lies madness. On the other hand, the road to hell is paved with melting snowballs.
Er, have you tried the official AOL Linux client? Interoperablility is the reason poeple are writing these AIM clones. Quite frankly the official clients are so bad they are nearly unusable, and AOL has constantly degraded the service for those clients making them very unattractive.
Worse, if all of your friends already use AIM it is nearly impossible to get them to switch. This leaves you with 3 choices:
1. Stop using IMs altogether, or use a nearly completely broken "official" client. Both of these are about the same.
2. Use a different IM, like Jabber and leave your friends behind. Unfortunatly IMing yourself isn't very fun, and this turns out to be like option 1.
3. Use a non-offical "hack" and "steal" a free service from AOL. I don't think the offical Linux clients even display ads, so I'm still wondering what exactly you are stealing that they aren't already giving away. Isn't this kind of like stealing Linux source code by downloading it off of an FTP site?
Of course I'm probably not the best person to be commenting on this as I use ICQ (as do all my friends).
Down that path lies madness. On the other hand, the road to hell is paved with melting snowballs.
Heh, if it eats, procreates, and maybe eventually dies, it counts as life in my book. I think people set their sights too high on what constitutes "life." Even a bacteria is the result of millions of years of change.
Also, about the changing of the conditions: you have to remember that we are talking about an entire planet here, over millions of years. As long as the conditions aren't overly esoteric, it is a good bet they existed somewhere on the planet sometime in the past. If it's too hot in an area, let the continent move farther north, or let an earthquake expose some minerals not normally found on the Earth's surface, or have the area form on the top of a mountain with lower pressure, or the bottom of the ocean under great pressure.
From what I can tell, the sience was there all along, everybody just failed to notice it.
Of course this is all IMHO.
Down that path lies madness. On the other hand, the road to hell is paved with melting snowballs.
Remember this, kids: we don't have to protect the popular things from censorship and removal. It's the unpopularthings that we need to stand up for, because sooner or later, they're going to come gunning for something that you care about.
Like porn? Although I'd have a tough time calling porn unpopular...
Still, this is a dangerous way of thinking, perhaps even more dangerous than the people who seem to think I'm not qualified to run my own life. You can't protect everything. If you don't choose your battles wisely you risk losing your voice entirely (when you become one of those people who are always protesting, no matter what the cause is). Personally I'd prefer it if people focused their energies on copyright law reform and repeal of the DMCA rather than yet another porn store online. Hint: they aren't hard to find, Yahoo links to a lot of them.
Down that path lies madness. On the other hand, the road to hell is paved with melting snowballs.
According to the article, he is going to try to get the archives back up in May. I say more power to him. I subscribed for a single article (talking to the Com port in Windows) and stayed for the rest. Plus this way I can write off the subscription as a business expense.:)
Down that path lies madness. On the other hand, the road to hell is paved with melting snowballs.
Generally you are screwed when this happens. Time limited licenses are not a new thing, many highly specialized companies use them (often through FlexLM) for software projects that maybe a few hundred people in the world own. Depending on how shrewd you were when you negotiated for the software, you can easily be left holding the bag if the company goes under.
The only things that have kept this from blowing up before was the intrisnic cost of the software (people really pay attention to the license when the software costs $20,000/year) and that not too many of those expensive specalist houses have gone under yet.
Down that path lies madness. On the other hand, the road to hell is paved with melting snowballs.
That's not an entirely fair analogy. The car rental place is most likely going to sell all of its cars along with all of it's other assets in order to cover its costs. These licenses however have no intrinsic value (they are just a stream of bits). Whats worse, the "intrinsic value" of software (which copyright is supposed to protect) is at times difficult to see, especially if it is software from a company that has gone out of business and left the software to rot.
Down that path lies madness. On the other hand, the road to hell is paved with melting snowballs.
Complain to that company that Lucent hired to write the drivers (and to Lucent itself for releasing that binary half driver crap).
Of course you could just use FreeBSD (shameless plug) and have them work more or less out of the box (you might have to compile in the wi driver though).
Finally, I should point out that it is non-trivial to get those cards working under windows, especialy if you want to use ad-hoc mode and turn on encryption.
Down that path lies madness. On the other hand, the road to hell is paved with melting snowballs.
Well I'll be, 512 is four times more than 128. And for those of you who are spoiled by the ultra-cheap RAM of today, 512k was an ocean back then, and cost a king's ransom. One of the big reasonss the Lisa was so expensive was all that RAM.
Down that path lies madness. On the other hand, the road to hell is paved with melting snowballs.
Everybody else has already commented on the rediculousnes of this post, but they seemed to have missed one:
spray DDT over villages growing Cocoa
Um, DDT kills insects (and is pretty effective at it as well!) Spraying DDT over cocoa fields would only cut down on the Malaria in the region. Now I know that you are going to go off on the US killing all of those poor defenseless mosquitos and trying to eradicate an entire life form (Malaria bacteria) but I can assure you that the people in the region won't mind.
The only reason I can even consider this America bashing is the environmental impact of DDT, notably the thinning of eggshells of nearby seabirds; however those studies have been mostly debunked already and I can't believe that you are basing your otherwise logically sound[1] ranting on this flimsy evidence.
[1] For some definition of logically sound.
Down that path lies madness. On the other hand, the road to hell is paved with melting snowballs.
Perl isn't about doing things other languages can't do. Perl is about doing things other languages can't do easily. Chances are, if you are doing a lot of string/text manipulation in C (especially if you are doing a lot of matching and replacing) you could get your job done a lot faster and easier in perl. A lot of 100+ line C programs can be broken down to a
Everybody I know who tried Perl's regular expression engine never went back. The C RE engine (that the manpage from 1994 claims is alpha quality) just doesn't have the rich feature set that the perl RE engine has. Perl's RE engine is constantly stress tested and obscure bugs are fixed, I'd dare say it is more stable than the C RE engine as well.
Perl also has a very comprehensive (if a little incomprehensible) package repository called CPAN. If you are looking to do something that somebody might have done before, chances are they DID do it before, and released the sources for free to a nice searchable database.
All this is just the tip of the iceberg. You really have to learn Perl (there are some great books available) to form your own opinions on it.
Down that path lies madness. On the other hand, the road to hell is paved with melting snowballs.
$249 is pretty average for handhelds (a bit more than an average Palm-type, less than an average Wince-type handheld. If you're waiting for PDAs to get down to the sub $100 price point, you might want to start looking around for old used Palm IIIs.
Down that path lies madness. On the other hand, the road to hell is paved with melting snowballs.
Ive got FreeBSD running on a 386sx with 8mb ram, it runs ok. We're just using it for a low powered router though. I imagine Apache would be OK, unless you start running CGI scripts or PHP.
Down that path lies madness. On the other hand, the road to hell is paved with melting snowballs.
I know I'm being redundant, but I loved Hypercard on my old LC and I just want to get my 2 bits in.
Hypercard is by far the easiest and fastest gui development environment (RAD at its finest) I have ever used. I learned everything I know about programming Hypercard from reading other peoples scripts (it was fairly hard to prevent people from reading your source code, so almost all Hypercard stacks were essentally open source). The entire package was so well designed an integrated that even a 7 year old can design a frightfully complex application. The best part is, every Mac came with a full development environment (until that blasted "HyperCard Player" appeared at least) that was only a "Command-M set userlevel to 5" away. Hypercard was Apples version of "GW Basic" when Apple did everything 100x better than Gates and Co.
Nur ar det slut
Down that path lies madness. On the other hand, the road to hell is paved with melting snowballs.
Or they wont and you will just cut off a line of communication with your friends.
Why are all these people assuming that as soon as they switch all of their freinds will immediatly switch as well? I'm not the only one on their contact list and they are going to want to lose all of their other contacts just to talk to me. Fortunatly, I lucked out and most of my friends are in the ICQ crowd (also owned by AOL however), so we havn't had these problems (yet).
Down that path lies madness. On the other hand, the road to hell is paved with melting snowballs.
Slashdot Mirror
Until you sign up for a mailinglist that automatically adds a "how to unsubscribe" section on the bottom of each message. :)
Not that it helps, even with a little note on the bottom of every message people still manage to post "How do I unsubscribe?" messages about once a week or so on even moderatly crowded mailinglists.
Down that path lies madness. On the other hand, the road to hell is paved with melting snowballs.
Fibre Channel doesn't always mean Optical - these drives use a 40-pin "copper" connection, which can be a cable or a backplane (for hot-plugging).
40 pins? Last time I worked with fibre the cables were 4 pins. They were heavenly to work with, especially after wiring up SCSI RAID racks (8 68 conductor cables all running under the floor, and 68 conductor cables are a true PITA to work with, they're heavy (especially when shielded and 50' long), don't bend easily, keep their shape even when you don't want them to (they always want to be rolled up) and it's easy to bend the pins on the connector. The Fibre Channel cables are like thin serial cables. A single person can carry enough cables for two or three enclosures without even breaking a sweat, and wire them up in 1/4 of the time.
Of course this isn't such a big deal in PC-land, but those tiny little cables do allow for better airflow in your case (especially compared to those 68 conductor ribbon walls, I usually split the cable into 4 or 5 secgments just so it doesn't create a huge heat sheild inside of my case (especially important for those hot running 10k RPM drives!)
Down that path lies madness. On the other hand, the road to hell is paved with melting snowballs.
Xine lets you display overlays (subtitles) but it doesn't do a very good job of it yet. Unfortunatly most Anime houses use the overlay feature in ways it was never ment to be used in valient efforts to get a third color on the screen, which confuses the heck out of many software DVD players.
.ifo support to work correctly, so on some DVDs you'll only get 1/2 or less of the subtitles.
Also, I've never been able to get xines
Still, the feature is there, and possibly even useful in some circumstances.
Down that path lies madness. On the other hand, the road to hell is paved with melting snowballs.
Not to mention they are really picky. If you're talking about 049s (as I think you are) those little 2 stroke engines need a lot of TLC just to get started, and then you have to be really careful with them or you'll just kill them right out. You're right about the noise though, those suckers are just as loud and a lot shriller than you average car, especially considering most people don't put any sort of exaust system on them (they need all the power they can get).
The only think I can see this used for is as something you can plug into the side if your laptop if you are traveling through the congo or something and want to carry a compact power source.
Down that path lies madness. On the other hand, the road to hell is paved with melting snowballs.
You mean tik? That uses TOC, or maybe you mean the java client, IIRC that uses TOC as well.
By the way, has anybody successfully run the java client for more than a few hours? I always had bizzare things happening with the widgets (buttons disappearing, windows growing to 1000x10000 and then disappearing, windows placing themselves at -31231,-12314, random freezes, etc...) Not to mention it slowed down my R10k O2 with 128MB of memory (Still a lot back in the day).
Tik was pretty cool, it even had a Slashdot ticker, but wasn't very featureful (you couldn't send files, chat, and do many of the things that the regular AIM clients could do).
Down that path lies madness. On the other hand, the road to hell is paved with melting snowballs.
Oh and you can't set the away message. In fact, gee, it doesn't do almost everything OSCAR does. You must not use TOC very much. I've had it go out for days at a time when I had to use it in my previous job. Oh, and you messages would make it through the servers about 90% of the time. Unfortunatly this was a few years ago, so maybe they improved it.
I can guarentee that TOC is a lower priority at AOL than OSCAR though. Worse, there is no guarentee that AOL is going to keep TOC around, only by using OSCAR can the Unix folks keep fairly confident that they won't simply be shut off one day when AOL decides that TOC is just too expensive to keep running for the few people who actually use it. Heck, they've been hinting at this for some time now by slowly shutting off features in TOC. As it is now, they are basically down to Login, logoff, set status, and send message to X.
Down that path lies madness. On the other hand, the road to hell is paved with melting snowballs.
4. If you are the only person on their contact list that is fine, but if your friends have other friends (who use AOL), then it really isn't feasable to ask them to switch. Worse, many people use AIM because it is part of AOL, making them quite hesitant to switch (why give up a perfectly good IM client just becaues one of my friends switched to something I've never heard of?). Running two IM clients side by side is not exactly an elegant solution. Worse, most people will end up forgetting about the second client, particularly if they are AOL (and not just AIM) users. I offer that this is a very suboptimal solution, and in the end equivelent to option 1.
Now this certainly isn't true of everybody. Maybe you can get your entire group of friends to switch, but I belive that is going to be the exception rather than the rule. Jabber like Linux whereas AIM is like Windows. You can run it yourself and appreciate the technical superiority, but don't expect your frends and family to switch.
Option 5 is the same as option 1, give up IMing entirely.
Down that path lies madness. On the other hand, the road to hell is paved with melting snowballs.
Actually, there are many people who don't have Windows but still need to communicated with their friends and co-workers. Besides, reverse engineering something for the purposeses of interoperability is not illegal, and is in fact one of the major tenets of fair use. Not even the DMCA can take this away (unless AOL starts to encrypt their IM messages).
:)
Anyway, you didn't answer my question: how are we stealing something that AOL is apparently giving away for free? Sure AOL doesn't have to give it away, but they are.
If I may venture a little ways offtopic here and offer an observation: I suspect you see issues like this in a very black and white manner. If someone isn't 100% obviously right, they must be doing something evil. If we're not following coperate policy to the letter, we are obviously no better than the common criminal. If something is against the law, then it is wrong, period. I'm not going to try to change your worldview here (it would be pointless for me to try) but I can only offer three nuggets of wisdom:
1. Laws are not always just or wise. History teaches us that laws are frequently put in place for entirely selfish or wrong reasons.
2. Fighting laws "in the system" is possibly the slowest and least effective means of changing a law. People don't wouldn't throw tea in harbors if it was easy (or possible) to change the law through the system. Even if a law is unjust, you are still asking the people who put it there (perhaps knowing that it was unjust) to take it away. If they didn't want it, chances are they wouldn't have put the law there in the first place, so you are asking the people who want the law in place to take it away. Can you see the conflict of interest?
3. I like enumerating things.
Down that path lies madness. On the other hand, the road to hell is paved with melting snowballs.
You just answered your own question:
I know that TOC isn't as fully featured as OSCAR, but that's what IRC and ICQ are for anyway.
Isn't this like saying: Why don't use use TOC? TOC sucks so much that you will stop using AIM altogher and switch to another IM system, like ICQ, or you can forget about IMs altogether and just use IRC. By the way, you don't have to reverse engineer TOC, it is available as a documented standard. Basically every AIM client supports it, and nobody likes it because it sucks. AOL frequntly lets their TOC servers die for days on end and the protocol has been loosing features ever since it was documented.
Down that path lies madness. On the other hand, the road to hell is paved with melting snowballs.
Er, have you tried the official AOL Linux client? Interoperablility is the reason poeple are writing these AIM clones. Quite frankly the official clients are so bad they are nearly unusable, and AOL has constantly degraded the service for those clients making them very unattractive.
Worse, if all of your friends already use AIM it is nearly impossible to get them to switch. This leaves you with 3 choices:
1. Stop using IMs altogether, or use a nearly completely broken "official" client. Both of these are about the same.
2. Use a different IM, like Jabber and leave your friends behind. Unfortunatly IMing yourself isn't very fun, and this turns out to be like option 1.
3. Use a non-offical "hack" and "steal" a free service from AOL. I don't think the offical Linux clients even display ads, so I'm still wondering what exactly you are stealing that they aren't already giving away. Isn't this kind of like stealing Linux source code by downloading it off of an FTP site?
Of course I'm probably not the best person to be commenting on this as I use ICQ (as do all my friends).
Down that path lies madness. On the other hand, the road to hell is paved with melting snowballs.
Heh, if it eats, procreates, and maybe eventually dies, it counts as life in my book. I think people set their sights too high on what constitutes "life." Even a bacteria is the result of millions of years of change.
Also, about the changing of the conditions: you have to remember that we are talking about an entire planet here, over millions of years. As long as the conditions aren't overly esoteric, it is a good bet they existed somewhere on the planet sometime in the past. If it's too hot in an area, let the continent move farther north, or let an earthquake expose some minerals not normally found on the Earth's surface, or have the area form on the top of a mountain with lower pressure, or the bottom of the ocean under great pressure.
From what I can tell, the sience was there all along, everybody just failed to notice it.
Of course this is all IMHO.
Down that path lies madness. On the other hand, the road to hell is paved with melting snowballs.
Remember this, kids: we don't have to protect the popular things from censorship and removal. It's the unpopularthings that we need to stand up for, because sooner or later, they're going to come gunning for something that you care about.
Like porn? Although I'd have a tough time calling porn unpopular...
Still, this is a dangerous way of thinking, perhaps even more dangerous than the people who seem to think I'm not qualified to run my own life. You can't protect everything. If you don't choose your battles wisely you risk losing your voice entirely (when you become one of those people who are always protesting, no matter what the cause is). Personally I'd prefer it if people focused their energies on copyright law reform and repeal of the DMCA rather than yet another porn store online. Hint: they aren't hard to find, Yahoo links to a lot of them.
Down that path lies madness. On the other hand, the road to hell is paved with melting snowballs.
Couldn't you just put a few dabs of hot glue on the case underneath the processor to keep the motherboard from flexing too much?
Down that path lies madness. On the other hand, the road to hell is paved with melting snowballs.
According to the article, he is going to try to get the archives back up in May. I say more power to him. I subscribed for a single article (talking to the Com port in Windows) and stayed for the rest. Plus this way I can write off the subscription as a business expense. :)
Down that path lies madness. On the other hand, the road to hell is paved with melting snowballs.
Generally you are screwed when this happens. Time limited licenses are not a new thing, many highly specialized companies use them (often through FlexLM) for software projects that maybe a few hundred people in the world own. Depending on how shrewd you were when you negotiated for the software, you can easily be left holding the bag if the company goes under.
The only things that have kept this from blowing up before was the intrisnic cost of the software (people really pay attention to the license when the software costs $20,000/year) and that not too many of those expensive specalist houses have gone under yet.
Down that path lies madness. On the other hand, the road to hell is paved with melting snowballs.
That's not an entirely fair analogy. The car rental place is most likely going to sell all of its cars along with all of it's other assets in order to cover its costs. These licenses however have no intrinsic value (they are just a stream of bits). Whats worse, the "intrinsic value" of software (which copyright is supposed to protect) is at times difficult to see, especially if it is software from a company that has gone out of business and left the software to rot.
Down that path lies madness. On the other hand, the road to hell is paved with melting snowballs.
Complain to that company that Lucent hired to write the drivers (and to Lucent itself for releasing that binary half driver crap).
Of course you could just use FreeBSD (shameless plug) and have them work more or less out of the box (you might have to compile in the wi driver though).
Finally, I should point out that it is non-trivial to get those cards working under windows, especialy if you want to use ad-hoc mode and turn on encryption.
Down that path lies madness. On the other hand, the road to hell is paved with melting snowballs.
Ok, lets do the math:
128 * 2 == 256
128 * 4 == 512
Well I'll be, 512 is four times more than 128. And for those of you who are spoiled by the ultra-cheap RAM of today, 512k was an ocean back then, and cost a king's ransom. One of the big reasonss the Lisa was so expensive was all that RAM.
Down that path lies madness. On the other hand, the road to hell is paved with melting snowballs.
Everybody else has already commented on the rediculousnes of this post, but they seemed to have missed one:
spray DDT over villages growing Cocoa
Um, DDT kills insects (and is pretty effective at it as well!) Spraying DDT over cocoa fields would only cut down on the Malaria in the region. Now I know that you are going to go off on the US killing all of those poor defenseless mosquitos and trying to eradicate an entire life form (Malaria bacteria) but I can assure you that the people in the region won't mind.
The only reason I can even consider this America bashing is the environmental impact of DDT, notably the thinning of eggshells of nearby seabirds; however those studies have been mostly debunked already and I can't believe that you are basing your otherwise logically sound[1] ranting on this flimsy evidence.
[1] For some definition of logically sound.
Down that path lies madness. On the other hand, the road to hell is paved with melting snowballs.
Perl isn't about doing things other languages can't do. Perl is about doing things other languages can't do easily. Chances are, if you are doing a lot of string/text manipulation in C (especially if you are doing a lot of matching and replacing) you could get your job done a lot faster and easier in perl. A lot of 100+ line C programs can be broken down to a
Everybody I know who tried Perl's regular expression engine never went back. The C RE engine (that the manpage from 1994 claims is alpha quality) just doesn't have the rich feature set that the perl RE engine has. Perl's RE engine is constantly stress tested and obscure bugs are fixed, I'd dare say it is more stable than the C RE engine as well.
Perl also has a very comprehensive (if a little incomprehensible) package repository called CPAN. If you are looking to do something that somebody might have done before, chances are they DID do it before, and released the sources for free to a nice searchable database.
All this is just the tip of the iceberg. You really have to learn Perl (there are some great books available) to form your own opinions on it.
Down that path lies madness. On the other hand, the road to hell is paved with melting snowballs.
$249 is pretty average for handhelds (a bit more than an average Palm-type, less than an average Wince-type handheld. If you're waiting for PDAs to get down to the sub $100 price point, you might want to start looking around for old used Palm IIIs.
Down that path lies madness. On the other hand, the road to hell is paved with melting snowballs.
Ive got FreeBSD running on a 386sx with 8mb ram, it runs ok. We're just using it for a low powered router though. I imagine Apache would be OK, unless you start running CGI scripts or PHP.
Down that path lies madness. On the other hand, the road to hell is paved with melting snowballs.
Yes, for less than US$1,000 you too can program like you used to with the free Hypercard interpreter that came with your Mac. It's practiclly a steal!
Down that path lies madness. On the other hand, the road to hell is paved with melting snowballs.
I know I'm being redundant, but I loved Hypercard on my old LC and I just want to get my 2 bits in.
Hypercard is by far the easiest and fastest gui development environment (RAD at its finest) I have ever used. I learned everything I know about programming Hypercard from reading other peoples scripts (it was fairly hard to prevent people from reading your source code, so almost all Hypercard stacks were essentally open source). The entire package was so well designed an integrated that even a 7 year old can design a frightfully complex application. The best part is, every Mac came with a full development environment (until that blasted "HyperCard Player" appeared at least) that was only a "Command-M set userlevel to 5" away. Hypercard was Apples version of "GW Basic" when Apple did everything 100x better than Gates and Co.
Nur ar det slut
Down that path lies madness. On the other hand, the road to hell is paved with melting snowballs.
Or they wont and you will just cut off a line of communication with your friends.
Why are all these people assuming that as soon as they switch all of their freinds will immediatly switch as well? I'm not the only one on their contact list and they are going to want to lose all of their other contacts just to talk to me. Fortunatly, I lucked out and most of my friends are in the ICQ crowd (also owned by AOL however), so we havn't had these problems (yet).
Down that path lies madness. On the other hand, the road to hell is paved with melting snowballs.